Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Central Park lies blanketed in snow beyond the office’s northern windows. With the lingering soft gray clouds beyond the city’s skyline, it creates a desaturated canvas for the Christmas decorations. The garlands strung from the hooks over the windows are already stark against the muted backdrop, even without further adornment.

Already, despite the open floor plan, the office smells like pine trees. Despite instructions to clear off desks in the main space, there’d been some clutter left over, so among the piles of garlands and wreaths and potted poinsettias, there’s the odd forgotten gift bag or laptop or leather portfolio or tupperware. Ribbons and lights are draped over dress forms to prevent tangling. Against one of the central walls lean a row of decorative wooden birch logs. Nearby there’s a giant crate of deer antlers and animal skulls, and somewhere in the chaos there’s a box of fake candles, though Sevika can’t be bothered to figure out where exactly right now.

And of course Silco isn’t here to help put any of it where it needs to go.

She can’t even be pissed at him, which makes it all the more annoying, because she’d love to be able to bitch him out when he gets back. But it’s not his fault that the custody agreement worked out that he gets Jinx for Christmas on the condition that he drives six hours each way to get her from fucking North Pole, New Hampshire.

Personally she’d like to suggest to Vander that he get his sorry ass to the parking lot of the Lowe’s in Hudson, Massachusetts to meet Silco halfway, or drive all the way down here to drop Jinx off personally. He hadn’t had any problem driving six hours when he moved Silco’s kid across state lines while Silco was at work.

But Silco’s custody lawyer has advised that Sevika shouldn't contact Vander. And especially not in writing, or aloud if Vander might be in a single party consent state. Like New York.

All in all she's in a pretty piss poor mood about the whole process, but by the time lights start coming on across the city she's gotten all the garlands up and most of the string lights, which is the bulk of the thing. Making the tables pretty and adding wreaths and ornaments and sprigs of holly will at least let her walk around instead of climbing up and down a stepladder over and over.

Her work cell rings, and it’s the night before the company holiday party and her hand and her prosthetic are covered in pine sap and the ringtone isn’t the Jaws theme, so she almost doesn’t answer it. But with her luck it’ll be the caterer saying there’s a problem with the pig or something. So she scrubs at her hand with an alcohol wipe and then pulls her phone out of her jacket pocket.

The area code is 603. New Hampshire. Sevika is half hoping it's Vander, somehow, for some reason. She answers it the way she always answers unknown calls: “House of Zaun – you probably shouldn’t have this number.”

She hears the sound of Silco sighing in relief and knows it's him before he even says, “Sevika.”

“Silco,” she replies, trying to remember if she has Vander’s number saved to her work cell. Probably? Maybe? If not, then this could feasibly be Vander’s phone Silco is calling from, but that somehow raises almost as many questions as who else in New Hampshire Silco would borrow a phone from? Borrowing a phone means both admitting to someone that he has no way to call for help and looking sufficiently pathetic for someone to hand him a thousand-dollar supercomputer with all their personal and financial information on it so he can call for help.

“You’ll have to give the staff the good news,” Silco says, voice dry. He sounds almost normal. “Jinx and I won’t be back in time for the holiday party.”

Sevika straightens up. “Did Vander—”

She doesn't even know what the rest of the question is going to be, but Silco cuts her off before she can get too far down any worst case scenarios.

“No,” he says firmly. “The snow hit faster than the weather report called for. Apparently this charming little town closes down at the first sign of a flurry,” he adds, not bothering to hide the seething rage in his voice.

Sevika grunts, relaxing a little. She’d rather Silco get stuck – even in a shithole town with Vander – than try to drive his compact sedan through weather so fucked even experienced snow drivers are closing roads. But she's not gonna tell him that.

“How long are you stuck for?” She asks. That's really the determining factor on his sanity. That, and if there’s anywhere to stay except Vander’s couch.

“There should be a gap between tonight’s storm and the Christmas Eve storm,” Silco says. “I’m almost tempted to see if I can charter a helicopter just to get one over on this smug Jack Twist wannabe.”

Sevika sets aside the helicopter thing – zero chance a man who's too anxious to ride the Coney Island Cyclone is gonna ask her to find him a helicopter – and tries to figure out what the fuck is going on. He’s spitting mad and fantasizing about escaping town to shove something in someone’s face, but that’s not the tone he uses for Vander – anymore – and he doesn’t know anyone else in town except Benzo. If she knew what the fuck a Jack Twist wannabe was maybe she could piece together what crawled up his ass and died.

“Who.”

Silco huffs at her. She decides not to count it against him this time because he did have to look at Vander’s stupid face today. “Jake Gyllenhaal’s character in Brokeback Mountain,” he explains sulkily.

Sevika can vaguely picture Gyllenhaal and she remembers that being a movie about gay cowboys. Okay. Silco has run into a cowboy he thinks is hot and, in typical Silco fashion, made a new enemy about it.

“Never seen it,” she says, rather than skip ahead to asking what the handsome cowboy did.

“Yes, well, I recognize that it doesn’t have enough of Catherine Deneuve circa 1983 for your tastes, but—” He starts, and then cuts himself off. “That's not the point.”

“Do you want a helicopter?” Sevika asks, climbing back up the ladder to finish hanging the light strand while she waits for Silco to start making sense.

“No,” he says immediately. “I don’t want Jinx and I to die in a fiery helicopter crash in the White Mountains.”

Sevika nods even though he can't see her. “You gonna reconcile with Vander?” She asks. Mostly to bait him into giving new information by denying it, but also because on the off chance that this is Vander’s phone, she needs to find someone with an all wheel drive and start heading to New Hampshire, storm or no storm.

“I’m going to find a new second in command,” he threatens.

Drama queen. She rolls her eyes with a snort. There’s no other second in commands for him and he knows it. But there’s no defensive guilt, so maybe he really isn’t calling from Vander’s phone. “Have fun chain smoking your way through a shitty podunk town’s entire stock of cigars.”

Now she just needs to figure out who he got a phone from, if not Vander. If he went to a church she’ll mock him forever.

“Unfortunately I’m staying in a local’s house,” he says. “I’d hate to be a bad guest.”

Sevika chews on that for a moment. So he’d not only asked for help getting a phone with a signal, but he’d found someone to offer him a place to stay. With Jinx? And he was going to sleep there?

“You’re staying with a local?” She repeats, when she realizes she’s been quiet too long. If she questions him now he'll just get more stressed.

“The smug little bastard’s mother,” Silco says smugly.

Apparently he's just not going to explain who he's talking about. She can read between the lines, anyway. Hot guy in small town. Pissed Silco off, but still pretty, and apparently non-threatening enough to only make Silco angry and not make him terrified. Especially since Jinx hasn’t interrupted the conversation even once, so he’s allowed the brat out of his sight. Unless he’s allowing Jinx to stay with Vander? But she doubts it, even if it means keeping her in a house with strangers. Better to stay up all night gripping a knife in case their host plans to hurt them than to be away from Jinx a single night more than necessary.

“Well,” Silco amends after a moment. “There’s not much ‘little’ about him. With a lobotomy or a shock collar he might make a decent model.”

Sevika wonders if Silco realizes he’s attracted to this guy. Probably not. Well. He doesn’t pay her for relationship advice.

“I’m not googling Jack Twist,” she informs him. Then, “I’ll tell everyone you can’t make it. Might make the party less shitty this year. Gonna cheat some of the accounts guys outta their Christmas bonuses at the poker table.”

Maybe they can make this a proper party for once. Not that they don't all drink and swear in front of the kid, but they have to minimize anything more interesting than that, and also keep the kid away from small appliances.

“As far as my lawyers are concerned, you never said that,” Silco deadpans. And, “Enjoy the party.”

“Enjoy pissing off your host’s son,” Sevika said. Then adds, “Don’t get punched. And if he really annoys you… fuck his mom.”

It's worked for her, but she’s not delusional enough to think it would work for Silco.

“Sevika, I am always impressed by how consistently you can give such terrible advice.”

If she were going to give him actual advice, she’d tell him to just fuck the guy before they leave. Stress relief, distraction, harmless fun, and with a little luck and some small town gossip, Vander will find out his ex hooked up with one of his hot neighbors. But giving Silco personal advice is sort of like offering sailing lessons to snakes in the Mojave desert. He’s missing some essentials. Like a personal life, or the ability to actually listen to advice.

“Don’t talk about your personal shit if you don’t want shitty personal advice,” she tells him.

Silco grumbles wordlessly and then she hears the dial tone.

Sevika snorts. “Dumbass,” she mutters.

She pulls up her email app and finds the contact group for everyone who RSVPed yes to the holiday party.

No more PG-13 bullshit.

#

Mel is just getting home from the latest function when her phone chirps with its email notification sound. It's set to only make a sound if an email is marked urgent. Today’s was the firm’s holiday brunch at Tavern on the Green with all the partners and junior attorneys and whichever terrified 2L interns had elected to stay in town rather than going home for the break. She’d managed to drag it out even further by walking around Central Park giving money to buskers playing Christmas music so that all her mother’s employees would spook and do the same, and while she feels a little bit better having minimized time in her apartment before she leaves for tonight’s staging of The Nutcracker (not to mention making sure all the buskers were well compensated for their time playing in frigid New York weather), she really should have worn better shoes.

She gets her phone out of her clutch and reads the email on her way to start a hot bath to soak her feet.

Mel’s blood runs cold. “—call Elora,” she orders her phone.

“Calling Elora,” the tinny computerized voice replies.

Elora answers immediately, even though it’s six days before Christmas and she has the week off, because she’s a saint. “Ms. Medarda,” she says. “What’s wrong?”

“When I said to RSVP yes to as many non-conflicting social events between Thanksgiving and New Year’s—” Mel starts, rummaging under her sink for epsom salts like they’ll save her from the looming social disaster. “—did you RSVP yes to the House of Zaun invitation?”

She finds a bag of epsom salts which purport to contain stress relieving aromatherapy oils. She wonders if she can sue for false advertising if they don’t relieve some stress.

“Oh,” Elora says. “Let me check my spreadsheet. Right, it’s tomorrow evening starting at 9pm – no end time listed – which gives you time after the Christmas Dinner with Governor Hoskel, so we had to say no to the 7pm staging of The Magic Flute at the Met and move that to—”

Mel dumps some epsom salts into the bath, watching it swirl under the flow of water from the tap, and then adds more. It’s not like the stress relief properties are real. She can’t overdose on the scent of ginger and ginseng. “Elora,” she says, cutting her assistant off before she can explain the entire spreadsheet.

“Yes?” Elora says.

“What did you plan for me to wear?”

“Oh, you have that red velvet Valentino gown, and I picked you up some earrings that look like daggers, there’s a single blood drop on the one side,” Elora says. “The theme is ‘Yuletide Feasts and the Wild Hunt’ apparently. If you go to your calendar you can find a link to a quick cultural guide to the underlying mythology that I typed up.”

Mel cuts off the tap.

She has already attended the UNICEF Giving Tuesday Gala, the Rockefeller Christmas Tree Lighting, three bar association cocktail hours, the Savoy Winter Charity Gala, the Annual Mercy Ball, the NYC Tourism Foundation Fundraising Gala, a staging of A Christmas Carol, a staging of The Magic Flute, and four different company holiday parties that probably didn’t expect the founding partner of the law firm they keep on retainer to actually RSVP yes – but she generally politely declines House of Zaun’s annual perfunctory invitation to all the other businesses in the same building.

In part because the things that occur at holiday parties shouldn’t occur in front of lawyers, but also because the rules she knows for event dress codes don’t apply to holiday parties at up and coming New York fashion houses where everyone will be well dressed at minimum and most people will be extremely beautiful. Silco is expressly working to design clothing for a new era, where people who claw their way up from poverty can dress themselves in something that isn’t just cast-off trends from the dominant social strata.

And Mel comes from that dominant social strata, so showing up in Valentino might send the precisely wrong message. Even if Silco himself isn’t there.

“Thank you,” she tells Elora, because she doesn't need Elora to stress about this on her much-needed holiday break. “I'll check the event in my calendar. I just got an email update for all attendees so it was fresh on my mind.”

“Oh? What update?”

“Evidently Silco and his young daughter will not be attending.”

“That might change the tenor of the event,” Elora observes, tone neutral.

A party full of people in a high-stress industry with a rate of substance abuse comparable to lawyers’ at a company that exclusively hires felons, plus all their professional contacts, including New York models.

Mel mentally makes a note to bring condoms, since Elora won’t voice it but they're both thinking it. “I have to get ready for the ballet, but thank you for your help.”

“I'll have my ringer on the entire holiday,” Elora assures her. “My father’s taken a sales call and my brother is responding to emails, no one can object.”

“You can object,” Mel reminds her.

“Not after you faked an emergency to get me away from Easter dinner with my aunts,” Elora mutters, voice pitched low. “I'll let you go get ready for the ballet. ready for the ballet. Remember to eat.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Mel says dryly.

When she picks up her phone to hang up the call, she sees that a new text has arrived. The notification looks infuriatingly benign, considering that it may as well be a venomous snake.

Mel takes a deep breath. You’ve prepped for this, she reminds herself.

She puts her phone on airplane mode, sets an alarm to tell her when she absolutely needs to start getting ready, and then sheds her clothes so she can settle on the edge of her bathtub and slip her aching feet into the water, lean back against the tiled wall, and close her eyes.