A/N Bioware owns all. Dedicated to Em as always. Let me know what you guys think!
Shepard pinched the bridge of her nose in an effort to stall the encroaching headache she could feel threatening behind her eyes.
"Ok," she said letting out a whoosh of breath. "What if we put Wrex and Bakara here?"
She tapped a few keys on her omni-tool and two holographic pins floated up from the display in front of her. They moved fluidly across the series of little circles shown on the display and settled down on the outside of a random circle. Two other pins rose to make room for them.
"And put the Primarch and his wife over there."
The newly raised pins began their trek back across the circles and took their place on the outside of another circle. If one looked closely enough one could see the pins were marked with tiny holographic text that read 'Primarch' and 'Primarch's wifey'.
The man seated next to Shepard leaned forward, bracing his forearms on his knees as he studied the display projected onto the coffee table in front of them.
"No good," he said after a moment. "That puts the Krogans too close to the Salarians."
"Gah!" Shepard threw her hands up into the air and slumped back onto the sofa. "Then I officially give up!"
Now that she thought about it, it had all started with that dammed council meeting. She should have put her foot down right then and there but oh no! She'd let in all the thoughts about representing humanity and doing the right thing and showing support for the new council and she'd figured it was only three extra guests. But then, once word had gotten out that the council was going, the media had gotten involved in a big way, they'd pried and pried and pried, and eventually someone had found out that an Admiral of the Migrant Fleet was going to be in attendance. Then someone else had discovered that the clan leader of Tuchanka was going. Then the Turians had kicked off claiming that they were being under-represented at an event that had already become about so much more than just two people who loved each other to the point that Shepard was beginning to wonder whose wedding it even was anyway.
Shepard had tried; she really had, to make the point that both the Quarian Admiral and Clan Leader of Tuchanka were treasured friends and valued members of her crew and were invited by virtue of those attributes rather than any kind of job title or political ploy.
It had made absolutely no difference whatsoever.
In a matter of weeks, the guest list had swelled. At first it had just been the Council and then the Primarch. Which Shepard didn't mind too much since she liked the Primarch and all just maybe not enough to drop him and his wife a voluntary invite. However, this had annoyed the Salarians who insisted that the Dalatrass be invited. Then the Dalatrass had insisted that she couldn't possibly travel anywhere without her entourage of six attendants. This had brought the Asari into it who claimed that they were underrepresented and before Shepard knew it, a troupe of four matriarchs had been invited. Finally, the Admiralty Board had decided that all of them should be there to represent the Quarians and Shepard had serious doubts about her ability to refrain from punching Han'gerrel repeatedly in the face the moment he showed up. She'd jokingly asked Wrex whether he thought the entire Urdnot clan should be in attendance in order to accurately represent the Krogans and he'd gone really really quiet for a moment, which had really really scared her until he'd laughed and clapped her on the back and informed her that he and Grunt were more than enough Krogan.
Privately, she agreed.
She wasn't completely sure why they needed to be doing the seating chart anyway. It wasn't like they'd picked the venue, or the food or the guests or… anything, really.
That had all been Asha. Asha was an Alliance PR representative. One of the best, apparently. All Shepard knew was that the woman had a perpetually positive outlook that was so 'sunny' in its disposition that it pissed her off just a little bit more each time she saw her. She was also absolutely delighted to be responsible for planning what she called 'the wedding of the age' and, oh, wasn't their story just so terribly romantic?
Well no, no it wasn't. It had involved a lot of pain and heartbreak and almost the destruction of the entire fucking galaxy as they knew it. It had involved a lot of bullets and blood, it had involved losing friends. Hell, she had actually been bleeding and surrounded by wreckage when he'd proposed.
Shepard wasn't an expert on romance by any means, but she was fairly sure that most romantic story telling didn't require vast amounts of blood and wholesale destruction.
More's the pity.
She wondered if it would it be considered 'romantic' if she had Kaidan kill their assigned wedding planner simply because she pissed Shepard off?
Because if blood-plus-explosions-equals-romance she was pretty sure she could get Kaidan on board with that plan if she had to.
And then she could plan her own wedding herself, as she'd originally wanted to.
The first order of business being throwing the damn seating chart out of the window.
The hand on her knee interrupted the mental image of the holographic interface speeding down the building and shattering into a million pieces. He squeezed her knee reassuringly.
He activated his own omni-tool, a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth "What if we take these two pins?" Two pins rose from the oblong table at the top of the interface. "And these ones?" Another twenty or so pins rose to join the two already in the air. "And take them... over... here somewhere. In something that looks like... that?"
The grin bloomed across her race as the twenty-two pins floated away from the concentric circles and filed into a very familiar, very unique shape.
"Kaidan Alenko," she said slowly, still grinning. "Are you suggesting we elope?"
He grinned back at her. "Maybe?"
If possible, her smile got even wider as she entertained that notion. They could probably do it, even with the entire galaxy watching. The idea of being able to marry Kaidan Alenko the way she really wanted to had such appeal. Also, if she could somehow get a recording of Asha's disappointed face when they failed to turn up, that would definitely be the cherry on the proverbial cake. Except...
Except there would be a lot of disappointed faces.
A lot of people, a lot of civilians, were 'following' their wedding. A lot of people wanted to see their hero get her 'happily ever after'. Which thus far had sucked a relatively huge amount of ass, but she understood. She did. Those tens of thousands of people had lost daughters, husbands, brothers, sons… They hadn't been trained to deal with the horrors of war like she had. They couldn't compartmentalise like she could and she could see how those people might need to see a 'happily ever after' in action. Just so they could believe that it was possible.
She couldn't let those people down like that. She just couldn't.
She sighed. Who knew that victory could be so hard?
"We can't, Kaidan. The ordinary people. They need us."
His face fell. It was entirely likely that for one glorious moment he'd just been thinking of them.
"I know," he muttered, bitterly. "I know. It's just..."
She understood. "Yeah, I know."
And then she had the epiphany. She had had a few epiphanies in her career, that one about using the nearby fuel cells as a makeshift bomb had been pretty good, but this one had them all beat hands down.
"What if?" She began, once she was sure the smile was no longer visible. "What if we took those pins to that place for a while and then brought them back to... here?" The twenty-two pins sailed back to the concentric circles.
It took him a moment, but when the realisation crested in his eyes and the smile began to break over his face, she decided it was worth the effort.
"Commander Shepard, are you suggesting we have two weddings?"
She grinned at him.
"Why the fuck not? We could have one, the real one, on board the Normandy with the important people and then the big stupid fairytale ridiculousness afterwards with the unimportant people."
He leaned forward once again, bracing his forearms on his knees, and studied the interface.
"It'd be difficult," he said after a moment. "Keeping it secret, I mean. We'd have to make sure no-one noticed the Normandy leaving. Or that we're on board."
She leaned forward, matching his position.
"Yeah, but we have a team of the best... and I'm sure they can think of a few things."
The next day, Asha felt like all her dreams had come true. Commander Shepard was suddenly agreeing to everything. Giant fifteen-tiered cake? Check! Swan ice sculptures? Check! Rose pink colour scheme? Check!
She didn't know, of course, that the reason for this was that Shepard no longer cared. She would formally be marrying Kaidan Alenko hours before the circus began. That, and she had discovered that her time with Asha seemed to go so much faster when she just agreed with anything the woman said.
Not that this new plan wasn't without its difficulties.
Shepard spent all day with Asha, agreeing to whatever she said, and all night up with the crew, planning the real wedding. Granted, planning the second wedding was less like planning a wedding and more like planning a mission. Shepard couldn't decide whether she preferred planning the real one because it was the real one, or because it was like planning a mission.
Credit where credit was due, her crew were working wonders. Cover stories, fake signals, misinformation. To anyone who cared to look into the records, the Normandy was obviously docked in an Alliance station for routine maintenance. In reality, she was hiding in a nearby planetary orbit under Joker and EDI's care. Miranda had secretly filmed the 'hair trials' Asha had insisted on. Shepard had had no clue what a 'hair trial' was, and once she'd been forcibly introduced to the idea she could not, for the life of her, understand why it was necessary.
Well, unless your friend was recording it so she and your other friends could do something something something to the metadata that would render them able to broadcast the footage days later but make it look like it was happening live.
But besides that, she couldn't see the reason.
Kasumi, ever the procurement goddess, had managed to find all the liquor, flowers and decorations they could want. The boys did a grand job of hiding them around the apartment and ensuring that the er... purchases couldn't be traced back to them.
All in all, it really looked as if they might be able to pull this off.