Danicka is blessed with good health. They've been together over three years as adults; they knew each other for a time as children. In all that while, he can count the times he's seen her unwell on one hand. Even less now that she's grown up, grown strong, grown away from that anxiety-induced thinness she had when he first met her.
All of that only makes it all the more concerning when she is sick. When she's sick like this, so suddenly, with almost no prodrome to speak of. She doesn't cough. She doesn't ache. She doesn't sniffle and she doesn't pop a rash. She just
gets
sick.
And: so sick. By the time they're getting back to Prague Lukas is cursing at the traffic, he's putting his hand on Danicka's brow now and again to feel the steady elevation of her temperature. He's thinking about taking her to the hospital, but -- no, she wants someplace quiet, quiet and dark and cool. It's hard to get her out of the car. It's hard to get her to wake up. He starts to pick her up, but she pushes his hands away, resists, insists on walking. He stays close, his arm around her.
The receptionist sees them and asks if they need anything. "Teplomr," Lukas replies, worry making him terse, making him forget his politesse. "Balená voda." She's in bed by the time the bellhop brings these things up to them. Lukas opens the door, takes the thermometer and the six-pack of water without a word; stuffs a bill in the man's hand and shuts the door in his face.
He stays by the bed, then, getting up only to change the cool damp towel laid over Danicka's brow. There are breaths of gaia on the nightstand. His phone is in his hand. He knows the number to the nearest hospital; he looked it up. He knows the number for emergency services. And he has the number to Danicka's half-sister, the almost-Elder, who surely knows a good Theurge in the area. Maybe he should call them. Maybe she has meningitis. Maybe she's been possessed. Is he overreacting? What is it, how did she get sick, what did she eat, what did they do? He gets up, unable to sit still; walks an abortive circle around the room, comes back. Sits again, his right foot tapping an anxious beat, his eyes fixed on his mate.
Red VengeanceThis is different from that time she got the flu. She could talk to him then. She even cried a little after the fourth day of illness, insisting that she was never getting better, she was always going to be sick, and she could not conceptualize of a time when she would feel anything but miserable. At least then she was coherent. She could sit up and eat broth sometimes, she could ask him for more tissues or medicine. She could, even if she was a little confused about things, tell him no, get out of bed, he might get sick -- because she kept forgetting he would not, could not catch this. His rage would devour the virus, his body would heal itself, it could not touch him. At least then, she was talking to him.
Danicka falls ill almost instantly, too exhausted and in pain and woozy to even form words that aren't curses. She doesn't sleep like herself, even. In sleep, her hair begins to be soaked with sweat. Occasionally she paws away at the cloth he's put on her brow, jerkily, like a marionette with an inexperienced puppeteer yanking her arm around, flopping her hand at her temple. Her temperature rose rapidly in the car but every time he slips the thermometer under her arm, it gives him the same number. It's a high fever, to be sure, but not lethal. Not dangerous.
After an hour or so of sleep, her breathing begins to relax. She still twitches, but not the full-body shivers she was having before, and after a time even the trembles slow and fade to nothing. A couple of hours in, her temperature begins to come down. Not very much, but soon enough her skin feels the same temperature as his own. It's still quite hotter than Danicka's usual. Her sweat evaporates, cools, dries. She rolls onto her right side, legs and arms flung together in front of her and lightly curled. Whatever it is, the worst must be passing.
Outside, the sun begins to set. Danicka sleeps soundly, motionlessly, even her breathing subdued. Occasionally there is a rough sound to her exhales, a quiet rumble in her throat.
The room grows darker. The moon outside is a narrow sliver, a white papercut in the sky, just one sunrise and sunset away from being new. Danicka's skin, which has regained most of its color, turns soft and pale in the dimness of their room. She sleeps on.
It has been hours. Maybe he has fallen asleep, himself; more likely he has watched her like an unblinking angel. When Danicka wakes, the first hint of it is a deep, full inhale. She holds it for a second. Exhales through her mouth, voiced quietly. Limbs move under her, push herself up. She sits up halfway, hands planted on the mattress and arms straight, and opens her eyes. Cracks her neck to one side, then the other. Arches her back and rolls her head on her neck as well, squeezes her shoulderblades together, lets out a beastly, noisy yawn. Smacks her mouth a few times, licks her lips in a thoroughly unladylike fashion, and then her nostrils flare. She scents the room.
Finds Lukas with her eyes. And there's a look in them that is and is not familiar; a sort of ache of recognition, of something akin to loss. The way she has looked at him after long separations, absences. It goes deeper, though. It looks like pain and longing and, strangely,
profound gratitude.
"Tvé oi jsou stejné," she says, her throat raspy from disuse and dryness, as though she has been asleep for far longer than several hours. The words themselves sound like nostalgia, like grief.
She moves to him then, whatever she is wearing, wherever he is, and wraps her arms around him. Breathes him in and holds him tightly, firmly, feeling so much stronger than he has ever felt her hold him. "Můj bratr," she says, but the words are not bringing up Vladik. They are naming
him.
She does not smell like his mate.
Lukas does not sleep. He paces. He worries. He stares at her, touches her brow, wipes her sweat. Sometimes he can't seem to bear it, and he goes to the window to stare unseeingly out. He makes himself a promise, one he would keep: another degree and he was going to do something. The slightest sign of seizure or vomiting, and he was going to call someone, bring her somewhere.
This is not like the flu. This is not like human disease at all, and his nerves are jangling; he's tense. The air is thick with his rage, though the moon is a bare sliver on the horizon.
Her fever doesn't rise, though. It levels out. And then, slowly but surely, it begins to abate. He doesn't call anyone. He finds himself capable of sitting again, and so he does, watching over her from the armchair by the bed. The hours roll by. He turns out some of the lights, and then all but one of them. The windowshades he leaves open. The night deepens, tilts past midnight.
He is not sleeping, but he is in a sort of stupor of exhaustion by the time she wakes. His eyes are still on her, dull, then sharpening as she moves. He sits up. For no reason he can explain, the hairs on his neck are standing on end. The hairs on his forearms. He inhales as she yawns, a swift and alarmed intake of breath.
She looks at him. He stares at her. Something in his eyes is hostile. It's not at all the way he looks at his mate, but then:
she does not smell like his mate.
Lukas doesn't let this creature, this thing that has taken his mate's body, touch him. She reaches for him and he is on his feet, his armchair shuddering backward. He grabs her wrist, snatches her hand away from his skin. His teeth flash in the darkness.
"Kdo jste? Kde je moje Danicka?"
Red VengeanceLukas is recoiling even as she's reaching out to embrace him, grabbing her wrist for a multitude of reasons, and she -- not his mate, not Danicka -- neither goes limp nor tenses up. Her eyes flash. She keeps her lips closed, and he can tell from the force in it that she is trying not to bare her teeth at him. Her hand is in a fist, real strength there. Surprising strength. More than Danicka has in her body, in fact.
But this is Danicka's body.
They speak in Czech. Maybe...whatever this is doesn't know English, or doesn't care for it. No matter. Her nostrils, flaring, relax again. With what seems to be intense effort of will, she does not -- what? Growl at him? Fight him?
"You knew me as Red Vengeance," she says, and: "The one you love... her spirit slumbers." The thing calling itself this name, speaking to him with a voice that is (and is not) Danicka's, takes a breath. "She is fulfilling her oath."
Maybe it's the name. Maybe the word 'oath'. Something scratches at the back of his mind, a hound at a door. Some story from his fosterage that stuck with him for years. It was the sort of thing talked about in the cabins or around fires, not told at moots or spun into song. Not really a happy story. Not really an illustrious one. Sort of a ghost story, in a way, since many weren't sure it was anything more than a tall tale, born out of some Galliard's imagination. But it left him, at that age, with an inexplicable feeling of sadness, as though he could identify with the characters in a way no one else was.
A pack of four wolves went on a quest to some dark place -- it changed in the stories sometimes, what that place really was, or even if it was in the spirit world or the material realm -- and only one came back. That one told the story, presumably, at least once. Wherever they went, it was more dangerous than they expected. Devil's deals were made. Sacrifices, too. The details -- where they went, what their genders or auspices were, what happened to them there -- changed depending on who told it, and are fuzzy in his memory anyway. But one thing was always constant:
One was left behind.
One died trying to save them.
One died on the way back, protecting the survivor.
And the last of the pack made it home, half-mad from guilt. They say that not long after, that one died of shame, for not only had the quest failed, but they had left one of their own in the clutches of something terrifying enough to make a strong pack turn and run, only to fall to death and madness.
In some tellings, that one died of a broken heart. For as a pack, they were closer than brothers and sisters. Closer to each other than to their mates or their siblings, closer even than the bonds of their totem could bring them. They were said to have been as though cut from one cloth, poured from one jar. If you cut one of them, it was the other three who bled.
And then tore your fucking throat out.
The moons and everything else of the packmates shifted around, but the names did not, as standard and recurring as Cinderella or Superman: Red Vengeance. White Vision. Black Wind. Silver Warning. Unlikely names. Fairytale names.
Danicka's eyes look up at him. Whatever is in her right now waits for him to let go. Or ask her something new. Or try to tear her head off.
Black WindLukas would never attack whatever or whoever is speaking to him right now. He would never try to tear its head off; not while it lives in Danicka's body. Not while it speaks to him through her lips.
He can hate it, though. Intensely and irrationally, which is the only way hate born of fear materializes. He grimaces sharply as it names itself, claims to be something he knew once. Red Vengeance. He does know the name. Remembers it, though he remembers so few of the stories they told him during his Fosterage. This Ahroun. That hero. He cared little for the legends; he always was more interested in the concrete, historical details of the battles, the strategy and the tactics.
This legend, though. This one he remembers. This one made him ache inexplicably when he heard it. Makes his brow furrow even now.
He lets her go. Her. It. He can't remember who was who; which one died, which one was left behind, which one sacrificed, which one told the tale. Right now, it hardly seems to matter. He sits abruptly, heavily in the armchair, brooding.
"What oath to you could she have possibly made?"
Red VengeanceEven his hand on her wrist is as gentle as he can make his strength. Not bruising, not crushing. He could do both. He could, in another form, tear hand from arm completely, rip the skin like so much paper. He doesn't. She does not smell like his mate, but she is inside of his mate. She looks like his mate. She even sounds a little like her. There is some of that same, familiar grace in her when she lowers her arm back to her side. She watches him as he sits in the armchair, standing there in camisole and underwear, the things he stripped Danicka down to when she was feverish.
It watches him, brow furrowing again with that look of grief remembered, revisited...renewed.
"The same one you made. The same one we all made," she says after a few seconds, and sits down on the edge of the bed, facing him. She sits like a soldier, limbs lanky and elbows on her knees, fingers dangling lazily between them. Her head is cocked, lupine and langorous, but he knows from his own body and from his packmates that look: she is anything but sleepy or listless right now.
"You knew me as Red Vengeance," she repeats, though her tone has changed to begin a story, "your Ahroun. But that was another life, and I think it has been a very long time. Where I have been, there is no moon to mark a cycle by, and no sun to count days." Her shoulder twitches, a tight little shrug that is more of a roll backwards. "I have waited for you at the doorway, but you have never been near it together at the same time until now.
"The last time I saw you both," says Red, that stabbing pain still twisting in her eyes, "we were in the Homelands together. Before the two of you were reborn. Before I went to limbo to wait for you. That is where we swore to go back for him. That is where we oathed our spirits, our bodies, and our strength to free him."
Her voice lowers, heavy with grief and, he is soon realizing, with the sheer weight of time. "We would need bodies to access the gateway, and the realm. So two of us had to go on to other lives. But...one of us had to stay to remember the path. Or we would all forget, more and more on every rebirth, and might never find our way there again. Where he waits for us still." Her skin is prickled with gooseflesh, though not from cold. "Unable to escape. Unable to die."
Black Wind"The doorway," Lukas echoes hollowly. "Where -- the fountain?" He puts his head in his hands, bending, his shoulders massive, his torso the very expression of weary strength. "Who exactly do you think I am?"
Red VengeanceShe gives a small, mute nod to his question. The doorway. The fountain.
When he bends, Red's eyebrows tighten together, tie in a knot. She watches as he lowers his head to his hands, and -- if he lets her, if he does not flinch away, if he does not push her hand back -- she rests her palm on top of his shoulder. It feels, in nature, like the silent presence of Sinclair when neither of them are saying their pain aloud but both of them are feeling it. Or like Kate at her most sisterly, her most invested, her least... mad, flighty, pristine silver. It feels nothing at all like Danicka's fingertips brushing hair from his brow or stroking his back while he falls asleep next to her.
That is, if he feels it at all. If he lets her.
"My brother," she repeats, the words a warm slur in his native tongue. "My Alpha. Black Wind."
Black Wind[NOTE TO SELF I WAS SO PLEASED WHEN THE FOUNTAIN = DOORWAY CLICKED :]]] ]
Black WindLukas stiffens under her touch, but this time he doesn't recoil. The name is familiar and alien at once. It's not his name; he denies it on sheer instinct, shaking his head against the cup of his palms.
"That's not who I am. Maybe ... maybe it was once. Maybe that's who I was in a previous life, and Danicka was there too, and you, and one other. But that's not who I am now. My name is Lukáš, called Wyrmbreaker. Called Cold Victory. I'm an Ahroun in this life. I'm an Adren. I'm mated and married to the woman whose body you're stealing right now -- god."
The word bursts out of him, raising his head, dropping his hands. He pins her with a look. Red Vengeance in Danicka's body.
"I can help you. I will help you. But if we go through the gateway and find the fourth and free him, then you have to move on. You can't ... be Red Vengeance forever."
Red VengeanceHe's Lukas, Wyrmbreaker, Cold Victory, and the thing -- male, female? -- calling itself Red Vengeance does not debate or huff at any of those names. She does not take her hand from him, does not stop watching him, as he works out what this means, what he was. He tells her he's an Adren Ahroun now. His mate is this woman whose flesh she is inhabiting. Her brows twitch at the word 'stealing', but she does not argue with that, either. As he lifts his head, the motion of his shoulder makes her hand slip away.
She still looks like Danicka. Danicka in camisole and panties and if she hadn't gotten sick and if she were in there they'd be fucking by now, maybe without even taking it off. But it's unlikely that thought would have ever entered his mind. She did get sick, and this isn't her. Doesn't smell right. Doesn't feel right when she touches him. Feels familiar.
But not like his mate.
He tells her to move on. She huffs, a bitter laugh that speaks more of decades -- centuries? -- of loneliness and pain than mirth or friendliness. "I do not want to be, brother." The tightness around her mouth dies, fades, and with it any trace of that breathless, voiceless laugh. "We are going there to free him. And then we will kill him."
The words fall like hammers against stone in his head as she says them, with the cold brutality that all Ahrouns find themselves capable of as they grow in rank. Because it's necessary. Because it's what they are for.
"I will go to the homelands with him. Then we will be reborn, as the two of you were. We will be allowed to forget, as you have."
There's a pause there, a glance down at the hand that fell from his head, bearing his wedding ring. The ring on her hand, Danicka's hand. She looks at him again, with Danicka's eyes. There is something else in them. Something familiar not because he knew it once in a long-forgotten life, but because he knows it even now.
"And we will find each other again. As you have."
Black WindLukas's eyes follow hers. They both look at the ring on Danicka's hand. Lukas's eyebrows contract together abruptly. He stands.
"Please take that off." He's strained, very quiet. "I know it's a small thing. Maybe it shouldn't even matter when in a past life we were all brothers and sisters, equally close. But that belongs to my mate. And I'm frightened for her. So it matters to me."
He steps into his shoes. He puts on his coat. He pulls clothes out of Danicka's suitcase -- the warmest, most durable items he can find -- and tosses them on the bed. "Let's walk," he says. And rather abruptly: "Which one was he, the one we left behind?"
A beat.
"And which one was I?"
Red VengeanceHe's getting to I know -- as Red Vengeance is lifting Danicka's left hand, using Danicka's right hand to twist and slide the ring off. There isn't a hesitation. She is handing it to him, without interrupting, looking up at him. Rises when he takes it, and for the first time -- sees herself in a mirror. Stares for a moment, without saying anything or altering her expression. After a few seconds she inhales deeply, nostrils flaring, and then moves to start putting on the clothes.
As she dresses, pulling on jeans and flat-soled boots, a long-sleeved shirt and a sweater over that, she answers his questions. He was, after all, her Alpha. She was, after all, his Ahroun.
But first, she says: "Is." Flatly, and meeting his eyes after zipping up Danicka's boots: "He still breathes." It isn't a joy. He knows that, though. She goes on, though.
"Silver Warning is a Half Moon. You were once rivals, when you were cubs. Disagreed on almost everything even when you were named and bound together. You made each other stronger that way. Steel on steel."
Her eyes shift to his, arms crossed over her chest. Clarifies: "You were a Half Moon, then." She watches him a moment, but only a moment, before telling him what she knows some part of him must be wanting to know, wanting to ask -- or avoiding asking: "She was our Theurge, brother." There's more there, but Red Vengeance leaves it as it is. She looks at the window, sniffs the air. "What year is this?" she asks with a frown, and then a flinch: "Do not tell me. I do not wish to know. It does not matter."
With that, a swift turn of her head, she makes for the door.
Black WindThere's a flicker of shame in Lukas's eyes when Red Vengeance so unhesitatingly removes the ring. Gratitude too, though. He doesn't change his mind, doesn't tell her it's okay, really, leave it on. He takes the ring. He starts to put it in his pocket, but changes his mind -- sifts through Danicka's jewelry box and finds the simplest chain in there. Threads the ring through. Hangs it around his own neck.
He's ready, then. And she's dressed. He starts to answer her -- she stops him. Through his worry and anger and bewilderment he feels the first stirring of something like pity, or perhaps sorrow. Four of them once. One trapped. One always staying behind so that they don't forget, they won't all forget. And then the two of them. Black Wind, White Vision. Reborn again and again, free to forget, free to move on, free to find each other and become two halves of the same whole. It doesn't seem fair. It seems like a dereliction of duty.
"I don't know when you last saw the Realm," he says as he puts his hand on the doorhandle. "It might have changed overwhelmingly. Stay close to me. I'll keep you both safe."
Red Vengeance's spirit.
Danicka's body.
Red VengeanceRed gives him a glance aside as he holds his hand on the door handle, telling her the world has change, might overwhelm her. But it's really the part where he tells her to stay close and that he will keep them safe that makes her hesitate. She is an Ahroun, too. Has, in a way, been one for possible centuries. She knows now that he is one, too.
"Brother," she calls him, because it is easier for her than calling him by some new name, and because it is easier for him than calling him the name she knew in her own breathing, walking life, "we entered a habitation of the Wyld together once. Your hands became grapes, my voice became the number seven."
There's a beat.
"I will not be overwhelmed by humanity's newest follies," she says dryly. Then, she lifts her hand -- the one that still bears the imprint on the third finger of Danicka's wedding ring -- and
shifts.
With archaic grace and primitive speed, black fur spreads from the middle of Danicka's forearm up her wrist, across the back of her expanding, widening hand. Her palm turns pink, mottled with grey, the flesh reshaping around long fingers that become, soon enough, the viciously curving claws of a crinos.
"Nor will you bear the burden of our sister's life alone," Red tells him, and with a clench of that clawed hand and a crack of that now-enormous wrist, the fur and talons recede even quicker than they appeared, returning once more to Danicka's soft skin, slender fingers, perfectly manicured nails.
Black WindLukas's breath is sucked so swiftly in that his throat feels raw, his ribs ache. He doesn't exhale until the shift dissipates and Danicka's hand is as it was, and always has been. His own fingers move, the faintest twitch. He wants to take that hand, which was briefly a paw, but he doesn't.
"How is it possible?" His eyes meet hers. His eyes are the same, she said. Hers are surely not. "How is any of this possible?"
Red VengeanceRed Vengeance can only shake her head. "I know only that it is," she tells him. Her head jerks toward the door. "I have waited a very long time, brother."
