if i think i can figure things out, is that curiosity or arrogance?

Some boarding school students might have gone home for Christmas. Topher, whose family was not in the slightest bit religious, had spared everyone the need to observe the holiday by waiting a few days to go home, and he brought a guest. The result of this, especially after years of not hearing about Topher's friends at all, was that his highly polite and welcoming parents had been practically bouncing by the time Topher and Billy's portal arrived, and after a few minutes of gushing over both of them, took the boys' things to put upstairs while Topher gave Billy the tour.

"And this is my room," Topher concluded as they reached the top floor of the townhouse. The rest of the house was almost intimidatingly nice, decoration-wise: framed paintings hung on the wall and every inch of floor was covered either in soft carpeting or in marble tiles. As Topher swung his bedroom door open, it became apparent that his room was not quite up to the standard the rest of the house had set, an image best conveyed by the fact that although his room was certainly big enough for a normal, human-sized bed, he'd insisted on twin-size bunk beds, the bottom bunk of which had no mattress and instead contained a TV and some X-Box controllers.

He surveyed the room through the critical lens one tends to develop when examining one's living space with company present. "...There's an air mattress we can bring in, probably."

Probably.

[[for the boyfriend, mostly! phone calls are also okay!]]

The hallway was pretty quiet this early in the morning, but not deserted. There were two teenagers in their pajamas standing outside a friend's door, bearing gifts.

They were givers like that. Just exemplary human beings.

No, really.

"Do you think he even does Christmas?" Topher wondered, moving to the side to let Kenzi knock.

( The fact that they might be waking him up had nothing to do with anything. Nope. )

[[Preplayed with regretiz4suckas and lockestheway, because timezones suck and we wanted A Very Black Hat Trio Christmas, dammit. NFI, OOC welcome, and all good for broadcast except for the talk of Karla, which is NFB.]]