perfect clarity.

[Danicka] Saturday night. No, almost Sunday morning, into the late hours that become early if you just go to sleep the night before. By the clocks and calendars it is Sunday but everyone here has been awake all of Saturday, left their homes and apartments on Saturday, have lost track of time and date. They don't care anymore. Most of them are here just to get drunk or get laid. There's something about this time of year and the weather getting warmer. There's something about this city, or this part of the city, that makes them all come out and fill the dark, sweaty space where lights are intermittent and colorful and show almost nothing.

Danicka is not dancing. Danicka is sitting on a low couch against the wall with a beer in her hand. Her boots hit her knees. Her skirt -- which is charcoal gray but looks black -- barely hits the middle of her thigh. If she's wearing anything underneath that nearly-transparent yellow shirt with its sharp collar and wide cuffs and the flecks of some silvery pattern that glints when the lights hit her...fuck it. It's decent enough to go out in public but it's equally obvious that the small-breasted woman drinking her beer and cooling off after sweating has no bra on.

The last three people who sat down near her have used the words vicious, dyke, and bitch to describe her. Sometimes all at once.

[Lukas] It could be any club. It doesn't fucking matter. He doesn't even know which club he's in anymore, because it doesn't fucking matter. It's not large, this venue; it's long and rectangular, and Lukas is against one long wall, Danicka the other. There's a scant twelve, fifteen feet between them.

The first time the crowd parts just right that she can see him, he's looking elsewhere, and he hasn't noticed her at all.

He's on a low couch. Against the wall. He's not sitting; he's sprawled, his shoulders and the back of his head pressed to the wall, the rest of his torso horizontal. His feet are planted apart. There's a bubble of space around him, an amorphous zone that no one stays in for long. On the small cube of a coffee table in front of him there's a glass of some quasi-toxic concoction, poison-green, enough ethanol content to sterilize a surgical setup.

He's in jeans, a buttondown shirt. The jeans are dark; they might be grey or dark blue, probably not black. The shirt is striped, a dark color and a lighter one; it might be grey or dark blue, but not black. It might be nice to say he looks a fucking mess, that his hair is tousled and his jaw is unshaven, that his clothes smell like he hasn't changed in days, that there are dark circles under his eyes. But that wouldn't be true.

He looks clean. He looks groomed. He looks like he's still taking care of himself, eating and drinking when appropriate, shaving, washing.

The clothes look new, though. They are new. He hasn't been home since ... since the last Friday. He bought new clothes instead of going back to change, because every time he thinks of facing the same faces, the same people, the goddamn questions, he wants to tear someone's fucking face off.

The second time the crowds part, he's looking right at her. His regard is flat and fixed. He doesn't even pretend he hasn't seen her, wasn't staring.

[Danicka] The moon's full, or close enough to it, that no one can stand to be near him rigt now. He feels like a monster. He looks like a man on the prowl. They both look perfectly put-together. What tousled appearance they have is intentional and carefully manufactured. Danicka's hair is curled at the ends, her makeup is applied, her clothes are clean. She looks lazy and gorgeous and...like a slut.

And the second time the crowds part, she's looking at him, too. It doesn't last. The crowds are dancing fervently, like their lives depended on it.

The third time they can see each other, Danicka is a part of the crowd, in the middle of it. She's not dancing. She's watching him, and the people move around her.

[Lukas] The third time, he's still staring right at her, as though in their time apart he's learned some new trick; as though in the last nine nights he's hung himself from the world-tree, sacrificed himself to himself, and gained goddamn x-ray vision.

He's still staring right at her and she's watching him, and people are moving all around her and she's the still point of the turning world.

And Danicka looks good. She looks better than good. She looks lazy and gorgeous and she looks like a slut, and for fuck's sake, her skirt barely covers her and her shirt is nearly transparent and she doesn't have a bra on again.

The last time he saw her, she took his cock in her mouth but not in her body. She let him come in her mouth but not in her cunt. He wonders who else has had the privilege by now, and then he remembers that doesn't fucking matter anymore, either.

He sits up. He doesn't put his hands down to push himself up. He just straightens up, smoothly, and he picks up his drink and finishes it. The glass is empty when he sets it down, leaves it behind.

People don't move all around him when he crosses the narrow, long strip of a dance floor. They skitter the fuck out of his way. His rage breaks against her like a wave.

He cannot think of a single thing to say; but then, he's not trying very hard either. Lukas just looks at her, this woman whose face was wet with tears the last time he saw her, this woman who gave his present back to him; this ex-girlfriend of his who wrecked his fucking life.

She has no idea where he's been these last nine days. He has no idea where she's been. His eyes are steady and cool. He just looks at her. He just watches her.

[Danicka] It's almost ironic, how they meet in the middle. How she takes the first steps and then he comes to her. If he were not an Ahroun on a near-full moon people would be bumping into them, but a buffer of air and Rage exists now around Lukas, around Danicka. She's slightly drunk. Her eyes glisten like the tears did on her cheeks. Those cheeks are faintly flushed now, from drink or heat or something. Her pupils are dilated.

She doesn't tell him how many times she's been fucked since the last time he saw her. Zero, or two, or seventeen. She looks up at him, the heels of her boots giving her extra height, and then crooks her finger, as though to ask him to bend so she can whisper in his ear. Whatever she has to say she should not yell over the music.

[Lukas] A calculation -- then, with a faint wariness, he bends to her.

The crowd undulates and flows around them. Lights glitter and glance over them, painting her face, his skin, her hair shifting shades of blue and green and pale.

[Danicka] "Jděte na záchod," she murmurs in his ear. Her voice is low enough that only he can hear it, but the music is what's blotting it out: Lukas can understand every word, every phoneme, as clearly as if she were speaking aloud in a private room. "Žen," she adds in a purr of vivid desire that makes the word fuzzy around the edges. This is how she sounds when she's been pressed up against him, moaning not an instruction but his name, gasping yes...now...oh god...

But that was before.

Now, she pulls back as she adds with a wry taint to her tone:"Obvykle čistší."

[Lukas] Lukas can't say for certain what he expected to hear murmured in his ear.

A number, maybe, preceded by Lukáš, to je to, kolik mužů jsem v prdeli tento týden. Another number, preceded by Lukáš, to je to, kolik mužů Jedu do prdele večer. And a third number, zero, preceded by Lukáš, to je kolikrát jsem myslel na tebe.

Something like that. Which he might very well deserve. Something like that -- but not this, which makes him snap his head back and up before she's quite finished.

Her eyes are glittering. He can't tell how much of it is alcohol, how much of it is a taunt, how much of it, if any, is genuine want.

"You're drunk," he says flatly. "Go home."

[Danicka] What he didn't understand before was that she is capable of cruelty. What he doesn't understand now is that she never meant or wanted to hurt him. That she still does not want to hurt him. She didn't hand him the lingerie to hurt him a week and a half ago; that was self-preservation.

He said he understood that.

When he pulls back and looks at her, when she looks at him, her eyes aren't looking the way they did that night at the bar, the night she was so drunk and so high she wouldn't remember it. There's a flash of something when he tells her she's drunk and to go home; he can't tell if it's anger, or if it's something deeper than that.

Danicka steps back. She just looks at him. And then she leaves the dancefloor, walking towards the back. Towards the bathrooms.

[Lukas] He threw her lingerie on the floor of his car when he got in. He's been meaning to throw it out since, or wash it and send it back to her, but he can't bring himself to look at it, much less touch it.

So it's still there. Rolling around the otherwise immaculate cabin of the MKZ, out of place, leaving traces of her scent in the air.

Danicka steps back. She just looks at him. Then she starts to turn and his hand flashes out; he catches her by the wrist and pulls her back so suddenly that some girl dancing three feet away lets out a startled gasp.

"What do you think you're doing?" The words are uttered low; he's in her face. "Don't you think we've fucked each other up enough?"

[Danicka] She goes limp. As he knew she would. As he should have expected when he grabbed her like that, almost vicious. He yanks her back, whips her around, her hair flashing; the lights turn her green and purple and blue for a moment, then she goes dark again. Her eyes finds his, level.

"Let go of my arm, Lukášek," she says softly, her breath beer-tainted and hitting him just below his lower lip. "If you don't want to come, don't come. No one's making you."

[Lukas] There's a glimmer when the lights hit them -- it might be shame. Then it's dark. And it's gone. "Go home," he repeats. "Or find someone else to fuck. I don't care."

He lets go her wrist.

[Danicka] [Perception + Empathy]

[Danicka] She sees him as she's always seen him: deeper than he wants her to, clearer than she should. She sees him and knows...more than he would like her to know about him. Danicka knows Lukas in ways no one else does and she has wrecked him, ruined him utterly. Yet every time she looks at him she doesn't feel triumph or a pleasant numbness or regret or anger but

agony

and a longing that hasn't been beaten out of her all week by anything she's found. For his breath in her ear and his hands on her breasts and the rightness of it, the anguished perfection she feels when he makes her come. The way she could lay her head on his shoulder, after, and not feel

weak.

He lets go of her wrist. Danicka looks at him, then turns around, and walks to the women's restroom. She is done talking.

[Lukas]

[Lukas] (kahseeno, wtf?)

[Lukas] Danicka goes to the women's restroom. She seems to expect him to follow her. Him. Lukas. He'd have to be out of his mind to use her like that, after he left her naked, tear-streaked, alone in a hotel room. After he told her no, no, no, no, it's over, even when she begged.

He'd have to be out of his mind. He'd have to have lost every shred of regard for her. He'd have to truly think she's nothing to him, that she's a slut, that she's a whore, someone that locked eyes with him at the wrong time, on the wrong night.

Meet me in the bathrooms, she'd said, or something like that. The women's, because it's cleaner, and the memory is vivid: her yellow dress against the bright orange walls, her hair golden, her skin flawless and pale with winter. And he knows he should turn and walk out of this club that some streak of bad luck has brought him to; he knows this, but he doesn't know why he's following her to the bathrooms.

He'd have to be out of his mind, and apparently he is. But then, and let's be honest, if Lukas were perfectly in his right mind right now, he wouldn't have spent the last nine days roaming around the city, sleeping in one hotel room after another, avoiding his goddamn duties, letting his packmates think he'd lost his marbles, lost his way, gone off the deep end, gone into a tailspin of his own.

This is a nightclub, not an expensive transpacific restaurant. There's a steady stream of traffic in and out of the bathrooms, and while several people sidle out of his way, no one says anything when he goes in the wrong door.

It's dark in here too. Everything's dark tile, dark metal, dark stone: a glistening black that sheens green if the light hits it right. There are tiny halogen spotlights over the huge mirrors; other than that, all the lighting comes from tiny threads embedded of light in the ceiling, in the walls. Lukas has not waited two minutes. He's right behind her; he's angry; it's hard to say if he's angry at her, or himself, and for what offense real or imagined.

[Danicka] Why did you let me bring you here? I would have thought you'd prefer something... nicer.
Being somewhere nicer wouldn't have made any difference.

This is a pretty nice bathroom, but a busier one. The doors swing in and out but as soon as people see him go in, the line gets shorter. People think about telling the management. No one is sure where to find the management. The bartenders barely have time to fill orders, much less listen. Security? Well if they're going to the front doors they might as well leave. Well if you have to pee so bad use the men's. Ew, Kaeley, that's disgusting. Your mom is disgusting. That doesn't even make any sense.

And so on.

Danicka goes inside, boots tapping the floor and drowned in the music thudding through the walls. It's quieter in here but not by much. Lukas is right behind her but Danicka doesn't stop. If anything she walks faster, out of her own mind -- if she was ever anything but, if she's ever going to be anything but riding the edge between sane woman and lunatic whore -- and going to the handicapped stall. She doesn't turn around until she's in there, until he's followed her, and her breathing is quicker. She's not angry, even if he is.

It doesn't make any difference if he is.

She turns to him and two weeks ago they would have kissed. A week ago they might have kissed. She doesn't kiss him. She looks at him and breathes out: "Jsem mokrá a chci vás uvnitř mě."

[Lukas] Two weeks ago they would have kissed. Two weeks ago he would've been reaching for her even as she turned; two weeks ago she'd be up against the wall before the kiss is over, and he'd be pushing his hands under her skirt.

Two weeks ago, they were still in love. Tonight, they're simply over. They've had enough; there's no point; they're not capable.

Even before she's finished he's shaking his head. He doesn't quite interrupt her, but it's close:

"What are you trying to do? Why are you doing this?"

[Danicka] Tonight they're over. Because he's had enough of her making him weak. Because she's had enough of him -- or anyone, really -- reminding her than she is, always has been. Tonight...there's no point in kissing him or telling him she loves him and wants him, only him, she doesn't want this to end and she can't bear not having him anymore, because he's not going to listen nine days later any better than he listened before. It's not going to make any difference.

Tonight he still believes that they're not capable.

It doesn't matter what Danicka believes.

His hands don't go up her skirt and he doesn't lift her against the wall so he can find his home in her as he has so many times they lost count, if there was ever a number to keep track of. Danicka doesn't answer him for a moment. She leans against the wall, unbuttons one of the three buttons that are keeping that shirt held over her torso in the first place.

"Potřebuji tě uvnitř mého těla, Lukáš."

Her hands slide to the second button.

[Danicka] [Zomgpause]

[Lukas] "Stop it."

The same speed he'd caught her wrist with: his hand closes over hers. He holds her still, before she can undo that second button. His eyes close for a moment; he turns his face to the side, and the threads of light in the walls glimmer and glow off the planes and angles of his features, glitter in his eyes when he looks at her again.

"Just stop it, Danička." He's angry, but it's more than that: anguished too in some way. "You don't have to do this. I don't want you to -- " something like a faltering, "I don't want you to whore for me."

[Danicka] At the touch on her hand, gentler than his grasp on her wrist but just as rapid, Danicka's eyes close. They open again only slowly, looking at his profile and the way he has had to turn his head away from her for a moment. Her shirt is asking to fall open, reveal her flesh, give her to him. She's more tanned than she was the last time he touched her, in the W.

His favorite, of all the hotels.

Blue eyes come around again to her green ones, nearly black in all this emptiness, all this lack of light. When the light does catch her irises, all he can see are the flecks of gold, the hints of brown.

"I know," she whispers. "And I'm not."

Her free hand drifts forward. She hooks her fingers into his belt, pulls him forward if she can. Her question could be coy, from another woman, batting her eyelashes. Another woman might be coy. Danicka never has been, with him. He knows she can be. He knows she would be...with another man. But her question, when she murmurs it, is genuine.

"Do you want me?"

[Lukas]

[Lukas] It's a sort of battle in slow motion, lunges and parries, thrusts and feints. She reaches for the buttons of her shirt and he catches her hand. His hand is still caging hers against her stomach; his knuckles press through her shirt, large and hard.

Last night -- or perhaps it was the night before last -- he broke a man's face against those knuckles. He had no cause, no reason; no discipline to mete out, no Wyrm to crush. He did it because he wanted to destroy something. He did it because he wanted to kill someone, and it was an act of will to hold back at the last.

That will has utterly deserted him. He finds himself incapable of turning and walking out. And when she reaches for his belt he catches this hand as well, catches it and presses it back to her, both her hands under his now, pressed against her torso.

"What do you think this will accomplish?" He's asked her this question over and over in a half-dozen guises. She's given him the same answer over and over, but it's not an answer he can understand. So he asks again: "Why are you doing this?"

[Danicka] [WP]

[Danicka] By the grace of --

no. There's no grace to this. There's no explanation for why she does not raise her voice and shout at him now, snap. But she just barely reins herself in to avoid this. She has a strength of will tonight that is not drunken, is not high or sleepless. She's been taking care of herself. And he can't tell if she's been eating because he won't let her take her clothes off.

"I need you inside me," she says, her jaw clenching as though against a scream, or against tears. "That's all I want. I just want --"

All of you. Všechno.

Danicka tenses under his hands. It's the first time she's ever done anything that felt like resistance to the way he grabs her, holds her, refuses to let her move or forces her to. Her eyes burn into his as she whispers: "Let go of me if you're not going to love me," and surely she meant make love to, not love, surely by make love to she would have meant fuck, "because if you don't need this too I don't know why the fuck you followed me."

[Lukas] So Lukas takes his hands off her. He lets her go and he takes a step back, and this is an act of will, and she can see it, she can read it clearly in the tension in his body, the stiff way he holds himself, if she looks.

"I followed you because I wanted you."

He's almost angry. He spits this confession at her.

There are no speakers, no subwoofers placed directly in the bathrooms, but this is a goddamn nightclub, and the basslines roar right through the walls. Every time the doors open a wave of sound rushes in. They're steeped in it; the beat, the rhythms, the bass is all around them, and for all that, every time she opens her mouth, he can hear her as clearly as if they were together, alone, in a hotel somewhere, side by side in bed.

Which is not what this is.
Which is not how this is now.

"It was a mistake. It's never just a fuck, Danička. We'll end up right where we were. Fed up, torn apart, weak."

Lukas doesn't wait for a reply. He turns and gets the fuck out, walking quickly before he can change his mind, not looking back.

[Danicka] She can see it, because she looks. At the lines of his shoulders and the cut of his shirt and his hips and the body she knows is underneath his clothes. She looks at his face, watches his eyes, fighting off not pride or self-preservation but grief. That's harder than anything, really: you'd think she would have learned to cope with bereavement by now, given her life.

Her life that she's hidden from him.

There's nothing she can cry out, nothing left. He knows that she is in love with him. He knows that she loves him the way wives love husbands and mates love their other half and the way it isn't even okay to say all that often. He knows that she has pride, that she's strong, but...she's not that strong. And she's not that proud. She's unbuttoning her shirt in a nightclub bathroom all but begging him to just fuck her one last time, she wants him, she needs him...but saying that she wants him and needs him doesn't make any different either. Saying that she wants him to trust her doesn't mean anything, either.

Sobbing as he leaves doesn't change that he leaves.

The thing to do now would be to beg him to tell her what, what does she have to do, tell her and she'll do it. Anything. She'll do anything if he'll just come back and hold her. She'll do anything if he'll just make love to her again. She'll do anything if he just won't leave her.

But he's right: Danicka is strong. And Danicka does have pride. She has enough to stand up straight with her shirt mostly unbuttoned and snap at his back:

"I've never wanted it to be just a fuck, Lukáš. And I was never fed up with you."

[Lukas] The stall door swings open. There's a line out there now. Some girl, first in line, starts forward, startles, stops when she sees what's coming out of the stall, what's left behind in the stall. Then the stall door swings shut again, blots her big eyes and her O of a mouth out. Lukas barely has time to throw the lock on the door before he's turning, before he's crossing the breadth of the handicapped stall to

slam his hands down on the wall on either side of Danicka.

Hard. She can feel the vibration of the blow against her back, transferred through solid cement. He slaps his palms against the wall a second time, then balls his hands into fists. He's not almost angry now; he is angry, and frustrated, and he just wants her to

( ... )

let him go. Let it end. Let it fucking die so he can move on, clear it off the table, go on and pretend nothing's wrong while he bleeds the fuck out from a wound he can neither see, nor smell, nor feel.

"No," he snaps right back at her, "no, but we did tear each other apart, and we did it without even trying or meaning to. So tell me, Danička, how strong do you feel right now? Tell me that doesn't bother you. Tell me you aren't fed up with being weak."

[Danicka] She doesn't flinch. She never flinches unless she thinks it's wanted, unless that's what's going to keep her from getting hurt, unless flinching is what whoever is coming at her needs to see to feel big, and strong, and powerful. Danicka is standing straight up before he slams his hands on the wall to either side of her, and she remains standing straight up when he does. She watches the tremors of motion and intensity going up and down his arms.

And she slowly exhales a breath she was holding. "I accepted all the ways I'm weak a very long time ago, Lukáš," she says quietly. "I'm just tired of being reminded." She pauses, and she's not telling him how strong she feels right now. It sounded like a rhetorical question. "I've never cared if people thought I was weak, or thought I was a whore, or didn't trust me. But I don't want that to be how you see me."

She lets her shoulders relax, leaning her head against the wall so she can see him more clearly. "You...make me want things to be different."

[Lukas] "Things were different." There's very little pause between her words and his. "We couldn't handle it. Remember?"

He straightens his elbows. Pushes off the wall, straightens up, drops his hands back to his sides. She recognizes what he's doing, because he's done it a million times before: putting himself back together. Calming the fuck down.

"What the hell would make you want to do it all over again?"

[Danicka] Her head falls to the side slightly as she watches him. Her shirt is still open. And he can smell her.

God.

"The first time I fired that gun you gave me, my arm was sore for hours afterward," she says, almost...patiently. "There is no other way to get stronger than by enduring the weakness that comes before it, burning it out of yourself, conquering it."

(He can smell her. Her arousal. Her blood. Her breeding.)

"I can handle it." She lifts her hand, carefully, and -- if he lets her -- sets it lightly on his face. "When I said I was tired of feeling weak, I was trying to tell you that I want to be stronger."

[Lukas] The second her palm contacts his cheek, Lukas jerks like a whipped horse. He draws a sip of a breath through his nostrils. Then, for a little while, he just --

lets himself go. Lets his head hang down, and his body sway toward hers. The space between them diminishes to three inches, an inch, half an inch. He closes his eyes when his brow touches hers.

It's momentary; barely a second. Then he reaches up and takes her hand gently but firmly from his face.

"Yeah, well." He straightens up again, lets her hand go. "Maybe I can't handle it." A beat. Then he nods toward the stall door. "You should go, Danička."

[Danicka] Lukas lets himself go. He leans in, and their bodies almost touch, and Danicka does not leave that half-inch of space empty. She moves from the wall, pressing against him with her half-bared torso and her skirt-covered hips just as their foreheads end up coming together. Like they do. Like they have. But he moves away again.

And again. Danicka's hand slides away, and then her eyebrows pull together. "No," she says quietly, almost a whisper, shaking her head. "I'm not the one who wants to leave."

[Lukas] In so many ways, Lukas is the stronger of the two. He could tear the rail out of the wall behind her with his bare hands. If he landed a punch right, he could pulverize her face. He can slip his skin and become something else entirely, with more strength than a human mind can easily grasp.

And in some ways, Danicka is the stronger right now. She's dared to admit her weaknesses. She can look them in the eye and try, at least try, to face them down.

Lukas just wants to leave. He wishes she didn't mean a thing to him; he wishes he could just fuck her like a whore and be done with this. He wishes he could even pretend, just pretend, that there's nothing left of whatever there was between them.

He doesn't wish, or want, any of that at all.

He can see her skin where her shirt is coming undone. She's more tanned than she was even a week ago; closer to golden, just as he always thought she would be. He felt her body against his, though, and that was exactly the same. Exactly the same.

The thought is intoxicating.

"I don't want to leave." He's almost as quiet as she is. She can barely hear him over the thunder of music coming through the walls. "I need to leave. I just need to ... think. I haven't thought straight for a week. I can't think straight when you're looking at me like that."

It's not an excuse for what he does, but it's the best he can give her when he goes for the door again.

"Promiňte, Danička. Potřebuju čas myslet."

[Danicka] It doesn't make any sense to her. Loving, and wanting, and walking away. But it does. She understands self-preservation: needing a limit, needing room to breathe, needing to know they can survive each other. That, Danicka can wrap her mind around. Lukas may not have been able to think straight for a week, he may not be able to think straight when she's looking at him like this, but it's not the same the other way around. She's thought about it. And when she looks at him she feels perfect. Fucking. Clarity.

Everything else is fog.

She knows that she is weak. And she knows that she is not a whore. She knows that only one of those words has true meaning. She knows which one it is preferable to be, and which one is simply not permissable. Danicka looks at him and knows that he has no earthly idea what it takes for her to tell him, over and over again, that she wants him. That she needs him. That she's willing to change, that she's willing to try. She looks at him and thinks:

He has no idea how much this hurts

when he tells her what he thinks he's hearing from her lips (you make me weak) when what she is trying to say is just...the answer to a question that was blown over, glossed over, left to fly off in the wind. Danicka watches him push away and try to turn and he apologizes but it's hard for her to believe that means anything at all, from anyone. Because it's him, she tries to believe it means something.

Danicka gives him a small nod, which could mean any number of things. That she understands, that she agrees, that this is all right. It could be seen as permission: she won't make him stop this time. She won't call him back. She won't try, again, to keep him from leaving her.

Again.

Prosím neříkej mi, abych přestal tato doba.
Baby...I won't tell you to stop.

But she wants to answer that question, because he doesn't understand. Or she thinks he doesn't.

So she nods, and he reaches for the door, and she re-fastens the two undone buttons of her shirt. "You asked me how strong I feel right now." A pause, to see if he waits to hear the rest, to see if he gives a shit anymore. He does. Or at least he's curious. She drops her hands; it was only two buttons. "Cítím se silnější, když jsem s tebou."

Danicka gives a small smile that's almost a wince; he probably doesn't see it. "Which is probably why I hate it so much when I think you see me as weak."