Archive of Our Own ^beta

"Come on Kendl...you ain't got to do all that." 

"No, I insist, Carl. This place lookin' like a haunted house." She ran her hand along the wooden table nearby, shaking her head at the mess she found on her fingers. "And we need a good dustin' up in here. Come on, CJ. Moms raised you betta than this."

"Girl, what the fuck you goin' on about? I ain't given you permission to come in here and give orders. I got get these extra valets in 'cause the driver decided to be a bitch and refused to suck up a cold. Shit." 

Cesar shook his head, coming in with Christmas reefs under his armpits. "I wouldn't test her man. Once she gets an idea to fix up the place, there ain't no way she's ever gonna be lettin' it go." 

"That's right. Now scotch your ass over. We need to put some ladders against these pillars so we can get up to those lights so we can hang the reefs against em. Now make sure you can see the tinsel. Don't put it too far back." Kendl wrinkled her nose. "And where's that sweeper at? Might need to get a mop for these hardwood floors. They're so beautiful and would go nicely with the Christmas decorations. If you would dah actually bothered to clean up every now and then." 

"Girl, what the fuck did I just say? This is my hotel, not yours." 

"Please. I am just doin' what you should have done months ago. Seriously Carl. It's almost Christmas and you ain't even bothered to put up a tree in here yet. It looks so dreary in here. You should be ashamed Carl. Ashamed."

CJ shook his head, realizing the fight was already a lost cause. 

Alright, he supposed. A little Christmas spirit wouldn't kill him. Plus it seemed to b be only a few decorations based off of what Caesar was carrying. 

But that was until he saw Wu Zi and Guppy come into the lobby with boxes overflowing with tinsel, glass balls, Christmas ornamentation. 

"Look Kendl...I don't mind if we put up a tree in here but all this...it's just too much."

Kendl waved her hand, ignoring Carl's words. "Oh, nonsense. Don't be such an Ebenezer Scrooge. 'Specially since we all took this time outta our busy schedules to bring all this down here." 

"Once again, I never fuckin' asked you to do that!" 

Guppy looked between the two of them, a nervous look on his face. Kendl waved him over, motioning him to set the boxes in front of the desk, which he did so. 

"It don't matter what you want! What's the point of havin' a brother if you can't tell him to keep his business in seasonal order." 

"Then don't tell me to keep my business in seasonal order. Because you're missin' the key word there. My business. Mine. Not yours, Kendl." 

Kendl went over to the boxes digging through the different pieces of tinsel and lights, looking for the clips that would be used to hang the reefs up on the lights. She then motioned for Guppy the set the ladder up at a diagonal angle beneath the lights and had him go up there to start hanging the reefs.  However, the first one was quite crooked and Kendl had to keep getting Guppy to move it around until it was finally at a somewhat decent angle. 

“But I don't understand what Woozie is doing here? You do know the man is blind, don’t you Kendl?” 

“Yes, of course, I do. He’s here for moral support.” 

Wu Zi nodded in agreement to that. “I may be blind but I am not completely helpless. I am sure that I could help with the trees if you would let me.” 

Kendl gave Carl a look. “See CJ. I know what I am doin’.” 

“Alright, then.” 

Carl decided to stay around and make sure that they didn't mess up whatever kind of decorations they were trying to put up, as he could already tell this was going to be a disaster for the different electrical light sockets that were scattered throughout the lobby of the hotel.  He had seen firsthand from his childhood what an overused socket could do and the last thing he needed was an electrical fire in the hotel he had just purchased ownership over. He couldn't exactly kick his sister out because that would look pretty bad around the hood and would seek to ruin the reputation he had worked so hard to build up over the past few months.  

Besides, Kendl had a point.  The place certainly did need some Christmas cheer to lighten the halls up a bit and he certainly wasn't about to dish out thousands of dollars on some cheap,  know-it-all,  snooty interior decorator or professional designer. It could only help the business, after all, making the place more cheery and welcoming like that.  As a kid, Kendl always tended to take charge of this sort of thing and she did a pretty damn good job of it too. 

 In fact, she seemed to be doing quite a good job now, if it weren't for the fact the workers she had chosen to help volunteer for this task weren't exactly the most equipped to help decorate the inside of a hotel lobby, and didn't have that special designer touch that Kendl had.  When she put holiday decorations up, everything had its own place, from the setting to the angle that pieces were placed at. Hell, even the ornaments were put in a way that the light would catch them or organized based on size and color that would make it easier for the human eye to catch on to what kind of design she had been going for.  He wasn't even surprised when she pulled out a fully fleshed-out floor plan of where she wanted the decorations to go. Evendentully she had been planning this for weeks now. 

She assigned them each to a different corner of the room,  in which they would decorate each corner with the set of decorative items and then slowly make their way back out to the center, until they would meet in the middle to start putting up the Christmas trees.  Carl at this point had sent one of the bellhops to go fetch some of the janitors to go fetch the Christmas trees that were down in the basement that he had seen before when he had had an inspection done of the building, a few days prior to purchasing. 

Each of them did their own little corner slowly making their way out to the center, with Kendl coming around every few seconds to check on their progress,  normally reaching over to adjust some of the ribbons or to straighten any of the lights that may have been put out of place. 

“So is this where this goes baby?”  Carl overheard Caesar asking Kendl, as he held up a string of blue lights. 

“Yeah, we’re gonna connect the red lights from that corner where Guppy is, the white lights where CJ is, and then the blue lights where you are. I am gonna go ahead to the fourth corner over there to help connect these white lights to make the sort of star shape you can see in the middle of the floor plan right here.” She answered, the two of them bending over and almost touching foreheads trying to see where she was pointing to on the sheet of long paper. 

Carl was already worn out by the time he got halfway done. Who knew putting up Christmas lights could be so stressful?  He had already broken three bulbs, much to Kendl’s dismay, and received quite the severe tongue lashing for it. 

Finally, the four of them had reached the center of the room connecting the lights in the various ribbons in the middle right where Wu Zi had been climbing up the end down the ladders that Caesar had set up in a repetitive motion attempting to hang the reefs under the lights. They were pretty crooked so Kendl sent Caesar up there to help position them in a way that would be more visually appealing to the potential guests that were entering the building to stay there.

By the time they had finally finished and Kendl had gone around making sure everything was in its meticulous place of accuracy,  they finally were ready to start working on the Christmas trees which luckily the janitors had already set up with some nice gold and silver floor cloths to put at the base so the guests wouldn't be stuck staring at the ugly, faux metal rooting systems. 

Kendl pulled out the ornaments, taking the glasses balls and passing them around, before giving them each a grid paper with direct instructions on where each of the different kinds of ornaments were supposed to go. In total, they did about a dozen trees that were all set at the base of each of the pillars that lined the lobby, a certain pattern being used among them every other one had the same ornament coding as the other,  making quite a festive scene. 

Cj certainly hadn’t taken kindly to the idea at first, but when they all went up to the indoor balcony to look over their handy work (or in Wu Zi’s case have it described to him) he felt a breath of fresh air, along with the satisfaction of a job well down. 

Maybe this side of his ever-growing criminal empire wouldn’t be so boring after all, especially with such great and loyal allies by his side.