A/N: Hello my glorious readers. And Merry Christmas! Ok, I know it's not quite Christmas yet, but this is a Christmas fic, so I couldn't resist wishing you one a day early!

This is going to be a 2 or 3 shot and will be updated tomorrow and, if it turns out to be 3 chapters, on Boxing Day. Enjoy!

DISCLAIMER: Seeing as it's still Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day, Santa has yet to bring me the rights to Alex Rider. Or A Christmas Carol.

-o-O-o-

Sometimes, Alex wondered about himself.

It was Christmas Eve. Back in England, Tom had apparently been ice skating with some friends, with hot chocolate afterwards. They were all back home, now though. It was nearly three in the morning there, after all.

Just a few miles away – and no, Alex still hadn't made the switch to thinking in kilometres, even if he had been living in the states for almost the last three years – Sabina and her parents were throwing a party. They went all out for parties, remembered Alex with a smile. Sabina would have invited half the school, plus their families, and Edward and Liz would have invited everyone they knew. There would be a ridiculous amount of mulled wine and beer, and a lot of canapés. Last year, Liz had made mini Yorkshire puddings and stuffed them with roast beef and horseradish. Each tray vanished within a minute of being brought out of the oven.

Later, they'd bring out mince pies, and apparently they had finally given in to their daughter's incessant badgering and had hired a chocolate fountain for the occasion.

There would be Christmas songs, and no doubt if he went, he'd want to tear his ears off within half an hour, even as he grinned and danced with Sabina.

But he wasn't there. Instead, he was sitting on the couch in his pokey little apartment, typing up a report for the CIA on his laptop, with one Christmas film after another playing on the muted TV. The only other sign that it was Christmas at all, here, was a plastic tree sitting on his table that Sabina had marched in and deposited there, right before he told her he was leaving for a mission.

They didn't know he was back yet. He'd only returned at about lunch time, after his shortest stay in hospital to date – just three hours. Byrne had told him to take a few days off before starting to think about the report, but Alex preferred to get everything down immediately. He couldn't let himself forget it until he had after all.

He'd delay a few days before handing it in, of course. Otherwise Byrne would get worried again and try to send him to a therapist again. They both knew how well that had gone over last time.

He'd been working for the CIA for almost two years now – ever since his sixteenth birthday. He'd bought the flat with his first pay check – he'd never realised being a spy could pay so well – because he'd been unsure of his reception back at the Pleasures. Liz and Edward had been… very forthright on their objections.

They'd welcomed him back, but Alex had never felt as comfortable with them, since they had tried to deny something that, he was realising, was a large part of him and his legacy. He could never have given the job up for good.

He groaned as he finished typing up his infiltration and put the laptop down. He was sleepy, but loath to go to bed until he finished the report.

Surely, just closing his eyes for a moment couldn't hurt?

"Honey, don't go to sleep yet," said a voice.

Alex groaned and his eyelids fluttered.

"J'ck?" he murmured, confused. His eyes opened and he frowned. "I thought you were dead?"

"I'm sorry, honey. I'm not Jack," said Jack and Alex frowned. "I'm the ghost of Christmas Past."

"Who are you, and why do you look like Jack?" demanded Alex, rolling away over the back of the couch.

"I told you, I'm the Ghost of Christmas Past. And I look like Jack because who else would I look like? She as good as raised you, Alex."

"You know what?" snapped Alex, backing up to hide the tears springing to his eyes. "I don't care. I don't care who you are, or what sick game you're playing! Just get out!"

Jack sighed, and then suddenly she was beside him. "Come, Alex. There is much for me to show you."

She placed two fingers to his forehead and Alex felt himself dissolving into the air.

When he came back together, he was somewhere else entirely.

They were in a snow-covered field, thick clouds above them blocking out the night sky.

"Do you remember this?" she asked, quietly.

"It's kind of hard to forget," spat Alex. "Why have you brought me here?"

"There's something that you've forgotten," said not-Jack. "Something that you shouldn't have forgotten."

"What?"

She gave a light, musical laugh that broke Alex's heart with its familiarity. "It doesn't work like that, Alex. You have to work that out on your own."

"Fine," muttered Alex. "Come on, then."

He shoved his hands in his pockets and tramped across the fields. The ghost rolled her eyes and walked after him.

She caught up with him at the far end of the field, outside a small, ramshackle shed.

"Do I have to do this?" he asked.

"I cannot make you do anything," she said, softly. "It is your choice. If you want to remember, you will continue."

"And it's important?" he asked, his voice pained.

"Yes."

"I hate this," he growled and yanked open the door. He slammed it behind him, and the ghost sighed, again, and walked through. They could be so tiresome on the first few visits.

Inside the hut, there was a flight of stairs descending down into the ground and Alex was already halfway down despite the dark. When she appeared in front of him at the bottom, he jumped and scowled. "Too good for stairs, are you?" he hissed quietly.

"They can't hear us, Alex. Or see us, for that matter."

"My point still stands," grouched Alex, walking down the corridor. Behind him, he assumed, the Jack-ghost followed.

Already, the smell was assaulting him. He could feel him going cold at the first traces and by the time it had turned into the stench of disease and death that he remembered he was shaking in badly suppressed horror.

"It's okay, Alex," whispered not-Jack, wrapping an arm around his shoulder. "You got through this. You got out and you recovered. You are strong enough to revisit it."

"I…", he stuttered, pulling away uncomfortably. So much of his psyche depended on locking the horrors of his past away, that he really wasn't sure that that was true. He jumped as she laid a cold hand on his arm.

"You can," she said, and he nodded.

"Right," he said, striding on. "I will."

"Atta boy," whispered the ghost, before hurrying after him.

When she found him again, he was standing in front of a row of bars, looking through at himself. Past-him looked even worse than he remembered. In fact, if Alex hadn't known it was him to the very depths of his soul, he wouldn't have recognised him. One side of his face was swollen with bruising, with all of it streaked with blood from a deep cut in his hairline. His shoulders hung unevenly and he was hunched over to one side to shield broken ribs. He was thin, and shaking and blood bubbled from his lips with every gasping breath, courtesy of teeth knocked out from repeated blows to the face.

"That is you last Christmas," she said, as if he didn't know.

"Hey, Rider," spat a man, and Alex spun around, his face going white.

But the man simply walked straight through him and into the cage.

"I thought we'd try something a little different this time," said the man. "Tell me, Rider. How do you feel about fire?"

"What do I need to remember?" present-him said, desperately. "I don't want to watch this."

"Look," she said, gesturing through the bars.

"I don't want to," said Alex, continuing to stare at his hands.

Before his eyes, the ghost grew and became transparent, misty and ruffled by malevolent winds, her eyes burning red. "You Will Look," she commanded, every syllable a death knell.

Moments later, she returned to her Jack-form and Alex breathed a sigh of relief.

"I'm sorry, Alex," she said. "But you are passed the point of no return. You will not find peace until you face this."

Alex nodded and turned to face the bars once more.

He stared. "I don't remember this," he said.

"I know. This is why you must look."

And he did. He saw, not just the mutilations visited on him by his torturer, but the blank, peaceful look in his eyes, and the half-smile on his face, that only shuddered slightly with each new horror.

"What were you thinking of?" asked not-Jack.

"I don't remember," he replied, woodenly.

"Yes, you do," she corrected, gently.

"I-"

"Yes?"

"Sabina," he said, finally. "Sabina and Liz and Edward, and how doing this job, and surviving everything it threw at me, meant that they'd be safe, that they would never have to know what this truly meant."

"You'd do anything to keep them safe."

"They're almost family."

"Alex, do not lie to yourself," she said, sternly.

"But-"

"Why do you qualify how you feel about them?" she asked. "They are your family, and deep down, you know this. So why do you deny it?"

Alex scowled. "I think we're done here."

She sighed.

"As you wish," she said, and touched his forehead.

Once more, he dissolved into air and reformed somewhere else.

Alex looked around. "I thought you were taking me home?" he said, desperately.

"Don't you recognise where we are?" she asked, quietly.

He swallowed and shook his head in denial. "Alex, you are home."

"This isn't my home," he denied, desperately.

"Then why do you look like someone just poisoned your pet hamster?" she asked.

"Fine," snarled Alex. "Why are we here?"

"You had fifteen Christmases here, Alex. Did you think that we could pass it by entirely?"

He sighed and sat down on the couch. "I guess not," he said, glancing around his uncle's living room.

The melancholy feeling was broken by a giggling blur of bubbles that stampeded into the room and scrambled over the sofa to hide behind it.

Alex stared in bemusement at the young blond child currently clutching at the sofa through his legs.

"Is that me?" he asked.

"Of course it is, Alex," smiled not-Jack. "Don't you recognise yourself?"

"Apparently not," said Alex, bemusedly. "How old am I?"

"Erm, 'I'm-not-three-I'm-nearly-four', I believe."

Alex blushed.

Suddenly, there were harried footsteps behind him.

"Alex!" called a voice. "Alex, you little monster, where have you gone?"

Alex spun around. "Ian?" he whispered.

"There you are!" growled Ian playfully, as he spotted his soapy nephew. "Now, what did I say about the bath?"

'I escaped from the bath?' mouthed Alex, incredulously, prompting not-Jack to giggle again.

"Nuffin'," giggled Alex skittering away to hide behind the tree in the corner.

"Now, you know that's not true, Alex," said Ian, bending down to peer at the three-year-old under the lowest branches.

Little Alex pouted adorably from behind the pine needles.

"What did I say, Alex?"

"Tha' I haf to have a bath 'n' go to bed or Faver Chrissmas won't come."

Behind Ian, not-Jack seemed to be having a seizure from over-exposure to adorableness.

"That's right, little buddy. Now, do you want Santa to come?"

Alex nodded forlornly.

"Are you going to come and finish your bath like a big boy?"

Alex pouted and then nodded and crawled out to let his uncle pick him up.

"Come on then, kiddo," said Ian, swinging Alex onto his hip with practiced ease.

"Love you, Unca Ian," mumbled Alex sleepily. He seemed a completely different child from three seconds ago.

"Don't call me uncle, Alex. Just Ian."

"Sorry, Ian," mumbled Alex, snuggling down further into Ian's now soaking t-shirt.

"I love you too, little one," whispered Ian, softly, pressing a kiss to Little Alex's forehead.

Only Alex and not-Jack saw the stricken expression on his face when he said it.

"This is the last Christmas we spent together, isn't it?" asked Alex quietly.

"Yes. At least here, in this house. There were a few times he took you abroad, I think. While he was working."

"We don't have to go through them all, do we?" asked Alex.

"We'll fast forward through the next few," she said and Alex nodded in relief.

The next four Christmases were… depressing to say the least. There was no decoration, or food and the only celebration was Little Alex opening a few presents alone on Christmas morning. Without fail, one was a book in a foreign language that Alex would then end up struggling through for the rest of the day.

Things changed when he was eight years old. The decorations were almost obnoxiously shiny, and if he really thought hard, Alex could remember a pair of warm arms lifting him up to hang the paper chains from the lights and helping him wrap tinsel around the bannisters on the stairs.

But right now, there was simply the smell of the only meal Jack spent more than ten minutes on cooking in the oven, and a plate of mince pies on the coffee table, next to a half drunk glass of sherry. One of the mince pies had a large bite taken out of it, Alex noted with a smile. It had taken Jack half an hour to convince him that even if Santa didn't exist, that putting out sherry and a mince pie for him and a carrot for Rudolph couldn't do any harm. When she'd finally broken down into simplified game theory, Little Alex had given in and placed, with great reverence, a mince pie and a chopped carrot on a plate, and poured sherry carefully into the glass with a childish hopeful solemnity that belied his apparent disbelief in Santa Claus.

Suddenly, Little Alex, still in his pyjamas cannoned into the room, only to stop and stare in amazement at the presents.

"Jack!" he yelled excitedly. "JACK! Santa's been!"

Alex held his breath as he heard someone coming out of the kitchen behind him. He couldn't turn around. He couldn't.

"Well of course he has, sweetie," said a voice, and almost against his will, Alex spun around.

Stood in the doorway to the kitchen was Jack. Not not-jack, with Jack's face and voice and laugh and none of her mannerisms, but Jack, with her boyish grin and frizzy hair and off-key singing at ridiculous hours of the day.

"Jack," he whispered brokenly. "I miss you so much," he told her, although he knew she couldn't hear him.

It was bittersweet, to see that day, to see Jack coax smiles and laughs out of the reticent eight-year-old and ply him with more treats than could possibly be good for him. They played in the snow, and Alex made his first snow angel before, giggling, shoving snow down the back of Jack's top and starting a snowball fight of epic proportions and, when finally too cold and wet to continue, Jack took him back inside and made hot chocolate while he had a bath and changed into warm clothes. She pulled him into her lap while he drank, and he read to her from the book Ian had sent, translating from Spanish as he went.

When his eyes started to droop, she made him lay down the book and pushed a video into the machine. That night, Little Alex fell asleep to the black and white flickering of 'It's a Wonderful Life'.

"Are you ok?" asked Not-Jack, as Alex watched Jack carry Little Alex to bed.

"Yeah, I'm fine," murmured Alex, wiping tears away from his cheeks, and smiling slightly. "I'm perfect."

-o-O-o-

He woke up to find Scrooge playing on the telly and sighed. That had been one hell of a weird dream. Probably just the mission screwing with his thoughts.

He sighed and pulled his laptop back over to him. He really should finish the report tonight.

-o-O-o-

A/N: So what did you think? Can you guess who is going to appear next? And I hope that Santa brings me lots of REVIEWS for the morning!