Inamorata

Chapter Thirty-Nine - Taking Flight

Chapter 39. Author's note - this is it, the last chapter! There WILL BE AN EPILOGUE, though. But I'm sad that the story's almost over. I'm going to miss these characters, particularly Robin and Nightingale...

The month passed far more quickly than Nightingale wished it to. Her days seemed to blur into one and when she laid down her head to rest, it seemed as though she had no sooner blinked than it was morning. 

She went to see her sisters nearly every day, sometimes with Robin, sometimes without, when she had learned to fly a hovercraft. Like any skill she put her mind to, she took to it quickly, becoming a much better flyer than Robin.

But the times she did take Robin he was viewed with strange mixture of emotions by her fellow Inamoratas. Every one of her sisters circled around him and stared at him with no shame in their abject examination of him.

The shier, quieter ones, like Cocoa, Ruby, Mermaid, and Silk examined him from afar, seeming to form their estimation of Robin through careful contemplation and meditation on his actions. They seemed to research him carefully through observation, practically taking notes and musing over him before coming to a conclusion.

Nightingale could tell this did wonders for Robin's ego, for she often saw him smirking in a way he was never wont to do when he saw her sisters regarding him.

Her friendlier sisters approached him automatically, seeming to trust him the moment they saw he was the highest person in Nightingale's esteem - higher than Michael or David or Clarence, higher even than themselves, and she had known many of them since their extraction.

Upon their first introduction to him, Glitter and Sparkle (who seemed joined at the hip since the liberation) had gone up to him and touched him.

"Well," Glitter had said to Nightingale. "He's real. That's a start."

"Yes," Sparkle had said, nodding along with Glitter's words. "We were sure that someone Nightingale could like better than her sisters, better even than Detective Beckett, would be a character from one of her silly books."

Robin had laughed.

"So, it's true then? Nightingale likes you?" Emerald sadi to him. Her eyes were fixed on him, wide and curious.

Nightingale, seeing a similar disbelieving reverence in most of her sisters, was able to reflect, with a bittersweet joy, on the cause of it. Robin was the first nice man, other than the agents, that they'd ever met. The rest of the men they knew had either taken the bordello by storm and killed before their very eyes, or they'd come to the bordello in the days of the Inamoratas' captivity and raped and beaten them. Robin was not like that. He was one of the most prominent abolitionists in the world, and he was gentle, sweet, calm, quirky, and had absolutely no interest in having sex with any of them, save Nightingale.

So of course they'd treat him like some mystical, impossible being.

"As in...she actually likes you?" Lace continued, peering over Nightingale's shoulder at Robin.

"I think she does, at least. Do you like me, Nightingale?" he asked, as if challenging her.

Nightingale, full of impish humour, had given Robin's mouth a kiss to prove it. This simple gesture had earned her a gasp from the assembled Inamoratas. 

"My God," said Peppermint, gaping.

"Well, I never," cried Aphrodite, grinning from ear to ear.

"I don't believe it," said Diamond, her face in a hilarious state somewhere between a massive smile and a half-witted gape. "Nightingale...how?"