The Principia Tescordia, Parts I & II
Title: The Principia Tescordia
Fandom: Torchwood
Author: Kenazfiction (kenazfiction@gmail.com)
Beta: caladria
Pairing: Teamfic, plus Jack/Gwen/Gladys (unrequited! Woe!)
Rating: R for dodgy language and questionable comedy
Disclaimer: I am not, nor have I ever been, The BBC.
Summary: The Christmas crackers are possessed, Santas are on a rampage in Roath, Jack and Gwen are smitten (and not with each other!), and Owen’s feeling festive in his Christmas jumper. Did we mention that the Goddess of Chaos is in town? Really, it’s just another day in May for Torchwood.
Warning: Really awful humor alert.
Author's Notes: Originally written for kate24534 for thestopwatch's 2008 Holiday!Bang. Slightly modified from the original, because I don't know when to leave well enough alone. ;)
"Bollocks to Tilda Evans. Big, bloody bollocks!"
Roger Barris didn't care if the neighbors heard him swearing as he pushed the wheelie bin down to the kerb. Bollocks to the neighbors! The lid clattered as he forced it roughly over a lump in the tarmac. The last of the drive inclined toward the street, and gravity's influence hurried the bin along in a most satisfying fashion.
"Bollocks to Tilda Evans!" he shouted, giving the bin a swift kick. It up-ended all over the foot of the drive and the overstuffed bin bag ruptured like a spleen, revealing the detritus of holidays past, reminders of Tilda Evans and her nearly life-consuming obsession with All Things Christmas: wrapping paper rolls still snugly encased in cellophane, stick-on bows, tangles upon tangles of tree lights, and a menagerie of aggressively cute plush toys shaped like reindeer and snowmen and "ickle elveses wif bells on their ickle toesies-wosies."
"Bollocks to elves andtheir stupid bells," he grunted.
He gave the wheelie bin one final kick, and out popped a Valu-Pak of Christmas crackers in red and green and gold foils. Leave it to Tilda to buy crap novelties in bulk.
He stormed off for a fresh bin bag, pondering how many days of his life had been wasted being dragged around to Christmas craft "shoppes" to buy hideous ornaments. Or chauffeuring her to those god-awful Christmas Fairs where poncy actors in pseudo-Dickensian costumes gamboled about, spouting pseudo-Dickensian blather like "Blimey, gov'nah!" He had even worn a Christmas Jumper, for the love of Christ! A grown man! In a jumper with a giant bloody Christmas stocking on!
He had done all of that for Tilda, the cow, and how had she repaid his forbearance? By taking up with a Tescos manager! From Swansea! And she had the unmitigated gall to ask him to forward on all of her Christmas things to his flat! He jammed the wrap and the bows and the little reindeer into the bag by the fist-full and then knotted it up. For three years, he had sacrificed his game room to store all this happy-holly shite, and she runs off with Mr. Produce Department. Oh, he was itching to tell the bitch what she could do with her Christmas things, but he was a gentleman. He was simply going to toss it all here at the kerb, and if she wanted it, well, Mr. Tescos could just drive the silly bint over here to get it.
"Bollocks to Tilda Evens!" he roared to the heavens. "And bollocks to Christmas!"
"It's May, you silly git!"
That was Colin Beddoes, the useless little spiv who faffed about all day with his equally useless friends playing video games and listening to shitty music, cadging rent money off his mother. In his mind, the face of Colin Beddoes inexplicably merged with that of the Tescos manager, and his anger surged. He gathered up the last of his fury, feeling it coagulate in his chest like a great big ball of phlegm, and flipped the house next door an emphatic V.
"Bollocks to you, Colin Beddoes! And to your useless mates, too!"
And with his Parthian shot echoing in the empty air, Roger Barris turned around and walked back inside his house. He had nearly made it inside when he heard the crash.
Travis Braithwaite reached for the plate of hot dogs that had been placed with great fanfare on the table, only to have his hand summarily smacked away by one Loki von Raven.
"Those are libations for Eris," said von Raven.
Travis rolled his eyes. "Sod Eris. I'm hungry. Gonna call for a pizza."
"With sausage," called Colin Beddoes from his spot on the sofa, where he was engrossed in Guitar Hero.
"And pineapple," added von Raven (or Craig Davies as he was still called by the grey-faced drones he worked with at VideoPalace), trying to affect an expression of mysterious ennui, but only succeeding in looking sullen. Which he was. "Pineapple on pizza. That seems appropriately Discordian, don't you think?"
"It's all just a joke, you know," said Travis dismissively, turning an acquisitive eye on the pizza box that was dropped next to the hot dogs a half-hour later. "There's no Cult of Eris-- 'cept maybe you lot, and a couple of wankers with a plate of hot dogs does not much of a cult make-- and 'Malaclypse the Younger' is just some old hippie having you on while he collects royalties from that stupid book." He flailed an arm in the general direction of von Raven's dog-eared copy of The Principia Discordia. "This whole idea is stupid."
Colin pulled a face and took his hand off the model guitar just long enough to give Travis the Vulcan salute. "But Star Trek, that's totally real, right Travis? And your ability to speak Vulcan has really helped you pull, yeah? Goes down something grand with the ladies, eh?"
Travis testily tugged his red Star Fleet uniform shirt down over his prodigious belly and returned the salute with a gesture of his own.
"Eris is real," barked von Raven. "If I were a lesser man," he said to no-one in particular, "I would shun the non-believers."
Travis took a swig of lager and belched. "And as soon as you can afford to get a flat on your own, you can shun away. Now bugger off and gimme a fiver for the pizza, von Budgie."
"Von Raven, tosser." His face had gone a decidedly non-cadaverous shade of red, and Colin's snorting laughter from the sofa didn't help. Sometimes, the line between one's friends and one's enemies was perilously thin.
"Von Budgie, von Raven, von-bloody-Halen," Travis retorted, pulling a slice of sausage-and-pineapple out of the box and fixing the steaming cheese with a lusty gaze, "just pay up."
Von Raven tossed a wadded note that bounced off the computer monitor and landed limply on the floor by his feet. Travis, pizza in one hand and cordless ergonomic mouse in the other, made no move to gather it up.
For a few minutes, the bickering was superseded by the wet sounds of chewing, occasionally punctuated by Roger Barris, the middle-aged insurance adjuster two doors down, shouting "Bollocks this!" and "Bollocks that!"
Colin choked down a mouthful and opened the window. "It's May, you silly git!"
"Bollocks to you, Colin Beddoes! And to your useless mates, too!" came the reply.
Eventually, von Raven wiped his mouth on his sleeve, stood, and demanded attention. "The clock tolls midnight--"
"If by 'clock,' you mean display on the dvd player--"
"Shut. It. It's midnight. The summoning of Eris shall commence."
Travis sighed. Colin wiped pizza grease on to the leg of his denims.
Von Raven had barely finished the invocation-- which borrowed a little from Aleister Crowley, a little more from the Principia Discordia, and a lot from random web sites he had googled earlier in the evening-- when he was interrupted by a high-pitched whine, followed by what sounded like a car plowing through rubbish bins. They stopped. No one moved.
The Ford Fiesta touched down-- smacked down, rather, with a bone-rattling crunch-- and mowed a dramatic swath through a pile of rubbish at the end of someone's drive. The impact popped open the boot and bounced the driver back and forth between the steering column and the seat before coming to a halt in a sea of shredded tinsel and shattered ornaments and disembodied Santa heads floating against the jaunty green background of wrapping paper.
"Oh, that is just brilliant!" the Sharkhûla hissed. The fuel gauge on the instrument panel showed the reserve tank was completely empty. Well, only itself to blame. If experience had taught it anything, it was to make sure both the main tank and the reserve were filled when anticipating a hasty exit. If it had not been for that time-space rift it had been pulled into, it might have been stuck in stasis, orbiting the Falcuanii moons forever. Or until it gave up and sent out a distress signal, in which case it was all just a great big lottery of misfortune, waiting to see who would take it first: The Judoon for breaking Shadow Proclamation conventions, or any of a thousand governments, juntas, warlords and chieftains the Sharkhûla had scammed and hoodwinked across galaxies. The best it could hope for was that they would be so busy arguing over who had the bigger claim on its head that it could just slip out a back door, hypnotize some inattentive underling, and flee. Wouldn't be the first time.
In the boot of the Fiesta were five strongboxes, each containing half a million--less the few thousand it carried at all times in a little titanium blowgun strung around its neck-- Pyrythian neuromanipulators: the ultimate intersection of nanotechnolgy and psychic warfare: expose the neuromanipulators to propaganda, give them a substrate to inhabit, and turn them out to seek out sentient life. Once they had physical contact, the neuromanipulators could invisibly and effectively control minds in minutes. The future of bloodless revolution, and completely illegal in almost every galaxy. Not that the Sharkhûla had any moral qualms about revolution, bloodless or otherwise; As a species, Sharkhûla were singularly interested in what was going to put the greatest number of untraceable galactic credits in their anonymous and equally untraceable accounts. It had taken the better part of a solar year to get its hands on these, and it had managed to lure two separate buyers and collected from both of them. The plan was to program the neuromanipulators to make each buyer believe they were in possession of the merchandise and then skip town with twice the profits, and a boot full of psywar weapons to start again elsewhere. Elsewhere being very, very, very far away. And the plan had worked, for the most part-- except that 'very, very, very far away' had inadvertently become hundreds of light years and oh, a few millennia, from anywhere that it could access any of its hard-earned lucre.
So where are we, anyway?
It ran a sequence through the controls. 21st century Earth? Oh, for the love of Sharkhu. Highly unlikely that one could find a fueling station that sold sodium nitrate fuel rods round these parts. It wrenched open the driver door and unfolded out of the Fiesta-- which was, if one wanted to get specific, a personal transport unit (D-Class) with a sodium nitrate-powered tachyon particle thruster engine-- like a sardine slipping out of a tin. The bonnet was rumpled and the bumper snapped half way off the body, but the headlamps issued a flood of xenon light through the rubbish, illuminating a little plush reindeer that was caught in the grill like a minute bit of roadkill.
"Oi! What's going on there?"
The silhouette of a human male loomed in the doorway of the nearby house. He charged down the lawn and the Sharkhûla ducked behind the transport.
"What the...?" The man stopped to survey the wreckage.
"Damned drink-drivers! I know you're there!" He waved some sort of primitive communications device above his head. "I'll call the police, you!"
Well, that wouldn't do. That wouldn't do at all. The Sharkhûla knew full well that any extra-terrestrial presence in this century, even one that could sufficiently pass as human-ish, if not precisely human, was more than likely to end up in "protective custody," which was more than likely a euphemism for "vivisection lab." And that was not on.
It stepped out from behind the car looking as helpless, human, and female as it could manage. As soon as it got a clear angle, it blew a shot from the blowgun right in the man's face. He didn't even flinch.
"Oh, not the police!" the Sharkhûla crooned, amused by the high-pitched modulation of its voice. "Please don't harm me!"
The man stared, anger and incredulity screwing up his face. "Tilda? Is that you? What in God's name are you doing? Look at the lawn!"
He took a step closer, staring with a bit of uncertainty, as if he wasn't quite certain who or what he was seeing. "And whose car is that? Look at it! You're a bloody menace, you are!"
It-- she-- moved toward him. "Yes, it is all a bit of a mess, isn't it. Now, would you happen to have any sodium nitrate fuel rods?"
He gawped at her. "Have I got what?"
"You'd call them hot dogs, I think. Or Bangers? Kielbasa, maybe? Even some cocktail sausages would do."
"Cocktail sausages?" The anger and uncertainty had fled, leaving only the incredulity and flustered spluttering. "No! No, I absolutely don't." He flipped opened his communications device. "No more faffing about now. You're either mad or on drugs and I'm calling the police. Your stupid Tesco-hero can bail you out of this mess."
For a moment, she considered simply using her scrambler beam to disable the device, but then she thought better of it. Instead, she pulled a disintegrator pistol out of her flight jacket and just blew Roger Barris into a billion atomic particles.
The worst part about it was, Barris hadn't even been lying: there wasn't a single hot dog in the entire house.
So she aimed the disintegrator pistol at the door of the next house and watched it dematerialize.
If only everything were that easy.
Travis Braithwaite opened his eyes and found, quite as he suspected, that Eris, the Goddess of Chaos, had not materialized when summoned by three post-adolescent tossers in their flat in St. Mellons. He opened his mouth to unleash a long-winded diatribe on Time and the Ridiculous Wasting Thereof by Wankers Who Styled Themselves After Birds, but the door to the flat suddenly wasn't there anymore, and something was stepping into the room. He hid behind the computer desk; whatever it was didn't seem to see him there.
"Motherless fuck," Colin bleated, "it worked."
"Hail Eris!" von Raven exalted. To him, Eris revealed herself as an unnaturally buxom blonde in a glorious chain mail bikini. Like Jordan, if she had been rendered in airbrush on the side of a caravan.
"Hail Eris!" Colin cackled, bouncing on the toes of his black plimsolls. To him, the Goddess revealed herself as Victoria Beckham in 'sexy librarian' kit: tits practically exploding out of a tidy white shirt, bedroom eyes giving him a come-hither look from behind horn-rimmed spectacles, slim haunches delectably braced in a pinstriped pencil skirt.
But to Travis Braithwaite, the nonbeliever, she looked like the emissary of death: pale, and somehow not-quite-right. Alien.
"Jesus Christ," he whimpered, and the thing turned and looked him straight in the eye.
"Not even close," it told him, and with a shot from some queer-looking pistol, Travis Braithwaite ceased to exist.
Colin shrieked like a girl and looked to von Raven for some sort of guidance, but von Raven was prostrate on the floor, muttering "Hail Eris! All Hail Discordia" over and over again.
The woman snorted. "Oh, get up, will you? I know you've got hot dogs in here. I can smell them."
Speechless, von Raven stood and pointed to the plate of hot dogs on the table. "My offering has been received!"
The woman picked up the plate and counted the hot dogs. "That's it? That's all you've got?"
For a moment, von Raven's mouth just opened and shut like some animatronic goon in a EuroDisney display. "I didn't know... The book didn't say how many..."
She picked up the copy of the Principia Discordia that lay on the grotty carpet with half its pages bent under and thumbed through it quickly, an unnerving grin spreading spread across her face. Colin shuddered. She blew through the silver straw she was wearing: once at von Raven, and once at him. Instantly, he felt a little muzzy. Dream-like.
"Eris, is it? Well, then... Listen to me, you whingeing little turd of a human: Eris, your Goddess, needs fuel, and your meager offering isn't quite going to do the trick. I'll need every one of these things you can put your five-fingered little hands on. So let's get on with it, shall we?"
Colin went slackjawed. They had summoned Eris, and She needed more hot dogs. Really, that was about as far as conscious thought could take him.
Eris made a noise of irritation and raised the gun again. "Show me where you humans--er, pathetic mortals--find hot dogs!"
Colin looked at von Raven and von Raven looked back.
"Tescos!" They shouted in unison. It almost sounded like hallelujah.
The Goddess herded them out through the open space where the front door had previously been and over to her disabled transport. The hot dogs, she explained, would power it up long enough to go for about 100 terrestrial miles, but it wouldn't get her moving quickly enough to slipstream on the time-space rift. Colin didn't ask what a time-space rift was. It seemed better not to know.
"Erm... is that a... a Ford Fiesta?" he asked, his voice cracking and sounding entirely un-casual. Somehow, he'd thought that a goddess would travel in something more stately. More...well... goddesslike.
"No," von Raven whispered in a hushed and reverent tone, "it's a Fnord Fiesta."
Eris rolled her eyes and impatiently forced the hot dogs one by one into the fuel tank. She failed to notice that one of the containment chambers full of Pyrythian neuromanipulators had come out of the boot and was snugly nestled in a nest of Valu-Pak Christmas crackers.
She also failed to notice that the containment chamber had cracked.
Owen drove with the windows down. It was fairly mild for a night this early in May, if a little misty. Besides, the chill helped focus his eyes on the lines on the road-- there wasn't much else to look at out here. He had been engrossed in World of Warcraft-- at least there was one universe where he was guaranteed to find companionship at all hours that didn't require a functional bladder, or functional tackle, or, hell, even a pulse-- but Captain Sod-It-All-Literally Harkness had called him and asked him to come out to the arsehole of Cardiff and its environs and check out some unaccountable energy shift.
"What's this about, then? Just because I'm dead, I get all the middle-of-the-night runs?" he had complained. "You don't sleep, either, so why can't you do it?"
It was bloody well obvious why Jack couldn't be arsed to do it: the Teaboy. It was enough to make a dead man weep, if he could have manufactured the tears.
"Just because you want a shag, I have to go to St.-bloody-Mellons, is that it? One of your little over-the-desk romps is going to take precedence over national..."
"Are you certain you want to finish that sentence, Owen?" Ianto's voice, clearly coming through the phone from over Jack's shoulder, was unbearably smug.
"Fill in the blanks, Teaboy."
So now, there he was in St. Mellons, looking at the remains of some sort of really belated holiday frenzy. He kicked aside some rolls of wrapping paper and picked up a hideous red jumper with a Christmas stocking from the pile, a man's size medium. "Jesus," he muttered in disgust. "Poor bugger." He pointed Tosh's PDA at the pile to take a reading, and then he rang Jack.
"Residual energy, unknown origin. There's nothing here." He hoped he was interrupting. "It looks like Santa's little helpers went on a binge and honked all over the lawn, but there's no craft, no life forms registering, and the scanner's not picking up any alien artifacts. If something was here, it's gone now."
"Ok. Thanks for checking it out, Owen. I appreciate it."
Owen grunted. "Tell Ianto he owes me one." He rang off before Jack could respond with something clever. Owes me one what? A pint? A lunch? A shag? The best he could hope for was a fresh roll of surgical tape to bind up his permanently broken fingers. "Sod this," he muttered, and floored the accelerator through an amber light as it changed. A traffic camera flashed.
There: Ianto could fix another ticket for him. It would have to do.
He parked around the corner from his flat, and as he got out, he noticed something in the back seat. A Christmas cracker? Wind must've blown it through the window. No other explanation. He was about to hurl it down the street toward the public bin on the corner, when he was overcome with the urge to pull it.
"Oh, what the hell," he shrugged, and grasped the ends. The foil gave way with a loud crack that made him jump in spite of himself, and bog-standard cracker fare tumble out onto the sidewalk: a red fortune-telling fish, a plastic mustache, a blow-out noisemaker, a paper crown and so forth. He laughed a little derisive laugh, picked up the crown. There was no one about. He put it on, just as a lark.
The next thought he had was to wonder if that brilliant jumper was still in the rubbish pile in St. Mellons where he had left it, and why hadn't he taken it with him in the first place. It was bloody festive, it was, and he needed to have it. Now.
Owen got back in his car, and he drove.
Part II. It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas
The calendar on the wall of the tourist office-- a free gift from the Cardiff Chamber of Commerce featuring, predictably, photographs of Cardiff's most over-photographed tourist attractions-- was very clear: It was the 12th of May. Ianto let his mouse hover over the clock in the corner of his monitor, and a little rectangle appeared, reiterating the fact that it was, indeed, the 12th of May. As a final experiment, he extracted his phone from his jacket pocket and checked the display.
Yep, still the 12th of May.
So what, then, was a shiny, gold-foiled Christmas cracker doing on his desk? They weren't particularly amusing in December; they certainly weren't of interest five months after the fact. Where did one even find Christmas crackers in May, he wondered. Perhaps Tosh had unearthed it while hunting for something in one of the supply cupboards-- there was, after all, a six-foot-tall fake Christmas tree and a ridiculous quantity of plastic mistletoe (thank you, Jack) around somewhere. But he couldn't remember having bought crackers this year, or last year, for that matter, and as the procurer of all-things-holiday, he was pretty certain he'd recognize a cracker bought with his own petty cash, and this was not a recognizable cracker.
Pull me.
Ianto looked about warily, nearly certain that he had heard a little voice in his head; not for the first time, he opted to tune it out.
The thing about Christmas crackers was, they rather begged to be pulled, didn't they? Ianto had hated them as a child: the anticipatory dread of the BANG! that never quite came when one expected it to; squabbling with his cousins over who had the bigger piece and therefore got to keep the bits of useless tat inside; the forced recitation of god-awful jokes; and the obligation to don the stupid tissue crown. So really, Ianto had no interest whatsoever in pulling the cracker, despite what the voice in his head may or may not have been suggesting. He scooted it toward the edge of the desk with the end of his biro, and got on with the business of his day: answering emails, deleting sensitive information from files on Cardiff PD's supposedly secure server, and entering Owen's terse notes on his excursion to St. Mellons--Bloody waste of time and petrol. Next time dispatch I. Jones.-- in the official record.
At half one, he went downstairs to collect lunch orders. The first thing that caught his eye was Gwen spinning in Tosh's desk chair wearing a paper crown. Tosh was standing beside her, the stumpy end of a green cracker clutched in her hand and an expression of dejection on her face. She looked up as Ianto came down the stairs.
"I always get the short bit!"
"Sorry to hear it," he offered.
It was then that he noticed Owen, wearing the most absolutely god-awful Christmas jumper in the entire of the UK. Owen! Christmas jumper! The mind boggled at the sheer wrongness of it. And if that wasn't disturbing enough, he was wearing a cracker crown, albeit one that looked comparatively worse for wear, as if he had been wearing it for some time. The hairs on the back of Ianto's neck stood on end.
By the time he returned with lunch, all of them were wearing paper crowns. Even Jack. What's more, they had ransacked the supply cupboard for the Christmas tree and the box of plastic holly. Their eyes were all a bit glassy, as if they had broken into a bowl of rum punch as well as into the synthetic flora. He had been transported into a bizarre Frank Capra-directed nightmare. Toshiko had found-- God only knew where, or why it was even in the Hub at all-- a little plastic brooch shaped like a reindeer and pinned it to her blouse. Normally, Ianto would have been quietly pleased by anything that justified a lingering look at feminine curves, but the brooch had managed to almost instantaneously suck all the joy out of a surreptitious glance. The reindeer had a obtrusive red LED light in its nose that blinked on and off. On and off. On and off. When he bent down to put a take-away carton in front of Jack, he registered his disapproval for the unseasonable shenanigans by plopping it more force than was strictly necessary. Jack ignored this, and chucked him under the chin with a ruffle of red foil.
Pull me.
"So, Ianto," he growled low in Ianto's ear, "wanna pull?" He underscored his innuendo with a positively obscene waggle of eyebrows, which gave Ianto pause, but he quickly got hold of himself.
"I prefer to save that for bars and the occasional public restroom, but thank you for asking."
"Oh, come on!" Jack teased. "Where's your Christmas spirit?"
"Packed. In a cupboard. Where the lights, and the tree, and the plastic mistletoe ought to be right now. It's May; I am not required to have Christmas spirit in May."
Jack stared at him grimly. Disconcerted, he scanned the room. Everyone was staring at him grimly. Again, the tiny hairs running up from his collar stood at attention.
"What?" he demanded.
"Ianto," Tosh's voice was uncharacteristically stern, "It's Christmas Eve."
Ah. Apparently, this was some sort of insider joke that he wasn't in on. Shocking, that.
"Fine." He said. "Happy Christmas. I'm going down to feed the Weevils."
His footsteps echoed on the steel steps. Cued by his approach, the Weevils started lowing, an eerie chorus muted by the perspex walls of the cells. Slop bucket in one hand and anti-Weevil spray in the other, he began with Janet. Janet, who was crouched on the floor surrounded by shredded red foil and cheap plastic novelties. When she growled, he could see the sodden remains of a paper crown sticking to her teeth. Oh for Christ's sake, this crossed the line.
"Not funny, Owen!" he called up the stairs. "You're sick and wrong!"
As he turned back toward the cells, trying to decide if it was worth the possible loss of life and limb to take a party popper away from a Weevil, a metallic glint caught his eye. There, on the floor near the staircase, was the gold Christmas cracker. Oh dear God, it had followed him.
Pull me.
Ianto frowned. The voice (No.The Christmas cracker is NOT talking to me. It just isn't!) was more compelling now. His fingers itched. He turned and looked at Janet, who seemed oddly content chewing on a plastic key fob shaped like a dog, and then back to the cracker.
Pull. Me.
"Gwen, stop messing about," he barked into his earpiece. (Must be Gwen. Has to be.) "It's not f--"
He wasn't able to finish his sentence before Jack cut him off, calling him back double quick. He gave the cracker wide berth as he passed it and bolted up the stairs, where the rest of the team was scrambling. He caught a flash of Owen's trainers vanishing up the stairwell to the Tourist Office entrance.
"Ianto, I need you to stay here and run communications." Out of habit, Jack checked his Webley for ammunition, but it was always loaded. "Tosh and Owen are going to check out reports of suspicious crowd activity in Roath; Gwen and I are headed to St. Mellons."
"What's in St. Mellons?"
"Tesco," Jack answered.
"End-of-the-world sale? Buy in bulk for apocalyptic savings?"
Jack gave him a warning look. "Hostage situation."
Ianto accepted the chastening with a nod, but Jack had already turned his back and was headed out the door with Gwen at his heels. "We're out of washing-up liquid, if you happen to think of it," he called after them, not anticipating a reply, and not receiving one.
"What is it we're looking for again?" Owen careered around a pedestrian in a zebra crossing and then over-corrected, sending Tosh smack into the passenger door.
"Could you drive a little more like a maniac?" She reached down for her PDA, which had flown out of her hands at the impact. "Jack didn't say exactly, only that he thought there might be some sort of crowd activity around City and Albany Roads."
"Of course there'll be crowd activity," Owen groused. "It's the biggest shopping area in Roath and it's the bloody day before Christmas!" He inched the car impatiently through a red light. A kiosk on the corner was plastered with posters advertising the game on 30th May, and an Oasis concert at the Millennium Stadium on 16th June. "Every arse and his uncle will be out doing last minute shopping! And we should be out getting pissed on eggnog and snogging fit birds under the mistletoe in some bar!
"Well," he amended, "I would be out getting pissed on eggnog and snogging fit young women under the mistletoe in some bar if I still had a circulatory system. Dunno what you get up to these days. Sudoku and a hot toddy?"
Tosh pursed her lips and adjusted her crown. "Charming, Owen. Thank you."
As they swung around on to City Road, Owen brought the car to a rolling stop. "Bloody hell."
Rounding the corner from Albany road was a growing mob. They were all dressed tatty Santa costumes or red track suits or even red dressing gowns with white plush pinned on, and many of them sported false white beards. Owen could even see one saddo with cotton wool glued to his chin. Some were wearing snowball-tipped Santa caps and some were not, but all of them, to the last man, had on a paper cracker crown. Strewn all around were the trampled remains of foil: red, gold, and green. It was like a Christmas cracker abattoir on the streets of Roath.
"Well," Owen sighed, "at least they're all in the spirit of things."
They drew closer. At the far end of the street, Owen spotted a Harwood's Haulage lorry stopping, the nosy parker behind the wheel leaning out his window to watch. Owen could hear the men chanting as they came down the street, and the mantra was getting louder with every step.
"HO. HO. HO! HO. HO. HO!"
One of them hoisted a ghetto blaster onto his shoulder (who even has a ghetto blaster anymore, Owen wondered), and Slade's Merry Christmas Everybody came flooding out of the cheap all-treble-no-bass speakers.
"Are you hanging up a stocking on your wall?
It's the time that every Santa has a ball"
And that was all it took. One store window shattered, and then another. The Santas roared like a band of football hooligans. Christmas mayhem roared full-tilt toward them down City Road.
"Oh God," Tosh whispered in dismay. "It's anarchy."
"No." Owen shook his head with fatalistic resignation. "It's Santarchy."
Despite the fact that she had a full view of the shoppers inside, all milling about between the chilled foods aisle and the fresh meats, and she could hear the tinny strains of Slade resonating from the PA system ("Are you waiting for the family to arrive? Are you sure you got the room to spare inside?"), the automatic doors to Tescos had all been closed and locked down. Completely shut. She shouldered hard against them (ow!), but they didn't budge.
"Gwen, stand aside." Jack had assumed his heroic stance and was pushing buttons on his wriststrap. A click, and the doors eased open.
"Might've done that before I threw myself at them."
"Yeah, but it's kind of a turn-on when you get butch." A little toothpaste advert glint sparkled on his incisors when he smirked and strode past her.
"What, no big flashy coat?"
Jack shook his head. "Left it in the SUV. The last time I had an alien encounter in a supermarket, there was quite a bit of HP Sauce involved and Ianto was less than thrilled by the dry cleaning bill. And when Ianto is less than thrilled, he won't--"
"--more than I need to know, Jack."
Inside, the cashier stations stood abandoned, the overturned trolleys near the doors and the tins left slowly spinning at the ends of the conveyor belts telling of a hasty and highly disorganized exit. Jack signaled for her to go right as he went left, and they moved swiftly and silently up the aisles. As Gwen edged closer, she could see the situation more clearly: an elderly woman in the blue checkered shirt of a Tesco cashier was being restrained by a something that looked eerily like Angelina Jolie. (Alien, Gwen decided. No human has lips like that.)
The hostage-- Gladys, her name badge read-- stood stock-still, the barrel of some sort of pistol up against her temple. Her eyes, magnified by the thick lenses of her heavily-rimmed spectacles, rolled wildly in their sockets as she surveyed the horrified throng that had gathered to watch and was now too frightened or intrigued to move. Her snow-white hair was teased up into the sort of candyfloss confection favored by pensioners and drag queens, and Gwen could see the tops of her support stockings rolled to her knees beneath her Tesco uniform skirt. Two young men, one rather goth looking and the other wearing an Little Britain t-shirt and a pair of plimsolls, were behind the butcher's case, pulling saveloys and chipolatas out of the out of the display and stuffing them into bags. On the floor next to Gladys lay a passel of other bags, all filled with jarred hot dogs and tinned cocktail sausages.
Jack's whisper came through the bluetooth. "There are better ways to play hide-the-salami."
Gwen bit back a giggle. "That was a bit too easy, don't you think?"
She tried to keep her attention on the situation at hand, but her mind felt intermittently fogged. Eggnog, she thought. Ought to get some eggnog while I'm here. Ooh, mince pie! I wonder if Rhys will make a mince pie? Oh, of course he will, he makes one every Christmas, he-- Jesus, Gwen, get your head on! Focus!
She shook off the miasma of distraction, the paper crown shifting on her head, itching. She had completely forgotten she was wearing it. "Who is she, Jack? What is she?"
"Sharkhûla. Sentient, humanoid, bipedal, and famous for having incredibly flexible... morals."
"Just your type, then."
"Even I have my limits. I'm going to see if I can get it to talk to me. You stay out of sight. I don't think it knows we're here yet."
"It?" Gwen asked, her eyes hovering on a pair of full yet gravity-defying tits she would have killed for. "From where I'm standing It's very definitely not an 'it'."
"That's because it's throwing out a psychic bioform shield. Camouflage. Gives it a physically appealing yet vulnerable package. Most species, ours included, are less likely to attack something they find attractive. It must have enough experience with humans to know that most of our kind view women as the weaker gender."
"Oi!"
"It's just playing the odds. The Sharkhûla have a thing for gambling."
"So what does she-- It-- look like to you? Angelina Jolie?" she asked, curious.
Jack chuckled. "Nope. Thyrene Kolsaavaar. A cabaret singer I knew a long time ago. She was very... generous... to members of her fan club."
"Of which you were a member in good standing, I'm sure."
"Well, some member was in good standing!"
"Oooh, you're rough!" she snorted, unable to help herself. "I suppose I should just be glad it doesn't look like Ianto." She inched closer to the end of the babycare aisle, a photogenic blonde tot beaming down at here with a four-toothed grin from a package of disposable nappies. "It would be a shame for you to have to shoot him if it came down to it."
Rhys couldn't believe what he was seeing.
Was this some sort of radio contest? Bizarre new reality TV show? A bunch of yobbos in cheap Santa suits were running amok in Roath, in the middle of the afternoon! He stopped the lorry, not even caring that he was completely blocking the turn on to City Road, ignoring the angry honking of the motorists behind him, and gawped: Santas! Dozens and dozens of them! In May!
He reached for his mobile and rang Gwen.
"Gwen, you'll never believe this!" (Of course she'll believe it, you silly git! She hunts aliens for a living!) "There must be a hundred blokes out here in Santa costumes and they're all chanting Ho! Ho! Ho!"
Gwen's whisper on the line sounded exasperated. "Well, ''tis the season' and all that. Listen, I'm a bit busy at the mo... Oh! but since I've got you, do you think you could make a mince pie tonight? There's a love. Gotta go." She rang off.
Rhys sat for a moment in bewilderment. Mince pie? No one makes mince pie in May! Gwen didn't even like the mince pies he made at Christmas. She always claimed she ate them under duress.
He looked back at the gang of Santas just in time to see one of them heave a brick at a shop window. The shattering glass refocused his attention, sharp as a splinter.
Oh, this was not good. This was not good at all.
On to parts III & IV!
Fandom: Torchwood
Author: Kenazfiction (kenazfiction@gmail.com)
Beta: caladria
Pairing: Teamfic, plus Jack/Gwen/Gladys (unrequited! Woe!)
Rating: R for dodgy language and questionable comedy
Disclaimer: I am not, nor have I ever been, The BBC.
Summary: The Christmas crackers are possessed, Santas are on a rampage in Roath, Jack and Gwen are smitten (and not with each other!), and Owen’s feeling festive in his Christmas jumper. Did we mention that the Goddess of Chaos is in town? Really, it’s just another day in May for Torchwood.
Warning: Really awful humor alert.
Author's Notes: Originally written for kate24534 for thestopwatch's 2008 Holiday!Bang. Slightly modified from the original, because I don't know when to leave well enough alone. ;)
"Bollocks to Tilda Evans. Big, bloody bollocks!"
Roger Barris didn't care if the neighbors heard him swearing as he pushed the wheelie bin down to the kerb. Bollocks to the neighbors! The lid clattered as he forced it roughly over a lump in the tarmac. The last of the drive inclined toward the street, and gravity's influence hurried the bin along in a most satisfying fashion.
"Bollocks to Tilda Evans!" he shouted, giving the bin a swift kick. It up-ended all over the foot of the drive and the overstuffed bin bag ruptured like a spleen, revealing the detritus of holidays past, reminders of Tilda Evans and her nearly life-consuming obsession with All Things Christmas: wrapping paper rolls still snugly encased in cellophane, stick-on bows, tangles upon tangles of tree lights, and a menagerie of aggressively cute plush toys shaped like reindeer and snowmen and "ickle elveses wif bells on their ickle toesies-wosies."
"Bollocks to elves andtheir stupid bells," he grunted.
He gave the wheelie bin one final kick, and out popped a Valu-Pak of Christmas crackers in red and green and gold foils. Leave it to Tilda to buy crap novelties in bulk.
He stormed off for a fresh bin bag, pondering how many days of his life had been wasted being dragged around to Christmas craft "shoppes" to buy hideous ornaments. Or chauffeuring her to those god-awful Christmas Fairs where poncy actors in pseudo-Dickensian costumes gamboled about, spouting pseudo-Dickensian blather like "Blimey, gov'nah!" He had even worn a Christmas Jumper, for the love of Christ! A grown man! In a jumper with a giant bloody Christmas stocking on!
He had done all of that for Tilda, the cow, and how had she repaid his forbearance? By taking up with a Tescos manager! From Swansea! And she had the unmitigated gall to ask him to forward on all of her Christmas things to his flat! He jammed the wrap and the bows and the little reindeer into the bag by the fist-full and then knotted it up. For three years, he had sacrificed his game room to store all this happy-holly shite, and she runs off with Mr. Produce Department. Oh, he was itching to tell the bitch what she could do with her Christmas things, but he was a gentleman. He was simply going to toss it all here at the kerb, and if she wanted it, well, Mr. Tescos could just drive the silly bint over here to get it.
"Bollocks to Tilda Evens!" he roared to the heavens. "And bollocks to Christmas!"
"It's May, you silly git!"
That was Colin Beddoes, the useless little spiv who faffed about all day with his equally useless friends playing video games and listening to shitty music, cadging rent money off his mother. In his mind, the face of Colin Beddoes inexplicably merged with that of the Tescos manager, and his anger surged. He gathered up the last of his fury, feeling it coagulate in his chest like a great big ball of phlegm, and flipped the house next door an emphatic V.
"Bollocks to you, Colin Beddoes! And to your useless mates, too!"
And with his Parthian shot echoing in the empty air, Roger Barris turned around and walked back inside his house. He had nearly made it inside when he heard the crash.
Travis Braithwaite reached for the plate of hot dogs that had been placed with great fanfare on the table, only to have his hand summarily smacked away by one Loki von Raven.
"Those are libations for Eris," said von Raven.
Travis rolled his eyes. "Sod Eris. I'm hungry. Gonna call for a pizza."
"With sausage," called Colin Beddoes from his spot on the sofa, where he was engrossed in Guitar Hero.
"And pineapple," added von Raven (or Craig Davies as he was still called by the grey-faced drones he worked with at VideoPalace), trying to affect an expression of mysterious ennui, but only succeeding in looking sullen. Which he was. "Pineapple on pizza. That seems appropriately Discordian, don't you think?"
"It's all just a joke, you know," said Travis dismissively, turning an acquisitive eye on the pizza box that was dropped next to the hot dogs a half-hour later. "There's no Cult of Eris-- 'cept maybe you lot, and a couple of wankers with a plate of hot dogs does not much of a cult make-- and 'Malaclypse the Younger' is just some old hippie having you on while he collects royalties from that stupid book." He flailed an arm in the general direction of von Raven's dog-eared copy of The Principia Discordia. "This whole idea is stupid."
Colin pulled a face and took his hand off the model guitar just long enough to give Travis the Vulcan salute. "But Star Trek, that's totally real, right Travis? And your ability to speak Vulcan has really helped you pull, yeah? Goes down something grand with the ladies, eh?"
Travis testily tugged his red Star Fleet uniform shirt down over his prodigious belly and returned the salute with a gesture of his own.
"Eris is real," barked von Raven. "If I were a lesser man," he said to no-one in particular, "I would shun the non-believers."
Travis took a swig of lager and belched. "And as soon as you can afford to get a flat on your own, you can shun away. Now bugger off and gimme a fiver for the pizza, von Budgie."
"Von Raven, tosser." His face had gone a decidedly non-cadaverous shade of red, and Colin's snorting laughter from the sofa didn't help. Sometimes, the line between one's friends and one's enemies was perilously thin.
"Von Budgie, von Raven, von-bloody-Halen," Travis retorted, pulling a slice of sausage-and-pineapple out of the box and fixing the steaming cheese with a lusty gaze, "just pay up."
Von Raven tossed a wadded note that bounced off the computer monitor and landed limply on the floor by his feet. Travis, pizza in one hand and cordless ergonomic mouse in the other, made no move to gather it up.
For a few minutes, the bickering was superseded by the wet sounds of chewing, occasionally punctuated by Roger Barris, the middle-aged insurance adjuster two doors down, shouting "Bollocks this!" and "Bollocks that!"
Colin choked down a mouthful and opened the window. "It's May, you silly git!"
"Bollocks to you, Colin Beddoes! And to your useless mates, too!" came the reply.
Eventually, von Raven wiped his mouth on his sleeve, stood, and demanded attention. "The clock tolls midnight--"
"If by 'clock,' you mean display on the dvd player--"
"Shut. It. It's midnight. The summoning of Eris shall commence."
Travis sighed. Colin wiped pizza grease on to the leg of his denims.
Von Raven had barely finished the invocation-- which borrowed a little from Aleister Crowley, a little more from the Principia Discordia, and a lot from random web sites he had googled earlier in the evening-- when he was interrupted by a high-pitched whine, followed by what sounded like a car plowing through rubbish bins. They stopped. No one moved.
The Ford Fiesta touched down-- smacked down, rather, with a bone-rattling crunch-- and mowed a dramatic swath through a pile of rubbish at the end of someone's drive. The impact popped open the boot and bounced the driver back and forth between the steering column and the seat before coming to a halt in a sea of shredded tinsel and shattered ornaments and disembodied Santa heads floating against the jaunty green background of wrapping paper.
"Oh, that is just brilliant!" the Sharkhûla hissed. The fuel gauge on the instrument panel showed the reserve tank was completely empty. Well, only itself to blame. If experience had taught it anything, it was to make sure both the main tank and the reserve were filled when anticipating a hasty exit. If it had not been for that time-space rift it had been pulled into, it might have been stuck in stasis, orbiting the Falcuanii moons forever. Or until it gave up and sent out a distress signal, in which case it was all just a great big lottery of misfortune, waiting to see who would take it first: The Judoon for breaking Shadow Proclamation conventions, or any of a thousand governments, juntas, warlords and chieftains the Sharkhûla had scammed and hoodwinked across galaxies. The best it could hope for was that they would be so busy arguing over who had the bigger claim on its head that it could just slip out a back door, hypnotize some inattentive underling, and flee. Wouldn't be the first time.
In the boot of the Fiesta were five strongboxes, each containing half a million--less the few thousand it carried at all times in a little titanium blowgun strung around its neck-- Pyrythian neuromanipulators: the ultimate intersection of nanotechnolgy and psychic warfare: expose the neuromanipulators to propaganda, give them a substrate to inhabit, and turn them out to seek out sentient life. Once they had physical contact, the neuromanipulators could invisibly and effectively control minds in minutes. The future of bloodless revolution, and completely illegal in almost every galaxy. Not that the Sharkhûla had any moral qualms about revolution, bloodless or otherwise; As a species, Sharkhûla were singularly interested in what was going to put the greatest number of untraceable galactic credits in their anonymous and equally untraceable accounts. It had taken the better part of a solar year to get its hands on these, and it had managed to lure two separate buyers and collected from both of them. The plan was to program the neuromanipulators to make each buyer believe they were in possession of the merchandise and then skip town with twice the profits, and a boot full of psywar weapons to start again elsewhere. Elsewhere being very, very, very far away. And the plan had worked, for the most part-- except that 'very, very, very far away' had inadvertently become hundreds of light years and oh, a few millennia, from anywhere that it could access any of its hard-earned lucre.
So where are we, anyway?
It ran a sequence through the controls. 21st century Earth? Oh, for the love of Sharkhu. Highly unlikely that one could find a fueling station that sold sodium nitrate fuel rods round these parts. It wrenched open the driver door and unfolded out of the Fiesta-- which was, if one wanted to get specific, a personal transport unit (D-Class) with a sodium nitrate-powered tachyon particle thruster engine-- like a sardine slipping out of a tin. The bonnet was rumpled and the bumper snapped half way off the body, but the headlamps issued a flood of xenon light through the rubbish, illuminating a little plush reindeer that was caught in the grill like a minute bit of roadkill.
"Oi! What's going on there?"
The silhouette of a human male loomed in the doorway of the nearby house. He charged down the lawn and the Sharkhûla ducked behind the transport.
"What the...?" The man stopped to survey the wreckage.
"Damned drink-drivers! I know you're there!" He waved some sort of primitive communications device above his head. "I'll call the police, you!"
Well, that wouldn't do. That wouldn't do at all. The Sharkhûla knew full well that any extra-terrestrial presence in this century, even one that could sufficiently pass as human-ish, if not precisely human, was more than likely to end up in "protective custody," which was more than likely a euphemism for "vivisection lab." And that was not on.
It stepped out from behind the car looking as helpless, human, and female as it could manage. As soon as it got a clear angle, it blew a shot from the blowgun right in the man's face. He didn't even flinch.
"Oh, not the police!" the Sharkhûla crooned, amused by the high-pitched modulation of its voice. "Please don't harm me!"
The man stared, anger and incredulity screwing up his face. "Tilda? Is that you? What in God's name are you doing? Look at the lawn!"
He took a step closer, staring with a bit of uncertainty, as if he wasn't quite certain who or what he was seeing. "And whose car is that? Look at it! You're a bloody menace, you are!"
It-- she-- moved toward him. "Yes, it is all a bit of a mess, isn't it. Now, would you happen to have any sodium nitrate fuel rods?"
He gawped at her. "Have I got what?"
"You'd call them hot dogs, I think. Or Bangers? Kielbasa, maybe? Even some cocktail sausages would do."
"Cocktail sausages?" The anger and uncertainty had fled, leaving only the incredulity and flustered spluttering. "No! No, I absolutely don't." He flipped opened his communications device. "No more faffing about now. You're either mad or on drugs and I'm calling the police. Your stupid Tesco-hero can bail you out of this mess."
For a moment, she considered simply using her scrambler beam to disable the device, but then she thought better of it. Instead, she pulled a disintegrator pistol out of her flight jacket and just blew Roger Barris into a billion atomic particles.
The worst part about it was, Barris hadn't even been lying: there wasn't a single hot dog in the entire house.
So she aimed the disintegrator pistol at the door of the next house and watched it dematerialize.
If only everything were that easy.
Travis Braithwaite opened his eyes and found, quite as he suspected, that Eris, the Goddess of Chaos, had not materialized when summoned by three post-adolescent tossers in their flat in St. Mellons. He opened his mouth to unleash a long-winded diatribe on Time and the Ridiculous Wasting Thereof by Wankers Who Styled Themselves After Birds, but the door to the flat suddenly wasn't there anymore, and something was stepping into the room. He hid behind the computer desk; whatever it was didn't seem to see him there.
"Motherless fuck," Colin bleated, "it worked."
"Hail Eris!" von Raven exalted. To him, Eris revealed herself as an unnaturally buxom blonde in a glorious chain mail bikini. Like Jordan, if she had been rendered in airbrush on the side of a caravan.
"Hail Eris!" Colin cackled, bouncing on the toes of his black plimsolls. To him, the Goddess revealed herself as Victoria Beckham in 'sexy librarian' kit: tits practically exploding out of a tidy white shirt, bedroom eyes giving him a come-hither look from behind horn-rimmed spectacles, slim haunches delectably braced in a pinstriped pencil skirt.
But to Travis Braithwaite, the nonbeliever, she looked like the emissary of death: pale, and somehow not-quite-right. Alien.
"Jesus Christ," he whimpered, and the thing turned and looked him straight in the eye.
"Not even close," it told him, and with a shot from some queer-looking pistol, Travis Braithwaite ceased to exist.
Colin shrieked like a girl and looked to von Raven for some sort of guidance, but von Raven was prostrate on the floor, muttering "Hail Eris! All Hail Discordia" over and over again.
The woman snorted. "Oh, get up, will you? I know you've got hot dogs in here. I can smell them."
Speechless, von Raven stood and pointed to the plate of hot dogs on the table. "My offering has been received!"
The woman picked up the plate and counted the hot dogs. "That's it? That's all you've got?"
For a moment, von Raven's mouth just opened and shut like some animatronic goon in a EuroDisney display. "I didn't know... The book didn't say how many..."
She picked up the copy of the Principia Discordia that lay on the grotty carpet with half its pages bent under and thumbed through it quickly, an unnerving grin spreading spread across her face. Colin shuddered. She blew through the silver straw she was wearing: once at von Raven, and once at him. Instantly, he felt a little muzzy. Dream-like.
"Eris, is it? Well, then... Listen to me, you whingeing little turd of a human: Eris, your Goddess, needs fuel, and your meager offering isn't quite going to do the trick. I'll need every one of these things you can put your five-fingered little hands on. So let's get on with it, shall we?"
Colin went slackjawed. They had summoned Eris, and She needed more hot dogs. Really, that was about as far as conscious thought could take him.
Eris made a noise of irritation and raised the gun again. "Show me where you humans--er, pathetic mortals--find hot dogs!"
Colin looked at von Raven and von Raven looked back.
"Tescos!" They shouted in unison. It almost sounded like hallelujah.
The Goddess herded them out through the open space where the front door had previously been and over to her disabled transport. The hot dogs, she explained, would power it up long enough to go for about 100 terrestrial miles, but it wouldn't get her moving quickly enough to slipstream on the time-space rift. Colin didn't ask what a time-space rift was. It seemed better not to know.
"Erm... is that a... a Ford Fiesta?" he asked, his voice cracking and sounding entirely un-casual. Somehow, he'd thought that a goddess would travel in something more stately. More...well... goddesslike.
"No," von Raven whispered in a hushed and reverent tone, "it's a Fnord Fiesta."
Eris rolled her eyes and impatiently forced the hot dogs one by one into the fuel tank. She failed to notice that one of the containment chambers full of Pyrythian neuromanipulators had come out of the boot and was snugly nestled in a nest of Valu-Pak Christmas crackers.
She also failed to notice that the containment chamber had cracked.
Owen drove with the windows down. It was fairly mild for a night this early in May, if a little misty. Besides, the chill helped focus his eyes on the lines on the road-- there wasn't much else to look at out here. He had been engrossed in World of Warcraft-- at least there was one universe where he was guaranteed to find companionship at all hours that didn't require a functional bladder, or functional tackle, or, hell, even a pulse-- but Captain Sod-It-All-Literally Harkness had called him and asked him to come out to the arsehole of Cardiff and its environs and check out some unaccountable energy shift.
"What's this about, then? Just because I'm dead, I get all the middle-of-the-night runs?" he had complained. "You don't sleep, either, so why can't you do it?"
It was bloody well obvious why Jack couldn't be arsed to do it: the Teaboy. It was enough to make a dead man weep, if he could have manufactured the tears.
"Just because you want a shag, I have to go to St.-bloody-Mellons, is that it? One of your little over-the-desk romps is going to take precedence over national..."
"Are you certain you want to finish that sentence, Owen?" Ianto's voice, clearly coming through the phone from over Jack's shoulder, was unbearably smug.
"Fill in the blanks, Teaboy."
So now, there he was in St. Mellons, looking at the remains of some sort of really belated holiday frenzy. He kicked aside some rolls of wrapping paper and picked up a hideous red jumper with a Christmas stocking from the pile, a man's size medium. "Jesus," he muttered in disgust. "Poor bugger." He pointed Tosh's PDA at the pile to take a reading, and then he rang Jack.
"Residual energy, unknown origin. There's nothing here." He hoped he was interrupting. "It looks like Santa's little helpers went on a binge and honked all over the lawn, but there's no craft, no life forms registering, and the scanner's not picking up any alien artifacts. If something was here, it's gone now."
"Ok. Thanks for checking it out, Owen. I appreciate it."
Owen grunted. "Tell Ianto he owes me one." He rang off before Jack could respond with something clever. Owes me one what? A pint? A lunch? A shag? The best he could hope for was a fresh roll of surgical tape to bind up his permanently broken fingers. "Sod this," he muttered, and floored the accelerator through an amber light as it changed. A traffic camera flashed.
There: Ianto could fix another ticket for him. It would have to do.
He parked around the corner from his flat, and as he got out, he noticed something in the back seat. A Christmas cracker? Wind must've blown it through the window. No other explanation. He was about to hurl it down the street toward the public bin on the corner, when he was overcome with the urge to pull it.
"Oh, what the hell," he shrugged, and grasped the ends. The foil gave way with a loud crack that made him jump in spite of himself, and bog-standard cracker fare tumble out onto the sidewalk: a red fortune-telling fish, a plastic mustache, a blow-out noisemaker, a paper crown and so forth. He laughed a little derisive laugh, picked up the crown. There was no one about. He put it on, just as a lark.
The next thought he had was to wonder if that brilliant jumper was still in the rubbish pile in St. Mellons where he had left it, and why hadn't he taken it with him in the first place. It was bloody festive, it was, and he needed to have it. Now.
Owen got back in his car, and he drove.
Part II. It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas
The calendar on the wall of the tourist office-- a free gift from the Cardiff Chamber of Commerce featuring, predictably, photographs of Cardiff's most over-photographed tourist attractions-- was very clear: It was the 12th of May. Ianto let his mouse hover over the clock in the corner of his monitor, and a little rectangle appeared, reiterating the fact that it was, indeed, the 12th of May. As a final experiment, he extracted his phone from his jacket pocket and checked the display.
Yep, still the 12th of May.
So what, then, was a shiny, gold-foiled Christmas cracker doing on his desk? They weren't particularly amusing in December; they certainly weren't of interest five months after the fact. Where did one even find Christmas crackers in May, he wondered. Perhaps Tosh had unearthed it while hunting for something in one of the supply cupboards-- there was, after all, a six-foot-tall fake Christmas tree and a ridiculous quantity of plastic mistletoe (thank you, Jack) around somewhere. But he couldn't remember having bought crackers this year, or last year, for that matter, and as the procurer of all-things-holiday, he was pretty certain he'd recognize a cracker bought with his own petty cash, and this was not a recognizable cracker.
Pull me.
Ianto looked about warily, nearly certain that he had heard a little voice in his head; not for the first time, he opted to tune it out.
The thing about Christmas crackers was, they rather begged to be pulled, didn't they? Ianto had hated them as a child: the anticipatory dread of the BANG! that never quite came when one expected it to; squabbling with his cousins over who had the bigger piece and therefore got to keep the bits of useless tat inside; the forced recitation of god-awful jokes; and the obligation to don the stupid tissue crown. So really, Ianto had no interest whatsoever in pulling the cracker, despite what the voice in his head may or may not have been suggesting. He scooted it toward the edge of the desk with the end of his biro, and got on with the business of his day: answering emails, deleting sensitive information from files on Cardiff PD's supposedly secure server, and entering Owen's terse notes on his excursion to St. Mellons--Bloody waste of time and petrol. Next time dispatch I. Jones.-- in the official record.
At half one, he went downstairs to collect lunch orders. The first thing that caught his eye was Gwen spinning in Tosh's desk chair wearing a paper crown. Tosh was standing beside her, the stumpy end of a green cracker clutched in her hand and an expression of dejection on her face. She looked up as Ianto came down the stairs.
"I always get the short bit!"
"Sorry to hear it," he offered.
It was then that he noticed Owen, wearing the most absolutely god-awful Christmas jumper in the entire of the UK. Owen! Christmas jumper! The mind boggled at the sheer wrongness of it. And if that wasn't disturbing enough, he was wearing a cracker crown, albeit one that looked comparatively worse for wear, as if he had been wearing it for some time. The hairs on the back of Ianto's neck stood on end.
By the time he returned with lunch, all of them were wearing paper crowns. Even Jack. What's more, they had ransacked the supply cupboard for the Christmas tree and the box of plastic holly. Their eyes were all a bit glassy, as if they had broken into a bowl of rum punch as well as into the synthetic flora. He had been transported into a bizarre Frank Capra-directed nightmare. Toshiko had found-- God only knew where, or why it was even in the Hub at all-- a little plastic brooch shaped like a reindeer and pinned it to her blouse. Normally, Ianto would have been quietly pleased by anything that justified a lingering look at feminine curves, but the brooch had managed to almost instantaneously suck all the joy out of a surreptitious glance. The reindeer had a obtrusive red LED light in its nose that blinked on and off. On and off. On and off. When he bent down to put a take-away carton in front of Jack, he registered his disapproval for the unseasonable shenanigans by plopping it more force than was strictly necessary. Jack ignored this, and chucked him under the chin with a ruffle of red foil.
Pull me.
"So, Ianto," he growled low in Ianto's ear, "wanna pull?" He underscored his innuendo with a positively obscene waggle of eyebrows, which gave Ianto pause, but he quickly got hold of himself.
"I prefer to save that for bars and the occasional public restroom, but thank you for asking."
"Oh, come on!" Jack teased. "Where's your Christmas spirit?"
"Packed. In a cupboard. Where the lights, and the tree, and the plastic mistletoe ought to be right now. It's May; I am not required to have Christmas spirit in May."
Jack stared at him grimly. Disconcerted, he scanned the room. Everyone was staring at him grimly. Again, the tiny hairs running up from his collar stood at attention.
"What?" he demanded.
"Ianto," Tosh's voice was uncharacteristically stern, "It's Christmas Eve."
Ah. Apparently, this was some sort of insider joke that he wasn't in on. Shocking, that.
"Fine." He said. "Happy Christmas. I'm going down to feed the Weevils."
His footsteps echoed on the steel steps. Cued by his approach, the Weevils started lowing, an eerie chorus muted by the perspex walls of the cells. Slop bucket in one hand and anti-Weevil spray in the other, he began with Janet. Janet, who was crouched on the floor surrounded by shredded red foil and cheap plastic novelties. When she growled, he could see the sodden remains of a paper crown sticking to her teeth. Oh for Christ's sake, this crossed the line.
"Not funny, Owen!" he called up the stairs. "You're sick and wrong!"
As he turned back toward the cells, trying to decide if it was worth the possible loss of life and limb to take a party popper away from a Weevil, a metallic glint caught his eye. There, on the floor near the staircase, was the gold Christmas cracker. Oh dear God, it had followed him.
Pull me.
Ianto frowned. The voice (No.The Christmas cracker is NOT talking to me. It just isn't!) was more compelling now. His fingers itched. He turned and looked at Janet, who seemed oddly content chewing on a plastic key fob shaped like a dog, and then back to the cracker.
Pull. Me.
"Gwen, stop messing about," he barked into his earpiece. (Must be Gwen. Has to be.) "It's not f--"
He wasn't able to finish his sentence before Jack cut him off, calling him back double quick. He gave the cracker wide berth as he passed it and bolted up the stairs, where the rest of the team was scrambling. He caught a flash of Owen's trainers vanishing up the stairwell to the Tourist Office entrance.
"Ianto, I need you to stay here and run communications." Out of habit, Jack checked his Webley for ammunition, but it was always loaded. "Tosh and Owen are going to check out reports of suspicious crowd activity in Roath; Gwen and I are headed to St. Mellons."
"What's in St. Mellons?"
"Tesco," Jack answered.
"End-of-the-world sale? Buy in bulk for apocalyptic savings?"
Jack gave him a warning look. "Hostage situation."
Ianto accepted the chastening with a nod, but Jack had already turned his back and was headed out the door with Gwen at his heels. "We're out of washing-up liquid, if you happen to think of it," he called after them, not anticipating a reply, and not receiving one.
"What is it we're looking for again?" Owen careered around a pedestrian in a zebra crossing and then over-corrected, sending Tosh smack into the passenger door.
"Could you drive a little more like a maniac?" She reached down for her PDA, which had flown out of her hands at the impact. "Jack didn't say exactly, only that he thought there might be some sort of crowd activity around City and Albany Roads."
"Of course there'll be crowd activity," Owen groused. "It's the biggest shopping area in Roath and it's the bloody day before Christmas!" He inched the car impatiently through a red light. A kiosk on the corner was plastered with posters advertising the game on 30th May, and an Oasis concert at the Millennium Stadium on 16th June. "Every arse and his uncle will be out doing last minute shopping! And we should be out getting pissed on eggnog and snogging fit birds under the mistletoe in some bar!
"Well," he amended, "I would be out getting pissed on eggnog and snogging fit young women under the mistletoe in some bar if I still had a circulatory system. Dunno what you get up to these days. Sudoku and a hot toddy?"
Tosh pursed her lips and adjusted her crown. "Charming, Owen. Thank you."
As they swung around on to City Road, Owen brought the car to a rolling stop. "Bloody hell."
Rounding the corner from Albany road was a growing mob. They were all dressed tatty Santa costumes or red track suits or even red dressing gowns with white plush pinned on, and many of them sported false white beards. Owen could even see one saddo with cotton wool glued to his chin. Some were wearing snowball-tipped Santa caps and some were not, but all of them, to the last man, had on a paper cracker crown. Strewn all around were the trampled remains of foil: red, gold, and green. It was like a Christmas cracker abattoir on the streets of Roath.
"Well," Owen sighed, "at least they're all in the spirit of things."
They drew closer. At the far end of the street, Owen spotted a Harwood's Haulage lorry stopping, the nosy parker behind the wheel leaning out his window to watch. Owen could hear the men chanting as they came down the street, and the mantra was getting louder with every step.
"HO. HO. HO! HO. HO. HO!"
One of them hoisted a ghetto blaster onto his shoulder (who even has a ghetto blaster anymore, Owen wondered), and Slade's Merry Christmas Everybody came flooding out of the cheap all-treble-no-bass speakers.
"Are you hanging up a stocking on your wall?
It's the time that every Santa has a ball"
And that was all it took. One store window shattered, and then another. The Santas roared like a band of football hooligans. Christmas mayhem roared full-tilt toward them down City Road.
"Oh God," Tosh whispered in dismay. "It's anarchy."
"No." Owen shook his head with fatalistic resignation. "It's Santarchy."
Despite the fact that she had a full view of the shoppers inside, all milling about between the chilled foods aisle and the fresh meats, and she could hear the tinny strains of Slade resonating from the PA system ("Are you waiting for the family to arrive? Are you sure you got the room to spare inside?"), the automatic doors to Tescos had all been closed and locked down. Completely shut. She shouldered hard against them (ow!), but they didn't budge.
"Gwen, stand aside." Jack had assumed his heroic stance and was pushing buttons on his wriststrap. A click, and the doors eased open.
"Might've done that before I threw myself at them."
"Yeah, but it's kind of a turn-on when you get butch." A little toothpaste advert glint sparkled on his incisors when he smirked and strode past her.
"What, no big flashy coat?"
Jack shook his head. "Left it in the SUV. The last time I had an alien encounter in a supermarket, there was quite a bit of HP Sauce involved and Ianto was less than thrilled by the dry cleaning bill. And when Ianto is less than thrilled, he won't--"
"--more than I need to know, Jack."
Inside, the cashier stations stood abandoned, the overturned trolleys near the doors and the tins left slowly spinning at the ends of the conveyor belts telling of a hasty and highly disorganized exit. Jack signaled for her to go right as he went left, and they moved swiftly and silently up the aisles. As Gwen edged closer, she could see the situation more clearly: an elderly woman in the blue checkered shirt of a Tesco cashier was being restrained by a something that looked eerily like Angelina Jolie. (Alien, Gwen decided. No human has lips like that.)
The hostage-- Gladys, her name badge read-- stood stock-still, the barrel of some sort of pistol up against her temple. Her eyes, magnified by the thick lenses of her heavily-rimmed spectacles, rolled wildly in their sockets as she surveyed the horrified throng that had gathered to watch and was now too frightened or intrigued to move. Her snow-white hair was teased up into the sort of candyfloss confection favored by pensioners and drag queens, and Gwen could see the tops of her support stockings rolled to her knees beneath her Tesco uniform skirt. Two young men, one rather goth looking and the other wearing an Little Britain t-shirt and a pair of plimsolls, were behind the butcher's case, pulling saveloys and chipolatas out of the out of the display and stuffing them into bags. On the floor next to Gladys lay a passel of other bags, all filled with jarred hot dogs and tinned cocktail sausages.
Jack's whisper came through the bluetooth. "There are better ways to play hide-the-salami."
Gwen bit back a giggle. "That was a bit too easy, don't you think?"
She tried to keep her attention on the situation at hand, but her mind felt intermittently fogged. Eggnog, she thought. Ought to get some eggnog while I'm here. Ooh, mince pie! I wonder if Rhys will make a mince pie? Oh, of course he will, he makes one every Christmas, he-- Jesus, Gwen, get your head on! Focus!
She shook off the miasma of distraction, the paper crown shifting on her head, itching. She had completely forgotten she was wearing it. "Who is she, Jack? What is she?"
"Sharkhûla. Sentient, humanoid, bipedal, and famous for having incredibly flexible... morals."
"Just your type, then."
"Even I have my limits. I'm going to see if I can get it to talk to me. You stay out of sight. I don't think it knows we're here yet."
"It?" Gwen asked, her eyes hovering on a pair of full yet gravity-defying tits she would have killed for. "From where I'm standing It's very definitely not an 'it'."
"That's because it's throwing out a psychic bioform shield. Camouflage. Gives it a physically appealing yet vulnerable package. Most species, ours included, are less likely to attack something they find attractive. It must have enough experience with humans to know that most of our kind view women as the weaker gender."
"Oi!"
"It's just playing the odds. The Sharkhûla have a thing for gambling."
"So what does she-- It-- look like to you? Angelina Jolie?" she asked, curious.
Jack chuckled. "Nope. Thyrene Kolsaavaar. A cabaret singer I knew a long time ago. She was very... generous... to members of her fan club."
"Of which you were a member in good standing, I'm sure."
"Well, some member was in good standing!"
"Oooh, you're rough!" she snorted, unable to help herself. "I suppose I should just be glad it doesn't look like Ianto." She inched closer to the end of the babycare aisle, a photogenic blonde tot beaming down at here with a four-toothed grin from a package of disposable nappies. "It would be a shame for you to have to shoot him if it came down to it."
Rhys couldn't believe what he was seeing.
Was this some sort of radio contest? Bizarre new reality TV show? A bunch of yobbos in cheap Santa suits were running amok in Roath, in the middle of the afternoon! He stopped the lorry, not even caring that he was completely blocking the turn on to City Road, ignoring the angry honking of the motorists behind him, and gawped: Santas! Dozens and dozens of them! In May!
He reached for his mobile and rang Gwen.
"Gwen, you'll never believe this!" (Of course she'll believe it, you silly git! She hunts aliens for a living!) "There must be a hundred blokes out here in Santa costumes and they're all chanting Ho! Ho! Ho!"
Gwen's whisper on the line sounded exasperated. "Well, ''tis the season' and all that. Listen, I'm a bit busy at the mo... Oh! but since I've got you, do you think you could make a mince pie tonight? There's a love. Gotta go." She rang off.
Rhys sat for a moment in bewilderment. Mince pie? No one makes mince pie in May! Gwen didn't even like the mince pies he made at Christmas. She always claimed she ate them under duress.
He looked back at the gang of Santas just in time to see one of them heave a brick at a shop window. The shattering glass refocused his attention, sharp as a splinter.
Oh, this was not good. This was not good at all.
On to parts III & IV!