38. "The Giant of Loxley"
"You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, … back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time - back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."
-Thomas Wolfe
There's an old witticism in England that goes 'You can always tell a Yorkshireman, but you can't tell him much.' But it was the strangest thing: whenever Robin ran into a fellow Briton in America - something that happened much more often when he was a civilian working in entertainment and tourism in major cities, but something that still happened every couple of months in Nottingham - they would never guess correctly where in England he was from. This is not to say that he'd always introduce himself by saying 'Cor blimey, your accent sounds like mine! Guess where I grew up!', but as people do when they run into a fellow countryman in a foreign land, they strike up a conversation and question eventually comes up of where in the homeland both parties are from, and whenever Robin was one of those parties, the other party would invariably express shock to find out about his origins, and many would further mention that they had thought he was specifically from a different part of England altogether. Some would remark after the revelation that it made sense now that they thought about it that Robin would be from up north, given that he was friendly enough to start a conversation with a stranger (something a Londoner would certainly never do), but before he told them where he was from, they never would have guessed. Simply put, they could never tell this particular Yorkshireman.
Robin knew it was probably his accent. He'd been told that he had a very good speaking voice, but it came at the cost of completely sacrificing a piece of his regional identity. Heck, even back home, he didn't necessarily sound like the people who grew up on the same street as he: that's what happens when your mother grew up in Manchester (herself with a father from Leicester and mother from Kilkenny), when your stepfather grew up in a town just southwest of Leeds, when your filthy-rich biological father was technically from the area but had spent a lot of time in London and who spoke as poshly as someone with his bad attitude could, when you went to a boarding school as a day student and interacted with teachers and pupils from all over the north-central region of the country and specifically became platonic-friends-turned-romantic-partners there with a small-town girl from the northern corner of the East Midlands, and when you just generally grew up splitting time between the worlds of the wealthy and the working class and witness the glaring gulf in speech and dialect that that entails and while as an adult you might gain a knack for code-switching, you're still a kid who understandably can't handle such nuances and wind up just splitting the difference accent-wise.
But the real game-changer was when Robin and Marian went to New York to study acting. In their first semester at NYU, they were required to take a crash course in accents and dialects, a class that would dabble in English-language speech patterns from around the world. Robin had felt confident that he need not even try to study the British dialects because, hey, he already had one. Sure enough, when his class got to their unit on Received Pronunciation and it was Robin's turn to try his hand at it in front of the class, he just spoke in his regular voice without an ounce of apprehension about it - and the professor was livid. She pulled him aside after class and explained to him that he might have a British accent but he didn't have the accent that the world's stage associated with England and English characters (and that's not even getting into his horrid attempt at Cockney, which he had also put no effort into), and if these American kids had to unlearn their Boston accents and Texas accents and Minnesota accents and San Fernando Valley accents in favor of a "neutral" American accent, then Robin had to unlearn his quasi-Yorkie accent in favor of sounding like a completely generic British person - unless he was fine with never, ever getting cast as an Englishman in an American production, in which case he'd better be damned good at sounding like he'd just walked out of a Kansas cornfield.
Humbled, Robin took her advice, and Marian along with him - because of a scheduling conflict, Marian was in a different section of the accents and dialects course with a different professor, and while she had put far more effort into sounding like a BBC announcer than her boyfriend had, her professor still told her gently that he could place some vague regionalism in her voice. Since Marian didn't have the problem that bad, she didn't obsess too much over it, but Robin spent the next four years consciously trying to completely relearn his own accent from scratch. And he got creative with it; he even tried starting his second semester pretending to be American so he could look at the English dialect with fresh eyes, but his ruse lasted for all of about eight minutes into his first class of the new semester, a required gen-ed biology course, when they went around the room introducing themselves and Robin proudly told them he was from the good old US of A, specifically the true-blue American city of Minneapolis, Manitoba. (A rare moment of insurmountable embarrassment in Robin's life, he went to his academic advisor with his tail between his legs and had himself transferred to a different section for that class.) The idea of having to work for the next forty-plus years of his life and doing anything other than acting simply sounded like misery to him, and he was going to do all that he could to avoid such a cruel fate.
And at the end of those four years, his work may have paid off too well, as after moving to Philadelphia with Marian, he never again encountered a British stranger who could accurately place where under the Union Jack he was from judging by his voice, a feat that was rare enough during his time in New York. And it was a perfectly good voice - not too posh, not too working-class, not too Northern, not too London-y, not too proper, not too folksy, and perhaps a bit too deep to match his physical appearance but not to the point where you'd call it a particularly deep voice if you heard him on the phone or something without seeing him - but a voice without any of the charm and pride that came from clearly denoting being from a specific place, and after more than a decade in the States, he knew his accent was just getting more and more flavorless. It's not like Robin had become incapable of speaking the way he had spake as a child; he was known to sound much more like a Yorkshireman when extremely exhausted or incredibly intoxicated, and when he played the part of a mysterious panther entrant at the archery contest, his original plan was to put on a pronounced broad-Yorkshire accent that was heavily based on his pre-college way of speaking, but Little John convinced him that it would be a lot more discreet if Robin pretended to be from, like, Ohio or someplace like that.
But this bland and neutral accent had, for better or worse, become the voice he had come to speak in when he wasn't thinking about what voice he was speaking in. Other actors would kill to be in his position, but considering his own entertainment career now seemed like it was never going to come to fruition, he was now finding himself regretting that he had ever tried so hard to erase a major part of his heritage. It wasn't something that constantly tormented him, but every so often he and Johnny would encounter a British national in Nottingham, either a white-collar worker on a business trip or some curious tourists hitting up America's lesser-known cities, and it would always break Robin's heart just a little bit when they would accidentally remind him that this connection to his home was no longer with him, for these people could not hear it. In fact, it got to the point where Robin sometimes did start indulging in some less-than-charming behavior and actually did start outright daring these strangers to guess which major English metropolis he was from. Wrong answers ranged from Norwich to Southampton to Birmingham to bizarre guesses that weren't even in England like Cardiff or the one bloke from Newcastle who theorized that Robin had been raised in Belfast by Dutch parents (therefore explaining his height as well as his unplaceable accent, the Geordie argued), but geographically speaking, the closest anybody ever got to a correct answer was, ironically, Nottingham. None of them could ever locate the place that Robin called home.
-IllI-
It was the summer of 1985, and as a song singing the melancholy of life in a northern town climbed its way up the British radio charts, the city of Sheffield was square in the middle of what would prove to be a tumultuous decade for that city on seven hills. The industry that had given the Steel City its nickname was in a tailspin, and in an era where all but the most privileged parts of the United Kingdom were going through an economic depression, Sheffield was hurting particularly badly, the kind of place where one might expect a future champion of class justice to grow up. Indeed, while much of the rest of the country was going through a hyperconservative phase against their better judgment and kept inexplicably sucking the Iron Lady's teats (the only milk they would be getting from that old cow), Sheffield's City Council and the South Yorkshire Metropolitan Authority were fully embracing socialism. Led by a blind man (oh, the "blind leading the blind" jokes his detractors made) who himself grew up in poverty on a council estate on the city's northern end, in that decade under his watch, Sheffield welcomed the National Union of Mineworkers and had officially supported their strikes through the previous winter, declared itself a nuclear-free and demilitarized zone and made friends with he government of a Ukrainian city behind the Iron Curtain just to tell Maggie and her friends to go fuck themselves, started building a lot more public housing and transport, and just that spring had taken part in a protest with city councils across England to refuse to set a budget as a way of saying that they weren't going to put a cap on spending unless the federal government spent exactly as much as it needed to in order to help its own people as it was supposed to do. The support for left-wing leadership was so widespread that the area was scathingly quipped "the Socialist Republic of Yorkshire'' by the MP for the southwest ward of town, a rural and rich area which was the only part of Sheffield that was a lock to vote for the Conservative Party. (Although in a strange twist of irony, the constituency our English hero grew up in would be dissolved decades later, and the streets he grew up on would be absorbed into that once-reliably-conservative voting district inhabited largely by people who had traditionally opposed the things he stood for - and also the district where his biological father lived.) Of course, outside of political discourse, you would be hard pressed to find someone calling the area "South Yorkshire"; any true Yorkshireman or -woman only knew of the North, West, and East Ridings of Yorkshire, and would never recognize the boundaries set in 1974 in the same redrawing of the map that saw a sleepy hillside village to the northwest be incorporated into the city proper.
While the city itself was at conflict with the national government, things were mostly peaceful in the city itself. Mostly - the crosstown rivalry was horrifically one-sided as Wednesday had just finished eighth in the First Division while United was barely scraping by in the Second after having been even worse for years before that, but at least they had one thing to bond over: long before their city's representation in the world of music was a group of apes and white foxes who called themselves the Arctic Monkeys and made (fittingly) polarizing music, in that decade obsessed with glam metal, Sheffielders across town were proud to say they had given the world a band called Def Leppard - a band that incidentally didn't have even one feline between them, having named themselves after an ornery old neighbor, but eh, who's counting? Of course, the denizens of town were worried about the band's future after their drummer lost his arm in a nasty car wreck in the hills west of town the previous New Year's Eve, but little did the people know that their worry was aimed at the wrong member of the group. The drummer actually made a full recovery and learned how to play very well with just one hand; it was the guitarist they ought to have been concerned about. He would develop severe alcoholism that others tried and failed to remedy, and although that guitarist survived that tumultuous decade in Sheffield, he didn't make it much longer than that, ultimately succumbing to a fatal cocktail of alcohol and prescription drugs, whereupon he was buried in a cemetery near where he grew up northwest of town - and not too far from where the drummer lost his arm, actually - and to this modern day, loyal fans still make the journey to visit his grave in one of those satellite villages that were absorbed by Sheffield in 1974, a hillside hamlet watching like a guardian over the city in the valley below, a sleepy little suburb called Loxley.
The name of the old village meant "Glade of the lynx", and for most of its early history it was a farming town populated chiefly by lynxes. But when industrialization came to the Don Valley in the 17th century, many new families moved into the village from the countryside, and many of those families were foxes. When it came time to colonize the New World for England, many of those who volunteered were the members of medium and large predator species, who were starting to feel prosecuted at the hands of the deer, bovines, and other prey who seemed to be running everything, and those who chose to stay either moved deeper into cities for better opportunities to overcome the hand they'd been dealt or farther away from cities to not be in such close proximity with those who didn't like them. And while plenty of foxes also made the journey to the colonies… there were simply a lot of foxes in England, and whereas you'd be hard-pressed to find a significant enclave of lynx in modern Britain, you'd swear not a single fox must have ever left the island. The number of foxes who left didn't make a dent in their presence in the British Isles. Therefore a village on the border of town and country that had lost its appeal to its native inhabitants found itself a predominantly vulpine community. It was at the point that not only had the obvious nickname "Foxley" come about, but people then grew tired of such a nickname until they started using it again ironically and now in modern times, if someone's talking too fast, they might just misspeak and call the village "Foxley" by accident, and knowing good and well that everyone understands what they mean anyway, they'll just keep on talking as though nothing odd had just occurred.
Some of the houses in Loxley were structures that had stood the test of time and could almost qualify for ancient, being remnants of when it was a lynx colony, but most of the homes built in the last two or three centuries were built for its fox majority population. Many of these vulpine dwellings followed the same standards: five-foot ceilings and three-foot, eight-or-so-inch doorways, and a handful of newer houses built after 1965 had one-hundred-and-ten-centimeter doorways and one-and-a-half-meter ceilings - in other words, the houses built on the metric system were even smaller than their imperial counterparts by just a smidgen. This was all completely fine and dandy for the vast majority of people who would come to live in those houses over the years, although it did make things a bit awkward when a coal-baron-turned-steel-baron-turned-garments-baron who was more than a foot taller than other men of his species picked foxy Loxley as the perfect place to use his hush money to buy a house for his ex and hide away his illegitimate son.
We may never know whether Robert Scarlett genuinely didn't think that the boy would come to physically resemble him or if he just didn't care, but in his defense, even he probably wouldn't have had any way of knowing that the boy would get so many of his dominant genes and so few of his mother's recessive ones and would start displaying the Scarlett line's telltale traits at a dramatically early age. Anybody who saw Robert and Robin together would be able to tell immediately that one was the other's son.
But the two of them were rarely seen together in Robin's earliest years. After all, the point of putting Brianna and the baby up in Loxley was that it was far away from the posh countryside suburbs on the southwest outskirts of town where Robert lived with his new wife Susan and their growing family. Loxley was a place where a housekeeper and her son who just happened to spin the genetic lottery wheel in such a way to wind up taller than his mother before he was old enough to enter school could blend in with other foxes and nobody would think much of it. And for a time, that's how it was: Robert paid Brianna to raise Robin while playing completely dumb about knowing who her son's father was; since the money was good and her prospects were poor, she took the deal, and that was the bulk of the interaction they had for the first few years, with an underhanded offer to send her to nursing school here and there. In the Hood house hung a photograph from a wedding the summer before Robin turned four, the year when Brianna and her older platonic male friend Oliver decided to put their brilliant companionship to the test and get married for the child's benefit. In the photo were three individuals: a blushing bride on the right, a gentlemanly groom on the left, and between them a ring-bearer boy who seemed to be precisely the same height as his new stepfather. The family in that photo was happy, and when that photo was taken, it was thought that such a happy family would stay such a happy family for quite a long time.
But this was also the summer when Robert changed his mind. Following the proud English tradition of making rash decisions when you lose your patience that your wife isn't giving you a male heir, Mr. Scarlett decided he might just want that boy back in his life, no matter how sloppy and reckless it might seem. Robert had always wanted to raise a son in his image, but when given the option to raise a son with a working-class woman or trying his luck to have a son with a woman from the gentry with a good inheritance on the horizon, he tried his luck with the latter. And Susan knew this, as did Brianna when Robert told her that he didn't care if she was due in less than a month, this other woman with money had just missed her time of the month. But the next summer after that, that same year when Loxley became part of Sheffield and Sheffield became part of South Yorkshire, along came the twins, Sarah-Jane and Rebecca. When they were born, Susan knew that Robert was disappointed by the lack of boys, and she teased her husband that if the next three all turned out to be girls as well, they would be named after the Brontë sisters; though she was surprised by how unamused her husband seemed - one of the first times she really started to suspect her husband wasn't as kind and gentlemanly as he'd originally seemed - he was so disinterested by the idea of daughters that he genuinely didn't care what any future girls would be named.
The next three summers saw Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Scarlett come into the world. (Wait, stop, they named their daughter "Charlotte Scarlett"? Oh my god, that is child cruelty.) Shortly after Emily's birth, Robert realized something: even if the next child should happen to be a boy, it would still be a few more years before that boy was old enough to be taught the things that Robert wanted to teach him. Heaven knew Robert had no interest in changing diapers or filling bottles for years before he could have a real conversation with such a son. And even then, there was a very real chance it would be yet another girl. Meanwhile, there was another boy up north a bit kicking about with his DNA, a boy who was old enough and ready to be the son Robert wanted - hell, the boy already looked like a man. He refused to wait even a minute more and called up Brianna: he wanted Robin back in his life - but only sometimes.
Brianna and Oliver didn't want to, but they were in no place to say no. From that day onward, in Robert Scarlett's posh social circles, the tall boy from Loxley would make increasingly frequent appearances, touted as a "project" of sorts. Robert said he had encountered the boy's parents in downtown Sheffield and empathized with the boy for the ostracization he must he facing as a giant for his species, and realized that the lower-middle-class parents must surely need a hand raising the boy; Robert, therefore, stepped in to introduce this young man to aristocratic society, because that's just the kind of altruistic man Mr. Scarlett was. Any other physical resemblances between Robert Edward Scarlett and Robert Edward Hood, such as how their hands and feet and tails were completely devoid of any black or white discoloration like virtually all other red foxes around, were understood to be regarded as completely coincidental. The summer after this arrangement was struck, the Scarletts welcomed their sixth kit, who would prove to be their penultimate child and their only boy. If not for the addition of another Robert in their lives, the newborn may have been called Robert himself, but instead his parents went with William James Edward.
Over the next fifteen years, Robin found a lot of his time spent in Robert Scarlett's sphere of influence in one way or another. But rarely was Mr. Scarlett even present for it. The most egregious example was his insistence of sending Robin to a "public" private school (it was "public" because it was open to any member of the public who was willing to pay). Robert had wanted to send him to a full-on boarding school, one of the last solely-boarding schools remaining in the UK by that time, but Brianna and Oliver put their foot down and refused to lose their son for large swaths of the year - and yet they couldn't pass up the idea to get him a good education, so they negotiated with Robert to send him to a different public-private school. And for his part, Robert later came to think it was a good thing he sent Robin there, lest he send him to the same place he was going to send his "real" son and someone there might suspect they were related. They wound up sending Robin to a school south of the city across the Derbyshire border whose student body wasn't officially restricted to foxes (because that was absolutely not legal anymore by the late nineteen-seventies) but one whose student body was in practice near-exclusively foxes because of its history and architectural geometry, a school that had been a prim and proper boarding school in a past life but which now saw maybe a quarter of the pupils exercise the option of boarding full-time but saw the rest of their students either go home at the end of the day or board on the weekdays and go home on the weekends, the latter option the one chosen by the parents of a tall girl from rural Nottinghamshire whose parents were also working-class people with wealthy friends. If one considers the fact that the love of Robin's life was someone he only met as a direct result of Robert Scarlett's meddling, one could make the argument that Robin had been living in Robert's sphere of influence for decades after he left England.
But it was more than just his formal education that Robert had a hand in. He also had the lad sent to learn things a well-bred boy ought to know, such as sending him to those damned etiquette classes where one might think it was all drinking tea with their pinkies sticking out - and they did do that - but was more-so teaching them to master the mechanics of interpersonal interactions and having them obsessively read and reread things like How to Win Friends and Influence People and just generally programming these aristocratic kids to develop an insatiable need to always occupy leadership positions whenever possible and become serial-killer charismatic. Then there was the weaponry training, often done by a private instructor at the Scarlett house as Robert pretended to be too busy to watch so he could surprise Robin and later Will and challenge them against his own skills. First fencing, then graduating to actual sword-fighting, but also archery, which Robin always preferred. Robert wasn't too keen on Robin preferring the bow to the sheath because he knew his history, he knew that archery had been considered a women's sport for the longest time, but then Sir Walter Scott wrote Ivanhoe, which begat a nineteenth-century affinity for antiquity, and in Ivanhoe the titular character randomly gets help from the famous archer Adam Bell who for story purposes is hanging out as far south as Sherwood Forest for some reason, and inspired by the era's infatuation with medieval stuff some American wrote about the tales of Adam Bell and his friends in Ingleside Forest in Carlisle, causing England to reignite their love affair with him, and then archery was suddenly manly again, and Robert had originally only signed Robin up for an archery tutor literally just to give him another thing to keep him away from his parents, but Robert eventually came around to making peace with Robin's skills with the bow and arrow - after all, it just went to show that Scarlett men were good at anything they tried, and besides, the kid wasn't bad with the sword either. And then, of course, was the socializing, boring rich-people parties where Robert paraded Robin around like some sort of starving African child he'd adopted and therefore he now deserved praise for such a saintly act, like Robin was a living trophy for Robert's success that he had raised some other people's kid better than them and did so just as a charitable hobby, and at those events Robin was expected to utilize the unnatural charisma he'd learned in those infernal classes to make himself look like more than a poor boy from the mountainside and to make Robert look good by association - and once in a while, when Robert was hosting and when Will was old enough, he'd have the boys spar with swords or try to outdo each other with a bow and arrow just for his guests' amusement. Combine all this with tactics to ensure that Brianna was always at work in the hospital and Oliver was always at work managing the factory, and Robert had indisputably more say in Robin's life than anybody else.
And speaking of the factory, the decision to take Robin under his wing was one that proved to quite literally pay off for Mr. Scarlett. He was a wealthy man, but he was still a businessman, and if he could save money while still manipulatively providing for this kid's every need, he'd do it. Hence why he was annoyed that the boy had the audacity to get extremely large extremely fast, because it wasn't long before there just weren't many articles of clothing on the market for foxes his size, and while sure they could have just dressed the lad in clothes meant for young wolves or something like that, Robert found that unbefitting for someone of his social (and physical) stature. Therefore, for a few years there, Robin's clothes were exclusively specially-made for him, but one day when Robin was about eight or nine, shortly after that tumultuous decade had began, Robert was present for his personal tailor taking Robin's measurements again, and perhaps to make the boy more comfortable, the tailor initiated some child-friendly small-talk with Robin, asking how he felt about being such a big little boy. And it just so happened that Robin mentioned that his best friend at his all-fox school was also very tall, a girl who wasn't quite taller than the teachers like he was but certainly taller than the other kids in their year, and how even then there were older kids at that school who were also bigger than most of the teachers and still teachers who were still bigger than all the other teachers and all the tall kids, including him, and while there weren't too many of these four-foot foxes running around, there were enough that Robin never felt like too much of an outcast.
Robert heard this and immediately started wondering how he could enter a new industry from scratch. He had come up in the bureaucratic ranks of the National Coal Board, but when that industry entered doldrums from which it would never recover, he made the jump to a high-ranking position in a recently-privatized steel company a few years before he met Brianna. Now steel was going through a rough patch of its own, and while he was still making obscene amounts of money, he didn't want to keep all his eggs in that basket, and the thought of being the head of his own company for once tickled his fancy. He asked his connections for advice about purchasing a factory and what materials to buy, and by the end of that dreadful decade, his already-ridiculous wealth had grown exponentially. Since the moment he had his idea, The Peak Apparel Company, named to honor the mountains west of Sheffield near where his inspiration lived as well as the heights of the company's target demographic, has expanded its roster of big-and-tall offerings to members of dozens of species and is sold all over the world, with company retail stores in major cities in all but the most impoverished countries, its flagship store having opened in the city center of Sheffield when Robin was twelve. Robert's only regret was not allowing himself to be tacky and just naming his brand The Scarlett Company.
And Robin never cared for being the impetus that had caused Robert Scarlett to become even richer. Indeed, there had never even been a brief fleeting moment where Robin enjoyed being near Mr. Scarlett. Robin had started finding himself regularly in his biological father's presence starting that summer when Emily was born, the summer of Brianna and Oliver's wedding, a few months before Robin's fourth birthday, and since Robin's earliest memory of the man, he had always seemed a cold, conniving bastard who didn't really care for how Robin felt about anything Robert was putting him through. In those earliest years of his youth, Robin when speaking to his parents would refer to Mr. Scarlett as "The Tall Man" - not just to differentiate between another Robert and himself, and not just because this overgrown weed of a kid was literally already used to almost all the other adult foxes in his life being shorter than him besides this one not-very-nice guy, but to emphasize that his imposing stature only added to the intimidation and discomfort Robin felt in his presence. After a couple years, by the time Robin was ready to start Year 1, he had already learned enough about the world and met enough members of other species to realize that he and Robert still weren't the tallest people around, but Robin, Brianna, and Oliver kept privately referring to Scarlett as The Tall Man as a derisive nickname for the even larger fox who made their sweet Little Giant feel small and afraid; this moniker was used among them long after Robin had matched and surpassed his biological father in height sometime around his tenth birthday.
Yet regarding this trademark Scarlett stature and the fear it struck in Baby Robin: the fear didn't last forever. Much like how Robin had already had a decent understanding by the time he started primary school that just because most of the people he saw in his daily life were foxes who were smaller than him didn't mean the entire population of the world was smaller than him, Robin was quickly able to put the pieces together and realize that Robert was his real father by about the time he turned six, around the same time that his ears started tickling the tops of his house's doorways. Robert had never introduced himself to Robin as his father, and Brianna and Oliver were surely under orders not to tell him lest the kid go blabbing to everybody, but they didn't need to tell him. Even as a young lad it seemed fishy to him that his parents would have him spend so much time with a man who none of the three of them liked, and yet a man who looked so much like Robin himself despite apparently being a complete stranger. Somewhere along the line, it just clicked, and young Robin asked his mum, who told him the truth and why it was very important he not tell anybody.
This was the beginning of a lifelong habit of Robin's where he regularly flipped back and forth on his feelings about his own size. At school or around his neighborhood, he was happy with it, if not outright proud of it; neighbors and strangers were impressed by him, and the other children his age certainly thought it was cool to have around a kid their age who was bigger than their parents and teachers. At other times, he was ambivalent about it; for example, he never really had the chance to play on playsets sized for fox kits like the only one they had in Loxley or at the younger-children section of his school (after a bunch of lawsuits in the seventies, the infamously harsh English private schools lightened up a lot in the eighties, and his specific school went out of its way to look particularly soft so as not to scare off new enrollees), and he wasn't allowed to just play around on playgrounds for bigger mammals - or ride a tricycle where people who didn't know him could see him, or go sit on Father Christmas's lap when he came to Sheffield City Centre, or anything like that - because his parents told him point-blank that they were afraid strangers would think he was a strange adult playing with strange children and that would not be good, and although that always bummed Robin out, even as a kid he had the awareness that he had something that the other kids were always jealous of, and that was the privilege of being treated like an adult just because he looked like one, and he was always at least partially grateful for that. But then one bad weekend with Robert Scarlett could absolutely ruin him for days as he coped with the fact that he was not only this man's son, but that he was quickly physically turning into a clone of him. The young Robin was not only afraid of this monster; he was afraid he was turning into another such monster.
But as always happens, children get older, and when they get older they're pressured to put aside childish things - and for better or worse, a list of such childish things often includes being afraid of everything and crying over silly things. Of course, such children will still have no idea how to express their emotions when they find themselves in emotionally-confusing situations, so where they would once have started crying and seeking comfort from their parents, they decide to act like big boys and girls, and just get angry. Angry that something is trying to scare them and make them look like a baby, angry that something is trying to make them feel sad and cry like a baby, angry that they were in a situation with something they didn't like and that they couldn't do anything about it. Such a change usually comes when children approach the double-digit ages, a few years before puberty wherein they really embrace the anger, and for Robin, that watershed moment lined up nicely with the moment when Robin and Robert both realized that they were now eye-level with each other. Primary-school Robin would sit in a kit-sized plastic kiddie chair that was purchased long before anybody knew it would always be far too small for him and would stare into a bathroom mirror that would have gone up to his chin if he had been standing upright and cried his eyes out because he saw himself turning into that monster; secondary-school Robin sat in that same increasingly-unfitting kiddie chair they never got around to throwing out and stared into a bathroom mirror that would have gone up to his chest if he had been standing upright and seethed and growled and tried his hardest not to start screaming and shattering the mirror with his fist because he saw that he was clearly the son of a monster and everyone was too politely cowardly to address that his father was in fact a monster.
This shift in attitudes didn't happen immediately. For a while, he was no longer frightened by Robert Scarlett, but started finding him and his narcissism… vexing. Irritating. Annoying. But the moment where Robin started to truly feel hostility for his biological father could be traced to one specific moment in that summer of 1985.
Robin was eleven-and-a-half and a hair under four-foot-six; he had just entered a period where his absurd growth slowed way down for a good while before he entered puberty in earnest a few years later, but the important thing was that he now had almost two inches on The Tall Man, which was a lot more than two inches in fox terms, and Robin was not nearly as afraid of him as he used to be. Maybe Scarlett was still stronger than him just by virtue of being an adult, but then again, the newest circus-sideshow stunt that the other eleven-or-so-year-old little fox boys in Loxley were having Robin do for their oohs and aahs that summer was to have him benchpress and deadlift them, something he was able to do effortlessly and would continue to be able to do effortlessly for a while before his growth slowed down enough to let the other foxes his age close the gap a little, so maybe it was Robert who should have been afraid of him. None of this is meant to suggest that Robert ever physically abused Robin, but damn if he didn't look like he wanted to since the first time Robin ever laid eyes on him.
And Robert Scarlett most assuredly looked like he was going to punch somebody up that first Sunday in July. As per tradition, the first weekend in July was always a celebration of all the Scarlett children, brought home from boarding school for the weekend; that year, the firstborn twins were turning eleven, the youngest, Imogen, was turning six, and each of the other four bridged the gap with one-year intervals in between. Because of a sort of ritual between Robert and Susan, each of the Scarlett children had a birthday that fell between the twenty-ninth of June and the eighth of July; coincidentally, in addition to this being the first year Robin discovered his rage for Robert Scarlett, this summer was also the first time that Robin realized these two weirdos were having scheduled coitus on the anniversary of their first hook-up in roughly early October, and being an eleven-year-old boy who kind of understood what sex was but found it repulsive, he spent that entire party wanting to throw up every time he looked at his biological father or his illegitimate stepmother.
The target of Mr. Scarlett's rage was one of the caterers. Apparently when it came time for dessert, the crème brûlée was too much crème and not enough brûlée - or something like that, Robin was a kid who hated fancy food so he couldn't exactly tell. All he knew was that Robert was fuming and while everyone else in the yard was trying to eat some weird custard-gelatin-like stuff that didn't taste particularly good, Mr. Scarlett asked the guy in charge of dessert to come around the side of the house to have a word with him.
Shortly thereafter, everyone could hear harsh words coming from around the corner, and everyone seemed to understand that they were meant to ignore it. Robin, however, had a strange feeling of malaise as he looked around and saw all these people pretending not to hear an innocent man be verbally assaulted so as not to dishonor the assaulter. It just wasn't sitting right with him, and when he saw six-year-old Imogen and seven-year-old Will clearly very upset because they could hear their father yelling, Robin felt like he needed to do something; he didn't feel capable of intervening, but he did think that at least someone should bear witness to whatever Robert was doing so that poor man wouldn't have to suffer in poorly-kept secret.
Robin asked to be excused to the toilet and was granted permission. He went inside the house and made his way toward the kitchen, which had a window facing out to where Robert was telling off the caterer. The lights weren't on in the kitchen so Robert was unlikely to see him staring out the window at him from a few feet into the room, and as far as we know, nobody at that party ever realized Robin never actually went to the bathroom.
The caterer was also a red fox, and by himself, he'd probably also be considered on the tall side for his species, but standing next to a giant like Robert Scarlett, the man just looked like a scared little boy.
"You really think it's acceptable to make us wait upwards of an hour for a replacement order!?"
Robert was leaning in and over this man, looking straight down and forcing this man to look straight up, their noses only inches apart, and every couple of words he would jerk his head forward as a point of emphasis, and when he did…
"I-I apologize, sir, I was just offering an-"
"You'd need not have to offer had you just done it right the first time, you bloody idiot!"
...the poor man would flinch, each and every time.
Robert had already been going off on this guy for a good two or three minutes before Robin went inside to take a look, and the evisceration continued for another two or three minutes after that. While it may be controversial to trust the judgment of an eleven-year-old, Robin swears to this day that at no point had the caterer done anything even remotely out-of-line to warrant such brutal belittlement. And Robin stood there in the dark kitchen, watching it go on, and now he wanted to vomit for an entirely new reason. He was sick to his stomach from witnessing such injustice.
And Robin noticed something. At no point did Robert raise a hand to this man. His hands were indeed balled into fists, but ever the gentleman, they never even made their way above Robert's belt line.
Because Robert didn't need to raise a hand to this man. His physical presence was intimidating enough.
In that moment, Robin couldn't help but feel immensely grateful that he was already bigger than this bully. He couldn't imagine being an adult and letting another adult stand over him and literally belittle him and knowing there was nothing you could do about it because whether you gave him a sly remark or tried to take a swing at him, he'd probably beat your arse either way, and do so handily - all the while with you knowing he was also filthy rich and could probably pull some strings to screw you over for life for the crime of inconveniencing him.
But Robin wanted to be in that man's position. Not to be a smaller man being dogged by a bigger man, but to materialize into the exact spot that poor caterer was occupying, gaze down at Robert and make him feel small, and then, if he didn't quit his belligerence on the spot, knock his lights out. He wanted to exact justice for this poor man who had done nothing to deserve this treatment. But Robin knew good and well that punching his father in the face would never in a million eventualities end well.
This was not the first time Robin had felt bad after witnessing something unfair that he could do nothing to remedy. But he did not feel sad and he did not feel annoyed as he would have in the past. For the first time, he just felt angry.
School years in the UK ran well into July, so as Year 6 drew to a close, his instructors started to notice that Robin - usually a very attentive student - seemed deeply distracted by something. When school officials called home to ask if all was well, all Brianna could say was that she was wondering the same thing, as had Oliver. Robin spent those last few weeks in a perpetual bad mood, looking like he was constantly glaring off into the distance at something, seeming like his blood was constantly at a simmer just below a boil. The school thought maybe it was a hormonal thing and perhaps he was going through puberty; his parents thought it was frustration that he hadn't seen his friend Marian in a year after her parents decided she should spend a certain "time of her girlhood" at an all-girls' school and had her transferred out for a few years; in either case, the fact of the matter is that the adults did not mince words and quickly agreed that it wasn't good for a boy big enough to do injurious harm to most of the people in his life to go around being angry all the time. Brianna and Oliver had a talk with him and said that if there was something bugging him that he wanted to talk about, he could always discuss it with them; Robin grumbled that he didn't. Then they told him if something was bugging him and he didn't want to discuss it, he was welcome to take a pillow from the linen closet and beat the stuffing out of it to vent his frustration in a healthy way; he proceeded to destroy three of those pillows in short order.
Eventually, Brianna and Oliver were able to get some words out of him: Robin confessed that he may have witnessed someone being mean to someone else in some nebulous way and the mean person didn't get any comeuppance and probably never would and he wished he could have stepped in and stopped it but he couldn't and that made him angry. His parents had their suspicions - they were at that boring birthday party too that day - but they told him that all he could do now was let it go… but that he could also brainstorm ways to be ready to help the victim the next time he were to witness such a thing, provided that he not put himself in any danger by doing so. They couldn't give him anything more specific than that without him giving them more specific details about what had upset him, but they emphasized that it was good to stand up for people who weren't able to defend themselves, though he should be careful, because it could quickly become well-intentioned foolishness if he didn't know exactly what he was doing and could easily put himself and the people he was helping in danger.
Even though he stood head and shoulders above them, Robin was still an eleven-year-old boy and he couldn't immediately decipher what the heck they meant by that. His teachers noticed he still seemed distracted in those last days of school, though not angry this time, just lost in thought. He wanted to give his parents more information so he could get more direct advice from them, because he certainly didn't want to have to stand there and watch mean old miserable Robert Scarlett abuse someone again. But he didn't want to confess that he'd been spying on Robert and the caterer; his parents had always told him he'd always been such a good not-so-little little boy, and he would have hated to jeopardize their high opinions of him.
The last day of school was the day he thought he'd figured it out. The chauffeur Mr. Scarlett paid to drive Robin to and from school dropped him off at his house at the crook on South View Rise, and Robin ducked his way in through the door he dwarfed, made his way straight to his bedroom, ducked under that door and closed it behind him, doffed his specially-made school uniform, and opened his dresser drawer in a search of more summery clothes. Since his summer holiday had just begun, he was in no rush to get changed quickly; any summertime activities that he didn't finish that evening could be done the next day. He just sat on the edge of his bed (which was two adult-fox mattresses turned sideways for extra length), reflecting on the fact that another year of his life had been completed. And as he zoned out, his eyes wandered their way into his open drawer.
He saw the baby clothes that his parents had never gotten rid of. Shirts and pants and socks and shoes. They looked brand new, if a decade out of fashion. While they had been worn at least a few times, he quickly outgrew them, so they didn't give off the look of having been well-worn. It truly was a summer of firsts for Robin; he'd seen these in his dresser plenty of times before, but this time, looking at them filled him with an odd sense of sadness.
Years later, Robin would hear of the world's shortest short story, a particularly sad one: 'For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.' Looking back on it, Robin would describe seeing those baby clothes in that drawer that day as a similar type of sadness as was conveyed by that short story. These baby clothes had been worn and the child had not been lost - indeed, that child was staring right at them - but something about how they were quickly rendered unnecessary made him feel strangely remorseful.
He looked around his room. He saw his first blanket folded neatly on a shelf, something that he fondly remembered snuggling with but never once remembered himself being small enough for it to keep him warm. Tucked under the blanket was a thin plastic mat that had served as a diaper changing station on the floor since Brianna quickly lost the ability lift him onto a table, a mat on which she swaddled him in nappies sized for incontinent senior foxes, which he wore for far longer than he was proud to admit, though at a certain point only on occasions when he left Loxley with Brianna without Oliver, because he was afraid for the longest time to use public toilets by himself while Brianna couldn't bring herself to take a boy a foot taller than her into a ladies' washroom full of strangers. He looked at the bed itself, where there once stood a crib that had to soon be replaced by an adult-sized mattress with creative barriers of toys keeping the enormous kit contained, that mattress also soon having been outgrown; underneath the current bed, raised well off the ground, were even more old relics, including a little wooden toy riding trolley that he'd been too tall and heavy for by the time he could have toddled with it, and the owner's manual for a primitive 1970s child's car seat he never did fit in. He looked toward his bedroom door, where marks displaying his growth quickly ran out of room on the doorframe and now made their way onto the wall above, now just over six inches away from the ceiling. And he looked at the little white plastic table that was purchased as a second-birthday present by a friend of Brianna's who didn't have the luxury of regularly keeping in touch and who genuinely didn't know that the boy was already the size of a fourteen-year-old, and he looked at the two little plastic chairs that came with it, one red, one yellow, two amazingly sturdy things that he had used in the past to sit in front of a mirror that was too low for him and cry that he was becoming a monster, and which he would use in the future to sit in front of a mirror that was too low for him and seethe that he bore the mark of a monster.
A monster. He couldn't help but think it. He wasn't the child his parents wanted. His size had been nothing but a burden for them. They wanted a normal little boy who would have a normal, happy childhood, not a giant with the mind of a child looming over them in their own home like a fickle god they needed to appease. All these remnants of a childhood that never was were ghosts of stillborn memories. His mum and dad didn't want him like this. They didn't want someone like him.
Robin collapsed back down on his oversized bed and wept. Of course he knows now that Brianna and Oliver loved him more than anything in the world and they wouldn't have had him any other way, and Oliver especially hadn't even been on board to act as his father until it was clear the boy was going to be the way he would be, but that on July day when he was eleven, all he could think about was how much he must have hurt them by being so different. At no other moment in his life did he ever more deeply rue being the biggest fox he'd ever met. Nevermind all the pain and disgust he felt every time he looked in the mirror and saw Robert Scarlett's reflection; none of that ever hurt him as much as looking around his own room and realizing he'd failed his parents in being the son they wanted, the son they rightly deserved.
On second thought, his parents did lose the child who those baby clothes were meant for. Because their son was never a boy, he just went straight to being a man, then a giant of a man, then a monster of a man. Just like the monster he came from.
At a certain point, the tears ran out and Robin started thinking about all the times people had told him that being tall was both a blessing and a curse. But as he thought about Robert Scarlett berating that smaller man and how guilty he felt for not going out there and roughing Robert up himself, Robin thought that in his case, his size was neither a blessing nor a curse. It was simply a calling, a mission, a sign of his duty.
Surely he had to do something with this. Surely there must have been some way to use this gift for good. The other little boys always regarded it as a superpower; maybe they were more right than they knew. If he felt this bad about seeing someone he didn't know be treated unjustly, then maybe that meant that he was born to fight for justice. And if Robert Scarlett could be a villain and use his advantages to intimidate a good person, then maybe Robin could be a hero and use his powers to intimidate bad people.
Like most kids his age, Robin had never had the thought cross his mind to consciously choose whether he wanted to be a good person or a bad person. Of course, most kids still wouldn't make such a decision at his age, because most people never make that choice. But if this was an odd thought for someone as young as him, it would make sense that it would happen to cross the mind of the boy who'd been treated like an adult for almost as long as he could remember because everyone else's subconscious minds thought he was one, even when their conscious minds knew better.
But as he pondered that, he thought about all the times he'd already been told he was "good": a good son, a good student, a good lad. And those instances of praise weren't worthless, but it begged the question: what had he ever done that was "good"? He did his homework, did his chores, listened to his parents, listened in class, never really broke the rules or physical property, played well with the other kids, and just generally did what he was told. But what was good about just being on the straight and narrow and doing the bare minimum of being a decent person? Was it possible that all this time he was told he was "good", he was just… nice?
It seemed more that he was simply a nice young man, but hadn't earned the title of good. When he thought of good, he thought of heroes, characters like Adam Bell and Superman. They didn't just follow the beaten path and live conventional lives, they went out and sought to do good. Nice was holding the door open for somebody; good was busting down a wall and letting the wrongly uninvited in. Nice was passive; good was active. Robin thought that nice was nice, but it wasn't as good as good, and then yet another first in his life occurred that fateful summer: for the first time in his life, Robin Hood made the decision that he wanted to go out into the world and do some good. And he was sure he knew exactly how he needed to do it and what tools of his he needed to do it with.
Robin took a tiny green shirt out of the dresser drawer and examined it. One last tear escaped his right eye as he came to terms with the fact that he would never be the little boy his mum and Oliver had expected, the little boy they had wanted, the little boy they had gambled on him being by buying all these clothes and toys that they hoped he would one day have wonderful childhood memories of - a gamble they had lost. He could never be who his parents expected him to be, but there was still time to become someone who could make them proud. If he couldn't be the ordinary son they wanted, then he would do them one better: he'd be extraordinary.
-IllI-
It would be a few years before Robin would be able to see his best friend again - and by then, she would soon after be given a title more intimate than just "best friend". But even if that wasn't the case, they were still just kids and didn't have the ability to travel at will. Both Robin's and Marian's parents were aware of the other child's existence and thought their gender-blind friendship was adorable, but neither set of parents ever really found the time to drive all the way out to the other's town to put the kids up on a playdate, and God knows Scarlett's chauffeur for his project-boy didn't want to work overtime. Their companionship was essentially limited to school grounds until they were in their teens; Robin would not find himself in Worksop for a while, and moreover, neither would Marian make her way to Loxley any time soon. So as much as Robin would have loved to have been heroes with Marian, it would have to wait. But it was okay, because when Robin decided it was his moral obligation to patrol his vulpine village for bullies, he had a pretty good backup option for a sidekick.
Loxley wasn't entirely populated by foxes, and in fact some of the lynx families that settled the village never left. One of those larger homes populated by those larger mammals was occupied by the family of Michael Matthew Miller. This lynx boy was the only lynx boy in Loxley who was in the same year in school as Robin, but like Robin, his parents shipped him off to a fee-charging school, one north of the city on the way to Barnsley. The other kids in the neighborhood - or at least the preteens who weren't old enough to be psychotic adolescents yet - were friendly enough to him as they were to Robin, but also like Robin, it was a passive and impersonal kind of friendliness; much like how Robin was starting to get the feeling that the other kids his age at school and in Loxley alike saw him more as a living novelty act to be played with and less like a real friend who just happened to be two feet taller than them, the lynx boy very much felt like the fox boys and girls his age in Loxley were nice to him because of the sheer novelty of having a non-fox friend in their fox village, somebody who may well have gotten bullied in that village for being different had said difference not also made him two feet taller than them. Between being the only two kids their age in this village who didn't go to school with the others and being the only two kids their age in this village who were each other's size, it only made sense that Robin and this lynx boy would become each other's closest friends in Loxley.
Of course, we must briefly discuss the matter of the lynx boy's name. "Michael", "Matthew", and "Miller" all being extremely common names, it should come as no surprise that between Loxley and his school, the young lynx already knew at least one boy in his life older than him who had already laid claim to being called Michael, Mike, Mikey, Mickey, Matt, Matthew, and Matty each, and as for Miller, well, "Mr. Miller" was his father's name. So while adults in Loxley trying to be polite would simply refer to the boy as "the Millers' son", friends and family called him by the alliterative nickname "Much". How on earth does a boy wind up with such an odd nickname as "Much"? Suffice it to say, he ate very. Robin still doesn't know to this day why the only two blokes he's ever been able to call his best friends both just happened to be safely on the paunchy side, but in a world where so many people go their entire lives without ever finding even one person worthy of being their best friend, Robin would not complain.
Robin walked down Rodney Hill and went up to one of the last remaining houses in Loxley that Robin wouldn't have to duck his head to enter. The Millers' was an old home with no bell or button, so he knocked on the door that seemed enormous to him.
After a few moments, the large door opened and Much's father peeked out at him.
"Oh… morning, Robin. You here for Much now?"
"Good morning, Mr. Miller! Yes, I am here for Much! Can he come out to play?" Robin beamed as he looked up at the feline. Even though he'd spoken to Mr. Miller plenty of times in the past, the feeling of looking up at anybody other than Robert Scarlett had not yet stopped feeling odd to him. Robin had a wide smile on his face as he looked up at the man who was pushing six feet tall; now that Robin had decided that using his size for good was his destiny, he wondered if he himself would ever be as big as Much's father, or perhaps even larger, and the idea of it actually excited him - considering that he was still only eleven-and-a-half and nobody in his life had any way of knowing that he was actually almost at his adult height, it still seemed a very real possibility that Robin would actually keep pacing his lynx friend and wind up being nearly twice as tall as a fox is supposed to be, a prospect that had his parents worried for how that would further affect his quality of life and had Robert Scarlett downright aggravated, since he was expecting any day now that Brianna and Oliver would call him up and demand he either buy them a new house or pay to have their ceilings raised.
Not that Mr. Miller had any idea why Robin looked so excited that morning, so he was kind of skeeved out by the fox's excessive chipperness.
"Er… sure, I'll… go retrieve him," Much's dad said as he left the door ajar and disappeared back into the house. A minute or so later, the lynx boy himself came to the door, all dressed up to go outside.
"Hi, Robin," Much greeted as he shut the door behind him. "Do you know what you want to do today?"
"Yeah, I do!" said Robin. "Good news, Much! You and me are going to be heroes today!"
Much, of course, had no idea what Robin was on about. "...Heroes? What, like… playing pretend?"
"No, Much, we're going to be real heroes! We're going to stop people from being mean to each other!"
"...We are?"
"Yeah!"
Much could really have used an explanation. "...How!?" he asked as he shook his head incredulously.
"Well, think about it! What's something most of the people in this town have in common?"
Much just winced in confusion.
Robin helped him get the picture by grabbing his own thick red tail and holding it up for Much to see, gesturing to it with his other hand and smiling confidently.
"...Foxes. You're all foxes."
"That's right! And what do all the foxes in town except for me have in common?"
"Er…"
Robin put out his paw flat at about the level of his chest.
"They're all littler than us?"
"They're all littler than us! And what's something that bigger kids like to do to littler kids?"
"Wh- what, you mean… be mean?"
"Exactly!"
"So you wanna go around being mean to littler kids!?"
"No! No no no!" Robin shook his hands to calm his friend. "We're going to only be mean to mean people who are being mean to littler people! We're going to be heroes for the littler people, and make those mean old bigger people feel littler than two people even bigger than them!"
"...That still just sounds like being mean like they are!"
"Much, we probably won't even have to hit them! We can probably just scare them off by standing over them and making them feel small! And you know what? If it's someone younger than us being mean to someone even younger than them, we won't be mean to the mean lads, we'll just break it up. We'll only be mean to the people our age or older, promise. Sound fair?"
None of this seemed to be making Much much more comfortable with the idea. "Er- b-but I can't do that, me mum and dad always said I can't be mean to people smaller than me, even if they are older than me-"
"But Much, don't you see?" Robin said as he put his hand on the lynx's shoulder. "We aren't going to be starting fights with these people, we'll just be finishing fights for people who can't defend themselves! You and me have a special power in this village, and it's our job to use it for good instead of letting bad things happen when we can stop them! C'mon, love, haven't you ever wanted to be a hero!?"
Much now understood what Robin was saying but still didn't exactly agree with it. "A bit, but don't heroes only exist in storybooks and films?"
"Only if nobody tries to be heroes in real life, mate!"
Much didn't buy it. "What if nobody tries because being a hero in real life is too much harder than being a hero in stories?"
Robin had no answer for that, but he did have an ace up his sleeve: the acting techniques that Oliver had been teaching him.
"Oh, fine!" Robin said wistfully as he started walking away. "I'll just have a go at it by myself then! And if it turns out that those mean little blokes are too much for one big me, and I can't do it by myself…" Robin fell to his knees and looked yearningly toward the sky with a forearm to his forehead. "...then woe is me, because my friend won't be there to help me in my time of need!"
It wouldn't have won him a Tony award, but Robin sold the drama just well enough.
"I mean…" Much started, "I can… be around for you-"
"Brilliant!" Robin said as he jumped to his feet and ran off down the road. "Come, Much! We have hero-ing to do!"
And Much ran off after him as fast as his chubby legs would take him. "Wait! Robin, where are we going!?"
-IllI-
They were going to go all over town. The first stop was the thicket of woods north up the hill, off the nature trail that ran behind Robin's house. While the path itself was fairly well-trafficked, if you ventured off into the forest, you could quickly find yourself out of earshot of passers-by. This was a prime spot for younger kids to play free of their parents, a spot for older kids and teenagers from alternative lifestyles to hang out away from people who wouldn't understand them, and a spot for mean-spirited older kids and teenagers to ruin the days of kids of any age.
Robin and Much turned off the path and headed further into the woods, and sure enough, they soon heard the sounds of a struggle. They couldn't see anybody yet, but judging by the debris they saw strewn all around - packs of cigarettes and Oscar Wilde novels and dirtied Bauhaus and Joy Division t-shirts - it looked like on this particular day the woods had been playing host to goth teenagers who were then ambushed by savages their own age. As they got closer, they started hearing boys' voices:
"C'mon now, eat that dirt!"
"GERROFF of me!"
"It's black, it's your favourite colour!"
"Robin, there's no way we can take these guys!" Much squeaked.
"Ah, calm yer mardy bum, love!" Robin replied in a low voice, still smiling. "We haven't even seen what these blokes look like yet! I'd bet they'll be more afraid of us than we are of them!"
But in Much's defense, even Robin started to get a little worried as they drew nearer. The scene grew more dire as they got close enough to faintly see some movement through the trees, but what really alarmed them was not what was in the distance, but what was in the foreground: more clothes, shoes, trousers, underwear. Whoever these savages were seemed dead-set on fully humiliating these poor people. But while Robin started to share in Much's worry, this was outweighed by his determination that these people needed his intervention even more than he had previously thought.
They were soon able to see four angry-looking boys malicing three boys who had been stripped naked and pinned to the ground; all of them were foxes who appeared to be between fourteen and sixteen in age. Thankfully there were no girls among the victims, because Robin and Much were still too young to realize why a young girl forced out of her clothes would be an even worse thing than the same with a young boy; Robin would find out a while later that the goth girls in their area hung out in the cemetery down the road and the goth boys in their area didn't ask to hang out with them because they were too nervous to talk to them.
They only recognized two of them by name, but they could tell who all seven of them were: one of the hooligans was a local lad called Tony, who had brought along his delinquent friends from their downhill neighborhoods like Wisewood and Wadsley; one of the boys on the ground was another Loxley lad called Jamie, and these two friends of his were likewise from the adjacent neighborhoods and were rarely seen around here because they typically either hung out here in the woods or in one of their homes. Even though only two of these individuals were denizens of Loxley, this was still an injustice happening in Robin's self-appointed jurisdiction, and he refused to let anybody turn his beloved home into an unsafe place.
"Let go of us, you arseholes!" cried one of Jamie's friends.
"Not until we have you covered in dirt, like you freaks deserve to be!" hollered one of Tony's friends, rubbing soil into his victim's fur all up and down his body.
Each of the three goth boys had a hooligan with their knees on their elbows and backs, and the fourth dastardly teenager was walking around between them, kicking the trapped boys and cackling as his henchmen kept oppressing their victims. This ringleader was quite a tall bloke himself, probably closer to four feet than three, but he would also look tiny when Robin or Much stood over him.
"Robin, there's four of them, we can't take them!" Much moaned.
"Not with that attitude, we can't!" Robin replied, keeping his voice quiet. "I think I have an idea for how to get their attention off those poor boys and onto us!"
"I don't want their attention on us-!"
"Shhh!"
In making those poor boys get nude and throwing their clothes all over the forest floor, those bullies had inadvertently given Robin the resources he needed to make a heroic entrance. Right at Robin's feet was a pair of briefs with an elastic waistband, and not far from that were some straight and narrow twigs that were not too light, not too heavy, and didn't have too many smaller branches jutting off of them. Robert Scarlett had taught him at least one thing useful - or at least paid someone else to teach it to him.
"Why are you doing this!?" asked Jamie.
"This planet's crowded enough as-is!" replied Tony, who was holding down the other one of Jamie's friends. "We don't need creeps like you taking up space, now do we!?"
"The only creeps here are you!" said the boy stuck under Tony.
"Oh, we'll be having none of that shit from a lad who wears eyeliner!" said the ringleader with a sick smirk. "Tony, love, how about you shove some mud into his mardy arse?"
"Ah, brilliant idea!" Tony said as he spun himself around and wound up with his own bum sitting square on the boy's back, the boy crying in pain before quickly losing the ability to breathe. Tony lifted up the boy's tail and dug his paw in the dirt to grab a sizable load of soil. Little did Tony know that within two seconds that soil would wind up on his own head.
Whiz!
THUNK.
"GAH, what the hell!?" Tony yelped as he rubbed his dirt-filled hand on the newly-sore spot where a mysterious projectile felt like it had just sailed through the air and stabbed him behind the ear.
The standing boy had seen the twig shot at Tony but hadn't seen its source, so he looked toward the direction it came from.
"What the bloody he-?"
Whiz!
THUNK. Right on the side of his snout as he turned his head.
"Ghee-AHH! FUCK, my nose!"
"You leave those lads alone!"
All seven boys, the oppressors and the oppressed alike, felt their jaws drop as the giant fox stepped toward them, holding a pair of underwear and a bunch of twigs in his hand. But whereas six of them looked afraid of him, the standing boy just looked confused.
"Who the hell are you!?" he asked as he looked increasingly upward at the fox who just seemed to get bigger and bigger the closer he got.
"They call me Robin Hood," said the giant as he got within inches of the ringleader and glared straight down at him, just like Robert had done to the caterer. "This is my village and these are my woods, and I won't stand to let anyone hurt anybody else here under my watch. Now I need all four of you to get off these innocent lads and get out of here," he said as he turned his head up to gaze at the other three bullies; the two out-of-towners looked like they also had some skepticism to go with their fear, but Tony looked just plain terrified.
"I chose to be good and you all chose to be bad, and I don't ever want to see any of you around Loxley ever again," Robin continued. "That includes you, Tony. Find some other neighborhood to hang out in if this is who you choose to be."
"Tony, you know this geezer?" asked the standing boy, still fearless if still deeply confused.
"That's the huge Year 6 kid I told you about!" Tony said as he scrambled off his victim, who gasped for air immediately afterward.
"This guy's in Year 6?" asked the standing boy incredulously, looking up at Robin again. "That would make him, what, ten, eleven? You certain he's not just some retarded overgrown adult who thinks he's still a kid?"
"I'll be twelve in November," Robin answered with his own devilish grin. "And I'm already bigger than you'll ever be, little lad."
"Ian, seriously, we'd best get out of here!" Tony urged. "This guy's a freak of nature!" His other two friends seemed to be heeding the fear in his voice as they slowly got off their respective victims.
"You'd best do as he says, Ian," Robin taunted.
But Ian had no interest in listening. "Oh, I'm not taking orders from a little kid!"
THUD.
"GAH!"
Now it was Robin's turn to scream in pain as he fell to his knees and clutched his stomach, dropping his makeshift bow and arrows; suffice it to say that he genuinely hadn't been expecting his plan to fall apart in the face of such retaliation.
"You stay out of this, ye' nebby little cunt!" Ian barked before he turned to face his boys. "Are you cowards seriously backing away from some eleven-year-old freak!?"
But then, once more:
Thunk… THUD.
"GOD, DAMMIT!" Ian hollered as he found himself under a lynx who had just bodyslammed him to the ground. "What the fuck!"
"Aaand that's the cat I told you he hangs out with," said Tony.
"Stop hurting my friend and stop hurting these people!" Much shouted at the side of Ian's face.
"You don't tell me what to do, lard-arse!" Ian shouted back as he threw the lynx off himself and started for his feet. "You freaks get out of here before we-!"
Ian stopped talking when he felt the big fox boy grab him under the armpits and lift him off the ground, and he would have likely let out another scream if he had time before he realized Robin was about to pile-drive him into a tree.
One last time: THUD.
"AAAHHHhuhhuhhuhhh…" was all Ian could say as he collapsed into a lump, clutching his head. His pained moaning sounded far less aggressive, trailing off into something that was almost crying.
Everybody else at the scene looked on in shock, both the friends of Ian but also the goth lads and even Much, first looking at Ian on the ground, then looking at Robin in disbelief.
But Robin didn't see the looks on their faces, he just kept staring with his determined smile at Ian. "Let this be a lesson to you: don't ever let me see you bullying people in my home ever again!"
"Ohhhohhh…" Ian murmured as he started to get back on his feet, only to have his legs wobble and give out under him before he collapsed again.
"Robin, I… think you really hurt him," mumbled Much.
"Nonsense! He's just acting soft to try to make us feel bad! But we won't feel bad for being bad to bad people, now will we, Much?" said the cheery eleven-year-old fox who was too young to understand how traumatic head injuries worked. He leaned over the mean older fox. "Come on, now! You get your mardy bum off the ground! Quit yer rooering!" he said as he gave Ian an overly-aggressive pat on the back.
"AAAaaaowww!"
Robin turned to Ian's friends. "Now I won't be leaving until I see you blokes on the way out of here, do you understand!?"
Tony and the other two bullies didn't say a word, instead just going over to Ian to try to help him exit as he kept getting up and falling down again. Robin assumed that Ian was just being a big baby, as Robin had been taught bullies often were deep down, but he could see the four of them were slowly but surely leaving the area, so that seemed good enough for him. He turned to the three goth boys, still chest-down on the ground if only to hide their private parts.
"Gentlemen, I'm sorry I couldn't have gotten here sooner," he said, "so please let me know how I can make it up to you. And if anyone's ever mean to you like that again, you just let me know and they'll have to answer to me! Now I'll leave you to… um…" Robin remembered the underwear at his feet, picking it up and walking it over to a point roughly equidistant from the three boys and leaving it gently on a clean spot in the grass. "I, er… think this belongs to one of you. Thanks for letting me borrow it. Erm… do you… need anything else from me and my friend now?"
The boys, still looking shocked by what they had just witnessed, glanced at one another, then looked back at Robin and shook their heads sheepishly.
"Alright then, in that case, Much and me should go and see if there's anyone else around town who needs our help…" On second thought, Robin got closer to them anyway, offering Jamie a hand. "Can I at least help you up off the-?"
Jamie shook his hand at Robin. "No, no, we're… we'd rather not be seen like this… any more than we have to."
"Oh! Er… understood. You guys take care now," Robin said as he walked off with a simultaneously self-assured and embarrassed smile on his face.
Much, watching the three henchmen helping their ringleader stumble out of the forest in a perpendicular direction, reluctantly followed Robin.
"Er… Robin," Much began, "are you… are you sure we were heroes here?"
"Of course we were, Much!" Robin beamed. "You saw what they were doing to those poor guys, who knows what they would have done if we hadn't shown up!"
"Yeah, but… you said we wouldn't need to hurt anybody-"
"I wasn't lying, Much, I just didn't know. I didn't think we'd meet someone that hard-headed… and then he started whinging on the ground like he doesn't have a hard head!"
"Yeah, erm-"
"Wait!"
The two turned around to see the three goth kids had followed him, and while the two strangers were hanging back and picking up their clothes to cover their netherregions, Jamie ran up to Much and Robin while wearing the briefs that had served as a makeshift slingshot.
"Robin… Much…" Jamie panted as he caught up to them. "I just- we just… we wanted to say thank you. I- we don't know what those bloody psychos would have done to us if they had the chance. So… thank you. Both of you."
"Why… the pleasure is ours, Jamie," Robin said as he bowed just like they taught him in those damned classes. And although Much didn't say anything, he didn't feel quite so nervous anymore.
"I've got to ask, though… did you just stumble upon us?" asked Jamie. "Did you hear us screaming, or-?"
"Well, we knew that sometimes kids play here and sometimes bigger kids like to ruin those kids' fun," said Robin proudly. "And just yesterday, I had the thought that as long as Much and I are some of the biggest kids in this town, we'd better put that to good use and make sure those nasty bigger kids have to deal with someone even bigger! Sounds like I had that idea just in time to save you!"
"Huh… so you're making yourselves like t' local constables, yeah? I've got to say, that's a pretty good thing you're doing, Robin," Jamie said as he caught himself looking up almost in awe at this younger kid. "But… I've got to say also, this isn't the first time those pond-life boys've harassed us, but… hey, now with you two patrolling town, maybe they never will again, huh?"
"That's our plan, mate! As long as Much and me are around, we won't let people be mean to each other just because one person's bigger and stronger than the other!"
Jamie nodded, smiling sheepishly. "Yeah… shame most people aren't like you two, though. Erm… I-I'm going to go put my clothes on now… Have a good day, lads."
The older fox ran off to join his friends and collect their belongings, and Robin and Much walked due southwest back toward civilization.
"You see, Much? You see how much we helped those people? You see how much we made them feel happy when they were sad before we showed up? Doesn't that make you feel good about doing this?"
Much had no reason to lie. "I… it does, actually. It does. I'm glad we're doing this! I like being heroes!"
Robin turned to Much and saw the lynx smiling for the first time that day. And it was a pretty big smile.
"So you're not afraid of being heroes anymore?"
"No! And that mean boy probably deserved to hit his head, anyway!"
"That's right! If he didn't want to get hit in the head, he shouldn't have been making some poor lads take their clothes off!" Robin then went and put an arm around his friend. "And by the way, Much… thanks for taking that mean little bloke out after he hit me. I couldn't have saved them without you."
"Well, hey…" Much said with a nervous smile, "...isn't that what heroes do?"
"Hey, now that's the spirit! Now you're teaching me how to be a hero!" Robin put some pep in his step and started half-running the way back toward town. "C'mon, love! Let's go make sure nobody in Loxley is treating anybody else bad!"
And off they scampered, out of their forest and into their village.
-IllI-
Occupation Lane was a strange little thoroughfare. It was an unpaved path that ran diagonally up the hill, only wide enough for one car, cutting behind the backs of homes' back gardens except for maybe two or three houses that opened up onto it. It was rarely trafficked and the shade of trees at the edges of the adjacent yards made it a good place for local children to play on summer days when they didn't want to go play behind the primary school lest they be reminded of their formal education. Call it good luck or call it bad luck, but Robin had a hunch that there might be another incidence of injustice happening on that low-trafficked street, and unfortunately, he was right.
The lane had a slight bend at either end, so if you were just passing by on the connecting road, you would hardly be able to see down its length. And hiding in plain sight was an act of cruelty occurring right at the midpoint of the street.
Robin and Much rounded that bend and saw six local children they recognized. Four of them were younger kids on the ground, sitting or kneeling by their own volition rather than being forced there by someone else, playing in the dirt and gravel with their Majorette cars: six-year-old Nick, six-year-old Aajay, seven-year-old Jack and his five-year-old brother Eric; all of these four were also red foxes, though Aajay's coat was much closer to tan as was common for red foxes halfway across the world where his family hailed from.
The other two were standing over them, two boys a year ahead of Robin and Much: Simon, another red fox, but also the badger lad David, another rare non-fox in Loxley, someone else whose difference would likely have made him a target of schoolchildren's cruelty had he not stuck around Simon. While Simon and David didn't quite have a reputation of being bullies around town, they were known to be rather rough around the edges; they'd be present and participate when all the boys and girls in Loxley were playing together, but they'd often be off to the side by themselves, snickering to one another, presumably mocking the other kids. Further complicating matters was that other kids were faintly afraid of them, in part because, proportional to their ages and sizes, Simon and David most definitely had Robin beat in terms of physical strength per volume - granted, Robin had so much volume that he could probably still take either one of these boys handily, but taking on both of them together without Much for backup wasn't something Robin would have been so sure about.
But despite their tough exteriors, David and Simon had always been perfectly decent when Robin and Much were around, and Robin never even thought he might have to overpower them until that day when he saw the two of them kicking dirt at little kids and smashing their toy cars under their feet. One can debate which was more heinous: two twelve-year-olds performing cruel if generic acts of bullying to kids half their age, or four teenagers delivering excessive assault albeit to kids their own age. But this was no time to weigh the lesser of two evils; Robin was once again witnessing evil, and once again, he wouldn't stand for it.
Robin and Much walked quickly as they rounded the bend, after which the street was completely straight. They would have loved to have popped in from somewhere less conspicuous, but that would require cutting through someone's garden and hopping the fence - Loxley may have had the feel of a quaint old village, but if the fact that it wasn't immune to the bullying epidemic of the 1980s wasn't evidence enough, it wasn't that friendly and neighborly of a place. So the two of them had to walk straight down the line where they could easily be seen approaching.
And yet somehow it took a while for anybody to notice them. The little kids and the older kids were facing each other sort of perpendicularly to the road. Robin and Much actually got within earshot before any of them noticed two large figures drawing closer in their periphery.
"Sandstorm!" Simon jeered as he and David kicked dirt in the kids' direction, catching a few more diecast cars in their way.
"Why are you doing this!?" cried Jack.
"You shouldn't have been playing Cars in the Desert if you didn't want desert weather!" said David.
"It's not the desert!" said Nick. "It's Britain, just… with sand and rocks!"
"Oh, so we conquered Arabia again?" joked Simon.
"Sharif don't like that!" David giggled as he stepped on a toy Volkswagen Beetle. Its chassis held up fairly well, but its wheels and axles were irreparably broken.
"Hey, you broke my new car!" said Aajay, having just the slightest of foreign accents. "My mother and father just bought that for me yesterday!"
"Oh, don't worry, Cornershop!" said Simon with a sick grin. "They'll have the money for more by tomorrow after Nick's old-as-fuck dad buys his daily ciggies off them! 'Aah, pack of fags, mate-'" Simon put on his best impression of Nick's raspy father before completing the bit with an exaggerated whooping cough.
That's when little Eric started crying.
"Oh, what, can't handle the real world like a big boy?" David taunted.
But Eric didn't respond to them, he just turned to his left to face someone else.
"Robin, Much!" cried Eric. "Davey and Simon are breaking our toys!"
All five of the other boys felt their eyes pop open when their brains registered the names Eric had said, and turned their heads eastward down the lane.
"Well that's not very nice of them, now is it, Eric?" asked Robin, looking furious. "David, Simon… I've got to say, I never much took you two for the type to make little kids cry."
"Yeah, how would you like it if someone bigger than you broke something of yours!?" asked Much, doing well to match Robin's stern and determined tone.
"We can show you how that feels, if you'd like…" Robin's glare melted into a wicked smile of his own.
As the little kids sitting on the ground looked up at their heroes in awe, the big kids started panicking as they felt themselves enshrouded in the shadows of the even bigger kids.
"Er-" Simon gulped as he searched for words. "Er… we-"
"We didn't think you'd see us here!" said David.
"You didn't think you'd see us here!?" asked Robin incredulously.
"So, what, that makes it okay to be mean to these kids and break their toys!?" added Much, now feeling much more confident in playing a hero.
"Well… hey, that's not fair!" shot Simon.
"What's not fair?" growled Robin.
"Well- bigger kids broke our toys when we were their age, now it's our turn!"
"Yeah, and then one day they'll break little kids' toys!" added David. "It's just what happens!"
"You two wouldn't know what it's like to grow up normal because you two've always been bigger than the adults in this town!" said Simon, now seeming annoyed. "This is just how things are!"
And that struck a nerve with Robin, but he refused to let it distract him; in fact, he played it to his advantage:
"You know what?" he asked. "...You're right. I don't know what it's like to grow up as a normal person. But I'm not a normal person, lads. I've got a superpower, and I'm going to use it to make sure people like you are never mean to anybody else ever again. Not while I'm around."
"So how're you going to make it up to these little lads?" asked Much.
Simon and David, however, as intimidated as they were by these giants glaring down at them, still did not feel content to simply accept defeat. Indeed, they likely considered themselves brave in that moment, standing up for what they understood to be justice.
"That still isn't fair!" Simon protested. "We had our toys smashed and stolen by big kids when we were little, now it's our turn! Don't tell us we're bad people for getting what we're due!"
"Fine, then in this case, I'm against what's fair, because what's apparently fair would be worse for everybody," said Robin; not the most logically sophisticated retort, but hey, he was eleven. "Did these little lads nick your toys? If the whole world is ever going to be fair, then you two need to act like big boys and accept that some mean people did you wrong once and it wasn't fair, but now you'll try to be better than whoever was mean to you and choose to be good."
"Oh, like we should take wisdom from a bloody eleven-year-old on what it means to be a good person!" Simon shot back.
"And in case you haven't noticed," added David, "the cars are already smashed, you gigantic retard! What do you want us to do, fix them!? They'll get what they're due in due time!"
"Oh, I know what I want you to do," said Robin coolly to the badger boy. "I want you to buy them new ones."
"Oh, fuck off!" said Simon. "We don't have no bloody money!"
"We're not going to live our whole lives without getting what we're due from years ago, Robin!" shouted David. "You act like you're some kind of hero because you're standing up for these kids, but you're forgetting that we were wronged, too! Who's going to stand up for us!?"
"If you were actually good people, you would want this stupid tradition of smashing little kids' toys to end with you!" growled the emboldened lynx.
"What Much said," said Robin. "Like I said, move on and be better than the kids who weren't good to you. These little lads don't need someone to teach them how to be bullies, they need someone to teach them how to be good people! They need someone to look up to! Wouldn't you rather be their hero than their villain?"
"Wow, you actually believe you're a hero, don't you now, Robin?" jeered Simon. "You think you're so grown-up but you don't seem to realize heroes only exist in stories! So keep your neb out!"
"And hey, if they want someone to look up to, they've got your overgrown arse!" quipped David. "Hey, you know that tall people die sooner, right?"
Robin could see the four little kids off to the side. They had once looked relieved and excited that their heroes had arrived, but now they looked nervous, as if they believed that Simon and David had won the argument and Robin was out of ammunition. He then looked back to the two older boys who hardly made it up to the bottom of his chest. Robin didn't know which comment offended him more: the mockery of the idea that heroism could exist in reality or the reminder that he was a genetic freak who had to do good now because he may not have been long for this world. But while both statements infuriated him about equally…
"What're you going to do to us?" challenged David.
"Unless you think a good person would beat up someone half his size!" challenged Simon.
...David was closer to him.
"HEY! What the-!?"
THUD.
Robin had had to bend almost all the way over to tackle the badger with a lower center of gravity, but he got him down in the dirt easily enough. And without even having to tell him to, his loyal follower Much took his cue and similarly decked Simon.
"Get off me, you fat fuck!" Simon protested.
"No!" Much screamed back.
Robin waved over the little kids. "Lads! Check their pockets for money!"
The four boys, excited to see their heroes' triumph, jumped to their feet and each went for one of the mean boys' front pockets to shove their hands in eagerly.
"Tell us if you don't find anything and we can flip them over and check their back pockets!" Robin instructed the children.
"You're seriously going through our trousers for money!?" strained Simon.
But David was much more direct in his protest: "HELP, HELP! THE GIANT FREAKS ARE BEATING US UP AND ROBBING US!"
The four younger kids froze when they heard that, and Much looked like he was suddenly worried again as well.
Robin, however, felt no fear. "No, little lads, keep digging! If anybody comes here to defend you, David, we'll tell them what you were doing to these poor little kids!"
And Robin swears to this day that it was at the exact moment that he said the word "kids" that he heard old Mrs. Denton's back garden gate opening, but this narrator understands if you, Dear Reader, think such timing would have been too perfect to be true.
"What the bloody hell is going on here!?" the old vixen swore, and before Robin had a chance to look up and face her, he felt the beating of a broom upon his back.
"Hey! Ow!" Robin yelped as he rolled off David. Much saw this happening and got off Simon immediately, but Mrs. Denton still gave him a good strike or five with the brush of her broom.
Scared by the mean old lady, the four little kids ran off westward down the lane, screaming all the way, leaving their broken toy cars at the side of the road. As for David and Simon, they saw their opportunity and they took it, running eastward down the street and keeping their mouths shut as they did.
"What the bloody hell were you two doing to those poor boys!?" Mrs. Denton demanded of the towering fox and the timid lynx, now sitting on the ground and looking down at her - because now they were sitting upright and off the dirt, their torsos were still taller than she was. "Shame on the both of you for doing harm to two lads half your size! How would you like me to tell your parents what you've done!?"
But while Much was scared speechless, Robin was just livid at this obstruction of justice.
"If you tell them, then tell them the whole story!" Robin shot back at her. "Simon and David were smashing those little kids' toys!"
"And!?"
Robin didn't get it. "And what?"
"B-but it's true!" Much mustered the courage to say. He pointed to the damaged Majorettes on the grass and in the dirt. "See?"
"Yeah, we didn't do that!" added Robin. "They were being mean to the little ones, so we stopped them, and when they didn't want to apologize, we were making them pay up!"
"Yeah!" said Much. "And if we smashed them ourselves, then, then, then- then why would we point out the cars, huh?"
Robin nodded sternly to that as he looked back at the old lady. Both of the boys were operating under the assumption that Mrs. Denton thought they had initiated conflict.
But as she stared at them with an annoyed look on her face, the boys couldn't tell that that wasn't what was going on here at all.
"I never said I doubted that David and Simon were being dickheads, now did I?" asked the woman. "But even if they did break those kids' toys… so what? You think that makes it okay to knock them down and have those kids they stole from nick their pocket money?"
Robin and Much had no idea what to say.
But Robin said what he could: "Well… what else were we supposed to do!? We walked in on them bullying the boys, they refused to even apologize, and they kept saying that it was okay for them to break little kids' toys because they had their toys smashed when they were their age!"
Mrs. Denton knew that Robin had a reputation in Loxley for being wise well beyond his years as a consequence of physically looking well beyond his years, but she had never quite agreed with that notion. And as she looked at the tall boy who had always been told by adults he trusted that he was incredibly intelligent, she felt an ounce of pity for him, because he didn't seem to realize that all those adults were wrong and he was still just a young and foolish lad.
"It's not that it's okay or not okay, Robin," she said as gently as possible, still looking ornery. "It's just the way it is."
Robin was gobsmacked. "But- but how can you say that!? Those boys deserved none of that!"
"You're right," she said, "those boys - David and Simon - didn't deserve to have their toys broken. But now they're teaching the next generation a valuable lesson: sometimes bad things befall you and you didn't deserve it, and you need to learn to live with it."
"B-but that's what we told David and Simon!" squeaked Much. "We told them to live with the fact that some kids were mean to them once, but here they were being mean to younger kids anyway!"
"That doesn't mean that they didn't learn to live with it. Just as I said, boys, they were teaching them a very valuable lesson about life. Were you listening to me? Do you boys not listen to your elders?"
"Bu-but how can you just stand there and be okay with big kids being mean to little kids!?" Robin asked, himself now stuttering in frustration.
Mrs. Denton had two things she wanted to say, and she thought very carefully about the order she wanted to say them in.
"Stand up," she finally said. "Stand up, all the way up, the both of you."
Robin and Much exchanged confused glances as they got to their feet, stood up tall, and looked down at the tiny old vixen who was about as small to them as the two mean boys or Robin's mum, a woman who would be looking at their stomachs if she was looking straight ahead.
"You two think it's right and just to assault two kids who look like dwarves compared to you, but woe betide them if they lord over some little lads who aren't nearly as small to them as they are to you."
"But they're older than us!" Robin and Much protested in unison, starting to look worried.
"I don't care if they're older than you! You two are monsters compared to them! You could probably hurt them far worse unintentionally than they could hurt those little kids on purpose!"
"But what if they were even older?" asked Much, gulping. "Like… fifteen? Or sixteen?"
"It doesn't matter how old they are! It's about how big they are! You fighting another lynx your age is more of a fair fight than either of you fighting a fox of any age!"
"But that's why we're doing this!" Robin emphasized. "We don't want to see bigger people using their size for bad, so we're using ours for good!"
"And I know you mean well, but you're still a couple of foolish young lads who don't seem to understand that you could do great harm to people in this town even by accident! You need to be responsible with your size and strength!" She gestured to the fox. "And you especially, Robin! Listen: what if this wasn't happening on a side road? What if this was happening on the major street through the village? What if someone passing through town who doesn't know you sees you doing what you did to those poor boys? I assure you they won't think it's a younger boy serving justice to a delinquent older boy; they'd think it was an enormous… monstrous… ADULT, beating up a couple of twelve-year-old children! You'd best start carrying around a xerox of your birth certificate, Robin, because not a soul will believe you're still just a lad if they don't already know you."
Robin really wasn't enjoying having been called a monster twice in less than a minute, but as much as it killed him to think it, he couldn't think of a single rebuttal to what she'd said. He did, however, think of a point she was avoiding:
"So… what, you just want us to not do what we can to stop the bullying in this village? What else could we possibly do!? A-a-and what are you doing to stop it!? I don't see you doing anything!"
Mrs. Denton again reminded herself that these were children and they needed to be treated accordingly.
"Sit down again," she said. "I want to look you two in the eye."
Not seeing defiance as an option, the boys sat again to get closer to her level.
"Lads… it's sad to say, but what David and Simon did to those boys was probably better than what you did."
"What!?" was all Robin could say.
"What do you mean!?" asked Much.
"Tell me, lads: what do you think is a better lesson to learn? That sometimes people are mean to you and you just have to accept it, or that whenever someone isn't nice to you, a couple of giants will pop out of nowhere and handle them for you?"
Much seemed to be getting what the woman was saying, and hung his head in defeat. But Robin was not going to let this one slip away.
"W-we weren't trying to tell them we'd always be there for them! A-and neither! Neither of those is a good lesson!"
"Robin, those boys need to learn that life isn't fair."
"Then they should be taught how to try to make it fair!"
"You know what? I agree. But that won't happen if you insist on fighting their battles for them. They have to learn to stand up for themselves."
"They were defenseless!"
"I know they were." By this point, Mrs. Denton almost looked solemn, like she wasn't enjoying delivering this lesson herself, as though she was none too pleased that this was how she knew reality to be. "But were you here to teach them to defend themselves, or just to defend them and walk away without ever trying to teach them how to defend themselves the next time the bullies come around?"
"...Er-"
"The second one," Much murmured dejectedly.
"But we can start teaching them!" Robin argued. "That's a good idea actual-"
Mrs. Denton put a hand up. "Enough out of you. I need to get back to cleaning my house. So let's finish this up. There was no way they'd ever be able to defend themselves, and they were meant to learn from this that in life there will be times when they simply can't win. And I know you meant well to try to defend them, but they're simply too young to understand that you can't be their hero all the time."
"But those lads need a role model-!"
"Their role model should be an adult! You boys clearly don't know what you're doing, what with assaulting kids you could probably kill if you hit them hard enough!"
If Robin had actually been an adult instead of just looking like one, he might have been able to better refute her worldview; indeed, to this day, he thinks this woman's philosophy was a harmful one. But he was still a kid and was already frustrated to the point of speechlessness that this mean old bitch clearly wasn't going to so much as listen to an overgrown child's point of view, so at that moment, he just focused on getting out of there as soon as possible to go and find more people to defend.
Mrs. Denton had one more thing to say. "Robin, I don't know you too well, but I suspect that you have an easier life than you may think you do. But that likely won't last forever. One day, you're probably going to face real hardship. You'll be bad at things you used to be good at, or you'll be lost and have no parents to give you guidance, or you'll have someone be mean to you with no one to defend you and there will be nothing you can do - and if you ever leave this town, if you ever move into the city where there's many other species who are a lot bigger than you, you might go from being very tall to very small overnight. And when that happens, Robin… you won't know what to do with yourself. Because you'll have never gotten beaten up by some bigger boys before and learnt then how to handle feeling bad - very bad - when the world's got you down. I'm not happy to say that, Robin, but I've seen people with easy upbringings struggle in adulthood because they simply didn't know how to cope with hardship when the hardship finally comes. A happy child often becomes a miserable adult. It happens, Robin, and in that way - as much as the people in this village tout you as the most mature young lad around - in that way, those four boys know something about the world that you don't.
Modern Robin wishes to confess that, whereas everything that Mrs. Denton said prior to that point conveyed what he still believes to be an outdated and abhorrent worldview which he could easily counter-argue as an adult… that last part was something that to this day he wouldn't know what to say to rebut it.
Not that 1985 Robin was going to just accept it. "So… you say that you know people who were happy children and became miserable adults?"
"Yes, Robin. I do," she said without an ounce of joy.
Eleven-year-old Robin looked at the dirt pensively as he prepared to say a certain word for the first time in his life: "Well…" he began as he turned back to face her, "...was it you, you miserable old cunt!?"
"Oh, you cheeky little bastard!" the old woman swore as she took a swing at Robin with her broom, but Robin hopped to his feet and started running down the road before she could connect with him. Undeterred, she instead started beating Much.
"Ow, ow, hey!" Much yelped as he clambered to his feet and started walking away, still getting beaten. "I didn't do anything!"
"Sure you did! You hung around that insolent bastard!" she said as she pointed down the road. "And Robin!"
A safe distance away, Robin stopped to turn back toward Mrs. Denton.
"Remember, Robin! It's not fair to you that you have to act like an adult, but you do. Because life isn't fair! It's about time you learned that!"
"Please don't tell our parents," the lynx begged the vixen.
"Oh, I don't want to tell your parents because I don't bloody like your parents and I don't want to talk to them! Now get out of here!" she hollered as she beat Much with a broom again, and off he ran to follow Robin.
-IllI-
"Robin, I really don't know about this anymore."
"What, you're going to listen to what that mean old mad woman had to say?"
The boys rounded the corner at the end of Chase Road onto Hanson Road toward Loxley Road.
"I mean… what if she's right, though?"
"Oh, nonsense! She isn't right, she's just bitter that nobody in her life ever defended her! She thinks she's better than us just because she's old. Little does she know we've helped this town more in one day than she has in, what, a hundred years of living here?"
"...I suppose…"
"Plus you saw the joy on those lads' faces when we came to save the day, didn't you?"
"...That's not what I'm worried about."
"Then what are you worried about?"
"What if… what if she's not right, BUT… but what if all the adults in this town agree with her anyway? What if we really are right but everyone else thought she was right? Would it even matter then?"
"Much, nobody in this town even likes her! Nobody's going to agree with her!"
"You don't have to like someone to agree with them on something… do you?"
Robin thought that was a very good question. "Erm… well… hey!" The fox put his arm around the lynx's shoulders again. "I'll tell you what, Much. I still believe that we have a duty to use our superpowers to protect our home, and we should go the full monty and stop injustice whenever and wherever we see it! But maybe there was one thing that miserable old hag could teach us: maybe we should be careful not to be seen. At least not by adults."
"What, like… vi-gi-til-antes?"
"Kind of! But… we don't have to hide all the time. Just… when it might be more… touchy if we get involved."
"'Touchy'?"
"You know, like… when some people would agree that we should get involved, but others might not."
"Okay, I get what you mean by touchy, but… when would it not be touchy to get involved as long as people like Mrs. Denton exist? She doesn't want us touching any foxes!"
As Robin paused to give a good answer, the boys both realized they could hear a struggle in the near distance, and this time it sounded like it was coming from adults. Robin ran ahead and Much felt obligated to follow, and they soon saw that there was a fight going on in the car park in front of a faux-historic pub named for an admiral who had fought valiantly to suppress the rebellion of those impudent American colonists. Two pub regulars who they couldn't immediately recognize, already inebriated in the early afternoon, were going to pieces on someone on the ground as a bartender, a local bloke called Ashley, tried and failed to restrain them and another bartender, a woman called Joan, screamed from the doorway, begging them to knock it off. Also of note was the fact that all the people at the scene were foxes except for one: the guy on the ground. And the poor dumb bunny was wearing a United t-shirt in the wrong part of Sheffield.
"Well, let's see who would have a problem with this!" Robin said as he ran off toward the scene.
"Robin!?" was all the shocked lynx could say.
The drunken foxes didn't seem to be necessarily trying to pin the rabbit down as Tony and his friends had done to Jamie and his friends, but in their advanced state of drunkenness, falling down on top of him and beating his arse horizontally was a lot easier than making punches at a guy half their size while standing up. Ashley kept trying to pull one of them up and off the bunny, only to get elbowed off, then tried the same with the other and got the same result. Presumably there were no other staff or patrons at the pub at this early hour.
The drunkards weren't saying anything to the rabbit they were beating, who was just screaming and grunting as he took blows, but Ashley and Joan were trying to talk some sense into them:
"Roger, Barry, get off him!" Ashley ordered to no avail. "You're making us look bad, you stupid drunks!"
"Lads, cut it out of I'll have to call the police!" Joan screamed from the pub door.
"Boys, seriously-!" Ashley started before he realized a very large figure was running up to the scene, a figure he and his coworker soon recognized as that oddly tall boy in town.
Robin jumped into the action and grabbed the fox closest to him, pulling him off the incapacitated rabbit and throwing him onto the ground.
"You leave that poor man alone!" Robin hollered at the man.
"Robin, what are you doing!?" hollered Much.
"Kid, what are you doing!?" hollered Ashley.
"Lad, what are you doing!?" hollered Joan.
"I'm breaking up an unfair fight!" Robin declared proudly.
But before he could get the other man off the rabbit, the fox he'd just dispatched had something to say to him; it seemed that he recognized the town giant as well.
"Aw, it's you, Robin!" the fox said as he stumbled to his feet. "Now… why you defending a bloke like that? He's a bloody bunny and he's wearing red and black in the wrong neck o' the woods! You… you some sort of traitor or something? You not proud of who you are and where you're from?"
"Roger, leave him alone!" Ashley pleaded as he tried to restrain the one who must have been Barry, grabbing him from behind around the torso only for Barry to twist around and sock Ashley square in the ear.
"Why you defending him?" Roger repeated to the towering fox, slurring his words.
"Erm… sir?" was all Robin could say, finally recognizing this Roger fellow and remembering this man was Jack and Eric's father.
"Roger, he is a literal fucking child!" Joan yelled from the doorway.
"Oh, if you like the Blades so much, lad…" Roger murmured as he dug in his pocket. "...I've got a blade for you right here!"
And when Roger presented his surprise, Robin could see the terror in his own eyes reflected in the genuine Sheffield stainless steel.
"Goddammit, Roger!" Ashley screamed as he ran up behind Roger and grasped him from behind much like he did Barry, this time pulling himself backwards to take Roger with him and turning to send Roger face-first into the ground. The drunkard lost his grip on his pocketknife and it went sailing through the air, fully extended, mercifully landing on the pavement far from anybody.
Seeing an opportunity, Joan ran over to the knife - the blade of which had its spring bent from its landing, but it could still do some damage - and picked it up to go confront Barry, who by now had his paw over the rabbit's face and was repeatedly knocking the bunny's head into the ground.
"BARRY! GERROFF OF HIM! NOW!"
Barry saw the blade in front of his eyes and immediately jumped in fear, getting off the rabbit and rolling over as Joan stood over him, keeping the knife in front of his face.
"Sir, y'oreyt?" Joan asked the rabbit while still standing guard over Barry.
Everyone feared the rabbit would be unconscious by this point, but he was still groaning and moving his aching head. "What the bloody hell is wrong with you Owls supporters?" he mumbled.
"Why were you wearing Blades colors to this part of town, you bloody idiot?" asked Barry, sounding more cogent than Roger.
"I was just passing through to the Peak District to meet some mates and go hiking!" the rabbit groaned, his eyes still closed. "You think I expected to have engine troubles and need to nip into a place of business to use a phone?"
Everyone else glanced across the street, and sure enough there was a small Dacia broken down in the westbound lanes.
"I ought to have known you'd all be a bunch of hill-dwelling bumpkins out here!" the rabbit continued. "We're not even anywhere near Hillsborough, you maniacs!"
"Hillsborough's three minutes' drive down the hill, you stupid arsehole!" shot Roger, now safely restrained by Ashley pinning him down.
"Maybe with how mad fast you drive, Rodge," quipped Ashley before he turned to the boys. "Seriously, Robin, what was that all about?"
Robin looked down at the man who had saved him from the man he had tried to save someone else from. "I… I just wanted to… I didn't like seeing someone bigger hurting someone smaller. I… saw someone big be bad to someone small, and… I wanted to… use my own size to be a good big guy."
Ashley and Joan both looked rather bummed out to hear that this kid had a noble mission that had so badly backfired on him.
"And you know what, Robin?" said Joan. "That's really good that you're trying to defend the defenseless, but… you're still a lad, Robin, and these are adults. And they're stupid, reckless adults. They could have really hurt you."
"Yeah, it's good that you clearly have more empathy than some people…" Ashley said as he smacked the top of Roger's head, "...but… you really need to be careful that you don't pick a battle that's too much for you. You get what we're saying?"
"Er… yeah…" Robin muttered. "Yes, I understand, sir."
"But-!" Much cut in. "But… you do think it's a good idea for us to defend people? Because Mrs. Denton on Chase Road said that it's bad to go around defending people because they might start needing us to defend them."
"Oh, what does that miserable old bitch know!?" scoffed Joan. "She voted for Thatcher, I wouldn't concern myself with her opinions. Especially her opinions on self-reliance and helping people."
"Tell you what, lads," said Ashley. "You can still help us, really quick. Much, help the poor gentleman inside, and Robin, you hold down Roger here while I go inside and call the police and paramedics-"
"Ashley, the man just pulled a blade on him and you want him to restrain him!?" asked Joan. "Robin, you call an ambulance-"
"No, no, because if he calls, then he'll have to stick around for them to show up! I don't want the police knowing we got children involved in a pub fight! Besides, he's a kid! He probably doesn't know exactly what to say anyway!"
Robin just looked at the two pub employees back and forth, not sure what to do.
Joan eventually rolled her eyes and came up with a solution: "Right, how about this: Robin, come hold down Barry here while I go inside and call."
"Good idea," Ashley concurred, and gave Robin an encouraging look to go over.
Joan waited until Robin had sat down on the woozy fox's back and held down his arms before she put the knife in her pocket and guided Much in with the rabbit. While they went inside, Robin was left with Ashley and the two drunkards, and none of them said a word. So Robin occupied himself with his thoughts.
As he looked down at the man underneath him, who would occasionally give him a tired side-eye glare when he saw the kid was still staring at him, Robin reflected on what had just transpired. He believed with all his heart that his intervention alone was what saved that rabbit, because Ashley and Joan clearly didn't have the situation under control and surely there were neighbors who had heard the commotion and chose to do nothing. In this sense, Robin felt very proud to have done such an act of good.
But dear Lord, that knife had scared the living daylights out of him. Maybe Joan and Ashley were right, maybe he had bit off more than he could chew, and maybe he could have gotten himself seriously hurt if he hadn't been so lucky. But was this fear of getting hurt something he'd just have to deal with in his heroing career, or would it be something he grew out of in time? Because surely heroes rarely go their entire lives without taking at least some damage from the bad guys. Robin knew he wasn't Superman. He was telling himself to keep pushing and to just take this experience and learn from it for the next time someone pulled a weapon on him, but then again, he'd gotten a gut-punch from Ian and hadn't been any less surprised when Roger pulled a switchblade on him, so maybe acclimating to the sense of danger was going to take a while.
What Robin really wanted to know was what Much thought about this. Watching his friend almost get stabbed surely must have shaken the poor boy, but then Much asked that question seeking validation that their mission was right and Mrs. Denton was wrong, validation he received. This gave Robin hope that Much was trying his best to fight his timid nature and be brave, and if Robin was right, he would be proud of him for it.
A few minutes later, Much and Joan walked out of the pub with the rabbit, who took a seat on the ground by the front door as he waited for the police, holding a bag of ice to his head. Joan got the knife back out to hold Barry in place as she relieved Robin of his duty, and she and Ashley told the boys that they ought to make themselves scarce. Robin insisted on staying around to make sure these men were brought to justice, but the pub staff were having none of it. Once they were out of earshot, Much told Robin that Joan had been concerned - and probably Ashley, too - that if the two of them stuck around, stupid Roger might have the mind to drag Robin into it by saying he had participated in the brawl, too - which would have technically been true - and because Loxley didn't have its own constabulary, any officers who arrived likely wouldn't have been from around there and probably wouldn't have known nor hardly cared that Robin was actually a child, booking him for assault just like the adults. Robin then agreed that it was probably for the best that they had moved on from that conflict.
-IllI-
"How are you feeling now, Much?"
"What do you mean?"
Across from the pub was the head of a public footpath which ran along the western edge of the cemetery behind farmland and down to the River Loxley. The boys had clambered over a few stiles and walked the path's length and now found themselves on one of the secluded side streets shrouded in forestry, with scattered homes along the water.
"Well… that Roger bloke pulled a knife on me, I was afraid that might've scared you out of this."
"Oh, what, do you think I'm some sort of coward?"
"No, No! It's just… I was scared for a moment there, too, Much. I couldn't blame you if you were."
Much was quiet for a second before he answered. "I mean… yeah, I was a little afraid when that happened. But I was afraid when Mrs. Denton told us we were doing more harm than good, too. But… I'm trying to push through it, Robin. I'm trying to be brave like you."
Robin felt honored to hear that and wrapped his arm around Much's shoulders once again. "I'm happy I can be someone you want to be like, mate, but I'll admit… I'm not brave all the time, either. I can't expect you to be. But I think you're doing a splendid job yourself."
Much smiled a smile that was half from flattery and half from embarrassment. "Thanks… Hey, you know… they keep telling us that heroes aren't real… but maybe they mean people who aren't ever afraid aren't real. And the real heroes are the ones who feel afraid sometimes but push through it!"
Robin could see the smile on his friend's face growing wider, that of a child seeking validation from someone he admired, and Robin was not going to withhold that.
"That's a good way of putting it, Much!" Robin said as he patted the lynx on the back. "And you know what? Just seeing you try to conquer your fear… you're already a hero to me."
And Much's smile got even bigger.
The two kept walking, keeping an eye out for conflicts they could break up - though this time preferably not involving any inebriated adults. All seemed peaceful down by the river, a waterway that ebbed and flowed back and forth between spots where it was narrow and shallow and spots where it was wide and deep, splitting into two or three parallel creeks and merging again shortly after. Well over a century ago, a reservoir dam had burst and sent a rush of water down this river leading to perhaps the worst tragedy Sheffield had ever seen, but you would never guess on such a warm summer day like this that such a quaint old river running gently through the forested valley could ever have been capable of causing misery.
"Hey, Robin?"
"Yeah?"
"...Does… does it seem like there's a lot of people being beat up today in our town, or… or does this always happen in one day and we just haven't been noticing?"
"Erm… you know, that's a good question…"
It was a question that was further complicated by the sounds of further oppression in the distance.
"Hey, stop!"
The boys didn't need to confer; they ran toward the source of the sound. A little further downriver was a dammed-off section where the water widened and deepened, a spot often used for fishing for brown trout. Robin and Much got to the edge of the water only to find that the conflict was occurring on the other side.
This one was a weird situation. Neither Robin nor Much had ever seen any of these kids in their lives. Not only were these kids on the south bank of the river, but they were likely from south of the river, probably Stannington; they could tell because Stannington was a much more diverse place species-wise. A rabbit and a marten appeared to have been fishing before a fox, a goat and a ram had come along and thrown all their reels and bait into the water just to torment them; all the boys looked to be Robin and Much's age, if not a year or two older. Looking at the ram and the goat in comparison to the fox, Robin and Much probably still had a height advantage on them, but maybe not muscle, and they both knew it.
"Robin…" Much murmured, "...I'm trying really hard not to be scared, but… I don't know if we can take all three of them. They're a lot bigger than foxes, they might not be scared of us."
"I can see what you mean…" Robin replied, speaking slowly as he pondered the scene, "...but we didn't think we could take the four boys in the forest, now did we?" This situation looked like it was going to be very tricky.
Or it could have been very simple after all.
"Hey!" Robin shouted across the river.
All five of them looked up to see him and Much on the opposite bank.
"You leave them alone!"
"Aw, what ya going to do about it, love?" the ram jeered. No, this was not going to be very simple.
"Why's a grown fox hanging around with a lynx kid, you paedo!?" went the strange fox.
"That's just the thing!" Robin retorted. "I'm not even an adult! You just pissed off a giant, mate!" Seeing they weren't afraid of him across the river, Robin took off running down the shore.
"Robin, where are we going!?" asked Much, following as he felt obligated to do.
"To the bridge!"
"And… if they run off… before… we get there?" Much asked, wheezing.
"Good! Whatever gets them out of here!"
The boys ran down to where the forest footpath and a small road crossed over the water, hustling across to the small island in the split in the river and heading around the warehouse to get back to the bank they saw the boys on.
They started to slow down when they got to about the point they thought they saw the boys at, and had their suspicions confirmed when they saw footprints in the dirt.
"Where'd they go?" aske Much.
"I don't know…" said Robin.
This was a wee bit worrying; there was only one way on or off this small islet, and it was the footpath that went by the warehouse. Granted, the path kept going and another bridge crossed the south branch of the river, at which point the trail diverged into several directions, and the kids could have ran west further along the river or east toward the old Adam Bell Inn or south back into Stannington, and since they were likely from south of the river, they probably would have taken the south bridge to get off the island if they saw two big kids running over to confront them. But they would still have had to cover a similar distance and passed within feet of where Robin and Much had run, so this would have meant that Robin and Much just barely missed them on their way out as they would have had to pass through the same narrow piece of land between the warehouse and the water as they did. And even then, why would the boys fishing run away? They had nothing to run from, unless that marten and bunny were so deeply afraid of a giant fox like Robin.
If all five of them had managed to escape the island without Robin and Much seeing them along the footpath, then either all five of them ran really fast, or all five of them ran really, really slow and had been deep among the island's trees while Much and Robin went around the back of the warehouse. Or, come to think of it, that posed the possibility of a third option: if escaping without being seen would have necessitated them to hang back behind the trees and letting Robin and Much pass them by before making their escape, it was also possible that they never even left the island…
"You lads actually came over here?"
Robin and Much turned to see the strange fox boy step out from the tree line and join them on the banks.
"Wh-!? Where did- where did the other two you were with go!?" demanded Robin.
"And where did the boys who were fishing go!?" added Much.
"Oh, don't worry," said the strange fox, "the bunny and the weasel-y thing are being taken care of!" He wore another one of those haughty foxy grins that Robin loved giving but hated receiving.
"What the bloody hell do you mean, 'being taken care of'!?" Robin hollered.
"The goat and the sheep are taking care of them," the stranger said coolly.
"What does that mean!?"
"Don't worry, mate," said the stranger slyly. "You don't even hear them crying for help, now do you?"
Robin's first thought was that the poor fishing boys had been either knocked unconscious or… he could barely think to imagine. But as heinous as it was to torture counterculture kids by making them strip naked and covering them in dirt, as heinous as it was to make some little kids cry by breaking their toys and psychologically conditioning them to perpetuate the same behavior, as heinous as it was to commit what could be construed as a species hate crime that doubled as a microcosm of insipid football hooliganism, none of that was as insidious as this strange fox insinuating that his friends had quickly and joyfully harmed these children in such a way from which they may never recover. Robin's pupils narrowed and his blood was boiling.
Much, meanwhile, saw no time to focus his anger on this fox. "Robin, c'mon, we've got to find them!" he begged as he stood next to a tree, ready to run into the woods in search of those two poor lads.
"You want to go get them?" the stranger goaded, staring up at Robin without fear.
Robin saw no use for words.
"Hey! What the hell are you-!?"
Robin bent down, scooped up the smaller fox in his arms, and threw him to his side on the ground, where he landed with a grunt of pain.
"Robin?" Much was confused again.
Robin paid Much no heed, being far too busy kicking this strange fox in the ribs repeatedly before crouching over him and punching his face and torso, the perpetrator moaning in pain with every blow.
"Goddammit, stop!" he screamed.
"Oh, shut yer mardy arse up!" Robin swore, then looked to the lynx. "Much, get over here!"
"Er…" Much wasn't sure what he was going to be doing, but he followed orders.
Robin grabbed the stranger by each of his ankles. "Much, grab his arms! His wrists!"
"Er… okay-"
"What the hell are you idiots doing!?" the stranger protested, trying to kick Robin but failing to regain control of his legs.
Robin lifted the older boy's lower body off the ground. "Much! Start swinging!"
The strange boy tried wiggling free, but the lynx and the giant fox had no trouble keeping a grip on him, and they began swinging him like a pendulum as they stepped closer to the water.
The bully couldn't believe his fate. "You're seriously going to-!?"
"On three!" Robin commanded.
"Er, okay…" said Much meekly.
"Oh, no…" murmured the stranger.
"ONE!" Robin declared.
"Oh no, wait, wait!"
"TWO!" Robin and Much said in unison, albeit Much much less enthusiastically.
"Wait wait wait, stop! STOP!"
"THREE!"
Robin and Much released their grip and sent the assailant sailing through the air.
"I CAN'T SWIM!"
SPLASH.
Each of their hearts skipped several beats.
Robin and Much stared at the spot where the strange fox disappeared into the water, waiting anxiously for him to come up as Robin's anger and Much's confusion dissolved into panic as they tried to process the last three words they had just heard.
The wake from the splash had quickly died out, and now the river kept flowing along, the water seeming perfectly still.
Robin is still ashamed to this very day to admit it, but he kept staring at the water, paralyzed by fear of his own actions, while Much ran ahead into the river first.
"Robin, come on!" Much pleaded as he sprinted as fast as he could into the water, where nothing had yet risen from beneath the surface amid the gentle current.
Robin's brain kept misfiring before he was finally able to rush into the water himself, by which time Much was already chest-deep and almost losing his balance among the flowing water himself. Much wasted no breath speaking as he waved his arms around in the water, trying to feel for something mammalian, but Robin spoke loud and clear:
"Come on!" he begged someone who could not hear him. "C'mon, lad, where are you!?"
They splashed all around the area he had fallen, and an area well beyond that.
"Come on!" Robin repeated, panicking even more as he heard his own voice breaking.
They kept swishing their arms all around the water, but the only signs of life they felt were the odd grayling slipping through their paws.
"COME ON!"
"Robin?"
The fox turned to the meek lynx, who had stopped searching and now was staring straight at Robin. Much's eyes were glassed over and his unsteady breathing conveyed just how upset he was.
And it was perhaps seeing that loss of hope in Much that caused Robin to start crying as well.
"No…" he murmured as he laid his paws even on the surface of that deathly current and felt the drops of river water that had splashed onto his snout joined by the moisture coming from his eyes. "N-no… NOOOOO!"
Robin screamed at the top of his lungs as he closed his burning eyes and punched the surface of the water repeatedly with both hands. He knew when he started this journey toward heroism that he may err in his judgment, but he had never thought that he would falter so gravely. He knew immediately that he would never be able to live with himself for a mistake like this - assuming the authorities never found out about this and beheaded him for it, which he actually hoped they would for he did not believe he deserved mercy. In fact, he would have had the mind to submerge himself right then and there and scream until his lungs were empty. A drowning would have been a fitting punishment for his sins.
And the strange fox and his four friends agreed.
Robin and Much barely had time to look when they heard splashing coming from behind them, as they were promptly tackled by the goat and the ram and found themselves completely underwater.
The duo struggled to the surface to see the bunny, the marten, and the soaking-wet fox come up behind the ram and the goat.
"The bloody hell is wrong with you two lads!?" the strange fox hollered.
The goat got a good grasp on Robin and the ram a good grasp on Much, neither of the heroes able to use their arms, and when the fox got close enough, he took both of his hands to the tops of their heads and forced them down as the Loxley boys screamed in protest.
And while the rabbit and the marten gave the tall fox and the lynx some stomach punches to ensure they couldn't hold their breath, the soaking-wet boy thought this would be a good time to recite some poetry very, very slowly and dramatically:
"Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie, kissed the girls and made them cry…"
Robin and Much wiggled all they could while trying not to panic, their mouths and throats filling with water as their vacant lungs burned and their stomachs screamed in pain.
"...when the boys came out to play, Georgie Porgie ran away."
The stranger let go of the two boys' heads and they immediately threw their heads up and gasped for air, which caused a dilemma when they were still in the middle of inhaling as the strange fox dunked their heads again.
"Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in a pot, nine days old."
He let go, they came up for air, he shoved them down again, and the rabbit and the weasel-like creature just kept delivering underwater blows the whole time. This time the fox decided to sing:
"Looondon Briiidge is faaalling dowwwn, faaalling dowwwn, faaaling dowwwn, Looondon Briiidge is faaalling dowwwn, myyy faaair laaadyyy!"
And up, and down.
"Put your finger in Foxy's hole, Foxy's not at home! Foxy's out the back door, picking at a bone!"
Up. Down. And then a sadistically long and macabre nursery rhyme that the strange fox surely had no way of knowing was extremely fitting in several ways for one of the two boys.
"Who killed Cock Robin? I, said the sparrow! With my little bow and arrow, I killed Cock Robin! Who saw him die? I, said the fly! With my teeny little eye, I saw him die! Who caught his blood? I, said the fish! With my little dish, I caught his blood! Who'll make his shroud? I, said the beetle! With my thread and needle, I'll make the shroud! Who'll dig his grave? I, said the owl! With my little trowel, I'll dig his grave! Who…? ...Lads, what comes next?"
"I think it's the rook with a book," said the ram.
"You reckon they've had enough yet?" asked the goat.
The fox took a long moment to think about it. "Ah, sure."
He let go and the Loxley boys were dragged out of the river, coughing up water and gasping all the way to the riverbank. The ram and the goat threw them on the ground and all five of the strange boys stood over them, some giving dirty looks, others looking amused.
"You bloody fucking idiots were supposed to run into the woods to save them!" the strange fox barked.
"Yeah, don't you know it's rude to not walk into a trap that's set and waiting for ya's?" the goat jeered.
"They did that thing where you're waiting in a room to spook someone and they just never walk in!" the marten remarked.
Robin and Much didn't say a word, they were still catching their breath and putting the pieces together in their head to decipher what just happened.
The rabbit pointed at Robin. "I think I've heard of him."
His friends were surprised.
"You have?" asked the ram. "What you heard about him?"
"He's that giant fox in Loxley," said the bunny. "They have a freakishly tall fox lad and this must be him. Me mum always jokes we should never go to Loxley unless we want this big bloke to catch us and eat us."
"Oh, yer mum is such a bloody racist!" the strange fox remarked, half playful and half annoyed, smacking his rabbit friend on the back of the head.
"Hey, I know she is!" the rabbit protested.
The five of them looked down and pondered the fact that this enormous lad really was just another child their own age.
"That actually kind of makes sense, though," the ram said. "Maybe if he were normal, he'd actually recognize how normal lads play with one another! 'Ooh, you leave them alone!'" he mocked.
The fox boy chuckled. "Hey, good point there, Harry. I must say though, it's a crying shame none of us could see the looks on their faces when I said I couldn't swim!" And as he said this, he started walking away from the disarmed vigilantes, and his friends followed.
"Well, we saw the backs of their heads!" said Harry.
"You did!?"
"Course, love, we heard ya's screaming so we watched the whole thing from the woods!" said the marten. "Even from behind, they looked like they shat their pants!"
"And you actually had us fooled at first when we didn't see you come up!" added the goat.
"Aw, speak for yourself, you daft bastard!" said the ram. "The rest of us knew he was just swimming underwater!"
"You all should have seen his face when he saw Lee crawl out of the river down the shore!" said the marten, pointing to the goat.
"And that was a bloody good wind-up," said the fox called Lee, "but I'd rather not be soaking wet right about now."
"Hey, that's what you get for throwing our fishing rods into the water!" the bunny protested. "You owe Rich and I a new one each!"
"Well, it was your dumb idea to go fishing when you knew only two of us even had rods!" said Lee. "Now we each have zero! What's fair is fair!"
"Yeah, and fishing's boring anyway," said the goat, "I just came to twat about on the off chance something cool happened. Lord, did I get lucky!"
Robin kept staring at the boys as they disappeared around the bend and their voices faded away. He had finally caught his breath, but he was far from feeling alright. He had taken this yoke of heroism upon his shoulders because he knew he wasn't ordinary, but he had thought he'd had at least had a good understanding of what 'normal' was. And as those five lads' footsteps died out, never to cross paths with our hero again, Robin couldn't help but wonder if they really were such profoundly normal preteen boys that an immense freak like Robin couldn't comprehend their culture of normalness. He wondered to himself whether normal boys his age were meant to roughhouse even more than he thought, and if he was further than he knew from being a normal person who could relate to normal people.
But Robin had no time to feel bad about himself, as the one boy his age who he thought he did understand had started crying.
"Much?" Robin asked as he sat up and scooted over to the lynx, putting his hand on his shoulder. "Much, are you alright?"
"NO!" Much hollered with his face buried in his hands, occasionally looking up to give Robin a dirty look through angry tears. "No, I'm not alright! We almost… we almost got drowned, Robin! How are you even alright!? Don't you understand how bad this is!?"
"B-but Much, it's okay! We're okay now, that's what matters-!"
"NO, ROBIN, NO!" Much wept. "D-don't you see!? Th- this is just going to keep happening! The boy in the forest punched you in the stomach, then Mrs. Denton hit us with her broom, then the drunk man threatened you with a knife, and now a bunch of boys almost actually drowned us! It-it just keeps getting worse - and that was just today!"
"Much, you don't know that it's going to get worse-!"
"YES I DO! Because people don't want us to be heroes! They keep telling us so!"
"Much! Mellow out! Breathe for a second! Jamie and his friends were grateful! The boys in the lane were grateful! Ashley and Joan said we were doing a good thing! This was the one time we didn't help someone! We made one mistake-!"
"And it was a big bloody mistake!" Much said with a glare. "What if that wasn't a wind-up!? What if he really didn't know how to swim!? Then what!? We be heroes for one day and spend the rest of our lives in prison!? Heroes don't make mistakes like that!"
"But like we said, Much, perfect heroes aren't real, but real heroes are real! And real heroes make mistakes and feel scared sometimes! Don't you think I was afraid too when he said he couldn't swim!? A-and real heroes get hurt sometimes, too, and sometimes they even lose! It's going to happen to us, but what real heroes don't do is give up! We can't give up right after we've started!"
"I don't care, Robin! I-I don't care! I…" Much sniffled. "I don't want to do something that makes people hate me and- and want to hurt me-"
"Bad people hate heroes because they're bad, Much! But we don't care about what they think, we care about what the people we're helping think! And they love us for-!"
"Is this why you're doing this!?" Much hollered. "Because you want people to love you!? Good people don't do that! Heroes don't do that! And heroes definitely don't almost get people killed, especially their friends! They don't go around ruining people's lives just so they can get people to think they're a hero and love them! Bad people do that, okay!?"
Robin sat there feeling lost. He felt there was nothing he could do to convince his friend otherwise, so he was blunt with his next question: "Much… what do you want me to say to that?"
"I don't want you to say anything! Just- go! Go and be a hero without me, then! I- I don't want to be a hero anymore…" Much sobbed as he buried his head into the triangle he formed with his arms on his knees. "...I'll- I'll let somebody else do the heroing! I just want to be safe! I just want to be okay! Go be heroes with that girl at school you like! You probably like her more anyway! I don't care about having strangers love me, I care about not having strangers hate me, Robin! I… I just don't want to be hated! I don't want people to hate me and want to hurt me! I don't want to die, Robin! I…" He let out a weeping cough. "...I don't want to die."
Robin dare not say another word as Much went on weeping. Robin kept looking at Much, then the river, then the rocky and sandy banks, and at anything he could see, not knowing what to do, not knowing what to think. They may have sat there without a word for five or ten minutes. And Robin could only sit there listening to his closest remaining friend sobbing for so long before he started getting teary-eyed himself.
At long last, Much seemed to regain some of his composure, still sniffling and gently coughing tears out of his throat, but no longer howling in misery. He looked up and blinked away the moisture as he stared down the river. He wasn't looking at Robin.
"Much…" Robin finally got the nerve to say. "...I'm sorry. I shouldn't have made you do this. And I can't do this by myself, so… no more trying to be a hero for me either. No more. I'm done with it."
Much finally turned and looked at Robin, the lynx's face completely expressionless.
"S-so…" Robin continued. "...how can I make it up to you? Do you… do want to do something else now? What do you want to do?"
Much still didn't look engaged as he started to his feet. "Just leave me alone, Robin."
As Much started walking off, he heard the grass rustling behind him, and stopped and turned to see Robin starting to get up to follow him.
"I said leave me alone," Much repeated, his face no longer expressionless.
Robin didn't know what else to do, so he sat back down and watched Much turn away from him and continue onward, never once looking back. And until Much rounded the same bend as the Stannington lads did, Robin kept watching as his friendship disappeared.
And Robin sat there peacefully for a time, perfectly calm if thoroughly confused about how to feel. But after a few minutes, all the confused emotions started getting to him, and he soon wept much like Much had.
He wept because he was a failure, and he wept because he was letting evil men like Robert Scarlett win. He wept because he would never know the joys of a normal life, and he wept because he had disappointed his parents who had given him so much love that he could never repay. And he wept because he had scared away a good man from fighting in the name of good, having failed so hard to be good that he had convinced this boy that Robin was evil, and because he had driven away the only other boy his age who had ever seemed like he regarded Robin as his best friend.
Robin's physical size had robbed him of many of the things that make up a normal childhood, but one thing that they could never take from him was his childlike hope, his youthful idealism, his firm belief that people were more good than evil and good would always triumph over evil as long as the good people believed in themselves and wanted to be good. Robin didn't know it yet, but as he sat there dripping wet on the banks of the River Loxley and its deathly waters, he was mourning the death of his own innocence. And for this reason, he wept.
-IllI-
By the time Robin got home that evening, his clothes were almost dry, although some sand and dirt on the seat of his pants and in the fur of his tail betrayed that he had been somewhere that wasn't quite high and dry. When he walked in, Oliver, who had had the day off, told Robin that Mrs. Denton had stopped by and told him the very naughty thing Robin had called her, but in her Mrs. Denton-esque ways, she hadn't provided any context for why this had happened and walked away while Oliver was in the middle of his sentence asking about what had transpired between them. Oliver asked Robin plainly whether this was true or if the old vixen was just crazy, but Robin told him yes, he had said that, because she had yelled at some little kids who were being too loud in the street behind her house.
Oliver was impressed by Robin's honesty, and admitted that he'd wanted on several occasions to call Mrs. Denton that himself, but felt the need to give his stepson at least some punishment for doing what everyone else wanted to do but didn't do because it wasn't polite to do it. Therefore Robin wasn't allowed to watch telly for a week. But besides the eleven-year-old's lament that he would miss the next installment of the canine Musketeers' japanimated adventures, Robin had no other qualms about this punishment, as he was starting to wonder if the world thought he was too big for children's programmes anyway.
When Brianna got home from the hospital that night, Oliver informed her of Robin's misdeed and subsequent punishment, but she was too tired from work to care; she'd had a long and stressful day, lowlighted by a poor teenage boy who came in with a suspected severe concussion but soon looked like he had even more severe of an injury. She had wanted to talk to him, but Oliver explained that Robin seemed to have had some sort of a rough day himself and had gone to bed around sunset. Having recently started to fret about whether her dream job was worth sacrificing time with her family, hearing that her son was already asleep did nothing to brighten her mood. So she quietly walked into his room, kissed her fingers, touched her Little Giant on his cheek, and exited without stirring him, hoping she'd have better luck the next day for a chance to talk to him; it was less than a month later that she had her realization that her son's father had set her and her son's stepfather into exhaustive lines of work specifically to rob them of time with Robin.
But as for that sunny summer day and its long journey into a warm summer night, that was how it ended for Robin. As far as he knows, Oliver never found out any more about Robin's journeys that day, and Brianna similarly is still none the wiser. And Robin never felt an ounce of guilt for withholding this information from them. His parents had specifically encouraged him to defend the undefended, and he had tried his best to make them proud, but they had also stipulated that he not endanger himself by doing so, and he was afraid to ever let them find out that he had failed to do that. He already felt like a living disappointment; he couldn't handle disappointing them again.
-IllI-
The next day Robin went to the lynxes' house and was greeted by Mrs. Miller. He asked if he could talk to Much, but she told him that Much had asked her and his father nicely that if Robin should come calling for him if they would please politely ask him to leave. Much's mum asked Robin plainly if something had happened between the two boys, suggesting that Much really hadn't told his parents much of anything regarding the previous day's events. Not wanting to possibly get Much in trouble, Robin - perhaps shrewdly, perhaps rudely - told Mrs. Miller that it wasn't his place to say. He walked away heartbroken, but determined to make it up to his friend who he had felt he'd wronged by pushing him too far beyond his out of zone and trying to make him be someone he simply didn't want to be.
Robin came back the next day, this time greeted by Mr. Miller, who told him much the same thing as Mrs. Miller had told him the day prior, complete with a question of whether Robin would like to elucidate them on what exactly had transpired to upset their son so much; again, Robin declined comment, much to Mr. Miller's annoyance.
Robin tried again the next day and was again told Much wasn't ready to talk to him, then again the next day. Then he skipped a day to give him some more breathing room, but tried again the day after that, at which point both of Much's parents came to the door and told Robin that he need not keep knocking for them, and when - and if - Much would be ready to talk to Robin again, Much knew where to find him. Robin understood and spent the rest of his summer holiday waiting for a knock on his door that never came.
When school started again in September, Robin started to worry about how he hadn't even incidentally encountered Much around the neighborhood. He eventually asked the other boys and girls of Loxley, who told him that Much seemed to have spent most of his summer holiday indoors watching telly and reading books and comics, and although he would come outside to play every so often, he would be even quieter than usual, hanging back and blending in with the scenery - and come to think of it, the only days he seemed to come outside were the days Robin was away at Robert Scarlett's house or at those stupid classes.
But no matter, all of that was a moot point now that Much had specifically asked to board at school full-time, including weekends. Apparently he just needed to get away from home for a while, and he had somehow arrived at the conclusion that a private school with a reputation for being harsh was a better place to be than Loxley. The kids similarly asked if something happened between Much and Robin - indeed, many of these kids remembered that one day where the two of them had heroically stuck up for Jack, Eric, Aajay and Nick in the dirt road as well as Strange Jamie and his friends in the forest all in the same day - but Robin just told them that he had no idea what had come over Much.
And as time went on, that became less of a fib. Whereas he had once felt terrible about hurting his friend, as the months and years went on, Robin grew to resent Much for having been so weak. He still believed that he and Much had each had a power that few others in that village had, and it seemed frankly an act of moral cowardice that Much had been too afraid to use his abilities to help his home. Seriously, what little boy wouldn't take the opportunity to become a superhero when the opportunity was thrust upon him? And the fact that he refused to even show his face to Robin and went far out of his way to avoid him was just evidence of further cowardice. And the way that he had emotionally manipulated Robin into thinking he was the bad guy for pushing Much to be all he could be? Disgusting, absolutely reprehensible. Through his teenage years and into his adult life, Robin would come to feel bad about thinking so lowly of his old friend, then double down on thinking he had been a dirty coward, then feel like he was being harsh again, then think he was right the first time again, but eventually he came to the conclusion that it just didn't matter. He and Much had been separate people who had only ever bonded over being giants in a town full of little people and otherwise had little else in common, and they had always been destined to fall away from one another.
Not to say that Robin quickly found someone else to bond with over more substantial things. Robin still got plenty of friendly social interaction - indeed, it would have been a struggle for a truly friendless boy to grow into the endlessly charming and magnetic man he would come to be known as - but it was the standard fare as it had always been. The kids in Loxley and at school would invite him to come play, he was never isolated or neglected, he had physical attributes that would sometimes make him a particularly attractive playmate (Robin finally got a taste of that "normal" boyhood roughhousing when the other kids around town devised a Chicken-like game where one would sit on another's shoulders and they would try as one unit to wrestle him), but even as he celebrated his twelfth birthday that autumn, which almost all the children in Loxley between the ages of ten and thirteen attended just as he had attended theirs, he knew as he gazed down at these kits who barely made it up to where his chest met his stomach that not a single one of them would call him their best friend, nor would he them. Some would say that this foreshadowed who he would become as an adult: a charismatic character who seemed to be friends with everybody but who was actually close with very few. But much like how an adult Robin would sometimes find himself wishing that he wasn't conditioned to be so goddamn generically charming and would actually rather have had a few odd quirks with which he might have been able to form fewer but stronger interpersonal bonds, that young fox towering over all the adults and children at his party wished that he was more than just The Giant of Loxley, more than a living novelty act who everybody wanted to call a friend but who nobody wanted to be a good friend to, and he wished these other kids weren't so enthralled by his existence so that they could come to see him with new eyes and get to know him as an actual person.
Oddly enough, with age, the first part of that wish came true, but not the second. As a future friend who practiced medicine would tell him, children of a certain age go through a phase where they genuinely all lose substantial amounts of empathy, and as he entered those infernal teenage years, the other children his age very suddenly stopped being so infinitely fascinated by his existence. But it was not replaced by the social refresh he wanted; instead, the boys suddenly became very size-conscious and started hating the giant and seeing him as a condescending threat to their masculinity, while - ironically - the girls went out of their way to make clear that he was absolutely not impeding the attractiveness of the other boys, on the grounds that his excessive height went far past the point of making him look manly and hot and just made him look creepy and kind of intimidating (one might even say, like a monster). It wasn't all the other kids at school and in Loxley, and it certainly wasn't constant, and all but the most mean-spirited kids eventually mellowed out and grew up around the age of sixteen. But for a few years there he went through a period where, for example, every so often he would be ducking to enter a classroom and a boy would yelp to scare him and make him bump his head, or he would pick up a pencil for a female classmate and instead of gratitude they would reply with "Ew," or a kid his age in Loxley would tell the very young children that Robin had actually once been a normal-sized boy but had a condition that made him never stop growing and now he was an adult who hung around children because he wanted to molest them in ways Jimmy Savile could only dream of, and all of this constituted a situation that could be argued did or did not qualify as chronic bullying, but it was indisputably the closest thing to persistent, long-term rejection that Robin had ever experienced in his first thirty-odd years of life.
But he didn't go through it alone. Just when he needed her most, his best friend came back, and blimey, had she changed. Wouldn't you know it, it turned out that entering womanhood was misery for Marian at an all-girls school where she had been ridiculed for being tall, mocked far more mercilessly than Robin ever had been. While Robin was never entirely friendless, Marian had not had the same fortune, and getting through that period of her life (uh, pun not intended) was even more unbearable without the boy she liked there to help her through. After her thirteenth birthday, she put her foot down and demanded that she be allowed to transfer back, and her parents (and their wealthy lion friend who was footing the bill for her education) obliged.
When Robin found out that Marian was going to be in his life again, he of course got excited, but when he met her again, he found that she was not quite the girl he remembered - but he wasn't disappointed. She certainly wasn't a fully-formed adult yet inside nor out, but he was pleasantly surprised by her transformation, and something deep inside him wanted to stick around to see where it was going next. He suddenly saw her as a lot more than just his best friend, and she reciprocated.
And almost immediately after reuniting, Robin began one last growth spurt. The kid had been hardly growing half an inch each of the last three years and people were starting to think he was finally grinding to a halt, but then he met Marian again and grew another three inches within the next year and a half - and to reiterate, three inches is a lot more than three inches in fox terms. Unless you want to get picky about that last quarter of an inch, Robin had already arrived at his adult height shortly after his fifteenth birthday. Significantly, people they knew made jokes that after the sight of a post-pubescent Marian, Robin's pituitary got revved up after a certain other hormonal gland in his body was stimulated, as though his entire body got the chemical urge to suddenly become even more manly for this young woman - and while this may be a correlation/causation fallacy, the chronology of how things turned out can lead one to believe that such lewd remarks were not entirely inaccurate.
And for those curious about how this growth spurt affected the saga of the Big Boy in the Little House on South View Rise, Brianna and Oliver were on Robert Scarlett's tail to get him to find them more suitable living arrangement for a teenager who was down to hardly two inches of head clearance lest they take him to court to prove he was the father (a particularly palpable threat seeing as DNA paternity testing had recently been made widely available), but the bastard kept moving the bloody goalposts. Refusing to believe that the kid would wind up being that much taller than him, Robert had Robin taken to a pediatrician to have his growth plates read where they concluded, yeah, the boy's almost done, he's not going to hit five feet unless he suddenly develops a brain tumor on his pituitary or our measurements are just wildly inaccurate. And just in case they were wildly inaccurate, Scarlett drew up a probably-not-legally-binding contract with Brianna and Oliver saying that he'd either buy them a new house or have the ceilings at the house on South View Rise raised if and only if Robin was measured by a licensed physician to be four feet, ten and a half inches tall without shoes - which Robin never would. And as much as living in his house in Loxley did become genuinely more frequently uncomfortable in those last few years, Robin kind of wished that he could have squeezed out one last quarter inch just to make The Tall Man pay up.
But any of the cramped discomfort of that home was assuaged by the thought that he would soon be venturing away from Loxley, into the big wide world to seek his fortune. Now that he and Marian were teenagers, they were old enough to visit one another in their hometowns whenever they could get transport, and Marian found Robin's stepfather's background in theatre and his near brushes with greatness fascinating. Oliver - who by that point was in his mid-fifties and was very open to the idea of leaving a lasting legacy by passing along his craft and passion to curious pupils - gladly accepted her request to have him teach her what he knew about selling the drama. By the time she was done with her compulsory education, she had her sights set on making a career of playing pretend.
And Robin tagged along with Marian in her lessons and her dreams, but not because he was particularly as hooked on the idea, at least not at first. Robin wanted two things in life: he wanted to be happy, and he still wanted to be a hero. Admirable goals, but none of them pointed toward an obvious career path, and frankly, no line of traditional work seemed appealing to him. He listened good and well when Oliver was teaching him and Marian the differences between classical and method acting, and he did his best to be a good role partner when Oliver would have them perform Shakespearean scenes, but for a while, it was just something he did to bond with his girlfriend and stepfather.
But when Marian told him when they were seventeen that she wanted to do this for a living, and had been looking into universities with good theatre programs all over the world, it got him thinking. Hell, what was he planning on doing with his life? What did he want to do that would fulfill the tenets of making him happy and being a hero? He had briefly considered the idea of becoming some sort of doctor or scientist, but he had always been one of those students who was better at English and mammalities than at science and mathematics, so that probably wasn't going to pan out.
The idea of being a professional actor, however - no, a famous actor - well, that seemed like a promising prospect. He would be doing something fun for a living alongside the girl he loved, so that fulfilled the happiness requirement. And as for being known as a hero? He genuinely wanted to help people but, honestly, yes, he also wanted to get due credit for doing so - a lot of due credit. He had tried being a real-life defender of his town when he was little and it had been an abject failure, but now he was playing with the idea that maybe the sheer act of making art that made people happy was itself a heroic endeavor - and one that certainly would pay handsomely in terms of a lasting legacy (as well as actual currency). So while he still wished in the back of his mind that he could be some sort of modern-day folk legend, he came to terms with his situation and decided that bringing joy to the joyless was just as noble a cause.
His complicated feelings about this could best be summed up in his feelings about film portrayals of the famous English hero Adam Bell. While the Sidney rendition of the tale with cartoon humans had always been his favorite childhood movie, as a teenager he finally got around to seeing the classic 1938 film with that old Aussie wolf in the titular role, and in him Robin saw a man who was confident, courageous, charismatic, cunning, and strong in mind, will, and body, a man who women wanted to be with and who men wanted to simply be. And that made Robin not only jealous of old Errol and his take on the character but also retroactively jealous of the cartoon version, who certainly seemed a unique and distinct personality from Flynn's version but nevertheless had all those same enviable qualities about him (and who - Robin wouldn't find out until decades later toward the end of Oliver's life - just so happened to have been voiced by Oliver's childhood friend from Morley, the fox lad he took youth theatre classes with who later went on to win a Tony Award and be nominated for several more; it turned out that Oliver never told Robin about that because his friend hadn't really considered it that noteworthy of a personal accomplishment and didn't much care for film acting anyway). But Robin wouldn't let this jealousy become toxic and used it to challenge himself to become as much like them as he could, though as much as he still genuinely enjoyed both films, he did find both characters a tease, representing a type of hero - and a type of person - who could hardly exist in the modern world, assuming they could ever have existed at all. Therefore he told himself that if he couldn't ever be the character, he would be the actor who had the privilege of playing him.
Robin met Marian's "uncle" - really, her godfather - when the lion was visiting in England, having long ago moved to the States but making frequent visits back home a couple of times a year. Robin used some of his artificial yet potent charm-school charm on him and the two ended their only encounter in Britain with a mutual respect for one another. Turns out that the lion was the anti-Robert Scarlett, a man born of an obscenely wealthy family who had more money than he knew what to do with, a fortune that was implied going to keep growing as he suggested that his younger brother was kind of a loser who was going to be largely disinherited. Having no interest in sitting on his wealth and living the aristocratic life - in fact, he had entered politics to challenge himself to do something altruistic with his life, and doubly challenged himself by doing so in America because getting ahead in a political career with the money and connections he had in the UK would have been far too easy - he was already paying for all of Marian's education by his own volition, seeing as having children of his own just seemed like something that wasn't in the cards for him, and after meeting Robin, he said hey, what's one more aggressively overpriced American arts degree going to hurt his bank account? If Robert Scarlett was a filthy rich man who raised Robin in the aristocracy as a self-aggrandizing hobby, Richard Norman was a filthy rich man who genuinely loved the Swifts like family and wanted to give their daughter the best like she was his own, and if that was going to spill over onto her boyfriend, Robin wasn't too proud to say no.
Robin knew when he left Heathrow for JFK that he was beginning a completely new chapter of his life, but he didn't yet understand how radically different things would be for him. He was tired of being a quite literal big fish in a small pond, so he crossed the pond in search of a new adventure. He knew that America and especially New York City were famously diverse melting pots and that he would no longer stand head and shoulders above the crowd, but he didn't understand quite the impact that such a jarring change of scenery would do to his psyche.
Because from the very moment that he and Marian got out of her father's car in downtown Sheffield at the train station and craned their necks up to consult the doe at the window for two one-way tickets to London, Robin never felt like the giant he once was again. By the time the two of them boarded the plane and Robin sat down in an airliner's seat for the first time in his life and overheard an American wolf a row ahead of him bemoan the lack of legroom while Robin felt like he had more than enough, he would never feel tall again. And after a few months amid the hustle and bustle of New York, he never even felt average-sized again. He actively started feeling short, small, and not even remotely significant.
True, there would be times where he would feel big in a specific context - a professor would be a squirrel, a grocery check-out girl would be a weasel, a family he was helping would be rabbits who lived in a home sized much the same as the one he grew up in - but these were mere fleeting moments. His mental picture of himself went from one a time and a half as tall as everyone around him to one where he was often the shortest guy in the room, and this change happened within less than six months. It was a shock not unlike coming out of a sauna and jumping into a lake, a feeling like he had woken up one day to find he had been shrunken in his sleep by a mad scientist. When it dawned upon him that he was now exclusively having dreams at night where he was always smaller than everybody else, he realized that something had changed in the way that he fundamentally perceived himself.
Of course, this was still Robin Hood, a man widely admired for being so unendingly confident and self-contained - as far as anybody else knew. He did a bang-up job of never letting slip that this new role as The Little Guy was actually kind of bugging him, and indeed, as the years in America went on, he started to get used to it, having come to more or less accept his fate by the time he graduated from university. But every so often, something would happen that would have him lamenting who he had become; it could be not being able to see out of a window that stopped above his head, or it could be getting the shit beat out of him by some psychotic teenagers who dwarfed him, or it could be fighting for space when crashing in an abandoned van with a bear he loved like a brother but could care less for how the bear in question seemed to dominate eighty percent of the available cubic volume of the space, and when those moments happened, sometimes he wished he was once again that benevolent giant who nobody would so much as choose to mess with, and other times he just wished he was normal. Robin had gone from feeling better than normal to less than normal, and it was fucking with his head.
Yes, Dear Reader, in a story where it seems like most of the men we've met are troublingly self-loathing and unsatisfied with their physical size, even our friend Robin - who without exaggeration had never met another fox his own age his own size in his life because he was always bigger than all of them by a wide margin - was not immune to that classic male self-image problem that would prompt many in socially-progressive circles today to label his sense of masculinity as "fragile" and "toxic". But Robin's was a unique case. His was never a case of "Why am I so small?" - what he often found himself thinking was "Why are we so small?" Foxes: he was perplexed how he had been born into a species that it seemed was just big enough to sometimes be visible as a sneaky nuisance but small enough to be ignored at all other times. It just seemed like terrible luck. He never forgot the environment he grew up in, and that honestly made it more frustrating. Really? He was literally more than a foot and a half taller than the average male of his species and that still wasn't good enough to feel like he wasn't a freakish midget in a multicultural society? It just seemed ridiculous to him that despite his genes' best efforts, he couldn't escape his people's curse. The fact that he had on many occasions in his childhood shed tears out of fear that he was growing into a gigantic monster now seemed completely absurd, and the fact that he had spent much of his earliest years on prescription painkillers because he was clinically growing too large too fast now seemed like absolute horsefeathers. Between what he already knew about how his people were negatively stereotyped and what he had come to learn about how they were even smaller than your average mammal than he'd originally thought, he just wished he could be a member of a species normal enough to not feel literally and figuratively looked down upon; he didn't wish he was a giraffe or an elephant, but he was certainly grateful that he wasn't a mouse.
To reiterate, Dear Reader, by the time of that summer when Robin Hood and Little John met those three strange suburban boys who seemed like they desperately needed fulfillment and guidance, Robin had mostly become comfortable with this new version of himself as the scrappy little dude, but he was still mortal and he was still flawed and he was still as susceptible to insecurity as anybody else, and every so often such intrusive thoughts would enter his head. And we may have been able to pinpoint the exact moment that ensured that such thoughts would never entirely go away: it was the moment that he was told bluntly by a respected figure that someone who looked like him could never play the hero.
During that same first semester of college when he took that fateful accents class that inspired him to make the regretful decision to drop his Sheffield dialect, he also took his first proper acting course; unlike the accents class, Marian and Robin were able to get into the same section of this class. The professor was an actress herself who had a quarter-century's experience on and off Broadway, as well as some minor film roles, and she had worked behind the scenes a few dozen times as well, doing things such as casting. The other students were enamored by her success and awestruck by the idea that they were fortunate enough to learn from such an accomplished professional, which is why they largely gave her an endless number of passes for her frequent curt, condescending, and often callous behavior, much to Robin and Marian's confusion (they often joked to each other that they had understood the transatlantic trade-off to be that although Americans were fat and stupid they were at least supposed to be friendly, and that this kind of passive-aggressive pedegogy was exactly what they had left the UK to avoid; this was of course before they learned that Northeastern cities were glaring exceptions to this rule - people there were fat, stupid, and mean). This professor wasn't constantly antagonistic, but she was never afraid to say whatever unflattering things she thought about you, followed by telling you that she didn't believe in mincing words or sugar-coating things.
One day in class was a particularly slow day, a November day not long after Robin had turned nineteen. All the scene partners had finished presenting, and since it was the last class before Thanksgiving break, there was no urgency to start something new. As the students had their chairs arranged circularly around her as she sat on a block, the professor, acting jovially, mused aloud about how they should spend their time, and the other students, perpetually thirsting for her wisdom, asked her if she could typecast them all. She responded no, they hadn't yet reached the full breadth of their skills yet so she didn't have sufficient information to typecast them, but she would gladly go around the room telling everyone whether they were leading or character actors. For those not familiar with acting lingo, the distinction can be simply (if cynically) summed up thusly: leading actors were normal-looking enough - and often conventionally attractive enough - to be compelling to audiences in lead roles; character actors were literally everybody else, players who weren't easy enough on the eyes to play the lead and were invariably relegated to supporting roles, barring comedies, where it usually added to the humor to see the world from such a funny-looking creature's perspective. In acting circles, character actors are highly respected and treated as unsung heroes, because after all, a good supporting cast is what will truly make or break a production, and they're often regarded as better raw actors than their leading counterparts because they don't have looks to use as a crutch, but everybody knew that in the eyes of the general public, it was the handsome men and the beautiful women who got all the glory.
The professor prefaced her judgments by explaining that the character actors in the room need not fret, but had best be aware that things would be tough for them until their were about forty, at which time their services would be in much higher demand, while the lead actors should be wary of the opposite problem, and that they should work as much as they could until they were forty, at which point they'd best be very smart with their money. And as Robin sat there next to Marian, he wasn't listening to the teacher's assessments of the other students, and was mentally preparing himself for making the next twenty years of his life count since apparently it would all be downhill from there, but found comfort in his daydreams of success that would make that decline a gentle slide down, all alongside the woman he loved.
The professor finally turned to him, a concentrating look in her eyes and a wise smile on her face. Robin returned with one of his own famous smiles, completely certain he knew what she would assess him to be. The doe stared at him for a moment to take him in before she made her call. But she stumbled:
"Leadi- hmm… no. Character. Yeah, character."
And Robin was so shocked he actually caught himself whining without even realizing it, almost like a knee-jerk reaction:
"Aw, really?"
"Yeah, you're character. Definitely."
And after having the epiphany about what exactly it was that made Robin unsuitable for leading roles, she turned next to Marian and gave her the same Character label without any hesitation. Marian was a bit disappointed, but she'd fallen in love with theatre and acting for the sake of the craft, so as long as she had a place in that world, she would be happy.
But Robin was devastated. After class, he hung back and asked to speak with the professor privately, to which she predictably mentioned that she was very busy and didn't have much time but she would give him her attention anyway because that's just the kind of person she was. Therefore he wasted no time: he asked her plainly why she drew the conclusion that she did, and if perhaps the way that she had changed her mind halfway through was a sign that she had actually been right the first time. And he made a point to clarify that this was not a case of a bruised ego; he was not in this game solely to be a movie star and get rich and famous. He explained that he was doing this because he had wanted to be a real-life hero but couldn't for the life of him how he could ever do that, so the next best thing was to go play the characters that might inspire others to believe that heroes can exist if they believe they can, and maybe even inspire people to go out and do good and be heroes themselves, just like the heroes in fiction had inspired him. He made it abundantly clear that his insatiable need to play the hero wasn't a product of pure and undistilled narcissism, and that he had very practical and noble reasons for wanting to be a leading man.
He still remembered that look on her face like her time was being wasted.
"And? So? Why does this matter? What does that change?"
She explained to him with similar straightforwardness that he just didn't look like someone who could be a hero. And she clarified that he had a leading man's face - dear God, did he have a leading man's face, it actually made Robin kind of uncomfortable how this older doe woman was going out of her way to say his face was as close to empirically handsome as was possible - but underneath that face was four entire feet of huh? She almost sounded like she was pitying him when she told him that he was just too short to play the traditional lead - and yet somehow too tall to play a short background character in a diverse cast or a lead in a play or movie specifically about foxes. She told him that his body was a physical paradox and while that wasn't fair to him, life wasn't fair to most people, and as a consequence of how he looked - and Marian, too, for that matter - he could have all the talent in the world and he would still be lucky to make a living on the stage, let alone on the silver screen, and he'd best brush up on his comedy chops, because that would be his best chance at eking out a career in a field that specifically makes getting in even harder than it needs to be in order to keep out the wannabes who aren't willing to bust their asses just for a chance.
Robin was flustered. He told her that she was basically saying that his entire species - of whom he was possibly the tallest living member - was too short to be seen as capable leading actors, to which she said yes, his species and many, many others were barred from being cast as the everyman in a project not specifically marketed to their species. When going for wide appeal, you need someone who not only looks decent, but looks normal, including size-wise. Was it unfair? Absolutely. Was it going to change? Absolutely not. It wasn't just Broadway and Hollywood, the stage and film cultures of damn-near every country in the world were very old-fashioned like that, and for better or worse, if a story was meant to be consumed by the masses, English-speaking audiences were expecting the dramatic lead to be either a deer, a wolf, a cheetah or some other large feline if the production company wasn't too racist, maybe a gorilla, or maaaybe a dog here and there. And since Robin had specifically used the word "hero", she said that the reason why such tropes were likely never going away was because deep down we're all still a bunch of dumb animals and our primitive brains correlate size with significance, and if you're selling a "hero", people's subconscious minds would be more on board with a strong and statured man than a slight and scant one like him - and she added that she was in a similar boat regarding heroic roles because despite being a deer, Broadway and Hollywood reflect the cultures they exist in, and this chauvinistic world had no interest in a heroine over a hero; she had come to terms with it, now it was his turn. She said if Robin were a foot and a half shorter, he'd be a perfect leading actor for works specifically about foxes, but as it was, he was far too freakishly large for those, and in stories where the main character's species wasn't important to the plot and the target demographic, he wasn't going to be front-and-center on any advertising posters because he just didn't have a commanding presence. She told him plainly that he would never play Superman, he would never play James Bond, and he would never play, oh, what's a good third example?, ah yes, he would never play Adam Bell.
He was speechless. And as long as he wasn't saying anything, the professor remarked at how ridiculous it seemed to her that she even had to explain this to a theatre student, and asked him whether he'd ever seen any blockbuster films or marquee stage productions starring a fox despite the story not specifically being about a fox. Robin replied by sheepishly explaining that he actually hadn't seen that many plays or movies, since he was more interested in making his own art than consuming other people's, at which point the professor gave him a disgusted wince for a solid two seconds before she rolled her eyes, threw her hands up, and walked away without saying anything more to him. And as Robin watched her walk away, he reflected on how looking up at that doe a head taller than him and listening to her literally and figuratively talk down to him while saying he was too small to be a hero had given him a weird visceral feeling that perhaps she was right.
Robin and the professor didn't get along very well in that last month of the semester, but because she couldn't fail him just because she thought he was an immature crybaby, she passed Robin with a C- and never substantiated her reasoning besides writing in his final progress report that he should "watch more plays and movies and see how the experts do it, then [he]'d be more than just a pretty face." (He was seriously considering taking this to the school's administration and filing a sexual harassment complaint, but in his frustration he had absentmindely thrown the piece of paper away.) Robin was otherwise a fine student in college and got As and Bs in his other theatre-related classes, but that C- got his GPA off to a bad start from which he never recovered, and he never came close to qualifying for academic honors.
Therefore, Dear Reader, if you insist on seeing it as pathetic that Robin had come to feel such bitterness about his own body, much like how many would say it was pathetic that so many other men we've met have been insecure about their physicality, keep in mind as you do that he desperately didn't want to be a bitter and insecure person and actively strove not to be, and that he usually succeeded in this, but that he would never totally forget the time that a person who was a well-respected authority told him in no uncertain terms that he was, quote, "too short": too little too achieve his goals, too tiny to fulfill his life's mission, too small to be seen as a hero in either fiction or reality.
So when Robin was two years out of college and was having virtually no luck finding auditions, let alone actually booking roles, probably as a consequence of his strange proportions, and then suddenly found himself with the opportunity to go out and realize his childhood dream of becoming a real-life hero, someone who did real-life good for real-life people and getting real-life recognition for it, of course he abandoned all he knew in search of the life he'd always wanted. When asked why he did it, he always modestly answered that he'd felt he'd had a sense of duty, mentioning that it was a tough decision and he didn't want to leave his girlfriend behind, heavily implying that he really didn't want to do it but felt he'd had to. But while those who knew him best did believe that Robin was a genuinely good man who genuinely wanted to do genuinely good things, they also knew he was playing up his own selflessness to make himself look even more heroic… just like he wanted to be seen as when he was a lad. His close friends and family knew well that he'd jumped at the chance to be the great hero he'd always wanted to be as a child, a hero he'd been led to believe couldn't have existed in the real world - and a hero he'd been led to believe he didn't look like anyway.
And he did finally get that recognition he'd always craved for his eleemosynary exploits, and the way the people lauded him as a hero surely did assuage much of his worry that he and his people were just too small for the mainstream world - not completely erasing that worry, but largely. And a good thing it did, because it was clear by the time he made that leap to Sherwood Forest Nature Preserve that he would probably never again know the place where he was a giant without peer.
From the moment that aeroplane landed in America until the moment he threw away his status as a civilian in favor of the life of an underground vigilante who was surely on the no-fly list, Robin never did have a chance to return to Loxley, nor Sheffield, nor Yorkshire, nor England, nor the British Isles, nor Europe, nor anywhere outside the Northeastern United States. Marian's Uncle Richard was more than happy to pay for their education, but he wanted them to make the most of their university experience, so their end of the deal was that they stay in New York for their school breaks and try to earn extra college credits or work some jobs to earn their own money, and while after college Uncle Richard was more than happy to pay their rent, he didn't want them becoming reliant upon him, so their end of the deal was that they find jobs and work those jobs and earn money to get anything else they might want or need, up to and including plane tickets back home. While Robin was working as a tour guide in DC, he frequently encountered European tourists who were surprised to meet an Englishman living in the States, and on at least a few occasions the tourists talked about the broad concept of tourism and joked about how those ignorant and jingoistic yanks didn't seem interested in broadening their minds and seeing the world, and every time this came up, Robin would explain to them less and less politely than the previous time that now that he was living as an American, he could tell them from first-hand experience that it wasn't quite that simple, and that he had made the foolish decision of moving to a country that was so gung-ho about its work ethic that if its denizens stopped working for even a second, they would be branded as lazy and they would go broke and nobody would help them because they were so dreadfully evilly lazy and they would fucking die - ipso facto, few in this strange land had both the time and the money to travel the world. And Robin didn't mean to get so worked up about this with these strangers he was trying to charm for that sweet sweet tip money he needed so Marian and Annie wouldn't accuse him of not pulling his weight again, but he didn't care for the sentiment that travelling was so easy when he was desperately missing England and would have given anything to go back for just a day. But eh, those tourists were European and they probably weren't going to tip anyway.
We've all heard that saying that you can never go home again. It's supposed to be poetic, and although in Robin's case it was particularly literal, the abstract meaning was just as true for him. Because while it was still a possibility that he would one day return to Loxley, there was no way for him to return to the past. The place he knew to be home now existed solely in his memory. You could take him there and he could walk down Rodney Hill and all the vulpine villagers might come out of their houses and ogle at his size, but now he would be doing it as a stranger, just some bloke who happened to be freakishly huge compared to the locals. Never again would he walk that road as the bright-eyed young lad who all the foxes in Loxley gazed upon in awe, as if his heroic stature was a sure sign that the boy was destined for greatness. If he were to return to that town, he might be much bigger than everybody there, but he would no longer feel like a bold and fearless giant among normal people, he'd just feel like a small and vulnerable man among even smaller people. And if he came there with these things in mind, that village would be stained by the knowledge that he was only there to try to recapture a long-dead youth, seeking his past because he detested his present and feared his future, and it would not be painted with the aura of being a place from which the whole world was ahead of him in all directions, an aura that made even the cloudiest of English days feel sunny as he felt sure that his future was bright, an aura without which that town would never again feel like home. The place he called home no longer existed and would never exist again, and Loxley no longer had a place for him there. That village was missing its giant, its hero, its native son; the person Loxley needed was a person Robin simply no longer was. Heaven knows his accent didn't match those of the residents anymore.
And yet in many ways, he was still just like that chipper young kit growing up in the house on the top of the hill on South View Rise, and especially like the boy he was on that sunny July day twenties summers prior. He was still missing a girl he hadn't seen in well over a year; he was still hanging out with a plump old boy who admired him but may have only been following Robin because he had no one else to follow; he was still wearing a smile whenever he could, trying to brighten the days of everyone he met; and he was still pretending to be a hero and still doing his best to stop injustice and defend those who could not defend themselves, and while he still wasn't sure he was always doing a good job of it, he still always hoped with all his heart that he was, because he still didn't want to disappoint his poor parents yet again.
-IllI-
In the early dawn of that Saturday in June, Robin was urinating and vomiting at the side of a mountain of rubbish in the junkyard, trying not to shit his pants, expelling as much of the gross quantity of intoxicants that he had consumed the previous night as he could, while his friend could be heard doing the same thing on the other side of the trash pile. They were both going to go back to sleep in the van after this, but they wanted to get as much waste out of their system as they could before the day began in earnest and strangers might start to come through. To cover their tracks, they were going to bury their eliminations under the trash they had accrued the night prior, bottles and cans and cardboard boxes that they would have tossed in a recycling bin somewhere if they had had the luxury. And as Robin stood there with his plastic grocery bag full of garbage, absentmindedly dropping things into place between urges to expel something, he extracted and examined an empty bottle of a beer that he and Johnny had specifically picked in tribute to a friend who hailed from Milwaukee, Wisconsin:
Miller
HIGH LIFE
Robin never did see Much Miller after he had disappeared around the river bend that fateful July day on the islet in the River Loxley. Robin wondered if he should still try to apologize to him, or if he was right to write him off as a weak-willed baby and a manipulative coward, or if he should see whether Much had become a much different person in the intervening twenty years; but then Robin remembered that he still wasn't entirely sober and that he was having ridiculous thoughts and that he was likely never going to see Much Miller again. Ah, it was probably for the best. At this point, an encounter between them would only be awkward; Robin had topped out early while Much still had plenty of room to grow, so Robin wouldn't have been surprised if Much was a foot taller than him by then. The idea of having been outgrown by that coward was another one of those things that could make Robin briefly lament his people's curse to be forever diminutive, but in a minute's time the thought was gone from his head.
But other thoughts of Much did not go away as Robin stared at the beer bottle that bore the lynx family's name, and a wave of memories rushed in like a Sheffield flash flood. And as Robin zipped up his fly and wiped his mouth and crawled into the van's passenger seat so that the bear could have extra space on the mattress in the trunk, he expected to quickly pass out again from exhaustion and let his headache subside, but instead he found himself kept awake by memories. Memories of a time when he was a village hero, memories of a time when he was larger than life, memories of a time when he had a superpower that nobody could defeat, memories of a time when he had taken it upon himself to be a force for good in this world, memories of a time when he still felt invincible.
And he remembered all the things he felt when he realized Much wanted nothing to do with him anymore: so confused, so sorry, so angry, so anxious, so lost, so alone, so apologetic, so offended, so hurt, so abandoned, so heartbroken. And he remembered everything he had promised himself when he realized that Much wasn't interested in reconciliation. That was the day that Robin promised himself that he was going to find a way to be the hero people needed, somehow, someway, whether it was a real one who saved people's lives or a fictional one who inspired people to be a hero for others. That was the day Robin promised himself that if he could ever find someone brave enough to join him in his adventures as Much had refused to do, he would be sure to the best friend that person could ever have, and he would never treat them as unequal or make them feel lesser-than as he had with Much, as he would regard that person as a co-hero and not merely a sidekick. And that was the day that he promised himself that he was not going to let anybody convince him he wasn't a good person, not a sociopathic teenager in the woods, not an ornery old lady nobody in town even liked, not a drunken racist football hooligan. And he definitely wasn't going to take it from some kid who was content to sit on the sidelines and let other people be heroes when the opportunity for heroism was in his hands, someone who instead opted to let life pass him by as others lived it for him; it was a travesty that Robin had even considered for even a second that Much was right to blame him and say that good people never bend the rules. No, Robin had promised himself that he would not allow himself to be so easily convinced that he was not a good person, and he most certainly was not going to be told he wasn't a good person by someone who was too afraid to be a good person themselves.
