A/N: Sorry for the long, long, long period between chapters. Life and I got in a fight, and Life won. Hence, it owned me for the past several months. Hard.

Disclaimer: If I owned Ike, I certainly wouldn't be wasting my time writing fanfic about him.

NOTE: Yet more implied slash. Also, more Fire Emblem references. And the author failing to be funny.

Chapter Three: A Brawler and a Gentleman

Ike awoke with a start, called to attention and prepared for trouble. The enemy was upon him, and he had only enough time to get in one attack. He was just reaching for his sword when—

—when he realized that he was standing in the middle of the room he'd passed out in, poised for battle, his hands clutching for an obviously missing Ragnell. He blinked once, twice, and glanced around the room.

Link and Pit hung on each other, faces red and laughing as hard as they could. Samus stood nearby, her arms crossed over her chest, a look of smug satisfaction on her face. Meta-Knight was digging through a pocket (presumably) hidden somewhere in his cape, shaking his head slowly. After a moment, he obviously found what he was looking for and handed Samus a large gold coin, which she flipped once before slipping it into her back pocket (where Ike was most definitely NOT looking) and continuing to look smugly satisfied. Ike gave her a questioning look; she grinned.

"Up and at 'em, kid," she said, and hauled him to his feet. Up and at 'em, up and at 'em… Ike frowned as he pondered the phrase. It sounded familiar, like…

…like what his father had always yelled when he'd overslept and almost missed breakfast. Like what Mist had also taken to yelling after he'd overslept and almost missed the whole Crimean Independence War. Like what Soren had termed "Ike's never-fail get-him-on-his-feet-before-he's-even-awake magical phrase." Never mind that Soren was ninety-percent of the reason he was up so late in the first place.

Oh, that bitch.

"How'd you find out about that?" he asked the still-smirking Samus. She shrugged and reached over to straighten his coat, gone askew in the flurry of fainting fits Ike seemed intent on having.

"Sometimes having a psychic on the team is a good thing," she said. Ike took a moment to add Lucas and Ness to the List of People to Question When This is Over. Currently blinking in neon lights at the top of that list was "Samus," with the note, "Ask Her Why The Hell You're Marrying Ganondorf."

Ike felt a little faint just thinking about that. He swallowed the feeling and took a deep breath. Nice and easy, Ike. Take it nice and easy.

He'd just opened his mouth to ask Samus why the hell he was marrying Ganondorf when the same door the offending King of the Desert had burst through earlier swung open with much less crash but no less urgency. Ike had to squint to be sure he was seeing correctly.

"Roy? Didn't you leave?"

Roy paused in the middle of what was obviously some sort of urgent task to peer curiously at Ike. Ike stared curiously back. All in all, it was a curious sort of exchange.

"They needed an interpreter," Roy said after a moment, and then brightened up considerably. "But you're awake, which is good! I think. At least now we know that we can start soon, right? We're getting impatient in the other room. Or, at least Princess Zelda is."

Ike winced at the sound of that particular name, and was slightly relieved when he saw Link do the same thing, almost in unison. My brother in arms! He thought, magnanimously resisting leaping up to hug the elf in question; he was pretty sure the hug from Ganondorf had broken at least two of his ribs. He shifted uncomfortably and winced again. No, no wait, three ribs, definitely. Back in Tellius, assaulting a general is a crime. But then again, Ganondorf is a criminal, so you can't expect much from hi-

Oh, crap, Ganondorf. Ike felt the urge to be sick again, and considered aiming for the back of Samus's too-shiny boots, just to be spiteful. He settled for an uncomfortable urp-ing sound that brought all the attention in the room back on him with an almost audible snap. He resisted the urge to shrink back.

"How're ya feeling, champ?" Samus asked, with about as much empathy as a field surgeon telling his patient that a limb would have to come off. A momentary image of Soren flitted unbidden across his mind, along with the familiar regret of ever letting Rhys train him in the proper use of healing staves. Soren and Samus would probably get along pretty well, he couldn't help but think. Either that or they'd hate each other instantly and utterly. Ike didn't want to think about the consequences of either theory, though, considering what had happened the last time he'd told Soren to make friends. They'd only just finished paying off Naesala for covering the repair bills to Castle Phoenecis, and the crow king charged interest. He blinked, coming back to reality with a pang of discomfort in the pit of his stomach.

"I feel like I'm going to be sick all over your shoes," he grunted, glancing up at Samus. She smiled cheerfully.

"Do it and your day gets much worse," she said, and crossed her arms over her chest with purpose. "Stand up straight, kid, because the day's only just begun, and-" She paused then, and cocked her head to the side. "You look like you're about to say something."

If there was one thing Ike had (aside from washboard abs and a love of roasted meat), it was a so-called "honest face," called that (mostly in disgust) by the less-than-honest members of the Greil Mercenaries and the primary reason they refused to take him on any more missions involving subterfuge after that first one. Ike still wasn't sure what went wrong with that particular job. He'd followed Shinon's script to the letter and everything, which wasn't hard, since he only had two lines: "Hello, Officer," and "Turnips and various other root vegetables."

Soren had actually laughed when he came to bail him out. Even at his most happy (and Ike was probably the only person who had ever seen him that happy, period) Soren never laughed. Rolf had hid under his bed for a week after that.

"Kid?" Ike snapped out of his reminiscence with a start and looked up at Samus. The mercenary was leaning down, looking oddly concerned. "Kid, you're looking a little..."

He couldn't take it anymore. "Why am I marrying Ganondorf?" he blurted out, and all activity in the room came to a dead stop as five pairs of eyes fixed themselves to Ike and blinked in confused unison. Pit, predictably, was the first to talk.

"You're marrying Ganondorf?" he said, tilting his head in confusion. "I think I missed something."

Ike felt his terror at the thought of marrying a large, hairy desert-dwelling sociopath disappear, replaced quickly by confusion and then a new, alternate terror at what unknown person might be waiting down the hall to exchange whatever passed for marriage vows in this strange, strange world with him. Then his tactician's senses alerted him to the fact that his friends were still staring oddly at him and had unknowingly left the path to the still-open door wide open.

Ike was a ranger long before he was a general, or a lord, or a participant in the weirdest fighting tournament this side of Mario Kart. And before that, he was a man who was accustomed to evading his annoyed half-dragon best friend after he'd left a bowl of stew out overnight on the bedside table and it had fallen onto his pillow. While said half-dragon roommate was still sleeping there.

Suffice to say, Ike knew not to hesitate when an opening was presented to him.

He took off in a dead run for the door and skidded out of the room while his friends were still recovering enough to realize what he was doing. Slamming the door behind him, he sprinted down the hallway and turned a corner before pausing and looking around.

He was in a long corridor stretching several yards in both directions; closed doors lined the hallway, though the few that Ike tried were apparently locked. He paused again, at a loss for what exactly to do. He hadn't really thought his plan out in advance of Get the hell out of there before they make you marry someo-

Do I hear someone talking? He paused his mental freakout for a minute and strained to catch the faint sounds of conversation coming from the... left corridor! He took off in a run, still not sure what his plan was. The others would be coming after him in moments, if they weren't on his tail already, and maybe, just maybe, he could find someone who wasn't as crazy as everyone else apparently was. Someone that would explain what exactly the hell was going on around here.

Maybe this is a mass hallucination, he thought as he skidded around another corner and almost crashed into a side table; his ranger reflexes saved what was probably a priceless vase from a terrible fate. Behind him, he could hear the sound of heavy footsteps pounding toward him. Maybe this is another Subspace Emissary. Maybe we'll all wake up tomorrow and find out it was all a weird communal dream in which everyone decided that I would look really cute in a uniform or something. He sincerely hoped for the latter. It had been a while since he'd looked so good, after all.

Panting hard, he ducked around another corner and found himself at the end of the hallway. There was a door, slightly ajar, and the sound of voices drifted out of the crack and was like music to his poor traumatized soul. Please let them be normal, please let them be normal, please let them be normal, he prayed as he crashed through the door and stumbled to a halt. Or at least as normal as you can expect someone to be when they've been forced to fight lightsaber duels against a giant gorilla with a chip on his shoulder and unlimited supplies of spicy curry. That had not been a fun week.

Ike slammed the door closed and sighed in relief before turning around. Three pairs of eyes looked back at him in startled disbelief. Zelda, Ike noted warily as the princess-ninja raised an eyebrow at him in skeptical curiosity. He glanced at the figure next to her.

Peach. Well, I expected that, he thought, noting that both princesses were dressed in regal, if oddly subdued finery. This must be the, er... What was it? Bridal chamber? Boudoir? Hostage situation? He looked at the third person in the room and took an involuntary step back.

"Marth?"

The prince in question blinked himself out of his confused stare and breathed a sigh of relief, though Ike wasn't really sure why he would be doing that. "Are you guys the other wedding party?"

Zelda opened her mouth to say something, but Marth jumped up from his seat at some sort of fancy vanity and hurried toward Ike. "アイク！" he began, gesturing wildly as he spoke, "あなたは私を助けてくれる！ガノンドロフは私を採用し、私はあなたと結婚することによって私たちの王国を引き継ぐとしている！"

Ike stared at him for a long moment, in which time five more people burst into the room and fell in a pile at his back. He ignored them to continue staring at Marth. Maybe if I stare at him long enough, he'll start speaking English. Marth, for his part, managed to only look a little frantic at the blank look on Ike's face.

"Right," Ike said finally, his plan a failure. "You can't speak English. Makes perfect sense."

"T-that's why I-I'm h-h-here," wheezed Roy, catching his breath from the headlong sprint from the other waiting room. "N-needs a translator, r-right?"

"Wasn't your game never released in English, either?" Samus asked suddenly. Roy shrugged.

"Fan translations," he said simply.

There was a moment of understanding all around as everyone suddenly realized. "That explains Lucas, too," Zelda said thoughtfully. Then Marth threw his hands up in the air.

"誰も私に耳を傾けていますか？" he said rapidly, "私は別の男性と結婚することを余儀なくされてんだよ！そして、私はゲイではないんだよ！"

"Just calm down, okay?" Roy said, as Ike stared at Marth again. There was something odd about him today. He looked rather... white.

White.

WHITE.

HE'S WEARING WHITE.

"Oh, no," he said weakly, clutching desperately for something to hold himself up as realization hit him over the head like a hammer thrown by a very angry plumber. As was his luck that day, he got Marth. "Oh, no. I'm marrying you."

"おやおや," Marth said, bearing his burden like a true prince of Altea. If Titania was there, she would be telling Ike to act more like him: with the dignity of a prince dealing with a crisis and not with the wailing terror of a five-year-old dealing with the bogeyman under his bed.

Except the bogeyman Ike was thinking of didn't live under his bed. No, this bogeyman was much, much closer. As in, slept in the same tent as him.

Oh, Ashera, Soren is really, truly, and absolutely going to kill me.

Notes Notes Notes: Yet again, Ike, I'm sorry. You're just such an easy target.

I guess I can explain the genesis of this story: My favorite thing to do in Melee was put Marth in his all-white outfit and call him "Wedding Fun Marth." When Brawl came out and I found out Ike had a very similar outfit, I immediately dubbed him "Wedding Fun Ike" and started narrating he and Marth's terrible idea of a wedding that was actually... Well, I can't tell that part yet. Hence this story. And that's at least part of it :D

Marth speaks all in Japanese because at the time I started writing this, he had still never been translated in English (and yet Roy had a fan-translation, hence his job as the translator). So the joke was made moot because Intelligent Systems finally got off their butt and released it to us. AUTHOR FAIL. Oh, well, I'm still going along with it because I still find it funny. Maybe you readers will, too? Also, I don't actually speak Japanese, so all that up there was thanks to Google Translate. I'm just failing all over the place here D:

If you're still reading this, thank you for sticking it out! You're my favorite reader, and don't let anyone else tell you otherwise ;)

Questions, comments, and critiques are always welcome! Thanks for reading :)