Discovered in Yuletide Spirit - 1 January 2020 - No Such Thing as Father Christmas by Slantedlight

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

Happy New Year everyone! A few people will have read this story already this Christmas, so I hope this doesn't feel too much like cheating, but hopefully I'll make another post later today too. For now...

No Such Thing as Father Christmas
by Slantedlight

Doyle didn’t believe in Christmas. He’d stopped believing a long time ago, sometime around eight years old, when his dad had beat up his mum that last time on Christmas Eve and gone out to get drunk. When his mum had called social services to come and get her son, because she was scared that things would get worse when her husband came home again. When she’d tried to tell him that of course Father Christmas would find him, and had still been trying to hide the bar of chocolate that had caused that night’s problem in the first place. He’d seen her slip it to the woman with the red scarf and the tired eyes, while the man was talking to him about what was going to happen. His mum hadn’t come with him, she’d chosen her husband. He hadn’t believed in Father Christmas then, and he wasn’t about to change his mind now.

( His lighter was a hard presence in... )