When he received her letter he audibly groaned. He folded it without reading it and tucked it into one of his desk drawers, until he felt up for the task of reading it and deciding whether or not to respond. Birthdays had never been happy occasions for him — at least not since the Sycorax shipwreck. They had come and gone in the journal he'd kept through those years, serving primarily as reminders of the time that had passed and of the things that he had lost. While he'd largely lost the habit of annual self-pitying introspection after he'd returned to England, he still hadn't started celebrating again.

They had been in port on the twentieth, so he'd had no duties on the ship to distract him, but it had clearly still been a mistake to get that drunk.

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER