Author's note - aaaaaand, after weeks and weeks, an update. Sorry to have taken so long but it's not exactly like there's a lot of demand for the story. That being said, if you want more, please vote and comment! The encouragement really helps me write!

Headquarters was quiet. Nightingale slipped through the hallways, the only sound she made that of the computer authenticating her handprint as she ghosted through various locked doorways. A few guards stood alert in the atrium, but she was too quiet and moved too fast to give them cause to see or hear her.  

She expected to be alone in the office. She knew Nicholas had gone up to the Muskokas for a weekend with his new girlfriend, that Pierce was trying to avoid Michael's calls and so had gone with Nicholas.

As for Caroline, Nightingale had not really thought it best to ask. Besides, when Caroline was not on duty, it was usually almost impossible to get a hold of her. She was the opposite of David in that respect. Nightingale barely had to form in her mind a desire to see David and it seemed as though he had materialized before her.

 Materialized as he had now, she noted. For when she entered the office, she caught sight of David seated at the long table in the centre of the room.

"What're you doing here?" said David, his voice as brusque as his expression as he looked up from where his fingers were flying over a keyboard. 

"I could ask you the same question - but I'm here to do a bit of profiling of the next-" began Nightingale, taking a seat at the table and snapping her fingers to summon up a hologram from her tablet.

"Go home," he told her.

Nightingale's eyebrows rose. She had long since tamed her desire to throttle David at nearly every juncture, but his incessant poor temper never ceased to annoy her.

"I beg your-" she began.

"It's Sunday. We've just come off a big case. You should be taking at least a week off," snapped David, looking up very sharply at her, his hazel eyes alight. He slammed his hand flat against the table and stood. "And I don't say that for you. I say that because Robin and Colm probably deserve better than a fucking workaholic with nothing better to do than-"

Nightingale had learned that to get the better of David one needed only not to rise to the provocation he provided. Nothing made him angrier than a cool reply or no reply at all. It was how Robin, in his most teasing moods, used to infuriate with David with only a few words.

"Pardon me for not taking your advice on either parenting or marriage," she replied in her quietest, politiest voice. She cocked her head and arched her eyebrows, giving him a cold, tiny smile.

David's jaw snapped shut and his eyes bulged. Despite it being Robin's tactic, Nightingale knew that he would disapprove.

"Don't you dare speak to me that way, you-" he began, lip curled into a snarl. She hadn't seen him this angry in a very long time. David did not frighten her, however, and never had. So it was with utter confidence that she replied.

"Then don't you speak to me that way. In this building I'm your agent, not your...whatever else I am to you," she told him. She crossed her arms and glared at him just as he was glowering at her.

"My concern for your family-" he began again.

Nightingale didn't let him finish. "Is none of your business here! You're the one who's so eager for a separation of work and home, dear detective, so don't bring up my family!"

There was a pause in which David, giving a little smirk, sat down. Nightingale sat opposite him, giving her holograph a little flick, until it displayed the features of two men, suspects in their new long case. She was just about to read what exactly it was they were suspected of - David hadn't circulated a briefing bundle yet - but David's smiling had gotten to her.

"Something making you happy, Detective Beckett?" she asked. She didn't look up.

"You, Agent Brightley," he volleyed back.

Nightingale didn't ask why. She refused to play into whatever he was getting at. Instead, she hummed softly and zoomed up closer on the first man's face. He looked vaguely familiar, and Nightingale wondered if he'd been one of her clients.

"For someone who pretends to be so sweet and so kind, you're really capable of saying awful things," he said. "Tell me, Gale, do you actually get pleasure out of being cruel?"

Anger bubbled up inside Nightingale's chest. A past version of herself might have shrieked at David for that, but she was twelve years older and twelve years wiser and knew that any pleasure she might have had from rising to the challenge would hardly be worth it.

"No." Her reply was curt and she refused to look up. "At any rate, I've never pretended to be kind or sweet - as a matter of fact, ask any of my sisters. They'll tell you all I've ever said of myself is that I'm actually quite the heinous bitch who really only has a talent for fucking and, apparently, for public speaking."

David laughed. Nightingale barely managed to control herself with a few choice lines from poetry.

"Something funny?" she asked, her voice at its most polite.

"Yes - you are. I wish Robin could see you like this. You're always so sweet and kind and compassionate to him. He never sees this side of you, does he? Maybe that's why he likes you," said David. His mouth curled into a sneer.

Nightingale ground her teeth and tried to resist the urge to rise to David's goading. After so long, he knew how to get a rise out of her, and for whatever ungodly, vicious reason, was trying to make her angry.

She opened her mouth and suddenly could no longer control herself.

"Of course I'm always compassionate and kind towards Robin," said Nightingale. A part of her screamed at her not to continue but who she had been came back and she blundered on. "I love him - though I wouldn't really expect you to understand what love is - and he's never been cold-hearted a moment of his life. He hasn't, for example, coerced me into something I didn't want by exploiting my love for someone else, nor has he married someone he didn't love and then used her, nor has he sold his son to slavery to-"

"Enough, Nightingale!" David was quivering with anger, white as a sheet, more upset than Nightingale had ever seen him.

"Aw, did I hurt your feelings, David?" crooned Nightingale in her most mocking tone. "Forgive me."

He sprang up from the table and turned his back on her. "I know my sins, Nightingale, I don't need you to enumerate them for me. And however much you dislike me, I guarantee that I dislike myself even more."

Nightingale didn't say anything, though pity welled up inside her until tears flowed over her lids and she had to wipe her face with the back of her hand. David remained standing with his back to her, still as a statue, and she rose silently from the table.

He did not move as she wound her way around the table until she stood behind him. And then, reaching out one hand, she laid it on his shoulder. She expected him to flinch away as though she had burned him, to twist from underneath her palm as if her skin was some sort of contagion.

He did not. He stayed perfectly rigid, unmoving, unbreathing. But he did not recoil from her hand. So she put her other on his hip, feeling for the bone as she curled her fingers into the soft fabric of his shirt.

He shocked her by sinking back into her embrace, until her arms wound around him and he leaned most of his weight into her. He shut his eyes and gave a soft sigh, reaching up one hand to hold Nightingale's wrist.

Nightingale wanted to speak, wanted to say something, anything. She was instantly transported back twelve years, to the first moment she had met David, to that first night, when he had curled so very trustingly in her stranger's arms and let her soothe him.

Time went winging away as they stood. Nightingale tried to count the moments they stood together, but her thoughts went slipping through the cracks in her mind like sand through her fingers. David's breath came and went, his heart beat slowly against her palm, and his eyes remained closed.

He looked so very innocent, like Colm did when he was sleeping. So Nighitngale reached up and kissed David's temple.

Suddenly, his legs seemed no longer able to support him and he reeled back against her. His weight was of little consequence to her strength, but Nightingale bent her knees and, as smoothly as she could, sat down on the floor, leaning against a pillar, as David came to rest on his back in her lap, staring up at her.

She had no idea what to do. Nor did she particularly want to do anything. She was trying to savour a quiet, peaceful David, to remember when he was his usual vicious self.

"You've grown to hate me," he remarked, eyes opening. He didn't look at her, his eyelids batting as he stared off into the distance.

"I did. I don't think I hate you anymore," she confessed. 

"What a glowing commendation," sneered David, and his lip curled. Nightingale's sympathetic feelings threatened to fade entirely.

"I didn't say I liked you, David. And I think that has something to do with your permanently awful mood," she sneered back.

He was silent for a moment. When he spoke, the words were harsh and bitter and he spat them haltingly, as though the taste of them in his mouth was repugnant to him.

"I...should like us to get along, Nightingale."

"I don't think that's possible." She stroked his hair the way she did Colm's when he had a nightmare and climbed into her arms, shuddering and whimpering.

"Why? Are you too stubborn?"

Nightingale ignored the jibe. "Too much water under the bridge."

Another pause, another few moments where Nightingale was surprised to find herself savouring the feeling of David's breath coming and going, the sight of his lashes batting as he blinked and then closed his eyes.

"Gale, do you love Robin?" asked David.

"Of course," replied Nightingale.

"Do you love him more than you love Colm?" he pressed.

"Of course not," said Nightingale, and the answer flowed off her tongue. There was no being alive she loved more than Colm - her little son, the light of her life and the thing dearest to her soul - and even her ardent love for her husband could not rival it. "I'm sure you understand that."

"Only thing about you that I do," snapped David.

Nightingale's comm began to buzz, and it seemed to break the spell that held David in Nightingale's arms. Springing to his feet, he jerked himself away from her and gave a little shake, like a dog trying to rid itself of water.

"It's just Michael," said Nightingale, eyeing the I.D. as she rose from the floor and fished the thing out of her pocket.

"Go home, Nightingale," retorted David.

"Come with me. Robin would like to see you," said Nightingale.

"Are you inviting me home with you, Mrs. Brightley?" sneered David. He was straightening his cuffs and gave her a look that managed to be both incredulous and exasperated.

"On Robin's behalf," said Nightingale, quick to demonstrate that she had little desire to see David, and that her motivations were purely selfless ones devoted to making Robin happy. Or so she told herself.

David grunted. Nightingale, seeing that she would have absolutely no luck in either convincing David to see Robin or in getting her work done, packed up and ghosted out as quietly as she had come.

Her comm rang again as she got into her hovercraft. Sutffing it in one ear and flicking the hovercraft into gear, she soared out over the city.

"Agent Brightley," she answered, though she knew who it was.

"Ah, my esteemed agent. I was just going to ask when you were going to be home," came the musical warble on the other end, Robin's unmistakable baritone.

"Soon. Oh, and I did something very generous and kind hearted, aren't you proud?" mocked Nightingale, remembering David's accusation that she was kind only to Robin to win his love. While it was untrue, it was an idea not out of the realm of the possible.

"That doesn't surprise me in the slightest. What kindess was it this time, darling?" purred Robin. In the background, Nightingale could hear him admonish Colm very gently for bouncing on the sofa.

"I asked David for dinner - he turned me down," added Nightingale.

"His loss. Only an idiot turns down a dinner with a charming creature like you," said Robin, and in his flattery his voice was at its most attractive; low, controlled, and filled with warm inflection.

"Pah! I think the fact that I added it would make you happy was the only reason he was tempted to accept. To be perfectly honest, I think almost anyone would think he's in love with you if asked to pick of all the people he knows," muttered Nightingale. She'd seen a traffic jam up ahead, hovercrafts clogged in the bottleneck between two buildings. They buzzed like so many enormous flies, the sound of honking of horns permeating even the silence of Nightingale's cockpit.

"It's a reasonable guess," said Robin. Nightingale, navigating carefully between two hovercrafts whose owners appeared to be shouting obscenties at one another midair, laughed distractedly. "Given that one night back when we were in university."

Nightingale's hovercraft almost dropped out of the sky as her attention focused immediately on Robin's words. "What?"

"Didn't I tell you about that? I will have to one time. See you soon, Miss Nightingale," said Robin.

He hung up and Nightingale, shaking her head, was left with a silent comm and wondering about a possible dalliance between Robin and David. Giving a little laugh, she urged the hovercraft on faster. She would quiz Robin when he got back and she knew, with the right cajoling, he would be powerless to refuse her the story.