12 Days of Christmas Shipping Challenge

Spirit of Christmas - Tsureiruya / 킨톨멬

7. Person B has never been big on Christmas. Person A, someone who loves Christmas to hell and back, tries to show them the joy of the season.

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During the holidays, the atmosphere of the Kisaragi Foundation was gloomier than usual since the majority of the employees there didn't have any family left to celebrate the holidays with. These employees included the three survivors of the prototype killing game, Tsurugi, Rei, and Teruya.

All three of them had lost their friends and family, and the gloomy atmosphere was bothering Teruya too much. The holidays were supposed to be a time for celebration and raising hopes, and hopes needed to be high in the hellhole called the Biggest, Most Awful, Most Tragic Event in Human History. So what could he do?

The merchant suddenly got an idea. If he did Christmas activities with his fellow survivors but removed the whole Christmas theme from them, then he could imitate the holiday spirit without making them aware that he was doing Christmas things! Teruya smiled and began crafting his plan to cheer his friends up.

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Rei and Tsurugi caught on very quickly to what Teruya was doing, but they pretended to be oblivious for the sake of keeping the merchant happy. Even if he acted innocent to all the connections with the holiday, he wasn't very good at being subtle. That was one of the many reasons why the smart ones of the group cared about Teruya, he was too innocent for his own good.

The first hint they got that Teruya was up to something was when he spontaneously dragged them out of their offices to make some cookies in the kitchen. They didn't overlook how convenient it was that their schedules were cleared with other people handling their broken-down duties to go and make cookies with the merchant.

Nonetheless, they weren't complaining when they were helping to mix their batter of chocolate chip cookies. "These are going to be so amazing!" Teruya exclaimed, making sure that the oven was preheated. "I'm so glad that I found that bag of chocolate chips!"

"I haven't had many of these in my life." Tsurugi commented, mixing the bowl of batter. "I wonder what they'll taste like?"

"Well, if you don't know what a chocolate chip cookie is, that's a stupid mistake that needs to be corrected." Rei remarked as she lined the baking sheets with parchment paper. "Is the batter mixed yet, psycho cop?"

"Heh, it's been a while since I've heard that nickname." The wheelchair-bound man chuckled, handing the bowl to the former professor.

Teruya skipped over and grabbed a spatula. "Here, you hold the bowl while I put the batter on the sheet!" He excitedly offered. Rei had to hold back her laughter at the merchant's enthusiasm. With his unending excitement combined with his unnatural growth spurt, he reminded her of an overgrown puppy at times.

After the batter was placed into small globs on the baking sheet and put into the oven, the trio waited for a while until they were finally baked into cookies. There was much rejoicing from the merchant, Tsurugi's eyes lit up after he bit into a cookie, and Rei only laughed at their shenanigans.

Teruya later kept coercing them into different events with him, like drinking spiked eggnog, watching non-Christmas movies, taking photos together, and even playing in the snow somehow. The merchant took glee in making a snow chair for Tsurugi to sit on, shouted in despair as the policeman broke it under his weight, and started laughing as Rei repurposed it into a 'burrito' by covering Tsurugi in snow. They had hot chocolate afterwards.

As the three of them bingewatched another movie series together, they noticed that Teruya fell asleep in the middle of watching it, sitting right between them both. They just looked at each other with a knowing smile and continued watching anyways. Tsurugi and Rei eventually fell asleep on either side of Teruya, cuddling in his warmth as if he were a giant teddy bear.

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Art credit: kinderjoy_da on twitter