Note: This is not really a story so much as a series of vignettes, starting from the end of series 1 and continuing on towards totally speculative future stuff - I'm anticipating maybe 8 stories/chapters in total. They are all focused on Robin and Marian, because tbh that's where my interests lie :) Feedback is always appreciated - compliments and criticisms alike. Note that some chapters - particularly chapter 3, although 1 and 2 contain maybe a line here and there - contain dialogue directly from the show; this is of course not mine. Nor are these particular variants of Robin Hood and his men, but let's be real: Robin Hood belongs to the people. Happy reading!
The title, embarrassingly, is from a Jewel song, but it's actually kind of a lovely one. "Love is a flame, neither timid nor tame"...
When Robin arrives it is almost a relief, though she knows there will be a fight. (Robin visits Marian the night before her wedding, 1x13)
She has never truly forgiven him for leaving.
When she was seventeen years old he had placed his mother's ring on her finger and promised. I will always be there for you. You are my best friend. Marry me, Marian. And she had believed him; stayed up nights thinking of names for their dark-haired, blue-eyed children: Edward for her father, and Katherine for both their mothers. Eleanor, for the queen, and Richard, of course. What noble had a boy child in those days and did not call it Richard?
He had kissed her the night before he left for the holy land, standing out in front of Knighton Hall two weeks after he'd given her that ring, and the salt on his lips did little to assuage her anger. He should be sad. He should be miserable.
He should be staying.
For five years, she heard no word from Robin of Locksley, though perhaps she should not have expected it. After he'd kissed her - and it was a deep, true kiss, with Marian's arms twined around his neck and tears in her eyes to match his - she had sobbed out a curse and thrown his ring across the dirt to land at his feet.
For five years Marian remembered that as the last of Robin of Locksley: her engagement ring at his feet, and something broken in his eyes.
She has not forgiven him, but she cannot forgive herself, either.
And now she will marry another. Something inside her clenches to think of it. Guy's hands, Guy's lips. Marian tries to imagine allowing him to touch her, to undress her, to-
When Robin arrives it is almost a relief, though she knows there will be a fight.
"Are you feeling better?" he asks, his posture casual. Leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed over his chest. She sees it at once for what it is: a pose. His body cannot hide the shudder in his voice. She almost died today, and though Marian does not fear death, she does not like to think what her death would do to others. To her father, to the people in the village. To Guy. To Robin.
The things she says next, she imagines regretting for the rest of her life. Something about belief, namely hers, that she could teach Guy to love - and maybe she could, but does she want to? After she had nearly died at Guy's hands - after Robin had saved her, and pleaded with her, and offered himself to her - after all of that, she would still marry Guy?
Impossible. It seems impossible to her, but she still says it. "It is time to grow up and accept our lot in life." Coolly, carefully. And Robin just looks at her long and even, like he doesn't know he owns her heart, and then he leaves. Just like she told him to. No more fighting. No more declarations of love.
She cannot bear it.
That night sleep eludes her, and when she finds it at last, she is chased by dreams. Hands and darkness and a future she does not want. Dreams of her wedding night. She's had these dreams before, from the time she was fifteen and first noticed that her beloved friend had become something altogether more. Robin's eyes, blue like the water and grey like the clouds, and his hands, scarred and calloused and gentle with her, always. Even when they sparred as children, after he knocked her down, he would pick her up as though she were a fragile thing. In those months before their engagement he would take both her hands in his, his thumb tracing small circles on her palms. She used to dream of his hands on her, unlacing her gown to trail over the bare skin beneath. And his eyes, and his mouth: quiet for once, to kiss her better. Marian knew that plenty of women found pleasure in the marriage bed, and she intended to be one of them.
Her dreams now are different. Guy will not be gentle: she knows this. He will try, she thinks, but he does not yet know how to be gentle. Perhaps in time she will teach him, but she expects no pleasure, no delight. She has never longed to feel his body pressed up against hers.
When Marian hears a sigh, she awakens abruptly, though the sound might well have come from her.
It didn't.
After his visit with Marian, Robin spends the rest of the afternoon conducting a vicious sword fight against an old oak in the forest. It doesn't take long for his arms to ache - the tree doesn't give the way a body would, the way Gisborne's body would - but he soldiers on, relentless.
Much finds him then, and Robin is surprised, and relieved. He doesn't really believe Much would leave him, no matter what awful things he says, but it wouldn't be a shock if he slunk off for a while.
But Much is too good a man for slinking. He finds Robin, and takes the sword from his tired hands, and - what a good man, Much, what a good friend - ignores the fact that Robin has obviously been crying, and turns his back so Robin can wipe the evidence away a bit more privately.
He goes back to camp with his head low. He had been so certain of his success and failure colors his mood black, and as much as the rest of the gang tries to engage him, he will not be moved. While Much cooks dinner and Djaq leads the others to the road, Robin leans against a tree, moodily scraping at arrows. He says nothing and ignores every sympathetic glance, never taking his eyes from the arrows. Robin is not a methodical worker, never has been - he doesn't have the attention span for it, he's not Will - but if he does not stop working, he will not have to think.
And then night falls. Robin works by firelight for a while, but it dies after the others have gone to sleep, and he cannot picture himself caring enough to light it again. It's a waste of firewood, anyway, he hears Much saying, like he's said a thousand times before. And it makes us too easy to spot.
So he goes walking.
When Robin was a boy, and Marian no more than nine, her mother had passed away. Slowly, over a long, cold winter, and though everyone else in the village had seen it coming, Marian was still shocked. She had stared stone-faced through the funeral and as they put her mother's body in the ground. When her father reached out to console her, she pulled away. The villagers whispered about it, unkind things, ungenerous, but Robin knew.
For two weeks after her mother's death, Robin snuck out of the manor at night and slept in a nook outside Marian's room, tucked under the roof of Knighton Hall. Perched like a bird, he listened to her crying and tossing, sleeping and waking only to cry again. Though it was April, the wind was still cold. When the fire in her room went dim, he added wood and stoked it, so she would not wake up alone in the dark. When she cried out in dreams, he tucked her blanket back around her shoulders, placed a cool hand against her forehead until she calmed. For two weeks he kept vigil. Neither of them had brothers or sisters who survived infancy, so they only had each other. Just as Robin had taught her all the curse words he knew, just as she'd helped him with his sums, just as they'd worked together at shooting and fighting, so he had kept her warm during her first motherless weeks.
After that, Robin found himself watching over her at night every once in a while. When he was prowling the village in the dark and both she and Much refused to accompany him, he would stop by her window. Just to make sure.
He could not have explained this instinct if someone had asked. He only knew that it was important: that it was his responsibility to watch over her. This went on for years, until he was sixteen and Marian barely fourteen, and he realized that the ache he now felt watching her sleep had nothing brotherly in it.
Tonight, though, he'll make an exception. Tomorrow she will be in someone else's bed - in his bed with Gisborne, a nasty part of his brain reminds him - though she won't be Gisborne's. Marian is not the kind of woman who belongs to anyone.
Robin wants so desperately to belong to her.
One last night, he sits outside her window and watches her until he falls asleep.
Marian sits upright, clutching the blanket to her chest to cover her thin chemise. "Robin?" she hisses into the darkness, then shakes her head. No one is outside her window. Least of all him.
But she hears a rustling that cannot be explained by the leaves. She pulls out the dagger she keeps next to her bed and moves silently to the window. "Who's there?"
As she gets close, a pair of eyes peek over the bottom of her window. Marian gasps. "What-"
Robin's head comes up next, followed by his shoulders, his long legs. He climbs through her open window as though he'd been invited. "Sorry," he says, looking embarrassed, if not quite embarrassed enough. "I didn't mean to-"
"What are you thinking?" she whispers harshly. As quick as she can she grabs her robe and pulls it over her nightgown, though she knows it's too late for that. "Sneaking around here in the middle of the night, like an-"
"Outlaw?" Robin suggests, grinning.
Marian sighs. "Honestly."
He runs a hand through his hair - it's getting long, Marian notes absently - and says, "I'll go, then."
"No." She hears the word from afar, as though someone else said it. She hears it like a secret that should have stayed unspoken. Robin raises an eyebrow, and she rushes to make the word sound less like a plea and more like a demand. "You must have had something to tell me, if you came out here in the middle of the night."
"No, not really." He shrugs, grandly. Typical. She has to admit, his showmanship has improved over the years.
"You were walking through the village, and you just happened to fall asleep on my roof?"
"Under your roof."
"Robin."
He sighs, but he's half-smiling up at her through all of that hair. "I'll tell you, if you must hear it. It won't do much good."
"Try me." She sits down on her bed and faces him, wrapping her arms around herself. It feels like protection, though against what she doesn't know.
She watches him as he purses his lips, rolling the words around in his mouth, shifting his weight. She'll wait. "Marian, I-"
A long pause. She just looks at him.
When Robin exhales, he takes his whole body with him; folds into himself as he leans against the wall, looking back at her. "I used to do this when we were young."
"Do what?"
"Sleep outside your room. When you were upset, or when I was worried about you. I'd go walking and end up here." He laughs, but it's sharp around the edges. "I thought I could protect you."
This is something she's always known, but hearing him say it breaks her heart a little bit, and makes her furious at the same time. Just like always, she supposes. "I don't need your protection."
"Don't you?" he shoots back. "Here you are, about to marry Gisborne. And if I hadn't shown up here with that necklace, you wouldn't be marrying him at all because you would be dead."
Marian keeps her voice even. "Well, if you hadn't gotten involved, I wouldn't have lost the necklace in the first place."
"A necklace he stole from a villager!" Robin explodes. He isn't leaning anymore. They stare at each other from across the room, and Marian could swear that the ghosts of all their choices haunt the eaves of Knighton Hall. The air is thick with all their long years together. All the history and all the tears and all of the choices.
Everything is a choice, he always says. Indeed.
In the end, it's Marian who gives in. She stands up and crosses to him, and holds her hands out to his. A peace offering. He takes them, and while she talks he traces small circles on her palms, like it's instinct. Marian shudders. "I am sorry, Robin," she whispers, her gaze lifting from their joined hands. His jaw is set, and she cannot stand the thought of Robin Hood crying. Of making Robin Hood cry. "I wish things could be different."
He just nods, his face tilted to the floor and his eyes closed. He turns his face away from her before he opens them again, but it doesn't fool her. "I should let you sleep." On silent feet he retreats to the window, but Marian places a hand on his arm.
"Wait," she says. She wants to ask him why he came, what he wanted to tell her - he had skirted the question so easily - but looking at him, his body turned to the window and his eyes on hers with something desperate in them - she cannot ask. She cannot make him say it.
Anyway, she already knows.
"Please stay," she says, before she knows what she is doing. He stiffens and turns toward her, wary.
Marian closes her eyes and breathes. She wants to remember this, when she is another man's wife. The scent and sound of the fire in the hearth, the dried lavender under her pillow. And Robin, who has always smelled like earth and sweat and apple blossoms and home.
He still looks uncertain, but his expression has softened. Marian takes off her robe, conscious all the time of his eyes on her in her thin nightgown, but he doesn't say a word. She slides back under the blanket on her narrow bed, rests her head on the pillow. Turns onto her side, facing him. She will not ask him. If she has to say it out loud, then she has lost, and Marian has given up so much already.
Robin still hasn't moved, and she is ashamed to feel tears prick at the corners of her eyes. Perhaps this is it: the moment when he has finally had enough. When he finally stops fighting for her.
And then he bends down to take off his boots. His jacket, too, and the heavier shirt, and he never looks away. When he is down to his undershirt and leggings, he climbs under the blanket. Turns onto his side, facing her. He loops his right arm around her and sneaks his left arm between her stomach and the mattress, pulling her tight against him, their foreheads touching. She slides her feet between his legs, pressing out the last of their air between them.
Marian exhales.
His right hand reaches up to run through her hair. He twirls it around his long fingers and her breath catches when his palm brushes her jaw, then rests there. "Marian," he says.
If they were man and wife, she thinks, they would lie like this every night, just to remind each other what their bodies felt like, how perfectly they fit together. Of course, if she were the wife of Robin Hood, they would be lying together in the forest, instead of in her warm bed.
She realizes suddenly what a small sacrifice it would actually be, to give up her warm bed to marry the man she loves. If only that were all she would lose.
He traces his thumb around her ear, her jaw, her lips; when she presses a kiss against his thumb he blinks and inhales sharply. She trails her lips down his palm, and her left hand comes up to his lips. Dry and warm, and soft as they press against the backs of her knuckles.
Robin doesn't kiss her, though he surely knows that she would kiss him back. But his lips on her hands fill her with enough regret and desire already, and if he kissed her she could not possibly marry Guy tomorrow.
The thought of him should bother her now, she realizes. She should not be so comfortable thinking about him while she lies in someone else's arms. She cannot imagine sharing this kind of intimacy with Guy. With anyone else.
Finally, regretfully, Marian turns in Robin's arms so her back is pressed against his chest. She pulls his arms close around her, and shivers as he nuzzles her neck. His legs curl against hers and they sigh, audibly, at the exact same moment. She can feel him smiling into the curve of her shoulder. "Good night, Marian."
"Good night," she says, doing her best to clear her mind. He whispers something else but she cannot make it out, and in any case, she is fast asleep before he speaks again.