Why hello! This is my first foray into the Robin Hood fandom! This fic is set after Larnder's Ring in series 2 when Marian returns to the castle. Marian is finally realizing exactly what is at stake and sometimes it is the harmless lies that are necessary to keep on fighting. R/M. And beware (or be excited): the angst is abundant. As always, disclaimer: I do not own anything, the amazing (and wonderfully angsty) BBC does.
Enjoy and review if you please!
He comes to her in the castle so randomly it has become a pattern, a paradox as inverted as their love (he shouldn't have come back--he should have been swallowed by the bleeding sands. She shouldn't have waited--she should have accepted her offers and succumbed to womanhood). But neither have ever been able to accept their lots in life.
He slips through all the places he shouldn't be allowed, in the castle and in her, and manages to steal moments of her life where emptiness is a barrier to the bliss he always gifts. She cannot afford such luxuries, not now, not when so much is at stake.
Tonight is no different when he climbs through the window, a smile on his tired face, his arms outstretched and molded to her form before she arrives in his arms. Such is the ritual, and such is the familiarity.
As always, he kisses her hungrily but tonight, there is a passion in his insistent lips that tells her that she has almost lost him today on the edge of a sword. With this revelation, she responds with immediate fervor and she wonders if she won't explode in a flash of fire and emerge as someone new, like the phoenix. She is tempted, so very tempted, to let him bring her to ashes but resists, because she is unsure whether she wouldn't lose herself in the transformation.
"I have missed you," he whispers, panting between words, his eyes closed, hands on her face, neck, waist. Memorizing.
She was very close to losing him today.
"Stop," she demands as he leans into her again, her heart thundering so hard it must be pumping blood, but not a drop is nearing her face. "Stop, we cannot do this right now. I cannot do this right now."
He frowns. "What's wrong, my love?"
She starts, as if the question is unexpected, confusing. "I…Nothing…Everything. Everything is wrong."
His eyes darken and she glimpses the man he has become. "What did Gisborne do?"
She sighs, a frustrated puff of air that can never seem to quite blow away this argument. "Nothing, he didn't do anything."
"Then what?"
She is agitated and steps away from him with a hand across her eyes, sure that honesty is not what needs to be voiced at this moment, but unable to conjure an adequate lie. Though she wonders fleetingly if anything she says can be construed as truth. Because all she knows now is deceit. Her thoughts are not her own.
"I just…I can't keep doing this."
He does not ask what she is talking about, and she thinks, if possible, she loves him even more.
And then, as always, he speaks.
"Why not?"
He asks it defensively, the letters twisting to form an underlying curse with the spelling Gisborne. She hates that the man is having an affair with both their thoughts, hates to think what degrading things the Marian inside both Gisborne's lonely, abused mind and Robin's imaginative, horrified thoughts is being subjected to.
Why not?
"Because this isn't enough, Robin!"
He draws away from her, obviously hurt, and turns his back as he focuses his weakness into the anger that is their buffer from truth.
"What would you have me do?" He says it angrily, bitterly. She knows he is trying to give her everything, but what he doesn't understand is that love cannot encompass such a concept. And that is all he has to give.
"Nothing! Just…I cannot stand this. I cannot pretend that I am happy in this castle, with these men that are stealing my life, and who don't even have the decency to finish it before I truly lose everything."
"Marian …" The wearied, worried tone in his voice angers her. It reminds her of times he blighted with his leaving, and of new protection she has never asked for. He lays a hand lovingly on her cheek, but it is only there for the shadow of a moment before she flinches away. It is not a sign of affection, she knows, but one of guilt. He nearly committed the crime of leaving her forever. Punishable by her own death.
"Do not chastise me! If it is at all shocking that I would rather die than see what I love taken from me, then you do not know me at all."
"Marian…" Panicked, now. So he knows of her seriousness.
"I have already lost my father, Robin," she says quietly, her eyes stinging uncomfortably. I have nearly lost you. She does not say this. "And we are losing. Nothing is getting better."
"We are making a difference," he insists fiercely. "You are making a difference. To the poor, to my gang, to me."
She is approaching hysterics, pacing, distancing herself from him as her tears fight their way to release. "What does that mean, 'we are making a difference'? I see no difference! I have been fighting this war for nearly 4 years and I have only seen things get worse, no matter what I do!"
Robin grabs her upper arm sharply, pulling her to him harshly and throwing her against his chest, his arms vice-like, furious in their cloistering grip.
"You cannot think like that," he says, as if his voice has the velocity to banish her thoughts as they appear. "You must not." But he fails to continue into the words of heroism, the lectures of a leader, and he lacks the conviction she expects to hear, the lies and promises he idealistically spews.
Only a small rebuke for a truth he hasn't had the courage to voice.
She takes a shuddering breath to keep her eyes dry and her resolve steady, his heartbeat thrumming steadily in her ear. She is unwilling to let her greatest weakness sap the rest of her strength.
"You must go. I will not have you caught."
"And so I shall not be."
"Robin! This is risky, and foolish, and entirely not worth your life."
"You are my life; thus it all makes little difference, so long as there is breath on your lips, my lady."
He smiles at her and bows enthusiastically while kissing her hand with a flourish, his good humor billowing back in with a darker tinge than has ever entered his manner before. Because there is a promise of morbidity in his words and their sacrifice.
But she, her calculating, borderline-obsessive mind feverishly dark, does not slip into this easy frivolity, however ironically flavored, that has characterized their relationship since the beginning.
"Never let them win," she says fiercely, enough fire in her words to freeze him where he stands. She touches him, but this time it is he who flinches out of her outstretched hands. "I am certain that if they killed you, I would have the strength to follow…"
"Please, Marian, never…it is a cardinal sin," he gasps, his expression beyond horror. She ignores him, as always. But it is strange now, this small habit, and an appalling reminder to how very little they have changed despite their epic fall from grace into this abyss of damaged love.
"…And it frightens me. Because I can't decide whether an eternity without you, without enduring the pain of this life, is worse than living without you in this Hell with hope for Heaven and being denied you anyway. We can't…we can't know, Robin." She has thought about this, more than any youth (because at one and twenty, she is still barely more than a child) should. It is the uncertainty that brings the tears to their fall.
She doesn't know whether she goes to him, or he pulls her to him once again, but she is wrapped in his arms, her tears soaking his shirt and her dark hair stringing from his own. And she is sure that she cannot claim these thoughts as solely hers.
"We cannot know, Marian. But we have to have faith that we will be together. That this suffering is not all for nothing." His voice is strained, trying to believe his own words. "There is nothing else we can do."
They have never been very good at speaking the truth to one another. Even in the throes of death. They have almost reached an understanding to finally speak truth that (at a different time, in a different life) could save them.
But they have arrived at an unprecedented precipice.
And now, Marian wants him, needs him, to lie. "Promise me you'll never leave me again."
"I will never leave you again," he vows, the weight of his determination repressing the declaration to barely more than a sighed whisper. "Never again will you ever have to live without me, whether it be Sheriff-" he kisses her forehead. "Betrothal-" he kisses his engagement ring that lies as a talisman about her neck. "Or the entirety of the universe, that threatens otherwise."
She almost believes him.
She sucks in a breath as her tears run their course, pooling with a bottomless reflection on the ground between them. A chiasm that needs closing.
She knows it is he who will break the illusion first, and that she may not ever be able to forgive him such a betrayal.
"Never again, my love, never again," he whispers fiercely, as if daring Fate to shred their hearts. He has always been too bold.
She believes him. She must. But she cannot help but wonder whether she is forever purgering herself, or if her words are a purist's truth.
"Then I will never stop loving you, Robin of Locksley."
Regardless, at this moment, with his lips on hers, she almost believes herself.