Betrothed

Betrothed is a story written and illustrated by Iron Eater. It ran in Issue 87 at https://www.shousetsubangbang.com/mirror.

Summary

As Virgil awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself adorned in his bed with a gigantic diamond.

"Congratulations," said Alice when she answered, her voice sing-song and cheerful. She sounded legitimately happy for him. It matched how she'd replied to him when he'd texted if she was available to talk, so at least that matched up.

"Hey," said Virgil. "I've got some stuff on my mind right now and was hoping you'd have a minute."

"C'mon, aren't you going to say thank you?"

Did she know about the ring after all? For now, he'd pretend it didn't exist, even as he kept scooting the gem cluster around and around his finger. "For what?"

"You know what," she replied. "I can't believe you actually said yes. You always used to say marriage was for people who couldn't imagine anything better, but now here you are, ready to be a blushing groom. You're so cute together."

Virgil frowned. He'd used to say that, and still did, and until recently he thought she agreed with him. "Who? Who am I cute with? You know I'm single."

"Not for long you aren't!" she said with a laugh.

Connections

This story has no connections to other stories or characters, and thank goodness for that.

Related Links

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Author's Notes

I should probably open by clarifying that I'm quite happy in my marriage, honest!

I got the idea for this from listening to a bad romance movie podcast in which the hosts reacted with great distress about a film where the male lead sneaks into the female lead's house and slips an engagement ring on her finger, described as being "something out of a horror movie." I agreed with this and wanted to see where I could take it. It's shorter than usual since I set an approximate word count to keep from getting too far into the weeds.

The art doesn't actually use photographs of real people, instead being multiple results from This Person Does Not Exist combined into a single photocollage. Since I was focusing so heavily on obscured and distorted faces, I didn't want to be using pictures of real people for my gruesome work! Digital chimerae do just fine. The fellow in the middle was originally as faded as his colleagues until I realized that he, the typical white man, would naturally be front and center and overshadowing everyone else, even as his identity is being stripped from him.

As it may not be immediately obvious, the statistics merged with the hand photo for the title card are a sample of Socialblade stats, because when one is side-eyeing social media and its demands to put a pretty face on everything to be more consumable, one should probably tie that into the illustrations. Virgil is definitely the sort of person who breathlessly follows YouTuber drama despite not actually knowing who the dramatis personae are outside of their role as "the person we are cancelling today."

Thanks as always to my beta reader, who was able to take an incredibly raw and unpolished story and help me figure out what needed to be shored up to make it land better, and the editors, who noted a theme that could've been leaned on stronger and encouraged me to do so.

Fun fact: there was originally an entirely different sex scene here (involving the never-named Nice Jacket), as I wasn't sure where else I'd have a good opportunity to include something sufficiently explicit. Once Virgil ended up meeting the other person trapped in the mother of all liminal spaces it became obvious (to my beta if not to me) that so much time spent on a character who doesn't actually effect the plot was a questionable choice at best. Into the trash it went along with all the other darlings that have gotten cut during my increasingly long tenure of Doing The Thing.

I can neither confirm nor deny Alice gets out of this one okay. Sorry, Alice.