Disclaimer: All Young Justice characters, places and situations are the property of DC and are used without permission and without intent of plagiarism or profit. Copyright for all original stories, characters, and situations is with the author, and may not be published, copied, distributed or archived without the author's prior written consent.
This is just a short little story I wrote back during Christmas. Conner's a little more clueless in this story than in the actual series but I wanted to explore the idea that Conner hadn't learned as much from the Genomes as everyone believed he had, and I imagine that culture and social knowledge would be at the bottom of the list when they were uploading his knowledge.
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"What's this?" Conner asked as he held up the sprig of greenery.
"Mistletoe—it's an earth custom, when two people stand underneath mistletoe they're supposed to kiss. My Uncle J'onn told me about it." M'gann giggled. "Last year on the watch tower they hung mistletoe over Batman's station and he couldn't figure out why everyone kissed him when they came up to the monitor."
"That was because Batman drank the eggnog." Robin said as he came up behind them carrying a box of ornaments. "He came back to the Bat cave talking about caterpillars."
Robin sat the box on the counter and started pulling out strings of lights. Unlike normal Christmas lights, these had bulbs the size of Robins' fist. He began plugging them into the wall one string at a time to check for burned-out bulbs.
"M'gann, you wanna hang these?" Robin began connecting all the strands, then pointed along the wall. "Bats told me that they left up the nails for them."
M'gann took the lights and floated towards the top of the room to hang them over the nails. They were only decorating the kitchen/living area of the base—M'gann couldn't fathom trying to decorate the entire base.
"What's this?" Conner held up a snow globe.
"It's a snow-globe." Robin took the fragile figurine from Conner and tipped it. "This one has a little model of Gotham in it." He smirked, "Minus the grit and criminals."
"I thought my education was more complete…there's so many things I don't know…" Conner took the figurine from Robin and stared into it before sitting it on the table and began lining up others with it. Metropolis, Central City, and several more he couldn't recognize.
"I guess Cadmus didn't think holidays were important." Robin sounded a little sad about that. "You know, you can ask us anything—about Christmas or otherwise."
Almost on cue, Conner held up a nutcracker. "What's this?"
"It's a nut cracker." Robin got down a bowl of walnuts from the cabinet and popped one into the little soldier's mouth. "You pull the lever and voila!" He smiled.
Conner took the nut Robin was offering. "These are edible?" He frowned. "I thought they were for…never mind."
"For what?" Robin prodded.
"I had to hide the walnuts from Conner because he used them to play fetch with Wolf." M'gann said as she landed beside them. "Do we have another string of lights?"
Robin frowned at the wall. "That was all I saw, why wouldn't we have enough…C'mon, there might be another box stored somewhere I can't reach."
M'gann and Robin started out of the room.
"Will you finish hanging the rest of ornaments, Conner? There's little hooks for them everywhere." M'gann called behind her as they left.
After half an hour of searching Robin and M'gann came back carrying two boxes that bad been hidden on a high-up shelf in the storage room. Robin went to the counter and began testing more lights when a pair of chapped lips pressed against his cheek. Robin jerked around to look at Conner before he went three shades of red and fell out of his chair.
"W-What?" Robin's voice went up an octave.
"I thought you were supposed to kiss someone that's sitting under mistletoe." Conner looked at M'gann, who was stifling a giggle.
Robin's eyes drifted up to the clump of mistletoe hanging directly above where he had been standing just a moment before. He started laughing then and went back to testing lights, standing several inches left of the mistletoe.
"We should have name cards at the dinner and have red Tornado sit there." Robin mused to himself.
