“My lord! You said you had something for me! Pray, tell me what it is before I explode!” Kurt pleaded. He leapt into his marriage bed to join his husband, bouncing on the mattress, eager as a boy half his age.

“Hold a moment, husband,” Blaine chuckled as Kurt continued to upset the blankets with his gleeful tantrum. “I cannot give you anything until you are still.”

And to that, Kurt stopped all movement and waited, nibbling at his lower lip in his excitement … a habit that fired Blaine’s blood until he thought of nothing else but tormenting that lip with his own teeth.

But that would have to wait. What he had for his husband was far too important.

It was closing in on sunrise, too late in their day to be considered early for the next since they had yet to go to sleep. They were the last two of the revelers celebrating their wedding still up and about in the manor. They had spent the day, and well into the night, after a second glorious church ceremony, rejoicing their union. They had made merry, drunk champagne, danced (as best Blaine could) arm in arm, and fed one another cake to the cheering of all. They had received, in one evening, more presents than Kurt had ever gotten in the sum total of his life. However, two presents remained unopened until after their guests had been shuffled off to their respective rooms, so that the grooms could indulge in a quiet moment of private giving. The presents they had gotten one another they felt too intimate for an audience, even of their closest friends and family.

Blaine reached a hand underneath his pillow. He looked shaken to Kurt, more so than he had standing at the altar in his fine suit, reciting his vows. But they were such beautiful vows that, had that been Blaine’s only gift to Kurt this evening, Kurt would have felt his cup overflowed. Now that the moment to receive this other present had arrived, Blaine appeared, for a second, to reconsider. After a pause, he pulled his hand out, bringing with it a rectangular velvet box.

Blaine looked at the box in his hand, and with a heavy-hearted swallow, held it out to Kurt.

“Here,” he said, a trifle uncomfortably. “I chose it myself, if that’s any consolation. Brought it all the way from London. I do hope you like it.”

Kurt stopped himself from frowning at his husband’s self-depreciating speech, at his assumption that Kurt would despise any gift he would give him, especially if he chose it himself.

“Oh, Blaine,” Kurt gushed, translating by way of intonation what he knew to be true beyond all doubt, that whatever that box contained must certainly be the most precious gift in the world. He didn’t even need to open it to declare it. “Whatever it is, I am sure I will cherish it forever.”

Kurt took the box. Blaine watched Kurt closely as he opened it. From where Blaine sat, opposite his husband, he could not see the contents of the box, but he could see Kurt’s eyes, the pinch in his brow, the wrinkle on the bridge of his nose. Those clues spoke to curiosity, they did not betray like or dislike, and Blaine found himself on edge as to what his husband’s thoughts could be.

“A … a charm bracelet?” Kurt removed the bracelet carefully and held it up to his eyes. “Whatever made you think to get me this, my lord?”

“I wanted to give you something that would remind you us,” Blaine said, scrutinizing Kurt’s unreadable expression. “Something that you could wear, or at least, carry with you. Something that you could touch if we were ever apart that would remind you that I love you. That I have always loved you.”

Kurt looked at the delicate figures dangling from their roots on the silver chain – a horse, a doll, a pencil and a book, a needle and thread.

“My mother had one just like this,” Kurt hiccupped, voice nearly lost. “I think she had most of these same charms, too.”

“Yes.” Blaine sighed, despaired. “I feared that you might think it a bit too feminine, but it was not my intention to insult or belittle you in any way. Tis only … I could not find another that I loved as much, and I …” Blaine shook his head. “Husband, please, forgive me.”

Kurt gasped. “Oh, Blaine! There is nothing to forgive, my lord! I love it!”

“Do you really?” Blaine asked, relieved, though mildly chagrined.

“Yes, really,” Kurt said, holding the bracelet gently in his hand and hugging it to his heart. “I don’t even know how to tell you how much.” Kurt raised a brow at his own remark. “Or perhaps I do. It is time for my present.” Kurt returned the bracelet to its box and climbed off the bed.

“Oh, my love,” Blaine said, watching Kurt with a blush of sentimental pride as Kurt set the box with the bracelet on his vanity among some of his most cherished belongings – his mother’s perfume bottle, his sketchbook, the oil he used to tend to Blaine’s leg, and a picture Beth drew of the three of them sitting in Kurt’s field of wisteria. “You did not need to get me anything.”

“I did,” Kurt said, returning to the bed after retrieving a long, wrapped box from beneath numerous bolts of fabric, “because you have given me so much.”

“And you have given me more in return,” Blaine parried, eyes wide that such a box could have hidden in his bed chambers in relatively plain sight and he never realized it had taken residence there.

“Shush, my lord,” Kurt scolded playfully, sliding the box on the bed in front of Blaine before taking his seat. “There is something that I have been longing to give you since the first moment you came back into my life. I would have given it to you earlier, only I did not know how. But with the help of Finn and Hunter, I think I have done it.”

“Do I even dare guess?” Blaine asked.

“No, you do not,” Kurt answered, trembling with anticipation. “So just open it and see.”

“But, you have wrapped it so masterfully, husband,” Blaine teased, toying with the seams of the fabric, pulling it apart ever so slowly. “How am I to reveal what’s inside?”

“You are to do so quickly before I tear it open with my teeth, my lord.”

Blaine’s eyes snapped up, and Kurt laughed so loudly, he was in danger of waking their daughter, asleep one room over, as well as his father, chambered down the hall.

“Alright, my love,” Blaine relented, unravelling the wrap more urgently, barely setting it aside before he got the box unlatched. The box itself was constructed of a fine, polished oak, artfully weathered as had become the style in furnishings as of late. Considering its weight, its size, and its shape, Blaine could assume that the box itself was the gift, a new coffin for his false leg since the old one was splitting from use, the latches and hinges loosened by constant moving.

When Blaine opened the lid, he could not believe his eyes.

T’was not the box, as magnificent as it was, that was his gift.

“You … you commissioned me … a new leg?” Blaine looked to Kurt with confusion, but Kurt gave him no response. “B-but … did you not repair the original one weeks before our wedding? Did you feel I needed a spare, my love?”

“Tis not a spare, but a replacement, my lord,” Kurt explained. “If you examine this one closely, I think you will find that it is slightly different. I designed this one myself,” he added shyly.

Blaine looked at the false leg in front of him. It was a fine limb, nearly identical to the first … or so Blaine thought until his eyes reached what would be considered the knee. Then his jaw fell. “How … how did you do this, husband? How did you even conceive of this?”

“It had been a thought in my mind for ever so long,” Kurt admitted. “But the how came to me one day while I watched Hunter fix one of the springs on the carriage. I had your measurements. Finn, of course, knew how to make the limb. The three of us put our heads together and managed to create this.” Kurt waited for Blaine to say something more, but the man seemed stunned to silence. “Tis only a first attempt, my lord. It may need fine tuning here and there to get it perfect, but for now … you should be better able to ride your horse, play with Beth more easily, picnic on the grounds with less pain.”

Blaine listened to his husband speak, his head shaking with wonder, his eyes alight with the scope of new possibilities. He lifted the leg from the box with reverent hands. He maneuvered it, manipulated the joint, bent it back and forth, watched the gears silently move.

“Do you know what this means, husband?” Blaine asked, breathless. He set the marvel in its box, then slid the box aside in favor of embracing his true marvel – his husband.

“I would say that it means I need worry less about you falling down the stairs. I can only guess what you would say,” Kurt laughed, surrendering to his husband’s arms, lying on his chest with his ear to his heart. “So why do you not tell me?”

“It means that I can dance with you properly, not that sad show of limping off-beat that I have been passing off so far. I can stroll with you through the gardens the way you used to with Mr. Smythe. I can make love to you” – Blaine’s voice hitched with a unique and complicated sadness - “the way you deserve. With everything that I am. You can have your husband whole.”

“You have always been whole to me, my love.”

“That’s because you are a far kinder, gentler soul than I deserve.” Blaine caressed Kurt’s cheek. He brought his husband up to face him, rested their foreheads together. Kurt thought his husband would kiss him then, but he didn’t. Instead, he breathed in the subtle scent of mint, chased by a ghost of brandy on Kurt’s lips, absorbing him as thoroughly as he could with every inhale.

Kurt smiled at his husband, at the subtle frown tilting down the corners of his mouth, and the creases in his brow that worry tilled. “Maybe I am those things, my lord. But that does not mean you do not deserve me.”

“You deserve the world, Count Anderson,” Blaine said. “And I swear on my life, on the stars and the moon above, I will find a way to give it to you.”

“I have the world. I have you and I have Beth, and you both are my world. But, one thing at a time,” Kurt whispered. “Let us first practice how to walk down the stairs.”