Ornature

It is nearly Christmas! And the tinyhouse is still up in Evergreen. It moves from time to time -- partly to avoid getting an abandoned-vehicle ticket, and partly because the snowfall has been so heavy, and the cold so bitter, that Erich doesn't want the wheels freezing into place. Or the tinyhouse getting totally buried. Or Melantha having to go too far to work every day, and so on and so forth.

Still, for the past week or so, it's been situated in the residential part of town, amongst other little alpine-style houses that are one by one putting on their Christmas costumes. Lights on the eaves, wreaths on the doors, plastic Santas on the lawns -- it all leaves the tinyhouse looking rather shorn and forlorn.

So maybe it's Charlotte's idea that they decorate. Charlotte, who once threw the loveliest birthday party Erich had ever seen, with lights in the tree and meatcakes and candles and and and...

Charlotte, who suggests lights for their house. Little tiny all-white icicle lights draping from the roof outside; big, bright, colorful bulbs inside, plus maybe some fake snow and the like for the cabinets. And a wreath for the door and, of course, a tree. So that's what they're working on right now, with Melantha at work and the two of them at home. Erich is outside on a ladder, hammering tough little brackets to the eaves so they can hang lights up year after year without repeatedly making holes. Charlotte is inside working on inside-decoration-stuff, and just for good measure their tiny little oven is on and Erich is trying to make gingerbread cookies from store-bought mix.

Trying, being the operative word. Though even if it fails, he has eggnog ice cream in the freezer.

The door is wide open. It's frigid inside. Erich yells from the back (or the front, depending on whether the tinyhouse is parked or moving) -- "Hey, can you come see if this is on straight!"

Charlotte does not care about Christmas particularly, but she loves the lights. The time of year demands them. It is dark dark dark and we have to pray to make the sun return; we have to light up the darkness to remind ourselves that the seasons will move as they always do. That we sleep and wake and sleep again. There is a thing called Yule and a thing called Solstice and a thing called Christ's Mass and they have all been folded in together.

It is winter and the snow is deep, and the day is wan and the night is dark and long and the earth sleeps beneath its blanket of frigid white.

But spring will come.

It always does.

--

It is freezing inside the cold snap right now is sharp enough that it makes Charlotte's lungs burn with every breath she takes and even with the tinyfire and the tinyoven both on and the gingerbread cookies maaaaybe burning in the oven (Eric made men. Charlotte made sparrows and and tree branches and eyeteeth) the scent is festive, bright and spicysweet. Whatever she is doing inside is perhaps not traditional but does include the crisp scent of pine branches still metallic with cold and snow, but she abandons it readily enough to poke her head out through the door and then the rest of her body, hands in her pockets, pulling her hoodie close against the cold. She's been working inside so isn't wearing the bulk of her winter's coat and is clenching her jaw because she wants to forestall chattering and tips her head back and up, pale eyes flickering over the lights Erich has already put up.

"Which way do you want it?" Charlotte asks, thoughtfully, her nose wrinkled as she considers his work thus far.

"I'm trying to get it straight across!" Erich calls over his shoulder. "I mean like the top part, not these dangling lights. Up here? Does this," he points at one bracket, "look like it's straight with this one? Say stop when it's straight."

The second bracket is free in his hand. He slides it very, very slowly down the wood.

Charlotte wants to ask why it has to be straight across, why isn't crooked okay, why - except, well. She is not genuinely a two year old and staring up at him, dark down here but bounded by a half-circle of light spilling from the front door to the tinyhouse, the neighborhood similarly framed by a rich depth of shadow and the bright, welcome glitter of lights on the eaves, trees and doors of the various houses, she watches him with rather bated breath and a small, queer smile on her face until -

"Theretherethere!" Charlotte calls out, excitedly, as the brackets match up, straight across. "Right there!"

Erich is facing the brackets when she calls like that, so she doesn't see him grin, amused, endeared, happy that she's so happy.

A solid stroke of the hammer knocks the little bracket into the wood. Then he tucks the string of lights over the bracket and just hops backwards off the ladder, hands sliding down the sides, feet hitting the snow with a muffled thump.

"Awesome. All done. Wanna wait 'til Melantha gets here to light it up and decorate the tree? We can set the tree up though." And this is when he notices she's not in any outerwear. "Aren't you freezing? Let's go in."

He throws a brotherly arm around her shoulders. They look a little alike, blond-and-blue. They look nothing alike. He's all meaty upper-midwestern germanic-descent posterboy, cut out for quarterbacking, linebacking, hockey. She's frail and feral, her shoulder bony against his side.

Charlotte is cold. Her nose is red and starting to run; supernatural constitution or not, the sharp cold has that effect on her as her sinuses are already starting to stream, and she stands there are stiff-armed and stiff-legged to stave off the shivers and is stiff shouldered as he throws that brotherly arm around his shoulders but they are close enough now, that she just bumps back against him, all animal affection. familiar and assured.

And she has grown taller. Hardly noticeable day to day but now she is taller than Melantha, a skinny stick of a creature, bird-boned and gleaming-eyed.

"We should light it up now," Charlotte says, considering his work from way down here before she allows him to steer the both of them back inside. " - so that she get to see them all lit up in the darkness, welcoming her home. But we'll wait for her to get home to decorate the tree."

They haven't far to go, to get inside, and Charlotte turns back to pull the front door closed behind them, and inhales deeply. Gives him a sidelong look that might seem sly, except she does seem merely happy.

"The cookies smell good."

No they don't. They smell like they're burning.

But maybe that's just the bottoms.

"Oh that's an awesome idea. But we should totally wait until she's back to go out and look at the lights outside, 'cause then we can see them with her."

Charlotte closes the door. The air smells like cookies. Erich grins happily, agreeing: "That does smell goo-- wait. No. That smells like burning. SHIT."

-- and he goes to yank the door open on their tiny little oven, fanning the smoke away frantically as he grapples for the oven mitts. Fumbles with the little cookie tray. Gets the cookies out, holds them yelping hot hot hot while Charlotte moves the cutting board off the burners so Erich can set them down there, where

after a moment's inspection

they determine that yes, indeed, the cookies are burnt. But only on the bottom.

"Well," says Erich, optimistic, "I'm sure we can just scrape the tops off and eat them. It'll be a little weird but it'll still be good. You ever had gingerbread cookies before?" He's genuinely not sure. He doesn't trust her ultra-privileged upbringing to have exposed her to such mundane delights.

"'Course I did." Charlotte returns, a quiet little scoff in her voice. All as if. The scoffing note mellows into something rather more quiet and rather more golden, a glowing and vague nostalgia. "We weren't supposed to go into the kitchens," she goes on, explaining then, " - but Cook would pretend not to notice and sometimes she'd save me stuff. Or one of the girls in the scullery. Sometimes I had gingerbread.

"I mean probably." Leans in to sniff then, as Erich examines the cookies and declares that they can just scrape off the burnt part. "When I was little and there was extra pie crust sometimes Cook would save it and give it to us to make shapes with, and we'd sprinkle them with sugar and cinnamon and she'd bake them and we called them scrappies. 'Cos they were made outta scraps, see.

"Phillip didn't like that though. She said it was common." Charlotte finishes with a shrug.

"Do we have icing? We oughta have sprinkles and icing."

"Yeah," Erich has already taken a spatula out and is hard at work scraping the edible parts of the cookies off the burnt-black parts, "in the fridge, and the little cupboard over the fridge."

A small pause.

"What's your family doing for the holidays?"

How they have room for both sprinkles and icing in the tinykitchen of a tinyhouse is a mystery, but Charlotte opens the cabinet door and Charlotte opens the fridge door and finds both sprinkles and icing and the sprinkles are red and green because the season is red and green, flame-marked and fir-huedand the icing is simply white and maybe it is simply that Erich thought of it and bought them especially to use to decorate cookies or maybe such things simply appear, in the places we need them, at the times we need them. Like some kind of serendipity.

So: sprinkles and icing are ferretted out as Erich scrapes off the burned bits and Charlotte stills a bit, glances from him to the second bottle of sprinkles (these are pink and heart-shaped so, not to seasonal, and they cannot have been here since last Valentine's day since the tinyhouse is younger than that, isn't it?) in her hand and back to him. Puzzlement written across her brow.

Then she shrugs, Charlotte, quick and jerky in Erich's peripheral vision. "I dunno. Maybe a big ball for the Sept. Or something I dunno.

"That's what they used to do."

It blows Erich's mind sometimes how different their families are. How different their lives were before their lives intertwined and began to run parallel to one another. Maybe that's a sort of serendipity too.

The bag of gumdrops that Erich takes down from a high shelf and plunks next to Charlotte for gingerbread decorations, though? That's totally something he bought 'cause he thought of it 'cause they're gingerbread cookies and that's what you do.

"Do you still talk to them? And your brother, and stuff?"

"I talk to Chas sometimes," returns Charlotte, quietly and not-quite-sulkily. There it something darting in her gaze though. A kind of livid wariness has entered her body language and her pale eyes dart from the gumdrops to Erich's profile to the gumdrops and back again. "Uh, you know. Still."

"Sometimes," Erich echoes, thoughtful. They are working together, more or less. He scrapes cookies off the cookie pan. She decorates them. The designs are vivid and fanciful and they make no sense at all, except maybe to Charlotte. Erich doesn't mind. He doesn't even mind that he won't really be able to eat these cookies. He made them for Charlotte, and for Melantha, the way Charlotte made them pigeon-beads.

"But not a lot?" He tries to keep his voice quiet, gentle; tries not to make Charlotte feel cornered. He doesn't think it's working, though. The cornered part, at least. "Why not?"

The designs are fanciful. Some of these are gingerbread people Erich cut out with the cookie cutter enclosed with the kit. Some are stranger pieces, occasionally identifiable given the original intent, but more often than not the cookies expanded with the cooking beyond the initial confines and cooked altogether to form what appear to be - in the end - rather fanciful brown blogs.

And Charlotte works quietly with her sprinkles and uses all of them, the Christmas ones and the hearts and the icing and she does have rather clever hands and the designs that started as bare, wintershorn branches or doughy portraits of small birds all fluffed against the cold darting daintily over the surface of a deep-packed snow have become blobby not because she is uncareful or imprecise but rather because she did not understand the way dough expands and spreads in the oven.

The work is slower now though, and Charlotte is bent over it all furrowed and thoughtful and frowning and, yes, uncomfortable. Pricklingly so.

"I dunno," Charlotte murmurs at first, her shoulders twisting in a quick and - yes, defensive - little shrug. "He's doing other stuff now and I dunno what it is. And I'm doing other stuff too and he doesn't know what it is.

"That's all."

Erich gets the last half-burnt cookie off the pan and then puts the pan in the tinysink to soak. Hands free now, he dusts crumbs off, then folds his arms loosely over his chest as he turns to lean his lumbar back against the counter.

"Do you wanna maybe ... visit D.C. sometime? And see your brother? We could take a Christmas roadtrip. I bet Melantha wouldn't mind. I bet her boss would even give her time off. If she doesn't I could just go talk to her." Beat. Then, slightly mortified: "I mean. With a Gift. Not... beat her up."

Charlotte quickly shakes her head, close-cropped blonde-and-pink hair going all fly away in the dry heat. Wild from static electricity.

"We can't leave the Sept," the girl says, solemnly. Owlishly, and Erich knows its true.

Charlotte does not mean Forgotten Questions.

He knows it's true. He knows that really, Melantha probably couldn't get time off work either. Not that much time. Not enough time to cross most of the United States west-to-east and east-to-west again, plus time in D.C. with Charlotte's brother. Not when she just started a couple months ago, if that.

Still, he looks a little crestfallen. He angles his gaze down toward his toes for a moment, bare on the wood floor. They always leave their shoes by the door because there's so little space that whatever muck gets tracked in here eventually ends up in their beds. After a moment he raises his head and says, "Well, maybe we can have Chaz visit you out here. I'm sure he'd wanna see you again.

"I mean. If you wanna see him again. Do you?"

"'Course."

There is an undercurrent of deep and quiet passion in Charlotte's voice. She's not really looking at Erich then, not even sidelong, so she doesn't quite catch the moment when his crest falls, does she, and there's something a bit awkward about being joined both spiritually and in such physical proximity and still not looking directly at each other. Or well, Charlotte is the only one who is not looking directly anywhere, isn't she? And she has stopped what she's doing (which is decorating hte mid-section of one of the gingerbread people to look like a spiral-armed green sugar galaxy dotted by giant floating pink hearts) so she doesn't even have that my hands are full excuse.

"He's my brother."

"Well, let's invite him out here then! And I'll invite my sister out too. She's in college now so she can go wherever she wants, she doesn't even have to tell the rest of the family. And maybe Melantha can invite someone too and it'll be awesome."

This is how Erich thinks. Or: this is how Erich wants to think. He wants to think things are simple like this. That hurts can be paved over like potholes with a few little changes, a few easy fixes. He knows it's not true -- knows it better than most, maybe -- but he still wants to believe.

"You should call him and ask him if he wants to come out. Maybe after the holidays, if he has to go home to your parents instead."