100 Things 9/100: Lottery Win?
Title: Lottery Win?
Fandom: Original Fiction
Rating: Gen
Word Count 1,164
Prompt: Dark Bingo Fill: “Forced Marriage”
“You can’t do this to me, I have rights!” Mike screamed as his crewmates jostled him down the gangplank. A sharp prod in the kidneys made him fall silent. Or perhaps it was the look on the first officer’s face when Mike chanced to look back over his shoulder.
“Someone has to do it, your name came up,” Stingle reminded him.
This was the stupidest thing he had ever heard of. This was civilized space, for crying out loud! He was an officer, a damned decorated war veteran, he’d served three tours, how could they make him go through with this farce? How did such things still happen?
He tried reasoning with the men ‘escorting’ him one last time. “Look, a lottery is not a fair and equitable system for choosing a life mate. Surely this is an insult to the bride and some sort of nullification of the proceedings as a whole?”
“They’ve been doing it this way for generations, Major Lancey, quit griping sir. It isn’t forever, just while we’re here and then we leave and you’re a free man,” Lieutenant Peytr Nicol had a tight hold on Mike’s upper arm and was not letting him wriggle away. As if he could; Nicol was the biggest man in the crew, no small wonder they sent him as an escort.
“I don’t want to get married!” Marriage wasn’t a joking matter to him. He couldn’t just marry some girl and then leave her behind.
Someone in the small crowd around him laughed and replied, “No person in their right mind wants to get married, Major, that’s why we have the lottery.”
He should have gotten off at Dova. He had leave time, he should have given in to his mother’s nagging and gotten off at Dova and gone to spend time with the family. Instead, he had stayed aboard and his name had been pulled out of the hat when they needed a bridegroom to satisfy the customs of Toowalpa.
Mike Lancey was certain if his shipmates could have gotten away with it, they would have trussed him up and delivered him like a package to the bride’s family. But custom dictated that the groom had to walk in on his own feet. He was being marched towards his doom with far too much frivolity from his cohorts. Mike’s mind was racing with ways to get back at them.
“I’m not saying yes. I’m warning you, when they ask me, I’m not saying yes. I am not a willing participant in this at all!” He wanted to marry for love. Maybe that made him a romantic and thus a bit soft, but there it was. He wanted to choose his own bride, in his own time and marry in a manner of his own choosing, by the dictates of his own faith and customs.
“No talking in the ceremony. They did away with the gag about the same time as they got rid of the chains, ain’t that right, Peytr?” Mike’s best friend Jake said with a laugh.
He was dragged through a doorway to a stone altar and made to stand in front of it. His eight ‘escorts’ stood behind him. A woman in a colorful flowing robe came through a side door and practically floated over to stand on the opposite side of the altar. She smiled so broadly, Mike could count her teeth.
“Welcome. Toowalpa trades freely with our family and you shall be brother to us.” She clapped her hands and a door opened. Nothing happened at first and then a woman tumbled through the doorway, falling onto one knee before she scrambled up and spun around to rush back at the door, which closed in her face.
She let out a screech and tugged on her long black hair, which was quite messy. The woman in the robe cleared her throat and then called sharply, “Cari, come!”
The bride turned and stomped over to stand beside Mike, glaring all the while at the woman in the robes.
The woman smiled tightly and gestured with her hands, beginning the ceremony. “The clan of Oombri has sent this flower…” Cari snorted derisively and the matron in the gown rolled her eyes and continued with ceremonial words that apparently were all that was necessary for a marriage on this planet. The woman grabbed one of Cari’s hands and shoved it at Mike. “Your wife. Trade well, brother,” the gowned woman spun away and left them standing there as she went to the door.
“I curse the clan!” Cari spat on the ground in front of the altar.
“You would do well to take your wife in hand, brother, before she says something to spoil your trade.”
Huh?
“Take your ugly face away, I never want to see you or yours again!” the bride shouted. The woman slammed the door as she left.
The bride finally seemed to notice Mike’s presence. She looked up at him, “You have a ship?”
“I came on a ship, yes.”
“Good. We leave on the ship.” She grabbed his hand and started dragging him back the way his shipmates had brought him.
Leave? She intended to leave with him? He stopped short, and she huffed in irritation at his hesitance. “Wait. Don’t you want to stay here with your people?”
“I hate them. They cast me out. They made me do this thing. I don’t want to see them ever again. I leave with you.”
“You don’t even know me.”
“You are my husband. You have a ship. You are leaving Toowalpa, those things are all I need to know about you for now,” she tugged his hand impatiently to get him moving again.
Jake slapped his shoulder and said close to his ear, “Take her back to the ship before she causes a scene, we need to trade here, this is the only potable water to be had in three sectors. We’ll figure it out later.”
Later? He had a wife that he had not anticipated when he woke up this morning. He started to dig his heels in, but Cari was tugging him forward and his shipmates were pushing him and so he went.
When they got to the ship, he was hustled up the gangplank. The officer of the deck stopped them and demanded to know who the woman was. Jake helpfully called out, “That’s the new Mrs. Lancey!”
“That true, Major?”
“Well, yes, but…” And that is how Major Mike Lancey came to find himself in possession of a wife. Due to a regulation he had been unaware of, once she set foot onboard the ship and he did not officially deny that she was his wife when questioned by a due representative of the line; he was well and truly stuck with her.
His former best friend Jake was at the top of the list of people to pay back, once Mike figured how to do so within regulations.
The End
Originally posted at http://rinkafic.dreamwidth.org/