[Danicka] It's very, very late at night when Lukas's iPhone chimes or buzzes in his pocket, in his glovebox, wherever he has it. Maybe he is still at the bonfire, drowsing near the flames as the air flows over the lake and the wind carries that coolness out to the woods, creating a chill unexpected at this time of year. Maybe he is on his way back to the Brotherhood already, or in his bed there, or in his car, or...somewhere. Maybe he is thinking that this time four seasons ago he was lying with Danicka in Tekakwitha's woods, too relaxed with savage pleasure and primordial comfort to yet notice the faint bramble-scratches on her arms and legs, the imprints left by his teeth, the sheer and violent wildness hinted at by the marks on her very (fragile, perfect) skin.
Maybe.
She told him some time ago that this summer she'd be going to stay with her half-sister, the one with cancer, the one still in New York, the one not beholden to her brother or under his authority. She told him at the start of June that it would be soon, and perhaps he was over some night while she was starting to think of what to pack. It came up in a few conversations, over dinner or in texts: he was going to lose her soon, albeit briefly, but indefinitely. Maybe a few weeks. Maybe a month or more. It depended on how long it took to help the family settle into the house they'd just bought, how long it took to secure the finances and hire the help that would be able to care for Danicka's nieces and nephews without being terrified of the two who would Change. He just... didn't know. And neither did Danicka.
Then she sent him her itinerary, a one-way ticket, and he saw her covering certain things in her apartment with dropcloths and packing certain things to take, leaving others behind. Though Danicka was calm, and even orderly, and even a little withdrawn -- distant -- as she prepared, albeit always congenial, the last night they spent together before she went to the airport she --
They made love in her bed at Kingsbury Plaza, slow at first, slow the first time, aching. They made love with something like growing desperation and fervor the next time. The time after that. She clung to him when he thrust into her, growling against her neck, his face buried beside the pulse in her throat, his teeth locked in her flesh as he came. She ran her hands over his back as he shuddered to relaxation, and she arched her back when she kissed him, sealing their skins together along every possible inch. They made love until he literally could not hold himself up over her another time, when even his strength was coming to its end, and Danicka -- wracked by exhaustion and emotion both -- slid her arms around him when he rolled onto his back and brought her with him, over him, close to him.
-- she wept then, her face on his chest, her tears on his chest, holding him. There was no great sorrow to it, no boneshaking grief. Simply sadness, as passing and yet as genuine as any other human feeling. A true animal would not leave her mate, even for a brief time, not simply to care for another creature of her sire's first litter. Danicka is human enough that she knows how to feel sadness. She knows how to miss something. She knows the emotion well enough to feel it a little even while that Something is still in her arms, sweating, kissing her temple and her mouth and her tears and murmuring to her in intimate exhaustion:
Neplač. Neplač, láska.
Today was the longest day. Longer and longer since she left, the searing sun merciless on his neck and in his eyes. She called when she got there. She texts him every day, but she's in a household with four busy children and the eldest is pubescent and the second is nearing his Change and the third is frightening in her stillness as well as her fury, the fourth is...
well. He moos at Ahrouns. Imagine how he handles being told to brush his teeth before bed.
Today was long, and the bonfire was lonely, and now it is so late that surely the entire household in New York is asleep. Hell. Most households in Chicago are asleep, too. But Lukas's phone that his mate got him for his last birthday-cum-Christmas is awake, and alive, and telling him in big bright letters that Danicka is calling him.
Because it's the solstice. And today was the longest day, and a year ago she lured him into the woods and he thought that if he had to, if they wanted to, if she would let him, he could keep her there forever. Safe. Warm. His.
Of course she calls him tonight.
[Lukas] Truthfully, when Danicka told her mate at the start of June that she would be gone soon, he'd already forgotten that she was going to go at all. It came as an unpleasant surprise, one that he tried to mask, but even though he knows now he was never so transparent to her as he thought, and she was never such a creature of unfailing vision as he thought --
she still sees it plainly. He doesn't want her to go. He hates the thought of being without her. He's afraid hating it makes him weak. He's afraid he'll be weak without her, somehow.
He was quiet after she mentioned it. And a little later that night, he held her in his arms in bed and held her gently with his teeth, as though to remind himself that she was not gone yet. That soon is not now.
A few days later she talks about packing and Lukas turns away, stricken the way an animal or a child is stricken at the departure of a loved one. He's simple and feral like that: as though not having her around was something terrible and unbearable; as though telephones and webcams didn't exist; as though he couldn't moonbridge out there, or fly over on a discount ticket, or even drive.
As though they didn't spend days on end, sometimes weeks, apart. As though the addition of a few hundred miles really made all that much difference,
except, of course,
it did.
It makes all the difference because it's indefinite. There is no set return date. A few days after that, when she mailed him her itinerary, it was one-way. Lukas was irrationally angry; he deleted the email and rescued it hours later, embarrassed then at his reaction. And sad again, when he saw only a date of departure and a white space where the return flight would be.
Their last night, they made love again and again and again the way they did the first. And he couldn't help but think of her leaving him then, too. He couldn't help but think this was some sort of full circle, some sort of closure, a part of his life sealing closed and ending the way it began.
Loving her over and over. Saying little, keeping it all inside, because if he opened his mouth he'd never stop. He'd ask her not to go. He might beg, and it's not even pride that stops him.
It's the knowledge that he'd force her between a hard choice and a harder one. It's the knowledge, when she weeps against his skin and he holds her and does his best to soothe the sadness that howls inside the chambers of his own heart, that she doesn't want to lose him either.
So he murmured, don't cry. don't cry, love. And he stroked her back. And he pulled her face to his and kissed her damp cheeks, and kissed her mouth, and gathered her to his chest.
They slept like that, that last night: face to face, his arm slung over her side, warding her back. His shin crossing hers.
He did not drive her to the airport in the morning. Perhaps she understood: he could not bear that, somehow; the sense of finality in that, delivering her out of his hands, watching her disappear into the terminal. When she slid out of bed he stayed where he was, awake but saying nothing, watching her dress, waiting for her to come to him before she left,
upon which he raised himself on his elbow, cupped his hand around the back of her neck, and kissed her with an unspoken, sudden ache that wracked his brow and made his breath shudder.
Then she was gone. The days stretched out endlessly, each longer than the last. She calls him when she arrives and she texts him every day, but Lukas is a wolf, and it is not enough.
Every part of him keened softly for his mate, every minute; not because she was simply not there but because he didn't know when she would be back. Every part of him was aware that there was a possibility he would never see her again.
He could die. Not very long after this very night, this solstice night, he will very nearly die. He will take a blow that would have obliterated a weaker Garou; a Garou less wary and well-prepared than he. He will go home that night, not to the Brotherhood but to the den, and sleep where he can still smell his mate faintly.
And she could die. She could be in a subway derailment. She's scarcely more than human; she's so fucking fragile. Or even if he lived, and she lived, something could happen; the Wyrm could rise. The world could be cloven in twain, with he on one side of some limitless divide and she on the other.
He was shiftless and ungrounded; restless without her. His moods ran darker. He withdrew into himself and erected barriers, said nothing of any of it to anyone. He went through the motions of courtesy. He became more austere. He did not let others so much as attempt his name the way she said it, and that was such a silly, sentimental gesture that he was ashamed.
Solstice night came, and it was lonely and cold. He shot glass after glass after glass of Polish vodka and thought of dinner at a Polish restaurant; he thought of the last time the sun stood still at its northernmost arc; he thought of the wild things that skittered from them in the brush as they drifted, walked, raced into the dark and the wilderness, stripped bare and then stripped naked, which were not exactly the same thing, and commended themselves into one another's keeping.
They became mates then. The business with her brother months later -- it was a formality between he and Vladislav, albeit a treacherous one. Between he and Danicka, it was about something else altogether; freedom and boundaries rather than binding; unity.
The night was nearly over when he wakes. The bonfire is burned down. He's cold and stiff, and he gets up, and he goes home.
That's where she calls him: lying in their bed watching the east turn blue. Her name on the phone makes a smile ghost across his face, but it's small and it aches. He slides to pick up and puts the phone to his ear. He sounds quiet; introspective.
"Můj lodní důstojník," he says.
[Danicka] When Danicka considered moving out of Kingsbury Plaza, Lukas tried to mask his dismay at the thought of never being with her in that place again. Danicka saw it, though. When he tries not to show her so obviously how stricken he is at the idea of her going away, she sees that, too. She says nothing about it, and falls asleep with his arms around her, his teeth locked softly in her shoulder, his hand cupping her breast as though to cradle her very heartbeat.
Hints of his irrationality flicker through her awareness over the days preceding her departure. Danicka does not call him out on it. She does not tell him to stop being such a child. She does not try to counsel him that she'll be back before he knows it. She does not try to calm him with reason or rationale. For her, the fear is not there. For her, though the period is indefinite, it is simply 'not forever', and so she is at peace with it. She is patient with his lack of peace.
He is, after all, her mate. And her mate is war itself, wrapped in a swarthy human-seeming skin. Danicka knows this. She does not try to sweep away his fears and his upset. She simply accepts it. She comes to his room at the Brotherhood or meets him at their den or has him over almost every possible night before she leaves, and sleeps with him as though to imprint herself into his sheets, his flesh, leave her scent and the sense of her as strong as possible.
This is more than words. Words are the sources of misunderstanding, as they have seen time and time again. So Danicka does not give Lukas many words on the subject. She does not cry, or complain that she wishes she could stay. She does not talk much about it at all. In the last days they have together, Danicka is content to simply be with Lukas when she can, and let him hold her, and stroke his hair to ease him into comfort, to relaxation, maybe even to sleep.
He doesn't sleep before her, though. And after a little while, she understands why he is afraid to close his eyes and drift off before she does. So Danicka stops trying to stay awake, those nights. She does not want him to think
will close my eyes and when I open them, she will be gone. she will have left me.
The last night, though, Danicka's peace crumbles at the edges each time they make love. She fucks him into mutual exhaustion, and when she has nothing left to hold herself together with, she does not cry because she fears losing him -- not any more than she would if she were here for several weeks but not seeing him. She cries simply because she will miss him. She will miss him agonizingly, and it is not a familiar feeling to her, or one she has many guards against.
In the morning he does not take her to the airport. Perhaps she understands why he doesn't go with her to the aiport, why those last miles are taken alone. Perhaps she understands it has to do with what he can and what he can't bear to do. Perhaps it makes little difference to how she feels when they kiss like that but he stays in her bed as she leaves, the way they kissed even though he stayed in that hotel bed once upon a time and watched her walk out the door.
Days pass and Lukas aches. He has pictures on his phone of Danicka with her half-sister's offspring, perhaps taken by her half sister. She often speaks in nothing but Czech when she calls him, from the first greeting to the last goodbye. That is what they speak at home, and sometimes he hears the children in the background and sometimes he hears that she is outside, sitting on the front stoop as the night dwindles and sometimes she's alone in the guest bedroom and she tells him she misses him (so much) and her voice aches with a visceral but breathy longing that seems to have a direct line to his loins.
But they do not talk about when she'll be back, not yet. She doesn't know, and being told not yet over and over would only grieve him, over and over.
"Lukášek," she murmurs in response, soft and something like relieved, like sinking into a hot bath eases worn muscles. "Byl to velmi dlouhý den," she goes on after a moment, like a confession.
Like a ritual.
[Lukas] Seven hundred miles away -- a miniscule fraction of a second so small that they can't even hear it away -- Lukas's extraordinary eyes close. She hears him draw a breath, long and slow.
Then, "Byl to nejdelší den."
He's quiet for a while. There's a faint rustling. He sits up in bed, scoots back, leans against the headboard and looks across at the wall, at the front windows of their bedroom, at the two colorful, whimsical beanbag chairs he put beneath them for no better reason than because they were silly, and noisy, and made him happy.
"Mohl bych přijít k vám," he says -- the words are out before he can think about them. "Mohl bych tam být do svítání."
Sunrise is less than an hour away. It will take him thirty minutes to drive to the Caern. Stark Falls is not within half an hour from whatever borough of New York City Danicka might be in now. But Central Park is.
[Danicka] "Právě včas, aby mi pomohl udělat snídani pro děti," Danicka counters, with amusement that's gentled by a soft sort of ache. "Renáta by mi nikdy neodpustil."
The third-born. He may not remember her, that willowy blonde teenage girl who had stared at him through the railing of the stairs at Danicka's childhood home. She was the quietest of the four children that night he went to endure formalities and control his Rage with Vladislav. She was helping her mother, her aunt, shepherding her brothers and her sister, and she made almost no impression at all that was anything more than
a young
lovely
Shadow Lord kinswoman
of even greater breeding than Danicka's own. A few more years and few males of the tribe will be able to look at her without seeing her as the sort of prize she is. Nevermind that her closest Garou relative is an Athro Philodox in the Czech Republic, one who could lay them to waste with that fetish-sickle. Young Renáta, coming into womanhood, as softspoken and pretty in her submission as Danicka has always seemed to be.
She would never forgive her half-aunt if Lukas saw her at breakfast, without any warning. Such is the mind of a teenage girl. And such is Danicka's mind, that she considers it.
But then silence, for a moment. Even over the phone, it isn't awkward. "Ty zdá se tak osamělý," she says softly, with concern in her tone, with the implicit offer of comfort that is something both of them have only gradually begun to believe in. To trust. To expect from each other.
[Lukas] In truth, Lukas can barely keep Danicka's enormous extended family straight in his head. When his family left Czechoslovakia, it was on the losing end of some political upset that he was too young to understand, and probably never will fully grasp. Bonds were severed, ties broken. These days, Lukas's family consists of his immediate nucleus of relatives: the parents, the sister.
And Danicka. She's his family, too. She's his mate.
The name rings faintly familiar, though. Renata. One of the girls; the bold one, or the one that had peeked through the banisters? He mulls this quietly as she speaks, and they're both speaking the language of their ancestors now, and she sounds
so close
that if he closes his eyes he can almost smell her.
There's a silence; not awkward, but quiet. He opens his eyes when she speaks again. The sound he makes is wry, just a little edged. Or pained. It's hard to tell.
"Jo."
That's all he says for some time -- that one syllable, quiet. She's an hour farther east from him. For her, the sun is already rising. In Chicago, the sky has turned deep blue, but the horizon is still dark. His free hand rests over his stomach, traces thoughtless patterns.
"Je to bylo těžší, než jsem si myslel, že by bylo," he admits, then.
[Danicka] The bold one: Irena. Ahroun now, Ahroun one day. The one he has offered to foster. It is a good offer. He is a purebred Garou of her tribe and of her moon, and in a sense he is her uncle as much as Vladislav is, whether the courts of the United States would recognize it or not. The offer has not been extended formally to her mother's twin sister, but Danicka holds it in her mind, and she watches her littlest niece closely, thinking of how Irena's natural inclination towards stoicism as a way to control her Rage would shift into something more stable under the tutelage of someone like Lukas.
The little one: Emanuel, noisy and energetic and sometimes -- these days -- crawling into bed with his visiting aunt to cry because he misses his home, he misses his eldest siblings who are still an ocean away, he misses people who know his language, and English is still so hard for him, and he does not like being so different from everyone else, and his brother and his sisters are not interested in the games he wants to play, and he is lonely. She strokes his dark curls when he starts to fall asleep, humming lullabyes that he is far, far too old for. But they do not admit that to each other.
The eldest who is not the eldest: Renata, soft and quiet and drawn to Rage the way some unfortunate and perhaps even warped Kinfolk are. Unsteady in America, unsteady as the sudden eldest child of her family, unsure of what to do to keep her siblings out of their mothers' way. Not out of her hair. It hasn't grown back yet, after all the chemo. She is the one that wouldn't forgive Danicka for flaunting her mate over the breakfast table, even if that feeling of fury was shortlived, even if it was irrational, even if she could not explain or excuse it.
And Miloslav, named for his grandfather, so close to his Change that everyone around him can taste it. Can smell it, like ozone. Can sense it, and avoid him because of it. Miloslav, born under a crescent moon like Danicka and like Vladislav. He talks to trees even now, hears the voices of old memories. And his uncle will mentor him. Perhaps he will even keep his innocence.
Perhaps.
Lukas sounds lonely. He is lonely, and he confesses to her what he couldn't put into words when she was still here. Danicka sounds drowsy but is slowly waking. She has tea, and she's sipping from it, but that is almost silent. "Co je tak těžké?" she asks gently, and the question is genuine. She knows it isn't just that she's far away, and that he can't hold her. They've been separated longer than this before, seen each other less, even talked less. Texts and calls every day is more than they can usually do even when she's in Chicago. So,
it's an honest question, though a tender one.
[Lukas] It's an honest question, and he knows it is because the answer is not immediate or easy. He has to think about it. He's silent for a long time, seconds on end, a conversational eternity.
They have time, though. And they have a certain comfort now, after days, weeks, of talking to each other like this. They have a certain comfort remembered from lying beside each other like this, saying nothing, letting their breathing and the contact of their bodies speak for them.
"Nevidím konec," he says finally, and softly. "Nevím, kdy budu tě zase vidím."
Another small pause. Quieter still, a little ashamed now, "A ty jsi tak daleko. Neuslyšíte mě, jestli já vyli pro vás. Vím, že nemá smysl, ale to mi vadí."
What he says feels somehow unfinished, but he doesn't know what else to say after that. Lukas is quiet again, thinking of her house full of children, full of blood-relatives; thinking of that house that is not the one she grew up in, and not the one with the oak in the yard. Not the one with her father and her father's cabinets there, lingering through the years, aging.
He was the one that took her from that house. That made it impossible for her to go back again, at least for the now. He was the one that severed that bond, broke that tie. A year ago on this day, that he would take her from her father became an inevitability.
He's ashamed, now, to want to take her from her family again. To want to pull her from that house full of children, and family, and blood that is fundamentally the same as hers. The sons and daughters of Volos, that lineage: the inheritors of the deep dark earth, who gave Danicka so much of what he now recognizes as hers, as her, as his mate.
He's ashamed to want his mate back so utterly. He does not want to say the words, but they burn inside him until he does, whispering now --
"Chybíš mi. Chci, ty aby přijít vrátil brzy."
[Danicka] In a little while, Danicka will have to get up from the guest bed and because she is in someone else's home -- even the home of family -- she's going to straighten the sheets and smooth the covers and fluff the pillow until it looks as neat as if she'd never slept there. Lukas knows from being with her at the den and at her apartment that in her own space, when no one is there to impinge upon her freedom, she holds to no standards of housekeeping but her own shifting, meandering, inconsistent ones.
Sometimes there are dishes in the sink, takeout boxes on the counter, socks and clothes and shoes littering the floor. Sometimes her bed is a rumpled mess. Sometimes there's homework scattered all over the coffee table. And other times the bed is made, looking soft and clean and appealing. Other times the windows are washed and sparkling. Other times, he goes into the kitchen and it looks like it's never been used. He knows she hires a maid occasionally; there's a magnet on her fridge with the number of the service, and a particular name of a particular maid scrawled in Sharpie on said magnet, because Danicka does have a preference.
In any case: she will get up out of this borrowed bed and make it neatly. She'll wash her face and brush her teeth and put her hair back off her face, but she won't shower. The bathroom won't be available; Renata will take up too much time in there, and Miloslav will be ravenous, and today is the day Danicka plans on teaching Irena how to make her own eggs, which means today is the day that Emanuel has to learn how to crack an egg, and Miloslav will resist and defy being told to make everyone's toast while Renata quietly pours juice and milk.
Later today there will be a confrontation, because it has been building to one. Outside, in the scraggly litle back yard, Danicka will inform a soon-to-be Theurge that those who wish to eat must wish to learn to cook, and those who do not help their family do not deserve the roof over their head.
She is not thinking about any of that, though. The vagaries of daily life in this household are familiar to her. It's summer, and the children have to be pushed out of doors at one point or another. They're all going to school in the fall and so they have to be dragged back in to practice their English, because their mother cannot afford to send them to summer classes to learn the language, especially not when their aunt and mother have multiple fluencies. It is not strange to Danicka, even a year and a half after leaving the Sokolovs, to get up early and wrangle young people. It is like riding a bicycle, searching for things for kids to do during summer in New York. She just has less funding this time around, and no chaffeur.
Nor does she have her own home here. Or all of her clothes, or all of her books, or many things whatsoever that are hers and hers alone. She does not have her mate. She gets by, quietly and peacefully and accepting of internal pain in a way few people are or can be, but when Lukas's voice falls that like, aching with what he says does not make sense --
though it does, it makes perfect sense, the way that living together naked and wild in the woods made sense to her last year, this time
and the way Lukas's quiet but surging pleasure at bringing her food from some restaurant makes sense to her
just like it makes perfect sense to her when she hears both shame and longing in his voice and she feels it, as surely and certainly as if she were lying in bed with him, around him, her very pulse matched to his
-- her heart breaks.
"Oh, má lásko," Danicka murmurs, almost whispers, the words and the tone like arms sliding around his shoulders. Holding him, and because she is so far away, making it all the more clear by contrast that she is not there. She is not holding him. "Budu. Brzy."
[Lukas] Kdy?
That's what he wants to ask. The first word leaping to his tongue -- closer to desperation than anticipation. When? Next week? Tomorrow? In a year? Kdy?
He bites it back, because he is Shadow Lord. Because he is strong. But more so because she is her mate, and she would not leave him without reason. Because her tone is so soft now, like her slim arms wrapping around his chest from behind, her small hands covering his heart as she does, sometimes, occasionally, when something has happened to or between them to make him seem a little more vulnerable than usual, or to make her feel a little more protective.
Or perhaps simply -- and without negative connotation -- a little more possessive. A little more inclined to hold, and keep, and think to herself: mine.
He wants to roll on his side like that, as though she were behind him or before him, in their bed with him. He does not do this, either. It's too close to fetal posture; too fucking pathetic. He does not ask kdy. He does nothing but bring a hand up, abortively, pushing into his hair and then sliding down over his eyes as he clenches those eyes shut, bares his teeth in a silent grimace, beats back his own impatience and longing and loneliness and ache.
My mate is not here, every bone in his body tells him. It is summer, the time for cubs and mate and the richness of the land, and my mate is not here.
My mate cannot hear me if I howl.
Lukas stops trying to hold it back or beat it down. He lets the feeling take him like a frenzy: consume, echo and shudder through him, pass over and across and through, dissipate. When it's gone he draws a breath, and then another. Opens his eyes and lowers his hand. It falls to his chest, the strong thump-thump of his heartbeat there. He looks at the ceiling and seconds have gone by, half a minute or more.
"Oukej," he says quietly; like ritual, like a promise sealed. "Brzy."
[Lukas] [coughs. she is HIS mate.]
[Lukas] [OUT!]
[K. R. J.] [aw, sorry y'all!]
[Lukas] [FOUL WITCH! BURN IT! *chases*]
[Danicka] He may as well have said it. She can almost hear him biting it back over the phone, almost hear him choking down on the word til it sputters and coughs and blacks out. There's almost anger in it, almost palpable fury, because she is not there and she can't give him an ETA and he is in so much pain it is hard to fathom why she does not soothe it. She could. She could come to him, let him come to her. They could visit. The reasons are simple and flimsy at once: timing. The war. The kids, her sister. The fact that it really hasn't been that long.
Danicka is quiet, waiting for him to calm, waiting for that howling to stop wracking him from the inside. She does not let it destroy her, though she feels every drop of it, though she can sense how he is feeling and is pained by it. She wants to be with him. She wants desperately to hold him now, to soothe him, to protect him in her way. And she can't, or -- there are reasons why she does not.
"Where are you?" she says after awhile, after he agrees (accepts): Soon.
[Lukas] It was not fury she would have heard, though its expression was unutterably close to it. What he felt was closer to the exact counterpoint to fury: an emotion so far removed that, in some warped way, the ends twist and come back together.
It fades, though, or at least becomes manageable. And he accepts: soon. And there's another quiet, and she asks him where he is.
He replies, "Home." And he tucks one hand behind his head, reflects that he can still smell smoke on himself; the damp earth where dirt has smudged onto his clothing. He hasn't undressed yet. He's in bed in his dirty clothes, dirtying their clean laundry, their soft sheets. He would not do this if she were here.
"In our bed," he adds, quieter. "You?"
[Danicka] Home.
In our bed.
Which means he is not in Kingsbury Plaza, the place he could go where her scent would be strongest even after this absence, the place that might hurt him and comfort him at once. Which means he is not at the Brotherhood, sleeping on the summer sheets she bought with him.
(They were an odd sight in Bed Bath and Beyond, truth be told, fingering the various thread counts and Danicka hunting down an associate to help them find some that would fit one of those extra-long beds like you find in a dorm. She bought bath salts, too. And a picture frame. And a set of grapefruit spoons. And a thin summer quilt to go with the sheets they picked out.)
It means he is in their home. In the den he found and prepared for her, the one he set up safeguards around so that she would be protected even without his presence. She imagines the neighborhood at this time of night, still and quiet, the fountain in the other room gurgling away and the computer screen dark.
Danicka closes her eyes, and leans back on her pillow, back braced agains the hardwood headboard. "I'm still in bed. I'm listening for Emánek. He wakes up early, and I'm teaching him he can't get out of bed until seven."
Which means: she has to be awake when or before her youngest nephew is. She has to be listening for him. Training a child takes supervision. And sacrifice.
[Lukas] Some of the ache and tension is receding now. It gives him room to breathe a laugh. There's no one else here, no one to wake or startle with his voice, so he must be quiet for the sake of the night itself. For the sake of the sanctity of the solstice, or something like that.
"When I was young," he says, "I was out of bed at six sharp on Saturdays. Morning cartoons. But the rest of the time my parents had to drag me out of bed for school."
He starts to unbutton his shirt, flicking the buttons open lefthanded while he speaks to her. He thinks he'll probably get out of his clothes and roll under the covers soon. Go to sleep talking to her. He doesn't want to shower or even brush his teeth; the bathroom seems far away.
"I think they would have thanked the stars if I bounded out of bed before seven on my own."
[Danicka] She would say neither of your parents had cancer, but it would make him feel bad, even if that wasn't her intent. Danicka just smiles faintly, one corner of her mouth curving out and up, but her brow is furrowed with the ache of missing him. Sometimes talking about their childhoods makes her feel this. She wishes that she could share more with him that wouldn't remind her of pain or make him sad and angry. She wishes that most of her memories of being young were not surrounded on all sides with shadows, creeping in towards what light there was.
"When did you stop going to school?" she asks him instead, because she knows he had to have. Few Garou can stay in public or even private institutions even before the Change; no Ahroun could, not in her imagining.
[K. R. J.] [*SPIES* *with witch-powerz!*]
[Lukas] "My parents took me out of school after sixth grade," he replies. "I was ... twelve, I think. They told the district I was going to be homeschooled, which I suppose is true in a sense."
It's strange: these little details, things that friends might know, are still mysteries between them a year and a half later. She knows he was very close to the Change when he was 13; that the Philodox who would become his mentor had already made contact by then. She knows he and his sister stopped coming over to play years before that, when he was perhaps 8. She knows -- or he thinks she knows -- he had the rare privilege of a very long Fosterage; years and years to learn under the tutelage of a Garou more wise and honorable and ranked than many survive to be.
She probably doesn't know he took his Rite of Passage when he was sixteen; that he did not join the cubs he ran with; that he went back to New York City and, for the space of perhaps a few months, lived and breathed and ran and hunted
(close enough that she could hear if he howled)
in the same city as his past playmate, future lover, without the faintest clue or recollection of her existence.
It doesn't matter; she was gone months after he returned. Perhaps even before his return. Their timelines are fuzzy, uncertain. They've never sat down and mapped their lives in relation to one another's. It's enough to know: they intersected once long ago. They intertwine now.
"I don't think the faculty was particularly heartbroken to see me go," he adds -- not self-pitying, but wry. "I was a B student when I was small, but I was friendly. My teachers liked me. B/E/Es everywhere on the report cards. By those last two years or so, though, rage was riding me. I did well in class. I was ... so driven, because it was that or violence. But out of class it was one fight after another. Shoving kids on the playground. Shouting matches. Pushing them into lockers. Hitting them for touching my food, or standing behind me, or surprising me in the halls.
"I think the others were afraid of me. I think the teachers were afraid of me."
[Danicka] It takes a half-second for Danicka to make the mental connection, another half-second to process it, because it has been so very long for her.
The summer after Lukas finished sixth grade, midway between his twelfth and thirteenth birthdays, Danicka was fourteen. Her hair was long and wavy and tousled into curly tangles at the ends. She wore simple clothes still, unfashionable, inexpensive, because that was what her family had. She knew how to sew, and she'd made a few shift dresses. She wore sweaters she found in a trunk in the attic, which had belonged to her father's first mate, who had been tall but lean of limb. Her father did not tell her to put them away.
High school, which would be brutal at first for her, had not started yet. She knew many of her Kinfolk friends from younger grades would be going to other schools. She was skittish then, bright, still smaller than others. People feared her brother, spread rumors about why he'd dropped out and why she was still continuing. That autumn people would make fun of her clothes, and she would start learning to dress herself
But that summer, August was gold and fiery and hot and evil against her skin. Lukas very close to Changing and his teachers and classmates were breathing in relief that he was Going Away Finally. They still had cool days occasionally, usually before a rainstorm. On one of those nights, Danicka sat on the steps of the tiny front stoop of that house in Ridgewood, wearing one of her father's first mate's sweaters and one of those shift dresses. She was reading to herself as the light died into pre-storm blue and gray.
A werewolf came to the gate, and walked to her, and she was startled. He scented the air, and she knew what he was though she'd never seen him before. He introduced himself by a deedname she'd never heard before, and nothing else. He told her what had happened to Night Warder, and he used all of Laura's names in that story. It was a spartan, brutal recounting that the fourteen year-old girl was supposed to be able to handle because she was a Shadow Lord kinswoman, well-bred and the daughter of an Athro Ahroun, an Alpha, a now-fallen hero.
It's possible that very night Lukas was talking to Istok. It's possible they were underneath the same storm that was leaving the area around Stark Falls and traveling back towards the City with warning drums of thunder and unfurling banners of dark clouds.
None of it means anything, really. But that is when he left school, and that is when her mother died, and she remembers it in a split second, in all its unavoidable detail. For a moment, she can smell the storm coming, and she thinks of Lukas in it, and for that reason alone she feels oddly comforted. He was there. He was not with her then, she would not have wanted him with her then.
But he was there. He existed then, was alive and breathing and himself. She closes her eyes and thinks of him now, alive and breathing and himself, and speaks out of nowhere, with sudden and potent depth:
"Miluju tě tak moc."
It is not an answer, though perhaps it is. I think the others were afraid of me.
I love you. So much.
[Lukas] Storms came in the summer to New York, as they do in Chicago. Oftentimes it was swelteringly hot in the city, asphalt-melting hot, but sometimes clouds would gather and the heat would turn oppressive and lead would weigh on the skies,
and drop, suddenly and warninglessly, in a flooding deluge that cooled the air and put out the heat like water on a fire.
On one of those evenings, when the heat was just melting into coolness and rain, Danicka was fourteen and Lukas was twelve, and they were in the same city, and they did not know each other and barely remembered one another. On one of those evenings a werewolf came to the gate and told her what had happened to Night Warder, who had gained another, final name during the happening.
On that same evening Lukas was alive, and himself, and he was considering a future without school, ever again. He was thinking of his bookbag, emptied now, and how he would never again sling it over his shoulders to go to class. He was thinking of an endless summer, no more assignments, no more homework, and wondering why it did not make him happier.
The same storm dropped on them, the same sudden alleviation of pressure. The grief or wrath or compassion of the same storm-spirit that is the root of their entwined lineage, that knew the fate of his mighty daughter long before her own daughter knew. Lukas could not read the storm then, either. But perhaps Istok could, and perhaps he told him: Not very long ago, a mighty hero of your auspice fell.
Later on the life and death of that mighty hero would form an integral part of his fosterage. Much later on he would meet the daughter of that hero and realize who she was, and who that hero was, and how it was all always entwined.
Lukas does not know the path of Danicka's thoughts, however. Lying in bed seven hundred miles from his mate, he does not know that she thinks of that summer, that evening, that city and storm they shared without ever knowing it. He does not know what emotion lances through her, nor what comfort she draws inexplicably from the thought of his very existence. He does not know what makes her say what she does, the way she says it.
It still makes his breath catch, then release. He forgets about the buttons of his shirt, the fastenings of his pants, the dirt smudged onto him. The phone is warm in his palm from the length of their call -- an inadequate substitute for his mate.
But a link, nonetheless. Better than nothing. Enough, because it will have to be.
"Já vím," he murmurs. And, "Já miluju tě taky."
There are other ways to express love and adoration in their language: more casual, less wrenchingly heartfelt, less brutal in its power and depth. Those are not the words she chose, and those are not the words he chooses, now.
[Danicka] Mám tě rád is what her sister says to her children when she tugs them into her thin arms and holds them tight, no matter how longsuffering Renata is about it or how startled and uneasy it makes Miloslav or how much Emanuel wriggles on her lap or how sad it makes Irena because her mother is so weak, and she smells it and senses it as any predator would. Mám tě rád is the sort of thing Danicka lets slip when she kisses Lukas on the cheek in public before he goes to his car and she to hers, a quick and gentle reminder that she cares for him, that she is affectionate and fond towards him, that he is special.
Miluju tě is the sort of thing they speak in private, in the dark. It is the sort of thing married couples in Prague say, usually not in front of the children. It is the sort of thing mates say to one another, and answering the way he does cannot weaken the strength of the saying. He knows, the way he knew as a preteen that normalcy and peace was coming to an end for him. The way he knew, when Istok told him of Night Warder, that his own end would also be violent and sudden and only, if he was lucky, as glorious as hers.
He did not know then that he'd seen the woman herself in passing once, when he was very small. He couldn't have remembered. Even now, knowing, he likely doesn't remember one of those evenings they were at the Musils and the head of the family came home. At the time everyone had frozen at the wave of Rage that shuddered through the house like a ghost passing through every beam, every bone in its path. At the time, his fragile fairhaired playmate had looked up as sharply as a doe hearing a twig crack in the woods, and murmured
Mat.
which was not his language, and not the one she shared with him, not the one he knew. As a child, he probably did not recognize the sound of that word on Danicka's lips, simultaneously filled with dread and longing.
The longing any child has for their mother.
The dread prey have for predators.
As a grown male, he recognizes deeply and instantly the sound of her voice whispering that she loves him, the purity of it. He doesn't need to understand anything more than that, any other motive or thought process, to perhaps understand why suddenly she says: "Do konce tohoto týdne."
[Lukas] If Danicka were here, she would see the reaction written on her lover's face. She would see the way his eyes flare first, with surprise and then happiness. She would see the quick twitch of his lips and the way it spreads into a slow smile. She would see the flare of his nostrils on the quick inhale.
And she would feel his hand on her face, loving, heavy. He would touch her. He would probably kiss her.
She's not here, though. That's the very point. Their connection is tenuous: a phone line, invisible communication across the air. All she has is a short silence, a small huff of air, and the smile she can hear in his voice.
"Přijdu vyzvednout vás."
[Danicka] Lukas can be overwhelming. His hands hot and warm when they touch her, when he pushes her hair back, when she feels that bonecrushing strength graze over her neck or cup her jaw. He's not a gentle man. He tries to be, with her. Wasn't at first but he does try, because he has to in order to restrain and control the very nature of what he is. In order to protect her, too, which is also part of that savage and destructive nature. Countering instincts, just like hers.
Though hers are not simultaneously a drive to kill and a need to protect. It is like the way she once said mother, the way she once felt about Night Warder: the longing to be held, living alongside the desire to run for her life. It is like the way the child he met in the underworld was in his arms. Zlatuska, tiny and soft and reaching up to be held, squirming against the arms of her father even while rubbing her face on his chest, seeking escape and comfort at once.
Sometimes, if she is perfectly honest -- and she is neither perfect nor always honest -- Danicka's desire to be caressed and loved by her mate is equaled only by her sharp awareness of what his hands could do to her, what his Rage could become. It is the truth of what they are, and what their life together must be. She faces it. And she holds his hand anyway, though he could break all her fingers with a certain grip. And she trusts him anyway, though she knows what a frenzying Ahroun is like. And she loves him, lays with him, misses him, never once forgetting the reality of what he is.
A short stab of pain when he says he'll pick her up. Danicka smiles achingly, though, breathing quietly on the other end of the line. "Okay," she says, the end of the word jarred slightly by a knocking on the door that he can faintly pick up through the mic on her iPhone. Her mouth moves from the mic slightly. "Pojďte dál, Emánek. To je v pořádku," she says gently and quietly, as though sensing the knocker's nervousness about whether or not he's allowed to be up and out of bed and knocking on his aunt's door.
The door that creaks when it opens. Danicka moves, the bed rustles. Lukas can't see it but the little boy in his Buzz Lightyear pajamas is climbing up onto the bed beside her while she opens her arm to let him against her side, even as she murmurs into the phone: "Spánek, Lukášek. Zavolám vám brzy."
Which also means: I'll come back to you soon.
They say their goodbyes, quiet and brief. He misses Emanuel asking her if that was the man who came over, the man who he has a high opinion of for no other reason than that his presence at the dinner table meant that Emanuel got to have a hot dog and onion rings that night instead of a proper meal at home and he didn't have to use manners, which was very fine indeed in his mind, so the man that came over should come over all the time so that he would get kicked out of the house to go eat hot dogs and onion rings and not use his manners.
Gently: Ano, že byl ty muž, který přišel v průběhu. And after a pause: On je můj lodní důstojník.
And with disdain: Proč jste mu zavolat nemluvně jméno?
Then, after a moment of thought: Protože jsem jeho lodní důstojník, a jediný, kdo může.
Emanuel is silent, considering this. Then: Můžu jít hrát nyní?
Ne.
celebration.
9 years ago