[Episode OOM -- "Childhood" 2.03 (3)]
Part I - Part II - Part III - Part IV - Part V - Part VI
~*~
Locksley Manor would always evoke too many memories, a heaviness that settled into her chest like a weight even as she tried to push through it. Stabling her own horse in a stall she'd used across half her life, next to horses who had been there a shorter number of years. Places where she had once run and play, as beloved, but disobedient child. Places where she had walked and talked and laughed, once.
Even Thornton, who kept the house as long as she'd known of it, whom she only nodded to, with a quiet thanks, when he let her in the door, not truly answering the deeper question of concern in his eyes than the small question of what brought her here so late. Who had told her she could find the Lord of Locksley in the main room, handing her off to a guard to lead her.
Three years of saying that and it didn't give in the slightest. Three years she heard it, in one fashion of another. Guy of Gisborne, Lord of Locksley, in Robin's stead. As a punishment that might never end. But they weren't all Robin's memories either. There was the room where Guy announced their engagement. There was the staircase where Guy had both dragged her to see his wealth, and stabbed her, in the hopes of killing the Nightwatchman. And there was Guy standing half-dressed.
That was not a memory.
Marian blinked, her head tilting, out of breath.
Having turned from handing the guard her cloak, she found a sight she hadn't expected in any of her plans. Guy of Gisborne being fitted with what must have been the Damascus Steel armor Robin had been talking about. Silver pieces strapped across the front of his legs, over black trousers, that a man was on his knees sizing for him. While he, himself, was putting another piece on across the length of an upper arm.
Over nothing but his skin. There was no shirt. It would have been proper to step back. To ask the guard for an announcement of her presence. But her feet took her forward. Not backward. Compelled. By curiosity, she would tell herself. It was like nothing she'd seen. The armor. Pieces of it scattered on the table near him, gleaming bright with the light from firelight behind them.
Wasn't is supposed to be entirely a ruse when he looked up, at the sounds of her boots, catching her staring -- the way she took a surprise breath in, as her eyes hit the floor suddenly, cheeks flushing as she said, "Forgive me."