"Aching bones on sleepless bed They toss and turn and roll away From words unsaid" --TV on the Radio, "Don't Love You"

His head ached. It often did.

The watery light of the day shone down on the narrow streets as the taxi Amon and Robin rode in the back of poked along through traffic, both human and vehicular. The weather had abruptly taken a turn for the worse the last few days, and had been very foggy, cold, and damp. The weak sunlight that was trying its hardest to filter through the cloud-cover was the brightest light Amsterdam had seen in at least two days. The wind was still bitingly cold, and the air chilled, and he and Robin were dressed accordingly. His eyes flicked over to the girl on the other side of the backseat, briefly; she was engrossed with toying with the end of her scarf, staring out the window, wide-eyed. She hadn't even noticed that he'd looked at her.

She often didn't. Amon prided himself on being rather adept at watching people without their knowing it. His eyes slid back to the window on his side, watching the buildings and people pass by, the car bumping along the rough, narrow road. It wasn't very bright outside, but it seemed that way to Amon. For all his eyes were concerned, the sun might as well have been shining full force, not a cloud in the sky. The red sweater of a random pedestrian caused something behind his eyes, deep in his brain, to twinge a bit, and he closed his eyes briefly, rubbing at his temple with a hand. When he opened his eyes again, the outside world looked a bit dimmer, a bit foggier—the way it was supposed to look. An invisible weight upon his shoulders let him know that Robin was looking at him, and he turned and looked back, unflinchingly. As it often happened, she seemed shocked that he'd turned to look at her right then and turned down the intensity of her gaze.

"Yes?" he asked, expectantly. That she would look at him without a reason, simply to look at him, stirred thoughts in his head that did not need to be stirred. Therefore, he always made her have a reason by way of inquiry.

"Are...you alright?" Robin asked him, quietly. Keeping his face neutral, he nodded. Even if he wasn't, he still would have nodded.

Once she'd looked away, back out the window, Amon allowed his gaze to wander back to the strange, half-attentive, half-daydreaming position it'd been in before he felt her eyes upon him. He seemed to do that a lot, recently, and it frustrated him; allow his eyes to become unfocussed, unsharpened...vapid. It was as if, sometimes, he never fully awoke in the mornings when he rose from his bed—as if the dreams kept going, the hazy feeling of morning sticking with him throughout the whole day.

His head hurt, terribly. Instead of chasing the same old thoughts around and around until he was out of breath from it, Amon instead settled for gazing out the window, and letting the symphony of the moving parts of the car's engine blank out most of his hearing.

Funny that he could term a car's parts working together a symphony, nowadays.

What else was one supposed to call it when one could hear every single little part working; clinking or grinding, pumping or firing?

The cab pulled up in front of the building that contained the flat that Robin and he had most recently been occupying. As Robin exited the small, black, somewhat squat car, Amon eyed the driver's fare-screen and dug a bit more than the actual amount out of his billfold—a billfold now empty of mostly anything that made him a real person, save money and whatever ID he thought he'd need. After paying and tipping the driver, Amon exited the car himself to find Robin awaiting him on the sidewalk, her face already turning slightly pink in the nose and cheeks due to the cold wind. They looked at each other once, briefly; as if to say 'let's go inside', and then they both turned, heading up the stone steps into the building.

Once inside their quarters, Robin trotted off towards her own room, unwinding her scarf from around her thin neck as she went, humming slightly. Amon watched her go for a moment, inwardly amused—it seemed all he had to do to make her inordinately happy for a day or so was take her out to eat somewhere. He'd been around her long enough to discern that food was one of Robin's chief pleasures in life, not that she ate it in vast amounts, but that she always liked to try something new and different. Her palate was varied and easy to please, and going out for a meal instead of ordering one in or roughing it with base home-cooking always seemed to lift her spirits.

Within a moment, Amon turned and walked to his own room, shedding his coat, and then shedding his jacket and the holster he wore about his torso. From a table near him, he grabbed his cell phone, and then flipped open a laptop that was lying on the table as well. One end of a cord went into the bottom of the phone, and the other end of the cord, which resembled a disk, plugged into the laptop's disk drive. The drive chattered a few times, and Amon began to dial once the chattering had stopped.

A new phone number, every time. Scramblers were good things.

Once the other line had started ringing, Amon pulled the phone loose from the cord, and sat down in a chair at the table, holding the phone to his ear with one hand and pushing the laptop about slightly with the other. After about four rings, the other line was answered. "Nagira Law Offices," a busy, prim sounding female voice on the other end greeted. "How may I help you?"

"Mika." Amon paused. He didn't need to say anything by way of introduction, she'd know full well from the sound of his voice who it was. "Put Nagira on the phone, if he's there."

"Yes." A click, silence. He was on hold. Five seconds later the phone was picked up again, and the first human sound heard was a heavy exhalation—presumably, the smoke from a cigarette. "How're the plans for world domination coming?" Nagira's voice asked from the other end of the line, sounding dryly amused, as he always did. Amon had talked with his half-brother shortly after Robin's revelation (and threat) not too long ago, and had expressed nothing but quiet amusement about it. Amon couldn't tell what Nagira was really thinking, which kind of irritated him—but then again, Amon supposed that was how people felt about him, when he thought about it.

"What've you heard?" he asked instead of answering Nagira's question. Another heavy exhalation came from Nagira, and Amon settled back in his chair.

"It's been pretty quiet for a long time now, buddy," his older half-brother replied, and Amon could almost hear Nagira shrug. "I've been telling you that for a while. I think SOLOMON's starting to lose heart. You guys have been keeping yourself pretty well hidden, except for those couple run-ins with Hunters in the very beginning. You'd have to do something real—and I mean real—dumb for SOLOMON to catch onto you two."

Amon allowed himself a grim little smile. "Like trying to take over the world? Is that really dumb enough?"

Nagira laughed, his voice hollow and tinny through the phone. "Yeah. Yeah. That sounds like it'd clinch it. Has little Robin given up any more of her instinctual plan to find and form some sort of bond with others?"

Amon rolled his eyes up at the ceiling, staring upwards blankly as he spoke. "No. I'm still not really sure why she wants to do this. I don't, that's a fact."

More laughter. "I think," Nagira said, a smirk audible through his voice, "that maybe she's lonely."

"I see," Amon replied, without much thought. Of course she was probably lonely. They lived a life that no longer existed. They were like untouchables. They came and went without a trace. They talked to no one, and saw no one. She was a fifteen year old girl—of course she was lonely.

"Maybe," the phone-voice hazarded, still smirking, "you should be nicer to her."

Amon frowned, catching the underlying insinuation in his brother's voice. "Perhaps I should just get her thinking more on what this plan of hers is. That'll occupy her."

There was a typical, smug, Nagira-brand silence that always seemed to say: 'Well, if that's what you think.' As Amon turned his head downwards and fixed his gaze on the door as a light knock issued forth from it, and Robin's head poked in slightly, Nagira resumed speaking. "Sure, sure. Whatever you think is best, buddy. After all, you should know her best." Amon watched Robin as she hesitantly entered the room, eyeing the phone with a kind of excited questioning, even though she almost certainly knew who it was. It was hardly ever anyone but Nagira.

He watched the way Robin's pink lips turned upwards into a smile, curving gracefully, and quite suddenly handed the phone out to her. "It's Nagira. You talk to him for a bit. He is, as ever, driving me insane."

Robin took the phone from him eagerly, and almost immediately she and his brother fell into conversation. Robin strolled off to a corner of the room, near the drawn draperies of a window, and sat down on the window seat, talking all the while in her quiet little way. Amon listened to her and thought, somewhat warily, somewhere within that girl there is some sort of grandiose idea.

There was, somewhere. He knew there had to be. She wouldn't be acting this way, otherwise. She wouldn't have seemed so...powerful, otherwise. Robin's whole being seemed to tremble, the last few days, as if she were on the precipice of some giant discovery, some great adventure—it seemed to Amon as if she'd completely forgotten, for the time being, that they were still in danger of losing their lives every day. However, she seemed happy and hale, and Amon's mind was having trouble deciding whether that was a good thing out of sheer principle, or if it was a bad thing due to the cause of the happiness.

Or maybe it was just that he wasn't used to waiting for Robin to make a decision as to their immediate—and long-term—future. He looked over his shoulder at her, suddenly, and watched her talking on the phone. She managed to be subdued and animated at the same time, unearthly; one of her many magic tricks.

She had many, many more, much to his frustration.

A few minutes later she rose from her seat and walked back over to Amon, handing him the phone with a smile. He took it and placed it back up to his ear as Robin sat down in the other free chair at the table, her green eyes staring down at the tabletop. "Nagira," was all Amon said by way of re-greeting his brother.

"I'll be calling you again in the next few days. Little Robin has deployed me on a task for you two," Nagira replied, and Amon's brows furrowed.

"A task?" he asked, in semi-confusion.

"An information task, what else?" was the amused reply. "I'm going to see what I can dig up all the way from Japan, over here, and work my contacts and see what they can work their contacts for and find out." A laugh, deep and scratchy. Too many cigarettes, possibly? "She's going right after the big fish, Amon. She wants to find the witches in Europe—you know, like the big cheeses. Diplomatic ties, or something like that."

"I see."

"She wants you guys to get in good with someone who's got some measure of power on the Continent over there—so that way, at least, you guys are kind of safe. You of all people should know that it's not pretty when witches fight. I'm gonna see what I can dig up, okay?"

"Yeah."

"Always a man of many words, Amon. Until then, keep yourselves well—and alive, above all. I'll talk to you in a few days, buddy."

Amon sighed, wondering what exactly Robin and Nagira were going to drag him into. "You too. Yeah."

"Adios," Nagira said, and Amon stared down at his phone for a moment before flipping it closed, setting it on the tabletop. He stared at it for a moment, his mind digesting several different things at once. First and foremost, a large part of his brain told him that he should convince Robin to cease this nonsense, to worry more about preserving her own life than scampering about after witches who might or might not be around, and who might or might not be entirely friendly towards them—they were ex-Hunters, after all. He knew his words would be wasted breath, however.

The phone suddenly seemed to shine before him, the room infinitely brighter; his skin tingled, he was not only distinctly aware of his own heartbeat and breathing, he could hear Robin's heartbeat, hard and steady, like a drum. Briefly he closed his eyes, pressing them together tightly with a slight scowl, willing his mind to go as blank as humanly possible. Imagining an endless void was a lot more difficult than one would have thought. When he opened his eyes two seconds later the phone still seemed unusually glinty, and the colours of the room too bright to be normal, but his own heartbeat and Robin's had faded into nothingness.

"You...still think I'm doing the wrong thing, don't you?" she queried him suddenly, looking concerned. He looked over at her, disturbed and awed at how green her eyes really could be, when he looked at them, and blinked. She had three or four very, very faint freckles on either cheek, he noticed. They probably would have been very difficult to notice, but due to the fact that his Craft enjoyed randomly acting up from time to time, he saw them then with little to no effort at all.

Amon wasn't going to lie to her. "Yes." He held her gaze meaninglyfully. "I do."

She blinked back at him, all the different hues of green and facets of her eyes twinkling in the lamplight. "I can't be afraid forever." Robin paused, her eyes searching some spot on the wall, on the draperies over Amon's shoulder. Amon's line of sight did not follow hers, instead, it remained riveted to her face. "I was her hope, Amon. 'Hope'."

If he'd had a penny for every time she'd said that to him in the last few months, he would have been a far richer man. That phrase, that woman Maria's—her mother's—words seemed to be like a lifeline to Robin, the thing she clung to in order to make sense of her life, some sort of justification for why she lived. He wasn't sure if he believed in all he'd seen in that basement office at Factory that day so long ago—all of Toudou's scientific last words—but somewhere in the mess of words, whether or not all of it was true or not, was the puzzle piece that was Robin's destiny. How or where it fit into the grand scheme of things was anyone's guess. Furthermore, he often wondered where his own piece fit in.

Amon often had nightmares about being a child, confronting his mother as she stood high above him, unreachable; in her hand, she held a single puzzle piece just out of his reach. No matter how he reached for it or grabbed, he could never obtain it. Then, his mother would fade away, leaving him alone, taking the puzzle piece—his destiny—with her.

"Just like you do things because you feel like you have to, or because you feel that they're the best thing for you to do," Robin went on, her eyes still fixed on that mysterious spot, as if she were seeing someone over his shoulder that was telling her what to say, "I have to act that way, too. I understand that you're angry with this, my decision, with...me..." She trailed off, not finishing her sentence, but the unspoken words hung there in the air, between them:

But how long are you going to go on being angry?

They'd been around each other almost constantly for months, now, and the depth of their communication without using any words at all had actually begun to frighten Amon, a bit. He hadn't ever been that close with any woman (save perhaps his mother, years and years ago before he could really remember it that well, anyway)—let alone a fifteen year old girl—in his entire life, to be able to convey entire sentences, entire emotions in a single look. What frightened him even more was his ability to read her without a word being spoken, as well.

Her eyes slid down from the spot they'd been looking at, and settled on his own for a moment, briefly; then, nervously, they moved down and settled on the tabletop again. The same words, the point more driven home by eye contact: how long are you going to go on being angry?

His gaze was forcedly stoic as he looked at her. Amon's pride, for whatever reason, would not let his face show the message he wanted to convey to her, that he knew he should have conveyed to her: I'm sorry.

Thumping. Heavy thumping. It sounded like someone walking around out in the main sitting room, and Robin was awake with a jerk, sliding out of bed, her body low to the ground, heart pounding. More thumping, a dull thud. Her mouth went dry with a part fear, a part anxiety, a part Craft. She knew, full of dread, that Amon was never that loud at night. Out of respect for her sleep, he moved about almost silently to ensure that he did not awaken her while she slept. Something was not right. Hair hanging loose in front of her face, feet sliding silently along the carpet, she slowly and stealthily made her way to her bedroom door.

Hand on the doorknob, she closed her eyes and tried to reach her mind out, to see if she could feel the presence of another witch—but her mind was so muddled with nervousness that it didn't really work very well, only made her head spin and swim a bit. Her hand on the doorknob began to turn slowly, biting her lower lip hard in anticipation and fear of what she might find on the other side of the door. Had she jinxed them? Had her hopes for SOLOMON's disappearance from their lives brought the organization back into them?

Lips moving quickly in a silent prayer, she hoped that Amon was alright. She opened the door.

The lights were on, and the room was startling cold, as if perhaps one of the windows were open—or, Robin thought with trepidation, broken open. Her hand sliding along the wall, she moved towards the corner that once she rounded, put her in the main sitting room. She heard the sound of something being knocked over; the telephone, perhaps. It wasn't something glass, but it wasn't something metal either. More than likely the telephone, from the sounds of it. Robin felt as if she had a pit of snakes in her stomach, and taking a deep breath, she rounded the corner, eyes wide and pupils dialated—every cell in her being supercharged, heated, ready to bring about a quick death to anyone who threatened herself or Amon.

Instead, she saw nothing. Indeed one of the windows was open, the curtain fluttering with the cool night air flowing into the room. The sounds of something being dragged across the carpet, and Robin's already sick heart became sicker when she thought of what she could find on the other side of the loveseat, on the ground. Images of blood and gore flashed into her head uncontrollably, but she forced herself to start walking, numbly, towards the loveseat.

"Robin." The sound of Amon's voice from the floor on the other side of the piece of furniture nearly scared her out of her wits, but made her hurry around to the other side, only to find Amon half-sitting, half-slumping against the chair. Her brows knitted together, deep in confusion and concern, and then she dropped to her knees beside him, reaching out to him slightly but not wanting to touch him. "I woke you up."

"Amon?" she queried, gazing into his face, his somewhat squinted eyes, as they darted about everywhere and settled on nothing in particular. When he did not reply, her concern heightened to fever pitch. "Amon?" she tried again, a bit more frantically, her voice higher in pitch. His response was to wince and attempt to scoot away from her some, face contorted as if he were in pain. Somewhat clumsily, he almost fell over onto his side completely, and Robin noticed that the telephone had been knocked over; presumably by him.

Realization sunk in suddenly, and Robin frowned helplessly. Amon's Craft. This had happened before, while they were in New York—or perhaps it was somewhere in California, Robin couldn't remember. Somewhere, the two of them lost in America. He'd awoken, in the middle of the night, heart pumping, head pounding, sight blinding him, hearing deafening him, sense of touch overly sensitive to everything. It seemed as if, sometimes, Amon's Craft reeled out of control, rendering him completely incapacitated for minutes at a time. Bewildered, Robin tentatively reached out a hand to lay it on her ex-partner's shoulder, in an attempt to help him sit upright.

"Don't!" he barked at her, sharply, and she jerked her hand back, cowed, and he winced at the sound of his own words, presumably echoing in his own skull. Finally pulling himself up into what could be called a sitting position against the loveseat, Amon pressed his eyes shut forcefully, looking as if he wanted nothing more than to block out the world. They sat there like that in complete silence for what could have been five or ten minutes; Robin watching on in quiet despair, Amon blocking out the world, sweat beading on his forehead.

After what seemed like an eternity (far too long for Robin), his eyes opened again and she leaned forward immediately and uncontrollably, her own eyes searching the familiar charcoal-grey depths from a distance, looking for...something, anything out of the ordinary, anything to give cause for alarm. She saw nothing, only fatigue and an odd look of...thankfulness? Relief? "Are you going to be alright?" she asked, quietly, unsure as to whether or not he would snap at her again. Amon, as far as his Craft was concerned, was a bundled mass of exposed nerves. One verbal misstep and his mood would be ruined for the rest of the day.

"Yes." Just like that at least his voice sounded composed, again. Slowly he turned and pulled himself to his feet, looking about himself, displaced, before somewhat haltingly picking up the over-ended telephone. Robin looked up at him from the floor for a moment before she stood herself, still watching him.

"Amon, what happened?" she asked, confused. "I woke up because I heard...well, it sounded like someone was dragging something across the floor."

He sat down on the loveseat, large hands linked together, elbows resting on his knees. Robin watched the muscles of his shoulders move under his shirt and forced herself to look, instead, at the crown of his head, his glossy black hair. "I was asleep," he began incredulously, and Robin made a little face of disbelief.

"You were asleep?" she asked, yet more confused. "You don't sleep—"

"—at night anymore, I know. I thought so, too. I fell asleep." He shrugged with his eyebrows, slightly. "I was sleeping, and then I was dreaming, and then...I woke up, and everything was...blinding. Bright. White. I couldn't hear, I couldn't see. It felt as if I was getting ready to have a heart attack." Here Amon paused, looking at some invisible point in front of him, as if he was trying to compose his thoughts, put something into words. "I tried to get up, and I...lost my balance." He fell silent. That, apparently, was the end of his explanation. It didn't matter, Robin had heard the longer, more detailed explanation before, the first time this had occurred. Her only explanation as to why Amon had told her so much that time around was that he himself was frightened and bewildered by what had happened to him. This time, it seemed as if he was more...embarrassed than anything else.

She looked down at him, sitting there upon the loveseat. Her hands itched to do nothing more than to take his head in them and hold it to her stomach, protectively; to stroke his long hair and feel his arms wrap around her. She bit her lip. "What were you dreaming?" she asked, even though she was fairly certain she wouldn't get an answer.

"My mother," he replied almost instantly, to her great shock. Immediately Robin was extra silent, hoping her silence would coax him into saying something else as it did, sometimes. Amon hardly ever—almost never—mentioned his mother. To Robin she seemed to be some impossibly sad, tragic figure in Amon's past, one that he both missed and loathed terribly. She couldn't help but be curious about the powerful woman who was half of Amon, the woman whose blood made Amon what he was, the woman who lent half of her personality and features to her son. "I was dreaming about my mother," he said, almost as if he was back in the dream. His voice sounded far away and about as lost in a daydream as Robin had ever heard it. It was as if the room surrounding them, and she herself, as well, had disappeared in Amon's eyes.

He looked...peaceful.

"A good dream, then?" Robin said, hopefully. His face was so wistful, so...

"No, not particularly," he replied, which semi-startled Robin. "But not horrible, either. It was one of those dreams...that makes one uneasy, but one's not sure why. But nothing terrible at all happened in the dream." Suddenly his face was its normal self again, all hard lines and angles, all frowns and furrowed brows. "It wasn't one of the nightmares." Silence loomed over them again; the man, lost in thought, the girl, amazed he was talking so much.

The fact that their conversation, considering that it was all Amon- centered, had even gotten this far was a miracle, and Robin was desperately aware of this fact. Perhaps a bit greedily (even though she knew it couldn't possibly be harming him any) she wanted him to keep talking, wanted to hear about the unfamiliar inner workings of his mind. "Nightmares?" she asked, almost breathlessly, disbelieving.

Eyes hard and unreadable, he looked up at her after her one-worded question, and set his jaw, as if determined to do something. "It's late," he said, and any hope in Robin's heart that Amon would have kept talking was instantly crushed. It was, apparently, time for him to put the mask back on. "So late that it's early, as a matter of fact. You should go along back to bed. I'm sorry for having awoken you." His words were so curt, so flat, so perfectly Amon—it all sounded like lines from a well- rehearsed play, one that he and Robin seemed to play through every day; a string of endless dress rehearsals.

She blinked. His removal and re-application of the mask had been so quick, so flawless, that it was getting hard to tell if he even knew that he was doing it anymore. "But, Amon—"she began, and his grey eyes hardened even more. It wasn't as if he was angry with her, but rather instead angry with himself. "—are you—" She attempted to continue regardless of his dangerous look, but he stopped her.

"It's late. People talk all sort of foolishness at this hour." He stared her down, and she found she could not defy him. Those words had been his way of saying, in no uncertain terms: back off.

Robin began to head back for her room, staring down at her feet and legs as she walked, both of which seemed impossibly thin and white in the artificial light of the room. As she reached her door, she cast one more glance back to Amon, who was still sitting on the loveseat, apparently waiting for her to be a good little girl, to go back into her room, and to go to sleep.

"Maybe," Robin began, pausing with her hand on the door frame, looking back out at the back of Amon's head, "maybe Nagira will call tomorrow with some information."

"Possibly," he replied, and then turned his head, looking back at her. His eyes flicked up and down her figure once, which caused the snakes-in-her- stomach-feeling again—he'd performed such maneuvers with his eyes before, but that didn't mean that Robin knew any more of what he was thinking when he did them—and then he locked her eyes with his own, as he often did.

She had the feeling that he knew that his words carried much more potency if he had her to where she couldn't look away when he said them.

"Go to sleep now, Robin," he murmured, and she nodded, entering her room, closing the door behind her.