Season's Greetings (7 page)

“Staying would make it up to me.”

“I can’t. I’m out of time. You have to take the cookies down to the third floor, apartment G. He won’t answer the door, but you’ll know what to do when you get there.”

“Why the fuck did you come if you didn’t plan to stay?”

“I had to come, even if it was cheating, because I had to say good-bye. I didn’t get to say good-bye, Kyle. Now, go, he needs you.”

“But I need you…” His voice trailed off, because it was too late.

And the weight in his lap disappeared, and all that lingered of his lover was the scent of peppermint and vanilla and cum. And then, since the dream was gone anyway, Kyle opened his eyes and stared at his bleak little apartment with eyes accustomed to not seeing, and shuddered in distaste. Had he really lived like this? His gaze fell on the wrapped cookies, and he sighed. He hadn’t been able to deny Aiden in life, far be it from him to refuse the man’s request in death.

A shower and fresh clothes later, he was surprised by how much brighter everything seemed, how whole he felt. Good-bye was important, he supposed. Maybe after he’d dropped off Aiden’s cookies, he’d go back over to the station house and tell Chief Nick that he was sorry for being a pain in the ass the past year. If that went well enough, he might even consider walking on to the workshop, to see the frenzy of toy-making as Aiden’s old co-workers got ready for the upcoming holiday.

***

He stood outside the door of a dingy little apartment on a floor identical to his own, balancing the cheery wrapped plate of cookies on one palm, while banging fruitlessly on the door with the other. The sound seemed to echo in the interior, but no answer came. His brows drew tight together; he shifted the plate to his other hand and pressed his palm flat to the door. No heat seeped through.

There was no keyhole to peer through; no peephole to try to spy through.

“Hello?” he called. Somewhere in the distance a thready, weak strand of music drifted in the air. Something sad, and not quite seasonal, not quite distinguishable.

A roaring in his ears soon blocked that sound as well, and he heard only the rapid trip-thump of his own heart as he stood before that silent, dingy door, waiting for admittance.

In an effort to achieve calm, he drew in a deep breath, and that was when he caught the scent of something evil. Not smoke, no. Smoke hung thick and menacing, it reached out and choked you, burned your eyes and will away in visible swirls. If smoke and fire were on the other side of that door, he wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing for whoever Aiden had sent him to save.

This was something worse. Something sneaky and perverse, a killer that stole breath without pain, took life without care.

But it was an evil he could fight, a demon he could face more easily than smoke and flame. Foolish as it may seem, he set the cookie plate carefully near the wall, and spun out in a wide angled kick, splintering the door just above the lock.

The foul gas rushed out over him, and he yanked his red thermal long sleeved T-shirt up to cover his nose and mouth, stepping into the bleak apartment. A thin figure lay on a battered mattress in the corner, narrow chest rising slowly under a shabby quilt.

“Hey!” Kyle called. He turned left into the kitchen, where just like in his own unit, a single window let in meager sunlight in the day and reflected desolation back at him in the darkness. He shoved that window up as far as it could go, then, when it refused to stay put, shattered it with a cast iron skillet that sat on the stove top. His second priority was twisting the dial to shut off the flow of sodium scented gas that drenched the air with noxious rotten egg fumes.

The idiot was either trying to kill himself or…

Let’s just go with idiot, Aiden’s voice whispered in his ear.

“Hey!” Kyle called again, grabbing a worn blue terry cloth dish towel from the scarred countertop. Kyle ignored the fact that it had a smear of tomato sauce on one end and doused it with cool water from the tarnished tap. Wringing the towel out as he walked to the mattress, Kyle ignored the puddles he left on the utilitarian gray carpet.

At the man’s side, Kyle wrapped the cloth about the stranger’s mouth and nose and hefted the man in his arms, shabby quilt and all. There was no balcony, so he’d have to take him out in the hall until the air cleared.

And that was where he was, an hour later. Sitting in the dim hall, leaning against the wall, a stranger’s ginger head in his lap, sifting his fingers through fine silky straight hair, a plate of sugar cookies on his left. Bemused.

Frosty lashes lifted from pale freckled cheeks, and Kyle found himself staring down into pale blue eyes. “Hello,” he said.

THE END

For All Eternity

Prompt provided by Christopher - Santa & an elf, North Pole, Slave Collar

Tobias hugged his knees and followed the action at the office Christmas party. Mostly he observed, but occasionally he couldn’t help giving things a little nudge in the right direction. Like when the tipsy blonde nearly left with the smirking guy from accounting. He couldn’t have that. The blonde had a pure heart and the smirker was wicked with a side of malicious. He was clearly the type to write a girl’s phone number on the bathroom wall. Santa might not approve of interference, but really, it was just an extra gust of icy air that made her shiver and dump her punch down the front of the fluffy white sweater. And that put fashion above lust in the blonde’s eyes, and the smirking jerk was quickly forgotten.

The two dozen people Les employed were milling about, laughing and drinking, dancing and making merry. Some were drunk on the spiced eggnog, some on the spiked punch, some on the spirit of the season. This Christmas party would change things as no other party had in the thirty years of Winter and Sons’ existence.

Oh, it all looked pretty standard. Some guy was photocopying his butt, cookies and fruitcake were disappearing at a shocking rate, and almost everyone was indulging in something they shouldn’t. Two interns necked under the mistletoe, and that brought a shiny memory to the surface. More than thirty years before, he and Les had stood under the mistletoe for the very first time, and Les had startled him with a kiss that changed his life.

He’d been severely reprimanded for that incident, and warned that if he continued to interfere in the human realm he’d be restricted to the North Pole for several years. He’d learned to be more discreet, and there followed two decades of passionate, illicit encounters and joyful meetings. He’d listened to Les rant about his mother’s insanity, the religion that destroyed all the joy in her life, held him when he’d cried over his distant, oblivious father’s death, and laughed with him when he’d learned, despite the joylessness of his upbringing, that there were good people in the world.

Then twelve years ago, he’d made a foolish mistake, or his superiors had been suspicious, either way, he’d stepped too far and found himself banished from the human realm and restricted to communicating with Les only through the faded bit of frippery tree ornament.

The only contact he’d had with Les in all these years had been through that bit of decoration, watching over him. Occasionally, when all the planets and the stars and the pollution were right, they were even able to converse in some manner that Les laughingly called telepathy.

Those snatched moments were his most treasured memories, second only to the times he’d actually been in Les’s presence, and by unspoken, mutual agreement, neither brought up the question Tobias had asked just before his superiors whisked him away, insisting that relationships between humans and elves were wrong, that he had to give Les a fair chance to find love with one of his own kind. It seemed they both felt such a momentous decision should be made face to face.

His probation had finally ended, and now he could be here this year in person, as it were, or rather, as an ornament on the office tree, with the blessing of his superiors. He’d used his time of punishment wisely, campaigning even up to the big man himself for the right to bring Les home with him. It was all up to Les to decide.

Would the decision be made today? He huddled in the branches of the Douglas fir, anxious for his chance to jump from the branches into Les’s life again. Still, this was the closest he’d been allowed to get to Les in nearly a dozen years. What if Les had forgotten him? Given up on him? Found someone new? Someone…human? A dozen years he’d had to sit back and wait for the answer to the question he should never have asked.

His gaze was drawn to Les. A tall dignified man of slight frame, white hair neatly trimmed, blue eyes sparkling with life and determination. He stood near the door, a stack of envelopes in his hand, a faint smile on thin lips as he watched his employees cavort. As each one decided he’d had enough of work and departed for home, Les shook his hand and handed him an envelope and said a few words in his quiet stern voice.

Tobias could have cheated and eavesdropped, but Les had scolded him for it in the past, and the twelve years apart had bred enough uncertainty that he didn’t dare venture beyond the bounds of what the then twenty-two-year-old Les had called “human propriety”.

So he waited, perched among the tree branches, and watched, and hummed along with the music being piped in, and he remembered.

He remembered the first time he’d seen Les, way back when he’d been in training for his first position as one of Santa’s ears and eyes. He’d been standing in a shopping mall in the middle of Nebraska, listening to children as they sat on the mall Santa’s lap, sending back a constant stream of Little Susie wants a doll, and Trenton wants a football, when a severe-faced woman holding a tot of no more than two caught his attention. The boy had white blond hair and deep blue eyes so sad and lonely and out of place on a child his age.

There were only a few children in the line, and Tobias had broken protocol right then and called out, “Come sit on Santa’s lap, little one. Tell the Jolly Old Elf what you want for Christmas!”

The woman had scowled fiercely at him and stormed away, but not before Tobias caught the emptiness in the child’s heart and the wickedness in the mother’s. He’d ranted and raved, begged and pleaded, but his supervisors, and even Santa himself, had reluctantly told him there was nothing that could be done.

Nothing could be done, but he couldn’t forget those eyes, and he hadn’t been able to stay away. Every chance he had he’d searched for the boy, but it was years before he was assigned to that mall again, and years before he connected to the boy. He couldn’t mistake the white blond hair and blue eyes, but the glimpse into the empty heart assured him that the tall thin youth hanging about on the edge of the crowd of children waiting to sit on Santa’s lap was indeed the tot from years before.

Breaking away from his post, he approached the candy cane fence and called out to the boy. “Hey, come sit on Santa’s lap. Tell the Jolly Old Elf what you want for Christmas!”

The boy glanced left and right, as though making certain he wasn’t being observed, then looked straight into Tobias’s eyes. “You can’t give me what I want for Christmas, no one can. Besides, I’m too old for that.”

Tilting his head to the side, Tobias answered, “You’ve always been too old, it seems.”

Thin lips twisted in a sneer. “I remember you, you know. You were here before.”

And in the sparsely filled heart, Tobias read that the child had looked for him, in all the years passing, and that pleased him, inordinately so. “I was here ten years ago. I’ve been assigned elsewhere since then, and I’ll be assigned to different tasks entirely after this year.”

“You won’t be here anymore?” Was it a trace of hollowness, a bit of melancholy that threaded through that joyless heart?

Shaking his head, Tobias frowned. “No.”

“Then I won’t see you again. Okay then.” The boy turned his gaze over Tobias’s shoulder to the gingerbread throne where Santa sat. “That guy works at the courthouse sweeping floors. He’s not Santa.”

“He’s not.”

“I won’t come here anymore then, if you’re not going to be here.”

That made it sound like the boy came expressly to see him, and the warmth in Tobias’s chest blossomed a little more. “Someone comes,” he said. “Someone will be here, to listen to what the children tell the courthouse janitor. To make sure it gets heard in the proper place.”

“He doesn’t even know you’re there.”

Shrugging again, Tobias confessed, “He can’t see me. You can. Your mother did.”

“Why?” At the mention of his mother, the boy looked nervously around again. “Why can’t he? Why can I?”

“Because he doesn’t need to and because I want you to.”

The boy nodded as though that made all the sense in the world. “Okay. I’m Les Winter.”

“Tobias Strahleund.” Desperately Tobias looked around. His superiors had noticed the cease of information flow, and he was bound to get in trouble if he stood here any longer. He couldn’t bring himself to leave though, not while Les stood, staring searchingly at him, not while he could practically see that tiny virtually empty heart filling up bit by bit with…him.

“I’ve got to go. My mom will be home from work and she’ll expect me.” Les didn’t move though, and Tobias at last hit upon a solution.

“Yes. She’s not to be upset; I understood that immediately about her. Here.” He snatched a small bit of decoration from the display and breathed on it. “Take this with you. If it works like it’s supposed to, I’ll be able to find you as long as you have it with you.”

And he had. He’d stolen every moment he could over the years to visit with Les, watched him grow, watched his emptiness fill, until his heart and mind and soul were alight with life and intelligence. 

But until Les had taken over his father’s firm, until thirty years ago when his boy had graduated college and gone to work at twenty-two, that heart had still been missing one of the vital elements that made human life worthwhile.

Joy.

Love.