Santa sat motionless for what felt like hours, though the clock on his office wall insisted it had only been three minutes. The screen remained black. The call was over. He was fired.
He stood slowly, his joints creaking with the weight of centuries—not just age, but responsibility. His legs carried him to the window overlooking the Workshop floor below, where elves still moved with purpose, still believed in the mission, still had no idea their leader had just been terminated via corporate video conference.
The absurdity of it struck him like a snowball to the face. A Zoom call. Three hundred years of dedication to Christmas, to joy, to the impossible task of reaching every child on Earth, and it ended with pixelated buffering and a man who spelled his name like a Victorian villain.
Santa's initial rage—the kind that had once made reindeer nervous—began to crumble into something else. Something heavier. Exhaustion. Bone-deep, soul-deep exhaustion that he'd been carrying for decades without truly acknowledging it. When had Christmas stopped feeling like magic and started feeling like management? When had the sleigh become a logistics problem instead of wonder?
He looked down at his hands—still sturdy, still capable, but trembling slightly. His red suit hung on his frame like it belonged to someone else now. Someone younger. Someone who still believed the system could work.
A knock at his door pulled him from his thoughts. Jingleberry stood in the doorway, his pointed ears drooping with concern, his green tunic somehow still cheerful despite whatever energy he was picking up from Santa's expression.
"Sir? The production meeting is in five minutes, and the Nice List algorithm is acting strange again. Reginald sent another memo about—" Jingleberry stopped mid-sentence, reading something in Santa's face that no words had yet spoken. "What happened?"
Santa turned from the window. The moment had arrived where he would need to tell someone. Where it would become real.
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