Title: Persistence Of Memory
Author: Lady_T_220
Rating: NC-17
Total Word Count: ~33,000
Fandom: Robin Hood 2006
Pairing: Guy/Marian
Disclaimer: Just playing in the folklore/Beeb/TigerAspect sandbox.
Summary: She exists to remind him of a hundred thousand things.
Notes: Set at the end of S2. If you could change just one thing, how would things have worked out differently?
What if The Sheriff had never taken Marian into the desert to die with Robin? What if she'd never been present for that final fight?



Persistence Of Memory

Prologue

Sometimes, she reminds him of Nottingham Castle. She's stone-cold, walls built to the sky, bristled with arrows that are ready to spring on anyone foolish enough to try and breach her exterior.
There are days when he doesn't think he'll ever work out what's on the other side of those walls. Her insides remain a mystery and he wonders whether her heart is just as hard as the stone or whether those walls are there because her heart is pink and vulnerable and already too bloodied.
He's almost afraid to find out. He's not even sure if his desperate need to discover what lies within is purely masochistic curiosity or whether it's something more.
The truth he doesn't really want to acknowledge is that it's always been something more. He just doesn't know how to cease her arrows long enough to make her believe it.

Sometimes she reminds him of being lost in Sherwood. Endlessly confusing, impossibly dangerous, the kind of place a man could lose his purse or his life with equal ease. She blinds him and slights his efforts and turns him around so many times that he knows the faster he runs the smaller she will make his circles.
He aches for the stillness and shade but she is duplicitous illusion, her affections a mirage that draws him deeper into the trees until he is swallowed whole and left helpless.
She tricks him into losing himself, isolating him. He forgets who he is, what he does. Sometimes he even forgets why it matters so much and why it's supposed to make him afraid.

Sometimes she reminds him of Loxley pond. She is gentle and calm, shimmering like blessed relief from midsummer heat.
Vaizey he knows is the sun, the axis around which they must all revolve, but her presence tempts him to drown himself in gentle depths just to cool the burning that runs through his veins.
He would sacrifice himself to her, immerse himself in all that she is if only he could reach. But he has feet of clay, baked hard into the summer-parched earth, and he can't help but fall short.

Sometimes she reminds him of birds, or wine or the peasants in the village. Sometimes it's blessed saints and shimmering miracles and sometimes she reminds him of the Greek myths he heard on his way to the Holy Land.
But mostly she reminds him of Lethe.

Because he knows that he reminds her of absolutely nothing at all.

Continued...