[Danicka] It hasn't been long enough since that night in their back yard at the den for it to feel dull, this coming-home. And by now Danicka's realized that Lukas seldom will call her or text her to see where she is, whether she's at her apartment or at their house or out dancing or having dinner with friends. Perhaps she understands why; perhaps she's seen his blue eyes lit up with pleasure and a sort of animal pride at having found her, whether it was in the first place he looked or after driving all over the city. Perhaps she's wondered to herself if Lukas would be as delighted if she suggested they play hide-and-go-seek, though she knows she wouldn't be as good at it as she was as a child.
She always won, when they played at her house.
Tonight, however peaceful or pleased it makes him when he heads towards her apartment -- really, it's the closest, and she doesn't go to the Brotherhood that often -- he can see as soon as he walks in how it makes Danicka feel. She's sitting on the couch, which sort of half-faces the entry hallway, and when the door opens she pauses whatever is on the television screen, leans waaay over, and peers at the door,
as though she doesn't know exactly who it is, turning the key in the lock and shuffling his shoes off as it closes behind him. She grins at him, wearing striped pajama shorts and a green t-shirt with a tree screenprinted across the side and shoulder and chest of it, the branches all spiraling and dripping with various colors and shapes of fruit. Her hair is down and straightened; maybe she went out, earlier.
"Mate," she says, quite firmly, and with evident pleasure. "Come," she goes on, beckoning, patting the couch as she sits back up. "Come, come. I'm watching Rome. You've seen it, right?" Regardless of whether he has or not, there are two men frozen on the screen on some desolate beach, one of them glaring at a rock as he tries to carve something into it, the other standing in the water.
As soon as Lukas joins her, Danicka curls up against his side, wriggling under his arm, as though -- well, of course -- they do this every night. Not every night, still. But more often now than ever before.
[Lukas] More often now. As often as he can. As often as not, Room 2 is unoccupied at night these days, the window left a little open, the door closed and locked. His packmates are next door. He knows if anyone really needs to find him, they need only wake Theron. Or, at greater hazard to themselves -- if they could even manage it -- Sinclair.
And to some degree, too, Lukas trusts his septmates a little more to not need him at all hours of the night. Or maybe he trusts his packmates to take care of it if he's not there. Or maybe he's just learned to let go a little bit. To not always be on duty. To not draw the line so sharply between duty and idleness. To not always be so damn serious, so deliberately, self-righteously Responsible And Mature.
Still; it's not every night, even now, that he comes home to her. Last night, or the night before, he didn't come home. He texted her around dinnertime; something about cleanup and accompanying the archangel Michael up to the Elk Grove church. A few hours later: Going to make sure everything's secure up in the church while I'm here. Not going to be home tonight :(
Tonight, though -- the door opens. And Danicka peeks at him like she's not sure who could possibly be letting himself in. And she grins, and she looks absolutely adorable in her pajama shorts, and he finds himself grinning back as he shuffles his shoes off and drops his laptop bag at the breakfast bar.
"Only the first season," he says, and glances at the screen. "Oh, they're stranded on that beach. Wait til you see their raft."
He backtracks quickly into the kitchen; pours himself a glass of water. Then he comes to her, sitting down with a faint sound of contentment and relief, as though he's glad to be off his feet. His arm is heavy and familiar over her shoulders. She wriggles against his side. He kisses her temple, and then puts his feet up on the coffee table.
"Mate," he says, laughing a little: that same firmness echoed back, as though this were something to affirm and confirm.
[Danicka] Danicka's response to that particular text about taking an angel up to Elk grove got a simple O_< ? in response, followed by: Okay. :\ I'll take off the nightie then. :) when he told her he wouldn't be able to be home that night.
At least she's understanding. Or at least she's able to hide disappointment with a smiley. Maybe a little of both. They don't have every night, but it's a few a week, now. Usually. Not enough that she's used to it yet, really. Not enough that they've really settled into any kind of pattern together. Sometimes he comes home and she's already asleep, has been asleep for hours, and startles slightly when he comes into the room. Sometimes he comes home and it's two in the morning but she wants him to go to the 24-hour market with her and get an oven pizza and some really weak beers and watch a movie.
"Oh, I've seen all of it," she says. "Also, re: their raf: ew." She smiles at him while he gets water, asking him to pour her some iced tea from the fridge. It's some green blend, lightly caffeinated, and though it's late at night, that's what she asks for. Sips at it before curling up to him, inhaling deeply once of his chest and -- frankly -- under his arm before she turns her face back towards the screen, picking up the remote. "I don't want to spoil the second season for you, but that kid Octavian? He totally becomes Emperor Augustus," she says, with very serious wryness.
[Lukas] For creatures that fake being human so well, it's startling how easily animal they are with each other. Small wonder the angels mistook them for corruptors and destroyers: they are, in the end, such savages. Such beasts, red-blooded and vital and violent.
So: she breathes him in. He doesn't squirm uncomfortably away, or wonder if his deodorant is working. He laughs gently, and they sip their drinks -- tea and water -- and the show starts again.
"I had no idea," he says quietly, straightfaced.
They watch Pullo and Vorenus escape the island of doom, then. They watch them wash ashore, and Lukas says he always feels bad for Pompey, mighty old lion in winter that he is. He says one of his favorite scenes is the one where Pompey briefly comes alive again, talking to Vorenus about wars and battles, because you get a sense of who Pompey really is there. A soldier and a warrior; not a politician.
"Not a Shadow Lord," he says, half-ironic, and laughs.
Pompey dies at the end of the episode. Then the end titles are playing over calamitous music, and Lukas has slouched down a little more by then until the two of them are sprawling, are lazy, are relaxing.
"So I met the archangels Michael and Uriel," he says, rather conversationally, and out of the blue.
[Danicka] Multiple times, Danicka nudges Lukas and says SHH quite forcefully. Though she's seen it before. Though they both enjoy literature enough to have a lively discussion about metaphor and symbolism, about what you can learn about a character from a single moment in a scene, like the way Pompey explains the battle to Vorenus by drawing in the dirt, how easily he simplified it down to the basic movements and how easily Vorenus understood it.
Danicka shushes him, pokes him, at one point even puts her little hand over his mouth as she's sipping her tea, her eyes fixed on the screen.
At the end, he's slouched down, sprawled, lazy. She's curled up at his side, still, sipping her tea, which has perked her up a little. She peers down at him, her feet tucked under his side and her knees are to her chest.
Danicka's eyebrows lift slightly. "Oh?"
[Lukas] There was a time when Danicka would have never dared put her hand with its slender fingers and frail bones in front of Lukas's mouth. There was a time he would have never reacted the way he does now, either:
by snapping gently at her fingers, play-growling in his throat, before shushing and watching the show.
Then the credits are scrolling, and Lukas is talking about angels, and Danicka says Oh? and he turns his head to look at her without lifting it. "Yeah," he says, and smiles. "Well. Spirits born from prayers and mythology and belief in angels, anyway. Concepts and faith come to a sort of life. There were four of them. I only met two."
The smile fades, then. He takes another sip of water, then leans forward to set his glass down. When he comes back, he settles right back where he was, comfortable, if serious now. This is where he gave her her first gun. This is where she went away from him for the first time, fucking him, and where he stopped because he realized just to fuck her, just fucking her, was not what he wanted after all. Was never what he wanted.
"They had us confused with minions of their enemy, the demon Azazel. Because we're violent and bestial, I suppose. Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel came to kill us. We had to destroy them." A faint furrow between his eyebrows. "I had to destroy Uriel. He looked like a little boy, but he just wouldn't stop fighting. I think he couldn't. He was ... made that way."
A small silence, and then he shrugs. "Michael -- Meka'il -- was female. She was the only one that didn't wage war against us. She's up in Elk Grove now, at the church. I think she's leading the knights there. So there's that, at least."
[Danicka] She is a good listener, his mate. She has an interest in other people that for some time made her consider majoring in psychology rather than the electrical engineering degree she's working on now. He knows she keeps up other studies, but gave up on the idea of listening to other people's problems and investigating their minds for a living. He knows how shortsighted her goals can be, that a large part of why she chose this degree program is sitting in a climate-controlled safe in her study.
That safe was something she was quite pleased to show him, when she got it. She babbled for awhile about room temperature fluctuations and testing inaccuracies and said maybe when she studies more chemistry she'll find more uses for it, but she's become qutie adept at honing in on that moment when his eyes glaze a bit and his brain melts and suggesting some new line of conversation. There is a limit to how far one can extend one's interest, and she knows that quite well.
Because she's a good listener.
Sitting curled up, she rests her chin on her knees and then reaches down, stroking his hair idly while he talks, as though it is simply the thing to do when he's near her. Now he lets her. There was a time she thought he wouldn't, so she didn't try. In some ways, she's always been quite the defeatist. She isn't a pessimist, but often such a hardline realist that even his own seriousness balks at how hard, cold, and dark her view of the world can be. Even now. Even with as much good as she has in her life, Danicka's experiences color everything she knows.
Her brows tug together only slightly, when he says Because we're violent and bestial. It's true enough, but still. That frown flickers over her face, a beat or two before his.
Danicka knows a little about Elk Grove, but most of her knowledge is realmside. She's vaguely aware that there's some kind of spirits in some church up there, and they're very good, and they're called knights, but that's about it. She doesn't ask about how Michael can be Meka'il or female or any of that -- not because she doesn't care or wouldn't understand, but because in her mind it needs no explanation. Of all the things in the Garou world that Danicka seems to intuitively grasp even without detailed knowledge, it is the interaction and flux of various spirit broods.
This is the woman who meditates during storms, who prays to Thunder when she is afraid for the lives of those she loves, who sits in the yard at the den to talk to the oak sapling as it grows so that it may know her for as many generations as it exists past her.
"You killed an angel?" she asks quietly, with something not quite censure, nor disbelief.
[Lukas] Lukas shakes his head at that. "He killed himself. I offered truce twice; mercy once. He said he did not want my mercy. He would stay pure." That line stayed with him, and Danicka can tell by the way he says it: quiet, half-wondering. "And then he threw himself out a window."
He doesn't tell her about what came afterward. What the bargain was. He says this, though:
"But if he hadn't killed himself, I think I would have killed him in the end."
[Danicka] Another wrinkle in her brow; simply the idea of an angel killing itself.
The harder thing to explain -- rather than the brief flash of empathy, of disturbance -- is how easily, how quickly, she understands that line that sticks so hard in Lukas's mind. Her brow smooths as he says it, and she gives a small nod.
And then Uriel threw himself out of a window.
Lukas doesn't mention a bargain, and he doesn't mention the Angel of Death being summoned. He doesn't tell her it stripped him of the remains of the bandage he'd put on, or that it had wounded him half to death. He doesn't tell her that to make a bloody bandage, some of which he's given her, he bleeds himself to the last drop before shapeshifting and closing the wound, beginning the healing process back again. No matter how many times he's taken that sort of damage, no matter how many talens he creates,
it is not worth telling Danicka. He keeps his secrets, too.
Her fingers are in his hair. She says nothing. Perhaps there's nothing to say to that, for her. This is his life. He is an Ahroun. But after awhile, after stroking his hair for a few more seconds, Danicka asks: "Does it bother you?"
[Lukas] Lukas isn't sure why he's telling her, really. It's not that he wants forgiveness or absolution, or that he wants her to say something. On some level, he's telling her out of sheer bafflement: angels. On some other, it's because she's his mate, and this is his life. And perhaps -- to some degree -- he wants a little bit of comfort, too. He likes that she touches his hair constantly, strokes him. He likes that she listens without ever quite falling into the role of the passive little kin, the empty, mindlessly adoring mate.
He looks at her again when she asks what she does. No flippancy in his answer; no denial. Simple: "Yes." A moment later, "He wasn't evil. He wasn't ikthya. Or even deluded. He was simply obeying what he was, and what he had no choice but to be."
And a moment after that, "It bothered me more that Simon was so fucking gleeful afterward. He was there with us -- him and Christian and the two Bagmen, Penny and Greg. He and his Alpha fought another one earlier and nearly died, so I can't blame him for being sore about it all. But boasting about staying alive; bragging that anyone who went against him would meet the same end -- it was immature, hateful, remorseless, and shortsighted."
[Danicka] She flinches at that term. ikthya. It's a small, quick thing -- and he knows how well Danicka can hide things like that, how deeply she convinced herself never to show something like that. It's there, a flick of her eyes, a tightening of her jaw, a brief hesitation before she steps over a stumbling block and goes back to stroking her mate's hair, listening to him tell her about his week, and sipping her tea so that she can stay awake a little longer with him.
"He believed what he believed," she says, like she knows. "And wasn't willing to capitulate, even for his life." She tips her head to the side, watching him. "At least that's what it sounds like."
Danicka doesn't know who Penny and Greg are. But she'll remember their names, and that they were called 'Bagmen'. Danicka used to keep track of the names and dates and important figures in a half a dozen lives or more. She's an excellent liar with an impeccable memory.
"He is immature, though, love," she murmurs, as though to remind him. "Not to excuse it, but... he's a Shadow Lord Ahroun. And I have heard of or been introduced to a dozen like him ...and only one like you." She smiles faintly. "Perhaps you should talk to him about it."
[Lukas] Lukas laughs under his breath, then turns his head and kisses the heel of her hand, softly.
"I tried," he says. "I was angry, though, and I think he took it as a gesture of dominance. Besides," he's wry now, "it's hard for me to talk about a flaw I see without lecturing."
[Danicka] "Oh, darling," she says softly, and laughs as she does. "What do you think I meant when I suggested you talk to him?"
[Lukas] That gets a laugh out of him -- half-startled. "I always thought you hated it when I lectured," he says.
[Danicka] To that, she unfolds and leans over, setting her glass of tea down on the big black coffee table, then comes back to him. She crawls over him, straddling his waist, though it's nearly his ribcage the way he's slouched down to the point of being horizontal. And that's well enough: the couch is deeper than average, the cushions broad enough that they can lie comfortably side by side without the risk of Danicka tumbling off the edge should Lukas's circling arm go limp in sleep.
She perches atop him, eyes -- quite simply -- twinkling, regardless of that earlier flinch, those passing frowns. "I hate it when you lecture me, because I am your mate and not one of your Ahrouns or your Lords to boss at in the heat of battle," she corrects. "And I don't like to see it when you lecture without questioning what the subject of your lecture truly does and does not understand before you begin, because that is arrogance. It makes the subjects of the lectures hate you for that, rather than for what you really are trying to say or trying to accomplish by saying it."
[Lukas] There's a new, banked gleam in his eyes as Danicka comes to straddle him. His hands settle familiarly on the outsides of her thighs, large, strong, curving over her legs.
"You are my mate," he agrees, smiling, "and not one of my underlings."
Then he listens, and there's this to be said: whether or not Lukas is a generally good listener, he listens to Danicka. He takes her advice seriously. There's never the sense that he indulges her when he asks for her input, or when she gives it. There's no sense of condescension, of patronization.
She knows this. She knows, because when he's troubled, he comes to her. He asks. And she knows because:
well. He's her mate.
"So maybe I should ask him what he thinks first," Lukas says, thoughtful, "and then lecture him if he's being an idiot."
[Danicka] The arch of Danicka's lips curve as she watches the light in Lukas's eyes change. She could tease him for it, comment as she has a few times before on how he wants her, how easily and how quickly he starts desiring her. She could tell him what an animal he is, that as soon as her legs part -- even lazily, even sprawlingly, though she's rarely as loose-limbed as he is when he relaxes -- he perks up, as though some part of him is asking tiem 2 fuck nao? yes?
But she doesn't want to tease him, or tell him that he may as well have a wagging tail sometimes. She doesn't want to tell him that he's transparent. She just smiles, leaning over as he touches her legs so she can press a small kiss to his temple. She never smells of perfume; she never wears it. She smells clean and familiar, and it's at times like these -- when she's in simple things like pajama shorts and little t-shirts with her face washed and her books on the table and her dirty dishes in the sink -- that he might look back on the way he first saw her, so poised and so put-together and so goddamned elegant
and laugh.
Or look back on the first time he saw her in his bed at the Brotherhood, as though ready to curl up and sleep with her boyfriend, and realize that it was one of the first times he really saw her, was really comfortable with her, and she with him.
She smiles at him, and as she sits back up she gives a slow series of very serious nods. Her weight isn't fully on him; she won't let it be. "If it's important," she adds. "If in the long run it doesn't matter if he's the dumb jock of the Nation, then don't waste your energy. But if you think it's worth it --"
oh, how often that phrase defines each of their lives,
"-- then ask him why he thinks the way he does. You never know."
That said, Danicka bounces slightly on his chest. She's not miniscule -- the woman is average height, no shrimp, despite how vast the differential in their sizes is -- but she barely lets gravity have her, because however ridiculous it might seem, she is protective of him. "You wanna dance?"
[Lukas] That's a hard-won transparency in some ways. There was a time when she was poised and put-together and elegant, every time he saw her. There was a time when he would have rather choked on his own desire than let her see it. She saw it anyway, even then -- but not like this, so readily, so playfully, laughing when she smiles.
Then he's listening again. And when she finishes he's smiling again, though it's different this time, low and warm and fond. He reaches up and touches her face. She asks him if he wants to dance, bouncing lightly on his diaphragm. He mutters "oof" though he doesn't mean it, and then he brushes the backs of his fingers over her opposite cheek.
"Why don't you like it when I call you beautiful?" he asks: almost suddenly, and not really in answer to anything they've been speaking of.
[Danicka] His little 'oof' makes her laugh, a bright and sudden thing, tossing her head back a second. She puts her hands on his face and leans forward quickly, kissing his mouth. It lasts longer than she means it to, as soon as she has his mouth on hers. It makes her breathe in even as she's parting her lips to deepen it, but it doesn't spiral away from her into something entirely different. It lingers, and it softens, and when she lets it fade Danicka's eyes are a touch warmer, the amber in them more pronounced.
Her hands are still on his cheeks when he asks her that question. She blinks. "I don't?"
[Lukas] His eyes close to that kiss. His lips part with hers. They share a breath with the kiss, and when she draws back he smiles at her, looking warm and replete. I'm happy, he thinks to himself. Somehow, even now, that comes as a small surprise.
Then, quick, a flicker of a smile. "Well," he says quietly, "you didn't before."
[Danicka] Her head tips to the side, hair spilling over her shoulder, sliding around a bit. It's longer now than when he met her, but not by much. She goes to the salon often, and has reached a point where she likes her hair this length, and needs no spectacular variation. Danicka considers the question a little, now that she knows that this isn't -- necessarily -- a problem he's addressing, a sore spot he's mulled over.
She slides off his torso to his side again, but keeps her leg over his belly, leaning on the back of the couch and watching him from where she rests her head on the cushion there.
"I think it frightened me," she says quietly, after consideration. "Made me nervous. And... later on, I suppose, when I started thinking that this might go on for the rest of my life and not just til we couldn't stand it any longer, it made me sad sometimes to think that might be all you noticed."
[Lukas] He stirs a little when she slides off; twists his body to face her. His shoulders are wide. His stomach is hard under her thigh, the torsion of muscle there palpable and firm. He's warm, warm, his hand faintly rough with sword-callouses where it rests over her leg.
Not that he ever fights with a sword. But he spars with one sometimes with Sinclair, and Danicka knows the story behind that blade. Ancestral. Family heirloom. Given to him not by his father by birth but by his mentor; his father, one might say, within the Tribe.
There's a faint pull between his eyebrows when she says what she does. His hand squeezes gently, and then he exhales.
"Not too long after I met you," he says quietly, "I asked Sam what the hell he saw in you. He said you were beautiful." There's a pause there -- consciously or not, it mirrors the one that followed Sam's estimation of Danicka. "And smart, too. And kind of funny. And you were nice to him."
The very thought darkens his eyes, tenses his jaw. He thinks a moment, his eyes trailing idly to her collarbone, her sleeve. Then they come back to hers, a blue as arresting as any on this earth.
"Even then I was angry that that was all he saw. Even from the very start that was never all I noticed."
[Danicka] A wry twist of her mouth when he mentions Sam. Not a shudder, a darkening of her eyes. The Fenrir who stalked her is long gone. Even her relationship with Katherine, though still stiff, has mended somewhat. She's excellent at holding grudges and she has a long memory, but say this for her: she knows when to eventually let go, and she knows why to do so.
What Sam thought of her, what he saw in her and why he wanted her so badly, was even simpler than that: she had fucked him after it had been a long time since he'd fucked anyone, and she was pretty and nice to him. He 'fell in love' with any woman who paid him the slightest bit of attention, from what she saw and the rumors she heard.
Of course he never saw anything but appreciable beauty, tolerable intelligence, decent ability to amuse, and manners.
She nods the tightness in Lukas's jaw though, the way he recalls this. His eyes are sometimes blue as lupines of the darkest indigo. It strikes her, how penetrating they can be, how pale and cold they can go. She half-smiles. "I know," she says. "It was very early, that I was afraid of that."
[Lukas] Those eyes are the same in any form. She's seen them looking at her out of the face of a monstrously huge wolf, jaws dripping with the blood of some skinless shrieking thing he just tore to pieces in a cafe where
once upon a time, those same eyes looked at her with snapping fury cold as ice a second before he wrapped his fingers hard around her wrist and dragged her out onto the sidewalk to be beaten where
months later, a year later, those same eyes looked at her with no recognition at all because his mind was gone, his instinct was utterly savage and destructive, and she'll never know if it was will or sheer fucking luck that had him turning away to rend the vhujunka instead of her own fragile flesh and bone.
And now he's just looking at her, quiet and calm, a little sad the way he always gets when he thinks of those early months. He reaches out to touch her like he can't help but want to touch her, his palm on her cheek, on the outside of her shoulder. He leans into her and kisses her mouth, her neck, her upper chest at the very edge of her collar. He hasn't shaven in a while, and his beard-bristle scratches.
He rests his brow against her sternum for a moment. Then he lifts his head again, the smile slowborn across his mouth.
"Do you want to dance?" he asks, as though he thought of this himself.
[Danicka] Of course she's also seen them in bed with her, lit from behind before he closes them or pushes his head back like he can't stand the visual stimulation on top of everything else she's doing to his body. And she's seen them flicking with warm, lazy pleasure upon waking, as though he's vaguely surprised and happy to discover that the female he curled up to sleep with is still there in the morning. And she's seen them while he's laughing.
Or eating too many kolache, or darkening under furrowed brows because the kolache he tried to make didn't turn out so good, and why is the dough not taste the way Danicka makes it?
You're too strong, she explained to him, taking a piece off the too-tough pastry, which would be tossed rather than adorned with filling. If you work the dough as long as I do when I make them, it gets rubbery from all that force. Knead it more gently.
She wrinkles her nose in an amused farce of repulsion as he gives her that scratchy kiss, but it fades as his mouth travels around her, drifting down to her collarbone. He asks if she wants to dance. "Well not now," she says. "Now we're cuddling." She lifts a hand to twirl her fingertips in his hair, wrapping a lock around one finger then letting it go.
"Why'd you ask me that?"
[Lukas] Lukas has only tried to make kolache twice so far. The first time was one of the few times he woke well before Danicka did. He kissed her shoulder as he left the bed, whether or not she was too sleepy to remember it. He showered, and he went to the living room, and there was nothing on TV and the sun was already up so -- he decided to make kolaches, the way she taught him once.
Danicka emerged from her bedroom an hour or two later to find him frowning at a fresh-baked rack of incredibly tough, chewy pastries. I don't know what went wrong, he grumped, and she ran her hands through his hair and laughed and explained it and
somewhere in the middle of all that there was a whiteboard, and an Ahroun leaning against a kitchen counter frowning thoughtfully at equations and diagrams, and there were questions like wait but wouldn't yeast fermentation create more gas and but isn't it the same amount of work done if I'm just using less force over more time and where did you get a whiteboard from?
The second time he tried to make kolaches, they were in the den, and it was afternoon when he got there, and when she arrived he was taking them out of the oven, beaming because he got it right this time, but then the filling was incredibly sour because he halved the sugar from the recipe because they wanted me to put four cups of sugar in, baby! that's insane! and his eyes were wide with shock,
and the same clear, piercing blue they ever are.
Now they're cuddling. And he takes a breath and whuffs it out, animal-like, and he shifts and stirs and moves until they're lying out on the couch instead of sitting, and he's half atop her, his arms wrapped around her and his head resting on her the way she used to think he never would.
"Because I wanted to tell you you were beautiful," he replies, half-muffled against her t-shirt. "And I didn't want to upset you."
[Danicka] But sweetheart, you only put a couple tablespoons of filling at most in each one. It's not like four cups of sugar in each cookie.
These things they say to each other in sparing domestic moments, her arms wrapping around him from behind as he frowns at a rack of small rocks shaped like pastries, or smiling brightly because he understands something he didn't before. She's not a great teacher. She was never Yelizaveta's tutor, really. Breaking down the concepts of science and math does not come as intuitively to her as the science and math itself.
To his credit, Lukas is a patient and rather driven student. Even if they're just making kolache.
"Oh, love," she says quietly, with a bit of an ache in her voice now. Her back is straight, her side against the back of the couch, and Lukas leaning heavily into the hollow of her body, arms around her waist. It's tangled and warm, her legs akimbo, one over him and one tucked close between them. "It never upset me. It just ... used to make me uncomfortable sometimes."
[Lukas] "Used to," he repeats to himself, mullingly, and then lifts his head and smiles at her. "Jsi krásná. Ale to není důvod, proč jsem tě rád.
"Miluji tě, protože jsi jste Danička."
They lay like that for a while. Against her body, his is large and solid, the beat of his heart a low thunder in the core of his chest. She knows he's bound to a storm-totem. She knows -- oh, she knows, with the very marrow of her bones -- that they both belong to the storm. And these days, the hottest ending-days of summer, are when lightning storms sweep off the lake and crackle through the sky. They can see them now if they lift their heads: the low lines of dark clouds creeping slowly over the city, sometimes lashing the windows with rain; sometimes parting to reveal the moon.
"My mother," he says quietly after a while, "wants me to bring you home." He shifts, kisses her through her shirt, then lifts his head and props his temple on his fist. "Maybe for Thanksgiving this year. They've been asking for a while." A quiet laugh, "I think if I keep putting them off they're going to think I made you up."
[Danicka] Perhaps there's more to all of that business. Afraid, she said. Nervous. Scared. Uncomfortable. Used to, she says, but she doesn't tell him if she means he's exempt because he's him, or if she's grown, or... anything. The concern that he might see only her beauty seems to be what Lukas has honed in on the most, wants to make utterly certain she doesn't think any longer, but in all truth it was the most fleeting of any reaction she's had to him commenting on her beauty, or staring at it. It lasted a short while, a long time ago.
The discomfort, the nervousness. That was always there, well before she thought she might love him and wish him to love her back. And it is not clear at all why it would make her feel afraid.
She smiles gently at him as he says this, but with a sort of tender patience. "I know," she whispers, touching his face again, sweeping her thumb over his cheek. "I know, láska."
A few moments later he mentions his mother, and she startles at the kiss to the trunk of her body, laughing at the thought of it. He pulls away to prop himself up, her arms loosening around him but not entirely leaving him as their eyes find a more comfortable place to meet. Her hand rest on his chest now, his heartbeat a low thudding like booms of thunder far off the horizon.
She smiles. "Why have you put them off at all?"
[Lukas] Sometimes -- often -- he reacts to her touch in such thoughtlessly primal ways. It's the way he turns his face into her hand. The way he nudges against her, and presses his lips to her wrist, or nips gently at the heel of her palm. These things remind her as much as anything -- as much as the way he wraps his arms around her in the mornings and makes some wordless grunt of protest when she wants to get up and go to class; as much as the way his eyes light up with a quiet feral pride when he finds her, whether after a cross-city search or after turning over in bed -- that her mate is an animal. That he is half-wolf, and devoted to her.
He doesn't smile when she does, though. He thinks a moment, and then he tells the truth quietly and plainly.
"Because I don't like going home." He folds his forearm over her stomach, careful not to lay too much weight on her. "My parents are descended from ancient lines, raised in the old ways. Very traditional. Very, very strict about the line between Garou and Kin. I'm Wyrmbreaker to them now." He mutters a humorless laugh, "Sometimes I'm afraid I'll bring you there and my mother will want to know why you're not washing my feet every night or something."
[Danicka] An admission of truth, and one she could have guessed at easily enough. The home she was raised in they pretended at tender indulgences. Kinfolk were to serve obediently and quietly, to amuse sometimes, to fulfill all their many duties without complaint. Vladislav insisted that his sister and father call him by his name and his nickname, but that did not stop him from exerting his very real authority on them whenever it pleased him, no matter what endearments they used behind their closed doors.
She understands what he tells her about his family. She accepts without judgement that he says he doesn't like going home. It isn't relaxing for him, or pleasant, just a reminder of how deep the divisions between he and those who raised him go now.
But there is also this: she lifts a brow and quite dryly answers: "And I would tell her: because a Shadow Lord who must be reassured of his own strength by subjugating those weaker than him who do not defy him is not much of a Shadow Lord at all. And because you are neither a baby nor a Silver Fang to be washed, nursed, and catered to as though you are incapable of doing for yourself."
There's a pause there, and she settles into his arm over her, moving closer. "Though if you were quiet tired, and your feet were very dirty," she says quietly, just above a whisper, "I would wash your feet for you before taking you to bed."
[Lukas] Lukas laughs, and they move gently on the couch, shift around until he's lying beside her now on his side, his arm over her.
"I don't want you to wash my feet," he replies, just as quietly now, as though what they're saying is a secret even to her walls and her windows. "I'm very ticklish. But if I were quite tired, I wouldn't take it amiss if you decided to take me to bed and take good care of me."
He kisses her then: his lips to the tip of her nose. Gentle. A little playful. When he settles back, his eyes are fond, a little thoughtful.
"What happened that made you hate Fangs so much?" he asks. "I mean... besides the fact that the vast majority of them are entitled, overprivileged and useless."
[Danicka] She shifts her legs under him to make a sort of sloping pillow for his head, letting him rest on her thighs. "I wouldn't tickle you," she says, assuring him as though the very idea is horrible, terrible, she'd never do such a thing. And at the same time, she teases his ear as he lies down, fluttering her fingertips across it and behind it with a slowly growing grin.
"You're such a horny beast," she adds fondly, her hand stilling so she can curl over and kiss him. Her hair falls over his face, because she doesn't bother to tuck it back. It smells like her shampoo, herbal and... well. Something they share, when he's here. She puts it behind her shoulder again as she sits up, but not before he kisses her nose, which makes her grin again.
With him on her lap, she strokes his hair idly. Intuitively. Her hand pauses a moment when he asks her this, but she returns to the motion a second later.
"That would be the primary reason," she says, as though this is a light conversation. "But also because they're mad. No matter how controlled they seem, or the good they can do, they are out of their minds. They are given power, responsibility, and authority, and they are mad. If they checked themselves, or if others checked them with more than petty disagreements about tradition or leadership, it would be one thing. But they run rampant, and destroy everything and everyone around them because they are too sick to do otherwise and too goddamned selfish to acknowledge it."
Her hand is slow, her voice low. "As with no other Tribe, you can never trust them completely. You can never let down your guard entirely, because at any moment, they might dissolve into their own personal delirium.
"And they call it purity."
This, perhaps, is said quietest, and with the most weight. This is a lie. They call sickness and twisted natures purity. They lie. More than any Garou on earth, they lie to themselves and to everyone around them. And Danicka, of all people,
cannot tolerate it.
[Lukas] Perhaps once he would have found that ironic, that Danicka, of all people, consummate liar that she could be, could not tolerate deceit. That no longer surprises him, though. It doesn't strike him as a form of irony. The truth is, Danicka is not a liar by nature but by necessity. The truth is she learned to be very fucking good at it, but given the chance, given the opportunity --
she chooses honesty, now. She tells him so much that she doesn't have to.
He's quiet, though, thoughtful. There's a faint line between his eyebrows. He has closer ties to Fangs that she does. He has two sisters and a brother that are of that mad, twisted tribe. Some part of him is instinctively protective, and she can see her mate struggling to put that aside.
"It's true," he says quietly, eventually, "that most Fangs refuse to acknowledge their madness and their flaws, and insist on their ancestral rights of leadership to the detriment of all around them. But there are those who recognize their own madness and struggle against it. I respect them for it."
[Danicka] At the beginning, she told him that one thin she liked about him -- she did not say loved, could not have said loved -- was that he didn't lie to her. The only time he ever said anything that she knew was untrue was when he utterly believed it. He didn't attempt to deceive her. He seldom ever deceived himself. He didn't apologize when he didn't mean it.
Most importantly, he never promised her that nothing bad would happen to her, that if she was afraid he could stop the Bad Things from happening. He never told her the worst lies she's heard in her life. He never told her she would be safe.
Her answer to what he says comes easily enough: "And well and good for them. And for you, too, that you can choose to trust them."
She doesn't say the rest. That she will tolerate them for his sake. That she will try, for his sake. For peace, for simple fairness: she of all people can give others second chances, however long and perilous her memory may be. But there's no easy welcome in her tone, not even now.
[Lukas] What she says doesn't quite wipe the frown from his brow. If anything, it deepens it a notch. There's a pause, his eyes drifting past her to the ceiling, to the curvature of her wall of glass.
Then Lukas sits up, lifting his head from her lap. There's an understated sureness and power in that motion. He doesn't grab for the back of the sofa; doesn't push off her. When he's upright, he twists on the couch to face her, folding one knee sideways.
"I'm glad we can disagree without it being a meltdown," he says quietly, "but I still hate it when I disagree with you so fundamentally."
[Danicka] She wasn't frowning before, but her brow does furrow as he rises up. Her hand is still in midair where he was lying on her, before she quietly puts it in her lap again. The expression on her face is puzzled. And not pleased, though far from angry. "It isn't a disagreement, Lukáš," she says.
"Though when you pull away like that, it feels like more of a 'fundamental' schism." Danicka's quiet a moment, then just shakes her head. "I can't help what they've done. Or what they've taught me about their tribe. You've had a very different experience with them than I have. If nothing else, you have the strength and authority to check them when I don't.
"Calling it a disagreement suggests we've both seen the same evidence and chosen how to think about it. I've never seen the things you have that make it so easy for you to respect the ones you say have shown you a better side to their tribe's weakness. And I'm not so weakminded to believe as you do simply because you do, and you know that. I don't think you'd be with me the way you are if it were different."
She was frustrated for a moment. She eases back at the end there, and moreso when she goes on: "Baby, even now I see things like Katherine enjoying the power and terror she can wield on those weaker than she is. In the world you live in the changes she has gone through may be enough for you: she is better at doing the things that are important and necessary for your pack or the sept. But things are different outside of that war, and even with her -- who I know for you is one of the best of their lot -- it is not enough for me to believe I could trust her."
Danicka's voice quiets. "Though maybe you hate it and call it 'fundamental' because it isn't really about disagreeing or having different opinions," she says softly. "We are fundamentally different, no matter how much we love each other or how hard we work to treat each other with respect rather than control or fear. And... given what you said about your parents and going home just a minute ago, I wonder if that's really what bothers you about it. There's a line between you and I that we can sometimes bridge, but never erase."
[Lukas] Sometimes Danicka's astuteness startles him. Sometimes it's like she sees him so clearly -- more clearly than he sees himself -- straight through to the bottom.
He listens when she lays it out for him. That it isn't a disagreement because it's not even based on an assessment of the same facts. That if it's fundamental, it's only because they are, fundamentally, so very different. That when one comes down to the wire, there's a line between them that they cannot erase.
Just like there's a line between him and his parents. Him and his sister. Him and his loved ones.
That's when Lukas looks away, instinctively and reflexively. It's not something he can stop. A flicker over his forehead, a lowering of his eyebrows. A frown. He looks at the TV, which is dark now, the DVD played through to the end. His chest rises on a quick breath, and then he turns back.
"I do hate that," he says -- low, but with a quickness, an intensity. "I hate that we have to be ... so fucking careful sometimes, because there's no equality between us except what we make for ourselves."
[Danicka] It's excruciatingly painful. At the heart of it all, he is divided from those he loves most. He is a danger to those he wants most to protect. He is what he is, and he knows Danicka loves him as is...
but what he is can take him so far away from her, so easily. Without even death, without even frenzy, there is an intrinsic gap between them. He fights alongside Silver Fangs often. They play with him at the Loft. They have his back at moots, they listen to his orders. They struggle to keep a hold of their madness for the good of the pack. That is his world.
In Danicka's world, she watches Katherine Bellamonte walk through a nightclub full of humans, sees the bestial woman amused by their fear of her, sees that Katherine liked it, that it was part of why she slinked so slowly through the club in the first place, and she remembered
Katherine in this apartment of hers, coming through the Umbra because she could, because who would stop her or censure her?
Katherine sitting on a bed she ripped to shreds with her fangs, insisting that tying her crush down to the bed as though sweating out his addictions was right, that she was right, no matter what...
Katherine quietly acknowledging it as Lukas apologized for his mate as his mate stood there on the winter's solstice, as though it were her due to be appeased for the behavior of an insolent kin.
And there is nothing else to balance it but a few moments where Katherine has not taken advantage of her power, shown herself to have a gross miscalculation of the nature of reality. She doesn't know her as a sister grieving for her family falling apart, she doesn't know her as the Master of the Challenge or the leader of both Auspice and Tribe, she does not know that woman and the actions she takes in those roles that mean so much to all Garou
would mean very little to her in the end. Because she is not Garou.
It is painful to say to him, knowing how it will feel to him: we are different, and we always will be different, and there is nothing we can do. it will always be a struggle. it will always come between us. there will never be a perfect peace or understanding because we are so very, very different.
Danicka moves to her knees on the couch and wraps her arms around Lukas's enormously broad shoulders from the side, resting her chin on one of them. "Don't be angry at it," she whispers, with some earnestness. "It just is. I knew before I asked you to go see my brother for me that it would be like that. It's worth it."
[Lukas] The differences between them are so stark that they're literally writ onto their skins. Carved in to their bones. Just look at them: for all the heritage they share, they couldn't be more different. Danicka's so slender, so golden; Lukas, so broad and dark. Female and male. Kin and Garou. The list goes on, and on.
She wraps her arms around him, though. Kneels beside him and wraps her arms across his shoulders from the side, leaning into his arm. After a second he lifts a hand and covers her forearm with it, bending his head to the crook of her elbow, kissing her there.
She rests her chin on his shoulder. He tips his head to the side, lays his temple against her brow. And he closes his eyes when she whispers for him not to be angry, and somehow that tears at him too because it throws him back a year and a half, reminds him of her stroking back his hair and telling him stop, Lukášek, stop because he was angry then, too, and wanted to make it short and brutal and meaningless to kill any burgeoning spark of genuine, lasting attraction there was between them.
Worth it, she calls it. Worth it, he thought of her, so long ago that he doesn't even remember when she crossed from one side of that line in his mind to the other. Or if she was ever, for a moment, really in the not worth it pile.
"It's worth it," he echoes, soft, and his hand closes a little firmer on her arm.
[Danicka] Lukas says what she knew he would, and it makes Danicka smile gently as he tips his head towards her, as he kisses her arm, as he leans into her embrace as though no part of him, any longer, resists letting her nurture him a little. Protect him. And this is protective, the way she holds him and the way she asks him not to be angry even though that line is always going to be between them.
Though they can bridge it. They can keep it from growing into a wall. They can reach across it, even if they cannot change its reality. Nor would they ignore it; they are both deeply rooted in what is real, in what is actual, no matter what their ideals are.
"I knew you'd say that," she whispers to him, and kisses his temple, smiling still against his skin, her lips staying there as they curve out and upward.
[Lukas] Lukas saw the protective streak in Danicka before they were even properly lovers. He saw how she protected her friend, her roommate, and it infuriated him then because he didn't think Martin deserved it; he didn't think Danicka saw the whole picture
-- just the way she doesn't, and cannot see Katherine or Asha or Christian the way he does, simply because she is not and will never be Garou; and vice versa --
and perhaps to some degree a part of him was simply jealous, illogically and irrationally, because she would defend her friend with such loyalty and yet promise so little of it to him. But even then, some part of him must have admired her. Admired that courage; that loyalty. Admired that strength in her, who appeared so weak.
It was not easy for him to accept her protection, all the same. Even as he longed for it on some level -- that love, that loyalty -- part of him always associated protection with weakness. With needing to be protected.
It was not easy for him to accept that he could be protected without needing to be protected, just as it was not easy for him to let her hold him after they made love, and after she broke him to a thousand pieces and put him back together again. Just as it was not easy for him to let himself voice what she did to him when she broke him apart like that, and made him anew.
"You know me," he replies, quiet; affectionate, and honest. Then he turns his head and kisses her chin; tips his head up, kisses her mouth.
[Danicka] Strange, that Lukas simultaneously rejected the idea of Danicka protecting him so early on, while simultaneously refusing to let his guard down lest she use him. Expose him. Hurt him. Wreck his mind and his life, do what she did to Sam, when later he found out she didn't really do anything ruinous to Sam at all. Yet for the longest time -- maybe just a few weeks, in reality, but it felt so long -- he behaved as though this weak, slender woman could have some kind of power over him, could destroy him if he wasn't very, very careful with her.
Yet he tried to tell himself he didn't need protection. That she couldn't protect him. Hold him. Cradle him against her after sex and drowse with his head on her breasts, her hand in his hair. All of that.
Danicka breathes in as he kisses her, her arms slackening, her eyes closing. She moves again, crawling onto his lap while doing her best not to break their mouths apart, and spreads her legs over his thighs once more. The next thing he knows her warmth is settling against him, and her lips are parting to let him in.
[Lukas] Despite that earlier flicker of interest, of arousal, Lukas hadn't intended that kiss as anything but a kiss. He's not quite expecting her to move over him like this; not quite expecting her legs to open around his hips, for her weight and her warmth to settle
so intimately
against him. Her lips part, and so do his. He sighs softly against her mouth as she lowers herself on him, and then he's deepening the kiss, slowing it down, making it last while his hands reach under her shirt and open over the smooth skin of her back.
Lukas gets up, then. He lifts his mate with him, her weight ultimately negligible against his strength. He stoops to grab the remote, and the TV snaps off; the DVD player spins down. He hoists Danicka a little higher, until her legs can wrap around his waist, and the remote thumps down on the couch cushions.
The lights turn down. He carries her into her bedroom, which is beginning to feel more and more like their bedroom every time he comes here, and the drapes are still open. The light of the city and the stars and the moon reach in to them. He shuts the door to the rest of the apartment,
and he leans her back against the wall,
and he grinds slow and firm between her legs as he kisses her again, wordlessly now, as though all that needs to be said has already left his lips.
[Danicka] Tonight could be a night when he tugs her clothes out of the way and lays her in bed to make love to her. Tonight could be like other nights, when their lovemaking is a tender, firm, slow thing. Comfortable, in a way, making themselves sweat before they sleep, remembering each other's bodies. And it would be good. It would be one of the goddamn reasons this all ended up being worth it. No matter how they argued, they kept coming back together.
They haven't argued tonight. But it's been at least a few nights since she's seen him, and he's so very warm and so very big and as she kisses him she can feel his cock hardening underneath her, feel his hands spreading up over her bare back. And Danicka presses down on his lap with her hips, breathing a little harder as they kiss.
His hands move downward to grab her hips or her ass itself, lifting her against him as he rises, her legs going around his waist, all one smooth motion. "Leave it," she mutters, all but gasping the words as he's bending to the remote. She keeps his hands on his face, kissing him as he takes her to the --
hallway.
"Against the windows," she breathes, parting from his mouth a moment to look at his eyes. "It's supposed to storm again soon."
[Lukas] In the darkness his eyes take on a certain luminosity -- their sheer paleness, their sheer brilliance. He looks at her with his pupils wide, his chest moving with every breath, and when she says
against the windows
he gasps a breath out, leans in, kisses her again; hard. Then her back comes off the wall. He goes to the nearest window, thinking of that night in new york city, that city sprawled out beneath them like so many pearls, like the pearls that bounced against her chest every time she shuddered, and --
it's not that night. The glass is warm against her back. He leans her against the window, gingerly at first, as though afraid that it might give way, might allow his beloved, his mate, to fly out into the dark night; and then with greater confidence.
What words pass between concern the bare logistics. Here, he mutters, and lift your arms and hold onto me and oh, god. He pulls her t-shirt off, and these are pajamas, this is sleepwear; she's not wearing a bra beneath and he fills his large hands with her small breasts, covering most of her chest with his two hands as he kisses her, grinds against her, gasps against her.
He lets her down briefly. Lets her down and drops to his knees and whisks her shorts off, right down to the ground. His mouth is on the arch of her hip. The inside of her thigh. He pulls her knees gently apart with his hands and pushes his mouth against her cunt, shamelessly, just like that, growling in his throat as he goes at her while she stands over him, and while his hands tackle the buttons of his shirt. When he has it unbuttoned and whipped off onto the floor he pulls away from her, kiss her belly, kisses her breasts as he's standing again.
There's a startling, rising fervor in this. His hands are impatient as he goes at his pants. Undoes them, pushes them down, lets them sag between his calves as he picks her up, scoops her up, sets her against the window again,
harder this time, thumping hollowly against the glass as his body bears against hers. The glass is warm but his skin is surreally hot, and it's been a few nights, and she smells like summer and she smells like the night and
he's hard against her, long and thick between her thighs, grinding against her in hard strokes that make him groan and gasp as though he were fucking her already.
"I miss you when you're not with me." He's discovered words again. Mutters these; not romantic but raw, brutally honest. "When you were in New York I missed you so much I stroked off thinking about you all the fucking time."
-- and there's a laugh there, tattered and raw. His hands comb through her hair, drop to support her again.
"Take me inside you. Don't make me wait, láska."
[Danicka] Readily, Lukas changes direction, takes her across the living room instead to that magnificent view. Not a single window in this place is covered by shutters, blinds, or drapes. Not a single view is obscured, not a single pane of glass covered. It makes her cooling bill in summer obscene, to be quite frank. It makes the times she walks around naked or half-naked or wearing nothing but lingerie or one of those short silk robes she has all the more titillating.
It makes the sun come through her bedroom window and cast rainbows on the carpet from the prism. It makes the rainstorms always visible. It makes the sunrises and sunsets change the colors in her rooms according to the time of day, the season.
There's nothing to pull back or pull aside when Lukas takes them to the glass but Danicka's very clothing. Get it off, get it away. She helps him get her shirt off, tugging it up and over her head, tossing it aside, She doesn't say much of anything, breathing faster, kissing him often as she can, groaning slightly as he covers her tits and caresses them in his palms. She covers one of his hands with her own, holding it right there, moving it on her breast.
She laugh when he sets her down, and they go about helping each other undress, pulling at each other's clothes. He yanks her shorts down and she steps out of them as he's kissing her hip, parting her legs, and then her foot is on his shoulder and his mouth is on her cunt and she's leaning back against the glass, her fingers in his hair and her mouth open to gasp while he starts licking her, immediate and deep and enjoying the spreading heat flowing through her body.
What's left of his buttons come undone. What's left of his self control is quickly fading. Danicka climbs back up to him, legs around him again, grinning at him as he shoves his pants down so he can get his cock out
and against her. Oh, she moans, so soft, when he thumps her against the window, when he presses against her, stroking his cock along her cunt. And a second time, harder, Oh, as he's revealing just what 'I miss you when you're not with me' has always meant, at least in part. Danicka, who once told him to jerk off for her, to show her how he pleasured himself when he couldn't have her pussy, groans loudly when he tells her he was doing it again and again while she was gone.
Her hips roll, spreading her legs a little wider in answer to his plea that she not make him wait. She looks at him, her green eyes so dark with the moonlight and city light behind her, her breasts lifting as she breathes. "Do you feel how fucking wet hearing that just made me?"
[Lukas] That makes him groan, hard and rough. Her answer isn't really an answer at all -- just his mouth finding hers, a hard kiss that presses her back against the glass. Her taste is still on his mouth. Her breasts press against his chest, and there's something to be said for all that strength, all that breadth of shoulder and thickness of chest. He dwarfs her. He holds her up easily, tirelessly, and as she parts her legs wider for him he bows his head against her lips, looks down between them bodies to join them.
He's aware of how many days it's been, and aware, always, of how much smaller his mate is; how much more easily broken. Once, a long time ago, she sat him in a chair and fucked him with her boots on, and when she came down on him so hard and sudden he was afraid for her, held her up with his hands to slow her descent.
It's a little like that now. He has her caught between his body and the glass, his hand under her ass, her legs wrapped around him. He holds her with his fingers laced under her, bracing her up, and he finds the opening of her cunt blindly, like an animal: rocking his hips against hers until their bodies match.
Then he's lifting his head again. He's finding her mouth and this kiss,
this kiss is slow and long and luxurious, as slow and long and luxurious as his rocking, gentle entry. He moves into her a little at a time, a little deeper every time, opening her and filling her and ... his mouth parts from hers, trails down her neck. He bites her shoulder the way she's come to recognize by now, holding her with his teeth as though every instinct he has tells her to hold her just like this when he mounts his mate.
"Oh god," he's whispering, distorted against her shoulder. "Oh, fuck."
[Danicka] He's all over her. Pressed against her until she's all but crushed to the glass, which is warm but not that warm. Danicka makes a muffled exclamation as Lukas kisses her like that, an exclamation that dissolves into a moan again when he lifts her hip, tilting her hips towards himself so he can have her. Lukas isn't the only one working her onto his cock. And he does have to hold her back off of him if he wants to make it slow. She's sinking down on him -- or trying to, at least, whimpering softly as his head touches her opening.
"Give it to me," she's breathing in his ear, holding onto him as he holds her up, opening her mouth to gasp,
though he covers her mouth with his own and swallows that right out of the air between them, as though to soothe her while he rocks, so slow and so firm, pushing himself into her. Danicka's eyes roll back, eyelashes fluttering for a moment as a moan leaves her, filling his mouth, melting on his tongue the way she melts around his cock.
"Oh my god," to answer him, when he starts to kiss her neck, when he thrusts a little deeper, slides a little further into her, opening his teeth on her shoulder. "Oh, god, that cock." And she's said this before while making love to him, and if she hasn't said it she's thought it often enough, as though the feeling of him drives away memory of whatever else she's ever felt: "Jak jsem se žít, než jste začali kurva mě?"
[Lukas] As much as he craved that eye contact that she would not and perhaps could not give him at the start, Lukas loves it like this, too: their bodies fitted together, her limbs wrapped all around him, their heads nestled together and her moans soft in his ear every time he moves in her.
What she says makes him laugh a little -- a single stripped-down sound of appreciation more than humor, happiness more than mirth. He kisses her neck once, quick and firm, and his hands squeeze her ass gently before hauling her a little higher, bracing her between his chest and the glass and his hands. It gives him room to fuck her,
which is what he does, too hot for patience, really, no matter how slow he tried to take that initial penetration. She can feel his groan in his chest before he bursts quiet and ragged from his lips. He moves against her, thrusts into her, and his mouth falls to her shoulder again -- open, teeth set lightly against her skin, not quite biting down.
"Ano," is all he's saying now, whispered every time he moves into her. There's a city out over her shoulder; a lake, a sky full of storms. This high up, the wind vibrates the glass in its frame -- or perhaps that's just the impact of his body into hers, hammering her firmly to that wall of windows. "Oh, Danička, ano."
[Danicka] There's something namelessly thrilling about fucking up against the windows like this. There's no railing out there. There's no railing in here. There's little chance that they could exert enough force just by fucking to actually shatter it and tumble twenty-three floors to their doom, but there's still a sense of vertigo. Lukas can see it over her shoulder, past the lengths of her hair, illuminated now and again by lightning flashing in distant dark clouds.
In the beginning she tried once to look in his eyes. The first time, when he had her over him and was finally asking her to take him inside of her instead of demanding like this or open for me. Just...a sort of surrender, almost, to what was happening to them. What was really happening. Take me. So Danicka, riding him slow and tight the way she did, tried to hold his eyes when she came,
and he couldn't bear it. He closed his or turned away, as though he couldn't stand to see what was in her eyes or couldn't cope with showing her what was in his own. So she closed her eyes after that. She didn't try. And it happened over time, without argument or discussion. Sometimes he could fuck her, and watch her come while he was so far from his own orgasm that it was just Danicka, falling apart in his arms and quivering on his cock, her mouth open as she cried out, her eyes closed. Didn't matter if her eyes were open or not. He could see her. Straight through to the bottom, everything turned to crystal clarity for a few sharp, mindbending seconds.
There's no doubt at all who is fucking her. She knows his body as well as her own, remembers the way he feels, the way he ...well, bluntly put, the way he fucks. The particular roll of his hips when he thrusts into her, the rhythm she knows best, the muscles in his core that flex when he wants to move a little faster and is holding back, waiting for Danicka, waiting for her to arch her back a certain way and moan a certain way and beg him to fuck her the way she knows he wants to. The way it took him so long to let himself fuck her.
Like a goddamn beast.
They're as warm and wet together as the summer storms that are building and burgeoning outside. Danicka's shuddering as he holds her up a little higher so he can give it to her faster. Her cunt is squeezing him in fluttering little waves, and sweat's building on her skin, though the AC is on. "Oh, yeah," she breathes, incoherent, and frankly, not needing to be coherent right now. "That's it, baby, fuck me. Fuck my pussy like that. Make me come all over you," Danicka mutters, breathy and tipping her head back, shivering against him again.
[Lukas] This is a hard-won sort of clarity. A long rocky road to this sort of familiarity, this sort of attunement where he understands the language of her body. Where he dares to give in to her, or to what's between them, and give her everything. They are, after all, so very different, and for creatures that were quite literally made for each other, quite literally created by some progenitor-goddess for the purpose of belonging together, Shadow Lord to kin --
it was not easy to come together. To trust. To be. None of this was easy; but it was worth it.
And now they're coming together in the way they know best -- primal as storms, as forces of nature. They mutter things to each other that area at the edge of incoherence, and in the end there's little enough need for words. He can read her body. He knows that when she arches like that, she wants him harder. He knows that she'll twist her fingers into his hair when he bends to her breasts, and that she's squirm and writhe when he briefly holds her still to suck at her nipples.
He knows her heart trips when he bites gently at her breasts. He knows when he lifts her higher to hammer her, to give it to her, she'll wrap her arms around his neck and cry out, loudly enough that the spacious ceilings and walls of her apartment throw the sound back to them.
He's panting when he straightens suddenly. When he pulls her off the window and onto his body in full; when he laces his hands under her ass with her legs wrapped around his hips. He helps her move, sets the rhythm, groans every time she comes down. She's so fucking wet. He's turning his face up to hers, his brow wracked by what she's doing to him and what she feels like. He's kissing her again, snarling against her mouth, and
there's nothing held back in that kiss, or when it breaks -- this fuck. There's a certain rush in this. His eyes on hers, glittering and savage in the darkness. The windows at her back; the sense of space and emptiness. His two feet planted on the ground, and that's it, that's all the support they have. The sense of suspension; the sense of their fucking being their only link or anchor, until everything around him seems to peel back and fall away and become immaterial.
There's everything else, unimportant: and then there's Danicka. There's her golden hair swinging against his face. There's her body wrapped around his, her abdomen to his, her breasts against his chest. There are her arms, and her legs, and there's her cunt riding him, so tight and hot, gripping around him as he plants her on his cock, bounces her on it, fucks her until his mind is melting and he's kissing her again.
Kissing her. Leaning her back against the window. Leaning into her; holding her steady by the hips now; pounding her in short, deep, fast, heavy strokes.
[Danicka] "Ah!"
she cries out as he pulls her harder onto his body, fucking up into her with the strength that even among his kind, few have. And it's a half-laughing sound, the shock of sensation overcome almost instantly by a wave of pleasure. Make no mistake -- and he doesn't -- Danicka loves fucking him. Was willing to give up dignity and good sense to have this body of his up against hers, his hard cock inside her. She wanted him badly even before she had him.
Had him once -- four times -- and could not get enough. Almost every time they met she would roll over or turn around or lift her leg over his hip as they lay facing each other in bed and she'd fuck him again, til she was sore from sex and exhausted from orgasm after orgasm, til she no longer had the mental agility to think about how stupid what she was doing was, how if she kept being with him like that
and if it was that intense every time,
she was going to end up tied to him, or he to her, or both. And then she could be claimed by an Ahroun, challenged for and won, mated to him because she couldn't make herself stop wanting him.
And by the time she realized it wasn't just the way he fucks her, that a part of her she thought was withered was in fact alive and well and growing every time he was near her,
she didn't want to stop wanting him anymore.
"Oh god," she groans again, holding to his shoulders so she can ride him right back as he holds her up like that, fucking him as hard as she can with little more than her knees and her little hands to leverage her against him, gasping. "Fuck, baby, yes!" And he's hammering her now, giving it to her the way she asked for it, and the ceilings and the walls are echoing her back, a chorus of her ecstasy in his ears.
She looks at him as he holds her up, his brow furrowed with pleasure and exertion and everything else, and she gasps as he's pushing her back against the glass to really fuck her now, to fuck her til she comes for him, to fuck her fast and hard, to make her
moan like that, loud and head tipping back, clutching at him with her legs and her arms and her fingernails and her cunt bearing down on him as she jerks against him. That moan is almost a wail. That orgasm is hard and tight and yet not fast, not sudden. It unfurls for seconds on end, til she's working her hips on him to get more from it, steady rolls to stroke his cock and his abdomen against her clit.
The wailing moan shatters, splinters apart as it fades, but she doesn't stop moving on him. "Turn me over," she gasps. "Otočte kolem mě a kurva mě na podlahu, láska. Vezmi si mě od zezadu."
[Lukas] Something about the way she holds onto him, how she uses her thighs and her legs and her hands to ride him like a goddamn stallion, how she gasps and groans and yes!es her way through it -- that makes him laugh for a moment. It's a short sound. Breathless, almost soundless. More for the joy of it than any real amusement; more for the enjoyment of it, of her, than any mirth.
It doesn't make his eyes any less fierce. It doesn't make him slow down, or ease up, and then he's laying her out against the glass and even that momentary lightness is gone; they're kissing each other and clutching at each other, and when her head tips back as her orgasm starts to drag her under he puts his mouth to her throat
the way that she never used to be able to tolerate for long
and bites and nips at her, sucks at her breasts while she rides him and writhes on him and wrings that orgasm out of herself as much as he fucks it out of her. He's panting when she's done. His eyes glitter. She doesn't stop, and neither does he: fucking her hard and fast, with short solid pistons of his hips, the impact of his body into hers splintering the words she gasps out into hitches and shudders.
What she says makes him snarl. It's sheer animal lust. He kisses her; it's like a bite. Then he's pulling her up off the glass so fast her hair swings. He bounces her on his cock again, once, twice, three times, so fucking hard, and then he pulls her off his cock and sets her down and turns her around and
-- doesn't put her on all fours; no. Not yet. Turns her around, mutters "Ruce na ten skle, lásko." and when she does, when she bends over for him, thumps down on his knees and pulls her lips apart from behind and pushes his face against her wet, quivering cunt. He's only on her for a few seconds, but they're mindbendingly ferocious: his mouth mauling her cunt, mmmph!ing, fucking her with his face, licking up her cum like he wants to clean her up after that first, tight orgasm. For a moment he cranes to lick her clit, and yes, he sucks at that, too: wraps his lips around that electric little center of nerves and stimulates her with his tongue until he feels her knees shake.
"So fucking hot," he pants, drawing back. Drawing her down. Pulling her down, down, dragging her back over the rug, impatient now, every bit the horny beast she called him earlier, laughing.
He bites her shoulder when he gets her under him. He covers her on all fours, himself, one hand planted beside hers; his hand maneuvering his cock against her, sliding the head over her slit, slapping it against her clit a few times before
pushing into her. This time it's not slow. She's so fucking wet, and he's so fucking hard, and he can't wait: he grabs her hips and pulls her back on him, groaning rough and loud past her ear as he fills her up. Again.
[Danicka] They fuck athletically now, and they didn't used to. At least not to this point. He was afraid of breaking her, or hurting her, or going too fast, and she quite simply didn't have the strength or stamina. Not that it stopped her. She's too far gone to laugh with him, though, when her orgasm is cresting and she's wriggling in his arms and against his body and bearing down on his cock with those little ah, ah, ah! noises she makes when she's close, when she's about to come on him.
Even though she asked him to turn her over, Lukas's sudden withdrawl from her pussy makes Danicka yell, something like protest maybe, but far past the ability to use words to express herself. Her thighs are quivering when he helps her to the floor, and she's already turning around, starting to get on the floor, but he has her hips and tells her to bend over.
"Fuck," she breathes, planting her hands on the ground, her hips tilted and her pussy bared to him. Not for long. Not long, before he covers it with his mouth, licking her up like an animal, giving muffled groans as he rubs his tongue over her clit, sucks on it til her knees don't just shake but buckle entirely. She looks back at him as he pulls her onto the rug, gasping at the sight of his big hands grabbing her hips, dragging her back towards him, ready to plant her on his cock again, which even in this half-light she can see is slick and wet from being inside of her.
He's over her like a shadow falling, then, teasing her with his cock. When he slaps her with it she cries out, eyes closing tight and mouth opening with the sound of it. She starts to fuck even that intermittent teasing of his body, which is so very hard, and so very hot, and which her body knows and craves. Her body knows when he's inside her he's going to pleasure her. He's going to fuck her til she's a mess. He's going to fill her up with his cum and she's going to get to feel it and grind against him with it and some filthy animal side of her loves it.
Her hands grab at the carpeting when he slams back into her, holding her there for his pleasure, fucking her. "That's it, baby," she mutters, opening her legs so he can fuck her more deeply. "Give it to me. Just like that. Fuck me."
[Lukas] Almost unrecognizable, these creatures they become. In public Danicka can be so cosmopolitan, so put-together, such a city girl; Lukas can be so stern, so fucking serious, Alpha of this and this and that.
And then: this, in the privacy of their own homes. The masks come off, shed with their clothes. The pretenses. The veneers, the control, the restraint. This is what's left, this raw twisting core, the way they go at least other like the animals they are. Her legs are opening for him. She's on all fours and he's covering her like a beast. In the glass they can dimly see their reflections superimposed over that fantastic fucking view of the city, all those glittering multicolored lights that wash back on them and cast them into ghostly relief:
him over her, so much larger and darker, his shoulders wreathed in muscle. Taking her from behind, mounting her and gripping her shoulder in his teeth, and even that's something she's grown to recognize: the way he holds her with his teeth, the way he grips, gentle but firm, never hard enough to break the skin, while his cock slides into her, hot and heavy, slick with her wetness.
Fuck me, she says and he growls a response that's not even remotely verbal. His teeth come off her shoulder for a moment. He kisses the side of her neck savagely, licks at her earlobe, her earrings if she still has them in. Then he's bending to her, kissing the center of her back as his hands come down on either side of hers, bracketing her under his body entirely.
He likes fucking her like this. Let's be honest: he likes fucking her, period, but he likes being atop her. He likes it when they look into one another's eyes, but he likes it like this, too, so primitive, so feral. There's a raw primality in it; a sort of thrill, a power and a protection in one. The sky could fall on them and she would be protected. He's all around her, his mate, and inside her, and
those noises she's making, the gasps and the cries, the way she's fucking him right back: he has something to do with that. He has everything to do with it. He's giving it to her. He's giving himself to her, and
she loves it. Which is somehow more intoxicating to him, more arousing than everything else combined.
Lukas slides his hands under her palms, the way he did in the forest, over a year ago. His mouth is on her, all over her, kissing her skin and nipping at her flesh, and he's pounding her with hard, athletic bucks of his hips. Their bodies slap together. He fills her again and again, stretches her cunt with every sliding pound of his cock, rails her while his fingers spread to let hers between, to let her hold onto him, hold onto something, while he takes her
right to that screaming edge again, groaning in her ear as she's taking what he's giving her, muttering incoherently about that sweet little pussy and so fucking beautiful and love fucking you and to mě poser, kurva že kohout until it all runs together and distills down to the simplest of imperatives, or pleas, or ritual fucking chants:
"Come for me. Come for me, baby. Přijít celého přes toho velkého tvrdé kohout."
[Danicka] She can't remember the first time he took her like this -- bent her over, covered her, groaning as he fucked himself deeper into her -- but she remembers how it felt. How for the longest time she wanted him to cut out the bullshit, stop biting his tongue and swallowing his snarls. How she wanted him to just be what he was, prove that he wasn't afraid of her seeing him like that, let her have him the way she was letting him have her: entirely.
His hands come under her palms and Danicka feels a wave of tenderness in the midst of everything else, those hotly burning feelings that come from emotion and sensation alike. She rests her hands on his and turns her head to nuzzle him suddenly, forcefully, without rhyme or rhythm. She kisses him if she can, opening her mouth and gasping into his, slamming herself back on his cock as though to wordlessly ask him for more.
Their fucking -- because sometimes it is that, as much as it is lovemaking, simultaneously sweet and wild -- is forceful and energetic and somehow even playful like this, like two wolves tumbling together, even though Danicka has only the barest traces of Lukas's own lupine nature. She's sweating, and he could taste it when he kissed her back, feel the heat in her rising to her flesh in response to him. For awhile Danicka's just gasping, panting for air while he mutters in her ear about her pussy, her beauty, how she makes him feel, what she does to his cock.
"I want you to fill me up," she breathes, suddenly, shuddering around him. Her head drops, hair falling forward. She falls forward on her elbows, taking him deeper and groaning from it. "Oh my god, I want you to come inside me."
[Lukas] This is, indeed, a fuck.
They've never been ashamed of that. Whatever else, they've never been the sort to hide behind false modesties. The first time they fucked, he stripped the bed, kept all the lights on. He did that for a number of reasons, many of them unkind, true, but certainly not for modesty. She's seen him get out of bed after they've made love to go to the kitchen stark naked, returning with water, drinks, food -- heavy, filling food for his mate that she'd only nibble at, and even that to satisfy his sometimes irrepressibly strong urge to provide -- without a hint of shame.
She's seen him stand naked at the window, looking down at the city; or at his alley view. She's seen him making omelettes and toast in the mornings, his hair still wet from a shower, wearing nothing but a towel. Around his neck. Sometimes not even that.
No, shame and modesty isn't part of their language. The filthy things they say to each other are. The way their bodies move together, hard and athletic: that's part of their language, too. An expression of who and what they are, as much as it's an expression of what they are to one another.
This, too. When he reacts to the turning of her head with a kiss so hard and immediate that it takes her breath from her for a second
only to give it back from his lips. It's a paradox: the rhythm of his cock slowing when he ravages her mouth like that; and then the kiss softening, deeper, growing gentle and long and sweet while he starts pounding her again. It goes on until their can't hold that kiss anymore. Her head drops. His mouth kisses her hair, kisses her neck, finds her shoulder as she's saying
fill me up.
come inside me.
He bites her then. With a low, rough sound in his throat he bites her, and his fingers close around hers, pull her hands over the backs of his to grip onto him. His biceps are hard against the outsides of her arms; his forearms as solid as wood, as concrete. His chest to her upper back, his abdomen flexing against her lower, he hammers her: unrestrainedly, ferociously, snarling on every thrust.
An animal. Fucking her, running down pleasure like prey. She knows the way he sounds now, the noises he makes when he's close. She knows the way he bites at her, knows from the way his teeth seize her and from the way his cock strokes hard and deep and solid and fast into her that
he's going to come, just like this.
Panting growls against her skin. Tattooing them into her with the grip of his teeth. Not even a moment of electric stillness this time: just one breathtakingly hard slam of his hips into hers at the instant of climax. Then he just keeps fucking her, hammering into her from behind, pumping his cum into her thrust after thrust until his mind falls apart and his strength gives in to gravity.
He bears her down beneath him then wrapping his arms under hers, against her sides; his hands looped up over her shoulders. He carries his own weight -- but only barely -- and stays close to her, his chest pressing against her back, keeping her close. Covering her, and all but trapping her between his body and the floor.
Now and then, irregularly, he flexes into her. Gasps a moan every time. He kisses her back and the side of her neck; her mouth if she gives it to him. He's strangely overcome -- perhaps from how hard and fast this escalated, the few and not-quite-logical steps taken between walking in the door to find her watching the adventures of titus pullo and lucius vorenus
to this.
Eventually his breathing calms enough for him to survive without kissing her. He turns his head, his temple against her hair. City lights are a vertical blur at this angle. He's quiet atop her now, his heartbeat a deep rhythm against her back. He stays inside her. Of course he does.
[Danicka] And Danicka's... well. She walks around naked in her apartment because she could never do this at her family's home, she could never do this with the Sokolovs. The first time she stripped off all her clothes while high and drunk down in New Orleans after Lizzie had been put to bed she discovered it felt remarkably, deliciously liberating. And now she lives alone. Not with Martin, who probably would have made some snarky comment to disguise his lust. Not with Liadan, who probably wouldn't have cared but would have felt bad about herself as a result. Not with Paul, who would have been distinctly and vocally uncomfortable.
This is the woman who has no shame about grinding her cunt onto his face when he gets on his knees, even back when it still surprised her every time he wanted to eat her pussy. Even when it was the last thing she expected, she put her hands in his hair and rubbed herself on his tongue, taking what she wanted from him.
And ultimately, taking nothing at all, really.
Danicka comes again, but it's a soft, aching thing compared to Lukas's own. She works herself on his cock even as he's thrusting himself into her. They fulfill some of the most obvious stereotypes without thought: he large and brutal and ferocious, she sweet and tight and demanding. And they don't: she's nothing like submissive and he's not even dominating her, really. She asked for this. She wants it. And not because of some roleplay of sexual roles.
Just because it feels sofuckinggood like this, and that's what she moans when she's coming, her face just inches above the carpet and his cum filling her as he fucks himself harder into her pussy, grinding at the end, feeling her clenching, rolling orgasm all around him. Danicka's wet, still. She's horny, still, or she wouldn't have gone from cuddling with him on the couch to making out with him to, a split second later, finding him picking her up because it wasn't enough to make out or grind a little on the couch but because he needed to fuck
and his female was warm and receptive and asking for it, rubbing herself on him through their clothes as though to mark him with her scent. His female was in heat.
Is.
Danicka is breathing heavily under him now, too drowsy to kiss him back, though her eyes close and she tips her head to accept his kisses, to invite more, exhaling raggedly as he does so. She moves back against him a little as she's coming down, after her heart rate has slowed a little. She shivers, but not from the cold, and murmurs: "Good christ, what was that?"
[Lukas] Which makes him laugh -- low; lazy. Or perhaps not lazy. Simply: relaxed. Slowing. Blood slowing, breathing slowing, thoughts stirring slowly back to life. He rubs his cheek against her: her hair, her ear, her cheek, whatever he can reach.
"Incredible," he answers, a whisper, and she can feel his smile against her skin.
His hands are moving now, his palms rubbing over the fronts of her shoulders, then moving on to fold gently, even thoughtfully, over her breasts. And onward: crossing over her chest, clasping her against his. Lukas turns his head, and he kisses his mate: her neck, the corner of her mouth.
For a creature so large, so overtly and explicitly strong, he can be shockingly gentle. Not merely with her, but with his packmates, too. And some of his septmates. With those weaker than he is, who are not in truth weak. There's a difference there, just as there's a difference between kindness and pity.
It's with her that that gentleness is most pronounced, though, and most unguarded. He kisses her now, and nuzzles her. Pauses here and there. Grazes his lips and his teeth over her, soothing, mammalian. There's a subtext of caring here, of caretaking, as though having mounted her and fucked her and filled her so thoroughly, he should take care of her now. Of course he should take care of her. Of course. He should protect her, and nurture her, and make sure
that come spring, there will be cubs, and those cubs will grow up strong like their mother.
A deepdrawn breath. He flexes into her again, like he wants to remind her, or himself, that they're still joined. That he's inside her. He sighs past her ear, then kisses her jawline again. Softly.
"Nechci se pohybovat," he whispers, only half-joking. "Měli bychom prostě spát tady."
[Danicka] He considers everything. Every move. Every packmate. Every decision, every word. He judges and weighs like a Philodox, and why not? He was half-raised by one. Danicka is the instinctive one, the one who moves with whatever instinct her gut gives her to work with, who fucks when she's horny and eats when she's hungry and hides when she's scared and pistol-whips a dead vhujunka when she's traumatized and angry.
No wonder with her, Lukas doesn't think so much about what he's doing anymore. Strokes her body without hesitation, without really any purpose other than to fulfill the desire to touch her, to remember with his palms these are Danicka's breasts, and they are soft and they fill my hands, or this is her flat belly, her smooth skin, the beginning curls of hair between her legs, and this is her pussy, where I am inside her.
His instincts lie to him, though. They tell him he has filled his female with his cum and so after time, and time, and time, spring will burst out over the earth and the days will grow longer and hotter and
one night, when he comes back to his fat and sleepy mate, she will not be so fat and she will be very sleepy and there will be a small one sleeping next to her, and he will know it is his because his blood and his nose and his very soul will say mine! mine! my! mine!
But that isn't what will happen. Not because of tonight, at least. Not as far as either of them could possibly guess. She was on birth control the second time she got pregnant, she said. She comes from a line so fertile there's not a Garou who meets her who doesn't find their minds turning to breeding, to springtime, to the cubs that aren't but could be. Lukas has it worst of all. He knows what her body could produce. He feels it every time he's in her. He knows it when he sees how goddamn vicious she is in her protectiveness of him. He sees it in her eyes, smells it as he rests beside her.
And he has seen the eyes of his children. Heard their voices. He may not believe in fate and he may realize that those children were taken from his own mind and imagination, the depths of his own thoughts and not from some vision of the future, but Lukas has in his heart the knowledge of watching his cubs grow and their mother raise them.
So his mind turns to springtime, and breeding, and the cubs that will be safe and strong because his mate is strong, and because he keeps her safe and makes sure she has enough to eat, is kept warm when it's cold, is given water when it's hot. Because he takes care of her, his instincts lie to him, and make him heartbreaking promises.
She nuzzles him, rocking with him as he thrusts into her, making a soft mmm sound behind her closed lips, drowsy from orgasms, from fucking, from being, well... tired. She drank tea so she could stay up with him. So she could be with him.
"To je pošetilý nápad," she chides him. "Budeme narazíte dohromady."
[Lukas] "Je mi to jedno," Lukas whispers as they nuzzle each other; as he, eyes closed, rubs his nose and his mouth and his cheek over hers, and through her hair. "Nezajímá mě vůbec."
Distant thunder through the glass: her apartment so well-insulated that the sound is so dim that they could mistake it for one another's heartbeats. Could -- but they wouldn't. They are the children of the storm, after all.
And when lightning flashes over the lake, and thunder rolls in to shore, and a soft warm summer rain begins to wash the glass, Lukas's eyes open again. He watches the storm through the windows. Watches the city lights blur and clear through strands of rainwater weaving down the glass. His mate is so sleepy, so drowsy. He's not, but he is calm now, clear-eyed and quiet.
He thinks of going out on the balcony. Standing naked in the storm, rainwater mingling with all the other fluids on his body. He remembers opening his mouth to the rain as a child, long before he really understood the ancestral affinity his people had to the storm.
He thinks of Danicka, growing up across the city from him, existing parallel to and outside his immediate existence, and he turns and presses his lips to the back of her neck.
They don't stay there after all, no matter what Lukas said. Eventually, his arms loosen around her. He presses his palms to the carpet and pushes himself up, bowing his head. He's careful, drawing out of her. His hands rub up and down over her back as he sits back on his heels, and when she turns and sits up he smiles mutely at her. Holds out his arms.
Perhaps she comes to him. If she does, he wraps his arms around her again, draws her onto his lap. His back curves as he bends to her, resting his brow against her shoulder.
"Moje samička," he murmurs.
celebration.
9 years ago