Be Who God Meant You To Be

"How many shades of lipstick do I have on my cheek?" Meg asks.

The last of the guests has finally made it through the receiving line, and the bridal party has taken a moment to catch its collective breath after the whirl of thank you for being here and it was a lovely ceremony (and, from Laura to Alain, do not be a jerk).

Kim smiles. "A few," she allows. "Do you want help with that before your grand entrance?"

"And all the pictured thereof?" Meg asks. "Yes, definitely. Thank you. We'll be right back," she tells Alain.

He reaches out and catches her hand. "Hurry back. You owe me a dance."

The dance in question is to The Beatles' "Michelle." It may not exactly be a traditional choice, but it's in both English and French and includes Alain's nickname for her, and they like it. Alain is fond of humming it while they do things like fix dinner. (And it's certainly a better choice than that silly Bryan Adams Robin Hood movie song that the radio stations won't stop playing.)

There are other people Meg "owes" dances to as well: her father and Alain's father, Luc and Oncle Sylvain. And Carlisle, who asks her for what would probably be a very proper waltz if Meg knew how to dance a very proper waltz. She's quite sure that Carlisle does, but he's very gracious about leading her through steps she's not exactly getting right, and is probably doing a great deal of compensating for her missteps. When the song ends he returns her to Alain, and thanks them both. "Now you get to spend the rest of your lives realizing how lucky you are," he tells them before he goes.

"I think your friend is having fun," Alain says, wrapping an arm around her waist, and Meg looks over her shoulder to see what he's looking at, and then laughs. On the far side of the dance floor, Castiel appears to have been adopted by three of Alain's young cousins. (Meg knows their names are Hélène, Laetitia, and Virginie, though she doesn't know which name goes with which cousin). The four of them are dancing in the unself-conscious and fairly ridiculous manner of ten-year-olds and (apparently) Angels of the Lord.

There's no sit-down meal, though there's also no shortage of food. Not for most people, anyway, though Meg and Alain can't quite seem to get enough of a break from talking to people and dancing and photographs to actually get any of it themselves. Meg is starting to wonder how to go about remedying that when Parker arrives with a very full plate and hands it to Alain.

"You two need to eat something," she says. "Can't have the bride and groom fainting at the reception. I'm ninety-nine percent sure that's considered bad luck. And those little puff things by your thumb are excellent."

"Thank you," Meg says.

"Eat," Parker repeats. "I'm going to go say hi to the cute boy over in the corner."

Alain looks over to the corner. "That's my cousin Thierry. He doesn't speak English."

"Pfft," Parker says as she goes, with a wave of her hand that implies a common language is far from necessary.

Then again, this is Parker, so it may not be.

Several minutes later, when Parker is dancing with Thierry, and Alain has gone to get rid of the now-empty plate, Meg takes a moment to just look around the room and try to fix all this in her memory. It's all going by so fast.

"Hello, Meg," someone says from just behind her shoulder.

Hello, Edward. Meg turns around, and smiles. I suppose if I forget anything, I can always ask you to remind me.

Edward's smile has the edge of a smirk. "How thorough you like me to be? Should I prepare a journal with all the things you've missed?"

Meg smiles. No. Not all of them. Only the good ones.

When the DJ takes his break, Luc takes the microphone to make the toast. In addition to being the best man, the groom's brother is, after all, an actor and a performer. He is also fluent in English, and he essentially provides his own simultaneous translation throughout, moving easily from one language to the other, so no one will be left out.

"Mesdames et monsieurs, ladies and gentlemen, a moment of your time, please. Thank you," he says, as the the chatter in the room falls away. "My brother's first girlfriend was a girl called Anastasie." Beside her, Meg hears Alain groan, faintly and without anything much like sincerity. "She had long blonde braids and somewhat crooked teeth, and Alain talked about her all the time. They were six."

Luc pauses, and then continues. "After Anastasie, when he was older, Alain tended to be a little . . . cooler, about his girlfriends. Not quite so effusive. Until one evening, when he he showed up at a bar with this redhead he'd met in the audience of a play I had been in at university. And the next day, did he have anything to say what way, I must say, a rather performance by his only brother? Oh, no. All he wanted to talk about was this girl. How beautiful and intelligent and charming and kind and wonderful she was.

"And as far as I can tell, he has not shut up about her since, though he has decided she is even more beautiful and intelligent and charming and kind and wonderful than he initially thought.

"So, Meg, thank you, for giving my brother someone to talk about the way he talks about you, and welcome to the family. And Alain, I hope that you will always have as much to say about Meg as you do now. Just perhaps not always to me."

Luc raises his glass. "To the bride and groom. May you have every happiness."

"Merci, Luc," Meg says, reaching up to kiss her brother-in-law's cheek when he joins them a moment later. "That was lovely."

"You're welcome. Did you get lipstick on my cheek?"

"Only a little," Meg promises.

There's a small bouquet of roses that the florist has provided for Meg to throw, as she didn't carry one in the ceremony. There's a great deal of good-natured jostling and laughing, but Meg throws it quite deliberately to Kim.

The flowers from the prayer book she carried down the aisle, though, she gives to Laura, quietly and away from the main bustle of the party. "I want you to have these."

"Oh. I -- thank you. They are very pretty," Laura says. After a second, she adds, "I am sorry they will die." There's a longer pause, and then she says, "You will tell me what I am supposed to do with them?"

"Take them home, and keep them as long as you like," Meg says. "There's a superstition that whoever catches the bride's bouquet will be the next person to get married, but I didn't throw them and you didn't catch them. I just want you to have them. Because you're a good friend, and you've come a very long way to be here."

"You helped. It is important," Laura says. And, being very careful with the flowers, she hugs Meg.

All in all, it's everything Meg could have asked of her wedding day, with the possible exception of its refusal to slow down.

"Do you feel a little like this whole day has passed in twenty minutes?" she asks Alain, when the cake has been cut (and most decidedly not smashed into anyone's face) and they've made their farewells and left in a flurry of birdseed and confetti and cans rattling on the back of Alain's car.

"More like fifteen," Alain says. "But it was perfect."

"It was, yes," Meg agrees.

In every way.

Meg gets back to the hospital twenty minutes before it's officially visiting hours, and isn't at all surprised to find Alain's parents and brother are already there.

"Maman insisted," Luc says, sitting down next to Meg. "Don't worry. If I know my brother, he will make her let you have your turn very soon."

"No one has to rush on my account," Meg says.

"You look very nice," Luc says. "In case you were wondering again."

"Better than yesterday?"

"Everything is better than it was yesterday," Luc says, and Meg nods.

It is. And it has nothing to do with the fact that the clothes she has borrowed from Kim actually match.

Luc is right about the other, too. Twenty minutes after Micheline and Jean-Guy leave the waiting room, they're back, and reporting that Alain has asked for Meg.

It seems like she should have a lot to say, but all she can think of is, "Hi." And since that hardly seems adequate, she also leans over to kiss him.

"How are you feeling?" she asks, a few seconds later, her forehead resting lightly against his.

"Better now," he says, and kisses her again. "You are better than painkillers."

Meg laughs a little. "You actually make that sound romantic. Or maybe I just really love you."

"Or both?"

"Oh, probably," she says, lightly.

"How are you?" he asks, eyes on the cut on her cheek and the sling on her arm.

"I'm all right," she says. "Now. Luc has been looking after me."

So have a lot of other people, not all of whom Alain knows or has even heard of. But Luc is the relevant one, in this conversation.

"Good."

"He's good at it," Meg adds.

Possibly even better than he knows.

"Well, he's bossy," Alain says. And then, "I'm so sorry."

"For what?" Meg asks, puzzled. Because she doesn't think he's apologizing because his brother is bossy.

"I should not have let this happen."

"Alain, you didn't let anything happen. The other car swerved into us. There was nothing you could have done."

"You could have been killed."

Meg kisses him very lightly. "You came a lot closer to dying than I did."

"Do you remember it?" Alain asks, abruptly.

Meg doesn't need to ask what he's referring to. "Just in bits and pieces. Do you?"

"No. Nothing."

As Kim reminded her this morning, that's not uncommon with this kind of trauma. But Meg suspects telling him that is going to be about as much use as Kim's telling her was; it doesn't change either wanting to or thinking that you should be able to, anyway.

So Meg just brings her left hand up to rest against his cheek.

Alain leans into the curve of her palm and closes his eyes.

"If anything had happened to you -- more than did --" he says.

"But it didn't," she says, firmly.

"If we had left earlier, when you wanted to, this wouldn't have happened."

"That's true," Meg says, because it is.

"I expected you to argue with me, ma belle."

"Of course, it also wouldn't have happened if I hadn't sped up when you teased me, or if I had slowed down instead, or if I hadn't taken the time to call my parents after lunch or if I had taken a minute longer to call my parents after lunch."

"It wasn't your fault," Alain says.

"It wasn't your fault, either. If either one of us had made any one a of hundred decisions differently, something else would have happened. But we'll never know what. And it could have been something worse."

"I still shouldn't have--"

"I'm all right, and you're going to be all right. That's what's important. Please don't beat yourself up about it, okay?"

"Meg, I . . ."

"For my sake?"

Alain sighs. "When you say that . . ."

"You can't say no," Meg says. That would be why she said it. "I guess you just really love me."

"Or I have accepted that you are usually right," Alain says.

"Or both?"

"Oh, probably," he says, and smiles at her for a second. Then his face grows more serious, and his eyes again go to the cut on her cheek. "Are you sure you're all right?"

"I'm fine. I promise. Dad says it probably won't even leave a scar."

Alain frowns more, but lets it go with, "All right."

Meg kisses his forehead.

"How long can you stay?" he asks.

"Until you or your mother makes me leave," she says, sitting down in the chair to his right, and taking his good hand with hers. "Or visiting hours are over. Whichever comes first."