Wedding of the Century update

“We come up on our place now, yes sir,” their driver said in thick patois.

The road turned off onto older pavement. It twisted and narrowed, quite unlike the highway they'd been on. as if shying away from the army tents that sprang up. Breaking up the horizon with row after row that barely let the road get through. Sandbags cropped up into gun emplacements, all of which aimed at the limo before letting it go by.

And then there were the soldiers. Hundreds of them. Target practice at the range, standing at parade rest while being harangued by superiors, going on synchronized runs… no, not hundreds. Thousands.

“Who are you planning to get invaded by?” Mary Jane teased the driver.

“Lord Erik believes in strong Wakanda. We do not trust in history to defend us. We ready ourselves for the future.”

Some future, Peter thought, as the limo stopped and started, trying to avoid squads of soldiers that swarmed all around like they'd stumbled into an anthill.

Mary Jane’s voice cheered to brighten the mood. “Hey, driver, how about some music?”

The driver fiddled with the radio and the car filled with John Lennon lyrics. “Ah! The Beatles! Classic Wakandan music!”

“They're British,” Mary Jane said.

“It's Imagine,” Peter said. “They can have it.”

The car came to a vast wall. Thick concrete with the occasional hole stabbing through, showing a world of unfettered nature. The road terminated at an electric fence, with a pillbox beside that served as security booth. The guard inside traded terse words with their driver in Wakandan. Then the fence slid aside and let them into the royal grounds.

The miles of estate was dominated by the palace. An enormous adobe structure built in the Sudano-Sahelian style… endless logs and mudbricks fashioned into imposing walls, minarets, turrets. It was shockingly medieval, like a rock formation barely chiseled away to suit human habitation.

Yet it was all just the foundation for an enormous statue of a tribal chieftain, his sandaled feet embracing either end of the palace, his arms holding a spear high.

“That is Azzuri, the grandfather of the old king,” their driver said. “The present king is looking for ways of removing safely.”

“It would be nice to put a skylight in,” Mary Jane remarked.

The paved road became the crunching gravel of an open air parking lot. The driver didn't go for a space, but pulled up to the end of the lot, where a footpath led out through the tall grass.

“Lord Erik would like to see you, the driver announced. “You will down the path, please. Your bags will go inside the castle.”

Peter traded a look with Mary Jane. She giggled nervously.

“You've got me. This is my first monarchy.”

“I think we're both too thin to have to worry about hyenas.”

“And they were probably really excited when they heard two Americans were coming.”

They got out of the car. The heat was crisp: harsh, but dry and zingy in a way. Acacias provided shade, but the chest-high grass shadowed them already. Peter stretched his legs, rotating the kinks out of his neck, and scanned the grass for anything that might emerge. Warmth radiated up between his toes with each step. When Mary Jane took his hand, it was the one thing he wasn't expecting.

“Just in case this all turns into an international incident, I am enjoying myself at the moment,” MJ informed him. “This was a really good idea as long as no one starts shooting.”

A soft growl flowed through the air. Peter froze. Mary Jane’s hand went rigid in his. He thought to squeeze it reassuringly and was angry with himself that he hadn't thought to do so before.

“Any chance that's your stomach?” Mary Jane whispered.

Peter petted her wrist with his thumb. It killed him that he couldn't just tell her he could take this thing, whatever it was. There was no need to worry, she'd worried enough. He was better at it.

A musical voice floated on the wind, helping to sway the grass. “Do not be afraid, my friends. They're quite tame, I assure you. Please, come closer. Allow me to welcome you to my country.”

Peter felt Mary Jane’s gaze on him. He looked at her; her eyes wide, questioning. He smiled and tried to be calming with it. But usually the only one he needed to reassure was himself.

He took a step forward and heard her footfall after his. Step by step, they turned a curve in the trail and came to a clearing in the shade of a baobab tree. Seven lions, male and female, sprawled on the ground or lulled from the branches.

A giant of a man stood in their midst, wearing his own version of the olive drab uniform the other soldiers did. His was open to the waist, showing muscles segmenting his coal-black skin into two broad pecs and a series of abs. On his head, instead of the red berets of his men, he wore an Arab headdress, the band formed of a golden coil that became a flaring, hooded cobra above his forehead. The nemes was tilted casually off center.

“I guess guard dogs weren't working out for you,” Mary Jane said.

“My army suffices for personal protection.” Erik held up a mechanical device. A curving head on a straightened base, which he held it by. “This is more of a pet project. A simple radio signal, relayed to a chip implanted within the beast. So that even the animals know that my enemies are nature's enemies.”

“That's some advance,” Mary Jane said diplomatically.

“If you're a lion,” Peter added.

“Mr. Parker.” Eyes that were cold despite their soulful shade of brown shifted to Peter. “You have me at a loss. I don't follow gossip, so you are not well-known to me.”

“I'm the boyfriend,” Peter said simply.

Erik shifted his attention to Mary Jane so thoroughly that Peter might've ceased to exist. “Mary Jane Watson. Your talent and beauty are known even here. I thank you for gracing my humble people with your presence.”

He seized her hand and brought it to his lips for a kiss. It made Peter's palm itch where Mary Jane’s hand had been nestled in it.

“Not all that humble,” Peter said. “You must take a great deal of pride in the army you've assembled.”

“Purely in the interest of self-defense. Good fences make good neighbors, as they say in your country.”

“They do say that,” Mary Jane laughed pleasantly.

Peter's eyes narrowed. “I thought this corner of Africa was historically peaceful.“

“My predecessor kept the peace by certain cumbersome deals made with our neighbors. Deals that were not in the best interest of the Wakandan people. Now that those deals are rightfully ended, we may need to protect ourselves from our neighbors’ dissatisfaction.”

“Sounds like provocation… ending treaties that kept the peace.”

“There will be peace, I assure you.” He favored MJ with a glowing smile she could not help but return. “My peace.”

***

After that, Erik extolled Mary Jane to try petting one of his tame lions, but MJ couldn’t be convinced to give it a go. Erik’s displeasure was overtly obvious; it became a sulk, with him summoning one of his men from the grass to escort them to their rooms. Peter wondered if their new tour guide was a servant or a bodyguard.

The inside of the place was almost as barbaric as the outside. Cave-dank and grave-dark, with only a few windows to let in sizzling rays of light. From the sconces on the walls, it was meant to be lit by torchlight. Instead, Erik’s man carried a lantern, which guided them through crushingly narrow halls. In places, electric lights had been installed. They flickered and hissed, unconvincingly trying to persuade that it was day in a structure that seemed made out of night.

When they got to it, though, the room proved to have everything but a bowling alley. Whatever renovations were underway in the rest of the castle, they were totally finished there. Pink plaster hid the stone walls, the floor had been carpeted and then oasis’d with leopard-skin rugs. More pelts furred the furniture and bed. Chandeliers hung from the ceiling, doing the lighting bit, and an air conditioner filled one half of the window, gently droning. Paradoxically, there was a fireplace in the corner, but no wood—the pit was filled with a space heater.

Their escort excused himself without waiting for a tip. Peter clutched his wrist in one hand. With his thumb, he prodded his watch into scanning for bugs. He circled the room, pretending to look it all over.

There was the row of elephant tusks lining the headboard, the large chiffonier and rosewood sideboard that flanked the window, a horsehair-stuffed chair of Morocco leather facing the oblong slab of the bed. Even in Africa they had cuck chairs, Peter noted. Odd.

All of them pinged the tiny light on his watch telling him they were being listened to.

“Look at this,” Mary Jane said, and for a moment, Peter thought she’d actually found one of the bugs and was about to inadvertently blow their cover as innocents aboard—the ‘they don’t know that we know that they know’ mental knots of tradecraft.

Only she was holding the dresser door open to where Peter’s shirts had been neatly fitted to a number of clothes hangers. “They unpacked everything for us.”

“That’s service,” Peter commented, looking over more of the room. There was a writing desk, complete with a humidor and crystal decanter, both complimentarily full.

“I actually prefer to unpack myself. I have a system.” She paged through all the clothes hangers. “Where are all my… oh, this must be your room. So I would be…”

She went to a door and opened it into a mirror image of the current apartment, with Mary Jane’s bags by the bed. Little flouncing steps took her over to the chiffonier. Her make-up case was right at the foot of the mirror.

“I feel very classily violated,” she commented, picking up a tube of lipstick to touch up her face.

“The Neil Gaiman experience,” Peter remarked. “Too soon?”

“No, you stay relevant, I like that about you. Let me check real quick to see if they put any of my things with your stuff.”

“Not even being subtle about trying to steal my shirts,” Peter said, popping the humidor open to check out one of the cigars inside.

Mary Jane flipped through his suitcase, open on the bed. “Shirts, hell. I’m going to take your socks, cut off the ends, wear them like little arm-casts. Girls in my high school used to do that with boys. For real. Then the head quarterback got a girlfriend, I mean a serious girlfriend, and it turned out he didn’t wear socks. Oh, we were scandalized. I didn’t know you smoked.”

Peter jerked the cigar out from under his nose. But MJ wasn’t talking about that. She was holding the pack of cigarettes Frank had given him. “I don’t. I mean, I’m trying to quit.”

“How long?”

“Two years now. But if I get gored by a rhino… I’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it, you know?”

Mary Jane posed with one of the cigarettes in her mouth. “What do you think? Marlene Dietrich?” She took it out and preened with the cigarette between her fingers. “Barbara Stanwyck?”

“Maureen O’Hara and you know it,” Peter said, coming over to snatch the cigarette away from her. He put it away in the pack. “Now don’t touch these. They’re very bad for you. I only keep them around for sentimental value.”

“Alright, don’t touch the cigarettes or you’ll spank me, got it.”

Peter didn’t bother to correct her. He’d hate to get into an argument in front of the wiretappers.

***

Mary Jane watched Peter flop down on his bed, hands behind his head. She wondered how he’d react if she climbed in after him and pulled the welcome mat in with her. Probably not too well.

She knew what she was doing. Trying to have it all again. And she wouldn’t manage it. There would have to be cuts. She’d have to make room for Peter in her life; couldn’t just slot him in there. Which was why this trip was probably a mistake.

She was still getting to know Peter. Feeling him out. And now the forced intimacy of being two vacationing foreigners together. It was a lot of strain to put on a burgeoning relationship. If she saw it in a script, she’d ask for a rewrite.

But maybe it wasn’t a lot of strain. Maybe she was just used to crappy guys giving her crappy relationships and with someone like Peter, sweet and true, the kind of disasters that had sunk her past relationships would simply bounce off this one.

She went back to looking through Peter’s wardrobe, like somewhere in it there’d be a note from God saying ‘don’t worry about it, he’s your soulmate, ask him about the other half of the broken amulet.’ Like in all those romantasy books that were the only things people read now. And no wonder. Imagine if it were as simple as a tattoo or a birthmark or…

A little box stashed with Peter’s neatly folded underwear.

Mary Jane glanced at Peter. He was resting his eyes in a fatherly way: dead to the world. She looked back at the box. She wound open the little hinges…

Ring. Gold ring. Gold ring with a little crystal on it.

Mary Jane slammed the box shut. She looked at Peter. He was still sleeping. She looked at the box again. She started to open it. No! She shouldn’t look at it, not before Peter was down on one knee and holding it out to her and…

Oh my God oh my God oh my God!

Mary Jane retreated to her own room, locking the door behind her (for possibly the last time in her relationship with Peter) before thrusting herself into the bed and screaming into her pillow. And she’d hinted at getting married only this morning! The poker face Peter must have, to know it was right there in the trunk of the car the whole time, just waiting… She kicked and kicked and kicked the mattress, wanted to go fight a gorilla. They really were simpatico.

Then Mary Jane rolled over onto her back. Marriage meant wedding. She was going to have to plan a new wedding. And by God, she’d do it right this time!