Archive of Our Own

Mari's socked feet are propped on the table, and Lara's head is a warm weight against her shoulder. The drama on the TV is doing that thing where the music swells too early, like it doesn't trust the audience to feel anything on their own.

"They're gonna kiss," Mari says.

"They already kissed twice." Lara doesn't look up. Her hair smells like the shampoo from Mari's bathroom, and there's something about it that she doesn’t want to dwell on for too long.

"Third time's the weddin’, then."

Lara lifts her head. "They're getting married? This episode?"

"Rule of threes. And the finale’s next episode."

On screen, the actress in white is walking down an aisle strung with paper lanterns, and the actor is crying a little too hard. Somewhere a chorus starts up that has no business being in a drama about a fish market that’s about to be demolished to make way for a large-scale resort project in Okinawa. Mari has seen this genre enough times to know exactly how it ends. She reaches for the last of the popcorn and finds the bowl empty, licks salt off her thumb instead.

Lara hums amusedly against her.

"What," Mari says.

"Nothing." A pause. "Do people actually do this? Say all that, in front of everyone?"

"It's a drama. People say a lot of things in dramas."

"No, I mean at weddings. I’ve never been to a real one, so I don’t know if human weddings in dramas are made-up or not."

"They’re usually like the real ones, yeah. You got vows and everythin’." Mari gestures vaguely at the screen, where the bride is now being kissed in a very theatrical dip. "Why?"

Lara doesn't answer right away. She's watching the actress's face like it's a diagram she's trying to memorize, and Mari knows that look—it's the same one Lara gets over kanji stroke order, the correct fold for a box pleat, and really anything from the human world that she's decided is worth getting exactly right.

The credits roll. Neither of them moves to change the channel.

"Mari."

"Mm?"

"Do you think we'll get married someday?"

"...What?"

"Someday. You and me." Lara says it like she's reporting the weather.

Mari's face is doing something she can't control, and she's grateful, for once, that the lamp in the corner is the only light on. "I dunno. If we wanna, I guess."

"So you want to get married?”

"Do you?"

"I asked first."

"That's not—" Mari exhales through her nose. She should've seen this coming the second the wedding music started. She always sees it coming a half-second too late to play defense whenever Lara’s involved. "Fine. Depends. Who am I marryin’?"

"Me, of course." Lara sits all the way up now, turning to face her properly, knees pressed to Mari's thigh. There's a directness in her that still catches Mari off guard sometimes, a year and some months in—like Lara skipped whatever chapter of being human that teaches you to hedge.

"Well, anyone else in the runnin’?" Mari asks, deadpan, even as her pulse picks up something stupid and fast.

"You know there’s nobody else."

"You never know.”

Lara tilts her head, and there’s the narrowing of her eyes—part of the look that Mari's learned to brace for, the one that means Lara's about to say something that’s going to give Mari secondhand embarrassment.

"If you ask nicely," Mari says, before Lara can, "sure."

She means it as a joke. Mostly.

Lara's whole face changes.

"Then." She sits up straighter and looks Mari dead in the eye like she’s about to challenge Mari to a staring contest. "Otsu Mari. Will you marry me?"

Mari's brain short-circuits somewhere between her name and the question mark. "Now?!"

Lara glances toward the dark shape outside the window. "The chapel is next door."

"Lara."

"What?"

"You don’t just—" Mari doesn't finish the sentence, because she doesn't actually know how to. She can feel heat crawling up her neck, and Lara is looking at her all innocent and cute. The only sane response, Mari decides, is to commit to the bit before her face gives anything away.

"Okay," she says. "Where's my ring, then?"

That, at least, gets a flicker of hesitation. "...Ring?"

"You need a ring. That's how it works." Mari crosses her arms, mostly to have somewhere to put her hands. "You can't propose with nothin’."

Lara’s eyes drop to her own right hand.

She goes quiet in a different way now. Turns her hand over like she's looking at it for the first time, and starts working the ring off her finger—the ornate, heavy one with a giant blue-and-red stone that Lara lost once. Ever since she got it back from her sister, Mari's never once seen her take it off. Not even when she goes to sleep.

"Here." Lara holds it out on her open palm. "A ring. We can get married now."

Mari stares at it. Stares at her.

It hits her all at once what that ring actually is—the one piece of her old life Lara has carried through all of this. The irony of Lara blowing up at Mari over it a year ago before they first learned each other’s names isn’t lost on her, and now she’s just offering it—the last physical thing she has of her kingdom—as part of what Mari hopes isn’t an actual marriage proposal.

Mari's chest does something complicated.

"Not yet," she manages, closing Lara's fingers back over it before she can think better of it. "I gotta get you one too."

The bed is too small for two people, technically. Mari's known this for months, and every time, Lara just tucks herself in closer instead of taking the hint. Tonight is no different. Lara's back is pressed against Mari's front, feet cold against Mari's shins the way they always are no matter the season, breathing gone slow and even now that she's finally stopped talking about weddings.

Mari lies awake anyway, an arm draped loosely over Lara's waist because there's genuinely nowhere else to put it.

It's fine. It doesn't mean anything. People joke about getting married all the time—girls at school do it, best friends do it (probably), it's basically just a stronger way of saying I like you a lot and I'm not going anywhere. That's all it was. A bit. An extension of the drama, the popcorn, the stupid wedding music.

Except Lara doesn't really do bits like that. She'll get things wrong—she’ll mix up birthdays and funerals, ask if convenience-store onigiri are "someone's homemade recipe"—but when she means something, she means it with her whole chest, no irony left over to hide behind.

And she took her ring off.

Mari shifts, and Lara makes a small sound in her sleep and presses back into the space, closer, like there's an inch left to close that Mari's missed.

Well. Hypothetically.

If it were real—someday, when they're both old enough that nobody could say a single word about it—what would it even look like? Mari's not the type to picture flowers and dresses. She’s never once in her life daydreamed about a wedding, not even her own, not even as a kid. Her mom died when she was young enough that "someday" got filed under other things, and after that there wasn't a lot of room left over for daydreaming. There was boxing, and there was drilling footwork until her legs shook, and there was a talking fish who somehow made an empty house feel less empty. There was nobody. None that felt like they mattered enough to build a fantasy around, and even if there had been, some stubborn part of her never quite believed anyone would want to be hitched to her—not a real person, not even some fictional character in her head. Weddings were other people's thing, something you watched happen on TV to characters who cried on cue. But apparently there's a version of her brain that's been keeping the idea folded up in a drawer somewhere anyway, because it comes out fully formed the second she goes looking.

She doesn’t want anything with lanterns. Or crying. Definitely not a chorus.

She'd want it small. Her grandma, obviously—her grandma would insist, and honestly, Mari can't picture it happening anywhere but the chapel, weeds and creaky pew and all, because for two people who technically found each other by way of one of them being human and one of them being a mermaid LARPing as human, it should probably happen somewhere ordinary after everything they’ve been through. She pictures Lara in something simple and understated, because Lara in fussy clothes always looks like she's playing dress-up in someone else's life, and Mari likes her better in Mari's clothes, in mismatched socks, whatever she grabs off the floor. Which… is currently what she's wearing, sprawled half over Mari's side of the mattress, so maybe that part's not so hypothetical.

The reception would be something dumb. They’d cut into a wedding cake that’s just one giant Baumkuchen, and the guests would have two options for food: it’s either fish or mentaiko rice balls. Drinks would be straight hot chocolate. That's genuinely what Lara would request if given the option, and there's no version of this where Mari doesn't let her (except if Lara wants to serve their guests fermented fish sushi, then Mari would have to put her foot down).

She gets as far as picturing the actual I do—gets as far as Lara's face looking a little too sincere for the room—and has to stop, press her forehead lightly against the back of Lara's shoulder, breathe out slow until the feeling stops trying to climb up her throat.

This is stupid.

Lara sighs in her sleep and finds Mari's hand where it's resting against her stomach, laces their fingers together without waking, like even unconscious she doesn't want the distance closed all the way—she wants it gone.

Mari's going to have to find her a ring.

She falls asleep curled around Lara like a quotation mark, and doesn't dream about anything else.

The next few nights, Lara doesn't bring it up again, and Mari tells herself that's the end of it; a bit that ran its course, put away with the rest of their nonsense. She almost believes it.

Then Thursday, doing dishes—Mari at the sink, Lara beside her with a towel, drying and stacking each plate into the rack—Lara asks what time Grandma locks up the chapel.

"Why?"

"No reason." Lara takes the plate Mari hands her, drying it with more attention than a plate would normally require.

"Lara."

"I'm trying to make conversation!"

Mari eyes her over a soapy bowl, not handing it over yet. Lara's doing her best to look all nonchalant—humming a tune, towel moving in slow circles around the same plate that’s been dry for a while now, not meeting Mari’s eyes—but it comes off as comically evasive. She acts somewhat similar when she's hiding a surprise gift for Mari behind her back.

"It's locked at night," Mari says, setting down the bowl between them, "for a reason."

"Does Ema-san have the only key?"

"Lara."

Lara sets the plate in the rack. "I'm just asking questions, geez."

Mari rinses a plate, working up to something, and doesn't quite look at Lara when she asks it. "Have you ever thought about what kinda weddin’ you’d want? If you had one."

Lara's hands freeze on the towel for a second. Then she picks up the wet bowl Mari's put down and turns it slowly, drying in careful rotations, as though she's giving herself time before she answers.

"Not really," she says. "I never even saw a mermaid wedding. I don't think we had them, or if we did, no one ever let me watch." She smiles thinly. "The only thing anyone ever talked about was my parents', and it wasn’t even the wedding itself… just that they shared true love's kiss after, and it lit up the whole kingdom. That was the whole story. Like the rest of it didn't happen… or didn't matter." She sets the bowl in the rack. "I don't actually know what my mother wore. I don't know if she was happy that day, or relieved, or—I don't know. Nobody ever told me, and I never thought to ask before it was too late to."

Mari doesn't say anything right away. She scrubs the plate with the sponge, giving Lara room instead of filling the quiet with something clumsy.

"I might have gone to a human wedding," Lara adds, "when I was human the first time. It’s blurry, but I remember there were a lot of flowers. Someone crying. I can't tell if it's real or if I made it up out of wanting it to be." She shrugs. "So… no. I never had anything to want."

Mari rinses the plate longer than necessary, thinking. Then, carefully: "Well… now you've seen some. In dramas and stuff. If you could actually pick… what would you want?"

Lara goes quiet. She dries the same fork twice.

"Candles," she says after a while. "A lot of them. I like the way they move… it's the closest thing up here to what light looks like underwater, when it comes down through the surface. It always made me feel like I was somewhere safe." She racks the fork. "And dancing. I don't need music that's fancy, or a big room, I just… I saw the first dances in those TV weddings, and they look so romantic, so I'd like to do it with someone who wants to be there with me." She tosses Mari a small smile. "Oh, and I’d want a cake, but not a big one. I don't like how those wedding cakes in dramas look. They’re way too tall, and they look too much for anyone to actually eat. It just seems like such a waste, you know? I'd rather have something small enough that we could finish together."

Mari sets the plate down and turns the tap off. The kitchen falls silent except for the drip of the faucet and the low monotonous hum of the fridge.

“Grandma,” she starts, quietly, "keeps the spare key under the third flowerpot by the side door."

Lara blinks at her.

"You didn’t hear it from me," Mari says, putting the plate between them. "I didn’t say anythin’."

It takes Lara a second. Mari watches it dawn on her, the exact moment her whole face shows that she can't decide whether to smile or ask a hundred questions at once. She goes with both.

"Mari—"

"I didn't say anythin’." Mari reaches past Lara for a dirty pot.

Lara's still staring at her, towel forgotten.

"We don't have flowers," Mari adds, before Lara can say whatever's building up behind her eyes. "Or a cake. Or anythin’ you just described."

"I can always get something from the bakery."

Mari has to fight back a smile, mostly because if she laughs for real she's going to have to admit how much she's already planning this in her head—getting to the flowerpot, taking the key, which candles from the chapel's own supply closet nobody would miss for one night.

"Let’s finish the dishes first," she says. "We'll talk logistics later."

Lara's smile, when it comes, is the kind Mari's learned to brace for and never quite manages to—open all the way, aimed entirely at her like there's nobody else in the room worth looking at.

She picks up the plate next to her that Mari just washed, wiping it down while she hums again, the same tune from before.

Saturday, a little past ten, Mari is crouched behind the table at the altar with her knees screaming and her hands clamped over both their mouths, as she rethinks every choice that led her here.

The side door hadn't even been locked—Grandma leaves it that way for late arrivals to evening prayer, something Mari has known her whole life and only now recognizes as a design flaw. They'd slipped in with a tote bag, a small bakery box tied with string, Mari's catfish plushie, and zero plan for what to do if they got caught, which is exactly the situation they are currently in, because the door at the far end creaks open and a flashlight beam sweeps low across the pews.

Lara's shoulders are shaking. Not from fear.

Mari turns her head incrementally and gives her the full weight of a look that says: if you get us caught, I'm sendin’ you back to Kobe on the first express train, and Lara's eyes go wide and delighted over the hand still pressed to her own mouth, which does nothing to help.

The flashlight beam drifts closer. Pauses.

Mari stops breathing.

Then it swings away, toward the small room that acts as the vestry, and Grandma's footsteps recede slowly, the distinct shuffle-click of her slippers against the floor that Mari would know anywhere. The far door opens. Closes. A latch falls into place.

Silence.

Mari counts to twenty before she lets herself move. She peers over the edge of the altar table—nothing, no light under any door, just the blue dark and the shapes of the pews—and only then does she let her hands fall.

"You—" she whispers to Lara, "—you're lucky I like you."

Lara laughs, wiping at one eye. "You should've seen your face."

Mari doesn't have a comeback for that, mostly because she can't think of one, not with Lara looking at her like that in the dark, cheeks still pink from laughter. She busies herself instead with the tote bag, because if she looks at that face any longer she's going to lose an argument she hasn't even started.

"Okay," she says, rummaging for something in the bag. "We need some light in here, where's the—Lara, is that a candlestick from the altar?"

"I found it." Lara holds it up like a trophy.

"You stole it?"

"I'm borrowing it." She stands up and sets it on the table, looking entirely too proud of herself for someone currently guilty of theft in a house of worship. "For the ceremony."

"You realize Grandma's gonna notice one's missin’."

“Only if you snitch.”

Mari rolls her eyes, continuing to dig through the tote bag instead until her fingers close around the lighter she grabbed off the kitchen counter on the way out.

"Finally." She gets up on her feet, flicks it once, twice, before the flame catches, and touches it to the wick standing in the candlestick. The single flame steadies, and Lara watches it like it's the most interesting thing that's happened all night.

Mari picks the candlestick back up and moves along the altar, lighting the row of candles one by one. The chapel fills slowly with warm, moving light, the stained glass overhead gone from black to something like deep water, blues and reds with no sun behind them to make them true colors, just candlelight guessing at what they should look like.

When she turns back around, Lara's standing over the open bakery box with two thin taper candles in hand. She gently presses them one at a time into the frosting of the cake.

Mari walks over to the table. The string of the bakery box has been untied, and nestled inside is a cake small enough to fit in both palms—an off-white buttercream frosting base and the top perimeter ringed with shell-piped swirls interwoven with small pink rosettes and green leaves. The two candles are stuck dead center like flagpoles planted on a hill. "Why does it have candles on it?"

Lara’s eyebrows lift. "For the ceremony."

"Weddin’ cakes don't have candles on them. That's a birthday thing."

There’s a flicker of genuine confusion on Lara’s face that’s quickly papered over. "...They don't?"

"…No?"

"But you blow them out. At the end."

"That's a birthday wish. You're thinkin’ of a birthday wish."

"Oh…" Lara looks down at the little cake like it’s just personally betrayed her. It really is a nice cake, Mari has to admit—whoever decorated it actually put effort in, piping swags that drape garlands around the upper sides, matching shell-piped buttercream bordering the bottom edge. Lara clearly picked it out with care, and now she's standing there looking like she's failed some test nobody told her she was taking. "Well… I already put it there."

Mari opens her mouth to argue the point further and then just… doesn't. There’s something about Lara standing in the candlelight in her grandma’s chapel that makes the argument feel suddenly unnecessary. Pointless, even.

"You know what," Mari says. "We'll blow it out later. Make a new tradition."

Lara brightens instantly. "Really?"

"Sure. Why not." Mari takes another little candle from where it's tucked in the corner of the box—a spare, it seems like. She lights it off the candlestick, then touches it to the wicks already standing in the frosting. "There. Officially a Lara-and-Mari weddin’ tradition now."

Lara looks so radiant in the minimal light that Mari has to look away, back toward the altar and the candles throwing their shifting illumination across the old wood.

They haven’t even gotten to the vows yet.

"You go get changed first," Mari says, putting out the spare candle and setting it down on the table, away from anything flammable that’s not supposed to be on fire. "Here. Bring the bag.”

Lara takes the bag but then asks, "Where?"

"Vestry. Over there." Mari nods toward the side door. "I'll go after you."

Lara disappears with the tote bag clutched to her chest, and in the meantime, Mari busies herself setting her catfish plushie upright on the edge of the front pew, propped against the armrest so it’s facing the altar. She adjusts it twice. Steps back. Adjusts it again.

"You need to be able to see," she mutters to it, and feels dumb all over for talking to an inanimate object.

The vestry door creaks. Mari turns around and briefly forgets how to be a person.

Lara is standing in the doorway in a white nightgown with long sleeves from the back of Mari's closet that Mari genuinely forgot she owned until Lara found it three days ago and asked if she could borrow it for ‘something’. On Lara it hits the knee instead of her mid-calf, and over her hair she's rigged the makeshift veil out of the old bedsheet they cut up on Mari's floor last night, both of them getting fabric scraps everywhere, Lara insisting the edges didn't need to be even. They don't look even, but it doesn't matter. The candlelight is doing something unfair to the whole effect, catching the edge of the sheet-veil, turning the cheap white cotton into something that looks, from across the room, almost intentional.

"Well?" Lara turns in a slow circle, arms out. "How is it?"

Mari's mouth is dry. "It's… yeah. It's good."

Lara stops turning. Her arms drop, slowly, to her sides, and for a second she just stands there, looking at Mari across the candlelit space like the words took a moment to actually get to her.

"Thank you," she says. Her cheeks have gone pink, all the way up to her ears, visible even in the low light, and she reaches up like she means to fix the veil, or maybe just needs somewhere to put her hands.

"I mean it," Mari adds, because apparently she's decided tonight is the night she’s going to be a talker. "You look really good."

"You already said that."

"I'm sayin’ it again."

Lara's blush deepens, which Mari didn't think was possible, and she looks down at the hem of the dress, smoothing it out with both palms even though there's nothing to smooth.

It takes a while for Mari realizes that she's still just standing there. Staring. Hasn't said anything else, hasn't moved, has apparently just been looking at Lara in a bedsheet veil like she’s the eighth wonder of the world, which—unfortunately—might be true. And even more unfortunately, might be extremely obvious from the outside.

Heat crawls up her own neck. She clears her throat and says, “You should, um… you should go stand by the altar. I need to change too.

"Okay." But Lara doesn't move.

"Go on."

"I'm going." Lara finally turns, veil catching the candlelight again as she moves toward the altar.

Mari gets to the vestry with her ears burning.

Her dress—Lara's, technically, on loan in the other direction—is a white sundress with sleeves that hits Lara somewhere around the knee, and on Mari it falls almost to her mid-shin. She frowns at herself in the vestry's one small mirror, tugging uselessly at the fabric like an extra six centimeters will materialize out of complaint alone.

She pulls the second veil-strip over her hair anyway, ties it the way Lara showed her, and steps back out into the candlelight. Whatever complaint she'd been rehearsing dies somewhere in her throat, because Lara is standing at the altar waiting for her with an expression Mari has genuinely never seen on her before, not once, not in a year and some months of watching that face do a hundred different kinds of delighted.

"You look beautiful," Lara says softly.

"I look weird," Mari says, which isn't what she means, but she's discovered in the last thirty seconds that her vocabulary has temporarily left the building.

“No, you don’t. Don’t be so mean to yourself.” She reaches out and takes both of Mari's hands, easy as anything, like having a poops-and-giggles wedding is a thing they do all the time instead of a bit they’re doing because of one drama episode.

"Mr. Catfish is watching," Lara says, with a small nod toward the pew.

Mari glances over. The catfish plushie is indeed sitting there, slightly tipped to one side, one glassy eye pointed vaguely altar-ward. "Our VIP guest."

"He's very supportive."

"He's a stuffed fish."

"He's our witness. Be nice."

The candles are throwing long shadows up the walls, and somewhere outside a car passes on the main road, headlights sweeping briefly across the high windows. None of it should feel like anything, and yet… Mari's chest has gone tight and warm, her heart beating in a rhythm too quick for it to be comfortable.

"This is so dumb," she says, mostly to remind herself.

Lara tilts her head to the side. "Do you want to stop?"

"No,” her mouth answers before her brain can even deliberate. “No. We’re already here."

Lara's thumbs move slightly against the backs of Mari's hands. As she looks into Mari’s eyes, she says, “Thank you for doing this, Mari.”

Silence takes over the entire chapel. Even the candles seem to hold still.

Mari's throat closes up around at least four different responses, none of which are adequate, all of which feel too big for the room. She's aware, distantly, of her own pulse, the warmth of Lara’s hands around hers, the ridiculous veil slipping half a centimeter down her forehead.

"Okay," she says, because it's the only word that makes it out. Then, because the silence is doing something to her she can’t name and she needs—badly—to put a floor back under both of them: "Okay. Let’s start."

Lara looks at her.

"Do you, Lara," Mari says, and her voice only wavers a little, "take me, Mari, as your pretend wife?"

"Yes." No hesitation at all.

Mari can’t help but smile at that. "You're supposed to say 'I do.'"

Lara's cheeks go visibly pink in the candlelight. "Oh." A small breath. "I mean… I do."

"Good." Mari's own body is doing something equally traitorous, heat flooding her face, but she plows ahead because stopping now feels somehow more dangerous than continuing. "Now you ask me."

"Right." Lara straightens up, visibly rallying, doing her best impression of composure and missing it by a wide margin. "Do you, Mari, take me, Lara, as your pretend wife?"

"I do."

"Thank you." Lara nods once, decisively, like she's just closed a business deal.

Mari laughs now, both out of surprise and nerves, and some of the unbearable weight in the room lifts with it. "You don’t say ‘thank you’ after that."

"What am I supposed to say?"

"I dunno, either." Mari shakes her head, still grinning, and reaches for the vows in her head, memorized from the internet, because if she was going to get fake-married to Lara tonight in God’s house she was at least going to do it properly. "Alright. Repeat after me."

"Yes, ma'am."

That gets another laugh out of Mari, though softer and quieter this time, and she has to look down at the floor for a second to get her bearings back.

She takes a breath, then starts, "I take you—"

"—I take you—" Lara repeats.

"To be my wife."

"—to be my wife."

"To have and to hold—"

"—to have and to hold—"

"From this day forward—"

"—from this day forward—"

Lara's voice is steady on each line, saying them back like she’s actually making a promise, and Mari has to fight to keep her own voice level as she feeds them to her one at a time.

"For better, for worse—"

"—for better, for worse—"

"For richer, for poorer—"

"—for richer, for poorer—"

"In sickness, and in health—"

"—in sickness, and in health—"

"To love and to cherish—"

"—to love and to cherish—"

"’Til death do us part."

Something flickers behind Lara's eyes at that line—gone almost before Mari can catch it, a shadow of something older and heavier—but her voice doesn't so much as falter. Lara's grip tightens fractionally around Mari's hands. "—til death do us part."

The candle flames don't move. Neither of them do, for a second, as the words hang there in the space between them with more weight than either of them planned for.

Then Lara clears her throat, blinking fast. "Your turn."

Mari takes a deep breath again.

"I take you, Lara," she says, steady now, because saying it herself is somehow easier than repeating it after someone, "to be my pretend wife. To have and to hold, from this day forward. For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer…" She hesitates half a beat on the next line, glances at Lara's face, presses on anyway. "…in sickness and in health. To love and to cherish, 'til death do us part."

There’s silence again. Lara is looking at Mari as if she’s the thing the whole room is arranged around. Like the hush that settles over a congregation right after a hymn isn't coming from the building at all, but from Lara—aimed entirely at her.

It should be too much. Mari doesn't look away anyway.

"Okay," Mari says, a little too briskly, because someone has to keep this thing on schedule. "Now it's time for the rings."

"Right." Lara fumbles at the small pocket sewn into the side of the borrowed dress and comes up with the ring. Lara's ring. The old one.

She takes Mari's left hand gently and slides it onto her finger. It's too big—Mari's fingers are boxer's fingers, callused and blunt, nothing like whatever ring finger it was originally sized for two hundred years and one shipwreck ago—but it catches at the knuckle and holds.

Mari stares at it for a second. It's warmer than a piece of old metal has any right to be.

Then, because it's her turn and she can't let the moment get any more loaded than it already is, Mari digs into her own pocket and produces the second ring: a thin silver-toned band, with a little sea turtle worked into the front as the centerpiece, tiny etched lines for its shell. It was purchased two days ago for a hundred yen (hundred and ten with tax) from a Daiso near the station, chosen specifically because—out of everything—it looked the most like a real one.

"Here." She grabs Lara's hand and slides it on before either of them can dwell on the comparison.

Lara holds her hand up to the candlelight, studying the ring attentively. Her thumb brushes over the little turtle shape, and she goes still.

"Mari." Her voice has changed, like it’s caught on something

"I know it's cheap," Mari says quickly, taking the stillness for disappointment. "I was gonna get somethin’ better, but the good stores don't sell rings for, like, actual money that I have. It's dumb."

"It's not dumb." Lara is still looking at the ring, turning her hand slowly so the little shell catches the light. "Do you know what a sea turtle means, where I'm from?"

Mari blinks. "...No?"

"They're the ones who carry messages across the whole ocean, further than anyone else can swim without stopping." Lara looks up at her now, something bright and vulnerable in her face. "They always find their way back to the same place, no matter how far they go."

Mari doesn't say anything. Can't, really.

"You didn't know that," Lara says. It’s not a question. "But it means a lot to me that you picked this out for me."

Mari's face is hot enough now that the candlelight probably isn't doing her any favors. "It's a placeholder," she mutters. "For the real thing. Later. When we're—when we’re grown up."

"Later," Lara agrees, and doesn't stop looking at the ring, or at Mari, like she intends to remember both for a very long time.

Mari clears her throat, glancing over Lara’s shoulder for the sake of having something to do with her eyes. "Almost done. If anyone knows of any reason why we shouldn’t be married—" she pauses, feeling the absurdity of the sentence catch up with her mid-delivery, "—speak now, or forever hold your peace."

In perfect unison, they both turn to look at the pew.

The catfish plushie sits exactly where Mari left him, entirely and permanently silent on the matter.

"I think he’s fine with it," Lara chimes.

Mari has to bite down on a laugh, because the whole scene—the candlelight, the borrowed dresses, the dollar store ring, a stuffed catfish serving as the sole moral authority on their marriage—has finally tipped past the point where either of them can hold a straight face. Lara's shoulders are already shaking again, amusement trying to break through the ceremony like it did behind the altar table, and Mari feels her own composure go with it, the two of them laughing quietly at nothing and everything.

It takes a second to get it back. Mari wipes at the corner of one eye, exhales, tries to act like a woman of the cloth instead of a sixteen-year-old hiding a pretend wedding from her grandma.

"Okay," she says again, and this time her voice comes out almost formal, all the joking sanded off. Taking both of Lara’s hands in hers, she declares, "Then, by the power vested in me… I pronounce us wife and wife."

The words land heavier than she expects them to, given everything. She feels them settle somewhere under her sternum.

"We can kiss now," she adds.

Lara doesn't wait to be told twice.

It's clumsy. Lara tilts her head the wrong way at the same second Mari does, and their noses bump before their mouths ever find each other, and then Lara is laughing against Mari's lips before the kiss has even properly started, which makes it not really a kiss at all so much as two people trying not to fall over while grinning.

"You're ruinin’ it," Mari says, not letting go of her hands.

"You're the one who moved."

"I didn’t—"

"Let’s do it again," Lara says, still smiling, eyes dazzling in the candlelight.

Mari huffs, tips her chin, tries again. They both stick the landing this time, soft and brief and a little uncertain, the kind of kiss that hasn't figured out yet how long it's supposed to last. When they pull back Lara's face has gone pink all the way to her ears, and Mari suspects hers has done the same.

Then Lara leans back in.

The second one is steadier, Lara's hand coming up to rest against Mari’s cheek like she's testing whether she's allowed to, and Mari's fingers curl into the front of Lara’s dress to keep herself upright, because her knees have developed an opinion on the matter and the opinion is not favorable. Somewhere behind them a candle gutters and steadies. Neither of them notices.

By the third kiss the laughing has mostly stopped, replaced by something more earnest that neither of them has a joke ready for, and it's Mari who finally breaks it. She rests her forehead against Lara's, both of them a little out of breath.

"Okay," she says, and it’s more of an exhale than a concrete sound of a word. "Um… we should—"

"—cake," Lara says helpfully, still close enough that Mari can feel her breath.

"Right. Cake."

The cake is still sitting on the table, the two candles still burning, wax already threatening to drip onto the frosting.

“Make a wish, I guess,” Mari says.

They both get closer to the cake. Lara closes her eyes with theatrical seriousness, and they blow the two candles out in one breath. A thin curl of smoke rises between them.

"What'd you wish for?" Mari asks.

"I can't tell you,” Lara answers coyly. “It won't come true.”

Mari doesn’t bother telling her that that rule probably wouldn’t apply to wishes made at a wedding and reaches for the cake instead, plucking the candles out and tugging it toward her. Then she stops, patting down the empty space beside the box. "Wait. We don't have a knife."

"...Oh no. We didn't bring one?"

"I don't own a knife I'd bring to a chapel this late."

Lara considers this, chewing her lip, and then her whole face lights up with an idea. "We don't need one."

“Huh? Then how are we—"

Lara's already picked the cake up in both hands by the cake board, lifting it toward Mari. "Bite it."

Mari isn’t sure she heard that right. "What?"

“Bite it.” She holds it steady, an inch from Mari's face. "You get to be first.”

“I ain’t bitin’ into that.”

“Then you’re not getting any cake.”

Mari scowls at Lara, but leans in anyway, because she’s saying yes to everything tonight apparently, and sinks her teeth into the edge of the little cake. It's good—genuinely good. Moist and not too sweet, and she'd tell Lara that if she weren't currently pulling back with buttercream smeared clean across her nose and a smudge at the corner of her mouth.

Lara chuckles at the sight of her. "You have frosting on your face."

"Where?"

"Everywhere."

Mari swipes at her face with her index finger, catches frosting on it, and brushes it on Lara’s cheek.

"Mari!" Lara claps a hand to her face, scandalized, frosting now streaked from cheekbone to jaw, and Mari is laughing too hard to feel even a little bit guilty about it.

"My turn," Mari announces, taking the cake back before Lara can retaliate, lifting it the way Lara had. "Bite."

Lara narrows her eyes at her. “I’m going to get you back."

"Bite, Lara."

Lara leans in and takes an enormous bite, and comes away with frosting smeared across both cheeks, her chin, even a small dab on her eyebrow that neither of them can explain.

Mari stares. "How’d you get it on your eyebrow?"

"Talent," Lara says through a mouthful of cake.

"Now you have it everywhere." Mari's already laughing again, helpless with it, reaching up to wipe a streak from Lara's chin with her thumb as Lara chews with her cheeks full. She gets some frosting from her face on her fingers and reaches out to smear it straight across Mari's other cheek in retaliation, so that now they're both a mess—laughing too hard to properly eat their wedding cake, in a chapel lit by half-burned altar candles, and a stuffed catfish as their only witness to any of it.

There's still a quarter of the cake left when Lara sets it aside. They rid themselves of frosting with what used to be their veils—now demoted, permanently, to napkins.

Lara holds out her phone. "Dance with me."

"We ain’t got music."

"We do. I picked something." Lara taps the screen and sets the phone down on the corner of the altar table, propped against the empty cake box so the sound carries. A soft, piano-forward melody starts up. "Trust me."

Mari frowns at her. "That's an ominous thing to say before pressin’ play."

"Just trust me," Lara says again, holding out both hands.

Mari takes them.

A woman's voice comes in over the melody—low and a little husky at first, almost conversational, like she's speaking directly into Mari's ear before it climbs into something fuller.

"Be my only one
 The name I want to call you by
 Let's hold hands and walk along…”

Mari's eyebrows go up somewhere around the second line. "This is some sappy stuff, Lara."

"It's a good song."

"It's real sappy."

"It's a good song." Lara says it with total conviction. "The words are exactly how I feel about you. I heard it and thought—that's it. That's the one."

It's awkward at first—Mari's never really danced with anyone. She’s never really danced, period. Not properly, and definitely not like this. Her instinct is to lead with her feet the way she'd plant them in the ring, solid and squared, which turns out to be the wrong instinct entirely. She steps on Lara's foot twice in the first thirty seconds. Grateful, for once, for an excuse to look down instead of at Lara's face.

"Sorry—"

"It's fine."

"I dunno what I'm doin’."

"Neither did I, the first time." Lara guides her hand higher, resets their stance. "Just follow me. Smaller steps."

"On rainy nights or on lonely days
 Please color me with your light
 I'll do better when you promise me we will stay together”

They find it eventually—a slow turn around the small clear space in front of the altar, Lara humming a half-beat behind the melody like she's still catching up to a song two hundred years newer than the ones she grew up with. The candles throw their shadows long across the floor, sliding with them as they turn.

Mari's still thinking about the sappy thing. Lara hadn't even hesitated. And the worst part is that she agrees. It is a good song. She'd never admit as much on purpose, but some traitorous part of her has already started listening to the lyrics instead of just hearing them, matching them up against tonight, the whole dumb beautiful mess of it, and finding that they fit too well.

"Now I believe
 La-la-la-la-la, I sing a song like this
 With the one I was desperately looking for
 My, oh my, oh my, oh my love
 Be my only love"

Somewhere in that turn, Lara spins her out—untrained, a little too fast—and Mari laughs, off-balance, catching herself against Lara's shoulder as she's pulled back in. It feels less like a step and more like being caught.

"Every step we take
 It's like a dance we perform together”

Once they've settled back into rhythm, and before she can overthink it, Mari dips Lara—one arm braced firmly at the small of Lara's back, Lara's long hair pooling toward the floor, both of them frozen there for half a second in the candlelight.

It works. Mari has genuinely no idea how it works, given she's never done this outside of watching it happen in a drama, but Lara's laughing up at her, delighted and a little breathless, and that's apparently enough to make it count.

"Show-off," Lara accuses, once Mari pulls her back upright.

"You started it."

“My only one, when I see you
 I want to lean on you, I want to have you
 A love like this would make
 Even the most immature dream come true”

They keep going. The song moves into its last chorus, and neither of them is really dancing so much as just moving together now, slow circles, foreheads close, laughing at nothing in particular—the kind of laughing that doesn't need a reason, that just runs over because there's too much feeling in the room to hold quietly.

"Now I believe
 Every step we take
 It's like a dance we perform together
 My, oh my, oh my, oh my love
 Be my only love"

Mari feels, absurdly, like she’s the star of her own movie, and Lara is her leading lady, and this is the part just before the end credits roll. Except there's no crew here to call the scene, no music cue to fade it out. It’s just the two of them, and the candles, and a song that keeps playing after the moment it was supposed to end.

She doesn't want it to end either.

"One more thing," Lara says, before Mari can suggest packing up. She digs into the tote bag and comes out with her camera—a small secondhand one, the strap frayed at one edge from however many years it's had before Lara got hold of it. "We need proof this happened."

"Proof for who? A court of law?"

"For us, silly," Lara says simply. "So we remember."

Mari doesn't push back on that.

"Okay. You first—go stand behind the table." Lara waves her into place, then lifts the camera, one eye closing as she lines up the shot. Mari straightens automatically, boxer's posture kicking in out of habit, before she catches herself and lets her shoulders drop, lets herself just stand there instead—veil long since taken off, frosting stain still faintly visible on the corner of her chin, half a smile she's not bothering to suppress.

"There," Lara says, satisfied, checking the little screen. "You look adorable."

"I ain’t adorable."

"You don’t get to be the judge of that." The shutter clicks a second time before Mari's ready for it, catching her mid-eye-roll, which Lara looks delighted about.

"I’ll take your picture." Mari holds her hand out for the camera, and Lara passes it over without hesitation, then goes to stand where Mari had been—behind the table, candlelight throwing warm light up under her chin, veil also gone due to the frosting emergency.

Mari looks through the viewfinder and, for a second, just looks. Lara stands there in clothes that were meant to be slept in, looking back at the lens knowing exactly who's on the other side of it.

Mari takes the photo before the moment can get any bigger than it already is, and there have been way too many big moments this one night alone.

"Okay." She checks the screen. A candlelit Lara in soft-focus, unmistakably happy. "That one's good."

"Let me see." Lara crowds in at her shoulder to look, and hums approvingly. "Now let’s take one together."

Mari looks around the empty chapel. "We ain’t brought a tripod."

"We didn't bring a lot of things tonight and it's worked out so far."

"That's—" Mari stops, considers the problem instead of arguing with the logic. There's the pew. The altar table's too low and at the wrong angle. Her eyes land on the stack of hymnals sitting on the shelf by the vestry door.

"Gimme a second." She grabs three of the thicker ones, stacks them on the end of the pew nearest the altar, and balances the camera on top, angling it until the screen shows both of them and the whole scene in frame.

"There's a timer function," Lara offers, coming to Mari’s aid. She sets the timer, and they scramble into place—Mari behind the table again, Lara pressed into her side. The little light on the camera starts blinking, faster and faster.

"Smile!" Lara says, unnecessary, because Mari already is.

The shutter clicks. Neither of them moves right away to check it. Lara's still got her head tipped against Mari's shoulder, and Mari's still got an arm around her waist.

"We should probably..." Mari trails off, not finishing the sentence. She doesn’t really want to.

"Yeah." Lara doesn't walk away either.

But eventually, they clean up, dragging it out without either of them admitting that's what they're doing. Mari blows out the altar candles one by one, the chapel dimming a degree with each one until only the candlestick on the table is left burning, and she blows that out too. She returns it to its approximate spot on the altar—angled just slightly wrong, she notices, and nudges it a centimeter to the left until it sits the way it's supposed to. Lara wraps what's left of the cake—a lopsided, frosting-smeared quarter of it—back into its box like it's something worth saving, even though they both know it'll probably be inedible by morning.

They change back into their own clothes in the vestry, trading off, the dress and the borrowed sundress and both cut-up veil-strips—sticky with frosting—folded into the tote bag along with everything else. When Mari steps back out, ordinary again, in a T-shirt and sweatpants, it feels a little bit like taking a costume off after a play. Except something in her heart doesn't feel ordinary at all, still full of something incomplete.

Mari does one last sweep of the room before they go: checks under the pew, picks her catfish plushie up off its perch and tucks it under her arm. Then she flips the light switch by the side door, and the chapel folds itself back into the dark, like nothing happened here at all, a hundred small candle-ghosts still swimming behind Mari's eyes.

Outside, the air is cool and smells like the lake. Neither of them says anything for the first stretch of the walk home, hands bumping every few steps until Lara just laces their fingers together outright, like there was never a version of tonight where she wasn't going to end up doing that eventually.

"That was a good fake-wedding," Lara says finally, matter-of-fact.

"It was a disaster. You stole a candlestick. We got frostin' everywhere. I stepped on your feet when we danced,” Mari lists off. “And we almost got busted.”

In spite of that, Lara smiles down at her. Mari can make out the shape of it even when the sun’s not shining. "I liked it better than the drama one."

Mari scoffs. "Low bar."

"I mean it." Lara swings their joined hands once, loosely, looking over at her in the dark. "When we’re older, when we’re ready… I hope we get to do it for real."

Mari lets herself absorb those words and doesn’t say anything all the way up the path to her own front door, where they both know the night has to actually end now, the real world reasserting itself in the shape of a doorknob and a sleeping house.

"Hey," Mari says, before they go in. She reaches into her pocket, fingers finding the ring Lara gave her. Lara herself wore the Daiso turtle the whole walk home without taking it off once. Mari feels something in her chest tip sideways at that.

"What is it?"

"Nevermind." Mari shakes her head, opens the door as quiet as she can manage. "It’s nothin'. Let’s go to bed.”

Lara beams at her in the dark, bright enough that Mari has to look away before she does something reckless like kiss her again on the doorstep, and they slip inside together, the chapel already starting to feel like something that happened in a different, better world than the ordinary one waiting for them upstairs.