Due to some last-minute editing, I'm afraid I'll have to recant an earlier statement I made about this story being sixteen chapters long. After shifting a few scenes here and there and doing some editing, the story has ended up being one less. So it's fifteen chapters. Thanks very much to everybody who's been reading so far and leaving feedback, as well.

Disclaimer: I must continue to admit that I don't own the characters that I am so shamelessly taking advantage of in this story. Though since the BBC hasn't been using them this season, I figure they don't mind me taking them out and playing with them.

0…0…0…0…0

o…o

Ramadan wore on through September. It was still sickeningly hot. They were still fasting. His stomach hurt all the time but he didn't care too much. He was still grieving, still too sad and too angry and too frustrated to care. Acre, more than ever, felt like a prison. It was stifling and close and unnatural and uncomfortable and he felt like a trapped animal ready to gnaw his own foot off to escape his captivity.

Djaq wanted out, too, and he knew it. Even if she didn't have the fire or the drive to run away and keep running until they reached England like he did, he knew that she had to get out. For her own good. This place, and the utter sadness and the bad memories it held, would soon enough destroy her.

Or she would destroy herself.

She was an entirely different person since Gabrielle's death. He understood her grief, and her anger. He remembered how he was when his father was killed. He went mad, crazy, wild, and filled with hate. He wanted to kill everyone and everything in the world to make them all pay for the hurt they'd caused him. But his friends, and especially Djaq, had pulled him back from that edge of madness, and helped him through it. He still hadn't been quite right in the head for a while after that, but with their help he did, eventually.

But with Djaq now, it was different. She lived inside her own head, in a world of hurt and anger and pain and was unreceptive to everybody and any attempt to help her. All she was anymore was hostile, angry, sullen.

It scared him.

He was actually frightened of her, the woman he swore he'd love forever. She was his friend and his companion and his lover and the way she was behaving now scared him silly. They stopped sleeping in the same bed a few days after the baby Khadidja died—Will thought it would just be a brief and temporary arrangement until she cooled off, when she was no longer dangerously emotional. But it lasted much longer. Two weeks now. He hardly saw her at all anymore.

He missed her. He missed her warmth and her tenderness, he missed talking with her, he missed her smile—he loved it when she smiled, and he'd give anything in the world for her to smile again now. But he didn't want her to blow up on him again, so he gave her the space she needed and told himself over and over again that soon enough it would pass and she'd be back to normal again.

He just didn't know how true that was.

And it worried him.

He wanted to leave, he thought again for the thousandth time today. He wanted to go back to England and be poor again, and sleep in the dirt with the rest of the gang, and deliver parcels to the poor, and huddle in blankets when it rained on them and they all got cold and shivery. He wanted to wear scratchy wool that was never properly cleaned, and take off these silky, beautifully made Saracen clothes and never wear them again. He wanted to be an outlaw again. He wanted to be happy again.

He wanted to go home.

He turned the leather pouch over in his hands. The woodworking tools that Ifran had given him before he left Acre for safer territory were still pristine in their little pocket-loops and neatly arranged. He hadn't touched them—what with one thing and another, he'd been too busy and then far too depressed to want to do anything. It was a rare occurrence that he felt simply too depressed to even do any work at all. Work kept him sane and grounded, but… he didn't even feel like it.

This place drained all of the life out of both of them. They needed to get out of here. There was absolutely nothing here for either of them—he wasn't sure there ever had been to begin with. So why were they staying?

She needed more time, he decided. He wanted to let Djaq heal before definite plans were made about leaving. In the meantime, he tried to be patient and understand as best he could her state of mind.

Most of all, almost more than anything else, he hated that he couldn't help her in any way. He tried for a little while, tried to hold her and hug her anger away, but she pushed him away. Sometimes she hit him, then covered her mouth in shock and apologized profusely, but when he got too close she'd recoil again.

"Please, just let me be," she'd tell him. "Leave me alone, just leave me."

It hurt him, but he'd reluctantly obeyed her request.

Really, what was it he'd been expecting to help her with? Did he want to kiss away her grief? That wouldn't've worked. Djaq wasn't some sad, weak, and simpering woman who needed protecting and constant comfort. To hold her and try to soothe away her sadness would just have made him feel better, anyway.

There was nothing to do but wait.

He never felt like going into the market anymore. It used to cheer him up and make him feel closer to the people here, but now it just made him feel so very lonely. He felt no desire to be close in any way at all to Acre. He wanted to be as far from it as he could.

He was in the house, by himself, on his back in the other bedroom and staring at the patterns in the crackles on the ceiling. It was the room Bassam had given him when they first came to stay here. It felt lonely, much like everything else these days.

Bassam. Once the man stopped making him nervous, he'd thought he was nice enough, a benevolent man. He was kindly and gentle and generous, let the two of them stay in his house without a second thought. And for everything he did for young Safiyyah—taking her in, giving her an education, giving her a home where she felt loved when she never felt loved or wanted by her own father—Will thought that Bassam was a good man.

And he was good. Just… misguided.

He refused to accept that Safiyyah had grown up and become Djaq. She was a grown woman, not a little girl and not a young woman in her teens, and certainly not the same as she'd been all those years ago. Her ideals had changed, her attitude towards life had changed, even her appearance had changed—even Will realized that Djaq was not the same as Safiyyah, that they were two different people. The others in the house, the servants who knew her when she was Safiyyah, never alluded to how she used to be—it was only Bassam who insisted on living in the past.

It made him feel less for the man. He wasn't malevolent, he just… didn't get it.

And he still talked of them staying in Acre forever. Talk of using Djaq's—Safiyyah's—dowry to purchase a house and put a life together, to stay in this city and in this place with its warm winters and unbelievably hot summers, with the war just outside their doorstep, and periods of torrential rain and then no rain at all the rest of the time. Put up with those violent sandy dust-storms and sudden run-for-your-life thunderstorms, and all those snakes and lizards and poisonous little critters that could kill them—and big lions and frightening things that could also kill them.

He still expected them to stay here, set up house… have children and build a life together.

It was because of Bassam that they were here to begin with. Because Bassam helped Safiyyah when she was younger, and because of that, Djaq felt like she owed him—for his kindness to her when she was younger, and for running away and leaving him and everybody else to think she was dead. So she stayed to pay him back, and he stayed because he didn't want to leave her behind.

Even though he never actually made any real attempt to make her stay, and certainly he didn't have to stay with her, it was hard for him not to quietly, discreetly resent the man.

That was all Will felt these days. Frustration, anger, loneliness, sadness, resentment. He kept to himself, away from Djaq, and he was lonely all the time, perhaps even moreso than he was when they first came here; he was frustrated and angry with being stuck here with no foreseeable way to escape; and resentment at Bassam, and Djaq, and everybody else that tied him here.

He abandoned the bedroom for the roof, where he sat alone. It was later in the evening and the heat of the day was settling away. He spent rather a lot of time up here, where he didn't have to be around anybody else in the house or talk to them or look at them and he didn't have to see Djaq, either. He couldn't remember the last time he'd actively been trying to avoid her, except maybe for before they made their confession.

Eventually, he figured, it would be dark enough and late enough to go back down into the house and go into his old room and go to sleep. He'd dream of the forest again, like he always did; dream of the freedom and the cool days, the towering trees—he always felt dwarfed and small by those massive trees; the desert made him feel small, too, but in a different way. The forest always made him feel small and protected, like a small child comforted by his parents. The desert just made him feel tiny and lost and alone. England was his home, and he missed it—and the forest.

His days dragged. He was bored all the time. He didn't know what to do.

The people in the marketplace were mostly gone now. Watching them passed some of the time, though he seemed to have acquired this unusually strong compulsion to spit on the people who appeared happy, just because he was so unhappy. There were Crusaders in the city today, being boorish and speaking in broken Arabic or shouting at the locals in hopes of getting a message across. He'd acquired a dislike for Crusaders as well—he didn't like the way they treated the locals, didn't like the way they mocked the local practices and talked poorly of them, as if nobody could understand what they said.

But just about everybody in the market was gone now, and there was nothing else to watch. He walked back around to the side of the roof near the back of the house, where it backed into an alley.

And there was where he saw Djaq.

She left out through the kitchen door, looking to one side and then the other like she was trying to see if anybody was watching her. Then she let the door close behind her. She clicked softly, like she was trying to get someone's attention.

"Where are you?" She said softly. "Come on out—come out. It's all right, I am right here."

A wave of terror came over him—was she waiting for… what? Someone? Another man? Was she…? No. It couldn't be.

"There you are," he heard her say. He jumped forward immediately, then diving to his belly and creeping forward to look down.

Djaq was kneeling down now, reaching out to…

A cat.

Oh, it was an ugly thing, scrawny with tatty orange striped fur; it was covered all over with bald patches, like its fur had worn away with age. It was missing part of one ear and its tail was crooked and had funny angles where it'd probably broken more than once and healed poorly.

But the cat waddled up to her on rickety old legs, walking under her hand as she petted it.

"Here, I have something for you," she whispered, pulling something out from her tunic. Scraps from the kitchen, probably. "Try not to tell on me," she said as the cat gobbled down his food. "They in there will not like it if they find out I am taking things for you."

The cat meowed. It had a croaky voice, for a cat.

Then she knelt to pick him up. The cat was ugly, left dirty pawprints and clumps of orange hair on her tunic and her shawl, but she picked it up anyway and cuddled it. She scratched his mismatched ears and let him rub his dirty head on her face and her neck.

What a sight to see, he thought to himself. A cat of all things, the ugliest thing he'd seen in a long time, and she seemed so in love with it. He didn't know what to make of it.

He thought about Djaq and that cat well into the night, as he lay alone in bed and stared at the netting above him.

The cat was something to love, he thought.

Something to love…

He watched her with curious fascination for the next several days as she fed and cared for that ugly cat. She smiled, she was soft and gentle. She seemed like she loved that cat, really loved it. It was…

Nice.

It was part of how she used to be, and he liked it. He only wished that maybe she'd break out of this horrible grief-stricken state she'd been in. Maybe.

And then, some days later after Ramadan had ended—neither one of them participated the feasts and festivities that marked the end of the holy month and the fasting—he overheard some of the servants talking.

"Where are you taking those scraps?" Ayla asked one of the younger girls.

"Outside. To the cat. I thought it might be hungry…"

Ayla sighed. "The cat is gone. Somebody ran over it with a cart."

Silence.

"Oh," and the girl threw away the scraps without another word about the cat.

Later he found Djaq outside in the courtyard by the fountain. She had her shawl up to her face—it was still the same one from the journey to Acre; it was the only one she wore most of the time, as if it had some kind of significance for her—and she was sobbing quietly into it.

He didn't know if he should approach her. He stayed rooted to his spot, hiding from view, debating back and forth in his head whether or not he should. On the one hand, he was still a little frightened of her, didn't know if she'd snap at him—on the other hand… he didn't want to sit here and do nothing.

"I know you are there," she said softly, looking up from her shawl.

"I'm sorry, I—"

But she wasn't looking at him anymore.

"Kind of an obvious question, but… is something wrong?"

No answer.

"For the love of god, Djaq, talk to me. You can't go on like this forever, neither of us can. I'll get down on my knees and beg you to talk to me. Please. Tell me what's wrong, tell me what I can do to help—even if all I can do to help is go piss off and leave you alone."

She buried her face back in her hands again.

"I'm serious. Please, just talk to me."

He wanted so badly to reach out and grab her, though he didn't know if he wanted to shake her until she talked to him or hold her tightly, tightly.

"No."

"You've got to—"

"I do not have to do anything. Just go away."

He stood quiet for a moment. "It's the cat, isn't it?" He asked cautiously. "I saw you feeding it and petting it. I heard it… it died."

"No," she answered sharply. "Not that cat."

"You can't pretend it was all nothing, I've seen you sneaking food to that thing for days."

"Shut up," she growled. "It was skinny and I fed it, it all means nothing—I have people dying all around me, why should I care about… about some stupid ugly cat?"

"Djaq, I saw you trying to take care of it. You were hugging it and snuggling with it."

She didn't say anything straight away.

"It meant something to you, didn't it? It had to."

Silence.

"Everyone and everything I have ever loved has been taken from me!" She shouted. "Everything, everything!"

She threw her hands down by her sides; he startled backwards.

"All of it—everything. The place I loved as a child, my brother—my friends. Zahra. Marian. The forest. Even the stupid cat!"

She threw a rock into the fountain and watched the fish scatter.

"How much longer can it be before everything else is taken away? Or if I am taken away from you?"

"It won't happen."

"You say that—but you cannot stop it. Neither of us can."

He put a hand on her shoulder; he felt her stiffen and tense up, but she didn't pull away or shrug him off. They were silent a long time.

"D'you wanna talk about it?" He asked softly.

"No, Will, I want to scream about it!" She yelled, ducking out from under his hand and pulling away from him.

He grabbed her wrist to keep her from walking away again. She turned around and pulled her free hand back—his whole body tensed up and prepared for her to punch him, but instead she looked up at him with hard eyes and froze in place.

"So scream," he told her. "Go ahead. Or hit me. I don't care. Yell, cry, scream, just do something! Stop holding it in like this!"

She tore away from him and stood there, her fists at her sides clenched so hard she trembled. Then she shrieked. Clenched her hands in her hair and slowly sank to her knees as she screamed and screamed and screamed. It was blood-curdling and he could swear he felt the entire inside of his head vibrating from it; he clasped his hands over his ears and ground his teeth until she stopped.

Then there was silence. A donkey brayed in the distance but other than that there was no sound; a few windows opened and people popped their heads out to look.

Will slowly pulled his hands away from his ears. "Did that help?" He asked tentatively.

"No," she rasped, then cleared her throat. Her voice was still croaky. "Now I am angry and my throat hurts."

Then she pushed him away and went off into the house somewhere, sobbing quietly.

He didn't know what else to do. What could he do?

When he climbed up to his bedroom for the night, he was shocked to discover the bed already occupied. For a moment he wondered if perhaps he hadn't accidentally gone to the wrong room—to the one and Djaq used to share.

"What the—?"

"I did not want to be alone," she said softly as she sat up. Her eyes were still red from crying and she looked so incredibly sad. "I cannot explain the way I have acted, and I can't even begin to try to excuse it. I do not know what is wrong with me. I cannot make the words come. But I have been so utterly detestable to the only person I have in the world right now. And… and… I just don't want to be alone."

He knew he had to say something. "I don't… want to be either," he murmured as he sat on the edge of the bed.

He curled up around her. She felt so small and she trembled violently in his arms.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

"Me too."

o…o

She slept fitfully, tossing in bed. She didn't know why she'd acted the way she had for so long. She was mad with grief, she supposed; she'd thought she might've been past that, that completely losing her mind from the pain of loss was something reserved for her youth. She thought that fiery explosions of temper and anger were long outgrown—when Marian died she'd been so overwhelmed with everything that happened all at once immediately after and so utterly shocked that she hadn't done anything but sit in a daze with the rest of them.

But she was wrong. Zahra—the last scrap of her past that she tried to hold close to her heart—was gone. And she went mad again.

Anger, venom, madness. It all came up and manifested in angry explosions aimed at anybody who got close, which most often was the one person she loved more than anybody else in the world. And Will sat and took the abuse and waited for her to collapse.

And he was right there when she did. When the cat died, the last of her sanity snapped. The cat was something to love, something to be close to. And then, as soon as she let herself love it at all, even the cat was killed, and she snapped. She felt as though everything in the world that was close to her was always taken away. Zahra in truth was gone long before she died; the friend she knew as a child and the girl she was when they were friends were ghosts from a time long ago. Part of her—the mad part, which was more and more of her these days—thought that the more she loved someone or something, the quicker it would be taken from her. If she loved Will, it could only be logical that he would be the next to die.

Her actions hurt both of them, but she didn't know how to get out from under the horrible black depression that consumed her.

She felt in turmoil. Now more than ever she knew she had to leave Acre. There was simply no way for her to live here. She could survive, yes, but not live. But her uncle…

When she opened her eyes again, she wasn't in the bedroom anymore. She didn't recognize where she sat and didn't feel nervous or surprised to find herself somewhere different than where she'd fallen asleep. She did immediately look down at the chess board in front of her—she hardly ever played chess; why was it there?—and in doing so noticed her feminine clothing. And something else.

Her hands looked smaller, she realized. Her hair was long again as it had once been. Her waist wasn't defined and her hips smaller, and her chest even smaller.

She was a girl again, as she was when she was Safiyyah.

"Stalling again?"

She looked up across the table.

"Are you afraid I will beat you?" Zahra asked. She, too, was young; perhaps fourteen years old, her face still freckled and her mouth still turned up in her permanent smile. She looked so real and solid there, not at all like a spectre in a vision or a dream. What was going on here? Her face was young and she, had only the hint of adulthood about her, but her voice was still that of the woman she grew up to be.

Her eyes went wide.

"What are you doing here?" She croaked.

"Playing chess. Your uncle wants us to stay busy so that he can speak with the Sultan's messenger in peace."

Her wide eyes narrowed and she frowned.

"But what are you doing here?"

"Surprised?"

"Well… yes, I am. You are—aren't you?" She scratched her head in confusion. "Or are you?"

"Yes, I am. I'm dead,," she finished for her. Her voice was gentle and low and the mirthful look on her face softened.

"This is a dream."

"It is."

Her heart sank a little bit—so it was indeed the delusion of a grieving mind. "So, then… why?"

"Philomena, I think we need to talk."

Pause.

"What of?"

She raised her eyebrows at her.

"Philomena—"

"Don't use that name anymore," Djaq said, cutting her off. "I'm not Philomena. That was a nickname you used when we were children—just like Zahra. You might look it because this is a dream, and I might look it too… but we are not children anymore. We have grown up and moved on from this, from here. We're new people, different people. We are adults—I am an adult. And you… you died in childbirth."

Her eyes were still narrowed with the vague hint mirth, but her smile was bittersweet.

"Then why are you still here? If you are so far gone from Philomena and Safiyyah and everything in Acre, and even the names hurt you—then why stay?"

She sat there silently for a long time, staring at the chess board between them. "I thought… that I owed it to him, to Bassam, because he brought me up and I left him the way I did and I—"

"It is the past," Gabrielle cut her off again. This was how they talked when they were younger, constantly interrupting each other when they came up with a new thought. But her voice was sterner than she was used to and it made Djaq recoil just the littlest bit.

"Well, yes, but…"

"You cannot change what you did—you are not proud of it, and I am sure your uncle does not like it, either. But you cannot go back and change it. You must instead learn to live with what you've done and the way you've lived. And you have, I think, on your own. You tried to repay him for his kindness, but he will not know you as Djaq—he remembers you as Safiyyah, just like I remembered you as my Philomena. You are not the same as you were then, and it is not who you are."

"So you noticed, then."

"I did. I wanted to pretend that you were still Philomena, but you are not. Philomena and Safiyyah are ghosts of the past. Bassam does not want to get to know the woman you have become—he wants you to stay the little girl he remembers. I suppose I wanted to, as well, and I accepted it too late. But what I do know of Djaq-the-woman is beautiful."

She felt herself smile despite her gloom.

"Djaq cannot live where Safiyyah still haunts. And you need to live with the family who know you and love you as Djaq."

"I know," she whispered. Even in her dream she could feel the suppressed sadness gathering as a lump in her throat. "I know what I have to do. It is the only way I—and Will—can live."

"You have to do what is right, if not for yourself then at least for him. Because you love him."

Her lip quivered. "I was afraid that if I loved him then something would happen to him. Everything in the world that I love is taken from me."

"You think so?"

"It is hard not to. The world does not care—we are all the same to the world."

She lurched forward and swept her arm over the chess pieces on the table before her until only the pawns remained. She grouped them in the middle of the board.

"You see? Pawns. We are all the same. Different colours, different sides, but in the end we are all the same."

Gabrielle had her eyebrows all the way up to her hairline; she ignored it and picked up one of the white ivory pawns.

"Robin of Locksley," she said, then she put it back down. She picked up another, and then another, and another. "John Little. Much. Allan a-Dale."

She set those pieces down.

"Little pawns, all the same. Roy White," she picked another piece up. She didn't know Roy and had never met him, but she heard stories of him from her comrades and knew of the way he died. She tossed the piece over her shoulder, paying no mind to where it landed. "He is out of the game, but no worries, there are plenty more where he came from. Roy is gone, so in comes Djaq the Saracen." She took a red pawn and placed it where the other had been. "And Lady Marian, too," she whispered, tipping a pawn over. "Rest in peace, Marian."

Silence.

"Djaq, too," she said, tipping another pawn. "And Sir Edward of Knighton." Another pawn went down. More followed as she rattled off a list of names. "Dan Scarlett, and Gabrielle, and Carter's brother, and Legrand the Queen's guard… small and replaceable and expendable. So how hard could it be for the world to take away Will Scarlett, too? He just another pawn and he is so like everybody else in the world."

She could swear she felt herself crying and she wiped her eyes; she felt nothing on her hands.

"Death and loss not care how wonderful the people are or how many others who love them will be left behind. They just take them away. I used to think that I had seen death so many times that I could not feel it anymore. But I can, and I do, and I hate it."

"What do you feel?"

"I feel… I feel like…"

She took a deep breath.

"I just feel. Too much feeling for words, any words."

"And you want to do what, exactly? You cannot bring them back."

"I know that! But… I must repay the selfless acts of the past and honour the fallen. It is the right thing to do."

"And how do you repay somebody for the past?" Gabrielle asked. "How do you do something in the present, here and now, in payment for something that happened before? How do you honour your heroes?"

She choked out the words. "I do not know."

"The answer is that you simply cannot. There is nothing you can do, no speech you can give, no monument or memorial that could be built that can sufficiently honour the dead and be worthy of the sacrifices they made—and neither can any words or actions change the past. No matter how much we may want them to, it is futile to try. And all you can do for your heroes is to remember what they fought for, and continue their cause. Remember them, and they will live forever."

She sat there for a long, long time, digesting what had been said. Once she told Allan a-Dale that his brother could still live through his own memories, and that the twin she had tried so hard to forget lived inside of her; she even told Will that his father wasn't gone, but rather away, and that as long as he let his father's memory live in his heart and remembered him, he would always be there. These were the things she told other people, to comfort them, but that proved little solace to her in similar situations.

She knew all of this already. But it had to come from someone else in order for her to pay attention to it.

She knew what had to be done.

"I need to leave," she said.

"Yes," Gabrielle said. "I know."

The scene before her was fading and she felt as though she was walking down a dark tunnel.

"Veris, Philomena," she heard Gabrielle's voice, faint and fading behind her.

It faded faster and faster .

Veris, Philomena…

o…o

0…0…0…0…0

This chapter gave me a lot of trouble, so I'm glad to see it posted and definitely glad to see it come together in a way I like. One of the things I hate about writing is cutting out parts—and sometimes very large chunks—that have proven to be superfluous or pointless or that no longer fit in with the way the story has changed. I had a scene written for this fic in which Will finds two kittens for Djaq in a desperate attempt to try to cheer her up, but that scene had to go; sure it was cute, but it was utterly pointless.

I hope the dream isn't too much! I liked it but I found it difficult to write—it's quite powerful for something that plays out so quietly in my head. The phrase 'veris, Philomena' means, 'it's true, nightingale' in Latin. It comes from a song called 'Return of the Birds', from which I took the name Philomena. (I was also very surprised to find out that my spell-checker recognizes that name. Go figure.)

The next and final update will be on Friday, just as planned. Like always, if you'd like to leave a review then by all means please do so. It's always nice to hear what people have to say.