It should have been her wedding.
Instead, it was her funeral.
Duo Maxwell's stepfather and stepsister Iria had died last Tuesday in an automobile accident en route to the cake shop. They were still making preparations for Iria's wedding, which was scheduled to be the coming Sunday.
The young bride had made preparations for most everything: food, dresses, flowers, even the decorations had been left all up to her to choose. It was the best thing to ever happen, other than the birth of her brother Quatre, of course. With him, she shared blonde hair and teal eyes. He was staying with Duo at basketball practice at the time.
The cake was ordered, but it was yet to be decided how the cake would be decorated. That decision, too, was left up to Iria Winner. She was driving with her father to decide on the cake, when they collided with another car at the intersection preceding the cake shop. The other driver had been late for a meeting and had not seen the red light, and peeled through it, only to crash into the innocent Mr. Winner and daughter.
It was completely unfair, Duo had thought to himself. The speeding accountant had survived with naught but some scratches from the broken glass. Iria, whom he loved dearly, and his stepfather had both passed away. On impact. Tragically. The irony of the situation was such that he could not keep himself composed while waiting in the pew for the funeral ceremony to start, next to Quatre - Iria's brother and Mr. Winner's son, and therefore Duo's stepbrother - in the very local church wherein the wedding ceremony was to take place, and on that very same Sunday. Duo wondered if Iria's spirit was still happy to be there, as she'd arranged for that day, despite the reason.
"It's all right," Quatre said, a stroking hand on the shoulder of Duo's suit. He choked. His sadness could not be hidden so easily as he wished. He loved his sister, perhaps even more than Duo did, and he had his father to mourn for.
Duo looked up and coughed into a fist. "Yeah..." He wiped the saltwater from his eyes.
Scanning the audience, he saw that he knew most of the visitors. Iria's friends, classmates, and teachers, and anyone who had been invited originally to the wedding had arrived. There was only one person whom he did not recognize - a young man who may have been a bit older, maybe even by a few years, with tousled, dark hair. He sat patiently, straight up in the pew. He was only two rows ahead of where Duo and Quatre sat, about three yards to the right. Duo checked his watch. Still five minutes before the funeral started. So he stood and walked to the end of the aisle and forward in the church.
He found the man and tapped him on the shoulder. Quatre gave Duo a little smaile and a wave, encouraging his light-hearted bit of bravery. Bravery to meet a new person, as well as bravery from the dismal event of the day. The chocolate-haired man looked up at Duo's bright, but sad, and inquisitive eyes. Duo was surprised at the man's sharp blue, somewhat Asian-reminiscent gaze.
"Ah, excuse me, sir," Duo began slowly with a nervous chuckle. "I seem to recognize all here but you. May I... ask as to how you know Iria or Mister Winner?"
The man's stare became only a little softer. "My name is Heero Yuy," he said in a slightly gruff voice, medium pitch. "I was arranged to be Iria's fiancee."
Anne was late. She found her brother standing in the aisle, in the middle of the church, with a rather shocked expression on his face.
Duo slowly realized that he had not even met Iria's would-be groom before. How strange it seemed to him that this man with such a frighteningly fixed stare would be wed to his sweet and charming stepsister. What possibly could the peace-loving Iria have seen in this cross-looking person?
"I see you've met Mister Yuy," Anne drawled. Her floor-length black dress swished around her ankles as her heels clicked against the synthetic marble floors. A cruelly characteristic little smile curled up the edges of her subtly-glossed lips. "A fine man of the military." Duo was cought off-guard as his sister Anne put a hand on his shoulder, and also leaned down to set one across the other visitor's shoulder. This Heero Yuy did not move nor seem surprised, but Duo wavered a bit. Heero looked up at him again. Anne tilted her head both ways, acknowledging each, and her loosely braided and bound brown hair shook slightly on the back of her head, her deep brown eyes glinting with cleverness.
They were softer, though, now that she had gotten the contacts, her younger brother thought.
She nodded briefly as she stood, touching off of both Duo and Heero. "Well, I'm glad," she said, her voice low, "that you've found your family, Heero. You've recieved permission to come over after the ceremony, if you wish. Let's go, brother." She curled her fingers in a gesture of leadership. Duo nodded to the other man curtly, before Heero watched him leave, following Anne back to his seat next to his blonde stepbrother.