Work Text:
A Christmas Eve birthday tends to be overlooked, and this used to frustrate Yuugo. Over 15 years ago at Glory Bell Farm, his birthday never felt as celebrated as the others, as ‘happy birthday’ wishes were granted breathlessly in the midst of Christmas excitement, and small gifts were exchanged among the children around this time, anyway.
He had never been the type of person to be bitter over it, but on numerous occasions he’d expressed his jealousy to Dina and Lucas, who offered some sympathy but mostly teasing.
Yuugo’s Christmas Eve birthday has rolled around again this year, and he’s told nobody. There’s a part of this that’s due to the fact it feels irrelevant, but mostly it’s because he’s too damn old for it. The last birthday he celebrated was his 16th, and now he’s turning thirty. Almost half his current lifespan has been lost to loneliness, and even as he attempts to acclimate himself to sharing space with excitable children, of all things, there are some habits he thinks he’ll never regain.
Lucas, at least, will probably give his well wishes--an eternal connection to the past. The thought brings a smile to Yuugo’s lips. Even if it’ll never be the same, not everything has been lost forever.
The Christmas tree is really shaping up, Yuugo observes as he walks into the dining room. He’d been the one sent to collect the branches used to construct a ‘pine tree’, but the creativity behind it all is the kids’, through and through. The ornaments include fruit and paper trifles, and it’s topped by a cut-out cardboard star coloured in yellow crayon. They’ve got all sorts of arts and crafts projects like this underway to brighten up the holiday season. It’s one of those things which fills him up with love so unexpectedly it overwhelms his aching chest, like the abrupt turning of the weather this time of year. His heart hasn’t grown used to such things again.
All the kids are unbelievably excited for Christmas. He supposes dark times only make happy occasions like this all the more special. Some of them like Gillian and even Yvette, at her young age, are guiding the others through certain crafts. They’ve been saving their spare rations for a Christmas Eve and Day feast, as organised by Pepe. He’s heard whispers of the young ones, led by Chris, pioneering a visit from Santa, though they’re all well aware the gifts won’t be too extravagant.
It’s just past breakfast. Yuugo is thirty years old today. Leave it to those excitable kids to make him feel even older.
(Lucas had turned thirty just the previous month. The ex-Goldy Pond Resistance, already wise to their father figure’s birthday as well as his tendency to downplay it, had pulled everyone in the shelter into the celebration. The kids had given him a variety of hand-crafted gifts, and Yuugo had, as requested, simply given Lucas his time. He had felt it wasn’t enough but Lucas’s smile kept him from saying anything.)
He feels tired. As some of the younger kids run by him, he sits down in a chair by the table, not quite feeling connected to the world around him.
Instead, he feels--
Like he’ll never escape from the past.
Like you’ll never escape from the past.
Like it’s many, many years ago, and the shelter is empty except for your obtrusive body. Like your routine cycles over and over without meaning like the hands of a clock, and your life will never have significance again.
You’ve been out hunting. The dry meat and canned goods in the pantry aren’t enough to sustain you. What year--the fourth? The tenth? Sometime after your self-imposed break from hunting, which had happened because you couldn’t hold a bow steady enough to shoot. Your hands don’t shake as much anymore.
The limp body of a bird is placed on a table in the dining room, as well a collection of fruit gathered with little thought. You throw yourself into a chair, lowering your heavy pack and gun to the ground.
It’s your birthday. This is a fact you discovered after an accidental glance over calendars while cleaning up storage, the faded dates reminding you. You’d hid away the calendars as best you could.
How many years?
How many years since chatter and laughter filled this dismal underground prison? You can almost hear it. John and Jatte snickering together at some joke told by Abel. Maria calling out to remind everyone dinner is in an hour. Flore clinging to Viviana as they talked together. Lucas by your side.
Dina--
Dina by the other.
They had little, and they were family. And each loss is a gaping wound never to be healed, the infection growing year by how-many-years, yet your body somehow still refuses to give up.
“Live, Yuugo.”
How and why has that two-piece fragment of the worst day of your life managed to cling to you?
You’ve lived for another year. You grow older while they don’t, their bodies consumed by man-eaters in a hunting ground you willingly fled from. And still you’re stagnant and immovable in this prison, too scared to go in either direction to make things right.
It’s almost like--
“Yuugo.”
An all-too-familiar smile has obstructed Yuugo’s dead stare into space.
His skin is marred by ragged red scars, and the lines in his face are so much deeper than they were 14 years ago, but Lucas will always be Lucas.
Lucas will always be here. (Yuugo will make sure of it.)
“How are you?” Lucas asks, soft and nondemanding, as though his well-put-together self hadn’t just caught his childhood friend having yet another unnecessary musing.
“Fine,” Yuugo grumbles, even though he shouldn’t.
His friend simply shakes his head with a fond smile and sits down next to him. It takes him some effort to lower himself into the chair. They spend a few minutes in silence together amongst the chaos of the kids surrounding them.
“Everyone’s so excited for Christmas,” Lucas murmurs. “It’ll be a happy occasion…”
Yuugo knows not to interrupt as he thinks, and sure enough he continues soon after, “Back at Goldy Pond, I used to do a little something for the kids each year. You really need a celebration to look forward to. To prepare for. To think of instead of all the tragedy around you.”
“It works,” Yuugo admits. “I bet the kids are too excited for Santa to come to stay up all night thinking of what’s happened to them.”
“You’re right.”
Lucas watches a particularly excitable kid trip over his own feet while running past, and Jemima helping him. He chuckles and shakes his head. “I used to play Santa, you know.”
Nobody could blame Yuugo for choking out a laugh. “Really? A bit young for the role, aren’t you?”
“Ah, you’re the first one to say that to me…”
They meet eyes, both deadpan, until Yuugo chuckles and Lucas follows, and then they’re laughing together. Lucas gets out, “Besides, I’ve heard some younger ones may be taking up the challenge this year.”
“So have I,” Yuugo smirks.
“Mm. I did my best with what we had, in Goldy Pond. But we couldn’t exactly have a tree. We made things together… I tried to scrounge up appropriate gifts but it wasn’t easy. Some did last. You know Nigel’s hat was originally a Christmas present?”
“Huh.”
Lucas shakes his head again. “Anyway. Enough reminiscing about the past.”
He can agree with that.
After pushing himself up to stand again, Lucas inclines his head over to the left exit of the room. “Come with me?”
Yuugo blinks. Upon some thought, he realises it must be for his birthday. Maybe he’ll give Yuugo his time as an inversion of the previous month. They can have tea together, chat about the kids and whatever comes to mind. Yes, it’ll be nice.
He stands and follows Lucas’s limping pace down the hallways, thinking they’ll have a detour to the kitchen to put on a pot of tea, as their tradition… But they don’t. He frowns but keeps walking, and eventually realises they’re heading towards the reference room.
Before walking in, Lucas stops in front of the strangely closed door and offers Yuugo a strangely apologetic smile. “By the way, don’t blame me for this. I only told them the date. They did all the rest.”
Even as he’s about to ask what he means, or even process the words, the door is opened and Yuugo is quickly ushered inside.
“Happy birthday!”
Yuugo stops, and stares.
The kids are all in here. When did they get in here? Is this what they were in such a hurry to get to? Was Lucas there to distract him? There’s Anna and Nat and Chris and the rest of the Grace Field kids smiling at him as if he’d never threatened them, and Oliver and Sonya and Zack and all the Goldy Pond kids standing there with equally broad grins. They’ve hung up that ever-reusable ‘Happy Birthday’ banner they all made a long time ago, and a few of them are wearing the long-past DIY project of the birthday hats.
There’s a cake. There’s a goddamn cake. They don’t make a cake for most birthdays. What the hell is going on?
It’s not much, but really it’s all too much. The fact the kids acknowledged his birthday at all is almost enough for tears to come to his eyes, and the whole deal they’ve made out of it is what leads for it to actually happen. He wipes them away as quickly as possible, but he continues to stand there gawking like an idiot, because he really doesn’t think he can process it.
He eventually snaps himself out of his shock. “You’ve got to me kidding me…”
“Nope!” Gillian beams.
“I… I don’t know what to say.”
Because he really doesn’t. He can’t express the sort of burning love overtaking him, nor the gratitude shaking him to his core. And, somewhere along the road, some greater deity must’ve taken pity on the sorry bastard he is because they don’t question at all, simply welcoming him into the celebration, taking him as he is, despite everything.
The surprise party passes in a blur of chatter and kids smiling at him for no reason at all. Chris is outed as one of the instigators of this whole incident (that crafty kid is going places) and clings to him for almost the entire time, sometimes hopping up and down in excitement at seeing him enjoy the party. Oliver is another one of the ringleaders, along with Anna, who says that he’s more than made up for how their first meeting went, and she greatly appreciates everything he does for them.
Pepe informs him that the cake was made mainly as a test for the Christmas cake they’ll be having tomorrow, but despite him blowing it off Yuugo knows well their resources are limited and tests usually aren’t necessary. It’s delicious, anyway. Many push lovingly crafted gifts into his hands, of all different levels of craftsmanship, which he’ll treasure all the same. He has to hold back tears a lot during the whole thing, but he can’t ruin his cool, tough persona for all the kids that happen to look up to him by some sick twist of fate.
The party begins to wind down after not much time has passed, as they have even more duties to attend to than usual the day before Christmas, and by the time it’s him, Lucas, and a few lingering kids in the room, he feels a glow in his chest he hasn’t felt for…
How long, now?
It’s the warm glow of perfect contentment, somehow bestowed upon him.
“You didn’t have to apologise,” Yuugo murmurs.
Lucas blinks and looks over to him, “Hm?”
He sighs and speaks up a little louder, but not loud enough for anyone else to hear, “I said you didn’t have to apologise. Or pass the blame, I guess. It was nice. Really nice. I enjoyed it. And I’m… I’m just thankful.”
“Well, don’t let anyone hear you,” Lucas smirks, though there’s a soft edge to it that takes off the bite of his words.
And here, surrounded by the hard work and adoration of (almost) all the people he loves, he finally lets the tears well up in his eyes. A few fall. Not many, though. He wipes them away after a second.
These halls will never be empty again, and he wonders if the same is true for the gap in his chest.
“Oh, Yuugo,” Lucas utters with perfect fondness.
“Shut up,” he mutters, still wiping away some errant tears. “Damn brats… Who gave them the right to care this much about me, anyway?”
Lucas laughs, but then his expression turns more pensive as he faces Yuugo. “You know you deserve all of this, don’t you? Every single bit of it, and then more. It’s more than about time for it.”
Yuugo blinks the last of his tears away and finds with mild surprise a thin smile has stretched across his face without him even noticing. He looks out at the banner hung between the shelves, at the kids packing away the remnants of the cake.
“I… I think I will. Eventually. It’s a process.”
“Yeah. I know about that, too.”
Even as the occasion changes by that evening in excitement for Christmas, and that contentment is already marred by the mires of the events of his past and his mind at the present, Yuugo knows with unexpectedly certainty that the day that sort of happiness will come to him again only becomes closer and closer every second he spends among his new, incorrigible, achingly perfect family. Not everything is lost forever.
The constant presence of that spark of a reminder is more than he’s ever wanted over 14 long years, and he knows it’ll only keep growing with each new expansion of his heart.