Santa stood motionless at the window for what might have been minutes or hours—time had become slippery the moment Reginald's face disappeared from the screen. His reflection in the glass looked hollow, as if the termination had physically extracted something vital from him.
He turned away from the window and moved through his office like a man in a dream, his fingers trailing across the desk, the filing cabinets, the shelf of Christmas records dating back to the 1700s. Each surface held memories of purpose, of meaning. Now they felt like artifacts in a museum dedicated to someone else's life.
Santa's gaze fell on the red suit hanging on the coat rack in the corner—the one he'd shed only hours ago after the morning's toy inspection. The suit looked smaller somehow, as if it too had been diminished by Reginald's words. Three centuries of Christmas Eves compressed into that velvet fabric.
He sank back into his chair, and for the first time in memory, Santa Claus felt genuinely, completely tired. Not the kind of tiredness that sleep could fix. This was the exhaustion of carrying an impossible weight for so long that he'd forgotten what lightness felt like.
The question that had been lurking at the edges of his mind finally surfaced: What now?
For three hundred years, the answer had always been Christmas. Every decision, every moment, every fiber of his being had been oriented toward that single purpose. Christmas was coming, Christmas needed him, Christmas was everything. But Reginald's Zoom call had severed that connection with the efficiency of a corporate guillotine.
Santa realized he didn't know who he was without Christmas. Not the red suit, not the workshop, not the elves looking to him for guidance. Just... him. An old man. Alone in an office at the North Pole, holding a severance package he hadn't even read yet.
For the first time in centuries, Santa Claus had no idea what came next. And strangely, beneath the shock and the hurt, there was something else: a whisper of relief so faint he almost didn't recognize it.
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