Chapter Text
SIMON
As a kid, I never imagined that someday I would love Christmastime. But here I am, 24 years old and waiting with bated breath for this year’s first snowfall, for my boyfriend to suggest we go pick out a tree for our sitting room, for Netflix to release the annual 10-hour-long Yule Log video.
For looked-after kids, the holidays tend to be pretty shit—at least, they were for me (until Agatha’s family started inviting me round to their house, once I was at Watford). All your schoolmates get to go home to see their families while you’re stuck in your tiny, shared room at school, staring at the ceiling and procrastinating on the mountain of homework you’ve been assigned. (It’s un-bloody-reasonable, asking a kid to do so much homework over the break, if you ask me.)
The school remained open over the holiday break so that students with nowhere else to go would be fed and supervised, but since there were only ever a handful of kids whose parents were “too busy” for them, no one bothered to plan any activities for us to do. There was bugger-all to do for fun except make trouble, and the teachers who stayed behind to supervise us were always in a foul mood, either because they were estranged from their families, or because their adult children lived too far away (or couldn’t be arsed) to come home for Christmas.
No one who’s ever spent a Christmas at Watford was happy about it.
Ever since that first Christmas with Baz, I've had plenty to look forward to each year, come December. My gran, Lady Ruth Salisbury (who I’ve known for three years now, but still find it a bit hard to believe that she’s my grandmother) always invites Baz and I for dinner with her and my Uncle Jamie, and then we take the train up to Oxford to spend the 24th and 25th with the Grimms. Once everyone is back in town, Penny and Shep host a friends’ gathering at their cramped little flat. Depending on the year, and how busy we’ve made ourselves, Baz might drag bring me along to the holiday do put on by his uni department. I go along with him and don’t complain for two reasons:
- Baz looks proper fit in a suit. He’s stopped wearing ties and likes to leave the first button or two undone on his shirts. His trousers are always slim-fitting—distractingly so, in fact. If you asked me whether I’d prefer to see Baz in his football kit with the tiny shorts, or one of his tailored suits, I’d have a hard time deciding. He looks that good.
- There’s always an open bar.
Other than the free drinks, it’s dead boring, the university holiday do. Baz and his colleagues just sit around having a chinwag about ‘so-and-so who recently published in this-and-that scholarly journal’ for hours. Plus, all the blokes Baz works with are middle-aged or older, and most are too uptight to get well and truly sozzled.
(So there’s not even decent entertainment to get me through the evening, aside from counting how many times the department chair says the word ‘positively’ during his dull speech, and after a few drinks, a visit to one of the cleaner toilets on campus. Every year, I offer to blow Baz in the privacy of one of the stalls (to break up the monotony of the evening, and because Baz looks fucking delicious in his suit), but he always says no, ‘for sanitary reasons’. I’ll wear him down one of these years.)
Within the week, all the shops along the high street will have shiny baubles and colourful lights hanging in their display windows. (Baz’s aunt, ever the cynic, says that businesses only decorate to remind shoppers of how little time they have left to buy gifts. That woman wouldn’t recognize holiday magic if it jumped up and bit her on the nose.)
The coffee shop Baz visits every morning will replace his favourite (and unfortunately, seasonal) pumpkin drink with over-the-top holiday specials: peppermint hot cocoa, gingerbread frappés, tea that smells (and tastes) like it was brewed by tossing handfuls of pine cones and spruce needles into the kettle. Baz tends to whinge about his loss for a few days, but he still visits that café every weekday morning like clockwork, because the coffee’s not half-bad.
For now, the boys at the group home are keeping me plenty busy. There’s four of them living in the house: Michael, Ronan, Tommy, and Jack, all rough-and-tumble lads not unlike myself at that age. They’d ran ten or so respite workers off in short order before I came round, but nothing the lads tried scared me any; I knew all their tricks, because I’d done every single one of them at some point, when I was in foster homes that I hated.
I’ve enlisted the boys to help put together care packages of toiletries, socks, and other necessities, which we’ll donate to Rainbow House, a shelter for queer teens without permanent housing. The boys chose the organization without any suggestions from me, and I’ll be the first to admit that as soon as I’d traded off with the night care worker, I had a good cry about it on my walk home.
Other than that, it’ll be business as usual at work for just a few weeks more, and then I’ll be off for 10 days—plenty of time to visit family and friends before Baz and I take some time for ourselves to relax and recharge before the new year. He says maybe we’ll go to the seaside and rent a cottage on the beach for a few nights, just for something different to do.
All I know is that my heart is ready for the holidays. Nothing, not even Fiona Pitch’s rants about the evil of capitalism, can ruin the magic of Christmas for me this year.
BAZ
Some disappointments in life are inevitable. But if anyone deserves to not be disappointed, it’s Simon Snow. He is good and kind and selfless, and I’d rather have bamboo splinters shoved under my fingernails than have to watch Simon get hurt. Seeing him physically injured is hard on me, certainly; but when plans change—plans that Simon had his heart set on, his good, kind, selfless, heroic heart—that’s what really kills me.
(If he has to be hurt, I wish it could be about anything other than Christmas.)
Partway through November, Wellbelove sends a text to the group chat saying that she and Brody have booked tickets for a trip to sunny Majorca for the holidays. Cocktails on the beach, snorkelling in warm turquoise waters, couples massages and spa treatments—all very romantic. (I’m definitely not jealous at all.)
Simon is, as always, very understanding. The girls have been saving up all year to take a trip, he tells me, and this will be the first holiday they’ve ever taken together, just the two of them. I can’t begrudge them that, Simon insists when I ask how he’s feeling.
“Besides,” he says reasonably, tucking himself beside me on the sofa, “we don’t see much of them around the hols anyways.”
It’s a minor disappointment, as far as disappointments go. Simon will be fine.
The next blow is entirely unexpected. Bunce and her Normal have hosted a Christmas get-together for our friends as long as they’ve been together. The event’s dress code varies—one year we were asked to wear holiday-themed pyjamas, and the year after that, ugly Christmas jumpers—but there is always plenty of holiday cheer (see also: alcohol) to go round, and we get to spend the night gorging ourselves on delicious appetizers courtesy of Headmistress Bunce’s recipe collection.
It’s a Tuesday night at the start of December. Penelope and Shepard have come to our flat for our weekly ‘telly and takeout’ night. (Don’t blame me; I didn’t choose the name.) Simon has queued up a few episodes of The Great British Bake-Off, and as he piles more and more fried rice onto his plate, he thinks to ask about this year’s gathering.
“If you haven’t decided on a theme yet,” he suggests, carefully setting his plate down on the coffee table so as not to topple the Everest-esque mountain of carbs, “we could do something like ‘Human Christmas Tree’. You could wear sparkly baubles for earrings, Pen, and Shep and I could wrap ourselves in tinsel or popcorn garlands.”
Simon gets that dreamy look in his eyes that means he’s thinking about butter, most likely in relation to the popcorn garlands. How he can stomach the idea of wearing food as an accessory and then eating it escapes me, but then again, so do many of the things Simon thinks up.
With my attention focused on Simon’s brilliant grin, I nearly miss Penelope exchanging a nervous glance with the Normal. (Bunce thinks she’s far more subtle than Simon when it comes to hiding her emotions, but in reality, she’s an open book.) Before she’s even opened her mouth, I know she’s about to ruin Simon’s good mood.
“Er, Simon,” Penelope says hesitantly. “About the party…”
She doesn’t have to say anything more. Simon’s smile evaporates in an instant.
“Oh,” he says, swallowing the lump in his throat. “Did, um. Did your plans change?”
“We’re really sorry, man,” Shepard speaks up, taking over from Penelope. (Despite the Normal’s propensity for inviting disaster, he’s quite good at talking people down from their metaphorical ledges.) “I know it’s super last minute, but my parents called this past week and invited us to spend the holidays in Nebraska with them. Apparently they’ve been saving up to buy us plane tickets, and they were keeping it a secret until they were sure they could swing the cost.”
“Well, that’s...great, you guys!” Simon says cheerily, pasting on a smile so fake that it hurts my mouth just watching him. “It’s been ages since you’ve gone home. I’m sure you’ve missed your parents, and your siblings.”
“It’ll be the last opportunity we’ll have to travel overseas before the baby comes,” Penelope adds, setting a hand on the curve of her growing belly. “Shep’s parents have been asking us to spend the holidays in Omaha with them for years, and we’ve never taken them up on it.”
(She’s appealing to Simon’s fierce need to create and maintain harmony within families. Simon’s secret childhood wish was that he would be reunited with his parents—that they’d find him, pluck him out of whatever orphanage or foster home he was in at the time, and together be the picture-perfect family he’d dreamed of. When the truth about Simon’s true parentage came out, he was devastated, despite having known that his wish was unlikely to be realized.)
Of all people, Penelope should know better than to play this card with Simon. If I thought it would make anything better, I’d tell her off right here and now, but knowing how upset Simon gets when there’s discord amongst us, I hold my tongue.
“Guys, you don’t have to justify going to see your family,” Simon insists, throwing an arm around Shepard’s shoulders and giving him a playful squeeze. Penelope regards them both with a pinched smile, further evidence of her guilt, and strategically avoids looking me in the eye. “We’ll just do something in the New Year,” Simon says, “when you’re back in town.”
“That’s a great idea, darling,” I say, giving Simon’s knee a squeeze in an attempt at silently comforting him. “We’ll have to invite Agatha and Niamh as well, get the whole gang together.”
Penelope and Shepard both visibly relax. They know how much Christmas matters to Simon, and they clearly feel bad. But now that I’ve offered what they feel is good alternative, they feel reassured in their decision to travel.
The discussion comes to a halt when Simon presses play on the remote and Noel Fielding appears on the screen, detailing this week’s baking challenge.
GBBO is always a great distraction for Simon, who has really gotten into baking all manner of delicious things: bread, biscuits, rolls, cakes, dessert squares. In fact, he’s had his eye on a pastry arts program at one of the local vocational colleges, and I’ve been encouraging him to apply for this next year. It would give him something to do if he ever decides to leave his job at the group home. (Maybe once his boys age out of the system; he really cares about those boys.
The rest of the night goes off without a hitch, and no more mention of our holiday plans is made (by Simon or anyone else). He hugs Penelope and the Normal before they leave, and as soon as the door has closed behind them, his wings spring open, nearly taking out the lamp beside my reading chair and knocking askew the framed photo of his mother that Lady Ruth gave him for his last birthday.
“I’m sorry, love,” I say, following close behind him as he moves to the widest area in our flat, where he can fully extend his wings without having to worry about our damage deposit. I don’t touch him, not because I don’t want to, but because I’ve learned to trust that he’ll come to me for comfort when he’s ready.
“Fuck, I should have known this was going to happen,” he growls, threading his hands through his curls and tugging. It’s always been a coping mechanism of his, though I wish he’d be gentler with himself.
Just as I expected, Simon takes a few minutes for himself, quietly breathing through one of the exercises his therapist taught him during the year he spent going for weekly sessions. Slowly and surely, he regains control over his wings, to the point that, when he moves towards me at last, he can wrap them around us both like a warm, cozy cocoon, their red-brown leather smooth and warm against my skin.
“I’m so sorry, darling,” I say, shifting my head so that he can bury his nose against my neck. “This isn’t fair, I know.”
I snake my arms around his shoulders and draw him closer, until his chest is flush with mine, his strong arms around my middle. We stand together in silence for seconds or minutes or hours, taking comfort in touch and smell and heat, in the the stark contrast of my coolness against his warmth.
When we go to bed, Simon lies awake beside me for a long time, just staring up at the ceiling. I can’t tell if he’s thinking about something, or if he’s allowed his brain to go blank. I don’t remember falling asleep, but when I wake up in the morning, the bed beside me is cold, and Simon has left me a note in the kitchen saying that he’s gone out for ‘a nice, long run’. (Flying. He’s gone flying. It clears his head better than his ‘short runs’, which involve actual running.)
In the coming days and weeks, I try to do little things to brighten his spirits and bring about a bit of the holiday magic that’s made him fall in love with the Christmas season.
We build gingerbread houses with my sisters when they come to town for a visit while Daphne and my father shop for gifts. Sophie and Petra slather theirs with an unreasonable amount of icing (perhaps they’ve imagined their gingerbread people live in Canada?), Simon’s house is composed of more sweets than anything else, and Mordelia—my little Wednesday Addams lookalike—builds a gingerbread haunted house, complete with marshmallow ghosts and blood (red syrup) oozing from the windows.
We visit the Christmas Markets in search of gifts for our loved ones, and together, we wrap them (one of us more successfully than the other). We walk through a number of parks in our mittens and hats and scarves, pausing to listen to groups of carollers. We go skating and walk through impressive light displays, take a ride on the London Eye in all its festive glory and visit a palace made entirely of carved ice. If I thought meeting the Queen would make Simon even slightly happier (it wouldn’t, he’s firmly anti-monarchy), I’d make it happen somehow.
The last two nails in our Christmas’ coffin come just minutes apart: Jamie Salisbury calls to say that Lady Ruth’s youngest (and only living) sister, Martha, has had a very serious heart attack, and has been rushed to hospital near her home in Glasgow. The family dinner will be cancelled, so that Simon’s grandmother can travel to be at her sister’s sickbed; and Daphne, crying so hard she can barely speak, calls to say that all of the children (except Swithin) have come down with influenza, which has been making the rounds at their primary school.
(My stepmother feels awful asking us not to come, aware of the disappointments we’ve already experienced, but she explains that all three girls are miserable in their state of illness, and that Dr. Wellbelove has advised against the Grimms having any guests for the holidays, to prevent the flu from spreading any further.)
When I’ve ended the call with Daphne, I turn to look at Simon, who has been lying on the sofa devoid of any signs of life save breathing since he took the call from his uncle. The light in his eyes has gone out, his expression is drawn, and in what I’m absolutely certain is the result of magic, the vibrancy of Simon’s hair has dulled, not unlike a tea service tarnishing after months without being polished.
After a long, drawn-out silence, Simon’s gaze shifts towards me, settling on the air just to the left of my head. The sound that comes out of his mouth is weak, the voice of a man defeated.
“I think I need to lie down a while,” he croaks, his voice hardly louder than a whisper, and then he closes his eyes.