This fic was written for Verkaiking as part of the OQ Secret Santa exchange. Merry Christmas, Bea!
The tavern had been doing better business of late, what with the turn of the season and its erratic weather driving folk to seek shelter in the warmth of its hall (and in the potency of its ale), and so Robin wasn't surprised when someone dropped onto the bench beside him, sharing his elbow-room.
He was surprised that his company took the form of one Regina Mills, a woman who had long been marked for death by the Queen - and who had consequently developed quite a preference for solitude.
This was a rare sighting indeed.
"Haven't seen much of you lately," she said without looking at him, and Robin hid the twitchings of a smile in his tankard.
That Regina should ever lament his absence - lament might be overstating it, but her words rang with a soft note of accusation nonetheless - was beyond belief, though a small, heady thrill of pleasure rose through his chest at the idea of such a thing.
They had fallen into an ungainly routine these past months, caught in the distance between true rivalry and alliance: interrupting (and occasionally aiding) each other during heists, taunting each other with messages scrawled across the backs of the wanted posters bearing their faces, increasingly passing in the woods as they checked their respective snare lines for game.
She was ever like a bird, taking flight before Robin had the chance to study her fully, and so he was glad of each meeting between them, each crossing of paths - and (it was too foolish to hope) perhaps she thought of him much the same, after all.
"The season will make honest men - and women - of us."
Regina huffed in response, ill-humored. "Tell me something I don't know."
It hadn't yet reached the coldest depths of winter - that would come after Yule, when nights stretched longer than they had any right to be - but there were fewer travelers on the roads, more households double-barring their windows and doors against the elements, and the great inconvenience (and unsubtlety) of having to track through inches or feet of snow to get anywhere.
All in all it was a bad time to depend on stealth and thievery for one's living, and Robin wondered if Regina's ill-humor was a sign that she had been taken unawares by the starkness of the forest in winter, the need to prepare stores and hunker down until spring.
Then again, the fur around her neck was clumped with slow-melting ice, and snowflakes beaded into water along the thick plait of her hair (along her eyelashes too, Robin thought, though he couldn't quite tell from this angle) - it had started snowing again, plainly, and the creeping chill of that was enough to drive anyone into a foul temper.
Robin meant to offer the services of his scarf (its length bordered on the ridiculous, as if the maker had been a little too enthusiastic with her knitting needles or the bundles of wool available to her) to blot up some of the meltwater dripping from her cuffs and hood, moved a hand to his throat to loosen it before stilling abruptly at a sign from Regina: the jump of her fingers commanded a firm stop in the visual language of hunters, and of thieves.
Stop, and Robin felt his face darken with embarrassment.
"I -" he started, only for Regina to neatly interrupt him. "That man by the door - don't look - is watching you."
"Oh?"
"After your head, or the reward on it, I imagine. He was at the window when I came in, and it seems he's found his man."
"And you're telling me this because…?"
Robin didn't want to doubt the nobility of her intentions - didn't, actually, as Regina spoke with a calm matter-of-factness that tested as truth against his gut - but there was little enough reason for her to intervene when someone was trying to take out her biggest rival in the field, even if their competition felt more friendly than fierce these days.
Regina didn't owe him that warning, and for her to give it regardless, well… that was worth thinking on.
She efficiently drained her tankard between breaths, pausing only to lift her other hand in a mocking gesture as she said, "Must be that 'spirit of generosity and goodwill' Yuletide is supposed to bring out in people."
Robin let his eyebrows speak for him, letting one arch into a high indeed as he tugged the glass out of her hand, snagged his own with a thumb, and rose, making for the far-end of the bar under the guise of refilling their drinks.
It was a ploy to draw nearer to the man, to get a read what threat he posed. Robin hoped they wouldn't fall to arms straightaway, but he had a dirk at his belt and whatever protection the regularity of his presence at the tavern granted him - not that it mattered, in the end, as the man turned and bolted into the snow as soon as Robin's glance flicked his way.
A well-creased square of parchment fluttered to the floor in his wake, and the letters of Robin's name, the sketched lines of his nose and chin, showed clearly from across the room.
An informant and not a collector (not a man who liked to get his hands dirty), then, and that gave Robin time.
With any luck he would be well away, confusing his own tracks in the snow to stall pursuit, before the Black Guard stormed the tavern for his head. There was no sense in fussing about narrow escapes when nothing more could be done - the danger was part and parcel of being an outlaw, and so Robin did not hurry overmuch as he settled his debt (Regina's too, though a drink hardly paid for his life) with the barkeep.
A blur of black and cream flashed past in his peripheral vision, the end of a heavy braid whipping against his shoulder as Regina ran for the door.
"You can't just let him go," she snapped in passing, like an arrowhead (all edges) in her anger.
"It's not bloody worth it, Regina, I'll be gone before they - oh, hell," Robin swore as Regina burst out of the tavern with no ear for his protestations.
He couldn't very well let her go alone, even if it meant running straight for the teeth of his would-be captors. Why Regina was risking herself like this, without cause - he couldn't make sense of her at all, nor how carelessly she seemed to be casting her dependably cold logic to the winds.
Robin dropped random coins to the wood of the bar and turned and didn't stop, not for anything. Granny knew he was good for it, for the tab that his haphazard count likely failed to cover and for the chair, overturned to meet its (decidedly grisly, from the sound of it) end in his haste to enter into the chase.
The snow was ankle-deep now (higher for Regina, he thought, and hoped it might slow her) but still powdery, easy to pound through, and the long footprints of two people sprinting stood out clearly from its depths.
Regina was a damned quick thing, and he had to follow her and the man by tracks alone until the path began to slope downwards to the edge of the creek. He caught sight of her, and the man she dogged relentlessly, somehow keeping his feet ahead of her despite the steep incline and the slickness of the snow, and Robin dug in hard with his toes to close on them.
They reached the ice, sliding towards the middle of what had been open water short weeks before, and Robin had to stifle a shout of warning. It hadn't been cold enough, long enough, to trust the ice to bear his weight, but maybe, maybe, for one as slight as Regina...
He halted at the bank, one foot inching out as he watched Regina and the man pull ahead of him once more, past the center of the creek now, and listened hard for the sounds of cracking ice.
He saw the man lose his footing and gracelessly crash down, gliding forward on his belly with all four limbs kicked-out, and it was with a sick plummet in his gut (he half-closed his eyes before commanding himself to watch) that Robin knew precisely what would happen the instant before it did.
Regina's fall was so quick that he never saw it, and it was only her cry cut short and the flood of water washing over ice that told him she was under.
And as the water settled back, untroubled, the world became terrifyingly quiet.
The man had disappeared, safe, into the trees on the other side of the creek, and Robin spared no thought for him except let him run.
"Regina!" he called uselessly, mired in place on the safety of the bank though his body ached to go after her, for all it would drown them both. He prayed, prayed (he had never been a devout man before) that her head, an arm, something of her would break the surface.
He could guide her out if only she could find the air again, and if not… he could not let her drown, could not rescue her without pulling them both to the endless depths, and so it may be that they would save the Queen and her guards the labor of killing two outlaws after all.
But there - a flicker of movement at the border of the hole and then a storm, as Regina forced her head and shoulders clear with an explosive tear of breath, clutching at what little she could lock her fingers against.
Robin called to her again, urging her to kick until she was level with the ice and might propel herself out, but Regina couldn't seem to orient on him, to find the source of his voice, couldn't seem to do anything but bob and cough and brace her forearms against the ice in an increasingly desperate effort to not sink back under.
It was impulse in the purest sense (brain to heart to hand - or was he working in reverse?) that had Robin pressing himself flat to the creek, nudging himself forward with elbows and knees and feet and trying to feel lighter than his fears, than his too-heavy coat. He moved warily, sensitive to every sound and shift that followed him, scarcely daring to fill his lungs lest his simple breathing dislodged something below.
He was near enough to see Regina's breath now, so quick and light it hardly clouded the air, and the deep set of panic (better than shock, at least, because the panic meant she was still fighting, meant life) in her eyes, and hold on, hold on seemed an entirely stupid thing to say even as it rose to his lips once more.
She was losing strength, no pretense left in her to conceal how in need she was (and that transparency, so foreign on her, frightened him most of all), but Robin could advance no further without testing the same ice that had so dramatically collapsed under Regina's weight.
He fidgeted both hands down the pockets of his coat, searching for anything that might create a lifeline, and finally seized upon the long train of his scarf. It wasn't as sturdy as rope, or his own arm, but if Regina could get the thick knit of it around her, he might just be able to lever her back onto stable ice and tow her to shore.
He unraveled its length from his throat, letting it spool on the ice in front of him until he found the other end. Measuring a rough circumference with his hands, Robin secured a loop of scarf with a figure-of-eight and used his teeth to pull the knot taut.
Regina's eyes had begun to dull with shock, but the last ember in them, the stubborn light buried deep at their centers, pricked that much brighter when he flicked the loop out to her, a well-aimed cast of his wrist that landed the scarf against one of her shoulders.
"Get this around you - under the arms."
Regina nodded and painstakingly shrugged herself through the makeshift harness until it sat snug over her chest. Robin anchored the other end around his waist and, asking Regina to push herself up and kick with everything she had, every last bit of muscle, began to inch backwards, pulling her along with him as best he could.
The snow fell about them in a soft deluge, but there was nothing pretty about this, the push-pull of their bodies over ice not meant to hold them, the effort intense and exhausting for both as they struggled to help each other.
Freed from the water at last (Robin would always remember it as a lifetime, a small eternity, that passed before they hit solid ground again), Regina let herself be dragged to the dip of soil that lined the creek, and they were safe - not precisely that, drenched and freezing and in danger of being circled by the Queen's own battalion at any moment, but something approaching it.
They both lay panting, Regina alternately slack and near-convulsing at the end of the line, and Robin forced himself to get up, numb fingers grappling with the scarf at his waist. Regina was in no state to walk, and so he bent to her, lifted and tucked her against his chest though his knees protested at the unexpected weight of her sodden clothes.
He could feel ice water leaking down his front, leeching into the first of the layers between them, and neither of them would last long out here, where wind and snow struck straight to the bone.
Robin turned, naturally, to the tavern, thinking of its ready warmth and Granny's level head when faced with any manner of disaster, but it would be madness to return and await their (only slightly waylaid) deaths in such an obvious place. He and Regina would be like rabbits in a snare, helpless to run and equally impossible to hide from the guards who came for them.
His own camp, then.
It wasn't so far, and they had landed on the right side of the creek, its treacherous crossing and a mile-distant bridge between them and any pursuers that the man might bring down on them - and they may just have a run of luck yet.
Robin urged his legs into a shambling lope, Regina a deadweight against his chest that made no sound or movement apart from the chattering of teeth, and he feared she might shatter herself apart before they ever reached the meager shelter of his tent.
He shivered with her, giving her all the protection his body could offer against the elements, and lengthened his stride.
Keeping to the undergrowth as much as possible as he ran - it was the quickest path, and the one most likely to discourage trackers - he whispered nonsense syllables into Regina's ear, no thought to what he said and no memory of it afterwards. It was the motion that mattered, as though the mere burr of his chest and breath could keep her awake. Alive.
The snow continued to fall steadily, and low-hanging branches and twigs slapped against his shoulders, his hands, his face, until he tasted blood at the corner of his mouth with no idea where it ran from.
Robin staggered into the familiar clearing of home, too exhausted to even feel relief, and made immediately for his tent. Setting Regina beside his bedroll, he hesitated with his hands at her bootlaces, needing to undress her (she couldn't possibly navigate the fastenings of her garments alone) and now wasting valuable time while he waited for a word of permission that might never come.
Regina's head tilted towards him, pale and only loosely alert, and her lips fumbled around a single sound. "C-c-cold."
That was all he needed to start peeling back each ruined layer of her clothing - boots and furs cast aside carelessly before he moved on to the more delicate work of trousers, shirt, and undergarments. His tried to keep his touch efficient but gentle, looking at Regina only as much as necessary to guide his fingers, though he doubted she could feel much of the contact anyway.
He stripped himself to the waist, finding his shirt still dry and heated by his skin, and hastened to dress her again. The shirt covered her halfway down the thigh, and his warmest trousers and pullovers and doubled-up woolen socks followed until Regina was practically swallowed up in fabric (and in the several blankets and spare bits of cloth mounded around her besides).
Her shivering seemed to increase as heat and color slow-seeped back into her, and Robin, his own baredness forgotten, worked his hands up and down her back, along her arms, to soothe her. He felt for her fingers and toes and massaged those too, smiling grimly when Regina hissed in pain at the sensation.
"You can feel everything? Move everything?"
"'m f-fine."
Fine might be just the slightest overstatement, Robin thought, but the worry he had been carrying so tightly at the core of him suddenly released with this resurfacing of her damnable stubbornness, and he found himself weak, slumping into Regina until their foreheads brushed.
"Good," he breathed, eyes closing in gratitude when she did not pull away. "That's good."
(And he wondered that words were so inadequate to express what he meant, what he knew, down in the sluggish burn of his blood.)
With a small groan, Robin pushed himself upright and excused himself from the tent, giving Regina time to collect herself while he made use of the dry wood and tinder he had stored up to build a fire that could better warm them both.
He lost himself in the mechanics of it, hands moving in calm routine that soon stopped their tremblings, and the flames sparked bright and hot, licking upwards and seeming to drink in the snowflakes that danced into their path. He stood as close to the heat as he dared, stretching his limbs towards it and sighing with the tangled pain-pleasure that the fire awoke in them.
Somewhen, unnoticed, Regina had crept from the tent and joined him, tiny in his shirt and so many voluminous blankets, and now the unexpectedness of her voice (stronger, steadier) sent another rush of goosebumps up his spine.
"You should change too, you know," she said, making Robin newly conscious of his shirtlessness, his naked skin reddened by cold and exertion - and how little he cared that Regina should be the one to see him so undefended.
But there was a great deal of sense in getting out of his own wet clothes, and so he (reluctantly) turned from the flush of the firepit and searched for dry things to pull on. By the time he reemerged, laden with half a wardrobe that needed to be hung and dried by the fire, Regina had maneuvered two logs together and sat huddled close to the lively flames.
Robin sat beside her, accepting the fold of blanket offered to him and nestling close to share in the warmth, close enough to watch individual snowflakes land on Regina's eyelashes, on her nose, and he marveled that this last distance had been removed between them - both touching, tentative, and neither flinching away, neither chancing the loss of what had been so hard-won at the creek.
And so he had to ask, because she was not reckless, never had been, and still she had risked herself wholeheartedly (that heart he treasured above any riches that the Queen could boast, her heart the dearest of all) for him.
Quiet, but pressing for her true answer. "Why on earth did you…?"
Regina looked away, dismissive, but her shoulder knocked into his with a fondness that belied her avoidance of his gaze. "It seemed important at the time."
"Ah." Robin leaned into her conspiratorially and, stealing a bit more of the blanket as Regina scowled, teased, "Thinking better of it now, are you?"
"You have no idea."
"Your lips aren't blue any more," Robin mused, reaching up to run his thumb along their inimitable curve, lingering at the scar he had oft regarded with a longing curiosity.
The gesture was unthinking, as so much of his boldness had been today, and he was grateful that the two of them were still a bit dazed, willing to allow the kind of intimacy he had always imagined for other people but never for them. "That's something."
He thought to kiss her, but Regina had not yet stopped trembling from her ordeal, and Robin might not be a gentleman but he was not so much of a thief as that, to take something from her that she didn't have the strength to refuse him.
They sat together, watching the fire burn itself low (and Regina's head lowered to his shoulder with it, he careful to leave her undisturbed even as her hair tickled the sensitive underside of his jaw with every breath) and when the moon rose, he led her inside his tent and they slept, pressed into each other as if neither could find rest without the touch of the other to reassure them that all was well.
The next morning Regina gathered her things with something that might have been reluctance and made her excuses to leave, wanted elsewhere. Robin tugged once, gently, at her hand and bade her wait, collecting his now-dry scarf from its perch near the fire and winding it slowly about Regina's neck.
It dwarfed her even more than him, and he smiled at her smallness, turning aside so she wouldn't guess his mind. The moment when he couldn't quite let go of her, when he awkwardly fiddled with the tails of the scarf (he did not say it), passed, and Regina walked out of his camp with every word between them sounding as farewell.
A cat lived nine lives, so it was said, and Robin wondered how many lifetimes a thief owned, how many more he would need to wait before he discovered the one in which he and Regina came together as fate had always intended.
(Forever and a thousand days he would wait, if she wanted - even that sliver of promise was enough.)
…
The eve of Yule fell on another snowy night, not a week later, and Robin felt rather cheerless in the solitude of his camp with only a bonfire to keep him company.
He was throwing small bits of kindling into the pit, counting out the seconds each was able to burn, when her voice spoke from behind him, playfully reproachful. "You weren't at the tavern."
He bit his lip, loathe to admit that he was lonely on this night, and so Regina's coming was doubly fortuitous. "I thought it wise to lie low for a while given… well..."
"Here."
Regina held a lumpy square of sackcloth out to him, and Robin turned it over in his hands several times quizzically before slipping his thumb under the seam and opening the small package. A beautifully (ridiculously) long, forest-green scarf was folded inside, the stitching showing a bit uneven here and there as he unraveled it.
"You made this?" he asked, admiring the untold hours of labor that had gone into each bobble of yarn under his fingers.
"It is Christmas, after all," she said, as if he were very thick-headed indeed. "And you can't very well go tearing around in snowstorms without something to warm your neck."
"I see," he said, catching onto her game and playing his hand in turn. "I have nothing for you, I'm afraid."
"No?" she questioned with a lift of her eyebrow, stepping close to snug her gift around the exposed skin of his face and throat properly.
And Robin found that he had something to offer her, after all.
He bent, deliberately and achingly unhurried, to the curve of her lips and gave the kiss that had been waiting, half-hidden, in the corner of his mouth for quite some time.
A single kiss was a poor gift, Robin would be the first to admit, but his heart - his heart entire was carried within it, beating out the rhythm of his love, and Regina took it into both hands as if she wanted for nothing else in the world.
Two hearts given, two scarves exchanged, and if these were to be the only lifelines (the promise of lifetimes) between them, it would be so much more than enough.