Prompt: milliways_bar DE Challenge
Recipient: sardonicynic
Summary: Marian/Robin : bitter ; There's nothing left to understand.
Spoilers: This takes place after Robin returned from the war, toward the beginning of season two.
Disclaimer: Robin & Marian both belong to BBC Robin Hood. Title from Edwin Arlington Robinson's poem Lazurus.
There are many things they don't talk about when they find each other again.
The wounds of battle; in far flung land or deadly court. The lives lost. The humiliations. The scars. The ghosts. The hard choices. The lies. The nightmares. The weights of promises; loved ones. These things matter, but not enough.
Not as much - as parents choosing to starve for children to eat one more day, for tongues that get cut for self-defense, houses and businesses burned for missing tax money, imprisonments without excuse. The fear in a strangle hold, choking all of Nottingham. The opulence stocked in chests and heaped on houses of unholy.
Whatever games they once played with each other's hearts, whatever grand idealistic childhood dreams of right and wrong echo in each other's faces, the remnants of a golden childhood turned garish, they know what the only importance's are now, what the ever-heavy course of duty requires before all else.