☆ - happy headcanon ✿ - Sex headcanon ∇ -. old age/aging headcanon ★ - sad headcanon ♡ - romantic headcanon ■ - Bedroom/house/living quarters headcanon
It wasn’t really something Nathan ever planned. He didn’t intentionally stay in their shared home office working on something for the office in Paris until two or three in the morning. He just got caught up in his work and lost track of time. She never acted like it bothered her, and he knew how invested she was in her work, so knew that she understood it was important. If he ever tried to explain, she would likely explain as much, so he never bothered. But still Nathan wanted to do something to make up for it, so one night when he found himself glancing at the clock in the office at around two thirty in the morning, he pulled on one of his growing collection of red sweaters and made his way down the street to a 24-hour shop that he’d often seen flowers sitting outside of. He found a purple vase and a bouquet of Victoria’s favorite orchids and lilies and left them on the kitchen counter with a generic heart shaped card that had ‘Love’ scrawled in some calligraphy script. He had gotten a confused reaction from her the next morning, and he only shrugged and said that he hadn’t meant to stay in his office working so late. A smile and a kiss was his reward, and they never really spoke about it after that. Whenever Nathan stayed in the office working until she was asleep, he would go get another bouquet of flowers to put in the vase. Sometimes there would be new flowers in it before the old ones died, and sometimes they would go a week without any flowers displayed on the counter. Either way though, somehow the vase always made him smile. Because when there were flowers, he knew he’d done something to make Victoria smile, and when there weren’t, he hadn’t done anything to make her unhappy that required the silent apology.
The day of the funeral was supposed to consist of a lot of things that it didn’t. There were tears from everyone else but not from Nathan, and comforting words that he only pretended to hear. Someone asked Nathan if he wanted to say anything. What was he supposed to say? He and Victoria had never really been the couple that expressed everything in words. Why should now be different? He felt like he was watching the scene from somewhere else. Watching someone else stand there beside an open casket, reaching out to brush fingers over the cold hand that bore the matching ring to his. It was someone else that Casey hugged and spoke understanding words of comfort to. Someone else’s shoulder that Coral cried against. It didn’t feel like Nathan. Nathan was just—numb. He waved off Coral’s offers to stay the night at her house, and Casey’s as well. He just wanted to go home. It wasn’t until the door shut behind him, and his eyes landed on the vase of now dead flowers on the kitchen counter that it hit him. This wasn’t home anymore. It wasn’t like he had just walked into the house alone, and Victoria was just out with one of their friends, or at the library. He wasn’t walking into an empty house that she would be returning to within a few hours. His hand was shaking as he reached up to touch one of the dried out flowers. He had bought them the morning before Victoria died. It was why they were still on the counter. She wouldn’t have kept them after the flowers started dying. She kept everything too neat and organized for that. Why had he bought them though? What had he been doing? Working on some free lance computer programming system until some odd hour in the morning, probably. Even after he retired he couldn’t fully give it up. The first tears were starting to fill his eyes. He couldn’t even remember. Hours that he’d spent closed off in his office instead of with his wife, and given her some petty flowers as some weak attempt at an apology that he couldn’t say out loud. And he couldn’t even remember what he’d fucking been working on. How many times over the years had he done that? How often had he been working on something so inane until some ungodly hour in the morning and then couldn’t even remember what it had been the next day? Hours that weren’t spent with his wife. Words that were never spoken. Nathan heard a smash and saw the shower of water, glass and dead flowers before he realized that he’d thrown the damn thing. A sob ripped from his throat as he fell to his knees, jagged shards of glass pressing through the knees of his pants, searching for skin to tear through. More tears than he’d probably cried through their entire marriage were pouring down his face. She was actually gone. No second chances, no repeats. Just gone. He couldn’t do this. He wasn’t strong enough. Victoria had always been the strong one. He didn’t know how to do this alone. He didn’t know how long he sat there, knees pulled to his chest and tears flowing, before he was reduced to dry sobs and fumbling through his pocket for his phone to call Casey and ask if the offer to stay with him was still good.
Nathan wasn’t sure when it became an annual thing, or how they chose the date that it always fell on. Maybe it had been the date Victoria had first given him that red sweater back in Australia. He didn’t remember what date that had been, but maybe Victoria remembered and made sure it was always on that day. In any case, it was the seventh year that they were finally settled in a small town and had a real place to call home. And the day was tomorrow, so Nathan called Coral as he always did. he was terrible at shopping, and never wanted to mess up their annual sweater exchange by picking out something that Victoria hated. When his best friend begged off with a hundred apologies, saying that she had plans with Jeremy, he just said that it was fine and hung up. But it wasn’t fine. There was no way he wouldn’t fuck this up. He’d never gone shopping for a sweater, or really anything else, for Victoria without Coral with him. He felt lost when he got to the mall, wandering from shop to shop not really sure what he was supposed to be looking for. A dark purple sweater caught his eyes as he made his way through one of the shops. It looked like something that Victoria would wear. He settled on the soft purple sweater, patiently ignoring the nervous hammering of his heart when he asked the cashier to gift wrap it and took it home. When he handed the box to Victoria the next day, his legs crossed under him sitting beside her on their bed, he almost wanted to take it back and say that it wasn’t right and he needed to get her something else. But then she opened the box and her eyes lit up. It was possible that she was just being nice, but Nathan had come to be able to read her very well over the years, and most of the time he could tell when her excitement over something was genuine or just being nice. When he came downstairs the next morning and saw her wearing only the sweater, he couldn’t help but smile to himself and decide that maybe he wasn’t so bad at this after all.
■ - Bedroom/house/living quarters head canon
It had taken about a year in Paris for he and Victoria to realize that they didn’t like it. Sure, the city was amazing, but they missed their friends, and the Skype calls and short visits back to the small town weren’t enough. So when they started looking for a home in the small, picturesque town, Nathan was insistent that it have an office. Victoria hadn’t argued and he hadn’t expected her to. She wanted a place for her books as well. But for Nathan, it was a necessity. He had already talked to his boss, who wanted him to stay at their main office in Paris, and had argued and fought and threatened to quit until the man had agreed to let him work from home. Sure, he would have been able to come back on weekends if he worked in Paris, but it would be long travel days and minimal hours spent with her. So his ability to stay in the town with her was hinging on whether or not they could find a proper workspace for him. Not that he had told her that. He had only mentioned offhandedly during the drive out of Paris that his boss didn’t really need him in the main office, and that he could work from home.
When they first started sleeping together, Victoria surprised Nathan more often than not. The fear that she would get bored of his minimal experience was one that was very real, though he wouldn’t admit it out loud. Something else that he’d never admit was how much time he spent searching questionable techniques and positions on the internet. Being the computer genius of the group finally came in handy, and as far as he knew, no one had ever found out. He was very good at covering his tracks.
∇ - old age/aging head canon
It started slowly. Victoria wasn’t one to admit when she needed help, so it would follow that when her hands started shaking too much to do small tasks, she wouldn’t ask for help. If she noticed that Nathan started doing things like opening jars and cans for her before she reached for them, she didn’t say anything about it. So it only fell to logic that when the effects of aging started to hit him, she became patient with him as well. When he tried to tell her about a movie he had gone to see with Casey or Coral, and couldn’t recall the name of it, or when he got behind the wheel of the car and just sat there staring blankly ahead because he couldn’t remember how to get to the restaurant he’d planned to take her to. She would just change the subject, or offer to drive, and try to make him laugh by making a joke out of it. At some point, the jokes turned to something like, “I don’t care if you can’t remember what you ate for dinner last night, so long as you don’t forget the wife that made it for you.” He never knew if she was joking or if she was honestly worried about that happening.