[Fanfic, 100% Orange Juice] Season's Greetings 2

Genre: Slice of Life

Length: 3059 words

B/D: A continuation of Season's Greetings. I may edit it later, but it's okay for now. It's been so hot that I just kinda wanna post and be done with it, ahaha.

Aru considered herself to be a bunny of the world. She wasn’t a hundred percent sure what the idiom meant, but she had certainly seen the world, albeit from lower Earth orbit. Either way, she had accrued a measure of social wisdom on her travels through life, and distilled it down into a rudimentary Ten Commandments of Polite Conversation. The first, and most important, was that you must never, ever, start a conversation with the words ‘I can explain’.

“I can explain,” she said.

In her own defence, it was harder to remember such things when startled, and QP had decided to start their serious conversation by barreling into the shop at top speed, leaning over the counter and bellowing “EXPLAIN YOURSELF!” at the top of her lungs. QP had the lung capacity of a pro athlete, or perhaps an opera singer, and the sound of the accusation rang in Aru’s ears. Also not helping was the fact that the dog girl insisted on standing with her nose no more than half a centimetre away from Aru’s.

As a result, a lot was happening inside the bunny’s head. Her animal brain was charting an escape route from the shop and wondering if she could run faster than QP could follow. The bit of her mind that was actually sane and intelligent was trying to piece together a decent way to break the news that she was, in fact, a cosmic christmas entity that silently judged every child on an arbitrary scale of morality and allocated presents accordingly. A very small part of her was discovering that QP’s hair smelled of candy canes, and filing this information away for later enjoyment. All these different segments were fighting for her attention, and her wires were becoming well and truly crossed.

“Start talking,” QP growled, her ears flat against the top of her head. “What was that weird note you wrote me? And why did you steal the delicious pudding I set aside for Santa?”

Aru inhaled deeply. This wouldn’t be so hard. QP was her friend, and besides that, she was a good natured girl at heart. All she had to do was defuse the (quite understandable) hostility, then approach the matter from the side and very gently insinuate the truth. If she dropped enough hints, QP would eventually draw the conclusion herself, and then Aru wouldn’t feel guilty for having told her. It would be a win-win situation; QP would get her answer, and Aru would get to stop living a double life to fool her best friend. All she had to do was not put her foot in her mouth.

“Actually, I’m Santa.”

All of a sudden, Aru realised that she had very big feet.

QP frowned. QP was doing some vigorous mental calculations about how big Santa was and how big Aru was and how many Arus could fit inside of Santa’s belly. The answer was multiple, if you had multiple Arus to waste. Even by QP’s math, that wasn’t a satisfactory answer, but Aru wasn’t a liar, even if she did break into people’s houses at night and eat their food and watch them while they were sleeping.

Aru, meanwhile, had decided not to panic. Actually, she had gone right through panic and had settled at the still, bleak calm that some people experience in the seconds before they die. She was dangerously close to losing a valued friend (not to mention her favourite customer), and it put her in the same frame of mind she had when she was navigating whirling mazes of glittering bullets. It was a feeling that endured even as she watched QP open her mouth to pronounce judgement.

“Prove it,” she said. “Prove you’re Santa.”

Aru chewed her lip. It was never easy, was it? When she’d been flying out and about last Christmas, everybody just believed she was Santa at the drop of a hat. Now she had to put together a court case to convince easily the most innocent and credulous girl she knew. It was, at least, better than a flat rejection of the possibility, followed by a “Yeah but really though, why were you in my house stealing my food?”, although she had rather been hoping for something more along the lines of “Obviously my good friend has become over-stressed by the travails of a shopkeeping life, and subsequently done a reverse backflip from the diving board of sanity into the olympic pool of reduced mental acuity, and I will therefore afford her a measure of sympathy.”

“Are you asking me to do Christmas again? It comes once a year. That’s part of the sanctity of Christmas. Don’t ask me to violate Christmas,” she said, although she was more bartering for time than anything else.

“No! I would never do that. But if you’re Santa, you should know all sorts of Christmas secrets nobody else could know, right?” QP asked, her eyebrows twitching. “So if you can answer some questions, I might believe you. First question: what did I get for Christmas when I was eight years old?”

The answer sprang into Aru’s mind, as easily as if it had been there on the tip of her tongue the entire time. It was always like that with Christmas matters – as though there were an infinitely deep well of knowledge quietly sitting in the core of her being, waiting for her to dip in her cup and drink of it. She knew things about people she had never heard of, deeds that were so tiny and infinitesimal that no sane person would note them. The List was not written on a piece of paper. The List was written in the very fibres of her, and of Santa. It was greater than she was, and greater than she wanted to comprehend.

“You got a lump of coal that year,” Aru said.

“That’s right, but what gives? I was super nice! I ate all my greens in December, and I even took out the trash!” the dog pouted.

Aru scratched the back of her head. “Yes, but you kept tying Syura to the school flagpole by her braids.”

“Auuu… She deserved it. She kept putting clothes pegs on my ears whenever I fell asleep in class!”

“She also got a lump of coal that year, by the way.”

QP’s mouth formed the tiny ‘o’ of a woman betrayed. “She told me she got a mountain bike!”

She couldn’t help but roll her eyes. “Yes. A mountain bike you’ve never seen and that she’s never used. Why would I give a mountain bike to a girl who can fly, anyway?”

QP looked away, defeated. Her initial anger seemed to be dissipating, replaced by a slowly dawning curiosity. But her suspicions remained.

“Third question!” QP yelled, having casually skipped question number two. “When I was eleven, I wished for world peace, and I got a new ribbon instead. What’s the deal with that?”

“…Do you want the short answer, or the correct one?”

“Both!”

“Short answer: World peace isn’t something I can fit in my sack,” Aru said, her ears drooping. “Long answer… Well, to get world peace, I would have to brainwash a whole bunch of people. Sometimes, people fight for legitimate reasons, like trying to change the situation they’re in, and it would be evil to make them just stop fighting and accept having a bad life.”

QP tilted her head. There were various things she expected Santa to be able to give her, but a lecture on ethics hadn’t been one of them.

“Third question!” she interrupted, erasing the previous third question from her mind. “If you were Santa, all this time… Why didn’t you tell me?”

Aru didn’t say anything, but slowly walked out from behind the counter and sat down heavily in one of the little reading chairs set out for the patrons of the shop. All of a sudden her face looked gaunt and haggard, like years of exhaustion had settled on her shoulders at once.

“I wanted to. I really, really wanted to. QP… hmmm,” Aru said before halting, exhaling through her nose. “I… love being Santa. I love knowing that what I do is to spread joy to all the kids who’ve earned it, and to gently push the ones who haven’t into becoming better people. I love knowing that for one night a year, I create so many happy, smiling faces. So many memories. I love… being loved, by all the children of the land, even though they don’t know, and won’t see me. It’s so, so important to me.”

She leaned forward, her elbows on the arms of the chair, and rest her chin on her tented fingers. “But, QP, I hate keeping secrets from my friends. Because eventually, you end up with a whole lot of secrets, and not a lot of friends. There are a few people who know I’m Santa, but they found out without me telling them. I wanted to tell you, myself, of my own free will. When the time was right. When you were an adult, and, and you weren’t on my list, and… I screwed it up.”

QP had never heard the sound of defeat before, but she knew it now from Aru’s voice. It was somehow humbling to see her, usually so cheerful and capable, slumped in a chair with her shoulders sagging – as if a weight had been dropped on them, a weight that had been years in coming and only just arrived.

“And then, I thought, well, if you worked it out by yourself,” the bunny carried on, “it wouldn’t be my fault. But then I just came out and told you, and I didn’t mean to, so it’s not something I did by myself and you didn’t work it out, and it’s all gone wrong.”

QP’s ears twitched. They always twitched when she felt the point of the conversation whoosh overhead. In her heart of hearts, she wasn’t even sure why Aru needed to keep being Santa a secret. It was definitely the kind of thing you would want to put on your CV, wasn’t it? ‘Has seen the world, extremely hard working, eager to please, good judge of character. Provides own air miles, never misses a day of work, good sense of direction.’ Any way you sliced it, being Santa was like having a font of coolness that never ran out.

But, on some level, Aru was a rabbit. QP understood the hearts of rabbits, and understood that now was not the time to ask questions like that. Now was the time to work some QP-brand magic, cheer up her friend and eat some pudding. (All of QP’s plans involved the eating of pudding – sometimes more than once).

“Hey, hey. Aru. You told me a secret, so I’m going to tell you a secret, okay?” QP said, bending down so she was at face level. “It’s a super awesome one. You’re gonna be so surprised!”

The bunny looked up at her with eyes that were at once weepy and weary, but nodded her head anyway. Her chin was trembling very slightly.

“Ah! But you were gonna try and make me figure yours out, so I’m gonna make you figure mine out,” QP carried on, waggling her finger. “Here’s your hint. What was the nicest thing I did last year?”

Once again, the knowledge sprang to the tip of Aru’s tongue, but even as she began to frame the words she found herself disbelieving them. “You… saved pudding? By beating up a god?”

QP’s reaction was to twirl. QP enjoyed twirling and found that it was almost always appropriate, and occasionally broke up pity parties by twirling through through them like a landbound tornado. Only she wasn’t landbound at all, so the joke was entirely on them.

“Hahaha! Yes! I, QP, saved pudding! Not just a pudding, but all pudding. There’s no obstacle that my love for pudding cannot pierce! Also, space is nice. We should go to space sometime.”

Aru no longer felt sad. She didn’t even feel shocked. She just felt very, very confused. The world had become a very strange place in the last thirty seconds, and QP insisted on making it incrementally stranger.

“But! I couldn’t have done it if you hadn’t taught me all those Rbit formations. So in a way, you also helped to save pudding! I did all the work, but still!” the dog grinned, her chest thrust out pridefully. “That isn’t the secret, though. I mean, it is a secret, but I had to beat a bunch of people up, and they know about it, so it’s not really a ‘secret’ secret.”

“What is the secret, then?”

“Well… uh… When, I, y’know, beat up the god lady that was mad at pudding, she sort’ve… employed me? I guess?” she said, scratching her nose a little. “My job is to make sure that conflicts over pudding don’t destroy the world. I’m like a pudding elemental!”

Aru’s jaw had fallen open, and was in no hurry to start resisting the siren song on gravity any time soon. A twitch was developing in her right eye, and one of her ears had flopped over her face. “You’re a god?!”

“I mean… I-I guess so? One of the Six Gods of Sweets. I’m just a trainee, though. But forget about that!” the dog carried on, as if forgetting that somebody was a god were an easy thing to do. “My real point is: when you look at it, isn’t Santa a public servant?”

Aru sat, bewildered, waiting for QP’s train of logic to pull in at the station and discover that it was one wheel short of a full axle.

“I mean, Santa serves the public by giving them Christmas, right? And I serve the public by making sure pudding isn’t responsible for the deaths of millions of people! So really, it’s fine that I know you’re Santa, because we just work in two different branches of the same company!” QP beamed.

“I… don’t think public servants work that way.”

“Shhh…” QP said, and hugged Aru’s head against her chest. “This is a message from god, Aru. A god, admittedly, but still.”

There were a lot of things going through Aru’s head, and one of them was that Syura would kill to be in this position – although, to be fair, there were probably a lot of positions Syura would kill to be in with QP. The second was that, as cute as QP’s take on things was, it didn’t really change anything.

“Y-You know I can’t give you presents anymore, right? Santa has to be impartial. If you know that I’m Santa, how am I supposed to give you a lump of coal when you’re naughty?” Aru moaned.

QP, as was her habit, tried her very best to look like a perfect angelic puppy who would never require a single lump of coal and was, in fact, incapable of sin. Well, okay, there were some sins she would be loathe to give up. Gluttony, for example. It wasn’t her fault that she had a huge black hole situated in her lower intestine and that only one, delicious substance was amazing enough to fill it. People also told her that pride was a bit of an issue, although she begged to differ; all she did was acknowledge the very true fact that she was beautiful and amazing and huggable, although she was perhaps a little more aggressive than necessary about her acknowledgements. There was, also, the small issue of how many people she routinely beat up for reasons that were flimsy but well-intentioned.

“It’ll be fine. I don’t need a present from Santa.”

“Are you sure?” Aru asked, one eyebrow raised. “You’re grimacing.”

“I’m not! I’m smiling violently!” QP said, through teeth clenched as tight as a metalworker’s vice.

QP was also, much to Aru’s distress, squeezing violently. When is a hug not a hug? When the hug is too snug to be withstood. With only a little reluctance, Aru extracted her head from QP’s arms, for fear of losing it entirely.

“A-anyway! I don’t need a present from Santa. All I want is a present from Aru,” the dog continued, stroking Aru’s hair. Aru was fairly sure that usually the dog was the one who received the petting and not the other way around, but it seemed to satisfy her on some deep level, so it was fine.

“And, and, you gotta come to my party. You skipped the Christmas party, but that was the Christmas party. Now that we’re colleagues, I can have an office party!”

“With pudding?” Aru asked, rolling her eyes.

It was the kind of question that didn’t really require an answer, but it got one anyway. A simple yes or no was too bland when it came to pudding; QP felt that the occasion required something more along the lines of shouting and running around the room with her arms spread like an aeroplane. Her enthusiasm was, like love and many other diseases, infectious. Before long, Aru found a smile spreading across her face. When QP finally stopped her pudding anticipation celebration proclamation, the smile had spread to her too.

“Hey, Aru?” she asked, breathing in tired little puffs. She resisted the urge to let her tongue loll out; she could only indulge her puppy nature so much. “I’m sorry for being mad without knowing all the details.”

“It’s fine,” Aru said, and meant it. She had woken up that day expecting to lose either her friend, or her job; to have kept both of them was a stroke of good fortune that she was determined not to take for granted. “I was keeping a secret from you, and I’m sorry.”

The two smiled at each other. The crisp sunshine of a cloudless winter day was filtering in through the windows of the shop, illuminating the swirling motes of dust in the air, and there was a great sense of peace that Aru knew would never last.

“So, uh. What did Syura get from Santa this year?”

Aru thought for a second, before deciding that ‘candid photographs’ should definitely not be part of her answer. It was, of course, a little naughty of her to lie.

But being Santa did come with some privileges.

A/N: Yeah, this is a little messy. I wasn't really able to focus on it... *sigh* Oh well.