pack.

[Wyrmbreaker] The room empties out except for packmates, and Lukas faces his across a patch of threadbare carpet, low-wattage lighting. A bit of a pause, then, before he takes a step or two back, seats himself on the window ledge. He still has his coat on, is large and dark in it. It's cold in here; he feels no urge to take it off. He stares at Sinclair for some time, direct but puzzled, unsure of where to begin.

Finally: "I didn't even know you were so unhappy." He sounds unhappy himself, saying this. "I had no idea."

[Sinclair] Katherine does not, as it turns out, stay behind. Maybe words are exchanged, maybe just glances; they're pack, even without the bond of silent speech to aid them, and body language is how all wolves communicate. Sinclair, regardless of her choice to stay behind, has not lost that. Truth be told, even the most civilized of human beings has that innate sense of the group, the community, the animal movements hidden by seemingly logical thought.

She's leaning against the windowsill. She's barely moved since the last time he saw her, before he flashed out of existence with his mate, with Katherine, with the cub and the Theurge elder. Tomorrow at dawn his wolf will come back to him. To all of them, really, but Sinclair doesn't know that. Sinclair doesn't know that because Sinclair said, more or less

understanding won't make any difference.

The door closes quietly behind Katherine as she goes out to, perhaps, help the Half-Moon cub that Sinclair still hasn't been introduced to understand a little of what the hell just happened. Lukas and Sinclair are, for the moment, alone. She has her arms crossed over her chest, and he stares at her while she stares at the carpet past the tips of her boots.

"I wasn't exactly advertising it," Sinclair answers, because on some level her first instinct is -- has always been -- to comfort.

[Wyrmbreaker] So there's another silence. Awkward. Lukas feels like there's a sudden gulf there. He's always thought of Sinclair as the heart of the pack. Solid, strong, clear, savage. It feels suddenly like he doesn't understand her at all; that what he thought was her was only a phantom he conjured himself.

After a time he straightens. He crosses the room to her, putting his hand on her shoulder, steering her gently to sit on the edge of the bed with him. It's the only seating in the room, unless you counted the two dingy-looking armchairs in the corner. Lukas doesn't want to sit on dingy armchairs right now. He wants to sit beside his packmate, where their shoulders could lean together in some intimation of unspoken connection.

He has no rage right now. He has no Beast, no bloodthirsty monster inside him, but he still doesn't feel human. In some ways, in the sudden clarity and silence, he feels his other-ness more than ever. Sees it more clearly than ever.

"What can I do?"

[Sinclair] There's cruel, cold truth in what she said as comfort: she didn't advertise. But she also didn't talk to him, for a moment. One day she moved out of the Brotherhood and was just coasting from place to place. Then one day she was taking everything she had out of the Loft and it wasn't all in her car so it had to be somewhere else but she didn't talk about that, either.

Then one day she was living in the room beside his at the Brotherhood. She was taking up a more permanent sort of residence in a room at the Loft, and Sinclair never offered a word of explanation. He didn't ask -- she could point that out if she wanted to. But there's more truth beneath that. The times -- not just once, not even just twice -- that she was curled up with her head on Katherine's lap or Katherine's shoulder and she was crying so hard it was worth wondering if she could still breathe past the crushing pain in her chest. There's the truth that when Sinclair's heart broke, she didn't show a single expression of that to her Alpha.

Her brother, neither a replacement or stand-in for a blood relative but something else altogether. Sinclair is not closer to Lukas or closer to Katherine but she's closer to both of them than she's been to anyone else, even previous packmates. One can't imagine Katherine on the rooftop of the Loft in the Umbra slinging a pair of high-tech hand-axes at Lukas while he parries with an ancestral sword. One can't imagine Lukas in a position of comfort to a wrenched, wracked Katherine, who would never go to him with it anyway.

Maybe there's some truth in the phantom Lukas conjured. But there's truth in this, too: when he lays his hand on Sinclair's shoulder, trying to guide her to the bed, he can feel the premonition of a flinch under his palm, the pulling away that started this unhappiness reflected between two pairs of blue eyes. The refusal. Of what?

He's laid down in lupus with this female, with Katherine, and they've curled together warm and heavy and loyal. Protected. Strong. She's his sister as much as Anezka ever was. Hugs him like he's not a terrifying wolf that outranks her or some professional she works with, but like he's her brother. Wrinkles her nose up, when he kisses her forehead.

And she is all but flinching from him. From this. From the ghost of what she's been carrying since midsummer.

In the end she goes. After he takes his hand back, likely -- it's hard to imagine him forcing her. Harder still, without any rage, to imagine him growing instantly incensed with her reluctance. Her arms are still crossed, but she gets away from the window and goes to the bed, sitting up near the pillows, wrapping her arms around her legs. Her legs aren't tight together and her chin isn't down on her knees, but there's still a certain amount of defense to her posture, of... isolation, however self-imposed.

What can he do.

And at first it seems she might huff out a laugh, bitter and bereft, but she doesn't. She just shakes her head, moisture returning to her eyes but not falling this time, not a drop. Her voice is quiet. "Nothing."

The truth is -- all of this, finally, is the truth behind the curtain between them -- that he might not ask. Then they go back to talking like before, and it gets to be about the wolf and the eclipse and everything that happened and all the deeper things return to where they've been lying. Maybe she thinks that's how he wants it, prefers it. Maybe that's why it's been like this, why she's hidden so much, why he never saw how unhappy she's been. Sinclair sniffs, and swallows, and just lays it out:

"I had... a male," she says, "near the start of this year." A dead quiet, for a moment. Her eyes aren't on Lukas, focused more on his shoulder or something for a second, as though she's in her own thoughts, outside of this wretchedly awkward conversation. Then: "I don't think he ever really..." a pause. Her eyes flick to his again. "I don't think what he felt for me was quite what I always felt for him."

The words come slow. They have to. Then they just start coming, tumbling out of her, like she's not quite sure what she intended to say to Lukas, since she never intended to say any of it: "Back in summer shit just kept happening and we'd argue and I thought that was pretty normal but he'd sort of ...flinch, whenever I got really angry, and that would just set me off more and sometimes he'd just shut down totally and sometimes he'd yell back and that scared the shit out of me and it was just a few weeks and we hit this... breaking point."

And broke.

Sinclair rubs the heels of her hands over her face. She exhales past her hands, and lowers them again. She's staring at the bedspread. "He was my mate," she says quietly. "Not officially and... honestly I don't think he really wanted to be, maybe because he's a guy and guy kin by and large can't seem to fucking cope with female wolves, but..."

Her voice was steady there for a moment, strong with resentment and maybe disgust and mostly. Just. Pain. It quiets again. Dies a little, again. "Yeah. A part of me had chosen him, and bonded to him, and now he's gone and I've always, always been lonely but now it's just hard to get up in the morning, and it's even harder to just... give a fuck, anymore. I mean I go out and I fight and I do my duty and I know why it's important and I've been doing it regardless of how I felt for years now so it's not like I don't know how to keep making myself do it but I just... don't have the heart for it right now."

Her eyes lift, finding his. He's not mistaken, if he sees traces of shame in them. Of awareness of her own weakness. "So y'know, last night we all lost the wolf and it freaked me out when I thought it meant the Apocalypse was coming and we had nothing to fight it with, but when it seemed like it was just some spirit or another saying hey, come on some little visionquest and learn more about your nature and blah blah blah, I just... I didn't care, Lukas. I didn't want to pretend like the whole thing wasn't suddenly making me ask if losing my wolf was maybe a gift I didn't want to give back.

"A chance," she says, quieter.

[Wyrmbreaker] Lukas starts out on the edge of the mattress, but then Sinclair scoots back near the pillows. Maybe she did that purposefully to get away, put some distance between them -- if that's the case, it doesn't work. Lukas moves with her, his greater weight denting the mattress as he scoots up beside her, leans back against the headboard, draws his knees up and lays his wrists over them.

They still have their shoes on. The bed still has its quilted coverlet on, which is questionably clean at best; no harm done, really.

And Sinclair talks. Haltingly at first. Then tumbling out like water down a fall, blood from an unstaunched wound -- words, sentences, stories, pain. Lukas listens with his head bent, his brow furrowing, his mouth tight with something like pain. Shared grief. Once in a while, he glances at her. Somewhere in the middle, he reaches over and takes her hand, pulling it to his knee and clasping it between his.

She's as much a sister to his as Anezka is. But Anezka was always older, the big sister. Kin or not, that made a difference. Sinclair is the closest thing he has to a younger sister. A kid sister. It's a different dynamic; one he's not entirely sure of.

He's not entirely sure what to say, either. Suddenly he's acutely, painfully aware of how it must be for Sinclair, watching her brother hold his mate's hand. Watching him disappear night after night and return sometime in the morning or the afternoon smelling of sleeping-mate, of warm-den. Watching her sister, even, so happy now that her own male had returned. A part of him wants to counsel: say something like he probably wasn't really your mate or you'll find someone better or --

something like that, ultimately patronizing. Her heart is her own; her feelings, her instincts. To tell her she's read herself wrong -- that's not a call he has any right to make.

So finally, just this: "I'm sorry."

A few moments of pause. Then he squeezes her hand and looks at her, adds, "I'm sorry I didn't ask, too. I'm sorry I didn't even ... really know."

There's more to say. About the spirit, the visionquest, what was told to him, what he knows will happen at dawn. He draws breath to say it, but then lets it out again. Just silence: he listens, for now. Waits to see if she'll say anything more.

[Sinclair] "I didn't want you to," she says quietly, not long after that. For what it's worth, she let him take her hand. She doesn't squeeze it back. She seems too drained to either mind or appreciate. So she lets him hold it, and she stares at her feet.

[Wyrmbreaker] So there's another silence, stretching out. Sinclair's hand feels oddly strengthless in his own. This is the girl-wolf that hurled axes at his head. This is the girl-wolf he's seen tear into enemies with a singular viciousness unmatched by any other in the Sept. There are larger wolves, there are stronger wolves, there are more warlike wolves -- but what Sinclair has is a raw, burning ferocity.

But you're such a good Garou, he wants to say. And, But we need you.

He doesn't say it after all. After a time he says, "On the other side, we met a spirit that claimed to speak for Gaia. I don't know if it did or didn't, but it ... meant well, I think. It wanted us to know the war could be won. And that when the war was won ... I think it was trying to tell us when the war is over we'll return to our roots. Lose our gnosis, lose our rage. Return to a new, cleansed world."

A pause.

"Maybe. I didn't really understand. But whatever it was, whatever it was trying to tell us, it told me this, indisputably: that Gaia wants your love. And your devotion. But cannot force you to give it. And it told me that as a gift -- or a curse, if we choose to see it so -- it would give us all this night without our Wolves.

"Your Wolf will return at dawn, Sinclair. After that, I guess what happens next is up to you."

A quiet frustration twists in his chest. It feels toothless now without the edge of his rage. There's an irony to the whole night: the one person who might take relief from the thought of losing her Otherness, her rage, was the one who did not go to hear the message. The ones who did go -- Wyrmbreaker, at least -- finds the thought profoundly terrifying. He cannot imagine life in this quiet, in this stillness. He feels weak. He feels too still, too quiet. He feels not at all like himself,

and it only compounds that twist of frustration, that churn of impotence deep in his gut, unable to find the right words, the right things to do; unable to understand, even, where Sinclair was right now. How she got there. What she's thinking.

"I don't know what to do," he says suddenly, and lets go her hand with one of his, rubs the heel of his hand suddenly, briskly over his brow. "I don't know how to help you."

[Sinclair] The rage was always there. Latent, waiting for her as she grew older. It came as energy. It came as a Christmas puppy that had to be given away because it couldn't bear its young mistress's slumbering fury, predatory nature. The fact that Sinclair was born to Change was always there, she just never knew it. Never knew of the potential, the possibility, the world that was going to kick her in the back of the head when she woke up with her knees resting in the chest cavity of a man she'd just torn apart.

So much wrath. So much flat, human anger. So much grief set on fire by rage. They kept her locked up because she wouldn't stop screaming, because she lashed out at everyone. Forty-odd hours passed before she gave up, before she laid down at the back of her cell and wouldn't move. And they thought: slow track. They thought: broken. They thought: another long fosterage and we don't have time, these days, for that sort of thing.

It was the searing intelligence in her eyes when Failsafe entered the cell that changed all that. The searing intelligence that survived the rage, the loss, the confusion, the madness of the late change. It was the way Sinclair asked, her voice raspy from overuse and level with animal ferocity,

what do I have to do to get out of this cell?

that made Regina, an Ahroun -- because at that point they weren't putting anyone but Ahrouns within striking distance of that cub -- take a moment to reassess this new werewolf's potential.

The rage was always there, and to hear Sinclair now, so was the loneliness. The dog that she loved, who pissed itself every time she got near it because it was desperately trying to submit, to roll over, to prove that it wasn't a threat, to beg the little girl -- who was just happy she was finally allowed to play tee-ball, who never got a brother or sister, who thought a dog would be her friend -- not to hurt it.

Her parents, who did arguably a better job than even some Kinfolk in-the-know in accepting and supporting their daughter despite how difficult she could be, how challenging it was to raise her. There was always a separation there. A lack of understanding. She changed and she couldn't go home. She couldn't stand to see how much more vast the distance between them had gotten.

Friends. Teammates. Teachers. Boyfriends. Even other Garou, and it only got worse when Arthur died. Got worse when she succumbed to the Wyrm the first time. There are precious few Garou that think of her as anything but a mad dog, a useless wild cannon better put down than allowed to live, and those precious few are all her packmates. Who, beloved or not, can't take the edge off of an ache that's been with her as long as she can remember. An ache that, for as long as she can remember, has only led to greater rage.

There's no rage there now. Nothing of what she's feeling translates suddenly, instantly, into a desire to rip everything to fucking pieces. Maybe that's how she survived this long, hurting this bad: there was always something to kill, something to destroy, something to do with all that pain. Now it sits in her stomach like a stone.

Such a good Garou, he wants to say. We need you. And there's truth in that, too. She's one of the most powerful fighters they have in this sept. She's growing in wisdom. If he thinks of the questions she could have thought to ask that spirit, if only she'd gone --

But she didn't. Now she listens to what Lukas tells her about what happened, what all this is about. An eclipse of the moon. A reprieve. She puts her free arm across her knees, laying her chin atop it, staring past the edge of the bed. He might have understood. He might have heard the spirit say only what he wanted to hear -- or most feared. And for all they know that spirit was nothing, was no more the voice of gaia than a handful of epiphlings were the four archangels of christendom.

She exhales a sharp sound, a breath that doesn't quite turn into a laugh. "That sounds a lot like the bullshit I got at church as a kid," she says at one point, some pause in his speech. "God wants your love and devotion, freely given... but oh, by the way, you're going to burn in hell for all eternity if you don't 'freely give' it."

Lukas tells her that her wolf will return, and her eyes close. It's hard to tell just what effect that had on her -- in part because it doesn't seem like Sinclair quite knows what effect it has, herself.

She opens them again, slowly, turning her head to look at him. He takes his hand from hers, rubbing his head in open frustration that somehow seems less like a timebomb about to go off because there's no rage for him to even have to control, no temper that could turn lethal in seconds.

"I don't know, either," she says, drawing her hand back slowly. "While you were all gone I was thinking... maybe I could go find Alex, tell him 'look, it's okay now, you don't have to be scared of me', and I could go to my parents and tell them they don't have to worry constantly about me dying in some horrible battle with monsters anymore. I could get some dogs and I could have a kid, Lukas, and I could actually hold it and play with it and make it feel safe. I thought I could go back to school, and..."

She stops there, taking a deep breath and letting it out, rubbing her face in much the same way as he did. Then they drop, and she looks straight at him. "It's like when I changed and they explained to me what that meant. Everything I'd ever wanted or imagined for myself just wasn't an option anymore. I got over it, but it took a long time. This, tonight?" She shakes her head. "It's like fucking going through that all over again. It's like having my life dangled in front of my face and then yanked back again right when I start to reach for it. And it fucking sucks, and right now if Gaia wants my love and devotion she can blow me. I'm doing good right now to give her duty and obligation."

There really isn't anything he can say to that. I didn't know, he's said. And: I'm sorry. He's said that he doesn't know now how to help, and he wants to help, what can he do, and if she were in a different mode of thought she might be pointing out to him right now that he totally always wants to fix everything and make it better and he's not very well acquainted with his own helplessness, is he, and maybe he'd be wiser if he started, like, studying Buddhism or something and saying it is what it is sometimes.

Right now she's not his pack's Galliard, though, and the energy it takes to teach and counsel her packmates has gone right out of her.

So she takes a breath. "Look, I... I don't know what to do either. I haven't thought about how nice it would be to be more human for years now. This... blindsided me, too. I feel fucked up in the head because tonight I saw the possibility that if I stayed behind maybe I'd never get my wolf back, and it was way, way too easy for me to say 'okay'. And I don't want to end up going into Harano or turning into one of those nutjobs with a death wish or a hard-on for the Apocalypse, but it's just... so much work to have to get over all this same shit again, and I'm worn out just thinking about it."

There's a pause there. A twist. "I'm sorry, Lukas," she says quietly. "I'm sorry I kept you in the dark all this time, and now it's out of fucking nowhere and I'm a wreck, but... I meant what I said. I would never have chosen this life. And the only reason I don't give up my wolf entirely is because I do care. I don't want my pack and my people to die. I don't want the Wyrm to win. I know that even among the few of us there are, there aren't a whole lot that can -- or will -- fight like I do.

"But I bear it," she says, more quietly. "I don't cherish it. It takes more than it gives, and it isn't who I am."

[Wyrmbreaker] There isn't much Lukas can say to directly address any of that. There's a reason Sinclair went to Kate, not Lukas. Lukas doesn't know how to just listen, just absorb and Be There without trying to Fix. He doesn't know how to fix this; he doesn't know what to do, if he can't fix it.

He does listen, though. If only because it's all he can do right now: he listens, and after a while his hand lowers from his head. His arm nudges in beside hers, and even through the layers of their outerwear, shared warmth begins to build.

"Not too long ago," when he finally starts talking, it's just that. He's just talking. Letting his thoughts unspool on the fly; waiting to see where they lead, "I had a ... fight with my mate. Toward the end I told her, I am a Shadow Lord. A Garou. It is what I am, and I can never change that. And it turned out she already knew. I didn't need to tell her at all.

"I don't think I even realized how true that was until I woke up like this tonight. I haven't wished for a second that I could stay like this forever. I asked the spirit to keep me like this until the dawn, but that's only because ... I want to be able to be with my mate without frightening her. Without her having to be brave and strong to not be frightened by me. To tell you the truth, I feel like half of my soul is missing right now. I can't ... imagine living like this forever.

"And I don't know when I started feeling like this. I don't remember when I learned about Garou. I've known all my life. I don't remember how I felt when someone first told me I was going to Change. I must have been eight or nine. I do remember when Promised-Rain-rhya came to meet me the first time. I remember feeling -- awed, I guess. Eager. It felt right.

"I don't think it was until after my First Change that I really started understanding what it was that was being asked of me. But I guess by then the War and the Garou and -- all of it -- had become so much a part of my life that that, too, felt right.

"The truth is," he says then, quieter now, "sometimes I do wish I could have more time. More time with my mate. More time with my pack. More time with my friends, with my family, in this world. But I feel like it's my place to fight and die so they won't have to. And if I was given the choice, I would choose this life."


A long pause. Lukas, thinking: quiet and quietly breathing.


"I'm not telling you this to guilt you out," he adds, then. "If anything, I'm trying to apologize for the harsh things I said earlier. I'm trying to explain why I said them, and why I feel that way, or maybe I'm just trying to talk. The War has always been a part of my life, and I don't think I've ever felt robbed because ... well, I guess I never really expected anything more than the War at all. Everything else, Dani&+269;ka, you, Kate, Asha, every day -- it's felt like a gift. Something unexpected and cherished, but something that I expect to have to give up one day when I'm called on to die in the name of the war.

"But it's different for you. You had a life that the war didn't even touch, and then you Changed, and it felt like the war took everything away from you. And I can sit here and preach at you about how that life was an illusion, you are what you are and you can't deny that, so on and so forth, but ... I don't think that will change how you feel. And I can't even begin to put myself in your shoes, feeling like that."


And another quiet. He puts his head back against the wall after a time, looking at some indistinct point on the ceiling. The wall.


"All I can really say," he says finally, "is that I really don't know how to help you right now. I'll help however I can, but you have to tell me how. And if there's nothing I can do, then -- I guess it's up to you. To decide to pick yourself up again and move on, or ... decide not to. Check out. Become Ronin. Give up the Wolf forever somehow. Fuck -- I don't even know.

"I can't pretend that it wouldn't hurt me if you decided to do that, Sinclair. Or that it wouldn't hurt the pack, leave us weaker. And I can't pretend that it wouldn't disappoint and bewilder me. But you're my sister, Sinclair, and you'll always be my sister. It won't make me stop loving you."

[Sinclair] In the end there isn't much Lukas can say, period. He asked what he could do and she said Nothing and it wasn't just morose self-pity but an understanding of him. Of what he's like. What his power grants him, and what is simply beyond his reach.

He is an animal in the deepest sense of the word. Shadow Lord. Garou. And he can't fathom how any of their people could feel the way she does, as though her nature is a curse and not... who she is. He looks for shared warmth, for elemental comfort, and even without his wolf he can sense that right now, even that doesn't seem to help her.

The gulf must feel unimaginably vast, just then.


In the end, Sinclair can't even look at him while he talks about spending a night with his mate without having to hold back, without feeling the potential for her terror right over the horizon of his own control. She looks away, but if he knows her at all he knows she's listening. She'd tell him to STFU if she didn't want to hear it, or ask him to start over if she'd gotten distracted, wolf or no wolf.

Which is why it takes effort for her to keep silent when he admits that his preaching would be useless. He has it half right: it would change how she feels. It would make her angry. There's tension in her back and shoulders, even if that's not what he's saying, even if he knows it wouldn't help.

It wouldn't help because Sinclair knows. This is what she is. There's no one to see tonight, no one to confront or be with but herself, nothing to face but the long memory of utterly wasted expectations of her future. Come dawn, she'll be Garou again. Come dawn, every moment that she has that even comes close to comfort or happiness will have to be a cherished gift (and a painful reminder). Come dawn, everything she has will be laid on the altar every time she shifts, ready to be sacrificed.

And she can't deny that. Even at her angriest, at her most grief-stricken, at her worst, Sinclair never wailed to the Glass Walkers that found her

take it away

make it not true

let me go back.

Maybe tonight -- her refusal, her staying behind, her illusion of choice -- was just, itself, lashing out. Defiance, childlike and stubborn, stamping her foot and saying she wasn't going to play this game, she wasn't going to suck it up and be the good goddamn Galliard and fuck all of you, fuck Gaia, fuck Luna, fuck this fucking war, I will not submit so fucking prettily. I won't pretend to be okay anymore. I'm done. I'm sick of it.


Her forehead is on her arms. He doesn't know how to help her, and if he's going to, well, she has to tell him how. Whatever reaction Sinclair has to that is silent, and unseen, because she's not even showing him her face. Lukas goes on and she lifts her head finally, rubbing at her forehead. When her hands go still again, her head is still bowed, the heels of her hands are on her brow, and her voice is quiet.

"Thanks for staying to talk to me," she says. If he looks close, her eyes are shut. "I'm sorry I can't --"

But the words after that won't come, or simply aren't there, or there's too many to choose from for her to get any of it out. Sinclair lets the would-be sentence die, and just shakes her head. "I think I'm just gonna stay here for awhile," she says, lowering her hands and turning her head to see him. "You should go."

It isn't a push. It isn't leave me alone, just leave me the fuck alone. There's some trace in there of what's there when she nudges him towards his own betterment, or when she lays next to them all after a moot, that trace of the

exquisitely, achingly

gentle person she'd be allowed to be, if it weren't buried so deep under so much rage, so much instinct, so much anger and loss and monstrosity that even she can't feel it anymore.

"You should go," she says again, quiet. "Dawn's not that far off."

[Wyrmbreaker] He wishes he could say no, I'm going to stay. I'll stay until you feel better -- but the truth is he can't. He can't because that would be a lie; because he has a few precious hours in which he isn't a monster, isn't monstrous, doesn't have even the faintest flicker of a possibility that he could become something monstrous and kill everything he ever cared about in a blind rage. He only has these few hours, won't ever have them again, and he wants to spend them with his mate.

His female. Because even when he's not a monster, he's still an animal.

So he doesn't promise that. He does lean into Sinclair suddenly, though, and pushes his brow against her temple, the side of her head, as insistently and heavily as one animal to another. His eyes close. He nuzzles her a moment. When he draws back, he raises his hand and scuffs her hair gently, then kisses her atop the head as he's getting up off the bed.

"I'll come find you later on, okay?" A small pause. Then, "Maybe you should go look for this guy of yours. If nothing else, maybe you should... just tell him this stuff that you told me. Get it off your chest."

[Sinclair] It makes her wince, when Lukas leans into her like that, as though he's physically pleading with her to be okay, to not hurt like this anymore, as though even without his wolf some part of him can't tell the difference between a wound and a hunger, an ache from the shiver of a cold winter, and if he could just --

She doesn't pull away, though. She can't return it, can't give him even the promise that she'll be okay, but she doesn't reject it. Doesn't reject him.

Her face twists a bit, uncomfortable, as he scuffs her hair and kisses the top of her head, like she's his kid sister. Like he's about to go out with his friends and it's just past her curfew, or he'd totally let her tag along. Or something. It's awkward. It's out of place. It underlines, somehow, how bewildering this is to him, how deeply separated they are on this.

"Okay," she says, though, with a small nod, when he says he'll come see her later. Then:

Maybe you should go look for this guy of y--

Sinclair's head comes up and her eyes find his. She gives a sharp shake of her head. "No." It's flat, almost toneless. No explanation for that. Just a softer shake of her head. "I get what you mean, just..."

A breath. "I don't think it'll help." She hesitates, and her lips pull, a tight and brief and forced flickering of a smile. "I'll see you later, Lukas."

[Wyrmbreaker] Lukas doesn't go on when she cuts him off. That happens so rarely that he knows it's not some passing thing, something he can push through and go on with. There's a small silence; it's a little awkward. Then she gives him that forced smile and he gives her one back -- not forced but sad, lopsided.

"Okay," he says quietly. He looks at her another moment. Then he buttons up his coat, grabs his keys off the dresser, and walks out. The door shuts behind him -- it's almost silent.