You've Done More Than Enough, a robin hood bbc fanfic

Title: You've Done More Than Enough
Rating: PG (K+)
Word count: 723 words
Characters: Guy/Meg, Guy/Marian
Summary: OH, MY HEART. Starting from their final moments of the episode, going back to their first meeting. Guy thinks of Meg and of Marian, and realises something about himself. SPOILERS FOR 3x09.

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The ground is hard, and cold. He stays there for some time, allowing the ache to ebb and flow through his chest. He doesn't cry. He can't cry. She is still warm in his arms; warm, small and empty.

I always quite liked you.

They are like a balm, like a poultice to a wound, those words. They echo in his mind.

He had walked with her in his arms, each step slow and careful. Weak, her eyes were closed, but once as he looked down they were open. He had smiled reassuringly. He could rescue her, he had thought. He could. This time…

As they reach the glade, he looks down again. Her breathing is so shallow now, and with a dull thud in his chest he realises that she cannot be saved. She seems to know this. As he lays her gently – so gently – against the tree, she looks up at him.

Kiss me.

It is the lowest of whispers, but he hears it. His heart races in guilt, the image of Marian's face in his mind. Her face in the light of turret windows, stiff-necked and uncertain. Her lips as she clutched him in that stone hallway. Her confused hand reaching out towards him in a fire-warm room. Her smile as she told him it was Robin that she loved.

Meg's face has no guile to it, only hope and a hint of pain. She is dying. She is dying, and what she wants most is this. To be kissed by a shell of a man, hollowed of love. Perhaps…perhaps he heard her wrong. He shakes his head – no. It is the right thing, surely. They are still ragged and filthy from the dungeons, sitting on cold ground in the damp mist of a lake. It is enough that she must die like this. He will hold her, and ask nothing of her. He will not force his affection on another, when it is surely not him she really wants. But then she says please, and watches him for his response, and he sees himself in that painful hope.

That is why he kisses her. To try to answer as he had never been answered, to give as he had never received.

When it comes it will be very quick.

He is welcoming it, he realises as he stands there at the executioner's block. To escape from this. To escape from the forcing down, from the pushing away, from the tug and pull of everyday when there seems nothing truly good left in it. There is no need to escape his memories, not any more. Those have become hollow. He has grown so used to forcing down the emotion that used to overwhelm him that he can picture those memories now, nearly without that familiar pain. In his mind last night, he walked to Knighton, and stood in her house.

And Marian was there, as she always was in his recollections. She said nothing, only looked at him with cold and fearful eyes. He stood across the room from her, neither of them saying anything. He felt the space between them, that space that his heart used to reach out to fill, used to call at him to move closer, but he lets it rest. And the fear and coldness in Marian's face lessened, just a little. She smiled. It was a quiet, solitary sort of a smile; the smile of an unshared thought. But there was sympathy there, he thought. In his mind, Marian understood just how much he regretted…everything. Truly regretted, now, not just frustration at his own failures.

He looks across at Meg, standing before her own execution block. Her eyes are full of fear, and full of trust.

There must be some good in you yet.
You don't know me.

It was her step that had first caught his ear; just like that same light step she – Marian – had. He brings that name forth from his memory. Marian. Marian. He thinks it, and the sense of sickening guilt that used to flood him is only a shallow lapping. He had thought Meg a jabbering, petulant, girl. And of course he had snapped at her, because he was capable of nothing except being hateful. But in believing him more than that, in honestly believing it and acting on it, she had restored him. Not completely. She was no miracle. But she had done something. Meg had restored something within him.

Meg.

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end.