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Pixlriffs is ill. It’s not a shock and it’s not particularly a worry - this happens all the time at this time of year. Everybody picks up a sniffle or a persistent headache every once in a while, and Pix is no exception. It shouldn’t really be interfering with his work.
Only it is, and that’s the annoying part. He finds himself reading and rereading documents, trying to parse out the meaning of clauses that would usually slip smoothly into cognizance, but now they swim before his eyes instead. He begins lamenting, not for the first time, that he never got around to installing dimmer lights in his office. At least it’s easy enough to make the case to work from home, especially during exam week, where he can refer his students to his email inbox or to online office hours if they really need him. (He put an extra disclaimer clause in his auto-responder message, too, which he enabled in order to weed out some of the less necessary calls for communication.)
The more persistent problem, though, is arguably a problem of his own creation.
As a committed and proud aromantic, Pix has never particularly had the desire to settle down with a life partner and collect the prescribed 2.5 kids and white picket fence. Usually, this works extremely well for him - at least, it has for the last decade or so. He enjoys having the house to himself, being able to play whatever music he likes through the speaker without compromising, cook what he will and leave the dishes for later without annoying anyone with it.
Right now, Pix is dosing himself with Lemsip over the sink, feeling all the wrong temperatures all at once, and somewhat pathetically wishing he had somebody who was morally bound by in sickness and in health vows to make him chicken soup.
It’s nothing he can’t handle - it’s just annoying. Everything is about ten percent more difficult than usual. He plods through the necessary tasks of the day without complaint; allows himself some time to rot on the sofa in front of an episode of Traitors halfway between rest and having to ease the eternal torment of a stuffy nose; tries to return to the old inbox and make sure all of his affairs are in order before the true beginning of winter break.
He has an email from Oli, about half an hour ago.
OK so I was going to show up uninvited but then I realised that would be a bit rude so I’m asking for permission to come over can I come over?
Sent from my iPhone
Pix sighs, laughs, despite himself, and opens their texts instead.
Yes, you can come over LOL
great because i already stopped by aldi for supplies
Supplies? Now I’m worried…
fear not my boy you’re in good hands
Entirely unfounded accusations of boyhood aside, Pix awaits whatever Oli and the hallowed aisles of Aldi may have in store for him.
And what they have, it turns out maybe ten minutes later, is a healthy selection of soup cans and generic-brand medicines in a bag branded with the logo of a completely different shop. “Still alive, I see!” says Oli, a measure too cheery for the circumstances.
“Just about,” Pix manages to smile back. “Come in, then; let’s see the spread.”
Oli lines his haul up across the coffee table while Pix watches from the other side of the sofa, knees drawn into his chest to mediate any lingering body pains. (These things do tend to go hand in hand, don’t they?) “You just said ill on the automatic messagey thingy, so I wasn’t sure what to grab.”
“So you got one of everything? Your poor budget.”
“Worry not!” Oli flourishes the receipt at him from the bottom of the bag. “Return policies are my best friends! But, er. Also don’t open anything you don’t want.”
“And that includes the soup cans, too, does it?”
“No, no,” says Oli. “If you don’t want any of these, I’m having them.”
Pix laughs. It’s nice to fill the house with real-time enjoyment again. It’s been a good while since he invited friends over; free time has proven unfortunately hard to come by in this profession.
He settles on the option labelled chicken and vegetable broth, which comes with added rice for extra protein, and Oli sets himself to the stove once he’s figured out where Pix keeps pots and pans. (In the cupboard closest to the stove, of course.) “Festive in here,” Oli points out, without looking over. “You a big Christmas guy, then?”
“I do indulge a little,” Pix replies, picking up each medicine option one by one to read the labels. “Forgot to get a tree this year, though. I was thinking I should go on the weekend, but I wasn’t quite feeling up to it, and now we’re here.”
“We are indeed,” says Oli. “I don’t think it’s much of a loss. Aren’t real trees, like, mega expensive?”
“They can be! And there’s the hassle of lugging it home. I don’t think I could get a good one through the doors of the bus, you know.”
Oli chuckles. “And no car to strap it to the roof of, yeah. Better off with tinsel, I say.”
“I’d show you the lights, but I think they might give me a migraine.”
“Fair, yeah. Are you having anyone over?”
Ah. There’s the difficult question. The trouble with this house is that it was bought with his ill-timed inheritance, and being an only child with no living ancestors and no plans to settle for the nuclear family, Pix does not tend to have people to spend his Christmas with.
In Pix’s experience, this is fine - a majority of Christmas traditions can be done alone, or at least reworked to make them so. He has the present from his department’s Secret Santa sitting waiting by the fireplace, and there’s nothing stopping him from making and eating a roast on his own (in fact, that part is made even better by the amount of leftover chicken he can use to make sandwiches in the liminal week that follows). Walking through the nearest park in the few hours of daylight they have available, and entertaining himself with whatever books or games he might have bought himself to celebrate, are perfectly good ways to spend the day. You can even sing carols on your own if you’d like to.
The reason it’s a difficult question is that it’s extremely hard to explain all of this to anyone without them immediately launching into pity and pitching solutions. Pix does remember all the Christmases he spent with family fondly, of course - he just doesn’t feel the event becomes particularly lacking when played out alone.
Oli, though, for whatever reason, gives Pix the vibe that he might be more understanding. “No,” he admits cautiously, “I can’t really do family holidays any more. I don’t really mind, though.”
“Right,” says Oli, still not looking up from the saucepan. “As long as it’s not a problem.”
“Doesn’t bring the mood down for me, although a good majority of people seem to think it should.”
Oli sounds as though he’s about to say something else in response, but it gets cut off with a sharp inhale of pain and an “Ah - ow - fuck,” with the distinct tone of a man whose tongue is sticking out of his mouth.
Pix laughs again. “Is that the soup done?”
“Yeah,” Oli enunciates dramatically, and then slurs something like, “aiya bowl.”
“You need a bowl?” He probably shouldn’t subject Oli to the trials of trying to find another specific cupboard once again. “Hang on, I’ll grab one.”
There’s enough strength in him yet to reach the stack of bowls, from which he takes the top one, which has a fun little detailing of fruits painted inside. When he goes to put it down next to the saucepan, the whole arrangement of it gives him pause.
“Why are you stirring with that?”
Oli frowns. “Well, you can’t use metal in a non-stick pan.”
“I have wooden spoons, you know.” Oli seems to have chosen the world’s most forlorn and forgotten cheap plastic spoon as his stirring implement of choice. A real food court inventory item, the kind that must have been in the drawer since the year Pix moved in.
“I didn’t see any.”
“They’re in the other drawer with the big utensils.”
“You have two cutlery drawers? How bloody rich are you?”
Not very. I’m still just a lecturer, you know. “Kitchens have lots of drawers for a reason!”
“Yeah, so you can put random shite in them and pull it out when you need it five years later!”
The whole thing has pushed an irrepressible smile back into Pix’s cheeks, in much the same way sick days usually don’t. “Here,” he sighs, “serve up.”
Oli blinks. “... I need two bowls.”
One more bowl (plain blue) and two soup spoons (“You have special soup spoons that are different than your normal spoons?” “They’re rounder, like the shape of soup!”) later, and they return to the sofa in tandem. The broth isn’t exactly the pinnacle of heartiness and depth, but it’s about as good as Aldi’s own-brand soup can be expected to provide. Oli seems less impressed.
“I should’ve aimed higher. Gone to M&S or Waitrose or something. We could be having the stuff out the carton right now.”
“It’s not so bad!”
“Honestly? Honestly? I’m about to have a hot take. I’m not a fan of the rice.”
“It’s not very typical, is it?” Pix hums. “I’ve had scotch broth with barley in it before. That worked better.”
“You don’t mind it, though?”
“It’s fine! Maybe there’s some awful note I’m not catching because I can’t quite smell?”
“No, it’s not bad. Just…”
“You get what you pay for,” Pix nods.
“I’ll remember next time.”
Next time is promising.
They sit, finishing their food in some level of peace. Undeniably, the whole affair has perked Pix up a bit. It’s refreshing to be catered for like this.
Speaking of which, he’s lost his thread on looking over the various medicine options to take off Oli’s hands - “I think I’ll take the bog standard cold and flu pills,” he declares. “Caffeinated. I’ve still got work left to do before break.”
“Ugh,” Oli makes a face, “you aren’t half hard done by.”
“I am still getting paid for this, you know.”
“Yeah, and that’s how you can afford a second cutlery drawer!”
They laugh. Pix checks his phone for the time, and elects to take his first dose of medicine before it gets too late in the day. “I’m not taking you away from anything, am I?”
“No, no,” says Oli, “I’m actually fairly free this week. It’s January everything goes to shit.”
“Last few weeks of respite at the end of the year, I see.”
He nods. “I’ll be at my Dad’s for Christmas as well, or I’d pop in. Promise I would, just the tickets are already booked.”
“Of course.” Flattering as it is for Oli to suggest that, there’s no world where the man he TAs for ranks above his family. Such is the way in Pix’s life. He hadn’t particularly expected that to change.
“But,” and here he drags this out, setting the stage, “I am back for New Years’, ‘cause Lizzie - my mate Lizzie, you remember Lizzie - she’s having a New Years’ party and she insisted I had to turn up. So I’ll be back in town again before the end of the month.”
Pix does remember Lizzie, from the time Oli needed an excuse to avoid a night out, and they’d ended up getting dinner and drinks on the other side of town. He remembers enough of Oli’s stories to be sure this New Years’ event is going to become another handful of stories very quickly. “And you need another reason to be somewhere else?”
“No, no, I’m going to this one, I am! I just mean I could stop in beforehand.” Oli takes pains not to let these two sides of his world collide, and Pix can well see why. It could easily lead to a lot of sideways looks. “I was thinking about it, y’know. Doing Christmas alone. And you can do most of it without someone else, yeah, but I did think of one thing you can’t.”
“And that is?”
“You can’t pull a cracker on your own.”
“That’s true.” It’s been a while since Pix has actually even seen a Christmas cracker. Their paper hats and unfunny jokes and useless plastic trinkets haven’t exactly been sorely missed since then, but it would be nice to give it a go this year.
“So it’s settled, then! I’ll come by when I get back, I’ll bring crackers, you can feed me all your extra stuffing and we’ll get a sticky toffee pudding or whatever, it’ll be great.”
“I’m afraid I’m a traditional Christmas cake man.”
“That works too. Long as I get to set it on fire.”
Pix laughs. “Yes, Oli, you can set the cake on fire.”
“Right,” he says, “do you want to watch a bit of trash TV, then?”
“I was watching an episode of Traitors this morning, actually.”
“Oh, god, have you seen the new one, Celebrity Traitors? Stephen Fry’s in it, he seems like your kind of guy.”
“I have been known to enjoy an episode of QI in my time, yes,” Pix massively underexaggerates. “Show me Celebrity Traitors, Oli.”
So that’s exactly what they do.
It’s a strange little arrangement they have here. Pix doesn’t quite know where he stands with it. A lot of the time he tries to put it out of his head altogether - Oli is a colleague, at best, when it comes down to it, and at worst he’s a young man over whom Pix could be exerting undue amounts of power for all the higher-ups know. Any other dreams Oli might have in mind can be dismissed as long as they’re not in the room together, not spending the afternoon close enough to touch and doing absolutely no work whatsoever on a school day. Now, though…
Really, truly, Pix doesn’t mind doing Christmas alone. Let this not be taken as a sign of submission to the shackles of forced intimacy, the need to have a special someone in your life for every nice occasion.
He just knows already, in that sinkingly certain way that makes his heart twinge, that it’s going to feel a tiny bit worse knowing their shared celebration has to wait a few more days to come to pass.
Today is good, though. And Oli fetches him the box of tissues when he asks, and explains who the hell Niko Omilana is when the question arises, and keeps giving him these looks that linger a little too close to the edge of stares. Makes him feel like someone’s taking note of him in a way the rest of the world usually doesn’t.