chocolate and caramel
Story: Timeless { backstory | index }
Title: Saint Nick
Rating: G
Challenge: Chocolate #29: relief
Toppings/Extras: caramel
Wordcount: 544
Summary: Judy Prowse is not dressing up as a fairy for her school’s Christmas party.
Notes: Christmassy fluff! The Prowse family is growing on me. XD Happy Christmas Eve and other holidays, etc!
“Ugh! Daddy, if I have to dress up as a drippy fairy I don’t even want to go to the Christmas party,” Judy grumbled, pacing around the living room agitatedly. Isaac didn’t know whether to sigh or smile: both of those actions would probably rouse the eight-year-old even more.
“You don’t have to go as a fairy,” he said. “Just as something Christmassy. Shelly’s going as a star.”
“Shelly’s stupid,” Judy muttered.
“Be nice to your sister,” Isaac said, sighing and taking her by the wrists, guiding her to a sofa and then popping her down in it to stop her from stomping around the house any more. Judy was going through a bit of a stomping phase... if one could call stomping everywhere all of the time a ‘phase’. “There must be something you can dress as.”
Judy sighed. Loudly.
This needs something a little special, Isaac thought, rubbing his chin while Judy kicked her legs up and down. Nonetheless he had become fairly used to this after eight years of Judy being-well, herself. He finally decided on an idea and sat down next to her on the sofa.
“What about,” he began slowly, “you go as Saint Nicholas?”
Her eyebrows instantly rose. She is going to be one hell of a teenager, Isaac thought, dreading the years to come just a little bit.
“Santa Claus?” she asked.
“Saint Nicholas.” Isaac leaned against the backrest of the sofa innocently. “He did some amazing things, you know.”
“He’s a fat guy in a red coat.”
“Saint Nicholas wasn’t. He was a saint.” Isaac glanced at her. “Want to know what one of his miracles was?”
Judy seemed to think about it for a moment.
“Fine.”
“There was a famine in one of the areas he visited often, doing his saintly business. He was there to help the poor, like saints do. But he foiled a grisly crime instead.” Isaac smiled as Judy’s interest rose. “There was a malicious butcher in one of the towns that lured three children into his house, where he murdered them and chopped them up and put their remains into a big barrel to preserve them, planning on selling them as ham.”
“Cool!”
“But fear not, because Saint Nick showed up and he resurrected them, sticking them all back together and bringing them back to life.”
“He brought them back? How?”
“Nobody knows, Jude, that’s why it’s a miracle.”
Judy leaned back against the sofa too and continued to kick her legs wildly for a few minutes. Slowly, she nodded.
“That could work,” she said.
Isaac wasn’t sure what she meant but he was glad she wouldn’t miss the party that her primary school was throwing next week. He wanted her to go and keep an eye on Shell, besides which it seemed a shame for her to miss it.
-----
He hadn’t anticipated that she would get her hands on so much fake blood. Or, for that matter, plastic medical implements.
Or fangs.
“I thought you said she agreed to go as Mrs Santa, not Mad Professor McVampire,” Adele said to him after they had dropped them off at the party, having indulgently not passed comment while they waved their children off.
Isaac shrugged weakly.
“So did I.”