Warning: Swearing, no sex in this, tho there's plenty of suggestion and smooching :3 This may get a little ooc at points but I try to keep it in character. You cant have Christmas without the last minute Christmas shopping! And the rabbit thing actually happened! XD

Early Christmas present for Nagaku TsuzukuYami, Poking gets things done ;)

The Night Before The Night Before Christmas...

Victor Creed lay over the heater in the base common room, content as a lazy house cat. His peaceful slumber was interrupted by a loud rustling sound and cursing. He opened his eyes in time to see a large evergreen tree trying to force its way through the door. Deciding he'd rather not deal with large cursing trees at the moment he closed his eyes and went back to sleep.

"Watch it! Your gonna break somethin!"

"Maybe if we turned it around and pulled it through?"

John Wraith and Chris Bradley stood back as Fred Dukes pushed on the tree, the tree they had bought just in time for their Christmas eve party. Stryker had given Team X time off for the holidays to spend with family and friends, what most people do on the holidays. But in truth none of them had anywhere else to go.

The Christmas party had been Wade's idea, and John, Bradley and Dukes had insisted that you couldn't have Christmas without a Christmas tree. So the three of them went out and bought the biggest tree they could find, and it was a lucky find to, being only two days til Christmas, they were sold out almost everywhere.

Deciding at last that they weren't getting it in as they were, they hauled the tree back through the doorway and turned it around, pulling it by it's stump they managed to get it into the room, standing it up was another matter. The tree was at least three feet too tall for the room, it ended up stuck in a corner with it's top bent sideways. Victor had to move from his position on the heater as needles began to rain down on him.

"Well, that was a chore and a half," Bradley remarked, "but at least its up."

"Now we gotta decorate it." Said Dukes. They looked at the tree squashed into the corner and against the roof, all three wondering how they were going to get the lights around it.

"Yay! You got the tree!" Wade bounced excitedly into the room, "now hurry up and decorate it so I can put your presents under it! But don't do the star, I want to put the star on top!"

"Presents?" John asked.

"Ya, that's what people do on Christmas, they give each other presents." They all looked at each other blankly, none of them had given any thought to presents. "Come on people I put the list on the refrigerator a month ago!" Wade was of coarse referring to the piece of paper with all their names, stuck to the refrigerator with various colorful magnets, that read 'Christmas list' at the top in bold red and green letters. Some of them had written things on it, but couldn't remember what, they had thought it a joke, they considered themselves acquaintances, but not friends enough that they would give each other presents. But since Wade had apparently bought them gifts they felt they should at least return the holiday gesture.

"I don't see why people celebrate Christmas, its just another day that comes the same every year." Victor mumbled as they all moved to the kitchen to check the list.

"Its called fun Vicky!"

"its called an excuse to spend money and sing annoying songs." Logan said as he entered the kitchen and pushed aside the crowd at the fridge so he could get a beer.

"Come on Logan where's your Christmas spirit?" John remarked jokingly.

"Christmas spirit," Logan scoffed, "bah!"

"Humbug!" Victor finished his brother's statement.

Neither of the feral brothers had celebrated Christmas since they were very young, and that was a long time ago, to them it really was just another day.

"Im surprised you actually wrote something on your list, Victor." Logan said while studying the paper.

"What? I didnt write anything."

"It says you want a curtain tassel, a ball of yarn and a catnip pillow." Logan answered in an indifferent tone.

"Wade! You forgot to add scratching post."

"Oh yeah, didnt even think of that...oops!" Realizing he'd just given himself away as the culprit, and the fact that the big cat was looking at him in a way that suggested he was eying a good alternative scratching post, Wade hastily fled from the room.

"Well, Wade got us presents, Id feel bad if I didnt get him something." Bradley was the first to voice this opinion, nobody else jumped at buying Wade a gift. Bradley didnt mind, he was too nice for his own good sometimes, and he thought Wade was a laugh.

"Brads right, its Christmas, lets go buy some presents." Said John.

"I hate last minute Christmas shopping!" Victor sighed.

Logan raised a brow, "How would you know? you've never done it."

"No, but I can imagine what its like, and I don't like it!"

"Buy me something nice Vicky!" Wade said, poking his head back into the room.

"Im not buying nothin fer you! And stop calling me that!"

"Aww, but you got Stryker a present."

Both brows were raised this time, "you got Stryker a present?" Logan asked, incredulous.

"Ya, it was the body of that secretary he fired for asking too many questions, left it outside his office door." Wade answered.

"It wasn't a present, it was a warning."

Leaving Wade behind to attempt stringing the lights around the tree by himself, six of the soldiers of Team X piled into Zero's car, which really only held five passengers, but Bradley was small enough to squeeze between Logan and John in the backseat. Victor grumbled about how much he hated shopping all the way to the mall, and complained more when they got there.

The city streets had been busy, but inside the mall it was packed, it was as if more than half the city were doing their last minute Christmas shopping, and this was only the day before Christmas eve, if they had waited one more day it would have been worse.

"Okay, lets meet back here in exactly one hour, if you don't show Im leaving you here." Zero ordered as they walked through the mall entrance. Like the feral brothers, Zero wasn't particularly thrilled about this Christmas thing.

They agreed to the timing and each went their separate ways, except Victor and Logan who stayed together.

"You don't want a present do you?" Victor asked.

"No."

"Good, cus your not gettin one!"

"Well aren't you generous!" Logan elbowed him in the ribs. "We should at least get something for the others, from both of us, that means you pitch in some cash."

"Ya right." Victor didnt care, he thought his brother was being too generous. "Fine, but nothing for Wade!"

"He got us something."

"Ya, probably fancy underwear and santa hats." For some strange reason that remark set an image of Victor in a red leather bondage santa costume, complete with hat, floating through Logan's mind. He shuddered. "What?"

"Nothing."

They all found that Wade was easy to shop for, the man could be kept amused with just about anything. As such most of them went straight for the toy store, rather than try to locate some of the ridiculous items Wade had written on his list.

The line up in the toy store was outrageously long, so Logan didnt protest to his brother pocketing a few trinkets.

"I hate crowds." Logan muttered as they left the store.

Victor shrugged, he hated crowds more than his brother, but there were occasions when he liked crowds, after all, the more people the more blood, but being Christmas the one gift he could at least give to his little brother was to not kill anybody.

After breaking several expensive devices in an electronics store and having a heated bickering match over Victor refusing to give his opinion on gift items, Logan decided he would never go shopping with his brother again, ever! They were on their way out when they stopped outside a pet store Bradley was exiting.

"Oh, hey," said Bradley, unnoticeably hiding a plastic bag behind his back, "there's a really neat fish back there, you should check it out." he said before moving on.

A small golden furred puppy yipped at them from behind a pane of glass, it's fluffy tail wagging excitedly as it looked up at them with hopeful eyes, irresistible to anyone passing by.

"A puppy was on Wade's list." Logan said.

"Maybe we could give it to him as a warning." Logan punched Victor hard in the ribs for suggesting such a thing. "Ow! What, your not seriously thinking of getting Wade a puppy are you?"

"Might brighten things up about the place." Not to mention annoy the hell out of Victor, the cat hated dogs.

"It'd make mess, and after a week Wade would get bored and it'd be put in a closet and forgot about." Logan conceded the point, the man did have a low attention span.

Most of the small animals hid in the furthest corners of their cages as the predators passed by them, to the back of the sore, to have a look at the 'really neat' fish, which was about as exiting as a fish could be, which to them was not at all.

"I want to eat it." was all Victor had to say about the fish.

Victor spotted a couple of kids petting a small, fat, fluffy white rabbit with a red ribbon tied around it's neck. As he drew near the rabbit went still. The children looked up at him curiously as he picked up the rabbit by it's scruff and examined it.

"Hmm... I like rabbits, I like ta eat em." Victor put the rabbit down again and smirked to himself as he left the store, leaving the two children petrified, mouths open in expressions of complete horror.

"That was mean." Logan said, and punched him again.

Their Christmas shopping done they all met back at the mall entrance. It had grown very cold outside and a light snow had begun to fall, the fluffy white flakes drifting lazily to the ground, sparkling in the city lights. By the time they rolled back into base the scenery was painted white.

Logan entered first and stopped in the doorway, a sixth sense telling him something was amiss.

"What is it?" Victor asked, coming up beside him in the doorway to peer into the darkness beyond.

"Umm..." Bradley pointed above their heads. Sure enough, hanging from the doorframe was mistletoe. Dukes let out a little laugh and John raised an amused brow at the brothers.

"Fuck that!" Victor remarked, and he stepped inside. Bzzt! "Aaah! Shit!" Victor jumped several feet from the floor as Wade zapped him with a cattle prod. The elder feral turned a furious glare on the man.

"Your supposed to kiss! You don't follow the rules of the mistletoe you get zapped!" He prodded Logan next and danced away as the younger feral made a grab for the electrified cow torturing device.

"Where did you get that thing?!"

The rest of the team entered single file.

"Never mind that, now that everyone's here lets decorate the tree!"

Wade had done a fine job of putting the lights on the tree. He couldn't actually get them around the tree so he had simply set them on the branches in a cris-cross pattern from top to bottom. The lights were plugged into an extension cord that led to a socket on the other side of the room. Victor ended up tripping over the cord and pulling the lights from the tree, looking much like a kitten as he rolled around on the floor trying to free himself from the tangle. They all pointed an laughed for several minutes until Logan decided to help him before something got broken.

After a while they managed to get the lights wrapped around the tree and then did a half-assed job of decorating it. They didnt know where wade had gotten the ornaments from and they probably didnt want to.

Wade sat on Dukes's shoulders to put the star on the top of the tree, due to the position of the tree top the star kept falling off, unfortunately Victor happened to be under it as it fell pointed top down, and if he didnt have a healing factor it would have left a serious mark, eventually they had to ductape it in place.

"So your really serious about this whole Christmas thing?" John asked, thinking that clearly Wade had some mysterious Christmas past, he had everything planned out down to the egg nog.

"Not really, never done it before." Wade replied with a grin. John remembered then that Wade was never serious about anything. "It just seemed like a fun thing to do." nobody could really disagree, they certainly weren't bored.

After they had their fill of egg nog they decided to turn in for the night, before Wade suggested they go caroling...