Immortality

Chapter Eleven - Reflections and Mimicry

Chapter Eleven - Author's note: So there are only a few days left to submit your fanfiction to the fanfiction competition. Details here, and I really look forward to reading everyone's fics! The information for the fanfic competition is here:

http://www.wattpad.com/68889670-the-great-inamorata-fanfic-competition

The next day was devoted to physical workups during which Dr. Oshiwa - Erica, she had said she wanted everyone to call her Erica, and everyone seemed to be on first-name basis will everyone else all of a sudden - strolled about the gym making notes on a little electronic clipboard. She assessed both her own team and David's as she put them through their paces. She tested them, she said, for their skills using sparring hand-to-hand, target practice, and obstacle courses. These followed upon the medical tests of the previous day that Erica used to determine their physical fitness and degree of health.

That had, of course, brought back little twinges of grief. As Nightingale stood naked in a white room with scanners buzzing about her, stroking her skin, and casting her in deep shades of red, blue, and purple light, she could not help but think of Clarence.

Clarence. Clarence, whom Rose had loved. Clarence, who had not loved her. Brave, brash, darling Clarence.

She did not miss him quite so much now, or at least not in any sort of way that caused her daily pain. But even after twelve years, little things would remind her of him and make her flinch as the wound of her sadness twinged at the memory. The grief of Clarence's death was a wound that had long since healed and smoothed into a scar. It was not a sorrow that reopened, or bled afresh, or turned to agony at any mention of him, not as the death of Robin or her sisters or David would. But it was still there.

And for the rest of the team, who had known him much longer, she guessed their wounds were deeper. Their team still had no doctor, and it was subject upon which no member of the team - and least of all David - could be possibly moved.

Now, Nightingale was eager to demonstrate her physical prowess and took to each task with adroitness and enthusiasm. She was first out of the gate in the obstacle course when both teams, Britannic and Western Union, were set to running it as fast as they could.

"Stop showing off, Gale," panted Nicholas in an agonized shout as he lumbered, sweating and grunting, to follow her as she scampered up over an obstacle of suspended netting, leaped nimbly off the edge, and landed without a sound on the other side.

She didn't reply. Instead, she sprang up the stairs before her and made for the next obstacle, a catwalk suspended over a good thirty-foot drop. She jumped up onto the railing instead and, flying swiftly over it, opted to descend by leaping from the railing and landing on all fours followed by a roll as opposed to taking the stairs on the opposite side.

"That was beautiful," Erica said when Nightingale completed the course. She'd clocked in a few moments before David due to, in part, her showmanship with the stairs. "Not only deadly and efficient - beautiful."

It made Nightingale uneasy, for that was a description she herself would have given of David.

Uneasiness was momentarily set aside when Erica set her sparring with Daniel. As he stood before her on the mats, with both Amartya and Erica observing from the sides, Nightingale stretched in a show of needing to limber up. Daniel had been at her all the previous day and the beginning of that day with what were apparently well-meant but nevertheless irritating flirtations. And as she said to Robin when she'd arrived home the previous night:

"He's a little too big for his britches, I think. Someone needs to take him down an notch."

"You go for it, my fierce Nightingale," Robin had said, petting her face with the tips of his fingers. She had seized his hand and kissed it and tried not to count the number of kisses left before she was gone, off the slavery again, and possibly to infidelity.