Disclaimer: If I owned Robin Hood, it never would have been canceled...and the unspeakable events in the series would never have happened. Robin Hood belongs to Tiger Aspect and to its creators. Which does not include me, darn it.
So, I was starting a rewatch of Season 1 last week beginning with Will You Tolerate This? and it reminded me of a oneshot that I wanted to write ages ago (which has since been lost in one of my many notebooks somewhere). I always wondered what would happen if Robin had not saved Will, Luke, Allan, and Benedict. Perhaps this would be a good idea for an expanded story later, but this is all for now. Anyway, thanks for reading - don't forget to review!
He never should have listened to them.
He could still see them, standing on the scaffold. He could still see the looks in their eyes, the hope that he would save them.
He did not. He should have, but he did not.
Instead, he let them die. He let the punishment far outweigh the crime. Now, he paid for it.
He never should have listened to Marian and Edward. Never should have let the pressure they were putting on him overcome what he knew was right.
Will Scarlett. Luke Scarlett. Benedict Giddons. Allan-A-Dale.
They haunted him. Everyone could see that there was something wrong.
Marian had gotten exactly what she wanted. He had waited. He had waited and moved only when he could unseat the sheriff and set things back to the way they should have been. She had gotten everything she wanted. She had a comfortable life as the Lady of Locksley. But it was everything she desired in name only.
He knew that she fed the poor. He knew that she went around and fought injustice as the Night Watchman. He envied her that freedom of conscience. She had the money to do whatever she wished. She had the power as the wife of the Sheriff of Nottingham to change things.
She was not haunted by the deaths he could have prevented. It was strange how the deaths of four men haunted him more than the battles and death of the Holy Land. Was this guilt really so heavy that it had changed him so much?
Robin was almost a phantom of the man she had known. He had married her to protect her when her father had died in his sleep so that she would need for nothing and so that she would not have to worry about her lands being stripped from her.
But she was not as happy as she had thought she would be. She knew something was always on his mind. Something he should have done but never did. She did not know what. But she knew that he still dreamt about it. She knew that whatever it was had come between them.
Years later, he regretted not taking action almost as much as he regretted everything that had happened in the Holy Land. All of the deaths by his hand. All of the blood that was shed. All of the men who had died. All of it was comparable to the guilt and the heartache of seeing those four young men die before their time. It made no sense.
And yet it was. It was the silent creature that followed him wherever he went. It was the injustice that destroyed Nottinghamshire before he could reclaim it for the people. It was the pain that he had been forced to live with to see Dan Scarlett slowly dying of heartbreak when his beloved boys died. It was everything that made him unable to live with himself.
It was the choice he had not made. It was the choice he wished he had.
Everything was a choice. Everything was his fault.