belong.

[Danicka] One of these days he has to tell her to stop sending him text messages. Except that their may not be any more one-of-these days. The moon is so full that the human eye can't tell the difference. Lukas can feel it. Danicka may be able to, as well, after all these years. Who knows how much it sings in her blood?

The message is just an address. The hotel is called Affinia.

[Lukas] The first time she texted him, he was irritated at the brusque summoning, as though he were some sort of electronic lapdog. The second time, the third -- they don't even come to mind now. He thinks this may be the fourth time, or the fifth; he thinks this may also be the last.

Lukas clips his phone shut. Then he sets his laptop aside, gets off the bed. He turns the lights out and locks the door on his way out.

Twenty, thirty minutes later, he's knocking on the door, an easily-audible rap of the knuckles.

[Danicka] The first time she texted him like that, he had not asked -- as he may have wanted to -- what she thought she was doing, summoning a Trueborn. Her answer may have surprised him. Then again, by now it's also entirely possible that nothing Danicka does is really going to surprise him too deeply. It doesn't matter. She sends him an address, like they are two people who used to fool around and sometimes still get an inch, two people who have no illusions whatsoever about what the hell they're doing. No aspirations, either.

Not like they talked, last time, about taming each other. They both know it means something entirely different than subjugation, ownership, control, whether mutual or one-sided. At least it means something different the way they talk about it.

When Lukas knocks the door opens just seconds later; she doesn't keep him waiting. Danicka does not answer the door in heels and a corset and almost nothing else. She opens the door, her feet bare and her hair down, wearing the same dress she wore to lunch today. It's periwinkle, sleeveless, just barely casual enough to walk around town in.

She doesn't say anything. She doesn't grab him by the belt, or the collar. She does, however, take his hand.

[Lukas] Walking to that door must have been a feat for Danicka. She could feel his rage beating through it. She can see the mandatory fire-escape-routes notice posted on the door, and that may strike her as ironic: if the door feels hot, don't open it.

This door is beyond hot. It feels like there's an inferno beyond it. But when it opens, it's just Lukas, leather jacket and jeans, silk sweater, nothing but an undershirt beneath that.

He looks at her for a moment. If he'd meant to ask her what the occasion was, or how she was doing, or -- any of the things a man might ask a woman he's sleeping with -- the thoughts peel out of his head when she takes his hand. He steps in, and into her. With his free hand he pushes the door gently shut behind him, but by then he's already bending his head to her and angling it, and his mouth tastes faintly of the apple he ate in the car on the way over.

[Danicka] For once, it's only been two days since the last time they saw each other. The only difference it makes is in the almost imperceptible -- to most people -- spike of energy in and around him, the bristling fury that was there the first time she 'summoned' him. Otherwise there is no change, not in the way they reach for each other. There's unspeakable gentleness in the way she takes his hand, rather than yanking him into the hotel room and slamming the door behind him, slamming him up against it.

And at the same time, when the door does close (carefully) and Danicka pulls the hand she is holding around her to the small of her back (softly), they are reaching to kiss each other as though it's been weeks, not days. Months, not hours. With the height difference, he must bend and she has to stretch but they manage, they do just fine. Her dress is as soft as jersey cotton under his hand.

This isn't a suite. Not this time. The room is actually -- comparatively -- small, most of it taken up by the expansive, white-linened bed.

Danicka's mouth touches his, and she thinks finally as though she has been waiting longer than thirty minutes for him. Her lips part to sigh, and then to take his tongue in her mouth, and then she says what she was only half-sure of when she decided to come here in the first place:

"Lukáš, I don't want this to end yet."

[Lukas] Lukas has never been as vocal as Danicka.

... well. That is a blatant lie. Because when he was young, he was not only as vocal, he was far more vocal. He made engine noises when he played with toy cars and trucks and plane. He yelled and laughed when he chased Anezka around her house. He shouted encouragements down at the children climbing the tree with him, and then Danicka fell, and he jumped out of the tree, and everyone in the yard could hear him shouting for his father and Mr. Musil to come quick, come quick, Danicka fell.

He didn't holler or bawl when he got thrashed, though. He was silent for a while after that, out of remorse or a sore ass or both, and then he had some cake, because it was someone's birthday, and he forgot about it. By the time the sun went down he was tearing around the yard again, and his father had to call three times before he'd come in, put on his shoes, say thankyouverymuchforinvitingme to Mr. Musil, and leave.

He's forgotten about it by now, almost all of it. And he's not the same person. He doesn't yell anymore; he doesn't even speak loudly, though he does, sometimes, say things to her that he never thought he'd say to anyone.

He's said her name a time or two when he's inside her. He tells her what he wants in a language of caught and shuddering breaths, microexpressions, a fragmentary sentence or two.

He's said her name many, many more times than that, when he's just talking to her, or about her, or --

He always gets the pronunciation right.

The point of this is: when she draws away and the kiss ends, and he doesn't want it to, he comes very close, very damned close, to saying something. Danička, or wait, or please, or -- just a sound, even, something to express that he wasn't ready for her to draw away, and then she speaks instead, and his eyes flicker open; his brow still to hers, his face too close for him to see anything, so he tips his head down a few degrees and looks down at her body pressed to his instead, because sometime in the course of the kiss he had pressed her to him.

A silence. He takes a hand from her back and puts it to her face, stroking back over her cheek, into her hair; then the side of her neck. He touches her like this, a sort of heavy, tactile affection, and there's something half-animal about it, not quite human.

He could ask her how much longer she intends to give him, only he doesn't care; he'll take what he can get. He could ask her what made her decide to stay, only he knows damn well. He could say something to express his pleasure: i'm glad, i'm happy you said that, i'm pleased; only none of that was true, because it's not gladness or happiness or simple pleasure that makes him draw so deep a breath as that, filling his chest until his intercostals strain.

Lukas tips his chin up, then. His mouth comes against hers again, opening, and his tongue touches hers delicately, almost, before his eyes close, his mouth closes over hers and he tilts his head and deepens the kiss.

This is the only response he can give for some time.

Both his hands are on her face at the end of it, cupping her face to his the way one cups one's hands around something precious; or around a flame, something to be protected from the wind and the rain. When the kiss tapers off he turns his brow against hers, his mouth drifting from her upper lip to the corner of her mouth, and back.

"All the way here," he says, quiet as a secret, "I was trying to think how I would put myself back together again after tonight."

[Danicka] As she was in childhood, so she is now, at least in terms of how much of herself she shares. It was daring beyond reason that she climbed up in a tree when she was eight, and no one except her father might have on some level suspected that she was proving to herself or to Anezka or to someone that she could climb just as well as the dark-haired six year-old and his sister, which turned out not to be true at all. She didn't stomp her foot or huff her breath, and when she fell she didn't so much as sniffle, but that could never be mistaken for boldness or courage; when a door would slam Lukas's father's voice would raise by a decibel or two she would bolt.

She doesn't cry and she doesn't whimper out of terror but she folds in on herself when his Rage flares and she runs when she is told to and she hid in someone's bedroom when a Garou who has hit her in the past showed up in a form too twisted to be natural.

And she doesn't yell, and she doesn't raise her voice, and she doesn't snap when her temper is prodded...not very often. In fact, the only time she seems touched very deeply by what is going on around her or happening to her is when they're fucking. Then, she has to muffle her voice against his mouth or by biting into the meat of his shoulder, if she bothers to stifle them at all. Then, she cries out. In the course of one night she said his name three times during sex, had never done that before and did not use his name again a single time in the morning.

She's never told him what it does to her, hearing her own name out of his mouth. She might not ever tell him. And she might not ever need to.

Kissing him is difficult because it has to end at some point, to breathe or to speak. Speaking is the only way she can make herself stop kissing him this time, and even then she doesn't pull her body away, and her breath is on his cheek because their faces are still so close together, but Danicka was not expecting a response to that. For awhile, she thinks she won't be getting one. Not verbally, at least.

Her eyes are open, only came open after saying his name just a moment ago, and despite the fact that their kiss only lasted a handful of seconds her breathing is already fast. It started getting fast ten minutes before he got here. Her heart is thundering in her chest so hard she's convinced he can feel it even through the layers between them, and her eyes stay locked on his face while he is quiet, while he's touching her hair, pawing at her in a way he did not the last time the moon was full and they were in the same enclosed space.

They kiss again and she thinks, surely, he's not going to say anything at all. Relief floods through her for a few moments...and then several more moments. She slides her hands up his chest and around his neck, holding him right where he is. The kiss is slower this time, now that the ticking has stopped and no explosion has followed. Danicka relaxes against him, sighs again, and this time with a half-voiced sound of contentment. She doesn't protest when he stops, watching him with a slightly dreamy expression for a split second.

Their faces touch, slowly. She closes her eyes again and begins to smile. And then he says that. Her eyelashes flicker back upwards, a single line appearing to furrow her brow before it smooths, as though washing away her own expressions is instinct by now. Danicka doesn't pull away, but she does let her hands wander away from the back of his neck, under his jacket, beginning to push it off of his shoulders. "What do you mean?" she whispers back.

[Lukas] His reaction to that is almost helpless, instinctual: he shakes his head, quickly but tightly, several times, and he's still shaking it when he tilts his chin up again and kisses her, suddenly, as though only this could stop the negation he giving her, which meant almost nothing at all.

Until his mouth parts from hers again, anyway. His lips are still against hers. His breath washes over her skin; he moulds it into words --

"Please don't make me say it." If he's pleading, if he's begging, it's a very quiet, subdued version of it.

[Danicka] For a few moments there she'd thought she wouldn't say anything to him, not when he got there and not during and not after. She'd just kiss him, hard and desperately enough as though she could take some small portion of his soul into herself and keep it. She'd just fuck him, really just fuck him this time and not think of it or call it anything else, the way she meant to the first time, the way she couldn't. She'd just leave him.

And for awhile there she thought she would tell him only after, only with her mouth red from kissing his and her body lying limply on top of his and sweat drying on her shoulders. She'd tell him til the next full moon again. Something. She'd give herself a horizon to watch, or a time to count down to, a ready-made escape route. She would be honest with him about what to expect from her and not end up humiliated in public or beaten in the future, because they would both know not just that this won't last but how long they have.

Then they kissed and she told him, not without stopping to think but realizing, when she took a breath, what it was she really wanted to say.

Danicka blinks a couple of times when he shakes his head, very much like an animal or a child. She closes her eyes when he kisses her, not like either of those things, and her hands underneath his sweater curl and clench, grabbing at the fabric of his sweater. His words still taste like apples. Danicka pulls her head back, just an inch or so, until she can see his face, and his eyes if he'll let her.

"But I honestly don't know," she says quietly, like a -- yes -- secret. Because this may be one of the first times she hasn't already been aware of whatever it is he's not saying yet. Whatever 'it' is that he does not want to say, it is close to the surface. And yet she doesn't just nod, doesn't just say that she understands.

[Lukas] There's a war here, silent and slow, like a battle fought underwater. She draws her head back and he leans into her, and when she's out of his reach he turns his face to the side, his jaw clamps down, his rage, unstable with the moon, stirs uneasily beneath his skin.

Then he looks at her, directly, and he just spits it out, says it like he's half-angry, or half-crucified:

"I thought when tonight was done you'd tell me it was over, Danička." They hold their faces apart, but her hands are under his coat and twisting into his thin sweater, and his hands are on her face as though in a moment he would pull her mouth into his again, and, "I thought you'd tell me we were through, and then you'd get dressed and walk out the door and leave me to pick up the pieces."

A pause, a breath, unnecessary, but he takes it anyway, fast and swift and not quite steady.

"All the way here I was thinking how I would do that. And all the way here, I couldn't think of a single way, a single thing I could just do or say and -- " a grimace twists across his face, fades, " -- be all right again."

[Danicka] It wouldn't be fair of her to pretend that she doesn't already know, from experiences that go back farther than even her very first meeting with him, what he's going to be like tonight. It wouldn't be fair of her to act as though she isn't aware of that surge of fury twisting beneath his skin like an undertow, threatening to pull him down, under, and away. Danicka watches the way he turns his face from her, his face tightening, and her eyebrows draw together with something like concern. Or frustration. Or both. Her hands relax on his shoulders without her even telling them to.

This time her expression doesn't smooth over, become placid, pull away. The frown, small as it is, stays in place. The question she wants to ask is Why, nothing more. What she says instead is: "Why did you almost frenzy the first time we kissed?

Not the first time I kissed you. Not the first time you kissed me. It wasn't like that.

[Danicka] [Correction: There's a " missing in there. *taps chin* I wonder wherrre...]

[Lukas] "I don't -- know."

This is becoming a refrain, and damned if that doesn't gall him. Lukas Wyrmbreaker, who may quite possibly be happiest when he can plan his day down to the second, understand the inner workings of his mind and emotions down to the iota: and then she comes and asks him why this, why that, and all he can say is I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.

Her hands have relaxed. His, after a moment, draw away from her face as well. Some space opens between them now, but his hands don't return to his sides. They rest at her waist, her dress soft against his fingers. "I suppose it was any number of things," he says, looking down now, which is easier than looking her in the eye.

They are not whispering -- he was never whispering, though it was close at one point -- but he still speaks quietly, and as levelly as he can, laying out the facts like they didn't affect him, weren't part of him.

"I wanted to make it just a fuck. So I could have it and be done with it. But then you were there, and I couldn't stop kissing you, and I wanted you so badly. If you'd been afraid, or if there had been a lie in your body, the way you responded, or if you could've just been disinterested in me, just in for the sex -- then it would have been all right.

"But you weren't."

He finds he can look at her again. And he does, levelly, though his brow is furrowed, and he has that look on his face again, somewhere between consternation and pain.

"I suppose it was the way you kissed me. And the way you touched me. You didn't say my name, but -- I knew you knew it was you and I in that room, and no one else."

[Danicka] To this day Danicka does not know what the Garou call him. She knows his name, its meaning, his name day. She knows his last name, the line he's descended from, the fact that their bloodlines are both born out of a region that was once Bohemia, knows the names of his family members and their names. She knows his birthday because fifteen years later it's significant enough to stand out in her memory without any reminders. She knows random, small details like his favorite treat. She knows the location of individual scars on his body. She knows that no one ever called him Luki, but even when his father was being stern he was Lukášek.

And she would not know who the hell 'Wyrmbreaker' is if asked.

The way this night began could have gone on a very different track, just a crush of limbs and lust and perhaps misguided desperation. With the moon as full as it is they could have literally torn their clothes off of one another's bodies and made it only so far as the nearest flat surface -- the wall, the floor -- before trying to obliterate whatever words or feelings have risen up in a haze of fulfilled desire. Perhaps that's what they both had in mind. One last, almost maniacal rush of whatever this is before ending it and walking away. Or putting together the pieces. Or whatever.

That's how it started, their hands and mouths on each other before either one of them could say a word, and then Danicka blurted out what he has known since that night in the Brotherhood: I don't want this to end. And now her hands are loosening and his are falling to her waist rather than holding her against him, and they are doing that thing they have a tendency to do when they least expect it, perhaps even least want it: they're talking.

Or rather, Lukas is talking, and Danicka is listening. Not because this is her role as his kin, not because she is his counselor or confidant, not because she has some internal drive to ease whatever pain or trouble might be plaguing him. She listens because she is genuinely, if inexplicably, interested in what he has to say. Her brow remains furrowed, some of the concern drifting away along with any trace of frustration. Now it is mostly attention, which is surprisingly difficult to maintain with their bodies pressed together like this, when just a month ago something as small as sitting beside him would get her pulse racing.

It still would. Which makes this, his thighs touching hers and hands on her and a locked door between them and the rest of the universe, almost impossible to tolerate. Nothing in her has slowed down, or eased up, or pulled back. She is, however, trying to understand how his Rage would not have been piqued if she had not wanted him...if she had only wanted to 'get fucked', as he'd put it. She does not quite understand, not with the heat of him bleeding through veils of fabric to distract her.

She has to understand, though, because none of that has changed. They can't stop kissing. She knows he wants her; even when asking him what he meant she could not stop trying to get his clothes off of his body. She's not afraid...at least not the way she probably should have been then, in the way that should have made her run from the room rather than go back to bed with him. And Lukas knows that she is not there for the sex. She was there waiting for him, is interested in him, is kissing and touching him and not just another male body or another body, period. It is still him, and her, in this room.

Danicka takes a deep breath, meeting his eyes as soon as they come back to her own -- which watch him so relentlessly, so mercilessly, that he cannot deny she is anything but a Shadow Lord -- and runs her hands down his chest and abdomen to the waist of his pants.

"...Do you think it's going to happen again?"

[Lukas] Lukas can't remember if he's ever told her his auspice. It doesn't matter. He doesn't need to. She can guess. His control hangs by a thread when the moon is full. He comes home bloody but whole from encounters that left a Theurge nearly in pieces. His body beneath her hands might as well have been carved out of wood, or stone.

Except -- when her hands run down, he reacts. His chest fills against her palms on a sharp inhale. His stomach pulls in, flexes. Her fingers hook into the waist of his pants, under his sweater, and the heat of his skin warms her knuckles.

Wood doesn't do that. Stone doesn't do that. He's not stone at all here, a locked door between them and the world, an open window with the city and the moon outside. He's not stone at all in her presence, but only fallible flesh and bone and blood that yearns and howls for the taste of her with such hunger that he can hardly think.

He tells her the truth, which is all he's ever done: "It might."

[Danicka] What she hasn't told him is that later on in the day after the last time she saw him, she literally ran for her life from Black Spiral Dancers. She doesn't tell him that she could not stop crying until the front door opened and closed again, but that she didn't call him and she didn't call her father and she didn't call anyone because there was nothing more shameful than crying over something like that and telling someone about it. As far as she knows, Lukas has absolutely no knowledge of what happened in the park.

And apparently he's not going to find out tonight, either. It isn't the last thing on her mind, and in fact is near the forefront. Overriding it, however, is the way he reacts to the simplest things: her hands moving down his chest, her knuckles against his skin. He is -- as has been noted -- not as vocal as she is, not usually, but there are a thousand tells, each one as obvious to her as a word spoken aloud. On another night she would probably run her fingers along the inside of his waistband, perhaps slowly, maybe not.

Nobody on this floor of the hotel is sleeping easily right now. It's a few hours past midnight, the hour when more people die in hospitals and when it is too far from sunset and too far from sunrise, turning both into dreams and not realities, not anchors. Sleepers turn over in their beds and lovers curl into one another's arms, the whole hallway seeming to seethe with foreboding. All around them is dead silence, because she brought him here tonight.

Danicka doesn't tease him. She looks at her hands hooked at his waist and then looks at him, unafraid -- this is the woman who planted her hands on his chest and shoved him onto the bed literally minutes after he nearly tore her and the room apart -- but careful, just the same. She is also the woman who runs from trouble, who will take the chance she has to bolt...except that night, when she confessed that she did not want to leave, even if she should. And who confessed tonight that she does not want this to end ('yet'...she said 'yet'), even if she knows it will.

She exhales as if she's been holding her breath, sliding her fingers out from under his waistband. "Don't let it."

When her hand grabs a hold of his belt and starts to unfasten it, it's undone almost before he has time to notice it, before her words are even completely out of her mouth. She's using her dominant hand this time, not her off left. His jeans are undone and her hands are pulling them and the boxer-briefs they conceal off of his hips and down his thighs and -- at least for tonight -- if he thought that this particular truth would send her running, he's wrong. Danicka doesn't bother getting his jeans off even all the way past his knees before she's sinking onto her own on the thick, lightly patterned carpet.

"Take off your clothes," is the last thing she says to him, her breath curling over his abdomen, just under his navel.

His shoes are still on. There is no way he can get his jeans completely off without moving her. And moving her should, when Danicka pushes her free hand up under his shirts and caresses the midline of his torso, be the last thing he can think of doing. She does not pause to lick him or tease him, to play at inexperience or uncertainty. She takes him in her hand. And then she takes him in her mouth.

[Danicka] [Pause!]

[Lukas] It's fair to say that when Danicka flicks his belt, button and fly open in a matter of seconds and goes to her knees before him, Lukas is left shipwrecked somewhere between the islands of stunned and astounded by the speed and audacity of her. He wonders if she didn't hear him say It might, as in, I might turn into a ten-foot-tower-of-doom again if we fuck tonight; he wonders how a woman so timid sometimes, so easily cowed, so outright cowardly at any sight or sign of a Garou's more bestial nature could ignore all that and just --

(oh -- fuck.)

He's not sure if he thought that as a conclusion to his sentence, the caboose on his train of thought, or if he thought that because she's touching him now, her hand is wrapped around him, her mouth is wrapped around him; she is, ladies and gentlemen, sucking his cock. He's not even sure if he only thought it, the oh fuck searing across his mind like fire down a line of gasoline, or he's actually said it aloud. He wonders if he opens his eyes he'll see the words hanging there, and he's not sure when he closed his eyes, nor when he leaned back, but the door is suddenly behind him; he's sunk back against it, his shoulderblades are pressed to the heavy bright-varnished wood, his chest is aching from the swift sudden inhale his lungs have pulled in entirely of their own accord, without so much as consulting him, and yes, his head has fallen back against it involuntarily, more or less thudded back in a reflexive arc that he has no memory of, and cannot control.

Words she's said to him, low, in a dingy dive bar somewhere in the slums, marquee across his mind:

make you come so hard you see eternity.

and he wants to tell her that she doesn't even have to make him come to do that, but he can't find the breath for anything but to breathe.

For a few seconds he doesn't trust himself to raise a hand to her hand beneath his shirt, or to her hair. He doesn't trust himself to take his coat off, or his sweater, or his undershirt. He doesn't even trust himself to move, not an inch, not an iota. The pleasure has nailed him to the spot, it's electric, a living thing in and of itself that movement would only aggravate, the way you can't move your leg after it's fallen asleep because even a twitch would send jangles and starbursts of sensation up and down your nerve paths. For a few seconds Lukas just presses the back of his head to the door, eyes closed, breathing shallow, waiting for the initial assault to pass.

Because, so far as blowjobs go, this one is absolutely world class.

Then he opens his eyes, he finds himself staring across the room at the window, the view of the Magnificent Mile beyond, brilliant. He should take off his clothes, he thinks, or at least his jacket; it's another ten seconds -- another harsh breath drawn in through his teeth as her mouth does something that was so unbelievably good -- and then he peels the leather from his shoulders and lets it drop, reaches back to grab his silk-knit sweater and his plain undershirt, and his shoulderblades come up off the door for a second for him to pull them off together and drop them to the floor.

Lukas sinks back against the door again with a short exhale, as though even this has taxed him somehow. He flexes his hips, pushes himself into her hand and into her mouth, and it's half-voluntary at best, because she's done something else that makes him close his eyes, makes a frisson of reaction run up his spine and pass over his face.

His right hand comes up now, his fingers sifting into her golden hair, cradling her head, gentle; he's moving his hips against the rhythm of her mouth and her hand, gentle. It's only the flickers of reaction in the tips of his fingers, in the deep muscles of his lower abdomen, his flanks, that hint at what a colossal fucking effort it is not to grab her by the hair and try to ram himself down her throat, because that would be terribly impolite; because she's not a whore, and not a thing; and because he's almost completely certain if he did, her mouth would never come near his cock again.

A short while later his other hand finds hers on his body, draws it up higher until her fingertips rest over his heart, and she can feel the heat and the twisting tension all the way up in the clenching, rearranging muscles of his body. His heartbeat is triphammering against her hand. A light sweat has already broken across his skin, as though the hot wetness of her mouth has somehow engulfed all of him, and he has to shed heat to simply survive. The ridges of muscle down his stomach crunch as he bends his head, bends his shoulders down to raise her hand to his mouth, kiss her palm and her fingers, suck and nip at her fingertips with a silent, savage fervor, watching her all the time, watching her hair move against his fingers, her mouth move on his cock, his mind wheeling with spikes of incandescent pleasure and murky half-thoughts that made very little sense at all in the end.

Moments, minutes go by, and it's getting harder and harder to control the half-reflexive muscle spasms that ping through his stomach, clench up his back, that twitch his fingers against the curvature of her head, that buck his hips against her hand. His breathing is fast now, a heavy rush on the exhale, ragged at the edges -- he's not even trying to kiss her hand; he's just holding it against his skin, and he's watching her, eyes low, half-dazed. Abruptly his left hand joins his right on her face. He pushes her hair back, both hands now, combs the locks back, holds her head carefully, carefully between his hands.

"Přestaň, Danička." She's said much the same to him before; though not quite in this tone: low, a murmur, tightly and barely controlled, an ocean of turmoil just beneath the level surface. "Prosím, přestaň."

[Danicka] This woman's self-preservation instinct is strong and obvious, but not unassailable. Other desires, other instincts, have often overpowered her desire for survival. Lukas could very likely sense the wavering control of his packmate, the Ahroun he himself had recruited to the Unbroken Circle, on the night that Sam brought Danicka upstairs. The Fenrir's Rage had been coming off of him in unabating waves, and yet he had seemed...unstable. It hadn't been helped by the glitter of both lust and drunkenness in his eyes, and yet Danicka -- cowardly, craven Danicka Musil -- had gone to bed with him. She'd apparently found pleasure in it, even, unless she was faking it every single time. And this is the same woman who runs away when there is an imminent threat.

Yet when Lukas could have slaughtered her -- when, if his control had not been stronger than Sam's had been the night he slept with Danicka -- she stayed. When she knew damn well from the reaction of his body and the very words he said that the smart thing to do was leave, she'd stayed with him. She'd told him that she didn't want to leave. And then she'd fucked him. Over. And over. She'd been bold enough to tell him to stop, even, when what he was giving her wasn't what she wanted.

All of these things he knows about her now are contradictory. She is high-class, with the look and attitude of being high-maintenance, and yet she does not care if she is fucked in a filthy motel or a filthier dive bar bathroom or a car or in one of the more expensive suites to be found in Chicago. She is a coward who looks out for herself when her life and safety or even her secrets are threatened, and yet she is also more than willing to ride an Ahroun to orgasm before sinking her teeth into his shoulder to keep herself from screaming. She is an intelligent, perceptive, even rather clever woman, and yet she does not do the smart thing and walk away when she is flat-out told that what she's about to do could get her killed.

Aloud, without meaning to and possibly without awareness of what's coming out of his mouth, Lukas near-moans that oh -- fuck and Danicka's wandering hand slides further up his body, caressing one pectoral muscle, the pad of her thumb flicking over one hyper-sensitive nipple while the rest of her attention remains far lower. He does not, as she did just a couple of nights ago, tell her good or faster. Then again, from what Lukas can tell Danicka absolutely does not need the instruction or the encouragement. He has no bedcovers to grab a hold of, just the door behind him holding him up and the room swirling in his vision, blurring at the edges.

There's more than one reason for that hand still on his cock, and, to be blunt, it adds to her control over the situation, if not him. It's only after he pulls his shirt and sweater off to fall down on the ground with his jacket, only after Lukas reacts to a particular slide of her tongue with a barely-restrained thrust, only after his fingers move into her hair and she senses the tension of his own control that Danicka opens her eyes, looks up at him. It's just the barest glance, does not require her to slow down or stop, and a second later her eyes are falling closed again and she is making a small noise around him as though she is the one being pleasured here. Despite the full moon and his Rage and despite whatever the fuck it is she thinks she's playing at, doing this to him now, there is -- again -- that inexplicable gentleness, even affection, underlining the aggression and the fury that seems to exist between them when they're like this.

Like this is fucking. Or whatever it is. Like this is indefinable.

Not that, at the moment, either of them are entirely capable of naming anything but each other.

He could feel, minutes ago with his hands rather lightly resting on her body, the lack of lines beneath that incredibly soft dress. He could see, whether his mind processed it or not, the shape of her breasts under the fabric and see the faintest shadow of cleavage where the neckline dips. All of that awareness may as well be gone right now, obliterated along with everything else, leaving nothing in its wake but the heat of her mouth, the warmth of her hand, the touch sliding up his torso until he draws her palm to his heart.

If Danicka were standing right now, kissing his mouth instead of his body, the way he kisses her palm would make that odd, quirky, charming smile flutter across her lips as she watched him. They are miles away from charming, though. Lukas bites at her fingertips, as gently as he moves under her attentions, and she slowly pushes one finger into his mouth for him to suck on. It's insane, like putting her hand into fire, like teasing a beartrap, but she does it. Her fingertip stays wet when his lips let go of it, when he stops being able to kiss her hand or bite at her without risking instinct overtaking restraint.

At some point while he was kissing her hand, she slid her own down, moving her touch between his legs, making him clench up again and breathe those ragged, harsh breaths that are part control, part warning, part agony, part ecstasy. Even the women in nightclubs who think they want him because of what he is, because what doesn't terrify them about him makes them intrigued, often have no clue what to do once they have his pants down and his dick in their mouth other than the most obvious, the most mundane. Danicka wants him, and not what he is but who he is, which is part of why this is simultaneously so amazing and so petrifying for both of them. Perhaps it's an expression of the trust she claims not to have in him that she does not hesitate to both adore and explore him with her mouth and hands, as though she is unafraid of being degraded or mistreated. Perhaps it's as she's indicated, and she just doesn't give a fuck if he or anyone else thinks she's a whore.

Her eyes don't open again, not when he touches her face, not when the first syllable of a rarely-spoken word hits her. Not til he says her name, and then she breathes out and slowly, almost carefully, pulls away from him. And yes, her lips are livid red and moist. Yes, her eyes are darker than deep water -- he's seen them a completely different color now, seen her in the sunlight of wherever they had breakfast and coffee, something about the light making her eyes a bright, pale blue -- and her gaze is almost vicious with desire that she could do nothing, absolutely nothing about with one hand on him and her other hand held in his.

Danicka doesn't say anything. She looks at Lukas for a moment, her breathing heavy but almost completely silent, and then licks her lips. They have options. They have the wall. The floor. The bed that is only a couple of yards away but seems like it's on the other side of the world. The armchair by the windows that would have him facing the walls and Danicka -- if she did not turn around as she did once in another hotel, under another moon -- facing the city lit up at night. The only light in this room is coming from the shaded lamp by that armchair, leaving it dim. They can't even seen the moon tonight out there, not through the heavy rainfall still splattering the windows and the buildings and the sidewalks as though to drown the whole city.

It's only going to turn to thunderstorms later, and stay that way all night. If it storms again tomorrow night, while the Garou are gathered for the moot...oh, what an omen that will be.

Danicka doesn't say anything. Except "Lukášek..." which is not so much a purr from her throat as a growl. She is rising up on her knees, both of her hands running over his chest and abdomen, as though through caresses that are almost inappropriately gentle she can pull him down to her.

[Lukas] The only things they've said to each other since don't let it have been inconsequentialities: oh fuck, Lukášek; except, of course, they're not inconsequential at all. That he doesn't, and can't, hold back the two meaningless words that string together into a billet of pleasure -- that the first thing out of her mouth after his cock is out of her mouth is his name -- these things mean something, they mean something, even if neither of them can name it.

Her hands reach up to him, but there's nothing for her to grab onto, no shirt, no sweater, nothing to tug him down with except his flesh, the hard and curving shells of muscle that encase his bones, that encase the beating heart of this Ahroun and all his rage.

He doesn't let her pull him down anyway, because he's grasped her by the wrists, the arms, he pulls her up from her knees, pulls her swiftly up and leans forward and down and in and her wrists are still in his hands, drawn up somewhere around the level of his head, his shoulders, and he'd meant to wrap her arms around him but then that thought is left half-complete because he kisses her mouth, he kisses her red, red mouth so hard his brow furrows with it, there's a low soundless growl in his throat with it, a vibration of desire so intense it seems he might simply eat her fucking face for a minute.

Which is always a possibility, on a night like this.
Which is always a possibility.

When the initial onslaught of that passes Lukas can think again, if only in fragments and blurts, and he lets go her arms and lets them go where they please while his hands roam down her body, push down her body, and

(she's not wearing anything under that thin little periwinkle dress)

which he's realized this earlier, dimly, from the way the fabric lay against breast and thigh, but now it tattoos across his brain in neon fucking orange because there's absolutely nothing between his hands and her skin except for one layer of fabric, loose and flowy and bright enough to be of the spring, and really, if he were to think about it, he would say she is of the spring too, with her golden hair, her green eyes, the way her bloodlines welcome him and call to him across a room, across a fucking city; the way she welcomes him when he's inside her.

If he were to think about it. Which he isn't. Because his mouth has scarcely left hers, his hands have scarcely found their way to her hips before he scoops her up into his arms, swiftly and irresistibly, and now he's the one raising his head to her, and her hair is falling over his face when they kiss. He turns; he leans her back, slams her back into the door that he himself had leaned against when she nearly made him lose his mind.

It's the first real pause, then, since his hands had come to her head and he'd told her to stop, please stop, and they'd said one another's names to each other, and then he'd pulled her up and kissed her and pulled her up again.

This is the first real stillness in the eye of this particular storm, while spring comes in cold rain and rolling thunder outside, and rivulets of water run down the big window that she can see now; she can see too, reflected dimly in that expanse of clear glass, the quasitransparent image of the room superimposed on the city -- she can see herself with her back to the hotel door, Lukas between her legs, the breadth of his shoulders shadowing her, the clean line of his spine running straight from the nape of his neck to the small of his back, the way the shadows on his back change when he pulls her legs up higher, hiked around his waist now, her dress rumpled between them and his pants dropped down to his knees, which is as far as they can fall with his feet planted just past shoulder-width as they are.

He can't see that. He wouldn't be looking anyway. He's looking at her as the second kiss -- or perhaps it's the third, or the fourth, or the seventeenth -- tapers off, and he raises his hands to her face as her thighs tighten around him against her own weight, he puts his hands on her face as he had earlier, gently, stroking her hair back, stroking her face, and his eyes are open to her, with such clarity in the blue and such depth in the black; he looks at her like he sees her, really sees her.

He knows (she knows) it's her with him in this room, and no one else.

No other but her.

The eye of the storm closes, and so do his. What stillness there was, what stillness had caught them up for a breathless second is over. When he tilts his face up to hers this kiss is almost gentle, but his hands are not when he grabs fistfuls of her dress and he starts rucking it up, the fabric pulling up over her thighs, over his thighs; the fabric caught between their bodies, tugged free in heaves and frictioned pulls

until suddenly it's not rumpled cloth between their bodies, between the fork of her legs and the lean girdle of his hips; it's not cloth but nothing at all, nothing but skin, nothing but her hot wet cunt pressed against his cock, and he shudders into her mouth at this, his hands pushing under her dress to open over her hips.

[Danicka] There are words missing from this exchange, things she may forget to say later or may have no intention of ever letting pass her lips. Such as the question she tried to ask twice and still does not understand his answers to, because she does not fathom why her walking away would leave him with nothing but pieces to pick up and no way to be all right again. Such as the fact that she could have died last night, that someone she cares for nearly did. Such as the fact that some part of her still doesn't want this, that some part of her decidedly does not like how scared she is of this feeling.

She's not a warlike Kinfolk, one of those with scars from battle or a gun holstered in the small of her back. Danicka would be useless in any sort of fight, which is why everyone who has ever been with her when one's come up has told her to run. The woman is not strong --

"Lukáš," she half-whimpers, half-hisses when he pulls on her arms and yanks her upward, because it's rough, because he's uncareful. She knew what she was doing when she called him here tonight, she's no fool, but that doesn't change the fact that even though she's not a child he could very easily dislocate her shoulder or break her elbow if he pulls too hard or too fast. Danicka winces, because she's weak. Or because he told her he wished she would ask him to make exceptions for her.

Though whether or not refraining from breaking her arm during sex would count as an exception or not hasn't been discussed.

-- and the woman is not terribly brave or courageous. The end of his name is completely lost when his mouth finds hers and he kisses her as though he would very much like to devour her (but all the Little Red Riding Hood jokes have been done, and done, and done). This is not one of those kisses that comes from each of them, when they meet in the air like souls on Resurrection Day and seem to twine around one another. This is one of those kisses that makes her think of a poem she can't even remember the name of right now, as though he's trying to destroy the world or win the war (or both) by kissing her.

The war. Right. That's what we were saying: Danicka doesn't know from war. She runs away and she still could have nearly died and it's not as though that hasn't happened before but it's still with her. She was alone afterward, and alone even when she wasn't, and in this she's alone even now. You don't whine about how hard life is or how scared you were, you don't whine when someone hurts your arm, because there's always someone who suffered more than you did, who lost more than you have, who also nearly died last night. She shudders when she can breathe again, and even if she pleaded his name a moment ago she doesn't hesitate to wrap her arms and her legs around him as he's lifting her up and putting her against the wall.

This hurts, too, but isn't likely to break anything the way he does it. Danicka pulls him to her to kiss him again, or kiss him harder, ravenous. Her thighs around his waist flex, wordlessly demanding more pressure, more of him there. When it ends her eyes open and her fingers go into his hair. Danicka is looking at him and not their reflection, not the rain outside, not the ultimate core of his lineage and hers raging outside. Only at him. She breathes harder, touches his face, runs fingertips and palms over his jaw, cupping his cheeks, even stroking his brow and pushing an errant, sweat-dampened lock back in a show of tenderness that is striking only because her teeth are on edge -- she is trying not to bare them at him -- and her body is squirming between the door and his chest.

And he's touching her in much the same way, fingers in her hair, her skin, as though even now, even with no deadline looming this is precious. This could be lost, and it would hurt somehow. Danicka's brow furrows tightly as though she sees it, when she reflects it back to him without meaning to let him see what's in her thoughts. This hurts. Losing it would hurt. And she doesn't need to ask that question anymore, suddenly.

Lukas starts grabbing fistfuls of fabric that is almost silky in his palms, pulling at it to reveal inch after inch of thighs pale from winter and even softer than the dress, and Danicka gasps. She barely regains enough breath to survive a kiss, even a soft one, a slow one that closes her eyes again and loses her somewhere. She has no map, no moonlight, and no guide. She decides that the dark is okay, keeps her eyes closed, and then runs one hand down his body, pulling at him. The kiss breaks but Danicka doesn't open her eyes.

I could have died last night.

I'm not ready for this to end.

This hurts.

I don't care. I don't fucking care.

Danicka rolls her hips against him, murmuring against the corner of his mouth, kissing him in between phrases. Not just his mouth but his cheek, his brow, his jaw, her head ducking to his throat. "Ve mně," she moans, then sharper: "hned." With a deep, shuddering gasp she grabs the back of his head by the hair, groaning the words, begging him: "Prosím, udělej to hned."

[Lukas] Now, she says, and now, again, and the words are like a whip laid across his back, the roll of her hips against him are like a flaming torch tossed down, down, down the mineshaft of his psyche to the subterranean coaldusted caverns where the most basic, most primal, most mindless impulses of his being wait for release.

His hands are merciless on her hips. His fingers dig in, and she's not strong, not insensate to pain; the flesh is weak, the will is weak, and he's angling her hips against his, grinding her against him, grinding himself against her, and now his cock is wet with her wetness, hot with his own heat, and somewhere where the last guttering vestiges of his conscience and his control lay there's a voice whispering at him that he's forgotten something, she's forgotten something, or worse, they simply don't care, and --

Now his hands aren't dragging her closer, aren't pulling her against him with the irresistible force of a gravity well; they're holding her back now, pushing her lumbar spine back against the door, against the flex and wrap of her thighs.

"Danička," this is not a murmur, it is not a gasp or a growl, but something of all three, a sound dredged from the bottom of his chest and laid across her mouth, "Danička, čekat. Zapomněla jsem -- "

[Danicka] On another full moon night -- though, to be truthful, it has not been exactly a month, this is the night before the true full moon and their first time was the night after but what, really, does it matter? -- she had stopped him even after he was inside her, after he was on top of her, and she had literally thrown condoms at him. There was no way Danicka was going to let him fuck her without one, he'd learned that then and he'd learned it at the Brotherhood and they'd all but laughed about it then. Lukas has even proven that he's learned, that if he forgets he'll stop, and yet --

"I don't care," Danicka near-snarls, the words descending into a groan of need, of frustration, as her hips thrust against his another time. The words come out of her in a rush, all throaty and rough around the edges, indistinct because of the nature of the language as well as the nature of what they're doing to each other. She kisses his face, nips at his skin: "Lukášek, užívám antikoncepci," she insists, and pulls back to meet his eyes.

"Chci tě."

[Lukas] There's a shudder down his spine when she pushes herself against him again; it rolls down his vertebral column like an earthquake, making his eyes flicker shut. "Danič--" he begins, doesn't finish, she kisses his face and he turns toward her mouth like mindless invertebrates turn toward light, and then when she pulls back and looks him in the eye he seems to have no choice, none, but to look back at her.

He has seen her eyes by day, and they're blue then, a pale blue that's almost familiar. By night, by lamplight, they're green again, fierce with desire, the pupils so large he has the dizzying feel of standing at the edge of some precipice when he looks long and deep enough.

"Dobře," he says; it's a raw whisper, and then he leans in suddenly to collide with her, a kiss, something like a kiss, a word, not a reassurance, an acquiescence, pressed against her mouth. "Dobře."

He reaches down between their bodies, grasps his cock at the base, and his mouth opens, the kiss breaks, he draws back and it's eye contact again, too close to bear; not close enough; isn't that the cliche? -- only it's true. He finds the opening of her cunt by touch, and when he lets go, when his hands find their way back to her hips under her dress and he pushes into her with a single jagged thrust, his eyes open: not the lids but the centers of them, the black dilating like a camera lens.

When there's no more distance left between them he leans into her. He kisses her, slowly, and then not so slowly; his hands leave her hips and he lets her hold herself up, lets her move herself against his rhythm as he reaches around to draw down the zipper of her dress, finally, belatedly -- peel the fabric from her shoulders to bare her breasts, which he bends to, kisses, sucks, bites at fiercely with his lips, and gently with his teeth, and all the while he's moving into her with a force and a fervor that builds so steeply that he can barely, only barely keep in control of it.

[Danicka] At this point he can't even say her name. She does not, as Lukas does, revert to Czech during sex because she forgets English. She has no single language that was her first; it was only with time that she differentiated between the three different tongues she was raised in. Before she could call them anything else she knew the language that was Mother, the language that was Father, the language that was School, Market, Playground. So they mingle, when she's like this, when she can still use coherent words at all. Well...the English and Czech do. Danicka almost never speaks Russian.

Except when...

...they're not thinking about that right now. They're not thinking right now, not clearly, or she would find it in herself to tell him yes, thank you, waiting is good, they can get her dress off and go to the bed. Danicka cannot do that. She does not want to suggest that Lukas move; she does not want to have to try and survive him moving away. He could swear at her for using everything in her power to keep him right where he is, from opening her mouth to him as willingly as her legs to meeting his eyes as she rocks her hips hard against his lower body.

He says it's okay, and when they kiss she makes a low, pleased sound, her hands and body softening against his in reaction. She is getting what she wants. She doesn't have to wait. So her eyes are less fierce but no less lustful when he reaches down between them and locks his burning-blue gaze on her deep, earthy one. It does not seem to be too much for her, not now, not tonight, not at least in this moment. Not until he enters her, not almost but definitely roughly, making her cry out only half in enjoyment. Still.

Not out of desperation, not out of helplessness, but still Danicka tightens her hold on him, meets him, her head thrown back so suddenly that Lukas is no longer the only one who has clocked himself tonight. The cry she releases dissolves in her throat and remains truncated and lost in the air above and between them. The first kiss he gives her lands not on her upturned mouth but her throat, the second on her jaw, as she draws her mouth down to his once more. The attraction is blind, native, and automatic.

Danicka removes her arms from him one at a time to help get the dress down to fall around her waist, to keep her arms free to move rather than pinned at her sides. Now that he is inside her, complete and unrestrained and actually wanted like this for the first time, she seems satisfied. She thrusts against him, which takes effort, which takes some work on her part as well, fucking like this against the door, but this is the woman who will ride him repeatedly in a single night before she so much as lies on her side to receive him again. She grits her teeth when he bites at her, when his mouth attacks her bared breasts, and her hand in his hair again tightens further the harder he thrusts.

"Ano," she groans. "Dej mi to. Ano."

Her free hand rests between his shoulderblades. Her fingers curl, nails digging into his flesh. Danicka bows her head and rests it alongside his, her breath heavy in his ear, sweat starting to turn her skin slick. "Chci tě," she gasps. "Více. Všechno," she demands.

[Lukas] It's when she bows her head to him that he raises his, and later, he wouldn't be able to say if he had felt her leaning down to him, or heard it, or simply somehow -- intuited it, in the air, in her body, in the way the hand draping down his back is digging in.

Later, he won't be able to remember half of this, just the way she made him feel, the things she did to him; not the details of it, not the where and when and how and what, but the way she seems to have peeled back what thin veneer of civilization, of civility he had, and made him rough and ragged, imperfect, half-formed, a barbaric man-wolf fucking his kinfolk against a hotel door with an almost-full-moon lifting up over the lake.

But that's later. This is now.

Her hand is gripping his hair, now, her hand is leaving red lines on his back, now, but he's not human, and they'll heal in a day, in five seconds if he takes another form. He raises his head to hers, blindly now, his mouth finds her chin, and then their faces are sliding past, she draws him closer and her mouth is by his ear, he can hear her breathing, has just barely enough consciousness left to register the words that seem to spill so easily from her lips when they're doing this, when they're fucking, when his mind is so shattered and fragmented it's all he can do to not grunt and growl and moan and groan at her like a mindless beast. Because he's not a mindless beast. Because he will not allow himself to be a mindless beast, because that reduces him to something barely better, no better at all than the mindless beasts he fights against, and --

And who the fuck gives a fuck, really, when she's gasping into his ear like that, when he turns his face to her neck, fiercely, bares his teeth and catches her skin between them, presses his tongue to that place he has nipped, no bitten, the same way he'd pressed his mouth gently to hers after entering her so roughly, as if he could retroactively erase that first, that half-unhinged action with something gentler. Which, of course, he can't. He can only make it one and both, savage and poignant, a war fought in a private anonymous room where the only enemy is the space between them, and what walls, what shells, what shields they can manage to put up and tear down and put up again.

She demands more, she wants it all. Who is he to deny her? Her want is his: his hands go back to her hips, her dress is pooled down to her waist, hiked up to her waist, her legs are bare up to the waist and wrapped around him and his hands move over the thighs to grasp at the hips; it's an anchor-point, something to hold as he plants his feet and she's wrapping her arms around him and twisting her fingers into his hair, and he doesn't have the presence of mind now to kiss her, to do much more than open his mouth to the side of her neck and taste her on every quick-caught inhale.

"Danička," he says, and it's like the rest of his words have stripped themselves away; like this is the last word he has in his entire being, and she's just going to have to make do with it, she'll just have to read from the tone of it, tattered at the edges, that he means to warn her; that he's trying to say he can't hold back, can't be gentle with her, because of the moon and the night and the lack of anything at all between them where they're joined and what he thought she was going to say all the way here and what she said instead the moment he walked in, and --

He draws back from her, his balance shifts, he leans her against the door and turns his head, swiftly, presses his mouth to her arm where to rides over his shoulder, looks down their bodies as he tilts her hips and suddenly every stroke is sliding deeper, and now faster, and his back arches in counterbalance against the force of his thrusts; the door, the expensive, heavy, solid door of this expensive hotel room is jarring under her back.

A drop of sweat runs down his nose and drops off the end, perfect and spherical in midair, splashing off his skin or hers. His back is wet with sweat, the muscles hot with exertion under her hands.

Lukas is watching her face now, across the handswidth or so of space they have between them: he's reading her pleasure like he always does, but he's also watching, watchful for pain, and he thinks if he sees it he'll recognize it, and he'll still be able to, might still be able to, must still be able to stop. A great commotion is building inside him, drowning everything else out; he can feel his climax pushing up inside him, clawing up from the pit of his stomach to push aside his viscerae, his lungs, his hammering heart on its way to his head, and he knows when it gets there it'll commandeer his mind, his entire body, throw spears of pleasure to every last distant corner of his body, and he won't be able to stop then if the sky tumbles down.

He wants to tell her this, too, but for all his uncontrollable confessions when they're not like this, he can't find a single word in all the shattered fragments of his head; it's only her name again -- gasped now, barely even voiced: "Danička -- "

[Lukas]

[Danicka] [Oh, right]

[Danicka] You cannot judge what you have not experienced. You cannot know what you refuse to find out.

These are truisms that Danicka lives by, unspoken and unwritten. These are the tenets of her religion, the laws of her life. What other morality she has is built, constructed, and constantly questioned. Absolute 'right' or 'wrong' are as mysterious and unlikely as absolute 'truth'. If she said this aloud she might repulse the man whose every last drop of strength is, for these aching minutes, focused on her. She won't say it aloud, though.

What she says aloud to Lukas as he's moving inside her, moaning her name like it could replace the entirety not of English but of language itself, is murmured encouragements, professions of desire, repetitions of yes, of his name. Like an echo across the yard, through the air, because she would not contemplate a tether or a leash. Just a call. And what it feels like is not what it sounds like. What it feels like, those pulse-like murmurs in his ear, is I know you. I know you. I know.

Danicka closes her eyes now that their heads are together, bowed to each other. They're taken from one another's sight and left only with their other senses. The smell of him and his sweat filling her nostrils, the scent of her all over and around him. Heat. Moisture. The constant, rolling tension. Distantly she's aware of the hard door at her back, the way her body is being slammed repeatedly against it. Right now what she is more aware of is the ragged, panting way he's breathing, the way his perspiration is mingling with her own, the way he feels inside of her.

Lukas's teeth tear at her neck, make her breathe in sharply. She'll be marked for a day or two, because she's closer to human, because if she breaks she cannot simply regenerate and he cannot heal her. He's never left a mark on her before. Every time she's left him, every time he's rolled over in or returned to an empty bed, every time he's watched her get dressed and walk away from him, her skin has been as pristine as it was when she first moved into his arms. He's been so careful. The first night her legs had wavered but he had not hurt her. He had left no trace of himself on her or inside her, left her exactly as he found her.

Perfektní.

She arches her back as he holds onto her, thrusts into her, lets out a cry that is so charged it's impossible to tell if it's pained or pleasured or both. Her hands are clinging to him, her legs tightening so that the moisture of sweat and movement of sex don't have her thighs sliding, so that she can keep him where he is. Lukas says her name like a warning and as her head falls back towards his, as her head bows again and her lips touch his temple she makes a sound, a rush of air, as though shushing him, because she can't form je to v pořádku, because she can't say chápu.

Whether that's truly right or wrong, she doesn't know and doesn't care and wouldn't believe in either way. Maybe it shouldn't be okay that he hurts her. Maybe she shouldn't understand that when he looks down to watch their bodies joining, to see himself sliding in and out of her (wet from her), that he almost can't stand it and just flexes his hips faster, thrusts into her harder.

But it is.

And she does.

...What does that say about her?

Danicka just makes that soft sound in his ear, underlined with a whimper, with a full-body shudder of pleasure dragged from the storm and the moon as much as his body, as much as what he is and has done to her, what she knows he will do if she does not get away from him now. Tonight. As soon as he's asleep. The girl who used to cry because he got sick, or got punished, or would stifle a shriek with hands clapped over her mouth if he or his sister slid on the polished floor and wiped out, terrified that they would get hurt...she is and she is not the same frightened creature she used to be. She lifts her head from his shoulder, makes a noise that is somewhere between a moan and a stifled sob, until she opens her eyes and realizes he's watching her again.

She kisses him. Hard. Furious. Full of the thunder outside, the full moon, the things he is and that she was born of. She does not purr to him that it's okay or that she understands, that his attempt at a warning was heard but if she was going to heed it she would have never confessed to wanting him, to wanting him so badly she can't think, to wanting his mouth on her and his cock inside her. Danicka just kisses him, fierce enough to bruise, pulling him and his breath and všechno into her mouth, into her throat, into her lungs as deep as he already is, as it seems he always has been.

Her hands soften when she ends the kiss, pulling her mouth away to gasp but pressing her forehead to his. Her eyes are open; his are a blur of vivid ferocity and nameless feeling. Hers are engulfing, swallowing, drawing him as though into the earth itself, into her, into something that is and is not very much like a kind of death. As deep as her eyes take him, and he can't stop. She knows he can't, and she trembles against him but she's nowhere near her own orgasm. Danicka holds him, though, no longer raking her nails or gripping his hair but watching his eyes, making sure he knows...whatever it is she said to him when he first saw her tonight.

"Pojď dovnitř mi," she whispers. "Je to v pořádku. I have you, Lukáš. I have you."

She doesn't say those last words in Czech. It means something else entirely, in that language.

[Lukas] The truth is --

The absolute truth that he believes in absolutely, but she does not, is:

It's not okay. It's not okay at all that he can't stop himself, and she doesn't care about protection, and he might be, he's very likely hurting her, and she doesn't stop him. It's not okay at all that this is somehow all okay, tonight, and when she kisses him she's drawing him out through his mouth, and when she looks at him, so close that eye contact is a blur, their faces are blurs and all that's real is the nearness itself -- when she looks at him, she's drawing him out through his eyes.

It's not okay that she can do this to him. It's not okay that by taking him into her, into her, that through her softness and her yielding and her giving in she can strip him to an utter and indefensible bareness; that right now if she wanted she could look at him and read

(every last thought he's ever had)

the very depths of him, as though all his defenses were clearest water, and everything he is is simply written on the bottom in pebbles and stones and watergrass.

It's not okay that everything there is to read there is, at this moment, reduced to just this moment, a series of transient and passing instant, lances of pleasure and sensation and hunger and drive, the primordial of primordials.

It is not okay that this is all that's left of him, when the tatters of restraint are peeled back: a single, perfect knife's edge of need against which everything else pales, pares away, falls away.

That is his absolute truth. That this sort of -- total abandon is unacceptable, unconscionable, and beneath him. That is his absolute truth, but the truth behind the truth is that absoluteness is a sham, a lie; it's the emblem emblazoned on a scrap of fabric that, depending on the wind and the day, could take any form at all.

This is not something he can accept. This is not something he can even consciously understand, or grasp, but here, and now, they're not discussing philosophy, this is not a discussion, this is just him, and her, and sex, and when her hands draw his face to hers he kisses her, and does not care; when her thighs draw him deeper he fucks her, and does not care; when she holds him near, and deep, and tells him what she does, whatever last restraints and barricades remain come undone, and whatever's inside him comes free, and as it climbs the rungs of his ribs and claws up the steps of his spine he's suddenly terrified that if he closes his eyes now it won't be an orgasm that takes him over but a frenzy, uncontrollable, and when he opens his eyes again the room will be red.

So he doesn't close his eyes.

Simple as that. He doesn't close his eyes. Impossible as that. He keeps his eyes on hers, he brings his hands up now, half-conscious of even doing this, he takes her face between his hands, they press their foreheads together, and as the first livid pulse of his climax rolls through him his hands are dropping back to her hips, he grinds her hard against him -- he slams her back against the door with all the force of his body, once and then again, driving himself deep and then deeper, and then his back is arching involuntarily as though he wanted to press all of himself into her, and his face is hard with a pleasure so intense it crosses the border between sensation and emotion, translates into something like fury, furious elation, something.

He doesn't even manage her name. His breath catches hard in the instant before he comes, and then it's a just wordless exhale, a short sharp burst of air at the cusp of his orgasm, and then a series of them, running one into the other until he's just panting against her, emptying into her, his chest straining as though there wasn't enough oxygen in the room to fuel his demand.

His hands come back to her face. He's not even half-conscious of it this time. His hands stroke her face, push back her hair, again and again, and now, finally, his eyes are slipping shut. His mouth touches hers. It's not a kiss. It's just -- breathing, because that's all he can do right now, as his cheek slides past hers and he leans his brow against the door, and his arms are gathering her against him the way they always do, as though she were something irreplaceably precious.

[Danicka] [Willpower // +1 (that could-have-died thing, x2) +1 (ow)]

[Danicka] Anywhere her fingertips fall, she can feel his heartbeat. His temples, as her touch slides out of his scalp, as her hands run over his face. His lips on hers. His throat. With as close as he holds her in the end she cannot say with any certainty where she ends and he begins, simply because of the heat, which may as well have melded them together. The controls for the room's climate haven't been changed; the rain outside hasn't abated. As has happened several times since he walked in, lightning flashes outside and for the briefest of moments the electricity gives more light to the city than the moon, which is obscured by thick, dark clouds.

For the first time since Lukas stepped inside and closed the door behind him, Danicka looks past him and sees the storm outside the window, the constant rain, the tirelessness and seething serenity of it. Maybe it's her breeding, or her father, or some natural affinity, but thunderstorms are one of the things she was never frightened of as a child. Nor do they fascinate her. They simply are, as natural as the changing of seasons, the phasing of the moon. She looks at Lukas's back dimly reflected in the dark windowpane, looks at her legs encircling him, and while he is holding her and trying to remember how to breathe, she is wondering briefly

what

the fuck is wrong with her.

He has come; she has not. She feels him inside of her and realizes with the force of a fist to her stomach that even when he tried to stop, to remember a fucking condom, she stopped him. Danicka takes a deep, slow breath and tries to calm down her body's continued response to the lust that surged through her as soon as he touched her. As soon as she saw him. As soon as she felt his footsteps coming down the hallway. Her eyes close, and the lightning crashes through the sky again, illuminating her eyelashes, her cheeks, the way her hair clings to her hairline, brow, temples, neck.

Oddly, the less unnerving notion would be saying that she does not know why she told him that she didn't care, that she wanted him now. It would not be as frightening if she didn't know why she told him it was okay for him to come, to come inside of her. She wouldn't be so disturbed if she didn't have at least some idea of why she didn't cry out or stop him or something when it got so rough that it hurt. Danicka's eyes squeeze even tighter shut, her eyebrows pulling together, and for the span of at least a few seconds she hates him.

But she strokes his hair. She runs her fingers over his back, heedless of the rolling drops of sweat, the utter soreness that is making itself known not only in her lower body from him, from the way he slammed her to the door. But her shoulderblades. Her breasts. Her neck, where he bit her. Danicka takes a second deep breath and shudders slightly, still in his arms, still caught (held) between him and the closest flat surface. She doesn't want to hate him, and as she exhales, it leaves her, and she discovers that yes.

That's better.

Danicka knows it's not all right, it's not okay, and she's not thinking for an instant about what she's done with him but all that he has done to her, all that she has done to herself by being with him. While he was caught in his orgasm she kept his eyes, she held him, she had him just as she said she did. She rode with him through it, and was there when he came back, not a splatter or a corpse but still her. Whole. Lively. With him. But when he closed his eyes, when he leaned into and against her, she gently drew his head to her shoulder and he rested his forehead on the door and he held her and she held him and then she looked at the storm and wondered

what

the fuck is wrong with me?

Her eyes closed, though it's already been said, though it seems like forever ago that she let her lashes fall. It's another eternity before that shudder, before those deep breaths, but neither help. Danicka turns her face to the side of his neck and he'll miss the first drop or two because they're hot and salty like his own sweat rolling down his shoulder. He won't notice that she's crying until she takes in a ragged breath and exhales in a shiver. A shudder. A loss. And even then it won't make sense, because if she's crying she's probably crying because he hurt her, because he very nearly lost himself. But she cries, and she keeps holding onto him.

[Lukas] The door is cool against his brow.

It's the only coolness there is to be found, because the storm is outside, an invincible pane and a bright-lit hotel room away, and everything else is her, is the smell of her and him together, the temperature of their bodies, is the heat, is the wetness.

It's a monsoon in here, and for a while the fresh moisture on his shoulder don't even register -- they're blood in the summer rain, hot amongst hot, wet amongst wet. Nothing much is registering at all. He's picking up the pieces. He's putting himself back together, only it's not because she's left but because she didn't that he's shattered and scattered, strewn all over the room.

He feels eviscerated; torn apart. He wonders if death is a little like this, the bloody end he's brought to so many, to earn a name like Wyrmbreaker. Which is not, in the end, a terribly descriptive name. He has not, so far, done any terribly impressive deeds. He has been a good beta. He has been a good ahroun. He has been a decent shadow lord or a very good shadow lord, depending on whose opinion you sought, and overall, a good garou. He has made a life for himself and a name for himself, kept his pack in line. He has killed a string of nameless fomori and dancers, crushed a series of nameless wyrmlings, and in the end none of them amounted to anything much more than wyrm; broken wyrm; wyrmbreaker.

Nothing he couldn't handle. Nothing he couldn't predict, and compensate for, and control. Nothing that left him so changed, so scarred by its passage that he deserved a new name. In a very real way, she's the first truly extraordinary thing to happen to him.

He does not know how to deal with her.

Another drop of wetness rolls down his shoulder, and he thinks it's sweat, but then she draws a breath, and it's ragged, and he knows she hasn't come, wasn't even close, and anyway, this is not quite how she breathes even then.

It's with a slow sense of dread, a sense of the bottom dropping slowly but inexorably away from under his feet, that Lukas comes to the realization that the woman he has slammed against the door, has pinned against the door, has fucked with an uncontrollable brutality that could've at any given instant spiralled out into carnage, is in tears.

There's a moment where Lukas is completely at a loss. He does not know how to deal with her, or this, or any of this. If she weren't still holding on to him, he would've likely drawn away instantly, assumed that he was at the root of it in one form or another -- which, in all honesty, is still a valid assumption -- and removed himself from the equation.

But she is still holding on. So he holds on too, though there's an unmistakable tightening in him, a tension as his hand comes up to her shoulder to grasp at her upper arm as though he might try to peel her away from him, look at her face.

He needs to look at her face, sometimes. It's the only meager way he has of reading her.

In the end, though, he doesn't pull her away. His hand closes over her arm for a moment, and then it releases. It goes to her head, her face turned to his neck, and they're so near that she feels her name in his chest long before she hears it in her ear.

"Danička," he murmurs, "Danička, co to je? Danička, je mi to líto."

[Danicka] [Gold PAUSE Woman]

[Danicka]
If Lukas were a Philodox, or a Theurge, or a Kinsman who had managed to go to college and take a basic psychology course or a class in development, there would be things about Danicka that he would be picking up on. It was remarkable that he could even recognize that she has been hit before just based on the way she handles it happening again. Her caution, her tension, her rampant lying, the way she covers her mouth not only to muffle screams but even laughter, and the fact that right now she is crying almost silently: all of this, together with what he already knows about her, would eventually come together to tell him why shei s the way she is.

As it stands, all he knows, and knows for sure, is that Danicka doesn't fall to pieces when a Garou strikes her. She doesn't even look shocked. When they talked about this very topic in her car outside the Brotherhood, she seemed resigned to not just a werewolf, not just a Shadow Lord, but Lukas himself eventually hitting her. Perhaps often. Perhaps hard. And yet she kept coming back. And yet nothing about her seems to indicate that she wants this to happen, that she likes the pain.

This is the first time Lukas has hurt her, though. Whether or not that is why Danicka weeps, he doesn't know.

Without thinking about it, he knows that the way she sucks in that breath is not how she breathes when she has just fallen over the edge with him, or before him, or the way she breathes when she is about to demand more from him and his body than he thinks he can survive. Without thinking about it, he knows that were he to dance his fingertips over her lower abdomen that she would be tickled, that she trembles when he kisses her inner thighs, that every time he kisses her just under her earlobe she sighs and her cheeks flush with color. Without thinking about it, Lukas knows -- his body seems to know apart from him, even -- that her footsteps are different from all other footsteps.

Danicka is trying not to cry. She doesn't sniff but she buries her head against the side of his neck, neither trembling nor shivering, her arms wrapped around his shoulders and her legs wrapped around his waist, still holding him. So surely she can't hate him. Surely she isn't angry at him, or...afraid of him. Simultaneously she seems somewhat broken, somewhat withdrawn, and yet she is not breaking down into sobs and she is not pulling away from him. He cannot, really, be blamed for not knowing what to do with the constant conflicting messages he gets from this woman.

But they're not conflicting. Not really. Not at the source. Still, another man would have given up by now, if he was smart. Lukas isn't unintelligent. Maybe not the most perceptive wolf in the pack, or the most empathetic, but that's not what he was ever taught to be, and that's not what he was made to do. She's a distraction, and he knows it. She's a fracture in the armor, or the wall. Look at what she did to Sam. Look at what one goddamn night with this woman did to Sam. Except that what she is doing to Lukas is completely different than what she did to Sam.

What Lukas is doing to her is completely different. Sam couldn't touch her. The stone egg that Lukas mentioned, the inviolate part of her, is cracking. And it hurts more than the soreness in her lower half, than the ache in her back that will fade within hours, if that long. She doesn't hate him. For a moment, yes. But she doesn't hate him for it, and she curls against him even so.

"Jsem v pohodě," she assures him, in a voice more level than her tears would imply she could be. She is not trying to comfort him. She may not even be seeking comfort, with her head bowed against his like this, with his hand on the back of her head. "I bude v pořádku."

It's disturbing, how quickly she is able to get herself back under control, how fast she can make herself stop the tears that escaped, how rapidly she starts to re-seal those fissures in her persona. Danicka takes a deep breath and shifts against him, whispers: "Dovolte mi dolů, drahoušek."

[Lukas]
Very nearly the second she asks, he begins to let her down.

His breathing is still elevated. His heart is still running a few beats too fast. When he draws away from her -- draws out of her -- this still makes him gasp, as it always would this soon after.

None of this has changed, but some part of him might wish it would Before tonight, he always assumed she would end it now. Before tonight, he's never --

Perhaps that's not strictly true. He's dragged her down a sidewalk once already. He hadn't beaten her then, but really: what is the difference?

Where's the difference between that, and dragging her to her feet by the wrists so hard that his name fell from her lips like a plea; between that, and throwing her against the door and goring her over and over even when some part of him must have known that even if she said it was okay, it wasn't?

Where's the difference between any of that and beating a kin because he was angry, hurting a woman because he was out of control?

It's not that Lukas is a chivalrous man, a gallant man that would never raise a hand to a woman. He has no problem raising his hand to anyone, man, woman, child, wolf, or cub, so long as he feels he is in the right, and they were in the wrong --

(There it is again, that elusive and troublesome beast: the right, the wrong, the truth.)

-- and his discipline is duty more than wrath. He has no problem with that, at all. But this: this was something rather different.

It does not, in truth, occur to him that she might've cried for any other reason but that she was hurt, and hurting. His train of thought gets that far and then it gets caught, it begins to circle around and around that track, because that is what he knows.

Her legs have unwound, and he's lowering her carefully, very carefully, holding her by the waist until he's sure she's sure of her footing. Holding her by the waist even after, for the sake of touching her -- as though so long as his skin is in contact with hers he has an extra conduit of understanding with her. All the light comes from behind him; she stands in his shadow until he shifts to the side a few inches, and he's looking at her then, keenly; her neck and her hips, her inner thighs. He's looking for bruises; he's afraid he'll see blood.

"Danička, řekni mi, kde jste zraněn." It's the same tone, very gentle, very tender. Not cajoling nor reassuring nor comforting; not any of those things, but something a little like to imploring -- a distant cousin to beseeching. "Otevřeno pro mě. Řekni mi, co je špatně."

[Danicka]
As soon as Danicka's legs slide down Lukas's body and her bare feet once again touch the plush, light-gray carpet, the dress he could not take time to get off of her body before entering her slides to the ground. He'd unzipped it, she'd pulled her arms out -- he may not even remember this, may only remember a brief struggle and then her breasts against his chest and in his mouth -- and when her thighs drop, there is nothing holding it onto her. A pool of pale blue-violet falls to drape over his leather jacket, and she does not step out of it yet.

Details of the room fuzz into reality: the deep orange of the roll-style pillow and the patterned green on the throw at the foot of the bed, the silver armchair by the window, the gloss of the polished wood writing desk. His back is turned to them all though, as his hands hold onto her waist almost gingerly while she moves from clinging to him to standing in front of him. Her arms unwrap from his shoulders, her hands slid down his arms, not to steady herself but almost as though she is making sure he is sure-footed and stable.

There's a bruise, a bite mark on the side of her throat where he sucked on her skin and pulled it between his teeth. There's no blood there; he would be tasting it if he had broken skin. There's no blood on her inner thighs, even after a few seconds. Her skin is flushed and as soon as her back is to him he'll see some redness to her flank and shoulders...that is, if she'll ever turn her back to him again.

Danicka leans back against the door, tipping her head back. There's moisture on her cheeks, but her eyes aren't ringed in red and her nose isn't running. What he doesn't know is that she hates the way she looks when she cries, and that's as much as a reason to stop herself as any other. She looks up at him and she watches him looking at her, looking her over, waiting for him to satisfy himself that she is not shattered, not torn, not destroyed.

She could have been. And that's not okay. No matter what she said, or is saying now.

Her arms leave his biceps and move to his face, cupping around his jaw, thumbs smoothing over his cheeks. She tilts his head carefully, looks at his eyes, waits for him to meet her own. "I. Am okay," she says clearly, if still quietly. A roll of thunder outside sweeps away the last syallable, but he is close enough that he can hear her, close enough that he can form the words in his own mind based on the movement of her lips even if he could not hear them. "And I am not lying," she adds, more firmly, yet without the bristle of defense. This is cutting him off at the pass, telling him not to doubt her.

Someone else would have said trust me.

Danicka's hearth-warm hands leave his face and drift down to his chest, laying her palms there lightly. She keeps watching him, but her voice drops: away from the firm tone, away from the clarity of reassurance, away from the temptation to pull back even further from him. Her face pulls slightly in a brief wince, but he isn't inside her, he's barely even touching her, so it's not from pain.

"...I'm sore," she admits, that expression slowly easing away. "I want to shower. But I meant every word I said."

[Lukas]
When her hands go to his face, his rise of their own accord. He cups her elbows, looks at her as she looks at him, and she can see him trying to read her -- it's the way his eyes move between hers, the intentness and the intensity of his gaze.

Then she says, I am not lying.

Without understanding why he does this, he stops searching for clues, hints, indications, lies. His eyes drop briefly away. Her hands go to his chest and his to the outsides of her arms. His eyes flicker back up in time to catch the tail end of the wince, and his hands cover hers over his skin, catching them there.

"I didn't ask if you were okay," he replies. "I asked what was wrong."

[Danicka]
They won't stop touching each other. Perhaps they can't. They each have to have their reasons, if it's a decision at all to maintain this physical contact even after she murmured to him to let her not. Not 'go'. She quite carefully did not ask him, or tell him, to let her go.

Danicka does not caress him, not when for one thing she knows that his entire body is still on fire, is still hyper-tuned to all the sensations his body is forced to process. For another thing, she seems to be using him as a touchstone of a sort, molding her hands to him but not moving.

When he lifts his eyes again after dropping them, she's still watching Lukas's face. His reply makes her sigh slightly. "Lukášek..."

As if she might answer. As if she might go into detail. As if she might break down and tell him that wanting him even if tonight it hurt, that forgiving him even before she told him now, more, everything, that welcoming him inside of her when she was nowhere near the culmination of her own pleasure...that all these things were okay and they never have been okay before, any more than kissing was. She's known him for a month and she's held him on top of her, she's being loyal to him, she's being honest with him, and this hurts more than a broken collarbone.

That isn't what she says. She sighs out his name, leans forward until her brow hits his chest, and says to his solar plexus: "...come shower with me. Come to bed with me. Prostě zůstat tady se mnou dnes večer."

Danicka's hands slide up near the end of what she says, when the word zůstat leaves her lips. It doesn't hitch, it doesn't waver, but her hands slide up and she wraps her arms around him and her shoulders drop as she exhales a breath. It's defeat. Or relief. Or both.

[Lukas]
The way his arms wrap around her is at once everything and nothing like reflex. It has the thoughtless ease and speed of a reflex -- but there's thought there, a decision made, a wrestling with himself in the instants before the decision.

Some part of him knows he shouldn't be here. Not after what happened. Not on the night of a near-full moon. Not at all; not him, not her, not like this. Look what she's done to him. Look what he's done to her.

And then there's the part of him that cannot help this. Her arms wrap around him and it feels right; it feels familiar, though he can't remember ever having done this before -- embraced her like this, standing in the middle of a hotel room, and not because they're about to fuck, or make love, or kiss, or --

His arms slide around her. He is very, very careful not to squeeze, but his grip is firm nonetheless. He presses her against him and she fits him like she belongs there, and always has, and he can feel her chest drop as she exhales. It sounds like defeat, or relief, or both, which is something he understands all too well.

Eventually his arms unwind from her. He pauses to pull his shoes off, his socks, finally get his pants off from around his ankles. If she hasn't already left for the bathroom, his hand touches the center of her back as he follows her in.

The water runs. The mirrors steam.

Lukas is quiet in the shower. He says nothing at all, or at least, nothing of consequence. They move around each other, brushing past; they pass toiletries; when he circles around her to get at the spray his hand touches her elbow, and at one point, while he soaps up, he reaches up to redirect the showerhead at her.

Afterward, while she blowdries her hair, he sits on the edge of the tub in a bath towel, scuffing his dark hair into curls and cowlicks with a smaller one. He watches her thoughtfully while she watches herself in the mirror. He doesn't smile, not even close, but there's a certain -- softness in his regard, if it could be called that.

When she sets the dryer down, the comb a moment after, he reaches his hand out to her. "Come here," he says, quiet.

[Danicka]
She's never asked him to stay before. No wonder she seems defeated, or resigned, at least to a certain point. She doesn't even say it in English, cannot say it in English. She doesn't look into his eyes when she says it. Again: she can't. There's almost no fight left in her. Not after that other night in the W. Not after what happened in Grant Park. Not after what happened last night. Danicka has the inner strength to draw upon should she need to, but what is draining her so much right now is that she doesn't, even tonight, need to.

With him.

Danicka remains where she is for a few moments, feeling neither weakened nor protected by the way he wraps his arms around her, feeling nothing more than held. Which is, itself, not weakness. Not protection. It's something else --

I have you. I have you.

-- that she and he have already named for what it is, the last time they saw each other. The idea that he should not so much as be around her when the moon is this full does not seem to occur to her. The idea that it might be odd or strange for him to embrace her does not seem to occur. She stays where she is, and then takes a breath and begins lifting her head, which is his sign to loosen his hold and move.

While Danicka is slipping away to go turn on the shower and he is removing his shoes and jeans completely, Lukas may notice that there is a suitcase set over by the slim dresser. When he follows her into the bathroom he'll see that the soaps have been opened. There are toiletries on the counter that are Danicka's, not the hotel's. She has been here for awhile.

In the shower, she lets the hot water massage her aching back and hips for her. She washes herself, and he knows by now she is not going to wash him. This is the only time they've taken a shower for the sole purpose of getting clean, and so it does not last very long at all. Danicka dries her hair while sitting in an untied robe; she is not humming this time.

Come here, he says, when the noise of the dryer is gone. She looks over at him, blinking once, then stands up, takes two steps, and stands in front of him, her hands at her sides.

[Lukas]
She does not meet his hand with hers -- so his drops slowly as she approaches. It drops to the outside of her thigh instead, through her robe. He draws her between his knees, though the towel wrapped sarong-style around his waist prevents her from moving much closer than half an arm's reach.

It's possible he wouldn't have drawn her closer than that, at any rate.

There's little need, little hunger in his touch. His wrist rests over his knee; the point of contact, his palm to her leg, seems largely for the sake of contact alone. He'd called her closer -- it was a request, not an order -- but he seems to have little in mind beyond that. He does not ask again why she wept.

Beyond just looking at her, watching her as though to understand her, or to understand the contours of her face, the way it fits together, and why the very sight of her face made him ...

Lukas draws a breath. He'd left the towel half-rumpled on his head as he'd reached out to her. It's white against his dark hair, his olive complexion. It folds slowly on itself now, falling to his wide shoulders, and after a moment he reaches up with his free hand and pulls it carelessly off, tosses it across the edge of the tub.

He finds a topic of conversation after all; something harmless. He nods at her toiletries on the counter and the corner of his mouth tilts up, perhaps a little cautiously.

"Are you moving in?"

[Danicka]
The robe on Danicka's shoulders is open, as if -- no, because -- she has nothing to hide. There's nothing he hasn't seen before, nothing she is interested in hiding from him. One would think that if he had truly injured her, she would at least be covering her body up if not running away from him. Yet as he saw when she walked away from the door and into the bathroom, there are no dark, ugly bruises blooming on her backside. He really didn't hurt her. Yes, it was rough. Yes, it was rough enough that slamming her up against a hard, flat surface and thrusting into her with quite literal abandon had left her sore and unsatisifed, but Danicka is intact, she is unwavering, and she is afraid.

As usual, she displays no resistance to being pulled closer to him, though it's nothing like the way she goes limp if he grabs her by the arm or the way she froze that time by the waterfront when he wanted to kiss her and did not. Her face and eyes are as unreadable to him now as they ever are, and so he has to guess -- does she want to be near him? Is she just playing the role set out for her by birth and by the lack of Luna's blessing?

He doesn't have to guess, or wonder, for very long. Danicka feels his hand through the thin, waffle-textured robe and one of her own hands moves to his scalp. Her fingertips play with his damp hair. She does this a lot, almost every time she touches him, as though there is something irresistable about it. Her eyes follow her hand for a moment, then return to his eyes, waiting for him to speak, to do something.

Which isn't fair. She wept, and then she stopped. She spoke and began to pull away, refused to tell him anything but that she was -- or would be -- okay, and would not tell him what was wrong enough to make her cry. It is not fair of her now to stand there and wait for him to speak, and the fact that she is Kin and he is Garou is thin, thin justification for her silence by this point.

That is, at least so far as Lukas is concerned.

That is...at least when they are alone.

She turns her head in a gesture that is undeniably animalistic, quite like a slow-motion version of a canine following the arc of a thrown ball, and looks where his nod indicates. Without seeing his expression, the corner of Danicka's mouth tilts up wryly, but tightly. There's no real humor there, and the not-smile is gone when she looks back at him again.

"No," she assures him. There's a beat, a moment of thought, and then she adds: "This girl my roommate was...or I guess is seeing showed up last night and I didn't feel like dealing with her."

There's darkness in her eyes at the end of that, a shadow passing over her expression that could speak of anything from catty distaste to any number of deeper emotions (anger hurt). One of her shoulders lifts and falls in a single shrug. Danicka goes on playing with his hair; she looks at her fingers in the dark locks again for a second, then meets his eyes.

Concern marks her expression then. "You look like you've got something on your mind."

[Lukas]
This makes him smile, wryly, and the expression deepens as she tells him he looks like he has something on his mind.

"I have you on my mind," he says to that, gently but frankly.

This is not a lover's sweet nothing; a sweetheart's empty promise. This is neither sweet nor empty nor a promise nor nothing -- but it passes; his chin tips up slightly and he levels his pale eyes on her.

"What did Katherine want?"

-- just like that; the tone is the same, gentle but frank.

[Danicka] At this point, someone far less practiced at duplicity would freeze, like a deer in the headlights. Being suddenly caught in a lie or a simple withholding would slap them in the face like a bucket of ice cold water and they would stammer, they would try to cover, and they would fail. Danicka, however. The only moment of calculation -- and the flicker of it across her eyes is so brief that were he not literally inches away from her he would have no chance of catching it -- is deciding which of several available, viable paths to take.

Her hand, as though controlled by some force separated entirely from her conscious mind, goes on playing with his hair. She smooths her touch over short locks, spreading individual hairs over her fingerprints, droplets of water moistening her digits. She swirls her fingertips through curls, and just to make sure the contact does not cross the border between pleasant and agitating, occasionally she simply rakes her fingernails gently from hairline to the back of his skull, over his ears and part of the way down his neck.

It's affectionate. It's mammalian. It's thoughtless.

Danicka's eyes don't leave his, not even to blink in that split second of decision. He can't sense tension in her body, not through his hand on the outside of her thigh, not in a flutter of her stomach muscles or a pull of a tight expression on her face. Apparently she has decided not to feign confusion, or to tease him for assuming that her roommate is a woman as well. She doesn't know him well enough to believe that he is not the type to make assumptions, and in fact knows that he makes them all the damn time.

But the truth is she wasn't caught in a lie, because she never lied to him about this. The truth is, she wouldn't have mentioned to most people any information about who she's been living with. The truth is, something about the way he asks that tells her everything she needs to know: how he found out, and maybe even how much it does or doesn't matter to him.

"I don't know," Danicka says dryly, which is not the same as I have no idea. The way she says it, it is far closer to I don't care. Which is a lie. But Lukas doesn't need to know that.

Leaning in to him, she presses a warm, dry kiss to the center of his forehead. Her lips are soft even when her hand slips out of his hair, palm cupping his jaw for a moment as she pulls back and straightens again. "I think I'm going to go get in bed," she says quietly, taking a step backward and turning to go.

[Lukas] In all fairness, Lukas had never meant for this to be a deer-in-the-headlights moment. Another man -- another Garou, another Shadow Lord, in particular, would've milked the bombshell for all it was worth. He would've withheld his knowledge until the most damaging moment possible, and then he would've browbeaten Danicka with it, bullied her with it, used it to extract whatever ... information or favor he thought he could get for it.

This was never Lukas' intent. The way he broached the topic was, in fact, as gentle as possible. He wanted her to know he knew, that it was okay to stop -- if not lying, then at least omitting -- about it. He doesn't know why she never told him earlier, not exactly, but for one thing, he already has his guesses: it's not exactly the sort of thing a Garou would react well to. He didn't exactly leap for joy at the knowledge either. But then, it could have been worse. It could have been a lot worse.

For another thing, he's not sure it even matters very much.

When she kisses his brow he closes his eyes, and when she leaves the bathroom he lets her go. The air is cooler outside. It eddies in through the open door, displacing the warmth and humidity of the bathroom. She may have wiped a section of the mirror clean to dry her hair. The rest of it begins to unfog now.

Lukas doesn't follow immediately. He unwraps the disposable hotel razor and the single-use packet of shaving cream; lathers up. It's ironic that for all his thoughtless deftness with a straight razor, he's rather unpracticed with these cheap little plastic razors, and manages to nick himself twice on the line of the jaw. The second time, he lets out a hiss between his teeth, annoyance at his ineptitude rather than any real discomfort.

Afterward, rinsing the razor out, he leaves it on the side of the sink and flicks the light off on his way out. If she hasn't turned out the main room lights, he turns those out too, leaving only the desklamp near the window.

It's not the bed he goes to then but the armchair, angling it so he can look out the window if he turns his head; see her if he doesn't. He sits the way he always does, relaxed, spacefilling, lordly or Lordly both.

The rain has slowed. It's a lull in the storm. Water beads on the glass, runs down in streamlets. He props his cheekbone on his fist. The lamplight casts off his profile, which is what she sees of him as he watches the rain. After a moment he turns to her. Even in this light his eyes are a frosty blue, quite clear.

"What's between you and Katherine?" On the arm of the chair, his free hand turns over in a small gesture, like a shrug in miniature. "You don't seem terribly fond of one another."

[Danicka] When she says that she's going to go to bed and draws away, Lukas doesn't stop her, and Danicka continues in her chosen track: she pulls away from him, she pulls away from the topic, and shrugs out of the robe on her way out, hanging it on the hook by the bathroom door. The door is left open behind her as she walks to the bed, leaving him to his shaving and whatever contemplation he has left over for this particular subject, if his thoughts have not completely exhausted it yet.

It could be a signal, that she doesn't bother donning anything like pajamas before getting onto the bed. Danicka doesn't even crawl under the covers. She lays on her back with her head turned towards the windows, pulls the patterned green throw over herself. Her head is propped up on the roll pillow, her eyes watching the rain. The storm is less vicious now, but the rain isn't letting up even remotely. It's as though the sky wants to drown the city.

The room is as it was before when Lukas exits the bathroom, the lights off except for the lamp by the armchair. Danicka is not asleep, though she's very still. Her iPhone is sitting on the desk; so is a closed black Sony Vaio that has seen better days and not, apparently, particularly gentle treatment. She notices when he leaves the bathroom, because she cannot help but be aware of where he is in the room right now. One has to wonder if she'll even be able to sleep tonight, if he stays with her.

Danicka's eyes slide from the water-splattered windowpane and to him as he lowers himself into the armchair and sits there, towel draping over his thighs with the way he sits. He watches the rain for a few moments, the way she was, and so -- as happens quite often, really -- she is looking directly at him when he turns back to look at her again. At his question, one of her eyebrows lifts.

It falls again after a moment of thought, and she shakes her head slightly...about as much as one can shake their head when resting on a pillow. "She's your packmate," Danicka says, clearly but quietly, unaware that now Katherine has become not just a sister but his Alpha. "I don't think this is a safe topic of conversation tonight."

Just as whether or not she'd been beaten, and by whom, and how, and for what reason, was not a safe topic of conversation a month ago.

"...Why are you over there?" she asks, the barest hint of emphasis on the last word.

[Lukas] An exhale, not quite a laugh.

"Why don't you let me decide what's safe or not for myself, Danička."

She wants to know what he's doing over there; there being half a room away, near the window, when she's in bed. He watches her for a moment. Then he shrugs.

"Because I want to be." Another pause; previous subject again. "Tell me."

[Danicka] She could answer that question, which wasn't one. She could tell him why she doesn't let him decide what's safe or not. There are reasons for her reservation that have nothing to do with Katherine, or with him. There are conversations Danicka has with Lukas where she is not talking to him at all, really. Instead of answering, because he did not seem to really want an answer to that, she lets her eyes fall closed for a moment and then opens them again.

They've been here before. "No."

[Lukas] This snaps his attention back to her, a flare in the blue.

A beat goes by. Then he relents; looks away with something like a laugh, a faint huff of one.

"Is that courage, or resignation to the inevitable?"

[Danicka] There is no concurrent flash of lightning or roll of thunder outside to accompany the flare of temper in Lukas's eyes when he fixes them on Danicka.

To look at her lying there on the bed, she is as languid as the subject of an oil painting. If her hairline were dampened by sweat or if her skin was still flushed from the heat of the shower she would look very much like the way she does when catching her breath after sex. Instead she looks almost as though she's only now waking, drowsy and uncertain of what is real and what isn't.

Even, yes, when his cool eyes flare hotly for a moment. Even when he does that breath that is not a laugh, is absolutely nothing like the way he laughs when, say, she is swearing at her stomach's growling for food.

Lukas looks away again before he speaks. For her part, Danicka merely stretches her legs out, pointing her toes under the blanket, but the rest of her remains unengaged. For now. "What's the inevitable?"

[Lukas] "You seem to think," it's important, somehow, that he prefaces it with this, "it's inevitable that sooner or later I'll beat you for no better reason than that I want to."

[Danicka] Her left arm changes position, hand coming to rest on the pillow by her head. The back of her wrist follows the curve of the roll, her loose fingers seeming almost caught mid-motion in a beckoning gesture to the ceiling. The cover of the pillow is made of velvet, a crush of softness on her cheek and the back of her hand. Danicka's right arm is still draped over her torso, over the thin green blanket that is covering her far more completely than Lukas's towel covers him. Maybe it's the rain or the reflection of the lamp or the fact that the blanket itself is green but her eyes look like forests, deeper into spring than they will be for several more weeks.

Even now, when she has not been open to him since the last moments of his own orgasm, since the seconds afterward when she could not stop herself from shedding tears, Danicka seems like she belongs there. It's not her bed. It's not even his bed. Still: there is something natural about the way they are now, with the rain outside and both of them nearly nude, sitting in darkness that will only be complete if the lamp is turned off and the curtains pulled. He belongs there with her, which is why she asked him why he was so far away. It just does not matter where 'there' is, apparently.

"I never said I thought you'd want to," Danicka says quietly, almost pityingly. Her brow furrows for a flash, a slight wince.

[Lukas] "Because I couldn't help it, then," he replies immediately -- any louder and he would've snapped at her.

A beat or two. He can't even remember the topic of conversation; how they got here. She'd refused to answer something -- shut him down completely, fearlessly, or resignedly -- and that's it, he remembers now what he asked and why, but the moment seems past, and he doesn't bother asking that question again.

Another silence. Then: "Is that why you didn't ... stop me earlier? Because you expected I would hurt you?"

[Danicka] The woman on the bed -- his Kin in the sense that she is his ward, and he is her guardian in this city until someone else tries to take that claim -- does not flinch when his voice raises slightly, when it gets an edge to it. It isn't because she doesn't want to. It isn't because instinct doesn't make her want to run. And it isn't love or affection or respect that keep her still, or make her stay where she is, motionless and relaxed, attentive but unperturbed.

But then Lukas is quiet, and asks about...earlier. He gets no answer to the first part, no confirmation that yes, she means that one day he is going to beat her not because he wants to, not because he's decided to, but for absolutely no reason at all other than the ever-tenuous control Garou keep over themselves. He gets no denial, no assurance that no, that's not what she meant, please Lukášek, just come to bed.

When he asks if she expected him to hurt her, and if that's why she didn't stop him...then Danicka's hand moves away from her face again, going to rest palm-down on the mattress. Her other hand moves as well, to her other side, and she slowly pushes herself to sitting up. The green blanket pools slightly on her lap, as her eyebrows draw together. "I meant everything I said," she repeats, her voice soft but oddly tight at the edges. "I wanted you."

She takes a breath, shallower than she needs, but it's all she can get. "...It was rough." Too rough. "You nearly...lost control completely."

What she doesn't say, what's there under the surface, after the words: And not because I lied. Not because I made you angry.

[Lukas] She sits up and so does he. His back lifts from the armchair and then he leans over, leans down, props his elbows on his knees and lowers his face into his hands. His shoulders are a little hunched. It could be a penitent's posture, but it's not that, not exactly.

He scrubs his face with his hands. His neck bends further, after. He pushes his hands into his hair, his fingers plunging into the coal-black locks with less care and more familiarity than she can yet manage.

"I know," he says, very quiet. "I know."

She can't see his eyes, so she doesn't know that he squeezes them shut -- but she can see the edge of his jaw, and she can see how that clenches, how the line of it firms and shifts.

"It's never... " his conversation is full of pauses, trail-offs, half complete sentences left abandoned and then picked up again, " ...been like that before. I'm not like that."

Which is, of course, an empty thing to say when he is, very obviously, like that. Whatever that is: uncontrolled. Unhinged. Brutal.

Not all the exceptions he's made for her are for the better. He knows this; so does she.

In some ways, none of them are for the better.

"I'm sorry," he finishes, well aware that this, too, is an empty thing to say, "Danička."

[Danicka] What he says now, he already said before. And she has never assured him that he is forgiven. He has her continued presence, her permission to touch her. She doesn't flinch away from him in the shower or cease talking to him; she doesn't leave. But not once has she come right out and told him that he's forgiven. She's told him a sweet little lie that may be honest on her part, disturbing as that is: it's okay, she's said, when it's not.

And nothing he says now does he say to her face. His own eyes are turned down, to the carpet, to the space between his feet. The only other time she can remember seeing him anything like this was on the last full moon, just after the moot, when instead of fucking her brutally he'd nearly killed her. Could have, at least. Head in his hands, face down, not quite sorrowful but something else. As in that instance, Danicka does not sweep her naked body from the bed, go to him, and give him comfort. She stays where she is, bare to the waist and as unabashed her nakedness as a child. Or Eve.

She also seems as unsympathetic as a judge, and he knows well by now that it's not because she's incapable, or because she is truly cold. Or because she doesn't --

It's never been like that before, he says. Not I've. Sex, he means, or at least that's what she assumes he means by 'it'. In another context being told that fucking her is unlike fucking anyone else, that there is something indescribably and fundamentally different, might be complimentary. And she's heard something like it before, most certainly as a compliment, though she put less faith in those words than what Lukas is telling her now.

After he finishes speaking, after he says her name, she doesn't respond for awhile. Because his speech has been so halting the last few moments, she waits for several beats before she takes a deep breath and answers him.

"I know," she echoes back, her knees bending and sliding up, her pale arms wrapping around them. Her words are empty, somehow; they don't contain compassion, only understanding. Acknowledgement. I know you're sorry.

...You'll be sorry every time.

She has no leverage here. She has no way to tell him not to let it happen again, that 'sorry' means you'll stop, that if he is ever like that again with her that it's over, she's done. Maybe Lukas would accept that, but for some reason Danicka doesn't lay that on the table. She doesn't give him a bottom line. She is far too well-acquainted with powerlessness, far too entrenched in resignation. She is so jaded there is no wonder her eyes are, at the moment, the same color as the stone.

Still. Looking at him, she winces. It smooths away and she sighs out: "I've had worse." She means this as comfort, or something like it. She means it like absolution.

[Lukas] His head lifts; there's a strange light in his eyes, grim and angry. Were he clothed, he might hide his tension better. As is, she can see the muscles pulling taut across his shoulders -- the shifting fibers where the deltoid attaches to the shoulder girdle.

"Should I even bother asking for details?"

[Danicka] It does not occur to Danicka that there could be anything unwise about telling this man -- under this moon -- that she's "had worse" in the context of merciless, painful sex. Perhaps it should. The way he looked at her when she answered no to the question of whether she expected him to protect her may have been crystal clear. On the other hand, he said

...the truth is I would protect this kinwoman -- above and beyond all others

to his elder, and not to her. Yet again: would she even believe him, or have faith in the words, if he had?

It does not occur to her that he might not like hearing this, for whatever reason. Maybe it doesn't. The emotion that she reads in the cant of his head and the glitter in his regard and the slight strain of his musculature could be anger at her, could be frustration of the sort that is old news between them by now. Danicka could imagine him angry in anticipation of being told no, of her pulling even further away. She could imagine him angry for no reason at all.

Where the lamplight doesn't hit her, Danicka's skin is painted in shades of gray from the reflection of the city. She's flecked with the shadows of waterdrops on her shoulders and along her back, but her face and her breasts are golden and warm. Her brows are tightly pulled, in a mixture of perplexity and distress.

"Why would you want them?"

[Lukas] "Because they've made you the way you are," he fires back at her, instantly, quietly, intensely. "Because no matter how much you like to pretend the details don't matter anymore, they do."

He's still sitting hunched over with his elbows on his knees, only the posture isn't somehow defensive now, or pained -- there's a tension about it, as though he were a spring compressed, an animal crouched to spring. When he lifted his head his hands had come out of his hair. They fold now before his face, one fist inside the other, and he presses his mouth to his thumbnails for a moment, his eyes never leaving her.

With something like a deliberate effort, he lowers his hands -- opens the elbow joint and lets his forearms fall parallel to the floor. Opens his posture, if only by a little.

Body language matters to half-animals like him. Perhaps after twenty-four years as a kinfolk, it matters to her, too.

He continues, quieter: "Because no matter how much we talk about you and I being the only ones in this room, when you close up like that there's a third person in here and you judge me by his actions."

[Danicka] "...No, Lukáš," she says, shaking her head slightly. The words come immediately but are not tight, not defensive. The tension in her expression has faded somewhat, to be replaced with sympathy that he may very well find patronizing regardless of how sincere it is. (Or isn't.) He can't read her well enough to know, and neither of them can really help that. At this point, it may be beyond helping that he cannot trust her. (Or does not.)

But what is she saying 'no' to? That there is no 'they' that made her the way she is, that the details of her past really don't matter -- or shouldn't? That she's not closed up, or that she is not judging Lukas by the actions of someone who is not even here? She doesn't say.

Danicka is sitting the exact same way she sat on that cheap, squeaking, uncomfortable motel mattress the first time they were naked -- or near enough -- with each other. He'd sat across the room from her then, too, not on an armchair but against the wall, his jeans still on and his body burning up from the Rage that had almost overwhelmed him. She has a blanket covering her this time, the hotel is nicer...but as she'd said, it doesn't make any difference.

She takes a breath, looks at the ceiling -- it bares her throat, but only for a few seconds -- and exhales upward, blinking a couple of times. Lowering her jaw and looking at him again, Danicka just says: "All I meant was that you are not the first person to have hurt me while fucking me, and you really didn't hurt me that badly, and ...I honestly don't know who you think 'they' are or who 'he' is, but the whole...point of this for me is that when I'm fucking you, I'm. With. You."

Each word holds emphasis, hard and incontrovertible.

[Lukas] "I'm not talking about the sex," he replies, and there's a certain hardbitten patience in this. "I'll not deny that there's no one but us then. But beyond that, Danička, there are always ghosts hovering over your shoulder. There are -- things you do, and assume, and I'm not even sure you realize them yourself sometimes.

"Who taught you that an Ahroun will always lose his temper in the end -- your mother? Who taught you to go limp and try to bear it when you're struck, because screaming and begging then will only make it worse? That Theurge of yours? For god's sake, Danička, who taught you to cry silently if you have to cry, because heaven forbid someone hears you and really gives you something to cry about?"

The truth is he doesn't expect an answer to any of this. He puts the questions out anyway, though he can't say why. To have them out in the open, perhaps. To lay them out like inverse truths. To give her what he can see, since she won't give him what he can't.

Something like that. Something.

He's quiet now, finished. He watches her, frowning, the shadows on his brow deepened by the oblique light. He has such thoughtless comfort in his skin that there's little overt sexuality to his near-nudity. It seems natural that he should go about bare-skinned -- as though this were his native state.

[Danicka] That's what's almost as funny as it is compelling, in this: that when they're like this it's as though the intervening fifteen years never happened and they truthfully did grow up alongside one another, that they know each other intimately enough to be comfortable. Her sitting on the bed and him lounging in the chair, thoughts of other nights like whip-lashes through their minds and the memory of him inside her is still a searing, seething imprint to her flesh. Despite the fact that they are very close to arguing right now, or perhaps attacking and -- in her case -- evading, despite the fact that the absence of her own satiation is like claws running down her skin...

...it feels like they do this every night.

And if that isn't laughable, if that doesn't cause him to grimace and her to wince occasionally, if that doesn't slap them in the face sometimes, then Danicka isn't the only liar in the room right now.

Lukas isn't talking about the sex. What he is talking about is 'things' she does, things she assumes. He throws her mother at her and Danicka's eyes leave his instantly and go to the window, her jaw frozen so that it will not clench. Instantly he can see the change, before he gets to the words that Theurge of yours, the way her eyes soften at the edges and the way her shoulders round gently downward, the picture of relaxation.

because heaven forbid someone hears you

Yesterday she could have died. Last night a Philodox with Rage very near Lukas's own appeared inside her home with the same sound, the same pop! sensation in the air as the Spirals who had rippled into existence at Grant Park. Martin nearly lost his left arm. He mentioned his daughter. She thought about her father. Tonight Lukas could have frenzied while fucking her, and all the while she was saying Yes, holding him to her as though the pain didn't matter, the force didn't matter, the threat of death didn't matter, so long as he was there, so long as he didn't stop.

That Danicka can take a slow, deep breath when he lays those questions out -- questions he doesn't expect to hear answered and questions that may in fact be unanswerable -- and exhale it without wavering, that she can exist so quietly and that none of this is able to make her cry but somehow fucking him did...

...that says something about her. It's just that it's saying it in a language Lukas doesn't know. Like the Russian that tumbles out of her mouth when she's kissing his face and stroking his hair, purring endearments that he doesn't understand because she can't stand for him to know what she's saying, the strength in her ethereal calm right now is completely beyond his grasp because he does not know just how much there is assailing it.

Slowly, she turns back around and looks at him. She's more subdued. Everything about her. The sensual charge of the way she sits on the bed is dampened, the flickers of a dozen unnamed emotions veiled once more. This is why she can say what she does so quietly, and so gently, as though she is listing careful reminders rather than a recitation of charges against him.

"You nearly frenzied the first time I kissed you. You manhandled a Kinsman I care about and thought it ludicrous that it pissed me off. You let your packmate hit me. You called me a whore so many times I lost count. You informed me -- as though this was a good thing -- that if you ever hit me, don't worry Danička, I won't do it 'thoughtlessly'. You think it's funny that I don't see the point in talking to you if you're going to interrupt me. You put your hand on my throat the first time you were inside me."

A breath. Not much of a pause. Just another shake of her head, the way she did it when she said No so quietly.

"...I don't judge you by anyone else's actions, Lukášek. I don't judge you at all. I prepare for you. Being around you at all, much less on a full moon, is just about more than I can handle," she says, a flicker of a joyless smile and a huff of not-laughter leaving her as she says this, "but I keep coming to you because I can't stand not to be near you. Be angry at me for being fucked up and weak, but don't try to blame how much I hold back with you on anyone but yourself."

She's shaking.

[Lukas] Lukas tenses as she begins to lay his transgressions before him, one by one by one. It would be impossible for him not to. There's a storm at his back and a near-full moon at his back, and both of them are in his blood, as much a part of him as his bones, his sinew.

He tenses, and his hands clench on themselves, the left into a fist, the right around that fist as though to hide it, or hold it, or restrain it. His biceps are straining, the cords in his forearms standing out -- if she can see, the hairs on his arms are standing upright as well, and if he were in another form he would be bristling, every inch of black fur on end.

Every inch of his body is a silent shout: Enough. Enough!

There's no doubt, none whatsoever, that were another kinwoman to attempt this sort of litany of sins, he wouldn't bother getting angry. He wouldn't even bother listening. She'd get three words out of her mouth and then he'd backhand her across the room, and in a way, in a strange, sick way, he would be calm as still water.

But he listens; he does not silence her or tell her she's pushing her luck; he does not get up and break her over his knee like so much kindling. He sits where he is, the air around him thickening with rage, drawing in on itself until it seems impossible that it shouldn't just burst into flames, sear into plasma.

For all that: he doesn't stop her.

When she's finished, when she's finally done, he gives a short sharp scoff. A silence beats out. He sinks back in the armchair and his chest rises and falls in another breath, quieter.

" 'Can't stand not to be near me'," he echoes back at her, sharp as mockery. "Because that" a lash of his eyes at the door, their clothes still puddled there, "was worth it. Is that it, Danička?"

[Danicka] She doesn't trust him, and that's why she lies. She turns her back on him and walks away, she snaps, she talks back, and every time she waits for a bone to be snapped or the air to be strangled out of her...

...nothing.

It would be unfair to say that she's testing him, like a child testing boundaries laid in place by a parent or a teacher. Danicka doesn't expect to be beaten because she wants to see just how far she can go before something bad happens. There's a daringness to it, as well as an ample serving of apathy. What he might see only now, only as she slowly nods in response to his last question, is that on some level she is thinking that if he would just break her, if he would just break whatever this is between them, it would not 'prove her right'.

It would set her free.

Danicka nods, and when she speaks her voice is barely audible. Maybe because of his Rage. Maybe because of the words themselves.

"...And that's why I cried."

[Lukas] Lukas just stares at Danicka for a moment.

He stares at her for a moment, and he wishes he had a bottle of Wyborowa with him right now. Or Royal Lochnagar. Or ... paint thinner; antifreeze. It doesn't really matter.

He has leaned back in the armchair again, so it's just a matter of raising his hand, turning his head -- his thumb and forefinger bracket his forehead and he shades his eyes, kneads his temples, as if he couldn't bear to look at her anymore.

There is absolutely nothing left to say on his end.

[Danicka] [Perception + Empathy: Honeeey, What Are You Thiiinkiiing?]
Dice Rolled: [6d10] 7, 6, 7, 1, 2, 3 [Success x 2 at target 6]

[Danicka] If Lukas were in another form, or if he asked, he'd learn that there is indeed alcohol in the room with him now. It's still mostly full. It isn't cold. It's not Wyborowa or Royal Lochnagar but nor is it paint thinner. Danicka's poison -- when she simply wants the numbness -- is vodka, and mere hours after informing her roommate that they could not go get anything like that to help him cope, she had gone to the liquor store and procured something like that.

To help her cope.

But Lukas is in homid, and not only is he not asking Danicka if there is anything to drink in this room without a refrigerator, he is sitting there utterly and completely gobsmacked. It's not so obvious that his jaw is hanging slack or his eyes are wide. She can still feel the Rage coming off of him and it's turning her stomach, it's making her glad it's been quite a long time since she last ate. It takes effort not to cover herself, curl up, and hide underneath the blanket draped over her lap. It would be effort she could not expend if he had not looked away from her.

Danicka is still sitting the way she was before, her legs drawn up and her arms looped around them. After a little while she just bows her head and rests her forehead on her knees, her back curved and most of her body, now, sharing the same gray-and-pale dappled tattoo. Every so often a droplet shadow will roll down her side, her arm.

[Lukas] She doesn't say anything, which is ultimately a good thing, because he couldn't handle it right now. He needs a moment. He needs a moment to think, to regather himself, to figure out what the fuck to do now.

A gust of wind outside: rain patters on the window. There's only one light on in here, and it's the desk lamp, and in a curious way, this mirrors that first night, that first time, because there was only one light on too, then, and it was the one on the desk.

They're night and day, that lamp and this. One was cheap, tarnished, with a rattling lampshade. The other is svelte, tasteful, polished. But the light both casts, or cast, is dim -- nonobtrusive. There's enough darkness that the streetlights cast the shadows of the rain in on them: on her body, on his back.

Eventually he lowers his hand from his eyes, forks his hand over his mouth instead. See no evil, speak no evil. Something like that. If she'd thought for a moment that her words had somehow brought him to tears, that illusion's dispelled rapidly enough: his eyes are stark and dry and steady; but then, she wouldn't have thought that anyway. If nothing else, Danicka knows Shadow Lords. She knows, or is beginning to know, Lukas.

His hand closes to a fist. He presses his knuckles to his mouth instead. His brow furrows; he's thinking. He doesn't know what to think, except perhaps --

That is so fucked up. That is so fucked up.
And:
She's better off without this.

Without me, specifically, is not a word he can quite will into his mind.

Eventually he takes a deep breath. He lowers his hand. He's gathered himself again, and he looks at her, his brow still furrowed.

"Do you regret," he asks her, quiet now, "accepting the ride from me that morning?"

[Danicka] It could be said that nothing tonight has gone the way Danicka expected, but that would be suggesting that she had any particular expectations...beyond, of course, what they have called the inevitable tonight. Him hurting her. Badly. Willfully. Irrevocably.

And yet she says that whatever this is, it's worth it. Being with him is worth being scared. Being hurt. Being in serious physical danger if she says or does the wrong thing or if she pushes him in some other way closer to the brink. There is, of course, always the disclaimer that it is only worth it for now. There is, of course, twisted up in everything else, something like hope that one of them will fuck this up so badly that it's no longer enough, that it's no longer worth facing the lies, the bullshit, or the risk.

Danicka slowly lifts her head, still leaning forward so that her folded arms rest on top of her shins. She looks at him before he speaks, looks up when he takes a breath, and there aren't any more tears on her face, either. She doesn't know what he's thinking, can't guess what he's thinking, except perhaps --

She is so fucked up. She is so fucked up.
Or:
I'm better off without this.

But does she regret it.

Danicka shakes her head twice, slowly. "Not for a second."

[Lukas] And now he's well and truly out of things to say.

There's a pause; then he gathers himself and gets up. There's very little gathering before the movement: he moves as easily, as powerfully, as lions on the veldt. The rain is still falling outside. He doesn't close the curtains. He is not a mystic, and he is not particularly close to his tribe, not particularly involved in their machinations and power-plays. How could he be, with what he's seen as a child?

Still: he is of Thunder, in the way that rain is of the storm, and salt the sea. It is as deeply buried and inextricable to him as blood.

And he doesn't close the curtains.

Lukas does, however, turn out the light. And then there's just the light of the Magnificent Mile, glittering through the rain -- and the glow off the clouds, greyish-pink, a thoroughly unnatural color found at the heart of every major city.

That is the light they have to see by. In it, he's a shadow, his outlines vaguely limned. He stands at the edge of the bed and undoes the towel, dropping it where it is. He turns down the blankets, holds them up, and he does have something to say after all, though it means very little:

"Get in."

It is wholly possible that if she had answered with regret, or even a shadow of doubt of its lack, he would not have done this. It is wholly possible he would have left -- not out of pique or petulance, but out of ... what? Responsibility? Duty? Pity? Sacrifice?

It doesn't really matter. After she's under the covers he gets in as well, drawing a breath at the coolness of the sheets. His rage is a bonfire. She can feel it beating against her skin, refracting like waves off the shore.

For some time he lies as he is, facing the ceiling, silent.

"What do you want, Danička?" This, at last: scarcely more than a breath of sound. Not an angry demand; not that at all. It's a question, honest, and one that he realizes he's never actually asked her. He knows absolutely nothing about what she wants, beyond, of course --

(chci tě.)

-- the sex, the closeness, the rawness and the tenderness when there's no room left for defenses.

Besides that.

"Just at this very moment, right now." His head turns on the pillow; facing her now. "If you could have anything at all."

[Danicka] There are as many Garou perspectives on Kinfolk as there are Garou. Or, to be even more accurate, there are as many Garou perspectives on Kinfolk as there are Kinfolk. Any other kin other than, perhaps, members of his immediate family, would have been struck if they had spoken to Lukas the way that Danicka did just moments ago. Yet she's not. And it isn't because he's fucking her.

Some think they are just like Garou, trapped in unchanging human bodies that cannot cross the Gauntlet or interact with spirits -- and yet there are Kin who learn Gifts, there are Kin who heal, there are Kin who do things even Garou are not capable of.

Or they're human beings, just like human beings, but untouched by the Delerium (but there are exceptions) and maybe a little stronger of body and will than the average person on the street, but that could be a product of upbringing as much as birth. One has to find a way to survive, after all, if one's brothers and mothers and children are monsters.

Lukas rises up in one smooth motion and Danicka does not move. She watches him pass the curtains, watches his face even though she senses the fall of the towel and there is still a part of her that would -- if he were another man -- drag her eyes down his body rather than stay with him. His eyes, from this angle and when he douses the lamplight, are not quite colorless but they are not the same vivid blue she is so used to seeing -- and hates being used to seeing. Her eyes are murky and indistinct, still jade-green, stone-green, summer-colored.

He's old world, old country, and old blood. So is she. And because of his family, and because of her own, because of their pride and her secrecy they both know:

one finds a way to survive.

She twists her hips, rolling to one side, the green blanket slipping away like a sheet of water rippling off her skin. Her legs tuck under the blankets he pulls back, and she slides underneath them all, moving from the warm spot she's created on top of the comforter and into the cool, clean softness beneath. When Lukas lays down beside her, Danicka moves to him, her body aligning with his like the tumblers of a lock falling into place.

Or like flowers opening and turning sunward, which is sometimes how it seems between them...though she doesn't lift her face to his like a blossom seeking light and heat. Her left hand slides over his abdomen, following the scar he earned shortly after he met her (again). She does what she has never done before and lays her head on his shoulder, in the crook of his arm, as though there is nothing more natural in the world than for her to do so. Danicka's leg doesn't drape over Lukas's thigh, but the sole of her left foot comes to rest on the top of his, unobtrusive. Comparatively, her skin is almost cold. But not quite. The room is cool, but the sex, the shower, the blanket, the simple pounding of her heart have Danicka as warm as she ever is.

Her eyes stay open. Her back is to the windows, to the rain, but she can still hear it.

His heartbeat reminds her of a train.

Then he turns over and she's already there, but she does -- this time -- tilt her head up, moving back just enough so that she does not crane her neck in order to meet his eyes. What does she want. Just right now. Anything.

Všechno.

She answers without missing a beat, without hesitating to think it over, but she answers quietly. There's no need for her to speak up, not when the only sound is their breathing, the rain, their heartbeats. "Jaro." She turns her head and looks over her shoulder at the rain, then back to him, her hair rustling on the pillow and threading over his skin once, then again. "It's coming, but...it's not here yet."

A beat.

"What about you?"

[Lukas] It's almost incomprehensible to him how they can be very nearly adversaries on opposite sides of the room one moment -- tearing at each other with words -- and, a moment later, be like this.

Together. In bed. In the dark. With her body fitting to his, and his arm draping around her waist so thoughtlessly, so naturally, that it could only be instinct. It could only be natural, and ... right.

There's a sense of familiarity about her, and Lukas knows it has nothing to do with what mostly-forgotten memories he might have from childhood. Nothing to do with that, and everything to do with her bloodlines, the blood and soil from which she is raised. Like salmon swimming upstream; swans returning to nest: she draws him the way ancestral homelands draw simpler animals, on a deep, half-remembered level.

She tells him she wants the spring, jaro, and he thinks to himself, Jste jaro.

It's a flicker of a thought that makes no sense at all -- it's there and it's gone, but while it lasts it's blindingly bright, it arcs across his mind like a comet through the sky. He turns his face to her, presses his mouth to her hair. It's too dark to see the color. Her hair is merely bright, merely pale.

"Chcete-li vidět moře." He looks at the ceiling now. They're up high enough that more light comes from below than above. The shadows of rain crawl across the ceiling, refracting and diffracting, constantly in motion.

[Danicka] They change subjects. Again and again, sometimes because she has to avoid answering some question of is and sometimes because he does not seem to know what else to say about something she has given him. Danicka answers and Lukas, suddenly, cannot even speak to her until he is touching her again, until he's lying in bed and asking her what she wants. As though it matters. As though it's possible. As though she really knows.

There is nothing about Lukas that she finds familiar, or reminiscent of home. It would not be good for him if he did remind her of home, or memories long since past, rooms now emptied or enshrined to the people who used to exist there. She has never been to the Czech Republic where his family had an orange grove. She has sisters she has never met, never spoken to, only seen pictures of. She cannot look at Lukas and know him for what he is, other than the way that any mortal sees him; she would not have known his Tribe if Gabriella hadn't told her, would never have told her father that yes, she had met Shadow Lords in Chicago, she was fine. She was watched over.

Nothing about his breeding calls to her, the way his calls. His Rage is repellant to the point that she locks up and at times, yes, has to force herself to stay planted where is rather than bolting or screaming in terror. It does not attract her to him except on a level that she wholeheartedly acknowledges is rather sick. Danicka doesn't know why it feels so normal to be curled up against him like this, why his lips kissing her hair feels right. She doesn't know how on earth it can feel 'right' or 'good' or 'natural' when half the time she is sick to her stomach because she thinks she can see what's coming.

Maybe she can.

The reason she cried was because despite all that, the way she feels the other half of the time is worth it. And she doesn't know why. It just is. Every time he admits to not knowing why, not understanding the way this feels or why it would--

Danicka, listening to him tell her that he wants to see the ocean, is on the verge of asking him why, drawing out more than the words give her, more than he asks of her when she says she wants springtime to hurry up and get here, and she stops. He's looking at the ceiling and she's looking at his chest like it's a field she's surveying.

"I don't understand why there'd be pieces to pick up if I left," she says.

[Lukas] This makes him wince, though she can't see it. She can feel a flicker of unease roll through him though -- his shoulder tensing beneath her cheek, the steady rise and fall of his chest halting for a split-instant, so brief that a woman less perceptive than Danicka would have never noticed.

A woman less perceptive than Danicka would have never noticed any of it. He has never told her an outright lie; has even failed to make the most harmless lies of omission more often than not. This does not mean he has not lied to her, or to himself, or tried. His lies are subtler than words -- they're in the way he guards himself, his secrets, his self.

He's good at this. He practices every day. That she sees him so clearly is less a factor of his ability to conceal than it is a factor of her ability to see through what he defenses he might thrown in her way.

"Leave it be, Danička," he says. "Don't make me flay myself open to find you an answer."

[Danicka] She's too close to him not to notice. His ribs expand every time he breaths, moving his side further into her solar plexus and stomach. His skin is so hot that if she stays like this much longer she's going to begin sweating again under the covers, no matter how cool the room is or how much the rain outside wants to freeze. Danicka's far narrower hips are are pressed against the juncture where his thigh meets his torso.

As far as her nerves are concerned, their feet have melted together completely. Her left palm is cupped around the lowest ribs on his right, motionless except when his chest rises and falls, as it -- for a second -- stops doing in reaction to her question.

"Is that all I have to say when I can't stand to answer your questions?" she asks him, quietly but with more than a trace of wryness. "Nechte to být, Lukášek." She doesn't pause here, but her voice begins to fall, ending in a whisper. "Nacházíte se trhání mi sebe."

[Lukas] Lukas stirs. His shoulder moves under her cheek, though not to dislodge her. Merely to sink deeper into the mattress. Merely to rearrange, rebalance.

His free hand draws from beneath the covers. He reaches up to push the pillow out from under his head, replacing it with his hand. There's a moment when he's merely thinking, considering her question seriously; or perhaps considering what she has said, letting it sink in, in, letting her words sink into him like a knife dropped into fluid viscous as oil, as blood.

Sometimes -- though it's not sometimes, it's a very specific time: the full moon, of which, really, they've only seen two together --

Sometimes, Lukas burns so hot he doesn't seem real. It doesn't seem possible. Beneath her hand, and beneath her face, and against her body, he's nothing but heat and strength, but sometimes there's a sense that if she could peel back his hot skin, peel back his hard muscle, peel back his solid bones -- if she could see to the core of him, she would find nothing there but a white-hot blaze, a nucleus of thermonuclear heat like the heart of a star.

When his thumb sweeps her waist tonight, it leaves behind a tracery of heat, an afterimage.

"Ano." He closes his eyes as he says this. There isn't much to see anyway, and with his eyes closed he can open his other senses; he can feel her all along his left side, equilibrating to his temperature, warming to his skin. "To je vše, co má říkat."

This is a promise he'll have to remember, he tells himself. This is something he'll have to remember. All this.

[Danicka] With their bodies very nearly occupying the same space, they are somehow still acres and miles away from one another. She had wanted him in bed with her from the moment he let her down at the door. Her feet touched carpet and she would not tell him what was wrong, and told him to come with her. To the shower. To bed. To stay. And in the shower they'd barely touched. And he has only just now come to bed. She thinks he's going to stay.

She doesn't know for how long; what she remembers is that she asked him why he was so far away from her and he had told her that he wanted to be. What she remembers is that whenever he has held out his hand or looked at her and told her Come here she's come to him, and the exception of not coming upstairs to the Brotherhood when he told her to over the phone is not the same. It is not the same at all as seeing his palm outstretched and seeing his eyes. Yet she sat on the bed, aching for him to not be in that chair but closer, and he did not want --

Danicka takes a deep breath as he holds his arm around her and doesn't think about it.

The words come out of her mouth before she quite knows what they are, and when she gets to the end her voice is falling to almost nothing because every single syllable is true, no matter what language she speaks it in. His name, or the diminutive used by his family, by people who know him even though she has no right to know him, to see him, to understand him as well as she does. And then the truth, without even pausing to think about it.

You're tearing me apart.

And that is all she has to say, to get him to stop, to get him to let it go. Danicka holds it back for a little while, and then gives a slight shiver, which cannot possibly be from the cold. The thermostat in the room is set at sixty-five. The curtains are open and unprotective. And Lukas may as well be a blast furnace that she's leaning against. Well. He's learned by now she likes her showers -- and her baths -- hot enough to very nearly scald. Plus, it's still cold enough that she instinctively curls towards the source of the heat, dangerous as it might be to do so.

She closes her eyes, and after a few long, silent seconds, she answers a question he asked nearly a month ago.

"There is not a mark on me," she whispers, "because you do not need to be careful when you can heal with a touch."

[Lukas] It's the same: a clench of reaction in him, flash of tension as her meaning sinks in.

She'd said something of the sort: he's a Theurge; he didn't have to hold back. Lukas had not understood, not at all. He had assumed it was some comment on the strength of a Theurge -- some correlation with the damage an Ahroun could do versus a Theurge in terms of sheer bonecrushing, fleshrending might.

But it wasn't that. It wasn't that at all, and though Lukas doesn't move, doesn't stir, doesn't even breathe for a second, there's a flash of anger all through him, as though the white-hot blaze at the core of him had burned so hot that it cracked the layers of his flesh and bone, quaked to the surface.

Some time ago he had asked her -- derisively -- if she expected him to protect her. The answer he had implied was a resounding no, a resounding never when his packmates were concerned. She has no reason to assume he hadn't meant it. If anything, she has every proof that he did mean it: the night Sam had nearly cracked her cheekbone, Lukas stood six feet away, which is nothing to a werewolf, to an Ahroun. He stood here and he did absolutely nothing.

It wasn't shock. It wasn't even indecision. It was a deliberate, calculated decision to do nothing. He weighed her against his pack, and the scales tipped as they did.

Still -- for all that. The anger that spikes through him now is uncontrollable, a mindless reflex to the very thought of it. It makes him close his eyes, hard, though he doesn't squeeze. She can hear his throat click softly as he swallows.

I would protect this kinwoman, he'd said, above and beyond all others. He never said this to her, and might never. A moment or more of this, though, and she'd guess it herself. She'd read it from him the way she reads anything and everything else.

And then it's controlled, somehow: the fury wrested back into its cage, the fissures sealed, the cracks closed.

Lukas draws a deep breath. He turns his face against hers, his jawline sliding over her forehead -- a wordless, half-meaningless sort of contact. His chest rises and then it falls. He says nothing.

[Danicka] She did not tell him that to rake fingernails over his protective instinct. Nor did she tell him that to garner his sympathies. More than perhaps anyone, she understands the line between private and public, between pack and public, between Kin and Garou. She understands, better than he might think she does, why he didn't stop Sam. This is why she almost rolled her eyes at the idea of him protecting her. Perhaps that's what makes lying with him like this tolerable, rather than making her feel...frail. If she felt fragile she would not be able to circle back to such a question like she did just now, which seems to be the way it usually goes.

He asks. She refuses. And in a little while, if he sits very still and does not say anything, she comes closer. What she gives him may not be what he asked for initially, it may not have much meaning for him, but it's something. It's what she can do.

There are places where she should, by experiences, bear scars. There was damage done and then damage taken away, at least as far as physical remainders are concerned. Not because a Theurge is weaker than an Ahroun, or less filled with Rage. Because even the youngest Theurges can be capable of simply erasing the effects of brutality from flesh. It's so easy with mortals, too, as they have no Rage for the Mother's Touch to reach through. Danicka does not indicate any more than what he already knows: yes, she was beaten. And all she clarifies is what he had assumed: no, whoever beat her did not know 'what he was about', was not thinking of where and how to hit her when he did to keep it from being seen later.

She pulls away, her eyes opening. Tension runs in a wave through him, anger nearly shatters him, and even though his arm doesn't suddenly squeeze the life out of her and he doesn't grit his teeth, Danicka breathes in and separates her skin from his side by a mere half an inch, until it passes. Then she exhales, and with the slow curl of air leaving her mouth, she moves back to him and asks herself -- not for the first time -- if she's even going to be able to sleep tonight with him there.

If she is able, it will take time to get there.

He turns, his face rubbing against hers. Danicka closes her eyes again. She kisses his chest. She doesn't say another word.

[Lukas]
In the silence that follows, the only thing that passes between them is breath and touch, and each is inextricably linked to the other.

He breathes in and his chest fills against her mouth. She breathes in and hers fills again his side.

His hand moulds down over her hip. He draws her thigh over his, as though to press her closer. When his arm returns to her waist, it doesn't drape; it curls, as though to press her into his side, meld her back to his ribcage.

Christian dogma means little more to Lukas than it does any Garou, but he is at least familiar with it -- the echoes of it resonating in a million stories, poems, novels. Some part of him always found that creation myth vaguely absurd, condescending, but suddenly he thinks he understands, perfectly, how a woman might be so familiar, so necessary, that his very flesh recognizes her, and his very bones would mourn her loss if she weren't right where she is.

It is unlike him to think in such terms. His analytical mind is not built for this. He is no galliard; no garou of the softer tribes. These are not things he would speak aloud, ever.

He turns his head, looks over hers to the window, watches rain find its way down the pane.

"I never wanted this," he says, quietly and thoughtfully, as though the words were a delicate filigree he must handle with deftness and care. "I wasn't playing at coyness, or even acting for Sam and the pack's benefit as for my own when I avoided this. It was self-preservation, you see. It was different from the start. And I do not think I can keep you indefinitely, or even for long.

"But here we are anyway. And I've become accustomed to this. It's become ... necessary."

There's a pause.

"And if you tear what's necessary from a man, there's bound to be pieces to pick up in the aftermath."


[Danicka]
There have been very, very few instances where Danicka has resisted some touch-based guidance. It isn't always a pleasant thing to notice. Sometimes she goes limp when he grabs her. At the waterfront when he very nearly kissed her it happened so fast that she froze, but she didn't struggle. It takes conscious effort for her to fight down the instinctive reaction she has, which is to lock up and get away when she feels threatened on a primordial level, but Danicka has been practicing since...well who knows since when.

In this, however, it's different. Her ease of motion as Lukas pulls her leg over him has nothing to do with fear of retribution and everything to do with their seamless, wordless form of communication. His hand moving from hip to thigh is question, request, stated preference, and her movement into it is answer, acquiesence, and agreement. It works without a goddamn hitch, as he'd put it, and there is no doubt left on either side that the contact is wanted.

She doesn't think about the way they fit together like this. Pulled closer and kissing his chest almost idly, Danicka thinks only that she likes it her. It feels good. Despite the fact that he is technically more animal than she is and despite the fact that she seems so adept in the mortal world, her thoughts are infinitely more pared-down, less complicated, and almost brutally simplistic. It is based in the physical, for the most part: the way he feels against her skin, the smell of him -- the hotel soap, the man himself -- in her nostrils, her awareness of nicks on his jaw that are already beginning to heal, the sound of his heartbeat as well as the air traveling in and out of his lungs, through his nose and mouth.

She doesn't question it now. This feels good. This is good.

They've talked about self-preservation before. He said he could understand it, and she'd believed him. His blood, Caleb's blood, and the blood of three Black Spiral Dancers had been flecking her skin and hair as water crashed down in the shower stall, and she had been less bothered by it than he had been. She understands self-preservation...to a point, to a limit of her own faith in anyone's ability to survive what life throws at you. She believes in psychological self-preservation, though, fighting tooth and nail to hold onto yourself. And that's what they're talking about, here.

Her thoughts move away from this room, from this city, from even this region of the country. Her thoughts roll backwards, like pages turned quickly in order to reference something from earlier in the story, and thankfully Lukas uses different words in the present than she has heard in the past, or she would be even more truly unnerved than she already is.

This, he says, and it, only traipsing into you and we in the lightest spots, the most unobtrusive bits of what he says. He's become accustomed to this. It's become necessary.

Danicka is so still next to him, her breathing so regular and even, that he might think she's fallen asleep. She doesn't respond for a long time, and then there's a hitch. She breathes deeper and shifts beside him, stirring and lifting her head to look at him. Her body slides upward so that their faces are aligned, and no doubt as soon as he sees her he can read her intent, no doubt as soon as her breath hits his jaw he is meeting her there, pressing his lips to hers as she kisses him, before she can tell him that is what she wants.

It's sweet. To start.


[Lukas]
It’s sweet. To start.

He looks at her as she raises herself over him. His hand opens warm over her lower back – the other closes over her forearm. When she’s leaning down he’s already leaning up, the tendons in his neck pulling taut as he meets her halfway.

And it’s sweet. To start. But perhaps not for long, as his mouth opens to hers, and his hand releases her arm to push into her hair. He pushes her hair back from where it catches between them, back over her shoulder, and –

He draws back. There’s enough light that she can see his pupils have widened, and his breathing has quickened. He reacts to her without reservation, instantly – this, too, is instinct. He touches her face, looks at her face, and they both know this only leads to one end.

So Lukas sets his head back down, and he closes his eyes. She can feel him draw a deep, slow breath.


[Danicka]
Sweet becomes slow. Danicka moves to rest more of her weight on her right arm without letting her mouth leave his, her eyes closing as much in response to the kiss as to the fact that he returned it so soon, and so effortlessly. Then the slow kiss deepens, Lukas's lips parting as though in invitation and Danicka accepting, the tip of her tongue slipping into his mouth to touch his.

She melts slightly beside him, as though she were not already languid, as his hand moves into her hair. A sigh escapes her, and Danicka's leg -- already over him -- slides further. Her thigh muscle flexes, and there is the distinct impression that she is about to pull his leg between her knees, that the warmth of her at his side is about to become pressure.

Danicka's arousal is almost instantaneous, surely due in part to sheer attraction but also going so far with him before and coming back down without finding any sort of completion in the act. When Lukas pulls back her eyes flash, though not with anger, and her hand on his ribs tenses for a second. She licks her lips as he touches her face, still leaning towards him, into him, her respirations elevated rapidly, and then...

...he lays down.

And closes his eyes.

And takes a deep breath.

Danicka exhales. She forces her tensing hand and her flexing leg to relax, tries to breathe more normally, and closes her eyes to count down from five. Each number flashes in her mind the way she taught herself, vivid white against the darkness, and then she opens her eyes again and swallows.

She is not going to react petulantly. She is not going to get angry. She is not going to draw his hand between her legs nor lick his neck nor murmur C'mon, baby... in his ear. She stays where she is, still propped on her right elbow, and watches him, waiting to see if this is just a moment needed to collect himself or...

...or what, she doesn't know.


[Lukas]
It's a moment to collect himself.

It's more than that. It's a moment to retreat into himself -- self-preservation, you see, he'd said -- to be certain he could take it, to be certain he can handle it, and how much he can handle, before this spins out of his control again.

And then he opens to her again. His eyes, that is: the eyelashes coal-black, the irises not quite blue in this light, but clear for all that.

Lukas puts his hand back on her face. He draws her down to him and when his mouth opens to hers this time it's deep, a kiss that starts somewhere at the base of his spine, and sends a silent shiver right back to its origins.

Slow now, his mouth wanders her face. He kisses her mouth, and the trail her tears would have taken -- but if there was salt there, it's long since washed away. He kisses her closed eyelids, and then her temple, the outer contour of her face, her jaw, her chin. He kisses her neck and her throat, and when he reaches her collar his hands turn her, he turns her gently around and draws her atop him, her back to his chest.

He leans up to kiss the nape of her neck now, propping his weight on his elbows, his stomach contracting against her lumbar back. His balance shifts, one shoulder rising higher than the other as it takes his weight, and his eyes are closed now, his lips moving with something that she might almost mistake for laziness if not for his heartbeat hammering against her spine. He wraps his free arm around her, his hand wandering over her breasts, splaying over her ribcage, pressing down the slope of her belly.

When his hand presses between her legs he muffles a wordless sound against her hair, the back of her neck, a quiet exclamation, as though it were she who touched him and not the other way around.

He sinks back down then, his other arm wrapping around her too now, bringing her with him as he uncoils, lays flat. His hands remain where they are, motionless, and his pulse jumps through him, neck to sternum to stomach to cock.

Fits and starts. Stops and go's. He lays quietly beneath and behind her, his chest straining against her back as he forces his breathing to slow.


[Danicka]
Normally during sex, Danicka is beyond uninhibited. She does not even play at hesitance or timidity, whatever her behavior outside of the bedroom (or hotel room) might indicate. There are things she does to Lukas that seemed designed slowly to take him as quickly and as mercilessly to the edge as he can stand. She could be -- and has been -- described as having a ravenous sexual appetite, has never shown passivity or disinterest or boredom, and when she swivels her hips just so and makes him see a god he doesn't believe in, well...it's no wonder that he takes a moment.

He didn't hold back with her, the last time. She never holds back with him.

There is a part of Danicka that he has only truly glimpsed once, and could not entirely understand or take the time to think over and even -- perhaps -- talk about with her. That part of her is envisioning doing things to him now that she is not doing. That part of her is wondering how much she can get away with and not send them both careening off a cliff they came far too close to earlier. That part of her is, in her mind's eye, not giving him a few seconds to breathe, to make sure he can handle fucking her again. In her imagination she is not waiting for him to reach for her.

She controls it. When he does reach for her, kissing her mouth as though their lips never parted and kissing her face as though in worship, her eyes close and she breathes silently. Carefully. It is not entirely for his sake that she lets him go slow now, as though she, too, is afraid of what she might do if this gets away from her.

Danicka is not expecting to be pulled to his chest like that, not turned so that she cannot see him, can only feel him. Her back arches, shoulderblades tightening on his chest and ass pressing briefly on his lower abdomen. The curve to her quickly relaxes, as blankets are flipped off of their upper halves by impatient hands. For a few seconds, all she can do is squirm while he kisses her neck, while he slides an arm around her. A quiet gasp leaves Danicka's throat, a sigh in her high alto.

Her hand slides over his as he touches her. Danicka shudders, holding his hand where it is as her breathing ratchets up in speed and intensity by a few notches. Her mouth is opening, to say Don't stop, to say his name, to say something, but she doesn't get a chance before he is sinking back down, drawing her with him. Danicka waits. Danicka is patient...for a few moments, for a couple of heartbeats, and then she can't stand it. Her hand moves on top of his, encouraging, and she writhes slightly on his chest.

She's trying. She's trying to control herself, to give him another few seconds, but Danicka writhes, and moves his fingers against her, and she makes a small sound of half-frustrated, half-demanding pleasure.

"I want to see you," she breathes out, mid-squirm, and her free hand flattens on the mattress to their sides, abruptly slipping away from his enfolding arm and rolling onto the bed, on her knees. Danicka leans over him, all her weight on one hand, and kisses him fiercely and fast. "Sit up," she mumurs, her lips loosing the words just before they close on his lower lip.

At least this time she speaks to him before her hand goes to his stomach, before it slides under sheets that still cover him from the hips down, before she does, in fact, touch him.


[Lukas]
They never were very good at holding back.

Because even when he holds back, he only holds back a little; and she, well, she never holds back at all. It's no wonder they're not good at it. They've had no promise.

When he stops, she writhes, she moves against his hand until he opens his mouth to her shoulder, licks her flesh like he might simply devour her. When she draws away suddenly his eyes open, he watches her get up, he hears her say what she does and if this echoes back to what he's said to her he doesn't seem to register it.

Lukas does, however, sit up -- the muscles of his stomach bunching against her delving hand. When she takes him in hand he stops, he loses his train of thought, and he doesn't close his eyes, so she can see the way his gaze abruptly darkens and loses its edge, its fierce focus.

He covers her hand with his as she had covered his, earlier. There's not so much space between and he leans across it, suddenly -- this kiss is closer to a bite, something like an attack.


[Danicka]
She doesn't believe in promises, anyway. She doesn't believe the Garou that say no harm will come to her or that she's safe with them when they're the most dangerous things in the building, sharper than knives and more devastating than electricity, more forceful than gravity. She likes that he doesn't promise these things, but liking that about him doesn't mean she trusts him or that she believes she's safe. That wouldn't even make sense.

Her being here with him, knowing damn well the moon is full, does not make sense. Staying here and asking him to say borders on psychotic behavior. Maybe she has a death wish. Or she's a masochiest.

But honestly, at the moment, who fucking cares?

They've tried. Lukas has tried to slow down, to maintain his currently tenuous and obviously fallible control. Danicka has tried to let him. She does not have as much self-discipline as he does, even on her best day, and after the way things have been going not just tonight but the last few nights, today is far from her best day. Danicka seems eminently distracted at the moment by touching him, by the ferocity of the way he kisses her, and --

-- the smart thing to do would be to be passive and unresistant. Instead, she does not come close to biting him but tugs on his lip with her teeth, gnaws on him for a second, releases him, and kisses him again. The pressure and speed of her hand increases slightly, a ripple of tension shuddering through her. Saying I want you at this juncture would be utterly fucking pointless.

So Danicka doesn't say it. She gasps when she stops kissing him, tearing her mouth away and leaning over, reaching for something on the writing desk. "Jesusfuck," she breathes out, hissing the so-called blasphemy into the dark when she has to fumble in the dark.

The foil-wrapped packet ignored, forgotten, and dismissed last time is pressed into his hand then as she comes back to him. She's on her knees by his left side, her hand leaving his musculature to lay on his chest. Her other hand is between her legs again, and her mouth is on his again, and she is moaning.

Again.


[Lukas]
Some part of him is glad when she goes for the condoms again. Some part of him is glad to know that barrier is not entirely broken down -- some part of him is glad to know that piece of the world, at least, has not completely fallen asunder.

His hand is rising to receive the packet even as she's pressing it to him, and his face is turning up to receive her kiss, and

he loses his thread of thought again when she kisses him, his tongue slipping and tangling with hers, the foil ripped in his hands but the latex where it is, forgotten, until he turns his face away with an effort and lets her rain kisses where she may while he rolls the condom on, smooths the rim down as far as it'll go with both hands.

Even now his hands do not shake. Lukas is nothing if not steady. He reaches for her, he takes her by the hips and swings her astride him, sudden and irresistible, and then he remembers, he remembers to be gentle, to be slow, to treat her better than he did an hour ago.

He turns his mouth to hers again. He catches her lips with his, and on an inhale, opens his mouth to hers again. When he kisses her this time he forgets all over again, he grabs her by the ass and drags her against him, pulls her up on her knees, her thighs opening over his hips, pulls her to slide hip-centered down until his sex nudges hers, and his mouth is falling away from hers to pant against her neck.

"Jděte pomalý," he tells, or asks her. He puts his hands to the mattress behind him, leans his weight back, tips his brow against her mouth, opens his eyes to watch her take him inside her. "Pomalu, Danička."


[Danicka]
Sooner or later someone is going to tell him that his packmate is the Garou that fucked his Alpha's little sister recently. The packmate that asked his permission to take Danicka out on a date but did not ask permission to fuck her four times with only a couple of thin walls between them and the Shadow Lord. The packmate that he left a bloody heap on the floor for an animalistic version of insubordination. The packmate who seems to waver between honor and a sort of childish madness, who left a bruise on Danicka that covered most of her face, who could have taken her any way he wanted when he locked his eyes on hers in a coffee shop, who has been told to stay the fuck away from not just Danicka but any Shadow Lord Kin.

For all they know, Lukas will go retrieve his phone from his pants or his coat later and find messages from Katherine, or he'll hear about it when he leaves this hotel room, or any minute now a voice will resound in his head, snarling in fury about what Sam did now. Without a condom.

Danicka had taken Gabriella away from Lukas and from Planned Parenthood to go get a donut with the girl, with a sort of quiet understanding that may be as much persona as anything else. She has never let Lukas fuck her without a prophylactic, until that moment at the door when she flat-out demanded him inside of her, shuddered at the feeling of it, held him close to her chest and her shoulders even though her back was being slammed against the door, scraped against the plastic-covered fire escape plan. He knows now that she doesn't rely on the condoms, that it could be argued she doesn't need them with him, but after Gabriella and after his own brief flash of relief that this has not changed forever, maybe he has a better grip on it.

While they're kissing, Danicka is moaning, her body moving with the attentions she gives herself. When he pulls his mouth away she doesn't go on kissing him but lowers her head to his shoulder, leaning on him. Harsh gasps of hot, humid air hit his shoulder. She's not steady when he takes her in his hands and pulls her over him, is trembling with need as she straddles him. By necessity her head lifts and she meets his eyes, but just for a second.

and I couldn't stop kissing you

Her tongue slips past his lips, coaxes his tongue to move against hers, unaware that she's making him forget anything, from being gentle to being careful to his own name. She just groans, lifting onto her knees before he is pulling her like that. Danicka does not now -- rarely does -- need his encouragement, his direction, his insistence. She makes an incomprehensible noise as they stop kissing, as Lukas feels her on him and looks down, all but pleading with her to go slowly.

and I wanted you so badly

The sound ripped out of Danicka's throat then is as clear as a word: No, even if all it sounds like is frustration and lust, hunger being told to wait. Her eyes are closed, her forehead against his own, and she is fighting with every ounce of her dubious -- and weakened -- inner strength not to take hold of him, grind down on him, and ride him as relentlessly as he fucked her against the door earlier. Her teeth go on edge for a moment, but then she nods slightly, shuddering.

Slowly, then. It takes a moment, and Danicka takes a breath, but she reaches between their bodies and guides him into her with a slowness that is perhaps even more torturous than moving quickly would have been. Her free hand slides to the back of his neck, holding him where he is against her, brow to brow. She does not open her eyes until, inch by inch, she's taken him completely. Her right hand lays gently on his lower ribs, her lips parting as slowly as her eyelashes. It takes supreme effort for her to remain still, even for a moment, looking down at the seam where their bodies meet.

Just a moment.

Danicka exhales slowly, and then she rolls her hips, rising slightly before descending again. This time what leaves her is not a moan, not a growl. The sound of it almost makes it seem like she has not been with him for days, even weeks...as though she has had to go without this for so long that she almost can't bear having it again.

"Oh..."

Again. She lifts her hips, comes back to him, and this time she's louder.

"Oh, god..."


[Lukas]
Once, not so very long ago, she'd put her hand on the back of his neck to see if he would jerk away or relax into her touch.

He'd kissed her then. They'd met in the middle like their entire lives had been leading into it. They'd met in the middle like the last time they'd kissed was ten years and a million miles ago, and not --

What was it? Two weeks? If that?

That's neither here nor there. The point is: she puts her hand on the back of his neck now as she's coming down on him, and the tendons at the back of his neck are hard as stone, his shoulders are tensed, his back full of bunched and rigid muscles, shadows and ridges. His hands are twisted into the sheets where they prop behind him and as she takes him inside, inch by excruciating inch, he inhales and inhales until it seems his lungs would burst.

She stills, and he stills, he's barely breathing, she's adjusting to his penetration and he can feel her relaxing unconsciously, deep inside, before she bears down again.

Danicka rolls her hips and his head falls back. His exhale is a burst, and his back is dampening with sweat already. The lift of her hips is surreal; it sucks all his thoughts out of him and when she comes back down the sound that escapes her quavers in the air between them, only it's not the sound that quavers, it's his attention, unable to focus for long on anything but what's going on between him and her.

Again: and his hands have twisted so tight in the sheets one corner of the fitted sheet pulls suddenly free with a pop. His hand opens and closes, pulls in another fistful of high threadcount cotton.

Oh, god, she says, and he can't help but interrupt her -- he leans across the distance and kisses her so suddenly the last consonant disappears down his throat.

Again: and his balance shifts to one hand, the other reaches between them and he touches her breast, he cradles it in his hand, tugs gently at the nipple, smooths his palm down the squirming muscles in her abdomen; his hand catches and struggles with hers between her legs -- and she does it again, raises her hips and lowers, slowly, slowly, and the kiss breaks, he has to gasp for breath, he loses track of what he's doing with his hand and rests it on the joint of her hip instead a moment, just resting it there, before he pushes it back behind him, settles his weight on his hands.

Lukas lowers his forehead against hers again. He watches her, his chest moving as he breathes, watches her move on him, the rearrangement of slender muscles in her thighs, watches her fuck him.

Moments later, huskily, a catch of the breath on the first aspirated sibilant: "Trochu rychleji.


[Danicka]
If she were not exerting every single last drop of self-control she has to make herself go slowly now, Danicka would have opened her mouth and whispered to Lukas to

Breathe, Lukášek.

It is all she can do not to plant her hands on the headboard and use him, his body, fucking him until she reaches her own climax regardless of what it does to him, what he feels. She's done that once before, only...it wasn't, really. There's never been a time, even in his room at the Brotherhood, even up against the hotel room's door, when this has been about using each other, about getting off. And if they had any illusions about that at first, they've been obliterated by now.

By the way he touched her on his bed while she was even still clothed, by the way he knelt in front of her and pleasured her. By her taking satisfaction in his release, pleasure in his orgasm, when suddenly the last thing on her mind was that she wasn't going to come and the only thing she was aware of was him.

Even when Lukas's head falls back, Danicka doesn't take her hand off of his neck. Even when she moves on top of him, she doesn't take her hand off of his neck. The rain outside shows no signs whatever of letting up anytime. It patters, a sound taking over the entire city, filling the room at the edges of the noise made by their own breathing, overwriting the pop! of the sheet pulling free from one corner.

He is gentler with her breast than he is with the sheets. Danicka simply moves her hand out of the way when his slides downward, touching her breasts where he left off, leaving them wet, moaning at the barrage of sensation that does not stop when he puts his hand on her hip instead. She simply trails her own fingers downward again, leans to him, and watches him, watching her, until he speaks.

Danicka's hand tightens in her hair. She can't help it. The sight of him. The sound of his voice. The rain outside and the way the entire world has narrowed to nothing but Lukas and the rain and her body trying to accept and understand it all at once. So her left hand tightens, fingernails dragging at the ends of his hair, and she meets his eyes. Like a warning. He's seen that look before, and it's all she can give him before a sound of something very close to pain is ripped out of her and she does not slowly, warmly rise and fall again on top of his lap.

She presses her forehead against his, her mouth open to go on crying out, and grinds down on his lap. Hard. It doesn't last long, before she's flexing her thighs and her hips again, lifting up on her knees, slamming back down on him. Again. This is not a little faster. The first few times it is not even fast, but by god, it's hard. Again. Three strokes, slow and hard and almost malevolent, and then...then...Danicka moves faster. She lets go of his hair, she runs her moistened hand slick and fast up his torso and chest, to his shoulder.

Lukas is pulled, insistently, forward until their chests press together and Danicka's arms around him. She has no words for him. This is the way she held him around the shoulders when he fucked her at the doorway: close. Impossibly, irrationally close. And she kisses him: soulfully, wholly, as though for once in this uneven and fucked-up coupling of theirs she is completely, utterly opening to him, breathing his breath. That can't last, either; a few seconds later she's gasping as she rides him, faster now, faster than he told her, letting out ever-louder whimpers, minute after minute.

Time unravels, and Danicka finds a rhythm that pleases her, faster now and then slower again, picking up once more. She'll relax and grind against him, purring softly underneath his ear, only to move quickly again, vigorous and squirming. It would be nice to say she looks into his eyes as she does this to him...

...but instead she holds him, and does it with him.

If she remembers the times he has almost frenzied from desire, from holding back or not holding back, she doesn't show it now. Danicka only loosens her hold on him as she gets closer and closer to her orgasm, moving her hands from his back onto his shoulders, using him for balance or for a touchstone, an anchor, as she climbs higher. And where for all this time she has been almost completely silent, suddenly with a growl that verges very close to a shriek Danicka arches her spine, her head falling back, and lets loose a stream of Czech, each hard syllable a snarl and every aspirated consonant a purr.

"Ach můj bože. I nemůže zvládnout mnohem více o této tématice."

She whimpers, bearing down on him again, and gasps, her body starting to go rigid on top of him. Her skin is flushed and dusky in this light and the lack of light, her hair clinging to her shoulderblades and to her neck, to her hairline from sweat, her entire body slick and heated against his own.

"Co jste udělal? Ty hajzle, cos to udělal?" Danicka shudders, either because of what she is saying or because she knows he understands her this time, or because she is about to come, or because she is about to come and it's with him.

"Cítíš se tak dobře, Lukáš...cítíš se tak dobře! Ach můj bože, bože můj...!"


[Lukas]
This is not a little faster.

This is a wholly different animal. In an instant they've gone from something achingly slow to something completely off the charts, she's simply soared into the red, and the first two, three times she bears down on him, slams herself down on him, make him gasp at the force and the intensity of it. She makes him shift his weight to one arm again and put the other hand beneath her thighs, half-afraid that this time she'll fucking hurt herself.

But then her hands are disentangling from his hair, disentangling from herself. She leaves her wetness on his stomach, on his chest, and when her hand gets to his shoulder his comes up and he catches it, he brings it to his mouth, doesn't even think about it, sucks her fingers into his mouth, sucks her off her fingers until she grabs him and pulls him forward, and who knew such a slender frame had such strength in it when she put her mind to it, and he gives up holding onto the sheets, he gives up not holding on to her.

He lets go her hand and wraps his arms around her, and she's coming down on him and bending down to him and he kisses her half through the barrier of her fingers -- her fingers drawing away -- she's wrapping her arms around him too and they hold on to each other like children lost in a storm, like lost souls in a storm of their own making.

It cannot hold long. She needs to move; and not just a little faster; and he needs her to move almost as much as she needs to move. Their mouths tear apart and he's sucking air in, it's ragged, she starts riding him hard and fast, there's no mercy in this, no quarter on either side.

He moves beneath her suddenly, out of rhythm, and for a moment they're awkward -- he raises his hips without warning, throws his balance back and to the side, and if she hadn't been holding on so tightly she might've fallen off. Lukas bends his knees and brings his legs beneath himself, he rises to his knees, sinks back on his heels and then we're back, and then they're back on track, she's found her rhythm again and now he's got one hand to the bed for leverage and the other tight around her back while she clings to him like she couldn't bear to let go, and the svelte muscles of her loins are flexing under his hand, and she fucks him like she couldn't bear to stop.

It's never quite been like this. It's never the same, but it is the same, the very same: it's always on the verge of insanity, and it takes all his will, all his effort, to hold himself relatively still, to let her do the moving, to let her move on him and use him for her pleasure, only she wasn't doing that; it's never quite like that.

She outstrips him this time. He can't keep up with the rise of her climax; he doesn't even try. He just holds on. He just watches her go, because god damn it, Danicka was a sight even in the dimness, even in the dark.

When her back arches against his hand that last shred of restraint flies out the window too. His hand pushes off the mattress. He grabs her around the waist, both hands, his back convexing with effort; he moves against her now, thrusting against her grind, they're rocking together, and now she's crying out, stream-of-consciousness, her back is going rigid under his hands, she's tightening down on him, she's calling him a bastard and asking him what he's done as if he's kicked her puppy or drowned her kitten, as if he's burned her house down, as if he's battered down her gates and torn down her flag, committed some unspeakable crime, and it's all he can do to hold on, it's all he can do to wrap his arms around her, bending her backwards over his arms as he pulls her into him and bends his mouth to her breasts, and now there's no space between them, none at all, and

this is the first time she's come before him, but not without him. This is the first time she's come on his cock, her limbs wrapped around him, and he has not followed immediately.

It's the first time he's had even a shred of his mind to devote to simply -- being here.

Lukas holds her, crushingly tight, as her climax whips through her. She has room to roll her hips, to grind herself against him, but he does not, will not let her go; he holds her and he raises his head, he watches her, he watches every moment, every scrap of expression that flickers over her face, and it's only when she's beginning to relax, beginning to come down, beginning to come back together that he closes the distance and kisses her, fiercely but softly, once.

He's still inside her, still hard, her body pulsing around him. His chest, his stomach are rising and falling against hers, rapid and shallow with the effort of holding back. Slowly his arms loosen and he leans back, plants one fist beside his heel, curves the other over her thigh -- shifts her a fraction of an inch closer.

"Běž." This is almost gentle. "Nepoužívejte přestaň."


[Danicka]
One of these days she's going to have to tell him what it does to her when he licks the taste of her off her own fingers, but at the moment she doesn't need to. He can feel the shudder go through her, the involuntary clutch, and he feels the way she pulls at him like she --

like it's necessary. Like she'll fall to pieces if she doesn't hold him now.

What they're doing together now is...different...from how it's been before, but it's always different. The only thing that remains the same is that it is the two of them, and something else that yet remains indefinable and unnamed, which somehow makes it worth it when he moves suddenly and she yelps, in surprise more than pain. By instinct she tenses her thighs, squeezes him against her as though, she too, does not want to fall off. She curls her arms and legs tighter around him, finds his mouth and kisses him with something that is as much gratitude as passion.

The words coming from her mouth are what she thinks and does not say, or says in Russian, and when she demands to know what he's done to her and when she tells him she can't handle much more of this she's not talking about the sex because even this is worth it isn't talking about the goddamn fucking. She's talking about what she says next, and even that --

you feel so good, you feel so good

-- is not (just) talking about his cock inside her, about his hands on her, about his tongue licking her fingers or the muscles in his back flexing under her palms or his heart beating against her back while they're lying in a tub full of steaming water or sleeping with her arm folded over him, her forehead to his spine, their feet together as though they share the same roots.

Which they do.

Danicka doesn't bother to scream her obscenities and her blasphemies into his shoulder this time, nor does she run into a language where he can't follow her. She shudders on top of him as countless-seeming seconds of pleasure roll through her body, every single ripple and throb of it translated into his flesh as well. He can hear it, feel it, in the low moan she releases when he kisses her, somehow both tender and savage at once.

This time she's shaking when it's over. She slides her arms further around his neck and lays her head beside his own, a drop of sweat from his scalp or hers rolling between their temples, origin unknown and destination unimportant. She has not stopped moving, not completely, all this while. The entire length of her orgasm she rocks against him, rides it out ...slow again. Slowly, Danička.

She nuzzles him as she lifts her head, gasping for air. "Lay me down," she whispers, kissing his cheek, then his temple, then the corner of his mouth.


[Lukas]
See his face change when she whispers that to him: see how the ferocity of his expression shifts, and his eyes change.

It was a little like this the last time, in the hotel room with the windows open and the almost-full moon outside, and both of them looked out and knew, and knew the other knew, and then she'd put her bra aside and lain back, opened to him and touched herself and told him --

Something like this, actually.

And it's the same, but not the same: the way he looks at her when she says it, the way his eyebrows draw together without his even noticing it. It's something like pain. It's something like hurt, and something like understanding, and knowledge, and the realization, all over again,

(that he does not deserve this -- whatever this is.)

of what she is asking of him. Of what she is telling him, yet again, is okay. Is all right.

He turns his mouth to hers. A longer kiss, this, and gentler. Then he shifts, gathering her against him, leaning forward, pressing his hand to the mattress again, laying her down. They've turned one-eighty in bed, head over heels, and he follows her down, bracing his elbows on either side of her shoulders.

His arms and chest and shoulders are tensed against his weight. He waits for her to catch some of her breath back; waits for her to ground herself where she is, and tighten her thighs around him again. He's kinder to her than she was to him when their places were flipped; but then, there's really no comparison, is there?

Lukas says nothing now, though his eyes rove over her face, every inch, before they close. He lays his face against hers, his mouth to hers, his nose alongside hers, his forehead to hers, and he begins to move inside her again, slowly, and gently, long dragging strokes that build to something more fervent, more feverish, before long.


[Danicka]
They have turned, and they have gone in a circle. She was not kind to him just now but he was not kind to her earlier, and what happens between them now is another animal entirely. Danicka lays back on half-unfolded covers, looking up at him and letting her hands move to cup the back of his head, as though she were about to kiss him. But she doesn't kiss him. She just looks at him...at least at first.

Deserving or no, Lukas finds himself enfolded in her legs, in the warmth and relaxation of her body around him and under him. Gently she draws his head down and gently he kisses her, for a long, long time. She knows exactly where she is. Even if she forgot a little while ago, she knows now.

She pulls him to her with a sudden intake of breath when their mouths part, as though this is the first time, as though he is not just sliding deeper into her but entering her after god only knows how much time away from each other. Danicka arches once as a surge of pleasure goes up through her again, exhaling that harsh breath and meeting his eyes until they close.

Lukas moves, and she kisses him softly, her lips trailing across his face with inexplicable, almost inhuman tenderness. She presses her mouth to his with her hand laying lightly on his cheek, just before he thrusts harder than before, faster. Danicka breathes out carefully, as though to steady herself, as he begins to build back up to the pace they -- she -- had set just seconds ago, not even a minute.

"Ano," she breathes, warm breath curling into his ear canal. "Ah...Lukáš...ano." And as he gets closer, as she feels the tension rising in his body and kisses him once, ardently: "Vám náležet zde."


[Lukas]
In bed, Danicka is far more vocal than he. She moans; she screams; she cries out; she whimpers. She speaks to him sometimes, long cascades of words that almost run one into the next, spilling from her lips as though they passed directly from her mind to her tongue, unfiltered and unaltered, half-profane, unadulterated.

(She cries silently, though. She laughs silently.)

-- which is not the point. The point is: she seems to have no reserve on the sounds that escape her when they're like this, but he'd be a fool to think what she says is mindless, thoughtless, the sweet nothings of any lover. He'd be a fool to think there wasn't more truth here and now than in all the other moments put together.

The only time Danicka is anything close to naked is long after the door has shut, and the lock has been thrown, and her clothes are all off.

The only time Danicka is anything close to naked is now.

Which is why, when she says it: vám náležet zde, he stops. He stops for a stark, shivering second, his muscles quivering in place beneath her hands like those of an animal's. A beat goes by, two, and then he turns his face to hers and he kisses her, blindly, and there's a sort of anguish in this, a sort of desperate surrender, a sort of giving in, giving over that wracks his body and furrows his brow.

He takes her face between his hands when he starts to move again, and his lips move against hers as he moves into her, over and over, but if he means to speak she can't hear him, and if he means to kiss her he can't hold his attention there long enough.

There's an abandon in this, too.

It's not so fierce, not so wild, not so rough as what happened earlier. But it's an abandonment all the same: a bonfire to the conflagration that had consumed all shreds of his control earlier; a rainstorm to the hurricane.

He holds her face against his -- they hold each other with a strange tenderness that belies the speed and intensity of their coupling. At the end he doesn't even try to speak, or kiss her, or whatever it was he was trying to do. His lips simply part to hers, and he breathes, he tries to catch his breath as it slips away from him; he tries to remember to be gentle, to be careful, even as he's reaching to pull her knee higher around his ribs, to tilt her hips against his penetration, to hold her there, right there, and

já tady patří, he thinks, and

his climax is on him like a summer rain, drenching and warm, through and through. He's gasping in her arms, his body shuddering and jerking and thrusting into hers; he's gathering her to him before he can even rightly think, wrapping his arms around her and clasping her to him as though to

(return her to his ribs)

bring her closer than this, closer than she could physically, possibly be.

Again: as unheralded and indisputable as before -- Já tady patří.

He's beginning to return to himself. The iron-hard muscles beneath her hands are beginning to return to flesh; to quiver, very slightly, with exertion and release. He has found her mouth again, and he has found out how to kiss again, and so he kisses her, breathingly, breaking often to pant for air, but always returning again.


[Danicka]
Later Danicka will not, even to herself, be able to blame what she just said on impending orgasm or being saturated with alcohol or having a concussion. People do and say strange things in all of these cases, so strange that truthful or not they can be dismissed in the morning and others will buy it, if not forget it. She has come in his arms, she is not injured, she hasn't had a single drink, and there is no reason for her to lie.

But right now Danicka is not thinking about what just came out of her mouth, or how he feels about it, not until he stops moving and holds himself up over her. Muscles shudder and Danicka does not have time to suddenly flash with worry, is not given to natural or overblown concern for rejection. She has time to tighten her legs around him, smooth her hands over his shoulders, and press her hips against him again.

"Don't stop," she murmurs to him in that harsh second between her words and his kiss, for once saying it in English, shivering at the effect his sudden stillness has on her. "Lukáš, don't--"

He doesn't stop. He kisses with her abandon, with a wild submission that has nothing to do with subjugation and everything to do with giving up power that is his to use, his right to have. There is no reason why he should, no force compelling him except whatever it is she's done to him and whatever changes inside of him when they're together. He cuts off the rest of her plea and has none to give back to her in his own voice, only sharper gasps and wandering kises, only -- as if it is 'only' -- his body moving inside her.

For once, sensing his struggle to maintain some shred of control over how hard, how fast he takes her, Danicka does not writhe in such a way to make it impossible for him to be careful. She does not rip away the last veils of gentleness with her fingernails digging into him or her teeth sinking into his skin. She does not stop moving on top of the covers with Lukas but kisses him when he cannot kiss her, cradling his head and laying her lips on his once as he is pushing her leg higher and pushing himself deeper and not saying anything, not a word, not a moan, not any of the exultations she gives so freely.

When he comes, Danicka's mouth falls away and her hands leave his face, not out of dismissal or rejection but just to watch him, to not overstimulate already hypersensitive nerves with too much touch, to not -- in a way -- distract him. But she watches him when it hits, curls easily into his arms when he clings to her, and shudders around him as he is wracked for nearly a quarter of a minute by his orgasm.

"That's it," she whispers, as free from analysis or forethought as anything else, "let it go. Let it go."

It means nothing. He does not need to be told, she does not need to tell him, but there it is. Danicka's voice coming to his ears through the haze, perhaps nothing more than familiar sounds at this point, standing in place of her hands in his hair or her lips on his face.

And it seems like forever before he's still again, relaxing again. Danicka feels the release, the shift from agony to mere ache, and then she feels his mouth. Over and over, she feels his mouth, and she doesn't let go of him. The moon is full and he's on top of her and there's yet not a trace of fear or hesitation in her right now, not a hint of distance. That will come later, as it always does. They will both, like children clinging to the edge of the pool, leave the deep end and hold onto something solid because they can't stand to just float.

Enough time passes, either moments or minutes, that Danicka has her breath back. She is lying there with her ankles crossed on his lower back, her entire body seeming to have melted somewhat, and closes her eyes. If he is still kissing her, well. She doesn't mind. She licks her lips and takes a breath.

"We are really good at this," she says idly. And smiles.


[Lukas]
Lukas is not longer kissing her by then, not the way he'd kissed her immediately after, as though something in him, some failsafe mechanism had broken; as though he couldn't stop.

He hasn't quite moved either, though. When she lays back and closes her eyes he bows his head to her, lays his mouth against the pulse in her throat and just lies there, just -- absorbs the moment, her presence.

Their bodies re-equilibrate. His breathing slows, his heart rate; sweat begins to lift off his back, taking with it the hectic heat of the moment.

When she speaks he laughs suddenly, and she can feel his lips quirking against her skin; the exhale that curls over her collar, the hollow of her throat. She can feel his shoulders shake and his chest move against hers, and then he lifts his head and kisses her, still smiling, lingeringly.

"Should we start giving lessons?" he asks her, suddenly and gently playful. "Public demonstrations?"


[Danicka]
They have yet to maintain a long silence between them, before or after sex. The moments extend gradually, but still, eventually, one of them has to say something. Lukas asks a question or Danicka does, or one of them says they need a shower. The first night, they didn't talk, almost at all. Nothing but a question of whether she was cold, an answer. Nothing but a quiet farewell when she left him there. Most of the time, however, they can't just sit together, or lie down together, and simply be. Not for long.

This time the one breaking the silence is Danicka, though one could argue that she didn't expect any response to that, just as she didn't expect a response when she told him that was amazing. On the other hand, her reaction when he goes from resting silently on the bed with her to laughing is a bright shiver of delight that seems to come from the very tips of her toes.

She smiles broadly when he laughs, is still smiling when he kisses her. When they kiss. It's so rarely one or the other bestowing something and almost always the two of them coming together for it, as entwined and as simple and yet as deep as an embrace. It's possible that if they didn't kiss, if they could just stop that, then the sex wouldn't be as intimate, then they could both get up and move on without looking back or coming back, and this would have ended a long time ago. Or never started.

They kiss, smiling.

Danicka laughs at what he says, without covering her mouth. Her eyes close with it, head tilting back, torso quivering underneath him with the shaking her amusement causes. "That's a fantastic idea," she agrees, looking back at him and nodding enthusiastically, eyebrows high up on her forehead and one hand laying on his cheek. Her expression is ridiculous, especially given the flush to her cheeks and the sweat along her hairline, the glitter in her eyes that lingers long after the last pulses of climax. Her hand, though. Her hand is soft.

"Alternately, we make our own porn."


[Lukas]
Lukas turns his head, kisses the palm of her hand where it laid against his cheek. Then, turning back, he actually grins at her, eyes and teeth faintly aglimmer in the dim lighting.

"Oh, no no no. I know where that goes. Next thing I know blurry night-vision youtubes of me eating you out will be all over the internet and I'll be making crappy horror movies."


[Danicka]
"Aww..." Danicka says, forcing the sympathetic sound past the laughter still welling in her throat, "Lukáš, miláčku, I'm sure they wouldn't be crappy." There's something she almost says, but instead:

a grin spreads over her lips again and she lifts her head, laying her forehead against his. As a gesture it's as fond as the kiss laid on her palm, as the way they kissed despite the smiles on their faces. There is something nearly impossible about being cold to him now, or distant. He is still inside of her, his forearms laid on either side of her shoulders, and if she were afraid of him or wanting to get away right now, she would not be able to tolerate laying like this still.

Her eyes close for a second, brow rolling gently against his, before she relaxes the muscles in her neck again and returns to the mattress, looking up at him more clearly. "...Are you staying here?" she asks, more quietly.


[Lukas]
His humor doesn't quite die. It's nothing so absolute, so stark as that. It does play out, though, and dissipate. She lifts her face to his and he moves over her, shifts to cup one hand behind her head, hold her where she is.

A breath in and out -- not a sigh, not quite. Something fond in that, too; a sort of quiet, nonverbal affection.

His hand slides to her cheek as she lowers her head. She opens her eyes and so does he. Lukas is serious now, his face half-lit by what light comes from without. The rain has settled into a steady, constant downpour, uninterrupted by lightning.

"Do you want me to?"

And that's an honest question, quiet and uncomplicated. There's nothing passive-aggressive about it; he's not testing her, waiting to see if she gives him the 'right' answer. Lukas doesn't play games like that. Whatever else, neither does Danicka.


[Danicka]
So there they are, woven together with her legs and his arms and each of them holding a hand on the other's face with thoughtless, unhesitant warmth that belies so much of what's happened before and what happens when they aren't like this. Even when they're arguing there's this undercurrent of attention, of familiarity that was there before they ever touched, of plain giving-a-shit, for good or ill. It's just that now, it's so pronounced as to be undeniable and unalterable. It's simple, pared down, missing the extraneous...bullshit.

Danicka smiles, one corner of her mouth quirking upward before the other slowly joins. "Of course, Lukášek," she murmurs, infected suddenly with his inability to stop saying her damn name. Her thumb rubs over his cheek, newly cleanshaven. "I told you."

Which isn't true. She told him zůstat tady se mnou dnes večer, which is not the same as Chci, abyste se mnou dneska pobytu.

So she says it now, her fingers sliding up into his hair: "...I want you to stay."


[Lukas]
Lukas has never told Danicka that he likes it when she runs her fingers into his hair. That he likes it when she combs his hair tenderly back, or pushes her fingers through the dark locks, or even grabs handful of his hand and uses it to pull his head down to hers, or hold it to her. It's possible he never will; it's also possible he doesn't need to. When her hand moves into his hair, she can see his enjoyment in his eyes, quiet and appreciative.

He's silent for a while. Then he leans down to her, his shoulders rounding against his weight. He licks a line up the center of her lips with the tip of his tongue, closes his lips over hers a second later. His hips flex against hers as though to press himself deeper even as he's softening, and then he's drawing back.

"Be right back," he murmurs, and then he pushes himself up, draws himself out of her. Even now it makes him draw a half-sip of air, makes him glance down, and then meet her eyes again with a faint, crooked little grin, as if to share some unspoken secret with her.

Then he climbs off the bed, goes to the bathroom. He doesn't bother to close the door or turn on the lights. He can see in the dark better than most humans, and in another form, his night-vision is nothing short of extraordinary.

She can hear the sink tap run. He doesn't shower again, but he does splash water over his face, over his hair and down his back; towel off with a wet washcloth, and then a dry bath towel. When he comes back he smells faintly of whatever soap Affinia provides.

She's where he left her, atop the rumpled bedspread with her head at the foot of the bed and her feet at the head. He climbs back onto the bed with no hesitation whatsoever, slides his arms under her and scoops her up -- also with no hesitation whatsoever -- lifts her in a smooth limber arc to straddle his lap and kiss her with a sudden-flaring hunger that likely startles him more than her.

Then he's dropping back down on the bed, right side up this time, bringing her with him in a sort of half-controlled fall that has the mattress coils jouncing under their combined weight, the nightstand thumping against the wall. The covers are half caught beneath them, and instead of straightening them, he simply kicks them down to the far end of the bed.

There's a sort of active, athletic playfulness in this, too, which is rare for him; rarer still in this moonphase. He doesn't know what brings it on, besides the most obvious: sex, her, sex. He doesn't question this, either. They're half-tangled again, his arm caught beneath her and around her, her hair webbing over his face. He turns his head to clear his eyes, but does not push it away, even when he raises his free hand to his brow, rubs his thumb idly over his third eye, exhales.

"I keep waiting to get sick of this," he says, and he's wry now, "and it just isn't happening. I can't even put into words how much I like it when you're just ... here with me."

Serious now. Frowning now, his brow furrowing under his thumb, so he removes his hand and tucks it behind his head, and his other hand opens over her hip.

"What have you done to me, Danička?" He asks this of the ceiling; and then he looks at her, concealing nothing. "What the hell are we doing to each other?"


[Danicka] After a couple of times in the W, Danicka got used the smell of orange-ginger soap on her own skin, on Lukas's. The waterlily-white tea concoction that Affinia keeps in their bathrooms is lighter. It's a far cry from whatever it is that they have in bulk at the Brotherhood. Lukas has yet to smell perfume on Danicka's body. She smells like her shampoo, like the soap and lotion she uses on her skin, and most of the time when he's with her she smells so quickly like her sweat and her self that it doesn't even matter.

Seeing no reason to shower this time, Danicka remains in bed while he goes to the bathroom, eventually rolling onto her right side and propping her head up on her hand, watching the rain while the water runs behind her. She can sense him in there, just like the entire fucking floor has been able to sense him with knots in their stomach and tension in their backs. It is not unlike the feeling of being home alone some dark night and wondering all of a sudden if there's someone there.

She knows it's him, though. And that makes a difference. It doesn't make her safer, but it makes a difference.

It also means that when he comes back out she turns, rolling onto her back and then to her left side, this time not bothering to prop herself up. She rests her cheek on her bicep, arm stretched out, and smiles at him when he comes back. And then she laughs, caught up and deposited on his lap, because it is sudden, and playful. Her hands go to his shoulders as if for balance, but the way they curl over his skin isn't simply practicality. The way she kisses him isn't just non-resistance. There's less hunger in it, but no lack of warmth.

Laughter again, when they tumble, a mutter of "You're ridiculous" that is neither mocking nor displeased. Danicka has no idea just how much he likes it when she touches his hair, no way to separate the mammalian pleasure and comfort they have after sex from something else, no certainty that that gesture in particular has meaning or significance on its own for him. Sometimes she looks at him and knows everything. Sometimes she looks at him and only knows that it is him, and that it's him is enough. For now.

They flip. Danicka lands half on top of Lukas when he flops down to the pillows again, but she doesn't stay there. She rolls off of him and onto her back, his arm under her neck, her eyes on the ceiling at first, her body between his and the windows. It's cool enough in the room and their bodies are cooling enough after the sex that her skin reacts to it, but Danicka doesn't lunge for the covers or curl up in a ball to absorb his heat. She reaches up and though he does not, she sweeps her hair off of his face and her own, moving it all off to the side, onto the pillows, thinking that any minute now he is either going to settle down and sleep or else start touching her again, licking her flesh with the hunger that somehow flared to life again just seconds ago.

It's neither. Danicka has one leg bent, the other stretched out, and her hands are lying loosely on her abdomen, and turns her head to look at him when he speaks. She smirks at the first few words, but it fades as he goes on, as she watches his wry expression become serious, as seriousness becomes a frown.

It takes her a moment or two to answer him, even with his eyes on her, and then she takes hers away. She looks at the ceiling again, herself, and shifts on the bared sheets, switching legs. One slides down; the other bends. "...We've had this conversation," she says, in a lower voice than is strictly necessary.

[Breeze] (May I watch?)

[Lukas] Lukas' eyes stay on Danicka another moment, even after she's looked away. Then, after she speaks, his attention joins hers somewhere up on the ceiling, which is an amorphous pale stretch in the darkness of the room, the texture and subtle shading lost.

We've had this conversation, she says. He thinks a moment, not because he needs to recall which conversation she speaks of --

(do you remember the part about the fox?)

-- but because he's trying to find his thread of thought, trying to find something to hold onto, something to say.

"I suppose we have," he replies at length, quiet as well, now. The arm caught under her neck moves minutely -- the hand turns palm-up in some small gesture, like a shrug in miniature.

[Danicka] Now might be a good time for her to come up with something to say. Danicka is, after all, so generally adept in social situations that she has been entrusted -- at least in the past -- with smoothing over awkward conversations, with repaying debts, with repairing interactions that have gone completely awry. With Lukas there is not way that simple verbal waltzing is going to do any good; she sees no reason to say anything to him at all if it is solely for the sake of saying something.

And things she could tell him...stories, or explanations, or answers to questions...she is not inclined to share. If he hears about what happened in the park he will probably not hear about it from her. They are not going to talk about what will happen tomorrow, they never seem to ask the other when they can meet again, where this is going, even what it is.

Unfortunately, when Lukas does ask her what this is, what she's done to him and what they're doing to each other, she shuts him down. They've talked about it, about what the word tamed means, and she doesn't give him much of anything. It's almost shocking how much energy he has, how there's been almost no pause in it, how he does not seem even remotely tired or worn out. She glances out at the overcast sky through the city skyline and doesn't say anything for awhile.

Then, out of nowhere: "It's all right, though. I mean..." She pauses and licks her lips. "I like being around you. Even when you're pissing me off."

[Lukas] And his reply to that: only silence, and a flickering shadow over his brow.

He watches the ceiling. She watches the skyline, or him, or the ceiling. They don't talk for the sake of. They don't talk to spill their secrets, or clear the air, or fill the space. Now's the time to close his eyes, settle down and sleep; or roll over her again, start this all over again; or say something, anything.

Lukas does none of these things. He simply lays where he is, her words still dissipating slowly in the air, the long and unstable night still uncoiling around them.

Some time goes by.

Then -- and this too is out of nowhere, only that's not true, because surely he's wondered it more than once; surely he's asked it before of her, already, though not for himself.

"Where do you see this going?" -- soft, that.

[Danicka] This makes her smile, but there's not a lot of humor in it. He can't see it anyway, unless he studies the dim, wraithlike reflection of her in the glass across the way. Even then it's unlikely he'll see the way the corners of her mouth turn up and even if he could it's almost impossible to imagine him being able to tell that her expression is more wry -- maybe even sad -- than amused. This is the question he asked her back in January, when he was talking about Sam

Though they were never talking about Sam. Not at the root of it all. His interest had surely been in the welfare of the Fenrir who shares his auspice, but if she had not been his Kin and if he had not seen something Sam didn't in the way she left the blond man so quickly after fucking him, if he had not wanted her from the minute he saw her and yet given Sam permission to take her out anyway, would he have asked? Would he have cared as much about the answer, or felt a rather dark and guilt-inducing surge of pleasure when she said that things with Sam were not ever going to go anywhere?

Danicka's smile fades as these thoughts flicker through, not one at a time but all at once, and unfiltered, and unspoken. She takes a breath. "Honestly I try not to," she sighs out. See, that is.

[Lukas] It's like some sort of ancient rhythm: a call and response. He asks a question; she doesn't really answer. She gives him a confession, or a fragment of one. He doesn't really answer. He asks another question. She gives him an answer that doesn't seem like an answer at all, but is.

He doesn't really answer. He doesn't really have an answer, beyond an echo -- and something he's said already.

Stojí to za to.
It's worth it.

There is some distance again in the turn of her face to the window, his eyes on the ceiling. It's there in the silence. The last time the moon was this near to full was the first time, and they'd fucked and fucked and fucked, again and again, with barely enough time between to recover their wits, and no room at all for talking. Perhaps it would have been easier if tonight had been the same.

But it's not. From the moment he walked in the door -- the moment they met in a starved kiss -- the moment he put her against the door and lost himself, actually lost himself; from the very fact that this is not the first time but a month later almost, and from all that's happened between then and now: there is no way, none, that this night could have been like the other.

They are left with their silences, their quicksilver moods, the oppression of the moon, the distance that wavers and grows and fades and grows again.

He draws his arm out from beneath her neck. He sits up, drawing his knees up, looping his arms loosely over them. The room air is cool; pleasantly so, he thinks. The hour is late, or perhaps better termed early -- he's not even remotely tired. His skin is hot with rage. His body is electric with it. He's hypersensitive; he can feel every eddy of air in the room, every thread in the sheets, if he concentrates hard enough. He turns to look at her over his shoulder, her profile ghostly in the reflected city's light.

"Danička," he says, barely voiced at all, "podívejte se na mě."

[Danicka] Since the night he met her he's known that she is, at least on the surface, somewhat savvy. In the car when she told him what he might want to hear or what might get her out from under his questions, he's been almost wary of how much she seems to know. It was at the fireplace, though, before he went to a nightclub and told Sam she was like a cat in heat, asked him what he saw in her -- before all that, staring at each other at the Brotherhood of Thieves, when something had started to really shift. It's entirely possible that if he had not truly cared about Sam, if they had been alone, if she had not had two moderately inebriated Silver Fang Kinfolk to deal with, if he had been willing to let himself, that would have been it.

Not later. Not at a motel. Not after the moot. They would not have gone to that nightclub, she would not have danced with Katherine. She had not meant to hit on him with that phrase written on a piece of paper, not really, but that does not mean that if he had reached for her that night she would have refused. It came back on the waterfront the next day, plain as day: why did he count how many times she fucked Sam? What was with the fucking Czech that night?

Why do you think?

Chci tě.

And she knows. Looking at him from the start she's seen him, and seen them, and god only knows what else. It's almost like she's an oracle, the way she could tell him now how all this is going to play out, what they are going to end up doing. With disclaimers, of course. With the requisite mention of early deaths. With awareness of just how fickle affection really is. But she could tell him where she sees this going, because she's seen it from the second he shook her hand, known it even before she knew she wanted him anyway.

The first time they fucked they couldn't stop, both of them thinking surely it wasn't going to happen again, and trying not to care about that. Tonight everything started with her telling him she's not ready for it to end. She wants more. He doesn't know how much; asking herself over and over after the words left her mouth, Danicka realized that she doesn't know, either. Still. It can't be the same as before, because now they have some iota of greater reassurance that it won't be the last time.

Whatever that counts for, with their lives.

Danicka does glance at him, briefly, when he moves. She checks quickly over her shoulder, thinking he might be getting up, leaving the bed in response to her reticence, and her heart suddenly beats faster when she thinks this. Lukas is not leaving, though, and she takes a breath and turns back to the windows. They're both looking the direction: him looking at her, her looking at the city, at the cold, at the water running down the panes of glass. None of those things have any warmth or feeling to them. Danicka does. Danicka is warm as houses, as hearthfires, and there are times when he's inside her and she's looking at him that he can see she's not really reserved, not at all, that the only reason she holds back or lies is because there is so much that is really being contained. Has to be contained.

...podívejte se na mě, he says. She takes a deep breath and looks at him, her heart no longer pounding out of nowhere, and not only does she look at him, but she reaches her right hand over and lays it on his lower back. "Co?"

[Lukas] The Ahroun's back is a solid wedge of complex and interwoven structures -- centered on a spine flanked in lean loins, broad wings of the lats; two shoulderblades slung from a network of muscle and tendon, sheathed over by the trapezius. When she lays her hand on him, he's warm to the core. He doesn't jerk at her touch; he's looking at her, and he saw it coming.

It's possible he wouldn't have started anyway. It's possible that she has become familiar enough, somehow, here, now, that he would not startle to her touch.

"Nic," he replies, a shake of his head, slight. "Jen jsem chtěl vidět ty."

[Danicka] All she does is rub his back. Slowly, her hand moving in gentle sweeps. There's no tickling coyness of her fingernails, no patterns drawn, and also no massage of the muscle moving underneath the skin. After long enough this could put a person -- though perhaps not a Garou -- to sleep, lulling and hypnotic. He saw it coming and he knows that it is not going to be strange, or feel unusual. It is, as so much else, going to feel right. Familiar.

Knowing and known.

She lifts her eyebrows at his answer, dubious of its honesty -- or she would be, if she weren't considering the source. "I'm right here," she says mildly, a small smile curling on her face. Her voice doesn't break the quietude they're sharing at the moment, even when she asks him: "What about you? Where do you see this going?"

[Lukas] I'm right here, she says, and he interjects, very quietly: "I know." A pause. "I see you."

She asks him his question back, and he turns away, but not before she catches the shadow crossing his face. He gives her his back for a while, staring across the room at the wall, the tasteful unobtrusive wall art. He sinks down beside her, the muscles of his torso clenching to lower him smoothly, easily, and then relaxing beneath his skin.

Which doesn't mean he's relaxed. Far from it. His tension is a live wire in the room, crackling under his skin.

"Most likely nowhere good," he replies after a pause. "Most likely you're right, and one of these days I'll hurt you, badly. And whether because of that or for your own reasons, you'll leave, and -- "

(hurt me badly/tear me apart)

" -- then we're back to the pieces to be picked up." An inhale, an exhale. And then suddenly, with a quiet ferocity: "And the fucked up thing is, I don't care at all."

[Danicka] The only time it has seemed that Lukas has wanted to hurt her, to discipline or punish her somehow, has not been when she's been blunt or honest with him. He did not slam his hand down, grab her arm, and haul her out of the Blue Chalk because she told him something rude or unpleasant. He'd done that because she'd lied. Again. And again. When threatened, when told that she would regret it...she lied.

Earlier even tonight she told him in a calmly spoken recitation what he has done to make her not trust him, as though to dismiss -- or distract from -- any mention of who might have ever hurt her before, who she is supposedly judging him by. At least in part she was covering, getting him angry or telling him what he didn't want to hear because it would yank his attention away by a degree or two from what he'd asked.

She would rather him hit her than make her talk about certain things.

Yet later, curled against his side and unable to see his face, she'd told him...something. Not about who. Maybe he didn't relate the two conversations in his mind, even. Moments later they'd been talking not about springtime or the ocean or what Lukas has done to make her keep him at arm's length or how many times she has had a concussion or how many cuts and broken bones have been healed in instants rather than leaving marks to be questioned later...they'd been kissing. Slowly. Then: a little faster.

Danicka slides her hand away from his lower back as he sinks back down, pulls it back to her own abdomen, and listens without saying a word, without shadows on her face or a sudden clutch of concern or upset on her expression. She does, at the end, press her lips together, biting them for a moment, then slowly exhales. "What...I don't..."

Despite the moment of thought, she falters. She looks at the ceiling, and sighs, and looks at him again. "If that's what it would do to you, why would you let me?"

[Lukas] "Because," Lukas replies, "it's worth it."

[Danicka] Her eyebrows flicker upwards, then back down. It's just a moment of bewilderment, quickly recalculated and understood. "I mean," she whispers, "why would you let me leave?"

[Lukas] Now it's his turn to be puzzled. He turns to her, his head swiveling against the pillows.

"Why wouldn't I, if you wanted to go?"

He asks this as though it were the only natural thing to ask -- as though the world weren't rife with Garou who would never, ever let a kin go no matter what she wanted. He asks this as though they lived in a world where the choice was hers.

"What other choice would I have -- " something almost like anger rising in his tone, " -- forcing you to stay?"

[Danicka] For a few moments their faces are close enough to touch, the ends of their noses just an inch apart, sharing each other's breath, both eyes more different sorts of gray than any particular color, but that can be blamed on the rain diffusing and redirecting any and all light coming into the room. Danicka is looking at him with a sort of bewildered openness in her eyes, which he has only seen once before, when she got into a blood-drenched shower with him still wearing her lovely little brown dress with the long row of buttons.

There are two answers she could give. More than that, really, but it comes down mostly to just the two: a simple Yes. That would be his choice, since it cannot and will not be hers. Danicka doesn't bemoan this; she never even talks about what the future holds for her, whether she'll be mated off at some point and bear child after child or how she feels about this or whether she bothers to feel anything about it. She doesn't complain, or draw attention to it.

The other answer is not likely to make that surge of anger -- or something like it -- go away. And because he has only seemed drawn to brutalizing her when she lies, Danicka chooses the answer that is more likely to make him seethe. It's backwards, and it's insane, but it's what she does. Her eyes close, her body tense now beside his but not in any discernable fashion, no particular muscles tightened as though to seek flight or prepare for being struck. Danicka opens them again, still looking at him.

"It's easy to say now that if I wanted to go, you would let me," she says, as gently as she can.

[Lukas] Of course, Lukas doesn't like to be reminded of that. No Garou, no Ahroun would; no human either. No one wants to be told that whatever their best intentions, whatever their vows and promises when the stakes were low, there's a breaking point for everyone. No one wants to be reminded that in truth, he'll never know whether or not he'll keep his word -- until, of course, he knows.

But then, that's the point. She's only reminding him. She's not telling him this. This is nothing he doesn't already know. His eyes darken; they don't widen in surprise, or shock, or betrayal, or anger.

He frowns, looks away.

Then he turns to face her, rolling on his side, tucking the bedward forearm under the pillow. The blankets are still kicked down somewhere near their feet, a little higher on her side than his -- this is simply by virtue of who it was doing the kicking, earlier. For a moment he watches her and says nothing.

"I know," he says then, low. "But here's hoping."

[Danicka] No, she wants to say then, here's accepting.

They never got around to Danicka telling him what she might see of where 'this' is going. They didn't talk about what made her decide to blurt out that she wants him still, that she doesn't want him to go away, that this can't end not yet, when she seems so resigned not only to him hurting her but him going back on every word and every half-promise. She can see him becoming a monster and she doesn't even have to think about it, or try, and whether that's right or wrong or fair doesn't matter. Not to her. Danicka, ultimately, does not concern herself much with what is fair to Lukas.

But she reaches over and pulls his hand to her stomach, slides it to her waist, when he rolls onto his side. She looks at him with a surprising amount of compassion for someone who believes that eventually he's going to snap bones and tear skin and maybe even kill her because that's just what he is, that's what they all do, no matter how strong their will or how great their deeds or how much they claim to --

For now, Danicka looks at him the same way she did when he first walked in, just after they kissed, before she told him Yes. It's still worth it. Her eyes are half-pained but warm. Welcoming. She has no answer, none she'll say aloud, for the mention of 'hoping', and so she says nothing for a little while.

Then her thigh shifts against his, and she holds his hand where it lies on her skin, smaller and softer fingers laced through rougher and wider ones. She breathes in, looking at him, and whispers her exhale:

"...Are you ready to sleep?"

[Lukas] Lukas is a creature of clarity and causality. He obfuscates little; lies about even less. He does his very best to lay down his thoughts, his motives, his very life in straight lines, in direct cause-and-effect clauses.

He does not, and perhaps cannot, understand how she can believe wholeheartedly, fatalistically, that this will end in pain and terror, and yet tell him -- nearly in the same breath -- that she does not want this to end yet.

That yes, this is worth it. That even when it got so rough it hurt, it was worth it.

He does not, and cannot understand how she can say his; believe this. He does not and cannot understand how he can agree.

It's much the same when she takes his hand and draws it to her body. He watches this: her hand on his, and his hand on her skin. He does not and cannot understand why or how she can do this, either; and at the same time, in the moment that his palm opens over her stomach, he understands completely, and without a doubt.

Lukas' palm covers her lower belly. His thumb strokes the rim of her navel, and his fingers stretch to her hipbone, a span that far exceeds her own. When she laces her fingers through his, his fingers close for a moment, pulsatile and passing, before he looks at her.

He shakes his head. The moon is still nearly full. He's still wide awake; but his eyes soften as he looks at her, or darken, or ... something. His eyes change when he looks at her; leave it at that and let it be.

"Jste unavená," he says, gently. "Jděte spát. Jedu k pobytu až o něco déle."

[Danicka] Nechte to být.
Let it be.

For Lukas the world is cause and effect. Not exactly black and white, partly because he's not a Philodox, but there is right and there's wrong and there's worth it and not worth it and there's if/then and either/or. To say that Danicka is more 'complex' implies that Lukas is simplified, unthinking, nothing below the surface but a windy void. In the end it's not really even about him, or about her, or whether either of them is complicated. This is complicated, as anything involving more than one set of experiences and one worldview quickly becomes.

In Danicka's world, there is no discrepancy between believing in a fate almost nihilistic, void of pleasure or happiness or even hope, and choosing to not give him up now, when her heart still skips beats and then thunders in her chest if he so much as smiles, and god help her if he laughs, she can barely survive it. There is no gap between believing that he is going to hurt her, that this is not the last time he will fuck her without her coming, fuck her hard enough to leave her sore and shaky, and believing that whatever it is she feels -- she hasn't said -- when she's around him is not just worth a little suffering but makes her not even care if he pleasures her, too.

And that's why I cried.

She has never played hard to get, with him or with Sam. The Fenrir kid did not have to get her drunk or whisper sweet nothings in her ear to get her into bed, and it was pointless and a waste of time to try. Lukas did not have to do anything but agree to go with her. She doesn't care if this makes her a slut or if she gets called a whore, she doesn't care if Katherine thinks she's untrustworthy or if Mrena dismisses her. She doesn't care if down the line everyone she's ever met hates her because after awhile you just stop giving a fuck, you take what can, you stop asking questions when an inner impulse says care for this person or help this person while others in just as much need receive only fuck them, fuck them, fuck them.

And because she does not care what he thinks of her, because that has never once entered into her mind, because she doesn't concern herself with his opinion of her dropping or rising, Danicka has absolutely no problem with drawing his hand up her body and running the tip of her tongue along the underside of his middle finger. She gently strokes her fingertips in between his digits, grazes his fingerprint with her teeth, and guides his hand until she is sucking on that same finger, her eyes closing for a moment as though this, even, grants her some esoteric and unnameable pleasure.

When she's done, she withdraws her mouth and opens her eyes, letting his hand go and reaching up with her own to run her glossy, rounded fingernails into his hair and over his scalp.

"Já říkám, když jsem unavený," she informs him, in a voice that will not let him think about whether or not she's trying to exhaust him so that she can tolerate sleeping with him next to her tonight, or whether she actually is not tired and wants this. Danicka turns, the mattress shifting underneath her, the fitted sheet still disrupted from the corner where he yanked it free, and faces him.

A small smile curls at one corner of her mouth. "Jděte pomalu, Lukáš."

[Lukas] And his eyes change again, when she takes his hand and brings it to her lips; when she draws his finger into her mouth. He watches her, his eyes growing smoky, growing dark.

What little light comes in the window -- because he likes the curtains open, he likes to see the sky, and she does not seem to mind -- is not quite enough to give his eyes their usual glittering blueness; their incandescence and light. It's enough to give depth and clarity to the irises, nonetheless, and enough to be shadowed when his eyelids lower, watching her.

His fingertip is wet when she releases him. It feels colder for the lack of her warmth. She reaches her hand into his hair and he smiles; the edges of his mouth turn up and he doesn't think about this, he doesn't think about much at all except for the way she looks when she looks at him like this, across a handsbreadth on a hotel mattress with her hair loose and golden.

Jděte pomalu, she says, and this makes the corner of his mouth quirk abruptly up; it makes him draw half a breath, as though she'd found a bruise and pressed. It's simultaneous. He doesn't question why or how, anymore; why she makes him smile, how she makes him ache.

He doesn't pretend to protest, either. He doesn't insist that she's tired, she should sleep.

Lukas remembers where she keeps the condoms and, for once, remembers them before he's so far gone that remembering them would be either an exercise in masochism or plainly impossible. He rises up, he leans over her, one hand planted on the far side, and he reaches his hand into the desk and feels around until he finds them.

He lays back down, and there's a quickening in his body: a heat in his eyes, a speeding of the heart and breath. Perhaps it should bother him, how easily she arouses him. A word; a glance. A touch of her hand.

He takes her hand and he shapes it around him, wraps her hand around his cock, and now he's leaning in to kiss her, he's hardening against her palm and he's kissing her, and he's tearing the sachet open and rolling it on until his fingers bump hers and his tongue is in her mouth, he lets her roll the condom down while he puts his hand between her legs to find her growing wet for him.

They draw closer on the bed, side by side, face to face. No words now. He draws her thigh over his hip and their legs tangle, their feet overlap, their shins cross. He fits to her, and she to him, like two halves of the proverbial whole, and when he enters her this time it's slow, slow, a series of ever-deepening strokes until he's buried in her, and their bodies touch all along their torsos, from chest to belly.

This kiss meets somewhere in the middle, too. That's all it is for some time: a kiss, motionless, suspended, their bodies joined, his heart a thunder behind his sternum.

When they do begin, it's slow, pomalý, an aching surreal flex of their bodies together in the small hours far past midnight, nearly close to dawn. It's slow, but not quite gentle; deep; felt. His breath grows ragged, a shudder low in his spine every time he pushes into her, and his arm is over her waist, his hand over her hip, he can feel her moving as he moves, in reciprocation, in perfect complement. Passion rises, inexorable, but yes, it's slow, gradual, and he waits for her, pauses now and again to reach between and caress her with his hand, swallow her sounds in his mouth as he begins to move again.

It's only at the end, when he feels her as close to the edge as himself, that he rolls her under him. He raises himself over her then -- not so slow now, heavy, moving into her with the momentum of his body while her hands pull at his back and her legs wrap higher, tighter.

His spine arches with the mindbending tension of the release, this time. His eyes are closed but he's with her, he's right there, he knows where he is and who she is, even if he forgets, for a moment, his own name and identity.

Afterward, Lukas is loathe to let her go again. There's a bone-deep exhaustion in him, but it's only physical; his mind is still sharp, alert, crisp, but even that isn't enough to rouse him -- it's not enough to make him move. It's some time before he rolls back to his side beside her; some time before he'll unwind his arms from her. Even then his hand remains where it began, at her waist, on her skin -- perfektní -- though he knows he pitiful truth of that now, that truth and others just as hard to swallow.

Not ready for this to end.
Worth it.
Taming.

It's 4:18 in the morning when he draws the blankets up over them, his hand smoothing the comforter over her shoulder. There's an echo in this: Není ti zima? -- but if it occurs to him he says nothing.

After, his arm drapes over her hip beneath the blankets still, as though to ward her -- or as though to remind himself that she is still there, will not leave, will not go. He evens his breathing the best he can, eyes closed, waiting for her to sleep, but the truth is she's perceptive and he's charged, full as the moon is full. He's not sleeping and it may be some time before she sleeps, but when she does he opens his eyes again, he watches her through the darkness, which is nearly complete now, even the lights on the Magnificent Mile dimmed and lowered.

He watches her tirelessly, his eyes tracing the details of her face, asking himself over and over if it was this, or that, or that that has made her so necessary, so essential to him; deciding over and over that he would never be able to decide or pinpoint or name all the reasons she has slipped in under his skin and sunk into his blood.

He watches her until he's sure he won't sleep at all tonight, but of course that's a lie: the distant corners of his mind are shutting down wholly without his notice, the paths are narrowing and beginning to spiral in on themselves, and in he end all that occupies his mind is a single phrase turning over and over like a mantra:

já tady patří.
já tady patří.
já...

When morning comes she awakens first. His slumber is deep and still as a mountain lake, and his hand has not moved from her skin.