Wedded

[furgood]

The church is dusty, sand piled in the corners. Her fingers twitch with the urge to clean the dust off the windowsills, to run a cloth over the pews, bring some respect and life to this sad little church. His hand squeezes hers and makes her look up, see the uncertainty in his eyes. He flicks his gaze back to the door and to her in question but she shakes her head. A smile blooms on her face, lighting up all the corners of that dusty little church and she tilts her head to the preacher. The older man looks uncertain when she speaks up, when she asks him to marry them.

The preacher is always uncertain. Every single time. She's always wearing a respectable clean dress and Iz sometimes is just wearing what he always does. The first time, she finds him something a little nicer in a deserted home (it's amazing how often they find them sometimes. Sometimes it's the same ones and sometimes it's somewhere new but he always manages to find them a roof to sleep under eventually) But after the first time, when he teasingly asks her if they should get married again, does it still count, she drags him into a church in his usual bandit gard and her in that usual sage green dress and she kisses him.

Sometimes she gets lost in that kiss, lately. It takes her back, every time, to another time, to the feeling of his hand on her waist and his chapped lips and the way she giggles when he bends near in half to reach her.

It makes every death worse. Every time they panic, every time they reach for each other, every time she has to wake up anew and remind herself not to follow the same path she feels like she should--she hides things to remind herself. A loop of cord on the door of her bedroom, tied in a little noose, pressed flowers in a vibrant blue that hide under the simple green dress in her dresser, the ribbon she ties her hair back with, a particular familiar purple that made her stop still in the general store and remember him all over again. She'd walked herself back to her house that day and gathered up her things and hoped the ribbon would be there if she died once more.

The ring changes sometimes. Once it ended up in the middle of a canyon--the first ring, the chipped gold plate on silver, a small thing so unlike the ring she still has in her jewelry box at home. That one is braided silver, full of old meaning, but she never wears it. It's full of meaning for a woman she no longer is. But sometimes her new ring is pretty and gold and sometimes it's tarnished silver--sometimes it's even copper or bronze, it's anything she can get her hands on. They change but they all mean the same thing.

Sometimes she wonders if it was a mistake. Those days when she can't find him and he can't find her and her heart aches and she thinks perhaps she should have let him go. Perhaps she should have hoped he could find some peace out there without her. But she's too stubborn to let him go.

It's too late anyways. It's hard to sleep without his arm wrapped around her, her curved form sprawled over his lanky scarred one. It hardly matters that he spends most of the nights awake, watching her and keeping watch himself, because he never complains and she loves feeling safe. It feels safe. He feels safe. And she's addicted to the little touches. The brush of her fingers against his skin as she fixes his collar and the lingering hold on her that he keeps when he lifts her onto a horse. Leaning back against him and feeling his face bury into her hair when they're alone.

She loves that he treasures her like she treasures him, that they protect each other, that he wants to keep her safe but doesn't hold her back. It's different from being Meulin and Kurloz. Those two loved each other but--they were different. They were young, so young and the way they loved was young. The love would have been the same but so different.

She's different. He's different. Izaiah is who she's in love with, not the preacher's son or the bandit but the handsome beautiful man in front of her who's grinning like an idiot when she introduces herself to the new townspeople as Mrs. Makara but Meulin if they prefer.