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.

25. Run With the Hunted, Pt 2

*Author's Note* I write this on April 11, 2020, the day after posting Chapter 24, which today I learned is also the day after Disney announced that they would be making a live-action remake of Robin Hood exclusive to Disney Plus.

To the Disney Company, their executives, their employees, their artists, and their fans, this may well sound extremely sarcastic and backhanded. But I implore you to trust that I write this in complete sincerity. To Disney, I want to thank you for making this film direct-to-streaming. Allow me to elaborate:

It's ironic, in the last few chapters I was debating adding a quip in the author's notes saying something to the effect of "Hey Disney, don't remake this one until I'm famous enough to be part of it." Just a tongue-in-cheek little half-joke, purely cathartic, on a bizarre little fanfic they'll likely never see. Because I really didn't know whether they were going to touch this one; on the one hand, they've been mostly ignoring it for decades, but it's by no means forgotten, so in my heart of hearts, I think part of me knew this was inevitable. And my knee-jerk reaction to hearing news of the remake was "Aw, hell, this was my one chance to work with a piece of media I love in a socially-acceptable way, and I missed it."

Because for me it was never a case of "I have a public and unhealthy obsession with a kid's movie and I don't want its parent company to ever revisit it because I want to pretend it's mine and mine alone and hold it in a place of sanctity," it was a case of "strange as it sounds, this kid's movie has profoundly affected my life as an adult and given me a positive role model neither real life nor mature fiction ever gave me, consequently the Disney versions of Robin Hood and Little John are near the top of my list of dream roles and I can't imagine they're ever going to remake it more than once in my lifetime (and playing those characters as live-action humans is out of the question since I don't physically look like either one, ergo animation is my only way in) so my only hope is they wait until I can get there." Yeah, I want to make my own art with my own characters and stories, but I want to also create art with these specific versions of these specific characters because I have a personal connection with them, you know? God knows that's why a lot of "grown up" movies get remade (besides, y'know, money).

But the more I think about it, the more I think this is the best solution for everybody. Disney gets to expand their library and renew their copyright, the people who do want another Robin Hood movie can have it, and since it'll be confined to a Disney Plus exclusive rather than a wide theatrical release (at least that's the known plan at the time of this writing), maybe in 20-30 years they'll be open to reimagining the concept again, this time going a little more off-model from the original with some ideas I have as well as ideas from the original that had to be scrapped (and going back to 2-D animation, and if I ever have the sway to do this then hopefully I'd also have the money to say "screw it, I'll pay for the animation budget myself"; despite the moral of the Robin Hood story, there's one reason and one reason alone why I'd ever want to be a rich miser and that would be saving up to do this), and you know what, this will probably buy me some time to hone my skills on both sides of the camera so that I can become someone whose involvement actually fits with the project instead of being some random dude who comes out of nowhere and says "Hey Disney, just… let me do what I want with your IP." And hopefully by then nobody will remember that back around 2020 I wrote a really bizarre Robin Hood fanfic which included a cringe-a-licious out-of-character author's note where I lamented that I blew my shot at getting to be part of a children's cartoon which I had come to think of almost as my own since its parent company didn't seem to want anything to do with it, only to find that they did have interest in renewing it after all - and if the world does remember by then, hopefully they'll appreciate that I'm self-aware and own who I am confidently; if they don't then I'll tell them why they should. That seems like what Robin Hood would do.

So Disney, wherever you are (good god, this is so goofy), I appreciate that you did what you had to do from a business standpoint in a way that gives the people what they want and still leaves the door open for my stretch goal in life. To the people looking forward to the movie, I hope you enjoy it. If by some miracle there's someone involved with Disney reading who's SOMEHOW actually intrigued by this and the cast and writing staff for the movie hasn't been locked yet, well, uh… I might not be the most qualified at the moment but I'll work for cheap, just get me my SAG/WGA cards and I'll be content (hey, if you don't ask, the answer's always no). And to all my readers present and future… well, wish me luck. ;)

-The Artist Sometimes Known as Dobanochi

Revised April 12, 2020

25. "Run with the Hunted, Pt. 2"

Many would posit that another reason for the prevalence of the old adage that "a fox and a bear make a good pair" - especially a red one and a brown one, respectively - is that their species are on opposite ends of the size window of species that would conceivably hang out with one another's kind.

Yes, there were other contributing factors; one species being distrusted by broader society for being duplicitous and conniving and the other being distrusted by broader society for being aggressive and brutish may have also helped the two gravitate toward one another in that "us against the world" sort of way. Indeed, many would say that the be-all-end-all origin of the idiom may be the myth of how the bear "lost" its tail at the hands of the fox. The folktale, which some source to North American indigenous mammals while others trace to ancient Germanic tribes, posits that bears once sported tails that rivaled foxes' in their sheer opulence, but long ago, a fox, needing to get his trickery fix, decided to fool a bear into ice-fishing with his own tail, causing it to freeze in the water and ultimately snapping off when the bear tried to move, thereby cursing all of his ursine descendants to have stubby little fragmented tails forever. Somewhere along the line, however, the vulpine and ursine peoples realized that the story had not been progenated by the opposite species, but rather by all the other species in tandem, who had created a story that upheld their prejudice that bears were easily-duped dimwits and foxes were sociopaths who recreationally played games of psychological torture because they were bored. Upon the realization that the story had been borne of a concerted effort to vilify the both of them, it is thought that this may have been when the two peoples started an informal alliance lasting for generations; to this day, fox parents taught their kits that if there was once species bears wouldn't be belligerent bullies to, it was foxes, and bear parents told their cubs that if there was once species foxes wouldn't screw over for no constructive reason, it was bears, with the bigotted background of that story often being cited as the reason why. And the fact that other species could often see a fox and a bear as a pair and again assume the archetypal "brains/brawn" dynamic was at play only strengthened this resolve between the two peoples.

While this does much to explain the reasons why foxes and bears typically get along like Poles and Hungarians, it is likely not the full story as many think it to be. Truly, there are certainly other species stereotyped to be shifty liars or mindless bruisers who don't gel nearly as well as these two peoples do. That said, many mammalogists have theorized that, in addition to the pan-vulpine-and-ursine allegiance described above, red foxes and brown bears specifically likely also bonded over the way that they were at the exact opposite extremes of society's "normal-sized species" window.

The fact of the matter is that much of the world was built for the convenience and comfort of medium-sized mammals, and although there were some parts of the world that were trying to be more accessible to all peoples regardless of their biology (most famously Zootopia, Oregon, which was built up in the 1960s and '70s under the guidance of civil rights advocates to be equally accessible to all shapes and sizes of mammals - and which now had its own racial conflicts brewing unrelated to size, but that story would be told in a film loosely based on events which occurred there ten years after our story on the East Coast), on much of Planet Earth, very large and very small mammals had their own spaces. They had their own sections on planes, trains, and buses; they had their own neighborhoods with homes and businesses to accommodate for their size; they even had their own sports leagues. They generally lived lives where most of the people they saw everyday wouldn't be too much bigger or smaller than themselves.

For centuries by this point, members of these species have been arguing that this way of doing things was segregation in its purest form that forced these species out of mainstream society, to which detractors would say, yes, the implications were damned unfortunate, but it was a matter of incongruent geometry, not simple bigotry. Indeed, if a mouse and an elephant wanted to buy something from a convenience store housed in a hundred-year-old building, they wouldn't be denied service on the grounds of size, but the mouse would likely have trouble completing a transaction from far below the counter and the elephant would likely have trouble just getting through the door; whether the cashier had any personal prejudice in this case would be quite frankly irrelevant. Most species smaller than a red fox or larger than a brown bear would be species that found themselves forced into their own little corner of the world, not as a product of malice, but of circumstance - and even then, bears and foxes still found themselves to be a little too big or a little too small for everyday things every once in a while, likely another thing they bonded over as they recalled that old tale about their tails.

For example, Little John's adult experience seemed to perfectly epitomize life on the border of the window. If you took members of the famously gigantic indigenous Kodiak tribe out of the equation, Little John was nearly a foot taller than your average adult male brown bear. However, because society and media portray bears to be these big monstrous things, if you asked a typical non-ursine citizen what they thought the average height of an adult male non-Kodiak brown bear was, they would probably say eight feet on the dot, despite that being well above average. Being pressured with that number his entire life and cursed with a most anomalous pituitary gland, Little John was immensely grateful to finally hit that mark at nearly the age of twenty-seven, even though he was well aware that it was quite literally a high bar to reach. But after spending much of his early adult life still looking like a cub (and still spending a few years after that looking like a teenager), he was very content with playing the part of a big fish in a small pond. He could operate just fine in a medium-sized mammal's world: he could duck under doorways and suck his gut in to enter sideways; he could take advantage of his own sloppy posture and just let his ears brush against a ceiling that would be a smidge too low for him if he were standing all the way upright; he could lift the armrest on the bus and sit next to his fox buddy instead of feeling small in the oversized seats with the rhinos and hippos in the back - besides, other large species were dicks who always had to turn everything into a size contest. It took forever for him to get there, but Little John was now roughly the same height as his twin brother, roughly the same height as society expected him to be, and his medium-sized friends knew him as The Big Guy, so despite being raised to have an unhealthy obsession with his size (and by that token, everyone else's size), Little John was now finally content with his body and probably wouldn't want to be too much larger; maybe another few inches to one-up his brother, but he definitely wouldn't want to be a Kodiak or a polar bear. Those guys didn't have the option to just put the armrest up on the bus and sit in the medium-sized section; they had to sit in the back out of physical necessity. Even his own father, the giant of a bear who was the first to instill an ursine sense of size-consciousness in him, was a foot and a half taller than John and his brother thanks to Gramma Inger being a polar bear, but Little John didn't have much desire to be quite that huge; Papa Bear would often brag that nobody in the world would fuck with him on account of his size, but in Little John's observations of how Harry went through life, it seemed like it was the world itself that fucked with Harry on account of his size. Little John thought that he was just in the right spot to be as much of an imposing figure as he could without being too big for society, and for that he was immensely grateful.

That's why Thorbjorn Hviid never could have joined the Merry Men, even though he was one of the few people they had actively considered recruiting. He was just too goddamn big.

Granted, he eventually wound up filling a role that required him to have access to an indoor space for the purposes of making projects, so living full-time in Sherwood Forest was ultimately out of the question. But let us pretend that he was open to the idea of hiding in plain sight in his apartment in a large-mammal housing block on the Southwest Side down at Illinois and K, only to then meet up with the outlaws during their adventures and going back home afterwards. No, his size was bordering on being a liability. Heaven knows that the only reason he ever was receptive to cooperating with the Merry Men in the first place was because his inability to hide had directly resulted in his being unemployable.

Thor, as he was called, very well may have been deported by this point if not for the sheer accident that he was born under an American flag. The son of an Inuit Canadian mother and a Danish-Faroese father, Thor came into the world on Christmas Day in Nome, Alaska, a city which was the closest thing that Arctic-Americans had to a metropolis of their own. His parents were in town to see family for the holiday, and that was when Thor decided he wanted to be born a week ahead of schedule. The Hviid family was in Nome for a little longer than expected as they got the documents sorted out so they could take their newborn Yankee son home to Churchill, Manitoba, a city on the Hudson Bay which itself was like Canada's answer to Nome, though that wasn't saying much.

Thor's parents were both physicians, his father a general practitioner and his mother a pediatrician. They stayed in Churchill because it was a remote city with limited medical access, so they felt a sense of duty in staying there to serve the community, but educational access was also limited for the same reasons of remoteness. They were on the fence about staying when their cub was about to start school, but then they heard that Thompson, an inland city and the hub of Northern Manitoba, did not have many doctors who could deal with the visible-minority population of polar bears, they moved there to serve their own kind as well as to give Thor a better schooling experience.

Then, when Thor was in middle school, his parents heard about Flin Flon, a goofily-named mining town on a bump in the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border. That place had almost no doctors at all because the location was just too unappealing to too many people, let alone to anybody with a secondary education. At least Churchill, Canada's Arctic mecca, had a small but consistent stream of residents becoming doctors to serve the community. Flin Flon didn't have that, but the education was still fairly decent, so the family moved once again.

Flin Flon also didn't have much of a large-mammal population - actually, scratch that, there was exactly one species which gave the Hviid family a run for its money size-wise, and they were very prevalent in that part of Canada: moose. Flin Flon had the infrastructure to accommodate mammals ten or more feet tall (and with antlers as wide as half their height), but those same moose didn't very much like polar bears. Just didn't trust 'em. They were rivals in size and they were predators and they weren't from around there. There weren't even many grizzlies in that part of Canada to hang out with, and the black bears preferred the company of the medium-sized species. So while the large adolescent cub and his family had no trouble fitting in physically, they found that the community that they had come to help was skeptical of them.

So Thor took an interest in his parents' work, seeing as the other kids wouldn't have him around. That's when he discovered something: no matter where his parents worked - Churchill, Thompson, or Flin Flon - the problem with healthcare in remote places wasn't just the number of available doctors; there was also the availability of medicine to worry about. This notion was merely what got the ball rolling; what sealed the deal was the cartoon movie he saw on his eighteenth birthday. The movie was about a wolf who delivered medicine to Nome in the '20s when a bunch of kids got sick and nobody else could get the delivery there fast enough, and as he sat there in the Flin Flon cinema (way in the back corner, knowing that the others in the theater didn't want their view obstructed by a giant polar bear) (embarrassed that he was now an adult watching a children's movie) (alone) (on his birthday) (which was also Christmas Day), a thought occurred to him: what if he could be the bringer of hope and healing?

The very next day, he started looking into colleges all across Canada to see where he should start applying, and just to widen his net, he looked at schools in the States as well. A lot of schools weren't impressed by the low quality of the high school he went to, but one college that let him in was the University of Southern Delaware - hell, they gave him a scholarship to cover about forty percent of his tuition, which combined with their stellar academic reputation more than made up for the higher cost of American education. And they let him double-major in both pharmacy and pharmacology, so he could learn how the medicine was made as well as how to use it. And he was burning up the track, on pace to get his four-year undergrad degree in three years. But two-and-a-half years into college, he made a mistake that irrevocably ruined his life forever.

Thor had been busting his ass all throughout college, so when his twenty-first birthday rolled around and he could now legally drink, he decided to indulge and see what all the fuss was about. He had stayed in Nottingham for Christmas break to knock out some required classes during the condensed winter semester, so on December 26th, when all the liquor stores were open again, he went out and bought himself a tallboy. Not looking for any brand in particular, just whichever one had the most aesthetically-pleasing can design. He went back to his dorm and tried the can while he read a textbook. He thought it tasted revolting. He kept nursing the thing all the same, seeing as he paid for it, telling himself that he needed to acquire the taste so he could drink socially in the future. But it was a challenge; he told himself he was doing good to force himself through this, but time would soon prove that he should have quit while he was ahead.

He left his dorm on the way to the grocery store, feeling completely fine. The guy weighed a literal ton, so he hadn't had even remotely enough to get him drunk. But intoxication wasn't what he should have been concerned about, but rather how the alcohol had passed right through him.

This was back when grocery stores still made a point to hide their bathrooms; they were there, and they were publicly accessible, but you would have to ask an employee and then they'd basically have to hold your hand and guide you through the back storage area until you arrived at a dimly-lit lavatory that was tucked away in the most remote corner of the building. Thor was shy after all those years of rejection, and even if there was a bathroom he just wasn't seeing, there was no guarantee that he'd be able to fit inside it.

So he didn't ask. He dropped his basket full of groceries and hurried out, looking for an alleyway. There was no time to be picky. After wrapping around the back of the store, he found a little nook between two dumpsters that seemed like it couldn't be seen from any street - and it couldn't be, but visibility wasn't what screwed him over. He ran over, unzipped, and let loose.

That's when he heard the screaming. The shrill cries of protest from a homeless mouse who had been asleep down by his feet. Thor apologized profusely to the man he had just violated, but perhaps he shouldn't have. It ironically wasn't the mouse's high-pitched shouting that caught the ear of a police officer passing by on the street, but rather the bear's own booming, bellowing voice that resonated through the alley and carried its way around the corner and out to the street, whereupon it piqued the officer's curiosity of what sort of creature could have a voice that was deeper than the depths of hell and yet somehow still sounded fundamentally timid. Thor's member was still in his paw when the officer materialized behind him. The cheetah officer drew his gun with one hand while calling for backup on the other, telling dispatch that he was probably going to need some help bringing into custody a gigantic polar bear whose mugshot would later tab him to be precisely ten feet, nine inches tall.

You can imagine his unpleasant surprise when the judge told him that many jurisdictions in the United States considered public urination to be a sex crime, including the City of Nottingham, and because of laws saying that states, counties, and cities would respect the laws of other states, counties, and cities, that meant he was going to be a sex offender anywhere in the United States. He tried to appeal on the grounds that his size meant he had fewer options for places to legally relieve himself than a smaller mammal, but the appellate judge told him that in such a situation someone like Thor needed to "be an adult" and deal with the discomfort until they found a legal repository for their waste. Because he had tried and failed to appeal it once, he was precluded from appealing for another ten years, per contemporary laws on sex crimes. He was now a sex offender and there was nothing he could do about it.

It was around that time that everybody in his life politely told him to get lost. First it was his school. They told him that they understood the controversial nature of the law and the sheer bad luck that fell upon him, but they had a strict policy that anybody who was convicted of a felony while studying at the university would be immediately expelled, and if they made an exception for him then they'd have to make an exception for all the kids who got kicked out every year for drugs and DUIs and weapons crimes and the like. Of course, between the initial fine the NPD slapped him with and all the money he had spent in court, he was far in the red and couldn't afford to be a full-time student anyway.

Next, the entire country of Canada asked him nicely to never come home again. Because he was technically an American citizen who had emigrated up north, they saw him as someone who had gone home to his native land and committed a heinous crime. He even took a Greyhound bus to the Canadian embassy in Washington, where they told him, almost seeming proud of the fact, that they regularly turned American citizens away at the border for petty misdemeanors far less than what he had been charged with. When he reminded them that he technically had dual citizenship and was naturalized as a child by his parents, and that his mom was a native-born Canadian no less, they asked him with very professional-looking smiles if he'd like them to revoke his Canadian citizenship to avoid future confusion. When he started physically panicking, they sicced half a dozen security guards on the guy to get him out of the building. Ever since that experience, he would be the first to tell you that his fellow Canadians were not nearly as polite as they wanted you to think.

Then there were his parents. They simply didn't believe him. They did not believe that there were parts of the United States where pissing in an alleyway would yield the same punishment as forcing oneself upon another person, so when he told them he was a sex offender now, they thought that the "public urination" thing was just a lie to cover up the fact that he had done something far worse. He implored them to simply investigate themselves, but despite being medical experts, they were not too internet savvy, and rural Canada did not have the best internet in the closing years of the twentieth century anyhow.

When his conviction was finalized and he was expelled from the USD dorms, he took all his worldly belongings to a Super 8 in Harbeson which made most of its money lodging people like him who found themselves suddenly homeless. He then went promptly to the place where he had to physically go to register as a sex offender, where they warned him that he was no longer allowed to live within 1,000 feet of a school nor within 500 feet of a school bus stop (and since school bus routes changed every year, he would have to check every August to see if he had to relocate) and that he was legally required to tell all of his neighbors within a block of his house that he was a registered sex offender, and they mentioned that those neighbors were not likely to believe that it was simply a public urination charge, but in this event he should refer them to his publicly-viewable webpage on the Delaware Sex Offenders Database where they could see his official charges, him being listed alongside all those people who really did tangibly violate another living beings. They reassured him, however (with the most disinterested of looks on their faces), that it was illegal for civilians to harass him on the grounds of him being a registered sex offender, as if that was supposed to make him feel better.

As he left that wretched place and started hoofing it to the unemployment office, all he could think about was that his life was effectively over. He would never be able to get a decent job. He would never be able to leave the country again. He would never be treated like a regular person again. He had been kicked out of his home, kicked out of his homeland, and his family had told him in no uncertain terms that he was never to consider their presence home again. He had lived up to the dreaded stereotype that nerds do not in fact grow up to be successful bosses and leaders but actually grew up to be creepy weirdos and perverts, and to top it all off, he had disqualified himself from ever achieving his one true goal in life. And all he ever wanted to do was to help people.

He did the math in his head and realized that if he skipped meals, he could maybe afford three nights at the Super 8 before he ran completely out of money. And with all this weighing on his mind, he found himself collapsed on a bus stop bench, keeled over crying, as dozens of other people walked by ogling at the bawling behemoth but not bothering to ask what was upsetting him.

Until someone did. A few people, actually. Two really tall foxes with British accents, a really tall and really obese badger, a fairly tall brown bear, and a coyote who was the only one among them who was of average size. This motley crew of individuals materialized before him as he raised his head from his paws and looked up. They asked him what was up - the taller fox seemed to be doing most of the talking - and seeing as he was going to have to spill the beans to everybody in his life now anyway, he just went ahead and told them that he had made an honest mistake that had cost him his livelihood. They asked him to elaborate and he confessed that he had inadvertently broken a law and now carried a permanent criminal record, even though all he ever wanted was to be a good person. That's when they consoled him by mentioning that they knew how he felt - they were criminals who were just trying to do the right thing, too.

And at first, Thor was unnerved by this. Yes, he was a criminal now, but that didn't make him feel any more comfortable in the presence of other scoundrels. But they asked for him to join them away from the crowded street on that cold January day and into some place more private, and in an isolated corner of the Harbeson branch library, they gave him the run-down on exactly who they were. At that point, Thor felt comfortable enough to tell them all of the above.

(And at the risk of again breaking immersion, Dear Reader, this narrator needs to clarify that "all of the above," is meant quite literally to mean that that was the version of events that he told the Merry Men as well as the version he told this narrator. However, after paying for a copy of Thorbjorn Hviid's public record, one discovers that he neglected to mention that in addition to public urination, he was charged with "Sexual Assault - Bodily Fluids"; upon digging through other public records which offer more specific details, one finds that this does refer to his urinating on the homeless mouse and that his telling of the events of that specific day are, as much as can be determined, true. However, when this narrator questioned Hviid about the inconsistencies in the story of his subsequent conviction, he responded that he always told people that he was a registered sex offender for public urination because people would not believe the truth about the homeless mouse if he told them he was charged with sexual assault, and offered to submit to a lie detector test if our editors did not believe him. It is not the place of this narrator to judge Hviid for omitting that he was charged with a higher crime or to surmise how much or how little of the rest of his story is fabricated, but it is the place of this narrator to report all facts that could be found, and to that end it must be noted that while Hviid was indeed charged with both public urination and assault with bodily fluids occuring on December 26, 1998, and while there are several jursidictions in the United States where public urination is considered a sex crime, there is no record that the City of Nottingham, Nottingham County, nor the State of Delaware are such places now nor were circa 1998.)

Upon hearing the story, the outlaws immediately had two responses: that it was obscenely bogus that a guy would be lumped together with rapists and child molesters just for taking an emergency leak in an alleyway; and that his background in pharmacy might prove useful. As they put it, they were making great strides with working out the kinks in their operation, and were hoping the upcoming spring would be their breakout season, but there was one issue that they had not resolved, and that was how to safely rob people without being found out, or more specifically, how to not have their likenesses remembered by their victims. Their present strategy was simply to do their thing in elaborate costumes and run like hell when they were done, hoping that their "donors" didn't catch enough clues to simply report them when it was all over. So far, they had gotten lucky, but they had the feeling that they were pressing their luck. In more covert, risky missions, they had experimented with drugging their targets with pills that were supposed to wipe the victims' memories, but not only did they not feel comfortable associating with the kind of people who dealt such drugs, but they found out that such drugs only prevent new memories from being formed after the drugs were administered, thereby defeating the entire purpose; and in absolute emergencies they had simply punched the donors' lights out, but they were worried that this wasn't reconcilable with their aim to not do any permanent physical harm to their enemies if at all possible (after all, they wanted to make it as clear as possible to all third parties that the Merry Men were not the bad guys, and the more damage they caused, the more likely that conflict would escalate out of their control). They noticed that Thor seemed a bit confused as he nodded along to their story, so they cut to the chase: could he make them something that could wipe people's memories even before the moment of dosing, preferably something that wouldn't cause brain damage?

The short answer was maybe. The long answer was that they were going to have to help him get some equipment to work with. The five of them responded by saying that that shouldn't be a problem. They walked him back to his hotel, paid the front desk for a week's lodging in advance, and the rest was history.

Specifically, it was history worth poring over in extreme detail. By Easter, Thor had found himself in a fairly comfortable spot with an apartment and a part-time job, and as the Merry Men began what would be the most fulfilling summer of their lives together, Thor found himself with a fulfilling hobby of his own as he made the "night-night pills" that greatly helped the outlaws streamline their process and cover their asses. With the equipment they had procured for him, he also started experimenting with making his own versions of common prescriptions that the same people the Merry Men sought to help may need but not be able to afford. Of course, being the kind of person who was so shy and awkward that they would omit details about their past even when they were legally required to disclose them because in their anxious paranoia they would rather hope their audience never found out the truth than gamble with their audience rejecting them for telling them the truth, Thor needed the Men's help to connect him with the people who needed the drugs, but when they did, the smiles on their faces were all he ever wanted to see. That said, because these people trusted the Merry Men and therefore believed it wholeheartedly when they explained that their polar bear friend was only a registered sex offender because of terrible misfourtune and the indifference of authority, these people often tried to pay him at least a little something for his troubles, whatever they could afford to give. Therefore Thor started setting a "recommended price" for each of his products, with the prices being exactly what he estimated the cost for him to manufacture it, often being a sliver of a fraction of the cost of the real thing, and still maintaining that any friends of the Merry Men were under no obligation to give him even a cent if they really needed it. The deal was so reasonable and the prices so dirt cheap that most of these people would pay the price anyway, many adding a tip of hundreds or thousands of percentage points when the recommended price was less than a few bucks - and in the event that the consumer still couldn't (or, rarely, simply wouldn't) pay the asking price, the Merry Men would often cover it themselves, again tipping handsomely. With his profit margins well above zero, Thor was able to get more of the raw materials he needed from the shady sites that were scarcely regulated in those early Wild West days of the World Wide Web, and was able to experiment more and further expand his list of offerings, all while having a little left over to supplement his income from washing dishes on the weekends at the comedy club on the bay in Oak Orchard Beach. This was how Thor came to start branding himself as a "freelance medicine man" - a term he much preferred over "illegal drug dealer".

And he was starting to feel more confident as a person for the first time in his life. They say that a fox and a bear make a great pair, and much like how Robin helped Little John come out of his shell, Thor found that he was oddly comfortable in his own skin when Will was around. And it made sense enough: the two of them were about the same age; if they had grown up in the same neighborhood, they likely would have been in the same grade. Thor admired Will's bold and brash take-no-crap attitude, as that was what Thor himself had always wished he could be but never felt like that was really him, and Will - who had been forced into an even higher-brow education than Robin had and certainly more-so than the Americans - was happy to finally have someone in his life who would understand his infrequent but recurring references to 19th-century literature or complex scientific concepts or the politics of Benjamin Disraeli and didn't simply write him off as a nerd. Plus they were both unashamed to say they were adults who still loved cartoons; Will had invited Thor to go see that underrated movie about the giant alien robot before he even thought about asking his brother and Johnny, but it turned out that Thor had already seen it on opening night (he gave it a rave review). And for bonus points, Thor took great pleasure in providing Will with homemade antihistamines that worked better than Zyrtec or Claritin to fend off the pollen allergies which were another thing Will had always feared would make the world see him only as a weak little twerp incapable of heroics. Neither of them had ever referred to the other as their best friend, but anybody who knew the both of them could see that they were as tight as two guys in their situations could be. Indeed, if there was one person in the world who made Will feel like he was succeeding in being the badass he always wanted to be, it was Thor Hviid, and if there was one person in the world who could give Thor a birthday cake with "I'M SORRY YOU'RE A REGISTERED SEX OFFENDER" written in frosting and make him laugh instead of cry upon seeing it, it was Will Scarlett.

The others truly believed that Thor would have made a great sixth member if only we weren't so inconveniently enormous. They even had the thought to ask him if he'd like to formally join them when they invited him to Robin and Johnny's joint birthday celebration that Halloween (since Thor was legally required to turn out all his lights and ignore any trick-or-treaters at his door that night, he had no hesitance in overcoming his social anxiety and coming to join them), but when Will went to guide him through the woods and to the Major Oak, he spoke privately with each of the rest of the Merry Men when he got back, telling them that they ought to call off the proposition on the grounds that it might just not be feasible to run with a guy who had to duck under the branches of every single tree until he eventually gave up and started walking on all fours like an animal. Johnny, Alan, and Tuck all agreed; Robin didn't, and toward the end of the night Robin called everyone to attention to toast Thor and all his contributions to their mission, contributions which, for all they knew, were directly responsible for Robin and Little John each being able to celebrate another year of life, and then in front of the Merry Men and the rest of their guests, Robin put Thor on the spot and asked if he wanted to become their official sixth man. As everyone stared at him, Thor choked out a "no thanks" and explained that he was quite comfortable with his arrangement of being an ally rather than a fully integrated member. The party ended awkwardly after that, and in a rare moment of all four of the other Merry Men not being cool with Robin's actions of attempted leadership, they cornered him and told him not to speak on their behalf against their wishes like that ever again. The next time the five of them saw Thor, Robin did apologize for if he had embarrassed him, and Thor apologized for denying what was surely a heartfelt invitation, and then they got into a bit of banter about whether Thor had anything to apologize for before Will and Johnny interrupted with an idea of their own: if they ever had a job to do that required infiltrating large-mammal spaces - spaces for people larger than even Little John - they would welcome Thor to work with them. Thor said sure and that seemed to be that, but on the way back to Sherwood, Robin told Will and John that that was a foolish arrangement because Thor would be no help without regular training in their ways, and Will and Johnny said hey they were just trying to make it up to the guy so he didn't feel excluded, and Robin said that despite their good intentions they were setting Thor up for failure and besides he had already voluntarily excluded himself, and Will and Johnny said hey you don't know what he's capable of either, and Robin said Thor also had major anxiety issues to overcome like the worst Robin had ever seen, and Will and Johnny said okay then why the fuck did you think it was a good idea to invite him in the first place, and Robin said because he thought he could teach Thor self-confidence himself, and Will and Johnny said Rob you're gonna feel like such a jackass if there's something clinically wrong with his brain and nothing short of modern medicine can cure his chronic nervousness, and Robin said well that's fine because Thor could make his own modern medicine himself, and so on and so on as the two older guys walked ten paces behind them and talked about literally anything else that crossed their minds.

Was Robin embarrassing Thor at the party the sole reason why Thor stopped being as close to the Merry Men as he previously was? Probably not, but it was a contributing factor. After that, winter came, and the Merry Men had to scale back operations, ergo, they saw Thor less often than usual. Then the spring came and things seemed to be off to a great start, the Merry Men's missions having a near-perfect success rate, but not for lack of internal tension. Robin and Will seemed to be going at one another more than usual, and in a group where Alan and Tuck often stuck together and Robin preferred Little John over his own brother, Will felt like the odd man out, and whenever they were even remotely in the neighborhood, Will would always insist on going off on his own to pick up more allergy medicine, always using it as an opportunity to confide in the bear about how much of an egomaniac he thought his brother to be and how much it frustrated him that everyone else always seemed to side with Robin, them calling him the more "mature" one. Will even claimed that Robin's original plan when he got off the bus in Nottingham was to simply panhandle like crazy, and it wasn't until Will himself showed up out of nowhere and pushed his more rebellious idea that Robin had the guts to start actually live up to his homonym and start robbing people, with Robin now refusing to give Will credit, and although Thor had no way of knowing whether or not this was a fact, a lie, or an embellished half-truth, he trusted Will and believed every word of it. Each time Will came over to blow off steam, Thor outright asked Will if he wanted him to think less of the other Merry Men for making him feel ostracized, and every time, Will said no; he still believed they were good guys, they were just foolish. Nevertheless, while Thor didn't stop liking the other Merry Men and regarding them as friends, he did find that he couldn't help but see them as the people who were responsible for making his closest friend feel bad, whether they meant to or not.

Then June 28th came. It was a Wednesday, the last day of Thor's "weekend" from his "real" job, and earlier in the day he had ordered a birthday present for Will off eBay - a new bandana incorporating the designs of the American and British flags - and he was doing his best not to worry that it wouldn't arrive in time for Will's 22nd birthday in six days. Sometime around sundown, he got a knock at the door; he rarely got visitors besides the Merry Men, so he anticipated it would be some permutation of that group, and expected that Will specifically would be a part of it. Instead, when he opened the door and looked down at the mammals who barely went up to his belly button, the only ones there were the badger and the coyote. They explained that Little John stayed back at Sherwood to make sure Robin wouldn't be left alone. Thor asked where that left Will, and the two of them said that was what they were there to talk about.

As badly as Robin was shaken by losing Will, Thor probably gave him a run for his money. When the surviving members were ready to get back into work, they found their grieving process extended when Thor simply had not made any new pills for them to use. It was telling that when Robin finally worked up the heart to speak his version of the events, he waited until Thor was present. Robin had been the last person to see his brother alive, and on the day that it happened, all the others knew was that the two of them were alone before they heard Will scream once and Robin scream several times shortly thereafter, at which point they rushed to the source of the noise and found Robin collapsed in panic at the sight of his brother's body, and after forcing him to say something, anything about what he saw, Robin finally murmured something about how he had "found him like this." But several days later, knowing that telling a full story would give Thor some much-needed closure, Robin told him a more elaborate testimony: after Will accidentally slashed the volunteer who wanted to join the Merry Men, Robin went to talk with him in private, Will called Robin cocky and condescending, Robin called Will reckless and juvenile, they raised their voices at one another, and Robin told Will off with a long monologue, saying he couldn't hold it against Will that he was so maladjusted and that he pitied that his brother had to grow up in Robert Scarlett's loveless home since it had truly made Will into their father's son; at this, they simply glared at one another, and without a word Robin went off back toward the Major Oak to leave Will alone with his thoughts, only to hear not ten seconds later the sound of Will screaming in agony, at which point Robin turned around and immediately regretted every single word he had said. Robin said plainly that fear of becoming who he never wanted to be had driven Will to take his own life, and the others believed him. And as Robin said this, he wept all over again, and Thor and the others wept with him.

This tale did indeed give Thor closure, but it did not completely heal the rift between him and the other Merry Men. If anything, it solidified that they would never again truly be his friends, but merely his business partners. And it wasn't their fault - well, mostly; yes, he blamed them for making Will feel like the fifth wheel, but he knew that wasn't an act of premeditated malice and he tried to force himself to look past that. Still, he had been starting to form a sense of fraternity with Will much like what Little John had with Robin, and seeing the other four without his best friend there just wasn't the same; Will was his main connection to the group, and without him, he would never again feel that kinship.

It's debatable whether Thor ever truly got over Will's passing. He did indeed become functional again, but some would argue that the quality of his functioning was not what it ought to have been. For one thing, if he had been shy and reserved before meeting the gang, he was simply antisocial now, devoting himself wholly to his work and never meeting up with the Merry Men for a good party, being noticeably absent during the archery contest and the subsequent hoedown in Sherwood, insisting that he'd had to work at the comedy club that weekend (though as far as his tendency to miss parties in recent years went, one could argue that the Merry Men weren't making merry as often as they used to, anyway); whether he was doing anything to try to make friends in other parts of his life, Robin and John did not know, but they doubted it. He also stopped delivering the regular updates he would give them into his research into how to overturn his sex offender status, leading many to believe he had given up and was resigned to this fate for the rest of his life. But most notably, he went from leaning toward being a night owl to being fully nocturnal; while his "legal" job required him to work evenings, he used to wake up late in the morning and go to bed immediately after returning home from work, but now he often woke up to an alarm well into the afternoon right before he had to leave for The Chuckle Bunker, staying up until sunrise.

And if Robin and John had fallen asleep immediately in that cave under the waterfall, they could have woken up and still been fully-rested well before dawn and made it to Thor's place before he went to bed. Their plan half worked out: after the pain kept Robin awake until he passed out from exhaustion around sunset, that same pain returned and woke him up after just a few hours. And Little John, who wasn't usually a light sleeper, couldn't help but be awakened by the sound of Robin mewling.

As soon as they got to civilization, they went straight for the nearest convenience store they could find. They picked up travel-size bottles of Tylenol and Advil at a 7-Eleven, and since they were going to have to stay awake for the rest of the day, they decided to caffeinate themselves; neither of them particularly liked coffee, so perhaps predictably, the heavyset American got a Cherry Pepsi and the slender Brit got a Brisk Iced Tea (lamenting that there weren't any options that weren't horrifically over-sweetened). The two then went right for the 70th and Montana TAN station, the terminus of the TAN Green Line subway. The TAN trains ran all night, but between 1:30 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. they only ran once every half hour on the half hour, and when the duo finally got downstairs to the platform, it was 3:04. The next train pulled up and opened its doors about ten minutes later, but it still wouldn't get the green light until half past. As they sat alone in the idle train car staring at the ceiling, a scruffy-looking wolf waltzed in and sat across the aisle from them, and although the man didn't seem to recognize them, they had a friendly if awkward conversation, the man even being courteous enough to ask if Robin's arm was feeling okay (to which he politely lied and said it was), and the two of them were about to toss the guy a baggie of cash before he pointed at the backpack containing the bandit's implements for their later activities and said the magic words: "You guys got any cocaine I can buy off ya?" They told him no, acting sorry that they didn't, and if they were thinking about getting up and moving to another car to be away from the guy, they didn't have to worry about it, because the wolf got up first, looking annoyed that they didn't have any blow to spare, and walked right through the emergency doors to the next car, where there was a TAN employee who immediately reprimanded the man for using the emergency doors in a non-emergency situation, upon which the wolf turned around and went back into Robin and John's car just for the employee to follow him and radio security to have him removed. It was a tough scene for the Merry Men to watch, but they silently agreed that considering what they saw on a regular basis, this hardly qualified as an injustice, and if the brief time they'd spent with him was enough to judge by, the guy seemed like he was probably going to get busted for an actual crime sooner or later. Then the train finally started moving, and as it did, its motion caused a series of vibrations to rumble through its scattered passengers, and that was when Robin realized something: that over-processed bottled American tea had had a diuretic effect on him. He needed to take a leak. The urge wasn't too bad at first, but he immediately knew it was going to build quickly, and if the shakiness of the train wasn't bad enough, it was going to be a long journey to Thor's place, easily an hour and likely more if their transfer didn't go smoothly. Sure enough, the Green Line train had to tread slowly through a construction zone, and by the time they got to the Carlisle station to transfer to the southwest-bound Yellow Line trains (the name of which seemed to be mocking Robin), that train had already left. The walk between platforms was excruciating, and as per the anti-homeless sentiment that most major American cities harbored, you'd better believe that there were no public restrooms in any Transit Authority of Nottingham stationhouses. By the time they got off the subway at Tennessee Avenue, there was no way Robin could make it all the way to Thor's house, so he ducked into an alleyway, had Little John keep lookout, and prayed that he didn't fall victim to the same absurd misfortune as the polar bear had. He did indeed make it through unscathed, but he did make a point to check for any homeless rodents at his feet. And the sensation of operating everything down south with his left hand just didn't feel right.

With each floor having very high ceilings to accomodate for its residents, the six-story building was as tall as a regular ten- or twelve-story building. They walked in and went to the elevator, and were a bit surprised to see it wasn't waiting on the ground floor ready to go. After waiting the better part of a minute, the doors finally opened, and out waltzed an enormous brown bear, probably around the size of Little John's father, giving the two of them the side-eye - mostly Little John. He didn't seem to recognize them either.

"Man, I know your little asses don't live here!" the stranger grumbled.

"Yeah, I'm here to see my girlfriend!" Little John retorted as he walked into the elevator.

The giant pointed at the fox. "The fuck's he doing with ya, then?"

Robin simply stepped ahead into the lift; he was pretty sure he could verbally handle himself with this guy, but he knew to leave conflicts like these to Johnny, if only for his pride.

"He's gonna film us!" John jeered. "A dick as big as mine was made for show business!" And then he pressed the Door Close button and the button for the floor he wanted, a trick to immediately close the doors and go straight to the desired floor which worked in about half of all elevators, and from experience they knew this elevator was one of them.

"You fuckin' think you're tougher than me!?" the stranger growled just as the doors started closing. He reached his arm as if to grab Little John by the throat, but the mechanism saw to it that he didn't reach it. "God- DAMMIT!" He retracted his arm and grasped it with his other as the door reopened slightly, held for a moment and closed again. "Get out here and say it to my-!" And as the doors closed, they never saw the unpleasant stranger again.

"Dumbass," Little John grumbled. "That guy does not represent me."

"Oh, you needn't tell me, Johnny."

"Yeah, but I feel the need to say so anyways."

"And I appreciate your resolve. If there were to be a single ambassador for the Grizzly people, I would nominate you."

"Well, I appreciate it."

They were silent for a moment as the rickety old elevator moved very, very slowly.

"Uh… you do know…" Little John mumbled, "most brown bears you see on the street ain't necessarily… grizzlies…"

"Really?"

"You didn't know that?"

"I'm sorry, Johnny, I'd just been under the impression that it was just a North American thing that brown bears over here preferred to be called grizzlies. As opposed to the brown bears back on the other side of the Atlantic."

"Well, hey, I'm not offended, I'm just surprised you didn't already know that. You seem like you know everything..." The elevator was moving distressingly quietly. "...But, I mean, you're half right, almost all of us in America've got some grizzly in us because the Europeans mixed with the natives, but, y'know, unless you're in Alaska or bumblefuck Wyoming, you're probably not gonna meet a full-blooded grizzly. I mean, it's kinda the same as what happened to the foxes when they came over, but your guys' Native cousins were spread out all over the continent and my people were just in the northwest."

"I think I see what you mean."

"But yeah, we honestly just let you call us grizzlies because it's not worth explaining the whole thing. And then there's the whole thing where mammalogists say Natives who lived on the coast weren't technically grizzlies either, and at that point even most of us get confused, so, y'know..." Another moment of near-silence passed. Little John put his ear to the wall. "Goddammit, is this thing even moving?"

"I was about to say…"

"Yeah, she's humming. God, I hate this thing. How can Thor live this way?"

"I'm sure he'd rather not."

"Heh, ain't that right?" More silence passed. "But yeah, like, I know I ain't more than a quarter grizzly myself. My mom was full-blooded European - Irish and Dutch and Swedish and maybe some other stuff. But my grampa on my dad's side - he still had some English and German in him, but he had a lot of Native in him, too. Apparently he played a Native American grizzly at least once in some TV movie I've never heard of. And then he had a fetish for huge chicks so he hooked up with some polar bear actress from Norway and two generations later, you get me."

"I'd like to know more about this famous grandfather of yours."

"Hey, man, so would I. When we were kids, my brother and me thought our old man wouldn't let us watch Sidney movies because he thought they'd turn us gay. Then I found out years later that his daddy who left him was in a few of those old cartoons, and I thought, oh, now I think I know the real reason why."

Seemingly in unison, they both looked at the floor indicator above the door for the first time. Far from a modern one with a digital display, this was an old one with lights behind a metal stencil plate. Except this time the light wasn't even on.

Little John was the first to comment: "If after all this we get busted because we got stuck in a broken elevator, I'm gonna die angry."

And while Robin would usually try to be the optimistic voice in a moment like this, he had something he needed to confess: "I'm afraid I'm going to have to take a slash again."

It took Johnny a few seconds to rolodex through his mind for what the fuck that particular piece of British slang meant, but when he did, he was very tempted to force the doors open with his bare hands. But instead, he settled for kicking the plate covering the electrical wiring. The plate fell off its hinges and clinked on the metal floor.

-IllI-

The timing was impeccable. The precise moment he closed his browser was the precise moment he heard the knock at his door.

"Oh, Jesus fucking Christ…" he fretted. "C-coming!" He tried to speak loud enough for his guests to hear but not so loud as to wake his neighbors; after all, he knew how his voice carried. He waddled into the bathroom with his pants around his ankles, his back hunched so he could use one paw to keep it from dripping while carrying the evidence with the other.

He heard the knocking again. "Yeah, yeah, I hear ya! I'm just, uh… in the bathroom!" he said, louder this time.

Rob and Johnny could hear a toilet flush from somewhere inside his apartment.

"I think we caught him halfway between a tug and a snooze again," said Little John, markedly unamused.

"It would seem so," Robin said flatly. All morning he had been nowhere near his usual chipper self, and it wasn't helping that he wasn't particularly proud of what Johnny had insisted he do in the slow-moving elevator.

"How does this keep happening?" John wondered aloud. "Don't matter if we're here at twelve-thirty or four-thirty, there's always, like, what, a twenty percent chance that we interrupt him? Unless he's doing it multiple times per night."

"I'd always thought it was just convenient for Will to ask him to print him out screenshots to use back at camp because Thor had access to a computer, but now I'm beginning to think old Thor may be a... a connoisseur of this type of art."

"Just now? You're just starting to have these thoughts now? Jesus, Thor, ya gotta let those batteries recharge sometime," John mumbled, his face twisted in disgust. More awkward silence passed, and Little John was all ready to fill the dead air with the same tired old quip that he'd made at least a dozen times before, remarking that it was painfully ironic that Thor was a registered sex criminal and (as far as they knew) still a virgin, followed by the obligatory disclaimer that John knew he wasn't one to talk because he'd only ever had one intimate encounter himself and he didn't think it counted considering the circumstances, but then they heard a voice from inside the apartment.

"Uh, wh-who's there?" Thor's apartment door did have a peephole, but it was eight feet in the air, so his only chance of seeing them was if John was standing right in front of the peephole, which he wasn't.

"Domino's!" quipped Little John. "Somebody ordered a large anchovy pizza with a side of open the fucking door."

They heard the deadbolt disengage and then the knob lock, and as the door opened slowly, a timid-looking giant peeked his head out. "Y-y'know, it… it woulda been more fitting if you said you were from Papa John's." Come to think of it, Dear Reader, a good way to describe Thor's voice would be if someone with the neurotic and nerdy speech patterns of our friend Double-D Lupo had the vocal timbre of Satan himself.

Thor and John simply stared at each other, waiting for the other one to say something interesting, and Robin stared at them staring at each other.

"'Cause… y'know…" Thor gestured, "...John's."

"I get it, Thorbjorn, I just ain't laughin'," the pseudo-grizzly named John grumbled. "But that would've worked even better if I was somebody's papa, and I better not have any kids running around who I don't know about. For their sake and mine."

"Uh… yeah, that- that makes sense, I guess."

"Hey, listen, man, I'm sorry for coming on so strong, but we've had a seriously rough last couple of days, and I don't mean to take it out on you, but goddamn, even on the ride over here, I was liable to blow a fuckin' gasket."

"Well, uh, I appreciate that you, uh… aren't consciously trying to hurt me."

"Wouldn't think of it, bud."

Thor glanced down at Robin, who hadn't said anything since he'd opened the door. "Hey, how's it goin', Robin?" Thor asked with a blank expression as he extended his paw for a handshake. "You've been awfully quiet today."

Robin put his hands up as if he were being interrogated. "Er- please don't take it personally, Thor, but I think it'd be best if I washed my hands before we shook."

"Jesus, man, what happened to your arm!?"

Little John hushed Thor. "This and many other riveting stories can be discussed inside the privacy of your pad."

"Oh, uh, sure. Co-come in," Thor said as he made way.

"And on a completely unrelated note, the next time you gotta leave the building, take the stairs. Elevator smells like piss."

Walking into Thor's apartment was always a surreal experience. For Robin and John, it was like stepping into a really weird nightmare. It wasn't just that the furniture was oversized, there was a strange dearth of furniture in general. His kitchen table was pushed into a corner and only had one chair, his mattress was right on his living room floor next to his computer table, and the walls were almost entirely barren; the guy didn't even have a calendar on his walls. It was like the mammalian brain was trying to conjure an image of an apartment but it could only muster the barest details. And of course seeing all of this in the first place was a challenge since Thor kept his place dark to keep his electric bill low; there was yellow light coming from a dusty light bulb in his kitchen and the backlight coming from the computer's screensaver image of a rolling green hill under a clear blue sky and that was it - as Thor would tell you, his people were from a part of the world where it got dark and stayed dark for months on end, so he had no qualms with this arrangement.

Of course, he knew how to make his abode more inviting to his guests. "H-hold on, let-lemme turn the lights on for ya."

Flick.

Just as their eyes had adjusted to the darkness, they had to adjust back to the luminosity of the ceiling light in the living room. One could hear the faintest yelps of discomfort from under their breath.

"Er, th-thank you, Thor," said Robin. "Now, may I use your sink?"

"Oh, sure. You need a stepstool?" Thor asked as he grabbed his kitchen chair and started for the bathroom, not waiting for an answer.

"Please. Thank you."

Thor set up the chair at the sink, which was something like five feet in the air, and let Robin grab on to his arm to climb up. Little John stood in the doorway.

"So what's with the cast?" Thor asked.

Robin had the water on low so it wouldn't be too loud to speak over. "Well, it would seem either we've run out of luck or I've run out of talent." This was the first time he was washing his hands with a cast on his arm and he was struggling to circumnavigate it; he wasn't sure how wet he could get it, and the sheer act of rubbing the liquid soap between his paws was putting uncomfortable pressure on his fractured wrist. "One thing's for sure: I have a new challenge to overcome. If I can't overcome it, it will be my downfall, but if I can overcome it, it will make my biography all the more compelling."

In his periphery, Robin saw Little John roll his eyes.

"And that sounds nice and philosophical and all," said Thor, "buuut I still don't know what actually… happened."

"Fell from a tree."

"Huh. Surprised that that's the first time that's happened after all these years."

"You and me both, my friend."

"And don't forget how you almost got your tail curtailed with a chainsaw!" Little John added as he grabbed Robin's fluffy end-piece to show Thor the stitches.

"Gah!" Robin twitched as he felt his tail being grabbed, his nervous system moving it out of the way.

"Guh!" Little John made a similar sound as the sudden movement spooked him.

"I'm sorry, Johnny, but please don't do that. It's, er, like a primitive instinct that if something's got me by the tail, then I must be in grave danger."

"Well Jesus, man, don't move it out of my hands like that, either! Fuck, sometimes I forget you can control that thing. Like a snake lurching at me."

"The double-entendres of this conversation are killing me," said Thor, fully aware that such a comment would be construed as having made things even more awkward but not believing he was capable of speaking without making things awkward. After the other two didn't add to that remark, he continued, "But if you guys could molest each other somewhere else, I don't wanna risk getting tied to another sex crime." One of the things Thor had always admired about Will was his bold and boundary-pushing sense of humor, the spirit of which Thor tried to revive when he was feeling courageous enough to do so, though even the biggest fans of edgy comedy would admit that Thor didn't seem to have the best handle on how to make such jokes work.

"Don't worry," said Little John. "We have a vested interest in making sure the cops never find out what goes on within these walls." He knew Thor was speaking in jest but he just didn't feel like entertaining the thought.

Robin turned off the water and dried his hands on a hanging towel. "And this brings us to the reason for our visit."

"Yeah. Pills," said Thor. "Good-Guy Roofies. I got you. I got a bag ready to go. See? I'm proactive!"

"Actually," said Robin, "we were hoping to ask you for more than just one baggie of the goodnight pills."

"Oh, you… need some extra?"

"Yes," said Little John, "and also something else, if you can."

"Uh… wh-what's that?"

Robin held up his broken arm. "The good doctor who patched me up did his best, but given the way we had to do things, he couldn't follow protocol as closely as he'd have liked. He mentioned that he'd typically give his broken-bone patients hard painkillers for a time, but he didn't have any way of getting me any."

"And the doctor tried warning him and I tried warning Robin, too," added Little John, "that those pills can fuck you right up even if you're being careful with them. But we talked it out and, yeah, with the nature of our work, it behooves us to not have half our team be writhing in pain twenty-four-seven."

"So wait," said Thor, "this guy didn't give you any painkillers at all after you broke your arm!?"

"Oh, he gave us some over-the-counter drugs which he said were what he'd usually prescribe after the hard stuff," Robin clarified. "Drugs that we promptly lost - another incidental hazard of our hectic lives."

"And this morning we just bought some Tylenol and Advil at a gas station," added John, "which… I think it's doing fine for now. You tell me, Rob, how's your arm?"

"As you said, Johnny, fine for now."

"Yeah, well, that's after he double-dosed on both," Little John explained to Thor. "That's not healthy and, I gotta say, that stuff is a helluva lot more expensive than I remember. It probably wouldn't put too much of a dent in our donations, but still, you know, the less money we spend on ourselves, the better."

"So to cut to the chase, Thor, what we think would be the best solution for everyone would be - if it's within your power, of course-"

"-if you can make replicas of these painkillers that aren't homewreckingly addictive. I mean… you mess around with trying to make new drugs, don'tcha? You ever tried making these?"

Thor had predicted several sentences back that that was where they were going with this, and he was very afraid to be right. "Uh, um, what… what kind of drugs was he talking about?" he asked. "Please don't say oxy-"

"Oxy," Little John said flatly, knowing entirely why not to take those three letters lightly. "Or Vicodin, or Percocet. Like we said, we both understand these aren't things you just fuck around with willy-nilly; as I was telling Rob and the doc, Oxy did a number on my dad and it made him do a bigger number on me and my brother, so it did a number on us by proxy - Oxy by proxy, fuck, that rhymes. But hey, you've been workin' for years to expand your repertoire, ain'tcha? To make prescription drugs that're affordable and - with any luck - safer? Thor, we know you know your shit with medicine. If anybody can make a knock-off Oxy that isn't pure-ass evil, I'd put my money on you."

"Think of it this way, Thor," said Robin. "You started down this walk of life because you wanted to be the one to provide the medicine that could heal the world, correct? Well, if what Johnny and Dr. Fort tell me is correct - and I have absolutely no reason to believe it isn't - then it sounds to me like a non-destructive high-potency painkiller is something the world needs which nobody else has been able to find. Surely it isn't just me. Surely all these impoverished people we help - surely some of them could greatly benefit from this being in their lives. This could be your moment of truth to do something great, Thor. So… will you rise to the occasion, or just let the moment pass you by?"

Thor simply gave Robin one of those pensively-frustrated looks not unlike what Dr. Fort had given him yesterday when they were haggling over when to perform surgery.

Therefore Robin kept speaking: "And I'll volunteer to be your guinea pig. Not just because I'm a dirty low-life criminal who's surely living on borrowed time, not just because there are many who would argue that our methods are making things worse rather than better and the loss of me would be no loss at all, but mostly because…" And Robin allowed his face to melt into an uncharacteristically vulnerable look. "...I have never felt pain like this before in my entire life, Thor. He cut into my muscles and drilled into my bones. It hurts, Thor. It really does. The over-the-counter stuff is doing enough so I can stop whinging out loud but I still can't take my mind off it."

Seeing the look on Robin's face as he stood on the chair by the sink, Little John wanted to try an experiment of his own. John - who still only went up to the polar bear's chest - picked up Robin around the torso and held him a few feet above his own head, putting the fox's nose just a few inches in front of Thor's. "C'mon, Thor. How ya gonna say no to a couple of puppy-dog eyes like that?"

"He's not a puppy dog, he's a fox," said Thor, genuinely confused.

"Well they're cousins or something!"

And the polar bear did look into those hurt canine eyes and could clearly see that Nottingham's most beloved hero was in a crisis he could not simply will himself through. But as he reciprocated the look, it was not a moral or ethical issue that troubled Thor, nor even a matter of doubting his own abilities, but rather acknowledging the limitations of the natural world. He knew modern science could put a mammal on the moon, but he also knew modern science could never bring the moon to Earth. Perhaps many centuries from now it could, but not in the Twenty-First Century. And so also this dilemma.

"You guys don't know how badly I wish this was my chance to make my mark on the world," Thor sighed. "I really do. But I've already tried that. It didn't work."

"You have!?" Robin and John said almost in unison. Little John went to put Robin down on the floor, then thought better of it and put him back on the chair so he wouldn't strain his neck too much looking at Thor.

"Uh-huh."

"You never told us you experimented with that," said Little John, seeming almost offended by this revelation.

"Well, I did."

"Well, perhaps it's time to try again," suggested Robin.

"I already did. It didn't work that time, either."

"What exactly did you try?" asked Johnny.

"Well… the first time was years ago. Right before Will died, I think."

Robin and John glanced at each other, regretting for everyone's sake that they'd forced the issue.

"That time, I just tried recreating Oxy straight - I was still meeting my clients through you guys exclusively at this time, so I just assumed that anybody who was a friend of yours would probably be responsible enough not to abuse this stuff, but before you say anything, yeah, now I know that these weren't necessarily your friends, they were just… people you met. And to be fair I guess I shouldn't frame it as them being irresponsible with the drugs because the thing about narcotic painkillers like that is that for them to work like they should, they basically have to be inherently bordering on habit-forming, because they work by-"

"Uh, Thor- It's cool, man," said Little John. "Dr. Fort already explained the whole catch-22 about all this."

"Oh, uh, alright… but yeah, I don't want to make it sound like I'm blaming these people for getting hooked on it, because it was the nature of the beast, as it were. So when Will died and I stopped producing, I got a bunch of angry calls and emails from people demanding more, and okay, some of these people needed it for chronic pain, but a lot of them only needed them for temporary things like breaks and sprains - like you, Robin. So when I was ready to get back into action, I did the math in my head and I thought, wait, a bunch of you guys should be off this stuff by now. So I insisted they meet up with me in person and bring their medical notes if they wanted any more, and some of them said they didn't have notes because they couldn't afford a doctor and that's why they needed pills from me in the first place, and okay, that makes sense and all, but for ethical reasons I cut them off then and there, and as for the people with breaks and sprains and stuff, yeah, some of them confessed they were past the point of needing it, some of them tried to put up a fight and tell me they still did need it, and some of them - I don't know where I'm going with this, but I wound up giving them smaller and smaller doses until I was basically microdosing them, trying to wean them off. And then I swore not to touch the stuff for a while."

"Man, that's a bummer," John murmured, wishing there was a place for him and Robin to sit down.

"And I tried it again a few years later, and this time, it was your buddy Otto."

"Otto?" asked Robin. "I don't recall him ever telling us about that."

"Hey, I don't doubt it. He seems like the kind of guy who wouldn't want to broadcast that he's in the clutches of drugs. But this was that one year where he was hobbling around with a busted foot all summer."

"Now that we remember," said John.

"So he was a good friend of yours, he was self-employed so he didn't have insurance, he had enough money to pay for the ER but not the painkillers after that. So I decide to take another stab at it, but this time, I'm careful, because I'm still thinking I might've made the pills too addictive the first time, even more than usual. So I'm thinking, shit, how can I make these work without making them life-ruiningly addictive? And I'm wracking my brain and I'm trying a bunch of different compositions, and he's trying them, and I'm intentionally keeping them weak but Otto's telling me that they're not much better than just taking paracetamols - Tylenol, I mean, - and then I just say fuck it and roll out all the stops. I make them with the same formula as I did the first time, but I add some garnish so the pills taste like honest-to-god asscrack."

"Ew," the boys winced.

"And at first, I thought that worked. Otto says they get the job done like a charm but he hates taking them, actively dreads consuming them. So with that, I dare to start giving them to other people. And then something terrible happens."

"What's that?" asked John.

"They stopped minding the taste."

"Er… so we see," choked out Robin.

"You guys know how many people overcome their fear of needles because they're hooked on heroin? I do, now. Addiction's a hell of a thing. This time I didn't bother giving them smaller doses to come down off of, I just told them to get lost and leave me alone. Thank God these people don't know where I live."

"I… don't think you gotta worry about anybody knocking on your door and pickin' a fight, Big Guy," said Little John.

"I'm not so sure, man. My crotch is level with a lot of people's fists. They could take me out in one swing and my god-for-fucking-saken arms are too short to block a punch down there!"

"Alright, Thor, we get it," said John in disgust. "You're makin' my nuts ache just thinkin' about it."

"Same here," Robin mumbled, trying not to think about it. "But we understand, Thor: you've good reason to be skeptical that it can be done. But we encourage you to have another go of it. Just like I'm telling myself with this broken arm, a hero whose story doesn't involve overcoming failure is no hero at all. And don't they say, third time's the charm?"

"Uh… they do say that," said Thor. And he was about to mention that just because that's an old saying didn't make it true when the conversation went on without him.

"And if you need new ingredients to perform new experiments, maybe there's something we can do to help you get them," offered Little John.

"I mean… maybe, but it would take a while. It might be by the time I have something that works, you won't need them anymore. Or at least you'd be at the point where you shouldn't be taking something so strong."

"Understood," said Robin. "But then you can always pay it forward to the people of Nottingham, could you not?"

"Necessity's the mother of invention," said Little John, though he internally cringed a little at that old saying since one of the words reminded him of a stupid song his brother wrote once. "Nothing ventured, nothin' gained."

"You're just full of relevant old sayings today, aren't you, Johnny?"

"Fuckin' A I am. Darn tootin'."

Thor still looked uneasy at the prospect of experimenting with opiates again. "I-I mean… the supply line isn't a problem - at least not yet. Maybe if the FBI shuts down the Russian websites I use tomorrow, but for now, anything I need, I can probably find online and get shipped to me under a fake name three degrees of separation from my real identity."

"Thor, doesn't the government monitor your computer anyway?" asked Little John. "On account of your, uh… 'status'?"

"What? Oh, n-uh-no, tha-that's only for, uh, that's for people who get busted with, uh… y'know, the kinds of things you can theoretically find online. Y-y-y'know… contraband apropos of sex crimes-"

"We, er… we understand, Thor," Robin interrupted.

"Although that makes a lot more sense now," John added. "We'd been wondering about that, but we were afraid to ask."

Thor was looking at his feet, hoping that this might inspire them to change the subject - not necessarily change the subject to that, but to anything other than browbeating him into doing something he wasn't comfortable with. And the other two could tell, so they would not let the silence relent until he gave them an answer one way or another.

Thor looked up. "Well?"

"Well, what?" asked Little John. "We're waiting on you to give us an answer. Did you just forget that?"

Thor glanced at Robin; Robin returned his glance with a gesture of so what's it going to be?

The polar bear's look of resignation was much like the look on the St. Bernard roughly twenty-six hours prior, though whereas the doctor looked more angry, the pharmacist looked more sad. "I'll brainstorm… and if I can think of something, I'll try it; if I can't think of something, I won't. And I'm not promising you nothing - if I can't even come up with a prototype for it, I don't want you two acting like I failed you, because even offering to attempt this is doing more for you than I owe you."

"And we understand completely," said Robin. "And we thank you, Thor - I thank you. Even taking the first step toward this is more than we could have asked for."

"You're a good guy, Thor," John added. "You got this."

"Well, I appreciate the support," Thor muttered dejectedly; truthfully, he was hurt. He felt like two people he trusted and who the city at large adored had just violated his trust by bullying him out of his comfort zone. But of course, he didn't have the nerve to outright say that, for fear of making tensions worse. Not that he needed to say anything; Robin and John could tell that Thor had taken their cajoling much worse than Dr. Fort had, and they weren't happy about having made him feel bad, but they were in a crunch and they needed to give him a push, resigned to the idea that this was just the kind of person Thor was, and while they would have loved to have worked with him to help him build his own confidence and become the kind of person who chooses to challenge himself so they didn't have to force him to, they simply had no time for it.

"But, uh… hey…" Thor mumbled again as he opened his medicine cabinet and pulled out a gigantic bottle of Tylenol with a photograph of an elephant on the label. "I guess… for now, maybe I can lend you some of these for emergencies - and I mean emergencies. Because these are literally just regular Tylenols at exponential strength - okay, maybe not exponentially, but you know what I mean, several magnitudes more- well, wait, that basically means the same thing-"

"Thor," Little John cut in. "We get it. They're for big motherfuckers like you and me and this little guy should be careful with them so he doesn't OD on Tylenol of all things."

"No. Not for big motherfuckers like you, only for really big motherfuckers like me. Does the weight on your driver's license have a comma in it?"

"Hm… Hook me up with some gift cards to fast-food joints and I could probably get there within a month."

"But you're not there yet, so really even you shouldn't be taking these. At least not regularly. Now, for you, Robin, luckily these are the old-fashioned solid pills and not the capsules so I can probably cut a couple of these in half for ya and send you on your way."

"With the goods we came here for," Robin added. "As much as you can, because in my present state, I don't know if we can risk coming all the way down to your neck of the woods as often as we usually do."

"Right. Sounds good. Got 'em in the other room."

The room that was meant to be the bedroom was instead where Thor had his lab set up. A large table was placed squarely in the center of the room, not against any wall; it was littered with all number of tools and instruments, including tweezers, razor blades, an old-fashioned mortar and pestle, an old manual scale with an analog meter as well as a new electric one with a digital display, a mountain of boxes of Ziploc bags and extra-extra-large vinyl gloves and medical face masks, disinfecting wipes and paper towels, and a whole bunch of other things that Robin and John didn't know the names of and which this narrator couldn't remember after Thor told them.

The polar bear cleared off a space and placed a cutting board in front of the only part of the table with a chair anywhere next to it. He sat down and gently poured out about half a dozen of the extra-large-mammal paracetamols. The other two watched him do his work, both thinking to themselves that the size of these pills exceeded even what they thought of when they thought of 'horse pills', and yet they still looked miniscule when compared to the size of the Canadian's gargantuan paws; indeed, in a story where it may seem like every single one of our male characters fears that their size and stature was insufficient, Thor would have gladly swapped bodies with someone Robin's size if given the chance, because God knows that it would have made his work a lot easier. Thor put on some gloves and took the thin cardboard wrapping off a fresh razor blade, then grabbed the forceps with his left hand to steady the pills which were far too small for him to grasp with his fingers, something he especially wouldn't want to risk while working with a razor blade. And he got to slicing.

This wasn't the first time the Merry Men had seen Thor do his thing, and indeed they weren't even witnessing him doing something as impressive as formulating medicine from scratch, but it was the first time they'd seen him work in quite a while.

"I… thought all you guys were left-handed," remarked Little John, who as a consequence of his own fucked-up childhood wouldn't necessarily notice someone's handiness every single time, but would absolutely remember somebody's handiness forever when he did notice.

Thor didn't even look up. "That's a myth," he grumbled under his breath; with the depth of his voice, it was actually kind of challenging to make out his words when he was too distracted to properly annunciate.

He worked slowly and methodically, trying to make sure that he was cutting them as equally as he could, spacing his cuts equidistantly and making sure that not too much crumbled away from the pill fragments.

He cut the first two pills into thirds, then leaned back in his seat and looked at his creation with a sideways look, puzzled, one eye wide open and another glaring, his mouth pursed into the space between his thumb and index finger as the rest of his fingers scratched the bottom of his snout absentmindedly. He leaned back in and reached for his razor and another pill before putting them both down and assuming the same puzzled position.

"Uh, Robin…" Thor said without taking his eyes off the table, "ki-kind of a personal question, but it's important - how much do you weigh, exactly?"

Robin winced as he turned to look into space and shook his head slightly. "Er… I don't know, really, haven't checked in years. I'd say about eight stone."

Thor stopped looking at the table to turn to Robin and give him one of those really, man? looks. "I have absolutely no frame of reference for what the fuck that means."

Little John half-playfully smacked his British friend on the back of the head after that remark - only half playful because he was seriously confused how Robin was still getting his wires crossed after all these years stateside, but then again, he understood his friend probably wasn't in the best headspace. "You stupid limey bastard," Little John quipped. "Next you're gonna answer in kilograms, ain't ya!?"

"Er- my bad, Thor," Robin answered, "weight isn't something I discuss very often."

"I'm still waiting on a number I can actually use," said Thor, still unamused and showing uncharacteristic nerve in presenting himself as such.

"Erm…" Robin took his good arm and felt his stomach under his shirt. "I could say anywhere between… a hundred and one-twenty? I dunno, on the one hand, we're constantly getting our exercise, on the other, we don't always have the luxury of eating the healthiest. Then again, maybe we've actually built muscle from all the-"

"Alright. I got it. Good enough," Thor barked. "Nyeh, I'm Robin'ood, not only am I a great hero, but all my hero-ing makes me even STRONGER!" he grumbled aloud, feeling like Will would have wanted him to make such a remark in his stead. Of course, Robin and Little John didn't know that, so they heard that quip and wondered what the hell was up with him.

Not that Thor saw their confused faces, because he was glaring again at the pills. A moment passed before he shoved the partitioned pills to the side and started cutting up the rest, this time into quarters. The outlaws kept watching in near-silence, both separately glancing up to notice that beyond the shut curtains, the sky seemed to be getting lighter.

Thor stared at the sixteen fragments that lay before him. "Aw, hell, I probably made too much… whatever," he scoffed as he grabbed a plastic baggie and started filling it. "Now, I'm serious," he said sternly, quickly glancing at Robin but mostly keeping his eyes on the pills, "One of these a day - one - and if you don't finish them all, that's fine by me. You can match them with an ibuprofen if you absolutely need to, but whatever you do, for the love of fuck, please don't mix these with alcohol."

"You have my word," Robin affirmed.

Thor pressed the seal shut and Robin reached out to accept it. Thor didn't even look at Robin as he held out the baggie to Little John. "Johnny. Take it."

Robin and John were both surprised by that. Reluctantly, almost feeling like he was doing something wrong, Little John took the bag. "Uh- okay," he murmured.

"What, you don't trust me with my own medicine?" Robin asked with a playful smile in his voice and on his face to conceal the fact that he actually was quite a bit offended by that move.

"Nope. I don't," Thor said in complete unfazed sincerity; he was said to have two modes, 'anxious and neurotic' and 'disconnected and apathetic', and as he was forced into making tough decisions right as he was ready to hit the hay, he was certainly in the latter. "Don't choose to take it personally. I know this stuff and I know how it works. It's not a character flaw of yours that you might wind up hooked on something that makes your brain feel good, it's just how your brain works - it's how all of our brains work. Hell, common people don't realize how dangerous painkillers are. I wouldn't be surprised if before long, even Tylenol and stuff like that became regulated again, because-"

"Again: Thor, don't worry," cut in Little John. "The doctor already gave us a similar spiel about this stuff. With all I've learned about medicine in the last two days, I swear I feel like I could become a doctor myself right now."

"This has truly been an educational experience," said Robin, a bit drier than may have been expected since he was honestly still miffed about the pill hand-off.

"Alright, alright," Thor conceded, "Dr. Ford already talked enough for the both of us, I guess."

"Fort, buddy, Fort," John corrected. "His ancestors made army outposts, not pickups and sedans."

"You're from Canada, yes?" asked Robin. "Remember it this way: he's a big dog and his ancestors sont forts. They parlent le français."

"Man, foreign languages were always my weak point," Thor moaned, back to being nervous and neurotic again. "My parents tried to teach me their ancestors' languages, but it didn't stick - not that I'm missing any big opportunities in life by not speaking Faroese, but... you know how it is. And don't get me started on French class…" And the two outlaws looked uncomfortably for a moment at the drug dealer, who leaned forward in his seat and stared at the floor with his hands clasped, and everyone expected everybody else to say something before Thor finally looked up and spoke again: "So this Dr. Fort guy who patched you up, did he do it for free? Or are you guys in the hole for paying him back?"

"Oh no," said Robin, "he copied some insurance information from a patient who he swore wouldn't notice. Then he took us to his place to perform the operation."

"At his house!?"

"Yessir. With Johnny here as his nurse."

"More blood came out of this little shit than I knew he had in him!" John remarked.

"Hm. Well that was nice of him…" Thor seemed to be thinking again. "Y'know, you bring this guy up every so often and mention how he saved your asses; should I meet this guy?"

Robin and Little John glanced at one another, nonverbally confirming to the other that this question did indeed sound oddly familiar.

The fox went first: "Er… maybe! I mean, I could see your skills with medicine and his skills with surgery matching up quite nicely!"

"And it might actually be good for you to meet him," John added, "because, uh… he's actually kind of a lot like you, except… like, a lot less self-contained. It might be good for your self-esteem to meet someone who's just not content with who they are."

"Come to think of it, Johnny, whereas Thor here would be a champ and take it on the chin when somebody rubs him the wrong way, old Geoffrey would more likely snap at people and just escalate the conflict, and it might be good for Thor to see what happens when someone tries to present themselves as more confident than they are but has a very corrupted idea of what self-confidence actually is."

"Yeah, that's a good point, Rob. 'Cause Thor here's already had to be diplomatic in cutting off clients who he thinks are abusing his drugs and demanding more; I don't know if Geoff would be able to navigate a conflict like that without just losing his shit and making everything worse."

A nasal chuckled puffed out of Thor's snout and a smile came upon one side of his face. "Well… I guess I oughta feel better about myself now…"

Robin and John glanced at one another again, knowing they would be dissecting this part of the conversation on their ride home.

"Oh!" said Thor with a failed attempt at snapping his fingers. "Before I forget…" He searched around his table until he located the prepackaged bags of his retrograde-amnesia pills, three of them, each containing about thirty capsules; depending on how conservatively or liberally the outlaws would use them, and depending how hectic their lives were about to become, these bags could last them all summer or they could blow through them in a week. Next to the baggies was another baggie off to the side, seemingly still in the process of being filled as it only contained a dozen or so; Thor grabbed this one with the other three and handed them over, this time to Robin. "Hopefully you won't need to use these as much as you think you will. And you guys have my phone number somewhere, right? Call me from a payphone somewhere next time and give me a head's up before you show up. You can call collect, I don't care."

"Great idea, Thor!" said Little John, pointing at his fellow ursid encouragingly. "I assure you we'll forget to do that! Again!"

"Erm, pardon me, Thor," squaked Robin, "we'll be out of your hair soon, but if I may use your facilities before we leave?"

"Uh… sure, I'll move the chair for ya," Thor said as he stood to make his way to the bathroom.

"Jesus, Rob, you got a bladder infection or something?" asked Little John.

"I wouldn't say that yet, Johnny, but I'm not ruling it out," Robin said as he followed Thor to the lavatory.

Little John was alone for a second, listening to the muffled sounds of the chair squeaking across the linoleum floor in the bathroom, trying not to overthink things; now he was feeling slighted by Thor giving the amnesia pills to Robin. He told himself to give Thor the benefit of the doubt, that he should just assume that Thor gave them both something to carry specifically so neither or them would feel neither burdened nor slighted, but he couldn't help but think that if Thor also subconsciously (or consciously) thought of Robin as the head honcho, then Thor would probably have acted the way he did. And the conversation he was about to have with him only messed with his head further.

Thor walked back into the lab and stood leaning against the wall on the opposite side of the room from where Little John was standing. "I didn't need to see his puppy-dog fox eyes to see that he's in it bad," he said quietly. "He just doesn't seem himself."

"You are far from the first person to say that," John answered. "Course, neither of us've been… really at the top of our games recently… shit, we haven't told you anything about the last couple days, have we?"

"Nope. Besides the falling-out-of-at-tree part."

"Well, he fell out of a tree because- excuse me, he fell out of the tree, the Major Oak, because the cops finally located it and actually remembered where it was - took 'em long enough. And after all these years thinking we had some legal backup in the sense that Sherwood was a jurisdictional gray area, the slippery sons of bitches just fucking circumvented the problem by merging the city and county police departments after they staged a vulgar display of power where the old county sheriff and deputy beat some kid into a coma - the kid had his own issues, he found me and Rob hardly five minutes prior and threw rocks at us and called us faggots, but Jesus God Almighty, I dunno if he deserved that."

"Hm," was all Thor said. He was very fascinated to hear this side of the story about the kid beaten in the woods, of whom he had heard plenty, all of it sympathetic. Of course, he was going to have to force this out of his head by the time he saw his manager at work that night, lest he be unable to look at her straight. Thor wanted to ask more details, but Johnny just kept rolling right along:

"And I know I sound like Alan bitching and moaning about the police, but these specific police, yeah, fuck 'em, fuck them and their corrupted little system. They've got more of a run on us than they ever have, and if morale wasn't bad enough, we keep running into civilians who don't believe in our cause anymore - yeah, we've had people like that this entire time, but I swear we've had way more than usual this week alone, up to and including the motherfucker with a chainsaw we ran into at the Major Oak, sent there to chop it down, and I know, I know, he's just following orders, he has no personal politics in all of this, is what I thought before he tells us off for failing to make any progress until we twisted his arm into losing faith in us, and then he tried to Texas Chainsaw Massacre my friend, who escapes by climbing up a tree, only to fall right out of it. There! And it all comes back full-circle."

"...Wow." Thor had a lot of questions, but he was too flabbergasted to verbalize any of them.

"Tell me about it. And I'm seriously wondering if this is the first time in Robin's life that he's had a challenge he didn't really believe he could overcome. And you know what? Good for him that he's gone this far in life without losing his nerve - if only we should all be so fortunate. But good goddamn, man, this is not the time to be having your first mental breakdown. There's a name for it, Alan told me about this concept before he lost the ability to talk about anything other than politics - 'The Curse of the Happy Child' is the traditional name I think, but in Rob's case, let's call it 'The Curse of Superman': he's so used to being talented at everything and having success at everything that when he finally encounters a problem that hard work and hard thought can't fix, he doesn't know how to handle it…" At this point, Little John realized he'd been talking for a while. "ROB, ARE YOU STILL IN THERE!?" Thor tried to shush him, but Little John either didn't hear him or simply ignored him.

"Every time I think I'm done, I can feel more welling up inside me!" Robin replied.

Little John glanced at Thor for a moment. "Alright, man, take your time!" he replied to his friend. He turned back to Thor: "And I could try to give him pep talks, but it wouldn't work. He used to listen to me more - he only proposed to his girlfriend because I fucking told him to - but I think with everyone else out of the picture, he's stopped seeing me as his lieutenant who could help him run the show and started seeing me as another foot soldier to be managed. He's a good man, but he's in that spot where he's so good, he might not even think to improve on the flaws he does have, and the fact that he'd rather be my boss than my friend is one of those flaws. I mean, I'd bet deep down that he'd say he's trying to be both, but quite frankly, doing what we do, I'd rather fail with a good friend than succeed with a bad one. And… the guy's mentioned his father was an asshole, so maybe he gets it from him, but he never fucking elaborates on it, so for all I know-"

They both looked up when they heard the toilet flush. Sensing that this would be the end of their private discussion, the bears glanced at each other.

"Well, I've given you a lot to think about, now haven't I?" asked John.

Thor did indeed have a lot of thoughts about all of that, but he thought the most concise response would be this: "He really ought to appreciate how lucky he is to have you as a sidekick."

And that, Dear Reader, struck a nerve. Little John held his tongue, however, expecting Robin to leave the bathroom at any moment. But he never did.

"Uh… Rob, you still got more in the tank?" John called out, less loudly this time.

"I'm just as surprised as you are, Johnny!" the fox replied. "I just want to minimize the chance of another emergency on the way home!"

And with that, Little John felt it safe to turn back to Thor. "Elaborate on that."

"On what?"

"He's lucky to have me as a sidekick."

"Oh…" Thor hadn't been prepared to speak, but then again, he rarely was. "I mean… you know… from all I've seen, all I've heard about you guys, you've been loyal to him like I've never seen anyone be loyal to anyone else. I mean, I really don't know if Robin could have accomplished half as much as he has without you helping him out. You've done a lot for him for a guy you're not married to, and I mean that as a good thing, Johnny."

And Little John was going to tread carefully on the topic of guys being friends, knowing Thor's fraternity with their fallen brother-in-arms, but he needed to say something: "Alright, man, I know you said you mean well, but you're not the first person to compare me and Rob to a married couple. Not even this week."

"Was the other person the Lafferty kid in the woods?"

Little John didn't know how Thor knew the kid's last name, especially since he and Robin didn't even know the kid's name, but John lacked a key piece of knowledge that would make clear why Thor knew that. But whatever, it wasn't important, and if anything that confusion helped dissipate his memories of that weird dream he'd had, so with a weird look, Little John said, "And besides him. Not just him. People insinuating that two guys aren't… supposed to be as close friends as he and I are."

"Oh, and there are absolutely people who think you shouldn't be that close if you guys aren't fondling each other's dicks. I'm not gonna say you shouldn't if you two are both okay with it, but, yeah, I wouldn't want that for myself. I thought me and Will were tight, but I couldn't imagine being with the guy twenty-four-seven… forever. I don't know if there's anybody on Earth I would want to be around all the time, but hey, maybe that's just me being an introvert. And even if I did have someone in my life who I wanted to be around every waking moment - Will, another friend, a girlfriend, anyone - I'd still be afraid to constantly be around them. Don't want them thinking I'm clingy."

Clingy? Hoo boy, that was a word that wasn't going to leave John's head for a while. Thor had just managed to manufacture a new fear for Little John out of thin air. Clingy? Did John have to worry about Robin thinking he was clingy? Maybe not now, but if this all ended tomorrow and Rob and Marian got back together, would Robin think John was being clingy after that? If not Robin, would Marian have a problem with it, painting Little John as a desperately lonely little homewrecker? If they were both okay with it, would outside observers have an issue with it, and treat him or all three of them differently as a result? Should he care? Little John had never had a normal friendship before he met Robin - hell, some would argue he still hadn't. How often did adult friends see each other without it being weird? Was daily too much? Weekly? He legitimately had no idea. All he knew is that, much like how he told Otto, his main concern was that he just didn't want to be left all alone again. But of course, he didn't say that now, because Thor was still busy making things much, much worse.

"But Johnny, don't worry. I know you're not actually a married couple. You stick together for your own survival, I understand that. I understand you're separate people and you're eventually going to go your separate ways, but for now, you two have one hell of a rapport with each other, and I'm just saying he ought to appreciate it more."

Great job, Thor! John thought, You just invented two new fears for me by pulling them directly out of your fat white ass! Seriously? 'You're eventually going to go your separate ways' - is that how this story was supposed to end? Is that what the world expected of him? Was his end goal supposed to be that he learns enough from Robin that he can graduate from him and make new friends and maybe even find a significant other while Robin and Marian live happily ever after together in their lives separate from his? He had been feeling frustrated lately that he didn't know who he was and that he felt like his life was defined in reference to other people - was the solution to this that he would eventually outgrow Robin's companionship and become his own sovereign person, the main character of his own story? He didn't want to, he genuinely loved that fox as a brother… but what if he had to, to save his sense of self? What if the answer to his problem was staring him right in the face, delivered by a hermit who barely understood mammalian relationships himself, and now he was being called upon to take a big risk to save himself and become his own hero?

Of course, he most certainly wasn't going to abandon Robin now, when their goal was uncompleted and when his friend needed him most. But if it was what he needed to do to grow as a person, did this need to be the way this chapter of his life ended? He could just imagine it: everything in Nottingham is fine, poverty has been solved, corruption is over, their names have been cleared, John the Worst is John the Rotting Corpse with His Head Cut Off, and all is well with the world; Robin and Marian embrace before the Major Oak, but before they can run off on their honeymoon, Robin has to take a moment to thank Little John for being the best friend a man could have ever asked for, and they hug it out, neither saying it directly but both saying things that suggest that they both know their time in each other's lives is over, and then one of them says something at once cheesy and beautiful like "you'll always be my brother" before Robin goes back to Marian and they walk out of the forest hand in hand while Little John walks in the exact opposite direction, off to seek his fortune and find his next adventure, and to hopefully discover a life that's just as magical as Robin's has been and a story that ends with his own love of his life in his arms, and someone somewhere pipes in Johnny Cash, singing 'We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll meet again some sunny day', and the camera pans to the sky, cut to black, roll credits, and the audience in the movie theater feels it's bittersweet because they understand that these two characters never will meet again. No… no, it couldn't end that way… could it? Did he have a choice?

"You, uh… you alright, man?" asked Thor.

Little John snapped back into reality. Good god, how long had he zoned out for? When he blinked his eyes back into focus, he found a distressing amount of moisture in there, but thankfully none of it had left his sockets. And where the hell did this lump in his throat come from?

Robin still wasn't out. He wanted to interrogate Thor about what he meant by all of the above, but he knew he didn't have time for it. He still had one more important question to ask.

"Alright, uh… let's back it up here for a second," Little John spit out. "So you say I'm loyal to him… but… would you say, uh… would you say he's likewise as loyal to me?"

Thor seemed confused by that. "Uh, yeah, of course. He would've cut you loose by now if he wasn't."

Okay, no more mincing words. "Alright, it's just that you said it like 'you're a good sidekick,' and the whole 'loyal to him' thing makes it sound like I'm his underling."

"Well… I mean…" Thor had a funny feeling this was going to piss Little John off, but he would have felt more nervous withholding what John was clearly asking for. "...you kind of are. I mean, even you said, it's like he's the leader and you're the follower."

That pissed Little John off. "I was saying I don't like that Robin thinks that way about me."

"But it's just the way it is." Thor was gonna make himself power through this. "I mean, there's nothing wrong with that, it's just who you two are."

"Who we are?"

"Yeah, I mean, hey, don't worry, man, most people don't have natural leadership skills, Robin does, so the role suits him. And you gravitated toward that because deep down, you could appreciate that in him and you wanted to align yourself with that."

John's eyes narrowed, and only part of it was on account of his eyes being itchy from moisture. "I'd never choose to be anyone's follower."

And now Thor was starting to get annoyed that Little John was having the audacity to be this tense with him in his own house. "Man, I didn't say it was a choice. It's just who you are - it's who we are. Hey, you told me earlier about that doctor you know who's really insecure about who he is, and that I'm better off because I'm at peace with who I am - are you taking your own advice? I'm at peace with who I am. I know I'm not like Robin, and I don't try to be; I play to my own strengths and I don't worry about my weaknesses. Do you do the same?"

"You're supposed to worry about your weaknesses, you dumb motherfucker! And you're supposed to try to improve on them! And while you're doing that, you're supposed to have an epiphany that nobody's born great and anybody can become great if they work on it!"

Thor was not pleased with the trajectory of this conversation. First they bully him into messing with painkillers, and now Johnny was admonishing him and calling him stupid for taking his earlier advice at face value? But what should Thor have expected from the people who made Will feel so alone? "And you become great by playing to your strengths and not beating yourself up over your weaknesses-"

"-and nobody's born a 'natural leader' like you say!"

After hearing that, Thor just looked like he pitied Little John. Granted, he was getting annoyed by how John was disputing facts, but so far he was treating Johnny as the victim of a bad mindset. "Johnny. Dude. I encourage you to do some research. Mammalogists've been doing some digging. Natural leadership absolutely exists. In fact, long-term studies following kids into adulthood show that, on average, bullies are more successful than their victims, especially if you count the popular kids who emotionally manipulate the unpopular kids as bullies. You know why? It's thought all that desire to control others is natural leadership with no healthy outlet."

"Great, so now you're telling me that the kids who beat my ass as a kid are naturally better people than me!?"

"...You got beat up as a kid?"

"Yes!"

"...Somebody your size?"

"I wasn't always my size! Where do you think my family's last name comes from!? And even now there's always someone a lot bigger than me! Isn't that right, Guy Who's A Lot Bigger Than Me?"

Now Thor was starting to become legitimately irritated by John's offensive defensiveness. But civil discussion was the only thing that could combat that, right? "...Well, hey, leadership isn't inherently a good thing. If we're talking Robin or the kids who beat you up, if they ever had to work a lowly fast-food job to save their lives, they'd starve to death, they just couldn't take orders all day long and deal with customers openly acting like they think they're better than them. So they play to their strengths and I play to mine, and although there's a lot I'm not good at, I have a fulfilling career and I'm a hero that a lot of people need. I've found a way to be happy in life."

"You're a registered sex offender who sells drugs for a living, lives in the dark, and has absolutely no fucking friends!"

And then something snapped. Thor had tried to be as diplomatic as possible with Little John and Johnny was still trying to tear him a new one. It was true what Robin and John said that Thor and Dr. Fort weren't so different, because much like the good doctor, Thor had done his best to legitimately earn these guys' respect and he felt like he still wasn't getting it, so, much like the doctor, he decided to start demanding it. So he slowly walked around the table, eyes fixed on Little John, and decided to get right up in front of him, and, ultimately, over him.

"You got a problem with the way I live my life, Johnny?"

And all of the anger melted from Little John's face as he looked up at the eleven-foot polar bear towering over him. Even in the dim light of the lab, Thor could see the grizzly's eyes dilate, and they definitely weren't dilating in love.

Little John took a few steps backward along the wall. "Th-Thor, what're ya doin'?"

Thor took a few steps forward. "Answer the question."

At first, John was confused. Was this really happening? "Th-Thor, I-I know who you are, I know you're not going to hurt me."

"There's a first time for everything. I've always wondered what it's like to beat somebody up."

"Why would you want that!?"

"You still haven't answered my question."

In the bathroom, the toilet flushed again.

Bump. Little John had backed into the corner of the room. And all the light in the room was gone from his vision as Thor shrouded the smaller bear in shadows. With no escape now, Little John decided to try standing his ground. "Y-yes, I do think you should be trying to be more than what you are now!" He understood now how Robin felt when he had snapped at him during bathtime the other night; he could only hope this would end as amicably.

"After everything I've done for you, you still think of me as a loser behind my back? You think I'm gonna be okay with that?"

Little John wasn't having full audio-visual flashbacks, but as he looked up at the bear who had almost three feet and over a thousand pounds on him, he physically felt like a frightened cub again. His heart raced and his stomach twisted as they hadn't since those days back in the forests of suburban Nashville. He was a four-foot fourteen-year-old being sized up by a seven-foot twelve-year-old all over again. It was muscle memory. And because his body still remembered which function came next, his eyes started watering right on cue.

"I tell you about a scientific study and the insane conclusion you draw is that the guys who kicked your ass must be better people than you?" Thor growled. "I might as well prove you right then. You wanna try to hurt me? I'll hurt you twice as hard."

Thor was done waiting for an answer, and he was certainly done waiting to find out what it felt like to physically exert power over someone. He had been shit on enough in life; he wasn't going to take it from someone he thought he'd been able to trust. Thank God he long ago stopped considering these people his friends, or he might have been even more hurt.

Speaking of hurt, Thor didn't actually know how to throw a punch, and he didn't have the leverage to wind back and sock him anyway. Ever the inventive type, he grabbed Little John around the throat with one hand, picked all eight hundred pounds of him off the ground, lifted his arm over his shoulder and threw the grizzly nose-first into the floor.

"Gu-AHHH!" Little John screamed as he writhed in pain on his stomach, holding his nose and feeling for blood. Somehow, it didn't seem to be bleeding, but he didn't get to feel around for as long as he would have liked before Thor grabbed his arms and put them on the ground alongside his back. He stepped on each of John's elbows - which he only knew was an extremely painful pressure point because he'd read The Outsiders in Grade Seven - and sure enough, Little John screamed even louder. Seeing as Thor's short legs and John's thick torso made for little clearance between the two, Thor just decided to sit his two-thousand-pound mass on the grizzly's back. When Little John couldn't breathe anymore, his screaming stopped.

Thor leaned in and held Little John's head against the floor, not seeming to mind as the smaller bear's face was twisted in fear, his soaked eyes bursting open and his mouth begging for air that simply wasn't coming.

"And to think, Will said you were the cool one," said the only one of them who could speak. "And for the longest time, I agreed, but I guess I was-"

BANG, BANG, BANG, came a trio of noises from the ceiling.

"Shut the fuck up, you fucking pedophile!" screamed a muffled voice from upstairs, almost as deep as Thor's. "It's five in the fucking morning, people are trying to sleep!"

Incensed, Thor stood stepped off of his betrayer to retort with three pounds to the thirteen-foot ceiling himself. "RICK! I AM NOT A PEDOPHILE! GET THAT THROUGH YOUR FUCKING-!"

And that's when he felt something small, pointy, and sharp pressed against the crotch of his pants. He looked down, hands in the air, and saw the fox holding his pocket knife to his groin.

Despite the adrenaline rushing through his veins, Robin did his best to speak slowly and calmly as he looked straight up: "Now… Thor… I only overheard so much of what you two were discussing… so I don't know the full story of what led to this… but what I do know… is that I just saw you hurt my friend… and I don't think he did anything to deserve to be hurt like that… I'm going to have to ask you to back off, and let us leave."

Thor was going through his own adrenaline rush, so as much as he did fear taking a blade to the netherregions, his prevailing anger outweighed it. He impassionedly pointed behind himself at the fallen brown bear as he spoke: "That… motherfucker, owes me an apolo-!"

But then Thor turned to take a good look at Little John, who was propping himself off the ground with his left elbow as his right hand held a pistol aimed straight at him.

"You… wanna hurt me!?" Little John's voice betrayed that he was still clearly shaken up, trying to come back from being a cub again "...I'll hurt you twice as hard!"

Now Thor's fear was starting to outweigh his anger. "Y-you're not gonna shoot me. Those little bullets wouldn't hurt me! And if my neighbors hear a gunshot, the cops'll be here in five minutes! You're not gonna fuckin' shoot me!"

"And I didn't think someone like you was gonna get physical with me…" John's arm was quivering as much as his voice was and his waterlogged eyes shimmered in the dim light. "...but then you did."

Thor had nothing to say to that. Little John had made a very good point. Instead, he changed the subject: "You still owe me an-!"

"I'm not apologizing for telling you the truth. You're a loser. Everything- everything I said about you was true. And now… we can add to that list… that deep down… you've always wanted to be a bully… you just never had the nerve. You're a bully and you're a fucking coward! And by YOUR FUCKING RULES… Mister 'We-Can't-Change-Our-Nature'... that's who you really are. Isn't that right?"

Again, Thor did not have a good rebuttal to that.

"I'm surprised by you, Thor," Robin said as fatherly as possible. "Perhaps we can find someone else to connect us with medicine going forward, but for now… I'm going to have to ask you to step back, against the wall, and don't move until we're gone. We'll see ourselves out."

Thor had a thought: what was preventing him from just grabbing Robin's arm? After all, the fox only had one good one. So Thor leaned down to reach for Robin's arm and immediately found out what was logistically unsound about that strategy.

Slash.

"EeeughAAARGH!" He looked down to see a long gash stretching from the pad on his palm and down onto his wrist. The fur around there wasn't white anymore.

BANG, BANG, BANG, went the ceiling. "Shut up or I'm calling the cops and telling them I can hear children screaming for their lives over your computer speakers!" Rick hollered from upstairs. "Who do you think they'll believe!?"

Thor stumbled backward until he backed into the wall, then slid down into a seated position, grasping his gashed hand all the way. Now he looked like he was about to lose his own composure. He only looked up when a dishtowel was thrown into his lap; he saw Little John now standing, gun still in his hand but now at his side, and his moist eyes glaring from above drenched cheeks; and Robin, who apparently had tossed him the towel, still holding his knife in his good hand, simply looking confused by how this strange creature was capable of such evil after all.

"For your wound," Robin finally said, nudging his nose at the towel. "Good lord, just when you think you know a guy…"

And continuing with this story's recurring motif of men crying, it was now Thor's turn to feel sorry for himself.

"Wha… what did I-?" he choked out, staring at his palms, both the bleeding one and the unscathed one. "Oh- Jesus Fucking Christ, I don't know what came over me…"

"Cry me a river," Little John grumbled.

"Now, now, Johnny," said Robin, "he's realized his mistake, don't pour salt in the wound-"

"You shut the fuck up, too, Robin."

"Oh my god, Johnny," said Thor, "I- I'm so sorry, man, I…"

"...You what?"

"I-I was just trying to be rational, and you were just getting angrier at me, and… people've rejected me my whole life, you know? And I just… I guess I couldn't handle taking it from you, too-"

"I've been rejected my whole life, too, asshole!" Little John growled. "So I would expect you to know better than to ever treat me that way! No shit I was getting angry at you, you were telling me that I couldn't control who I was! You think that's a good life lesson!?"

Thor wasn't answering, simply staring.

"HUH!?" Little John repeated. And Robin wanted to tell him to calm down again, but he was starting to get the impression that John may have been affected by this incident more than he could understand.

"Alright, I'm calling the police…" said Rick through the ceiling.

Thor, his tongue silent and his eyes runny, buried his face in his paws and wept, smearing blood all over the right side of his face.

"C'mon, Robin…" Little John said, sounding like watching Thor go to pieces was making him feel distressed all over again. He took two steps toward the door before Robin spoke.

"Johnny, I'm only going to check to see if he needs stitches," Robin said calmly, making it clear that he wasn't going to fraternize with the enemy. Johnny, for his part, seemed to be okay with the olive branch.

Robin walked up to the blubbering polar bear and grabbed his right arm, gently pulling it toward himself. "Let me just see how bad it is," said the fox, trying to not sound too vindictive but also not too merciful. The wound was long, but miraculously, it wasn't that deep. "I don't think you'll need stitches. Some gauze and adhesives oughta do ya. If it doesn't heal right, get into contact with Geoffrey Fort at Bethlehem General, Geoffrey with a G; he'll recognize your name when you introduce yourself."

"Y-you guys need to understand," Thor coughed, "I'm terrified… because I don't know where that came from. Johnny, I'm so fucking sorry I did that to you, but… you aren't the only one all fucked up by this."

And Little John wanted to dispute that statement, but he decided to try to be more understanding, if for no other reason than to make sure Robin didn't think he was immature. "And I'm not trying to pour salt in the wound, Thor, but you gotta understand that it's gonna be awhile before I can have a friendly conversation with you again."

"I… I understand. I… I guess that's fair."

"You're afraid because this brought out a new feeling in you? Well I was afraid because this brought out an old feeling in me, one that I was hoping I'd never feel again. So thanks a lot for that. That's what I needed to start my day, some P-T-fucking-S-D."

Robin simply kept glancing at one bear and the other, feeling like he was meant to take control of this emotional dilemma but not knowing how.

"But seriously, Rob, let's go," Little John continued. "You heard the guy upstairs say he's calling the cops, and it didn't sound like he was bluffing."

"That's Rick," Thor said to his lap. "He's not bluffing. Not the first time he tried to frame me for having- uh… nasty shit. At this point, the cops know I don't have any interest in that stuff, but they still have to show up… Actually…"

He stood and walked over to the closet of what was supposed to be the bedroom, and from it he pulled out an enormous television set that had to have been at least a few feet in every dimension. He placed it on the table screen-up and popped off the frame, put some vinyl gloves on his bloody paws, and started stuffing his drug-making paraphernalia into the hollowed-out chassis. As the screen laid on the table, the light illuminated the inside of the glass to show brushstrokes, betraying that it had been painted black.

Little John decided to be the bigger man - or at least he decided to do what he had been led to believe the bigger man would do. "You need help hiding your stuff, Thor?"

"Wha-? Oh, n-no, I… I'm good. With that elevator, I've got enough time."

"Well, if you insist you have this under control, we'd best be making our exit," said Robin, and he and his friend turned to leave.

"Wait," Thor piped up suddenly.

"What's up?" asked Little John as the two of them stopped and turned around again.

"I, uh… I'm gonna make it up to you. Th-the medicine. The pills, the painkillers. I-I mean, I can't guarantee that I'll make anything that works, I-I just gotta get lucky, but… you got enough of the amnesioids to last you awhile, right? That should leave me with plenty of time to mess around and experiment."

Robin and John glanced at one another, not knowing what to make of this. "Er… it's fine, Thor," said Robin, "we can live without them if we need to-"

"No. Robin…" Thor had paused putting his stuff away. "Let me make this up to you… please."

Robin thought very carefully about how to respond to that. "Well… Thor… it's not I whom you have to make it up to." He gestured to his friend. "You hurt Johnny here a lot more than you hurt me - true, you did make me witness something that made me feel small and helpless, and watching my friend get hurt hurts me as well - but it shouldn't be me you're addressing here."

And Little John was inclined to agree. It was annoying enough that Robin had effectively had to save him like a damsel in distress and now he was even talking on his behalf, but this proved that Thor really did think that Robin was the ringleader to whom everyone had to answer. Okay, to be fair, maybe Thor got that impression from all those times Will bitched to him about Robin's de facto running the show, but a good explanation didn't equal a good excuse. But John had a funny feeling that if he were ever to get Thor to see him as Robin's equal, he'd have to start acting more like him, at least when Thor himself was around. And that began now with a calm response to the polar bear: "Is there anything you'd like to say to me, Thor?"

Thor rerouted his gaze to Little John. "Johnny… I'm sorry I snapped - first time in my life and you happened to be around for it, I wish it wasn't that way, but here we are… but Johnny, I truly believe that Robin would be absolutely fucked without you, and you're gonna have a big yoke upon your shoulders helping him get through this. So making this medicine is as much a gift to you as it is to Robin. Am I making sense?"

Hm, how could he say what he wanted to say without sounding too… bitter? "This can be the first part of a lot of things you do to make it up for me," John answered.

"Uh… okay. F-fair enough, I suppose."

"And another thing can be getting that shitty worldview out of your head. I can't change who I am? After I already have? Really? You're a smart cookie, Thor, and you know a lot of things, but you're not smart about everything, and for my own sanity, I'm gonna have to tell myself that you're a complete retard who doesn't know what the fuck you're talking about on this one."

Thor wanted to refute that again in the name of science, but he knew better. "I hear ya."

"And you can make it up to yourself by starting to have some self-respect for the way you live!"

Again, Thor wanted to fight that, but he knew better. "I'll try, Johnny."

"Johnny, I think we'd best be going," said Robin, worrying that more conflict was brewing.

"...Alright," Little John finally said. "Thor, you take care of yourself," he added as he turned to leave.

"Uh, s-same to you, man," said Thor.

"Until we meet again, Thor," Robin bid. "Hopefully then under better circumstances."

"Same."

The duo walked to the door; for size's sake, Little John unlocked it and opened it for Robin, who left first. John himself was halfway out the door when he stopped to add something:

"And by the way, Thor, that book you loaned us sucks!"

"Huh?"

"The book. It sucks. It reads like it was written by a crazy person."

"Oh, well, uh… I-I can loan you something else. If you want something lighter, more straightforward, I can give you a collection of stories and poems by Charles Mookowski-"

"No, we're gonna keep hate-reading it because we're bored, and we're gonna remember that you think it's good, somehow. And we're gonna secretly think less of you for what you like, but we're not gonna advertise that because we're too classy for that." And then he shut the door and the Merry Men were gone.

When the police arrived, they were clearly expecting nothing, but they nevertheless went through all the logical hiding places looking for contraband and found nothing, neither videocassettes nor digital media, and Thor explained that the screaming came when he sliced his hand open on a kitchen knife. Having little better to do, they helped him wrap his hand in gauze before they went upstairs to go tell Rick off for abusing 9-1-1. Thor got very little sleep that day and ultimately wound up calling off work; as he dialed the phone, he told himself that no matter which of his three managers answered at The Chuckle Bunker's office, he was going to confidently tell them point-blank that he'd had a traumatic episode and wasn't safe to work. Karin was disappointed to be down a dishwasher, but given what she had recently gone through herself, she understood completely.

-IllI-

"So… how much of that did you hear?"

"I imagine you mean back at Thor's."

"Yup."

They walked east down J Street as they approached the TAN station, looking toward the horizon. Any moment now, civil twilight would give way to sunrise. The forecast was another scorcher before rain came just in time for afternoon rush hour and the temperature would drop twenty degrees by sunset. Knowing this from the newspaper they'd found at the junkyard, the plan was to take the Yellow Line straight northeast to the ritzy side of town, do their thing until just past lunchtime, and get back to the van by 3 to ride out the storm, and maybe go around the West Side distributing wealth once it passed. But they were going to have some obstacles, including accommodating for Robin's broken arm and stopping to let him pee every five hundred feet, including twice on the way to the subway. Luckily the streets were still mostly empty.

"I heard screaming, but I couldn't make out any actual words," Robin said as the two of them started down the stairs to the station. No, he had heard everything after 'You're supposed to worry about your weaknesses, you dumb motherfucker' loud and clear, but he wasn't going to get into another conversation on the topic with Little John, at least not in public.

And Little John didn't really believe that Robin didn't hear any of the conversation at full volume, but after his conversation with Thor went far worse than the one he'd had with Otto, he was done with philosophical chit-chat for a while. "If you say so… what was the first thing you saw and heard when you walked out of the bathroom, then?"

"I skipped washing my hands to get out of there faster. I got to the doorway and first thing I saw, he's boxing you into the corner. And he said something about you calling him a loser." They got to the turnstiles and put their transit cards in. "And - and I regret this, so forgive me, Johnny - at first I couldn't believe it myself, so I hesitated. But then, I… I could just barely see the look on your face, and… I knew something was wrong. I pulled out my knife and I was going to go for his ankles or maybe the backs of his knees, but then he grabbed you by the neck and lifted you up, and… well, if he saw me with a knife, I'd be next, and then I definitely couldn't have helped you, so to save myself, at least for the time being, I jumped back around the door and hid. Then I peeked around the door as he was suffocating you, and by some miracle he didn't see me, but then the neighbor protested the noise and, well… I just got lucky."

They got on the downward escalator to the platform, Little John going first and Robin staying a few steps behind so they could be almost eye-level with one another. "You say you saw the look on my face?" John asked as he turned around. "What did it look like?" He already knew the answer, but he wanted to hear it from Robin.

Robin made a point to look around before answering, just in case anyone who recognized them might be in earshot. There didn't seem to be. "Johnny, I don't mean to embarrass you, but I've seen you scared. I've seen you sad. I've seen you nervous. I've seen you convinced you were about to die. But I've never seen you look like… that."

Little John stared off to the side as he let those words wash over him.

"Er, watch your step, Johnny," Robin warned.

Little John turned around and saw that they were at the bottom of the escalator. They stepped off and walked down the platform, where a few people seemed to recognize them but saw that they weren't brimming with their trademark merriness and decided to give them their space.

"Well…" Little John wondered aloud, "...I guess… that's the closest you'll ever come to authentically witnessing me getting my ass kicked as a kid."

"And if you're hoping it's given me a newfound appreciation for everything you've been through, it has. I assure you." And as Robin looked up at John, who was staring straight ahead, not looking back at him, wearing a countenance that looked like someone using anger to mask sadness and fear, a look Johnny used to wear a lot in the days when Robin had first met him, and now Robin felt more guilty than he ever had for not sharing more of his own past with him. He resolved that he would; he wasn't sure when, but he would, and he'd finally tell him the other thing, too, and probably some other things that Little John had more than earned the trust to know by this point.

"Well…" the bear began again, and this time he did look down to meet the fox's eyes. "...thanks for having my back."

"Oh, never mention it, Johnny. I'd never be able to forgive myself if I hadn't done all I could to help my friend."

"And I know, you're a noble guy, but I'm just used to the idea that if someone's getting their ass kicked, everyone else is gonna grab the popcorn and watch and say 'ha, sucks to be you.'"

"Well pardon the expression, Johnny, but fuck those people! They don't know what friends are for…"

"Well in any case, I owe ya one, Rob."

"Nonsense, Johnny! If anything, I'm still paying you back for saving my arse at the archery contest all those years ago…" They found a nice empty spot on the platform and stood in place. "...And to be completely honest, we both need to thank that ornery fellow Ron upstairs."

"Rick."

"That bloke, yes. It's a shame he seemed such a nasty personality."

As a moment of silence passed, Little John looked around to see how quiet he had to be to have this conversation in public - aw, screw it, if strangers were eavesdropping, then shame on them. "It's weird… if I did have a friend like you... hell, at literally any point of my life before I met you... then I probably never would've met you, because I met you in a place I wouldn't've taken myself if I felt like there was even one person in the world who cared about me. Funny how that works."

"Then I just hope I've been worth the wait! And while I'm not particularly pleased that all those people for all those years couldn't see how great of a lad you were, if that's what it took for me to end up with you in my life, then I must say that I am pleased with how things worked out!"

John's face still looked grumpy as he glanced at the schedule board; an neo-retro yellow-pixels-on-a-black-screen digital sign insisted that the next train would be there in four minutes. He couldn't tell if Robin was buttering him up again because it was beneficial for Robin to have a ride-or-die friend in his adventures or if he was genuinely gushing over his platonic pal in public where everybody could hear him. I mean, it had to be the first one, right? For Christ's sakes, with a slightly different intonation, Robin's last few sentences could have been something he said to Marian - not the most romantic thing ever, but still a testament of appreciation that people usually only reserve for their 'one'. And Little John didn't enjoy being so skeptical of Robin caring as much for him as he'd expect Robin to care for his girlfriend or his parents, but he had been raised to believe that an arrangement like this simply wasn't normal. And on a related note, stupid Thor had also made him more worried that the hyena kid in the woods wasn't as much of an outlier as they had previously thought; even if he and Robin were comfortable being better friends than most guys were comfortable being, would that matter if nobody else was comfortable with that? As Thor and Otto had both casually pointed out, even married couples who genuinely loved each other weren't this inseparable.

"Hey, uh… I gotta ask, does it ever make you, uh, uncomfortable with the way that… I dunno, do I give you the whole 'thank you for being a friend' thing too often? Is it weird?"

"H-huh? N- no. Lord, no. Whatever gave you that impression?"

"Thor. Thor is directly responsible for this question."

"Were you discussing this while I was relieving myself?"

"Eeyup."

"Well as we've well-established, Thor's not one to have the best judgment, now is he? Especially in matters relating to how people get along."

"Yeah, but… hey, if he's right in this case, you can tell me. Because, yeah, after having no real connections with anybody for so long, I can totally understand if I come across as overbearing - heh, overbearing, pun intended, I guess - but, uh, yeah, I know that a lot of people might not be comfortable with how often or how… elaborately, I guess, I say 'hey, man, I love ya, brother' - in the world I know, that would be called, and I quote, 'some gay shit' - so if you've been weirded out by me telling you that as often as I do but you haven't said so because you're too gentlemanly or polite or because it's in your best interest not to piss off your closest ally, it's fine, you can tell me. I got behind the curve and I couldn't catch up for the longest time because nobody told me what I was doing wrong."

Robin looked at Little John with a clear disbelief that this was a serious question. "Didn't we just discuss something similar to this a few days ago?"

"Yes, aaand now I'm not so sure it wasn't strategic lying. In which case I couldn't fault you for it."

Robin glanced down the tunnel; the train still was not visible yet. "Well, to answer your question, no, Johnny, I wouldn't toy with you like that, and if I found you to be overbearing, I'd find a polite way to tell you. Quite the contrary, I appreciate that I can have a mature friendship with you when so many other people - our fellow men especially, but in my experience, most women aren't off the hook for this, either - so many other people restrict how close they're willing to get to their friends specifically because, like you just said, they're afraid it may come across as something else. Maybe it is just because you're desperate deep down, or maybe you're more secure in your masculinity than you think you are - and with your physique, old boy, you should be! - but one way or another, in you I've found a sense of fraternity I've always wanted myself."

Little John noticed some gorilla just up and staring at them as they had their conversation, and not a friendly stare either. John stared back and the gorilla went back to minding their own business. "Good to know," is all he said. Then again, maybe the gorilla was just confused why a grizzly bear would be waiting in the medium-sized mammal section of the platform.

Robin kept thinking. "I might as well clarify. Now - and please don't think I'm bragging here, Johnny - I was fortunate enough to have two people I could love as my parents and a woman I could love as my girlfriend - hopefully one day soon, my wife - but the idea of having a brother, literally or figuratively, was something that always… teased me. And it was twofold. Part of it was Will, and how I knew he was my brother and he knew I was his brother and everybody in South Yorkshire knew we were biologically brothers but we both had to play dumb and we only got to act like brothers every so often. And the other part was… heh, you're going to roll your eyes at this, Johnny, but… while I can't deny I had plenty of options for playmates as a lad… I never really had one best friend. I'm talking like someone I felt I could have adventures with. I never had to want for people to invite me to kick a football around or let me sit with them in the school dining hall, but in all my years of schooling and in all those children's books about children's lives, it seemed all those children could point to one other lad and go 'him, he's by best mate.' I could never do that. Any kids can kick a football around and call themselves friends, but who's going to… I dunno, what do mates do?... Who's going to go explore the forest with me? Who's going to… who's going to… aw, piss, I can't even think of a second thing - shows how much I know about having a fun childhood, you can blame Will's father for that - but seriously, Johnny, who's going to be the best man at my wedding? I think I finally have an answer for that. Does that all make sense?"

They could start to hear the train coming through the tunnel in the distance; it was probably only a stop or two away. "I hear ya, Rob, I hear ya… I'm just thinking that I ought to know if I'm good friend material so that I can, you know, also make friends with other people when this is all over. Diversify my friend portfolio. 'Specially if - if for one reason or another - there should ever come a day when you just ain't around anymore."

"...I understand, Johnny."

And Little John appreciated that Robin was finally sharing more about his past, but it still raised more questions, and at the risk of ruining the moment, he had to pry just a little. "...Although if I'm being completely honest, I'm having trouble believing you could have that many friends and none of them stuck out as your favorite, and vice versa. You sure you weren't just one of those kids who had three or four best friends and you could never pick one?"

"Oh no, Johnny. If anything, I remember having a conversation once with my stepfather about how it seemed sometimes like he was my closest friend and that just didn't seem right. Er… to be fair, though… there were two close candidates at different points."

"...Care to elaborate?"

"Well, first was Marian herself, back when we were very young, the kind of young where nobody even cares about a little boy and a little girl being friends. But then her parents had her go to a different school for a few years, and when she transferred back a few more years later, we were older, and, well… we were suddenly interested in being more than just friends."

"Show-off."

"Hey, I said I was sorry, Johnny," Robin joked. The train sounded like it would be pulling in any moment now. "The other one… I thought he would be what you wound up being, but… I guess as we grew up, we found out our real selves weren't compatible."

"'Real selves'!?" Little John said with a raised voice as the train loudly pulled into the station. "C'mon, Rob, don't be like Thor with the whole 'you can't choose who you are' thing!"

"Heh, I suppose you're right, Johnny!" Robin spoke over the noise. "But when two lads are having a tiff, they're inclined to make the most cynical conclusions and say, fuck that guy, that's just who he is."

"Fair enough," Little John said as they stepped onto the train.

It was still mostly empty as they looked for three consecutive empty seats - one for Robin, two for John. They did find a spot for themselves between two zebras having a spirited conversation and an elderly German Shepherd woman who gave them a knowing wink and a wave. For politeness's sake, Robin sat next to the dog to give her plenty of space, while the zebra who was next to the empty seat looked less than pleased to suddenly have a brown bear's bulk spilling over next to him, but when Johnny looked down at him and gave him an intimidatingly self-assured smile, both of the zebras realized who they were dealing with and backed off. They talked much quieter after that.

Little John turned back to Robin. "But you know what? Enough about me. How're you feeling? How's your arm?"

In his periphery, Robin could see the old woman and the people across the aisle just then notice the Lincoln-green fiberglass on the fox's arm. "Eh, it's tolerable. I can't complain. I'm honestly looking forward to when it's safe to take one of those polar bear paracetamols, but I'll manage." Then he looked at their backpack full of supplies sitting on the ground between his leg and Johnny's and picked it up with his good arm, and placed it in his lap, hiding his cast between the bag and his chest.

"How's the rest of you?"

"Quite alright, I must say. A bit tired, though."

"And how's your head?"

Robin wasn't opposed to having this conversation, but not necessarily in a subway car, especially as it pulled out of the station and it quickly got noisy. "Just a little shocked by the newest surprise thrown our way and wondering if we have to worry about more of our friends falling away from us… not so much like Alan, but like Amanda, if you catch my drift."

"It's still bugging you what she did to you?"

"Not so much what she said and did, but the idea that if it could happen with her, it could happen with anybody." Robin was intentionally trying to keep the details vague just in case any of their neighbors recognized who Amanda was. "True, she had a reason to be mad, but I daresay I didn't deserve all that."

"Well, forget her," John said, trying to mind his language in close quarters with strangers.

"Oh, I intend to. But, er, for now… would you mind if I took a nap for a while? I'm just exhausted."

"Uh… okay, but, uh… what stop are we getting off at?"

"I dunno. We'll see when I wake up."

"...Alright then. Uh… g'night."

"Goooodnight," Robin said as he closed his eyes and laid his head back against the seat, and then he was silent.

And that left Little John alone. He wasn't so starved for companionship that short intervals like this would drive him crazy, but sitting in a subway car, he had little else to do but look around and every so often smile wave to the people who recognized them and give a friendly shushing gesture while pointing to Robin, which they all seemed to understand. But aside from these brief moments of having something to occupy his mind, there was nothing to keep his train of thought from going far off the rails.

First he thought of the dynamic that he and Robin had and kept running through a mental list of famous duos, real and fictional, who would make a good comparison; yeah, he knew that the happy hippie answer is that what they were was unique, but that wasn't very helpful in explaining it to other people. Eventually he recalled the Jack Kerouac/Dean Moriarty comparison from when he was at Otto's house the other day and remembered when he had to read that book in high school; he knew Dean Moriarty wasn't the real guy's name, and he knew that Jack Kerouac gave his stand-in character a different name, but he couldn't remember either of those other names, and none of that would have been an issue if Kerouac wasn't a fucking hack who just repeated real-life events with the names changed and called it literature but whatever, who's counting?

He remembered sitting in Mr. Grissom's senior-year English class. Mr. Grissom had a reputation for being an eccentric guy, kind of like an absentminded professor but who wasn't qualified to actually teach at the university level. He was somebody Little John kept bumping into throughout high school since his very first day, as he was Johnny's freshman-year homeroom teacher. Mr. Grissom was taking attendance that first day of high school, meeting the students for the first time, and when he called out 'John Little' and saw who answered, Mr. Grissom, being a black bear himself, hypothesized in front of the entire classroom that the diminutive bruin whose last name was literally Little must surely be one of the rare but real brown-furred black bears. And the kids laughed. A fitting start to high school, all things considered, since it set the tone for a four-year period where the majority of the attention he'd get would be random moments of accidental humiliation, in contrast to middle and elementary school, where he got plenty of attention as the subject of regular beatings and intentional humiliation; the tonal shift mostly came sometime during his sophomore year, as everybody started turning sixteen, and the kids who used to abuse him stopped thinking the idea that Johnny would stay little forever was hilarious and started thinking it was depressing, so they stopped mocking and assaulting him and simply started ignoring him. Therefore the only times eyes were on him were on him were when the universe seemed to conspire to embarrass him, such as when Mr. Grissom incorrectly assumed his species based entirely upon the physical trait John detested the most, and again three-and-a-half years later when Mr. Grissom thought it would add to the conversation to point out that "Little" John Little and Ti-Jean Kérouac had basically the same nickname.

That was a poor lapse in judgment on the teacher's part, but while the other kids - many of whom were now eighteen-year-old adults, including Little John, who was still the size and shape of a grizzly nine-year-old - found it unfortunate that John shared a trait with this author they all hated reading, they didn't find it outright hilarious. However, the students remembered it, and when they "finished" the book a few weeks later (few of them actually read it), Mr. Grissom was giving a postscript about Kerouac's writing process. He mentioned that Jack had told himself that nobody was ever going to read what he wrote, allowing him the freedom to write whatever he wanted as he wanted to write it, but when he found that people actually did want to read it, he was having some retroactive concerns about the novel's content. One of the many concerns Kerouac had was his analog character's bromantic infatuation with Dean Moriarty - hell, the novel ends with a line something like "and I was thinking of Dean Moriarty." - and never being one to shy away from the controversial aspects of literature, Mr. Grissom just up and mentioned that Kerouac had to sit himself down and ask himself, quote, "Is this a gay novel?"; immediately after saying that, Mr. Grissom remembered he lived in Tennessee in 1986, and as he had seen every time in the last four weeks that he mentioned something about Kerouac the students found abnormal, they all turned and looked at their class's own Ti-Jean.

Different people will surely have different opinions about how Mr. Grissom handled the situation from there, but he did what he thought he had to do. First, he clarified that Kerouac, as the author, knew well that his character had no romantic feelings for Dean Moriarty, nor did Jack himself have any for Dean's real-life counterpart, but it was America in the 1950s and Kerouac didn't think people would read what he wrote and think that a guy could care that much about another guy without something else going on - and by that, Mr. Grissom meant neither the straight population nor the contemporary LGBT community would believe there wasn't some secret undercurrent with the narrator's feelings. Then Mr. Grissom made a point to say that Kerouac decided to be brave and publish the book anyway, letting the readers draw what conclusions they may about all the details he was unsure about, and if the self-proclaimed moral majority was pissed at him, then Jack and his beatnik friends didn't care for them anyway, and if the gay community of the '50s wanted to think of the book as their own, then Jack said let 'em. And all throughout this Mr. Grissom was speaking delicately about gay matters, aiming for something that dignified the LGBT community but wouldn't completely burn bridges with these kids who were largely raised to be good Christian boys and girls lest he forever alienate them from accepting gay people; again, some would say he pushed his personal politics too far, others would say he didn't push them far enough, but he tried to talk to these kids as he would want someone with a different worldview to talk to him: civilly, but challenging. The teacher wrapped this all up with a note about how this was all one enormous moot point because very few people actually did interpret the main character as gay and Kerouac resolved that maybe his own hyperreligious French-Canadian Roman Catholic upbringing reinforced his fear of other people's fear of homosexuality, but Mr. Grissom used this as a springboard to discuss the argument in art criticism that what the audience derives from a piece of art is in practice more important than whatever the artist actually intended.

Little John remembered that classroom being very, very dark. Part of what made people think Mr. Grissom was an oddball was his strong preference for natural lighting, which worked just fine in the mornings when the eastward-facing windows were filled with sunlight, but not so much by the time the final period rolled around at two-thirty in the afternoon. This darkness did have the benefit of making it easier for Johnny to feel hidden in plain sight when Mr. Grissom kept inadvertently embarrassing him. But in this darkness, he remembered the final bell ringing and making his way towards the door when Mr. Grissom asked to speak with him. The teacher asked John if he was in any after-school programs or other timely obligations that he needed to attend; John said no, and Mr. Grissom insisted he stay a few minutes and talk if he was in no rush. Little John's father had done a good job instilling a fear of authority into him, so he did not know he had the option to say no.

Mr. Grissom told him to pull up a seat. He began by apologizing if the incidental detail about Mr. Kerouac and his characters had caused him any grief or would cause him any grief in the future; Mr. Grissom insisted that he knew how cruel students could be towards one another. But then he took it into an entirely different direction; he asked Little John whether he considered himself a good student. John meekly said no, expecting to be reprimanded for underperforming in class.

Instead, Mr. Grissom continued, explaining that he had been paying attention to Little John for a while; awkward as he was, Mr. Grissom did not realize how that sentence may have come across, and considering the topic that he had brought up out of nowhere in class that day, Johnny was honestly afraid that he could see where this was going. But it did not go that way; rather, Mr. Grissom explained that he was also aware of how he and John had kept bumping into one another over the years, and how it seemed that every time Mr. Grissom focused his attention on Little John, the young bear seemed to be dreadfully embarrassed by something. Of course, for the first three years, Little John had only known Mr. Grissom as a homeroom proctor or a lunchroom monitor; now that Mr. Grissom had John in his actual class, he finally understood what was up with the lad: he was embarrassed that he was a poor student and thought that everyone thought he was stupid. And Little John was too timid to point out that Mr. Grissom's hypothesis was only partially correct.

The teacher went ahead and decided to let Little John in on a little-known secret, a secret that he, as a teacher, was not supposed to let out: nerds don't actually run the world. He posited that surely the young bear had been told countless times that ones who are called nerds as children are called bosses as adults, but that that was not actually true, and explained that while nerds were important members of society, they lacked a sense of social skills that would make them quality leaders, and therefore in any given office in America, the former nerdy kids were often the high-ranking worker bees who took home a good salary, but the people they answered to were the people who knew how to wheel and deal. Mr. Grissom explained further that he classified himself as a nerd - he was an English teacher, for goodness' sakes - and as much as he sometimes wished he was somebody else, he had managed to find comfort in the cards he had been dealt; he elaborated that there was a reason why he had on several occasions refused offers to teach accelerated or AP courses, opting instead to teach the regular-pace and remedial students whom he found much more fascinating to work with. The moral of this story, he said, was that if it simply wasn't Johnny's destiny to be an intellectual juggernaut, that was fine, and depending on what he wanted in life, it may even be better, because not everybody craves a comfortable life working in an office for six figures a year. He said with a smile that Little John ought to enjoy the few remaining months before graduation and not stress about his grades, because no matter where life took him, he would find something that played to his strengths and made him happy. John tried not to have a panic attack as he heard that, but luckily Mr. Grissom eagerly told him to go home and start dreaming. Little John wept openly that night, and his father was about to shut him up by beating him with a Budweiser bottle until his mother reminded Harry that it was time to take his medicine.

The next day after class, Little John went up to Mr. Grissom, saying he had questions about what he had said yesterday. The teacher obliged. John asked point-blank, if the nerds don't wind up being the bosses, then who does? Mr. Grissom at first repeated that it was the ones who were good at wheeling and dealing, but when John pressed for an equivalent to a student clique, Mr. Grissom, absentmindedly as ever, mused something to the effect of, "oh, you know, probably the kids who make friends really easily, the popular ones, so-" and then he looked into his student's eyes and realized that for the second time in two days, he had talked himself into a sticky situation.

He was about to say something else, but Little John cut him off and never found out what it was. John demanded to know if, according to Mr. Grissom's wisdom, there were people who were good at thinking, and other people who were good at schmoozing, and still others were good at athletics, what was he good at? And Johnny still remembered the next couple of sentences verbatim.

"Uh… harumph… well, what do you think you're good at?"

"Nothing!"

"...Nothing?"

"No! Nothing!"

"Oh, uh… surely you've found something you're good at? Or at least something you enjoy doing-"

"No! I haven't! I haven't ever been good at anything I've ever tried in my life!"

"Oh, uh… I… I-I… I didn't know."

If Mr. Grissom's thesis statement was that nerds lacked the social skills to be good leaders, and Mr. Grissom identified himself as a nerd, he was doing a damn fine job of proving his own point. The man did not reassure Johnny that he would eventually find a talent, nor did he insist that nobody was good at everything on their first try and that everyone needed to work on their skills to be successful at them, nor did he even so much as try to help Little John feel like it was okay to be who he was. He simply stared at Little John in complete silence, looking downright spooked, almost as if he thought he was the only one there who had any reason to be embarrassed. He not only utterly failed at inspiring confidence in his pupil, he made his pupil feel like he was a lost cause who could not be helped, just such a stunning case of uselessness and inadequacy that it left even an English teacher at a loss for words. Little John left without saying anything else and walked home crying, which earned him a beating at the hands of some freshman who didn't know how old he was and didn't care.

That had been a Friday. On Monday during fourth period, some buck knocked on the door of John's math class and asked to take him away for the remainder of the hour. John had seen this guy in the hallways before but never knew who he was; it turned out he was the school therapist. This deer explained that Mr. Grissom had informed him of some of John's self-esteem issues and felt he had to hand the reins over to a more qualified person. John didn't remember too many specific details of that session, though he did remember that the deer was clearly in no emotional place to be handling other people's problems, at one point being deeply offended by Little John for his choice to discuss the cruel things people said to him as quotes with the profanity intact, and a few minutes later mentioning that he as a therapist still sometimes found himself bothered by the things the mean people in his own life said to him decades ago before he turned to stare off into space and not say a single syllable for a solid two and a half seconds. The therapist called the Little household later that day to ask if they were okay with John regularly attending school therapy sessions (which he didn't have to do because John was eighteen and legally an adult who didn't need his parents' permission, but the therapist had just assumed the kid was a freshman on account of his size and nobody anywhere along the line bothered to correct him), his mom answered the phone, she asked his dad, his dad said hell no, and John never spoke to the deer again. As for Mr. Grissom, he had trouble making eye contact with Little John for the rest of the year, and John still theorized that Mr. Grissom only passed him as an apology for such a misstep - or perhaps to guarantee Johnny wouldn't have to repeat the class so Grissom would never have to face him again.

Little John was mostly over it now. He'd finally found some things he was good at (although he had to wait for puberty to arrive a decade behind schedule for that to happen, with the unfortunate effect of implicitly confirming his fear that his life wouldn't have been worth living if his growth spurt never came), he had lucked into finding at least one person who cared about him like nobody back in Nashville ever did (not quite the love of his life, but still more love than he'd ever felt from anybody else), and he was doing something with his life that, on all but the worst days, he found greatly fulfilling. There were only two things about remembering that story that still bugged him - well, maybe three, if you include the way it tied into the themes that bothered him earlier in the day. But for one thing, he wondered sometimes what would have happened if he hadn't gotten lucky, if he hadn't found a friend or a talent or a calling, but he knew there was no use in pondering what-if's; thinking about whether or not he would have killed himself by now if he hadn't gotten lucky was a waste of time, especially since it wasn't totally off the table that he still might if his future was not as charitable. The other thing he wondered was whether anybody else had ever been inadvertently mindfucked by Mr. Grissom and his misplaced good intentions. Honestly, Little John thought the man had been cowardly, not necessarily for turning the situation over to a professional but for not even attempting to remedy what he had ruined for fear of making the situation worse. A fascinating character Grissom was, brave enough to defend gay rights in the South in Reagan's America in the middle of the AIDS epidemic but not brave enough to rectify his own faux pas. Hell, Little John had to wonder if any of the kids in that class to this day though homosexuality was wrong specifically because they thought that if a socially-inept man like Mr. Grissom defended it, then it must be wrong, since if Grissom wasn't smart enough to know how to talk to people then he surely wasn't smart enough to be right about social issues; Johnny could imagine Mr. Grissom never being able to sleep for the rest of his life if he ever found out that his attempt at being progressive backfired as a direct consequence of his dreadfully uncharismatic personality.

And then Little John remembered the dream he had had in the chair in the emergency room. Splendid. But even still, he glanced over at Robin, the disturbing details of that dream in the front of his mind, and he still wished Robin would wake up so he wouldn't be alone with his thoughts, left to dig up unpleasant memories. Actually, looking at Robin sit there with his eyes closed in a subway car that was rocking and rolling, poorly-wired interior lights sometimes flickering, the immediate space deafening with the sounds of the wheels on the tracks, people talking, doors opening and closing, and the retro text-to-speech program announcing each and every station, Little John wondered how the hell Robin could sleep through all of this.

Robin was not asleep. His body was completely numb and in a state of almost hibernation, and he could hardly hear the voices of the other passengers, but his mind was racing. What was eating him up was much more straightforward and didn't require quite as much exposition as his friend's trauma: he was nervous. Specifically, he was nervous about being nervous. Not to say that he'd never felt even a little bit nervous before, far from it, but rarely did it get so bad that he would think of himself as being "nervous" before using any other adjective, and heaven forbid it get so bad that somebody else would describe him as a nervous person. It simply wasn't his style, but considering the circumstances, it seemed foolish to not be at least a little bit nervous. Part of it was the thought that his fractured arm would be a hindrance, and part of it was the fear that he would permanently fuck up his arm as a consequence of their daily adventures; he was still shaken by the thought that he was getting old fast and that his lifestyle was further aging him prematurely, and he thought about how ten years ago he'd hoped he and Marian would both be successful actors by this age, and his ambitions to be the modern-day Errol Flynn were going to be even more of a challenge now that he was already older than that guy was when he played Adam Bell all those decades ago. Part of it was a worry that more people had lost faith in them than they had originally thought but those people weren't willing to admit it because they still enjoyed Robin giving them gifts like Father Christmas at any time of the year, and part of it was a worry that being seen with a cast on his arm would make the people of this city lose faith faster than they had before; he had seen the look that the old woman next to him and the people across the aisle had given when they noticed the cast, and he knew it couldn't help inspire confidence in them. And part of it was fretting again over what Marian was up to these days, while another part of it was remembering the childhood pal who disassociated with him; it was nothing new that Robin would frequently ponder what would happen if he ever saw Marian again, oh she accepted me back once before when she had every reason not to but does that make it more likely or less likely that she'd do it a second time?, so that wasn't anything precipitated by Johnny pressing him about who his childhood best friend was, but as long as that question got him thinking about people from his youth, what did ever happen to Much Miller, and was it a character flaw of his or Robin's - or both, or neither - that caused the rift between them?

But more than anything, it was a fear of the unknown. Robin had never harbored a fear of the unknown quite like this before. He had always had a healthy respect for the unknown, the kind that some misinterpreted to mean that he dove headlong into uncertain situations without even an ounce of doubt, but while he was still a mortal and still did have his moments of fear and apprehension, he had never felt so troubled thinking about what was waiting for him in the coming days and weeks. And it was the silliest thing, because he knew he'd been through tougher things than what he was going through now. He'd been personally affected by several national disasters, he'd made a grave mistake that cost him his brother, and he'd abandoned his girlfriend before risking his life to reunite with her just to be forced to abandon her all over again. He'd been shot at more times than a mathematician could count, he'd escaped several burning buildings, he'd almost drowned a few times, he'd dangled from ropes and leapt between rooftops, he'd received punches, taken blades, and gotten at least one good kick in the head. On paper, one would think that he'd have outgrown the fundamental concept of fear. Alas, Dear Reader, he was just like you and I deep down, and what was bugging him now was not that his current predicaments were inherently worse than any previous predicament, but that these predicaments kept piling up and overlapping each other. The cops were closer to getting them than they ever had before and they were no longer safe in their own home and their public support was at an all-time low and their friends and enemies were both starting to act unlike themselves and his best friend and right-hand man was starting to lose his own mind and was beginning to doubt that he really regarded him as his best friend and, of course, his arm was broken. What he was afraid of was that he would be crushed not by the weight of one boulder, but by the weight of a million pebbles.

That was all that one could glean about what was eating Robin up as he sat there on the train between the grizzly bear and the German Shepherd, pretending to sleep as his body lay catatonic. Not as much to exposit on as with his friend, but do remember, this was Robin Hood, Nottingham's greatest hero. He didn't like speaking much about his problems; he didn't want to worry people with them.

-IllI-

Robin decided to pretend to wake up when the automated voice announced that they were approaching the 55th and Portsmouth station. A nice centralized spot in the wealthy part of town. The two got off the train and didn't have much to say to each other as they headed toward the exit. They each had very different philosophies when it came to trying to keep their minds from wandering; Robin kept his eyes fixated on the escalator while Little John walked behind him, allowing himself to take in all of his surroundings to distract himself from his intrusive thoughts. It's a good thing he did.

"Rob," Little John beckoned in a low voice as he stopped walking.

Robin seemed not to notice and kept walking.

Oh, of course he's literally leading and literally expecting me to literally follow, John thought to himself, of course he is. "Robin," he repeated aloud, still keeping his voice down but delivering the name much more sternly.

Robin still hadn't registered that Johnny wasn't right behind him.

No, no, c'mon, don't overthink it, don't overthink it... "Rob!" Little John said in a whisper so loud it came out as a regular-volume word. This did succeed in getting Robin to stop and turn around, as well as got the attention of a few other passersby, but thankfully 'Rob' was a common name and the strangers didn't make any connections they didn't like..

"What's up, Johnny?"

"Look." He didn't point or gesture, he just turned his head back to face the paper on the pillar, and Robin followed where he was looking.

WANTED
NOTTINGHAM CITY AND COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE

And below their outdated DMV photographs:

Name: Robert Edward Hood Name: John Edmund Little
DOB: 11-08-73 (Age 31) DOB: 10-18-67 (Age 37)
Species: Fox (Red) Species: Bear (Brown)
Sex: M Ht: 04-10 Wt: 115 Sex: M Ht: 08-01 Wt: 844
Notes: Speaks with British/English Notes: Speaks with Midwestern or
or Transatlantic Accent Southern American Accent
Alias: "ROBIN HOOD" Alias: "LITTLE JOHN"

Both men were reported missing in May 1998. Several reputable witnesses have reported seeing two individuals matching their descriptions over the last seven years around the city of Nottingham and the surrounding suburbs. These individuals are thought to be living in the Sherwood Forest Nature Preserve. Both men are believed to regularly engage in robbery and burglary, often in elaborate disguises. The men are thought to be armed and extremely dangerous, especially to anybody appearing to be wealthy. Both men are thought to be fond of medieval weaponry. Other accomplices may be involved.

Anybody with any information about the two individuals is encouraged to contact the Nottingham City and County Police Department at (673) 401-1999.
IF YOU SEE EITHER OF THESE MEN, CALL 9-1-1 IMMEDIATELY!

A message from the Nottingham City and County Sheriff's Office
Ward C. Woodland, Sheriff of Nottingham
John L. Norman, Mayor of Nottingham

Now, Little John was a slow reader; he could comprehend the words just fine, it just took his brain a while to process them. So when he was finished reading all of that, he just assumed that Robin was already done and was waiting for him to get to the end. John glanced at Robin, who was still staring blankly at the poster.

"Well, uh… at least on the bright side, that's a lotta words, so not a lotta people're gonna read that, eh, right, Rob?"

But Robin was still staring at it. His eyes didn't even seem to be moving to suggest that he was still scanning the page.

John looked around to make sure they were alone and tried again. "Plus, y'know… it's just our faces, and for better or worse, a lot of people look like us. You gotta get really close to see our stats and, like… stuff about our accents and stuff. And who's gonna bother with that?"

Still no response.

Once more: "Heh… someone oughta tell them I've lost something like fifty pounds over the years. But judging by the photos, they got these details from our old driver's licenses… I coulda gone a lifetime without seeing that picture of myself again. I kinda wish Thor knocked that disgusting snaggletooth outta my head when he dropped me…"

Little John followed Robin's eyes to the paper and realized what he was fixated on. The fox was looking into the eyes of his own charmingly smiling visage staring back at him. John looked back at Robin and realized his friend wasn't even blinking.

"Rob, talk to me."

Robin did not.

Little John waved his hand in front of Robin's face. "Robin. C'mon. Stay with me, buddy."

Still nothing.

John gave Robin a few sturdy pats on the back of the shoulders. "Rob, seriously, you're scaring me. You havin' a brain aneurysm or something?"

Finally, he said something: "...He actually did it."

"...Huh?"

"The mad bastard actually did it… never thought I'd see the day…" And Robin was still staring straight ahead at his reflection in ink.

"Y- you mean the mayor and the posters? He's done this before!" Well, kind of. Back during that fourth summer, the summer that started with the duo robbing Prince John's motorcade and ended with them looting his bedroom, there was a tepid attempt by the authorities to stir up public sentiment against the mysterious outlaws of Sherwood Forest Nature Preserve. Since neither the cops nor City Hall wanted to admit to the other that they knew the names of the bandits for fear of making it look like they were willfully withholding information, they distributed wanted posters that only showed an illustration of one individual that was supposed to be Robin (a move that would have driven Little John crazy had they had they pulled it today), but not only was there no name attached, the illustration wasn't that descriptive; it was a very good drawing in its technique - rumor had it that they hired a recently-graduated art student who needed the work - but it was just a generic drawing of a lanky and long-legged red fox wearing a green shirt and blue jeans and holding a bow and arrow with a quiver strapped to his back, no other defining characteristics other than that, an extremely vague image that didn't really look like Robin specifically, and if anything they threw everyone off my absentmindedly coloring in black gloves of fur on his hands and white highlights on the tip of his tail. Despite the promise of a $10,000 reward for his capture, those who were in the know kept their mouth shut, and those who didn't have a clue thought that it was a bizarre marketing campaign for a new Adam Bell movie, since Hollywood was due to remake that story anyway.

But if Robin remembered all these details, he didn't say anything. Little John looked around again to see if they were alone before he started talking some sense into his friend. Wouldn't you know it, they weren't alone; there was a TAN employee a few pillars down, carrying a stack of the posters and taping them to the support beams.

John looked again at Robin, then back at the employee, then back at Robin all in about less than the span of two seconds, wondering if the information he could procure was worth it, but the more he thought about it, the more he thought that if Prince John seemed to finally have them by the balls, then they'd have to start playing balls-to-the-wall - that analogy made no goddamn sense, but neither did the government's sudden uptick in competence.

"Rob, just follow my lead for once," Little John said as he put his arm around Robin's back and shepherded him toward the employee. "This might help us if it goes well."

And without saying a word, Robin acquiesced, not because he thought it was a good idea to approach the TAN employee but because he found himself thinking that there was no such thing as a good idea in the position they were in.

The lion had the stack of posters balanced in the crook of his left arm. The posters were really just the size and shape of regular flyers, printed on regular white office paper, and he was taking Scotch tape to the top edge of the top sheet before picking it up by the tape and sticking it to the support beam, one by one on every pillar straight down the platform.

"Hey, there, stranger!" Little John greeted as he approached, trying slightly to make his accent sound more Nottingham than Nashville but not trying too hard lest it be too obvious a charade. He waved with his left hand and guided the fox with his right; Robin really looked like he had zoned out and wasn't coming back.

The employee glanced at the duo, then, sure enough, it clicked with him, and he looked back at the posters in his arm and back at them a few times, making it bad and obvious that he was spooked. Despite being a blue-collar worker, he didn't seem to recognize the Merry Men.

"Yeah, that's what my friend and I were hoping to ask you about," Little John continued. "We saw two guys who looked like us on a wanted poster and we thought, shit, should we be worried that somebody's going to think that's us?"

The lion looked a little bit nervous, but not disruptively so. If anything, what gave him most pause was how the fox was staring straight at the posters in his arm and refusing eye contact.

"What's with him?" the employee asked.

"Aw, it's been a long night, man. He's… he's still coming down."

"...I see…"

"So, who are these guys on the posters? It says something about medieval weapons? What's that all about?"

The lion snuck a glance at the stack of papers again. "I-I dunno, man, I just put the posters up, they don't tell me anything."

"I gotta say, they cheaped out on the print job but it looks like they still printed a million of 'em," Johnny said as he leaned over and felt the page attached to the adjacent pillar. He rubbed his fingers back and forth on it and the ink smudged a bit.

"Yeah, uh… the cop who dropped them off did tell me that I shouldn't worry about if these get yanked off the walls or whatever, because they're hoping to print better versions when they have more information on these guys."

Little John nodded, intrigued. Glad he asked.

"Hey, man," the employee continued, "I-I'm just gonna be real with you guys, to answer your question, you two look a lot like the guys in this picture. Pictures. Th-there's two pictures. You know what I mean. But, like… shit, how do I know you're not these guys?"

"Because it'd be pretty darn stupid of us to come right up to you and interrogate you in public where there's video cameras everywhere if we were those guys!"

"And that's what I'm telling myself, but… hey, maybe if you were, you two would just be really ballsy."

"I mean, that's a possibility," said John, "but you gotta put yourself in their shoes. Would it be worth the risk?"

But that question didn't sit well with the employee, something about it just didn't sound kosher, so rather than answer the question, he popped one of his own: "What're your names?"

"Tom! Tom O'Malley." Little John said confidently and without a moment's hesitation; even before he found himself rooming with the Irish-American tiger, he had long ago picked Tom as his go-to bullshit name for situations such as this - maybe his own name was more common in the entire history of the anglosphere, but in his lifetime, Tom was perhaps an even more generic name than John. "A pleasure to make your acquaintance."

And Johnny extended his hand for a handshake, but the lion did not reciprocate. "And you?" he asked Robin.

With that, Little John was suddenly worried. He had just sort of assumed that Robin would've snapped out of it by now. He looked at Robin, who was still taking in the picture of his face on the pillar. Edgy jokes aside, Robin honestly did kind of look like someone several hours removed from a cocaine bender.

John nudged him, trying not to seem himself panicked. Shit, he could spoof a name for himself pretty quickly, but now he'd have to pick up Robin's slack and feed him a line. And while he was composed enough to do it, he still did get his wired crossed.

"C'mon, Tom, tell him your name," Little John urged, realizing what he'd just said as the words were slipping out of his mouth.

"You're both named Tom?" the lion asked skeptically.

And Little John was in the process of opening his mouth very slowly to buy himself some time to formulate an answer, but then, a miracle happened.

"That we are," Robin mumbled. "It's a pretty common name, don't you know."

Unfortunately, Robin had made no attempt to hide his accent, so it yielded mixed results.

"I mean, yeah, it is, but…" the employee trailed off as he consulted the fliers again. "You really ain't these guys? Then you should be worried, because… yeah, British accent, you and this guy are basically the same height, and I don't see many foxes as big as you kicking around-"

"But you must remember, England's full of foxes!" Robin interrupted, still not at peak chipperness but certainly doing much better. "Back home, I knew half a dozen foxes my size or taller!"

"Yeah!" John added. "The more foxes a place has, the more big foxes they're gonna have!" He was ninety percent sure that was the point Robin was trying to make.

The employee was giving the two a look a lot like the ones Dr. Fort and Thor had given them in the last few days, pissed that he was being forced to change his mind. "Alright… fair enough… for the record, though, I'm not afraid of you, since there's cameras everywhere and I'm an employee and not just a random civilian-"

"Aw, c'mon, man!" John moaned. "You still don't believe us? H-here-" He leaned over and gently held out Robin's fractured arm. "Would wanted criminals be able to get a cast set? Professionally? In America?"

"Yeah," Robin joined in, "and if we were wanted criminals, would it be a bright idea for us to wander about wearing clothes like we'd just gotten out of a ballgame?" He gestured to his Angels shirt and Johnny's Grizzlies shirt and Titans hat, the sportswear they'd been donning for something like forty-two consecutive hours for want of an opportunity to go back to the van and change into something less conspicuous.

"Alright. Alright," the lion repeated, "I get it. I'm just saying, I don't know much about these guys, but what I do know is that apparently they're master criminals - I mean, for Christ's sake, they've been on the run for like seven years and still haven't been caught, assuming these guys on the posters are actually them and they cops didn't just accidentally accuse some poor dead disappeared guys - so in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, hey, maybe these guys have the balls to just walk up to the guy taping their wanted posters to the wall because they feel invincible.

"I get it, man," said Little John, "no hard feelings. What's your name, bud?"

"Erik."

"With a C or with a K?"

"...with a K," he said after a moment of hesitation, pleasantly surprised that this stranger had taken a moment to make that distinction. "Hey, uh, c-could you hold these for a second?" the employee asked as he gestured his occupied left arm toward Little John.

"Sure thing, bud." He took the stack into his hands.

Erik shook the pins and needles out of his left arm. "Sorry, just… arm's falling asleep here."

"Hey, no judgment."

"But, uh… honestly, yeah, if you aren't these guys-"

"We're not," Robin interrupted, which was odd because he'd regressed right back to being distant.

Erik tried not to overthink that outburst. "Yeah, well, uh… the best thing you two could probably do for yourselves would be to start spreading the word about these guys so they catch the real ones and you two can clear your names sooner."

"Makes sense," John said, and as Erik gestured to take the stack back, Johnny gave it to him. "You know what, though? Could we nab one of these off ya?"

"Uh… sure. Hell, take a few of 'em if you want to give them to your friends. Hey, maybe this is how you guys start a community-watch organization or something."

"Could be, could be…" Little John said kindly as he took a few sheets off the top. "Well, hey, Erik, we appreciate you helping us out."

"Hey, no problem," the lion said as he positioned the papers back in his arm. "Uh… you all have a nice day now. Tom, Tom." He nodded to each of them and took off for the next pillar.

And Little John nodded to himself as he watched the employee walk off; he was thinking about a lot of things at once. "Hm. Nice kid." He looked at Robin, who was right back to staring at the poster. John stuffed the flyers down his shirt and grabbed Robin by the shoulders, turning him around to face him - slowly this time, just in case he made the poor little guy think they were getting into a fight like they did by the creek the other night. "Okay, now I'm confused. Are you having a panic attack or not?"

Robin gave John a look that could be called solemn, but was a type of solemn that knew it was solemn and was trying really, really hard not to appear so dreadfully solemn. "I'm back to being functional again, Johnny, if that's what you're asking. But…" He turned and looked to the side and breathed for a second.

"Rob, look at me."

Robin forced himself to look back at the bear. "...I'm afraid we may have wasted too much time; that's what's on my mind. All these years, we thought we could wear the stupid bastard down… never even crossed our minds that he might finally grow a backbone and learn how to put up a fight."

"Dude, he's tried posters before!"

"Once. And a shoddy job at that. Those didn't count. But it's not just the posters. It's that, and… I'm really thinking the people are losing faith in us. I really do. They think if we were ever going to win this, we would have done it by now. And they may be right. And then there are the ones turning against us because they think we're just making everything worse. Making a bigger mess. Inspiring the powers-that-be to take their frustrations with us out on them. I think of people like Amanda, and her 'people' - whether that's her friends, her neighbors, her congregation, I don't know - but again, they may be right. And I see that poster and I think… I could actually conceive of somebody seeing us and reporting us. Not even necessarily a rich person; maybe even one of the impoverished people we've been trying so hard to help to no avail. And then you throw in this blasted arm, a-a-and… Johnny, they have our names on these. They think we're alive. Surely our families have been contacted."

"...Fuck, I didn't even think about that." Indeed, although he had thought about his family as recently as ten minutes ago, Little John had not thought about actually talking to them for nearly twenty years.

"Johnny, you don't have to worry about me giving up, because after all I've put into this, it would not have been worth the effort for me not to see this through. But… if I'm being honest… this is the first time in all these years that I really don't like our chances."

Little John again remembered the only two times when he had really seen Robin this deeply down: one was when Robin confessed his feelings of inadequacy for Marian, and the other was when Robin felt personally responsible for Will's passing. Both times, Little John had tried to give him a pep talk to get him back into shape; on one occasion, it worked like a charm, and on the other, he couldn't get anywhere with him. For Little John, trying to help Robin was a complete crapshoot. He figured it was time to flip the coin and see how it would go down this time.

He glanced again at the wanted poster on the pillar, and it gave him inspiration. It was gonna hurt like hell if he stayed there too long, but Little John got down on one knee to get closer to eye-level with his short-statured friend.

"Alright, Rob, listen to me… do you remember the graffiti we saw in the warehouse the other day?"

"...I-I do."

"Well, look. Some people… probably some kids with their whole lives ahead of them… they went out of their way… to immortalize you. And me, and Will, and Marian, and our friends. There are people out there who see us… as their heroes. And they made that memorial to honor us."

"That was old graffiti, they may well have changed their minds since then-"

"They may have but I'd bet my bottom dollar they didn't, and I'd bet a lot of other people haven't either! If I bet a buck on every individual person who's ever believed that we were going to be the ones who made their lives worth living again, I could swear on a stack of fuckin' bibles that I think I would make a profit!" Then Johnny pointed to the poster on the pillar. "You know what that is, Rob? That's the mayor and the police honoring you - that's the enemy honoring you, and they don't even know they're doing it! This isn't a reason to feel afraid - this is a reason to feel proud, like your hard work is paying off so much that the enemy needs to step up their game to keep up with you."

Robin didn't look inspired yet, but he didn't look discouraged anymore, either. Though he certainly did look like he was listening intently.

"But you know what?" Little John continued. "You can tell yourself you're doing it for... all those poor people we're trying to help. Or you can tell yourself that you're doing it for me, your best friend. Or for your girlfriend, or for your brother, or for all of us and everyone you've ever loved and everyone you're ever going to love… but above all of them - all of us, I should say - do this for yourself. This is your story, and this is the part where you overcome the greatest adversity you've ever experienced in your life, to be the hero who everyone needs, and most of all the hero you need yourself to be, for yourself, to prove to yourself that you can do it."

Little John was pleased with himself that he had for the most part avoided flubbing his words in that impromptu speech; evidently hanging around an eloquent guy like Robin rubs off on you eventually. The secret to the speech's success, of course, was that Little John was as much trying to convince himself of this as he was Robin; if anything, its meaning was twofold when those words were pointed at himself - he was challenging himself to not only keep fighting for Nottingham, but also to help keep Robin in the fight as well.

He glanced at the poster again and pointed to it. "They're stepping up their game… Are you gonna step up yours?"

Robin looked like he was very grateful to be hearing this.

"Are you listening?" asked Little John.

"I am."

"Do you understand me?"

"I do."

"So what's it gonna be?"

"You two realize I've been standing right here and I heard every single word of that, right?"

Little John almost fell over as he spun around on his knee to see the lion standing about a dozen feet behind him, probably just far enough back that Little John was blocking him from Robin's view as well even as he was hunched over to talk to him.

"...Yeah, you guys aren't no master criminals," Erik said as he power-walked over to an emergency call box two more pillars down. "Tom and Tom my ass."

"W-wait," said Little John, "Erik, buddy, we can talk this out-!" But he was interrupted when he felt a thump on his right foot. He leaned over to see around his gut and realized that Robin had tossed a bag of amnesia pills on his shoe. As he realized that, he faintly felt the breeze of someone rushing past him.

"Hey, what the fuck!"

John looked up and saw Robin picking up the pile of flyers Erik had set on a bench and taking off running toward the dead end of the platform, inspiring Erik to chase after him.

"Welp, here we go again," Little John quipped to himself as he picked up the baggie of pills and went to follow them.

Robin only had his left arm to keep the papers in order, and the stack blew in the air as he rushed along the platform. He debated spilling the papers on the ground behind him to make the lion slip and fall, but no, he had already set up for a different plan.

Where the platform ended, there were small iron gates on either side of the wall toward a small set of steps to let employees walk along the tracks in the tunnels. The gates didn't move, you were just supposed to hold on to them and swing yourself around them, but that was simple enough. Of course, when Robin took off running, he had been under the impression that this station was like the ones downtown where there was a long uninterrupted platform connecting several stations that they simply barricaded off so customers couldn't walk into the in-between areas, but whatever, he would make do.

"Somebody call the police! This is the fox from the wanted posters!" Erik could be heard hollering as Robin shimmied around the gate.

At that point, Robin had to use his good arm to give himself leverage, so he put the papers in the crook of his right arm as he swung himself over the tracks, and when they inevitably blew away, he let them. He saw them fall to the floor as he entered the narrow walkway adjacent to the tracks, and as he slowed slightly to negotiate the set of steps, he saw at least one of the flyers land squarely on the electrified third rail, sizzle, smoke, and spontaneously combust all in the time it took him to walk down four individual stairs.

When he went around the gate and down the steps, he saw Erik was a comfortable distance back from him. After he got about fifty feet into the tunnel, he heard a thump and looked back to see the lion had made up a lot of ground; he would later find out from Little John that Erik had just hopped the stairs altogether. But as he was running, he didn't know that, and he was actually starting to wonder if he'd challenged the wrong guy to a race. Robin was an incredibly fast runner, a long-legged specimen of an already-speedy species, but perhaps he had gotten a little too used to the idea that he could outrun any given person he saw.

The idea was to make it all the way to the emergency exit - he didn't know exactly where it was, but he knew there was at least one between any two underground stations, this wasn't his first rodeo - but since he hadn't found it yet, now he was thinking he ought to just pick one of the divots in the walls for letting maintenance workers duck into when a train passed. He glanced behind him and the lion was getting ever so closer. But the bear was visible in the background. Yeah, time to duck aside.

He tucked himself into the next cubbyhole he came across. As the TAN employee came upon him, Robin pretended to be much more winded than he actually was to make it all more believable. When Erik showed up, Robin saw again what Little John hadn't had the chance to see: the fox's own saliva splattered on the lion's face. Not the classiest trap Robin had ever set, but if it worked, it wouldn't have mattered.

"There you are!" the lion growled. He grabbed the fox by the shoulders and spun him around, shoving his chest against the wall. "You wanna spit in my face again!? Watch what happens!"

The employee grabbed his arms and pinned them behind his back like a cop apprehending a suspect. So far, Robin wasn't surprised by the way Erik was retaliating. Then Erik kicked it up a notch by pressing Robin's head into the wall with his shoulder and grabbing Robin's broken arm and whacking the cast repeatedly into the corner of the wall at the edge of the hole. Robin seethed and did his best not to scream, lest any authoritarian backup really was coming.

"You really thought it was a good idea to mess with me, you little shit!?"

And indeed, despite being a certifiable giant for his species, his species in general was still safely on the small side, and in moments like these, Robin still did feel very, very small.

"I'd better get a nice-ass reward for nabbing you!" The lion jeered as he kept slamming the little fox's broken arm into the concrete.

And speaking of concrete, the way the lion kept rolling his shoulder around into the fox's skull was moving Robin's head around, and now it felt like his left eye was about to burst as it was being pressed into the wall. "Johnny…" Robin murmured to himself, "where are you?"

"Here I am!"

Robin heard those words and instantly all the pressure on his body was relieved and control of his arm was relinquished. He heard a gagging sound and the groans of a bear whose arm was probably taking some teeth. Robin turned to see Little John standing over the lion with his arm halfway down the employee's throat, waiting for the pill to work its magic. The two of them stayed there like that, Erik trying and failing to wiggle free of the bear grasping him with his other arm, until after about twenty seconds the lion's resistance started to weaken.

"Move, move," Little John whispered, and Robin stepped out of the cubbyhole to make space for Johnny to sit the lion down in the nook, making him as horizontal as possible so that it would be extremely unlikely for him to slump onto the railroad tracks - which likely wouldn't be an issue anyway since surely the cameras saw three individuals run down the tunnel, and they likely wouldn't send any trains until they inspected to make sure it was clear.

"Sorry I couldn't get here faster," Little John said, "but I saw that piece of paper burst into flames and… I really didn't wanna risk tripping in the dark and getting electrocuted. I'd've been no good to you then."

"It's alright, Johnny, I understand." Robin looked relieved but also kind of exhilarated.

"What the fuck did he do to your arm? Is it alright?" Johnny asked, not drawing any attention to the fact that his own arm was bleeding from tooth punctures.

"It's aching, but I'll manage," Robin insisted.

"You sure?" But as Little John said that, they both heard the beginnings of a very faint rumbling coming down the tunnel.

"Even if I wasn't alright, I don't think we can stay here for very long."

"Fair enough. Let's boogie."

They walked briskly further down the tunnel until they eventually did find the emergency exit. When they did, they looked down the tunnel and could just then see the lights of the next train a good distance off, not too dramatically close but still close enough for them to feel thankful for finally finding the exit. They climbed the unlit stairwell in pitch black until Robin and John both simultaneously (because of the height difference on the stairs) thunked their heads on the horizontal metal door at the top. They fumbled for the latch, opened the hatch, and walked out onto an empty alleyway under the skies of dawn. They heard sirens in the distance, so they got running any which way their feet would take them, and when they finally found an isolated place to park up, they took a second to change out of their distinct shirts (which they agreed they probably shouldn't wear again for a few weeks, especially since stupid Erik had to run his mouth to everybody on the platform), switch into some costume clothes, and let Robin take a leak again.

"You good to go?" Little John asked, having heard a zipper zip somewhere behind him as he kept watch in the alley.

"I believe I'm ready to roll out!" Robin said as he emerged from the alleyway. Neither of them had heard sirens for a good ten minutes.

"Hey… you sure you're alright after all that?"

"Oh, I've been through worse, Johnny," Robin assured him as he looked at his cast. It had a Y-shaped hairline crack in it, but nothing that seemed like it would immediately compromise its structural integrity. And if it turned out that it was fubar, well, they knew where Dr. Fort lived. "What about you? Seemed like old Leo took a good bite outta you!"

"Eh, that warthog the other day was worse," Little John muttered as he inspected his arm, which had trace streaks of his own blood and the lion's saliva coagulated into his fur but which otherwise seemed to have stopped bleeding. "His teeth didn't seem that sharp. Maybe he ate too much candy as a kid - not that I'm one to shame him for that… Hey, Rob, I'm not tryna cut down your pride or anything, but… goddamn, that guy did a number on you."

Robin leaned himself against the wall of someone's garage so he wouldn't have to crane his neck as much to look at the bear. "Quite the contrary, Johnny… that was actually rather exhilarating. It wasn't our grandest or most exciting adventure ever, true, but… he had us dead to rights, he had evidence literally in his hands that we were the most wanted criminals in this city, and deep down I thought we were screwed, but I had an idea, we took a chance… and it worked. It actually worked. I mean, perhaps I speak too soon, heaven knows there were plenty of other eyewitnesses in the station, but... it certainly seems to me like we actually won this round!"

Robin was smiling again, and seeing that made Little John unable to not crack a smirk himself. "Just like we used to," said the bear.

"And although it hurt like hell what he put me through, if you take the experience as a whole - thinking we were completely boned and still managing our way out of it, the dramatic arc of it all - I kind of want to do it all again! Johnny, I want to win again!"

"Well, uh… y-you won't win unless you try, now will ya?" Johnny didn't know what to say. A bit of a delayed reaction on Robin's part, but it seemed as though Little John's pep talk had almost worked too well. "You know what they say, you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take!"

"Hm, I've never heard that one before. I like that!" Robin declared, pointing up a finger with a flourish. "It's just like you said, Johnny: they stepped up their game; now we need to step up ours."

Yup, it worked, and Little John was pleasantly surprised. "I'm flattered that you think I'm so good with words!"

"I must give praise where praise is deserved, Little John," Robin said, coolly as ever. Some could call it ironic: as Robin had been standing on that platform, staring at his own image, feeling viscerally certain that this was the beginning of his end, too afraid to speak, he wanted to let it all out, to disclose all of his secrets, to tell Little John right then and there everything he had been withholding from his childhood to that cloudy day in June, but he just couldn't, he couldn't get the bat off his shoulder, words simply failed him, he couldn't help but think that he'd only be making a bad moment worse; but now that he was feeling much better and sure of himself again, he had the thought that he ought to just fill in all the blanks right now anyway, as a reward to Johnny for his loyalty and companionship, but again he thought better of it, now because he didn't want to ruin a good moment. "Now, do you still have one of those wanted posters on your person?"

"Uh… I got a couple, actually…" John said as he went reaching down his shirt with one hand and tried to push the papers up from the outside with the other; they had fallen all the way down to his belly, but thankfully he wore his shirt tucked in so they hadn't fallen out. After a moment, he got a hold of one. "Got kinda crumpled in all the chaos, but I got 'em."

Robin took the piece of paper and inspected it. He tsk-tsk-tsked and shook his head jokingly. "If they wanted a good picture of me, they should've just called up Marian and asked her for my old acting headshot!"

"Well hey, man, your picture's still better than mine with that stupid little tooth catching all the light and makin' me look like even more of a gigantic eight-year-old whose big-boy teeth're still comin' in."

"Oh, nonsense, Johnny, you look perfectly fine in this. Besides, it's better to look youthful than to look aged. Why, here I see the face of a man who I'm sure will have his own Marian one day!" Robin said as he looked up from the page and showed the flyer to Little John again. "Though to avoid confusion, I only hope her name isn't Marian, too!"

"Hey, and I'll make a point not to hook up with any girls named Robyn either!" And now Little John was very tempted to ruminate on whether Robin thought he was weird for not having done more - or anything, honestly - to find his own significant other, which, hell, now that he thought about it was probably more damnably weird of him than just being tight with Robin alone, but he was going to force himself not to ruin the moment by overthinking things again. Besides, it wasn't like the thought of attracting a mate even crossed his mind on a daily basis anyway, but he still hadn't made up his mind about which had come first: the lack of interest in thinking about it, or the feeling of being convinced that it would just never happen for him. And then of course this all caused Little John to remember that godforsaken dream again.

But Robin's sudden sunniness scattered John's cloudy thoughts. "You know what, Johnny? I'm starting to think you're right! Whether they meant to or not, this is an honor," he said as he held up the sheet of paper again. "I'd actually like to keep this."

"Hey, fine by me!"

"But wait!" Robin seemed to put on an act of pondering something he was already mostly done pondering. "What if we made a game out of it? They clearly did a shoddy print job so they could afford to print more of them, quantity over quality as it were, so there ought to be plenty of these to go around all over town. Let's challenge our friends and benefactors to start grabbing these posters off the walls and holding onto them as little keepsakes! And if they don't want them, then fine, we'll buy them off of them and give them to someone who does! This way, the people who don't like us won't be able to see our beautiful faces, and the people who do like us will have something to remember us by!"

And Little John was biting his tongue from saying that that honestly came across as a little bit narcissistic, but considering Robin had just recovered from one of his worst self-esteem crises in years, Johnny wasn't going to risk undoing all that progress. Plus he knew that a bunch of people in this town would say in complete sincerity that someone as great as Robin had earned the right to be a narcissist. "We'll have our own memorabilia!" is what Little John settled on saying instead.

"Precisely!" Robin declared as he started walking out of the alleyway. "And our friend Erik said that they were already planning on printing a new design, didn't he? Let's challenge our fans to collect them all!"

Little John followed. "Heh, it'll be just like baseball cards!"

And as they set out on their daily adventures, they did indeed find posters bearing their likenesses all over Nottingham, which they gladly liberated from their walls, and when they delivered their bounty to their recipients, many of those people were more than eager to take a couple and share them with their friends for them all to keep as mementos of their heroes. And it was a good thing too that they had the mind to snatch up as many of these wanted posters as possible, because that first edition of these 'trading cards' uniquely included something that subsequent printings would omit.

*A.N.* So this is gonna be really confusing if anybody discovers this in, like, five years… So, how's the weather in 2025? I hear the global warming's nice this time of year. :P

Y'know, I really did write that author's note at the top before I wrote even a single word of this chapter, and at the time my muse didn't tell me we were going to get into such bizarre territory… again. "Hi prospective Disney execs, here's a completely sincere letter to you before I put your characters through extremely not-G-rated situations!" Actually, a friend of mine insisted in complete sincerity that I "send that to Disney", and while I hope it goes without saying that I'm not so eccentric as to actually do that, I was seriously considering posting it on Reddit, but then I couldn't find a single thread on any subreddit anywhere even talking about the news, and then a few days after that it seemed forgotten about entirely. That said, I still might put it up somewhere if I hear news of it again; such a work of art as that letter doesn't deserve to go unnoticed in a place like this.

But seriously, hearing about that did seriously kill my motivation to write this. It's like, great, even as society is at a standstill, time is still moving forward, and the world is going on without me as I sit here writing this thing that nobody's gonna see. That's why it took me so long to write this one; it really lit a fire under my ass to start spending my time doing things that were actually… consequential, and so I did. And so I will further. I said in past chapters that production might slow, and it never did, but then this happened, and now I mean it. If production doesn't slow down, well, that means I'm not giving the necessary attention to what I need to. As the note at the top hints, I'm in a line of work where I'm not really "supposed" to have free time where I don't do anything constructive.

And I'm not gonna lie, I was debating making this the last chapter. I mean, several of the characters have already gone through significant change - that's how Infinite Jest ends, after eleven hundred pages, the novel just stops with the "plot" unresolved, but you're supposed to realize the story's over because the main two characters' arcs are complete. But these guys' (and gals') arcs are not complete, so it would have been a move devoid of artistic integrity for me to just stop it prematurely. Not to mention I'd be giving up on the opportunity to learn more about myself through these characters - sounds incredibly corny, but it's true.

Therefore, I am not giving up on this. I still love this story and I do believe the best is yet to come; hell, I've got the next few chapters planned in immaculate detail. But if there ever should come a time where this story seems certifiably abandoned, you can point to April 11, 2020, the day I saw one of my dreams come true without me, as being directly responsible for me ultimately deciding that this was not a worthwhile expenditure of my time. I hope that I never come to that conclusion, but if it does, you have my express permission to assume this all as my rationale.

I gotta say, it's conflicting. I alluded at the top that amid all the real people in my life and all the fictional characters I've seen, Robin Hood, especially the Disney version, is the closest thing to a healthy role model I've ever had (and depending on who you are, this can either be read as an indictment of media's taste in designated heroes and how that reflects on real people, or as conclusive proof that I'm a manchild who should not be let outside). So with this in mind, I have to wonder, what would he, or someone like him, do in this situation? I don't think he'd let something like the above discourage him into abandoning a passion project… but I also don't think he'd spend so much of his life on a time-consuming hobby when there's so much work to be done and only one person who can do it.

It's a tough spot to be in. Wish me luck. Peace and love. -Dobanochi