Chapter 25: The Problem of the Gift

The quiet peace of the previous night settled into the bones of their apartment, a tangible calm that lingered through the morning after Pieck left for the Foreign Office. Stefan moved through the familiar rooms with a sense of settled purpose, the ritual of maintaining their sanctuary feeling less like a duty and more like a natural extension of breathing. Her study, however, always demanded a specific kind of attention.

He stood before her heavy oak desk, a stack of completed treaty drafts in his hands. The papers were dense with the dry, precise language of borders and tariffs, each page initialed in Pieck’s looping script at the bottom. Filing them was part of his unofficial portfolio, a way of translating the monumental into the manageable. He opened the top drawer of her filing cabinet, the one reserved for closed matters, and began slotting each accord into its designated folder. The system was his own design, chronological by ratification date with cross-references for participating nations. It worked.

As he reached for the next folder, his fingers brushed against a stiff leather folio tucked at the very back of the drawer, behind the hanging files. It wasn’t where it belonged. He pulled it out, recognizing the dark blue cover stamped with the Marleyan eagle—her official identification and travel documents. Probably shoved there hastily after her last return from Paradis, forgotten in the rush of more immediate concerns.

He opened it out of habit, just to ensure everything was in order. Her diplomatic passport was there, its pages thick with visas. Beneath it lay her national identification card. He scanned the details out of professional reflex: name, citizenship number, place of birth. His eyes caught on the date of birth field.

He blinked.

Then he looked at the small calendar blotter on her desk, its current page showing the month. He counted forward silently from today’s date, his mind performing a simple subtraction.

Her birthday was in nine days.

The realization landed in his stomach with a soft, cold thud. He just stood there for a long moment, holding the folio, staring at the numbers printed in official ink. Nine days. How had he not known? They’d been together sixteen months, through seasons and separations and countless quiet mornings. He knew the exact way she took her tea, the specific spot on her lower back that always knotted up after a long flight, the novel she’d been meaning to read for a year. But her birthday? The date had never come up. Not in any conversation he could recall. She’d never mentioned it, not once. Maybe she didn’t celebrate it. Maybe, for someone whose youth was measured in military deployments and whose adulthood was consumed by peacekeeping, marking the passage of a personal year felt trivial. Or maybe it was a private grief, tied to memories of a family lost long before he entered her life.

But he knew now. And knowing created an obligation that immediately curdled into a low-grade panic.

He carefully returned the folio to its proper place in the front of the drawer, his movements suddenly deliberate. Closing the drawer felt like sealing a vault. He finished filing the treaties on autopilot, his mind already racing ahead of his hands.

What did you get for Pieck Finger?

The question echoed in the silent study, bouncing off the shelves of law books and framed maps. Flowers? The image was laughable. Presenting a bouquet to the woman who negotiated cease-fires felt like offering a toy sword to a general. Jewelry? She wore so little of it, just simple stud earrings and sometimes a thin chain that usually ended up tucked under her collar by midday. A new piece would just be another object to keep track of, another thing to secure during travel. Perfume? She had a scent—clean soap, the faint trace of his sandalwood oil from last night’s bath, sometimes the crisp paper-and-ink smell of her work. Adding something else would be an intrusion, not a gift.

Every traditional option he mentally presented withered under scrutiny. They were all wrong. They were gifts for a civilian woman, for a girlfriend who existed in a normal world. Pieck wasn’t normal. She was… Pieck. The ambassador who could dismantle a hostile argument with a softly spoken question. The lover who traced his bruises like they were sacred text. The woman who carried the ghost of a war machine in her bones and built bridges with her bare hands. What object in any shop in Liberio could possibly hold meaning for her?

The panic tightened its grip, shifting from a cold thud to a buzzing anxiety behind his eyes. This wasn’t just about forgetting a date. This was about failing to understand something fundamental. If he gave her the wrong thing—something trivial, something expected—it would sit between them as proof of a gap in his perception. It would mean he saw only the ambassador or only the lover, not the complex, weary whole of her. The fear was irrational, maybe, but it felt real enough to dry his mouth.

He needed advice. Not generic advice from a shopkeeper or some magazine list. He needed perspective from someone who knew the terrain he was navigating.

The list of candidates was brutally short. Armin would think about it intellectually, analytically, which wasn’t what Stefan needed. Jean or Reiner or Connie would default to well-meaning but simplistic suggestions—a nice dinner, a bottle of expensive liquor. They knew Pieck as a comrade and a friend, but they didn’t see the quiet tiredness she brought home and laid at his feet like a heavy coat.

There was really only one person.

Annie Leonhart knew things without having them explained. She operated on a different frequency, one that picked up on subtext and unspoken truths. She had seen Pieck as a Warrior, understood the weight of that history, and now observed her as… whatever Pieck was becoming here in Liberio with him. Annie had given her tacit approval weeks ago in Pieck’s office with that blunt “he lets you be… just Pieck.” If anyone could see past the titles and the trappings to the core of what might actually matter, it would be her.

The decision crystallized with a sense of grim relief. He would ask Annie.

Finding her was its own small mission. She wasn’t in Pieck’s office wing, obviously. The administrative staff hadn’t seen her. He checked the main cafeteria first, scanning the crowded tables for her distinctive pale blonde hair, but she wasn’t among the clerks and junior diplomats eating their midday meals.

He remembered then that she often took her lunch outside when the weather permitted, seeking solitude over society. The Foreign Office complex had several small interior gardens, pockets of manicured greenery walled off from the city’s noise. He tried the nearest one—a formal rose garden popular with secretaries—and found it occupied by chattering groups.

The second garden was smaller and less cultivated, just a rectangle of lawn bordered by hedges with a single stone bench under a young birch tree. This one was usually empty.

Today, it wasn’t.

Annie sat on the far end of the bench, her posture straight but not rigid. She held a simple wax-paper packet in one hand, from which she was methodically eating what looked like a bread roll filled with cheese or cold meat. She wasn’t reading. She wasn’t looking at anything in particular, just staring across the lawn at the brick wall on the other side as she chewed. The scene was so profoundly ordinary it felt almost staged—a woman eating lunch alone in a patch of sun.

Stefan paused at the arched entrance to the garden, suddenly aware of intruding on a private ritual. But he was already here. Turning back now would be more awkward than proceeding.

He walked across the grass, his footsteps silent on the damp turf. She didn’t look up until he was about ten feet away, then her pale blue eyes slid toward him with no particular surprise.

“Stefan,” she said around a mouthful of bread. It wasn’t a greeting so much as an identification.

“Annie.” He stopped a polite distance from the bench. “Sorry to interrupt your lunch.”

She finished chewing and swallowed before answering. “You are interrupting it.” There was no malice in the statement; it was just a fact.

“I know.” He shifted his weight slightly, feeling foolish standing there like a petitioner. “I… wondered if I could ask you something.”

She looked at him for another long moment, then gave a single short nod toward the empty space on the bench beside her.

He sat down carefully, leaving a good foot of stone between them. The garden was quiet except for the distant hum of city traffic beyond the walls and the chatter of sparrows in the birch tree above them.

“The weather’s holding up,” he said because he had to start somewhere.

Annie took another bite of her roll and glanced up at the sky as if verifying his claim. “It is.”

“These gardens are nice,” he tried again, gesturing vaguely at the hedges.

“They’re gardens.” She finished her roll and neatly folded the wax paper into a small square, tucking it into her coat pocket.

The small talk had exhausted itself completely after two attempts. Stefan took a breath and decided to just say it.

“It’s Pieck’s birthday soon,” he said quietly.

Annie’s head turned toward him more fully now, her expression still unreadable but her attention fully engaged.

“I didn’t know until today,” he continued before she could comment on that failure. “And now I know, and I have no idea what to do about it.” He spread his hands slightly in a gesture of helplessness that felt too dramatic even as he made it. “Flowers are wrong. Jewelry is wrong. I can’t… I don’t know what you give to someone like her.”

He stopped talking then because he’d laid out the problem as clearly as he could without sounding completely pathetic.

Annie didn’t speak immediately either. She just looked at him with that flat, assessing gaze that seemed to take in more than just his face. The silence stretched long enough for him to hear another sparrow land on the bench near her end before fluttering away again.

Finally, she spoke.

“You’re thinking about it wrong,” she said flatly.

Stefan waited for elaboration that didn’t come immediately as Annie brushed an invisible crumb from her lap onto the grass below them both without breaking eye contact with him once during this small action before continuing where she left off before pausing briefly between sentences again now readying herself perhaps mentally preparing what needed saying next anyway regardless whether anyone else understood why such pauses existed within conversations sometimes especially when dealing with complicated subjects like gift-giving for former Titans turned ambassadors who also happened secretly dating ex-police officers turned househusbands apparently needing advice from former Female Titans currently eating cheese rolls on stone benches during lunch breaks obviously enough already so let's get on with it then shall we?

He waited for her to elaborate. She didn’t.

“Wrong how?” he finally prompted, when it became clear she considered her statement complete.

Annie shifted on the bench, turning her body slightly more toward him though her expression remained impassive. “You’re looking for a thing. A trophy.” She said the word with a faint distaste, as if it were a type of insect. “Something she can put on a shelf or wear on her wrist. A physical object to mark the occasion.”

Stefan opened his mouth to argue, then closed it. That was exactly what he’d been doing, mentally rifling through a catalog of objects. He gave a small, conceding nod.

“Pieck doesn’t need more things,” Annie continued, her voice low and matter-of-fact. “Her life is full of things. Reports, treaties, briefing papers, formalwear, gifts from foreign dignitaries that she has to log and store for propriety’s sake. Things are clutter. They’re obligations in physical form.”

The assessment was so brutally accurate it made his earlier panic seem childish. Of course she didn’t need another object. Their apartment was a curated space precisely because she needed simplicity, a blank canvas against the ornate chaos of her public life.

“What does she need, then?” he asked, the question genuine now, stripped of its earlier frantic energy.

Annie looked past him again, her gaze going distant as she considered the question. It wasn’t that she was searching for an answer; she was deciding how much of one to give. “She needs less,” she said finally.

“Less?”

“Less ambassador.” Annie’s eyes came back to his, sharp and clear. “For a day. Less schedules. Less talking. Less thinking. Less deciding.”

The words landed one after another, each one a quiet revelation. Less ambassador. The phrase echoed in his mind, unpacking itself. Pieck was never not the ambassador, not really. Even in their sanctuary, the weight of it lingered in the set of her shoulders, in the way she sometimes fell silent mid-sentence, her thoughts clearly tracking back to some unresolved clause or a diplomat’s suspiciously friendly overture. She was always calculating, always negotiating, even if only with herself.

“A day where she doesn’t have to make a single decision,” Annie clarified, as if reading the direction of his thoughts. “Where everything is just… done for her. Not because she’s incapable, but because someone else decided to do it. For no reason other than it being her day.”

The simplicity of it was staggering. It wasn’t about grand gestures or expensive tokens. It was about creating space. An empty pocket of time where the relentless engine of her duty could be switched off, not by her own exhausting willpower, but by his deliberate design.

He thought of her coming home from Odiha, shattered. He thought of her tracing his bruises last night with a touch that sought absolution. She was always giving, always pouring herself into the cracked vessel of the world, trying to mend it drop by drop. The idea of giving her a day where she only had to receive—not gifts, but care—felt like the opposite of a trophy. It felt like an antidote.

“You mean like… I handle everything,” he said slowly, working it out aloud. “The meals. The schedule. Everything. She just… exists.”

Annie gave a single, shallow nod. “She exists as Pieck. Not as Ambassador Finger. Not as the Cart Titan. Not as your girlfriend who has to be any particular way. Just… her. Without the burden of choice.”

It sounded like a profound kind of luxury. For someone who spent every waking moment making choices that affected nations, the freedom from even the smallest decision—what to eat, what to wear, what to do next—must feel like a vacation for her soul.

“But she likes control,” Stefan pointed out, thinking of the fierce possession in her touch, the way she orchestrated their private moments with such specific intent.

“She has to have control,” Annie corrected bluntly. “There’s a difference. Letting go of it is a different kind of strength. It’s trust.” She paused, her gaze drifting to a sparrow pecking at the grass. “She trusts you enough for that. Probably only you.”

The truth of that settled over him, warm and heavy. It wasn’t about taking control away from her; it was about offering a context where she could safely relinquish it, knowing he would hold the space for her without agenda or expectation.

“So no asking ‘what do you want to do?’” he mused. “No.” “No ‘are you hungry?’ or ‘should we go out?’” “No.” “Just… a silent itinerary.” “If you want to call it that.” Annie’s tone suggested the word ‘itinerary’ was still too close to the world of schedules she was advocating against.

He pictured it: Pieck waking up to breakfast already made, to clothes laid out not for a statement but for comfort, to a day with no appointments beyond perhaps a walk he’d already planned, to meals whose menus were a surprise she didn’t have to contemplate. A day where her only job was to be present in her own skin.

The concept was beautiful in its austerity. It was also terrifying in its responsibility. Getting it wrong wouldn’t mean giving a bad gift; it would mean creating a day of subtle frustration, of her feeling managed instead of cared for, trapped instead of freed.

“It has to be perfect,” he said quietly, more to himself than to Annie. “It won’t be,” she replied with her typical lack of sentimentality. “Something will go off-script. The weather will change. She’ll get a headache. The point isn’t perfection.” She stood up from the bench, brushing invisible crumbs from her trousers. “The point is the attempt. The fact that you tried to build her a day without corners to navigate.” She looked down at him, her expression still neutral but her words carrying a final weight. “She’ll understand the attempt.”

With that, she gave him another brief nod—a punctuation mark on the conversation—and turned to walk back across the garden toward the arched exit, her lunch break evidently concluded.

Stefan remained on the stone bench, the cold of it seeping through his trousers now that he was sitting alone. The buzzing panic was gone, replaced by a deep, focused calm. The problem had been reframed entirely. He wasn’t shopping for a present; he was designing an experience. He was building a temporary sanctuary within their permanent one.

Less ambassador.

He turned the phrase over in his mind as he watched Annie disappear through the archway. It wasn’t about negating who she was or what she did. It was about honoring the person underneath all that, the one who got quietly tired, who cherished stolen toast, who needed a bath drawn for her with sandalwood oil after a hard emotional reckoning.

He stood up from the bench, his mind already beginning to catalog their home with new eyes—not as a place to maintain, but as a stage to be set. He needed to plan not an event, but an atmosphere. Every detail would need intention behind it: the texture of the towels he laid out for her, the specific book left on the side table with a bookmark already placed partway through (one he knew she’d been meaning to read but never found the uninterrupted time for), the blend of afternoon tea that soothed her throat after too much talking.

He walked back through the Foreign Office corridors slowly now instead of with his earlier anxious purpose. The calculated tension that had defined his morning—the tension of a problem with no solution—had transformed into a different kind of tension altogether: the precise, deliberate tension of an architect reviewing blueprints.

He had nine days. He knew what he needed to build. Now he just had to build it perfectly imperfectly

The simplicity of the idea was its own profound revelation. It bypassed the entire economy of gift-giving—the price tags, the wrapping, the performative gratitude—and went straight to the core of what he could actually offer her: a suspension of her reality. A day where she didn’t have to be the one holding everything together. A day where everything was done for her, not out of duty to her office, but simply because she was his.

The clarity of it felt like a key sliding into a lock he hadn’t known was there.

“Thank you, Annie,” he said to her retreating back, the words heartfelt.

She didn’t turn around, just lifted a hand in a brief, dismissive wave without breaking stride before she vanished through the garden arch. The conversation was over. She had delivered her diagnosis and her prescription in under five minutes and had now returned to whatever passed for her own thoughts. He was left with the blueprint.

He sat for a few minutes longer in the quiet garden, letting the plan take root. The sparrows argued in the birch tree. A distant bell tolled the hour from a city clock tower. Less ambassador. The directive wasn’t just about activities; it was about energy. He needed to engineer a day of pure, passive reception. A day where Pieck was the subject of gentle, pre-determined action, not the author of it.

He finally stood, his movements deliberate now instead of anxious, and made his way out of the Foreign Office complex. The walk back to their harbor-side apartment usually took twenty minutes. Today it felt shorter, his mind racing ahead of his feet, already crossing the threshold and seeing their home not as a lived-in space but as raw material.

He unlocked the door and stepped inside. The afternoon sun slanted through the west-facing windows, painting long rectangles of gold on the wooden floor. He stopped just inside the living room and just looked.

He saw it all with new eyes.

The couch wasn’t just a piece of furniture where they sometimes read; it was a potential station for mandated idleness, needing the right blanket and pillow arrangement. The armchair by the window wasn’t just a chair; it was a viewing platform for harbor traffic, requiring a cleared sill and perhaps a cushion for the small of her back. Their bedroom wasn’t just where they slept; it was a launchpad for a day of non-decisions, meaning he would need to select her clothes the night before and lay them out without consultation.

He walked slowly to her study, but this time he didn’t open a filing drawer. He took a fresh sheet of paper from her desk and a pencil. At the top, he wrote a single word: Day. Then he drew a vertical line down the center of the page.

This wasn’t a schedule. Schedules were Pieck’s domain, things she managed with ruthless efficiency. This was an itinerary of care, a silent script where she was the audience, not the stage manager.

He started with the morning, because mornings set the tone. She usually woke before him, her mind already clicking through the day’s obligations even as her eyes opened. That had to stop.

Wake-up, let her wake up naturally and sleep in he wrote on the left side. On the right, he began to list components.

• • Breakfast in bed. Not a question.* He considered what that breakfast should be. Something comforting, not elaborate. Something that said this is for nourishment and pleasure, not fuel for negotiations. Her favorite was soft scrambled eggs on buttered toast, with a slice of tomato on the side. Simple. He could manage that. A pot of her preferred morning tea—the black blend with a hint of bergamot, not too strong.
• • No papers. No news.* The radio would stay off. The stack of overnight diplomatic cables that usually appeared by their door would be intercepted and hidden in his own desk drawer upstairs. The world could wait for twenty-four hours.

Post-breakfast, he wrote next. This was trickier. She wasn’t good at unstructured time. Left to her own devices with no demands, she would inevitably find some work to do, some minor domestic task to optimize. He needed to provide a gentle channel for her energy.

• • Prepared bath?* Too much like the other night, maybe. That had been about purification after an emotional storm. This needed to be lighter. Still need for cleaning purposes
• • Reading nook established.* Yes. He would create a specific spot for her. The armchair by the window, with the good reading lamp pulled close. But she wouldn’t have to choose a book. That was another decision. He would select one for her and place it there with a bookmark already inserted partway through, a silent invitation to begin where he had chosen for her. Which book? Not work-related history or political theory. Fiction. Something absorbing but not taxing. There was that novel about a lighthouse keeper she’d bought months ago after hearing Armin mention it, still sitting unread on her nightstand. That would do.

Lunch, he wrote. Again, no questions. He would make it and present it. Something light but satisfying. A salad with those berries she liked, and maybe a hot onion soup if the day was cold. Eaten at the small kitchen table, with the window open to hear the gulls and the harbor sounds.

The afternoon was the longest stretch, the hardest to fill without creating pressure.

• • Optional walk,* he jotted down, then immediately scratched out ‘optional.’ It couldn’t be optional; optional meant she had to decide yes or no. It would be presented as a fact: I'm taking you for a walk at 3 p.m. The route would be predetermined—not their usual brisk circuit for errands, but the meandering path along the less-commercial western edge of the harbor, where they could watch fishing boats unload without having to talk to anyone. And he will give her a red rose as a gift
• • Afternoon tea at 4:30.* This was non-negotiable. He knew the ritual soothed her like nothing else. He would use the delicate porcelain set she’d inherited from her mother, the one that lived on the high shelf and only came down for what she called ‘severe calm.’ And not just any tea. The particular blend she saved for headaches and deep weariness—a mix of chamomile, lemon verbena, and a touch of lavender from Paradis that a delegate had given her as a personal gift last year. He would prepare it silently and bring it to her wherever she had settled.

He paused, tapping the pencil against the paper. Was this too controlling? Too rigid? It felt like he was planning a military operation for a very sensitive asset.

Then he remembered Annie’s words: The point is the attempt. Pieck would read the intent behind the structure. She would see the meticulous care not as confinement, but as a holding pattern, a net strung beneath her so she could finally stop calculating her own footing.

Evening, he wrote. Dinner presented another challenge. Cooking something complex might make it feel like an event she had to perform appreciation for. Ordering in felt impersonal.

• • Simple dinner. Her favorite stew?* He made it on slow afternoons sometimes, the rich beef and root vegetable one that simmered for hours and made the whole apartment smell like safety. Yes. He could start it in the late morning so its aroma would permeate the day itself, a constant, low-level promise of comfort to come. They would eat by candlelight, not for romance in the typical sense, but to soften edges, to define the dining space as separate from the world of electric lights and official business.

After dinner, he left blank. No plans beyond perhaps sitting together on the couch. No expectation of conversation or intimacy unless she initiated it. His role was to be available, attuned, but not demanding. A fixed point in the quiet.

He looked down at his notes. It was a map of a day with no destinations, only atmospheres. A itinerary of passive reception: favorite foods, pre-selected entertainment, predetermined movements, all chosen with her specific quiet tiredness in mind.

The goal wasn’t excitement or surprise. The goal was profound uneventfulness. The goal was to give her nothing to manage, not even her own leisure.

He set the pencil down and leaned back in her desk chair, looking around the study that was usually an annex of her formidable mind. For the next nine days, it would become his workshop. He would need to procure ingredients discreetly—the specific tea blend from its hiding place, the novel from her nightstand without her noticing its absence. He would need to ensure no work crises were scheduled for that day, which might require discreetly checking her office calendar later in the week and perhaps planting a suggestion with Jean or Armin about keeping the day clear without explaining why.

The work of it felt good. It felt like service translated into strategy, devotion expressed through logistics.

He folded the paper and tucked it into his own pocket, not hers. This plan was his operation alone. Standing up, he walked back into the living room and looked at the armchair by the window again, already visualizing the exact placement of the book and the angle of the lamp.

He had nine days to learn how to build silence around her. He had nine days to prepare a gift that wasn’t a thing at all, but an empty space shaped exactly like peace. And for the first time since seeing that date on her identification card, he felt not panic, but purpose