#and now it's just steel-blood farm and there's no secret tunnels or anything

[altfire-archive]

no offense to lake ilinalta but why is the road SO CLOSE to its southern shore. if/when it floods u literally wouldn't be able to use a huge length of road. wtf

[stillness-in-green]

Scenes from a Wedding (2/4)

A look at Kudelia and Atra’s wedding, from proposal to planning to the main event.  Expect copious Chad/Yamagi on the side.  Also, the whole thing giving Eugene a big headache.  

Chapter 2: Planning (Practices, Paraphernalia, and What to Do About Parents) 

(Warning: No line breaks seem to be appearing on mobile, because we can’t have nice things, apparently.)

6 Months Out:

They kept the secret for about six months—better than Kudelia had hoped, honestly.  By February, though, Cucubita had been stopped in the office three times by coworkers asking if the rumor that the boss was getting married was true.  It was time to get out ahead of things.

Kudelia didn’t tell the news outlets directly—she didn’t need to.  Rather, she set up a gift registry—something that normally would have been done months ago—and let Cucubita post the web address at the office.  Sure enough, within the week she fielded the first question from a reporter about it.

Everyone held their breath, for what seemed like days—would the cover stories and the false last names hold against media scrutiny?  Makanai and his aide had sworn there was no way to connect their names to Tekkadan’s payroll lists, seized by Arianrhod years ago, but…

But no one from Gjallarhorn had ever seen Atra, at least not anyone still living.  A few hopeful photographers showed up at the farm—even the ones who didn’t come openly couldn’t hide for long from a horde of children at play—but between Dante’s colorful threats, Sakura’s ominous pronouncements about lawsuits, and Derma’s ability to dent camera lens casings in his metal fingers, no one stayed for long.  Kudelia received a distant, genial note of congratulations from Rustal Elion, and that was as close as danger came to home for some time.

In the meantime, the preparations continued.

“Oh, it’s bigger than I remember!”

“It will seem smaller once you have chairs and the arch in it.”

Yamagi trailed Merribit and Kudelia up the room at Chad’s elbow, listening with half an ear as the two women went on talking about the wedding arch.  The place was brighter than he remembered from Merribit’s wedding—the difference lighting made, he supposed—a long, bright, wood-paneled chamber with floor-to-ceiling windows on one side, showing the forest.

“Eugene’s going to hate the windows,” he murmured to Chad, who smiled, quick and lop-sided.

“Eugene already hates the windows,” came the low reply.

“How’s the guest list coming?”

Chad looked at a notepad he’d borrowed from the office, where he’d been jotting down notes in his careful, unpracticed handwriting.  “They’re at fifty right now, counting themselves.  They haven’t sent invitations yet, though—they’re expecting less.”

“That’s pretty small.”  Yamagi looked around the room, mentally occupying it with chairs and barely filling a quarter of the space.  “They could probably do the ceremony on one end and the reception on the other, with numbers like that.”

“If Eugene didn’t hate the windows,” Chad replied with another flash of the smile from before.  “But the people here said they can wall off half the space, so I think we’re going with that.”

Yamagi nodded, looking back across the room as Kudelia turned in place, looking up at the slanted rafters of the ceiling.  “How about the colors?”

“Purple and white.”

“No red?”  An obscure disappointment pricked at him.  Kudelia looked good in red, and Tekkadan had used it on some of its lily marks.

“She thought about it for a while.  She said she thought it would be a bit much, for a wedding dress.”  Chad’s expression, when Yamagi looked at it, was blank, the open sincerity of someone who had no opinion whatsoever about the matter.  He’s probably learned everything he knows about wedding dresses in the last two months, Yamagi reflected, and muted a smile, turning back towards Kudelia and Merribit.

“What are you planning for the unity practice?” the latter asked, hands folded neatly over her elbows.

Kudelia looked at her, blinking.  “Unity…?”

“The thing you do to show you’re coming together as a couple,” Yamagi filled in.  He’d sat through several long conversations between Merribit and the old man on the topic, as Yukinojo’s rough sensibilities grappled with Merribit’s Teiwaz-influenced multiculturalism.  “Drinking sake or tying knots or whatever.”

“I see.”  Kudelia’s expression cleared.  “We hadn’t talked about that yet.”  She smiled with a thread of a chuckle.  “Though it probably won’t be sake.”

Merribit sighed, briefly closing her eyes.  Yamagi hid a smirk in his hair.  Merribit was the most capable drinker he’d ever met, and it seemed to forever distress her that she couldn’t find more people who appreciated Teiwaz’s approach to alcohol—which, as far as Yamagi could tell, boiled down to, “Use it for anything you can find an excuse to.”

“It will have to be something,” was all Merribit allowed herself, though she said it in a voice with steel ribbing.  “That symbology is even more important than the arch.”

“What else is there?” Kudelia asked, tilting her head.  “I think on Earth they light candles.”

“A candle, typically.”  Merribit counted off on her fingers.  “Unity candles, sharing a drink from one cup or some kind of food with the right symbology.  Tying knots in cords, or having your fingers tied together.”  She flicked her pinky finger out in illustration.

Kudelia nodded thoughtfully, and Chad’s pen began scratching again as he wrote out “Unity practice?” at the bottom of his notes.  When he finished, Yamagi leaned in, bumping their shoulders together, and wound one hand in around Chad’s arm.  That close, he could hear the small, surprised hitch in Chad’s breathing.  After a moment, in which the temperature probably didn’t rise from the blood rushing to Chad’s face, but felt a bit like should have, Chad tucked the notepad under his other elbow and dropped his arm, leaving their hands held lightly, fingers barely twined.

In mutually-agreed-upon silence, they went on listening to Merribit’s overview.

Within the next week, Makanai finally settled on a suitable florist, and with the venue and dress decided, the wedding party gratefully left him to harangue the shop at his discretion.  Haba began to drop by the farm with samples of meals—fried dumplings, mixed rice dishes, carefully sliced sandwiches, cuts of meat, salad mixes, chocolates and pastries and more—to catch up with Atra and plan out the buffet menu.

A problem: there would have to be music, but it couldn’t be live music.

The solution: invite Zack over to the farm and spend an entire weekend putting together sample playlists between what he and Dante could pull from Ariadne, what Atra heard on radios around town, and what Cookie and Cracker were being exposed to at school.

A problem: Kudelia and Atra would need to be driven safely to the venue without too much time lost to reporters—or anyone else looking for a splashy headline, Eugene said ominously—but Atra’s address was now known.

The solution: Kudelia would stay at Cucubita’s home the night before, and Atra with Merribit at the same hotel Azee and Eco had booked.  Eugene would drive Kudelia and Cucubita to Cyllene; Merribit the other group.  This also neatly solved the issue of keeping the brides apart until the ceremony, as everyone agreed was traditional.

The guest list was finalized before long, with one lingering issue—the parental one.

Atra, of course, had no problems there, and Norman Bernstein was still persona non grata at any event involving his daughter, her wedding being no exception.  

Tomomi Bernstein, though.  Perhaps, perhaps…  Kudelia chased the thoughts around her mind in circles, running them into tunnels of procrastination and warrens of welcomed forgetfulness.  Later.  She could figure out whether to invite her mother later.  When it was closer to the wedding.

Yes.

3 Months Out:

The stylist—get it done right, Cookie and Cracker nagged, and Merribit insisted—was delighted with the pair of them.  He spent nearly four hours tugging their hair this way and that, working it into up-dos, elaborate braids, or considered curls.  Atra’s hair, with a natural wave that held true even as long as she’d grown it out in the last few years, and Kudelia’s thick, full-bodied true blonde, both held a wealth of possibilities so extensive that, by the time it was over, Kudelia had privately resolved to chop off the lot as soon as the wedding was over, if not before.  Driving them back to the farm, a pink fabric rose still tucked behind one ear, Atra giggled at Kudelia’s woes and quipped that they could probably pay for several days of honeymoon if they both just switched to short cuts and sold the rest.

Soon after came the word from Makanai: the flower arrangements were almost decided upon, but final decisions were pending on the rest of the wedding party—specifically, their costuming.  Send pictures, was the old politician’s dictate.  Dress the men, and send pictures.

“You look so handsome!”

Chad ducked his head as the salesperson nodded agreement with Atra.  He stole a glance at the store’s mirror, eyeing his reflection doubtfully.  The suit was handsome, sure—a warm dark gray with a faint shine to the thread, all sharp folds and even lines.  He looked as awkward in it as ever, though.

Across the room, Yukinojo, wearing the peanut-brown suit he’d worn to his own wedding, stood at something like attention, looking long-suffering as Merribit circled around him with a secretive smile on her face.  She turned to the woman with the tape measure looped over one elbow nearby, but Dante’s arm descending around Chad’s shoulders distracted him from whatever she’d been about to say.

“She’s right; we do look pretty great.  Right?”  Dante, wearing the nicest formal black since their Teiwaz sakazuki ceremony all those years ago, grinned into the mirror at Chad, who found his lips tugging up despite his embarrassment.  At the acknowledgement, Dante jostled him in rough support, then turned them around to face Yamagi, who’d been entrusted with documenting the excursion.

Yamagi was smiling—smirking a little, even.  He raised the camera.  “Smile for the Prime Minister,” he quipped.  “Again.”

Chad did his best.  And maybe with Dante flipping the camera a cheery thumbs-up, it wasn’t so bad.

With the mens’ clothes reserved, and Makanai in the final stages of negotiations with the florist, the wedding party turned their full attention to the menu.  Within the week, Atra and Haba had finalized plans for the reception dinner and begun stockpiling the foods that would keep—a bottle of cooking oil here, a sack of uncooked beans there, dry stock like spices, sugars and cocoa.

Kudelia pulled her intended away long enough to film an invitation to their wedding.  Paper was lovely, but pricey even in the low quality used by the average Martian business office; the quality one would want in a personalized wedding invitation made them an extravagance Kudelia was not willing to splurge on—to say nothing of the unreliability of interplanetary delivery times.  They sent the video to most everyone who could be reached with LCS.

The next night, sitting alone beneath the humming of Atra’s kitchen light, Kudelia wrote out the exceptions by hand, using a fountain pen she’d barely touched since receiving it as a birthday gift years ago, back before she’d left her parents’ home.

Tomomi Bernstein received an invitation sent by courier.  McMurdo Barriston had one handed to him by an underling, fresh off a Gjallarhorn-escorted carrier ship.

Ride was off-planet when Yamagi stopped by the last place any of the Tekkadan survivors had been able to track him to, a run-down apartment in Chryse’s eastern foothills.  Trow, who invited Yamagi in after only a few seconds’ sullen staring, could not be convinced to say where Ride had gone nor when he’d be back, only that Embi was in touch with him.  Yamagi managed a painful fifteen minutes—not record-setting, but far longer than Eugene could usually endure before snapping.  He left Kudelia’s painstakingly written invitations behind, a small, neat stack of white envelopes that lent an out-of-place brightness to the apartment’s gloom.

Atra, who had not thought much about vows and the writing of them until the first of several evenings curled up on the couch with Kudelia and a pile of poetry books and philosophical essay compilations, found herself staring at the task head on.  Once she had noticed it, of course, it sat at the back of her mind like a mouse, darting out of unexpected corners, chewing on her stray thoughts.  She took a few sheets of paper from Chad’s notepad and folded them up to keep in her back pocket, and spent no small amount of her free time staring and scribbling and crossing out.

She spent a weekend scouring jewelry stores with Cookie and Cracker for Kudelia’s wedding gift, and hid the result away in her closet, tucked into the pocket of her old Tekkadan jacket, which she’d long since outgrown, and couldn’t wear out in public in any case.

Kudelia, meanwhile, had decided months ago what she wanted to give Atra for her wedding gift, but it wasn’t so simple as just purchasing one from a store.

“I have no idea how she made hers look so nice,” Kudelia lamented, pulling a tangle of red hemp cording out of her purse and setting it on the table between them.  Yamagi—the only one who’d turned up for an intended double-date, with Chad staying late at the office to sort out a shipping order that had been garbled in transmit and Atra stuck at the orphanage dealing with a split pipe beneath the sink—set his beer aside to examine her progress.

“A lot of practice,” he opined as he pulled the tangle closer, flicking through it with deft fingers.  “She used to make these as a hobby, you know.”

“She hasn’t in a long time.”  Kudelia sighed, leaning forward on her elbows to watch.  “Not since the last one she made Akatsuki.”  A blue one to match Mikazuki’s, which they’d never recovered.  There’d been no chance to, with the escape to Earth being as pressing as it had been back then.

“Why’d she stop?”  Yamagi unknotted strands and stretched them flat against the table, only for them to bunch up on themselves again when he removed his hand.

“I’m—not sure.  A sense of finality, maybe?”  She stirred her martini absently, remembering Atra weeping in her arms as Akatsuki—just a baby, his ash blond hair soft and fine around the delicate curve of his head—sat in his crib and wetly gummed at Atra’s red bracelet.  He’d pulled it off the corner post where Atra used to hang it until he was big enough to wear it properly.

She does still think it’s lucky, right? she worried.  She must, or she wouldn’t still have him wearing them everywhere.

“Maybe” she went on, “maybe she thought that she wanted him to have all the luck she could manage?  Sometimes people can get—stuck, on thoughts like that.”  

Across from her, Yamagi hummed understanding.  “Have you tried just starting over?”

“That’s rather the point of the gift,” Kudelia admitted, feeling a touch of heat in her cheeks that she certainly had not yet drunk enough to justify.  “I want to remind her that…”  She trailed off, wincing faintly and picking up her glass.  Was it too selfish, or too naïve, to say, There’s enough luck to go around?  Or, She should think of her own protection too?

Yamagi tsked softly, and she looked up to find him running a length of hemp back and forth over the edge of the table with more force than was probably necessary, then frowning when it wrinkled again stubbornly.

“I know what you mean by the gift.  I meant you should just start over on making it.”  He held up the half-woven bracelet, its loose strands crimped and uneven.  “You’re never going to get a smooth line out of these.”

“…Oh.”  She took it back from him and laid it out across the table.  “That’s a good point.”

“I’d find something sturdier to work with for practice.  Go back to the hemp when you’re more confident,” he advised, returning to his beer.

They passed a few moments in silence, Yamagi studying her as she forlornly pressed her fingers across the curving braid then lifted them away, a pensive repetition.

“She always put beads on them,” he said eventually.  “Do you have one picked out?”

Kudelia paused, then smiled, gathering the bracelet off the table and letting it curl around her fingers and in the palm of her hand.

“Yes,” she answered softly, drawing the unfinished gift to lie close over her abdomen.  “A lily.”

At the two month mark, Chad, Atra and Merribit had what Merribit called a working lunch at Chad’s apartment, away from all possible distractions, to finalize the specific details of the wedding day plan—a timetable and instructions for setting up, carrying out, and cleaning up after the ceremony and reception.

It turned into a dinner as well, afternoon stretching into evening as they made phone calls, shuffled papers, referenced photos, debated the order of events, and in all other ways hammered out the framework for the big day.  By the end of the night, there was a copy of the schedule in each of their homes: Merribit’s locked securely in a desk, Atra’s pinned to the farm’s refrigerator, and Chad’s folded up and tucked in an inside pocket of his work jacket.

Two weeks later, Dante drove Atra to the city clerk’s office to file the request for a marriage license.

Growing up in the slums, Atra had developed a general, vague understanding that marriage licenses were hard to obtain, leading many of Mars’ poorer citizens to throw up their hands and decide to celebrate anyway, even with ceremonies that everyone knew weren’t legally binding.  For years, she’d assumed it was just a matter of expense.  She’d been shocked when she started researching what kind of paperwork went into a lawfully recognized wedding, at the level of vitriol and indignance she found in the public conversation about it.

The economic blocs, she read in article after article, had done everything they could to stop Martian citizens from building solidarity with one another, from union breaking to vote manipulation, from large-scale political interference down to the meanest level of meddling in Martians’ personal lives.  The expense of getting a marriage license, it turned out, had only been the most obvious bit of obstructionism; the process had also demanded permanent addresses, documented family information, a detailed medical history, and proof of stable income.  Even if they met all the requirements, it hadn’t been uncommon for a couple’s filing to be turned down on formalities, or for unclear reasons, and with no clear way to put in a complaint or ask for a reconsideration.

The whole mess was one of the earliest things that had landed on the Martian Union’s docket, and from there, been dropped down to individual cities’ councils to wrestle with, adding yet another item in a long list of considerations about what African Union policies Chryse was going to keep, what they’d modify, and what they’d throw out completely.  The last referendum about it, enacted mostly as a stop-gap until the city council had the time to debate it in detail, had set an eight-year minimum for common law marriages, cut the price of licenses by almost two-thirds, and stripped out every requirement except for the permanent address and a bare-bones medical assessment.

The waiting period from before the planet’s independence was one of the only things that hadn’t changed—the city office required a month’s advance notice, after which it would issue a certificate to be used at a ceremony within the month and signed by both members of the union and two witnesses.  Yukinojo, who had for years belligerently stamped his factory logo with the eye insignia that had once taken aim at Rustal Elion himself, roughly assured the brides that he and Merribit would witness for them.

When the Union next recessed, Atra gave Kudelia a few days to wrangle press appearances and business with the Admoss Company before stealing her away for more shopping—gifts, this time, for the wedding party.  In the afternoon’s long warmth, the two of them strolled hand-in-hand through the rejuvenated downtown’s stores and shops, Kudelia in her sunglasses resolutely ignoring the familiar blond head tailing them street to street, Atra shooting Eugene cheeky, unrepentant grins when she caught his eye and found him scowling at the length of their browsing.

When she spotted a kitchen goods store, Atra swerved into it, teasing a fond smile onto Kudelia’s face.  She trailed her fiancée through the different displays, asking questions when she—not infrequently—saw a tool or machine she didn’t recognize, content to let Atra be the expert.

She’d assumed it was a detour to buy something for the farm, and so she had no warning when Atra carefully tugged a boxed stand mixer off a shelf, settled one edge against her hip, and looked up to ask, “What should we do about your mother?”

“P-Pardon?” Kudelia stammered, blindsided.

“This is for Miss Haba.”  Atra bounced the mixer box once in demonstration, a quick smile rising to her lips.  “You’re supposed to buy presents for your parents, too, and—well, I thought about it, and she’s almost like a mother to me—she’s definitely the closest thing I have to one, anyway, and I want to tell her so.”  Her smile slid away as quickly as it had come, her eyes resting on Kudelia with a solemn awareness of the weight of the topic.  “I know your mother hasn’t responded to the invitation yet, but…”

“No, she…”  Kudelia swallowed, taking a breath to collect herself.  “We’ve barely spoken in years.”

“Weddings are a good time to mend broken bridges, everyone says.”  Atra gave her an encouraging smile.  “We should get her something.  It doesn’t have to be anything too big.  What does she like?”

“Goodness…”  Kudelia released the breath again, thinking back on her mother, with whom she’d never shared a great many interests to begin with.  “We had a garden, but she mostly just took tea there; I don’t think I ever saw her do anything more than cut roses.”

“She likes tea, though?”

“I suppose.  It’s the sort of thing nobles do, drinking tea.  And there’s so much class divide to it.”

“Class divide?  With tea?”

Kudelia smiled, though it felt wan on her face.  “All the finest tea is grown on Earth.  That’s what the devotees tell you, anyway.  I don’t know how much difference there is, really.”  And I won’t import tea leaves all the way from Earth as a show of wealth, not even as a gift, she thought, with a twinge of guilt both for keeping the thought silent and for the angry resentment of having it at all.

“Mm…  What else?”  Atra adjusted her grip on the mixer again and headed up towards the counter.  Kudelia drifted after her.

“She plays the piano, but I don’t know what I could get her for that that she doesn’t already have.  Most of it belonged to her mother, anyway; it’s all heirloom.  She knits, she—”

Atra giggled suddenly, ducking her head to hide a smile.  “Seriously?  She doesn’t do her own gardening and she has to import expensive tea, but she does her own knitting?”

Kudelia huffed out a short laugh.  “When you say it that way, I guess it does sound a little unusual.”

Atra hummed, looking thoughtful as she rummaged in her purse for payment.  Kudelia shot the girl behind the counter a polite smile, resisting the urge to brush back a lock of her hair and draw any attention to herself with such a self-conscious gesture.  Once Atra had her change and the bagged mixer, Kudelia took her purse from her and they headed back outside.

“Does she have a yarn bowl?” Atra asked, picking the conversation back up again.

“A—bowl?  No, I don’t think so,” Kudelia answered, puzzled.  As far as she could remember, her mother had always just set her sewing basket beside her chair in the upstairs drawing room, alternating between her quiet work and long, distant stares out the window.  She never would tell Kudelia what she was thinking about at times like that, sitting still and solemn and gazing at the sky.

Atra hummed assent and smiled, and Kudelia’s attention returned to her fiancée in a swift, warm rush of affection.  “I think I have an idea.”

With all the biggest arrangements made, the wedding party turned their attention to the smaller things, all the little accessories and personal items that would be physical reminders long after flowers wilted and dresses were outgrown.

Some of it, they could go without—a personalized knife and server set for their modest cake would be an extravagance when Cyllene included everything they needed in the normal array of dishes and flatware.  The same went for a dish to put under the shoe Atra would be leaving at the center of the dance floor.

The lodge had a price for renting champagne flutes as well, but Cucubita convinced Kudelia that those, at least, could be pulled out for anniversary dinners, and the memory would be worth the investment.  The guestbook, too—if there was any place to splurge on a paper product, it was there.

The kneeling pillows, Atra made herself, a quick two nights’ work with the farm’s sewing machine.  That weekend, she drove into town herself to pick up a length of silk, dyed the brilliant color of crushed strawberries, that she’d ordered after talking to Sakura about wedding practices months prior.

Something borrowed, something red, a piece of home and a lump of lead, the old woman had told her at the time in a firm, no-arguments-allowed tone, and so the words were folded into the planning.  Red, in the silk scarf that would bind their wrists together—their unity practice.

Cookie and Cracker had provided her the something-borrowed; they’d come home from school for the weekend with a secretive sparkle in their eyes, and with a curious air of reverence, had each taken one of her wrists and tugged her into their bedroom.  Knowing better than to even attempt prying it out of them, Atra waited patiently for Cookie to unearth a round box from the depths of their closet while Cracker stood by and squeezed Atra’s hand, smiling like a woman remembering a long-lost sweetheart.

The veil had belonged to their mother, they explained as Atra stared down at the folds of white organza trimmed with delicate beads and thin lace flowers.  They’d use it themselves at their own weddings, of course, that was always the plan, but they didn’t think their mother would mind if Atra did too, and Atra could think of it as a gesture from both them and Biscuit, so—

And then they had to hurriedly pull the box away as Atra’s eyes overflowed and she dissolved into blubbering, and it took the better part of an hour and a pot of tea before they managed to get back to doing anything useful with the day.

For the piece of home, the party briefly discussed using some of the farm’s harvesting baskets to hold flowers, but hurriedly nixed that plan when Merribit pointed out, as gently as possible, that using plain woven baskets to hold the painstakingly arranged flower sculptures Makanai was overseeing would probably send the old man into apoplexy.  Abashed, Kudelia proposed setting her fountain pen by the guest book instead.

The lump of lead came from Yamagi, who went into work early one morning and spent two hours working a cast-off scrap into shape, shaving off its rough edges, pressing it into a smooth, oblong disc, and buffing it to a smooth matte gloss.

Atra came by that night to pick it up, and stood very still as he placed the stone in her hand and folded her fingers closed over it.

“For good luck,” he told her, voice low, and she nodded, her smile soft with understanding.

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