#hi i'm still alive!!! pre me working essentially 20th december to 24th. i've got a few half done fics so am still trying to catch up 😭😭😭

[i-am-become-a-name]

08/12/2024 - Christmas

After his first Christmas on the KS-159 had gone so successfully - excluding, of course,  several students being tortured by the apparitions of a recently dead companion - Braxiatel had put a vague note in his future diary to carry out the same ritual the next year, for the benefit of the students and staff. Perhaps even tie in some of the other cultures from other planets to appeal to their rapidly diversifying population. The building work and final landscaping would be completed by then too, allowing for the festivities to spread out further. The Christmas crackers though, he would dispense with. It had simply been too excruciating considering having to offer them to others again the next year. Bernice would simply have to like it or lump it. Or he could arrange a suitably distracting need for an archaeologist on some holiday planet she would enjoy.  Which made it all the more suspicious when this Christmas came around, she had decided to stick around. 

The puddings had been cooked to high standards of historical accuracy under the sharp eye of Ms Jones, and Mister Crofton had begrudgingly cultivated the holly needed for decorations. He had even heard mutterings of a student having had burst into tears at a particularly sarcastic response from Bernice, thus fulfilling the rather concerning criteria of the prophetic song from the 21st century that it was not Christmas until somebody cried. And that he really must talk to her about her lecturing practices if they were reducing students to tears unrelated to boredom. But that was for later, and he cast a proprietary eye over the neatly laid out tables, the swags of tinsel that hung in mathematically precise distances along the walls, and the focal point of the tree, decorated in a carefully crafted and planned impression of chaos. He even had supplied a table that contained wearable decorations, including those infernal paper crowns but without the risk of the sharp explosives or flying debris of trinkets and those abominable masquerades of jokes. 

As the room filled up, the noise level rose as the levels of the wine bottles decreased, and people began to unwind enough to not feel embarrassment at wearing headbands adorned with bells, or facsimiles of animal antlers. They had left the curtains open, to emphasise the warmth of the room as snow still softly fell outside, and the effect was a pleasing tableau of Christmasses as depicted in surviving literature and media. By the time Bernice had found him, dressed in something that sparkled in even the lowered lighting, she was pink cheeked and a paper hat sat at an improbable angle over one ear. He had deemed the evening a success, having persuaded several somewhat inebriated eminent scholars in their fields to sign on for a period of sorting out antiquities into coherent exhibitions. He smiled genially at Bernice over his glass of wine (not one of the ones he had put out on the tables, but nor one of his best that would be better appreciated over an old book), pleased to see her happiness at a time of year she claimed to loathe. Admittedly, the first attempt had not been entirely favourable to her, but this year he had carefully monitored events around her to try and mitigate possible disastrous scenarios.

“Great party,” she hollered in his ear, wrapping an arm around his shoulders to pull him down to her level. He contained a wince at the volume, and the sudden shock of contact that most people did not dare to presume. 

“Thank you, Bernice,” he replied at a more reasonable level, and resolved to find a caretaker to make sure she made it back to her rooms safely after the event. But there was something in her eyes as he stood up, gently sliding out from under her arm and checking his wine had not spilt at the unexpected change of angle, that spoke not of over-inebriation, but instead of a mischievousness  that he had not seen in a long time. The short-lived mystery was solved when she reached into her dress (and his eyes slid away, because there was some things about ones friends that one really did not need to see again) and, when he had the fortitude to look back, had a red hat with a white trim in her hand. She was already wearing her crown, with as much dignity as if it was real, so her intentions-

“No,” he said firmly. Really, there were limits to this, and his sartorial sensibilities would not permit this. 

“Go on,” she cajoled, waving the hat at him. “Setting this all up, you’re the closest thing we have to Santa here. Think of how much it will cheer everyone up.”

He looked around, and raised a single eyebrow. There didn’t seem to be a lack of cheer evident, and Bernice abandoned that road for what she had clearly kept as a sure thing. 

“Think of the accuracy, Brax. It’s all part of the authentic recreation.” 

He was not one for cursing, but damn. The corners of her mouth turned up, and he suspected it was with the certainty of a battle won. He cast his eyes to the perfectly moulded ceiling, then bowed his head in defeat, allowing her the honours. It had a bell, he noticed distastefully, as he lifted his now heavier head, Bernice lit up as much as the tree. 

“Least jolly Santa I’ve ever seen,” she teased, and he mock scowled at her, promising himself another fortifying glass of wine after this as a shield against irrepressible archaeologists. Not that he had one elsewhere on the Braxiatel Collection that was quite so- irrepressible. 

“Cheer up, Braxiatel,” and he wasn't expecting the arm again, pulling him down to leave a firm kiss on his cheekbone. He felt the sudden itch of being watched, and flitted his gaze around before he found the camera, wielded by one of Bernice's students. He allowed a long suffering expression across his face, an allowance of the things he would put up with from Bernice to be recorded for posterity, and he knew she would be grinning, lipstick the same colour as the impression left on his cheek. The bell tinkled, and he closed his eyes. 

“Good evening, Bernice,” he said firmly, drawing himself back up to a safe height, and holding his glass up as defence. She just grinned and flitted off to one of the young scholars he had been talking to earlier, a fresh whiskey appearing somehow in her hand between here and there. He wiped the evidence of his cheek with the linen handkerchief he kept for such situations, less rare than they had once been, and began to circulate the room again, ridiculous hat in place.

People were more inclined to smile at him like this, and perhaps she had been wise in making him more … palatable for the evening. The giggling he could do without, he had hoped he would be able to carry this off with as much dignity as he had other unfortunate situations. That was until someone else bent close, lips pursed and he took an instinctive step back, a coldness washing down over his face and freezing the person in their tracks. 

The giggling. The attempted kiss. The mischievous look to Bernice. He glanced over at the window, become a mirror as the outside had darkened. There was a cluster of berries on his hat, inelegant leaves that had not been there when Bernice had held it up to him.  Viscum album. He breathed deeply in preparation, and swept the hat off his head, uncaring of how it disarranged his hair. 

“PROFESSOR BERNICE SUMMERFIELD!”