Epilogue

The marriage of Natalia Alianovna Romanova and Dr Robert Bruce Banner was a quiet affair that took place in a modest church in one of the less auspicious corners of Volgograd on a chilly November afternoon. It's not announced in any of the papers and nobody has been warned of it excluding those involved, who were only told of it the night before it happened, yet there is a wave of disquiet in the intelligence community that nobody understands but everybody feels. The spooks and spies of the world check behind them and sleep with their hands wrapped around the guns underneath their pillows. Militaries check and re-check their operations and operatives and everyone locks their doors and checks their guns. Yet if asked they could only tell you of a great fear that they could not understand.

When the Primate of the Church woke up that morning he did not expect to be presiding over the strangest wedding he has ever participated in. Though the bride was quite obviously Russian, and her male bridesmaid and the groom spoke the language almost flawlessly, albeit with an accent, all of the rest of the guests spoke not a word. There was a redhead with two small children who kept glaring at the best man pointedly. A large, black man with an eyepatch glared at anybody and everybody, though his face softened as the ceremony progressed. A tall, blond, Scandinavian man and his tiny brunette wife stood off to one side smiling brightly. A thin, brunette stood off to one side, her posture simply screaming of military experience, a blond man held the same stance in the front row. The other bridesmaid, a buxom woman with thick brown hair and pouty red lips who wore a red dress that looked like it had been through a war and back, held a small child in her arms with the dark hair of the groom and pale skin and eyes of the bride.

The bride wore not a traditional white dress but a bloody scarlet with a black damask lace veil and tight black leather gloves. Her thick red hair was pinned up with jeweled onyx pins and her. Both the bride and groom's smiles were rusty, as if they'd only recently remembered how to smile. The Primate noticed the influx of people wandering around the church that day, looking too perfectly as if they belong for it to be anything other then staged. Names are signed so that they are barely legible. The bridesmaid was a little too edgy for the Primate's taste and kept checking out the sight lines. The Primate sees outlines of the weapons he hasn't handled since the war hidden under suit jackets and dress hems and purses.

It's all slightly more sinister then the Primate would prefer but the way the bride and groom look at each other makes it worth it. He looks like he can't quite believe this is happening and she looks scared it will all go up in flames, yet the sheer, unbridled love between them is almost palpable. He sees it after the ceremony when she's leading her new husband around showing him where she and her parents used to sit every Sunday, where Pyotr Ulynov used to sit in the back and snore through the service and where Vladimir Tymoshenko used to a flask of vodka for morning prayers and where Madame Lavrova used to sit by the confessional and make sure everyone went in.

The Primate smiles. The Bride reminds him of a little girl with hair like blood who used to sit two pews in front of he and his family from the time he was eight to thirteen. The Primate used to stare at the way her ringlets bounced as she moved her head. He glances his grizzled beard and wrinkled and weathered skin and chuckles to himself. She's not the same little girl, too young, her eyes are too hard, hands that have been stained scarlet with too much blood.

But he enjoys the unexpected revisiting of halcyon days he has not recalled in what seems like a lifetime and for that privilege the Primate waives his fee.

The last he sees of the girl with red hair she is leading her husband and a little boy out of the church, dragging them across the square outside to some childhood haunt.