For Lalenna.
"Die in a fire," Gabriel Wolfe snapped with a scowl as he shut the door in the young man's face.
Salesmen on the morning of Christmas Eve. Great.
Disconsolately, he flopped onto the couch and began the mind numbing process of flipping through channels. Frosty the Snowman, sports, some old bat cooking, Charlie Brown Christmas, reality TV, screw it. He turned off the television with a definitive click and stared off into space.
The fat black cat sprawled out on the coffee table gave him a dubious look.
The past three months without Kait had been miserable, but there was something about the fact that it was the holidays that made it infinitely worse. He could still hear her voice, clear and sad even over two thousand five hundred miles of cable and wire, telling him that her father's condition was worsening, and that she wouldn't be able to make it home for Christmas.
"I miss you," he murmured to the air.
When they had first become connected by the web, Gabriel had found it intolerable. He was a reclusive person by nature, and the addition of four other people into his head was an inescapable prison.
It still irritated him to be within a mile radius of Rob, Anna, and Lewis, but Kait was something else entirely. Being connected to her was wonderful in a way he could barely begin to describe. It was like sitting next to a fire on an icy night, and he never tired of it.
The past four years with her had been filled with a happiness he'd never thought he'd experience. The pure enjoyment of being able to hold mental conversations had not gotten old, and domestication tended to agree with him. He reveled in his life with Kait, and missed her terribly. She was everything bright and lovely to him, and her absence was unbearable.
As he sat there in his worn old pajama pants, an idea began to form in his mind. It was a bad one, of course, their scholarship money so painfully earned from Zetes was meant for precisely that, school and emergencies. But still, this was Kait.
"Am I being an idiot, Hermione?" He asked the lazy cat seriously.
She blinked back with owlish golden eyes.
"That settles it," he said, grabbing his wallet, Kait's cat, and her bag of food.
Purposefully, he marched across the hall and knocked on his neighbour's door.
"Can you take care of Kaitlyn's cat for the week, Mrs. Matthews?"
The old woman gave him a scowl that rivaled the one he'd given the salesman.
"For twenty dollars," he added pleadingly.
"Oh alright, but put a shirt on young man. This isn't Woodstock, you know."
Grinning like an idiot, he dumped the past semester's notebooks out of his backpack, and threw in whatever clothing looked relatively clean. He barely had the presence of mind to call off work for the week at his internship on the way out the door.
The traffic in San Francisco was terrible, and flight to Ohio, interminable.
As he stared out of the window of the plane over the endless stretch of the western American desert, he collected his thoughts. Gabriel wasn't normally an impulsive person. He chose his actions with careful deliberation, but when it came to Kait, it seemed that all of the behaviours ingrained since childhood were suspended.
And what if she weren't happy to see him? What if his presence in her father's home was an intrusion? It was too late to think of such things when one is suspended thousands of feet in the air, however, and so Gabriel closed his eyes and drifted off in the afternoon light.
The sky was dark as he was jolted by the taxiing plane. Around him, the passengers were gathering their belongings, children shrieking with pleasure to be on the ground again. He noted with amusement that he had never imagined to empathize with that feeling when one is landing in Ohio.
The journey in the rental car passed in a haze as he drove through the night filled streets of Kait's much loathed hometown. He had only visited once before, four years ago in the summer just after their defeat of the abominable Mr. Zetes. It hadn't changed much, though everything was cloaked in a layer of snow and strung with Christmas lights, giving the rows of cheap houses an almost charming quality.
He shielded his thoughts as he turned onto her street. The best surprises are never given away with carelessness.
He parked on the street in front of her father's aging house, his nervous anticipation growing. He straightened his shoulders and made his way along the unplowed sidewalk, bending down to run his fingers through the snow at the front gate. It didn't snow very often in San Francisco, and he missed it.
Up the path among the wilted flowers and to the door with the paint peeling off., his hands were almost shaking in anticipation.
He rang the bell, and could hear the soft trod of footsteps on creaking floorboards, and then a light dazzled him as the door opened.
"Gabriel? Gabriel!" She gasped, pulling him to her. He dropped his walls, and their connection flooded through his mind, a brilliant array of the hues of her emotions.
It was so right. It was Kaitlyn.
He wrapped his arms around her, kissing her fire-coloured hair, her pale cheeks, her velvety eyelids. "I missed you so much," he whispered against her neck.
After what seemed an eternity of standing in the doorway, they pulled apart, but were unwilling to let go of each other's hands.
"Mind if I come in?" He asked almost shyly.
"My dad's sleeping now," she said quietly, "but you can visit him tomorrow."
They settled on the couch, and he wrapped his arms around her again, feeling whole for the first time in months.
As they sat there, however, his eyes were drawn to the modest little Christmas tree in the corner of the room. He smiled as he recognized Kait's mediocre wrapping job on half of them, and then he realized that he hadn't gotten her anything.
"Kait," he said slowly, "I forgot to get you a present."
2She craned her neck to look up at him, smoky eyes glimmering with mirth. "Don't be foolish, Gabriel, what do you think you are?"
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