He should've been looking where he was going.
That had been the story of his life, once, when he'd been Emerson, rather than Kent. Spatial awareness, his piano teacher had told him, when he had kept missing the note at the other end of the keyboard. In PE, they had just said that he needed to pay more attention to his surroundings. So he had practiced, and practiced, until he could play that piece with his eyes closed, until he could weave through crowds without slowing, until he could remember what all the people at a party were drinking and how much they had had.
He still lapsed, of course. Tripped over stuck out legs, stepped into the path of whatever piece of office stationary Mansell had thrown at him. And now, he had been more attuned to the books in the sale than to the person who'd been standing there looking at them.
The worst of it was, he wasn't even supposed to have been looking at the books. They had just been the last in a long line of distractions that had placed themselves between him and the exit. The first had been the smell. It wound around the shelves like the aroma of baking bread, lulling him until he'd been dawdling even through the travel guides section. And yet, all he'd been able to discern of its contents was that there were cloves in there, somewhere. Other things he couldn't place, because he couldn't get past the fact that it meant Christmas. Meant it in a way that the trees that stood in the spaces between the sections didn't, even with the soft fireside-flickering of their lights.
It had brought memories back. A similar glow, but on a different tree, with darker spaces where the bulbs had failed and not been replaced. Eyeing the presents at its foot with Erica, trying to defend the low-hanging baubles – purple, gleaming – against an inquisitive dog's nose, singing The Twelve Days of Christmas and getting stuck after the seven swans a-swimming.
Probably potpourri, he'd thought. He'd seen some in a different shop. Expensive, though. More than he'd been willing to pay for a smell, he told himself. After all, he could get two books for the price – paperbacks, not hardbacks, only one hardback – or sixty Freddos. Unless they had gone up again. Which wasn't particularly beyond the realms of possibility.
Kent had picked up the pace again, before he could convince himself that not buying potpourri meant that he was entitled to buy himself two paperbacks or one hardback, and started to weave through the people who were clustered around the sales tables, and the tables that weren't sales but contained particularly nice editions that people would like to think were on sale, and might not notice that they weren't until they'd bought them.
And there had been his downfall, a copy of A Christmas Carol in black and silver, stamped with simple silhouetted snowflakes. He turned his head to look at it as he passed, and then came the collision.
A collision, he told himself, and not a crash. He'd not knocked whoever it was over, just startled them into turning abruptly to face him, and he was the one recoiling back as if burnt. Overcorrecting. Overbalancing, the tilt of the world suddenly twisting up past his brain as if he was in a lift.
He didn't fall. The man he had walked into reached out and steadied him, as if he had been doing it for years.
"Sorry," Kent said, and then his mind finally caught up with what his eyes were seeing, and recognition dragged the air in his lungs down into his intestines, where it knotted. "Sir. Sorry."
"Kent," Chandler said, taking his hands away from Kent's shoulders, though the bemused smile stayed on his face. "What are you doing here?"
Kent, still trying to collect his thoughts, held up his bag by way of answer, only to realise too late that from the shape of it, it obviously wasn't a book. "I was getting a present for my mum," he said. "And there was something in the craft section downstairs. I just thought I'd come and take a look at the books while I was here. How about you?"
"Just looking at the books on my own, I'm afraid," Chandler said. "It's been a while since I've had the time to get into a novel. I've been reading a lot of poetry and short stories, but I thought I'd see if I could find something longer to read in the New Year."
And now, far too soon for Kent's still-startled brain, there were options. He could wish Chandler luck in his quest, and continue with leaving, and risk the excruciating possibility that they would both go in the same direction, despite there having been an official end to their conversation.
"Do you have any recommendations?" he asked, going for option two instead, and remaining in the conversation. "It's difficult to know where to start – there are a lot of books here, and they've all got glowing reviews on the back where the blurb should be."
"It depends," Chandler said, his forehead pulling into a thoughtful frown, looking at Kent as if he could pull the answer from the lines on his face. "What sort of things do you like?"
"Anything, really," Kent said, because there was absolutely no way that he was going to admit to his superior officer that the last book he had read had been a Classic Who novel, and then realised precisely how unhelpful that was. He waved at hand at the table, and the exquisitely bound classics. "I always feel like I should be reading more of those."
"Don't we all?" Chandler muttered, offering Kent a wry smile that included him in the joke. And then he was glancing away again, considering the books on the table. "To Kill A Mockingbird's very good. So's Frankenstein. To be honest, all of these are very good. Of the ones I've read, anyway."
"Probably why they're all on the same table," Kent hazarded, trying to smother down the part of his mind that was trying to work out precisely which of them Chandler would have read. It kept buzzing back to the surface, a low hum that he could still function past, like having the radio on. Only it was Kent's own voice, instead of a DJ's, wondering, did Chandler settle on one genre, or would he read something from any of them, so long as it was well-written? When he found an author he liked, did he stick with them, read their books one after the other, or did he look for someone new to fill out the spaces in between? Which books wouldn't let him sleep, wouldn't let him think of anything but their words?
Too much of it, he would never be able to bring himself to ask.
Chandler made a noise which might have been agreement, or might just have been simple acknowledgement of the fact that Kent had spoken. He didn't look up, watching the books in the same way that Kent had seen him watching the whiteboard in the incident room, the world around him glazing over until it was just him and the problem.
"It doesn't matter," Kent said, glancing off sideways as if the path of least resistance for sight had shifted away, something in the air around Chandler that made the light refract. But he was still hyper-aware of the man's presence, couldn't not be, when it felt like his every thought crackled about Chandler's outline, the swarm of sparks around a gloved hand on Bonfire Night. Erica said he should say something. But he wasn't her, and he wasn't Mansell, and he didn't know how. "You don't need to come up with anything."
"No, I'd like to," Chandler replied, his attention switching back to Kent. There was something soft playing across his features, something other than the quiet Christmas tree light. "It's nice to know that someone else in the incident room remembers the last time they read a book. But it's the sort of thing I'd want to get right."
Kent understood that. The books a person loved became a part of them, after all. "There's no hurry," he said, since there's no need hadn't worked out particularly well. "I've things to read in the meantime." More Doctor Who novels than an entire forest could shake its sticks at.
"I'll have to give it some thought, then," Chandler said, straightening away from the table, though the skin around his eyes was still creased with his smile. An afterimage from looking at the books, Kent told himself, or he'd read far too much into it.
"Thank you," Kent said, and then stood there dumbly, in the purgatory where both of them could sense the inexorable end to the conversation, but were searching for a way to keep it going anyway.
"Well," Chandler said. "I need to go and pay for this, so…" He held up something which Kent couldn't quite make out the title of, but it looked as if it wouldn't have been out of place on the classics table, even if that wasn't where it had originally come from. It was probably very literary, and full of words that Kent would need to look up in the dictionary.
"I was on my way out," Kent admitted, and wished that he had found a book that he could hold up, too. If he had looked much longer, he knew he would have found one, but that was just the nature of the shop. Look too much, and he'd end up trying to fill one of the buy two get one free offers.
"After you, then," Chandler said, and Kent wondered if perhaps he should have just vanished back off toward sci-fi and fantasy. At least that would have prevented the post-conversation walking in the same direction. It was too late now, and Chandler was offering a smile, gesturing in the direction of the escalator as if he were perfectly happy to spend more time together.
Kent smiled back, only for the expression to fall from his face as he came within sight of the great glass windows that looked out onto the street.
"Oh," he said. "It wasn't doing that when I got here."
Chandler stepped around him, frowned, and made a vague noise of agreement, the book in his hand momentarily forgotten as they both stared out at the snowstorm. Flakes tore past the glass, enough of them that it was impossible to make out the name of the supermarket opposite. They blotted away the light like a swarm of insects, turning the shop several shades darker.
Kent shivered reflexively, and glanced around to see that Chandler had turned his frown on him.
"You do have a coat, don't you?" he asked, and Kent winced.
"No, sir," he said, and his boss was going to think him completely incapable of looking after himself. "One of my housemates was going on at me to remember to pick her up some pasta as I was going out the door, and I forgot. There wasn't any snow forecast."
"Did you remember the pasta?"
"Yes," Kent said. "But I'm not sure it was worth it. She'll only overcook it and then forget about it. She has deadlines."
"Right," Chandler said, uneasiness twitching at the edge of his face. "It's just, it doesn't look very warm out."
"No," Kent agreed. "It doesn't."
There was a short silence, one that seemed to stretch throughout the whole building, as if when the snows had come, they had stolen the voices of everyone on earth. Kent found himself watching Chandler, instead of the blizzard outside, though he couldn't remember when he had made the transition.
"I'm not really comfortable with the idea of you going out in that without a coat," Chandler announced, eventually. "If you'd like, we can get some drinks and see if it eases off."
"That would be nice," Kent began, and then cursed his choice of adjective, because nice didn't really mean anything, not anymore. It was too mild. Maybe it hadn't been, once. Buchan could have told him. "Really, sir, I'd love to. I have a stamp card, if that helps."
"For the whole shop, or just the coffee shop?"
"I've got one of each, I think." Kent shifted, rummaging about in his bag for his wallet. "One of them might be full, I'm not sure."
"I can get a stamp on the general one now, if you like," Chandler said, turning his book over to check the price.
"Thanks," Kent said, somehow managing to extract it without pulling out enough receipts to put a magician to shame, and proffered it.
Chandler took it, his fingers warm where they brushed against Kent's, and whisked off to pay. Kent was happy enough to wait for him, his eyes wandering back to the windows. It looked as if the snow was settling. The part of him that was an adult, that had been worried to go out without a coat, acknowledged that London would be in complete meltdown by teatime. But he couldn't help his own smile. The snow still set his mind fizzing with childlike delight, spoke of days off school and hot chocolates, and if it had got Chandler to ask him for a coffee, something which he hadn't been able to make happen for four years, then who was he to complain?
The café buzzed with just the right level of background conversation to make their own seem private, and they settled onto a table next to one of the Christmas trees, the surface a patchwork of multi-coloured shadow. Kent swiped a couple of dropped needles away, watching as his fingers passed through shades of blue and red.
"So, if you haven't had much time for novels, recently, what have you been reading?" Chandler asked, a curiosity in his face that Kent supposed meant that he hadn't really thought that any of them, besides Buchan, read as a hobby.
"I have a couple of poetry anthologies," Kent said. "I quite like what I've read of Shelley. But I'm not really sure where to start with short stories – I've read some of Poe's, but beyond that, I'm not sure where to go. And the novels I've been meaning to read are piling up. I managed to get through an airport thriller last month, but they're fairly easy reading."
"Maybe you'll have some more time over Christmas, though," Chandler said. "Depending on what your plans are, of course."
"I don't really have any," Kent admitted. "I'll probably just be staying in and watching as much Christmas television as I can stand. My housemates are going to Scotland through to New Year. Erica's spending Christmas with Mansell, and they both said I could join them, but, well." He pulled a face, and Chandler breathed out something that was almost a laugh. "How about you, sir?"
"Oh, I'll be at the station," Chandler said, glancing down at the table in front of him, as if he expected a pity that he didn't want to see. "Miles did ask if I wanted to come over for Christmas. So did Buchan, actually, but, well, better me than someone with children waiting for them to get home."
Kent was saved from having to come up with something to say which wouldn't give away precisely how in love he was with his boss, by the arrival of their drinks. So, he sipped at his cappuccino, watched Chandler over the rim of the mug, and privately wished that the snow would never stop.
The station was quieter than it had been for a long time. But then, most of the sources of noise that belonged in the incident room had taken Christmas Day off, and Mansell had taken his obnoxious jingling playlist with him.
There couldn't really be that much noise, when Chandler was the only one there. There were other detectives in work, he knew, but they were probably downstairs pulling crackers with the desk sergeant. If they actually caught a murder, he could even call his team in, but they had managed to make it through to the early evening without any incidents. So he was left alone in the incident room with the blank whiteboards and the silence.
It was a testament to how much time he had spent there after hours, that he found the former stranger than the latter. The whiteboards were framed with tinsel that Miles had brought in, and there was a leftover game of hangman in the corner, with only the Es filled in and the gallows completely built. It looked like Buchan's handwriting, Chandler thought, as he reached for the rubber. That was probably why no one had got it.
He had only managed to take off the blank spaces when the sound of the doors opening made him turn, the eraser held out almost as if in self-defence.
It was Kent, with a carrier bag in each hand, wearing an oversized jumper decorated with bands of reindeer. He made his way towards his desk, following a circuitous route, all the better to avoid the mistletoe that Mansell had hung strategically from the light fittings. He deposited his bags onto his chair, and then peered toward Chandler's office.
"Kent?" Chandler prompted, and Kent started. Perhaps he'd been so focussed on avoiding the mistletoe that he hadn't actually noticed Chandler.
"Merry Christmas, sir!" Kent said, with a hesitant smile, as if he wasn't quite sure how he would be received.
"Merry Christmas," Chandler replied, turning to put the rubber back on the board. "What are you doing here?"
"I didn't think there was much sense in the both of us spending Christmas alone, so I thought I'd come and… help." There was a sudden pang of disquiet in Kent's voice, and he glanced away, suddenly fascinated by the Santa hat on Mansell's desk. "That is all right, isn't it, sir?"
"Yes, it's fine," Chandler said, and wished that it sounded less like he didn't mind, and more like he was pleased. "I just thought you were staying in and watching television?"
"I've set it to record the important things," Kent said, sticking a hand into one of his carrier bags, withdrawing it, and then frowning at the result, as if he couldn't remember putting it in. "I brought crackers," he said, anyway, holding up the one he'd retrieved. It flopped alarmingly over his hand, but he heroically declined to look at it as if it had personally failed him.
"That's very kind of you, really," Chandler tried, and Kent's smile came back, brighter than before.
"I brought dinner, too," he said. "It's a bit early for it now, but it's in foil, so it won't get too cold. And there's a microwave downstairs if it does." He lapsed into quiet again, scratching at the edge of his cracker, as if moving his hands would stop him from speaking just to fill the silence. Then he set it down on his desk, moved the carrier bags out of his chair, and sat at it. "So, was there anything that needed doing?"
Chandler had been making his way through increasingly banal paperwork. He hadn't particularly had all that much to do, none of them had. They had been through a lull, case-wise, so there was just the usual sort of internal admin, that didn't really need a DI to sign off on it.
It wasn't the sort of thing that he was going to make Kent do on Christmas Day. He shook his head, and took the chair at the other end.
"Not really. There's always something to do if you look for it hard enough, but we should leave some of it for the others when they get back."
"I'm sure they'll be thrilled," Kent muttered. "They'd probably be glad of a new case."
"We probably all would," Chandler said. The only thing worse, after all, than consistent failure, was inertia. "Not at Christmas, though."
The quiet came back, and Kent reached over to switch on the fairy lights. Riley had wound them around all their desks, whilst ignoring Mansell's off-tune renditions of various carols. The light was warm, and softened the incident room, so often made of harsh lines and harsher happenings, the only blurring the dwindling of the edges away into shadow.
It made the murders that had crossed over their desks seem more distant, cast away all the travails of the last year, from Kent and Mansell's fights to Buchan's mould. They might as well never have existed, the air finally something which could be breathed calmly. There was certainly no anger in Kent's features now, just the sort of warm contentment that only ever seemed possible in winter, out of the cold.
"It's probably just as well you came back, really," Chandler found himself saying. "I have something for you."
Kent looked up again, but Chandler didn't see the rest of his reaction, standing to make his way back to his office. He rummaged through his drawer, fingers recoiling from the cold of the whiskey bottle. The package he retrieved was wrapped in more dignified paper than he had used for the Secret Santa, plain brown decorated with reindeer in the same pose as they were on Kent's jumper.
Chandler made his way back to Kent, wondering if, if the DC hadn't come back in, it would have just stayed in his desk until next year, and the possibility of Kent's name coming up in the Secret Santa again. He wouldn't have driven it round. He hadn't the courage.
"I got you this," Chandler said, offering the package. "I would've given it to you before, but, well, I didn't want to feel obligated to get Mansell something."
"You got him something anyway, though, didn't you?" Kent pointed out, but he took the package with a smile. "You were his Secret Santa, weren't you?"
Chandler eyed him with mock-suspicion, remembering too late how his jokes with Miles had gone down. "How did you know?"
"Well," Kent said, slowly, his fingers falling away from the sellotape on the package. "I thought we all sort of knew. Considering we're all detectives, all with our own unique styles of wrapping things. Riley's has the most child-friendly wrapping, and it's fairly neat. With Mansell, you're lucky if you get properly sealed goods in anything other than newspaper. That, or he uses something immune to tearing and tapes up all the ways in. Skip's a bit harder, he's quite good until you get to things that aren't square, but sometimes he gets Judy or one of the kids to do it."
"Very observant," Chandler said, quietly wondering how Kent would describe his wrapping style. "So, who was my Santa, then?"
"Hm," Kent said, wincing. "I don't really have to observe anything for that. That was me. Though I hope you appreciate that telling you that is completely against the spirit of the Secret Santa, and Buchan would lecture me about that for weeks if he knew."
It was strange, to hear Kent talking to him with such ease. They way they had been in the café, gentle light on their faces, and before that, so long ago, before the Kray case. Friends, they had been then, Chandler thought. Pulling faces across the incident room. And then Chandler had done something or not done something, and Kent had done something or not done something, and they had been back to colleagues.
Until somehow, next to a table of classics, they had found their way back. Or, perhaps, their way forward. Sometimes it was difficult to tell, when so much of the present, so much of the future, seemed so rooted in the past. Maybe they had been making steps before, like in the moments before the end of the Abrahamians case, but there were always steps back, too, that had stopped them from gaining ground.
Chandler shied away from the idea that they could only be approaching another moment of stumbling backwards, and reached back into the conversation.
"Well, thank you for your Secret Santa," he said, sitting back at the end of the desk, admiring the colour that the fairy lights brought out in Kent's eyes. He could probably have worked out that it was from Kent, he decided. It had been fairly neat, but he hadn't quite managed to get rid of the air bubbles. Perhaps Chandler could teach him sometime.
"Thank you," Kent said, reaching for the package again. "This is above and beyond the call of Secret Santa."
Chandler made a non-committal noise, straightening a pen that had rolled out of alignment when Kent had put his cracker down. "You might not like it," he said, and voicing the idea made it settle heavily in his stomach.
For a moment, Kent gave him a look which he couldn't quite decipher, but then it was gone, and he was pulling at the sellotape again.
Chandler fixed his eyes on the berries of one of the mistletoe plants, ghost-white in the darkness that lurked at the incident room's ceiling, and did his best not to watch. It was worse than his vague moment of wondering what sort of beer Mansell would like best (it had turned out that he wasn't fussy). It was more personal, he supposed, but understanding why his insides were suddenly heavy didn't make them light, and his attention was struggling to sneak back to Kent, as the wrapping paper rustled.
"Thank you, sir," Kent said, finally, and Chandler needed no more encouragement to look back, stifling the worry that had started to buzz in his fingers. "This is lovely."
"You like it, then?" Chandler checked, even as Kent's fingers ghosted along the cover of the hardback book, and lifted it open. He paused for a moment, reading something, and a wider, helpless smile lit his whole face.
"Yes," he said, and seemed temporarily incapable of anything more.
"Good," Chandler said, leaning back in the chair. "I was still finding it difficult to come up with a novel to recommend, and I wondered if maybe that was because I've not been reading so many recently, but that's a copy of the first poetry anthology that I really enjoyed. I go back to it a lot. I hope…" Chandler let his voice trail away with his thoughts, abruptly uncertain of exactly what he was hoping for. Did he want Kent to like the same poems he did? Did he want to understand new poems through Kent's liking them? Or both, perhaps? "You enjoy it," he finished lamely.
"I will, sir, thanks," Kent assured him, and placed the book almost reverently on his desk, alongside the discarded cracker. He picked it up, blinking as if he had forgotten that it existed, or that he was unfamiliar with crackers in general, before he offered Chandler the flapping end. "Do you want to…?"
Chandler reached for the other end, still warmed by Kent's smile, and pulled.
It didn't bang so much as tear, and Chandler found himself holding the part with the tube. He upended it, and they both sceptically regarded the hopping frog that fell out onto the floor with a plasticy clatter.
"Do you want it, sir?" Kent asked, reaching down to scoop it up, and gesturing with it at the remains of the cracker. "I think you won."
"One more such victory," Chandler muttered, and went on more loudly. "Only if you take the hat."
"I don't think that's how crackers are supposed to work, sir," Kent ventured, but he took it anyway, eyed it dubiously, unfolded it, and put it on. Overlarge, it flopped down over one of his eyes, and he righted it with a sigh. Chandler collected the hopping frog, and bounced it over Kent's desk.
"I take it," he said. "That we're not even going to look at the joke?"
"No," Kent replied, grimly. "The hat and the frog were bad enough. The joke will be worse."
Chandler nodded, and swept it, along with the main body of the cracker, into Kent's bin.
"It's still a while before we can eat," Kent said, checking his watch. "There are more crackers, but they'll probably all be at the same level as the one we just pulled. I know Buchan has a Cluedo set downstairs somewhere, if you were desperate for a murder to solve. Or we could just sharpen pencils, Mansell's are looking a little blunt. I don't mind."
It wasn't the greatest of selections, Chandler mused, and Cluedo wasn't particularly challenging with only two players. There were some playing cards somewhere in Miles' desk, but no doubt Kent's evening of Christmas television was beginning to look more and more attractive, and Chandler shouldn't keep him from it.
"It really was good of you to come," Chandler said, standing, ready to make his way back to his office. "But I don't want you to feel that you have to stay…"
Kent got to his feet with a sigh, but he didn't head toward the stairs, instead moving to stand in front of Chandler, no longer paying any attention to the safe path across the incident room.
"I'm here," Kent said, his eyes alight, meeting Chandler's in a way that meant something, indicated communication on a level that people seldom reached, that everything he said was completely the truth, nothing more and nothing less. "Because I want to be. And I think you know that."
Chandler knew. Of course he did, he'd just been pretending that he didn't for far too long, not sure of what to do with the information. He still didn't quite know, but Kent was standing there, waiting, and his expression said that he would still be doing so until the last syllable of recorded time, if needs be, one of Mansell's sprigs of mistletoe overhead, and he followed the impulse – followed tradition – the moment he felt it.
He leaned in and kissed Kent. It was little more than a brush of lips before he pulled back, stepped back, eyes down.
"Sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have–"
"I'm glad you did," Kent said, and he was smiling, his face soft.
Chandler breathed again. "Good," he said, though he was still far too aware of the thudding of his pulse in his neck. "So am I, really. I might do it again. If that's all right?"
For a moment, it looked as if Kent was swallowing a laugh. "That," he said, with some difficulty, the word sounding chewed. "Is very all right."
Chandler moved closer again, and found himself repeating what he had written on the tag that he had folded into Kent's book.
"Merry Christmas, Emerson."
A/N - I didn't have as much time to edit this as I would've liked - it turns out Christmas is a rather immovable deadline (and I've never written fluff before, all I had throughout was Buchan's voice from the S4 trailer in my head going murrrder). But I hope you enjoyed it anyway, thank you so much for reading!
If you have a question or a comment that you don't want to leave here, or just need someone to wail headcanons at, I am also over at this Tumblr.
A very merry Christmas to you all! ^.^