Graeme Brandham - 2008AD - A London Department Store Santa’s Grotto - David the Santa and Tin’tan the Rabbit Helper.
The Aurora Archives: Day 23
ARCHIVE ENTRY: 2008 AD (The birth of the first Rabbit Fashion house LOCATION: Harrisons Department store SIGNAL RESONANCE: Transition/Acceptance
The Quiet in the Noise
Date: December 23rd, 2008
The Grotto smelled of damp wool, synthetic pine needles from too many plastic trees, and recession anxiety.
It was 2008. The banks had crashed, the mood on Oxford Street was brittle, and Tin’tan was sitting on a velvet cushion, trying to ignore the fact that her left ear was itching furiously from a foolish looking elf hat that was clearly not made for rabbits.
“Look lively, Fluff,” Mr. Henderson, the floor manager, snapped as he walked past, tapping his clipboard against the side of her stool. “We’re not paying you to be sullen. Twitch the nose. The kids like the nose.”
Tin’tan didn’t twitch. She adjusted her shawl, a coarse, scratchy thing issued by the store. In her notebook, hidden under the velvet cushion, she had planned out a better design: a structured linen capelet with high-collar clearance for the ears and hidden pockets for travel passes. High fashion for the modern Lagomorph. That was the dream.
The reality was this. Being a christmas rabbit. A prop for human kids. Undignified.
To her right sat David. He was the store Santa. Sixty, grey-faced, and he smelled faintly of rolling tobacco and peppermint tea. He was adjusting his fake beard, his hands shaking slightly.
“Ignore him, Tinty,” David murmured, not looking at her. “He’s just worried about his bonus. We’re all just trying to get to the 25th.”
Tin’tan nodded stiffly. She tried to keep her mind closed. That was the trick to surviving London. In the quiet of the old word, the strings were useful. They tell you where the fox is; they tell you when a storm is coming. But in a department store in December? It’s a cacophony. A billion invisible fishing lines tugging at you, vibrating with every shopper’s greed, panic, exhaustion, and hope.
Instead she blocked it all out. She wanted to be like the humans: singular, focused, deaf to the noise. That was how you succeeded in a world where rabbits didn’t matter.
“Next!” Henderson barked.
A small girl, maybe seven, was shoved forward by a tired-looking mother. The girl sat on David’s knee.
“And what would you like, young lady?” David asked. His voice was warm, a practiced baritone that sounded like safety. She fidgeted uncomfortably at first, looking about like a lost soul. Her mum seemed absent, like she wasn’t even there. The girl gestured to David to lean in closer, and she shyly spoke into his ear.
“I want my Daddy to come back,” the girl whispered.
The air in the grotto froze. The mother looked away, biting her lip.
Tin’tan felt it then. She hadn’t meant to. The Solstice was only two days away, and the strings were always tricky at this time of year. Her mental walls crumbled.
She felt a snap in the air. A vibration so sharp and jagged it made her teeth ache, but oddly, when she explored it briefly, it came from David, rather than the girl or her mother.
Outwardly, the old man just paused. He rested a hand on the girl’s shoulder.
“That is a very big wish,” he said softly. “Some wishes... even Santa has to leave those to the Angels. But I can make sure he knows you miss him. Would that help?”
The girl nodded and she left with a candy cane, a small consolation.
When the grotto finally closed, the lights dimmed to a bruised purple. The silence of the empty store was heavy.
Tin’tan found David in the break room. At first she wasn’t going to go in, she had things to do at home, but she heard a sniffle as she was walking by. Something tugged at her, she couldn’t just leave him like that. When she entered he was slumped in a plastic chair, his red coat unbuttoned, staring into a mug of cold tea. The strings around him were vibrating with a sorrow so deep it felt like gravity, and she couldn’t help but notice them even if she tried to shut them out.
Tin’tan hopped up onto the chair opposite him. She adjusted her scratchy shawl. Internally she wondered why she wouldn’t just leave. She could catch the bus back to her bedsit in Zone 4 and work on her sketches.
But the string between them was pulling tight.
“You’re thinking about someone,” Tin’tan said. It wasn’t a question.
David looked up, startled. Rabbits rarely spoke about human things. They usually stuck to the weather or the rotas.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Someone you loved” Tin’tan said. “The girl... she asked for her dad. It made your string snap. You wanted to promise her you could do it. Because you want someone to promise you the same thing.”
David stared at her for a long time. Then, his shoulders dropped. The Santa facade melted away, leaving just a tired, grieving man.
“Mary,” he whispered. “It’s the first year without her. I keep expecting to see her in the crowd. Telling me my beard is crooked.”
He rubbed his face. “I’m a fraud, Tinty. I sit there in this red suit, promising joy, and I’m empty. I want to help them, but I can’t feel it anymore. I used to glow when it came to christmas, but now… I feel like im singing a song without any emotion. It feels flat and hollow.
Tin’tan looked at her paws. “I know. I can feel it.”
“Feel it?”
“The Strings,” she said quietly. “My kind... we hear the world. We feel the connections. The joy, the panic, the grief. It’s like a thousand radios playing at once.”
David frowned. “That sounds... unbearable.”
“It is,” Tin’tan admitted. “That’s why I block it out. I try to be like you. Like a human. Deaf to it. I thought if I stopped listening, I could just be... successful. I could launch my label. I could be more than just a rabbit.”
She pulled her sketchbook from under her shawl and pushed it across the table. It was open to a drawing of a cloak, elegant, practical, dignified.
David put on his glasses. He looked at the sketch, then at Tin’tan.
“This is beautiful,” he said. “It has dignity.”
“I want to be seen,” she said. “Not just felt.”
David handed the book back. He leaned forward. “You know, Tintan... today, when that little girl spoke... I didn’t have magic. I couldn’t fix it. But I listened. And for a second, she wasn’t alone with that big, scary wish. She shared the weight of it with me.”
He looked at her, his eyes kind. “Maybe blocking out the noise isn’t the answer. If you block out the sad strings, you block out the happy ones too. You block out the inspiration.”
Tin’tan twitched her nose. The real itch was gone.
She closed her eyes. She lowered the mental wall she had built so carefully over the years.
Whoosh.
It came back. The hum of the city. But this time, she didn’t fight it. She separated the strands. She felt Mr. Henderson’s anxiety about his mortgage. She felt the security guard’s anticipation of his dinner. And she felt David.
His string wasn’t jagged anymore. It was a steady, low thrum. A bass note of new found endurance. Perhaps listening to him hadn’t been such a bad idea.
She opened her eyes.
“It’s not just noise,” she whispered. “It’s music.”
David smiled. A real smile this time. “And you, my dear, have the ears for it.”
He stood up and buttoned his red coat. “Same time tomorrow? It’s the 24th. The big one.”
“Same time,” Tin’tan said.
She watched him leave. She looked down at her sketch. She took her pencil and added a detail she hadn’t thought of before, a small, hidden panel in the lining of the cape, right over the heart. A place to keep things safe. A design born from listening, not ignoring.
She realized then that David was right. He wasn’t magic because he could fly or make toys appear. He was magic because he sat in a chair and let people give him their heavy things for a moment.
And she could do that too, she was born to, she was a Rabbit.
Tin’tan picked up her travel cloack. For the first time in years, she hopped out into the London night and didn’t cover her ears. The city was singing.
ARCHIVIST’S NOTE: To the modern reader, the idea of a Lagomorph suppressing the strings (what we now scientifically classify as Bio-Resonant Empathy) seems unthinkable. However, one must remember the era. 2008 was barely a ferw decades out of the silent era. Our ancestors were integrated into human society, yes, but often as novelties or second-class citizens. Assimilation was the goal; our natural abilities were viewed as feral or distracting.
This encounter is significant not just for its emotional resonance, but because it represents the genesis point of the House of Tin’tan.
If you look at the modern Tin’tan travel-cape you likely have hanging in your burrow, with its acoustic-dampening hood and resonance-shielding lining, you are looking at the direct result of this conversation. Tin’tan did not just become a fashion designer; she became the first resonance architect. She realized that we shouldn’t block the world out, but rather design tools that help us manage the noise in an increasingly chaotic and busy world, so we could endure it.
David, the human santa is largely lost to history, though records suggest a David O’Connell worked at Harrisons until 2012. He likely never knew that his moment of vulnerability didn’t just help a rabbit get through a shift, it helped a species stop hiding their ears.
Artifact Status: The original sketchbook mentioned in the narrative is currently on display at the Museum of Integration in the British Library. The page for the David Cape is tear-stained, but the lines are unwavering.
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