Chapter Text
Twelve-year-old Robert had always known that he had spent the entirety of his life in the lap of luxury. His father had tried to teach him that theirs was a privileged family, a family meant to rule over all of Sherwood Forest. And Robert supposed that he had a point. After all, citizens bowed to his father and younger siblings (and to him, though he liked to pretend otherwise).
But Robert preferred to see the world the way his mother had. She had always told him, “Robin, you mustn’t allow your position in our community to make you think that you are better than everyone else. We all make mistakes. No person, no matter what their circumstances, is above another, for we are all human. Therefore, you must be truthful, righteous, and good in all you do, no matter what the cost.”
And Robert had always agreed with her wholeheartedly, the child’s eyes seeing his mother as nothing short of an angel. He had always loved how she called him Robin, too. It was a sign of her love for him, and he never tired of hearing it, despite his father’s disapproval. He may be Lord Locksley’s eldest son, but he knew that he was a disappointment to him. He had only ever seen his life and compared it to the lives of those around him, and seen the inequality of it all. Sweet Daisy Kluck, with her family’s warm kitchen. Gentle and generous Friar Tuck, who was always helping the townspeople around him. And even Marian, who was his best friend and had been since he had started sneaking into the village, was someone who constantly made the world better, even though she was just a girl like himself.
He loved his visits to the village and had hoped that one day he would get to visit it as much as he wanted. But his father somehow knew about his excursions and had discovered them despite Robert’s best efforts to keep them a secret. So as punishment, his father (also named Robert, why they shared a name the younger of the two would never understand) ordered that he be given more coursework and more responsibilities within Sherwood whenever possible. So instead of visiting his friends, Robin found himself studying charts and maps. Trade routes, facts, and figures had replaced his bedtime stories, and he wished fervently that his mother, who had died a few years before, was still alive. Perhaps she would have been able to curb his father’s controlling tendencies. His younger brothers, Ronald, Rupert, and Ryan, were certainly no help.
Take Ronald and Ryan, for example. One day, Robert discovered them playing with a slingshot. Ronald was trying to teach Ryan how to use the slingshot on an unsuspecting servant before Robert snatched the slingshot from the innocent Ryan’s hands.
“Why are you teaching him to do that?” he scolded the elder of the two. “You should know better.”
He immediately regretted his last statement. With their father’s wicked tendencies, it was unlikely that either of his brothers would have adopted any honorable habits. Being cruel was what the elder Robert Locksley did best, a permanent state of mind that consumed him. Even around his sons, he was nothing but militaristic, never showing them any affection. If it wasn’t for the love of their mother, Robert knew that his character would have turned as dark as his father’s long ago.
“What?” Ronald asked. “Father does things like this all the time. And besides, you may be older, but you’re not the boss of us.”
Knowing that he was right even if he was reluctant to admit it, Robert redoubled his efforts to mold his brothers into the men their mother would have wanted them to be. Ronald seemed impervious to his efforts and dragged Ryan under with him. But Rupert listened eagerly to Robert’s tales of men who were heroic for all the right reasons- men who lived as their mother did, with honor.
But his efforts weren’t enough to erase his father’s cruelty or his influence on the younger Robert’s brothers. One day, he had had enough. His father had tried to tell him to order one of the palace guards to cut off someone’s hand for stealing a loaf of bread from the vendor. Robert hated having to endure the woman’s pleas for mercy, claiming that the food was for her three children, not for herself. He believed her- after all, her cries for help were too genuine not to be taken seriously. But his father, on the other hand, took it upon himself to order the guard to sever the woman’s hand.
It was the final straw for young Robert. After the traumatizing ordeal, he ran through the dark hallways of his family’s manor until he finally escaped into the forest surrounding his home, determined to find the waterfall that lay within its depths. What he would do once he was there, he wasn’t certain, but he knew that he needed an escape. Something about his life had to change, and he didn’t know exactly what. He was hopeful that the rushing water crashing down onto the rocks below would clear his head and allow him to come up with a plan. His father’s cruelty knew no bounds, particularly without his mother there to keep him in check. Something had to be done, or the people would suffer.
As he was standing at the edge of a cliff that looked down to where the waterfall filtered into the river below, a voice behind him said, “What do you think you’re doing?”
Robert spun around, slipping and just managing to catch himself on the trunk of a tree before he fell into the waters below. “Wh-what? Who are you?”
The woman standing before him- or he supposed she was a fairy, given that she was small, glowing, and had wings which were helping her stay at his eye level- smirked. “You think I don’t know what you were planning?”
Robert shrugged. “I wasn’t planning anything.”
The look she gave him was more stern than he had thought to give her credit for. As a fairy, his automatic impression of her was that she was nothing but good-natured. However, it seemed that this fairy was more free-spirited than the fairies that he had heard about growing up. “Right. And I’m a dwarf. My name’s Tinkerbell, and I’m here to help.”
Robert couldn’t help laughing at that. "I’m Robert, and I wasn't! I just…" his voice trailed off, at a loss for words to describe his life, the crushing weight of being Robert Locksley's son. The expectations, the cruelty, the loneliness- how could he express the crushing weight of all of that in a simple sentence?
"Felt like you had the weight of the world on your shoulders?" she finished, nothing but sympathy and pity in her eyes.
"Yes," Robert whispered,
She smiled. "What do you say we find some motivation for you to live differently than your father does?"
Robert hesitated for a moment. Stand up to his father? It seemed impossible, a dream that was far too sweet to be true. No one said or did anything against his father, so much so that he could barely remember a time when his mother had done exactly that. But still, he had to ask: "How?"
"Let me show you," she told him, beckoning him closer.
When Robert stepped up to her, a green dust floated down around him. He found himself lifting off the ground and he asked tremulously, “Wh-what’s going on?”
“I’m taking you to her, of course!” the fairy exclaimed.
“Her?” he asked, confusion written all over his face.
The fairy smiled. “There’s a girl your age that you’re destined to be with one day. I thought that seeing her now, maybe even meeting her, would help you be better than those around you. But you should know, too, that you have the purest heart of anyone I’ve ever met. While I’m helping you now, I suspect that you would do just fine all on your own.”
Robert sighed. “All right. Where are we going?”
The fairy cast her arm out as if she was throwing a ball, and the same green dust that had covered them shot out across the sky, leaving a trail that Robert assumed they would follow.
His assumption proved to be correct when Tinkerbell led him down the path. It led them over Sherwood Forest into what Robin knew to be the Enchanted Forest. His heart sank. How would he be able to see this girl in the future if they lived so far apart? Did he even want to see her at all?
His musings continued as their path led them to a garden that Robert could see was behind a castle. To their right were stables. Hidden among the trees, he watched a girl with dark curls crying on a bench in the garden, her back to them.
Her sobs made his heart clench, compassion that he had inherited from his mother consuming him. What had happened to her? He longed to go to her and hold her. Maybe they could figure out how to solve the problems in their lives together.
He had taken a step toward her when a sudden call of “Get in here! There is much that needs to be done before tonight!” had the girl drying her tears with the back of her hand, then standing and walking toward the building past the garden, which Robert assumed was where she lived. As she walked away, Robert saw a birthmark shaped like a feather on her left arm.
When she was gone, Tinkerbell faced him. “So, think you can live a better life now?”
Robert nodded, his eyes bright with his determination. He didn’t know why- he had never been interested in girls before, and he hadn’t interacted with this one- but something about her called out to him. He knew he had to find her again, and when he did, be a better man than he was now. “But how do I do that?”
Tinkerbell grinned. “I know you’ll find a way. Maybe your friends in the village can help. But first, I think you need a name that reflects the new person you’ll be.”
He thought for a minute, then snapped his fingers. “I’ve got it! From now on, call me Robin.”
Her knowing smile made him wonder if she knew something he didn’t. “I like it. Robin it is.”
So while he was Robert to his family, from that day on, those he helped in the village knew him as Robin. He decided that one day he would get a tattoo of a lion on the inside of his wrist, as a reminder to live with courage and righteousness.
And the girl he had seen? He searched high and low for a long time after Tinkerbell led him to her, hoping that she would one day come to Sherwood Forest, but he could never find her.