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FIC: Bread and Games [Gundam Wing, Heero x Relena]
Title: Bread and Games
Author: Omnicat
Spoilers & Desirable Foreknowledge: Gundam Wing
Warnings: None.
Characters & Relationships: Heero x Relena
Summary: Ambrosia Wedding Catering may actually have discovered the food of the gods, their stuff is so good. Relena and Heero aren’t planning on getting married quite yet, but that’s not going to stop them from getting another taste of Ambrosia’s delicacies. // 6298 words
Author’s Note: Written for Kameiko in the 2020 Just Married Exchange on AO3. Enjoy!
Bread and Games
Relena imagined most people who attended as many parties as she did enjoyed them better. Not her colleagues and other people in positions like hers, of course, since they were in attendance for the same reasons she was – normal people. The kind that got to throw a birthday party as a child without having to invite a hundred of their parents’ work friends, plus at least ten sworn enemies they were mutually pretending not to be openly antagonistic to.
For Relena Darlian, parties meant and always had meant work. Socializing? More like networking and intelligence-gathering, i.e. work. Partaking in whatever activities, celebrations, and et cetera were being hosted? Work. Mostly PR, at that. The food? Had its moments, but the quality varied wildly, not to mention the culinary taste of the organizers. Being completely allergy-free, her parents had forbidden her from turning down food for any reason as a child, only allowing polite requests for small portions if the situation allowed and she could realistically claim to already be quite full. But that hadn’t expanded her culinary horizons beyond the average so much as given her a lifetime of practice at maintaining a blandly pleasant poker face while she choked down things she couldn’t stand the taste or texture of. (Mushrooms? Eurgh.) Relena would bring her own caterers – or at the very least a lunch box – to everything if she thought she could get away with it without starting another war. Even having Heero around the entire time wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, since having your bodyguard hovering too close by, or being seen talking to him too often, made people worry he was there because he had some urgent reason to be. The better your public persona, the less likely people were to correctly guess you were just bored and lonely. And last but not least, dressing up for parties meant wearing heels, and heels ought to be recognized for the torture devices they were.
It really was a shame. There were so many parties to attend, and so much fun to potentially be had, but Relena was just no good at having fun on the clock. Her work was rewarding in its own way, of course, but not the fun and parties way. And sometimes, that just felt bad.
As their destination – an antique mansion converted into an event and conference center – came into view, she told Heero: “Remind me that when I get married, I’m inviting ten people, tops.”
Arms crossed and sunglasses, for the moment, pushed up into his hair, Heero studied her from the corner of his eye. “Okay. How many do I get?”
She shrugged. “How many do you think you need?”
“Depends on who you invite.”
Relena smiled at him, unbearably fond, and then went back to staring out the window.
“If you invite your brother, for example, I need three people between him and me at all times to act as a buffer against anything he might say,” Heero added unexpectedly.
Relena spluttered with laughter. “Behave, Heero!”
The corner of his mouth ticked up by a tiny but triumphant increment.
She’d shaken off her mood before the car stopped, and got out with her game face firmly in place. Smiling, she shook hands, kissed the bride and groom on the cheek and presented them with their gift, spoke to anyone who asked to be spoken to, and sampled hors d’oeuvres. Heero observed from an unobtrusive distance, always just tickling the edges of her senses.
The hors d’oeuvres were surprisingly good. Relena found herself discretely tailing the waiters in search of more.
“Here,” Heero said, appearing at her elbow suddenly and yet not at all surprisingly. He came bearing a full platter, and Relena could have kissed him right then and there.
“It’s like you read my mind sometimes.”
“Sometimes I feel like I do. Sometimes it’s just that you’re as subtle as a bull in a china shop.”
“Mean.” She smirked, elegantly stuffing her face with salmon bites and potato fritters, and they retreated to a quiet corner to snack.
The ceremony was beautiful. Relena was truly touched, despite barely knowing the bride and barely tolerating the groom. Love really does conquer all, she thought to herself. There’s a lid for every pot. I hope dinner is as good as the finger foods were.
Dinner was even better. So much better.
A stew of root vegetables (not usually a favorite food category of hers but unprecedentedly delicious the way it was prepared here), mutton barbeque with a choice of sauces she couldn’t even begin to place but loved instantly, lamb pastry, and a caramelized apple pie for dessert. Relena was no kitchen princess at the best of times, but even she could tell there was something extraordinary about this meal.
“That is the best food I’ve ever tasted,” she told Heero afterward, still licking her lips. “Did you get any?”
“No. I was doing what I’m always doing during your work dinners: working.”
He didn’t mean that badly – he insisted on it even on those rare occasions when it wasn’t necessary – but Relena never quite got used to it. And tonight it felt like an outright crime.
“We’re getting you a doggy bag,” she decided.
He raised an eyebrow.
“Trust me, you’ll thank me later.”
In fact, she got three doggy bags; one for Heero on the drive home, and two as their dinner for the next day. The catering company was only too glad to see their leftovers not going to waste. And Heero did thank her.
“This is good,” he said, looking at her with wide eyes. “Is the party food always like this?”
“Never.”
He disappeared into the study for a while that night, researching and contacting Ambrosia Catering. They listed the usual information regarding allergens and dietary restrictions, but no actual recipes. When he e-mailed to ask them about it, he received a decisive ‘no’ in reply almost immediately. The secrets of their chef were the key to their success, and they would not be sharing them, end of story. But he was certainly welcome to hire them!
“Hire them for what?” Relena asked. “I have no events of my own lined up for the foreseeable future, and anybody I could recommend them to certainly already has their catering in order.”
“We should give one of the other portions to Mrs Twaluf,” Heero concluded. “Maybe she’ll be able to reverse engineer the recipe.”
“Oooh, good idea.”
The next day, they presented the second plate of mutton and stew to their cook and housekeeper while they shared the third, and watched her eyes light up a little brighter with every bite.
“My goodness, this is delicious,” she said, scraping even the tiniest leftover morsels up with her fork. “The interplay of flavors is genius – so daring, and yet so obvious now that I’ve tasted it – and even reheated it’s obvious this was cooked to perfection.”
Relena and Heero shared a hopeful glance.
“Do you think you could make it too?” she asked.
Mrs Twaluf’s eyes went wide, and she looked down at her almost spotless plate as if rifling through the memory of its recent contents for an answer to the meaning of life.
“No, ma’am,” she said eventually. “But I can certainly try for the next closest thing.”
Relena beamed. “Would you, Mrs Twaluf?”
“Oh, absolutely. I won’t rest until I can eat this once a week for the rest of my life myself.”
The next weeks were marked by one or two of Mrs Twaluf’s valiant efforts at reproducing the mutton and stew and apple pie every week. Each time, she explained to Relena and Heero what approach she’d tried that night. This and that technique, such and so order of things, a rotating laundry list of ingredients that might have been in the wedding meal.
Heero listened with genuine attention and even took the occasional note, but it all went straight over Relena’s head. Possibly her best kept secret – better than actual state secrets, better than Heero’s identity as a former gundam pilot, better than where her brother had disappeared to – was that she could barely cook and hated doing it so much she intended never to learn better. Hardly a rare thing, for one of her standing and heritage or otherwise – Heero’s idea of cooking came down to ‘toast some bread and add butter, boil some rice and add packet of ready-made chopped vegetables and meat, screw even that and heat a leftover MRE’ – but going to an elite international boarding school in Japan had raised her on a lot of mixed signals. On the one hand, there had been a culture of paying it no particular mind, leaving that skill up to the family to teach if at all, and offering home economics for only one hour a week for one year of school; on the other hand, there had been cooking as an art form, a love language, a bonding ritual, a top ten entry on the list of national hobbies, a marital duty, a Must Have on the list of feminine skills, and ‘haha she can’t cook’ as the punch line of far, far too many juvenile jokes.
Suffice it to say there was a not-insignificant amount of unwelcome shame buried beneath her antipathy. Relena could feed herself if she really had to and be satisfied with her three-step results, but she thanked god for restaurants, and take-out, and staff, and microwaves. To her, food was divided up into ‘I can make this myself or buy it as-is in a store’ and ‘fancy Quality Nutrition created using impenetrable magic formulas by people who Can Cook’.
Mrs Twaluf was a sorceress to her, in other words. But even her witchcraft seemed no match for the secret of the wedding caterers. Time after time, she presented them with her attempts with a look of frustration or defeat, and time after time, she got Relena and Heero to admit it maybe came vaguely in the neighborhood, but no, this wasn’t it either.
In the end, after over two months of increasingly erratic results and depressing failure, Mrs Twaluf threw in the towel.
“I’m sorry, but it’s just not going to work without a recipe.” Her head hung in defeat – and then shot up, her eyes burning with determination below her salt-and-pepper bun and bangs. “Please get me that recipe. I’ll have no rest until I uncover the secret of this dish. Mr Yuy, let’s not mince words: we all know you have shady skills beyond what you employ in your daily duties as Miss Relena’s bodyguard. Surely you can get hold of a copy of a piece of paper from an unsuspecting catering company?”
They exchanged a look. As she considered Mrs Twaluf’s words, a slow grin spread across Relena’s face. One of Heero’s eyebrows rose to match.
“Yes, surely you can, Heero,” she cajoled.
“It’s a rather trivial thing to risk a scandal over should it come out, don’t you think?”
“That’s assuming you let it come out. Because surely there’s no other way anyone would ever learn of it.”
“Flattery will get you no-where, Relena.”
“Liar.” She nudged him with her elbow. “Come on, say it. I know you wanna. Say the words.”
He ducked his head and crossed his arms, and she knew he was smiling. “Mission accepted.”
Heero started with the most unobjectionable possible way to acquire the information they sought: Ambrosia Catering and its cook’s public publishings. The cook, a tall, stately, heavy-eyed woman called Zevevan Neghen, prided herself on her mystique and kept everything but her professional information artistically vague. The company posted a lot of pictures of their dishes and snacks with basic descriptions of what they were and where they’d been served, to illustrate the options on offer. If they’d ever shared detailed instructions or recipes anywhere, though, Heero couldn’t find it.
Step two: hack their website.
“Last chance to back out before I do something illegal,” he warned.
Relena bit her lip. “It is a bit much, isn’t it?”
“I’m not saying that, just that it’s illegal.”
“...oh, who is it going to hurt? Go ahead.”
So he did.
“You’re a bad influence and I love you,” she whispered, and pressed a kiss to his temple.
He hrm-ed happily.
“I can access their booking calendar, what they’re serving where, number of guests... no recipes here either, though.”
“The calendar is useful,” Relena said, leaning on the back of the computer chair and tapping her chin thoughtfully.
“Yeah, now I know when they’ll be out on a gig, so I can break into the Ambrosia office and Neghen’s house to look for the information at leisure,” Heero said.
Relena stared him down. “No,” she said slowly. “So we can attend one of their next events and find out more from there.”
“The odds that they take their written instructions with them to a party they’ve already prepared all their food for are lower than the odds that they leave at least one copy behind,” Heero reasoned.
“Out of ‘breaking and entering’ and ‘crashing a party’, which one is more illegal?” Relena shot back. And she admitted, only blushing slightly: “Also, the other dinner option at the wedding was a venison dish, and I’ve kind of been wanting to try it.”
“Okay.”
He turned his attention back to the computer and began typing.
Something belatedly occurred to Relena. Heero stopped typing.
“Wait,” they said in unison.
“Why crash a stranger’s party –” Relena started, and Heero finished: “– when we can hire them for one of ours?”
They stared at each other for a beat and then burst out laughing.
“When was the last time we pretended to know your birthday?”
“Long enough.”
Shaking her head with a grin, Relena picked up the phone and dialed. “Yes, hello, this is Relena Darlian speaking. I recently attended a wedding you catered at, and I was so impressed by your menu I would like to hire you for an event of my own. Congra–? Oh, no, no, I’m not getting married, I’m thinking of a birthday party for my – oh. You only do weddings. And you never make any exceptions? Not even if the arrangements needed are almost identical to a wedding’s? Ah. I see. Yes, yes. What a shame, I don’t think wedding bells are in my future just yet...”
She looked at Heero. Heero looked at her.
They both shook their heads, grimacing. Staging a wedding was one step too far, even for this food of the gods.
“Well, thank you for your time, then. I’ll keep looking. Yes, goodbye.”
She hung up.
“So we’re not crashing just any party, we’re crashing a wedding,” Heero concluded.
Relena gasped. “No! We can’t go crashing weddings!”
“Does it even count as ‘crashing’ if nobody realizes you don’t belong there?”
“What happened to breaking and entering being more likely to get results?”
Unperturbed, he shrugged. “I wanna try that venison too now.”
“I’m a bad influence,” Relena muttered to herself, pinching the bridge of her nose.
“Relena,” he said calmly. He spun his desk chair to face her, and she met his eyes. He gave her one of his rare, subtle smiles. “When’s the last time you had a good adrenaline rush?”
“Minister Tachtig opened his mouth again yesterday,” she answered, valiantly keeping her expression in check. “My blood pressure skyrocketed almost immediately.”
“I said a good rush.”
“Hm...” Affecting an air of deep thought, she crossed her arms, stared up at the ceiling, and tapped her foot. “My... third-to-last orgasm?”
“That’s not going to distract me,” he said, though he did pull her into his lap. “Come on. You know you wanna.”
Relena bit her lip. “Of course I want to. But we shouldn’t. A gala or a business party or something is one thing, but disrupting a wedding is crossing a line.”
“Nothing will go wrong.”
“You have a plan already, then?”
“Plans are overrated, but yeah, I know what to do.”
Relena kept chewing her lip, halfheartedly trying to convince herself to say no. Heero’s hand slipped beneath her skirt, running up the inside of her thigh – and right across a ticklish spot. Giggling, she slapped his wrist.
“Stop trying to distract me, I’m in already, I’m in.”
“Then it’s not a distraction anymore, is it?” he said, and kissed her.
They postponed their mischief until the morning.
“It has to be a big wedding,” Relena said, pacing through the study in her bathrobe and messy bedroom braid, and gesturing at nothing in particular. “Nothing intimate we would actually be likely to ruin. One where we can disappear into the crowd, and even the bride and groom won’t be sure we’re not a distant cousin or somebody’s plus one, and it won’t look too strange if we claim they miscounted the number of seats at the table. And of course we go in disguise.”
Heero grunted his approval and scrolled through Ambrosia Catering’s calendar, then leafed through Relena’s paper-and-ink one. “They’ve got one with seven hundred and fifty people next Sunday, and your schedule’s open too.”
“Excellent.”
“And if that one doesn’t pan out, there’s five more with ridiculous numbers lined up in the next month. We’re in luck. They seem popular with the filthy rich and the eager to show off.”
“Figures. But I can’t even say I blame them.”
“Now we just hope they’re not the kind of filthy rich that makes their wedding guests show ID when they don’t immediately recognize them,” Heero said.
Relena gave him a wide-eyed look.
“Kidding. I’m checking what they have for security, there’s no way I’d leave that to chance. If they seem too paranoid, we’ll try another wedding.”
Relena fetched them both breakfast and brought a commercial rocket fuel tariff proposal to work on while Heero delved into Mrs Vier and soon-to-be-Mr Feif Optelson’s wedding arrangements.
“This wedding ought to work,” he declared eventually. “Let’s get working on your disguise.”
Relena raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you mean our disguises?”
“Nobody pays attention to what I look like. I’m not the famous one here.”
“Oh, no no no no. We’re both going in disguise or we’re not going at all.”
Relena was sure she didn’t imagine the hint of concern that tightened his eyes at the sight of her gleeful grin.
“How much facial hair can you grow between now and Sunday?”
“Uh...”
As it turned out, woefully little.
Relena plucked at the patchy bristles Heero called a beard, smoothing them out, fluffing them up, and generally trying in vain to rearrange them into something resembling camouflage.
“No,” she decided. “Shave it off. This would just draw attention, for all the wrong reasons. We’ll use the stick-on goatee.”
(Heero let out a breath of relief. Funny what could bing out the vanity even in people who thought they had none.)
His hair was already dyed – a brown only a shade or two darker than Relena’s natural honey blonde, almost too light for his skin tone – and slicked back with copious amounts of hair gel. Between that and the facial hair, his own proverbial mother wouldn’t have recognized him.
Relena’s hair was tucked away beneath a skull cap with a long, curly black wig overtop, and she’d put in tinted lenses to make her eyes brown. While Heero shaved, she applied an amount of make-up she’d hoped she’d never have to resort to again. Having come into her position of political influence though family inheritance and a bigger set of balls than anyone else in the arena (to quote her unauthorized biography) while she was still a teenager, she had years of experience with making herself look older and more traditionally ‘respectable’. Making herself look like someone else entirely, though, was a whole new challenge.
She made her eyelids look heavier – not unlike those of the Ambrosia Catering cook, coincidentally, and her lips fuller, using a dark lipstick she couldn’t pull off as herself but looked striking in a good way combined with the dark hair and eyes. Pushing her contouring skills to the edge of credibility, she made her face look as narrow and her features as harshly angular as possible. Thick, dark lashes and some mascara to blacken and fork her eyebrows later, and she was done.
“How do I look?” she asked, tossing her hair.
Heero, now goateed, looked like he missed the real her already. “Disguised.”
“You don’t look so familiar yourself. Alright, let’s go!” she said, and clapped her hands in delight.
Heero smirked and shook his head as he hooked his arm through hers, but after six years together, Relena knew the signs, the twinkle in his eyes, the lightness of his step: he was excited too.
It was a long drive to the Optelson’s wedding, breakfast but a distant, rumbling memory by the time they parked their nondescript rental car a few blocks from the venue.
“Fake IDs?” Heero asked.
Relena held up both their cards. “Check.”
“Stealth wedding gift to ease your conscience?”
She held up the envelope of cash. “Check. Spy gear?”
He opened his suit jacket and showed her the many pockets lining the inside. “Check. Permission to proceed?”
“I still can’t believe we’re doing this,” she laughed, unbuckling her belt and opening the passenger side door. “Permission granted.”
“As exactly one person I know would say: you two are too young to be so uptight, live a little.”
“Duo?”
“Dorothy. Duo would be too busy gaping like a fish at the fact that we came up with this ourselves.”
The Optelsons had rented out half a swanky uptown hotel for the happy occasion. Posing as guests with no relation to the wedding, Relena and Heero faked a phone call just outside until they saw the receptionist was occupied, and then walked into the lobby and made for the elevators without sparing the signs for the event a single glance. In return, nobody spared them a glance. They pushed a button at random, went up two floors, got off, and set out through the quiet hallways. Further into the building, staircases led back down to the ground floor, closer to their destination. Making an educated guess based on the floor plans they’d studied, they descended into a long hallway with only one door without a bathroom sign over it on either side; clearly some of the larger gathering spaces.
It was quiet, and deserted. The hallway was decorated in white and silver though, balloons and flower arrangements and spray-painted branches hung with fairy lights arranged on miniature Grecian columns set all along the walls, large silk ribbons with even larger silk bows tied in the middle hung between each. And from the ceiling rotated oversized silver wristwatches: the family business Mrs Optelson owed her fortune to. They were definitely close.
“I can’t figure out if that’s a quirky personal touch or an attempt at shilling their product even on one of the most personal days of their lives,” Relena whispered, staring.
Heero refrained from comment.
Just as they made for the wide double doors to investigate further, applause and music erupted from the room on the left. They froze. A voice rose as the sounds of celebration died down, speaking words they couldn’t make out, and moments later chairs started scraping and conversations started up.
“I think they just kissed,” Relena whispered.
“I agree,” Heero whispered back. “If they find us out here now, they’ll know we don’t belong at the party.”
“The bathrooms, quick!”
They ran for the ladies’ room, ducked into a stall together, and embraced.
“Ha. Great minds,” Relena breathed, her mouth a hair’s breadth from Heero’s. Her heart was pounding with the excitement.
He hummed his agreement, and when he closed the distance, she felt his lips quirk against hers.
Always with the distractions, she thought, even as she gave herself over to this one wholeheartedly. How did I ever think this boy was a ruthlessly driven professional?
She cupped his jaw. He snugged his arm around her waist to pull her against him nice and firmly. She parted her lips to allow his tongue entrance, and the rest of the world melted away, and breathing got harder, and they didn’t have to fake her yelp or his elbow banging into the stall when the bathroom door opened. Heels clicked to a startled stop on the tile floor.
“Hello?” a voice asked.
Wide-eyed and struck mute, they stared at each other. The heels made muted little taptap-taps, no doubt because the woman wearing them was bending over to peek underneath the stall doors. Two other chattering women entered, and Relena’s heart leapt into her throat.
‘Run,’ Heero mouthed.
A nod. Then, as one, they yanked open the door to their stall and stumbled out, Relena giggling uncontrollably and Heero chanting a laughing “shit shit shit”. They bolted from the restroom, surprised laughter from at least one of the women following them, and let the stream of people in the hallway swallow them up and make irreverent but legitimate guests out of them.
They followed the crowd into the ballroom. A band in white and silver livery was already slowly building up from a light, patient tune to an anticipatory crescendo. Hotel staff holding white velvet ropes between their folded hands formed a human chain herding the guests away from the center of the room. When the influx of people dried up, they extended their arms to open the circle into a corridor toward the double doors. The man closest to the door looked out into the hallway and signaled to the band, and then the bride and groom entered to a rousing musical welcome and launched straight into their first dance. No less than three cameras followed in their wake.
(Relena and Heero retreated a little further into the mass of bodies.)
Relena watched the scene unfold hand in hand with Heero, touched as she always was by weddings, but also wildly amused. Standing there in such a crowd, witnessing such a ruthlessly choreographed spectacle – the newlyweds’ perfectly bleached smiles were frozen on their faces, and all the musicians and staffers she could see were wearing a different model of those big silver wristwatches with price tags attached, for crying out loud – it was hard to feel very guilty for sneaking in.
She nudged Heero, pointed out the tags, and whispered, “We picked the perfect wedding for this.”
In the crowd, Relena was the only one who could feel the repressed laughter shake his frame.
The bride and groom finished their dance and bowed, the staffers with the ropes dispersed, and then waiters with hors d’oeuvres appeared. One shared look, and they struck out in pursuit.
The catering company served herb-filled cheese ‘boxes’ and breaded seafood and various bacon-wrapped bean products this time, all of it delicious, as well as a great deal of alcohol. Relena and Heero restrained themselves in that regard, because nothing good could come from going beyond a pleasant buzz, especially before dinner. The band played softly. Here and there people swayed to the music, but the grand opening dance notwithstanding, this was cocktail hour, not party time, so mostly it was mingling, or standing around with whoever you’d arrived with and keeping busy. Relena spotted more than one hand-held game hidden awkwardly behind a purse, and passed an elderly gentleman who had simply planted himself in a chair and unfolded a newspaper.
The size of the crowd made it even easier to blend in than she’d imagined. She made her way from one corner of the room to the next, sometimes alone, sometimes side-by-side with Heero. They shuffled a little, people-watched a lot, took a canapé whenever they felt like it, and even let themselves be drawn into conversation a few times. When asked, they introduced themselves as Prima Meervow and Laaste Plurales.
Between hunting waiters and the surprising pleasures of disappearing into a crowd for the first time since she was a child, of talking to strangers without an agenda, and of doing what everyone else was doing without all eyes turning to her, time flew. Soon, dinner was announced, and all those hundreds of people trooped back across the hall, where the space that had housed the wedding stage and the pews an hour before had been rearranged into a dining room. This was the moment everything could have gone horribly wrong for Relena and Heero, but they were in luck: the Optelsons had invited so many hundreds of people, they had decided that since they barely knew any of the rest anyway, assigned seating was reserved for only a handful of VIPs.
They claimed a table with three other young people, none of whom had met each other before, and were having a good time before the waiters even got around to taking their orders.
The duck ravioli and goat tortellini plus side dishes were every bit as divine as they’d hoped for. At any other public occasion, Relena would have been too embarrassed to feed Heero from her plate, but that night she just went ahead and did it. Prima and Laaste were just as disgustingly in love as the Foreign Minister and her bodyguard were. They just didn’t have to care about how they showed it.
After dinner, the bride and groom had another opening dance, this time with touches of fireworks. And then everybody stopped caring about them until it came time to cut the cake – and anyone who stuck around for the afterparty promptly forgot about them again after that. Heero asked Relena to dance with a formal little bow and that shared-secret-smile both of them always got when this happened, and then dance they did, without a care in the world and until their feet hurt.
They ended up partying late into the night and booking a room in the hotel rather than driving home. They hadn’t brought any clothes but what they’d arrived wearing, but they did have a spare goatee for Heero, large sunglasses for Relena, and each other’s bodies to keep them warm that night, so that was no issue.
“I had fun,” Relena said to the ceiling, starfished naked and still a little damp on the hotel bed after a (slightly less than efficient) shower with Heero. “Wow. I actually had fun. I can’t remember the last time I went to a party and had fun.”
Equally nude, Heero sat down beside her and rested his hand between her breasts, his thumb casually brushing the soft swell of one. “We can do it again some time if you want.”
“Really?” she asked, coyly looking up at him from beneath her eyelashes. One of her hands crept back towards her body.
“I haven’t seen you this excited about something in a long time.”
There was nothing but sincerity in his eyes in that moment. Abandoning her own playfully predatory approach, Relena cupped his wrist and squeezed with a smile, equally earnest.
“What about you, though? If this is just more work for you, or worse than work because of the risks to my reputation you’re personally enabling me to take...”
“More like a hobby,” he said, utterly unashamed. “I’ve missed flexing these muscles.”
“Okay.” With one hand, she pulled his head down toward her for a kiss; with the other, she moved his touch a little to the left, where she really wanted it. “It’s a date, Mr Yuy.”
The next morning, Relena became aware she was awake when she heard Heero groan beside her and utter a defeated, “Aw, shit.”
“Hm?”
Not sensing any urgency behind his words, she didn’t open her eyes, just stretched and lazily latched onto every part of him she brushed up against in the process.
“I forgot to look for recipes last night,” he said, sounding a little stunned.
“Oh. Lucky we’re going to do this again then, huh?” she slurred.
“I completely lost sight of the mission objective. I thought I’d kept myself reasonably sharp and in shape, but I didn’t at all.”
Relena blindly found his shoulder and kissed it. “That’s a good thing.”
“No.”
She didn’t have to have her eyes open to know he was pouting. Biting her lip to stifle a laugh, she rolled back onto her back and stretched some more.
“D’you think Ambrosia provides today’s breakfast for the overnight guests?”
That cheered him up. “Only one way to find out. If they do, I’ll be able to complete my mission after all.”
He jumped out of bed, taking both his body heat and the covers with them, and oh, right, that was why she used to think he was a ruthlessly driven professional. Jerk.
“But I’m your jerk,” he breathed, right beside her ear, and pressed a kiss to her cheek.
“Read my mind this time?”
“Nah. You’re still not subtle.”
She swatted at him, and he made it up to her by not dodging.
They were eating their Ambrosia-supplied breakfast of fresh croissants and omelets (jackpot! though predictably, their recipes were nowhere to be found) on the drive back home when Heero started sneaking glances at Relena.
“What?” she asked with her mouth full. “Something on my face?”
“Do you think there’s anything this company makes that isn’t delicious?”
“Nothing and no-one can make mushrooms or hot fruit taste good, but other than that, I doubt it.”
“Which did you like better, the mutton and stew, the duck pasta, or the goat pasta?”
“What a horrible choice to have to make. I don’t know, I’d have to have them all more than once to decide.”
“Okay. What about dessert? We had two of each.”
“Oh, the rainbow sherbet, no contest. You?”
“Yeah, I’ve always liked ice cream better than chocolate-flavored not-chocolate anyway.”
For their second wedding infiltration, Heero was the one sporting a shock of black curls, along with a thick, full beard, while Relena was a redhead sporting the ‘hip slit’ cut that was so popular during the war. Walking around with half your face covered was a little outdated now, but still an excellent and socially acceptable way to make yourself harder to recognize. That wedding was a chaotic outdoor event, with picnic blankets instead of dining tables and a petting zoo running loose across the grounds to keep the guests’ children occupied. (Heero, forever a boy who grew up in a tin can floating through the void at heart, surprised her by loving the petting zoo. They were still learning new things about each other every day.)
They aborted their third operation when it became clear that the priest had an uncanny nose for trouble, and they smelled like trouble. The setback didn’t stop them, though. The one time Relena expressed doubts, Heero in fact insisted they try again. And Relena liked to think even she wasn’t as fun-challenged as Heero was, so really, who was she to tell him no when he’d found something that brought him such joy? She wasn’t exactly complaining, anyway. She was still having the time of her life, and every wedding presented them with new Ambrosia dishes to discover.
One day, Heero went out on an errand and returned with a shit-eating grin and a stack of print-outs as thick as his fist. He’d found it. Not just the mutton and stew that started it all, no, he’d found and copied Chef Neghen’s entire recipe book. Mrs Twaluf lifted him off the floor with the force of her hug and covered his face in so many kisses he looked like a beet-red twelve-year-old boy afterward. Relena fell into his arms and proposed on the spot.
“Not yet,” he said. “But feel free to hold that thought.”
Relena didn’t realize he was up to something until their second-to-last outing. Probably a good thing, because she had zero patience for secrets and guessing games and not knowing things, while Heero had infinite patience for keeping his lips sealed. But still. ‘Almost done’ was not an answer. Gah!
She ambushed him with questions at random – while she brushed her teeth, while he reviewed footage from a recent speech of hers, while he was furiously typing away at the computer – hoping to startle an answer out of him even though she knew it was futile.
“Almost done with what?”
“Almost done with what?”
“Almost done with what?”
With an amused sigh, Heero pressed print and caught the thing he’d been typing up as it came rolling out, hot off the press. Then he passed the paper to her.
Relena read it, frowning. It was a menu, featuring multiple options for everything from breakfast and lunch to snacks to a three-course dinner and nightcaps. Very familiar options.
“Out of Ambrosia’s catalogue, these are the foods you liked best, right?” Heero asked.
“Yyyyyes? Looks like it?”
“So, do you think this works as the menu for our wedding?”
Relena looked up and stared. “Our wedding?”
“Yeah,” Heero said innocently. “If you really want to, that is, not just because I brought you something nice.”
“Are you asking me...?”
“Yes, Relena. I’m asking.”
She took a deep breath, tried to think about it, realized there wasn’t really anything to think about, and breathed out.
“Well. Okay then.”
Then the waterworks started, first in her and then in him in response, and she laughed and covered her mouth with her hands. And then her arms were around his neck and his lips covered hers instead, and they didn’t stop kissing or crying or laughing for a long, long time.
“Good morning, this is Relena Darlian. Again. I don’t know if you remember, but I called you a few months ago too. Well, turns out there are wedding bells in my near future after all.”
Author: Omnicat
Spoilers & Desirable Foreknowledge: Gundam Wing
Warnings: None.
Characters & Relationships: Heero x Relena
Summary: Ambrosia Wedding Catering may actually have discovered the food of the gods, their stuff is so good. Relena and Heero aren’t planning on getting married quite yet, but that’s not going to stop them from getting another taste of Ambrosia’s delicacies. // 6298 words
Author’s Note: Written for Kameiko in the 2020 Just Married Exchange on AO3. Enjoy!
Bread and Games
Relena imagined most people who attended as many parties as she did enjoyed them better. Not her colleagues and other people in positions like hers, of course, since they were in attendance for the same reasons she was – normal people. The kind that got to throw a birthday party as a child without having to invite a hundred of their parents’ work friends, plus at least ten sworn enemies they were mutually pretending not to be openly antagonistic to.
For Relena Darlian, parties meant and always had meant work. Socializing? More like networking and intelligence-gathering, i.e. work. Partaking in whatever activities, celebrations, and et cetera were being hosted? Work. Mostly PR, at that. The food? Had its moments, but the quality varied wildly, not to mention the culinary taste of the organizers. Being completely allergy-free, her parents had forbidden her from turning down food for any reason as a child, only allowing polite requests for small portions if the situation allowed and she could realistically claim to already be quite full. But that hadn’t expanded her culinary horizons beyond the average so much as given her a lifetime of practice at maintaining a blandly pleasant poker face while she choked down things she couldn’t stand the taste or texture of. (Mushrooms? Eurgh.) Relena would bring her own caterers – or at the very least a lunch box – to everything if she thought she could get away with it without starting another war. Even having Heero around the entire time wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, since having your bodyguard hovering too close by, or being seen talking to him too often, made people worry he was there because he had some urgent reason to be. The better your public persona, the less likely people were to correctly guess you were just bored and lonely. And last but not least, dressing up for parties meant wearing heels, and heels ought to be recognized for the torture devices they were.
It really was a shame. There were so many parties to attend, and so much fun to potentially be had, but Relena was just no good at having fun on the clock. Her work was rewarding in its own way, of course, but not the fun and parties way. And sometimes, that just felt bad.
As their destination – an antique mansion converted into an event and conference center – came into view, she told Heero: “Remind me that when I get married, I’m inviting ten people, tops.”
Arms crossed and sunglasses, for the moment, pushed up into his hair, Heero studied her from the corner of his eye. “Okay. How many do I get?”
She shrugged. “How many do you think you need?”
“Depends on who you invite.”
Relena smiled at him, unbearably fond, and then went back to staring out the window.
“If you invite your brother, for example, I need three people between him and me at all times to act as a buffer against anything he might say,” Heero added unexpectedly.
Relena spluttered with laughter. “Behave, Heero!”
The corner of his mouth ticked up by a tiny but triumphant increment.
She’d shaken off her mood before the car stopped, and got out with her game face firmly in place. Smiling, she shook hands, kissed the bride and groom on the cheek and presented them with their gift, spoke to anyone who asked to be spoken to, and sampled hors d’oeuvres. Heero observed from an unobtrusive distance, always just tickling the edges of her senses.
The hors d’oeuvres were surprisingly good. Relena found herself discretely tailing the waiters in search of more.
“Here,” Heero said, appearing at her elbow suddenly and yet not at all surprisingly. He came bearing a full platter, and Relena could have kissed him right then and there.
“It’s like you read my mind sometimes.”
“Sometimes I feel like I do. Sometimes it’s just that you’re as subtle as a bull in a china shop.”
“Mean.” She smirked, elegantly stuffing her face with salmon bites and potato fritters, and they retreated to a quiet corner to snack.
The ceremony was beautiful. Relena was truly touched, despite barely knowing the bride and barely tolerating the groom. Love really does conquer all, she thought to herself. There’s a lid for every pot. I hope dinner is as good as the finger foods were.
Dinner was even better. So much better.
A stew of root vegetables (not usually a favorite food category of hers but unprecedentedly delicious the way it was prepared here), mutton barbeque with a choice of sauces she couldn’t even begin to place but loved instantly, lamb pastry, and a caramelized apple pie for dessert. Relena was no kitchen princess at the best of times, but even she could tell there was something extraordinary about this meal.
“That is the best food I’ve ever tasted,” she told Heero afterward, still licking her lips. “Did you get any?”
“No. I was doing what I’m always doing during your work dinners: working.”
He didn’t mean that badly – he insisted on it even on those rare occasions when it wasn’t necessary – but Relena never quite got used to it. And tonight it felt like an outright crime.
“We’re getting you a doggy bag,” she decided.
He raised an eyebrow.
“Trust me, you’ll thank me later.”
In fact, she got three doggy bags; one for Heero on the drive home, and two as their dinner for the next day. The catering company was only too glad to see their leftovers not going to waste. And Heero did thank her.
“This is good,” he said, looking at her with wide eyes. “Is the party food always like this?”
“Never.”
He disappeared into the study for a while that night, researching and contacting Ambrosia Catering. They listed the usual information regarding allergens and dietary restrictions, but no actual recipes. When he e-mailed to ask them about it, he received a decisive ‘no’ in reply almost immediately. The secrets of their chef were the key to their success, and they would not be sharing them, end of story. But he was certainly welcome to hire them!
“Hire them for what?” Relena asked. “I have no events of my own lined up for the foreseeable future, and anybody I could recommend them to certainly already has their catering in order.”
“We should give one of the other portions to Mrs Twaluf,” Heero concluded. “Maybe she’ll be able to reverse engineer the recipe.”
“Oooh, good idea.”
The next day, they presented the second plate of mutton and stew to their cook and housekeeper while they shared the third, and watched her eyes light up a little brighter with every bite.
“My goodness, this is delicious,” she said, scraping even the tiniest leftover morsels up with her fork. “The interplay of flavors is genius – so daring, and yet so obvious now that I’ve tasted it – and even reheated it’s obvious this was cooked to perfection.”
Relena and Heero shared a hopeful glance.
“Do you think you could make it too?” she asked.
Mrs Twaluf’s eyes went wide, and she looked down at her almost spotless plate as if rifling through the memory of its recent contents for an answer to the meaning of life.
“No, ma’am,” she said eventually. “But I can certainly try for the next closest thing.”
Relena beamed. “Would you, Mrs Twaluf?”
“Oh, absolutely. I won’t rest until I can eat this once a week for the rest of my life myself.”
The next weeks were marked by one or two of Mrs Twaluf’s valiant efforts at reproducing the mutton and stew and apple pie every week. Each time, she explained to Relena and Heero what approach she’d tried that night. This and that technique, such and so order of things, a rotating laundry list of ingredients that might have been in the wedding meal.
Heero listened with genuine attention and even took the occasional note, but it all went straight over Relena’s head. Possibly her best kept secret – better than actual state secrets, better than Heero’s identity as a former gundam pilot, better than where her brother had disappeared to – was that she could barely cook and hated doing it so much she intended never to learn better. Hardly a rare thing, for one of her standing and heritage or otherwise – Heero’s idea of cooking came down to ‘toast some bread and add butter, boil some rice and add packet of ready-made chopped vegetables and meat, screw even that and heat a leftover MRE’ – but going to an elite international boarding school in Japan had raised her on a lot of mixed signals. On the one hand, there had been a culture of paying it no particular mind, leaving that skill up to the family to teach if at all, and offering home economics for only one hour a week for one year of school; on the other hand, there had been cooking as an art form, a love language, a bonding ritual, a top ten entry on the list of national hobbies, a marital duty, a Must Have on the list of feminine skills, and ‘haha she can’t cook’ as the punch line of far, far too many juvenile jokes.
Suffice it to say there was a not-insignificant amount of unwelcome shame buried beneath her antipathy. Relena could feed herself if she really had to and be satisfied with her three-step results, but she thanked god for restaurants, and take-out, and staff, and microwaves. To her, food was divided up into ‘I can make this myself or buy it as-is in a store’ and ‘fancy Quality Nutrition created using impenetrable magic formulas by people who Can Cook’.
Mrs Twaluf was a sorceress to her, in other words. But even her witchcraft seemed no match for the secret of the wedding caterers. Time after time, she presented them with her attempts with a look of frustration or defeat, and time after time, she got Relena and Heero to admit it maybe came vaguely in the neighborhood, but no, this wasn’t it either.
In the end, after over two months of increasingly erratic results and depressing failure, Mrs Twaluf threw in the towel.
“I’m sorry, but it’s just not going to work without a recipe.” Her head hung in defeat – and then shot up, her eyes burning with determination below her salt-and-pepper bun and bangs. “Please get me that recipe. I’ll have no rest until I uncover the secret of this dish. Mr Yuy, let’s not mince words: we all know you have shady skills beyond what you employ in your daily duties as Miss Relena’s bodyguard. Surely you can get hold of a copy of a piece of paper from an unsuspecting catering company?”
They exchanged a look. As she considered Mrs Twaluf’s words, a slow grin spread across Relena’s face. One of Heero’s eyebrows rose to match.
“Yes, surely you can, Heero,” she cajoled.
“It’s a rather trivial thing to risk a scandal over should it come out, don’t you think?”
“That’s assuming you let it come out. Because surely there’s no other way anyone would ever learn of it.”
“Flattery will get you no-where, Relena.”
“Liar.” She nudged him with her elbow. “Come on, say it. I know you wanna. Say the words.”
He ducked his head and crossed his arms, and she knew he was smiling. “Mission accepted.”
Heero started with the most unobjectionable possible way to acquire the information they sought: Ambrosia Catering and its cook’s public publishings. The cook, a tall, stately, heavy-eyed woman called Zevevan Neghen, prided herself on her mystique and kept everything but her professional information artistically vague. The company posted a lot of pictures of their dishes and snacks with basic descriptions of what they were and where they’d been served, to illustrate the options on offer. If they’d ever shared detailed instructions or recipes anywhere, though, Heero couldn’t find it.
Step two: hack their website.
“Last chance to back out before I do something illegal,” he warned.
Relena bit her lip. “It is a bit much, isn’t it?”
“I’m not saying that, just that it’s illegal.”
“...oh, who is it going to hurt? Go ahead.”
So he did.
“You’re a bad influence and I love you,” she whispered, and pressed a kiss to his temple.
He hrm-ed happily.
“I can access their booking calendar, what they’re serving where, number of guests... no recipes here either, though.”
“The calendar is useful,” Relena said, leaning on the back of the computer chair and tapping her chin thoughtfully.
“Yeah, now I know when they’ll be out on a gig, so I can break into the Ambrosia office and Neghen’s house to look for the information at leisure,” Heero said.
Relena stared him down. “No,” she said slowly. “So we can attend one of their next events and find out more from there.”
“The odds that they take their written instructions with them to a party they’ve already prepared all their food for are lower than the odds that they leave at least one copy behind,” Heero reasoned.
“Out of ‘breaking and entering’ and ‘crashing a party’, which one is more illegal?” Relena shot back. And she admitted, only blushing slightly: “Also, the other dinner option at the wedding was a venison dish, and I’ve kind of been wanting to try it.”
“Okay.”
He turned his attention back to the computer and began typing.
Something belatedly occurred to Relena. Heero stopped typing.
“Wait,” they said in unison.
“Why crash a stranger’s party –” Relena started, and Heero finished: “– when we can hire them for one of ours?”
They stared at each other for a beat and then burst out laughing.
“When was the last time we pretended to know your birthday?”
“Long enough.”
Shaking her head with a grin, Relena picked up the phone and dialed. “Yes, hello, this is Relena Darlian speaking. I recently attended a wedding you catered at, and I was so impressed by your menu I would like to hire you for an event of my own. Congra–? Oh, no, no, I’m not getting married, I’m thinking of a birthday party for my – oh. You only do weddings. And you never make any exceptions? Not even if the arrangements needed are almost identical to a wedding’s? Ah. I see. Yes, yes. What a shame, I don’t think wedding bells are in my future just yet...”
She looked at Heero. Heero looked at her.
They both shook their heads, grimacing. Staging a wedding was one step too far, even for this food of the gods.
“Well, thank you for your time, then. I’ll keep looking. Yes, goodbye.”
She hung up.
“So we’re not crashing just any party, we’re crashing a wedding,” Heero concluded.
Relena gasped. “No! We can’t go crashing weddings!”
“Does it even count as ‘crashing’ if nobody realizes you don’t belong there?”
“What happened to breaking and entering being more likely to get results?”
Unperturbed, he shrugged. “I wanna try that venison too now.”
“I’m a bad influence,” Relena muttered to herself, pinching the bridge of her nose.
“Relena,” he said calmly. He spun his desk chair to face her, and she met his eyes. He gave her one of his rare, subtle smiles. “When’s the last time you had a good adrenaline rush?”
“Minister Tachtig opened his mouth again yesterday,” she answered, valiantly keeping her expression in check. “My blood pressure skyrocketed almost immediately.”
“I said a good rush.”
“Hm...” Affecting an air of deep thought, she crossed her arms, stared up at the ceiling, and tapped her foot. “My... third-to-last orgasm?”
“That’s not going to distract me,” he said, though he did pull her into his lap. “Come on. You know you wanna.”
Relena bit her lip. “Of course I want to. But we shouldn’t. A gala or a business party or something is one thing, but disrupting a wedding is crossing a line.”
“Nothing will go wrong.”
“You have a plan already, then?”
“Plans are overrated, but yeah, I know what to do.”
Relena kept chewing her lip, halfheartedly trying to convince herself to say no. Heero’s hand slipped beneath her skirt, running up the inside of her thigh – and right across a ticklish spot. Giggling, she slapped his wrist.
“Stop trying to distract me, I’m in already, I’m in.”
“Then it’s not a distraction anymore, is it?” he said, and kissed her.
They postponed their mischief until the morning.
“It has to be a big wedding,” Relena said, pacing through the study in her bathrobe and messy bedroom braid, and gesturing at nothing in particular. “Nothing intimate we would actually be likely to ruin. One where we can disappear into the crowd, and even the bride and groom won’t be sure we’re not a distant cousin or somebody’s plus one, and it won’t look too strange if we claim they miscounted the number of seats at the table. And of course we go in disguise.”
Heero grunted his approval and scrolled through Ambrosia Catering’s calendar, then leafed through Relena’s paper-and-ink one. “They’ve got one with seven hundred and fifty people next Sunday, and your schedule’s open too.”
“Excellent.”
“And if that one doesn’t pan out, there’s five more with ridiculous numbers lined up in the next month. We’re in luck. They seem popular with the filthy rich and the eager to show off.”
“Figures. But I can’t even say I blame them.”
“Now we just hope they’re not the kind of filthy rich that makes their wedding guests show ID when they don’t immediately recognize them,” Heero said.
Relena gave him a wide-eyed look.
“Kidding. I’m checking what they have for security, there’s no way I’d leave that to chance. If they seem too paranoid, we’ll try another wedding.”
Relena fetched them both breakfast and brought a commercial rocket fuel tariff proposal to work on while Heero delved into Mrs Vier and soon-to-be-Mr Feif Optelson’s wedding arrangements.
“This wedding ought to work,” he declared eventually. “Let’s get working on your disguise.”
Relena raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you mean our disguises?”
“Nobody pays attention to what I look like. I’m not the famous one here.”
“Oh, no no no no. We’re both going in disguise or we’re not going at all.”
Relena was sure she didn’t imagine the hint of concern that tightened his eyes at the sight of her gleeful grin.
“How much facial hair can you grow between now and Sunday?”
“Uh...”
As it turned out, woefully little.
Relena plucked at the patchy bristles Heero called a beard, smoothing them out, fluffing them up, and generally trying in vain to rearrange them into something resembling camouflage.
“No,” she decided. “Shave it off. This would just draw attention, for all the wrong reasons. We’ll use the stick-on goatee.”
(Heero let out a breath of relief. Funny what could bing out the vanity even in people who thought they had none.)
His hair was already dyed – a brown only a shade or two darker than Relena’s natural honey blonde, almost too light for his skin tone – and slicked back with copious amounts of hair gel. Between that and the facial hair, his own proverbial mother wouldn’t have recognized him.
Relena’s hair was tucked away beneath a skull cap with a long, curly black wig overtop, and she’d put in tinted lenses to make her eyes brown. While Heero shaved, she applied an amount of make-up she’d hoped she’d never have to resort to again. Having come into her position of political influence though family inheritance and a bigger set of balls than anyone else in the arena (to quote her unauthorized biography) while she was still a teenager, she had years of experience with making herself look older and more traditionally ‘respectable’. Making herself look like someone else entirely, though, was a whole new challenge.
She made her eyelids look heavier – not unlike those of the Ambrosia Catering cook, coincidentally, and her lips fuller, using a dark lipstick she couldn’t pull off as herself but looked striking in a good way combined with the dark hair and eyes. Pushing her contouring skills to the edge of credibility, she made her face look as narrow and her features as harshly angular as possible. Thick, dark lashes and some mascara to blacken and fork her eyebrows later, and she was done.
“How do I look?” she asked, tossing her hair.
Heero, now goateed, looked like he missed the real her already. “Disguised.”
“You don’t look so familiar yourself. Alright, let’s go!” she said, and clapped her hands in delight.
Heero smirked and shook his head as he hooked his arm through hers, but after six years together, Relena knew the signs, the twinkle in his eyes, the lightness of his step: he was excited too.
It was a long drive to the Optelson’s wedding, breakfast but a distant, rumbling memory by the time they parked their nondescript rental car a few blocks from the venue.
“Fake IDs?” Heero asked.
Relena held up both their cards. “Check.”
“Stealth wedding gift to ease your conscience?”
She held up the envelope of cash. “Check. Spy gear?”
He opened his suit jacket and showed her the many pockets lining the inside. “Check. Permission to proceed?”
“I still can’t believe we’re doing this,” she laughed, unbuckling her belt and opening the passenger side door. “Permission granted.”
“As exactly one person I know would say: you two are too young to be so uptight, live a little.”
“Duo?”
“Dorothy. Duo would be too busy gaping like a fish at the fact that we came up with this ourselves.”
The Optelsons had rented out half a swanky uptown hotel for the happy occasion. Posing as guests with no relation to the wedding, Relena and Heero faked a phone call just outside until they saw the receptionist was occupied, and then walked into the lobby and made for the elevators without sparing the signs for the event a single glance. In return, nobody spared them a glance. They pushed a button at random, went up two floors, got off, and set out through the quiet hallways. Further into the building, staircases led back down to the ground floor, closer to their destination. Making an educated guess based on the floor plans they’d studied, they descended into a long hallway with only one door without a bathroom sign over it on either side; clearly some of the larger gathering spaces.
It was quiet, and deserted. The hallway was decorated in white and silver though, balloons and flower arrangements and spray-painted branches hung with fairy lights arranged on miniature Grecian columns set all along the walls, large silk ribbons with even larger silk bows tied in the middle hung between each. And from the ceiling rotated oversized silver wristwatches: the family business Mrs Optelson owed her fortune to. They were definitely close.
“I can’t figure out if that’s a quirky personal touch or an attempt at shilling their product even on one of the most personal days of their lives,” Relena whispered, staring.
Heero refrained from comment.
Just as they made for the wide double doors to investigate further, applause and music erupted from the room on the left. They froze. A voice rose as the sounds of celebration died down, speaking words they couldn’t make out, and moments later chairs started scraping and conversations started up.
“I think they just kissed,” Relena whispered.
“I agree,” Heero whispered back. “If they find us out here now, they’ll know we don’t belong at the party.”
“The bathrooms, quick!”
They ran for the ladies’ room, ducked into a stall together, and embraced.
“Ha. Great minds,” Relena breathed, her mouth a hair’s breadth from Heero’s. Her heart was pounding with the excitement.
He hummed his agreement, and when he closed the distance, she felt his lips quirk against hers.
Always with the distractions, she thought, even as she gave herself over to this one wholeheartedly. How did I ever think this boy was a ruthlessly driven professional?
She cupped his jaw. He snugged his arm around her waist to pull her against him nice and firmly. She parted her lips to allow his tongue entrance, and the rest of the world melted away, and breathing got harder, and they didn’t have to fake her yelp or his elbow banging into the stall when the bathroom door opened. Heels clicked to a startled stop on the tile floor.
“Hello?” a voice asked.
Wide-eyed and struck mute, they stared at each other. The heels made muted little taptap-taps, no doubt because the woman wearing them was bending over to peek underneath the stall doors. Two other chattering women entered, and Relena’s heart leapt into her throat.
‘Run,’ Heero mouthed.
A nod. Then, as one, they yanked open the door to their stall and stumbled out, Relena giggling uncontrollably and Heero chanting a laughing “shit shit shit”. They bolted from the restroom, surprised laughter from at least one of the women following them, and let the stream of people in the hallway swallow them up and make irreverent but legitimate guests out of them.
They followed the crowd into the ballroom. A band in white and silver livery was already slowly building up from a light, patient tune to an anticipatory crescendo. Hotel staff holding white velvet ropes between their folded hands formed a human chain herding the guests away from the center of the room. When the influx of people dried up, they extended their arms to open the circle into a corridor toward the double doors. The man closest to the door looked out into the hallway and signaled to the band, and then the bride and groom entered to a rousing musical welcome and launched straight into their first dance. No less than three cameras followed in their wake.
(Relena and Heero retreated a little further into the mass of bodies.)
Relena watched the scene unfold hand in hand with Heero, touched as she always was by weddings, but also wildly amused. Standing there in such a crowd, witnessing such a ruthlessly choreographed spectacle – the newlyweds’ perfectly bleached smiles were frozen on their faces, and all the musicians and staffers she could see were wearing a different model of those big silver wristwatches with price tags attached, for crying out loud – it was hard to feel very guilty for sneaking in.
She nudged Heero, pointed out the tags, and whispered, “We picked the perfect wedding for this.”
In the crowd, Relena was the only one who could feel the repressed laughter shake his frame.
The bride and groom finished their dance and bowed, the staffers with the ropes dispersed, and then waiters with hors d’oeuvres appeared. One shared look, and they struck out in pursuit.
The catering company served herb-filled cheese ‘boxes’ and breaded seafood and various bacon-wrapped bean products this time, all of it delicious, as well as a great deal of alcohol. Relena and Heero restrained themselves in that regard, because nothing good could come from going beyond a pleasant buzz, especially before dinner. The band played softly. Here and there people swayed to the music, but the grand opening dance notwithstanding, this was cocktail hour, not party time, so mostly it was mingling, or standing around with whoever you’d arrived with and keeping busy. Relena spotted more than one hand-held game hidden awkwardly behind a purse, and passed an elderly gentleman who had simply planted himself in a chair and unfolded a newspaper.
The size of the crowd made it even easier to blend in than she’d imagined. She made her way from one corner of the room to the next, sometimes alone, sometimes side-by-side with Heero. They shuffled a little, people-watched a lot, took a canapé whenever they felt like it, and even let themselves be drawn into conversation a few times. When asked, they introduced themselves as Prima Meervow and Laaste Plurales.
Between hunting waiters and the surprising pleasures of disappearing into a crowd for the first time since she was a child, of talking to strangers without an agenda, and of doing what everyone else was doing without all eyes turning to her, time flew. Soon, dinner was announced, and all those hundreds of people trooped back across the hall, where the space that had housed the wedding stage and the pews an hour before had been rearranged into a dining room. This was the moment everything could have gone horribly wrong for Relena and Heero, but they were in luck: the Optelsons had invited so many hundreds of people, they had decided that since they barely knew any of the rest anyway, assigned seating was reserved for only a handful of VIPs.
They claimed a table with three other young people, none of whom had met each other before, and were having a good time before the waiters even got around to taking their orders.
The duck ravioli and goat tortellini plus side dishes were every bit as divine as they’d hoped for. At any other public occasion, Relena would have been too embarrassed to feed Heero from her plate, but that night she just went ahead and did it. Prima and Laaste were just as disgustingly in love as the Foreign Minister and her bodyguard were. They just didn’t have to care about how they showed it.
After dinner, the bride and groom had another opening dance, this time with touches of fireworks. And then everybody stopped caring about them until it came time to cut the cake – and anyone who stuck around for the afterparty promptly forgot about them again after that. Heero asked Relena to dance with a formal little bow and that shared-secret-smile both of them always got when this happened, and then dance they did, without a care in the world and until their feet hurt.
They ended up partying late into the night and booking a room in the hotel rather than driving home. They hadn’t brought any clothes but what they’d arrived wearing, but they did have a spare goatee for Heero, large sunglasses for Relena, and each other’s bodies to keep them warm that night, so that was no issue.
“I had fun,” Relena said to the ceiling, starfished naked and still a little damp on the hotel bed after a (slightly less than efficient) shower with Heero. “Wow. I actually had fun. I can’t remember the last time I went to a party and had fun.”
Equally nude, Heero sat down beside her and rested his hand between her breasts, his thumb casually brushing the soft swell of one. “We can do it again some time if you want.”
“Really?” she asked, coyly looking up at him from beneath her eyelashes. One of her hands crept back towards her body.
“I haven’t seen you this excited about something in a long time.”
There was nothing but sincerity in his eyes in that moment. Abandoning her own playfully predatory approach, Relena cupped his wrist and squeezed with a smile, equally earnest.
“What about you, though? If this is just more work for you, or worse than work because of the risks to my reputation you’re personally enabling me to take...”
“More like a hobby,” he said, utterly unashamed. “I’ve missed flexing these muscles.”
“Okay.” With one hand, she pulled his head down toward her for a kiss; with the other, she moved his touch a little to the left, where she really wanted it. “It’s a date, Mr Yuy.”
The next morning, Relena became aware she was awake when she heard Heero groan beside her and utter a defeated, “Aw, shit.”
“Hm?”
Not sensing any urgency behind his words, she didn’t open her eyes, just stretched and lazily latched onto every part of him she brushed up against in the process.
“I forgot to look for recipes last night,” he said, sounding a little stunned.
“Oh. Lucky we’re going to do this again then, huh?” she slurred.
“I completely lost sight of the mission objective. I thought I’d kept myself reasonably sharp and in shape, but I didn’t at all.”
Relena blindly found his shoulder and kissed it. “That’s a good thing.”
“No.”
She didn’t have to have her eyes open to know he was pouting. Biting her lip to stifle a laugh, she rolled back onto her back and stretched some more.
“D’you think Ambrosia provides today’s breakfast for the overnight guests?”
That cheered him up. “Only one way to find out. If they do, I’ll be able to complete my mission after all.”
He jumped out of bed, taking both his body heat and the covers with them, and oh, right, that was why she used to think he was a ruthlessly driven professional. Jerk.
“But I’m your jerk,” he breathed, right beside her ear, and pressed a kiss to her cheek.
“Read my mind this time?”
“Nah. You’re still not subtle.”
She swatted at him, and he made it up to her by not dodging.
They were eating their Ambrosia-supplied breakfast of fresh croissants and omelets (jackpot! though predictably, their recipes were nowhere to be found) on the drive back home when Heero started sneaking glances at Relena.
“What?” she asked with her mouth full. “Something on my face?”
“Do you think there’s anything this company makes that isn’t delicious?”
“Nothing and no-one can make mushrooms or hot fruit taste good, but other than that, I doubt it.”
“Which did you like better, the mutton and stew, the duck pasta, or the goat pasta?”
“What a horrible choice to have to make. I don’t know, I’d have to have them all more than once to decide.”
“Okay. What about dessert? We had two of each.”
“Oh, the rainbow sherbet, no contest. You?”
“Yeah, I’ve always liked ice cream better than chocolate-flavored not-chocolate anyway.”
For their second wedding infiltration, Heero was the one sporting a shock of black curls, along with a thick, full beard, while Relena was a redhead sporting the ‘hip slit’ cut that was so popular during the war. Walking around with half your face covered was a little outdated now, but still an excellent and socially acceptable way to make yourself harder to recognize. That wedding was a chaotic outdoor event, with picnic blankets instead of dining tables and a petting zoo running loose across the grounds to keep the guests’ children occupied. (Heero, forever a boy who grew up in a tin can floating through the void at heart, surprised her by loving the petting zoo. They were still learning new things about each other every day.)
They aborted their third operation when it became clear that the priest had an uncanny nose for trouble, and they smelled like trouble. The setback didn’t stop them, though. The one time Relena expressed doubts, Heero in fact insisted they try again. And Relena liked to think even she wasn’t as fun-challenged as Heero was, so really, who was she to tell him no when he’d found something that brought him such joy? She wasn’t exactly complaining, anyway. She was still having the time of her life, and every wedding presented them with new Ambrosia dishes to discover.
One day, Heero went out on an errand and returned with a shit-eating grin and a stack of print-outs as thick as his fist. He’d found it. Not just the mutton and stew that started it all, no, he’d found and copied Chef Neghen’s entire recipe book. Mrs Twaluf lifted him off the floor with the force of her hug and covered his face in so many kisses he looked like a beet-red twelve-year-old boy afterward. Relena fell into his arms and proposed on the spot.
“Not yet,” he said. “But feel free to hold that thought.”
Relena didn’t realize he was up to something until their second-to-last outing. Probably a good thing, because she had zero patience for secrets and guessing games and not knowing things, while Heero had infinite patience for keeping his lips sealed. But still. ‘Almost done’ was not an answer. Gah!
She ambushed him with questions at random – while she brushed her teeth, while he reviewed footage from a recent speech of hers, while he was furiously typing away at the computer – hoping to startle an answer out of him even though she knew it was futile.
“Almost done with what?”
“Almost done with what?”
“Almost done with what?”
With an amused sigh, Heero pressed print and caught the thing he’d been typing up as it came rolling out, hot off the press. Then he passed the paper to her.
Relena read it, frowning. It was a menu, featuring multiple options for everything from breakfast and lunch to snacks to a three-course dinner and nightcaps. Very familiar options.
“Out of Ambrosia’s catalogue, these are the foods you liked best, right?” Heero asked.
“Yyyyyes? Looks like it?”
“So, do you think this works as the menu for our wedding?”
Relena looked up and stared. “Our wedding?”
“Yeah,” Heero said innocently. “If you really want to, that is, not just because I brought you something nice.”
“Are you asking me...?”
“Yes, Relena. I’m asking.”
She took a deep breath, tried to think about it, realized there wasn’t really anything to think about, and breathed out.
“Well. Okay then.”
Then the waterworks started, first in her and then in him in response, and she laughed and covered her mouth with her hands. And then her arms were around his neck and his lips covered hers instead, and they didn’t stop kissing or crying or laughing for a long, long time.
“Good morning, this is Relena Darlian. Again. I don’t know if you remember, but I called you a few months ago too. Well, turns out there are wedding bells in my near future after all.”