Even now, they struggle through so much to be together. In the beginning it was his pack, her reticence, his threats, her lies. Every step they took towards something deeper, something that would last them the rest of their lives, they took in the knowledge that he would not be able to live with her or their cubs, that she would outlive him, that he could very well die long before either of them would be ready to let go. Three years later and they are married. They share a den, at least as often as they can. They are trying to get started on those cubs. His pack has changed. Her committment is total. His heart breaks if he so much as bruises her feelings with a poorly-chosen set of words. She tells him the truth even if it scares her, even if it hurts. But they still struggle.
Yet there's this: when they struggle, they do not push each other way. They circle each other at most, wary of causing harm, and then -- like now -- they hold each other as though staunching a wound. Tight. Uncompromising. Vital.
He wasn't okay. He thought he never would be. Danicka's arm encircles his chest completely then, holding him closer. A moment later he's saying that this is exactly what she did, and it helped him open his eyes. Upon mention of Red and Silver appearing before them, Danicka sees them flash into her mind's eye, as brilliant as though they had never died, hundreds of years apart from each other. She exhales, shakily.
Her mate is still not okay, and a part of her wants to keen softly. The noise is animal, and it sticks in her throat a bit. She doesn't entirely understand it. Instead, she strokes his side, and turns her face to kiss his chest. He will think. He will coalesce again. He'll tell her what happened tonight,
and another night, centuries ago. And he will be okay. He will.
She takes it as a promise, for that is what it is.
Later on they rise, and in this grand, luxurious hotel shower of theirs, they rinse the last of this night from their skins, at least. Danicka rests her head on his chest; Lukas folds his arms heavy around her, his large hands touching her back. She wrings the water from her hair while he wraps a towel around her shoulders, still remembering how she shivered in the rain, even though now her skin is pink from warmth. It is hard to let go of things that ache, that frighten, that grieve. Sometimes they linger for an entire lifetime. Sometimes they linger for many.
Their bed is larger than it needs to be. Many beds are. Tonight she sleeps with him as the first time she ever slept with him: wrapped around him from behind, her hand covering his heart, his hand covering her hand. He cannot see her but he can smell her all around him, hear her breathing, and follow that breathing into the dark. He finds, after frenzy and agony, that he is exhausted. Sleep comes easier, perhaps, than he might have expected.
So, too, do his dreams. Half nightmares, the aftertaste of his own rage taking him down a sickening spiral toward the Wyrm. Half mourning, seeing flickers of an old lifetime. Brawling in adolescence with Silver Warning, literally smashing each other's faces while rolling in the dirt. Hearing Red Vengeance howling, never quite finding her.
Hey.
Through the dreams, Lukas hears a voice. He wakes, or half-wakes, to it. The room is dark and sealed against the night. Danicka still sleeps. Distantly in his mind, so far away it's barely conceivable, small flames pulse in his mind. That pristine white, alert but silent. That 'hey' is Sinclair, on the other side of the world -- or at least an ocean -- calling to him. Not really in words, though. She's just there. Both of his sisters are there. Maddox, too. In some corner of his mind they gather around him, lean to him.
He isn't quite okay. But that is all right. He will be. Danicka shifts slightly behind him, her arm slack now around him. Her foot moves under the covers, slips between his calves. Sleep lures him under again. His dreams are quieter, this time. They are of pack.
In the morning -- or the tail end of it -- they go out walking. Breakfast is taken late, like an afterthought, but it is extensive. Even Danicka eats more than usual, but she is done long before Lukas has replenished himself. The streets outside are wet and the sun glints off of puddles between the cobblestones. They walk nowhere in particular. They slip in and out of shops, not talking much, and not needing to. Passing through the lower square, they see a repair crew examining the grate around the fountain.
Danicka glances at her palms as they walk, without saying anything, then slips her hand into Lukas's and leads him away. Much later, they wander through a garden near the castle itself, and
Lukas begins to talk to her. About all of it. Everything he said he wanted to tell her, and some things he simply needs to. Danicka sits with him on a low stone bench and just listens. She asks questions here and there, about Red, about how Lukas felt, but mostly she just lets him talk. From the first months she knew him to now, he has had moments of just spilling his thoughts out wholesale, discovering them even as he hears himself put them into words. For a man who plans so carefully, who thinks so logically, much of him simply... is. He is this way because he is this way.
Perhaps it says something that Danicka understands that. Danicka, who once told him that she doesn't try to reconcile herself with herself. Danicka, who even now sometimes simply just does things.
"I wish I could remember more," she does say, very softly. And: begins to tell him a few things, too.
Like how she was feeling strange from the first time they passed that fountain, took pictures in front of it, stared at it. Like how she fell asleep in the car, feeling drunk or drugged, and knew by instinct that she was not dreaming when Red first spoke to her. She tells him that she at least remembers that: that her heart leapt when she heard that voice in her own mind, sharing her mind. That she knew that voice, that presence, like she does not even know her own blood-kin.
Red told her what happened to them all, at least the broad strokes. Red had gotten to the part where the three of them met in the Homelands and that White Vision had sworn --
"I told her I knew," Danicka says to Lukas. "And I told her it was all right. I told her that you would go back with her, and she said... she knew you would. She said --"
it's who he is.
After that, she was just asleep. Til the eagle gate. Danicka tells him, blessedly, that she doesn't really remember it happening. It's like a dream, that pain. She could feel Red fighting to get back in control, but that's all she remembers of that incident. She doesn't remember what, really, happened to her hand. Or anything after that, until Red's ghost left her body entirely and they faced their brother and sister.
"He looked at me like he knew me," Danicka says, of Silver, "and some part of me felt like I knew him, too." Her head shakes. "Mostly I just wonder if I'll know them, if we meet them again."
Again, softly but not sorrowfully, as she leans to Lukas's side, as he draws her close: "I wish I could remember more."
Late that night, they call Sabina again. They meet at her house, and the 'kids' are there again, minus Tadeas, who has a date. Dinner is simple and includes leftovers. Zdenka engages Lukas and her uncle in a game of cards; Danicka and Sabina talk on the couch, at length, about what it was like when she changed, when Miloslav was taken, when her fosterage began. What they thought and felt when they heard about their halfbrother's birth, who now only one of them has met. The night stretches onward, until Zdenka takes herself home with a yawn. Danicka is thinking of driving back; Sabina tells her not to be silly. They will sleep there tonight, she says.
She insists. Even though the hotel isn't far.
Sitting on the couch, long after Sabina's husband has gone to bed, Danicka falls asleep against Lukas's arm in between the two wolves. His hand moves up and down her shoulder. Sabina, with the canny eyes of a truthteller, has been watching him all night. And though the moon outside is dark now, an empty black spot in the sky, she tells him quietly:
You should run with me tonight.
And by god, they run. Their kin are safe in a warm den together, the walls warded. Sabina howls prayers to Luna even as they are reaching the apex of their hunt in the spirit world. They tear apart the ethereal, quintessential self of an elk together, and the taste of its blood is the purest taste that has ever been lapped by his tongue. It is real and it is a part of him to do this, be this, sharing the memory of meat with blood-pack, spirit-pack, family-pack. They wait together, soaking in Gaia's grace, for the elk's spirit to rise again from its own remnants. It does, shaking coltishly as a newborn. Sabina bows to it, whuffs gratitude and honor. The elk bays, the tips of its fur glinting blue-white, and trots off to re-join its herd.
Danicka is still sleeping on the couch when Lukas comes back to her. She's under a blanket that Sarka knitted, that Lukas laid over her. She wakes up when he comes back in, and smiles drowsily at him. He takes her up the guest room, where
quietly, and gaspingly, and deeply,
she takes him under the covers, her hands holding onto his back and her thighs opened around him, holding him against her. They go slowly to keep quiet. Danicka's teeth press into his shoulder when she comes, her eyes rolling back and closing from the struggle to be silent. Sweat is a thin sheen on both their skins when it's over, though he goes on moving, panting as softly as he can, flexing into her like he can't stop it, though he can't bear it either. She's gone limp then, trembling like a leaf, calming when he kisses her.
Sabina isn't there in the morning when they get up. That's all right. They share a small breakfast with her mate and say one last goodbye, heading back to the hotel to shower and change and begin packing. It's their last day in Prague. That's when they go to all those shops they've seen here and there and Danicka buys presents for the kids back home, for her father, for herself, for Anezka and Daniel, for Lukas's parents. They have lunch at that restaurant they meant to go to. They visit that gallery they had been talking about. By dinner they are worn out, and afterwards sit on top of their bed, peeling oranges with their fingers and feeding each other segments. They discuss how to smuggle some back into the States. They fall asleep with bits of orange rind still under their fingernails.
The flight home is similar to the flight there. Except this: looking down at Prague as it recedes, Danicka's eyes become wet. She wipes them, sniffs, and tells Lukas before he can even tell her it will be okay: "We'll come back. As a family. We will."
She laughs at herself, saying that. Huffing the air out, amused and exasperated by her own high emotion. But Lukas answers her, echoes her:
We'll come back. We will.
