Post-ep, kind of, for Parenthood. I thought Roy's little memorial could use a closer look.
He'd thought he was done losing good men. When he had left the Holy Land, he had said a silent farewell to the tragedies and the injustices he had witnessed there, and had set his face to the wind, to a better life. To peace, or some measure of it.
He'd been a fool.
Mary stumbled over a tree root – he caught her arm less gently than he would have wished, still caught up in his own grief, but she did not seem to notice. Her eyes remained lowered. He felt the pull of Much's stare, and acknowledged it with half a nod as they trudged onward, deeper into the forest, deeper into the falling night. Sherwood often had its own serene quiet – but it seemed to have gentled. Robin could not deny feeling as if the forest was recognizing the loss of one of its own.
The baby – Seth, he recalled – made soft noises, and his mother made her own hushing sounds. Their feet cracked the occasional twig underneath. A bird in the distance, still yet to settle in for the evening, let out its call.
Mary was silent.
At the camp, a fire was set, and a few words spoken. Much did not try to hide his tears. Will was as quiet and still as the grave. And Little John - Little John stared into the fire as though seeing something beyond it, something Robin did not want to intrude on for it was not just a friend who had died, but a son. And Robin did not understand that pain.
When the fire at last was down to glowing coals, Robin gathered the courage to approach Roy's mother. She intimidated him, standing there in the dark like a statue of a martyred saint, all stone, all stillness.
She did not move, but spoke.
"I didn't know it was possible...losing a son twice."
Robin looked away. His arm ached dully; his whole body was sore. Yet what have I suffered? He felt chastened. Small.
"He was a good man," was all he could think to say. Words were failing him. He worked his jaw, fighting frustration.
"He was," she said distantly.
It was almost a question. Like a sudden fracture running through glass, she stirred. Looked at him.
"I never got the chance to know him as a man. Only as a boy."
Robin met her gaze, flinched but did not turn. A ghost of a smile lit across her mouth. "He was always a boy to me."
Sudden anger pulsed through him. The injustice, the unfairness, the cruel twists life had thrown at him, at Roy, at his poor, poor mother -
The tears he had not yet shed began to gather. The forest floor blurred. He made a tight fist with his left hand, needing the pain, needing the physical presence of it to match the pain in his heart, to make it real...
A hand touched his cheek. He turned, and Mary was still beside him, still terrible to look upon in her grief, but he dared not shift his gaze. He drank in the deep lines, the shadows - the look of a woman steady but lost, and there felt himself to be a child again, unable to offer comfort because he was too much in need of it himself. He dropped a tender kiss on her forehead. She ran her hand over his hair in a motherly gesture he didn't realize he could still want.
He took that hand, pressed it between his own.
His voice had gone hoarse.
"I'll take you home."