DW -- Frost
Title: Frost
Fandom: Doctor Who/Sam and Adrian crossover
Rating: PG
Word Count: 4,710
Warnings: fantasy (or is it sci-fi?) violence, brief language, mortal peril, etc.
Summary: It did not continue to be a normal day.
Author's Note: o hai, icequeenrex -- have almost five thousand words for your Adrian meets Jethro request. XD eltea is behind almost all of this conceptually, of course. :3 It fits into our alternate canon... -ish... -thing in which Jethro becomes a companion, as is probably pretty obvious. :)
FROST
In Adrian’s defense, it started out as a perfectly normal day.
It wasn’t too unusual, at any rate, for a new student to enroll in a record-breakingly chilly January, right at the start of the second semester, and having an addition to his fourth period, just before lunch, was nothing particularly out of the ordinary. If, perhaps, he should have suspected anything, he was distracted by the new student in question - Jethro Cane, who had a lovely English accent, and whose slightly defensive self-consciousness reminded Adrian intensely of a certain Sam Tanner at a comparable age.
Except that Jethro was tall, of course, and Sam was practically pocket-sized.
It wasn’t even odd that Jethro loitered after the bell rang, rather than racing outside to throw snowballs at anyone foolish enough to try to eat lunch on the front lawn. Adrian figured that he was a relatively approachable teacher, as math teachers went, and would be happy to give Jethro any pointers the boy needed about surviving at this school. Teachers were like old-world servants that way - they saw and heard a lot more than anyone gave them credit for.
“Mr. Leyman?” Jethro asked, sure enough, still tugging at the zippers on his backpack by the time the room had gone empty. “This is a weird question, but - have you noticed anything… strange lately? Around the school, I mean. Anything you can’t quite explain.”
…all right, that was a little weird.
“Not that I can think of,” Adrian answered slowly. “What are you looking for?”
Jethro shrugged, glancing towards the door. “Nothing specific,” he answered; “just… stuff that doesn’t quite make sense.”
Adrian frowned, not fond of the sound of that. “I don’t think there’s anything noticeably illogical going on around here,” he answered slowly.
And he would know - math teacher.
“Things are pretty much the same as…” Avoiding Jethro’s half-hopeful, half-anxious gaze, Adrian’s eyes landed on the stack of test papers he hadn’t given back - something like ten of them, all belonging to students who hadn’t shown up in over a week. Vaguely Adrian recalled that the first girl to disappear from class hadn’t been around in over a month, and hadn’t he seen Missing Person flyers plastered on the telephone poles…?
“The kids are disappearing,” he realized blankly. “Is that why you’re here?”
Jethro nodded grimly. “Must be.”
Adrian looked at Jethro, who was wearing black jeans, layered black T-shirts, and a fleece jacket, unzipped in the warmth of the classroom. He did not exactly look like a private detective.
“Well,” Adrian said, “what are we going to do about it?”
He hoped this wouldn’t take too long - if he didn’t show up within fifteen minutes of the start of fifth period, half of his class would wander off and go find a cubbyhole where they could smoke pot.
“Don’t worry about it,” Jethro told him. “We’ll take care of it. The Doctor and I will, I mean. He’s - well, maybe you should come; he might want to talk to you…”
Adrian had no idea what the hell was going on, but it couldn’t be any worse than grading papers through his half-hour lunch period, so he followed a beckoning Jethro out of the classroom and up the stairs.
On the roof of the math and languages building, where the snow-laden wind whipped mercilessly at Adrian’s clothes and face, there was a large blue phone box.
His mouth fell open.
Snow flew in.
At least it was clean.
“It’s the TARDIS,” Jethro informed him distractedly, hurrying towards it, his narrow shoulders hunched against the cold. “Stands for… never mind. Doctor?”
Just when Adrian had started to think that this couldn’t possibly get any weirder, a man with extremely wild brown hair, who was wearing a brown suit and a long coat, stepped out of the big blue phone booth, saw them, and smiled.
“Afternoon,” he said brightly. “Teach here? I’m the Doctor; you’ve met Jethro; this is Donna.”
Right on cue, a woman with red hair stepped out of the box. “Doctor,” she huffed, pulling a parka closer around her, “you promised me someplace warm this time.”
“Duty knows no climate,” the Doctor replied. He held out a hand. “Didn’t catch your name.”
“Adrian Leyman,” Adrian managed, shaking clumsily, his fingers stiff from the cold. “Nice to meet you…”
“He’s a gentleman,” Donna sniffed. “Bet he’d keep his promises, instead of dragging warm-blooded people to the Arctic like somebody’d died and promoted him to Intergalactic Tour Guide-”
“If I was,” the Doctor retorted blithely, “you’d be paying me. Tell me, Adrian Leyman - what’s wrong here?”
“Students are going missing,” Jethro reported before Adrian could respond.
The Doctor sauntered closer to the edge of the building, taking out a strange device a little longer than a pen and a little thinner than a whiteboard marker. “Tell me, Adrian,” he remarked. “What’s changed since the kids started to disappear? New staff? New policies?”
Adrian blinked, Donna grumbled, and then he knew.
“The cold,” he said. “It’s never been this cold - I’ve lived here for three years, and I had to buy a coat, and boots, and everything else. It doesn’t snow here; it’s never snowed here. The meteorologists can’t explain it.”
The Doctor grinned like someone had handed him a map to El Dorado.
“Where in the school is it coldest?” he asked.
Adrian shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know; I guess… down by the football field? There’s a creek that runs just below it, and it’s frozen over now.”
The Doctor twirled his strange silver utensil and then jammed it into his pocket. “Allons-y,” he declared.
Jethro hopped to it, jacket flapping as he trailed with interest.
“J’ai froid,” Donna muttered as she rather less enthusiastically followed suit.
“Do you want to borrow my coat?” Adrian asked.
Donna beamed and stretched her arms out for it. “I knew you were a gentleman,” she said.
-
Colder, but accompanied by a much more personable Donna, Adrian trekked down to the dusty track, which encircled the frosted, wilting grass that made up the school’s playing field.
The Doctor stood, hands on hips, looking distastefully out over its expanses. “How do you play football on this, then?”
“American football,” Adrian said. “The gopher holes are like an extra obstacle.”
“You lot are mad,” Jethro decided, pleasantly enough.
The Doctor was already moving along the track, heading for the tangle of trees that lay beyond the chain-link fence. “Getting colder…”
Wrapping his arms around himself, trailing a twice-hooded Donna, Adrian had to agree.
The Doctor led the way through a huge rip in the fence - Adrian wished he was surprised that no one had bothered to patch it up - and started into the greenery, Jethro bouncing along beside him.
The whole thing was adorable - Jethro had been shy and subdued in class, though he’d followed the lesson intently, but the Doctor’s earnest fascination brought out a vibrant energy that Adrian hadn’t expected the boy to have.
Adrian, however, was having a bit more trouble staying upbeat, in large part because he was freezing his ass off. It was getting progressively colder as they traipsed through the brush, the Doctor batting leaves aside and explaining that the orange flowers were California poppies, which were not quite the same as Wizard of Oz poppies, but close. Jethro asked if that made him the Scarecrow, and the Doctor ruffled the boy’s hair until it rivaled his own in complete dishevelment.
Meanwhile, the temperature of the air was still steadily dropping.
“This is a lovely coat, Adrian,” Donna decided, snuggling up with the collar.
“It’s n-n-nice, i-isn’t it?” Adrian responded.
“Here we are, then,” the Doctor announced, somehow managing to sound even more excited as he ducked a short curtain of trailing ivy and stepped into what looked like a cave, crudely and deeply scoured into the hillside they’d reached. “Come on,” he called back, voice echoing wildly, “aren’t you even the least bit curious…?”
Shivering uncontrollably, rubbing at his arms, Adrian had to admit that he was a little bit curious.
And a lot bit… totally freaked out.
It was really too bad he’d quit smoking five years ago. He could almost feel the grooved wheel of the lighter under his thumb, familiar and reassuring.
It was probably not a coincidence that using a lighter would involve an open flame, which sounded very appealing to Adrian’s soon-to-be-frostbitten body.
Ah, well; he’d live.
Hopefully.
The Doctor headed straight into the dark of the cave - which seemed now to be more tunnel than cave - looking more like a kid in a candy store than a man tracking something dangerous in an underground passageway precipitously running out of light.
In fact, as they crept a little further, the darkness descended, and everything went black.
Adrian gulped, moving cautiously forward, squinting into oblivion to see if the others were still in front… or if he’d wandered into some sort of detour, presumably never to be seen again.
Literally never seen again, in this place.
There was a faint crunch of shoes - or he desperately hoped they were shoes - on the gravelly dirt.
“Hey-” Adrian began.
“Doctor?” Jethro gasped, and a shaking hand seized his in a grip that would make vises green with envy. “I think it’s separated us somehow; I can’t hear anybody else-”
“Uh, Jethro-” Adrian cut in hastily.
There was a silence, and then the fingers curled around his abruptly released.
“Oh,” Jethro managed in a small voice. “Oh, God, I’m sorry, I - um.”
“No problem,” Adrian replied, trying to wriggle some feeling back into his hand where Jethro had made a respectable attempt at wringing the life out of it. “You wouldn’t happen to have a flashlight, would you?”
“Sorry…”
Adrian bit his lip. “Knew I shouldn’t’ve quit the cancer sticks.”
“Well, getting lost in a dark cave is better than dying of cancer,” Jethro said. He paused. “Maybe.”
“Maybe,” Adrian conceded uncertainly.
“Hang on,” a slightly distant voice cut in. “I swear there’s a-”
Blue light swelled without warning as Adrian turned, and then it illuminated an excited face and a rather less amused one - the Doctor and Donna, respectively of course.
“Thought it had a function like that,” the Doctor remarked. “Good to see you. Shall we go?”
Jethro was speechless, and Adrian was starting to hope that he’d wake up in his bed with Sam drooling on his shoulder, so they went without protest.
Donna, of course, put in a grumble of “It’s even colder now” before tromping after the Doctor’s coattails, following the bobbing blue-purple glow of that same strange device, which the man had raised like a torch.
Adrian had a very bad feeling about all of this.
Actually, he had several very bad feelings, which were bad in different ways and predicted a variety of distinct and universally unpleasant outcomes.
All of these very bad feelings coalesced into a single throat-blocking, heart-squeezing mound of terror as a new, pale light overtook them, and they stepped into a vast cave chamber swathed in snow.
Adrian didn’t know where the light was coming from, and the B.A. graduate with a physics minor in him was appalled at the very prospect of a self-lit cavern, but he was slightly preoccupied with the stalactites-turned-icicles and the still, frosted bodies strewn all over the snowbanks, their skin blue with cold, all of them still wrapped in their winter coats and festive scarves.
“It’s them,” he managed faintly. “It’s the students. They’re dead.”
The Doctor crouched down by the nearest one, running his glowing, buzzing device up and down two inches from the body.
“No,” he corrected slowly, “they’re frozen. They’ve had all the heat sucked out of them, but they’re… they could be… alive if they were properly reanimated. It’s crude - very crude, but very effective - cryogenics.”
“Fascinating,” Donna decided. “What’s doing it?”
“That,” Jethro said, somewhat unsteadily. “That thing is.”
Slowly, expecting the worst, Adrian turned away from the freeze-dried teenagers and looked the way Jethro was pointing.
That thing was vaguely humanoid in shape - but bigger than any person Adrian had ever seen, broad-shouldered, narrow-faced, and, most notably, covered in ice.
No, perhaps ‘covered’ was the wrong word. ‘Covered’ implied something of a lack of deliberation, whereas this thing was evidently designed to be this way - to be an implausible, unpleasant, utterly horrific creature possessed of icicle spines and icicle fangs, bent over and curled up like it was looking for something it had lost.
“What is that?” Adrian demanded, unable to stop staring at the way the light refracted off of the pale blue-white of the creature’s form.
“I… am not entirely sure,” the Doctor murmured in reply.
Jethro crept towards it, eyes wide and curious.
“It’s not moving,” he observed. “It’s not even breathing.” The boy himself certainly was, in soft puffs of mist that grew denser as his shoes crunched in the thin carpet of snow. “Maybe it’s not alive at all.”
“Jethro, love,” Donna said slowly as the boy sidled nearer, “don’t you think that’s close enough?”
“Hang on,” Jethro responded distractedly. “I can’t tell if…”
Oh, it was alive all right.
Plates of ice cracked with a sound that echoed thunderously as it rose to taloned feet and clasped one long-nailed hand immovably around Jethro’s wrist.
Jethro had time for a faint squeak and one weak jerk against the creature’s grip, and then the sparkling, tessellated frost crackled over every inch of his skin.
The creature flung his body to the ground before them, where it crumpled and lay still.
“Holy shit,” Adrian said in a small voice.
He didn’t care what the Doctor’s glowing toy said; Jethro looked dead, and there was ice in his hair, and chips of it dotting his eyelashes-
“Don’t know what it is,” the Doctor muttered, taking one slow step back from it as it gathered itself taller, revealing a height and a glassy-eyed malice to make a grizzly proud. The Doctor pushed Donna behind him. “Do know that we’re going to kill it, preferably before it kills us. Identify yourself!”
Adrian hadn’t been sure that it was sentient - who knew what kind of predators winter produced? - but it spoke in a voice like clashing glaciers shattering into the sea.
“I’m Jack Frost,” it said. “You can’t destroy the cold.”
Adrian’s lungs were prickling, and his feet wouldn’t listen to his urging them to stumble back.
His ears hurt, too, but he didn’t have the breath to yawn to clear them - which was wretched; who’d ever heard of dying with stuffy ears?
…wait.
Urgently he grabbed the Doctor’s arm. “It’s creating a low-pressure field.”
The Doctor stared at him for a moment, comprehension dawning in his eyes.
“It’s doing what?” Donna demanded.
“Low-pressure,” Adrian hastily explained. “You know how snow stays on the ground at higher altitudes even when it’s not that cold? Low pressure raises the melting point. It’s pulling the heat out of the kids; it’s-”
“Moving towards us; trip along, then,” the Doctor muttered, snatching up Jethro in both arms, nodding to the exit, and, without further ado, leading them out into the tunnels again.
Adrian glanced over his shoulder, and Jack Frost bared icicle teeth in a terrible grin.
Their panting breath hovered around them in damp clouds as they ran, and Adrian dazedly wondered whether his pounding heart would produce enough force to break his ribs.
He was on quite the physics trip today.
“What about Jethro?” Donna protested, holding the Doctor’s now-familiar technological device aloft. “Look at him, he’s all-”
“Frozen, yes,” the Doctor cut in, careening around a bend in the tunnel, his burden looking even odder and paler in the indigo light. “My suspicion is that if we kill this thing, it melts, and the kids all thaw out, too. It’s using some of the heat energy it took from them to maintain a radius of low-pressure around itself - it looked from the readings like it hadn’t siphoned off quite enough to hurt them permanently, but it’s hard to tell - he - might’ve…”
Adrian knew very well that saving breath for running wasn’t the real reason the Doctor didn’t bring that sentence to a close.
“But it’s following us,” Adrian reported - an unhappy fact of which they were all quite aware due to the steadily-thudding footsteps trailing much too closely behind them. “Won’t that - um - defrost the kids?”
The Doctor steered them around another turn, Adrian’s red boots grating on the gravel and almost slipping out from under him. He’d done cross-country in high school, but there was really nothing quite like sprinting for your life through tunnels dim enough to give you eyestrain, carrying an unconscious child, attempting to navigate a labyrinth that only seemed to get deeper.
“’Fraid not,” the Doctor replied; “that room’s cold enough and far enough below the surface that it’ll stay that way, like an icebox, as long as Jack Frost’s influence extends over this town. I imagine that’s-” The Doctor swallowed, slightly uncertainly, and Adrian’s heart did a very unsetting oh-shit flutter-thing. “-what it wants, on the larger scale, is to take the whole town. If it gets enough warm bodies…”
Warm like a couple people running as fast as they can, Adrian thought.
“…eventually, it’s going to succeed.”
“‘The Bahamas,’ I said,” Donna muttered. “‘They’re full of old gods,’ you said.”
With that pearl of wisdom, they emerged into the blinding sunlight.
“This isn’t the same way we went in,” Donna realized, her voice tight and anxious.
“No,” Adrian assented, spinning and then pointing the way. “We’re right by the science lab-”
“Which ought to have central heating; well-done!” The Doctor had repossessed his device and was off and running, Jethro’s sneakered feet dangling over his arm, before anyone could comment.
And before Adrian could inform him that the science lab was really nothing more than a disused building with work tables - an old part of the school they’d recruited and vaguely refurbished for the purpose so that students could blow up their experiments without threatening the rest of the school. It was dull and windowless, and its heating system probably hadn’t been functional since the eighties at best.
Adrian was having more very bad feelings.
He and Donna raced after the Doctor, and one more look over Adrian’s shoulder confirmed that a horrifyingly agile Jack Frost was not far behind.
It also confirmed that said horrifyingly agile Jack Frost was glinting like a very misguided disco ball now that he was out in the sun.
To be honest, Adrian wasn’t sure which revelation was worse.
He caught hold of Donna’s sleeve and hauled the pair of them through the door to the lab, which banged shut at their heels.
Jethro lay motionless on a long lab table, a ring of weights, washers, and half-assembled pulley systems strewn around him like objects in orbit. The Doctor was at the far wall, his shoulders tense enough to show it even through the fabric of his coat and clothes, panning his favorite toy up, down, back, and forth before the front panel of the heating unit. Even as they scrambled in, he forsook the technological approach in favor of pounding a fist on it the old-fashioned way.
“Not impressed with the upkeep of your school, Adrian,” he announced through gritted teeth.
Adrian had meanwhile found the sturdiest of the lab chairs, propping it under the handle of the door. He managed a faint smile.
“To tell the truth,” he replied, “neither am I.”
The Doctor executed an extremely smooth kick, but Converse clanged on the heater to no avail.
“How about a blowtorch?” Donna pressed, jumping nervously as something huge, angry, and very cold slammed into the door, the chair rattling feebly. “Have you got one of those?”
What Adrian did have was an idea.
He scrambled into the hall, hoping desperately that this unimpressive school hadn’t bothered with effective locks.
His boots squealed shrilly as he skidded around the corner, but not loud enough to block out the tremendous crash as Jack Frost bested the flimsy barrier at the door.
Adrian shoved through the door to the storeroom - no lock in sight.
There were some advantages to a pathetic lack of a budget after all.
The canister he wanted perched innocently on a countertop - large and heavy as he lifted it, and he didn’t dare to run too fast, but he could hear the shouts and collisions of an ongoing battle.
Then everything went quiet.
Adrian dared to run a little faster.
He reached the room to find himself in the middle of something like a stalemate. The Doctor had made what appeared to be an improvised flamethrower by combining a methane feed for the chemistry classes with the tall lighter he’d turned up amongst the rubble, and Donna was standing just behind him, holding a sledgehammer like a baseball bat.
Jack Frost wasn’t approaching, but he didn’t seem to be intimidated - he mostly just looked amused.
He was even more tickled as he turned to see Adrian just inside the door.
A jolt of manic fear sizzled down Adrian’s spine as he met the eyes of winter personified - the ice over them had melted, and they were a cold, cold electric blue, searingly bright with an incredible and unquantifiable intelligence.
Jack Frost laughed softly, and Adrian knew, somehow, from the tone of it, that he could feel them - that he was so sharply attuned to temperature that he could sense more about them than they could ever read about each other.
“Charming,” he decided. “You’re all here.” He nodded to the Doctor, whose grip on his makeshift weapon tightened. “The Tin Man, with two hearts that still don’t make up enough. The Lion, with her claws.” Adrian’s eyes flicked to Jethro as Jack Frost considered the boy bemusedly. “The Scarecrow’s all without his stuffing now.” He turned to Adrian with another frostbite smile. “Who does that make you, friend?”
Adrian clenched the canister tighter to his chest, fingers working at the lid as Jack Frost stepped slowly closer.
But Jack Frost hadn’t accounted for something - the very fact that he was drawing heat from warm-blooded creatures and using it to maintain the low-pressure bubble that kept him frozen. It took a lot of collected energy to hold that temperature, but if something colder than that met with Jack Frost, it would leech energy from him, and his protection would collapse.
“I’m Dorothy,” Adrian said, “bitch.”
He wrenched the top off of the canister and flung liquid nitrogen all over Jack Frost’s towering frame.
For a long moment, Jack Frost simply stared at him in disbelief - no anger, no fear, just pure and complete incredulity.
Then he melted extremely precipitously into a faintly-artistic splatter on the floor, reduced to cold water dotted with chunks of ice.
Adrian took a breath so deep it was slightly dizzying and set the canister down on the nearest table, his hands shaking slightly.
That done, he joined the Doctor and Donna in racing to Jethro’s side.
Cautiously, the Doctor employed his glowing device for yet another meticulous scan, and then he splayed a gentle hand over the center of Jethro’s chest.
Color jumped into the boy’s white cheeks, and he gasped raggedly, eyes flying open as all the curling frost designs that had lately blanketed his skin immediately began to melt.
“Wh-what-” Jethro sat up, shivering uncontrollably. “I’m s-so c-c-cold-”
Before anyone could get a word in edgewise, the Doctor swung his coat around Jethro’s shoulders and helped him to his feet.
“Come on, then,” he prompted. “Get the blood moving. We’ve got a whole lot more kids who are going to need a little help warming up.”
Jethro nodded resolutely, clutching the coat tighter around him, and the Doctor patted his shoulder and then put an arm around him.
“Tell me,” he instructed, “if at any point you can’t feel your toes.”
-
A somewhat striking amount of hugging the life back into people followed, and then they were standing in a cave lit only by the screwdriver’s flashlight function - Adrian had finally asked what the damn thing was called - and filled with very cold, very confused teenaged former victims.
The Doctor looked pleased with himself, and Jethro looked pleased to be himself.
Adrian was fairly certain that this was the most epic day in the none-too-illustrious history of this unimpressive school.
He had no idea, however, what the bewildered defrostees were going to tell their parents.
-
They were all panting a little by the time they made it back up to the roof - except, of course, for the Doctor, who seemed to run on fascination and sunshine - and over to the Whatever Jethro Had Called It Box.
Adrian put his hands in his pockets. The snow was starting to look slushy even now, and while the air had a ways to go before “balmy,” the wicked edge had gone out of its chill. Things were returning to normal, and the Doctor and his crew were going back to wherever they had suddenly come from - in the nick of time, raring to give everything they had to help people they didn’t even know.
But they were hesitating.
“You’ve got a bit of a knack for improvisational physics,” the Doctor told him, smiling.
Jethro mimicked the expression, shyly. “You might like to see a black hole,” he reported. “They’re not like you’d expect.”
“I can’t,” Adrian said, not without a twinge of real regret. “They’ll never get through conic sections on their own - and I’ve got to get the frozen ones caught up.” He smiled. “I don’t think I could do what you do every day. Teaching teenagers trig is enough of an adventure.” He paused. “That is, presuming that I could even seriously consider the possibility of leaving without my boyfriend reading my thoughts and ending me with his mind.”
“I knew it,” Donna sniffed. “All the good ones are either gay or secretly trying to kill you.”
“Oh, come here,” Adrian ordered, holding his arms out for a hug, and Donna obliged.
Jethro took one, too, tentatively but with a characteristic warmth, and the Doctor clapped Adrian’s shoulder.
“Don’t be too shocked if we turn up here again,” he advised. “There’s something a bit off about this place, and that’s what we always end up looking for. Excellent working with you, Adrian Leyman.”
Grinning, Adrian shook the offered hand.
He was still smiling long after the blue box vanished into the air, taking the last vworping echoes with it. The clouds were clearing, the sun was warm against his back, and he’d insisted that Donna keep his jacket.
Also, his class was probably off in the bushes doing LSD by now.
Adrian hastened for the stairs.
-
Sam’s eyes widened as Adrian stepped into the apartment. “What happened?” he wanted to know.
Adrian flopped down on the couch beside him, kissed him for well over a minute, and then drew back.
“Didn’t you always want to write a collection of stories?” he asked.
Sam frowned. “Yeah, sort of. Why?”
Adrian was already laughing. “How do you feel about science fiction?” he inquired.
Fandom: Doctor Who/Sam and Adrian crossover
Rating: PG
Word Count: 4,710
Warnings: fantasy (or is it sci-fi?) violence, brief language, mortal peril, etc.
Summary: It did not continue to be a normal day.
Author's Note: o hai, icequeenrex -- have almost five thousand words for your Adrian meets Jethro request. XD eltea is behind almost all of this conceptually, of course. :3 It fits into our alternate canon... -ish... -thing in which Jethro becomes a companion, as is probably pretty obvious. :)
FROST
In Adrian’s defense, it started out as a perfectly normal day.
It wasn’t too unusual, at any rate, for a new student to enroll in a record-breakingly chilly January, right at the start of the second semester, and having an addition to his fourth period, just before lunch, was nothing particularly out of the ordinary. If, perhaps, he should have suspected anything, he was distracted by the new student in question - Jethro Cane, who had a lovely English accent, and whose slightly defensive self-consciousness reminded Adrian intensely of a certain Sam Tanner at a comparable age.
Except that Jethro was tall, of course, and Sam was practically pocket-sized.
It wasn’t even odd that Jethro loitered after the bell rang, rather than racing outside to throw snowballs at anyone foolish enough to try to eat lunch on the front lawn. Adrian figured that he was a relatively approachable teacher, as math teachers went, and would be happy to give Jethro any pointers the boy needed about surviving at this school. Teachers were like old-world servants that way - they saw and heard a lot more than anyone gave them credit for.
“Mr. Leyman?” Jethro asked, sure enough, still tugging at the zippers on his backpack by the time the room had gone empty. “This is a weird question, but - have you noticed anything… strange lately? Around the school, I mean. Anything you can’t quite explain.”
…all right, that was a little weird.
“Not that I can think of,” Adrian answered slowly. “What are you looking for?”
Jethro shrugged, glancing towards the door. “Nothing specific,” he answered; “just… stuff that doesn’t quite make sense.”
Adrian frowned, not fond of the sound of that. “I don’t think there’s anything noticeably illogical going on around here,” he answered slowly.
And he would know - math teacher.
“Things are pretty much the same as…” Avoiding Jethro’s half-hopeful, half-anxious gaze, Adrian’s eyes landed on the stack of test papers he hadn’t given back - something like ten of them, all belonging to students who hadn’t shown up in over a week. Vaguely Adrian recalled that the first girl to disappear from class hadn’t been around in over a month, and hadn’t he seen Missing Person flyers plastered on the telephone poles…?
“The kids are disappearing,” he realized blankly. “Is that why you’re here?”
Jethro nodded grimly. “Must be.”
Adrian looked at Jethro, who was wearing black jeans, layered black T-shirts, and a fleece jacket, unzipped in the warmth of the classroom. He did not exactly look like a private detective.
“Well,” Adrian said, “what are we going to do about it?”
He hoped this wouldn’t take too long - if he didn’t show up within fifteen minutes of the start of fifth period, half of his class would wander off and go find a cubbyhole where they could smoke pot.
“Don’t worry about it,” Jethro told him. “We’ll take care of it. The Doctor and I will, I mean. He’s - well, maybe you should come; he might want to talk to you…”
Adrian had no idea what the hell was going on, but it couldn’t be any worse than grading papers through his half-hour lunch period, so he followed a beckoning Jethro out of the classroom and up the stairs.
On the roof of the math and languages building, where the snow-laden wind whipped mercilessly at Adrian’s clothes and face, there was a large blue phone box.
His mouth fell open.
Snow flew in.
At least it was clean.
“It’s the TARDIS,” Jethro informed him distractedly, hurrying towards it, his narrow shoulders hunched against the cold. “Stands for… never mind. Doctor?”
Just when Adrian had started to think that this couldn’t possibly get any weirder, a man with extremely wild brown hair, who was wearing a brown suit and a long coat, stepped out of the big blue phone booth, saw them, and smiled.
“Afternoon,” he said brightly. “Teach here? I’m the Doctor; you’ve met Jethro; this is Donna.”
Right on cue, a woman with red hair stepped out of the box. “Doctor,” she huffed, pulling a parka closer around her, “you promised me someplace warm this time.”
“Duty knows no climate,” the Doctor replied. He held out a hand. “Didn’t catch your name.”
“Adrian Leyman,” Adrian managed, shaking clumsily, his fingers stiff from the cold. “Nice to meet you…”
“He’s a gentleman,” Donna sniffed. “Bet he’d keep his promises, instead of dragging warm-blooded people to the Arctic like somebody’d died and promoted him to Intergalactic Tour Guide-”
“If I was,” the Doctor retorted blithely, “you’d be paying me. Tell me, Adrian Leyman - what’s wrong here?”
“Students are going missing,” Jethro reported before Adrian could respond.
The Doctor sauntered closer to the edge of the building, taking out a strange device a little longer than a pen and a little thinner than a whiteboard marker. “Tell me, Adrian,” he remarked. “What’s changed since the kids started to disappear? New staff? New policies?”
Adrian blinked, Donna grumbled, and then he knew.
“The cold,” he said. “It’s never been this cold - I’ve lived here for three years, and I had to buy a coat, and boots, and everything else. It doesn’t snow here; it’s never snowed here. The meteorologists can’t explain it.”
The Doctor grinned like someone had handed him a map to El Dorado.
“Where in the school is it coldest?” he asked.
Adrian shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know; I guess… down by the football field? There’s a creek that runs just below it, and it’s frozen over now.”
The Doctor twirled his strange silver utensil and then jammed it into his pocket. “Allons-y,” he declared.
Jethro hopped to it, jacket flapping as he trailed with interest.
“J’ai froid,” Donna muttered as she rather less enthusiastically followed suit.
“Do you want to borrow my coat?” Adrian asked.
Donna beamed and stretched her arms out for it. “I knew you were a gentleman,” she said.
-
Colder, but accompanied by a much more personable Donna, Adrian trekked down to the dusty track, which encircled the frosted, wilting grass that made up the school’s playing field.
The Doctor stood, hands on hips, looking distastefully out over its expanses. “How do you play football on this, then?”
“American football,” Adrian said. “The gopher holes are like an extra obstacle.”
“You lot are mad,” Jethro decided, pleasantly enough.
The Doctor was already moving along the track, heading for the tangle of trees that lay beyond the chain-link fence. “Getting colder…”
Wrapping his arms around himself, trailing a twice-hooded Donna, Adrian had to agree.
The Doctor led the way through a huge rip in the fence - Adrian wished he was surprised that no one had bothered to patch it up - and started into the greenery, Jethro bouncing along beside him.
The whole thing was adorable - Jethro had been shy and subdued in class, though he’d followed the lesson intently, but the Doctor’s earnest fascination brought out a vibrant energy that Adrian hadn’t expected the boy to have.
Adrian, however, was having a bit more trouble staying upbeat, in large part because he was freezing his ass off. It was getting progressively colder as they traipsed through the brush, the Doctor batting leaves aside and explaining that the orange flowers were California poppies, which were not quite the same as Wizard of Oz poppies, but close. Jethro asked if that made him the Scarecrow, and the Doctor ruffled the boy’s hair until it rivaled his own in complete dishevelment.
Meanwhile, the temperature of the air was still steadily dropping.
“This is a lovely coat, Adrian,” Donna decided, snuggling up with the collar.
“It’s n-n-nice, i-isn’t it?” Adrian responded.
“Here we are, then,” the Doctor announced, somehow managing to sound even more excited as he ducked a short curtain of trailing ivy and stepped into what looked like a cave, crudely and deeply scoured into the hillside they’d reached. “Come on,” he called back, voice echoing wildly, “aren’t you even the least bit curious…?”
Shivering uncontrollably, rubbing at his arms, Adrian had to admit that he was a little bit curious.
And a lot bit… totally freaked out.
It was really too bad he’d quit smoking five years ago. He could almost feel the grooved wheel of the lighter under his thumb, familiar and reassuring.
It was probably not a coincidence that using a lighter would involve an open flame, which sounded very appealing to Adrian’s soon-to-be-frostbitten body.
Ah, well; he’d live.
Hopefully.
The Doctor headed straight into the dark of the cave - which seemed now to be more tunnel than cave - looking more like a kid in a candy store than a man tracking something dangerous in an underground passageway precipitously running out of light.
In fact, as they crept a little further, the darkness descended, and everything went black.
Adrian gulped, moving cautiously forward, squinting into oblivion to see if the others were still in front… or if he’d wandered into some sort of detour, presumably never to be seen again.
Literally never seen again, in this place.
There was a faint crunch of shoes - or he desperately hoped they were shoes - on the gravelly dirt.
“Hey-” Adrian began.
“Doctor?” Jethro gasped, and a shaking hand seized his in a grip that would make vises green with envy. “I think it’s separated us somehow; I can’t hear anybody else-”
“Uh, Jethro-” Adrian cut in hastily.
There was a silence, and then the fingers curled around his abruptly released.
“Oh,” Jethro managed in a small voice. “Oh, God, I’m sorry, I - um.”
“No problem,” Adrian replied, trying to wriggle some feeling back into his hand where Jethro had made a respectable attempt at wringing the life out of it. “You wouldn’t happen to have a flashlight, would you?”
“Sorry…”
Adrian bit his lip. “Knew I shouldn’t’ve quit the cancer sticks.”
“Well, getting lost in a dark cave is better than dying of cancer,” Jethro said. He paused. “Maybe.”
“Maybe,” Adrian conceded uncertainly.
“Hang on,” a slightly distant voice cut in. “I swear there’s a-”
Blue light swelled without warning as Adrian turned, and then it illuminated an excited face and a rather less amused one - the Doctor and Donna, respectively of course.
“Thought it had a function like that,” the Doctor remarked. “Good to see you. Shall we go?”
Jethro was speechless, and Adrian was starting to hope that he’d wake up in his bed with Sam drooling on his shoulder, so they went without protest.
Donna, of course, put in a grumble of “It’s even colder now” before tromping after the Doctor’s coattails, following the bobbing blue-purple glow of that same strange device, which the man had raised like a torch.
Adrian had a very bad feeling about all of this.
Actually, he had several very bad feelings, which were bad in different ways and predicted a variety of distinct and universally unpleasant outcomes.
All of these very bad feelings coalesced into a single throat-blocking, heart-squeezing mound of terror as a new, pale light overtook them, and they stepped into a vast cave chamber swathed in snow.
Adrian didn’t know where the light was coming from, and the B.A. graduate with a physics minor in him was appalled at the very prospect of a self-lit cavern, but he was slightly preoccupied with the stalactites-turned-icicles and the still, frosted bodies strewn all over the snowbanks, their skin blue with cold, all of them still wrapped in their winter coats and festive scarves.
“It’s them,” he managed faintly. “It’s the students. They’re dead.”
The Doctor crouched down by the nearest one, running his glowing, buzzing device up and down two inches from the body.
“No,” he corrected slowly, “they’re frozen. They’ve had all the heat sucked out of them, but they’re… they could be… alive if they were properly reanimated. It’s crude - very crude, but very effective - cryogenics.”
“Fascinating,” Donna decided. “What’s doing it?”
“That,” Jethro said, somewhat unsteadily. “That thing is.”
Slowly, expecting the worst, Adrian turned away from the freeze-dried teenagers and looked the way Jethro was pointing.
That thing was vaguely humanoid in shape - but bigger than any person Adrian had ever seen, broad-shouldered, narrow-faced, and, most notably, covered in ice.
No, perhaps ‘covered’ was the wrong word. ‘Covered’ implied something of a lack of deliberation, whereas this thing was evidently designed to be this way - to be an implausible, unpleasant, utterly horrific creature possessed of icicle spines and icicle fangs, bent over and curled up like it was looking for something it had lost.
“What is that?” Adrian demanded, unable to stop staring at the way the light refracted off of the pale blue-white of the creature’s form.
“I… am not entirely sure,” the Doctor murmured in reply.
Jethro crept towards it, eyes wide and curious.
“It’s not moving,” he observed. “It’s not even breathing.” The boy himself certainly was, in soft puffs of mist that grew denser as his shoes crunched in the thin carpet of snow. “Maybe it’s not alive at all.”
“Jethro, love,” Donna said slowly as the boy sidled nearer, “don’t you think that’s close enough?”
“Hang on,” Jethro responded distractedly. “I can’t tell if…”
Oh, it was alive all right.
Plates of ice cracked with a sound that echoed thunderously as it rose to taloned feet and clasped one long-nailed hand immovably around Jethro’s wrist.
Jethro had time for a faint squeak and one weak jerk against the creature’s grip, and then the sparkling, tessellated frost crackled over every inch of his skin.
The creature flung his body to the ground before them, where it crumpled and lay still.
“Holy shit,” Adrian said in a small voice.
He didn’t care what the Doctor’s glowing toy said; Jethro looked dead, and there was ice in his hair, and chips of it dotting his eyelashes-
“Don’t know what it is,” the Doctor muttered, taking one slow step back from it as it gathered itself taller, revealing a height and a glassy-eyed malice to make a grizzly proud. The Doctor pushed Donna behind him. “Do know that we’re going to kill it, preferably before it kills us. Identify yourself!”
Adrian hadn’t been sure that it was sentient - who knew what kind of predators winter produced? - but it spoke in a voice like clashing glaciers shattering into the sea.
“I’m Jack Frost,” it said. “You can’t destroy the cold.”
Adrian’s lungs were prickling, and his feet wouldn’t listen to his urging them to stumble back.
His ears hurt, too, but he didn’t have the breath to yawn to clear them - which was wretched; who’d ever heard of dying with stuffy ears?
…wait.
Urgently he grabbed the Doctor’s arm. “It’s creating a low-pressure field.”
The Doctor stared at him for a moment, comprehension dawning in his eyes.
“It’s doing what?” Donna demanded.
“Low-pressure,” Adrian hastily explained. “You know how snow stays on the ground at higher altitudes even when it’s not that cold? Low pressure raises the melting point. It’s pulling the heat out of the kids; it’s-”
“Moving towards us; trip along, then,” the Doctor muttered, snatching up Jethro in both arms, nodding to the exit, and, without further ado, leading them out into the tunnels again.
Adrian glanced over his shoulder, and Jack Frost bared icicle teeth in a terrible grin.
Their panting breath hovered around them in damp clouds as they ran, and Adrian dazedly wondered whether his pounding heart would produce enough force to break his ribs.
He was on quite the physics trip today.
“What about Jethro?” Donna protested, holding the Doctor’s now-familiar technological device aloft. “Look at him, he’s all-”
“Frozen, yes,” the Doctor cut in, careening around a bend in the tunnel, his burden looking even odder and paler in the indigo light. “My suspicion is that if we kill this thing, it melts, and the kids all thaw out, too. It’s using some of the heat energy it took from them to maintain a radius of low-pressure around itself - it looked from the readings like it hadn’t siphoned off quite enough to hurt them permanently, but it’s hard to tell - he - might’ve…”
Adrian knew very well that saving breath for running wasn’t the real reason the Doctor didn’t bring that sentence to a close.
“But it’s following us,” Adrian reported - an unhappy fact of which they were all quite aware due to the steadily-thudding footsteps trailing much too closely behind them. “Won’t that - um - defrost the kids?”
The Doctor steered them around another turn, Adrian’s red boots grating on the gravel and almost slipping out from under him. He’d done cross-country in high school, but there was really nothing quite like sprinting for your life through tunnels dim enough to give you eyestrain, carrying an unconscious child, attempting to navigate a labyrinth that only seemed to get deeper.
“’Fraid not,” the Doctor replied; “that room’s cold enough and far enough below the surface that it’ll stay that way, like an icebox, as long as Jack Frost’s influence extends over this town. I imagine that’s-” The Doctor swallowed, slightly uncertainly, and Adrian’s heart did a very unsetting oh-shit flutter-thing. “-what it wants, on the larger scale, is to take the whole town. If it gets enough warm bodies…”
Warm like a couple people running as fast as they can, Adrian thought.
“…eventually, it’s going to succeed.”
“‘The Bahamas,’ I said,” Donna muttered. “‘They’re full of old gods,’ you said.”
With that pearl of wisdom, they emerged into the blinding sunlight.
“This isn’t the same way we went in,” Donna realized, her voice tight and anxious.
“No,” Adrian assented, spinning and then pointing the way. “We’re right by the science lab-”
“Which ought to have central heating; well-done!” The Doctor had repossessed his device and was off and running, Jethro’s sneakered feet dangling over his arm, before anyone could comment.
And before Adrian could inform him that the science lab was really nothing more than a disused building with work tables - an old part of the school they’d recruited and vaguely refurbished for the purpose so that students could blow up their experiments without threatening the rest of the school. It was dull and windowless, and its heating system probably hadn’t been functional since the eighties at best.
Adrian was having more very bad feelings.
He and Donna raced after the Doctor, and one more look over Adrian’s shoulder confirmed that a horrifyingly agile Jack Frost was not far behind.
It also confirmed that said horrifyingly agile Jack Frost was glinting like a very misguided disco ball now that he was out in the sun.
To be honest, Adrian wasn’t sure which revelation was worse.
He caught hold of Donna’s sleeve and hauled the pair of them through the door to the lab, which banged shut at their heels.
Jethro lay motionless on a long lab table, a ring of weights, washers, and half-assembled pulley systems strewn around him like objects in orbit. The Doctor was at the far wall, his shoulders tense enough to show it even through the fabric of his coat and clothes, panning his favorite toy up, down, back, and forth before the front panel of the heating unit. Even as they scrambled in, he forsook the technological approach in favor of pounding a fist on it the old-fashioned way.
“Not impressed with the upkeep of your school, Adrian,” he announced through gritted teeth.
Adrian had meanwhile found the sturdiest of the lab chairs, propping it under the handle of the door. He managed a faint smile.
“To tell the truth,” he replied, “neither am I.”
The Doctor executed an extremely smooth kick, but Converse clanged on the heater to no avail.
“How about a blowtorch?” Donna pressed, jumping nervously as something huge, angry, and very cold slammed into the door, the chair rattling feebly. “Have you got one of those?”
What Adrian did have was an idea.
He scrambled into the hall, hoping desperately that this unimpressive school hadn’t bothered with effective locks.
His boots squealed shrilly as he skidded around the corner, but not loud enough to block out the tremendous crash as Jack Frost bested the flimsy barrier at the door.
Adrian shoved through the door to the storeroom - no lock in sight.
There were some advantages to a pathetic lack of a budget after all.
The canister he wanted perched innocently on a countertop - large and heavy as he lifted it, and he didn’t dare to run too fast, but he could hear the shouts and collisions of an ongoing battle.
Then everything went quiet.
Adrian dared to run a little faster.
He reached the room to find himself in the middle of something like a stalemate. The Doctor had made what appeared to be an improvised flamethrower by combining a methane feed for the chemistry classes with the tall lighter he’d turned up amongst the rubble, and Donna was standing just behind him, holding a sledgehammer like a baseball bat.
Jack Frost wasn’t approaching, but he didn’t seem to be intimidated - he mostly just looked amused.
He was even more tickled as he turned to see Adrian just inside the door.
A jolt of manic fear sizzled down Adrian’s spine as he met the eyes of winter personified - the ice over them had melted, and they were a cold, cold electric blue, searingly bright with an incredible and unquantifiable intelligence.
Jack Frost laughed softly, and Adrian knew, somehow, from the tone of it, that he could feel them - that he was so sharply attuned to temperature that he could sense more about them than they could ever read about each other.
“Charming,” he decided. “You’re all here.” He nodded to the Doctor, whose grip on his makeshift weapon tightened. “The Tin Man, with two hearts that still don’t make up enough. The Lion, with her claws.” Adrian’s eyes flicked to Jethro as Jack Frost considered the boy bemusedly. “The Scarecrow’s all without his stuffing now.” He turned to Adrian with another frostbite smile. “Who does that make you, friend?”
Adrian clenched the canister tighter to his chest, fingers working at the lid as Jack Frost stepped slowly closer.
But Jack Frost hadn’t accounted for something - the very fact that he was drawing heat from warm-blooded creatures and using it to maintain the low-pressure bubble that kept him frozen. It took a lot of collected energy to hold that temperature, but if something colder than that met with Jack Frost, it would leech energy from him, and his protection would collapse.
“I’m Dorothy,” Adrian said, “bitch.”
He wrenched the top off of the canister and flung liquid nitrogen all over Jack Frost’s towering frame.
For a long moment, Jack Frost simply stared at him in disbelief - no anger, no fear, just pure and complete incredulity.
Then he melted extremely precipitously into a faintly-artistic splatter on the floor, reduced to cold water dotted with chunks of ice.
Adrian took a breath so deep it was slightly dizzying and set the canister down on the nearest table, his hands shaking slightly.
That done, he joined the Doctor and Donna in racing to Jethro’s side.
Cautiously, the Doctor employed his glowing device for yet another meticulous scan, and then he splayed a gentle hand over the center of Jethro’s chest.
Color jumped into the boy’s white cheeks, and he gasped raggedly, eyes flying open as all the curling frost designs that had lately blanketed his skin immediately began to melt.
“Wh-what-” Jethro sat up, shivering uncontrollably. “I’m s-so c-c-cold-”
Before anyone could get a word in edgewise, the Doctor swung his coat around Jethro’s shoulders and helped him to his feet.
“Come on, then,” he prompted. “Get the blood moving. We’ve got a whole lot more kids who are going to need a little help warming up.”
Jethro nodded resolutely, clutching the coat tighter around him, and the Doctor patted his shoulder and then put an arm around him.
“Tell me,” he instructed, “if at any point you can’t feel your toes.”
-
A somewhat striking amount of hugging the life back into people followed, and then they were standing in a cave lit only by the screwdriver’s flashlight function - Adrian had finally asked what the damn thing was called - and filled with very cold, very confused teenaged former victims.
The Doctor looked pleased with himself, and Jethro looked pleased to be himself.
Adrian was fairly certain that this was the most epic day in the none-too-illustrious history of this unimpressive school.
He had no idea, however, what the bewildered defrostees were going to tell their parents.
-
They were all panting a little by the time they made it back up to the roof - except, of course, for the Doctor, who seemed to run on fascination and sunshine - and over to the Whatever Jethro Had Called It Box.
Adrian put his hands in his pockets. The snow was starting to look slushy even now, and while the air had a ways to go before “balmy,” the wicked edge had gone out of its chill. Things were returning to normal, and the Doctor and his crew were going back to wherever they had suddenly come from - in the nick of time, raring to give everything they had to help people they didn’t even know.
But they were hesitating.
“You’ve got a bit of a knack for improvisational physics,” the Doctor told him, smiling.
Jethro mimicked the expression, shyly. “You might like to see a black hole,” he reported. “They’re not like you’d expect.”
“I can’t,” Adrian said, not without a twinge of real regret. “They’ll never get through conic sections on their own - and I’ve got to get the frozen ones caught up.” He smiled. “I don’t think I could do what you do every day. Teaching teenagers trig is enough of an adventure.” He paused. “That is, presuming that I could even seriously consider the possibility of leaving without my boyfriend reading my thoughts and ending me with his mind.”
“I knew it,” Donna sniffed. “All the good ones are either gay or secretly trying to kill you.”
“Oh, come here,” Adrian ordered, holding his arms out for a hug, and Donna obliged.
Jethro took one, too, tentatively but with a characteristic warmth, and the Doctor clapped Adrian’s shoulder.
“Don’t be too shocked if we turn up here again,” he advised. “There’s something a bit off about this place, and that’s what we always end up looking for. Excellent working with you, Adrian Leyman.”
Grinning, Adrian shook the offered hand.
He was still smiling long after the blue box vanished into the air, taking the last vworping echoes with it. The clouds were clearing, the sun was warm against his back, and he’d insisted that Donna keep his jacket.
Also, his class was probably off in the bushes doing LSD by now.
Adrian hastened for the stairs.
-
Sam’s eyes widened as Adrian stepped into the apartment. “What happened?” he wanted to know.
Adrian flopped down on the couch beside him, kissed him for well over a minute, and then drew back.
“Didn’t you always want to write a collection of stories?” he asked.
Sam frowned. “Yeah, sort of. Why?”
Adrian was already laughing. “How do you feel about science fiction?” he inquired.