Of Good Cheer (Panik, L/Ja, PG-13)
Title: Of Good Cheer
Pairing: Linke/Jan
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: Linke has noticed that during December Jan always seems to wear something on his head, like a woolly hat, or he keeps his hoodie up. When he manages to trap Jan into removing his protection he finds out why; Jan had little pointed tips to his ears. Would love it to end up Jan/Linke and would be very interested to see the explanation for the ears ::g:: (submitted by beren_writes )
Date: 12/19/08
Linke was about twelve before Jan’s cold-weather quirk genuinely starting twigging his Weird-o-Meter. Before that winter the two of them hadn’t hung out much, just seen each other now and again, usually at Timo’s or David’s houses. They were on friendly enough terms - they both liked music and computers and video games - even if Jan was too desperately nerdy to be a proper friend, but just before Christmas that year David decided he was going to try to put together a little holiday concert for their parents and friends, and started beating the bushes for willing participants. Timo was in, of course, which was kind of funny considering Timo had yet to learn any guitar tabs more complicated than “Hot Cross Buns,” and Linke quietly assured David that he’d help Timo practice whenever he could. As thanks David gave Linke his choice of Christmas song to solo, thereby happily negating Linke’s need to demand exemption from any and all performances of “Jingle Bell Rock.”
More surprisingly than Timo overestimating his own abilities was Jan volunteering his. They all knew Jan played at the guitar some; he wasn’t bad but he was only ten so he couldn’t really be expected to do much other than sit on a stool that was too high for him and attempt to play a guitar that was too big for him and generally look pathetically cute. Luckily, he was stellar at that and David was too happy for the warm body on the docket to say no, despite his own and Linke’s misgivings. So Linke privately resolved to give the kid a bit of a hand, too, if he needed it and didn’t get on Linke’s nerves too much.
They practiced in David’s school auditorium Tuesday evenings because it had the nicest piano and because David could sweet talk his teachers into giving him anything he wanted, the conniving son of a bitch. The acoustics and sound system were nice, too, but these were just bonuses when really all Linke needed was a music stand and a guitar for himself and some duct tape to keep Timo lashed to his own seat while they pounded out the chords for “Adeste Fidelis” over and over and over again. It was thankless work, but Linke took twisted joy in it, and Timo actually grew grateful for the coaching as Christmas swiftly approached and he began to realize just how little he’d been practicing on his own.
“No, here, your middle finger is laying across, like, four strings, Timo,” Linke mumbled at him around a pick between his teeth, reaching across and molding Timo’s hand correctly around the fretboard. “You bend it…arch it over the strings like this. Just use the tip of your finger.” He demonstrated on his own instrument. Timo nodded.
“I see,” he said, and, carefully watching the formation of his own hand, pressed down a very-nearly-perfect A7 chord and strummed it. He grinned. “Ahh, that’s what I’m talking about.”
Linke smirked. “Bravo. Now just do that a half a million more times and you might get this song right.”
Timo went a little pale but cleared his throat and forced a determined look onto his face. “Okay, where are we starting at?”
“Uhh, how about measure sixteen.”
Timo meticulously reconfigured his fingers and started strumming again, a little haltingly but not nearly so much so as he had been two weeks ago. Linke was pleased with his progress and he knew that at least he wouldn’t have to worry too much about stage fright fucking with Timo’s composure. Timo didn’t know the meaning of stage fright.
Just then the door at the back of the auditorium creaked open and Jan trotted in, hauling a well-beaten second-hand guitar case and bundled to the gills in mom-approved winter layers all topped with an electric blue parka and matching toboggan that made him rather closely resemble that kid from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory who got blown up into a blueberry. Linke rapidly shook away the mental image.
“Hi, guys!” Jan chirped, gently plunking down his instrument and beginning to unwrap himself like an early Christmas present.
“Hey,” Linke replied, smiling amusedly as he watched the parka, a hoodie, a windbreaker, and two pairs of gloves melt off Jan’s little frame. Timo said nothing at all, just kept playing with his eyes glued intensely to his sheet music and his tongue stuck partway out his lips.
“Little flat, Timo,” Linke admonished him, then returned his eyes to Jan, who was opening his guitar case and struggling with the instrument inside. His fingers were pale around the neck of the guitar and he’d left his toboggan on, though it was plenty warm in the auditorium. Jan gathered up a sheaf of music and mounted the stage.
“There, how was that?” Timo prompted as his final chord faded away, a bit unnecessarily muffled and tinny. To his credit, Linke didn’t wince much.
“Just…make sure and keep your fingers as curved as you can make them, okay? You’ll be alright, you know the notes.” Linke was satisfied enough with Timo’s work for now; being a perfectionist was David’s job, not Linke’s, and Timo would be certain to get nitpicked later when David finally showed up.
“Where is David, anyway?” Linke wondered aloud, glancing down at his watch. Timo was gathering up his music off the stand and nudging his guitar case open with his foot, and he frowned and leaned over to see Linke’s watch too. Then he shrugged.
“He said he’d be a little late, some class project he’s working on with a group.”
“Oh, alright, then. Well, in his absence, then, Jan, have you decided yet what song you’re doing for sure?”
Jan looked concerned, peering up at Linke from his tuning with big worried eyes that very nearly matched his toboggan. “Umm…well, I have two that I really like, and also I think I want to do the harmony on that one piece with you? The one David talked about?”
“‘O Tannenbaum?’ Okay, if you’re sure…” Linke didn’t want to admit that he was afraid Jan would kind of mess it up. He really liked that version of “O Tannenbaum” and was looking forward to playing it. But Jan’s face lit up when he agreed, so he didn’t have the heart to tell the kid to find his own song.
“Alright, then, let’s go ahead and practice that one so we can let David hear it when he gets here.”
“Okay!” Jan quickly set up in Timo’s vacated place, Timo having retreated to a corner of the stage to work on his fingerings and snack on some crackers leftover from his lunch. Linke waited until Jan was settled in and adjusted and had pushed back his slipping toboggan from his eyes for the third time, and then they started slow.
Linke was pleasantly surprised by how smoothly Jan played. It was far from perfect but he could tell Jan had already put a great deal of time into practicing it. And the harmony line was a bit less difficult than the melody, perfect for Jan’s skill level. They blended well. As they played, Linke had to admit a duet might not have been such a bad idea.
Jan’s infrequent missteps, however, generally coincided directly with his cap falling into his eyes, and it was making Linke a little nuts watching him keep pushing it back and pushing it back only to have it slip forward again. It was too big to begin with, and Jan’s unruly curls gave the toboggan nothing to grip onto. Finally, when they paused for Jan to make a note on his music, Linke reached out and clapped his hand on top of Jan’s head to snatch the toboggan off.
“You’re making me crazy with th-”
“DON’T!!” Jan yelped at the top of his voice, startling the other two boys so badly that Linke’s chair squeaked when he jumped and Timo dropped cracker crumbs all down his front. Jan had his guitar balanced precariously in his lap by his elbows while clinging tightly to the sides of his cap with bloodless fingers, pulling it down tight over his ears almost all the way to his jaw. He looked up at Linke with an expression of bald terror and no little annoyance. Linke pulled his hand away immediately.
“Jesus!” he said huffily. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“Don’t take my hat off, asshole, it’s not yours!” Jan’s blatant fear rapidly disappeared, replaced with too-hasty bravado. “Besides, I’m cold, and you lose, like, most of your body heat through the top of your head.” He let go the cap and smoothed it unnecessarily, his eyes fixed steadily on the guitar in his lap and not on Linke.
Linke’s eyebrow hiked up, but he had no response for that. He didn’t know if that was true, about losing body heat through your head, though it sounded like something a science dork like Jan would know, so he couldn’t challenge it. Across the stage, Timo looked equally skeptical, but he just shrugged and popped the last of his cracker in his mouth, and then Jan asked Linke loudly whether they were gonna finish practicing or just sit there staring at each other and so Linke started playing again and soon pretty much forgot about Jan’s little outburst.
Linke was prepared to chalk it up to Jan just being a weird kid, which he certainly was, though his weirdness had never before translated to violent possessiveness. But over the next few weeks he seemed to be even weirder than normal. He was more picky, especially about the music he was going to play with Linke, which he perfected in no time and then started nitpicking Linke about. He would randomly break into Christmas songs, loudly and in languages other than German, which Linke had had no idea the kid even knew. And he got positively militant about decorating for the concert: every scrap of tinsel and every wreath had to be just so. Timo threatened finally to choke him with a garland, but Jan just smiled sweetly and put a piece of holly on Timo’s head, making Timo splutter in consternation and wander off, confused.
All in all, Jan seemed to be in another place for most of that month, floating through a haze of Christmas-induced dreaminess. He walked around with a vague half-smile hanging around his mouth most of the time, and, strangest of all, every time Linke saw him, Jan was wearing that stupid blue toboggan. Indoors or outdoors, warm, cold, or indifferent; he wore it constantly. Linke never saw him take it off, and when he dropped hints big as anvils about Jan removing it, about it being very warm in the room or about the horrible hat-hair Jan was creating, he was met with incredulous looks and eyerolls. Jan acted absolutely a martyr when it came to that cap, and it became a point of contention between him and Linke. In what he could only guess was some kind of stressed-out holiday-season paranoia, Linke began to think of the hat as the cause of Jan’s creepy Christmasy mood, like it was bad mojo or something. He was therefore inordinately happy when, on the day of the concert, David told Jan in no uncertain terms that he couldn’t wear the hat for the show. This was going to be for their parents, for god’s sake; hell, David was going to wear a tie. Jan was most certainly not going to wear some natty blue ski cap up on his and David’s meticulously-preened stage.
Jan looked very much like he wanted to mutiny but it was soon as clear to him as to Linke and Timo that this was going to be one of Those Decisions on which David simply would not be moved. So, pulling a face and muttering to himself, Jan disappeared for several minutes and returned just before the concert was due to start, wearing a smug grin and a Father Christmas hat so large and fluffy that it dwarfed his entire head.
“Where did you get that?” Linke burst out before he could stop himself. Timo and David were both staring at Jan with eyes as big as saucers, but then David doubled over laughing and said it looked brilliant and that Jan had to wear it for the show.
“He looks just like our very own Christmas elf, don’t you think?” David sniggered, plucking at the white fluff at the end of the enormous stocking cap. Jan blushed bright red but he just smiled at David and stuck his tongue out at Timo’s disbelieving look. Timo stuck his tongue out right back and pulled the hat down over Jan’s eyes; it was so big it didn’t need much help falling down.
As David herded them onto the stage (a makeshift construction of pallets and crates in the back of David’s mother’s garage, with a small copse of kitchen chairs assembled before it where the boys’ parents and neighborhood friends were already waiting patiently), Linke leaned down and muttered in Jan’s ear, “Make sure and keep it out of your eyes while you’re playing, or I really will take it off this time.”
Jan just sniffed self-righteously. “I won’t mess up,” he said determinedly, “unless you mess up first.”
“Not gonna happen, Elf-Boy,” Linke grinned, and Jan’s face flushed again.
They played almost a half-hour long concert. David had his little cheap electric keyboard set up on its stilt-like legs at one corner of the rickety stage and still managed to make it sound as good as a concert grand. Jan played a flawless solo and then Linke did, and then they played their duet; Linke was relieved to see that, oversized as the Santa hat was, it didn’t offer to fall into Jan’s eyes the whole time they played. Even Timo’s simple little guitar piece went beautifully, and David applauded him louder than anyone else in the room, whooping unnecessarily and making Timo grin shyly at him and then punch him in the shoulder. Last of all, David stood in front of all their parents and, conducting politely, led them all in a final and not-too-tonedeaf rendition of “Stille Nacht.” When it was over, everyone clapped enthusiastically and the boys lined up in front of the stage for a group bow. Linking their arms over each other’s shoulders, they swept grandly toward the floor once, twice, three times-and Jan’s ridiculous Santa hat slid right off and flopped onto the concrete floor of the garage.
David and Timo both burst into giggles at that, infecting their audience, and Jan was already diving for it by the time Linke even registered that it had fallen. But while everyone else was distracted laughing at Jan, Linke caught a tiny fleeting glimpse of what made the younger boy pull his hat back on in such a panicked hurry.
A single guilty glance up at Linke told Jan that he’d been discovered. Linke gaped at him. Jan’s big eyes got even bigger and pleaded silently with Linke not to say anything, so after a long moment, Linke slowly shut his jaw and nodded, and then his mom and dad were hugging him and telling him what a great performance it had been, and Jan’s mom was descending on him with embarrassing kisses, so Linke couldn’t say anything just then.
***
“So…what are you, exactly?”
Jan sighed and huddled deeper in his blanket, looking like he hoped it might just eat him whole. David and Timo stopped mid-whispering at the serious tone of Linke’s voice and looked over at Linke and Jan in surprise. The smell of the hot chocolate they were all drinking hung heavy in the air among them where they were camped out in the floor of David’s living room.
Jan had reacquired his shapeless blue toboggan at some point after the concert and David and Timo hadn’t said a thing about it, but Linke knew that Jan was hiding something and he had a feeling it was a Something they all needed to know about. He wasn’t trying to be mean, but if he didn’t say something about it now he knew Jan would try to weasel out of explaining it at all, and that would only end up making Linke mad.
“What was that, Chris?” Timo said, glancing from Linke to Jan and back again.
Linke kept his eyes on Jan, and, after sighing heavily again, Jan reached up and dragged his toboggan off his head, his unruly blond curls spilling out over his forehead and the nape of his neck and the perfect pointed tips of two elongated ears. All small and curly-headed like that, he looked exactly like a picture of Merry Brandybuck from Linke’s well-loved illustrated version of The Lord of the Rings, his ears peaked and elfin and definitely abnormal. David gasped audibly.
“What the hell?” Timo blurted. Jan winced.
“My godfather. He thinks he’s really clever.” Jan sighed even more heavily and looked like he might burst into tears. “You guys’ll never believe me…”
“Your godfather did that to you?” David asked, aghast. He reached out without any hesitation and touched one pointed ear-tip; Jan jerked a little as David’s fingers brushed it but then he stilled and let David gently feel them. He blushed furiously.
“Well, sorta. Actually, my ears are naturally like that, but most of the time I keep a spell on them that makes them look normal. It’s just that my godfather…well, when I was littler, and I told him I didn’t believe in the Weihnachtsmann, he put some kind of bigger spell on me to make me have my elf ears during Christmas.” He wrinkled his nose, still pink-cheeked. “He told me I was short on Christmas spirit, and ever since then, every December, I can’t make my ears stay normal no matter what I do…”
“Wait, wait, wait, wait,” Linke said rapidly, throwing his hands up in what felt like self-defense. “What?”
“Jan, you’re…not making any sense,” David told him, sounding a bit nervous. Timo just stared.
Jan curled his hands over his alien ears in deep embarrassment. “You guys have to promise not to think I’m lying, okay? I’ve never told this to anybody. I’m not supposed to tell anybody and if my mom finds out she’ll kill me…”
“Well you’ve gotta tell us now,” Linke replied, frowning fiercely. None of this was making any sense at all. Jan looked at him, seeming half-afraid, half-wary, and Linke huffed out an impatient breath. “Look, we promise not to call you a liar. Alright?” He sent a stern look at David and Timo to ensure their cooperation, but they were both fixated on Jan and his hidden ears and seemed in no immediate danger of saying anything at all.
Jan couldn’t meet any of their eyes. “I’m a…I’m a kobold. A kind of sprite?” He dared a glance upward to see if there was any recognition in his friends but got none. “Well, my dad was a Klabautermann, a boat-sprite. He sailed with fishermen in the North Sea. Klabautermänner are kind of like good luck charms on ships, and they…” He trailed off, cleared his throat, continued in a smaller voice, “they’re really good at music. But my mother didn’t want me going off to sea so young, so after my father left she domesticated me into a house sprite instead. So my ears, they naturally look like this.” He peeled his hands away and gingerly fingered the tips, making a face.
There was thick silence for several long seconds, until finally Timo said wonderingly, “Dude…you’re an elf?”
Jan’s grimace deepened. “Only half. My mom’s a human. And I’m half-kobold, not elf. Elves are short-tempered and stupid. Trust me, I’ve met them, and you’d better be glad you haven’t.”
Timo’s mouth snapped shut and tense silence fell again. For all that he’d read more fantasy books than anybody else he knew, Linke was having a little trouble keeping up. The one immovable constant in his life thus far had been that the books he read and the movies he watched were pretend, and that everything else was real. He’d never ever had to question that line before, and he didn’t like the thought of starting now. He loved elves and sprites and magic…in pretend. The idea that they might all be real didn’t quite want to fit inside his head.
But Jan was looking miserable and, really, he hadn’t done anything wrong, so Linke hated to make him feel bad. So he cleared his throat and grasped an abandoned plot point, his brain meanwhile sifting through all the mental illnesses he knew of, trying to think of one that could fit Jan’s situation.
“Sooo…what’s your godfather got to do with all this?”
Jan winced. “He’s a trickster. His name’s Hinzelmann. He’s like the most famous house-kobold that ever lived, or he likes to think so, anyway, so he gets away with a lot that other kobolds would be ashamed of. Like jinxing his godson, for instance.” He rolled his eyes a little, clearly recalling old bitterness. “He’s not bad, really. I guess. Just has a weird sense of humor.”
It was on the tip of Linke’s tongue to say that it was Jan who had the weird sense of humor and didn’t he think this was a bit far to take a joke, but the vaguely hunted look in Jan’s eyes made him bite off the words in his mouth. As the oppressive quiet swallowed them all again Linke slowly began to realize that Jan was completely serious about this. He believed every word he was saying. So either he was crazy or…or. Linke winced a little at or. Jan glanced at him pleadingly.
“Look, I can prove it, if you want me to,” he said hurriedly, sitting up straighter and smoothing out a corner of his blanket on the floor in front of him. “Okay? Watch.”
David and Linke leaned forward to get a better look. Timo drew away slightly until David poked him, and then he leaned in just a little, too. But he didn’t look happy about it.
Jan’s eyes darted around at their faces, making sure they were watching, and then he pulled on a loose thread in the blanket. It was already two or three centimeters long; as he pulled it, it unraveled easily. When it was maybe ten centimeters long, he stretched it out and laid it flat against the blanket again. Then he placed his pointer fingertip right against the place where the thread emerged from the cloth and dragged his finger along the length of it. It disappeared as his finger passed over it. Linke felt his own eyes widening and Timo emitted a choked sound and then breathed, “It’s gone!”
Jan frowned in confusion. “No,” he said, picking up that edge of the blanket and holding it up so that they could look across the surface of it. “I just put it back in. I’m not very good at it, see?” He scratched a bit of blanket with his fingernail and, sure enough, a still partially-loose loop of thread rose up from the fabric. But it had most definitely been stitched back into place, if poorly.
David puffed out a breath. “How’d you do that?”
Jan shrugged a little, seeming to be relaxing a bit now he’d gotten David asking questions. “It’s kinda hard to explain it. It’s just like sewing with a needle, I guess, except I just…tell the thread to go into the blanket.” He wrinkled his nose, looking dissatisfied. “Something like that. Like I said, hard to explain. I can’t do much more than that, I’m not…I don’t know very much. My mom can’t exactly teach me anything, and my dad…” He trailed off, shrugged again. “It’s just little stuff, like sewing threads and buttons on, or putting pages back into books when they fall out, or…oh!” He reached out and picked up David’s mug of cocoa. Wrapping his small, long-fingered hands around it, he stared down into it intensely for a moment, then smiled and handed the mug back to David. David took it hesitantly, and nearly as soon as it was in his hands he gasped and put it down quickly.
“Ouch!” he yelped. “You…did you heat it up?”
“Yep. I can almost boil a kettle now. It’s not hard, but it’s kind of lame. I mean, if I was gonna pick a magical power I’d make it good, y’know? Invisibility or something. Flying. Killer laser beams. I dunno.”
David laughed, and Linke could tell David had gotten over his initial shock and was starting to accept all this. Most of Linke’s brain was still frantically jamming down the brakes, trying to get the world realigned back along a normal track, but seeing David so calm and…well, normal went a long way to easing Linke’s mind.
“So,” Linke ventured slowly, making sure he’d got it all right. “You’re half…kobold, and usually you put a spell on your ears to make them look normal?”
Jan nodded, looking relieved that Linke was running with the explanation. “We can change the way we look, a bit. Like I could probably change my hair color a little or maybe the sound of my voice. I’d have to concentrate on it all the time, though, keep the spell up, so I try not to do much more than my ears most of the time. The rest of me looks pretty normal-” he grimaced “-y’know, except for the ears.”
David cocked his head a little, studying Jan thoughtfully. “I’d say you look very normal, for a kobold,” he observed. “Especially with the ears.”
Jan colored. “I hate them. I wish my stupid godfather had just left me alone. Hard enough I have to be little. I’m still the shortest person in my class, you know. Now I have to be pointy-eared on top of it. It’s like he wants people to hate me.”
“We don’t hate you, Jan,” David replied immediately. “And we don’t think you’re lying.”
From the corner of his eye Linke just caught the look Timo threw David at that statement, but luckily Jan missed it. Linke’s conscience pricked him when he saw how Jan smiled when David said that, and when he reached out again, curiously, to touch Jan’s pointy ears. If David bought it, then Timo would have to. Linke supposed that just left him, then.
“I kinda like ‘em,” he said quietly, feeling Timo glaring at him for his betrayal of sanity. “I mean, they’re weird and all, but it’s…kinda cool, knowing that elves and kobolds and stuff like that exist.”
Jan snorted. “Yeah, wait til you meet some more of them. I guarantee you won’t think it’s cool for very long.”
“Well, you’re pretty cool, so how bad can they be?” Linke shot back. “You’re a complete dork, of course, but not bad, as dorks go.” He grinned at Jan and Jan’s smile intensified. He looked about like an elf, all blond curls and perfect white teeth and pointed ears. He looked magical, somehow. Linke could almost swear Jan’s eyes lit up from the inside, when he smiled like that.
Then Timo was crawling over David to feel Jan’s ears himself, looking intensely skeptical, and Jan dissolved in giggles as Timo lightly tugged on one.
“Stop, that-! It tickles, Timo, quit it!” Jan curled up, trying to get away from Timo’s inquisitive fingers, but Linke wasn’t about to let a prime opportunity like that pass.
“Oh, does it?” he muttered, reaching out and plucking at Jan’s near ear. Jan yelped and covered his head with his hands, trying to look stern. He couldn’t quite contain his laughter, though.
“David, help!”
David threw up his hands helplessly. “Hey, you’re the magical one, remember? What am I supposed to do about it?”
Their torture thus unofficially sanctioned, Timo and Linke grinned at each other wickedly.
***
“Jan, where did we put the fairy lights?” Linke yelled back through the house as he rummaged in yet another box of Christmas decorations. Jan’s family had positively a frightening amount of Christmas paraphernalia. For Linke, decorating for Christmas went no farther than helping his dad string lights and putting the big red bow on top of the tree because he was the only one in the family tall enough to reach that high without a step ladder. But for Jan and his mom and sister, no shop display of ornaments or tinsel or wrapping paper was safe, and it wasn’t Christmas until every square inch of clear space in the house was garland-bedecked and fairy-lit and holly-wreathed within an inch of its life. An outside observer would probably have chalked it all up to the house being largely run by females, but years had taught Linke better.
“Which set?” Jan’s voice came back from his bedroom, where Linke had left him fussing with an elaborate string of gold beads and his bookshelf.
“…Whichever set you told me to hang around the front door.” Linke rolled his eyes, safe from Jan’s wrath with several walls between them, and stuck a stray sprig of fake greenery over one ear to keep it out of the way as he continued rifling through boxes. Jan had asked him to come help decorate this year because Jan’s sister, who was normally very enthusiastic about decorating, was out of town. Never, ever again. Linke was rapidly burning through his nominal allotment of Christmas spirit and could feel his mood becoming scroogy.
“Oh, that’s the green set. The big box.”
“Jan, that’s, like, five boxes.”
“The one with stars on.”
Craning his neck to peer around the room, Linke saw three different boxes emblazoned with a starry pattern. He sighed.
Jan being disgustingly cheerful about Christmas was nothing new to Linke - he’d been putting up with it for nine years, now - but having quite such an up-close-and-personal taste of Jan’s indomitable holiday spirit was. Usually everyone was so busy with band stuff right before the Christmas holidays that Jan barely had time to breathe, let alone spread Christmas cheer. Anymore, nearly the only reminder of Jan’s little holiday problem was his continued dependence on hats, caps, hoodies, and headbands to keep his ears under wraps.
The rest of the guys had gotten used to it. David had been alright with it all pretty much from the get-go; Timo had naturally followed David, with the stolid resignation of the thoroughly whipped. And if Juri or Franky had noticed anything odd about never seeing Jan’s head in December, they never mentioned it.
Linke had taken a bit of time to truly come around. That first Christmas had been alright; ten- and eleven-year-olds bounce back pretty quickly, even from a shock like that. And by New Year, Jan had been acting - and looking - totally normal again. It was when Jan’s incessant hat-wearing and nearly frightening Christmas spirit had reoccurred the following year that Linke had really begun to realize that the whole thing wasn’t a hoax or a prank. It was as much a fact of Jan’s life as his tragic shortness or his penchant for changing his hairdo like most other people changed their underwear. Jan hadn’t overtly mentioned his ancestry to Linke again that year but had seemed to understand that Linke wasn’t yet quite okay with it. He’d kept his distance.
And Linke had realized how much worse it was not to have his shrimpy little dork buddy around than to put up with his being a mythical creature.
They’d been inseparable after that. And Panik had kept them busy, Nevada Tan even more so, until Linke couldn’t remember anymore what it had been like not knowing that Jan had pointy ears and occasionally did magical things like turn briefly invisible or sew buttons onto shirts with his bare hands.
It wasn’t even all that special, anymore; just the way things were. But in December Jan’s magic-induced weirdness was a little harder to ignore. And this year had been the worst in recent memory for sheer Christmas insanity on Jan’s part. Maybe it had been the enormous stress they’d been under all year, what with the record deal and the Bravo publicity and the unexpected demands of their producers that nearly killed them before the album was all said and done. When December arrived Jan had seemed to nearly burst with desperate energy and stubborn determination to make Christmas happy for the band. Now that they’d finally gotten home for their holiday, it seemed he wasn’t inclined to slow down at all.
Jan appeared in the living room doorway just then, interrupting Linke’s brief pity party.
“Find ‘em, yet?” he chirped, bouncing on his toes. Linke noticed he was still wearing the gaudy cranberry-green-white (vomit-colored, Linke privately thought of it) chullo that he’d donned earlier when they’d gone out to buy a pack of replacement blinker bulbs. Linke had always wondered, morbidly curious, just where Jan got all this awful headwear. For a guy with such impeccable fashion sense the rest of the year, Jan’s style radar went on the serious blink every December.
“Yes, absolutely. You’ll notice they’re not up now, though. I found them, put them up, admired them for a minute, then took them back down and hid them in another box because it was just so darn fun looking for them the first time.”
Jan looked aggrieved. “Your sarcasm’s just so attractive, Chris.”
“I’m a sexy character, what can I say. I have no earthly clue what box you’re telling me to look in, Jan.” He got up to show he was making an attempt at cooperation, toeing aside several boxes. “I’ve already gone through all of these, but no dice.”
“That’s because they’re in this one,” Jan sighed, laying on the martyrdom annoyingly thick, as he clambered over a small army of boxes to get to a narrow but deep green cardboard box with holographic stars all over it. Lifting the lid, Jan immediately withdrew a neat coil of green fairy lights, holding them up and giving them a little wave in Linke’s direction.
“Bravo,” Linke growled. “You’ve found the prize. Make a Christmas wish.”
Jan was carefully picking his way unsteadily back out of the morass of boxes. “You do realize the Weihnachtsmann only brings gifts to boys who are good. You’re rapidly working your way down the list.”
“I seem to recall,” Linke said, sidling over to give Jan a steadying hand over the last couple of crates, “a little boy named Jan Werner once telling me he didn’t believe in the Weihnachtsmann.” Linke cocked an eyebrow down at Jan. “Where does that put you on the list?”
“Oh, I made up for that a while back. I met the Weihnachtsmann. Nice chap.”
Linke froze, giving Jan a manic look. He wasn’t a gullible person by nature, but Linke had also learned in his time with Jan not to take anything for granted.
Jan saw Linke’s face and burst out laughing.
“Kidding!”
Huffing out his breath, Linke pursed his lips. “Okay, that’s definitely no presents for you, then.”
Jan pouted. “Aw, not even a Christmas kiss?”
“Hm?” Linke blinked, surprised by the non-sequitur.
Jan pointed at the side of Linke’s head. Linke put up his hand automatically and bumped into the forgotten sprig of plastic greenery behind his ear. He extracted it from his hair to inspect it.
“It’s mistletoe,” Jan said rather too helpfully, subtly narrowing the space between him and Linke. Linke looked at the mistletoe, then up at Jan, and smirked.
“You’ve done nothing but work me like a Christmas slave today,” Linke said airily, twisting the sprig between his fingertips. Jan watched it a bit hungrily. “And then you come in here and tease me. That’s not what I call good behavior.”
Jan moved closer still, his big, bright blue eyes pleading. Linke could feel the warmth of him through both their clothes and Jan’s hoodie.
“But I was very, very good all the rest of the year. You can’t deny that I was.”
Linke appeared to ponder it. “True, you were certainly better this year than last year. No repeats of the tourbus toilet incident.”
Jan nodded emphatically. “So really I deserve to be rewarded, don’t you think?” He plucked the mistletoe out of Linke’s hand and carefully stuck it up under the band of his cap so that it hung right between his eyes. Linke swallowed a snicker.
“Well, alright, then. One Christmas kiss won’t hurt, I suppose.” He looked down at Jan seriously, which was a little difficult to do with the smaller man practically climbing into Linke’s sweater with him. “You sure you don’t want to save it for later?”
Jan shook his head definitively. “No. Now.”
Linke started to sigh heavily, the longsuffering boyfriend, but Jan’s lips interrupted him.
Try as he might to be a hardass, once Linke started kissing Jan he was nothing but an addict getting a hit. Something about the way Jan kissed was intoxicating. Linke had been hooked from the very first, which, incidentally, had also been under mistletoe (and under duress; Timo had thought it an hysterical prank until Linke and Jan couldn’t stop).
The second Linke tenderly brushed the tip of his tongue against Jan’s, he tasted tiny little fiery bursts of spices like you got when chewing cinnamon gum or eating ginger cookies. Linke moaned happily; he loved the taste of Jan’s magic in his mouth. Before he knew he was doing it, Linke was slipping his fingers up under Jan’s hat to curl into his cropped blond hair. Shifting the cap made the fake mistletoe fall and bump their noses on the way down. Jan laughed. Linke just grinned mischievously and pulled the cap off all the way, chucking it across the room where, with any luck, it would get eaten by a box of Christmas ornaments, never to be seen again.
“Oh, look what I found,” Linke murmured sinfully, brushing his thumbs over the exposed pointy tips of Jan’s kobold ears. The light touches made Jan shiver and blush perfectly. Linke’s grin became a leer. “Now I get to make a Christmas wish, on a Christmas elf.”
Jan squirmed, struggling to keep his eyes open as Linke slowly rubbed the very tips of Jan’s ears between his fingers. “’M not a…not a…”
Linke leaned down and closed his lips around the top of Jan’s left ear. Jan gave a little cry, twisting his hands in the front of Linke’s sweater and hanging on for dear life as Linke flickered his tongue over the eartip.
“Mmm,” Linke hummed, and Jan shuddered deeply.
What had tickled a ten-year-old kobold, Linke had discovered over time, gradually didn’t tickle as he grew up. The two of them had been simultaneously shocked speechless the first time Linke had gone to tweak one of Jan’s ears in play and Jan had crumpled boneless and gasping to the floor.
Now Jan’s ears were Linke’s favorite part of Christmas.
Jan was making the most delicious little helpless whimpers in Linke’s left ear, trying to get his own back by nibbling the lobe and sucking on the corner of Linke’s jaw. Linke chuckled sonorously and, tracing Jan’s pointy ear a final time with the tip of his tongue, disengaged.
“That doesn’t work nearly as well on me,” he whispered against Jan’s ear, but Jan already had a double fistful of Linke’s shaggy hair and was dragging Linke’s mouth back to his. A few seconds later, Linke jumped at the feeling of Jan’s fingers worming up under his sweater. Next thing Linke knew he felt sparks - literal as well as figurative - burst over his nipples. He gasped in surprise and pleasure.
“No,” Jan said, grinning against Linke’s lips. “But that does.”
Linke struggled to catch his breath as he reached up under his own shirt, wound his fingers around Jan’s wrists, and forcibly withdrew those magical hands. Linke brought Jan’s hands up to his own face and watched Jan’s eyes as he methodically kissed every fingertip, feeling electricity arc across his lips with each one.
Just as he had expected, the blue of Jan’s eyes ignited like the flare of fireworks at each kiss. Linke could just see in his periphery the bright golden glitter of a stray spark falling from Jan’s fingers every now and again.
“Just think,” Linke murmured, punctuating his words with kisses. “If your godfather hadn’t jinxed you, we wouldn’t be having so much fun right now.”
Jan was vibrating like a guitar string struck and never muted. “Oh, the old geezer probably meant us to find out how sensitive my ears are, that would be something he’d do,” he said shakily.
Linke wrinkled his nose. “Well, I don’t really care for the thought of your godfather knowing what we’re up to, but…”
Jan laughed. “Well, then let’s not look a gift kobold in the mouth.” He took hold of Linke’s hands, tugging him towards the back of the house and his bedroom.
“What about the fairy lights?” Linke reminded him, no heart in the question whatsoever.
The grin Jan shot him over his shoulder fired a lightningbolt of worry through Linke’s gut.
“We have to light up my room, first.”
Pairing: Linke/Jan
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: Linke has noticed that during December Jan always seems to wear something on his head, like a woolly hat, or he keeps his hoodie up. When he manages to trap Jan into removing his protection he finds out why; Jan had little pointed tips to his ears. Would love it to end up Jan/Linke and would be very interested to see the explanation for the ears ::g:: (submitted by beren_writes )
Date: 12/19/08
Linke was about twelve before Jan’s cold-weather quirk genuinely starting twigging his Weird-o-Meter. Before that winter the two of them hadn’t hung out much, just seen each other now and again, usually at Timo’s or David’s houses. They were on friendly enough terms - they both liked music and computers and video games - even if Jan was too desperately nerdy to be a proper friend, but just before Christmas that year David decided he was going to try to put together a little holiday concert for their parents and friends, and started beating the bushes for willing participants. Timo was in, of course, which was kind of funny considering Timo had yet to learn any guitar tabs more complicated than “Hot Cross Buns,” and Linke quietly assured David that he’d help Timo practice whenever he could. As thanks David gave Linke his choice of Christmas song to solo, thereby happily negating Linke’s need to demand exemption from any and all performances of “Jingle Bell Rock.”
More surprisingly than Timo overestimating his own abilities was Jan volunteering his. They all knew Jan played at the guitar some; he wasn’t bad but he was only ten so he couldn’t really be expected to do much other than sit on a stool that was too high for him and attempt to play a guitar that was too big for him and generally look pathetically cute. Luckily, he was stellar at that and David was too happy for the warm body on the docket to say no, despite his own and Linke’s misgivings. So Linke privately resolved to give the kid a bit of a hand, too, if he needed it and didn’t get on Linke’s nerves too much.
They practiced in David’s school auditorium Tuesday evenings because it had the nicest piano and because David could sweet talk his teachers into giving him anything he wanted, the conniving son of a bitch. The acoustics and sound system were nice, too, but these were just bonuses when really all Linke needed was a music stand and a guitar for himself and some duct tape to keep Timo lashed to his own seat while they pounded out the chords for “Adeste Fidelis” over and over and over again. It was thankless work, but Linke took twisted joy in it, and Timo actually grew grateful for the coaching as Christmas swiftly approached and he began to realize just how little he’d been practicing on his own.
“No, here, your middle finger is laying across, like, four strings, Timo,” Linke mumbled at him around a pick between his teeth, reaching across and molding Timo’s hand correctly around the fretboard. “You bend it…arch it over the strings like this. Just use the tip of your finger.” He demonstrated on his own instrument. Timo nodded.
“I see,” he said, and, carefully watching the formation of his own hand, pressed down a very-nearly-perfect A7 chord and strummed it. He grinned. “Ahh, that’s what I’m talking about.”
Linke smirked. “Bravo. Now just do that a half a million more times and you might get this song right.”
Timo went a little pale but cleared his throat and forced a determined look onto his face. “Okay, where are we starting at?”
“Uhh, how about measure sixteen.”
Timo meticulously reconfigured his fingers and started strumming again, a little haltingly but not nearly so much so as he had been two weeks ago. Linke was pleased with his progress and he knew that at least he wouldn’t have to worry too much about stage fright fucking with Timo’s composure. Timo didn’t know the meaning of stage fright.
Just then the door at the back of the auditorium creaked open and Jan trotted in, hauling a well-beaten second-hand guitar case and bundled to the gills in mom-approved winter layers all topped with an electric blue parka and matching toboggan that made him rather closely resemble that kid from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory who got blown up into a blueberry. Linke rapidly shook away the mental image.
“Hi, guys!” Jan chirped, gently plunking down his instrument and beginning to unwrap himself like an early Christmas present.
“Hey,” Linke replied, smiling amusedly as he watched the parka, a hoodie, a windbreaker, and two pairs of gloves melt off Jan’s little frame. Timo said nothing at all, just kept playing with his eyes glued intensely to his sheet music and his tongue stuck partway out his lips.
“Little flat, Timo,” Linke admonished him, then returned his eyes to Jan, who was opening his guitar case and struggling with the instrument inside. His fingers were pale around the neck of the guitar and he’d left his toboggan on, though it was plenty warm in the auditorium. Jan gathered up a sheaf of music and mounted the stage.
“There, how was that?” Timo prompted as his final chord faded away, a bit unnecessarily muffled and tinny. To his credit, Linke didn’t wince much.
“Just…make sure and keep your fingers as curved as you can make them, okay? You’ll be alright, you know the notes.” Linke was satisfied enough with Timo’s work for now; being a perfectionist was David’s job, not Linke’s, and Timo would be certain to get nitpicked later when David finally showed up.
“Where is David, anyway?” Linke wondered aloud, glancing down at his watch. Timo was gathering up his music off the stand and nudging his guitar case open with his foot, and he frowned and leaned over to see Linke’s watch too. Then he shrugged.
“He said he’d be a little late, some class project he’s working on with a group.”
“Oh, alright, then. Well, in his absence, then, Jan, have you decided yet what song you’re doing for sure?”
Jan looked concerned, peering up at Linke from his tuning with big worried eyes that very nearly matched his toboggan. “Umm…well, I have two that I really like, and also I think I want to do the harmony on that one piece with you? The one David talked about?”
“‘O Tannenbaum?’ Okay, if you’re sure…” Linke didn’t want to admit that he was afraid Jan would kind of mess it up. He really liked that version of “O Tannenbaum” and was looking forward to playing it. But Jan’s face lit up when he agreed, so he didn’t have the heart to tell the kid to find his own song.
“Alright, then, let’s go ahead and practice that one so we can let David hear it when he gets here.”
“Okay!” Jan quickly set up in Timo’s vacated place, Timo having retreated to a corner of the stage to work on his fingerings and snack on some crackers leftover from his lunch. Linke waited until Jan was settled in and adjusted and had pushed back his slipping toboggan from his eyes for the third time, and then they started slow.
Linke was pleasantly surprised by how smoothly Jan played. It was far from perfect but he could tell Jan had already put a great deal of time into practicing it. And the harmony line was a bit less difficult than the melody, perfect for Jan’s skill level. They blended well. As they played, Linke had to admit a duet might not have been such a bad idea.
Jan’s infrequent missteps, however, generally coincided directly with his cap falling into his eyes, and it was making Linke a little nuts watching him keep pushing it back and pushing it back only to have it slip forward again. It was too big to begin with, and Jan’s unruly curls gave the toboggan nothing to grip onto. Finally, when they paused for Jan to make a note on his music, Linke reached out and clapped his hand on top of Jan’s head to snatch the toboggan off.
“You’re making me crazy with th-”
“DON’T!!” Jan yelped at the top of his voice, startling the other two boys so badly that Linke’s chair squeaked when he jumped and Timo dropped cracker crumbs all down his front. Jan had his guitar balanced precariously in his lap by his elbows while clinging tightly to the sides of his cap with bloodless fingers, pulling it down tight over his ears almost all the way to his jaw. He looked up at Linke with an expression of bald terror and no little annoyance. Linke pulled his hand away immediately.
“Jesus!” he said huffily. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“Don’t take my hat off, asshole, it’s not yours!” Jan’s blatant fear rapidly disappeared, replaced with too-hasty bravado. “Besides, I’m cold, and you lose, like, most of your body heat through the top of your head.” He let go the cap and smoothed it unnecessarily, his eyes fixed steadily on the guitar in his lap and not on Linke.
Linke’s eyebrow hiked up, but he had no response for that. He didn’t know if that was true, about losing body heat through your head, though it sounded like something a science dork like Jan would know, so he couldn’t challenge it. Across the stage, Timo looked equally skeptical, but he just shrugged and popped the last of his cracker in his mouth, and then Jan asked Linke loudly whether they were gonna finish practicing or just sit there staring at each other and so Linke started playing again and soon pretty much forgot about Jan’s little outburst.
Linke was prepared to chalk it up to Jan just being a weird kid, which he certainly was, though his weirdness had never before translated to violent possessiveness. But over the next few weeks he seemed to be even weirder than normal. He was more picky, especially about the music he was going to play with Linke, which he perfected in no time and then started nitpicking Linke about. He would randomly break into Christmas songs, loudly and in languages other than German, which Linke had had no idea the kid even knew. And he got positively militant about decorating for the concert: every scrap of tinsel and every wreath had to be just so. Timo threatened finally to choke him with a garland, but Jan just smiled sweetly and put a piece of holly on Timo’s head, making Timo splutter in consternation and wander off, confused.
All in all, Jan seemed to be in another place for most of that month, floating through a haze of Christmas-induced dreaminess. He walked around with a vague half-smile hanging around his mouth most of the time, and, strangest of all, every time Linke saw him, Jan was wearing that stupid blue toboggan. Indoors or outdoors, warm, cold, or indifferent; he wore it constantly. Linke never saw him take it off, and when he dropped hints big as anvils about Jan removing it, about it being very warm in the room or about the horrible hat-hair Jan was creating, he was met with incredulous looks and eyerolls. Jan acted absolutely a martyr when it came to that cap, and it became a point of contention between him and Linke. In what he could only guess was some kind of stressed-out holiday-season paranoia, Linke began to think of the hat as the cause of Jan’s creepy Christmasy mood, like it was bad mojo or something. He was therefore inordinately happy when, on the day of the concert, David told Jan in no uncertain terms that he couldn’t wear the hat for the show. This was going to be for their parents, for god’s sake; hell, David was going to wear a tie. Jan was most certainly not going to wear some natty blue ski cap up on his and David’s meticulously-preened stage.
Jan looked very much like he wanted to mutiny but it was soon as clear to him as to Linke and Timo that this was going to be one of Those Decisions on which David simply would not be moved. So, pulling a face and muttering to himself, Jan disappeared for several minutes and returned just before the concert was due to start, wearing a smug grin and a Father Christmas hat so large and fluffy that it dwarfed his entire head.
“Where did you get that?” Linke burst out before he could stop himself. Timo and David were both staring at Jan with eyes as big as saucers, but then David doubled over laughing and said it looked brilliant and that Jan had to wear it for the show.
“He looks just like our very own Christmas elf, don’t you think?” David sniggered, plucking at the white fluff at the end of the enormous stocking cap. Jan blushed bright red but he just smiled at David and stuck his tongue out at Timo’s disbelieving look. Timo stuck his tongue out right back and pulled the hat down over Jan’s eyes; it was so big it didn’t need much help falling down.
As David herded them onto the stage (a makeshift construction of pallets and crates in the back of David’s mother’s garage, with a small copse of kitchen chairs assembled before it where the boys’ parents and neighborhood friends were already waiting patiently), Linke leaned down and muttered in Jan’s ear, “Make sure and keep it out of your eyes while you’re playing, or I really will take it off this time.”
Jan just sniffed self-righteously. “I won’t mess up,” he said determinedly, “unless you mess up first.”
“Not gonna happen, Elf-Boy,” Linke grinned, and Jan’s face flushed again.
They played almost a half-hour long concert. David had his little cheap electric keyboard set up on its stilt-like legs at one corner of the rickety stage and still managed to make it sound as good as a concert grand. Jan played a flawless solo and then Linke did, and then they played their duet; Linke was relieved to see that, oversized as the Santa hat was, it didn’t offer to fall into Jan’s eyes the whole time they played. Even Timo’s simple little guitar piece went beautifully, and David applauded him louder than anyone else in the room, whooping unnecessarily and making Timo grin shyly at him and then punch him in the shoulder. Last of all, David stood in front of all their parents and, conducting politely, led them all in a final and not-too-tonedeaf rendition of “Stille Nacht.” When it was over, everyone clapped enthusiastically and the boys lined up in front of the stage for a group bow. Linking their arms over each other’s shoulders, they swept grandly toward the floor once, twice, three times-and Jan’s ridiculous Santa hat slid right off and flopped onto the concrete floor of the garage.
David and Timo both burst into giggles at that, infecting their audience, and Jan was already diving for it by the time Linke even registered that it had fallen. But while everyone else was distracted laughing at Jan, Linke caught a tiny fleeting glimpse of what made the younger boy pull his hat back on in such a panicked hurry.
A single guilty glance up at Linke told Jan that he’d been discovered. Linke gaped at him. Jan’s big eyes got even bigger and pleaded silently with Linke not to say anything, so after a long moment, Linke slowly shut his jaw and nodded, and then his mom and dad were hugging him and telling him what a great performance it had been, and Jan’s mom was descending on him with embarrassing kisses, so Linke couldn’t say anything just then.
***
“So…what are you, exactly?”
Jan sighed and huddled deeper in his blanket, looking like he hoped it might just eat him whole. David and Timo stopped mid-whispering at the serious tone of Linke’s voice and looked over at Linke and Jan in surprise. The smell of the hot chocolate they were all drinking hung heavy in the air among them where they were camped out in the floor of David’s living room.
Jan had reacquired his shapeless blue toboggan at some point after the concert and David and Timo hadn’t said a thing about it, but Linke knew that Jan was hiding something and he had a feeling it was a Something they all needed to know about. He wasn’t trying to be mean, but if he didn’t say something about it now he knew Jan would try to weasel out of explaining it at all, and that would only end up making Linke mad.
“What was that, Chris?” Timo said, glancing from Linke to Jan and back again.
Linke kept his eyes on Jan, and, after sighing heavily again, Jan reached up and dragged his toboggan off his head, his unruly blond curls spilling out over his forehead and the nape of his neck and the perfect pointed tips of two elongated ears. All small and curly-headed like that, he looked exactly like a picture of Merry Brandybuck from Linke’s well-loved illustrated version of The Lord of the Rings, his ears peaked and elfin and definitely abnormal. David gasped audibly.
“What the hell?” Timo blurted. Jan winced.
“My godfather. He thinks he’s really clever.” Jan sighed even more heavily and looked like he might burst into tears. “You guys’ll never believe me…”
“Your godfather did that to you?” David asked, aghast. He reached out without any hesitation and touched one pointed ear-tip; Jan jerked a little as David’s fingers brushed it but then he stilled and let David gently feel them. He blushed furiously.
“Well, sorta. Actually, my ears are naturally like that, but most of the time I keep a spell on them that makes them look normal. It’s just that my godfather…well, when I was littler, and I told him I didn’t believe in the Weihnachtsmann, he put some kind of bigger spell on me to make me have my elf ears during Christmas.” He wrinkled his nose, still pink-cheeked. “He told me I was short on Christmas spirit, and ever since then, every December, I can’t make my ears stay normal no matter what I do…”
“Wait, wait, wait, wait,” Linke said rapidly, throwing his hands up in what felt like self-defense. “What?”
“Jan, you’re…not making any sense,” David told him, sounding a bit nervous. Timo just stared.
Jan curled his hands over his alien ears in deep embarrassment. “You guys have to promise not to think I’m lying, okay? I’ve never told this to anybody. I’m not supposed to tell anybody and if my mom finds out she’ll kill me…”
“Well you’ve gotta tell us now,” Linke replied, frowning fiercely. None of this was making any sense at all. Jan looked at him, seeming half-afraid, half-wary, and Linke huffed out an impatient breath. “Look, we promise not to call you a liar. Alright?” He sent a stern look at David and Timo to ensure their cooperation, but they were both fixated on Jan and his hidden ears and seemed in no immediate danger of saying anything at all.
Jan couldn’t meet any of their eyes. “I’m a…I’m a kobold. A kind of sprite?” He dared a glance upward to see if there was any recognition in his friends but got none. “Well, my dad was a Klabautermann, a boat-sprite. He sailed with fishermen in the North Sea. Klabautermänner are kind of like good luck charms on ships, and they…” He trailed off, cleared his throat, continued in a smaller voice, “they’re really good at music. But my mother didn’t want me going off to sea so young, so after my father left she domesticated me into a house sprite instead. So my ears, they naturally look like this.” He peeled his hands away and gingerly fingered the tips, making a face.
There was thick silence for several long seconds, until finally Timo said wonderingly, “Dude…you’re an elf?”
Jan’s grimace deepened. “Only half. My mom’s a human. And I’m half-kobold, not elf. Elves are short-tempered and stupid. Trust me, I’ve met them, and you’d better be glad you haven’t.”
Timo’s mouth snapped shut and tense silence fell again. For all that he’d read more fantasy books than anybody else he knew, Linke was having a little trouble keeping up. The one immovable constant in his life thus far had been that the books he read and the movies he watched were pretend, and that everything else was real. He’d never ever had to question that line before, and he didn’t like the thought of starting now. He loved elves and sprites and magic…in pretend. The idea that they might all be real didn’t quite want to fit inside his head.
But Jan was looking miserable and, really, he hadn’t done anything wrong, so Linke hated to make him feel bad. So he cleared his throat and grasped an abandoned plot point, his brain meanwhile sifting through all the mental illnesses he knew of, trying to think of one that could fit Jan’s situation.
“Sooo…what’s your godfather got to do with all this?”
Jan winced. “He’s a trickster. His name’s Hinzelmann. He’s like the most famous house-kobold that ever lived, or he likes to think so, anyway, so he gets away with a lot that other kobolds would be ashamed of. Like jinxing his godson, for instance.” He rolled his eyes a little, clearly recalling old bitterness. “He’s not bad, really. I guess. Just has a weird sense of humor.”
It was on the tip of Linke’s tongue to say that it was Jan who had the weird sense of humor and didn’t he think this was a bit far to take a joke, but the vaguely hunted look in Jan’s eyes made him bite off the words in his mouth. As the oppressive quiet swallowed them all again Linke slowly began to realize that Jan was completely serious about this. He believed every word he was saying. So either he was crazy or…or. Linke winced a little at or. Jan glanced at him pleadingly.
“Look, I can prove it, if you want me to,” he said hurriedly, sitting up straighter and smoothing out a corner of his blanket on the floor in front of him. “Okay? Watch.”
David and Linke leaned forward to get a better look. Timo drew away slightly until David poked him, and then he leaned in just a little, too. But he didn’t look happy about it.
Jan’s eyes darted around at their faces, making sure they were watching, and then he pulled on a loose thread in the blanket. It was already two or three centimeters long; as he pulled it, it unraveled easily. When it was maybe ten centimeters long, he stretched it out and laid it flat against the blanket again. Then he placed his pointer fingertip right against the place where the thread emerged from the cloth and dragged his finger along the length of it. It disappeared as his finger passed over it. Linke felt his own eyes widening and Timo emitted a choked sound and then breathed, “It’s gone!”
Jan frowned in confusion. “No,” he said, picking up that edge of the blanket and holding it up so that they could look across the surface of it. “I just put it back in. I’m not very good at it, see?” He scratched a bit of blanket with his fingernail and, sure enough, a still partially-loose loop of thread rose up from the fabric. But it had most definitely been stitched back into place, if poorly.
David puffed out a breath. “How’d you do that?”
Jan shrugged a little, seeming to be relaxing a bit now he’d gotten David asking questions. “It’s kinda hard to explain it. It’s just like sewing with a needle, I guess, except I just…tell the thread to go into the blanket.” He wrinkled his nose, looking dissatisfied. “Something like that. Like I said, hard to explain. I can’t do much more than that, I’m not…I don’t know very much. My mom can’t exactly teach me anything, and my dad…” He trailed off, shrugged again. “It’s just little stuff, like sewing threads and buttons on, or putting pages back into books when they fall out, or…oh!” He reached out and picked up David’s mug of cocoa. Wrapping his small, long-fingered hands around it, he stared down into it intensely for a moment, then smiled and handed the mug back to David. David took it hesitantly, and nearly as soon as it was in his hands he gasped and put it down quickly.
“Ouch!” he yelped. “You…did you heat it up?”
“Yep. I can almost boil a kettle now. It’s not hard, but it’s kind of lame. I mean, if I was gonna pick a magical power I’d make it good, y’know? Invisibility or something. Flying. Killer laser beams. I dunno.”
David laughed, and Linke could tell David had gotten over his initial shock and was starting to accept all this. Most of Linke’s brain was still frantically jamming down the brakes, trying to get the world realigned back along a normal track, but seeing David so calm and…well, normal went a long way to easing Linke’s mind.
“So,” Linke ventured slowly, making sure he’d got it all right. “You’re half…kobold, and usually you put a spell on your ears to make them look normal?”
Jan nodded, looking relieved that Linke was running with the explanation. “We can change the way we look, a bit. Like I could probably change my hair color a little or maybe the sound of my voice. I’d have to concentrate on it all the time, though, keep the spell up, so I try not to do much more than my ears most of the time. The rest of me looks pretty normal-” he grimaced “-y’know, except for the ears.”
David cocked his head a little, studying Jan thoughtfully. “I’d say you look very normal, for a kobold,” he observed. “Especially with the ears.”
Jan colored. “I hate them. I wish my stupid godfather had just left me alone. Hard enough I have to be little. I’m still the shortest person in my class, you know. Now I have to be pointy-eared on top of it. It’s like he wants people to hate me.”
“We don’t hate you, Jan,” David replied immediately. “And we don’t think you’re lying.”
From the corner of his eye Linke just caught the look Timo threw David at that statement, but luckily Jan missed it. Linke’s conscience pricked him when he saw how Jan smiled when David said that, and when he reached out again, curiously, to touch Jan’s pointy ears. If David bought it, then Timo would have to. Linke supposed that just left him, then.
“I kinda like ‘em,” he said quietly, feeling Timo glaring at him for his betrayal of sanity. “I mean, they’re weird and all, but it’s…kinda cool, knowing that elves and kobolds and stuff like that exist.”
Jan snorted. “Yeah, wait til you meet some more of them. I guarantee you won’t think it’s cool for very long.”
“Well, you’re pretty cool, so how bad can they be?” Linke shot back. “You’re a complete dork, of course, but not bad, as dorks go.” He grinned at Jan and Jan’s smile intensified. He looked about like an elf, all blond curls and perfect white teeth and pointed ears. He looked magical, somehow. Linke could almost swear Jan’s eyes lit up from the inside, when he smiled like that.
Then Timo was crawling over David to feel Jan’s ears himself, looking intensely skeptical, and Jan dissolved in giggles as Timo lightly tugged on one.
“Stop, that-! It tickles, Timo, quit it!” Jan curled up, trying to get away from Timo’s inquisitive fingers, but Linke wasn’t about to let a prime opportunity like that pass.
“Oh, does it?” he muttered, reaching out and plucking at Jan’s near ear. Jan yelped and covered his head with his hands, trying to look stern. He couldn’t quite contain his laughter, though.
“David, help!”
David threw up his hands helplessly. “Hey, you’re the magical one, remember? What am I supposed to do about it?”
Their torture thus unofficially sanctioned, Timo and Linke grinned at each other wickedly.
***
“Jan, where did we put the fairy lights?” Linke yelled back through the house as he rummaged in yet another box of Christmas decorations. Jan’s family had positively a frightening amount of Christmas paraphernalia. For Linke, decorating for Christmas went no farther than helping his dad string lights and putting the big red bow on top of the tree because he was the only one in the family tall enough to reach that high without a step ladder. But for Jan and his mom and sister, no shop display of ornaments or tinsel or wrapping paper was safe, and it wasn’t Christmas until every square inch of clear space in the house was garland-bedecked and fairy-lit and holly-wreathed within an inch of its life. An outside observer would probably have chalked it all up to the house being largely run by females, but years had taught Linke better.
“Which set?” Jan’s voice came back from his bedroom, where Linke had left him fussing with an elaborate string of gold beads and his bookshelf.
“…Whichever set you told me to hang around the front door.” Linke rolled his eyes, safe from Jan’s wrath with several walls between them, and stuck a stray sprig of fake greenery over one ear to keep it out of the way as he continued rifling through boxes. Jan had asked him to come help decorate this year because Jan’s sister, who was normally very enthusiastic about decorating, was out of town. Never, ever again. Linke was rapidly burning through his nominal allotment of Christmas spirit and could feel his mood becoming scroogy.
“Oh, that’s the green set. The big box.”
“Jan, that’s, like, five boxes.”
“The one with stars on.”
Craning his neck to peer around the room, Linke saw three different boxes emblazoned with a starry pattern. He sighed.
Jan being disgustingly cheerful about Christmas was nothing new to Linke - he’d been putting up with it for nine years, now - but having quite such an up-close-and-personal taste of Jan’s indomitable holiday spirit was. Usually everyone was so busy with band stuff right before the Christmas holidays that Jan barely had time to breathe, let alone spread Christmas cheer. Anymore, nearly the only reminder of Jan’s little holiday problem was his continued dependence on hats, caps, hoodies, and headbands to keep his ears under wraps.
The rest of the guys had gotten used to it. David had been alright with it all pretty much from the get-go; Timo had naturally followed David, with the stolid resignation of the thoroughly whipped. And if Juri or Franky had noticed anything odd about never seeing Jan’s head in December, they never mentioned it.
Linke had taken a bit of time to truly come around. That first Christmas had been alright; ten- and eleven-year-olds bounce back pretty quickly, even from a shock like that. And by New Year, Jan had been acting - and looking - totally normal again. It was when Jan’s incessant hat-wearing and nearly frightening Christmas spirit had reoccurred the following year that Linke had really begun to realize that the whole thing wasn’t a hoax or a prank. It was as much a fact of Jan’s life as his tragic shortness or his penchant for changing his hairdo like most other people changed their underwear. Jan hadn’t overtly mentioned his ancestry to Linke again that year but had seemed to understand that Linke wasn’t yet quite okay with it. He’d kept his distance.
And Linke had realized how much worse it was not to have his shrimpy little dork buddy around than to put up with his being a mythical creature.
They’d been inseparable after that. And Panik had kept them busy, Nevada Tan even more so, until Linke couldn’t remember anymore what it had been like not knowing that Jan had pointy ears and occasionally did magical things like turn briefly invisible or sew buttons onto shirts with his bare hands.
It wasn’t even all that special, anymore; just the way things were. But in December Jan’s magic-induced weirdness was a little harder to ignore. And this year had been the worst in recent memory for sheer Christmas insanity on Jan’s part. Maybe it had been the enormous stress they’d been under all year, what with the record deal and the Bravo publicity and the unexpected demands of their producers that nearly killed them before the album was all said and done. When December arrived Jan had seemed to nearly burst with desperate energy and stubborn determination to make Christmas happy for the band. Now that they’d finally gotten home for their holiday, it seemed he wasn’t inclined to slow down at all.
Jan appeared in the living room doorway just then, interrupting Linke’s brief pity party.
“Find ‘em, yet?” he chirped, bouncing on his toes. Linke noticed he was still wearing the gaudy cranberry-green-white (vomit-colored, Linke privately thought of it) chullo that he’d donned earlier when they’d gone out to buy a pack of replacement blinker bulbs. Linke had always wondered, morbidly curious, just where Jan got all this awful headwear. For a guy with such impeccable fashion sense the rest of the year, Jan’s style radar went on the serious blink every December.
“Yes, absolutely. You’ll notice they’re not up now, though. I found them, put them up, admired them for a minute, then took them back down and hid them in another box because it was just so darn fun looking for them the first time.”
Jan looked aggrieved. “Your sarcasm’s just so attractive, Chris.”
“I’m a sexy character, what can I say. I have no earthly clue what box you’re telling me to look in, Jan.” He got up to show he was making an attempt at cooperation, toeing aside several boxes. “I’ve already gone through all of these, but no dice.”
“That’s because they’re in this one,” Jan sighed, laying on the martyrdom annoyingly thick, as he clambered over a small army of boxes to get to a narrow but deep green cardboard box with holographic stars all over it. Lifting the lid, Jan immediately withdrew a neat coil of green fairy lights, holding them up and giving them a little wave in Linke’s direction.
“Bravo,” Linke growled. “You’ve found the prize. Make a Christmas wish.”
Jan was carefully picking his way unsteadily back out of the morass of boxes. “You do realize the Weihnachtsmann only brings gifts to boys who are good. You’re rapidly working your way down the list.”
“I seem to recall,” Linke said, sidling over to give Jan a steadying hand over the last couple of crates, “a little boy named Jan Werner once telling me he didn’t believe in the Weihnachtsmann.” Linke cocked an eyebrow down at Jan. “Where does that put you on the list?”
“Oh, I made up for that a while back. I met the Weihnachtsmann. Nice chap.”
Linke froze, giving Jan a manic look. He wasn’t a gullible person by nature, but Linke had also learned in his time with Jan not to take anything for granted.
Jan saw Linke’s face and burst out laughing.
“Kidding!”
Huffing out his breath, Linke pursed his lips. “Okay, that’s definitely no presents for you, then.”
Jan pouted. “Aw, not even a Christmas kiss?”
“Hm?” Linke blinked, surprised by the non-sequitur.
Jan pointed at the side of Linke’s head. Linke put up his hand automatically and bumped into the forgotten sprig of plastic greenery behind his ear. He extracted it from his hair to inspect it.
“It’s mistletoe,” Jan said rather too helpfully, subtly narrowing the space between him and Linke. Linke looked at the mistletoe, then up at Jan, and smirked.
“You’ve done nothing but work me like a Christmas slave today,” Linke said airily, twisting the sprig between his fingertips. Jan watched it a bit hungrily. “And then you come in here and tease me. That’s not what I call good behavior.”
Jan moved closer still, his big, bright blue eyes pleading. Linke could feel the warmth of him through both their clothes and Jan’s hoodie.
“But I was very, very good all the rest of the year. You can’t deny that I was.”
Linke appeared to ponder it. “True, you were certainly better this year than last year. No repeats of the tourbus toilet incident.”
Jan nodded emphatically. “So really I deserve to be rewarded, don’t you think?” He plucked the mistletoe out of Linke’s hand and carefully stuck it up under the band of his cap so that it hung right between his eyes. Linke swallowed a snicker.
“Well, alright, then. One Christmas kiss won’t hurt, I suppose.” He looked down at Jan seriously, which was a little difficult to do with the smaller man practically climbing into Linke’s sweater with him. “You sure you don’t want to save it for later?”
Jan shook his head definitively. “No. Now.”
Linke started to sigh heavily, the longsuffering boyfriend, but Jan’s lips interrupted him.
Try as he might to be a hardass, once Linke started kissing Jan he was nothing but an addict getting a hit. Something about the way Jan kissed was intoxicating. Linke had been hooked from the very first, which, incidentally, had also been under mistletoe (and under duress; Timo had thought it an hysterical prank until Linke and Jan couldn’t stop).
The second Linke tenderly brushed the tip of his tongue against Jan’s, he tasted tiny little fiery bursts of spices like you got when chewing cinnamon gum or eating ginger cookies. Linke moaned happily; he loved the taste of Jan’s magic in his mouth. Before he knew he was doing it, Linke was slipping his fingers up under Jan’s hat to curl into his cropped blond hair. Shifting the cap made the fake mistletoe fall and bump their noses on the way down. Jan laughed. Linke just grinned mischievously and pulled the cap off all the way, chucking it across the room where, with any luck, it would get eaten by a box of Christmas ornaments, never to be seen again.
“Oh, look what I found,” Linke murmured sinfully, brushing his thumbs over the exposed pointy tips of Jan’s kobold ears. The light touches made Jan shiver and blush perfectly. Linke’s grin became a leer. “Now I get to make a Christmas wish, on a Christmas elf.”
Jan squirmed, struggling to keep his eyes open as Linke slowly rubbed the very tips of Jan’s ears between his fingers. “’M not a…not a…”
Linke leaned down and closed his lips around the top of Jan’s left ear. Jan gave a little cry, twisting his hands in the front of Linke’s sweater and hanging on for dear life as Linke flickered his tongue over the eartip.
“Mmm,” Linke hummed, and Jan shuddered deeply.
What had tickled a ten-year-old kobold, Linke had discovered over time, gradually didn’t tickle as he grew up. The two of them had been simultaneously shocked speechless the first time Linke had gone to tweak one of Jan’s ears in play and Jan had crumpled boneless and gasping to the floor.
Now Jan’s ears were Linke’s favorite part of Christmas.
Jan was making the most delicious little helpless whimpers in Linke’s left ear, trying to get his own back by nibbling the lobe and sucking on the corner of Linke’s jaw. Linke chuckled sonorously and, tracing Jan’s pointy ear a final time with the tip of his tongue, disengaged.
“That doesn’t work nearly as well on me,” he whispered against Jan’s ear, but Jan already had a double fistful of Linke’s shaggy hair and was dragging Linke’s mouth back to his. A few seconds later, Linke jumped at the feeling of Jan’s fingers worming up under his sweater. Next thing Linke knew he felt sparks - literal as well as figurative - burst over his nipples. He gasped in surprise and pleasure.
“No,” Jan said, grinning against Linke’s lips. “But that does.”
Linke struggled to catch his breath as he reached up under his own shirt, wound his fingers around Jan’s wrists, and forcibly withdrew those magical hands. Linke brought Jan’s hands up to his own face and watched Jan’s eyes as he methodically kissed every fingertip, feeling electricity arc across his lips with each one.
Just as he had expected, the blue of Jan’s eyes ignited like the flare of fireworks at each kiss. Linke could just see in his periphery the bright golden glitter of a stray spark falling from Jan’s fingers every now and again.
“Just think,” Linke murmured, punctuating his words with kisses. “If your godfather hadn’t jinxed you, we wouldn’t be having so much fun right now.”
Jan was vibrating like a guitar string struck and never muted. “Oh, the old geezer probably meant us to find out how sensitive my ears are, that would be something he’d do,” he said shakily.
Linke wrinkled his nose. “Well, I don’t really care for the thought of your godfather knowing what we’re up to, but…”
Jan laughed. “Well, then let’s not look a gift kobold in the mouth.” He took hold of Linke’s hands, tugging him towards the back of the house and his bedroom.
“What about the fairy lights?” Linke reminded him, no heart in the question whatsoever.
The grin Jan shot him over his shoulder fired a lightningbolt of worry through Linke’s gut.
“We have to light up my room, first.”