Jack paced his room in the Ice Palace, his staff twirling as he burned nervous energy.
The other Guardians were going to arrive soon, though Jack wouldn't be greeting them. They were going full out with this, which included not seeing each other until the start of the ceremony.
They weren't having an officiant, as such. Originally the Man in the Moon had done it, but he was still reeling both from the effort of speaking to Jack and from the information bomb Jack had dropped on him. If Ombric showed up on time, then he could do it, but that was a pretty big Maybe. So they'd be doing the vows themselves, rather than keeping to that tradition.
Most of Jack's anger over the time he'd been alone had disappeared when he'd learned how hard it was for Manny to speak to them, had understood the reasons for the silence and how long Manny had been alone (long enough he didn't realize other people might not be able to handle it, nearly his entire life spent alone on the moon with just the Moon Mice and robots), though he hadn't realized how much pain had been left behind from his three hundred year stint until he'd spoken with Manny, but there was just enough of both left to feel a little amusement at Manny's discomfort.
Jack pressed a hand to his stomach. He was nervous, yes, but now that the time had come it was an excited nervous, an anticipatory nervous.
He glanced over at the stand in the corner of the room, where his outfit for today was resting. It still seemed a little silly to him to have an outfit for a single event, and yet.
Given what his looked like, he was fairly sure none of them were going to be in any sort of traditional outfit, Western or not. No black suits or white dresses here, if the yeti had anything to do with it. Maybe he'd be able to use this again after all, if slightly different. It felt somehow wrong to him, now that he remembered all those times when things needed to be stretched to their limit, to have an outfit like this that was only going to be worn once.
Jack ran his hand over the fabric, finding himself wishing that his mother and little sister could have seen this. It made him chuckle, sadly. What would they have thought, their Jackson a spirit of Winter, about to marry six other equally powerful spirits? It was so out of the realms of possibility...and yet, if anyone might have been proud of him today, it would have been Mother and Mary, he thought. They might not have understood, might have been worried about the implications and morality of it, but it would have been weighed against his happiness and that would have won their support and pride.
The Guardians all knew about their families or lack thereof. North and Katherine didn't know who their parents were, as both sets had died when they'd been too young to remember. North had been raised by bandits, Katherine by Ombric and the people of Santoff Claussen. Sandy and Nightlight were created of stardust and wishes, not born. Bunny and Tooth had families, once, but they'd been killed in battles.
Jack figured he'd got it luckiest – he'd been the one to die, letting his family live long, if sadder, lives.
It was depressing to think about on his wedding day, so after that brief wish that their families could have been here to see this, Jack made himself let the thought go.
Ombric would be here, and he'd be family enough.
Or, at least, Ombric was going to try to be here. For Father Time, someone who could be any when, he had a loose grasp of when he needed to be somewhere.
