Captain's Hart and Soul

Chapter 13 Ant-man?

June 29, 2015

"This is way too much." Arianna said flatly.

The past two months had been hectic, to say the least. Arianna was up to her neck in wedding planning, and she was definitely stressed out by it. Two days into the whole ordeal, she'd decided she wasn't cut out for a lavishly planned wedding. Unfortunately, Wanda and Nat disagreed. Ironically, so had Maria Hill.

So Arianna found herself in the most unusual situation where two of SHIELD's fiercest ex-agents and a powerful enhanced Sokovian were dragging her along with their enthusiastic plans. Nat had been particularly interested in the food for the wedding, including the cake, while Maria sorted out all the details from the invitations to the band to the wedding venue, and Wanda took charge of all the design aspects, including the decorations, bouquet, wedding dress and bridesmaid dresses. And that was just the beginning.

For two months, Arianna had been forced to make decision after decision. Steve stood by her in most of the process, for which she was immensely grateful. The super-soldier patiently went through every detail that was thrown his way, although Nat did tend to go a little overboard just to poke fun at the couple. Like the thirty different types of cake- after about the eighth they all started to taste the same- and the forty different finger foods for the starters, most of which were exotic and half of which they couldn't even pronounce. Arianna was dreading when Nat would start drafting the main menu.

Maria and Wanda were a little less extreme, but Maria's compulsive need to be fully organized - engrained through years of SHIELD training - made her a different type of nightmare. Steve's patience was tried again and again while Arianna wanted to just throw a knife at something. As she'd told a highly entertained Clint over the phone: she didn't care if the napkins were swans or bows. Neither did she care if they were pale blue, sky blue, or any other variation of light blue.

The wedding dress had been it's own kind of stress, mostly because she'd had to wade that mission on her own. Steve had taken Sam (and a curious Vision, Rhodey, and Tony) to pick out a tux, and he'd been done in maybe thirty minutes- most likely because Tony knew his suits. Arianna was in the dress store from 8am to 4pm.

Due to their high profiles, Tony had booked out the whole shop for Arianna. On the one hand, this ensured there were no other customers watching her curiously. Unfortunately, this also meant that all the shop assistants present that day were watching her constantly.

The attention stressed her out so badly, Wanda eventually halted the dress-search to call Tony over. Tony had entertained the staff, taking their attention off Arianna and she was finally able to try on dresses in peace. That was it's own worry area as Arianna struggled to decide between a classic style that would be reminiscent of Steve's childhood era, or a modern-style cut that would satisfy Wanda's fashion need, and generally everyone else's.

Arianna had honestly found it surprising when Wanda turned out to be extremely picky over their design choices for Arianna's wedding. She suspected that Wanda's life before, both during her hardship years and after Strucker's experiments, had forced the young woman to suppress her creativity. Now, it was being unleashed, and powerfully, as she wanted to help create a perfect wedding for her friends.

Arianna could appreciate that, but between the three women she was finding the whole process overwhelming. Especially since she really didn't mind what they chose. But each of them had a point, since they had each reminded her that this was going to be the biggest day of her life.

As Nat had eloquently put it: "You're marrying Captain freaking America."

In case all the tabloid and news articles weren't enough of a reminder. It didn't matter what anyone anywhere else in the world did- all the news and people could talk about was the upcoming nuptial of the leader of the Avengers and the infamous Aria. Tony's PR team had their hands full trying to release polite statements for the private couple, but apparently America wanted to know everything they could about their hero's fiancée and wedding plans.