Santa remained in his chair as the office grew darker around him. The Arctic sun, which had been riding low on the horizon for weeks, finally dipped below the ice entirely. The darkness felt appropriate somehow—a physical manifestation of the void that had opened inside his chest.
He thought about the elves. They would need to know. The workshop couldn't function without leadership, and Reginald's appointment would be announced soon enough. Santa imagined their faces when they learned—the shock, the confusion, the questions he wouldn't have answers to. He'd spent three centuries being the one with answers.
His computer sat dark and silent on the desk. Somewhere in the corporate servers, paperwork was being processed. A severance package. Health insurance continuation. Probably a non-disclosure agreement preventing him from discussing Christmas operations. The bureaucracy of erasure.
Santa rose from his chair and walked to the coat rack where his red suit hung. He reached out and touched the velvet, feeling the texture his fingers had known for so long. The suit smelled like pine needles and chimney soot and something indefinably like Christmas itself. He'd worn it for three hundred years without question, without hesitation.
He thought about taking it off. About hanging it up for the last time. But not tonight. Tonight he would sleep in his quarters, and tomorrow he would face the workshop. He would tell the elves. He would pack his things. He would walk away from the North Pole for the first time in memory.
But where would he go?
The question hung in the darkness of his office like a star that hadn't decided whether to shine. Santa had no home outside the North Pole. No family beyond the elves. No life that wasn't Christmas. Three hundred years of single-minded devotion had made him excellent at one thing and utterly unprepared for everything else.
He moved toward the door, his footsteps echoing in the empty hallway. Tomorrow would bring difficult conversations. But tonight, for the first time in centuries, Santa Claus would go to bed without knowing what Christmas needed from him. The thought should have terrified him.
Instead, it felt almost like freedom.