Elaine smacked her hands down on the top of Finch's console—which she could barely see over—making him and Mush jump. "Finch! What are you doing Sunday after the show?"

"Uh… Driving home for Christmas?"

"We're going to go see Star Wars if you want to come."

"I can't. I'm driving home."

"Okay. Mush, do you want to come?"

"I've never seen a Star Wars movie, so I'm going to pass."

"You've never seen a Star Wars movie?"

"No. And when people react like that, it makes me want to never watch any of them, just to make a point."

Elaine narrowed her eyes and stared at him. "Whatever. Weirdo."

Alan appeared behind her. "Who's a weirdo?"

"Mush."

"Definitely."

"Thanks," Mush glared at Alan as he wandered into the wagon house. "So, you guys are twins?"

"Yeah, why?"

"You don't really look alike."

"Yeah, we both look like Alden and our mom, but not much like each other somehow."

"I definitely would have guessed that either you or Alden or the two of them were the twins, not you and Alan."

"We get that a lot."

"Do you guys have twin telepathy?"

Elaine rolled her eyes. "No. That's not a real thing." She stuck her hands in her apron pockets and rocked back on her heels. "So, do you want to make this your first Star Wars movie?"

"Absolutely not."

She shrugged. "Fair enough. Hey, JoJo!" she turned and trotted along behind the other boy as he headed into the wagon house. "Do you want to go and see Star Wars with us?"

"Who's us?" JoJo asked.

"Uh… Me, Alan, Alden, Will, Jack, Crutchie, Elmer, and I think Sarah and Davey?"

"Sounds fun! When are we going?"

"Sunday after the show? It'll be kind of a long day, and it'll be a push for me and Crutchie and Sarah to get there with laundry, but we should be able to make the last showing for the night."

"Okay! I'll be there."

.*.*.*.*.*.

Sunday was the last show day before Christmas. They had three full days off in a row for Christmas: the Monday that they normally had off, in addition to Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. JD had finished his finals and Elaine drove him to the airport to fly home early on Sunday morning, meaning that the apartment would be quieter than normal when they got home that night, between everyone else's exhaustion and his absence. The Sunday show felt like the longest show they'd done since the start of the run. Everyone was jittery, full of nerves and anticipation for the day off.

At intermission, Jack, Albert, Race, and Elaine were crammed into the little alcove that housed the washers and dryers, doing their best to ignore the sulfuric stench seeping out of the washers' drain pipes.

"That is just… so bad," Race pinched his nose and stepped away from the pipes.

"I think," said Albert, leaning forward to fruitlessly peer down the pipe, "that part of the drain must sit too high or at the wrong angle to drain properly, and that means that water just sits there without draining and just, like… stagnates."

"You'd think with how much we run the washers it would flush it out, though," Elaine grumbled. She was fiddling with the tiny bulb in the bite-light around her neck, trying to adjust its position so she could see better when using it.

Albert shrugged and leaned back, waving his hand in front of his face as if it would do something about the stink in the air. "I don't know. That's just my guess."

Elaine shrugged, dropping her bite-light to adjust the dress laid out on one of the dryers for quick-change purposes.

"Hey, Finch!" Jack called, stopping him in his tracks. "Are you coming with us tonight?"

"I can't," Finch groaned. "I have to be home by seven tonight for family Christmas stuff."

"Aw, are you sure?" Elaine leaned around Jack to peer at Finch.

"Yes," Finch sighed. "If I'm late, my mom might actually kill me." He glared at her. "I told you this the other day."

"Did you? Probably." Elaine sighed.

"I'm going to try and go see it Christmas Day," he said. "But no spoilers before then!"

"Yeah, I'm going with my brothers tomorrow," said Albert.

"Race, are you going tonight?" Finch asked.

"Nah," Race shrugged. "I don't care enough about Star Wars to brave the theatre on a weekend evening right before Christmas, which also happens to be the weekend directly after the movie opening."

"That's pretty valid," Elaine admitted. "I wouldn't for anything less than Star Wars."

Race took a half-step away. "Star Wars isn't worth it"—

"You get back here and say that to my face, Race Higgins," Elaine snapped. She started to move towards him, but he danced away and Albert and Jack both reached out to stop her—Jack with an arm around her shoulders, Albert by grabbing the side of her apron.

"Them's fightin' words with Elaine," Albert laughed.

"You bet they are," Elaine grumbled. She jerked backwards and turned away to sneeze into her elbow, both of the boys taking a step away from her on each sneeze. "Ugh," she groaned. She blew her nose and put hand sanitizer on, then went back to fiddling with her bite-light.

"Well, none of you better spoil it for me," said Finch.

Elaine held her hands up. "Spoiler ban until at least after Christmas. Probably longer, depending on how many people see it over the break."

"Good," Finch nodded. "I guess, since I can't go to Star Wars tonight, I'll take a bad joke."

Elaine's face lit up. "Really? Okay, hang on, let me think of a good one. Um… What's big and grey and can't fly?"

"I don't know. A whale?"

"No. Well, technically, yes, also true, but the answer I was looking for was 'parking lot'."

"Why the fuck would I have guessed parking lot?"

"I don't know, but that's the answer to the question," she shrugged. "Have a good show!" She slipped out from between Jack and Albert, lifting her bite-light to her mouth as she stepped backstage. Seconds later, they heard spluttering, and she returned, face twisted into a grimace. "I got hand sanitizer on my bite-light…"

.*.*.*.*.*.

"I can't believe you're all going to the movies tonight."

Elaine, Sarah, and Crutchie traded glances, then grinned up at Medda from where they were seated on the wagon house floor, waiting for the laundry to be finished. They had changed out of their uniforms, into far more comfortable street clothes, while waiting, and had already clocked out upstairs so they wouldn't have to go back up in the crunch of time they had to get to the theater. "Medda, come on; it's Star Wars," Elaine laughed. "I personally won't make it more than a few more days without seeing it. I'll explode."

Crutchie laughed. "That's a definite possibility here."

Medda shook her head, grinning. "That's commitment."

"The wash is almost done, and then we'll be out of your hair, Medda," Sarah said. "We already clocked out; we just need to hang up the shirts and tights and we'll be gone."

"We thought we timed it better to when the wash would be done," Elaine sighed.

Before anyone could say anything further, there was a buzz and a chime from the direction of the washers. Elaine and Sarah leapt to their feet and Sarah darted towards the washers while Elaine helped Crutchie to his feet. Medda laughed to herself and headed off, shaking her head, to turn off the lights on the stage and in the house. By the time Crutchie was up and heading towards the z-racks and drying rack on the carpet, Sarah had pulled everything out of the washer and dumped the load into a basket. She shoved it to Elaine as the second washer began to chime; Elaine took the full basket over to Crutchie and the racks while Sarah filled the second, and they got to work.

Soon enough, all of the dress shirts had been hung on the z-racks, while all tights, fishnet stockings, dance briefs and undershorts, show bras, socks, and the brightly-colored elf leotards and undershirts were draped over the drying rack. The men's undershirts went back into a washbasket and were tossed into a dryer with the sweat towels. Elaine powered on the washer while Sarah ran onto the stage to call to Medda that they were leaving, and then they were scurrying down the outside stairs, into the parking lot, and piling into Elaine's car.

"Everyone buckled?" Elaine asked, not waiting for an answer as she shifted the gears and started driving.

"Wait!" Sarah giggled, clicking her seat belt into place.

"Elaine, have I never been in your backseat before?" Crutchie asked, pulling a beanie baby spider with giant, sparkly eyes out of the pouch on the back of Elaine's seat.

"Uh, probably not," she said. "We usually stick you in the front."

"Ah, sorry!" said Sarah.

"No, it's okay!" Crutchie said. "You get motion sickness. I don't." He reached into the seat pouch again, this time producing a large plastic box full of half-melted crayons. "Elaine, I have some serious questions about some of the stuff you have back here."

"Wait, what did you find?"

"Melted crayons? Which kind of explains why it usually smells like crayons in here, actually…"

"Oh, I forgot about those. A lot of that stuff is leftover from the babysitting and nannying jobs I did back in Boston."

"Like this spider?"

"Oh, no. He's my friend. Give him here." She reached her hand back, and Crutchie put the spider in it. Elaine set him on the recessed part of her dashboard behind her steering wheel, in front of the gas gauge. "Well, that makes it a little hard to see how much gas I have, but that's okay."

Crutchie and Sarah laughed. "You know you're crazy, right?" Crutchie teased.

"All the best people are," Elaine sang out as she pulled into the theatre parking lot. "Wow, it's busier than I was expecting."

"I hope we can still get tickets," said Sarah.

"Alan said he and Jack and Davey got tickets for us already," said Elaine. "He texted me before we left. They wanted to make sure we'd be able to get in."

"Oh, good," Sarah grinned.

Elaine parked the car and they all clambered out, heading for the theatre building. Inside, they found Alan, Alden, Will, Davey, Les, and Jack all waiting for them. JoJo and Elmer arrived just after them, and joined the group as Alan was talking:

"So, we weren't able to get all of the seats together," he said. "Most of us are in the third row. Jack and Davey said they'd take a pair of seats that's a little further back, and then there's another single seat a few down from the rest of us, but we're going to try and just get the people in between us to swap for that one."

"Okay," Elaine nodded, accepting the ticket Alan handed her.

"Can I sit at the end of the row?" asked Crutchie. "It's easier to get in and out, and I don't want to have to walk past a bunch of people with my crutch."

"Oh, yeah, Jack said you'd probably want that one, so I saved this ticket for you," said Alden, passing the slip of paper to him.

"Okay, does everyone have a ticket?" Alan said. "Great. Let's go. The movie starts in five minutes."

.*.*.*.*.*.

When they all filed out of the theatre, Les and Alden in particular were chattering excitedly to each other, but the others were all talking over each other as well. The only one silent was, surprisingly, Elaine, who stood quietly tucked up against Will's side, under his arm, eyes and nose red and cheeks tear-stained.

"You okay, Laine?" Jack teased.

"Shut up," she sniffled.

Will laughed and rubbed her arm. "She got a little emotional during the movie."

"'A little'?" Alan repeated, laughing. "She cried for two hours straight through."

"Wait, you could hear that?" Elaine gasped, mortified. "I thought I was being quiet!"

"You were quiet, just not… that quiet," Crutchie laughed.

"Oh no…" she groaned.

"Why were you crying?" Jack asked.

"Leia," Elaine sighed. "Look, Carrie Fisher was my idol as a kid. She's the only celebrity whose death has made me cry"—

"Also for several hours," Alan interjected.

—"and seeing her on the screen again was just… I mean, episode eight was bad enough, but this one was just… you know. Hard to watch, but in a good way. And the ending of a series, especially one that has meant so much to me as Star Wars has, is always an emotional time to me, so." She shrugged.

"She also cried after the last Hobbit movie," said Alan.

"And rewatching Return of the King," said Alden.

"The last Jurassic World movie," said Will. "Although that one wasn't the last of the trilogy."

"No, but it was traumatic," said Elaine. "All the dinosaurs dying, and then the ones they rescued almost dying? Awful."

"Don't forget Detective Pikachu!" Alan piped up. "We went to see it for our birthday this year, and she cried the whole way home."

"Can we not talk about how easily I cry please?" Elaine laughed. "Anyways, the reason I was crying then wasn't so much about Detective Pikachu—even though that movie did make me weirdly emotional—I had a lot of things on my mind and the movie just kind of pushed me over the edge."

"That's valid," Crutchie shrugged.

"Moving on," said Jack, "who's driving home with me?"

"You can either take Alan, Alden, Will, and Crutchie straight home, or take Davey, Sarah, and Les to the theatre to get Davey's car," said Elaine. "I'll take whoever you don't."

"You should probably take the Jacobses," said Jack, ignoring the twinge of reluctance in his stomach. "Your car is smaller. Don't want to cram too many people into it."

"Yeah, sitting in your back seat when it's full is not fun," Alden laughed.

"Okay, that's fair; it is pretty tight back there," Elaine agreed. "Let's go, then. Davey, you'll want to sit behind me; more leg room."

"'Cause she's so short she has to sit inside of the steering wheel to reach it!" Alan called after them.

"Shut up!" Elaine yelled back.

"Make me!" Alan retorted, sticking his tongue out. "Oh, wait; you can't! Your legs are too short. You'd never catch me!" He took off running towards Jack's van in the distance.

"I hate it when he's right," Elaine grumbled.