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Kick had tried to think of a perfect gift for you, looking at all those online articles full of ‘ what to get your S/O this holiday season’. They were all horribly cheesy, and not in a good way. Personalized bracelets were cute and all, but the idea of having you wear his initials felt weird to him. You couldn’t really wear jewelry anyways given your jobs, and it felt reminiscent of a high school guy giving his first real girlfriend the most generic gift of all time, or that it was some kind of fetishy ‘ownership’ thing. He’d prefer the latter, but that’s neither here nor there. It was a cop out and he wasn’t doing it. You meant more to him than some lame, thoughtless present. You would have been happy with anything, he knew that - but that wasn’t the point. You were special, the gift he got you should reflect that.
Over the last few weeks he’d casually dropped hints here and there about what kinds of old games you liked, what you played growing up, if anything that held nostalgia to you in particular. You thought nothing of it, given that was something very in-line with things you two would talk about. Secretly though, he’d been memorizing them. He had a whole list going in his phone that he’d been slowly adding to as you gave him more and more intel on what he could get you for Christmas. It felt almost devious, sneaking around and using the information you so unknowingly gave him to concoct the perfect gift - espionage wasn’t something he was trained in, but dammit it sure felt like he knew what he was doing given you never caught on.
One afternoon a few weeks before the 25th, a day where you got held up with training and he was conveniently free - he may or may not have stolen your laptop for a couple of hours. He’d helped you pick out a good computer that - one you could run games off of back when you were in m the market for a new one a little over a year ago; so he knew beforehand that the specs would be enough to run what he had in mind. After countless tutorials and trial and error, he managed to get a few emulators downloaded and running. He kept most of it on a flash drive so that you would be none the wiser, given that he needed a few afternoons like to get everything downloaded and working. Adding a few games he either remembered you saying you liked, or that he thought you might like to try. He even got it all fitted with adorably categorized thumbnails coordinated to each game file, separating them by console, button mapping all the controls for you to an xbox controller. Working around the wii remote needing a 'shake' option was a little tricky, but he’d be damned if he wasn’t getting you that consoles version of Super Mario Bros. It was one you both talked about specifically, and if he worked out the issue now, should there be another Wii game you wanted later on - he could just download it for you without any hassle.
It wasn’t much, hell it only cost him a few afternoons and the cost of a decent flash drive, but it was the most heartfelt thing he could think of to get you. He scoured a lot of places for some of the games you mentioned, to no avail. It made him second guess the whole idea entirely - resorting to trying to make it up by finding a host of really silly looking gamecube games he could play with you instead. If Tekken 4 for the PS2 wasn’t available, surely a copy of Shrek: Super Slam and Super Monkey Ball would more than make up for it right?