Title: Why We Fought
Author: Nettlestone Nell
Word Count: 4101
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Much, Little John, Allan, Will, DJaq, Guy, 2 OFCs; Much/Eve, Will/DJaq, Robin/Marian
Spoilers/Warnings: All seasons, and, it is imperative that you listen, because reading this without reading what has come before could prove catastrophic: my INTERCOMM 2011 submissions, "A Bit Too Much" at 'Treat Much Right', "Deposed" at 'Society for People Who Are Afraid of Maid Marian', "The Long Dark Knight of the Soul","Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair", both at 'Sir Guy Treats YOU Right', and the immediately preceding "Much Gets By with a Little Help From His Friends". Read those first. No joke. Nothing will make sense if you don't.
Summary: The conclusion of the INTERCOMM-spawned series, newly-christened, "We Are 2011". Part Six, the final. (Written and conceived, actually, after the INTERCOMM had wrapped.)
Disclaimer: No one can truly own the legend of Robin Hood, but BBC/Tiger Aspect seem to hold rights to this particular iteration.
Category: Comedy; Short Fic
Why We Fought
I.
Chelsea Harbour Luxury Condominium Development, LONDON - Early sun through only half-closed blinds painted them both with dappled skin, the particular tone of her flesh not that far removed from his own. Yet always, entirely, deliciously, other.
Allan-A-Dale moved as stealthily as possible to extricate himself (however much he'd rather not, just now, do so) from their mutual embrace. Within his arms she slept like a child at peace, but as ever, as always, his ex-wife roused at his slight stirring as though primed to expect just such an escape.
As his feet touched the floor and he froze seated on the mattress' edge, his eyes clenched closed in the knowledge that he had awakened her. Behind him (him too cowardly for the moment to turn back toward her), she grabbed for a handful of the pristinely white down duvet to give her warmth where the removal of his skin against hers had in its absence left a chill.
Without looking, he knew how she would have situated herself: sitting up, the duvet falling in heaps and folds about her, mounded like beaten cream, her hair falling fetchingly into her face, her bare shoulders peeking out from the covering's crenulated centre. The foot and calf of her leg exposed, perhaps, where she had it propped up at the knee. The way her twin malleoluses perfectly bookended the enticing narrows that was her flawless ankle.
Criminy, but he was all but back in bed with her right now. Peeling his way into that labyrinthine nautilus of a covering, ready to unearth the rest of her from within it. But it was a necessary morning of strength over desire. He told himself that again. Strength. Resolve, over desire.
"You're psyching yourself up to go, aren't you?"
He heard her hand, its fingers, go to shake-out her hair, tousle it from the scalp.
"Wot's that?" He faked not being able to catch what she had said over the sound of pulling on his trousers. "Say," he went on, conversationally, catching her reflection in the over-dresser mirror, feeling the safety, like Perseus, in that reversed image rather than turning to confront her head-on. "How's my girl? How's little Aly?"
"If you think for one moment I will let you wake her at this ungodly hour, as you did me, you have another think coming, Lover."
"Right," he said to the mirror, threading his belt, where she was framed atop the Modern-style furnishing. He let his face telegraph that he was considering the past three hours, "and so you are so unsatisfied, my hen? For certainly, were I called to testify under oath as to your level of satisfaction some ninety minutes ago, I should perjure myself to deny you were anything but. Is such bone-deep contentment so fleeting?"
"When the man that brings it always is-so fleeting? Yes."
At this he turned, his crisp collared shirt half-buttoned starting at the tails. "Nell!" he playfully reprimanded her, "that I cannot have. 'Fleeting', you say-this man-'fleeting'?" He extended both his hands as if to illustrate the impressive figger she chose to slight.
"I did not mean your physical prowess," she told him levelly. "For that to be the case 'twould hardly be a transgression to scold you about." She sighed, seeing how her sudden seriousness caused his mouth to part mid-repartee. "And doubtless," she withdrew her foot into the cover of the duvet, "a trade I would gladly make: fleeting fireworks for you here to tuck in Aly, to walk with us to the park, to sleep-only sleep beside me of a night-the entire night..."
His hands had retreated to his hips. It was a compelling argument (request, appeal) as ever, and not one that he had yet found an equally compelling answer to articulate into words. He was what he was. He did what he did. The posh homes of Chelsea Harbour furnished in the pricey Modern style were, he supposed, what he wanted for his family (the safety, the security), but for him...it was his feet each morning that walked away from such places, beat a path elsewhere, and from that elsewhere to another. Away from such places-never from such people.
She answered for him, compassion in her tone. "It is only that your Sherwood is cutten down. And you cannot find spot nor shack to compare with it. And so you keep looking."
"How is it," he asked, perilously seating himself back on the bed's edge as he finished buttoning up and began wrapping his tie, "you can always do that? Give life to the very words that seem unable to form on my tongue?"
"Ah, well," she scoffed, silently critiquing the knot he had chosen for his tie, "your tongue has only ever gotten you in trouble."
He smiled to this slowly, until he wore a full-on grin. "Yes, well, it has gotten you in trouble your fair share as well, has it not, my hen?"
She did not have to state her agreement, as the main 'trouble' it had gotten both of them in was sleeping two doors down the hall under a Disney Princesses canopy.
"You are off then, you said, to meet with the firm?"
"That's right," he agreed, looking for where he had thrown his suit coat earlier this a.m. before slipping between the sheets with her. "Be gone from London for a bit."
"But first, you said, going to see him? After all this time? Didn't you say you had been his dogsbody?"
His tone became a little sharper. "No." The tone backed-off, "It was Robin who called me that."
She seemed to consider this. "And then onto meeting with the others, altogether?" Nell asked. "Will she be there?"
"My darling," he began, as ever when the subject of DJaq came up, "that was over ages ago. On my honour, we never even so much as kissed."
Her former pout of insecurity immediately transformed into an expression of sardonic paradox. "Allan-A-Dale," she took him to task. "Did you really just proclaim," she mimicked his voice, "'on my honour' to me? Have you forgotten entirely to whom you speak?"
He chuckled good-naturedly, leaning back toward her where she still sat just out of his easy reach. "On my honour as a thief, and a no-good, and above all, one of Robin Hood's men, I swear to you, Nell, I shall not have this good of a time in twice a fortnight."
At this she slyly replied, "you would if you broke-in here again ere the month were out."
He chose to stop her invitation with a kiss.
For a moment she pretended to push him away, her hands to each of his shoulders. "You'll wrinkle your fine suit."
"Sod my suit," he told her, kicking off his Kenneth Coles to bring his feet up onto the bed, letting her peel the lapels of his coat back over his shoulders like stripping the rind off a tender fruit.
She had the coat off, flung...somewhere. As her hands worked unknotting his tie, and her tongue worked, conversely, to knot his, he brought his arms about her neck, and set to undoing his cufflinks, with a great many pauses in his work to recall his mind to the tricky task.
"I have every intention of making you late for work," he told her. "Egregiously so."
"And I am committed to seeing you miss your flight, train, helicopter, zeppelin out of London," she further teased him, reinforcing her point by ripping open his dress shirt, setting buttons flying, pinging into the walls and onto the bamboo hardwood floors.
"Well, then," he spoke into her mouth, without pulling his more than millimeters away from her wanting lips, "we are both resigned."
"Shut up," she told him, urgently rather than angrily, "and do your bloody job."
Sometime later, Allan-A-Dale sat in a busy London coffee shop at the heart of The City, reminiscing on the early morning his day had already seen while streaming live BBC video onto his smartphone.
"They are asking for a full expose," Nell had warned him that morning before he left. "What shall I do? It does none of us any good to be brought too fully out into the open."
"You do what any presenter might do," he told her, his tone cajoling. "Eyes to the teleprompter, and just read from the scripts."
"And what about what I find?"
"Find?" he asked, in a manner of put-on confusion. "You're not gonna find nuffin'. Neither are the others wot come lookin'. What you're gonna find, investigative reporter or no, is that no matter what newsreporters think, the populace like mystery. They like not knowing, everyone with their own theory, thinkin' they've got it all figured out. Trust me, Nell, conspiracy will win the day. Always has, always will."
"...curiously," Nell's picture, seated behind the newsdesk, showed on the streaming video playing in front of him, "with the soon-to-be mediated conclusion of the courts-sealed litigation of an unknown nature, all correspondents have directed that their settlements in the matter of Undisclosed Parties v. BBC/Tiger Aspect are set to pay out to the anonymous philanthropic organization, Locke's Lea. This largely unknown and aggressively clandestine charity has, over the past one-hundred years, outshone even such altruistic giants in giving as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and as we have reported on this program previously, shared certain ties during her lifetime with the charitable work of Diana, Princess of Wales..."
"Good girl," Allan smiled his approval into his ex's unseeing eyes on the feed.
"This is Nell Stone reporting, BBC Online."
II.
Knightsbridge, LONDON - It was a pretty chic flat Allan-A-Dale had found a reason to break into. None too shabby, with occasional objets-de-interest here and there clearly Middle Eastern in their origins. But since none of the religious pieces were in obvious use (the mihrab, he noted, for one, being set upon the wall nearest Scotland rather than Mecca), they seemed to serve purposes more decorative than cultural.
He had timed things pretty well, and found himself in good position when the sounds of a couple ascending the stairs to the walk-up came to his attuned ears.
"This does not look like my flat," came the man's voice, still pitched at an entirely conversational timbre.
"I would not know," the woman replied in a posh London accent. "You have never yet taken me there."
Their steps neared the door.
"Jumi," the man said, "I am not good at this...at flirting..."
"I had not noticed, Guy," she told him, her voice jolly, "I thought I had been more than making up for your lack."
They paused at the door. "I thought you said you were taking me home," he countered.
"And so I am," she assured him, causing Allan's eyes to roll.
Allan reached for the handle and pulled open the exterior door. "Alright, then," he nearly had to catch the woman, whose back had been to the door, catch her from falling through the doorway and onto her own welcome mat. "That'll be quite enough of that for the moment."
He saw Gisborne. He saw Gisborne instinctually reach across himself, his right hand stretching for the hilt of a sword he no longer wore. The Sheriff's former Master-at-Arms scoured the perimeter of the half-darkened flat, looking for Allan's compatriots.
"I am alone," Allan said, his hands open to show his lack of weaponry. As he had come in through the roof, commando-style (he had to admit he enjoyed such games) he was dressed in elite-forces all black, his jumper with sewn-on top shoulder patches. He had not expected to feel so keenly the color and military nature of his wardrobe when confronting the long-lost (and thankfully so) Gisborne.
Gisborne moved slowly to shift the woman (clearly his date for the night) out of Allan's immediate vicinity. He said brief words to her, promising a better explanation momentarily, and asked for thirty minutes' use of her apartment, promising to meet up with her at a nearby bar within short walking distance.
To Allan's moderate surprise, rather than protesting and throwing both of them out (or calling the police), she agreed.
"What's this, then?" Guy asked, Allan letting him be the first to open the dialogue once they were alone.
"I've no interest in being a bother. I need only your signature, twice, and I'll be on me way. Apologies for the lady, 'bit messy that might prove, but you are no easy find anymore, Guy."
Gisborne shot him a level look. "I have not wanted to be found."
"Obviously." Allan extended the papers to him.
"Legal documents?"
"You know, regarding the..." Allan motioned with his hands to indicate Much's suit.
Gisborne scowled. "I have no interest in this. I am past it. Hood's legal wranglings mean nothing to me."
"Actually," Allan assured him, "they could mean a great deal to you. That is why I am come."
Gisborne glanced at the paper, saw the mounting number of signatories committing themselves to the class action; the Sheriff's Booby, the blind architect, the Templar Carter, a man he did not know named Bassam. "You are not hearing me, Allan," he re-stated, "I don't care. Take your papers and go. I will sign nothing."
"Don't you care, then? What they say about you? Doesn't affect you at all?"
"I have made a sort of peace with the past," Gisborne confessed. "I suppose it bothers you, to watch yourself face-down dead, your fellows believing you betrayed them a second time?"
Allan countered. "Even so, it is not the same as killin'-living with people thinkin'-"
Gisborne spoke on, as though Allan had not nearly referenced what he had nearly referenced. "And why need you my signature so desperately? Your pages seem quite overflowing with others-even," he glanced down, "the outlaw John Little's son?" He scoffed, "you mean to prove that he was mis-represented in the series? Little Little John?"
Allan continued to explain what had brought him, not attempting to answer Gisborne's questions. "The first you sign to join the suit. The second," here he paused, taking Guy's measure, "to designate your share of the settlement be signed over to the foundation, the old 'general fund' wot was."
Without another word, taking a ballpoint pen from the nearby breakfast nook, Gisborne signed both papers with great flourish, extending them to Allan.
Allan looked at them as Guy extended them in his hand. "A bit easier than I thought that would be," he confessed, warily assessing the taller man.
"After all this, do you not believe that people can change, Allan?" Guy asked. "And so which was the real you, if no one truly changes? The thief to be hanged? Robin Hood's man? Gisborne's boy?" He had almost spit out the words. "Or, again, Hood's faithful man? Which?"
Allan knew he did not have to reply, but he did anyway. "I suppose I am all of those things...and can choose from among them. Choose to be the better of what's among them."
Guy nodded. "And so you are again Hood's man." He gestured again with the signed papers, until Allan took them. "Hood sent you."
"No," said Allan, sliding the packet of documents under his jumper for safe-keeping. "She did."
A beat passed. He avoided Guy's instantly heavy gaze, which he knew to be upon him. "Wasn't supposed to tell you that," Allan confessed, his eyes, in avoidance, on level with Gisborne's hand, where he spied the King's Mark. "Hurt much, does it still?"
Gisborne ignored his question. "And so she sent you, thinking that I owe her, that I am yet in her thrall and must do as she wills? As I must live, at her and Richard's decree?"
Allan shook his head, bringing his eyes to meet with Guy's. "No," he said, offering his former employer truth, and compassion, even, where he had often (in the past) found such wanting. "I think she had me come to extend to you the opportunity to do right, to chose for the good. To learn, for once, the reward in it."
Silence fell, neither breaking their stare.
"Your time is up," Gisborne told him enigmatically, referencing the thirty-minutes having passed. He said nothing more of Marian, of Robin, of changing or good-doing.
Surprisingly, as Allan made to go, Gisborne caught his hand and grasped it in his own. "Have fun, Allan," he told him, a peculiar and unusual sincerity about him, "it is what you were always best at. 'Twas a pity I never made use of that talent."
The rare cordiality coming from Gisborne left Allan himself speechless, and he was already back in his car before he noticed Gisborne had not been too far behind him in descending the stairs, and that he, in fact, as he had said he would, was heading into the coffee bar where the woman sat patiently waiting for him.
III.
Cathedral de Rouen, Normandy, FRANCE - "I can never remember, not with any reliable accuracy," Much nattered on, "which of Richard's graves we are meant to gather at. Here, with his heart? With his entrails at Chalus? With his bones at the feet of Old Henry at the Abbey in Anjou?" If he had been wearing a hat he would have wrung it in his hands. "We need a better system."
"Works fine for me," Will interjected. "Good enough place as any."
"Easy for you to say," Little John griped. "Tour groups aren't constantly asking you to step aside as you're getting in the way of their photograph-taking."
"Was something not good about your flight?" Much asked John suspiciously. "Did the play not open well? You have been in a frightful mood ever since you arrived."
"At least I am not wearing a mop on my head," the large man shot back, calling out Much's dodgy attempt at disguising himself.
"See here," Much took offense, "I have been the public face of this suit. I have borne the brunt of the media scrutiny, the reporters and gossip-mongers on my lawn, in my gardens. You have all been quietly tucked away in your corners of the empire, pleased to read about the progress of it all," he shot a withering look at Will, "if that."
Allan sought to settle them all, asking of Will, "where's DJaq?"
"It is," Will cleared his throat, "not a good time for her to be traveling just now."
"Really," Allan asked, "again?"
"Nice work," John announced, heartily punching Will's unprepared-for-it arm.
"And Robin," Much carried on like he had never left off, "where has he been in all this? In some hidey-hole somewhere, willingly ignorant, willingly unhelpful in all that I have suffered..."
"I shall let him know you think so," came a voice with a distinctly Bavarian accent.
Stepping toward where they were all gathered about the prostrate stone coffin that held Richard's heart, was Count Freidrich von Wittelsbach, his sense of fashion as flamboyantly bold as they all recalled, the deceptive carelessness in his step still well in place. In his hands he held a small netbook. "Or," he added, "in one moment you might tell him yourselves." He clicked open the device and quickly set it up to Skype between a location within the former city limits of Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
With great interest, all present watched the glowing screen.
A dark fall of hair over the corresponding webcam coalesced into Marian's face.
Much scoffed audibly.
If she heard his dismissive noisings she either took them for interference in the connection, or generously chose to overlook them. "Sorry," she began. "We could not come. Robin's fighting through his malaria at present, and we were not permitted to fly."
Instantly, Much was all-concern, "will he be well? Should I come? Have you the supplies necessary to handle such a flare-up?"
"Peace, Much," everyone heard Robin say off-camera. The picture jostled and jumped as Marian handed the laptop over to her reclining-in-his-illness husband. "It is only that I was (through force) off my quinine for several days. All will be right, soon."
To a man, all those gathered relaxed to hear their leader declare so in his own mostly-strong, familiar voice.
"What are our plans, then?" Robin asked, ready to be about business.
"It is a right-impressive sum," Allan began.
"In no little thanks to your efforts at tracking-down signatures for your little class action," Robin praised him.
Allan continued, trying not to smile too broadly from the compliment. "'Would be best, likely, to stow it a bit before paying it right back out. Garner some banked interest, let public curiosity in the Lea die back a bit before putting it to work."
The Count spoke up, no stranger to moving about large amounts of monies. "The Channel Island of Sark is a fairly close, fairly discreet tax haven."
Little John spoke in warning. "Let us not use it to make us too much more, lest we let down those in want, choosing to help them on our timetable, rather than the one of their need."
Will looked up from where he had been texting DJaq about the meeting so far. "Agreed."
Much and Allan also nodded.
"Very well," Robin replied, "we shall have a little of it now to get us started, and let the bulk rest a bit and call on it in the not-too distant future." He took a breath. "So, where are we thinking of spreading the wealth?"
"Surely you could use an influx at the school and children's home, there," offered Much, thinking of Robin and Marian's current endeavor with quake-orphaned children in the decimated Hispaniolan port.
Allan spoke up. "Still sort of have my eye set on that after-school program we talked about settin' up within the sound of Bow Bells."
"I am of a mind," John added, "to stand as contractor on some building for those who lost so much in the Australian floods and cyclone." He looked to Will, "if I can manage to locate a decent carpenter."
Will smiled in return. "Done," he said. "Might as well put Christchurch, New Zealand on the list as well."
"You will not ask for it, I know, my friend," Robin singled out Much, "but I have read the prospectus, and 'tis obvious even in your characteristic understatement of your own needs, that your and Eve's London shelter needs more than simply a new coat of paint, but rather, an across-the-board renovation and, if we can get the proper permits, an expansion."
"If you cannot get the proper permits," Count Freidrich slyly responded, "I met a fellow in Monte Carlo-no, in Dubai-no, no. In Vegas who said he was working for just that branch of Her Majesty's government."
Allan smirked, "and I thought what happened in Vegas staying in Vegas."
The Count smirked back, "oh, so rarely. So very rarely."
As the long-distance meeting came to an end, the gang's plans solidified, as well as the order in which they would tackle each situation, settling on working as a group, jumping from task to task, rather than scattering one here, one there.
It was the Count who left first, snapping the netbook closed once Robin and Marian had signed off, tucking it under his arm and melting away until he was indistinguishable from any among the tour groups again picking up in number at the conclusion of the noon hour.
In a sort of reverence each of Hood's men took a moment to reach over the cast-iron railing and take hold of the folded marble hands of their once-king's death statue, as if renewing their ongoing commitment to 'We are Robin Hood'.
It was Will Scarlet who came to it last, touching the cold stone before he pulled something from his shirt pocket that DJaq had given him before he had left her and the children in Wales.
It was in the ancient script of her people, but he had lived with her long enough now to read it for himself-even had he not already had the passage committed to heart: "For every man, there is a purpose which he sets up in his life. Let yours be the doing of all good deeds."
He placed the scrap there, as though within the grasp of Richard's clutching fingers. He knew the paper would not endure until their next meeting here. He knew that some actions (like this) were simply ephemeral. And he knew that others, those deeds that Robin Hood's men sought continually to be about, those would outlast them all.
...the end...
A/N: Now, this is the FINAL in the "We Are 2011" series, the 1->6 stories that have a clear beginning, middle, and conclusion (as this was).
HOWEVER, happenings in the "We Are 2011" universe continue in several more stories, starting with "Loose Ends" a brief glimpse back to what Allan was up to just prior to this story ("Why We Fought").