yankees, cats, living together.

[Danicka] For no reason at all, and with no communication on it whatsoever, Lukas and Danicka end up at their home tonight, within just a few hours of each other. She left class with Jesmond and got some tea before the two women separated and went on with their respective days, but Danicka lives a life of -- if not ample luxury -- quiet peace, most of the time. She has a great deal of time to herself where from birth to twenty-five she had almost none at all. The time has not come yet where she feels the need to find a job or fill her days endlessly.

Danicka reads a lot. She spends time in her study-cum-laboratory tinkering with the so-called 'toys' ganked from the Vhujunka. She still plays World of Warcraft far, far more than she ought to. She works out and she suns herself. She swims. She takes naps. She goes on long walks and sees movies, theater. She goes to the zoo and museums. She makes new friends and they go out on excursions. She goes dancing. Last week she took a salsa class and absolutely loved it.

Text messages go back and forth now where once upon a time she and her mate-then-boyfriend rarely spoke at all when they weren't together. She tells him random things she sees. She sends him cameraphone pictures occasionally when something strikes her fancy or amuses her. A couple of days ago she called him around the time she thought he might be heading to bed and talked to him for maybe twenty minutes while he was lying on his mattress, arm folded behind his head and the window open.

I'm not tired, she said, while yawning, though it was nearly dawn and she'd woken up specifically for this purpose. Fondly, softly, he called her a liar, and it says something that she just laughed quietly and said that if she wouldn't crash the damn car she'd come over and just go to bed with him.

They like waking up to each other. More and more they find themselves almost needing it, craving it, finding no reason at all to delay it.

But tonight, on the beginning crest of August, there were no text messages saying I'm going to do some gardening; you should come over. No phone call telling him she'd bought some little tools and was going to carve Perun's symbol into the roofbeams in the attic to protect the house from lightning, or that she planned on staying there the night.

By the time the whim takes Lukas to drive out to Stickney instead of going back to the Brotherhood, Danicka's been there for awhile. There is a carving in the roofbeams in the attic. The garden has been watered and tended to. She's done some vacuuming and dusting and changed the sheets on their bed, and she's showered, and she's on the little back porch in a blue camp chair that has a yellow daisy on the back. She has a glass of iced green tea close at hand, and all the lights are off but the one in the kitchen, which shines through the screen door and the window to illuminate the book she's reading.

He knows she's there, though, long before he comes inside. Her car is in the garage, forcing him to park in the driveway. And she knows he's there, too, as soon as he arrives; the garage door opening is loud and rattly, like any old house along this street. But though she smiles to herself, turning a page, Danicka doesn't get up to meet him. She waits for him.

[Lukas] They have a strange little house, if one is honest about it. Small and square and blocky, with an awkward little addition in the back; set up on a half-basement with the front door situated more toward the side and the back. A half-flight of stairs right inside the door, because someone didn't have the basic architectural sense to put a porch out there.

Lukas loves this place, though. They don't talk about it, and they might never at all, but he knows she loves it too. Their handprints are on the wall. Their scent fills the interior, and only theirs. In the attic, there's a symbol of Perun now. Maybe he taught her how to make it, crafting storm feathers some night. Maybe he taught her when they planted the oak. Or maybe she just knows -- picked it up somewhere along the way, from someone or other or from her own vivid curiosity.

It might be months before Lukas sees it. He doesn't go up to the attic much. They have no reason to; there's more room here than they could ever fill, and the basement alone is ample room for storage. But one of these days, he might go up into the attic, might open up the little trapdoor to awaken the frame of the house so as to make it stronger, or ...

he'll see it then. And passing his thumb over the carving, he'll smile to himself and feel such a wave of adoration that he, quite frankly, won't know what to do with himself for a moment or two.


Tonight, though: he parks his car in the driveway because her car is in the garage, and though the garage nominally holds two, they have a gas-powered lawnmower in there now, and a trimmer, and a whole bucket of gardening tools. Lukas keeps meaning to put up shelves and hooks and other things to suspend them off the floor, but -- well. He hasn't gotten around to it yet.

So the garage rattles open, and then he sees her car and it rattles shut again. He leaves the M3 in the driveway, and if Danicka listens carefully she'll hear him unlocking the front door; heading up that half-flight of stairs. He calls something inside, but it's muffled through the walls. He might've gone upstairs if he hadn't seen the kitchen light, but he does. So it's to the kitchen he goes, to leave his keys on the counter and grab a little juice-box out of the fridge. Treetop apple juice. He buys it because he likes them, even though they're hardly more than two or three mouthfuls for him.

Then it's out the back door, pushing through the screen door and out onto the little concrete porch that, for no discernible reason, the same architect decided to put out here, but not in the front. The night is warm. He pauses a moment to insert his straw in his juicebox, and then descends the stairs and comes up behind her and leans over her shoulder, his hand warm on the opposite shoulder,

and kisses her. Warmly. Lightly.

"Hi," he says. He pulls up a lawn chair at right angles to her, and then, with little ado, pulls her feet onto his lap. Summertime. Crickets are calling in the night. This far from the heart of the city, when Lukas tips his head back he can see stars. His hand cups over her ankle. He points up, smiling. "Look, Slalom Bunny."

[Danicka] Perhaps on another night she would have set her glass on the porch and gotten up out of her chair and trotted up the steps to, at least, meet him in the kitchen. But Danicka is not a puppy waiting at home for him. He didn't even know she was going to be here. But there she is in her chair when he comes out of the kitchen and takes a few steps down to the raised, deck-like back porch that, itself, has steps going down to the back yard.

She smiles at him, closing her book, and she is smiling still when he leans over her, smiling when she tips her head up just a touch, so that their mouths can meet. It's a soft kiss, almost achingly tender, and her eyes are a rich, gleaming dark green when he pulls back.

Seeing what he means to do when he sits, Danicka leans back a little so that Lukas pulling her feet up won't tip her and her chair. Her smile grows to a lopsided grin briefly as she settles her bare feet on his lap, watching him rather than the sky. Her eyes flick up at the made-up constellation, and she laughs. "You're a dork," Danicka says gently, and sips her tea. "I didn't know you were coming over tonight," she adds, still smiling.

[Lukas] Lukas sprawls in his chair, the leg he balances her feet on bent at the knee to give her a flat surface; the other outstretched. He finishes his juice in the expected three gulps, then crumples the carton in his hand and leaves it on the sidetable. When his hand drops, his fingers brush the deck, which is still warm from the day's sunshine. It feels nice. It feels organic, and living, and alive.

She laughs, and he smiles. He turns his head without raising it, looking at her fondly. "I didn't know either," he replies, his thumb tracing an arc over her ankle. "And I didn't know you were coming," he adds. He sounds like this pleases him somehow: finding her here when he didn't expect to.

He looks up at the sky again. The night sky of summer is consummately different from that of winter. And it's be said, and said, and said, but let's say it again anyway: Lukas is a creature of winter, but he loves the summer season. He loves these stars in the clear, warm sky. He loves their patterns; Orion in the west and Cassiopeia overhead, Slalom Bunny swishing its way between.

"It's nice out here," he says. He breathes the night air. He rubs the soles of his feet over the wood of their deck. "I just felt like coming out and sleeping where your scent was in the sheets."

[Danicka] "It's quieter," she says, perhaps in agreement, though then she has to pause for a moment. Her apartment is so well-insulated she only hears the city if she goes out on her porch. "It's a different sort of quiet," she adds, which is also true.

She sips her tea and puts it in the little cupholder that lives in the arm of the camp chair, wriggling her toes where he holds her legs and her feet on his lap. He's looking at the sky and she's looking at him and he's saying he just wanted to be where her scent was in the sheets. That makes her laugh softly. "I just changed them."

But that's alright, because she'll be staying here tonight and he'll have her, rather than just her scent, to keep him company in their bed. "I also had to dust, and check on the plants. I try to come out here every few days at least to take care of the place," she goes on, sounding sort of musing as she looks at ther tea, and the book on her lap. "I don't want to show up one day and find what looks like an abandoned house."

[Lukas] He smiles at her again then, slow and warm. He doesn't smile like this at anyone else; not his family, not his pack. The first time he smiled like this at her

-- was a long time after he first met her. He did not trust her enough to smile, at first. But when he did --

it made her ache. Because they didn't know what they were doing to each other, then. Because falling in love was just that: a sort of falling, a sort of freefall, at once terrifying and exhilarating and deadly.

"I wouldn't let our den go to ruin," he says softly. And, "Neither of us would."

[Danicka] She promised him she wouldn't let them forget each other. No matter if they had children, if they had half a dozen little things to name and raise and worry about. And he promises he wouldn't let their den go to ruin and somehow this strikes her as a more difficult promise to keep, though all it really takes is showing up and running a duster over the shelves and watering the garden and doing the routine maintenance that keeps a house from falling apart.

Danicka just watches him quietly for awhile, thoughtful. Maybe there was vodka in that iced tea, who knows? She seems mellow, seems slowed down -- though perhaps it's just the quiet of the neighborhood at this hour, free from random gunshots or sirens or noisy neighbors.

"In any case," she says, trailingly, because truly she can't think of anything else to respond to what he just said with. It isn't deep enough, this conversation, or perhaps the peace she feels here is deep enough, to keep stronger waves of emotion or reaction at bay. She is happy with the quiet, and leans back further in her chair, content with this heavy silence, this easy companionship.

[Lukas] So that's what there is for a while. Heavy silence; easy companionship. He looks at her a little longer -- not scrutinizing or inspecting, but simply that. Looking. Seeing.

There's something animal about that regard. Humans are trained not to stare like this. Humans would feel uncomfortable giving, or receiving, a regard such as this, and if she were not his mate he would not do this because he too is trained, is well-versed enough in the ways of humanity to know better.

But: she is his mate. And he looks at her because ...

well. There's no reason, beyond that he wants to. Likes to. After a moment, his hand lifts from her ankle, leaving a patch of coolness in counterpoint to the warmth of his palm. He holds out his hand for her ice tea in wordless request, and if she hands it to him, takes a sip before passing it back.

"The Yankees," he says, a lopsided smile curling now, "are coming to town last week of August. I'm totally getting tickets. Do you want to go with me?"

[Danicka] There were things Lukas learned about Danicka early on based solely on how she reacted to him. He could tell from how she went limp when grabbed or curled protectively around herself when threatened that she had been hurt, and repeatedly. He could tell someone had made her pay for her existence dearly.

But long before that he could tell that she was used to being looked at. Stared at, scrutinized, inspected, drunk in like water. Maybe it's because she's beautiful and maybe it's because she's both beautiful and purely bred and maybe it's because she's all these things and also a survivor of some truly heinous situations, but Danicka has learned to quietly accept it when she is looked at. Even like this.

Neither of them are human but she's closer to it than he is. And though the moon is waning it is still not easy to be stared at like this. Like dinner. She's stronger than she once was but even Danicka finds unease in herself the longer his eyes fix on her with something far, far beyond simple affection and fondness. She can't tell herself he's just like an animal, because she knows that even at his wildest there's a keen intelligence in those blue eyes of his. She can't tell herself he sees her as prey because she knows it isn't true.

Regardless. It does not bother her, but at the tail ends of that long silence where he doesn't watch the stars or the back yard but her, just her, as though she's all that exists, Lukas can sense a deep unease stirring in her as well, perhaps outside even her own consciousness.

Danicka hands him her tea, keeping herself forward until he hands it back, then leaning into her chair again. She lifts an eyebrow, her half-smile on the verge of laughter. "Now what would you say," she begins, "if I told you I'm a Mets fan?"

[Lukas] Lukas grew up in the Bronx. Yankee stadium was literally blocks away. He might be a Garou; he might be a Shadow Lord; he might be an Ahroun and elder of two out of these three things -- but as he's said more than once, he bleeds Yankee blue.

There were actually arguments in the Unbroken Circle when Edward wanted to move everyone to Boston so he could go to college. Not because that was consummately selfish (though it was); not because a Garou going to college wasn't ridiculous (thought it was) -- but simply because: the Boston Red Sox were the enemy.

There were fights between Lukas and his packmate Sampson when the latter, who they'd met in Boston, put a red hat on his head. Even as recently as last year, there were arguments over the superiority of one team versus the other,

weeks before Sampson died.


Well; Lukas is a little older now. A little wiser. More things on his mind; more serious things to think and worry about than whether or not the Yankees were going to do well this year. And Danicka is his mate. And besides, she didn't say Red Sox. She said Mets.

So Lukas doesn't scream divorce! and run away. He doesn't rant and rail about one team vs. the other. He just says, mature creature that he is:

"Baby: you suck."

[Danicka] She smiles at that, amused, and terribly fond. "Yes, occasionally and with both great skill and enthusiasm," agrees his mate, nodding her head a little bit.

Her glass comes up, her eyes twinkling a darker shade than the tea could ever be, and sips from its straw. Which is bendy. As she puts it back in the cupholder: "Sweetheart, I'm not a Mets fan." And she doesn't tell him the rest of the truth, which is that she's not really a Yankees fan, either, that she's not a Red or a White Sox fan, that she's simply not all that interested in baseball or teams or leagues whatsoever, that she knows enough to keep from offending the more rabid of any fandom and holding up her end of a sports-related conversation til she can change the subject. What she tells him, utterly honest, is:

"I'd love to go with you."

Because fan or not they went to a few games when she was little. It didn't matter what team and she doesn't remember. She cheered for a team based on whose colors she liked better or whose players, when put up on the JumboTron, had the nicer smile or the kinder eyes, though she kept that part to herself.

Danicka liked the crappy food at the stadiums. She liked it because that was when she was allowed to drink soda pop, from a big paper cup with a plastic lid and a straw she'd chew on until she was squirming in her seat needing to go to the bathroom at the most inconvenient times. She liked it because the nachos were gooey and they never really had nachos at her house, and it was well into adolescence before Danicka learned that chips weren't supposed to be soggy and stale as cardboard. She liked that if you got ice cream it came in a bowl that looked like a helmet, and it as all very fun and exciting and night games were the best though she usually fell asleep.

"I haven't been to a game in years," she says, which is also the truth.

[Lukas] Her reply to that makes a sudden grin break across Lukas's face. He laughs aloud; his eyes flick down with something like shyness or embarrassment, and then back to hers.

Because there's no need for modesty between them. Because she knows who and what he really is, and what he's like.

"Yes," he agrees in turn, quiet and smiling. "You do."

She drinks. He didn't use her bendy straw; he drank from the rim. If there was vodka in there he didn't complain. There's vodka in their house; good potato vodka, as well as a bottle of his favorite tucked away in one of the cabinets. He remembers a night she slammed into his room because something frightened her outside. That was the first drink they shared: Wyborowa Exquisite out of chipped mugs, she on the only chair in his room and he on his bed.

"I'll book us tickets," he says, and he sounds happy. He is happy. These are the little things they hardly ever have time for. "And I'll explain stuff," he adds, smiling. "So you're not bored and out of the loop."

[Danicka] It isn't arrogance on her part to acknowledge, however silently, that she's blown his mind more than a few times by getting on her knees in any various stages of undress and putting her mouth on him. The way Danicka is with him in bed it's hard to imagine her a shy, blushing virgin. It's hard now to imagine her as anything but what she is: sometimes shockingly blunt, sometimes incredibly open about her wants, and her desires, and the entirety of her sexuality. She's never shown him shame, for her body or for her lust or for her flat-out skill.

But oh, she loves when he looks down like that, looks a little shy, a bit modest, though color doesn't rise in his cheeks along with that grin. She loves that for a moment he flickers away from her eyes, and when he meets hers again she is endeared. Amused, too, because

she knows what he's like in the bedroom, too. Or in the car. Or on the car. Or in the nightclub bathroom, the restaurant bathroom, the hotel, the goddamn balcony. Shameless, ravenous, senseless, and hers.

There isn't any alcohol in the green tea, in point of fact.

She laughs at him again. "Excuse me," Danicka says, feigning offense, "but I know how the game of baseball is played, buster."

[Lukas] Lukas laughs quietly, holding his hand out to ask for another sip of her tea.

"I know," he says. "But I want to explain so you can enjoy everything with me. So you're not left out when everyone screams their heads off when A-Rod knocks in his 600th home run, or something like that."

He takes a drink, and then he hands it back. When his hand comes back to her ankle, his palm is faintly wet from condensation. He smooths it over her skin, and then runs his hand back and forth, back and forth, until that lingering tracery of moisture lifts with evaporation.

"And we'll totally gorge ourselves on hot dogs and coke," he adds. "And ice cream."

[Danicka] Her eyes narrow at him. The fact that it's so quick and so obvious should be a tipoff to him that what in another woman would look like instantly seething rage is, for Danicka, something else entirely. "Baby," she says, a little too pointedly, "you're still assuming that because I haven't been to a game in years I don't know what's going on in the world of baseball and that I will need you to explain things to me. You're being condescending."

There's a beat. She's withholding her iced tea from him this time, her fingertips holding it by the rim while she looks a bit haughtily at him. Stiffly, she says: "Now, just because I don't know who A-Rod is does not for a moment excuse you."

Danicka sips her tea. "And I want nachos."

[Lukas] Lukas's eyebrow flicks upward, the corner of his mouth following suit for an instant before he schools his face into a simulacrum of repentance. He draws back, settling back in his lawnchair, which creaks faintly as his weight leans into it.

"Okay," he says, and all the pretense in the world can't quite obliterate the warm, low hum of humor in his tone. His hand is settling back on her shin. "I remain unexcused and quite apologetic. You get your nachos. What else do you want?"

[Danicka] "Hmm."

One can't hear a question like that without considering how to respond. She sips at her lightly sweetened green tea thoughtfully, still keeping it back from him. Because there's no excuse for his behavior, one might imagine. Or maybe she's just too thirsty to share with her friends.

These chairs are some of the things in the home that reflect the differences between them. Lukas grabbed a lawnchair from some garage sale he passed on his way here one day, because he wanted to sit out on the porch. He would have bought two, but they only had one. It's clean, and sturdy, and reasonably comfortable. It was one of the rare things he got on impulse.

Danicka's camp chair, on the other hand, was bought at an enormous sporting goods store where they have a rock climbing wall inside and people who know how to help you buy a kayak. Underneath the bright daisy on the back of the chair is a little phrase informing whoever reads it that Life is good. She would have bought two, but something in her rebelled against buying one of the dark green ones, and she thought as funny as it would be to buy Lukas a pink one to go with her blue one, he would never sit in it for very long. She didn't know if he'd want one that has a collapsible footrest -- hers has one, but it's not up right now. She didn't know if he'd want one with a cupholder or one without arms, because he's not a tiny fellow.

So Lukas has his lawn chair, springy and secondhand and suitable for his purposes. And Danicka has her sky-blue camp chair with its daisy and cupholder, and they sit out on the back porch that will one day overlook whatever other garden they create, and the oak that will grow to be as tall as the house itself, though they both may be dead and gone by then.

"Umm," she muses. "I do want ice cream. In a helmet bowl. I also want cheap beer and Cracker Jack." Sagely, she adds: "Baseball games are long. We need provisions."

[Lukas] Even when he's here alone, Lukas rarely sits in Danicka's chair. It's her chair, just as this one is his. Not that he thinks she'd mind -- but it's the same reason he doesn't sleep in the center of the bed here even when she isn't here. He falls asleep on his side; and then he wakes up on her side, his face buried in her pillow.

He asks, and she gives him a veritable list. Plus rationale. Lukas has to bite his lip to prevent a grin; has to hide it against the side of her ankle, which he lifts and places a soft kiss on.

Resettling her leg atop his, he looks at her solemnly. "What about foam fingers? We have to show up prepared for bitter battles with those filthy Chicagoans."

[Danicka] She grabs onto the arm of her chair when he lifts her stretched-out leg to kiss her ankle, shaking her head at him. "You're going to tip me over, you keep wiggling me around and wanting my tea, mister."

He lets her down, and her eyes are twinkling though her face is very very serious, and he says something about foam fingers.

Danicka looks vaguely aghast at the very idea. "Excuse me, who's the warrior here?" she says, waggling a finger at herself then at him. Maybe she is buzzed, though there wasn't any vodka in the tea that he could taste. Or anything else. "You're expecting me to defend my own honor, plus yours, plus the great state of New York's? Christ, Lukáš, aren't you demanding."

[Lukas] "If you're worried about tipping over," Lukas says slowly, thoughtfully, "why don't you come over here and I'll cushion the fall?"

[Danicka] "I have the most insidious suspicion," muses his mate, watching him with mock wariness, "you're hitting on me. Making up for all that time you spent rejecting me now, sir?"

[Lukas] That makes him smile, but there's a flicker of some sorrow, some true regret there as well - a flash under the surface. Then, rather without warning, Lukas gets out of his chair; wraps his arm under her knees and behind her back, scoops her right out of hers.

Maybe the ice tea spills. Maybe she manages. He doesn't carry her like this often; he can't remember if he ever has. When he lifts her -- which is often, as though sometimes his happiness or passion or joy or desire simply can't be expressed without literally lifting her off the ground with it -- it's usually with bodies aligned, both his arms around her waist or beneath her ass, scooping her up to ride on his body. Not quite like this. Not across the arms. Regardless, he presses his lips to her brow, and when he moves it's not toward the kitchen door but away from it, descending the steps down to the lawn.

The earth still carries some warmth from the day. The grass is beginning to gather dew, wet between his toes. Dark and darker as they leave that lone kitchen light behind. "Your suspicion is correct," he says, and now his face is lost in shadow but she can imagine the smile there from his tone alone, "I am."

[Danicka] "Ack!"

One of the dangers of honesty, for Danicka, is simply that she's not very good at it. Lies are easier, and lies are always what people want to hear. Otherwise people don't believe them as readily. The trouble with the truth is that sometimes it isn't what people want to hear. And the trouble with the truth, for Danicka, is that she doesn't always grasp immediately that sometimes things being half-true makes them tragic, not funny. The words slipped out of her mouth a second before she realized that they might make her lover's face fall.

Because early on, he did reject her. Rejected her as a liar, as a user, as a manipulator, and he tried in every way to not want her. She wonders if he was ashamed of himself at the start for wanting her, ashamed because he couldn't make himself stop though his packbrother shared his desire and though he was convinced for awhile that she wasn't worthy of his trust, worthy of his time.

Danicka lets out a blurt of outcry when Lukas grabs her, but at the same time she's putting her arms around him, and her tea is left in the cupholder of the camp chair, which manages not to tip over as she quite simply pulls herself into the very embrace he's hauling her into. No, he's never carried her like this that she can remember. But she leans against his shoulder and his chest and holds her arms loosely around his neck, smiling.

And putting her hand, gently, on the side of his face as he carreis her down to the lawn.

"You," she says softly, "want to make love to me out here." A beat. A smile, strangely more tender away from the light. The way that Danicka herself, the closer they became and the further from exposure and scrutiny she felt, became more tender to him. More open. She looks beautiful in the sunlight. She knows him best, and lets him see her most clearly, in the dark. "You're so transparent."

[Lukas] The lawn in the backyard is older than the one so recently planted on the front. The soil here is a little harder, not as fresh and dark; but springier, too. Threaded through with the roots of a thousand tiny blades of life, and with the roots of their oak, which will outlive them and their children and their children's children -- if they ever have any; which grows faster and stronger than any oak has a right to.

This yard's a little messier, too. Not because they care about how their front lawn looks for the neighbors' sake, but simply because it's been here longer. Long enough to gather some weeds; long enough for the honeysuckle crawling over the neighbor's fence to spill down on this side. If they had children, they would pull those flowers from the stem and suck out the miniscule drop of nectar at the base of each. They don't have children, though. They have one another, and the darkness, and the clarity that comes with the dark.

"Yes," he says, and he doesn't bother with the pretense now, the farcical complexities of phrasing. It's just that: yes, quiet and low, a little rough-edged with sudden desire that, in truth, unfurled in him only seconds before she saw it and named it. "I do."

[Danicka] It is hard not to think of the children they might have when they come here. Diapered proto-people crawling around in the summertime with sunblock smeared all over their ridiculously soft little bodies because it's too hot to make them wear clothes and no matter that their mother tans and their father is swarthy, they would burn otherwise. It is hard not to imagine them filling the empty rooms of this place: changing the current study into a nursery, moving the computer and bookshelves to the den downstairs. It is hard to look at the spot where the oak was planted when she came back from New York and not think of it growing to scrape against the upstairs windows like the one in her childhood always did.

There's understandable psychology behind it all. They've been together long enough and they've made enough of a committment to each other to have had discussions about the future. To imagine spending it together. To work through the sometimes horrific fights that come up because they want to share something beyond that argument.

And she has told him secrets no one else has heard. He knows about the pregnancy she couldn't protect against her own inherent weakness or against her brother, and he knows about the one she willingly, willfully ended to protect herself. She knows about the children he met in the underworld and knows, by that alone -- would know even if he hadn't confessed as much to her -- that a very strong part of him would like to be a father, just as a very strong part of her would like to be a mother.

The insult slung at her by a spiteful Bone Gnawer meant, as a result, nothing. Danicka feels no shame for her flat belly, her empty womb. She feels no rush, and she feels no regret. At this point, the emptiness of her body and the emptiness of the extra rooms of this house and the lack of children sucking nectar from honeysuckle is all a sort of preparation, a waiting. When she is strong enough. When Lukas is. When she knows she can dedicate her life to something other than herself and her own pursuits. When she knows he is ready, which will likely be quite some time before he's convinced he is.

Not now.

So the rooms are empty and the yard is clear and there's just them, the evening trending towards midnight now, and a fence that sure as hell isn't tall enough for what Lukas is proposing to be quite the best idea. From upstairs windows in other homes they could be seen.

Danicka kisses his cheek softly, smiling. "Okay," she says. "Go up and turn off the kitchen light."

[Lukas] Even with the kitchen light off they could be seen out here. Not in ten or twenty years, when that spirit-touched oak has grown to some great and sprawling size; not then, because it would shade half the yard, scrape the windows of the bedrooms. But for now, their backyard is all but bare; the fences are five feet high; the crescent moon, waning, is just now rising.

And even so, she kisses his cheek; says what she does. That cheek moves beneath her lips: he smiles, turns and catches her mouth on his, softly.

A moment later he kneels. Her feet touch the grass first, and then the rest of her. He sets her down gently, then takes her face gently between his hands and kisses her again. Deeper this time. His hands follow the slope of her neck, the curve of her shoulders. Sometimes he's still shocked, frightened, by how slight she feels in his hands. Against his body.

Most times he doesn't think of it anymore. Danicka has grown strong in more ways than one, and

he trusts her to tell him no if she needs to.

"Be right back," he whispers, and then gets up. He's a dark shadow gradually silhouetted and then limned by the kitchen light, and for all his size and strength his feet are startlingly light on the grass, on the deck, in the house. The light goes out and all that's left is what sheds from the dark skies. All those stars out there, farther away than their minds can comprehend; all that distance, all that vastness, and somehow:

them. Together.

He comes back, and his eyes have adjusted enough now to see the impression of her. He comes to his knees and finds her hands; guides them to the buttons of his shirt.

[Danicka] Perhaps it isn't modesty at all that has Danicka asking Lukas to get the kitchen light. With the light off it's less likely anyone will look to begin with, truth be told, and if anyone turns on their own porch lights to figure out what that noise was it will be more of an alert to the Lord pair, but most people are asleep anyway. It is a quiet street in a quiet neighborhood. It isn't immediately obvious why she wants him to turn the light off.

It makes her laugh, the way he lowers her so gently to the ground. She laughs quietly, at least, but her amusement is instant and genuine. And he knows her. She's happy he's here and she's tender and affectionate but her desire hasn't risen like his, sudden and fervent. Then, if he thinks about it, it seldom does. So many times with her it's a slow burn. She's fantasizing about him well before she calls him. She's considering asking him to tie her down long before they go back to his place. She's lying naked in bed next to him for minutes on end before she presses herself to his thigh.

Sometimes it's like a switch gets flipped in her mind and she wants him with such vigor it's almost overwhelming. But most of the time, even the times it seemed to come out of nowhere for him, she was thinking about it for a long time before she decided to touch him

like that,

or like this

and tell him to make love to her.


Tonight it's Lukas who touched her first, who kissed her and brought her feet close and then wanted her in his lap, wanted her against his body, wanted to take her down to the grass and be with her. Danicka is with him now, waiting for him when he comes back down the steps to her. She's sitting up. He's seen her in shorts so seldom it's a little strange to see her legs halfed like that, the upper halves clad in tailored, knee-length, crisp shorts in a mellow, sherbet-like orange, the lower halves smooth and tanned. On the porch he could see the woven belt she wears, and he could see the lack of buttons or zippers on her silk-blend white tanktop, the bra underneath too seamless and smooth to make a wrinkle or shadow.

She feels his hands on her hands and lets him guide her, like she let him pick her up, like she let him take her legs. Once upon a time when she was so unresistant, so compliant, it bothered him. It may still. But she's amicable. She's soothed, and she's with him, and

that really seems to be all that matters to her right now, as she begins to unbutton his shirt, watching her own slender hands reflecting a little bit of moonlight. She could make quicker work of it than she does, and he knows that, too, but she goes slowly. And when his shirt is undone, hanging off his shoulders, she reaches underneath it instead of taking it off of him, laying her smooth-cool palms against his chest. She feels his heartbeat. Her eyes drift closed a moment.

"Miluju tě tak moc," she whispers, her eyes still closed as though to feel his pulse more clearly. "To mě naplňuje, a to bolí, jako bych příliš malá pro takovou věc."

[Lukas] It's different now. There's a different between the sort of lack of resistance she gives him today and the sort she used to show every time he grabbed her. Put his hands on her. Dragged her out of a cafe that's burnt down now, along with all the mutated bodies in it. Lukas was not sorry to see it go. There were memories there he was ashamed of, just like the thought of his resistance, his rudeness, his flat-out brutality, makes something inside him twist now.

Just like something inside him twists, and aches, when she says what she does the way she does. Her palms are flat against his chest. She can feel his warmth, which is very nearly surreal in the darkness: like summer itself, thick and all-pervasive. She can feel his heartbeat strong beneath his ribs, beneath his sternum. She can feel how it quickens, thumps harder for a second.

And: the birth of motion, too. The way the muscles of his chest contract a second before his hands come up; before they plunge into her hair and cup her to his mouth, where he drinks her kiss in like it was

nectar from honeysuckle, draping over its vine.

Sometimes -- oftentimes -- his hunger for her comes upon him like a storm breaking out of a clear sky. Hers is slower, a gradual build. He has to be careful not to overwhelm her. In the darkness, where he's nothing more than a startouched shadow, he has to be extra careful, not because she's weak but because...

Because he is. Because he wants to be gentle with her.

So the kiss doesn't descend into the sort of madness it aspires to. He doesn't tear at her clothes suddenly; he doesn't press her down in the grass. It tapers off and then it's just his big hands cupping her cheeks and her neck; it's just his forehead leaning against hers, his back a smooth powerful curve as he kneels before her.

"Já vím, láska," he whispers. "Chápu."

[Danicka] That kiss is sudden, too, enough that though it builds in his own mind with ache and love for her it startles Danicka slightly. She gives a slight gasp just as he pushes his hands into her hair, pulling her forward and tipping her face up to his before she quite knows what's going on. That itself might feel like resistance, like hesitation, but it's not. It's unexpected, that kiss, the way he kisses her, the way he seems to need her tonight.

Danicka's hand flexes gently on his chest when her eyes, already closed, flutter a little. When her mouth opens to him. Slowly, says that kiss, breathe. And he does, easing into kissing her more deeply, not madly. Not eating at her the way he does sometimes, voracious for the experience of loving her.

The summer night is muggy. They all seem muggy in this area of the country, because of the damn lake. They're more inland than Chicago proper and still it feels humid out here, enough to make their skins slightly tacky, enough to make being outside instantly lazy, turns time to molasses.

Danicka feels him pull away, and when his shadow moves from her he can see her eyes, open now.

"I'm not horny," she whispers, her lips spreading into a smile, her head shaking a little. Her hands are still on him, gentle. Slow. Almost painfully so. "But I want to make love to you," and there's a difference there, a great one, between wanting to rip his clothes off and fuck his cock with his hands all over her and his teeth locked in her shoulder and

wanting to feel him inside her, and feel him touching her, and be marked as his when he comes, burying himself and his groans in her flesh.

[Lukas] Her skin is a pale blur in the darkness; her eyes glimmers of reflected light, the color all but lost. So much of her reminds him of spring, of the verdant earth. So much of her reminds him of summer.

His hands smooth over her cheeks, back into her hair. And again. "I know," he whispers again; and he does. This kiss: soft, too, gentle now. Something of a confession, this: "When I carried you off the porch, I just wanted to lie with you in the grass."

His hands have followed her body down; lay heavy and warm now on her upper chest, as though hesitating. A moment later they cover her breasts: a slow careful caress, following the curve of her body.

"We don't have to, baby."

[Danicka] Her smile is still there, sweet and curving and happy and -- yes -- amused. This is nice, she might say if it were necessary. Being at home with him. Nothing to do all night. Nothing haunting their eyes or steps. Nothing to run away from, nothing they're running towards. Just home. Lounging in the back yard where they rarely spend time and where they won't be able to spend much time in coming months as Chicago gets colder and colder and colder.

She's surprised by what he says, but only mildly. They kiss again, and he makes his confession, which makes her ache for some reason. She moves her hands up and wraps them around his neck as he's touching her, running his hands down her, covering her small breasts and warming them in his palms.

"You never need to say that," she says quietly, pulling her head back where she was about to lay it on his shoulder. She meets his eyes, as best she can in the dark. "I never feel like we have to."

[Lukas] So their eyes meet: there in the darkness, if only momentarily. She can see his flicker between hers, searching. Then he kisses her again, softly, and wraps his arms around her midway through, drawing her onto his lap.

A moment later he lays back. Rolls and sprawls on the grass, half-tumbling, his body cushioning hers against the fall. His shirt is half undone. His feet are bare. He likes the feel of her hands on his skin, soft and a little cool from the night and her drink and her book.

"I love you too," he whispers, as though it were perfectly natural to echo her sentiment now, moments later. The stars are so bright here, he thinks, this far from the heart of the city. With their neighbors' yards dark and their yard dark, he can see so many of them, littering the sky.

[Danicka] It's like being a kid, or a puppy, the way they tumble about, and also the way she trusts him when they do. She spreads her legs when he pulls her onto him but only for a moment before they're rolling, toppling, albeit slowly. Danicka chuckles, and -- to be frank -- she snuggles against his bared chest now, laying atop him and ducking her head to breathe in his scent.

Her arms slide around his body, and she tucks her feet between his legs, just above his knees. He is much bigger than she is. He always will be. Hell, when he was five years old he was bigger than she was.

"You're my favorite," she says quietly, rubbing her face on him. He looks at the stars. She looks at the earth. And there is something deeply poetic about that, and natural. Perun above, Volos below. Or something like that. "And we're gonna go to a baseball game."

Pleasure, there. Simple, unadorned pleasure. She folds her arms on his chest and puts her chin on them, smiling at him. "You never told me how all that stuff with Ray worked out," she says.

[Lukas] Lukas laughs gently as his mate burrows against his chest. "We are," he agrees, and though it's a little silly to recount it to each other, he understands why. He understands the quiet simple pleasure of knowing that they were going to go to a baseball game together, and spend the day, and come home at night, and ...

have time to themselves. Which is a rarity.

In the end he might well end up going to all three games. The Yankees are doing well this year, as they did last year. Lukas is hopeful; there might be another Series title on the horizon. He wants to cheer his team on, and he wants to bring his pack, and part of him rather wants to take them all and sit in the middle of the home section so he can scare the crap out of the White Sox fans, but --

one of those games will be theirs alone. He won't invite his pack. He won't even tell them.

She puts her chin on her hands on his chest, then, and his mouth quirks as he looks at her. "Jako kočka," he notes, stroking her hair back. She asks about Ray; that looks shifts toward wryness; a touch of a smirk.

"I explained to Ray the consequences of his decision. What would happen to his spirit, and the spirits of all his descendants. How they'd all be cut off from whatever past and ancestry he might have in Thunder's homelands. He was rattled, and asked for a night to think about it. The next day he came back and asked why he couldn't stay a Shadow Lord while being guarded by Marni and raising their child together.

"I told him if he couldn't summon up the courage to choose one or the other, then he didn't deserve either. He chose Marni." Marni: not the child. The look on Lukas's face says what he thinks about that. "So I gave him to her. I told her she owed me two debts of honor, and she could repay the first one by growing the fuck up and learning some responsibility toward her mate and her unborn child.

"She wasn't happy. I'm quite certain she went away convinced I'm villain and she's the victim."

A small pause; his hand smoothing down her back, settling low over her center of gravity, weighting her gently against him. A small epilogue:

"Then I called Ezra back. He wasn't happy either. You might say he bitched his face off. So I took him down and explained that he could either toe the line or find another Sept. He left town."

[Danicka] "You," Danicka says slowly and dryly, laying on his chest like -- as he put it -- a cat, "are just the meanest man in the whole wide world."

Which is all she has to say on that subject, really. She never knew Ray well, but her eyes were sad when Lukas told her how that went. It's not clear who she's sad for. Or why. It's a mere flicker, though, and it's easy enough to chalk it up to her strange concern for the unborn child. Or maybe she doesn't want to think about someone leaving their tribe. Or maybe

it's just sad, to her.

She nuzzles his jawline, and gives him a single small lap of her tongue. "I've thought about getting a cat," she says consideringly, musingly. "I don't believe it's possible for them to be frightened by anything, much less Rage. I'd go get some tough-as-nails rescue cat that will just stare at you when you come over like whut? you ain't so big, mothafucka."

Danicka, in her best ghetto voice, is vaguely hysterical-sounding. But she also sounds somewhat serious. A cat. One could imagine that she could never have pets as a child, that Yelizaveta had none, that she doesn't even know if she's the sort of person who could keep a pet. But she's thinking about it. One more thing she's never tried. Never had.

[Lukas] In that moment when her eyes are sad, Lukas's hand touches her cheek, strokes her hair. There's an inherent sense of comfort there, or at least the attempt thereof. It's all right, his hand says to her. It'll be okay.

And she's right. It is sad. Millennia of history altered on the basis of some adolescent fantasy of true love. Or maybe just forbidden love. Or maybe just rebellion, or daring, or -- whatever it is, it's happened; it's done. Neither of them seem the sort to dwell on it. Ultimately, neither of them have any pity for weakness.

Lukas laughs then. A quick blurt of surprise, and then a pause of consideration, and then a lower, quieter sound.

"Well," he says, "so long as it stays out of the bedroom when we're fucking. And if it walks on my face in the morning, there will be blood. Probably mine, but."

He lifts his head, kisses her on the brow. Lays back again.

"Get an orange cat. They're cute. And legendary."

[Danicka] Lukas thinks of history thrown aside for adolescent fantasies, and he touches Danicka's cheek to see if he can comfort her. Danicka is comforted, and thinks of an unwanted child who, all the same, will be brought into the world and raised primarily by a father who did not choose her, and likely would not have.

And either way, the moment passes. She's not a cold woman or a withdrawn one but she's also not an inherent counselor; Danicka retains her empathy for when she gives a damn. And though who and what she gives a damn about can seem incredibly random, once she chooses she has a high standard of loyalty.

Danicka's smile quirks at him from where she rests on his chest. "I can't handle the thought of being woken up by something crawling on me. The bedroom and study will be off-limits to kitty." A pause. "If I get one."

She kisses his chest. "If I find a legendary orange rescue cat with backbone, I'll name it after the toon you made on my account." Oh yes. She saw that.

[Lukas] Lukas laughs, shifting beneath Danicka, tucking his hand behind his head.

"You're naming your cat Gankiskhan? Or Hannibull?" As a matter of fact, Lukas has several toons on Danicka's account. Gankis is an orc rogue. Hannibull is a tauren warrior. Neither of them have made it past level 30 yet.

A pause; then, "Or are you talking about Regina?"

[Danicka] At the mention of Regina, his mate pokes him sharply in the ribs and gives a low-key snarl. She bites his left pectoral muscle. And the thing is, it's all playful. It's rough and tumble and growly and... it's play. She grrs while she sets her teeth in him, something she couldn't even get herself to do when he'd make her come and she knew she had to be quiet. The first time they fucked in his room at the Brotherhood he had to physically put her face against his shoulder to muffle her cries, to get her to use his body like that.

"That depends," she mutters, talking around a fold of his skin, "on if it's a boy or a girl. And if it's more of a Hannibull or a Gakiskhan. Or a Regina."

[Lukas] The first time they fucked in his room at the Brotherhood, she told him to cover her mouth to muffle her cries. She would have preferred that to setting her teeth in him.

Now she bites him without fear; playfully. She growls at him and he laughs. He laughs and he rolls over, flipping her under him, bracing himself up on his elbows over her. There are blades of grass stuck to his back. He smiles down at her; nuzzles her for a moment, then scoots down a little and wraps his arms around her waist. Lays his ear to her breastbone.

"I think Regina would be an awesome name for a cat. Genghis isn't too bad either. I'm not sure about Hannibal, though. Especially if you're going to get a fearless feral cat."

[Danicka] The first time they fucked in his room at the Brotherhood... they hadn't really meant to at all. He looked at her lying there and thought of seeing her there every night, of holding her while he slept, of waking up and finding her body pressed closed to his by necessity -- because of the lack of space, and because of the lack of warmth in Chicago in February, March. And then he came close to her, touched her, and wanted to see her pleasured. He wanted, with a surprising and unexpected -- especially to him -- selflessness and singlemindedness, to make her come.

What Danicka wanted -- as soon as she saw him enter the room wearing his towel, going to the mirror to shave, being the same distant man he tried so hard to be in her presence, uncertain of who she was and what she wanted from him -- was to watch him uncover himself, lose that towel, grow hot and hard against her body, and fuck her

the way he always fucked her, with those long, firm strokes of his lower body driving him into her.

And now they play. Now he doesn't turn away from her and act like he can barely stand to have her there in his bedroom. Now he doesn't hold himself back from her, still not quite trusting. Now he rolls her over and his shirt is still hanging off of him unless he stripped it off and yes, there's grass all over the back and Danicka's giggling as she ends up on the back lawn.

"Shh," she says, though she was the one making more noise, "neighbors'll think we're up to no good." And she nuzzles him back, smiling, her hands lifting to touch his hair as he moves down to rest against her,

the way she never thought he would, and always wanted him to.

Her fingertips stroke his hair back, back over his temples. She exhales slowly and he can hear her heartbeat through her middle, distant and sounding like it's coming through an ocean to get to him.

"I like Genghis or Regina," she says thoughtfully. "But I'll have to see. I haven't decided if I'm even going to get one or not."

Oh, but she has. And he can tell from the way she says it: one of these days Danicka is going to have a cat, and one that she thinks can tolerate a goddamn Ahroun, if not stare him down with more hauteur than any Fang.

[Lukas] "Neighbors are asleep," he mumbles against her stomach, and then nuzzles against her torso. Bites her softly through her shirt, his teeth a faint impression of hardness through ... cotton or silk or linen or whatever it is she might be wearing. "God, I love your body."

She strokes his hair. Even early on, even at the beginning, he was always struck by how gently she did this. How tenderly she strokes his hair back over his ears; moves her fingertips through the black strands that, when short, are all but straight; when longer, begin to wave and want to curl.

He laughs again, a subtle rumble somewhere in his chest, when she says she hasn't decided yet. He knows. He knows one day he'll go to 520 Kingbury at two a.m. and some furball is going to attack his ankles, or worse, wind around them and try to kill him with kindness when he trips in the dark. He keeps this knowledge to himself, though, shifting one hand out from beneath her body and -- with an odd animal innocence, as though bothered purely by the fact that his mate has something unnatural between his skin and hers -- tugs her shirt up out of the way

and kisses her tummy softly. His beard bristle scratches faintly when he lays his cheek against her skin and mmms.

"Mate," he whispers, happy. And he wraps his arms around her again and rests against her,

the way he never thought he'd dare to, and always wanted to.

[Danicka] Cotton, though ringspun and soft against him when he nuzzles her belly. And it whispers across her belly when he nudges and nuzzles and bites and tugs it out from where it's tucked in so he can kiss her bare flesh. Which makes her laugh softly, tenderly, as he confess to loving her body and calls her his mate.

Now, this is rare, too: not to attack each other on sight because it's been so long, not to need to fuck because they feel disconnected otherwise and sometimes touch is easier and words get in the way. To be, quite simply, sitting around their yard talking about World of Warcraft and cats and not thinking about grass stains on her white shorts or his linen trousers.

"I'm so glad you're here," she whispers back to him, touching his hair over and over and over as she looks at the stars. Breathes deep and exhales, confesses suddenly in the way she never did even though he seemed to lose all control of what he said and didn't say when he was around her:

"Sometimes I wish we lived here together."

[Lukas] There's a ripple of stillness in him. Then Lukas lifts his head from his mate's body. Even in the dark she can see the faint furrow in his brow; not displeasure but something more like thought. Seriousness.

Softly, "Do you want to?"

[Danicka] They look at each other now, not at the stars or each other's bodies. Her own brow furrows like his does. "I'm not sure," she admits, and stars to sit up, pulling off her shirt in one smooth motion as the very upward arch of her body forces Lukas to either move back to let her up or push her back down. Her bra is quite simple, actually, some flesh-toned Lycra thing with almost no visible seaming though they have to be there. It's meant to be worn under the sorts of things she had on tonight. Of course.

The shirt gets dropped and she reaches for him, leaning for his chest to nuzzle the side of his neck. It's almost as though she took off her shirt the way she would at home, after a long day, intending nothing but her own preparation for sleep. But they're in the back yard. And she's moving up on her knees, now, unbuckling her belt and undoing the button of her shorts as well.

Pushing them off her hips, she starts to knee-step out of them, holding onto his shoulders for balance. "It's far away from Chicago, and school, and I just set up the study like a lab like I want it. Plus we haven't had the potluck yet."

[Lukas] Lukas shifts as she does, and she takes her shirt off. Not seductively. Not tantalizingly. Naturally, casually, as though stripping down after a long day.

His eyes flick down. Then back to hers. Even here they're clear, clear and brilliant. They're both moving up on their knees. She leans into him and nuzzles him and he thinks it again: like a cat. Like an animal. Like something warm and mammalian and tender and carnivorous; like a wolf in her own right,

which is true. She has the same blood he does.

He turns his head and kisses her cheek, and it's not light and glancing but firm, heavy, warm, his cheek sliding against hers. Then she's drawing back to undo her belt and push down her shorts, and he's helping her, drawing them down as she holds onto his shoulders for balance.

His hands are on her body. His eyes can't seem to decide whether to watch what he's doing or watch what she's saying. His brow furrows a little more, though --

"I don't want you to move out of your apartment."

-- and he's said that before, if not in so many words. In some ways Lukas is more attached to that place than Danicka is. He loves the silence, the space, the scents there; the memories that come to mind. Look, there's where you laid me out and made love to me. Look, there's where you told me you were falling in love with me. Look...

Her shorts are pushed aside. She's kneeling into summer grass now, legs bare, body all but bare. He's stroking his hands up and down her side, and then undoing the last two buttons on his shirt and shrugging out of it.

"But if you want to live together," he adds quietly, and this too has a certain hint of rush to it, of a sudden confession, "I'll come home to you every night no matter where you are."

[Danicka] Though her bra is seamless and plain and flesh-colored, Danicka's panties are ...well, they're yellow cheekies with little orange dots, trimmed with light pink lace. They're very colorful, and very girly, and they make her ass look incredible. Though he's caught between watching his hands or watching her mouth, Danicka seems only moderately distracted by his hands on her. She is still frowning a little, but at least it's in thought rather than displeasure.

Her hands are on his chest while he takes off his shirt, all the way, finally. It whispers to the ground like her own did, and the grass murmurs when it's covered by the fabric. Her breathing is increasing and it's hard to tell if it's because he's helping her out of her clothes and she's helping him out of his or because of what they're talking about.

Or both.

She kisses him, leaning in and up to do so. Even with Lukas sitting on the grass and Danicka up on her knees, she has to tip her head back to kiss him. He's so very tall, his body proportionate and heavy and sometimes seeming so rock-hard that she's shocked when she touches him and finds some give, finds heat.

The kiss is soft. It's not as warm as he is, not yet.

"Will you?" she whispers, and kisses him again, needing confirmation, needing a promise, when she so rarely asks for them and to this day has trouble believing them.

[Lukas] There's no hesitation: Lukas nods. "If you want me too."

As though that is as important as the promise itself. As rocky as the beginning of their relationship was, he's careful not to push her. Not to demand of her what she cannot, or does not want to give. Ever since he tried to force her to tell him the truth and seen for himself how she will resist it,

and how much better it is when she gives him something of her own accord,

he's tried so hard not to demand anything of her ever since.

He kisses her again, then, his chest expanding against her hands as he inhales. And he is so very warm; so very large, and strong, and sometimes almost overwhelmingly charged with rage. And strength. And danger. Her mother was an Ahroun, and not merely an Ahroun but very nearly the apex, the ideal, the archetype of such a thing. She knows very well what it is to love an Ahroun, and she knows all the dangers of loving one, of living with one, intimately, painfully.

She's here anyway. This is something neither of them can easily explain, except in the only way they know how:

I want, and
I love.

[Danicka] To say this is an unexpected turn of conversation is unnecessary. Danicka wasn't even expecting to see him tonight. She thought she'd come over and clean up and putter around the house for awhile before going to bed with a book. She didn't think he'd just... be here. And pull her feet into his lap like he does this every night, sharing her tea and caressing her leg. She didn't expect to end up cuddling and rolling around in the grass and stripping off her clothes

and talking about being together every night when this was the last thing they thought they could have. But then, for a long time it seemed like Danicka could barely handle being around him. That he scared her too much, that her will wasn't strong enough to bear up under his rage. If he stubbed his toe and shouted it would make her heart race. Now she nibbles on him, pokes him in the ribs, plays with him.

But the moon isn't full. And it will be, like clockwork, and there's no telling how she'll be able to handle it.

Danicka shudders slightly as he kisses her, moving in closer again, closer to his warmth though there isn't enough of a chill in the air to make her shiver like that.

"We can try it," she whispers, parting her legs to climb onto his lap, to settle down on his thighs with her own to either side of him. She kisses him again, slower this time, her breath catching in her throat. "Just... like when you'd come to my place after I gave you the keys. Only more often." And kisses him again.

[Lukas] It's a strange, slow progression they've made from lying in the grass to tumbling in the grass to this. Or it would be, if it weren't so natural. So effortless. It hardly seems to matter that what they're discussing is a major lifestyle change; is potential for something even more earthshattering.

She settles on his lap. He's kneeling in the grass, sitting on his heels. Her thighs part to either side of him, and his hands are large and warm on her back, on her ass. He covers her with those hands as though to keep her warm, though the night itself is warm, and lovely, and rich with summer.

And Lukas smiles when she says that. And it's such a smile, so sudden and happy, that she knows without a doubt -- though he's never actually come out and said it -- that he wants to live with her too. He'd love to live with her. Here; at 520 Kingsbury; in his dorm room at the Brotherhood; in the fucking wild in a cave with nothing but a stone for a door. Anywhere.

"Okay," he whispers, and she kisses him again. He moves her hand to his face, where she can feel the shifting of his jaw; the stubble over his lean cheek. His hands stroke through her hair and down her back, and when their mouths part for a breath he says it again, "Okay. I'd like that."

[Danicka] Innocent as animals, they run their hands over each other, and climb on each other, never quite acknowledging through the course of their conversation what it is they're doing. And that's because this conversation deserves all their attention, all their focus. Yet at the same time, it seems so... simple. It seems as though it can't shatter anything, because it's already secured by what's between them.

Danicka nuzzles him, and breathes him in, sighing softly. That seems to be all she has to say about it now, settling onto his lap and into the broad palms of his warm hands. "Make me naked," she whispers, the words themselves loose and unconcerned with how they sound. But it is what she means:

make it happen. She doesn't care how, doesn't care for pretty words, or conversation about it. She's so close already that all it takes is his fingers unclasping her bra and a shrug of her shoulders to help it slide off and down. All it takes is his hands going into her underwear, cupping her flesh in his palms

or hooking his thumbs in the lace-covered elastic to draw it down

or rolling her on her back

or whatever it is he does.

[Lukas] So he does.

So his fingers unhook that clasp on her bra, and it's so easy because he's done this so often for her that he remembers how it feels. Where it sits on that narrow, slender back of hers. She shrugs her shoulders, and he bends to kiss her collarbone, and the bra slips between them and he paws it idly aside.

He doesn't lift her after all. He doesn't roll her under. Lukas lays back instead, lays himself out thick-shouldered and broad-chested; warm and dark as the earth itself. His hands urge her up, then back; she sits on his thighs and he peels her panties off, dropping those to the ground as well.

Crickets call in the humid night. The grass is faintly scratchy on his back, and lush. It smells green. He reaches down and undoes the fastenings of his pants, and when he pushes them down, and pushes his underwear down as well, he sighs as he frees his cock

as though he had been waiting a very long time to be naked with her.

"Come here," he whispers. "Come here and love me."

[Danicka] "Oh, baby," Danicka is whispering, is sighing, as she crawls over him again, "I always love you."

...though she knows what he means. The way they've always known translating between languages, the way it's always seemed right to say this, to call it making love when they both knew it was never just fucking, it was never something they hated and wanted to go without, it was something

they couldn't quite live without any longer.

She comes down over him like she's been waiting to be with him since she was very very young, like finding him has been a relief. And that's the truth of the matter: she never knew that the way she felt was loneliness. She never knew that the way she felt was longing. She never named it as wanting, and if she had gone her whole life without falling in love with him she might have never realized what she was missing. But now that he's here, now that she can look back on how it was before,

Danicka can't quite imagine how she managed to breathe, day in and day out, never knowing this. It sounds romantic, and it sounds sentimental, but so does making love in the grass of their backyard where they planted the oak tree where he wants a handful of his ashen remains buried, should he die as it's growing. It's all romantic. It's all sentimental. And it is, at the same time, utterly true. Utterly real. Utterly necessary.

She crawls over him, her hair hanging down but not quite enough to brush against him, and takes a breath as she's sinking towards him. It's so simple, really. It's so soft, and so slow, the way she reaches between them to take him in hand and moves him against her cunt, simply stroking him there once

and twice

and again, until she shudders out a quiet groan and starts to ease him inside of her. Danicka moves her hands to his chest, faintly moist with grass and dew, gasping softly every time she works herself down a little more

and takes him a little deeper.

[Lukas] There is truth in this:

that they are so deeply a part of one another now that it's hard to remember how they managed to exist without. It's hard to imagine how they could have ever resisted this, or thought it would be hurtful to them. Harmful to them.

And that may sound sentimental. Seem romantic. But it's not, because it is so true, so iron-hard and savage with truth, that it becomes something iron-hard and savage itself.

Look at the way they claimed each other on the solstice. Look at the way they fuck sometimes, her eyes like poison, his like starfire. Look at the way they make love -- with that same savagery wrapped somewhere beneath the tenderness, just as tenderness is always wrapped in their savagery.


A month ago, when he thought her endangered, when he thought her injured, he lost his head so utterly that he couldn't make himself bite back his own rage. A day or three ago, the very sight of creatures like the one that had slammed his mate into the pavement sent him to the exact same heights of fury, so close to the wyrm-frenzy that he had to struggle, had to fight with every ounce of his will, to hold it back.

Their love is a wild, savage thing. It is as strong as they are.


And yet: tender. And yet, when she moves over him, it is all so simple and plain and slow and sweet. So soft, how she takes him in hand. So soft, his exhale; the way he presses his head back into the grass as she works herself onto him

and a little deeper

and a little more.

A groan escapes his. He lifts his head a moment after, his hands holding her gently by the hips; catches her mouth and kisses her. Slow and soft. Deep and deeper.

[Danicka] In truth, even now Danicka is ambivalent about this. About fucking. She wants to be close to him. She wants to feel near to him, to hold him, to know that her nearness is a comfort to him, but she could just as easily, just as happily, have fallen asleep on his bared chest right here in the grass. Woken up dew-covered and stiff from some awkward sleeping arrangement. Even as she's taking him inside, even as he feels wetness sliding around his cock, smoothing his push into her, what Lukas feels from Danicka isn't the sort of lust he's known from her for so long.

One might even say, what he's become used to.

And it doesn't really mean anything. She isn't sad or scared or bored. She isn't distant or withdrawn. She's with him now, as she's been with him ever since he stepped out on the porch, and she's happy. A little overwhelmed by their conversation, if anything, but... here. And all she wants, which is all she ever wanted from the beginning, is to be with him.

Danicka's kisses are slow and soft as rain. Her breath flutters when he groans. The way she moves is simple and plain and slow and sweet and, yes

soft. Like her skin, and her hair, and some of her features. Like the way she looks at him sometimes.


It's been awhile since she's ridden him like this, the way she used to when she knew he would never let her hold him close to her chest, when she thought he'd never, ever lay against her and listen to her heartbeat, let her cradle him, let her comfort him. It's been awhile since she's taken him outside, and when she does this time, it seems like it goes on forever. The way she moves. The way she watches him, and the way she arches her back, holding his hands against her, their fingers laced, shuddering the longer it goes on

and making those soft, aching sounds she does when she starts to go faster. When she starts to ride him. When he can hear their bodies moving together because the back yard is so quiet they can hear crickets and little else. When she has to fold over him, burying her face against his chest, to let her cries tattoo themselves into his flesh instead of dissipating in the air

like she wants him to be able to keep them, always.


In the end, Lukas lays his arm across her back and rolls her over, rolls himself on top of her into that thick, soft, wet grass and kisses her as he moves in her again. There's no question now if she's ready, if she can take a little more, if it's okay to thrust into her until he comes. Just this: the flex of his torso, their legs twisting together and then hers wrapping around him, high and tight while he opens his mouth to hers and flexes into her again

and again, firmer and harder each time, then faster, picking up his pace all over again til he's sure he can't stop, he can't ever stop,

only of course he can't go on. Not when pleasure is creeping up from the base of his spine and then unfurling in one spiraling explosion which seems like it, too, has gone on forever. Like it always felt like this. Like this is all reality is, anymore.


So he keeps her warm like that, laying beside her and laying half on top of her, covering her with his chest and his arm and his leg, trying to make sure she doesn't fall apart. Their neighbors are, in fact, asleep. And they don't turn on their lights and they don't look outside. They sleep on, while Danick and Lukas make love. And while they drowse afterward, stuck with grass.

Without talking about it, they both know they want to stay out here. Sleep out here.

Without talking about it, they both know they can't.

Danicka does, though. In his arms, going from her own orgasm to receiving his to kissing him as he comes down, soft and soft again and again over and over his face, going to relaxing in his arms,

to drowsing with her head pillowed on his bicep

to her breathing becoming steady, rhythmic, and measured. He feels her fall asleep, and it isn't until the sun is close enough to the horizon to make the sky go from black to indigo that she starts to stir, and breathes in, whispering Why did you let me sleep? with a little laugh. She's covered with grass. It's in her hair. It's staining the clothes she took off. She kisses him, still sleepy, her muscles stiff.


They get inside before the sky turns navy blue, purple, trending upwards towards hotter, brighter colors of sunrise. They gather up their clothes and grab her cup from the chair and go inside, laughing when the screen door bangs shut in the hush of early morning. They leave damp tracks through the kitchen, and a few blades of grass on the carpeted stairs up to the second floor.

Their shower is hot and longer than it could be, shorter than they might want it to be, but they're sleepy and yawning and even as Lukas rubs her back under the water he can feel her wanting to sleep against him again. Feel her wanting to hold him, and be held by him, while the world slips away again.

When he takes her to bed and pulls the clean sheets up over their clean bodies, Danicka is settling in against him even before he quite lays down. Because he's home with her. And that's all she ever really wanted.