A/N: Please note that there's double update today – it's 2/1

About Happiness

When Grant was nine, he had to write an essay for school entitled "I think happiness is…" He remembers sitting over the empty sheet of paper for an hour, having absolutely no clue what to write. After all, what was happiness? He just couldn't pinpoint out one single event or occurrence that that evoked a strong enough feeling in him that he could have called happiness.

In the end, he wrote things about how happiness was being good enough, not embarrassing your family, and being safe. He also included that it was playing in his room – he didn't add that it was because Christian left him alone there, because that would have fallen under the category of "embarrassing the family."

"You don't talk about your problems, you deal with them," his mother used to say, glass of brandy in her hand.

He got a B minus. The teacher wrote that he had very mature ideas, but his sentence structure was weak, and the text felt forced, rushed – she advised him to spend more time on writing a piece in the future.

He thought about this homework a couple of times in the following years – in the woods, at the academy, while on mission –, and he came to the conclusion none of the people he met, the places he'd been to, or the things he experienced, made him happy. That feeling was still foreign to him. But he made peace with this, as much as he could – he reasoned with himself that some people just weren't destined for happiness, and he was one of them. And maybe after all he'd done, he didn't even deserve it.

(Helping John and repaying him was more important than chasing happiness, anyway.)

But in the end, he did find it – he is past thirty when it happens, and the elation he feels every single moment of every single day completely astonishes him, and sometimes he still feels like he doesn't deserve it, but he is happy.

If he had to write that that essay – the one that caused him so much headache at nine – now, he would go somehow like this:

Happiness is having a messy house with boxes and bags and things you have no idea why you have and where they come from. It's a girl with wide, dark eyes and a joyous smile, always teasing you. It's fleeting touches and stolen kisses. It's having a nap in the middle of the day amongst the mess. It's curling up together on the couch, because there's no bed yet. It's holding her close and never letting go, and listening to her breathe as her face is nuzzled against his chest. It's her arm around his middle, and his leg thrown over her waist, anchoring each other. It's an unruly shelter dog, as lost and in need of a family as they were once, climbing onto the back of the couch and looking down at them, her tail wiggling.

It's bad takeout eaten in candlelight – because they have no lightbulbs yet – on the floor – because they still have to buy a table. It's talking well into the night about the future, making silly plans, like putting up a swing in the backyard and painting the living room turquoise and planting a tree and filling the house with children's laughter. It's making love long and slow in the soft pre-dawn light, whispering sentimental nonsense.

It's having friends over, being loud and making jokes – pranking, and laughing like crazy when somebody gets drenched or drops something on their foot. It's sharing beers and old stories, sitting on the porch instead of putting furniture together. It's having her in his lap, leaning against him, drawing nonsensical patterns on his chest, her eyelids dropping, but still smiling about some silly anecdote.

If he had to write that essay now, he would get an A, he's sure.