43. "Foiled, Pt. 2B"
Little John realized he had doubly fucked up, but there was hope yet. He had at least one barrier that ought to buy him some time to figure out an escape plan. Just as the sticky note above the knob instructed him, "Lock Door". And if the world thought he was just a stupid clumsy goofball who could never be a leader and was destined to always be a follower, he might as well do as he was told.
Ward Woodland had not been in this hallway in over a decade, but he still remembered it like the back of his hand. The strange asymmetrical mirrored-but-not-really more-like-flipped-or-180-degree-rotated design did nothing to confuse or deter him. He took a left when he went up those stairs and went straight for the first door on the left without a moment of hesitation. He yanked on the knob, but it wouldn't budge.
But no matter; he knew he could just break the door down. A messy option, yes, but not only was that door the only thing standing between him and a highly wanted criminal and a close personal enemy, that door was also the property of a sister and brother-in-law who had deeply betrayed him, and you just know he wanted to break a lot of their stuff right about then.
And Johnny knew the son of a bitch could just break the door down at will if he wanted to - and that he probably wanted to. Little John would have liked to have remained calm, but in a situation like this, he had plenty of good reasons not to be, so that wasn't really an option. In lieu of being worried though, he just got angry. He looked around the neat freak's bathroom looking for something he could use as a bludgeon if need be. What was there? A toilet plunger? The shower curtain rod? Here's some more emasculating thoughts: if his brother could rip a small tree out of the ground, could Johnny tear the toilet out of the floor? Okay, maybe just the seat would be enough to stun the sheriff. It was a shame good old hand-to-hand sparring wasn't an option, because Johnny could have taken Woodland pretty easily if that were on the table, but in all likelihood, old Ward would probably come right out pointing his-
Oh. Wait. That's right. Stupid old wolf. Did the dumb motherfucker ever even get around to getting a new one? Well, Little John was probably going to find out soon enough. The kid would probably die from an anxiety attack if either one of the combatants discharged one of those things inside his house, but he was gonna have to suck it up. Johnny reached for something that was getting a little too comfortable in the back of his pants. Talk about going out in a blaze of glory.
And yet Ward never kicked in the door.
Actually, he took his hand off the doorknob entirely. He didn't need his sense of touch when he had his sense of smell. He may have gotten screwed out of a bunch of the innate skills and abilities of his primitive ancestors, but his nose still worked just as well as those of his forefathers. He could tell there was no fox in that bathroom.
And with Johnny standing in the tub right next to the door waiting to clobber the sheriff over the head with the porcelain lid of the toilet tank, he could hear perfectly what the sheriff muttered to himself:
"You're not the one I'm lookin' for, Li'l John."
Woodland followed his nose. He could discern that the fox had been in Sammie and Vince's room, but he wasn't there now. The guest bedroom was clear of his musk, as were the four doors to the crawlspaces. By process of elimination - and his olfactory soon confirmed this - the little red bastard was in the Little Pup's room.
Robin could tell by the wolf's footsteps that he was homing in on him, and he likewise scrambled for ammunition. He had more options than Johnny did, but few were much better: glass beakers, a fuckton of heavy textbooks and encyclopedias, forceps and scissors and other pointy scientific equipment, et cetera et cetera ad infinitum.
But he wound up choosing none of them. In his frantic search for the perfect defensive weapon, he failed to select a good one. This was a foolish rookie mistake Robin usually knew better than to make, but something else was on his mind that caused his brain to grind to a complete halt.
Johnny. The poor dumb bear may have arguably caused and then promptly exacerbated this situation, but he was still Robin's poor dumb bear. The slender little fox still had the option to clamber out the window and dip, but that wasn't the person Robin wanted to be. For all he knew, maybe saving himself and leaving Little John here alone would have been the wise decision to everybody else on earth, but what he did know for certain was that he himself had recently pissed Little John off and made a few big mistakes that had endangered their safety as well as their credibility, and although it seemed like Johnny wanted to abandon Robin then, he didn't. So Johnny had pissed him off and made a mistake that endangered them. Big deal. Robin wouldn't abandon him now. Wise decisions be damned, he wasn't going to abandon his brother.
Of course, he was still making the unwise decision to not make any decision at all regarding a defense weapon. But then he saw it. He didn't have time to grab it, but he saw it. Sitting on a desk right next to the door, it had blended in with all the other miscellania decorating the room, despite its distinct appearance. Like everything else in Edd's room, it was labeled, and its label simply read "JIM".
Now, if this were a work of fiction, the evil sheriff probably would have been a drama queen and given an elaborate villain's speech that would have bought our hero some time to think before the door was broken in. But nah, fuck that, Ward didn't dick around. He just broke that door in without so much as a taunt.
Robin hadn't been expecting that and had to jump back to keep the door from crushing him; he only partially succeeded as the door still caught his lower extremities and knocked him over as it pinned his legs to the ground. And to add injury to insult, his right paw hit the ground first, sending a current of pain down his freshly-recast broken arm.
"MY DOOR!" hollered Double-D from somewhere.
Robin looked up at the sheriff patting a billy club into his palm. It was a sight not unlike looking up at the guy with the chainsaw.
"It's time fer me ta' send ya ta' hell, foxy…" the wolf growled as a sick sneer crawled across his snout.
You know Robin wouldn't have gone down without a fight, but with the lower half of his body stuck under the combined weight of the door and the wolf, he wasn't going anywhere, and nothing was within his arms' reach. He hoped to hell that his legs weren't broken too, but he knew that wouldn't have even mattered if Woodland thoroughly bashed his brains in.
But then they both heard a door opening down the hallway.
"What the FUCK do you mean I'm not the one you're looking for, ya ugly fatass redneck trailer-trash country-bumpkin honky-ass yokel-lookin' hillbilly fuckin' HICK!?"
Ward spun around to ask where the hell Little John got off calling him a hick, only to be surprised to see his own gun staring back at him.
"GAH!" the sheriff yelped as he hit the floor, falling forward and pulling his center of gravity off his nephew's door.
But his Little Pup saw the weapon too.
"Now you brought a GUN into my house!?"
Ward had no time to wonder what had previously transpired that prompted his nephew to say "now" they'd brought a gun. The paternal instincts he'd never gotten to use were kicking in.
"I'll protect ya, Eddie!" Ward hollered as he jumped to his feet - only to promptly collapse onto his stomach again.
"GUAHHHUAHHUAHH!" he screamed as the firm pat on the back he'd received from Jim the Cactus proved far from encouraging. "DIDJA JUST THROW A GOSH-DAMN PORK-A-PINE AT ME!?"
But none of the other three individuals present cared to clarify his situation. Little John did, however, dare to move forward, gun still drawn and aimed at the wolf's nose.
"STAY DOWN!" the bear roared. "STAY THE FUCK DOWN!"
The sheriff, however, had a lot of guts, and not just the big flabby one attached to his person. He knew a lot about these two criminals, and one of the things he knew was that they'd had plenty of opportunities to do away with him before now and never chose to exercise that option. Doing it now inside a civilian's house with a skittish little teenage boy present to potentially be traumatized forever? Oh, no, that simply wouldn't do. It would be a bad look for them; he knew it, and he knew they knew it too. It took him but a split second to calculate his risk and decide to call the bear's bluff.
Ward channeled something deep inside himself to push through the agonizing pain and hopped up onto all four of his paws, then shook himself violently like his feral forebears to shake the pins and needles loose.
The other three were stunned by the scene. The cactus didn't come out easily, and indeed Jim shook off his planter before Ward shook off Jim, but after what couldn't have even been ten seconds, the prickly little plant released its grasp of the wolf. There were still a few dozen quills sticking out of the sheriff's upper back, pinning his shirt in place and contorting the fabric into strange shapes as he stood to his full stature, hurting like hell but not letting that stop him.
And the livid look on his face was enough to unnerve even the great big grizzly bear, who in any other context would have been fully and unconditionally confident of his ability to take on the wolf.
"W-Woodsy!" Johnny barked. "Woodsy, ch- just chill out! This doesn't have to end badly!"
Ward didn't care how badly it ended as long as he got to be the one who ended it.
He looked at the bear, who was still holding the pistol in his direction but trembling ever so slightly as he did so.
He turned to the fox, who was completely petrified, partially due to shock of seeing Ward shake the cactus off like it was nothing, but also because - unbeknownst to the sheriff - the fox was again debating the ethics of abandoning his friend, escaping out the window, and getting the hell out of Dodge.
He glanced at the flora said fox and just tried to bludgeon him with.
And then he saw his beloved nephew.
"Un-Uncle Ward?" asked the timid young boy, who in an unsung show of bravery was actually approaching his seething uncle, feeling like he was the only one present who had any chance of calming the sheriff down. It's a damned shame that this act of courage backfired so badly.
Yoink.
"MY HAT!"
One barely had time to blink in the time that Ward picked up the cactus with his nephew's knit cap and threw it right back at Robin, who ducked just in time before he'd bhave taken cactus quills directly to the eyes. It landed on the floor behind him and bounced a few times as it rolled towards the window, a bunch of prickles sticking up in the carpet along the way.
Then, just for good measure, the sheriff picked up the clay pot that Jim had once called home and threw it as hard as he could at the fox. This too sailed right over Robin's head as he ducked; suffice it to say that this and the cactus toss were very much some of those moments where Robin was actively grateful that he turned out to be a little guy in this great big world.
The planter, meanwhile, somehow hit the newly-implemented death spikes on the ground at some ridiculous angle, and while a good chunk of the ceramic did break off as it hit the floor, most of it bounced up and hit the window, shattering most of its lower frame along with the planter itself, showering shards all over the ground before it. (M'right, now that the window route was most assuredly cut off, Robin was back to feeling meh about being small.)
Amid all the sounds of crashing and seething, one could be forgiven for failing to notice the young wolf collapse against the wall, breathing frantically and contorting his arms grotesquely as he covered his exposed scalp.
"WARD, YOU'RE SCARING THE FUCKIN' KID!" Little John screamed at the top of his lungs, still pointing the gun. He was seriously considering pulling the trigger, but he knew better: if he made an attempt on the sheriff's life, there would be absolutely no possible outcome where he and Rob wouldn't be totally, completely, and utterly fucked. But if Woodland dared lay a hand on Robin, Johnny was gonna make himself do it.
Imagine Johnny's surprise when Woodland went to lay a hand on him instead.
Little John had been aiming the gun at chest level, so when Ward turned and charged him, the bear was so startled and the wolf was so fast that Johnny didn't have time to aim the gun up right - and with an innocent bystander in the hallway, Little John would not have allowed himself to shoot unless he was one hundred percent confident in his aim. Perhaps he should have gambled on himself.
The wolf plowed into the bear with enough force to knock the gun out of his hand, sending it flying behind him but also off toward the right, ricocheting into the cavity of the staircase towards the front door. By some miracle it didn't discharge as it bounced down the stairs. But while its presence may have seemed like a false alarm, surely even Mr. Chekhov would agree that what was about to ensue outdid any chaos a gunshot could have sewn.
As Robin peeked around the corner, he saw two behemoths wrestling in the hallway right at the landing for the nearer staircase down to the back door and kitchen. With the window in Edd's room no longer a viable escape route, and no guarantee in this bizarrely-designed house that the crawlspaces went anywhere or that the guest bedroom even had a window, the fox recognized that his only other logical exit was being blocked.
It killed him to witness the conflict; he desperately wanted to intervene to save Johnny, but the two giants were going at each other so hard that intervention didn't seem a plausible option. They were punching each other, headbutting each other, clawing at each other, roaring and growling all the way, but most confusingly, they kept rolling back and forth as they tried to pin one another down. Could Robin grab something from Edd's room to use as a projectile or a bludgeon to knock out the sheriff? Hypothetically, yes, absolutely. And if he had his bow and arrow, he would have had much more confidence in his ability to hit a moving target. But what was he going to do here? Throw a book at the wolf and expect to incapacitate him just like that? Didn't seem like it would work, especially as the sheriff was hulking out, but he had to try.
Robin looked around the room. Okay, something hard, something he could grasp, something he could throw - and yet something that wouldn't irritate his broken arm. C'mon, c'mon, c'mon.
The human skull. Perfect. Hopefully it was just a replica because he'd hate to use a real caveman's corpse as a weapon, especially if it all proved to be in vain.
He leaned back out into the hallway, took a second to get a gist of the rhythm Johnny and Ward were moving at, and when he felt he had a shot, he shot.
And as he shot, Johnny had just gotten a good grasp of Ward to turn him over and slam him onto his back, and with the bear's head occupying roughly the spot where the wolf's had been, he was plunked square in the head by the skull - or most of it at least, with the lower jaw flying right off and nicking Johnny in the wrist that held Ward down.
Little John roared in pain as he put his other paw up to the spot of impact on his head, collapsing his weight onto the sheriff as he couldn't support himself with his other wrist which had just given way. Ward was breathless for a moment as two-fifths of a ton smashed into him, but he soon got a grip and threw as much of the bear off of himself as he could. Mostly liberated, the wolf started making his way toward the fox in his nephew's bedroom, trying to stand but finding his legs in the bear's grasp so crawling instead, slowly but surely, inch by furious inch.
Robin wasn't quite yet panicking, but he was a lot closer to panicking than he'd have liked the world to know. Slightly assuaging this pre-panic was the fact that Johnny was making progress with clambering on top of the sheriff and slowing him down, but Ward was not coming to a complete stop. This was not good.
The fox ducked back into the room and looked around even more frantically than before. What on earth could he use to knock out the sheriff? Robin was a very resourceful man, but this kid's bedroom genuinely didn't offer him many options. What, a dissection tray? Too light. An enormous book? Maybe that was heavy enough, but to get close enough to use it, he'd have to get within an arm's reach of the sheriff. A chair? Alright, that could go in the maybes pile. The ant farm? A massive glass rectangle full of compacted dirt? Oh, Robin was bigger and probably stronger than most foxes, but he was not that big and strong, especially with one arm unable to bear that much weight at the moment. If Johnny had to do the duty of stunning the sheriff once and for all, that ant farm would have been a perfect option, but it was sitting on a high shelf already above Robin's head and may well have weighed more than he did. Curse his small vulpine body, and curse his infernal broken arm.
But then, a miracle happened. As Robin went over to pick up the chair with the intention of bashing it over Woodland's head, he heard footsteps enter the room behind him. It was a wolf. But it wasn't that wolf.
Double-D ran in towards the opposite side of the room to his closet, keeping one arm covering his head as he used his other to shuffle through his clothes. Robin may have had a mild heart attack from the shock of the boy running in, and now he stopped and stared until he could figure out what the boy was doing.
The first thing Edd did was grab another knit cap and put it on hastily; for a brief moment, Robin was able to see what Double-D had going on under there (or rather what he didn't have), and in that eternal split second, Robin kind of understood how the kid was so dogmatically unadventurous.
But the young wolf kept digging; Robin had no idea what he was looking for, but he assumed the worst. The way that Edd kept shooting Robin these nervous glances wasn't helping. This was the same kid who had stormed off in a huff after Robin had offended him earlier, the same kid who had Stockholm Syndrome for law and order, the same kid who would never love the archetypal lovable rogue - oh, and not to mention, the same kid who was now confirmed to be blood-related to one of their greatest enemies. There was no way he'd have any interest in helping Robin at the inconvenience of his uncle.
Which made it really confusing when Double-D threw him a bicycle helmet, followed by a pillow he snatched off his bed.
"The laundry chute!"
"Er- huh!?" was all Robin could say.
"The laundry chute!" Double-D repeated in a harsh whisper. "Escape through the laundry chute! It will take you to the basement! And I implore you to use this pillow and helmet for safety!"
Robin was still frozen for a fraction of a second as he processed these words. "Escape"; Edd was the cautious type. The thought of trying to help Johnny surely hadn't even crossed his mind, surely if he were in Robin's position he'd just be thinking about saving himself - and a contemporary interview with Eddward Lupo confirmed that he was absolutely only offering Robin the helmet and pillow to let Robin save his own tail. But this wasn't necessarily a problem. Robin realized that getting himself to the basement might have been a good idea.
And as for Double-D, was he being cowardly by offering Robin an out with the implication that Robin ought to leave Little John to fight this on his own? One could surely make that argument. But think of it this way, Dear Reader: Double-D was helping the righteous criminal over the malicious lawman. He was breaking the rules to do what he thought was right. Surely that had to count for something.
Robin snapped back into action, picking up the pillow and hurrying out into the hallway, but not before saying something on his way out:
"You're a good lad, Eddward!"
"Mr. Hood! You're neglecting the helmet!" Edd made the mistake of screaming this one so everybody could hear it, which was especially unnecessary as he ran back out into the hallway and turned to see Robin was stopped right there, seeing that Ward had made a lot of ground since they'd last seen him, and he was now about even with where the three laundry chutes were.
And the wolf's wild yellow eyes looked like they contained the burning embers of hell itself.
But the bear had his arms on the wolf's shoulders.
"Johnny!"
Johnny looked up to see Robin bite into the pillow and tear it open like a wild animal, stuffing flying everywhere. Edd, off to the side and already struggling for words, gasped the biggest of many gasps he'd gasped that day.
Robin spat out a bunch of stuffing when there was a sufficient hole in the middle of the pillow, then tossed it over to his friend.
"Suffocate him with this!"
Little John forced one paw as hard as he could into the back of Woodland's shoulders to keep him down while lifting himself up to grab the torn pillow out of the air. He found the hole and fit it right over the wolf's snout.
"I'LL FUCKIN' KILL YOU-! Ack, ack!" The sheriff had tried to scream, but soon found himself choking on bits of fluff getting vacuumed into his windpipe.
Robin ran over to the laundry chute, barely avoiding the flailing arms of the sheriff as he did, and pulled one of the wedges out of the walls, the rightmost chute, labelled "Eddward".
"Johnny, if we get separated, you know where to meet me!"
"Mr. Hood! For your safety!" Edd cried out, no longer even trying to hide his allegiance.
"Ah, don't worry lad!" Robin replied, intentionally projecting his voice far louder than he needed to. "The Merry Men wouldn't have lasted this long if we didn't know how to stay safe!"
And as he hopped up and slid himself into the laundry chute, he thought this little ride might actually be a bit of fun. In one of those millisecond memories, Robin recalled once when he and Johnny were doing their laundry in Sherwood only for Tuck to appear out of nowhere and scare the bejesus out of Robin, whereupon he fell ass-backwards into a mostly-full clothes hamper. And honestly, that had been the comfiest fall Robin had ever taken in his life. If he were to land in a laundry basket again today, that would be a weird spot of joy amid this wild and worrisome day.
But that millisecond passed and Robin immediately realized why Edd was so insistent on the helmet and pillow. Fair enough, in the heat of the moment, Double-D couldn't warn the fox that in their infinitely neat-freak ways, Mr. and Mrs. Lupo had applied a lubricant to their laundry chutes to ensure their soiled garments reached their respective hampers as quickly as physically possible. Robin's original plan was to shimmy his way down while pressing against the sides of the chute, just to make sure that he didn't break his feet or tailbone when he landed, but he quickly found that the sides of the tunnel were as smooth as ice.
"AAAAAHHHHH!"
Another seeming impossibility of the Lupos' strange, strange house: considering that he reached terminal velocity almost immediately, it shouldn't have taken almost ten seconds to reach the basement from the second floor, right? At least it seemed like ten seconds, and that was after you account for the sheer shock Robin felt as he realized how quickly he was falling, a shock that made that ten seconds seem even longer as he couldn't breathe from the G-forces compacting his lungs and diaphragm.
Thump.
"GAH! Bloody… FUCKING hell!" Robin yelped as he landed in Double-D's laundry basket, which had been completely empty before suddenly being occupied by a large fox. Thankfully Robin had a big bushy tail to cushion his fall somewhat, although his tail itself could have cared less for that. He was just glad he'd had the mind to kick his feet up at the last second so he didn't completely shatter his ankles.
"Ow, ow, ow, ow, owww…!"
Robin tipped over the basket as he rolled out, perching himself on his left hand and knees as he rubbed the area that had taken an impact. He tried to stand but it simply hurt too much and he got back on his knees, worrying for the better part of a minute that he may have given himself some lower-back spinal cord damage that might have paralyzed him if he irritated it further; always somebody who would never be okay sitting on the sidelines as someone else played the able-bodied hero, Robin was very much the kind of guy who would genuinely rather be dead than living with some permanent disability like paraplegia or an amputation or brain damage. So he stayed in that spot as he seethed in pain, terrified to move a muscle lest he worsen any potential damage. After a little longer, however, the pain subsided a bit, and Robin dared to try moving his legs; hey, even if he somehow damaged them this way, the worst that could happen would be that the sheriff found him down there and shot him dead in a fit of rage, a fate Robin would have preferred to being a wheelchair-bound jailbird. By some miracle, his lower extremities still seemed to work, even if his hip region hurt like a son of a bitch.
He started rubbing the sore area with one paw while propping himself up with the other (after a false start where he reflexively tried to prop himself up with his right arm first, only to be reminded that it was broken when his arm immediately flared up in pain). He was there for a little bit longer, massaging the place where there would surely be a prominent bruise under the fur for a good long while. He knew he was burning oil, so he made a point to look around for any windows to the outside if he needed a[nother] quick escape, but also slowly crawled over to the Cabinet of Failed Inventions.
There were a few decent options he could take, but the one that he thought might be the best option was the one that he thought would also be the easiest to carry and operate with his busted arm. That said, his initial plan was just to pick up one of them and brandish it like a gun, but as he tested the buttons for the remote control to see if the contraptions still worked, he found himself jokingly thinking that he'd hate to separate two halves of such a fine piece of work. So he decided he wouldn't.
Meanwhile upstairs, recent events had exacerbated the wild wolf's anger tenfold, but he was still choking on particles of fabric he kept inhaling. Little John used this as an opportunity to pick the guy up under the armpits and drag him down to the nearest staircase, which was the one that led to the kitchen and the back door. The plan was to dump the guy down these stairs while splitting down the opposite case towards the front door (and hopefully grabbing the gun again if he had the chance) and getting the hell out of that house. But the best laid plans often fall apart.
Somewhere along the line, Woodland gained the wherewithal to stop struggling for air, swallow whatever was currently in his throat, and reset his respiratory system. This is when things got juicy.
Ward realized that they were getting closer to the stairs. The big bear was carrying the wolf high up enough that the sheriff's toes were just barely able to touch the ground. He had a hunch about what Little John had in mind, and he was correct. He pretended to be down for the count and saved his retaliation for the very last possible second. He timed it perfectly.
"HEY!" Little John protested as Ward reached backwards and started making grabs for the bear's face. "What the hell are you-!?"
But Johnny stopped talking when he realized he'd lost his balance. Since Ward couldn't reach the ground while Little John was carrying him under his armpits, the sheriff decided instead to push off the wall with his legs, just to see what would happen. Woodland had been stuck in a neutralized position, so trying to do something risky was better than not trying to do anything at all.
"Whoa, whoa, WHOA-!"
CRASH, BANG, BANG, CRASH, CRASH, BANG, CRASH.
"WHAT IN THE SAM HILL ARE YOU TWO DOING!?" Edd shrieked from the top of the stairs, although he wasn't looking at the enormous men at the bottom landing as he spoke so much as he was regarding the enormous holes in the walls along the staircase and the enormous chunks of what used to be the handrail now bouncing down the steps to the ground level.
Little John was too disoriented to answer, his head spinning from the tumble. Ward's head was still spinning too, but that didn't prevent him from getting to his feet and picking up Little John by the back of his shirt to railroad him into the first-floor bathroom.
His disorientation did, however, prevent him from hitting his target.
BAM.
Another giant hole materialized in the wall between the doors to the bathroom and the TV room. Johnny was a huge pile on the ground as he grasped his aching head, while the sheriff, who had faceplanted into the wall but otherwise did not cold-clock himself too badly, picked the bear up again like a bartender tossing out a drunk and shoved him into the bathroom door.
Trouble was, Johnny was not only too tall for the doorways in a house like this, but he was also a tad too wide, so to get through a door like this he'd have to turn sideways and suck his gut in. And he wasn't planning on doing that.
Realizing the bear was stuck, Ward got pushing. Maybe it wasn't the smartest decision and there would have been a myriad of better options in his position, but he really wanted to do a certain something to Little John.
Johnny didn't budge. Until he did.
Ward stepped back to get a running start and charged at Little John's backside. Johnny got his composure back at just the right time, contracting his stomach, turning himself a little to the side, and swinging himself into the little bathroom, just in time for Woodland to come running in and slam face-first into the medicine cabinet mirror.
Physically, it barely even hurt. Some head throbbing and some cuts on his snout and face, and his nose was bleeding like a sieve, but nothing too crippling. What really got Ward's blood boiling was that he wanted to put the bear's head through that bathroom mirror. But no matter, he still had plenty of other options. The wolf swung an arm up behind him and bopped the unsuspecting bear square in the nose, stunning him for just long enough to give the sheriff time to lift up the toilet seat and put Little John in a headlock to force his head into the bowl.
Johnny was less than pleased to find out that his ding-a-ling wouldn't be the only part of his body he'd find submerged in a john that day. His arms flailed as he tried to shake the sheriff loose, struggling not to drown as his snout found itself almost all the way to the drain. He'd already panickedly let all his air out.
Woodland was frustrated by how big the bear's head was. The front half of Little John's face was safely beneath the surface, but his eyes and ears were still high and dry. Ward tried to remedy this by slamming the toilet seat down on Johnny's head a good half a dozen times or so.
Almost completely out of air, Johnny had a moment of clarity. He grabbed the sides of the toilet and pushed himself up, mostly knocking the sheriff off of himself, but not entirely; Ward still kept a grip on the bear's shirt at the shoulders. When Little John turned and spit a long stream of toilet water in the wolf's face, that got him to relinquish his grasp.
"GAAAHHHUUUAAAHHH!" the sheriff protested as he was sprayed. "What the fuck was tha-!?"
Thunk.
After not getting the chance earlier, Johnny now had the opportunity to reuse his idea and knock Woodland over the head with the lid to the toilet tank. You see, children? Recycling is good.
Ward fell backwards into the small bathtub, grabbing onto the curtain rod as he did, hoping he could catch himself but only finding it to pop off the walls and come tumbling down with him. But he soon realized this was a gift.
He broke the hard plastic rod in two and stood up, swinging away at Little John to beat him over the head. Johnny tried to grab away the fractured sticks; he managed to get one, but not the other, and with a free hand Ward got a better grip of the one he retained.
But one was plenty for Little John. He was somewhat of an expert with big fucking sticks.
They swung at each other vertically, horizontally, diagonally. The small confines of the space made swerving and jumping damn near impossible, so they both had to do a lot of blocking, holding their stick with both hands across the strike to prevent a blow. And Johnny was much better at blocking.
After a good thirty seconds of beating and banging, by which point it looked it would boil down to a war of attrition and the walls were themselves battered by the wayward batons, Johnny heard himself step on some shattered glass on the floor. This gave him a new idea.
Little John swung the medicine cabinet open, which just happened to entail the cabinet door swinging in Ward's direction. The sheriff jumped as he saw a dozen tiny shards of glass fly through the air in his direction. He saw that they were nothing to be concerned about, but they distracted him for just long enough for Johnny to grab a bottle from the medicine cabinet.
The wolf saw what the bear was doing and turned his head in time to save his right eye, but not his left.
"AAAHHH!"
Truth be told, this is the part of the story where this narrator got skeptical when hearing it myself, but upon consulting Google, apparently no, getting hydrogen peroxide in your eye isn't necessarily something that'll automatically dissolve your cornea and permanently blind you like, say, drain cleaner or bleach would. I guess some people even dilute it with water and use it to flush out their eyes? Still, it's not something to be careless with and it's gonna sting like a bitch if you get it in there, but the story checks out that Ward was temporarily blinded in one eye while still being able to function.
And function he did as he saw out of his uninjured eye that the bear was squeezing his way out of the bathroom and making a break for it. Therefore he followed, keeping his piece of the curtain rod in his paw just as Little John did.
Johnny couldn't get too far away too quickly by virtue of getting through the bathroom door being a slow process, so it wasn't long after breaking free that the wolf tackled him, much like how he'd tackled the wolf upstairs. He rolled over and whacked the sheriff on the head with his medium fucking stick, but that didn't do too much. Ward was snarling as he glared down at the bear, and his glare looked even more unnerving with one of his eyes shot blood-red. The wolf was looking like he was about to bite Johnny in the neck.
Then he bit Johnny in the neck.
"AAAAAAAAARGH! WHAT IN THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU!?"
Hearing that, Robin decided to get a move on.
Thankfully the bear had a thick pelt, and the wolf had dull and decrepit teeth. Johnny got his paws under Ward's armpits and rolled the both of them over. Now he was on top. He was very tempted to go for the bite himself, but he settled for giving the sheriff a few good punches to the windpipe.
Coughing and gasping for air, internally freaking out as he genuinely worried that his airway might have been collapsed, Ward couldn't stop Little John from picking him up by the throat and whipping him running into the kitchen, going crashing into the oven and putting his head through the cabinetry above.
Stylistically, Johnny thought that was a bit creatively redundant, effectively being the same thing he'd done with the bathroom mirror, but whatever worked, worked. It wasn't like this was a work of fiction or anything where the action needs to be perfectly cinematic all the time.
But as Little John stood there for a second staring at the sheriff, who was presently struggling to breathe after getting the wind knocked clean out of him, Johnny wondering if he should deal more damage or just split, he heard a door opening behind him and oddly mechanical footsteps approaching. He turned to see a pair of brown eyes nearly level with his, and a pair of red ears tickling the ceiling just as his own did. The fox who was already pushing five feet tall seemed to have grown another three.
"Top o' the morning, Johnny!" Robin beamed with a friendly smile. "Fancy my new shoes?"
Little John looked down at one snow boot and one cowboy boot on the fox's feet, each boot attached to things that had started life as accordions.
"Oh, they're fancy alright," was all the bear said.
Thunk.
"Son of a-!" Little John hollered as he sank to the floor. Getting hit in the head with a refrigerator freezer door will do that to ya.
Robin realized he had failed to be vigilant of the sheriff's return, but he made a point to remedy it by reaching in for the wolf's stupid ugly face before Woodland had a chance to knock him out with the door in the same way he'd done to Johnny. He dug his thumbs and their claws into the sheriff's red and yellow eyes.
Ward screamed as he dropped the freezer door to grab Robin's arms instead and force them off. By this point, however, Johnny decided that fighting clean was long out the window.
Chomp.
"MAH TAIL!"
Yeah, Johnny bit him in the tail. He tells me Ward's rear fur tasted even worse than he had been expecting.
"AAAAAH-!" Woodland kept wailing until Robin, whose hands were free again, picked up a bag of frozen peas from the liberated freezer door and stuffed it into the sheriff's maw.
"Mrphrmphrmrmphrm!"
"I agree!" said Little John as he rose to his feet and shoved the sheriff back into the kitchen, sending him tumbling backwards back into the oven.
Robin thought this was the moment he'd waited for. He hadn't put the elevator boots on as a fashion statement. He waltzed over to the sheriff, cool as the Fonz in a meat locker, pressing buttons on the remote control so he could lower and reraise himself through the doorway without having to duck. This was even better than the last time he walked on stilts.
The sheriff, stunned, couldn't find the strength nor composure to walk away from the obvious setup; Johnny notes that he'll never goad professional wrestlers ever again for not getting out of the way of a telegraphed finishing move now that he'd seen basically the same thing happen in real life. Robin stood before the sheriff, the fox's head about half a foot below the ceiling for maximum intimidation, and raised his right foot toward the sheriff's face. He pressed a button to retract the spring, just to give it the most leverage possible for when he dealt the knockout blow.
Robin pressed the button to extend the right boot as swiftly as possible.
So imagine his confusion when it lowered his left foot instead.
"Er… wait…"
He pressed another button and the left leg went back up, but he was starting to lose his balance and the added weight on his feet wasn't helping, so he surrendered and put his right leg back down for stability, but now his legs were uneven, so he pressed a few buttons and found himself wobbling back and forth before both of them went straight up.
Thunk.
"ARGH! Blooooood-y hell!" Robin swore as he rubbed his head.
"Now we know why that one's in the rejects closet," Little John remarked.
But now it was the sheriff's turn to be the beneficiary of someone else's dawdling around.
Woodland got to his feet, and although he wobbled himself a little bit, he was able to deal some damage just by aiming for Robin's unfamiliarly high center of gravity and giving him one good grade-school shove, sending Robin stumbling backwards.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoooa-!"
Thunk.
Ah, violently hitting his head on a doorframe that didn't even go up to his shoulders; it was enough to remind Robin of childhood memories.
If you're wondering, Dear Reader, Little John hadn't even attempted to catch his little buddy because, Super-Fox that Robin was, Johnny honestly just expected him to regain his balance by himself before hitting the wall above the doorway. But he did catch his friend before he slumped to the ground.
Ward had a couple feet of distance from them now and they were distracted. He had a chance to grab something and launch an attack. These two criminals were just trying to stun him and get away, but for him, the only way he could win this was if he could completely neutralize them and capture them - dead or alive. He didn't have his gun on him, and this wasn't some hippy-dippy city on the West Coast so he didn't regularly carry tranq darts on his person either. He'd have to be resourceful, and he was in a room full of resources. Gee, what can you use for a weapon that you'd normally find in a kitchen? If only there were some everyday cookery tool that was sharp and pointy enough that you could stab people with it and make them bleed out and become dead. Hmm, if only.
The sheriff opened up the utensil drawer and pulled out a spoon.
(Yeah, so when Robin and Johnny were recalling this part, I straight up asked them if they were fucking with me, because at this point I thought the tale of the Battle of the Lupo House was being augmented to make it a more compelling story; this pushed me into thinking their retelling was a little too ridiculous to be completely true. But they both looked me dead in the eyes and said no, this is all actually what happened, every wacky word of this fight was true, they had almost died that day and they have no reason to spice up the story to make it more commercial. They told me to look at their faces and ask myself if they looked like two men who were goofing around, and I had to concede they didn't. And as they said, even beyond being unbelievable, the idea of the stupid asshole grabbing a spoon instead of a knife like a normal person just wasn't funny enough to be worth making up.)
But the spoon thing especially wasn't funny when Woodland charged Robin, spoon raised in the air, hollering,
"YA WANNA GOUGE MAH EYES OUT!? I'LL GOUGE OUT YERS!"
He went right for 'em. Robin put his hands up to grab the sheriff's and tried to evade the spoon of blindness, twisting and turning his head in any direction he could and head turned back and jaw open wide like a yawn that never ended. He did almost too good of a job of deflecting the death spoon, because Ward quickly changed course, shoving the spoon into the fox's open mouth and gagging him until Robin's eyes looked like they were about to pop out of his head.
And Little John wanted to get to the sheriff himself to personally beat his ass but they were all stuck in a narrow entryway with a doorway Johnny could squeeze through but just barely (ba dum tiss!) and poor little Robin was stuck between the two big-bellied behemoths (come to think of it, this sounds like we're getting into fetish fuel again, and for that I apologise). John was trying to reach around Robin (Jesus, narrator, wrong choice of words after what you just said!) and hold off the wolf that way, but between him trying to pull Robin away from Ward and Ward trying to pull him closer, Robin was struck in the middle of a tug and a squeeze (I'm so sorry I don't know how this keeps happening). But the bear could see that Robin was starting to panic a little from being choked (GODDAMMIT), so action needed to be taken (alright, that one's only a double entendre if you really stretch it).
Little John pushed forward, plowing Robin along and taking Woodland along for the ride (okay, fuck it, let there be suggestive lines, I don't care, I'm done, I am so fucking done). Then he spun himself ninety degrees with his back toward the living room and pulled Robin with him away from the sheriff. Robin was still standing roughly nine feet tall in a room a foot too short for him, and with how tightly he had laced the shoes to make sure they didn't slide off his skinny feet, slipping out of them quickly wasn't exactly an option. So he stepped to the side and let Johnny have the spotlight for a second as he stepped to the side and tried to mess with the controller.
The wolf grabbed a frying pan and charged the two of them. Little John looked around quickly for something to strike back with and saw the gaping hole where the freezer door used to be.
Woodland raised the pan and laid down a hard strike to the head, but Johnny's counter with a full ice cube tray wasn't too shabby either.
Both grumbled in pain as the tray shattered and chunks of ice cubes rained down around the linoleum floor. They both instinctively went back into wrestling mode, each with their arms up, grabbing the other's paw and trying to shake their inertia onto the ground, but oopsie, there's a downside to having such big feet: it's kind of hard not to step on things.
We don't know who stepped on an ice cube first, but in the span of about two seconds, both of them slipped and fell flat on the floor, Ward falling forward and winding up partially on top of Johnny, who had fallen backwards.
Robin, meanwhile, was realizing that it may have been wishful thinking to assume that a remote control that hadn't been touched in a couple years would have batteries that were still full of juice.
"Johnny, hold him off for a second, I've got to take these blasted boots off!" Robin said as he tried to clamber off to the safety of the living room to unlace the shoes, only to find it too difficult a task to crouch down to less than half his body height to get under the doorway upright and subsequently falling forward onto his face.
The bear grabbed the wolf around the neck twisted around to get himself on top, then dragged the both of them over to the refrigerator where the big door of the lower main compartment was still intact. Woodland tried to wrestle free, but Johnny rolled over onto him to pin him down as he dragged him over.
Slamming the fridge door repeatedly was probably gonna break a few eggs. Hopefully it would break something more than that.
Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump.
"LI'L JOHN-!" Thump. "CUT IT OUT!" Thump.
"WILL YOU HURRY UP AND BLACK OUT ALREADY SO WE CAN FUCKING LEAVE!?"
Thump, thump, thump.
Ward tried to grab hold of the door to force it open, and although he couldn't grasp the handle, he did get a handful of something else.
Johnny was compelled to stop door-slamming the sheriff's head when Ward shoved a huge wad of sticky notes into the bear's eyes.
"GOD-! WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR OBSESSION WITH EYES!?" Johnny hollered as the sheriff put him in a headlock.
"YOU TRIED TA' BLIND ME FIRST, YA DUMB SUM-BITCH!"
"BECAUSE YOU TRIED TO DROWN ME FIRST!"
"BECAUSE YOU'RE THE BAD GUY, DUMBASS!"
"YOU KEEP FUCKIN' TELLING YOURSELF THAT! IF I GET A FUCKING PAPERCUT ON MY EYEBALL, MY HAND TO GOD, I'M GONNA FIND THAT CACTUS AND FUCKING SODOMIZE YOU WITH IT!" Ocular papercuts aside, the weird adhesive stuff making contact with his corneas wasn't any more comfortable either.
"Aw, ya would wanna fuck a guy up the ass, wouldn't ya, Johnny boy? We all know what ya two do in the woods ta'gether!" the sheriff teased, quieter this time as he felt like he was getting an advantage. But in his euphoria of potential victory, for a moment, that poor dumb son of a bitch sheriff had somehow forgotten about the fox. And you know an ego-case like Robin doesn't like being forgotten about.
Thwack!
"Gah!" the wolf howled as he relinquished control of Little John and rubbed the spot where he'd just been hit in the head by something pointy. Glancing at the ground next to him, it turned out to be a screwdriver. Looking at his paw, said screwdriver had left a gash that drew blood.
Looking up to the doorway, the fox was back to his normal abnormal height, holding a pair of Ward's sister's pantyhose procured from the basement laundry room, and lining up the elastic to shoot another Philips-head he'd found in the garage.
"A thousand apologies for interrupting your riveting conversation, gentlemen," said Robin with a wry smirk, "but I just can't have a skirmish without scratching my archery itch!"
The wolf jumped to his feet and went to charge the fox, but not before making a point to tip the refrigerator over onto the bear.
"The fuck is wrong with you, man!?" Johnny protested as he covered his head to shield himself from the food raining down upon him, bracing for the weight of the appliance to flatten him.
Robin, not realizing that the refrigerator full of food still didn't weigh nearly as much as Johnny and possibly not even as much as Woodland, saw the sheriff try to crush his friend to death and thought that was a most heinous action. He aimed his next screwdriver where he knew it would hurt.
"Bwah!" yelped the sheriff as something cold and pointy struck him on the base of his tail. He turned toward the fox just in time to see Robin stretch back the elastic band on the pantyhose again and shoot for the upper part of Ward's chest. (Robin didn't want to keep aiming for the face, but he wasn't entirely sure that the wolf would even feel it if he got hit in the gut.)
Woodland coughed as he was plunked in the larynx, but got right back on track to attacking Robin.
Robin seemed startled, dropping his makeshift bows and arrows and running into the living room. All according to plan.
Ward briefly lost sight of Robin when the fox turned to the right past the doorway - this should have been the sheriff's first hint of danger, because that's not where the exit was. When the wolf turned the corner, he was greeted by the fox holding a poker from the fireplace, pointed right at the lawman's neck.
"You could have let us go by now, Ward old boy, but you kept wanting to fight this battle!" Robin teased as he waved the poker in the terrified sheriff's face. "I suppose you can say you walked right into this!
But in his triumphant glee, Robin seemed to have forgotten that this wasn't an actual broadsword with a sharp blade running all the way down. So when Ward found the courage inside himself to keep fighting, he had no hesitance in just grabbing the fire poker and trying to pull it out of Robin's grasp.
"Aw, shit!" Robin swore as he realized he'd been a tad overconfident again, something that seemed to be becoming a more and more frequent occurrence. He tried to pull the poker back from the wolf, and he did get a few solid tugs to shift the inertia, but Ward was just too strong. Ah, no matter. Robin took a few steps back and grabbed the other fire poker from its rack. Time to put the swash in swashbuckling.
"En garde!" Robin decreed. Because ya have to.
Robin started out playing defense as he tried to get a feel for Woodland's offensive strategy - or lack thereof. Ward began by mostly swinging his poker like a baton: overhead right, sideways left, overhead left, sideways right. But as he saw Robin blocking all his shots as someone with actual fencing training would, the sheriff figured he'd start treating this like a real swordfight. (This narrator acknowledges this is yet more innuendo.)
He'd only ever seen swordplay in movies set in antiquity, but while that was no substitute for actual training and practice, it was getting the sheriff a lot more mileage than one might expect. In close range, he went for slashing motions, and when Robin backed off, he tried more jabbing shots.
Robin was doing well to deflect by crossing swords vertically and horizontally, but he was having trouble finding opportunities to strike. This was a bit more of a challenge than he'd been expecting. It wasn't just the fact that gasping the poker was difficult because his dominant hand was partially encased in plaster and his arm was screaming in pain with every vibration of contact. He hadn't had a swordfight like this since the shitdisco at the archery contest four summers back, when everyone grabbed the medieval weaponry laying around and started duking it out, his showing there was arguably more impressive than his feats with a bow and arrow that day. But he'd had virtually no opportunities for swordfighting since; it wasn't exactly like he'd had anybody competent to practice with after he lost Will. But he was remembering what he'd forgotten as he went along.
Don't stay in one spot, don't be a stationary target. Yeah, that's right! Robin trotted in a semicircle around the sheriff, sparring all the way, and Woodland struggled to keep his rhythm as he adjusted.
Don't be afraid to use your environment to give yourself an advantage. Yes, of course, of course! Robin hopped up onto the couch and instantly erased the two foot height difference between him and his adversary, and again the wolf had a hiccough as he had to readjust his momentum.
Just like he had in a photo someone had taken of the medievalesque brawl after the archery contest, Robin was grinning like a madman as he wielded his weapon, his mouth open and teeth bared. It was all coming back to him. The wolf with his creepy red eye didn't intimidate him.
Robin remembered one last thing: your best chance to knock their sword away is an uppercut. A very high-risk/high-reward move, as having your sword beneath the belt was always a vulnerable position to be in, but that just made it all the more (literally) disarming when you landed a blow from below. And as he was taught, swordfights rarely end in actually slashing or stabbing your opponent; what you're really aiming for is to knock their weapon out of their hands and force them to submit, taking upon themselves all the shame that that entails.
Robin couldn't back up very far standing on the couch, but he didn't want to give up this good leverage, so he had to move fast.
Ward pulled his poker far to the left to swipe it back right horizontally against Robin; Robin swiped right and stopped it in its tracks, then quickly made a small loop to jab upwards towards the sheriff's face.
Woodland didn't have time to hit back with his poker, so he backed off. But this gave him the space to swing straight down at the fox. Just as Robin expected.
Clink!
Ward watched his poker fly away and hit the wall. He turned back to face forward when the pointy tip of his opponent's poker gently touched the tip of his nose.
Perhaps you can already envision the foxy smirk on Robin's face as he kept his sword hardly an inch in front of his enemy's face while looking him right in the eye.
"Good match, old chap. But you lose."
Trouble was, the sheriff was in no mood for theatrics, and he most certainly was in no mood for losing.
He didn't waste time with words. Woodland grabbed the poker in front of his face and threw it off to his left, shattering a window in the process. Robin didn't even have time to yelp before Ward put both of his paws on the fox's neck and shoved him against the wall with enough force to put a hole in it while pressing his thumbs into Rob's windpipe and squeezing the vertebrae in the back, strangling him in a manner that even Homer Simpson might call cruel and excessive.
"THIS IS GON' BE THE DAY YOU DIE, FOXY!"
But thanks to the intervention of Mister American Pie, the good ol' boy whose breath still tasted of whiskey and the, this would not be the day Robin would die.
The sound of a spring unloading was heard, followed by the sound of a loud thump with maybe a faint crunch in there, then an even bigger thump as the giant wolf hit the ground and didn't get back up.
Robin saw the bottom of one of the elevator shoes occupying the space where Woodland's head used to be, then his eyes followed the long scissor-lift mechanism about eight or ten feet to where Little John was awkwardly holding it, one paw shoved into the cowboy boot and the other holding the remote control with his arm wrapped around it to steer and stabilize it.
"Don't ya just love when ya take dead batteries out and just put 'em back in again, and they end up having a little bit a' juice left in 'em?" Johnny asked.
Still looking startled, Robin just took a few deep breaths through his mouth before nodding, then collapsing onto the couch. "Thanks for saving my arse, Johnny," he muttered with his eyes closed, looking like he was about to pass out.
"Hey, it's my job," Little John replied with an exhausted smirk. "Jesus, I think it's safe to say we earned that win."
"Good Lord, I thought it would never end…"
"Does this mean you gentlemen are about through?"
Robin snapped out of his fatigue when he heard that voice, shooting straight up in his seat on the couch. Johnny also did a double take when he saw who had come back downstairs. In the heat of battle, both of them had completely and genuinely forgotten whose house they were fighting in.
"Oh- oh my- oh my dear-" Robin stammered as he jumped off the couch and walked over to the wolf boy - unable to resist taking a glance into the kitchen, which was trashed even worse than he'd thought. "Eddward, I'm sorry, there aren't enough words in the English language to convey to you how sorry I am- we are-"
"Like- like, um-" Johnny wasn't having much better luck with words. "Ya gotta understand, I know that was your uncle, but he was gonna kill us if he caught us. You're a smart kid; you understand what I mean, right? He was gonna actually, physically kill us-"
"Eddward, we'll pay you back for the damages, every last penny with interest! We wouldn't imagine skipping the bill on this-"
"Yeah, you know we're good for the money! Just- just give us, like, a week to get it. Tops! Absolute tops, a week. If we get lucky, we might have it as soon as tomorrow-!"
Double-D put a paw up. "That won't be necessary, thank you," he said stoically as he looked around at seemingly everything but the Merry Men's faces. "My parents have very good home insurance. This isn't the worst that's happened to our house."
Robin and Johnny wanted to ask, but they knew better.
"I think it's best if you two leave right about now," said Edd, still with hardly a trace of emotion, and still not looking them in the eye.
"Eddward, genuinely," said Robin, "we're torn up over all the damage we've caused, and we'll work for the rest of our lives if we have to to make it up to you-"
"We don't need stolen money to mend what's been broken." And at least a few of the things that had been broken couldn't have been mended with money.
"Kid, we know we're criminals, and we know we fucked up," said Little John, "but all we want is to be able to convince you that we're good guys! You got every reason to be pissed at us right now, but we're gonna ma-"
"It's not you gentlemen I'm frustrated with."
The young wolf was looking the fox and the bear right in the eyes, and his cold stare sent a chill through their hearts. This boy had clearly had a very rough day today, maybe even the kind that ensures that all the rest of the days of his life would never be as easy and carefree as those which had come before it.
They each glanced at the unconscious sheriff laying on the ground; with a gut as huge as his, you didn't have to look too closely to see he was breathing.
They turned back to his nephew. He nodded morosely.
"Uh… a-alright, then…" Little John began, "um… guess we'll be taking off, then…"
"I don't mean to be rude, and I apologize if it seems like I'm shooing you, but…" Double-D gestured broadly to the house around him. "...I have a very large mess to clean up before my parents return home."
"A-a-and," added the fox, "please believe that we'd gladly offer to help you clean up if not for… you know…" Robin trailed off as he nodded his head towards Woodland.
"I believe it, you needn't worry," said Edd. "I'll see you out."
"A-and I'm dreadfully sorry for the things I said earlier!" Robin continued as he followed Double-D to the front door. "I'm ashamed of myself, truly I am! I've been feeling very- very unlike myself lately, and in a fit of what I guess was insecurity, I made an arse of myself-!"
*If it grants you peace of mind, I'll allow it."
"A-a-and thank you, thank you a thousand times over for helping me get past your uncle up there! I'd surely be dead by now if not for you-!"
"What's done is done, Mr. Hood. Let's not dwell on the past."
"And I meant it when I said you were a good man, Eddward! We'd still love to have you on our side, but even if not, even if you'd just like to come over and pal around with us, our door is always open-!"
"Understood," was all Double-D said as he disengaged the deadbolt and unlatched the sliding lock. He opened the door and gestured. "Have a good evening gentlemen, and please do stay safe."
Robin, realizing Edd wanted him out of there as soon as possible, nodded with a nervous smile and walked out the door. "And thank you so much for having us over on short notice, Edd!"
"Of course."
The wolf boy turned and looked up at the grizzly bear, who seemed like he wanted to say one last thing before he stepped through the door.
"Yeah, um… same as Robin," said Johnny. "You're a cool kid and a good dude. You got a good head on your shoulders and you're gonna do good things in your life. And it might be hard in this world full of retards and assholes, but I hope you have good luck in finding more people who can see that in you."
And you see, when Robin called Double-D a good man, that was nice and all, but it came across as Robin just being complimentary like a well-groomed English gentleman ought to always be. But hearing Little John call him a cool kid and a good dude after discovering that Johnny had experienced a lot of the same struggles as himself and had busted his ass to even get to be maybe seventy-five or eighty percent of the way to being where Robin had gotten to without even trying? Man… it just meant more coming from Johnny.
And that made Double-D smile.
"Thank you, Mr. Little," said the wolf boy as his guest ducked and squeezed through the front door. "It's been a pleasure to have met you!"
All three of them picked up on the odd sense of finality in the way he'd phrased that. None of the three of them could tell how intentional that was supposed to be.
"Likewise, bud," said Little John, facing back as he walked away. "See you soon, Edd."
All three of them could tell that choice of words was very intentional.
Robin and Johnny stopped where the driveway met the street and stopped to take a breath. They didn't know how long it would be until the sheriff woke up, but they figured they had the time to reflect on their situation.
"We're never gonna see that kid again, are we?" asked Little John.
"Oh, heavens, no," replied Robin. "Oh! By the way…" He gestured for Johnny to get closer as he pulled the back of his shirt up; it wasn't something you wanted to go around showing off in public willy-nilly. "I remembered to pick something up from the bottom of the stairs when I was on my way to the garage."
"Aw, ya beautiful limey bastard!" Little John exclaimed as he picked up the fox and wrapped him into a tight hug that Robin would have reciprocated if he'd had the use of his arms.
"Hey!" they heard a cheeky young voice call out.
The duo turned to see a young koala kid poking at an anthill with a stick, a 2x4 plank of wood on the ground next to him with a crude face doodled on it.
"Get a room!" the koala chuckled at the Merry Men. It was clear as day that this kid was just goofing around and that this wasn't an act of homophobic malice, but the koala had made his point.
Johnny put Robin down and they each brushed themselves off, looking a tad embarrassed.
"Yeah, er… I'll hand the gun over to you when we're sure we can't be seen," Robin said as he looked up and down the street. There were indeed a few more people on the street: a goat mowing a lawn, an old boar woman watering flowers in a planter box, and a bobcat girl constructing something out of wood in her front yard as a rabbit boy and a bear girl looked on.
"Are you Ed's uncle or something?" the koala asked, still wearing a goofy smile while staring straight at the grizzly.
"Sorry kid, not every brown bear's related," Johnny answered Jonny.
The kid's face scrunched up for a second before he gasped and held up the piece of wood. "Plank says, how'd you know Ed was a bear then if we didn't say he was!?"
With the sheer incongruity of that very cogent answer being delivered through a plank of lumber, Robin and Little John were visibly confused as they stared back at the koala.
"Yeah, let's, uh… let's get outta here before Woodland wakes up," Johnny mumbled to Robin.
But Robin was digging in the back of his pants again, producing a few more screwdrivers he never had to shoot. "I feel like I ought to return these though. Shall we just leave them in the mailbox or somewhere like that?"
Little John thought about that for a second before walking over to the cross street. "I got a better idea."
-IllI-
After puncturing all four of the county sheriff's tires plus the spare (just for good measure), keying the phrases "CLASS TRAITOR" and "PRINCE JOHN'S BITCH" onto the car's sides (along with a drawing of a phallus, as is required by the rules of rascalry), and urinating in the gas tank (Johnny drank a lot of water at Geoff's place), Robin Hood and Little John left Peach Creek and trekked through Sherwood Forest Natural Preserve on their way to the city.
"Y'know, that was some pretty good swordfighting I saw outta you there," Johnny felt compelled to say as they journeyed through the woods.
Robin appreciated the compliment, but felt the need to play humble. "Oh, hardly my best work. Pales in comparison to my heroics at the ren-faire archery contest free-for-all - and that wasn't even my being a master swordsman as much as it was just me having my way with a bunch of blokes who'd never picked up a sword in their lives and thought it'd be easy!"
"Yeah, but even if that was the case, I still wish I could pull that off!"
"Don't I recall you handling a sword pretty well yourself at that same ren-faire brawl?"
"Oh, for like, not even two minutes before some rhino ripped a tentpole outta the ground and then it became a stick fight. But seriously, man, when you finally make it to Hollywood, they gotta cast you as, like, a pirate or something! It'd be a waste of talent if they didn't."
"Note to self, Robin: brush up on your Cornish accent!" The Englishman chuckled. "Seriously, though, I appreciate the optimism that you still think I haven't yet missed my chance. You really are my biggest fan, aren't you, Johnny?"
"I was the only one crazy enough to actually join you and stick with it, wasn't I?"
"That you were!" Robin patted his friend on the back. "I tell you what, Little John. I did a pretty bang-up job of teaching you archery, didn't I? If we can come across a pair of swords for us, I'll teach you swordsmanship too." He'd gifted his own away years ago to a Georgetown resident who collected antique weaponry but couldn't afford to buy the cool stuff, and there was no way Robin was touching Will's if he didn't have to.
"Well, your brother tried teaching me for the longest time, remember?"
Robin's heart sank.
"Er… yes, I… I remember."
Johnny knew he was getting into touchy territory here, but he wanted to turn this into an opportunity to prop Robin up while also honoring another fox he'd called a very close friend, almost a second honorary brother.
"And while you were a lot better at teaching me archery than he was at teaching me sword shit… man, just messing around with swords with him was fun. He was a fun kid. Even when he was geeking out about cartoons, he wasn't a nerd about it, he made it all fun."
Robin sighed and tried to glance at Johnny. "And geography. I remember you two both geeking out over your maps together."
"Fuck yeah, we loved maps! And we were gonna travel this world together when all was said and done here…"
Johnny put an arm around Robin and pulled him into himself.
"I miss him too, Rob. Every single day." Johnny took a breath before continuing. "I know this is a tough conversation, man. But I'm saying all this because I really do think he'd be proud of you. Both for being a badass with a sword and for fighting off Woodland so valiantly. He believed in our cause just as much as you did."
Oh, he believed in the cause, alright… oftentimes more than I did.
Little John continued: "I know you two butted heads a lot, but that kid loved you, Robbie. And he was so goddamn proud to be your brother."
Little did Little John know that this conversation was far more excruciating for Robin than he'd thought it would be. It wasn't Johnny's fault; he didn't know, and with any luck, he never would.
"And I'm so goddamn proud you let me call you my brother, too, bud." Johnny's eyes were glistening despite the wide smile on his face. "And I know I'll never replace Will and that I'll never be your real brother, but I just hope I'm doing a good job of being a brother."
Robin returned an arm around the bear's back. "You are my real brother, Johnny. You are now. And you're doing an amazing job of it. I just hope I'm doing a decent job returning the favor." And we both know I'm not.
"Aw, for someone who basically grew up an only child, you're doing the whole 'brother' thing pretty well!"
Oh, that's a damned lie and you know it.
"... Definitely doing a better job of it than my real brother," Little John mused aloud when Robin didn't say anything.
Robin couldn't take all this fraternal talk anymore. He needed to change the subject. But there was only one other question on his mind.
"So… at the risk of completely killing the mood… I need to ask eventually, so I might as well do it now… why'd you flush the toilet, Johnny?"
Now that the ordeal was over and they'd survived, Little John felt comfortable to chuckle about it.
Therefore he explained that his lapse in judgment had been caused by intrusive thoughts about the insufficient size and shape of a certain body part, especially how it pales in comparison to the analog of a fox a fraction of his size, which thereby inspired Robin to stop walking and to set the record straight once and for all. This entailed Robin explaining that his was a sort of optical illusion, wherein it looked bigger than it actually was because of Robin's short and slender vulpine frame, something you wouldn't notice unless you got up close and personal to it in ways Johnny never had, and while Robin admitted that he'd heard on good authority that his set the curve for his species, that was much like how he may have seemed muscular for a fox but was basically still skinny as a rail, and when it came to that part of the body, his didn't completely dwarf Little John's by any stretch of the imagination.
Apparently somewhere along the line Robin just dropped his knickers and encouraged Johnny to do the same so they could finally clear the air on this, and Johnny obliged mostly so Rob wouldn't think he was being a pussy about it. Once having compared them in their resting states, they did not go as far as to demonstrate what they looked like when those parts of their body experienced blood clots, but they did give each other specific numbers and detailed visualizations of their sizes and shapes when they evolved into their final forms. Suffice it to say that Johnny was still a little irked that his was even in the same ballpark as that of a fox, but he reminded himself that the fox in question was a freak of nature who any statistician worth their salt would disregard from the data set and he could at least rest assured that his was a lot more comparable to Robin's than he had thought. And although they told me with goofy grins that they'd never tell me nor anyone else which of them had the other beat (not to suggest I asked, which I didn't), but they did agree that in terms of absolute value devoid of context, neither of them had much reason to feel inferior. Still doesn't answer why Robin previously said he'd had a history of dipping in the toilet and Johnny hadn't, so for all I know Robin might have been lying to me about lying to Johnny and these two were just telling me this to weird me out like they had Geoff, which would be an especially gross thing for Robin in particular to do to me (though he probably does still see me as a stranger), but I'd already heard enough and didn't seek to know more.