Chapter 37. Author's note - there will be two chapters after this one and then an epilogue. The story's coming to a close, everyone. Thanks for the (dwindling) support, though, and I hope you will all check out my new story when I release it after Inamorata. Please excuse the shameless self-promotion.
"Nightingale!" Robin's voice was pleading. "Nightingale, wait!"
For anyone else she would not have turned. For anyone else, even for Rose, whose freedom was now her focus, she would not have stopped in her warpath towards anyone, anything that could get her closer to her sister.
But Robin was different. The tone of his imploring voice struck a chord with her, something deep down and visceral, and so she turned.
"What, Robin?" she asked.
By this time, he'd caught up to her. He'd been trailing behind for she'd been walking very fast, so fast, in fact, that he would have had to have run to keep pace with her.
"What's going on?" he huffed. He seemed a little out of breath.
The sympathetic, wide-eyed look of confused pity and astounded concern now making Robin's face positively endearing with worry barely took the edge off Nightingale's fury. She shook as she raised her eyes to Robin's and said:
"Rose shot Bobby. Now she's been arrested. I'm going to get her back," she said.
Robin was quiet for a moment and Nightingale could practically see the cogs in his mind turning as he considered her words.
"'The modest Rose puts forth a thorn'," he muttered, and Nightingale remembered the quotation as being from one of many Blake poems she'd read. He shook his head like a dog with water in its ears and continued:
"And how are you going to do that, Miss Nightingale?" he asked softly, as if saying the words in a gentler tone would minimize their impact.
"I don't know," she replied, his query not deterring in the slightest her ambition to liberate Rose. "I'll think of something. It's my duty to her! My duty to do something! She's just a child and she thought of me as her mother, I swear, so I-"
Nightingale's words cut off with a gagging sound and she realized she'd litterally been choked into silence by the ardour of her fury.
Out, out, brief candle! she recited to herself, closing her eyes and shutting out everything, focusing only on the flow of the verse. Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player-
"Nightingale?" asked Robin. She felt him touch her arm. He'd never seen her recite, and so was probably confused by the fact that she was standing in utter silence, her eyes closed, when moments before she'd been jabbering, her only movement the heaving of her chest and the quivering of her frame.
This time, she ignored him.
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told-
"Nightingale, what the bloody hell is going on?" she heard Robin say, his tenor voice shooting up in pitch as worry made his words grate urgently against Nightingale's ears.
By and idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Feeling her fury not abate, but at least settle, like some wild animal that has been whipped to mutinous silence, she opened her eyes.
"I need to talk to David," she told Robin.
He raised his eyebrows. "About Rose?"
"Exactly. It's was a member of his team who arrested her - Caroline, I'm told," she said, her lips curling back over her teeth as she spoke. "He's the leader of that team. I need to talk to him."
Robin looked uneasy but Nightingale could not afford to spend time wondering why. Her thoughts were entirely focussed on Rose. Everything else was secondary and so Robin's perturbation did not even faze her.
"Robin," she demanded, when he did not speak. "I'm not asking you to help. I'm just asking you to help me talk to him."
Robin sighed. "Very well," he said, taking her by the elbow. Then, to the computer, he said: "Directions to the front desk, please."
The glowing arrows seemed to struggle as they leaped from wall to wall, attempting to keep up with the speed of Nightingale's pace. Even Robin seemed to struggle, too, for he maintained a sporadic half-jog behind her.
When they reached the atrium, the way through which Nightingale had first come when David had brought her for questioning the first time, Robin pulled her to a long desk. Even with her focus devoted to Rose, Nightingale could not help but notice the similarity to the long desk at the Corporation's head office; the place where, so long ago, she had met Michael.
"May I use your com, please?" enquired Robin of the young woman seated at the desk. When she arched her eyebrows at him, he smiled in his charming lopsided way. "I don't carry one. Old-fashioned of me, I know, but it's still the truth."
She nodded as she pushed a tablet and an earpiece his way. "Simply authenticate and then place your call," she said.
Robin nodded, laying his hand flat against the screen. The tablet first came up with a photograph of him and a long list of information, and then his profile vanished, leaving in its place a keypad, complete with a full set of numbers and letters.
Robin's fingers flew as, with one dexterous hand, he placed the piece in his ear and, with the other, keyed in a long string of letters and numbers.
Nightingale waited in an impatient, agitated silence before Robin appeared to start a conversation with the open air.
"David," he said. There was a little pause. "Yes, I know it's strange that I never call you. But this is important. I'm here at Headquarters with someone who would like to talk to you."
During the briefest of moments, Robin turned his face and threw a rueful little smile Nightingale's way. "Why, yes, that is who wants to speak to you. She's just been to visit her sisters and would like an explanation about a certain person's absence."
This time, the silence was much longer. As Robin listened, Nightingale watched his brow begin to furrow more and more as the pause became drawn out, till his forehead seemed as though it would be permanently creased with wrinkles.
Nightingale could bear it no longer. Leaning forward, she snatched the com out of Robin's ear - earning an astonished look from him - and shoved it in her own ear.
"Rose has been arrested. By your team. I want answers," she snarled.
She could practically see David's response in his words. As he spoke, she was able to picture how his eyebrows would rise with incredulity and his cold eyes would flash at being so rudely addressed.
"Ah, so you're giving me orders now, Nightingale?" he replied. His voice was frigid in tone and Nightingale knew why. This was the first time they'd spoken since they'd slept together.
"Yes," she said.
"And I'm just to obey them?" he snorted. "Why?"
"Because you're angry with me for a personal reason. But this is a professional problem. And who was it who was so keen to teach me the distinction between personal and professional affairs?" challenged Nightingale.
David must have remembered this lesson as one of the many he'd tried to give her, for he gave a resigned hiss.
"Very well. Be at the team's office as soon as possible," he snapped. Then there was silence from the earpiece and Nightingale assumed that David had disconnected the communication.
Nightingale relayed David's instructions to Robin. Together, they made their way from the atrium to the door of the team's office, neither one needing directions from the computer in order to find their way. When they arrived at the black door and Nightingale placed her hand up against it, Robin spoke.
"Nightingale, what are you planning on doing about Rose?" he asked.
The door swung open and they entered the room. Robin immediately took a seat next to the window, throwing himself down in a patch of sunlight . "I don't know. But I need to talk to him first."
When Nightingale tried to sit, she found she could not. It seemed as though the anxiousness and anger racing throughout her would also not let her rest, as much as she wanted nothing more than to pull up a chair, lay her head in Robin's lap, and sink into slumber.
She was suddenly weary, so weary. After all, she'd been through so much in the past few days - death, freedom, love, loss, and now this.
"Come, sit down," said Robin. Her exhaustion must have shown on her face, for he immediately sprang up and took her by the shoulders.
She shook her head and pulled away from his embrace.
"Just sit," he implored, his dark eyes so wonderfully winsome.
She followed his instructions, sinking into a chair. Immediately, he came to stand behind her. His long-fingered hands came to rest on her shoulders. As he bent over her to kiss the top of her head, Nightingale gave a sigh.
A feeling of blissful safety, perfect calm stole over her. She had once felt safe when she was with David and had once felt warm with Clarence and Michael. All of those things paled in comparison to feeling both in Robin's presence.
"Robin," she protested.
"I know," he said, and proceeded to prove himself to be the excellent judge of character David had once told her he was. "You're independent. You don't need me to help you with this. You can, and always have, handled things on your own. But let me at least comfort you, Miss Nightingale."
There was a short pause.
"I love you, Robin," she said, her shyness and bashfulness at saying the words so unlike her.
He chuckled. "I'm sure you do," he said.
David, as always, seemed to pick entirely the wrong time to walk in, for Nightingale, just as she was staring up at Robin, knowing her face was full of an affection she would have once scorned, she heard the tell-tale footsteps of another person enter the room and then stop dead before them.
When she looked up, she saw it was David, a glower that seemed permanently etched into deep lines on his face.
"Oh, so when should I expect the happy announcement?" he asked, throwing himself down in a chair much as Robin had done.
As he spoke, Nightingale observed him carefully. In the flash of his cold eyes she saw not the cool reservation he was so proficient at. No, the glare he was sending at her and Robin was something else entirely. This was cold, controlled fury, not detachment.
"Whenever Nightingale so chooses," replied Robin, mocking David's anger with a sweet, placid smile.
Nightingale, though she hadn't a clue what they were talking about, still twitched a smile.
David grunted and rolled his eyes in his customary way before he turned his attention to her. "Now, you're here to talk to me about Rose?" he asked.
Nightingale nodded. "I want to know why."
David snorted. "She shot Bobby, Nightingale. Attempted murder is actually a-"
"Attempted murder?" asked Nightingale. She did not try to disguise the smile that curled over her face, spiteful though it was. She was not smiling for Rose, though she knew Rose would pay a far gentler price for the attempt without success. She was smiling because death was too good for Bobby. He deserved something worse. Something more cruel.
"Yes," said David. As he spoke, he crossed his legs and then steepled his fingers, gazing out at Nightingale from over them. "Rose is not a good shot, not to mention that her emotional state most likely made it very difficult to shoot. I'd already landed two shots on Bobby, and she managed to land a third. She was aiming for his head, according to Pierce and Nick, and she got him in the abdomen."
Nightingale did not know whether to be horrified by Rose's act of violence, as such violence she had once told Rose she'd never partake in, or to admire the girl for her misplaced courage.
"I suppose it's lucky for her," added David, not even the slightest inflection of either anger or sympathy in his voice as he went on. "The punishment for attempted murder is light in comparison to that of murder. Add onto that the context of the crime, that she was in an emotional state and simply trying to avenge the death of someone she cared for, and her punishment will not be too bad. Nine or ten years in a Union prison on-"
"Nine or ten years?" cried Nightingale. "Nine or ten years? She's a child, David, a-"
"She tried to kill someone, Nightingale," he returned, leaning forward as his words cut over hers, sharp as ice. The very coldness of them shocked even the mutinous Nightingale into silence. Now there was anger in his voice when before he'd been so calm. "I'd say one stops being a child when one tries to kill someone!"
"You can't possibly understand her motivations," she hissed at David. "She-"
"What? You're going to tell me that she did it because she loved him? That she should somehow be excused for her crime because she was in love? With a man she'd known for a few days? I've never heard such nonsense from you, Nightingale," scoffed David.
It was Robin's hands on her shoulders, the gentle, warm hands that were trying to soothe her, to calm her, that drove Nightingale to a rash anger. Because with Robin there, so close, Nightingale was reminded of the awful things she would be capable of doing to the person who harmed him.
"You don't understand!" she screamed at David, her voice louder and her fury more ardent than ever before in her life. "You don't understand because you don't-"
"Don't what?" he shrieked right back, voice just as loud as hers.
"Because you don't love anyone! You can't understand what you would do for them because you are incapable of love! Do you know what I would do for him?" she howled, dragging Robin by one hand until she clasped him to her. "I would act exactly as Rose did, anyone would! She thought she loved Clarence and I know I love Robin! But you can't understand that, can you?"
Nightingale did not get the reaction she expected from David. She had expected him to screech back at her, to rail and howl and shout, but instead, he did quite the opposite.
He fell back into his chair and laughed. But it was not the mirthful laughter she'd once heard. This was terrible. Mocking.
"Why are you laughing, David?" asked Robin. All his characteristic humour had vanished from his voice
"Because of her," he said, a cruel smirk curling over his face as he pointed at Nightingale. "I can love, Nightingale, you foolish bitch, and don't you dare say otherwise. Just not you."
Nightingale's mouth opened with shock.
"David," warned Robin, and his voice was shockingly grave.
"You-" began David, but Robin cut him off.
"Enough," he snapped.
His tone was enough to stop both Nightingale and David from speaking. They stared in shock as Robin regarded both of them waspishly.
"You're here to talk about Rose, not squabble about love," he chided them. "I love you, Nightingale, and we all know that you're my best and dearest friend, David. So I tell you both with all the love in the world that I'm sick of your behaviour."
Nightingale and David glared at each other.
"We were discussing Rose, Detective Beckett?" asked Nightingale.
His lip curled with contempt. "We were. Now, Rose, if she's convicted, and she will be, is looking at nine or ten years, as you said. However, the courts are prepared to let her off on only house arrest, being closely monitored and tutored by an agent and a psychiatrist, on one condition."
There was a flutter of some emotion in Nightingale's stomach and it was a moment before she realized what it was: hope.
"And that condition is?" she asked, fighting to keep her voice free of hope for Rose and anger towards David.
He smiled sardonically, his mouth barely twitching as he looked at Nightingale. "You won't like it, Gale."
Nightingale flinched with surprise at the use of the sobriquet.
"With the whole affair with Rose and the government's new experience with Inamoratas, they've come to realize something; that you, Nightingale, are miraculous, even for a genetically-engineered being. Everyone was working on the assumption that every Inamorata is as you are, and that's simply not true. You're unique and, as the government sees it, valuable," he said, a sneer finding its way onto his face. The look of contempt was so at odds with the weight of his praise that Nightingale found herself confused.
"Your point being what, exactly?" she retorted, making the words as hostile as she possibly could.
"My point being that the condition for lenience for Rose is that you become a government agent," said David. "A government agent on my team, no less."
Now it was Nightingale's turn to laugh with no humour as she collapsed into a chair. Her shoulders shaking with her perverse mirth, she caught her face in her hands. She hid her eyes and let her hair flop over her face, trying to shut everything but the man with his hand on her shoulder out.
"Nightingale," said Robin uneasily. He had begun to stroke her back, his warm fingers trailing the sharp ridge of her shoulder blade.
She lifted her head. "I've no choice, then. As always in my life, I have no choice. I thought this would be the end of my slavery, that I'd have a choice from now on. A choice of who to love. Of who to fuck. Of where to live. Of how to make my living. But apparently not. I've no choice."
"You're wrong. You do have one," replied David. His cold eyes were fixed on her unblinkingly, like a snake's about to strike. Or, at least what Nightingale's conditioned knowledge told of how a snake looked.
"My choice is to condemn my sister to prison for nine years - where, doubtless, she'll kill herself, because she's completely fucked up in the head, you know - or become beholden to the government. Do you really think I have a choice, Detective?" she snarled at him, her words even colder than his at that moment.
David did not respond. He simply looked down, staring at the cuff-links that Nightingale knew gave him so much trouble to remove.
"Nightingale, you don't have to take it," said Robin. "I'll get Rose a lawyer, and we can get her excused on medical grounds."
"And then what?" asked Nightingale, turning to him. She met his dark eyes and found them wide with sympathy. Tears, hated, weak tears, began to mist her eyes as she went on. "If she gets excused on mental grounds she'll be locked up for the rest of her life. Rose won't survive being caged, Robin. She's too delicate."
Robin only sighed, the sound seeming to come from the bottom of his soul.
"So that's your answer, Detective. Tell the government I've accepted the position," she said. Then she snorted. "But make sure they know how ashamed I am of it. Make sure they know how they used my love for my sister against me."
David nodded and, without another word, left the room.