Something wasn't right, that much was obvious. Robin and Amon had been acting like they barely knew each other for two days. Nagira himself had noticed it right away; it'd taken Sigrún another day to notice it and mention something to Nagira.
"Lover's quarrel," he'd explained to her when she'd asked him what was happening. Sigrún's eyes had widened and she'd looked at Nagira.
"So then...they are...?" She had asked him, trailing off. Nagira had laughed slightly and shook his head.
"No, no. Just a figure of speech." Looking back at her evenly, he had quirked an eyebrow. "Why? Would it bother you if they were?"
Sigrún had shrugged, rifling through her bag for something or another. "No. I actually think it'd be better if they were. Perhaps they would learn to communicate better."
And now they were on day two and they were nearly to Copenhagen, and Nagira couldn't even coax Amon and Robin to say more than a sentence to each other. Of course, his brain grumbled, right when it's the most important for them to show a unified front and communicate and formulate a plan, they get in a stupid little fight and now they're going to look like a bunch of petulant grade-schoolers to the people we're going to meet. He watched them across the table from him, going about their dinner business as if the other one didn't exist. Robin looked sadder than usual—and that was damned downright depressing, since she always seemed to look sad to Nagira—and perhaps Amon looked a bit more edgy than usual. Nagira's eyes flicked to Robin's plate; she was finished with her dinner and was only sitting there drinking a cup of coffee.
"Robin," he piped up suddenly, and she looked over at him with wide eyes. "Sigrún had mentioned earlier that she'd wanted you to drop by her room later on. I'm not sure if she wants to talk to you or if she needs help with the kid or what, but you might as well go see what she wants."
Amon's eyes looked up from his plate minutely and bored into Nagira from across the table dangerously. Don't you dare stick your nose into this, the look on his little brother's face seemed to hiss. Nagira ignored it. Robin was pushing her chair back slowly, unsurely, a bit confused by the sudden revelation. Nagira nodded reassuringly at her. "Go on. Go. We're just gonna finish up dinner here, anyway. I promise you ain't gonna miss anything." Robin, somewhat pacified by Nagira's words, pushed her chair in and walked away from the table, her cute little black mary-jane shoes striding purposefully but unsurely towards the exit.
Silence reigned between the brothers for a moment. Nagira was watching Amon, who for the most part seemed to be ignoring his brother's existence, continuing his meal.
"So, what the hell's wrong with you two?" Nagira said, diving right in. "Did you catch Robin with another boy at the drive-in movie, or what?"
"Fuck off." Amon hadn't sounded amused in the least at Nagira's teasing. He occupied himself with his plate.
"Oh, c'mon. It's obvious something happened," Nagira went on, scraping at his own plate and pushing a last forkful of mashed potatoes into his mouth. "You two had some kind of little spat and now it's obvious to anyone who's got eyes—even Sigrún, who doesn't even know you two all that well," he said around a mouthful of potato. Swallowing, he reached for his pack of cigarettes on the table and his lighter and lit one, watching his brother pretend as if eating his dinner in the fastest manner possible was the most interesting thing in the world. "Do I have to go ask her?"
Amon looked up finally, casting another dangerous look at Nagira—a dangerous look whose warning was largely ignored by the receiving party. "Nothing happened. So drop it. And leave Robin alone."
A reaction, finally. Nagira quirked an eyebrow high and gazed at Amon through the smoke. "So if nothing happened, why can't I ask Robin about it? Are you afraid of what she'll say?" Silence. "I figured I would try to talk to you first—shows what a dumbass I am—because I'd mistakenly assumed that you'd be mature about this and talk about what happened. If I have to go ask Robin, I will. I know she'll spill."
Amon frowned deeply, laying his fork down with a purposeful clink. Staring down the man across the table from him, he reached for the pack of cigarettes and withdrew one himself, lighting it. "Nothing happened. Robin's young and easily offended. She's acting her age, and it's showing."
"Well, you're not acting your age and it's showing too." Nagira watched the cigarette across the table from him flick, hard, in irritation. "Whatever happened, you're both being awfully silly about it. Hasn't it occurred to you that you're about to meet a whole bunch of people that you two are going to need to impress, and you're busy running around acting like some school kids in study hall?" Amon said nothing in reply. "I shouldn't have to step in and mediate like this, you know. You two have been living together for a long time now and you still act like a couple of awkward little kids a lot. I'd suggest that you two apologize to each other and make busy with the not stepping on each other's toes before we get to Copacabana or wherever the hell it is we're going. Otherwise I think you're gonna find that very few people are going to be willing to take you seriously when you can't even manage the relationship between you and Robin."
"When the hell did you become some sort of relationship counselor?" Amon asked flatly. He sounded irritated, but didn't fight back any more—he knew that his brother was right, Nagira could tell. Amon knew that Nagira was right and that was probably what irritated him most of all, Robin-warfare aside.
"Sigrún asked me the other day," Nagira began, a slow smile creeping across his face, "if you and Robin were sleeping together."
On cue Amon's face darkened considerably. "What?" he asked, sourly. "What the fuck business is that of hers, at any rate?" A telltale sign of Amon in distress or in thought—at least internally—was the hand that came up to rub at his forming beard, roughly. He took a lengthy drag from his cigarette and did not falter under Nagira's gaze. "Why the hell were you talking about Robin and I?"
"From the way you're reacting, it's hard to believe that you two aren't sleeping together." Nagira grinned at his brother's look of utter murder. "Easy, killer. We all know that you're a perfect saint." He couldn't stop his grin from growing wider at his little brother's growing anger and exasperation. "But it seems to be the general consensus that you and Robin would get along better and communicate better if you were to—"
Amon looked incredulous. "If we were to sleep together." Grey eyes blinked slowly, fingers crushing a cigarette, hand rubbing fiercely along facial hair. "I can't believe you."
"—apologize." Nagira, still grinning, raised his eyebrows high. "Hmm. Got something rolling around in that brain of yours, buddy?"
That was all it took. Amon, snarling, smashed his cigarette into an ashtray and left the table without another word, stalking out of the dinner car. Nagira watched him going with the same grin, snickering somewhat. Most of the time he just felt plain sorry for Amon but there were plenty of times that he couldn't help but laugh at his brother—especially when he painted himself into a rather telltale corner.
Especially when it was about Robin.
........
Despite the blackness of the sky and the slushy rain falling in torrents, Copenhagen managed to keep up a small front of cheer. That shocked Robin. She hadn't expected it to look like it did—she'd expected Copenhagen to be cold, bleak, dark, despairing—just like she'd learned from Hamlet. Apparently a lot had changed for the Danes since then.
They bounced along in an old Checker Marathon—not that she would have known that on her own. Nagira, whom apparently had an affinity for old American cars, had expressed his utter shock at seeing such an antiquated old beast in Europe. "They used to use these things for taxi cabs in New York City, ages and ages ago," he'd told Robin, who was bewildered by the fact that the car had two backseats facing each other, and a large foot space in between them. One could have easily fit a small table between the two seats. "There are two back seats so that the taxi drivers could fit more people in, and the reason the foot room is so big is because people would put their luggage, briefcases, what-have-you down there. Neat old car."
"Trygve always was fond of old American cars too," Sigrún interjected, holding a smiling Eirikur in the seat opposite from Robin, Amon, and Nagira. She sat with her back to the driver's seat, which held a quiet, fair-haired male driver. "He said he thought they looked very classy. This car was actually Gróa's at one point—but when they divorced, she allowed him to take it."
"Why?" Nagira asked incredulously. "A car as old as this, in this good of shape? This thing's probably worth a small fortune by now."
Sigrún smiled but somehow the smile managed to look like a pained grimace. "Perhaps she let him have it because she knew he loved it so. Perhaps she wanted to be rid of all of the memories of their old life together. I'm not certain. I never asked." Subtly, the tone of her voice suggested that perhaps Nagira shouldn't have, either. Amon gave Nagira a quick warning look, and Nagira resumed looking out the window through the slush at the colourful, tall buildings.
Robin looked back from her window, refusing to let herself look at Amon, whom was sandwiched between herself and his brother. "Do you and Trygve live in Copenhagen?" she asked, conversationally. Sigrún looked mildly relieved at the change in topic.
"Not exactly," she replied. "When we married, he purchased a home just outside of Copenhagen. It's an old holdover from the times when Denmark's monarchy was actually important—when dukes and lords and such were granted estates."
Robin's eyes widened. "You live in an estate?"
To that, Sigrún laughed, bouncing her baby on her knee. He laughed too, as if his mother's laugh was connected to him somehow. "Maybe I was incorrect to say estate. It's a large house; quite a few rooms—but the tract of land is actually rather small and I'm sad to say that we haven't been diligent at keeping up on certain portions of the house."
"Oh." Robin's curious green eyes strayed once again to the window, once again to the plethora of tiny, smashed together flats lining the streets, in many shades of blue, yellow, red, and brown. "Is your house colourful, like these?" she asked.
"Oh, no. It's somewhat dull, I suppose, by Copenhagen standards. You shall see once we arrive," the Icelandic woman replied a trifle enigmatically. It seemed that she always liked to surprise them in, in some way, always have a little trick up her sleeve—hopefully, Robin thought, they would all be good tricks.
.......
Holding her heavy sack uselessly in one hand, and a smaller bag in her other, Robin stared up at the home in front of her. The sleet had since let up and her breath hung in the air in little grey clouds. The house was a large, three-story affair; covered by grey stone and ornate windows. Foliage pressed in around it in the form of evergreen trees and some trees who were not as lucky, their bare branches shaking in the cold wind. The stone drive leading up to the house was shielded by trees that stubbornly clung to some of their rapidly yellowing leaves. Robin blinked.
"Estate," she murmured under her breath. Amon, who just happened to be walking past her at that moment with his own bag in tow, paused briefly in front of her and turned to look back. They still hadn't been on the best of terms since that night on the train outside of Prague, and on the evening on the train that she'd talked with Sigrún after dinner, Robin could have sworn that she had returned to the room to discover Amon irritated by her very existence.
"What was that?" he asked, his tone slightly clipped and stand-offish. She shook her head, looking away from him.
"Just a sigh," she replied, and re-gripped her bags. Wordlessly, she resumed walking, as did Amon. Behind them Nagira helped Sigrún with her bag as she carried Eirikur up the drive; the silent driver in the Checker Marathon had departed immediately after dropping them off. Sigrún had explained that he had other business to attend to.
At the grandiose front door, Robin and Amon waited in uncomfortable silence for their traveling companions. Upon arrival at the door, Sigrún smiled at them slightly. "Well, we're home," she murmured, obviously pleased. "Thanks be to the Gods for granting us safe travel here." She opened the door and walked in, and Robin followed, with Nagira and Amon in tow.
The main room was a masterpiece of dark wooden molding and ornate carving. Richly coloured and patterned carpets adorned the dark wooden floor, and the wide, curving staircase that led upwards to the second floor was covered with a deep green, red, and blue rug. The giant framed windows allowed the grey light in, but most of the room's warm, ambient lighting came from a giant hanging light fixture, made from wrought iron and cast into many curves and hooks, swirls and curls. At one point in time it had probably housed many gas lamps, lit every night, but now it had been converted to electricity.
Robin realized she was gawking. Nagira had whistled, long and low. Amon appeared largely unaffected by the dark, elegant beauty of the house around him. Sigrún turned to them with a smile and set her bag down in the middle of the floor. "Well, I won't waste time. I shall show you to your rooms right away so that you can get settled in and perhaps have a rest, then you can meet some of the other inhabitants here. Trygve will be overjoyed that you've come. It shall give us something to take our minds off of the grief of my sister passing."
Robin hadn't really thought about it until Sigrún had mentioned it, and she continued to ponder it as she followed the group up the stairs, carefully balancing her bags and her steps. Sigrún hadn't appeared too terribly shaken up about the death of her sister, really; and Robin thought that very strange. It was obvious that the woman was, at times, uncomfortable speaking about what had transpired between herself, her sister, and her new-husband-and-ex-brother-in-law, but she appeared to have at least cared for her sister somewhat deeply. The thought turned into a burning question in Robin's mind, but she realized that it would have been highly rude and inconsiderate to ask such a question as doesn't the fact that your sister's body lays in her bed, in Iceland, bother you at all?
Another thing struck Robin: was anyone going to even make funeral arrangements for poor Gróa? Or was she just doomed to rot there, unnoticed forever, in her snow-covered little home?
By the time Nagira had been shown to his room, and Amon had been shown to his (which, of course, was always right next to Robin's), Robin's very soul felt heavy with sadness and horror all over again much like it had been that night in Iceland. She forced herself to focus on the smiling Sigrún's words of the gracious hostess.
"...the rooms connect, of course," Robin started listening just in time to hear Sigrún say. She assumed that her hostess was speaking of she and Amon's rooms. "And sadly, yours is one of the rooms in the house that hasn't been converted to electricity. It is, however, one of the more beautiful rooms in the house, and I thought it fitting that you should have it. There are plenty of gas lamps in the room, and if you'd like, I can have one of our maids come to light them for you shortly instead of having to do it yourself."
Sigrún stopped dead in the middle of her hostess-type-words. "...I just realized how ridiculous of a suggestion that was. Forgive me, Robin."
Robin forced a small, polite smile onto her thought-weary face. "That's alright. I'll be able to light them myself, I think."
Sigrún was holding a hand to her head, shaking it slightly with wide eyes. "I was...I guess I wasn't thinking, really. There I was, imagining you having to climb up upon chairs and tables to reach the lighting fixtures...! How silly of me!" She laughed a little at herself, and Eirikur laughed with her once more. "Well. That aside, if you need anything, please feel free to ask. We have two maids here—their names are Beatrix and Helle, and they should be able to tend to your needs. A word of caution, however—Helle's English is not too good. Their Danish is perfect, of course, because they're Danish. They both speak passable Dutch and I believe some French, however. I don't think it should be a problem with Beatrix, her English is rather good."
Robin found it hard to concentrate. "Oh. I see. That'll be fine."
"I'll leave you to your own devices, then." A smile. "Just come downstairs whenever you're ready and rested, Robin."
"Thank you," she replied softly. "I will."
Inside the room she dropped her bags by the door with loud thumps on the old floor. The room was dim, the curtains drawn over what appeared to be a large, ornate window with two halves that opened outward.
Robin sighed, and every wick on every oil lamp in the room ignited, bathing the room in a warm yellowish light. Suddenly very depressed and very tired, she didn't even bother to take in the surroundings of her room as she trudged in the general direction of the bed. Flopping across it horizontally, she pulled her legs up and curled into a ball, not even bothering to remove her shoes. As was typical for her whenever she was truly tired, Robin was sleeping within minutes.
.........
The man sitting behind the desk was, like his wife, extremely fair-haired and blue eyed. The only real difference in what was becoming apparent as the typical Icelandic look was that the man had a fair spattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose and his cheeks. He sported a neatly trimmed blonde moustache and a head of fairly long, very curly hair.
He looked, Nagira thought, like a slightly refined version of a Viking. The man was not small, by any means; he dwarfed his tiny wife, and he definitely would have dwarfed Gróa. He was a little shorter than Nagira and Amon, but was a bit larger than his brother was.
In short, Trygve didn't look like someone you wanted to mess with. Trygve reached down onto the desk to retrieve a pair of glasses, and perched them on his face. He squinted more closely at Nagira and his brother—whom, Nagira sorely wished, would quit acting like a big baby in regards to Robin, and would shave his scraggly mess of a face.
"Can I smoke in here?" Nagira asked, suddenly, and Trygve smiled at him.
"I'm sorry, but I'd prefer if you didn't." He indicated the bookshelves lining the room. "I have some very old texts in here, and it's enough to fight the damp destroying them. There is a parlor on the other side of the entry room that you may smoke in, or the dining room. I would also ask that you please refrain from smoking in any of the rooms. Some of the tapestries and furnishings are very old in those rooms, and I would hate for the smoke to damage them."
Nagira nodded and internally grumbled. "Fine by me. At least you're not gonna make me go outside."
Amon sat forward in his high-backed, deep reddish-leather chair, steepling his fingers under his scruffy chin. "Tell me more about this committee your wife spoke of."
The blue eyes behind the glasses blinked with shock. "Right to the point, eh? No sooner than the introductions are out of the way the planning is to begin?" Trygve smiled faintly at Amon. "Do you not think we should await Robin's arrival to discuss this matter?"
Amon did not waver. "I'll inform her of necessary information later, or she can inquire of you herself if she so wishes. For my own purposes, I'd like to be informed." There was a pause in Amon's speech. "It would do more good to tell me about this committee than it would to tell Robin, anyway. She...has no mind for logistics."
Nagira hid his eye roll behind a palm rubbed over his face. Way to go, big man! Silently win the big fat war with the fifteen-year-old by insulting her when she's not around to fight back.
Trygve leaned back in his chair, reaching for his cup of coffee and sipping from it. "I see," he said, replacing the mug onto the desk. "Well, then. Here's the short of it. The committee is a group of six witches reigning from around Europe; all very powerful, all very connected, all very...what's the saying? Old money?"
"Mommy and daddy's mommy and daddy were rich bastards?" Nagira supplied with a shrug. Trygve nodded and pointed at the lawyer.
"Precisely! So, each of the committee members, in turn, is the head of their own coven. These covens are also very powerful and very connected, very old money. They're a manner of...witch elite, I suppose one could say. At least here in the European theatre, they largely hold the reigns of power in the witch community."
Amon nodded slowly, absorbing the information. His eyes narrowed in thought. "What do they do? Are they as a crime syndicate would be? Business connections, illegal trades, anything of the sort?"
Trygve shrugged almost nonchalantly. "Not that we know of. As much as we can tell, they're just elitist old fools who like holding the reigns of power and aren't afraid to kill people—humans, witches, whoever—to hold onto it. They're under the impression that their positions of power are somewhat...inherited. It's a large deal of their pride. They believe that they have the right to terrorize and subdue other witches because their ancestors somewhere along the line were witches."
Frowning, Nagira leaned forward in his seat then as well, almost mirroring his brother's position. "But all witches have witches somewhere in their lines of ancestry. Any idiot knows that ancestry is how one becomes a witch in the first place."
Once more a shrug from their host. "Exactly. But, there's a difference to them. It's kind of like...oh, say...the noble class versus the peasants. Or perhaps the idea of divine right. One party deserves to be in power because they're smarter, prettier, richer, favoured by God, what have you. The other party was just born to serve and be used."
"That's wonderful." Amon looked severely put out. "In essence you're telling me that these people have already made up their minds about us before they've even met us, right?"
Their host's smile appeared, seemingly absurd for the particular moment in the conversation. "Bingo! They really don't like the idea of some little, all-powerful upstart girl who thinks she's the master of all witches. It's taken me the better part of two years just to get onto speaking terms with the fools, and it's still a big show of condescension at best. I think the only reason they're even minutely willing to listen to my prattle is because there's a bit of money in the family."
Lawyer looked to ex-Hunter as the host looked on. "Maybe that could swing in your favour, buddy. There's money on all sides of the family, true, but Japanese money ain't gonna mean squat to these people, probably. That and I'm a measly little human. But you...you've got ancestry and money in a European family backing you. They might like that."
The ex-Hunter pondered the lawyer's statement for a spell, fingers running repeatedly over facial hair. "I'll play that card if I have to, if it appears it'll be necessary." Amon sighed, closing his grey eyes wearily momentarily. "But that still doesn't change the fact that they're already going to fundamentally dislike me for being on Robin's...side, in this whole bit. And what would I say to them, anyway? I'm not Gandhi. It isn't as if it would be as simple as me saying 'You hate SOLOMON, we hate SOLOMON, let's unify under this child and take them down'."
A comment bit at Nagira's tongue and he couldn't hold it back. "She's not a child and you know it, Amon. And if they want to be political about it, maybe I could try to weasel myself in there somewhere and butter 'em up a bit. I mean, I am pretty good at talking and politics." Nagira grinned wolfishly. "I went to school for it."
.......
Lights were swirling all around her; less apparent as the phenomenon of light and more apparent as what looked to be black and white paint mixing in a swirl all around her. For the first time, she could see herself clearly among the swirling anti-world. Sitting cross-legged in the middle of the swirling void, she felt as if she was floating.
Her ears strained to hear the murmuring voices all around her, so many in quantity and so low in volume that they sounded like the far away, unified chanting of monks. For being a void it was uncommonly warm—a soft, comforting sort of warmth—and Robin laid down on her side drowsily, her stomach flipping slightly at the sense of laying down weightlessly, in nothing.
As usual, the murmuring began to intensify, and Robin's void self squeezed her eyes shut tightly, in concentration. "What? I can't understand you all," she murmured out loud, balling her fists up under her chin and drawing her legs closer to her body. In the womb-like warmth of the void, she was compelled to try to mimic a fetus.
The murmuring stilled and quieted for a moment but then began again in earnest. Robin frowned disappointedly, opening her eyes. "I'm trying to understand you, but I can't when you all speak at once. If we want to talk, we're going to need to work together."
So it went for what could have been moments or time immeasurable. Robin spoke to the lights around her, coaxingly, encouragingly, trying to get them to understand that she wanted to understand them and wanted to very badly, but that she couldn't unless they understood that she couldn't listen to them all at once.
Eventually she gave up and closed her eyes again, pressing her hands over her ears. The swirling of the lights stopped, and they all began to break off into separate, individual entities. She gave a shaky sigh, feeling defeated. "Half of having power is making people think you have it," she whispered to herself there in the void, not caring whether or not the murmurs could hear her or not. For a few moments she laid there and collected herself, and then lifted her hands from her ears, snapping her eyes open.
"Listen," she began, with as much authority as she could muster—which, startlingly enough to her, seemed to be a lot. Her voice sounded severe and unfamiliar to her. "You all need to help yourselves before I can help you. Now you need to learn to speak in turns, or communicate better, or something, because I can't understand all of you when you're going on like a bunch of squawking birds." She drew in a breath, waiting for a reaction. The murmuring was significantly hushed, as if mollified. "And I won't tire myself out trying to understand a bunch of people who aren't going to learn how to communicate!"
The murmuring withdrew from her, leaving her feeling suddenly cold and alone in the void. The lights no longer looked warm and glowing but cold and eye-burningly bright. It was almost as if the voices were whispering to each other about her, talking behind their hands into each others' ears, their eyes riveted on her. Robin sat up, pushing herself up on unsure arms. "So now you're going to forsake me because I yelled at you?" she asked, some part of her intrinsically irritated. "I'm being as fair as I think I can be. If you want to be immature about it, then be my guest. No one ever said I had to come here. No one ever said I had to try to talk to you."
And then she stopped dead in her speech, blinking in shock at herself. Her voice, so unfamiliar from her own slightly trembling lips, suddenly seemed very familiar to her.
It was as if Amon's consciousness had grabbed her vocal cords and forced them to move. The words coming from her mouth barely sounded like something she herself would say, but something that Amon would say.
Then, suddenly, a small voice from amongst the murmuring broke free, completely audible and discernable to Robin's alert ears: Hungry.
Robin scrambled to stand on trembling, eager legs. Her green eyes searched the lights desperately, eagerly, a smile finding its way onto her face in spite of herself. "Hungry? You're hungry? I can hear you! What else? Who are you?"
Hungry. Alone. Unfamiliar faces... The voice was echoing in Robin's very mind as she began to stumble headlong through the lights around her, watching them swirl and rotate around her to prevent her from running into them. Her heart was pounding and she was grinning, smiling like a child. "I'm sorry you're so sad, but—I'm sorry, I'm so glad I can hear you! Where are you? What can I do to help?" Her hands parted the gloom like a machete slicing through thick jungle foliage, and the murmuring around her intensified. While searching, Robin reached out with her mind as far as she possibly could, and as if on cue the void around her became never-ending; she seemed to be floating in the universe, surrounded by billions of glowing lights, some near, some far away.
Hungry. Mother. Hungry. Scared, confused. Robin rushed through the void at breakneck speed, her mind doing the seeing for her. At the very far reaches of its searching grasp, Robin felt a very small, very familiar presence, and the voice echoed in her skull. "You!" she practically shrieked, hurtling headlong towards the pinprick of light. "I see you! I know it's you!" Scared. Don't want to be held by you. Mother.
As she drew closer, Robin's brain began to see, to feel, to smell the presence within her mind, the presence that was the source of the voice. Reaching out, her hands cradling the glow to herself, she brushed hands against a small head of soft, downy hair; a familiar smell assaulted her nose, and then—a very definitely familiar choking wail.
"Eirikur!" Robin cried, laughing, cradling the glow in her arms, bouncing him eagerly. Her mind began to slowly fill in the blanks around Eirikur; the room, his crib, two unfamiliar women speaking to each other in a strange language, one holding a bottle and the other holding a small stuffed toy. Nurses! At the same time Robin cradled the glow of Eirikur, she seemed to be able to look down and see him in his crib, kicking and wailing, red-facedly. "You want Sigrún, don't you? You're hungry, but you want Sigrún to feed you—and you want your nurses to leave you alone! Oh, I understand! Thank you, God, I understand!" Robin was ready to cry tears of joy at finally having touched another being, another witch.
A sucking breath—she was moving backwards through the void at dizzying speeds, as if being sucked out by a giant vortex of wind. Gone was the nursery scene, Eirikur's familiar little baby voice in her head. She was moving so fast that it terrified her and threatened to make her sick to her stomach. Something had happened—perhaps she'd been somewhere she wasn't supposed to be, done something she shouldn't have done?
Gasping, Robin watched the lights all around her—billions of them—blur into nothing but lines at high speeds, the sheer terror of moving so fast threatening to wrench a shriek out of her still-bruised throat—
.......
"Robin! Robin!" Nagira was shaking the girl in his hands, watching her flushed, sweat-covered face roll back and forth on a head that seemed like a useless flower bud on an unsupportive stalk of a neck. Her mouth fell open slightly and for a split second, Nagira was scared out of his mind that she was sick, or that she was dying.
Her mouth opened all the way suddenly, sucking in air as if she'd been underwater forever, her body going rigid with the effort of it. Her eyes snapped open, small tears leaking out the moment they did. Going limp in Nagira's hands she fell backwards slightly onto the bed, gasping for air.
Not knowing what else to do, assuming a nightmare, Nagira grabbed Robin's tiny form and cradled it against his own much larger one, smoothing her slightly sweat-dampened hair. Her face smashed into his breast pocket, crushing his pack of cigarettes. They sat like that for a few moments, Nagira allowing Robin to catch her breath. She didn't appear to be crying anymore.
"You okay, kid?" he asked, gently. "Nightmare?"
Robin looked up at him suddenly and vehemently, eyes as wide as silver dollars. "I'm fine. Not a nightmare, Nagira—it was wonderful! I could talk to them, other witches, for the first time—before it was nothing but noise, like a crowded room with everyone in the world in it, but now...I yelled at them, and they started to calm down! I found someone! I talked to him—as much as I could talk to him, I suppose..."
Nagira's brow furrowed somewhat as he held Robin's small form away from him some by way of her thin shoulders. "Whoa, kiddo, slow down. Who? What? And who's this guy you were talking to?"
Robin was still breathing unevenly. "The...witch-world, Nagira. The lights I see when I kind of...reach out, with my mind. I can see them all. Normally I couldn't talk to them because they were all talking at once, but then I yelled at them to talk one at a time, and then they got mad at me, but then I found one and talked to him and it was Eirikur!" she rushed on, an uncharacteristic giggle escaping from her lips. "Eirikur, of all witches! He's hungry and fussy and he doesn't want his nurses to feed him. He wants Sigrún."
Silence befell the lawyer. He wasn't sure what to make of all of Robin's excited, rushed statement. Sure, Amon had told him briefly about Robin's ability to see in some sort of...otherworld, but he hadn't known that it entailed this. For some reason, he didn't doubt Robin in the least when she said she'd reached out and actually talked to witches. With Robin, just about anything seemed plausible. And she seemed so sure, so full of conviction about it...it couldn't have been a simple dream.
And another thing was for sure: Amon was going to shit a brick when he heard about all of it.
"Well, that's good news then, I guess." Nagira patted his semi-crushed pack of cigarettes, and smiled at Robin. "I'm going to go have a smoke in the parlour. Why don't you come with me and tell me more about this whole weird dream—"
"It wasn't a dream!" Robin piped up, with all the vehemence of a little girl telling her father that there was actually something living under her bed. "It happened while I was sleeping, but it wasn't a dream. It was real, and I can make it work now!"
"—well, okay," he answered, pacifying Robin. "I believe you. I came up here to get you for dinner, anyway. It's going to be ready soon. Come downstairs with me to the parlor and I'll have a smoke and you can tell me more about this experience."
Robin smiled tentatively, wiping at the rapidly drying sweat on her brow. "Okay. I am getting a little hungry."
.......
At dinner, Robin had excitedly launched into her narrative of the witch world, and Trygve and Sigrún had appeared especially pleased at the part about her making contact with their son, first. Sigrún (who appeared a bit drawn and somewhat ill) had confirmed for Robin that Eirikur had indeed been being very fussy around the time it was time for his evening bottle before bed, and the maids had indeed had to come fetch her to feed him and put him down for the evening. He'd refused to drink any of the bottle from Beatrix or Helle's hands, and had even squalled at being held by both of the maids.
"He gets that way, sometime," Trygve had added after his wife's statement. "He's just very attached to his mother. He knows both the maids, they've been around since he was just born. Sometimes he just...fusses." A smile broke out on Trygve's mustached face, and he adjusted his glasses. "But this is most definitely amazing news, Robin. Thank you for telling us. And I must say that as Eirikur's father, I'm very honored that our child was the first to connect with you, the Eve, in such a manner."
Amon, on the other side of the large table, merely appeared pensive about the whole thing. He immersed himself in cutting his sole fillet up into tiny little pieces—indeed it almost looked to Robin as if he was mashing it—and putting it into his mouth with an evenly paced deliberateness that was masking some inner turmoil.
Nagira looked up from his own plate and over to Robin, proudly. "I'd thought she was having a nightmare when I first found her. Guess not, huh? This is pretty big news. I mean...I've never heard of a witch with such wide-spread ability. Granted, Robin hasn't really gotten the hang of it yet, but just imagine. I mean, I've seen plenty of small fries with the limited ability to communicate with other people, but this...this is big."
Despite her joy at Nagira, Sigrún, and Trygve's joy, Robin desperately wished the reticent Amon would say something. She recalled their morning conversation in the hotel in Iceland, after the night when she'd accidentally lashed out at him. She wondered if that was what was running through his mind right then as he meticulously and robotically ate his food.
"You've been unusually silent, friend," Trygve said, looking to Amon, who looked up with a very, very faint 'who, me?' look on his face. "The food can't be that good," their host cracked, eliciting a small laugh from a drawn-looking Sigrún.
Amon cleared his throat and wiped his mouth with his napkin, slowly placing it back in his lap. Deliberating before speaking, he refused to make eye contact with Robin. "This is a rather interesting development in the situation," he said evenly and a trifle guardedly, "and I guess we'll just have to see what comes of it. I'm not sure what to think of it at the moment."
Robin's heart sank noticeably, even if she was currently embroiled in some sort of standoff with Amon. She still wanted some sort of positive reinforcement from him, but his words had basically confirmed her suspicions for her: her warden was probably locked into thoughts of her powers, spiraling out of control, and his promise and duty.
She sighed out loud without meaning to, and went back to her food. Trygve looked over at her discreetly and then went back to his own food, choosing not to comment. The table was immersed in awkward, uncomfortable silence for a bit after Amon's lukewarm words regarding his ward's power. Nagira, as was typical, was the one to break the silence and bring up the mood.
"So, uh, living in Denmark, here," he said, pointing at Trygve and Sigrún with his fork, "do you guys have any problems with...you know, ghosts of dead kings stalking about parapets at night, or, uh, semi-mad spurned lover girls drowning themselves in local waterways?"
.......
A knock at his door roused Amon out of his copy of collected H.P. Lovecraft works. Having been interrupted in the middle of "The Colour From Space", Amon's mind snickeringly told him that on the other side of his door was going to be a meteorite that was going to drive him mad. He laid down his book and crossed the room to the door, opening it to behold a fidgeting Robin.
"Hello," she said, a bit ridiculously. Amon looked down at her.
"Hello," he answered, and then they stood there in silence. Robin picked at her nails.
"Um, am I allowed to come in?" she asked timidly, looking up from her nails to him. "Or are we still being mad at each other?"
Sighing, Amon opened the door wider and indicated that she should enter. "I suppose I'll call a truce for some bilateral negotiations." Robin shuffled past him into the room, and he closed the door behind him and then leaned against it as Robin walked over to the chair he'd been sitting in and sat down. Eyeballing the book, she picked it up and flipped through a few pages, careful not to lose the marked spot.
"What's this?" she queried.
"A collection of short stories, mostly about perfectly awful things," Amon replied, not moving from the door. "You know, the kind of thing one would expect me to read."
"Oh." Robin replaced the book on the arm of the chair and looked to the door, where Amon stood leaning, hands in his pockets. She straightened in the chair, folding her hands over her crossed legs primly. "What do you make of Trygve?"
Amon remained impassive. "Seems harmless. I suppose we'll just have to be on guard for anything unusual or threatening."
The girl across the room from him nodded, smoothing invisible wrinkles in her long, pristine dark grey skirt. "Your room has electricity," she murmured, looking around the room a bit. Amon nodded in reply.
"Sure does," he replied in monotone. He straightened up some, hands still in his pockets. "What do you want, Robin?"
She appeared decidedly hurt, just as he figured she would have. He knew they couldn't go on being disgruntled at each other forever, but some part of him was still internally smarting at the fact that she had come so damn close to figuring him out so completely. Part of him was angry at himself for letting her make him add to his own guilt by making him feel even guiltier, as well. "I...just wanted to talk," she explained lamely. "We've been...avoiding each other for a few days now."
Amon nodded. "Yes, we have. There's been a reason for that."
Robin blinked at him. "Why?"
"I was angry," he said simply. "Sometimes angry people need their space."
"Oh." Robin didn't really know what to say to that, evidently. She pursed her lips and looked around the room again. "Are you still angry?"
A little honesty couldn't help things—so Amon's brain told him. The least he could do was be honest with the girl, since she'd gathered up the courage to come knock on his door, especially when he'd been trying especially hard to keep her at an arm's length the last few days. "A bit." Robin's face fell immediately, and Amon sighed, internally. "But that's mostly just me being a stubborn jerk," he added, and Robin looked up at him with a glimmer of hope in her green eyes. "You know how much I love to be one of those, sometimes."
A shy smile tugged at one corner of Robin's lips. "Sometimes."
"In any case," Amon began, leaving his position by the door and crossing the room to the foot of his bed, "I'm sure my wounded male pride will get over it, eventually." He sat down on the edge of the bed and leaned over, elbows on his knees. He and Robin looked at each other for a second. "So you wanted to talk? I find it rather amusing that you chose to talk to me, instead of Nagira or a wall or something that'd be more talkative than I."
Robin, warming to his facilitating mood, shifted from her uncomfortable position in what was formerly his chair to pull her legs up to her torso, arms wrapped around them. That was seemingly her favourite position to sit in. "I tried talking to the wall, but it said it was busy and that I should go bother someone else," she said in perfect seriousness.
"And it told you to come bother me?" Amon asked, raising one perfectly serious eyebrow at his young cohort. She nodded.
"Incessantly," she affirmed.
"It seems the walls of the house were knee-deep in a Robin-Amon truce conspiracy," he mused seriously, looking down at his shoes. You are flirting with her. She is flirting with you. And why the hell isn't there a little red warning light going off in your dense head? "Walls and their conspiracies aside, what do you make of Trygve and this whole affair?"
The blonde pondered his question with a very serious look. "I haven't had much of an opportunity to speak with him very much, but he seems very kind. All of the people we've met so far have seemed very kind. I trust him. I believe that he just wants to help us, just like Gróa did. But because humans have their own desires, as well, I think there's at least a bit of his situation that might be benefited by helping us. I don't think it's for bad or dishonest purposes, but I guess...maybe he's somewhat of an activist."
Amon nodded, internally amazed at Robin's perceptiveness and ability to judge character. "I agree with you. He certainly struck me as somewhat of a social-conflict activist, rather irritated with the general class disparity among witches in the European theatre."
Robin 'hmm'ed. "Witches need to have a unified front if we ever, ever have chances against SOLOMON."
"True." Amon nodded slowly, rubbing at his new beard. "He realizes this. However, I think that he also opposes class disparity in general, and perhaps that's where we'd come in to serve his latent purpose."
Robin pondered that for a moment, the gears in her head whirring. "Yes. That's a tolerable latent purpose, I think. I..." She trailed off, furrowing her brow in thought. "...Did Sigrún look ill to you, at dinner?" she asked, steering the conversation in a completely different direction. Amon let it go; although having been wordlessly impressed at Robin's ability to talk strategy with him. It wasn't as if he doubted her intelligence or her abilities, but he was glad to see her at least taking an interest in planning and discussion of situations rather than just rushing into them.
"Yes, she did," Amon affirmed. "Remember that she'd told us in Iceland that she was pregnant again." Remembrance dawned on Robin's face. "Women in their first trimester of pregnancy often feel rather ill."
Shifting in her seat, Robin pursed her lips again. "I'd forgotten about that."
A conversational lull befell the two. Indicating Robin's neck, Amon cleared his throat. "Your bruises are fading," he commented. Robin's hand found its way up to her slender neck and lightly touched the fading yellowish-brown bruises there from her attempted strangulation at Gróa's house. "That's good. I think people wondered about them when they saw them, especially when we were traveling."
Robin agreed with a small humming noise. "I noticed people looking at them and then looking away quickly when I noticed them looking. I guess they figured it would have been a faux pas to bring it up." She then took her turn at indicating Amon. "You're...growing a beard?"
Amon smiled very, very faintly, running his hand over his face appraisingly. "I don't know. I just...started letting it grow. I don't think it will last very long; I suppose I just became tired with shaving my face every day to keep it clean."
"You look very different with that much facial hair."
Amon's smile grew incrementally. "You mean to say that I look scary with facial hair."
She was waving her hands at him then, eyes wide. "Oh, no, no. I meant—"
"Robin, I do look scary with facial hair." He looked at her knowingly. "I've got eyes. You don't have to try to be polite about it. I look like some madman one would encounter in a darkened alley."
Looking at him, decisively caught in a train of thought, Robin sighed. "Well, I hadn't meant to make it sound that way. It's different, but it's not...as scary as you think."
Once more Amon quirked a brow at her, regarding her in mock seriousness. "Is that so?"
She smiled at him, her eyes crinkling, their green depths betraying emotion. "I'm not scared of you."
Amon looked down at his shoes again, nodding slowly. "Yeah," he replied, sounding distracted. "You're not." And sometimes that scares me, because if I can't push you away with fear or respect, there's not much left for me to push you away with. And I'm starting to feel like I am not pushing quite as hard as I used to. Society has already rejected us; we're not even a part of it any more. Is that why I feel like it's acceptable for me to act like you're my age; flirt with you, let you in closer than you should get? Things are not any easier when you act as if you're my age, because you just make it that much easier for my mind to incorrectly justify what I'm doing.
"Amon?" she asked, breaking into his train of analysis. "Are you alright?"
He looked up at her, forcing the impassive mask back into place over his visage. "Fine. Just thinking." The situation was becoming too close, too intimate, too much like they were a couple sitting around making small talk about their day. Amon's brain decided it was time for a diversionary tactic. "Tell me more about what happened earlier today, while you slept."
All pretext of playfulness fled Robin's face and she became serious and businesslike, ready to calmly and logically discuss her experience with him. The level of emotional proximity between them declined, and Amon began to feel comfortable in his own skin again as Robin spoke, even if she was speaking about something that made him fundamentally uncomfortable anyway—the expansion of her powers. At least it was something logical to focus on, instead of the static-fuzz blurred lines of the dynamics of he and Robin's relationship together.
A familiar question, one that popped into Amon's head quite often popped back in as Robin talked: Why the hell can't you just be older?
........
Robin, called the voice from the back room, Robin, I know you can hear me.
Cowering in the corner of the small, dark living room with her hands pressed against her mouth, the Eve of Witches shook her head forcefully. "No. No. Why is this happening?"
Robin, come here. The voice was everywhere and nowhere at once, reverberating through Robin's very being. The dead body of the SOLOMON agent that she had killed still laid in the living room, decomposing and covered with squirming maggots and flies. The house reeked of human death and dried blood. Robin's eyes, already pregnant with tears, began to leak. Be a big girl, like I know you can be, and come here.
Robin pressed her fingers tighter against her lips, continually shaking her head. "No! No! No! This isn't right! Why am I here?"
You're here because no one else will come. Now come here.
Trembling as if her body were in seizure, Robin made her way very slowly across the small living room, overly careful not to look down to the floor to where the body of her kill laid. As she approached and walked past him, the stench of human death grew exponentially, and the buzzing of flies grew louder. Maggots squished beneath her feet and she closed her eyes tightly, fat tears of fear rolling down her cheeks all the while. To the hallway she went, and when she turned she drew in a sucking breath and dropped back against the wall at the end of the hallway.
There in the doorway to the rear bedroom was another dead body, in a similar state of decomposition as the body in the living room. The other SOLOMON agent. Robin chortled on her own tears, falling into shaking her head in disbelief once again. "Stop it!" she cried, hands pressed against her temples, shaking uselessly. "Please, stop! I'm sorry! I didn't mean for you to die! But I...I..."
But no one ever wants to pick up the pieces. It's never But no one ever wants to pick up the pieces. It's never YOUR fault. No matter—I'm not angry. Come here, Robin.
The scared girl at the end of the hallway, framed by the light from the open door at the other end, wiped at the snot threatening to drip from her nose. "I can't. I can't. Why are you doing this to me?"
You're the only one who's listening. You're the only one, I think, who cares. Trygve and Sigrún would like to forget, at times, that I exist. Now they can. Nagira can't be bothered and Amon is too difficult to reach. You...you're perfect. Now come, Eve. I won't hurt you. I'm not angry. These men here cannot hurt you any longer. Ignore them.
Motivated by guilt and words, Robin moved slowly and unsteadily down the hallway towards the open bedroom door, towards the light in the house. Maggots squished, once more, under her shoes as she stepped over the dead body in the doorway, eyes closed tightly. She ignored the flies buzzing about her and entered the room fully, and then stood there in dark ignorance, eyes closed tightly.
Open your eyes, Robin.
Robin opened them and gasped, hands flying to her mouth once more to muffled a cry. There, across the room from her, sat Gróa, covered in blood, looking very much alive except for the fact that she was very much dead. Her eyes were glazed over, having taken the eerie bluish haze of the dead, and her face looked sunken in. It was grotesque.
Hello, Eve.
"Why?" Robin asked, chokingly, through a sob. "I..."
Did you think that your finally opening the door to the world of the witches wouldn't come with a few little surprises? Gróa's enveloping voice asked. That you wouldn't cross a few other barriers, as well? I suppose it's not fair of me to say such things, because perhaps it's not true. Perhaps I'm just stuck here in limbo because I'm bitter and I refuse to move on, and I have to talk to someone. But it is entirely possible that... Here, the corpse of Gróa trailed off, milky eyes rolling to the side. A bit of her flesh near her neck fell to the ground, and Robin whirled away, repulsed and sobbing. I'm sorry. You should ask Amon about his mother's power. If he wants to know why you're asking, or why you'd even bother, tell him that I told you to ask him. He'll tell you then, I'd think. The Gods are trying to tell me, through the decomposition of my body, that I need to let go of my earthly grievances and move on to their grand hall, to dine with them for eternity. I'm...not sure if I can do that yet.
Face buried in her hands, Robin sniffled. "What do you have to tell me?" she asked, softly, wanting nothing more than to get away and somehow feeling strangely guilty for it. As a live woman, Gróa was obviously lonely, betrayed, and somewhat looked-over—and Robin felt that even in Gróa's death, she was continuing the legacy.
I don't know. Gróa sounded unsure, sad, ethereal. I'm sorry, Robin, that I am using you like this. I...don't know what else to do. There are a few things, however, that I am certain of. My sister's child will die.
At that point, indignation overrode Robin's rampant fear instinct, and she looked to Gróa's corpse with bewilderment. "Eirikur?" she breathed, sounding stuffy. "No! Not Eirikur!"
No. Not Eirikur. The child within Sigrún is sick, dying. It will not live. Of this I am certain. Gróa's corpse tilted her head inquisitively at Robin, unblinking milky eyes boring into the live girl. Another is that you will have to be strong.
Robin nodded, looking away somewhat. "I know that. Everyone tells me that. I'm trying."
Try harder. A fly landed on Gróa's corpse and began to buzz about her eye, and she seemed not to notice it. You must. Trust in yourself. Take comfort in the support of those around you, even when it is not readily apparent. It is there.
Wiping at her snot again, Robin shuddered with a small sob. "Amon. You mean Amon."
You knew right away whom I spoke of. You know him better than you think. Robin?
The live girl was too busy crying to reply.
Robin?
"What?" Robin almost shrieked, the horror of the situation starting to chip away at what little resolve she had left, starting to permeate into her mind.
Don't forget me. Please, don't forget me. It seems that most of the people I've met in my lifetime have spent most of their either denying that they've met me or trying to forget that they ever did. You haven't, and that's why I'm here. That's why I'm talking to you.
"Please, stop," Robin whispered. "Please, don't talk like this."
My sister and Trygve are good people. They're just...good without me. Remember my words to you. And do remember to thank Nagira and Amon for helping me. Especially thank Amon. I think it would mean much more coming from your mouth than it would coming from mine. You can go now.
"Thank you," Robin whispered shakily.
Don't thank me. Just go. Leave me alone here.
......
Her body snapped bolt upright in bed, covered in sweat and tears for the second time that day. Only this time around, what had happened in her sleep hadn't been as joyful of an experience. Wildly flinging her covers aside, she stifled a tremendous sob and scrambled out of bed, her bare feet hitting the thick carpet with a muted boom.
She ran for the door on the opposite side of the room that connected her room to her warden's, next to hers, and flung it open. Immediately she heard the sharp crinkling of bedsheets and covers as Amon jerked awake forcefully, and she let out the sobs she'd been squelching down inside of herself. Not caring whether or not it was alright, she practically dove onto Amon's bed, pressing her face down into the warm blankets that somehow already managed to smell like him and let out an anguished, frightened wail right into the fabric and mattress.
In the dark, she heard the safety of a gun sliding into place and the quick thud of a gun being set on a hard surface. Part of her mind registered that she'd startled Amon awake so badly that he'd grabbed for his gun and aimed in the dark. "Jesus, Robin! What the hell—" He was moving forward; she'd landed herself near the lower middle of the bed. His hands latched onto her arms and pulled her upwards, towards him. "Robin. Robin. What's happening?"
"Gróa," she wailed, into the covers. "Gróa..."
He was pulling her upwards still, grabbing hold of her urgently and fiercely and pulling her to him, cradling her against him as his brother had much earlier that evening. "Gróa...Gróa's gone, Robin. Hush."
Robin's brain, overloaded as it was, barely registered her face pressing against the bare skin of the space between Amon's shoulder and neck. "She was talking to me! She told me—she told me—"
Amon's arms tightened around her, his beard scratching at her forehead roughly. "Hush, Robin. Calm down. It was just a nightmare. I can't understand what you're saying when you're crying like this."
She cried for a while longer before she could finally try to reign in her emotions and be coherent. Her body was rocking back and forth and Robin realized that it was because Amon was rocking back and forth slightly, trying to calm her as one would try to calm a small child. "I—I don't know if it was a dream," she finally stuttered out with clogged sinuses. "I was in the house again—" Pausing to collect her breath, Robin wiped at her eyes and nose. "—Gróa's house. The bodies...the bodies were there, like Nagira hadn't moved them...and they were...they were..."
Creaking and swinging; the sounds of an opening door filled the room, and the lights in the room flared to life. Squinting against the sudden intrusion of light—no matter how dim it was—Robin spotted the sleep-rumpled form of Nagira in the doorway. He likewise squinted and looked at the two figures frozen on the bed. "What the hell's going on? I heard Robin crying."
"Nightmare," Amon said simply, tersely. "I've got it."
"Okay. Sorry. Wanted to make sure everything was okay." Nagira exited the room as quickly as he had entered, turning out the light as he went. The darkness seemed much deeper and more oppressive than it had before in the absence of light.
"...they were rotting," Robin continued in a whisper, as if she'd never been interrupted at all. "And there were bugs and flies everywhere and the house stank horribly and I heard Gróa talking to me. And it was awful because it was as if her voice was in my head and everywhere and I couldn't get away from it even if I tried." A shudder ran through Robin as she recounted the conversation-dream, like she was there in the frozen house in Iceland all over again. "She told me to come into her room, and I did...and she was dead, Amon, bloody and rotten and falling apart..."
Words were cut off as Amon squeezed her tightly, held her against him more securely. "None of that was real, Robin. It was all just a dream. It's been a long, strange day, you are probably over tired; your mind was reacting to stress in an adverse way."
Blonde head shaking negatively, Robin frowned. "No, no, no. This felt more real than a dream. She spoke to me...she told me things. She told me that Sigrún's child would die." Here, Amon made a sound as if he wanted to interject and interrupt her, but Robin paid it no mind and went on, her voice increasing in volume gradually, threatening to crescendo into hysterics. "She told me I needed to be stronger than I was. She told me that all her life people had forgotten about her and tried to forget her, and that she couldn't forgive and forget and that's why she couldn't get to see her Gods. And she told me to thank you for what you did—"
"Robin, stop," Amon cut in, lowly. "It was just a dream."
"—and she told me that I was the only one who hadn't forgotten her and that's why she could talk to me and then she told me to ask you more about talking to her. She told me to ask you about your mother."
Silence.
"She told me to ask you about your mother's power, and you would explain." Amon's arms had slackened around her, or perhaps that was just her imagination. A split second later they tightened again and she found herself being drawn backwards, out of her control—being drawn by Amon to lie down against him, her face cradled in the crook of his neck.
"My mother may have been a witch, but she was also insane," he said into the darkness. "She said lots of things. She could do lots of things...in life and also in her head. She used to say that she could talk to the dead and that she did so all the time; when she was asleep, when she was awake, when she was in the middle of talking to me. It may have been true or it may have been a manifestation of her dementia. I'm not certain. I was very young." Amon released a gusting sigh. "You must have heard something about that from either me or Nagira at some point in time, and it must have worked its way into your dreams. As for Sigrún and her baby, that is just a product of your worried mind. You'd just mentioned earlier tonight that you thought she looked ill at dinner tonight. And everything else..." Amon trailed off. "...that was a bad night, for all of us. It doesn't shock me that you're having nightmares about it."
Robin tittered, still feeling uneasy and as if it hadn't been a dream. She was almost certain it hadn't been a dream. It'd been too incredibly real to have been a dream. Somehow, somewhere, she'd opened a door, and now it seemed all manner of things were to come spilling out of it. Pandora's Box had been opened, and now everything was swarming out.
But hope, too, had been locked into Pandora's Box, a tiny voice in her mind reminded her.
Amon began to tug at his covers, moving them down. Robin shifted, startled. "Get under the blankets," he said, simply. "This house is freezing cold." Wordlessly, Robin assisted in moving and lifting the covers, and slid under them, finding herself enveloped in Amon's arms once again. "Try to remember that it was just a dream. You are here now. You've left it behind. The past cannot catch up with you unless you allow it to."
Robin lay frozen against her ex-partner's side, nervous and startled and comfortable about the whole situation.
"Try to get some sleep, as well," he said quietly. "Tomorrow we meet with Trygve and some of his fellows about how we're going to approach this so-called committee. Tomorrow is a big day of plans. You're going to need to be well-rested and able to think."
"Okay." Robin's body began to relax incrementally against that of Amon's, a sliver of her brain chattering on excitedly about lying there in his bed next to him so nonchalantly, as if it were nothing or an everyday occurrence.
"And I'm quite certain that you are probably not familiar with this quote, but an old Hollywood movie tells us 'after all, tomorrow is another day'."
................
AFTERWARD: hi. It's me. BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH. Fuckall, I can't help it. I'm a sucker for dialogue. This might be, quite possibly, the slowest-moving WHR fanfic in the history of the universe. Evar. Character development and relationship fluff, whee!
Oh, and bits of rotting flesh too. Zombies. Well, maybe not zombies. Undead-in-limbo-spurned-Icelandic-women-corpses. Hee.
It's 3 am and I should be in bed.
