December Twelfth
Shepard woke to the maddening jingle-jingle-jingle of someone thinking they were entirely too cute. Her eyes flashed open.
Absolutely not. She hopped into her pajamas pants on her way out of the room, clomping downstairs and cornering Garrus in the kitchen. Now she stood in front of him, hand held out. "Give me that. Now," she demanded.
"Give you what?" Garrus asked, eyes wide and confused. His eyes flicked to the stove, and Shepard shook her head, red curls flying.
"You are wearing jingle bells. You must stop." Something under her left eye twitched, causing little flickers on her vision as the eyelid tried repeatedly to close.
"But I like them," Garrus protested.
Shepard's free hand crept to her forehead, trying to rub away the headache there. She remembered her least favorite part of Christmas, now. Mindoir had been one of the early human settlements, and they had been big on certain things. Since so many of the settlers were from the western hemisphere, one of those big things had been American-style Christmas, an event which was so much more about the trappings than anything else.
Trappings like jingle bells.
They did Christmas wrong. The Shepard children were only allowed to speak to a few other families' children at Christmas, the ones who all went to the same church every Sunday. For some reason she couldn't quite remember, jingle bells were the epitome of this wrongness.
"Garrus. I can only make so merry. If you insist on jingling all day for the next—" Shepard checked her omni-tool— "thirteen days, I will need to shoot someone. And you won't let me outside, and you're the only one here."
"Fine," he finally grumbled. He removed various jingling accoutrements and handed them to her, including a belled Santa hat, jingling necklace, and clip-on earrings.
Shepard stared at them. "You do know you don't have ears, right? These are earrings. What'd you even clip them on?"
"I like them. I clipped them on my crest." He turned back to his cooking, still using his sad-bunny-pouting voice.
"You know they're for girls, right?" Shepard asked.
"You keep them."
Shepard shook her head as she left the kitchen, Garrus calling after her.
"Maybe you can wear them when you're out of your foul mood," he yelled.
Shepard dumped all the jingling crap into a box in the living room. She could almost remember why the jingling was wrong. Almost ….