When Connor felt something - someone - twist and grasp at the shoulder of his robe, he acted out of habit. "Habit" meaning, clutching the offender's arm and throwing him unceremoniously over his shoulder and into the dirt, pressing one boot onto his chest.
The face that greeted him was not that of a soldier. "Norris!" he cried, stepping off of his coal-dusted friend. "What are you doing?"
"She said yes!" he laughed giddily, smile stretching from ear to ear.
Connor couldn't seem to stop the grin that spread over his face. "- Myriam?"
"We are getting married!"
As Connor heaved Noris to his feet, the young woman in question sauntered up to the pair, her voice laughing, delighted, "I told you not to touch him, Norris." Norris threw one arm around her shoulders, pulling her in close, her head pressed momentarily into his frayed cotton shirt.
"Is it true?" Connor asked her, and felt the warmth in his chest spread when he found her eyes bright and content as she responded with an enthusiastic "Yes!"
He didn't know what to think when he found her flowers thrown to the floor, daisy petals ground into the rug. And he really didn't understand why he found her hand mirror smashed to pieces over the hardwood flooring, shards of glass peeking out between the floorboards. Had she been taken? -No, no, she was alone; Myriam wouldn't have allowed herself to be hauled off without a fight, without turning over tables and breaking chairs. This, he turned a shard of mirror over carefully in his hand before letting it clatter back to the floor, was intentional.
Connor's concern deepened as he noticed that the door leading to the balcony was left ajar, and a scrap of frilled lace was hooked, torn on the branches near the balcony's ledge. "Myriam?" he called into the nearby trees. Only the chirp of songbirds and buzzing of insects sounded back to him. He sighed then, there's no helping it, as he readied himself on the white stone banister and flung himself into the welcoming branches of the forest.
He had always felt more comfortable in the trees than he did on the ground or hopping from rooftop to rooftop. Trees were safe. Haphazard and unpredictable, yes, but always had a way of opening themselves up to just-him and giving him safe passage through the leafy wooden canopy to exactly where he needed to be. And so when his only route was to scramble down a fallen tree trunk and into a small clearing, he trusted that he was headed in the right direction to find his missing friend.
Once his shoes hit the dirt, Connor walked a few feet before turning in a slow circle. "Myriam?" he called once more, eyes searching the branches far above his head.
"Leave. Me. Be." his head snapped around to the source. A hunting blind. He should have known.
He tried again, "Myriam-"
"I'm telling you, go away. I don't need you, or anyone else telling me what to do." Her voice was tight, angry - frightened?
"Why don't you come down, so we might talk?" he shouted up to the wooden ledge.
A cold voice floated down to him once more, "Leave. Me. Be."
He certainly wasn't getting anywhere like this. Connor let out a quiet, irritated groan, before noticing the rickety ladder leading up to the blind. Tossing his hood back and running a gloved hand through his thick hair, he cupped his hands around his mouth. "I'm coming up!"
After clambering his way up the latter, he pulled himself up and over the wooden boarding only to find himself staring to the space where Myriam must have been. Instead of dark hair and warm eyes to greet him, he found himself face to face with a pair of abandoned, glossy heeled shoes and a lack of the woman he'd been chasing down for the better part of an hour. A low cuss and the rustle of leaves and creaking branches drew his attention, and looked over to glimpse Myriam climbing - trying to anyway, with Ellen's cumbersome gown in tow - and swinging wildly from branch to branch several yards ahead of him.
"Why do you run?" he demanded, leaping after her. She has no right to be able to move that fast in that dress!
"Leave me be!" she cried over her shoulder. "I am no housewife!"
Connor sputtered, absolutely puzzled. "Nobody thinks you are one!" His hands caught a thin branch, and he swung from it, using his momentum to hurl himself onto the branch she was moving from, catching her wrist. She jerked sharply out of his grasp and- she pushed him! She pushed him right out of the tree! He fell to the ground with a roll, and looked up to the woman still freerunning her way through the treetops.
"That's what all of this means!"
What all of this...? He tore after her retreating form, eyes on the fluttering tail of her gown. She lept from branch to boulder and out of his line of sight, and he ran harder after her, trying to get her in his vision again. Connor's sprint slowed to a cautious jog as he found her, her back to him, ankle deep in the middle of a shallow stream.
Long ago Connor had learned that he was no good at reading colonists' emotions, their hand gestures and idioms nonsensical and foreign. Instead, he found that he could tell a lot more about how people felt about something by the set of their shoulders. Myriam's, he observed, were unnaturally stiff. Her neck was bent down, head bowed, arms stick-straight and ending in fists clenched tightly at her sides.
"Myriam," Connor said cautiously, regarding her like a cornered animal, his tone low, soothing, hands up in a gesture of nonaggression. "Tell me what is troubling you."
Her back relaxed, tension unwinding off her form. She turned to him, eyes glassy, looking for all the world like a frightened doe rather than the bobcat of a woman he knew her to be. "That's what all of this means," she repeated slowly, eyes searching.
"Please explain."
"Nothing is turning out like I thought it would," she went on. "This," she gestured roughly to her wedding gown, at this point slightly frayed and dirty, "This isn't me."
Her features twisted in anger, teeth gritted, lips drawn back tightly, "None of this is me!"
Connor cocked his head to her, brow furrowed. "What do you mean?"
"Wh-" she stammered, "LOOK AT ME!" she cried. "There's-" she reached over her shoulder, pulling angrily at her braids. "There's flowers braided into my damn hair!" She began to pick them out, undoing Prudence's handiwork in a flourish of knots and cussing and frustration.
"I still don't understand," Connor admitted, "Do you not wish to marry Norris?"
At this she went still, eyes wide, hands frozen in their motions behind her head.
After several tense seconds, she barked a laugh and looked at him with a small smile, hands falling to her sides, "Oh, Connor." And at this, she quite literally sat down in the stream, arms encircling her legs. She fell silent for a moment, trying to work through her thoughts, and so Connor waited. "Of course I want to marry Norris," she whispered finally. "I love him."
"Then why all of this?" he asked, hand outstretched to indicate the forest around them. "Why did you run? From me, from Norris?"
Her neck bent forward, forehead buried itself between her crooked knees and crossed arms. "Because it seems like despite everything I've done to avoid it, it seems like my life is quickly becoming less of my own and there's nothing I can do to stop it."
Connor very suddenly felt naked, exposed, stripped of all the walls and armor that had been built over the span of over two decades. Over the recent months, the same sinking feeling had made itself well known in his chest. Things are changing and there's nothing I can do to stop it, no matter how hard I try.
Myriam was alerted to Connor's approach by the sloshing of hide boots through the creek. She looked up to see him standing beside her, eyes looking somewhere beyond her shoulder. And just when she expected him to offer her a hand up, or to forcefully drag her to her feet, she was shocked to see him splash down, sitting with her, caring little of how soaked he would become.
And so they just sat, each caught up in their own thoughts, dragonflies buzzing lazily over the water and plants.
"I lied to Norris," Myriam admitted quietly.
It took Connor a moment to be pulled out of thought, and a moment more to fully process what she told him.
"What about?"
Myriam sighed quietly, chin nudged into the crook of her arm, unable to make eye contact with the man next to her. "I told him I didn't know where my father is," she explained. "That's a lie."
"Father Timothy told me that Norris holds tradition in very high regard," Connor frowned, "If you knew where your father was, why did you not tell him?"
She let out an irritated yell before turning sharply to Connor, "Because I have spent nearly my entire life trying to get away from him!" she cried. "We weren't well off at all, and after ma' died, he couldn't wait to be rid of me!" She bit back a snarl. "He'd prefer me be in a convent or a brothel, where someone would take care of me. And I didn't want that, I wanted to be my own." She clutched at Connor's arm, and he swallowed his instinctive urge to shrug it off. "Don't you see? I've been building a life for myself - just me, on my own - from when I was just a girl. And he didn't want that for me!" her hands shook, blinking back tears, "Why should such a man be entitled to be a part of my life when he did nothing but fight who I wanted to be? Why should he have to be a part of it at all?"
Do you think me so soft that by calling me "son" I might change my mind?
Connor let out a light breath and let his head tilt back, his weight on the palms of his hands stretched in the water behind him. "Yes," he agreed softly, "I see."
"And- and to be 'given away' to anyone!" Myriam clutched the roots of her now-disheveled hair in her hands in irritation, "I've spent my entire life-" her voice broke.
"The only reason I am here," she tried again, "Is because I have lived my life not belonging to anyone."
"And so no one should be able to give you away," Connor finished.
Myriam gave a short nod before clamping her mouth shut and looking away.
They sat for minutes longer, feeling the cool stream pick up the hem of Myriam's dress and Connor's coat.
"Things aren't turning out like I pictured them," Myriam sighed, chin resting on her wet hands.
"How did you want them to be?"
She hummed contemplatively. "I pictured living alone, honestly," she confessed. "But if I was to choose someone, if I had to live with anyone..." she picked at the lace on her sleeve. "It would have been with someone like you."
Connor started, brows high above where they would normally be. "Myriam," he looked at her, clearly uncomfortable.
"Don't get me wrong!" she rushed, and rolled her wrist in an attempt to pass her statement off. "I mean, I love Norris, very much, but if you asked me two years ago who I would like to settle down with, I wouldn't have pictured someone like him!"
"I would have answered, someone who has a life like mine, self-sufficient, a hunter, probably. Someone I could respect and feel on equal ground with. Who I could depend on helping me and be a team with."
"Do you... not respect Norris?"
She laughed. "Oh, I do, I just don't think particularly highly of his skill with a snare or a skinning knife."
"Then perhaps you should show him."
"You don't think I've tried?" she guffawed, "The man gets woozy at the sight of blood! I doubt he'd be able to skin and tan hide."
Connor gave her a soft smile. "But you still love him."
"But I still love him," she agreed. A mischievous grin crossed her features, "I still love him, despite those silly purple flowers he tried to push on me all those months ago."
Connor let out a woosh of air that could have been a laugh. "Ah, actually, if it makes you feel any better, those were mine."
"Yours!" she cried in surprise.
"Yes, Prudence made the suggestion; I fetched them for him." He left out the part where he fought off a pack of six wolves to get to them, but what did it matter. "When I took them back to him, he knew they were wrong for you right away."
"Well," she chuckled, "That does make me feel a bit better."
The slight smiles slid from their faces, replaced by an air of anxiousness. Connor picked at the grasses that had taken root in the shallow stream, let the sun soak into him.
"So," Connor began, "What do you want to do now?"
She quirked a brow at him, eyeing him out of the corner of her eye.
"Unless," he elaborated, "you plan on leaving Norris at the alter?"
"I'm not sure," she admitted. "I mean, I don't want to leave Norris - I love him, I really do, but..."
Connor gave a short nod. "Perhaps this is the type of thing you take one day at a time," he said slowly, laying an encouraging hand on her shoulder. "You say you want to marry him, and so that is what you do."
"Yes," she acquiesced, discomfort evident.
"And," he continued, "Despite what Father Timothy or Norris might think, I am not going to 'give you' to anyone, and I will not be there in lieu of your father."
She tilted her head, "Then what do you propose, Connor?"
"I propose that I am there as your partner." the look in his eyes was sincere. "As someone that you trust to support you no matter what, and someone that wants you and Norris to be happy."
And at this Myriam couldn't help but grin, the familiar warmth in her eyes returning. "You have yourself a deal, partner," She stretched out her hand, to both shake and to haul each other to their feet.
It was only then that they both seemed to notice how soaked they were, how mussed Myriam's hair was, how the lace on the bottom of her skirt was torn to shreds.
"But," she winced, "my hair is in no state to be married, it seems."
Connor coughed lightly. "I... can braid. If you'd let me. I'm sure I could find something that... suits you."
"I'd like that," she smiled, cupping his cheek lightly. "Thank you, Connor. For helping me through this silly case of cold feet."
Cold feet? Connor glanced down, suddenly remembering the forgotten shoes in the hunting blind, the soles apparently too stiff to go branch-swinging in. He looked to her toes, sure enough, flexing and curling in the sand beneath the surface of the creek. "Well," he huffed, "Then we best get out of the water."