It is Christmas again.

The city hums with warmth, its streets wrapped in golden lights. Wreaths hang on doors, snowflakes twinkle in shop windows, and the smell of cinnamon drifts through the air. Ibrahim pulls his coat tighter as he climbs the steps to his apartment, his arms weighed down with grocery bags. The bags crinkle softly with each step, the sound swallowed by the muffled laughter and distant carols drifting down the hall.

Inside, his apartment feels too quiet. He kicks the door shut behind him, sets the bags on the counter, and exhales. The hum of the refrigerator is the only sound to greet him. It’s warm here, insulated against the cold that seeps into the cracks of the city. His breath lingers for a moment in the air before dissolving. He unpacks slowly, the motions automatic. A loaf of bread. A jar of pickles. A small box of mismatched ornaments he’d picked up on a whim. His hands falter as he pulls the box free, the lid slipping slightly to reveal a tangled mess of tinsel and glass baubles. He stares at it for a moment, the colors catching the faint light of the kitchen. Reds and greens, silvers and golds. Warm colors. Festive colors.

A smile tugs faintly at his lips. It’s shaky, but it’s there. "They’ll love it," he mutters under his breath.

The tree stands crooked in the corner of the living room, a little too tall for the space. He sets it upright, steadies it, and starts to string the lights. The cord tangles almost immediately, and he laughs softly to himself, the sound thin but real. He untangles it, working the lights slowly around the branches. Each bulb blinks to life as he plugs them in, the room filling with a soft, multicolored glow. The smell of cinnamon still lingers faintly in the air, mixing with the scent of pine. He’s halfway through hanging the ornaments when he pauses, holding a bauble in his hand. His thumb brushes over its surface, smooth and cold, and for a moment, he’s still.

He remembers. The very last year, Leonhard and Lisette at the dining table, their chairs pulled so close together their shoulders touched. Lisette had rolled her eyes as Leonhard whispered something in her ear, her mouth twitching into a barely-contained grin. “You’re terrible,” she’d said, shaking her head. “I’m efficient,” Leonhard had replied, his voice low and smug. When the table burst into laughter, Lisette had joined in, loud and carefree. It was the only time Ibrahim had ever seen her throw her head back, the sound spilling out of her like a song.

Engie stood on a chair, tossing ornaments one by one as Nigel shrieked, “For the love of God, stop throwing them like grenades!” Engie was grinning like a rebel puppy. The glass baubles crashed harmlessly into Nigel’s arms, and Ibrahim had snorted into his alcohol-free drink, hiding his smile behind his hand.Even Conroy, always the observer rather than the participant, had joined in that year, his smile rare but genuine as he’d stood back, watching Nigel drape tinsel across the mantel and offering the occasional amused suggestion.

The room had been filled with warmth, laughter, and the glow of twinkling lights. It felt like something unbreakable.

The ornaments are strange in his hands now. The polished glass ball reflects the room back at him, distorted and warped, but something about its smooth, perfect surface unsettles him. He places it on the tree quickly, his fingers brushing against a strand of tinsel. It’s too soft, almost wet in its sheen, and he snatches his hand back.

He tells himself it’s nothing. Just Christmas decorations. Just—

Digging through the box, his hand brushes against something unfamiliar. He pulls out a cluster of tiny figurines, no bigger than his thumb. Six little bodies, each carved with care.

He stares at them, confused, turning them over in his fingers. There’s Engie, frozen mid-leap, his smile silly and wide. Nigel, two hands on his hip, looking judgingly still. Convoy is proposely looking arrogant and stupid here. Leonhard and Lisette, their arms crossed, their smirks identical. And then there’s Ibrahim himself, captured with a neat little smirk, his arms open as if mid-protest.

They’ve been here for years, nestled among the tinsel and lights. Nigel must have made them the first Christmas they spent together. He must have helped hang them, year after year, without ever noticing.

His fingers tighten around the tiny wooden figures, his chest heaving.

It feels too much. It feels like nothing at all.

He places them on the tree, clustered together near the center. Not carefully, not precisely—just close enough that they could see each other if they were real.

When he sits back down, the couch feels impossibly wide, impossibly empty. He stretches out again, awkward and cramped, trying to preserve space that no one will ever need again.

He remembers the van jolts over uneven terrain, its rattling frame groaning under the weight of bodies and gear. Across from Ibrahim, Lisette and Leonhard sit shoulder to shoulder, their heads bent together as they whisper and giggle. The rest of the team doesn’t bother asking what’s so funny; it’s always some inside joke, some HMCC secret they’ll never share. Engie fidgets beside him, humming under his breath as he scribbles in the margin of a weathered field manual. Nigel and Conroy are squished against the opposite wall, both trying and failing to ignore Engie’s perpetual motion. Nigel mutters something sharp about “boundaries,” but his voice lacks any real venom.

It’s normal. All of it.

The explosion splits the air before anyone can process it.

A rocket, a missile——something tears through the van’s middle with a scream of metal and fire. The blast slams Ibrahim back into his seat, his head cracking against the steel wall behind him. The world tilts, spins, swallows itself whole in sound and fury.

When the smoke clears, he sees them. Or what’s left of them.

Lisette and Leonhard are gone. Not gone as in missing, not gone as in vanished. Gone as in—

Their seats are empty, their bodies obliterated, reduced to tattered, burning scraps of uniform and ash. What remains is scattered across the van in wet, sticky streaks: an arm draped limply over a seat, a chunk of jawbone resting near Ibrahim’s boot, a spray of viscera splattered across the windshield like macabre paint. Across from him, Nigel and Conroy sit frozen, their faces pale and slack. Conroy clutches the strap of his rifle with trembling hands, his lips moving silently, though no sound escapes. Nigel’s mouth hangs open, his eyes wide and unseeing, his usual flamboyant confidence dissolved into something brittle and fragile.

Neither of them screams.

Ibrahim does.

It tears out of him, raw and unfiltered, a sound so primal it doesn’t seem to belong to him. It’s instinct, pure and unthinking, rising from some deep, untouched part of his soul.

And then, just as suddenly, it stops. The scream dies in his throat as he snaps back into himself, too conscious now to let it escape again. He clasps his jaw shut, biting down hard enough to taste blood, and forces his body into silence. The air is thick with the smell of burning flesh and gasoline.

He’s been here before.

This is home.

He remembers.

Then the sound of the very first shot, the sharp, ringing crack that cut the air. How Engie had spun, his hands reaching for the rifle he’d slung over his back. How it wasn’t fast enough. The visor shattered before his eyes, the glass exploding outward in glittering shards. Engie’s head snapped back as the helmet blew apart, and beneath the ruined metal, there was nothing but pulp. His skull was split, uneven like a jagged piece of fruit. Flesh hung loose where the visor had once covered it, the raw orange-white of his eye socket catching the light for just a moment before the blood overtook it.

Ibrahim had seen his eyes then. Or what was left of them. He couldn’t even tell the color, couldn’t catch it before the body fell forward into the dirt, the weight of the gun pulling Engie down into the mud where his face vanished, forever.

He remembers.

He remembers the gaudy, secondhand ornaments Leonhard and Lisette would bring, snickering at their own taste but insisting on stringing every corner of the room with tinsel. He remembers Nigel bossing everyone around, declaring that even the ugly tree deserved to be fabulous. Engie would fling decorations across the room, missing every intended target, yelling, “Catch, mate!” He never caught them.

And he remembers how they teased him, every year, for not helping. “C’mon, Dromedary! What do you do at Christmas?” Nigel would demand, hands on hips, voice pitched high. Ibrahim would roll his eyes, flop dramatically onto the couch, and mutter, “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It’s not my holiday.”

But when they weren’t looking, he’d sit a little closer to the lights, his chest tight and warm, and stay until the very last carol played out.

Now, in the hollow silence, he sets up the tree.

The scent of cinnamon drifts into his nostrils, dry and acrid. He coughs, throat raw. His hands tremble as he adjusts a strand of mismatched lights, fingers fumbling over the cord. A familiar hitch in his chest starts as he reaches for another ornament. He freezes.

There’s no conscious thought—just the sudden, visceral surge of memory: he sees the flying dashes of flesh, piles of tissue....tons of 'Tinsel&ribbon' and bursting 'colour baubles' he once again pick up the fact that it was orange inside human's eye, no blue tapetum like cattles', but just like camels', oh it is the very right colour of christmas colour baubles. He feels his body lock up, his muscles stiff as if encased in stone. His knees buckle under him, and he collapses onto the floor, tearing, drooling and whining.

It’s not crying.

He is drowning.

Minutes pass. Maybe more. When the worst of it subsides, he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and rises to his feet, unsteady but determined.

The ornaments are still strange in his hands. The polished glass ball reflects the room back at him, distorted, misshapen. He doesn’t know what each decoration is supposed to mean. No one ever taught him; it didn’t matter then. He stares at a tiny wooden angel for long minutes before deciding to hang it near the top of the tree. It looks wrong—out of place—but he leaves it there.

He curls beneath the tree now, his breath ragged, his fingers clutching the figurines so tightly the edges press into his skin. The lights blink unevenly above him, casting soft patterns across the ceiling.

He whispers under his breath, words bleeding together. "Lights… and ribbons. Stay in the light. Stay. God, oh God—"

The muttering shifts, unbidden. Words in his native tongue slip from him, quiet and trembling:

"Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir-Raheem…"

The prayer dies in his throat as realization sets in. His breath catches. He bites his tongue so hard he tastes blood. They wouldn’t want this. It’s not their prayer.

He presses his face to the floor, his body curling tighter as his mind races. But exhaustion takes him, dragging him down into fragments of memory.

He doesn’t remember when he starts to hum. The sound is low and broken in his throat. It’s an old melody, one he hasn’t thought of in years. The words slip out, soft and uneven:

"Naam ya sagheeri… naam ‘ala janaah el-nawm…"

The lullaby faltered, his voice fading into silence as sleep overtakes him. The tree lights blink softly above him, their glow casting fragmented shadows across the room.

Good night, Ibrahim’s very first Christmas.