Garethon had made a mistake, and now there was a huge pile of old books in the middle of his living room. Garethon didn’t admit to many of his flaws, but his weakness for his daughter was one he owned up to.

He had told Millicent that he would try to get donations from the people at his work, but to do this he needed a box. It had been him that had suggested going up into the attic and looking for one. He’d thought they’d just find a small box laying around somewhere, put a piece of paper on it and throw it somewhere outside his office.

But, of course, Millicent had seen the biggest box in the attic, full of Garethon’s old books from college. Garethon had tried to change her mind, showed her other boxes, especially ones that weren’t full of stuff, but she wouldn’t hear it. She wanted that box, and she wanted it full to the brim with food and clothes. So Garethon consented, and went about the grueling task of moving the box down to the rest of his house.

It was a huge, heavy thing that took forever to get down the ladder into the living room, and once there he had to unpack his books. He had said, at the time, that he’d put all the books into smaller boxes and move them back up to the attic. But instead they were still sitting in a pile in his living room, which annoyed the hell out of him. Between Christmas stuff, end of the year work crunch, and his duties as Magnetite, Garethon simply hadn’t had the time to move them all. Every night he came home late, crashed for what was probably only five hours, and then got up to get right back to the grindstone. He’d even fallen asleep during pathfinder, and that was just unacceptable.

To top it off, there was an event coming up for his kendo group, and he had really wanted to attend. He had told the group he’d be there, but he hadn’t had time to run through drills in weeks, and needed to get back into the swing of practice sparring if he was going to do well at all. And Garethon was not interested in doing poorly, some people may compete for fun but Garethon competed to win.

So it was with a lot of frustration that he pulled himself off the floor that morning, having tripped over the pile of books in his living room, to find that he was limping. Now Garethon was not usually too phased by pain, but he couldn’t put his weight on his foot, hed hurt it bad. He growled, leaning against the back of a chair and hobbling over to his freezer to pull out ice and put in in a bag. While he iced the sore appendage, a thought occurred to him he just couldn’t resist announcing to the empty building.

“I hate the holidays.”