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zecretsanta · 9 months

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Twelve Days of Carlosmas

To: @gorokiichi

From: @junpei-rights-activist

For the prompt: Snapshots of Carlos and Junpei spending the holidays together while Akane is away. Maybe Carlos turns on the radio to Christmas songs and Junpei is cranky about it because it’s too early in the morning, or Carlos fumbles when making a gingerbread house because his hands are too big. Up to you! I just really like slice of life with them.

I hope you enjoy and are okay with the amount of shippiness I included because it didn’t occur to me until I had already written it that I might have misinterpreted that part.

Junpei wasn’t above the simple pleasure of watching a strong man do hard work. Well, that was assuming stringing a house in Christmas lights was hard work— and it certainly appeared to be. Hell, Junpei was pretty sure he could catch a gleam of sweat on his forehead, even in the early December chill. He wore it well. Junpei didn’t comment.

“Did you want me to…I dunno…do something?” He figured it was fair enough to offer, even though he had no idea about any of this. He wasn’t exactly in the habit of climbing up ladders to put up lights just to climb up ladders and take them down again later. Still, it seemed important to Carlos, so he was happy enough to indulge.

“Just stand there and look pretty.” Junpei crossed his arms and scowled when Carlos looked over his shoulder from his perch, but he felt just a little warmer.

“What’s this?” Junpei observed the mug Carlos had placed in front of him on the table. It looked like the sort of monstrosity you could only find this time of year, though usually from some overpriced coffee shop. It was piled high with the kind of whipped cream that definitely came from a can and some crushed mix of chocolate and candy cane.

“Cocoa. Drink it.” Carlos crossed to take his own seat, another mug prepared for himself. Junpei was tempted to ask how, exactly, he was supposed to go about that. He opted to take a mouthful of the candy and cream instead. Not a bad combination, even if he hadn’t touched the chocolate yet.

“Thanks?” Even as this sort of consideration had become commonplace with Carlos in his life, Junpei wasn’t entirely accustomed to it. There was still a part of him that searched for some underlying motive. Carlos wasn’t that complicated, though. Junpei appreciated that, when he took the time to think about it.

“You’ve been down since Akane left.” Astute observation, if not a statement of the most absolute obvious.

“She’s coming back.” Junpei sounded more defensive than he meant to, but Carlos seemed to take it in stride. Whatever uncertainties he might have had were well enough founded after how long he’d been searching…

“Yeah. She’s visiting her brother right? No point sulking around until she comes home.” Junpei startled as Carlos reached across the table and swiped his thumb across his nose. He held it up to display a little dollop of whipped cream, then licked it clean. Junpei averted his eyes and took a too-big gulp of his cocoa. The heat prickled down his throat and overwhelmed his face but he gave a half-hearted shrug.

“Maybe.”

Carlos couldn’t carry a tune in a paper bag, not that his enthusiasm with early-morning festive cheer was any indication. Junpei tried covering his head with the blankets, then with the pillow, then gave up on hoping for that ten more minutes of sleep. If bedhead were a person, it was Junpei stumbling out of his bedroom to hone in on the source of the disturbance. He found Carlos singing along with the kitchen speaker while hanging something or another above the room’s entryway.

“Isn’t it a little early for that?” Junpei’s voice remained thick with sleep. Carlos looked amused.

“It’s Christmas. Have a little holiday spirit.” He let his arms fall and looked up at his mistletoe-y handiwork. Junpei looked up too, making a careful distance between himself and the sprig. It was definitely too early for that.

“It’s been December for maybe two days.”

“Fine. Almost Christmas.” Carlos tilted his head slightly, hands on his hips. He was glancing at Junpei but Junpei didn’t look back.

“Almost Christmas means it isn’t Christmas.” Carlos only put on a faux pout in response to this clarification.

“Now c’mon. Get decorating or go mope somewhere else.” Carlos gave him a soft punch to the shoulder then turned to hand him what had to be the world’s oldest, rattiest cardboard box. Junpei was inclined to hand it right back to him and take the moping option, but he decided better of it. It was almost Christmas, after all.

Junpei wasn’t sure how he felt about Carlos’s boundless holiday spirit. Depending on the time of day, the position of the stars, and how much Junpei had to drink, it would range between charming and mind-numbing. He had expected the movie marathon to be on the latter end. And he hadn’t been entirely wrong, either. They were all the same basic plot, the same basic story. Small-town girls and businessmen and miracles.

But it was nice when Carlos leaned into him on the couch. When their hands brushed against one another’s. When they shared a look or a laugh. It was nice enough that maybe it didn’t matter if the movies were all garbage and Carlos was hell-bent on driving him crazy for the next two and a half weeks. There was the fleeting possibility that this wasn’t all that bad.

“You’ve really never done this before, huh?” Carlos was squatting down, packing snow together in an oversized ball, rolling it around to reveal grass beneath and grow the icy orb. Junpei was right there next to him, observing with some skepticism.

“Never really had enough snow. Or yard.” Junpei shrugged it off. Carlos had enough of a lawn to sustain an entire family of snowmen by Junpei’s estimation, though he didn’t have the experience to back those claims. Carlos flashed him a smile and started rolling the growing ball in earnest, waddling down the lawn then back up in neat little lines.

“Maria and I used to do this every year. The first snow is always best for it.” However the memory made Carlos feel, he didn’t seem keen to show it. Instead, he rolled the ball back toward Junpei, then nudged it so Junpei could take over the rolling.

“How big do we make it?” The thing seemed to be rapidly expanding in mass and Junpei wasn’t really clear on the scale they were after here. Carlos was already hard at work constructing the next part of the snowman’s stacked body.

“As big as you want. I’ll pop the head on when you’re ready.” He gave a cheesy bicep flex then kept rolling. Junpei responded by rolling both the snowball and his eyes. And then a new thought occurred to him. He waited until Carlos was on a trip down the lawn, his back turned. Then he gathered up the snow in a rush, packed it into a ball, and aimed straight for his back.

Or, it would have been his back, had Carlos not turned around just in time to be nailed in the face. A comedy of errors in which Carlos was wiping his face while Junpei, in his haste to rush over and apologize, was slipping cartoonishly in the snow. Carlos accepted these apologies with a fair amount of laughter and a huge handful of snow down Junpei’s hood.

It was a fair bit more fun than Carlos had made it sound when he’d suggested the whole thing.

The apron Carlos was wearing hadn’t done much to keep him from making an absolute mess of himself. It seemed like their was flour streaked everywhere— across his cheek here, over his knuckles there, a smudge next to his eyebrow… Junpei felt an almost irresistible urge to walk over and wipe him clean.

Instead, he followed his nose to the oven and dropped to his knees to look in, the scent of the cookies erasing all else from his mind. They still had a good few minutes based on what he saw through the little glass window, but Junpei was drooling. He looked at Carlos again, with his apron and his flour and his sleeves pushed up to his elbows. Yeah, he was still drooling.

“How much longer?” He whined instead of taking any action, however tempting the alternative might have been.

The tree was too big.

Surely, Carlos had realized the tree was too big.

It took over the bulk of the living room, branches hanging dangerously close to the couch. Junpei thought it was a disaster waiting to happen, but that didn’t stop him from hanging another bauble on a branch. Yeah, it was way too big, but it made Carlos happy and that in turn made Junpei happy, even if he wasn’t always keen to admit it.

“So you like it?” Carlos hadn’t actually asked for an opinion since he went through the trouble of setting the thing up in its stand and smoothing out the skirt and hauling out what seemed like an endless number of ornament boxes. Hell, he’d probably started it all by chopping the thing down himself, knowing Carlos. Junpei was pretty sure he knew his way around an ax, as he could recall.

Junpei considered a sarcastic response, but he didn’t quite have the heart for it with the way Carlos’s eyes gleamed.

“Yeah. I like it.”

Junpei watched as Carlos slotted together the two large, square cookies at the corners. He was as delicate as he could manage while he pinched them together and reached for the cement-like frosting. Unfortunately, as it happened, that was not delicate enough. Junpei winced to see the gingerbread crumble beneath his fingers.

“Just let me help.” Junpei’s own attempt at cookie architecture hadn’t turned out half-bad, he had to admit. It wasn’t the fanciest thing, but if he were made out of gingerbread he wouldn’t be too ashamed to have some friends over for dinner. Carlos’s house looked like it probably sat on the other side of the tracks.

It wasn’t his fault, or at least Junpei couldn’t really blame him. He had such big hands for such delicate work. And while Junpei could imagine a thousand and one scenarios where strength and calluses could be major boons, building gingerbread houses didn’t seem to be one of them. Carlos swore under his breath as the whole wall came down before he could seal it up.

“Maybe you should leave the construction to me and worry about the decorating.” The way Carlos’s eyes lit up at the suggestion only confirmed Junpei’s suspicion that that was the part he was looking forward to in the first place.

“You don’t mind?” There was an eager puppy quality about him that made Junpei’s insides squirm.

“Knock yourself out.” He pretended to be just as focused on repairing Carlos’s disastrous attempts as he could be, but Junpei was absolutely watching that childlike glee from the corner of his eye.

“Carlos…did you embroider these yourself?” Junpei stared at the stockings on the wall. They hung beneath the TV, for lack of a proper mantel, and each was emblazoned with one of their names. Junpei had the distinct impression that Carlos wasn’t able to pick these up at the superstore.

“I didn’t want you guys to feel left out.” Akane couldn’t have felt left out, not having been there at all, but that hadn’t stopped Carlos. It was sweet, the sort of sweet little thing that always took Junpei by surprise, even if it shouldn’t have by this point. Maria and Carlos had their own, much older, versions in that line. It was a heartfelt gesture. Junpei didn’t always know what to do with those.

“Well…they look good. I mean, uh, thanks.” He rubbed the back of his head and flashed a smile. “Kinda like a real family.” Carlos smiled back at him.

“Yeah. Kinda like that.”

“Aren’t you supposed to put liquor in this?” Junpei swirled his small glass of egg nog disdainfully, his nose scrunched up. Some people might have braced themselves for the impact of spiced rum. Junpei should have braced himself for the absence of it. He wasn’t a fan of festive drinks that didn’t inherently make him feel more festive. And no amount of nutmeg was gonna do it in this case.

“You can,” Carlos admitted over a sip of his own glass, “but then you end up on the naughty list.”

“Maybe I want to be naughty.” Junpei huffed.

“I bet you do.”

Junpei stared at the television screen with the sort of awe this particular programming had never before inspired.

“Carlos. Why are you watching a log?” As confounding as the guy could be, this was taking it to new extremes.

“It’s a yule log.” As if that explained it.

“What the hell is a yule log?” Junpei looked at Carlos then back on the screen. He was currently enjoying the HD surround sound version of a log crackling in the fire. This one was well beyond him.

“I mean it’s…a log. For Yule…” Carlos’s voice trailed off. God help them both, he didn’t really know either, did he? “I don’t know, it’s festive. You put it on and you feel cozy. Isn’t that enough?” Junpei covered his face with one hand.

“I guess it’s better than the romcoms.”

“Junpei, could you come here a sec?” Carlos’s voice rang from the edge of the kitchen, drawing Junpei away from some holiday-themed comedy. It was, as with the yule log, better than some of the alternatives. Still, he was happy enough to abandon his post and attend to whatever need Carlos had.

“What’s up?” Junpei stopped in the doorway to the kitchen where Carlos met him, spoon in hand with his hand carefully cradling beneath to catch any spills.

“Try this.” Carlos didn’t wait for Junpei’s acceptance to lift the spoon to his lips. Junpei didn’t reject it though and sipped down whatever it was Carlos was making. Soup, nice and hot, and damn good. Junpei shot him a look that said as much.

“The fact that you can cook on top of everything else is just unfair. Leave something for the rest of us.” Junpei’s pouting was in jest, of course, and Carlos’s eyes only flashed with a hint of…something… while he stepped closer to Junpei.

“Hey.” He leaned in, over, close. Really close. Body heat on Junpei’s skin close. “Notice where you’re standing?”

And Junpei hadn’t noticed, until that moment. He hadn’t necessarily been avoiding the mistletoe, but he also hadn’t been making himself an easy target. Not that Carlos would have pressed if Junpei had given any indication of real discomfort. Still, it was a bit embarrassing, even if it was only the two of them. The way he could smell Carlos’s cologne and feel his warmth, practically taste him through the broth.

“Is that why you called me over?” Junpei’s accusation was met with a smirk. Carlos grasped Junpei’s chin between his thumb and forefinger and tilted his face upward.

“Maybe. Is that why you’re still standing here?” So close.

So close.

“Maybe.”

#submission #ztd #carlos/junpei #gorokiichi #junpei-rights-activist #zecret santa 2023

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