Work Text:
the road not taken looks real good now,
and it always leads to you
"I’m gonna see about getting us a couple horses. If we keep it up like this, we’re not gonna make it to Texas by Christmas.”
“...by what?”
The old bookstore in Memphis was a much-needed escape from the blizzard roaring outside. Abby sent a brick flying into one of the glass doors without giving it so much as a second thought. She looked over her shoulder at the trio behind her – Ellie with her pink cheeks and chapped lips, Hanna shivering under the weight of Lev’s leather jacket, and Lev letting one of Ellie’s old hoodies hang off of his small frame, shaking as the snow whipped around them.
For a brief moment, none of them were thinking about how they should be so much further along than they already are. Nobody was bickering about how they never should have let a horde of infected in Shreveport stop them in the tracks for as long as they had, or how it shouldn’t have taken them so long to find a replacement vehicle after their SUV broke down a few hours outside of Little Rock.
It had been over a month since they’d left Galveston – and however naively, they’d thought that they would be closer to the east coast by now. But they weren’t. They were barely into Tennessee, and a snowstorm had damn near blown them off the road.
They’d wandered into Memphis, another vehicle having bit the proverbial dust, with their packs heavily hanging over their shoulders and their feet nearly soaked through with the snow underneath.
“Looks like it’s going to be a white Christmas,” Hanna said quietly as Abby shouldered through the shattered door. She turned her head to look at Lev, give him a knowing smile, but he only appeared confused in return.
“What do you mean?”
Hanna frowned, caught off-guard as they made their way inside. “It’s December 24th, Lev,” she explained to him, but it didn’t appear to make any sort of a difference. “It’s Christmas Eve, and tomorrow is Christmas, and… and it’s snowing!” Her eyes were twinkling, even despite the frigid air and the borderline frostbite. “It never snows like this in Austin. It snowed sometimes, but never… never this.”
“I don’t really know anything about Christmas,” Lev admitted, sheepish in tone. “Seraphites didn’t celebrate holidays. They said it was superficial commercialism – and I didn’t even know what that meant, but I never really questioned it, I guess.” He fell quiet after that, kicking away a shard of glass from the window with the toe of his damaged-beyond-repair sneakers. “Yara used to tell me that when we got out of there, we’d celebrate every holiday. The one where you dress up as someone you’re not, and the one where you light fires in the sky, and the one with the gifts and twinkly lights.”
“Christmas is the last one,” Hanna chirped, nudging her shoulder against his. Her eyes wandered off ahead of them, to where Ellie was trailing after Abby, the two talking about where the best place would be to set up a fire pit for the night.
“Go find some books for kindling,” Ellie told her, and Abby looked back at her like she’d just told her to throw Lev in the fire to keep everyone warm.
“Go find some comics,” Abby snapped back, and Ellie’s eyes narrowed into slits before shoving past her, muttering under her breath about Abby being “fucking impossible” before heading to an area toward the front corner of the store with a sign hanging overhead that read NEWSSTAND.
Lev followed them with his own gaze for a moment, before his eyes were back on Hanna. His eyes were almost always – maddeningly, embarrassingly – finding their way back to Hanna. In his defense, he was pretty sure it wasn’t his fault.
After all, Hanna was beautiful.
She had long braids that she often pulled back until they were piled atop her head, and she always wore bright colors – brighter than Lev had seen anybody else wear. Shades of pink and purple and gold and vivid green. When she looked at Lev, it felt like she was really looking at him – and seeing him. Not a former “Scar,” not a boy who once heard the name Lily like a knife to the gut, not as someone who couldn’t take care of himself among the likes of people like Abby or Ellie. She just saw him.
And he saw her, too.
Hanna caught his gaze, as she always did, and sent him a warm smile. “Come on, Lev,” she said softly, reaching for his hand and intertwining their fingers together. His heart felt like it was hammering outside of his chest, but he didn’t dare let go. “I’m going to blow your mind.”
“That sounds dangerous,” Lev said softly, and Hanna’s laugh bounced in his ears. She tugged him further into the bookstore, toward a directory near a stairwell. Her finger trailed down the list in front of them before landing on the word CHILDRENS – 2ND FLOOR, and dragging him toward the stairs.
“Christmas was always a really big deal in my family,” Hanna explained, like this would somehow make everything make sense. They didn’t let go of their hands as they made their way up the stairs, and they didn’t let go all the way to the children’s section of the store. There were brightly colored, wooden fairytale characters adorning the walls, a broken-down wooden table that had plastic train cars in the middle of the department.
Lev’s eyes trailed along the books that were left in the store, knowing that in the old world, this place was probably bursting at the seams with books for children – and children eager to read them all. Each cover was colorful and bright, the years and years of decay swarming around them not doing anything to rid them of their magic.
“Holiday books, here,” she finally declared, moving to sit cross-legged on the floor and pulling Lev down to sit by her. “I know you don’t celebrate – or never have, at least – but at least this way, you can, like… read about it, you know? See what the fuss is about.” She reached for a book with a red spine, a green monster of some sort on the cover. Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas was the title, and she smiled brightly at the sight of it. “Dad used to read me this every year,” she said softly.
She cracked open the cover, turning the first few pages and clearing her throat. “Every Who down in Whoville liked Christmas a lot,” she read, and Lev wondered how – how, how, how – she could manage to always sound so full of light – “but the Grinch, who lived just North of Whoville,” she paused, looking at Lev and leaning in just enough to bop him square on the nose with her fingertip, “did not.”
Lev’s eyebrows furrowed. “This is a cheerful story?”
“Just wait,” Hanna said through a laugh, scooting closer to him, until her knee was pressing to his and Lev was finding himself trying to remember what it felt like to breathe, “it gets really good.”
It went on like that for what could have been minutes or hours or entire lifetimes. By the time the white light cast from the snow outside was being replaced with the light from the moon, Hanna and Lev both had their flashlights flipped on and a pile of books scattered in front of them.
She was laying with her head in his lap, a book by the name of A Christmas Carol open in her hands as she read it aloud. Her voice was growing tired and raspy, but she didn’t seem to mind. Every so often, her eyes would peel away from the book, looking at Lev just to make sure he was still listening. And he was. He’d probably listen to her read safety manuals if she wanted him to, but there was something about reading Christmas stories, about discovering something that he felt like he’d never really gotten a chance to before, that made his heart swell in his chest.
“A lot of these stories are about mean people who stop being mean by discovering the true meaning of Christmas,” Lev noted after some time, and Hanna could only nod in response.
“That’s the magic of the season,” she told him, and even after learning about the big man who broke into people’s homes and ate their cookies and the reindeer who never felt like they quite fit in, he still wasn’t sure if he really understood what that meant. The magic of the season.
“Are you guys okay up there?” Abby’s voice broke the barrier that had been built around the two of them, and however reluctantly (and much to Lev’s dismay), Hanna lifted herself from where she had been using Lev as her own personal pillow.
“We should probably get back down there,” she said softly, reaching a hand out to ruffle through his mop of hair. Ellie had touched it up for him when they had stopped in Arkansas, and it was once again the color of the wheat fields they’d driven past on their way out of Texas. “We can read more tonight – and maybe tomorrow, if we don’t hit the road right away.”
“We probably will,” Lev replied, getting up and following her as they made the trek back down the steps to the main floor of the bookstore. “They think we’re behind schedule.”
“I don’t really think there is a schedule,” Hanna offered with a shrug. “And besides, it’s Christmas. I think we probably deserve a break for that, you know?”
But, of course, he didn’t know. Because it was yet another thing that he’d missed out on.
They didn’t have a lot of food, but enough canned food that they had picked up along the way to make for a satisfying enough dinner as the storm wearily began to slow down outside. Hanna kept her eyes on Ellie and Lev, who were pouring what looked to be some sort of soup into a pan over the fire, before stepping away and moving toward Abby. Abby, who had terrified her when she first met her.
Abby was intimidating – that much was for certain. But she was also kind. And she cared, deeply, about Lev if nothing else. And that just so happened to be exactly what topic Hanna wished to discuss with her.
“He’s never celebrated Christmas,” Hanna pointed out quietly, and if we’re being honest, at the same time, she wished she could swallow those words right back up. Of course, Abby already knew that. She and Lev were attached at the hip. Hanna would be hard-pressed to find much of anything about Lev that Abby didn’t already have tattooed into her mind.
“Yeah,” was Abby’s somewhat gruff response. “Scars,” she frowned, clearing her throat and quickly correcting herself, “Seraphites didn’t really do much.”
“Maybe we could,” Hanna suggested. As if it were that simple, right?
She could practically hear Abby now. She knew how ridiculous she sounded. How naïve and full of blind hope and optimism. They didn’t exactly live in an accommodating enough world where they could just pull an entire Christmas out of thin air. That didn’t just happen, and there was no way that it could happen.
Hanna had managed to have this entire conversation with herself and talked herself out of bringing any of it up to Abby any further by the time Abby actually responded to her.
“I don’t think we can really track down a Christmas tree,” was what Abby actually said – and of all the ways that she could have shot down Hanna’s scheme (if you could even call it such a thing), that wasn’t half bad.
Hanna looked around the bookstore, illuminated by its warm glow, and tried to consider her options. It’s not like they could really go track down a pine tree and chop one down. Her dad had gotten their Christmas tree by raiding an old home in Lago Vista and taking it from their attic – it had been a staple of their household ever since. But the storm was bad enough outside that the last thing any of them could really think of doing was trying to track down a neighborhood, let alone a Christmas tree.
And then she saw it.
“There,” she pointed toward the potted (and clearly plastic) trees that lined either side of the ramp that led to the checkout lanes. “It’s not the right kind of tree, but it doesn’t need to be, right? I think it still works.”
“Lights.”
“They have to have some,” Hanna blurted this out without so much as a second thought, only looking at Lev and Ellie for a moment or two before looking back at Abby. “Right? I mean… Dad said you decorated every year. He said it was his and my mom’s…” Her words trailed off at the mention of her mother, but only for a second, “…it was his and my mom’s favorite tradition. Using the same Christmas decorations every year. So, they have to have some here. Somewhere. Something.”
Abby fixed her gaze on Lev and Ellie, before looking back at Hanna. “We can look,” she suggested, and no matter how half-hearted of a suggestion it may have been, it sent a bright smile bursting across Hanna’s face.
They waited until they’d eaten, until Lev was asleep with his head nudged against Hanna’s shoulder, an open copy of The Night Before Christmas open across both their laps. Hanna watched him for another second before slipping away, standing up with only the sound of the crackling fire and Ellie’s soft guitar strumming to be heard, and made her way to Abby. “You ready?”
“You know we have no idea where to look for something like this, right?” Abby asked with a quirked eyebrow, looking up from the book in her hand to meet Hanna’s expectant look.
“Something like what?” a third voice piped up, and both of them turned to see that Ellie’s eyes were now watching them, fingers still plucking along the strings as she kept an eye on them.
Abby opened her mouth to most likely say “nothing” when Hanna spoke over her. “We’re going to find Christmas lights.”
Ellie blinked, fingers pausing over the chords for a moment before she moved to sit her guitar down against the counter she was sitting atop. She hopped down, made her way closer to the two of them. “For Lev?”
A bashful smile spread across Hanna’s cheeks before she could stop it, but she opened the dim lighting of the room would keep anyone from really noticing. “Yeah,” she said, voice timid. “I think he deserves to have a real Christmas, you know? Or, well. Whatever kind of Christmas we can have.”
“Not much of one,” Ellie scoffed, hand reaching behind her neck and fiddling with her strands of hair. She’d had Hanna help her cut it back in Arkansas, when they’d touched up Lev’s blond, and Hanna was fairly convinced she’d cut it a little too short judging by how many times Ellie played with it. “But, I mean. I’ve been sketching some tattoo ideas to surprise him with,” she added on after a second. “And I bet I could find more copies of Savage Starlight he hasn’t read.”
Hanna’s smile widened, rocking forward on her boots before swaying back. “So it’s settled,” she declared brightly, as if there was any sort of game plan whatsoever. She turned to look at Abby. “If you were a box of Christmas lights, where would you be?”
Abby blinked at her for a moment, before shaking her head and taking a step backwards. “I don’t even know how I’m supposed to answer that.”
Ellie snorted at that, brushing past Hanna and Abby and moving toward the back of the store. “These places always have back offices and supply closets,” she explained, more for Hanna’s sake (obviously) than Abby’s. “If they have anything, that’s where it’ll be. But if we’re going to find lights, one of us is going to have to find a generator to actually get them lit up in the first place.”
“I think I saw one around back,” Abby offered. “We’ll just have to see if we can get enough power to it.”
There was a sign hanging on the door in the back of the store that read EMPLOYEES ONLY, a keypad under the handle to deny them any further entry without a code in. It only took Ellie a few hearty shoves to get the rusted-over handle to bust open the rest of the way.
Despite the door being jammed shut, they were hardly the first group to make their way through this room, judging by the knocked-over tables and the ripped-open refrigerator. Hanna, however, had her sights set on what appeared to be a supply closet in the corner, face quickly lighting up and shining her flashlight toward the door. “This is the moment of truth,” she declared, wiggling the door open and flying backwards, toppling into a metal table and sending the chairs clattering to the floor a moment later.
A corpse, completely rotted and decayed, nothing more than a gnarled skeleton, was lying on the floor where Hanna had just been standing. Her heart was caught somewhere her lungs and her throat, pushing herself back up on her hands and only keeping her attention on it for another second before she was standing back up.
Abby grimaced at the body on the tiled floor. “How festive,” she deadpanned, and Ellie rolled her eyes before directing the glow of her flashlight to the shelves in the closet.
“You see anything?” she asked, and Hanna realized that she didn’t really have much of a clue what a box of Christmas lights would even look like.
She made her way inside anyway, shoving past old signs and stacks of long-since abandoned books, metal shelves and plastic racks, until she found the stack of boxes piled up at the back of the closet. Each one was labeled something different, and she made sure to pay careful attention to each box until she found the one that she was looking for.
CLEARANCE Q4 2013
HWEEN DECO
OFFICE JUNK
XMAS ORN. TREE. DECO.
FRAMES AND SIGN HOLDERS
“There,” Ellie spoke up from behind her, popping up over her shoulder and pointing a finger toward the box with the word “XMAS” sprawled across it. It was nearly at the very bottom of the pile, and it was ultimately Abby who leaned over and pulled it out the rest of the way so that Ellie and Hanna could reach inside. There were ornaments and knotted up tinsel, faded bows, felt stockings, and crumpled up wrapping paper. And, at the very bottom of the box, a tangle of Christmas lights.
“WE FOUND THEM,” Hanna exclaimed, for no reason at all, and reached into the box to pull out the jumble of lights and cords. She stood, handing them to Ellie with a warm smile as Abby reached back into the box and rooted around for what else was inside. “Can you help me untangle these?”
“Could probably use this stuff, too,” Abby offered up after a moment of Ellie and Hanna dismantling the cords. Hanna turned, seeing Abby lift the entire box and move it out of the closet and into the breakroom. She sat it down on one of the tables, sifting for anything salvageable.
She pulled out the tinsel, which Hanna was sure had seen so many better days, and some snowflake decorations, before reaching for the stockings and sitting them down on the table beside the box as she sorted through everything else that the box had. She came out with a few of the ornaments that weren’t broken, moving to put the stockings back in the box before Hanna was stepping away from Ellie and reaching to take them from her.
“We have nothing to put in those,” Abby argued, and Hanna shook her head.
“Doesn’t matter,” her voice was sing-song in a way that made Abby outwardly grimace. “I’ve seen a few old Christmas movies, I’ve read books, they always have stockings hanging. It’s tradition.”
“So is this,” Ellie said with a wolf-whistle that quickly turned into a weak laugh as she pulled out a plastic plant from the box. She lifted her gaze only to see Abby looking right back at her, and Ellie quickly shoved the mistletoe into the pocket of her jacket and cleared her throat. “Anyway,” she said dismissively, turning back to look at Hanna. “We should get to decorating if we’re gonna do this.”
If Hanna had been a little more perceptive, or maybe a little less focused on getting everything in the store decorated before Lev woke up, she just might have questioned Ellie about the flush that she could have sworn had just spread across her cheeks.
Abby dragged one of the trees from the checkout lane closer to the makeshift campfire, the pot clanging across the tiled floor. “It’s not a pine tree,” she said with a defeated huff, “but it’s better than nothing.”
“I think it’ll be perfect,” Hanna sighed, and Abby only rolled her eyes.
“Your optimism is gonna get all of us in trouble one of these days.”
There wasn’t any malice in Abby’s voice, and all Hanna did in return was send a smile her way. Lev barely stirred at the noise, merely rolling onto his side and burrowing his face into his jacket, and Abby moved for the box of decorations.
“I think I got it!” Ellie’s voice rang through the otherwise quiet building a moment later, poking her head out of one of the swinging doors of the stockroom to look at them. “The generator’s back here. Not a ton of fuel, but enough to get the tree going.”
The Christmas lights stayed in their untangled pile beside the box, neither Hanna or Abby moving to plug them into the socket behind the tree. Between the two of them, it was pretty much unspoken who should be the one who got to do the honors of plugging the lights in and seeing them twinkling for the first time.
“Abby!” Ellie called out from the stockroom, and Abby was reflexive in dropping the snowflake ornament she was holding, turning to look over her shoulder at the direction of her name being called. “Help me get the generator out there.”
Abby shook her head, more to herself than to Hanna, and muttered something under her breath that Hanna couldn’t quite make out. She didn’t seem annoyed, though – she didn’t shake her head like she was bothered by Ellie’s disruption or irritated by her asking for help. She loped away from the fire, from their sad but hopeful plastic tree, and made her way back toward Ellie.
The generator wasn’t like the ones that they were used to running into. It wasn’t the big kind that powered an entire building. It was smaller, with wheels on the back and a handle to drag it through the store. “Clearly, they never worried about this whole place losing power,” Abby pointed out as she tugged it out onto the floor.
They parked it a little ways away from the fire and the tree, but close enough that they could reach the cord for the lights out to plug into it.
It wasn’t until Ellie was tugging the pull cord and the generator was (loudly) rumbling to life that Lev stirred from where he lay asleep by the fire. He sat up, bleary eyed and looking back at the group of them in confusion. “What’s going on?” he asked. His eyes found the generator, and then landed on the tree. “Was that there before?”
“It’s for Christmas!” Hanna burst out, moving forward and reaching for him, pulling him up so that he was standing in front of her. “We… well. It was going to be a surprise, but obviously it got too noisy for that, and…”
Lev still appeared confused, eyebrows furrowed, and head tilted to the side. He looked at Ellie and Abby in question as Hanna reached around for the pile of lights and handed them to him. “So, we don’t really have a Christmas tree, but we have a tree, and we’re going to decorate it. And Ellie is going to sing Christmas carols—”
“—Ellie is going to what?” Ellie asked pointedly.
The wheels were turning in Lev’s head, looking between them in search of answers before his eyes were back on Hanna. “You did this for me?” he asked quietly.
Hanna nodded, the blush growing more and more difficult to hide, before looking back at Abby and Ellie and offering Lev a sheepish shrug. “We all did.”
“Mostly her,” Abby was quick to counter, but she still took the step forward and ruffled Lev’s hair. “Merry Christmas, kid. Let’s get this thing decorated.”
The Christmas lights were bundled in Lev’s arms when Hanna stepped away to plug them in. Within seconds, the dim bulbs were replaced with softly illuminated reds and greens and blues and yellows all shining back at him. It’s not like it’s the first time he’d ever seen lights like this – the Seraphite bases had used hanging white lights to illuminate every safe space and walkway. But this was different. This seemed celebratory. This, however stupidly, seemed like something that was just for him, just for them.
“These are so cool,” he breathed out, and Hanna reached out to take part of the strand from him, leading him toward the tree.
It wasn’t like the pine trees that they’d seen in the books he and Hanna had been reading earlier in the evening. It had plenty of branches and green leaves, but it looked like a miniaturized version of the kind of tree you would find on a farm more than the kind you would find in a forest. It didn’t matter, though. None of it mattered.
The fact that anybody wanted to do this kind of thing for him felt like magic. It made his knees lock up and everything in his head go fuzzy. But he let Hanna guide him to the tree, and he let her show him how to light up the branches with the strand of lights, and he followed her lead.
The lights were strung around the small tree, twinkling against the fire alongside the ornaments they’d tried their best to hang from the branches. Hanna had foregone lining the tree with tinsel in favor of wearing it draped across her shoulders like a scarf, and Ellie was sitting close to the fire, plucking at strings and murmuring words to a song that Lev had never heard before.
His eyes were focused on Hanna – always, always finding their way back to Hanna – for a moment before he turned to see Abby, who was tacking stockings to the wall behind the tree.
“Thank you for doing all of this,” he said, siding up next to her and bumping his shoulder to hers.
Abby gave him a small, wistful smile for a moment before looking back at the stockings and sighing. “Christmas used to be a big deal with my dad,” she said, and Lev made sure to give her his full attention, because it was rare for Abby to bring up her dad, and he knew that meant it was important. “When we lived in Salt Lake, we’d always cut down a tree and decorate it. The whole base would watch the same, like, three Christmas movies that we had every year. It was good. It was cool.”
Her fingers trailed along the stocking for a moment before she hung it up. “Which one do you want?” she asked, and Lev blinked back at her in confusion.
“What do you mean?”
“Which stocking?” Abby clarified, nodding toward the four stockings she’d hung up. Each one had a picture of a book on it – one featuring a cover with boy with a lightning bolt on his head and a wand in hand, and another with a girl with red hair in two long braids. One had a pair of boys floating down the river in a raft and the other had a girl in a bright blue dress alongside a cat and a rabbit and a man in a very tall hat.
“That one, I guess,” he decided, pointing to the boy wielding the wand. “He looks cool.”
“He is,” Abby was quick to follow. “I read the books a long time ago – I’ll have to see if I can find some for you before we leave, so you can read them.”
Lev gave her a small smile, but then his eyes were back on the stockings hanging in front of him. “That one is for Hanna,” he pointed to the girl with the red hair and the braids. She didn’t look a thing like her, but she had the same wonder in her eyes that he saw time and time again. “And I think that’s Ellie, because we’re all just sort of stuck here together,” he pointed to the girl and her eclectic band of woodland friends.
He pointed to the last one, the boys on the raft, and looked to Abby with a small smile. “And that’s you and me.”
Abby seemed taken aback, only for a second, before smiling back at him. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. That’s your stocking.”
When morning rolled around, Lev awoke to Hanna’s head on his shoulder. He sat up a little more, looking around the bookstore as the fire died down but the tree stayed shining. His eyes found Abby and Ellie – Ellie, who would wake up soon and find her leg draped over Abby’s knee and shoot up in horror, hoping to clear the scene of the crime before anyone noticed. Abby had a stack of books beside her, the spines reading HARRY POTTER, and Lev somehow knew that they were all meant for him.
He thought of Yara, of all the promises they’d made to each other – promises to get out of Seattle, to get away from the Seraphites, to start living a real life. Yara didn’t get to know Abby the way that Lev did. Yara never knew Ellie as anything at all, and Yara would have loved Hanna. Yara deserved this future.
He curled his knees up to his chest, arms folding around his legs as he watched the fire, the tree, the quiet stillness of Christmas morning.
Hanna let out a soft hum, bumping against him for a moment before sitting up and stretching. “Hi,” she said quietly, giving him a small smile and bumping her shoulder to his. “Merry Christmas.”
“This is still really strange,” he admitted with a small smile, and Hanna laughed in a way that he felt all the way down to his toes, a live wire being cut in his veins.
“It’s not… tradition like I’m used to, or like anyone’s used to, but maybe we can start our own traditions, you know? Trees that don’t make sense, lights that we dig out of closets. Campfires and songs we don’t know the words to.”
Lev smiled softly, a little sadly. This time last year, he and Abby had been strung up in a base in California, the Rattlers having their way with them until Lev was sure the salt and sea and sand were going to split open and swallow them down. Abby had lost so much of herself that she was practically unrecognizable – and then, somehow, somehow, they’d made it out. They’d survived.
And now they were here. With a group he’d never have imagined traveling with. With a family he’d never have imagined being a part of.
He didn’t know where they would be next year. He didn’t know where they would be tomorrow. But right now? Right now seemed really, really important.
“Those sound like okay traditions to me,” he admitted, and Hanna tucked one of her braids behind her ear and smiled back at him.
“Well, there is one other tradition,” she said softly, “one other tradition that, um. That we could do.”
He blinked back at her, curious. “There’s probably a million,” he said, and she nodded, standing up on her feet and reaching out to pull him up with her.
“Yeah, but this one…” she stepped away only for a second, and he followed the trail she took. She stepped around the fire, leaning over to where Abby and Ellie were asleep, and she reached into the pocket of Ellie’s jacket, pulling out what looked to be a green leaf. Ellie let out a small grunt at the disturbance, but didn’t stir, and Hanna turned back to Lev. “This one is pretty special.”
She made strides back toward him, holding the green plant above their heads, and Lev looked up at it. The green leaf, the red holly – when his eyes turned back to look at Hanna, her eyes were closed, and she was leaning in.
His eyes fluttered closed the moment her lips found his, soft and delicate and feather soft. His heart vaulted up, up, up, and he didn’t know what to do with his hands, what to do with any part of himself. His fingers, clumsily, settled at Hanna’s elbow just before she pulled away and giving him a shy smile. He wanted her back, wanted that back.
“Merry Christmas, Lev,” she whispered, leaning in and pressing one last kiss to his cheek.
He looked back at her in wonder, stomach a swirl of knots and twists in his gut. “That was a good tradition,” was all he could think to say back to her.
“I was hoping you’d think so,” Hanna admitted, tucking the leaves back into her pocket.
Lev and Hanna were curled up by the fire, the first Harry Potter book open between the two of them as they quietly read, looking back and forth at one another for silent cues as to when it was okay to turn the page. Abby kept her eyes on them for a moment or two before her gaze was back to Ellie.
Ellie, who was sitting and plucking at her guitar, humming softly to Auld Lang Syne. Her eyes lifted, meeting Abby’s gaze, and Abby willed herself to not immediately avert her attention.
It was fucked up to think about – to think about how they’d gotten here, why they were here. How they were here together, in this place, this specific group of once strangers, once enemies.
Ellie held her gaze for one, two, three seconds before she was looking back at her guitar. She strummed a final chord before letting her hand still against the fretboard. “Dina’s Jewish,” she spoke, and it caught Abby off-guard. Ellie didn’t bring up Dina. She didn’t bring up JJ. She didn’t bring up so many parts of her past, and Abby didn’t blame her. It still made her hair stand on edge ever the same when she mentioned their names. “And last year, we celebrated, like… this weird hybrid of Christmas and Hanukkah for JJ. We found a menorah, and a Christmas tree and it was…” she trailed off, shaking her head sadly. “I don’t know. It was nice, I guess.”
The last time Abby had celebrated any part of Christmas, she had been in Seattle. She had been at the aquarium, surrounded by Christmas lights and stockings celebrating a one-year anniversary that didn’t belong to her. All she cared about was that they had tracked down Joel. She couldn’t have given less of a shit about what holiday was coming up.
“I wish someone loved me enough to make me a stocking,” she’d told Owen, and he’d told her she didn’t deserve one. “What?” she’d pressed. “A stocking? Or someone who loves me?”
A good mood. That’s what he’d pointed out. That she’d been in a good mood. It didn’t matter that the idea of Mel and Owen curled up by the fire made her sick to her stomach, it didn’t matter that this was a life she could have had but never would. She let Joel Miller take up every ounce of attention in her body, because it was easier that way. Because it had to be easier that way.
“I’m sure they miss you,” Abby found herself saying, looking down at her lap.
“Yeah,” Ellie said softly. “Probably.” A beat passed. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
Abby’s eyes cast back over to her, a heavier look than she’d intended. “She’d be an idiot to not miss you, Ellie.”
If Abby didn’t know better, she’d swear she’d made Ellie blush.
Ellie’s attention quickly went back to her guitar, and Abby cast her gaze back down to the book in her hand. She’d been on the same page for an hour.
The words on the page blurred together and Ellie strummed the opening chords of Last Christmas by Wham! The storm went to a dull still outside until everything was soft, and white, and sparkling.
And if Ellie was upset about Abby’s hand absentmindedly finding its way to her knee amidst the soft hums of Christmas music and blur of black and white letters on a page, she didn’t say a word.