I know there's a couple of other Doctor Who / Torchwood crossovers, so I hope it's OK to write this - it's a little different so hopefully it is
. Please
enjoy!Joey loved her children dearly, but on days like today she could cheerfully strangle them all. Stephen had been grizzling since dawn - a stomach ache, she suspected - and with the elder girls at school, and Anna on her day off, this meant trying to keep him pacified and keep her eyes on her triplet daughters by herself.
And even that she would have ordinarily managed, but Margot had somehow got it into her head that the extra attention she was paying to Stephen meant that Joey didn't love her daughters any more. Connie, scared and worried by this announcement, had dissolved into tears, setting off Stephen again, and while Joey tried to calm the both of them down, little Len had for some reason taken it upon herself to tackle Margot like a rugger-player, knocking her over and knocking her own head against an armchair in the bargain. Finally, the exasperated Joey had threatened all three girls with early bed and had told them stay in the nursery and stay quiet until her youngest had calmed down.
Stephen was asleep, now, with a look on his face that Joey fancied was almost triumphant. "Yes, I expect you're very pleased with yourself," she murmured to him tenderly, "upsetting the whole household with your aches and pains." She kissed his forehead and placed him gently in his crib, hoping that he would sleep off whatever what was wrong.
She'd had some time to think on what she should say to her girls. She'd obviously been wrong never to consider that they would be prone to the same jealous urges that other children were. She'd assumed, since they were used to sharing her, that sharing her with one more child would not be a problem, but after Margot's outburst today she knew they needed reassurance. The identical worried looks on their faces as she entered the nursery almost broke her heart.
"Oh, my darlings," Joey sighed, kneeling down and opening her arms wide enough to fit all three of them in a hug. "You've all been very silly today."
"But you do love us less, don't you Mama?" That was Connie, her voice small and muffled by Joey's blouse.
"No!" Joey said, as vehemently as she could. "No matter what happens, I will always love you just as much as I always have."
"Then why don't you want to play wiv us any more?" Margot chimed in.
"It's not that I don't want to, darling, it's that Stephen is very little and he needs to be with Mama as much as possible. He can't talk yet, and he can't walk, and the world is still so new to him that it's quite a scary place. When he's a little older, I'll be able to spend more time with you - and then one day all five of us will be able to play together! Would you like that?" Connie's face brightened immediately, and Len nodded happily. Margot, after a moment's consideration, agreed that she would, too.
"Now Len," quoth Joey, turning to her eldest daughter, "whatever did you mean by attacking Margot in such a manner?"
"When we were at Auntie Madge's, Aunt Daisy told Primula that you slap people, when vey're historical," Len explained a little unwillingly. Joey choked back a sudden need to laugh, and made a mental note to remind the heedless Daisy to watch what she said in front of the little ones.
"I see. Well, Aunt Daisy was talking about something that a grown-up should do, not something that a little girl should do. Have you told Margot you're sorry for hurting her yet?"
"Yes," declared Len, and Margot assented.
"And I forgave her," Margot added, grandly.
"That's my good girls. Now then - how about I tell you three a story? A new story, just for you three and no one else. I'll tell you a story today, until Stephen wakes up and needs Mama, and then tomorrow after lunch when he's sleeping again I'll tell you some more."
"But what about Stephen?" asked Len, who at age four already had a decided interest in everything being fair.
"When he's your age, I'll start telling him his own story. Now," and Joey's voice forbade further arguments, "what kind of story would you like?"
"A fairy story!"
"A true story."
"A story about you!"
The three exclamations came at once, and Joey smiled. She had just the story in mind.
One upon a time, said Joey, there was a man who lived in a blue box.
"How did he fit in a box?" Margot demanded.
-who lived in a magic blue box. The magic meant that from the outside it looked small, but from the inside it was just as big as Plas Gwyn. His box could do all sorts of amazing things - it could even fly through the air like an airplane! I don't think there are many people who would like to live in a home that flew, but it suited the man just fine, since he had to travel all over the world. His job, you see, was to make sure all the witches, wizards and warlocks, and all the sorcerors and sorceresses, were obeying the laws of magic.
"Why did he need to do that?" Len asked.
If you or I break a law, if it's only a little law, maybe a policeman will come and tell us off for being a naughty. If we break a big law, someone could get very badly hurt. But if a magical law got broken, hundreds of people could get very badly hurt.
"In Sleeping Beauty, everyone falls asleep for a hundred years." This time it was Connie who interrupted. Joey smiled.
Right. And it wouldn't be very nice to fall asleep for that long, would it? So the man in the magic blue box had to make sure that magic was only being used the right way.
One day, he was chasing some magical wild animals across the Austrian mountains, when he came to a very narrow pathway. Now, the man's biggest fault was that he never stopped to think about things before he did them. So instead of stopping to make sure the path was safe, he started to run across it...
. Looking
forward to the next bit. 
