Marriage Material

A Dearka-Miriallia Story

Chapter One: My Life is Over!

Tension between the PLANTS and the nations of Earth is growing. Everywhere, there are whispers of a looming war. Despite lengthy negotiations and summits, the Naturals and Coordinators are growing farther and farther apart. Fredrick Haww is the governor of Heliopolis, and he has come up with a way to keep peace between Orb and the PLANTS. It involves his seventeen-year-old daughter, Miriallia.

"I cannot believe this!" Miriallia practically screamed into the telephone. She could still hear her father banging on the locked door, nearly knocking it off its hinges. He was trying to reason with her. Fat chance. Fredrick Haww had called his daughter into the sitting room of their mansion minutes before to break "the news" to her. After hearing it, Miriallia did what any self-respecting teenage girl would do: she screamed, stomped up the stairs, and promptly slammed the door with an earsplitting bang.

"Calm down, Mir," Cagalli cooed on the other end of the line. "He can't be serious; you're only seventeen!"

"He's not joking!" Miriallia shrieked at her best friend. "Married. Me. I'm getting married, to some stuck up, arrogant, pig headed…bastard!" Miriallia shouted into the phone. She was on the verge of tears.

"Is he really that bad?" Cagalli asked.

"He's a Coordinator, of course he is!"

"Have you met him?" Silence, peaceful, blissful silence greeted Cagalli's ears. "You've never met him and you are writing him off as some stuck up asshole already?"

"Why aren't you on my side," Miriallia asked, her voice cracking.

"Miri, don't be silly, of course I'm on your side. But you shouldn't start making judgments about people before you meet them. And you shouldn't really say that kind of stuff about Coordinators. After all, our fathers are working hard to keep peaceful relations with them." Mir bit her lip. "I have an idea," Cagalli announced, her voice perking up considerably. "What is his name? Kira moved back to the PLANTS a few months ago. Maybe he knows the guy."

"I…don't know his name. I didn't ask. But Cagalli, he's going to be jerk, I can feel it." Miriallia threw herself down on her bed. "This is so medieval times. Shipping off the daughter to marry some guy in another country to try to keep the peace. I'm going to have to move to PLANTS, Cagalli, PLANTS! It was bad enough moving from Orb to Heliopolis, but now I have to go to the other side of the universe to live with a race of people who will hate me because I'm not like them."

"Don't worry Mir," Cagalli tried to sound reassuring, "PLANTS is only on the other side of the Earth, not the universe."

"That's not the point, Cagalli! The point is I am being forced into an arranged marriage with some guy that I have never met! This is so unfair!"

"Mir, you aren't doing anyone any good by upsetting yourself like this. You need to pull yourself together and we will come up with a plan to get you out of this. When is the wedding day?"

Mir let out a sigh and threw her head against a pillow. "It hasn't been decided yet," she answered in a small voice. "My parents want me to spend a while in the PLANTS getting to know the guy, and then I'm supposed to come back and help plan the wedding. My shuttle leaves tomorrow."

"And your 'rents just broke the news to you now? Bummer. Call me as soon as you can once you land. I'll try to arrange to come visit you, and we can start to work out a strategy."

A bleary, puffy-eyed Miriallia grudgingly made her way onto the private shuttle at six-forty five the next morning. She had tried every trick she had ever known to get her way. She had complained, pleaded, swore, cried, threatened to harm herself, and even reached back so far as to throw a temper tantrum. In the end, her father had picked her up off the ground and locked her in the back of the limo, which drove her to the shuttle dock. People had looked at her strangely when she stomped and scuffed her feet along the floor, but Miriallia didn't care what they thought about her childish antics. As far as she was concerned, her life was over. She had finally found out the name of her "fiancé."

Dearka Elthman.

He sounded like a pig.

Miriallia threw herself into the nearest seat on the private shuttle like a sack of potatoes. Miriallia had refused to pack her things, and her father had forbid her mother and the maids from doing it for her. And so Miriallia Haww, daughter of the Governor or Heliopolis, would show up on the doorstep of Dearka Elthman's mansion sans luggage.

Marvelous.

Ten restless hours later, a much more agitated Miriallia stomped off the shuttle on one of the PLANTS. They were all the same to her.

Miriallia pushed, shoved, elbowed, and stomped on the feet of other people in the shuttle port, just to work out some frustration. She got through very quickly, not needing to pick up any luggage. If she had expected to see the (what she imagined to be) the pig-like face of Dearka Elthman, she was sadly disappointed. A driver in a stereotypical uniform stood near the front exits holding a sign that read "Miss Haww." Miriallia scowled. She was hoping that they had forgotten all about her, or that she could at least avoid the person sent to pick her up, and then she could call home in tears on her brand new cell phone that her mother had given her to try to make her feel better about the situation. And then she would go home, and things would go back to normal. But the driver was holding a picture. He examined it, and then looked up at Miriallia, and then waved her over. Plan A: failed.

Miriallia sighed. It was hard work being moody for almost two days straight. She silently trudged over to the driver, who led her out to a waiting limo. Too tired to care anymore, Miriallia crawled into the back seat and fell asleep.

Miriallia did not open her eyes when she awoke. She felt so warm and snug in her soft bed. She reached down to pull the comforter up to her chin. That's strange, she thought absently, I don't remember it being so thick… Miriallia slowly opened her eyes. The first thing she saw was a cream coloured canopy above her head. She was wrapped up in the middle of a gigantic bed, all of the blankets and pillows the identical colour of off white. The room was stark and bare, with minimal furniture in it, only a small sofa, a chair, and a desk with a brand new computer perched on top. The bedroom was as big as the sitting room at her old house, which was by no means small.

Miriallia wracked her brain as hard as she could, trying to recall how she came to be in the room. But as hard as she tried, nothing came to mind.

Cautiously, Miriallia scuttled over to the side of the bed and swung her feet over the edge. She was still fully clothed (a good sign) and her socks were still on her feet, but her shoes were missing. Miriallia stood up, but fell right back when she got a head rush. After a moment or two of kneading her forehead, Mir stood up again and crossed the room. She found her shoes beside three doors. Miriallia slowly opened the first, which was an empty closet, the second, which led into a bathroom, but the third led into a wide hallway. Mir slowly inched her head out the door. The hall stretched on for a long while, with many doors spaced far apart. The floor was a soft, plush carpet that crushed under Miriallia's feet and then sprung back up like grass. At one end of the corridor, a large window allowed a great deal of sun to fall against the floor, at the other end, a spiraling staircase led downstairs.

Miriallia was just about to put a tentative foot out the door when someone tapped her shoulder. Miri let out a strangled scream and jumped about a foot in the air.

"Oh, my, I'm terribly sorry to have frightened you," a soft voice. Miriallia swung around to find a short, thin, blonde woman with a pleasant smile on her face. "I am Julie Elthman, Dearka's mother."

Miriallia was too scared to remember her manners. She asked curtly "Where am I?"

Julie let out a small laugh, before realizing that Miriallia was not joking. "You are in the Elthman mansion, of course." Right, stupid question, Miriallia chided herself.

"How did I get here?" Oh, great, I haven't even said ten words to the woman and she already thinks I'm a blundering idiot.

Julie, however, thought nothing of the sort. "Oh, you poor thing," she cooed, pulling Miriallia out of the room and leading her through the hall and down the stairs. "You must be hungry. Let's go get you some breakfast. It must have been quite a long journey for you, ten hours on the shuttle! I've ever only gone for five at the most. You were sound asleep when you arrived at the house. My husband Ted, Dearka, and I were waiting for you. Well we all trooped down the front stairs only to find you passed out on in the back seat!" Here Julie laughed in a good-natured way; Miriallia only hoped that nobody had seen up her skirt. "Anyway, darling, Dearka—oh, he's such a gentleman, I'm sure you will just love him!—he didn't want to wake you, so he carried you up the stairs and tucked you into bed. It was the cutest sight!"

Miriallia perked her ears up as soon as she heard the name 'Dearka.' "Is he here?" she asked quickly.

Julie's smile faltered for a split second. "No," she answered sorrowfully, although Mir couldn't help but let out a sigh of relief, "I'm afraid Dearka and Ted are both away for a short while. Ted, well he's on the Council, so he is obligated to go to all of those silly conventions and whatnot." Miriallia gave her a strange look. Julie suddenly remembered that those "silly conventions" were given by the girl's homeland.

"Ah, here's the kitchen!" Julie exclaimed, happy to change the subject. "I'm afraid that our cooks have the day off today, so we must fend for ourselves."

Julie sat Miriallia down on a chair at a scrubbed wooden table off to the side of the kitchen. It seemed that everything in the house was made on a grand scale, right down to the blender.

"Ted should be back within two days," Julie continued chatting. "I don't know about Dearka though. You can never be sure with the military."

"Military?" Miriallia asked, confused.

Julie looked at her like she was an alien. "Yes, Dearka is in the military. He's just training at the moment, though. My, my, what have they told you about my son?"

"His name."

Julie laughed again. "You are such a funny girl! You and Dearka will get along great!"

"I'm telling you Cagalli, the woman is deranged!" Miriallia had excused herself after a breakfast of cold cereal and had locked herself in her new room. The moment she had, she pulled out her cell and called Cagalli.

"I still can't believe you showed up with only the clothes on your back!" With this, Cagalli hooted with laughter.

"Shut up! This is really starting to get on my last nerves. This woman—Julie—is carrying on like she's my mother, or at the very least, by bestest buddy. All I've heard from her all morning is how Dearka and I will get along great."

"So is he a fox?" Cagalli asked in a mock-sexy voice.

"I still haven't seen him, and there are no pictures in this mansion."

"Wasn't he there to greet you last night?"

"He was there to see me snoring and drooling all over the limo last night, but he left this morning before I woke up. He's in the army."

"What?"

"I know! If there is a war, he's going to be fighting against us!"

"Calm down, Mir. There won't be a war." Cagalli was trying to reassure herself as much as her friend. Cagalli knew that she had to change the subject. "So what's it like in the PLANTS?"

"Oh my God, horrible," Mir answered. "I flipped on the t.v. earlier, and there was this trivia game show, and they were asking about nuclear physics! And the maid answered the question as she was walking by with a basket of laundry before any of the contestants could beep in."

"Wow," Cagalli answered. "Sorry, Mir, but I have to go. My dad has recruited me to help in the peace campaign, and I have to start getting ready for a luncheon. Keep an eye out for Kira, he lives on Aprilius One, too. Bye."

"Bye," Mir answered just as the phone hung up with a little click on the other end. Mir tossed her phone onto the bedside table and threw herself back against the bed.

"Miriallia!" Julie's soft voice drifted up the stairs, "Could you come down here please?"

With a long-suffering sigh, Miriallia pulled herself off her bed and trudged down the stairs. It took her a few minutes to find the room that Julie was in, but when she got there she stopped in the door and let her jaw drop to the floor.

The cavernous sitting room had been converted into a mini-store. Racks up on racks of clothes were neatly lined up, and shoes were stacked on small portable shelves. An assortment of accessories and handbags stretched across two coffee tables.

Julie emerged from between two racks of formal evening dresses. She gave Miriallia a wide smile and took her by the hand.

"I called your father last night to let him know you arrived safely, and he told me that you were too upset to pack your belongings. So I had my favourite designer bring over a selection of her spring line for you to have. We are going to do a little shopping today, right here at home!"

Perhaps it was because Miriallia was starting to come to terms with her banishment from Heliopolis, or perhaps the sight of thirty pairs of shoes would make any girl melt, but either way, Miriallia could not help but feel a bit cheerful.