A/N: Until I figure out exactly what the hell is wrong with my copy of Microsoft Word and why it won't let me save anything, I shall be doing all of my writing in Wordpad, which is GHETTO. No spell check, no grammar corrections, etc. I'm sort-of-kind-of pretty good about stuff like that on my own but we shall see, I suppose. Also, I have no italics font, so (here we reach the very zephyr of ghetto fabulousness) for the next however long all things that would normally be in italics will be seen in between slashes, such as this: /shit/. Yeah, I know. Ghetto. But you know how we do, g. Onward with the story.
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They arrived in London with the coming of dawn. The sun had not even appeared just yet—the sky had gone from the black of night to the eerie grey of pre-dawn. The river Thames stretched out like a great, dark snake, onward. To his irritation, Amon found he could not shake the scent of the sea—his clothes, his hair, his /being/ seemed permeated with the salt water smell. He looked down at his cohort and found that the sea and the light of pre-dawn had stolen all the colour and hue from her being; she was a painted character of a girl in shades of grey and white. He imagined that he looked much the same, only on the darker end of the scale; not so much white, more black.
Robin, in the strange light, looked only half-alive. This disturbed Amon, and he found himself not wanting to look at her until there was more light outside.
His body ached, his head throbbed, his senses switched randomly from being normal to slightly heightened. Amon groaned, mentally. Apparently his body was still reeling from the exertion of the prior night, feeling worn out and misused. Doggedly he went on, although he wanted to do nothing more than lay down where he stood, on the dock, curl into a ball, and go to sleep for a few million years. Archaeologists would dig him up, still intact, still slumbering, and call it
the Second Coming of Christ. Everything else would pass into the dust it started from, whatever and ever, amen.
Amon shook his head slightly to stop it from rambling on, nonsense. Behind him, a very tired and sea-hating Robin trudged along faithfully, bag too heavy for her slight frame. Up, up, up; to something that looked more like civilization and less like a dockyard, and out, out out; to something that looked more like a futuristic transportation booth and less like a phone booth. Amon dialed the operator and asked to be put through to a taxi company. He was, and he was informed that
one would be by shortly. Exiting the phone booth, he discovered Robin sitting on a bench next to the street and sat down next to her, thumping his bag down on the ground (albeit somewhat gently, there were electronics in there). She appeared to be fighting sleep, as well, except in a more outward fashion. Her eyelids sank down repeatedly, only to be jerked back up to stay open.
It made sense that she should be tired; she slept not at all on the trip from Amsterdam to London. Amon suspected it had something to do with her wary watching of the water; something that once she'd started doing, she'd done all night until their arrival.
There was no one about. Five minutes passed. The sun began to rise fully, lightening the sky to a whiter shade of grey. Amon, hands folded in his lap, felt like a zombie. Robin curled up in a ball in an effort to fall asleep, supporting herself.
Half-awake, moderately hung over, and letting the irrational, emotional side of his brain run things for him, Amon reached over with his right arm and drew Robin to him, leaning her head against his shoulder for support. She was stiff at first, startled; and then relaxing thankfully, cuddled against him. She was asleep within two minutes.
Amon sat and wished that he could have firmly stated that the reason why she was leaning against him at the moment cradled in the crook of his arm was that he wanted her to be comfortable while she slept.
He could have firmly stated that fact, but the point of the matter was that even if he convinced anyone else, /he/ would know that he was lying.
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He was beginning to suspect that perhaps he was bi-polar. Amon contemplated this as they bumped along in the small taxi, Robin once again leaned against him in slumber, once again at the insistence of his arm. His own actions confused him, sometimes, and he knew that they certainly confused the hell out of Robin—and most anyone else that he came into contact with, more than likely.
Frustrated, he'd long ago given up on any denial of his feelings towards the tow-headed witch at his side; at least denial to himself, anyway. Plenty of time had been spent wrestling with the demons in his mind; the guilt, the self-loathing, the bewilderment at having someone so under his skin. Even though it still irked him considerably at times, he'd somewhat come to grips with the fact that he had intense feelings for someone who was ten—strike that, now /eleven/—years younger than him. After a while Amon had realized that the guilt would eat him alive if he let it, and he shoved it away, ignoring it. Nothing he could do—or did—seemed to change his feelings for Robin. They only seemed to intensify the further along they went.
Bi-polarism played into the picture with respects to how Amon acted towards Robin, mostly due to the fact that he was frightened by the intensity of his own emotions. He alternated between treating her like an insignificant speck to being a benevolent older-brother figure; from snapping at her nastily to comforting her. He wanted to grab her, hold her so tightly that it left bruises, memorize the shape of her body, run his hands through her light hair and hold her to him
in such a manner that it would probably be somewhat unpleasant feeling. He'd dropped his life /just like that/ to run off and bind himself to the girl next to him, and that, quite frankly, /scared the hell out of him/. He'd never been that engrossed in something before in his life, let alone a woman.
Let alone a /girl/.
He'd never loved or wanted something so much that thinking about it made him grit his teeth so hard that he thought some of them were beginning to come loose.
He'd never met someone who'd looked down the barrel of his gun and lived because /he could not pull the trigger/.
If Robin was Eve, Amon wondered, did that delegate him to the Adam role? Did Robin expect him to fill that role? He wasn't sure if he was ready for such a thing--or if he would ever be.
As the taxi wound around narrow, slow London roads on its way to a hotel, disturbing thoughts echoed around in Amon's too-tired, semi-malfunctional brain like ricocheting bullets.
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A hotel. Robin inferred from Amon's choice of lodging that they wouldn't be in London for very long. Or perhaps they would; staying in a hotel was not always an indicator of how long they would stay somewhere. They'd lived out of a hotel room in Paris for nearly two months, Robin nearly going mad with the brusque infamiliarity of it all. (She'd run up a room service bill that would have made any normal person's eyes fall out of their head at the end of that two months; but no, not /Amon/, he'd just looked at it and paid the disgusting amount of money without a sound.) Not that she was hoping that they'd be staying in London long enough to get an actual /lodging/ of some kind--she wasn't very fond of London, or of England for that matter.
Bad memories. Bad SOLOMON memories, more specifically. And plus, she hated the food. And true to the rumour, British people really /did/ have the scariest teeth she'd ever seen in her life. She'd been caught staring, helplessly, at the gnarled teeth of the young man behind the counter at the hotel while he was checking them in, and caught a slight reprimanding look from Amon for it. Obviously her stare had been so pointed that he'd noticed it, which may or may not
have meant that the young man behind the counter had noticed it. They retreived a room key. Amon gruffly declined the assistance of a eager bellboy who wanted to carry their things for them, and then they were off, into the elevator, up to their room.
There weren't too many people about at the early hour, and she and Amon were the only two in the elevator. The flourescent light did little to improve their appearances, Robin noticed from looking at their reflections in some brass panelling. She looked like a girl on her death bed, and Amon looked much a corpse /past/ its death bed.
"We're staying in a hotel?" Robin asked, mostly to break the silence. Amon nodded, minutely.
"I don't expect to be here long," he said, simply. That was that. Silence reigned again.
It did so all the way to the room, which Amon opened with the key, Robin stumbling in ahead of him, hand groping for a light switch. She finally found one, and flipped on a set of lights only to see Amon wince exaggeratedly, walking heavy-footedly over to a couch near a bank of windows along the wall. He tossed his bag onto the floor near the couch in a seemingly uncaring manner and then pulled off his shoes with a exhausted desperation of a man who wants to sleep but has no patience for getting ready for sleep. After the shoe removal Amon simply flopped heavily down upon the
couch and laid there, unmoving. He was still wearing his coat and all, but Robin thought it wise not to say anything since he obviously didn't care much.
Instead, she double-locked the hotel room door behind her and made her way silently to the bed at the other end of the room. She went though the same bag-dropping and shoe-removing ritual that Amon had, but she removed her coat and took down her hair before crawling into the bed, not caring that she was still wearing all her clothing that smelled of the fight in Amsterdam and the sea.
Robin was asleep in short order. She did not know that Amon had been asleep almost from the very second that he'd touched the couch.
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Nagira Syunji was sitting at a ritsy sushi bar in downtown Tokyo, having lost all interest in the food in front of him. Oddly enough, as he sat and listened to his baby brother's otherworldly monotone rattle on in his ear through the cell phone, Nagira became more interested in his drink and his cigarettes. He became so interested in his drink that it interested him to order another--a stronger one.
He rubbed his eyes and groaned slightly, said eyes flicking over to the window to gaze out the window of the building, four stories up. He imagined his baby brother doing the same across the world, staring vapidly out a window at a significantly more drab outdoor setup. Strangers in a strange land; Robin and Amon in London, /again/. They /really/ hadn't liked it the first time around, and now they were there again, and Nagira could hear all kinds of complete clusterfuck frustration in Amon's voice.
"And so now you're in London again, eh?" he asked the voice on the other side of the world, picking up his drink and taking a swallow. Much better. Much stronger. He lit up a cigarette, looking down at the food in front of him disinterestedly. At this point, he'd be better off having them wrap it to go for him.
"Yes. In London. Again. And we can't stay here long."
Nagira let out a big lungful of smoke, once again looking out at the night sky through the window. On the other side of the world, Amon would be almost in time for afternoon tea--or, at the very least, having just finished lunch. "Well, no shit, kid. I don't understand why /London/ would be such a SOLOMON stronghold, anyway."
"I don't either. But it is, and we can't stay here long. I already pressed our luck once with London and we came the closest to being killed that we've come yet. I don't care to try it again."
"Have you slept?" Nagira asked, out of nowhere. He couldn't help it. Affection, emotion, concern--these things were usually never displayed between the brothers. But ever since Amon had been routinely coming close to death on average once a month, Nagira found himself unable to help but be concerned whenever he got the inevitable phone call--Amon's voice, sounding like a cello string pulled too tight, a voice too ragged, too tired, saying that they'd just run. Again.
"I have," his baby brother replied. "A bit."
"Have you eaten?"
"No. Can't. Not hungry." Nagira heard a sound through the phone that was all too familiar to him, and he couldn't help but smile at how much they were alike, sometimes, even if Amon tried fervently to deny it. "I had room service bring me up a pack of god-awful cigarettes, though."
Still smiling, Nagira spoke. "You had room service go out and get you cigarettes? That's awfully eccentric, even for you."
"I don't particularly care how eccentric they think I am. If I'm paying them this much money for a hotel room, they'd better do jumping jacks if I ask them to, as well as go get me cigarettes."
Nagira chuckled. "I thought they were called fags on that island, brother."
A pause. "I see. I'm /not/ going to call them that. I am, however, going to wonder about what the hell we're going to do now."
Nagira sighed, having been jerked back onto track by Amon's determination. He ground his cigarette out in the sleek metal ashtray on his table and immediately lit up another, taking another large swallow from his drink. At this rate, he'd be strolling into the office about three hours late tomorrow, just late enough for Mika to try to slap him. "They just keep trying to kill you two, but you refuse to go down. As long as whatever you're going to do involves keeping on your
toes, I'd say you'll be okay, kid."
Another pause. "I'm not sure how much longer I can go on being on my toes for." More silence.
Nagira fought the urge to let his jaw drop. Amon? Admitting weakness? Albeit it was probably more than warranted in this situation, but that only frightened Nagira even more. Amon and Robin had been pretty good at staying alive, at staying hidden, at living a life that mostly involved disappearing--but Nagira had often wondered when it was going to start to take its toll, or when something was going to go horribly, horribly wrong. He couldn't /help/ but think those things,
sometimes. And now, the fact that his abnormally stoic, overly-competent baby brother was admitting that he was starting to get worn down, Nagira knew that things were worse than they seemed. Running from SOLOMON hadn't been easy on either Robin or Amon, but Amon, it seemed to Nagira, perhaps had it a bit worse than Robin in some respects. Amon was living a life he didn't want, the life of a witch; which included forsaking all he'd known, unable to control himself or the
circumstances around him, and /still/ not able to come to grips with whatever it was that was happening between him and the young girl he'd sworn (in a fucked up but kind of cute-Amon way) to protect by killing, should he ever think she needed it.
Dare Nagira call it love? He dared to, sometimes, but that usually resulted in Amon hanging up on him. So he stopped daring.
"You just need to keep being careful, that's all," Nagira said, reassuringly. "And you've got Robin to help you with that."
"What help is a girl who's chief concern is running out and, for all intents and purposes, blowing our cover?" Amon asked tinnily, sounding harried. "/This/ kind of thing occurring is why I don't exactly think it's the brightest idea in the world to go out and try to find others. I don't /want/ to find any others."
"Maybe you don't, but she does," Nagira reminded, frowning. "That's something you two need to take care of on your own. And if you can't take care of it, go your separate ways."
"I wasn't asking you to play mediator," Amon snapped, coldly. Nagira let his head loll somewhat, exasperated--was his brother /ever/ going to stop being an emotional mindfield? Or, at the very least, not so much of a damned /porcupine/? "And as for going our separate ways, that's completely out of the question. Robin wouldn't last a day on her own." A pause. "Her powers are growing. I'm not sure when--or /if/--they're going to stop. I need to watch that," Amon said, detachedly. Nagira couldn't help but snort.
"I don't think either one of you would last very long without one another," Nagira found himself saying, somewhat laughingly. Could Amon /really/ sit there and lie to himself so straight-facedly? It was amazing. Nagira wondered if perhaps it was some sort of strange self-hypnosis plan that Amon prescribed to. "Robin's too guileless, and you can't even control your Craft properly. And as
for making sure that Robin doesn't suddenly lose her mind completely and level a small country, if you're /still/ worried about that, you're a fucking /moron/, Amon. I'm not really seeing that happen at this point in time. And even if it did--" here, Nagira couldn't stop himself from getting a jab in, "--you couldn't pull the trigger once. I don't think you could do it the second time, either."
Nagira listened a measurely smugly, a measure worriedly at the stark silence eminating from his earpiece. Either Amon was getting ready to have a complete nuclear meltdown or he was just going to take a moment to stuff it all back inside, and stay silent and stoic about it only to lose sleep over it later. "I don't call you for commentary on my life," Amon said finally, evenly. "I'm calling
you because I need help. And if /I'm/ asking for help then you know I must need it badly."
A waitress came and looked at Nagira's empty glasses, and his plate of full sushi rolls. She silently offered another drink, to which Nagira nodded, and then he covered his mouthpiece momentarily to ask her to package the rolls to go for him. She nodded, smiling, and complied. He went back to his conversation, eyes shut. "As it so happens, I /do/ have some help for you. But I have the feeling you're not going to like it at all."
There was silence and rustling from Amon's end in London, and then Nagira heard murmuring through the earpiece. It sounded backgroundish and very female--Robin. She'd been sleeping when Amon first called, but she was evidentally now awake. "Robin is awake," Amon said into his phone. "I see. Why wouldn't I like it? /Hey/." Amon's voice suddenly sounded a bit more
distant on the last word, as if he were holding the phone away from his ear somewhat. "What are you doing?" he asked, sounding vaguely reprimanding and still somewhat faint. "This isn't a bar in France, you know," he went on, distantly.
Nagira couldn't help but crack a smile and wonder what the hell Robin was doing /now/ to make his baby brother's blood pressure run high. He could hear the faintest of murmurs in the background that must have been Robin's replies to his brother's queries, but he couldn't quite make them out.
"What I do and what you do are two /very/ different things," Amon continued at Robin. More murmuring. "Do as you please, then," Amon replied with vague distaste and resignation, and then came back into Nagira's earpiece fully. "Continue."
"What the hell was that all about?" Nagira had to ask.
"Nothing. Tell me what you've got planned."
"Well, the reason I said you wouldn't like it is because it pertains more to locating other witches than to finding a way for you to get away from SOLOMON, really. Although who knows, perhaps those two are one and the same." Nagira took a deep breath, and went on. "You're going to need to go to Iceland."
"Iceland?" Amon asked, sounding flatly incredulous. He might as well just have asked Nagira if he was fucking joking. "/Iceland/."
"Yes, Iceland. There's a woman there who's kind of like...well, I don't really know what the hell to call her." Nagira thought for a moment. "She's kind of like an international witch phonebook. She's pretty damned connected."
Amon was silent as he probably processed the information. "How is that possible? How does she know what she knows?"
Nagira lit another cigarette and took another drink from new glass the waitress had placed in front of him. "I don't know. No one told me. All I know is that she's supposed to be very, very connected. She probably knows more witches than SOLOMON."
"Is she a witch?"
Nagira laughed somewhat. "From what they tell me, no. No, she's not."
"That sounds rather strange to me."
"Sketchy, you mean," Nagira corrected. "That sounds very sketchy." His food returned, wrapped and boxed in an elaborate plastic affair. He nodded appreciatively at the waitress, and turned his attention back to the phone. "It's legit, though. I checked it out. That's pretty much all I know right now--but I'm going to do some more digging, here, soon, and you should be able to get out of London within the week."
"Make it within a couple days," Amon said, sounding put out. "We won't stay here a week. I'll fly us over to the damned United States before I stay here another week." That statement alone spoke measures, Nagira knew, because Amon and Robin hadn't even considered staying in the States once they were there. They just got across the country and got the hell out because they'd absolutely /hated/ it there, even if they hadn't been hassled by SOLOMON at all while there.
"Let me talk to Robin," Nagira said, suddenly, and Amon sighed, still sounding put out. Clunking; the phone was being handed over, and suddenly Robin's voice: "Hello?"
Nagira smiled at the sound of her voice, the thought of her little presence. "Hey, kiddo. What're you doing to make Amon have a heart attack now?"
"Um." Robin tittered slightly, and exhaled somewhat. "...I'm smoking."
Nagira let out an outright laugh, picturing Robin smoking. Amon had informed him that Robin had dabbled with smoking a couple of times while in France, none much to Amon's liking, but as long as Amon was an on-again-off-again-usually-due-to stress-smoker, he couldn't really complain, now could he? "Hey, those things are bad for you, you know," Nagira commented, finding the whole thing hilarious.
"I know," Robin replied, sounding cowed. "I guess I just like to do it every once in a while. What's Amon talking about Iceland for?" she asked, suddenly changing the subject.
"You two are probably going to be going there within the week," Nagira informed her. "I've caught wind of a woman there whom I know that at least /you/ would be interested to talk to. She could probably steer you in the right direction of other witches."
"Really?" Robin sounded glad; exhausted, but glad. "That's great. Thank you, Nagira. We've never been to Iceland, before."
"It's cold, I hear. And strange, as well," Nagira said.
"Well, as long as it's not London, I think we'll be fine," Robin replied.
Nagira smiled. "I think you two will be fine, anyway."
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Amon hung up the phone a few minutes later, setting it on the table next to his laptop. He turned, frowning, to look at Robin, who was perched in a chair next to him, arms around her knees, cigarette freshly extinguished in the glass tray on the table. She, like him, was wearing the same clothes that she'd been wearing yesterday, and both were probably in desperate need
of bathing. She, unlike him, was probably hungry.
He'd deal with that in a minute. He grabbed the pack of cigarettes off the table and shook one out, sticking it in his lips and lighting it. Sighing, he extended the pack to Robin and shook one out, and she reached a slender hand over and took it.
"I'll let it slip this one time," he said, not looking at her as she lit the cigarette, "because we're in London. Next time I catch you smoking I am going to cloud up and rain all over your parade."
Robin raised an eyebrow at him inquisitively. "I would hardly call this a parade."
"It's a figure of speech."
"I know. But it's not a very good parade, is it?"
Amon sighed. "No. No it's not. But it still doesn't change the fact that I am not going to let you smoke." He took a drag. "It's extremely bad for you--not to mention it's not very becoming of a fifteen year old girl to have such a habit."
"But you're--"
"I'm sure you've heard the phrase 'Do as I say, not as I do'," Amon countered before Robin could get her full, quiet protest out of her mouth. Never mind that he was a hypocrite. They were in London again and his mood was foul, and, as usual, he was taking it out on /her/, the one person who probably deserved it the least. Amon mentally stabbed himself in the stomach.
"I have," she replied, after a while. She looked down at her toes and curled them back and forth. "I don't really think it matters in this situation, anymore," she added, quietly.
"I still think it does." Amon fixed her with a /stare/. "Why are you being difficult?" he asked, pointedly, icily.
She continued to look at her toes, curling. The cigarette dangled from her hand. "I'm capable of making my own decisions," she murmured, steel underneath the soft whisper. "Why are you being mean?" she added, countering his comment about being difficult.
Amon was taken aback by her question, her quiet insinuation. In her quiet, Robin-way, she had just done the equivalent of calling him an asshole--which he deserved, he knew. Not that he agreed with her smoking any more or less, but there wasn't really much he could do about it.
They were partners in this whole messy nightmare, not father and daughter. And being partners made it very, very hard for him to push her away sufficiently the way he could when he was in the father-role. He was coming to discover that Robin had apparently decided that she would have no more of that, anymore. He found he couldn't blame her, really.
"Because," he started, and then stopped. "Because I /am/ mean," he admitted. "And we're in London again, and I am more irritable than usual. I'm tired, worn-out, and my patience is about gone. I am trying to figure out how to keep us alive when I barely have enough energy to sit upright, and the task of keeping us alive requires infinitely more energy than that." He sighed, and stuck the cigarette in his mouth, leaving it hanging there as he stared flatly out the window
into the perpetual London rain.
I am trying to break your heart, his mind added.
"I have one good nerve left, and /everything/ is on it right now," he said, finally, "whether it means to be or not."
Robin nodded, saying nothing as she stood. This was either her way of saying she understood, or he'd just hurt her feelings. Perhaps a bit of both. Twisting the mental knife in his gut, he noticed that he tended to do that a lot--hurt her feelings, that was.
"I'll go take a bath," she said, evenly but somewhat brightly. "I'll get out of your hair." She turned to offer him a half-smile, something that seemed to say that it was okay, and that she appreciated him explaining why he was acting the way he was acting for once, but something in her eyes was saying that it shouldn't have been that way between them, anyway. "You should go back to sleep, maybe," she advised.
"Perhaps," he said, staring out the window, brain half-heartedly reeling.
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Because he /was/ mean.
Amon's frank words echoed off the walls of Robin's brain. He was mean, wasn't he? He was not a monster, and he wasn't unusually, bitingly cruel--but he wasn't ever very nice, either. Well, to say that would be a lie. He was perfectly capable of being a normal human being when he wanted to.
That was the catch. When he /wanted/ to. And that struck Robin as not being very often at all. Amon seemed to garner secret pleasure out of being curt and intimidating to people he didn't know, and aloof and unsociable to the point of meanness to people he did know. He didn't even seem to ever be friendly to Nagira, and Nagira was his older brother. Robin bit her lip, unable to keep her mind from straying to an inevitable topic whenever she wondered about Amon and how
he treated people--Touko. Had he been that cold and impersonable with the woman he'd been seeing? She couldn't help but wonder. Touko and he had not seemed happy, ever. In a strange twist of fate, Robin had noticed that Touko actually seemed /happier/ when she wasn't around Amon, judging from the few short glimpses of her ex-partner and Touko together
that she'd seen.
The bath water, once so hot it was almost painful to Robin's white skin, had become semi-lukewarm. She knew how to fix that; due to the fact that she was often in the habit of soaking in the bathtub for one to two hours at a time (much to Amon's sometimes irritation; he was in and out of a shower within fifteen minutes). Slipping one of her feet down to the drainplug, she pulled up on it slightly with her toes and watched the water level start to drop as the tub began to drain.
Once the water reached a point that was a few inches lower than it had been to begin with, she plugged the drain again and turned the hot water tap back on.
Why did Amon seem to be so /irritated/ by her, sometimes? Robin suspected it had to do with the fact that sometimes he realized that he'd given up his life to, in a way, follow the whims of a fifteen year old girl, and he got bitter. The fact that he /had/ given up his life as he knew it to help her showed that somewhere, deep within him, there was a huge capacity for kindness and loyalty, but sometimes with the way he acted...it was easy to forget that.
Sometimes she wondered if he saw her as a human being or a chore. Sometimes he acted like she was something that had /happened/ to him, and what was even more horrible was that sometimes she thought he /meant/ to evoke the feelings within her that he evoked. Not that she'd ever come out and told him that he'd blatantly hurt her feelings on a number of occasions, but sometimes, she just got the horrible feeling that it had been his /intention/ to hurt her feelings in
such a manner. Why he would want to do such a thing, Robin did not know. She hoped secretly and fervently that she was just being paranoid, that Amon would never want to intentionally hurt her. He'd saved her life when he'd been ordered directly not to, he'd hidden her away from harm, he'd gone out of his way to help her.
But then, inevitably, a small part of her brain countered: he was going to /kill/ you, once. He Hunted you, once.
But she was still alive, wasn't she? She'd never been able to figure out why. Robin had fully expected to die that night above Nagira's law office, staring down the barrel of Amon's gun. She knew that being Hunted didn't mean she would die, but there had been an awful feeling in her gut that night that she was going to die. Hoping against hope, she'd appealed to the goodness that she was convinced had to be within Amon--the compassion, the pity. She hadn't seen too much of it exhibited by him up until that point, and the look in his eyes gave her no reason to believe that /anything/ she said was going to sway him.
It helped to hope against hope, sometimes. Because not only had Amon lowered his gun, but he'd performed a strange about-face, as well. SOLOMON's most loyal operative in its Japan office, one of their pet killers trained in their own homeland of Europe had turned that night and bit the hand that fed him. He'd bitten it hard. He'd bitten it clean off, Robin thought. Amon's actions were something that SOLOMON had obviously expected out of someone like her, due to how quickly
they'd turned against her. But Amon--Amon had seemed like a SOLOMON-lifer, someone who would kill and kill and kill for the organization until he was old enough and respected enough to come back to the mother office in Italy and sit on the council along with people like Juliano. That would have been the life that Robin would have envisioned for Amon until he'd suddenly and violently changed his destiny.
Now, she wasn't sure where her destiny ended and his began, their fates had become so intertwined. Every day they stayed alive and free from SOLOMON only put them in further over their heads together, only twisted the separate strands of their destinies into a single rope.
Robin's bath was near scalding again, and she turned the water off, sinking down into it with a small sigh.
Nothing was simple, anymore. Not that it had ever been that simple, but it /had/ been simpler once before. Before their separate lives had ended. Now it was all just a big mess. From out somewhere in the hotel room, Robin heard the harsh, electronic beeping of Amon's cell phone, and then his heavy footfalls. It had to have been Nagira; he was the only person who could contact them. Robin twisted around in the water, her thin knees knocking together as she drew them up
and out of the water. She was white, so very white. Would--/could/--anyone ever, one day, look at her and see something beautiful, and not a too-thin, strange, pale girl?
Robin sank down in the bathwater a bit more, her next thought so quiet it was almost lost in the white noise of her brain: could /he/ ever find me beautiful, and not a mere annoyance?
He was knocking on the door and Robin jerked upright in the water reflexively. It was as if he'd somehow intuitively known that she had been thinking about him right then. "Yes?" she called, feeling strange. Amon usually left her alone while she was in the bath unless he was telling her to stop taking her time.
"Close the shower curtain," he said sternly, through the door. "Nagira wants to speak with you, now. Apparently it's /urgent/," he said, sounding vaguely put out, as if anything Nagira would have to say to Robin couldn't possibly be so urgent that it couldn't wait until the girl got out of the bath. "I'm going to come in in a second."
Robin blinked, confused. "Oh." She reached over quickly and grabbed one edge of the shower curtain and pulled it across the metal bar above her with a loud clinking, rattling noise. The bathtub and herself were suddenly shrouded in weird half-darkness, and she sat there unmoving for a millisecond. "Okay," she called, and the door opened, bringing with it a gust of cold air that flooded over the top of the curtain rod, down into Robin's swampy sanctuary.
"Jesus," Amon murmured, right on the other side of the shower curtain, sending a slight thrill through Robin. "Are you trying to cook yourself in here?"
"No," she replied, dumbly, sticking her hand out of the shower curtain, right near the wall, careful not to let any light in. "Um, here." The phone was placed into her hand, and then, much to her shock, Amon did not leave. He stayed right where he was and waited. Obviously, he was waiting for her to be done so he could retreive his phone.
"He-hello?" Robin asked of the phone, unsurely, still a bit distracted by Amon's presence on the other side of the shower curtain.
"Hey, kiddo," Nagira said, cheerfully. "He's standing right there breathing down your neck, isn't he?" he asked immediately afterwards.
"Well, not /exactly/, but...yes," Robin replied, hoping that Amon wasn't listening in on the conversation by way of his Craft.
Nagira had apparently guessed the same exact thing. "Tell that jerk to get out of the bathroom and wait outside for the phone back," he said. "And tell him no fair listening in with that damn super-hearing of his--and make sure you tell him off for hanging out in the bathroom, anyway," Nagira snickered. "Doesn't he have any decency, hanging out in the room while you're bathing?"
Robin couldn't help but turn pink at Nagira's teasing comment. She looked towards the shower curtain, clearing her throat. "Nagira says you need to get out," she said, towards where she knew Amon was standing. "And he says you're not allowed to listen in with your Craft, either."
"And? And?" Nagira piped insistently in her ear. Robin sighed, turning pinker.
"And he wonders if you have any decency because you're in the bathroom while I'm bathing," she added, and that apparently was all she needed to say to chase Amon out without a word. The door closed firmly behind him.
Robin tittered for a moment. "Why did you want to talk to me?" she said into the phone, after the pause.
"You two are going to fly into Iceland tomorrow night," Nagira informed her, without preamble. "I'm going to meet you there."
"/What/?" Robin whispered, sinking into her bath water further, feeling secretive. No /wonder/ he didn't want to tell Amon. Amon would have never allowed it; he would have hung up on Nagira and packed up their things and moved he and Robin somewhere new that very instant. "Amon will be furious. He's not going to let you."
"You forget which one of us is the big brother," Nagira said, matter-of-factly. "You--and he--forget which one of us used to do the beating-the-other-one-up when we were kids. I'm going to do it whether or not Amon /lets/ me. He can not let me all he wants. The fact of the matter is that I'm worried sick about you two and I'm tired of sitting here on my ass in Japan doing nothing, waiting every day for a phone call that one of you is dead--or waiting for the day that I stop /getting/ phone calls."
"Are you going to stay with us?" Robin asked, whispering. She feared that Amon was right outside the door, or worse: that he was sitting across the room, flexing his Craft and intensifying his hearing, growing angrier and angrier by the moment with what he was hearing.
"For a while," Nagira replied. "I can't just pack up and leave Japan forever. I've got responsibilities here. But I can get away for a week or so. Who knows?" he said, his voice sounding suddenly grim, as grim as Robin had ever heard it sound. "It may be the last time I see both of you alive, my favourite witch kid and my baby brother."
Robin shook her head, feeling choked up somewhat. It wasn't like Nagira to show such outward emotion, and she found it made her emotional, as well. "Amon and I are very safe, Nagira," she reassured, although sometimes she wasn't so sure. "We'll be fine, so don't worry about that. It would be nice to see you, though." She blinked, staring at the wall mistily. "It would be nice to see /anyone/. We might as well be dead, Nagira."
She could almost /hear/ him smiling on the other end of the phone line, a million miles away, on a different island. "Aw, cheer up. I let you get all depressed with my mushy, sentimental talk. I know better than to think that you two would be dead--that brother of mine is like a damn cockroach. You look so sad all the time anyway--I can't stand to think that you might be frowning now, because of me. Let Amon do all the frowning, alright? God knows he does enough for all of
us. You concentrate on smiling, kid."
Robin smiled slightly, in spite of herself. "You're in a good mood," she noted, in wonder. Two brothers, like night and day.
"I'm drunk," Nagira replied, and Robin suddenly realized that maybe they weren't as night and day as they always seemed. "Don't worry. I'm gonna meet you two in Iceland tomorrow--whether or not Amon knows it--and then I'm going to help you find that woman, and then I'll get out of your hair. Maybe I can convince you two to go out and do something fun while I'm there, too."
"Amon won't go out, anymore," Robin informed Nagira, and suddenly she was recalling Amsterdam all over again. Was it only a little over a day ago that it had happened, the Hunt at the concert hall? It seemed like so long ago. "It's too dangerous."
Nagira pshawed. "SOLOMON's grip on Iceland is non-existant. The country's only got two hundred-something thousand people in it, Robin; it's so tiny it's not even worth SOLOMON's time. I /don't/ think you guys will have a problem there and by /God/, I'm going to get you out while I'm there. It's what I do best, you know--cause fun to occur."
Robin was smiling fully then, unable to keep herself from feeling jittery with excitement. "Alright. I suppose it'd be fine, then. So, when will we see you?"
"This is where you're going to call Amon back to get the phone from you, and I'm going to work all that out with him. Just you two flying to Iceland, you see. He's not going to know about me, not until he sees me, anyway." Nagira was laughing, then, whisky and cigarettes written all over his voice. "Call him back."
Robin did so, and she was glad that the shower curtain was up not only because she was in the bathtub naked, but because she had a smile on her face that would have immediately made Amon suspicious. He seemed to have a suspicious joy detector or something embedded in his brain.
Tomorrow they would be in Iceland. And tomorrow, they would see Nagira.
She and Nagira could deal with Amon's reaction after it happened.
--------------------
They arrived in London with the coming of dawn. The sun had not even appeared just yet—the sky had gone from the black of night to the eerie grey of pre-dawn. The river Thames stretched out like a great, dark snake, onward. To his irritation, Amon found he could not shake the scent of the sea—his clothes, his hair, his /being/ seemed permeated with the salt water smell. He looked down at his cohort and found that the sea and the light of pre-dawn had stolen all the colour and hue from her being; she was a painted character of a girl in shades of grey and white. He imagined that he looked much the same, only on the darker end of the scale; not so much white, more black.
Robin, in the strange light, looked only half-alive. This disturbed Amon, and he found himself not wanting to look at her until there was more light outside.
His body ached, his head throbbed, his senses switched randomly from being normal to slightly heightened. Amon groaned, mentally. Apparently his body was still reeling from the exertion of the prior night, feeling worn out and misused. Doggedly he went on, although he wanted to do nothing more than lay down where he stood, on the dock, curl into a ball, and go to sleep for a few million years. Archaeologists would dig him up, still intact, still slumbering, and call it
the Second Coming of Christ. Everything else would pass into the dust it started from, whatever and ever, amen.
Amon shook his head slightly to stop it from rambling on, nonsense. Behind him, a very tired and sea-hating Robin trudged along faithfully, bag too heavy for her slight frame. Up, up, up; to something that looked more like civilization and less like a dockyard, and out, out out; to something that looked more like a futuristic transportation booth and less like a phone booth. Amon dialed the operator and asked to be put through to a taxi company. He was, and he was informed that
one would be by shortly. Exiting the phone booth, he discovered Robin sitting on a bench next to the street and sat down next to her, thumping his bag down on the ground (albeit somewhat gently, there were electronics in there). She appeared to be fighting sleep, as well, except in a more outward fashion. Her eyelids sank down repeatedly, only to be jerked back up to stay open.
It made sense that she should be tired; she slept not at all on the trip from Amsterdam to London. Amon suspected it had something to do with her wary watching of the water; something that once she'd started doing, she'd done all night until their arrival.
There was no one about. Five minutes passed. The sun began to rise fully, lightening the sky to a whiter shade of grey. Amon, hands folded in his lap, felt like a zombie. Robin curled up in a ball in an effort to fall asleep, supporting herself.
Half-awake, moderately hung over, and letting the irrational, emotional side of his brain run things for him, Amon reached over with his right arm and drew Robin to him, leaning her head against his shoulder for support. She was stiff at first, startled; and then relaxing thankfully, cuddled against him. She was asleep within two minutes.
Amon sat and wished that he could have firmly stated that the reason why she was leaning against him at the moment cradled in the crook of his arm was that he wanted her to be comfortable while she slept.
He could have firmly stated that fact, but the point of the matter was that even if he convinced anyone else, /he/ would know that he was lying.
--------------------
He was beginning to suspect that perhaps he was bi-polar. Amon contemplated this as they bumped along in the small taxi, Robin once again leaned against him in slumber, once again at the insistence of his arm. His own actions confused him, sometimes, and he knew that they certainly confused the hell out of Robin—and most anyone else that he came into contact with, more than likely.
Frustrated, he'd long ago given up on any denial of his feelings towards the tow-headed witch at his side; at least denial to himself, anyway. Plenty of time had been spent wrestling with the demons in his mind; the guilt, the self-loathing, the bewilderment at having someone so under his skin. Even though it still irked him considerably at times, he'd somewhat come to grips with the fact that he had intense feelings for someone who was ten—strike that, now /eleven/—years younger than him. After a while Amon had realized that the guilt would eat him alive if he let it, and he shoved it away, ignoring it. Nothing he could do—or did—seemed to change his feelings for Robin. They only seemed to intensify the further along they went.
Bi-polarism played into the picture with respects to how Amon acted towards Robin, mostly due to the fact that he was frightened by the intensity of his own emotions. He alternated between treating her like an insignificant speck to being a benevolent older-brother figure; from snapping at her nastily to comforting her. He wanted to grab her, hold her so tightly that it left bruises, memorize the shape of her body, run his hands through her light hair and hold her to him
in such a manner that it would probably be somewhat unpleasant feeling. He'd dropped his life /just like that/ to run off and bind himself to the girl next to him, and that, quite frankly, /scared the hell out of him/. He'd never been that engrossed in something before in his life, let alone a woman.
Let alone a /girl/.
He'd never loved or wanted something so much that thinking about it made him grit his teeth so hard that he thought some of them were beginning to come loose.
He'd never met someone who'd looked down the barrel of his gun and lived because /he could not pull the trigger/.
If Robin was Eve, Amon wondered, did that delegate him to the Adam role? Did Robin expect him to fill that role? He wasn't sure if he was ready for such a thing--or if he would ever be.
As the taxi wound around narrow, slow London roads on its way to a hotel, disturbing thoughts echoed around in Amon's too-tired, semi-malfunctional brain like ricocheting bullets.
---------------------
A hotel. Robin inferred from Amon's choice of lodging that they wouldn't be in London for very long. Or perhaps they would; staying in a hotel was not always an indicator of how long they would stay somewhere. They'd lived out of a hotel room in Paris for nearly two months, Robin nearly going mad with the brusque infamiliarity of it all. (She'd run up a room service bill that would have made any normal person's eyes fall out of their head at the end of that two months; but no, not /Amon/, he'd just looked at it and paid the disgusting amount of money without a sound.) Not that she was hoping that they'd be staying in London long enough to get an actual /lodging/ of some kind--she wasn't very fond of London, or of England for that matter.
Bad memories. Bad SOLOMON memories, more specifically. And plus, she hated the food. And true to the rumour, British people really /did/ have the scariest teeth she'd ever seen in her life. She'd been caught staring, helplessly, at the gnarled teeth of the young man behind the counter at the hotel while he was checking them in, and caught a slight reprimanding look from Amon for it. Obviously her stare had been so pointed that he'd noticed it, which may or may not
have meant that the young man behind the counter had noticed it. They retreived a room key. Amon gruffly declined the assistance of a eager bellboy who wanted to carry their things for them, and then they were off, into the elevator, up to their room.
There weren't too many people about at the early hour, and she and Amon were the only two in the elevator. The flourescent light did little to improve their appearances, Robin noticed from looking at their reflections in some brass panelling. She looked like a girl on her death bed, and Amon looked much a corpse /past/ its death bed.
"We're staying in a hotel?" Robin asked, mostly to break the silence. Amon nodded, minutely.
"I don't expect to be here long," he said, simply. That was that. Silence reigned again.
It did so all the way to the room, which Amon opened with the key, Robin stumbling in ahead of him, hand groping for a light switch. She finally found one, and flipped on a set of lights only to see Amon wince exaggeratedly, walking heavy-footedly over to a couch near a bank of windows along the wall. He tossed his bag onto the floor near the couch in a seemingly uncaring manner and then pulled off his shoes with a exhausted desperation of a man who wants to sleep but has no patience for getting ready for sleep. After the shoe removal Amon simply flopped heavily down upon the
couch and laid there, unmoving. He was still wearing his coat and all, but Robin thought it wise not to say anything since he obviously didn't care much.
Instead, she double-locked the hotel room door behind her and made her way silently to the bed at the other end of the room. She went though the same bag-dropping and shoe-removing ritual that Amon had, but she removed her coat and took down her hair before crawling into the bed, not caring that she was still wearing all her clothing that smelled of the fight in Amsterdam and the sea.
Robin was asleep in short order. She did not know that Amon had been asleep almost from the very second that he'd touched the couch.
--------------------
Nagira Syunji was sitting at a ritsy sushi bar in downtown Tokyo, having lost all interest in the food in front of him. Oddly enough, as he sat and listened to his baby brother's otherworldly monotone rattle on in his ear through the cell phone, Nagira became more interested in his drink and his cigarettes. He became so interested in his drink that it interested him to order another--a stronger one.
He rubbed his eyes and groaned slightly, said eyes flicking over to the window to gaze out the window of the building, four stories up. He imagined his baby brother doing the same across the world, staring vapidly out a window at a significantly more drab outdoor setup. Strangers in a strange land; Robin and Amon in London, /again/. They /really/ hadn't liked it the first time around, and now they were there again, and Nagira could hear all kinds of complete clusterfuck frustration in Amon's voice.
"And so now you're in London again, eh?" he asked the voice on the other side of the world, picking up his drink and taking a swallow. Much better. Much stronger. He lit up a cigarette, looking down at the food in front of him disinterestedly. At this point, he'd be better off having them wrap it to go for him.
"Yes. In London. Again. And we can't stay here long."
Nagira let out a big lungful of smoke, once again looking out at the night sky through the window. On the other side of the world, Amon would be almost in time for afternoon tea--or, at the very least, having just finished lunch. "Well, no shit, kid. I don't understand why /London/ would be such a SOLOMON stronghold, anyway."
"I don't either. But it is, and we can't stay here long. I already pressed our luck once with London and we came the closest to being killed that we've come yet. I don't care to try it again."
"Have you slept?" Nagira asked, out of nowhere. He couldn't help it. Affection, emotion, concern--these things were usually never displayed between the brothers. But ever since Amon had been routinely coming close to death on average once a month, Nagira found himself unable to help but be concerned whenever he got the inevitable phone call--Amon's voice, sounding like a cello string pulled too tight, a voice too ragged, too tired, saying that they'd just run. Again.
"I have," his baby brother replied. "A bit."
"Have you eaten?"
"No. Can't. Not hungry." Nagira heard a sound through the phone that was all too familiar to him, and he couldn't help but smile at how much they were alike, sometimes, even if Amon tried fervently to deny it. "I had room service bring me up a pack of god-awful cigarettes, though."
Still smiling, Nagira spoke. "You had room service go out and get you cigarettes? That's awfully eccentric, even for you."
"I don't particularly care how eccentric they think I am. If I'm paying them this much money for a hotel room, they'd better do jumping jacks if I ask them to, as well as go get me cigarettes."
Nagira chuckled. "I thought they were called fags on that island, brother."
A pause. "I see. I'm /not/ going to call them that. I am, however, going to wonder about what the hell we're going to do now."
Nagira sighed, having been jerked back onto track by Amon's determination. He ground his cigarette out in the sleek metal ashtray on his table and immediately lit up another, taking another large swallow from his drink. At this rate, he'd be strolling into the office about three hours late tomorrow, just late enough for Mika to try to slap him. "They just keep trying to kill you two, but you refuse to go down. As long as whatever you're going to do involves keeping on your
toes, I'd say you'll be okay, kid."
Another pause. "I'm not sure how much longer I can go on being on my toes for." More silence.
Nagira fought the urge to let his jaw drop. Amon? Admitting weakness? Albeit it was probably more than warranted in this situation, but that only frightened Nagira even more. Amon and Robin had been pretty good at staying alive, at staying hidden, at living a life that mostly involved disappearing--but Nagira had often wondered when it was going to start to take its toll, or when something was going to go horribly, horribly wrong. He couldn't /help/ but think those things,
sometimes. And now, the fact that his abnormally stoic, overly-competent baby brother was admitting that he was starting to get worn down, Nagira knew that things were worse than they seemed. Running from SOLOMON hadn't been easy on either Robin or Amon, but Amon, it seemed to Nagira, perhaps had it a bit worse than Robin in some respects. Amon was living a life he didn't want, the life of a witch; which included forsaking all he'd known, unable to control himself or the
circumstances around him, and /still/ not able to come to grips with whatever it was that was happening between him and the young girl he'd sworn (in a fucked up but kind of cute-Amon way) to protect by killing, should he ever think she needed it.
Dare Nagira call it love? He dared to, sometimes, but that usually resulted in Amon hanging up on him. So he stopped daring.
"You just need to keep being careful, that's all," Nagira said, reassuringly. "And you've got Robin to help you with that."
"What help is a girl who's chief concern is running out and, for all intents and purposes, blowing our cover?" Amon asked tinnily, sounding harried. "/This/ kind of thing occurring is why I don't exactly think it's the brightest idea in the world to go out and try to find others. I don't /want/ to find any others."
"Maybe you don't, but she does," Nagira reminded, frowning. "That's something you two need to take care of on your own. And if you can't take care of it, go your separate ways."
"I wasn't asking you to play mediator," Amon snapped, coldly. Nagira let his head loll somewhat, exasperated--was his brother /ever/ going to stop being an emotional mindfield? Or, at the very least, not so much of a damned /porcupine/? "And as for going our separate ways, that's completely out of the question. Robin wouldn't last a day on her own." A pause. "Her powers are growing. I'm not sure when--or /if/--they're going to stop. I need to watch that," Amon said, detachedly. Nagira couldn't help but snort.
"I don't think either one of you would last very long without one another," Nagira found himself saying, somewhat laughingly. Could Amon /really/ sit there and lie to himself so straight-facedly? It was amazing. Nagira wondered if perhaps it was some sort of strange self-hypnosis plan that Amon prescribed to. "Robin's too guileless, and you can't even control your Craft properly. And as
for making sure that Robin doesn't suddenly lose her mind completely and level a small country, if you're /still/ worried about that, you're a fucking /moron/, Amon. I'm not really seeing that happen at this point in time. And even if it did--" here, Nagira couldn't stop himself from getting a jab in, "--you couldn't pull the trigger once. I don't think you could do it the second time, either."
Nagira listened a measurely smugly, a measure worriedly at the stark silence eminating from his earpiece. Either Amon was getting ready to have a complete nuclear meltdown or he was just going to take a moment to stuff it all back inside, and stay silent and stoic about it only to lose sleep over it later. "I don't call you for commentary on my life," Amon said finally, evenly. "I'm calling
you because I need help. And if /I'm/ asking for help then you know I must need it badly."
A waitress came and looked at Nagira's empty glasses, and his plate of full sushi rolls. She silently offered another drink, to which Nagira nodded, and then he covered his mouthpiece momentarily to ask her to package the rolls to go for him. She nodded, smiling, and complied. He went back to his conversation, eyes shut. "As it so happens, I /do/ have some help for you. But I have the feeling you're not going to like it at all."
There was silence and rustling from Amon's end in London, and then Nagira heard murmuring through the earpiece. It sounded backgroundish and very female--Robin. She'd been sleeping when Amon first called, but she was evidentally now awake. "Robin is awake," Amon said into his phone. "I see. Why wouldn't I like it? /Hey/." Amon's voice suddenly sounded a bit more
distant on the last word, as if he were holding the phone away from his ear somewhat. "What are you doing?" he asked, sounding vaguely reprimanding and still somewhat faint. "This isn't a bar in France, you know," he went on, distantly.
Nagira couldn't help but crack a smile and wonder what the hell Robin was doing /now/ to make his baby brother's blood pressure run high. He could hear the faintest of murmurs in the background that must have been Robin's replies to his brother's queries, but he couldn't quite make them out.
"What I do and what you do are two /very/ different things," Amon continued at Robin. More murmuring. "Do as you please, then," Amon replied with vague distaste and resignation, and then came back into Nagira's earpiece fully. "Continue."
"What the hell was that all about?" Nagira had to ask.
"Nothing. Tell me what you've got planned."
"Well, the reason I said you wouldn't like it is because it pertains more to locating other witches than to finding a way for you to get away from SOLOMON, really. Although who knows, perhaps those two are one and the same." Nagira took a deep breath, and went on. "You're going to need to go to Iceland."
"Iceland?" Amon asked, sounding flatly incredulous. He might as well just have asked Nagira if he was fucking joking. "/Iceland/."
"Yes, Iceland. There's a woman there who's kind of like...well, I don't really know what the hell to call her." Nagira thought for a moment. "She's kind of like an international witch phonebook. She's pretty damned connected."
Amon was silent as he probably processed the information. "How is that possible? How does she know what she knows?"
Nagira lit another cigarette and took another drink from new glass the waitress had placed in front of him. "I don't know. No one told me. All I know is that she's supposed to be very, very connected. She probably knows more witches than SOLOMON."
"Is she a witch?"
Nagira laughed somewhat. "From what they tell me, no. No, she's not."
"That sounds rather strange to me."
"Sketchy, you mean," Nagira corrected. "That sounds very sketchy." His food returned, wrapped and boxed in an elaborate plastic affair. He nodded appreciatively at the waitress, and turned his attention back to the phone. "It's legit, though. I checked it out. That's pretty much all I know right now--but I'm going to do some more digging, here, soon, and you should be able to get out of London within the week."
"Make it within a couple days," Amon said, sounding put out. "We won't stay here a week. I'll fly us over to the damned United States before I stay here another week." That statement alone spoke measures, Nagira knew, because Amon and Robin hadn't even considered staying in the States once they were there. They just got across the country and got the hell out because they'd absolutely /hated/ it there, even if they hadn't been hassled by SOLOMON at all while there.
"Let me talk to Robin," Nagira said, suddenly, and Amon sighed, still sounding put out. Clunking; the phone was being handed over, and suddenly Robin's voice: "Hello?"
Nagira smiled at the sound of her voice, the thought of her little presence. "Hey, kiddo. What're you doing to make Amon have a heart attack now?"
"Um." Robin tittered slightly, and exhaled somewhat. "...I'm smoking."
Nagira let out an outright laugh, picturing Robin smoking. Amon had informed him that Robin had dabbled with smoking a couple of times while in France, none much to Amon's liking, but as long as Amon was an on-again-off-again-usually-due-to stress-smoker, he couldn't really complain, now could he? "Hey, those things are bad for you, you know," Nagira commented, finding the whole thing hilarious.
"I know," Robin replied, sounding cowed. "I guess I just like to do it every once in a while. What's Amon talking about Iceland for?" she asked, suddenly changing the subject.
"You two are probably going to be going there within the week," Nagira informed her. "I've caught wind of a woman there whom I know that at least /you/ would be interested to talk to. She could probably steer you in the right direction of other witches."
"Really?" Robin sounded glad; exhausted, but glad. "That's great. Thank you, Nagira. We've never been to Iceland, before."
"It's cold, I hear. And strange, as well," Nagira said.
"Well, as long as it's not London, I think we'll be fine," Robin replied.
Nagira smiled. "I think you two will be fine, anyway."
--------------------
Amon hung up the phone a few minutes later, setting it on the table next to his laptop. He turned, frowning, to look at Robin, who was perched in a chair next to him, arms around her knees, cigarette freshly extinguished in the glass tray on the table. She, like him, was wearing the same clothes that she'd been wearing yesterday, and both were probably in desperate need
of bathing. She, unlike him, was probably hungry.
He'd deal with that in a minute. He grabbed the pack of cigarettes off the table and shook one out, sticking it in his lips and lighting it. Sighing, he extended the pack to Robin and shook one out, and she reached a slender hand over and took it.
"I'll let it slip this one time," he said, not looking at her as she lit the cigarette, "because we're in London. Next time I catch you smoking I am going to cloud up and rain all over your parade."
Robin raised an eyebrow at him inquisitively. "I would hardly call this a parade."
"It's a figure of speech."
"I know. But it's not a very good parade, is it?"
Amon sighed. "No. No it's not. But it still doesn't change the fact that I am not going to let you smoke." He took a drag. "It's extremely bad for you--not to mention it's not very becoming of a fifteen year old girl to have such a habit."
"But you're--"
"I'm sure you've heard the phrase 'Do as I say, not as I do'," Amon countered before Robin could get her full, quiet protest out of her mouth. Never mind that he was a hypocrite. They were in London again and his mood was foul, and, as usual, he was taking it out on /her/, the one person who probably deserved it the least. Amon mentally stabbed himself in the stomach.
"I have," she replied, after a while. She looked down at her toes and curled them back and forth. "I don't really think it matters in this situation, anymore," she added, quietly.
"I still think it does." Amon fixed her with a /stare/. "Why are you being difficult?" he asked, pointedly, icily.
She continued to look at her toes, curling. The cigarette dangled from her hand. "I'm capable of making my own decisions," she murmured, steel underneath the soft whisper. "Why are you being mean?" she added, countering his comment about being difficult.
Amon was taken aback by her question, her quiet insinuation. In her quiet, Robin-way, she had just done the equivalent of calling him an asshole--which he deserved, he knew. Not that he agreed with her smoking any more or less, but there wasn't really much he could do about it.
They were partners in this whole messy nightmare, not father and daughter. And being partners made it very, very hard for him to push her away sufficiently the way he could when he was in the father-role. He was coming to discover that Robin had apparently decided that she would have no more of that, anymore. He found he couldn't blame her, really.
"Because," he started, and then stopped. "Because I /am/ mean," he admitted. "And we're in London again, and I am more irritable than usual. I'm tired, worn-out, and my patience is about gone. I am trying to figure out how to keep us alive when I barely have enough energy to sit upright, and the task of keeping us alive requires infinitely more energy than that." He sighed, and stuck the cigarette in his mouth, leaving it hanging there as he stared flatly out the window
into the perpetual London rain.
I am trying to break your heart, his mind added.
"I have one good nerve left, and /everything/ is on it right now," he said, finally, "whether it means to be or not."
Robin nodded, saying nothing as she stood. This was either her way of saying she understood, or he'd just hurt her feelings. Perhaps a bit of both. Twisting the mental knife in his gut, he noticed that he tended to do that a lot--hurt her feelings, that was.
"I'll go take a bath," she said, evenly but somewhat brightly. "I'll get out of your hair." She turned to offer him a half-smile, something that seemed to say that it was okay, and that she appreciated him explaining why he was acting the way he was acting for once, but something in her eyes was saying that it shouldn't have been that way between them, anyway. "You should go back to sleep, maybe," she advised.
"Perhaps," he said, staring out the window, brain half-heartedly reeling.
--------------------
Because he /was/ mean.
Amon's frank words echoed off the walls of Robin's brain. He was mean, wasn't he? He was not a monster, and he wasn't unusually, bitingly cruel--but he wasn't ever very nice, either. Well, to say that would be a lie. He was perfectly capable of being a normal human being when he wanted to.
That was the catch. When he /wanted/ to. And that struck Robin as not being very often at all. Amon seemed to garner secret pleasure out of being curt and intimidating to people he didn't know, and aloof and unsociable to the point of meanness to people he did know. He didn't even seem to ever be friendly to Nagira, and Nagira was his older brother. Robin bit her lip, unable to keep her mind from straying to an inevitable topic whenever she wondered about Amon and how
he treated people--Touko. Had he been that cold and impersonable with the woman he'd been seeing? She couldn't help but wonder. Touko and he had not seemed happy, ever. In a strange twist of fate, Robin had noticed that Touko actually seemed /happier/ when she wasn't around Amon, judging from the few short glimpses of her ex-partner and Touko together
that she'd seen.
The bath water, once so hot it was almost painful to Robin's white skin, had become semi-lukewarm. She knew how to fix that; due to the fact that she was often in the habit of soaking in the bathtub for one to two hours at a time (much to Amon's sometimes irritation; he was in and out of a shower within fifteen minutes). Slipping one of her feet down to the drainplug, she pulled up on it slightly with her toes and watched the water level start to drop as the tub began to drain.
Once the water reached a point that was a few inches lower than it had been to begin with, she plugged the drain again and turned the hot water tap back on.
Why did Amon seem to be so /irritated/ by her, sometimes? Robin suspected it had to do with the fact that sometimes he realized that he'd given up his life to, in a way, follow the whims of a fifteen year old girl, and he got bitter. The fact that he /had/ given up his life as he knew it to help her showed that somewhere, deep within him, there was a huge capacity for kindness and loyalty, but sometimes with the way he acted...it was easy to forget that.
Sometimes she wondered if he saw her as a human being or a chore. Sometimes he acted like she was something that had /happened/ to him, and what was even more horrible was that sometimes she thought he /meant/ to evoke the feelings within her that he evoked. Not that she'd ever come out and told him that he'd blatantly hurt her feelings on a number of occasions, but sometimes, she just got the horrible feeling that it had been his /intention/ to hurt her feelings in
such a manner. Why he would want to do such a thing, Robin did not know. She hoped secretly and fervently that she was just being paranoid, that Amon would never want to intentionally hurt her. He'd saved her life when he'd been ordered directly not to, he'd hidden her away from harm, he'd gone out of his way to help her.
But then, inevitably, a small part of her brain countered: he was going to /kill/ you, once. He Hunted you, once.
But she was still alive, wasn't she? She'd never been able to figure out why. Robin had fully expected to die that night above Nagira's law office, staring down the barrel of Amon's gun. She knew that being Hunted didn't mean she would die, but there had been an awful feeling in her gut that night that she was going to die. Hoping against hope, she'd appealed to the goodness that she was convinced had to be within Amon--the compassion, the pity. She hadn't seen too much of it exhibited by him up until that point, and the look in his eyes gave her no reason to believe that /anything/ she said was going to sway him.
It helped to hope against hope, sometimes. Because not only had Amon lowered his gun, but he'd performed a strange about-face, as well. SOLOMON's most loyal operative in its Japan office, one of their pet killers trained in their own homeland of Europe had turned that night and bit the hand that fed him. He'd bitten it hard. He'd bitten it clean off, Robin thought. Amon's actions were something that SOLOMON had obviously expected out of someone like her, due to how quickly
they'd turned against her. But Amon--Amon had seemed like a SOLOMON-lifer, someone who would kill and kill and kill for the organization until he was old enough and respected enough to come back to the mother office in Italy and sit on the council along with people like Juliano. That would have been the life that Robin would have envisioned for Amon until he'd suddenly and violently changed his destiny.
Now, she wasn't sure where her destiny ended and his began, their fates had become so intertwined. Every day they stayed alive and free from SOLOMON only put them in further over their heads together, only twisted the separate strands of their destinies into a single rope.
Robin's bath was near scalding again, and she turned the water off, sinking down into it with a small sigh.
Nothing was simple, anymore. Not that it had ever been that simple, but it /had/ been simpler once before. Before their separate lives had ended. Now it was all just a big mess. From out somewhere in the hotel room, Robin heard the harsh, electronic beeping of Amon's cell phone, and then his heavy footfalls. It had to have been Nagira; he was the only person who could contact them. Robin twisted around in the water, her thin knees knocking together as she drew them up
and out of the water. She was white, so very white. Would--/could/--anyone ever, one day, look at her and see something beautiful, and not a too-thin, strange, pale girl?
Robin sank down in the bathwater a bit more, her next thought so quiet it was almost lost in the white noise of her brain: could /he/ ever find me beautiful, and not a mere annoyance?
He was knocking on the door and Robin jerked upright in the water reflexively. It was as if he'd somehow intuitively known that she had been thinking about him right then. "Yes?" she called, feeling strange. Amon usually left her alone while she was in the bath unless he was telling her to stop taking her time.
"Close the shower curtain," he said sternly, through the door. "Nagira wants to speak with you, now. Apparently it's /urgent/," he said, sounding vaguely put out, as if anything Nagira would have to say to Robin couldn't possibly be so urgent that it couldn't wait until the girl got out of the bath. "I'm going to come in in a second."
Robin blinked, confused. "Oh." She reached over quickly and grabbed one edge of the shower curtain and pulled it across the metal bar above her with a loud clinking, rattling noise. The bathtub and herself were suddenly shrouded in weird half-darkness, and she sat there unmoving for a millisecond. "Okay," she called, and the door opened, bringing with it a gust of cold air that flooded over the top of the curtain rod, down into Robin's swampy sanctuary.
"Jesus," Amon murmured, right on the other side of the shower curtain, sending a slight thrill through Robin. "Are you trying to cook yourself in here?"
"No," she replied, dumbly, sticking her hand out of the shower curtain, right near the wall, careful not to let any light in. "Um, here." The phone was placed into her hand, and then, much to her shock, Amon did not leave. He stayed right where he was and waited. Obviously, he was waiting for her to be done so he could retreive his phone.
"He-hello?" Robin asked of the phone, unsurely, still a bit distracted by Amon's presence on the other side of the shower curtain.
"Hey, kiddo," Nagira said, cheerfully. "He's standing right there breathing down your neck, isn't he?" he asked immediately afterwards.
"Well, not /exactly/, but...yes," Robin replied, hoping that Amon wasn't listening in on the conversation by way of his Craft.
Nagira had apparently guessed the same exact thing. "Tell that jerk to get out of the bathroom and wait outside for the phone back," he said. "And tell him no fair listening in with that damn super-hearing of his--and make sure you tell him off for hanging out in the bathroom, anyway," Nagira snickered. "Doesn't he have any decency, hanging out in the room while you're bathing?"
Robin couldn't help but turn pink at Nagira's teasing comment. She looked towards the shower curtain, clearing her throat. "Nagira says you need to get out," she said, towards where she knew Amon was standing. "And he says you're not allowed to listen in with your Craft, either."
"And? And?" Nagira piped insistently in her ear. Robin sighed, turning pinker.
"And he wonders if you have any decency because you're in the bathroom while I'm bathing," she added, and that apparently was all she needed to say to chase Amon out without a word. The door closed firmly behind him.
Robin tittered for a moment. "Why did you want to talk to me?" she said into the phone, after the pause.
"You two are going to fly into Iceland tomorrow night," Nagira informed her, without preamble. "I'm going to meet you there."
"/What/?" Robin whispered, sinking into her bath water further, feeling secretive. No /wonder/ he didn't want to tell Amon. Amon would have never allowed it; he would have hung up on Nagira and packed up their things and moved he and Robin somewhere new that very instant. "Amon will be furious. He's not going to let you."
"You forget which one of us is the big brother," Nagira said, matter-of-factly. "You--and he--forget which one of us used to do the beating-the-other-one-up when we were kids. I'm going to do it whether or not Amon /lets/ me. He can not let me all he wants. The fact of the matter is that I'm worried sick about you two and I'm tired of sitting here on my ass in Japan doing nothing, waiting every day for a phone call that one of you is dead--or waiting for the day that I stop /getting/ phone calls."
"Are you going to stay with us?" Robin asked, whispering. She feared that Amon was right outside the door, or worse: that he was sitting across the room, flexing his Craft and intensifying his hearing, growing angrier and angrier by the moment with what he was hearing.
"For a while," Nagira replied. "I can't just pack up and leave Japan forever. I've got responsibilities here. But I can get away for a week or so. Who knows?" he said, his voice sounding suddenly grim, as grim as Robin had ever heard it sound. "It may be the last time I see both of you alive, my favourite witch kid and my baby brother."
Robin shook her head, feeling choked up somewhat. It wasn't like Nagira to show such outward emotion, and she found it made her emotional, as well. "Amon and I are very safe, Nagira," she reassured, although sometimes she wasn't so sure. "We'll be fine, so don't worry about that. It would be nice to see you, though." She blinked, staring at the wall mistily. "It would be nice to see /anyone/. We might as well be dead, Nagira."
She could almost /hear/ him smiling on the other end of the phone line, a million miles away, on a different island. "Aw, cheer up. I let you get all depressed with my mushy, sentimental talk. I know better than to think that you two would be dead--that brother of mine is like a damn cockroach. You look so sad all the time anyway--I can't stand to think that you might be frowning now, because of me. Let Amon do all the frowning, alright? God knows he does enough for all of
us. You concentrate on smiling, kid."
Robin smiled slightly, in spite of herself. "You're in a good mood," she noted, in wonder. Two brothers, like night and day.
"I'm drunk," Nagira replied, and Robin suddenly realized that maybe they weren't as night and day as they always seemed. "Don't worry. I'm gonna meet you two in Iceland tomorrow--whether or not Amon knows it--and then I'm going to help you find that woman, and then I'll get out of your hair. Maybe I can convince you two to go out and do something fun while I'm there, too."
"Amon won't go out, anymore," Robin informed Nagira, and suddenly she was recalling Amsterdam all over again. Was it only a little over a day ago that it had happened, the Hunt at the concert hall? It seemed like so long ago. "It's too dangerous."
Nagira pshawed. "SOLOMON's grip on Iceland is non-existant. The country's only got two hundred-something thousand people in it, Robin; it's so tiny it's not even worth SOLOMON's time. I /don't/ think you guys will have a problem there and by /God/, I'm going to get you out while I'm there. It's what I do best, you know--cause fun to occur."
Robin was smiling fully then, unable to keep herself from feeling jittery with excitement. "Alright. I suppose it'd be fine, then. So, when will we see you?"
"This is where you're going to call Amon back to get the phone from you, and I'm going to work all that out with him. Just you two flying to Iceland, you see. He's not going to know about me, not until he sees me, anyway." Nagira was laughing, then, whisky and cigarettes written all over his voice. "Call him back."
Robin did so, and she was glad that the shower curtain was up not only because she was in the bathtub naked, but because she had a smile on her face that would have immediately made Amon suspicious. He seemed to have a suspicious joy detector or something embedded in his brain.
Tomorrow they would be in Iceland. And tomorrow, they would see Nagira.
She and Nagira could deal with Amon's reaction after it happened.
