XII
"Okay, are we ready to go?" Steve looked around.
"More or less," Sam agreed, straightening out his jacket. "Bridesmaids are despatched, the First Couple are following behind... Josh, are you ready?"
Josh frowned. "Has anybody seen Charlie?"
Sam blinked at him. "You lost the groom?"
"No, I didn't!" he defended himself hurriedly. "I, uh... I think he's still upstairs. I'll just go check."
He jogged quickly up the two flights of stairs, trying to ignore the beginning of a burning in his chest and throat that told him he was in no shape for this. He'd been in and out of Charlie's door several times already this morning, and didn't think anything of pushing through it again.
Charlie jumped at his entrance. He was standing in front of the mirror, shirtless, and crossed his arms over his chest in an oddly defensive gesture. Josh lingered in the doorway a moment, then stepped forward, letting the door fall slowly closed behind him. "You okay?" he asked.
Charlie turned back to the mirror, eyes lingering on the blemishes that remained on his dark skin from the aftermath of his brutal beating five months ago. There was uncertainty written on his face, and that made him look even younger than the age his professional exterior usually disguised.
His mouth twisted awkwardly as he gestured vaguely to himself. "Zoey hasn't... seen this." He didn't say anything more, but Josh heard it perfectly anyway.
Is this repulsive? Does it make me ugly? Will she still see me the way she used to? He knew those thoughts and the demons that lay behind them; the self doubt, the knowledge that the marks of someone else's hatred would remain forever stamped on you.
He hesitated, and then stepped forward and quietly unbuttoned his own formal shirt. Charlie's eyes in the mirror flickered briefly to the long, jagged scar in the middle of his chest, and quickly darted away in guilt. Josh gripped his shoulder.
"They're just scars, Charlie," he said softly. "They don't say anything about us, except that we survived. They did those things to us, and we're still here."
Charlie still seemed uncertain. "You think it'll upset Zoey?"
"Maybe," he admitted honestly. His own more prominent war-wound seemed to exert a strange fascination over people; they wanted to see it without him realising they were looking, wanted to know if it hurt him without actually wanting to ask him. He frowned suddenly. "She hasn't seen it before?"
Charlie gave him a look. "The 82nd Airborne works for her father."
"Point," he conceded. He quickly buttoned his shirt back up, and reached across to hand Charlie's to him. "Hey, come on, that crazy girl's agreed to marry you - you think she really cares about a couple of nicks and scratches? Besides," he waggled his eyebrows, "scars are sexy."
"Oh, is that what they told you?" Charlie rolled his eyes, but obligingly started to pull his wedding shirt on. Satisfied, Josh turned to go. The younger man suddenly flashed a playful grin at him. "Written your speech yet?" he asked pointedly.
"Shut up," he growled good-naturedly on his way out.
"Unusual place to meet you," she observed dryly.
Toby turned to glance up at the church. "Not my first choice for a house of worship," he agreed with a shrug.
"It's good to see you, Toby," Andy smiled.
"I'm sure it is," he agreed.
"And in the great outdoors, too."
He looked around. "I fail to see what's so great about it."
"It has trees and flowers and happy little squirrels," she supplied.
"Do they bite?"
She had to smirk. "It's good to know that weddings still bring out your soft and tender side."
"I am nothing if not the spirit of romance."
"Right you are, Pokey." Andy rolled her eyes, but still linked her arm through his when he extended it. They walked together into the church to take their places.
She didn't remember anything so concrete as words or images - just flashes, sensations. The warmth of her father's arm linked through hers; music; the soft and soothing murmur of the voice of the priest as he recited the opening prayer. And Charlie, always Charlie, the one thing in the entire church that she was seeing in clear focus.
Words didn't reenter her world until the moment her father stood up to make his reading, making the church and the people there his own as effortlessly as he did any podium and any crowd. His voice was a comfort, the familiar rumble of her childhood and every important moment since, but she didn't look at him; she didn't look at anyone but Charlie.
She didn't need to look to know that the words he spoke were read from nowhere but the inside of his head. She didn't worry that he would stumble or forget or struggle to get the words out; he wouldn't let her down.
In all her life, he'd never let her down.
"Jesus said to the disciples, 'This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you," he began, and his voice filled the air, gentle but thunderous in the same breath. "Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you."
When she was a little girl, still fresh to the ways of religion and faith, still unknowing of all the ways in which the world was bigger than she could imagine, Zoey had always privately believed that the voice of God would sound exactly like the voice of her father. Here, now, in this place, two decades older and wiser and becoming a married woman, she heard him speak... and she still believed it.
"You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide; so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. This I command you: love one another.'"
In the oasis of velvet silence that followed, she drifted back to herself for long enough to wonder if everyone else in the room - across the globe, as they sat glued to their TV screens for the public event of the decade - was hearing and feeling the same thing she did. Seeing her father, perhaps for the first time, cloaked in the glory of the words and the faith that had always been his power.
She couldn't know... and it didn't matter. Because in this moment, even her father was only a voice; there was nobody else in the church but one man. The man who was going to be her husband.
She felt Jed's hand tighten in her own, knew without looking at him that he was silently mouthing the words along as she was doing. In this exact church, thirty-five years ago, it had been her father and mother who sat in these seats, and she and Jed standing before them. Eyes locked together, hearts beating fast but in synchrony as they spoke the words that would seal them together forever.
"I, Charles Young," (I, Josiah Bartlet) "take you, Zoey Patricia Bartlet," (Abigail Anne Barrington) "to be my lawful wedded wife. To have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health-" Jed's fingers pressed closer against her own, and she closed her eyes momentarily against the sting of tears that were neither sad nor happy but overflowing with a love almost painful in its intensity, "-till death do us part."
She wasn't sure she'd ever known until now quite how much Zoey looked like her. While Charlie, of course, couldn't have looked less like Jed, tall and dark-eyed and chocolate-skinned - and yet, at the same time, in some undefinable way he did. She could see her husband in his stance, in the intensity of the gaze locked on her daughter's face (blue eyes, boring into hers, deep enough to drown in and never come back to the surface, not in thirty-five years, not ever) as she repeated the words.
And the priest could have been any of the men who'd stood where he stood for decades before and would for decades after. Speaking the words of a promise that was sacred to her in more ways than the purely religious.
"You have declared your consent before the Church. May the Lord in his goodness strengthen your consent and fill you both with his blessings. What God has joined, men must not divide."
"Amen," said the congregation in unison.
And softly, below the dying wave of voices, her husband repeated for her ears alone, "Amen." She reached across her lap with her right hand, and his left met it in the middle. They sat that way with both pairs of hands locked together, and as the priest blessed the rings she was conscious of her own in a way that she hadn't been in all the years that it had felt like nothing so much as an extension of her hand.
"Lord, bless these rings which we bless in your name. Grant that those who wear them may always have a deep faith in each other. May they do your will and always live together in peace, good will and love."
"Amen," repeated the congregation. She wasn't quite sure what made her glance at Jed in that very instant, but he was looking at her too, and the softness of his smile made her heart flip as easily as it had at nineteen.
It seemed that she was lost in his gaze for an eternity, for when she looked back to the front of the church the ceremony was reaching its final point.
"I now pronounce you man and wife," the priest said gravely, and Abbey heard the smile enter his voice. "You may now kiss the bride."
And so she saw her daughter kiss her new husband for the first time. But only for a tiny fraction of an instant.
Because right then, she was also kissing hers.