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Bart Allen did not understand many things that exist in the past-present. How money works. The fixed structure of school. How readily available fresh produce is.
What ‘Christmas’ was.
These were all things that were not necessary to survival; things that wasted your time when you could have been doing something more important: staying alive.
Bart Allen did not understand the concept of Christmas.
Sure Max had tried to explain the concept of one of the largest and most-widely celebrated holidays back when Bart had been living with him. Those first few months he had been in the past-present.
But it had gone straight (ha!) over his head, for no one reason in particular.
Christmas, when observed by an outsider, was such an abstract concept with so few concrete ties that made it difficult to wrap your brain around.
Especially to someone like Bart who had grown up not celebrating nearly any holiday. Except his birthday, and even that had been only kind of celebrated.
It certainly did not help the matter that Max wasn’t the kind of person who got very into the Christmas spirit or the holidays in general. But he had tried. Had sat Bart down and explained the holiday as best he could when the thirteen-year-old had gotten home from school with questions.
Then Max ‘died’ before December. Before Christmas.
Bart experienced his first Christmas with the Garricks, who took him in after Max’s ‘death’. The couple got more into the whole ‘Christmas spirit’ thing than Max ever did. Lights, a tree, Christmas-y baking, all of it.
Bart spent a chilly Saturday afternoon in late November putting up Christmas Lights on the outside of the house with Jay.
Christmas Lights, as he soon discovered, were lengths of cable with multicoloured lights strung along them and used for decoration, mostly on the outside of a house.
A shorter length got wrapped around the tree in their front yard. That one had only white lights on it.
A week after the disaster that was Bart’s first Thanksgiving, they spent nearly two hours driving out to a ‘Christmas Tree Farm’ and returned home later that day with a whole pine tree.
Once they made it home, managed to get the tree inside, and have set it up in the living room , Jay disappeared into the basement and reappeared with two cardboard boxes labelled ‘Christmas Decorations’.
“Why are we hanging…spheres on a tree?” Bart asked as he strung a bright red and silver sphere-thing onto a branch.
“They’re called ‘baubles’, Bart. And when we’re done hanging these decorations, this’ll be a Christmas Tree,” Joan explained.
That did not really explain anything. At all.
“But why?” he questioned. “Why do we decorate a Christmas Tree; what’s the point?”
Jay shrugged as he reached for a gold present-shaped one.
“It’s more about the decorating itself than the meaning,” he said. “These ornaments on their own aren’t anything special but hanging them is a Christmas tradition for a lot of people,” he told Bart. “And when they’re hung, they make this a damn good Christmas Tree,” he added.
“The best Christmas Tree,” Joan chimed in from where she is hanging ornaments on the other side.
“So it’s more about the tradition than the decorations themselves?” Bart summarised with a slight tilt of his head. The yellow and red bauble in his hands went long unthought of.
The next day, Joan introduced him to another Christmas tradition.
“Baking?” he questioned as he entered the kitchen. “We bake all year, what makes it a Christmas tradition now?”
“The difference between baking now and during the rest of the year is what we bake,” Joan said. “This is a Christmas tradition because what we bake now, around Christmas time, won’t be made again until next Christmas,” she explained as she went about getting out bags of flour and other such ingredients from the pantry. “Now, we’re going to be making peppermint chocolate chip cookies,” she announced.
Half an hour later, there were five trays of fresh-out-of-the-oven cookies cooling on the benchtop. In any other household, this many would have been enough to feed a small army, but in theirs it was enough to feed a speedster, another speedster with a hypermetabolism (that was, on top of the already-enhanced metabolism considered normal for a Speedforce conduit), and a regular human.
Years and quite a few hero alias changes (although not all had to do with a certain redheaded time-travelling speedster) later, an old Christmas tradition was continued and a new one was started.
On December 24th, Christmas Eve.
Bart was sitting on the sofa in the apartment he shared with one Timothy Drake. The other vigilante next to him, laptop balanced on his knees precariously. The two were sitting so close to each other that their shoulders were touching. It wasn’t a tiny sofa by any means.
Tim was working on a report or something for Wayne Industries, he wasn’t certain. Bart, on the other hand, had been scrolling aimlessly through Instagram for the past twenty minutes. It had started lightly snowing not long after dinner and had yet to stop.
“We should bake cookies,” the speedster declared, sitting up suddenly from where he had been leaning against his boyfriend’s side.
Tim looked up from his screen at the loss of contact. Blinking as he processed the words.
“Now?” he questioned. “At 9:30?”
“Yeah! And 9:30 isn’t that late, Tim,” Bart pointed out.
“True…okay,” Tim shut the lid of his laptop and set it on the coffee table. “What cookies should we make? Do we even have the ingredients?”
“Peppermint choc chip? And—“ Bart sped off into the kitchen and Tim heard the sound of multiple doors opening slamming shut before his boyfriend reappeared in the living room. “—we just need butter, baking soda, chocolate chips, and peppermint candy,” he said. “But would any grocery stores still be open this late?”
“Not here, but on the west coast there should be,” Tim suggested, standing up and heading in the direction of the kitchen.
“Oh, right!” Bart had sped off, only to return less than a second later with a question. “Do you want dark or milk chocolate chips?” he asked. “‘cause the recipe needs milk ones but I know you don’t like milk chocolate—“
“If we need milk chocolate then get that one, doesn’t matter if I like it or not,” Tim interrupted.
“You sure?”
“Certain. Milk always goes better in chocolate chip cookies anyway,”
With the matter settled, the speedster sped off towards the west coast of the continental United States. Within minutes Bart was crouched in the baking aisle of a Target trying to find a milk chocolate chips packet in his Christmas-coloured lightning bolt sweatpants and cranberry-red jumper with the tinsel tree. A packet of mint candy canes, a container of baking soda, and a stick of butter already in his arms.
He almost had to get the dark ones before a packet of milk chips shoved in the back of the still very much full white chocolate chip row caught his attention.
Less than fifteen minutes after he had left their apartment, Bart returned. It would have been less but he had remembered to pay for the items before he sped back home, which had taken the most time.
With the last of the ingredients secured, they could get started.
Any other couple would be cozy up on their sofa watching a holiday movie at this hour on Christmas Eve, not this one. Instead they were rolling out enough dough to fill three trays full of peppermint chocolate chip cookies.
He had also grabbed a small packet of cookie cutters on his way out of the Target. Not that this particular kind of cookie needed them but it was still fun to have them.
That was totally why he had gotten the cutters, not because it was a hero-themed pack with a Robin logo-shaped one. Not at all.
It was nearly eleven PM by the time they were finished and all the cookies were cooling on the kitchen bench.
But now they had a couple dozen cookies ready to take with them to Christmas lunch at Wayne Manor the next day. And Bart had managed to snap a photo of Tim with chocolate smeared down his cheek and flour dusted in his hair, that he could surely use for something in the future.
Little did he know, Tim had gotten a potential-blackmail material photo of his own, where Bart had fallen asleep draped across the bench with his tinsel Christmas tree headband mere millimeters from falling off of his head and into the tray of still-hot cookies.
(Dick had looked particularly pleased when he had seen the Robin logo-shaped, very-sweet cookies at Christmas Lunch, and then had proceeded to go track down and poke his husband more than once to show him.)
Bart Allen did not understand the concept of Christmas. But Bart Allen-Drake liked to think that he did, or at the very least tried to.