It's a place to stay. It's not a bad place to stay, probably. It's fine. 

He puts on his prettiest smile.  

Mr. Claus shoves him up against the wall and kisses him roughly. 

(He has also heard of inventions like consent. Fortunately, he is too magic to have to worry about them.)

Ugh. 

Sometimes that happens. He's mostly very passive about it. 

He slaps the boy across the face.

Yeah, sometimes that happens too. 

He flinches and does his best to stop paying attention to this. 

Well, if he's not paying attention, that's not very fun.

"Get your clothes off," Mr. Claus says, and considers how he can return Sasha's attention to the task at hand.

Ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh. Yep he can do that. 

He looks around the kitchen of his AirBnB and spots a knife. Yes, that will do nicely. 

But first he forces Sasha onto his knees, undoes his pants, and has Sasha get him ready. 

Grindr hookups are a shot in the dark at the best of times but usually there is less shoving involved. Fuuuuck thiiiiiiiiis. 

And then Mr. Claus grabs the butcher knife off the counter, pulls Sasha to his feet, and holds the knife to his throat. 

Sasha flinches away reaches back for anything he can reach away away away — 

That's the reaction he was looking for!

Let's see how well he can fuck Sasha while Sasha is reaching back for things.

— not very well because Sasha has found a rolling pin. 

In principle, while Mr. Claus is magic, he is also old and not terribly athletic and distracted by his own arousal, and he's used to sleeping with elves who don't object to anything he does to them. 

So he is too busy trying to line up his dick with Sasha's vagina to notice when Sasha clonks him in the back of the head.

It makes a cracking sound that would be horrifying in any other context, and then Sasha is left there with his hands shaking naked in a kitchen and an unconscious man on the floor. 

He finds his clothes and puts them back on and leaves, and looks for a bus stop that'll be relatively sheltered no matter how tempting it is to open grindr again. 

Santa's chest heaves, and then it is still.

A movie producer, struck by a sudden wave of inspiration, calls a director and orders a reshoot so that their new Christmas movie ends not with a reconciliation but with the protagonist telling their asshole family to fuck off and celebrating surrounded by their friends.

An advertising executive sketches out his new vision of Santa. Young. Sexy. Maybe pale and dark-haired, to make him really look different from the previous Santas.

A dozen pundits come to the conclusion that, since Christmas is a Christian holiday, really the best way to win the war on Christmas is by not forcing it on unsuspecting Jews who don't accept Christ as their savior at all.

Way up at the North Pole, a house redecorates itself. 

And an elf decides that rather than teleporting to the new Santa, he is going to teleport the new Santa to him. 

He waits for Santa's house to finish settling, sits in the newly soft couch in the newly purple living room, eyes the poetry on the shelves, and snaps his fingers.

"What the fuck!!" 

"--I figured you probably didn't want to sleep on a bus stop?"

That does not remotely address his objections! 

"You weren't wrong but —" 

"You murdered Santa Claus and now you're Santa."

There are at least three things fighting to come out of his mouth, including that was self defense, santa isn't real, and why the fuck am I HERE. 

The thing that actually makes it out is "No." 

"--I mean, I totally support murdering Santa. He was a horrible person."

This time the thing that wins is "...no, Santa isn't real." 

"No, Santa is real. He just wanted us to mind-control parents into thinking they bought the presents so that children would believe in Santa without evidence which is apparently a beautiful and touching example of true faith or something. --Please tell me you want to change that."

Sasha looks at the guy, and looks around the room, and looks back at the guy, and attempts to process this information, and then grabs a pillow off the couch and shoves his face into it and screams. 

Is that what's supposed to happen?

He's pretty sure this is not what's supposed to happen.

Once he finishes screaming he flops down onto the couch and holds the pillow like a weirdly shaped stuffed animal and says "I guess this might as well happen." 

...Lev can deal with one part of this. 

He brings Sasha a stuffed animal from the bedroom. 

He will accept the actual stuffed animal as a substitute for this pillow. 

"So what things.... are involved...... in being Santa." 

"Well, the Christmas spirit is set based on your beliefs about what Christmas should be. And all of Santa's elves are now your slaves and you can command us to do things? --If you really don't want to be Santa you can go back to what you were doing, you won't age and you'll be immortal unless you're killed, but otherwise your life will be the same and we can try to figure out what you'd want us to do without your actual input?"

'We are your slaves now, or you can go back to being a survival sex worker' is the kind of sentence that calls for Screaming Into Pillow Part 2: 2 Scream 2 Pillow. 

This is not actually any more reassuring the second time!

"...do you need. Help."

"....yeah. I do. Do you have. A name. — I'm Sasha." 

"I'm Lev."

"Hello Lev. I am against lying to children for no reason. I am also Jewish and don't celebrate Christmas and also I really do not want to go back to being a survival sex worker it was terrible. Do you see my problem." 

"...We could be Hanukkah elves spreading the Hanukkah spirit?"

"No you could not," and then he remembers all of the reasons he should not snap at this person and curls up around the stuffed rabbit. 

"...do you want a hug?"

No. Yes. Maybe. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe when it's been more than, like, an hour since someone forced him on his knees and put a knife to his throat. "No." 

"...okay. I'm sorry, I don't know what I'm doing at all."

"It's okay. Neither do I. — sorry about all the everything, I'm not this much of a mess usually." 

"...People are usually kind of a mess after they get raped. And also presumably after they murder people although I don't know that one for sure."

"Yeah. Usually. 

So what do I have to.... do, as part of being Santa, since apparently this is my life now." 

"Uh. Well. This is your house, it changed itself to be the sort of house you'd want to live in. We can just keep doing the same things we were doing for the last Santa? And then when you feel up to it you can-- change things. If you want. And give us some hints about how you're going to affect the Christmas spirit. Or, uh, Generic Winter Holiday spirit?"

"I have no idea how I'm going to affect the... generic winter holiday spirit. I should come up with a better name than that probably. Thank you." 

"We were Yule elves for thousands of years, we could be Yule elves again."

Nodnod. "My first association with Yuletide is the fic exchange but maybe that's not a bad thing." 

"...I have no idea what that is."

"Every year a group of people on the internet host an event where writers sign up to exchange stories as Christmas presents; the event is called Yuletide. I'm fond of it." 

"That sounds nice. Full of the Christmas spirit."

"It's pretty great. 

Other than that — I don't know. The lights are nice when people don't go too crazy with them." 

"Maybe you'll just get people to write stories for each other and for children. That sounds nice."

"That'd be good." 

(Squeeze the stuffed rabbit. Thank you stuffed rabbit.) 

"I can... leave you alone for a bit? The house should have everything you need." He stands up and points to some buttons on the wall. "You press this one to get me, this one to get your cook, and this one to get housekeeping. Housekeeping can also handle any other kinds of routine life things you need."

Nodnod. (He is really not used to being the sort of person who has housekeeping and a cook.) "Thank you. And goodnight." 

"Good night."

Oh fuck oh fuck he fucked it up--

Probably Sasha should go and make himself food but right now he does not super want to interact with kitchens, like, as a concept. If he still feels that way tomorrow he will..... take an action about it probably. 

Tonight, he has an entire bed all to himself (!!!!!!!!) and it's very soft and has multiple soft heavy blankets and he is going to hug this stuffed rabbit and see if he remembers how to sleep alone. It doesn't take long; it has been the longest fucking day. 

Lev tells the cook not to make Santa breakfast unless he asks, tells the current bedwarmer that her services will probably not be required ever again and he's reassigning her to toymaking, and announces to everyone that all of Old Santa's policies are staying in place until further notice.

In the morning, Sasha can sleep in as late as he wants. No one will disturb him.

He sleeps in until 11 am and gets up and explores his house and — turns out to not want to spend time in the kitchen; turns out to not want to interact with having a cook; makes himself microwave hot chocolate and then leaves — and looks at the spines of books and then pushes the button for Lev, on the basis that he should probably at least attempt to do his job. 

Pop.

"I was not really expecting to get called for another couple days."

"It's been a while since I didn't have work of some sort and I'm putting off figuring out what to do with myself," he says, maybe a little bit too honestly. 

"Well, an advertising executive is fighting with his bosses about whether Pretty Dark-Haired Santa Claus should kiss a boy in their advertisements, so at least we know one thing that's going to change."

"...never thought I'd root for an advertising executive. Seeing ads around Christmas is going to be incredibly weird from now on, isn't it." 

"At least it'll take a couple of years for you Santa to replace the last Santa."

"So existing Santa-related things don't get overwritten? That's good. I think." He sort of wonders what a little kid watching the Rise of the Guardians movie in ten years will think of it. Speaking of which, "Are there things like this for other holidays, is there actually an Easter Bunny out there?" 

"Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Sandman, Death, leprechauns, the Bogeyman, Jack Frost, Mother Nature, Father Time, Krampus, and Jack O'Lantern."

"...are they all doing the mind control thing. Speaking of which I do not plan on doing the mind control thing unless there was a really good reason for it so you should tell me if there was." 

"Tooth Fairy is, the rest are less obvious in their effects."

"....I'm not going to speculate about why the Tooth Fairy is doing that. Did the previous santa have any other policies I should make actual choices about whether I'm continuing."

"I took the liberty of reassigning the elf who was the old Santa's sex slave to toymaking duties."

....

.......

.....

"...I shouldn't actually be surprised. Thank you." 

"Yeah, I kind of figured this was not something you were going to be interested in."

"You were not wrong." 

"Do you want us to give presents to children who aren't celebrating Christmas? To children who were naughty?"

"Yes and yes. Also no giving live animals as pets, if that was a thing that was happening, I don't know that it was and sorry if it wasn't I just want to make sure." 

He writes this down. 

"No live animals. Anything else you want to blacklist?"

"As pets, if someone wants a chicken for eggs they can have it. — uh. No guns?" 

"Weapons are already on the blacklist. I have no idea why six-year-olds are like that but we get at least ten requests for a nuclear bomb every year."

"Kids in general get kind of edgier-than-thou although I'd expect it more from ten-year-olds than six. I can't think of anything else off the top of my head but I'll keep thinking about it. What's the upper age limit to be considered a child, is there one?" 

"When they stop believing in Santa Claus. --You can come up with a different rule within reason, you can't say that all human sixty-year-olds are children compared to elves."

"...since we're going to be providing actual evidence of my existence I might want to keep that one actually but I'll keep thinking about that too." 

"Since we're telling people about your existence, should we start giving presents of equal quality to rich children and poor children?"

"— yes. Why was that not already the policy. Alternately poor kids should get better presents from us because they don't have as much in general." 

"It's suspicious if poor kids get presents their parents couldn't afford."

"Thanks I hate it. We aren't doing that." 

"...you are the best Santa."

"The other guy doesn't exactly sound hard to beat but thank you." 

"...So I feel really bad about this next thing I'm going to tell you."

".....go on." 

"...if you don't get married in the next two years you stop being Santa. It's called the Mrs. Clause-- C-L-A-U-S-E--"

".....the fuck." 

"...I'm sorry, if I knew how to change it I would."

"Sorry. I'm not mad at you about it, I'm — uh, some combination of frustrated with the world in general and confused and incredibly fucking tired. Please say it doesn't have to be to a girl." 

"Well, I don't think humans can marry men?"

"...varies by jurisdiction but it's been legal in the United States since 2015 and the North Pole is not to my knowledge a country." 

"...oh! That's good for humans, I guess. --I think technically we're part of Canada."

"It's legal in Canada too. Also I'm not... super sure what Canada thinks my legal gender is so it doesn't matter anyway. Does the weird ritual marriage magic really follow human laws about who can legally marry, I guess that isn't that much weirder than everything else that's happened to me in the last twenty-four hours." 

"Well, you have to... actually be married... I guess I don't know what it thinks 'actually married' is. But if you think you can marry a man and the man thinks he can marry you that probably works out fine?"

"That's good. — I don't have anyone in mind, or anyone who might potentially become someone I had in mind, I have coworkers and grindr hookups and ugh I should probably tell my boss I'm quitting my job, so I'm going to shelve that for a while, we have two years." 

"Makes sense. ...We'd really rather you get married though. If there isn't a replacement Santa, Jack Frost becomes Santa, and he wants us to charge money for toys." (His voice is horrified at the prospect.)

That is not actually more confusing than any of the other things. "That sounds not great. I'm not planning on not I just... don't have any friends." Or a boyfriend. How about he just doesn't think about boyfriends in full generality. 

"...Maybe I can be your friend?"

"...that'd be nice." 

Lev, who had been standing sort of awkwardly in a corner of the living room, sits on the couch.

Tiny smile. 

...oh no Santa's cute. 

He should probably not be staring.

Yeah, probably. 

"So. Um." 

"So, yeah. Is there anything you need? I told your staff to make themselves scarce-- I figured you didn't really want surprise people in your house--"

"....food would be good but I'm not sure how to interact with the fact that I am now the kind of person who has a cook. And. It might be a while before I'm great at spending time in kitchens." 

"...if we go somewhere else for a while the house might rearrange itself so it doesn't have a kitchen."

"..okay. I don't know what other places there are to go, you'll have to show me around." 

"Well, we could get something to eat at Cocoa Cottage, or we could go see the reindeer, or we could listen to music at the Christmas Music Academy, or go hang out at the Top of the World Park..."

"...that's the cutesiest thing I've ever heard. Food and then reindeer?" 

"Sounds good! --Sorry, we totally thought we'd have a better welcome for the next Santa, but you're Jewish, so we don't know anything about you."

"That's fine, I'm not sure it wouldn't have been weirder to get a personalized welcome from people I'd never met or heard of." 

Then they can go to Cocoa Cottage!

It sells ambrosia, candy canes, Christmas cookies, gingerbread houses, Christmas ham, cranberry sauce, and assorted pies. To drink, there's hot buttered, hot chocolate, and eggnog. 

That's... certainly a selection. 

How about pecan pie and peppermint hot chocolate and he'll get some kind of protein into him later. 

"You don't actually need to eat, but it tastes good," Lev says, eating a gingerbread house and some candy canes.

"...oh. Weird." 

He eats. The food is very good, because of course it is. 

"Yeah. You don't get sick, you don't need food, you don't age..."

"There are worse ages to be forever than twenty-four."

"Yeah. You get to be tall, helps to reach high places."

(If Sasha looks around he might notice that the average age of elves appears to be about ten, and the counter is being manned by an elementary schooler.)

"That does seem convenient," Sasha says instead of commenting. 

"Um, I have a lot of questions about humans, but I'm not sure if it's right to ask them? It's just that we don't know that much about humans once they stop believing in Santa Claus, or about humans who don't celebrate Christmas at all--"

"You can ask questions!" 

"...what do humans get out of having pet fish?"

"...it might help to think of it less like a pet and more like a higher-effort potted plant?" 

"I'm also not sure what they get out of potted plants."

"You have a pretty growing thing in your house, and it's like having a tiny lil piece of nature inside, access to nature matters to some people and if you live in a city you probably don't have much of it." 

"...So it's like Christmas trees. Or mistletoe."

"I have never had a Christmas tree but for humans at least it appears to fill a completely different function, and if you're human mistletoe exists so you have an excuse to kiss someone under it, but for elves very plausibly." 

"When it's cold and frozen out and there's nothing green humans need to put some of the green inside of their houses so they can remember that the rest of the green will come back someday."

"...yeah. Like that." 

"...I mean, humans probably like the kissing too, but Jack O'Lantern would know more about that."

"Eh, kissing is fun but mistletoe kissing I could take or leave, you can be cute about it but sometimes someone thinks it's a good idea to have it at a workplace Christmas party and your asshole coworker just stands there under the mistletoe the whole party and just leers at you and you have to do ridiculous logistical planning to not get caught under it with him." 

"...that does not sound great!"

"It really isn't!" 

"Why do humans do... so much... of that."

"The coercive kissing thing? People like sex and lots of people like having power over other people and sometimes those things combine in perfectly fine ways but sometimes they combine in ways that are terrible." 

"The... trying to get people to have sex when they don't want to."

"...same reason, pretty much. It's mostly a difference of degree and not kind." 

"...we get a lot of letters from kids. Including the ones they can't write and just think, or say privately. If they mean to direct it to Santa, we get it."

"...jesus fucking christ." 

"And we can't. Do anything about it. Most of the time."

"Like, innately, or because of a policy the previous santa set to conceal his existence, or —" 

"Well, it's hard to give presents that help, and-- we can influence people if they're open to the Christmas spirit, or I guess the Yule spirit now, but most people who do that aren't-- and our own Santa was, uh--"

"Yeah. He sure was, uh." 

"...I'm half-human."

The only thing that comes to mind is 'do you want a hug' and offering physical touch is -- not really a thing he can do at the moment. 

"I'm sorry," he says instead. 

"I mean... it's not..." He tries to form his mouth around words. "Human children are so good. And then they get older and... we don't know a lot about adult humans but they're. Less good. They hurt kids a lot."

"...kids hurt other kids too. I think everyone just hurts everyone." 

"I mean, they often don't mean to, and it's usually because other people are hurting them first."

"....as someone who got bullied for being weird all through elementary school, they often mean to. But I'm not going to disagree with you that lots of adults hurt people." 

"...sorry. I didn't mean to. Get all depressing. I really just wanted to ask what the purpose of fish was."

Shrug. "It's fine, I think most conversations I have will turn depressing. They're a thing to take care of and they're seen as a low-effort version of a more interactive pet. Not that nobody ever has super high-effort aquarium setups but I think those people get a different thing out of it than a kid who asks for a goldfish for Christmas and I don't actually know any of those people well enough to have asked." 

"..........yeah I'm probably pretty depressing too. Because. I like people." 

"...that's the least depressing reason to talk about lots of depressing things I've ever heard. I say that flippantly but also I mean it as a legitimate compliment." 

"I was on naughty-and-nice duty before I was Santa's assistant and... being on naughty-and-nice duty is awful."

"...that's the one where you watch what kids are doing, or —" 

"Yeah-- at the time we watched them all the time but that took a lot of elfpower so we could only do it in New York and we were going to have more elf kids to make up the shortfall but I figured out how to make it so you could just watch the kids at random times and still figure out how naughty or nice they are on average--"

"— you independently invented random sampling? Cool." 

...oh gosh Sasha keeps making that face at him. It's a very good face.

"Yeah, that's why I'm Santa's assistant."

"I don't think I'm getting across how cool I think that is but yeah." 

No, it does, and his brain is completely failing to process it.

"It's really nothing."

"It's not, humans figured it out — I'm not sure how long ago actually — and it gets used in all kinds of things, it's incredibly useful and you just, independently derived it from nothing — that's not nothing." 

A really cute person keeps saying nice things about him and it is making him squirm in his seat.

"It was really very obvious-- you just have to watch them enough, and spread out so that it's not just a weird week--"

"Well, I'm still impressed." 

"...you keep saying nice things about me."

"Nice things keep being true." 

He should probably redirect the conversation to be about the Generic Winter Holiday spirit. 

Instead, he bounces.

.....cute. 

"Do we know what the Yule spirit is shaping out to look like? — also, did the other santa have more policies I should know about." 

"...does that mean 'does the old Santa have any other policies that I, Lev, find personally offensive'?"

"....yeah it does kind of shape out to that but if all his policies are in, like, a convenient book I can look over, I'd like to have a copy." 

Lev snaps his fingers and summons a leatherbound book entitled LAWS AND POLICIES.

It is very, very large.

"...wow, that's a lot. At least I have a lot of free time. Do you particularly hate any of them?" 

"I have a lot of complaints about how we decide kids are naughty but if we're giving kids presents whether they're naughty or not that doesn't matter. --Mostly I just really hate lying."

"I think I'm going to throw the whole concepts of naughty and nice out entirely, not just give presents to the naughty kids too, but what did you hate about them?" 

"Disobeying your parents is naughtiness, no matter what."

"— everything I hear about this person makes me more glad I hit him over the head with a rolling pin." 

"Lying is naughtiness even if you'll get hurt if you tell the truth, if you fight with your siblings you both get dinged even if it's their fault, not doing your homework is naughtiness even if you're hungry or tired or busy or have ADHD--"

Quiet unhappy sound. 

"Getting rid of the concept altogether sounds good."

"Yeah. — and there's all the obvious examples like shoplifting because you're hungry, or whatever." 

"Yeah-- and a lot of the kids are little, shoplifting is naughtiness even if you don't understand the concept of private property--"

"...did he just — not want to deliver very many presents, or something —"

"Bad kids don't deserve presents."

Sasha opens his mouth to say something and what comes out is, "Good thing deserving is fake." 

"...you're my favorite Santa."

"I don't know that 'better than that guy' is a particularly high bar, but thank you." 

"...you get that kids are supposed to have presents, that's-- it might not be the most important thing for you but it's an important thing--"

'More like, given that my job is to deliver presents to children, I am not such an asshole as to only do it for children who ~deserve it,~' he thinks, and does not say out loud. 

"Thank you." 

"Kids being happy on-- uh, Yule-- is the second most important thing in the world," Lev says firmly.

Tiny smile.

"What's the first most?" 

"You're going to think it's silly. Everyone else does."

"...I can't guarantee that I won't or anything, but even if I do think it's silly I promise I'll believe you that it's the most important thing to you?" 

"...People... like me specifically but everyone really... should believe true things and not false things."

"That's not my most important thing but I get why it'd be someone's." 

"What's yours? --I mean you don't have to tell me I just."

"I.... don't know that I have one." 

"...I guess I don't know whether humans do, usually."

"I think lots of them do. I used to. I just, don't." 

"...maybe it's better not to have one? Because then you don't." He stops.

"Because then I don't?" 

"I don't know."