Summary: Sebastian hates Thomas's Elf on a Shelf.
Notes: Inspired by the Hummel Holidays prompt 'traditions'.
"I don't like it," Sebastian says, scooching down the length of the couch. "I don't like it at all."
"What?" Kurt asks, not looking up from his magazine for one second to acknowledge his husband's ridiculousness. "What don't you like?"
"That frickin' … psychotic … minion thing!"
Kurt snickers. "Do you mean Thomas's Elf on a Shelf?"
"Yup. That's the one."
"And why don't you like it, pray tell?"
"Because it looks like it's staring at me."
"That's the point," Kurt explains. "Kids are supposed to believe it's watching them so they behave and give their poor parents a break. Too bad it doesn't work on husbands, too ..."
Sebastian glares at Kurt, but Kurt doesn't look up. "But Thomas is at school. Why can't I put a napkin over it or something?"
"Because you'll forget to uncover it. Then Thomas will find it like that and he'll freak out. Best to leave it be. Try to ignore it. That's what I do. I've made a career out of ignoring things that annoy the hell out of me ..."
Sebastian glares harder at his surly husband, but it doesn't affect him in the slightest. "Can't we move it at least?"
Kurt finally looks up, but only to roll his eyes. But after a thought, he says, "Yeah, we probably should before Thomas comes home. You know, to keep the elf magic alive."
"Great. You do that," Sebastian says, getting up off the couch.
"And where are you going?"
"I'm going to go take a shower. Something about that little motherfucker makes me feel dirty. Speaking of which … if you'd like to join me …"
"Thomas is going to be home in about fifteen minutes."
"All I need is five, babe."
"I need longer, so I think I'll pass."
"Suit yourself," Sebastian says, heading for the master bedroom while Kurt takes a turn towards the kitchen.
"Stupid, creepy holiday tradition," Sebastian mutters under his breath as he takes off his t-shirt and tosses it into the hamper. "The things we do for our kids …" He stops short of the bathroom door, his hand reaching for the knob when he spots the elf in question, perched on the edge of their headboard. It takes him a moment of blinking and squinting to recognize for certain that that's what he's looking at. "What the …?" He walks over to it slowly. He doesn't want to touch it, but he has to to know that it's real. "Weren't you just …?" Sebastian wraps his fingers around it and backs out of the bedroom, into the living room where Kurt and the elf had been a minute ago.
Kurt is in the kitchen. Sebastian can hear him getting Thomas's after school snack ready, but the elf that had been there with them, the one that had been sitting on a shelf above the sofa, isn't there.
Sebastian shudders. No. It can't be …
"Babe?" he calls with mild urgency. It's Kurt. It has to be Kurt. Kurt moved it. Kurt said he was going to move it, and he did.
But how did he get in and out of the bedroom before him, and without Sebastian seeing him?
Sebastian nearly bursts into the kitchen in his need to be out of the living room. He has to talk to Kurt. He has to get this mystery resolved.
"Did you decide against a shower?" Kurt asks, unwinding the twist tie on a loaf of bread.
"No, I didn't. I was on my way there, but then …" Sebastian walks towards his husband holding the elf in his outstretched hand.
Kurt barely glances at him while he opens jars of peanut butter and jelly. "I thought you said you didn't want to go near that thing?"
"I did," Sebastian replies. "I mean, I don't."
"Then why do you have it? I said I'd move it."
"So … you haven't moved it yet?"
Kurt looks at his husband, confusion on his face. "Uh, no. I thought I'd do this first. Which is probably why you have it?"
Kurt stares at Sebastian, but Sebastian is staring at the elf.
"Are you okay?" Kurt asks, tone laced with worry. "Is something going on with you?"
"Uh …" Yeah. I might be having a mental episode … "… no. No, I'm fine."
"Are you sure?"
No. "Yeah. I promise. I'm okay."
Kurt gazes thoughtfully at Sebastian. He seems worried, but he has no reason not to believe his husband. "Go take your shower," he suggests. "I'm sure you'll feel better when you get out."
"Yeah." Sebastian nods, eyes glued to the elf, waiting to see if it'll twitch or blink, give any indication that it moves of its own accord. "Okay. You're probably right."
He hears Kurt say, "Probably!?" before he returns to the business of taking his shower. But Sebastian still has this elf to deal with, and absolutely no answers as to how it got into the bedroom without him seeing.
His first instinct is to lock the thing in the closet. Or rip it limb from limb and toss it in the trash. But if he does that, the elf will have gotten to him. It'll have won.
Sebastian can't have that.
He puts it on the bed, throwing it down hard for good measure, then goes back to the bathroom. (He may glance over his shoulder once to make sure it stays where he put it before shutting the door.) He steps out of his pants, climbs in the shower, and turns on the water. He breathes in deep and tries to relax. And it works. The water is blessedly hot on this frigid af winter day. Even with the heater in the house on, there's a chill inside him that he can't seem to shake. But underneath the water, he can wash it away, replace it with soothing warmth.
There, he says to himself in the calm and the quiet of the shower. It was nothing. There's a simple explanation to this. He may not know what it is right now, but that doesn't matter. He will eventually.
And if he doesn't, they can always move.
Sebastian hears the curtain open behind him, and he grins.
"I knew you'd change your mind," he says. He turns to greet his husband, his cock rock hard at the mere thought of Kurt standing behind him, ready to partake in the best five minutes of shower sex of their lives. Sebastian expects to see naked Kurt standing there, expects him to wrap his arms around him and kiss him. But instead, he sees the chubby plastic cheeks of that abominable elf, sitting on the soap tray sticking out of the wall!
"What the …?"
Sebastian reaches behind him to shut off the water, his eyes locked on the elf, not willing to take them off it for one second. His hand comes in contact with something soft and plastic, straddling the knob. He tears the curtain aside and leaps out of the shower. He runs to the bedroom, but right at the doorway, something hard drives into the arch of his foot. He looks down and there's another elf, lying with his arms outstretched, as if it was trying to trip him!
"Stupid little …!" He punts the elf across the room, but a quick glance tells him he's surrounded by them – on the pillows, on the bedside table, hanging from the overhead light fixture. They're not doing anything, just staring in his direction.
Staring at him.
Except, something isn't right.
Well, something is less right. Sebastian immediately looks for the elf he'd left on the bed …
… but it's gone.
"Kurt!" Sebastian yells, grabbing the closest elf around the neck and racing out to the living room, naked and dripping wet. But the living room is worse than the bedroom. They're everywhere! On the bookshelves, the fireplace mantle, the arms of the sofa, the Christmas tree, hanging over the TV, and frighteningly enough, over by the front door, one guarding the door knob, two more on the floor on either side with a rope pulled between them, blocking his escape. He races into the kitchen where Kurt had been and finds more – one hanging from the refrigerator door, ready to open it; two having a snowball fight with marshmallows on the kitchen table; about five seem to have taken over the task of making Thomas's sandwich; and one is half in/half out of the flour jar, flour scattered all around the clean granite. Kurt would never do that. He'd never intentionally leave a mess of this magnitude.
Come to think of it, where was Kurt?
Sebastian swallows hard as he notices for the first time that the house is eerily silent. He no longer hears the hum of the house heater, and he doesn't hear Kurt anywhere – not his footsteps, not his incessant singing of Christmas songs, not his knocking around while he cleans. Nothing.
Sebastian's heart begins to race, his fight or flight reflex kicking in.
No.
This is stupid.
Is he really convinced that a bunch of toy elves kidnapped his husband?
Sebastian hears the creak of a distant door swinging on its hinges, and his heart slams to a stop.
Okay, maybe cheap, plastic elves didn't kidnap his husband, but Kurt has inexplicably disappeared.
That can't be good, right?
Sebastian hears another noise – a low scraping coming from beyond the kitchen … inside the garage. Sebastian bolts toward it, flying past the elves causing mayhem in the kitchen, yelling the entire way.
"Kurt? Where are you, Kurt? Are you hurt, Kurt? This isn't funny, Kurt, I …"
Sebastian barges into the garage, stopping at the head of the stairs. It's dark as night inside, but he knows something is in there, watching him.
He can feel it.
He reaches to the side for the light switch and flicks it. As the space fills with bright, white light, Sebastian becomes aware of two things.
One, he's still naked. But that's not a problem.
Two, the something watching him is his husband, not at all kidnapped and completely unharmed.
Kurt, holding an elf mid-pose, stares at Sebastian, strangling the elf he's holding in his fist. Sebastian looks around the garage. There's only the one elf in here, but on the ground he can see boxes and boxes of the little fuckers, each adorned with an orange clearance tag, more than likely from Kurt's after-Christmas sale excursion with Carole last year. All at once, it clicks. Kurt knew that Sebastian hated these things since last Christmas when he remarked several times thank God Thomas didn't want an Elf on the Shelf, that they should come out on Halloween instead of Christmas because they aren't elves, they're Satan's tiny little red-robed sons. But the second December first rolled around, Kurt started reading Thomas the story of Elf on a Shelf until he begged Kurt to buy him one. And then, one just appeared, like in a puff of smoke, and it never dawned on Sebastian to question it because Kurt's skills with a credit card and the Amazon shopping app are nearly occult.
But the truth is Kurt has been sitting on this prank for close to a year now, waiting for the right moment to strike, and then he stormed the house like grunion during mating season.
And as obnoxious an experience as this one has been, that, Sebastian realizes, is one of the reasons why he loves his husband.
"So, it's been you this whole time," Sebastian says. "You've been planting these devil spawn all over the house to drive me crazy."
"Duh," Kurt says, plopping his elf down on the hood of Sebastian's car.
"Did you buy, like, eighty of these things?"
"More like a hundred."
Sebastian shakes his head. "Why? Why are you like this?"
"Because …" Kurt reaches for another elf, refusing to call it quits even after he's been caught "… I have been married to you about ten years too long."
"We've been married for nine!"
Kurt sighs, tearing the Elf box apart with both hands. "It feels like a million."