This story is loosely based in the universe of "In Time We Trust" which means Ric is back from the dead, Elena is back from college, and everybody's living in a mostly-happy dysfunctional bunch in the boarding house. This was written without a beta, in airports and airplanes and spare bedrooms, and half hour bits in coffee shops, and in the bathroom on Christmas morning so I wouldn't wake anybody up. So please read with forgiveness in your hearts, because I didn't have the time to do everything with this that I wanted to do.

This is dedicated to my writing friends, goldnox and Nightlightbright, latbfan and mrsl488, because as I've been forcibly reminded recently, the unconditional acceptance and support I've found in the online fanfiction community is a rare and beautiful gift, not to be taken lightly. No thanks would ever be enough, ladies.

Merry F**cking Christmas

DAMON

"Elena," I say, with the smallest available amount of inflection. "We live in a forest. Tell me again why you need another fucking tree?"

She gives me a patient look from soft brown eyes, the corners of her glossy pink lips tugging upward. It's a look I've become very familiar with, as it mostly means "I love you" with a side of "It's possible I'm going to slap you" and a bonus round of "Yeah, you're getting laid later. While we try to be quiet. Because my little brother lives with us. God bless his bass-heavy music addiction."

"It's festive!" she protests. "How can we have Christmas without a tree?"

I open the door to the garage for her and watch the cable knit of her lipstick-red sweater dress ride up on her world-class ass when she takes a step down to enter the concrete-floored sanctum of 30-weight oil, wrenches, and everything else that makes her look like a visiting pinup girl.

I wanna hand her a motocross trophy and kiss the fuck out of her.

I clear my throat.

"I never said we had to have Christmas without a tree," I remind her. "I just suggested we might have it without needles and assorted other arboreal bullshit getting all over carpets that cost more than the gross domestic product of some small island nations."

"Don't be a snob," Jeremy suggests. "It's Christmas. Buy a fucking tree."

"Language!" Elena squeaks, turning around to glare at her younger brother.

He shrugs and slams the garage door behind him, and I add my scowl to hers because that little son of a bitch just cost me a thirty-dollar tree and a ten-thousand-dollar rug.

"Alright," I snap. "But we're taking your truck. If there's going to be sap all over somebody's car, it ain't gonna be mine."

The next door I open for her is to Jeremy's new Audi SUV, financed by his last collision insurance check and yours truly. I make a mental note to pay him a generous fifty-five cents an hour against his running debt to hold the watering can on this latest chlorophyll-pandering adventure.

Elena steadies herself against my forearm to drop down into the passenger seat, and I bless the abysmal ground clearance of modern SUV's when I'm treated to an extra-credit three inches of creamy thigh as she folds herself inside.

I shut the door, closing her safely inside, and then my peripheral vision alerts me to Jeremy reaching for the handle of the driver's door. I goose it up to supernatural speed to get there before he does, and once I do I shoulder-check him aside.

"Who said you get to drive?"

"It's my car!" he protests.

"You have less road-time under your belt than my floor mats," I point out. "And my girl's in the car. Which means I'm driving."

He opens the backseat door with a brow so furrowed that I consider momentarily if we shouldn't be raising him in the same house as Stefan.

"You know, before you showed up Elena rode with lots of people who hadn't been driving as long as cars have been invented and it didn't hurt her any," Jeremy grumbles.

Her shoulders flinch and curl forward a little under the weight of his words and I drop into the driver's seat next to her.

And people say I have no fucking tact.

"Point taken," I tell him tartly, nailing his eyes with mine in the rearview mirror. His brow furrows further and then his eyes pop wide and guilty and I give him half a headshake to warn him off from the awkwardness-extending apologies. Elena's biting her lip, her gorgeous eyelashes swept downward and trembling slightly. I reach for her leg, squeezing her knee and then sliding my hand up until my pinkie finger burrows under the soft yarn hem of her dress.

She catches my wrist, blushing brightly as she crosses her legs, lacing her fingers together with mine and clearing her throat.

I reach through the steering wheel and crank the ignition with my off-hand, holding back a well-earned smirk in favor of more distraction tactics.

"Well," I say grouchily. "You can have a damned tree, but that doesn't mean we have anything to put on it other than pesticide and a hair ribbon that some chick left in my bathroom half a decade ago."

Elena's lips tighten along with her fingers and I wince at the strength of her grip, but I'm not letting go for anything.

"We are not besmirching our Christmas tree with your checkered sexual history," she declares dangerously.

"We could use candy canes," Jeremy says hopefully over the sounds of the video game on his phone, because he's 90% stomach, 8% emo-bangs, and 2% brilliant at killing pixilated creatures. Sometimes I think if my girlfriend weren't so fond of him, I'd stick him in a shallow grave, buy a second garbage disposal to get rid of all the extra food, and call that shit even.

"Candy canes aren't much of a decoration," Elena says scornfully.

"Popcorn chains?" Jeremy attempts, sticking his head up between the seats like a dog seeking fresh air. "They're historic and shit."

I stop the car with a lurch of too-touchy modern brakes, and give him a nasty side-eye. "You think popcorn on a damned string is historic? For God's sake, you probably think cassette tapes are classic and eight track players were chiseled out of stone."

He blinks at me. "A what-track player?"

"Never mind," I mutter, flicking on the turn signal with a vigor that is unsatisfied by the smooth slide of the annoyingly ergonomic indicator lever. "Infant."

"Geriatric," he shoots back. "Just let me know when it's time to call hospice on your saggy ass."

I let the tires bark a little to cut off the minivan gassing every inch of its four cylinders up into my back bumper. Which on this car? Is probably made of Styrofoam.

"Be nice," Elena snaps. "We're going to pick out a Christmas tree, as a family. It's not exactly festive for you two to be ragging on each other all the time."

"Sorry, did you want us to come, or did you need me to hire those over-powdered, sweater-vested assholes from the Target photo frame for you?" I ask with a lift of an eyebrow. "'Cause I'm going to guess that Target Todd isn't going to want to get dirt on his Abercrombie extra-starch, even if he could lift a tree onto the top of a car. Which he can't." I aim a pointed look at Jeremy in the rearview mirror. "Not even if it happens to be an SUV slung so low to the ground that it ought to be blasting mariachi music."

"Damon," Elena hisses. "That's racist."

"You picked out the car, asshole," Jeremy says, slouching in the backseat and casting bored eyes out the side window.

"Yeah, for its roll cage rating," I fire back. "Because you drive like somebody on booze-boosted benzos, with the attention span of a pixel."

"What, like you've never wrecked a car?" Elena bristles, crossing her arms under her perky breasts, which does nothing to help keep my eyes virtuously on the road.

"Not by accident," I point out.

Jeremy snorts.

Elena seethes.

I park.

Admittedly, with more flair that is strictly called for by the occasion. The parking lot is empty, which makes me think I can probably afford an extra quarter-pterodactyl of fossil fuel to spin a dry pavement cookie that will put a smile on Jeremy's face and a scowl on Elena's long enough to make this little shopping trip register just barely into the black on the Fun-O-Meter.

Until the weird computerized traction control dreamed up by Audi's demonic product development team fucks up my whole plan and I feel the wheels catch instead of slide.

Adrenaline bites into my veins with a hyper prescient understanding of the exact amount of shit I will feel like if I roll this thing and have to blood share with my moody almost-brother-in-law to get him to the shopping portion of the trip without stitches or a traction cast.

I slam the wheel, feather the gas, and brush a hopeful kiss over the brakes and the next thing I know, we are at a dead stop. A sidelong glance confirms that our landing spot is miraculously bracketed by state-sanctioned yellow parking lines and I cough casually and toss a smirk at Elena.

"Ready to shop, babe?"

She's chalk white as she glances in the backseat to see if Jeremy's okay, but he's already out of the car and sauntering toward the carefully pruned versions of American Bonzais, texting idly as he goes.

"What in the hell was that?" she snaps.

I shrug. "Just keeping things interesting."

She rolls her eyes and gets out of the car, muttering under her breath as she stomps toward the tree sales lot. I unfold myself out of the car and toss the keys up in the air, catching them with an unsatisfying snap of the comically large computer chip keys. They just don't have the same jingle as the old school style.

I stroll around the edges of the lot, taking my time to let Elena cool off before I join her. Her temper runs about like a fire with whiskey tossed in: it flares up fast and settles down just as quick, which is part of the reason we get along so well. After about five minutes, I see Jeremy perched on the curb, two thumbs all in on a game on his phone, and I go looking for Elena. I find her gazing longingly up at a fifteen-foot monstrosity whose weight will do things to Jeremy's suspension that I may never be able to fix. I also find the pudgy owner of the Christmas tree lot lurking off to the side, gazing longingly at her flawless ass.

I step into his line of sight and give him a hard look, and he pales, clearing his throat and scuttling off to make himself useful elsewhere.

I have to admit, though, I can hardly blame the guy. With candy cane earrings dangling against the graceful curve of her neck she makes a beautiful, holiday-themed picture of innocence just begging to be corrupted.

I sidle up behind her and wrap my arms around her waist because if Elena thinks that a clingy sweaterdress that matches the scream-my-name scarlet of the lacy panties underneath is appropriate attire for Christmas tree shopping, then she must think that a boner the size of the Baja Peninsula is appropriate accessorizing.

"Which do you like better, the thick one, or the long one?" I purr into her ear.

"Very funny, Damon."

She slaps halfheartedly at my hands and I hear a sigh hovering under her next breath that has nothing to do with my bad puns. Dammit, I know what that means.

I shift my hips back so her sentimental moment won't be ruined by the evidence of how much I want to find a private corner and charm my way underneath that skirt. Instead, I lean my shoulders forward so she can feel my chest solidly behind her, and I wait.

"I know you think this is dumb," she says, her voice more subdued than I'd like. "But it's the first Christmas since I burned our house down and I just want Jeremy to feel comfortable in the boarding house. You know, like he really has a home and not just a place to stay." She pauses, her fingers toying with mine where they are resting on the flat, sweater-soft plane of her belly. "He used to love the big trees we would get when we were little, and how they would sparkle like magic when the lights turned on, just layer after layer of light strings because we could never decide what color we wanted."

"Uh-huh," I murmur, my arms tightening as I listen to her talk about what "Jeremy" wants.

"We'll have to buy ornaments, too," she says wistfully. "Ours burned with the house. We had really good ones that we'd built up over the years. This ugly one made of hemp rope and fishhooks that Jeremy made in Cub Scouts, and this pretty ballerina one that I got when I danced as one of the backups to the Sugar Plum Fairy in the local production of the Nutcracker. We even had an angel my mom made in a dollmaking class back in college. It had this cool hand-sewn dress and its arms were a little off-center, but I just–" she hesitates for a long moment. "I can't imagine a tree with anything else on top."

"You know if you ask really nicely, I bet Stefan could dig up a historic ornament or two out of the attic," I offer.

"Really?" she turns her head a little to look at me, perking up at the thought.

"Yeah, he probably has shit from the very first Christmas crammed into his hoarder midden," I scoff, but for once I kinda hope he actually does. Elena may not have access to any of her own family history, but she can have any of ours that she wants. Fuck, I'll go find an angel and break both its arms while I'm at it since she seems to want a Christmas tree topper that's collecting federal disability.

I stare at the tree in front of us, feeling uneasy. I'm not sure how I missed the cues, what with all the stores playing canned Christmas music that never fails to make me feel like I ought to be killing people by the baker's dozen. And then the tinsel, those odd puffball red hats on everyone and everything…but at no point did those human oddities translate into a reminder that Stefan and I now have three other people who live in our house. People who expect the holiday season to be marked by something other than the slightly higher blood sugar of my unwilling blood donors.

Ric's easy enough. I could tell him today was Christmas and he'd probably believe me, drink an extra toast to Old St. Nick, and go on about his business. Stefan, too. For all his journaling, I know his months and years blur together as quickly as mine do. We once had a debate over what year it was that lasted the better part of an hour, and we were sober as judges at the time. And when we finally pulled in someone for a third opinion, it turned out we were both wrong.

Stefan and I haven't exchanged presents for most of the time we were vampires. I did get him a motorcycle for Christmas last year, but mostly just to get him out of that matchbox car Porsche he thinks is so cool. I mean, our family has a reputation to maintain around here and dark, dangerous and un-fuck-with-able is not best conveyed by driving something that looks like it should be parked next to the Barbie Dream House.

In the end, Christmas? I could take it or leave it. But Elena and Jeremy are still young. Maybe it wouldn't hurt to keep that magical holiday allure alive for them for a few years more.

I turn my head and raise my voice to the lot owner, who I can hear lurking just around the corner.

"Hey, we'll take this one!"

Elena sucks in a breath and twists in my arms. "This one, Damon? It's huge! Will it even fit in the house?"

"If it doesn't, I'll cut the damned roof off," I promise her, dropping a kiss onto the end of her pert little nose. "I gotta go find some rope. Pay the nice man and I'll wrangle the tree." I toss her my wallet and she catches it, her eyes following me as a smile tugs at the edges of her mouth.

"Only the best for my girl." I wink at her and slip into the next row of trees, pulling out my phone as soon as I'm out of sight and texting with quick, efficient fingers. I've got a lot of shit to pull off before tonight.

X X X

Three hours later, I'm a little pissed off, a lot sweaty, and there are pine needles wedging themselves into my ass crack.

"A couple inches to the left!" Elena directs, and I grit my teeth and adjust the tree for at least the thirty-fourth time. She took an hour in the store buying ribbons and shiny breakable shit and enough lights to illuminate the yellow brick road all the way from here to Kansas. Not to mention the four trips to stores in two towns trying to get a tree stand that'll hold up this monstrosity. And of course it was my stupid ass who happened to be lying under the tree making adjustments every single time it toppled.

I'm pretty well versed in torture methods, but pine needles in your balls and nostrils at the same time? Let's just say I'm keeping that little gem to pass on to some lucky winner on a very special occasion.

"Back the way we had it, just a hair," Elena says thoughtfully.

"Look, how straight does it need to be?" I gripe. "It's not going to Bible college!"

"Do you want it to fall over again?" she challenges. "You screamed so loudly that last time I was worried you might have accidentally staked yourself."

"I didn't scream," I mutter. "It was more like a manly howl."

"More like a shriek," Jeremy weighs in.

"Listen, you little shit, anytime you want to stop playing Plants vs. Zombies for long enough to do something useful, you can talk. Until then, shut it."

"I think that's straight," Elena says thoughtfully.

"Honey, if you're not sure, I'd be happy to assist with testing out your preferences. See if there's any wiggle room."

She smacks my knee as I scoot out from under the tree. "Don't say dirty things underneath my Christmas tree. You'll ruin it."

"What, you're afraid I'm going to corrupt its woody little mind?" I cock an eyebrow at her. "Might be too late for that, darlin'. Damn thing already copped a feel or six off me earlier."

She rolls her eyes at me and starts searching through the shopping bags. "Did we forget to buy a tree skirt?"

"A tree that big?" I scoff. "That thing wears the pants in its family, I promise."

Just then, the doorknob rattles but doesn't turn and I stiffen.

"Door," Jeremy calls, not looking up from his game.

"Rude much?" Elena asks him, glaring as she heads for the front door. "You know, Damon's right. It wouldn't kill you to help."

"I helped carry the tree in," he argues, and I interrupt Elena's response when I cut in front of her so I can open the door before she gets to it, just in case it's something dangerous.

Ric glares at me over a stack of boxes in his arms. "Took you long enough. I'm about ready to pull a muscle out here. There's a reason Santa has slaves."

"Elves, Ric," Elena says, peeking around my shoulder. "I think it's more politically correct to call them elves."

"Actually, I'm pretty sure they prefer to be called little people, Elena," I lecture, and lift an eyebrow at Ric. "Is that the haul or is there more in the car?"

"This is plenty," he growls, and tips the top box off in my direction so I'm forced to catch it.

"What are those?" Elena asks. "Did you go to clean out another one of your old weapons stashes?" She nudges me out of the way so Ric can come inside. "Hey, Ric, did you see we got a tree?" She grins hugely, gesturing at it in case he could miss a pine tree with more square footage than the local Starbucks.

"Um, yeah," he says, darting a glance at me with a raised eyebrow. "And when we're done, we can hollow it out into a studio apartment for me."

Elena flushes slightly and bites her lip, giving me a sideways look. "Is it too big?" she asks guiltily.

"You never complained before," I drawl.

"Jeremy, come take these boxes so I can punch Damon," Ric requests.

"Kick him," Jeremy suggests, eyes glued to his phone. "You don't have to have a free hand for that."

I put down my box on the coffee table, and take a step back so that if Ric decides to take a swing, we won't land on the breakables.

"Wait, is that…" Elena's brow crinkles. "That's my mom's handwriting," she says softly, touching the crinkled flap of the cardboard box, the edges of which are thick with old layers of yellowed and brittle tape, none of which are doing much to hold the box closed anymore.

"Damon said you had some ornaments at the lake house and that you wanted them today," Ric says with an ill-tempered look over his shoulder at me.

Elena's still looking down at the boxes and I shift my weight uneasily, wondering if maybe I should have left well enough alone. I'd rather not have her spend all of Christmas crying over her dead parents.

She looks up, tears glimmering in her eyes, but she's beaming. "How did you know?"

"Caught a glimpse of some on the trip when we were trying to talk Jeremy out of being a vampire hunter."

"Hey, are those our old Christmas ornaments?" Jeremy says, dropping his phone on the couch cushions and heading over to have a look. "I thought mom kept most of them at the house."

"She did, but remember when we used to go to the lake house the day after Christmas and stay there until New Years?" Elena says, already digging into the first box.

"Dad would get me up really early to cut another tree, and then we'd get to lay around and drink coffee while you decorated the tree and mom made cookies." Jeremy grins. "It was the only time he let me drink coffee all year."

"Yeah, because between that and the cookies, you were always a jerk that day." Elena rolls her eyes. "Seriously, I can't remember a single lake house Christmas where I didn't ask mom if you were adopted."

"Ooh, and you turned out to be the basket on the porch baby!" Jeremy crows and Ric cuffs him lightly in the back of the head. Jeremy looks up, affronted, and Ric gives him a pointed look.

"Sorry," he mutters, but Elena's not listening, biting her lip as she sits back on her heels.

"I should have made cookies," she says, disappointed.

Fuck.

I swallow and Ric and I swap a resigned look, but before he can say anything, Stefan comes in carrying yet another box. His eyebrows go up at the stack of shopping bags and the growing mound of wadded newspaper and ornaments on the coffee table.

"I thought you said she didn't have any ornaments, Damon," he accuses.

Elena turns, her hair swirling softly around her shoulders, and looks curiously up at Stefan.

"What do you mean?"

He sets down a small wooden crate, the lid already missing and the inside stuffed with rough brown paper.

"Damon asked me to see if I could dig up any old Christmas stuff. There's nothing left from when we were kids: most of that burned with our house," he avoids my eyes, but I just shrug. I may have burned the house, but it was to cover his crimes, not mine, and I'm damned well not going to waste time feeling guilty about it. "But I have some stuff from the other generations of Salvatore families that have lived here since the turn of the century. It's pretty interesting historically, anyway, but you don't have to use any of it if you don't want to." He hesitates with the first layer of cushioning paper in his hands. "It's up to you, Elena."

"Yeah, even with a tree that big, this isn't all going to fit," Jeremy points out.

Elena doesn't look worried. Instead, she's absolutely beaming, her smile so bright that it tugs deep inside my chest when she looks around the room at her brother and mine, at her undead stepdad/guardian, at new Christmas decorations and old.

At me.

"I want it all," she says softly, her eyes warming mine. "Every bit of it."

X X X

The blankets rustle and Elena crawls under them, kneeing me in the bare hipbone and then collapsing with her cheek on my chest, an exhausted sigh tickling my underarm with the escaping air. She feels kind of sticky. And soft. And a little bit perfect.

"Are you done adorning that tree within an inch of its cut stem life?" I murmur, shifting her so she's laid more evenly across my chest and adjusting the sheet so it covers her shoulders because she's Elena, which means that in 1.6 seconds she'll be freezing half to death despite the fact that she's a vampire and more immune to temperature variation than the average municipal sidewalk. Because somehow, her tundra-temperatured ass never seems to get the memo.

"You have to go see," she mumbles into my neck. "Ish beautiful."

"I can't," I tell her. "There's a creature laying on top of me and I have it on good authority that if I move, claws will be involved."

"Nooo," she half-moans, half-sighs. "I worked so hard on it!"

I roll my eyes. I've barely been in bed for an hour. After Elena's sad little comment about her mom's cookie baking, Ric and I met by silent agreement in the back hallway. He extended a sadly stoic palm with his opposite fist poised on it, I did the same, and on the count of three, his rock lost to my paper and he was therefore in charge of Christmas cookie duty.

I sauntered off to the library to dodge the rest of Elena's decorating whirlwind and the absolute disaster I knew Ric would make of the kitchen. I settled in with a well-aged scotch and my old copy of The Count of Monte Cristo and was feeling very liberated indeed until the fire alarm went off. For the second time.

The first time, I was expecting it, and I ignored it. By the second, I knew my buddy was in real trouble and according to the Man Code, it's well within bounds to let a friend flail a little, especially after a rightfully won bout of Rock, Paper, Scissors. But it is distinctly out of bounds to let them burn the house (and Elena's beloved Christmas tree) down.

And yeah, maybe we're all a little touchier about house fires now, considering how many of them we've seen.

But one little safety-mandated check-in in the kitchen led to me being legitimately horrified at Ric's careless use of flour in cookie baking. And the only way to keep him from ruining Elena's cookie daydreams was to put some money on it, because Ric responds better to gambling than to constructive criticism.

Which is why I went to bed at 1:30 A.M., twenty-six hundred dollars of I.O.U.'s and six dozen cookies richer, and why Ric will be on Craigslist first thing in the morning, looking for teaching jobs that don't ask too many questions about the year-long gap in his employment history. It might be hard to explain that he was a little dead at the time, but I need him to stop waiting around for the Other Side to call him back over, and to start living his life again. Being a hard-ass about his gambling debts seems as good a ploy as any to kickstart him back into active adulthood. Two birds, one stone, and only a little lost sleep. Until now.

"Elena," I explain patiently, tightening my arms around her shoulders. "I'm going to see that tree every day from now until Christmas. And do you really expect me to move when you're finally in bed with me?"

"Yes!" she exclaims, sounding a little more awake as she props her chin up on my chest and looks suspiciously at me. "You don't even want to see it, do you?"

"I feel as if that might be a trick question," I comment mildly.

She glares harder. "Are you telling me that I worked for nine hours on a tree no one cares about but me?"

"Um, no?" I attempt to lie, out of sheer self-preservation.

Elena huffs an incredulous little angry breath and starts to crawl down off my chest. I catch her before she can, scooping her into my arms and rolling us off the bed.

"Okay. You asked for it."

She squeaks and grabs onto my neck to keep her balance.

"What are you doing?"

"What's the point of me looking at the tree if you sleep through my reaction?"

"Erm," she grumbles, but falls silent instead of posing further argument.

I just smile, and carry her downstairs. She tucks her head into my shoulder and I think she's half-asleep by the time we get there anyway, because she's so used to me carrying her she doesn't even bother to tense up anymore.

I can see the glow from the tree all the way down the hall, and when I round the corner, it's like a supernova of twinkles, sparkles and enthusiastic gleaming that literally knocks me back a step as I blink my watering, protesting eyes.

Elena lifts her head. "Well?" she says eagerly.

"Oooh," I say flatly.

"Damon!" she whisper-shrieks.

"Ahh?" I add hopefully.

She flails, trying to smack me but not getting any leverage. I pin her wrists before she can do any damage and stand grinning while she squirms and curses in my arms, her sweater dress getting hopelessly twisted.

"I hate you," she vows.

"I know," I tell her smugly, but then something catches my eye. "Wait, what the hell?"

She freezes. "What?"

I step closer, frowning at the angel on top of the tree. "Did you buy that today? It looks really familiar."

"Nope," she says, and this time she's the one who sounds smug.

"It looks just like…" I trail off, thinking. "No, the one we had when we were kids had a yellow dress. For a second, I thought it looked just like the angel my mom made for the tree before Stefan was born."

"Stefan found it at an estate sale in Mystic Falls in the late 1800's," she says, watching my face closely. "He thinks it's one of the ones your mom made your neighbors before she died."

I can feel her eyes on me as I lean closer, probably waiting for me to explode into pretty tears and tinsel-trimmed Christmas spirit at the sight of the angel.

"Looks like it's been into the red wine," I say instead, because there's a dark red stain spreading across half the angel's face that looks almost like blood. Apparently it had a bit of a rough life between my mother's death and when Stefan found it again.

"I think it's beautiful," Elena says softly.

"A boozer angel for a houseful of alcoholics," I say sardonically. "Seems appropriate."

"Scrooge," she accuses, her eyes already drifting closed.

"Pollyanna," I rally back, my eyes drawn back to the wine-stained angel. If I look close, I can see the tiny, imperfect stitches all along the hem of her dress, and though I can't be certain, they look just like the stitches in the angel I remember.

I could tease her more, but somehow my voice falls silent after that. Elena's exactly the kind of person they made Christmas for: sentimental, idealistic, overly concerned with picking out just the right gift for each of the dozens of people who all flock adoringly around her like the world's most dysfunctional family. There's symbolism in everything for her: the stockings, the cookies, the weird plastic shit she put on the tree.

I just can't imagine caring so much about a single day when I've had thousands. I pause, my arms tightening, wondering if Elena will care so much once she's had fifty Christmases. A hundred. Two hundred.

Maybe, with so much time passing, it will be good for her to have a day once a year that's different, so that no matter how long she lives, time still means something. Life still means something.

I make a mental note to transfer that stained angel to a fireproof safe deposit box. There's no telling how long the boarding house will stay standing, considering the company we keep. Best to take precautions.

And if Ric sticks around for another decade or so, I might even be able to teach him how to make decent cookies. A smile touches my lips as my eyes drift down to the girl in my arms, but she doesn't see, because she's already asleep, her ponytail mussed and crooked and her long lashes resting sweetly against the curve of her flawless cheeks.

I think about carrying her upstairs, but instead I find myself sinking onto the couch with my girl on my lap. Elena sighs and melts against me, filling up all the empty nooks and hollow places of my hard body. In her little red sweater dress, she looks like my own personal Santa Claus, and for an ass like that, I could be good all year long.

I'm still smiling at the thought as I take a deep breath, enjoying the fresh pine and cookie scent of the holidays that still clings to her hair; watching the steady, hopeful glow of the lights on the tree. Elena's right: when there are enough of them, and everything else is dark, they look a little bit like magic.

Author's Note: Happy Christmas, everyone. I hope you enjoyed my little story, and that everyone was kind to you today, of all days.