Bristol, England

3 months later

Amon had always been a light sleeper. Having to always be in a state of alert, his unconscious mind seemed to scan for noise and movement even in its sleep. The soft shuffling sounds coming from within the apartment did not go unnoticed.

He sat up in bed, reaching for the gun in his night table drawer with practised stealth, throwing a quick glance at the alarm clock almost as an afterthought.

3: 17 a.m.

He opened the door a crack, just enough to peer out into the darkened hallway, eyes immediately scanning the empty space.

Robin's bedroom door was open across from his, her bed empty and perfectly made.

His pulse quickened, a feeling of unease growing in his chest.

Exiting his room, he noticed the soft light coming from the living room, shifting slightly to produce shadows on the hallway floor.

Quickening his step, finger firmly placed on the trigger of his gun, Amon rounded the corner into the living room to find that the source of the light was the fireplace burning with a small flame. Across from it was Robin, curled up in an aged recliner chair, legs pressed tightly against her chest, staring out the window at the swaying branches of trees in the garden of their small rented apartment.

"Robin?" he called. Letting out the breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding in, he lowered his gun and approached her slowly. The relief he'd felt when he saw her there unharmed vanished seconds later when she turned to face him and he saw her dazed expression and the fresh tears staining her cheeks.

"Amon. I didn't mean to wake you." she said apologetically, a weak smile hanging from her lips. The look in her eyes was glazed and distant, a contrast to the usual warmth present there.

"What are you doing up?" he asked, setting his gun down on a coffee table as he continued to make his way towards her, a sudden feeling of dread rooting itself firmly in his gut.

She turned her face back to the window, away from him, and simply stared. Amon was beginning to think she wasn't going to answer him when she finally spoke again. "I couldn't sleep," she murmured softly, almost as if she was talking to herself.

"Why not?" his slow advance finally led him to her, and he stood somewhat menacingly in front of her, trying to turn her attention back to him as she continued to stare out the window into the night. There were was no moon out tonight, and the town's few and far between lamp posts did little to illuminate the outside world.

"I had a bad dream" she whispered again, even softer than before, so that Amon had to strain to hear her voice.

Amon was at a loss, taken aback by her strange behavior. She seemed hypnotized by whatever it was she was looking at, though there was nothing to be seen outside. The tears on her cheeks were beginning to dry away, as if she'd forgotten what it was that had prompted them, or as if she'd never noticed she' been crying at all.

Amon's usual reaction to Robin being up in the odd hours would have been to immediately send her back to bed, though it did not happen very often. In the three months they'd spent travelling together, he had only awakened to her being up during the night in two occasions. If she left her bed during the night she was always quiet and careful not to wake him, knowing that her making any noise in the middle of the night would immediately awaken the trained soldier in him, and that once alert, his mind would most likely not be going back to sleep. Both times she had quickly apologized for waking him and gone back to her room as soon as she had had the midnight snack that had led her from her bed. She had seemed almost embarrassed at being caught. The girl sitting in front of him now seemed barely aware of his presence.

"What were you dreaming about?" he asked as he leaned back against the window, trying to get a better view of her face from the direction she was facing.

She didn't answer him. He wondered if she'd heard him at all. The only sound in the small living room was the gentle pop and crackle of the single burning log in the fire place.

"Do you remember that doctor we hunted?" she asked suddenly, firmly, surprising Amon with the change in her tone and the out-of-nowhere question.

"He was a nice man," she said, not waiting for Amon to reply to her question, "he was very nice to me when I went to see him for my cold." Amon remembered Robin telling him that he'd met that witch only days before, remembered the inner-conflict her eyes had expressed at the time. Why would she bring him up now?

"He didn't even know he was a witch," Robin continued, all the while staring past Amon to a spot outside the window. Her voice softened slightly when she spoke next, prompted by her memories of their encounter. "When he saw me use my craft, he asked me if there were others like us out there. People with powers who shouldn't have been. He didn't seem to understand his own craft very well. All he knew was that he was able to give life by taking it from others. He said the people he'd killed didn't deserve to live...and I told him that wasn't his choice to make." The last words were spoken softly, sadly.

Amon cocked his head towards her, trying to face her directly by standing between the window and herself. He didn't know what to say to her, and realized that she most likely didn't expect him to answer. She was talking more to herself than to him, recollecting a time when she'd held the approval of SOLOMON and the Church to punish others for their sins.

His efforts to discern the expression on her face were stopped when she turned to look directly at him. Her face was still distant and withdrawn, and she seemed not to notice or care about the bewildered expression in Amon's.

"Do you believe in destiny?" she asked him, but once again didn't seem to be looking for an answer. Her eyes moved to some unspecified spot on the floor behind Amon. "He asked me...if I was going to fulfill my destiny too..." The tears brimmed in her eyes, dancing momentarily with the reflection of the fireplace, finally slipping past long lashes and rolling quietly, unnoticed, down her cheeks.

As she trailed off, Amon moved towards her, reaching out an uncertain arm to place on her shoulders, whether to comfort her or to snap her out of whatever dream she was having while awake, he wasn't sure, but he couldn't keep still as Robin seemed to be torn apart by her memories.

Before his arm could reach her, she turned once more towards the window, her eyes unseeing anything but her memories.

"I told him it wasn't his choice to make...but I was doing it too, wasn't I?" her voice became even softer. "I was choosing who deserved to live and who didn't. Except that my decision was solely based on whether I thought them to be a witch or not," she said, her brow furrowing to finally lend her face some outward sign of emotion.

"You didn't kill them," Amon said, finally reaching his hand out to hold her shoulder, prompting Robin to turn haunted eyes back to look at him.

'No...no, I didn't," she whispered, and her eyes seemed a little more focused now, a little more awake. "I just left them there to suffer."