Settle & Sink
Sections 17 through 20
(abandonment)
Robin comes back to
camp after everyone is sleeping and leaves before they wake. Money
still circulates in the hovels and muddy villages; the good folk of
England are not abandoned, because even in his deepest, hardest
moment, Robin is not capable of abandonment. It was the same in Acre,
and it will not change. He will not stop until he is finally dead and
there is nothing he can give except his name. And in time that too
will fade, crumbling into infamy, perhaps, or simply forgotten
completely.
He avoids the still form laid out beside the fire, and
does not sleep. Mistakes are somehow more costly here then they were
in Palestine.
(focus)
When Allan woke, he was
warmer than he'd been in his entire life. The heat had been a
background noise, as much as the trees and the wind, but it had
suddenly snapped into focus, hard, demanding, painful. Frightening.
The fire was unbearably close; there were blankets tucked over him,
and he tried to struggle out of them. His chest was tight and he
couldn't breathe or speak, tongue cotton-dry and throat scraped and
it was all suddenly too much. He fought wildly, mindlessly,
desperately, and panted and pushed at the blankets with ineffectual
hands. It was fire and he was burning- he was burning,
couldn't they see? The sheer heat battered at his mind, and when he
moved the pain did, too, and in that moment, feverish, senseless, and
exhausted, there was nothing Allan wanted more than for it to end.
Everything.
And then Will was there, eyes wide and mouth moving,
and there were hands on his arms and a cup forced into his mouth and
then-
Then there was silence and oblivion.
(sown)
The camp was dark and
quiet, but Will was tense and tired and he could not keep still.
Thoughts were whirling in his mind, too fast to catch and too slow to
ignore. Allan's chest rose and fell unevenly, and behind him, the
fire grew dim. It was bitterly cold, the crisp kind that made your
face tight and your hands so numb that if you were, say, whittling
restlessly, you could cut yourself and not even notice. Will swore
softly when he saw the red dripping onto the dirt, and hastily
cradled his palm to his chest, crossing quickly to the small box with
Djaq's medical supplies. He grabbed a length of fabric, wetting it
and wiping off the blood that was filling his hand. He carefully
cleaned it, examining the shallow line as best he could in the nearly
non-existent light, and decided that it didn't need to be sown. Will
wrapped it tightly with the linen.
When he turned around, the
pallet by the fire was empty, and Allan was gone.
(unforgivable)
He'd made the right choice back in Nottingham, but that bit of self-assurance did nothing to change the fact that he'd made the wrong one before, and that what he'd done was unforgivable. So when Will finally, finally turned away, Allan had silently thrown off the blankets he'd been loosening for the last hour, and padded towards the door. His movements were slower than he'd like, but at least he'd made it out. The cool air felt refreshing against his skin, and so what if he was a little unsteady on his feet? It was better this way, for all of them, and he wasn't going to pretend that anything else mattered to him right now.
A/N: I am The Lev ; yes, I think I'll be extending it. this is actually... fairly close to the end of the story. I don't have it outlined in my head or anything, but I have a vague idea. Thanks for leaving a review!