to you, i’ll give the world
The first anniversary gift is paper. Well, it’s paper in the United States, and that’s where Brittany and Santana Lopez-Pierce live. Honestly, it was not something that Brittany even cared about it any of the first million times that she heard about it. People talk all the time twenty five is supposed to be silver and fifty is gold.
It’s kind of cool to think about fifty years. One of the amazing things about getting married at nineteen is that, in fifty years, they’ll won’t even be 70. Well, they’ll be 69--wanky--so not that far off, but it’s still close. Fifty years seems utterly achievable.
The shitty thing about getting married at nineteen is that buying anniversary presents on a twenty year old student’s salary is next to impossible. But, luckily, even when things are rough because Brittany’s classes are hard and Santana gets snippy when she’s stressed and the jobs they have to work are irritating at best and degrading at worst, even when the sink is clogged again and neither of them have the energy to cook or the spare cash for take out, at the end of the day, they have each other and the love language they’ve been wearing into each other since before they had the words to call it that.
It means that when Santana sits down on the other side of the table, back held a little too straight, hand placed just so on the edge of the table, legs crossed primly at the ankle and eyes tracking along the (ratty, worn, and slightly crooked) cabinets in their kitchen, Brittany pays attention. Santana wants to say something that matters, but she doesn’t want to admit that it matters to her.
“I saw this article today…” she begins, the tips of her fingers rippling, belaying just a touch of the energy she’s feeling.
“Yeah?” Brittany says, maintaining her own casual air, so as to not scare Santana away from the idea that she’s been growing.
“Yeah. It was about the gifts you get for people. You know, for each of their anniversaries. It was talking about how in the UK it’s cotton for the first year, but it’s paper here.” Her eyes flash towards Brittany’s for just a moment, brown and deep and Brittany has to try to not kiss her.
“Paper, huh?” Brittany says, anything more clever delayed for a moment by how pretty her wife is, and the fact that she actually gets to call her my wife.
“Yeah. Kinda silly, huh?” Santana says.
“Kinda cool,” Brittany counters with a grin. The sun comes out with Santana’s dimples, an understanding passing between them.
At first, finding something paper seems impossible, but soon Brittany realizes the problem is that she’s spending too much time trying to think about it the way a typical person would. She’s got to let herself think outside of the box.
It’s getting uncomfortably close when she realizes that photographs are printed on paper. By their anniversary (bitterly biting cold, more than a foot of snow dumped on the ground), she’s got a wrapped frame in the back of the spare closet. University is cancelled, the universe giving them their own little present, but they wouldn’t have gone anyway. Instead, they spend the morning in the cool grey light that filters through heavy clouds, an air thick with fat snowflakes, and the gauzy cream colored curtains that Santana had picked out when the first moved in.
Much of the morning is filled with the press of mouths and fingers, skin rosy pink with need and heat, slick and sweat and a slow burn of passion. Some of it is just the peace of lying close enough to feel each other’s hearts thrumming through chests and fingers, the rise and fall of lungs, and the steady beat of life and love. Eventually, they’re hungry in a way that they can’t satisfy by making love, so they pull on sweatpants and oversized sweaters (and thick wool socks for Santana, who’s always a little cold, and thin ones with cat faces for Brittany, who needs a bit of whimsy) and scrounge up breakfast.
True, it’s more kissing than cooking, but by the end, they’ve had plenty.
They end up fielding a few phone calls--their parents, Santana’s abuela, Brittany’s sister. Mercedes and Sam, Mike, Quinn, Sugar, and a few of their school friends have texted or made posts on instagram, so they respond to those as well.
Then, they might as well do presents, so Brittany pulls out the package and Santana climbs on a chair to pull a perfectly wrapped present from one of their less-used cupboards. It’s obvious what Brittany’s present is, but it doesn’t change the delight and emotion on Santana’s face when she unwraps a large photo of the two of them. It’s from their honeymoon. Brittany had snapped hundreds of pictures, but this had been one of her favorites from the moment that it had come up on the screen.
Brittany had set the camera on the bar of the restaurant they were in (with the assurance of their neighbor that he’d keep an eye on it), and set the camera to go off every twenty seconds or so. Then, they danced to the music. It’d been a slow song, and Brittany couldn’t help forgetting the camera, just pulling Santana into her. In the photo, she’d been pressing a kiss to Santana’s forehead, eyelashes and sunshine freckles stark in the black and white print. Santana’s dimples were sunk deep into her cheek, her face was peaceful and happy, and her dark eyes, liquid pools, were staring straight at the camera. They looked utterly happy, a moment of joy and tranquility in the chaos around them.
They kiss for long enough that Brittany almost forgets she has her own present to open. It’s a beautiful planner/journal, a sky blue leather cover held closed with a golden ribbon and Brittany is already in awe of it, until Santana encourages her to open it, and she finds that Santana has littered the entire calendar with small words of encouragement for her. Special dates are wreathed in hearts or the cutest little birthday cakes. She lets it fall open to a random week and finds, in Santana’s neat writing: Never forget how much I love you. You are the most brilliant person I know, and anyone who doesn’t understand that isn’t smart enough to see it.
They’re both a little teary eyed by the end, and a new tradition is born.
The second year is cotton, so they talk about it and decide to get away from the chill of New York for a week, buying each other cotton sundresses that they wear on the beaches of Mexico.
The third year is leather. Brittany goes out of the box and buys them tickets to see Fleetwood Mac in concert. They are the guardian angels of their relationship after all. Santana goes into the gutter and buys them a couple of things that result in a really great time.
The fourth year, Brittany knows what she wants to do, and it’s not something she can surprise Santana with. A few weeks before their anniversary, she asks Santana if she’d get a tattoo together. Santana thinks about it and does her research, but she ends up agreeing.
They work with the artist to create a delicate tattoo of tiny blue hydrangeas, white lilies, and, at the heart of it, a little songbird. Brittany gets it on the inside of her wrist, Santana on the back of her shoulder.
It hurts, but it’s manageable, particularly because the other one spends the whole time holding her wife’s hand and talking her through it.
After, they go to get ice cream: strawberry for Santana and pineapple-banana-blueberry for Brittany. Santana can't stop admiring Brittany’s tattoo, hers covered by the sweater she has on to keep out the chill of ice cream and February air.
“It’s going to be hard to top this next year,” Brittany says around a mouthful of strawberry she stole from Santana. She notices the shift in Santana’s posture at her comment. They’re sitting on the same side of the table and Brittany has her left arm resting on the back of Santana’s chair, the right one with her sleeve pushed up digging into ice cream and gesturing with the spoon.
Even if they weren’t so close, another four years has made Brittany even more adept at catching that straight back, her eyes adverting, the too-carefully-casual appearance of nonchalance. Santana has something important to say.
“I don’t know, I had an idea,” Santana said, scraping carefully at the edge of her ice cream to keep a drip of pink ice cream from falling to the table. “Fifth year is wood, so--” she paused to take a breath, “--what about a crib?”
The pink drop made its escape, falling to the table, but Santana didn’t notice, too deep in a kiss with her wife.
