"So there will be a wedding tomorrow?" Victor asked me.
"Yes," I replied. There had never been a question of calling it off. At this point -- what with all the guests, all the preparations, and, quite importantly-- the most important of all, in fact, our embryonic daughter--- all of these, compounded, were sufficient reason to go forward with the wedding. Even in my darkest moments, I had not contemplated calling it off.
"There is something that I believe you may have forgotten." Victor turned his head and looked at me meaningfully.
"What might that be?" I asked.
"This is the day before our wedding, and as I was promised, the ring I designed for you has been completed and delivered. I told you that when it was ready, when I could put it into your hand, and you could read the words engraved there, then I would tell you what you said to me in Hell that persuaded me we should be united."
"That's right! I hadn't forgotten exactly, I just mislaid it, what with everything that was going on. Are you going to tell me now?"
"No. Not yet. Later. Now I believe they are expecting us for a wedding rehearsal." He was right of course, as he so often was.
The ceremony was going to be Latverian Orthodox, which was essentially Eastern Orthodox with a few local variations.
A lot of our guests were going to be surprised by the differences between this wedding ceremony and those they were familiar with in the Western forms of Christianity. The problem was, so was I. I was fairly ignorant.
I had plenty of faith, once. My grandmother had been a convert to Lutheranism, my mother's family were all Baptists, and I went to church with first one, then the other, without questioning it. After my mother's divorce, she stopped going within a year, and I stopped too. Since moving to Latveria, I had attended services at the Doomstadt Cathedral but rarely, and never had I been to a wedding here.
I had only a few sketchy ideas of what the differences were going to be. I knew, for example, that at some point Victor and I were going to be holding lighted candles for a extended time, and that there would be crowns involved. I did not know that I would not be walking down any sort of aisle to meet Victor at the altar, or in this case, walking through the assemblage of guests to enter the Castle and go to the balcony where Victor would be waiting.
No, instead, Victor, accompanied by Boris, and my mother and I, would meet the bishop at the back of the castle yard by the gatehouses, where my mother would place my hand in the bishop's. Then the bishop would place my hand in Victor's, and lead us together down a white carpet, (which at the moment was simply some chalked-in lines), up the aisle into Castle Doom, up the stairs, and finally out onto the balcony.
We walked through it -- and walking was the relevant word. There was a small altar table set up on the balcony, and part of the ceremony required that Victor and I walk around it three times while carrying the aforementioned lighted candles. It's a good thing my dress didn't have an enormous train like Princess Diana's -- or it would have ended up wound around the altar table like spaghetti on a fork.
It was nice to see how both Boris and my mother were relieved to find Victor and I were on better terms than we had been that morning. It made up for the bishop, who seemed disappointed that I was willing to leave the stricture to obey in his Instructions on Marriage. However, he did have a chance to chide me for being so westernized that I thought the left hand was the proper hand for wedding rings. Another thing I did not know— apparently in Eastern Orthodoxy, wedding rings are always worn on the right hand.
And that was another difficulty. The bride and groom were supposed to exchange rings. It was an important part of the ceremony. I didn't have a ring for Victor. My mother, seeing my wide-eyed look of momentary panic, came to my rescue. "Don't worry, dear. I didn't forget it. It's at home. For the ceremony, she wanted to use her father's wedding ring." she explained.
It was a nice save. "I really didn't know what sort you'd like." I told Victor. "Or what your size might be. We can choose one later."
"It was something to which I gave no thought." he admitted, or invented. It occurred to me that I have no idea what Victor's religion might be-- or if he had any at all.
After the wedding rehearsal, it was time for dinner. Most rehearsal dinners are apparently somewhat formal events, these days. This was not. It was basically make- your-own sandwiches with cold cuts and salads, served buffet style in the garden for ourselves, and for such wedding guests who had showed up early, such as the King of Wakanda, T'Challah, also known as the superhero Black Panther.
He drew me aside at one point, as we stood around with our plates of food and asked a favor: Could he be seated next to Ororo Munro, who was also Storm of the X-Men? Storm was a very beautiful woman of African decent, whose mutant power was weather control. Her mutancy showed in her pure white hair and her crystal-blue eyes; she was striking. Small wonder that he should want to be seated near her!
I thought that was quite interesting, and I told him yes, I would speak to a steward about it -- only after chiding him for sending, as his wedding gift, a fertility, or rather a virility, idol so enthusiastic that it could not be put on public display. He laughed, and said he had put aside his quarrel with Victor for the occasion, but that he could not resist embarrassing him.
Moving along, I encountered Namor, who had printed out a picture of Marrina and was inclined to gaze at it moonily, which interfered with his ability to eat properly. Still, he seemed very happy. If the business with T'challa and Storm of the X-Men turned out the way it seemed it might, I anticipated a flood of wedding invitations in the next several months. That was amusing to think of.
All of this, however, was simply filler. I was waiting for the time, when dinner was over, when everyone had gone back to their rooms, or their homes. Then I could go upstairs with Victor and finally find out what it was I had said, when I was dead, when I could not lie about how I felt, or conceal it. It seemed to me the person I had hidden it from the most was myself.
It was not until it was time for the dessert course, profiteroles filled with ice cream and drizzled with chocolate sauce, that Victor and I were thrown together by the ebb and flow of people.
"I fear, my dear, that you have lost an admirer. I have just spent the last quarter of an hour speaking, or rather, listening to Namor talking about a woman by the name of Marrina. He had with him a picture of her, but I must say that she is one of the oddest -- even to the point of being repellent -- females I have ever seen."
"Well, you have to make allowances for individuality." I told him. "She's not of the surface world, you see. And if he findsher beautiful, well then she will be beautiful -- and the world will come to see it as well. After all, I am not, objectively speaking, beautiful, for my features are too strong -- even heavy. I know quite well that if somehow the young Audrey Hepburn and I were in the same room nobody would look at me twice. Yet I'm being called beautiful, and in print, too. I know quite well it's because I'm marrying you."
"What a ridiculous statement. Are you somehow of the impression that you aren't attractive?" Victor asked.
"I'm attractive enough." I smiled. "You seem to find me so, anyway."
"I believe it is quiet enough now that we might slip away unobserved." Victor commented. "I shall meet you upstairs in ten minutes."
I said good night to a few people, hugged my mother, who promised she would be by in the morning to help me dress, and then, (what the heck), hugged Boris too, and went upstairs.
I did not find Victor where I thought I would -- which was to say, in my suite. The connecting door to his apartments was open, however, and I hesitated but a moment at the door before I asked, "May I come in?"
"Naturally." came his voice from the darkened room.
For the first time, I stepped over the threshold. It would been fascinating to have a good look around at everything, but the focus of my attention was on the man who stood by the windows. He had shed the armor and was wearing the informal mask with a shirt and trousers. The lights came up as I crossed the room to him. I looked out the window, just as he was doing.
"I thought your rooms must overlook the city, and I was right." I said.
"It bears watching." said Victor,. My hands were resting on the window seat. His hand slipped into mine, and in it there was a small velvet-covered something that I supposed to be a ring box. When his hand retreated, leaving the walnut-sized box in mine, I raised the box to the level of my eyes and opened it.
Of course it was beautiful. It was also very unusual. There was a brilliantly clear rectangular cut diamond mounted lengthwise across the band, surmounted by a crown. It was heavy gold, and delicately enameled in blue, red, and green. The crown had a ruby set in it, and the shank of the ring had a hand holding a heart on each side.
I took out of the box, and as I did so it came into pieces -- two pieces. One half had the diamond, and the other half had the crown. I realized it was a gemmal ring, two interlocking bands. The inscription was not inside the band, where it would be rubbed against the finger, but inside the two bands, which when worn would look like one ring.
"You are my summer." I read, and looked at Victor. "You are my summer?"
"Yes." he said. "I decided upon that, although you gave me any number of phrases to choose from. When I asked you 'But why? What am I to you that you would you do such a thing for me?', your reply was:
"I admired you before I ever met you. Plus, I need you, but that didn't happen much to do with why I did it -- it came upon me by degrees." You looked puzzled.
"What came upon you by degrees?" I asked
"Liking you. I didn't think I would. At first I thought it was just that I liked talking to someone who understood everything I said, every concept, every word. But I realized I liked how I felt when I was around you. Since I was 12 or so I've gone through the world feeling like Alice in Wonderland, after she drinks the potion that makes her grow until she's stuck in the rabbit's house, with her arm out the window and her foot up the chimney -- too big, too tall, too smart, too outspoken, too opinionated, too odd-looking.
"It made me awkward, and silent. It made me feel ugly. It made me hate myself. But around you -- I notice none of those things. I feel as if I fit -- as if I'm normal, even accepted.
"Even if it's just because I'm so insignificant to you that you can't be bothered to stare or sneer, I had rather be miniscule to you, than be noticed by anyone else -- because to anyone else, I'm an oddity.
"I don't know if this is love; it seems too quiet and too natural. A flower, a jasmine perhaps, that's wintered inside will live, or at least not die, through the months of frost. Perhaps it would even send out a flower too, but nothing like what it will do one put outside when summer comes. Then it unfolds its leaves, uncurls its tendrils, growing fit to overflow the container that binds it -- and it blooms as though to garb itself and lace and reflect the sun that nourishes it.
"You are my summer, although you did not know it nor intended, and near you, I grow, I thrive, and I bloom."
"What do you want of me -- that you do not have already ?" I asked you.
Your reply was, "Nothing -- except that I wish you were happier."
I asked you, "What?"
"I know being angry is part of who you are, like your height or your intellect -- but I wish there was room for happiness there as well. I wish it could just enjoy a joke or read a book, and be happy in that moment."
"And for this you would risk your immortal soul." I marveled.
"Heaven would not be heaven, were you not there."
"I am scarred. I have killed people with my own hands, and I am likely to do so again. I have conquered the world, and will do so again. I have been called vicious, ruthless, cruel, and implacable, and in those things there may be some truth."
You nodded "And your name is Victor Von Doom. Yes, I know. You say these things as if they should be new to me."
"And yet you feel as you do?" I asked.
"Yes." was your answer.
"What if I were to send you away? What if you never saw me again, nor spoke to me, nor heard my voice, ever again?"
"Winter always comes back, sooner or later. I'll live."
"What if I were to requite it? What if I took you to my heart, as you have taken me to yours, make you my wife?" I asked you.
"'It were all one that I should love a bright particular star, and think to wed it, he is so above me.' That's from 'All 's Well That Ends Well ' "you answered. I do not think there can be many other people in the world, on whose soul the entirety of Shakespeare is apparently engraved.
"Not Shakespeare's words; your own." I demanded.
"You'd never do that." was your reply.
"For the sake of argument, then, what if I did?"
"You said, "I don't know." -- but your mouth smiled just a little. I do not know precisely what decided me -- whether it was the simple eloquence of your statement, or that you wanted so little -- but I decided then that I must marry you."