WHO: Allison and Tig
WHAT: heart-to-hearts and atypical celebrations
WHEN: backdated to Christmas Day
WHERE: Allison's cabin

WARNINGS: mention of canon character death and probable resulting themes of grief associated with it later on, alcohol abuse, also it's Tig so really there could be anything in here.

Christmas is always hard on Tig, only gets harder the older he gets. The whole damn month, really; Thanksgiving comes around and that's manageable, at least, the whole family gathered around one table and sure, none of them are blood, but that's what the club is, at the end of the day. His family because he fucked up the one he made and didn't want anything to do with the one he'd been born into. Thanksgiving's about being grateful, about appreciating what you've got and he knows he'd already be six feet under if it wasn't for the club.

But Clay's dead, nobody left of the brothers who welcomed him all those years ago but Chibs and Bobby, everybody else is either in prison or dead.

When he was younger, when things weren't so bad, Christmas was good. The one day he'd make sure he was actually home with Colleen and the girls, and it was never perfect, there was always at least one argument and something would inevitably go wrong but he'd tried. And shit, no matter how bad it was in retrospect they'd still been better than any Christmas he'd had as a kid, better than the half-assed attempts they'd made when he was still in the corps, surrounded by sand and swapping parts of presents from home and questionably-legal shit they bought off the locals wrapped in old newspaper and stained canvas.

But then they'd gotten bad, the kind you can't spackle over with nostalgia later, outright toxic and maybe they'd always been that way, he just hadn't been able to see it until it was all laid out in front of him, and he came home from the latest bit only to be kicked out of his own damn house and after that Christmas only ever stung. Easier to just drink straight through to the new year after Thanksgiving wrapped up, especially when everything just fell apart more after Dawn died. The girls had at least both always called without fail, even if he was pretty sure Fawn only did it because her sister nagged her about it, but now there wasn't even that.

So when Allison had shown up and demanded his company, suffice to say he was less than enthused about the idea.

There's a dog insistently at Tig's side when he opens the door, pressing into his legs as if attempting to hold him up by sheer force of will, and a telltale bottle dangling from one hand, the other moving to grab ahold of the doorjamb as he stares at her.

"I'm not going anywhere."

He'd already threatened to destroy his liver over the network, he'd thought that explanation enough of his feelings about things.