They found him outside, near the arrivals and departures car driveways, anger radiating off him in almost tangible waves. The wind was cold and fast and it whipped around them carelessly, whipped around all other pedestrians carelessly. Nagira wasted no time in walking up to his brother, undaunted by the anger-forcefield.
"Nice to see you, too," he started it all off as Robin came up behind him, timidly, taking great care to remain mostly hidden behind Nagira as he spoke. Amon said nothing. Nagira made a little psh noise and extracted a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket--that ridiculous white coat, apparently he thought it well enough suited to the biting wind--and held it in his hand for a moment, uselessly. "So, that's it? You're just never going to speak again? That's very wise and mature of you, Amon." He turned to Robin with a grin, and Robin wondered how anyone, even Nagira, could brush Amon's intensity off so easily. "Wouldn't you agree, Robin?"
Amon finally looked at Nagira; a start. His face was calmer, now; less of the angry mask, but his eyes spoke murder. "I don't believe you." That was all he had to say, apparently.
Nagira scoffed, digging in his other pocket--presumably for a lighter. "And why not? You've known me long enough now to know that I'm just full of surprises."
"Have you become so full of surprises that there's no room left for a brain?" Amon snarled in return, apparently tired of being semi-civil. "Think about it if you can, Nagira. If SOLOMON's paying attention to you--which they probably are, considering you're my brother, then they're more than likely going to wonder why you suddenly disappeared off to Iceland." Amon's voice was still a snarl, albeit a low snarl, leaning in close to Nagira as he spoke. Robin, meanwhile, was still pretending like she didn't exist. "They're going to think, and they're going to pull out their little maps and their little information reports and they're going to start putting the puzzle together. They're going to look at the fact that Robin and I probably just fled the Continent, to the best of their knowledge, all of about three days ago, and then they're going to look and notice that we haven't been spotted or caught in Iceland yet." Amon drew back for a moment, teeth clenched; Robin could tell that from the way his jaw was set. "They're going to put it together, Nagira," Amon reaffirmed, leaning back in. "And then you, me, and her are going to be as you would probably put it, Nagira, in a world of shit."
Nagira didn't even seem ruffled by Amon's tirade, and merely shrugged, attemtping in vain to light a cigarette in the strong wind. Finally, after a great deal of hand-cupping he got it lit, and exhaled a cloud of smoke with satisfaction. "Not likely. SOLOMON's not interested in me in the least, for the most part. I've been a good little boy, lately. And I didn't fly directly into Iceland. I'm not a moron, Amon." He laughed a little, nursing his cigarette once more. "You forget that I'm just as good at being Secret Agent Man as you are. I think it's in our blood."
Silence.
"I think you're overreacting," Nagira said, non-chalantly, and then looked over to Robin, who wondered why her invisible disguise wasn't working. "Wouldn't you agree?"
"Yes, do ask her," Amon snapped. "Since Robin apparently thinks this whole thing is just one big game, I'd be fascinated to hear her take on the situation and my overreacting. The next time our lives are in dire danger, I think I shall be very calm about it and let her handle it, since she seems to want to handle everything else either with or without my knowledge."
Robin's throat constricted and her stomach felt leaden. "Amon, I didn't mean to--"
"Robin, there are a great many things that you shouldn't mean to do, and furthermore, shouldn't do at all. Taking chances with our lives is one of them. I don't know about you, but I've worked too long and too hard at staying alive to die." He looked over at her for the first time since he'd begun addressing her; eyes hard, tone cutting. "But this isn't anything new to you, now is it? Haven't you heard these words come out of my mouth before, in various guises? And as usual I find myself wondering why I've even wasted my breath because it all just seems to go in one ear and out--"
"Hey, damnit," Nagira interrupted, grabbing his brother's shoulder, effectively forcing Amon to look him in the eyes. "Calm down. If you're going to let one of us have it, let it be me. This whole damned thing was my idea and I more or less dragged her into it. I was going to do it anyway, regardless of whether or not she knew about it or if she even agreed with it. So quit being a bully." Nagira made a face then, a weird kind of half-confused-half-amused face. "And quit acting like her dad."
Robin was thankful for Nagira interrupting Amon's angry tirade on her behalf. Unobtrusively, she cleared her throat, trying to loosen the gunk there. She was very thankful that Nagira had interrupted and grabbed Amon's leash, reeling him back in--she wasn't sure how much more of his speech she could have taken before she'd started to cry. For that, she felt like an immature, irresponsible little girl but she found that she couldn't help it. The emotion had been welling up within her no matter how she'd been trying to fight it; with every single word more that Amon had spoken she'd felt her despair level growing. Had he ever outrightly berated her like that before? Robin couldn't recall, but even if he had--what had just been happening had hurt like it was the first time.
And what was worse, she feared, she'd probably just done substantial damage to the benevolently symbiotic relationship that she had with Amon. It'd been getting somewhat better with time; their ways of interacting had improved, their understanding of each other, their level of trust and faith in one another had increased. Robin feared that she'd just burned half of the bridge that had been slowly building its way across the gap between them. She felt like she'd just burned half of it--and it hadn't even really been half-completed to begin with.
"She should've known better," was all Amon said, after a brief silence. To Robin's surprise, Nagira's face went from calm and shadow-smiling to taut and slightly angry.
"Hey. I said knock it off," Nagira said firmly, and to Robin's even greater surprise, Amon obeyed.
Truly strange dynamic between two brothers, indeed.
--------------------
The hotel was nice, very nice. Not, by any means, the nicest one that she'd ever stayed in since the whole life of running had begun, but very nice just the same. It was pleasant in a strange way, just as everything she'd seen so far in the odd country had been. During the taxi ride to the hotel Robin had spent most of her time staring out the window over Nagira's shoulder (having found herself, by virtue of being small, smashed into the middle of the seat between Amon and Nagira--who were large enough to where they would never in a million years have been able to fit into the middle seat). Everything was bright, friendly, almost glowing in the cold, brisk air. The city seemed alive and bustling, despite its relatively small size. Robin had also noticed, with some amusement, that almost everyone she saw through the car window was some manner of fair-haired and pale-skinned, and on the shorter end of the height spectrum. Amon and Nagira, by contrast, being dark and tall, stuck out like twin sore thumbs.
Nagira had arrived in Iceland before them, and had booked rooms for them already, having known of their arrival. Their room conjoined his, and was decently-sized. Thankfully Nagira had ensured that their room had two beds--something that Robin had worried about from the moment they'd walked in the door to the lobby. It would have been just like Nagira to tease them by only getting one bed; and then what was worse was that Amon would never take the bed and let Robin take the couch if there was only one bed. He always let Robin have it and the sight of Amon's tall, large frame scrunched up on hotel sofas was almost heart-breaking to her. She doubted he could have possibly slept well on them and had even ventured once to ask him, but naturally he'd denied any type of discomfort or annoyance. Once, she'd discovered that he'd moved from the couch to the floor during the course of his dawn-time sleeping, and she'd known right away that he'd lied; that sleeping on the couches obviously bothered him a lot if he preferred the floor to the couch.
Robin's cheeks coloured suddenly. They'd shared a bed, two or three times, but it had been due to the fact that she'd crawled into his in sudden bouts of fear or sleeplessness. Miraculously, Amon had allowed it every time--he'd startled awake, of course, but then just looked at her on the opposite side of the bed and gone back to sleep. Never touching, never sleeping within extremely close proximity of each other--just one on either side of the bed, Robin taking comfort from the simple fact that he was nearby and nothing could happen to her.
"Robin." Nagira's voice snapped into her consciousness, startling her. She tore her eyes from the blank spot in the room she'd been staring at as she'd let her mind wander and turned to face him, a trifle embarassed.
"Yes?" she asked moving towards him as she spoke. He smiled at her.
"Sorry to interrupt your zoning-out time, but I was wondering if you were hungry at all." He grinned at the way her eyes seemed to suddenly light up. "I'm getting pretty hungry myself and I was going to call up some room service---you should take a look at some of the stuff on the hotel menu. I don't think I've even heard of some of it before."
"Never mind that it's completely unpronounceable," Amon's voice echoed in from his brother's room, through the open double-door. "If you'd been planning on magically showing up here, aniki-san, you could've at least learned some of this damn language."
Nagira rolled his eyes theatrically at Robin, shrugging. "I think he's going to hate us forever," he said in annoyance. "He could, at the very least, quit pouting. Whatever."
Robin chose not to comment, but her mind found it odd that Amon had refered to Nagira as 'aniki-san'. True, it meant older brother--one of the many ways to say it--but it was usually reserved for an older twin brother. Perhaps, Robin thought, Amon was cryptically acknowledging to Nagira that they were more alike than Amon sometimes let on. She followed Nagira back into his own room, where they discovered Amon sitting down in an overstuffed chair, apparently trying to make heads or tails of the menu with its long, Icelandic dish-names.
"So sorry, Oou-sama," Nagira gushed, upon re-entering the room, dropping suddenly into an overly-dramatic bow in front of his younger brother, who merely looked up with a disinterested frown. "You may beat me for my negligence to make your life easier." Nagira stood up straight, and made a little face at Amon, who ignored it and looked back down to the menu. "That's why everything is in English too, because I'm assuming that a lot of people have difficulty understanding the language."
"Perhaps," Amon said shortly. He had said a total of about four words to Robin since the airport and it was starting to make her a bit nervous. She suspected that Amon was doing it purposefully, to let her feel the full extent of his displeasure with her. Bravely, she walked up to him and peered over his shoulder at the menu, squinting somewhat. She needed her glasses sometimes to read--it depended largely on the lighting of the room.
"Halibut soup?" Robin murmured, mostly to herself. "That sounds like it could be pretty good."
"Any particular reason why you must hang over my shoulder?" Amon replied, brusquely.
"To read the menu, since you're the one holding it," Nagira answered for Robin, coolly.
Tense silence ensued. Robin, hurt at how Amon was acting; Amon irritated with both people in the room and the language; Nagira, irritated at how much of a brat his little brother could be. There was complete silence between all three of them, the only sounds being Nagira smoking as he sat in the overstuffed chair opposite Amon.
"I want the marinated herring," Robin announced suddenly, her hurt and feelings of sadness temporarily displaced by the fact that the food on the menu sounded amazing. "It sounds delicious." She left her spot behind Amon and looked about, in vain, for another chair to sit in. There was a small table with four chairs on the other side of the room, but that was far away, and for some strange reason Robin was suddenly inexplicably lazy. There was a couch underneath the window, with a large, low table in front of it, but that obviously wasn't going to be very easily dragged or moved. Nagira patted the wide, cushioned arm of his chair, suddenly, looking at Robin, and she trotted over and seated herself on it. "It has onion, and laurel leaf, and sugar, and honey, and curry, and egg, and apple, and--"
"Whoa, there, killer." Nagira was laughing slightly, and Robin looked at him, mildly bewildered. She looked over to Amon to discover that even he had eased his bad mood enough to crinkle the corner of his eyes in amusement. "He is trying to starve you, isn't he?" Nagira asked of Robin, who shook her head, embarassed by her vocal cravings for food. She couldn't help it if it sounded absolutely delicious, now could she?
"The way she eats eats a hole right through my pocket," Amon commented suddenly, voice sardonic. Robin's ears perked--could Amon's mood be improving?
Nagira looked up at Robin through a cloud of white-grey cigarette smoke, smiling at her, his face seeming much older than Amon's--although that was perhaps because his smile lines were much more prominent from frequent use. They were there, visible, even when he wasn't smiling, making him look a few years older than he really was. Amon had no smile lines, no lines around his eyes, no lines anywhere on his face.
The mask was perfect.
"I," the smile-lined man began, "am going to have the crumbed flounder. That sounded pretty good to me."
Robin felt her mood start to lift, even if Amon was still being bristly and angry with everyone and everything. Nagira's moods were infectuous--if he was nervous, so were you. If he was serious and down-to-task, so were you. If he was happy, so were you. One couldn't help it, or at least Robin couldn't. "I thought about ordering that," Robin said, venturing a tentative smile back. "It did sound good."
"Good food improves moods, you know," he said to her, grinding out a cigarette in the tray on the chair arm that Robin was not occupying. He was saying it to her, but his words were really meant more for his brother across from them, Robin thought.
-------------------
Moods had improved slightly by the time they'd finished eating. Nagira had taken his sweet time with his food, even pausing in the middle of eating to take cigarette breaks. Robin, as per usual, had eaten as quickly and voraciously as she could while still being polite (prompting several amused run-of-the-mill "growing teenage girl" comments from Nagira). Amon had more of picked at his food (he hadn't been eating much lately, she'd noticed, but then again, he never seemed to eat very much anyway), leaving more than half a plate full with uneaten food.
At some point after dinner, the older and more free-wheeling of the brothers had discovered that his room had a small cabinet and fridge stocked with several different kinds of alcohol, and decided that after-dinner drinks were in order. Amon, more than likely still smarting from his lapse into drink in Amsterdam, was adamant about his refusal of drinking anything. At first, at least. After a while it had become fairly obvious to Amon--and Robin, as well, who was watching the whole semi-argument unfold--that Nagira was never going to give it up until he shared a drink with his brother. Eventually Amon begrudgingly agreed to have a drink, and Nagira called room service up with coffee.
Robin watched the free-wheeling brother pouring some type of alcohol into two cups of black coffee while she nursed her own cup of non-alcoholic coffee. He returned, smiling widely, and handed Amon his cup. Nagira was Nagira--he was not showing any signs of wear or tear, which amazed Robin slightly. She figured that he would have been fainted dead asleep already due to time difference but apparently time was of no importance to him, even though she was fairly sure that he'd probably been awake for close to 48 hours by that point.
"Try this, Robin," he piped suddenly, thrusting his mug at her. She took it from him warily. "It'll put hair on your chest."
"Just what she needs," Amon remarked into his cup, which, for all his protests, he appeared to be working right along on.
Robin sipped and pulled a face not only at the taste, but the smell also. She handed the mug back to Nagira, a sour aftertaste lingering in her mouth. As Nagira laughed at her, she sought to remove said aftertaste by taking a drink from her own coffee. "What is that?" Robin asked, after she'd annihilated the aftertaste to her satisfaction.
"Irish coffee," Nagira replied cheerfully, to which he was rewarded with a blank look from the girl next to him.
"Jameson Irish whisky and coffee," Amon informed her, speaking into his cup once more. Robin's face was still somewhat blank; she didn't know one type of alcohol from the next, except for perhaps wine.
A few minutes later, it was noticed by older brother that baby brother needed a refill. More coffee was brought up by room service and Amon was once again connected to his cup after another mixing from Nagira. Vaguely, Robin found herself wondering when Amon had started to drink so much. Not that he'd been drinking a lot lately, but Robin couldn't ever really recall having seen him drink anything before. Searching her brain, she remembered seeing him in Harry's often, what seemed like so long ago--he had almost invariably had a drink in front of him, hadn't he? And Robin had stayed with Nagira long enough to know that he certainly wasn't a stranger to having a few drinks every day, as well as working overtime at polluting his lungs.
The sound of Nagira's deep, jovial voice broke into her pseudo-reverie. "A little secret," he began, looking down into his own coffee cup, now almost empty. "Amon's got a weakness for whisky. Scotch, too. As a matter of fact, if I remember correctly...it is a bottle of scotch you buy yourself every year on your birthday, isn't it?" he asked of Amon, who merely nodded.
"Robin knows about that already," he added to the nod, a few seconds later. He was staring down into his mug as if he was wondering what it would look like if it had liquid in it, again--for it was empty, again.
"He also gets chatty when he's drunk." Nagira was grinning like the Cheshire cat.
Amon grumbled slightly and stood abruptly. Robin had thought for sure that Amon was going to go into their room and not emerge again, having gone to bed, but instead he walked over to the cabinet that Nagira had been producing alcohol from. "She's aware of that, as well." He began to shift the bottles around, looking at them. "How do you like that," he muttered, mostly to himself, it seemed. "Gin but no tonic. That's a classic."
Robin blinked, mildly dazed. The situation felt surreal.
Nagira didn't seem fazed in the least; but then again he often didn't seem fazed by much. Everything rolled off him, like he had a repellent coat. "Another little secret: this is why he and I don't hang out together more often. One of us or both of us usually ends up stinking drunk."
Amon was inspecting a particular bottle. "There's ginger ale. And whisky."
"Ah, a Horse's Neck," Nagira said, nodding sagely. "If you're going to make yourself one of those, why don't you make me one too, buddy?" His coffee cup, too, was empty now. As Amon went about preparing drinks (the young girl's mind reeled), Robin took the opportunity to turn to Nagira and catch his attention by clearing her throat. The lawyer looked over at her with his best 'how may I help you' look.
She tried not to watch Amon out of sheer fascination and instead forced herself to rivet all her attention onto Nagira. "When will we go to meet this contact, here?" she asked, and was rewarded with a look of amusement.
"Little Robin the taskmaster! Probably tomorrow," he said, accepting his drink from Amon. The ex-Hunter, meanwhile, sat back down in his chair with his own drink, and immediately began to work on draining it. Robin didn't know much about alcohol and how much it took to get a man of Amon's size drunk, but she did know that it probably wouldn't take long in any case with how he was drinking. "We're going to have to go a bit outside the city, here, so it'll be a bit of a day trip. Or, perhaps, depending on how he and I are feeling in the morning," here, he indicated Amon, "a late-afternoon trip."
Robin digested this information, sipping her coffee. "Won't that be a bit dangerous? To go out on a trip, so far?"
"Not really," Nagira said non-chalantly. "The country's not very big, and it sure as hell isn't very populated. Once we get out of the city, we probably won't be seeing much in the way of civilization."
"I think she's talking about interference from SOLOMON," Amon interjected. A moment later he was digging in a pocket, searching for something. His hand emerged--the pack of cigarettes, now looking considerably worse for the wear.
Nagira shook his head, reaching for his own cigarette pack. "Not likely. This place is like the Land SOLOMON Forgot. From what information I could get my hands on, they haven't set foot into this country--at least not officially--since 1982." He nodded at the looks on both Robin and Amon's faces. "Yeah. That's a long damn time ago, FYI."
Amon lit a cigarette and looked over at Robin over it quickly, his eyes flashing something that was halfway in between guilt and a warning. "Huh. Not officially, anyway," he murmured, watching the smoke spiral in the air in front of him. Smoke from Nagira's freshly lit cigarette began to mingle with Amon's smoke as well, and Robin thought that at that point, it didn't matter if there was a cigarette in her mouth or not--she was smoking by simply just being in the room with the brothers.
"I wonder why that is," Amon mused out loud--presumably as to why SOLOMON had skipped over the strange island in recent years.
"Maybe they don't like the language, either," Robin suggested, one of her rare forays into humour. The humour seemed lost on Amon but Nagira cracked a small smile.
Amon still looked serious, staring into space, thinking. It was as if he hadn't heard Robin's comment at all. "Or they just don't want anyone to know that they've been here. Luring people into thinking it's safe when it's not. That seems just like something SOLOMON would do."
"You're fucking paranoid," Nagira said, dismissively.
"You'd be fucking paranoid too," Amon countered flatly, the obscenity sounding slightly to Robin, especially coming from Amon's mouth. True, he swore; but hardly ever that particular word. And Robin had noticed that he usually did not swear at all when talking to her. "You say this woman's not a witch, herself? No ties to SOLOMON?"
"From what I hear tell. I don't know how she got mixed up with the whole business, but she appears to know people in all the right places--well, witches in all the right places," Nagira explained, gesturing vaguely. "Like I said before, it all seems pretty legit."
Amon appeared to be thinking about something--either that, or he was having some minor Craft issues. "You're sure."
Nagira looked exasperated and shot Robin a look, as if to ask her if he was always like that, even though he knew his own brother full well enough to know that the answer was yes. "If I'm not right you can kill me, okay? And then you can let Robin dance on whatever shallow grave you toss me into afterwards."
Robin didn't know whether to giggle or frown at his comment.
"I'll probably end up having to kill someone, if this goes badly," Amon stated plainly. He was well more than half-way through his drink. "As usual. I wonder how many people I've killed by now in my lifetime."
Both Nagira and Robin were silent for a moment, each taken aback by Amon's perhaps-but-not-sure-rhetorical question in their own ways. Robin said nothing, but Nagira chose to make light of the situation, perhaps for everyone's benefit. (Perhaps because none of them wanted to seriously contemplate how many people Amon had killed--Amon included.) "And lo, it begins! He speaks!"
"You do enough talking for the both of us," Amon retorted. "Perhaps enough for the three of us," he said, verbally including Robin, who had been silent for the majority of the conversation, silent. She was too busy looking discreetly back and forth between the two men who seemed to serve, in shifts, as caretakers in her life.
Now that she looked at them in close proximity, both holding drinks and both smoking, they were startlingly similiar.
"I have a question," Robin piped up suddenly, looking at both of them in turn. "If you're brothers, why does everyone call you--" here she pointed at Nagira, "--by the last name, and you--" here she didn't dare to point at at Amon, but instead looked at him, "--by your first name?"
Nagira nodded thoughtfully, leaning back in his chair comfortably. "Well, first of all, I suppose people call me by my last name because Syunji's a painfully ridiculous name." He shrugged and said no more. It was an odd explanation, but one Robin would accept. She looked at Amon, who exhaled through his nose.
"Secondly, we don't have the same last name," he added almost quickly. "And Syunji is a painfully ridiculous name."
Robin's brow furrowed, even if she was mentally smiling at Amon's agreement about his brother's name. But wait--it kind of made sense to her, now; her face relaxing, recalling that the men in front of her were only half-brothers. But then just as soon as her face had relaxed, her brow furrowed up again. "Oh--wait." She was desperately scraping her brain for any tidbits to their familial past that Nagira or Amon might have given to her at various points in time, but was coming up with very little. "But...wait. Don't you two...share a..."
Amon looked at her, evenly. "A father? Yes."
"But Amon's mommy insisted that he take her family name, and not our daddy's," the other brother picked up where Amon had left off, shrugging lackadaisically. "That's also how he got landed with his painfully ridiculous name."
Robin nodded somewhat, storing the information away in the section of her brain that was little more than a file cabinet of Amon fact-bits. Her brow furrowed a third time. "What is your last name, Amon?" she said curiously, and Nagira erupted into hysterical, deep, scratchy laughter. He carried on for a good half a minute or so, finally beginning to calm down after a bit, Amon and Robin staring at him.
"She doesn't even know your last name?" Nagira chortled incredulously, staring at his brother with a particular glee. "This is the girl you depend on to watch your back and help keep you alive and you've never even told her your last name? You are one screwed up guy," he stated, and then chuckled to himself, as if remembering how funny it was all over again.
Amon looked vaguely offended. "She never asked. Why should I have told her?" He looked over at Robin and blinked. "But now you've asked, so I suppose I must answer you. Novotne."
Robin was flipping through the cards in the various file cabinets of her brain, searching through until she found the language file cabinet. In said file cabinet was her fairly extensive--almost fluent--knowledge of English and Japanese, and her completely fluent knowledge of Italian. There was also a liberal smattering of various other European languages that she'd been made to study while training with SOLOMON. "That's..." Her mind drew more blanks in attempting to place the origin of the last name. "...not Japanese," she finished, somewhat cowed.
"Good observation," Amon quipped dryly; his good humour was coming back--probably greatly aided by alcohol. He was also growing somewhat talkative, Robin noticed. "It's Czech."
"Amon's mommy's a European mutt," Nagira said.
"Was," Amon countered, and the topic was effectively killed. Neither Nagira nor Robin was quite brave enough to venture further onto the topic of Amon's mother, something that was never heard about unless it was in a situation of extreme duress. Robin didn't think she'd ever get the whole story; she figured that Nagira knew it all, but she also figured that if Amon ever found out that Nagira had told her said story, he'd be rather disgruntled to put it mildly.
"Well, in any case," Nagira said suddenly, brightly, as if he was physically grabbing the conversation and steering it away from the mysterious Novotne-mother, "Amon's about fifteen different nationalities rolled into one. That's probably why he knows about five billion languages."
"I do not know five billion languages," Amon replied, matter-of-factly. "And I'm not fifteen different nationalities."
Robin once again went back to the Amon file cabinet in her brain, searching through it--Amon did have an uncanny grasp of more languages than anyone had any business knowing. SOLOMON certainly didn't provide their Hunters with that much language training, that she knew. "But you do know a lot of languages," she said to her ex-partner, who merely shrugged with his eyebrows. His face seemed...relaxed, somehow. He was at least moderately inebriated, if not hurtling along towards totally drunk. "But I didn't know that you were of European descent, too, Amon. So you're Czech and Japanese?" The man got more and more interesting the more she learned of him, and that of course only made her want to learn more. It was like giving a dehydrated person salt water to drink--they would only dry out more and need more water.
Amon made a 'heh' noise. "And French and Egyptian. My mother was a bit of a mutt, I suppose."
Robin couldn't help but look at him then; couldn't help but give him a good, long look. His looks began to make a bit more sense to Robin, then; now she understood why he'd never looked in particularly Japanese, why he'd always seemed to be able to mix well wherever they went in Europe, why he'd always seemed perfectly at home in Japan with Japanese customs (most of which, despite her best efforts to embrace them, still completely baffled Robin). Amon Novotne--or, as Amon himself would probably introduce himself, clinging to Japanese tradition--Novotne Amon, even though the name didn't sound Japanese in the very slightest.
"Ah," Robin remembered to murmur in reply, after a few moments of staring at Amon. She would have kept studying his features but as usual his magical sixth sense kicked in and he looked over at her suddenly, pinning her with a stare that almost burned her with its intensity. Her eyes moved on quickly as if they'd only settled on him momentarily to begin with.
She did find it somewhat amusing, however, that Amon should be more Japanese in appearance than her and have a name that was so wholly un-Japanese, while Robin herself was about as far from Japanese in appearance as one could get--but she'd been the one to get stuck with a Japanese last name.
Gaze wandering over to Nagira, she found him to watching Amon and herself with a distinctly pleased look on his face. "I knew he couldn't go on being mad at you forever," Nagira practically sang. "Now we can all get along and have a good time. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside to see my baby brother and my favourite witch kid alive and semi-amiable.
--------------------
Dawn. She awoke at dawn, as always.
The room was almost unpleasantly chilly, and she shivered under her blankets and curled into a bit of a ball on her side. The room was a colour study of greys, whites, blacks, shadowing and the illusion of depth. Or perhaps that was just Robin's eyes playing tricks on her. For some reason, that morning, she was inundated with sleepiness; pondering snuggling up and falling back asleep for a bit didn't seem like such a bad idea. She had stayed up rather late with Amon and Nagira, after all, and they had still been awake when she'd finally stumbled into bed, so numbly tired that her body refused to work properly and she might as well have been drunk.
Amon and Nagira had just been plain drunk. It wasn't as easy to pin down a drunken Novtone as it was to pin down a drunken Nagira, but Robin had watched it happen.
And now she couldn't fathom her ex-partner still being awake at this hour, as he usually was. But then again he was usually sober when he stayed up all night until dawn, waiting for her to awaken so he could sleep. And on top of the fact that she was for some strange reason, ridiculously tired (it was as if being happy the night before had sapped all her energy), Robin was freezing and the bed was warm. It all boiled down to the fact that her head felt fuzzy with lack of sleep and she didn't want to leave the bed.
Amon be damned, this morning. Robin was going back to sleep. Maybe, she pondered, her act of sleep-sin made her a bad person, but she was too tired and warm to care. Sleep it was.
But, she was to discover as soon as she rolled over, snuggling into the blankets further, that Amon didn't really need to be damned to be awake while she slept on.
That was because he was sleeping right behind her, fully clothed, on top of the covers. He was laying so close to her that she bumped into him slightly face first when she rolled, earning herself a nose full of chest. The sight--and the feel--of him lying there in the very dim greyish-purple light almost made her squeak in shock. Instead she burrowed down into her covers and pretended that she was invisible.
She seemed to be doing a lot of that, lately.
Robin blinked rapidly, looking at the still-very-much-slumbering-in-spite-of-her-having-bumped-into-him form of Amon. How had he ended up in her bed? Why had he ended up in her bed? She didn't even remember such a thing occurring during the night--how long had he been sleeping there for, anyway? She was further shocked that he had not awoken, anyway, upon her gentle impact with him. He really was asleep.
It was dawn and Amon was sleeping in her bed. Not her in his, on the opposite side, after a nightmare or a night of sleeplessness. Him in her bed, her body inches away from his. The familiar old burning sensation started up in her cheeks and ears with a fury.
Too scared to move--not only because she didn't want to awaken him, but because she was afraid of ruining the moment--Robin laid there in heart-pounding, nervous silence, staring at him. Eventually, however, her breathing began to slow and her heart started to thud at a normal rate. God, he was so close. Sleeping, so unguarded--almost every fibre of Robin's being wanted to cuddle against him and go to sleep, yearning for the almost alien feel of his arms around her.
She did no such thing, however. The wall that Amon had so carefully constructed around himself was present even when he wasn't busy building it, repairing it; was present even when his guard was relaxed and he was asleep.
Robin listened to his breathing, watched his pulse fluttering at his neck, marveled at how he looked somehow younger while in somewhat mussy-haired sleep. Her mind and her body gradually came down from the panic high. He'd sought her out, obviously, and it was no problem or fault of her own. She may have not had the courage to curl up against him, but he had found her bed.
Perhaps, Robin mused, he'd needed to find it.
In any case, whether Amon had simply been too drunk to realize which bed was his or if he really had sought her out for comfort through proximity in a bizarre twist of their power roles, Robin was tired again. Amon's presence in her bed would not prevent her from sleeping.
And it didn't.
