crazy broken weak damaged.

[Danicka] All the way to the bed last night, Danicka did not uncurl from Lukas. She kept her head buried against his shoulder and neck even when he leaned, when he sat down, when she unfolded her legs and shifted her arms so that when he laid down she would not need to let go of him. They've never slept together as they do for the first few hours of the night, with her half-sprawled on top of him like this, but it comes naturally. She is warm, and she is exhausted, and she falls asleep within a matter of silent minutes.

Lukas wakes repeatedly during the night; Danicka does not. Her face is turned to his shoulder when he opens his eyes and looks at the window to the alleyway, but she doesn't even move except in the subtle rise and fall of her back as she breathes. By the second time he wakes she has shifted in her sleep, she has slid off his chest and is lying on her side next to him, her arms folded up between her chest and his side, hands holding one another under her chin. She doesn't stir, and he won't recall it anyway, but her feet were tucked around one of his ankles, as though to hold onto him still.

The third time, it's colder. Danicka's lips are parted and her arms is draped over his chest then, but she shivers slightly some time after he opens his eyes, after he realizes that she's still there. She's in his bed, close to him because in this narrow mattress they have no choice. Then again, even on nights in hotels in king-sized beds, they have always occupied the same small space, arms and legs entwined as they sleep. It's the same here, out of necessity, out of what comes most naturally, because of how they...fit together.

As his palms slide down her back, her breathing hitches and changes. When he turns towards her, his bare back no longer turned towards the bed but to the room, Danicka's arm is displaced. Her eyes flicker open, air shooting into her nostrils, but as soon as she sees his eyes, she exhales in a sigh of contented, languid recognition. Her arms slide around his neck, pulling her body closer to his. She nuzzles his face before they kiss, draws his wandering touch towards her breast when they do.

She murmurs "Take them off," in his ear as his hands trace the edges of the underwear she pulled on at the door, shivering again as he draws them down her thighs, but this time not with chill. The slip of white cotton gets pushed away and ignored, ends up somewhere under the covers at the foot of the bed, ends up forgotten.

She kisses him over and over as he's moving inside of her, half-dreaming and holding him with one leg hooked around his hip, holding him with her fingers buried in his hair. Danicka is almost silent, even while rolling her hips in rhythm with his slow thrusting. She shudders as their lower halves grind harder together. Their brows are touching, they are sharing one another's breath, he is whispering her name and it glistens in her mind like a silver thread guiding her through a labyrinth. When she comes, her back arches, her spine elongating and her hands tightening in his hair, her head falling back as she gasps out her pleasure.

For awhile afterward, after Lukas draws her face closer again and holds her to his brow when he follows her over that edge, after they begin to come down to catch their breath, Danicka just curls into him as she did when he first brought her to bed. She rests her head on his shoulder, close to the side of his throat, until she can breathe again. Until she can kiss him back, mouthing something -- it may be his name -- against his mouth, brushing her lips across his jawline and his brow, grazing his cheekbones.

It takes no time at all for Danicka to fall back asleep, this time even heavier than before. She turns her back to him and curls up in a near-fetal position, her heartbeat echoed back into her as it strikes the heel of his hand. She sleeps deeper now than she has in days, in a week, in all of the times he's slept with her before.

When she opens her eyes, she doesn't go tense at the weight of his arm over her or the fall of his hand on her breast. The fact that she doesn't, the fact that she knows him instantly, makes her smile. She can just barely make out the sounds of the restaurant and its patrons downstairs, the sounds of the city, the sounds of the lake, the footsteps of others milling around in their rooms and the communal bathroom. The corners of her mouth curl up gently, and she turns her face into the pillow beneath both their heads as though to hide it.

And then her stomach growls.

[Lukas] True silence is a rarity at the Brotherhood -- the purview of a few hours past midnight, before dawn, if even then. It had been truly silent the second time Lukas awoke in the night, truly silent and truly dark, except even then he could hear Danicka breathing, and even then her very presence lit him up like a lantern in the night.

At noon, there's nothing like the silence she would have in her expensive apartment on the 23rd floor with the city and the lake literally at her feet. Pipes are banging and groaning in the walls: people are showering and cooking and doing laundry and washing dishes. Muffled footsteps in the common room, going up and down the stairs. Now and then somehow shouts, or laughs; even without these immediate sounds, there's always the hum of the city outside, traffic on the streets or in the alley, the wind and the lake, the world through the thin walls and the single-layer windows.

Lukas sleeps through all this. He's used to it. It's background noise. But when Danicka stirs, he awakens. She can tell by the way he stirs faintly, and the way his breathing changes -- becomes silent, shallower. His eyes open slowly, drowsily; the first thing he sees is the spread of golden hair, and the pale curve of her shoulder.

Danička, he thinks to himself. There's no confusion, not a single moment where he's uncertain who or where or why. His hand opens on her skin, the fingers splaying as though it had its own life, its own awakening. Then his palm molds back to her breast, and against the curvature of her ribs. He curves closer to her back, kisses her shoulder.

"Hi," he murmurs, against her lee of her shoulder, against her skin. A pause, perhaps for thought. His chest moves against her back as he inhales, a long slow breath.

"Ty jsi ještě tady."

[Danicka] Mornings in her house were quiet. The neighborhood the Musils lived in was filled with the elderly, people closer to her father's age than her mother's, and not many children. She used to listen to the tree outside brushing its branches across her window, as though it was talking to her.

Living with the Sokolovs she was in a penthouse, high above the city, so far ensconced in luxury that New York seemed miles away. They were on an island of wealthy silence. Mornings there were peaceful, when she awoke before dawn and prepared herself for the day. It was the nights that were so often disturbed: weeping, or the occasional scream, or soft footsteps coming into her small but well-appointed room.

In Louisiana they were near the swamps. She listened to birds, bullfrogs. She laid in bed at night and fell asleep to the noise of crickets and the quiet voices of the men-at-arms outside on the veranda, the smoke of Rick's cigarettes curling heavenward. In the mornings she sometimes heard the wind, before anything else, and it always sounded like voices.

Her apartment in Chicago is silent, now. Mornings no longer begin with a coke-addled older man blasting Joplin or Hendrix from the stereo system. Weekends no longer involve impromptu dance parties to the Beastie Boys. Danicka never wakes with someone's arms around her, warm lips pressing to her shoulder as a hand flexes and then curls back around her breast, and thinks Jsem tady patří.

She doesn't stretch, though she wants to. She turns her head as far as she can and nuzzles him where she is able to reach his face, his jaw, nodding as her eyes fall closed all over again.

"Hi," she murmurs back, nodding a couple of times to his second statement. "Mm-hmm." As though to say: Of course. As though to say: Neat, isn't it?

[Lukas] His mouth stills against her shoulder. Then his free arm moves, withdraws from under her neck if she'd pillowed herself there; props knuckles to his cheekbone. On his side behind her, and raised on one elbow like this, he considers her for a moment.

Danicka's eyes are a sort of opaque, secret green, like plantlife in the heart of a forest; waterweed a hundred feet from the surface. Except when she's alarmed, or frightened, or angry: they take on a jewel-like clarity then, a shocking color like poison. Except when she's out in direct daylight, with the sun in her eyes: they become blue then, blue as his.

Except when she's half asleep like this, and her eyelashes shadow her irises before her eyes close again altogether. And then they're unfathomable, a green deep as night, barely seen beneath her lids.

After she closes her eyes he leans over her again. He kisses the curve of her shoulder; bends; kisses the outside of her bicep. When she lifts her arm he kisses the side of her breast, and the rung of the first rib beneath that -- and she's not so starved that he can see it beneath her skin, but he can feel the hard arch of its under her flesh.

"I was afraid you'd leave me," he whispers against her skin, like a secret. He turns his cheek against her body; looks up at her face, which, eyes closed and at this angle, seems remote and sublime as a statue, a work of art.

But she's not stone. She's warm as life. As spring.

[Danicka] As Lukas moves to prop himself up on his elbow, Danicka turns more in his direction, laying on her back. It opens up her torso to him as he starts to kiss her, shoulder and arm and chest. She smiles as his mouth travels. The room needs to be aired out, the sheets cleaned. She doesn't know where her underwear is; she doesn't remember right now that she ever pulled it on. She has smelled him on her skin for so long now that the comingled sweat and fluids of the two of them may as well be her own scent, her natural scent.

Danicka takes a deep breath and unwinds her arms, stretching them up over her head and arching her back. She stretches out to her full length, holding it for a few quivering seconds before relaxing again, joint by joint, exhaling a contained breath and opening her eyes again to look down at him. She smiles, fondly, the look in her half-shut eyes saddened briefly at what he says. Her hands float downward and the tips of her fingers play with his hair, matted and messy and dark and familiar. At first it's idle, but after a few seconds she begins falling into a rhythm, a pattern they both know well by now, dragging her fingernails in slow, steady rakes that barely brush his scalp.

"No," she murmurs finally. "I wanted to stay with you. And," she goes on, but this is an afterthought almost, though more quietly spoken than the rest, "you said...if I still wanted you at all, you needed me to stay."

[Lukas] Lukas's mouth curves against her skin as she stretches: a small smile, but unadulterated, pleased somehow, humored and charmed somehow by the way she performs even this most mundane of actions.

She's turned on her back, and he sets his elbows down on either side of her; not quite atop her, but perhaps getting there. Her fingers move into his hair. His mouth moves across the underside of her nearer breast, then presses to her breastbone.

His amusement fades as well. He kisses her body, and then he murmurs, "I did." And again, a slower kiss against her heartbeat, his eyes shutting for a second before opening again, flame-blue. "I needed you."

[Danicka] What most people do not understand about Danicka is that as reserved as she can be with so many people, as restrained, her home life was strangely not emotionally repressed. Her participation in emotional expression was treated differently, but it was not a cold home. For everything else, she was not raised without hugs and kisses and scritches of her scalp, a hand stroking her hair at night, the comfortable closeness of family. There were good things. Sometimes.

All of that is to say that she has no hesitation in letting Lukas know that she enjoys the way he touches her. Whether this is something she has never struggled with or something she fought for in early adulthood, she smiles when he kisses her and her smile only grows as he moves up over her. He can tell by the way her body moves or the changing pressure in her hands on him that she likes this, all of this: that he is close to her, that he is kissing her, that he fell asleep wrapped around her as he did.

If they were not talking now about why she stayed, she would be laughingly telling him that his hand on her all night made her boob all sweaty. And kiss his hand, and bring it to her flesh, and kiss his mouth.

As it is, she goes on stroking his hair, smiling softly at him, and her stomach protests again that it has been given nothing in the past fourteen hours but two red bulls, a smoothie, and some french fries. Oh, and a bit of vodka. Danicka ignores the gurgling noise, though it adds a gently smirking edge to the curve of her lips, but then he says that he needed her, and her expression softens, relaxes into something completely different.

"Why?"

[Lukas] He looks at her then; a mildly quizzical look, a faint curl at the edge of his mouth.

"I don't know," he says, quietly. "I don't know why I'm in love with you either." He considers a moment. "Because I did," then. "Because I am."

And then Lukas sits up, bending his knees beneath him, sitting back on his heels. The blanket falls from his body and folds slowly to the bed. They're filthy: sweaty, sticky, smelling of one another and of sex. He should shower. He's in no hurry. He stretches, lacing his hands and pushing them forward until his muscles quiver. When he relaxes he slouches on himself, his spine an easy curve, hands relaxed in his lap.

This time the smile is a little quirky, a little crookedly. "Do you want me to make you an omelet?"

[Danicka] That Why? could just as easily have been What would have happened?

But she knows what would have happened. He would have tried to put the pieces back together. He never would have forgiven her, taken her back, trusted her again. That's a funny word to apply, but there is trust here.

Danicka sleeps deeply with him because she trusts him, makes love to him slowly in the dark because there's some doubt as to who started that. All Lukas was doing was touching her, as though she was something remarkable to find in his bed, otherworldly. She stirred because he turned, because his hand ran over her arm and warmed her skin. His arms came around her and grew bolder because she wrapped her own around his neck and sought him out to kiss him. She lifted her leg around his hip because she felt him growing hard, because she wanted him to know --

Ano.

-- exactly what she whispered into his ear as his mouth had gone down to her neck.

And he says that he doesn't know why he needed her last night, or why he's in love with her. Another woman might rankle at that, whether she showed it or not. Another woman might demand reasons, or question the sincerity or validity of what he said last night and what he says again now in English, because if he cannot give her a checklist of traits of hers that he adores then he is a manipulator, or a fool, or worse. Another woman might simply melt, and simper, and just be pleased to hear the words, meant or not.

Danicka asks once, genuinely, and accepts the answer as it's given: I don't know. Because. Which has almost been enough. She would not be able to answer him any more definitively if he asked her Why. The uncertainty, or --conversely -- the unanalyzed surety, somehow makes sense to her. Somehow, she can trust it.

Lukas slides upward and her brows pull together briefly at the loss of him. His body and his shadow and the blankets all move away from her together, leaving her just as bare as he is. As innocent as Eve. As deeply knowing as her predecessor. He smiles, and she smiles back in the same, the same loose and off-kilter pleasure in her expression that is almost shy on both their faces. But when he asks her if she wants him to make her an omelet, her eyebrows hop up on her forehead and an incredibly serious purse comes to her lips. She nods several times in quick succession.

"Yesplease."

[Lukas] Lukas can't help but laugh. He gets up out of bed, tosses the blankets back at her as an afterthought. The first thing he does is not to dress, or to grab a towel and go shower, or -- any of that, really.

The first thing he does is --

Well. The first thing he'd intended to do is open the window, to let the fresh air in, to get a whiff of the city, the new day, the spring, the noon. But the first thing he actually does is lean right back down over her -- his hands braced on the bed on either side of her, his body taut, as though he were doing a push-up. He kisses her, not quickly but deeply, until he almost forgets where he is, what he's doing, what he's going to do.

It parts. He lingers a moment.

Then he gets up and goes to the window. He opens it, and it's old-fashioned, a dorm-style window, which is to say it slides up. He shoves it up and leans out, not caring that he'd naked; it's an alley out there, anyway. He looks left, looks right. She can hear the sounds of cars passing on the street, the lake in the distance. He ducks back in and finds his pajama bottoms from the previous night, pulls them on.

A pause while he's letting the elastic snap in place just under his navel. "Do you want to come with me?"

[Danicka] When the tangled sheet and blanket, about as luxurious or soft as Army-issue, come back down to Danicka, they drape around her legs and her waist and her rather vocal belly, but she does not reach down to wrap them all around her again, or cover herself. They're left to lie where they fall. Her very-serious expression breaks into a beaming grin as he laughs, openly pleased at his amusement. But that smile, like many things, like the two of then, is short-lived.

Not because she is afraid to be happy. Not because she is unhappy. Because he kisses her. She lets out a soft laugh as he's coming back right after standing, lifting her hands to cup around his face and keep him there, should he try to part from her again before she's ready to let him go.

It won't last. This: not necessarily the affair, or the feelings they've confessed to, but this moment when he is kissing her in his bed out of something like sheer joy and she is beaming because he is offering to make her breakfast, this moment when they are...happy, and feel something like peace with it, rather than guilt or fear or shame. It will not last, and it cannot. And that is, if one were to ask Danicka, all right. If she felt this way all the time, she wouldn't be able to bear it.

She watches him when he does pull away, her hands sliding fro his cheeks and her eyes opening. She's not sure how long they were kissing. It doesn't matter. He lets her mouth go before she eats him alive, and either she is too hungry or too tired to follow him or she was satisfied. She lays in his bed, on her back, arms loosely falling...wherever they fall. She breathes in deeply as cool, fresh air curls into the bedroom. She tips her head a bit and checks out his ass. Her eyes are back on his face when he turns around to get his pajama bottoms up, and her eyebrows lift.

"You smell and look like you spent all night fucking," she says drolly, "and you're just going to waltz down to the kitchen during the lunch rush?"

[Lukas] "I was going to grab a quick shower," he says.

And then, a little of the thoughtless arrogance that made him say and since when do Shadow Lords bow to the whims of their kin so long ago, only it wasn't that long ago at all; he's known her for

(all his fucking life, almost.)

two and a half months; been sleeping with her for maybe two, but sometimes it feels like he's never had anything but this. Sometimes it feels like they really did grow up together, and know each other inside and out, and --

and there's a little bit of arrogance in him, thought perhaps just as much knowingness and wryness when he says, "Anyway. They wouldn't stop me from making an omelet or two."

A pause, then; something occurs to him.

"Do you mind? That people know that we were together last night?"

[Danicka] She grew up with that arrogance. Not Lukas's, in particular, but the hauteur of her mother and brother's Tribe. It was there when she was in preschool, it was there before she met Lukas himself. It was there as she chased her brother down the sidewalk, running to keep up with his longer strides. It's always been a part of her life, a different shade and flavor than the regal insanity of the Silver Fangs, but she knows it.

And she quietly, inevitably withdraws a degree. She is still bared from the navel up, her hair is still askew on his pillow and she looks very much like she's just woken, like she's been loved thoroughly and well. Her eyes are half-lidded, the light from the window hitting her and casting her into brilliant, stark relief. If he came to her again now she'd accept him, invite him in with a completely different sort of hunger, but in an inexplicable way he can't likely even fathom, she takes a step back.

Smiles anyway.

"My reputation in this city was ruined as soon as I decided to fuck Sam," she says quietly, dryly. "I don't think it's exactly going to scandalize anyone. We're of the same blood, we share a language, and you've claimed me." She shrugs one shoulder, as if to say It doesn't matter.

[Lukas] And that makes a shadow cross his face too -- the mention of Sam; the mention of her fucking Sam; or perhaps just the mention of her reputation in this city.

What his pack thinks of her: Danicka the slut, Danicka the untrustworthy, Danicka the liar.

Danicka, who spent the last night in his bed, in his room, in his arms. Danicka, who has said not only zamilovávám se do tebe but já jsem zamilovaný s vámi. Danicka, who he thinks of -- even though he tries not to -- as mine, now; mine; my lover, my love, but not, even now, in terms of forever. In terms of anything farther away than tonight, today, the next five minutes.

There's so much between them that's still so fragile: like plants that grow towards the warmth, but shrink from the slightest touch. Just look at the way she withdraws when he reminds her of what they are inevitably a part of, and of her past. Just look at the way his smile dies, now.

"You know," he says, quietly, "when I said I said I wouldn't flaunt this, it was half for Sam and my packmates' sakes, and half because I ... hate that you might be considered a slut for it.

"I hate that."

A beat. Then he shrugs. Grabs a towel from his closet, and his toiletries -- a small perforated bucket, incongruously cheerful-red with a chrome bar, that carries shaving cream and toothbrush, a tumbler, his shampoo and his conditioner, his bodywash.

"I'll be back in ten," he tells her.

[Danicka] I hate that you might be considered a slut for it...

One of her eyebrows lifts up. If Danicka has much concern over being flaunted, over being thought a slut by the Unbroken Circle, it doesn't glint in her eyes or flash across her expression just then. If anything she looks dubious, and then when he repeats

I hate that.

Her brow furrows slightly, the smallest and briefest of frowns, little more than her eyebrows pulling down and together for a second before her features smooth again. She yawns, and nods to his assurance that he'll be back, and instead of getting up -- to shower, to dress, to do anything -- she rolls over in his bed and pulls the sheets and blanket up to cover herself. The air outside is cold. She closes her eyes, inhales the scent of him, dozes.

Her toes find her discarded underwear. She smirks and leaves them where they are.

[Lukas] (w00t 2 dice!! GO GO 2 DICE!)

[Lukas] The frown catches his attention for a moment. Lukas doesn't linger, though. He leaves his room, leaving the door unlocked, pulled closed behind him.

She dozes. She leaves her underwear where it is, in his sheets, and at some point he'll find them too; smile; perhaps laugh. Get them washed out, add it to the other pair of panties he has, which someday, at some point, he'll mail back to her in a Priority Mail flat-rate envelope. With a note. Which he has yet to formulate in his head.

He's gone for perhaps fifteen, twenty minutes. When Lukas comes back he's showered and shaved, though quickly, and roughly -- there's a patch under his jaw where he missed a spot. He also has two bowls, into which are folded two rather large omelets, and a half-gallon of milk under his arm.

"I hope you like Canadian ham and red peppers," he says, handing her a bowl. He lets the carton of milk drop from under his arm, catches it neatly in his now-freed hand. Sets that on the nightstand, nudging the still-displaced drawer aside, and then goes to fetch cups. They're the mugs this time -- his Ellis Island mug, plus one, blue that advertises the NY Yankees.

He doesn't pull up the chair. He sits back down on the bed, his back to the headboard, propping his pillow up behind him as he passes her a fork and digs in.

[Danicka] The fact that the door is left unlocked behind him and that her back is to it does not make it harder for Danicka to drift off. She's never locked her bedroom door any of the -- notably few, notably rare -- occasions he has slept over. Here she's arguably more at risk: she is surrounded by Garou, at least one of which she does not trust with her physical well-being, if she trusts any of them with that, even...ultimately...Lukas. Here, having an unlocked door at her back could be frightening to the skittish Kinswoman whose breath hitches sharply if he so much as tightens his arms around her at the wrong time.

She dozes, naps in the early afternoon while Lukas is showering and making breakfast -- or having breakfast made. Given what he said when he was going to head downstairs she wouldn't be surprised if he had the staff of the Brotherhood do it. Given who she is, it's debatable whether or not this would make much difference to her.

When the door opens again, however, she stirs, wakes easily because she is not fully asleep. She rolls over and -- as the door is closing again -- starts to sit up, his blankets falling from her breasts to pool around her lap. She smiles, glad to see him or glad to see food, whichever.

"I'm easy," she says, as to her preferences, and lifts the bowl to smell the omelet inside as he's situating himself and bringing mugs over. They're still in a narrow bed, sitting side by side, leaning against the headboard. Her stomach snarls at her at the prospect of food and she digs in.

[Lukas] Lukas no longer smells like Danicka, nor the night they spent together. He smells like a shower and a shave: his soap, his shampoo, his shaving cream. He also smells, faintly, of egg omelets. It's possible he actually cooked. It's also possible he stood by while Saint Jenny cooked, directing her to put in some more canadian ham, not so many peppers, etc.

They don't discuss who actually did the cooking. He eats with gusto: it's been some time since he last ate, after all. It's not lamb, nor scallops, but it's good food, and he enjoys it.

Still; there's a silence between them. And when she'd said I'm easy there'd be a faint sketch of a frown over his brow, though perhaps not for the most obvious reasons. The bed is small enough, and Lukas large enough, that his shoulder brushes hers. No, that's a lie. He would've sat this close, regardless.

When he's half done with his omelet, he pours milk; he hands her the Ellis Island mug and keeps the Yankees mug for himself. He concentrates on his food. He thinks, his thoughts his own until he can arrange them into some semblance of order.

"It's not that I give a damn if my packmates think I'm sleeping with a slut," he says, quietly. "It's that they think you're a slut. And you're not. Sometimes that bothers me."

[Danicka] She's filthy. In due time she's going to cease smelling of lovemaking and sweat and simply going to become rank and rancid, disgusting. Danicka is well aware of the fact that her 'boyfriend', who uses his hands nonstop as he's fucking her, left traces of wetness on her breasts, on her thighs, everywhere he touched her after playing with her cunt last night and in the dim hours of this morning. She is aware of the bite mark on her shoulder that he made when he came, the physical remainder of a groan he could, for once, not stifle completely, even in her flesh.

Danicka really could care less that he is scrubbed clean and fresh and she's still a mess. At the moment she is eating as ravenously as an animal or a child, eating too fast because she either does not care what he thinks of her or because her manners, too, are all just a joke played on the world, or because she's fucking hungry as hell right now. By the time Lukas is half finished with his omelet, Danicka is nearly done. She pauses eating to take the mug he hands her, drinks several mouthfuls of milk, and then blinks and peers at the blurry photograph on it.

"Huh," she says, her eyes lighting up. She goes back to her breakfast, and then he brings up the slut bit again. She sets her fork down in an empty bowl, sets the bowl on her blanket-covered lap, and turns her head to look up and over at him. Car horns honk outside.

And you're not. An eyebrow quirks.

"So...what bothers you is them having a false impression of me?" she asks, somewhat leadingly.

[Lukas] He thinks about this for a moment, during which he takes another biteful of his omelet. He's half done with his ... breakfast. Brunch. Lunch. Whatever this is. She's almost finished, and he's thinking to himself that he might have to make another trip downstairs.

"It bothers me that they think things of you that you don't deserve," he says, then, his eyes on his food.

[Danicka] Her hands wrap around the Ellis Island mug the way they would if it were a cold day and this a hot drink; her fingers obscure the faces of his family as she takes another drink. She thinks to herself that the omelet she just ate was quite possibly the best thing she has ever tasted, and no cup of milk has ever been this sweet, but her perception of reality is possibly skewed.

Given last night.

She does not argue with him over whether or not she deserves the title of Slut or not. Danicka just tips her head and leans against his arm, eyeing the opposite wall, her feet under the covers and his feet atop them, further down.

"So what do you want to do about feeling that way?"

[Lukas] He shrugs; his shoulders and his arm move against her head. "Nothing." He's said this before, a little over twelve hours ago: before last night.

Before ... all that.

"It's not their business." This still hasn't changed. "And arguing with them over this makes it their business." His fork makes small sounds against his bowl. He's a quiet eater, which surely doesn't surprise her. After a pause, he looks at her, down the slope of his still-bare shoulder.

"Do you want me to do something about it?"

There's perhaps a certain wariness in the question; a tiny level of guardedness. He doesn't know how she'll respond. He doesn't think he's ever asked her anything like this before. He never thought he'd ask her, or anyone, for that matter, anything like this.

[Danicka] Do you expect me to protect you?

And before that:

Do you want me to tell him to leave you be?

The answer to both questions had been no, initially. The answer to the second changed. The answer to the first still hasn't. She doesn't expect him to take care of her, to show up and save her when something bad happens. She doesn't even tell him about being attacked by Black Spirals, why would she tell him my roommate had a heart attack or my father's going in for tests or they're not sure how long before Šárka will need a transplant. He doesn't even know who Šárka is, or who Tereza, Havel, and all the others are. Danicka does not expect to be able to lean on him...or else she can't make herself for some reason, even if she wanted to.

Last night they talked about something like this, about making nice with his packmates so his life might be easier. But he's not going to argue with them about her, because it's not their business. She doesn't know this, but he is going to talk about her to his packmates, at least the one who shares their Tribe. Danicka exhales. Her sigh sounds somewhat wearied. Almost --

"I only asked because you said you hate it," she says, and then drains the last of her milk, setting the mug gently into the wide bowl on her lap. "If you're not going to do anything about it, or there's nothing you can do about it, you might want to just...get over it."

[Lukas]

[Lukas] Lukas glances at her once, around the time she sighs. He watches her put the mug in the bowl. She tells him to get over it. He casts her another glance -- a beat goes by.

He bites the inside of his lips. And then, rather without warning, he bursts into laughter.

[Danicka] [Guess Who]

[Danicka] [Give her this, she's got an arm. +WP]

[Danicka] There are losses of control, and then there are...complete breakdowns of the walls that contain a person's behavior. When this happens to Lukas, he frenzies. He snaps, and there's blood, and destruction, and death. When this happens to Danicka...well. He's only ever seen her lose her temper once, a quick flash of anger that resulted in her raising her voice at him before immediately calming. Other than that her only losses of self control have been breaking down in tears, holding in sobs but weeping all the same. He has never seen her become instantly angry, and he has never seen her violent.

He does, however, start laughing, and then he sees the bowl he brought her, with his Ellis Island mug inside of it, slam into the wall past the footboard. The ceramic and the fork clatter together shrilly, but Danicka herself does not make a sound.

If it had just been the bowl, or the mug, they would have been...reasonably fine. She's not a strong woman; the dishes do not shatter on impact into a thousand pieces. The handle breaks off the Ellis Island mug, rolling under the bed. The bowl has a huge crack down the side, enough that there will be gluing it; it will simply snap in half later. There are chips of stoneware here and there, a crack through the picture of his family.

Danicka is still sitting beside him, staring at the spot on the wall where she suddenly snapped and hurled the dishes across the room, and there is absolutely color in her face, or her lips. From the look of her, she's not even breathing.

[Lukas] (OMG!)

[Lukas] Lukas has never, not once, seen or heard of Danicka getting violent. Not when he called her kurva the first time he saw her naked; not when he tried to fuck her like a whore, or a slut, or a blowup doll. Not when Sam hit her in the common room. Not when Dancers were on her heels and her life was literally in the balance.

Never.

He doesn't expect it -- so when she whips her hand back and launches the bowl and the mug and the silverware, he's just staring at her stupidly in that instant he should've been lunging across to snatch the dishes from her, or catch her by the hand, or backhand her across the face. He's just staring when she hurls the bowl over the foot of the bed and across the room, and when they hit the wall, and subsequently the floor --

Lukas is not laughing anymore.

He's out of bed in an instant; he ignores the cracked bowl, dives for the ground, heedless of the shards of ceramic on the floor. The mug has rolled under the bed, and that's okay: he just moves the entire fucking bed aside, her included, aside by a foot or more.

It would be absurd, comical: a grown man diving for a goddamn mug, if not for the fact that his rage is suddenly so thick in the air; if the hairs on his body were not quite literally standing on end. If he were in another form, his hackles would be up all down his spine. He'd be snarling.

He retrieves the mug, turns it over in his hands for a moment. It's not shattered, no, and later on he might be glad of that, but right now, he's not particularly glad for anything. When he looks at her, it's sheer amazement, sheer fury in his eyes. He didn't look at this even when she stood in the same room as his packmate that she'd fucked, and for all he knew was still fucking, and told him she wanted him, instead.

"Zbláznili jste se?" He's not shouting at her, not quite; he's too goddamn flabbergasted for that. "Co je sakra s tebou?"

[Danicka] There is no attempt, on her part, to explain. She doesn't even look at him; she's staring at that spot on the wall. Even when he moves the goddamn bed she's sitting on, and she is jostled, Danicka doesn't start weeping or pleading for mercy or trying to make him understand. She is still as stone for a few seconds, even as he is furious, even as he is at a total loss, and then his words seem to jar her out of some reverie.

Co je sakra s tebou?

She is already pale as a ghost. When she hears that, she visibly reels, closes her eyes for a moment. When they open they are green as sharp-edged, (broken) glass. There is no color in her face, but there is also no trace of the shellshocked stillness that was there a second ago. She grabs her underwear with her toes, flips the blankets back, and swings her legs off to the side, beginning to draw the scrap of cotton up her legs.

Without a word, she goes to her bag, to the puddle of denim she left behind last night, and starts putting on her jeans.

[Lukas]

[Lukas] There's a moment when she's getting up and she's passing him to go to her bag that his eyes burn murderous blue and his hands twitch on the half-broken mug. It's in his mind, almost in his hands and his body, to grab her by the wrist, or the arm, or the throat, and shove her back to the bed. Bear her down on the bed. Hold her down and shout in her face, demand an explanation or an apology or -- something.

He controls the impulse. Instantly. His control is fucking absolute, even now, even when he's so angry he can feel his pulse beating through his head. Already he's packing his anger up and subdividing it into little boxes: what i am justified to feel and what i am not justified to feel and what i want to do and what i should do and what i should not, cannot not, must not do.

It's not without cost. His hands clench around the mug so hard his knuckles are white, and it's a goddamn miracle he doesn't simply pulverize it to dust in his fists.

"Co kurva jsi to udělal pro?" He gets up. It's inevitable that such a gesture carries threat. He's a werewolf. He is threat. It's almost impossible to imagine how this is the same man, the same creature that had held her last night and fucked her in the pre-dawn; fucked her last night, too, until she was almost in tears from physical pleasure and emotional pain and --

the same creature that claimed to be in love with her; that she claimed to be in love with.

Digression. He gets up. He puts the mug on the table, and then, instead of grabbing her and forcing her back down, he grabs her bag instead, before she can take another item of clothing out of it. He holds it in his hand, his body turned a little ways away from her as though to shield it, as though he really expected her to struggle with him for her things.

"Dej mi odpověď. Co sakra sis myslel? Co si myšlení?"

[Danicka] [Manipulation + Subterfuge // + 1 (Dizzy Much?)]

[Danicka] Question after question after question. She feels that surge of anger and her legs sway slightly as she's buttoning her jeans. Her head pounds from the force of it, from the imagery of being splattered in here, and she wonders exactly what he ends up asking: what was I thinking? what was I thinking? but it isn't for the same reason. She's not thinking about throwing the mug. She's thinking about --

Danicka breathes in sharply when he gets up. She isn't even trying to conceal how scared she is, but she stands on her own feet even when he yanks her bag out of her hands to stop her from getting dressed. She doesn't collapse, or ask to sit down, even though she's seeing spots. And then she does something he's never seen her do before: he takes her bag, keeps her from getting out any more clothes, and Danicka...folds her arms over her chest. Her hands cup her shoulders, but she doesn't hunch over or curl up. This isn't shame. If anything, it seems like practicality. The room is getting colder, and he has decided she is not to be allowed to dress.

So she covers herself, and he's never seen her do that before, not like this. She looks at him ...or his earlobe, at least.

The woman who said she was in love with him (ty jsi můj princ...a můj liška...a moje láska) stares at him, and licks her lips, and then she meets his eyes for a scant second or two: "Já jsem si myslel, že bych měl odejít," she says quietly, and then shakes her head. "...Neexistovala žádná omluva pro to, co jsem udělal."

[Lukas] That wasn't even what he was asking, really. He wasn't asking about getting out of bed and getting dressed; he was asking something that she very likely couldn't answer.

He was asking what the hell she was thinking, throwing dishes around the room. He was asking why she flew off the handle because he laughed at her. He was asking why the fuck she threw his mug, of all things, at the wall.

This is what he was asking, but she answers something else, and it doesn't even matter if she's lying or thinks she's telling the truth, because Lukas looks at her as she covers herself with her hands, hides herself away from him as she's never, ever done before.

There's something animal in the clarity of his eyes, the way they flicker over her, reading the body language; the tone. There's something animal in the faint tilt of his head.

"Ne," he says slowly, "sis myslel jste měl volno mě po všech."

[Danicka] [WP -1]

[Danicka] He gets it wrong. He cannot see what is really going on. Lukas can't tell if what she just said was the truth or not. It may very well be: there is no excuse. She thinks she should just...go. Leave him alone. Get out of his room, out of this building, away from his belongings and so forth so she doesn't snap and break something else. She shouldn't be here, she doesn't deserve it, she's lost the fucking privilege.

Who knows. She may even believe it. That may be Gaia's truth from her lips, because it sure as hell sounds true. She cover her breasts as her nipples harden from the chill, though, and drags her eyes down from his ears to his arms, down to the bag he's holding away as though he can stop her from leaving because he knows that she hates to be exposed. He can control where she goes like this, without having to grab her wrists, and convince himself it is somehow less...

...less like her Theurge, or her mother, or whoever made it so that she just goes limp when she thinks she is about to be struck. He can tell himself that he's different, if all he does is hold onto her bag and not let her leave.

When she answers him, she's looking at the leather strap in his hands, and her tone is flat, though not with annoyance. There's just something empty about it. Like she'll answer now because there just is no point in fighting. "Jak můžu věřit, že mě miluješ, když se ti něco nelíbí se mi?"

She pauses, and lets out a breath she seems detached from, but she doesn't cry. "Pokud si myslíte, že jsem blázen ... a rozbité ... a slabý?"

And this he doesn't even have to doubt. This is Gaia's truth from Danicka's lips. Because as she says each word, it all but rings in his ears with the same clarity that lights up his eyes.

Crazy.

Broken.

Weak.

Damaged.

[Lukas] And it's this again. And Lukas is briefly so frustrated he turns half away from her in a short, abortive arc -- a physical rejection of what she says.

Then he turns back.

"Kdybys věděl, jak těžké je pro mě, že to říkám, ty by nebylo pochyb, to." This is very level, very quiet, rigid with control. "Ty by nebyly síly, abych řekl to znovu a znovu."

Her bag is still in his hand. After another second he holds it out to her and, if she doesn't take it, sets it at her feet.

"As for what I said -- Jesus Christ, Danička, I spoke in anger. Don't blame me for being angry. You could've broken anything else in this goddamn room and I would've apologized and explained why I laughed at you."

[Danicka] If you knew... You would not force me... Don't blame me

She's not a very strong person. She's not very good at being angry, or staying angry. She's not terribly prideful, even if she has a good portion of self-respect. It's not the same thing as believing that what she sees from him, misinterpreted or not, isn't true.

Her world does not so much fall out from under her as become very cold. He puts the bag down at her feet because she doesn't uncross her arms to take it. Danicka crouches silently and pulls out the t-shirt inside the purse out, unfolding it to pull it on over her head.

"I won't force you anymore then," she says levelly, dragging the cotton down over her bare breasts, and shoving her fingers into her hair to comb it back slightly. The band on her wrist is still there from last night; she begins to pull her hair in front of one shoulder to put it in a ponytail.

[Lukas] Lukas just can't seem to get it right this morning.

He closes his eyes for a moment when she says that; bows his head and pinches the bridge of his nose. Then, lowering his hand, he looks at her again. By then she's almost done with her ponytail.

"I shouldn't have said that either." There's a sort of forced calm in his voice. "You didn't force me to anything last night, or ever. I said it because I wanted to. But it's not easy for me to admit such a thing in the first place, Danička. And it kind of sucks to be repeatedly called a liar over it."

[Danicka] "I've never called you a liar," she says softly, picking up her bag. Her feet are bare; she glances past him at the desk, hesitates, then ducks her head and walks around him, right at the edge of arm's length, to start picking up the clothes she was wearing last night when she showed up with pomegranates on her breath.

Her t-shirt is yellow. She plucks pink shirt and black belt from the desk, shoving them haphazardly into the large purse she's carrying. "I believe everything you say."

[Lukas] And that's it; the exact problem. It's like the opposite of the old story of the boy who cried wolf -- lying until no one believes you when you tell the truth. Only in Lukas's case, it's telling the truth until no one believes you when you lie.

If those were even lies. If the things he says in anger aren't exactly what he means to say, and exactly what he thinks of her, and exactly what the truth, the real truth when he's not blinded by her beauty and addled by the sex, is.

He should apologize. He should, and he would, and later he will regret not apologizing, only he's still too angry -- because of the mug, yes, but also everything that came after it, and also the sheer fact that he was happy when he woke up, god damn it, and now look where they are.

Just look: she's dressed and packed and ready to go.

And she still smells like him. And the room still smells like her. And Lukas looks at her, his eyebrows low over his eyes, his mouth a tight, frustrated line, and then abruptly his eyes flicker away, then back.

He doesn't want to apologize. The best he can do is, "Let me walk you to your car."

[Danicka] While he is staring at her, watching her, Danicka is bending her knees and picking up her thong and her skirt. She puts them into the bag with just as little fanfare as everything else got. They're just clothes. Last night he had all but purred an offer, a threat, to rip them all off her body if she would not lift her hips and let him get her panties off so he could fuck her. So he could be in her.

They've been addled by sex from the start, lost in how intense it is between them, undone by how close they become when with everyone else -- goddamn near everyone else, literally hundreds of men and women -- they have been able to keep their distance. Lukas isn't alone in this, isn't theonly one who has to wonder if what he snaps at her when he's angry or frustrated isn't the truth, and everything else is incidental.

Danicka rises again and plucks her heels off the desk, setting them on the floor and stepping into them. They were well-chosen: they actually go rather well with jeans, just as they went well with her pencil skirt and shirt with its discreet ruffles. Somewhere in this room there is a bit of pale blue lace he's kept since the night it got shoved into his coat pocket. In the drawer yanked from the nightstand are a pair of pearl and white gold earrings. And she is not a forgetful, absent-minded woman, nor is she the sort to play the scavenger hunt game with a man she wants to call her.

She just has completely forgotten about these things.

Because of what they went through last night, a rollercoaster of pleasure and genuine joy in each other and incomparable intimacy and waking up to happiness that could not last, happiness that neither of them have ever had very much of, happiness that ironically got broken because he laughed...and she lost her temper, and broke something that mattered. And he lost his temper, and...may very well have done the same.

And just look where they are now. Look: she's dressed and packed and ready to go. He looks at her; she is routing her path from the desk to the door, and not expecting him to speak. But he does, and she takes a breath, holds it. It is released in a rush a second later as she turns to look into his eyes finally.

Let me walk you to yo--

Danicka shakes her head, says simply -- and very quietly: "No."

She picks up her coat from the back of his desk chair, shoulders her bag, and drops her eyes from his again, to walk to the door. If he doesn't stop her -- and she does not think he will, and she does not want him to -- she grasps the handle and says: "Jsem velice líto, že jsem zlomil váš hrnek."

Her hand twists the knob, pulls the door, and she lets herself out.

[Lukas] (GAH, IT'S CONTAGIOUS.)

[Lukas]

[Lukas] Lukas doesn't stop her from leaving. She doesn't think he will, and she doesn't want him to.

He wants to. Very much. For a moment it's at the tip of his tongue -- Pobyt. -- it's in the marrow of his bones to go after her. The only thing keeping him from the former is that he doesn't think she will, and as much as Lukas hates begging for anything, he hates begging for a lost cause a hundredfold more.

The only thing keeping him from the latter is that he doesn't think he can stand seeing her flinch from him again. Not after last night.

So he stays where he is, which is in the center of his room where -- a very long time ago and not very long ago at all, a little less than two weeks after the first night they spent together, but did not sleep together, in that dingy motel down the street from Mr. C's -- she came to him and he caught her up and they kissed like it was the first time.

He doesn't know why he remembers this now. But when she says jsem velice líto he closes his eyes for a beat.

"Zatím," he says, as she lets herself out.