The Best of Surprises

Waking up on the morning of your birthday is normally an experience filled with excitement, anticipation, joy, and pleasure - with some little bits of astonishment that you've made it through another year without setting something on fire or blowing something up.

At least, if you were as undomesticated as Dec was, that meant something.

But, for some reason, this year his birthday felt like any other ordinary day.

Actually, scratch that: it felt worse than any other ordinary day, although it didn't start out like that.

He'd woken up at around 9am, alone as usual these days, with Rocky curled up at his feet - the tiny pup almost buried in the folds of the duvet thanks to his miniature size. Blinking awake slowly, it took him a few moments to remember what day it was, and even then he only felt a flicker of excitement.

That in itself was unusual for him: in the years gone by, he'd always been very excited about his birthday, and he'd never quite lost that childhood anticipation that came with the annual celebrations of one's birth.

But these past few years, his birthdays hadn't been occasions to look forward to, and he'd lost most of that excitement in exchange for an almost inevitable resignation.

To that end, Dec spent the next ten minutes lying in his bed - alone - and debating whether or not he should get up just yet, and then he spent another ten minutes trying to summon the energy to get up, and then a further five minutes actually getting up and out of bed, getting an indignant bark from Rocky in response.

"Sorry pal" he apologised, rubbing the pup behind the ears. Rocky glared at him for a few moments, before he quickly relented and began to cover his master in kisses.

"Okay, gerroff" Dec laughed, pushing the insistent puppy away and standing up off the bed. Grabbing his phone from the bedside table, he scrolled through his messages, and was surprised to see nothing from any of his close friends or his family.

"Strange" he muttered; that was odd - his family always called (or at least texted) him on his birthday, usually around this time of the morning in case he was working. But today, there was nothing.

"Oh well, maybe they just haven't gotten around to it yet" he shrugged, trying to brush off the glimmer of hurt that clenched at his heart. "It's not like they've forgotten or anything, after all" he added, switching over to the Twitter app - their fans could always be relied upon to post (many times) on both his and Ant's birthdays, and they hadn't failed them in the last 2 years since they'd had their account.

But there too, was nothing. There were surprisingly few mentions, and even those had nothing to do with birthday wishes.

That's odd he mused thoughtfully, pocketing his phone and walking down to the kitchen - hoping that a cup of tea would help things make more sense.

As he waited for the kettle to boil, Dec couldn't help but double check the date on his phone - as if that might explain the lack of birthday activity.

Nope: it definitely was September 25th, so it wasn't like he had the date wrong. It was definitely his birthday.

So why the radio silence from everyone?

Then, just as he was about to return his phone to his pocket, it started to ring. Grinning when he saw the caller ID, he answered after the first ring.

"Hey Ant" he greeted cheerfully, pouring his cup of tea as he spoke.

"Hey pal, listen, any chance you could look after Hurls for me this morning?" Ant replied, without even letting Dec get another word in.