Casper Gets His Wish

by Cooper, R.

  Typical, he’d railed to himself, his heart pumping fiercely as he’d jabbed at the elevator buttons to make it move faster. He’d never once thought half-assed respect would be worse than none, but he’d been wrong. It was infinitely more hurtful, and infuriating, to know he’d barely crossed Hollyberry’s mind.

  It was enough to make him direct a sharp glare at his slacker nemesis and then at his slacker nemesis’s assistant. Both of them were staring at him, blankly, he realized. As though they had no idea what he was talking about.

  The loud, angry exhalation left him with no warning. His face felt impossibly warm as he pinched the bridge of his nose. He tried to think of marshmallow worlds and happy, jolly snowmen but it was no good; he could lose control at any second.

  He scrubbed at his stinging cheeks and spoke like he was addressing children. “It is the end of the month.” Well, not how he’d talk to real children, but two children who he was amazed ever got any work done, because clearly they were idiots too busy playing with markers to notice the grownups around them, like Casper. “Do you seriously not understand?”

  “Sorry.” Hollyberry coughed. His voice was strangely rough. “I must have forgotten them.” The rasp in his voice only got worse when Casper exhaled again, the sound more like a garbled scream than a sigh. He knew what that rasp was—suppressed laughter. What else could it be?

  “But I did do them,” Hollyberry took a small step forward and waved at his desk. He was actually smiling warmly, beaming like the light in his eyes, as though getting the bare minimum of work done was supposed to be enough to have Casper ecstatic. “They’re over there, Casper—Silverbell.”

  Casper quickly, but not too quickly, turned to look in that direction, taking a step and instantly fumbling. There was a mess on the floor. Someone ought to clean it up.

  Nonetheless, mess or no mess, the tips of his ears were burning at the echo of Hollyberry saying his name like that, trying to say it how Casper wanted. It was more teasing, he was sure, but focused a little desperately on the toy prototypes closer to the desk.

  Blocks and dolls were always popular, but the scope of toys demanded by children now always astounded him. Secretly, perhaps, sometimes, he even admired that this department could not only keep up with that demand, but produce more, and better, toys. Toys that clearly outdid most of the gifts made before Hollyberry’s arrival here, in part due to Dmitri’s drive and his determination to expand what it was that toys did.

  It wasn’t the toys themselves that kids loved, Hollyberry had said in a speech during his first year here, it was the freedom to imagine that the toys gave them. And that was what he required of all his gifts, from the most complex board game to the fluffiest teddy bear, that they would captivate and stimulate in ways previously unheard of.

  Even his dolls had a flair to their design, a hint in their eyes that girls or boys holding them could be transported anywhere, could be anything they wanted. It was the kind of beauty in creation that Casper knew qualified as art. For all his complaining, he knew why this department got special treatment. He didn’t have to like it, however.

  He curled his hand around a doll before he could stop himself, his fingers trailing down through tight brown curls, over mischievous eyes, and then on to the oddly simple dress. Her chin was up. She looked like a princess in disguise, waiting for her moment at the ball, although Casper couldn’t say why or where he got that impression.

  “Like that one?”

  Casper half-raised his head at the question, his eyes still on the elegant angle to her head, the suggestion of temper in her eyebrows. He felt a whisper of heat on his cheek.

  “She inspires, doesn’t she? What she is on the surface is not what she is underneath, and that’s what I like to see.”

  Distantly agreeing, Casper nodded, inching back toward the warmth of that voice, his fingers slowly relinquishing their hold on the doll. Inspiration had always been the policy, but that policy had never been so brilliantly carried out. The gifts themselves, joyous though they were to see underneath a tree, were jumping off points for the soul and the mind, and making them took time.

  “She took a few days, like a lot of things down here, and I suppose, like always, time got away from me. But,” Dmitri’s voice dropped even lower, his words trickling out like maple syrup, and Casper blinked, hot all over as he angled his head up to catch the rest. “I recognize that others have work to do too, so I stayed up all night thinking of you, and what you might do if I didn’t get everything just right.”

  Casper frowned, a little frown, not quite following what was being said, and then jerked away in surprise as he leaned into what must have been Dmitri himself—Dmitri Hollyberry’s body, warm and strong under his too-thin, ragged, disgrace of a shirt, his arms moving as though he wanted to pull Casper closer. Casper pushed forward, burning to realize that Hollyberry had come up behind him and had been practically whispering in his ear and he hadn’t noticed.

  He twisted around and caught Miss Pinebough’s openly amused look.

  Right. How could Casper have forgotten who and what he was to them? He yanked at his waistcoat and stalked away to the other side of the desk in order to snatch the expense reports. There was a noisy, disappointed sigh from Hollyberry’s direction, which he ignored.

  He flipped through the file, nearly tearing the paper. “What is this?” he bit out, and then dared to look up for half a second, long enough to see the twinkle. He looked back down. “What language is this in?”

  He reached into a pocket and pulled out the velvet bag for his glasses. Once they were on and carefully pushed into place, he tucked the bag away again.

  With his world in focus, Dmitri was suddenly too close again, hovering at Casper’s side, and staring at him with a bright intensity.

  “Oh,” Dmitri said, almost drowning out Pinebough’s soft giggle. “Oh I… Oh, Silverbell. Silverbell, you are—” He cleared his throat though he wasn’t moving away or backing off, the big oaf. “Like I said, I worked on it late last night for you. It might not make sense in the light of day.”

  It had been light all last night as well. Casper didn’t point that out though it would have meant a chance to brag about the window in his office. He cleared his throat, not quite glancing up over the rim of his glasses. He could feel a flush move under his skin. Snow drifts, he thought. Frozen ponds. Icicles.

  “There was no need to sacrifice your personal life, Mr. Hollyberry.” Mercifully, his voice didn’t crack.

  “Dmitri.” Dmitri—Hollyberry—corrected.

  “Hollyberry.” Casper drew in a desperately needed breath and inhaled the scent of peppermint. The man only pressed closer. Casper would have inched away, but their opinion of non-creative elves was already bad enough he wouldn’t have them thinking him a coward too. He lifted his chin and met those eyes. They weren’t twinkling now. If anything they seemed dreamy and almost lost, though the idea was so fanciful Casper felt a little lost too.

  Perhaps Dmitri’s talents were catching. Casper didn’t have thoughts like those, fantastic and wistful and compelling. Not ever. No matter how much he might wish to.

  “My personal life?” Hollyberry inquired carefully, his voice dropping off, getting low. “Are you asking about that, Silverbell?” But the corner of his mouth quirked up as he asked and Casper immediately felt the lick of fire behind his eyes, rushing through his chest. It knocked that vague hint of fantasy right out of him.

  “You can make time for your work at work,” he ground out, narrowing his eyes when that didn’t instill any fear or remorse. “Like everyone else.”

  “Playtime is for later then, or is it all work and no play for you?” Hollyberry asked, leaning in as if he truly wanted to know. His assistant let out another giggle. This one wasn’t as soft.

  Casper grabbed blindly at the paperwork and stepped back. It would have taken a blizzard to keep the heat out of his voice.

  “But I am a dull boy, Mr. Hollyberry, as both you and Miss Pineb
ough are well aware.” He glared at both them as the smiles disappeared from their faces, and clutched the file to his chest. “I will expect this report to be legible in the future. I have better things to do than constantly look over your work.”

  Not wanting to give himself another chance for further humiliation after that blatant lie, as well as hoping they wouldn’t know it was a blatant lie, he walked out, painfully conscious of how Dmitri Hollyberry watched him until he was out of sight.

  –

  The burn of his embarrassment lingered over the intervening weeks, which was what he labeled them, intervening weeks, because he knew they would be. Because Hollyberry wouldn’t listen to him, and if Casper wanted his own work completed, he was going to have to see the man again. Talk to him again. Embarrass himself again.

  It was inevitable. Somehow each month until this he’d had hope that something he would do would finally get a real response from Hollyberry, but now it was obvious that the other elf simply found him amusing.

  Casper had never dreaded the end of the month like this. It was a busy time for him, certainly, but he enjoyed his work. Before this, he was even willing to admit that while he had never felt especially calm in Hollyberry’s presence, their interactions had at least been stimulating, different. Casper hadn’t met many elves from outside the Pole. Except for vacations or trips to go clothes shopping, he rarely travelled south at all. But Hollyberry was different in more than just the way that Southern elves were, not quite like a human either.

  He took arrogance to new levels, certainly, but he pushed his employees to think differently and go beyond their limits without ever getting a single complaint about attitude or unfairness. It was as though he liked things to be shaken up, regardless of the consequences. That was a terrifying idea, practically anarchy as far as Casper was concerned. If things weren’t the way they were, then where was he to go, what was he to do? His hobbies would not make viable elf careers and his dating situation was already pathetic.

  Not that he was terrible looking. Casper was somewhat small and slender, true, but so were many others. It was that the only skill that had ever set him apart—math—was also the one thing that ensured no nice elf boys ever brought him home to meet their mothers.

  Hollyberry likely did not have that problem. Hollyberry probably had to fend off the adoring hordes on a daily basis. The waiting list to work in his department was already huge, and that was work. His bold policy worked for him, had earned him success as well as popularity, though, it probably helped that he wasn’t bad to look at.

  Quite the contrary really. If the man hadn’t been so obnoxious, Casper might have hoped for a brief affair, in lieu of anything permanent. He might even have idly wondered what Dmitri Hollyberry was like outside of work, stretching the imagination he’d been told many times that he did not have, to daydream like a boy in school about what anything more would even be like.

  Things were different among the Southern elves. On his vacations, one or two had found Casper’s suits charming, had sipped cider with Casper instead of nog. But those were vacations, harmless fun, they were not waking together or sharing the sink to brush teeth or bickering over the remote. And even Southern elves had found Casper entirely too serious for much more than a night or two.

  Years ago, once upon a time, when Hollyberry had first been hired, before they had met, Casper had even, vaguely, faintly, wished for Dmitri to be as different from everyone else as Casper was. After all, what was a Southern elf doing moving back here, especially after making his fortune among the humans? He had to be different. Casper had wished and wished until there weren’t stars left in the sky to wish on.

  His wish had been answered, but it was hardly a present with his name on it, and it was only going to get worse. But to not go downstairs himself to get the paperwork that was sure to be missing was to admit that he was giving up, and he couldn’t do that, even if he wasn’t creative enough for comebacks and his mind stumbled when Dmitri came near. All he could manage were icy putdowns that never seemed to do anything but make Dmitri’s gaze shine like the borealis.

  His heart pounded hard at the memory of brilliant, shifting lights, of heat at his back, and for a moment he didn’t hear the knocking at his outer door. He lifted his head, but before he could manage a, “Come in,” the elf on his mind strolled into his office without an invitation, his hands full of a neat stack of paperwork collected into a binder that he deposited on Casper’s desk.

  Right on top of the work he was doing, but Casper was too stunned to protest. After a few moments of silence and a stare that went on far too long, Hollyberry moved first, straightening up and glancing around.

  Casper knew he wasn’t dreaming because that was impossible. His imagination was so small as to be non-existent and this was… this was Dmitri Hollyberry, in front of him, his t-shirt short enough to reveal the ink at his hip, with his monthly paperwork on time and neat and ready to be filed and still warm from his hands.

  Casper wasn’t just blushing. His entire body was flushed hot. His ears were most certainly pink. Not that Hollyberry said a word about either situation.

  “So this is the big office I’ve heard all about. You wouldn’t believe the people who are jealous of this office, but then it is a corner with a beautiful view.” He turned to face the wide, shining, sugar glass and Casper’s truly breathtaking view of pale blue snowdrifts and the already fading midnight sun of late summer.

  He hadn’t even known Hollyberry had known where his office was. The elf was smiling as he drank in the landscape, and then he turned. Casper remembered to blink. “No wonder you don’t want to leave this room. I never expected this.”

  Casper blinked again, then rubbed his warm cheeks. “And with all your talk about imagination,” he drawled, and did his best not to shift at Dmitri’s flashed grin.

  Dmitri turned to face Casper again. “You know, Casper, I try to be nice and bring you your sacred reports so you won’t come storming into my department and scaring the faint of heart, and it isn’t enough to even bring a gleam to those big brown eyes. And no glasses today? I’m disappointed.”

  It was blatant baiting. Casper ignored it, though his fingertips ran over the surface of the binder the paperwork had been clipped into. He’d collated them. Into the proper order. Casper felt his chest constrict as his breathing picked up.

  He could speak, if he really tried. “I doubt anything’s even spelled correctly in those. Your floor director once spelled it, r-a-i-n-d-e-a-r.”

  “Randy has issues with spelling, but he’s got a first rate vision of what could be. Which seems to be more than you have.” Dmitri let out a gusty sigh and ran his fingers along his collar, which was torn so that his collarbone was visible. Casper couldn’t see any ink there, but he averted his eyes, then brought them right back at the other man’s tone. “What exactly is your problem? Do you not like Southern elves? Or do you not like me? Because say the word and I’ll stop.”

  What he thought he would stop was something Casper didn’t allow himself a moment to think about, though it might haunt him later.

  “My problem?” As though everyone didn’t know that already. “I am a non-creative elf, Mr. Hollyberry.” He didn’t mean to say the words but they rushed out in a chilly stream anyway. He shouldn’t have to say the words. Everyone knew about him. “Don’t you understand what that means? I do math, Mr. Hollyberry. I even like it. And I wouldn’t “storm” anywhere if you sent your papers up on time. It’s like you want to force me to make the trip downstairs. And for what? So I can once again be shown how superior the artistic elves are? So it can be rubbed in my face yet again, as though it isn’t every other moment of every other day that what I do isn’t as important as what you do?”

  Oh dear. He hadn’t meant to say that and he was going to blame the elf in front of him. Dmitri was always pushing him, making him lose control as though Casper were some brilliant idea or gift or something. The breath puffed out of him, and he abandoned the bi
nder to smooth his hands over his suit, the mostly clean and organized surface of his plain, metal desk. He raised his gaze and saw Hollyberry’s attention was focused solely on him. The breath he tried to take in left him in a ragged gust. “Just because I don’t make things doesn’t mean I don’t deserve your respect.”

  Dmitri dropped both hands to his sides. He shifted forward but stopped when Casper stiffened.

  “I respect you, Casper,” he murmured, but right there was proof he didn’t in what name he chose to call him. Casper flicked his gaze to the side and snorted. “I mean it,” Dmitri drew his attention back, raising his voice and stepping forward. “I’ll never be as clever as you. Organization is not my strong suit.”

  He made the sort of flaily gesture that he probably made when confronted with billing forms. It was so sincerely awkward that Casper twisted his mouth because it wanted to soften and smile and utter reassuring, quiet things. Things no one wanted to hear from him. He rubbed at his face again.