Prompt: milliways_bar DE Challenge
Author: wanderlustlover
Recipient: ikissdhimbck
Summary: Marian & Kate. Theme: outlaws. Suggested sentence: Our worlds seem not so different, after all. :)
Spoilers: This takes place after Robin leaves for war, pre-series.
Disclaimer: Marian belongs to BBC Robin Hood. Kate Barlow belongs to the book and movie Holes. The two cross paths and timelines in the most awesome of places, milliways_bar. Title from Louis Untermeyer's Train-Mates.
though differences appear in what we do
It was Marian's pride that started it all.
The way Kate was looking at her newest opulently overboard dress, forced on her from the sheriff, and had that expression that dare to beg the question even faintly of whether Marian could be taken serious for a rider and a shooter. A girl who didn't even have defined calluses or a curl out of place. A girl who couldn't have any idea what Kate's world was like.
It turned into a wager that could only be accomplished in Kate's world. Horses and dust and plateau's and endless sky, that makes the land feel so naked without forests. But Marian's good to her word; riding a horse like she was born to do it; fighting and stealing like she's been doing it for years; staying in pants as long as Kate doesn't comment and even then.
Two or three days of this and Marian stops dodging the 'how' looks that Kate throws her, and lets something 'slip.' But they both know it's not a slip. A girl with her backing, her skills, doesn't 'slip,' and Kate gives her the day and the space, before getting her story later that night, under the stars.
It starts with, "I haven't been able to look up at the stars while I was sleeping for almost half a year now. It's one of the differences between castles and houses."
It's starts with Nottingham, and ends with everything. (Everything that isn't Robin. There is someone, but she never breathes their name. And Kate, Kate who knows what it is to love where you can't speak, doesn't ask that night.) Everything under those stars, soaked up in that naked sky and hot air.
And one of the last things Kate says that night, when Marian's almost fallen asleep against her not so soft ground pillow is, maybe our worlds aren't so different, after all. And Marian barely smiled, just a little too young regal beloved girl and old haunted fighter, and said, maybe. And Kate knows that face, too.