hey so you mentioned juno and peter's wedding.... do you have any other headcanons about that bc i'd love to hear
honestly, the ending of this is pretty close to my ~main~ headcanon! but I have a few other scenarios I like to think of, bc I am a sucker for marriage tropes (see: the aforementioned fic). the second one here is the one I envision for the time travel AU.
They play an engaged couple, investigating suspicious disappearances at a mountain resort near Mars’ north pole, after an old friend asks Juno to find her brother. The mountains are obviously a lovely place for a wedding, and it just so happens that one of their fellow guests is an obliging official. It’s short and sweet and for the sake of the cover, of course, just a spontaneous elopement to surprise their friends and family when their vacation ends, and they exchange vows using the names of people who don’t exist.
But Juno wonders sometimes whether the Lessoniana Growth didn’t leave some trace in him after all; and this is one of those times, because when they leave those names behind, without saying a word to one another, both of them keep wearing the rings.
“Juno Steel, I could marry you right now,” Peter laughs, covered in blood and grime and bruises, as they slump against the wall in exhaustion, and in that moment Juno is so in love with him, so full of exhilaration and triumph – he had been pretty damn slick back there – that he says, “I think I’m gonna hold you to that.”
Peter blinks at him in surprise for a second, long enough that Juno goes through all five stages of grief for his undoubtedly dead relationship and is halfway through plans to fake his own death and never surface again, before Nureyev says, “Really, my love, I couldn’t be happier, but – would you forgive me if I stretched the now a little bit? Just give me five hours.”
Rita insists on doing it “properly” and so it takes a bit more than five hours until they’re on an abandoned rooftop in Oldtown where the shields are so weak that no one’s bothered with the bugs and cameras that pepper the city. It’s not many people, either – Mick and Rita cry, and Alessandra cracks jokes, and Sasha – as she does every time she meets Peter – threatens him, shakes his hand, tries to recruit him to Dark Matters “for real this time,” and then watches the two of them all evening with guarded approval in her eyes that Juno can only read because of thirty-odd years’ experience. Cassie Kanagawa, smuggled back onto Mars just for the occasion (after Peter broke her out of Hoosegow two years ago – she might have been famous, but no one could erase an identity like him) insists on officiating with all of the presence and flair that made her the darling of the streams in another life.
Peter has no one to invite, but that doesn’t matter because the old vows always had some kind of sentiment like what’s mine is yours, didn’t they? And Juno is giving everything he has to give to this man, and if you were being honest, all that he has to give is what other people have inexplicably seen fit to give him. He likes seeing Peter laugh with his friends, people who know who he is, likes knowing that’s something Peter can have now.
Juno has never had any illusions about marriage. And even if he had, well, half of any PI’s cases come with pending divorces, and he’s seen enough ‘forevers’ fall apart in his fifteen years on the job. But somehow, when he makes vows to Peter Nureyev, promises and forevers feel like they really mean something.
There are a lot of inhabited planets in the JS universe. Like, enough that Engstrom, a guy who trades in information, hadn’t heard of Brahma (so I’d guess low hundreds, minimum). And the governments seem pretty localized - there’s no “human government” or “Space Alliance/Federation” type thing. Consequently, there’s no way there isn’t some kind of Lawless Space Vegas out there with an entire sub-economy based around marriages for people who don’t want their marriage on record anywhere else. The kind of place whose government doesn’t even keep its own records – the kind of place where a name that has been quietly hunted and searched for through the galaxy for twenty years is as safe as any other to put to paper, should its owner wish.
Juno hadn’t honestly expected ever to leave Mars, but for all his reluctance, it’s worth making that damn trip one time just for the look on Peter Nureyev’s face as he writes his name – his own name – on the license next to Juno’s. There’s no ceremony, no rings, no change of names; the certificate hides in Juno’s office, inside the false compartment of a safe only Peter himself has ever succesfully cracked. But they know. They’ve never needed anything else.
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