A/N: Not mine. Written for a winter/holiday challenge.
The holidays. He got to see his family. Take a few days off from work. Get into an argument with his brother, maybe even his mother. Depended on their moods. Who was he kidding? Depended on whether he talked to them or not. Opening his mouth always led to something.
All in all, he didn't usually enjoy the holidays as much as he would like to.
In fact, most years he tried to avoid staying with his mother for more than a few days.
But this year felt different. He could feel it. Something working up inside him, excited. Like being a little kid again. Oh, if only. He had even done all his shopping. And he had already arranged it with Cragen. A week off. Well, ten days. God knew he had the time and Cragen was always happy to send him home. Not because he was annoying or anything like that, more along the lines of Cragen knowing the feeling of loneliness and not wanting it to spread. He wanted his detectives to have stable home lives. If they didn't... the job wasn't going to do much for them.
Driving around with Fin, he annoyed his partner by singing with the holiday tunes blasting from the radio. Didn't matter what they were. He sang anything and everything. Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer to Jingle Bell Rock. Everything.
So when he got out of work early the day he was going to drive down to Baltimore, he practically skipped out of the precinct, saying hello and goodbye to nearly everyone he saw, probably scaring half of them half to death. Seeing their local Mr. Scrooge smiling and ready for a snowball fight (if only there were snow) was something their hearts weren't quite ready to take.
He took no notice.
Instead, he stood for a minute on the top of the steps leading into the precinct, inhaled the frigid air deeply and then threw his arms up and out, throwing his face to the sky, eyes closed, laughing.
This was it.
He finally felt it.
Holiday spirit coursing through his veins, he flew down the steps and out to his car to start the drive down to Pikesville where he would sit in the warmth of his mother's house, eating until he gained enough weight to make her happy, generally spoiling his nephew rotten and reminiscing about holidays past with Bernie.