frenzy.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] It's a Saturday night, and while Danicka and Lukas never went through the traditional courtship rituals of first dates and third dates, goodnight kisses at the door and invitations to come in for a drink, they do make an effort now to see each other. To not merely bump into each other, or call each other up just to go to the nearest four-star hotel to fuck their brains out against someone else's sheets, but to spend time together. Do things. Go to museums and aquaria, dinner, movies.

It was a dinner and a movie, tonight. Dinner was at some noisy little steak joint, inexpensive and hearty, crowded with flocks of friends, young couples, families. They had a little table in the back where they didn't have to shout to be heard, particularly because Lukas sits beside Danicka rather than across from her. His plate had straight fries, hers seasoned potato wedges, and they nabbed food from each other casually, thoughtlessly, as he listens to her explain the plot to Bioshock.

The movie was Toy Story 3. It's strange to think that when the first one came out, Lukas was ten years old, and their families had only not so long ago pulled away from one another quietly, politely, and finally.

Now they're out on the street, wandering away from the dissipating crowds outside the theater. It's a little after midnight, a clear summer's night. Parking was atrocious at the dinner hour. Lukas's car is a good four or five blocks away, and as they walk away from the glistening heart of the Mile, the night settles around them, humid and warm. They pass crowded pubs, bars, patrons within spilling out onto patios and decks to enjoy the weather. Conversations ebb and flow and finally fade as the streets fall away to storefronts and office buildings, silent now at this hour. Here and there, crickets chirp. The Ahroun's walking with his hands in his pockets, giving the crook of his elbow to his mate, reminded of a night she's lost to alcohol amnesia when she told him he was the best werewolf boyfriend she's ever had.

(And the worst. And the only. But.)

They're still a good block or two from Lukas's car when a sudden clattering crash across the street sets instantaneous tension into the Ahroun's arm. His head snaps around, breath caught, eyes alert. For a moment it sounds like a false alarm, a cat or a stray dog. Then, across the street, in one of the Magnificent Mile's pristine uncluttered alleyways, they can clearly make out the shape of a hunched, bent figure running from ...

... creatures that are decidedly not stray dogs.

The fleeing, limping figure has spotted them too. He alters course and comes straight for the pair of Shadow Lords.

[Danicka Musil] There was a time they couldn't get through dinner, could barely get through appetizers and a few sips of wine, before they were leaving restaurants or invading bathrooms just to fuck each other. It was like they both knew it could end at any moment, and not because of his death or hers but pure and simple refusal on each of their parts to admit what was happening to them. So they couldn't wait. They couldn't calm down. They couldn't, also, keep their hands off of each other.

One of the first times Danicka can remember actually relaxing enough to finish a meal together, they were in one of those four-star hotels and surrounded by takeout containers. They were in a suite, and just through this arched doorway was the bed where he'd lay her down for the first time and find himself welcomed there, wanted. Invited. So they ate their fill without hurry or confusion, and when she looks back on that night and sees just how many Firsts there were, her heart aches in a soft, warm way for him.

She looks very small compared to Lukas, sitting beside him at dinner. They have to turn their heads to talk to one another, which is a little awkward, but they also don't have to look at one another constantly to know they're being listened to. She eats his mixed vegetables, at least some of them. Neither of them touch the cauliflower. He eats the bites of steak she leaves on her plate as she gets full, but only after she nudges her plate close to his and moves those bites onto it, assuring him she isn't hungry, and isn't going to go hungry if he helps her finish.

Toy Story 3 was disappointing to her, but she says as they leave the theater that it's mostly because Pixar is capable of such better work, it seems like they're just milking this one without bringing anything new to the table story-wise. They talk about Finding Nemo for awhile, and Monsters, Inc, and about Up.

Danicka walks close to him, arm looped through his, her hand curled lightly around his bicep, leaning into him the way she did when she was blasted drunk, only now she doesn't need the alcohol to lower her inhibitions against wanting to be so close to him.

The clatter-crash that makes Lukas tense immediately makes Danicka lift her head from his arm and go "Squirrel!" as though by reflex. But that's it. Because a moment later, there's the figure

and there are the Things, and now Danicka is breathing in sharply and unwinding her arm from his, reaching for her purse. "Do you want me to run?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Squirrel! makes Lukas exhale a blurt of laughter, but that's all there is. A moment later there's the figure. And there are Things. And Danicka is unwinding her arm and reaching for her purse, where she keeps her gun and her concealed-carry permit, where she keeps the nifty little tools and tricks he gave her.

There's only a split second to decide. Then, "No." He turns, facing the fleeing man -- a hobo, a bum, dressed in colorless shapeless rags that flap and flutter as he runs -- and his pursuers. "Stay with me."

A Garou of another tribe -- a Fenrir, a Fianna, a Coggie, even a Fang -- might leap instantly to the attack. Ever the hero. Ever saving the weak and beleaguered from the strong and vicious. Lukas is not a Garou of another tribe, however. He is a Shadow Lord, and he stands his ground, but he has his priorities and saving some nameless bum is not at the top of that list. There's every sense that if they pass him right by, he would let them go and leave the man to his fate.

They're closer now. Danicka can see the things chasing the limping man, and they're not dogs, no, but perhaps once they were. They're low to the ground, snarling, frothing, quadriped. Their skins are sleek and furless. Slick, even. The darkness of the street -- the nearest streetlight half a block away -- does not seem to affect their tracking ability in the slightest. But then, it wouldn't. Their heads are knots of muscle, snapping teeth, sniffing nose, no visible eyes. There are three of them, each the size of a rottweiler, and they snap and strain for the heels of their unfortunate prey --

who throws himself behind the Shadow Lords unhesitatingly. Who flings himself to the ground like a supplicant, or like a man protecting himself from a bomb blast. Who clings with bony, long fingers to Danicka's ankle, pleading in an incoherent, muffled voice.

It says something about his priorities, too, that Lukas's instantaneous response is to kick the man back from his mate, viciously, mercilessly, as hard as he can. The point of his shoe connects hard. There's a crack, some ribbone snapping. The man goes flying in a heap of rags, thrown back a yard or two.

It's too late. The eyeless hounds' heads turn unerringly toward the Shadow Lords. Lips peel back; teeth bare, long and vicious, rows and rows of them. It seems they've been identified as prey.

[Danicka Musil] There was a time she would not have hesitated. She would have let go his arm and found the fastest path to get out of the way, get hidden, get safe. Danicka has run in heels from Spirals, has taken Lukas's car to get away from an alleyway monster, and has never shown an ounce of shame or embarrassment for surviving when others stay, fight, and get injured or even killed. Well. No more shame than she has shown pride for staying, fighting, and surviving. That is to say, in both cases: not very much at all.

She quickly loads her firearm, the same one she's had since he gave it to her, the one she is most familiar with and which is easiest to carry around. One would think that going out with her mate, a near-Adren of the bloodiest moon of the Nation, she wouldn't feel the need to keep it with her. One would think that only forgetting the time he was struck again and again with strange, gooey bullets that sent him reeling while their attackers had to essentially wrestle her to the ground to stop her from shooting at them.

She is in the middle of reaching for a talen -- one of the discs that makes her bullet bite harder, perhaps, or one of the bandages that makes her able to withstand even gunshot wounds -- when the hobo reaches them and grabs at her ankle, pleading with her in slurs and desperation.

In response, Danicka starts to say, "You must let go of me or I cannot he--Lukáš!"

It's rare to the point of shocking to hear her speak to him like that. And it's strange even now that she would speak to him like that at all, say his name so sharply, but underlying her tone is something like surprise. Put into words, the sound of his name just then is something like

Dude, what the fuck?

Which she does not say, as the man goes sprawling. She's turned her head to stare at Lukas a moment, but she does not go after the man to try and play Florence Nightingale. She doesn't see -- or can't interpret -- the staring and snarling of the dogs. She does, however, take a breath and remove a bandage from her bag, laying it against the side of her neck until it starts to flicker with blue light, then writhe, then unravel. Those strands of bloodied gauze seek her skin, merge with veins they find, and a moment later

a scrap of pristine white fabric flutters away from her hand, drained of all usefulness as anything but, well. A normal bandage. And no longer an even slightly sanitary one.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] It makes him glad, in times like this, that she carries her own weaponry. Lukas has ever felt emasculated or undercut by her unwillingness to go unarmed. If he'd felt that way, he would have never gotten her that gun in the first place. They wear gifts to one another. She wears the bracelet he gave her. He wears the watch she gave him. But the first gift he ever gave her was this one: this heavy, deadly chunk of polymer and steel and hot lead in her hand.

And the hobo clutches at Danicka. And Lukas kicks him aside. And Danicka is shocked, and sharp, and wondering co to kurva, Lukáš, but there's no more time. The eyeless hounds, which came to a sharp stop to assess the situation, have revised their initial estimation of these two newcomers. They've made up their minds.

They're coming forward again. Their claws tick on the asphalt. The one one the left barks, viciously, a roaring sound, and while Danicka is drawing weapons and applying bandages

her mate is preparing, also, a bandage of his own crushed in his fist, his very skin suddenly taking on a brilliance, a subtle, hard glow.

The hounds break into a sudden run. The Ahroun lunges forward to meet them, throwing himself forward and down like he's suddenly taken it into his mind to drop and get them twenty. Before his hands hit the pavement they're paws. Whatever undedicated clothing on him shreds in an instant. Before the hounds are on them he's a canine himself, a lupine out of nightmare, huge and bristling and black.

[w00t! let's init!]

[Danicka Musil] [For the record:
-1WP, Bloody Bandage (from old stash, +5HP)
+6]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 8

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [homid luna's armor!]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 3, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 (Success x 2 at target 7) [WP]

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [-1gn BB, -1gn soak talen

init for lukas! +20]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 9

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [init for hound o' war: Gnasher! +7]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 1

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [init for hound o' war: Slasher! +7]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 8 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [init for hound o' war: Gasher! +7]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 5 (Failure at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [init for hobo! +3]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 7 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [Gasher is now Basher!]

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] 29 Lukas
15 Slasher
14 Danicka
12 Basher
10 Hobo
8 Gnasher

Basher
1. Body tackle Danicka!
R1. Bite Danicka!

Hobo
1. DODGE! ACK!

Gnasher
1. Bite Hobo!
R1. Bite Lukas!

[Danicka Musil] [1a. Shoot Basher!
1b. Slap on a damage talen for next time]

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas
1a. bite Basher!
b. Jawlock Basher for Danicka!
R1 - R3. Bite Basher --> Slasher next!

Slasher
1. Jawlock Hobo for Gnasher!
R1. Bite Lukas!
R2. Bite Lukas again!

[Danicka Musil] [so tired! that 'shoot' is a 3RB]

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [a. -2 chomp!]
Dice Rolled:[ 11 d10 ] 1, 1, 4, 4, 4, 6, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10 (Success x 5 at target 5) Re-rolls: 1

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [dam+4!]
Dice Rolled:[ 13 d10 ] 1, 2, 2, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5, 7, 7, 8, 10, 10 (Success x 4 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [soak!]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 1, 1, 7, 8, 9 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] b. jawlock!
Dice Rolled:[ 10 d10 ] 1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 8, 8, 9, 10, 10 (Success x 2 at target 5) Re-rolls: 2

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [str+ath!]
Dice Rolled:[ 9 d10 ] 1, 2, 2, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 8 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [SUCK, DICE!]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 3, 6, 6, 6, 9, 10 (Success x 4 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] There are three hounds. They attack as a pack, coordinated, fluid, vicious. One lunges to seize the hobo and wrestle him down, vulnerable, for the second. A third leaps past them both, snapping for Danicka.

It's this last one that the Ahroun goes for. His teeth clip the hound's shoulder, tears away flesh and fur. Much larger than the hounds, heavier, more robust, he leaps after it to pin it down,

but the lither creature wiggles free from beneath his jaws and hurtles itself onward.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [Slasher: i can jawlock too!]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 5, 5, 8, 9, 10, 10 (Success x 6 at target 5)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [jawlock +5succ!]
Dice Rolled:[ 12 d10 ] 1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 5, 7, 7, 10 (Failure at target 6)

[Danicka Musil] Her concern for the hobo is minute, when you get right down to it. He's quivering, shaking, hiding, and it won't save him unless the Shadow Lords do, it seems. Danicka aims for the one coming at her, watching it wiggle out from the massive hispo wolf

whose presence simultaneously comforts her and terrifies her. Which is how it always is. Which is how it has always been, and how it will always be. There is never going to be a time in her life when she thinks to herself of the beauty of the shapechange or the glory of it. All she will see is mindless, seething violence taking physical form, and a part of her will always wait for it to come lunging for her throat.

It is a measure of Danicka's composure and a signal of her trust in Lukas that she aims at the thing that really is lunging for her instead. It always is.

[1a. 3RB: dex + firearms -2 (split) / diff +1 (maneuver)]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 4, 5, 9, 9 (Success x 2 at target 7)

[Danicka Musil] [+3, since that's actually how many dice you have for a 3RB @_@]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 1, 6, 10 (Failure at target 7)

[Danicka Musil] [+1!]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 1, 1, 5, 7, 10 (Failure at target 6)

[Danicka Musil] [1b. -1WP, make the bullets moar hurty!]

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] The largest and meanest of the hounds leaps onto the hobo, searching for purchase on the beleaguered man's neck. Its teeth manages only to seize a mouthful of rags, though, and in the next instant falls aside, twisting on its haunches to snap at the Ahroun instead.

Its packmate, undeterred, races for the Ahroun's mate. Its forepaws leave the earth. There's a sharp report, a crack! of a handgun that echoes up and down this corridor of skyscrapers and highrises, but the bullet grazes the hound's tough hide and leaves it unharmed.

In the next instant, it bowls into Danicka.

[tackle!]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 3, 5, 7, 9, 9, 9 (Success x 4 at target 7)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [dex+ath!]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Danicka Musil] [ACK! Stoppit! :[ ]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 1, 4, 6, 6, 9 (Botch x 1 at target 10)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [bullets!]

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [bashing damage from knockdown! +3 succ]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 3, 5, 8, 10, 10, 10 (Success x 3 at target 6)

[Danicka Musil] [owwww]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 2, 2, 6 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[Danicka Musil] [stamina]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 3, 7, 10 (Success x 1 at target 8)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [i should probably roll frenzycheck for formality's sake! new moon diff!]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 2, 4, 8, 8, 9, 10, 10 (Success x 5 at target 8)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [you know, i should roll for Gnasher and Hobo first! Gnasher bite!]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10 (Success x 5 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [hobo dodge!]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 1, 1, 7, 9, 10 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [gnasher +3!]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [hobo soak!]
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 2, 8 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] The impact is bonejarring. She goes down hard

and three, four feet away, a direwolf's ears flatten against his head. His limbs are rigid, his hackles on end. His eyes go wide

and his mate hits the ground at a bad angle, her leg twisting. Pain shoots sharp up her calf -- but she was lucky. Or just resilient. The tendons hold; the bones stand firm. There's still an eyeless, fell thing on top of her, though, teeth bared, slaver running from jowls, snarling in her face. Wyrmbreaker knows what's coming next; has seen it a thousand times, done it a thousand times himself: the snap, the wrench, the tearing, the final

bloody

snuffing-out.

No. That's the thought in his mind, the only one, the resounding roar of it filling his head from ear to ear, pounding in his brain. No, no, no, no, no, no, NEVER, and he opens his maw to say it, to roar defiance, but what comes out isn't a human word, isn't High Speech, isn't even coherent. Or sane.

The twist of his body is unreal in its speed and dexterity: all that muscle, all that weight, moving as though it were massless. He leaps. The ground shakes when he lands. Some chain somewhere has snapped. Some lastditch barrier, some almost-impenetrable wall of will against the engine of destruction that is his basest, deepest self, crumbles like sand in the face of a tidal wave. A beast roars out of the hidden depths of the mind, the parts of him that he himself fears, and

Wyrmbreaker stops thinking and loses his fucking mind.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [R1. bite!]
Dice Rolled:[ 13 d10 ] 2, 2, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8, 8, 8 (Success x 8 at target 5)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [dam +7!]
Dice Rolled:[ 16 d10 ] 1, 1, 1, 1, 5, 6, 6, 6, 6, 7, 7, 7, 8, 8, 9, 10 (Success x 7 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [yelp! soak!]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 1, 7, 8, 9, 10 (Success x 3 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [basher: incap! slasher: bite lukas!]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 (Success x 4 at target 5)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [dam +3!]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 6, 6 (Failure at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [gnasher: bite lukas!]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7 (Success x 2 at target 5)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [dam +1]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 1, 5, 5, 5, 7 (Failure at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [R2. bite slasher!]
Dice Rolled:[ 13 d10 ] 1, 1, 2, 4, 4, 4, 4, 5, 6, 8, 8, 8, 9 (Success x 4 at target 5)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [dam +3!]
Dice Rolled:[ 12 d10 ] 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9, 9 (Success x 5 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [soak!]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 2, 5, 7, 9, 9 (Success x 3 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [slasher bites lukas!]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 6, 6, 8 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [should be diff 6. no change though. +1 dam!]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 1, 2, 4, 6, 9 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [soak!]
Dice Rolled:[ 12 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 3, 6, 6, 7, 7, 10, 10, 10, 10 (Success x 7 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [endround summary:

Lukas OK +6, frenzied
Slasher 2A
Danicka OK +3
Basher Incap @ 7A
Hobo 1L
Gnasher OK]

[Danicka Musil] This has never happened before.

This has happened too many times.

One would be too many.


Danicka's ankle is sore where she twisted it so hard as she fell that it nearly broke. She has a hound atop her and she isn't screaming, oh no, this is the woman who taught herself in childhood not to flinch, much less cry out. This is the woman who learned not to shriek even with a frenzied wolf in the house because there was a hand planted firmly over her mouth and it would be worse for her if she got loud enough to scream past that sweating palm on her face, half-suffocating her.

Her leg is humming like a tuning fork from pain and she's struggling, both trying to push the thing away as well as get her gun in position to jab up against it, but she can't do both these things and guard her throat and face and all this is happening in seconds when Lukas makes that noise

and comes at her.

No: at the thing on top of her, threatening her, ripping it nearly in half. Blood splatters across her hair and her face, soaks droplets and splashes through her clothes. She feels a rush of dark fur as he passes over her. That's when Danicka screams.


It suddenly doesn't matter any longer that he's her mate, or that he's wearing the body of a legendary direwolf rather than a true monster, a thing no more capable of gentleness than of mercy. What matters is that he's gone. The one she knows is gone, and this thing does not know her, will not protect her, does not love her.

What matters is that this thing, when all their enemies are dead, may very well not know to turn away from her. While Lukas goes after the others, roaring and tearing, Danicka starts to pull herself up, so she can disobey him.

And run.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Two, three blocks away, oblivious humans are partying. Humans are drinking, are dancing, are watching movies and having latelate dinners; are enjoying each other's company. The night is young and the summer is warm and it's the season of love and war.

Out where they are, it's dark. It's quiet, the entertainment cores of the city left behind. Cars are parked along the roads, and a few urban trees shade the sidewalk, but by and large it's all concrete and glass, all steel and asphalt. It's in this arena, this corridor of skyscrapers, that this vicious battle goes down.

In an eyeblink, the hound atop Danicka is savaged. Mangled. Cast aside to die. Roaring, the wolf-monster turns on the next, and the woman, who always was clever, who always was a survival, does the best thing she could possibly do right now:

she gets up and she runs.

Except movement draws the predator's eye. That's what they say about bear attacks, mountain lion attacks. Don't run. Stand your ground, don't look them in the eye -- and do not run. There's logic in that. The instant she scrambles to her feet and takes off, one of the two remaining hounds snaps its head around. They don't seem to feel fear. They don't seem to care that one of their own has just be ripped to pieces. One throws itself at the frenzied Ahroun, and the other --

the other turns on its haunches and dashes after the escaping kinswoman.

[round 1 recap:

Lukas OK +6, frenzied, rage to full, WP -1, Gn -2
Slasher 2A
Danicka OK +3
Basher Incap @ 7A
Hobo 1L
Gnasher OK

Declares!

Gnasher:
1a. pursue Danicka!
b. bite!
R1. hamstring!

Hobo:
1a. draw firearm!
b. fire on Gnasher!

Basher:
@_@]

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [a survivor. not a survival.]

[Danicka Musil] [Oh fuck you, Gnasher. I was having a good date before you showed up.
1a. Stop and fire, 3RB
1b. Fire!]

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [slasher
1. chomp lukas!
R1. chomp hobo!
R2. chomp lukas again!

lukas
1. GIBBERGIBBERRARBITE
R1. AGAIN
R2. CUZ I CAN
R3. W00T NO WITS LIMIT
R4. ONE MORE TIME!

we'll start with slasher!]

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] 1. rarchomp!
Dice Rolled:[ 13 d10 ] 1, 2, 4, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8, 8, 9, 9, 9, 10 (Success x 9 at target 5) Re-rolls: 1

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [yeaaaah!]
Dice Rolled:[ 17 d10 ] 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 4, 4, 4, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8, 8, 9, 10, 10 (Success x 6 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [stupid 1's!]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 1, 1, 3, 8, 9 (Failure at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] slasher x_x

[Danicka Musil] [1a. -2 (split) +3 (3rb) // diff +1 (3rb)]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6, 9 (Failure at target 7)

[Danicka Musil] [1b. -3!]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 5, 8, 9 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Danicka Musil] [+1]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 2, 6, 6, 9, 10 (Success x 4 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [yelp!]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 2, 4, 6, 10 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Behind Danicka, the street rings with snaps, crunches, surreally deep snarls. There's a hound behind her, and she can hear it panting, hear its eager, anticipatory whining. It wants her blood. It wants the taste of her flesh. It's starved, constantly starved, until the only thing in its simple dull mind is hunting, is hunthunthuntchasechasechase, KILL.

She whips around. Her ankle protests. The gun in her hand recoils; a triplet of bullets streak past the hound. Hit the sidewalk.

In the distance, she can see the monster her mate has become. It snaps its jaws shut on the spine of the closest hound. There's a hot splash of blood; a wrenching twist of forequarters and neck. When the hound hits the building wall and slides twitching to the ground, half its back is simply missing.

The monster throws its head back howls. It's a demented sound, raw and bloody, totally unsated. Its heavy head swings left, swings right, glaring empty eyes seeking another victim. Its eyes fix on the last hound --

-- the one Danicka's bullet slams into, sending it reeling, yelping, scrambling back to its feet to pursue.

Meanwhile, the ragged quarry of these mindless killer-hounds is fumbling in the tatters and rags that serve as his clothes. He pulls something out, a weapon, a gun, raises it and takes aim and --

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [hobo: firing!]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 2, 3, 3, 4, 8, 9 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [damage +1!]
Dice Rolled:[ 9 d10 ] 1, 1, 2, 2, 5, 7, 9, 9, 10 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 2, 5, 6, 7, 10 (Success x 3 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] -- and a blinding, crackling beam of energy slices instantaneously across the distance.

Danicka has seen that before. It was surreal in the confines of an underground laboratory where everything was pristine and curving, lit and immaculate. On a city street, it's out of this world. For an instant it lights everything up: cold white light throws the pitchblack shadows of cars and trees onto the glass and concrete sides of skyscrapers. It throws every strand of fur on her mate's body into absolute relief; cuts him so starkly out of the night that he seems

well. Exactly what he is:

not of this world.

Then it's gone. The hound seems barely deterred. It comes for her, so happy, so excited for the taste of fresh flesh that it's not even growling, but yipping in joy.

[Gnasher:
1a. pursue!
b. chomp! -3]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 1, 6, 7 (Success x 1 at target 5)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [damage!]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 2, 3, 4, 6 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[Danicka Musil] [Soak!]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 8, 9, 10 (Success x 3 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas: R1 - CHASE!
Slasher: ded.
Danicka: no rage! alas!
Hobo: no rage!
Gnasher: R1 - hamstring Danicka!
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10 (Success x 2 at target 8)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [dam +1!]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 5, 8, 10, 10, 10 (Success x 4 at target 6)

[Danicka Musil] [GIBBERGIBBERGIBBER;jews]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 1, 2, 4 (Botch x 1 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] There's some rudimentary, brute intelligence in these beasts after all. When its first snap only manages to snag at Danicka's clothes, the hound aims its second bite for her leg.

And sinks its teeth in.

And rips her flesh out.

The tendons in the back of her leg have come unmoored. A vivid splash of blood paints the sidewalk. Her flesh seals itself shut almost as soon as it's torn, but the damage is done: that leg will no longer hold her weight.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas: R2 - chomp gnasher!
Dice Rolled:[ 13 d10 ] 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 5, 6, 6, 6, 6, 7, 7, 10 (Success x 7 at target 5) Re-rolls: 1

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [dam +6!]
Dice Rolled:[ 15 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 7, 7, 7, 7, 8, 8, 9, 9, 9 (Success x 8 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [yelp!]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 4, 5, 9, 9, 10 (Success x 3 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [annnd incap.]

[Danicka Musil] The report of her own gunfire -- four shots going off in rapid succession -- is nothing compared to what comes out of the hobo's hand. "Co to --" she's saying, whipping her head to the side. It has no effect, and the thing coming after her lunges.

Danicka hits the concrete and asphalt, hand clenching around her gun, and this time

this time

she screams. Because she's never felt this before. Even her brother never did something like this, dragging her down and ripping her leg open. She shrieks at the feeling of it, images of her own body being torn apart first by the hound and then by her own mate filling her mind. She barely registers that most of the wound closes on its own. The knowledge of its uselessness now makes her eyes briefly roll back. Her scream ends on a sob.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 1, 3, 4, 4, 9, 10 (Failure at target 7)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Again and again, blood has showered this street. Blood is smeared on the walls where the largest of the hounds struck, flung in a negligent ragdoll arc by the monster that has inhabited Wyrmbreaker's skin. Blood is splattered on the sidewalk where he tore the first hound apart. Blood soaks Danicka from that first, brutal ending, still hot, still slowly seeping through her clothes

and blood soaks her again, salty-coppery and steaming, when this third and final hound, whose shoulder is wounded from her bullet and whose fur is singed from the hobo's energy-gun, is simply

ripped wide open.

The monster atop the hound, inches from Danicka, is still snarling and growling. Its jaws are biting, biting, biting down, reducing bones to splinters, crunching through them, ripping and rending and mangling. It gets a good grip on the hound's neck and starts shaking it, viciously, flinging loops of intestines and droplets of blood in every direction, cracking the spine over and over and over until some primitive circuit closes, some lizard-brain switch trips, and it recognizes, finally, that the hound is dead.

Very, very dead.

It collapses from the wolf-monster's maw in a raw heap. For a terrible moment, the direwolf's glazed and staring eyes are on Danicka. It licks its bloody maw maw absently, luxuriously, and its huge paw takes a single velveted step forward.

There's nothing human in those eyes. Nothing intelligent. No recognition, no love, no protective instinct. Nothing but the drive to destroy. Nothing but death.

Then the monster wheels around. Roaring, snapping at the empty air, it lunges for the hobo. The unfortunate, unfortunate hobo.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [just cuz i wanna see how much damage is done!]
Dice Rolled:[ 10 d10 ] 3, 4, 4, 4, 6, 7, 7, 8, 8, 10 (Success x 6 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker]
Dice Rolled:[ 11 d10 ] 1, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8, 8, 8, 9, 9, 10 (Success x 9 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [for the record: -1WP to avoid attacking allies!
R3 was spent pulverzing Gnasher.

Lukas: OK +6, rage 3, WP -2, Gn -2
Slash X_X 1 overkill
Danicka 1L
Basher Incap
Hobo 1L
Gnasher X_X ......15 overkill]

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [Hobo: OMFG. LIFE SUCKS.
1a. ZOT! lukas!
b. ZOT! again!]

[Danicka Musil] Many women would be collapsing into a heap, sobbing oh god oh god oh god and crawling away from the scene. Truth be told, that's what Danicka wants to do right now, too. She wants to curl up. She wants to crawl away. She wants to survive. Danicka is no hero, and she never has been. No matter how noble her intentions or pure her spirit becomes, she will never be a martyr. She will never take peacefully what is coming to her. She may endure it. She will never accept it.

For a moment it looks like her life is going to end under the teeth of her mate. She can't think beyond that, to what will happen to Lukas afterward, to what he will do to himself. She can't fathom it. All she can think, while that thing is ripping another hound off of her -- saving her -- only to turn on her, is that this is her mate. This is her love. This is the little boy who fell asleep in a heap with her and his sister on her family's couch ages and ages ago after eating too much at dinner and throwing up after too many goddamn koláče.

Bitterly, she knows she wouldn't be the first kinswoman to end like that.

But Lukas doesn't leap for her throat. He whips around and goes for the hobo who, for some reason, is carrying the sort of weapon Danicka got from some of the darkest, most alien creatures she could imagine. For a moment she's about to scream at Lukas not to, even knowing that her screaming would be useless, that there's nothing she can do to stop him right now.

The hobo points that thing at Lukas, and Danicka's arm snaps to the side, 9mm aimed straight at his head.

[1a. Oh HELL naw! 3RB on Hobo, targeting head]

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [lukas:
1. dash!
R1. NOM
R2. NOM
R3. NOM]

[Danicka Musil] [3RB. +3 // diff +1 (maneuver) +2 (aiming)]
Dice Rolled:[ 9 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 9, 9, 10, 10 (Success x 5 at target 9) [WP]

[Danicka Musil] [+4]
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 (Success x 5 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [ack soak!]
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 3, 5 (Failure at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [we come out of frenzy now, ok?]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 10 (Success x 1 at target 7)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] When Lukas frenzied, Danicka ran.

She turned and she ran, and though she's not a trained athlete, she's young and fit and she keeps herself in shape. She takes self-defense classes, and yoga, and she knows how to fire a gun.

She runs fast. She gets ten, fifteen, twenty feet away before that hound caught up to her and made her wheel around to face it because she's not going to cry on the floor and she's not going to die running. She brings her gun up and then there was blood, there was bullets and there was blood, and now, now:

What's twenty feet to a werewolf? Nothing. Nothing at all. The monster leaps; he'll be atop the hobo in a blink of an eye. That's still enough time for the hobo to bring his weapon up, though. To target it, aim it at the monster that is, when he's not a monster, Danicka's mate. Danicka's. Hers.

Earlier, when the hobo had latched onto Danicka and thereby marked her as one of the prey for the hounds, Lukas didn't stop to think. He didn't fucking care that this is a victim, this one's running from the wyrm. He kicked the hobo as hard as he possibly could.

Now, Danicka doesn't even seem to stop to think. Her arm snaps up and she takes a split-instant to aim. Then she pulls the trigger.

Twenty feet away, the hobo's head snaps back. The rags fluttering around his head flutter back, a tattered hood unhooded. There's a small dark hole in the center of a head

that has no eyes

and a vast toothringed aperture for a mouth.

The hobo -- who's not a hobo at all, or even human -- goes sprawling back on the pavement. It's dead so fast it doesn't even have time to twitch. The weapon unfolded and loosely surrounding its right arm in a humming orbit of blades and arcs collapses on itself, fits into itself, reassembles and powers down. It rolls from the too-many joints of its right arm, an inert, faintly inscribed cylinder that rolls off the curb.

It clinks dully as it lands in the gutter.

An instant later the direwolf lands. The prey is already dead. Everything's dead. One hound is stirring weakly, whining piteously; the other two, plus one bizarre, alien thing, are corpses. The Shadow Lord's forepaws are braced wide, his head hanging low; sides heaving, teeth gnashing. His growling is continuous, mindless -- subsiding. From one rolling snarl to discrete, panting growls on every breath, to occasional, low spikes of threat,

to nothing. Fur becomes flesh. Monster becomes man, becomes her mate, bloody, on his hands and knees. All that remains of his clothes are his boxerbriefs and, absurdly, his belt. His wristwatch, that she gave him.

He pushes himself up unsteadily. Sways on his knees for a moment. Then he collapses sideways, dazed.

[Danicka Musil] There was a morning when she would have torn her roommate's head off if she'd known the redhaired woman was even thinking that Lukas was a sociopath.

There was a long night between winter and spring when he met a version of Danicka who firmly and a little blithely handled a troupe of dirty, semi-naked werewolves tromping into her home and frightening her children, and it is not hard to imagine her sharpening a kitchen knife and threatening any monster that tried to do the same.

She has tears on her cheeks. Her hair is matted to her scalp on one side with blood, splashed across her face. It soaks her clothes and sticks them to her clavicles, her breasts, her belly. Her skirt-bared legs are similarly smeared, and one of them is sliced open up the back. She has a gun in her right hand and a bracelet on her left, and no

it isn't clean anymore. The silver shines through but there's blood that needs to be cleaned off, and carefully, if it is ever to regain and retain the beauty it had when she first opened it on her birthday.

Danicka was shocked when Lukas kicked the hobo. She would have yelled at him to stop, knowing how useless that would have been. And he's one of those things. She does not regret shattering his head with a trio of bullets. She regrets that she did not kick him in the face with one of her heels right at the start. She doesn't know why the hounds were chasing him. She doesn't care.

Reeling -- from pain, from near-death, from the ringing ache in her arm and shoulder -- Danicka lays on the ground, half-propped on her elbows, staring at her mate as he comes back to her. Comes back from the edge. And though she would have shot a human being just as surely as she shot that monster wearing rags to disguise his nature, Danicka is not, deep down, a true nurturer. She does not rush to Lukas's side, or even try to limp or crawl over to him.

She gasps, and she chokes on a previously restrained sob, and she manages to roll onto her side, covering her face with her left hand.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] So that's how they remain for a while. The hound whining, dying, is the only sound on this street. Well. That and the slow drip-drip-drip of blood -- or whatever passes for blood in the veins of these creatures -- when the pool under the vhujunka's head finally reaches the edge of the curb.

For a long time Lukas is lost in a sort of grey fog; a daze that settles after the red mist clears. His mind doesn't want to work. His synapses are reforming anew, stray flickers of thought struggling to rejoin across the shattered void. He's exhausted, aching, taxed beyond his limits because his awareness of his limits was lost along with everything else. He's numb and dull. He barely remembers where he is. Who he is.

A few moments go by. Blood isn't dripping anymore. It's a slow viscous sheet spilling over the edge, running into the gutters. A fragment of his mind thinks to itself:

my mate.

And he holds onto that. He picks that up like the first piece of a treasure map, and he follows the clues backward. He remembers her: my mate, Danička. Who is golden. Who is the spring.

Who was knocked down by that thing, pinned beneath its paws. That's the second coherent thought in his mind, that single terrible image that makes his eyes suddenly snap open, snap wide. He bolts upright. The rest of it now: she fell. I frenzied.

I frenzied.

He casts about. He looks around himself wildly, looking for -- god, he can't even think of it; for bloodstained blonde hair, for pieces of her. When his eyes fall on his mate, still whole, relief rushes through him and makes him dizzy. He pushes himself up, is moving toward her before he's even fully on his feet, and when he's a yard away from her the thought finally coalesces into something logical, something beyond primitive terror and horror. It hits him like a thunderbolt:

I could have killed her.

Lukas drops to his knees behind his mate. Horror at what he's done, what he almost did, churns in him. He pushes it down. Time for that later. Or that's what he wants to think; that's how he wants to operate. Coolly. Logically. Methodically. But he doesn't know where to start, and his hands are shaking; he's shaking all over from stark cold horror.

Then he sees her leg, and though the wound isn't deep he knows there shouldn't be a wound at all; he knows she was wearing a bandage. That thought alone twists in his gut. It pushes the rest away. It gives him someplace to start. He pulls his bag of talens out, literally draws it out of his flesh. Holding it in his teeth, he presses a bandage to her leg, not caring if this is a waste.

"Je mi to líto," he says. "Omlouvám se, lásko. Je mi to líto."

[Danicka Musil] my mate.

He hears blood going into the gutters, and he hears his mate crying into her palm, gasping. He can hear the movement of her body on the ground with every shudder, and there's been painfully few times he's seen her anywhere close to this. Broken down. Crying. Unable, or unwilling, to pull herself out of it to deal with reality.

The reality that comes to him a moment later, as he picks his way carefully back from frenzy to knowledge of himself again. The last time he frenzied -- no, that doesn't matter. What matters is this, what's here, and she's here. Hurt but not in pieces. Wounded but -- he can hope -- not by him. Still, the reality he's crawling back to is that he frenzied, and

I could have killed her.

Danicka is coherent enough even now that when he pushes himself up and starts to move towards her she lets out a truncated, sharp cry and flinches. She very nearly scrambles away from him, but in the end that's all it is: a flinch. A hard, sudden flinch, as instinctive as his frenzy had been. As thoughtless as the movement of her arm to aim her gun at the 'hobo' had been.

She curls up tighter as he drops to his knees, ludicrous in belt and boxers and shoes and watch. Danicka doesn't even register that he dedicated that gift to his spirit, to carry it with him through all forms. She can't even look at him right now. And it isn't because of the pain. And it isn't because she could have died. It isn't because this is the second goddamn one of those things she's killed when she'd really rather she'd never seen one to begin with. All of that she could come back from easier than

Lukas, frenzied, staring at her the way he did before turning away.

The way she jerks when he takes a bandage to apply it to her isn't quite as violent a flinch as the first one, but she sucks in a ragged gasp of air as light floods the flesh between Lukas's fingers, as the blood she's never questioned soaks into her skin. The damage isn't deep but it keeps her from walking, and though it would heal quickly thanks to her heritage, it heals instantly thanks to a talen that takes nearly every drop of his own blood to make.

Wasteful. Uneven. Lopsided. But Lukas doesn't care, and Danicka doesn't stop him, even though she knows it's a waste. She might, if she knew what it took to make one of those little scraps of healing, protecting cloth. But she doesn't.

She trembles, and tries to steady her breathing. It takes a long time for that to happen. No words are forthcoming to answer his murmured apologies, his terror at what he could have done. What he came so very, very close to doing. She doesn't pick herself up off the ground as soon as she gets herself under control, but she starts to push herself up on her hands, still shaking. And uncontrollably.

"Chci jít," she says raggedly, her lips trembling. "Chci jít nyní."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [EMPATHEE!]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 5, 7, 10, 10 (Success x 3 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] It's hard for him to see her flinching away when he comes closer. Jerking under his hand when he presses the bandage to her leg. He has other talens in his pouch, ones that are not so difficult to make; ones that are a little less wasteful to use. He doesn't think of them. Perhaps it's because he's an Ahroun, the bloodiest of the moons, for whom even healing is inextricably bound to hurt.

But -- he does heal her. And when that scrap of cloth is cleared of all blood, when it's just a scrap of cloth again, he takes his hand away. Because he understands that she cannot stand for him to be so close right now. She cannot stand for him to put his hands on her skin when a moment ago he was a breath, a thought away from leaving her corpse on the sidewalk with the others.

That's hard for him, too. It's hard for him to think of how close he came to killing her tonight, but it's just as hard not to touch her not. Not to reassure himself that she's in one piece. She's not bleeding out silently from some unseen wound. She's not mortally injured, curled around a fatal wound that will pour her lifesblood all over the sidewalk the instant she releases pressure.

There's a moment when he rises on his knees and leans closer as if he might simply scoop her up --

but it passes. She's pushing herself up and he backs off, standing, holding his hands out to her as if to catch her, or ward her, without ever touching her.

She wants to go. She wants to go now. He thinks of the carcasses on the ground, the eyeless hounds and the creature in the rags; he knows he can't leave them behind. "Okay," he says, low, unsteady, and he nods. "Okay. Go wait for me in the car."

He gives her his keys. They're smeared with blood. His car is just up the street, within visual range.

[Danicka Musil] Knowing her like he does, and standing as close to her as he is, Lukas can see that Danicka's gorge rises when he holds his keys out to her. And she's never thrown up because of terror or even drunkeness that he can remember. There was that time when she had the flu, but he was out getting her some more medicine and then he came home and she was in bed again crying, her breath smelling of mint and alcohol, and she cried -- a little deliriously, and embarrassedly, and miserably -- because

Lukáš, I threw up

so he got a cool cloth for the back of her neck and made sure she had enough water and that next time, if there was a next time, she wouldn't have to get up and go all the way to the bathroom.

And right now it's insane that he might think of that, that he would think of anything at all other than the look on her face when he reaches out to her and how close she is to just... crumpling again. Losing it. His mate. Who is so very strong, who is seen as so unassailable by others, who he once saw as untouchable.

A stone egg.

Danicka takes his keys, not looking at his face. The way she used to avoid meeting his eyes. The way she simply can't, right now. Danicka wraps her fingers around the bloody keys, and takes a few steps back, then starts to walk away, turning.

She pauses only once, bending her knees and wrapping her hand around the vhujunka's alien weapon that is nearly identical to the one she has in her apartment. She picks it up,

and slams it viciously across the bloodied head of the dead thing, like a cop might use a nightstick, like a savage might use a club, like a beast might rip the head off of something it has already killed. The look on her face then is not one of horror or disgust. It's the closest thing to rage someone like her will ever feel.

Her hand does not leave the weapon. She takes it with her, all the way to the sleek black BMW waiting for her.


When Lukas comes there to find her, she's sitting in the passenger seat, staring forward a thousand yards, a gun and a glyph-covered cylinder held nestled together in her lap.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas doesn't take very long. He hauls the carcasses into the alley -- into the corridor of concrete and cement that passes for an alley in this shining, glittering part of town -- and there looses the carrion-crow spirits bound into his body. As the bodies begin to disappear piece by inexplicable piece, he leaves them behind.

The sidewalk is still drenched in blood. No helping that, though. There'll just have to be a few startled yuppies in the morning. He jogs on the way back to his car, his gait long and even, tireless.

The door opens. He gets in. His rage is burnt down, almost nonexistent, but he's still what he is: a savage, a primitive, a monster barely held back by his own hand. His mate is staring straight forward, and he looks at her for a moment, brow furrowing with concern, before he silently starts the engine.

She doesn't live very far from here. That's where he drives.

[Danicka Musil] Which is perhaps for the best. Anywhere but here is what she meant, but at least there are already horrors associated with the apartment on the twenty-third floor of Kingsbury Plaza. Their home in Stickney still feels protected in her mind, sheltered from the War and from, yes, even Lukas's own rage.

Gaia only knows what Danicka has been thinking since she walked away from Lukas and slid into the passenger seat of his car, or what she thinks as he drives. Likely it isn't thoughts of calming comfort. There isn't, truthfully, any to be had for her right now.

When the police department tries to figure out the blood all over the sidewalk it will turn out to be canine. The human blood -- her blood -- won't come up on any criminal database. No missing persons reports will show up that might connect the two. It will, like anything that doesn't send up a red flag saying a bad person got away, it will just slip

through

the cracks.

Down into the gutters, like so much of the blood that Lukas sent flowing, drenching the concrete and asphalt and polluting the sewers. Blood doesn't upset Danicka. Even his. Even her own. She doesn't think about the blood. She doesn't tell him what she's thinking, though that may be because her thoughts don't have words just yet.

He starts the car, and she stirs momentarily to buckle herself in. Looks at the weapons in her lap for awhile as though they are mandalas, meditative objects that send her mind reeling to buffered empty spaces, and somewhere between the alleyway and the garage of her building, she's lifted her eyes again and goes back to staring the way she was when he first entered the car.

Her car is in her parking spot underneath the building, but there's an empty spot open nearby. He'll get a parking ticket. They'll take down his license plate number and scold him if it happens again. But he can't go through the lobby like that. Hell. Even using the elevator like that is going to be a bit tricky, especially when

someone gets in when they get to the ground floor. Who looks at the two of them and does a double-take.

"Photoshoot," Danicka says blithely to the startled building-sharer, her lips curving in a small, amused smile. "Long story."

Which doesn't explain the smell. Luckily, the person decides that they still look kind of wet, whether that's corn syrup or something else. They take another elevator, and the one she and Lukas are in rises to the 23rd floor without further incident. They don't pass any of her neighbors. She turns her key in the lock and lets them in. The apartment is a bit of a mess. It's been awhile since she's bothered to call a cleaning service, so there's dishes and a sticky spot on the kitchen floor and the bathrooms probably need some work, but Danicka's a reasonably tidy woman to begin with, so nothing's exactly disgusting.

The lock clicks behind them, whether turned by Lukas's hand or her own. And Danicka takes a deep breath, exhaling slowly, as she steps out of her heels and starts to peel her blood-splattered lavender shirt off of her body. She doesn't say a word.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Photoshoot, Danicka explains, lying effortlessly. Her companion looks at the stranger, his blue eyes brilliant in a bloody face. After a second he smiles too, close-mouthed.

Her neighbor decides to catch the next car. They ride up in silence, and then she's unlocking the door because he doesn't want to leave blood on her doorknob. Then they're inside, where everything smells like her.

He draws this into his lungs: a long slow breath. He tries not to think of the what if. He tries not to think of having to come here alone, days or weeks or months after he

[killed her.],

coming here to clear out the last of her things or his, to do something about it all, to take care of those lingering loose ends that always scatter every where way when someone's life is sliced short. He tries not to think of any of this, but he does, inevitably, and he fixates on these small, painful details, the possibilities and distant eventualities, because like her,

his mind stops at the very possibility of what he could have done. He cannot think past that, not to the immediate aftermath. He cannot even really consider surviving that, and so

everything else is just pointless conjecture.

He takes his shoes off. And his belt. He holds the latter in his hand, loosely looped. The blood on his body is cool now, gelling, tacky, some parts beginning to flake. He looks down at himself, and around her apartment, and finally to her. She's peeling her shirt off. He follows her, trying not to track on the carpet, and when he catches up to her he holds his hand out for her bloody shirt.

"Go shower," he says quietly. "I'll put our things in the wash and join you." A pause. "Unless you'd rather be alone."

There's no blame or censure there.

[Danicka Musil] "These are dry-clean only," Danicka says quietly, as though to speak at a normal tone of voice would disturb something infinitely fragile. She is taking her shirt to the kitchen, and stepping on a lever, and dropping it into the bag within the very expensive, very shiny Simplehuman can. The kitchen is so close to the entryway it barely leaves a step on the carpet between the doorway (tiled) and the kitchen itself (also tiled). He follows, and she continues to evade, as though even now she cannot bear for him to be too close.

Still. They'll need to run a vaccuum over the flakes before they get rubbed into the fibers, and so on. Cleanup follows them everywhere, really.

Standing in the kitchen now, Danicka slides her skirt -- white and effervescent and actually shorter than most of the ones she wears around town -- off her legs, putting it in the trash, too. It isn't worth it to her to try and wash the blood out. It isn't worth it to her to take them to the drycleaners. It isn't worth it to bother looking at them again after tonight.

Her shoes are probably salvageable, and cost quite a bit more than the outfit. Danicka considers her shoes, the bloodsoaked heels and interiors, and then reaches for them and drops them in the garbage can, too.

They're followed by the soft cotton panties she was wearing tonight, the seamless bra that didn't show up under her tissue-weight silk-blend shirt. Everything. It leaves her in a pair of simple white gold earrings with pearl drops and a silver bracelet, all of which she can drop into this or that particular solution and clean with a toothbrush.

Danicka tips her head to one side and removes one earring, then the other. She drops them in the trash. She slides the bracelet Lukas gave her off her slender wrist

and sets it on the counter beside the sink. The lid to the trash can falls closed again when she moves her foot, and she picks up the bracelet to take it with her to the bathroom.

"You can join me," she says, only because tonight, it's necessary for her to actually say it.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas stands silently watching his mate undress. This might be the first time watching her skin reveal itself to him piece by piece has not immediately brought a dizzying wash of arousal. This might be the first time --

no. That's not true. It was like this the night he came home to find her sick, too. When he looked at her in their bed and

-- he thinks not of taking her to bed, of mounting her and riding her until they were both sweating and groaning and out of their minds for each other, but of how very fragile she really is. Of how easily torn her skin is, how easily broken her bones, how easily ended that flame in her that has somehow, inexplicably, improbably, endured her entire life thus far.

There's something horrific about that. That after everything else, it could have been him. Not her brother, not her mother, not some eyeless monster from the deep -- but him.

His breath catches quietly as she slides the bracelet from her wrist. If she threw that into the trash, too, he would not blame her. But she doesn't, and he lets his breath out again, slowly and silently.

They go down the short hall to the master suite, then. He follows her into the bathroom, and he puts out his hand and turns on the single lamp over the toilet. Even so, their images are starkly clear in the mirror: bloody, horrific. He doesn't look at their reflections. He doesn't look at the blood on his body, nor how much larger he is, how much stronger: and that's in this form.

Again and again, his mind circles back to that one vortex at the midst of it all. Again and again, it peels away, unable to hold the horror of it.

I could have--
I almost--
I--

He leans down to wrench the shower on. While the water warms he straightens, peeling off the last article of clothing he has on. He doesn't throw it away. He can't: it's bound to his spirit. It's tossed into the sink to be rinsed out later, then washed. Where it covered him, blood-soaked, his hip and flank are painted dull red.

[Danicka Musil] They go to her bedroom, lights in the apartment off again. If the hallway door gets closed it's only if Lukas does it. Danicka walks in a sort of haze, and it isn't actually far off from when she was sick, when she was so visibly fragile that he forgot any thought of how sometimes she's strong. He felt good to be able to take care of her, as though doing so was rare for him. That's part of why they are the way they are together, though: neither of them think they are doing enough for the other. Neither of them stop feeling like

I could do more for you. I want to do more for you.

When she was very young, she survived near-starvation because of her mother's stubbornness and rage. When she was a little older she survived a frenzied werewolf in crinos coming close to destroying the interior of their home. Then she survived her brother's burgeoning abusive streak. She survived her mother's death, and her brother's meteoric rise to familial power afterward. She survived the beatings he gave her, the miscarriage, the upheaval of being taken to New Orleans.

Danicka survived hungry bloodsuckers there, and angry ghosts. She survived a hundred mundane situations she should not have sanely been in to begin with. Drug abuse, too much alcohol, the wrong person at the wrong club, the walks home alone because she ditched Rick and Christian. She survived even when things went bad; one could never call her charmed or lucky or carried along by a guardian spirit. At times she has survived by luck. Other times wits and cowardice. Other times... pure, feral tenacity.

She survived her own cruelty, the gradual degradation of her own spirit into something she barely recognized herself. She survived knowing that a locked door meant nothing more at the Sokolov household than at her own. She survived the long fingers sweeping her hair back and leaving a cold chill across her neck, the whisper in her ear, the madness that saturated that ancient Silver Fang house and its members.

After coming to Chicago, she survived a werewolf who wanted to stalk her, attract her, claim her with or without her willing and coherent participation. She survived Spirals. She survived tentacled bloodsuckers in alleyways. She survived bizarre, twisted creatures that even the Wyrm does not understand. She survived undead. Fomori. Again and again.

It's hard to look at her and realize how much, exactly, she has lived through. Because she has no scars on her slender body to show for it. She has no hard look in her eyes or casing of ice around her heart. She has no way to explain how someone like her could still be alive to this day. And yet she is. And yet she's here, getting some jewelry cleaning solution out of the cabinet while her mate runs the tap in the bathtub so they can shower.

Danicka's hair and face and body and leg are bloodstained, sticky with it. She gets out a little toothbrush and sets to work cleaning her bracelet with gentle but firm strokes, as though this is the most natural thing to do right now, the highest priority when she is covered with... filth.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] There's a small hesitation; a moment where he almost tells her, leave it. I'll clean it later.

He doesn't. Some part of him understands why she cleans that first -- intuitively, instinctively. Another might look at the situation and see symbolism in that. She's cleaning what he gave her. She's cleaning what's between them, washing away the taint and the blood, making it shine again. Lukas doesn't think so very far, though. He looks at his mate cleaning her bracelet and thinks to himself: that's what I would do first, too.

Which is what he does -- unstrapping his wristwatch and running it under the tap, rinsing blood from the watch face and the crevices between the metal links, rinsing it until the water runs clear. Then he sets it aside to dry and steps into the shower instead, drawing the curtain or the sliding door shut. She takes longer: she's using jewelry cleaner and a toothbrush, and this gives him time to wash the blood from his body. To soap himself and scrub, to flood it from his hair, to pick it out from beneath his nails, to gargle it from between his teeth.

By the time she finishes, he's clean. He stays in the shower, though, waiting for her while water beats against his back. When she steps in, he moves aside, gives her the spray while he rubs soap into a shower puff, works it into a lather.

Then he holds it out to her, silently.

[Danicka Musil] The truth is, there's no symbolism or sentiment to it at all. The sentiment stopped at her need to keep it, when everything else -- hundreds of dollars' worth of cloths and lingerie and jewelry and shoes -- went into the trash can. Cleaning it first is, to a degree, coldly practical. The longer the blood dries on the bracelet the harder it will be to get off the metal and out of the crevices. She does not want to be wearing it one day and have the light catch it and show her some spot she missed, show her that she's had flecks of it rubbing against her skin for days or weeks. She wants it clean. She wants it done. She needs something to do with her hands right now that is apart from herself.

And she needs it to be alright, days or weeks from now. She needs her bracelet to be clean, because she does not want to lose it. If there really is symbolism to this, if it's connected to what is between them or what they feel for each other --

no. If he were to suggest it, voice his thoughts aloud, she would say no. It isn't that.

But he doesn't, so all this remains quite simple, and unexplained, in their separate minds.

When he gets into the shower she goes at the metal of his watch, too, which he washed with water. She scrubs at the metal and gets in between the links and then rinses both pieces again, setting them aside on a washcloth near that shallow metal tray where she keeps river stones and candles. And by the time her careful, meticulous work is done, Lukas is clean. She hears him gargling and pauses her scrubbing for a moment.

At least she doesn't have to clean blood out from between her teeth.

Danicka rinses out the toothbrush and caps the jewelry cleaner. She puts them both away and wipes the counter off. She gets a second towel out, a large, fluffy one, and hangs it on the second prong of the hook on the back of her door.

She asks herself if she's stalling.

And pulls back the curtain to step inside, looking at Lukas, who no longer looks like he just stepped off the set of a zombie movie. She looks at him and takes the lathery, creamy bar of soap from his hand, but ultimately sets it aside on the tray where he first got it from. Danicka reaches for the shampoo. For a creature so wildly unpredictable in so many ways, she has certain habits that seem unbreakable. Like washing from the top down.

Under the water, her hair starts to plaster to her scalp, her cheeks, her neck. It turns dark as it wets, making the blood less obvious. As she starts to wash her hair, the lather turns pink. And red.

She shampoos it twice.


With the water coming down and with Danicka so withdrawn, there isn't a lot of conversation inside the shower. She cleans her hair and her face and uses the little bottle of eye makeup remover on her lids and lashes. She washes her shoulders and her arms, behind her ears. She washes it all away, and then she washes again, until even the water at their feet runs clear again.

One of them turns off the tap, and Danicka steps forward and puts her head on his chest.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Moments like this, Lukas is reminded of those first nights. Is reminded of the story she told him, which was a story they both knew, of taming the fox and approaching without approaching.

She washes herself, thoroughly. He stands there because he does not want to leave her alone. He stands there because he knows she can't stand it if he went to her, if he tried to wash her, if he tried to soap her skin and shampoo her hair. He stands there because being any farther away is unthinkable, and being any closer is impossible.

Sometimes, after a rough night, a battle or a war she should never have been pulled into, it's like this. He cannot sleep too close and he cannot sleep too far. One time he slept on the floor at the Brotherhood, within arm's reach of his bed, but far enough that she could stand his presence. Ultimately that barrier is unilateral, though. Danicka does not have rage. Danicka does not frighten him on a instinctive, genetic level. And it's a sort of quiet agony to hold himself away from her, not because he needs it but because he knows she does.

So -- when they're finally clean and the shower turns off and the last of the water sluices from their bodies, flows down the drain -- when it's quiet except for the drip-drip-drip of water, it's an utter relief, a dark, deep relief when she steps into him. When she rests her head against his chest. A beat when he's afraid to move, afraid to smother her. Then he wraps his arms around her shoulders, gently, and then a little more securely. He bends to her, folds around her, and kisses the top of her head.

"Moje láska." He draws a breath; closes his eyes. "Moje lodní důstojník."

[Danicka Musil] Sometimes that's all he says, and perhaps it's because that's all he can say. Danicka understands, perhaps better than anyone, that past the words and the clothes and the wristwatch and belt and shoes and BMW, Lukas is an animal. That his nature is to nudge food towards his mate before he himself feeds. That he would gladly be the more colorful and larger of the pair in order to gain the attention of predators and keep them from noticing her small, sleek darkness behind him. That when he holds her like this and names her as his love and his mate, he is only putting words to what, on an instinctive level, are grunts and whines and low rumbles of recognition, affection, protection, and even need.

Even appreciation. Even a dozen other things that are so difficult to tabulate and categorize that all that he is left with are howling emotions that try to fit inside the words he chooses, words from the language of his childhood and the meaning of his adulthood: my love. my mate.

It is hard for Danicka to keep him away like this. She knows too well how it must make him feel, how much it must make him ache to hold himself back from her when he knows she's suffering, when those hard bones of his all but quake in his body with the longing to shield her somehow. How nothing in him feels settled, with that emptiness between their bodies.

Simultaneously she aches for him, with her own longing and her own shame. And gratitude, too, in there with all the rest. If she were not like this, were not weak, she would not need to ask her mate to stay the hell away from her

but not go too far

until she can come to terms with what could have been.


Thankfully, Danicka is more adept at accepting the could-have-beens and what-ifs than most people. She has extensive practice in dealing with what is, what was, what really happened, and though it takes her time tonight to get to that point, she steps close to him again because she is getting there. He didn't kill her tonight.

The knowledge that he could have, and almost did, will linger longer than she thinks.

For now, though, she slides her arms around his waist and rests her head there on his wet chest and the damp hairs there. It endears her, oddly enough, when they dry and brush against her cheek or her nose. Danicka stands there, breathing quietly, saying nothing of what is on her mind, holding him, until finally she whispers.

Another woman would ask to have a drink and curl up on the couch to watch t.v. See, everything is alright. Everything is normal. We're fine. It's fine. We'll catch the end of a movie and laugh at it and then drowse til we fall asleep cuddling in my unmade bed. And it's alright. It's all okay.

Danicka, the liar, does not pretend.

"I think next time I should run."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] A flinch goes through him, rippling through his hard body, heavy muscles, like a deepwater wave. He draws a short, painful breath. There's a silence.

When he speaks, it's not a direct answer. Not yet. When he speaks, he holds her still, ther bodies pressed together, aligned, touching, as though this is in and of itself a sort of communication.

"I always want to keep you close to me," he says, hushed. "I always think I can protect you. I'm always afraid that if I were to let you go, they would chase you, and then I would be too far away to help."

She knows exactly what he means. She was there the night Lonna Larson died, too far away from the Garou who might've helped her.

"I always think if you're close to me, then I can keep you safe."

It's not protest, in the end. It's -- he doesn't know what it is. An explanation. A confession. An admission of these ideas in his head, these ideals, these dreams. When they're laid out like that, they seem so thin, so frail, so imperfect. He holds her a little tighter, bends to her, buries his face in her wet hair for a moment.

It's hard for him to say this. It's hard for him because it's tantamount to admitting that he has failed at one of the most basic covenants of mateship:

that he cannot, after all, protect her. Not from himself.

"Next time you should run."

[Danicka Musil] They both know how it happened tonight, and there's a wave of bitterness to be found at that realization. He kept her close so he could protect her. And when she was hurt, when something came at her, that's when he became the worst thing on the street, the most dangerous threat to her life there could have been. Not because he is a hateful or careless man, not because he doesn't love her.

Because he loves her. And needs to protect her.

Danicka holds him a little tighter when he flinches, as though to hold him together. She listens to his quiet confessions, her hands still on his back, and she thinks of Lonna, too, though the woman's name never comes up. Danicka knows Lonna died in part because Lukas and Theron both chose to safeguard one of their own blood than the Child of Gaia, the town bicycle, the one who died and was never really mourned or memorialized.

Of the two of them, Lukas is the one with the ideals. The one who dreamt, for awhile, of a great leader for the Garou, one with pure blood from a Fang house who had so much potential he might be able to use it for something worthwhile. He's the one whose loss of innocence happened in snowtime in Chicago, meeting with his Alpha's sister to, quite simply, prepare for the downfall of the overgrown boy he'd once followed with all his heart.

Danicka is the one who doesn't believe in ideals, and finds those who do disturbing. Danicka is the one who sees sharply through people, who quickly and easily finds the worst of them, the red flags, the things that will eventually come up to bite them. Or her. She is the one who does not have any illusions of honor, her own or anyone else's. Danicka is the one who understands Lukas's ruthlessness and animalism just as well as she understands his determination to see the good. And she protects that, when she can, and aches terribly when his ideals are taken from him.

Which is a thoroughly new experience for her, to tell the truth.

Water runs in a trickle down her back from her hair, and he feels a powerful failure in the words it is so hard for him to say. Danicka feels only familiarity, and a sort of strange comfort in the world working in a way she knows how to navigate. Garou are dangerous. Even the ones that love you. Even the ones that want to care for you. And sometimes you have to run.

She closes her eyes, exhaling, feeling calmed by that admission in a way she likely can't explain to him, especially when the admission itself is so painful for him. It aches. Oh, it aches, because it is an ideal he is losing, that he can protect her perfectly even as his own rage grows hotter and more vicious every year, that he can truly protect her, period. It hurts her because she knows it hurts him.

But still. Somehow, it helps.

Danicka does not draw back, but lifts her head a little and looks at the underside of his jaw.

"Miluji tě stále," she murmurs, her voice light but not cajoling. Tender, but not coddling. Reaching out with what he already knows: that his rage and his nature have never been something for her to see past, to overcome, to love him in spite of. That they are a part of him. That she loves him no matter. That she loves him, and what he is,

whole and entire.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [i roll empathee!]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 2, 3, 5, 9 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Some would say life is an exercise in losing ideals. Most Shadow Lords might say that. That with maturity comes realism, and with realism comes -- well. A certain jadedness. A certain callousness, and cynicism; a way of looking at the world that is all hard, all cold, all relentless.

It doesn't make it any less painful, though. Children cry when they discover there is no Santa Claus. Well, Lukas did not cry when he discovered the brother he followed as a brave new leader turned out to be such a failure. He did not cry when he discovered another brother he was sworn to would force a kinswoman not of his own tribe to want him. Would strike her for daring to not want him.

He doesn't weep now, either. But this ideal is perhaps the hardest yet to lose, because it's older than the ideals of war and brotherhood given to him by the Nation. It's older than what was taught to him by his mentor, or even his parents, his sister. It's the oldest ideal of all, not an ideal in truth but an instinct, of the same root and shoot of the instincts that tell him

to hold his mate in the night. To feel her heart beating under his hand. To bring her hearty food when she is hungry, cool water when she is thirsty. To love her with everything he is, because she is his and he is hers.

The instinct to protect: it is as deeply woven into him as his own flesh and bone. As a rib in his side. As she is, herself.

So she lifts her head a little; and he does not. He closes his eyes, and he holds her a little more fiercely now, a little more desperately, as though -- yes -- to staunch a wound. To heal an injury. He draws an uneven breath as she speaks to him of love. Still, she says. Always, he hears.

No matter what.

Which is painful in and of itself. To know that that would have been true even if tonight had gone very, very badly indeed. To know -- in that instant -- what she was thinking when she faced him in the street, eyes empty of recognition, mouth full of blood. To intuit that in that instant, looking at what was very likely her own death, she thought only

-- that she couldn't think of what would happen to him, after. That she couldn't bear to think of what he would do to himself when he awoke with her blood in his mouth.

And: that this is her mate.

He presses his brow to hers. He lifts his chin and kisses her on the crest of her cheekbone, fiercely. He breathes raggedly, and does not let go.

[Danicka Musil] [ahem.]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 2, 2, 4, 4, 4, 5, 6, 10, 10 (Success x 3 at target 6) Re-rolls: 2

[Danicka Musil] At his worst --

no. It could have been worse. He was so close to something Danicka has thankfully never seen, so close to the point where he would not have woken up to find her in pieces but gone. And it isn't worth thinking about, it isn't worth imagining what that would have done to him, realizing he had not only killed his mate but --


It doesn't matter. They're here now.


Danicka is nestled against his chest, held in his arms, and he hears her murmur that she loves him still, she loves him with a steadfastness that is unmarred and undisturbed by even the events on the street. He hears always, hears no matter what, and it makes him ache just as greatly as before. That she could love him -- that she di love him -- even when he was staring at her, eyes glittering glacially blue and red-ringed with frenzy. That she loved him then, and even when he called on some deep and unknown resources of inner strength to tear his attention away from his mate and attack something else instead

she shot the distraction. Which could have very well left her alone on the street with a frenzied Garou who had nothing else to vent his rage on, nothing else to turn against but her fragile, tender, beloved flesh. But the supposed hobo had raised a weapon to threaten Lukas. No matter that Lukas would have torn him to pieces first. No matter that he never would have gotten a shot off. Danicka was faster, and Danicka saw a weapon that wouldn't even have harmed Lukas all that much.

But still. Still, she loved him. And so she fired.


Lukas does not weep at the loss of this illusion that someone, he can protect her against everything. Even if rationally he knew that to do so would mean putting her in a cage, hiding her from the world, and ultimately losing her love and her faith in him --

even if he knew all along he could not protect her from the inevitability of death, pain, and trauma, because there is no living without these things

-- it hurts him enough to hold her like that, as though by holding her he could survive his own love for her, and what it does to him. What it does to his entire world.

Danicka closes her eyes as he kisses her like that, and she holds her hands warm and gentle on his back. "Let's go sit," she says softly, after a little while. "We can watch a movie while my hair dries. Monsters, Inc."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] The truth is half the night is missing for him. Chronologically it was only a few seconds, only five or ten blood-red seconds slashed through the midst of his memory, but in terms of significance, in terms of impact, those seconds bleed far beyond their borders.

He has no memory of them. He does not know what happened, exactly. He does not know he leap across spaces in eyeblinks; tore things apart with singular, devastating crushes of his teeth. He does not remember shaking one hound until it was literally falling to pieces. He does not remember

staring at his mate, licking his chops.

And the truth is: some part of him wants to ask. Wants every second in its complete, shattering detail. Wants to know how close to the edge he was. Wants to know by what factor, by what margin, did he avoid utter unthinkable catastrophe. Wants to flay himself alive on these minutiae.

She does not volunteer this information. Not to comfort, and certainly not to blame. She gives him only this:

Miluji tě stále.

And she gives him, overwhelmingly, this.


He's not quite ready to go yet when she speaks again. He bends his face to her shoulder, leans into and over her. His back is an arch of strength under her hands. His arms surround her utterly. Small wonder that he likes to -- liked to -- believe that he could protect her. That the sky could fall, and as long as she was with him, as long as there was breath left in his body, she would be safe.

"Miluju tě tak moc," he murmurs, muffled against her skin. "Miluju tě."

Only after that -- and only slowly -- can he bear to let her go. She steps away, and there's still shower in the bathroom. There's still wetness dripping from his black hair, running down behind his ears, trickling over his body. A drop weaves its way down his chest and down his abdomen, tracking right of his navel. He swipes water off his face and pulls back the curtain.

There are towels. He doesn't bother to get dressed, though he has clothes here now, some of his things living alongside hers. He wicks water off his upper body, then tucks the towel around his waist. He sees that she's cleaned his water as well, and an odd little smile twinges at the corner of his mouth. Gently, his hand folds over her shoulder. He kisses the opposite shoulder, and there's a certain gratitude in that, but not for the watch alone.

It's left where it is -- his watch, alongside her bracelet. Stepping out of the bathroom, the air feels dry and cool. Lukas wraps his arm around Danicka's shoulders and, if she lets him, if she can stand it, hugs her against his side.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [STEAM.]

[Danicka Musil] [THIS WAS A TRIUMPH.]

[Danicka Musil] [She's cleaned his water, too. *amused*]

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [arrrghhh. i don't know what's wrong with me lately. i do this ALL THE TIME.]

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [EMPATHEE]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 3, 4, 7, 10 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Danicka Musil] Not surprisingly, Danicka has never frenzied. She cannot take some experience of hers and draw an analogy between that and the force that took hold of Lukas tonight. She doesn't understand.

She doesn't know he can't remember. The blackout of berserk rage is not something she ever had a conversation about with her mother after the fact, and in truth, her mother is the only Garou up until tonight whose frenzy impinged on Danicka's memories. If she knew he could not remember, she might --

well.

Danicka might tell him what happened. Or she might look at her mother in a whole new light, look at her childhood and realize that Laura never knew what she'd done, never knew how close she'd come, until someone told her. If anyone ever did. And it wasn't a frequent occurrence, even in that horrific household. But it doesn't matter. Danicka doesn't know that Lukas can't remember, and he doesn't mention it, doesn't ask her for details, so

he holds her in the shower and she holds him back until he can bear the thought of loosening his arms around her. Danicka kisses his chest softly when he starts to breathe normally enough, when he starts to unfurl from his embrace around her body. She moves slowly, as though moving through water, and Lukas opens the curtain, hands her one of the large towels hanging behind the door. Danicka takes it, tilts her head, and rubs the towel through her hair.

His hand cups her shoulder, his lips find the other one, and she pauses, looking back at him with a small smile. She tips her head towards his and nuzzles him against the side of his face, the void between them closed, the emptiness of shock falling away from her. And he sees, albeit through a hazy, unclear glass, how someone like her could survive everything she has seen and not been broken by it all.

It takes Danicka a little longer to be ready to leave the bathroom. She shakes excess water off her bracelet and his watch and sets them back down to continue drying. She hangs up her towel and runs a comb swiftly but carefully through her hair. She slips into one of the silk robes he's discovered she likes so much -- this one is green and gold, shot through with black outlines in the patently Chinese design of dragons and flowers -- letting it hang off her shoulders at first. When she's ready to go she ties it loosely around her waist and leaves the door open, the overhead fan on, the light off.

She stays close to him as they walk through her bedroom hallway, her hand over his where it rests on her shoulder. She notes how quiet he is but she doesn't try to reassure him that they're alright. She just stays near, all the way to the couch.


Perhaps it means something that when she curls up on the couch she lets Lukas get up to put the DVD in, then holds her arms out to him when he turns and walks back. She hits play and sets the remote down and then her arms are around him again, holding him close. Maybe he wants to hold her right now, feel her against his chest and in his arms and feel strong again, safe for her again.

And maybe he intuits that Danicka, too, has a need to protect. To feel strong. To take care of him, who was as much at risk tonight as she was. So when he sits with her and there's an awkward moment, he looks at her and finds her eyes --

and settles down on the couch, leaning against her, as her arms slip around his shoulders and his slide around her waist. Heavy and large as he is, he fits between her legs and they find a way to curl together like this without limbs going numb or either of them having to hold themselves up. Danicka strokes his hair as the movie starts playing. He can dimly hear and feel her heartbeat when he lays his head along the softness of her middle.


The only time either of them move is when he hears her stomach growl quietly. And perhaps it means something, too, that Danicka lets him get up to go find food. There isn't much in the fridge, certainly not enough to satisfy his tendency to push hearty, heavy sustenance on her. But there's snacks hidden here and there in the cupboard. He makes popcorn and drizzles it with butter. He brings back a bag of cookies. He brings water and a bit of milk -- for the cookies, of course -- and when he settles back down with Danicka on the couch, she eats comfortably, and he can feel where his body keeps her warm. He can feel her bare feet tuck under his legs when her toes get a little cold.

"God," she says amusedly at one point, still playing with his hair, "that girl is so going to be one of our kids."

Lukas chuckles, and holds her more closely. Tightly, for a moment.

It gradually creeps up on him. The exhaustion of the night. How far he pushed beyond his limits, how deeply he was drained merely by frenzy. He drowses. He starts awake a few times, resisting the sleep that wants to claim him. Every time he stirs like that, his arms clutch around Danicka as though to make sure she's still there. He shifts around, keeps his eyes open, because she's awake, and her hand is still moving

slowly, and hypnotically

over his scalp.


In the end, Danicka doesn't move without waking him. She lays her hand over his crown and whispers that it's time to go to bed. They leave the kernel-lined bowl and the half-full bag of cookies and the empty glasses and stop to lazily brush their teeth but all in all it's just a blur, all the steps between couch and bedroom, hallway and her unmade, rumpled bed.

Even lying together in the dark, her robe on the floor and his arm around her, it takes them both a long time to fall asleep. Danicka, for reasons harkening back to a lifelong learned trait of hypervigilance. Lukas, because she is awake, and he wants to stay awake until she is safe and asleep. He always wants to. He almost always does. She is silently grateful that she doesn't often have nightmares. He is silently grateful that he can still be here, in her bed in the apartment she never invited anyone to, holding her like this even though --


It takes a long time for the night to let them go.