Britannia did not celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday. After all. The Empire itself was holy. Who needed a messiah when they had an Emperor? Blasphemous? Certainly. By Christian standards, definitely. They did, once upon a time, celebrate the estimated birth of Christ in a manner that borrowed from various pagan traditions in a calculated effort to entice the pagans to join a burgeoning religious movement, but in a parallel sense to how that holy day was subsumed within our own world by rampant commercialism, consumerism and shopping sprees that are a shade shy of being called riots - Well. Britannia had an evolution that went along a similar route with a few small changes.
It was kept mostly secular. That’s not a good thing in and of itself, nor is it a bad thing. It’s just a statement of fact from which other truths also happened to develop. They weren’t celebrating anything holy. They weren’t joining hands in prayer or wishing peace and goodwill to all men or anything like that. Yeah. Can you see that at all? Can you honestly see Emperor Charles delivering anything like the Queen’s speech? Even remotely. Doesn’t quite work, does it?
Instead of religion the idea was simple: Bonds with those around you. The rich, of course, particularly enjoyed this holiday for two main reasons. The first? They got presents from their closest friends and family. The second? The poor (as in, the Numbers) were reassured that what really mattered was spending time with one another, and most of them only really celebrated the holiday because either they already did for religious reasons or because they were made to.
They had their own version of Santa Claus as well, but the Britannian media didn’t quite go for the whole “good girls and boys” schtick. Not exactly. Santa was a symbol of the season, even more so to Britannia than he is to us. He was a metaphor for the joy of spending time with your loved ones, of giving them presents and receiving your own. Nobody - not even children - believed in the obviously supernatural elements of the Santa mythos. He was a symbol. A mascot. A character that people dressed up as.
What this might say about the typical Britannian mindset is the kind of thing best left to psychiatrists that are practised in psychoanalysing fictional Empires. This was all mentioned purely to develop a taste for the atmosphere that Lelouch Lamperouge was in as he returned to his home one snowy evening. His birthday had been earlier in the month, and Christmas was a week away. He had not really had the time to purchase gifts for anyone, not even Nunnally. After all, his attention had been rather consumed with more important matters. You know how it is during the holiday season. You get caught up in things, like building up a rebellion to overthrow an Empire, develop long and complicated plans to free nations, give charismatic and over-the-top speeches to inspire hope or fear in the intended audience. Getting involved in pitched battles and pitting wits against a sister that thinks you are dead.
You know. The usual sort of holiday diversions that eat up so much of your time. It’s a wonder anyone gets anything done this time of year.
His foot landed on something that did not have the texture of snow, and Lelouch stopped in his tracks to take a look at it. He beheld something red as blood lying sadly in the snow. A hat with a white little bauble sticking to the top through more determination than thread, and a fluffy white brim. Unmistakable. A Santa hat. Carelessly discarded, or perhaps it had been lost by someone due to the weather?
He picked it up by the brim and noticed that there appeared to be something inside. It looked like… Slips of paper? How strange. Given the weather conditions the paper must be soaked, but it didn’t look that way. Peculiar. This required further examination, so he reached inside -
And the wind suddenly picked up, blowing a big clump of snow right down his back. Lelouch jumped, and quickly went back inside the school grounds and into his home. A building on the grounds that doubled as the student council’s.
“Well, there you are!” declared the voice of the student council president. Milly Ashford. Standing on top of the stairs, tapping her foot, and, oh dear, folding her arms as well. Surely he wasn’t that late? “Honestly. Kallen I could understand being late. That girl could catch a cold if she were standing on the sun. Then again, she is quite a bit more hot. Care to explain yourself, Lelouch?”
Lelouch shrugged and smiled, his mind already calculating the likeliest routes towards an acceptable excuse. “Sorry,” he offered. “Unfortunately, I was -”
But Milly wasn’t listening to him. She strode down the stairs and plucked the Santa hat out of his hand, moving to plop it right on top of her own head only to stop when she saw the paper inside.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, and her annoyed expression seemed to vanish for reasons that he didn’t understand, and he suddenly began to feel dread that he would very soon understand far too well. ”I see. You were setting up something like this? What an interesting idea! Come on. Everyone else is waiting.”
Honestly… He felt a little bit disappointed that he didn’t even get to use his excuse. It was a pretty good one, as they went. Oh well. If he was going to be given a freebie, he might as well take it. So he followed Milly into the meeting room, where the other members of the council were busy making themselves look busy. Nina and Shirley fixing decorations, Rivalz helping Kallen catch up on paperwork, Suzaku trying desperately not to feed Arthur.
“H-Hold on,” Kallen said, carefully approaching Rivalz in a manner that deftly avoided walking under any of the mistletoe in the room. Which there was an awful lot of. There was probably more mistletoe mass in the room at the moment than human. “What sort of costumes does the budget mean?”
“Why, what else?” Milly replied, gently tugging Kallen just off balance enough that the two of them were directly underneath a sprig. Kallen had never looked more uncomfortable, and Rivalz couldn’t sit down fast enough. “It wouldn’t be Christmas if we all didn’t dress the part, now would it? Oh, dear. We’re under the mistletoe. You know what that means, don’t you?”
Amazing how Kallen managed to slip out of her grip while maintaining her facade as the weak and sickly girl. Simply amazing. “But, hold on! Dress the part?” she said, keeping her distance from the pouting president. “In what way do you mean?”
“Well, that’s up to you,” Milly said. “Why, you could be a sexy elf, a present, or even a sexy Santa!”
Shirley muttered something under her breath about a dirty old man trapped in a girl’s body, Nina gave her a reassuring pat on the back, and Rivalz stared at the ceiling whistling off key.
And for those wondering about Suzaku: “Ow! Stupid cat! Stop that!” He was feeding Arthur.
Lelouch tugged the hungry kitty away from his friend and stroked him in a manner that was entirely unlike a Bond villain. “Sorry I’m late,” he said, while everyone else took their seats. “I trust I didn’t miss much?”
“Oh, not much!” Shirley said, taking the seat next to him. “We sorted out the party budget a few minutes ago, the decorations are pretty much set up and Milly already has the place wired for mis- Oh dear me would you look at that we are both sitting under mistletoe whatever shall we do?”
Shirley twiddled her thumbs and blushed slightly. Lelouch glanced at the ceiling. “Actually, I think we’re good,” he said. “We appear to be sitting in one of the empty spots, and - Are you feeling alright? You look rather tired all of a sudden.”
“No, no…” Shirley mumbled. “It’s nothing. Really.”
“Anyway!” Milly said, throwing the Santa hat right into the middle of the table. “One main point of the agenda that I was meaning to bring up was simply this! What sort of Christmas game should we, the student council, play? After all! Isn’t it our duty to ensure that the student body gets into the spirit of things? And wouldn’t you know it? Our dear vice president has provided us with the answer!”
“I did?” Lelouch asked.
“Alright! Good job, Lelouch!” Suzaku said. “I’ve not really had much of the chance to properly celebrate Christmas before, so I’m really looking forward to this.”
“But I didn’t -”
“Well, it probably won’t be too bad if Lelouch suggested it,” Rivalz said. “Just so long as it’s not related to somehow beating him in chess or something.”
“No, but I don’t have the faintest idea -”
“Yeah, great job, Lelouch! We were really stuck on this!”
There wasn’t much else for it but to throw his hands up in the air and let Milly get on with it. What fresh hell awaited him now? At the very least Kallen seemed to be sharing some of his pain. Pinching the bridge of her nose and sighing very wearily.
“It’s a very simple idea!” Milly declared. “We play a game… of secret Santa! Lelouch has gone to the trouble to fill this Santa hat with slips of paper, which I have no doubt have our names on them! We’ll draw them out one at a time, and then give a gift to the person whose name we draw without revealing who gave the gift! Obviously, if we draw our own name, we return it to the hat and draw again. How does that sound?”
“Not nearly as bad as I feared,” Kallen whispered. “Actually, that does sound kind of fun.”
“W-well, I’m not really good at giving gifts…” Nina wrung her hands.
“Oh, don’t worry about it!” Shirley said. “Even if it sucks, nobody here will know you gave it. Right? It’s all part of the fun, trying to figure it out!”
“Huh! This does sound like a kind of fun game,” Suzaku agreed.
“That’s the spirit!” Milly declared. “I, as your president, shall draw first, and Lelouch can take the slip of paper that is last in the hat.”
Well, it all seemed like a perfectly fun little distraction and it would save him having to get gifts for everyone. Except for one small problem. Milly had assumed that he had written the names on the slip of paper and put them in the hat, when whatever was written on them was certainly not going to have anything like that. Possibly a different group of people entirely, and -
And Milly picked out a slip of paper before Lelouch could voice any kind of objection. She read it. Smiled to herself. Then the paper just… vanished in her hand.
“Oh!” she said. “Why, Lelouch. I didn’t have you pegged for a magician.”
Which is right around about when he started getting worried. “I’m not,” he said, feeling a little confused. The hat was passed around the table and everyone drew a name. The same thing happened each time. They would read the name, the paper would vanish… And the weird part was that nobody seemed to think it strange. They thought it was a magic act of some sort. Which was impossible. They say that the hand is quicker than the eye, but both Kallen and Suzaku were far quicker than a normal person’s hand. If he tried some sleight of hand on either one of them they’d catch him out in an instant, and the fact that everybody had a similar reaction to it smacked of something suspicious.
Geass? Could it be some form of Geass? No. That didn’t make sense. Something different, a different supernatural… something? Affecting their perceptions in some way. Keeping them from seeing anything odd about it. But to what end? The fact that they all seemed perfectly alright with whatever they saw on their paper said something as well, like they had just read the name of another person around the table…
And before he knew it, the hat was in front of him. Lelouch stared at it, and gaped in horror as his hand automatically moved inside to withdraw the final slip of paper within. He tried to shut his eyes, but found that he could not do anything of the sort. Therefore, he found himself reading the name of the last person drawn, and the paper vanished right before his eyes. And the name he read was none other than…
- Milly Ashford
- Kallen Kozuki
- Suzaku Kururugi
- Nina Einstein
- Shirley Fenette
- Rivalz Cardemonde
Nice!!!!! Hope someone adds to this!
ReplyDelete*prays for Kallen*