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Strictly speaking, Maxwell didn’t measure the time down here. It was...inadvisable, given his situation. Wilson kept a diary, but if there were dates in it, they were as unreadable as the rest, by way of the cipher his pet wrote in as well as his pet’s atrocious handwriting. He suspected if there was any datekeeping involved, it didn’t go further than tracking specimen growth, and that was fine by him.
Likewise, the seasons didn’t seem to really adhere to a calendar. Without horizons to govern them, they spun at their own rate, usually at an alarming pace, but occasionally lingering far past what passed for normal.
This was one of those winters, and it was wearing its welcome threadbare.
Maxwell had his suspicions as to why.
Hell, forget that. He knew. Watching Wilson languishing by the fire like a dying lamb, his experiments untouched for days, weeks at a time, he didn’t have to question it any more than the ache in his spine. They didn’t want him here, and while they couldn’t get rid of him directly, they could diminish him, fade his light out with long shadows and short days, with chills that Maxwell couldn’t rub out of thin, tremulous hands.
And then, the night before, some petty, vicious little shade had figured out a new trick, turning the wind into hounds howling and falling trees into the heavy, thudding footfalls of monstrous deer, and Wilson had awoken curled against him, grip tight and chest tighter, and he had gotten halfway through reassuring him that he heard them too and that it wasn’t real before he saw his face and saw it didn’t matter, that he was wearing that particular pained, despairing expression he only got when he knew he was lucid and the nightmares still weren’t going away.
Maxwell hated that expression. He hated seeing him confused and scared, but that was fixable, a couple of pills and a little distraction later and he was all right again, but seeing him so tired, so goddamned resigned…
He couldn’t let it stand. So as soon as he got the idea, he started refining it, and once Wilson was at least somewhat comfortably asleep, he had slipped out to prepare.
The fire was already in place, and a hasty journey into the cellar yielded glowing spores to use as fairy lights. Pine branches for the mantle were hardly in short supply, and the rest of the ornaments required minor prestidigitation, the kind he could easily walk off.
Chester preceded Wilson, as usual, yapping and snapping at spores, and Maxwell finished off the presentation with a flourish, mistletoe popping into existence above the parlor entrance, and he stood beneath it, arms crossed, grinning.
Maxwell hated the expression on Wilson’s face when he was suffering silently with his demons, hated the weary, resigned look of a dog waiting for a kick it knew was coming. It was only as he glanced around, expression going from confused to panicked to tight and hollow like a dog that understood it had been kicked far too often, that he realized there were any number of ways to summon them.
“Wake up on the wrong side of the bed, pal?”
It was the worst thing to say, or up there, but he said it anyway, angling for the usual half-snide, half-pleased mumble of ‘you would know’ to be shot back at him, trying to steer a situation that was suddenly out of hand back into clear waters.
Wilson didn’t respond, at least verbally, going to busy himself with a storage box instead, and when his chest hitched a few times in half-words, Maxwell tried to cut across his momentum before he could force out whatever he was working on.
“Figured you could use some Christmas ch--”
“K-k-k --Christmas is a p-pointless exercise of huh, hedonism and excess and a d-detriment to the f-forward-thinking mind, and while ah, all of those may fit y- you as neat as a glove--y-your gloves, I might mention, are also a p-pointless exercise of hhhh, hedonism and excess, like all of y-your clothes--”
“That’s not what you--”
Wilson slammed the box closed, cutting off his weak attempt at a smart remark, and finished his erratic, typewriter-fast lecture. “--r-respect what l-little I ask and
keep me out of it.”
“Christ, Wilson, I did this for you!”
He looked at Maxwell, finally, and Maxwell’s stomach clenched not so much at the betrayal in his eyes, but that it was clearly a betrayal he expected.
“D-did you really?”
That, finally, was enough to hold Maxwell’s tongue, and in the ensuing silence, his pet hauled himself up on his cane and brushed past him again.
“I’m g, going for f-firewood, we’ll be out at th-this rate.”
“For fuck’s sake, Wilson, wait--”
The force of the door slamming behind him was enough to rattle every hedonistic, excessive ornament on the mantle.
Maxwell closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, sighing deeply.
God. Dammit.
For far from the first time since he had taken Wilson in, Maxwell felt divided against himself. It wasn’t a pleasant place to be in. He had any number of ointments to apply to his bruised ego--that he had no way of knowing when he’d brush up against some scar from his pet’s past,
(not that he ever asked so he could)
that he couldn’t keep himself from falling into fast patter because that was how he had survived,
(not that he had ever tried anything else)
that he had done all of this for him--
(had he, really?)
...they all felt false when he weighed them against the hurt in Wilson’s eyes.
Maxwell gritted his teeth and punched the wall behind him with both hands, eliciting a whine from Chester. He was trying, dammit! What else did he want from him?
Keep trying.
It was a softer dissent, a nudge inside him, and he opened his eyes and looked around.
After a long moment, he gestured to Chester, who was still anxiously awaiting instruction.
“Go on, you talk to him.”
As she *poink*ed off, Maxwell sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose again.
This was going to take some thinking.
----
Somehow, Chester always made her way to him on her own time, so Wilson wasn’t concerned about leaving her when he stormed out. Forgetting his gloves was more of an issue, but he wasn’t about to go back in after them.
As the saw slipped again on the icy tree trunk, Wilson amended that train of thought to “yet”.
He went to reset it in the groove he had made, stopped to warm his hands against himself, found them pressed against his temples instead, and he hissed out a sigh.
Why did it have to be this hard?
It wasn’t that Maxwell should have known. It wasn’t even that he should have asked. He never did, whenever the ropes of days past tightened around his throat, he’d put a reassuring hand there instead, kept them from strangling, pressed relief through his body like he was pressing the infection from a wound, and God, it was what he needed, what kept the words from spilling out and never stopping, kept him from vomiting up every insignificant slight he had ever suffered, the ridiculous, embarrassing nonsense that he should have dismissed so long ago--
--except sometimes he came too close, set it off like this, like the weight on a bear trap fox trap all the words sloshing around in his skull, under his skin, itching like wire-wool, and he thought that if he didn’t drain them out he might die, but he couldn’t let them out, couldn’t couldn’t couldn’t risk that kind of ridicule from his master, because that would just fill up those sharp points of letters all over again but worse, he couldn’t be stupid to him, couldn’t be--
Chester plowed into him, knocking him onto his back in the snow, knocking the breath and the ugly ink-lined shadows out of him at the same time. He gasped air and dragged his bad leg to one side painfully, burying his hands in warm, soggy fur as the fit slowly faded in a series of twitches and shocks.
“G-good girl,” he mumbled, at length, and was rewarded with the slap of an enormous tongue across his face.
Wilson stared up at the sky through the trees as the scrawls and scribbles in his head continued to drain off. It was late morning, but the overcast blue glow of the ersatz ‘day’ wasn’t close to showing. There was just a sliver of moon, its light cold and secondhand, stolen from a sun that wasn’t there, and…
...and he couldn’t help thinking that the way it made the snow glint on the trees was its own kind of warmth.
Fuckin’ romantic.
He sighed and hauled himself up, crossing his arms over his chest to quell the shivering. In truth, he had always liked the lights. That, like many truths, was something he had had to keep hidden and locked away, sooner than have it removed with a razor strap and something more acceptable put in its place. This one, at least, wasn’t hard--they were everywhere in December, impossible to avoid, until the season ended and they started going dark, one house at a time. When the last was snuffed out, it was equal parts relief and heartache, escaping from temptation straight into the long, black silence trapped under thick sheets of ice.
It wasn’t something he had forgotten about as an adult, but something he had set aside. He had reached more than once for a box of tiny candles in tiny glass lanterns on his odd foray into the city, had once convinced himself it was all right to pick one up and look closer for the sake of scientific curiosity, but as soon as he had touched it he had pulled away as if they were already burning brimstone-hot. Foolishness. Childishness. There were things so much more important to spend what little he had on than…
Wilson looked back towards Maxwell’s excessive, hedonistic mansion.
There was a light on to guide him home.
There always was.
Snow melting through his vest where it had slipped in under his coat, the moon still high in the sky, Wilson thought as long as he cared to, then sighed mutely and picked up the saw with half-numb hands.
“Y-you’re going to h-h-have to h, help me with th-this.”
Chester lolled her tongue winningly.
----
The door slammed open and Maxwell slammed the Book closed and out of existence, heart seizing in his chest, jarred by the lost tempo of Wilson coming back too early, the man was like clockwork with his solitary moods and if he had lost time reading again--
The traitorous thought dissipated into irritated concern as he made out the quivering figure of his pet through the double vision, cursing inwardly at his chattering teeth, why had he let him go out like that why hadn’t he gone after him, and he was by his side before the door had closed again, stripping off his own gloves.
“Goddammit, what were you thinking? Do you want to freeze to death?”
“M-Maxwell--” Wilson stopped as Maxwell took his hands, rubbing life back into them, making a soft, pained noise as the blood started flowing again.
“I don’t understand how you’re so Christing smart and still pull these dumb fucking stunts--”
“D-don’t you?”
Maxwell stopped, although he didn’t drop his hands. It was a sharp, direct shot, clinical in its precision, and as he met Wilson’s even glare, he thought he could feel the unsaid words in the ache of his clenched jaw. No one ever cut through the patter, no one got that close and stayed except this pathetic, miserable, piteous solid fucking stone that saw straight through him despite his fervors and fevers, maybe saw better for them, but if he said so much as a word toward the truth of that, started unraveling those long strands of thread he’d spent so goddamned long weaving to cover himself, then they’d both be exposed, and that risk…
“Heh.” He stroked up Wilson’s wrists, his voice subdued, just barely sardonic. “I guess I deserved that.”
Wilson relaxed, his eyes softening, and Maxwell was profoundly grateful, not for the first time, that his pet understood ciphers.
“I d-don’t know everything,” he mumbled, a plaintive statement toward the outburst, and Maxwell put it by to decrypt later.
“You’re working on it, I’m sure.” The sardonicism wasn’t even slightly muted this time, and Maxwell finally let go of Wilson’s hands at the tiny quirk of a smile it earned. “Go take a hot bath before you catch your death, I’ll have this place cleared out by the time you’re done.
Wilson coughed self-consciously. “Th-that w, wasn’t what I hhh, had in mind…”
Maxwell raised an eyebrow, but instead of elaborating, Wilson maneuvered by him and into the hall, disappearing into the bathroom without a word.
In the ensuing pause, Maxwell considering whether he should follow and get him to elaborate, or at least berate him for the soaking trail he left in his wake, but stopped at a rhythmic hurk-hurk-hurk from behind him, followed by an unpleasant wet throaty noise and a loud thud.
Maxwell counted to ten, then twenty, then finally turned to see Chester sitting by an enormous, freshly-cut Christmas tree, wagging her tail for approval.
“This is more than I deserve,” he muttered, meaning it thoroughly in two entirely different directions at once.
Chester wuff ed and coughed up a pinecone.
----
The hot water took the chill off quickly, but Wilson took his time, letting it ease out the aches and pains as well, listening for movement in the hall. At length, the door opened and closed once, and he looked up.
Maxwell’s coat was hanging from the hook.
As he got out and dried off, Wilson thought, again, what he had thought in the snow--it wasn’t that Maxwell didn’t try. It was that he wasn’t good at it.
Wrapping the soft, warm fur around himself, he came to the conclusion, again, that that was what made the difference.
Maxwell was on the couch when he limped in, Chester curled up by the fire, the scent of pine almost covering the smell of wet fur. The tree was up, the ornaments and spores transferred onto its branches, and he stopped, watching the glowing lights bob gently.
“Well?”
He reached out and turned a glass globe, smiling faintly at the reflections. “...i-it’s b, beautiful.”
“Heh. Fuckin’ romantic.”
Blushing softly, Wilson pulled the coat tight and started to kneel by Maxwell, stopped as he gestured for him to sit by him and complied, blushing harder. The litany of sweet obscenities he’d committed and would gladly commit again for his master was endless at this point, and always expanding, but for some reason it was the soft touches and closeness that made him shy. It was...confounding to the forward-thinking mind, to say the least.
“Here. Don’t get excited, ain’t anything fancy.”
He looked at the gift Maxwell was offering and his smile faded.
“C’mon. What are you afraid of?”
There was a softness to the question that made it less than rhetorical, and Wilson reached up to stroke the ruff of the coat nervously. He thought of boxes too hot to touch, torn-up floorboards, blindfolds, bandaged fingertips.
What was he afraid of?
Things that had died but didn’t leave. Husks of dried leeches with blank eyes that suckled scars long after the blood was gone.
Things he didn’t have to carry anymore.
When he reached for the gift, Maxwell put his hand over Wilson’s to stop it from trembling first, and he felt echoes of parasites dropping away.
“Not gonna--” Maxwell stopped as Wilson started opening it, seeing the flash of panic, and seemed to recalibrate. “...pretty common to shake it first, try to guess what it is by the sound.”
He was learning.
Wilson shook it tentatively, then more earnestly. His heart dropped when it didn’t make a noise, then he paused, doing some recalibrating of his own, and looked evenly up to Maxwell’s smirk.
“Didn’t say it’d work , sweetheart.”
It was a welcome return to normalcy, as was the withering glare he shot back, and he opened the package.
Bright paper fell away from a book, A History of Tradition stamped into the cover, and Wilson turned it in his hands silently as Maxwell spoke, his tone just a bit too casual.
“You’re the only man I ever met who thought he needed to know everything, you know that? Hell of an ego, pal. But if that’s what you want, fine, knock yourself out. Far be it for me to argue with a goddamned geni--”
Maxwell flinched when Wilson kissed him, like he always did, relaxed into it and took the reins, like he always did, letting one hand entwine with his, sliding the other up to stroke his hair. Somewhere in the surge of relief and gratitude and belonging, Wilson thought vaguely that he wasn’t the only one flustered by soft touches, and that did burn, soft and clean and bright as the light over the doorway.
When he broke the kiss, it was barely, murmuring against Maxwell’s skin. “Th-thank you.”
“Heh…merry Christmas, sweetheart.” He pushed him back a little to study his face, stroking his cheek with one thumb. “Let me know when you’re done, I’ll see what else I can scrounge up for the library.”
Pursuing where Maxwell ‘scrounged’ the things he did was a fruitless line of inquiry, so Wilson nodded, chest tightening again. “I...d-don’t have anything f-for...I-I m-mean I k-k-k-- couldn’t, I w-woke up to this, i-if you give me ssss, some t-time--”
“Try looking under the tree first, pal.”
Wilson wondered how he could have even briefly thought that Maxwell, in all his excessive, hedonistic glory, wouldn’t have that angle covered, then whistled for Chester. Maxwell sighed, harried, as she snapped to attention and heeded the following ‘go see’ and ‘fetch’ whistles.
“That mutt’s too smart for her own good.”
Wilson ignored him pointedly as he retrieved the box from her mouth and scratched behind her horns in reward. “Ch-Chessie good girl. G, good girl Chessie.”
Chester *poink*ed happily and returned to her spot by the fire as Wilson offered the gift to Maxwell. He motioned for Wilson to open it instead, and he paused, weighing the implications. Somewhat belatedly, he shook it. It made a quiet, shifting sound.
“Any guesses?”
“N-nothing that b-bears suh, saying in polite c-company,” he muttered, picking at the wrapping.
“Good thing there isn’t any around, then.”
Wilson sighed and opened the gift.
There was a long silence, during which a heat that had absolutely nothing to do with the roaring fire blossomed up through Wilson’s chest and into his face. Maxwell’s grin looked wide enough to be painful, and Wilson was content with that as a state of affairs, asking himself if pursuing just where and how the contents of the box were ‘scrounged’ really wasn’t worth the trouble. At length, he discarded the notion and ventured a hypothesis.
“Y-you’re not the o-one intended to w-w-w--wear these, a-are you.”
“Red’s your color, pet.”
“D-did you use my sss--silk for this?”
“Just a little.”
“A vuh, very l-little.”
“See? We’re in agreement.”
“I th-thought you d-didn’t want me to f, freeze to d-death…”
“I don’t, and yet…”
One hand snaked beneath the fur of Maxwell’s coat onto bare skin, and Wilson jerked at the sudden cold and made a sharp noise, somehow managing to blush even further.
“Gonna catch chill all over again like that, bud.”
The long dark had sapped Wilson’s desires, and he truly hadn’t intended wrapping up in his master’s coat as anything more than an attempt at comfort, but he realized the return of that wanting with a strong roll of heat through his stomach, and he took a deep breath and courted it.
“...g-going to nnn, need another b-bath anyway, at th-th-this rate.”
Maxwell growled softly, appreciatively, and moved to pull him close. The grin disappeared from his face as Wilson pulled back, slowly grew again as his chest hitched a few times in half-words, and he didn’t cut off what he was working on behind a thick sheen of embarrassment.
“...l-l-l-let me...g-get changed.”
“Sweetheart, I think you know much more than you give yourself credit for…”
Chester stayed by the fireplace as they left, watching them go. She wasn’t sure why the Boss would go to so much effort to make such a pretty-pretty warmy-warminess and then leave it, but she was sure that Mister Wilson was smiling again, and that was a Good. And she had a gift of her own, which was also a Good.
Chewing on her new sticky pinecone friend, Chester contemplated that she didn’t know what a Christmas was even as much as Mister Wilson, but she understood one thing: It was the best one ever.