A/N: Well then, snowylavendermist, I'm so sorry this isn't a happy fluffy Joshua/Marisa, because I simply am not a happy writer.
Inspired by a cryptography class I went to, and they were talking about binary XOR functions and my brain jumped from binary to this.
Life, Joshua had decided, was and should be a dichotomous thing.
Life was full of choices – one did not go in a straight road forever. And choices, he realized, had a tendency to come in pairs. In a duel, you either won or lost; in war, your opponent was either alive or dead; in a coin toss, the coin either landed on its heads or tails. So many things in life followed this two-way branching, this dichotomy, and indeed there was a pleasant symmetry to it all.
Joshua may be a warrior, but he felt it stupid to resist the pattern of life.
And thus, he began working actively to achieve it.
It was a simple philosophy of life, really – to narrow down everything into two choices, to an either this or that situation – and everything before you would suddenly become insanely clear, the choice you should make startlingly easy, for you knew that half the time you would not regret that decision.
Perhaps it sounded absurd, but it had worked perfectly well for him. When he had left the halls of Jehanna in pursuit of a life as a mercenary, it was a matter of either leaving or staying – to hell with all the political factors and his title and whatnot. When he had decided to take up gambling, every game was a matter of either winning or losing – regardless of the means to get to the win or loss. When he had joined Eirika's army, effectively turning himself against his mercenary group, it was a matter of either joining them or killing them – why would he care about the big picture and how this might affect him in the future? Joshua was a person who lived in the present, not in the past, not in the future. All that mattered whenever he made a choice was the present, was the choice itself. And like thus Joshua led his life, ever walking down a road which would only branch in two, then choosing one of the two roads and continuing on.
That was, until she had come along and messed up the dichotomy of his life.
She had never believed in the dichotomy of life: when he had mentioned it to her, she had stared at him with an incredulous look on her normally expressionless face and told him flatly that it was the most childish philosophy she had ever heard.
He had not given up then, of course; he had strongly believed it to be the ultimate truth in life, the unchanging constant. And he had pestered her, time and again, to believe in it as well.
Life is just like a coin, he had said. There are and should only be two sides to everything, just like how the coin can only land on heads or tails. And he had even taken out his lucky coin – the one that he had never shown to anyone else for fear of them "sapping" the luck out of it – and he had tossed it, just to prove his point.
He had never expected the coin to land perfectly on its side.
She had smiled one of her rare smiles and walked away then, as though she had proven her point.
But Joshua was not a man to give up easily, and he had clung on to his way of life defiantly. But she, unwittingly, had become the bane of this dichotomy, and unknowingly she had undone every effort of his to re-establish the symmetry of his life.
When he had challenged her to a duel, they had, by some miraculous chance, drawn, blades reaching the opponent's throat at exactly the same time; when he had betted with her that he would kill more monsters than her in the next battle and she had betted the converse, they had killed exactly the same number of monsters, and thus neither had won. In everything that they did, they just seemed to defy the dichotomous outcome that he had set, ever showing him the grey area that he had not noticed before, showing him the third possibility that he had not considered.
His dichotomous life was unraveling, and there was nothing he could do about it. Just like how there was nothing he could do to revive his mother's broken body when they arrived at Jehanna Hall, just like how there was nothing he could do to put Jehanna's Sacred Stone together again.
Just like how there was nothing he could do to make her stay with him forever.
The old him would have insisted that it was a dichotomous choice – either she loved him, or she did not. But now he knew better – marriage, as with all other things, did not just depend on that one factor – there was the problem of status, of political relations, of so many things which stubborn old advisors had summed up under "appropriateness". And he knew that they could not be together, whether she loved him back or not.
And so it was that he stood in the halls of Jehanna facing his queen-to-be – someone not altogether unknown to him, but he had never really liked more than a friend. She smiled shyly, gracefully at him, and he could see the admiration in her serene features.
Everyone in the hall was cheering, rejoicing, and he felt compelled to force a smile on his face, too. There were so many old friends and old comrades in the crowd, all of them smiling and clapping – no doubt they felt truly happy for him and believed that he felt the same way as they did. After all, why shouldn't he? It was supposed to be his wedding, after all.
His eyes scanned the halls again and met with a pair that he had not wanted to find.
She was smiling, and the smile even reached her eyes; in those magenta eyes, however, there was the tinge of sadness, of longing, but also of understanding, of some unspeakable pride. You've finally grown up, the eyes seemed to say, and now you finally see that I had been right all along. There is no dichotomy in life.
"King Joshua of Jehanna, will you take Natasha of Grado as your wife?" Ironically, when all the dichotomy had slipped away from his life, he was once again facing a question with only two answers. But then again, did he really have a choice? Could he really have answered "no"?
"I will." Those two syllables escaped from him, and yet they did not feel like a part of him – they were unreal, cold, distant. He watched as his bride answered the same question, and vaguely wondered who one earth had set the rule that a cleric was of a higher status than a mercenary swordsman.
The crowd was now demanding a kiss. He complied, bending down and meeting her lips with his. As he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine the lips to belong to another person, someone whom he knew was no longer standing in the crowd.
Life, Joshua realized, was never meant to be a dichotomous thing.
Was it horrible? Okay? Good? I cannot characterize Joshua and Marisa well, so this fic isn't very good, I think.