i'm glad we didn't let go.

[Lukas] That new key on his keychain has been there for several weeks now. Even so, this is the first time Lukas has used it not to come by in the dead of night to sleep, but simply to drop by unannounced.

It's the dinner hour when the lock on the front door of 23-C clicks back. A moment later the door swings open and Lukas calls, "It's me," as though there might be any chance at all that Danicka would mistake him for anyone else. She doesn't have roommates anymore. He's the only other person on the face of the planet with a spare key to her den. Even were that not the case, there's the matter of his rage, his presence, utterly unmistakable.

When he steps in, he's not emptyhanded. He's carrying a takeout bag from the Brasserie Jo, where once upon a time she found him enjoying a late dinner and sat down to join him moments before a monster in an alley and loyalty to a brother he later forsook called him from it.

There's more, though. He also has a backpack; a duffle bag. These things he lowers to the floor in the entryway.

"Dinner," he says, holding the takeout bag out. "And," after she takes it, he shrugs out of his light leather coat, hanging it up or tossing it aside as appropriate, "I brought a few changes of clothes and some books. Plus my favorite pillow."

[Danicka] He knows she's at home as soon as he turns his key in the lock and opens the door. There's the matter of her scent, for one thing, but the stereo is on inside, playing some kind of house-trance music that seems perfectly appropriate for sunset. Her apartment faces East; it's already lost much of the sunlight, and so it's dim inside. The kitchen lights are off, so what light there is comes from the lamp over by the couch, the lamp set amongst the two large leather armchairs she added months ago. They're nicely, warmly shaded; it's comfortable.

He knows she's home as soon as he steps inside because she's standing just barely within the peripheral view from the door, leaning on the kitchen counter with one of the many (many) takeout menus he knows live in the junk drawer opened in front of her. She's playing idly with an earring when she looks up from said menu, all her thick hair in a ponytail, wearing a pink v-neck sweater over a thin white t-shirt and heather gray yoga pants that, as yoga pants are wont to do, hug her from the hips downward.

There are sneakers by the door, and a gym bag. And a rolled-up purple and yellow yoga mat in a sling. From the look of things, and from the scent of her, Danicka hasn't been home long, and the last place she's been probably involved a session with that personal trainer she was talking about.

Lukas has probably gotten texts about this personal trainer. Her name is Sophia, and she is the reason why at least one of these texts was omfg can't feel my arms followed by that's probably a good thing. She started taking simple hatha yoga classes to follow those sessions, a counterpoint to Sophia's cheerful intensity.

Seeing him, Danicka smiles, stops playing with her earring -- because she does, in fact, wear earrings to work out sometimes, if not makeup -- and rounds the corner to come see him, her eyes lighting up at the sight of the bag from Brasserie Jo. "Ooh," she says," taking it from him and waiting for his stuff to make it to the floor before she winds an arm around his waist, smiling.

"I find it unquestionably adorable," Danicka she says, when he starts to explain what he's brought along with him, "that you even have a favorite pillow."

Kisses him, if he'll bend his head to her uplifted one, in softer greeting. When it's over -- and it may take longer than one might think for her to finish welcoming him like that -- she nods her head towards the south hallway. "If you want to unpack anything, there's space in the closet and bathroom. I'll pour wine and get plates and things. We can eat on the patio. It's a nice night."

[Lukas] "Mmgh," Lukas replies, immediately wrapping his now-free arm around her as she comes close. He doesn't drop his stuff on the floor after all. He turns his face into her hair; she can feel him inhaling, his chest expanding against her shoulder. He presses a kiss to her temple and then --

then, instead of letting her put their food aside, or going to put his stuff into her closet, he turns toward her instead, wraps both arms around her, bends to her and nuzzles against her neck and bites at her shoulder, gently.

"Mate. Mine," he mutters against the curve of her neck, as though he were Tarzan of the fucking Jungle, as though he'd lost all semblance of human language facility. He kisses her again.

A moment later he lets go. And straightens, shouldering his dufflebag again where it'd slipped down to the crook of his elbow. There's a quirky, lopsided little smile on his face, pleased, and then she comments on his favorite pillow and he laughs, happily, a little abashedly, and looks down at the rather large dufflebag at his hip.

"Yeah, well. I do. And it's awesome."

He goes into the bedroom, then, while she gets plates and utensils, pours wine to go with their meals. There are steamed mussels in there, and prosciutto and melon; a rather enormous steak, medium; the ubiquitous rack of lamb; a roast duck breast. There's no clear indication what food belongs to whom. Then again, Lukas never draws these distinctions between himself and his mate. Likely he intends to share everything.

While she's unpacking dinner, he's unpacking his things. He hangs a few pairs of jeans in the closet; one pair of slacks. A few buttondown shirts, smart-casual. The light leather coat he wore here; a zip-up sweater, finely knitted; a jacket. Some boxerbriefs go into the drawer she cleared out for him, along with some undershirts, socks, a silk sweater or two with a drape too heavy to hang up lest they pull themselves out of shape.

Two belts go next to hers. A newsboy cap, dove grey, which seems to be the only thing he'll wear on his head.

In the bathroom, he puts a tumbler, a toothbrush, a jar of shaving cream and a brush, and a straight razor in the medicine cabinet. Two small bottles of shampoo and bodywash join Danicka's in the shower -- just in case one day she decides to switch from the blessedly faint-scented toiletries she typically uses, to something much more blatantly girly.

His books go into the nightstand. And a spare dock for his iPhone, and a spare powercord for his laptop.

All told, he fills up a little less than half the space she gave him. He's quietly pleased to see his things living next to hers, though, their more monochromatic color palettes and understated designs counterpointing the startling array of her things. When he's finished, he leaves the dufflebag rolled up in his drawer, tosses his backpack next to the nightstand, and comes back out.

[Danicka] "Jesus," she calls to him from the kitchen while he's unpacking his things in her bedroom, "you bought enough food for six people, Lukáš." Nevermind the fact that on her birthday she ordered enough for eight. At least in that case that was the smallest number of people you could cater for. A rack of lamb, a steak, some duck, and that's not all. She shakes her head, to herself, as she starts portioning out things onto plates. Not two. She makes three plates, holding an assortment of everything he brought. "It looks like you were either really hungry, really indecisive, or both."

Without any discussion as to the fact, they both move naturally towards the thought of sharing all of it. Of eating from the same plates, though they never really indulge in the dripping sentiment of hand-feeding each other. Occasionally, a bite, at a bonfire or on a boat, when they're playful. Nothing more than that. They are content to eat off one another's plates, both of them quietly but constantly aware of how much the other has had, of a gentle give and take. She prefers the fruits and vegetables; he wants more meat, especially lamb. She's pleased when he leaves her the leanest bites of steak or duck; he likes seafood more than she does. Her stomach fills up faster, so she eats slower; he burns more calories per second, so he eats more.

She gets out some red wine, the sort of blended table wine she usually keeps on hand along with a bottle of cab sauv and a bottle of chardonnay. Meanwhile, he's hanging up slacks and shirts and putting away underclothes and sweaters, putting his cap on one of the hooks by the closet door next to her small collection of hats. The green one he's seen so often is nearest the door, chipper and bright. She doesn't wear hats often. Apparently she has a pinstriped white fedora he's never even seen on her. Maybe it's new.

By the time he comes back out, Danicka has a bottle and two glasses in one hand, a plate in the other. She nods her head at the other two plates, similarly laden, smiling. A year ago it was rare to see her smile so readily, so openly, even when they were alone. She's warmer now. She seems sure of herself in a way she never allowed others to glimpse. And... more than that, she seems sure of herself in a way she never even was. "Did you have enough space?" she asks, genuinely -- though not deeply -- concerned about this.

[Lukas] From the bedroom he laughs -- says nothing, doesn't want to shout across her apartment. When he comes out, though, automatically picking up the other two plates as she indicates them, he says, "Actually, I was being very decisive. I wanted everything. So I got everything."

He follows her to the balcony, where it's warm outside, the last heat of the day rising from the concrete far below. Danicka has never gotten a dining table. Lukas sort of likes that, just like he likes that she's furnished the north bedroom now and bought armchairs and patio chairs. The latter signals to him that she's settling into this place. That she's staying here in this apartment where there is where she told him she was falling for him, and there is where he told her she was precious to him. That she feels safe enough, now, to stay despite the ugliness that has also happened here.

And the former: that's different. Not having a dining table is a little like not having curtains over that enormous wall of glass. It gives a sense of spaciousness, of open spaces. It reminds him a little of flying with the Talons of Horus, which is perhaps the one thing he misses most about that lofty, idealistic totem.

"Láska," he says, amused; warm, "I filled up about half the space you left me. You should move some of your things back down."

He hooks one of the patio chairs over with his foot. If there's a table, he sets the plates down, helps her with the wine and the glasses, sits. The days are long now. The last light of the sun washes over the magnificent mile; the lake beyond it. Her balcony is set into an alcove, protected from all but the most direct wind. It's warm and pleasant on a spring evening, and Lukas puts his feet up on the balcony rail, exhaling in contentment.

"My god," he marvels, appreciative without envy, "you are living the life up here, aren't you?"

[Danicka] "Oh, I see," she replies easily and agreeably, when he tells her that no, he was very decisive. There's a definite twinkle in her eye, a smile living at the corners of her mouth without quite blossoming into full upward curves, as she steps around the counter before him and walks out to the balcony.

No, no dining table. Not even a tiny round bistro table. The chairs are angled towards each other so that the square side table fits into the corner their arms create; he can imagine, if he likes, Danicka turning one chair sometimes to put her feet up on it when she comes out here. Or he can sit with her and their feet can tangle. It takes effort to make all of the plates and the bottle and glasses fit on the table; in the end she puts the bottle on the floor between the two chairs, the corkscrew beside it.

They have a dining table in their den. It's impossible to imagine a family, or children, living in Lukas's room at the Brotherhood. Appalling, in fact, to consider. It's not impossible, but it's difficult, to imagine this apartment transforming to accomodate a nursery rather than a study, a crib wedged in where her desk and bookshelves are now, the place made baby- and child-friendly. At the den in Stickney, it's... not hard at all to look at the empty spaces, the empty rooms, and put a family inside it. It wasn't the house they had when he went to the Underworld and was shown that heartrending vision, but all the same.

Not hard to see that table, only half-full even on Thanksgiving, when they cooked a ridiculous amount of food and turkey it took them ages to finish no matter how many turkey sandwiches they ate... circled by children being taught the basics of good manners. Thank you and You're welcome. Please pass the potatoes. Děkuji vám, maminka.

This is perhaps one more reason why they hold onto their private spaces, the defined domains of His and Hers and Theirs.

They leave the door open, music filtering out dimly onto the patio as they settle onto their chairs. Danicka takes down her hair, ruffling it out afterwards as Lukas is settling into one of those surprisingly comfortable chairs. She curls up on her own, legs tucked, and reaches down to uncork the wine. "Oh, that's just more work for me," she says mildly, waving away the thought of taking things back down out of storage. "I'll leave the space. It'll fill eventually."

The cork comes out with a pop and she pours their glasses neatly, setting it back down on the floor and reaching over to pluck a bite of melon off a plate. "Mmm," she agrees, as he surveys the view she sees every day. "I become more luxurious by the day. It's quite disgusting, actually." She doesn't mean a word of that. Swallows the melon and licks her lips, glancing out at the city thoughtfully. "When Martin and I first headed out to Chicago to look for a place, he didn't much care where we ended up. I didn't have much of an idea what I was doing. I think the view and getting sick of looking was what sold me, here."

[Lukas] Lukas slides a mussel off its shell and into his mouth. While he's chewing, he unbuttons his shirt rather deftly, shucks it off to the side. Then his undershirt, tugged up behind his neck and over his head, off, tossed aside as well. He settles back, bare to the waist now, relaxed and basking in the last warmth of the day on her balcony in her glass tower.

"I love that you're luxurious," he replies, wrapping a cut of melon in prosciutto now: down the hatch. The toothpick he leaves on an empty napkin, wrapping it over once to keep it from blowing away in an errant breeze. "I love that you're fucking decadent. I love that you've got class and taste. I love the car you drive and the shoes you buy. I love watching you get dressed in the mornings."

Lukas laughs -- low, lazy.

"I love undressing you to find out what you're wearing under them this time."

He turns to her then, rolls his head without lifting it from the off-white cushions of her new patio furniture. He finds her eyes and there's a stirring lust there: the very thought of undressing her; the very thought of what she's wearing under her clothes. It's banked, though, an ember and not a flame, and overlain now with a slow, deep affection. His blink is slow, almost drowsy, as he watches her.

"And I love that you're wild. That none of this ... " he makes a vague gesture, " ... stuff defines you."

[Danicka] It says something to her that the mere mention of Ilari Martin's name doesn't make Lukas so much as bat an eyelash, much less bristle and turn his face away, as though that would keep her from seeing the flare of irrational anger, the clamping down of his control on the connection his temper has to the pure fire of rage. She understands that fire, though not as another Garou can. She knows, at least, that it is as connected to lust and fear and hunger and shame and a great many other things as it is connected to simple anger.

She did not know, when she opened her mouth and told him about looking for an apartment with Martin, whether he would be okay with it or not. She sips her wine and watches him strip out of his clothes. She keeps hers on, eyes thoughtfully tracing over his form as it bends and flexes with the way he moves to take off one item and then the other. In this, too, she's luxurious; he's called it carnivorous in the past.

What he says amuses her, like she told him at the Art Institute it did: that he's so excited, so fascinated, so delighted and turned on by these human trappings. So her smile as she sips her wine is more wry than anything else, with the faintest, smiling eyeroll when he mentions her car and her shoes. It softens a bit when he says he loves watching her get dressed in the mornings. She actually looks a little surprised when he owns up to enjoying undressing her just to see what kind of lingerie she has on now, whether it's lace or cotton or silk or any of her other combinations.

By now he might be used to hearing a quiet I know to anything he might say along these lines. Of course she knows the effect she has on him, the effect all the staging has on people, especially male. At one time she was intrigued to discover that it had an almost identical effect on most male, human-born Garou, as well. But something about the way he says that, the anticipatory air of it, actually seems to surprise her a little.

"Really?" she laughs, and as he rolls his head towards her: "Sorry to disapoint you, but I generally don't wear anything particularly interesting to the gym."

Danicka sets her wine glass down and reaches for more food, this time a bite of the steak she cut inside, as though she knew they'd end up eating more with their hands than anything. Her hair falls across her face slightly, and he tells her one more thing that he loves about her. She glances at him, her eyes just as wild as he says she is, secretive and indistinct. Furtive, almost, by nature.

"I'm not, actually," she says quietly, "luxurious or decadent. I don't see myself that way. It... was a joke." She shrugs, and eats a bite of steak.

[Lukas] The truth is, Ilari Martin hadn't pinged on Lukas's radar because he's not thinking about that right now. He's thinking of Martin as he knew him for all that time: Danicka's cokehead roommate, rail-thin, smart-mouthed, prematurely aged from the life of a kin and a life of hard fucking drugs, who was inexplicably involved with Katherine.

He's not thinking of what happened between the first time he and Danicka made love, and the second. He's not thinking of what happened when the kinsman went home from having his head dunked in a toilet. He's not thinking of what implicit promises were made that night at Mr. C's, nor the outcome of those promises.

He doesn't think of any of that because it's in the past. There were a thousand things that happened then that he doesn't like to think of now, and he was the author of most of them. He can't change that past any more than he can protect her from hers.

So:

The evening's warm. There's food. There's mate, and her presence is all around him here at her den. He's happy. And he doesn't follow that old, bitter trail, long since stale.

He eats appetizers, instead, and then starts in on the duck. He strips a lamb rib clean, delicately and precisely, practiced with his teeth in a way humans never are. He laughs under his breath when she says she's not wearing anything particularly interesting.

And then he looks at her again, his smile fading to a faint, quizzical expression, his eyes searching hers for a moment.

"I know," he says quietly. "That's what I meant when I said none of this defines you."

He lays the bone down beside the toothpick. Shifts, settles again, lower now, slouching in the patio chair, lazing about. The sky is that dazzling, deep blue one only ever sees at dawn or dusk, the eastern horizon a bruised purple in counterpoint to the sunset they cannot see from here.

"Tell me about New Orleans," he says.

[Danicka] Telling him the truth of herself has never been -- and might not ever be -- truly easy for Danicka. Letting others see who she is remains patently nervewracking, and impossibility shrouded under at least half a dozen potential personas, each managing to seem startlingly real by how it intersects what they've seen previously. Every time she speaks to Theron he ends up confused, and every time she speaks to Theron he ends up thinking he has seen underneath her shell at least a little bit. Every time she speaks to Theron, he remains ignorant of who, exactly, he is dealing with.

Lukas is one of the few people -- not the only, not this far into her life -- that Danicka has ever wanted to see past the constructs of her appearance, the things she surrounds herself with that seem as much a part of her as her various, calculated smiles. It's hard to unwind Danicka from her earrings, her lululemon gymclothes, her expansive apartment with its thousand-dollar furniture and a secondary closet full of what may as well be called Decadence itself, capital D and all. It is hard to separate her from all of that, which means

it is hard to see her amongst it all, which is part of the point.

There's the sense that she wants to say something, while he's shifting in his chair and she's picking at the plates between them, but perhaps also the vague aura of uncertainty. Whatever it is, if there's anything at all on her mind that could be formed to words, it doesn't get voiced. And when he changes the subject, she is at least marginally distracted by it.

"About the city?" she asks, taking another bite of steak. She prefers it, to duck. She hasn't touched the lamb.

[Lukas] [wut dat!]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 4, 5, 5, 6 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[Lukas] [I LOOK HARDER.]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 3, 4, 7, 8 (Success x 2 at target 7)

[Lukas] There's a moment there when Danicka is silent, but there's something in the air that suggests she might be on the edge of saying something. Lukas pauses then, jaw working as he chews, eyes pale in this light, pupils still constricted against the daylight. He looks at her for a while, for a long time, and in the end --

looks down to their food. He waits while she cuts steak. Then he cuts a slice himself, eats it with his fingers, and goes on to ask about New Orleans. Whatever he may or may not have seen in her, he doesn't mention now.

"Yeah. And your life there. And ... " he shrugs a little, something almost sheepish in the gesture. "I've just never asked you about all those years between when you lived at home and when you moved to Chicago."

[Danicka] "Well, it's a long time, all those years," she says vaguely, picking at the food on the plates still. She eats small bites. Slowly. "I started working for the Sokolovs when I was sixteen, on the recommendation of some of the older Kin who knew me and my family. I essentially lived with them but for weekends. Still went to school during the days and governed Lizzie in the afternoons."

As she speaks, she reaches up and tucks a lock of hair behind her ear. She's looking at the food. She eats slices of melon without touching the prosciutto, finally starts to tear slivers off of the lamb with her fingernails, neatly manicured as they are but getting covered in juice, in seasoning.

"After 9/11, they were determined to get their only child out of the state. They moved her, her nanny, and two men-at-arms to their plantation outside of New Orleans. They hired local tutors to come to the house there. When I graduated from high school, I followed and my business became coordinating and supervising the daily affairs of our odd little household."

Danicka glances at him, perhaps just to glance at him, since it doesn't look like she's gauging his reaction, looking to see what he wants to hear next, or if that's enough, or if there's something in particular he's searching for, here. They're talking about nine years of her life, though more specifically a brief interlude in that time when she was in Louisiana, but still: he's getting the proverbial tip of the iceberg, only what can be skimmed right from the top, what anyone back in New York who knew Danicka's family could probably tell him if he went asking.

They could not tell him, unless he found some very specific people, what he already knows: that she was sixteen when she got pregnant. That she was sixteen when she miscarried, and that she still does not know whether to blame herself, or her brother, or thank Gaia for it.

"Nanny Helena and the two bodyguards and I were quite wild while we were there. I'd never encountered vampires before, but that city is crawling with them. I spent a lot of time in the old gardens behind the house. They had magnolia trees. Just... heavy with white blossoms." Her fingers trace invisible designs over her plates, in between cuts of food she can't quite decide on. Her eyes have drifted downward again, as she talked about the gardens -- a bit stiff, truth be told, and she quickly leaves the topic, moving on.

"We came back to New York City in early 2004," Danicka explains. "Lizzie hated New Orleans." She could say this with disdain for a spoiled Fang princess, but there's a certain respectful seriousness to those four simple words, as though Danicka -- however her own feelings ran -- could not blame her, for whatever reason. "Her parents had finally calmed down enough to let us all come back. She started high school, and life settled into a pretty basic routine over the next four or so years. When Lizzie graduated, they let me go so she could prepare to pretend to go to Yale for a year or so before being mated."

Which brings him up to speed, back up to things he already knew. Danicka puts a bite of lamb in her mouth, torn from the bone, and licks her fingers.

[Lukas]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 2, 4, 6, 9 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Lukas] It's strangely awkward, asking her about a period of her history like this. He tries to remember how it went the last time he asked her, and then it occurs to Lukas that there was no last time. This is the first time they've discussed her life like this: openly. Because he asked.

Because she answered.

Everything else he knows, he knows because he guessed. Or pried out of her. Or because she told him in secret, unguarded moments, whispered confessions. Never before like this.

Which might be why all she gives him, really, are the superficial details. The distilled surface of nine years of her life, a rather distanced narrative that could've come from a not-very-close-friend's testimony, a casual biography. An account, surprisingly impersonal, of the years she spent not in that city of towers and concrete in which they both grew up but in a very different southern city, where time moves slower, where magnolias drip from the trees well into the autumn, where somehow she found her way from a terrorized childhood to a reflexively deceptive adulthood with that deep core of herself intact.

He listens, though. He watches her for a while, and then he tips his head back and closes his eyes, as though the sound of her voice, even like this, even underlain with tension, with secrecy, is enough to lure him. And somewhere in the weave and weft of her voice are shadows, like ripples in a still pond; like fish beneath the surface. They wash across his awareness, flick onto his consciousness here and there, and consciously, he chooses to let them slip by. He doesn't seize on a single one.

When she's finished, his eyes stay closed a little longer. Then they open again. The shadows have changed across the city even in this short time. It's now a little closer to evening, a little closer to night.

And he reaches for more lamb. He's not ravenous; he's not scarfing his food down. He eats with a sort of casual indulgence, almost sleepy. The prey's caught, brought down, ripe for devouring. There's no hurry now.

"Will you tell me more," he says quietly, "when you're ready?"

[Danicka] Through most of this barebones retelling, the details skimmed over or alluded to as though to add flavor and life to a lie -- a habit she's so practiced at it infects even her truths -- Danicka and Lukas don't look at each other. He closes his eyes; his eyes are closed when she looks at him for a few moments, and because his eyes are closed she can look at him honestly. If he could see her eyes then he'd know what she's wishing, or be able to guess, but the irony is that if his ability to see and guess makes her just as nervous as it ever has.

Or at least: tonight it would. Talking about this, it would.

She looks down again, and after awhile she finishes talking about things she's never chosen to bring up herself. Lukas looks over at her, letting what she's told him just dwell in his mind and in between them for a little while. Danicka sips her wine, and he asks what he does.

Almost involuntarily -- but not quite, because few reactions Danicka has can be said to be truly involuntary, unconsidered, uncontrollable flashes -- she huffs out a soft, small, mirthless laugh. It aches in the ears. "I think I'm ready now," she admits, shaking her head as she sets down her glass. "I just don't know how."

[Lukas] Lukas looks at her then. His mate, this woman he has bound himself to freely, inextricably. His mate, who he's comfortable enough with that he'll leave his belongings in her home; that he'll come by unannounced; that he'll strip bare to the waist in front of not because he intends to fuck, now, but because he wants to enjoy the breeze on his skin, the feeling of impending summer in the air.

That's one thing about magnolias. If ever there was a flower of summer, that would be the one. And the summers in the south are so sprawlingly endless: wide white blossoms amongst glossy dark leaves from april to november, the better part of the year touched with the fragrance of the solar season.

So. He's looking at her, his head turned on the off-white cushion, juice from lamb and duck and beef and seafood on his fingers. Tenderness and ache pass over his face in waves. He swipes his fingers clean on a napkin and holds his hand out, the gesture reflexive in its simplicity.

"Come here," he says.

If she lets him, if she rises from her chair, he pulls her closer. Draws her down on his lap, closer to him, her slighter body cradled on his. He closes his eyes and nuzzles against her briefly -- the side of her head, her hair.

"Tell me about Lizzie," he says. It's not accident, not coincidence, that he begins with the topic that seems farthest from herself, least personal. "When you first told me you were a governess for a Fang, I imagined you must've hated your ward for a spoiled little princess. But listening to you now -- I think you actually liked her."

[Danicka] Of course Danicka doesn't know how to tell him more. Not when the alcohol hasn't touched her yet, not when she's spent the majority of her life making sure she was one doll amongst a mountain of them, indistinguishable as the real thing when surrounded by porcelain and silk frozen in its own mimicry of relevance. Everything is there inside of her. The words to get it all out are not there, and the questions are so broad she cannot begin without thinking that all at once will be too much.

Maybe it will be, given the fact that New Orleans is where she first got stalked and cornered by bloodsuckers. The very first time is seared into her memory so starkly she can close her eyes and remember every single sensation, even the kaleidoscopic fuzziness that overcame her as the leech lured her in, soothed her instincts, made her want to let go. She could tell people that it isn't lust that draws people to them, makes them unable to resist. That isn't what the vampires elicit with their prolonged eye contact and murmured words.

It's a premature wish for death that makes people give themselves over to it. It feels very calm. It feels peaceful. It feels like a fucking relief, getting your hand taken as you're guided into a car or a back room or, in Danicka's case, an alleyway, knowing that this beautiful thing is going to make it all Stop. Even the happiest, most exuberant youth can fall under that sway, because even the happiest, most exuberant youth's death is inevitable to begin with.

Danicka takes Lukas's hand, his fingertips warm with the sort of thrumming, vibrant life that is the realm of his kind. Their hearts beat so strongly that even when they die they can come back from it. Frenzied. Blood-crazed. Roaring, yes, but... alive after death, the most defiant fucking refusal of Death itself imaginable. She can feel his pulse through his touch, if she's quiet enough. Still enough. And Danicka, more than most, can be quite still, quite silent.

She slides onto his lap, sitting sideways because the chair is simply not wide enough to straddle him on, though she usually prefers to face him. He can feel that she's tense, that she doesn't want to feel cradled, that she doesn't want to curl up and be protected right now. She's near him but she's stiff, the closeness wanted but not the protection, not the breaking down of whatever walls she's made herself. That protection, right this moment, she holds to. Her own.

Still: she comes, and she stays near to him while he holds her, nuzzling her, and it's one of the only times that he's touched her and she's remained a little far away. It's one of the only times that the instant their hands touched, she hasn't all but melted into him. The discomfort he sensed growing as soon as he started talking about her luxury and decadence, that increased into distance when he asked about New Orleans, is now pervasive in her, even if it seems to have little to do with him by this point.

Her brows draw together. "No," she says slowly. "I never hated Lizzie." A pause, thinking. "I didn't really like her, either. She was my responsibility, in some ways. I cared for her. I never... allowed myself to really feel strongly about her one way or the other, in a personal sense." Danicka waves her hand slightly, back and forth, a visual representation of that ambivalence. "But I did feel pity for her," she goes on, quieter, her hand falling. "And fear for her."

[Lukas] "I understand the pity," Lukas replies quietly. "I was thinking that, when you talked about how she'd pretend to go to university for a year before getting mated. It's not as though the kin of our tribe are much better off, but ... there's something particularly pitiful about being promised away to another before you're even born."

There's a discomfort in her, and a distance, that he doesn't wholly understand. He's not sure she even understands it -- or at least, how to get around it. What to say. How to break through it. So he doesn't address it directly. Not yet, anyway. He circles around it, asks her about things she's ready to talk about, that she doesn't know how to talk about. He tries to find a safer subject amidst it all and chip away at it, gently, watching for her reaction all the time.

"But why were you afraid for her?"

[Danicka] "No," Danicka says quietly, shaking her head slowly when he talks about the life of Kin, the illusory promises of a life of your own being stripped away to bare reality: breeding. She has her hand on his forearm where it crosses over her midsection, her lap. She strokes the hairs there lightly, as though following the wind. "It wasn't that. I have small pity for her, or others like her, in that sense. This is the life we are all born to. She was no more special or put-upon than most, and far luckier than many."

She leans against his chest now, though she's still tense. It's a seeking. It's a wanting, a pushing against her own boundaries from the other side. Dangerous way to bring down a wall, with pressure both inward and outward. Good way to hold it up. Thankfully, Lukas isn't pushing. He's waiting, from a safe distance, and softly calling.

"Yelizaveta saw the dead," Danicka tells him after he asks his question, though it seems to answer the void of where her pity came from, as well. "Or at least she thought she did. I didn't quite believe her before New Orleans; there are so few places in New York that don't live solely in the moment, so her little... moments were rare. But in Louisiana, they hold to the past. The dead aren't inclined to stillness."

She's quiet a few seconds. "She sometimes had seizures, passing through the city and its graveyards. There were nights I heard her from my bedroom, holding conversations with the dark. She avoided places where there had been murders, without knowing their history." Stories swim behind her voice; she doesn't share them all. "If that was just some Fang madness, better to smother them all in their cradles then have them live with ghosts."

[Lukas] Every Garou is a creature half of spirit. For all that, the Ahrouns of the breed are an intensely physical lot, concerned largely with the matters of the fleshly world -- and amongst them, Lukas is surely one of the more fiercely pragmatic.

He doesn't think often of spirits. He considers them useful resources and tools, but not necessarily as allies, friends, entities every bit as complex and interesting as a Garou, a kin, a human, a wolf. He never thinks much of ghosts, and of all his harrowing encounters in Chicago, the one that rattled him most, perhaps, involved ghosts in a cemetery.

Ghosts are beyond his experience. They are not spirits; they are not like the part of him that will travel back to Thunder's homelands after he dies, and dwell there until he is reborn. They are hungry, haunted things, too closely bound to some idea or thought or place to escape even after death.

So -- he frowns when she says, Yelizavieta saw the dead. Without even a layer of cloth between her and his chest, she can clearly feel the tensing of his body, the quickening of his heart for a few seconds. He draws a breath and releases it, and listens.

"I've heard," he says eventually, "that the terrain of New Orleans is so low and wet that the dead can't be buried. The graves fill with water. If there's a city that fosters the restless dead, I can't imagine a better one."

For a moment, quiet, he wonders what became of Yelizavieta. Who she's mated to now. What he thinks of her fits and spells, her visions of the dead.

"You didn't hate it, though," he adds, quieter. "New Orleans."

[Danicka] "No," whispers Danicka, and lays her head on his shoulder. If she were taller, or if he weren't so tall, this might be awkward from where she sits on his lap. She might have to bend her neck uncomfortably to do this, but leaning as she is on his body now, it's a simple enough thing to just rest against him like she does.

The sound of her voice is almost a sigh, as though she still misses that city. In a way, the city she Didn't Hate died a few years ago, drowned and was destroyed, leaving only a remnant. To visit New Orleans is, for those who knew it before, an experience of deep grief. Still, though she was there for only a couple of years, Danicka confesses less than hatred of the place with a sort of ache. She doesn't talk about New York like that, though, to be fair, she doesn't really talk about New York any more than she's ever talked about New Orleans.

"I still had to be careful," she admits softly. "Helena and the men-at-arms were trustworthy because they were just as sinful as I was, but I know the hired tutors reported back to the Sokolovs, and there was Lizzie to consider. They had friends in the city to be wary of. Sometimes they'd drop by unannounced, but... not often."

Her hand is still on his arm, stroking up to his bicep now, touching the relaxed curve of muscle there over and again. She loves his body. She thinks, when she touches herself on the nights he's not with her, that next time he makes love to her she has to remember to tell him how much she fucking loves his body, how deeply the sight and feel of him turns her on. But she often forgets. She turns her face into her pillow and cries out when she comes, and she forgets to tell him things like that.

It is only distantly on her mind right now, though. She considers it absently, vaguely, as she strokes his arm. If she let herself she'd drift into memories of how he looked with his arms stretched over his head, wrists bound to the bed by manacles. Or how he looks when he's holding himself up over her. Right now, though, she's thinking more about how she feels when he holds her from behind as they sleep. And what it's like to wake up and be slightly stuck to him by sweat where his arm lays over her, and how sometimes she tries not to move because she likes the way it feels to have his face against her back, his breath steady on her shoulderblade, because he curled closer and closer in sleep til he was unconsciously nuzzling his way nearer to her.

More immediately, though, she's thinking about New Orleans. And not hating it.

"At the end of the day, I was in charge of the household, but there wasn't much to manage on a day-to-day basis. Lizzie was old enough by then to take care of herself in a lot of ways, and I think it was good for her to not be quite as constantly... tended to." She pauses, and finally confesses, as though this has always been some shameful secret she didn't dare speak aloud: "I had so much freedom there, compared to anything I'd known before. And I didn't have to hide everything as much. I hardly knew what to do with myself."

[Lukas] Quite wild, she called herself in New Orleans. Sinful.

Lukas doesn't ask about that. Just like he doesn't ask her what she did in that week they were apart last May. This time, last year. Just like he doesn't ask too much about Martin, and Sam, and the guys he found circling her like jackals that one time at Mr. C's, and...

She's not a goddamn virgin. He knows this. She's snapped strings of numbers at him: two, for the number of times she was pregnant; hundreds, for the number of men and women she's fucked. For the most part, Lukas doesn't mind in the sense that he won't be so petty or insecure or domineering as to punish her for some imagined past sin that he would not, and has not, punished himself for. That's a world away from not caring at all. That's a world away from wanting to know -- because he doesn't.

She's his mate. His other half, literally: the one who fits him, his opposite, his complement. A few days ago he bristled quietly when a kinsman turned it up from playful flirtatious banter to something a little more objectifying, a little more concretely interested. A few months ago he snapped at his packmate -- mine, mine, my, mine. A few months before that, he ripped his packmate open without warning, with minimal explanation, because he haunted her doorstep.

Some of that is sheer protective instinct. Some of that, too, is because she's his mate.

What Lukas understands, too, is that he can't hold her too tightly. That he can't protect her too much or he'll suffocate her. That he can't grow jealous or possessive or upset about a past in which he had no part at all, not merely because it's reactionary or hypocritical but because -- he'll suffocate her. And take away her freedom, which she has waited all her life for, and which is as necessary to the core of who Danicka is as oxygen is to fire.

So Lukas listens now, and doesn't ask questions that he won't want to hear the answers to, and she's stroking his arm again and again like she's unconsciously fascinated by his body, like she loves him. His one arm is behind her back, cushioning her from the hard teak arm of the patio chair; his free hand curves over her thigh, through her yoga pants. He tries not to think of all the others who have preceded him to her bed. When the thought flickers through his mind, he lowers his face to her shoulder and grips her very gently, very carefully with his teeth; an open demonstration of affection, a reassurance to himself that she's here now. His, now.

She speaks of freedom. Which he supposes was the first time she ever had such a thing, even if it was bounded by the absolute necessity of discretion. To your average college-aged human, out of the nest for the first time, what she called freedom would have been almost unthinkably restricted. Don't do this in front of them. Don't let those people guess what you're up to. Don't let word get out that you're doing this. Don't, don't, don't.

For her, though: freedom. Compared to what she'd known before.

And he's nuzzling her shoulder now, rubbing his nose and mouth over her as though to soothe even that gentlest of bites. He exhales, something like a sigh, and raises his head again, lets her rest her head on his shoulder again.

"Is that why you left New York again?"

[Danicka] There's a certain wryness to the way Danicka uses the word sinful, like it's stuck in airquotes that she doesn't bother to draw around it. It has no meaning except to summarize a whole world of behaviors involving sex and drugs and drinking and carousing after dark, swearing and dancing and wearing short skirts and high heels. Red lips. Black panties.

'Sinful'.

Lukas could imagine, but he doesn't want to. Lukas knows what happened with some kid named Steven that she knew from school, a Kinsman not of their tribe who she was young enough to think she could run away and be with. Even at sixteen it was unlikely that Danicka thought her life was going to be perfect, then. But she thought, because there was a baby, she might be able to get out. She might be allowed to have it, and with the child, some measure of freedom.

She was sixteen. Danicka knows better now what a child really means. She knew better the next time she got pregnant, too, though Lukas doesn't know when that happened between age sixteen and age twenty-six, doesn't know how or why that ended. Truth be told, given what she's told him, it's possible she had the child. Gave it up, maybe. That's the most unlikely scenario, though. He hasn't ever asked, and Danicka hasn't ever has impetus or room to tell him.

She feels Lukas tense, even if he keeps his body relaxed. She senses it below the surface of his skin as though she's reading more than the patterns on his flesh where she touches his arm. Danicka feels it in his breathing, and she closes her eyes when he turns his face to her, searching, opening his mouth and closing his teeth on her where the neckline of her sweater gives way to the flesh of her neck and shoulder.

It does not make her gasp, fearful for her jugular. It makes her turn her own head slightly towards him, bend to him gently so their temples rest close together while Lukas engages in an act of affection so animal that many humans are repulsed by it. A few remember what this is like, what it means. Danicka isn't human. Danicka knows he isn't, either. She holds him without moving her arms around him, holds him by nuzzling the side of his face as he sets his teeth on her like that, as though in understanding. And agreement.

And comfort.

She smells him, murmuring her words while he holds her with his teeth and while she holds him with the curve of her neck and jaw. They loosen a bit as he nuzzles her. She doesn't see it as soothing the bite. She feels as though he is rubbing it into her, securing it, tattooing it invisibly into her flesh. Danicka keeps it. She rests against him again, and neither of them mention it. They don't need to.

"Hmm?" she queries softly, then: "For freedom?" Silently, she considers this, then nods. "Sort of. When the Sokolovs let me go, they also told me that Martin -- who I'd accompanied to certain events for a few years at their request to ensure that he didn't kill himself drinking or make an embarrassment of himself and lose whatever position he had -- was moving to Chicago. I think to some extent I convinced myself that I was here to go on keeping him in line, however little influence I actually had over that."

Another pause, longer. "My first intention was to leave the Sokolovs and move back in with my father to take care of him. Go back to the way things were before I moved out, and the way things were on holidays from my work with Yelizaveta." One corner of her mouth tightens, not quite a smile. "He slapped me across the face," she says blithely, not sure if she's told Lukas this before, if she's told anyone. "He told me he would never forgive me if I didn't get out of New York. I spun most of my stories to Vladislav around Martin to excuse my leaving."

This pause isn't very long at all, but her voice is quieter: "There wasn't a week that went by that he didn't contact me to try and get me to come back. I was afraid, when Martin left for Florida, that he would demand it."

[Lukas] Danicka is blithe about her father slapping her, but Lukas has a memory, so vague that until she spoke of it again he didn't remember he had it, of her telling him: until then, he was the only member of my family never to have hit me. She's blithe about it, but like most things she's so deliberately casual about, it's a sort of falsehood, a veneer of not caring when she does.

And he acknowledges that, too. He kisses her temple as though to say --

...well. There are no real words; nothing he means to say. It's just what it is. An acknowledgment. A physical connection.

Ilari Martin's name, though, engenders a different response. It comes up again and again and again. And each time that tension she sensed in him winds a little tighter. What happened with Martin was different from all the rest. Everyone else -- her long-ago lovers, the ones he may have subconsciously scented on her in May, even Sam -- those were men and women she took into her bed when they were not together, and when both of them understood that they were not together. Martin: they never did manage to agree on that one. Whether they were together. Whether that was an act of disloyalty, a promise broken. In the end, all they managed to do was agree on a disagreement: that to her, they were not together. That their relationship, or agreement, or contract of faith, began in the middle of the night at Mr. C's and ended when she walked out in the morning. Or when they finished the first time and he asked her how many more times she'd let him fuck her.

That to him, she was meant to be as faithful as he was. And he was faithful to her from the first time they fucked.

That they did not understand each other. And tried their best to hide from each other. And that they hurt each other, and regretted it.

Their final concord on that matter: that's what it was. An exhausted, shattered ceasefire. A truce, and then the matter buried: because it's in the past now, and he wants to leave it there, out of sight, out of mind. The subject is still too raw to bring forth in any detail. She says accompanied, she says keeping him in line; she says his name again and again and Lukas moves his head, twisting it as though to loosen a muscle. Draws a breath and lets it out.

"Can we not," he says, quiet and low, "talk about Ilari Martin?"

[Danicka] That isn't what she believes. That isn't what she agreed to disagree on. Even now, months after the fact, they misunderstand each other on why it all happened, what it meant, where the schism was. Danicka doesn't know that the way Lukas sees it is different, still, from how she sees it. That he doesn't even understand how she sees it. It might not matter. But if she knew, it would matter to her.

That he sees himself as faithful, and she as an oathbreaker. That whatever he says, he has not forgiven her, and he has not gotten over it. And may never. That he sees the act of faith as narrowly as he does: who she fucked, who he did not fuck. That in the end, all they came up with was a ceasefire, with little to no understanding of each other and burial in the shallowest of graves, if the mention of Martin's name makes him ...like this.

Lukas is tensing more and more, and in response, Danicka is drawing away. It's gradual. She lifts her head a little as she talks. She straightens a bit on his lap. Her body turns eversoslightly, and he seems to be putting effort into not gritting his teeth when he asks that they not talk about Ilari Martin.

Danicka sighs, quietly enough that he'd miss it if he weren't holding her. They've barely eaten anything of the feast he brought, just picked at it. Two or three things come to mind that she bites back, doesn't say. They're awful. They're mean. They're nasty words, would be spit out in irritation. She exhales, and counts to ten, but there's frustration -- even anger -- underneath the care she takes with her words and her tone:

"I know," she says gently, "that it's hard for you to think about him. And about a lot of other things I've done. But when you ask me if I'll tell you more when I'm ready, then ask me to stop talking about certain topics or certain people because it upsets you, it undermines the patience and the acceptance you're trying to show me."

She has taken Intro to Psych by now. She attended lectures for extra credit. Danicka has learned a thing or two about open and honest communication... and, frankly put, Danicka's willingness now to stand up for herself outclasses the effect his Rage has on her in a way she has never in her life experienced.

"Which makes me think: you don't really want to know who I am, except for the good or the easy parts. Which makes me think: you're afraid you'll hear something that will make you too angry to forgive or love me. Which makes me think: if I tell you the whole truth, or even mention the wrong name, you will not forgive me. You won't love me. You will see who I am and what I'm like and what I've done and either deny it entirely or... forsake me, entirely."

Danicka turns, on his lap, looking at him. In the eyes. It is an unforgivable glance, to most Garou. It holds neither challenge nor expectation. But, unthinkably, there is a measure of equality in the way she looks at him, and in that sense it makes the same demand of him. Unthinkable. Unforgivable. Since when do Shadow Lords --

"I know better, now, than to give you details that you don't need, that will only hurt you. But if you want me to be honest with you, and let you see me, then I don't want there to be topics between us that we just... avoid, or gloss over, or never deal with. It is not going to stop them from coming up." A beat, though a brief one. "You haven't forgiven me for sleeping with Martin after I offered myself to you. That isn't good or bad or right or wrong, it's just the truth."

She doesn't demand he forgive her. She doesn't even suggest they try to work that out right now. "But it isn't fair to ask me not to talk about him. I wasn't talking about Martin, miláčku. I was talking about why I left New York and came to Chicago, about my father and brother and the lies I told each of them, and he happened to be a part of that. I couldn't answer your question without mentioning him, unless I lied. Or withheld certain facts. I want to be honest with you," she says, without even seeming to stop to realize that he is the only person she knows with whom she wants to be perfectly honest, or how meaningful that is, "but sometimes I think you're not ready for it."

That, oddly, does not sound angry. Her anger and frustration has dimmed while she's talked -- at length -- and receded into genuine calm. The last, actually, sounds more forgiving than anything else. Holds an unspoken question:

Are you?

[Lukas] Lukas has not calmed while Danicka spoke. He has not gone from tense to calm, from frustration to acceptance. Or peace. If anything, he's wound tighter now -- the arm at her back shifted away a near-imperceptible inch, that hand wrapped tightly around the arm of the chair. The hand at her thigh has withdrawn as well: grips the other arm of the chair. He breathes steadily and quietly and evenly, but something about that is deliberate, conscious.

"Don't," he says quietly. "Don't do that. Don't generalize this one taboo to a sweeping condemnation of the way I treat you or think of you. That's not fair. I want to know you. I want to know what I missed. I want you to tell me even if it isn't good or easy. What I don't want is to rehash something I already know about, that we cannot come to an accord about.

"It's not that I'm not ready for the truth, Danička. I'm not ready to forgive you for a truth you've already told me. I'm not ready to forgive you for fucking someone else after promising me the same loyalty I'd show you."

The words are changed from what she'd said: sleeping with Martin after I offered myself to you. The bones are the same, but the meat is hardened, severe, absolute. He's not looking at her now. He's looking past her, eyes downcast, fixed on the city spread beneath them.

"I'm not ready," he continues, "because you still insist it was somehow not a breach of trust. And we cannot agree on that point. We've been down that road before, and we ended up nowhere good. I don't want to fight with you again over something that neither of us will give ground on. So the only recourse I can see is to make this one thing, this one topic, taboo."

There's a small pause before he adds, "I understand that you weren't intending to talk about Martin at length, that he was simply part of what you were telling me about. But he'd come up over and over and -- I just hit my tolerance."

[Danicka] Lukas gets to rehash something before she starts to tense up, and fucking someone else before she can't continue this conversation and stay where she is. Danicka removes herself, because his arms no longer enfold her, sliding off his lap and away from him. She doesn't go back to the other chair. She moves to the railing, leaning back against it with her hips, holding onto it with her hands, watching him as he finishes speaking.

At least she isn't crossing her arms over her chest, staring flatly at him, clenching her jaw and hardening her eyes into the livid, poisonous green of intense emotion. The sun's gone, there's no hint of blue to her eyes, but there's also no irrational -- or even reasonable -- fury. She's angry. Her calm is gone, like her willingness to sit on his lap where literally seconds ago they were nuzzling one another, and she was sinking further and further into his embrace.

After he's finished, she doesn't say anything for a few seconds, as though waiting to order her thoughts before she tries to express them. Then, licking her lips: "I was not... condemning you, lásko. Or the way you treat me in general. I was trying to tell you that when you make something taboo, that's the message I hear, and it makes talking to you about everything else more difficult for me."

She does, now, let go of the railing. When she crosses her arms across her middle it's because she's getting cold out here, maybe. Or because she's standing alone now. Or because she feels vulnerable. It's hard to tell what it is, when she doesn't shiver and when her eyes don't fill with ache, one way or the other.

"It's unfair of you," she goes on, "to say something like 'because you still insist', when the last time this even came up was almost a year ago. When even then, your reaction to it was so volatile the choice not to talk about it was more for sanity and safety than any genuine, mutual decision that there was no point to trying."

Her voice is hardening, though not quite as severely as his did, changing her words as he repeated them back. "Just like now, you're deciding that we can't agree. Assuming that nothing's changed in ten or eleven months, no matter how much either of us have changed or how our relationship has changed in that time." She relents, for a moment, because she hears her voice like nails being driven into wood now, and does not like it.

"You talk about it like we're at war and I'm your enemy: 'giving ground'." She says this with open, if quiet, disdain, and shakes her head as though she can't quite wrap her mind around it, is appalled by it. "I'm coming back to what I said from the start, Lukáš: you're being unfair. And in your rapid retreat from this, you're the one who's fixated us on it, and ...frankly, I don't feel like talking about anything else right now, pretending this doesn't matter, or isn't worth it. So..." her arms come apart, hands flicking outward, though she usually doesn't talk with her hands, "fuckit. If that's where we stand on this, then I'm going inside, and I'm going to take a shower."

[Lukas] Lukas doesn't stop when Danicka tenses; when she smoothly, swiftly removes herself from his vicinity. He does watch her, though, blue eyes aglitter in the last light of day, unmistakably angry now as he says...

Well. What he said.

Then he's finished. And she speaks. And he listens, and if he's learned nothing else, grown not at all in any other way in all the time they've known each other, he's at least come this far: he waits until she's finished. He doesn't interrupt.

He does, however, stop her before she leaves altogether. A sudden coiling: his body language changes, readies unconsciously for pursuit.

"No. Don't go."

That, only that, for some time. Then --

"You're right. I'm not even giving you, or this, a chance." A silence; then a small gesture of his own -- one hand turning palm-up.

"If you have something to say, I'll listen."

[Danicka] She doesn't go. She wasn't even moving to go, yet. Not stepping past him towards the door to the living room, not waving her hand and just going. At least there's that: Danicka was waiting to see if he was willing to talk, or if giving up really was the only recourse... for both of them. So when he tells her no, and not to go, she stays where she is, and her hands go to her sides. She waits. They're more patient with each other, now. They've learned they have to be, if what's between them is to survive all that they and their lives put it through.

"I hate," says his lover, his mate, her voice quiet and not, really, sounding very hateful of anything right now, "that you hold this against me so strongly. That in your mind, you were faithful and I was not. You were good, and I was bad. You loved me, and wanted me, and I didn't love and want you back. I hate that that's how you seem to see it.

"I hate that your forgiveness is contingent on my saying, 'I was wrong'. I hate that for you to forgive me, I have to pretend that last year I knew exactly what I was doing, and I knew exactly how I felt, and I knew exactly what I wanted. I hate that admitting that I wish it had not happened isn't enough for you."

Her brow furrows, her eyes hard and tight as a result. "What's worse is that I know you understand how your behavior -- how you treated me even that first night, things you said to me or didn't say -- affected how I thought and felt about what was between us then. That's what infuriates me, Lukáš: you know that you hold some measure of responsibility for me thinking that it was over, it was nothing, it was one night and that was all, but you still hold me solely accountable and unrepentant."

She exhales, slowly, glancing away from him and out at the city for a moment. For that moment, he sees her in profile, the side of her face and the length of her hair against whatever darkness the city lights allow in the night sky behind her. She holds her lips together but does not press them. She stares at nothing, for a moment, and then turns back to him.

"If I tell you 'I knew better, and hurt you anyway', I would be lying." Her eyes are dark now, deep the way they get when the moon is high and the weight of it seems to live in every word she says. "All I can say is that I am sorry for the way things were with us at the beginning, and that Ilari Martin is one more on a long list of people I wish I had not slept with." A beat. An honesty, though it's a bitter one: "Ever."

This part is hard to say, and the fact that emotion is rich in her voice when she says it might tell him that she's afraid: "But if that isn't enough for you, then I don't know what else to do, because that's all I can give you."

Afraid that it isn't enough. Because she speaks the truth, again, a skill so recently learned and so very hard one: she does not know what else to do.

[Lukas] When silence again settles between them, Lukas's eyes drop away. They scan the horizon, the buildings falling away at the edge of the lake. The bruise-purple of the horizon darkening steadily as evening comes, night falls. It's begun to grow a little chilly in the shade, and their food is cold.

He stands. Such effortless power, such self-contained grace in that: a reminder of who and what he is, what his purpose always was.

And he moves alongside her, though not facing her: he leans his forearms on the balcony rail and looks over. Busy streets, dinner-hour traffic. They are not quite close enough to touch, but close enough that the distance between doesn't glare and seethe. After a moment Lukas lowers his head, raises his hands, pulls his fingers through his black hair. When he finishes, his brow presses to the heels of his hands, and he closes his eyes for a moment.

"I don't think you even understand why I'm still angry over this," he says quietly. He turns to her now, his hands still pressed to his head; his temple now, the edge of his forehead. ""I'm not passing judgment. I don't see this as a balance: you were bad, I was good, you were unfaithful, I was faithful. It's not a comparison. It's not even that you fucked someone else once upon a time before we even really understood what we meant to each other. That doesn't make me happy, for god's sake, but that's not what I can't get over.

"The reason I'm so angry," he lowers his hands now, braces them on the rail, straightens, "is because you told me you would be as faithful as I was. You said that of your own volition. I never asked for it; never forced you to it. You gave me your word of your own free will. And in my world, that's an unconditional thing. If I were to say 'I would be as faithful as you are,' I'd mean if you don't fuck around, if I don't have solid fucking proof that you've fucked around on me, I will not fuck around on you. Period. It's unconditional, Danička."

He can feel his voice rising again, his anger swelling inside him, so he turns away there. White-knuckled, he grips the railing until that feeling goes away. Washes out like the tide. Then he continues.

"But in your world, your word was never absolute. There were stipulations that you never told me of. 'As faithful as you are' apparently meant 'as faithful as I think you might be given my assessment of how you treat me.' And you thought we were over based on ... conflicting signals that you interpreted as you liked, things I did or didn't do, said or didn't say. You made an assumption, and then you went out and acted on that assumption. You never even informed me of it, much less asked whether or not our faith was already broken. Your word was conditional, and I didn't even know.

"That's the crux of it, Danička. You've told me you regret it; I believe you. You've told me it was the result of stupidity on both our parts; I know it was. But none of that makes me feel any less betrayed or any more secure. What you've never told me is that if you were to make an absolute promise to me again, you would keep it completely and unconditionally this time. No matter what else I've seen and felt from you, no matter how much trust I've tried to place in you, that still stands between us. It's not what you did then, you see, it's how you still perceive it now. If you don't even acknowledge what you did as a betrayal or a breaking of your word, then you could do it again. Not because you're evil or malicious, but because you wouldn't even see it as betrayal.

"That's why every time I'm reminded of what happened, I can't stand it. Because it makes me doubt you."

[Danicka] There are times, and now is unquestionably one of them, that she wishes she were inclined to interrupt him. To cut him off when his words cross the line and tell him to shut his fucking mouth. There are times she wishes she were the sort to just shake her head and walk away when she heard too much she did not want to hear, if only to stop more from coming out that she could not tolerate listening to.

But Danicka, sometimes to her credit and occasionally -- though rarely -- to her detriment, has a certain sick fascination with seeing it all to the bitter end, to the last word, as though to remind herself just how brutal, unkind, and merciless the world and its inhabitants can be. So that she never forgets. So that she never fools herself, when almost everything she sees and hears seems like a lie. Especially the good parts.

In a way, the ugliest things feel the most honest to her. It's why, if more people knew her better, they would be wary of her smiles.

She's very still, until the end of all that Lukas has to say. Her arms are crossed loosely, her eyes on the cushion of the seat he recently vacated. That silence stretches on for a long time, empty enough that it's impossible to tell how hard her heart is slamming inside her chest. It's nearly impossible, especially with her eyes turned away from him, to tell what she's feeling.

"What I'm hearing," she says slowly, after a very long time, "is th--" she stops, right there, and presses her lips together.

Then she steps away from the railing, turning to look at him. The breeze takes a strand of hair across her cheek, and she leaves it be. "I gave my word," she begins, in the same tone of voice... though it's harder, and it doesn't attempt the grace of attempted resolution, "I meant it. You treated me like a whore that you never wanted to see again, but now what you seem to be saying is that I should have been loyal to you anyway. I'm sorry," she says, and for a moment he can see her teeth, can see her anger, "that I didn't sit down and talk to about what we were or weren't before I went and fucked someone else, Lukáš. But what I can't believe is that you have no mercy, whatsoever, for why I didn't. Why I couldn't, then.

"I was afraid of you," she all but whispers, "and I did not know it was my loyalty you wanted, and not just my cunt." The worst part about this, in her mind, is that there are hot tears building up in her eyes. She could use those. She knows it. She usually doesn't, simply because tears have usually made things worse for her, rather than better. Danicka is better than most at controlling them, and she doesn't let them fall. Her eyes are wide and open and dark. "To tell the truth, I would have said just about anything that night to get you in my bed. And I'm sorry for that, too."

She closes her eyes for a moment, opens them. Her lashes are wet; nothing more. "If your forgiveness is contingent, not on my regret or grief, but on me seeing it your way, and if you don't trust me because of one fucking mistake over a year ago, no matter what else there is between us, and if you still doubt me, after everything... then you are a tyrant and a liar."

She takes a breath, speaks carefully as she fights, now, visibly, not to cry out of sheer anger: "I have forgiven you for your mistakes and your faults over and over, whether you showed remorse or admitted fault, because I saw you change and because I kept coming to understand you better. I have given you my trust, my secrets, and allowed you closer to me than any living soul, not because you did the same or showed that you deserved it, but because I wanted you to know me completely. I didn't have any more faith in you than you had in me at the beginning, Lukáš. But if you think, even for a moment, that I could do it again, then you don't know me, and you have no faith in me at all."

A beat. It's almost hard to hear her now. "Miluji tě, můj lodní důstojník. Jste vítáni v mé doupě, to vždy. Ale musíte nechat tuto jít, a věří ve mne tak jako tak. Dokud si může dělat, že budu se sdílet své posteli. Budu se sdílet vaše jídlo. Avšak ja nebude být... otevřeno."

Her arms fall to her sides, after that rests in the air between them for a moment. "I'm going inside to shower, now. I don't want to argue about this anymore tonight." No, more truthful, and with the sort of desperate, overcome, humorless laughter that sometimes touches conversations like this: "Honestly, right this minute I think if I hear another word out of your mouth I'll scream. So please, just... let me go in, this time."

[Lukas] Hands wrapped around the rail, Lukas does not turn to face his mate even when she turns toward him. Instead he stares out at the city: head lowered, eyes straight and unflinching, rigid and stony as a carving of Alexander, of David. He's not stone, though. His chest moves as he breathes. His face flickers now and then as anger, ache, grief, weariness trace through his mind. He does not look at her.

If he looks at her, he'll break. He'll shatter. This is not a war, but he can't help but think of it as one: give ground, take ground. Stand strong. Never surrender.

He can hear her holding back tears, though. The subtle instability in her tone. He can hear the anger and the hurt in her voice, subsumed, present perhaps only because he knows her well enough now to know he's cut her deeply, tore into her as surely as if he'd used his claws. And some part of him is terrified that even now they can argue like this; is terrified that she, or they, won't heal from this.

When she turns to go, he clenches his jaw -- not out of frustration, but because he wants very much to let her go. Let her have her peace, her solace, her shower.

He doesn't manage.

"I don't need you to apologize." The words come out of him, very quiet, barely more than a whisper, "And I don't need you to see it my way. Danička..."

Lukas does turn to look at her now: her back if that's what faces him; her eyes, if she's turned to look at him. Her, walking away, if she hasn't stopped at all.

"If you want me to let it go, I need to know that if you give me your word you'll keep it. That's all I need to know, but I need to hear that."

[Danicka] There are other words out of his mouth, but Danicka doesn't scream. He might not be surprised by that, his reserved and surprisingly self-controlled mate managing not to let out an earsplitting shriek of emotion. Danicka is a bit surprised at herself, though, that she doesn't lose it. Doesn't break down, doesn't start yelling at him or just... crying. Not on the floor, maybe, but crying nonethless, which -- if this is a war -- would feel much like defeat.

She doesn't want it to be a war. She's tired of feeling like it's a war. But that doesn't mean she's willing to surrender. Not on this.

Danicka's walking towards the door that they left open so they could listen to music as they ate and talked, pausing to pick up her still half-full glass of wine. She doesn't take the bottle or any of the other plates with her, not knowing if he will end up staying out here longer and eating more.

And she doesn't stop as Lukas talks, but does pause at the door until he's done. The balcony isn't very large; crossing it, even for Danicka, is a matter of just a few steps. He turns to look at her and there she is in front of the glass door that leads into one corner of that living room that curves like a grin.

He can see her shoulderblades through her sweater, because it's not very thick. Some silk blend. Once, the sight of those angled wings of bone would just remind him of how fragile she is, how thin. Danicka is still more slender than she should be, probably always will be. But she's not so fragile and frail as she was; he can see her shoulderblades because of how tense she is, shoulders pulled back and breath so rigidly controlled it's almost held.

Danicka turns to look at him over her shoulder a couple of moments after he's done. She just looks at him. She thinks seriously about just opening the door and going inside. But that wouldn't tell him much. Almost nothing.

"The fact that you need to hear that?" she says, her voice audibly tired now, so rather quiet, though firm underneath its faint rasp, "After all this time, after everything that's changed between us, after everything I've shown you? Is how I know you have no faith in me, and why I don't believe any promise is going to change that. And that's why I'm walking away."

Her head turns again, and she nudges the door open a little more to pass through it. She leaves it open behind her. He can see her through the tall, expansive panes of glass that make up her living room's east wall; it's a neat angle that the balcony has. There's a couple of lights on inside, and darkness has come down quickly on this side of Chicago. He can watch her, if he's inclined, as she walks across to the stereo to turn it off. Sips from her wine. Crosses again, empting her glass in transit, setting it on the kitchen bar.

Then the interior pillars and the shadows and his perspective take her away, though he knows she's going to the entry hall, and to her door, and into her room.

[Lukas] "For god's sake, Danička!"

For the first time tonight, Lukas is shouting. He shouts at her retreating back through the open door, standing still on the small balcony.

"Stop acting as though you're some sort of innocent victim in all this. Stop acting as though what you did was some minor misdemeanor that I'm blowing out of proportion. You fucked someone else. You betrayed my trust the day after I gave it to you. You made me an unconditional promise, and then you broke it, just like that. And you won't even stop rationalizing it long enough to listen to what I'm saying to you.

"The truth is I don't even care anymore about what you did. But that doesn't mean what you did was trivial to me. And it doesn't mean I don't care about what you think of it all now. If you want me to let this go once and for all, I need you to tell me the promises you make now will be kept. I need that."

He doesn't miss a beat in all this. Never pauses once, until now: and only long enough to take a breath and bellow after her:

"Do you understand what need means? How the fuck can you just walk away from me?"

[Danicka] He yells after her, and from their vantage point it's impossible to know if others on their balconies below and above tonight, hearing this. It doesn't matter. Danicka doesn't look back, and she doesn't stop what she's doing.

He bellows about understanding what need is. And she's turned off the stereo and finished her wine and she sets the glass down. Now she looks at him, finally, through that open door. May as well be stone. Or worse, ice. Stares at him for a moment, letting everything he just shouted at her hang between them.

"Listen to yourself," she says quietly. "Listen to the way you're talking to me. The things you're saying."

This time there are two heartbeats between one set of words and the other. "What blows my mind," she murmurs, "is that you want a promise that I can keep a promise, and you're so dead-set on getting it that you don't even see the problem with that.

"I'm not," Danicka goes on, gentling -- a trace, which isn't much when she's this hard, "acting like an innocent victim, or behaving as though fucking Martin was trivial, or even rationalizing it. All I have been doing, the last time we talked about it and tonight, is telling you what I knew then, and what I know now. Why it happened then, why it couldn't possibly happen now."

She is poised midway between the hall and the living room and the door where he stands. "It isn't that I don't think this matters, Lukáš. It isn't that I don't understand what need is. It isn't even that I want to 'win'. I'm walking away from you because everything out of your mouth right now is undermining and chipping away at what we have. You're chipping away at my trust in you, and that's something I'd like to salvage before the shit you say when you're angry obliterates it completely."

Her eyes close and open. They're dry now, but distant. "I'm not walking away because it's a promise I'm incapable or unwilling to keep, láska." She exhales audibly, honestly though quietly incredulous: "I'm walking away because I can't believe you need it."

[Lukas] That silence she gives him, in which his words hang like a livid red miasma between them, is all he needs to rein himself in again. A second later the shame comes, flushing his cheeks, making him look away from her.

She speaks, then. Quietly; but so hard, like diamond, gleaming and unalterably perfect.

His eyelashes are as dark as his hair. They shade his eyes, downcast; brush his cheeks when he closes his eyes once or twice. When she says listen to the way you're talking to me. When she says you're chipping away at my trust in you.

In the end he's looking at her again, and his eyes are as ferociously blue as they ever are -- pale and crystalline. Like diamond, gleaming and unalterably perfect.

"I'm sorry," he says. It's so quiet. "I'm sorry."

Silence again for a while.

"I don't really think you'll break another promise to me after everything that's happened. It's just that I hate that once upon a time you did. I cannot stand that you fucked someone else after the way we made love. That you could have done that at all. That despite everything that happened that night, you could still act like I was nothing to you, and you still thought you were nothing to me. I hate that you couldn't tell that I wanted you to stay so much. I hate that you left me there and fucked someone else."

It's a quiet, stripped litany of shame; all these things that prove him weak. It's weakness, after all, to hold onto old hurts. To be incapable of letting them go after a year, a year and a half. To be driven to fury by the very thought of such things.

"I wouldn't have gone with you to that motel at all," he add after a moment, "if you hadn't promised me you would be faithful to me. That was it, Danička. I didn't care about the rest of the shit you promised me. Všechno, co jsem kdy chtěl jsi byl ty. That's why it hurt so much to discover, months after the fact, that you couldn't even -- "

he doesn't know where that sentence ends. Couldn't even stay true to me. Couldn't even last two days. Couldn't even tell. It breaks off there, the rest lost; he turns away fiercely, brow furrowed, teeth on edge against some bone-deep ache that makes him want to scream. Or howl. Or weep.

"That's why I felt so fucking betrayed. Because it felt like you either lied or broke your word to me, and you did it maliciously. It felt like you said the one thing that would've made me let down my guard and then you trampled me while my defenses were down. I hate that that's how it feels to me even now, and I hate that to you, that's not what happened at all. I hate that as clearly as you always saw me, you never figured out how much I wanted and needed you, and that everything else you did, you did based on that. I hate that I can't fucking forgive you for betraying me because you can't apologize for something you don't think you did.

"But I can't change any of that now. So I just needed something to hold on to. Something we could agree on. Some indication that that shit is over and done with, won't happen again, can be left in the past now where it belongs, and where I don't have to care about it anymore. Ever. That's why I wanted you to tell me it wouldn't happen again."

[Danicka] Separated by a room's worth of distance, talking only as loudly now as they need to to cross that distance, neither Danicka nor Lukas make a move towards each other. There's food on the balcony, all of it ice cold now -- whatever wasn't cool to begin with, that is. His shirt is still out there, too, his torso bared with that ugly reminder across his middle of a time he almost died, alone and without his pack, before he even knew her. Her eyes are on his face, though, on those eyes that are always as clear as hers are indiscernable.

"Láska..."

An ache to that, and an uncertainty of where to go from there. Because that word alone is the truth: love. Her love. Her mate. Without promises that would take their lifetimes to keep. Without the veneer of beautiful submission she can, even now, wear so easily for the right audience. Without acknowledgement of what they both know: that it is a shame among their kind to be honorably and well mated, as they are, and have no cubs to sacrifice for the War. Just:

láska. moje láska.

She exhales after that word, and licks her lips -- pale pink, like the faint print left behind on the rim of her wineglass -- and then takes another breath.

"You once told me, before you knew I'd had sex with Martin, before that night at the W before Mrena died, before a lot of things, that you didn't think I was capable of cruelty. I told you I was. And before we ever made love, you wanted to know if I was capable of loyalty. I told you I was. Both times, I told you the truth.

"I'm capable of a lot of things, baby," she murmurs, and that's almost inaudible, from where he stands. "And many of them are cold, and cruel, and all but inhuman. I have done horrible things to people who did nothing but care for me. But none of that means I was incapable then of loyalty, or that I'm undeserving now of your faith."

She's silent a moment, to gather her thoughts again. To be still, a moment. "My clarity was never as perfect with you as you seem to think," she says, her thoughts going -- painfully -- to the night of the bonfire for spring, to the glove he put in her hand, to the name he told her, the nickname they used around the house. It makes her smile, dim and brief and aching. "I didn't know you, Lukáš, and you didn't know me."

He may notice now, late, that her hands at her sides are wrapped up in the ends of her sleeves, as though they're cold. Her hands are curled up tight, grasping fabric, hiding her nails. It doesn't make any difference to what she says, or even how she says it. It just makes her look like she's readying for a fight, when the tone of her voice and the look in her eyes say anything but.

"All I keep hearing from you is that the only way for you to forgive me is for me to lie to you. Tell you that your way of looking at all this is right, and my way of looking at all this is wrong, instead of just... different. All I keep hearing is that the only way you can trust me, even now, is if I lie to you: tell you that a year and a half ago I knew how you felt, and what you wanted, and not only ignored it but used it to deliberately hurt you." Her eyes are gentle. Or look it. Right now she doesn't know if he believes anything he sees in her, if the way she speaks to him matters, if any of this will make a difference. If he trusts her, at all.

"I made a choice, Lukáš," and there's his name again, falling off her lips like she can't stop saying it. She, who almost never said it even in conversation, even when he said hers over and over again, like a mantra or a prayer, like some way of touching her even when his hands were still at his sides. Now, though: Lukáš. baby. láska. Over and over. "Based on what I thought and how I felt at the time. It was the wrong one. And I regret it. And I'm sorry," she says, her voice falling again as the tears gleam in her eyes again, just as defiantly unshed as before, "because I hurt you."

She looks down, and it seems like they're reaching something now. He's calmed down, isn't shouting anymore. He's trying. So is she. Now it seems like there's a chance to come out of this intact, where for awhile it didn't feel that way. Not with what they have. What they've had. Mateship, shared dens, yes. But...

for awhile, she started to wonder if the rest would still be there at the end. Her throat moves as she swallows, her chest moves as she breathes, and she looks back up, and over, at her mate. If he's come into the living room at this time, she hasn't gone to him. And, perhaps harder to deal with, she hasn't let him come to near. Maybe he can tell from body language, that rigid stance she wears no matter how soft her voice or gentle her tone: she does not, even as emotion brutalizes her tear ducts, want him to touch her.

"I think," Danicka says, "that you're not really hurt or angry about what I was capable of or incapable of. I think it's a copout to reduce it to what I 'could' do or 'couldn't' do. I think... you're hurt and angry that there was a time when -- whether I knew better or not -- I was willing to hurt you." A confession of sorts, that. But a truth he already knows: there were times, even when she loved him, that Danicka was not only able but willing to turn away from him. Be cold to him. Treat him like he was nothing to her, and tear his heart out in the process.

"If that's the case... then I still can't believe you need to hear, now, that that's changed. That I've changed. That I'm not the person I was when I came to Chicago. I can't believe you think for a moment that I would ever willingly hurt you again." She fails, now. She's weak, now. Because the fight is lost, and no amount of biting her cheek or digging her fingernails into her palms to try and snap herself back into a survival mode that will dry her eyes is working. They fall. They're shed. She hates it.

"I can't believe you won't just let it go, Lukáš. That what we have and what we've built doesn't stack up enough to let you forgive that, or see me as I am now clearly enough to trust me. And now I think --" which is when the tears get in the way of talking, which makes her angry, which makes her clench her jaw for a moment, which makes her look aside sharply, as though to cast the wetness off her face and the emotion from her very being. She exhales as though in pain, as though a broken bone is being reset, and whips her eyes back to his. "I believed an hour ago that I could tell you anything, and you would accept me, and forgive me, and love me anyway.

"And now I don't believe that anymore, and it's killing me."

[Lukas] There's a softening in his eyes, in his manner, as he watches her struggle from across the room. Struggle to speak. Struggle not to weep. Struggle to reach him with her words.

He hasn't come past the doorway. He's inside the building now, but barely -- the balcony door is still open, their cold dinner still exposed outside. He makes no move at all to approach her, though he surely wants to. Even from the start, Lukas could never bear to see Danicka in tears. He was just better at pretending not to care, then.

Things change, though, when she gets to I think that you're not really hurt or angry about what I was capable of or incapable of. The instant those words are out of her mouth, Lukas's anger comes roaring back. His eyes snap sharply back to hers, fix. His brow furrows. Then he's frowning openly, his body language closing up again, his stance growing rigid and set and furious as she finishes.

"Stop trying to tell me why I'm angry, Danička," he says, bitterly quiet. "I'm not angry because I found out last August that you were once willing to hurt me. I have known that since the night you looked at me like I was nothing to you. I have known that since the night you shoved me away as hard as you could to keep me from asking about your fucking brother. That's not new to me. That's not why I'm hurt and angry, and it is such arrogance to assume it is. It tells me you aren't listening to me at all. I've told you exactly why I'm hurt and angry. I've said it as clearly as I can, and I've said it half a dozen different times.

"So stop assuming you know me better than I know myself.

"And for god's sake, Danička, stop apologizing in one breath and undermining it in the next. 'I'm sorry I made the wrong choice, but this is why you're really angry'. 'I'm sorry I fucked my crackhead roommate, but this is why you made me do it'. 'I'm sorry I hurt and angered you, but you're destroying my trust in you.' 'I'm sorry I broke my promise, but I was just trying to get you in bed and I didn't think you were going to be loyal to me anyway'.

"I know you've changed. I know we've changed. I would've forgiven you the past a long time ago if you'd just for a second show me that you genuinely regret it. But all I ever hear are backhanded apologies. Don't you see how it's impossible for me to let it go when every apology you've given me has been negated by the next words out of your mouth?

"Have the fucking courage to apologize and leave it at that. Have the fucking courage to ask my forgiveness instead of demanding it. I have a right to my hurt and anger, Danička. You betrayed me."

He's so angry again that his face is dark, his eyes aglitter, his hands doing their best not to clench to fists. He's silent in the doorway another second.

"And if you simply can't bring yourself to regret it without qualifications," he adds, quieter now, "then we need to drop this subject and never bring it up again."

[Danicka] if you'd just for a second show me that you genuinely regret it

"Stop."

It's quiet enough that he might see her lips move and think it for breathing, for weeping.

if you simply can't bring yourself to regret it without qualifications

"STOP, Lukáš!" Danicka says, loud this time, snapping the words like a bone cracking in midair. It's possible he gets to the end of what's spoken more quietly now, and it's possible he's gone silent entirely. What's not possible is that he could miss, now, what's like an electric charge in the air, what lines every muscle in her body as she stands there.

"Do you honestly believe that my regret is false?" she asks, in a flat murmur of words.

[Lukas] A beat of pause. He thinks about it. Then,

"No."

This fight has been like a lightning storm. Not one constant surge of fury but distinct, vicious strikes of it, again and again; lulls in between when the clouds almost seem to part only to boil forth again.

This is another pause. Another lull in the fury. That one word seems to take something from his anger, calm it somehow. He looks away, grimacing now, uncurling his hands to rest them on the frame of the balcony door and brace himself there.

"But I don't know if you even understand why I'm angry. All this time I've been telling you, but you just don't seem to hear me. And I don't understand why you can't apologize without turning it back around on me somehow."

Another pause. His hands drop from the door. He enters the apartment finally, wandering aimlessly for a moment; finding the couch and dropping down on it. He leans his elbows on his knees. He puts his head in his hands for a moment.

"Do you think I'm trying to blame this all on you?" There's something introspective about this; like he's thinking aloud. "Is that why you keep qualifying every apology you've given me? I'm not. I know where I went wrong and what I did. I think maybe you wouldn't have done what you did if I'd been a little kinder to you that first night.

"Or," his hands lower. He raises his head and looks at her, brow furrowed, "are you refusing to apologize because you just... want me to trust that you regret it? Is that it?"

[Danicka] Of course she doesn't trust it. This calm. This relenting. It hasn't stopped his anger from surging forth again and again moments later. Loving Lukas is a little like loving the sea: storms come out of nowhere only to clear again, death lurks down in the dark and the cold, the tide recedes but always comes roaring back, and there are deep currents to watch for, lest they pull you under and drown you in a bone-crushing onslaught.

Here there be monsters.

So though he quiets some, and walks over to the couch to sit down, Danicka sees it as the respite it is -- for both of them -- but does not let down her guard. It would not be entirely amiss, if one compares Lukas to the sea, to liken her to things of the earth. Nighttime and cold weather close flowers; it takes time for the sun to coax them open again. But right now the protections she has around her don't seem like petals or leaves. Stones and locked gates of iron, maybe. Walls.

She does not sit down, or even lean back against the edge of the kitchen counter. Where they've had breakfast together time and time again now, sitting in her barstool-like chairs and eating whatever was made by whoever got out of bed and into the kitchen first, drinking coffee from colorful mugs covered in silhouetted trees.

At first, Danicka doesn't answer the questions he poses to her at the end, when he looks at her and genuinely seems to want answers. Her brow is furrowed; she's looking at him like one can imagine she'd look at a particularly troubling, complex question... which is only to say that she's concentrating, and doubting, and being extraordinarily careful.

"I understand why you're angry, Lukáš. Believe me," and that's the closest she gets to a flare of aggression that's writhing under the surface. It's a flicker, in those two words, and she waits til it dies before she opens her mouth again.

"I have not," Danicka goes on, quietly because of that care that's being taken, "been turning my apologies around on you, or qualifying them. I don't think you're trying to blame me for everything, but I do think that your acknowledgement of your part in it is ultimately pretty meaningless. The way you speak of it, understanding why everything happened between us the way it did, even understanding that at the time we would have had to be different people for it to have gone differently..." she gives a shrug, "doesn't matter to you."

She swallows, and has to clear her throat. "I've apologized," she says, and shakes her head. "I've apologized for not communicating... because I was terrified of you. I've apologized for saying whatever it took to get you to fuck me... because though I had affection for you even then, for me that was something to lie about and run from and twist until it didn't feel good anymore, not something to chase.

"And I've apologized for hurting you. I've said I made the wrong choice. And there was no 'because' on either of those, none other than what is essentially the same 'disclaimer' attached to every single other fucking thing I've said tonight: I did. Not. Know."

She's silent a moment, watching him, and somewhere in there her arms crossed over her middle again. She's holding her elbows, her head canted eversoslightly to one side. "I am never going to apologize for betraying you, because I did not and do not see it as betrayal. If I had known you better then, or known myself, or if my life had prepared me for anything but a mate I would have to constantly lie to in order to survive, maybe I would see it differently.

"The thing is, I don't need you to stop seeing it as betrayal," Danicka exhales. "I don't care if you see it the way I do. Nothing I've said has been trying to convince you that you're wrong, Lukáš, either to see it as you do or be hurt and angry over it. What I have been trying to do is get you to see that it is wrong to doubt me now for one regrettable, painful mistake so long ago."

She closes her eyes a moment and looks at the ceiling, then back at him. "We said and did a lot of cold, fucked-up things to each other back then, Lukáš, but I'm not holding on to any of them anymore. I don't fear that you're going to beat me if I tell you the truth anymore. I don't expect this to end horribly because we're both too terrible to each other for it to go on. I don't keep waiting for you to throw me under the bus for your pack, and..." a pause, because this is what she said changed, and her voice falters to bring it up again, "I hadn't been living alongside you expecting you to automatically distrust everything I do and say, like you once did."

Then her arms unfold, but she doesn't open them to him, or close the distance between them. She lowers them to her sides. "Yes, I want you to trust that I regret it, Lukášek. I've said it over and over again. I want you to believe that thinking about all the horrible ways we treated each other at the beginning breaks my heart. I want you to stop hearing nothing from me but what you see as qualifiers, disclaimers, and backhanded, undermined lies.

"I want you to stop clinging so tightly to feeling betrayed long enough to say to yourself 'She hurt me, and I hurt her. This is why. And this is why we will never do it again.'

"I want you to forgive me. And even if you can't do that, I want you to let it go."

She takes a breath. All that was easy to say. This is not. It threatens tears again, but her jaw tightens for a moment as she digs her teeth into the inside of her cheek, that flare of pain bringing her back from the edge. Her voice is quieter, though: "I want you to have faith in me, because I have proven my devotion to you over and over and over. I want you to trust me because I'm your mate, and not because I am perfect or because I agree with you."

Quiet, quieter, quietest: "I want you to stop seeing the worst in me."

[Lukas] For the most part, listening in silence, Lukas watches Danicka. Occasionally he looks away, looks down, looks at his hands. Always, he looks back, his eyes training to hers as though he might discern her meaning better that way; as though he were deaf, and could only read her meaning not on her lips but in her eyes.

When she's finished, he's silent for a long time. There's silence for a long time.

Then he leans back slowly. It's less a relaxation and more a capitulation; a surrendering of his anger or his frustration. He leans his head back, exhaling, and his eyes search the ceiling for a moment.

"I haven't distrusted you since we came back to each other last May, Danička. It's just that this conversation drove me toward mistrust again, if only momentarily."

Another pause, there. Then he lowers his head, looks at her directly.

"All my life, Danička, I was taught that my word must be unbreakable. I'm not telling you this to shame you. Or to force you to see things my way. But this is what I know, and it's the only explanation I have for the way I've reacted and thought and felt.

"I've always been taught that while I have no obligation to promise anyone anything, my word, once given, must be kept it. My honor is bound to my word. And without honor, I'm no better than the creatures I despise and fight and kill. Everything I am literally rides on whether or not I keep my promises.

"That's not how it was for you." This is perhaps the first time in all this, all of it, that Lukas has even attempted to step out of his own, wounded point of view and into Danicka's. "The way you grew up, the way you lived -- I think you had every obligation to promise others what they wanted, or they would beat it out of you. I think your very survival depended on your ability to say one thing and do another. To pretend utter submission while holding onto yourself.

"We were literally at opposites at the beginning. To me, your words were a promise, and it was sacrosanct. But to you, they were just words.

"I don't think we're so far apart anymore. I think if you would not be so quick to promise me things you think I want, or you think would keep you safe. I think if you promised me something, you wouldn't renege. And as for me -- well. The first promise I made you was also the first time I broke my word in years. And I don't regret that at all. I regret the promise more than its breaking."

Quiet for a moment. He's lost his thread, casts about for it, finds it again.

"But even now," he says, "it's still hard for me to see it from your point of view last January. To stand where you stood at the beginning of all this. It's almost impossible for me to believe that your word could have once been casually given, that you did not place such rigid weight on a promise as I did. That's ... wholly alien to my entire worldview. And if I cannot believe that, then I cannot believe that you truly don't believe you've betrayed me. That in turn leads to only two possible conclusions. Either you refuse to apologize out of pride and brinkmanship, or worse, because you intend to use the same excuses to betray me again.

"That's why my trust in you was shaken. That's why all your other apologies couldn't sway me: because the one I needed most was missing. Because it's almost impossible for me to see it from your perspective -- to consider a time and a viewpoint where your word to me was just that. Just words."

Another pause. He raises a hand, rubs the bridge of his nose for a moment, drops it.

"But I'm trying. So I need you to try to understand where I'm coming from, too. Why it's so hard for me to believe anyone could see what you did as anything but betrayal, and why it's so hard for me to get over what I see as a betrayal when you won't even acknowledge it as that. When, ironically enough, you can't acknowledge it as a betrayal if you want to avoid lying to me again."

[Danicka] Lukas tells her what his life made him, the tenets he learned to cling to for the sake of not becoming a true monster in the face of his ever-growing Rage, the ever-worsening War. He tells her that this conversation pushed him back towards his old mistrust. He isn't looking at her just then, but if he were reading her eyes and her now-silent lips, he might discern the message:

me too.

She keeps her arms around herself, because the night air coming through the balcony door is getting chilly and her body cannot seem to handle what they are talking about alongside what it knows to be true: when Danicka's heart beats like that, when her anger and fear get inextricably twisted up in each other like that, it means she is going to be beaten. Her body prepares. She gets ready, without a moment of conscious thought in the matter, to hold on to her survival til the very, very end.

Something in her was broken before her memories truly begin, and it took away one of the few gifts granted to the Kin of the Garou. Something that can never, will never heal. The psyche at that age has so few defenses against the sort of things she saw, the things she endured. No one told her as a child it's going to be okay, and when she grew older and heard those words from teachers, from classmates, from other Kinfolk, she knew them for the lies they almost always were.

Danicka isn't vigilant or attentive or detail-oriented. When she seems to know what's going to happen before it happens, when she picks up on the little things that tell her whether someone is lying, what someone is feeling, what they plan to do, it is no more than because she -- ironically -- is always looking for the worst. She is always waiting for her world to get shattered, and for her life to be snapped in half, if only so that the world can prove to her once and for all that she does not belong to herself, and that her life is not her own.

That's not how it was for you.

She turns her head to the left, and looks out the windows, but the gesture isn't -- this time, finally -- one of anger. She doesn't look away because she can't stand to look at him. She looks away because she's not sure she can stand knowing he's looking at her. And he goes on, and her eyes are drawn and wide open, and her shoulders pull in towards her body a little more. A little.

When Lukas finishes, she takes a deep breath, and unfolds her arms, and walks over to the couch. More accurately, she walks over to the coffee table, huge and black and square, a solid wood piece he's seen her with her homework spread all over, that they've used as a makeshifting dining table for takeout time and again. That's where she sits, facing him, bent forward slightly. Her elbows are on her knees, and her arms are out towards him, and her palms are up.

It's hard not to see it as a gesture of supplication and of offering, both. Which is what it is.

"You're right," she murmurs, not for the sake of his ego or for peace, but because that, too, is just what it is. Whether he takes her hands or not they remain as they are, her fingertips curved slightly upward as though cupped to fill with her words, so that she can hold them out to him. The truth has to be held apart from herself. Gaia only knows what it will be come if it stays inside of her.

"Lukášek, I was never like you," Danicka whispers. "In my life, punishment and abuse was random, arbitrary, and severe. Whatever moral compass I had was so warped as a result that by the time I was twenty-one years old I believed I was not capable of loving another person, and it did not matter what I did. I had no obligation to anyone to do right, or tell the truth, if I could even tell what either of those things were. When you asked me on the waterfront if I could ever be loyal... I really had to think about it. And I had to hope I was telling you the truth, because I honestly wasn't sure."

If he has taken her hands, they have not closed. They remain open, touched or not, though if he does touch them he'll notice how cold they are. She isn't usually cold.

"My life has changed. I've changed so much I'm constantly trying, these days, to figure out who I'm becoming." Her eyes close in a slow blink, but open again to his, and he can see the amber-gold rings around her pupils that seem to vanish when they dilate. "Almost all of that is because of what I've found with you," she says quietly. "So what I'm about to say, I need you to just hear. And if you can believe it, then I want you to decide if you can forgive me."

Maybe he nods. Maybe he just stares. Danicka does not wait for a response, for an implicit promise that he will listen openly, or that he will take what she says and feed it into the forgiveness she wants, the forgiveness that some part of him must want to give her... or else he would not still be here in her apartment, trying to talk to her.

"You have to understand three things about who I was when you first met me," Danicka tells him, a crease appearing in her brow, an ache in her eyes. "I wanted you, almost the moment I saw you, more than I'd ever wanted anything in my life. I was afraid: of you, of wanting you, and more than anything afraid of what I was.

"And I was a bad person," she whispers, both because there's something ridiculous and darkly comical about the words themselves, and because despite that they are also starkly, brutally true. Or at least this: she is earnest. Whatever he saw her as, whatever she did, that is who she knew herself to be. That is who she still believes she was.

Bad.

"Despite that, I meant it when I promised you that I would be as loyal as you were. I said it because I wanted you so badly. I said it because I was willing to be yours, and yours alone, if that's what it took to have you. I didn't know that was the only thing that mattered, and I didn't know everything else hinged on that one promise, but I... I did know you wanted me for yourself. I was scared that it would be awful and painful and I would still want you. I was afraid that it wouldn't last, and you would send me back to my brother, and I was terrified because I still wanted you."

She winces, briefly. Out of guilt, maybe. Out of uncertainty, perhaps. "I wasn't lying, Lukáš. I wasn't setting you up. I wasn't even speaking without any intent of following though. They weren't really... just words. I was willing to be yours. Only yours. For as long as you wanted me."

That last part matters to her, from the way she says it, as much as the words as loyal as you are mattered to him. And how could she not know he wanted her? How could she not see that he needed her, that he longed for her to stay, that he adored her in spite of himself so much that he would break his word to avoid harming her? How could she think he did not want her?

Danicka tells him.

"That first night, the first time we m--" she stops there, partly from growing emotion and, frankly, because that isn't it. That isn't when. Danicka pauses, lips curling inward. She licks them, the skin below and above their soft pink curves turning pale as it presses on itself. Then she takes a breath. "The first time we kissed, I felt like I was shattering. Not because that wasn't something I usually did, because before you I kissed people the same way I always spoke to them: to get something I wanted out of them, or to escape something they might do to me. But when we kissed like that, I felt like I was being torn open, and it hurt like hell.

"It opened something in me, Lukáš, and I'd believed for a long time that that part of me was... broken."

She takes a breath. This is the part where she's afraid he'll see blame, he'll see her turning this all back on him, excusing herself in the process. Her body language's tone shifts slightly, self-protective. Preparing for some kind of imagined onslaught, tensing gently beneath the veneer of perfect calm and vulnerability.

"That was one of the most confusing nights of my life," Danicka tells him. "Every couple of minutes it changed: one moment you seemed like you wanted to humiliate me, or hurt me, or punish me. Then the next, you'd touch me a certain way, or look at me a certain way." A beat. "But... you closed yourself off from me even when we were coming together, like you could barely stand to look at me. You talked to me like I was a whore. One you saw through down to the ugliest parts, who you could tell wasn't capable of loyalty or true affection. Who would never stay with you, who was there to fuck you and then move on with her life."

Her words come a little faster, there, as though she has to rush them out in order to say them at all. The awful part is that it isn't anger quickening her pulse and her speech: it's fear. Even if it's old, remembered fear. Because he kissed her and she opened to him, and then he could see what she was.

Terrifying.

"You held me at the end," Danicka whispered, "like you wanted to keep me warm, so I kissed you before I left. But every time I think about the way you watched me as I walked away, all I remember is how hateful you looked."

There's a flash of pale skin as she swallows. It's been a long, gray, wet winter. It's May and they're still waiting for consistently good weather. Tonight is one night nice flanked by nasty skies and cold winds. Danicka is not coloring with spring, not turning golden with oncoming summer. Not yet.

"I don't know why I fucked Martin," she says quietly, knowing that those three words together are like needles in his eyes. From the sound of her voice, though, it seems like they cut her tongue even as she says them. She looks, and sounds, a little repulsed. A little lost. Anguished. "I don't know why I fucked Sam, or why I hit on Katherine, or why I tried to fuck Gabriella, or why I've done most of the shit I've done in my life. I was angry at you for humiliating him, but that was... as much an act as anything else." She shrugs, small and tight. Oddly apologetic, though it's not certain to who, or why.

"I was angry at you, but I didn't do it to punish you." That matters. She says it as firmly as she can. "And he was sick and weeping and pathetic, but I didn't do it to comfort him." Her head moves back and forth. "Maybe I did it because I was scared of what happened to me when I was with you, and he was an easy place to retreat from that. Maybe I felt like I had to."

She stops. She dwells on that for a moment, and drops her eyes, swallowing. Danicka looks slightly nauseated as she contemplates the unconsidered honesty of that statement. Unconsidered, spontaneous honesty is still something new for her; she takes a few seconds to reaffirm it, still looking downward.

"I think maybe I had sex with him because I lived with him, and so I had to keep him happy and make sure he liked me. Because I thought I was his friend, and so I had to be on his side, and it didn't matter what I felt, or if anything I felt was real." Though her head is bowed, he can see her eyes close. Tightly. "Because he kept referring to you as 'mine'. My stranger, that wonderful guy of mine, almost every fucking time he mentioned you, and I wanted him to stop."

Old frustration, there. That Martin kept saying it, again and again. Kept tying her back to this male that

hated her.

"I thought you acted the way you did that night because you saw through me," she lifts her head a little, opening her eyes to find his, "and realized how empty I was. I thought you hated what you saw when you were inside me." When she says them, Danicka means when his body and hers were joined, when their gasps mingled together in the air, but after the words are out of her mouth, she looks at Lukas and they both know what those words really mean.

"I thought you didn't want me. I thought you had never expected me to be anything but a liar and a slut, much less loyal. I thought I was nothing to you. I didn't think it mattered what I did after that. I didn't think --"

you cared.

Danicka doesn't finish that sentence, wherever it may have been going. She takes a ragged breath, looking down at her wrists again, quite literally too miserable at the thought of all these things to cry over them. For awhile, she talks to her hands. Or his, too, if they've come to cover her own.

"I didn't do any of it to be malicious, Lukášek. I didn't mean to hurt you, or lie to you, or break my promise. I'm not... I'm not even trying to 'rationalize' anything, or blame you for any of it. I just want you to understand that with who I was back then, I can't even say I should have done better, because I still believe that --"

Shame stops her. Chokes her. It rises up in her throat and she grimaces, her brow deeply wrinkled and her eyes dark and hot and withdrawn. The words themselves are bitter with it, this shame he might now be realizing has been with her since her earliest memories, underwritten and reinforced year after year after year, punishment after punishment, choice after choice.

"I still believe that when I first met you... I was honestly doing the best I knew how to."

She looks at him again now, somewhere between anguished and fearful: fearful of the revulsion she expects to see in him at that confession. She can barely say the words loud enough to be audible, even as close as they are. "It doesn't mean I don't wish I had done it all differently, from the first moment I met you."

It's unclear then if she means from the night they met at Smartbar, when she touched his hand and they said one another's names. Or if she means from the moment she met him in her father's living room in Ridgewood, and invited him to come see her backyard, and meet the old oak that would remember him almost twenty years later. It's unclear if she means: I wish I could change all of it. I wish I could change what my life was. I wish I could change what I became, and the things I've done.

"I am sorry, baby. I haven't been asking you to forgive me for betraying you because to me, betrayal is willful. Something intended. Something you do knowing it will break another person's heart or destroy them." Her voice falls to a whisper again. "And I never meant to hurt you. I need you to believe that even then, as bad as I was and as much as I was capable of, I did not know I was betraying you."

[Lukas] Wariness and something painfully close to hope are both in Lukas's eyes as he watches Danicka cross the room. He straightens carefully where he sits, watches her approach, watches her sit across from him on the smooth dark surface of her coffee table.

Where they've shared more meals than he can easily remember. Where they've set their wine or their juice or their ice cream or their popcorn, resting together on the couch while some old movie or other plays on her plasma screen. Where he set the first gift he ever got her once, which was not really a gift at all because it was so unflinchingly practical.

He's not thinking about meals or gifts now, though. His focus is on her, and he watches her sit, he watches her settle herself, the language of her body, the way she holds her hands out to him.

There's only a second of hesitation before he takes them. And when he takes her hands, he does so carefully, folding his larger, stronger hands around hers as though she were breakable. Or fragile.

Or precious.

Much of what she tells him then hurts him, or makes him flinch or wince or ache. Some shames him. Some changes the way he breathes; hitches an inhale, delays an exhale. All of it is naked, unadorned, brutal truth. Almost all of it is stunningly new to him still. He knows her much better now than once he did, but even so -- so much of this he had not guessed. Or known. Or understood.

When she speaks of punishment and abuse, there's a flare of pain in his face. He brings her hands to his mouth, presses his lips to her palms. As though her paw had been wounded. As though his adoration could heal it.

When she calls the person she was bad, he shakes his head once, sharply, out of instinctive denial.

And when she says For as long as you wanted me --

When she says that, there's a sudden, sparking comprehension in Lukas's eyes. There it is, then. At last, a circuit completed, a connection made: what as loyal as you are meant to him was not, in fact, quite the same as what it meant to her. He was always speaking of loyalty in the most rawboned, technical sense. Whether or not she spread her legs for someone else. Whether or not he put his cock in someone else. She was always speaking of something a little deeper than that.

Until we're tired of each other. That's how she put it at Mr. C's at the end of her stripped-down, matter of fact, unromantic litany of promises.

Until he didn't want her anymore. That's what she meant.

"Oh, Danička."

That's so quiet, barely voiced, held in his throat and in his chest, murmured against her hands. There's a bone-deep ache there; and sorrow, and regret. He kisses her hands again; presses them to his mouth. Opens her fingers over his jaw, holds her palms to his cheeks -- the arch of bone hard, the bristle of his beard beginning to scratch. His fingers lace through hers against his face. He closes his eyes, bowing his head into her hands, aching, aching.

"Je mi to líto, Danička."

Truth be told, she doesn't even need to say the rest. He understands, then and there: why their covenant was broken, and how, and his part in it. The crux of it. The rest, then -- all the rest of it laid forth; what he did, what she did, what she felt, why. Most of that, Lukas listens to with his head bowed, his hands gripping hers, and he listens to it all. Hateful, she says at one point. He lifts his head then -- fast, shocked. As much an act as anything else, she says, and maybe I felt I had to, and his hand clasps briefly at her forearm, returns to her hand.

And -- he listens. Everything she says, absorbed silently. Everything, realigning his view of who she was a year and a half ago; all his assumptions debased, that myth of impenetrable, all-seeing Danicka dispelled, until all that remains is some image, however faint, of who she was. No monster or goddess, then, but just Danicka.

Just his mate.

"I have never hated you," he says quietly. "Not even when I tried to. Not even for a moment. Never."

It's not a defense; not an excuse, or an argument. It's something closer to an apology, as though by telling her this now, he could heal the hurt from long ago.

"Everything I did, I did to protect myself. Not because I didn't care for you. I thought you were toying with me. I thought I'd end up like that stupid Fenrir, used and cast aside while you moved on to fuck someone else. I thought if I showed you how much I wanted you, you'd destroy me. I thought if I treated you like a whore, I could salvage some measure of my dignity when you finally left me for another."

Some mirthless exhale of a laugh, "I never thought you'd believe the act. I never thought you'd leave because of it. A self-fulfilling prophecy."

Another silence: Lukas putting his head in his own hands now, closing his eyes.

"I forgive you, láska. And I'm so sorry for hurting you."

[Danicka] There were enough times tonight when Danicka tried to walk away -- or walked away in actuality -- that it's not even that difficult to remember the time when her only reaction to Lukas's bursts of temper were to go limp, to drop her eyes, to move instantly into a portrait of submission so perfect, so complete, that at least a few times it probably kept him from losing himself further in his rage. He can recall easily to mind the feeling of her arm going limp in his grip, a readiness for injury that was horrifyingly indicative of what she had been through before him. One of the most stark, cold signifiers of her trust in him was the first time he grabbed her, and she resisted, even a little.

She is stronger now than she used to be. Enough to yell back at him, even if it was only one word. Enough that she told him clearly before she tried to walk away that he was welcome here, that he was her mate... even if she could not stay where she was, curled up on his lap. Or standing beside him. Or within five feet of him. Enough that she didn't try to leave, or try to get him to leave.

Enough that now she crosses the room and comes over to him. Harder than it looks, especially after what happened at the porch. Lukas has no idea what she was trying to build up to, what she wanted to finally tell him and finally felt ready to say aloud. For awhile on his lap she didn't fear his revulsion anymore. She didn't see it as a risk to his love for and faith in her. Now everything in her is telling her it isn't safe, and he's going to hate her, he always hated her, deep down he always knew there was something wrong with her and everything else they've had has been built on pretenses and pleasant denial of the truth.

The fact that Danicka comes to Lukas now and holds her hands out to tell him everything she does takes more effort than leaving him in that underground cell did. Then, she thought she might never see him again. One of them might die. Now, she thinks it will be even worse, if she holds herself out to him and he rejects it, refuses it, lets her go: they will both still be alive, but what they have might die.

He takes her hands, and hers do not relax from their gently cupped position. When he kisses them, borderline worshipful, Danicka's fingers curl slightly in on themselves, wary. Because he hasn't heard it all yet, and after everything they've said and done tonight, she's not sure even this will make any difference. There's an ache in her eyes when he does all that he does, then: kissing her hands, shaking his head, saying her name.

But when he brings her hands to his face, she lets him. She opens them over his cheeks, the hard line of his jaw, and lets him hold her hands there. Right there. Her right thumb sweeps a light inch across his left cheekbone. And he comes to understand that he was as much of a black box to her as she was to him at the beginning: both lighting up with confusing, incomprehensible signals at utter random, with no key to interpretation but their own skewed, dark perspectives on themselves and each other.

When Lukas speaks, it's quietly. And Danicka listens, and her head tilts slightly to the side, her brow furrowed but not in a frown. She touches his hair, once, idly pushing back what would want to become a curl if his hair were longer. Like it was when he was a child, and getting him to být stále! long enough for a comb and a pair of shears to do any good after a bath was next to impossible for his overworked, exhausted parents.

(Truth be told, it was more likely he would run naked and soaking wet and howling from the bathroom, chattering away in Czech like an angry squirrel that he did not want a haircut, he just had a haircut, Anežka doesn't have to get haircuts so much, it's not fair! Hence the curls when he would come to Mr. Musil's house, hanging around his ears and eyes, unruly as he himself could be.)

Anyway.

Her manicured nails drift to his temple, and then back to his cheek, and she holds his face while he talks, loose enough that his jaw brushes her palms over and over as it moves. And when he lowers his head to his own hands, hers push into his hair. She looks at his dark crown, fingers lost in the silk of it, and exhales slowly.

"I know all that, můj lodní důstojník," she whispers. "I've known for a long time now that you did not hate me then. I've understood for a long time now what you really thought about me, and what you were afraid of, and what you were trying to do. It is all already forgiven, láska. It has been."

She strokes his hair, her voice never reaching above its current softness. "I know now, and I have known. I just needed you to understand that back then... I didn't."

Danicka leans forward, pressing a kiss to the top of his head, her nose and her lips burying themselves in his locks for a moment. She turns her head back and forth slowly, letting his hair brush across her face, and then sighs, her arms past his neck and ears, her hands on the back of his head now, holding him gently. She rests her brow to his.

"I need your trust in me more than I can tell you," she breathes. "I need you to have faith in me, who I am now, whoever that is. I need to know that you to expect me to be better than I used to be. I need to know you believe that I can be."

[Lukas] Lukas doesn't lift his head. Not when his mate strokes his hair. Not when she leans forward and kisses the crown of his head, nuzzles into the coal-black thickness of his hair.

That feels a little like forgiveness, though, or redemption. And he holds to that with a ferocious, drowning intensity, his hand coming up blindly to clasp over her forearm, to grip at her as though to let go would be to be lost.

Lukas's anger is like the sea. Much of him is oceanic, celestial; sky and sea, brilliant and cold, deep and dark. They are so very different, this Shadow Lord and his mate. Even from the earliest days they felt it, they knew it on some instinctive, unconscious level. When she asked for spring. When he asked for the sea. He holds onto her now: like a drowning man clings to the promise of shore.

And she holds him. Gently, resting her brow to his: connecting again after they so very nearly tore themselves apart. Beneath her arms, Lukas's shoulders are still tense and tight. He's bent almost double over himself, head in his hands, braced, solid, wracked.

She can scarcely hear him:

"I do."

He lifts his head, then, his eyes closed now, his brow rolling against hers, his nose brushing hers. "I do believe that," he whispers. "I do trust you. But thank you for telling me. I needed to hear it. I couldn't understand why you did it, and the only explanations I could think of were all ... agonizing."

[Danicka] This is the way she strokes his hair when his scalp is damp with sweat and those would-be curls cling to his brow and his temples. This is the way Danicka holds him to her when every panting exhale from his mouth mingles with her own, when their foreheads are touching and their eyes are closed. This is the way she holds him when he's wracked for other reasons, holding onto her like he can't breathe if he lets go.

This is the way she wanted to hold him from the beginning, and this is the reason she would not let him on top of her when they made love, because she didn't think for a moment that he would let her. That he would open to her like this, and trust that she would protect him.


His totem is a god of thunder, whose symbol is the oak, the axe, the wheel, whose demands are brutal and absolute.

Her family has ties to a dragon-god of the earth, the creature who is both opposite and inextricably bound to Perun.

There is an oak almost a thousand miles away that has seen more storms than either of them will ever see, that is more deeply rooted in the earth than they can comprehend, and it remembers when they were children, and Lukas dropped from its branches to run for help when she was hurt. It remembers scraping her window when she wept to find out that he'd been beaten for it. There is an oak, far far away, that remembers how they tried to protect each other long, long go.

And there is an acorn created from the very spirit of thunder and storms, with a curling green sprout pushing up on its cap, waiting to be given to the deep, dark earth near the den of a son of Perun, a daughter of Volos.


Danicka, no part of her any longer shrouded truly in some mythology of Lukas's mind but just... herself, holds her mate now and does what she can to protect him from those lingering bursts of what she calls agonizing. The only part of her that is celestial, whatsoever, is her nickname, what he's called her from childhood. She is named for someone else's ancestor, a man she has no blood relation to, but the name Lukas has always had for her means

morning star.

She draws back slowly, the way she sometimes lifts herself from his body, as though the separation must be done carefully, lest it pain them. She lifts her face and kisses him above each of his eyes, as her own open. She has her hands on his cheeks again, and waits until he looks at her before she answers.

"We should finish the conversation we were having on the balcony," she says quietly. "There are things I want you to know about me that you don't yet. But not right now." She breathes deep, exhales slow. "But right now, I just want to bring in the food and the wine, turn off the lights, and take a shower. And then we can do whatever. Okay?"

[Lukas] Rather than agreeing outright, Lukas stands. His hand covers hers over his cheek. Then his fingers curl through hers; he takes her hand.

"I want to stay close," he explains. It's such a simple thing to want -- almost childish, almost silly. He says it without self-consciousness, though, and without fear. Turning toward the balcony, then, he considers the near-feast outside, cold now. Beyond it, the city is aglitter. Night has fallen while they argued, while they fought, while they broke everything down to rubble,

and forged from the ruins some sort of exhausted understanding. And peace.

"You haven't eaten much," he notes then, his eyes coming back to her. "I'll bring some food to bed after we shower."

[Lukas] Night was falling on them outside like an omen, and has come down utterly now like prophecy fulfilled. Even as they sat on those cushioned teak chairs and drank their wine and nibbled their dinner, Danicka was drawing away from him like their part of the earth turning away from the sunlight. She heard luxurious and she heard wild and though a part of her said yes and yes, another part of her said

you don't see me.

It would be hard for her to tell him what he is supposed to be seeing, who she is supposed to be, when it's all half-formed anyway. She's as vague and indistinct as she has ever been. For the first time in her life she wonders, silently and alone, how she can reconcile herself to herself. She asks herself why she did this, why she didn't do that, why she is all rage and fire and vengeance when she fights alongside Lukas and why she is uncertain of every pull of the trigger when he is not with her, when he is not threatened, when her own life is not immediately at stake.

These days, Danicka pushes herself to lift a weight -- a laughably light one, compared to what Lukas might choose for himself, were it ever necessary that he go to a gym -- one more time even when her muscles are shrieking at her, aghast at what she asks of them. And she has to know why she does it. These days she considers taking a few extra classes and summer school to reach her degree a quarter, half a year, a year earlier, and she has to understand what drives her, when it sure as hell isn't a need to graduate and get a high-paying engineering job.

She wonders, even now, if he sees her. If he knows that she's no more this lovely, decadent goddess living a life made of silk and wine twenty-three stories up than she is a wild beast driven by instinct and carnal longing for the basest satisfactions, or a myth of perfect clarity and untouchable, unassailable secrets. She feels his warm hand covering her cool one on his face, even as he rises to his feet and the distance between them grows enough that her fingers slip from his cheek. She feels him keep her hand, so that they don't lose contact, and she believes he forgives her,

trusts her,

and loves her.

But she does not know how he will react when he hears her other stories from New Orleans and her time with the Sokolovs. Danicka does not know what he will think of her then, and if he will love her anyway. Understand. Accept. She feels guilt for doubting his love, even for a moment. It isn't enough to obliterate her fear. In the end, though, she trusts him. And she loves him. She will tell him anyway, and tell him I am not that person anymore. But it is all still a part of me. More than fucking Martin ever was, or could be, or could have been.

Perhaps that conversation will begin: This is what I know of betrayal. This is what, even at my worst, at my most confused, I would never have done to you.

Perhaps not.


Danicka moves her hand to his chest, bared and lightly dusted with dark hairs. She exhales as her fingers touch him, stroking through those inexplicably soft curls and over that inexplicably soft skin. She feels his heart beating through his chest, all thick muscle and hard bone. Her eyes close for a moment as she feels the dim echo of his pulse against her palm and her fingertips. While he turns his head to glance outside, she sits on the coffee table and touches him like that.

As he's turning back around, she is leaning forward, laying her head on the front of his hip, wrapping her other arm around his waist. If they were not as close as they are, if they were not as comfortable with each other as they are, if this were the very beginning, it might set his pulse to racing to have her --

well. To have her mouth so very fucking close to his cock, her hands all over his bared flesh. And frankly, regardless of what they just went through with each other, it's entirely possible it quickens him a little as it is. No matter, really, in the end. There's a tenderness and vulnerability to this, not a seduction.

And weariness. This has worn her out more than her time at the gym or her schoolwork. She seems wounded, somehow: tired and damaged and sad and a little afraid, still. In a way, she always has been. Only now she doesn't deny it, or hide it under layers of hedonism and subversive defiance. Only now, he can see it. Because she lets him, true, but also... because he knows her, now.

Oh, the irony. That he can begin to see she is afraid he doesn't know and accept her,

because he knows and accepts her.

No matter, now. She is too tired for it to matter. She is too tired to say any of it anymore. She is too tired to let herself be so afraid or sad that she draws in on herself, away from the one person who might be able to help her with it. Danicka holds onto him now, and he tells her what he always seems concerned about:

she hasn't eaten enough. The fact that it's such a familiar worry makes her huff laughter against him, and lift her head from him to look up at him. "Baby, I don't have much of an appetite right now. If I feel hungry I'll let you know. And then you can go hunt down a wild boar and cook it on a makeshift spit in the bathtub for all I care, if that makes you not worry about how much I'm eating."

Danicka smiles up at him. A bit sadly. Mostly: affectionate, achingly so. "Right now I really just want to shower with you, and be close, and maybe watch a movie or something." In that he might hear a subtler truth: Right now I really just want some time with you.

It's been a long time since her birthday. And a long time since they've fought like this.

She finds his hand and pulls it to her face, kissing his palm before putting it on her face, that sweet, weary smile still on her lips and in her eyes. "I'm glad we held on," she whispers, which may very well be the first out-loud acknowledgement that... they could have let go.

[Lukas] They could have let go.

They came perilously close to that not so very long ago. When he could not understand. When she could not give in, not if she wanted to salvage any part of what they had, and really were. When they could not come to an accord, could not meet, could not connect. When he could not let it go --

they could have let go of each other, instead. Maybe they would've parted, then, and done their best not to see each other again. Maybe, worse, they would've remained true to the bond between them -- mates in name only, with only a fading echo of trust and unity between them.

That's not what happened. But it could have happened, very easily. And even now the echo of it quakes through him, makes him step forward into her embrace, makes him wrap his arms around her shoulders. He cradles her head against his bare stomach, wanting to bend to her, wanting to engulf her utterly in his arms and hold her there until...

Until the danger of their dissolution is utterly past. Until it fades into unimportant memory. Until the sky falls down around his ears.

He doesn't, though. He's careful, now, not to suffocate her with his love and protection. He strokes her hair the way she stroked his: tenderly and gently. He stands still for her, letting her hands stroke tenderly over his body -- that hard muscle, that soft skin. When he breathes in, she can feel it in the shift of his torso; can hear it, if she turns her ear to his chest wall.

Then she laughs. Because he wants to take care of her, and because when he can't think of anything else, he starts with the very basics. Food. Shelter. Warmth. Sleep. She jokes about wild boars. He laughs quietly, but in a flash he can see it, too -- the hunt, the trees rushing by, the great prey with its cruel tusks, the hot blood, the meat steaming on a cold morning.

He could do that. He would do it for her.

But this is not prehistory anymore. They are not wolf and kin, mate and mate, in some lightless era before the written record, when meat is hunted and fruit is gathered. He does not have to dig her a den and keep her warm with his own body. He does not have to hunt for her so she can birth their cubs and nurse them and raise them.

Protection, though. That's still a necessity. He still has that covenant to fulfill.

So -- he laughs a little at the thought of boars in the bathtub. And then he grows serious, and touches her face as she allows it, encourages it. And bends to her, and kisses her brow. Unhurriedly, that. Like a blessing; like worship.

"Come on," he says quietly, drawing her to her feet.

[Danicka] It goes to show how much has changed when Danicka thinks to herself, even now, that she would have stayed with him. She would have kept her apartment open to the man who just tonight filled gaps in her closet and drawers with his own things, quiet markers not of territory but of the knowledge that he is welcome here, that he has a place here. She would have continued going to their den with him, though perhaps less on her own. She would have kept her legs closed to others. She would have remained... loyal.

Even if much of their bond had been stretched beyond the limits of what it could bear. Even if, welcome or not, Lukas spent less and less time with her. Even if they broke something in each other, broke something in between themselves.

But that's not what happened, and Danicka is glad of it.

She knows how strong his ancient instincts are, even the ones that are just memories, ones that they have no need for anymore. He has admitted that bringing her food fulfills his urge to provide, and she knows without words that his need to protect is soothed when he can sleep between his mate and whatever door stands between them and the world.

Ironically, perhaps, this is the one place they sleep where that does not happen: Danicka sleeps on the side of the bed nearest to the hallway, nearest to the rest of the apartment, and Lukas sleeps between the prism-lit window and her body, holding her from behind.

Just like when she was a child, and disagreed vocally with her brother when he called Lukas pathetic, and wept because he'd been punished, and burst into worried tears when he threw up once because of eating too many of the kolache she herself had made... Danicka has a need to protect him, too. And very occasionally when they sleep, she crawls behind his body and wraps herself around him. Holds him, and covers his heart with her small hand, and keeps him close.

She smiles again, a little softer and a little less sadly, when he bends and kisses her brow. She starts to rise up, into his embrace and into the words before he's saying them. In the end there's no 'drawing' on Lukas's part; Danicka simply stands, continuing to touch him, and kisses his chest on her way up the way he kissed her brow.

They want to stay close, and they do.


Still there's the food to deal with. They do that together, a single trip to get his shirt and the three plates and his glass and the bottle of wine. They close the door and flick the lock on it and while Lukas starts putting some of the various dishes away, Danicka turns off the stereo over to the slanting north wall of the living room. She rinses out wineglasses; he stacks a few takeout boxes in the fridge, to be reached into later when her appetite snarls back to life.

Danicka has no doubt that as soon as his hands feel it where they rest on her or, as soon as he hears the gurgling growl, he will be waiting only for her admit that she's hungry. Or maybe he won't wait. Or maybe, trying not to suffocate her, he'll rein in his most basic urges to provide in case she'd rather feed herself.

A part of her wants to do that. Tell him to stay on the couch or stay in bed, wherever they are, and go fix herself a plate so that he can continue to relax. And another part, perhaps wiser, wants to ask him to get her some food, and tell him in the asking that she loves him, and trusts him, and will let him take care of her. Wants him to take care of her, now, which once upon a time she could not even fathom desiring.

That's all later, though.

There are almost no lights on; just in case, they turn those off. Danicka checks to make sure the front door is locked again, a habit he's noticed time and time again. She never bothers to lock her bedroom door, and wouldn't, but the exterior doors she always checks. It's just a glance at the deadbolt, making sure the knob is turned just so, but still: she makes sure. She's vigilant. Life has not been gentle.

They shower. Her gym clothes tossed into a hamper, her hair twisted up into a quick bun to keep the majority of it dry. She comments about the toiletries he brought with him, jokes about him not wanting to sound like a salon. She washes herself with the same smooth, rich-lathering bars of soap she always has, washes her face with something gentler, and they take turns under the water, or stay close enough that no matter who is being hit more by the spray, they each stay warm. Truth be told... Lukas would stay warm anyway.

But Danicka wants to take care of him, too.


Her towels are big and thick and soft, and when they get out of the tub much of her tension has gone down the drain with the water. She sits on the bathroom counter while she moisturizes her face and puts lotion on her arms and legs and breasts, her brightly colored towel wrapped and bunched loosely around her hips. Strangely, even as she looks beautiful, and luxurious, and a little wild doing it, there's something else there: simple. Like the soap she uses. Like the bedspread she has. Like even her colorful little mugs in the kitchen, and the additions she's made to the den in Stickney:

simple. She has good taste, a clear aesthetic sensibility, and so on, but much of it comes from the base and natural reaction of seeing something that in some small way pleases her, and reaching for it. There is, too, something unadorned and essential about the way she cares for herself after their shower, and the way her smiles come more easily now as they talk quietly about what to do.

He would be happy just to go to bed with her now. She says, massaging the last of her lotion into her cuticles idly, that she could stay up all night with him. And be happy.

The lotion is set back inside the medicine cabinet, out of the way. Lukas has been here often enough to see how much Danicka keeps out of sight: there is almost nothing but some hand soap and some candles in a tray out on the bathroom counter. She's actually quite organized, his mate, from her books to her DVDs to the contents of her closets, and she enjoys having a certain clarity of environment.

She is still seated on the counter, towel around her waist and hips and barely covering her upper thighs. She has a light robe hung up on the hook behind the door, but she doesn't ask him for it. She holds out her arms to him, her hair still up and her nipples slightly hardened from the shift between hot shower and cooling bathroom.

And if he comes to her, she slides those arms around his neck, her knees parted at the edge of the counter to allow for his frame between them. Her lotion is some expensive, fast-absorbing type with only a faint scent, but she's still slightly slick to the touch from it all. Danicka looks at him then, her flesh quickly drawing on the heat of his, and asks what is perhaps an odd question

or would be, had tonight gone differently than it had:

"Will you kiss me again?"

[Lukas] Coming out of the shower, they wear their towels the same way: tucked around the waist like south-pacific sarongs. While Danicka rubs lotion into her skin, Lukas opens her medicine cabinet and takes down the shaving implements he so recently put in.

Long before they admitted their love, or even any real attachment or attraction beyond the most basic, the most physical, he let her into this small, intimate slice of his life. He remembers shaving in his room with her on his bed, reading or listening to her music on apple's trademark white earbuds. It makes him ache now to think of the distrust he had for her then, and his utter certainty that she was so utterly certain of him and his intentions and his feelings that he never for a moment thought to himself:

this is a human being. and the way i'm treating her now might hurt her.

Did hurt her.

Lukas pauses, his shaving cream just lathering up on the end of his badger-fur brush; sets it aside, lays his hand along the side of his mate's neck, bends his brow to hers briefly. No commentary there. No explanation, other than the mutely obvious: he wants to be close to her. And he regrets some past misdeed, some past hurt.

After a moment his hand slides to her shoulder, lays heavy for a moment, withdraws. He lathers up and razors his jaw swiftly, deftly. She rubs lotion into her shins, into her hands.

He finishes a little before her, rinsing his face with a small washcloth, then hanging it up to dry. It's as he's washing out his brush and setting it all back into the cabinet that she finishes, and places her lotion one shelf up from his things, and holds her arms out to him in unspoken welcome.

Lukas goes to her, of course. He steps between her parting knees and her arms loop around his neck and his hands clasp gently at her waist. She's only beginning to ask her question, only gets so far as kiss, when he bends to her.

His mouth opens to hers unhesitatingly: the kiss warm and deepening. Her breast is small and shapely against the palm of his upsliding hand, and then against his chest as he wraps his arms around her and keeps her close.

"Můj lodní důstojník," he murmurs -- kisses her again. "Moje láska."

[Danicka] Like they do this every night. That's how it felt when he slipped into her apartment late one evening before the battle at Elk Grove Community Church. That's how it felt when he sat on her bed and she gently woke, watching him and touching him idly until he came under the covers to her, wrapped himself around her, and fell asleep within moments of her going still again. It feels like that now, with her rubbing her lotion on after her shower and him leaning slightly over her sink to shave his face.

They argue more than one might imagine most Kin dare argue with their mate, if their mate is an Ahroun. They argue more than Danicka's parents ever did. They argue more than the Sokolovs ever did, though Danicka isn't sure they ever fought. A Look from Yelizaveta's father was all it took to silence the entire household for a full day or more; she can't imagine the girl's nervous, trembling mother standing up in word or deed.

Danicka kisses him back with everything she has, though right now everything she has is a bit weary, a bit languid, a bit ready to do nothing but this: be close to him. Warm.

But her arms slide around his neck as his hands go to her waist, then her breast, then her lower back. She breathes in softly as he presses their bare chests together, and her eyelashes flicker downward slightly while he echoes now the way he greeted her when he first walked in tonight: my mate. my love.

"Miluj mě," she whispers back to him, her breathing quickening, her tone aching beneath the murmur of it, but she doesn't sound uncertain.

[Lukas] Momentarily, Lukas pauses: his hands open over his mate's slender back, his lips parted to hers, touching, his breathing already stepped up. In the shadows between their bodies, she can see his eyes half-open, eyelashes low; shadowed, the blue of his eyes seemed deeper, faceted.

Then they close again. And there's no uncertainty, either, in the way he kisses her now, with a renewed, delving fervor. His hands come to her face, stroke back her damp hair. Large and warm, they mold over her neck, past her shoulderblades. He tugs her towel loose and lifts her against his body, that same effortless swiftness he's always had.

On the counter is where her towel stays. A curl of steam escapes the bathroom when he opens the door. It's dark now, the last traces of blue gone from the sky. Her bedroom is all shadows, all the faint multihued lights of the city beyond the windows. Later on Lukas will close the bedroom door before they bed down for the night -- the same instinct for safety and protection that drives Danicka to check the locks despite the security in this building -- but now; now, the only thought on his mind is not locks, and doors, and minor acts of protection.

She's the only thing on his mind. The taste of her mouth, the warmth of her body. Her thighs parted over his waist. Her legs folded around his back. He's been here often enough to know where her bed is, and to stop before his knees hit the mattress. He lays her over the counterpane, braces himself over her now to kiss her, to spread her hair over the mattress, to draw back far enough to watch her, to see her face through shadows and dimness, while his hands run down her body, up again, hold her breast cupped in his palm as he bends to her and takes her nipple in his mouth, adoringly.

This is what he might have lost tonight. Maybe not the strict physical act, but something of the connection here, something deeper than his mouth, her breast, his cock, her cunt. The same unutterable difference between when they make love, and the few times when she's simply -- gone away from him. The thought of losing what they have both frightens him and spurs him on; makes him suck at her nipple and kiss the underside of her breast; makes him kiss the center of her chest and scrape his teeth over the soft skin between her breasts; makes him find her nipple again with his mouth, the other one this time, and lean over her, and sink onto her and between her legs, and wrap his arms beneath her waist to bend her gently up against his mouth

as he loves her, focused, patient, just like this.

[Danicka] Why he pauses, she doesn't know, though it doesn't read as hesitation. Danicka waits for him to come closer before her knees touch his sides, the edges of her towel shifting aside. She closes her arms around him and closes her legs around him as they kiss again, deeper than before. More wanting.

When Lukas pulls her towel from whatever loose twist she folded it into, Danicka takes one hand from him and reaches back and untangles, unfurls her hair from the bun she flipped it into before their shower. She lets the band fall, and lets her hair fall, the edges of her hairline already drying and the rest of it soft. Light. Cool when the ends brush his hands.

There's a damp, quiet thump when her towel slides off the edge of the counter and hits the bathroom floor behind them. There's no rainbows on the floor of her bedroom, and the darkness is only offset by dim moonlight -- she never closes her blinds, it seems, has never bought curtains -- and by the lightness of the wood. Her room seems sort of empty now that her desk and bookshelves are gone from it, but it has gained more quietude because of it. The emptiness makes her room still, makes it soft, makes it share the expansive peacefulness of her living room.

It's a feeling entirely unlike their den, and unlike his room at the Brotherhood. It is perhaps one of the reasons he did not want her to give this place up: that peace forgives so much of the ill that has happened here. That stillness is a secret part of Danicka that he has been given grace to pass into, a part no one else quite sees.

Her bed is made, and it's the green bedding that she uses in spring and summer. Lukas watched the changeover last year when she switched to similar bedding with lavender-colored blooms across it, slept with her there through autumn and winter. Green again, now. And once upon a time, perhaps even the first time he was brought into this bedroom, he laid beside her and opened his dark hand across her pale belly and imagined summer turning her flesh golden, like her hair.

Now he has seen her in all seasons. A little wild in summer, hunting him by luring him through the trees. His mate beside him in autumn, eating from his plate and lying on his chest. A sort of priestess in winter, black-clad and sacrificial and angry. He still thinks of her, though, as one: jaro. The season she was born in, the oddly innocent little deviant, pointing to stars and telling him their names.

Jaro.

Compared to the duvet she is dark, and compared to the room and the air cooling his freshly washed skin, she is more than warm. She's laying back and drawing him down with small hands on his face and his shoulders, pulling him down to kiss him more hungrily, her head lifting from the cream, dove, and moss of her bedspread. The nipples he knows are a sort of sweet pink in the light are just shadows on her pale breasts, but they taste the same. She tastes the same, when he bends over her and closes his hot mouth on her.

She sounds the same, when she tips her head back and sighs like that, heavy and relieved and shuddering all at once. Her fingers trail gently through his hair, which is wet. Her hands stroke slowly over his shoulders and his back, as though she'd forgotten up til now what his body feels like. Danicka doesn't say a word. Nor does Lukas.

Love me, she'd said, and he loves her, and she loses herself in it, melts into it -- and him.

A soft whimper, rather than even a quiet oh, when he kisses the underside of her breast. She shivers a little at that. She arches her back for more, at that. She twists under him when his lips and tongue move to her other nipple, adore that one like the first. Danicka's legs are still parted for him, open to either side of his body, but they close around his waist almost as soon as he lowers himself between her thighs.

She gasps at the first brush of his stomach against her cunt. She rubs once, then twice against him as he lifts her by the waist, deepening the arch of her spine. Lukas can feel the first traceries of wetness between her legs, can feel how warm her inner thighs are and yet how cool compared to the heat of her cunt pressing against him, can feel her body tensing slightly with longing just like he can feel her pulse quickening, feel her breathe that much faster.

Her hands stroke down his sides to his hips. She slides them around to his lower back, and up again, following his spine to his shoulders. Danicka moves her palms to his arms and exhales raggedly as she wraps her hands around his biceps, feels them flex, feels how heat radiates off of every inch of him. She doesn't say a word even now, but she does

turn her face to the side of his, and nuzzle him gently, brushing her lips over the curve of his ear.

[Lukas] Beneath her hands, the expanse of his back is smooth and unscarred, the musculature there flexing and rippling gently to her palms as he moves. The sweep of her hands up his spine seems to draw him up and onto the bed -- his arms beneath her shifting her with him. The sheets whisper. He reaches down to tug his own towel loose, leaving it at the edge of the mattress. One of the nightstands knocks gently, then quiets.

He comes down over her and kisses her again. It's hungrier now: his want and intent clear in the way he eats at her mouth, and the way he kisses her neck, her jawline. Her gasps, her sighs -- he answers them with a soft growl, biting gently at her shoulder where his teeth have held her so many times before.

He can't remember if he let himself bite her that first time. He can't remember many details from that first time, except that it blew his mind; except that instead of slaking his lust for her it only made him want her more.

He does remember watching her walk out. He remembers how he wished she would stay, but would not let himself say a word, a breath, to that effect.

That's all in the past, though, which is what they argued over all evening: it's in the past, and they're different now. They're almost different people, now. The past does not -- should not -- matter anymore, except as a memory.

This is where we were. This is where we are.

This:

His hands are all over her: stroking, grasping. He wants her so utterly, his caresses heavy with lust. He's holding back, though. He's making himself be patient, wanting to enjoy her, wanting to make her enjoy this. Or perhaps just wanting more of her -- every inch of her body, every instant, every possible moment. He moves over her like an animal, kissing her over and over, everywhere, nipping and sucking at her skin like he can't get enough of her.

Her breasts. The subtle arch of her ribcage; the expanse of her belly. The soft skin below her navel. Then he's between her legs, touching her with the pads of his fingers, watching her with a sort of absolute, simple focus -- watching the quiver of her inner thighs, the pulsing of her cunt as he strokes her clit, as he slips his fingers into her.

He bends his mouth to her and sucks and kisses and licks at her there, too. Tangled up with her on her mattress, sprawling on his stomach: until her taste is on his tongue, sweet; until his cock is slick with precum in his free hand, until he's stroking himself and eating her out and moaning for pleasure from one or both.

"Jsi tak sladký," he mutters against her cunt. "Vaše kunda je tak sladký."

[Danicka] The movement of his body is prophesied under her hands, and Danicka breathes in and moves with him when he climbs fully onto her bed, sliding up the covers til her hair spreads over her pillow and her mate comes to lie over her, against her, naked and wanting. She's ready, for this and for him. Gasps fill the air, and his mouth, as she kisses him back again and again. Ducking his head to taste her throat, Lukas doesn't see just how she closes her eyes when her head tips back.

He does feel her hand on his hand, guiding his touch back to her breast, moaning softly when his fingers and his palm cover her nipple again. He does feel her lift her hips against him, aching for contact.

That first time, that whole first night, he didn't set his teeth in her. She didn't rake her nails over him, she didn't let herself scream, she didn't even whimper. He didn't watch her eyes when she came, nor let her see into his when he followed her over that precipice. Danicka was afraid of him, and some part of him knew -- somehow -- that if he locked his teeth into her flesh, marked her as his own or even showed her in such a primal way just how badly he wanted her, she would bolt.

Maybe. They won't ever know, and it won't ever matter now.

What Danicka has chosen to remember of that night for a long time now is that after the first time, Lukas held onto her like he couldn't breathe if he let go, and he let her stroke his hair, and he calmed when she told him that she was there. She was right there. She has chosen to remember that he kissed her shoulder before he left the bed for a few minutes, and that he shuddered a certain way, panting quietly, when he slid into her from behind, his hand on her hip tilting her a bit to receive him. She has chosen to remember how near-silent they were the last time that night, and how they kissed over and over and how after she left, even when she tried to hate him she wanted him again

and again.

So it does not matter to her that once upon a time she was afraid to cry out for him when she came, or even speak a language he could understand when the urge to tell him what the fuck he was doing to her became truly too much to keep silent. It really doesn't matter anymore that over a year ago, she didn't know that he was already falling in love with her, or that every time he held her at arm's length or hurt her it was the equivalent of jabbing a fork into his thigh.

She doesn't care right now that once, they tried to keep themselves from each other, because she is so glad that they failed.

Danicka doesn't want him to go. She's ragged with longing now, needing more than the simplicity of orgasm, more than the heat and sweat of the physical act itself. She makes some noise when he starts to draw downward, his mouth suckling at her breasts again, and kissing her torso, her softness, feeling the tremble of breath in and out of her.

"Lukáš..." she murmurs, panting his name. Her legs part over his shoulders as if by nature, and she pushes herself up onto her elbows to watch him. His name sounds plaintive on her lips, like the way she might call to him after waking from a nightmare.

When he touches her, spreading her lips to see her, she exhales in a rush, helpless to stop it. Her body reacts, too, without her willing it, without her wanting to stop it, either. She gives herself over, and lets herself close her eyes and gasp again when he slides his fingers into her pussy. They're not even words, those sounds she's making now as her hips roll, as she tries to fuck him... just like this.

Danicka has never stopped Lukas from this. Partly because, to be frank, she thought for a long time if she ever stopped him he might never get back down there. And partly because she loves it, and loves that he went from unsure and unpracticed to ...well, this. Knowing her body. Knowing the way to make her arch her back so hard her hips lift, knowing how to make her go wild and careless and overcome. Knowing how to please her.

Once, uncertain and afraid, she told him he didn't have to. He seemed almost stricken by even that much. Normally she lays back and she pushes her fingers into his hair and she groans when he licks at her clit like this, when he spreads her wetness around her cunt with his fingers and loves her with his mouth.

When he does this, every breath he takes is scented with her arousal. The taste of her lingers on his tongue long after he's done lapping at her. His senses are saturated with awareness of her, and nothing else, and he loves the way she arches, and the way she screams, when he makes her come like this.

Danicka loves it, too. Danicka loves seeing his dark head between her thighs, loves watching him lick her the way he does, the feel of her slick around his fingers, the vibrations his groans send up through her. She likes knowing he's stroking his cock while he pleasures her. The thought of it makes her ache. Makes her want to grind her cunt on his face. Makes her need to come.

But she whimpers, and she says his name again, scritching his scalp. She can't stop him. She can't pull away, doesn't want to, can't bear to. But she whimpers: "Lukáš, baby... baby, přijít zpět. Potřebuji pocit, že jste ve mně. Potřebuji tě políbit. Potřebuji být s tebou.

Which is just:

potřebuji tě.

potřebuji tě.

potřebuji tě.

Now.

[Lukas] Sex used to be purely selfish for Lukas. Which is not to say he mistreated his lovers, abused them or made efforts to degrade or objectify them. Merely: sex used to have a single purpose, which was pleasure, which was release and -- more specifically -- his pleasure, his release. There was a time when he would've never thought to do something like this. To go down on a woman, to use his hand and his mouth on her for the sole sake of pleasuring her. That wouldn't have made any sense; would've struck him as a pathetic, ingratiating thing to do.

It wasn't until he met Danicka, not until the night he dropped to his knees for Danicka on a kingsized bed in the lakeshore W, that it ever occurred to him -- it wasn't about ingratiation. It wasn't about submission, or weakness. It wasn't even entirely about pleasuring her, just as sex wasn't entirely about pleasuring himself. It transcends that; it's about what's between them, what's there and what's being created, what is created by these acts of devotion. And worship. And love. Making love: he never used that term before her. That never made sense before her, either.

This, though: it can be called nothing but that. His eyes closed, his hands and his mouth on her, his free hand going from his cock to her body, splaying over the snaking muscles of her stomach as she shudders against him. She's whispering to him then, whimpering to him, her fingers tangled in his thick hair, telling him --

well. Not to stop, per se, but to come closer. Be closer to her. Be inside her. He lifts his mouth from her cunt then, wetness on his face, on his chin and the tip of his nose, his eyes brilliant even in this light, in this darkness. He's breathing harder, like pleasuring her is the same as pleasuring himself, which is the truth. That's the truth he couldn't understand before: that he could be so inextricably bound to someone, so utterly invested and entangled, that the lines between them begin to fade

especially when they make love. Sometimes in the aftermath, he can't remember where she ends, where he begins. Sometimes,

he can't help but bury his face between her legs to go at her again with a silent, burning ferocity, eating at her cunt until she bucks under his hands and rubs against his face and gasps, like that, and cries out, just like that.

Just another second or three. Just another few moments of it before he pulls away for good, raises himself on his hands, crawls up the bed and over her and there's a certain impatience in him now, almost reckless, as he brings himself over her with his hands moving all over her, sliding up her torso to cup her breasts, cup behind her neck, cup her face up to his and kiss her, to give the taste of her back to her, eating at her mouth now the way he'd ate at her pussy.

"So fucking good," he breathes. He licks at her lips, bites at her chin, gently. Then he's settling over her again, and she's sliding her legs around his waist, and he's braced on his forearms and looking down the length of their bodies and his hair, still damp from his shower, is falling in his face and some arch or twist of her body brings her breast back in range, which makes him catch at it with his mouth, suck at her until her nipples stand erect, tight against his tongue.

That's how he slides into her. Her nipple in his mouth, her limbs wound around him. Blindly, by touch alone, rocking his hips against her until the smooth grind of his hard cock over her cunt becomes the slow stretching slide of his cock into her. He's careful with her, because it's been a long time, but not hesitant. He moves into her surely, heavily, sinking into her inch by inch while he gasps against her breast, gasps like he's overcome, like he's already come inside her and now she's holding him while he puts himself back together again.

Lukas raises his head when he's filled her utterly; when he's hot and hard and deep inside his mate, held in the hot tightness of her cunt. He finds her mouth and he kisses her, open-eyed now, gently and savoringly. This will be a slow, firm, tender fuck: that's the promise in that kiss, and in the way his hands stroke back her hair, stroke over her cheeks and her neck, down.

"Miluji tě," he's murmuring to her, and it's savage and it's sweet, and it's filth and it's worship. "Miluji tvoji tělo. Miluji tvoji píču. Miluju, jak si vzít mou kohout.

"Miluji tě. Miluji tě, můj lodní důstojník."

His palm to her hip, then -- his fingers opening over her waist, her ass. He shifts her, pulls her up against him, pulls that sweet pussy onto his cock, urges her to open to him, more; accept him, deeper. A groan against her mouth, low and soft, as he thrusts back against that lift of her hips

and bears her down into the mattress, and pushes himself deeper still, and just

grinds against her. Just moves against her, just like that, slow, winding flexes of his body against hers. That's how he makes love to her: so slow, so deep, as though he couldn't bear to let even a fraction of an inch of space between them.

[Danicka] What was once recreational, physical, and primarily selfish for the both of them became -- becomes -- something different between them. It wasn't like this when they broke up a year ago and each made the rounds through any number of meaningless partners. It wasn't like this with anyone else, and they hated the people they fucked because of it. They looked for or avoided the ghosts of each other, in turn, and could not find solace even when they took out their loss and pain on spectres.

For Danicka, sex was everything it could be to a person. She used it as a weapon and she used it as a tool. She sought her own pleasure and her own release. She endured it, sometimes, though that was rare. She didn't really seek closeness. She never found connection that made her shake because it reached past what she thought she was willing to give. She never trembled in the midst of sex or the aftermath of orgasm because it had stripped her of her ability to act, her desire to pretend.

If she had let herself that first night, if she had not thought he despised her, if she had known then what he has revealed only over time, she might have sought comfort in his arms. Might have laid her head on his chest the way she sometimes does now, and closed her eyes, and let him protect her. But that would have meant trusting him enough to let him see how deeply being with him had touched her, and she could not have done that.

Truthfully, neither of them could have tolerated it then. They are both stronger now than they once were.

Strong enough that Lukas slides down her bed and her body to adore her with his mouth until she seems to fall apart under his hands, melt onto his tongue like grains of sugar. Strong enough that they don't have to protect themselves, they don't have to see every word and deed as an act or war or a game the other is playing. He licks her, shuddering at the pleasure it gives him. She writhes under his hand on her belly, squirms with his fingers in her pussy, and begs him to come nearer to her, and it is as simple as that.

That is all it is.

When Lukas lifts his eyes and mouth to watch her, he doesn't look angry that she's asked him to forego what he's doing and do something else instead. He doesn't ask her what the fuck she wants, if not this. He pants, and he bows his head to eat at her for a few more seconds, needful and hungry, and Danicka just moans. Her hand tightens in his hair, her thighs flex and quiver on either side of his face, his shoulders. She bucks like that, rubs like that, gasps and cries out. Like that.

Like this:

Danicka reaches for him when he crawls back up her body, meets her again on her bed. Her hands grasp and pull at him, slide over him like she would cover all of him if she could with her warmth, and with her adoration. "My love," she whispers in English, affirming it, sealing him with the word long before he sinks down to her flesh. "My love," again, just like that, a claim in and of itself just as it always was.

There's some irony in all of that. Danicka called him hers before he claimed her as anything but his kin. Danicka told him she was falling in love with him before he could say it aloud. Danicka told him she loved him before he could bear it. Danicka took him into the woods and claimed him as her mate long before he went to New York to challenge for her. And these are all secrets between them, and precious ones, because since when do Shadow Lords --

But they do not add up to an exchange or imbalance of power. They come to a single sum: she chose him as much as he chose her, and with certainty, and with all her heart, and he need never truly doubt that. She is his and he is hers not because he was strong enough to demand her and not because she was too weak to do anything but submit and not because they played out some trite romance but because, despite everything, they chose one another. Completely.

Which brings them to this, again and again: unable to stop touching each other. His hands on her face and her breasts and her body, her fingers trailing into his hair and then down his back, her caress on his flank, her breast to his lips, her legs lifting to wrap around his waist, both welcoming and guiding.

He lifts his mouth from her nipple to find her looking down at his winding hips, down at his hard cock, at the shadows between his flesh and her cunt. She is panting and he can feel it, humid, when he nips at her face and kisses the corner of her mouth, catches her lips with his own wet ones and feels her moan into the kiss.

One of Danicka's hands is on the middle of his back, holding him where he is, and her other hand grasps at the sheets at her side, at the creamy botanical bedspread.

So fucking good.

Danicka arches her back, and her hips are tilting when he rubs himself against her, suckling at her breast with a ferocious hunger that borders on need. She wants him inside her and she works her hips back to his as they move together, his cock slippery now with his precum and her wet, and she's making these little noises that are part want and part urging, as though she's trying to somehow verbally encourage their forms to join together. The head of him, silky and slick, slips across her pussy

and her head thumps back against the pillows with a gasp. She moves her hand to his ass, and his hip, groaning. One of Danicka's legs slides higher, wet with sweat now against his side. And Lukas flexes those hips of his under her palm, gasping where he rests his face against her breasts, as they find their way together like virgins, like animals, or like males and females of prehistory.

Her head lifts and her mouth is on him before he raises his head. His cheek is warm where her hand moves to the side of his face, where her palm molds to him. There is no urging or demand in that touch concurrent with their kiss, just... recognition, as he moves that much deeper, slow and sure and known. All of her is wrapped around him, pressed to him, until, yes

it becomes difficult for her to tell where her skin ends and his begins, where everything they are, and were, and are becoming melds together. Sometimes it's like this even when they sleep together. He puts his foot over hers, sole to top, and she cannot tell where the point of separation is. That is how she falls asleep sometimes, one with her mate

and the thought that she could have lost that,

and the thought of how many times she almost has,

and the knowledge that one day she inevitably will,

makes Danicka shudder under Lukas's body, tremble so deeply he may worry, may hesitate at how achingly hard she kisses him, how tightly she holds him and how hot the clench of her around his cock is. He kissed her gently, as though to tell her what this would be. And she holds him there and deepens it, on the verge of... what, it's hard to tell. Tears, maybe. Falling apart. She holds to him, gasping away the threat of weeping as his hands stroke her hair, as his touch traces her body.

"I love you so much," she whispers, lifting her head and resting it alongside his, her arms around his neck and almost all of her weight with him now, her hips alone resting on the mattress for a few seconds. Danicka holds him as though

as though she can't breathe if she lets go. No talk of his cock or about her cunt or about the fact that she loves his body, because she's terrified right now, she's overcome and it hurts. Danicka buries her face against the side of his neck as he moves her body against his, his groan moving into her shoulder or her neck rather than her mouth.

Lukas lays her down, lays atop her. Danicka does not let go. She unfurls against the top of her bed, their bodies sealed together, her breathing shuddering as he grinds into her, and her face pressed to his skin like she might lose him if she lets go, right now.

[Lukas] A hesitation, indeed, when she trembles like that -- shudders beneath him as though utterly overcome, as though utterly overwhelmed. He can't read the thoughts in her mind; can't guess at what it is that makes her shake like that, that makes her grip him like that, and hold him like that, as though to let go

was to let go

and be lost.

All he can do, then, is still over her, and inside her. All he can do is hold her tightly in return, to pull her body up onto his and against his; to wrap his arms around her and hold her safe beneath her, protected from his weight by the strength of his arms and his shoulders and that entire body of his, war-honed, war-hewn, war-bred and war-wrought.

This will inevitably end someday. He will not survive this war; she may not. There is almost no hope for some far-distant reunion, when they are both old and when his rage might finally burn itself out. There was almost no hope for such things even at the dawn of their people -- not for a full-moon, warrior of warriors -- but now:

now, with the world all but literally burning down around them, there is next to none.

Perhaps they hold onto that sliver of a fragment of an iota of hope. Perhaps they hold simply to the notion that someday, beyond this world, far in the umbra, they'll find each other again.

Or perhaps they just hold onto each other. The here, the now; today; this moment. That's all the certainty there is, after all.

And he kisses her. That's certain, too. His mouth to hers, as though their breath were shared, indistinguishable. As though how they sleep, entwined, and how they make love, enjoined, is how they were meant to be. He's moving in her again, longer strokes now, steady and deep, careful but escalating, gasping against her mouth now, panting against her over and over as he pushes into her, fucks her, makes love to his mate

just
like this.

"Touch it," he whispers to her, his lips moving against hers. He finds her hand and he guides it down between their bodies, down to her cunt, his cock, to the place where he slides into her and moves into her, where she clenches around him. "Feel that. Feel that sweet cunt, baby. Feel yourself taking my cock."

His teeth, now, scraping her shoulder. Setting into the flesh of her shoulder, that slender muscle anchoring the point of her shoulder to her collar; gripping her gently, groaning against her, his fingers tangling with hers against her slickness, her wetness, her hot flesh filled with his.

"So good." Not even a whisper, that. A ragged, muffled murmur; syllables, barely words. "So fucking good, baby."

[Danicka] Maybe in that realm where their particular souls go when they die, he will dig a den in the earth and protect her there. Hunt down the spirits of long-gone animals to feed the part of her that lives on. In the harsh winters and rainstorms of that place he will cover the two of them with the furs of slain prey, so that she can hold him in sleep in the more fragile bodies that she knew best when she was alive. Maybe those fantasies he has, those moments when desire flashes in him to provide for their most basic needs in the most brutal, immediate way possible, will all be true after death

which will come all too soon, and all too unexpectedly, as it always does. It's always sudden, endings. Every death she's known, every loss, seemed to hit her from left field, even if she saw it coming, even if she planned it herself. It does not help to know that there is no reasonable hope that one day, grayhaired and quieting inside, they'll be together; it does not make the thought easier that there are only a few possible endings for what they have. Each one is more eviscerating than the last. It says something about the nature of the world they know and live in that the most merciful path has them dying at the same time, with only minutes at most to feel grief.

The shadow of grief is heavy over Danicka, and there is not a time in her life she can remember living without it. Worse, still, grieving for someone or something you see every day in front of you: the brother he should have been, the father he tried to be, the mother that was separated from her own gentleness by her rage. Worst of all, the grief of reflection, touched on tonight as they stood fighting in her living room: the life she wishes she had led, the things she wishes she had done

and not done.

Another chance, maybe. They say that: where there's life, there's hope. While you breathe, there's a chance. They say, too: tomorrow is another day. Perhaps both Danicka and Lukas would say that hope is a fool's game, or might have once said that: do what you can now, because there is no guarantee of a then. If that were completely true, though, or even a fraction true, they would not be here right now, making love in her bed with the apartment dark and their bodies trying to burn away memory with something else.

"Láska..." Danicka whispers, as he's taking her hand and starting to pull it downwards. She resists; turns her wrist and laces their fingers together, holds him there for a moment before she's letting go, and moving her hand to his face again. He starts to speak, muttering aching filth in the language he learned when his childhood was uprooted and tossed across an ocean, and Danicka lifts her face to his and kisses him instead.

Instead of talking about her cunt, his cock, their bodies, how good it is. Instead of feeling his teeth in her shoulder, holding her close to him in a way that is purely animal. Instead of hiding her face in his neck, and hiding the wetness on her cheeks, which she was doing just a few moments ago. She lets him see: I'm overcome. I'm overwhelmed. even if she doesn't tell him:

I was thinking about all that we have, and about how I could have lost it tonight, and I can't bear it.

Even if all she can say is just what she did:

I love you so much.

Not for a moment, though, speaking or holding his hand or touching his face, does Danicka stop making love to him. Her hips roll, and so she grinds herself against his cock. Her legs tighten around him, and so she takes him a little deeper. Her free hand runs up his back, and so she shudders gently at the sheer pleasure of touching him. She rocks with him on her bed, gasping as he pushes into her again and again, and so they make love. And so.

It was never the sex, the orgasm, the body parts, the pleasure, the sweat, the smell of him on her, the pleasantly hot ache afterwards, none of it. She never came to him to fuck. It was always him. It was always this: the inexplicable connection they have in sex. It was, as she told him once in midwinter, sitting in his car, worth it.

This is what is worth everything else, what makes the arguments worth fighting through. It's what makes her able to bear the loneliness that wraps around her like a blanket when they go a week, two weeks, three weeks with nothing but a few phone calls or texts and the video files he's made for her to get her through til the next time. This is what makes the fear and the grief livable. This is what has given her enough hope to look at tomorrow, and next week, and next month, and next year, and think:

it matters.

So Danicka holds him more tightly, and lets out a moan when Lukas thrusts that much harder into her, both of them gasping for it, her body clenching around his with hard, twisting pleasure. So Danicka's hand moves from his face to his arm to hold onto him while they go o trochu rychleji, displacing and wrinkling the bedspread, filling the room with quiet cries of enjoyment that are only as soft as moonlight,

which can be quite hard indeed.

[Lukas] That it was never the sex she wanted, that it was him, always him -- that's one thing he could never accuse her of lying or concealing or misleading him about. She said that from the start, when he said you came here to get fucked and she said

I came here to fuck you,

and that one word made all the difference. Just like one word made all the difference between love and my love. Just like every time they've admitted some fundamental, soul-scorching soul to one another, it was always her first.

Which is a paradox, because Danicka was once so careful to be inscrutable. So much of who they were to each other at the start was a paradox: Danicka, the liar, who again and again told the truth to him. Forced herself to. Stripped her will to the bone, to give him the truth he needed.

And Lukas, starkly honest -- hiding what he felt from her the best he could; hiding his fascination and adoration behind a mask of coldness, of hatred, of disgust and disdain.

That's who they were to each other. That's in the past now, and it was a long and hard road out of it -- a trust as carefully tamed as a wild fox, as carefully nurtured as an oak sapling

which might've, in one fell stroke tonight, been ended.

That's why there's nearly a desperation in the way they make love tonight. That's why she holds him like that, and moves against him like that. That's why he loves her like this, and holds her like this. That's why there are tears on her cheeks, wet against his face when they nuzzle together, when they kiss

(like that),

and wet against his palm when he brings his hand up to touch her face. That's why he doesn't stop; doesn't ask her what's wrong or what he's done. Because he knows. Knows this and intuits this, at least, because he knows her; has come to understand her at least a little.

A lot more, perhaps, than she's ever let anyone else understand her.

He kisses her wet cheeks, then. He kisses her mouth, and now his lips are salty; and then he's kissing her over and over, sharing breath, sharing every instant of what he's doing to her and what she's doing to him, gasping into her mouth, shuddering against her body, moving into her deep and thorough and steady while he murmurs, again and again --

"Ono je v pořádku. Jsem tady, má lásko. Ono je v pořádku. Budeme v pořádku."

[Danicka] That life he saw in the underworld may never be. After tonight's revelation that Danicka never, ever saw him quite as clearly as he thought she did, perhaps he understands better now that everything the gatekeepers created, they took from him. His perception. His memories, his imaginings, his desires, his fears. They took awareness and acceptance of imperfection from him, too.

In that life, Danicka wanted to give their second-born, his only son, a name he himself didn't like. And in that life, he acquiesced to it. In that life, his cubs feared him and his mate was harried by motherhood and -- maybe -- work and school and the War and all of it. In that life, genetics played tricks on him, making the little boy look more like his mother than his purebred, fullmoon father. His daughters were noisy and agressive and his son was quiet and had to be given glasses when he was still so very, very little

and his own rage was a danger to any peace any of them could know. Which made him, his presence, his longing to be close to them, sometimes an enemy to be conquered.

Lukas has never been overly optimistic, naive, or romantic. He has been so viciously the opposite that for awhile, he closed himself off from even the possibility of what he has now with Danicka, much less what he could have in the future. He left her because she pushed him away, and because the fact that that could destroy him made him feel weak, which is not acceptable. He is not the sort of man who would imagine a perfect future for himself. He is the sort of man who needed to see he could have a future at all, and have some happiness in it, despite the cost. And the risk.

The risk of not just loss, but being the cause of her misery. Which is not, he knows without words, why her eyes are wet, and why she kisses him like he's air.

Danicka does not tell him she knows, or that she believes it. Her back arches and she moans, though, her hands tightening on him where she holds him: clenching around his bicep, pressing against his back. She writhes now under him, reminding his body if not all of him what it feels like to be close to something completely wild

and completely his, all the same.

The headboard thumps slightly against the wall, now. Rhythmic and heavy, their bodies move the bed, move together, and Danicka rides up on his body, panting softly. He kisses her wet cheeks, tastes salt. He kisses her gasping mouth and swallows the little cries that leave her, and when their lips part she touches her brow to his, her eyes closed and her mouth open.

Her hand on the back of his neck now, holding him there, loving him, and allowing herself to -- for now, for this, for tonight -- truly need him. No whimpering now of

what have you done?

what are you doing to me?

None of that, any longer, though it still stuns her to wonder, to look back and realize how much she has changed and how much of it had to do with him. Who she was when she met him, what she was like... and what they have now. How open she is, and how utterly he's willing to give himself over, and how much she truly adores him.

Danicka wraps her arms around him, and whispers: "Let me ride you. Let me love you til we come, baby."

[Lukas] A quick, sharp exhale, then. A quick hard kiss, his teeth catching at her lower lip for a moment.

Then he wraps his arm under her and turns with her, his back hitting the mattress. She's atop him now, her hair loose from the knot she'd wound it in for her shower; the tips dry, the roots faintly damp as she sweats, as they sweat, as everything between them becomes a dark, breathing, liquid heat.

"Jo," he breathes as she starts to ride him. His head tips back; his eyes close. His hands are all over her: her breasts, her sides, holding her by the waist, then by the hips. Gently, his fingers squeeze her ass, rub her, return to ride the rise and fall of her hips as she rides his cock; the rise and fall of his thrusts in counterpoint, muscles flexing and releasing beneath his skin. "Love me, baby. Don't stop."

Flexing up to her, then. Arching up to her, and cupping his hand behind her neck to catch her down to him, catch her mouth on his. Their tongues wind together for a moment. He growls into her mouth, " -- God!" when she comes down a particular way, moves a particular way.

When she does it again his head snaps back against the bed. He finds her hands by touch. Guides them to his chest, holds them there, holds her eyes with his, watches her with furrowed brow and overcome eyes, lips parted to pant, teeth parted to groan; watching her moving over him, riding him

the way she rode him nearly a year ago on the cusp of summer,

the way she's ridden him over and over again in the months since,

the way she rides him now, wild and luxurious and simple; neither wild nor luxurious nor simple; nothing more or less than what she is in all her facets, her, his mate, Danička.

[Danicka] Easily, smoothly, they move from Danicka under him, her legs and arms wrapped around him while he flexes into her again and again

to Lukas laying back against her bedspread and pillows, her thighs parted over his hips, her cunt sliding along his cock again and again.

The comforter where he's rolled is cool compared to the heat of his skin, the heat of the bed where they were laying until now. And it's cool compared to the woman on top of him, rising up and her hair falling all around her face, spilling over her shoulders, waving slightly above her breasts. He worships her with his touch, adoring her breasts, holding her body to feel it move on his own. Her palms slide up his abdomen, then his chest, then over his shoulders as she leans forward. Danicka comes closer then, comes back to him, and moans into his mouth when he touches her neck and kisses her.

"I'm not going to stop," she breathes against his lips when their kiss parts, and then she presses their mouths together, moaning again, tasting his tongue with what is unavoidably called luxury.

Her hips swivel on top of him, to elicit gasps, to make him growl like that again, to make him buck the way he does when he's close. She does it again and he slams his head into her pillow; Danicka's mouth plays at a smile, and she nips at his lips and his jawline, laying kisses along his flesh after each tiny bite.

Every time she rolls her hips down and he flexes his hips up, her breasts brush against his chest. And every time her nipples stroke along his skin. Danicka lets out a little noise, and every time she makes that noise it seems to fall apart into tatters, and her pussy squeezes him so fucking deep inside of her it is, as he or she or they thought,

like there is no separation between them. Not tonight.

Which is, after all, what she needed to feel when she kissed him in the bathroom and touched his body with longing and encouragement and told him to love her. Make love to her. Remind her, at the most physical and carnal level, of how it feels to be with him.

"Faster?" she breathes in question, panting, putting her hands on his chest and lifting herself a little, in anticipation of his yes, in anticipation of fucking him like that, which

she starts to do, gradually ramping up her pace, watching his eyes.

[Lukas] His answer isn't even verbal. It's a nod, then another, quick succession, and -- when she goes faster -- a shutting of his eyes, a sound uttered from the back of his throat, the bottom of his lungs.

His hands are back on her hips. Back on her ass. He holds her without attempting to guide her, feels her body winding and moving on his, the sleekness of it, the growing strength in her that he had not felt before. Before those yoga lessons. Before that personal trainer. Before all the things that happened in this last year that have, slowly but surely, made his mate -- never truly weak to begin with, no matter what she might have thought -- stronger.

"That's it," he's whispering, eyes closed, letting pleasure wash over him over and over with every slide of her pussy, "that's it, oh, that's it."

This isn't the first time they've made love anymore, when he barely even looked into her eyes as though afraid of falling into her. So he looks at her, right in the eye: meets her eyes again, finds her eyes, looks at her and lets her look into him. This isn't the first time anymore, when he wouldn't make a sound, wouldn't say her name. So he does: groans for her, snarls and moans; says her name over and over, whispering, worshipping.

And this isn't the first time anymore, when they did not know each other's bodies. She knows his now. The ever-increasing strength of it; the hardness of those bones, the toughness of that flesh. The sinews and joints, all of him, moving beneath her, hot blood pounding through his arteries.

She knows the way his muscles clench, and his jaw tightens, and his teeth bare, when he's close. She knows how he gasps, how that sounds, and how he clutches at her hips, her back. She knows that rough groan he makes, the way he starts fucking her back with a certain mindlessness, a certain recklessness, and she knows the way he bites at her neck and her shoulder.

She knows, even before he gasps it to her --

"Jdu přijde."

He's falling back from her, his mouth leaving her shoulder and her neck, enough space opening between them that she can see his eyes. His pupils are blown, huge in the darkness. Flickers of sensation score his face, shut his eyes and make them blaze by turns. He's fucking her now every bit as furiously as she rides him, panting for breath while he urges her on, "Mějte na koni mě, lásko.

"Bože, jo. Udělej mi přijde. Udělej mi přijde, lásko."

[Danicka] This is the way she rode him in the woods the night of the summer solstice, skin bared to him and moonlight, twisting with previously hidden or disguised or undiscovered strength, every motion borne out of the strength of her desire and not the strength of her body. That's changed, too. As his hands run over her, Lukas can find the places where bones were once prominent, where the frame of her form was all too discernable. And he can feel the softness that's replaced it, the smoothness. She was always slender, but there was a certain fragility to her that is fading to nothing more than memory now.

Now: his mate is stronger where he touches her, and she can take more, and she can do more, and she rides him that much harder when he touches her. Today she worked out and when he came over she was tired and energized at once, hungry and satisfied, lazy and eager. Now she's fucking him with a sort of athletic fervor, all but pinning him to the bed as she works herself on his cock, crying out as the tears dry on her cheeks and the thoughts of loss and grief dissolve into this pure, mindaltering pleasure that burns away everything else the closer she gets.

On a strictly visceral level, they're using one another: Danicka is adoring him from above, running her hands over him as though to imprint on herself physically this body of his that she loves so much. She's gasping when she starts to bounce on top of him, and her bed is quiet but not strictly silent as she intersperses those aching, needful grinds of her pussy onto him with the fast ride, the chase, the ever-quickening rolls of her hips. She always wanted him. And yes, she wanted him, she wanted to know him, she wanted to unlock him somehow and be near him

but she also wanted to fuck him. And feel him inside of her. And come on his cock. And make him see eternity.

In return, Lukas is fucking up into her pussy like he's hunting something, like he's got to or else he'll die, and lose the war, and lose himself. Like this is everything, being in his mate like this, feeling his female clench around him faster, and harder, because she's going to come soon, and that means she's going to let out one of those loud, plaintive groans as she jackknifes over his chest and buries her face against his pectoral muscle, bucking her hips again and again and again, as though to milk his orgasm out of him in the midst of her own.

Which is what she does: the clenching, which makes wetness slide out of her and over him, which makes him slippery with her, just before she folds over him and cries out like she does, grabbing at his arms and the bedspread when she comes, fucking him with fast, hard bucks of her hips

while she screams against his chest, getting out only the first syllables of baby and Lukáš again and again, because she can't stop moaning, and she can't quite breathe.

[Lukas] There's a tension that wracks him a moment before he comes, which flexes him up into her so hard that his hips come off the bed; that his feet plant soles-down to the mattress and lever him up against her, lever her up and nearly spill her forward except she's coming forward, coming down anyway, bending over him to scream against his chest as she fucks against him

on and on and on

her cunt clenching and squeezing around him while she clutches at his arms, his hard biceps, his shoulders; all of him flexed into a single arc of motion driving him into her as his hands come up to cup her face.

Those syllables spilling from her mouth, those half-words that might be his name or something she calls him that she waited months to call him -- those syllables are swallowed, utterly, when he crushes her mouth to his. Now she's screaming into his mouth, and he's snarling back, and somewhere out of this discord is an agreement of the body:

yes. this is good.

yes. this is how it should be.

His hands are everywhere. Her face; her back; her ass; finally wrapping around her, clutching her to him as he fucks up into her, hammers her, pounds the breath out of her. His orgasm hits when the last of hers is still ripping through her. He slams into her and goes rigid, goes still for an instant. Then: groaning muffled against her mouth, against her lips, groaning over and over as he keeps fucking her, fucks his cum into her, fucks her until he can't tell if the slick between them is his or hers or both.

Until his knees are literally weak. Until he thinks he might die if he doesn't stop. Until he stops, collapsing slowly back onto the mattress, holding her still, holding her against his hammering heart, trying to remember how to breathe properly.

I cannot bear to lose this, he thinks. It's the first rational thought in his mind since ... time immemorial. It burns across his brain.

He holds her tighter still, pressing his lips to her neck; that tender point where jaw meets ear.

[Danicka] Oh, she knows this. She knows the way he feels now when he loses himself. The man who couldn't stop saying her name, whether they were arguing or he was kissing her, about to make love to her, who appended it so often to what the fuck or co to blejes -- he never did this at the start. Never growled or snarled or groaned aloud as he grabbed at her. The most he did was gasp, and try to contain what fucking her was doing to him.

While Danicka yelled for him, clutched at him and swore in Russian, moaned as he stroked into her, said ano, to je ono,

znovu.

Though she wouldn't say his name until the night he made her come with his mouth. He explored her with his tongue that night. He paid attention because he wanted to learn how to make her tremble and moan for him. He kissed her pussy just like he did tonight, touching himself as he did so, refusing to moan against her skin but panting by the time he looked up and found her overcome, undone, shaking from what he'd done to her. And it was longer still before she called him baby, before he was, to her, my love.

"Oh," Danicka is whimpering now, shuddering against his chest from the sheer force of orgasm, of pleasure, holding onto him with both arms and with her legs close to his sides and his mouth on her throat, close enough that once upon a time she would have fought not to flinch away from his teeth. She doesn't flinch away; she winds her pussy in slow, lazily hungry circles on his cock, gasping for breath as she lays on him. "Oh, my baby. Oh, fuck. Oh, my god."

[Lukas] Lukas shudders beneath her as she works herself on him as though to draw the very last vestiges of pleasure from their coupling. He jerks and jumps beneath her, involuntarily, the whole of his body responding as though every tight friction of her pussy were an electric shock straight to the motor centers of his brain.

"Oh my god," he gasps. He doesn't even realize he's repeating her; doesn't mean to, or else can't help but repeat her, as though his capacity of language has been reduced to echoes. "Oh my fuck -- oh god. Baby."

And his hands, grasping at her ass, trying to hold her still. And his teeth, scraping the side of her neck, biting her shoulder.

"Stop," he's whispering then; panting, begging. "Baby, stop. Please stop. Stop."

He holds her. He holds her hips down, holds her still, holds her with his cock still deep inside her, filling her full, jumping now and then in reflexive echo to the rolling clenches of her body.

"Jen zůstaň se mnou."

[Danicka] It doesn't mean they don't love or respect each other, when after blowing each other's mind one or the other reaches down, or moves a certain way, and... well, to put it simply, tortures the other with more pleasure than they can physically tolerate in the wake of orgasm. He's reached between her legs to stroke her pussy and had her jerk and whimper and beg him not to touch it. She's worked herself to climax on his cock after his orgasm left him shattered, and he was convinced it was going to kill him for a minute there.

When Danicka winds her hips like that, writhing on top of her lover's body as though to take every last possible moment of enjoyment out of this, he gasps and holds onto her and pleads with her to stop. His body has reacted instantly to all of it: shuddering, jumping, gasping, twitching slightly. Danicka smiles against his chest, lets her eyes close lazily, sinks against him and stops resisting those hands that are trying to hold her still so she'll stop.

She drapes herself over him, no longer riding, no longer rocking against him, but it doesn't stop the intermittent, gradually fading clenches of her cunt on him. "Yeah," she whispers, as though in agreement, relaxing slowly. Melting, even, though it will be some time before their bodies start to cool down even a whit.

It doesn't mean they don't love one another, that they fought tonight. It doesn't mean they don't respect one another, that they fuck so tearingly, so deeply, so hungrily. It doesn't mean that they could have given up entirely, forever, so easily as they might have once wished to be able to. It doesn't mean they don't adore each other, that sometimes they just... can't quite stop themselves from wanting to keep going.

Danicka holds him though, staying with him all laid out and wrapped around him. Keeping him warm, ironically, though he doesn't need her to. It isn't about need.

Though a minute or so after she finally settles, however, her stomach growls. And that is about need.

[Lukas] For that minute or so, Lukas finally and utterly relaxes. He melts beneath his mate, limbs growing heavier by the second, body resounding with the last fading echoes of pleasure.

His hands trace her smooth back. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a primitive sort of satisfaction pings when he registers that Danicka is no longer so painfully thin; that those sharp wings of her shoulderblades and the shadows of her ribs that he glimpsed the very first night when he nearly frenzied and she curled herself into a terrified self-protective ball

(prepared to hold onto life until the very, very end)

are sheathed now in thin, sleek muscle. His mate is growing stronger, and this makes him happy. His mate will survive the coming winter, and this makes him happy

even if it doesn't make any sense at all.

He nuzzles her idly, sleepily: drowsing in the warm aftermath. He kisses her cheek and nips at her earlobe with his lips, sucks gently at her neck. Growls an exhale, pleased, pleasured, holding her gently now, keeping her warm even as she keeps him warm. Even though neither of them need it.

Then her stomach growls. And his lips curve against her skin. He laughs silently, chest moving beneath her before it expands with a deep breath that has him rolling, rolling, rolling her under him again as he playbites at her neck.

"Should I go hunt that boar now?" he murmurs, laughter tracing his voice.

[Danicka] There's no real danger of them falling asleep like that. Danicka's limbs are all akimbo and, to put it crudely, they're sticky and sweaty from loving each other. They've drifted off like that before, pleasantly sore, utterly exhausted, and completely filthy, but when you get right down to it they both prefer to feel clean and dry and soft when they sleep.

The few times he's been able to come over here, use his key, and slip into bed beside her, he's found Danicka curled up in light pajamas -- short shorts made of some thin and colorful cotton and a tank top or a t-shirt that's been through the wash so many times it's soft as her own skin, or a short nightgown over a pair of panties, or just as naked as the nights he sleeps with her -- and smelling faintly of her soap.

To a creature like Lukas, scent-oriented and scent-guided, the time will come -- if it hasn't already -- when the smell of the various things Danicka uses around her apartment and their den are inextricably bound to his thoughts of her, his memory of her, his love of her.

And moments like this: her wrapped naked and sweaty and sticky around him, slippery and satisfied and frankly just hot to the touch. And her moaning softly in protest when he rolls them over. Her legs don't wrap around him; she hasn't the energy, so they lay on the outsides of his legs, loose, feet caressing his calves. She opens her eyes and lays back, arms too relaxed to even hold onto him. Her hair spreads over the pillows, her cheeks are still flushed, her eyes are bright from satiation.

"Nnno," she groans, resistant and unable to wrap herself around him to keep him there. "No, baby," Danicka whispers, and rolls her hips, grinding herself up onto his cock again, though just moments ago he begged her to stop, it was too soon. It's been a minute. Two, at the most. She does this to him anyway, as though to keep him there, keep him with her. "Nechoďte lov. Zůstaň se mnou."

His mate underneath him, well-fucked and still sheathing his cock, moving herself on him like she still wants more, coaxing him quietly not to leave to go hunt for food, is a compelling argument. One that, had their ancestors given into it, would have obliterated all their various bloodlines ages ago.

[Lukas] Lukas's extraordinary eyes flick closed again as she moves like that. A second later they open again, and it's with quite a deliberate exertion of will that he raises himself on his elbows, ducking his head to kiss her mouth.

"I'm only going," and her chin, "as far as the kitchen." And her collarbone, "I'll be back," and her breast, "in a minute."

His mouth closes on her nipple. He sucks at her for a moment, mmming, licking at her until her nipple tightens on itself, firm against his tongue. Then he grins at her -- something between mischief and an oddly innocent pleasure in his smile -- and kisses her again over her heart.

"Hned jsem zpátky," he whispers, and pushes himself up. Even now, he's careful when he withdraws from her, sliding out of her with his breath held, his head lowered, as though afraid that pulling out too quickly might hurt her.

His feet hit the ground beside her bed. When he opens her room door, the outside seems marginally cooler than the heat they've generated in there. He goes to get food.

[Danicka] Right back. He promises, or close enough to it. Danicka is roused to energy when he pushes himself up on his elbows, making that plaintive, wordless protest again. Nevermind that she promised -- or close enough to it -- that if her stomach growled or her appetite came back she would tell him, and let him feed her, and he could go hunt or reheat as his heart desired. She does not want him to go, not when making love to him after so very long and after such an argument made her weep. She doesn't want him to leave her, not when the thought of their bodies not being connected is almost physically painful.

He kisses at her, suckles her breast, makes her eyes close and her head tip back as she exhales heavily. Danicka's hand moves to his hair, strokes it back, tries vainly and vaguely to encourage him to stay right there, licking sweat off her skin and earning some renewed response from her body. But it falls away, and he all but promises that he'll come back.

Danicka's eyes drift open just before he slides his cock from her. She breathes in soundlessly, but he can see her breasts rise with it, can see how her eyes flicker at the sensation. "Come back," she whispers, though he will. He's not going far. With the door open behind him, Danicka can hear him padding around the ktichen. Opening the fridge. She hears takeout boxes rustle, hears cupboard doors open and a drawer slide out. He makes a single plate and the microwave beeps and hums and beeps again to warm it up.

Not quite a wild boar, or a pit dug in the ground to roast it over. Not quite dead creatures brought to her feet for them to skin together and turn into food palatable for a human's teeth, a human's digestive system. Taking a mate is, for the Garou, something of a sacrifice as well as an honor and a wise path: if he were alone, he could risk hunting more dangerous prey. He could eat it there, steaming in the woods, freshly dead. No thoughts of making sure that he saves his energy, making certain that he brings back something, anything, that will feed his mate and the cubs she might bear. No thoughts of having to carry it back to her, of helping her prepare it for a more refined, demanding body. Cooking. Jesus. The need for fire.

Taking a mate is a sacrifice. Having cubs is a risk. Human beings have forgotten: spouses are part of the package, children are status symbols, it is all just what you do as part of a 'successful' life.

These are not the thoughts going through Danicka's mind as she lies in her bed and watches the moon outside her window, the night sky lit from below by Chicago itself, and all its human influence. She is not thinking much, at all. Her hand traces idly over her breasts, and she drowses against her covers, which need to be washed again now. Somehow she knows that Lukas will come back with a single plate of food to share with her, and clean, clear, cold water for her to drink. Somehow she knows that he will likely choose food she can eat with her fingers, making it all the easier for him to lie with her and hold her while she quiets her belly's protests.

Somehow she knows that he will close the doors and close them into this den of hers, wrapping himself or her blanket around her even if she doesn't shiver. She knows him. She knows the instincts that drive him most strongly when they're together. She has known from the start that he was an animal and a monster, and did not believe he trusted her at all until he finally let himself act like one with her, until he finally believed that she loved him

and because of,

not in spite of.

She knows: he will stay with her tonight, legs entangled and his hand over her heart, cupping her breast. She knows: they will breathe together in sleep, close as they are when they make love, closer than they have been in almost a month, since her birthday, since the last time they had to leave each other. She knows: he will sleep easier, knowing she is fed and warm and safe and his. Still his.

Danicka turns her head on the pillow when the door clicks and the air in the room changes with the presence of darkness in darkness, shadow in shadow, rage in the silence. She looks at him, half-illuminated by slowly waxing moonlight, as he comes towards her bed and crawls back onto it.

"Děkuji vám, láska," she whispers, though -- somehow -- she knows it isn't necessary. She knows:

he is her mate.

[Lukas] There was light in the kitchen, shed from the refrigerator and the microwave. There was light in the living room -- the city glowing in through her enormous plate-glass windows, incandescing through the night. When he returns to the bedroom, there's light still, but it's more muted here. The windows are a little smaller. The sun is still far from the sky.

She's not wrong. He did make a single plate. Heaped it full of food -- appetizers, yes, but mostly hearty foods. Steak cut into bite-sized pieces. Duck breast sliced thin. Lamb ribs already separated. Steamed vegetables that had accompanied one entree; herbed potatoes that had accompanied another. And water, ice cubes floating within.

He does close the door, too. It clicks shut, and to his sensitive nose at least, the smell of cooked food, fit for the more discerning digestion of his near-human mate, is stronger. The smell of her is stronger, too. The smell of them; their presence marking this place, which is hers, but where he is welcome.

Which could be said for her as well. Danicka belongs to herself. But she welcomes him.

He passes her the plate, shakes his head in silent negation as she thanks him. She doesn't need to thank him. He's her mate. As she sets the plate down on the mattress he climbs back onto the bed, springs rocking quietly beneath his greater size and weight. Stretching out on his side, he moves in behind her, and his arm is solid and heavy over her waist, and his shin is solid and warm over her feet.

He props himself up on his elbow, knuckles to his temple. Idly, his hand traces her side, her stomach, cups her breast and strokes her nipple. He touches her gently while she eats, and it's not so much erotic as it is comforting, and intimate, and familiar, and loving.

There's far more food there than Danicka could eat even at her hungriest. Lukas eats, too, though only a little. Mostly, he holds her, quiet. After a while, he sinks down behind her, nuzzles against her, and closes his eyes.

Lukas falls asleep first while she's still eating -- his arm going slack over her side, his breathing evening out, the timbre shifting. When she's finished, though, and leaning away to shift the plate off the bed and onto the nightstand or onto the floor, her mate wakes again, easily and quickly, stirring to some subconscious registry that she was drawing away. He makes a faint, sleepy sound, but she's coming back already by then, turning back to him, and he puts his hand on her cheek.

Her hair sweeps his forearm, sweeps his shoulder and his cheek, as she leans over him. They kiss. It's soft. Then less so as a different sort of hunger rises, making his hands pull and grasp at her body, making him shift her over him again.

This time, when she rides him again, it's slower. Quieter. Softer. A world of half-caught breaths and half-voiced gasps. Their mouths meet again and again. At the end he turns her under him and it's not so soft then. It's deliberate and heavy. He fills her again, grunting quietly in her ear on every thrust; lies panting afterward, spent.

In the shower, he holds her under the spray, his back to the wall. Water scatters off their skin until the steam and the heat makes them lightheaded, and then they finish washing, step out, dry off. They leave their towels on the bathroom floor and following her back to bed, Lukas is looking at his mate's body again, looking at her hips and her ass, touching the dip of her spine as he catches up to her.

It's been a long night, though, and not an easy one. He holds back. They get in bed and they were in the shower long enough that the sheets have cooled, so he draws her close and wards her with his body, thoughtlessly, because with her his drives and urges are always so primitive, so essential. Keep her warm. Keep her fed. Keep her safe. Keep her protected.

Keep her.

He lies awake until she's asleep, this time. He waits until Danicka finally drifts into sleep, her body relaxing in his arms, her breathing growing steady. He waits until she's asleep, and then he waits a little longer while the night grows quieter around him; the city a little darker.

He waits until some strange, wary aspect of himself has finally settled. Is finally certain that she's still here. She's still his. She's safe and protected, warm and fed; she's content, and resting, and his.

He shifts a little, then. He draws the sheets up, kisses his mate gently on the shoulder, and closes his eyes. A few moments later, he lets himself sleep.

[Danicka] When he came to her apartment tonight -- she doesn't call it her home, she doesn't think of it as her den -- he brought with him a few changes of clothes. Razor, soap, toothbrush, shampoo, conditioner, bodywash. His own things. His own smells. When he came here tonight he expected to stay, he knew he was welcome, and he was not looking for an argument. He was looking for his mate, and she was there, contemplating dinner as the sun set over Chicago.

It will be a long time til dawn, even now with springtime's longer days and shorter, warmer nights. It feels like it has already been a long night, one that in a way they feared would never end: as though, if it had taken them from each other, it would go on forever in memory, lightless and cold. That is not how it went. Another spring together, perhaps another summer. If fate is kind and the war fails at its purpose, which is destruction, pure and simple. Another night together.

They lay atop the covers and eat. Danicka eats. She goes for the vegetables, the potatoes. A few bites of steak and lamb, a nibble of duck, but this is done to satisfy Lukas's less rational instincts as much as it is to satisfy her own hunger. Nevermind that he knows her body does not need what his body does, that she doesn't need that much meat, or even a fraction of the calories he himself burns away just by existing. Nevermind that he knows she prefers the lighter foods: this time of night, after fighting and after sex and under the moonlight, he looks at the food he can gather for his mate and he chooses what will fill her most, keep her warm, and make her strong.

So she eats: vegetables, herbed potatoes, some steak and lamb, drinks the cold water. Irony, there, that as sweat wicks heat from her body as it evaporates and as the ice water cools her from within, she nestles back closer to her lounging, lazing mate. He runs his hands over her and she twists at one point, chewing on a piece of broccoli, looking curiously but wordlessly at him. Perhaps he smiles. Danicka does, and nuzzles him, then turns back to the food he brought her.

They are as animals who have learned to use tools and talk and dress and make fire, but in their moments of intimacy revert back to primitive, wordless, naked existence. They eat with their hands. They warm each other with their bodies. The male touches the female idly, feels her shift away slightly when it becomes arousing, distracting, if not unwelcome. Waits for her to settle again, and settles himself, and sleeps.

Danicka likes that he sleeps. She likes that he touches her like this, primal and endearing, as thoughtless and secure as a child. She likes that he doesn't stop himself, doesn't question whether or not she wants him to touch her. She likes that when he strokes her nipple and it makes her shiver, he doesn't grow wounded at the way she wriggles to make his hand slip to her ribcage and her belly instead. She likes that he eats with her, even if they both know the plate is really for her. She likes that he made one plate

and she likes that he drifts away, lax and heavy and warm, while she goes on. She likes the fact that with him, she does not feel like she should wake him, or stop eating, or do anything but what she is doing already: eating her fill. Even if it isn't much. She likes knowing that whether he stirs or not, he will welcome her when she turns and curls against his chest.

Truth be told, when Danicka stretches under Lukas's forearm to set the plate on the nightstand next to the water glass, she is thinking of doing exactly that: turning around, curling to Lukas's chest, and inviting him to warm her with his arms and his legs and his own body heat rather than pulling up the comforters. She is thinking about sleeping. Shower be damned, and brushing her teeth, and damn the covers and all the rest of it, too. She would be happy to sleep now. Here. With him. Their needs met, their connection proven again to be forged of sterner stuff than an argument can destroy: the roots of oaks, the depths of mountains.

She would be satisfied to fall asleep with him then.

But he touches her face, and his eyes are half-lidded against their startling blue. Danicka tilts her head against his palm, lips moving with some wordless, meaningless, soundless phrase -- though perhaps it's his name, or a word that becomes a name between them. Lukas lifts his head, searching, and Danicka finds him there, kissing him slowly. A sound leaves him, or her, or both of them together, and he pulls at her, urges her down to him, urges her nearer

which makes her gasp. Her legs part only a little when he runs his hands down her sides to her hips, drawing her body fully against his. His cock begins to harden against her thighs and her cunt as they explore each other's mouths. Her breathing quickens, and the movement of it strokes her breasts against his chest.

Baby... she whispers, when he rolls onto his back, when she slides on top of him.

This time, she stays close all the while. She lays her head on his chest once or twice, rocking with him gently, moaning quietly into the dark as his hands hold her. Move her. Lay on her lightly when she starts to buck, starts to clench around him, starts to gasp with quick, imploring little pants of breath. His hands tighten again when she whimpers, when she squirms, when she rolls her hips and comes around him, holding onto his arms and crying out his name like she's lost, like she's falling apart.

Which is perhaps why, though he fucks her slow and soft through the fringes of her orgasm, he grinds so heavy and so achingly into her when he rolls over, puts her against the mattress, and takes her again. Danicka is still moaning for him as he fucks her against her bed, holding to his back while he snarls quietly, flexing his hips hard and grinding between her thighs at the end as though to fuck his cum that much deeper into her

and then those strokes, those faster jerks of his hips as he rides out his own orgasm, which she loves. It makes her clench around him again, though more slowly, more gently, than during her own. She rocks with him, holding him, murmuring to him, til he finishes, til all they can do is lie entwined and sweating and breathless with each other. She tells him

I love the way you fuck me

and means it.

The suggestion of a shower, wherever it comes from, is met with a low laugh from Danicka, who rubs her face against Lukas's and smiles lazily. She makes him wait a little while before they part again, and keeps her arms wrapped around him as soon as she can while they stand in the bathroom, waiting for the water to warm. She holds him in the shower, and he strokes her back. They trade a few sentences about going to bed with wet hair, and she mumbles that she doesn't care as she nuzzles his chest, all but falling asleep into him even as the showerhead pelts them with heat and wetness.

Danicka needs help getting dry afterward. Or rather: she is willing to just fall into bed damp, and sleep. But Lukas wraps her in a towel, and she smiles with a low tenderness, touching his face, because once upon a time it was not okay for him to take care of her. She did not want him to, because she could not trust it. Now he brings her food and he helps her dry off after the shower and she adores him for it, but her limbs are heavy with weariness at this point.

The sheets under her comforter are clean and cool and dry. When Lukas takes her there, Danicka lets out a soft sigh as her head sinks onto one of her pillows. She is not so tired that she's unaware of her mate's body close to hers, or unaware of the heat coming off of him or the want that seems to vibrate quietly in the air. She says nothing. She lays quite still when he wraps himself around her from behind, though that is not because she doesn't want to move and arouse him further. She's just tired.

Makes a noise, low and soothed, when he puts his arm around her. And that is the last thing she knows, that last sound she makes consciously. Danicka is asleep in mere seconds, not long for him to wait to make sure she is settled and protected. She didn't even reach for the comforter and sheets to cover herself before she drifted off; Lukas does that for her.

In the morning she will love this, too. That she will wake so warm and so content that leaving this bed is unthinkable. In the morning when they eat again and shower again, she will take more pleasure than she can bring herself to say aloud in watching him reach for his own clothes from her closet, rather than digging them out of a knapsack or putting on whatever he dropped on the floor the night before. She will not remember that while she slept, he kissed her shoulder. Unlike the first time he did that, though, she does not need to feel it to know

he's staying with her.