Title: Going Home For Christmas
Rating: PG-13 / R - nothing is too graphic, but just in case.
Setting: Daniel's house. December 24th-25th. Anna's twenty, almost twenty-one. Daniel just turned twenty-two.
Summary: Anna shows up at Daniel's door for Christmas after her parents leave her alone. She finds home is where the heart is. (Mostly fluff.)
Feedback: feel free to review.
Dedication: for Cee. Merry Christmas!
Disclaimer: Cee owns Daniel (and his family). I own the Lex, Jeff, Matt, Sammie, Chris, and Anthony. Cee owns Kate and Fred.
Story Notes: I wrote this for Cee as her Christmas present, so it's mostly fluff without any real conflict or anything. It has three parts. As per usual, I own Anna (and her family). This is one of the few stories I've written where the title isn't stolen from a song.

(Part 01 / 03)

Anna watched the houses get bigger and bigger as the cab she was in drove farther and farther away from the center of Lakewood. Just like in the city. Generally, the further you got from Manhattan, the bigger the houses were. Price was a different thing entirely. She stared out the window. She’d be at Daniel’s soon.

She’d been there a number of times before, but never so spontaneously like this, and never uninvited or without Daniel’s company. She had a couple of bags with her; one with some clothing and her things, the others filled with presents for Daniel’s family. Before coming, she’d gone shopping and bought a kind of “pamper yourself” spa kit for his mother, an expensive chopping knife for his father who cooked, and a number of toys and games for his kid brothers and sister. And of course she had something for Daniel. She’d wrapped all their stuff and called a cab to take her down to Lakewood. Anna hoped that being particularly kind to Dennis, Derek, and Daphne would soften the blow of her showing up on their doorstep on Christmas Eve.

The fact of the matter was that she didn’t have any place else to go. Her parents literally abandoned her; they’d left for the “old country” this morning without any warning to visit Anna’s sick grandmother. Without Anna. They left her a note on the door, explaining where they’d gone. Anna called both her parents a number of times, but they didn’t answer. Christmas had never been a big deal to them. They celebrated it out of cultural necessity but they never made the huge deal of it that other families made. Now, at twenty, Anna figured she was probably lucky she hadn’t spent more Christmases alone.

It obviously wasn’t beyond her parents, who were flaky in their own way, to take off on Christmas Eve without her. This was hardly an isolated incident; in fact, it was only one bump in a long road of inappropriate times Anna’s parents had left her by herself. Once when she was nine, her parents had left her to go to an opera at the Met without leaving anything for Anna to eat for dinner. Her older sister, Lisa, had been at a sleepover, and her older brother, Shawn, came home around ten o’clock from basketball practice and found Anna picking at stale crackers. He was only thirteen, but he could at least make her scrambled eggs and help her get cookies from the top of the closet for dessert.

This Christmas was another story though. Nobody would come home this time. Her sister was with her rich boyfriend’s family in Maine; her brother with his wife’s family in Virginia. Anna called Lisa, but Lisa didn’t pick up. Anna loved Lisa because she was her sister, but not for many other reasons. Lisa could be kind and never actually treated Anna badly, but Anna couldn’t help noticing how Lisa tended to be shallow, used her good looks to get what she wanted, and considered most people expendable as long as Lisa got what she wanted. Both the Eukovich girls had been blessed with beauty but unlike Anna, Lisa let her good looks define her life. Anna tried to make something of herself; Lisa’s goal was to be a trophy wife…and then she would divorce her rich husband and take him for all he was worth.

Their brother was much more like Anna. He also had good looks, but he had a real family and wanted kids of his own some day. He had a job, a dream and wanted to be somebody. Anna didn’t know if she wanted to get married and have kids, but she definitely had a dream and a job and wanted to be somebody.

Plus, Anna much better liked Shawn because Shawn was always the one who did things like take her to the park and buy her things and make her food when she was little. Now, Shawn was the one who called her to make sure she was all right at school, and Shawn was the one who was always there when she needed him. Shawn lent her money, Shawn got her out of trouble, Shawn gave her good advice, Shawn looked after her. But Shawn was all the way down in Virginia and out of Anna’s reach. She hadn’t even bothered to call him. He would spend all Christmas worrying about her and not enjoying himself, and even if he invited her, she’d never get to Virginia by tomorrow morning.

The rest of her family was also scattered all over the country. Anna normally would have gone to spend Christmas with one of her friends, but her friends were all out of town too. Lex and Jeff were both way out on Long Island. Matt had gone to Vermont, and Anthony was in Florida. Chris was in California and Sammie was in Connecticut. Fred had gone with Lex’s family and Kate and Daniel had both gone home. This was the first Christmas Anna could remember where all of them were out of town. It figured, really, since it was the one time she was alone.

Since Daniel was the closest at only an hour or two away, it was Daniel or bust. If he sent her home, she would go back to the apartment and spend Christmas by herself. It wouldn’t be so bad, except that her parents had left her nothing to eat and no money to buy food with, though Anna figured she could find some place that was still open and buy some simple groceries.

Anna knew how to cook from her mother. Her mother insisted that Lisa and Anna knew how to be “good wives,” and taught them to both cook and sew when they were young. When they were home, they were still subjected to random nights where their mother gave them an ingredient and told them to do something with it that made the family a meal. Their mother tested them to keep them sharp.

But now Anna would make what she wanted, if she could find something to make, if a grocery story was open. And she would listen to Christmas music and unwrap all her presents the next morning by herself. She’d probably go to church for the sake of tradition, because she actually was raised a Catholic, and had been confirmed at fourteen. After church, she would spend the day in her pajamas not talking to anyone and watching TV. Maybe she’d order Chinese for dinner. Maybe she wouldn’t feel alone if the TV was on loudly enough.

She watched the snow drifts go by and the decorative lights blur together. Stopped at a traffic light, she could see inside the window of a house. There were two little kids in their parents’ laps watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas on TV. Anna found herself crying silently in the back of the cab. She never remembered so much festivity being so lonely.

The cab pulled up outside Daniel’s home and stopped. The fare came to something exorbitant but nothing Anna hadn’t expected. She pulled out her debit card and swiped it. She’d get the money back from her parents – or let Shawn talk them into giving it back to her. They always listened to Shawn because he was older and a guy. Her parents always were equal with their children in terms of tangible needs, but both Anna and Lisa knew that when it came to intangibles, Shawn was the favorite. He was their son – their pride and joy. Lisa and Anna were girls. And while their parents loved them and Anna knew her father would do anything for her, because she was the baby and his little girl, she also knew that somewhere deep down, Shawn was the favorite because he was the boy, even if their parents never admitted it. In some ways their parents were very modern, but in some ways they really should just pick up and move back to the “old country.”

The driver helped Anna out of the cab with her bags and then drove off. She pulled her backpack on her shoulders and picked up her shopping bags. Before ringing the bell, she checked her eyes to make sure they weren’t puffy from crying and checked that her makeup looked all right. She said a silent prayer that Daniel would answer the door so she could explain to him what happened without everyone listening in. She prayed that she’d get through her explanation without crying. She hoped Daniel wouldn’t be angry with her. He tended to get angry with her for ridiculous things. Most of them were jealousy related, but she hadn’t shown up with a guy on her arm so she might look pathetic enough for him to feel sorry for her and be easy on her.

Anna rang the bell.