landlesslord | 2 months gone... [post season 2, pre season 3]

It's been a long day, but quiet, as thankfully the door stole her after being called the Sheriff for morning reports. Long enough that she was made to play song bird, before she was given The House of Arch to take respite in.

She spent the morning and afternoon there in the gardens with tea she hardly drank. When she finally grew sick of her own hiding, and the absolute necessity of the life that needed it, she forced herself back to Milliways.

To a dinner in the main room, followed by taking a walk around the lake. The lake was fine and so was she, even at the point when she realized the passed out person, and went to help. She only stopped when she got to about twenty feet from him.

"You can't be serious."

"....Marian...no no no...NO..NO....MARIAN"

The last is almost a shout, but even that does not wake the turning, twisting wreck on the shore - it only causes him to grab at the mud and grass blindly.

Edited 2009-05-04 19:44 (UTC)

Marian frowned disconcertingly at the whisper and then shout of her name. Not only was he unconscious - and wreaked of a ale house - but he was dreaming about shouting at her. Didn't she get enough of that when she was home?

Except that he looked, she couldn't be sure.

Something seemed different. In his voice? Or how he was laying? Not that she knew how he slept. She crossed her arms. She should leave him here, in the bracken and mud and he was going to be fine. Clutching at the grass and shouting her name.

Her frown hardened looking at how close the water was, and against her better nature she walked a step closer and nudge his boot with her own, thinking about the word fetch and how he deserved to fall in the lake.

"No." Anguish twists his face. "Marian...you don't...no"

In his dreams, the moist earth feels like her blood. The pressure on his foot feels only like he is stumbling, both towards and away from her.

"...haunting me..." The despair starts to take hold of the dream, away from the fear, the panic and the loathing. It's what urges his heavy limbs to draw inward, curling himself on the ground.

He curls up, still talking. The least he could would be to make it useful information. Something the she could use to help the people, or Robin. Something that was not continually the murmuring of her name like it's supposed to mean something.

It's truly annoying that she can't leave him there to sleep.

She can't even be grateful he might drown himself.

Instead of kicking his curled up legs, as she thought about quite vividly for a second, she crouched to one side and placed a hand on his arm to shake him. Not exactly as gently as she could.

"So help me if you even start yelling."

Guy doesn't yell. In fact, he doesn't make a sound when he starts awake and half twists to grab Marian to pull her down.

For a moment, he stares at her, breathing hard.

"You haunt me, even when I think I am awake." His voice is quiet and hard.

Being pulled down, even just until he noticed who she was, was not on the list of ways she thought he'd suddenly react. The shock, wave of combined fear and anger, making her reaction to try and pull from his grasp far more important than his alcoholic babbling.

"You are awake," Marian said, a rushed snap.

This ghost will not escape him, even if she feels real. He rolls to trap her beneath him.

She has tricked him before.

"Yet still you haunt me."

Guy studies her hairline, her eyebrows, her eyelashes, her nose, her mouth, her chin. He does not look into her eyes, for that way madness lies.

She smells real.

Oh, no. He wasn't. Marian struggled harder, pulling her legs up and planning kicking him hard. He was larger and his vantage point was better, but he was--well, he wasn't moving. Why wasn't he moving? Why was he staring at her face?

"I'm going to do worse than that if you don't let me up."

Then pray very hard he can't remember it in the morning.

So he can't take out on her, or her father.

Edited 2009-05-11 11:35 (UTC)

He is, he reasons, perhaps already mad - so what it hurt to look in her eyes now.

Guy laughs, short and sharp.

"I have done far worse than you can imagine, and what can you do to me now, hmm?"

Nevertheless he flops onto his back, releasing her and staring into the sky. He does not see a thousand, thousand unchosen futures being extinguished one by one there.

"You can only follow me the rest of my days."

Marian scoffed before she could even stop herself, in the middle of pushing herself up from the ground. That she kept herself from catapulting up and away faster than would look natural and normal for a Lady was grace enough on her nerves.

"Aren't you an assumptive drunk." It was incredibly sharply but better than the honesty and anger of the first four things that crowded her mouth. "I will not spend my whole life as a prisoner for either of you."

She could not contemplate that life.

Even as she lived it already.

"Your life?" Guy snorted with laughter. "Your life? What life?"

Abruptly though, the amusement in Guy's face disappears - alcohol doesn't quite have the same hold that it once did and so many things cut through it so easily now.

"Either of us?" He eased up to lie back on his elbows and fixed her with a dark look. "You made your choice in the end though, didn't you?"

His eyes lost focus for a moment, seeing a scene that wasn't now or here but in a dry land far away.

"And it wasn't me."

It might be that he's still bitter about that, among other things.

Marian was only angered further by the insulted inference of her not having a life anymore. Wasn't it bad enough that she had to crawl for them there? He'd taken her house, and willfully imprisoned her and her father in the fingers of the Sheriff.

The look he fixed her with and the words, angry and sharp and only going to one specific day in her life, only caused her eyes to narrow. Her want to sharply hit him curbed in her nails against her palm and the tightening of her jaw.

He'd blackmailed her. He'd been willing to let her father die. He'd lied about the king returning. He'd threatened her at the altar of God and their future. He was her ruin and still her jailer.

And her brain wasn't working apparently, because it came out sharper and more honest than she ever meant, "You never once gave me a choice."

Guy snorts. "I asked you one thing. I asked you to stay."

He frowns, looking for an answer blindly in the middle distance.

"I should have known you wouldn't listen." There is a bitter taste in his mouth and it isn't the sour taste of wine. "I should have known you wouldn't trust me."

He looks at her then, long and hard. "And after all I risked for you. You betrayed me and I..."

He cannot keep her gaze.

He's drunk. She keeps reminding herself, uneasily shifting her step even though he hasn't moved from the ground where he'd settled when he rolled off of having attacked her.

She doesn't want to be talking with him here.

She has to deal with him so much there.

"Burned down my house, marched my father and myself off like criminals, made it very clear what you think each day since," Marian said, coldly. And who his master always had and would be. There was no remorse in punching him. She should have done it harder when she had the chance.

He almost cannot believe that she would forget what he thought that they had shared, but then, this is Marian. In the end, she hadn't cared at all.

"I love..." No. Not now. She is not there to be loved. "I loved you." He looks at her, hurt and desperate.

"I stood by you, I saved your life" There is disbelief in his eyes, even now after she made her choice.

This is insanity. Insanity.

She can't believe he's even using that word after the things he's at fault for. That's not love. It's obsession or fixation or something, dark and twisted and wrong, but not love. She has to fight the confused wave at the pain in his expression.

He'd proved her wrong when she'd defended him being more than a monster before.

"Saved my life? How? By trying to take it from me at any cost? And then when you couldn't have it, taking everything else from it you could?" Marian's tone was biting even as her hands bunching into the fabric of her skirts at her back. "You are no savior."

"Do you forget so easily?" He had not thought her so petty as this. "The Sheriff was going to execute you - I saved you."

Quieter now. "I saved you." Marian was never who he thought she was and yet he loves her still, while he hates her.

He could not save her in the end though.

Very drunk.

"That's so very hard," Marian said. The words still, even as her expression was wavering with uncertainty at his quietness and specificity. "He only threatens such action, for myself or my father, at every turn should I disagree with any request of his."

Beat.

Perhaps, because she doesn't like that she's confused at his oddness, she has to make herself push. "Will you want me to sing for you out the gratitude of not being executed next, too?"

"The scaffold was there, ready. The executioner." For moments he is not here, but there in another time. "Hood did not come to your rescue."

He returns to the present.

"I did. You. Me. We... we were friends."

He is unsure now, of himself. Of his memories.

"I thought we were."

Guy is almost lost in his doubts again, when he realises what Marian is saying and turns his face to stare at her, appalled.

He's babbling now, and she supposes that what she gets for expecting sense out of someone who reeks as much as he does. She's been to the scaffold once herself and not for an execution of anything but pride and vanity -- pieces of herself they continue to try to chip at, as though they matter.

But it fades for the unsteady words that follow it.

Still even her voice isn't as correcting as her words should make it. "You have much to learn about friendship then."

"Perhaps."

He shrugged sadly.

"Perhaps I should have known you were too good to be true."

The kind of thoughts that the alcohol usually disguises are creeping back in. Guy stares at his hands, maybe seeing something that is not there.

"I thought you content, for a while."

"You thought yourself content," Marian returned, thought she had turned part of her attention to making sure he wasn't going to fall into the water if she excused herself from this bizarre exchange.

He might almost smile at that, if he were not so full of sorrow.

"I had too much to do before I could have been content." It is hard to look at Marian and consider these things he can never have. Guy looks out over the waters instead. "And now I shall never be."

"Did you ever think you would have a family of your own? Could you have been satisfied with me, if he had not returned?"

If Robin had not returned--

The idea alone was painful to consider, causing her chest to tighten at the notion of it. She would still have been carrying around the weight of such an angry bitterness, never admitting... and never truly embracing hope beyond action.

Never knowing the piercing fear or the endless joy she lived in now.

She ignored his pitiful statement about his own affairs. He'd made his choices and he was going to live with them. And tried her best of figure out what to say that wasn't the honest sharpness of the second part in her head.

"Yes." She afforded after a moment, even as she was frowning. As though it were possible to be raised in a court, or at all, as a woman and not to have been bred toward the idea. "I have though of what it would be like to have a family of my own."

He does not think of what a child of Marian might look like. He does not think of what their child might have looked like.

No, he does not think of them at all. Nor of watching them grow, growing old with her, grandchildren...none of these things.

Guy nods slowly, that she does not answer his question is answer enough.

"You never thought me good enough, nothing I could have done would have pleased you, would it?"

He is looking at her almost soberly. "You were always waiting for him."

It is not so much a question as an accusation.

She would like to tell him, cruel and hard, that she was. It would be easier -- if so much more deadly and dangerous and untrue. She does not want to look to her own folly.

Trying to believe him, to believe in her future, trying and thinking she had been finding reasons to think that underneath that dark exterior there was anything but a monster.

More than her pride had been stripped in letting herself believe.

"Is it his fault you are laying out here nearly drowning yourself, too?"

"Yes. And yours."

Stark, cold reality is intruding on the tolerable, slow, confused muddle he had been trying to keep his thoughts.

"The Sheriff. King Richard."

He looks at his hands. It had been too easy to kill her, the sword went in too smoothly. There should have been something to stop him. How did God allow it to happen?

"Me." Guy looks at her then, with a question that will not really give him any answer that he would want to hear. "I tried so hard for you. To give you everything I could. Why did you let me hope?"

It's too much. Too much. The quiet, steady, broken appearance he's playing. The way the ache in her chest evoked on Robin's name earlier stays and responds to whatever new game he's decided to play at her.

Even as she knows she swore she wouldn't

Beg.

again.

Even as she knows it could just be giving him something, some new way to torment her each day, a way he knew would work. She would be handing him the newest way to parade her about, trying to break what couldn't be burned or taken.

All she did was shake her head, grateful for the cloak of darkn night, "Stop this."

"I cannot." No wry smile. No smirk of triumph. He can never win any skirmish with her. Not anymore. "You torment me. My hell."

Guy reaches for her, suddenly. Pleadingly.

"Kill me."

Marian actually took a step back, shocked and confused far more by his words than his prostration. What was this? What was he doing?

He's on his knees now.

"Kill me."

He reaches for where his sword should be, but he must have left it behind.

In Marian's still warm body.

No sword.

"You had a knife to wear in your hair..."

There is a touch of desperation in Guy's voice.

He couldn't--shouldn't--can't know that.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

How does he? Another step back. She could not say she did not want him dead -- all that he'd taken, all that he'd threatened, all that he's almost done -- but she was supposed to be above that.

His kind was meant for the courts so that all could see. She was the person who had sung that song to Robin a hundred times. Not the person who was supposed to shed his blood -- to want it, to be offered it.

"I don't want to either." She didn't want that choice.

She couldn't convince herself which was right and wrong here.

Another step, a half turn, what was more terrifying in the choices or the honesty of the things she wanted. A breath, shaking her in its stillness. "Do try not to fall into the lake."

She doesn't know? That confuses Guy for a moment, but perhaps, he reasons, she has more than one.

He didn't really know her then, so anything could be true.

"A blade with a jewelled handle. You wore it in your hair and..."

He was trying to remember what else he could tell her, when she spoke again.

"You say that to torture me before twisting the knife, you always do." His laugh is short, sharp and brittle. "You have every reason to."

Guy drew back from her and regarded the lake slowly. The cold water could kill him.

But then it might not.

He rose to his feet clumsily, stumbling forward a little.

"I could drown."

She's absolutely certain it would not be wise to even acknowledge a discussion of the weapons she might or might not have carried on her person. Especially given the necessity of fashion and matching accessories to please even a minute dot of an English court.

Even if the grandest sum of it was a mass of ashes.

But then he's back to baiting her, with stabbing words and punctuated sounds. Things that make no sense. Her fingers fettered together in front of her, as she wondered if he was truly cruel enough to try and make her plead with him not to kill himself after asking her to do such a thing.

This is twisted and she can't even figure out how or why.

"As though you even have a reason to." It's out of her mouth before she can stop herself, both more sharply annoyed and curiously confused than she likes to hear in it.

Guy takes one difficult, unsteady step towards the edge of the water and then another before she interrupts him.

"I have every reason to." Possibly, he is more hurt that she doesn't understand, then that she does not care. "You should know."

He focusses on the water again.

"I lost you."

2 months gone... [post season 2, pre season 3]

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