[OTA] Now join your hands, and with your hands your hearts

[onlytolerable]

(Fitzgerald-Berthier Wedding)

It's been a long road from asking to wedding, Sophie thinks as she watches the stylist add the last touches to her hair. Adrien had wanted the wedding close to Sophie's birthday, but then Silas had talked about stepping down and there was the very real chance Cadogan might have been asked to fill his shoes. They'd decided to postpone. Then there'd been Lotty - and another postponing. She looks at the ceiling and wills tears away. The last thing her sister would have wanted was to ruin an excuse for a perfectly good party.

And so here they are, with Sophie looking like an Edwardian lady in Claire Pettibone and her bridesmaids like iced petit fours in sage and peach respectively. Other than the butterflies performing an aerial show in her stomach, she's surprisingly free of nerves. Nothing has felt so right to her as loving Adrien. The wedding is just one more step in that, a chance to tell the world how she feels. She's even stopped worrying about tripping down the aisle.

Not that Cadogan, who she'd asked to escort her down the aisle, would ever allow that to happen. No, she arrives safe in one piece before he leaves her side to take up his place as Adrien's Best Man. He looked handsome in his morning suit, though not so handsome as the groom. She gives Adrien a blinding smile, one that's returned to her full-force. He's been like a kid at a candy store ever since they'd begun planning. Utterly sweet, she thinks, and, well... surprising. She feels stupidly gooey inside (like one of those ridiculous romance heroines) just knowing he wants this as much as she does. Not that he'll hear that from her, at least not without prying. A woman needs to have some secrets.

All in all, she thinks later as she and Adrien leave the chapel as newly married couple, everyone and everything looks lovely. The chapel has never smelled so sweet as it has today with the profusion of peonies, roses and hyacinths. Sitara has never looked so adorable as she does in her sage flower girl dress. Adrien can't have been more charming and handsome.

A day made of superlatives, with an equally astounding evening ahead of them. She brushes a soft kiss along her--her husband's!--cheek. Never has anyone been so lucky.

Comments

[onlytolerable]

"Borrow Sitara if you feel you need an excuse." Sophie suspects her little girl will be ice cream camouflage for a lot of the party-goers. She hopes Adrien remembered to buy tummy medicine just in case.

[uncutclarity]

"I think I would have gone swimming in it when I was her age," Avery says, laughing. "It's a good thing I was never called upon to be a flower girl. I asked Mom and Dad if they would please get married when I was six, you know." She gives Sophie a conspirational look. "I just wanted a dress and an excuse to wear flowers in my hair."

[onlytolerable]

She suspects Avery seldom had to argue if she wanted flowers in her hair. Her parents probably encouraged it. "Our problem was that there were four of us." She stumbles a little on the four. "No one wants that many flower girls. Irene and--the twins--one the flower girl lottery whenever the occasion did arise. There's something about the double effect. Gets them every time." She smiles, albeit a trifle sadly, at the memories.

"I doubt they ever got to swim in chocolate fountains, though. Mama would have kept them on a tight rein."

[uncutclarity]

"I can't quite imagine that, I admit." She and Sophie were the same age, but Avery's rise hadn't been quite as meteoric - there'd been that year she'd taken off to tour Europe, after all, and that had put her behind Sophie for a while. It had been the twins Avery had usually been competing against. "They always looked picture perfect when we were all little. I was usually covered in mud."

Or chocolate, just not from fountains.

"It was a beautiful wedding," she adds. "You and Adrien look so happy."

[onlytolerable]

"It was leaves for me. I climbed a lot of trees when I was little--not so dirty and easy to deny so long as I was careful to pick out any leaves or sticks before I met an adult. Do you know, I'm not sure what Irene and...Lotty...did to misbehave. I'm sure they must have. Clearly they were far sneakier than I ever was!" She chuckles.

"I am ridiculously happy, ridiculously, stupidly happy. I feel like every horrible wedding cliche out there right now." Her gaze seeks out Adrien in the crowd. "Mostly I'm happy that he's happy."

[uncutclarity]

"I can't imagine Irene misbehaving." She'd perfected looking...well, perfect, before she was four years. "I seem to remember that Lotty used to sneak into the stables, though. I wonder how she bribed Mel."

Avery brushes her hair back and smiles over at Adrien. Time was that they'd both had an unspoken pact to stay separate from real romantic entanglements. Now it seemed like she was the only one holding on to that. Which was, probably, a good thing. "He deserves it," she says out loud. "He's spent way too much time pretending to be happy and not enough time actually being it."

[onlytolerable]

One of the maddening things about her younger sister was her no one seeming perfection. Irene might well be the most internalized of them all. Sophie had finally decided that in itself was a sort of misbehavior and given up looking further. Perhaps she shouldn't have done that.

"He has, and so well not many realize it." She smiles, grateful Avery sees through Adrien's disguise. Her smile grows deeper--as does her color--when she realizes his happiness isn't because he got married, but because he got married to her.

"Oh dear. I hope I don't mess this up."

[uncutclarity]

Avery's eyes crinkled up in a smile. "You love him and he loves you, and you're both determined, strong people," she says lightly. "In end, I think that's all it takes to make it through any rough patches that might be ahead." Not that it would always be easy - Avery couldn't imagine Adrien being easy - but they had the tools to survive.