Instead, he sighs and rolls up his sleeves. “Show me what needs to be done.”
The next hour passes in a blur of colour-coded branches and increasingly creative swearing as we attempt to make the tree look like something that might once have been related to actual plant life. Dyfri approaches the task with the same methodical precision he brings to everything else, though I catch him muttering what sound like Fey curse words when a particularly stubborn branch refuses to cooperate.
“This is remarkably inefficient,” he observes as we step back to survey our handiwork. “Surely it would be simpler to acquire an actual tree.”
“Yes, but then we’d have to water it and clean up fallen needles and dispose of it afterwards. This way, we just pack it back in the box next week.”
“Next week?”
“Christmas decorations usually stay up until New Year’s. Sometimes longer if you’re feeling lazy.”
Dyfri stares at me as if I’ve announced my intention to take up professional dragon wrestling. “You maintain this... display... for over a week?”
“It’s festive!” I defend, then catch sight of his expression and start laughing. “You think we’re completely mad, don’t you?”
“I think,” Dyfri says carefully, “that humans have a remarkable capacity for creating elaborate rituals around the most arbitrary concepts.”
“Fair point.” I head toward the box of decorations I’d managed to scavenge from a storage closet. “Wait until you see the baubles.”
If Dyfri thought the tree construction was bewildering, the decoration process clearly pushes him well beyond the bounds of rational comprehension. He holds each ornament like it might explode, examining the glittery spheres and miniature angels with the sort of scientific fascination usually reserved for rare specimens.
“And the purpose of these is...?”
“To look pretty. To catch the light. To make people smile when they look at them.” I hang a silver bauble near the top of the tree, pleased with how it catches the morning sunlight streaming through the windows. “Not everything needs a practical purpose, you know.”
“Doesn’t it?” The question is quiet, almost thoughtful.
When I look at him, there’s something vulnerable in his expression that makes my chest tight. As if the concept of doing something purely for beauty, purely for joy, is so foreign to him that he can barely process it.
“No,” I say gently. “Sometimes things can just be... nice. Just because.”
We work in comfortable silence after that, Dyfri gradually relaxing into the rhythm of hanging ornaments and adjusting their placement with an artist’s eye for balance. By the time we’re finished, the tree actually looks quite respectable, twinkling cheerfully in the corner of the room.
“Now what?” Dyfri asks.
“Now we have Christmas breakfast. Then we pull crackers and eat far too much food.” I grin at hisincreasingly bewildered expression. “Don’t worry, I’ll guide you through it.”
Breakfast is a cheerful affair of Buck’s Fizz and croissants, though I have to keep steering the conversation away from politics when Dyfri tries to bring up Resistance planning.
“It’s Christmas,” I remind him firmly when he starts outlining potential weaknesses in fey communication networks. “We are having the day off.”
“A day off from what, exactly? The occupation? The conspiracy? The imminent threat to both our peoples?”
“Yes.”
Dyfri stares at me. “That’s not how crises work, Jack.”
“It’s how Christmas works.” I refill his champagne glass, noting with amusement how the alcohol is bringing a faint flush to his cheeks. “One day. Twenty-four hours where we don’t think about any of it. Where we just... exist. Together. As a married couple doing normal married-couple things.”
“I’m not entirely certain I know how to do that.”
The admission is so quietly honest that it breaks my heart a little. “Lucky for you, I’m an excellent teacher.”
By afternoon, I’ve managed to coax him into pulling a Christmas cracker, though he flatly refuses to wear the paper crown that falls out.“I am not putting that ridiculous thing on my head, Jack”, and he reads the terrible joke inside with the sort of deadpan delivery that makes it actually funny.
“Why did the turkey cross the road?” he intones. “Because it was the chicken’s day off.”
“That’s terrible,” I laugh.
