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Stede is yanked unceremoniously to consciousness by the sound of children screaming.
Given a moment's groggy consideration, he concludes that it's good screaming, not bad screaming, and he lets his head fall back to the pillow again.
The exhaustion is deep in his bones. He hasn't had to shoulder the full weight of Christmas preparation in several years, but with Ed away for work all week, Stede has needed to try to fill Ed’s very large boots as Cool Dad in addition to his own less interesting but (he tells himself frequently) equally important shoes of No-Fun Dad. Dad who makes you go to bed on time, and drags you to the dentist. Dad who has to ensure that you actually eat a vegetable from time to time, and who—worst of all—sometimes turns off the Switch and makes you play outside because, as his well-meaning childhood nanny had often told him, “being bored is good for you.” Back when he and Mary had still been together, he’d gotten to be the fun one, but when they had separated she'd made it clear that he needed to actually parent rather than just play pirates, so he’d done his best to step up.
The door to the bedroom slams back, and Louis lands on him with what would, had he landed several inches to the right, been a testicle-crushing thump. Alma follows, all but vibrating between the Christmas morning enthusiasm of a child and the world-weary cynicism of a preteen.
“They’re gone, Dad!” Louis says, eyes sparkling and hair still tousled from sleep.
“What are we talking about?” Stede asks, trying to shake the haze from his sleep-clouded brain.
“The cookies, duh,” Alma says.
The cookies.
Shit.
Stede's eyes snapped open. He’d done everything else last night—leaving the presents under the tree, filling the stockings, pressing part of a boot print into the ash left in the fireplace—but eating the cookies was always Ed’s job, given how much more of a sweet tooth he had than Stede. But because of that sweet tooth, leaving cookies out for Santa had become a much-revered tradition over these last few years, and now the illusion would be—
Wait.
“They’re… gone?” Stede repeats tentatively.
Louis nods enthusiastically.
“Are you… quite sure?”
Louis nods again, the enthusiasm now tinged with confusion.
“Why wouldn’t they be gone?” Alma asks, eyes narrowed with suspicion
“I—um, well, you see…”
He’s floundering, not an idea in his head, when the next door neighbors pull into their driveway. Perfect.
“You see, I heard from Ms. Read in the carpool line that they were going to set out the most beautiful cookie spread you’ve ever seen. Gingerbread and chocolate chip and shortbread, anything you like! So, I just assumed that once Santa had his fill next door, he might be tired? Of cookies?”
Both kids stare, their expressions unreadable. Yeah, he’s not buying it either.
“But Ed says eating the cookies is Santa’s favourite part.” Louis’s face wrinkles. “He wouldn’t skip his favourite part.”
“Quite right!” Stede says quickly, shimmying his way between his children and out of bed to get his slippers. “Makes perfect sense when you put it like that. Let’s go down and take a look, shall we?”
He heads for the stairs, straightening his wrinkled pyjama shirt as he does so, as if that might protect him from whoever or whatever absconded with Santa’s cookies. Because he’s positive that they put them out, is the thing. He’d helped Louis and Alma make them, sealed them away in a container to remove temptation, then watched the children lay them out on the same plate they always use.
Unless he’d dumped the lot of them somewhere? He’d certainly considered it when making his Christmas Eve plans; that would be easier than having to eat the cookies himself. He had abandoned the idea when he’d realized he would have to either hide or throw out an entire plate’s worth of cookies that his own children had made, which seemed like a monstrous thing to do even for the sake of a Christmas tradition, but maybe in his haze of pre-Christmas exhaustion…
Stede gets to the living room, and sure enough, the plate is sitting on the edge of the hearth, right where he remembers leaving it. It is, as Louis and Alma have told him, utterly devoid of cookies, but there are enough crumbs remaining to render his current working theory invalid.
They definitely put out a plate of cookies, then. And there is definitely a plate with no cookies now. And somehow, in between those two points in time, the cookies… disappeared.
“Daaad?” Alma asks tentatively, overly bright and pleasant. He's been quiet for too long and stared too intently, and now she's treating him like Old Dad who lives in a nursing home and has wandered off and gotten lost. “Whatcha doing?”
“Just… taking in the scene,” he replies, doing his best to sound relaxed and unbothered, as if he isn’t wracking his brain trying to figure out how a plate of ornately decorated sugar cookies just vanishes into thin air. “You know, the tree. The stockings. The presents.” The missing desserts.
Louis, who can always be trusted to keep the main thing the main thing, shouts, “Oh yeah! Presents!” as if this is his very first Christmas morning ever, and he’s only just realized that there are, in fact, gifts beneath the tree. “Can we start with the stockings now, Dad?”
Stede gives him a small nod to send him on his way, then lets his attention wander back to the mystery still at hand. Maybe he sleep-ate the cookies? Is that something people can do? He’s heard about all sorts of unlikely things people do while asleep, why not eat cookies? It’s certainly possible.
Possible, but unlikely, he decides. He has been known to be quite an “active sleeper,” or so Mary had told him (in much less polite language), but surely someone would have noticed if he was getting up to wander around the house in the middle of the night. Not to mention that the stairs down to the living room are a little treacherous at the best of times, and he can’t imagine he’d do a particularly good job of navigating them while unconscious.
That leaves one option, then: Someone (or something) else ate Santa’s cookies.
Stede goes out into the hallway and checks the front door. Still locked, no signs of tampering. He opens it, peering suspiciously out onto the snow-covered porch. What he’s looking for, he’s not sure. But whatever it is, he doesn’t find it. Shutting the front door, he walks briskly through the house and checks the back door: also secure.
Maybe the windows? Surely none of them are large enough for a fully grown adult to climb through—not without breaking or removing some of the glass, at least—but a particularly small and determined child might be able to do it.
Or, for that matter, the local wildlife could be involved. He’s heard the neighbours complain enough about the squirrels getting into the bird feeder and the raccoons in the recycling bins. Perhaps they weren’t satisfied with simply depriving the birds of their daily bread, or strewing empty food wrappers across the driveway. Perhaps the animals have coordinated their efforts to wage a full-on assault on Christmas.
(Why would they do that? He’s not sure. Why would they pick his house in particular? Also unknown. Possibly homophobia; based on what Lucius says almost anything unpleasant or inconvenient under the sun was liable to be the result of homophobia.)
He heads back towards the front of the house again, checking the windows for any sign of entry, but he finds nothing at all out of the ordinary. All the windows are shut, the screens fully intact. He’s heard raccoons are clever, and even that they’ve sometimes been known to use tools, but he thinks that the screwdriver (and other tools? Maybe? He’s not the handy one around this house) required to not just remove the screens and open the windows but also to close up again behind themselves might be a little sophisticated, even for them.
So, no intrusion from outside, then. That means that the assault must have come from within.
As far as he knows, the house has no unknown animal occupants, either of the domestic or feral variety. On the other hand, he’s occasionally seen mice out and about on people’s lawns and in their gardens, so maybe some of them have made their way inside. The raised stone hearth where they generally leave the cookie plate is fairly close to the ground, though he would’ve thought a little high up for mice to get to. Perhaps if they worked together, though…? He’s heard of what they call a “rat king”; groups of rats with their tails all tangled together, moving and working as one. The stuff of fairy tale nightmares, that. Maybe he’s got a mouse king in his house. He’s struck with the mental image of a tumbleweed of mice rolling through the living room and across the brick of the hearth, absorbing his children’s delicious cookies into their squirming, squeaking mass.
Stede shudders. It simply doesn’t bear thinking about. Except, if there’s some kind of mouse king running amuck in his house and ruining Christmas, he’s got to think about it, hasn’t he? He hurries into the living room, getting down on his hands and knees by the fireplace. He looks closely at the ash where he left “Santa’s” bootprint, squinting to see if there are any tiny rodent footprints alongside the boot.
Nothing.
But maybe if they climbed straight up the bricks? He’ll have to check the room for holes. He turns around, eyes darting into the dark corners of the room, looking for any point of entry—
—when he sees Alma and Louis standing uncertainly by the tree, the treats and trinkets from their Christmas stockings on the floor around them, watching him. Alma looks confused and a little concerned; Louis looks almost scared.
Stede stops dead in his tracks, realizing what he must look like to them; some kind of pyjama-clad madman prowling the inner perimeter of the house, rattling the windows and pawing around in the soot by the fire, looking for all the world like some kind of animal attempting to escape its cage.
“Well, now. That’s done! All secure in Sector Seven!” he chirps, bright and cheery and trying his best to chase away the fear beginning to dawn on their faces. “What say we move on to some holiday cheer, hmm? Ready for prezzies?”
“Yes!” Louis shouts, with an enthusiastic fist in the air.
Alma’s gotten rather good at hiding her excitement, she keeps it close to her chest and tucked under a thin veneer of cool these days. But even she has trouble suppressing the smile that sneaks onto her face. “I mean, sure. I guess.”
Stede watches Louis and Alma carefully inspect the presents waiting for them under the tree. Alma has lined everything with her name up in a row, and appears to be systematically assessing them against some kind of unknowable internal checklist. Louis, on the other hand, immediately pulls out three gifts, all different sizes and shapes, and is waffling between them. As far as Stede can tell, his only criteria seems to be vibes, but Stede personally feels like that’s a perfectly reasonable way to make a choice.
And then they’re on the move, Louis is shaking a small box next to his ear (Legos, definitely Legos), and Alma pulls the first box she’d lined up for opening into her lap and stares at it in anticipation. They’re moments from tearing the wrapping off, starting the whirlwind that will be over far too soon for a months-long build up, and they’ll be that much closer to turning the page on yet another Christmas. It’s bittersweet. Stede loves to see their enthusiasm and knows he’s only got another year or so left of this kind of magic permeating everything they do, so he’s tried to savour it.
Suddenly, Louis stops his shaking and his eyes snap open. There’s a look of worry on his face.
“What is it, buddy?” Stede asks.
“Ed’s not here.”
It catches Stede off guard—his heart lodges in his throat and he swallows it down with an near-audible gulp—because the road to Louis and Ed becoming inseparable best friends who build cardboard swords for duels and blanket fort hideouts for bandits hasn’t been a smooth one. It had taken a lot of time, the drawing out of a skittish cat that would spook whenever the movie was wrong or the popcorn too salty or the hot chocolate loaded with soggy marshmallows that made Louis gag. Ed had been quietly persistent. Louis had been loudly resistant…until he wasn’t. Until Ed wore him down and proved that he wasn’t going anywhere, and Stede found the two of them snuggled on the couch while the credits rolled on KPop Demon Hunters for the fifteenth time.
“We can’t open them if Ed’s not here, Dad.”
Alma stops then, places both hands in her lap and closes her eyes. “He’s right. We should definitely wait.”
“Oh, my darlings…” Stede pauses as he feels his heart grow three sizes in his chest.. “I wish Ed were here too, but he won’t be back until tomorrow afternoon. That’s an awfully long time to wait. He’ll understand.”
“We can wait! Can’t we, Alma?” Louis exclaims, turning to his sister. But he turns to the toy in his hands and his face falls. “Or maybe we can open just a few things and wait for Ed for the rest?”
“Yeah, that,” Alma says. “Let’s open the ones from Santa and leave the ones from you guys.”
“If that’s what you two want to do…”
“It is!” shouts Louis, and it’s settled.
He feels himself smile as he watches the two of them deliberate over their decisions, silently marveling at the way these two—who he sometimes has to remind himself aren’t still infants—are growing up to be such unique and distinct people. They have their own habits and personalities, and are well on their way to being fully formed, whole entire people with their own tastes.
Speaking of tastes, though…
He briefly considers that maybe one of the children actually ate the cookies, and are just carrying out some kind of sophisticated ruse to keep from getting into trouble, but he abandons the idea immediately. Not only are neither of his children particularly good liars, but it feels profoundly uncharitable to suspect them of such a crime.
On the other hand, if it wasn’t so much a crime as an experiment… Alma has been taking a great interest in her science classes this year, to both Stede and Mary’s bemusement. She’d also had a bit of a run-in with Abigail Badminton in that science class—the little brat had started loudly proclaiming that Santa wasn’t real while everyone else was working on a project. The teacher had done nothing. The little Grinchy terrorist wouldn’t listen to reason. So Alma had taken matters into her own hands and punched her right in the nose. It makes Stede smile to think of it, even now, because she’d made him the kind of proud that had resulted in him being unwilling to punish her. She was passionate about justice, that’s all, and in his mind, that didn’t deserve consequences.
It makes Stede wonder—if Alma’s willing to start a fist fight over the question of Santa, maybe she does still believe, on some level? And maybe, just maybe, she’d gotten into the cookies as a way to test Stede’s resolve on the whole Santa Issue.
He watches her out of the corner of his eye, she’s picking at the tape on the edge of her first package while Louis tears into his third. She’s so meticulous, all but folds the wrapping paper back on itself in an effort to save it after she finally pulls it free from the hot pink Instax instant camera Ed had picked out for her himself.
She wouldn’t have…would she?
Only one way to find out. The kid’s never had a poker face and can’t hide a lie. So bring on The Inquisition.
“Alma?”
“Mmhm?”
“What do you think happened to the cookies?”
There’s a moment of hesitation, but not the blushing, face-hiding shame of a kid caught with their hand in the literal and metaphorical cookie jar. She's thinking, chin tilted up and a serious wrinkle between her eyes that makes her look like Stede does when he's well and truly confounded.
“Aliens,” she says, just like that, as if it's a perfectly normal response. And she doesn't give Stede time for a follow up, she's already back in the pile for another package.
Okay, so Alma isn’t responsible. On one level, Stede is relieved; he’d hate to think one of his own offspring was conspiring against him, even in the spirit of scientific inquiry. On the other hand, he’s not sure what that means for the mystery of the cookie theft, because he’s pretty certain that aliens aren’t the answer either.
He’s ruled out the members of his own family, and there’s no sign of any kind of pests or vermin, so that eliminates the possibility of an attack from within. He’s checked all the doors and windows, and as far as he can tell, there’s no sign of external intruders, either human or animal.
So where does that leave him?
The thing is, Stede went through a bit (okay, a lot) of a Sherlock Holmes phase in his youth. He reread the books over and over again, and even took to playing detective around the house complete with a moth-eaten deerstalker hat he’d found in a closet at his family’s hunting lodge. So deep down in his soul, he knows the next logical conclusion.
As the great detective himself once said, “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” And Stede’s done his eliminating, which means that the only remaining truth…
…Is that Santa is real.
An unknowable, immortal entity descended down Stede’s chimney last night (in spite of the bird netting they had installed over the top several years ago, the extreme narrowness of the flue, and the fact that they’d left the coals smouldering in the grate), eaten all of the cookies he and the children had left out, and… then what?
He looks over to where the children are dutifully only opening their gifts from “Santa,” leaving the ones from him and Ed. The presents certainly look like the ones they had set aside as gifts from the man in red.
So if Santa is real, and he really did come eat their cookies in the night… then what, pray tell, did Santa leave them in return? The gifts under the tree with his name on them are from Ed and Stede, after all.
Maybe Stede is moving on a little fast from the earth shattering revelation that this beloved figure of childhood mythology is actually real, but frankly, he’s a little offended by the lack of manners from the jolly old man. If he’s going to get the payment for the job—both in cookies and in childhood joy and gratitude—then he should at least be delivering something.
Stede feels his brow furrow, irritation building the more he thinks about the situation. Honestly, the nerve of some—well, not people, he supposes, but still. He knows things are hard for gig economy workers out there, and he tries to be understanding when a rideshare cancels on him or his takeout order winds up at the neighbour’s house, but this is simply beyond the pale.
He lets out an indignant huff of annoyance, and the sound doesn’t escape Alma’s attention. She looks up from her packages with that same little forehead wrinkle, only now it’s turned on him.
“All good, Dad?”
He could lie. He probably should, he doesn’t need to drag his children into his beef with Jolly Ol’ Saint Nicholas. But he’s not in the habit of telling falsehoods to his progeny and he doesn’t want to start with this one. Besides, the same qualities that make Alma a terrible liar also make her the human equivalent of a lie detector. He won’t be able to pull anything over on her now that she’s onto him—and honestly, he doesn’t want to.
But where to begin? Hey, kids, we thought we were lying to you about Santa for years, but it turns out we weren’t! Isn’t that great? That doesn’t seem productive. Gather ‘round, you lot, your dear old dad has made quite the discovery today!
There’s not a clever way to break the news to them, so he’s just going to have to tell it to them straight. No funny business.
“Alma, honey,” he begins. “I think we need to have a little talk…”
She rolls her eyes. “God, not in front of Lou, Dad. Mom’s already given me the basics anyway, and—”
The front door swings open, thudding heavily into the coats hanging on the wall behind it, and sending a gust of cold air rushing into the house.
Alma lets out a squeak of surprise (and if Stede does too, that’s no one’s business but his own) pulling back to put Stede between herself and the door. Stede’s imagination kicks into high gear, his hypervigilance since he woke up screaming at him to throw something at the intruder, take his children, and ru—
“Ed!” Louis’s delighted shout cuts through Stede’s racing thoughts like a hot knife through butter. Because sure enough, Louis is running across the living room, and colliding like a cannonball with the snow-dusted knees of…
Ed.
“Hey, guys,” Ed says, a broad grin across his face as he tries to hold the several paper bags in his hands high enough to avoid bonking Louis in the face with any of them. “Didja miss me?”
“Duh,” Alma says, her limited vocabulary doing very little to hide the fact that she’s smiling from ear to ear, has rushed into the hallway to deliver Ed a signature punch to the arm, and throw her arms around his neck.
“You’re back! You’re back!” Louis shouts as he grabs Ed around the waist, still jumping up and down. “Now we can open all of our presents!”
“Stede?” Ed says, and he’s still smiling, laughter still in his voice, but Stede can tell that his silence has been noticed.
“Of course I missed you,” he says, going over to take the bags, freeing Ed’s hands up to take off his boots and coat. He doesn’t complain when Ed uses said hands to cradle his cheek and lean in to give him a kiss that’s just long enough for Alma to start making barfing noises and Louis to start demanding to know what Ed has brought them for breakfast.
“Only the best for you guys,” Ed says, and Stede sees that the bags have come from The Best Revenge is Brekkie, a slightly pricey family favourite that they generally save for special occasions.
Ed tells the kids to meet them at the table, and goes into the kitchen to get plates and cutlery. Stede follows behind, putting the Best Revenge bags down on the counter.
“You’re back early,” he says. Then, because he realizes that his words might be somewhat lacking in enthusiasm, he adds: “Not that I’m not thrilled to see you, of course! Just surprised.” Frankly, he’s a little relieved that he’s got another adult to share his Santa-related revelations with.
Though…
Stede is starting to get that cold prickling down his spine that tends to directly precede the realization of his most embarrassing mistakes. He’d been so sure, mere moments ago, that his house had been the site of history’s most inconsiderate and irritating miracle. Now, though?
Ed, oblivious to Stede’s inner turmoil, has been answering his questions for approximately thirty seconds now. “…so when my lecture on the final day got cancelled, the organizers were able to get me on a red-eye flight home last night. I got in at about 6:00 am, but I didn’t want to wake you up by coming to bed, so I just hung out in the living room for a while.”
The prickling is getting sharper now, as a thought that Stede hadn’t noticed before begins clamouring ever louder for his attention.
“Then I realized that breakfast might be nice,” Ed continues, but Stede isn’t listening anymore. The picture is movie-clear in his mind’s eye: Ed coming into the living room, coals still barely smouldering behind the grate and casting a dim, warm light. Ed sitting down on the couch, curling up in his favourite corner, and pulling out his phone.
Ed getting hungry after a long flight, looking around the room, and noticing something that Stede has forgotten…
As a hot flush of embarrassment rushes over Stede, he realizes that Ed has asked him a question.
“Sorry?”
“I said, what have you lot been up to this morning? Everything okay, babe? You seem…” Ed pauses, as if at a loss for words, and Stede can’t entirely blame him. He also feels whatever word fits in that empty space.
“Oh, not much,” Stede replies. Kids got started on the presents from Santa. They wanted to wait for you for the others, though.”
He watches the smile spread across Ed’s face, can tell that his heart is melting the way Stede’s had when Louis had insisted on waiting, and decides that maybe the cookies aren’t the point. Maybe it doesn’t matter who ate them. Maybe (probably) Santa isn’t real, and Ed just decided to do Stede a little favour, and Stede let his imagination shoot him out of a cannon and into the upper atmosphere.
What matters right now is that he’s here at home, surrounded by the people he loves most. There’s brunch on the counter, children calling to them from the table, and a mountain of presents left under the tree.
And for what it’s worth, there’s still a whole tin of cookies left in the pantry.