Chapter Text
Chapter One
December 6th, 1982
'I swear to God,' his mother bit out, voice half-mad and half-exasperated, 'if you don't get back to your bed, I'm going to cuff you to it.'
'But Mom, I'm not even tired!'
'I don't care, your bedtime was an hour ago! Your Aunt Jamie will be here any minute and when she arrives, I don't want to see one inch of you.'
'Please Mom, I know Jamie! Just half an hour, then I promise I'll go straight to sleep. I'm not five anymore.'
Clasping his hands together in mock prayer, she was half surprised that he had resisted the urge to drop to his knees alongside the plea. A stray thread, loose from the edge of his worn pyjama top, brushed against the nape of his neck, illuminated from behind by the glow of Christmas lights on the tree.
She sighed, the deep and heavy sigh that comes from below the ribcage and resonates in the bones on its way out, and pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes until colour spiralled into life behind her closed eyelids.
'Fifteen more minutes. Fifteen minutes, and then you go to your room you sleep.'
'Yes! I promise Mom, you won't regret it.'
'I already am.'
Falling back into the couch, she listened to the sound of his bare feet vanish off into the kitchenette, a cupboard swinging open. Her bones ached, and she was desperate for sleep. Work had been torturous, long hours bleeding into longer hours; neighbours thankfully opening their homes for an hour or two each night after school was the only thing that stopped her from having to pay for childcare too. Nick may not have been five anymore, but he still hadn't long hit teenage years, and she wouldn't have been able to live with herself if she had to leave him home alone at that age, day after day.
Ever since David had left – been kicked out, rather, and had finally stopped coming back – things had been difficult. Not that saying so meant that things had ever been easy, but rather the difficulties that had once been personal and private had become cold, hard economics. Covering shifts and working until her feet bled, the cardboard falling out of the bottom of her shoes, was the only thing that kept food in their stomachs and promised a glimmer of a gift for Nick.
Aunt Jamie was doing well enough that she was able to help out, but it wasn't enough to make up for everything. Still, she was grateful; without her, they might not have been able to afford both electricity and a Christmas meal.
The sound of pattering feet came back, an encore that had her bracing herself as Nick's weight impacted the couch beside her. Handing her a candy cane, he smiled and unwrapped the plastic on his own. On another day, she might have said no, but the energy wasn't there.
'You're going to have to brush your teeth again, you know?'
'I know,' he said. 'Don't worry about me.'
'I'll always worry about you. That's what moms do.'
Shying away from the sentiment in the manner most typical to younger boys, Nick firmly placed the sugary candy into his mouth, and she smiled to herself. She'd leave the candy cane he'd brought through and put it back in the box; he would never even notice, and he'd appreciate having one left for himself in a few day's time.
The fifteen minutes passed by, and Nick seemed not to have noticed, but as he cuddled into her arm, she found it difficult to send him off to his room. The apartment was cold, outside all frost and snowfall, but heat pooled around the two of them where decorations on the walls trapped warmth and the fiery glow of the tree cast tongues of glass-flame across the carpet and couch. Despite their best efforts, it had never quite felt the same anywhere else, and she was loathe to tear it away from him.
Eventually, circumstances dictated the change for them.
A hammering came at the door, and she leapt from the edge of rest into movement, blinking any hint of sleep from her eyes. Without stopping, she continued her motion towards the door and quickly undid both the sliding lock and inserted the key into the door, before swinging it open.
Jamie barrelled in, her coat buttoned tight over her chest and a bundle of scarves still glinting with the occasional intact snowflake whose crystal had been insulated from her body heat by their wool catching in the light. Setting down her bags, she turned immediately to face her shell-shocked host and took no opportunity to remove her voluminous coat.
'You two,' she said, gesturing wildly with one hand in the rough direction of the rest of the apartment, 'need to get your shoes on. Shoes and coat, come on, we need to be out there!'
Befuddlement slid into place where fatigue was slowly slipping away.
'What on Earth are you talking about?'
'Scion's overhead.'
By the time the three of them made their way outside, wrapped tight in layers of coats and cardigans, shoes crammed on in a rush and awkwardly rolled at the heel, laces lolling on either side, everyone else had too.
For the most part, people kept to themselves, and as such it was rare to see such a gathering; the full range of their local population on display, it always surprised Nicholas how many people fit inside these buildings. It was as though they vanished, most days, disappearing into nowhere, but when the occasional called for them to spill into the streets their number was almost uncountable.
To their left Nicholas saw Alex, the janitor, standing near the door with a suspicious look on his face, gaze roaming between the symbol of their gathered fixations and the door, an overly vigilant expression on his low brow. A cigarette hung from his fingers, the smoke-trail holding together far past where it would generally lose coherence, the gelid winter's air preserving its form.
On their right, he saw Miss Andrea; an older woman, her glasses were thicker than the soles of his shoes, and she stooped low with a back bent under the years. Despite this, her movements were sprightly and animated, and it was with Miss Andrea that he occasionally spent the early afternoons upon returning from school, waiting for his Mom to get home.
Beyond that, a veritable smorgasbord of humanity spilled out before him; brown coats milling about around one another like shoals of leathery fish, the soft swish of fabric against fabric murmuring atop the subtle crunch of the snow as it was stomped underfoot; the dark shadows cast by the streetlights slicing figures in two as they moved towards loved ones and friends, eyes upturned to the sky as they fumbled into one another with an easy forgiveness. Frigid air warmed rapidly between them, and one could have almost been fooled for thinking it was April if judging from temperature alone, the massed heat of their gathering erasing the hesitant chill of December.
Above them, alight with a golden iridescence, was Scion. Shaped almost as though constructed from the unified totality of mankind's aesthetic image, he was breadth without intimidation; height without precarity; and a handsomeness which never trespassed far from approachable. His Vitruvian frame hung in the sky like a star, shining brighter than any of the others, and beneath him they all felt his glow like a warm embrace.
Nicholas' feigned teenage indifference was unable to stand up to the significance of the moment, and his icy cheeks found themselves opened wide in a toothy grin which revealed both of his missing teeth; a late bloomer, he was still working his way through his baby teeth and with a moment of realisation sparked by the infiltration of bitter air into the gap, he shoved his candy cane into the space between and re-asserted the seriousness of his visage.
All eyes stayed glued to the Golden Man, whose light poured upon them as a blessing, and Nicholas felt a heat stir and build in his heart. Looking down on them, Scion seemed almost unreal, and yet there was an undeniable firmness to his presence, as though he existed not just in this moment or in this place, but at all times and places; as though wherever Nicholas went, there would be a Scion to illuminate the path. Heat turned to a burning, and the young man wrapped his hand around his mother's, squeezing firmly. For a brief moment, though he would only half believe it when recounting the tale to others the next day, Nicholas swore that Scion had looked down upon him in specific and the two of them had shared a glance more direct and connected than anyone else had.
'Make a wish, Nicky,' Aunt Jamie said. 'You won't see him again in person for a while, unless you're very lucky.'
And so he did; the most generic of wishes, but one which he would never find himself regretting.
The entity looked down on those who had gathered below it with a curiosity. Each of them craned their necks towards it, catching eager glances of its form, and he did nothing, simply allowing them to watch. Their presence was nothing, though it felt from them the needling of their gaze, and averted his its eyes; having adopted the form of the planet's hosts, it found that there was an advantage to dividing up the natural senses of their fallible bodies with the greater senses that allowed it to survey the planet more generally. Absence while remaining present. It assured them, made them feel as though they were watched over. The entity did not understand, nor did it attempt to.
Alone, it wandered. The Earth was small, in comparison to many planets, and it found itself making circuits with regularity and without difficulty; the native fauna of the planet was not particularly interesting beyond the extent of scientific curiosity, and offered little in the way of biological processes to borrow or social mechanics from which to learn. Nevertheless, the entity continued to roam and catalogue, for without its partner there was little else to do.
Disturbed, the cycle had withered on the vine, and until the man in England had given it instructions, the entity had been doing nothing much at all. Even now, the actions in which it partook required little energy, and despite the reactions from those it saved matching all indications of happiness and appreciation, the entity never felt anything beyond a sense of intrigue in response.
They were, to the entity, writhing in helplessness, and eager only to take.
Still, with the cycle having been interrupted, the entity had been forced to resort to engaging with them directly; it did not fool itself into believing that the mental capacities to engineer a functional cycle existed without its partner, the more cerebral of the pair. Instead, it had resorted to that most clumsy of methods of perpetuating the cycle; stripping off its own shards manually, attempting to duplicate the frequency of its own dispersal so as to mirror the scattering of shards that would have come had the two entities begun their mission in earnest.
Inefficient as it was, it was nevertheless something, and for reasons that the entity could not quite fathom, it felt important to do something. The alternative was to do nothing at all, other than serve according to the instructions given by the man who had named it, and while that certainly seemed to satiate much of the entity's time, it did little to advance the cause.
Those gathered below had little potential; few of them had the spark which prompted connection, and as the entity scanned them, it found itself momentarily panicked. A sensation which had been absent since its early days of crawling adolescence, panic was not desirable. However, echoing the psychologies of the planet's host species, it was understandable; the cycle was all, and in moments of contemplation the enormity of attempting to reverse-engineer the Thinker's role in things by its own efforts left the Warrior bereft. It did not know how to do this.
Reaching out for the first connection which seemed prepared to accept a power, the entity cast itself into the mind of the child. Among those gathered, it was the one which reached out to it most ardently, grasping with a pitifully small mind. Small, skin darker than some of those around him but lighter than both of the women nearby, the child was still young enough to have a sense of possibility, and the entity therefore felt a muted relief. Inserting shard connections whilst young often helped when shaping a power, as it permitted the still-creative mind of the host to forge the outward shape of their abilities, something much more difficult in the calcified minds of the adult members of the species.
Within the child's mind, the entity read images of flying figures in the sky, conjuring tricks and the fluidity of form. It saw images of a large figure in red, infiltrating the strongholds of others and drawing from their minds their desires; from this, the entity began to craft a connection which would support these images. Tied to the moment of the year, powers waxing with the onset of winter, a connection stronger than most in the child's subconscious, the entity did not understand the purpose but emulated it faithfully. Allowing the host to guide the form of their capacities was the only method by which the Warrior might glean something new.
And once it had created the link, the entity finished pouring in the crystalisation of the child's thoughts, before taking its leave. The skies beckoned.
December 13th, 1982
His recovery was slow, but steady. His mom had fretted and fawned over him, but he was old enough that she could be convinced to leave him alone in their apartment while she went off to work, knowing that the neighbours were never more than a phone call away. Struck ill, she suspected from the foolishness of heading out into the night a week earlier to see the Golden Man without hat and gloves, he had been largely bedridden anyway.
Waking the next morning, he had been shaken, but no more than that. Able to clamber from his bed, go about his morning routine, and prepare for the day – until the moment came for him to leave the house. A steady accumulation of fatigue hit him all at once, and any scepticism his Mom might have had about a posed illness, conveniently timed to begin the Christmas holiday much earlier than it was due, had slipped away. By the time had thrown up on the rug, she had ushered him off to bed and called in both to school and to work with excuses.
Unable to afford more than a single day, however, she had been back to work the net day, and Nicholas had been left to put himself back together over time.
Things had been rough at first, his head rent open by pulsing headaches that seemed to come at the most inopportune times. They woke him in the dead of night, leaving him curled with tears in his eyes, or swept his feet from under him as he attempted to put together some food that his body would accept. Shivers racked his body, and he found himself having to push past his limits for even the most basic of actions.
For a brief time, he wondered – even though he admitted to himself that it was dramatic beyond belief – if this was to be his final Christmas. The thought hadn't lasted long, and had only come about in the delirium of a particularly hideous migraine, but the thought of the thought had lingered and unsettled him.
Eventually, however, after a few days the headaches began to wane. Not entirely; there was still an insistent pressure that engulfed his skull almost once an hour exactly, squeezing his head so tightly he wondered if there might be bruises in the shape of fingers left across his scalp. Nevertheless, the pain shrank away, day on night and day on night, and with it some of his other more serious symptoms regressed as well.
And the pain turned to knowledge.
Peculiar as it was, Nicholas found himself knowing things. How much seemed to change, growing smaller by the day, and he began to attribute those earlier migraines to a simple overload of the mind, and it wasn't until four days had passed that he had begun being able to pick out information from the crush of ideas filtering into his head.
Bizarre as it might have seemed, he knew – with a powerful confidence that he would've been unable to explain to anyone – what people wanted for Christmas. For a time, he hadn't really believed it himself either, brushing it off as an absurd symptom of hallucination brought on by days of sickness and high temperature, but the facts seemed to be consistent and plausible.
When his mother had come home from work on that first day of clarity and he had known without ambiguity that she wanted nothing more than a break, he had been filled in that instant with the strength it took for him to spend the next day cleaning up the apartment, items finding their places for him without a moment's thought, dust seemingly fading away under his stare, and preparing a meal that sat warming in the oven timed precisely for her arrival at home.
She'd cried when she had seen it, and wrapped him in a hug so tight that he felt five years old once again. After the tears had stopped, she had remained watery eyed for the rest of the night, and he had shoved to the back of his mind more of his knowledge; her desire for happiness for him, while he knew it to be selfish on his part, satisfied more than anything his own wishes.
Upon the coming of the end of the week, he had begun testing things out more and more clearly; the actions he had found so easy upon the day of cleaning came more and reliably. With a swish of his hand or even, in many cases, a mere thought, he was able to move things around, even popping them out of existence and bringing them to somewhere else entirely without any need for travel time.
Once, desperate for a strip of tape to help put some fallen tinsel back in its place before his mother's return, an entire roll of the stuff had simply metamorphosed from the air before being swallowed back up by the same after its use was fulfilled. Instinctively, with the same confidence as he knew the Desires of others, he knew that he could call it back.
He had powers. Indeed, the same powers he could apply to other things, he found he could apply to himself; by the time he had reached full strength, sickness fleeing his limbs, he could teleport the apartment with ease and generate within arm's distance anything he needed at all. A new pair of sneakers came from nothing, as did a stack of comics that seemed entirely up to date. Time passed with inevitable weight, and as it did, the powers seemed to grow only stronger.
Nicholas was not a stupid person. Perhaps a little reckless, foolhardy – possessed of the typical obstinance and strange empathy so typical and at odds with themselves in the teenage component of the human species – but things came together rather rapidly for him.
Capable of conjuring almost anything he had thus far tried in his hands and placing it within what could only be described as a pocket dimension; the ability to teleport from spot to spot; the capacity to warp the world around him to his desires – all seeming to grow stronger as the solstice approached and enrobed in the absolute knowledge of what other people wanted or needed in their lives.
At thirteen years old, Nicholas sat on his bed, blankets gathered around him and the clearing scent of sickness being banished by soft clean cotton, and mulled over the consequences.
Just how and when had he become Santa Claus?