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I’m forever yours, faithfully, his messy handwriting - scrawled across the thick, gold-embossed hotel napkin - reads. Then, at the very tail of it: I’ll meet you at the end. - Your (almost) husband.
She sets the napkin down at the sound of the door opening. For a few quiet minutes, Rachel got to bask in the glow of being completely, entirely alone — for the first time since five o’clock this morning. Just her and a half-dranken mimosa and shaky hands, and the note Finn had Puckerman sneakily pass off to Quinn, who gave it to Tina, who finally gave it to the bride-to-be.
She holds her palm flatly over it, sitting up straight. She can feel the pins holding her bun stiffly in place already start to give her a headache — or maybe it’s just the way her maid of honor storms into the room.
“Bad news…” Santana, the train of her blush-colored bridesmaid’s dress trailing along the carpeted floor behind her, enters the bridal suite in a frenzy.
“Yes…” Rachel clasps her hands together, top lip folding over her bottom, “‘Bad news’ is exactly what a bride wants to hear from her maid of honor like, an hour before she has to walk down the aisle.”
Santana holds up three fingers and wiggles them at her. “Three, you’ve still got some time.”
“What’s wrong?” Her heartbeat is heightening, and underneath this lace bridal robe her skin is prickly from nerves. She smooths a hand along one of her biceps and takes a breath, her knitted expression locking on Santana’s from the vanity mirror. The makeup artist is coming back in a few minutes for finishing touches; she can already feel the inner corner of a false lash lifting. “San, say something.”
“Something.”
“That’s not funny, Santana.”
“Fine.” She sighs, stepping further into the room, two perfectly manicured fingernails pressing into her temples. “So, like. How attached to the veil were you?”
“I — I liked it enough to make my fathers spend over four hundred dollars on it,” she says, swiveling around in the white leather stool. The makeup artist is quietly reentering the bridal suite, her kit in hand, ready to get to work on the final touches. “Why?”
“Right, I forgot to tell you how beautiful you look,” Santana adds. “The nose contour is just stunning. Aren’t you glad you didn’t get that last minute rhinoplasty before the wedding now?”
“Shut up.” Rachel meets the makeup artist’s gaze, signaling for her to come back and finish. She scoots back in the stool, eyelids shutting, and she can feel the nerves burning in her lungs. “Just tell me, Santana.”
“It got ruined in transport.”
“What do you —” She smacks her lips together at the feel of the makeup artist sliding a finger underneath her chin to tip it up, her sponge working its way across Rachel’s skin.
She remembers to breathe; the conversation she had with Carole when she dropped off the bridal party robes and gift baskets this morning echoing in her head. Nothing except the two people at the opposite ends of the aisle matter in the moment, and no one — no one — will remember the finest of your details; whether the napkins had rings or the cake topper sparkled in rose gold like it was supposed to.
And evidently, whether or not the bride had a goddamn veil.
“You know what?” She smooths her palms down her thighs, holding onto her knees. “I don’t care. I don’t care how it got ruined, or — Whatever. I don’t need a veil.”
Santana, wide-eyed in surprise, swallows thickly. “You…don’t?”
“I don’t.”
“And you don’t even want to know how it got ruined?”
“Would it change anything?”
“No, but it would make you stop looking at me with daggers.”
“No, I’m just squinting because —” Her makeup artist pinches the pad of two fingers by her eyelid to draw on her black eyeliner swiftly across the skin. Once she finishes, Rachel nods. “The eyeliner. I’m not mad.”
“You’re not.” It’s not a question. She can see the color return to Santana’s blush-stained cheeks, one hand resting on her nape. “Because she really is sorry.”
“Who?”
“Quinn. She was holding the baby, who was having like, a fit, and at the same time Kurt was walking by with the veil and she just, like, dug her heel into it.” She demonstrates, wiggling the toe of her right heel into the carpet. “Ripped the end.”
“Oh. Oh, I mean, look, it’s —” It’s not okay, but Rachel peeks at herself in the mirror behind her and feels elegant-enough with her low bun; classic and simple and beautiful. She doesn’t know that a veil needs to be covering it, and Finn won’t know any different.
Quinn managed to be a pivotal part of Rachel’s bridal party, from the very beginning, while also becoming a mother. Her eight-month-old can’t walk, but she’s still going to be carried down the aisle as the flower girl, so Rachel isn’t going to fault Quinn for one thing going wrong when she’s done so much for this wedding to happen.
“I don’t think Finn even knows there was a veil to begin with,” she justifies.
“Atta girl.” Santana approaches her once the makeup artist steps aside. She lifts Rachel’s mimosa glass off of the vanity, stealing a sip from it for herself. “Sorry, but you wouldn’t believe the stress I’ve gone through today, and it’s only noon.”
Rachel squints. “You, huh?”
“It’s a lot of work, being the maid of honor to the most high maintenance bride in New York City.”
“Would the most high maintenance bride in New York City be this calm about missing her veil?”
Santana shrugs, taking another sip from the champagne flute. “Guess not. But look, it’s not a wedding if shit doesn’t go wrong, you know? Just worry about the end of it.”
Rachel nods. “Finn.”
“Drunk hotel room sex, but yeah, sure, Finn.”
She ignores that retort and stands up from the vanity chair, minutes away from asking for help getting into her dress - still hung on its custom hanger by the tulle drapes.
“How is everything else looking for the ceremony?” She takes a breath, snatching her champagne flute back from Santana. “Is the harp player here yet?”
━━━━━━━━━
God, the harp player. Finn wanted a band, and he finally managed to sell Rachel on one too, but Rachel’s father Hiram knew a friend of a friend of a cousin who was this world-renowned harp player, and he insisted she perform at the ceremony.
The best part of it all was that the harp player — Jane Hayward was her name, and Rachel searched a few videos of her playing and admittedly, she was impressive. And free. That was the catch. It’d already been too much — the ceremony, the dress, the four hundred dollar veil that was now gone and forgotten, the reception and the after party and those ridiculous, massive ‘F & R’ ice sculptures for the dessert table that Burt and Carole covered the cost of.
“I should mention,” Hiram said a few days before the wedding, a glass of wine lingering by his lips in Finn and Rachel’s kitchen, surrounded by a sea of wedding favors and carefully-cut ribbon on the table, “Jane is a little…pregnant.”
“What is ‘a little pregnant’, Daddy?” Rachel asked, uncorking the wine and refilling her own glass.
She’s wide-eyed, asking Finn for his phone so she can type in ‘Harp Player NYC’ before Hiram can even begin his next sentence.
“Relax, sweetheart. She can still do the ceremony. She just can’t reach some strings, but no one’ll notice.”
“It’s a harp,” Kurt chimes in, tying pale gold ribbon around custom beer mugs — favors for the tables at the reception. They say their names, and the date, and Finn and Rachel stopped asking Kurt how much things cost eight, nine thousand dollars ago. “It’s the least sexy instrument in the world; no, no one will notice.”
Jane enters the bridal suite and it’s Quinn, her daughter on her hip as she uses one hand to fasten a bib around her neck so she won’t ruin her dress before the ceremony, who eyes the harp player and says, “Wow, they weren’t kidding about you being ‘a little pregnant’.”
She puffs her cheeks out, a palm flat on her protruding stomach, and she lets out this little laugh, like she’s half-pained.
Rachel tilts her head. “Quinn!”
“Sorry, it’s just…” She hoists her daughter further up onto her hip, meeting Jane’s gaze. “When are you due?”
Jane places both of her hands behind her - obviously aching - back and winces. “Tuesday.”
Quinn’s brows lift. “Oh! So soon.”
“Last Tuesday,” Jane corrects, and Quinn and Rachel and Santana all share the same look. Rachel’s about to call it; she’ll use her Bride Card if it means she absolutely, one-hundred percent gets out of cleaning up Jane’s water if it breaks all over the ceremony room floor.
“I mean, if you can’t do it, I can always —” Santana steps forward and raises a hand to Jane, and Jane looks at Santana like she just grew an extra head. “What? How hard can the freakin’ harp be?”
“Have you studied the artistry of the harp,” Jane starts, eyes rolling, “for twelve years.”
Santana backs up. “Well no, but I have it on good authority from a celebrity wedding planner himself that it’s the least sexy instrument in an ensemble, so…” She surrenders, waving a hand at the air in defeat, “Whatever.”
Jane huffs wordlessly and once she winces, Rachel, still in her robe and with bare feet, saunters across the floor and instinctively curls an arm around her wrist. “Um, Jane, was it?”
Jane nods, and Rachel can see the tension in her entire body, the way her shoulders lift.
“Are you okay? And by ‘okay’, I mean, ‘not in labor’.”
Jane winces uncomfortably again, and then she grits her teeth forcefully and holds onto one of the side tables with a bunch of bouquets on it, gripping the edge so hard she knocks an entire vase over. Santana rushes to clean it up from the carpet, but Rachel stops her.
“San, it’s fine, they’re just flowers.”
“Yeah, flowers your ass is supposed to carry when you walk down the aisle!”
Ignoring Santana, Rachel turns with concern to Jane and asks, “Can I get you some water?” She presses her palm into Jane’s arm to guide her backward, forcing her to take a seat on the stool by the vanity where she’d just finished getting ready. “Are you sure there won’t be placenta all over the floor in a few minutes? I - I’m not that good with childbirth. I watched a baby come out of Quinn eight months ago and I’m still a little nauseous over it.”
“I’m…I’m fine,” Jane says breathily, taking a long sip out of the water bottle Santana passed over for her. “I just need to put my feet up, take a few breaths, and let myself get distracted so I forget all about my water breaking.”
“Wait, your water broke?!” Rachel can’t help herself now, a tremor of panic in her voice as she looks helplessly behind her own shoulder at her bridesmaids, who are just as floored as she is.
“Ah, there it is,” Santana says. Rachel knows she’s been taking wordless bets with Quinn on when the bride would finally snap, and maybe the ripped veil and a broken bouquet didn’t do it. She treks past Rachel and over to Jane, crouching down to her level, careful not to scrunch up the fabric of her dress when she sits on her knees.
Quinn passes off her daughter to Rachel for a moment and joins Jane and Santana, bending to the floor, her hands on Jane’s knees. “Look,” she begins, “I was in labor with my daughter for like, three days. This is probably nothing.”
Rachel watches on in silence, bouncing Quinn’s daughter on her hip. She’s quiet through the breaths Quinn is telling Jane to take and she’s quiet when Santana panic-dials someone — Kurt, she’s sure — on the phone and tells them to get to the bridal suite, stat.
“You’ll fix this, won’t you maid of honor?”
Santana looks behind her at Rachel, tossing her a half-assed thumbs-up. Then, into the phone, she says, “And get her a scotch on the rocks, while you’re at it. Thanks.”
━━━━━━━━━
“Where the hell are you going?” Puck asks worriedly at the sight of Kurt filling a glass and fleeing the room.
“Santana called. Bringing this to Rachel.” He wiggles the glass at the air. “When the bride calls…”
Puck knits his brows in concern. “It’s barely noon. Wait! Is she nervous?”
“She’s getting married in a few hours,” Kurt says flatly, one hand curled around the doorknob, “it would be weirder if she weren’t.”
“‘Cause I’m kind of nervous. I mean, first my wife fucks up Rachel’s veil, and now she’s texting me about some harp player giving birth, which like, I have no fucking idea what that’s about…”
Kurt smacks his lips together. “It’s Placenta O’Clock in that bridal suite, is all I know.”
“Could be sexy, if you’re into that.”
Kurt wrinkles his nose in disgust. “I am not.” His vibrating phone cuts through the mostly-noiseless room, and he picks it up and puts down the glass of scotch. “Finn? No, no, just — stay there, Finn. I’m coming. Because I said so! Yes, you moron. I don’t care!”
“Finn?” Puck shoots Kurt a look of confusion, and then asks, “What happened?”
“I don’t know. He screamed at me for forty seconds straight, something about ‘hair’, ‘screwed up’, and ‘Sugar’. What is he talking about, ‘Sugar’?”
“Oh, Sugar! You know Sugar.”
“I do not know a ‘Sugar’.”
“Sure you do! Blaine’s cousin, the —” Puck swirls a finger at the air, and Kurt gasps.
“We did not hire Sugar to do the hair at this wedding.”
“You might not have, but you might wanna double check with your boyfriend.”
“I — I have to fix this!” Kurt circles the room in a panic, lifting the glass of scotch back off of the table he’d set it down on. He shoves it at Puck. “Bring that to the bridal suite.”
Puck frowns, shoving the glass back at Kurt. “Why do I have to do it? I’m Finn’s Best Man.”
“You’re his pity-choice. The Best Man he picked out of obligation because you made him yours.”
“Still a Best Man. Still coming.”
“Fine.” Kurt huffs in frustration, and the second Mike walks through the doors of the room the guys have been getting ready in, he hands him the glass. “Chang, Bridal Suite. Now.”
“For the bride?”
“No,” Kurt scoffs, “for the harp player who’s in labor, she likes it on the rocks.”
Mike narrows his eyes, his hand limp around the glass now. “Wait, what?”
“Just bring it!” Kurt demands, scurrying out of the room with Puck on a quest to find his brother.
━━━━━━━━━
“So like, are you gonna give us a reason for wearing a towel like a turban on your head, or is this just one of yours and Berry’s weird fantasies coming to life one last time before you put a ring on it?”
“If I say it is…” Finn sighs, holding his stretched-out hands over the towel, “Will you never ask me to take this towel off of my head for as long as we live?”
Kurt, ignoring the banter between Finn and Puck, takes that entirely as initiative to rip the towel right off of his brother’s head. It takes him a second to pry it out from underneath’s Finn’s grip, but when he does, he gasps so loudly it fills the room.
“What the hell are those, Finn?!”
Finn shakes his head in shame, his eyes unable to meet Kurt’s or Puck’s. “I know. I know! Freakin’ Sugar said she went to cosmetology school, w’do’you want me to say?”
Horrified, Kurt clutches the towel dramatically between a fist. “On where, Barbie-dot-com? Finn, you look like a member of a horrible N*Sync cover band. You must cut it all off, now!”
“He can’t cut his hair off dude,” Puck insists, “he’ll look so stupid bald.”
“And this is better?” Kurt is mortified, dropping the towel onto the floor so he can use both of his hands to hold his own face between them.
Finn’s hair is frosted blonde on the ends, and it’s all spiky and gelled and frankly, just ridiculous. Kurt is lapping the room in frantic circles, going on and on about how he’ll have Sugar sent to prison for committing such a crime on his brother’s wedding day.
“I can’t get married to Rachel like this, man.”
“Well.” Kurt kicks the toe of his shoe into the carpet. “At least you’re not entirely clueless.”
“Fix this!” Finn yells, sifting his fingers through his hair in frustration.
“And if I - somehow, miraculously - had access to a beauty supply store on this wonderful Saturday afternoon, you know I would.”
“Rachel’s been waiting her whole life for this wedding, and now every time she looks at our pictures from this day, what the hell is she gonna see?”
“A botched, taller Lance Bass, probably…” Puck comments.
Kurt lifts a finger at him warningly, muttering, “Not helping, Puckerman” as he holds his cell phone up to his ear. Aloud, to both of them, he says, “I’ll figure this out. I have a hat guy.”
“Great. Because that’s better.”
“Rachel likes hats,” Puck says pointedly.
“Yeah, on babies and old people, maybe,” Finn counters, walking over to the vanity in frustration. Plugged into the outlet next to the mirror still is a buzzer, which Sugar - somehow - used to trim some of the guys’ facial hair before. Without thinking, Finn lifts it up and flicks the ‘On’ button up, and the sound of the vibration echoing throughout the room causes Kurt to drop his phone.
“Finn, NO!”
“Too late!”
“You wouldn’t dare!”
“Watch me!”
He lifts the buzzer to his head and through a strip of thick hair, barely blinking as it falls to the floor.
Kurt is trying his best to wrestle the thing out of his hands while keeping his suit free of wrinkles, failing miserably.
“Finn!”
“Too late!”
Kurt looks like he’s going to be sick, Puck eventually manages to wrangle the buzzer from Finn’s shaky hands before he can botch his entire head, and Rachel, Kurt promises, is going to cut his balls off and feed them to him in lieu of the main course when she sees his mangled haircut at the end of the aisle.
━━━━━━━━━
“So uh, how bad is it if someone’s contractions are every four minutes?”
Rachel is slipping into her dress — with her mother-in-law-to-be’s help. She’s holding onto both of Carole’s shoulders, doing her very best to shut out the whispered conversation Quinn and Santana are having in the corner of the bridal suite.
Quinn’s eyes widen immediately. “Four? Are you sure?”
“Timed ‘em myself. I’d do a lot of things for Rachel and Finn, but I am not helping that weird harp player push a baby outta her hoo-ha.”
“You won’t have to,” Quinn promises. “I called an ambulance; they’ll handle it.”
“Cool, fine, thank god we don’t have to add ‘Delivering a Human’ to the list of shit we’ve had to do for this wedding,” Santana rambles, “but what about the music?”
“We have no choice but to ask Mercedes to step in, sing like, a ballad as they walk down the aisle.”
“Great, so we can watch Hiram Berry have a fit.”
“He’ll live,” Quinn says. She juts her chin out to the left hand corner of the room, where Carole is delicately tugging the zipper on the back of Rachel’s dress up, taking her time fastening her into it. “Come on, let’s help her finish getting ready.”
━━━━━━━━━
“Hey, Rach.”
“Puckerman, don’t say ‘hey’ to me like you haven’t been standing in my bridal suite for ten minutes. Also, where’s your child? Ripping Finn’s tuxedo in half as we speak?”
“Ah-ha. So you do want this day to be perfect.” He wags a finger at her accusingly, and she grabs it with two of her own fingers in annoyance. “Look, I get it. And it will, it just — I have something to talk to you about first.”
She smooths a hand over her middle, letting out a long exhale. Carole and Quinn and Santana are cleaning up the bridal suite around them; pouring out the half-dranken mimosas and tipping the makeup artist and gathering all of Rachel’s belongings into a duffel bag, so she won’t have to.
She shakes her head. “Great, is it about Finn?” She wonders where Kurt is with the scotch she asked for about five ‘Bad News’ ago.
Puck decides against bringing up anything Finn-related, and he just shakes his head. “Your ex-boyfriend might be in the lobby of the venue right now, Berry.”
“Who, Jesse? Noah, it’s fine, I invited him. You know, it’s possible to get along with people you were once romantically linked to. Didn’t Lauren Zizes come to your wedding?”
“Sure did. Who could forget her toast?” He smacks his lips together. “But no, uh, not - not Jesse. Does the name ‘Brody’ ring a bell to you at all?”
Rachel’s bronzed cheeks lose all color. She bites the inside of one to keep from screaming, Puck would guess. She straightens up and leans in toward him, her voice lowered. “Brody? Like, the Brody I haven’t spoken to since my fiancé punched him in the face in college, Brody? What the hell is he doing here, Noah?” She panics, using the heels of both her hands to chop at his chest. “Tell him to go away!”
“He’s not a wild bird, Berry. He’s a man with — Well, honestly, he’s got beautiful hair and kind eyes, and I feel kind of bad for him.”
“You feel bad for him?”
“Yeah, I mean, he’s at the mini-bar all sad, right? Stag. He asked me which part the minister’ll say, ‘Speak now or forever hold your peace’ during, but for the life of me, I can’t remember, ‘cause Q and I were married by my weird cousin Mordecai who just kinda winged the whole thing, so —”
Rachel stomps her foot, still sans her heels. She’s waiting until the last possible second to put them on. With her luck today, she’ll break an ankle, snap her leg in half, trip on her face in the center of the bridal suite and break her nose a minute before she’s supposed to say ‘I Do’.
“You feel bad for my ex-boyfriend who is about to crash my wedding?” She steps even closer, hitting him harder. “Noah! Make him go away, right now!”
“No can do, Berry. He’s actually on the other side of this door. I’m sorry!”
On instinct, Rachel’s hands ball up into two fists, and Puck steps aside as the door swings open, a hand looped around both of her wrists to keep her from lunging forward.
“Well, there’s the bride!”
“I —” She swallows thickly. “Here I am.”
“Hi Rachel.”
“Brody.” She wants to spit in his face. She wants to bend down to the floor and take little pieces from the vase Jane broke and shove them in his arms. She wants to scream and cry and stomp her feet and my goodness, they should’ve just eloped somewhere on a mountain, far away from the city. She wants to go back to ten-months-ago-Rachel and slap some sense into the girl that said, ‘Noooo Finny, we need a real wedding; Kurt would be so embarassed to know us if we got married alone on a mountain’.
“I don’t even know how you knew my wedding was today.”
“Facebook. You never deleted me.”
“Well.” She levels a hand at him. “How else would I subtly brag about my life to all of the people who wronged me?”
Puck laughs beside her, and the second he can feel her leap forward, his fingers dig, white-knuckled, into her forearm. “Easy, easy.”
“Rachel, just — There are so many times where I see you, and what you’re up to, and I think, ‘That could’ve been us’, you know?”
She stutters. “I…”
“Look, just - just look me in the eye and tell me that you want to marry Finn, and I’ll go. I’ll go, and I’ll never bother you again.”
Rachel wiggles out from underneath Puck’s grasp and steps a few inches forward. She locks her gaze firmly onto Brody’s. “I want to marry Finn,” she says, monotone. “Happy?”
“Uh, what - what did you say? I couldn’t —”
“I. Want. To. Marry. Finn.”
“Again, I just —” He dodges her eyes, looking to the floor with both hands in his pocket, a low whistle buzzing from between his lips. “I couldn’t hear —”
“I WANT TO MARRY —”
He’s crouching down, his eyes swirling all over the room. Quinn whips past him with her daughter perched in her arms, and he turns around on both feet, says, “Ooh, whose baby?” Then he pivots back, facing Rachel again. “Sorry, one more time, Rach. I just didn’t catch it.”
“Noah, get him out! Now!” She’s stayed mostly sane, mostly calm, up until this moment. She’s about to pinch Brody by the collar of his suit and drag him out of the venue herself — barefoot and all. “I’m the bride and you have to do what I say, so get him out of here!”
Puck looks legitimately terrified for a hot second, but then he salutes Rachel and steals his daughter from Quinn’s arm, escorting Brody out with one hand. “Come on baby,” Puck says to his kid, “let’s go show our friend Brody how nicely-paved the parking lot of this place is.”
━━━━━━━━━
“Phew.” Santana swipes at her upper lip, bending down at the vanity mirror with a makeup sponge squeezed between two fingers, touching up her foundation. “So…Jane almost had a baby in the hallway, but Quinn got her escorted to a hospital before the head came out. Deadly fucking sight, though.”
Rachel’s by the window, her dress cascading down behind her, arms hugged around herself. Santana looks around the room and sees Mike and Tina sharing a glass of scotch in one corner, Puck and Quinn taking selfies with their daughter in another. One of the staff members is crouched down on the ground, sweeping up little shattered remnants of the broken vase next to scattered, destroyed bouquets.
Santana saunters over to the bride and lifts a hand up onto her shoulder, leaning into her. “Hey, you better not even be thinking about climbing out that window, Rachel. You love Finn and a few itty bitty things going wrong on your wedding day doesn’t mean the whole thing is ruined.”
Rachel finally - after what feels like a whole lifetime - turns around and meets Santana’s eyes, managing a small laugh underneath her breath. “‘Itty bitty’?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m not. I thought about it for a second, but I’m not going to dramatically crawl out of this window.” She drops her head. “Not in this dress.” She pauses, then, “How many times do you think a normal bride cries on her wedding day?”
Santana tilts her head. “You think you’re a normal bride, babe?”
“Well no…”
“Probably a few.” She pinches together two fingers, inching in closer to Rachel. “Let it out. I know a few good tricks to glue those bad boys down,” she says, referring to Rachel’s false lashes the second Rachel snakes an arm around Santana’s waist, her breath small and soft and quavering.
“I never needed a perfect wedding.”
“I know.”
“But no one’s even told me how Finn is doing, I have no veil, no bouquet, no - no harp player.” Even Rachel breaks, chuckling softly at the situation. She scrunches her nose. “Did you really see the baby’s head?”
“Uh-huh.” Santana winces. “Promise me when you procreate, I do not have to be in that delivery room.”
Rachel lifts her right hand, looping her pinky around Santana’s.
━━━━━━━━━
Rachel has a good cry in the bridal suite. She’s a stage actress, so she knows how to keep her tears subtle — soft and just delicate enough to where Santana only has to touch-up a little patch of concealer underneath her right eye.
Puck joins Finn back where the guys are getting ready, and he lets him bitch for thirty minutes about how ugly his hair looks, and how it might never grow back the same, and he fists the beanie Puck snatched from the coat room, saying how ridiculous it is to wear wool in June.
“More ridiculous than the hair, Backstreet Boy?”
On either ends of the venue, both Finn and Rachel ask to see each other before their ceremony starts.
“Are you sure?” Santana asks Rachel as she’s helping her slip into her right heel. Carole’s got the left held between her hand, delicately sliding it over Rachel’s foot. “You believe in all of that weird, superstitious shit, though.”
“It’s bad luck! Mike saw Tina in her dress at their wedding and he tripped so hard walking into the limo a few hours later that he twisted his ankle. They’re just facts.”
Mike raises his empty glass at her from the corner of the room, Tina falling into his side with laughter. “Spent the whole honeymoon getting my ankle iced by my new wife.”
“And weeping, ‘cause you couldn’t jetski,” Tina adds, standing on her toes and smooching the side of his cheek.
“But…” Rachel continues, “They’re still married, and they’re still obsessed with each other, and that’s what counts.”
At the very same time, Kurt asks Finn, “Are you sure?”
Finn nods insistently, slipping two fingers underneath his tie to make sure he has some breathing room. He’s already choked-up, imagining his bride standing there, ready to marry him.
“Be warned, she might yell at you about your weirdly-shaven head and it most likely will make you cry. You’re very sensitive right now, Finn.”
“Worth it.”
━━━━━━━━━
They meet by this tree in the back of the venue, green and full of life from the recent bloom.
“Oh my God, your hair.” Rachel gasps, and Finn asks her to be pissed about it later. He says he’ll find a stranger’s hat for the wedding pictures; that Kurt might even know a guy who can photoshop him back to normal.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she promises, her voice carefully low. The second she stepped underneath the tree, Santana started making vocal, monetary bets with the rest of their guests on how long it’d take for her to cry. She’s already asking Quinn and Tina to pay up.
“Hi baby.”
She lets out this little laugh-cry, lifting one of her hands up to hold onto the back of his neck. “Hi yourself.”
Finn wrinkles his nose and slips an arm around the small of her back, and then he pulls her toward him and tells her how beautiful she looks. “Even without a veil,” he adds with a wink.
“Obviously, weddings aren’t supposed to be perfect,” Rachel begins. “But this one is a mess.”
“Yeah, well.” Finn scrubs the heel of his hand down his cheek. “This is the first time I’m actually enjoying myself today.”
It’s the middle of June, just before summer creeps in over New York. It’s just seventy degrees, the sun high enough in the sky that they don’t squint underneath it. The tree covers them all in a little bit of shade, and someone - Kurt, maybe Blaine and Quinn, too - comment about how this is the most gorgeous tree on the entire property, and how for a moment, none of this feels like New York or a crowded venue at all.
“Me too,” Rachel comments, her fingers squeezing into Finn’s side. She doesn’t kiss him, even if she’s aching to, because that might be the worst luck of all, to kiss the groom before they’re supposed to be married. “I almost want to just stay out here forever.”
Blaine interrupts the moment with one raised hand. “Hey, wait a second.”
“What is it?” Santana asks frantically, looking around. “Does Finn have something on his — Oh. Yeah. He has fucking frosted tips.”
“Ha-ha, San. We know.”
“No, it’s just…” Blaine clears his throat, his hands raised. “Rachel, when you first started wedding planning, didn’t you say to me that your dream wedding would’ve been an intimate, outdoor ceremony, just you and Finn and a few people you loved?”
“You mean before Kurt took over and vetoed every one of my ideas?” She laughs loosely, nodding. “But yeah, that’s - that’s what I wanted.”
“So why don’t you?” Blaine prompts. “Like, just get married right here, right now.”
Everyone around them instantly starts to buzz - mostly in confusion, on how the hell that’s going to happen, or why Blaine is even suggesting it could.
“Someone,” he continues, prodding his own pointer finger into his chest, “might’ve gotten himself ordained. I mean, you just - you do it online now, but it’s still legit.”
“Wait, wait.” Santana paces the lawn, arms folded around her center. “Are you saying they should get married underneath this tree like, now?”
“Well yeah,” Blaine says. “I mean, look around us — nature, intimate, the people who love you most in the world.”
“And me,” Santana adds, earning an eye roll from both the bride and the groom who know she’d set the next person to try and ruin this day on fire if it meant making them happy.
Blaine bows his head. “And Santana.”
Rachel looks around for a solid minute in contemplation. She looks at Puck and Quinn and their daughter, dozing off in her mother’s arms, her stocking-covered legs dangling down Quinn’s torso. At Santana, who’s stealing a tissue from the little plastic package Tina rips out from her clutch. At Kurt, who’s got a little Polaroid camera tucked in his jacket pocket, positioning himself by Blaine, who’s stepping toward the center of the tree.
She snaps her head up to look at Finn, who she’s almost sure is on the same page as her. He always, somehow, is. Her chest feels tight and she knows she just made Santana two-hundred bucks richer by crying before the ceremony, but she doesn’t care.
She’s enveloped in love underneath this tree, and she’s a few minutes away from marrying someone she loves more than everyone else she loves in the world put together.
“Okay,” she says easily, more easily than Rachel Berry has ever said anything in her entire life. She surrenders to the moment, and for once, nothing has to be planned and perfected and polished. It just is.
Finn looks down at her. “Yeah?” He’s only asking because he’s a little surprised she’s as okay with this as she is; with getting married underneath a tree by a man whose credentials come from the internet, the only witnesses their best friends and Kurt’s cheap little camera from Amazon.
She reaches her arm out to squeeze Finn’s hand, the pad of her thumb tracing his knuckle. “What are you waiting for? Marry us, Blaine.”
━━━━━━━━━
Rachel’s face drops just as everyone has taken their place underneath the tree, waiting for Blaine to marry them.
“What is it, baby?” Finn asks, tracing his fingers over one of her wrists.
“I left my vows inside.”
“So did I,” he tells her. “Crap. You think we have time to race back in, successfully dodge a room full of our relatives and then run back out here after we grab ‘em?”
Rachel laughs at his attempt at a plan, shaking her head. “I think we’re out of luck.”
“No you’re not,” Puck says. “Screw ‘em. Just…” He looks over at his own wife, who’s holding their sleeping daughter in her arms. “It’s easy. Just tell each other why you love each other.”
“Okay.” Rachel lets out a nervous breath, her hands sliding down the center of her dress as she positions herself on the left side of where Blaine is stood. “Should I go first?”
Finn waves a hand at her and says, “I will.” He looks behind his shoulder to ask Kurt for the rings, and he takes both of them out of his pocket, one-by-one from the little cloth bag he’d been holding onto them in. He hands them over to his brother, who claps him on the shoulder as a wordless thank you.
Finn holds Rachel’s ring in his hand so delicately, and in that moment he thinks about how he’s never, ever going to do this again — until they have to re-do it inside in thirty minutes, of course. He swallows down a breath, and then he says Rachel’s name. “Rachel, there are a million reasons why I love you. We’d be here all day if I started to list them all but I’ll - I’ll just say a few. You uh, you make me laugh - even when you make up those crazy songs and sing ‘em to me. You take care of me when I’m sick.”
Rachel presses her lips together, one knuckle wedged in the crease of her right eye.
“You’re sweet. That’s something a lot of people don’t know about you when they first meet you; like, underneath it all, you’re just sweet. You care about everyone — too much, sometimes. But you’ve cared about me since we were fifteen years old, and uh, I don’t know if I can ever thank you enough for that.” He licks his lips, his hand shaking a little as he grazes her palm with his fingers. “You uh, you created an egg dish and named it after me.” He scrunches his nose and looks at the group, the corners of his lips curling. “She puts a little Italian dressing on scrambled eggs before she cooks ‘em. It’s called ‘Eggs Hudson’, and it’s freakin’ awesome.”
Everyone swears they can see Santana laugh-cry, rubbing the tissue she swiped from Tina underneath her mascara-coated lashes. Beside her, Puck and Quinn and Kurt laugh-cry quietly too.
“But,” he continues, taking a deep breath before sliding the ring onto her fourth finger, “the main reason I love you is that you’re my best friend, Rachel. You’re uh, you’re the best friend I’ve ever had. Sorry, Puck.”
Quinn’s full on-crying by then, and Kurt and Santana have their arms linked together, holding onto one another. There’s a crack in Blaine’s voice when he tells Finn to slip on Rachel’s ring, but he has to keep it together — he still has to marry them.
Rachel’s flooded with overwhelm as Finn sets the band on her finger.
“Finn,” she begins, “I love you because you’ve never tried to change me. You just let me be who I am — bossy, a bed hog, a terrible driver…”
“Terrible,” he confirms.
“I love you because you’re funny, and you - you make me feel loved, and safe,” she continues, a little hiccup in her voice. “Once, for our anniversary, you made me a sweatshirt that said: ‘Finn and Rachel: Rockin’ it Since 2009’. I kind of wish I was wearing it right now ‘cause it - it smells like you.”
Kurt raises a hand. “For my wedding gift to you both, I am burning that sweatshirt, F-Y-I.”
“You never let me go to bed upset, and you never let me go an entire road trip without a duet partner. Even if you hate the song.”
“Even if I hate the song,” he echoes.
“But the main reason I love you, Finn Hudson, is that I’ve known you for half of my life and you’ve never not made me happy. You make me happy all the time.”
Rachel slips Finn’s ring onto his fourth finger quicker than she thinks she does, and before anyone can blink, Blaine happily prounounces them husband and wife.
“You may now kiss, you crazy kids!”
━━━━━━━━━
“Hey, Mr. Hudson,” Rachel says in a sultry, sing-song voice, tugging down onto her bottom lip with her teeth. They’re holed up in the men’s bathroom inside the venue, and it’s the first time they’ve been alone together all day.
“Hey, Mrs. Hudson.” He snakes both arms around her waist, tugging her toward him. “We’re married, just so you know.”
She laughs breathily. “I know. I was there.”
He leans down to kiss her, one of his hands fixed underneath her chin to tip it up toward him. It feels just as nice as it felt when they kissed underneath the tree, or inside at 3:00 P.M. sharp when they got married — officially — or whenever guests at the reception would bang a fork against a champagne flute and chant, ‘Kiss! Kiss!’ at random.
“Finn,” she yawns, looping a hand around one of his shoulders as she falls into him, “I’m tired. I got married twice today, you know.”
He laughs into an open-mouth kiss and says, “Where should we do it for the first time as a married couple, Mrs. Hudson?”
She closes her eyes, head tipped back. “Ooh, I like the sound of that so much. Say it again.”
He thumbs the flesh of her cheek, eyes squinted in amusement.
“Okay, but wait, wait, what are our options looking like?”
“We have two: Bathroom stall, or the hotel room upstairs in like, four hours. Or whenever we escape all of our guests.”
“Four hours?!” She laughs, and then she groans like she’s in agony. She laces her fingers through his and tugs him down to meet her face, peppering kisses along his jawline. “Bathroom stall. Obviously.”
Just as Finn is messing with the lock on one of the stalls, Kurt wiggles his feet from underneath the one beside it, yelling out, “Please don’t!”
━━━━━━━━━
When Finn and Rachel tell the story of their wedding — only because Ava asks; she’s four and sees the picture above the mantle and wants to know everything, including why Daddy’s hair is so weirdly-shaved and why Mommy is holding two mismatched flowers underneath a tree — nothing that happened before ‘I do’ ever matters.
The harp player in labor doesn’t matter. The crazy ex-boyfriend showing up in the eleventh hour is a story for Ava’s teenage years, maybe, but it’s long-forgotten and omitted, for now. Quinn ripping the veil with her shoe is never even brought up. Finn has to remind Rachel about the broken vase all over the bridal suite floor, and Rachel can barely get through the story of her husband panic-buzzing a strip of his hair off two hours before their ceremony without pausing to swipe tears of hysteric laughter away from her eyes.
When Finn and Rachel tell their daughter the story of their wedding, all that matters is a hidden tree at the back of the venue, vows that had never been written down, Uncle Blaine pronouncing them husband and wife on a whim.
That’s the real story of their wedding, and Ava - wide-eyed and begging for a recap, again and again and again - calls it absolutely perfect.