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There will be a cake, a colour scheme and two pairs of suits. There will be chairs for Adam’s small family, as well as Takashi’s not-so-small family. There will be a space next to Adam for Keith to impatiently stand, and a space next to Takashi for his favourite cousin, who will inevitably arrive late - but that’s okay, because Adam will tell him to arrive two hours before he’s actually supposed to so he can take his time with driving and the new GPS he just bought. Kai will arrive just in time for Takashi to ask Keith if he wants to carry the rings because little Louise will need someone to follow because she gets nervous (she doesn’t, and Keith knows this) then Keith’ll roll his eyes and huff as if it’s the greatest inconvenience because he’s 15 and thinks everything is a bore.
They won’t get married in a church, because no one with Elenora’s blood has been blessed enough to enter any of the Lord’s doors without feeling the weight of sins they could not help burying themselves deeper in their chest, inherited or not.
Adam wonders how marrying a man like Takashi could ever be a sin.
There are a handful of tales Adam knows, where stones weren’t cast and tables were flipped because messages were lost in translation, time and greed. A healer, he eventually learned, was no match against the roar of all that was wrong with the world. Turning drops of water into wine, one fish into hundreds, a man of miracles with a burden just as vast walks and keeps going until the world no longer believes in him. He lets it happen, just as any good martyr does.
Was Jesus obsessed with purity, a long winding road of a trap, where the handcuffs are not placed by God but the wearers themselves? Can a virtuous life only be achieved through the shaming of the lesser? What would virtue be anyway, if not a medal of honour for those who held onto one meaning out of many?
Who is Adam really disobeying, if he chooses to love in the only way he knows how? Without falsities, virtue or shame, Adam does not worship Takashi in the way the preacher sings to the heavens and is nowhere near as perfect as the man in the sky - but there are stars, and Adam prefers to place his faith in something so permanently impermanent.
Indeed, these are the things Adam will think about on their wedding day, where the snow of a New York winter will make Takashi’s cheeks flush an apple red, and Adam will grumble because Florida is evergreen in its sunshine and its ochre sands. There is no room, Adam decides, for those who do not have room for them. An act of self-preservation, he calls it.
It’s a lot more and a lot less than that.
Yes, there will be a cake, three tiers of marbled buttercream and white chocolate sponge because Takashi loves white chocolate for some goddamned reason, because he wrote WHITE CHOCOLATE PLEASE, ADAM!!! in red marker on a post-it note hanging on the edge of the bedroom mirror. There will be a colour scheme drawn from the ochre of Adam’s Florida summers and two suits that fit perfectly, with silken pocket squares that Adam will scoff at. Nora will wear a dress she hadn't worn before and Maria will wear her favourite red lipstick and get it all over Keith’s cheeks when the crowd cheers and cries, and the sounds of Takashi’s laughter will ring instead of the sound of church bells.
There’ll be snow, but make no mistake, the heavy winds of January will not be enough to keep the boys apart. In fact, it’ll give Adam all the more reason to hold onto Takashi. There will be laughter, embarrassing stories and the smell of Takashi’s cologne permeating the air surround them both. The photographer will take a ridiculous amount of photos, because Rochelle, Takashi’s favourite Aunt-in-law, has a knack for making everyone laugh, and they’ll release that Takashi is the most photogenic person to have ever existed and that Adam truly smiles when he is next to him.
Of course, their first dance will be recorded by several people under a soft spotlight that makes Takashi shine like a star. But Adam will treasure the zoomed-in, secretly recorded angle of the dance that captures the way Adam bites his lip when Takashi whispers something undeniably simple and sweet, from the grain of Keith’s phone, which used to be Adam’s.
Keith is not a wild animal by any means. He will make sure Takashi or Adam are never out of his sight the whole time, and he might even read out the speech he’d been working on for the past couple of months. Adam might even cry, Keith might even smile, and Takashi will most certainly be doing both at the same time.
There will be a holiness, a reverence Adam feels throughout this day. It dawns on him, the meaning of placing your faith into something so uncertain that it makes you want to sing for the rest of your life. He understands why God rested on the seventh day, why he stopped to revel in his creation - why Adam will continue to rest his assurances in the future he and Takashi have built together. This epiphany had almost manifested itself in the times Adam caught himself buying Takashi’s favourite Japanese candies, or the way Takashi automatically plucks Adam’s glasses from the perch of his nose when he dozes at his desk at night. But now, seeing Takashi in the light of moon, the stars, the sparkle of champagne, the love of it all - this is the culmination of everything they've unknowingly built, imprinted in the back of his mind, a rewrite of the blueprint of how Adam sees the world.
There will be a cake, first cut by Takashi, and the icing will find itself smeared all over his cheeks. Adam will try his best to commit this to memory.
“You’ve got a little something there,” Adam will say, stifling a laugh. He’ll grab his pompous pocket square, silken and cool between his fingers, and start wiping it at Takashi’s cheek as if he’s exasperated, but he’ll make sure none of the icing smears onto Takashi’s eyelashes and lids.
Takashi, like the born performer he is, will huff and puff with laughter, shoulders shaking because it’s impossible for him to completely conceal what he’s feeling at any given moment. He’ll squish his face against Adam’s and the icing will get on his glasses, his nose, and his lips. There will be nothing sweeter than this.
Yes, there will be a cake, smeared on the married couple’s faces, but there will be a colour scheme too. The golden sunrises of Adam’s childhood bookended by the years where he wished his days away, to be able to skip to the part where he got to be happy to whatever this will be. The ties will be a faded ochre, but the wash of navy on Takashi’s dress shirt will make his cheeks glow even brighter than usual, and it’s wonderful. The way the moonlight will bounce off with clarity against the snow, against the shine in Takashi’s eyes can’t be captured in a simple colour, so Adam won’t try to. But it will be their wedding day, and all Adam will do is marvel at the way the Takashi twinkles through his tears.
Adam will feel a weight of relief because they'll no longer have to worry about deposits, deadlines and whatnot. A binder (or two) will find themselves tucked safely into the back of their study, and perhaps every so often, Adam may take it out, and smile at how they could’ve chosen to have a wedding in summer, or a wedding where they wear red instead, or a wedding where they dipped their toes into the ochre sands of a beach Adam grew up on. He’ll grin at the sight of scattered post-it notes of cake, stars, and snowy afternoons, where New York?!?? is scribbled in a green highlighter, and make sure you research which flowers are in bloom in January, Takashi is hastily scratched in a red pen that Adam can only find in the stationery shop half an hour away from their apartment.
All will be well, as Takashi and Adam slow dance on the veranda of the fancy hotel that Takashi’s aunts and uncles have offered to pay one day and night for, and Keith’ll start feeling sleepy, leaving him vulnerable to any and all attempts at affection from both of the grooms’ families. It'll be January, it'll be cold, and it’ll be perfect.
It will be quiet, with the music muffled in that charming way you find in movies, just before the swell of emotions and a crescendo of strings that make you wonder if you too believe in love.
Adam will ask something just this once because he hates the moments where he needs help finding answers. He'll be brave from the champagne and euphoria. He'll whisper, low and sweet, “How important am I to you, Takashi?”
“Very important,” Takashi will respond, as he laces his fingers around Adam’s. “The most,” he’ll add, giddy and serious all at once.
Adam will laugh at the ridiculousness of this bald-faced lie, because-
There will be no wedding, because Takashi is a good martyr of some sort, and was made for things more important than weddings, small families, and not-so-small families. The doors this man wanted to go through do not belong to a church, and there are so many questions to be answered that aren’t solved with cake, chairs and colours.
Perhaps it would’ve been too much of a hassle, Adam supposes, since Takashi’s legs didn’t work well enough for him to stand about for a whole day, but he insisted that he could drive a spaceship just fine and had trained enough under zero-gravity that he didn’t even have to feel the weight makes his knees buckle most days, the weight that Adam was willing to handle for all the days they would've spent together.
There’s a binder (or two) in the back of a study, with post-it notes with rushed, shaky letters of i love you don’t forget to take your tablets Takashi. There are receipts of returned deposits, and an incomplete registration form for the hotel Takashi’s mother found back in July. There is an unopened email from the photographer, awkwardly insisting on sending the practice shots where Adam, Takashi and Keith all sit as a family because they look very lovely, and besides it would be a shame if no one ever saw these, you know? A session for cake sampling is rescheduled so many times that it now remains cancelled indefinitely after Adam finally loses the fight. There is a history and a future that Adam will never get to witness in those files, and not even the magic of a healer can fix that now.
Why should he believe in blessings or miracles? There is nothing to be learned from a wedding that will never be, and a man who keeps bleeding for a body that stopped believing in him. The only person Adam betrays in this act of love and blatant disregard of self-preservation is himself.
No, there will not be a cake, chairs or colours. The ochre of Adam’s summers will remain a private affair, and the sweet navy of a pressed dress shirt remains frozen in time in the back of a cupboard, gathering dust because there’s nothing better to do. There will not be a wedding, because Takashi’s body is hundreds of thousands of miles away, and he’s dead.
What is the point of martyrdom, if not to show a virtuous performance of dedication to a cause? Adam wonders what the fucking point of virtue is if all it does is hurt everyone else who isn’t you?
Was Adam so wrong for wanting something as simple as wishing for his fiancé to be alive for a wedding, even though there are so many other things to do? Was he so wrong for wanting something that didn't have to change the world?
There is a man on the edges of the solar system who believed his death would mean something if it meant he got to choose when it happened if it meant something to others even if he couldn’t reap the rewards. It’s as simple as that. There’s no comfort in that, no love, no nothing, except from a few rock samples from a distant moon and a Pilot Error.
There is a man who sits by himself in his classroom, looking at a desk chair at the back of the classroom that is empty every Friday afternoon and wonders about cakes, colours and chairs.