Title: Endgame
Rating: PG13
Pairing: Guy/Allan, Guy/Marian, Robin/Marian, and even some Robin/Allan if you squint at it sideways.
Summary: He was a beautiful fighter…or at least he had been…Angst, pain, fighting and character death. Oh and spoilers for series 2 episode 13.
Warnings: Angst, pain, fighting and character death. Oh and spoilers for series 2 episode 13.
Status of Fic: Completed one shot
Author's Note: It's taken me a looooong time to finish but I got there in the end. Not sure if I'm overly keen on it now to be honest but I'm posting it up anways, just to get it off my fic-list. ;)
Disclaimer: Endgame.
On the few previous occasions that they had engaged him in combat, he had always moved like a whisper through midnight.
He would swing his sword, diamond bright, with well practiced ease as if the weapon itself was an extension of his own long, lithe, powerful limbs. Coiled and ready to strike.
He had always been, on those encounters that they had fought with him, as skilled and naturally talented with his sword as Robin was with his bow and arrow and aim. Evenly matched in their separate areas of expertise.
And always before he had fought to the best of his ability. Never holding back the barely concealed power that rippled somewhere beneath the surface of his body, never restraining that almost God-given skill.
He was a beautiful fighter…or at least he had been.
-oOo-
Allan hadn't witnessed the fight from the beginning. Only the aftermath.
Much had seen fit to punish him for his betrayal of them all with firewood duty since they had return from the Holy Land months ago and as he had sulked and muttered beneath his breath and bent to retrieve a splintered log from the ice-covered ground, he had heard the scuffle of limbs colliding and fists landing upon their mark. Of frigid breath rasping in through open mouths and the clinks of swords, metal upon metal.
And all of a sudden Robin and Guy had stumbled in tandem through the bushes, face-to-face, so close and furious that they almost shared breath, teeth bared like a pair of wild dogs claiming territory.
He'd remained silent at first, merely watching them as they came to a halt, still joined, eyes blue ice and locked as if nothing in the world existed beyond their combined hatred for each other and themselves.
One of Robin's hands clasped Guy's shoulder, fingers biting into the taller man's muscle like claws into prey, preventing them both perhaps from moving apart. The other was fisted, so tightly that the knuckles shone brilliant, blinding, bone-white, between them. Forced up against the black leather clad torso and trembling with exertion.
The hilt of a sword was suddenly recognisable to Allan as he stalked forwards carefully, dazed and bewildered with the motionless battle being waged before his very eyes.
Twigs snapped under his booted feet and suddenly their separate gazes were upon him. Robin's furious and sharp, Guy's sluggish, sweeping towards his former companion from behind a languid, lazy blink.
It was not hard for Allan to tell what had happened, nor who was injured.
"Oi." was all that he could muster from his slack-jawed mouth, eyes flitting between the two familiar faces turned to him. "Oi."
And Guy laughed at his one-time right hand man's inarticulate exclamation. A slow and tired laugh and something, some liquid gurgled and clicked where it had collected in the very back of his throat as he gasped in his breath, chest heaving.
"Leave, Allan." Robin ground out from between clenched teeth, his stare having return to Guy's features, watching, studying the mixture of pain and amusement dance there in the fading light of his eyes. "This doesn't concern you!"
Allan, however, disobeyed, shook his head in defiance even though he knew that Robin could not see the motion.
"Not on your nelly, mate!" he responded, just as fiercely, continuing to move closer, carefully, as if moving too fast would spur Hood on to turn on him and run cold metal through his belly like he had just done to his enemy. "I'm not goin' nowhere until you stop this."
"It is already over." and as if to prove that point, Robin twisted his hand slightly, the one clutching the sword hilt and Guy's responding wince of pain almost echoed through the deadly silent forest, the dark, tiredness bruised skin beneath his once sharp and alert blue eyes pulled taut as he closed them involuntarily.
It was long moments more that they stood like that in their deathly embrace before the chuckle returned to Guy's throat, his eyes still closed tight.
"To die at your hands…is to be close…to her…" he murmured, head lolling to one side listlessly before he managed to roll it back upright and squint his eyes open once more.
"You do not deserve it." words, sharps as the sword in Guy's belly, snarled from between Robin's pursed lips. The outlaw gripped his hand on the taller man's shoulder tighter, gathering the leather between his fingers until it was trapped in a rock hard fist.
Guy's smile was back again. Night blue eyes rolled into an un-seeing, glassy expression beneath slowly blinking lids.
"You are right. I don't." the words were thick and fell lethargically from his tongue. "But I want it all the same…"
He was tired, Allan could see that much. He had been tired since the Holy Land, since Marian and the desert, possibly even before then. His life was leaving him in the last laboured breaths he took and the slow hunching of his shoulders. He was half the man he had been and he was not long for this world.
The resolution left Robin's body then, exhaled through tight lips and teeth grinding together. It poured out of his body in a stream along with the last fiery anger that had coloured his face until he resembled something close to a corpse. His eyebrows smoothed out, relieving his brow from the frown that had been darkening his features and he turned away, dropping his hand from the sword hilt until it thumped against his side, as if the smooth, well worn grip had burnt and blistered his skin.
Whether the man was more disgusted with Guy or himself, Allan could not discern.
His hands shook like the last few leaves clinging to the skeletal branches of the trees around them and as he stepped back from his enemy, turned to stride away, Guy's knees buckled, sending him crashing to the bare, cold ground amidst the fallen leaves.
"Oi, Robin! You can't le-" Allan began, taking a step after him but his leader sent a fiery glare over his shoulder that served to stay his movements and his mouth.
"Do not tell me what I can and can't do, Allan." Robin snapped in response. "You're on thin ice as it is." a finger jabbed his way like a small knife.
"Yeah, but, you can't leave 'im 'ere like this, can you?" reasoning. Allan cocked his head to one side and held his hands, palms up, in a beseeching semi-shrug.
"Why not?!" Robin's growl was indignant. Head whipping up until some of his lengthening hair fell into his angry view and he flicked it away, a bizarrely normal gesture in a moment, a mere chink of time in which something monumental, something life changing was occurring.
"He deserves to suffer for what he did to Mar…" Robin's throat closed over, constricting around the word, her name, strangling it in his throat prematurely. "For what he did to her! He deserves to die. He will die and he should suffer alone."
"No one should suffer alone, no matter what they deserve!" Allan retorted firmly, brushing past Robin until he could kneel at Guy's side, shifting the dark-haired man's arms and legs until they lay at less awkward and less corpse-like angles. "Marian taught me that and I think she'd want you to remember it too. She wouldn't have wanted you to be like this…"
Robin made a sneering sound in the back of his throat and quickly turned away, his back to the two men on the cold, muddy ground, swiping at hot tears that scorched his cheeks.
"What do you know of her?" he whispered, so low that Allan barely caught the words but before he could respond to his leader's accusation, Robin had lifted his chin and spoke again. "Do what you want." he ground out from between his teeth. "I do not care if you want to waste your time on a dead man…just don't forget the firewood."
Allan grit his own teeth, clenched his jaw so tight he thought the bones may shatter in his head, against the bitterness in Robin's tone as he watched him go, wending his way through the trees until he merged together with the brow and dirty green hues of bark and bare branches and he disappeared from sight altogether.
It was only a grunt from the ground and the slow, shifting of leather against leather that drew his gaze back down to the face of his fallen once-master.
"Leave, Allan." Guy coughed, attempting to frown and retain some measure of his previous authority over the younger man. "Do not feel you have to stay and watch my passing from this world. It was obvious where your loyalties lay when you left us back in Portsmouth."
Allan tutted, clicking his tongue against his back teeth and sniffed somewhat indignantly as he helped Guy struggle into a more comfortable position, propping his dark haired head upon his knee.
"I'm your boy, Giz." he snorted, smoothing the hair back, out of Guy's eyes and wiping the trickle of blood that oozed slowly from the corner of his mouth with the cuff of his own sleeve. "How many times do I need to tell you before it gets through that thick 'ead of yours, 'eh?" he tapped against Guy's forehead for good measure and to illustrate his point effectively. "Don't matter if we're on opposite sides an' all. I'm still your boy. You treated me well back in the castle, even when you was bitin' me 'ead off. You looked out for me, now I'm just returnin' the favour."
A lazy smirk tugged half-heartedly at the corner of Guy's rapidly paling lips. His eyes rolled closed once more, head swaying to one side again as his control over his own body dwindled. He chuckled again, with effort, managing to keep the bloody cough down to a few short, hacking barks before he stilled and took a deep breath in through his nose. Eyelids fluttered, as if he were trying to prise them open again and failed.
Something was on the tip of his tongue. It hung heavy in the air between them, waiting to be drawn forth from cold lips and heard by ears that burned with the silence of pre-noise.
"Do you think…" the recumbent man began finally, pausing for another breath after those few words, finding it difficult to fill his lungs fully. "Think that I will see…her again…before I am sent to Hell?"
And there is was.
"I'm sure of it. No doubt. She'll wanna give you an earful, Mate, and I'm not bein' funny but you deserve it."
"I know…" Guy smiled fondly at her memory. "If I could take it back, I would. A thousand times over, I would. I did one last thing for her…" He began coughing wildly again, shoulders, his entire body, wracked by them as the air caught in the back of his throat.
"Shhh, stop chattin', you're makin' it worse, you Pillock!" Allan growled but Guy merely shook his head as best he could.
"I did what she asked of me. I did it. For her…" he sounded near delirious, the words tumbling from between his lips as if they were falling over each other
"What are you talkin' about?"
Guy pressed his lips together into a thin, pale line and the blood that had trickled back across his lower lip made a crimson mirror image print upon his upper lip.
"Hood." the name must've tasted bitter upon his tongue because Allan noticed the skin at the corners of his mouth and either side of his nose pull into a silent snarl. Or perhaps it was the metallic taste of his own blood. "Tell him to go to Nottingham…Prince John's men will arrive after Sir Jasper's visit tomorrow morning…the rest is up to him now…"
Guy's words very nearly went unheard but Allan ears had perked up at the mention of the little weasel of a man, Sir Jasper, drawing him out of his contemplations of Guy's countenance and back into reality.
"What did you just say?!"
Guy, however, either ignored Allan's disbelieving exclamation or did not hear it. Instead he raised a gloved hand with effort and haphazardly placed it down onto the other man's shoulder.
"Thank you, Allan. For staying this time…" his eyes drifted then, to somewhere, some spot behind Allan's head, as if he was seeing something, or someone in that space of empty air. He smile, truly and genuinely for the first time since Marian had died, and his eyes closed again, losing their battle against exhaustion and death, his breathing slowing, the pulse in his throat ceasing until his spirit left him in one final, shallow exhalation.
Sir Guy of Gisbourne stopped fighting and whether he was headed to heaven or hell or straight to purgatory, Allan knew not. But anything was better than the torment he had suffered since that fateful day in the burning sands and brutal sun.
He took a deep breath, shifting slightly and moving Guy's head from his own lap to the hard packed dirt ground.
"S'alright, Mate," Allan told the silent, still body of the once great, fearful man. "I'll be seein' you again soon, I think."
-oOo-
"Where have you been?!"
Much's voice was shrill to Allan's ears after the silence of the forest. He ignored the furious glare stabbing into him as he dragged himself into the camp, boots caked with mud, hands and arms and fingernails plastered with it. Face smeared with dirt and dust and the slightest trace of red.
He'd dug the grave in silence. Shallow though it was, it served it's purpose and he had placed Guy's sword, stabbing it down into the ground at the head of the mound of soil and rocks, to serve as a marker. Even if he was the only person who remembered where the burial site was, even if he was the only one who knew who was buried there, it was enough.
"Nowhere." Allan replied quietly, tossing the bundle of firewood down at Much's feet and then shoving his grubby hands into his pockets, hiding them from the other outlaw's view.
"Well, you must've been somewhere, you're covered in mud. Absolutely filthy! Don't think you're coming in my kitch-"
"Leave it out, Much? Alright?" he snapped. "I need to speak to Robin."
Allan shouldered past him, towards the place where Robin sat up in the bows of the great tree they had built their shelter around and Much stood, mouth flapping open and closed a few times in outrage before he shut it firmly and sniffed, turning his back upon Allan and returning to his cooking pot.
Robin glanced down at Allan's approach, took in his current state of uncleanness and sniffed, turning his face back to the arrow that he was feathering.
"It is done then?" he queried, voice level and measured and Allan nodded, folding his arms across his chest and resting his weight onto one leg.
"Yeah, its done." he countered. "But we've got bigger things to worry about now, don't we."
It wasn't a question and it drew Robin's steely blue frown back to meet Allan's.
"What's that suppose to mean?"
And Allan laughed, little real amusement in his tone at all. His arms uncrossed and he fisted his hands upon his hips, tilting his head to one side and jerking it back in the direction of Nottingham Castle.
"Sir Jasper Fart-Face is on 'is way, in'e? Giz only went and knocked off the Sheriff before he came out 'ere."
Disbelief. Confusion, realisation, relief and then anger, anger that he had not been the one to end the Sheriff's, life all flitted across Robin's face in a matter of split seconds before he slipped down from the tree branch he was perched upon and he stood before the red haired outlaw.
"Looks like we go to Nottingham then." he shrugged.
-oOo-