Nothing Else Matters

You know, with everything else that happened during the day it's a wonder that I only had the one meltdown.
What's that? You want the list? Well, here goes.

Thad showed up with Shannel or however you fucking spell it, that newscaster from New Orleans. Who is Thad? Thad is Alison's ex, and he is, in fact, a colossal douchebag. I mean, I don't trust anyone named Thad to begin with, but this guy has some sort of complex. Apparently he made his way to Chicago all the way from Vegas just to crash Nate's date. I only heard secondhand accounts from Nevermore of these events, mostly of Nate heroically juggling my wedding cake and Thad's face while Ciara scaled the nearest skyscraper pretending to be a jumper (which is probably one of the best wedding presents ever, and a lot easier to figure out than that blender).

Then there was a cattle drive through downtown Chicago.
You know what, that's inaccurate. Pardon. It wasn't a cattle drive because they were yaks. Forty golden yaks and several dwarves. It sounds like the punchline to a bad joke. Until you think about what they did to the church grounds.

Oh, and the wedding planner, Anne, cancelled on me the morning of the wedding, saying that her mother was dead. She offered me a refund, but I told her to keep the money. She'll probably need it for the funeral, and she'd saved me a few headaches. Anyway, that was why Nate was juggling a cake. People had to be sent to go retrieve the wedding cake, the food, and the flowers. Ciara helped with that too. She's a lot more helpful than I was expecting her to be, considering she's supposed to be making sure we accomplish a task we're just kind of ignoring.
The Eye of Balor, by the way, was also in attendance at the ceremony. Let's add that to the list of shit I'd rather hadn't happened and contributed to a mild case of hypertension. We put it in a crate under a sheet in one of the corners. Though, my logic was that if anyone had the balls big enough to crash a party full of gods, and I'm talking the progenitors of pantheons, to get that thing then I figured they fucking deserved it.

But everything was retrieved without much difficulty, for all the difference it made, because according to Gunnar, "Some Greek people showed up" and started redecorating. I guess they weren't impressed by my floral selections.
Whatever.

Finally, I was getting ready, putting on my shoes and swearing at my new hairstyle. There was a knock on the door. She said her name was Judith and that she was Anne's assistant.
Anne cancelled on me this morning, like I said, so that should have been a warning sign. I finished finding my shoes. Judith said she was sent to deliver the boutonnieres.
Those should have come with the flowers. That should have been a warning too.
And for some reason she wasn't taking them to the groom or best man, who really should have been in charge of getting them on the groomsmen and ushers. I'm bad at paying attention to warnings so I opened the door once I finished struggling around my dress to get the thigh holster for Sibyl on. Some brides wear garters. Not me.
Anyway. She brings them in, scooting around Camila who I guess was there to make sure I didn't go ballistic and kill anyone. I'm not sure who thought that one up. She said... something. I wasn't paying attention, honestly. Then she told me I was a beautiful bride, and put her hand on my shoulder and left.
I turned to Camila to make a "that was weird" face, and Camila met that and raised me a "you need to look in a mirror because you've got MURDERER carved into your forehead" face.
I just... took a long breath and stared at the mirror. Breathing. Evenly, calmly. I had options, obviously.
I could try to cover it up.
I could call everything off for the day, spend gods-know-how-long figuring out what was done to me and how to undo it, if that was even possible and take gods-know-how-long for the stars to align so that we could all (Odin, Frigg, Zeus, Hera, Heimdall, Apollo, Artemis, Ms. Esparza, our Bandmates and all of the kids) get together like this again.
Or, the option I chose, I could think about this realistically. Just because it was on my forehead did not make it news, and the one person about whose reaction I really even gave a good goddamn anymore was there the night I pulled the trigger. He'd been there for me ever since and quite frankly, leaving him standing at the altar was nowhere on my to do list.
Almost eight seconds later Brendan was pounding on the door. Nate must have known I was in trouble and sent Brendan to keep Gunnar from bouncing through the church to check on me. You know, since the groom's not supposed to see the bride and all those other stupid traditions.
"You alright?" Brendan asked cautiously.
I turned to him, gesturing to my recent cosmetic modification, raised an eyebrow, grinned sarcastically. "Just peachy. Be down in a few." He looked at me like he didn't believe I was actually going to come down. I just shrugged. Deep breaths. It's probably bad luck to kill someone on your wedding day, especially an innocent bystander.
It's also not like I'm expecting that either the Dodekatheon or the Aesir would feel terribly scandalized by the knowledge that I had a body count. Gunnar's mom might take some calming down. Ugh.
I sent Gunnar a pic of Judith's parting gift. "Didn't wanna surprise you. Scary Mary says hi. See you soon."

The rest of it went... I can't really remember how it went, honestly. I was all nervous and giddy and tongue-tied and I probably said 80 stupid things and there were still yaks in Chicago and Dionysus was spiking the... alcohol... with more alcohol and oh my gods I was getting married and my wedding guests included Odin and Zeus.
I mean, I remember the part where we said our vows, and Hera gave us a fucking dagger with which to cut ourselves. Gunnar was first, I remember the color of his blood. I remember how it darkened, thickened. I remember grinning, guessing what that meant. My turn went the same, I made a deep cut up my left arm. The blood welled up, dripped off of me before it thickened and the ruby red turned to a blackened burgundy. More ichor than blood, now. My nerves calmed then, probably because I felt stronger and just a little less socially unstable. I hadn't thought I could smile any brighter, but I did.

But that's not the part that's important. The new powers, everything that went wrong, the hard road ahead of us, even what Mary's goon did to my face... it doesn't matter. Smiling into his crazy blue eyes for that one dance, his face when he saw his groom's cake, that's the type of stuff that mattered today. Nothing else.


"So close no matter how far
Couldn't be much more from the heart
Forever trusting who we are
And nothing else matters

Never opened myself this way
Life is ours, we live it our way
All these words I don't just say
And nothing else matters

Trust I seek and I find in you
Every day for us something new
Open mind for a different view
And nothing else matters..."
Metallica, Nothing Else Matters