Destination Wedding
All Arthur and Eames want is to find a location where they can have a nice, peaceful, and legal wedding. Same-sex marriage is legal in 38 countries, but it turns out to be harder than they thought.
Direct sequel to megaphone to my chest (and part of the Louvre heist timeline) but can be read standalone. T-rated, 8,674 words.
Tags etc. under the cut
And here are the author's notes/general research things that didn't make it into the actual author's notes because I hit the character limit.
Basically, me while writing this fic:
Welp, of course, I forgot a few. Although these are more "behind the scenes" rather than quick annotations per se. Mostly about Judaism, Australia, the British, plus the coding around the translations/transliterations:
You can indeed see wild kangaroos in Melbourne!
There is a reference to the Australian movie The Castle.
Spousal privilege - in some jurisdictions (places using common law, so mostly English speaking/Commonwealth/former British Empire countries), as a weird holdover from older law, spouses can't be compelled to testify against each other and can't be made to reveal their confidential communications. I mostly like it for a great fake marriage pretense and having a very suggestive name.
Rosh Hashanah: Jewish New Year. In 2025, this fell on 22nd-24th September, just under a month before the Louvre heist on October 19th.
Bris: Jewish ceremony of circumcision for male newborns.
Bar mitzvah: Jewish coming of age ceremony at 13 years old, which also involves a celebration.
"The McCann Case" is a reference to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, a British girl who went missing in 2007 while on vacation in Portugal with her parents and has never been found. The British tabloids went fucking nuts over the story for at least a decade, there was a Netflix documentary in 2019 and then there was a mention in the Epstein files so it got dragged back into the media recently.
There are a few references to Eames' schooling being privileged. He went to a religious school with its own chapel, which suggests a private school. He's described as being in "fourth form", which is a pretentious public school (private, in the American sense) way of saying year 9 at a state school or freshman year at an American high school. In contrast, the girl is mentioned as going to a "comprehensive", which is a public school in the American sense. I did kinda wanna send him to Westminster school in London (literally at Westminster Abbey) as a reference to the Under the Steinway series, but I couldn't figure out a way to gracefully incorporate their school year names bc seriously look at this shit.
The streetlamps in Lisbon are nice, which I'm gonna be honest, I only found out after I wrote Arthur picking a fight with one.
The Cuba story comes from a particularly weird acquaintance of mine, with some creative license applied. For his sake, I hope he made it up.
I'm using the <ruby> HTML tag for the translation/transliteration annotations and I really like them. They remain in place when exported to PDF or epub, Apple VoiceOver picks them up properly (not Google Reading mode alas), and they still work without the custom workskin (that's just there to make it look a tiny bit cleaner, and if I ever want to do both transliteration and translation). The coding is plain HTML, it doesn't require scrolling and going to the end to see the endnotes and losing your spot, it doesn't require hovering or fancy CSS that gets stripped on export. The drawbacks are that they're very small and can be hard to read, they make things more cluttered, plus they look bad if the annotation is substantially longer than the text so you can't use them to define acronyms. But that's substantially fewer downsides than pretty much every other way people handle this problem.
