Title: The Beginning
Pairing: Shuurei/Jyuusan-hime

"I'm not going to make you choose between the country and the Ran family," Shuurei said. "Or between your family and me. This is the only way I can think of for everyone to have what's best for them. So, what do you think?"

Being a daughter of the Ran family, Jyuusan-hime had received many marriage proposals. This one, however, was easily the strangest.

"But we're two women, Shuurei," she said. "We could live together, but we can't formally…"

But as it turned out, it was indeed possible for two women (or two men) to marry in Saiunkoku. It was a rare ceremony, normally used to iron out the knottiest issues of land inheritance, but there was nothing actually saying that the Ran daughter and the Kou daughter couldn't wed.

They had to marry quickly, so her brothers wouldn't catch wind of it ahead of time. Between the secrecy and the preparations, Jyuusan-hime hardly saw Shuurei from the time she accepted her proposal until the ceremony itself. It was true that she had agreed to the marriage for the sake of her family and country. But already she found herself hoping that it would be something more. For the first time since Jin, she'd found someone she really wanted to marry. And she wasn't sure whether Shuurei felt the same way.

After their wedding, when they were finally alone together in their carriage, they sat in silence for a time. Shuurei was looking down fixedly at her own hands, and so Jyuusan-hime looked at them as well. They were the smooth hands of a scholar, pale and slightly ink-stained. She looked at her own hands; they were coarser, of course, but not so different.

"You know," Shuurei said finally, "this doesn't have to be forever. After we do everything else we talked about, and the situation with your family calms down, we can get a divorce."

It wasn't what Jyuusan-hime had wanted to hear. "So you don't want to be married to me?"

Shuurei looked up, her eyes wide and her face red with embarrassment. "No, no, that's not what I meant at all!" she said, waving her hands. "I don't mind—I mean, I like it, I think. But I was worried that you might not—"

Jyuusan-hime couldn't help it; she started to chuckle, and after a little while Shuurei began to laugh as well. "I wouldn't have married you if I didn't want to," she said. "Let's make this marriage work."

And they did.