Title: Wes and Hobbie Get Married
Author: upsidedownbutterfly
Summary: Exactly what it says on the tin. The unsolicited and three years overdue sequel to "Personal Insight Is Something That Happens to Other People". Wes/Hobbie, obviously.
Rating: PG
Author's Note: I would also like the record to show that the Big Green Fish and Lord Being of the Swirblies are actual Star Wars deities. I don't make this shit up. Also, though this was envisioned as a sequel to my prior Wes/Hobbie fic, it functions mostly fine as a standalone.
Somehow the two of them made it through the Yuuzhan Vong War alive. Even more unbelievably given Hobbie's long and rather inglorious track record, they both survived with no more artificial limbs than they'd started with. Wes wasn't sure what the odds against that were precisely, but he strongly suspected they were long enough that even Han Solo wouldn't have taken the bet. Over a hundred billion dead and yet Wes and Hobbie – still throwing themselves against impossible opponents in nothing but their X-wings like they were twenty-two all over again – managed to walk away without a scratch.
Okay, not quite without a scratch, but with nothing more than three broken fingers, several bruised ribs, and a mild concussion between them. On the scale of things, Wes still considered that pretty damn remarkable.
Wedge insisted it was because pests, by definition, were impossible to kill. Wes preferred to attribute it to divine intervention. Not that either he or Hobbie had ever been particularly inclined towards theology, but who could ever truly know the mind and will of the Big Green Fish or the Lord Being of the Swirblies? Maybe Wes and Hobbie were exactly the type of beings they would deem worthy of their divine preservation. Unlikely, admittedly, but not strictly impossible, and Wes wasn't ready to rule it out entirely.
Hell, there was sure to be at least one culture that had a patron god of pests. Let it never be said he wasn't willing to meet Wedge halfway.
The war did change them though. Of course it did. It changed everyone that had the misfortune of living through it. It turned spouses into widows and children into orphans, and then it turned those orphans into soldiers first and corpses second. It left many survivors suicidally depressed or homicidally angry. Then there were the few that found their calling in the carnage, a sense of purpose and direction in the destruction. Sometimes, just sometimes, those were the ones Wes felt the most sorry for. How broken did you have to be that it took a war to put you back together?
Not all the changes were so dramatic of course, and for Wes and Hobbie, at least, it was slightly more subtle. In the end, it boiled down to this:
They had never talked about marriage before the war.
Not that they'd avoided the subject. Whatever people like Wedge and Tycho might think, Wes and Hobbie were in fact grown men who were quite capable of having an open and mature conversations about their mutual feelings. Occasionally. Should the need arise.
But that was just it. In this case, the need never had. Somewhere in between that first drunken tumble into bed together and the surprisingly not-entirely-awkward morning after, they had arrived at the common, if completely unspoken, understanding that this was, well, it. For both of them. Anything more was like one of Calrissian's capes. Nice enough for show and probably bound to leave a better impression on certain people but not strictly necessary. Wes and Hobbie were old soldiers. They'd learned to make do with only the strictly necessary a long time ago.
In fact, when you've spent enough years sleeping in your flight suit, it's the cutting-edge fashion that starts to feel uncomfortable. Well, metaphorically, at least. On the literal side of things, silk certainly chafed a lot less.
After the war though, it was different. How could it not be? In four years, they had witnessed the annihilation of whole worlds and entire species on a scale that made the tragedy of Alderaan seem almost trivial. They had buried not just friends this time but friends' children – better, younger, brighterlives than theirs cut terribly and brutally short. They had watched as their very civilization slid to within a fire gnat's wingspan of oblivion only to be saved at the eleventh hour by, depending on who you believed, either a stroke of blind luck or the clearly capricious will of the Force.
Wes was a comic and Hobbie a cynic and they were both soldiers, but there was no force in the galaxy that could keep a hell like that from worming its way into their flight suits and under their skins. It left them with an acute sense of the… impermanence of it all.
It left them both wanting a constant.
At least that's what Wes figured. He was getting better at this whole personal insight thing.
So one standard month after the Sekot Accords brought the hostilities to a final and official end, Wes and Hobbie dragged Wedge and Tycho out to the most disreputable bar still standing on Coruscant, bought four pints of Whyren's Reserve, and told them their plan. Tycho merely choked on his whiskey. Wedge actually spit his across the table.
In retrospect, Wes was willing to admit that they probably could have worked on their timing. Not that that in any way excused Wedge's waste of perfectly good, not to mention expensive, liquor.
"At our bachelor party, no less," Wes lamented dramatically, "And by my best man." This time the whiskey came out Wedge's nose.
His punishment, Hobbie decreed gleefully, was to buy the next round – and the next, and the one after that – until finally two hours and twice as many drinks later, the four of them stumbled through the door of the government office conveniently located three levels up. The Twi'lek behind the desk looked positively scandalized at their entrance. Wes privately thought that was somewhat ironic given where her neckline ended, which, fine, was probably a bit unfair and not strictly culturally sensitive, but this was his wedding day. Surely he was entitled to one or two uncharitable thoughts.
Besides, it wasn't as if people hadn't been getting drunk and married since Coruscant was a bunch of mud huts. Probably. He couldn't prove it, but it seemed likely enough anyhow.
It was a fussy-looking Ithorian however that actually produced the requisite paperwork that would declare them legally married in the eyes of the New Republic. Then three minutes and one exasperated huff later, he re-produced a new set of the same paperwork after Tycho managed to sign the first on the wrong line. Apparently, after four pints of Whyren's Reserve "witness" and "sector administrator" start to look alike.
Hobbie applauded his noble commitment to not allowing Wedge's worst best man title to go uncontested. Wes settled for making stinging comments about waning alcohol tolerances.
Ten minutes later, it was over and done and quite literally sealed with a kiss. The Ithorian handed Wes and Hobbie a pair of official-looking datacards that were promptly and unceremoniously stuffed into their back pockets. That earned them a pointed look from the Twi'lek along with several unsolicited comments about "proper reverence". Wes elected to take the high road and gave her nothing but a cheerful wave as they made their way out of the office and back to the bar with the intent to get even more thoroughly smashed.
They already had the bachelor party and wedding taken care of, now it was time to start in on the reception.
"Streamlined," Hobbie had called it, which was one way to put it. "Not particularly romantic," had been Wedge's less charitable assessment, which Wes could admit was also accurate. Not that it mattered – something about stylish capes and all that. Which is what he told Wedge.
Actually what he did was grin hugely and stupidly at Hobbie, summoned his most melodramatic tone, and declared loudly, "Our love is all we need." Tycho pretended to gag. Wedge rolled his eyes. Hobbie just grinned back at him until they both burst out laughing. It was true though, and they both knew it.
The honeymoon phase lasted six months before Gavin Darklighter showed up at their door with three war orphans and a pleading expression on his face.