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It was a quiet day in April, long enough after Christmas that all the post-mortem meetings had been had and all the laborious fuel recalculations had been done, but long enough before Christmas that there wasn’t any real pressure on yet.
Small moans and shushing could be heard through the various holes in the ancient wood walls—or would have been heard had there been anyone else anywhere near Tunnel Three. But there wasn’t, and there hadn’t been last time either. Once, a lost new-hire elf whose name had turned out to be Sandy had come close enough to hear them, but she’d been too distracted by being lost to notice. At least, Patrick hoped she hadn’t noticed. Every time he passed her in the halls he blushed a little and looked away. David always met her eye and grinned. Whether she thought they both had a crush on her was still an open question.
"Being engaged is the best," David said to the ceiling. He couldn't say it to Patrick, as Patrick had one hand firmly in his hair, pulling his head back, and his lips fastened to a spot just barely—dangerously so—below the line of David's collar.
"We did this before we got engaged, " muttered Patrick into his fiancé’s skin.
“Once,” David reminded him. “You got all nervous about getting caught until I convinced you I know who uses this tunnel, and—oh my god, never stop doing that—it’s fine.”
Patrick pressed his nails gently into David’s scalp and gave his neck one last kiss before coming up for air.
“Yes,” he said, meeting David’s eyes and resorting unfairly to logic. “All the people you’ve brought back here, all the many, many elves who have shown you a good time in the recesses of Tunnel Three, can all attest to never having been caught, and somehow they’ve all never compared notes or come down this way again with someone else. Right.”
David took a step back out of the embrace and crossed his arms defensively. “Okay, one, it wasn’t many, it was just two people on about six occasions, and B, one of them doesn’t work here anymore and the other one hates me so much now that she never even comes into this whole building. She literally goes around the barn to avoid me.”
He seemed a little proud of this achievement.
“You should apologize to her,” Patrick said. “I wouldn’t be able to stay working here if someone hated me so much they’d go out in the snow and ice just to not run into me.”
“I didn’t do anything!” objected David. “She only hooked up with me in the first place because she thought we were still filthy rich, and now she works in some boss’s office as a personal assistant and spends all her time arranging parties and shit.”
Patrick grinned. “Oh, I see. You’re jealous of the fancy parties.”
David just turned and left back toward the main building. “Such character assassination will not be tolerated!” he threw back over his shoulder.
“Love you!” called Patrick.
“I love you more,” grumbled David from around the next corner.
It was a sunny, breezy day in June, and the barns were bustling with the arrival of the next generation of reindeer. The soft bawling of the calves and the indignant grunts of the females in labor were hard to miss, even outside the barn doors.
Just like every year, David was disgusted at the whole concept of reproduction, but Patrick and Alexis were fascinated, and they never missed an opportunity to visit the small pasture reserved for the nursing mothers, especially when Ted was there working.
“Patrick, look!”
“Oh! Alexis, the one with the white spot on her head just fell over again!”
“Patrick, do not look right now, you will die!”
“Alexis! The one with the ears!”
“You guys obviously reindeer-ly love the spring,” came a voice from behind them.
Alexis playfully slapped Ted on the arm. “The puns are not getting better, you!” But she smiled anyway.
They had broken up for the last time the year before, but had quickly gotten over it and had become good friends. At least, Alexis had. Ted lived his life with his heart on his sleeve, and Patrick had spent more than one evening with him over a tearful eggnog, but things were better now.
“Do you want to have a peek inside?” the vet asked. “I need to check on Zibia.”
Zibia was Alexis’s favorite reindeer, and she’d already snuck in to see the new calf that had been born the night before. Alexis twirled her hair around her finger, acting all innocent, but was unable to stay cool about it. “I already saw it! It’s adorable, it has little white spots just on one side—"
“Lex, you have got to stop sneaking in. It isn’t safe for the really new babies to be exposed to people germs before they’ve had a chance to at least get a couple good feedings in.”
Alexis looked properly abashed. “I’m sorry, I just couldn’t resist. You guys should put a window here, or—ooh! Teddy!—a webcam!” she yelped. “If I could watch them any time, that would be amazing.” She grabbed Ted’s arm, as if to squeeze her idea right into his skin.
Patrick laughed. “And half the elves in North Pole would get nothing done between April and July.”
Alexis scoffed. “Maybe you can’t do two things at the same time, but that’s not my fault.”
Ted took Alexis’s hand off his arm and gave it a smooch to placate her. “We’ll think about a window. For now, maybe head back inside? These guys all need a checkup and some shots. I’ll let you know how Zibia is. Okay?”
“Okay.” She booped Ted on the nose, pirouetted neatly despite the mud, and headed for the doors into the nearest building. She knew the tunnels like the back of her hand—they were nothing compared with sneaking out of a major consulate—and had a dozen options for a route back to marketing.
“You okay, man?” asked Patrick. It had been a while since he’d seen Ted and Alexis interact, and their vibe seemed a little weird. Alexis would never hurt him on purpose, but sometimes she didn’t seem to know how important she still was to him.
“I’m awesome,” came the answer. “I’m seeing someone great, I just set a PR on my run this morning, it’s all good. I’m sleigh-ing it.”
With anyone else, Patrick might have worried that this was too enthusiastic, but with Ted it was probably just what it sounded like. “Glad to hear it. Bring her around next time David insists we host a party, okay?”
“Of course! Can’t wait for her to meet Olive the other reindeer!”
Patrick groaned good-naturedly, clapped Ted on the back, blew a kiss to the calf with the bad sense of balance, and went reluctantly back to his office.
It was a chilly day in September, and David was fully into the busiest part of his year, when designs were done and the months-long process of revision, iteration, and perfection was under way.
“What?” he yelled into his phone. “Ronnie, I swear the spec sheet says sixty millimeters, not sixty centimeters! What kind of fuc—okay, hold on, let me take a breath, maybe we can … you already have what idea?”
He listened to the person on the other end for a minute or so. “That … that might actually be really cool. Can you get with the outdoor … yes. Oh, right, that would probably be dangerous or whatever … Yeah, big surprise, I don’t want to hear those details. Call me back after? Yep. Bye.”
He hung up the phone and looked around the office. No one else was there, it would be hours before Patrick was ready to go home, and even Alexis was busy today. There was no one to complain to.
So he complained silently to himself, which was very unsatisfying, and went back to assigning colors to the different pieces of the toy they were working on.
The phone rang again a few minutes later.
“Ronnie? Good news, please give me good news. What? No, I know I overreacted. I’m sorry. We can spin it like we did it on purpose. Right. Anything else go wrong today?” He listened a bit, then laughed a bit louder than might have been appropriate. “I will not pass along that message to the man I love, thank you very much. Okay, talk to you tomorrow.”
He hung up the phone, dropped his arms to his sides, and gently faceplanted onto his desk and stayed there.
When Patrick came in, five minutes or possibly five hours later, that was what he found: his beautiful fiancé sound asleep on his desk, drooling a little bit onto a printout of a tower of irregularly shaped building blocks labeled with color and material codes.
He rubbed David’s back to wake him up.
“Baaabe, it’s time to go hoooooome,” he sang softly.
The only reply at first was a sort of mrrf-ing sound, but soon David sat up and looked at Patrick like a man defeated by life. A man defeated by life, with a paper clip embedded in the skin of his cheek.
Patrick plucked it off and thoroughly kissed the spot where it’d been. “Rough day, then?”
“They made the bamboozle blocks literally ten times larger than they were supposed to be. They made sixteen million of them, Patrick. Enough for every kid turning five between July and November in all of Regions B and J.”
It was difficult, but a laugh was stifled. “What on earth are you going to do?”
“It was an emergency for sure, but I think we still have time to manufacture the small ones. And Ronnie is checking with production to see if we can coat the huge ones with something to make them safe outdoor toys, I guess? With no bamboo getting all splintery in the rain? I don’t know, she handles stuff like that. I don’t like dirt.”
Patrick knew this. “I know this. It’s good you have her, then.”
“It is. She still does not like you, by the way.” David blinked. “Wait. Did I have a metal paper clip stuck on my face? Oh no no no, that is an emergency. Where’s a mirror? We have to do vitamin E masks when we get home.”
It was a shitty day in early December, and nothing was going right. A person eavesdropping in the workshop was likely to hear words not usually associated with the magic of the Christmas season, or with toys, children, and general overall joy.
In design, the eavesdropper would learn that the fucking bamboozle blocks for outdoors were fine, but on the regular-size ones the colors had come out all wrong and they’d had to be relabeled as “bamboo-tiful” blocks because they were all shades of pink, which was the kind of stupid gendered toy that made David absolutely fucking crazy.
Meanwhile, if they were to pass through veterinary, a listener would overhear that Zibia the reindeer was sick. They’d hear Ted mention a fear of brucellosis, which was a disease that might mean she couldn’t have any more calves, or might actually die or have to be put down to protect the rest of the herd. For now, she was in isolation while tests were run, and Alexis was on the edge of heartbreak, actual heartbreak, you don’t even understand.
A particularly bold or overcurious snoop who dared to sneak through design into finance would overhear a pleasant but furious voice complain about how there had been a blight in foliose lichen in Lapland, in northern Finland, and Patrick’s goddamn feed estimates from August were completely fucked. He was working ten or eleven hours a day, and the chances of having enough fuel on hand for the big night were estimated at about eighty-nine percent, which was basically the same fucking thing as zero percent.
Stevie had come home for Christmas, for the first time in absolute yonks, and yonks was a word she’d learned while opening the first Rosebud motel in Region E, which was southern England and Wales. Someone listening in on Stevie’s phone would hear her bemoaning how fucking expensive what she wanted to buy had gotten while she was away, and all just because her regular guy had finally graduated high school and joined the fucking army and gone to fucking Kentucky, all just to piss her off. It was a goddamn nightmare.
Still, some bright spots shone through the winter darkness, perhaps even brighter than the two hours of wan sunlight around the middle of the day.
A wiretap on Ray’s phone line would catch him talking to a friend, celebrating the success of his new side gig in closet organization. He was especially popular with older ladies looking for a pretty, old-fashioned, yet efficient “Mrs. Claus effect” for their storage spaces.
Ted, along with his girlfriend—who, it turned out, was Albany, the elf with the last-season designer shoes who’d come up with the idea for the molecular gastronomy kit for kids—would give an eavesdropper plenty to hear, but that eavesdropper would have been especially rude, because nothing going on with them was anyone else’s business at all.
One town over from headquarters, at a desk in the window of The One Ring, Elfdale’s only jewelry store, co-owner Sarah Bueller would be overheard talking to herself. She was rehashing a conversation with her friend, a fellow math nerd who’d come to her store for a unique set of engagement rings a year ago. She'd had to come clean to him soon after about how she knew full well where he worked—she had her own connections with the company and knew quite a bit about it. Every so often Patrick would tell her something about how things were run over there, and she was always fishing for tips from the finance department that she could put to use. But lately, he seemed to want to talk more about her personal life, which was mostly nonexistent.
In the back room of The One Ring, a metalsmith named Richard Cox was also talking softly to himself, over some delicate but well-practiced filigree work that didn’t take all his attention. As he turned a tiny file around a tiny rose, someone who snuck in would hear the soft rasp of the tool against the gold and—if they really listened—his deepest secret, one he’d entrusted to only one friend, a fellow artist. Richard wasn’t sure why David had been the one he’d confided in, but something about their common experiences and David’s own engagement made him feel like sharing that he was—and always had been—in love with his business partner.
But that’s another story.