In a turn of events that would shock exactly zero people who knew him even in passing, Dr. Jericho Rost did not keep track of holidays. Or birthdays. Or anniversaries, or any other sort of thing that people liked to celebrate the dates of. Time had never been his friend, unless it was being utilized in an experiment; it was one of the reasons that the Skrull rules had chaffed so badly. He didn't like to be constrained by timetables or expected arrivals and departures. He worked when he wanted to work (which was basically always), and left when he wanted to leave. It helped that the labs were a bit like a casino in the sense that they lacked any real way to tell time on the inside, outside of whatever phone one might have on them.
So it wasn't really so much that he
forgot Christmas. That was practically impossible anyway, what with the decorations everywhere aboveground and all of the trees (and the few nods here and there to whatever other religions celebrated here). He refused to allow anything like that in the labs themselves, but he'd still heard a person or two listening to carols while they worked. He didn't get it. But then, it wasn't his religion, so he supposed that made sense. He knew the holiday was fast approaching and that people were taking time off, and then one day he was alone in the labs and realized from a generic post pinging on his phone that people were awake and opening Christmas presents.
A twinge in the back of his mind had hit him, then, at the thought of going upstairs. It had been her favorite holiday. The girl that he'd been connected to by Essex. One of the million strange details about her that had suddenly appeared in his mind when they were brought together, and refused to leave. He didn't want to think about her, and especially not today, so he forced himself to stay downstairs past when he wanted to go up and sleep, just to make sure that he worked through the period.
It seemed safe enough now, days later, except then Ziggy had asked him what he'd gotten Bobby as a present and he realized that he'd fucked up. They still hadn't even bothered to give a name to whatever they were, but even someone as stunted as Jer knew that he was closer to this man than he had been with any of his other partners. He should have gotten him something. A normal person would've. It actually made him feel slightly bad -- something he wasn't used to at all -- and he couldn't sit right with it. Which was why he was at Bobby's classroom now, where he'd been told the other was working on grading finals.
He was smiling as he approached, hands behind his back, and held out a wrapped package as a greeting. For someone with the brains and degrees and precision that Jericho had, it looked like he'd used about half a roll of paper and an entire thing of tape before letting a toddler give it a mark of approval, but still. He couldn't even remember the last time he'd wrapped a present. "Someone told me it was Christmas a few days ago."
(Bobby!) 
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