The twenty-fourth of December had come round and even to someone not interested in, or invited to for that matter, the excitement of Christmas Eve, Brennan could certainly feel it, buzzing in the air of the safehouse. He hadn't been keen on the holiday, even back when he still had relations and people who wanted to see him for the holidays. It was a commercialized waste of time, and he passed it off as such, not accepting anything, though he usually bought things for his mother an brother to appease them. If anyone could have been the Grinch or Scrooge, it might have been him, but that was fine with him. The one thing he did appreciate about Christmas was its ability to bring families and people together. Even the scattered families and collections of survivors inside the safehouses came together to celebrate. It was such a human thing to do, to grasp onto things like this and keep themselves going.
While he wasn't ready to let himself be human just yet, he couldn't help but notice a small change in himself. He knew it had all to do with his breakdown on the eighteenth, with meeting Kate. He hadn't seen her since that night, and he wasn't going to start chasing her down. Change is hard for him, and while he knows that it's happening, that something beyond his control is happening, he isn't going to try and speed it up. Brennan knew it would take time for him to adjust and while he knew he wanted her around, his fear of uncertainty would not make him a great companion at times. Though he couldn't imagine that really stopping her if she was as determined as she seemed.
People paid him no real attention when he had left to go upstairs to the second floor, but when he returned after a quiet patrol, he noticed that some of the survivors were staring at him, or staring at the door to the periodicals room; some where whispering, but he couldn't really hear any specific words and the noise of collective whispering always annoyed him anyways.
He was unsettled, but he made his way towards the periodicals room -he still can't call it his- trying not to think too much about them. They might just be remarking that he was ever strange, patrolling the second floor on the eve of a holiday, alone, as usual. As he got closer to the door, it smelled like something was cooking, but he couldn't really place where the smell was coming from. Opening the door, he was met with a barrage of Christmas decorations covering the usually empty, cold and bare room. He was confused, and a strange combination of slightly amused and annoyed at the same time.
Brennan could appreciate the effort that it took to do something like this, though he couldn't figure out why someone would go out of their way to do it. It might have been done for him since he was the lone occupant of the room, but the faces of the people outside had not been so kind-hearted despite the nature of the holiday. Whatever negative emotions he might have felt when he saw the decorations faded when he figured out that it must have been Kate's doing. And whatever had been cooking that he could smell out in the main room was clearly somewhere in this room.
There was a little tree set up, and it brought a smile to his face, an honest to god smile. Where she had gotten all of this, he couldn't imagine. Maybe she was indeed some kind of faerie.
He walked in, taking in all the effort she had put into making this small little refuge into some wonderland, finding the survivalist's version of a Christmas dinner set out. The tree with the lone gift underneath it caught most of his attention before he saw Kate. He would have actually felt guilty for turning up empty-handed had he not already, if anonymously, left her something earlier in the evening.
There was no one in his life that would have ever called him romantic, but there was honestly something to seeing Kate, that beautiful faerie, in the glow of those lights that he never would have believed in before he'd met her. He was pretty speechless.
"Thank you," was all he could say, as he dropped his bag on the floor, somewhere out of the way. Brennan tried to think of something else to say, but nothing was coming to him. He just smiled.