Chapter Text
Thomas Tucker was dead as a door nail. In order for any magic, any wonder, to come of this story, that must be perfectly understood.
Not that his son cared much. Craig Tucker was a busy man. Nobody ever became executive director of a series of smash hit television shows by taking vacation days over an often-absent father who was now permanently absent. And nobody ever became executive director by the age of thirty, period.
Nobody but Craig Tucker.
He’d spent his twenty-eighth Christmas Eve bullied into attending the funeral by his little sister. A year later, here he was in his office where he wanted to be the first time around, Clyde perched on the armrest of the leather couch that was supposed to be for important company only.
“Off,” Craig said, waving him away. “You’ll break it.”
“You spent over a grand on this thing,” Clyde said cheerfully. “If it can’t hold my fine self, you should ask for your money back.”
“Would you stop wasting my time?” Craig rubbed his temples. “If you’re not going to do the job I hired you for, you’ll celebrate Christmas by losing it.”
“Alright, alright.” Clyde slid off the armrest onto the cushion, then, under Craig’s glare, slowly stood up and stepped away from the couch altogether. At one time, he might have said, “Nah, you love me too much,” but that had been a very long time ago. Craig had forgotten it, and Clyde mostly had, too, but the narrator thought the reader might find it an illuminating tidbit. “Got your messages.”
Craig crossed his arms against the edge of his desk, which had cost even more than the couch. “Read them.”
“One call from Mr. Marsh.” Clyde crinkled his nose, like addressing Stan as such was strange even after years of working together. “He…wants to adjust where his paycheck is deposited.”
“That’s a problem for HR, not me,” Craig said.
“Oh, I know,” Clyde said. He hesitated a second longer before adding, “Don’t you want to know why?”
“I couldn’t care less. Next message.”
“Well, his mom got laid off,” Clyde said anyway, “so he wants to send half his paycheck to her—”
“I said I didn’t care, Clyde. Next message.”
Anger got through where agitation didn’t. Clyde flinched back and flipped to the next page in his notepad. “Um, but—Mr. Stotch confirmed all the legal paperwork to feature Duchess on the show.” Duchess, for those readers who don’t watch cute pet programming, was a much sought-after, prizewinning, media darling Shiba Inu who was not only elegant in glossy magazine photos but cute on camera. Super cute. Back when he was doing grunt work, Craig would’ve had her agreed to the show in a week. Butters, bless his hardworking little heart, had taken three.
“What a nice sendoff that will be for him,” Craig said. Clyde’s fingers had been worrying the flipped-over page in his notebook, but they froze now. He looked up in slow motion.
“Craig…you wouldn’t…”
“It’s not working out. We can’t be waiting around for weeks to confirm an appearance on the show, especially a high-profile one.”
“But the show is booked up for the next month anyway! Duchess wouldn’t be appearing until February at the earliest.”
“At which point we will have a new account manager who will be competent enough to handle her,” Craig said. He reached into his desk and pulled out the paperwork, already prepared and signed. Holding it out, he made no motion to get up from his desk and waited for Clyde to come collect it.
“You…you wouldn’t fire him on Christmas?” Clyde asked, a final, weak petition. Being Craig Tucker’s personal assistant isn’t a job the narrator would wish on an enemy, let alone someone with as big a heart as Clyde Donovan. It should be noted here that Clyde’s Christmas spirit was merry and bright, and kept all the year, but still not enough to counter Craig’s grinchiness.
“Tomorrow is Christmas,” Craig said. “It’s only Christmas Eve. Give this to him before he goes home. He’s always leaving early.”
“He. He leaves at five, sir.” Calling Stan ‘Mr. Marsh’ was weird, but Craig had long since ceased to be ‘dude’ or ‘bro.’
“Hours before he has any business going anywhere. Although now he’ll have plenty of time on his hands.” Craig leaned back into his chair with a sigh. “Next message.”
Clyde’s hands stuttered around his notepad and the awful paperwork he didn’t even want to think about leaving on Butters’ desk. “Just one more. Your sister.” Craig groaned. “She wants you to know they’re setting a place for you whether you come tomorrow or not.”
“Not,” Craig said emphatically. Once upon a time, he’d put his sister through school, and fought bullies who picked on her for being poor, and didn’t bat an eye when she brought home her partner to meet him. These, too, were memories coated in dust in the crevices of Craig’s mind.
“She said she wanted the family to be together,” Clyde said quietly.
“Well, we’re all that’s left, aren’t we? Not much of a family celebration.” Craig exhaled sharply and pulled out new paperwork to review. “Fine. Go back to your desk. I want everything in order for the after-Christmas programming. People don’t want to think the day after Christmas, they want to eat leftovers and watch T.V. And we’re going to capitalize on it.”
“Right,” Clyde said. Agreeing with one’s boss and agreeing in spirit are very different things, dear reader.
Just as Clyde turned to go back to his desk outside Craig’s office, Craig called him back. “One more thing.” He pulled one last document from his desk. Or, rather, an envelope, sealed.
It contained Clyde’s usual end-of-year bonus, something Craig continued to do for his assistant, his once-best-friend, even after convincing the head of the network to cut holiday bonuses in the interest of saving money for “what really mattered”: their programming and advertisers. This tiny act, one admittedly born from obligation and not without its bitterness, may appear to the reader as it does to the narrator a sign, a slight glimmer, that not all hope was lost.
“Here.” Craig thrust the envelope at Clyde without ceremony and shooed him from the office with even less warmth.
The next few hours, the narrator has opted not to summarize, as they are egregiously boring and do not further the story at all. Craig sat at his desk on Christmas Eve and worked, the end.
Not the actual end, mind.
At seven o’clock, Clyde came back in to tell Craig he was leaving.
“Did you speak with Stotch?”
“I gave him what you gave me,” Clyde said.
“Good.”
“I’m off tomorrow, sir,” Clyde reminded him. “For Christmas.”
“Yes, I’m aware. I’ll see you all the earlier the morning after.”
Clyde’s shoulders hunched. “Yes, sir.”
It wasn’t until nearly eight o’clock that Craig himself left the office. There were folks still working, of course, but they had come in for the night shift. They weren’t pulling fourteen-hour days.
Again, the humble narrator will save the good reader the exhaustion of hearing every detail of Craig’s journey home. Simply put, he bought himself a sandwich from the deli on the first floor of his office building and got into his private company car, which his private company driver used to transport him to his fancy downtown apartment. Craig got out without acknowledging his driver, and ate his sandwich in the elevator up to his place.
This is where it gets good, the narrator promises.
Because no sooner did Craig Tucker walk through his apartment door, he realized that someone else was in his apartment. Dear old dad, who was dead as a door nail.
“What the he—” Craig managed, slamming the door shut behind him. Thomas Tucker looked just the same as he did the last time Craig had seen him years ago. Still balding, still fat, still wearing an expression of empty confusion.
“Hello, son,” Thomas said.
“Who the—” The narrator regrets to say that Craig’s word of choice isn’t suitable for a nice Christmas story. “—are you?” Craig threw aside the foil from his sandwich and grabbed an umbrella from the stand by his door, brandishing it as a weapon. Thomas looked at it with eyes crinkled with sadness; Craig saw his chance and took it, thrusting his weapon forward. The umbrella went right through Thomas as if he were a hologram.
“In life, I was your father,” he answered.
“Jesus,” Craig said, which was wildly inappropriate considering the Eve on which it was said. “You don’t stick around when I’m a kid, but now you take time out of your busy schedule in Hell to bother me?”
“I haven’t come to bother you, Craig.” Thomas’s voice cracked. “I’ve come to help you.”
“I don’t need your help. Go haunt somebody else. Show up in a bathroom mirror and scare a bunch of kids, or whatever.”
“You do need my help,” Thomas insisted. “Craig, I know I wasn’t the best father to you—”
“Understatement of the century.”
“—but, believe me, I never dreamed you’d turn out like this.”
Craig bristled. “Like what, exactly? Successful? Independent?”
“Lonely,” Thomas said. “Cold. I was foolish in my life, son, I wasted the time I had. And if you don’t get off this path of spite you’re on, you’ll follow in my footsteps.”
The idea of being even the slightest bit like his old man stayed Craig’s tongue.
“There were mistakes I made,” Thomas continued. “So many mistakes. Some I knew I was making or realized later, but most…most of my errors, I had no idea. I walked through life with my eyes closed. Closed to kindness. Closed to family. Closed to what really mattered.”
“Nice epiphany.” Craig wouldn’t want the reader to know this, but he worked very hard to sound cold and not curious. “Get on with it, then. What do you want with me?”
“Much. It’s years too late to make up for your childhood, but…but consider this a true act of fatherly love for you, Craig. I had to pull a lot of strings to get this opportunity, this chance for you to be saved. Tonight, you’ll be visited by three ghosts.”
“No, I think I’m good,” Craig said.
“The first will come at one o’clock, the second at two, and the third at three.”
“They weren’t willing to coordinate and get it all over with in one go, huh?”
Thomas stepped closer, and Craig instinctively stepped back. Ghosts aren’t exactly the most beloved house guests.
“Son, don’t waste this chance. I want better for you. I want you to have everything I gave up. I want you to be happy.” Thomas put his hands on Craig’s shoulders. Despite their transparency, Craig felt their weight. “I’m doing this for your own good.”
And with that, Thomas gave him a good shove.
He should have staggered into the door, or perhaps landed on the sleek hardwood floors of his apartment, but when Craig’s butt hit the snow, he knew his father had screwed him over one more time from beyond the grave.
“Son of a…” Craig jumped to his feet, glad that he hadn’t taken off his coat, and spun around. He was back out in the city, in a young, trendy district he vaguely knew. On one side of the street was a Korean Barbecue restaurant next to an Italian bakery; in front of him was a family-run grocer advertising homemade hot apple cider in their window.
It took Craig a few moments, but he finally found a street sign and whipped out his cell phone to call his driver. Who, for his part, was totally baffled as to how Craig managed to get across town moments after he’d been dropped off at his apartment.
“Does it matter how I got here?” Craig growled into his phone. “Pick. Me. Up.” He hung up and stuffed the phone back in his pocket. Behind him, the grocer door jingled with one of those tacky bells, a woman’s “Thank you, come again!” following her customer out into the cold. Boots crunched in the snow behind him, then came to a halt.
“Craig?”
Craig would never admit it if he were narrating his own story, but his heart stopped at that very moment. He knew that voice. Every fiber of his being remembered that voice. When he whirled around, the speaker stood just outside the grocer’s door, two bottles of cider in his arms.
“Tweek,” Craig managed. How long had it been? Years. Years since Craig had seen him, but he hadn’t changed a bit. Tweek shuffled towards him in the snow.
“What are you doing here?” It wasn’t a mean question, but genuinely curious. Shocked, perhaps, just as much as Craig was. Major cities meant few run-ins with old flames. That is, unless Fate steps in. The narrator hates to spoil a good story but will just say that Fate may or may not have been involved.
“I…I don’t know,” Craig admitted. “I just sort of…ended up here.” Tweek cocked his head to one side, expression thoughtful. Craig hurried on. “What about you?” He glanced at the bottles. “Going to a party? Um…a date?”
Tweek blinked, then smiled slowly. “No, I’m not—no. I live near here. Just on my way to a friend’s for dinner.” Tweek shrugged, the cider bottles in his arms clinking. “Are you spending the holiday with Ruby?”
“Yeah,” Craig lied. He knew Tweek would like that answer, and he did. His smile lit up his whole face. “You look. You look great.” He did. His hair was longer now, spiraling out from under his knit winter hat and curling over his shoulders. Very little had changed, his fair skin still looking impossibly soft, freckles splashed over the bridge of his nose, green eyes wide and wondering. Craig swallowed.
“Thanks. So do you.” Tweek shrugged again, his cider an awkward weight to carry, and Craig lurched forward with arms outstretched. “No, I’m okay, I’ve got them.” He laughed. “Well, I should go. Tell Ruby I said hi.”
“Okay. Wait, no, don’t go!” Even Craig knew enough about Fate to know their paths wouldn’t cross again after this night if he didn’t do something. Tweek paused and looked up at him. “Would you—do you…are you hungry?” He gestured at the barbecue joint across the street. Tweek bit his lip to hide a smile, that slow, crooked smile Craig had seen on his face thousands of times.
“My friends are expecting me,” he said, not unkindly.
Craig let his arm drop, embarrassed. “Oh. Right. Um, but, wait, are you—” Tweek stopped to wait for him again. “Do you want a ride?” Craig asked. “My driver is on his way.”
“Your driver,” Tweek repeated, his crooked smile softening. “Gosh. No, Craig, but thank you. I don’t want to take you out of your way.”
“It’s not,” Craig said.
“You don’t know where I’m going.”
“It’s not out of the way,” Craig said. Tweek evaluated him again.
“It’s not that far. I can walk.” The words weren’t what Craig wanted to hear, but the tone in which they were said was sweet. “But thank you. Really.”
“Are you sure? I can—” The rest of Craig’s sentence was lost to the roar of an engine pulling up behind him. He spun around to see one of the company cars tearing down the street. Instinctively, he jerked between the car and Tweek, even though it slammed to a stop a few feet away.
“That wouldn’t happen to be your car, would it?” Tweek teased, and Craig’s knees went weak at his chuckle. That sound hadn’t graced Craig’s ears in so long, he decided to let this driver live.
It wasn’t his usual driver. To Craig’s horror, the fat bastard waddling out of the driver’s seat was his least favorite employee, Eric Cartman. Craig had tried more than once to get him fired, but he had some sort of in with the people in charge. They thought he was funny.
“’Ay, hotshot!” Cartman shouted from a few feet away, brushing the cheese dust from his Cheesy Poofs off the front of his uniform. “What the—” Again, reader, your narrator makes the story nicer for you. “—are you doing, calling me out here in this—” Reader, truly, you narrator does a lot of work. “—cold to pick up your sorry butt?”
Craig had never wanted to fire him more. Behind him, Tweek was failing to stifle his giggles, his mittens too busy keeping his cider from falling.
“I think I’d better go,” Tweek said then, and Craig turned to look at him. “But you get home safe.” He widened his eyes and tilted his head in Cartman’s direction, and every part of Craig ached with longing. “It was good to see you.”
“You, too.” And Craig’s heart sank because he knew there was no way to salvage this meeting now. Watching Tweek, bundled up in his winter coat, walking off into the snow just starting to fall was the worst thing that had happened to Craig tonight. Including the incompetence of his employees. Including a visit from his ghostly father.
“Come on, loverboy, I’m freezing my ass off out here. Get in the car so I can go home!”
Including Eric Cartman.