This epilogue has been floating around in my head for months now, and I was debating whether or not to a) write it, and b) post it. After all, the story really does end in the last chapter, but part of me wanted to take this peek into the lives of our favourite characters, to see how they've adjusted to a life without war. Then I decided, why not? I'm sure it'll be as amusing for you to read about their lives as it was for me to write it.

Disclaimer: Robin Hood is, sadly, still not my property. I think it's time to just accept this. So much for bribery, begging, and threats.

0…0…0…0…0

o…o

October, 1956

Will left Djaq to pay the cabbie and dashed up the walkway through the rain and sleet, taking refuge underneath the tiny overhang above the front door and flattened himself against it in an effort to get as much of himself out of the wet as possible. Djaq fumbled with the money and called back, "Keep the change!" before hefting her bag and running up the walk after him. She slid dangerously on the wet stone and he lunged down to grab her, keeping her from falling.

"Are you okay?" He asked her, his hands on her shoulders.

"I am fine," she assured. Then she slapped him on the chest. "You might have taken my bag for me, or offered to pay the man instead of charging up the walk like that!"

"All's fair in love and war," he drawled, kissing her on the cheek.

"And which is this?"

"It could be either, or both."

She giggled softly.

The weather was horribly bleak. The sleet and rain that fell were that icy, sharp cold that bit into his hands and face, the exposed skin; wind rushed, too, bending the bare gray-brown trees at an angle and blowing the wetness right into their faces. The sky above was gray and solid, with some lighter gray clouds lower down were floating along slowly. The last few leaves clung to the trees in the wind, hanging curled and crumpled off of the otherwise naked limbs.

"I told you we should've brought a brolly," she groused.

"How were we supposed to know it was going to rain? It was perfectly nice when we left Nottingham this morning!"

"Oh my goodness," she gasped, laying her hand on her cheek and adopting a mock-surprised expression. "Rain in North Yorkshire? How were we ever supposed to anticipate that?"

He growled and grasped her around the shoulders from behind, roughly tousling her short hair. She never let her hair grow longer than the bottom of her neck before cutting it shorter again—he used to think that this was simply a throwback from her long-ago masquerade, but nowadays he couldn't imagine Djaq any other way. The thought of her with long hair just didn't seem right.

She squirmed and tried to wiggle out of his grip.

"You cheeky thing, you," he rumbled in her ear. "Somebody should spank you."

"Did you have anybody specific in mind?" She asked innocently.

"Cheeky," he said again. He released her and smacked her behind.

He found himself silently and reverently grateful to whoever was in charge of making tight jeans fashionable for women—she wore them very well, he noted, with the clothing hugging her around her backside and legs. Of course, he'd only be able to see her backside if she wasn't wearing that great big, thick gray Duffle coat. She loved that thing—he gave it to her for Christmas last year—and wore it all the time. Through the little open part of her coat, he could see her black-and-white striped shirt; and she also wore, as always, her bright red Converse All-Stars.

She'd always looked quite a bit younger than she was, and her current choice of clothing tended to make that worse, so much so that it wasn't uncommon for fairly young teenaged boys, upon failing to notice her wedding band, to shamelessly flirt with her or make eyes at her across train the aisles or on the bus. He'd long grown used to this and it didn't bother him—after more than ten years of marriage, insecurities of that nature were a thing of the past—and mostly thought it was funny, particularly when the boys found out that Djaq was both married and twice their age.

He'd changed with the years, as well; he kept his hair a little longer than he used to, a style that the times now permitted. She said that rather liked him with the longer hair. And in the snug jeans he wore more often these days. And in his plain black coat and black-and-white trainers. Actually, she said she liked him in anything. He also knew that he, too, looked quite a bit younger than his thirty-three years; not nearly as much as she did, but enough that he was still asked for identification when he tried to buy alcohol.

While she and Will were being downright silly on the front step, the door opened. He couldn't see right away who had answered it, until he looked down and saw a head full of dark sandy-brown hair and big blue eyes.

"Were you smackin' her?" The little boy asked as he looked carefully back and forth between his aunt and uncle.

"Only a little bit," Djaq laughed.

"Daniel, don't you know you're not supposed to answer the door without asking who's there first?"

"Oh."

The door slammed; they both leaped back in surprise.

"Who is it?" Came the muffled question from the four-year-old on the other side of the door.

Both of them, still standing and being steadily drenched by the cold rain, were completely doubled over with laughter. They could only have expected that level of cheek from Luke Scarlett's son.

They heard another voice on the other side of the door, this one a grown woman's. "Why are you yelling at the door, Danny?"

"There's people on the other side, laughin'."

"People—what? Who? Did you open the door for total strangers?"

"No."

"Do I have to tickle it out of you, or are you going to tell me who it is?"

"Uncle Will and Aunt Djaq."

"You mean you just—oh for goodness sake!"

The door opened quickly, and on the other side was Auntie Annie. Her bright ginger-red hair had greyed over the years, and she fought aging the whole way by dying her hair with Indian henna, producing an amusingly uneven hair colour. Her mouth and the corners of her eyes were creased from years of laughter. But her kind brown eyes still sparkled with the cheer and mischievousness of youth, and she was still so very young at heart.

"I swear, that child doesn't do anything halfway!" She shook her vibrantly red head as she ushered the two of them into the house. "Come in out of the rain, quickly!"

Annie's house was warm and cozy, and it hadn't changed since approximately the 1920s. There was the same olive-green carpet with the raised pattern worn away in some places from decades of foot traffic in the house; the old brown sofa in the sitting room had gone through new slip-covers faster than he went through socks. The wallpaper had faded and the house smelled comfortingly, familiarly old and well-loved.

Will bent down and kissed his aunt on the cheek. "Hello, Auntie."

"It's nice to see you, dear. I'm sorry I didn't come to the door so quickly," she apologized as she took their wet, cold coats and their overnight bags from them. "It's all a bit hectic around here!"

"I imagine," Djaq said, hugging the older woman. "With the new baby and trying to get the whole brood here from Newcastle, and having all of these people staying in your house, I am surprised you are not already hitting the bottle." With her hands now free, she bent to ruffle her nephew's hair. "Hello, love."

"I'm not the baby, Aunt Djaq!" He protested, with all the dignity inherent in a four-year-old. "The baby's—"

"Ah-ah!" Annie grinned and placed a finger to her lips, signalling the boy to be quiet.

"What was that all about?" Will asked as the boy wandered out of the front hall. "Surely there can't be any real secret about this, can there? I mean, we did know that Emily was expecting…"

If there was one relationship that nobody expected to work, it was the one between little Luke Scarlett and bouncy, perky Emily Bennett.

They met seven years ago, when they were both at university—Emily was bubbly and outgoing and energetic, in contrast to Luke who had always been shy and a little reserved, much like his big brother was. They began seeing one another casually, just as teenagers normally would, and it never seemed particularly serious. The first time he brought the young blue-eyed, freckled, and cheerfully chatty young woman to Auntie Annie's house, in all of her bobby-socks-and-penny-loafers finery, honey-coloured curls bouncing all around her face, they had all been quite thoroughly amused by her presence. She was refreshingly different and a great deal of fun, but nobody really expected that she might stay interested in him—certainly Will didn't expect a great deal to come from this little young-love courtship between her and his younger brother.

But she had, and three years later, after they had both graduated and Luke was a professional portrait artist and Emily was teaching English at a secondary school, they married. They lived further north from Annie, and considerably far away from Nottingham—Scarborough was used as a central meeting place whenever the family wanted to get together.

Daniel was their first, named for his grandfather. He took after his mother more than anybody, but he had his father's wicked cheek. And some weeks ago, Emily had their second child, a girl. Djaq and Will had yet to meet the new baby, so they'd all arranged the visit. They were all crowding into Auntie Annie's place, making the old house look quite a bit smaller with all of those people crammed inside.

"Hey, Will!"

They both turned to the doorway between the sitting room and the front hall and saw Luke standing there with a burping cloth still slung over his arm and his son perched up on his shoulders.

"Oh, god," he buried his face in his hands. "My little brother has a moustache."

Luke was grinning around the little dark moustache on his upper lip. He looked much closer to Will's age than he really was, but the two of them still looked frighteningly similar.

"Will, I'm twenty-seven years old, I think it's acceptable for me to have facial hair."

"I don't care how old you are—you're still my little brother."

It was still a little unusual, he thought, to think of his little brother as all grown up, married, and with children of his own. He imagined he'd always, always think of his little brother as just that—little, and young.

Smiling, they embraced awkwardly around the four-year-old on the younger man's back; he kissed the dark-haired woman, as well, careful to bend to her level without tipping Danny onto the floor. The little boy began to struggle, and he lifted him down and let him run off into some other quarter of the house to do goodness knew what.

"You'd better not be getting into anything!" Auntie Annie called after the boy. She stood in place for only a few seconds before deciding that it wasn't worth letting her great-nephew go through the house unattended, and went after him.

"He is right, you know," she said. "It seems a little odd."

Luke sighed. "What, is this another one of those 'you have no business being taller than I am' situations?" He teased her, referencing one of Djaq's long-ago observations about the younger Scarlett boy growing older—and bigger. He'd topped out at nearly six foot, towering over his sister-in-law.

"Of course," she replied, grinning. "How are you?"

"A little overwhelmed," he sighed. "I forget how much trouble it is having a baby in the house."

"I remember when Danny was little—I don't think either of you slept at all for that first year," Will recalled.

They continued talking as they left the front hall in favour of heading into the living room.

"Stop reminding me."

"How's Em doing?"

"Pretty well, but she's tired."

"Understandable. Where is she?"

"In the kitchen, heating up the formula."

"Hey, mate."

Will looked up to see a familiar face.

"Allan?" Djaq asked, sounding as surprised as he felt. "What are you doing here?"

"You could pretend to be a little more excited to see me," he said, feigning mock-hurt. He stood up from the sofa, cradling a pink blanket in his left arm; the other hand was occupied with a baby bottle, feeding the little baby sleeping there.

"We thought you were still in the states on business," Will said.

"Why did nobody tell us you would be here?" She asked as she hugged him cautiously around the shoulders, careful not to crush the baby.

He shrugged. "Surprise," he said with a lopsided grin.

She smiled, too.

"When'd you get back?" Will asked as he gently clapped his old friend on the back.

"Yesterday—my plane came in really early in the morning and Annie is let me crash here rather than finding a hotel room. I'm just staying until tomorrow, and then I'm going back to London."

Of most of their old friends and family, he and Djaq were the only ones who had stayed in Nottingham. Journalism proved to be Allan's calling, and he advanced quickly through the various departments before being offered a position as a columnist with The Times, when he relocated to London. His work took him all over the world and they didn't see him nearly as often as they used to. But he still came to Nottingham to see them whenever he could. And still walked into the house without knocking.

In truth, Will thought that he and his wife might have left Nottingham, as well, if a situation had presented itself. Certainly a change would have been nice, but they were happy and comfortable with their lives in their old home. And when the opportunity arose for Will to open his own shop in the village, he snapped it up immediately, and leaving seemed a rather silly idea. He opened his own shop selling his furniture and, perhaps the best part, his own little wooden toys, putting to good use the more frivolous side of his woodworking talents. When they opened the business, Djaq left her position at the department store and kept track of his books for him. He liked to think that his father was watching them and approved of his business venture—even though Dan Scarlett hadn't always been supportive of his toy-making passion, he'd always admitted that he had a gift for it. It was just that he never thought that there would be a way for him to make a good living with it, at least not with toy-making alone. Now that he had found a way to do just that, Will liked to imagine that his father approved of it.

Everybody else had moved on from Nottingham; even Marian and Robin had left, for a few years anyway.

When the war ended, they sold Robin's family home and spent years travelling throughout Europe and the United States and Canada together to get the collective itch out of their feet before they came back, quite suddenly, four years later. The reason for this sudden return and their purchasing of Marian's family home was somewhat mysterious until it was revealed that the woman was pregnant, and they had decided that travelling with an infant would be too hard.

"I know you don't like babies, Djaq, but would you like to have a look?" Allan teased gently, lowering the infant in his arms.

Will wasn't sure what she was going to say, if anything at all, but she smiled a little crookedly and peered over the baby.

"Sure," she said. "Why not?"

He stood behind her as she looked at their niece, small and pinkish in colour, with big blue eyes and a dusting of curly black hair on her head. She was kind of cute, he decided. He didn't like babies, much, either, and preferred it when the children were older, but he could admit that the newborn was a cute thing.

"She's so tiny," he remarked.

"Well, she is just a little baby," Djaq said.

"No, I mean—she's smaller than most babies I've seen. A lot smaller than Daniel was." He leaned down so his face was right over Djaq's, carefully watching for the baby to do something but she never did. "Little Madeline," he said, recalling the name that both Luke and Emily had been so adamant about calling their daughter if they had a girl this time.

"Not Madeline," Luke said as he came into the room and carefully took the baby from his friend.

"You have not called her Madeline?" She asked, turning to him and frowning.

"I thought you loved that name!" Will said. "Why'd you change your mind?"

"We didn't," came Emily's voice as she walked out of the kitchen. "We just couldn't use the same name twice."

The meaning of Emily's words became clear the second he turned around and saw her there holding another bundled baby blanket in her arms, this one yellow, feeding a second tiny little newborn baby.

"We've called this one Madeline," she said, beaming. "Allan has Evelyn."

"Twins!" Will's face went from surprise to a grin all at once. "Well, how about that. Congratulations!"

Pause.

"You are happy, right?"

"Of course!" She laughed.

"All right, children!" Auntie Annie came from the kitchen in her faded striped pink apron, with Danny on her hip. "Lunch is all ready in the dining room—we'd better eat now before it gets cold."

She ushered the whole group, all five adults and herself and Daniel, into the dining room and arranged them at the table around the big hot lunch set up at the table. Even after the war ended, food rationing continued for many years. It was only recently that the last of the restrictions were lifted at last. They'd all been so used to living thriftily, and the sudden abundant availability of food was something almost novel.

Annie had always been good at providing food for all of them, whenever they were at her house, which they usually were around Christmas and Easter and any big holiday.

The whole house was full of warmth and laughter as they sat down to eat. This was their family—it was perhaps a little different than most, but still good.

The best.

o…o

Lunch lasted well into the evening hours as they all caught up with one another. The large family gatherings like this occurred seldom, with everybody living so far apart from each other, and they weren't going to waste it. Especially with Allan travelling so much for work, having all of them here together was wonderful.

While the adults had some drinks after lunch, their old friend took out a thick folder full of photographs from some of his previous trips to work—his trip to France in April, his two weeks in Japan last December, the time he'd recently spent in the United States from which he'd just returned. He was one of those people whom activity just seemed to follow. Wherever he went, things just happened to him. He was never bored, that was for sure.

Will shared with the present company what he considered to be the most amusing story of the evening: always a lover of suspense and mystery, Djaq had dragged him to the cinema to see a double-feature of Hitchcock films, The Rear Window and Dial 'M' For Murder. After this, he said, laughing as he recalled the events, she slept with the lights on for four days and kept a cricket bat close at hand in the bedroom.

Just in case.

Other stories about friends and family were regaled all afternoon and all evening. Some of them were new and were told as a way of catching up; others were old classics, like about the first time Luke got drunk at Robin and Marian's wedding.

Djaq enjoyed some time with her nephew as they gathered in the living room around the radio; she was starting to like him more and more as he got older and became a little bit more interesting. She didn't want one of her own, but she decided that he was fun to be around these days. She played with him for a while, helping him set up an enormous sprawling Brio train track through Auntie Annie's sitting room. Sometimes the family jokingly asked her if the only reason she played with her nephew at all was for an excuse to play with his toys.

Maybe only a little. She'd just never had toys this fun when she was younger.

It was fairly late by the time they all decided that it was time to turn in for bed. Outside it was still sleeting, with the steady tup-tup-tup of frozen rain on the windows somewhat a comforting sound. Even with the radiators on, it was cold in the house without central heating. Scarborough was always a lot colder than Nottingham, especially in fall like this; nobody knew why Annie hadn't had central heating installed. She had the money, certainly, but for whatever reason she refused to invest in something that could make her house liveable for the six coldest months of the year. To compensate for the cold house, extra blankets were pulled out of linen closets and out of storage spaces underneath beds and put on all of the beds to keep them warm—it was going to be a little cozy in here tonight.

There was also a distinct lack of beds in Auntie Annie's place. There were only three bedrooms between all six people and the three children. Annie let Emily and Luke and the bassinets for the two babies have her room while she bunked down in the smaller of the two spare rooms with Daniel; Will and Djaq took the other spare room with the incredibly small double bed, leaving Allan to make up a bed on the sofa downstairs.

"This place always seemed a whole lot bigger when I was little," Will remarked absently to Djaq as she sat at the edge of the bed.

"And there were fewer people in it," she added. Then she pushed his shoulder. "Nudge—there is no room for me in there."

He moved a tiny little bit.

"Move than that!"

"If I nudge any further, I'll fall out the other side."

She sighed and tried to settle down in bed next to him, but the bed was small. So she smacked his backside to get him to move.

"Stop hitting me," he grumbled.

"Stop whinging."

She snuggled up behind him, her arms wrapped around his shoulders and his head resting back against her breast, warm and snug under the heavy wool blankets. Just to be obnoxious, she manipulated his pajama top with her feet.

"Don't touch me with your cold feet!" He yelped at the contact, jumping right out of the other side of the bed.

She laughed quietly as he settled back into bed, moving to put her feet on his back again.

"Stop that!" He said sharply. "Go put some socks on or something!"

"Goodness," she groused as she slid out of bed to find her woolly socks. "Whatever happened to 'love, honour, and cherish'?"

"You know I love you to bits, but I remember absolutely nothing in my wedding vows about 'I will let my wife put her cold feet on my butt every night from October to April'!"

"Really? It was in the fine print."

"Shut up and get back into bed."

She got back into bed and cuddled up at his back again, her arm around his shoulders and her chin resting atop his head. He turned his head towards her, his nose pressed gently against the base of her throat; his arms were around her, over and under her body to hold her. He was warm—Will was always warm in the cold weather. She loved curling up with him on cold nights, close and cozy and wonderful.

Even though they were in their thirties, and had been married for years and living together for many more than that, she still found that there was a sort of thrilling freshness about their relationship—as friends, as spouses, as lovers, as companions. Sometimes it was like they were teenagers. He certainly made her feel like a giddy adolescent girl sometimes—a girl with her first boyfriend. Of course, he really was her first boyfriend.

For the most part, they'd settled from the flame of newlyweds to the comfortable familiarity of an established couple before they'd even married; and after they married, it continued that way. Nothing had really changed. Not that familiarity was a bad thing; it meant that they knew each other, body and soul. They could communicate with one another without words, an almost telepathic connection between them. And although she had never had another lover before, she didn't think it would be possible for somebody to know her very body more intimately than Will did.

But every so often, she would find herself looking at him—never during a particularly poignant or romantic time; usually while they were just going about their daily business together, while he was working in his woodshop, or while they were eating dinner or sitting down on the sofa together and working on the crossword puzzles—and her heart would go all fluttery and she would get the feeling she used to get when she was young, when her attraction to her shy friend first blossomed. The feeling of being sweetly, giddily in love was never far from her.

Their breathing was synchronized, deep, long, even breaths in time with one another. They were dozing for a long time, hovering between sleep and wakefulness in the cold room under the heavy warm blankets.

She heard him murmur something beneath her, rousing her from her half-sleep. "Hm?" She hummed gently.

"I was thinking," he whispered, pushing himself up on his elbow to look into her face.

"What of?"

He fidgeted. "Well…" he began slowly.

"Will, what is it?" She asked gently.

"The thing is… when we found out that Emily was going to have another baby, I started thinking that they might, you know… need more room, for the kids and all."

Nod. "Understandable. Living in that little townhouse cannot be easy on them."

"And, well, now that they've got Danny and the twins, they can't possibly stay in that house for too much longer. It'll just get too crowded."

"Mm-hm."

"I was thinking… what would you feel about giving the house to Luke and Emily?"

She sat upright. "What?"

He began to explain himself very quickly, jumbling over his words as he tried to get them all out more or less all at once. "I just meant that, well, it's only the two of us in that house together, and we don't need the room—and having two new babies, they're going to need more rooms soon and—"

She put a finger to his lips to silence him. "You do not need to convince me," she said. "I think it is a good idea."

Pause.

"Really?"

"Yes."

"You don't think it's… I dunno, I sort of thought you might have some objections."

She shrugged. "I'm sure picking up and starting over and finding a new place to live could be a bit difficult to do. We've lived in the same place for how long, now—about a hundred years?"

He snickered.

"But you are right—they need the house. We have the resources to start over, but they don't. Not really." She reached out and stroked his hair gently with the back of her hand. "Will, I like the idea! If we have to go someplace else—leave Nottingham… well, that wouldn't be too bad, would it? A change could be fun."

He was smiling now. "What about the shop?"

"There is no rule that says we cannot open another toy shop wherever it is we go. Furniture and toys and cabinetmakers are in demand everywhere—and I think you shall always need me to do your accounts."

He chuckled; she leaned over and kissed his forehead.

"I think it is a good idea," she repeated. "But it's late, and I am tired. We will talk about it in the morning."

"Mm," he murmured. "Good idea."

He turned over again, this time facing her, and buried his face against her shoulder. Body was tightly knit with body, their arms and legs entangled, perfectly fitted to one another. She hiked the blankets up around them as the warmth settled back over them and they slowly began to drift off to sleep again.

The last thing she was even vaguely aware of was the sound of his voice.

"Djaq?"

He took her sigh to mean that she was listening.

"I love you."

o…o

0…0…0…0…0

It's too bad there isn't some kind of a medal given for the sappiest endings, because I think I'd win that hands down.

I don't think I can thank you enough for reading this story for such a long tome—for offering your support in reviews or messages, or by favouring the story or recommending it to other people. As long as you're enjoying the story, I'm a happy writer. I know I sound really schmaltzy here at the moment, but it's true. A special thanks go out to MissWed, who was very good for bouncing ideas off of, and to MaddieStJ, who thought that Will should open up a toy shop. And to those of you who are still reading the story after all this time. And those of you who hate AUs, but saw this monster story on the top of the page once a week and decided to give it a go.

Actually, thanks to all of you. Really.