And yet, he could not get back to that. He did not know how to find it. The loss of them was something that had frozen him over, and he had never yet found his way back. Not to himself. Not to anything else.
Nothing that felt half so much like home.
And then Olive appeared in his vision, walking across the grass, between the chairs. And he nearly laughed. She was not wearing black. But she was wearing a white wedding dress with long sleeves and an extremely high neck. It was elegant, and perfect, like the rest of her, but also inarguably shaped like her preferred black turtlenecks.
It was essentially her, to make that reference, perhaps one that only he would understand. And she would make it slyly all the same.
She was holding a large bouquet of flowers, all in fall colors, her brown hair down and curling, swept to the side over her shoulder.
She had never looked more beautiful.
It was enough to drive him to his knees. It was enough, to harken back to his raider ancestors, make him wish to pick her up and carry her out over his shoulders so he could make love to her, rather than stand here with her in front of an audience.
But the audience was necessary.
The rest of it was not.
When she arrived at the front, she had no bridesmaids to hand her bouquet to, so she turned to the crowd and cheerfully tossed it out. There was a minor celebrity in the third row who caught it and screamed excitedly.
Oh, yes. Olive was wonderful at a spectacle.
She knew how to command attention.
She always had.
Her tech presentations where she debuted the year’s new technology for Ambient had been huge events for the last few years. Building in popularity each and every time.
She was just that way. Just undeniably that way.
He was not a man given to socializing. And the truth was, he had never been to a wedding. He never had occasion to. He had certainly never attended as anyone’s date, and had never felt beholden enough to somebody to have to review the spectacle himself.
And so the words of the vows were unfamiliar to him, something foreign, even though he had seen abbreviated versions of them in movies. But not many. He didn’t watch a lot of movies. Occasionally one would play in the background on the plane.
How could you promise such things to another person? And how can they promise them to you and expect to keep them in any kind of fashion? He found it a daunting thing to think of. And the divorce rate was so high. And yet humans did this. And expected theirs to last.
The unbearable optimism of some people amazed him.
He had lost his own when he’d been twelve years old.
He had traded his own. Sold it. For thirty pieces of silver, as it were.
Olive was saying her vows, bright and clear and true, her eyes shining, and anyone might’ve thought that she meant them.
It did something to him. To hear that.
To see her pledge her loyalty to him. Her... Her love. But then, he had just promised the same thing, and he had no concept of love.
Not really.
And when it was time to kiss, it was a relief. Because he understood that. The physicality between them was undeniable, and there was a familiarity to it. It was at least the ghost of something that he had experienced before.
Except then her mouth met his, freshly scented with the words she had just spoken, and it was as if he had never been kissed before in his life.
As if she had found a way to weave the words into every pass of her mouth over his. And he was undone.
There before a crowd of people. He, Gunnar Magnusson, who had never once been undone.
Who was the undoing and ruin of many, but had never been touched by another soul.