51. "Interstate 97 Love Song"
If you just Google "Chesapeake bay bridge", you'll first get results for the bridge-tunnel in Virginia. But the name also refers to the less-famous bridge linking Annapolis to Maryland's Eastern Shore, and consequently connecting the Capital region to the Delmarva Peninsula. Originally carrying U.S. routes 50 and 301, it was also signed on as Interstate 97 in the 1970s when the route was designated to run from Baltimore through Annapolis, across the bridge into Delaware to reach Nottingham, then sharply turning south to cross the bay again on the aforementioned bridge-tunnel before terminating in the Hampton Roads area - Pennsylvania was pissed that they didn't just route it north-south through Delaware to connect more linearly to Wilmington towards Philly instead of DC, but they eventually built the First State Freeway as I-197 roughly along the route of U.S. 13 and DE 1, so everyone had a happy ending there.
Or at least a mostly happy ending. The Maryland bridge was the bane of motorists across the Mid-Atlantic. It was, and is to this day, frequently cited as one of the most dangerous, frightening, and frustrating in the United States. Very high, very steep, very narrow with no shoulders and with very, very low "guardrails" which are basically just a very high lip of concrete. A few years prior, the bridge had been closed during a hurricane as it was dubbed unsafe to drive (okay, that's not too insane) and a few years after this, at least one semi hopped the wall and crashed into the water below (yeah, that's pretty insane). At peak vacation season in the summer, people from all over the Balto-Wash corridor head across the bridge to flock to the beaches on the Atlantic, only to find themselves stuck in gridlock on a piece of concrete suspended over open water. To at least somewhat alleviate traffic on the way back, the bridge has the odd quirk of only having tolls on the eastbound lanes, the prices doubled, idea being that you'll probably be going across the bridge in both directions eventually so you might as well save time by only stopping at the toll booth once. Of course, if you're on a one-way trip and only going across the bridge westbound, you're getting a free ride out of it, while if you're going east and staying east, you get the privilege of paying for one trip for the price of two, which was the case for a particular peculiar pair of a Scottish ewe and an English vixen, presently stuck on the bridge in that traffic of people heading to the beaches for Father's Day.
"...Och, do you think all these people are regrettin' going to the seaside for their holiday if it meant sitting in this jam?" the sheep asked; like the vixen and her tod, the ewe's brogue had wanted significantly after more than a decade in the States, but it had been so strong in the first place that many yanks she encountered would often still say it was the strongest Scottish accent they'd ever heard in-person. "I've known a great many short-tempered men in me life, and I can't imagine they'd enjoy spendin' a day dedicated to them in a standstill like this!"
"Hm, perhaps," replied the fox, not really feeling the small-talk, her mind in other places as she stared out the window over the water. "Not much different than sitting in traffic on the way to, say, a sporting event, eh? Plenty of people seem to think that wait is worth it." She figured she ought to at least put some effort into having a normal conversation instead of leaving her friend alone with her own thoughts while she pondered what had become of her man.
"Och, these people must really love gettin' sand in their fur if they think it's as entertainin' as a football match!" Interestingly enough, back in Livingston, a lot of people would accuse Annie of having an accent more like a Saxon from south of Hadrian's trying to put on a Scottish accent - and there was undeniably some truth to that as, as her surname betrayed, her father was an Englishman by birth and heritage before being raised under St. Andrew's cross.
Mari found herself giggling. "Oh, Klucky, you're just jealous of them because they can swim!"
Kluck scoffed. "Well if you want to take your theatre degree and explain to me how it's my fault that wool isn't buoyant, you can be my guest, Mari!" The sheep's avian nickname was just too perfect. For one thing, her surname Clough, traditionally pronounced to rhyme with tough, with her accent came out sounding more like cluck, which at this point she just told people was how it was supposed to be pronounced. But then there was the fact that she was, as she would put it, "a big lass"; sheep had a ridiculously wide range of plausible sizes, some ewes could damn-near fit in some rams' pockets, but while Annie wasn't the tallest ewe around (about a smidge shorter than Marian, herself an incredibly tall vixen)... let's just say that if she were a farm animal, she'd be a bountiful source of mutton chops. So once one night in college, she and the foxes had been stumbling around Manhattan in search of drunk food, and Robin dared her to try a Chicken McNugget. Her people were traditionally vegetarians, of course, but by this point in mammalian history, basically any herbivore could consume meat in a pinch if they had to, so she took the Anglo's dare to eat a chicken nugget and by the end of the night had downed 157. Hence a new affinity for poultry was born, as was an endearing moniker. Definitely a better joke about her surname than all those people growing up who'd incessantly ask her whether she was related to Brian and Nigel from Nott'm Forest, knowing damn well a sheep likely wasn't related to those foxes.
Marian still found the concept of a floating ball of fluff amusing. "Oh, I've seen sheep swim before!"
"Oh, yeah!? Where!?"
"Oh, at swimming pools, at… you know, the beach-!"
"And they were just wadin' in the water, weren't they!? Fine, so we can tread water for a few minutes before our wool gets waterlogged if we get thrown into a fooking lake, but do you really think that's the same as being able to swim enough to save ye' self!? Can you truly call it strong swimming if we have such an elevated drownin' risk!? You'll never see one of us working as a lifeguard - and you most certainly won't see is swimming in the Olympics!"
The vixen just kept gently giggling as she looked out over the bay. She didn't care that she'd probably lost the argument; she just found it amusing when her friend went off on a silly tirade about nothing even remotely important.
"Well, then…" she said slyly as she slowly turned back to her friend in the driver's seat, "...'d be quite a shame if we had to put this question to the TEST!"
"AAAAAAAHHH!"
Annie saw her life flash before her eyes as Marian grabbed the steering wheel to jerk it to the right towards the miniscule barrier. The sheep tightened her grip, swerved it back to facing straight, took a second reset her heart rate back to normal, let herself come back to reality… and then remembered that the car had been going at precisely zero miles per hour in the gridlocked traffic when Mari had spun the wheel and that her hoof had been firmly on the brake the entire time, and that there had never been any real danger to warrant her panicking.
Over in the passenger seat, Marian had her head against the glass as she was keeled over sideways in hearty laughter.
"Are you a fooking child!?" Annie hollered. "You think that's a funny joke!? Makin' me feel like I'm about to meet me maker!?"
Marian's chuckling petered out and she sat back up to face her friend. "Oh, Klucky, you surely must calm down. Lighten up a bit!"
"I've good reason not to be calm, Mari! And when a grown woman seems to have the sense of humor of a five-year-old, that's quite frankly alarmin'!"
The vixen's laughter finally ended in a smiling sigh. "...All this driving is driving you mad, isn't it?"
And Kluck did indeed look like she was finally calming down. "I suppose it hasn't been the best thing on me nerves…"
"Want me to take over?"
The ewe replied with a look of incredulity. "Och, yes, of course, how foolish of me, the answer seems so obvious! Let's get out of the fooking car and switch seats in the middle of a bloody motorway!"
The vixen just kept smiling a smile that many said perfectly matched her tod's. "We're hardly even moving, Annie. If someone else were here, he'd tell you not to be so afraid to break the rules just a bit."
The sheep was smiling now, but nevertheless rolled her eyes and went back to facing the road. "If he were here, I'd tell him he must be too used to breaking the rules if he can't discern when it's wise and unwise to break them!"
Marian just shook her head and turned to stare dreamily out the window again. She didn't really want to drive through all this madness, but she did believe that it wasn't that big of a risk to get out and swap seats in the middle of this traffic jam and that if he were here, he'd agree with her, difference being however that he'd be pushing harder to actually do it. Without boasting, she'd like to describe herself as sharing in his fearlessness - but being a lot more picky and choosy about when it was worth demonstrating it. She'd be the first to tell you that he could be a bit of a showboat sometimes.
The sedan got quiet again. Neither of them cared for the mix of music played on the radio and all their cassettes and CDs were boxed up in the U-Haul truck a few vehicles ahead of them. As the hum of the air conditioner droned on, they were each left to think about the upcoming chapter of their lives, they each independently arrived at the conclusion that they might as well address the elephant in the room - which was to say, the fox in the forest.
"You've been thinking about him ever since they called us, haven't you?" Annie asked.
For some reason, saying it that way made a strange pang of melancholy pulse through Marian's heart, as though she found it sorrowful how much time she'd spent just waiting to see him again. "One does tend to think a lot about someone they agreed to marry, Klucky."
The sheep nodded. "I know you said you'd feel it out once you met him again before decidin' whether you still want to go through with it, but… have you thought more about what you do and don't want to see in him?"
The fox turned to stare straight ahead, gazing blankly through the windshield as if looking into her future. "If this were a decision to be made more with logic than with emotions, I'd agree that it'd be best to have some specific standards going into it, but… things like love just need to be felt out, Annie. We'll see whether the spark's still there after all this time - I certainly hope it is, but… I'm prepared for it to not be."
At least one thing was for sure: he was still alive and still raising hell. He had to have been. There would have been absolutely no logical reason for her uncle to offer her a job and a place to live rent-free out of the complete blue if her fiancé wasn't still a significant and tangible threat to him. Even Robin method acting as a blind man by squeezing his eyes shut until he saw stars could see that Prince John was attempting to use Marian as bait again, and since it benefitted them to do so, Marian and Annie were going to play dumb and play along.
"Ah, I understand that," cooed Kluck. "But there may come a point where your heart is confused and you'll need to call in your brain for reinforcement!"
Marian chuckled and rolled her eyes. "I know he's not what you'd want in a bloke, Annie, but just because he wouldn't work for you doesn't mean he can't work for me!"
The ewe looked offended. "Marian, I'm not tellin' you to break up with him! If I felt you should, I woulda said something by now!"
The vixen shrugged with a coy smile. "Yes, but I know you have mixed feelings about him."
"But I only have good feelings about you - when have I ever done anything but support your happiness!? I'm merely sayin' that if your happiness tells you to move on from him, then you mustn't be afraid of that!" She was getting pretty animated at the notion that she wasn't a good cheerleader to her friend, the sheep thumping her hooved hands against the steering wheel a few times as she spoke. "Remember four fooking years back when we first came to this town!? I didn't speak a single ill word against him! All I did was encourage you to follow your heart!"
Marian was still giggling at her friend getting agitated. "But even then, I had to wonder how much you did wish to speak ill of him!"
And Kluck realized that her frustration was what her friend was seeking, so she sighed and mellowed out. "All I wished to do was to see you happy, Mari. You're a good lass and you deserve it, just because I can't find a lad who suits me doesn't mean you shouldn't."
Marian nodded as her smile dissolved back to a neutral expression. "Don't think I haven't noticed you being a supportive friend, Annie," she said as she started zoning out again. "Even if I sometimes wonder if it's hard for you."
She knew what her friend thought of her boyfriend, as her friend had made her opinions clear plenty of times, albeit much less frequently over the years; very frequently when the three were all living together in Philadelphia and Washington, then progressively less and less often for about a year after he "disappeared" until Annie realized that Marian didn't share in her opinion that Robin had abandoned her and that the vixen still loved him deeply, at which point the ewe decided to keep her mouth shut with the uncharitable remarks and only share them when Marian specifically requested she do. Therefore there was no reason to bring it up again during this car ride and hurt her friend's feelings for no good reason, it wasn't like Annie thought Robin was flawed in any way dangerous or immoral way (well, besides the part where you could argue what he did was indeed abandonment, righteous reasoning or not). If Marian never came around to her way of thinking, Kluck wouldn't lose sleep over it, it wasn't her life and it wasn't that important for her to butt in. But damn did she ever wonder what Mari saw in him.
Annie didn't hate Robin. Nonono, not at all. She actually rather liked him. He was a swell fellow who was doing some pretty great things that nobody else had the nerve to do. That was great. But what about… beyond that?
Annie had always found Robin boring. Yeah, the guy carried himself like a true gentleman; okay, so what? Annie didn't think he was faking it - from all she'd heard and overheard about his upbringing, she knew he wasn't - but when people swooned over him for that sole reason, Annie always thought that was a pretty one-note descriptor. Chivalry was a great personality trait for a guy to have, but chivalry alone a well-rounded personality does not make. But he's fun, Marian would probably say. Okay, so what? So what if everyone thought he was the coolest cat in town because of moments of seemingly effortless smoothness like when the guy played his bow like a fiddle during the hoedown in the woods? Good for him that he's fun at parties, but life wasn't always a party, and he wouldn't even have been playing that makeshift fiddle had he actually known how to play any real instruments. But he's so charmingly self-confident, Marian would probably say, clarifying that it was the good kind of confidence that inspired others and not (usually) the bad kind of over-confidence that made him a right dickhead. Okay, so what? Let's rewind to before he became an outlaw; before then, what did he use that confidence to do? Move to a new country (which wasn't even his idea) and try and fail at starting an acting career? Annie had lived with Robin and Marian for years during and after college and she still didn't know what the guy's hobbies were outside of theatre and medieval weaponry - some would say that's still a pretty solid pair of hobbies, but one of them was more of a nostalgia thing for him and the other was his trade, a trade he wasn't even successful at. Skilled? Absolutely, but skill doesn't always translate to success; if Annie's understanding of Robin's time in Sherwood Forest was correct, he got back all the luck he never received in his acting days.
Actually, speaking of work, had Robin ever even held a real job? Annie didn't think he had. All the underpaying part-time gigs he had while surviving off his girlfriend's godfather's dollar didn't count - not that Marian or even Annie herself had much more luck in their artistic careers, but they at least held day jobs while Robin seemed almost too at-peace with being an underemployed artist. In all their time living together, in New York and Philly and D.C., Robin and Marian would on several occasions excuse themselves from Annie to have behind-closed-doors conversations which never got too heated but which any outside observer would likely describe as an argument, a civil and mature argument but an argument all the same, between the couple who liked to tell people that they never 'really' argued. And because all the apartments they inhabited had walls that were paper-thin, there always was at least one outside observer to pass judgment, and on one specific occasion while in Philadelphia, Annie could hear clear as day that they were talking about his job prospects, wherein Robin said plainly that he wasn't looking too hard because he had faith in his acting career taking off soon and taking a full-time job would run a high risk of robbing him of the time he needed to devote to his craft, and quite frankly he couldn't think of any other line of work that he would find, quote, "fulfilling" and that he would be no good to anybody if he were miserable; at this point, Marian naturally rebutted that it was a sucky situation to be in but they needed to bite the bullet and be responsible adults, to which Robin could be heard saying that searching for a traditional job would be a waste of his time since with his lack of a proper work history he'd probably never be accepted for one anyway.
This was again the same man who Marian described as not necessarily the perfect man, but likely the closest anybody would ever find to the perfect man; to Annie, this seemed like a major mark against his case. Knowing Marian, Annie figured she probably admired how Robin showed absolutely no signs of fear or anxiety when faced with the possibility of perpetual poverty and how he had complete confidence that things would soon get better for them, but Annie would counter that someone in his position should feel at least a little bit of a fire under their arse and should maybe sacrifice some of their confidence in exchange for a grip on reality. If she were in Marian's position in that bedroom, Annie would have dumped him that same day, but not before making sure Robin understood that, in most people's eyes, refusing to get a crappy job didn't make him some paragon of morality who was an honorable conscientious objector to participating in capitalism, it just made him a bum. Yes, in his personal interactions, he was a downright gentleman, but perhaps he thought he was too gentlemanly to take ungentlemanly work to support his loved ones. He always treated everyone else with an elevated level of respect; many would be shocked to find out that in private, he didn't always treat himself with the same dignity. It's funny; considering how unemployable he was, running off to be a bandit may have been the best career choice he had left.
And yet this flaw still wasn't even interesting. It wasn't that Robin had no character, but the trademark chivalry and swagger and such… it all painted a picture of someone who was almost cripplingly extroverted, someone whose genuine personality was concentrated entirely on how other people thought of him, and doing everything to ensure that others always did think of him. Did this guy ever do anything for himself? Even when he made an enormous leap to move across the ocean to pursue his dreams, it was at his girlfriend's behest, and as Kluck understood it, a big part of the reason why he said yes was because the guy still had absolutely no other realistic idea of what career he wanted to go into even as he rapidly approached adulthood. Annie thought Robin was living proof that it was possible to be objectively, empirically overflowing with charisma and still not have a single ounce of actual personality. So what if he was the greatest guy to have around in a social setting? How was he when he was alone? To Annie, that was the real test of character. She would think he was interesting when she walked in on him being interesting when he thought nobody else was around.
And that led to the big thing about him that most people thought was interesting - at least since he moved to Delaware and became an underground celebrity, as Kluck learned four years ago. But he's so heroic, Marian and many others would probably say. Okay… let's ignore that she still chose to be with this guy long before he became a folk hero vigilante. Let's ignore that. They all say he's so heroic? Hell, he'd better have been; he had no reason not to be. Annie knew Robin's secret; not only did she know his secret, when she saw people in the woods that night regaling him as a hero, their hero, she had consciously thought to herself I know his secret, but said nothing, lest it sound like she was trying to tarnish the image of these people's hero.
Usually the story is that a hero is heroic because they went through some hardship and came out the other end better for having survived it. Annie would never in a million years say that Robin's upbringing was without hardship, but in private company, she would absolutely say that his hardship wasn't hard enough to make his heroism truly compelling. She had lived with him; she knew his history. Oh, so he's so brave and confident? Of course he is. He's had people backing him up since day one. Between his mother, his stepfather, Marian, and now his fraternity in Sherwood Forest, the guy had rarely gone a day in his life without someone there to give him positive reinforcement. Annie knew that Robin wasn't constantly optimistic because he had overcome his self-doubt; he was constantly optimistic because he didn't know self-doubt.
Or, rather, he'd never known a time when his self-doubt overshadowed his confidence. He had most assuredly had his bad days and God knows he almost started cracking during the two years that he had to come to terms with the fact that being several magnitudes larger than the average fox was going to make a successful career as a Hollywood leading man unlikely, but - at least until the day he left for Sherwood, she couldn't vouch for whatever happened to his psyche after that - things like chronic depression and anxiety were surely unknowable to him. It was deplorable that his biological father had spent eighteen years swooping in to pick him up whenever Robin was useful to him and sending him back to Loxley the moment he wasn't useful anymore, and it probably caused Robin grief to keep flip-flopping between being a rich kid amongst poor people and a poor kid amongst rich people, and he similarly must have received some modicum of juvenile ridicule for being a child giant in a village full of foxes half his size - Oh, but he was always so mature for his age!, Marian would probably say. Och, he'd fucking better have been! Kluck planned to retort, when you're taller than most of the adults in your life before you're out of nappies, they're going to start treating you like one! You're a tall girl yourself, Mari, you should know this! And if Marian brought up that he was such a smooth talker, Annie would say, Och, he'd fucking better have been! He had to learn to talk with wildly different types of people to survive when he had to switch between two different worlds his entire life! And if Marian brought up that he was such a skilled leader, Annie would say, Och, he'd fucking better have been! He had the privilege of having adults in his life who taught him everything he needed to know about shooting arrows and achieving goals! Most people aren't that lucky, and he'd have squandered his good fortune if he hadn't become who everyone thinks he is!
But beyond all that, Robin grew up with a loving mother and a positive male role model in a safe home with a warm bed and a color TV where they never had to worry where their next meal was coming from, nor whether they would have heat in the winter, nor whether there would be presents at Christmas or on birthdays, nor whether the tax man would kick them out. And he had a fine enough life outside his family, with a good education and a healthy number of friends - and sure he got teased for being rich or poor or gigantic, but every kid gets teased for something, and sure he got beat up once or twice by boys of bigger species (or by all the average-size kits dogpiling him), but every little boy who isn't giving beatings is going to get beat up at least once or twice, and even Robin himself would probably never claim that he was the victim of chronic, severe, irreparably-damaging bullying that other people they knew went through, including his own brother. By these rules, even Will would have made a better hero's story than Robin; sure, Will grew up as a bona-fide rich kid medium-sized mansion, but he also had regularly gotten his arse kicked at boarding school, and when he wasn't at boarding school, all he had to come home to was a cold and uncaring father, a mother who was under duress to favor her husband over her own children, and six sisters who often weren't interested in having him around; even if Will only had a fraction of self-confidence as Robin, every ounce of Will's had to be earned harder than Robin's since not a single person in Will's youth had any interest in actively teaching the lad how to believe in himself - not even his own brother.
If someone said that the emotional abuse that Robin had suffered at the hands of Robert Scarlett and all the socioeconomic grief he had waded through was enough for them to think he overcame a lot, Annie would not argue. But like most people in the developed world, Annie was raised in a culture that loved its entertainment, and now she worked in that entertainment, and part of that entertainment was tales of heroes who had to overcome a lot to become great, so it honestly made her feel bad for all the kids in the real world who were experiencing broken childhoods that sounded like the beginnings of heroic journeys but in actuality would lead them to becoming broken, jaded, destructive people who had no chance of ever being someone like Robin. Annie remembered those impoverished kids in Nottingham who idolized Robin - not even the rest of the Merry Men, just Robin - and she could just imagine those lads crying themselves to sleep at night if someone with no tact told them bluntly that their rough upbringings would likely leave them too bitter and socially maladjusted to ever be like the positive and personable person they admired. It made her sick just thinking about it. A long time before it became such a buzzword, Kluck would absolutely have described Robin as greatly privileged for turning out the way he did, and for somebody who's so lucky as to become someone so well-adjusted, it was basically his moral obligation to use that power to make the world a better place; it was the bare minimum he could do.
So Robin was a confident, charismatic leader of men who didn't know the meaning of fear? Of course he was; that's who he was always raised to be. So Robin's skills were almost godlike and his demeanor was almost christlike? Of course they were; he was lucky enough to have a childhood with clear and obvious role models and non-role-models, and he was doubly lucky that he extracted relevant skills out of both of them. So Robin's just the coolest guy you know? Of course he is; his life's been far too easy and he probably doesn't know a reason not to be cool as a cucumber all the goddamned time. Annie would never say Robin didn't overcome a lot, and she'd never say his actions weren't heroic, but she might just dare to say that his life story wasn't compelling enough to call his personality heroic. And that was another reason why she never understood why Marian thought Robin was boyfriend material. (Not to mention how Annie found it funny that Robin was suddenly this brave and fearless champion of class justice standing up in-person to the powers-that-be when he'd never even done volunteer work or participated in a protest before in his civilian life; to be fair, though, Kluck would posit that it was not out of a lack of empathy that he'd never done such things but rather due to finding such activities boring - and lacking in opportunities for individual recognition.)
But Annie was biased and she was well aware of it. Her own upbringing had been easily rougher than Robin's or Marian's; part of the reason she wanted to go to uni in the States so badly was to be as far away from Scotland as possible. Her childhood wasn't the most deplorable, but there was a lot of yelling, a lot of alcohol, a lot of bruising, a lot of broken glass, and she could say from firsthand experience that her brothers Danny and Robbie never stood a chance to have turned out to be someone like Robin, as much as she knew they would have loved to. Danny was struggling with a litany of mental issues (some of which were prenatal while others were likely a consequence of his childhood) and it was abundantly clear that the doctors were giving up on him, and as for Robbie, suffice it to say that when she and the foxes saw Trainspotting when it first came to America, it was tough for Annie to watch as it quite literally hit a little too close to home.
Besides, Annie's real theory about all of Marian's insisting that Robin was the perfect life partner was that it was probably the vixen working backward to justify her own conclusion after realizing at a young age that Robin may indeed be one of the few tods she'd ever meet who was taller than her without being related to her. And good for her that the boy she met in primary school literally and figuratively grew into a man she would come to adore; Annie had no interest in ruining Marian's fun if she was genuinely happy with her choice of man. But Annie had to wonder if Marian herself had gotten considerably lucky with her catch.
That was the other thing that Annie could think of that might trick people into working backward from the conclusion that Robin was interesting: the guy didn't look half bad. Not at all a supermodel or anything, but what he had, he carried well, and that aforementioned attractive self-confidence he had never been in jeopardy of losing probably put him over the threshold to being an eleven out of ten in many women's eyes - heck, probably a lot of men's eyes, too. But in Annie's personal opinion, she'd let Marian have him without contest. It wasn't just that she thought he was rather dull; it wasn't just that he was secretly a naïve, overly-idealistic slacker; it wasn't just that some primitive part of her could never be attracted to a guy who she knew had been in diapers for an embarrassingly long time as a lad, an embarrassment amplified by how he passed for an adult as a toddler (man, the things you talk about with your roommates when you're all drunk); for a few reasons, she kind of preferred his friends.
For one thing, Annie had always had a thing for big guys - not big like Robin, the rare fox taller than her, but really, really big guys. She had spent more time than she was proud to admit wondering what it would be like for a little sheep like herself to get together with a much larger mammal. Anybody in particular coming to mind so far, Dear Reader? Imagine what went through her head when, sitting in the front row of the spectator's area at the archery tournament four years ago, not yet having met Robin's friends, she saw a gigantic brown bear waltz up to Mayor Norman unannounced and just start schmoozing with him. At first she and Marian were confused by his bizarre manner of dress, but when they put the pieces together and realized that he was one of Robin's incognito entourage, the gears started turning in Annie's head, and she realized that since he was the friend of her friend's boyfriend, she might conceivably have a chance, and she found herself having a lot of trouble paying attention to the actual contest, fantasizing in intricate detail the mechanics of such acts with a guy more than twice as tall as her and exponentially heavier, and during one lull in the action she was having a long internal monologue about how she really hoped the rumors weren't true that bears had pencil-dicks when Marian noticed her zoning out and nudged her, playfully telling Kluck to control her ovaries. And that's when it hit her: Annie realized she had been objectifying this guy she hadn't even formally met yet. And the thought of that made her feel really, really… unclean. Marian had long teased that Annie only called herself a feminist because the sexual liberation part was convenient for her, but now catching herself thinking about a guy in a way she wouldn't stand for a guy to think about her… she didn't like that. So she forcibly pushed all of those thoughts out of her head - and just in time too, because she almost missed the climax of the archery contest and the ensuing brawl, during which she made some pretty impressive takedowns herself (thanks in no small part to skills learned during her rough-and-tumble tomboy youth). Annie told herself it was for the best that she not think of Robin's best friend with explicit thoughts on her mind - and it may have been best for Little John, too. In the intervening years since their summer in Nottingham, Annie had once worked up the courage to start flirting with a moose at a bar, but when it came time to pop the question, the moose told her candidly that she seemed like a cool girl and wasn't too bad looking herself, but he was afraid what people might think if he hooked up with a woman the size of a child of his own species; in that moment, Annie realized she may have spared Robin's grizzly friend from a profoundly awkward and uncomfortable encounter. But when the dust had long been settled at that archery contest and everybody was making merry in the forest that night, and Little John and Annie found themselves dancing next to one another and wordlessly agreed to start dancing with one another, and at a certain point Little John picked her up and swung her around and eventually flung her down between his legs and Annie found herself with the bear's crotch right in front of her face, you'd better believe that Annie kept her eyes open and that she would have given the world for that moment to last even a second longer.
But then there was the coyote, who would have started out as Annie's sleeper pick for the most mateable of the Merry Men, but the more she thought about it - and boy, had she thought about it - he might have actually been the ideal candidate. In a few ways, it was the most logical combination: they were the closest in size, and the sheep called Kluck and the coyote called The Rooster getting together would have just made too much sense. Yes, he was a bit older, even older than the bear, and at first that would have been a mark against him, but as the night went on, she found herself not thinking about that. She had gotten a chance to know the other Merry Men as Marian and Robin were having their alone time, and while Annie could relate to Little John's background and found Tuck's story of resilience to be touching, it was Alan's nomadic lifestyle that got her attention. And as the party went on and Alan played the music that got the people dancing, she found herself further intrigued; Little John was pretty good at improvising on his homemade, bear-sized banjo, but the technical skills in the coyote's guitar work were what really impressed her. And something about his country drawl and chilled-out demeanor just sang to her; despite being arguably more from the Midwest than the South (and I do mean arguably, because even Oklahomans don't know how to categorize themselves), his accent was a lot more pronounced than Johnny's and something about its folksy flavor made it seem at once exotic but also somehow familiar and, in that way, comforting; she felt like this was the kind of guy who could be mellow without being boring, whereas with Robin, if he suddenly started acting this mellow, you would wonder if the guy was sick or something. Annie had decided a long time ago that if she was going to harbor feelings for any of the Merry Men, Alan was the responsible choice, and he was the one she was hoping to see most again.
Of course, the individual at that goofy little hoedown in the woods that night who Annie thought was the most purely attractive was Marian, but after all these years as her platonic gal pal and knowing that the vixen didn't harbor any curiosity to explore such a thing, there was no longer any one-sided tension there and there hadn't been for quite a while. Now, if Marian were to find Robin and the two of them were to proposition her, however…
...Nope, nope, no more thinking with her libido, Annie needed to focus on driving, slow as traffic might be. Hey, there were plenty of non-sexual reasons why she wanted to meet all these guys again, first and foremost just to do the decent thing and make sure they were still alive and well. And with any luck, they'd both love if Robin could help them locate that prison he'd alluded to his brother winding up in so they could go visit him as well; curious that the two of them couldn't find any records of his arrest anywhere on the internet, but hey, maybe it was a cover-up by her uncle to keep from embarrassing the city and letting the public know these outlaws existed. Alternatively, Robin could have just gotten his facts wrong when he said Will got busted and was carried off to prison - hopefully Prince John's goons didn't execute him off the books or something or the girls might have murdered that smarmy lion themselves - but one thing was for sure: Robin told Marian that Will had been put in prison, and Robin would never knowingly lie to her.
But first they still had to find them.
"...One thing you do need to choose, however," Kluck resumed, "...will we be waiting for him to find you, or are you off to go seek him out?"
Marian agreed that was a good question and pondered it for a second. "Well… he's certainly not the type of lad to wait around when he knows where to get what he's looking for… but he surely knows I'm not the kind of girl who'd wait around either. Hrm… I say let's make a game of it!" she proposed as her face lit up, finger in the air. "He knows where to find me, this time we know where to find him… it'll be a game he doesn't even know he's playing! Find me before I find him!"
"And that's why I'd never tell you to break up with him," said Annie. "That sounds exactly like something the two a' you's would do. You two have such fun together. I couldn't take that away from you."
"One day you'll have someone to have such fun with, too, Klucky, I'm sure of it "
Oh, Annie could already think of two Southern gentlemen she could see herself having some fun with. But pushing away the thoughts of sharing a post-coital cigarette with the coyote or sharing a post-coital family-sized bucket of fried chicken with the bear, the sheep found herself wondering whether seeking out wanted criminals was the best idea. "Is it the wisest decision, though, for a pretty young vixen like yourself to go wanderin' into the dark forest by yourself? Robin and his boys might not hurt you, but other lads might!"
Said vixen playfully scoffed at that. "Oh, I wouldn't be going alone, I'd have a ram in the body of a ewe right there with me!"
The ewe allowed herself to laugh at that. "Ah, I suppose if I can take down a gaggle a' rhinos, I can likely take whoever comes at me!"
Chuckles, then quiet again for a moment as they both wondered where to take the conversation from there.
"...Who do you think will win?" asked Kluck, probably just to say something. "Us trying to find one specific tree in the gigantic fooking forest or him and his mates tryin' to burst into a mansion!?"
"Hm, when you put it that way, he might still have the advantage!" replied Marian. "Breaking into a private home is still probably easier than finding a needle in a haystack!"
"...It can't be that hard to find their camp, can it be?" Annie pondered. "Just find the creek, follow it until you find the waterfall, and it surely won't be hard to find from there!"
"But they've gotten past my daft uncle's incompetent security plenty of times before, it's surely second nature to them by now!" Marian quipped.
"Not to say it was much of a challenge in the first place…"
"Precisely! And yet he still did it, something that anybody could have done and nobody was going to do. You see, Klucky? When there's something he deeply cares about, you can't deny he has work ethic!"
"I never denied that, Mari! What I said was that only having work ethic when you want to do something isn't the same as actually having good work ethic as a person!"
Marian just shook her head, smiling softly, as she turned to look out the window again. You see, this is one of those instances this narrator mentioned earlier of Marian almost goading Annie into sharing her true feelings about Robin, something that was becoming increasingly more common as she approached four years without so much as hearing his voice. It was a sort of mental exercise: invite Kluck to pass whatever negative judgment she may on Robin - rarely scathing criticism, but always stated firmly - and this critique of her choice of boyfriend would trigger a defense mechanism in her head that would inspire her to remember all the things she loved about him as a rebuttal. Might sound kind of odd, but it did wonders to keep her memory of him from fading when the passage of time was doing everything to ensure it did.
If you were to ask her whether she thought Robin had good work ethic, she'd respond as such: do you think it counts if he had amazing work ethic for things that he seemed worthy of hard work and virtually none for that which he thought was nonsense? If so, then yes, and if not, then no, case closed and she probably couldn't change your mind anyway. In her head, though, a lazy person couldn't found and lead an underground band of vigilantes, could he? Surely not, right? Of course, at this point someone like Kluck would probably say someone could have poor work ethic while not necessarily being lazy.
Honestly, she'd fully admit that Robin's work ethic was all over the place, a paradox of lackadaisical grit. He always did the dishes after dinner, but he never really took the initiative to teach himself how to cook beyond what he picked up from the girls. In college acting class scenes, he'd always obsess over trying to figure out every aspect of the character just right so as to get fully in their headspace, but he didn't try too hard to memorize his lines with one hundred percent accuracy, believing instead that his momentum as the character would carry him through any lapses in his memory. And there was a point while they were living in DC where he was strongly petitioning Marian's godfather to pay for him to get a personal trainer to get him jacked like a Hollywood action star should be (and possibly to resolve some potential body dysmorphia problems Marian was starting to think Robin didn't realize he might have had), Robin insisting he'd pay Richard back when he got booked for leading roles in movies at which point said training would pay for itself; Uncle Rich told Robin to just get a gym membership instead, which he never did, citing that access to body-conditioning implements without any guidance on how to use them was a waste of time (and as for why Robin didn't just hit the gym anyway and ask a stranger for help since he's just so goddamn charming, well… he's not gonna like me saying this, but there's a good chance that he was just too embarrassed that he'd look delusional approaching a member of a brawnier species for help making him more buff than his vulpine biology would allow.)
And then there was his work history, which… hoo boy. In Philadelphia he worked weekends as an usher at a theater downtown for a few months, hoping to be close to the action of the entertainment industry (he quit) before taking up another part-time gig at an ice cream shop for even fewer months (he quit again, but he was moving to Washington so he had a reason this time); both jobs were minimum wage with no attempt to even come close to working full-time hours and there was a long gap of earning zero dollars in between.
In Washington, Robin worked his infamous tour guide job on a double-decker bus. It began promisingly after he aced the audition, hooking the hiring manager right off the bat with a joke that London-style double-decker buses were required by law to come with a British person and that was him, and only improving from there throughout the trial tour with his mastery of the city's history combined with his trademark Robin Hood™ charm. Then he started actually working and things went to hell. Unbeknownst to him, they expected him to work the full operation day, morning well into the evening for twelve hours total or more, and still be available for four or five days a week. (Keep this in mind, we'll revisit this soon.) Robin "protested" this by pretending to only be available two or three days a week; the only time he ever worked a full forty hours or more in a week there was around the tourist surges of the Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Labor Day weekends when they forced him to show up under threat of termination. There were a bunch of other factors that made his workdays hellish - let's just say his famous charisma failed him under all the duress and if the tip jar was anything to go by, he was not a successful tour guide - so Marian completely understood why he didn't want to suffer through that more than he had to, but there are plenty of people in this world who won't respect a man who doesn't do everything he can to support himself, including working a crummy job, and when Marian saw how beloved he was in Nottingham, she had to wonder how many of these working-class people would instantly lose respect for him if they found out he refused to subject himself to conditions like they had no choice but to endure.
But Marian would concede, his most damning example of his quickness to write a job off as beneath him was actually the first job he ever had, back in college. Yeah, he was at his youngest when he was looking for that first summer gig in New York, so maybe it was understandable that he was lacking in maturity, but he never did come to express regret for how quickly he bailed on this one. You see, Dear Reader, it was a job that could have potentially fast-tracked him to his dream career.
It was a production assistant gig on a TV show. For those of you who inexplicably don't have dreams of Hollywood, what you need to know is that PA jobs are best for those seeking to become directors, producers, or tech people, and not quite so promising for actors and writers - but it still is an opportunity to get in, so actors and writers lucky enough to get a chance at them almost always take them. And they do have to get lucky because you're never going to find these jobs listed on the internet; you have to know somebody to get in. That's the way it has to be; the market's oversaturated as it is, they can't let just anybody throw their hat in the ring.
So now you'll understand the context better when I tell you that Robin was wandering Manhattan alone looking for a job one day when he came upon a production crew filming something and decided to chat up a couple workers on their smoke break. Wouldn't you know it, they were filming the first season of a new TV show, a police procedural. Robin knew this could be a chance to get his foot in the door, so he asked them if they needed any new employees, and despite not having any experience with filming equipment (or even experience working in general), his conversation with these guys was so pleasant that they did indeed take his contact information and put in a good word for him to their boss. Part of it was luck that they needed another person to run the craft services truck, but the fact remains that Robin's silver tongue once again worked a miracle. He was officially employed in the world of entertainment.
He lasted just over a week. He knew it was a great opportunity - he was working the snack truck for Christ's sakes, he had a chance to meet everybody there as they came to him asking for Fritos, fruit cups, and Fresca - but, as he told Marian, it went against his morals. The default in television work is a twelve-hour day (sound familiar?), often running over, not including the time it took to commute to on-location shoot sites all over the New York metropolis, five days a week, Monday shifts starting at the crack of dawn and call times progressively later and later throughout the week until Friday shifts started late in the afternoon and ended around sunrise Saturday morning. And this was allowed partially because a lot of work needed to be done in a brief period of time, but also because everyone wanted to get into TV and was willing to work whatever crazy hours necessary to do it.
And for that reason that he felt they were exploiting people who dared to dream by making them work a crazy amount of hours to even have a slim chance at that dream; this was perhaps the first clear instance of Robin feeling the need to stand up not just for his own dignity, but also specifically for class justice. He saw the whole setup as evil, and he refused to participate in it.
And yet this was his dream. He had a dream to work in entertainment in a real capacity, he got it, and he dropped it almost immediately because he didn't like the terms. He had a path to achieve his greatest goals and he just threw it away. And indeed, if he had had any platform to speak loudly and publicly about his moral disdain for the situation, he could have guaranteed himself blacklisted from Hollywood. Was this a just action, or was it just juvenile? That's not for this narrator to decide. All that we know for sure is that Marian was of the opinion that he'd blown it.
True, she had dreams of the stage rather than the screen, but if their goals were reversed and she'd had the opportunity he'd had, she'd have hung onto it for dear life. Yes, it was suboptimal, but what if he could have met somebody there who had the power and influence to put him where he wanted to be? He'd already charmed his way into the job in the first place, what was preventing him from doing the same again to get himself a bit role that could get him an important step closer to getting his SAG card? So what if it's a slim chance? A chance is a chance, is a chance. (Robin had an arsenal of excuses ready to go, stating that he'd been under pressure to do his job and not socialize for the sake of it and that a lot of these people who surely must have known somebody and been somebody's friend to get a TV gig were curiously some of the most cold and antisocial people he'd ever met, and these things combined with the long and grueling hours left him without the energy and will he needed to be as gregarious as he'd usually like to be.) Actually, speaking of the hours that were such a deal-breaker, Marian had noted: come on, Robin, this is the part where you're supposed to realize that this is just how TV work is, he wasn't going to find a less-frustrating way in, he didn't have the power to change it yet and he most certainly wasn't going to change anything by quitting, you don't win an unfair game playing by the rules as they ought to be, you have to beat the unfair game first before you have the power to change the way it's played and if Robin really cared about those workers he felt were exploited, he'd climb his way to the top of the ladder with years and years of hard work until he had the sway in that community to make things better for the people in it, instead of abandoning them because he thought they were trying to take advantage of him in particular and thought he was too smart to let them. Yeah, the hours were brutal, but there were so many worse jobs you could have in America; at least here the pay was good and the work was interesting and they provided all the workers top to bottom with free meals and unlimited free snacks - you should know that, Robin, you were the one in charge of handing out the snacks. The directors and actors all had to work those long days, too, Robin, and the system was specifically set up so that only those who wanted to work in television badly enough to be willing to do it for most of their waking hours would get the privilege to do so - do you want it badly enough, Robin?, she'd asked him plainly. Because she made no bones about it: she didn't have his back on this one, and he'd given up far too easily.
But in classic Robin Hood fashion, he'd had absolutely no anxiety about all the things Marian was telling him he ought to have anxiety about. Of course, he'd said, he wanted this badly enough, which was precisely why he was going to work hard, ahem, to find another way in that was more to his liking, disregarding her skepticism that such a path could exist. Besides, this was all an enormous moot point - he'd already walked, and he kind of suggested that he may have made a bit of a scene on his way out (honestly, Robin may have already been blacklisted from film and television work after that implied stunt and just never realized it). Marian resigned that this fight was indeed already over, but warned that he'd better hope this show didn't turn out to have a long and successful run that could have opened doors for him by his association to it, but Robin still harbored no worry over this, insisting that with such a miserable production behind it, that show surely wouldn't get renewed past its first series and would likely be completely forgotten by the American public by the time the two graduated from university.
But that was 1993, now it was 2005, and that spring NYPD Blue had just finished airing its twelfth and final season to conclude a long and successful run. Maybe thirty-one-and-a-half-year-old Robin regretted the rash decision he'd made when he was a nineteen-and-a-half-year-old, but at twenty-four-and-a-half he still hadn't come to express any lament for his actions as a foolish young man, so who's to say he ever did in seven more years? (And no, Dear Reader, the irony was not lost on anybody who knew the situation that Robin would probably have never become an infamous outlaw had he just stuck with the bloody cop show.)
So her boyfriend-cum-fiancé wasn't always willing to work if he thought a job was bullshit - which wasn't in and of itself a bad thing, some might even call it honorable and dignifying, but Robin had a very broad definition of what constituted a bullshit job, perhaps troublingly broad, and Marian would never deny that. But she didn't think it was a deal-breaker.
As for Kluck's other criticisms of Robin? Marian could reply to all of them with a smile and a shrug. Could he be boring? Yeah, but who cares? Who among us isn't boring once in a while? At least this way you know he's not some sociopath who seems perpetually interesting because it's a calculated ruse he's putting on. Did knowing him as well as they did make it seem like he was a bit more concerned with others' opinions of him than his self-contained persona would lead passing acquaintances to believe? Yeah, but so what? If we're being honest, most people would consciously like others to think highly of them, and those who don't often could probably do with a little more anxiety about how they're perceived - you know who really didn't care what others thought of him? Her Uncle John. At least Robin was parlaying this desire to be seen as a hero into actual good deeds in an effort to earn that praise. And was Robin only capable of doing such good deeds in large part because his life's been too easy to break him like had happened for many of the people he was trying to help? Yeah, but so what? At least he was doing those good deeds when so many people even luckier than him in life would prefer to stay in a state of comfort and let people gush over how great they are because they've been given the tools to succeed at everything without ever helping anybody else get those tools. And Marian wouldn't have his backstory any other way, because if things had been even slightly different, there was a decent chance that they'd have never met.
It was that simple: none of these less-than-desirable attributes outweighed the fact that she just felt good around Robin in a way she didn't quite feel around anybody else. They clicked in ways that many people aren't fortunate enough to ever click with anybody else, and Marian was worried about how poor Annie's love life had been that she didn't seem to understand the concept of maintained attraction. Ah, well, maybe things would change for the better for both of them in this new city.
"...When's the last time you've been with a bloke, Klucky?"
Annie, who had been in the middle of sipping from a bottle of water, promptly expelled her Dasani all over the dashboard. "Really, Mari!? We have a brief moment of dead air and you skip straight to talking about men!? And you accuse me of being too horny!"
Marian giggled with her face in her paw. "Would you rather we go back to talking about your people's risk of drowning?"
The woolly creature did not want to discuss such a macabre topic again, so she pondered for a moment thinking of something they actually should probably discuss. "...What do you think old John-Boy is going to want us to actually do?"
The vixen seemed confused. "...You mean the bear?"
"Tf-hp-hrp-dr-grp-! Not the bear, I meant your fooking uncle! Why would I be talking about Robin's bear friend!?"
"Because I know you surely think about him a lot," Marian teased.
Kluck gave a dismissive wave and returned her eyes to the road. "...Is he planning on using you as living bait again? I mean, of course he is, but literally again? Will he be hoping to persuade you to kiss whoever wins a contest again like it's the fooking Middle Ages? Or do you reckon he has something more sophisticated up his sleeve? I know you mentioned he wants me as 'an aide', but you never told me-"
"All he said was that he wanted me as a secretary and you as an extra aide. He said nothing more than that."
Annie's face scrunched up in disgusted confusion. "Why does he need both of us for!? Did he even attempt to answer that!? Is he even trying to make this look like less of a ruse? What happened to that weasel, the odd fellow with no arms!?"
Marian shrugged with a friendly nonchalance. "He probably just knows we're a package deal? That's what I imagine. But that's all he disclosed to me and knowing him, I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't have much more of a plan beyond that. He likely just wants me around for when he finally thinks of something to do with me."
"...Like use you as living bait," Annie retorted without looking. "Probably just have you sit on ye' arse and wait for word to spread that you're somewhere at City Hall, or the mayoral mansion, or wherever, not let you out of his sight so he can make sure his guards get ye'."
Her friend snickered and rolled her eyes with a shake of the head. "Well, when you put it that way! Then I suppose we'd best start brainstorming ways to get out of his line of sight. He doesn't seem like he'd be receptive to simply being told he's invading our privacy."
"Och, then we'd best start thinking of what materials to use to make a fake dummy of you! The old 'looks like you're sleeping' trick!"
"You really think he'd put cameras in my bedroom? Again? After we found them and unplugged them in less than a day the first time?"
"You really think he hasn't learnt his lesson and made them harder to find and disable!?"
"I don't, actually. He doesn't strike me as the type of individual who'd learn from his mistakes."
The sheep guffawed at that one. "Ah, fair game, lassie…" But then she got to wondering something. "...Aye, Mari?"
"Yes, madam?"
"Robin never actually got to visit you in your room there, did he?"
"...I don't believe he did."
Annie kept thinking. "Do you think he tried and failed, or did he just never have a chance to try?"
"Oh, well things got hectic after that scrum at the archery tournament, I couldn't blame him if he felt it was too risky-"
"That one day and night was the only time you two had to see each other that whole summer, wasn't it!?" Kluck exclaimed, just now realizing it after never having really thought about it.
Marian sighed. "How I wish it wasn't."
And Annie quickly realized it may not have been the most helpful thing to point that out. "Ah, well… at least it was a great night!"
But the vixen had clearly tuned out, shifting to an inward focus again as she turned to stare lazily out the window. "Yes… that it was…"
So we know how these two women feel about one of our most prominent characters to this point as well as how they feel about each other's feelings about that guy, but how do these ladies feel about themselves? Why, I'm glad you asked, Dear Reader! So it wouldn't at all be a stretch to say that the Merry Men weren't the only thing they were looking to find in Nottingham. They were both in the mood for a fresh start.
Moving to Philadelphia was Robin's idea. Kind of. The girls never really approved of it, and time vindicated their notions. Originally after college, Robin had wanted them to move to Los Angeles (of course), while Marian wanted to stay in New York and Annie wanted to take the third route of continuing their education somewhere, whether that be in New York or LA or Chicago or Boston or even London. But then Uncle Rich stepped in to say that he'd be happy to keep supporting his favorite goddaughter and her favorite people, but they had to stick in the Northeast and preferably not New York with its ludicrously high cost of living - though living across the Hudson in New Jersey was still on the table.
All three agreed that accepting his money was too good an offer to refuse, and the girls both voted New Jersey. But Robin had a different philosophy: how about rather than try to cut it as small fish in a big pond or dicking around learning more about something they were already sufficiently good at (there's that overconfidence again), why not prove their worth in a smaller market before springboarding to someplace bigger and better? Besides, Philadelphia was still something like the fifth largest city in a pretty populated country, it couldn't be that barren of opportunities, could it be?
Mari and Annie thought that idea was completely daft; Uncle Rich, who had no knowledge of how to make it in the arts but did have knowledge of Philadelphia being right up the road from Nottingham, did not.
So off to Philadelphia they went, where the acting scene proved to have the opposite problem: work was hard to find because there just weren't that many places to act. It had a healthy theatre scene as a city its size should, but there were just too many more-experienced thespians booking all the roles. But while the girls had trouble breaking in, at least they found an audition here and there; ironically, Robin had screwed himself more than anybody. He didn't think he was above stage gigs by any stretch of the imagination, but he put all his energy into looking for on-camera roles, and all there were in Philadelphia were poorly-written zero-budget student films with plots that screamed I'm twenty and this is deep. At least all of the three of them got to pad their scant résumés with some very minor projects.
Then Richard got elected to Congress and decided he wanted these three to join him in the city nicknamed Hollywood for Ugly People - which was also a smaller city with an even smaller acting scene. Same problems as before, then Robin and Will the Freeloader disappeared, and after about a year of burying herself in her assorted day jobs to take her mind off the heartbreak, Marian found the willpower to go out and chase her dreams once more.
Much like her boyfriend, Marian's physical stature made her difficult to cast, but she still got some gigs in student films and hole-in-the-wall theaters that could see her skill and couldn't be picky with their talent's looks. It helped that unlike Robin, Marian knew how to be realistic about her odd appearance and marketed herself accordingly, selling her type as that of a young woman who looks and acts kind of quirky but was confident in being so; much like their professors had warned them, she found herself getting a lot of comedic roles, such as screwball romances where the joke was that she was paired with a tod a head shorter than her.
Annie's experience had been much the same, but for different reasons. Her size and shape weren't too abnormal - an audience member who doesn't rub shoulders with too many sheep in their daily lives might think she's huge if they have a mental image of ewes being tiny as many people do, but by her species's standards, she was actually considered short, and if anything it was her, um, husky physique that ensured she would always be a character actress - but her accent was just too strong. She was able to greatly reduce it, but it could rarely be quelled completely, and even when she could put on a decent American accent, if her character went into a fit of passion, her true manner of speech often slipped out. One of her major personal conflicts was whether to take advantage of the fact that a lot of these miniscule productions didn't mind her Scottish accent and to speak the way her heart spake, or whether to use these opportunities to practice her bland yankee accent just to prove her brain could.
The toughest thing for up-and-coming actors is often nothing to do with the craft itself, but finding a day job that could pay enough to support you (okay, that's not too difficult) and understanding enough to provide you with flexible hours so you can work around rehearsals and showtimes and maybe even cut out of work sometimes to attend an audition (yeah, that's pretty difficult). They both made the classic move of serving and waitressing in Philly and DC while Robin was still around, but then sometime after the '98 congressional cycle Richard made a new work friend, a newly-elected senator out of Maine, and wouldn't you know it, he was looking for a housekeeper for his family's new home away from home. Marian had been chiefly working as a maid for that deer family ever since; not the most spiritually fulfilling work, but they paid her well and since they were friends of Richard's, they were fine with her stepping out and coming back whenever as long as she got her work done eventually. Kluck, meanwhile, found herself working as a substitute teacher, and one in rather high demand when it was realized that these inner-city kids who kept most subs at bay would quickly learn not to fuck with an angry Scottish woman.
They hadn't given up hope in their careers. They were still doing what they loved on a fairly regular basis - perhaps not at the level of fame and recognition that they'd hoped for, but they were grateful to have the privilege to do it at all. Did they think they'd ever get to Broadway? I'll tell you this, they both thought the only way they'd ever get there was if they thought they would. Might as well keep hopes high since being a pessimist would fix nothing. Besides, it wasn't like there was anything else they'd rather do with their lives.
And that was something about Robin that Marian was jealous of - and perhaps even a little resentful. His dreams of Hollywood hadn't come true - he'd found something better. He'd always told her he wanted to get into acting because playing a hero on film was the closest this cynical world would let him get to being a real one, and now he'd gone ahead and found a way to be a real one; all the glory and adoration he'd hoped to find in the hills of Los Angeles he'd instead found in the forests of Nottingham.
And she was happy for him; she knew as good as anybody that that had been what he'd always wanted. He was probably happier there than he ever was as a civilian adult. But as much as she still loved theatre, seeing him discover something he loved even more than what he'd loved before made her wonder if there was something else out there that she'd have enjoyed more than acting. What that could be, or whether there even was such a thing, she had no inkling, but seeing him get it took the question from an unknown unknown to a known unknown, and now that question was bugging her. She knew she'd only succeed as an actress if she spent most of her time working towards that goal, but what if she should have been spending some of her time exploring other avenues, just in case there was something down one of those roads? It just boiled down to the fact that she wanted to be as happy as Robin surely was right then.
...Preferably, happy with him, but if he was happier without her than with her, well, that was that, she couldn't ask him to be like his stepfather and put his own happiness aside for his entire life for the sake of someone else's happiness. Which is not at all to say that she thought it was a foregone conclusion that he didn't need her anymore, but some things did make her wonder…
"Did you never give him our new address?"
The vixen snapped back into the present timeline. "Hm?"
"Four years ago when you saw him that night," the sheep explained. "I'd always wondered why he never bothered so much as writing you, you said it was because after he and Will disappeared Rich moved us into a smaller flat and Robin didn't know the new address, I said that's fair, but then we found out how many friends he has… civilian friends, who aren't living in the woods, he couldn't ask but one of them to Google our names?"
"Well, er…" Marian was wracking her brain to piece together the events of nearly half a decade ago. "...I didn't know we'd be sent back to Washington so soon! And then we had another new address!"
"And you couldn't use the internet to find his friends to put the two of you in contact?"
"...I didn't remember their names." Which was true, but it was also true that the thought had just never crossed her mind that that was an option.
Kluck shrugged. "Just thinking about how odd it is that a couple who loves one another as much as you two wouldn't do everything ye' can to keep connected."
Well, Marian couldn't disagree with that.
"...What did you tell him that night?" Annie continued. "Not that it's any of my business, but… och, tell me anyway."
Marian had to remember. "Not much, honestly… we were mostly talking to all the things he'd been up to, truly more interesting than anything you or I had been up to."
"You didn't tell him anything?"
"I told him we were doing well and that I'd had a few roles that weren't much but were at least enjoyable… but for the most part, it was either catching up on his adventures, or… just being quiet, and enjoying each other's presence."
There was a distinct melancholy in her voice as she said that, remembering a moment that she was so happy had happened but was so afraid would never happen again.
Annie felt the need to clarify something. "I never did deny this man loves you, Mari," said the sheep, speaking carefully. "I just don't know whether despite his romantic gestures he knows how to show you he loves you, all put together. With any luck, he'll have grown up a bit."
Marian nodded to her reflection in the passenger side mirror. "Everyone always thought he was so mature, but I know all the ways he wasn't."
In many ways, she hoped he'd changed for the better, but in many ways she also hoped he'd stayed exactly the same, that he was still the caring and dashing young tod she remembered. But she knew that as a matter of statistics, that person she remembered him being surely couldn't still exist.
It had been seven years, after all, and she knew she certainly wasn't the same. Part of her sense of impatience in finding the best path to happiness was that she'd just turned thirty-one herself not even two weeks ago. And as much as she wanted Robin to be part of it, she couldn't wait around on her happiness for much longer.
During the first three-year interval, Marian played the "loyally waiting love interest" role completely straight, not so much as entertaining the thought of accepting another man's advances, no matter how chivalrous they seemed. Yes, it did get lonely very quickly, but she managed to get through it with Kluck's support and the accompaniment of… well, you see, it was actually a half-tongue-in-cheek, half-dead-serious gift from Annie from long before the boys moved out, one to keep company the one Annie had bought for herself, and once stupid Will had stumbled upon the both of them while he was looking for something else and thought this discovery was absolutely hilarious and took them to the living room to show the other three, the cartoon-loving kit promptly naming the pair "Woody" and "Buzz Night-Gear" (which were admitted fitting nicknames since they could accurately be described as toys with their own stories). So she wasn't the most content with the arrangement, but she didn't completely deprive herself from feeding her womanhood.
But when Robin was ripped away from her again (or, I suppose, when she was ripped away from him), something about that set something off in her brain that told her she couldn't just wait around for him forever because she couldn't guarantee they'd ever get to be together as a couple again - and now that it had been even longer without him than the first time, she was glad she didn't wait. So she shopped around and tried to move on. But there was another reason Marian was deaf to Kluck's criticisms of Robin: a good man was hard to find, and in four years of trying, she hadn't found anybody yet who could top him.
Considering she was already taller than most tods, that made courting and dating frequently awkward, but she decided to bite the bullet and give a chance to any guy who seemed decent and expressed interest in her, even some of other species. And they somehow all left something to be desired.
Collin seemed promising at first, but it quickly became clear that he'd have commitment issues. Casey also seemed promising before he let slip that he really didn't believe in monogamy, and Evan similarly didn't even pretend that he thought fidelity was important in a relationship. Brent was a little too much of an introvert, always preferring an evening at home with her over going out where there might be other people, while Donny was way too into outdoorsy stuff and would probably go stir-crazy if he had to spend a night in. Stewart was far too controlling with an extremely antiquated view of gender roles, and Carson's personal politics were much too conservative, but then there was Cole, who was so into women's empowerment that he "invited" Marian to do all the heavy lifting in their brief time together because he didn't want to suggest she couldn't do everything herself. Dave was a tod a few inches taller than her who turned out to have a fetish for English women, while David was a tod a foot shorter than her who turned out to have a fetish for giantesses. Enrique was also a tod a foot shorter than her, and he swore he wasn't insecure about it, but he clearly was, though Marian couldn't be too angry at him because it seemed the poor little guy had been lying more to himself than to her. Stan was a rabbit who waited until the deed was done to confess he'd always wanted to get it on with a vixen, and taking a page out of Annie's playbook, Marian accepted the offer to go out with a short-statured black bear named Neil, and while he was a sweet guy, it was just too clear that it was always going to eat him up inside that he was seen as too small for his own species and was now seeking the company of smaller species' women to compensate. Adewale was a twentysomething who lived with his parents, which wasn't quite as common for Gen-Xers back then at that age as it is for Millennials today, but he wasn't the only one of these guys who did and it wasn't an automatic disqualification, but what was an automatic disqualification was that the guy was pushing thirty and had neither a driver's license nor a bank account. Another tod named Robert became the new recipient of Annie's old nickname for Robin, "No-Job Rob," Rodney was very skilled at the fine art that was tattooing furry creatures but lacked the backbone to ask his boss for more than twenty-five hours a week at the parlor, and Ricky was actually a morning deejay on a local Top 40 station but it just wasn't fun to be in a relationship with someone who had to go to bed every night at eight and wake up every morning at three. Her two flings with fellow English expats didn't pan out; Peter was in DC as a budding political journalist but wouldn't stop speaking ill of America to the point that Marian wondered who'd twisted his arm to make him stay here, while Graeme had the opposite problem: he wanted to be in the States so badly that he was still there long after his visitor's visa had expired. Curt, Brad, Kent, Fred, Zach, Walt, Wlad, Fernando, Joe, Joey, Kerry, Gary, and Larry were all cool guys but they all said that she wasn't clicking with them. Dean very much struck her as the "protector" type like she saw in Robin, but he seemed a bit too eager to get into a broken-bottle fight in an empty parking lot to defend her honor. And then there was Randy, who… unless she's testifying against him, Marian doesn't want to talk about Randy. All she told me was that he didn't get to do as much to her as it seemed he wanted to ("Thank God I was bigger than him," as she put it) and that she soon understood how a fox twice as handsome and smooth as Robin could still be single; she did mention filing a police report and finding out he'd already had priors and warrants, and last she heard, he'd been on the run ever since. Hopefully the son of a bitch never finds himself in the woods outside of Nottingham lest her fiancé finds out what he tried to do to her.
Jeez, did she have bad luck with guys or was this just how guys were? She had absolutely no idea, but it all just made her feel more strongly that she'd been right the first time: Robin was the one. But speaking of Robin, Marian had to wonder whether part of this bad luck was her fault - not a "fault" as in something she'd done wrong, but just a consequence of circumstance.
Think of it this way: if you'd been with one person throughout your entire upbringing, a person you just fell into without either of you courting the other long before you're even at an appropriate age to start experimenting with romance, and then you decide at twenty-seven that you're gonna go try to find somebody new, do you think you would know how to navigate the market of potential partners your own age when they have so much experience with trial and error in dating and you don't? Marian couldn't help but feel like she'd had to play a lot of catch-up in learning how to pick and choose guys like a woman her age should; thankfully she'd had Annie there to help her out. Honestly, she felt like she'd been on the same level as someone who'd never even been in a relationship, as things like casual flings or how to reciprocate comfortable advances or how to even initiate a conversation with a guy at a bar were all complete mysteries to her. She had to wonder: had Robin struggled in the same way?
...I mean, he had to have at least tried to have moved on by now, right? He had to. It would have been weird if he hadn't. Seven years. He must have at least tried to find another partner; the hope was just that none of those women satisfied him in the way that she did.
Because let's just be honest, any heterosexual woman of a compatible species would have him, and given the unique circumstances, she couldn't fault him if he accepted any of them. He wasn't a soldier on a tour of duty with a set date to return home and regular leave to visit home in between, he was fighting a war that would only let him return to his loved ones when he finished it off - a war that, quite honestly, she was secretly certain would never end.
And to be fair, even when he told her that day that he was going to leave her to serve his conscience, it seemed like he knew then that this journey would be goodbye. He swore he'd come back to her someday, because of course he said that, he had to, but he'd also said that he felt this was his mission in life - and he went on this mission of his life without her. Ergo, it seemed like she wasn't to be a part of it.
Because the fact of the matter was that he did leave her. He did. This was not up for discussion; Marian had long ago come to accept this. What was up for discussion were the questions of whether he had righteous reasons to leave her, or whether his act of leaving her could qualify as 'abandonment', but he indisputably left her all alone with no timetable nor plan of return. Whether he meant to or not, all the rules of reality indicated that the way he handled that should have been the end of their relationship.
In retrospect, his decision to propose to her amid the madness of the archery contest debacle seemed puzzling. At the time, it may have made sense: maybe he, like her, had made it three years and remained completely faithful despite surely getting numerous other offers, and he saw that she was now in the same city as him again and believed they could still make up for lost time. But now? Three years of celibate fidelity is one thing, seven years and counting without an end in sight is… that's not even being faithful at a certain point, that's just forcing yourself to be heartbroken and lonely in a staunch refusal to face the facts. Before a week ago, neither of these two had any logical reason to assume they'd ever see each other again. So go, Robin, find a new woman who can suit your new lifestyle in ways Marian can't, you deserve to be happy and loved just as she does, even if you two can't be that person for each other anymore.
And if she found him and he still hadn't even attempted to find someone else, well… Marian would be very tempted to find that almost creepy. Like… excessive, almost. Nobody's quite that romantic in the real world - but then again, this was a guy who's always wished he could be as great as a bunch of fictional characters. This wasn't a case of an insecure woman wanting her guy to cheat on her to prove she's not dating some loser who can't get a sidepiece; this was a case of… well, remember Annie's criticism that Robin seemed a little too focused on catering to what other people thought was a good person to be and was almost selfless to a fault? If Robin's dick hadn't been touched in seven years, it would almost be a case of… Robin, are you okay? Have you been depriving yourself of intimacy because you actually are that impossibly loyal and romantic, or because you want people to think you are? Is your brain okay if you haven't yet accepted the reality that the chances of reuniting with Marian in a peaceful setting have been getting increasingly unlikely to the point of now being negligible? Did you put yourself through unnecessary levels of loneliness far beyond what any reasonable person could have expected you to? Not to mention the unavoidable awkwardness of her admitting "yeah I cheated on you because I just sort of expected you to do the same," and then the whole of Nottingham would think she was the bad guy. But come now, how could he possibly have not? Unless Annie was correct in her half-joking hypothesis that Robin and Johnny bloke seemed to be particularly good friends.
That said, there was an insecure thought she did have relating to the idea of Robin staying impossibly loyal: why her? This actually preexisted Robin leaving for Nottingham; even as teenagers, she saw herself as rather plain, and while their mutual attraction was undeniable, her infatuation with him was so profound that she always wondered whether she was good enough to earn his admiration in return, and whether he couldn't find someone better if he wanted. For the longest time, that was just a recurring but fleeting feeling that would breeze through her mind every so often, but now combine that with the notions that he could sometimes be a little too quick to settle in his lot in life and that he may genuinely have been as romantic as he seemed - could he have been lazy in love? Could it be that he just latched onto the first girl he had feelings for and never let go because he wanted a long-term romance with someone but didn't want to go through the mess of wasting time starting from scratch and finding someone new? To reiterate, Marian did not deny their love was real, but to also reiterate: this dude could have anybody, he wasn't in Loxley anymore, there were so many more options if he wanted them, and guys like him who knew they looked good often exercised that option. If he still chose Marian over all of them, that had a ninety-five percent chance of being the ultimate statement of love and devotion, and a five percent chance of being something worrying.
Oh, she was just worrying herself. All that rejection and failure in love over the last four years must have been driving her more mad than she knew. There was a very good chance that Robin still believed she was the one for him, and if that was the case, he'd still be the one for her, no questions asked. You see, Annie, this is why Robin was so close to being the perfect man. He was just so dreamy.
...Or perhaps he was just a dream. Seven years with just one day of contact with him; it would have been enough to make anybody wonder whether such an impossibly enduring love was ever real or if they were just too young to know what love truly meant. Marian wasn't giving up hope, but she was bracing for any and all unexpected surprises.
"So… what's your plan to help your lad once you find him?"
"I'm sorry?"
Annie glanced over at Marian. "When you find Robin and help hurry him up with knocking Prince John out of power, don't ye'? What ideas have you?"
Marian had to think about that. The thought hadn't even crossed her mind that they'd get that far. "Oh… we can figure it out when we meet up with him and his lads. We'll be their insiders at City Hall, we can misplace some paperwork or delete some files or fudge some numbers… I don't know, Annie, we're creative types, we'll figure something out! We have plenty of paths we can take."
Kluck smirked; she liked that answer, but didn't love it. "I'm just saying, Mari, it's best to have a plan before you get there. If Robin's as secure in himself as he says he is, he'll probably appreciate a lass who can stand for her own ideas!"
Marian smirked; she liked that answer, but didn't love it. "But he is still a bloke, and one who revels in taking charge; he'll likely prefer talking it out as equal partners. He's not that secure that he'd take my orders without question, and I wouldn't expect him to!"
The sheep chuckled and rolled her eyes. "Ah, you know him best…"
They were finally almost over the bridge. The traffic jam still continued well onto the land, but at least they were making progress.
But Kluck had one more question. "So… that one night… you didn't even tell him about-"
"I didn't want to ruin the moment, Annie," Marian replied rather sternly.
Her friend just nodded morosely. "I understand."
But the vixen felt bad about biting the sheep's head off like that. "...I'll tell him when I next see him… I do regret not telling him last time, he wouldn't keep such secrets from me."
Annie just nodded; nothing more needed to be said.
And as they approached the eastern shore, Marian turned her head and stared straight down the coast towards the horizon, seeing how the great green land and the deep blue sea lived together in such harmony like a couple in love, and yet a couple that could never truly inhabit the other's world. And as she stared at let the weight of the world wash over her, she thought of love, and she thought of loneliness. She thought of undying loyalty and she thought of heartbreak. She thought of fantasy as she did of reality, and she thought of dreams coming true and dreams left dreamt. She thought of young love and of growing old with someone before thinking of growing old alone, and thought of all the people with whom she could spend every moment in between. And she thought about family, and of a brown bear couple in West Virginia who she had only ever met once six years ago.
