Beth counted herself lucky to have pulled Kaylee's name from the feathery purple-and-pink hat that Edith had passed around the circle. She wasn't sure what she'd have done if she'd pulled Blake, or Amaris, or someone like that. As it was, she'd found the perfect secret Santa gift in Viridian last week, and had squirreled it away in her room until she could secure wrapping paper. The wrapping paper in question wasn't particularly holiday-appropriate—it was adorned with dancing chili peppers and the text TOO HOT TO HANDLE—but she figured that way there would be no question who the gift was for.
The gifts had been appearing in the living room periodically throughout the week, which was the only way the group could decide to handle the situation. If they all showed up with their secret Santa gifts in hand, it wouldn't be too much of a surprise who got who. One by one the gifts showed up, some of them wrapped abysmally and some quite well. One gift featured copious amounts of duct tape, and Beth snorted when she saw it. Her bets were that one of the boys had been responsible for that.
When the morning of the present exchange dawned, Beth wasn't surprised to find that she was joined by people who were not normally early-risers. Jason, his hair a mess of cowlicks, was already sitting in one of the armchairs with a cup of cocoa, looking ruffled and tired but very eager to start. Gina appeared to be asleep on the floor near his feet. Blake was sitting cross-legged near the pile of gifts, blinking sleepily into the empty space near Beth's head. It was still another fifteen minutes before Victoria appeared in the hallway, and Gav and Kaylee came inside from where they had been training outdoors. "Man," Kaylee said as she threw herself down on the couch. Beth didn't miss the way Edith twitched at the sweaty person sprawled all over the upholstery. "I almost got set on fire out there. Though really, what's new." Beth bit her lip and struggled to reign in on the overwhelming urge to blurt out that Kaylee needed to open her gift from her mysterious secret Santa right now.
Most of their Pokemon were also out and about this morning, though they were largely confined to the kitchen and dining room, away from the common area in which group meetings were always held. Beth was used to talking business in this place, her friends falling into their favorite chairs or leaning against their favorite walls while they discussed conspiracy theories. It was nice to have everyone together for something lighthearted. Some Pokemon seemed to disagree, however—Gina's Charmander had set a Santa hat ablaze when Kaylee had tried to put it on the lizard, and Amaris' Pokemon, much like their trainer, seemed to keep to themselves in a slightly haughty way. Zahlia's Haunter was having a great time, though, drifting around (and sometimes through) the other Pokemon, though Edith had requested that it not do that to her more emotionally fragile ones. Bulbasaur was the only one who had conceded to wear a hat, and Beth suspected that was because it was too lazy to move out of the way when she'd placed it there.
Zahlia, Amaris and Orion appeared from wherever they had been wandering, and the group was ready to go. "Okay," Edith began, clapping her hands and looking around the room. "I guess we'll just start handing these out?"
"We could do it one at a time," Gav suggested, but Jason vetoed that with vehemence.
"Heck no! Paper-ripping free-for-all!"
Gina rolled over sleepily near his feet and blinked at the room at large. "When did all of you get here?" she asked in a daze, and Edith chuckled.
"Okay, okay," she said, leaning over and picking up two gifts. One was a somewhat messily wrapped, oddly-shaped package with green swirls drawn hastily all over it. It looked like it had been wrapped in a brown paper bag. "Victoria, this is for you," Edith said, passing it over. Victoria looked at it with bemused interest. The next one was two flat square packages tied together with ribbon, which turned out to be for Orion.
"Gina," Edith said, handing Gina a rectangular package that was evidently heavy—GIna's hands hit the floor when she accepted it from her. "Yikes," the girl remarked, hefting it up and weighing it experimentally in her hands. Amaris' package was lumpy and odd, a big swatch of wrapping paper tied up at the top like a drawstring bag. It was considerably lighter than Gina's, and he stared at it with puzzled interest, examining it from all angles.
Jason's gift appeared to have been wrapped by someone who actually knew what they were doing. It was a stereotypical present—a big square box with a bow on top. Jason seemed delighted to have it and shook it near his ear. Gav's was in a small bag with what looked like shredded paper towels and bath tissues heaped on top of it to hide whatever was inside. Zahlia was the recipient of the duct-taped present, and Blake's was wrapped with so much flare and precision that Beth decided at once that he had to be Edith's giftee. Edith's gift, too, was wrapped rather nicely—better than Beth's, anyway, and she laughed as she received a lumpy package with tape haphazardly slapped down on many wayward flaps. Kaylee picked up the gift Beth had wrapped and laughed out loud at it. "Santa's got good taste in wrapping paper," she said, posing cheesily with the box, and Beth grinned.
"Okay okay nice, look at the wrapping jobs in varying degrees of success, can we please open them now?" Jason asked, and as a response Orion started to rip the paper off his present. Jason exclaimed at him and got to work at his at once, paper and ribbon flying in the air, and that set the others off.
Beth always loved to watch people interact with one another. She supposed it had something to do with her interest in media and PR—she could spot a conflict brewing a mile away, and so long as both parties were amenable to assistance, she fancied herself rather good at stopping those fights from escalating. On the flipside, she could also spot the good things between people pretty quickly, too. She'd noticed that Kaylee was crushing on Orion almost before Kaylee had, and when the younger Harrison sister had confided it in Beth a month later, blushing furiously, Beth had to pretend to be surprised. She'd pegged Edith and Jason as a potential couple in the first few days of their stay at the cottage, and of course Gav and her sister were practically married by now. There were other little signs here and there, lingering looks and thoughtful gestures between people that might become problematic later, but for now things were okay at the status quo.
Beth peeled the paper on her gift back bit by bit, enjoying the reactions surfacing around the room more than the act of finding out what she herself had received. Unsurprisingly, Jason was the first to uncover his gift, and his burst of delighted laughter captured the room's attention.
"Oh hell yes," he said, holding up something that Beth had to lean forward to see. It was a small bottle in a clear box, and was bright, acid green—a second later Beth saw the punk-rocker with the green mohawk on the label and a grin broke out onto her face.
"Oh god," she said, and Jason started messing with his hair at once, pushing it up into a faux-hawk. "Is that permanent?"
Jason glanced at the bottle, his eyes scanning it. "Naw, temporary. Frickin' sweet!"
"Well, I'd hope that no one here would get you permanent eye-burning green dye," Orion said with a chuckle, his own wrap-job half open in his lap. "You'd never be able to come with us on missions ever again."
"This is going in my hair right after this," Jason said with a grin, and glanced down into the box. "Wait, what? There's something else in here!"
"Score!" Kaylee said. "You have the best Santa ever. What is it?"
Jason held up a black and green t-shirt and gave a thumbs up to Edith, who had snapped a picture with her camera. On the front was a Bulbasaur cracking its vines out into the foreground, tall block letters below reading (Vine) Whip it Good! The room laughed as one and the Pokemon glanced over from their various posts, curious.
"Check it, buddy!" Jason said, showing Bulbasaur, who trotted over at a steady pace. "That's you. 'Cept not, 'cause this Bulbasaur is actually attacking."
Kaylee had hers open next, and Beth couldn't keep the tell-tale grin off her face as her friend burst into laughter and pumped her fist in the air. "Speak of the devil!" she said, and the group turned to her next. Beth found it amusing that, even though they had decided not to open gifts one-by-one, there was still an unspoken order established in their group. Kaylee read off the front of the box: "Flame-resistant sunscreen! Apply liberally to arms, legs and face. Protects against sunburn and prevents surface burns from fire Pokemon attacks!" Gav clapped a hand to his forehead and laughed. "Reapply after contact with fire," Kaylee said, noting the additional instructions and nodding to the room. "Wise words."
"Thank you Santa, wherever you are, for helping to prolong my sister's life," Gav said, and Kaylee went "awww" and stuck her bow onto Gav's head. She glanced down at the box again, grinning, and flipped it over. Then she burst out laughing anew.
"What?" Jason asked, scooting closer as he tugged his new shirt on over his current one.
It took Kaylee a second to compose herself. "WARNING: do not attempt to set yourself on fire while wearing flame-resistant sunscreen." The group didn't recover from that one for quite some time, and the flash of Edith's camera no doubt captured a few very embarrassing expressions. Gina, for example, had been trying to drink water and had almost choked on it.
Orion got the rest of his wrapping paper off next, and muttered a quiet, "oh, wow," as he ran his hands over something in his lap. Not everyone was paying attention, but he lifted up his gift for those who were curious. In his hands was a handsome, leather-bound notebook with thick, creamy pages. The next package contained charcoal pencils of varying shades and tip widths, and Orion shook his head, looking a little emotional. "Guess someone was paying attention when I mentioned I was almost out of pages in my ratty old sketch book," he said quietly, smiling at his gifts in a way that managed to still be his Orion-patented brand of slightly awkward. "Thank you, whoever got me this."
"Oh yes," Victoria said from her place across the room, holding up a shrink-wrapped basket stuffed full of sage-green and violet bath and spa items. Beth's interest perked as she saw the little wooden hand massager, the bath salts, body spray and facial creme. "I will never leave my room now. You all will never see me again."
"You're gonna share, right?" Beth asked, and Victoria laughed like she'd made a particularly funny joke.
Beth made a mental note to suck up to her sister like crazy over the next few days, and caught the fact that Gav's gift was a coffee mug, which he was reading and mouthing words from, his brow furrowed. Curious, Beth opened her mouth to ask him, but Gina cut off the would-be question with a loud, "no way!"
The group snapped its collective attention to her. Gina was staring down into her torn-open wrapping paper with wide eyes and a flush of shock across her cheeks, as if unable to believe what she was holding. "Holy crap. It's—" she hefted up something that looked like a very worn-down dictionary, and Beth frowned, scooting forward to read it. Gina, however, apparently had the title memorized: "It's the final book in the Trainers on Training series — 'One hundred and one outdated training techniques and their contemporary counterparts.' I—" Gina began, shaking her head and turning it back around to gaze at it while the others looked at one another in confusion. Jason, however, had realized something.
"What? No way! That thing went out of print like five years ago! You can't get that anywhere, and if you do—"
"We had a dollar limit!" Gina said to the room at large, looking genuinely torn between horror at whoever had spent that much money on her and overwhelming gratitude. "My god."
"Santa's pretty well-to-do," Victoria commented, also looking impressed. Beth glanced around the room, looking for signs of weakness in their flock so she could determine who had given each gift, but Gav's snort of poorly-concealed laughter distracted her.
"What?" he asked the cup, as if it would tell him the answer. "This is pretty great. Okay, it says: 'WARNING: the side-effects of coffee include a) palpitations, b) trouble sleeping, c) compulsive manscaping, d) underwater basket weaving, e) uncontrollable roundhouse kicking, and f) spontaneous combustion."
"What?" Victoria asked, and Kaylee snorted into her drink.
"Well, if you spontaneously combust, you can use my flame-resistant sunscreen," she said, and the group laughed.
"Compulsive manscaping…" Orion began, his brow furrowed and a confused grin on his face. "And what is it with the Harrisons and warnings about their health?" Orion mused.
"Someone knows us pretty well, I guess," Kaylee said, slinging an arm around Gav's shoulders and causing him to spill a bit of the coffee he was now transporting from his travel mug into his new, very strange gift. Edith jumped up to get her cleaning supplies and in the interim, Blake said, "holy snap."
"Whatcha got?" Kaylee asked eagerly, shifting forward closer to Blake. Blake held up something Beth couldn't recognize at first—it looked like a tangle of straps and swatches of leather. He shifted it around in his hands though, and Beth murmured "ohh," to herself. Some of the others still looked confused, though. "That looks like a whole bunch of belts had a horrible, horrible love-child," Kaylee commented, and Blake glared at her.
"It's a courier's harness for Grumpy," Blake said, whistling his Pokemon over. Grumpy flew messily towards him, trying to negotiate its long wings in the cluttered living room, and people shouted and ducked low. Edith looked frazzled and overwhelmed again, and Beth relieved her of photo duty for a while. "Why don't you open your gift?" she said, handing the nicely-wrapped package to her.
Blake was setting up his Pokemon with the harness, the rest of the box forgotten, and Edith murmured softly, "why don't you check to see if there's anything else in there?"
Beth struggled to hide her grin, and had to put the camera up in front of her face to disguise it. Well, now she knew who had given Blake his gift, anyway. Blake glanced at her with as stunned an expression as a Nakawa could muster, and Edith put her hands up. "I mean, there might not be anything in there, but it's, a big box. Don't want to miss anything if…" the others were looking at her now with varying degrees of sly smiles, and Edith's dark skin flushed as she muttered something to herself. Blake dug around in the box and emerged with some attachments—plastic slip-in bags for the satchel to protect the letters in case of inclement weather, and a small clipboard with mail receipt confirmation forms and an attached pen.
"Damn," Blake muttered, looking rather overwhelmed. "Thanks, Edith."
"Santa," she corrected, fighting a losing battle. Beth thought the holiday warm and fuzzies would just about kill her.
"Amaris, what did you get?" Gina asked, apparently trying to get some of the uncomfortable attention off of Edith. Amaris was actually smiling at whatever he was holding in his hands, and after a moment's pause he held one up to the group, looking like he was judging them a little for this display of present exhibitionism. "They're for my Pokemon belt, so I assume." The item in question was a small leather pouch, just the right size to hold a minimized Pokeball, and a loop on the back to slide it onto a belt. Beth frowned for a second, and Amaris elaborated. "This will help with my Pidgeot-Returner post-traumatic stress. Thank you." The light went on in Beth's head and she went "ahh," remembering how the aiming laser on one of his Pokeballs had been used to recall his Pidgeot mid-air and nearly send him careening to his death. With six leather pouches to conceal the Pokeballs, the aiming lasers would not be accessible to be tampered with.
Gina shuddered on the ground, her book open in her lap. "I like to not think about that, either," she muttered. "So, thank you from me too, Santa."
Gav looked incredibly fascinated by that. "That's actually a downright brilliant idea. I know this is secret Santa and all, and we're supposed to be off work for the day—" Kaylee and Jason and a few others groaned, sensing where Gav might be going with this. "No, no, I'm not going to make us work, I promise," he said, lifting his hands in surrender. "I just… whoever made those, can you say who you are? I might ask you to make some for the rest of us, too."
"Uh," Orion said, turning slightly red around the ears the way the Fremont brothers tended to when embarrassed. "That… would be me." Exposed now, the group turned to look at him, impressed, and Beth realized she should have put two and two together before this; Orion had created his own Pokemon belt from scratch, after all.
"I feel your pain," Edith said, and Orion nodded at her, both of them outed in their gift-giving. Amaris was looking at Orion with a mix of amusement and subdued gratitude, though, and Gina appeared to be watching the display with badly-concealed glee. Amaris making friends (sort of) with any of them was something the other girl tried to encourage at every opportunity.
Beth snapped a few more pictures, then rested her camera on her leg while Edith started to unwrap her gift in a very Edith-way: methodically and with surgical precision. Beth tore the paper off hers, curious, and lifted up the package of three shirts. They were blue, green and pink respectively, and she flipped the package over in her hand, wondering if one of her friends had simply decided she needed new shirts. If so, it was still a great gift, but something about the way they were packaged made her doubt that was the end of the story. Normal clothing didn't come packaged this way, and she found it at the bottom corner. "Oh! Oh, cool!" she tore open the package and grabbed the first shirt, testing the fabric and feeling the weave beneath her fingers. It didn't feel like a bathing suit—bathing suit material was always thick and unforgiving, very synthetic and with no breathing space. This felt like a regular knit-top, but—
"What's cool? C'mon, share!" Kaylee prompted, and Beth snapped out of it.
"These are quick-dry, virtually waterproof shirts," Beth explained. "They 'breathe better than a surf shirt,' and dry completely in 'under ten minutes in cool weather, under five in summer.' Score!"
Kaylee leaned over to give her a high-five. "Our elements will never get the best of us again!" she declared.
"Dang, I need to get me some of those!" Gina agreed, shooting Amaris and Wartortle a glare. Both of them looked at her like they had no idea what she was talking about.
Beth was so happily distracted by her gift (pulling it on over her tank top the way Jason had slipped immediately into his Bulbasaur tee) that she almost didn't do her math correctly. Edith was almost done unwrapping her gift, but there was still one other person they hadn't heard from.
"Zahlia," Beth asked, emerging from inside the sinfully comfortable pink top, "what did santa bring you?"
Zahlia's duct-taped package had understandably taken longer to open, and it looked as if she'd snipped through it with the scissors from her pocket knife in the end. It took her a moment to look up, and though her expression was never easy to read, Beth thought the older Nakawa looked… rather incredibly touched, actually. "This… they sell these in Lavender," she said, holding up a small charm on a dark violet string. It revolved gently and Beth could make out the shape of a Gengar and a gently woven tapestry of symbols hanging beneath it on a long strip of fabric. She couldn't understand the characters, but Zahlia continued. "They're to ward off bad luck and encourage good dreams." She tapped the Gengar with her finger. "Hence."
"Wow, Lavender?" Gina asked. "I guess whoever Santa was must've had to order out for that."
"There another…" Zahlia began, swallowing rather hard and lifting up a framed photo, looking a little embarrassed to be sharing it. Beth didn't even have to lean forward to see what it was—she knew that picture very well.
It had been the hottest part of summer, not long after Amaris had joined their ranks. The rust-haired boy had still not been exactly warm towards them, and it had taken a lot of coaxing to get him, Zahlia, and Blake into the shot. As it was, the Nakawas had been standing near the back, straight, tall and utterly awkward for an impromptu group photo. Kaylee had tried (unsuccessfully) to get them to lighten up—it had been in the days before the revelation about Zeke and the Nakawa syndicate, and Kaylee had still been friendly and boisterous around the two of them. Gina had been hovering near Amaris, and honestly, she had never really stopped. Even now Gina was within a ten foot radius of her childhood rival, remaining available at a moment's notice while trying not to smother the boy. Jason and Orion were also near the back, and Jason had not been able to stop himself from putting a number of weird horns, ears and antlers behind Gina's head until the other girl had turned around and started swatting at him. Beth, Victoria and Gav were more in the foreground, crouched down or sitting to create the front row, and Victoria had snarled at Jason and Gina, telling them to quit slapping each other around over my head. Gav had his face turned down to his PDA, clicking away at something until Beth had actually reached out and taken it from him, putting it behind her back. Hey! he'd protested, but he'd been laughing. He knew he was being ridiculous. Edith stood behind the camera, ready with the ten second countdown timer, and after verifying that, yes, the group was ready no fewer than five times (Amaris had exasperatedly called out, for the love of god, get on with it!) she hurried over to them. The group had stood there wearing the weird, forced smiles that people always got when made to hold the expression for too long. At the two-seconds-remaining mark, one of Edith's Spearows had careened wildly at the beeping camera, apparently pegging it as a devious threat.
As a result, the picture Zahlia was showing them captured a number of truly hilarious things. The ground was slanted at a strange angle, the camera halfway through falling over. Gav, Victoria and Beth were all reaching out to stop it, and Edith was a blur of movement and a startled face, going after her Pokemon. Jason and Kaylee were laughing hard in the background, Kaylee doubled-up and apparently knocking Blake off-balance and into Zahlia, who in turn had bumped into Orion. Orion was in the process of steadying the three of them, but it was clear from the look on his face that they would all end up on the ground very soon—which they had. Gina was crouched in the midst of the flurry of motion, dodging Jason's elbow and Blake's flailing hand, looking like a parody of a kung-fu fighter. In the back of the shot Amaris was executing a flawless face-palm.
It was by far Beth's favorite picture of the group, even though they had recovered the fallen (unharmed) camera and had taken a somewhat normal shot after (with only a few closed eyes or instances of hair in the face.) Amaris, however, had not stood for a third take at a photo and had bailed, so all they had was the semi-normal one, and this examination of just how utterly a group of twelve teens could fail in the space of one second. Then Beth caught the two engraved words at the bottom of the wooden frame, and her throat constricted around emotion while she blinked bleary tears back.
"Thank you," Zahlia said quietly, and a silence settled over their group that seemed almost sacred. Amaris didn't break it with a snide comment—Jason didn't try to lighten the mood with a joke. Gav didn't push them forward to get back to work and Kaylee didn't burst into a dance routine to get them moving again. For a moment they just looked at one another, some of them smiling and some of them not, but all of them—she thought—feeling the same thing.
Then something—probably a wandering Pokemon—made Orion jump slightly and bump into the chair that Gav was sitting in. Gav's already once-spilled coffee tipped onto the floor again, and Kaylee jumped away from the splash-zone, half-slipped, and shouted in alarm. The sound was what caused a flurry of action from the Pokemon in the next room. The sound of some bowl of food hitting the floor came to their ears and everyone looked at everyone else in dread.
"I'm on this!" Edith said, a grin on her face, bizarrely—then Beth saw what she had in hand. Her gift, apparently, had been a brand new, state-of-the-art line of lemon-scented, antibacterial cleaning agents and tools. Beth recognized it as a set so new that it wasn't due on the market for at least another two weeks. She cast a look to Victoria, lifted her eyebrow, and smiled. It appeared that her sister had been milking their aunt in the Celadon homecare industry as a resource.
"Good timing," Beth said with a grin, and the group got up to help subdue the chaos in the kitchen. Gav, Blake and Kaylee rounded up the screaming, flapping birds, Jason opened the door and helped usher them out. Amaris and Gina closed all the doors and windows so more Pokemon couldn't get in to join the commotion, and Orion started to help Edith gather fallen items and mop up the mess on the floor. Beth turned to Zahlia and grinned. "Guess we should go check to make sure nothing's on fire in the kitchen," she said, and Zahlia smiled and nodded. The elder Nakawa put down her picture frame—with the words Our Family carved into the bottom—and joined Beth in coaxing Gina's very annoyed Charmander away from anything combustible.
Author's Note: Hope you enjoyed that diabetes-inducing fluff-fest XD I'm a little ashamed for writing it, haha. Happy holidays, everyone.