Malodorous Malcolm and the Dart of Doom
WARNING - as usual, not nice if you like Bobbin!!
My main issue with the whole Closet Hobbit/Ghislaine scenario was how in heaven’s name she managed to see anything at all in the bloke, leave alone embark on a relationship with him. I guess that desperation leads to the weirdest things…
A working knowledge of episode 3-10 is needed for this; as usual, liberties have been taken, not the least of which is my daring to write it in the first place.
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Guy’s nerves were twisted tighter than the string on the makeshift bow that he carried. He wasn’t a skilled bowman, but now that he was outlawed and forced to inhabit the same pestilent forest as Bobbin Hood, the self-satisfied, self-proclaimed people’s champion and his reeking retinue, Guy needed the comfort of knowing that he could at least wave the thing about and look vaguely threatening.
He was being followed. He knew it and it was making him angry. Not yet a towering and terrifying rage, but not far off it. He’d heard rustlings in the undergrowth behind him and once thought he’d seen a vague, hooded figure. He nocked an arrow to the string and tried to look as if his sad excuse for a bow could actually project it anywhere other than straight down and through his foot.
He twitched as the rustling began again and had finally convinced himself that it was Bobbin stalking him, when he crested a ridge and saw the man himself in front of him. In front. Then what was behind? A quick glance revealed nothing and he turned back to the arrogant little shit who so provoked his worst feelings. He and Bobbin had just started their familiar pattern of trading insults prior to knocking out one another’s lights when Guy felt something sharp hit his neck and he fell into oblivion.
And wished he’d stayed there. He regained consciousness to a thundering headache, the realisation that he was bound hand and foot - oh, sweet Jesu, not again; he was so damned tired of this - and the slow but horrific awareness that he was staring into the puffy, pasty features of his arch enemy, currently screwed into an expression that was reminiscent of a smacked arse.
‘Is this your doing, Hood?’ he demanded, his befuddled brain failing to register that Bobbin was also hog tied, although in his case he actually quite closely resembled the hog.
‘Gnmmf?’ Bobbin grunted and, Guy observed with considerable distaste, a stream of dribble run from his mouth onto one of his chins. God’s blood, he would rather now be suffering the torments of Hell as punishment for his black sins than be forced to gaze at this slobbering bag of blubber.
‘Please don’t struggle; there really is nothing to be gained from it.’ The voice was reedy and had a slight wet lisp to it that reminded Guy of something elusive from long ago. He glared in the direction of the owner, but could make nothing out. Guy sighed as he shivered in his thin but fetching shirt. The mystery creature had a thick cloak from which noxious vapours emanated and Bobbin, already insulated with a tidy layer of flabby flesh, was wrapped in a padded jerkin that would have been cinched in at the waist, had there been a waist to cinch into. Not for the first time, Guy felt indecently attractive but terribly hard done by.
By now, he’d managed to manoeuvre himself into a semi-upright position and watched with some satisfaction as Bobbin tried to do the same. However, lacking both Guy’s muscular frame and the lean angles of a perfectly toned body, he succeeded only in rolling sadly from side to side like an upturned beetle. He gave up the struggle and instead glared balefully at the stranger, who eventually agreed to untie them provided that they would listen to the story that he had to tell.
For a horrible moment, Guy feared that Tuck was lurking under the cloak, forced to adopt desperate measures in order to inflict his sermons on a literally captive audience, but the creature before him really didn’t look, move or sound like the monotonous monk, so he relaxed and prepared to be entertained. Except that the story of his childhood and its connection with Bobbin’s wasn’t his idea of entertainment.
It was a sorry saga of treachery and betrayal, of disease and despair, of a terrible fire and the loss of loved ones. It was also a tale which brought back far too many painful memories for endurance. On a lighter note, it reminded Guy of exactly why just the sight of Bobbin made him want to wipe the smug look off his face by pushing its features through his skull, from front to back.
After a while, even Bobbin was sufficiently moved to haul himself up and attempt to shove the storyteller through a tree trunk. He tried to emulate one of Guy’s fearsome snarls which he’d secretly admired for so long, but the effect was inevitably lost when not gracing the chiselled features of the Black Knight but squatting ignominiously on the fleshy folds of a lard-filled loser. However, the gesture was sufficient to alarm the storyteller into flinging back his hood and revealing the fire ravaged face of Malcolm of Locksley.
Bobbin gasped and Guy nodded; he had been right in feeling that there was something familiar about this supposed stranger. God’s teeth, Malcolm had never been pretty, possessed of unfortunate ears and a chronic underbite, but now he looked like a pudding bag with its fasteners pulled too tight. His head, always too large for his body, had taken on a permanent starboard list and he consequently had to squint in an alarming manner in order to bring someone standing directly before him into focus.
The someone currently standing before him wasn’t being convinced by his reasoning for leaving him all alone in the world (well, apart from the priest, the servants and the peasantry) and the other someone, presently glowering and smouldering and showing off his long legs to perfection, was growing increasingly enraged to learn that it was he, Malcolm, who had caused Ghislaine’s death, not the fire accidentally started by her unfortunate son.
Once Bobbin had finished with his tantrum and flounced away in a creditable impersonation of a challenged two year old, Guy moved down the slope with his customary cat-like grace, attractive yet deadly, and pinned Malcolm against the same tree that Bobbin had used. He was momentarily distracted by the man’s disturbing jaw deformity that allowed saliva to collect in a frothy pool inside his lower lip, but pulled himself together sharply and snarled, ‘ You let me think I’d done it. For twenty years I’ve thought about that. Every day!’
Malcolm swallowed some of his excess saliva, sensing that he was losing his audience. ‘There’s more that you do not know,’ he asserted. He told them of their shared half-brother, Archer, so named because of his conception under the arches at the back of Cedric the Chop’s slaughter house. (It may have smelled rank and split the eardrums with the squeals of prescient pigs who always knew when their time was up, but there was little risk of interruption or discovery.) He told them that they must unite to save this brother from the long dangle at York and revealed how he would be recognised by the birthmark on his manly breast; he was coy about the description, but did mention that the child had almost been christened Dick.
‘So You Will To York?’ He was certain that great acts of derring-do had to be expressed in such portentous and syntactically incorrect terms. Guy and Bobbin looked at each other. It may have taken Malcolm twenty years to get around to remembering them but now he had and knew where they were, they’d never be free of his wheezing pleading and that weird, flat-footed gait that sounded so much like small fish slapping on the ground. Bobbin gave his errant father a brief embrace - that cloak’s aroma, or possibly Malcolm’s, was beyond description and Bobbin had never been good at holding his breath - then agreed that They Would Indeed To York.
With a shrug, his mission complete, Malcolm put his blowpipe to his lips and fired, between the second and third fold on Bobbin’s neck another of the darts he had coated that morning with the slime from crushed slugs. The slugs’ favoured diet of valerian leaves made them highly effective in the creation of soporific solutions and he’d made this one extra potent in order to combat the height/weight ratio. Bobbin fell to the ground with all the grace of a pole-axed cow.
Malcolm stared sadly at his son. Good grief, he’d been responsible for that? That chunky frame, that dough-like face, that ridiculous strutting walk and the male pattern baldness, ineffectually disguised by a combed over style that screamed, ‘I’ve too much forehead for my hair!’? His gaze fell upon Guy; tall, lean and fit, with stunning blue eyes and long, raven locks and mused that it was a bugger that all Archer’s good looking genes had come from Ghislaine.
He sighed, forgetting that his blowpipe was poised to send the gorgeous Guy back to temporary oblivion. The dart, sucked instead of blown, not only discharged its cargo of barbiturate blackness straight down his gullet but lodged there, providing Malcolm with a highly novel shape to his neck. The anaesthetising properties of the dart vied with a perfectly natural attempt not to suffocate; Malcolm flapped his hands about desperately, pointing all the time at his throat and slowly turning an interesting shade of blue.
Guy agonised between continuing to watch the spectacle, which to be fair, was far more entertaining than the story had been, or making an effort to do something to save this catastrophe of a man for whom his beautiful and usually tasteful mother had somehow developed a passion. He opted for the latter, because Guy did guilt very well; guilt about calling his father a leper, guilt about his mother, guilt about the fire, guilt about Marian, guilt about guilt…God’s bones, the creature currently flopping at his feet had even guilted him into putting his life at risk to save Dick - Archer - whoever, in memory of that beloved mother.
With a heartfelt sigh, Guy reached down, pulled Malcolm upright and enthusiastically pummelled his back through the disgusting cloak, sending up a miasma of dust and foul odours, but alas, not the offending dart. He changed tactics, stood, grabbed Malcolm by his scabby ankles and swung him furiously from side to side. Had the former Lord of Locksley been compos mentis, he’d have appreciated the fact that the glorious Guy had grown so tall, otherwise his head would have been scraping a furrow across the forest floor.
However, the dart tenaciously kept its position. Guy briefly considered opening Malcolm’s jaw and prising the thing out with his long, elegant fingers, but concluded that not even he suffered from that volume of guilt. He pondered further. He was no physician, but he could appreciate the risks involved in performing an emergency tracheotomy and hooking the dart out through the extra smile. He was fast running out of options and Malcolm was fast running out of air. Guy resigned himself to the inevitable. He watched Malcolm wheeze his last, the pool of saliva finally spilling over his out-thrust bottom lip and collecting in a sad, frothy little puddle. His mother had actually produced a child with this! Guy’s shudder had nothing to do with his being cold.
He glanced across at Bobbin; the born again orphan was still unconscious, sprawled on his back and snoring almost loud enough to waken his newly dead father. Guy tried a tentative kick, appreciated the pleasure it had given him and indulged in another, more certain one. Its effect was somewhat mitigated by the way in which Bobbin’s blubber absorbed his boot but it did the trick; the eyes opened and, mercifully, the mouth closed.
Guy explained Malcolm’s demise by deathly dart and Bobbin’s face crumpled into the expression it always did when he was trying to convey emotion, regardless of what the emotion was; unless of course he was happy, in which case he brought out the patented smug and cocky grin.
His companion indulged him in this outpouring of grief for a minute, before holding out a shapely arm to help him heave to his feet. ‘So, are we going to York?’ he asked.
Bobbin thrust out his chest, with its newly acquired, yet determinedly flabby, musculature and in the way expected of the Hero of the Piece, (despite what thousands of intelligent females world wide maintained) declaimed, ‘Aye We Will To York.’
Uttered in the thin, querulous register that Bobbin had unfortunately inherited from his father, it sounded more hysteric than heroic and he wished, for the umpteenth time, that he'd been blessed with Guy's deep, rich and manly tone. And that he'd been blessed with those dark, good looks. And that long, lean body. And those beautiful, sapphire eyes. And that luxuriant mane of hair...
Alas, poor Bobbin!
My main issue with the whole Closet Hobbit/Ghislaine scenario was how in heaven’s name she managed to see anything at all in the bloke, leave alone embark on a relationship with him. I guess that desperation leads to the weirdest things…
A working knowledge of episode 3-10 is needed for this; as usual, liberties have been taken, not the least of which is my daring to write it in the first place.
**********************************************************************
Guy’s nerves were twisted tighter than the string on the makeshift bow that he carried. He wasn’t a skilled bowman, but now that he was outlawed and forced to inhabit the same pestilent forest as Bobbin Hood, the self-satisfied, self-proclaimed people’s champion and his reeking retinue, Guy needed the comfort of knowing that he could at least wave the thing about and look vaguely threatening.
He was being followed. He knew it and it was making him angry. Not yet a towering and terrifying rage, but not far off it. He’d heard rustlings in the undergrowth behind him and once thought he’d seen a vague, hooded figure. He nocked an arrow to the string and tried to look as if his sad excuse for a bow could actually project it anywhere other than straight down and through his foot.
He twitched as the rustling began again and had finally convinced himself that it was Bobbin stalking him, when he crested a ridge and saw the man himself in front of him. In front. Then what was behind? A quick glance revealed nothing and he turned back to the arrogant little shit who so provoked his worst feelings. He and Bobbin had just started their familiar pattern of trading insults prior to knocking out one another’s lights when Guy felt something sharp hit his neck and he fell into oblivion.
And wished he’d stayed there. He regained consciousness to a thundering headache, the realisation that he was bound hand and foot - oh, sweet Jesu, not again; he was so damned tired of this - and the slow but horrific awareness that he was staring into the puffy, pasty features of his arch enemy, currently screwed into an expression that was reminiscent of a smacked arse.
‘Is this your doing, Hood?’ he demanded, his befuddled brain failing to register that Bobbin was also hog tied, although in his case he actually quite closely resembled the hog.
‘Gnmmf?’ Bobbin grunted and, Guy observed with considerable distaste, a stream of dribble run from his mouth onto one of his chins. God’s blood, he would rather now be suffering the torments of Hell as punishment for his black sins than be forced to gaze at this slobbering bag of blubber.
‘Please don’t struggle; there really is nothing to be gained from it.’ The voice was reedy and had a slight wet lisp to it that reminded Guy of something elusive from long ago. He glared in the direction of the owner, but could make nothing out. Guy sighed as he shivered in his thin but fetching shirt. The mystery creature had a thick cloak from which noxious vapours emanated and Bobbin, already insulated with a tidy layer of flabby flesh, was wrapped in a padded jerkin that would have been cinched in at the waist, had there been a waist to cinch into. Not for the first time, Guy felt indecently attractive but terribly hard done by.
By now, he’d managed to manoeuvre himself into a semi-upright position and watched with some satisfaction as Bobbin tried to do the same. However, lacking both Guy’s muscular frame and the lean angles of a perfectly toned body, he succeeded only in rolling sadly from side to side like an upturned beetle. He gave up the struggle and instead glared balefully at the stranger, who eventually agreed to untie them provided that they would listen to the story that he had to tell.
For a horrible moment, Guy feared that Tuck was lurking under the cloak, forced to adopt desperate measures in order to inflict his sermons on a literally captive audience, but the creature before him really didn’t look, move or sound like the monotonous monk, so he relaxed and prepared to be entertained. Except that the story of his childhood and its connection with Bobbin’s wasn’t his idea of entertainment.
It was a sorry saga of treachery and betrayal, of disease and despair, of a terrible fire and the loss of loved ones. It was also a tale which brought back far too many painful memories for endurance. On a lighter note, it reminded Guy of exactly why just the sight of Bobbin made him want to wipe the smug look off his face by pushing its features through his skull, from front to back.
After a while, even Bobbin was sufficiently moved to haul himself up and attempt to shove the storyteller through a tree trunk. He tried to emulate one of Guy’s fearsome snarls which he’d secretly admired for so long, but the effect was inevitably lost when not gracing the chiselled features of the Black Knight but squatting ignominiously on the fleshy folds of a lard-filled loser. However, the gesture was sufficient to alarm the storyteller into flinging back his hood and revealing the fire ravaged face of Malcolm of Locksley.
Bobbin gasped and Guy nodded; he had been right in feeling that there was something familiar about this supposed stranger. God’s teeth, Malcolm had never been pretty, possessed of unfortunate ears and a chronic underbite, but now he looked like a pudding bag with its fasteners pulled too tight. His head, always too large for his body, had taken on a permanent starboard list and he consequently had to squint in an alarming manner in order to bring someone standing directly before him into focus.
The someone currently standing before him wasn’t being convinced by his reasoning for leaving him all alone in the world (well, apart from the priest, the servants and the peasantry) and the other someone, presently glowering and smouldering and showing off his long legs to perfection, was growing increasingly enraged to learn that it was he, Malcolm, who had caused Ghislaine’s death, not the fire accidentally started by her unfortunate son.
Once Bobbin had finished with his tantrum and flounced away in a creditable impersonation of a challenged two year old, Guy moved down the slope with his customary cat-like grace, attractive yet deadly, and pinned Malcolm against the same tree that Bobbin had used. He was momentarily distracted by the man’s disturbing jaw deformity that allowed saliva to collect in a frothy pool inside his lower lip, but pulled himself together sharply and snarled, ‘ You let me think I’d done it. For twenty years I’ve thought about that. Every day!’
Malcolm swallowed some of his excess saliva, sensing that he was losing his audience. ‘There’s more that you do not know,’ he asserted. He told them of their shared half-brother, Archer, so named because of his conception under the arches at the back of Cedric the Chop’s slaughter house. (It may have smelled rank and split the eardrums with the squeals of prescient pigs who always knew when their time was up, but there was little risk of interruption or discovery.) He told them that they must unite to save this brother from the long dangle at York and revealed how he would be recognised by the birthmark on his manly breast; he was coy about the description, but did mention that the child had almost been christened Dick.
‘So You Will To York?’ He was certain that great acts of derring-do had to be expressed in such portentous and syntactically incorrect terms. Guy and Bobbin looked at each other. It may have taken Malcolm twenty years to get around to remembering them but now he had and knew where they were, they’d never be free of his wheezing pleading and that weird, flat-footed gait that sounded so much like small fish slapping on the ground. Bobbin gave his errant father a brief embrace - that cloak’s aroma, or possibly Malcolm’s, was beyond description and Bobbin had never been good at holding his breath - then agreed that They Would Indeed To York.
With a shrug, his mission complete, Malcolm put his blowpipe to his lips and fired, between the second and third fold on Bobbin’s neck another of the darts he had coated that morning with the slime from crushed slugs. The slugs’ favoured diet of valerian leaves made them highly effective in the creation of soporific solutions and he’d made this one extra potent in order to combat the height/weight ratio. Bobbin fell to the ground with all the grace of a pole-axed cow.
Malcolm stared sadly at his son. Good grief, he’d been responsible for that? That chunky frame, that dough-like face, that ridiculous strutting walk and the male pattern baldness, ineffectually disguised by a combed over style that screamed, ‘I’ve too much forehead for my hair!’? His gaze fell upon Guy; tall, lean and fit, with stunning blue eyes and long, raven locks and mused that it was a bugger that all Archer’s good looking genes had come from Ghislaine.
He sighed, forgetting that his blowpipe was poised to send the gorgeous Guy back to temporary oblivion. The dart, sucked instead of blown, not only discharged its cargo of barbiturate blackness straight down his gullet but lodged there, providing Malcolm with a highly novel shape to his neck. The anaesthetising properties of the dart vied with a perfectly natural attempt not to suffocate; Malcolm flapped his hands about desperately, pointing all the time at his throat and slowly turning an interesting shade of blue.
Guy agonised between continuing to watch the spectacle, which to be fair, was far more entertaining than the story had been, or making an effort to do something to save this catastrophe of a man for whom his beautiful and usually tasteful mother had somehow developed a passion. He opted for the latter, because Guy did guilt very well; guilt about calling his father a leper, guilt about his mother, guilt about the fire, guilt about Marian, guilt about guilt…God’s bones, the creature currently flopping at his feet had even guilted him into putting his life at risk to save Dick - Archer - whoever, in memory of that beloved mother.
With a heartfelt sigh, Guy reached down, pulled Malcolm upright and enthusiastically pummelled his back through the disgusting cloak, sending up a miasma of dust and foul odours, but alas, not the offending dart. He changed tactics, stood, grabbed Malcolm by his scabby ankles and swung him furiously from side to side. Had the former Lord of Locksley been compos mentis, he’d have appreciated the fact that the glorious Guy had grown so tall, otherwise his head would have been scraping a furrow across the forest floor.
However, the dart tenaciously kept its position. Guy briefly considered opening Malcolm’s jaw and prising the thing out with his long, elegant fingers, but concluded that not even he suffered from that volume of guilt. He pondered further. He was no physician, but he could appreciate the risks involved in performing an emergency tracheotomy and hooking the dart out through the extra smile. He was fast running out of options and Malcolm was fast running out of air. Guy resigned himself to the inevitable. He watched Malcolm wheeze his last, the pool of saliva finally spilling over his out-thrust bottom lip and collecting in a sad, frothy little puddle. His mother had actually produced a child with this! Guy’s shudder had nothing to do with his being cold.
He glanced across at Bobbin; the born again orphan was still unconscious, sprawled on his back and snoring almost loud enough to waken his newly dead father. Guy tried a tentative kick, appreciated the pleasure it had given him and indulged in another, more certain one. Its effect was somewhat mitigated by the way in which Bobbin’s blubber absorbed his boot but it did the trick; the eyes opened and, mercifully, the mouth closed.
Guy explained Malcolm’s demise by deathly dart and Bobbin’s face crumpled into the expression it always did when he was trying to convey emotion, regardless of what the emotion was; unless of course he was happy, in which case he brought out the patented smug and cocky grin.
His companion indulged him in this outpouring of grief for a minute, before holding out a shapely arm to help him heave to his feet. ‘So, are we going to York?’ he asked.
Bobbin thrust out his chest, with its newly acquired, yet determinedly flabby, musculature and in the way expected of the Hero of the Piece, (despite what thousands of intelligent females world wide maintained) declaimed, ‘Aye We Will To York.’
Uttered in the thin, querulous register that Bobbin had unfortunately inherited from his father, it sounded more hysteric than heroic and he wished, for the umpteenth time, that he'd been blessed with Guy's deep, rich and manly tone. And that he'd been blessed with those dark, good looks. And that long, lean body. And those beautiful, sapphire eyes. And that luxuriant mane of hair...
Alas, poor Bobbin!