Immortality

Chapter Four - The Depth of David's Soul

Author's note - the quotation here is from Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, as Robin tells us. It's a glorious poem, a great political satire that is both really pretty and really petty and you should all read it.

"So you kissed David when you were in university? Forgive me, Robin, but I was expecting something a little more sordid."

Nightingale was seated on the sofa, two dark heads resting in her lap. One, feather-light, with the softest black hair one could possibly imagine, slept soundly against her thigh, his breath coming and going with barely a sound. She had often held her hand upon her boy's chest, when he slept, to make sure that the breath that was so silent was indeed still there. Colm was such a delicate sleeper, such a fragile creature, that his stillness often seized her heart in panic. Cold terror, as frigid as ice, froze her to what felt like her very soul until she placed her palm against Colm's chest.

There she would feel the heat and the pounding of his heart and the coming and going of his breath, the unmistakable signs of life, and her panic would melt with all the warmth her son's life gave her.

The second dark head, one that was not quiet at all, and quite unlike his son in that way, spoke up and brought Nightingale back to a rather less innocent topic than her love for Colm.

"I'm sorry to disappoint in giving something not quite as debased as you were hoping," said Robin. He looked up at her with a roll of his dark eyes. "I was very drunk. I got curious - I wanted to know what it would be like. The girl he was dating at the time used to rave to me when she was drunk that he was the best kisser she'd ever had. God, that girl was irritating."

"And you wanted to see for yourself?" asked Nightingale. She was treated to a rather huffy and charmingly envious expression from Robin as she stroked Colm's hair in favour of Robin's.

"Partly," he conceded. "I wanted the proof. I also wanted to know how to kiss better. I was young and stupid."

Nightingale smiled at his self-deprecation, though not because she found it amusing. She had long since learned that Robin's ego, for all his bravado, was a delicate thing and that the mockery he directed at himself was far too often genuine.

"You kiss very well, darling," she told him, and it got her a happy smile. "Did you want to practise?"

"I'd never kissed anyone before, Nightingale. I wanted to learn how. I wasn't popular at all, my love, and thought maybe I'd learn how so someone would want me," he confessed. He did not go on, did not seem to be able to, until she let her hand rest on the cheek that was reddening with bashfulness.

"So you can imagine my disbelief when you told me you loved me," he went on. "I'd always been scrawny and ugly and the only girls I attracted wanted my wealth and nothing else, so when you wanted me and not my wealth, I was astonished. And a bit smug."

Nightingale's eyes narrowed in suspicion and she withdrew her hand. "You're digressing on purpose, aren't you?"

"You know me too well," he conceded, and grinned at her.

Nightingale, giving a contemptuous huff as punishment, lifted Colm into her arms. His light weight was of no consequence to her considerable strength. So Robin could not have imagined that the way she jostled his head a bit roughly as she stood was an accident.

Robin's smug smile, which was one of the most charming expressions he owned, stayed plastered to his face as Nightingale turned and made for the stairs, leaving Robin draped over the sofa. 

Nightingale glided up the stairs with the smoothest gait she could manage. A small smile, and not entirely a happy one, pulled at the corners of her mouth when she realized that her fluid motions, the ones that had been engineered and trained into her, the ones she'd used to excite her clients, now served only the purpose of keeping her son as comfortable as she could make him.