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

[landlesslord]

If the dark shape of the man passed out at the foot of a tree not too far from the lake looks like he stinks, it is probably because he does. Too much wine, beer and mead; all mingled up with stale sweat, anger and heartbreak.

The wine helps him sleep. The beer pushes him over into being so wasted he doesn't care anymore. The mead, mostly, is for a change from the monotony.

The rest is thanks to the nightmares of a foreign land, a woman who wouldn't love him and that moment, just after waking, when you remember everything.

His skin is cold and clammy to the touch.

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[landlesslord]

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.

[queenofmay]

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?"

[landlesslord]

"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?"

[queenofmay]

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."

[landlesslord]

"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."

[queenofmay]

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

[landlesslord]

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.

[queenofmay]

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."

[landlesslord]

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."

[queenofmay]

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.

[landlesslord]

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."