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In honor of the first day of winter, I bring you this small offering. Enjoy!

“What are we investigating again, Miss?” Benton asked, stumbling awkwardly on his snowshoes.

“Nothing much, Sergeant,” Jo replied, trying to steady him. “Frankly, I think the Brigadier just wanted us out of headquarters.”

“We can be a bit of a rowdy lot,” Benton admitted, laughing wryly.

“Except the Doctor, of course,” Jo said. “He takes everything too seriously!”

“We’re opposite ends of the spectrum,” Benton agreed thoughtfully. Jo shoved him playfully.

“There, all the science is rubbing off on you!”

“No, it’s just something I heard the Doctor say,” Benton said placidly. Jo giggled.

“Wait a minute, Sergeant—I’ve got an idea!”

“Are you two going to dawdle all day?” the Doctor called from up ahead. Jo squished snow in between her gloves.

“Not really, Doctor!”

The snowball smacked the Doctor squarely in the back of the head. He whirled around, brushing snow out of his hair and looking a little bit annoyed. “Really, Jo!”

Benton’s snowball hit the Doctor in the face. The Doctor spluttered, spitting out dog- and leather-flavored snow. Jo broke into a fit of laughter. The Doctor drew himself up.

“I can see I have no choice,” he said, and hefted a large chunk of snow from the side of the road at them. Jo and Benton dived in different directions and the game was on. They slid and scrambled around in the snow, ducking out of cover to fire off volleys at each other.

There was a brief ceasefire as a UNIT truck pulled up on the road. “You three were supposed to report in a half hour ago!” exclaimed Captain Yates. Four well-aimed snowballs knocked him flat on his backside, the Doctor making good use of both his hands ambidextrously.

Howling bloody murder, Yates dived into the fray.

Another fifteen minutes later, the Brigadier drove up on a motorcycle. Alstair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart had seen quite a few strange things in his time, but never anything quite so strange as UNIT’s scientific adviser holding a sergeant in a headlock, with his assistant clinging to his back shoving snow down the back of his neck, and a captain yelling like a banshee and pelting all three of them with snowballs.

Years later, Lethbridge-Stewart would remember the look on the Doctor’s face as the one and only guilty expression he had ever surprised out of the Time Lord.