[fic] robin hood : the sky tumbles
Title: The Sky Tumbles
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairing: Robin/Marian
Summary: Surely, he has endured enough.
Author's Note: Written for Hana, thedreamygirl, who requested Robin’s perspective of Marian’s engagement to Guy in Brothers in Arms over at saythewordsthen's The Finale That Never Happened fic exchange. Many thanks to my lovely beta clanne. Spoilers for 1x8.
Disclaimer: BBC owns the world. And my soul.
The Sky Tumbles
Surely he has endured enough. Every day, slivers of recollection - the wails of broken men, their shattered limbs and souls sprinkled across the battlefield - painfully threaten to push through his mental blockade. Surely to live through the Holy Wars is all the torment one man can bear in a lifetime.
And yet, here is something worse than the Holy Lands: the empty shells of brave, decent men and the faceless enemy. Here is his reward for surviving every Saracen attack, for sacrificing his title, for fighting for his country and for his beloved king: Gisborne asks the question that splinters hope and brings the sky tumbling; Marian says the words she must say, and Robin wonders if he is dying.
Time stops. All the world’s goodness flickers out to reveal the awesome futility of his existence. It’s choking him and he wishes that the Lord would spare him this anguish and strike him down now, where he stands frozen by her closed bedroom window.
He sees Gisborne ride away. His mind is screaming at him - to follow this monster masquerading as a man, but bleeds its poison through Robin’s life, to follow and destroy it, to rid humanity of this felon; his body does not respond.
Marian crashes through the oblivion. Throwing open the shutters, she watches the monster ride away, her pretty face contorting with some terrible emotion too fierce to express. She rips the ring from her finger and hurls it across the room. Then, horribly, she crumples, her energy exhausted.
He watches. She’ll hate him for seeing this, but he cannot look away. The devastating sight of Marian defeated petrifies him momentarily, then he is clamouring through her window, like he used to do, long ago, before the Holy Land and the Sheriff and Gisborne, when all the world was perfect and nothing stood in the way of his golden future. And she is melting into his embrace and she feels like this is home.
He has held her like this before. He has been this rough and this desperate, building a fort of his own grief and guilt and self-righteousness so strong that she can forget the flawed world. But it has never worked for him. He never could block out the lust for glory and blood, and now as her soft whimpers slowly subside, he cannot suppress this fervent hate for the man who is living his life.
She falls quiet, clinging to him, and he wonders where his life went. Who is this imposter living his life, he wonders, and how did it come to this? He knows the answer, though he would never admit it aloud. He abandoned his old life and its potential the day he rode away from her. He looked back once that day, and still he rode on to the nightmarish war that he knows will stay will him always. That is just too painful to think about.
When Marian finally speaks, her words are familiar.
“Robin, what will we do?”
It’s a question that he has heard a million times. What will we do? she’d ask, every day before he left, and every day they would construct a different, more magnificent plan for their future. They’d had so much ahead of them, before he had left.
It sounds the same, but Marian is not asking the same question. Now, she is asking, What will we do? This is the end of any chance we had - are we ready to face that? But those questions are too frightening, so he answers as he used to: he tells her of all the marvellous things they’ll do, all the splendid places they will see, all the wonderful people they will meet. He tells her every dream they have ever imagine.
All night, he lies with her, whispering to her all the things they’ve envisioned. All night, they forget that this is a future that no longer exists, and that when dawn breaks, he will skulk off into the forest and still she will have to smile and laugh and no one will know that inside she is dying. All night, all they have is each other.
Then dawn breaks. He skulks off into the forest and she smiles and laughs and no one knows that inside she is dying.
They never talk about that night; they don’t need to - they remember.