Christmas Eve
by Lara

SUMMARY: The arrival of Christmas is bitter and sweet for Wesley and Fred

RATING: FRC [GF]

SPOILERS: “That Old Gang of Mine” and Season 4.

DISCLAIMER: I only wish I were as successful as Joss Whedon. He and Mutant Enemy own this; I just write fanfic for fun while waiting for my own big break.

DISTRIBUTION: Permission granted to Bookish, WNW and Blue Moon Rising. If anyone else wants to archive it, please let me know.

FEEDBACK: Very much appreciated. Please e-mail lara@darling-moon.com. Flames, however, will be used to fuel the fire in Wesley’s next spell casting session.

AUTHOR'S NOTES: I wasn’t going to do it. I wasn’t going to write a Christmas fic. I don’t think I’ve ever written a holiday fic before (or at least one that solely focuses on a specific holiday). But this bunny came with such pretty bow... This is set during Season 4 – sometime after the events in “Rain of Fire” would be resolved, but I’ve kept it otherwise vague since I’m not sure when Christmas would fall storyline-wise. The carol excerpts used in this fic are from “Deck the Halls,” “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” and “Home for the Holidays.”

Nominated for Best Unconventional Fanfiction

Round Two

Christmas Eve 2002

Deck the halls with boughs of holly.
Fa-la-la-la-la la-la-la-la.
‘Tis the Season to be jolly.
Fa-la-la-la-la la-la-la-la.

Fred Burkle sat next to the fountain in middle of the mall, watching people go about their last-minute shopping as the music played over the loud speakers. It seemed rather funny to think of Los Angeles as a Winter Wonderland, considering its temperate climate even in December, but Christmas was almost there, and people were preparing to celebrate. Everyone she observed seemed either happily full of the Christmas spirit or somewhat stressed by the holiday the next day.

Even those people were lucky to only have that to worry about, she thought, running a hand through her hair. No one seemed to remember how close the world had come to ending yet again, how fire had rained down on Los Angeles with the appearance of the Beast. No one remembered...

Except for a select few.

Looking down at the bag by her feet, Fred sighed. Try as she might, she was finding it near impossible to get into the spirit of the holiday season. When she had been a child, Christmas had been her favorite time of year with the decorations and presents and the feast her family would cook up, but now with all the horrors she had lived through, with everything that had happened over the last year, she found that more than anything, she was just going through the motions. Things were still tense between her and Charles. Angel was missing again. And Wes... She wanted more than anything to pretend that everything was normal, but it wasn’t. She wasn’t. As much as she wanted to be.

Her watch beeped to remind her that it was time to head back, so she rose and picked up her bag. On her way out of the mall, a window display caught her eye, and she walked over to look at it. For the first time in weeks, a real smile spread over her face as she stood there, her eyes transfixed.

Suddenly, a clap of thunder outside startled her out of her reverie, and she backed up from the store window, her attention going to the exit a few feet away. A storm was coming. She needed to get going if she wanted to make it back to the Hyperion before it started raining.

“At least it’ll only be water this time,” she muttered to herself as she left the mall.

*****

I’ll be home for Christmas.
You can count on me.
Please have snow and mistletoe
And presents by the tree...

At least it was only water this time.

Wesley Wyndam-Pryce stood at his window, watching the rain beat down in the street below as people made their way home for Christmas Eve. People who would be celebrating with their family, their friends. People who didn’t realize how lucky they were that they had even made it to another Christmas at all.

Through the rain, he could see the decorations in the flats of the building across the street. Bright colors, festive ornaments, flashing lights. And every now and then, strains of music would reach him, played at high volume by his neighbors as they held various parties. Fun and fellowship he wouldn’t be a part of.

Christmas Eve will find me
Where the love-light gleams.
I'll be home for Christmas
If only in my dreams.

Christmas alone.

As if in response to his thoughts, the phone rang, and Wesley made the sardonic realization that he didn’t have to be alone. But did he really want to spend the holiday with her? He could only imagine what Lilah’s idea of celebrating the birth of Jesus would entail, and he actually wasn’t too keen to find out, so he let the answering machine pick up the call. She left a message telling him there was a present at her place he could unwrap – leaving little to the imagination as to who the present was – and though it was quite the temptation, he instead shook his head and hit the delete button on the machine.

*****

Reaching her room at the Hyperion, Fred dumped her bag and jacket on the bed and was about to collapse next to them when she noticed something sitting on the nightstand. A present wrapped in paper decorated with music notes and holly. She stared at it for a moment. Her name was printed on the card attached, but there was nothing to indicate who had given it to her. Charles?

“Hey, babe?” his voice suddenly came from the door.

She turned and saw him standing there with a gift in his hands, this one covered with Christmas teddy bears.

“I...I know it’s only Christmas Eve, but I wanted to give you your present,” he told her, holding it out to her. “That is...if you...”

Patting the bed, she sat down as Gunn walked over to join her. He placed the gift in her lap.

“I wasn’t sure what to get you,” he told her as she started to remove the paper. He gave her a look at the way she was methodical about opening it, so she quickly tore the paper off and tossed it to the floor. “I hope you like it. I figured that since you’re into Physics and all, you’d like these.”

Inside, she found a garishly-colored box holding two items. One was a Magic Sand Wand filled with pink sand. The objective was to get the marble inside from one end to the other through the sand blocking its path. The other was a dynamo hobby kit to make a flashlight that didn’t need batteries.

“I know you like to build things,” he explained.

Fred smiled at him. “Thank you. It’s really sweet. We can always use another flashlight around here.” She reached back into the bag of stuff she had bought at the mall and pulled out a small wrapped gift that didn’t leave much to the imagination as to what it was. “Here.”

He tore off the paper and smiled when he saw the CD cover. “Cool. You want to come downstairs and listen to it with me?”

She shook her head. “I’ve got a couple of things I need to sort through up here. You go on.”

He stared at her for a few moments. “We okay, babe?”

“I’m not sure yet,” she answered with a slight shrug. He nodded slowly, then got up and walked to the door. Before he left, he looked like he wanted to say something but thought better of it and headed downstairs.

Once he was gone, Fred tossed the physics toys down next to her and drew her feet up beneath her. She knew he had meant well, but she already knew the solution to the wand and the hobby kit was something she would have been interested in when she was ten. He still wanted to see her as his innocent Fred, the girl he could protect. The gifts, even the paper he had wrapped it in, told her as much. It was commendable in a way, but he didn’t understand that wasn’t who she really was and that in doing what he had done to Professor Siddell, he had taken something away from her, something she had needed to do.

Sighing, she leaned back against the headboard and closed her eyes for a few moments. She could hear Gunn playing the CD on the player in the office downstairs. When she opened them again, she turned her head to look at the mystery gift on the nightstand.

It was rather heavy when she picked it up. Wondering what in the world it could be and who it was from, she carefully removed the paper, smiling at the pretty silver notes and metallic reds and greens of the holly. The box inside was plain brown, giving no hint as to what it contained. Any labels that had been on it had been removed.

When she opened the box and looked inside, she let out a delighted gasp. Inside was a ballerina music box, like the ones she had seen in the store window right before she had left the mall. Who could have known?

Taking the box out, she set it on the stand to examine it. The china ballerina was in a small diorama on top of the wooden box that contained the player. She was dressed in a flowing blue and pink costume made of real material and her dark hair – real hair, not painted on – was pulled up into a bun with a tiara on her head. Fred wound the key to see what the song played.

When she finished, the strains of the Sleeping Beauty Waltz by Tchaikovsky began as the ballerina turned in the diorama.

And in that moment, she knew who had given it to her.

*****

Wesley wondered if she had found the gift yet. Would she know it was from him?

Would she remember?

*****

October 2001

Wesley kept a tight hold around Fred’s waist as he escorted her from the taxi once they reached the Hyperion. After what had happened at Caritas that night, he didn’t want to leave her alone. She had been shaking the entire way home, and he feared that the standoff with Gunn’s old gang might end up setting her back after the slow progress she had been making over the last few months since her return from Pylea.

Damn them. He could have strangled those stupid boys for what they had done.

“Wesley?” Fred’s quiet voice stopped him on the walkway up the hotel. She looked up at him in the darkness, seeking out his understanding blue eyes. “I don’t want to go in there. I don’t want to be by myself.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he reassured her. “Angel should be back soon, and I’ll stay here tonight if you’d like.”

She shook her head. “Please...can we...I just don’t want to...” She didn’t know how to explain it. She wanted to crawl into her cave and hide, but at the same time, she didn’t want to go in there. She didn’t want to be alone, the way she knew she would be, the way she had always been for so long.

He stared into her eyes, seeing so much panic and conflict in their depths. Oh, how he wished he could take away everything that had happened to her to make her this way. If he could have healed her with a touch, he would have. “Do you want to go for a drive in my jeep?”

She nodded, her hands gripping his tightly. “Someplace away from demons and gangs and bad people.”

Promising to do his best, he led her to where his vehicle was parked around the back of the hotel and helped her into the passenger seat. Once she was settled, the seatbelt drawn over her slender frame, he slid behind the wheel and headed off with no real plan of where he might go.

“Would you like some music?” he asked, turning on the radio. He thought that pop or rock might be a little too much for her, so he hit the program button for the local classical station. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata was playing, and he could see the music had an immediate effect on Fred, her shoulders finally relaxing from their tensed scrunch.

As he drove through the streets of Los Angeles, Fred leaned her head against the window, trying to forget what had happened that night. She had told the truth when she had said she didn’t want to die, but she couldn’t have hurt Angel...her handsome man. She couldn’t have stood it if any of them were hurt. Angel or Cordelia or Charles or Wesley.

When Wesley turned the jeep onto the highway leading toward Port Los Angeles, the end of Moonlight Sonata segued into the Sleeping Beauty Waltz.

“I know you...I walked with you once upon a dream...” Fred started singing softly, her now breathy voice a stark contrast to her tremulous, almost ready to crack one during the Patsy Cline song she had chosen earlier that evening. Wesley still wondered what Lorne read from her. Would she be all right in the end?

“I love this piece,” she said, closing her eyes. “Danced to it when I was younger.”

This piece of information surprised him. “You used to dance?”

She nodded, smiling at the memory of how dancing had made her feel. She had almost forgotten over the past few years. “Took ballet for a lot of years in Texas with Miss Becky. She was so beautiful and tall and graceful, and I wanted to be just like her and the ballerinas I used to see when my parents took me to shows.”

This was the first time she had ever mentioned her parents. “Where are your parents?”

Suddenly, she shook her head and tried to again curl herself into a ball. Wesley cursed himself. She had finally managed to relax a bit, open up, and one question had just made her shut down again. So he waited a minute as the music continued to play before asking another question – this one completely different.

“Were you Aurora?” he asked, hoping she would talk to him again.

He was relieved when she shook her head and said, “We didn’t actually do the ballet itself. My class just danced to the piece during a recital. Some of us were dressed in pink, and some of us were dressed in blue, and I remember how wonderful it was. I couldn’t see beyond the first rows because of the spotlights, but it was so magical...”

As she talked about the performance, Wesley could almost see it in his head. A younger Fred with her long hair up, dancing to the music, the spotlight on her.

It seemed all too soon that the piece was over on the radio, and with it, so was Fred’s reminiscing. The rather discordant opening passage of the next piece caused Wesley to reach over and snap the radio off, and for the next few moments, they drove on in silence except for Fred’s soft humming. She had once again relaxed, much to his relief.

“Wesley,” she said unexpectedly, looking over at him as she sat up slightly.

“Yes, Fred?”

“Thank you.”

His eyes darted over toward her in surprise before returning to the road. “For what?”

“What you did tonight...pulling me off the stage...protecting me.”

“I wouldn’t have let them hurt you.”

Nodding, she shifted slightly to lean against his shoulder as they drove through Port Los Angeles.

*****

Christmas Eve 2002

The music box had long since stopped playing, the key wound down. But Fred still stared at the ballerina. She remembered the look they had exchanged when Angel had told them he had gotten tickets to the ballet, how Wes had seemed as excited as she while Charles had practically had to be dragged kicking and screaming. Granted, he had apparently enjoyed it in the end, but still...

Leaning over, she pulled something out of the bag sitting at the end of the bed. When she had bought it, she hadn’t been sure if it would be appropriate, but she had decided to get it anyway. Now, she was glad she had. She slid off the bed, grabbed her jacket and slipped out of the hotel through the back way so Gunn wouldn’t see her, hurrying off into the rain that was still coming down.

*****

It was nights like this that Wesley missed having a fireplace. When his father used to be away on Council business and it would start raining, his mother would build a big fire in the lounge, and they would sit in front of it with hot tea and biscuits and read stories together in the flickering light. Those had been some of the few times during his childhood when he recalled ever being completely happy. However, that seemed like another lifetime ago now. Now, he had had to make do with the flicker of the television and the annual Christmas Eve showing of It’s a Wonderful Life.

Nearly an hour after the movie was over, he was about to shut the set off and go to bed when he heard a noise outside his door. Getting up, he walked over just as the doorbell rang.

No one was there except for a wrapped gift sitting on his doormat. Glancing down the hall, though, he saw a familiar form retreating.

“Fred?” he called.

Stopping at the sound of his voice, she turned. Her hair was sopping wet and hanging in her face, and she was shivering in her oversized jacket. “Wesley...I...didn’t expect you to...I just wanted to...um...thank you for the gift. It’s beautiful.”

“You remembered?” he asked as they locked eyes for a moment and she just nodded. They stood there without saying another word before he finally averted his gaze to look down at the gift at his feet. “Is this from you?”

“Yeah...I wasn’t sure...but I thought of you when I saw it, so I decided to...I hope you like it.”

Smiling gently, he reached down and picked it up. “Would you...um...would you like to come inside?”

“I don’t know...I should probably—.”

“Fred, you’re soaking wet. I can’t let you go back out there. Please, come in and dry off.”

Finally, she came back up the hall to follow Wesley into his apartment. Inside, he put the gift on the coffee table then went into the bathroom to get one of his big towels for her.

“Fireplace would be nice on a night like this,” she commented as she scrubbed at her hair.

Wesley laughed. “I was just thinking that myself before you arrived.” He looked down at the gift. “May I?”

Blushing, she nodded, and Wesley picked it up again, realizing for the first time that it was probably a book by its shape, size and weight. He unwrapped the gift, his eyes opening wide in amazement. She had gotten him a hardback, illustrated edition of The Lord of the Rings – all the books in one.

“Fred...” He honestly didn’t know what to say.

“Do you like it? I wasn’t sure, but I thought you’d like it. If you don’t like it, you can return it and—.”

Reaching over, he placed a finger over her lips. “It’s wonderful. Actually, I was just recalling that my mother and I read this together when I was younger.” He weighed the tome in his hands. “Would you like to...? I mean, you don’t have to if you need to get back but—.”

“I’d love to.”

Sitting down next to her on the couch, Wesley opened to the first page and began reading as the clock struck midnight, ushering in Christmas.

Oh, there’s no place like home for the holidays
Cause no matter how far away you roam,
If you long for the sunshine of a friendly gaze,
For the holidays, you can’t beat home sweet home.

© December 2002

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