#anyway. accidentally proposing to your partner by just calling them your spouse out loud after years of doing it mentally. the ellas story

[dracaeons]

❝ nobody’s ever called me that. say it again. ❞ zevellas

ellas looks up, surprised. in truth, she's been thinking of him like this for so long, now, that she hadn't realized that this was the first time saying it aloud.

at least, within earshot of zevran.

her cheeks flush warm, caught out — but it's just a harmless kind of embarrassment, she thinks. not something she worries would drive a wedge between them; not something that would itch beneath his skin or hers. not like that, anyway.

home has always been people, more than place, for her. nature of the life she's led; even if they had their paths, the clan moved plenty, and during the blight— ferelden's what it is, but she doesn't like denerim half as much as she does the open road, or the lush canopy of a forest. of late, home's been— waking up warm, tangled with zevran. finding ways to make each other laugh; mapping his skin beneath her palms, just for the sake of touching.

so she supposes she could've called him that, instead; ellas wonders whether it would be new, too. thinks she knows the answer.

"well. official or not, it's what you are, to me, isn't it?" might as well admit it all, now. she twines her hand with zevran's, and smiles. "my husband."

@hemerasiae

[team-shithead]

I know you said Alex and John get married eventually but are we ever going to see their wedding?

I mean, in theory, in nine hundred years, when I finally get to that part in the story.

But, with the knowledge that this shit takes me forever and we could all be dead tomorrow, here’s some stuff about it, most of which I think I may have mentioned in other posts? 

*

Alex rejects John’s first proposal. Which, frankly, is well deserved. John puts off proposing or even discussing marriage with Alex for years once Eliza comes into the picture. This is mostly because he knows that Eliza has always imagined her future wedding and has always thought about getting married and has always wanted to get married, whereas John didn’t think about the future at all until he met Alex. He thinks that Eliza deserves to marry Alex, if she wants, but she insists that John should be the one to do it. Alex and Eliza love each other deeply and all three of them live together (and, at this point, have children together), but John is still more-or-less Alex’s primary partner. (Plus, on their first official date, one of the first things Alex says to her is, “I’m going to marry John one day.”) So they spend years arguing about it and it takes on the tone of arguing over who has to marry Alex instead of who gets to marry Alex.

Eliza eventually accidentally recruits four year old Philip to her side when he overhears an exchange between her and Angelica (”How’s your husband?” “Good. How are yours?”) and she explains that she’s not married to Daddy because Papa is going to marry Daddy. Which leads to Philip asking John why he and Alex aren’t married and John trying to explain the intricacies of legal marriage and that it has nothing to do with how much he loves Alex, etc. Eliza eventually points out that if Alex and John get married, they’ll have some sort of legal connection to each other’s biological children, and John finally caves.

He finally mentions to Alex, “Hey, so, do you wanna get married?” and Alex drives the entire room into dead silence when he says, “No.”

It’s only for a few seconds, but they’re the longest, more awkward seconds of everyone’s lives. The kids are there, of course, but also the Washingtons and Angelica and Church and their baby. John is fucking floored, just totally mute with shock. So is everyone else. But Alex doesn’t let the silence stay for long before he goes off on John and Eliza both for treating this like a game for all these years, for not even asking him for his input, for acting like marrying him is some terrible burden, for turning the idea of their marriage into a joke. 

Eliza and John are both chastened by this. Alex, dramatic as ever, storms out of the dining room to brood in his office, and after some self-flagellating, John follows him and apologizes and they talk a little bit about why John’s avoided the marriage issue for so long and how Eliza fits into everything and John’s guilt, etc. And they’re okay, after (Eliza apologizes, too), but they don’t talk about marriage again for a little while.

*

The second time John proposes, he puts a lot of fucking thought into it. He doesn’t tell anyone at first, except Philip, who’s sworn to secrecy, and only then because Philip is out sick from school on the day John has to go to the jeweler to check out the ring he commissioned. Eliza eventually figures it out (Philip is not good at keeping secrets), which is fine because John has to recruit everyone they know anyway. There’s a big parapsych conference that’s coming to town, and their whole extended family is using it as an excuse to visit. He sets up a big breakfast the day before the conference starts–Eliza and the kids and the other two Schuylers and their spouses and kids and Laf and Adrienne and Georges and Mattie and Jo and Frances and the Washingtons and Herc and even Burr and Theodosia and Theo Jr. 

This time he plans out a whole speech in the days leading up, but forgets most of it the moment he stands up and clears his throat to get everyone’s attention. The actual speech he gives is pretty good, though, and Alex cries a lot and does, of course, say yes this time.

*

Eliza plans most of the wedding, because she needs something to funnel her energy into in order to keep from being too bummed out. Because she is a little bummed out–she loves John and she has always known that he and Alex were going to get married, but now that it’s finally happening, she has to put away the dream that she had of her own wedding. It’s never going to happen and it hurts a little, knowing that, despite all these years of preparation. She’s very happy with her life–she loves her job, she loves Alex, she loves John, she loves their children–but it’s not the life she imagined for herself and this is the last part of that dream that she’s finally putting to bed.

But she doesn’t want to be mopey and unhappy and she doesn’t want John to feel guilty, so she decides the best thing she can do is be too busy to mope and throws herself into planning. She also knows that John and Alex would be happy with hiring a wedding planner and calling it a day, but that her doing it will make it more personal since she knows them better than anyone. Also, she’s a huge fucking control freak and the idea of anyone else planning this thing for her family makes her pretty anxious. Angelica lectures her a lot about emotional labor and the weird sort of masochism inherent in planning your boyfriend’s wedding to someone else. Eliza doesn’t know how to make her believe that this honestly makes her feel better–Angelica has never fully understood how her relationships with Alex and John work, both individually and as a unit, and while she’s accepted it at this point, occasionally she has to remind Eliza that she just Doesn’t Get It.

She ends up doing a lot of work with Herc, whom the boys recruit to officiate the ceremony. She’s always liked him a lot and she likes him even more now–he’s very aware of her complex feelings and supports her through all of it, even though Alex and John are his friends. He also knows everyone and is able to help her haggle down to very inexpensive prices for most of the things they need. They’re not wanting for money at this point, but there’s nothing wrong with being thrifty.

The one thing she does politely refuse to do, however, is participate in the ceremony. It feels wrong to her, awkward and uncomfortable, and even though Alex and John come to her both together and on their own to try and change her mind, she’s firm in her refusal. She’s happy to plan the thing, to herd the kids during the ceremony, and to watch from the audience.

*

John, who stayed stoic through his proposal and mostly finds the entire planning process tedious (they’ve been functionally married since he was twenty-three, this all seems absurd), makes it two sentences into his vows and then starts sobbing and doesn’t stop until after the ceremony.

*

John and his dad are on okay terms by the time of the wedding–Ella’s about two at this point and right after she’s born, Henry makes some overtures of mending fences–but some of the things that John mentions during the ceremony strike a chord with him. He doesn’t bring it up during the reception, but he sends John a very awkward email a few days later. John sends him an equally awkward email back. It’s not a replacement for the family therapy they probably should have had when John was thirteen, if not when he was seven, but it’s a start.

*

They don’t go on anything resembling a honeymoon, really. They’ve got two kids and Eliza discovered she was pregnant a month or so before the wedding, plus they both have about three different jobs each, but they do spend a long weekend alone at a hotel. It’s both very nice and very weird. They haven’t been alone with absolutely nothing to do in literal years. They spend just as much time reading silently and catching up on Netflix as they do having sex (which is to say, they do A LOT of both).

*

The first time Alex calls John his husband casually and out loud, he freezes and almost starts to cry, which is mortifying, but mostly he’s distracted by being so unspeakably happy that it almost makes him dizzy. He didn’t think that titles and legal documents were such a big deal–even when he got upset after John’s first proposal, it was more a matter of feeling disregarded and disrespected than any longing for a marriage certificate–but it does mean something. Symbolically and as a matter of professional optics, but more than that, the knowledge that John stood up in front of all of those people and promised to love him forever is still overwhelming. All that they are to each other and all that they’ve been to each other isn’t easily summarized or explained, but having this connection feels like an important symbol, an important piece of the puzzle. In this simple, ancient way, he and John officially belong to each other–something he never dreamed of having as a child and something that he can never imagine being without going forward.