A/N: huge thanks to ladygalaxyj and black-throatedblue for looking over this!

woman (there's just the one)

Regina can't be bothered, at first, to keep track of just how many there are. She has her own business to mind (traps to manage, merry mouths to feed, scores to settle back in town), and whatever—or whomever—that thieving scoundrel does in his spare moments is, quite frankly, the least of her concerns.

As it turns out, it's not the sheer number of these exotic, slim-limbed creatures, parading steadily in and out his tent with every passing of dusk to twilight (always gone before the sun at daybreak), that finally captures her attention and holds it ruthlessly hostage.

It's not that each somehow happens to be even more impossibly gorgeous than the last, from mischievous, green-eyed porcelain redheads to alluring brunettes with olive-tanned skin and legs that simply go on, and on, and on.

It's not the utterly baffling knowledge that they've crawled from whatever hellpit is responsible for their existence to seek the esteemed company of an outlaw. Of all the fools with half a mind between two legs to come hither and peek up their skirts, apparently none boast the same appeal as the most wanted man in all the ten kingdoms.

Honestly. Robin Hood is not even that skilled of a thief.

Nor is he half so good-looking as their smug smiles and sultry prancing might suggest—he smirks far too often to be considered charming, and there's that stupid way his hair flops over his forehead, and how he's always smirking that smirk meant for her alone to find intolerable. Perhaps he has certain roguish qualities that some women consider positively irresistible, but Regina is hardly some women.

In fact, one might argue she's hardly woman at all, as far as everyone else is concerned.

It's exactly that which has her finally seeing green, when a particularly stunning beauty saunters her way through camp, rendering it entirely useless with a single saucy sway of her hips. Sheer pandemonium erupts in her wake, heads turning, tongues lolling, shoulders shoving and squabbles starting over which is most entitled to the best rear view as she slips inside their leader's tent. The very same tent where Regina has endured countless debriefings on heists gone wrong or jobs planned poorly, without so much as a discretionary wall between their place of work and where Robin likes to fuck his women.

Men.

All pigs.

All idiots.

And for all Regina's fierce determination to blend in as one of their own—trading out her silken things, painted lips and other such feminine fusses, for plain linens and a plainer face, and far more practical ways of spending her time (she's not even certain she still owns a hairbrush)—it seems she's been entirely too successful.

The men are now heatedly engaged in a rather crude discussion on the finer points of the woman's numerous assets. Regina grimaces openly, taking this as her cue to escape, but she's barely made it two steps to the woods before Will reels her back in, eager to have her weigh in on the matter.

It's not that she wants to be seen the same way, or talked of in such lewd terms that even the most indelicate of them has to fight back a blush; far from it. She imagines she'd never command the same respect from these buffoons if they're frequently reminded of the fact that she too has curves to rival the best of those they ogle. The thought of her carefully planned heists ending in disaster on account of their bumbling around—as they are wont to do whenever a real woman's nearby—gives her such a headache, she wonders why she doesn't just cut her losses now and go off on her own again. She'd managed to survive just fine long before Robin Hood coerced her under his wing.

Ugh. Robin Hood. As if she needed his help, or his charity. Truth be told, she ought to have refused him based on the arrogant manner alone in which he'd offered her a place amongst his Merry Men—as though he couldn't fathom a reason she might say no, when no fewer than twenty came instantly to mind (that smirk, for one, and the way his scrutiny makes her squirm; does he always have to stare at her so…relentlessly?).

But she'd been desperate at the time, had just narrowly escaped yet another ambush by the Queen's Guard, and only then by the aid of a well-placed arrow from the least expected of allies (and oh how he'd smirked and smirked as though there were no tomorrow, that day). A little extra cushioning between her and the next black knight couldn't hurt, she had reasoned, particularly when there was nothing little about any of them, despite what certain names might suggest.

So Regina had fallen into bad habits—bad, unbreakable, dependable habits, that she strongly suspects her men (for better or worse, they are just as good as hers now) would be significantly less merry to do without. She can't help that she's easily the most resourceful in a pinch, or that what she lacks in the strength and bulk of her companions, she more than surpasses in speed, swifter than the deer they hunt (though she's no good for what to do after, leaving the meticulous business of roasting and seasoning to those with more patience and pickier palates). She also boasts the gentlest touch when it comes to bandaging their wounds—a service that Robin himself has taken to abusing quite regularly, it seems, barging into her tent with more and more complicated-looking injuries each time, declaring she's the only one he trusts though she's certain he does it just to test the limits of her skills, and it galls her to no end.

Everything about him, in fact, never fails to drive her up the wall. Regularly. Whenever she sees him (more often than she'd like), and every damn time that he sees her (more often than he thinks she knows); she's come to recognize the feel of his gaze on her back, though she never turns to meet his eye, knowing the look she'll find there is one that makes no sense to her.

But this is the last straw, the way he cavorts with these women, none of whom ever seem to merit a return invitation and yet never fail to leave their camp unstirred or give Regina cause to fiddle with her own ratty, less-than-glamorous side-braid. She hates the sudden uncertainty, this conscientious decline into doubt no matter how briefly she indulges in it, but most of all, she hates him, for making her feel like less than herself.

Because she's a woman, goddamn it, and she won't have an oblivious bunch of idiot man-children, least of all the one who leads them, give her reason to forget it, that she too has quite the rack (wouldn't you say, Regina?), not to mention one hell of a lovely arse, and damn that sodding lucky bloke—

That's enough. "Sorry, Will," she cuts him off in the midst of his poetic tribute (to the finest specimen of the female form he ever did see). "I just remembered there's somewhere else I need to be."

Which is as far from this godsforsaken camp as the remaining sunlight can take her.

"Oh," says Will, "well, all right, then," sounding rather put out, but she's already several steps too far to know if he wears a surly expression to match.

Regina takes flight through the nearest entryway into the woods, fallen foliage crunching underfoot and dirt-packed stones unsettling where her boots race with her hammering heart, but they don't make it far. They're traitorous things, stumbling over jutting roots and slamming her, chest-first, into something very warm and very solid that encircles her instantly, bracing her fall.

She knows his scent before he's even spoken.

"Milady," and Robin's tone is endlessly amused, "have I caught you at a bad time?"

She rears back, just enough to shoot him the most baleful of glares, but no more than his arms have allowed. "What are you doing here?" she asks, meaning to cut down his smile, but it only tilts sideways as it spreads.

"Am I not allowed a leisurely stroll through my own forest?"

"Shouldn't you be back at camp?" she replies, sneering.

"I was headed that way," he answers affably, unaffected as ever by her belligerent tone. "In fact, I was hoping you would join me." He relinquishes half her waist to proffer two rabbits, cleanly slain, dangled in hand by the ears.

She stares, uncomprehending. "Join you for what?"

"For supper," he supplies, with a pointed look at his rabbits.

"With you," she states incredulously.

"That was the idea, yes."

Regina thinks she sees something like hope in the blues of his eyes, but it must be a trick of the dying daylight.

"And?" she presses, hands forming fists against his chest, prepared to box him in the chin if it comes down to that. Who does he think she is, his goddamn sidekick? She won't allow him to treat her this way, as his tagalong to the prelude of some raunchy affair. Does he honestly expect her to sit idly by and bear witness to him charming the skirts off another woman? What the hell is wrong with him?

"And…" Robin repeats, and the nerve of this man, to sound every bit as innocent as he looks, brow lined in confusion now, as if he couldn't possibly know he had previously committed his time elsewhere. As if there weren't some leggy redhead naked in his tent at this very moment, awaiting his return. As if one simply weren't enough for him. Is his heart so slippery a thing that it requires two hands to hold it, and for no longer than a night at a time?

Unbelievable.

"You can't be serious," she tells him, and this time, the aggression has him stepping back, palm sliding from her waist to drop at his side.

"I apologize," he frowns slightly, "I'm afraid I must have misread something."

"I'll say," agrees Regina nastily, and the silence that follows is oppressive, somehow leagues more uncomfortable now that it's stretched several feet between his eyes and hers.

His bafflement is plainly apparent, and it chips slowly away at her anger, until she feels each little chink caving into a deeper uncertainty. Had she been too quick to be too hard on him? If she allows him a moment to explain himself, maybe there would turn out to be a perfectly good reason why—

"Again, my sincerest apologies, milady," and her chance is gone along with that something-like-hope snuffed from his eyes, as he looks at her with nothing but the politest regret. "I can assure you I won't make the same mistake twice," he vows, with a perfectly cordial dip of his head, but it leaves her feeling oddly chastised, as though she's just been careless with what she never realized was hers to keep whole.

Simultaneously numb and acutely aware of parts of herself cracking open in places she can't name, she stares at him for many lengthy seconds before it occurs to her that each is waiting for the other to leave.

"See to it that you don't, then," she sniffs with a sharp sense of finality, before pivoting on her heel and stalking off in the direction she'd come, not wishing to give him the satisfaction of being the one followed back to camp.

Still, she finds herself dawdling, ears craning to locate the sound of footsteps surely just behind hers, but Robin must have taken some other, more expedient route back. She's alone in her trek, in the company of nothing but moonlight dashed upon rocks at her feet, and low-lying tree branches that whip unkindly at her cheeks when she brushes past them, unseeing.

By the time she returns, having skirted around the outmost perimeter to avoid any further opportunities for awkward run-ins or unpleasant conversation, the tent to the right of hers has already shaken several stakes loose to the exuberant and highly audible satisfaction of its two occupants.

Anger prickles hot at the backs of her eyes.

Regina storms inside her own tent, but it's a useless place to hide from her brewing shame and humiliation; no number of flimsy canvas partitions can block out the apparent ease with which he'd dismissed her rejection, nor the image of him thoroughly enjoying his dessert before dinner.

He's already made good on his promise to leave her alone, and yet she can't help but feel he's betrayed her, somehow.

She can barely stand there a second longer before a heady, masculine groan filters through the treacherous cracks in her tent, and she makes a blind grab for her nearest weapon, a small dagger by her pillow that's barely the length of her palm. Determined to lodge it into something soft and fleshy—preferably with whole realms to separate her from Robin, for the sake of his more vital body parts—she tosses her tent flap violently open, startling Will on the other side.

"Oy, Regina," he says, "have you seen—" but she waves him off with her dagger, and he gives her a wide berth, evidently not keen on getting in between her and whatever it is she's clearly decided to kill.

"Right then," he calls after her, "I'll just…look for 'im myself."

She makes it to the southern borders of camp without hearing another peep from him, but just as she's slipping through the trees, he yells, "be careful, would ya? It'll be me head if you come back without yours and Robin learns I was the last to see you leave."

Regina grits her teeth and marches on. "I'm not his pet," she growls as soon as she's put a considerable distance between her and his camp, "and I'm sure my head is the least of Robin's concerns right now." She charges forward with purpose, though she has little regard for where she is or where she's going, so long as she outruns him from her mind (no such luck yet). But her rage only festers the farther she walks, and walks, and walks, and it makes her careless, immune to the darkness ahead.

She's so lost to her inexplicable fury she hardly thinks anything of it, at first, when her inky black surroundings give way to the smallest of flickers, and through fissures of light she detects a smoky, crackling scent in the air that calls up a rumbly ache in her belly.

She barges fearlessly straight into a clearing, with a hearty-looking fire at its center, the periphery scattered with mossy fallen logs. On one such log sits a shadowed figure, hunched over the flame, and she's struck with a strange sense of familiarity though she can't quite make out his face, until blue eyes glance upward, green hood falling back, and—Robin?

He looks just as startled by her sudden appearance as she is by his.

"Oh!" is all she can manage to say, halting abruptly.

He seems to recover from his shock first.

"Have you decided to join me after all?" he teases, but there's a wariness in his gaze now, and Regina is no longer sure she can blame it on a trick of the light.

"I," she starts to say, but then she's unsure how to finish, so she shifts her eyes from his, pointedly glancing all over but back his way, with a cold sort of scrutiny, as though she'd returned rather reluctantly but intentionally so.

He goes on watching her all the while, hands loosely clasped together, smiling his bemusement, and suddenly she can't bear to look away any longer.

"You're not with her," she states then, blunt, and there's an agitation in her chest that only begs harder for relief the more he stays silent and guarded.

"How do you mean?" asks Robin, breaking the stare he'd caught her in as he reaches forward to rotate a spit on the fire. She glances down, distracted from his odd line of questioning, to see he'd neatly skinned and skewered one of the rabbits, its meat glazed and browning, juices dripping to sizzle enticingly below.

"I still have the other," he offers, gesturing for her to please, sit when she looks poised neither to fight nor flee. "I saved it, just in case."

She's thrown, from every angle. "For…me?" and she hates how small the words make her sound.

His grin falls sideways with a simple, one-armed shrug. "Who else?"

She honestly doesn't know anymore.

There's an unbearable lightness in the way he looks at her now, as she carefully side-steps the log he'd indicated across the flame and winds around to the one he's seated on instead. He dutifully scoots to his left when she roughly toes his boot, and she's certain he can't be comfortable perched on the edge as he is, but he doesn't utter a single complaint as she gingerly situates herself by his side. The space is still tight, far too narrow a fit for the curves in her hips, and his arm lifts accommodatingly, casually slinging across her back to grip the other end of the log. She wriggles until she's fully settled, shoulder nestled lock-and-key into his, thighs pressing, knees knocking gently together.

He switches the spit to his other hand, and they sit in silence for long moments while it spins and spins. She spots the second rabbit in a bed of leafy greens at his feet, still wrapped in its furs, a gift (hers); she briefly contemplates opening it up, remembering the dagger now relaxed in her grip, but when she shifts to do just that, he lays a hand atop hers, silently urging her to tuck it away in her boot, it's all right, I've got it (you).

She tells herself it's not a thing to get used to, least of all from him, this feeling of being cared for in such an offhand, everyday way, but as they catalogue each passing second with stolen glances instead of spoken words, she realizes she longs for something else to satisfy her hunger now.

"They come for John, you know," Robin mentions finally, gaze firmly focused on the fire before them.

She can't contain her surprise, starting around to find his profile blank, unreadable, though it's a closer view than she's ever had of him. Her eyes trace the warm, dimpled laughter lines etched into even the most somber of expressions, and she thinks, vaguely, that if he were to turn those bright blue eyes back on her, their noses would kiss.

"What?" she asks, dumbly.

"All those women I'm sure you've noticed," he says, and it's a funny thing, but whenever she had (peevishly, and often), the one person she'd failed to notice was him. "They're here for John."

"Little John?" she blurts out, as if there were any other kind he could possibly mean.

Robin bites back a smile too late, looking almost smug, as though he'd waited ages for just this moment to say, "I have it on good authority that there's hardly anything little about—"

"Enough," Regina interrupts hastily, "I don't want to hear it."

"Well," he reasons, "would you have believed me if I told you women simply enjoy being in his company?"

"No," she answers instantly, and predictably too if his sudden chuckling is any indication, the feel of them rumbling through her body at every point they touch.

"But I don't understand," and her confession tastes bittersweet in her mouth, all the more so when it sounds greener than she'd meant it to, "I saw them, going into your tent every—"

He does look at her this time, gaze soft yet cutting still somehow, as though he means to open her up with it just as she had planned to do the rabbit he'd caught her. She tries to lean away from him, but she's rooted to this log, it seems, trapped there between the depth of his scrutiny and the solid warmth of his arm at her back.

"My tent?" he wonders, mystified. "The one left of yours?" and oh, gods, what a complete idiot she's been.

Her lips part on words that she leaves unsaid before they dig her a deeper pit of mortification. But her silence seems to be all he needs, and his smile is so brilliant, so loose and wide, as though unpinned from something that had previously confined it to polite, placid lines, and she is the one who has made it so.

She answers with a smile of her own, but it's hesitant, not quite as free, and he ducks his out of sight so as not to overwhelm her with the force of its lack in restraint.

"I…may have misread something," she admits gruffly at last, much to his apparent delight and gently mocking echo of her previous retort.

"I'll say."

She digs an elbow into his side and can't resist a smirk at his displeased grunt.

"We always have our meetings there," she brings up in her own hapless defense, and he concedes her point with a shrug and another rascally sort of grin.

"Well, John's tent is bigger," he tells her, bumping their shoulders suggestively, and she's scowling before he's even finished, "for obvious reasons."

"Gross," she mutters, and the richness of his laughter has her feeling a touch lightheaded.

The rabbit has begun to brown into black, a faintly burnt smell twirling smoky tendrils into the air, but Robin looks more intent on awaiting her response than tending to their dinner. Regina reaches to relinquish his hold gone limp and negligent over the crisping branch, huffing her quiet exasperation when he doesn't budge save to tangle their fingers, forcing her hand to relax over his.

"Were you jealous?" he wonders curiously then.

"Of Little John?" she asks innocently, while she rotates the rabbit from belly to back.

"Of those women," he supplies, with a hint of amusement, as he watches her work with both their hands.

She attempts to call up her earlier rage, the way she'd grit her teeth until her head ached at every sign of their existence—the hints of fragrance that lingered where they'd frolicked about, the half-besotted dreamy looks they'd leave behind on the faces of drooling, full-grown men. How even Will, with a fair-skinned maiden of his own, blonder than the sunlight, would start fussing with his hair and suddenly stand a little straighter. How Regina would notice herself smoothing out her braid and tugging at the dirtied hem of her tunic, glowering while the men goggled and spoke crassly in her presence, thinking themselves safely within the company of their own.

But not him. Not Robin.

Robin, who's been too busy catching rabbits and nursing the wound of her rejection by the fire, to pay heed to the same cravings as his men, when he has something—someone—else on his mind. When there's an overabundance of other, flashier ladies to choose from, all more than available (though clearly lacking in standards), yet he can't seem to be bothered by it when his righthand man warms his bed with them all.

Robin, who always smirks when he knows she's looking, and never quite stops looking himself when he thinks she isn't any longer.

Regina finds that she can't think of a single thing to be jealous of, when she's the only woman in this world of his.

"No," she tells him honestly. "Not…not anymore." His bottom lip tugs between his teeth at that, another smile that can't be contained, and she wants to roll her eyes, but throws his question back instead, vaguely teasing, not quite accusatory. "Why? Are you jealous?"

"Of those women?" he hedges playfully, and she pointedly snaps around to face him, drawing his attention to her wholehearted glare.

"Of Little John," she says, her sour expression in counterpoint to the way he simply beams and beams at her, like he's the damn sun, though she'll not stand to have him burn for anyone else.

His voice drops along with his gaze, while he lifts their twined hands and grazes a kiss across her knuckles. "No," he says at last, and then he's looking her back in the eye, and all she sees is her reflection in his. "Not so long as you aren't one of those women."

(But there's just the one, and she is his.)