L'EDgendary

by dobanochi

A few years since we last saw any of them, the Peach Creek Boys and the Merry Men run into one another at just the right time, working together to undermine an oppressive city government as well as their burgeoning insecurities. An action-comedy-drama character study about friendship, leadership, self-esteem, and the divide between who we're born as and who we choose to be.

11. All in a Long Day's Working Journey into

11. "All in a Long Day's Working Journey into Night"

You could usually tell what side of Nottingham you were on based on the street names at any given intersection. The north-south baseline was Millsboro Boulevard, named for a town that was annexed by Nottingham shortly after the boom in the Fertile Crescent; north of Millsboro Boulevard, the east-west streets were numbered, and south of the baseline, they were given letters, and after the letters ran out, it switched to unalphabetized proper nouns, surnames of early city leaders, until the neighborhoods gave way to the Great Cypress Swamp at the south edge of town. The north-south streets going westward were named after states in order of admission to the Union - starting, of course, with Delaware Avenue, which served as the baseline. This did create some mildly confusing situations, such as how the Georgetown branch of the Nottingham Public Library system was located at 6500 North South Dakota Avenue, but it was too late to redo all the streets now, and besides, it was quite fitting how the west edge of the city's limits bumped up against the southern tip of Sherwood Forest and the town of Apple River right around Hawaii Avenue, with territories taking the names of the few remaining streets in the gaps. North-south streets east of Delaware Avenue took the names of major U. S. cities, though since east was toward the ocean, these streets often ran through higher-end parts of town, and carried an air of ritziness about them accordingly; even though the most western of the city-name streets were still not the most well-off places to live, people would still think it was better to live on Boston than seven blocks away on Massachusetts. Of course, there were also some diagonal or meandering thoroughfares that broke the mold, such as the Georgetown-Millsboro Highway and its surface-level counterpart and forebear Sherwood Forest Road, and the streets in the old part of the downtown center were much more haphazard and European in their layout, but once you got out of Old Nottingham, the classic American grid system was reliably navigable, although some English expats might disagree with intuitiveness of a system where every street needed a directional prefix and every block had a value of one hundred.

Priscilla found herself walking along 73rd Street and after turning right from Baltimore Avenue in the Harbeson neighborhood. Harbeson was almost straight north of downtown, and some of its north-south streets were states while others were cities; Baltimore Avenue was the first major city-name street on the East Side, five blocks east of Delaware. Fittingly, it was regarded as a sort of transitional neighborhood, bridging the divide between the upper-class East Side and the lower-class West Side. It was regarded as being a tinge better than Georgetown - that is to say that neither was necessarily rampant with gang activity, but whereas you were more likely to get your face clocked in by a resident in Georgetown, you were more likely to be mugged by a roving hoodlum (who probably lived on the west West Side) in Harbeson. Nevertheless, it was mostly a quiet neighborhood, though if the residents had one reservation about their area, it was that its geography meant that there were always people from outside the neighborhood passing through. It had Georgetown to its west and the Fertile Crescent beyond that, the college and hipster neighborhoods of Zoar Park and Hollyville to the south and the downtown area beyond that, the well-off neighborhoods of Milton Park, Nassau and Long Neck to its north and east and the beach towns beyond those - suffice it to say that Harbeson's reputation as a socioeconomic crossroads was not inappropriate. The locals weren't morally opposed to the passers-by, though they did have some reservations about the arrangement, like how traffic on the major streets was always a nightmare, and how they had to watch their tongues - just in case someone within earshot wasn't in the know - when speaking of the vagabond vigilantes who acted as their guardian angels.

Priscilla was one of the natives who was in the know, but hadn't thought much about the Merry Men in awhile. She had only ever interacted with them when she was part of a larger crowd that they were addressing, and hadn't seen them at all recently (except for the one former member she'd just seen today, but he didn't count and she no longer consciously thought of him as one). She had more important things on her mind, like trying to add up how she was going to pay to feed her daughter five more meals a week now that school was out and weekday lunches were no longer paid for by the state. The mink was fortunate enough to own her own home, a small bungalow typical of the Harbeson neighborhood that stood out from the row houses of the West Side and the grander homes of the East Side, but homeownership wouldn't have meant much if she couldn't pay the utilities. Not only did she not get a refund from her April taxes, but she actually owed the state and federal governments money because her employer - which, incidentally, was the City of Nottingham - did the math wrong and didn't withhold enough from her paycheck. Now Priscilla was kicking herself for not realizing that the boost in her direct deposits was a sign of incompetence rather than mercy from above.

For now, all she was thinking of was going to bed. She had gotten off her night shift manning a subway station in Zoar Park, and went straight to mass at St. Ursula's, which was located at 70th and Wyoming right near the edge of the forest. There were other Catholic churches nearer to her house, but she had been going to St. Ursula's since she was a little girl and now no other parish seemed right to her. Today the homily was done by Father Tuck, whose past was an open secret among the Northwest Side members of the congregation, whereas the parishioners from the suburbs were none the wiser. Priscilla was going to hang onto the small amount of cash she had on her person, but then Father Tuck went on another fiery rant about the importance of almsgiving, and did a deep dive into that story in the Bible where Jesus tells off a bunch of hypocritical scribes and makes a positive example out of some desperately poor woman who gives the last of her money to a synagogue charity collection, and Father Tuck's thesis on the passage basically boiled down to, 'Okay, I get it if you don't want to be that charitable, especially in this modern world where you can't survive with zero dollars and zero cents in your pocket unless you're living off the grid (hint hint, wink wink), but always be aware that there is most assuredly somebody out there who's even worse off than you are.' That was paraphrasing, of course, but at one point, Father Tuck made incidental eye contact with Priscilla during his sermon, and something about that shook her and possessed her to put what she had in the collection bin - minus what she needed for bus fare.

She then took that bus fare and took the 70th Street bus - on the North Side, streets divisible by five were the major streets with bus lines, which were vital because Nottingham's subway system was poorly designed and you couldn't take the subway from the Northwest Side to the North Central Side without riding through the city center - and rode it almost fifty blocks until she got off at Baltimore Avenue, whereupon she walked three blocks north and turned east on the residential 73rd Street toward her house on Chicago Avenue, one block east of Baltimore. And now all she wanted to do was give her daughter and hug and a kiss and then go to sleep.

Priscilla crossed the alley that ran between Baltimore and Chicago Avenues. To her left, she saw that there was graffiti on the side of the garage of the corner-lot house. Priscilla knew the owner of the house, a peaceful elderly woman who probably would rather that her garage wasn't vandalized, but who also may have been zen enough to just shrug it off with a soft smile and say, hey, it's not tangibly hurting anyone, and since she was planning to stay there for the rest of her days, she probably wasn't too concerned about her home's resale value, either. The graffiti in question had two parts, seemingly one in response to the other.

First, in white paint on the red bricks, written in all-capitals and just a smidge left of dead-center, with the first word stacked upon the second: FUCK BUSH.

Immediately to its right, squeezed between the original graffito and the edge of the wall, was a case-sensitive continuation written in a dirty yellow that probably came from a spray-can labeled 'gold,' and similarly formatted with the words stacked, though misaligned enough from the first statement to make it clear it was a sovereign thought: And Fuck Prince John!

And as she came to a complete stop there in the mouth of the alley, the mink had mixed feelings about what she was seeing. While she had her reservations about how the old Mrs. Rooney would feel about the graffiti, and while she worried that a similar tag would soon be written upon her own garage, she was mostly conflicted about the message and its methods of communication. Priscilla also harbored a disdain for the two figureheads on their respective macro- and micro- scales, one for impersonal reasons (mostly - she and many others at 73rd and Chicago blamed him for sending the Taylors' poor son to die in Afghanistan last year), and one for much, much more personal reasons that need not be elaborated upon. But she didn't know if she liked seeing it written there on Mrs. Rooney's garage. What was it meant to accomplish, being written there? It wasn't like the Mayor, let alone the President, was going to see this graffiti on a random house in Harbeson and suddenly have an epiphany that their public hated them and subsequently have a change of heart about all of their unpopular policies. Yes, she was sure that the original artists would say that it was intended to sow seeds of unity among the downtrodden of Nottingham, but while Harbeson wasn't nearly as downtrodden as the likes of, say, Hermosa Park on the West Side, it certainly wasn't as socioeconomically tranquil and self-impressed as a place like Long Neck or Belltown. Who in this neighborhood wasn't opposed to Dubya and Dingleberry? Of course, there was also the argument that this was vent art, and its creation was its own goal, but then that got Priscilla wondering if somehow, someway, this was Mrs. Rooney's doing.

Priscilla was so fascinated by the new art installation that she didn't notice the puma and the porcupine exit the opposite alleyway and calmly walk across 73rd Street right toward her turned back.

"Stay right there," said the puma.

"Wha-?"

"Turn around slowly," said the porcupine.

Priscilla obeyed, though the shock had inspired her to also reflexively jut her hands into the air. She just imagined that this was something that the strangers would want her to do anyway.

Her shocked reaction inspired a different shocked reaction in the strangers, who twitched into defensive positions, weapons drawn from their persons and presented to be clearly seen.

"Hey, don't fucking jump like that!" said the porcupine, who was holding a jet-black pistol.

"Or are you not as harmless as you seem?" asked the puma, who was holding a large knife that was probably manufactured for wilderness survival.

"What are you talking about!?" begged Priscilla.

"You got any weapons on you?" asked the puma.

"Empty your purse and take everything out of your pockets," said the porcupine. Both of these strangers seemed to be teenagers, two boys most of the way through adolescence but not quite there yet, who were nevertheless trying their hardest to speak in the lowest register possible. The puma was wearing a yellow-on-purple Lakers snapback with its Mitchell & Ness authenticity sticker still intact and a black hoodie, zipped all the way up despite the stifling heat, bearing a white "ZY" logo that people of a certain age might recognize as belonging to a skateboarding company. The porcupine was wearing a t-shirt that read "SYSTEM OF A DOWN" and sandy-tan cargo shorts.

"Why are you doing this to me?"

"Because we're smart enough to survive, and you were dumb enough to stop moving," said the puma.

"No, I mean, I live here, do you think I'm not hurting for money too?"

"You're gonna be hurting for a lot more than money if you don't drop this attitude," said the porcupine. "Now the purse and pockets."

Priscilla slipped the purse off her shoulder, unzipped it, and dumped it out on the pavement. Out fell a small wallet, a hairbrush, some lipstick, some loose change, and not much more than that.

"That's it?" asked the porcupine. "What about your pockets?"

"Women's pants don't have functional pockets!" Priscilla answered. "There's nothing I could have on me!"

"Goddammit, gimme that," the puma swore as he grabbed the purse. "Bro, check if she has any bulges on her, and grab the wallet while you're at it. I'll see if there's anything in the other compartments."

The porcupine gave her a look-around as the puma unzipped the smaller compartments of the purse, where he didn't find anything of worth, only things like rudimentary and low-quality feminine beauty products and some scraps of paper with phone numbers on them. The porcupine didn't see any strange shapes under the mink's clothes to indicate a knife or a gun or a taser, so he decided it was safe to pick up the wallet, his head turned to and gun pointed at Priscilla just to dissuade her from literally kicking him while he was down.

"I knew I should have bought pepper spray," Priscilla lamented.

"With what money?" asked the porcupine as he thumbed through the wallet. "You seriously don't even have any cash on you?"

"Hey, we take plastic," the puma said as he grabbed the wallet. He saw that there were two cards in it - not much, but it would do. "Are these credit or debit?"

"Green one's debit, silver one's credit," said Priscilla. "There's hardly anything on the debit and the credit's almost maxed out."

"Yeah, that's what we'd say if we were in your position. Debit card got a pin number?"

"One-one-one-six."

"Eleven-sixteen. Is that your birthday?" asked the puma with a self-impressed look.

"It's my daughter's birthday," said Priscilla, who was trying to contain her rage if only for her own safety. "A daughter I won't be able to feed if you take my money."

"Well then, she should start robbing people," said the puma. "Girls can be muggers, too."

"Yeah, we're feminists," said the porcupine. "That's why we're being as rough with you as we would be with a man."

The puma let out a voiceless chuckle at that. "He isn't joking, though," he clarified.

"My daughter can't start robbing people; she's six."

"So start her robbing young. Everyone who's good at something started at it when they were young. We can offer to teach her now that we know she lives at, uh…" - the puma slid out Priscilla's driver's license - "...7311 North Chicago Avenue. So, the credit card," he said as he used his knife to gesture toward Priscilla's face. "You need to punch in a zip code to use these, right? What's your zip code?"

"Boy, you must not be from around here if you don't know the zip code," came a bass-baritone voice with a vaguely Southern or Midwestern twang not often heard in the Mid-Atlantic.

"Huh?" the puma asked as all three turned to see a rotund grizzly bear casually standing in the alley, one foot planted and the other foot crossed over that, right arm coolly propping him up against a garage and his left arm akimbo with his fist digging into his hip, and a long, thick stick about as long as he was tall stood up along the wall right behind him. He was wearing a green t-shirt, which from this distance one could vaguely see had once been emblazoned with the words "PHILA. EAGLES" along with the team's old logo from a decade ago, these decals' former presence betrayed by adhesive residue that stayed after the easily-identifiable markings were carefully removed; he was also wearing a smirk on his face that seemed to say you fucked up, and I'm going to have some fun with kicking your ass.

"Who are-?" - swoosh, tink! - "Gah!"

Swoosh, plunk! "What the-!?"

Swoosh, yoink.

In the course of hardly two seconds, an arrow had come from out of the ether, struck the blade of the puma's knife and knocked it out of his hand, ricocheted into the porcupine's gun and knocked that out of his hand, and made its way back toward the bear, two grabbed it out of the air and tossed it up to the roof without even looking. Up on the corner of the slanted roof was a lanky fox wearing a polo shirt - also green, albeit a lighter shade with a slight yellowness to it - under a quiver full of arrows strapped around his back. The fox held a large bow, which he shifted from his left hand to his right to catch the arrow tossed up to him.

"It's astounding, really," said the fox in an English accent that towed the line between refined and folksy; he had a smirk much like the bear did, but being a fox, it just looked so much more fitting on his face. "So often people just don't think to look up."

"Is that a fucking bow and arrow!?" shouted the puma; at that point, any earwitnesses in the vicinity would have immediately known what was going on, and would have been very tempted to run over and catch a glimpse of them, but they restrained themselves because they knew it surely wasn't a situation to interfere with.

"That it is!" the fox beamed. "And I'm good at using it because I've been practicing since I was young!" He gave a knowing wink to celebrate his clever callback.

"Wait a minute…" the porcupine mumbled to himself, but nobody heard him amid all of this. He was on the verge of remembering something he had forgotten.

"Although, I must admit," continued the fox, "I couldn't have pulled off that trick shot if it weren't for you boys holding your weapons at precisely the right angles. You two really gift-wrapped that one for me!" He held the arrow to his cheek and stroked it with a forlorn look on his face, looking like a sad child hugging a teddy bear. "And then this poor baby would have hit the ground, and then she'd surely have been damaged, and then I'd never get to use her again…"

"So what's the deal, boys?" asked the bear as he grabbed his stick and moved toward them. "Why are you harassing the lady?"

"B-because we need money!" the puma stuttered. Meanwhile, Priscilla was feeling a slight uptick in adrenaline as she wanted to see where her saviors were taking this. The porcupine, lost in thought, wasn't moving a muscle.

"What, and she doesn't!?" growled the bear.

The fox slid off the corner of the roof and made his way over to the puma, who was presenting himself as the brains of the duo.

"Or is this simply a matter of you not caring about somebody else's needs because you're you and she's someone else?" the fox asked. As tall as this specimen was, he was still at least a foot shorter than this teenage cougar. And yet the puma found the fox strangely intimidating; something about the fox's air of impenetrable confidence made him come across as one not to be fucked with (of course, having immaculate control of a medieval weapon certainly helped the fox's intimidation factor).

The puma didn't know what to say. But then he remembered something: actions speak louder than words.

He ducked down to grab the gun laying at the porcupine's feet. The bear saw this and wasted no time tweaking his grasp on his staff and holding it up over his head, winding it up to come crashing down.

As the puma stood back up, he saw the motion of the staff coming down upon him, and he dropped the gun and collapsed to the ground with a shriek. The bear, of course, stopped the staff before it ever would have made contact with the cougar's cranium.

"You see now, children, this is why we don't even need modern weaponry," said the fox.

"Wait a minute," said the bear, and he leaned in to examine the gun, now at his own feet. He examined it for a second before picking it up to get a closer look. After a few moments, he had come to a conclusion: "This is a BB gun."

"What!? No it isn't!" protested the puma, still on the ground.

"Okay, then…" - and the bear pointed the gun at the puma's face - "Run."

"Aaahh!" the puma screamed and covered his head with his arms. But he didn't run.

"I'm from the South, kid," said the bear, "I know my guns around."

"Now why can't you be more cooperative, like your friend over here?" the fox asked as he gestured to the stunned porcupine.

"I know who you are," the porcupine finally said.

"What!?" said the puma.

"Is that so?" asked the fox.

"About damn time," said the bear.

"Dude, I know who these guys are," repeated the porcupine to the puma. "These- I think these are the guys who helped my mom out after my dad left."

"Wait… these are those guys!?"

"I think so."

"How do you know!?"

"The medieval weapons. The British fox who's tall as fuck. It just sort of clicked in my head."

"Hold up. Are these… are these the same guys who saved Mike's dad from the police?"

"I think so."

"A-a-and the same guys who… who robbed the guys in charge of foreclosing on Claudia's parents' house?"

"I think so. And I think they're the ones who steal from rich people and give it to poor people."

"They do what now!?"

The bear scoffed. "I thought we were famous around these parts."

"What part of town are you boys from?" asked the fox.

"Hermosa Park," the boys said in unison.

"Ah," said the fox, looking like his mood had just gone down the slightest notch. "That explains it."

Hermosa Park, on the far West Side, was indisputably the worst part of Nottingham, to the point that even Robin and Little John actively dreaded going there. The Merry Men did still force themselves to visit Hermosa Park and deliver assistance to the locals, but not as often as they would have liked. Some would argue that this infrequency just made the situation worse. While most Hermosa Park residents appreciated Robin Hood and Little John's help, there was a sizable faction in that part of town that were angry that they didn't show up enough, and another sizable faction who would rather that Rob and Johnny just fuck off since their giving them temporary financial aid wasn't actually going to have any lasting effects on the residents' social mobility. Suffice it to say that the reason Hermosa Park got less attention than places like Georgetown or Harbeson wasn't just because it was the place they'd be most likely to be shot by a wayward bullet (which Little John actually was back in their second summer of duty, but thanks to his thick ursine pelt, he didn't realize until days later that strange pinch he'd felt on his posterior hadn't been a bee sting); it was more of a matter that charity excursions to Hermosa Park had the highest chance of backfiring and becoming a waste of time. If Harbeson was home to the "depressed poor" and Georgetown was home to the "jaded poor," Hermosa Park was home to the "aggressive poor," for absolute lack of a better way to put it. A visible minority of people in Hermosa Park were enough to make Robin and John question whether their mission to bring joy to Nottingham's poor was a fool's errand, and while the boys weren't going to let that lead them to neglecting the majority of Hermosa Park denizens who would accept their gifts, it was always a hiccough when someone looked them straight in the eyes and said "Explain to me how a few hundred bucks is going to lift me out of poverty forever," or "Yeah, thanks, this will really make me feel less afraid to leave my house," or "Your charity isn't going to stop institutional class warfare," and shut the door on them. In life, there would always be those who were too proud, or too cold, or too angry to allow themselves to be helped, no matter how much they clearly needed it; a disproportionate amount of those people lived in Hermosa Park. If there were any children raised in poverty in Nottingham who didn't know for a fact that Robert "Robin" Hood and "Little" John Little were real people, then those children surely would have been raised in Hermosa Park.

"Well then," continued the fox, "Tell the people back home that we're sorry we can't be around their neck of the woods as often as we wish we could be. Of course, we'll tell them ourselves the next time we're there. But in the meantime, I must ask… if you knew of us, then why did you rob this poor woman? Why would you victimize someone just like yourselves when you know that we do the work we do so that you don't have to do such things?"

Neither of the teenage boys had a good answer, so they said nothing.

"If you know about us," the fox continued, "what are our names, then?"

The porcupine seemed to think for a second, not as if remembering something he'd forgotten, but rather as if he were double-checking his answer before submitting it. After a moment, he said:

"Robinhoodan'littlejohn." He said it just like it were all one word.

"Very good, young man," said Robin.

"I think I've heard those names before!" said the puma, still huddled on the asphalt.

"Who doesn't know the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest Nature Preserve?" Priscilla piped in.

"Ma'am, I'm so sorry to be talking through you," said Robin, "we just want to make sure these boys are straightened out before we let our guard down."

"Oh, it's not an issue, gentlemen," said Priscilla, "I feel safer already."

"You call yourselves 'the Merry Men'?" asked the puma. "That's a stupid name!"

"Dude, hush-!" said the porcupine worriedly, but Little John needed to say a word to this delinquent little shit cougar kid. It didn't help that John had a bad history with large-species teenage boys with nasty attitudes.

"Boy, stand up! You look pathetic down on the ground like that!" John barked, and the puma slowly and carefully got to his feet. "We call ourselves that because we're a bunch of happy-asses who love our work. And because this guy's from Merrie Olde England," John said as he gestured to his British buddy. "Most good decisions in life aren't made for just one reason, kid."

"I thought there were more than two of you, though," said the porcupine.

"Honestly, so did I," confessed Priscilla. "I mean, we all know about- um…" - Priscilla made the sign of the cross to hint at which former Merry Man she knew for a fact was still living, and Robin and John understood, while the boys cocked their heads in confusion - "...but weren't there others?"

"Things fall apart sometimes," said Little John. At that, Priscilla and the porcupine both looked bummed out at this revelation, assuming it meant the worst, while the puma was just further confused.

"Though our jobs could be made easier if the youth of this city stopped undermining our efforts," said Robin sternly. "We try so hard to bring hope to the lowly people of Nottingham, and yet the poor still victimize the poor. Why do we bother, then?"

"It's pronounced 'Nottingham', not 'Knotting'em', britfag," said the puma.

"'Fag'? But I'm not even smoking a cigarette!" Robin quipped, but the puma clearly didn't get it. "Young men, what are your names?"

"Alex," said the porcupine.

"Why would I tell you my name?" asked the mountain lion. "So you can get me in trouble?"

"His name is Landon, sir."

Landon tried to smack Alex on the back of his head, but aimed too low and got exactly one quill stuck in his hand. Landon grasped his paw in pain and tried not to squeal, while Alex rubbed the back of his head with only mild frustration.

Little John scoff-chuckled. "Poor bastard."

"You don't have to call me 'sir', sir," Robin said to Alex. "Now, you mentioned that once upon a time we gave your mom a hand. Does she need some more help?"

"Uh… I-I guess so…" the porcupine murmured.

"What about you, Land-o?" asked Little John.

"What are you gonna do? Give my parents a check for a million dollars?" the puma spoke up to the bear, trying his best to stand tall and look formidable; it wasn't working.

"Do you want help or not?"

"...Nah."

"Alex, you?" Robin asked.

"Yes," he said firmly. "Please. For my mom."

Robin spotted a scrap of paper and a pen that had fallen out of Priscilla's purse. "Do you mind if we borrow these, madame?"

"Go ahead," she replied. "And you can call me Priscilla."

"Thank you, Miz Priscilla." Robin picked up the pen and paper and handed it to Alex. "Here; write down your address and we'll stop by when we have something to deliver."

"Are you just trying to bust him to his parents in person?" demanded Landon.

"Don't worry, Alex," Little John said, "we'll tell your parents to punish you constructively, not destructively. My dad beat my ass, and now I'm the kind of guy who reminds a couple of kids that I'm being nice to them and I could easily've knocked them off the mortal coil after I saw them robbing a woman at gunpoint."

"Jesus, John," remarked Robin, perversely impressed.

"Hey, I'm just giving an example. Maybe a solid argument to their parents can save them from an ass-kicking."

The example worked and Alex wrote down his address and his mom's full name, and handed it to Little John, who was closer. Little John went to shove the piece of paper in his back pocket, but surprised himself when he felt something cold and metal under the back of his shirt and pants that he'd forgotten was on his person. Luckily, nobody saw the shocked look on his elevated face, because Robin was saying something:

"Now, don't tell them that we're coming; we want it to be a surprise. Besides, we don't know when we'll have time. It's been a slow couple of days for, er, access to redistributable wealth, shall we say."

"Um… okay," said Alex.

"And between you and I, Johnny and I've promised ourselves to try to speak somebody from our past today; I won't spill the details, it's all rather personal, but it's probably going to be a long conversation. But we'll make time to see your mum, Alex."

When Little John snapped out of it, he did so with an observation that seemed completely out of left field.

"Hey, by the way, you kids are terrible robbers if you're wearing recognizable clothes like that," John noted.

"Well it's better to dress like normal people than to walk around wearing black sweatpants and ski masks!" retorted Landon.

"I literally don't remember the last time I saw someone in Nottingham wearing a Lakers hat. And what's that logo on your hoodie even supposed to be?"

"What, this? It's Zoo York; it's a skate company! And I can just go home and get changed after I rob somebody! Problem solved!"

"And when you're running from the cops and they know exactly what you're wearing?"

"I just said, I'll go home and change!"

The other four exchange looks of incredulity, amusement, disappointment, and confusion.

"I don't think he gets it," said Priscilla.

"Maybe it's best not to give him robbery advice, Johnny," said Robin.

"Hey, wait, where did you kids even get these clothes from anyway!?" Little John turned to Alex to let him know that he was on the hook for this, too. "The kids in Georgetown don't usually have trendy hats and - what the fuck is 'System of a Down'?"

"A band," said Alex.

"They can't usually afford band t-shirts, neither!"

"H-hey, hey, it's- it's cool, w-we, we, we, uh…" Landon stuttered.

"We really did buy these legally, though. We didn't steal these," said Alex, speaking much more calmly than Landon was.

"And where did the money come from?" asked Robin.

Now Alex wasn't looking so calm anymore. The boys' silence spoke volumes.

"Well, boys," Robin continued, "do you have anything to say to our friend Priscilla here?"

"Uh, yeah, um…" Alex turned to face the mink. "Uh, s-sorry, ma'am. We won't, uh… we won't do it again." The porcupine then bowed like someone who had only ever seen people bow while practicing karate.

"And Landon?" asked Robin.

The puma looked down at the mink, locked eyes, looked frustrated, and then closed his eyes and took a deep breath through his nose. "...I'm sorry, Miss Priscilla."

"Well, then," Priscilla said as she turned back to the Merry Men, "I didn't think this interaction would end like this!"

"Oh, I know!" said Alex, and he knelt on the ground and started collecting the contents of Priscilla's spilled purse. "I can help clean up!"

"I like this kid more than the other one," remarked Little John.

"Now, Alex," said Robin, "that's actually a very good idea for an apologetic gesture, but it might be best to let you boys skedaddle and Little John and I will help her clean up." This was very much a measure to assure the kids didn't pocket anything they found while the adults weren't looking.

"C'mon, Alex, let's go," Landon said, already making his exit.

"Wait, real quick," said Alex, "Can I ask you guys a question?"

"What's up?" asked Little John.

"How do you guys run across town when you're carrying such big weapons?" the porcupine asked as he pointed at the fox's bow and the bear's staff in quick succession.

Little John let out one sharp guffaw. "You're asking a couple of masters of hidin' and disguisin' to just tell you our secrets?"

"It's just something you get used to, and you learn to adapt," said Robin. "For awhile I had a second bow that was collapsable, but the string just couldn't keep its tension. I'll say this much, though: our travels take us across a bunch of rooftops - as you may have noticed," he said as he gestured to the garage he'd been standing on. "That and using our bow and staff with telephone wires, like ziplines and such." And that was true, although it avoided the full story of how they also utilized sewers, subway tunnels, dirty alleyways, shortcuts through people's backyards (where they often stumbled and fell goofily over people's outdoor furniture and garden installations), and waiting sometimes upwards of twenty minutes for a break in traffic to cross a busy street with no other logical concealed crossings - and even then, they sometimes just got tired of waiting and made a mad dash across the road, avoiding moving cars like Frogger.

"Cool!" said Alex.

"Yeah, but you're record's spotty, so you can't join us," said Little John. "At least not yet."

"Well, time to start cleaning up," said Robin, and he bent over and went straight for the knife and BB gun. "I think we'll be keeping these."

"Wait a minute!" said Landon, turning back around to protest. "Those are ours!"

"Well, we steal from the rich to give to the poor," explained Little John. "You boys have some cool duds, while we live in the woods. I think we're the poor ones here."

"Not to mention, you almost walked off without them," added Robin.

"That, too."

Landon just glared, and Alex looked conflicted, like he didn't know who to please. After a moment, Landon walked off toward Baltimore Avenue without a word, and Alex followed after.

As the porcupine left, he walked with his back turned toward the adults, and said, "Thanks for the, uh… thanks." And he turned back around was gone.

Robin and John got on their knees to help pick up Priscilla's stuff, which they handed to her and she carefully placed back into her purse.

"Thank you boys so much," said Priscilla. "How could I ever repay you?"

"Oh, you needn't repay us," Robin insisted. "Just keep supporting us and keep resisting the Prince Mayor and his tyrannical idiocy, in whatever way you think you can."

"Oh, but surely I can offer you something. Wouldn't you say that would be supporting you?"

"The lady's got a point, Rob," said Little John.

"It really isn't an issue-" Robin began before John had an idea.

"You know, Priscilla, Rob and I were on the fence about even bringing our weapons into town today," he said. "Good thing we did, but now we're about to head into enemy territory, and the more we think about it, the more we think the heat's up on us today and we should have left these at home. So we might need a safehouse to keep our stuff for a few hours."

Robin let John take the reins on this one.

"But are you sure you won't need them again?" Priscilla asked.

"The kid was onto something; these things are hard to hide. We've survived this long without these things constantly by our sides; we'll survive a little longer without them now."

"Not to mention, we've got a knife and a toy gun now if we really need them!" Robin added like a giddy little kid hoping to enter a grown-up conversation.

Priscilla thought about it for a second. "I'd need to keep it away from my daughter while I'm asleep - I just got home from work - but I can probably find a place to stash them." She stood with her purse and its contents now again intact. "Would you like to come meet her? I've told her stories about you guys a couple of times, truth be told."

"Really!" said Little John "We'd love to meet her! Lead the way!"

Priscilla walked off toward her house, and Robin began to follow, but Little John grabbed him by the shoulder with an uncertain look on his face.

"Everything alright, Johnny?" Robin asked; he was trying to forget how jarring it was to be reminded that, despite recent events, Little John could still make his own decisions for the both of them without needing Robin's permission.

Little John started walking to follow Priscilla, but he and Robin were keeping a few feet back.

"Hey, Rob, I'm sorry that I keep acting like an asshole in front of complete-ass strangers," the bear said in a hushed tone. "I don't want there to be a bad guy between us."

"Nonsense, Little John; those kids deserved your tone!"

"Yeah, but… something about that mountain lion, something about- not just his attitude, but, like, the structure of his face… it reminded me exactly of one kid from back home."

-IllI-

The porcupine wasn't the only denizen of Nottingham who referred to the fox and the bear as though their first and last names were conjoined. Especially among the younger set, these two constant members of the West Side's favorite band of vigilantes had just sort of always been there for as long as they could remember.

In the very earliest days of the group's operations, they had made a point to try to keep a low profile; that plan did not last long. But it was all for the best that their devotion to anonymity fell apart exactly when it, as Robin realized that they could connect a lot more with the people they were helping if there were names and faces connected to these mysterious figures who would swoop in and bring them gifts of hope and joy and monetary contributions, and yet they had stayed nameless for just long enough to gain the people's trust and have confidence that the people would not use their details to betray them. The timing of the change in philosophy was perfect.

So it was that the last two remaining members of the crew were practically mononymous. The kids who were now teenagers had first heard of these characters seven years ago, having overheard their names from the adults, and the legend status of these two was germinated amongst the youth so thoroughly that there were even a sizable number of adults who had heard the names bounced back from the teenagers and now themselves emphasized Robin and Little instead of Hood and John when speaking the names aloud, as opposed to putting the stress on the second names as they would with anybody else's.

-IllI-

He didn't like the sound it made when his car hit that bump. He stopped in the middle of the alleyway and got out to inspect it. Sure enough, he had a flat tire. Upon giving it a closer look, there was a carpenter's nail sticking out of it. He expected that the alleyways behind his house would be cleaner than this; he wouldn't have bothered buying a house two blocks from the Inlet if he knew Oak Orchard wasn't as immaculate of a neighborhood as it seemed.

He popped the trunk of his luxury sedan and moved a bunch of junk that the world was never meant to see. Finally, he uncovered the hatch that contained the spare tire and the emergency tool kit.

The lemur knelt down and tried to make heads or tails of the implements at his disposal. He had been fortunate enough in life so far as to not have to change a tire before in his life, and now he was wondering whether he could figure it out in a pinch.

"Do you need any help there, stranger?" asked a voice.

The lemur turned to see a pair of scruffy-looking fellas in ratty clothes walking toward him, a bear and what was either a large fox or a red coyote with an extremely thick tail. The look on their faces seemed friendly enough, but their way of dress struck fear in him.

"We can help you with your tire if you want," said the fox-yote, although something about his accent seemed off.

"I don't need your help guys," said the lemur. "Don't sweat it."

"What, do we look scary or something?" asked the bear.

"I don't know you. Don't take it personally."

"If something about us strikes you as uneasy," said the fox-yote, "you can tell us. How are we supposed to know if we offend if nobody tells us?"

"I dunno? Just get the hint?" the lemur said as he turned back to his car.

"C'mon, just let us help you!" the bear begged. "We'll feel better about ourselves if we can help you!"

"You'll feel better about yourselves when you get some nicer clothes! What are you two doing in this alley, anyway? You don't look like you live on this block."

"Oo-de-lally! Now why would you say a thing like that?" the fox exclaimed.

Oo-de-lally; the codeword that meant go for it. The clandestine communicator for one of the Merry Men to tell any quantity of the others that they were personally certain that they had found an unkind rich person deserving of victimization and that it was conscionable to proceed. The phrase was Will's idea; on one of his last days as a free civilian, he was watching reruns of cartoons at Marian and Annie's apartment in DC, and one episode of a show about a boy genius with a secret laboratory ended rather oddly with a short sequence devoid of context where the titular character is having a dream wherein he's going to town on an infinite pyramid of burgers, only to awaken and remark "Oo-de-lally, I'd better become a vegetarian!"; Will thought that phrase was the perfect balance of plausible enough to be a thing an eccentric might say but rare enough not to be confused with anything else you'd hear someone say, and the others agreed it was a perfect codeword.

If any other member disagreed with the call, and felt that they needed more time to get a read on the subject, they need only reply with "Golly!"; if they agreed with the green light, then nothing more needed to be said.

But the lemur was nevertheless caught off-guard by the phrase. "What the hell did you just say?"

"I said that's quite a remark to make about a couple of strangers who're just trying to help!" the fox-thing said.

"We were walking down the street when we heard a pop!" the bear said. "Now, c'mon, let's get you some help!" he said as he lumbered over, the maybe-fox in tow.

"No, no-" the lemur began to protest. "I-I have a cell phone! I can call the police from anywhere!"

"Oh, there's no need for that, friend-o!" said the bear as he picked up the scissor-jack. Then he looked to his right, then he looked to his left.

"Buddy, just put my jack down," begged the lemur.

"Oh, okay!" Then he dropped the jack on the lemur's head. "Oops! Sorry!"

-IllI-

One might think after seven years of living off the grid with only each other (and a few others who ultimately fell away) that Robin and Johnny's social skills would have deteriorated from lack of use, but with all the community work they did, it was almost like they never left. Almost would need to be stipulated - they certainly had taken some psychological bruises and mild Stranger-in-a-Strange-Land Syndrome from having less than full contact with a rapidly-modernizing society, but not nearly as many as some others might in their situation. They just so happened to live in the woods, but as those woods bent around Nottingham's Northwest side and captured the communities of Georgetown and Harbeson and Hermosa Park and Piney Grove and Wood Branch and Gum Hill and Hardscrabble and Stockley in a loving embrace, that just made them neighbors to everyone.

And they were neighbors who everybody - barring the most jaded and militantly hopeless of Nottingham's lower-class - was happy to have next door. By the time that second summer rolled around, Robin Hood, Little John, Alan A. Dale, Tucker "Friar Tuck" Brock and Will Scarlett were names that did not need an introduction in Nottingham. Of course, it helped that the face of the gang was the single most compelling fox you ever did meet, a real English gentleman whose oozing charisma and charm were entirely natural - at least as far as anybody knew. With him at the helm, the boys couldn't help but to integrate themselves into the community.

At first, the other four thought that Robin was being reckless with how outgoing he was, but when they saw that he was the catalyst for getting two-thirds of a major American city to back them up unconditionally, they said screw it, this kid must know what he's doing. (Incidentally, it was this revelation that Robin had singlehandedly peopled his way into getting thousands and thousands of people to be their peripheral allies that for the first time caused Little John to consciously wish he could be like Rob, but it manifested itself in admiration instead of bitter self-loathing, further helped by the fact that Robin was simultaneously working his magic on his new grizzly bear friend to help John let his rough guard down and rediscover his inner fun-lover that he thought had been beaten out of him.)

When Will passed that third summer, the people mourned with them. When the Prince Mayor set up an archery contest that next summer to try to snuff out the criminals with a knack for outdated weaponry and it backfired hilariously, the people partied in the forest with them (and what a bizzare, classical period-piece that hoedown was, but nobody was in the mood to be cynical about it). When that fall came and the way of American life was changed forever and Prince John was this close to successfully convincing/bribing the Delaware National Guard to come garrison the city just "in case", the people lay awake at night with them - perhaps not in the same space but nevertheless under the same autumn moon, its glow piercing through the cold clouds, not a single airplane in the sky, over a town that was silent save for the rustling of dead leaves being rushed down the sidewalks by the wind and police sirens that always seemed far away no matter where in the city you were - the people fearing for the safety of the ones they'd come to know less like neighbors and more like family who worked very busy schedules on very odd hours and only got to see them every sweet so-often.

The effect had on the Merry Men's street cred by Alan getting incarcerated and Tuck tapping out for medical reasons could be the subject of much debate, and indeed there had been several occasions where Nottingham residents would debate the topic during the last four years since the Men had reached their zenith in the summer of that fateful year. Some would say that it gave Rob and Johnny the ultimate sympathy points, cementing their place in the hearts of the true believers. Others would say that the culling of the Men's numbers had - through no fault of Robin or Little John's - put a mark on them that they would never be able to scrub off. The mark was not that there was anything specifically wrong with Robin or John; the mark was that there was something wrong with the fundamental structure of the Merry Men, something irreparably wrong. With Will, Alan, and Tuck out of the equation, the outlaws of Sherwood Forest Nature Preserve would never, ever be the same as they were. It used to be that there were five of them, all bringing their own skills to the table, they were relatively young, they were running on pure adrenaline and nothing could stop them and their guerilla tactics that confused the NPD to no end. Now there were two of them, one of whom would soon be pushing forty and who was carrying far more weight than you'd think someone living a life of voluntary poverty would, ursine metabolism be damned (and who didn't have a legitimate medical condition to blame it on like Friar Tuck did), and the other who seemed to be healthy, but who was now also on the wrong side of thirty, and whose impressive vulpine height stopped being impressive and started being concerning - after all, if a seven-foot wolf or a nine-foot grizzly is fated to have a slew of back and knee problems, then the clock surely must be ticking on the almost-five-foot fox. All of this was still disregarding the advancement of technology that now saw even regular people being able to afford small silver bricks that they could keep in their pockets and purses with which they could summon the authorities in five minutes if they saw a fox and bear making a mess they didn't like. Imagine how badly the people's confidence in the Merry Men would be shaken if word got out that between the two of them, there was trouble in platonic paradise.

This is by no means to say that the everyday people of Nottingham had given up on the Merry Men themselves, but there were those who were starting to believe it was too late for them to achieve their ultimate goal. They would still exalt the names Robin Hood and Little John and welcome them into their homes and accept their gifts and offer them something in return and tell them to their faces how grateful they were to have people like them in their city, and they wouldn't even be lying to say that, but in the backs of their minds they would think that their scheme of the redistribution of wealth wasn't actually going to scare Prince John off his mayoral throne. They thought that if it were ever going to happen, it would have happened if the events that occurred up the coast four years ago had never happened and the three-and-a-half remaining Merry Men were able to keep their momentum, and maybe then there would be a breaking point where one day you'd just see John Norman running down the streets, bare-ass naked for no apparent reason, pissing and shitting and sucking his thumb all the way out of town and into the suburbs, where hopefully he'd have learned his lesson before becoming some other town's problem. The people of Nottingham quietly accepted that Rob and Johnny would be there as long as they could to make their lives a little better in the short-term, but there was a stark loss of faith in any results for bettering their lives in the long-term.

It was this complacency that some of the most violently frustrated residents of Nottingham despised. These malcontents hated that people would allow Robin Hood and Little John to carry on their merry way acting like they were going to permanently solve the class conflict and socioeconomic immobility in this town forever; these were often people who also were not great fans of the elder Norman brother's mayorhood either, wherein Richard genuinely tried his best to care for even the lowliest of his citizens, but - according to the agressively cynical - his best simply would not do, and even what he did accomplish was nothing his idiot brother couldn't undo. Robin had always tried to ignore these characters and hoped that by bringing hope leading by example, they would eventually come around to his way of thinking; Little John, traditionally the more cautious one of the two, had tried to push the doubters out of his head, but had confessed to Robin that he had the thought cross his mind on several occasions that maybe the naysayers were right. Such naysayers had always been there since Day One, mostly to be found in Hermosa Park, but there were increasingly more of them in more areas of the North and West Sides. There were also those who had observed this trend and added it to the list of reasons why the Merry Men were on their last legs, but such people were fewer in number.

Most of Nottingham's poor were still on-board with the Merry Men's mission, but while they absolutely believed that there was still time for things to turn around and for some new iteration of the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest to come turn the tables on Nottingham's corrupt political machine, few would say that this 'could-happen' scenario actually would.

Of course, the skeptics would have a laugh and say that deep down, the allies had always known the vigilantism was doomed to fail. Their case in point: in the seven years that Robin Hood, Little John, and company have made the City of Nottingham, Delaware, and Sherwood Forest Nature Preserve their own backyard, never once did even one of the many lost, aimless, unemployed, hopeless-yet-hopeful people in the city nut up and ask the Men if they could join the club. That said, there was once one person who tried to gain entrance to the band of thieves, but since his failed attempt happened right around the time of Will Scarlett's passing, he kept his mouth shut, thinking it best not to speak unflatteringly of the Merry Men in their time of grief. The identity of that person may as well have been lost to history.

-IllI-

"Shine your shoes, citizen?" asked a bear to the impala. The bear was sitting next to a fox against the wall at the entrance to a luxury high-rise apartment building in downtown Nottingham. They each had a shoe-shine box, the fox with a smaller one and the bear with a bigger one.

"I-I'm sorry?"

"Shoe shine, sir?" asked the fox in a vaguely transatlantic accent, like something out of an old film. "Only five dollars!"

"You're looking pretty snazzy, mister," said the bear, "but we can make you look even snazzier!"

"Uh… sure, I'm in no real hurry," said the impala, and he placed his right hoof on the fox's shinebox. The fox got right to work, grabbing some spray bottle from beneath the box and moistening his rag.

"We appreciate your patronage," said the bear. "It's awful hard to earn an honest living for some people."

"Oh, I'm sure of it. But at least you two seem to be doing something about it."

"We know it's just our lot in life to have to live so lowly." The bear was making sure to maintain eye contact and keep the conversation going so he the impala wouldn't be tempted to look over at the fox, whose eyes were sizing up the impala to estimate his worth.

"Oh, what're you talking about?" asked the impala in a cheer-yourself-up sort of way. "You two are running your own business, aren't ya? You might be able to make something out of this."

"But so many people we know say it won't change nothing, so we might as well not try."

"Well, fuck 'em. You've got work ethic. I like that."

"Other shoe, please," said the fox, and the impala complied. When Robin went to grab the spray bottle, he scared himself when he almost grabbed the chloroform bottle instead.

"Well, I know that some people think us poor folks are nothing but criminals, and we don't deserve to get ahead in the world," said the bear, trying to recapture the impala's attention. The conversation was meandering a bit too much, so he was trying to be more direct with his statements to hear what he needed to hear from the man. "And it sure seems like it's the people who run the world that think that who feel that way, so who are we to fight it?"

"What, you mean like our dumbfuck mayor?" the man asked; it was exactly the answer Little John was waiting for. "Who cares what he thinks? He's not even half the mayor his brother was - Rich had issues, but at least he tried. I don't know how he got elected to Congress, but I wish he didn't, because he left us with his idiot brother, who everyone knows just got nepotism'd in."

"Why, you mean a rich man like you doesn't support our mayor?" Little John asked, hoping he wasn't sacrificing too much subtlety.

"Oh, God, no. I'd call the man functionally retarded, but, you know, it's not nice to mock the actually mentally handicapped."

John and Robin allowed themselves a genuine chuckle.

"Haven't heard that one before, sir!" said the bear.

"Well, my closests friends and I aren't too fond of the guy, but my colleagues at work are in love with him. And I get it - he makes our lives easier - but at whose cost?" The impala looked kind of melancholy for a moment. "I'd love to do more to help guys like you, but, hey, I'm only one man. What can I do?"

"Well, golly," said Little John, "we appreciate the sentiment."

And he did. A golly without an oo-de-lally meant the speaker thought that the target was more of a good guy than a bad guy, and should be let free to go. The same rules applied for negation: no other codewords meant that nobody dissented. Of course, if anarchy-phase Alan were here, he'd probably oo-de-lally on a guy like this eight days a week for what he would call "malicious neutrality," a guilty complicity through inaction, but Robin and John thought that victimizing the well-meaning rich folks would just start an all-out class war, and that would be counterproductive if nothing else. And when the impala said 'What can I do?' - they both felt that. Especially recently, the boys were no strangers to feelings of helplessness. They weren't going to tab somebody as viscerally evil for refusing to fight a war when they genuinely didn't think that they could win even a single battle; maybe they would qualify such a person as a moral coward, but even then they would prefer to think of such a person as needing help instead of deserving shame - Robin and John would take allies wherever they could find them.

"Well, there's a little I can do," said the impala, and he pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of his pocket and handed it to the fox. "Keep the change, boys."

Robin and John, maintaining their friendly smiles, just stared at the bill in his hand for a second, then glanced at each other. The impala wondered if he'd done something to offend them.

After a moment, the bear and the fox both stood, grabbing their shineboxes but not touching the twenty.

"You know what?" said the fox; now that he was standing, the impala was surprised to see how tall he was. "If you really want to help us, keep that for now and give it to somebody who really needs it, more than us."

"Yeah, we can find more customers," said the bear, who also surprised the impala with his standing stature despite it not being much different from when he was seated, thanks to a combination of a thick ursine posterior and short ursine legs. "Others worse off than us might not be so lucky."

As they started walking off, the impala just looked dumbfounded. "Did I… do something wrong?"

"Whaddaya talking about?" the bear turned back to ask. "You did everything right! You passed the test."

"T-test? There was a test?"

"Yeah, and you passed it. Don't sweat it."

"Actually," the fox said, and he turned and walked back to the impala, "do you have an idea of how to pay it forward for us?" His accent was sounding much more British than it did earlier.

"N-no? What do you mean?"

"Ah, yes, that's our fault. We should not've put you on the spot like that," the fox apologized, and yoinked the twenty from the confused impala's hand. "Pardon my curtness; we'll do it on your behalf for now. But start brainstorming how you can pay forward a different twenty dollars next time." He shoved the twenty in his pocket, picked his shinebox back up, and walked off with his colleague.

"You take care now," said the bear.

"Um… alright," said the impala, who stood there for a few moments afterwards, watching them walk off and wondering what the hell just happened.

-IllI-

It was probably a good thing that the Merry Men's mission statement from the get-go was to give their winnings back to the poor, because if they were to have kept their liberated assets to themselves while living in those woods, they may not have survived that first winter.

Nobody remembered exactly who was the first beneficiary of the Men's exploits. All they remembered for sure is that they didn't start giving back until about a week after all five of the members had joined that May, because the original plan was to save up a huge sum and dump it on the people of Nottingham altogether at once, but this was later revised to a "give it as it comes" method that would make them look less like the bad guys. Robin could have sworn that the first recipient was the elderly antelope who lived around 44th and Minnesota in a row house with storm door that was falling off, while Little John was certain that it was the beaver who was sitting on his porch on Louisiana Avenue, gently petting his pet parakeet while having a bummed-out look on his face when the bird saw the five strangers walking aimlessly past and flapped over to them, affably perching itself upon high on Little John's shoulder; John insisted that this was the first recipient of reappropriated funds, because he remembered telling the beaver as much five seconds before Will mentioned that the man should probably get the bird's wings clipped. But the fact of the matter was that all of those first cases blurred together in Robin's and John's memories. It took them awhile to figure out how to approach strangers, often at their front doors, and give them a financial stimulus package with no strings attached and based solely on the way that they appeared to be someone whose wallet could use a little pick-me-up; even Robin, with all the powers of his natural and nurtured social skills combined, had trouble figuring out the best way to break the ice for such a bizarre proposal.

And for the longest time, they didn't really figure it out. People would give them side-eyes and tell them in no uncertain terms that they were skeptical; some thought that it was a trap and that the five of them were going to rob them and use their winnings to bait the next victim, some thought that they were troublingly eccentric rich people who were getting some masturbatory high on charity, and some didn't know what to think. There were some tough customers those first few months. While most people did cautiously accept the strange assistance, there were a few who denied the gifts out of distrust, and others who declined out of pride. There were those who tried to test whether these strangers were really as selfless as they seemed, asking them for specific favors, like yard-work or fetching groceries, to which the Men always replied with some permutation of, We'll try, but we might have to take off at a moment's notice if the cops show up. Indeed, there was at least one instance where the gang got dangerously close to apprehension when the loud sound of a lawn mower drowned out the approaching sirens until it was almost too late.

There was also a time during a night in the very tail-end of June when Robin woke up abruptly, shooting straight up in his sleeping bag and visibly freaking out in the moonlight, because in his half-asleep state he thought he had heard a very near gunshot. But then he heard another one, and he knew he wasn't asleep anymore. Then he heard another one, and another. The others awoke to the loud sounds, but quickly reassured Robin that those weren't gunshots, they were fireworks being shot off by some people who just couldn't wait a couple of days until the Fourth of July. Granted, they sounded like they were rather close, so they probably were coming from one edge of the woods, but they likely wouldn't come any closer than that, since shooting off fireworks in a thick forest probably wasn't the best idea.

Robin had completely forgotten that Independence Day existed. Will - who as a schoolchild back in England had always agreed with his teachers and other authority figures when they said his improper and irreverent ways would be much more suited to the brash and bratty American culture - began to explain the story of the holiday to his half-brother, but Robin did not need to be retaught; he just needed to be reminded. After all, he'd been in the States for longer than Will had, and he'd attended a few Fourth of July events in the six years that he'd been a legal resident alien. He knew that there were fireworks; he simply wasn't that much more familiar with the sound of an M-80 than he was with the sound of a Glock 44. But it did give him an interesting idea.

While the modern tradition is to blow off fireworks on the night of the 3rd and save the 4th for barbecues and other summer activities better suited for daytime, July 4th fell on a Saturday that year. The celebration across the nation was going to be stretched from Friday night straight into the wee hours of Monday morning. This meant all the more opportunity for Robin to meet the people he was trying to help in a neutral, jovial setting. Robin told Tuck to send Pope Gregory a prayer saying thanks for such chronological windfall from the calendar he had created (and then got an ear-full from Tuck about how Catholics don't pray to saints, they pray through saints, and hey wait a minute, now that he thinks about it, the Pope Gregory who made the calendar wasn't even the same Pope Gregory who got canonized, et cetera, et cetera).

Robin thought it would be weird if all five of them went, so he implored Tuck and Alan to stay back at the Major Oak to keep watch over their stuff - he implored Will to stay, too, but Will wanted so badly to come along, and luckily Robin remembered that it was also Will's birthday weekend before Will had to mortify him by reminding him - while he and Little John went to go mingle with the townspeople at the various public fireworks shows across the North and West Sides; Robin figured he needed an American with him to help them blend in, and he didn't just choose Johnny because Tuck was too old and Alan was too crazy and John was the closest in age to Robin besides Will (although those were definitely factors that did reinforce his confidence in his decision). Even though the bear - who had done his damnedest to hurt Robin for daring to cross his path when they first met seven or so weeks prior - was still coming out of his shell, Robin felt a weird click with the guy. He was getting some reads that there was a heart of gold under all that fat and muscle and fur that just needed to be dusted off, and Robin wanted to be the one to clean it, and not just to gain a loyal ally, but to gain a loyal friend. Hey, if he couldn't bring joy to one of his partners in crime, how could he bring joy to the people of Nottingham?

Robin, John and Will were wearing very basic disguises, nothing too fancy, just enough to get the job done. Their story was that Johnny and Rob were work buddies and Will was Robin's brother who gelled well enough with the other two to tag along - which you, Dear Reader, may realize was not very far at all from the truth of their dynamic. They meandered from park to park, chatting up friendly-looking people, saying they were from the far-out suburbs and were looking for livelier festivities than the ones they had out in the likes of Seaford or Selbyville, but not quite as rowdy as the celebrations in the beach towns like Rehoboth or Fenwick. They casually brought up in their conversations that they'd heard there were some weirdos knocking on doors throughout the blighted side of the city, and asked what their interviewees would think and do if such people arrived at their door one day offering to give them an unofficial tax refund apropos of absolutely nothing.

Some of the people they met had heard of the Merry Men, others had not, and at least one person who the trio thought was by himself turned out to be married to a woman the boys had already given a donation to, but by some miracle she didn't recognize them through their rudimentary disguises. However, the responses seemed to have a common theme: the people would probably accept the gifts, but they would feel weird with it all happening out of the blue. Alright, nothing the boys hadn't heard before.

But then on that Sunday night, just a few minutes before the final fireworks started in Antonucci Park, the trio were talking to an aardwolf couple who had a young son, a hyperactive little boy who wanted to show all the people in the park his newly-invented semi-improvised dance. Robin had just popped the question of how the aardwolves would react to a sudden donation from a couple of strangers when the son - whose name was either Tyler or Taylor - insisted that the three strangers join him in his dance. Robin was not one to say no to such an innocent request, so he played along, soon joined by Will (who was slowly getting over his teenage predisposition for thinking that cheesy things, like dancing with a little kid, were stupid and should be shunned), and finally, after much beseeching from the foxes and the young rug-cutter, Little John let loose, too (and later confessed that it was much more fun than it should have been). While Tyler/Taylor's parents didn't join the dance, they did look on with soft smiles as these kind strangers were able to entertain their child, and as Robin and Will eased their way out of the dance - Little John kept going with the aardwolf, secretly not wanting to stop, and the big bear and the little pup were actually playing so well off each other that it would have been a crime against performance art to stop them - the conversation got back on track, and after seeing such a heartwarming moment, Tyler/Taylor's parents had the inspiration to say exactly what Robin was looking for.

The mom mentioned that although receiving help was nice and she would be grateful for it, it might be a tad bit awkward if it came from a complete stranger who had no rapport with her. The dad then put it more bluntly: he'd feel much better accepting such unconditional assistance if it came from a friend, even if it was a friend made just then during the duration of the transfer of funds.

Robin was so flabbergasted to get such a perfect answer that he debated revealing his and the boys' identities right then and there, but he restrained himself. He hastily mentioned that he and his entourage had other friends to meet at the event, and took off back for Sherwood with Will and Johnny (after Will and Robin each grabbed one of Little John's paws and dragged him out of his hedonistic trance). While the rest of Nottingham had their eyes turned to the sky, the three of them made their way safely back to the forest preserve, where Robin hatched a very simple plan to win over Nottingham's hearts.

-IllI-

Ding-dong!

The elephant opened the door and glanced down to see a sickly-looking brown bear, seeming aged in a shawl and an old-fashioned flat-cap, and farther down was a fox who also appeared to be advanced in age, holding a cane and sporting thick coke-bottle glasses. She would guess they'd be about her parents' age. Neither of them seemed to be able to afford a more fashionable wardrobe.

"Excuse me, ma'am," said the bear, "we hate to bother you, but-"

"Who are you?" asked the elephant impatiently.

"Oh, were just two old men who got lost trying to find a detour to the veterans' cemetery in Lewes," said the fox. They both had very strained voices, as if speaking was a struggle.

"Well, it's not around here," said the resident of the house. "You two aren't from around here, are you?" The fox and bear noticed that she was dressed rather fancily for a quiet Sunday.

"Oh, no, we're from Georgetown," said the bear. "We're just trying to visit our friend-"

"Your friend doesn't live here. You two are going to have to leave."

"Our friend lives in the cemetery!" said the fox. "We're begging you for directions!"

"Well, we don't take kindly to beggars in this part of town. If my husband were here, he'd make sure both of you stood off his doorstep!"

"Are you home alone today, ma'am?" the fox asked. "It would be such a shame for a lady like yourself to spend a day like today alone!"

"Excuse me? You think I'm some kind of loner!?" the elephant exclaimed. "I have dinner plans for later this evening! And my husband is on a business trip - which is something it looks like neither of you've ever been on!" Furious, she started to close the door on the old men.

But Little John put his arm out and kept her from closing it. "Now listen here, little missy!" the bear said to the elephant who was larger than him in all three dimensions. "Show some respect for your elders! We fought in Korea!"

The elephant was so unimpressed by the 'little missy' comment that she opened the door all the way again just to tell them off. "'Little missy'? Hardly. I'm fifty-one."

"Oo-de-lally, you don't look a day past twenty-eight, young lady!" the fox remarked.

"'Oo-de-lally'? I've never heard that phrase before in my life-"

Hack! Hack!

The bear keeled over and tried to catch himself on the side of the doorframe, coughing horrifically; intriguingly enough, he seemed to be coughing directly into the doorframe itself, and spitting something up in the process.

"Eww!" the elephant squealed. "Get out of my house, you sick old man!"

The bear slowly got himself back up, grasping the door frame to prop himself up, as well as to discreetly shove his fingers into the lock and deadbolt slots, as if pressing something into place. "It's alright, it's alright; I'm going to be fine-"

"I don't care if you're going to be fine! I want you off my doorstep!"

"But won't you please give us directions to the veterans' cemetery in Lewes?" asked the fox.

"No. Now, leave-"

"But our usual route is crowded with traffic going to the luxury mall!" said the bear. "We heard on the car radio that they're having a sale on plus-size négligées!"

"I don't-!" the elephant started, but took a second to process what they said. "...I don't care. You have to leave, or I'm calling the police. And they won't escort you to Lewes."

The old men looked dejected, and walked away without saying a word in that slow, silent way that dejected old people do. The elephant watched them walk all the way off her property and shut the door, and went to the window to make sure they kept walking after that.

Twenty minutes later, she locked up the house and pulled out of her driveway in her convertible, her husband's credit card safely in her purse. Five minutes after that, the old men casually waltzed up to the front door, moving much more spryly than earlier, and took a quick glance to make sure nobody was watching before they gently shook the front door and fiddled with a card in the gap and a bent paperclip in the keyholes until the lock and deadbolt both disengaged. They entered nonchalantly. The old gum trick had worked again.

-IllI-

For the rest of that first summer, the five of them very slowly eased their way out of the social shadows. When they met citizens for the first time, they subtly communicated amongst themselves to determine who it was safe to open up to, share their names and faces with, and establish a relationship with wherein trust and distrust was not an issue. They were excited, but hesitant; as much as they were itching to have meaningful interactions with people outside their group, they were worried that they were going to be jeopardizing their safety, and that if they built a bridge, they would just have to run right back across it. But Robin promised them that the only way that they were going to get the city on their side is if they stopped being strangers.

By that fall, a fair chunk of Nottingham would consider the five vagabond bandits their friends, even as rarely as they saw them. Such people probably wouldn't say they knew the five of them inside and out, but they would likely say they felt comfortably familiar with the pious Irish-Catholic badger from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who got kicked out of the Navy while stationed at Norfolk because he couldn't control his weight (though he swore he tried, and while the navy's doctors gave him the benefit of the doubt, his commanding officers didn't) and bounced aroung homeless shelters in Nottingham for twenty years before he ran into a group of four men; familiar with the kooky coyote from rural Oklahoma who was the closest thing the gang had to an outdoors expert (which is to say that he had been camping and bird-hunting a few times under pristine conditions and vaguely remembered the most basic survival skills that he'd been taught in the military), who had seen some shit in the Gulf War and had nicknamed himself "the Rooster" after the Alice in Chains song that he could just feel was written about himself or someone like him the first time he heard it back in 1994 during a rare moment when his pickup truck's radio wasn't tuned to the country station, and who was nomadically driving around the country a few years later when he ran into a group of three men; familiar with the younger of the British lads, who was a rebel with several dozen poorly-defined causes, rejecting his well-to-do upbringing, and who had harbored a strange love affair with the United States ever since he discovered that he preferred Black Flag, Bad Religion, and the Descendents over The Clash, the Sex Pistols, and The Damned (and although he was aware that the stateside punks probably had mixed feelings about their own homeland, he didn't think that was a dealbreaker for his dreams of America), and who had run away from his legal guardian in DC to the Delaware forests to join a group of two men; familiar with the lumbering bear from Nashville, Tennessee, who slowly but surely rediscovering his sunny side and overcoming his frustrations with the first thirty years of his life not going quite the way he'd hoped and whose only source of self-esteem at the time was his size, and who decided to try to make a consequential dent in the world around him when he was angrily walking through Sherwood Forest to blow off steam and just happened to cross paths with one man; and familiar with the Englishman who started it all, who originally wanted to be an actor in America alongside the love of his life before deciding that his dreams coming true wouldn't mean much if he had had the chance to make other people's dreams come true and chose not to, consequently making the toughest and most selfless decision of his life, and while his origins before that were a tad bit hazier than that of the other four (people faintly understood the Rob and Will to be brothers, and they certainly looked like it, but they had different last names, so was there more to the story than that?), whoever had raised this fox clearly knew how to cultivate a gentleman.

It was just in time for the weather to start getting colder, and for a permanent life in the outdoors to start looking like a bad idea. The Men tried reassuring themselves that if their distant ancestors could survive through the worst of nature back when there were no doors to be outside of, then surely they could survive with modern camping gear, but it wasn't long before they shook their heads and said, no, that was then and this is now.

It killed them to do it, but they had to start taking up the citizens of Nottingham on their how-can-I-ever-repay-you? offers. It seemed so damned hypocritical and counterintuitive and borderline shameful, and they had already had arguments amongst themselves about how much of their loot money they should keep for basic supplies, but they resolved that they weren't going to be much help to Nottingham if they died of hypothermia.

They told themselves that they would only accept reimbursement offers that were simple and/or necessary: absolutely nothing that required the citizen to spend money on them directly; it either had to be something that they already owned (and preferably didn't need anymore) or a service that cost nothing but time.

Splendid, so an agreement had been reached. Now they argued about how to ask. Little John thought it would be as simple as saying "yes" when they asked Can I give you boys some _?, but Tuck was nervous that that would come across too strong, and thought they should only accept gifts from people who were really insistent that they accept, but Will thought that it was a wee bit urgent and that they should just pop the question themselves while explaining it was quite literally a matter of life or death, because who would argue with that? Then Robin came forward and volunteered to do all the talking.

And just as he anticipated, most of the interactions followed the script to a tee. They would offer, Robin would coyly decline, they would offer again, and then Robin would accept in such a way that it looked like he was accepting to make them feel happy - which it often did. It was seriously like watching magic happen. This guy could say exactly what he wanted to say in a way that his listeners wanted to hear. You could see the way women's hearts would melt when he spoke, and how men would feel compelled by his confidence.

Alan and Tuck, who had long since accepted that they weren't ever going to be so silver-tongued, were impressed; Little John, meanwhile, was also outwardly impressed, but the seeds of jealousy were in the process of being planted. Long before Robin had to deal with Little John's rekindled insecurities, however, he had to deal with Will's.

And Robin sincerely wished that Will wasn't so jealous of his way with people, and not just because it was counterproductive to have bad blood amongst co-conspirators. Robin actually felt kind of disgusted that the etiquette classes Robert had forced him to take were paying off dividends, the same etiquette classes that Will had defiantly blown off and walked an hour home from mere minutes after Robert dropped him off, every single Saturday, until Mr. Scarlett acquiesced and let him stop going (ironically, this showed a level of chutzpah in Will that Robin was jealous of). But Robin did not want to risk making the mood even worse by bringing up the subject of their father, nor did he want to confess that a fair chunk of his magnetic personality came from a classroom in Sheffield, lest it come across like he was saying all of his charm was artificial. Robin still did privately fancy himself some natural foxlike talent with making friends and influencing people, but he had to confess that the classes did help him hone his craft; indeed, while the idea of taking an etiquette class was rather snobbish, the classes themselves actually provided some rather useful information on how to cordially interact with people of any class or social status, such as how to pretend to politely decline a gift and still manage to receive it anyway. Of course, he also had plenty of practice speaking with adult strangers as a lad, seeing as many of them thought that he was an adult because he certainly was the size of one. There was also the way that he grew up simultaneously inhabiting both the world of the working-class back home with Brianna and Oliver and the world of the aristocracy when Robert dragged him away to do rich-person things as his "project child" or whatever he called him - come to think of it, Robin had had plenty of help cultivating his legendary personality, but he would be slow to say so. After all, a magician never reveals his secrets.

With the people won over, a supply line was established. Reasonable offers were always accepted. Well-worn clothes and hand-me-down kitchenware, old blankets and leftover food when the residents had accidentally cooked too much and couldn't possibly finish it all before it went bad. Maybe once in a blue moon they'd accept a ride if the person was driving in the direction they were headed anyway (and had a car that could fit all five of them). And maybe some fresh-baked cookies here and there.

As the weather got worse, the five of them pow-wowed to decide whether it was a security risk to both themselves and their hosts if they were to accept invitations to stay in their homes on a cold winter night. They all came to the same conclusion: hell yes it was a security risk, but it was still better than the alternative. They tried to limit their overnighting to when it was actively raining or snowing, but after they consulted a camping guide that laid out clearly how bad of an idea it was to suck up the cold, they swallowed their pride and started asking for shelter when the nighttime temperatures were projected to drop below 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

As the year came to a close, they accepted an invitation to spend their first Christmas with a widower hound dog who ran a modest tool-and-die shop in Georgetown. He wasn't hurting too badly financially, though a new tax on small businesses in certain areas of town ("to discourage disturbing the peace of a residential neighborhood by bringing commerce to it," was the lame reasoning the then-fairly-new mayor had given for it) was certainly taking its toll on him. The six of them had a quiet, cozy holiday, chumming around and sharing stories and spinning fantastic yarns while Miracle on 34th Street and It's a Wonderful Life played on the television in the background with the volume set to ten percent. Then the hound dog stepped away and said that he was retrieving their present, having been fully cognizant that they had asked for no material possessions but consciously choosing to ignore their polite request, and returned with an enormous rolled-up tent, a high-end model which boasted being large enough for four medium-sized mammals and a grizzly bear, and being impermeable to temperatures down to 15 degrees. He said it was so that they wouldn't have to be as reliant on people's kindness if they didn't want to.

They shared their thanks before revealing their present to him; although he had similarly insisted several times over that they not bother getting him anything because the only present he wanted was company for Christmas, they were far too gentlemanly to take that for an answer. Their offering was a large painting of the hound dog and his late wife on their wedding day, its detail impeccable and its scope breathtaking, all bounded by a flourishing golden frame; the Men had secretly snapped a Polaroid picture of a small photo of the same scene they'd seen on his mantle two weeks prior, then commissioned an art-school kid in Zoar Park to put it on a canvas, under instruction to add just a touch more flair to it while still keeping it recognizable, and he had done splendidly.

The toolmaker was immediately overcome by emotion, and they waited patiently for him to let it all out, soft smiles on their faces. When the dog looked up again, he said something that shook them: he didn't want them to stay at his house on Christmas next year. He wanted them to spread the joy to everyone all over Nottingham; he felt so selfish keeping their generosity to himself.

It then seemed so obvious. They agreed to his terms to start spending future Christmases doing the best they could to be modern, real-life Santas; it just made too much sense. In return for the invaluable guidance, they began to regard the hound dog as one of their closest civilian confidantes, and whenever the weather was too dangerous and there was no immediate threat of police - or when there was an immediate threat of police and they needed a safehouse now - he was always their first choice to ask for a place to crash. Even when he was at his shop, the men knew where he hid his spare key.

It was a good thing that he had suggested the Santa Claus Christmas routine, because the Merry Men's new tradition of tossing out flour-bags full of cash to needy people was a highlight of the slower winter months, when the Men couldn't help but let the inclement temperatures get to them. But when spring and summer rolled around, their activity would be back in full swing; many would say that this is why the merry month of May was the favorite page of the calendar on Nottingham's West Side. But of course, now it was June, and freezing to death was quite the opposite of Robin and John's meteorological concerns, and the fact that their favorite month was now freshly behind them was just another thing to add to their list of reasons why they worried that it would be a long while before happy times would return.

-IllI-

Knock, knock, knock.

"Hey, Otto! You home?" asked Little John as he bent down to peek through the door's semicircle window. There was a faint sense of urgency in his voice. Otto Smith was not the person they had been planning to surprise with a visit today, but sudden natural urges and geographical convenience had squeezed him onto their list of appointments.

"Do you see any lights on or anything?" asked Robin with a similar voice of urgency. He leaned over the stoop's railing to see if he could see any signs of life in the diemaker's house; despite being exceptionally tall for a fox, he was still a member of a smaller species, and Robin was still too short to see into the window on the door. "I can grab the spare key."

"I'm not going to go into the guy's house just to use his bathroom, then leave. Let's just run to the library or something," Little John suggested.

"No, no," said Robin as he went over to the other side of the stoop to try to look into the other window. "Then we'd have to do a publicity tour before we can excuse ourselves to the facilities." Robin secretly didn't have to go that badly; what was urgent was that he have a quick moment to speak with Otto while Little John wasn't around, now that Robin realized this was the perfect opportunity to get an outsider's perspective.

"Well, now I guess I understand why some people can't handle being celebrities."

"Could you make it back to Sherwood?"

"I cannot make it back to Sherwood."

"Can you make it around to his backyard?" This part of Georgetown had the typical mid-Atlantic row housing, so to get to Mr. Smith's backyard, you had to either pass through his house or walk all the way down the block to the alley and around the back.

"What good would that do?"

"I'll keep watch for you; just go behind his house. I'm sure he'll understand-"

"Rob, I'm not gonna take a leak on the side of the man's house after all he's done for us!"

"We'll hose it off afterward-"

"And also I don't just need to pee!"

"Oh… I see…"

"Goddammit. You wanna find me a quiet alleyway and keep watch while I uncover a manhole and-?"

Just then, they heard the lock disengaging. Otto opened the door and greeted them with a smile that was warm, but a little embarrassed.

"Sorry to keep you waiting boys, I was in the bathroom," said the hound dog. "You boys alright?"

"We're so sorry to bother you, Otto, but we were hoping we could-"

"Can we use your bathroom?" Little John interrupted Robin. His voice sounded as pained as every part of his body looked.

"Oh, sure," Otto said as he stepped aside and opened the door all the way. "Don't let me stop you-"

"Rob, give the man some money," Little John said as he rushed in, failing to duck enough to clear the doorframe. "GAH! Jesus lordy fuckin' Christ!" he swore, putting his paws on his head to simultaneously rub the point of contact as well as keep his head from dragging on the eight-foot ceiling that was just a smidge too low for him. He speed-walked toward the lavatory, instinctively knowing the path around all the ceiling fans and light fixtures from years of navigating around this house built for medium-sized mammals. Robin and Otto watched until they saw him disappear into the bathroom and slam the door behind him.

"Yikes," said Otto, "is the poor guy gonna be alright?"

"Oh, I'm sure he'll be fine," Robin said as he walked inside the house. "Between you and me, I'd be more concerned about your bathroom fixtures."

Otto let out a light chuckle as he closed the door and locked it, just for good measure. "Well, you won't have to pay me just for the privilege of using my bathroom… unless he breaks something, then damn straight you're paying me!"

"Duly noted," Robin said as they both had a seat in the living room.

"Little John, help yourself to some aspirin while you're in there!" Otto hollered toward the hallway, then turned back to Robin. "Did you have to go too?"

"Not that badly; I'll take the opportunity if you'll allow it-"

"I will."

"-but I was more hoping to ask you a question."

"Oh? What's up?"

Robin had rehearsed the question in his head a bit, but he still wasn't quite sure of the direction he wanted to take it. "Well, Otto, I feel like I need to qualify this question by saying that you are probably the person we see most often, aside from one another."

"Really? Me?"

"Well, who else would it be?" Robin asked playfully, but realized it may not have come across that way. "I didn't mean that to sound so sarcastic, Otto, I-"

"No, no, you're fine. I just thought it would be Tuck or someone like that."

"Tuck's asked us to help him keep a low profile in his new lease on life, and we're not going to deny him that. We still see him, but it's very much on an as-need basis." Robin realized that he didn't know how long Little John would be in there, so he jumped right into it: "So does Little John seem in any way… different to you?"

"'Different'?"

"I know that's a broad question worthy of a broad answer, but perhaps that's for the best. Free-associate. Tell me the first thing that comes to mind."

Otto just looked confused. "Uh… nothing, really. I haven't been paying that much attention."

"That's fair."

"Why? Have you sensed anything different in him? Is there something going on between you two?"

"You say this like he and I are a couple."

"Well from what I've seen, you two have a better relationship than a lot of married couples I know. But seriously, is something up?"

"Er, there was, but I think it's mostly passed. I do have my concerns that it may pop up again."

"Tell me about it."

"I… I really shouldn't-"

"Then why did you bring this all up?"

"I was trying to get information out of you, not the other way around!"

Otto gave him a look that said tell me anyway.

"...He's just been sort of… 'moody' might be the right word?" Robin asked himself.

"Well, how so?"

"He's just starting to lose faith in everything. And I do mean everything."

"Well, that's perfectly understandable. You two have been doing this for… what, eight years?"

"Seven."

"Oh, close enough. All that would take its toll on anybody."

"Are you losing faith in us, Otto? Faith in my and John's ability to change things for the better?"

"I wasn't, until you asked that question."

Robin and Otto heard the toilet flush, then stop abruptly. "God, dammit!" Little John screamed, the bathroom door only slightly muffling his booming voice. "I knew that would happen. I knew that would happen!"

"Plunger's under the sink!" Otto called out to Little John.

"I know where the fuckin' plunger is, Otto!" Little John called back. "You don't have to remind me!"

Otto turned back to Robin. "You may indeed owe me some money in a few minutes."

Robin - much like this narrator - was starting to get a sense of malaise from this scatalogical turn of events, but it was likely to be expected to happen, and there was nothing to do about it now. But Robin realized that this bought him some more time.

"Okay, for fairness's sake, would you say you've noticed any changes in me?"

"Well, you seem to be a little less confident than usual today."

Robin's eyes popped open. "Me? Not him - me?"

"I mean, you just asked me to reaffirm your faith in yourself. And you're making less eye contact than usual."

"B-because this is a strange situation! This is something I've never dealt with before. I've experience in speaking on all sorts of situations, but this isn't one of them!"

"Like I said, this isn't something I've been realizing for awhile. It's basically just today - hell, these last couple minutes - that I'm starting to wonder if something's going on that I don't know about."

"Based on?"

"The fact that you felt the need to ask me for an outsider's perspective to tell you that nothing's obviously changed about either of you."

Robin didn't know what to say next, so he turned his head toward the hallway for a moment and stared into space. He couldn't believe it. He couldn't believe that he was having his confidence shaken by simply having someone else say that he appeared to have his confidence shaken. Then again, he had asked an impartial arbiter for their judgment, and he got it.

"You alright, Robin?" Otto asked. "Something had to have happened that inspired this question; you wouldn't just ask it out of the blue."

"I can't refute that," said Robin, but he heard the sounds of a struggle in the bathroom finally settling down. "I don't think I'll have time to delve into details, though."

"Do I need to moderate a chit-chat between the both of ya's?"

"No, no, if anything, make sure Little John doesn't know I asked this."

"If you say so, my lips are sealed… Oh! I almost forgot! Have you been anywhere near a TV screen for the last, oh, two hours?"

"Er… no, why?"

"After the County Sheriff and Deputy beat up some kid in Sherwood, they merged the County department with the city's."

"...What!?"

"Yeah, and everyone's saying it's to get tax dollars out of the suburbs for Prince John. But it's probably that, plus he just wants to make it easier to find you two."

While Robin's jaw unhinged itself to drop open as dramatically as possible, the sink in the bathroom turned off and Little John opened the door.

"Your turn, Rob," Little John said. "Uh… if you still want to."

"I can hold it a bit longer, Johnny. But, er- Otto, run that by us again? I want to make sure I heard you right."

-IllI-

The news had thoroughly ruined their day. As they left Otto's house, they told themselves that they would feel better when they went out and distributed the day's winnings, but they really were in just no mood for it.

As they roamed the streets of Georgetown in their street clothes, knowing that they were in friendly territory, Robin and John did not speak to one another, not because there was any sort of tension, but because they would have plenty more time to shoot the shit some other time, and keeping their ears peeled for sirens couldn't hurt. Of course, this just allowed them time to be inwardly upset by the circumstances.

But while Little John was fuming that the mayor had somehow pulled off an insane move to get another leg up on them, Robin was frustrated about that and the way that Otto had inadvertently given a blow to Robin's self-esteem simply by alluding to the sheer idea that Robin's self-esteem could take a blow. It was like unconfidence had been manufactured out of thin air. Or maybe it didn't materialize out of the ether, and Otto was on to something? The logic seemed clear enough: to need to ask a question would indicate the questioner had a lack of confidence on the subject matter, and since the subject matter was himself, well…

And Robin had a strange awareness that the more he let this bug him, the more it became a self-fulfilling prophecy that he was losing his grip. He tried to remind himself that it was completely normal to have lapses in confidence from time to time, and indeed he did have moments where he questioned his self-worth, especially when thinking about whether he'd ever be worthy of Marian's love again after abandoning her for a life of crime, or whether he was a bad son for not telling his mum and Oliver what he was doing, or whether there was an inherent evil deep inside of him that he had to confront every time he saw his reflection and observed all the other genetic traits he had inherited which made it clear to everyone back in Loxley that he was his father's son, or whether in a million eventualities he could have handled the situation with Will so it would have ended less shamefully tragically, or whether he could have done a better job of being a role model for Skippy and Toby, or whether he was born the wrong species in a world that sometimes seemed like it had no place for foxes…

But it was an insecurity about insecurities themselves that had now made his vulnerable confidence visible to the world, and a person who experienced visible lapses in confidence simply was not the kind of person Robin wanted to be. These moments of public insecurity were not just inconvenient to their situation, but they were strange and foreign and alien to him after all these years of being surrounded by people who had nothing but good things to say about his character and ability; Robin fundamentally loathed this feeling of visible diffidence, and if he never felt this way again, it would be too soon. Robin was sure someone would say that he should not strive to never lack confidence, but rather to be able to muster his confidence when he needed it; but that just didn't match the standards to which he held himself. He had been so good for so long at hiding his moments of weakness; why was this the thing that pierced the veil?

Little John kicked a rock at just the right angle to send it damn-near a football field down the sidewalk, and as he slowly looked up to see it roll along its merry way, he noticed somebody standing at the end of the block.

"Rob, hold up," Little John said in a harsh whisper, and Robin, who had similarly been walking with his eyes upon the ground, jerked himself to a halt at the strange command.

"What?"

"Look," Little John pointed.

At the corner was a very well-dressed doe who looked like she was trying to pretend she knew where she was and where she was going. But with clothes that nice on a random day in Georgetown, it was clear she wasn't from around those parts.

"Is that who I think it is?" Little John asked.

"Who do you think it is?"

"The head of the county."

"Er… I mean-"

Doty incidentally turned her head toward the bandits, and the boys ducked into an alleyway, just in case she saw them.

"I mean, I don't know her face as well as I know Prince John's," said Little John, "but how many other well-dressed does would you see in this part of town?"

Robin thought about that for a second. "Well, if we aren't sure… we can just ask her, now can't we?"

"Coming on a little strong there, don't you think?"

"We can charm her."

"My question is, do we rob her?"

"Well, if Otto relayed the story of the police merger correctly, then she's certainly deserving of some retribution…" - Robin peeked around the corner just to see if she was still there - "...but she really does look lost out here."

"You'd feel bad kicking her when she's down. Or do you think it would be a bad look to rob a woman in the middle of the day on a busy street?"

"Ah… a bit of the former, a bit of the latter, I'd say," Robin mused. "How about this: we'll offer to get her wherever she needs to go, safely… and then we guilt her over it until she overpays us for the favor."

"Ooh, Rob, I like that!"

And just like that, Robin had his self-confidence back.

Commissioner Roe was staring at the street sign at 55th and Nevada, avoiding the glances and gapes and glares of passers-by, trying to remember the order that the states were admitted to the Union to see if that would spark something in her brain to remind her of the way to Bethlehem General Hospital, when she heard a soft-spoken voice with a non-rhotic accent, and not one from up the coast, either.

"Excuse me," said Robin, "but we couldn't help but notice that you seem to be lost. Could we offer our assistance?"

Doty was understandably startled by this, and Robin and John were prepared to make themselves come across as non-threatening as possible.

"Sirs, I don't need any help," said the commissioner, as firmly as she could. "Please just leave me alone."

"Ma'am, we understand that it's a strange thing to offer out of the blue," Little John said. "So we'll turn it over to you: how can we prove to you that we have the best intentions?"

"You can't."

"We understand it's a tough sell, ma'am," said Robin, "but we won't be able to sleep tonight if we don't do our best to help you."

"Do I look like I need your help?"

"Ma'am, we couldn't help but notice that some people are giving you strange looks," said Little John, "and although we know this neighborhood and its people and we're sure that most of them would never want to hurt you, I can't imagine that's a risk you'd want to take in an unfamiliar neighborhood."

"Are you saying that this is a dangerous neighborhood or not?"

"Ma'am, please be frank with us," said Robin. "Are you County Commissioner Roe?"

Doty merely glared at him for daring to ask the obvious. "You two haven't even introduced yourselves yet."

"Alex," said Robin.

"Landon," said Little John. "What are you doing out here, Commissioner?"

"It's a long story and it's none of your business."

"But you look like you're lost," said Robin. "Are you sure we can't help guide you somewhere?"

"Where did you come from? Where did you go?" asked Little John with a silly grin. "Where did you come from, Commissioner Roe?"

And Doty was mortified to cough out a little chuckle at that. (Robin didn't get the reference until it was too late.)

"I-I'm sorry," Doty apologized for her unprofessional laughter. "My daughter just graduated kindergarten; a few months ago, they had one of those… 'plays' where they just dance to goofy music, a-and, that… that was one of them."

"Oh, there's nothing to apologize for," said Little John said with a self-impressed smirk that he hoped to hell came across as friendly and not predatory; he thought he had made a breakthrough. "But really, where are you headed?"

"Bethlehem General. If you have directions, I'll take them."

"But are you sure you don't want us to escort you?" asked Robin.

"I don't know you guys. I'm not getting in your car."

"Oh, we don't have our car with us. We were just going to walk you there, if you'd allow us. It's not too far a walk."

"And we'd stick to major streets with lots of people around, where you wouldn't have to worry about us or anybody else pulling a fast one on you," Little John added.

Doty looked unsure, and sized up the men making the sudden offer. "What's in your pockets?"

Robin and John tried to contain their surprise; they hadn't heard that one in awhile. They were both wearing unfashionable but practical cargo pants - Robin in shorts, John's were full-length - which were fulfilling their intended duty. Their many pockets were filled with cash and cards and valuable-looking knickknacks they had acquired throughout the day, which they had kept on their person because they were getting ready to start knocking on doors at random and dropping them off. But this predicament was nothing that a little quick thinking couldn't fix.

"Oh, not much," said Robin as he started fishing through his main pockets, inspiring Little John to follow his lead. "House keys… wallet…"

"I've got my Epipen on me in case I get stung by a bee," said John; they were taking an enormous gamble in hoping that she wouldn't call their bluff. "Do you want us to empty our pockets, or-?"

"No, no," said Doty, "it's fine. Really, I ought to take myself to a police precinct and get a ride from them-"

"Oh, believe us, Commissioner, the cops in this town are creeps."

"Hey, if you two really do mean well, I'm sorry for drilling you. But if you're up to something… I just want you two to fuck off. After what I've been through in my life, I have trouble telling the difference until it's too late now."

"Well, listen," said John, "let me put it this way: if we were gonna hurt you at a major intersection in a major city at - what time is it?"

"3."

"-3 in the afternoon, wouldn't we have done it by now?"

Doty just looked at the negative space between the two of them. She thought that was a fair observation. Or was that just what they wanted her to think?

"Hey, come to think of it," said Robin, "we don't know you either! How do we know you aren't going to hurt us!?"

"Yeah, uh- Alex!" said Little John, briefly forgetting Robin's alias. "I'd bet a face like that could break a few hearts."

Doty heard that and wanted to feel flattered, but the allusion to relationships made her wonder again if they were looking for something inappropriate. But what ultimately made up her mind was her realization that time was ticking, and Krupa and Ryan were probably confused by her absence. She would have plenty of time during the walk to convince herself that this was as good a time as any to try reestablishing her trust in well-meaning strangers of the male persuasion, and (heaven forbid) to test those self-defense skills she'd been teaching herself. But she had one last question.

"Why do you two want to help me so bad?" she asked.

"Because there have been times when… ahem… Landon and I have needed help from strangers," said Robin, ready to answer such a question without missing a beat. "Sometimes we were fortunate enough to receive it, and sometimes not."

"So we figure we might as well pay it back," said Little John.

Doty shuffled around a bit, checking her watch and adjusting her collar, not looking at either of the boys.

"...Landon, I'd prefer if you walk in front of me."

The three of them still got some strange looks on their way to Bethlehem Hospital, but unbeknownst to Commissioner Roe, the looks were not exclusively directed at her. Hell, if anything, there were more eyes on her while she walked with "Alex and Landon," since everyone in the neighborhood knew the fox and the bear, but not everyone was so well-versed in local politics as to know the face of Doty Roe offhand. The denizens of Georgetown noticed two familiar faces walking with a different familiar face and realized there was something incongruous about the three of them being altogether at once, seemingly at peace. But as they walked by or drove past the three of them, they didn't say a word, trusting that there was a brilliant plan going on that they were not to mess with; tentatively, they were correct.

The trio exchanged pleasantries and small talk as they walked down 55th Street down to Montana Avenue, then down five blocks to 50th Street, and kitty-corner to Bethlehem General. By the time they arrived, almost all of Doty's apprehensions were gone; something about these two strangers was boding oddly well with her.

They got to the end of the walkway that lead to the visitors' entrance. "Well," said Robin, "I think you ought to be able to find the rest of the way by yourself now."

"Indeed I shall," said Doty. "But thank you guys for, uh… joining me on that walk."

"The pleasure is ours," said Little John.

"Although - and it kills us to ask this - we might have walked a bit too far out of our way," said Robin.

"You see, Alex and I need to be up early for our jobs at the sanitation works," said Little John.

"Our shift starts at midnight, and we have to go until the morning crew comes in at eight," said Robin. "We really ought to be in bed already, but it's just so hard to sleep when the sun's out on a beautiful day like today."

"Besides, a nice long walk gets us nice and tired," added Little John.

Doty looked justifiably suspicious. "...Oh?"

"Could we trouble you for some cab money back home, Commissioner, after all we've done for you?" Robin asked rather loudly, gaining the attention of plenty of eye- and ear-witnesses.

"...How were you going to get home otherwise?"

"We met you before we'd walked so far out of our way."

Doty glanced around, nervously looking for an out.

"Can I just give you bus fare?" she asked, nodding toward a crowded bus shelter not even twenty-five feet away.

"Oh, with the slow pace of the bus and the transferring between lines, it'll take forever for us to get home," Little John moaned. "At least an hour. A cab would be much faster."

"I don't have my purse on me; I'd have to find my assistant first-"

"We can help you find them!" Robin exclaimed.

Doty realized the people at the bus shelter were watching, waiting to see what she would do. Those were people who she may have needed to vote for her one day.

"...Goddammit, how much do you need?" she asked under her breath while leading the way into the hospital.

"Well, I'm all the way on the Southeast Side in Frankford," said Robin.

"And I live in Harbeson," said Little John. "Which isn't too far, but the cabs for larger types like myself cost more. I mean, I guess I could squeeze into a medium-sized one-"

"Oh, Landon's just being modest. Please don't make my friend feel claustrophobic again, Commissioner,"

"Alex, I'm trying to get over it-"

"And you've tried hard enough and you deserve to not have to force yourself to be uncomfortable."

Somewhere along the line, Doty stopped walking to just glare at them.

"You walked from the Southeast Side to the North Side to the West Side all just for the hell of it?"

"Oh, it's great exercise, Commissioner!" said Robin.

"Oh, and my brother's a cabbie back up in Philly," said Little John, "so I won't feel right unless I tip handsomely."

-IllI-

"I'm telling you, Rob, that bodyguard of hers must've been one of my old roommate's kids!"

Little John and Robin Hood were making their way due south, trying to find one specific home in Hermosa Park. Their pockets were now even more full of loot after their dealings with the county commissioner. They had scored a solid couple hundred bucks in the deal, thanks in part to Little John's last-minute idea to bullshit something about needing money for insulin after his pharmacy filled an order incorrectly.

"You say that about all the tigers we see. Or at least all the ones our age or younger."

The guys stepped around a passed-out homeless otter propped up against the side of a small pub; it wasn't clear whether it was alcohol possessing him or some other substance. This was another reason that the Merry Men were hesitant to give out money in Hermosa Park: if there was anywhere in Nottingham where the rich people were right to say that a poor person would just spend their assistance on self-destructive vices, such helpless addicts would most certainly be found in Hermosa Park. Rob and Johnny both knew that the best option would be to get them help, but getting all the addicts in Hermosa Park to a rehab clinic - whether those addicts consented to go or not - was an undertaking bigger than the scope of their powers. Not to mention, they would probably all be kicked out anyway for a lack of ability to pay. Seeing people like that otter just made Robin and John feel powerless all over again.

"Yeah, and the more I think of it, Tom wasn't as tall as this guy, either. But I swear could just sense a resemblance when I saw his face."

Someone threw a glass bottle from a third-floor window onto the sidewalk below; it exploded right at Rob and John's feet, but they pretended it didn't phase them. They did allow themselves to glance up at the window from whence it came, but whoever threw it closed the window quickly afterward and was nowhere to be seen.

"You really are on a face-hunch kick today, aren't you, Johnny? But I think he was too old to be your roommate's son."

The two of them turned down a side street.

"I'm not so sure. Tom was a lot older than me. I remember him bragging that he'd been fucking around in jazz clubs since the Seventies. And I do mean fucking around. I think he had some kids who were almost my age - maybe your age. And he was still knocking twentysomething girls up when I met you, sooo…"

They started paying more attention to the numbers on the houses.

"Really? You never told me that about Tom! I thought he was your age, maybe a little older. Why haven't you told me more about this fascinating character?"

They both set their eyes on one specific house in the near distance, but didn't say anything about it.

"He wasn't that interesting. He wasn't home half the time, and when he was, he was locked in his sex chamber."

"'Sex chamber'? Is that what you're calling it, or did he-"

"I think we're here, Rob."

The row house at 1313 North Utah was pastel-blue if you recognized the paint flakes that were still hanging on. Evidently the boys had been here once before, but it wasn't ringing a bell yet.

Robin knocked on the door; he and John had long ago agreed that Robin should knock on the doors of mammals smaller than the both of them, and John should knock on the doors of mammals that dwarfed both of them; they only had to converse about who should do the duties when it was a member medium-sized species they were calling upon.

The door unlatched and opened tentatively, revealing a timid-looking middle-aged porcupine.

"Pardon us, ma'am, but we're searching for a Miz Sarah McQuillan; do we have the right address?" Robin asked with a smile, confident of the answer.

"I've been expecting you," she said calmly. "Long time, no see, boys."

"Y-you have?" Robin's confidence was once again uncharacteristically misplaced. "Huh. We even told Alex not to spoil the surprise!"

"Alex told me everything. He knew you were coming, so he wanted to get his punishment out of the way. I guess you two put the fear of God in him."

"I hope you didn't punish him too severely."

"Let's just say that if you two put the fear of God in him, I glued it into place," she said with a wink; she had interpreted Robin's sentence as dry wit and didn't realize she was talking to two people who had rather negative views on corporal punishment.

"Is he here now?" asked Little John.

"No, I sent him to some neighbors down the street. Some old people who need help re-grouting their bathroom."

"Could these old people use a little pick-me-up?" John asked, rubbing one paw's fingers together to specify he was talking about dollars and cents.

"Will it cut into my share?" Sarah asked, then chuckled after a beat. "I'm just fucking with you. I'll take whatever you offer."

"And so it shall be," Robin said, producing a small wad of bills from his front pocket, which Sarah accepted. "But Johnny here poses a serious question: are the old couple, er, 'fans of ours?'"

"You know we aren't too popular in this part of town," said Little John, which inspired him to glance around just in case anybody was giving them the evil eye as they stood there out in the open.

Sarah thumbed through the currency and counted it in her head. "Um… they could take you or leave you, I guess. They're old-school. They probably think that they've lived this way for long enough, they can probably hang on until the end." She put the money in her blouse pocket. "And thank you, guys."

"But wouldn't they agree that things've gotten worse under Prince John?" asked Robin.

"Uh… they wouldn't, honestly. I mean, not saying I agree with them, but… they wouldn't, honestly."

"You know how cynical old people can be," said Little John.

"But yeah, they're a capybara couple at the end of the block and across the street," Sarah said, and started walking backwards to close the door. "Thanks again, guys-"

"Wait!" Robin said. "One last question. What about the other boy's family?"

"Landon," Little John clarified. "The mountain lion."

"The pumas?" asked Sarah, a bit surprised. "...Yeah, don't- don't go looking for them."

"They won't take free money?"

"Not from you two. And if they see you, they might get into a fight about it."

"How so?" asked a curious Robin.

Sarah get out a small embarrassed chuckle. "I mean, it's not like they regularly have debates about you, but… I did see them have an argument about you two once. She thinks you're too radical, and he thinks you're not radical enough."

"Shit, we just can't win, can we?" mused Little John.

"Well, it's flattering that we're the topic of a philosophical debate among people who don't even know us," said Robin.

"Well, good for you that you feel flattered, but it was really uncomfortable to listen to," said Sarah. "I didn't actually participate in the conversation; I just was in the room when it broke out. And don't take this the wrong way, guys, but they both made pretty good points."

"Oh, really?" asked Robin. "Go on then; convince us that our actions are more harmful than helpful. I welcome a differing viewpoint."

"C'mon, Rob, let's go," said Little John. "I don't think it's safe to just be standing on this lady's stoop for much longer." He had been watching for the looks that passers-by were giving them; so far he had seen four people who looked pleased to see them, three that looked hostile, one who didn't seem to recognize them, and five who didn't even notice them standing on the stoop.

"No, I'm curious."

"You've already heard all the arguments."

"I'm trying to instill faith in her by putting the dissent to rest."

"Can I talk now?" asked Sarah.

"Oh! Yes, please! Apologies, Ms. McQuillan."

"Well, uh - shit, where do I start? - I guess, just, Tina was saying you guys were encouraging bad behavior - like, other people starting robbing, but not for noble reasons like you - and that you guys were reckless and, uh… just generally that you guys are overkill, I guess."

"And to that we would say that we do our best to work with the community to make sure they leave the vigilante stuff to us, and that we make a point to try to only rob from people we can prove deserve something to balance their karma." Robin spoke with a warm smile, confident that he was doing a good job pleading his case to this undecided voter. "And the husband?"

"Greg just plain thought that you guys were pussy-footing around and that if your, uh, 'vigilante' shit was ever gonna work, it would have worked by now. He thought you guys should just storm a press conference and-" Sarah switched to pantomime as she acted out popping off a few rounds of a revolver at an implied target. "Y'know, get it over with. You already threw your lives away."

"Well, if we should ever come up in discussion again, send them our word that we strive for non-violence whenever we can, because while our little forced-charity operation may be a bit, er, agitative, we know for a fact that political violence will cause chaos on levels we could never imagine. And say the same to the people who think we're too extreme. I hope we've done well to put your mind at rest, Ms. McQuillan."

"Well, that's just the thing. They basically kissed and made up when they both agreed that you guys were just making everything worse."

"Yeah, that's a pretty Hermosa mindset, if you ask me," Little John remarked, and he went right back to keeping watch.

"I have to agree with my friend here, Sarah," said Robin. "We really do think that life in this city would be unbearable if we weren't here to help out; we wouldn't keep doing this if we didn't. But I have to ask: do you agree with them?"

"Well, the idea was that you guys are just pissing the cops and the government off and now they all hate poor people."

"Like they didn't already?" quipped Little John.

"I shoulda mentioned, this was right after the cops shot the shit out of those guys who robbed the liquor store on-"

"Huh?"

"Wait, when did this happen?" asked Robin.

"Oh, five years ago, at least. After I already met you. And the others who were with you. Sorry about what happened to them, by the way-"

"I'm sorry to cut you off, Sarah, but…" Robin tried to find the right words. "...you referred to that botched robbery like it was some major event everyone should know about. Is there something about it we missed? Some important details, I mean? Because otherwise, it would sound pretty mundane to me."

Sarah didn't know that they didn't know. She looked Robin in the eye and took a breath so she could answer the question without hemming and hawing.

"When the police had to publicly answer why they shot him, they said it was because they thought the robbers were with you."

"What!?" Robin was flabbergasted. "Why did no one tell us about this?"

"We thought you knew. We thought that was why you guys weren't in the neighborhood for, like, three weeks afterwards."

"Nuh-uh! No way!" Johnny interjected. "That couldn't have happened. The NPD's never publicly acknowledged we exist. We have connections who would tell us if they did."

"They didn't specifically say you or anybody else; they just said something about a possible gang of bandits trying to steal for poor people. Coded language and all that."

Little John just shook his head while Robin kept staring forward. "We gotta wring Otto out for dropping the ball on that one," John grumbled.

"They… they shot some blokes because they thought they were with us?" Robin choked out, trying to process the information.

"I mean, that coulda been a cover. But I honestly think that the cops have been a lot more… brutal in the last five years."

"Because of us?" Robin just spit it out without bothering about tact.

Sarah once again didn't know that they didn't know, but her sympathy for their unpleasant surprise was starting to turn into impatience. "Again: we all thought you knew. We thought that's why you don't show your faces around here as often as you do up north or down south."

"We've been having trouble with this area since the day we started!" Little John protested. "We try our best not to leave you guys behind, but for Christ's sakes, lady, when half the people would tell us to our faces that they think we're fuckin' looney tunes for offering them free money, and the other half wanna spend the money on crack, and when I have a scar on my ass that won't ever heal that I got from a stray bullet in this very neighborhood, then yeah, it's kinda hard not to feel tempted to just circum-fucking-navigate this place and stick our fingers in our ears and go 'na-na-na can't hear you!'" Little John put an arm around Robin, who at this point was staring into space lost in thought, and pulled him into himself. "Me and this guy've lied the fuck awake at night feeling like shit because it really seems like people in this place refuse to be helped. But we force ourselves to do try anyway because we know not everyone in this part of town is like that. So we're sorry if our best isn't fucking good enough, but it's not like we see any of you guys coming out to Sherwood to give us some other ideas! Maybe not leave us alone to be two guys against the world!"

Sarah McQuillan would usually feel terrified being spoken to sternly by an angry brown bear, but since it hadn't even been five minutes since she was reassured that they were committed to nonviolence whenever possible, she didn't think she had much to be concerned about.

"Well the fact of the matter is that I know the people in this neighborhood better than you do, and a lot of them think that things have gotten worse here with the police being dicks and the mayor coming up with bullshit laws and taxes to keep us down, and they think it has something to do with them taking their anger with you out on us."

"Then why would they be doing it here and not the entire West Side!?"

Robin still wasn't saying a word.

"Are they not? I don't know how things are in Georgetown or Harbeson or Phillips Hill or wherever the hell you guys spend all your time. Maybe they're only doing it here because they think that the worst neighborhood in the city would be the most likely to produce some crazy radical motherfuckers like you two who think that robbing rich people at point-blank range and giving the money to poor people at random is going to solve anything."

"Well if nothing else, it's supposed to boost your fucking morale! It's not our fault you're all so goddamn miserable that you won't even give hope a chance when it's staring you in the face and standing on your goddamn stoop! The people in Georgetown and Harbeson and Phil Hill are broke, too, but they don't tell us to fuck off because they think our good intentions are paving a road to hell!"

"Well, you've got to convince a whole lot of other people of your good intentions, not just me," Sarah said with a pose that said she was just about done with them and their well-meaning ignorance. "You said you think people around here don't want to be helped, or something like that?"

"Yeah, I did!" stated Little John.

"Fine, suit yourself," Sarah said as she pulled the wad of cash out of her pocket and tossed it off the stoop onto the pavement below. "I'll survive without it. And if I don't, maybe I shouldn't want to. Apparently my fucking kid can find his own money." Sarah took a step backward and grasped the door handle. "By the way, they prefer to be called 'pumas' or 'cougars,' not 'mountain lions,' you fucking racist. Get out of my house," said the porcupine, and she slammed the door shut.

"We're not in your house!" Little John hollered. "And that delinquent little puma shit straight-up called my buddy a faggot for no reason, so you ain't gonna convince me I'm an asshole for calling him a mountain lion!" He then realized that he should maybe keep his voice down around these parts. He glanced left and right, and saw a few people on the street staring at him, some angry, some starstruck, some confused, and one elderly rabbit sitting in a rocking chair on the sidewalk, who had not been there when they arrived, smoking a pipe and looking coolly entertained.

Then the bear glanced down at his fox friend, who appeared to pondering something he would rather not have pondered.

"Hey, Robin… you, uh… you okay, little buddy?"

Robin closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths through his nose.

"Rob? Buddy?"

"...It's been a long day, Johnny."

"Well, we certainly got our exercise today," Little John said, relieved to hear Robin speak. He kept his arm around Robin and walked him off the stoop and down the street. Neither of them remembered to pick up the cash Sarah had thrown back at them, nor did they remember to go seek out the elderly capybaras.

"You still want to go to see Amanda?"

"We can wait till tomorrow. Let's just grab our things from Priscilla's and head home."

"We can't go home, Rob. Remember?"

Robin didn't say anything. John wished he had phrased that better.

Little John was acutely aware that this was exactly the kind of openness with bad feelings that just the other day he'd implored his friend to start showing, for both of their sakes. Now Little John was starting to wish he'd been careful for what he'd wished for, because he didn't know if he could be as helpful to his friend as he thought he could be. Little John was well used to Robin being mildly bummed out about Marian or Will or Skippy or his parents, which was something John could easily cure with a jocular pep-talk, but this kind of hard shut-down was something Little John was ill-equipped to handle. The only times he'd ever seen Robin like this were right after Skippy and Toby got sent to juvie, right after Marian had to go back to DC after she spent the summer of That Fateful Year in town, and in the days and weeks immediately following Will's apparent suicide; in all those cases, John tried his best to help his friend, but the only thing that seemed to have helped was the passage of time.

"Rob, we aren't responsible for those guys getting shot."

"Oh, yes we fucking are."

"No, we're not. We're not responsible for anybody's actions but our own." Little John prayed he was being helpful.

"If only it were that simple. And all the other misery we've caused… because we were too cowardly to help the place that needed us the most..."

"Oh, don't say that; we've helped this neighborhood plenty. We've done plenty more good than bad."

"I have no patience for myself doing anything bad."

"You wanna talk to Tuck about it?"

"You know he's not allowed to see us."

"You wanna talk to Otto about it?"

"I don't think he's equipped to talk about things like this."

"You want to talk to me about it when we get back to the junkyard?"

"I don't think so."

They were back on major streets now, but in light of recent revelations, Little John was keeping an extra sharp eye out for squad cars waywardly patrolling the streets.

"You know you're the greatest guy I know, Rob."

"And I appreciate that, Little John." - John noticed that Robin didn't call him 'Johnny' like he was expecting - "But please don't be so damned jealous of me; you're doing yourself a disservice."

"Brother, I'll stop being jealous when I got everything that you got!" Little John was hoping the light levity would cheer his friend up a little bit. While Robin appreciated the effort, he did little to show it.

They crossed the major street and walked down another side street to give themselves a bit more privacy.

"Just be grateful for who you are, John," Robin said; his voice seemed to be getting somehow drier. "This is one of those times I really wish I were in your shoes."

Little John saw that this conversational direction wasn't going anywhere, so he changed the subject. "We need to recruit. I mean it. We can't go on like this alone."

"Agreed," was all Robin said.

"Hell, we probably should have asked Alex."

"Too late for that, I guess."

"Rob, if I lose you…" - Little John looked around to make sure nobody was watching - "...I'd be screwed in more ways than one." He pulled his small friend in tighter and patted him twice on the chest. "You're really all I got left, man. Don't take that away from me."

"I wouldn't think of it, Johnny."

Little John didn't say anything as he waited for Robin to say something along the lines of 'don't you leave me alone, either,' but evidently Rob wasn't going to say anything else. Little John looked down at Robin and realized that he had not made eye contact with him since they were standing on Ms. McQuillan's stoop. In fact, he didn't think Robin had turned his head in any direction away from straight forward, with the possible exception of glancing down. John understood what Robin meant when he insisted he not be jealous, but Little John really wished he could have Robin's magic right now.

As for Robin, he was wondering if allowing himself to break down in tears and openly weep in the streets of Hermosa Park would inspire its people to forgive him for his sins. But he decided against it; only so many of his sins were theirs to forgive.