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Dec 26, 2015

My gift to @ame-kuma2 for the @dgmsecretsanta! Merry Christmas, ame-kuma2 (even if it’s actually after Christmas)! I hope you like it.

Warnings: One instance of almost-swearing. Created from humor and cheese.

Pairings: Slight Marie/Miranda, slight Lavi/Lenalee, slight Allen/Kanda.

Timeline: Supposedly after the Order’s move but before Cross’ death (is there such a time? I’m not sure). That means that technically Link is there whenever Allen is, but he is not mentioned even once. Oops.

Word count: 3,757.

The whole thing started because of Allen.

“Whaaat? Allen, it’s your birthday?” Lavi exclaimed.

Allen blinked at him. “Well, yes. That is, the twenty-fifth is my birthday.” He clearly didn’t think anything of it.

Lavi was horrified.

“Allen! That’s tomorrow!”

“Oh. I suppose is it,” Allen said with another blink, further horrifying Lavi. Allen, for his part, couldn’t understand why Lavi was so upset about this when nobody else had mentioned their birthdays even once in the year Allen had known them. Of course he wouldn’t have mentioned his either.

Lavi took this as a sign that Allen was a lost cause, and so he promptly ditched Allen (temporarily!) for a better Christmas-and-Allen’s-birthday partner. Lenalee, at least, shared his horror; together, they decided that they definitely had to celebrate Christmas-and-Allen’s-birthday this year.

(The name was a work in progress, but Lavi was rather fond of it. In his opinion, it got the point across effectively and had a nice ring to it. Lenalee disagreed.)

It had been a while since any of them had celebrated Christmas, was the thing. In fact, Lenalee and Kanda couldn’t remember ever celebrating Christmas, which was, according to Lavi, just as tragic as Allen’s failure to mention that it was his birthday. Lavi’s melodramatic tendencies aside, it meant that they were left relying on Allen and Lavi for knowledge of Christmas celebrations.

(Lenalee and Lavi had considered making it a surprise birthday party, but, since they figured it was a bad idea to startle Allen and also because they needed his help, they’d decided against it.)

Allen, whose Christmases had been on the road when he’d had one at all, was only able to offer that they should do something together, as a group. He also mentioned large amounts of food, because large amounts of food were never a bad thing.

Lavi had a bunch of ideas for Christmas traditions. These ideas included a Christmas tree, a wreath, tinsel, mistletoe, candles, punch (of the spiked variety, of course), presents, a Christmas dinner, saying Grace, and other increasingly outlandish things that were vetoed by Lenalee long before being suggested to Allen or Kanda.

Presents, in the end, were also excluded, since nobody they knew was particularly materialistic (except for Cross, but Allen violently opposed the mention of him) and none of them exactly had a lot of opportunities for shopping. Although it was possibly unfair to Allen, none of them knew what they’d get him anyway – there were no physical objects that could really make him happy.

Dinner was easy enough to manage; they asked Jeryy to make a lot of food for them. And they did mean a lot; enough that even Allen wouldn’t be able to eat all of it. In return, they promised to help him in the kitchen for one day each upon request (because Jeryy was scary and in charge of all of the Order’s food and they wanted to stay on his good side).

Lenalee produced Christmas decorations from somewhere (seriously, though, none of them remember packing or moving the things, so where did they come from? Lenalee wasn’t telling). These decorations included a fir tree (real and somehow alive) and the proper ornaments, garlands, wreaths, strange glowing orbs of light connected by string (it was concluded that she got those from the Science Division; everybody was properly wary of them), and mistletoe. Lavi knew there was a reason he liked this girl.

Naturally, Lenalee made her fellow exorcists – meaning Lavi, Kanda, and Allen – help her decorate. Lavi was entirely too happy to help; enough so that Lenalee was a bit suspicious. Allen was a more normal level of happy – politely courteous as he always was but genuinely pleased at the same time. Kanda was not happy at all and would, in fact, much rather be somewhere else; however, he had no choice in the matter and Lenalee’s puppy-dog eyes trumped all his complaints.

Because the Order building also had many cheerless, humorless Order officials living in it, ones who certainly didn’t appreciate the holiday spirit, they couldn’t really decorate the entire HQ. Everywhere people normally went was off-limits, as was the Science Division, because, even though it didn’t get many passersby and they’d probably be able to get permission from the scientists, it was too dangerous with whatever experiments they could be doing there. Headquarters was a big place, though, and it wasn’t hard to find a clearly unused room that was large and out-of-the-way enough.

Given that Lenalee apparently had enough to decorate the entire Headquarters, however, the result was that they had entirely too many decorations. Despite the high number of decorations to places to decorate, Lenalee, Lavi, and Allen were determined to use all of the decorations. Kanda grudgingly but with surprising zeal helped them decorate and then over-decorate the room they were using.

(Secretly, this was because The Three – Kanda felt their moniker deserved capital letters – had decided that any unused decorations would have to be put in their rooms instead, and Kanda was not having any of that crap in his room. If the result was a room so Christmassy it probably featured in Santa Claus’ dreams, so be it.)

“Well, it’s certainly… decorated,” Allen decided as they surveyed the product of their work.

Lavi grinned. “It’s got character, man!” he crowed.

They’d put the large dining table in the center of the room, and it was covered with a simple white cloth and nothing else. The table was not the problem.

They had decided to put the Christmas tree – thankfully they’d only had one – in one corner; it was too tall for the room, causing the top of it to bend over, although that might have also been due to the weight of three tree topper decorations, and it was covered in ornaments. There was not a single branch that didn’t have at least one ornament, and most had two or even three. A string of garland wrapped around the tree, but it had turned out to be too long, so they’d had to wrap it completely around the tree three or four times, causing the green of the tree to be almost completely concealed by the garish white and red of the garland. The strange glowing orbs connected by string were also wrapped around the tree, but were visible only because they glowed.

And then there was the rest of the room.

They’d had so many garlands that they had covered the entirety of all four walls – double thick. Given that the garlands were different colors – white and red for one type and green and gold for the other– this created an interesting effect. Also strung along the walls at the top and bottom were the strings of light, which, again, were nearly hidden in the garland except for their glow (“Uh, Lenalee… isn’t that a fire hazard?” “What? No, of course not. They’re perfectly safe.”).

On top of the garlands, they’d pinned wreaths, all green with gold-red-white adornments on them. One wreath ended up on each wall in addition to the one on the door. Along the perimeter of the room was a line of candles squished as close together as they could be; only in front of the door was free. They didn’t intend to actually light the candles, as electric lighting was more efficient and less of a fire hazard, and so they hadn’t known what to do with them. Finally, Lavi had pinned mistletoe in the doorway (there was only the one visible bundle of mistletoe in the room, even though Lenalee had definitely had more; the others were extremely suspicious).

Kanda wondered despairingly if the decoration-free state of his room was worth the monster headache he was going to have when they forced him to eat with them in this room. He promptly decided that yes, yes it was.

With the decorating done and the food in the works (thanks to Jeryy), the only thing left was the people. It wouldn’t be much of a party without any people, they figured. Kanda thought they would just tell the others, like logical people; Lavi, however, argued that that was boring and also defeated the purpose of having a Christmas-and-Allen’s-birthday party – otherwise they could just eat dinner together like they often did. Lenalee believed that, since the point of the party was a distraction, doing something fancy would only benefit the purpose. Allen didn’t really think it mattered one way or the other, but he joined Lenalee and Lavi’s side because of their good points and also to spite Kanda. Because Allen was spiteful like that sometimes.

So it was mostly unanimously decided that they’d do something fancy. Lenalee even made very fancy, official-looking, Christmas-themed invitation cards and envelopes – carefully made so that Marie would be able to feel the embellishments, though Lenalee didn’t know how to make them a non-visual version of aesthetically pleasing. The invitations were split up between the four of them to deliver. They couldn’t exactly give very long for proper responses or anything, since the party was the same day as they were sending the invitations, but Lenalee figured it would be fine since they were handing them to people personally.

Chaozii and General Nine were away on a mission with Maosa and Kie as support, so they unfortunately were unable to attend.

Tiedoll’s invitation, entrusted foolishly to Kanda, mysteriously disappeared en route. Jeryy actually did receive his invitation, but decided not to go anyway. Kanda assured them that he’d had no part in influencing this decision. Marie chuckled at Kanda, making him bristle, but readily said he’d go.

Allen volunteered to deliver Cross’ invitation, hoping to take the opportunity to have a much-needed conversation with him, but never got the chance to actually deliver it. Miranda accepted the invitation from Allen, decided to go, and had to be hastily reassured that she didn’t need to bring any presents for anybody before she had a panic attack. Krory was still bedridden under Head Nurse’s orders (“Yes, I know how important this is to you. No, I will not let you risk injuring yourself further by going.”); he started crying happy tears when Allen gave him the invitation, but was left rather upset when Head Nurse refused to let him leave. Then Head Nurse kicked Allen out for agitating her patient.

Komui burst into tears and glomped Lenalee, but regretfully informed her – still crying – that he was too busy; the other scientists much more calmly said the same. Head Nurse told Lenalee that she couldn’t attend without giving a reason, but Lenalee decided that making an invitation for her was worth it anyway for the genuinely pleased look Head Nurse had had for a moment. Lenalee wondered how long it had been since anybody had been friendly with her.

Bookman was unsurprised when Lavi gave him the invitation, as he’d already known that the kids were setting it up, and he also agreed to go. General Socalo laughed in Lavi’s face and didn’t stop until Lavi had edged warily out of view. Lavi assumed that meant he wasn’t going. Hevlaska laughed, too, but in a less insane and more gentle way, and informed Lavi of the obvious; that she would be unable to attend. She’d seemed happy enough about getting the invitation, though, so Lavi was just pleased he hadn’t made some horrible social faux pas.

That was everybody they could think of that they even potentially wanted to invite; there were a lot of Finders, but they weren’t on very close terms with any of them. They certainly weren’t going to invite any Central Order douchebags like Lvellie. Allen did want to invite Bak, Fou, Rohfa, Rikei, and Shifu, which would be easy with Allen’s Ark, but the use of it was ‘restricted’, even to Allen, and it was decided that it would be better to avoid getting in trouble with the bureaucrats for this; Fou couldn’t leave the Asian Branch, anyway, and the scientists would probably be too busy.

Everything was taken care of. Well, they did still have to move all of the food to the correct room, but that was no big deal.

The low turn-out rate – three people – was a little disappointing, but it wasn’t like they knew a lot of people anyway; they’d expected that the party would be small from the beginning. Still, Lavi felt it was somewhat ironic that there were fewer people who’d accepted the invitations than had been setting up.

Then it was time! Bookman tagged along with Lavi, so they didn’t get to do anything grand, but they did get to see his face when he saw the room for the first time. Lavi felt this was a fair trade.

Lavi beamed as he spun around to face Bookman, who had just entered the room after him. “Isn’t it great, Panda?” he asked delightedly, already knowing what the answer would be.

Bookman gave him a deadpan look. “Yes,” he said, voice unamused but still slightly strangled from surprised horror. “It’s wonderful.”

Kanda scoffed, Allen sweat-dropped amusedly, and Lenalee shook her head with a smile. Lavi just grinned, put his hands behind his head, and swaggered away.

The table had been set up with seven chairs, three on one side and four on the other and none at the head or foot. Lavi had argued that the seventh chair should be at the head and Allen’s, since it was his birthday and this was the Christmas-and-Allen’s-birthday party (“Do you have to call it that, Lavi?” “Yes, Lenalee. Yes I do.”), but Allen argued that being at the head of the table separated one from the others and he didn’t want to be held apart from them in any way. Lavi had conceded defeat.

“This is going to be awesome!” Lavi declared, slinging an arm around Kanda’s shoulders.

Kanda glared furiously. “Get the fu –“

“Kanda!” Lenalee interrupted, scandalized. “Don’t be so rude.” She pouted at him angrily.

“Yeah, Kanda, don’t be so rude,” Allen mocked.

Lenalee turned her frown on him. “You too, Allen,” she said disapprovingly.

Both Kanda and Allen subsided. But Kanda still shoved Lavi off with great prejudice.

“Oh, a-are we late?” came Miranda’s voice, and they swung around to face the door, where Miranda and Marie were standing in the doorway.

“Happy birthday, Allen,” Marie added.

Miranda nodded anxiously. “Yes! Happy birthday, Allen!”

Allen smiled at them. “Thank you,” he said with a thankful nod.

“Welcome!” Lenalee greeted warmly. “And no, you’re not late.” She laughed kindly.

Lavi somehow brightened further than he already was. “You’re under the mistletoe!” he informed them cheerfully. He also took gleeful note of the fact that they’d shown up together.

Miranda and Marie looked up reflexively and saw the mistletoe.

“Oh – I – it – well – that –“ Miranda started stuttering incoherently.

Marie just smiled calmly, leaned down, and gave her a chaste kiss on the lips. Miranda turned red and stuttered harder. Still admirably calm, Marie simply steered her to a chair.

Everybody stared for a moment before accepting and dismissing this new information.

“Okay!” Lenalee clapped her hands. “Everybody’s here now, so we can start!”

There was a moment of uncertain chaos as everybody tried to find a seat. They quickly decided on an effective seating arrangement. Marie was in the middle of the three chairs, with Miranda on his right and Kanda on his left. Allen was across from Miranda with Bookman beside him; Lavi was beside Bookman, and Lenalee was on the edge across from Kanda.

Once everybody had been seated, Lenalee stood. “First off, happy birthday, Allen.” She smiled at him, a wealth of happiness and kindness and good intentions and sympathy held in the expression.

“Thank you, Lenalee,” Allen murmured with a responding smile.

Lenalee continued, “I’ve – never celebrated Christmas before, because – well, because. And this year might seem like a strange time to –“

“Hold a Christmas-and-Allen’s-birthday party,” Lavi interjected, then yelped in pain when Lenalee kicked him in the ankle.

“To celebrate Christmas,” Lenalee continued almost seamlessly, “but I think it’s perfect! I can’t think of a better time to celebrate than when we’re all together.” There was a unanimous moment of silence for those who couldn’t be there. Lenalee smiled tremulously at everybody. “It’s no secret that I consider the members of the Order – all of you – my family, and I’m so glad to be able to celebrate with you all.”

A little overcome with emotion, Lenalee sat back down. Everybody looked touched, even Kanda; Miranda looked as though she might start crying.

Allen stood. “Thank you, Lenalee,” he said sincerely. “That was beautiful. And thank you to all of you, as well,” he added, then shuffled in place a little, awkward. “Although we have had our share of difficulties –“ he meant this with far more meaning than petty rivalries, but he glanced at Kanda pointedly anyway, hoping to lighten the atmosphere, “ – I cannot imagine people with whom I would rather celebrate my birthday and Christmas, nor any circumstances.”

“Christmas-and-Allen’s-birthday party,” Lavi murmured, unwilling to let the joke go, before flinching and scooting away from Lenalee.

Allen ignored him skillfully. “So thank you all for allowing this to be a wonderful birthday,” he said with heartrending sincerity. He pressed his right hand to his chest. “And may we all have a merry Christmas.”

(And hopefully nothing disastrous will happen went unsaid.)

Allen retook his seat somewhat uncomfortably. He’d never been much of the speech-giving type; it was somehow far more nerve-wracking to do it in a peaceful, unworried environment than to do it in the midst of a battlefield. Who knew?

“I would add my own thoughts, but I do believe everything has been covered,” Bookman said dryly without bother to stand. “As such, I will leave it at this: happy birthday, Allen, and Merry Christmas to everybody.”

“Thank you, Book –“ Allen began.

Lavi grinned cheerfully, reaching over Bookman to ruffle Allen’s hair. “Happy birthday, Allen!” he said, talking over Allen. Allen just sighed and left the matter alone.

Lenalee smiled happily at everyone, and then smiled harder, pointedly, at Kanda, who was the only one who hadn’t yet wished Allen a happy birthday.

Kanda glared, grumpy and petulant. Lenalee continued smiling. Kanda twitched, huffed, flipped his hair over his shoulder, and grudgingly ground out, “Happy… birthday.” It genuinely seemed to be causing him pain, and he couldn’t help but add to the end, “Moyashi.”

“You don’t have to sound so reluctant about it, BaKanda,” Allen retorted, his polite demeanor falling in the face of Kanda’s personality.

“Allen, Kanda,” Lenalee interrupted. “Don’t fight, please.”

They gave her identical disbelieving looks. Their entire relationship was built on arguments.

“It’s Christmas,” Lenalee said softly, a hint of some fragile emotion entering her eyes.

Allen and Kanda reluctantly ceased their argument – for now. There were no guarantees one of them wouldn’t manage to annoy the other again later.

Lenalee was careful to hide the sly, self-satisfied smirk that tried to tilt her lips up.

(Lavi saw it anyway.)

“Now, dig in!” Allen said, oddly informal. It was explained by the eager way he eyed some of the food; the four of them had all asked Jeryy for different dishes, so Allen hadn’t tried some of them and was excited to get the chance.

The food, as expected from Jeryy, was incredible. Possibly even better, however, was the company, and all of them enjoyed themselves, even Kanda. He didn’t show it, though, because he had a reputation to maintain (and if they found out that Kanda could have fun, they’d never stop trying to get him to).

Lavi gleefully pestered Marie and Miranda about their maybe-relationship until Bookman jabbed him in the ribs. Allen and Kanda nearly started arguing three more times, but otherwise Allen was very happy and relaxed; he even forgot to speak politely. Lenalee was just so happy the entire time, even though she was on Kanda-and-Allen management duty and despite her brother’s inability to attend.

It couldn’t last forever, but they resolved not to be melancholy about that fact and instead treasure the moment. There was a lot to treasure.

They all finished eating at some point; Allen took the opportunity to finish off the rest of the food. Still, they continued talking even after, none of them wanting to be the first to leave. Technically, this dinner wasn’t really any different from any of the other meals they’d shared, but it felt different. It felt like they could ignore the war and all of their problems, just for a little. None of them really wanted to be the reason the moment ended.

But it had to, at some point, and the timing ended up being decided by Kanda and Allen. It was a typical interaction between the two of them: Kanda made a taunt – this time about Allen’s eating habits – Allen responded angrily, a full-on argument ensued. The way most of their conversations went.

Finally, Kanda, fed up with people in general and Allen in particular, stood from the table and stormed to the door. Allen, apparently not finished with the argument, followed. As if that were the cue they’d been waiting for, everyone else stood as well.

Kanda’s attempts to leave were impeded by his refusal to let Allen get the last word, and so the both of them stalled in the doorway as Kanda tried to loom – which didn’t work – and Allen did his best to loom while being several inches shorter – which worked even less. The others sighed, resigning themselves to the possibility of having to interrupt the argument before they could leave.

“Wait!” Lavi shouted. Everybody froze, responding instinctively to his alarmed tone. Lavi pointed over Kanda’s and Allen’s heads. “You’re under the mistletoe,” he whispered, in awe at the once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.

Would they actually get to see Kanda and Allen kissing, however grudgingly?

In perfect unison, Allen and Kanda looked up, saw the mistletoe, and blanched. Lavi trembled in excitement.

“Not happening,” they both deadpanned at the same time. Lavi’s hopes were crushed.

Kanda stalked away down the hallway without further fanfare. Allen went in the opposite direction.

Lavi dashed to the doorway. “But it’s tradition!” he wailed after them. He was soundly ignored.

With a despondent sigh, Lavi stood up straight from where he’d been leaning out the door. He found Lenalee standing next to him, also peering after Allen and Kanda with a smile playing about her lips. Also under the mistletoe.

Lavi smiled.

#dgmsecretsanta #ame-kuma2 #D.Gray-Man #fanfiction #Allen Walker #Lavi #Kanda Yuu #Lenalee Lee

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