It wasn't so easy to be a wealthy, handsome, billionaire, he mused, and perhaps he'd be best off ignoring that horrid alarm today. Just this once.
He knew he had a bottle of fine something or other, from some diplomat, or businessman, or over bred little tart of too rich parents. He could sleep-in, drug himself in style, and celebrate Christmas in oblivion.
He groaned, rolling to the edge of his bed, as he realized the bottle of numb was five floors down in his gourmet kitchen. Oh how the fates conspire against him.
Groaning again, Vlad shifted forms, went intangible, and free fell through half the house, landing and shifting back a hallway away from his destination.
Grumbling to himself about house staff who wouldn't work on Christmas he stalked down plush halls and grand rooms, and nearly ignored the grandest of them all.
It was truly magnificent, the the best decorations, the best tree, the best everything money could buy and his decorators could dream up. Of course it had been up for nearly a month and was the best every year. So with a pause and a humph he glanced at it and continued walking, then stopped and glanced again.
There, placed ever so carefully under the tree, tightly bound in big red bows (albeit a slightly glowing-green red), was the best gift he could have ever hoped for and all he ever wanted.
Carefully he walked to the gift, as if too eager a tread would show it to be some unhappy trick, some dream born of false hope. But no! It was true, and it was his!
Smiling his first real smile in twenty years he knelt to pull his gift to his heart, to hold it close.
Tears in his eyes, he reveled in the presence of his greatest gift, his unwilling son, his Daniel.