Chapter 224 The Marriage
POV: Cormac | Rookeries, back room
The ceremony takes eleven minutes, which is the amount of time it takes when you strip everything away and keep only what matters, which is two people saying true things to each other in front of witnesses who mean something to them.
I asked Moira this afternoon, which is to say I asked her three hours after Valentina died on the Parliament steps and two hours after I got Dante off the ground and one hour after Callum stopped pulling against the chains, which is to say I asked her at the specific moment when I understood with complete clarity that the future is not a guaranteed thing and that the things you want to have done need to be done now rather than when the situation is more appropriate, because the situation is never going to be more appropriate, the situation is what it is and you either move in it or you wait and waiting is its own kind of answer.
She said yes before I finished asking, which is Moira, which is the specific Moira quality of already having decided something before the other person has completed the sentence.
Finn is here. He is two years old and he does not understand the ceremony but he understands that something important is happening because of the quality of the room and the quality of the adults in it, and he is sitting on Callum's lap with the focused solemn expression of a two-year-old who has decided to be serious about something, which is the most serious expression I have ever seen a two-year-old produce and which makes something in my chest do a thing it has not done in a long time.
Tom performs the ceremony, which he has done before in the Rookeries community, the informal version that does not require Parliamentary sanction or supernatural authority and which is the version that most of the packless community uses because Parliamentary sanction has not been something the packless community has traditionally had access to. He says the words and they are simple words and they are the right words.
Moira's hand in mine is the specific weight of something real, the weight of something that has been true for a long time and which is now being stated in front of people rather than simply existing between us, and the stating of it does not change what it is but it does something to the space around it, makes it solid in a way that private things are not solid.
My vow is the one I prepared this afternoon in the twenty minutes between asking and starting the operational planning, and it is short because short is what is true and long vows are often people using length to avoid precision.
"I will be the father Finn deserves," I say, and I say it to Moira and to the room and to Finn who is watching from Callum's lap with the solemn focused expression. "And the brother mine deserved."
Callum makes a sound that is not quite a sound, the specific quality of something managed rather than expressed, and I do not look at him because looking at him right now is not the right thing to do, is not what either of us needs, and I keep my eyes on Moira.
She says her vow, which is also short and which is also precise, and Tom says the words that complete the thing and the room is quiet for a moment with the specific quality of a quiet that is not empty but full, the fullness of people who have just witnessed something real.
We have one hour before the rescue operation moves.
I hold Moira's hand for the length of time that one hour away from the most important thing you have decided to do allows, which is not long but which is real, and then I cross the room to Callum and I stand beside him and he looks at me with the expression that means he is holding several things at once and managing all of them.
"If I don't come back," I say, and I say it without softening it because softening it would be dishonest and Callum and I have been past dishonesty with each other for a long time now. "He's yours. You and Isla. He knows you're his uncle. Make sure he knows his mother and I both chose this."
Callum looks at me for a long moment with the expression I have been seeing since noon, the one with the grief underneath and the purpose on top.
"You're coming back," he says.
"I know," I say. "But if I don't."
"If you don't," he says, "he's mine. He'll know you both. I promise."
We stand in the room together for a moment, two brothers on the other side of everything we were three years ago, on the other side of the trial and the Rookeries and the rescue and the war and all of it, and the room has the quality of a moment that knows it is a moment and which is not going to last long enough.
"One hour," Callum says.
"One hour," I agree.