Warning: Sensitive content. Proceed with caution.
34. "WWRD? (What Would Robin Do?)"
The worst part was that most of the people were cool. And yet they couldn't remember them. They couldn't remember them twenty minutes after encountering them and they certainly couldn't remember them when quizzed about that day fifteen years later. They could vaguely remember that they had positive encounters, plenty of them, but they couldn't remember any names and faces, times and places, and not a single word exchanged with the gifts they were dropping off. And the fact that their memories of these perfectly pleasant people were completely erased by the presence of a few nasty characters destroyed them inside; although plenty of worse things happened during that trip through Hermosa Park - dear God, did worse things happen - acknowledging that their negative memories superseded their positive ones was the biggest bummer in the grand scheme of things, psychologically speaking.
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they could remember some positive people from that day, but only the ones who were present in unpleasant situations; similarly, some of the people their brains had negative associations with had done nothing wrong and may have actually shown evidence of being great people if they thought more about them and the situation they were in, but those people were likewise tied to moments which they would rather forget. And then there was the worry that they were losing their charming touch and the people who they found less than agreeable were simply having a justifiable reaction to the Merry Men being uncharacteristically disagreeable. Altogether, the truth likely lay in it being some mixture of all these hypotheses, but that didn't make the day any easier.
As they roamed through the blighted neighborhood that they had historically neglected just as much as the city council did, they encountered some residents who knew them and loved them, and some who didn't know them but loved them after meeting them; they encountered some who knew them and were indifferent toward them, and some who didn't know them but were indifferent toward them after meeting them; and they encountered some who knew them and detested them, and some who didn't know them and told them to get fucked after meeting them. Far from a chorus of vitriol, but whereas barnstorming with donations throughout Georgetown or Harbeson or even Hardscrabble or Mission Hill would invariably give them a very high success rate of grateful recipients, Hermosa Park was much more hit-or-miss; if the entire motivation for these acts of charity was to get the feeling that they had done well to uplift people out of poverty and misery, then Hermosa Park simply didn't provide as much return on investment as other neighborhoods did.
They had also decided not to bother bringing their weaponry with them. Some might call that an unwise decision, but they just had too many reasons not to. For one thing, this was the highest-crime area in Nottingham, and cops often patrolled the streets for the sake of it; Robin and Johnny were already taking a gamble by walking around in their standard attire, just so that anybody here who had never seen them in the flesh before would form a mental image of Robin in his kelly-green chest-unbuttoned polo and Johnny in his forest-green graphics-scratched-off Philadelphia Eagles t-shirt, so they didn't need to stick out even more to the passing cops with a bow, an quiver full of arrows, and a big motherfucking stick. There was also the issue that they didn't want to look threatening to the locals; the traditional wisdom was that in all but the most dangerous neighborhoods in America, one could usually avoid trouble as long as they didn't go looking for it, but strutting around with things that could conceivably kill people might embolden some local gangbangers to take you up on your implicit offer to engage in some recreational violence. Not to mention, if you already live in a sketchy neighborhood and answer the door to a pair of strangers carrying medieval weaponry, would you feel comfortable talking to them?
"I know I sure wouldn't," Little John muttered.
"You really wouldn't answer the door for a stranger if you lived in a neighborhood like this?" Robin asked, rephrasing his previous draft of his question. He was wondering why 2S wasn't answering when there was clearly someone home; vertical blinds were swaying every so often behind the glass balcony door and they could hear the doorbell ringing through the open window when they pressed the button at the front door. "I don't even mean buzzing complete strangers in, I meant simply talking over the intercom."
"Nope," Johnny reiterated. "Rob, I ain't tryna call ya stupid, but comments like that make me wonder if you actually even know what it's like to be this kind of poor. Hell, I've never even had to live in a place this bad, and even I wouldn't have opened the door for just anybody."
"Well, Johnny, I posit this," Robin said, beaming, "society will only grow great when we seek to help people whose challenges we can't at all relate to."
Robin looked up at the four-flat apartment building they were trying to gain access to; these men were still master criminals, and they could probably find a way in if they needed to, but when you're trying to make a good first impression to an entire neighborhood, breaking into their apartment buildings doesn't seem like quite a wise decision, socially speaking.
"They really think if they open the door for strangers, they might just barge in, take them out, and steal their stuff?" Robin pondered. "Why on earth would they be afraid of such a thing?"
Johnny couldn't help but let out a nasal chuckle. "Well… in their defense… we've done that," he said, leaning sideways over his little friend for emphasis.
Robin nose-chuckled himself, just a tinge embarrassed. "Okay, true enough, but we did that to rich people in rich neighborhoods. Who would steal from the poor? They have nothing to steal."
"Well somebody oughta tell Prince John that the next time he raises taxes on these people!"
They both laughed, more vocally this time, then trailed off and went back to staring up at the building before them. They were at a building on the 800 block of North Guam Avenue on the very western edge of town, a place due south of Sherwood Forest's southern extremities where they ran out of states to use for street names and started using territories, just a few blocks away from City Limits Road and the suburb of Apple River; after the release and cultural dissemination of a film about a Detroit rapper, many had begun to dub City Limits Road as Nottingham's 8 Mile, a line which represented a hard frontier between the peaceful suburbs and the blighted inner city, a border where one could exponentially increase their risk of danger by literally just crossing the street.
"Next doorbell?" asked John.
"Next doorbell," said Robin.
Little John rang 3N. They had been working their way bottom-to-top on the row of doorbells at the front door of the building. Garden-North had come to her halfway-underground window and shooed them away with a rude hand gesture and a dirty look; 1S said hello on her intercom but stopped responding after the Merry Men introduced themselves; GS, 1N, 2N had all shown no signs of life and now 2S seemed to be ignoring them. That just left the top floor.
"But seriously, Rob," said Little John, keeping his eyes on 3N's balcony instead of looking at his friend, "let's pretend you're a poor person who lives in this area and you need to break into someone's house, steal their TV, pawn it off and use the money to buy SpaghettiOs to feed your family. Are you gonna steal from here where the TVs won't be worth that much but you know there's no sophisticated security systems and the cops don't give a shit about the locals, or are ya gonna travel clear across town on public transit because you don't have a car just to try to steal a TV that's probably too big for you to even carry to the closest pawn shop from someone whose house probably has cameras trained on you from a block away and where the cops are a lot more likely to care that you're trying to victimize the residents?"
Robin thought about that one for a second. "Well in such a specific scenario, Johnny, I can absolutely see why someone would take the easier option."
Jesus, Rob, can't you just say I'm right? As much as Little John found it annoying and a little bit worrying that Robin genuinely didn't understand some key details about living in poverty, in a weird way it kind of made Little John feel good to know he was the more knowledgeable one on some topic between them, and not just his side of some transatlantic cultural differences. Now if only he could get the fox to notice.
The two of them craned their necks as they heard a sliding glass door open in the sky. A middle-aged stag walked out onto the balcony, wearing nothing but mesh shorts.
"Yeah?" he asked.
"Good day, my friend!" greeted Robin. "I don't recall if we've met yet, but my name is Robin Hood and this is my friend Little John; perhaps you've heard of us! We're here to help-"
"Nope," the buck said stoically, putting his hands out in front of him and sliding them past each other to signal that he wouldn't be hearing another word from them. "This is a private building and we don't allow solicitors."
"B-but sir-" Excessively tough customers who inexplicably and adamantly refused Robin's kindness were one of the few things that could make Robin's famous charm and charisma evaporate instantaneously, but as he stumbled on his words for what seemed like the fiftieth time that day, Little John got right to the point:
"Buddy, we're not fucking solicitors! We're here to give you shit, not sell you shit!"
The deer's unimpressed tone and expression hadn't changed at all the entire time since he'd stepped outside, and it still wasn't changing as he turned to head back inside, gesturing vaguely toward the distance. "You see those cops driving up and down the street? They don't allow solicitors at these buildings. They'll be lookin' for ya." He slid the door shut behind himself and that was that.
Robin looked down the street in both directions just to make sure that "those cops" was just referring to them in the abstract and that there weren't actually any police immediately present. Johnny, however, saw no need to avert his glaring gaze from 3N's door.
"You're seriously gonna be calling the fucking cops on us?" Little John fumed, trying his best to keep his voice somewhat low. "You really think-!?"
"Shhh! Johnny!" said Robin in a harsh whisper. "He's gone, he can't hear you. Let's just-"
"Well I guess we gotta get outta here now since Dingleberry in 3N wants to call the boys on us!"
"Johnny, calm yourself, I'll be damned if he's not bluffing," Robin insisted, wrapping his good arm around Little John's big forearm and patting Johnny's upper arm with his busted paw to try to mellow the bear out. "He was an arsehole, but he was an arsehole who was just trying to scare us. Let's be fair to 3S and give them a ring before we-"
"Aw, 3S isn't home!" Little John growled, breaking his arm out of the fox's grasp. "If they were home, they'd've heard all this commotion by now! It's three o'clock on a Friday, Rob. These people are poor, but they still have jobs. C'mon, let's go!"
Little John started walking away and Robin, not seeing any other options, acquiesced and followed. Johnny was still grumbling as the two of them walked down the path back to the street.
"'Nyeh, this is a private apartment building-!' Motherfucker, every apartment building in the world is a private apartment building! Show me a public-!"
The Merry Men stopped in their tracks as they heard the distinct sounds of a sliding glass door opening behind them. What followed was a voice that certainly did not belong to an adult buck.
"Bitch-ass tigga!"
The two of them turned around as quickly as they could just in time to see what looked like an elementary-school-aged capybara chuckling to himself as he closed the door on 2S's balcony, the blinds swinging behind him as he disappeared back into the apartment.
Thoroughly confused, Robin's gift of gab continued to fail him. "Did- did that little lad just call us…?"
"Get me out of this fuckin' neighborhood…" Little John muttered as he walked off again.
The next building they tried was across the street. This was a low, long and narrow apartment building, something one might call a tenement, one that had long hallways running down its length rather than the previous one where presumably the only common area was a central stairwell. This one likewise started without much drama. They rang top-to-bottom this time; 2A and 2B weren't home, but 2C buzzed them in without even talking over the speaker and was pleasantly surprised to see two strangers she recognized at her door - heck, this older woman even gave them some fun-sized packs of Skittles and M&Ms as a token of gratitude (although the quality and packaging of the candy suggested that these was old Halloween goodies she just needed to get rid of). Since they were already inside the building, they just continued down the second floor hallway; the next three didn't answer, but 2G and 2H were home, and though neither knew who they were and didn't seem too impressed to have met them (though to be fair, the woman 2H didn't seem to speak English very well), they both accepted the duo's gifts without any hostility. The southern wing of the first floor had two empty units, but the gentleman in 1B made a tired old joke the duo had been sick of for years (to paraphrase: "Oh, you stole from the rich to give to the poor? Thanks, now I'm rich!", this particular man including the optional ending line of "Wait, are you going to rob me now?") and a cranky old lady in 1C proved to be the complete antithesis of her upstairs neighbor, telling them off through her closed door that they should have rang the outside doorbell and that she didn't trust strangers in her hallway, and although Little John was steaming again at this lady's hostility toward their good intentions, she was a piece of cake compared to the lady in 1E.
Although this building's apartments had old-fashioned doorbell chimes built into the interior doors, the Merry Men always knocked the first time they tried a new unit; it just seemed more personable to them. They both thought they could faintly hear sounds coming from inside, but in a world where people left their TVs and radios on to deter thieves (ironically enough), that didn't necessarily mean anybody was actually home.
"How ya holding up, Johnny?" Robin asked as they gave this hypothetical resident time to answer the door. "I know these people are driving you mad, but… I trust you're handling it better than you would have in the past."
"Eh…" Little John mumbled. "I dunno, Rob, I keep flipping between feeling pissed and feeling… bored. Or- shit, not even bored, just… restless. Like, I could seriously go for some- action right about now." (He was being careful not to say the word that started with R and rhymed with "sobbing" as a stranger in this building.) "Because I've got a lot of frustration building up from these ingrates, and the last few days've been slow; I could seriously stand to get some of this energy out of my system."
"And I get that, I could surely go for some action myself, but I don't think Dr. Geoff would like that," Robin said, holding up his casted arm. "And you know what? That little fox lad was right, we can't let a few rude people scare us away from helping the part of the city that needs us most."
"Yeah, well… can't help but feel like at a certain point we're overstepping our boundaries," Little John mumbled as he got tired of waiting and rang the doorbell under the peephole.
"You really think we're-?"
They both got quiet quickly when they clearly heard footsteps coming from inside 1E, footsteps that sounded thoroughly annoyed but not necessarily angry. The door opened slightly, and a younger cheetah woman opened the door slightly; Robin and John could barely see half her face, and the lack of light coming from her dark apartment wasn't helping, but she certainly looked even more annoyed than her footsteps sounded.
"Can I help you?" It was not an invitation to ask for help.
Robin put on one of his famous disarming smiles and told himself that this woman's icy demeanor was not an obstacle to be avoided but rather a challenge to be overcome, and a challenge he would only overcome if he believed he could.
"Good afternoon, neighbor! My name's Robin and this is my friend Little John - perhaps you've heard of us around! We're here to help people like you who the city seems to have forgotten about, so…" Robin trailed off as he slipped his half-unzipped backpack off his shoulder and produced a Ziploc bag full stuffed full of twenties. "...if we can offer you something to lessen the burden-"
"Dude, this is my only day off!" the woman interrupted. "And I'm tryna enjoy it because I work hard for my mothafuckin' money and I don't want your goddamn charity! And we have a rule against solicitors, so get the FUCK outta my building before I call the cops on you two right now! RIGHT NOW!"
She was outright screaming at the end there, but what was especially worrying was the look on her face. She was audibly seething through her clenched teeth and her eyes genuinely looked like she was about to pounce on Robin and tear him limb from limb. Either this poor woman was severely mentally ill as a consequence of the powers-that-be consistently refusing to provide people like her with mental health resources, or this woman was on something. Possibly both.
And as for Robin? He was starting to feel what Johnny had felt several dozen times that day. His heart was racing with adrenaline, probably similarly-sized quantities of fear and anger. He knew perfectly well that this woman had likely been through tougher times than he ever had and that there was a very real chance that her behavior was not even of her own volition but perhaps a direct consequence of a condition exacerbated by the system perpetually failing her… but goddamn, Robin did not care to be spoken to that way. He was of course far too much of a gentleman to ever seriously consider raising a hand to a lady, but he was still a mortal and still a flawed fox, and such thoughts did sometimes cross his mind, and as ashamed as he still is to admit it, this moment remains a contender for the time he was closest to actually, actively wanting to. If you asked him in that moment, he would have told you that he'd been face-to-face with both Prince John and Chief Woodland and still felt less in the presence of evil with them as he did in that apartment hallway.
Little John was feeling much the same way. Although she had only given him a fraction-of-a-second side-eye glance when she first opened the door and otherwise had her eyes set on the fox, Johnny didn't like being spoken to that way by proxy and was again having trouble letting it slide off his shoulders. During those eternal two or three seconds where the three were all just glaring at one another, Little John was telling himself over and over again in instantaneous micro-thoughts that there were probably very real socioeconomic reasons for why this woman was flipping out on them like this, and that the person he wanted to be would handle this with poise and class instead of throwing her energy back at her.
"Jesus, lady, do you really think the cops are gonna give a shit about a poor cheetah lady like you!?" exploded Little John, completely failing to be the person he wanted to be.
The woman's face scrunched up in fury. "I'm callin' the fuckin' police," she said as she slammed the door on them as loudly as possible.
Little John kept staring at the door, taking deep breaths and trying to come down. Meanwhile, although still himself shocked at Johnny's outburst, Robin was withholding comment. At least such a moment distracted him from his own boiling rage.
"Hey!"
The two looked down the hallway and saw an elderly sheep poking her head out of 1C's door.
"I told you to get out of my hallway! I'm calling the police!"
The sheep then slammed her own door shut, and through the echoey hallway the duo could still hear her deadbolt turning from several dozen feet away.
Having now mostly simmered down and the intrusive thoughts of deplorable acts mostly gone from his head, Robin's fight-or-flight response was telling him that flight was probably the wiser option. "C'mon, Johnny, we know where we're not wanted."
Little John was still grumbling to himself as he followed Robin back toward the vestibule. "Heh… pretty fitting that she's a cheetah and she looks like she was fucked out of her mind on speed… Wait, is speed crack or meth? Fuck, I thought it was crack, but now I'm thinking it's meth…"
This apartment building was still another building constructed with medium-sized mammals in mind; the door from the lobby which required a key or a resident's buzz to get past had a window, but its bottom was above our fox friend's head and its top was below our bear friend's chin. This, Dear Reader, is a plot point.
"Oh, I'm the wrong person to ask, Johnny," said Robin as he turned the corner toward the entrance, playing along with the conversation to keep his mind off the excessive negativity they'd encountered in the last thirty minutes. "I honestly thought 'speed' referred to just plain cocaine."
As they walked into the foyer through the buzzer door with the window through which neither had been able to see, Robin was ahead with his head turned up and behind him to face Little John, who was facing straight down as he hunched over to allow his head and shoulders to get through the doorway.
"Well," said Little John, "crack is a type of cocaine-"
And at roughly the same time, the two of them both noticed a figure in their periphery, standing in the lobby with them. They both turned their heads to see a spooked-looking serval in an officer's uniform standing in front of the exit, and their own spooked minds registered what they were looking at just in time to hear the door click and lock behind them.
"...Howdy, gentlemen," said the serval with a raised eyebrow.
"Uh, h-hey, how's it goin', Officer?" Robin asked in his best American accent. Even he couldn't pretend to be confident when he was wearing his regular clothes without any weapons in a space that contained an armed police officer but did not contain a clear exit.
"Yeah, uh… how's the patrol?" asked Little John, wondering if it would have been justified to bodyslam this little cat to get past him. "B-uh-by the way, um, hey, we get it, it sounds sketchy that we'd be talking about hard drugs, but, uh… we were just, uh, just on the bus and overheard other people talking about them, so-"
"Yeah, I… wasn't gonna ask about that," said the officer, still looking suspicious, but oddly not looking confused. "So for the record, I'm here on a call that someone saw some solicitors going into this building-"
"Oh! Jesus, uh… Mike!" Little John said with an elbow nudge to Robin as he started patting himself down. "I-I-I think I left my wallet on Missus… Missus, uh-"
"Mrs. Doyle's table!" Robin said as he made a bad and obvious glance at the list of surnames on the directory. He pressed 2C three times. "Yeah, I remember now, she paid us for cleaning her, uh, her apartment, and you took out your wallet and you-!"
"Boys," interrupted the officer, making a cut-off motion with his hands similar to the one the deer across the street had made. "Drop the act. I know who you are."
The boys' eyes popped wide open upon hearing that, so shocked that they couldn't physically display it when they were further shocked by the doorknob buzzing away. Their eyes darted to the door and they both frantically put their paws on the knob.
"Don't open that door if you wanna live," said the serval, calmly but sternly.
The two turned back to him to see that he did indeed have a hand on his holster now.
"...Don't make me regret trying to help you."
They both slowly lifted their hands from the knob, and it stopped buzzing.
"...Help us?" asked Robin.
"Trying to help you," said the cat, letting his hand slip down his side and dangle, not touching the gun but not too far from it either. "And by the way, Hood, ya forgot to put on an accent when you said 'Mrs. Doyle's table'."
"Oh, well, heh heh… th-thanks for the constructive criticism!"
The serval simply nodded, keeping a serious expression, neither too hostile nor too friendly.
"Why do you wanna help us?" asked Little John.
"How do you wanna help us?" asked Robin.
"Because - on a conceptual level - I like the idea of you guys," said the officer, "and I'm willing to give you two a new lease on life, but your end of the deal is to not be so stupid and put yourself in situations like this where we'd look stupid for not catching you when you're already trapped."
"I see…" Robin murmured.
The officer nodded again. "Hey, I grew up around here, I know how tough this part of town can be, but… yeah, you guys are actually kinda doing what I was hoping to be doing when I took this job - not the robbery part, which I would still rather you not be doing, but I get it, a complicated problem in a complicated world demands complicated solutions… but the helping-my-community part. But then I got disillusioned but now I have bills to pay and a family to feed and… fuck, nothing's more reliable than a government-job paycheck."
"Well, hey, man, uh… we appreciate it," said Little John, hoping he wasn't pushing his luck, "but… y'know, you can still help your community… while being a cop. I-I-I mean, not-not to be condescending or nothin', just-"
"Well, yeah, I know that, I mean…" the serval trailed off as he chose his words. "I mean, that's why I wanna let you guys go, 'cause you help this community in ways I can't. I can't just hand them money to pay their bills. And…" He looked at the wall to his right, then pointed at it as he turned back to the Men. "And like the lady in 1E right here? Everyone knows she's a crackhead. That's a controlled substance, I could throw her in jail for that. But I'm not gonna, because that wouldn't fix her problem, it'd just make-"
Blip! "Hey, Mitch, you in the area yet? We got two more reports about solicitors in apartment buildings on, uh… 800 block of North Guam. Getting calls from from the apartment across the street that the first guy said they went into." Blip!
The officer grabbed his radio. "Yeah, Jerry, I'm here, I'll get back to you in a sec, I'm just talking to some residents right now."
Blip! "Copy that." Blip!
He put his radio away and then looked at the north wall full of mailboxes before looking at Robin and John again. "Was it her? Was it 1E who called us on you? One of the two, at least?"
"Uh… we… probably shouldn't say," said Little John. "...But yeah, it was her."
"Was it the deer bloke in 3N across the street who called you on us?" asked Robin.
"Well… probably shouldn't say," said the officer, "but yeah, it was him. But you know what? Even if you were solicitors, selling window treatments or something, I wouldn't fucking arrest you for it. Maybe tell you to get the hell outta here, but I wouldn't cuff ya for it. Because what would that accomplish?"
"Well, it certainly warms our hearts to see that you're doing what you can to be good in a job where it's all too easy to abuse your power," said Robin, relaxing a little bit.
"Yeah, an old friend of ours would never've believed cops like you exist," added Johnny.
"Well, hey, while I can't say I know any other cops who go around saying 'Yeah, that big-ass British fox and the redneck grizzly bear he hangs out with, I like them, I support them, I hope they win'- while I don't know any cops who'd be open about it, there's gotta be a bunch of us. In secret. Because this force has plenty of people who grew up on the West Side and joined because there were basically no other job opportunities for them, I can't be the only one who sympathizes, I can't be. I mean…" he said as he gestured toward the general area of the Merry Men, "...this can't be the first time this has happened, can it?"
"Actually, you are the first officer who's gone out of their way to express their support for us!" said Robin, now almost completely at ease.
The serval, however, winced again. "Really? B-b- hm… Maybe I'm just the first one stupid enough to tell you. But what I meant…" he said, leaning in for emphasis, "...is this can't be the first time you've been cornered by a cop and… somehow got away. Like… if you guys had got through that door when it buzzed… and then I somehow lost sight of you and you got away… like if you slipped out the back and it was obvious but I just checked the hallways, almost as though I let you escape… would something like that have ever happened to you? It must have, right?"
Robin and Little John found that puzzling.
"Uh… maybe?" said Johnny. "Never really… thought they'd be letting us get away-"
"Well the fact of the matter is you guys've escaped for seven entire years while being right under our noses. This force's leadership might be a bunch of idiots and so are half the dipshits on the beat, but plenty of us aren't. If enough of us actually wanted to catch you, you'd better believe we woulda done it by now. I mean… don't you think?"
Robin and John looked at each other for a moment, trying to gauge the other's expression to see if such a thought had ever crossed the other's mind. It seemed to both of them that it hadn't.
"Well… in any case," said Robin, "it's good to know some of you guys are on our side."
"Question, though," said Johnny. "Why don't the smart cops just… force the idiots out of power? Hell, maybe then you could pardon us and help us force the city council out of power! Book 'em for abuse of power and corruption and stuff."
"Oh, I'd like that, believe me, I would," said the officer, "but with the amount of ass you'd have to kiss and the number of strings tying our power directly to corrupt politicians… it wouldn't be worth the effort. So me and the others who try to be good cops do it on the ground instead of from up on high. And… y'know, cops like me feel especially compelled to be good and help our communities because, you know…" the serval said as he gestured to his body up and down his length, "...people like mine tend to get a raw deal in society and becoming a cop can come across like complacency with an unfair status quo that negatively impacts my own people."
"Oh, you need say no more, Officer!" said Robin. "We're predators ourselves, aren't we? We know how it can be out there in this cruel world!"
Once again, the serval winced, but this time, the bear winced too, as neither of them were expecting that response.
"Yeah, well… that's definitely part of it," said the officer, seemingly embarrassed for someone other than himself. "But… hey. I gotta play along with my assignment to catch a bear and a fox going door-to-door on private property. You guys get outta here," he said as he grabbed the door to the main entrance and held it open for them - only to close it again as soon as the Merry Men took a step forward.
"Seriously, though," he continued, "don't ever tell anybody that NPD Officer Mitch Johnson supports you and actually let you guys go. Because if word ever gets around and I suffer for it… don't ever let me fucking find you again."
Robin and Little John felt a slight wave of shock again as he said this, but upon thinking about it for a moment, they mentally agreed that this was a reasonable arrangement.
"You got it, boss," said Little John as he made his way again toward the door.
"And we appreciate everything you've done for us and for your community, Officer," added Robin as he walked past the serval.
"Hey, don't mention it," said the officer, sounding like he was swallowing a tough pill. "B-but hey, for real, get out of the immediate area, for your own good. At least for now. And if someone threatens to call the cops on you again, don't just assume they're bluffing!" He closed the glass door behind them and radioed to ask which residents he needed to consult with.
-IllI-
"So… you think we really only made it this long because some cops've been cutting us some slack?"
The Merry Men had heeded the officer's warning and were heading due northeast. Left at one corner, then right at the next, left, right, left, right.
"That was a curious thing he said," answered Robin, "but I've other things occupying my mind."
"Like what?"
"Well I've already told you that the fox lad was right about us being cowardly about coming here… but the wolf boy also posed a good point."
"These kids have names, Rob."
"No, Johnny," Robin said with a chuckle, "they have one name between them! This way is less confusing! But as for the lad with a sock on his head… how would we handle such a tough moral dilemma where… let's say… we'd almost be justified to really, really hurt someone?"
"I kinda answered him when I told him that I coulda killed that dude with the chainsaw and made a point not to."
"And that was a great answer, Johnny! Really coming in clutch there! But I meant more situations that… don't directly impact us. Like bearing witness to an injustice-"
"So you took us to a part of town where there's a fairly decent chance that we'll witness a drive-by or something just so we can gauge our own reactions and prove to that kid we handled it well by using anecdotal evidence."
"Oh, come now! We're not here to prove it to anybody but ourselves!" Robin beamed.
Little John gave that some concentrated thought before replying. "...Well, what about the way that we witnessed class conflict that didn't really directly involve us, and so we decided to do what we could to fix it? We went above and beyond, but not so far beyond that we went out and found some people to help us wipe out this city's government and throw this town into sheer fuckin' chaos, which you know we coulda done. Didn't kill nobody, even though we could have and some people'd probably say we should have. Does that count?"
Robin was intrigued by his friend's argument. "Hm… you might be right, Johnny!"
"Cool. Can we go now?"
"Ah, not just yet! While we're here, we might as well do our thing. These people deserve our gifts too, and we won't be cowards just because some of the more jaded locals don't want us here!"
They turned the corner onto Puerto Rico Avenue, named for the presumptive fifty-first state if such a title should ever come to be granted, which following the "5x+1" model was a major north-south thoroughfare, the westernmost one entirely within the city limits. Some denizens were scattered up and down the street, walking along or lingering in front of storefronts.
"And speaking of cowardice," Robin continued, "I honestly found the Officer's story of trying to help his community incognito as a cop rather inspiring! Could he be doing more? Sure, but he's trying. And it's enough to make me wonder… would these people be more willing to help their community than we think? If we want more members, maybe we've just been too cowardly to ask! 'Scuse me while I do something silly, Johnny." And with that, Robin started power-walking away from Little John.
"Uh… Rob?"
Robin's first target was a wildebeest who was walking out of a liquor store.
"Excuse me, my friend! I'm Robin and my friend back there is Johnny, and we're out to liberate the poor of Nottingham, just like the ones who live in this neighborhood! Would you like to join us in our adventures and fight back against the oppression by the rich?"
The wildebeest scoffed. "Man, is that all we are to you? Poor people?" He began walking away. "We'll fight our own battle, we don't need some fancy-ass British guy to swoop in and save us."
"Ah, but that's why we don't want to fight for you, we want to fight alongside you!"
"You see me walking away, don't you?" said the stranger, who gave Little John an equally dirty look as he passed him.
Refusing to be deterred, Robin next walked up to a moose waiting at a bus stop.
"Good afternoon, ma'am! My name's Robin Hood and my friend lagging behind me is Little John, and we're the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest. I have a simple question for you: would you-?"
"I know who you are. Are you gonna ask me the same question I just overheard you loudly asking that other guy?"
"...Why, yes, ma'am, would you like to join us?"
"Oh, like any working adult's got time for that?"
"Well, if not you, maybe someone you know? We accept referrals!"
The woman held up a plastic grocery bag in her hand. "I'm working hard to feed my family, it'd be pretty stupid for me to erase all that hard work by letting them go run off and live in the woods, don't you think? Might as well be asking me if I wanna let my kids join a gang - which, isn't that basically what you're doing?"
"Oh, but we're not a simple street gang seeking power for the sake of it! We're fighting for-"
"What, and you think gangs don't think of themselves as fighting a system that's trying to keep them down? Do you even know how gangs work? Do you even know anything about lives like we live?"
"I'm always eager to learn!"
She turned back to face the street.
Robin slipped the backpack off his shoulders. "But may I at least offer you a little something for your troubles?"
He looked up to see the moose leaning over him.
"Sir, I don't want to talk to you anymore, and if I weren't waiting for a bus, I'd walk away right now. Y'know, I've heard about you, I've heard people say that you're one suave sucker, a real charming man, I think one of my teenage daughter's friends has a crush on you and I think one of my friends from Georgetown does too... so it surprises me to finally meet you and you don't seem to realize that it's very impolite for a man to keep talking to a woman who wants him to go away."
Robin certainly didn't look or sound like a charming man when he realized that she had made a very good point.
"I-er… apologies, ma'am," Robin said as he slid his backpack back on. "B-but, er… you-you enjoy the rest of your day now, would you please?"
She was facing back toward the street again, but glaring at him from the side of her eye.
"...Right," Robin mumbled, but then saw his next subject and scampered off.
And just as he scampered off, Little John finally caught up to the woman at the bus stop. "Uh… s-sorry about my friend, ma'am. He's not himself today. I'll reel him in."
The moose conceded a slow nod to the bear, but still looked frustrated.
Robin ran up to another red fox, a much more normally-sized one who hardly made it up to the Englishman's chest. This gentleman was smoking a cigarette outside a hole-in-the-wall restaurant advertising sushi and ramen with very grainy-looking photos in the windows.
"Hello there, neighbor!" greeted Robin. "It's a pleasure to meet you! I'm Robin-"
"クマはあなたが彼の友人を殺したことを知っていますか?"
Robin's mind ground to a complete halt as he stared down at his fellow vulpine, the japanophone dangling his cigarette out the side of his snout and not looking very interested in a conversation in any language.
"...Well, I can't say I speak your tongue, but in any case, my fellow immigrant, welcome to America!" Exasperated, Robin turned around and immediately took a deep breath as he faced the sky - then started coughing profusely as he inhaled the ambient cigarette smoke.
"Well, I'm glad I didn't bother hurrying up for that," said Little John as he caught up with Robin, gently patting him on the back. "You alright, bud?"
Robin looked around the streetscape and saw a few people staring at the two of them, but most were just ignoring them. He also saw that there was a sizable break in the traffic.
"Shall we cross here, Johnny?"
"Uh… sure," he said, and they crossed Puerto Rico Avenue and walked in the privacy of the side street.
"Johnny… please be honest with me… am I losing my touch?"
The bear's face scrunched in confusion. "Your… your touch? What?"
"Hrm… how should I put this?" the fox pondered. "So… as the woman said, I've gained a reputation for being… a cool character. How did she put it? 'A suave sucker, a charming man'? Now, please understand, I didn't go into this journey with some self-image that I was Errol Flynn or James Dean or Sean Connery, but… hey, I suppose I played that role well and all these people started seeing me that way, and when I realized early on that that could help me, I leaned into it."
Little John was trying his best to be supportive and not be self-conscious about the direction this conversation was heading.
"And don't get me wrong, Johnny, I very much feel like a twat for… being an adult who's so hung up on whether I still seem cool, and I am very conscious of all you've been through and how you'd kill to be spoken of the way they speak of me, but… yeah! I really believe that we wouldn't have had the support we've had if not for - one reason or another - people finding me a magnetic personality. B-because it's important for us to be role models who people want to be like, and if I were just doing this as a boring average Joe, they might appreciate us, but they wouldn't be inspired to be like us… A-a-and let me clarify, for your sanity, that I don't claim this is entirely some natural talent of mine. This is likely a result of those damned classes my biological father made me take, and people thinking I was an adult and talking to me like one since I was in diapers, and how I spent my whole childhood zigzagging between high society and the working class-"
"Jesus, Rob, spit it out. What's your question?"
Robin looked up at Little John morosely, worried he'd offended his friend but more-so worried about the waning of his own abilities.
"Just like I said… am I losing my touch?" Robin held up his cast and stared at it as he walked, feeling that there was probably something symbolic about this he just couldn't put into words. "These last few years, months, weeks - days especially - I've been tripping over my words more than I ever have… been at a complete loss for words more than I ever have, as I am now… I've been failing left and right to get through to cold-hearted people like I used to do easily, and just in general, I'd like to imagine that I used to handle stressful situations gracefully, but now I feel like a… I feel like a nervous wreck at times where I used to have no fear. So… do you think I'm losing my touch?"
Yes, and I honestly like you better this way because I can actually relate to you as a person now. "I-I mean…" Little John stammered, "...we all slip up sometimes, it happens to the best of us - and I know plenty of people who'd say you are the best of us. Like, shit, I know your acting hero is Errol Flynn, but even Errol Flynn wasn't who we think of Errol Flynn being all the time, especially off-screen. Even he couldn't always be as cool as he was on camera." Like how uncool he was when he was off fucking underage girls… seriously, Rob, get a new role model.
Robin chuckled to himself. "Funny you should say that, I read a biography on the old wolf when I was in university and apparently he was close personal friends with John Bearymore, who he was actually deeply jealous of, because he knew John was an amazingly talented actor while old Errol knew good and well that he was only making it in Hollywood himself because he was a looker." The fox found the cheeriness to playfully nudge the bear. "We gotta have you try your hand at acting, Little John! Between Bearymore, Belushi, and Goodman, seems to me that bears named John have a knack for it!"
"Hm!" Johnny forced a nasal chuckle. "Maybe when this is all over." And you just gotta love about how this entire conversation about how "cool" people think you are has an obvious subtext that "cool" also includes the way that between your handsome body and your manly self-confidence, women find you hotter than the fucking sun - and probably plenty of guys, too - but neither one of us is saying it because it would make this conversation even weirder…
The breeze was nice that day-
Wait a minute, stop, Little John's inner voice continued, you read a fuckin' biography on the guy and you didn't- did they not mention the underage girls part or did you just choose to ignore it!? Shit, don't I remember hearing that he was with one when he died? Did you not finish the fucking book? Jesus, Robin, you're worrying me here.
"You know…" Robin thought out loud, "...these last few weeks have actually been eye-opening, really. I mean, ever since poor scared Martin tattled on us a while back-"
"Which was not even a week ago."
Robin stopped walking. "...It wasn't!?"
"Nope. Happened Friday night going into Saturday morning. Today's the next Friday after."
Robin paused for a second to stare into space before shaking his head in disbelief and starting to walk again. "I swear, this week has aged us. But even before this, it did seem like we were getting more… opposition, shall we call it? A-am I getting worse, or are people just getting harder to interact with!?"
Both. "Oh, the second one. Easy."
Robin nodded. "Well… I'd much rather they all lightened up. Because as I was saying, this has been eye-opening. After receiving so much negativity lately and almost coming to expect it, I… for the first time in my life, I- I think I'm starting to understand what social anxiety feels like."
Okay, now I feel like an asshole for being glad this is happening to you, but still… Jesus Christ, welcome to my world, Robin. Let me show ya around, why don't I? I might not spend as much time in Social Anxiety World as I used to, but I still know this place like the back of my hand. "Rob, don't worry. You got a very good reason to have some anxiety about this. Times are getting tougher for us and we're getting a little bit desperate - understandably so. Hey, coming from someone who didn't discover self-esteem until, like… five years ago, my guess is that the reason you always came across as so smooth and so fearless is… well, that was a reflection of your self-confidence, and you've never really had a reason to lose your self-confidence… not for long, anyway." Because you've had an easy fucking life, Rob, and I'm sorry you're dealing with the shock of having actual persistent challenges in your fucking life for the first time, but holy hell, you're kind of overdue.
"Eh, I suppose you're right," Robin murmured. He heard some voices in the distance but tried not to let it distract him. "But, like… the officer, and his saying 'my people are down in society' and I said 'yes, we're predators, we're right here with you,' and he acts like I just said complete nonsense… a-am I losing my ability to read social cues? Was there a detail there I just didn't pick up on? What else could he have been referring to?"
As they crossed Alaska Avenue, walking toward the big park that lay between Alaska and Arizona Avenues and 10th and 11th Streets, Little John first looked both ways for cars, then down in disbelief at his friend that he still hadn't picked up on what the serval had been hinting at.
"Uh… Rob, do you really… still not get-?"
"Hold on, Johnny. What's going on here?"
"Huh?" Little John asked as he looked toward the center of the park.
There was a large gathering in the wide open green space. A few people were holding signs that couldn't be read from the Merry Men's distance and someone was screaming something that couldn't be heard from the Merry Men's distance.
As Robin and Johnny looked on from the street corner, cocking their heads and trying to figure out what they were missing, a llama pushing a stroller was walking by on the sidewalk, seemingly paying no attention to the commotion in the park.
"E-excuse me, ma'am," said Robin.
"Oh! Heh…" the woman said with a knowing smile. "Hi, guys. Um- is your… arm okay, sir?"
"Oh, it will be better soon, ma'am, and I thank you for your concern, but, er… may we ask what's going on in the park? Would you happen to know?"
"Oh, yeah, uh…" she said as she looked off toward the crowd. "So… I'm guessing you guys don't exactly watch the morning news, but they released the cell-phone video of the former Sheriff and Deputy beating the everloving crap out of that poor hyena kid. Played it on all the local stations."
"Oh, jeez…" Little John said softly as he and Robin looked bummed out.
"Yeah, so… I-I think they just threw this together on short notice, but they're probably organizing today to make a more organized demonstration over the weekend. To tell the establishment, 'Hey, stop messing with us.' I'd be surprised if there aren't other gatherings like this around the city right now."
Robin nodded with determination. "And good on them that they're standing up and fighting the power that keeps the poor down. I suppose my only other question is… if you don't mind me asking, ma'am, I can't help but wonder, why are you not there yourself with them?"
The llama gave Robin an awkward smile that he'd seen a few times so far that day. "Well, you know, I support their cause, but…" And she began gesturing broadly to herself just like the feline officer had. "...not my fight to fight, now is it?"
Little John understood and nodded; Robin thought he understood and nodded likewise.
"You need say no more, ma'am," said Robin. "We know how risky it can feel, especially with a little one in your watch."
"Hey, buddy!" Johnny cooed as he leaned over the stroller and waved at the baby llama, and Robin joined him. The child giggled and the mother chuckled.
"But thank you for the update, ma'am," Robin concluded. "You have a nice day now."
"Oh, you two, guys," she said as she started off to cross the street. "And go gentle on that arm!"
The duo watched her cross before turning back to the scene in the park.
"I understand her hesitance to go out and fight when she has a newborn in her life," Robin said to the world before him, "I just hope the poor woman hasn't been brainwashed into thinking a female can't grab life by the reins the way a man can."
Little John was growing increasingly concerned about the subtext repeatedly failing to click in Robin's head. "Uh, Robin, I… don't think that's what she meant."
"Then what else could she mean?"
"Well-" He really wanted to just say it without any ambiguity, but centuries of American history had made saying such things so blatantly something that was awkward at best and outright taboo at worst, especially if it came from someone like him from the part of the country he was from; saying it with even the wrong intonation could make it sound derisive instead of informative. "...Well, it's not exactly a… llama issue, now is it?"
"Hm, you're right," Robin pondered with his chin in the crook of his thumb and forefinger. "In the world of predator-prey relations, hyenas always have been more stigmatized than most, haven't they?"
"Aw, Jesus Christ…"
Robin scanned the crowd and saw that there was actually a pretty healthy mix of predators and prey between them; hyenas next to impalas next to cheetahs next to giraffes next to servals next to rhinos next to lions next to zebras next to mongooses next to gazelles next to caracals next to elephants.
"But it certainly looks like they have some prey allies on their side, good for them!"
"You really think this is a prey-predator thing?"
Robin turned to Little John looking concerned that the bear wasn't getting it. "Johnny, don't you see? It's twofold! The old Sheriff and Deputy had it in for poor predators!"
"Well, Goldy's a bobcat-"
"And what of it!? You know how people can be brainwashed against their own kind!"
"And are we even sure that kid was poor?"
"He must have been! What kind of moneyed teenagers go to the woods at night for fun!?" Robin looked off toward the crowd again, feeling the passion burning inside him. "What they did to that lad was a crime against the poor and against predators, and who better to lead the fight back than the two predators who are champions of the poor!?"
"...Robin, what the fuck are you drivin' at?"
"Johnny… this is our chance!" Robin beamed. "We've been suffering from waning public support and people losing faith that we can actually change things - how better to win them back than by throwing ourselves at a very immediate issue and fixing it ourselves!? We're the perfect men for the job, Johnny! Don't you agree?"
The bear simply looked worried as he gazed down at the fox. "...No, Robin. I actually don't."
And despite being seriously crushed that his best friend was refusing to have his back, Robin kept on smiling bright, doing an expert job as always at hiding the fact that he was indeed capable of feeling bad about anything ever. "Ah, ye of little faith, perhaps I just need to prove it to you!" he said as he tossed Little John his backpack full of cash and ran off toward the crowd. "Follow me or don't, choice is yours!"
"Robin?" Little John asked as he slowly started walking in the direction Robin ran, less as an act of obedience but more from feeling compelled to go save his friend from his own bad decisions, and when he realized Robin wasn't slowing down, Johnny broke out into a trot. "...Robin!? ...Robin, will you listen to me for once in your goddamn life!?"
Robin first ran up to a playground area; it was built for medium-sized mammals' kids, so while he was still a little too big to navigate it comfortably, it wasn't prohibitively tiny, nothing more geometrically difficult than some fox-sized places in his childhood in Loxley. He climbed to the top of a slide, the platform of which must have been a good ten or twelve feet in the air. From there he had a good vantage point over the crowd. He could see that the crowd wasn't quite a symmetrical circle; the nucleus was off to one side, near a line of trees which extended right down to the playground he was at. Now, he could have made a less-dramatic entrance, but if he were to rudely push and shove his way to the front, then they'd surely never follow him into battle, whereas if he could make himself look compelling by successfully pulling off something more cinematic, that might just leave a good impression on them. Besides, he really didn't care for being stuck in the middle of a large crowd of people if he didn't have to.
He slid down the slide and scurried over to a swingset near the trees, one that had a very high crossbar and which had a large tire swing at its far end, set horizontally for multiple children to ride and with only one cluster of chains connecting it to the top. He stood on the tire and started swinging himself while standing straight up, aiming sideways for the tree. If not for his broken arm, he would have just climbed the first tree; there was nobody here to impress with his Flynnian stunts since most of the crowd had their backs to him and nobody was watching - except for a few protesters toward the back of the crowd who were able to hear the chains creaking and were now giving him very confused and offended looks… and come to think of it, the orangutan toddler in the nearby sandbox and their grandmother at the adjacent bench probably also had no idea what they were witnessing.
Robin trained his eyes on a particular branch which was unobstructed and provided plenty of space to grab onto. When his swings were approaching an eighty-degree angle, he bent his knees and leapt at the highest point of the arc. His contact wasn't as perfect as he'd have liked, having to wrap his arms around the branch when his paws missed, but he made it okay, no harm, no foul. He hugged the branch as he got his footing on the base of the tree until he was steadily on the branch, and started making his way toward the makeshift stage, slowly and methodically finding the sturdiest and farthest-reaching branches to link him to his destination.
"...and we're going to demand that Thomas Elkins and Matthew Goldthwaite be arrested for excessive use of force against a child committing a victimless crime!" preached a zebra holding a megaphone. "I don't care if that kid isn't one of us! We understand what it's like to be victims of such abuses of power and we don't see anybody else standing up for him!" And to this, the crowd cheered.
It warmed Robin's heart to hear prey standing up for this predator boy even if he wasn't, as she had said, 'one of hers', although he wasn't totally sure what she meant by not seeing anybody stand up for him when there were clearly plenty of people here, including a few dozen hyenas. It certainly seemed like this group had their goals spelled out succinctly, and Robin thought that all they needed to push them toward victory was the help of the modern-day Adam Bell.
Indeed a very spur-of-the-moment affair, the crowd was centered around a small and undefined space that was the closest thing to a makeshift stage for this precursory protest. The zebra stood on this metaphorical stage while immediately behind her were a couple of particularly stern-faced mammals who weren't quite as responsive when she spoke, perhaps members of her inner circle who were also taking turns speaking: a lioness, a lemur, a giraffe, a wildebeest, and a meerkat standing on the shoulders of a hyena. Robin was seriously considering aiming for the giraffe's neck and sliding down it like a fireman's pole just to make sure he wouldn't break his ankles when he landed, but decided using a potential ally like an inanimate object like that would be a bit rude. And of course nothing else about what he was doing there was rude, so it wouldn't match his classy image and his compelling arrival.
"And you know what!?" the zebra asked the crowd rhetorically. "Those cops probably didn't know he was one of us! And they probably wouldn't have cared even if they-!"
The speaker joined her audience in a shocked gasp as a big red fox in a green shirt materialized out of the sky and landed at her feet.
"Hello, people of Nottingham!" the Englishman greeted as he rose from his (screaming, aching) feet. "For those of you I've not yet had the pleasure of meeting, allow me to introduce myself! My name is Robin Hood, of the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest! We fight against the rich to help this city's poor! And now we are well aware of what the former Sheriff and Deputy have done to some poor hyena lad, and I am here to tell you that we are on your side! And we are here to help you extract justice from the powers-that-be in the way that only we who have successfully trounced those powers for seven years can do! Together… together we can make this city a fair and just place for all, rich and poor, predator and prey! And so, to you, the public whom I serve, I ask you: what can I do to help you receive the justice you so deserve!?"
Robin snuck a look at the zebra with the megaphone, who was staring at him wide-eyed in disbelief which Robin had originally interpreted as her disbelief of her own good fortune.
"Apologies for the interruption, ma'am," said Robin with a foxy smile, "but I couldn't withhold my offer of service much longer."
Therefore Robin turned back to the crowd to gauge their reaction. He would later find out that, because he was still a short-statured little dude compared to many in this crowd, roughly seventy-five percent of the rally couldn't see him and could hardly hear a word he'd said. But as for the first dozen or so rows of mammals near the inner circle, they heard him loud and they saw him clear, and - for reasons Robin did not yet understand, but which in twenty minutes' time he would be convinced were completely reasonable - they were livid.
"If you wanna help us, then why did you just crash our fuckin' protest!?"
This was another instance where Robin could not fathom how his audience could deny the charm he had worked so hard to perfect, and consequently all his self-confidence and swagger disappeared at the drop of a hat.
"Who the hell is this guy!?" asked somebody else.
"Aw, he's that homeless British guy who steals from rich folk because he's too fuckin' lazy to work like the rest of us!" This came from a hippo in the front row, pointing at Robin accusationally; this man was the first of the crowd to take a step toward him.
"What's this asshole do!?"
"He steals from the rich and gives it to the poor and doesn't actually fix anything and demands we treat him like a fuckin' hero for it!" said an ibex who was likewise in the front row, pointing, and taking a step closer.
"You mean the crazy guy who lives in the woods!?"
"Yeah, with that redneck grizzly bear!" a jackal hollered to someone behind her as she pointed at Robin and became the third person to move in on him, and when Robin saw that, it got a little something churning in the back of his brain.
And now, Dear Reader, a brief recess. Let it not seem like the people of this crowd are being demonized; indeed, years later, even Robin himself agrees that they were completely justified in how they handled his intrusion. How would you react if your rally was interrupted by an interloper? Looking back on it with a clear mind, Robin can't even say that he thinks any of the people there were looking to hurt him, they were just trying to get as close as possible to give him a piece of their mind. But in that moment, Robin did not have a clear mind, as the sight of people closing in on him caused his mind to be clouded by terrifying visions he had had ever since that April day when his mother came home from work at the hospital with all the joy drained from her face.
"I-er-m- my apologies-" he stammered.
"You wanted our attention, now you have it!"
"Linda, don't you have a crush on this guy!?"
"Oh, you know I don't anymore!"
"How nice it must be to be able to live out a Sidney movie because you don't have any responsibilities! Ain't that right, Adam Bell!?"
"Does this guy really think he's a fucking cartoon action hero!?"
And the crowd drew closer.
"I-I'm sorry!" he pleaded. "I'll leave!"
"Aw, now yet, man, we wanna talk first!"
"If he's such an action hero, how'd he fuck up his arm!?"
"Hey, where the fuck did he even get that cast from! Man, I know your homeless ass don't have insurance!"
"He probably paid for it with the money he stole, you just know he keeps most of it for himself!"
"There's a reason they call him the Prince of Thieves, because he fucking lives like one!"
And the crowd drew closer.
"Er, p-please? I-I'm sorry?" Robin felt his legs give out, and felt grass on his knees soon after.
"Man, get up off your knees!"
Too many people.
"And look at us when we're talking to you!"
Not enough room.
"You're really gonna crash our party and then act like a pussy when we don't take kindly to it!?"
Not enough air.
"Everybody stop!" somebody called.
Robin's eyes burst open, and he was looking straight at the feet of a rhino less than a foot in front of him. He hadn't even realized his eyes were closed.
"He's hyperventilating," said the same voice, calmly this time.
He also hadn't realized he'd been doing that. Robin looked up at the rhino and everybody else in the crowd, but his vision was unexpectedly blurred.
"Looks like he's been crying, too," said someone else.
"...He's afraid of us!" someone called out as though having an epiphany.
"He is, ain't he!?"
"He wants to be our savior, but he's afraid of us having power!"
"He wants to think he knows people like us, but he's afraid of people like us!"
"He only wants to help us if he gets to be the one in charge!"
"N-n-n-n-no!" Robin begged, waving his arms frantically. The crowd was no longer advancing, but that wasn't bringing him ease. "I-it's not like that-!"
"Of course he wants to be in charge of us! The British fucked up the entire world because they thought they were better than everybody else!"
"He's a fancy-ass British guy who doesn't realize we're not his luxury imports anymore!"
"Man, stand up!" said the rhino whose gut was in Robin's face; this was indeed the same voice who had told everyone about Robin's panic attack. "We ain't gonna hurt you, we just wanna talk!"
"You know his racist ass probably thinks we're lying and that we're just gonna hurt him anyway!"
"Look at him! He's literally fuckin' paralyzed in fear at the sight of people like us!"
"And his fatass bear friend ain't here to save him!"
"'Scuse me, pardon me, move aside, foxcatcher comin' through!" came the voice of his fatass bear friend, coming to save him.
Robin nearly had a heart attack upon feeling someone grab him by his good arm and yank him upwards; it still took him a second to calm down after realizing it was Johnny. He soon found himself being held tight against Little John's chest, the bear's arms hooked under his armpits and wrapped around his torso, holding him like a child holding a teddy bear.
"You'll have to forgive my friend here," Little John said in a tone that made it clear to everybody that he didn't actually expect forgiveness for his friend. "This poor dumb son of a bitch's experienced so much success in life that the idea that he could face rejection is a completely foreign fuckin' concept to him!"
"Er, th-thank you, Johnny," Robin mumbled. Feeling the bear's heart beating on his back was helping Robin's heart come back to a regular pace.
"Oh, so he's way too fuckin' overprivileged?" asked someone in the crowd. "Sounds about right!"
"I know you guys wanna have a word with him, but he's probably really confused right now and I don't think he'd be able to tell you anything useful," said Little John. "I'll be gettin' him outta your hair now. Pardon me," he said to a hippo who had come to occupy the hole he'd slipped in through.
"Stacy, we really just gonna let him go?" the hippo asked the zebra. Several in the crowd murmured to echo their skepticism.
The zebra, trying to be the most effective leader she could be, decided to take a diplomatic approach. "I actually do think this gentleman means well," she said to her crowd, "but he's definitely a bit… uninformed of why this might not've been the most thoughtful gesture."
"Yeah, so let's inform him!" shouted someone, and again many cheered in agreeance.
"And I appreciate that, folks, but I can handle him by myself. Jessica, you can take over, I was almost done with my part anyway" she said as she handed over the megaphone to the lioness behind her before turning to Robin, who still looked like he was wearing Little John like a comically oversized backpack. "Mr. Hood, I'd like to step aside and have a private conversation with you. And your friend is welcome to come too, of course."
"Er- y-yes, ce-ce-certainly, erm… Little John, you can put me down now."
"You sure about that?" asked the bear.
"I am."
Little John slowly and gently put Robin down on his feet and released his arms from under the fox's armpits, whereupon Robin promptly collapsed again.
The zebra led Robin and John to a bench at the edge of the park along the jogging loop. She sat down and gestured for Robin to sit next to her.
"I'm sorry there's not enough room for you, Mister…? I-I'm sorry, I know they call you Little John, but I don't know if that's your real-?"
"Oh…" Little John said with a wave and a bashful smile. "The real name's John Little, but… you can just call me Johnny. Little John's just my stage name. And don't worry, I-I'm good to stand. Uh, honestly… I think he needs to hear it more than I do. I-I- I'm from the South, so for better or worse, I… I think I saw things in that crowd that he didn't. I-I mean that in the most friendly way possible… in case the 'Southern' part sounded like a red flag, I mean."
She nodded with pursed lips and turned to Robin, who still wasn't entirely sure what he was missing.
"Mr. Hood, my name is Eustacia Walker, you can call me Stacy though. I'm the head organizer of this rally right here and tomorrow we plan to take to the streets downtown to protest what was done to that hyena boy in the woods last weekend."
"Admirable work, Miz Stacy," said the fox, "and you can call me Robin. It's a pleasure to meet you."
"And it's likewise a pleasure to meet you, Robin. I've heard about you through the grapevine. I've heard you do admirable work yourself up north; I've heard that up in Georgetown and thereabouts, you could be considered quite the leader to that community much like how I try to serve my community as a leader here."
"Oh, I… I have heard some say that about me, though I don't fancy myself as one. I just seek to provide them with the hope they need to carry on in this mad world."
Neither of them saw the annoyed look on Little John's face as he overheard this part of the conversation.
"Many would say that providing hope is a key tenet of good leadership, Robin," posited Stacy.
Robin chuckled politely. "Well, ma'am, it certainly seems to me that what you're doing here is more tangible leadership than anything I do, and I commend you for it."
Stacy nodded. "Thank you, Robin, though I must say… today you seemed all too eager to exert your leadership where there was no need for it."
This was the first of many uncomfortable realizations Robin had during the course of this discussion. "What? Oh, nonono, I apologize if it came across that way! I just… I simply thought that you could use the services of someone with seven years' experience fighting the power in this city! That I could provide you all guidance on how to best implement your strategies for seeking justice and perhaps provide some ideas of my own-!"
"Mr. Hood, that's called leadership."
Robin's mouth stayed stuck open as his cheeks dropped from a smile to a look of shock.
"Listen, Robin," the zebra said as if explaining a sensitive topic to a child. "I can see your good intentions. I can. And I'd bet that most of the people here could see them too, they were just outweighed by your… tone-deaf decision to-"
"I'm sorry, you're right, that was a dreadfully tacky decision to enter like that," Robin said, facing the grass at his feet and shaking his head. "Tasteless!"
"It wasn't just the entrance, Robin," Stacy said as she put her hand on Robin's shoulder and waited for him to return eye contact before she continued. "You might be skilled at subverting the corrupt authority in this town, I wouldn't doubt that you are. But… people like us do not need to be led by someone who is not like us." She gestured to the crowd, who were now listening to the giraffe's speech. "Look at us. Look at that crowd. Look at that community. You see plenty of people like me… I don't know if I see anybody like you."
And Robin looked at the crowd, trying to see what she was referring to. As he stared at the gathering of zebras and hyenas and lions and elephants and gazelles and warthogs and rhinos, he racked his brain to try to decipher some sort of pattern. Was it… was it their way of dress? Some of them were wearing clothes that seemed a bit more tattered than the clothes of others, was that supposed to be the giveaway? Good God, she was implying what Little John had implied earlier: that he had no place being a hero to these people because he didn't truly understand what it was like to be poor. Not to say he agreed with it, but to be confronted with it, he didn't know what to say. Like, that had to be what she was getting at, right? What else could she possibly be referring to?
Robin turned to look at Little John for the first time in about a minute, hoping his friend would bail him out by giving him some sort of hint. It turned out his friend wasn't even looking at him.
"Johnny! Are you smoking a cigarette!?"
Little John stopped staring across the park and turned to face the fox. "Robin!" he said, sarcastically matching Robin's tone. "Are you avoiding the nice lady's question!?" He turned his head away again and took a drag, shaking his head in disbelief.
"So? Do you understand what I'm saying?" asked Stacy.
Robin turned back to her, then the crowd, then her again.
"Yeah… yes, I understand."
"Very good," the zebra said in a bit of a lighter tone. "Now… I understand that your people have likely been taught otherwise, but from our perspective, in order to recognize the different ways different peoples experience life in this country, we believe it's not always a good thing to pretend to be blind to ethnic differences-"
"WAIT, THIS WAS AN ETHNIC THING!?"
The background noise of the rally came to a complete stop. Robin could see everybody, including the giraffe with the megaphone, had turned to him with looks of disgust crossed with pity. The giraffe soon started talking again as though nothing happened, and Robin turned back to Stacy, who was looking more annoyed than she had since she'd left the circle.
"What did you think I meant!?" she demanded.
"I-I-I-I thought you meant I wasn't fit to-to be a hero to the poor because I wasn't- because I haven't been poor enough!"
Robin couldn't bear to look at her, so instead he looked at the bear. He couldn't have been the only one who didn't understand that… could he have been? "J-uh-Johnny, did you…?"
But Little John had his back completely to Robin, his left paw dangling at his side with the burning cigarette hanging from his fingers, his right paw on his temple as he stared downward. To use an anachronistic piece of modern lingo, Dear Reader, the scene was simply too cringeworthy to look at, and Little John just couldn't handle it. Robin could even swear he heard his friend mumble to himself:
"This is so fucking embarrassing…"
Robin was alone in that crowded park. He turned back to the gathering again.
"B-b-but isn't that a porcupine I see!?" he asked, pointing.
"There are porcupines in Africa."
"B-but what about the bunny!?"
"There are hares in Africa."
"A-a-and that bloke! Is… is he a coyote? Is he a fox?"
"That 'bloke' is a woman, her name is Stella, her people prefer to be classified as wolves and they come from Ethiopia. Which is in Africa."
"...And the panda?"
"There are- wait, what?"
Robin pointed and Stacy looked. "There. Next to the… is that a kangaroo?"
The zebra was surprised by this but conceded a point to the fox. "Hm. Haven't seen them before. But what can I say? This isn't Detroit or Baltimore, this neighborhood is still pretty well integrated; they could be locals who decided to join the cause. And we appreciate them for doing so."
And as if right on cue, a snow leopard and a camel jogged by them on the running track.
Robin was confused all over again. "Well- why do you have no problem with them, but a problem with me?"
Ms. Walker was growing tired of Robin's inability to grasp the situation. "Because you'll notice they're standing in the back. They understand that this isn't their fight, but they're here to help prop us up. As allies. As loyal soldiers. As people who will follow the leadership of people who actually understand this problem from firsthand, lived experience every day of their lives."
Robin kept staring at the crowd as the puzzle pieces refused to go together in his head.
"And you can still be an ally, Robin," she continued, "and we'd love to have you. Or you can keep fighting for class justice and work alongside us. But this… this is a battle we know best. So you can take a seat in the back, or - what I imagine you'd rather do - you can fight your own fight and work with us when our goals overlap. But you can't come in here saying you know better than we do how to fix a problem that doesn't affect you."
"B- b-but… you keep saying I don't understand - teach me! I'm willing to learn- no, I want to learn!" Robin begged, gesticulating wildly. "C'mon, get me up to speed! I'm a quick learner!"
Stacy was doing an admirable job of hiding how thin her patience was wearing. "I'm sure you are eager to learn, Robin, but I could lecture you for a year and it still wouldn't be the same as you having to live it yourself."
"Then how can I live it myself!?"
"...You can't-"
"You know, when I first approached this crowd, I thought… I thought this was a gathering against the injustice facing predators! Which, you know…! Look at me! You've never heard of fox-hunting in England? My poor brother got the living daylights beaten out of him by deer and sheep and the like at boarding school! Surely your experiences and mine couldn't be that different!"
"They can be, Robin, and they are," she said sternly. "I don't doubt that you've encountered negativity in your life because of who you are. Every type of person has experienced negativity for being that type of person. But these are challenges to species from Africa, and you-"
"And that's another thing!" Robin raved like a madman. "Are you even sure all these people are of African extraction? I'm from Europe, there were members of all these species back home, and many of them had lived in the British Isles for as long as their family histories could be traced! I mean- look at our mayor! He's more of a posh stereotypical Brit than I could ever dream to be! People like this existed in Europe and we never treated them differently!"
The zebra was no longer trying as hard to hide her frustration. "Well, while I can't say that I'm an expert on race relations in the UK - much like how you don't seem to know much about race relations in the United States - it must be nice that you weren't burdened by an awareness of what they surely were going through when you weren't looking."
Robin looked sheepish. He didn't have the confidence to respond to that.
"But to answer your question… you're right. Long ago, nomads wandered around the world and settled in places far from home, and now you have a little bit of every species all over the world if you look hard enough, including, for example, a bunch of lions in England. We call such peoples the Lost Peoples; their ancestors went to find a new watering hole one day and somehow wound up in Switzerland. But you know what? ...We can tell they aren't recently from the Motherland. A few thousand years of being cut off from the rest of us, they have some different traits we can pick up on. Prince John? You won't ever see an African lion man with no mane - unless he's going through chemo or something, and I don't even wish that on him - that weird little tuft of fur under his chin, you won't see African lions with that… and that weird, wide, flat head of his - I-I don't know if this'll mean anything to you, but I've got kids, they're older now, but about a decade ago when John first came to office, my son and daughter are watching TV and… I guess they were flipping between the news and some cartoon channels, because I walk into the living room and they're having an argument about whether Prince John's head is shaped more like Arnold's from Hey Arnold! or Bobby's from Bobby's World."
"I... have no familiarity with either of these characters."
"Neither did I, but then I asked what the heck they were talking about, and they flipped to one cartoon channel and another and I've gotta say… both characters with extremely wide heads, the Prince would probably be halfway between one and the other. But the point stands that a pre-evolutionary lion looking like John Norman would not survive in the wild homeland with deformities like that. His people are my people's cousins, but they aren't my people. And actually, you know who else isn't my people, even though he looks it?"
"Er… n-no, who?"
"The hyena boy," Ms. Walker said solemnly. "At least we have every reason to believe so. I personally had a tougher time telling from the video, but the hyenas I've talked to, they can tell. You know what the biggest clue is though? The fact that we have to stand up for him because his people won't."
"...I don't follow."
"It's not uncommon for the Lost Peoples to think they're better than us, and then they suck up to authority more because they think the authority will treat them better than they treat us - they won't, but they don't care, they tell themselves they're not doing enough to prove they're better than us. So when their kid gets the shit beat out of him for trespassing in the woods at night… they might just side with the cops and write off their own kid as a fuck-up."
"...You really think so?"
"We have every reason to think so. Go look in the newspapers for a statement from the kid's family. You won't find any. They're staying silent."
"A-and you're certain they're not simply staying silent to avoid drawing attention to themselv-!?"
"Not certain, but we have no evidence to suggest that's the case, while we know our own relations with our Lost cousins and how conservative they can be, even when it negatively affects them. But we've been through this and we can empathize, and we're proving that we care about all peoples, not just our own, and we're going to defend this kid whose own people have abandoned him - not that the cops knew he wasn't one of us, or cared."
Robin looked at the grass again, dumbfounded and speechless.
"So you see, Robin," said Stacy, trying to be gentle again because she understood that this fox had no previous understanding of any of this and it was surely hitting him like a brick wall, "I get that this is a lot to take in, and the relations between different peoples in this country are extremely complicated, especially for an outsider to understand. But if there were a social problem that specifically affected predatory species - like what I'm hearing happens in that European-Savior-Complex town, Zootopia, but I do not have the energy for that right now - if there was a fight against institutional prejudice against predators, then I actually would follow your leadership in the fight, because you would know more about that struggle than me. But in a fight to get the entire United States to stop oppressing peoples whose ancestors came from Africa - whether they stopped in Europe or elsewhere first or otherwise - you may be very qualified in sticking it to the man, but you will always be underqualified in fully understanding the root of the problem, so this fight for African-American mammals cannot be led by a fox fresh out of Great Britain."
Robin was still staring at the grass, taking all these words in. There was only one thing he still wanted to say, and he was going to say it. And the statement he was about to say would be considered by many to be juvenile and overly-idealistic at best and irredeemably foolish at worst:
"Well… that's not fair."
Stacy couldn't help but let a wry smile overcome her face. "I beg your pardon?"
"That's just not fair," Robin repeated. "Just like you said, I'm overqualified to… to help orchestrate a movement against this city's powerful and elite. A-and just like I said up there, 'What do you need me to do?', I'll take the instructions from you, just, just, fill… fill me… in…"
Robin trailed off when he realized the zebra was too busy laughing to be listening to him.
"'That's not fair'? Ha! Boy, aren't you too old to be thinking the world cares if things are fair or not? Life isn't fair! You wanna talk about fair!? It ain't fair to us that we've been treated like shit ever since we were brought over here as a commodity! And it wouldn't be fair to us if we still had to follow directions from someone from a country who's oppressed people all over the world, from the Indians to the Irish to… hell, the other Indians! You think it isn't fair that you don't get to do something because of who you are? Of course it isn't! Welcome to our world! Nice to finally have you on the same page as all the other adults in this world, let's see how long you last! Oh, boo hoo you, your life isn't fair - honey, tell somebody who cares!"
And in a complete reversal of how he'd been feeling throughout that entire ordeal up until that point, Robin was neither afraid nor confused; he was simply fuming. All these years later, Robin still has mixed feelings about that moment; she had a point with all that she was saying, but he still doesn't know if he should have forced himself not to feel like he'd been unjustly humiliated by her. He still doesn't know whether he had a right to be angry that she was relentlessly mocking him or whether he should have tried harder to accept that her points were valid and taken her laughter like a champ. He wasn't as brimming with rage as he was with the cheetah woman who had told him to fuck off with more vitriol than he'd faced in years, but his blood was still boiling as he sat there and took her heat. Please let it be known, Dear Reader, that this narrator is again trying to present this touchy scene as neutrally as possible to paint how it actually happened, without bias to make anybody look good or evil or smart or stupid, and indeed Robin himself actually implored me not to include this detail, but alas, it could not go unacknowledged, because Stacy certainly noticed the furious look on his face.
"Oh… oh, you're angry?" she asked, still smirking. "You say something laughable and you get angry when it makes me laugh?"
"You didn't need to belittle me like that," Robin seethed.
Now Little John was looking on just to make sure things didn't get too heated. He would have had absolutely no idea what kind of damage control he could ever possibly have done if Robin got into a fight with a woman who was an important figure in the local African-American community.
She chuckled again. "You really tout yourself as somebody who should be seen as a hero and a leader and you can't even handle it when people make jokes about you even when you basically set the joke up for them?"
"That wasn't playful ribbing, that was the kind of excessive ridicule I'd expect from my greatest enemies," said Robin. "A good person wouldn't choose to go as overboard as you just did."
Ms. Walker let out a sharp guffaw. "Oh… nonononono. I ain't out here about to be lectured about being a good person by someone who thinks he's helping by crashing our protest and telling us that he would be our savior because we couldn't do it by ourselves! Nuh-uh, sweetheart! Not happening today!"
"So I made one mistake, does that disqualify me from being a good-!?"
"That's a pretty big mistake to make, don't you think!?" she laughed. "You take yourself way too seriously. Hey, while we're at it, no! I don't think you're qualified to be a hero or a leader to the poor, either! Didn't I hear you say your brother went to boarding school? How could you possibly know what it's like to be poor?"
"I-I-I- that was my half-brother, who was raised by our wealthy father! I wasn't! My brother grew up in a large manor home, I grew up in a small cottage at the edge of town where- where the ceiling leaked whenever it rained!" (Robin has since confided to our editing team that this was an exaggeration, and the ceiling only leaked at his childhood home in Loxley on two occasions and was swiftly repaired and paid for by Robert Scarlett both times.)
"Oh, so you didn't go to boarding school?"
"I- my biological father only paid for my education and expenses to take the power away from my mother and stepfather!"
"So you did go to boarding school?"
"...I-it was a school where some of the students boarded, but I didn't-!"
"So a rich guy abused you by showering you in money. How terrible."
"Oh, don't assume it was all-!"
"Rob, you wanna mellow out there, buddy?" Little John interrupted. Both ignored him.
"Have you even worked a tough job in your life?" asked Stacy. "Have you even struggled with the bills as an adult?"
"I-I- yes I have! I spent an entire year working on a tour bus in Washington, DC, open roof, sweltering in the sun and freezing in the rain and snow-!"
"A tour bus?"
"Yes, I was a tour guide! Twelve-hour shifts that were hardly even legal, on minimum wage plus tips that never came!"
"Five days a week?"
"Er- three, sometimes four, but that's still forty-eight hours-!"
"That's nice. Fresh out of college I was working upwards of sixty. But it's good to know that the hardest work you've ever had to do was entertaining tourists. You know, maybe I should take over the fight for class equity in this town since you clearly don't understand the lives of the people you're fighting for."
"Grrr… what the fuck do you know about my life!?"
Robin again got the attention of the crowd, who were now shooting daggers without an ounce of their previous pity of his childlike ignorance.
"Robin, chill out…" Little John cooed as he stood behind the bench and started thoroughly rubbing Robin's shoulders, while also wondering about this tour guide job of Robin's that he'd only heard of so faintly and infrequently that he kept forgetting about it and re-remembering.
"I know that when you were surrounded by a bunch of African mammals, you were clearly so afraid that you fell to your knees and started crying," the zebra said with a confident smile.
Robin's heart and lungs both came to a complete stop, and his face, once twisted in anger, now dissolved to one of bewilderment as he no longer had the blood-flow to maintain his facial muscles in their places.
"I- n-no, it's not that!" he insisted when he regained the ability to breathe.
"It's not what?" Upon seeing the fear return to his face, Stacy dropped most of the mockery from her tone. She was almost worried about him.
"I-it wasn't what it looked like!" Robin insisted. "I- I know now that it might have come across as racist, but… ge-genuinely, that's not what it is! I wasn't afraid because of who you all were, just… afraid because of how many of you there were. It's… it's not quite claustrophobia, because small spaces I can handle, it's… it's crowds, where the walls are moving, and at any moment… they can close in on you… and crush you."
"Oh…" Stacy now completely regretted the direction in which she took this conversation. "Well… just like I said earlier, I never doubted that you have your unique challenges. Um… I'm… I'm sorry you have to live with such a phobia, and… and I apologize for bringing it up-"
"Oh, no, no, it's not your fault, erm…" Robin said, staring at the grass and looking like his eyes were getting glassy again. "It-it's from something in my youth where… a bunch of people did get crushed to death near where I lived, dozens… and me mum was a nurse at one of the hospitals, erm…" Robin covered his mouth with his palm and took a deep breath through his nose.
Even more intrigued by this than Stacy was Little John, who had never even once heard anything that could even remotely suggest that Robin had a problem with crowds - although now that he thought about it, he didn't remember ever being in a crowd with Robin quite as densely packed as the rally in that park.
"Hey, Robin," Little John said softly, ceasing to massage Robin's shoulders and giving him two firm pats on the back. "You wanna head outta here, buddy?"
"Er, y-yes, just… just give me a minute."
"Alright…"
"Pardon me, Johnny," said Stacy, "but may I speak to you alone really quick?"
"Uh… sure."
The two of them stepped aside near a tree while they gave Robin a moment to decompress.
"So… you seem to be at least reasonably aware of… the idiosyncrasies of American race relations," said the zebra.
"I… I'd like to imagine I am."
"And considering how you seemed worried that you'd made me uncomfortable when you mentioned you were from the South… I think I can reasonably assume you're not one of the willful bigots you clearly didn't want me confusing you for."
"And I thank you for trusting that that's not who I am."
"Of course. But what I'm wondering is… if you showed up to bail him out, I imagine you must have already been in the area…"
"Yeah, I was with him."
"Yeah, that's what I thought… so… why didn't you stop him?"
Little John found that question curious. "Oh, believe me, I tried. But he doesn't listen to me." Johnny looked over at Robin and saw him staring straight into space. "Because he doesn't respect me."
"He doesn't?"
"Nah… this is the first I'm hearing about this… claustrophobia thing or whatever, too."
"Hm…" Stacy pondered. "I- I'll be honest, you make him seem like he's not a good friend to you."
Johnny looked to Robin again, who now had his face buried in his hands, not crying, just breathing.
"He's not," said Little John.
"Oh… well- this is absolutely none of my business, but… why stick around him then?"
Because he's still the best friend I've ever had… besides maybe his brother. "Because if I don't have his back, who will?" Johnny shrugged. "Sometimes ya just gotta step up to the plate and be the bigger man.
The zebra chuckled. "Well, just eyeballing, you're definitely the bigger man between you two, am I right?"
Little John felt his cheeks burn under his fur as he chuckled along. "Yeah… yeah, I guess I am…"
"Well, I hope one day he'll realize how lucky he is to have you," Stacy said as she looked toward Robin herself; he was now twiddling his thumbs, looking lost in thought. "Not a lot of people would have his back after how bad he fucked up today."
"Hey, believe me, I didn't want to. Haven't felt that embarrassed since I was a kid."
Stacy nodded along, wanting to ask about that but realizing she'd been gone from the rally too long. "I have to say, though… I don't wanna kick the man while he's down, but he really does seem like a mess, and he really does seem like he does only think about himself. I mean… am I wrong to think that maybe more than not, he does his charity operation as a big ego-stroke?"
Johnny blew some breath out the side of his snout. "Shit, maybe. I mean, the kid's an actor by trade. He's gotta be a narcissist on some level… I know he's got a good heart and wants to help people, but… I mean, he's gotta be getting a kick outta all the attention he's getting. He's gotta. It could be a little of both."
"I was thinking the same thing. Because when I said I could tell he had good intentions, I meant it, but… you know, when I first realized it was him, I thought about how odd it was to see him here. Because you know, since you guys are barely ever in this part of town, a bunch of people around here think the whole operation is just to feed his ego, so he doesn't come to the most dangerous part of town since he doesn't wanna be in any real danger, definitely more than any of those dumbass cops could pose to him. They suddenly aren't as trigger-happy when it's a shrimpy little fox with a wimpy British accent."
Little John was debating bringing up the secret ally cop they'd met earlier but thought better of it. "Yeah, we've been having a bit of a tough day sharing the love around here… we'll keep that in mind when we get friction next time."
She was still looking at Robin. "I can't help but think about how you said… he's succeeded too much and now he can't comprehend failure… I don't know his life like you do - or I gather that you hardly do either, but still, better than me - I don't know him like you do, but I think you might be onto something about that."
"You know, it's funny, I've heard people gush over how mature he is, especially in our early years when he was even younger and it was more impressive," said Little John, likewise staring at Robin. "But they've only seen him when things are going well for him. When things are going bad for him for longer than he's used to? Man… he's got some growing up to do… Hey, you mind if we take off now?"
"Yes, I think it's best we all do."
They walked over to Robin, who was now slouched back on the bench, his head tilted back and facing the sky, watching the clouds go by.
"Hey, Rob! Uh… you… good to head out now?" asked Little John.
"Yeah… yeah, I think I'm ready," Robin said as he stood up, then faced the zebra with a smile. "Ms. Walker, I've made up my mind - I would love to combine forces when the time is right!"
Stacy was very tempted to tell Robin off for even needing to think about it, that deciding to help a large group of people fight oppression should have been a no-brainer, but she had long ago resolved that this fox wasn't nearly as witty as he was reputed to be and decided to let it slide.
"I'd be glad to, Mr. Hood."
As he was taught in his etiquette classes, Robin did not break eye contact with his respondent when he saw motion in his lower periphery that suggested she was reaching to shake his hand. Therefore he reached for her hand without looking and gave it a few good shakes before he realized it didn't feel right, and saw her face come to look uncomfortable as she looked down at his hand, which inspired Robin to finally look at it himself. There he discovered that his hand was wrapped around a balled-up fist.
Ms. Walker extracted her hand and shoved it right back into the crook of his to return his handshake, giving herself an awkward smile like she was telling herself that she should have known that would have happened.
Robin and Little John walked eastward away from the park, not saying much before Robin made a quip:
"Well, Johnny… you often say it seems like it's impossible for me to have an awkward moment… well, today I guess I proved you wrong!"
I never fucking said that, other people do. "Well - heh - just a good thing fuckin' G.G. Alan ain't here, he'd jump at the chance to run a revolution against the cops and bring about a new world order! Old boy wouldn't take no for an answer, they'd have to drag him out of that crowd kickin' and screamin'!"
Robin smirked and let out a tired laugh, but he really wasn't into it. "You know… when I made the decision to… go and try to provide my services to that crowd… I was thinking again about Eddward's question again: how would we react if we witnessed a gross injustice that had nothing to do with us? Well… we encountered an injustice that really didn't affect us… and we saw how I reacted! Tried to do something good… wasn't in the cards, though… Ah, stupid Robin! Stupid, stupid, stupid!" Robin said as he repeatedly knocked his working fist against his skull.
"Hey, hey, Robin, don't do that to yourself!" Little John said as he grabbed Robin's arm and forced him to put it back at his side. And Robin didn't fight it.
Neither said anything more for a while after that. Robin had taken his mind off his fear of dense crowds by instead dwelling on something marginally less upsetting: how abandoned he felt when he felt so stupid and mortified and could really have used his friend's support, only to see that Johnny wouldn't even look at him. Meanwhile, Little John was occupying the silence by wondering why Robin told this woman more about his past after knowing her for seven minutes than he'd told him after knowing him for seven years.
-IllI-
As the ramp on the stoop suggested, the man who answered the door was indeed in a wheelchair.
"Oh. It's you two," the walrus grumbled.
"Oh! I'm sorry, sir, have we met before?" asked Robin.
"No," was all the man said.
"Well, er… it's a pleasure to finally meet you, Mister…?"
"You can call me 'sir'."
"Oh! Erm… alright, sir… we're sorry we don't visit this neck of the woods too often, but we're looking to make amends as we speak!"
"Yeah!" added Little John. "We're here right now, aren't we?"
"Hrmph," the walrus grumbled. "How much ya got for me?"
"Here ya go, sir," said Robin as he handed the man a Ziploc bag of cash.
"That still doesn't answer my question," the stranger grumbled as he took the baggie. "How much ya got for me?"
"Er… two hundred?"
"There should be ten twenties in there if we counted right," said Johnny.
The man turned the plastic baggie around in his hand as if inspecting it for defects. "You know, we don't need your charity 'round here."
"Er-"
"Well, hey, man, if you don't want it, we'll take it back," said Little John, hand extended to accept the gift return. "There's plenty of other people in this town who'll take free money."
"No… no… gimme another two hundred."
"Huh?"
"I thought you said you didn't need our charity?" asked Robin.
"I don't. But if those motherfuckers in Georgetown get money from you while they already live like kings compared to us, then I demand my fair share! Now gimme another two hundred or I'm calling the cops!"
Since the precedent had been set that at least some of the people in this part of town weren't bluffing about getting the fuzz involved, Robin felt he had no choice but to slide the backpack off again and give the man another bag of twenties.
The walrus took the bag and held it sideways, as if trying to count it without actually wanting to open it. "My entire species is bound to wheelchairs and there's a lotta jobs we can't hold. You don't think that makes things hard for us?"
"Well, Jesus, brother, do you need our charity or not?" Little John snapped. "Because it seems like you do and you're just too proud to admit it!"
Mister Sir ignored him. "You can come back here with the next four hundred same time next week," he said as he started backing up to close the door.
"Well, hey, man, we don't just keep a schedule and-!"
"Come back here with the next four hundred this time next week. Otherwise I'm calling the cops next time I see you walking down my street. Now goodbye."
He wasn't closing the door. He was staring at them, waiting to watch them leave. So after staring at the guy for a few seconds, he gave them a shooing motion and they acquiesced, turning and walking down the wheelchair ramp.
"Gentlemen!" the walrus barked. "The ramp is for my use only. You're to use the stairs."
The duo looked down and saw confirmation of what they were already pretty sure was the case: the wheelchair ramp was almost as wide as the steps and there were hardly six inches of free space on either side.
"Erm… sir, we… literally can't use the steps with the ramp covering-"
"You're really gonna walk your able-bodied asses down my designated ramp?" He pointed at Little John specifically. "You're too heavy, you'll break it."
Johnny responded with a look of offended disbelief. "Really? Coming from you, Mister Blobbo? I bet your wheelchair alone weighs more than I do if it hasta support yer fat ass!"
"I'm calling the cops," said the walrus, grumbly as ever, as he backed up and closed the door on them.
Little John rolled his eyes and walked down the ramp, scooting Robin along in front of him.
After the protest debacle, they decided soon after to turn north and head back towards familiar territory. They were still safely in Hermosa Park, but they were quickly nearing the Georgetown border. And although they had found themselves in an area that had many more single-family-homes that didn't present the logistical challenges of visiting apartments, there were still a healthy amount of residents skeptical of the Merry Men's good intentions.
"Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with people these days?" Little John wondered aloud.
"I propose a better question," said Robin. "Why are these people so much angrier than the poor people in Georgetown or Harbeson or… anywhere else in the city for that matter?"
"I mean, I got a theory," said Little John. "When I was a kid getting my ass kicked all the time, I was sad that I was getting my ass kicked all the time… until it got to the point that I just started getting angry that I was getting my ass kicked all the time. That's why I was such an asshole when you first met me; I was done feeling like I was weak so I started thinking everyone else was an asshole. Now… I'm no expert on this town, but I think Hermosa's a step beyond Georgetown. They're done with being sad about their situation like the people in Georgetown are, they're done with being sad that the world keeps kicking their ass like the people in Georgetown are… they're just resigned to the idea that this is how their lives will always be and they're angry about it. Not that I can blame them. I think that's what's going on here. Don't quote me in your scholarly essay."
Robin nodded along. "That's a pretty good hypothesis, Johnny. Good thing we're helping Georgetown before they're too far gone… shame that suggests we're too late to save these people though…"
"Y'know…" Johnny kept philosophizing, "...walking these streets, seeing how everything looks, getting rejected about fifty/fifty… I think about all those rich fuckwits who would look around here and assess the situation and go, 'Oh, how can you help people who don't help themselves?' But these people do try to help themselves, you know that, I know that. They work their tails off to support themselves and their families - God knows they wanna keep reminding us. So that ain't the problem… But what I think would be a better question, with all these people who've been kicked while they're down their whole lives and don't have any reason to believe the boot standing in front of their face belongs to someone who's gonna bend over and pick them up… how do you help people who refuse to trust you to help them? ...I think that's a better question to ask."
Robin kept nodding, impressed by the folk-poetry Johnny was coming up with. "Yeah… just like those protestors who wouldn't have me-"
"N-no! No, Robin, no! Jesus, dude, bad example, wrong battle to pick! They had a pretty good reason to tell you to fuck off, you literally crashed their party and told them they couldn't succeed without your help. Fuck, if word gets around that you have a grudge against a civil rights group over this, now that's gonna do some damage to our reputations! I was talking about Mister Fatfuck Walrus, I was talking about the crackheaded bitch and the cocksucker buck in 3N, people like that!"
Robin still kept nodding, not feeling very verbose today and certainly not feeling very argumentative anymore. "Okay, Johnny, fair point, fair point… Do you think she was right in everything she said, though?"
Little John was worried that Robin was still dwelling on this. "Well… some things she said I agree with more than others, but… at the end of the day, I'm sure if she were here, she'd tell us that our opinions about her opinions didn't matter, and I'm sure there are a lotta people who'd agree with her.
Robin nodded again, not feeling the need to add any words.
"...Okay," said Little John, "I can't wait any longer. What's this about you having a fear of crowds?"
Robin didn't say anything.
"Like, hey man, I don't wanna yank out any bad memories, but I feel like as your friend, I oughta know this stuff."
"No, no, I- I'm not avoiding the question," Robin insisted, "I'm just… thinking of the best way to say it."
"It's okay, take your time."
"So… yeah, there was something that happened when I was a lad, a bunch of people got packed like sardines and they suffocated to death standing right up. Happened walking distance from my house, me mum worked the ER that day, they took a bunch of them to her hospital… and she came home completely shaken, told us everything, and…"
"Jesus Christ, Rob, I'm sorry you had to go through that."
"Oh, don't worry, I'm not the one to feel sorry for, a lot of people were hurting more than I was that day, plenty I'm sure still are. I wasn't even affected by it."
"It sounds to me like you were very affected by it."
"Well… it's just that… ever since that day, I… I suppose that's when I first gained a fear of death - but not just any death. I guess… I guess I became afraid of dying… suddenly, and needlessly. Like… when I escaped the mayor's burning mansion and they were shooting me in the creek- yes, I was afraid I was going to die, of course I was, but I didn't go into that situation terrified of the idea of death. Because in my head… honestly, I'd be fine dying tomorrow if I died heroically. I just don't want to die in vain, Johnny. Because what really scares the living daylights out of me is if after all the hard work and all the great things you and I have done…" And he pointed to the next intersection up ahead. "...is if after all that, I cross that street and get hit by a car and boom, that's it, that's the end of me. Or that transformer could explode and the power lines collapse onto me. Or I could drop dead from a brain hemorrhage. Or…" Now he held out his cast for Johnny to see. "...Or I could fall out of a tree and break my neck."
They arrived at said intersection and made a point to look both ways very carefully before crossing. Somewhere off in the middle distance, some boys were shouting.
"...I think I get what you're saying."
"You know, though… this is right fucked up, but in some ways it's good that I went through that trauma when I was a lad. Because if I hadn't learnt then how any one of us could die at any moment for the stupidest reason… I might not have tried to make the most of my life while I still had it. I certainly don't think I'd be doing all this."
"I hear ya," said Little John, who didn't know what to say but felt he had to say something.
"So all the people of Nottingham owe a great thanks to dozens of people for their sacrifice and how it lit a fire under me arse… Argh, I feel so sick and callous talking about all those unfortunate souls this way, but I don't honestly think anything I'm saying is wrong. Life is twisted sometimes like that."
"Okay then, we don't need to talk about it." They had crossed the street, but now they would soon be crossing the alleyway serving the houses facing the street they had just crossed.
"I'm just saying, Johnny, let them take me out in the line of duty. Don't cry for me if I go out with a bang trying to be strong and make the world a better place; cry for me if I go out with a whimper at my weakest moment and all our hard work gets erased."
"Brother, if I ever lose you, I'll be crying like a baby either way."
"And likewise I for you, Johnny. So don't you ever put me in that position!" Robin found the energy to chuckle. "I call dibs on dying first!"
"Naw, fuck you, Rob! I call dibs on dying first!"
"Ohhh, I'll race you to the end! And you can't kill yourself, that's cheating!"
"Boy, I don't need to cheat with my family history of heart disease!"
"But you know I'm a magnet for negativity!"
Thunk.
"Aaargh!" Robin yelped as he fell to the ground, clutching his head. Around him rolled a peewee-regulation-sized football.
"Robin!?" Little John shrieked.
"Hey, get off the ground and throw our football back, you weak-ass faggot!" yelled an adolescent-sounding voice.
Robin and John turned to see seven or so teenage boys standing around in the alley.
"Just don't throw it to Austin because he sucks at catching even more than he sucks at throwing!" hollered an otter.
"Shut the fuck up, Wade, you're too much of a midget to play QB anyway!" a gorilla boy shouted back at the otter.
"It don't matter how big your Koy-Detmer-lookin' ass is, Austin!" jeered a sheepdog. "You ain't no Donovan McNabb!"
"You gonna throw us the ball back or what, fuckwit?" asked the first voice, which belonged to a young buck; this boy was now walking over to the Merry Men and the others seemed to be following him. "Are you deaf or are you as retarded as you look?"
Little John was fuming as he helped Robin to his feet, but Robin had had enough friction for one day and wanted to try to play it cool.
"Well gimme a second, lads," said Robin. "You saw you hit me square in the head."
"'Lads'?" asked a puzzled cheetah. "What, are you fucking Scottish or something?"
Robin smirked. "Wrong part of the island, lad. Try English."
"Wh-? I am speaking English, you fucking retard!"
"He means he's from England, Cody, you fucking retard!" laughed a coyote. "'English' is what skinheads from the England part of England call themselves because they're too racist to be associated with Scottish people!"
Robin wanted to say something to protest being labeled as such, but deep down he knew that the coyote's assessment of the practical usage of that demonym wasn't entirely wrong.
"Of course you know that, Damien, you fucking nerd!" went a wolf boy whose fur was the color of cigarette smoke.
"It'd be a lot cooler if you were Scottish because the Scottish are at least manly faggots!" said the deer straight to Robin's face. "Regular British people are just a bunch of limp-wristed candy-ass fags. Ain't that right?"
"Oh, and from where are you getting this information?" Robin was starting to get angry again, but that was tempered by the thought that these were just rambunctious teenagers and they probably posed no real threat to him, so he was able to channel his emotions into acting cooler than they thought they were.
"From the world, dipshit!" said the stag. "Am I wrong? Prove me wrong!"
"He's walking down the street with his boyfriend, seems pretty gay to me," said the gorilla who sucked at throwing footballs.
"Well shit, there ya go!" the deer said as he threw his arms out from his chest as if to say come at me. "Case closed!"
"Goddammit, what's with all the fucking teenagers in this town harassing us and calling us faggots!?" Little John growled.
"Oh shit, the mauler talks too!" said the otter.
"And he's not British, he's a redneck!" added the sheepdog.
"How'd you get out of the South without being murdered for being a homosexual?" asked the wolf.
"That's a sick fucking joke, kid," said Johnny.
"Who the hell said I was joking, fucktard? It's a serious question!"
"So that double-confirms you're a gay couple," said the deer, who seemed to be the ringleader of these delinquents.
"Wh-th-f- how the fuck does that confirm we're a-!?"
"Because the first thing out of your mouth wasn't 'we're not gay,' it was 'that's a really mean thing to say.'"
"And then he asked how we knew they were gay and still didn't say we were actually wrong," said the cheetah.
"Motherfucker, we're not a couple and that was a fucked up thing to say! Both statements are true! Why are you kids choosing to be such assholes!?"
"Because we hate you," said the coyote as matter-of-factly as any of them had said anything.
"Yeah, what he said," echoed the otter with the same no-nonsense tone.
"Well if you hate us for being gay," said Robin, "your energy might be misplaced. You lads really aren't familiar with the concept of two guys being friends?"
"Boyfriends, maybe!" jeered the cheetah.
"If you're just friends, where are your other friends?" asked the deer.
"Uh…?" Robin completely misunderstood the question.
"The fuck do you mean, 'where are our other friends?'" Johnny growled.
"Where are your other friends? It's a simple question," said the deer. "You see us? We don't hang out unless at least three of us are together at the same time, because we know if it was just two of us then people'd think we're queer. Jesus, how are you adults and not know basic facts of life?"
"Yeah, only having one friend is even weirder than not having any!" said the sheepdog.
"And for the record, we don't hate you for being gay," said the coyote, "we hate you because you're not us, and the fact that you're weak-ass gay-boys just means it's even easier to fuck with you."
"And we hate you because you never threw us back our fucking ball!" the deer said as he went over to the oblong that had rolled to Little John's feet, bent over to pick it up, started to stand up, but then stopped halfway and head-butted the bear's stomach with his adolescent antlers.
"Gah!"
"Good one, Dylan!" the gorilla congratulated as the other boys looked impressed by the deer's antisocial tactics.
"You kids really think it's a good idea to assault someone six times your size!?"
"Hell yes, we do!" beamed the deer. "We're minors! You lay a hand on us, you go to jail!"
"Yeah, there's seven of us and three of you!" added the coyote. "You could each take three of us and there'd still be one of us left over to scream 'CHILD MOLESTERS, CHILD MOLESTERS!' really, really loud."
"Alright, you know what? Fuck it, I'm leaving!" Little John said as he threw his hands in the air and turned to walk in the opposite direction.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa there, buddy!" said the deer as he ran over to block Little John's exit. "You can't leave until we say you can!"
And just like that, the other six boys moved into a circle around Little John and Robin.
"So, what, you think you can just keep us from leaving!?"
"You think we're fucking with you about screaming 'child molester'? We'll do it."
"Yeah, Dylan's really good at screaming from all the practice he gets when his dad rapes him every night!" said the cheetah.
"Cody, you shut the hell up or I'll rape your mother!"
As the officer had warned them and their experiences that day had validated, Robin and John couldn't just assume that these kids were bluffing about invoking the police, no matter how much it may be against their own best interests. That was the moment the two of them truly felt stuck in this alleyway. Around this time, a car tried turning into the alley, but upon seeing the path blocked by the teenagers and their hostages, the unidentified driver immediately threw it in reverse and backed out of the alley without so much as a honk of the horn.
"Who are you faggots?" asked the sheepdog.
Feeling like he had nothing left to lose, Robin thought he ought to gamble by impressing these kids with what didn't impress Alex and Landon.
"Why, we're the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest!" Robin said proudly. "We-"
"That is an extremely gay name," said the wolf, and the others nodded and murmured in agreement.
"But you see, lads, we're professional thieves! Experts at it! You're looking at the two men most feared by all the ruling class of this city! We live underground in the forest and they haven't caught us in seven years of robbing them every single day!"
The teenagers looked shocked that he had just disclosed that information, as did Little John, who didn't understand Robin's motivation for saying all that.
"Uh…" Johnny began, "why did you just tell them-?"
But he was interrupted by the sound of the coyote standing right in front of Robin laughing to himself, then leaning in and pointing at Robin, starting a chant which the other boys joined in:
"Swiper, no swiping! Swiper, no swiping! SWIPER, NO SWIPING!"
They all started laughing heartily and pointing at Robin, who had no idea what they were referencing, just assuming it was generic anti-fox prejudice.
The gorilla nudged the sheepdog. "Carlos, be Dora and tell him to go fuck himself in Spanish!"
"¡Oye, maricón…!" jeered the sheepdog. "...Tigga, I don't speak that much Spanish!"
"Hey listen, spic, you watch it with that fuckin' word!" warned the cheetah, still half-smiling as one does when exchanging extreme racial slurs with a close friend of a different extraction. "Otherwise I'll feed ya to the fatfuck grizzly bear!"
"Naw, I don't think this thief needs any more food!" said the deer, still standing right in front of Little John. Fearlessly, this kid started literally poking the bear, repeatedly, specifically in the belly region. "Looks like Yogi here's already stolen enough pic-a-nic baskets!"
"Oh, yeah, ya see a brown bear and ya think of Yogi Bear!" said Little John. "Right, right, real original!"
"No, I don't think of Yogi Bear everytime I see a brown bear," the deer said with a revolting amount of confidence. "I think of Yogi Bear everytime I see a homeless, obese, Jewish brown bear with a goofy-sounding voice, wearing green and hanging out with someone half his size, living in the woods and stealing shit to survive."
Johnny was more confused than offended. "...I'm sorry, did you say 'Jewish'?"
"Yeah, I can tell by your voice. But don't worry, you're one of the gravelly-voiced kikes, not one of the sniveling nasally ones."
"Kid, I'm from a part of the country where we barely even have any Jewish pe-!"
"We still don't know your names."
"Yeah, what're your names!?" demanded the gorilla.
"Ah, but of course!" Robin said, desperately trying to salvage the situation with his charms. "Perhaps you've heard of us. I'm Robin Hood, pleasure to make your acquaintance." As he had told Johnny earlier, Robin firmly believed that the only way they would ever inspire people like these kids to not be completely terrible people is if they could see someone make being a good person look cool enough to be worth emulating.
"So you're British and you have a girl's name and you really want us to believe you're not gay?" asked the deer dismissively; the question of whether any of these kids were indeed secretly privy to the existence of the Merry Men would remain unanswered. The deer turned to the bear without waiting for the fox to respond. "How 'bout you, Yogi?"
"I'm not telling you my-!"
"And that right there is Little John," said Robin. And there was a brief second where Little John was glaring down at a nervously-smiling Robin before their attention was drawn instead to the kids laughing.
"Your name is… you're Lil Jon!?" asked the deer, guffawing.
"...Yeah?"
"You're the Lil Jon!?" asked the gorilla.
"...Uh-huh, yeah?"
"So you have heard of us!" said Robin.
"We've heard of Lil Jon," said the wolf, "everybody knows who Lil Jon is!"
And the kids kept laughing.
"So… you've heard of my friend but you haven't heard of-?"
"Diddle-um-dum-dum, da-duh-la-dum-dum…" the sheepdog began singing quietly.
"...me?"
"Diddle-um-dum-dum, da-duh-la-dum-dum…" The cheetah and the deer joined in.
Little John didn't get it either. "What the fuck are you kids-?"
And then all seven of the boys started singing at the top of their lungs.
"TO THE WIIINDOOOOOOOOOOW, TO THE WAAAAALL!"
"To the wall!"
"Erm…"
"FROM THE SWEAT DROP DOWN MY BAAAAALLS!"
"I'm confused-"
"AAAAALL THESE BIIITCHESSS CRAAAAAWL!"
"What?"
"YOWWWWW, SKEET SKEET, MOTHAFUCKAAAAAAAAA!"
"What does that even-!?"
"YOWWWWW, SKEET SKEET, GODDAMN!"
"Oh, godDAMN!"
"What the FUCK are you kids doing!?" Little John hollered.
The kids all still had shit-eating grins on their faces as their rendition ground to a halt.
"What's the matter, Lil Jon, ya don't recognize your own song?" teased the buck.
"Aw, he's probably not the Lil Jon!" the sheepdog goofed. Clearly none of them had thought he was, but they had grown bored of the charade.
"Then why the fuck do they call your big ass Little John?" asked the gorilla.
"I'm not answering that-"
"He probably got a little dick!" said the coyote.
"Yeah, I bet he does!" said the wolf.
"Show us your dick, Little John," ordered the deer.
"I'm not showing you my dick!"
"Show us your dick!" said the cheetah.
"We're gonna assume you have a small dick unless you prove it otherwise!" said the otter.
"Fine! You think I care about what a bunch of kids think about my gear!?"
"Only femboy faggots who take it up the ass are okay with people thinking they have a small dick," said the deer.
"Do you think I care if you think I'm a femboy faggot!?"
"You cared earlier," said the coyote. "'Oh, we're not a couple, we're just friends!'"
"Maybe he doesn't have a dick!" said the sheepdog. "Maybe he's a she-male!"
"No, she-males are chicks with dicks, retard!" said the wolf to the sheepdog. "Like the kind of chicks you like! Little John here must be a cunt-boy!"
"You kids already said you're gonna frame us for pedophilia if we don't let you fuck with us! You really think I'm dumb enough to actually expose myself to a bunch of kids!?"
The deer smirked. "Awww, he saw right through us! Okay, have it your way. I'll just show you my dick and I'll tell by the look on your face whether it's bigger or smaller than yours!" Without waiting, the kid went right ahead and started unzipping his fly.
"Oh, I am not looking at a kid's dick!" Little John groaned as he just turned around to show his back to the delinquent deer. "Y'know, for some kids who really hate gay people, you sure do seem obsessed with looking at dicks!" he said to the opposite side of the circle.
"Aw, you're right," said the deer behind him, "this is pretty stupid, let me just put this away… hey, Little John, you dropped your wallet!"
"Wait, what?" Little John turned around to see that the stag was not only still revealing his genitals, but sticking his pelvis forward to display them in prominence.
"HA! Pedophile! Gay pedophile!"
"Oh, goddammit!" Little John turned around again, trying to look at anything else to get the image out of his head.
"I saw his face, he was shocked! He's definitely got a little one!"
Johnny just turned to Robin, who had been silently watching this all unfold with a dumb look on his face for lack of an apparent alternative. "Rob, ya remember how I told you a couple times that I didn't actually wanna be called 'Little John', I just let you call me that?"
"...Yeah?"
"I hold you responsible for this moment. Fuck you for this."
"Well, in my defense, Johnny, I didn't expect that something out of West Side Story would happen where we get surrounded by a singing street gang-"
"STREET GANG!?" the kids all shouted in near-unison. They weren't joking this time, they seemed actually offended.
"You think we're a fucking gang!?"
"You really think a street gang would bother messing with a couple of dipshit losers like you!?"
"Do you see us all wearing the same color or are you fucking color blind!?"
"Uh…" Robin struggled for words as his mind was filled with questions about why he kept making an uncharacteristic amount of social faux pas today.
"They probably saw Cody and thought, 'Oh shit, a tigger! These must be gangbangers!'" the wolf said with a chuckle, warranting the cheetah to grab him by the elbow and punch him as hard as he could in the arm.
"Shut the fuck up, Mario!" Cody growled at the wolf before turning to Robin and getting close to him, the teenage cheetah having a decent height advantage on the lanky fox. "Is he right, though? Are you scared because I'm here? If there wasn't a tigger here, would you just think the rest of these retarded faggots were just a bunch of harmless kids?"
Robin couldn't help but look a bit nervous as he looked up at the cheetah. He had absolutely no idea whether this kid was actually angry or just pretending to be to make Robin afraid.
"Er…"
"Hey, maybe it's not just you, Cody!" said the otter. "Maybe he was afraid of the Mexican, too!" he said as he gestured toward the sheepdog.
"Wade, you know I'm not fucking Mexican!" replied the one called Carlos.
"He doesn't know that!"
"...Hey, good point!"
"But wait!" said the coyote. "Wasn't there some war between the British and Argentina and now the Argentineans and the British hate each other?"
"Damien, you fucking nerd-" said the gorilla.
"No, wait! He's right!" said the sheepdog. "My parents fucking hate the British!"
"Oh, so it's you he's after!" the cheetah said, pointing at the dog. "His racist British canine nose could smell the Argentina on you!"
"Hey, yeah, he could smell it in my scent! Fuck you, asshole, ¡las Malvinas son argentinas!" Then the dog started laughing. "...Or whatever the fuck it is my parents say!"
"And the Potato Famine was a genocide!" added the gorilla.
"And we still ain't forgot that out of all the colonists you coulda shot to start the Revolutionary War, you picked Crispus Attucks!" added the cheetah.
"Who the fuck is Crispin Attics?" asked the wolf.
"The dude who was half African jackal and half Native coyote! There were plenty of Europeans around for the British to shoot and they picked him!"
"Uh, Rob?" Little John asked. "What is it with you and starting ethnic tensions today?"
"You'll have to pardon my ignorance of your man Crispus, boys," Robin said to the crowd, "but they don't teach us much about your revolution back home. It was just another Tuesday for us!"
"AHouw, it 'twas JAUST anotha' CHEWSday fo' UZ- man, shut the fuck up, Redcoat!" said the coyote.
"Wait, are you calling him a redcoat because he's British or because his coat of fur is literally red?" asked the otter.
"It works both ways, actually!" said Robin, who was running out of ideas for peaceably leaving this situation and was sticking with the strategy of playing along because he couldn't think of anything better shy of outright assaulting some minors - and even then, they might still have the two of them beat on sheer numbers.
"Hey, Swiper!" said the deer. "I see ya got Dora's backpack on ya. Whatcha carrying?"
Deep in the red, Robin decided to keep gambling to get himself back in the black. He did not succeed.
"Well you, see, Dylan - it's Dylan, yes?"
"Answer the fucking question."
"...So you see, lads, we're not just petty thieves! We're heroes! We steal from the rich and give to the poor of this city!"
"Robin," asked Johnny, "why the fuck are you telling them this-!?"
"Because, Johnny, I need these lads to know that they are in the presence of greatness! Yes, if they want to keep pestering us, they need to know that they're messing with some of the most beloved people in this town, and there will be many, many people on our side who won't take too kindly to you harassing us!"
Robin smiled a confident smile, and looking around vindicated his confidence, as all the boys looked spooked. But in reality, much like Little John, these kids were not spooked, but rather dumbfounded that Robin had thought it was a smart decision to divulge this information.
"But… the cops aren't any of those people on your side," said the coyote.
"Yeah, all I heard in that was that if you don't let us keep fucking with you, we can probably actually screw you over by getting the cops in here," said the sheepdog.
"All I heard was that there's probably a big reward for turning you faggots in!" said the gorilla.
"Fuck that, all I heard was 'give to the poor',' said the deer. "And, well… we're the poor! So what's in the bag, Swiper? Money?"
Robin was starting to realize he may have worked himself into a corner. "Well… yes-"
"Alright, give us the backpack."
"Well, I am a gracious man even to my enemies, so I can certainly give you some-"
"Some? No. Give us the backpack."
"And what in the good golly fuck is preventing me from shoving you out of the way and telling you to fuck off?" asked Little John.
Dylan showed no wavering courage as he looked up at the gigantic bear straight in the eyes. "What, besides the fact that we'll scream that you're child molesters? Hold on, gotta scratch my ass…" he said as he went digging in the seat of his jeans. "I mean we already discussed that part earlier, so… oopsie, look what I found!" And so he presented a shiny black pistol.
"Oh, what the fuck-!" Little John swore as he shook his head in frustration, but in this motion, something caught his eye. Right on cue, the other six pulled out pistols of their own.
"Hands in the air, faggots."
"Oh, bollocks…" Robin muttered as he raised his arms, Little John following suit.
"Goddammit, Robin, why did you show your fucking hand!?" hollered Johnny. "Are you kids sure you're not a street gang?"
"Yeah, man, we're the 28th Street Readers!" the gorilla joked. "If you don't fuck with Hop on Pop, we don't fuck with you!"
"Aw, shut up, Austin, you probably still read Dr. Seuss!" jeered the deer, who then turned his attention back to Robin. "Give us the money. All of it."
Seeing no other option, Robin slipped the backpack off his arm and handed it to the deer boy.
"I just realized his arm's broken," said the otter.
"He probably tried shoving his entire arm up the bear's ass and it got stuck in there and he broke it trying to get it out!" theorized the cheetah.
Meanwhile, Dylan was going through the backpack to see how much they'd scored, then slipped it on his own shoulders when he was satisfied. And when the bag was securely on his person, at that precise moment, the boys all started laughing all over again.
"I can't believe that actually worked!" the deer wheezed.
"Oh, now what!?" Little John grumbled, lowering his arms because at this point getting shot in the head didn't sound too bad.
The sheepdog raised his pistol. "These are BB guns, you fucking retards!" he laughed.
"They are!?"
"Yeah, see?" the wolf said as he demonstrated by putting his gun up to the head of the coyote, who had his eyes closed as he was doubled over in laughter.
POP.
"GAH! Mario, that fucking hurt!" the coyote protested as his head started bleeding.
"It did?"
"Yes, you retarded fucking guinea!"
"Aren't BB guns supposed to have colorful plastic on them so people know they're toys!?" Little John demanded.
"Yes," said the deer, "aaand it takes not even sixty seconds to pop the plastic off. Why would we want you to know these are toys? Then we couldn't get what we wanted out of you."
Little John looked at Robin. The fox looked catatonic, his arms still raised but sinking as though they were already falling asleep from a lack of blood-flow. Robin had clearly failed more times today and more severely today than he was used to, and he obviously didn't know how to handle it. But Robin was like the people of Georgetown: when life got them down, while they didn't give up, they did start feeling down. Johnny, meanwhile, was like the people of Hermosa Park: when life got them down, they were all too used to it, sick of it, and having no time to be sad, they just got angry.
"What the FUCK is wrong with you kids!?" the bear roared. "Is this really who you wanna be!? You really wanna fuck with complete strangers just for a fucking power trip!? At least me and this limey bastard rob people for a constructive fucking reason! What you little retards are doing… committing false imprisonment at the threat of framing people for molesting you just so you can fuck with them, robbing people at gunpoint with weapons that aren't even fucking REAL-" he leaned in and looked the ringleader in the eye. "-this is cowardly."
And the stag laughed. "Heh… 'cowardly'? You think we're cowardly?"
"YES, I DO!"
"No, no, no, dipshit. Most people would be too cowardly to do this. This is bravery. This is strength. And you falling for it and not fighting back is cowardly!"
"No, beating the shit out of a kid - which I could have done at any point - would be fucking cowardly!"
"We're not just kids, we're strong, brave kids who are clearly stronger and braver than you are! Pfft, cowardly. Are you fucking delusional? You wanna talk about cowardly? THIS is cowardly!" And at that, Dylan took a step forward in a motion just like a soccer player making a free kick, and to roughly half the world's population, this narrator apologizes for what happened next.
THWACK.
"GheeeAAAAAaaaaaAAAAAhhhhh…!" Little John screeched as he collapsed to the ground. He may have been gifted with a good voice, but he had never been able to hit a note quite that high before.
"Johnny!" That act of violence seemed to have snapped Robin out of his stupor.
"I can't breathe!" Johnny moaned and groaned as he vocalized like a soprano.
Robin no longer respected the boundaries of the kids' circle and ran over to assist his fallen friend. The boys didn't like that.
"Let's break his cast!" We aren't even sure which of them yelled this, but it hardly mattered, as not two seconds later, they were upon him.
First one of them cracked Robin over the head with their BB gun. It didn't knock him out, but it did disorient them enough to allow the bigger kids to drag him over to the curb of the sidewalk met the asphalt. Their first idea was to slam his arm against the curb repeatedly, Robin screaming as anybody in his position would, but then they got more creative.
"Hey, let's go take him to the sewer grate!"
They all agreed and dragged him a few dozen feet down the street to a drainage grate with a big gaping hole in the vertical face of the curb.
And Little John heard all of this, and was doing all he could to save his friend, army-crawling toward the site of the torture as quickly as he could despite every motion in the lower half of his body causing pain like he hadn't felt in years.
"Robin… Robin, I'm coming…"
Several of the kids had their feet and knees on Robin's back, legs, and left arm; he wasn't going anywhere. One of them stuck his arm in the hole, just beyond the wrist, and started kicking Robin's elbow for all he was worth, using the lip of the curb as the fulcrum.
"AAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!"
"Quit your whining," said the deer, who then noticed something big and brown slowly making their way toward them. Therefore he went over to confront it.
"H- hey!" Little John wheezed. "Let go of my friend!"
"You want me to fuckin' blind you?" the buck asked, pointing his BB gun at each of Johnny's eyes. "One shot, two shots, goodnight, everything's gonna look dark for the rest of your life. I'm not interested in a life where I'm not in control over everybody I meet. If you don't understand that, I'll make you understand that."
Little John was two seconds away from throwing away all his standards for himself and literally, actually ripping this kid limb from limb in the most gruesome conceivable way, for he could not think of anybody more evil that he'd ever met in his life. But in those two seconds, a new voice emerged.
"HEY!" It sounded like an older gentleman.
Dylan turned to see a wolf approaching. "What the fuck do you want, McCreadie!?"
"Why the fuck are you doing to these two!? I'll have you know these guys are local fuckin' heroes and they did absolutely nothing to deserve your abuse-!"
"Shut the fuck up, old man!" said the deer as he pointed his BB gun at the wolf's face.
Mr. McCreadie, however, was unafraid. "Oh, get that shit out of my face!" he shouted as he slapped the gun out of Dylan's hand, its plastic casing and chassis shattering as it hit the ground.
"...You just broke my gun!"
"Damn straight, I did! And you kids!" the old man said as he went over to the scene where Robin was being victimized. "Get the fuck off him!" He shoved the gorilla and wolf boys off the fox, whose arm was still intact but whose cast was not.
"Hey!" protested the ape as he stood to face the old wolf. "You don't fucking touch me like that!"
"You kids get the fuck outta here right now or I'm calling the cops!"
"Do it!" challenged Dylan. "I'll tell them you destroyed my fucking property just to defend some wanted criminals who they wanna kill anyway!"
"You're a sick fuck, Dylan!" the wolf howled. "You're a sick fucking kid and you and all your friends are gonna wind up in prison sooner than-!"
The deer had had enough of being talked down to, so he punched the old man right between the eyes. The stranger fell straight backwards and the back of his head hit the lip of the curb with a sickening sound that one might describe as a crack.
"HA!" Dylan cheered for himself. "ONE PUNCH! ONE PUNCH and he's out!" He high-fived his friends as he went back over to Robin, arm still stuck in the sewer hole. "You see!? That's what happens when you mess with ME!"
Little John was the first to notice what was wrong. "Oh, my god…"
The boys heard his voice and looked at him.
"The fuck are you whining abou-?" The deer stopped when he realized what Little John was looking at. "Huh… I really KO'd him, didn't I?"
"Yeah, I… guess ya did," said the cheetah, though not as excitedly. Dylan's other friends didn't look too excited, either.
"Um… he's bleeding out his ears…" observed the coyote. "...A lot."
The seven of them suddenly all looked very afraid, and when the deer kneeled down and put his finger in front of the old wolf's nose, he looked very, very afraid.
"Shit, run," he commanded, and the other six needed no push to follow. "RUN!"
And off the seven teenagers ran down South Dakota Avenue, and perhaps to make it easier to run, Dylan slipped the backpack full of cash off his shoulders and dropped it in the street.
"Oh, my god…" Little John repeated to himself as he crawled over to where Mr. McCreadie lay. Johnny was again having trouble breathing, but now for entirely different reasons. "Oh, my god…"
"Johnny!"
Little John looked up to see Robin standing over him on the sidewalk, free from the sewer, jittering and even more panicked than he was.
"Johnny, we have to go!"
"B-but we have to help him!"
"Johnny, the cops will be here any minute now!"
"Rob, we have to help him, we can't just leave him here!"
"Johnny, if we stay here any longer, they'll think we did it!" Robin cried, his voice breaking. "We can't help him!"
"Robin!" Little John's own voice was now broken. "Wh-what did that kid ask you!? What would we do if- if we saw an injustice that didn't affect us? D-do ya wanna tell him we just ran away!? That we didn't even try to help!?"
And for a moment, they just looked into one another's eyes, seeing the light of the setting sun shimmer in the pools forming over their irises.
"...Johnny…" Robin leaned down and put his paw on the bear's shoulder. "He's- there's nothing we can do, Johnny… we have to go."
Little John turned back to the man and grabbed his arm, which was completely limp. He put a finger to his wrist and waited, and only then did he get himself up off the ground, running off to follow Robin. The last he saw of the man were his eyes, half-open and unfocused as they stared into the sky. All these years later, Johnny Little still expresses regret that he didn't take a second to at least close the man's eyes.
As they ran down the street, Little John made a point to pick up the fallen backpack. Perhaps it may seem a callous decision, but when he grabbed the money, he had every intent to deliver the contents of the bag to the stranger's family. McCreadie, he repeated to himself, McCreadie, McCreadie, McCreadie. Alas, both Robin and Little John had forgotten the man's name by morning, thanks in no small part to their activities that night, and only rediscovered the name of Robert Thomas McCreadie when our editing team went digging with them through old news articles looking for a story about him, eventually finding one reporting about an elderly man found dead on the 2800 block of North South Dakota Avenue after what was presumed to be a senseless act of violence, but that authorities were hopeful about finding the culprits with clues from a shattered BB gun in the vicinity and bloodstains nearby that didn't match the victim, a story buried under much bigger headlines of even more dramatic things that had happened in Nottingham around that time.
-IllI-
It was getting dark out as the Montana Avenue bus approached 70th Street.
Robin let out an exhausted sigh as he stared out the window. "Never stops surprising me how early the sun sets in the summer down here."
Little John misunderstood. "It's eight-thirty, though."
Robin didn't "Yes, but… remember, higher latitudes, longer summer days. In Sheffield in the summer, the sun would start rising long before five o'clock and there'd be light in the sky past ten at night."
"Hm… interesting." Johnny wasn't in the mood for small talk.
"But on the flip side, in the winter, it'd be dark from before four in the afternoon until almost half-eight in the morning… fair trade, I suppose."
"Huh… never realized how far north you guys are, I guess."
"Hm… yeah, geography is interesting," Robin murmured as he readjusted in his seat and sighed again. "...Just glad this day is finally over, though."
"Amen."
They got to their destination and hopped off the bus, then walked westward toward the dying light.
"I'm kinda afraid to ask…" Little John mumbled, "...but I gotta be a good friend. How ya feeling?"
Robin just kept looking at his feet on the sidewalk. "Well, Johnny… you had the same day I did."
"Yeah, but I didn't almost get my arm rebroken. Lemme see that."
Robin held out his arm, which was still being held together by a jagged, splintered hunk of plaster that was split into two or three contiguous chunks. A bunch of gigantic holes betrayed the incision stitches and the slightest bit of fuzz growing on his shaved arm.
"Jesus Christ, Rob."
"Hey, there's a metal plate in my arm. It's stronger than ever, innit?"
"Well we should still have Geoff take a look at it."
"Ah, it can wait until morning. Let him enjoy his Friday night…" He kept staring at his busted arm. "This old thing sure is quite the attention-seeker, ain't she? Is it too hot out to be wearing a long-sleeved shirt? Or maybe a hooded sweatshirt to match my name!"
"You're really that self-conscious about that, aren't you?"
Robin chuckled and shook his head. "No… no, what I'm insecure about is the fact that I've realized today that I'm a complete sham."
"Robin, no-"
"That I don't know how to actually relate to the poor I've sworn to serve-"
"Robin-"
"-that I've lost the ability to talk to difficult people-"
"Rob-"
"-that we've only lasted this long because some cops have been going easy on us because they hate their own superiors more than they hate us-"
"No-"
"-that I'm capable of shamefully evil thoughts of initiating violence-"
"Wait, what?"
"-that I'm completely tone-deaf to social issues and completely daft about noticing the enthic makeup of a crowd-"
"Dude-"
"-and that I'm not fit to lead people I'm trying to help because I'm not truly one of them-"
"Jesus, Rob, no-"
"-in part because maybe I am a narcissist who has a crippling fear of crowds anyway-"
"Goddammit, I thought you were done…"
"-that teenagers who are too old to be impressed by me and too young to respect me will always be allergic to my personality-"
"Man, fuck'em-"
"-that I am not as creative at getting out of tough situations as I had fancied myself to be-"
"Oh, lordy…"
"-and that my gross incompetence and insistence on engaging with violent psychopaths whom I grossly underestimated got an innocent man killed. Among other things."
Little John just took a deep breath. Robin still wasn't looking up.
"Okay… so… that last part…" Johnny ventured carefully, "...it's neither right or wrong, it's incomplete. You… and I… were involved in a series of events that wound up leading to that. We didn't cause them, we just participated in them, and at no point did we make a choice that we could have reasonably thought would have resulted in that. We can't be held responsible for the end result when it was out of our hands, and honestly, I think it would be self-centered to suggest that… okay? Does that make sense?"
Robin nodded exactly twice, very slowly. "Still feel like I ought to have had the foresight to have seen that anyway-"
"Oh, bullshit! Nobody could have seen that coming."
"Hmm… hindsight's twenty-twenty, I suppose."
"Yup."
They crossed a street, making sure to look both ways very carefully.
"Hey. Rob. You got off to a rough start today and never really got back in your groove. Happens to the best of us." And also you've been geeking on painkillers all day, that couldn't've helped...
"And I know it does, but I'm not content to be so… flawed."
"...Well, what, do ya wanna be God?"
Robin chuckled. "That'd be nice." He turned his head up and looked down the street, which was ending in a few blocks as they approached the woods. "And for a while there, I had myself convinced I wasn't so flawed. And it seems like I had everyone else convinced, too… I wonder if I owe them an apology for misleading them…"
"Hrm," was all Little John said.
Another thing on Robin's mind was that moment where Little John couldn't even look at him after Robin had embarrassed himself on the topic of social issues, among other moments that seemed to suggest a waning loyalty. He kept flip-flopping in his mind over whether it was uncalled for or whether it was completely justified and he deserved to be abandoned by his friend: Johnny wouldn't look at him when he needed to feel less alone, but then again, Robin had completely isolated and made an arse of himself; Johnny didn't want to play nice with the icier locals, but then again, maybe he was just better at reading the room than Robin was; Johnny didn't want to play along with deconverting some psychopathic kids from the cult of evil, but then again, look how well that turned out. In the end, Robin decided not to bring it up; that was far from the most important thing that happened that day.
For similar reasons, Little John wasn't pushing Robin on being a bad friend even though he really, really wanted to; between not listening to him and not telling him things, Johnny was building a pretty strong case against Robin for not truly regarding him as an equal. But it simply wouldn't be appropriate to criticize him on it now. Instead, Little John told himself that he needed to be a good friend for his bad friend or his bad friend would never get better.
"So…" began Little John, "I guess we really need to bite the bullet and let those kids come along with us."
"Kids!?"
"Yeah… th-the kids from Peach Creek. The other fox and the other bear. And maybe the wolf if he grows a pair… hey, that rhymes."
Robin smirked. "I actually have quite the opposite thought. I don't wanna hang around teenagers ever again if I don't have to."
"What? Really!?"
"You saw how those devilish kids had their way with me today. Teenagers and I just don't seem to click. Younger kids like Skippy? They love me, because they still believe in heroes. Then they get older and jaded, though, and… they just have no patience for someone who tries to be a good person. No matter how cool you try to make it seem."
"Well, hey, do you really get the impression that the Eds're that bad? Like, no disrespect, but they really kinda seem like… well, like you know how that son of a bitch buck fuck was trying to sell us on the idea that he was a fuckin' portrait of bravery and people who didn't victimize people were cowards? Well I think the Eds would be too cowardly to victimize people."
"And I see your point, Johnny, those suburban lads definitely aren't that bad, and they can't be if they want to come along with us, but… I mean, it's just how teenagers are, isn't it? I think even Dr. Geoff once told us that he learned from one of his neurologist colleagues that teenagers have less empathy than babies as a product of puberty."
"And, okay, sure, a lot of teenagers are like that, but…" Little John put his hand on Robin's shoulder, and Robin finally looked up at him. "I wasn't like that. And you weren't like that… were you?"
Robin turned back to the road ahead. "No… no, I wasn't. Although I hadn't had much of a choice…"
They walked in silence again for a few moments. The last of twilight was fading from the sky. They were going to have to walk all the way to the junkyard in the dark; thank God they knew Sherwood so well that they could navigate it in the pitch black.
"So… where do you wanna go from here?" asked Little John.
Robin came to a complete stop and looked around at his surroundings, and Little John came to a complete stop to stare at Robin and wonder what the heck he was doing. And Johnny was about to ask if Robin would care to verbalize his thoughts when Robin found what he wanted.
"Johnny… I know where we must go."
"Uh… okay, care to share where?"
Robin pointed, and Johnny looked. It was a store on the corner. Sherwood Liquors.
"...Okay, so you wanna get drunk tonight," said Little John, unamused.
"Johnny, that's not it at all-"
"Dude, if you wanna grab some booze and chill out tonight after the long day we had, that's fine, no judgment, I'll join ya, just… I thought you were going somewhere, like, philosophical with this."
"But I am, Johnny!"
"...You are?"
"Think of it, Johnny… who are we?"
"...Robin Hood and Little John."
"No, our other name."
"...The Fox and the Bear."
"The other one?"
"Nottingham's Greatest Heroes."
"The other one!"
"The Boyz in tha' Woodz-"
"Bloody hell, Johnny!" Robin laughed, "Just say 'The Merry Men'!"
Johnny gave Robin a tired look. "C'mon, Rob, you know I'm so fuckin' sick of that name."
"But for better or worse, it's who we've come to be known! And we-"
"So you wanna interpret our nickname in what my second-hand knowledge of British slang tells me is the most literal way possible and have us go back to being boozehounds like we used to be because you're going through an extended tough time for the first time in your life and you need an excuse to get something to take the edge off?" And that sentence was halfway out of his mouth by the time Little John realized it might be a bit of a low blow to criticize Robin for handling his first-ever non-fraternal-death-related long-term self-esteem crisis poorly, but honestly, he didn't really feel like he was wrong.
And Robin was a bit taken aback by Johnny's criticism of his handling of his first-ever non-fraternal-death-related long-term self-esteem crisis, but he couldn't honestly say his friend was wrong. "Hear me out, Johnny: did things or did things not start getting worse for us after we cut back on the booze and implemented the Only When Offered rule?"
"...They started getting worse before that, honestly."
"And you know what? Fair point, and it proves my point! Because when things took a downturn, we thought we needed to stop getting sloshed every night because it was affecting the quality of our work… but when things kept getting worse, that proved it was never about the alcohol! You know what I think it was? A combination of panicking about too much time passing… and coming to take ourselves too seriously."
Little John put his hands together and tried to speak as diplomatically as possible. "So! ...I understand what you're saying… and I get the logic in your argument. I just think you're wrong."
"Oh, that's no argument at all!"
"No shit, it isn't!" Little John snapped, a wry smile on his face. "I've done enough talking for today! My fuckin' throat's startin' to get scratchy from the strain!"
"Then why don't you come wet your whistle with me?" asked Robin; now he was the one trying to be excessively diplomatic. "And if you won't join me, then at least humor me. But I really do think we can only turn this ship around with an attitude change, and that requires us to be happy more often. And honestly, what sense does it make to call ourselves The Merry Men if we never make merry?"
Little John had a feeling Robin was going to get his way one way or another. "Hey man, I just wanna be careful, I have a family history with this shit, and I was proud of myself for figuring out how to keep it responsible before it became a problem-"
"And you have my word that I'll keep it responsible," Robin swore with his hand held in an oath. "You police me, and if you choose to imbibe, I'll police you."
"I don't remember inviting you to police me."
"Johnny, Johnny, Johnny… don't worry. All I'm saying is that we both can trust one another to let the other hurt themselves. Am I correct?"
"...I sure hope so."
"Splendid!" Robin said as he crossed the street. "So let's go and celebrate the life of the man who sacrificed himself for us!"
"'Celebrate the-'? Jesus fuck, Robin, we watched the man get murdered today!" said Little John, who was nevertheless following Robin across the street.
"Yes, and I very much want to be shaken by it for the rest of my days, but what will that accomplish? Therefore, a celebration of life to celebrate his heroic sacrifice! In complete seriousness, Johnny… we should all strive to be more like him."
"Rob…" Little John stopped him before they walked in the doors. "...'Celebration of life' is literally just a euphemism. Nobody's celebrating anything at a funeral."
"But you must remember: we're The Merry Men. We inspire people to find joy in their bleak lives and believe that a chipper attitude will help fuel our fight! And as the nice lady at the park said, we're leaders, you and I. So people don't actually celebrate the lives of the recently deceased? Well then, let's be trendsetters! Let's inspire them to start."
Little John was hanging on the idea that Robin just lumped him in with himself as a 'leader', a term that had always eluded his character, a trait he felt selfish wanting for himself but invariably recognized it in people he admired - like, for example, Robin. Despite the fox's warm smile, Johnny didn't totally buy that he meant that comment, but he could appreciate the effort to make it seem real.
"Have I mentioned that we'd be supporting local business?" Robin said as he gestured cheekily to the front door.
Little John rolled his eyes in defeat. "Fine… but if you're getting beer, I'm getting whiskey."
"Well if you're getting whiskey, I'm getting wine!"
"Well if you're getting wine, I'm getting rum!"
"Well if you're getting rum, I'm getting cider!"
"Well if you're getting cider, I'm getting brandy!"
"Well if you're getting brandy, I'm getting vodka!"
"Well if you're getting vodka, I'm getting tequila!"
"Well if you're getting tequila, I'm getting pretzels!"
"Well if you're getting pretzels, I'm getting Doritos!"
And thus our heroes went into the liquor store and spent an unhealthy and irresponsible amount of money on a vice which could itself become unhealthy and irresponsible if not handled with great care, which they both thought they could do but probably wouldn't have been able to recognize if they couldn't.
And The Merry Men did indeed make merry that night, hooting and hollering in the junkyard with each other's company, and although the events of that day still weighed heavily on their minds, neither of them had any trouble falling asleep that night, though the last thing Little John remembered thinking about before he passed out was that he just wanted to feel like his best friend saw him as an equal, and the last thing Robin remembered thinking before he passed out was that he seriously needed some good news soon.
