wc_women_fest | Round Four: Holidays

Round Four of the Awesome Ladies of White Collar prompt fest is now open! The theme for this round is Holidays. How do the ladies celebrate? Are there parties to plan? Friends and families to see? Crimes to commit or criminals to foil? You can either respond directly to the theme and post your work to the community, or you can leave prompts here that relate to the theme. Or you can do both. If you do post your work to the community, please tag it "round 4 - holidays".

Before we begin, I just wanted to remind everybody to be respectful, fills for prompts should be posted as a reply to the prompt, or linked in a reply to the prompt.

For fics longer than one comment and vids, please use the following header:

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Feel free to pimp the community! a community banner can be found here, along with the round banner at the top of the page. please resize to whatever size you want to.

sahiya has set up a collection on AO3 for the fest. Posting fills there is encouraged, but not required.

Please read the rules carefully, and post any questions you have here.

Please please please leave suggestions for future round themes here. We need as many as we can get.

And again, everybody, have fun!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

She remembered telling Neal on the roof of the FBI building that her parents were dead. Of course she'd also told him she was an only child. She pressed play on the answering machine and the "Hello Sara, sweetheart, your father and I were planning on coming up to New York for Christmas this year, an we wanted to know if you would be able to put us up, or do we have to stay in a hotel? Well anyway, we love you, can't wait to see you, Bye now," recorded on it.

She restrained herself from putting her head on the counter, or from calling her mother up to yell, "Hotel, please dear God, stay in a hotel, or better yet, don't come. Just have a nice, quiet, little holiday, away from me!"

Most of her belongings had somehow migrated to Neal's, her house abandoned most nights. And she could just see her parents' faces, and the way they would just know when she brought them inside, the way they would know,and pick at it, and everything would seem so normal. She wanted to say to them, "Just pretend I'm there. You're already doing that with one daughter."

Every year, there had been an extra set of presents from her parents, wrapped and hidden away, waiting for the day her sister would miraculously return. They sat dusty and ignored with birthday presents, and piles of well wishes, and the gifts that every year, her mother had dragged her out to buy for a sister who was never going to come back and open them. Every year, her parents set them out under the tree, and every year when she saw them, Sara wanted to scream, and yell at her parents for doing it again, for reminding everybody all over again that she was gone.

They didn't do that anymore. The unopened presents were probably in a storage container somewhere, gathering more dust, and more layers of guilt. Sara almost missed them. At least when they were there, sitting under the tree like talismans to bring her sister home, she could point to them and say, "See? This is what's wrong."

Now there was nothing that anybody else saw. There were no more outward signs to betray just how broken and warped it still was.

She wondered if it would have been easier if she had been an only child, if her parents really had been deceased, if there had been no explanations following her return to life, no effects following her supposed death because there was no one around to care instead of a family she made unable to contact. She wondered if it meant that one day, she was going to disappear just like her sister, and if her parents were going to keep buying presents for her in the hopes that she would return. She wondered if her parents would ever learn she had died, and if she ever wanted them to, someday, when it happened.

Round Four: Holidays

Fill: Cruel, Sharp Recollections