Who: Julius Weaver and Petra Danvers What: The man who never asks for help meets the woman who can't walk away when someone needs it. Where: New York City When: Thursday, December 21; evening Warnings: Panic attacks, discussion of past violence, anything else TBD
Christmas wasn't the easiest time of year for anybody old enough to have stopped believing in Santa Claus.
Jules could remember loving Christmas. He'd always got every toy he'd wanted and he'd known that meant that he was a very good boy. That in itself had almost been more rewarding than the presents themselves. Once, Jules had been the kind of little boy who needed to know that he was good, that he'd pleased every adult authority figure in his life. That everyone liked him. Then had come the revelation that Santa was just his parents and a little of the magic had faded from the world. All that getting everything he wanted meant then was that his parents could afford it. It was nothing special. When they stopped buying presents at all and started giving him money to get whatever he wanted instead it had stopped being anything special at all and just turned into another day.
Now Christmas was about making sure that he'd gotten presents that showed the family members they were for that Jules cared and that he'd paid enough attention to them to know what they wanted. It was one more thing for Jules to hold himself to impossibly high standards over and it was one more thing to beat himself up over when he didn't come up with the perfect gift idea but it was what he did anyway. Every New Year's he made a resolution that he was going to be less hard on himself next year. Every year by Christmas he was back into the same hole.
That was without worrying about the office Christmas party the next night, the Secret Santa gift that he was supposed to bring and the separate gift that he made sure to pick up for his personal assistant... and it was without worrying about what the family Christmas was going to be like that year, if anyone would be hard on Kassidy. If Jules would sit there knowing that if he'd spoken up she wouldn't be carrying the weight of being a reincarnate on her own. There was worrying about whether his mysterious sometimes-visitor had a family to be with for the holiday and there were a million different organizations that Jules was involved in either personally or as RP for the company that needed just that little bit more at this time of the year.
His thoughts were already spiraling faster than he could keep up with, fast enough to pull him in so many directions that the idea of handling all of them made his heart thunder in his ears, when a car backfired.
There were some ways that it was different, when it was Goody that panicked first. From the outside it looked exactly the same though. Jules froze with shaking hands and a racing heart and Goody was way up high with a man in his sights and a bullet speeding away from his gun and there was death, so much death. There was another name on the list and another body on the pile. They weren't there, Jules told Goody within the safety of his own head. There wasn't a man in their sights. They didn't even have a gun. It was safe, safe, safe as could be.
Their head spun; they weren't sure how they were supposed to hold a gun with shaking hands and a spinning head. They didn't know how they could run away when there wasn't any air in the whole damned world to breathe in. Quietly their world fell apart and all they could do was stand in the middle of the sidewalk and stare glassy-eyed at nothing.