He's trying hard to learn forgetting, but it never gets easier.
She is there in every curve and curl, but only from behind. It's better that way. Face to face Isabella is too pale, too sharp; her cheekbones are knives and he's just offering himself up to be stabbed. What was she like, like that's a question he can answer when he can't even speak her name.
What was she like, like the answer won't fill all the space in the world.
The void, all that's left to him now that she's gone.
Magic is for the weak and the godless, but when he wakes up sweating and gasping he knows. He'd carve out Isabella's beating heart with his fingernails for five more minutes with her, and he would never look back. On starless nights he convinces himself it's possible, and why not? All he learned in the desert was that Christ had surely forsaken England. All that blood spilled and for nothing, but his grandfather still prayed to the old gods, just in case. If magic found King Arthur, why not Robin Hood?
It's heresy to look to magic, but look where faith has led him.
He's trying hard to learn forgetting, but his treasonous brain reinvents her history over and over.
The dream where she survived after all, waltzing back into his camp with Djaq and Will months from now, a miracle. The dream where he got to the plaza one minute earlier, placing himself between Gisborne and the king, as it should have been. The dream where he killed Gisborne years ago. A thousand ways: aiming through the trees, releasing, then watching him fall. Slicing his Saracen blade clear across Gisborne's torso. Sliding a knife into him and twisting, carving out yet another matching wound.
Once innocence was real to him, and so the promise of redemption. Now it's revenge bleeding him out. Deeper than the knife wound that almost killed him - that wound, delivered by the same man who killed his wife. And then there is Isabella, who is all sharp edges even if he squints, and when the wind blows the right way he can smell Gisborne's blood in her.
He'd carve out Isabella's bleeding heart and make Gisborne eat it, but he knows it won't bring her back.
Even the desert had held its breath for her. When they laid her body out on the sand the hot wind stopped. Not a grain of sand on her perfect skin.
When the others picked up their shovels, Robin turned away. There was so much he could suffer, so much he had suffered, but he could not watch them bury her.
He didn't look back.