Carols of Before

Callum-B042 sat idly in the booth which felt too small, out a window onto the city that felt too big, hands wrapped around a mug that was too hot, in a place he was certain he did not belong. Snow fell slowly outside, laughter and conversation filled their air of the diner, and the Spartan felt distinctly uneasy. 
Across from him sat Cadmon Dawes, his husband, and their two little girls, the eldest of which had not torn her deep brown eyes from him in what felt like an eternity. She’d grown used to her father once he’d been augmented, but Dawes was not quite as distinctly Spartan as he, nor as Rodger or Jacob who sat beside him. They were her heroes, and not hers alone. Thrice now little boys had come up to ask if they really were Spartans, shown them their SPARTAN-1337 figurines, and asked if they knew him.
Rodger had told them he did, he’d always been good with civvies, but Callum and Jacob both sat uncomfortably in silence, the civilian food before them untouched on their plates. The flavor was so rich, they worried it wouldn’t agree with their stomachs. Still, Cadmon was lost in conversation with his spouse, and Rodger was trying his hand at charming the waitress who was doubtlessly only a year or so his junior.
But he and Jacob sat together quietly, not a word between them. Sometimes he wished he hadn’t opened that file, things were simpler when he could look at Jacob-G043 and see a subordinate Spartan and not the squalling infant painted in his memories as he’d been ushered aboard a shuttle away from their father’s corpse. Now everything was strange. 
It’d been today, twenty-one years ago. He’d woken in the morning thinking about what he’d wanted for Christmas, and not fallen asleep for the subsequent forty-eight hours as he shook and cried and clutched his infant brother in his arms. They didn’t know one another. Barely a month was all they’d had together, as family, yet things were so radically different now then they had been.
“What was Christmas like with them?” Jacob asked quietly as Callum pressed the mug of coffee to his lips and sipped at the hot liquid. At first he didn’t register the question, and then he struggled to find an answer. The last Christmas he’d had with their family had been when he was three years old, solid memories of the time didn’t exist, or did they?
“Was a long time ago, don’t remember a whole lot.” Callum sighed, looking back from the window and leaving the urban sprawl of Gannick 22’s capitol city unobserved. Jacob met his gaze as he shifted it towards him, clearly dissatisfied with his answer, and for that Callum couldn’t blame him.
“Well he,” That felt like the wrong way to refer to him. He then nearly thought to say my father as if they did not share him, even if only he had been there for the memories. But that would’ve been even worse than referring to the dead in such indifferent passing.
“Dad used to sing. Carols and things like that, I remember mom holding me in her lap while he sang, put stuff on a tree.” The recollection was painted in vivid colors in his head, but for every stroke of detail in the foreground, there was a lack of it in the back. It was an imperfect memory, even for those who had not lived the lives he and Jacob had, recalling anything from when one was only three was nigh on impossible.
But he remembered what it was like to be held by his mother, as his father screeched out broken melodies. 
“Was he any good?” Jacob questioned, raising an eyebrow, leaving Callum with a rare half smile. 
“No,” Callum laughed.
“No, not at all.”