Faye and Ed sat on the couch. Faye was filing her nails, and Ed was flipping channels. They stopped on the gardening channel for just a second, and both of their eyes widened.
"That's it." They both squealed simultaneously. The TV showed a miniature garden. Bonsai trees were lined up in a circle. Small bridges connected them, and in the middle was a small area of sand and a fountain. Little paper lanterns hung over the bridges and lit up the garden. The water from the fountain ran under the bridges and little pebble roads connected the trees on the mossy ground area. Playing amongst the mosses were gnomes.
"We have to make that for Jet. He would love it." Faye had been looking for something special that she and Ed could do for Jet's upcoming birthday.
He'd done a good job with Edward's 14th birthday, despite lack of funds. He baked a chocolate cake with chocolate icing. He used purple icing to write "Happy Birthday, Edward" on it. Purple is Ed's favorite color. He bought her a unicorn stuffed animal and a box of rainbow glitter gel pens. Faye got her two pair of socks with glitter butterflies on them. Edward had never had a real birthday party before that.
They'd had more money around the time of Faye's birthday. For her birthday, the crew had gone out for Chinese food. He had also made her a chocolate cake. Her name was written on it in pink icing, not because pink was her favorite color, but because he thought she would look good in pink. Her presents were a small bottle of apple scented perfume and a pale pink sweater. The sweater wasn't really her style, but it was classic looking, so she figured she'd wear it eventually. If nothing else, she needed to wear it once to make him happy. The perfume was one she'd looked at in the mall. The scent reminded her of apple pie, which made her feel like home. Ed had given her glitter lip gloss and a matching nail polish.
She felt kind of guilty accepting the presents. "He's too nice to me," she thought. "All the times that I've stolen money, and threatened not to come back, yet I still get birthday presents."
On Spike's birthday, they didn't have that much money. Still Jet managed to scrounge together a couple of things to make the day special. Spike didn't really like chocolate, so instead his cake was a plain white cake. Jet and Ed decided to get creative with the plain vanilla icing and dye it blue. Then they put rainbow sprinkles on top. 28 candles were also placed on the cake. He never used candles on Ed's cake because he was afraid she might be a pyromaniac. With Faye, it was because he was unsure how old she actually was. It was either 23 or 24, not counting her fifty years in hibernation. He didn't use candles because he figured she'd yell at him if he got it wrong. He thought she was 24, however.
Spike's presents were a bottle of mid-grade whiskey, a pack of cigarettes, and a really neat looking lighter with a dragon on it. The girls went in together on a bottle of cologne because they couldn't stand the cheap stuff that he currently wore.
Faye thought they needed to try as hard as possible to do something spectacular for Jet because of everything he did for them simply out of habit. She knew he sacrificed a lot to take care of them, even though he didn't show it.
Faye began sketching how she wanted the trees set up almost immediately. Jet currently owned seven trees, however, the design Faye wanted to follow called for nine. It also called for seven bridges, nine gnomes, and a fountain in the center. They wouldn't be able to do the gravel and sand in the middle because they didn't want to mess up Jet's Bonsai by transplanting them. They intended to connect the pots with the bridges, and to create a courtyard for the fountain in the middle between the pots. All of this would be set up on a large wooden platform. A little gnome would be placed on the moss next to each tree. So nine gnomes and a fountain had to be purchased along with the two additional trees.
Then there was the matter of the paper lanterns. Ed said they should use christmas lights instead, but finding a power source could prove to be difficult. How could they light miniature paper lanterns to hang over their bridges? Faye's design took her a week to sketch out, in order to get the details for the garden perfect both in her mind and on paper.
Birthdays almost always hold expectations for people, but not for Jet. Other than being thankful for being alive another year, he didn't give it much thought. He made so much effort to make the others' so special because he felt their loneliness and lack of family ties. He enjoyed paying attention to others; it made him happy to know that he was taking care of their emotional needs as best he could. Every other day of the year, they may have felt isolated, but damn it, on their birthdays they were going to feel special. Maybe it was because he'd had so many good birthdays. Of course, before he'd had friends and even family. All that changed when he lost his arm, left ISSP, and began traveling the long lonely road as a bounty hunter. It'd been five years since then, five birthdays alone.