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Reagan is absolutely fucking exhausted.
Her dad has decided it’s socially accepted to bother her in her lab at all hours of the day AND night.
Ron is away on some Illuminati field trip bullshit he couldn’t miss because he’s a “valued member of the team.”
Valued member her ass. The Illuminati valued Ron as much as Rand Ridley values sobriety. Not very highly.
The roads from her brownstone to Cognito Inc have been flooded with snow since the stroke of midnight on the first of December, and Reagan’s commute only gets worse.
Reagan spends more time in her lab now than she does at home. Between trudging back to her brownstone in five feet of snow and staying in her blessedly warm and dry lab to get some extra work done; well, she’s already got the file loaded up, she might as well do it.
“Reagan, consider going home.” AlphaBeta says to her from his plexiglass cylinder.
She looks up from the papers she’s signing, and snorts. “Go home? Home to where my father is sitting on my couch preaching the bullshit gospel to Flat Earthers? Home where I feel like every second I spend there I’m going to implode? Absolutely not.”
AlphaBeta sighs. “It’s Christmas Eve, Reagan. Is there nobody you want to spend tonight and tomorrow with?”
“Uh, let me see, who would I tolerate spending this miserable money-suck of a holiday with? Ron’s in— where the fuck even is he, Bora Bora? Ron’s in Bora Bora, my mom’s writing another book and doesn’t answer her phone, Brett went home to his shit family for Christmas, and everyone else is at home. So I’m stuck with you.” Reagan ticks off her options on her fingers, laughing half-heartedly when she vocalizes her loneliness.
Reagan’s lab door was left cracked just the slightest bit open.
Brett walks down the hallway with a pep in his step, hoping to surprise Reagan with his presence. But when he stops outside the cracked-open lab door, he hears Reagan admit she’s alone for Christmas.
That absolutely will not stand.
His first thought is to bust into the lab and proclaim that she shouldn’t have to spend Christmas alone. But then he realizes she might just throw something at him and tell him to go fuck himself, so Brett hatches a better plan.
“Heyyy, Gi, do you know how to get into contact with Ron?” Brett says into the phone when he’s out of earshot of Reagan’s lab, already planning out the next fifteen hours he’d have to organize and execute his plan.
AlphaBeta rests his only hand on the glass of his tube, seeing Brett stand in the little crack in the lab door to listen and walk off, but he doesn’t say anything. “I think you’ll be surprised by the outcome of today.”
Reagan swirls the dregs of a cup of hot cocoa in her hand before she drains the cup, her nose wrinkling when she finds that it’s cold. “It’ll be like any other Christmas except I won’t have to listen to my mom scream at my dad for buying her a pair of socks with dicks on them because he thought it was funny.”
“Really? He did that?” AB asks, but he knows it’s well within Rand’s well of comedy.
“He did that.” Reagan rolls her eyes and sets her cup down on her desk. “I think I’m gonna take a nap. Maybe my meds. Night, AB.”
“Goodnight, Reagan.”
While Reagan settles down at her desk and rests her head on her arms, Brett is hard at work in the atrium.
“Everyone has pine garland, you…you easy-bake oven!!” He half-shouts down the phone to an on-demand decorator, who’s just told him that they couldn’t just supply him with an atrium’s worth of tinsel and pine garland.
Brett hangs up the phone, loosening his tie. Pacing the length of the atrium works him into a sweat, so he peels off his suit jacket. “If I can’t get pine garland and tinsel from someone else, then I’ll just find my own!”
He’s back on the phone by the time he skitters off down a back hallway to see if Cognito has any Christmas decorations hidden away from past days of joy.
When Reagan peels her eyes open again, it’s eleven pm, everyone in the building has definitely gone home, except for her. She looks over and AlphaBeta has powered off. “Huh. I wonder how Ron is doing.”
Reagan slides her phone out of her lab coat pocket, clapping her hands for her automated lab assistant to brew her a fresh cup of coffee and to fix her ponytail. She sits still for the moments it takes for the robotic hands to pull her hair tie out of her hair, and retie it up. Then, she shoots him a simple text.
Hey Ron. How’s Bora Bora?
She smiles unwittingly when he replies almost immediately.
Hi Rea. Bora Bora is good. Won’t be able to text you for a while. Wi-if’s going to be out.
The shadow gov literally controls the wifi?
No reply. Reagan frowns and closes her messages, opening up Amazon. She scrolls through her lists, little items she sets aside throughout the year in preparation just for this day.
And at 11:32, Reagan is about to test the limit of same-day shipping. She searches through each list with razor accuracy, digging out the best of the best for her crew. “If they’re not going to be here, I may as well get them something,” she rationalizes, grimacing at her total in the cart.
But then she realizes with a maniacal grin that she has access to the company debit card, and punches in the card details before she clicks buy. “It’s eleven thirty-seven. They’ve got…ah, about twenty minutes before I disappear them forever!”
Reagan sits back, leans her head over the back of her chair, and waits. She waits a little bit more. Gets up to close her lab door, which she must have left open, and sees that the hall lights are still on. “That’s odd. Thought I was the only one left in the building tonight.”
She ventures out into the hallway, flicks off the light, and slips right back into her lab, closing the door behind her. And then Reagan sits back at her desk and checks her phone. It’s 11:54. No package to be seen.
Maybe delirium takes over, but she starts to giggle uncharacteristically at being able to disappear some lowly minimum-wage Amazon employee when the deep state controls Amazon.
Brett is going full-throttle, balls to the wall, he’s never christmas’d this hard in his life. The entire atrium is decorated with pine and tinsel, ornaments hang from every available fixture that Brett could get his grubby hands on. There’s a meeting-room table that Brett dragged down that is almost entirely laden with food.
Anything and everything he could think of that Reagan might like; eggnog, peanut brittle, peppermint bark, he even found something called christmas crack on Pinterest and he made it!
Ron should be on his way soon, Gigi and the rest of the Squad will be in the atrium bright and early; they’re bringing hot chocolate and breakfast, Rand was very pointedly not invited.
The last thing he needed to do was his gift to Reagan. Brett sat down on a couch he dragged into the atrium right next to the twenty foot tree he found in a storage closet and decorated top to bottom. He put an angel on top and fell off the ladder.
He grabs both handles of a basket full of yarn, needles, and other things, and gets right to work. Brett hums his way through every christmas song he knows as he does it.
Reagan is sitting antsily at her desk. It’s 11:58, and she can practically taste the acid powder that they use to whisk people off to Shadow Prison X.
Just as the clock hits 11:59, and she’s about to shuffle-sort through the Amazon database for the worker tasked with bringing her her damned packages, she gets a notice on her phone.
Your package has been delivered at Cognito Inc !
“YES!! MY PACKAGE!!” Reagan eagerly pushes a button on her control panel and just like that, her box is on her desk at midnight exactly.
She stares at her package eagerly until the hit of exhaustion and nausea crashes into her all at once. “Wrapping these tomorrow.”
Reagan stumbles out of her chair onto a bed that can be pulled out of a wall. She curls up on the mattress she ordered especially for her lab, then custom modified specifically for her, burrows under her three blankets and comforter, and is put like a light.
Brett works all through the night, knitting, until nine am when the elevator down into the Cognito lobby opens and a bustle of people flow into the atrium.
“Brett Hand! This looks stunning!” Gigi says as she’s carrying a liquid dispenser, and Brett’s hoping there’s hot chocolate or at least coffee in there.
“Thank you! I did it all in two hours with only a minor injury!” Brett holds up both hands and there’s only a small bruise on his cheekbone.
Gigi pulls out her phone and snaps a couple pictures just for herself, walking over to their snack table and looking at the “christmas crack” accusingly. “Brett, what in the fucking white people is this?”
“I found it on Pinterest! It’s crackers and chocolate and peppermint and happiness!” Brett bounces from one foot to the other, oblivious to the look of obvious disgust Gigi is throwing at the dish.
“Yeah. Sure.” Gigi pushes the tray aside roughly, dropping the dispenser on the table and laying out a pile of red and green paper cups next to it.
“Gigi, what is in that? Exactly?” Brett hedges his way over to the table, poking at the dispenser cautiously.
“A mix of hot chocolate and coffee liquor!” Andre shouts from where he’s staring wide-eyed at the Christmas tree.
“Andre and Myc made it together. Totally unrelated, Myc couldn’t make it.” Gigi starts to tap away on her phone, tucking her hair behind her ear.
Gigi stalks around the atrium like a panther, tapping on ornaments and cackling in delight when they jingle or make stupid little noises. Her heels click on the tile floor, rattling the jingle bells and fairy lights strung up on the poles.
“Is Ron here yet?” Brett asks, tapping his fingers together. “Reags will be really disappointed if he’s not here for Christmas morning.”
“I hope he died!” Andre chimes in again, now wrapped up in a strand of Christmas lights.
Brett frowns and tugs on the sweater he knitted while he was waiting for the squad plus Ron to arrive. He fiddles with the fully wired and functional Christmas bulbs he wired into the sweater himself. Red fuzz gets stuck under his jagged nails, chipped from hours of chewing on them.
“Hope who died?” Ron asks as he walks in, pocketing a specialized security badge he got from Reagan and straightening his purple Illuminati tie.
“Not you!” Brett cheers, throwing a sweater full-force at him.
Ron catches it, and looks at it with both eyebrows raised into his hairline. It’s red and plain, but what scares and confuses him is the hole on the breast, surrounded by green tinsel. There’s a red pom-pom clipped to the collar, and googly eyes attached to a card that’s stuck to the same clip the pom-pom is on. “Brett, what is this ?”
“Oh!” Brett rushes over, carrying a pair of reindeer antlers. “So you take the shirt underneath off, and then you put the sweater on, and put the pom right here–and the googly eyes there and—done!” Brett steps back, and Ron is in the sweater.
The antlers are sitting on Ron’s head, and he’s in the sweater. One pec is visible through the hole in the sweater, there’s a pom on his nipple, and googly eyes just above it. “Brettward Hand, what the hell am I wearing?”
“You almost knew my name! I knit you a sweater, but I ran out of yarn three fourths of the way through so I made you a breathing hole for your chest!” Brett tosses Ron’s shirt, blazer and tie onto the couch and pours himself a mixture of cocoa-liquor and sprays whipped cream on top of it.
He blinks, slowly, trying to comprehend what this fidgety dirty blond has put him in. Then Ron catches sight of a table with food and drink on it. “Is that eggnog ?”
Ron pushes past everyone to the punchbowl of eggnog, pulling a flask out of the pocket of his dress slacks and pouring it into the bowl, stirring it heartily and pouring himself a glass. He drinks it down in one gulp and sighs heavily, “Hallelujah, praise Jesus and Christ for nog.”
“Ron, we faked Jesus, you know that,” Brett says kindly, cupping both hands around his cup.
“Didn’t know that,” Ron drawls sarcastically, downing another cup of eggnog.
The rest of the people in the room nod appreciatively, but Brett launches into a monologue about how he found out that they had faked Jesus in one of his first days in the office, and he was just so torn up about it, all while Ron drains half the bowl of eggnog cup by cup, Andre’s licking an ornament while Glenn yells for him to stop, and Gigi is what appears to be sexting.
“...and then Reags gave me ten dollars to shut up and watch The Growing Years!” Brett finishes his story after five minutes with as much zeal as Andre hopped up on Myc’s goo mixed with cocaine.
Ron turns around when he hears Reagan mentioned, clinging to his cup of eggnog. “Rea? Is she here? I didn’t get her anything but–”
“Shut up, you hot Illuminati fuck. You’re the first thing that’s made Reagan genuinely happy since she got to reinstate and then explode the Soviet Union. She’ll combust into a million pieces just seeing you here,” Gigi chimes in from where she’s now sat down.
“Plus, you’re here as a surprise!” Brett says, coming up behind him and pushing him off towards a corner behind the Christmas tree. “Everyday Reags is out here at nine-forty on the dot because she’s looking for her meds. And it is….nine thirty-eight!”
Ron shuffled into his secluded corner with his half-full cup of eggnog, and everyone else disperses into hiding spots. Brett flicks off the lights before he hides behind the tree.
Reagan’s been awake since seven in the morning. She’s dug out the centuries old wrapping paper at the very bottom of the furthest bin in her storage system, and it shows. It’s patterned exactly like the 80’s hopped up on coke.
“And that’s Brett’s done, that should be everyone, right we’re all good,” Reagan mutters as she finishes wrapping up her gifts, looking blearily at the clock for the time. “Shit! Where are my meds?”
She’s got no time to leave and come back for her gifts if she wants to even DREAM of getting them to their desired places before Christmas day is over, so Reagan scoops them all up into her arms and pushes the button to open her lab door with her elbow, racing down the hall into the atrium.
The lights in the atrium are suspiciously off, and Reagan slows her steps as she makes it all the way in. It’s quiet, too.
“Hello? Guys?” Reagan asks into the quiet stillness.
“MERRY CHRISTMAS!” screams everyone in the room, and the lights flick on.
Reagan is blinded and temporarily dazzled by the lights and colors, distracted by the Christmas tree and amused by the pair of ornaments hung craftily underneath a candy cane.
“Merry Christmas Reags!” Brett says as he jogs up to her, holding his arms out wide.
She smiles softly and sets her gifts down on the floor, allowing herself to be picked up and spun by Brett. “Merry Christmas, Brett. Wow, that is an ugly sweater. When did you even have time to do all of this? It’s incredible, but there’s no way there was a store open late enough with this much tinsel.”
“There wasn’t!” Brett starts as he sets her down. “So I went digging and found a box of a bunch of decorations from the 90’s.”
“Wow, those are old. Hey, is that peppermint bark?” Reagan leans around Brett and makes a beeline for the snacks, grabbing the entire plate of peppermint bark and sitting down on the floor.
Half the plate is gone before Brett makes it over to her and pulls her up. “You’ll make yourself sick, Reags.”
“So will Glenn on that white people shit he’s got,” Reagan snorts, pointing at Glenn, who’s holding onto the tray of Christmas crack with a piece hanging out of his mouth.
Brett steers Reagan back towards the center of the room, making hasty eye contact with Ron, who looks back at him cautiously. “What’d you bring with you? New assignments?”
“Oh, uh, no. They’re gifts. Because I…I—fuck it, I can’t say it.” Reagan pushes a button on her watch, and a holographic model of her face pops up and says “I tolerate you.”
“We tolerate you too, Reagan. I’ll help you pass these out.” Brett bends down and gathers a few gifts in his arms, reading the hastily scribbled names on the paper.
Reagan sets Myc’s down onto a table since he isn’t here, and hands the rest of what she has out to their recipients. Brett does the same, but he hands Reagan the gift meant for Ron and sits down with his own.
“You guys can open them,” she says, sitting down on the floor and twiddling her thumbs nervously.
Gigi is the first to tear into hers, and when she sees what’s inside it she screams with laughter. “ELON MUSK’S REMOTE CONTROL!” She immediately pushes a bright red button and a screen comes down; Elon Musk just pissed himself.
“Glad you like it, Gigi,” Reagan says as Gigi has a field day with her new toy.
She gave Andre a sample of an under colonized mushroom that they found in the earth’s core and Glenn a candle that was supposed to smell like gunpowder and shrimp. But she’s pretty sure it’s really just vanilla.
Brett carefully tears into his gift, lifts the lid on the box inside, and almost breaks into tears. It’s a golden retriever hand puppet with a tie that looks suspiciously like Brett’s own. “Are you crying ?”
“No! My eyes are malfunctioning!” Brett says as he wipes away tears.
Reagan bites into another piece of peppermint bark when she reclaims the plate, smiling at Brett playing with his puppet.
“Oh! Reags, I almost forgot, I got you something too!” Brett stands up and lays the puppet gently back in its box.
“No, you shouldn’t have—like really, you shouldn’t have, why the fuck would you do that,” Reagan basically pleads, but Brett is dead set.
“Close your eyes.” Reagan closes them.
Brett summons Ron forward and motions for him to stand behind Reagan.
“Hold out your hands.” She does.
Ron stands behind Reagan.
“Hey, Rea.”
Reagan flinches and reflexively almost punches Ron in the balls. She opens her eyes and turns around, taking in Ron’s face. And then his sweater. She starts laughing, and that’s when he realizes she’s crying a little bit and pulls her into his chest. “Merry Christmas, Reagan.”
“Merry Christmas, Staedtler. What’s with the sweater? You know it’s absolutely buttfuck ugly, right?” She asks, poking him right in the pom-pom covered nipple.
“Brett made it for me, and I acknowledge that it’s ugly but he also stole my shirt so I don’t have anything else to wear.”
Reagan laughs, fiddling with the tinsel. “Maybe we should celebrate Christmas more often if this is what you show up in. Too bad I don’t have one,” she says sarcastically.
“Actually, Reags, I got you two things! One was Staedtler, and the other was this.” Brett pulls a blue knit sweater from behind his back, and holds it up for her to see.
It’s definitely a sight, with a little brown reindeer on the front with a red nose and Reagan’s lab coat. It says “Reagan the red-nosed reindeer” in red yarn. She separates herself from Ron and takes the sweater, marveling in it, before shucking off her lab coat and pulling on the sweater. “THERE! Now I'm ready to celebrate this infernal holiday.”
“That’s the spirit!” Brett cheers as Andre chugs a cup of cocoa/alcohol, and Ron pulls Reagan back into him.
“Did you get me anything?” He asks quietly, holding onto her.
Reagan snorts. “Pretentious AND assumptious. Yes, I did get you something.”
They lean together, Reagan grabs the gift, and they stand back up straight. She hands it to Ron, who opens it and inspects the little wallet carefully. “Thank you for the…wallet?”
“Open it, you idiot.” Reagan watches as he opens the wallet and looks at the identification card he finds inside. “It’s an ID for a part-time job at Cognito. We’re officially colleagues.”
The only thing Ron says is, “I can’t wait to mess with the temperature dial in your lab.”
“Kiss! Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!” The other people in the building chant, as the two of them look up with the ID between them to see mistletoe hanging above them.
“Tis the season, right?” Ron says, and Reagan leans on her toes, and he kisses her.
“‘Tis the goddamn season, and merry fucking Christmas.”