Work Text:
“Darling, can you open my computer and send me the document for the Scrafton proposal? I forgot to upload it to the shared drive last night.”
As Anthony spoke, Kate made her way up the stairs to his office and sat down to turn on his computer. She put her phone on speaker and set it on the desk.
“Okay, what do I have to do?” she asked as she entered the password.
“Scrafton, it’s somewhere on my desktop,” her husband explained. “It’s a PDF, and there should be a purple tag.”
Kate hummed in concentration as her eyes scoured the countless folders, files, and other documents on the desktop. Unable to locate what she was looking for, she typed in the first few letters of the document’s name in the search bar and among the results, saw one that intrigued her: “Scrapbook.”
How odd, she thought, but kept looking.
“Found it! I’m sending it to your work email, let me know if you received it,” Kate said as she dragged the PDF into a new message window.
“Yeah, got it!” Anthony answered some twenty seconds later. “Great, thank you, my love.”
“I love you,” Kate said in a sing-song voice.
She could hear how he smiled as he spoke. “I love you too. See you tonight.”
“Bye.”
Once the call ended, she immediately went back to find the mysterious folder from earlier. She couldn’t help it—Anthony was not the arts-and-crafts type, in fact he was quite possibly one of the last people Kate expected to have dedicated storage space for any kind of scrapbook on his computer.
She hesitated before double-clicking on the item, wondering if he would feel betrayed by her snooping. They trusted each other wholly, and she technically had full access to his devices like he had to hers, though it was mostly for convenience as neither of them had ever given the other reason to question their integrity.
However, as soon as Kate remembered that one time Anthony had changed her desktop wallpaper to a photo of himself from their trip to Majorca—shirtless, flexing, and holding a large flamingo pool floatie as if it were his dance partner—which she hadn’t seen before opening her laptop in front of several coworkers, the hesitation vanished.
The folder was filled with images, and she clicked on the first one. It was a photograph that Anthony had taken of her and their cocker spaniel Dottie—or, as Kate liked to say, their second child after their corgi Newton—while out for brunch a few weekends ago.
Except the picture had been edited in the silliest of ways. Cutouts of Kate’s smiling face had been carefully placed all throughout the image, resulting in a chaotic collage that included her head seemingly popping out from the corners and through the windows in the background. The focal points, however, constituted the large heart around Dottie at the centre, as well as the tiara on Kate’s head, once again both made up entirely of miniature cutout versions of her face from the very same photo.
Ew, she laughed. Why’d he cut out my face like that? Kate thought to herself with a furrow of her brow and an incredulous smile on her lips. She was confused and amused in equal measure.
She opened the next image. With Anthony’s careful editing, she could not immediately recognise what the original photo was, but the document name “Kate and not-Ben” was enough for her to remember the day they had all gathered at Benedict and Henry’s home for a barbecue last summer and taken this very picture—now completely transformed into yet another bizarre shrine to Kate’s face. This time, it not only covered her brother-in-law’s face entirely, but popped through the doorway, and even adorned the chandelier in the background. She then noticed how the faces formed a heart on her jacket sleeve, as well as a bracelet around her wrist, complete with an A-shaped charm. She laughed at the thought of her husband, hunched over his computer as he meticulously arranged the elements in the picture.
Once again, the final product was entirely ridiculous and almost headache-inducing as her own face populated the image.
There were a couple dozen more edits in the same style made with pictures taken over the last couple of years since they had gotten married, and Kate took her time looking at each one. One of her in the backseat of a cab coming home from a party Edwina had hosted, at a restaurant for Colin's birthday, in their kitchen, at a promotional photoshoot she was a part of, and many more.
Though still surprised that Anthony had seemingly made all these—and constantly wondering when he had done so or why he had not shown her—she was charmed. His love for her, which he never failed to demonstrate and verbalise on a daily basis, was, curiously enough, incredibly evident through these collages. Not just in the hearts he had made with her face, but the pictures he had chosen (photos he had asked her to pose for as well as candid shots she didn’t necessarily like, yet where she was clearly radiating with happiness), the humour behind his choices (including details that made Kate laugh out loud, like her face replacing the flames of Colin's birthday cake candles or a cutout of Anthony’s face pasted onto her tongue as she sticks it out for the camera), and the unexpected preciseness of his edits.
The idea of a scrapbook may have sounded unlike her husband, yet there was something so distinctly him in these silly photo collages that she found incredibly endearing. And there were so many; he had clearly spent a lot of time on them, and indulged in the childishness of it all.
Kate glanced at the time, and decided to do a bit of indulging herself. After finding just the right picture of Anthony, she opened Canva and started playing around with some of the features herself. Almost an hour later, she downloaded her masterpiece, placed it in the scrapbook folder, and went on with her day.
~~~
“I need to check on some things before bed, I’ll join you in a bit,” Anthony said with a peck on Kate’s lips. He entered his office while she made her way to their bedroom down the hall.
He sat down at his desk and before he knew it, over two hours had passed as he got carried away replying to emails and working on an important presentation of which the deadline was approaching. With a sigh, he opened up his favourite folder amidst the sea of files and documents that were making his head spin at this late hour.
His “scrapbook” as he liked to call it—despite it not having the format of a proper scrapbook at all—was like a little treasure trove on his computer. It combined his favourite pictures of his wife with his favourite thing to do with them when she wasn’t there; other than look at them, naturally. It had started when Kate had gone on an extended business trip a few months ago, and ever since then Anthony enjoyed toying around with editing tools, even if just to make himself laugh.
As soon as he opened the folder, he noticed the top item: “I did it better.” This was not the kind of name Anthony usually gave his own edits, and before he even opened and saw the image, he knew. He was surprised, but most of all delighted, to see what Kate had made earlier today, as the modification date attested. She had used a photograph she'd taken of him on their honeymoon—a beautifully framed shot of Anthony coming out of the water as the sun hit his body, which she was extremely proud of. It had served as her lockscreen wallpaper for a long time.
Now, the picture was adorned with a heart-shaped cutout of Kate’s face—also from a honeymoon photo—with a border of Anthony faces, and among other things, Kate's name was written across his biceps to look like a tattoo.
Immediately, Anthony opened Canva and got to work. Fifteen minutes later, he was sending his newest piece to Kate’s phone with a cheeky “You sure about that?”
