Who: Johnny Reb and Emo What: The first anniversary either of them has ever had Where: Indie's apartment When: Tuesday evening Warnings: Tooth-achingly sweet fluff? Language, adult themes, the usual for these two.
He'd never had an anniversary before. Not in the sense of an anniversary to be celebrated, anyway. There were always anniversaries of battles and the surrender and other War-related things, but those weren't happy occasions and there was nobody to commemorate them with anyway. He had had a wedding before and knew what those entailed, but for something so simple as an anniversary Johnny was completely at a loss. What was he supposed to do? Was it supposed to be some big thing, would Emo even want to do anything for it at all?
So far as a gift was concerned, Johnny had agonized over it for a solid month. What did you get for your sickeningly rich and famous boyfriend who could have anything? The idea of a rose garden came to him completely out of the blue, and for the full week leading up to the tenth, he buried himself in researching varieties of roses, growing climates in Tennessee, and gardeners who he could consider trustworthy enough to care for the flowers while they weren't there. But everything was finished and planted and photographed by Monday, and bright and early on Tuesday morning Johnny woke up and left the envelope of pictures on the kitchen counter before he took the dogs out for a walk.
The rest of the day was slow and uneventful, at least for Johnny. He played with the dogs, set up and attempted to play against himself on the chess set that had been his own gift, and eventually got up to go across town to the apartment that had belonged to both Rose twins this time last year. There was a bottle of whiskey in a bag under his arm, and he raised one hand to knock on the apartment door. For a moment everything felt exactly as it had one year ago, but he shook that off momentarily. The whiskey this time wasn't a cheap brand, but one from their own distillery. And this time, he wasn't just looking for who would drink with him and let him rant. Most importantly, this time he had no intentions of sneaking away in the night.
"You really kicked out your sister and her husband just so we could come back here for the night?" was the first thing he asked when the door was opened.