Work Text:
The Christmas holiday is – above all else – a time for showing off.
Quill Kipps, formerly of Fittes Agency, formerly something of an unrelenting showman, can’t help it, even as he quietly curses himself for having frankly unattainable expectations.
It’s not that he wants to be bent over a pie, carefully rounding out the handle of a rapier to decorate the crust. It’s that the little voice inside his head – the one that insists on perfection, on elevation, on excellence – just won’t stop until he’s done it.
It’s like the second round of ironing on a shirt, or taking the time to touch up his closely-shorn offensively red hair before he goes out.
On holidays above all days, the little things – the details -- matter.
“If it’s worth doing,” he can practically hear Marissa Fittes saying, grainily from a training video, posthumously drilling her ideals into young Fittes agents, “it’s worth doing right”
He trained too long with Fittes to ignore that voice. It buried too deep into his core, setting in alongside his bones. Rigid perfectionism.
So, he does his holiday right. Rapier-crust edging on the pie. Gifts wrapped with individualized flair, each chosen to be both thoughtful and something that the other person couldn’t have acquired on their own.
His house's decorations are simple, clean, perfect.
“Don’t be gaudy, Kipps - we’re Fittes, not Rottwell.” Though the voice that taught him that wasn’t Marissa at all. It was one of his earliest supervisors. Garman, or Germain, or something like that. They'd died so long ago, he can’t quite recall anymore. And really, he always has struggled a bit with names.
While the pies cool, he goes over the gifts once more, adding the last-minute tags, the ribbons and bows. The boxes don’t look like all that much, in the bottom of a two-handled Christmas-themed tote from Satchell’s. And they aren't, really.
A vintage tome for George. A particular, rare perfume for Holly. For Flo it was warm socks and a thick scarf. For Lucy, art supplies. Real ones – the kind that she’d itch to use and loath to waste. A perfect gift, really, and with an added bonus, one that would annoy Lockwood purely for its thoughtfulness.
Lockwood was the tricky one. Tony’s interests were on a whole narrow: visitors, fighting visitors, and – occasionally – committing minor crime. The small box wrapped for him was perhaps the riskiest choice of them all: a pair of cuff-links shaped like tiny elephants.
They weren’t perhaps exactly the ones Donald Lockwood had worn, once, visible in a handful of images secreted away in Portland Row. A close comparison hadn't been possible. But those had long since been lost. Stolen, perhaps, or misplaced while Lockwood’s sister still had presided over the household.
Sold, Kipps suspected, because the cost of their replacement – second-hand, at a vintage shop – had been no small thing. To a teenage girl, desperate to make ends meet, it would have been an impossible sum to ignore.
Kipps himself was almost uncomfortable with the cost, except that he’d seen the way Lockwood had looked, when Lucy had asked about the little elephants. And he’d remembered – because details, they mattered, and so did the children that made up Lockwood & Company, no matter how much he wished they didn’t.
When he’d happened upon the little glimmering elephants, looking for something else entirely, well, what else was he to do? He’d bought them, and then waited for a reason to bring them home to Lockwood, where they belonged.
When Kipps was happy with the wrapping, had cooled down and packed up the pies, carefully boxed up piles of Christmas cookies and packed the lot together in the tote, he gave his appearance one last look-over.
To his eyes – scrutinous as they came – he was if not handsome then at least well put together. His skin was pale, sure, but clear of acne or blemishes outside the freckles. The forest-colored Christmas sweater covered the worst of his scars, though the collection of them that escaped coverage were almost impossible to pick out against his skin. His red hair was short and tidy, his eye striking and green. Teeth, clean and unstained - though he could still see the crack if he looked closely from where he'd taken a rapier hilt to the face.
If he was small for a man, delicate even, at least he was small and delicate and clean. Tidy, even.
He looked serious, perhaps, with his military precision. Far more serious than a party required. And certainly Lockwood and Co wouldn’t appreciate any of his efforts. But their lack of notice didn’t stop Quill Kipps from shouldering the bag like a solider off to war, armed with stray elephants, and with one last longing look at the quiet of his small rooms, make his way home to Portland Row and the small, boisterous family he’d found there.