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.

She hummed quietly a song of Sparkle's composition as she wound up two flights of stairs and all the way to the end of the hall. Colm had, when he was very young, insisted on sleeping in the highest point of the house, in a small room comprised nearly entirely of windows.

When head chosen it, Nightingale had asked him whether he would not be frightened up there all by himself, when he had turned to her and said very seriously:

"Birds aren't afraid of heights."

Robin had laughed at that, but Nightingale had taken her son's words as earnestly as he had meant them.

But the distance did not stop Colm, however, from ghosting down the stairs and appearing at Nightingale's side when he had nightmares. She would wake at feeling his presence in the room and, with a smile, draw back the blankets and let him climb in next to her. He would fall asleep curled flush against her body, his dark little head tucked firmly into the hollow under her chin.

Robin slumbered on completely unaware of Colm when he did this, for Colm could move so quietly so as to wake only his mother. And, in the mornings, when Nightingale felt Robin stirring, she would softly pick up her son, ghost up the stairs, and tuck him into his own bed.

Colm seemed to appreciate this, for he thanked her in his sweet trill whenever he woke.

Now, Nightingale laid Colm in his bed, covered him with his duvet, and watched in satisfaction as he snuggled into his blankets. Brushing back his dark hair - precisely the colour of Robin's, but softer - Nightingale kissed his forehead.

Then she left the room in the silence of only which she was capable. Colm was indeed a quiet creature, but he was half Robin, and so Nightingale remained the only one of the three of them who could pass unnoticed in the house.

"Are you coming back, Nightingale?" she heard Robin call as she was heading down the stairs.

"Obviously," she retorted. "I want to know what happened. But I didn't really think it was appropriate for our son to hear about your sexual escapades."

Robin blushed again, but managed a witty little smile.

"Well, what happened?" she demanded, as she wound herself back down onto the sofa. Robin, who had been lounging spread-eagle over the whole piece of furniture, all tangled, gangly limbs, moved aside to accomodate her.

"You've kissed David," Robin pointed out, waving his hand and sending her a coy, sidelong look. She returned it with a cool one, to let him know that bringing up her past with David was dangerous territory. "You tell me what you think happened."

"An all-out attack?" It wasn't even a guess, since Nightingale was certain in her assertion.

"Precisely," said Robin, and smiled. "David had me on my back in half a second and I was just considering that it was getting hard to breathe when he sat up and stopped. Then he told me he didn't see me that way, I agreed, and he and I never talked about it again."

"So that was it?" asked Nightingale. She was quite astonished - that was far too innocent and far too gentle for the David she knew.

"Yes. Does that surprise you?" replied Robin.

"Of course it does!" she cried.

"Nightingale, is it really so hard for you to understand why I might be curious?" said Robin, lowering his chin to give her the full advantage of an incredulous stare. The expression was undeniably endearing. "You, who both kissed and fucked multiple men in a bout of polyamorous curiosity?"

"That's not the part I'm confused about, darling," retorted Nightingale. A person less cavalier about sex might've been indignant, but Nightingale was not. "Also, keep in mind that the man I was most curious about I ended up marrying."

"A solid point," he granted, with a grin.

"I'm only surprise that David didn't take it further. When he goes for something, he goes in for the kill," said Nightingale. After a moment's pause, she had her own back at Robin for his teasing when she went on. "He didn't end up actually sucking your di-"

"Nightingale!" he cried, and went scarlet. It was delightful.

"I've offended your modest sensibilites," laughed Nightingale.

After a moment's blush, Robin went on, but the horror in his eyes hadn't faded and he looked scandalized. "No, my dear, we didn't have sex, not because we're both flagrant heterosexuals, but instead because neither one of us has ever been as casual about it as you."

"I'm not sure that's why," said Nightingale.

"Then why?" Robin cocked his head.

"He loves you, you know," said Nightingale. She was disgusted at the level of devoted affection the sentence carried, but her disgust was hugely outweighed by the nauseating love that caused it.

"Oh, who can sound the depth of David's soul?" mused Robin in his most pretentious, plummy tones, waving his hand about with such sharp enthusiasm that Nightingale could swear she heard his wrist crack. "That's from Dryden, Nightingale, I can't take credit for it. It's a turn of phrase I don't use often enough...and I suppose David does, in his way, but what difference does that make?"

"He would never want to fuck you because he loves you," said Nightingale. "I'm not entirely sure he could ever reconcile sex and love. He's too fucked up."

"How perceptive you've become about him," said Robin, his lopsided smile back on his face.

"You're making fun of me," snapped Nightingale.

"I'm not," he promised, when there came a ringing from somewhere off to the side. Nightingale jumped up and went instantly to her jacket pocket. "Aren't you going to get that, Nightin-"

"It's just my fucking comm, Robin," she replied, already setting the annoying little device aside. She didn't much feel like answering it.

"Answer it, please. Michael's been bugging me all day."

"It's not Michael. It's Rose," she said, hoping the pedantic little difference would satisfy Robin.

It didn't. "Nightingale, would you please pick up the damn comm?"

"No, I don't think I will. And there, it’s stopped ringing,” said Nightingale. She flung the comm across the room and it landed neatly in a vase. She heard the distinct splash of the electronic sinking like a stone amongst the flowers. Unluckily for her, it was waterproof and continued to ring, the sound gurgling its way up and out of the ceramic.

Robin rolled his eyes, giving Nightingale one of the disparaging looks with which he usually graced David. Eventually, the comm fell silent and Nightingale settled back down on the sofa.

“So, how long do you have before the next big case?” asked Robin. He, having grown only little bolder in so many years of marriage, had looped a piece of Nightingale’s hair around his finger and was playing with just a little bit of it.

“David says it’ll be a week. Which means he’ll be growling at all of us tomorrow about it, I’m sure,” she sighed. David was nothing if not a fucking slavedriver of a boss.

“What’s the case this time?” asked Robin. With an encouraging nudge of her head, Nightingale induced him to let his fingers climb her hair until his palm rested against her neck and his thumb stroked her cheek.

His touch was so very delicate, something Nightingale had never gotten used to. She had been used to the rough, brutal caresses of her clients; then, she had suffered David’s aggressive affection and the wild embraces of her sisters; now, she allowed the clumsy, brutal touches of the otherwise-fragile Colm, who seemed not to understand the strength he possessed.

Robin’s hands, however, seemed capable of infinite gentility. Roughness was not in him. Though he tempered it with a quick wit and a wicked ability to tease, sweetness was Robin’s constitution and tender clemency his nature.

“Don’t know,” murmured Nightingale. She wasn’t interested in speaking, not with Robin’s hand on her skin. When a little dip of her chin did not encourage him to any further affection, she bent her head forward and kissed the heel of his hand.

He blushed deeply – still so bashful – and when he spoke his tuneful voice hitched slightly with a sharp draw of breath.

“Weren’t you at HQ today to find that out?” he said, and when he cocked his head and narrowed his eyes, Nightingale could not help but smile.

“I was, but David kept me quite occupied and I didn’t feel like sticking around to suffer him any longer than I had to,” she replied.

Robin made a noise of assent low in his throat. "Well, don't go to work tomorrow then, yes?" he said.

Nightingale, getting tired of trying to coax initative out of Robin, instead draped herself over his chest. "All right," she conceded, and wriggled just a little because she knew it would would make him cross-eyed with both pleasure and bashfulness.

They sat there in silence before Robin's voice, at its most handsome and its most persuasive, hummed under Nightingale's ear. She immediately distrusted it.

"Oh, and my darling, lovely, brave, intelligent Nightingale, one more favour?"

"Oh, for fuck's sake, Robin, you know you can get anything if you flatter me like that," she snarled.

"Please, for the love of God, pick up the fucking comm if it rings?"