christmas lights //none shippy obvs
christmas lights: muses decide to decorate their home(s) for the holidays and go through many adventures in the process.
( christmas isn’t something carol’s celebrated in earnest for a long time–since she left boston for the air force, really. but this year, her apartment feels a lot more like home and her friends feel a lot more like family, so she figures maybe it’s time to break out the tinsel and dust off the ornaments her mother had given her the first christmas she had a place of her own. and clint seems like the perfect sucker to help her tack up all the lights and wrestle the tree into place.
carol bribes him with beer, pizza, and the promise to not add her voice to the christmas music she has playing. they find the tree in a somewhat sketchy lot outside of the city, but the guy seemed nice and the giant bald spot could be fixed by sticking that side in the corner. a box and a half of decorations later, her floor is almost entirely coated in glitter, they both have tinsel stuck in their hair, and there’s a growing pile of shattered ornaments pushed off to the side.
with a crate of lights still left to hang, carol’s beginning to regret her decision to go full on kris kringle. so she does what any bored holiday decorator in her position would do--she makes a bet with clint to see who can make the most obscene image with the lights. it takes them a good hour of taping and retaping the lights to the big windows in her living room, but by the time bing crosby’s done crooning and the pizza’s long since gone cold, her living room is a little less miracle on 34th street and a whole lot more miracle in the red light district.
and she decides decorating for christmas isn’t so bad after all. )
