Christmas is close enough that it’s starting to feel real.

Four days until the 24th. The oven hums softly behind you, heat fogging up the kitchen windows as gingerbread cookies bake inside. The smell is already filling the place—cinnamon, ginger, sugar—clinging to the air and settling into your clothes. You made the glaze earlier and shoved it into the freezer so it wouldn’t melt into a useless mess before the cookies were ready. One less thing to worry about.

You and Nam-gyu are in the living room, standing around the slightly crooked Christmas tree you dragged home together after arguing for ten straight minutes about whether it was “too small” or “good enough.” The lights are already tangled—because of course they are—and Nam-gyu’s holding one end while you try to loop the rest around the branches without losing your patience.

He’s unusually tolerable tonight. Still sarcastic, still muttering under his breath when an ornament slips or the lights refuse to cooperate, but there’s no real bite to it. No fight. Just… noise. Normal noise.

Every so often, the oven timer ticks softly in the background, reminding you that something’s actually going right for once.

You hand him an ornament—a cheap one, plastic and shiny—and he squints at it like it personally offended him before hanging it anyway. When you step back to look at the tree, he does too, arms crossed, head tilted slightly.

It’s messy. Uneven. Very you two.