She was so beautiful. Robin would have called her an angel even if he hadn't known that was what she was. He knew they were both dead, and yet he was still surprised when his fingers met hers and found warmth. Her eyes were so full of love.
She was just as he remembered, but better. Here, she was happy. Here, she was completely and irrevocably his - and he was hers.
The idea of being dead was one he accepted calmly and without fear. What was there to be afraid of? As soon as he had touched Marian she had taken away his pain, and there was no danger here. There was only him and only her.
He would miss his friends, there was no denying it. Perhaps John was right, perhaps it wasn't fair. They should have died together, died fighting, died as they lived - that would have been a good day to die.
But Marian was right; this wasn't the end, far from it. Life had only been the very beginning of their story - and its middle would stretch out for eternity. This was the one story that would never end.
And, he came to understand, there was no reason to miss his friends at all - and he laughed with delight as he realised. Those who had fallen had already found a place in this world, and those who had not would find their way here one day. Robin no longer feared their deaths, for this world that he had always named death was one of such bliss that he longed for them to share it. His life had been too short, and yet it had been good. It had led him to her. And because of her, he knew that death would be even greater than life.
There was so much to be done here, in this place. He could find Allan, wherever he was, and ask for the forgiveness that he somehow knew he already had. And then... The heart that rested still within him (protected all this time by Marian, so that nothing in the living world could harm it) leapt. He would find his parents again. He could see their faces so clearly now, as though their memory had never dimmed with the years that had passed.
But there was no need to hurry here, in the place beyond time. He did have an eternity, after all.
And it was an eternity with her. Marian, his beautiful, beautiful wife. Nothing could have been more perfect, and Robin felt such joy flood him that put even the greatest happiness he had known before to shame. This was the place where all emotion was true and sweet, and his love for her was so great that it could have sent them flying together through the clear blue sky above.
In death, they had come to the place that had been a real home to them both throughout their lives, from their youthful games to outlawed camping. Sherwood was, like Marian, simultaneously the same as it had ever been and yet better. The trees grew taller, the forest was larger, the sun shone brighter. The air was sweet and filling, the leaves were a truer green than ever before, and the wind seemed to sing to him.
Yet none of it captured his attention as she did. Despite the long months lived without her, the heartache and the horror, Robin was not surprised to find that she had been here all along. And there was no need to weep even for happiness now that he had found her again, for he was in a place without sorrow or regret. This was the world he had longed for all his life and now, in death, it was theirs. The Lord and Lady of the Greenwood, ruling over it forever more.
And so it was that Marian and Robin, the Nightwatchman and the outlaw, walked hand in hand beneath the boughs of their beloved Sherwood. The forever-young lovers filled the forest with light talk and easy laughter, gentle touches and soft kisses. Their old fight would live on without them; the legacy and the brave souls they had left behind would bring the King home and restore happiness to England. The world would always remember them, long after all who had known them joined them in paradise, and it would remember all that they had done. Finally they found for themselves the peace that they had for so long fought to bring others. The two halves of the legend, reunited. Together at last, if only in death.