Hands on his hips, Charles stared at the eleven brightly wrapped packages all neatly arrayed on the coffee table in his quarters. His officers sneaking him presents at Christmas time had become something of a tradition, but getting them into his quarters was their most audacious stunt yet.
The cheeky sods had even included a miniature fake tree!
If this had occurred in public (like last year when he’d left his seat in the commissary at the Christmas dinner to get something and come back to find a waiting pile of gifts around his plate that somehow no one had seen appear) he would have affected a scowl and loudly remarked to anyone in earshot that he cannot accept gifts from his subordinates but since he ‘didn’t know’ who was responsible he could ‘grudgingly’ accept them. Since this was in private he didn’t have to put on the act and allowed himself a smile and a fond chuckle.
“How on earth did they manage it this time?” Charles wondered out loud as he picked up the battery-powered tree to examine it. It was maybe half a foot tall, the green plastic needles interspersed with fibre optic threads that glowed with an ever changing display of colour and the fake ‘ceramic’ plant pot base had a Spectrum logo painted on it. He knew this had to have been the product of Magenta’s influence with Ochre’s assistance. Magenta was quite insistent on ‘properly’ decorating for the season, which meant a tree at minimum.
Putting the tree down, Charles crouched and sifted through the presents. He wasn’t going to open them yet, Christmas was still four days away, but as a boy he’d always had to satiate his curiosity by giving his waiting presents a little prod, poke or shake, and he’d never lost that. Two of the packages squished like fabric, three were certainly books, one glugged like liquid in a container but it was inside a box so he couldn’t discern much more, and for the rest he couldn’t tell as they were also in boxes. “Hm, no labels,” he murmured absently. There never were any, but he always checked just in case.
Initial investigations finished, he put everything back as he’d found it, straightened up and surveyed his room. The main door was his first target. He examined the frame with care, found no signs of tampering, then turned his attention to the lock and keypad. He first checked the physical state of it, then went over the entry logs to see if he could pick up when his officers had made their foray.
“Hn, nothing. Magenta is very good, but he’s not quite good enough to get past me,” was his thought as he got up from his examinations. “I remember each of my entries and the only other entry log is from when the cleaners came by to let the vacuum ‘bot in and tidy up, and I was here when they came.”
That only left his private lift up to the Control Room. White crossed the room to it and this time his searches yielded fruit - a long, white-blonde hair caught in the door. Charles plucked it out and took it over to the bin beside his kitchenette. “Destiny or Symphony I wager,” he remarked as he disposed of it, “and Green has to have been in on it too. He must have let them into the Control Room whilst I was on my ship-walk.” That he left the Control Room to take a daily walk through the base was well known, but he liked to keep the timing and the locations he visited randomised. If they’d prepped well and Green had tracked him through the base, whoever was on the delivery team would have had a good forty five minutes to get to the Control Room, get past the security, into his quarters and be out, leaving him none the wiser until he’d signed off for the night and come down.
White chuckled fondly at the thought of his officers - his highly trained, incredibly competent, hand-picked and deadly officers - slinking through the base with brightly wrapped presents in hand, using their hard-learned skills for a benign purpose. “They’d have run the operation as a proper op as well, with planning meetings and briefings,” he grinned to himself as he filled the kettle and poked through his collection of different teas, “and they would have had such fun doing so too.”
He was absolutely certain about that because he had seen for himself how they all threw themselves into not just hunting out the perfect gifts for the base-wide Secret Santa, but into sleuthing out who their Secret Santas were. It was one of the many reasons why he not just permitted it but encouraged it - his officers needed to have a chance to have fun and distract themselves from the life and death nature of their duties.
The smell of peppermint filled the air as he poured the freshly boiled water into a hand-made gold-bronze tenmoku glazed mug (a gift from last year that he suspected had come from Melody - she’d taken a holiday in the area where the potter lived, if his research on the maker’s mark had been accurate) and he turned and leaned against the bench as he waited for the leaves to steep.
The physical evidence of how fond his officers were of him, how they used this to express the things they could not say because of rules and regulations, went a long way to bolstering him. “No matter how long I have been and will be in a position of leadership, I never have been nor do I hope I ever will be immune to the desire to be not just respected, but liked by the people I command. It keeps me human, something all too important with the foe we face.”
As he idly surveyed his quarters, his eyes lit upon a second pile of gifts. Half of them were wrapped, the rest he was planning to tackle tonight. Charles’ smile renewed itself as he contemplated the pile. As CIC of Spectrum he was supposed to be impartial, not having any favourites. That he absolutely did was one of the open secrets of Cloudbase, but it was hard not to, not with the people he’d gathered up and how they strived, struggled and fought as he sent them out across the world.
“It is such a good thing that turnabout is fair play.” Charles’ smile broadened into a grin as he turned back to his mug, took out the tea bag and returned to plotting how he’d sneak these to his people when they were least expecting it.