A|N Based on two prompts from two delightful ladies, emily31594 and narcolepticbadger (loveexpelrevolt on tumblr). Kitchens came first (included at the end for reference), and then I decided to write it a prequel, so, here. Enjoy!
Hazard
It appears, much to Little John's delight, that Granny Lucas has quite outdone herself this morning.
He surveys his options, then carefully heaps his plate with buttered toast, thick slabs of roast ham, potato hash topped with a green onion garnish and a generous dollop of fresh sour cream. His other hand cradles a gravy boat fit to serve twenty, though he's absolutely no intention of sharing its contents.
He's just settling onto his bench—a tighter squeeze each day, but no matter—and searching for the nearest coffee carafe when he's distracted by the relative hush that's fallen over the banquet hall, as it tends to do whenever the Queen has made her sweeping entrance.
John dares not roll his eyes in so blatant a sign of disdain, so he trains them instead on a particularly crispy corner of toast, munching away with exceptional focus whilst sparing not a glance for the Queen as she stalks her way to the buffet table.
The clinking of cups soon resumes, but there's a curious undertone to the chatter that accompanies it now, drawing John's gaze reluctantly upward.
He squints at the Queen's backside as she ignores the meat and potatoes (excellent; more for him, then) and picks daintily at the fruit adorning the table's far end. Nothing of her appearance strikes him as terribly out of the ordinary—she looks her usual, murderous self, as untrustworthy as ever in his opinion.
Not that anyone ever thinks to ask it.
Upon second glimpse, John supposes she generally does wear a great deal more black than she is currently, dressed in neutral tones and a rich burgundy riding jacket. He thinks perhaps there's also something different about how she's done her hair; it's still rather fancily arranged, but plaited over one shoulder instead of twisted high on her head, and looking thoroughly windswept from her morning horseback ride.
And his hash is growing regrettably colder the longer he contemplates this, so in the interest of both himself and his breakfast, he abandons any further thought on matters that don't concern him in the slightest.
He beams when a familiar, vastly more welcome head of hair bobbles into view and comes to hover, elbow-level, by the table. Roland's curls are positively riotous, pointing every which way they possibly can, always unrulier in these early hours before the day has endeavored to tame them.
"Little tyke," chuckles John, closing a large fist around the boy's collar and hauling him onto the bench beside him.
"I'm not lil'," chimes Roland the instant he's comfortably seated, "you are!"
"He didn't hear it from me," laughs his father as he approaches from the other side, and John's nod of greeting earns him a hearty slap on the shoulder. "Please tell me you saved some of that for the rest of us."
"There's plenty more where all this came from," John defends, while Roland poaches from his plate and grins through a mouthful of potato.
Tutting gently, Robin snags the topmost two mugs from a nearby stack and hands one to John. It smells faintly of dishwater, and then, thankfully, of coffee, as Robin obliges to fill his first.
John grunts his thanks and gestures toward Granny as the woman bustles into the banquet hall, balancing two trays of thinly cut cheeses, bottled fruit jams and—hang on, are those biscuits? "See, there's enough to go around and still have room for seconds." Possibly even thirds, if all goes well.
But Robin no longer seems to be listening.
John eyes him askance, finding him frozen mid-pour and a touch loose at the jaw. He follows the path of Robin's dumbfounded gaping, then swivels back around in horror the moment his gaze falls on the Queen. She's seated herself beside the Charmings at the front of the hall now, regarding her breakfast in much the same way she might her royal subjects, with a haughty, pinched look.
Surely he'd been mistaken. Surely Robin's attention must have gotten caught elsewhere. Why would he…?
John peers cautiously up at his friend again, who appears very much as though he's been struck over the head with something hard enough to daze him. "Gods alive, Robin," he starts, unsure of exactly how concerned he ought to be, "what's the matter with—"
His arm gives a sudden, violent jerk, as something hot—bloody hell, that's hot—scalds his skin through his shirtsleeve. Robin comes to at the sound of John's impressive yelp, and then he's muttering apologies and tossing napkins about to soak up the spilt coffee from his overflowing mug.
John waves off his friend's sorrys and hasty attempts to clear away the mess, distinctly aware that even the Queen has deigned to acknowledge the racket they've made. She's watching them—watching Robin—just a touch too curiously for John's comfort, and he's struck with a sense of foreboding, akin to witnessing a predator consider her prey.
Robin, meanwhile, flushed redder than John's burned-sore arm now, pours him a clean replacement cup and takes a seat with his back firmly facing the Queen, entirely oblivious or perhaps all too aware of her scrutiny.
Seizing his moment, Roland helps himself to John's entire plate, gleefully cramming whole pieces of ham into his mouth while the grown men at the table privately nurse their respective wounds.
Under the pretense of sipping his coffee—he's quite lost his taste for it at the moment—John peeks over the ceramic rim, spying the royal table through an aromatic fog. The Queen has gone back to glaring quietly at her breakfast, but with an air of uncertainty now, as though her modest serving of sliced cantaloupe has somehow become more complicated than she'd bargained for.
Robin, meanwhile, clears his throat needlessly, smiling his gratitude when Roland thoughtfully offers him a half-bitten crescent of toast; but he soon falls back into distracted silence, mistaking John's gravy boat for a bowl of cream several times before appearing to give up on his coffee altogether.
John might have sighed, if the sound of it weren't guaranteed to deafen them all.
Well this has been a rather unfortunate turn of events.
§
It only gets worse from there.
Normally, John would describe himself as the decently selfless, compassionate sort—it's hard to survive otherwise, in this life of thieving that serves strangers more than it does their own kind—but by the end of the week, he's certain Robin is hopeless, and finds himself running low on reasons to sympathize.
He's limping his way to the forest with an armful of target boards, mulling on these matters he's been forced to make his business and cursing all the while. The swelling in his ankle has not much improved since Robin had clumsily trod on it the previous afternoon, when the Queen breezed into their council meeting a half hour late and uncharacteristically apologetic for it.
In point of fact, everything about her had been near-unrecognizable, from the relatively light—one might venture to call demure—simplicity of her gown, to the hair tousled loose down her back, without any hideous headpieces to pin it severely in place.
The Queen had seemed even dare he say almost pleasant, directing a polite smile at John's general direction in lieu of her usual snide remarks about the expanding size of his waistline.
She didn't have him fooled in the slightest, but Robin, his useless idiot friend Robin, had looked at her as though he'd never laid eyes on a woman before, much less one so blatantly and shamelessly evil (it's only a part of her bloody name, after all).
John strongly suspects if she'd asked the man to jump, she need only have specified how far.
And, of course, John's foot would have been the thing to stand in the way.
"Idiot," he mutters aloud this time as he hobbles onward, feeling little by way of fondness for Robin at the moment. The sun does John no favors either, bearing brightly down from a cloudless sky, and his injured ankle adds an extra weight to his step that might have otherwise spared him a few seconds from the heat.
But as his luck would have it these days, he's sweating buckets by the time he makes it into the shade, huffing through each breath and feeling rather cross.
His mood sours further when he sees the Queen has inexplicably joined them for target practice, waiting with a patience that sits oddly on her rigid shoulders while Snow White strings a bow and hands it to her for a test shot. As if the woman needs more weapons at her disposal.
Roland scampers in front of her then, wielding his own miniature bow and arrow. The Queen, pausing, swoops down to level him with a stern gaze, but it cracks and spills into a warm smile as he chatters animatedly at her. He then steps obediently to the side, and her exaggerated wink sends him into a fit of hysterics.
She's gone and bewitched them all, thinks John, too resigned to even scowl properly as he lumbers over to the treeline and begins hammering targets into the bark. He gives one a final prod before backing hurriedly away as the Queen takes aim and aligns a narrowed gaze with its bullseye.
John is wondering how secure he feels turning his back and continuing on with the rest of the targets (surely Snow White would protest if she felt his safety in question?), when something rustles the foliage a few paces ahead of him, sending skittish sparrows into flight.
"Oh!" says the Queen suddenly, startled off course, and her arrow catches flame mid-air, hurtling heat past John's forehead on its way to ignite a nearby log yards away from her target.
He pivots around just in time to see a glint of something knowing in Snow White's features as she too turns to regard the cloud of purple, obscuring the spot where the Queen had just stood.
What on earth—
Robin steps from out of the trees and into John's corner view then, bare from the waist up, tunic slung over one shoulder. His hair is sopping, skin still damp from bathing in some stream close by, and gods help them all but it seems the Queen is just as prone to foolishness as any.
John is standing there, speechless, thoughts tripping over this new revelation, when he vaguely registers the smell of something burning. He hastens to stamp out the log, realizing too late his bad foot is not up for such an activity.
Robin looks at him curiously while he cradles his ankle and mutters profanities.
"John," says his friend then, "I think your eyebrow's caught fire."
§
John happens upon the idea later that evening while seeking solace in the kitchens, picking morosely at some leftover meat pie and resting his foot in a frigid water basin until the feeling's all but seeped out of it.
Granny had wordlessly tossed him a wet rag for his face as well, though it burned more from mortification than any true sensation of pain at this point, and he'd been grateful when she refused to comment despite the undoubtedly ludicrous appearance of his half-singed brow.
She's not so pitying toward Roland, whom she's just caught scuttling about her cupboards in search of a snack before bedtime. She now tasks herself with disciplining him on the proper way that things are earned, graciously offering him something sweet in exchange for his help preparing the next day's course of meals.
Roland is bobbing his head in a heartbeat, clearly under the impression he's struck the better end of the bargain.
Granny breaks out a rusty smile for his benefit then, sitting the boy on a stool within easy reach of her workspace. Her hands are patient, time-calloused, guiding his to disassemble a large bowl of biscuit dough into small, irregular lumps, carefully lined onto trays to plump up for the ovens first thing come morning.
John finishes off the casserole Granny had tersely shoved to his corner of the table and watches with keen interest as they move on to making what looks to be a dessert sandwich of sorts—something fluffy white and sugar-spun, scorched to a caramelized outer crust and jammed between two honey-glazed crackers.
"Chocolate is much harder to come by here," sighs Granny suddenly, seemingly apropos of nothing, and John, for the first time, finds himself intrigued by this other world of theirs, that had so recently shunned them back to this one. He'd once had the great fortune of robbing a nobleman with exemplary taste in both artwork and culinary confections, and the truffles he'd sampled while dismantling picture frames had been nothing short of divine.
"What's choc'late?" wonders Roland, licking the stickiness from his fingers while Granny's back is turned to gather another handful of fluff-speared sticks from the fire pits.
"Something that would make these taste even better," she informs him, jerking her chin to their small pile of sandwiches.
Roland frowns, dimples hollowing in deep contemplation, as though trying to imagine what could possibly exist to make it so. "Where's it?" he wants to know, evidently willing to keep an open mind.
"Oh," dismisses Granny, "there aren't cocoa beans to be found for miles from here."
Seeing the boy's face flatten in devastation, John is quick to reassure him, "the Queen will know exactly where to find some"—Roland brightens considerably at that, hope realigning his smile—"and she won't rest till you've had that first bite."
It's an ambitious claim to make, preposterous even, but John discovers, to his surprise, that not a word of it feels the slightest bit false on his tongue.
§
And it's no surprise at all, really, when a simple suggestion to Robin, casually voiced over biscuits and tea the following morning for a nearby Queen to overhear, soon escalates into a rather hostile standoff.
The banquet hall instantly empties of half its occupants, but John stirs another sugar cube into his tea and tips it down in a leisurely gulp, swallowing with it the satisfied grin that would easily lose him his last good eyebrow, should the Queen happen to notice.
But she's quite preoccupied at the moment, glowering, "I'm the one who knows where the chocolate is," while Robin calmly refuses to budge on the matter, insisting she'll not be making this journey alone.
"My accompanying you was not a request, milady," he tells her firmly, and for one disappointing second John is convinced the Queen will refuse him, adamant as she is that their debts have already been paid in full.
"And what explanation will I owe my son if you came to any harm that I might have prevented?" Robin inquires, polite but for the bold quirk of his brow, and it seems to gall the Queen into a troubled silence.
"I believe that settles it then," Robin declares, sounding far too pleased with himself, though she looks more disagreeable than ever. John resists the urge not to cuff him over the head for pushing his luck with the sort of woman who sets fire to things that dare defy her.
But then, John supposes, the Queen has always been oddly permissive when it comes to the ways of the Hood men. There's a lightening in her gaze even now as Robin turns to inform his boy of the good news, and John promptly busies himself with refilling his tea cup—it wouldn't do, he thinks, to catch her smiling.
They linger past the highest point of the sun overhead before setting a course through the wood—a shortcut to the main roads, Robin had claimed, and the Queen, though she scowled and scowled, had not endeavored to dispute him.
Instead, she marches stubbornly ahead, tossing glares over her shoulder and looking perfectly exasperated when Robin straggles contentedly behind, making no conceivable effort to outpace or even match her strides.
John bounces an overexcited Roland in his arms and waves merrily from the courtyard as they depart, a smile crinkling his beard now that he's no need to hide it.
The Queen stumbles once when the hill dips unexpectedly, and Robin's steadying arm on her back makes solid contact for several seconds before she's shoving him off, which John considers to be no small triumph. The sounds of their squabbling linger behind them, carried across on a sultry summer wind—she reminding him to stay out of her way, he unable to make such promises—until their shadows have merged with the treeline.
"That went well, I think," John tells Roland, who claps his joy and immediately begs another trip to the kitchens.
John obliges, whistling a jaunty tune as they go investigate what Granny has in store for tomorrow's menu.
He's optimistic that Robin and the Queen—with nothing but starlight, the smell of forest and the brunt of each other's gaze for company—will have had no choice but to sort out their business by the time they return. And then perhaps these two smitten dimwits, who've posed a most unwelcome hazard to his health, can finally leave him be a while.
Though he thinks a bit of chocolate ought to do nicely as settlement for his troubles.
§
John's neck gives an unpleasant twinge as he leans delicately over the breakfast buffet, browsing through a liberal selection of cured meats, fried potatoes and oatmeal toppings before working his way toward the sweets at the end.
He'd wound up dozing off the previous night in a rather cramped armchair, stationed by the fireplace nearest the front doors. Not that he'd intended to wait up for Robin and the Queen—wouldn't that have been silly—but he thinks they must have sought reentrance elsewhere, for he'd hardly stirred a limb until morning lightened the hall and dragged him rudely from sleep.
Still, his mild bit of discomfort proves entirely worthwhile.
He reaches the table corner and rearranges his plate, potatoes piled high to make room for a handful of dessert sandwiches that are warm to the touch at their centers. Fine slivers of the darkest chocolate lie nestled between the layers of fluff and cracker, molten and deliciously bittersweet to the taste.
John scarfs down three before he's even made it back to his table, where he'd deposited a fairly ravenous four-year-old who's now peering eagerly at his ration of the treasure.
Neither Robin nor the Queen resurfaces until midway through the meal. She's the first to arrive, without her customary spectacle, bypassing the center aisle and slinking instead along the wall of tapestries least touched by the filtering sunlight.
John has grown used to seeing her so meticulously put together, from her coifs to her corsets to her sour-looking facial expressions, so it takes a moment to adjust to the sight before him now. This particular morning has found her almost soft at the edges, forming a secretive half-smile as she fiddles absentmindedly with a lock of hair that's come unraveled.
She's also in what appears to be yesterday's clothing.
"Robin, you old dog," John mutters under his breath, undecided as to whether he ought to goad or congratulate his friend when he gets there.
The Queen eventually resumes her usual place at the front of the hall, and looks convincingly ornery when Charming leans winningly onto an elbow to engage her in conversation. But the moment he excuses himself for seconds, she's back to toying with the hair behind her ear and biting a lip before it turns on her again.
John is cleaning the chocolate-coated cracker crumbs from Roland's grinning face when Robin makes his appearance, curiously timed an exact five minutes following the Queen's.
"Morning," greets Robin, sounding thoroughly distracted, and John doesn't have to look to know where his thoughts have already drifted.
Still, it's too tempting not to at least side-eye him a little; he takes note of Robin's general dishevelment, detecting a smear of chocolate on his tunic collar—which is now slightly crooked and upturned on one side—while Robin briefly presses his smile into Roland's hair, as though to deflect any suspicion as to why he might be in such a favorable mood.
"I see you're enjoying the spoils of our adventure," he comments affectionately to his boy while swiping a thumb across the corner of Roland's mouth, which has re-accumulated another dusting of crumbs.
"Did you make these together, then?" John asks conversationally, raising a sandwich as though to toast him for it. "These…" he trails off, trying to recall the odd name Granny had given them.
Robin chuckles in some obscure form of an answer, reaching over John's shoulder for an empty mug, gaze wandering off again in the direction of the royal table.
John hides his smirk between drags of coffee and tries not to look as smug as he feels.
He rotates his ankle beneath the table; it's significantly less sore already, and he fancies the notion of going for a jog after breakfast, followed by a nice refreshing soak and a clean white bandage change. Perhaps he'll even be so bold as to ask the Queen—she is looking much more approachable today than most—about any magical remedies that might help facilitate the return of his eyebrow.
A spectacular clank disrupts his cheerful ruminating as the mug slips from Robin's hand and lands squarely onto John's plate.
Wincing through an eyeful of oatmeal, John brushes flakes of potato from his beard and sighs, feeling defeated.
So much for that, then.
Kitchens
It's still an adjustment, the feel of plush feather beds in place of the pine needles he's used to, and he's up before the sun, with a low ache in his back and a grumble in his belly that denies him the hope of returning to sleep.
The rest of the castle has yet to wake for the day, it seems, as he shuffles bleary-eyed past the darkened banquet hall—with nary a sound nor the promising smell of an early breakfast within—and heads instead for the pantry by the kitchens, hoping to scrounge up any of last night's leftovers Granny might have stowed there.
A sudden, vigorous thudding of wood against floor interrupts him mid-snack, one hand poised around a turkey leg and the other stuffing his mouth with a semi-stale biscuit; to his dismay, he realizes he's not the only one up after all, when he hears a masculine grunt on the other side of the wall, underscored by a husky, gravel-throated cry of "Mmmm—Robin—"
Little John's eyebrows shoot to the ceiling, while the turkey leg drops to the floor with a thud, and then he's moving with a speed inconceivable for his size, darting for the doorway and making himself scarce to their moaning.
He's famished and feeling rather vexed about it by the time breakfast is finally served, and he's helping himself to an extra serving of fresh-baked biscuits, thinking it's been justly earned, when the Queen saunters into the hall; John carefully avoids her withering stare as she passes, but then he catches sight of the flour generously dusting her backside and he finds he doesn't have much of an appetite for biscuits anymore.