Original -- The Trappings of Joy
Title: The Trappings of Joy
Rating: (very light) PG-13
Word Count: 1,742
Warnings: language, fluff, characteristic silliness, hasty editing
Prompt: winter song at pulped_fictions (taken a bit loosely)
Summary: Christmas with celestial beings is, strangely, not bad at all.
Author's Note: We return to the vague post-novel future for… well, what it says on the tin. XD For anybody who’s missed previous installments, Vincent Duval: 250-year-old French vampire; Edward Blevins: high school janitor werewolf; Maion: low-ranking seraph; Belial: high-ranking demon; Tierfal: resident coke addict/Christmas fan.
THE TRAPPINGS OF JOY
Edward wasn’t stupid enough to expect Christmas at Vincent’s to be normal-which was why he definitely wasn’t expecting to wake up to the sound of carols playing softly down the hall.
His first thought was that he’d always kind of liked the nice, old-timey recordings of the classic ones, even during the many Christmases he’d spent holed up in his apartment, searching the basic cable for a Christmas program that didn’t have any happy families. His second was that if this was happening, Vincent had to be dead.
Re-dead. Extra-dead. Mega-ultra-über-dead.
He only tripped and introduced his face to the rug once during the scramble out the door, and it was such a nice rug that it barely hurt anyway.
When he skidded into the living room, however, Vincent was sitting on the couch furthest from the curtained window, tick-tapping away at his laptop keyboard. He looked exhausted, there was a Santa hat settled incongruously on his dark hair, and a length of gold tinsel was draped over his shoulders, but he was most certainly alive. After-live. Normal.
Except the carols were still playing, a garland wove its way along the fireplace mantle, and there was a huge Christmas tree in the corner tricked out like Times Square.
“…am I high,” Edward asked cautiously, “or are you?”
“Neither of us,” Vincent said. “Unless you had an extraordinarily good time cleaning up the candy wrappers and crumpled report cards at the high school yesterday.”
“Not that I remember,” Edward said, shortly after which he realized that this response was not as clever as it had sounded in his fuzzy head. The slow-burn smirk began to simmer on Vincent’s face, and he hastened to say something else and distract the undead bastard. “What are you still doing up?”
That erased the smirk in favor of a sneer. “Unfortunately,” Vincent said, “all of this insipid capitalist piggery means that ninety percent of my employees always quit working a week before their official holiday time begins. Those of us who actually care if there’s a company to come back to after New Year’s have to pick up the slack.”
Edward gestured. “Sorry, but… that’s kind of hilarious when you’ve got the hat on.”
Vincent frowned. “If I hadn’t given in, he would have spent the last eight hours whining about my lack of Christmas spirit, and I wouldn’t have gotten any of my employees’ work done.”
“Maion?” Edward said.
Vincent raised an eyebrow. “No, Woody Allen. Who the hell do you think? You might want to make sure he hasn’t burned down the kitchen, since you’re the one who has to eat.”
Given that that was probably the kindest dismissal Vincent had ever offered to someone who wasn’t immortal or to whom he didn’t owe money, Edward decided to take it gracefully.
The sharp and festive scent of gingerbread greeted him from halfway down the hall, as did the sound of a quite literally transcendent voice.
“Trumpets sound, and angels sing-”
“They sure do,” Edward said.
Maion looked up from rolling out the dough. There was flour on his face, accompanied by a particularly bright smile.
“Good morning!” he said. “And merry Christmas!”
“Right back atcha,” Edward said. He motioned to the fairly considerable decorative explosion, subdued though it was by the smaller and more recent confectionary blast. “What’s all this?”
“This is Christmas,” Maion said plainly. Then his turquoise eyes went almost unnervingly large. “Oh, my goodness,” he said. “Are you Jewish? I’m so sorry; I didn’t even think to get a menor-”
“No,” Edward said quickly. “I’m not really much of anything. Obviously I’m on board with the angels and demons thing, but… no worries. It’s just that I didn’t figure you’d be much into the whole Hallmark conspiracy, and isn’t some of this kind of…” He waved his hands around a little at the sprigs of holly and the pine-cone wreaths, probably bearing more than a passing resemblance to a possessed Little Drummer Boy figurine. “Pagan?”
Maion set the rolling pin aside, selected a gingerbread man cookie cutter, and held a star-shaped one out to Edward-who took it. Not everybody got the opportunity in life to make cookies with a seraph, and sometimes he had to remember to appreciate the batshittery his life these days provided.
“The thing is, Edward,” the angel said, “that it’s not really about pagan or Christian so much as it is about celebration.” He pressed out a perfect gingerbread man and set the dough on the cookie tray. “All of the scholarly debate on the matter aside, if you think about it, the calendars have changed so much, and the stories have, and the axes of power, that the twenty-fifth is essentially a symbolic date by now. But that’s the point. Symbols are good. Symbols are significant. Having a specific day of the year towards which to direct the energies is the important part, and the more energies that focus in on a particular moment… well, I don’t personally discriminate too much during eras like this one, where cynicism so often rules. I’m happy to include and to accept the positivity of winter festivals and their hopes for spring. Almost every faith has a winter celebration, and, to me, it is the joy that is important. If these-” He held his doughy hands out towards the room at large. “-are the trappings of joy, then I am more than happy to deck the halls with boughs of holly, fa-la-la-la-”
“Gotcha,” Edward said.
Edward had never in his life seen cookies bake that fast, but he’d also never seen cookies baked by an angel with some attention span issues. Uncannily quick results aside, he helped carry the plates out to the living room, where Vincent had acquired a blanket with a reindeer motif.
Maion smiled, and the room warmed. “Thank you, Edward,” he said. “By the way, what do you want for Christmas?”
“I don’t know,” Edward said, setting his plates on the coffee table. “Usually I just ask Santa to let me get through the holidays without having to see a therapist.” He glanced over to see Maion watching him patiently, blinking at extremely regular intervals. “I guess… I’ve always kind of wanted to have a white Christmas.”
“Then you shouldn’t have started living in San Francisco,” Vincent said.
“Hush,” Maion said. “Or you, young man, are getting nothing but coal.”
Vincent’s eyebrows rose. “As opposed to…?”
Maion beamed and produced a wrapped present from thin air, aided only by a small puff of sparkly smoke.
Momentarily, Vincent’s characteristic wariness-verging-on-paranoia was bested by his curiosity; he accepted the vaguely rectangular gift, shook it gently, and then ripped the wrapping to shreds.
“Holy shit,” he said. “Is this…” He raised the slender bottle from the confetti he’d made. “Where in the hell did you find a bottle of wine from 1944?”
“The year we met,” Maion confided to Edward; to Vincent, he said merely: “Just consider it a Christmas miracle.”
Before Vincent could articulate some kind of clever reply, there was a significantly larger puff of smoke-this one black and crackling, smelling like sulfur instead of Douglas fir, and dissipating to reveal a very miffed-looking demon who was adjusting the cuffs of his suit jacket.
“Can I get a goddamn drink?” Belial asked without looking up. “Only Chinese restaurants are open at this hour, and all they’ll serve me is goddamn Tsingtao-” He glanced up at last and went very still. “What in the hell is he doing here?”
“I assume,” Vincent said, “that you’re referring to my self-appointed interior decorator, rather than to my tenant. And he’s distributing Christmas gifts to a few undeserving semi-mortals, if you must know.”
Edward took one careful step backwards towards the hall. He’d heard about the time these two set Vincent’s office carpet on fire.
Instead of picking a fight, however, Maion drew himself up to his full height, swallowed, and generated another wrapped parcel, which he held out to the extraordinarily well-dressed demon.
“We were family once,” he says. “And whatever has happened since-despite the very great deal that has happened since, most of which I feel it is fair to maintain was the fault of your side-today is for remembrance and forgiveness and love. Merry Christmas.”
The exchange that followed reminded Edward of the innumerable times he had fed mistrustful strays. With something of an air of a member of the bomb squad, Belial peeled the wrapping off of a remarkably fine red silk necktie.
There was a very long pause.
“I didn’t get you anything,” Belial said.
“I didn’t anticipate that you would,” Maion said, “what with you being a minion of the Fallen One and whatnot.”
A small but eventful war appeared to be taking place on Belial’s face.
“Thank you,” he said after a moment.
After the first fifteen seconds, Edward resigned himself to the prospect that they would all be frozen in awkward silence for the remainder of eternity, but then Vincent snickered and stood up from the couch.
“I’m going to go open this,” he said of his own gift, “before I lose my mind. Avoid the tinsel if a fight breaks out; I don’t care to find out what that stuff looks like charred to hell.”
As he surveyed the possibilities for decoration damage throughout the room, a tugging instinct drew Edward to the bay window. With Vincent moving towards the kitchen, it was safe to pull the curtains just a little bit aside.
“It’s snowing,” he said dumbly, staring out at the lazy rain of pale flakes. “Oh, my God; it’s snowing, it’s-”
Maion stopped him with a preternaturally quick hand-and the trademark blinding grin-as he bolted for the door.
“Don’t forget to bundle up,” the angel said, holding out the beautiful wolf-gray wool peacoat Edward had briefly and wistfully eyeballed while trudging through the crowds downtown.
Edward flung both arms around him. “Merry fucking Christmas, Maion,” he said.
When there was a massive quantity of snow in his hair, and he could hear Vincent laughing at the security feeds showing him live, it occurred to Edward Blevins that he might be able to stomach a cheesy Christmas special this year-he had something a little bit like a happy family, after all.
Rating: (very light) PG-13
Word Count: 1,742
Warnings: language, fluff, characteristic silliness, hasty editing
Prompt: winter song at pulped_fictions (taken a bit loosely)
Summary: Christmas with celestial beings is, strangely, not bad at all.
Author's Note: We return to the vague post-novel future for… well, what it says on the tin. XD For anybody who’s missed previous installments, Vincent Duval: 250-year-old French vampire; Edward Blevins: high school janitor werewolf; Maion: low-ranking seraph; Belial: high-ranking demon; Tierfal: resident coke addict/Christmas fan.
THE TRAPPINGS OF JOY
Edward wasn’t stupid enough to expect Christmas at Vincent’s to be normal-which was why he definitely wasn’t expecting to wake up to the sound of carols playing softly down the hall.
His first thought was that he’d always kind of liked the nice, old-timey recordings of the classic ones, even during the many Christmases he’d spent holed up in his apartment, searching the basic cable for a Christmas program that didn’t have any happy families. His second was that if this was happening, Vincent had to be dead.
Re-dead. Extra-dead. Mega-ultra-über-dead.
He only tripped and introduced his face to the rug once during the scramble out the door, and it was such a nice rug that it barely hurt anyway.
When he skidded into the living room, however, Vincent was sitting on the couch furthest from the curtained window, tick-tapping away at his laptop keyboard. He looked exhausted, there was a Santa hat settled incongruously on his dark hair, and a length of gold tinsel was draped over his shoulders, but he was most certainly alive. After-live. Normal.
Except the carols were still playing, a garland wove its way along the fireplace mantle, and there was a huge Christmas tree in the corner tricked out like Times Square.
“…am I high,” Edward asked cautiously, “or are you?”
“Neither of us,” Vincent said. “Unless you had an extraordinarily good time cleaning up the candy wrappers and crumpled report cards at the high school yesterday.”
“Not that I remember,” Edward said, shortly after which he realized that this response was not as clever as it had sounded in his fuzzy head. The slow-burn smirk began to simmer on Vincent’s face, and he hastened to say something else and distract the undead bastard. “What are you still doing up?”
That erased the smirk in favor of a sneer. “Unfortunately,” Vincent said, “all of this insipid capitalist piggery means that ninety percent of my employees always quit working a week before their official holiday time begins. Those of us who actually care if there’s a company to come back to after New Year’s have to pick up the slack.”
Edward gestured. “Sorry, but… that’s kind of hilarious when you’ve got the hat on.”
Vincent frowned. “If I hadn’t given in, he would have spent the last eight hours whining about my lack of Christmas spirit, and I wouldn’t have gotten any of my employees’ work done.”
“Maion?” Edward said.
Vincent raised an eyebrow. “No, Woody Allen. Who the hell do you think? You might want to make sure he hasn’t burned down the kitchen, since you’re the one who has to eat.”
Given that that was probably the kindest dismissal Vincent had ever offered to someone who wasn’t immortal or to whom he didn’t owe money, Edward decided to take it gracefully.
The sharp and festive scent of gingerbread greeted him from halfway down the hall, as did the sound of a quite literally transcendent voice.
“Trumpets sound, and angels sing-”
“They sure do,” Edward said.
Maion looked up from rolling out the dough. There was flour on his face, accompanied by a particularly bright smile.
“Good morning!” he said. “And merry Christmas!”
“Right back atcha,” Edward said. He motioned to the fairly considerable decorative explosion, subdued though it was by the smaller and more recent confectionary blast. “What’s all this?”
“This is Christmas,” Maion said plainly. Then his turquoise eyes went almost unnervingly large. “Oh, my goodness,” he said. “Are you Jewish? I’m so sorry; I didn’t even think to get a menor-”
“No,” Edward said quickly. “I’m not really much of anything. Obviously I’m on board with the angels and demons thing, but… no worries. It’s just that I didn’t figure you’d be much into the whole Hallmark conspiracy, and isn’t some of this kind of…” He waved his hands around a little at the sprigs of holly and the pine-cone wreaths, probably bearing more than a passing resemblance to a possessed Little Drummer Boy figurine. “Pagan?”
Maion set the rolling pin aside, selected a gingerbread man cookie cutter, and held a star-shaped one out to Edward-who took it. Not everybody got the opportunity in life to make cookies with a seraph, and sometimes he had to remember to appreciate the batshittery his life these days provided.
“The thing is, Edward,” the angel said, “that it’s not really about pagan or Christian so much as it is about celebration.” He pressed out a perfect gingerbread man and set the dough on the cookie tray. “All of the scholarly debate on the matter aside, if you think about it, the calendars have changed so much, and the stories have, and the axes of power, that the twenty-fifth is essentially a symbolic date by now. But that’s the point. Symbols are good. Symbols are significant. Having a specific day of the year towards which to direct the energies is the important part, and the more energies that focus in on a particular moment… well, I don’t personally discriminate too much during eras like this one, where cynicism so often rules. I’m happy to include and to accept the positivity of winter festivals and their hopes for spring. Almost every faith has a winter celebration, and, to me, it is the joy that is important. If these-” He held his doughy hands out towards the room at large. “-are the trappings of joy, then I am more than happy to deck the halls with boughs of holly, fa-la-la-la-”
“Gotcha,” Edward said.
Edward had never in his life seen cookies bake that fast, but he’d also never seen cookies baked by an angel with some attention span issues. Uncannily quick results aside, he helped carry the plates out to the living room, where Vincent had acquired a blanket with a reindeer motif.
Maion smiled, and the room warmed. “Thank you, Edward,” he said. “By the way, what do you want for Christmas?”
“I don’t know,” Edward said, setting his plates on the coffee table. “Usually I just ask Santa to let me get through the holidays without having to see a therapist.” He glanced over to see Maion watching him patiently, blinking at extremely regular intervals. “I guess… I’ve always kind of wanted to have a white Christmas.”
“Then you shouldn’t have started living in San Francisco,” Vincent said.
“Hush,” Maion said. “Or you, young man, are getting nothing but coal.”
Vincent’s eyebrows rose. “As opposed to…?”
Maion beamed and produced a wrapped present from thin air, aided only by a small puff of sparkly smoke.
Momentarily, Vincent’s characteristic wariness-verging-on-paranoia was bested by his curiosity; he accepted the vaguely rectangular gift, shook it gently, and then ripped the wrapping to shreds.
“Holy shit,” he said. “Is this…” He raised the slender bottle from the confetti he’d made. “Where in the hell did you find a bottle of wine from 1944?”
“The year we met,” Maion confided to Edward; to Vincent, he said merely: “Just consider it a Christmas miracle.”
Before Vincent could articulate some kind of clever reply, there was a significantly larger puff of smoke-this one black and crackling, smelling like sulfur instead of Douglas fir, and dissipating to reveal a very miffed-looking demon who was adjusting the cuffs of his suit jacket.
“Can I get a goddamn drink?” Belial asked without looking up. “Only Chinese restaurants are open at this hour, and all they’ll serve me is goddamn Tsingtao-” He glanced up at last and went very still. “What in the hell is he doing here?”
“I assume,” Vincent said, “that you’re referring to my self-appointed interior decorator, rather than to my tenant. And he’s distributing Christmas gifts to a few undeserving semi-mortals, if you must know.”
Edward took one careful step backwards towards the hall. He’d heard about the time these two set Vincent’s office carpet on fire.
Instead of picking a fight, however, Maion drew himself up to his full height, swallowed, and generated another wrapped parcel, which he held out to the extraordinarily well-dressed demon.
“We were family once,” he says. “And whatever has happened since-despite the very great deal that has happened since, most of which I feel it is fair to maintain was the fault of your side-today is for remembrance and forgiveness and love. Merry Christmas.”
The exchange that followed reminded Edward of the innumerable times he had fed mistrustful strays. With something of an air of a member of the bomb squad, Belial peeled the wrapping off of a remarkably fine red silk necktie.
There was a very long pause.
“I didn’t get you anything,” Belial said.
“I didn’t anticipate that you would,” Maion said, “what with you being a minion of the Fallen One and whatnot.”
A small but eventful war appeared to be taking place on Belial’s face.
“Thank you,” he said after a moment.
After the first fifteen seconds, Edward resigned himself to the prospect that they would all be frozen in awkward silence for the remainder of eternity, but then Vincent snickered and stood up from the couch.
“I’m going to go open this,” he said of his own gift, “before I lose my mind. Avoid the tinsel if a fight breaks out; I don’t care to find out what that stuff looks like charred to hell.”
As he surveyed the possibilities for decoration damage throughout the room, a tugging instinct drew Edward to the bay window. With Vincent moving towards the kitchen, it was safe to pull the curtains just a little bit aside.
“It’s snowing,” he said dumbly, staring out at the lazy rain of pale flakes. “Oh, my God; it’s snowing, it’s-”
Maion stopped him with a preternaturally quick hand-and the trademark blinding grin-as he bolted for the door.
“Don’t forget to bundle up,” the angel said, holding out the beautiful wolf-gray wool peacoat Edward had briefly and wistfully eyeballed while trudging through the crowds downtown.
Edward flung both arms around him. “Merry fucking Christmas, Maion,” he said.
When there was a massive quantity of snow in his hair, and he could hear Vincent laughing at the security feeds showing him live, it occurred to Edward Blevins that he might be able to stomach a cheesy Christmas special this year-he had something a little bit like a happy family, after all.