Choices - Part VIII
Spoilers: DON'T READ THIS if you have not seen the ending to Season 3.
PG for romantic scenes
Closer to R than PG-13 for the violent scene here, the more I think about it.
Thanks extended at the very bottom, under the cut, in grey font. More thanks given in the same way under the first part of this fanfiction.
Wednesday morning. Guy comes to from where he has spent the night at the table to a loud wailing coming from the kitchen and a household bedecked in the trappings of mourning.
Catching Thornton by the sleeve as the servant passes on his way to complete some pointless errand, Guy commands, “Who died?” only to stop listening before Thornton has finished saying her name, his mind on the retreat, his entire body given up to a primeval, deafening roar that hooks into the visceral instincts of any who can hear it, instincts they did not know they had until this animalistic sound, instincts that recognize it for what it is. An all encompassing, inconsolable anguish accumulated over ages of loss and tragedy has taken possession of Sir Guy of Gisborne.
“Where is she? Where’s her body?”
Filling him in will be as good as lashing him with a cat-o’-nine-tails. Thornton is glad to do it, hating Gisborne more than he did, before he thought he understood him better, “No one knows, but the carriage and two horses are gone. Someone must have taken her. Perhaps is was Robin of Locksley. He and his men have gone on a trip, we’ve heard. You told us yourself you killed her. We heard you. Drink has dulled your memory, I suppose.” Thornton waits to gloat over the full effect.
Thornton is talking too fast. Guy struggles to process the words but all he can make out is the sound of Thornton’s voice. The whole room is moving too fast for him to follow. Guy does remember drinking. After he had sent her to Hood, he had wanted to drown his foolish dreams along with her treachery, her written devotion to an outlaw. But he would not have killed her. Not even if he was the angriest, most violent of drunks. He missed her.
Sir Guy looks lost. Thornton is adamant he be made to understand, “M’Lord, your sword is covered in blood!” One piece of evidence at a time.
Thornton is holding up his task. Of course, it’s his job to keep Guy’s weapons ready. Unclean thing! Guy turns his face away, closing his eyes to shut it out of his mind. One drop of her dried blood in her hair from the first murder attempt had been more than he could bear. His sword is gelled with it, none of it yet dry or brown. There is too much. A demon voice starts gnawing at his brain. You’re on thin ice with the Sheriff. “No.” You are prostrate with grief having run your sword through the silliest girl in England. “No.”
“M’Lord?” Thornton is pleased. The sacrilege Sir Guy has committed appears to be sinking in.
“I said, NO!”
“Changing the bedding, Bess found this under your bed ropes this morning. She hasn’t stopped sobbing since.” Thornton holds up the dress with his other hand, displaying it so not one crease or fold of fabric covers from view that matters most.
Guy would murder Thornton right now if that would reverse time to when she was alive, but he cannot bring himself to touch that which killed her. Touching the proof would make it true.
Marian’s got the proof. He remembers he had been looking for the letter yesterday in her chest of clothes to burn it, to ensure he could remain close enough to the Sheriff to be able to kill him when the time was right. Then, Simon had brought her to him. Simon had explained it was the law.
Slit her pompous, little throat. “No!” The demon has a brother. Me next, Papa! Me next! “She was supposed to be mine!” Slamming his palms on the table, a pain shoots up his left wrist into his forearm. Marian’s last hurrah. Guy buries his hands in his hair, pressing hard as he runs them over his scalp. If he could grab hold of his brain through his skull, he could make it remember. There is a vital piece of information missing. There has to be. The reminder will not come. Marian fought you for her life.
In a sudden rage unrestrained as Thornton has never seen before, Sir Guy tears at the scarf on his hand, then savagely rips out stitches he must have sewn himself in a thrashing frenzy of despair far more satisfactory than Thornton could have hoped for. Overturning the table as he stands with a hand pouring blood from a hole through his palm, Sir Guy makes for the door, throwing aside any guard hapless enough to dare to stand in his way, across the grass glowing green with the unheeded joy of spring, the air perfumed with an unnoticed new beginning.
In the barn, he orders the fear-stricken boy, “Saddle my horse!” with only a passing glance to the white one in the next stall. He had been saving him for her. Now he wishes it did not exist.
The demons won’t be quiet. They are playing a gleeful tug-of-war with the frayed ends of memories, knotting them into a nonsensical trail of blood over which whinnying horses drag an empty carriage toward a faraway dream. The unmistakable union of their souls; a life in which they were finally aligned with some heretofore unknown law. A being as marred as you should suffer for what you have done.
“Hello, Simon. Sleeping where you belong I see. In the gutter.”
Simon awakens with dread. He recognizes that voice, “Gisborne.” An iron, painful grip pulls him up by the hair, bending his head back against Gisborne’s shoulder, exposing his throat. Gisborne holds up the dagger in front of his broken nose. “No! Please, don’t kill me!”
“Oh, I won’t.” With the back of his hand that holds the dagger, his hand with the open wound twisting Simon’s hair, Gisborne flips Simon’s body around like a top. Eye to eye, he rams the dagger into Simon’s mouth, slicing his tongue and the roof of his mouth. Unsatisfied, Guy shoves the handle and blade deeper, not stopping until his fist is inside the mouth filling with blood, until he sees through the skin in Simon’s throat the tell-tale lumps of an Adam’s apple split apart and hears the screams Simon’s lungs are panting are nothing but wind. “That’s for convincing me to kill her, for holding a knife to her perfect throat.”
Turning around Simon’s body again, Gisborne next slices off the muscles and tendons behind Simon’s left knee which buckles, forcing him to stand on one leg. He does the same to Simon’s right knee. Simon is helpless to refuse the aid his tormentor gives to hold him upright. “That’s for climbing the stairs to bring her to me.”
Taking the scruff of Simon’s shirt with a whiplash to his neck, Gisborne lets Simon’s body drop and drags him out of the ally into the middle of the main road. “And this is for her. People don’t bother to steer around half-dead beaten drunks in the road around here. They think it’s an act of mercy.” Gisborne throws Simon to the ground.
In terror, Simon uses his hands and elbows to pull himself out the way of the morning rush to market, to posts at the castle, to shops of various trades; it should begin in just a few minutes.
For only two steps, Gisborne stalks beside the thing crawling before wordlessly crushing the bones in its arms with his spurs and boot. It lies dead still, except for the rise and fall of its breathing, its bruised beady eyes set close to its skewed nose are open wide. Walking away from the latest rung in his career, Sir Guy of Gisborne could not feel an emotion if he tried, except for this grief most evil. Uncompassionate, it replaces whatever Marian had seen in him with scorn for any happier man, woman or child as it creeps inside him, taking him over. Dying will be unremarkable compared to this. Welcome.
You should be punished for what you have done. If Hood had never persuaded him that Hood could protect her, there would have been no warrant, no hellish law to obey. No matter where he goes, or to whom he turns, his enemy is there. Watching, waiting to undermine every good thing Guy struggles to achieve. Hood swore he would let the Sheriff will hear of your disloyalty. Yes, Hood forced him to do it. Hood will make you pay. Not if he makes Hood pay first. If it wasn’t for the Sheriff, Hood and the warrant, she’d be waiting for him at home right now.
Walking toward the main entrance to the castle, Gisborne steps aside, giving the road to the morning’s first cart pulled by one horse, the expendable blonde scum riding in the seat presumably taking her wares to market. He should have thought to ask Simon about Hood and the rumours flying the outlaw has taken his gang to find and retrieve Marian’s body. If only you had pledged your fealty to Sir Edward.
Here Season 3 begins, and plays out in its entirety. SPOILER WARNING: Don't read on if you haven't seen the finale to S3.
His body looks so insignificant from up here, like an extraneous detail. He can see people talking around it, past and present friends who have stretched it flat on the ground from where he had sat down for the best view of the forest, this placid, beautiful place. Two he hasn’t seen in a year. One in particular is more precious to him than any of the rest. So, this is what it’s like to die.
“Robin!” Her breath must be baptismal, her light kisses on his eyes, his forehead, his mouth must be from an abiding, unfinished love. If only he could feel them. Lord, I choose her over any other spiritual joy you might be thinking of. Just trying to be help.
“Nothing’s happening. We’re losing him!”
Robin could have sworn he had told Much - everyone - he had wanted to die alone. Sherwood. He’s going to miss it.
“No! It must work!”
Will. He must be dead since he’s here.
“Give it time.”
Djaq and Will must be both dead. Shame that, but it will be good to catch up with them once this dying nonsense is over. This is weird, though. Everyone he loves is here, talking to each other, the living with the dead. On Earth. Except for Guy who is floating in front of him with arms crossed over his chest looking all smug and self-assured.
“Care to explain your bad attitude, along with that hair? Let me guess. You washed it.”
“As usual, your plan is half a plan,” Guy tells him with a friendly, lopsided grin. “You’re going the wrong way.”
“Robin doesn’t have time!”
Tuck’s yell diverts Robin’s attention. He wishes Tuck would be the voice of reason saying “Let him go.”
Kate’s being pretty quiet. Maybe that’s because Marian’s right in front of her. Robin chuckles. He can see how this could be interesting. Robin looks to say as much to Guy, but Guy isn’t there. Great. Now how is he supposed know which way to go?
“Are you sure you gave him the right antidote?”
Archer, what’s this talk about an antidote? I’ve got to die if I’m going to be with Marian. So let me.
“Of course! This poison has a very peculiar odor that’s difficult to get wrong.”
“Well, did you give him enough?”
Marian. It won’t be long now, my love.
“He’s not breathing! Do something!”
“I am!”
Good thing he can’t feel that. Djaq is beating his chest hard enough to break a couple of ribs. Not that those matter anymore.
“Robin of Locksley, I did not come back after all this time for you die on me!” Marian backs away, giving Djaq room. “Escaping kidnappers, and -”
“I did not kidnap you. Sir Guy put you in my care, remember?”
“No, but since you are here you must be all right otherwise Much and Little John wouldn’t have you along with, um -” Marian’s voice trails off because no one makes time for introductions during a crisis.
“Archer. Robin’s brother.”
“Hello. And um -”
“Kate. I’m no one important.”
“You are to me.”
Much. Never has there been a more perceptive, generous soul or a better friend.
“Hello, Kate. And you are the one who kidnapped me from England for who knows what purpose taking me all the way to France!”
“I am Friar Tuck. We used to be good friends until that evil potion -”
“- How’s Robin?” interrupts Marian. Djaq has stopped her pounding.
“He’s breathing. I think he’s going to make it!”
No, Djaq. Don’t make me live without her.
“Is there anything more should we do?” Marian is running her hands all over his chest reassuring herself that he’s filling his lungs on his own. He is.
“All we can do now is wait. For him to wake.”
“While we wait, I want to make it perfectly clear that potion wiped away all your memories of our friendship. Sir Guy didn’t recognize me either.”
“Hang on.” Much is trying to grasp how Marian, Will and Djaq managed to appear at the right time in the right place after two of them were supposed to be living happily ever after in the Holy Land, and one had been dead since last spring. “Do you mean to say that you, Tuck, are that friar - the one who used to work for Gisborne?”
“Yes.”
Little John is outraged, “And you knew? You knew Lady Marian was alive and you let us all go on thinking -”
“I didn’t know. She woke up on the ship unable to remember anything, she ran away - ”
“I remember Guy saved my life and how!”
“But not all of it. You don’t remember riding in the carriage or getting on the ship, do you?”
Marian refuses to answer. The missing hours have plagued her ever since she had escaped from this man in France. Guy lowering himself to the floor, the fearful wound in his palm, blood everywhere, the blood he had given. That weasel Simon. Then nothing, except on the ship the recurring dream began - of a happy life with treasured children she had had. With Guy. So much love.
“Lady Marian. I searched for months through France, Spain, northern Africa. An impoverished woman alone in a foreign land with her arm in a sling could not have survived, I was sure. I believed you were dead. What happened to you?”
“You haven’t met the Nightwatchman then, have you Friar Tuck.”
“Your Majesty.”
Robin is falling out of the sky. Maybe once he’s floating closer to their heads bowed to the King he’ll find out if King Richard is one of the dead or the living out of this bunch.
“Excellent fighter that Nightwatchman. How is Robin?”
“Coming around, your Majesty.”
Slipping into his body feels like sinking into a warm bath, a buoyant pressure from without pressing around his soul.
Much is still pretty confused. “How is it you’re not dead? Not that I’m sorry your alive, it’s great, but Gisborne knew he had -“
“The last thing I remember is Guy stabbing himself to make Simon think I was dead.”
Seeing that has made no sense to the rest, Tuck fills them in with what Marian does not remember, “Lady Marian gave Sir Guy a potion to make him forget her. I woke him up in the middle of its work which must have disrupted the process, warping the memories he had left of Lady Marian while destroying all memories of me. He believed the lie he had fabricated, the one he was going to tell the Sheriff to keep her being alive a secret, had actually happened.”
“But why send her to France?” asks Kate.
“He was afraid the potion would make her forget what had transpired in that bedchamber, to tell you, Robin, that she had to hide until he had made life here safe for her again. He chose France because he had hoped she might warn you, your Majesty. Of the Sheriff’s plot.”
“And you didn’t tell us that much, Tuck? You didn’t tell him? Probably would have been helpful, especially once he started fighting for us,” Little John is past outrage and bereavement. An enemy who had joined the right side, Gisborne was just growing into an inkling of a great man. He could have been a great friend. “Why did you let us go on thinking the worst of him, like we did with Allan?”
“The truth I thought I knew and Gisborne’s lie had one thing in common. Gisborne had sent Lady Marian to her death, or so I believed. Knowing she had lived a month longer would not have eased your grief. The ending was unchanged.”
“Well, I’d say things have changed by miles,” mutters Kate under her breath.
“Marian.”
“Robin!” Marian showers his face with kisses, “Thank you, Djaq!”
“You’re welcome,” answers Djaq with a jolt of laughter, of surprise, relief, gladness. Robin has opened his eyes and is speaking, exploring the reason for the pressure on his neck with his fingertips, the poultice over Isabella’s nick.
“Am I dead then? Is this heaven?”
“You are very much alive, my love.”
Clutching Marian’s hand for fear she may disappear, Robin satisfies himself that Will and Djaq are solid, also very much alive with his other hand. “How?”
“I could not shake the foreboding, the feeling that if I didn’t bring back Will, Djaq, and the King the Sheriff would succeed. I had to bring them back.”
“Your Highness,” Robin seeing his King tries to rise to show the proper respect, “I thought you were being held for ransom.”
The King pushes Robin’s shoulder down, giving his permission for his vassal to lie still and rest. “I was. Turns out this Nightwatchman and her friends are a formidable enemy to anyone on the wrong side of them. But if you ask me how could anyone look at that-” the King looks at Marian up and down, “and believe she is the Nightwatchman?”
“I’ve never understood that myself,” agrees Robin. “But if you don’t mind, that’s my wife you’re ogling. Your Majesty.”
“By precontract only, I understand.”
“That’s good and married,” winks Robin. “Although, there are a few technicalities.”
“What?” asks Marian nervous, but so glad to have Robin back she could take on the world if it stood in their way.
“First, we were going to bring the King home. Destroying the Sheriff was second. Only then were we supposed to get married. But thanks to you, we did it backwards, step for step.”
“And that’s a problem?”
“It is to me.”
“How?”
“Let me show you.” Pulling her down, he kisses her with a newfound strength. Again. Once more. “Marian, will you marry me in a very public, irrevocably official ceremony with King Richard giving you away? If that’s all right with you, your Majesty.”
“It would be an honour, Robin of Locksley.”
“You best not die, my love.” Marian’s face is shining with a more radiant joy than on that last fateful morning. “I’ve loved you since I was five.”
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ ”
Surrounded by the overjoyed tears, cheers, and applause of the people of Locksley, Clun, Nottingham, and Nettlestone, and their friends, Robin has ended the kiss by swooping his Lady of Locksley off her feet before they have even turned away from the altar.
Nuzzling her ear, his whisper husky, “Do you take this man as your way out of here?”
With her lips brushing his cheek she answers, “I do.”
Lifting his head, turning with her in his arms to face the overcrowded church, every spare surface adorned with flowers, Robin announces to all, “I’m carrying her all the way!”
The King stands on the steps of the church of Locksley laughing as he and his soldiers behold the sight ahead of them. The crowd, the children skipping alongside, Robin is carrying Marian to Locksley Manor. Home. All are walking toward the unknown fearlessly and with laughter. England is renewed, in just hands, her future full of promise once more.
From the folds of Marian’s bridal gown flutters a piece of folded parchment. Tumbling in the wind, it changes course to skim and scurry across the road as a flat creature until it is caught in a barricade of tall, brown grass along the roadside. Archer reaches down to pick it up, has to make a grab for it as a sudden gust of wind competes for it, threatening to steal it away forever.
Unfolding it, Archers sees the creases have slits through which he can see the skin of his palm. This parchment has been folded and refolded, read and reread, hundreds of times since it was written over a year ago. The ink is faded, but still legible.
My dearest love,
Whether I live or die, I beg you, do all you can to stay alive. You have said to me Gisborne has qualities. I hope one of them is that he honours his word when he gives it, and will save you from the Sheriff. He has sworn to me he will not keep you against your will. Take advantage of his protection long enough to survive then be the free spirit I so do love.
You are the voice of my soul. If I die, you must speak for me, for England. So you have to live. You must. Marry him. It’s the only way.
Then come back to me. I will wait for you here on Earth should we both survive tomorrow. And if one of us should not, if we cannot have on Earth what should have been, I will wait for you in heaven until you are there with me, my sweet. As we were born to be. Each for the other.
God is loving. He will give us that chance.
Robin
_______________________________________
I did write an epilogue which takes place in Heaven - for me, being a hopeless romantic and an even more hopeless Gizzy Gusher. I didn't include it here because with so many different hopes out there - Guy and Marian, Guy and Meg, Guy and Kate even, Guy and somebody completely new - I thought I'd leave my personal one out of it and let readers make their own happy conclusions about what is in store for Guy in the afterlife. Enough said.
Thanks: To those who have read this, I hope you had a good enough ride. This is my first ever attempt to write a story like this, and obviously my first attempt at fan fiction. I am not a writer, so I have to extend here my deepest thanks to M and E (first letters to their usernames) for getting me started with this story, then for encouraging me to keep writing it as they got scene by scene installments, then to post it up for others to read. As you know, I did this primarily for you. My joy came only from yours.
Thanks and gratitude go to Y (again, first letter to username) for her generosity and without whom this ending, and the events leading up to it, could not have been imagined, much less included. Thanks also go to 5 others who also took an interest in this story as I wrote it, 3 of them family (and who still call themselves my relatives - phew).
Last, but by no means least, I would like to thank the entire cast and crew of BBC's Robin Hood. Without your wonderful telling of the stories you wanted to tell, M and E wouldn't have asked the questions that inspired me to answer with a quickie outline which led to a story that had little in common with said outline, (although, in my defense, I have to add that M and E did make some very specific requests that had poor Marian going in two directions)...well, without you lot, I wouldn't have wanted to write a word. I didn't want to alter the events of S2 and S3, I tried to make this story fit in with those, because I enjoyed the show. Yes, I changed one little detail. I fully intended not to, except maybe to make it happen in the library with the fire poker at the hand of Mrs. Peacock whilst Colonel Mustard yelled "What the f#&@ are you doing?" but when push came to skewer, I went the other way. Translation: Mum wouldn't have it.
PG for romantic scenes
Closer to R than PG-13 for the violent scene here, the more I think about it.
Thanks extended at the very bottom, under the cut, in grey font. More thanks given in the same way under the first part of this fanfiction.
Wednesday morning. Guy comes to from where he has spent the night at the table to a loud wailing coming from the kitchen and a household bedecked in the trappings of mourning.
Catching Thornton by the sleeve as the servant passes on his way to complete some pointless errand, Guy commands, “Who died?” only to stop listening before Thornton has finished saying her name, his mind on the retreat, his entire body given up to a primeval, deafening roar that hooks into the visceral instincts of any who can hear it, instincts they did not know they had until this animalistic sound, instincts that recognize it for what it is. An all encompassing, inconsolable anguish accumulated over ages of loss and tragedy has taken possession of Sir Guy of Gisborne.
“Where is she? Where’s her body?”
Filling him in will be as good as lashing him with a cat-o’-nine-tails. Thornton is glad to do it, hating Gisborne more than he did, before he thought he understood him better, “No one knows, but the carriage and two horses are gone. Someone must have taken her. Perhaps is was Robin of Locksley. He and his men have gone on a trip, we’ve heard. You told us yourself you killed her. We heard you. Drink has dulled your memory, I suppose.” Thornton waits to gloat over the full effect.
Thornton is talking too fast. Guy struggles to process the words but all he can make out is the sound of Thornton’s voice. The whole room is moving too fast for him to follow. Guy does remember drinking. After he had sent her to Hood, he had wanted to drown his foolish dreams along with her treachery, her written devotion to an outlaw. But he would not have killed her. Not even if he was the angriest, most violent of drunks. He missed her.
Sir Guy looks lost. Thornton is adamant he be made to understand, “M’Lord, your sword is covered in blood!” One piece of evidence at a time.
Thornton is holding up his task. Of course, it’s his job to keep Guy’s weapons ready. Unclean thing! Guy turns his face away, closing his eyes to shut it out of his mind. One drop of her dried blood in her hair from the first murder attempt had been more than he could bear. His sword is gelled with it, none of it yet dry or brown. There is too much. A demon voice starts gnawing at his brain. You’re on thin ice with the Sheriff. “No.” You are prostrate with grief having run your sword through the silliest girl in England. “No.”
“M’Lord?” Thornton is pleased. The sacrilege Sir Guy has committed appears to be sinking in.
“I said, NO!”
“Changing the bedding, Bess found this under your bed ropes this morning. She hasn’t stopped sobbing since.” Thornton holds up the dress with his other hand, displaying it so not one crease or fold of fabric covers from view that matters most.
Guy would murder Thornton right now if that would reverse time to when she was alive, but he cannot bring himself to touch that which killed her. Touching the proof would make it true.
Marian’s got the proof. He remembers he had been looking for the letter yesterday in her chest of clothes to burn it, to ensure he could remain close enough to the Sheriff to be able to kill him when the time was right. Then, Simon had brought her to him. Simon had explained it was the law.
Slit her pompous, little throat. “No!” The demon has a brother. Me next, Papa! Me next! “She was supposed to be mine!” Slamming his palms on the table, a pain shoots up his left wrist into his forearm. Marian’s last hurrah. Guy buries his hands in his hair, pressing hard as he runs them over his scalp. If he could grab hold of his brain through his skull, he could make it remember. There is a vital piece of information missing. There has to be. The reminder will not come. Marian fought you for her life.
In a sudden rage unrestrained as Thornton has never seen before, Sir Guy tears at the scarf on his hand, then savagely rips out stitches he must have sewn himself in a thrashing frenzy of despair far more satisfactory than Thornton could have hoped for. Overturning the table as he stands with a hand pouring blood from a hole through his palm, Sir Guy makes for the door, throwing aside any guard hapless enough to dare to stand in his way, across the grass glowing green with the unheeded joy of spring, the air perfumed with an unnoticed new beginning.
In the barn, he orders the fear-stricken boy, “Saddle my horse!” with only a passing glance to the white one in the next stall. He had been saving him for her. Now he wishes it did not exist.
The demons won’t be quiet. They are playing a gleeful tug-of-war with the frayed ends of memories, knotting them into a nonsensical trail of blood over which whinnying horses drag an empty carriage toward a faraway dream. The unmistakable union of their souls; a life in which they were finally aligned with some heretofore unknown law. A being as marred as you should suffer for what you have done.
“Hello, Simon. Sleeping where you belong I see. In the gutter.”
Simon awakens with dread. He recognizes that voice, “Gisborne.” An iron, painful grip pulls him up by the hair, bending his head back against Gisborne’s shoulder, exposing his throat. Gisborne holds up the dagger in front of his broken nose. “No! Please, don’t kill me!”
“Oh, I won’t.” With the back of his hand that holds the dagger, his hand with the open wound twisting Simon’s hair, Gisborne flips Simon’s body around like a top. Eye to eye, he rams the dagger into Simon’s mouth, slicing his tongue and the roof of his mouth. Unsatisfied, Guy shoves the handle and blade deeper, not stopping until his fist is inside the mouth filling with blood, until he sees through the skin in Simon’s throat the tell-tale lumps of an Adam’s apple split apart and hears the screams Simon’s lungs are panting are nothing but wind. “That’s for convincing me to kill her, for holding a knife to her perfect throat.”
Turning around Simon’s body again, Gisborne next slices off the muscles and tendons behind Simon’s left knee which buckles, forcing him to stand on one leg. He does the same to Simon’s right knee. Simon is helpless to refuse the aid his tormentor gives to hold him upright. “That’s for climbing the stairs to bring her to me.”
Taking the scruff of Simon’s shirt with a whiplash to his neck, Gisborne lets Simon’s body drop and drags him out of the ally into the middle of the main road. “And this is for her. People don’t bother to steer around half-dead beaten drunks in the road around here. They think it’s an act of mercy.” Gisborne throws Simon to the ground.
In terror, Simon uses his hands and elbows to pull himself out the way of the morning rush to market, to posts at the castle, to shops of various trades; it should begin in just a few minutes.
For only two steps, Gisborne stalks beside the thing crawling before wordlessly crushing the bones in its arms with his spurs and boot. It lies dead still, except for the rise and fall of its breathing, its bruised beady eyes set close to its skewed nose are open wide. Walking away from the latest rung in his career, Sir Guy of Gisborne could not feel an emotion if he tried, except for this grief most evil. Uncompassionate, it replaces whatever Marian had seen in him with scorn for any happier man, woman or child as it creeps inside him, taking him over. Dying will be unremarkable compared to this. Welcome.
You should be punished for what you have done. If Hood had never persuaded him that Hood could protect her, there would have been no warrant, no hellish law to obey. No matter where he goes, or to whom he turns, his enemy is there. Watching, waiting to undermine every good thing Guy struggles to achieve. Hood swore he would let the Sheriff will hear of your disloyalty. Yes, Hood forced him to do it. Hood will make you pay. Not if he makes Hood pay first. If it wasn’t for the Sheriff, Hood and the warrant, she’d be waiting for him at home right now.
Walking toward the main entrance to the castle, Gisborne steps aside, giving the road to the morning’s first cart pulled by one horse, the expendable blonde scum riding in the seat presumably taking her wares to market. He should have thought to ask Simon about Hood and the rumours flying the outlaw has taken his gang to find and retrieve Marian’s body. If only you had pledged your fealty to Sir Edward.
Here Season 3 begins, and plays out in its entirety. SPOILER WARNING: Don't read on if you haven't seen the finale to S3.
His body looks so insignificant from up here, like an extraneous detail. He can see people talking around it, past and present friends who have stretched it flat on the ground from where he had sat down for the best view of the forest, this placid, beautiful place. Two he hasn’t seen in a year. One in particular is more precious to him than any of the rest. So, this is what it’s like to die.
“Robin!” Her breath must be baptismal, her light kisses on his eyes, his forehead, his mouth must be from an abiding, unfinished love. If only he could feel them. Lord, I choose her over any other spiritual joy you might be thinking of. Just trying to be help.
“Nothing’s happening. We’re losing him!”
Robin could have sworn he had told Much - everyone - he had wanted to die alone. Sherwood. He’s going to miss it.
“No! It must work!”
Will. He must be dead since he’s here.
“Give it time.”
Djaq and Will must be both dead. Shame that, but it will be good to catch up with them once this dying nonsense is over. This is weird, though. Everyone he loves is here, talking to each other, the living with the dead. On Earth. Except for Guy who is floating in front of him with arms crossed over his chest looking all smug and self-assured.
“Care to explain your bad attitude, along with that hair? Let me guess. You washed it.”
“As usual, your plan is half a plan,” Guy tells him with a friendly, lopsided grin. “You’re going the wrong way.”
“Robin doesn’t have time!”
Tuck’s yell diverts Robin’s attention. He wishes Tuck would be the voice of reason saying “Let him go.”
Kate’s being pretty quiet. Maybe that’s because Marian’s right in front of her. Robin chuckles. He can see how this could be interesting. Robin looks to say as much to Guy, but Guy isn’t there. Great. Now how is he supposed know which way to go?
“Are you sure you gave him the right antidote?”
Archer, what’s this talk about an antidote? I’ve got to die if I’m going to be with Marian. So let me.
“Of course! This poison has a very peculiar odor that’s difficult to get wrong.”
“Well, did you give him enough?”
Marian. It won’t be long now, my love.
“He’s not breathing! Do something!”
“I am!”
Good thing he can’t feel that. Djaq is beating his chest hard enough to break a couple of ribs. Not that those matter anymore.
“Robin of Locksley, I did not come back after all this time for you die on me!” Marian backs away, giving Djaq room. “Escaping kidnappers, and -”
“I did not kidnap you. Sir Guy put you in my care, remember?”
“No, but since you are here you must be all right otherwise Much and Little John wouldn’t have you along with, um -” Marian’s voice trails off because no one makes time for introductions during a crisis.
“Archer. Robin’s brother.”
“Hello. And um -”
“Kate. I’m no one important.”
“You are to me.”
Much. Never has there been a more perceptive, generous soul or a better friend.
“Hello, Kate. And you are the one who kidnapped me from England for who knows what purpose taking me all the way to France!”
“I am Friar Tuck. We used to be good friends until that evil potion -”
“- How’s Robin?” interrupts Marian. Djaq has stopped her pounding.
“He’s breathing. I think he’s going to make it!”
No, Djaq. Don’t make me live without her.
“Is there anything more should we do?” Marian is running her hands all over his chest reassuring herself that he’s filling his lungs on his own. He is.
“All we can do now is wait. For him to wake.”
“While we wait, I want to make it perfectly clear that potion wiped away all your memories of our friendship. Sir Guy didn’t recognize me either.”
“Hang on.” Much is trying to grasp how Marian, Will and Djaq managed to appear at the right time in the right place after two of them were supposed to be living happily ever after in the Holy Land, and one had been dead since last spring. “Do you mean to say that you, Tuck, are that friar - the one who used to work for Gisborne?”
“Yes.”
Little John is outraged, “And you knew? You knew Lady Marian was alive and you let us all go on thinking -”
“I didn’t know. She woke up on the ship unable to remember anything, she ran away - ”
“I remember Guy saved my life and how!”
“But not all of it. You don’t remember riding in the carriage or getting on the ship, do you?”
Marian refuses to answer. The missing hours have plagued her ever since she had escaped from this man in France. Guy lowering himself to the floor, the fearful wound in his palm, blood everywhere, the blood he had given. That weasel Simon. Then nothing, except on the ship the recurring dream began - of a happy life with treasured children she had had. With Guy. So much love.
“Lady Marian. I searched for months through France, Spain, northern Africa. An impoverished woman alone in a foreign land with her arm in a sling could not have survived, I was sure. I believed you were dead. What happened to you?”
“You haven’t met the Nightwatchman then, have you Friar Tuck.”
“Your Majesty.”
Robin is falling out of the sky. Maybe once he’s floating closer to their heads bowed to the King he’ll find out if King Richard is one of the dead or the living out of this bunch.
“Excellent fighter that Nightwatchman. How is Robin?”
“Coming around, your Majesty.”
Slipping into his body feels like sinking into a warm bath, a buoyant pressure from without pressing around his soul.
Much is still pretty confused. “How is it you’re not dead? Not that I’m sorry your alive, it’s great, but Gisborne knew he had -“
“The last thing I remember is Guy stabbing himself to make Simon think I was dead.”
Seeing that has made no sense to the rest, Tuck fills them in with what Marian does not remember, “Lady Marian gave Sir Guy a potion to make him forget her. I woke him up in the middle of its work which must have disrupted the process, warping the memories he had left of Lady Marian while destroying all memories of me. He believed the lie he had fabricated, the one he was going to tell the Sheriff to keep her being alive a secret, had actually happened.”
“But why send her to France?” asks Kate.
“He was afraid the potion would make her forget what had transpired in that bedchamber, to tell you, Robin, that she had to hide until he had made life here safe for her again. He chose France because he had hoped she might warn you, your Majesty. Of the Sheriff’s plot.”
“And you didn’t tell us that much, Tuck? You didn’t tell him? Probably would have been helpful, especially once he started fighting for us,” Little John is past outrage and bereavement. An enemy who had joined the right side, Gisborne was just growing into an inkling of a great man. He could have been a great friend. “Why did you let us go on thinking the worst of him, like we did with Allan?”
“The truth I thought I knew and Gisborne’s lie had one thing in common. Gisborne had sent Lady Marian to her death, or so I believed. Knowing she had lived a month longer would not have eased your grief. The ending was unchanged.”
“Well, I’d say things have changed by miles,” mutters Kate under her breath.
“Marian.”
“Robin!” Marian showers his face with kisses, “Thank you, Djaq!”
“You’re welcome,” answers Djaq with a jolt of laughter, of surprise, relief, gladness. Robin has opened his eyes and is speaking, exploring the reason for the pressure on his neck with his fingertips, the poultice over Isabella’s nick.
“Am I dead then? Is this heaven?”
“You are very much alive, my love.”
Clutching Marian’s hand for fear she may disappear, Robin satisfies himself that Will and Djaq are solid, also very much alive with his other hand. “How?”
“I could not shake the foreboding, the feeling that if I didn’t bring back Will, Djaq, and the King the Sheriff would succeed. I had to bring them back.”
“Your Highness,” Robin seeing his King tries to rise to show the proper respect, “I thought you were being held for ransom.”
The King pushes Robin’s shoulder down, giving his permission for his vassal to lie still and rest. “I was. Turns out this Nightwatchman and her friends are a formidable enemy to anyone on the wrong side of them. But if you ask me how could anyone look at that-” the King looks at Marian up and down, “and believe she is the Nightwatchman?”
“I’ve never understood that myself,” agrees Robin. “But if you don’t mind, that’s my wife you’re ogling. Your Majesty.”
“By precontract only, I understand.”
“That’s good and married,” winks Robin. “Although, there are a few technicalities.”
“What?” asks Marian nervous, but so glad to have Robin back she could take on the world if it stood in their way.
“First, we were going to bring the King home. Destroying the Sheriff was second. Only then were we supposed to get married. But thanks to you, we did it backwards, step for step.”
“And that’s a problem?”
“It is to me.”
“How?”
“Let me show you.” Pulling her down, he kisses her with a newfound strength. Again. Once more. “Marian, will you marry me in a very public, irrevocably official ceremony with King Richard giving you away? If that’s all right with you, your Majesty.”
“It would be an honour, Robin of Locksley.”
“You best not die, my love.” Marian’s face is shining with a more radiant joy than on that last fateful morning. “I’ve loved you since I was five.”
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ ”
Surrounded by the overjoyed tears, cheers, and applause of the people of Locksley, Clun, Nottingham, and Nettlestone, and their friends, Robin has ended the kiss by swooping his Lady of Locksley off her feet before they have even turned away from the altar.
Nuzzling her ear, his whisper husky, “Do you take this man as your way out of here?”
With her lips brushing his cheek she answers, “I do.”
Lifting his head, turning with her in his arms to face the overcrowded church, every spare surface adorned with flowers, Robin announces to all, “I’m carrying her all the way!”
The King stands on the steps of the church of Locksley laughing as he and his soldiers behold the sight ahead of them. The crowd, the children skipping alongside, Robin is carrying Marian to Locksley Manor. Home. All are walking toward the unknown fearlessly and with laughter. England is renewed, in just hands, her future full of promise once more.
From the folds of Marian’s bridal gown flutters a piece of folded parchment. Tumbling in the wind, it changes course to skim and scurry across the road as a flat creature until it is caught in a barricade of tall, brown grass along the roadside. Archer reaches down to pick it up, has to make a grab for it as a sudden gust of wind competes for it, threatening to steal it away forever.
Unfolding it, Archers sees the creases have slits through which he can see the skin of his palm. This parchment has been folded and refolded, read and reread, hundreds of times since it was written over a year ago. The ink is faded, but still legible.
My dearest love,
Whether I live or die, I beg you, do all you can to stay alive. You have said to me Gisborne has qualities. I hope one of them is that he honours his word when he gives it, and will save you from the Sheriff. He has sworn to me he will not keep you against your will. Take advantage of his protection long enough to survive then be the free spirit I so do love.
You are the voice of my soul. If I die, you must speak for me, for England. So you have to live. You must. Marry him. It’s the only way.
Then come back to me. I will wait for you here on Earth should we both survive tomorrow. And if one of us should not, if we cannot have on Earth what should have been, I will wait for you in heaven until you are there with me, my sweet. As we were born to be. Each for the other.
God is loving. He will give us that chance.
Robin
_______________________________________
I did write an epilogue which takes place in Heaven - for me, being a hopeless romantic and an even more hopeless Gizzy Gusher. I didn't include it here because with so many different hopes out there - Guy and Marian, Guy and Meg, Guy and Kate even, Guy and somebody completely new - I thought I'd leave my personal one out of it and let readers make their own happy conclusions about what is in store for Guy in the afterlife. Enough said.
Thanks: To those who have read this, I hope you had a good enough ride. This is my first ever attempt to write a story like this, and obviously my first attempt at fan fiction. I am not a writer, so I have to extend here my deepest thanks to M and E (first letters to their usernames) for getting me started with this story, then for encouraging me to keep writing it as they got scene by scene installments, then to post it up for others to read. As you know, I did this primarily for you. My joy came only from yours.
Thanks and gratitude go to Y (again, first letter to username) for her generosity and without whom this ending, and the events leading up to it, could not have been imagined, much less included. Thanks also go to 5 others who also took an interest in this story as I wrote it, 3 of them family (and who still call themselves my relatives - phew).
Last, but by no means least, I would like to thank the entire cast and crew of BBC's Robin Hood. Without your wonderful telling of the stories you wanted to tell, M and E wouldn't have asked the questions that inspired me to answer with a quickie outline which led to a story that had little in common with said outline, (although, in my defense, I have to add that M and E did make some very specific requests that had poor Marian going in two directions)...well, without you lot, I wouldn't have wanted to write a word. I didn't want to alter the events of S2 and S3, I tried to make this story fit in with those, because I enjoyed the show. Yes, I changed one little detail. I fully intended not to, except maybe to make it happen in the library with the fire poker at the hand of Mrs. Peacock whilst Colonel Mustard yelled "What the f#&@ are you doing?" but when push came to skewer, I went the other way. Translation: Mum wouldn't have it.