pravda.

[Gabriella Bellamonte] For all the time that she'd spent in Chicago, Gabriella Bellamonte had yet to visit the Shedd Aquarium. She had no plans today-- the majority of the Unbroken Circle was either indisposed or avoiding her (or vice versa), Marjorie Lee was back in California for the summer visiting her parents, and everyone else was simply gone. There was no summer practice for the school's orchestra, no events on the calendar, and frankly she was sick and tired of sprawling about The Brotherhood reading. She was starting quite the library of books in her bedroom, and she'd gone through every one of them.

So she took today to go to the aquarium. Why not? It was an indoor establishment, the day had been a little muggy and a little cloudy, so it seemed perfect.

And this was precisely where Gabbie was. She currently loitered in front of the Wild Reef exhibition, dressed in a pair of expensive distressed jeans, simple but no doubt expensive open-toed black heels, and a gray T-shirt with a black lace camisole peeking out from the bottom of such. She had a multi-colored square scarf wrapped about her neck in a loose and current-to-style imitation of a cowboy's bandana from the old western movies, primarily in tones of aqua, pink, and purple, and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail with her long bangs swept to one side. She kept no purse with her, everything she needed had been tucked away into the pockets of her snug pants. It was harder to steal pants than it was a purse, after all.

[Lukas] The pink and the purple in Gabbie's scarf disappear into the shadows as she leaves the bright-lit, high-ceilinged main hall to enter the Wild Reef wing. The aqua, though, positively glows in this artificial twilight -- as though a piece of the jewel-bright aquaria curving from the walls has detached itself and deigned to linger on the kingirl's person.

It's dark here, with muted path lights guiding visitors past vast oceanic displays. The crowds are considerable today: it's muggy, it's warm, it's Memorial Day weekend. Most people come here for the sharks, though, and they pass the schooling fish display right by. Even if they didn't, the man on the padded bench would drive them away before long. There's an emptiness around him, a space that humans consciously or unconsciously avoid. That's fine with him: it affords him a better view of the silent whirlwind of silvery fish behind the glass.

Gabriella, though, grew up with Garou siblings. Edward was laid back, but Katherine was as angry as an Ahroun. Perhaps she doesn't notice the Rage. Perhaps she's strong enough to weather it. Perhaps she's on the verge of walking right by him, her attention on the fish, when Lukas speaks up.

"Hey. Gabbie."

The Ahroun is relaxed on the bench, his back to the cushions, one ankle crossed over the other knee. He's in a linen shirt, short-sleeved, button-up, that might be white or light grey, though this light makes it a pale, bluish blur. His pants are light too, some sandy color, very summery. He looks relaxed, quiet, contemplative; the corner of his mouth turns up a little when she sees him.

"What are you doing here?"

[Gabriella Bellamonte] Gabriella had been drifting slowly through the aquarium today, taking a few meandering steps, pausing, observing, and continuing. This was the cycle that she'd been practicing for the past forty five minutes, and it didn't bother her a bit that she was doing it in three inch heels. These were broken in, and expensive not just because they looked nice but because they were comfortable to boot. No blisters or sore arches today.

She'd walked into a more vaccant part of the building, but didn't seem to notice. The world was tinged aquamarine and she was enjoying it, she had eyes only for the fish and the reefs and the sea mammals today. So accustomed to Rage was she that while so absorbed in this underwater world she'd barely noticed that she'd walked directly into a cloud of it. When she heard her name, it surprised her, but certainly didn't startle her. She didn't jump, but her eyebrows flew up high on her forehead and she turned about to hunt for the person calling out to her.

Lukas.

She blinked at him, surprised to find him out here, she'd always thought he was more a night person than anything else, when she passed by his room most of the time during the day she would hear the rhythmic sounds of his heavy sleep breathing and be assured of his presence. They might not have met on the most pleasant terms last time, but she had forgiven him. He was in some sort of a fit of depression or Rage or something, and she needed friends too badly these days to let something like that tear apart relationships.

So she smiled at him, the expression not quite so bright and sparkling as it usually was, but bounds more authentic because of how loose and relaxed it was. Turning away from the display, she walked over to stand before the bench that he lounged on. "Taking in the beauty. What about you?"

[Matthias Jorgenson] The tread of heavily soled leather boots grows steadily louder near the oceanic displays, barely audible at first, then growing steadily louder. The crowd seems oblivious, though when the growing sound of the footfalls gives way to the view of a hulking figure well in excess of 6 feet, the concerned glances and shuffling feet part the humans milling about the area. A mane of blond hair falls to wide shoulders, swarthed in a black tee shirt that would seem voluminous on most yet fit the more-than-a-man Matthias well.

A large wooden handle juts from the hip of the Fenrir, its terminus lost in the black cotton of his shirt. Denim jeans, dark and devoid of device or brand name design, flow to the tops of brown leather boots...

In short, Matthias is the very image he always has been... Stern and dangerous... Rage gathering around him, leaving a distinct level of discomfort as he makes his way through the other people in the area, gathering with his every stop in lieu of even the merest breath of wind.

[Lukas] "Relaxing."

His eyes return to the display as though drawn. The schooling fish form a glittering cyclone in the luminous blue aquarium. The glass stretches from wall to wall, floor to ceiling; most of the light in its vicinity comes from within, refracts and scatters through the glass, paints the Ahroun's face shades of blue. It makes the color of his eyes a little more vivid; a little less cold.

"Caleb's concerned about you," he adds. It seems like there might be more, but if there is, Lukas doesn't voice it.

An approaching whirlwind of rage: the Ahroun's eyes shift from the aquarium, flicker to Matthias. It's a moment before he recalls. Milo's packmate, that's right. The Ahroun lowers his foot to the floor, sitting up a little.

"Matthias, I haven't seen your elder brother in some time. I thought you guys might've left town."

[Gabriella Bellamonte] Lukas mentions how Caleb was apparently concerned about her, and something flickered in the Kinfolk's pretty blue eyes. Contempt, anger, memory... something along those lines. But it was gone as soon as it had appeared, and the comfortable smile never left her face. Matter of fact, it never even tightened. She pondered taking a seat beside him, but remained on her feet for now, and instead chose to tuck her thumbs into the front pockets of her pants and let her fingers rest loosely curled against the fronts of her hips.

"Caleb and I have had our discussions, and he knows precisely how little I care about or for his concern."

Then Lukas's eyes flicker to something over her shoulder and the Rage that she was accustomed to but still very well aware of thickened immensely. She blinked when Lukas addressed this person, and turned to glance over her shoulder at him. Holy Hell, Thor Incarnate. She said nothing, but left a polite ghost of a smile on her face and glanced neutrally between the men as they exchanged greetings.

[Matthias Jorgenson] "I remain."

The Fenrir's steel gray eyes move to Lukas as he approaches, then to the woman with whom Lukas had been conversing. As he answers, the deep bass rumble seems to express some measure of trepidation... And resolve.

"He lives yet... Though I too have seen him little."

The eyes move back to the woman, a curious expression on his face, before returning to Lukas.

"One of yours?"

[Lukas] Lukas doesn't reply to the comment about Caleb -- perhaps largely because he's never been one to share private business with the world -- but in the instant before he looks to Matthias, Gabriella might catch a flicker, just a flash of displeasure in his eyes.

"We should talk a little more later," he says. Then Matthias is joining them; the Full-Moons exchange greetings.

"Well," Lukas replies, "maybe the heads of the family have him going undercover again. And no," a glance at Gabriella, "a little sister of my brother Caleb. This is Gabriella. Gabriella, Matthias. He's related to Sam."

If humans were eavesdropping -- and none are -- their heads would be spinning at the family connections by now.

[Gabriella Bellamonte] "We certainly can, Lukas," she replies to his suggestion that they talk later in a low, smooth tone of voice. He didn't want private business displayed to the world, and Gabriella was trained to prevent that from happening, raised to keep indiscretions quiet, even if she wasn't particularly keen on all this secrecy old habits were definately hard to break. And don't assume that she didn't catch that touch of displeasure in Lukas's icy eyes, she was very perceptive of such things. Truth be told, though, she didn't care. She knew he wouldn't approve, but it didn't matter. She was upset with Caleb, didn't much care for him, and she didn't believe that just because he was a Silver Fang she needed to be unrealistically pleasant with him.

She considered their relationship distant and profesional, at best.

So Matthias approached, introductions were exchanged, and she smiled that bright, cheerful, sparkling smile of hers that she had practiced, refined, and perfected to look authentic even if it wasn't. One small, nimble-fingered hand was offered for a greeting shake to the large Thor-impersonator. "Hello, Matthias. It's a pleasure to meet you."

[Matthias Jorgenson] The blond mane bounces as Matthias nods... The stern expression and steel gray eyes turning to Gabriella. A simple grin plays about the typically stern expression as he speaks, his words well-measured as always they were and delivered in the deep bass rumble wholly befitting Matthias' physical form. Listening to him speak, one got the sense he said little more than was absolutely necessary, as if being concise was something from which he would never deviate.

"Nice to meet you as well."

A meaty hand engulfs the smaller hand gently, but with enough firmness to qualify as a handshake. Then, releasing Gabriella's hand,

Then Matthias nods, turning back to Lukas. He stands quietly, his arms folded across his chest, seemingly unbothered by the act of standing and making no move to sit. It was as if he seemed perfectly at ease this way, uncaring or oblivious to the motions of anyone who had to move out of their straight line path to avoid running into the large figure.

"It is possible. My... elder brother has talent at such things."

The merest of pauses as he speaks of Milo, the viking expression turning dubious.

[Danicka] She likes sharks. Not moray eels. Moray eels freak her right out.

Danicka stands in front of the tank holding a leopard shark, as she has been standing for the past...ten minutes or so. There's a tall styrofoam cup in her hands with a bulbous plastic lid and a long straw; luckily it isn't from Juiced!. That chain of smoothie shops had one representation in Chicago, and it burned to the ground recently. No, Danicka's smoothie is from a plain old Jamba Juice.

Her outfit is reminiscent of another visit to this aquarium, months ago. She's wearing a pair of brown leather boots that almost reach her knees and have a slouched look to them. Her A-line skirt ends a few inches above her knees, linen in a light tan. It's cloudy enough outside and cool enough inside that she's wearing a light green sweater, but it's a loosely-knit, thin one that drapes slightly off of one shoulder. Underneath it can be seen the barest outline of a white, laceless camisole. She has a purse over one shoulder, middling in size and casual. Her hair was allowed its loose waves today.

She gets tired of the leopard and walks over to the entrance down to the Wild Reef area. There's a sandbar shark there. And the reef sharks. Her heels tap softly on the stairs.

[Lukas] (Lukas is gonna try to read that dubious expression with his new&improved empathy!)
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 5, 5, 9, 10 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Matthias Jorgenson] ((*chuckle* Okey doke... Matthias is gonna try not to let him.

Manipulation + Subterfuge, diff = 6))
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 1, 8 (Failure at target 6)

[Lukas] With their combined rage, the full-moons have driven the humans back further still. They're clearly visible even far down the darkened gallery: a trio, two men and a woman, or a girl, really.

They make an unusual tableau, the three in front of the schooling fish. There's a blond giant standing stoic, a straight throwback to the viking age in modern clothes; there's a slim blond girl, standing, delicate, something of the lilies of france in her face; there's a youngish man comfortably slouch-seated on the cushioned bench, and though his clothes are light and summery, his coloration is darker than either of his...

...friends? companions? He calls them cousins and siblings, but surely they're not that. Surely none of them are related.

Lukas studies the dubious expression for a moment. His eyes are sharp and pale. Whatever he sees, he says little of. Instead: "Well, if you're still in contact with him, tell him that family business in the city can't wait too long. If he can't be around to take care of it, I'll have to start handling them myself."

[Gabriella Bellamonte] And Gabriella slides right out of the conversation. This seems to be a trend when Lukas was involved. Someone always showed up and she was pushed back into the shadows. She was entirely too accustomed to give a damn anymore.

So she stayed standing, closer to where Lukas was seated than where Matthias was looming, but not close enough to look like she was about to sit beside him. Instead she loitered beside the bench, one hand remaining rested at her hip while the other lifted to arrange her scarf and then straighten and smooth and fiddle with the fringes that dangled from it in the same rainbow pattern of colors that the rest of the scarf was woven with. Clear, but not necessarily pale blue eyes surveyed the tanks for a moment longer, but then caught onto a familiar face coming about the corner.

Danicka had arrived. She hadn't seen the woman in a while, was well aware of the relationship between her and the Shadow Lord seated beside her, and had the vague tickling feeling that it wasn't a relationship that was all daisies and perfumed romance. So she was uncertain of whether to call her over or not. Instead she watched her, opting not to approach or call over, but not to ignore her entirely either. Quiet and content in the background, she observed the woman and listened to the men.

[Danicka] Entering the lower level, Danicka watches the life inside the vast watery tanks as she strolls slowly around the room, around the corner, to where she knows the sharks will be. They've been here every time she's come; something about their quiet savagery feels right to her, feels familiar, and yet just alien enough to not remind her too much of things she would rather not think about.

You speak of her so little.

Her stacked heels are remarkably quiet on the tiled floor; Danicka seems so accustomed to shoes that elevate her height this much that she all but floats on them. But she's not as dark or as intense as the sharks, or the two Full Moons lying in wait. She feels a ripple of tension go up the back of her entire body, chilling her spine and raising hairs on the back of her neck, but that tension isn't what anyone can see on her face when she walks within sight of, at very least, Gabriella Bellamonte.

When she sees her, she lifts her free hand -- the one not holding the smoothie -- and her fingers collapse like dominoes in the slightest of waves. There's a faint smile on her face, hinted at in the corners of her mouth. As her hand lowers, her eyes slide to Lukas, briefly, but then back to Gabbie as she heads in the girl's direction.

[Matthias Jorgenson] "I will so advise him should the opportunity arise."

Every word carefully chewed and digested before its utterance, as the viking head nods. Then, hearing the approach of footsteps, steel gray eyes shift to the approaching blond.

The blond man then stands silent, as though silence bothered him not at all, and watches.

[Lukas] "And if it doesn't?" It's not a challenge. At least, it doesn't sound like one. Lukas merely sounds curious: what would Matthias do if his Alpha remains so scarce?

[Caleb Delacourt-Alden] he Aquarium was an exhibit that the Silver Fang had never visited before, never really had a cause to. There was much on his mind of late, of things serious and inane. As of this moment the theurge was standing before a large tank of blue water, an eye raised as he watched the fish swimming around. There was a large manta-ray in there that held the cajun's eye.

Graceful behemoth 747's of the ocean, these creatures were beautiful to behold. It was amazing that such gorgeous fauna and other life could exist beneath the waves - sometimes he could almost envy the whispered-of Rokea. Then again, from what little he has heard those creatures were best to be avoided at all costs.

Standing with his arms folded, Caleb wore a loose-fitting button-down shirt that was so light a gray that it was almost white, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The shirt was tucked into a pair of light-colored jeans, which in turn were tucked into his boots that laced to his knee. Safari-chic, Gabriella had once called it. Caleb called it wisdom - leather was much more prone to stop a blade than mere cloth.

[Matthias Jorgenson] "If it does not, you will be forced to handle the issues you mentioned personally."

It did not answer the question Lukas intended, but it addressed the question Lukas posed. Still, there was consideration as to Lukas' words inherent in the Fenrir's tone as he speaks.

"He still lives. Our territory remains claimed."

[Gabriella Bellamonte] The men continued to talk, and seemed completely ignorant of the Kinfolk and what they happened to be doing-- or even that they were present at all. Danicka had waved in a smooth, single-motion manner and approached. Gabriella smiled and lifted the hand that was playing with the fringed edge of her scarf to return the wave, hers a simple lift of the hand and display of the palm and not much else. Then the hand would drop back to doing what it's doing.

She didn't verbalize a greeting, not yet. There seemed to be some amount of tension in the conversation between the pair of Rage-saturated Garou to her right, so she remained quiet, and simply watched Danicka's approach while trying to convey 'Hello, how have you been?' in her eyes instead of off her tongue.

And another figure, meanwhile, had strayed in closer than what the humans would be willing to with the thick cloud of Rage in this section of hallway. Her eyes strayed in that direction, curious. Upon finding the side of Caleb's head and recognizing that safari-tastic attire of his, she sighed very, very quietly and leaned back against the wall behind her.

Oh goodie.

[Lukas] "I was never disputing your territorial claim," Lukas replies, "but your pack shouldn't go too long without a clear and present Alpha."

[Danicka] She walks towards Gabriella directly until she comes to stand by the slightly younger woman, taking a sip of her smoothie. Whatever she's drinking, it's bright red, almost purple. Gabbie doesn't speak, so Danicka gives her a gentle smile.

"It," she intones, "has been ages," and leans in to wrap one arm around the girl. "How are you?" she asks, when she moves away again.

[Joss Lehrer] She had settled into a room in the Brotherhood, after receiving such wonderful directions from Evan - wait, that was the GPS, not the not so helpful Eagle, but did she expect anything else? of course not! - and thus today was a day for exploration. She will see the rest of the Eagles soon enough, she wagers, and it is always wise to find out more of your new surroundings.

...then she got distracted.
(Look! something shiney!)

Thus - she's in the Aquarium, wandering about looking at the various displays, while munching idly on some popcorn.

Pretty fishes.

[Caleb Delacourt-Alden] If the Silver Fang made any inclination in the way that he noticed the others, it was lost on him. Oh, he knew Lukas was there because of the totem bond, but actual acknowledgement was not needed for the mere reason that packmates tended to feel one another's presence long before they came into sight.

A flickered glance their way and no more, and he returned his eyes to the tank before him watching the manta-ray. Idly he began wondering what one tasted like.

[Matthias Jorgenson] Matthias nods, his voice a steady rumble, as the steel gray eyes meet Lukas' for a moment.

"Nor will it."

The modi simply stands, his gaze drawn to the fish for a time. Then he grins, before speaking once more.

"Nature abhors a vacuum."

[Lukas] At some point, it becomes impossible for Lukas to not notice Danicka. He turns to look at her briefly -- she's hugging the girl, two golden heads coming together and parting again. Lukas's pale eyes flicker down to Danicka's boots briefly, and then he returns his attention to Matthias and, beyond him, Caleb.

"Yeah." A pause. Needless to say, his tone is low and discreet, "I look forward to seeing who stands at the head of your pack at the next gathering."

Then, raising his tone back to normal conversational levels, he nods over Matthias's shoulder. "This is my brother Caleb." And back toward Danicka, "And that's Danička."

He doesn't indicate what Danicka is: 'little sister', 'cousin', anything of the sort. Then again, he doesn't need to. The woman has no rage, none whatsoever; the woman, besides, has the sort of inner flame that makes no secret of which tribe she belongs to.

[Gabriella Bellamonte] Danicka opted to break the silence, stating that it had been ages. In reality it'd been a few months, but a season had changed and it had, indeed, felt like so much longer. So she returned the smile and leaned into the one-armed hug that she had been given, touching fingers lightly to the Shadow Lord Kinfolk's waist in physical response to the show of affection.

With Danicka she has always been utterly honest. No need to change that now, even if she did smooth over wrinkles and blemishes a little due to the fact that other ears were able to listen. So she responded in a pleasant tone of voice, as usual, and leaned back against the wall behind her while doing so, crossing her feet at the ankles and allowing herself to be more comfortable. She had the distinct feeling that she would be standing there for a while.

"I certainly has." Been ages, that is. "I've been better, yet I've been worse as well." Her slim shoulders rise and fall in a dismissive shrug. "In good health, at least. How about you?"

[Joss Lehrer] There's a gathering ahead, and she does not seem to mind, or care - or possibly even notice, as she watches the schools of fish as if they had something important to tell her. She licks the butter off her finger tips before replacing it with more as she pulls another few bits of popcorn from the back, and places them between her lips.

Then, suddenly, she turns her head to eye each of those in the little gathering. Caleb, Lukas, Matthias... and the pretty kinfolk as well. She marks their place, than returns the majority of her attention to the exhibit again.

[Danicka] It's natural, only natural, for her to turn her head in the direction of the voice saying her name, especially when it is truly her name and not some anglicized, Americanized version of it. The woman's breeding gleams under her lightly tanned skin like firelight striking off a copper pot, warm and reminiscent of home, kitchens, long nights stretching towards dawn. Something about her bloodline does not scream the names of heroes or the height of mountains as it does call one to fields, vineyards, and warm hands.

From the way she turns when Lukas says her name, looking first to him and then to the one he is 'introducing' her to, it is clear not only what Tribe she belongs to, but which wolf. There's simply an inherent awareness to her body language, even as she's hugging Gabriella, that ties her by an invisible thread to the Shadow Lord across the way.

But her attention goes back to the Silver Fang, the other Kinfolk. Her smile remains in place. Polite. Demure. Soft. "That was an excellent non-answer, darling," she purrs, and takes a sip of her smoothie. "I need a new car and a major."

[Caleb Delacourt-Alden] As his name was spoken, the theurge turned and inclined his head to the others and then made his way over. "Good evening," he said to Matthias in his cajun's accent. "We have met once, I believe. You are one of Milo's... family, yes?"

Danicka was given a polite nod and smile. He didn't know the woman very well, or at all really, but it never hurt to be civil. Speaking civil, an eye was cast to the youngest Bellamonte and a nod given. A short, brief nod. Acknowledgement and nothing more - she wanted to be left alone, and left alone she would be. For those that acted as she has, they were written off as inconsequential. For the moment, at least. It was almost as if he knew Gabriella about as well as he did Danicka - that is to say, not at all.

Next his eyes landed on Joss, and with the apparent ease at which she stood around them without shying away Caleb nodded to the woman as well. Nostrals flaring briefly - that was all he needed to know about her.

[Matthias Jorgenson] "As do I."

Matthias' gaze follows Lukas' to Caleb and to Danicka. The hulking Fenrir form turns slightly, allowing him to keep them within his field of view. A nod is made to Danicka, before the steel gray eyes move to the woman eating popcorn who stared at them (Joss). The viking's expression turns curious as the woman stares at them, his head tilting in an all too wolfen manner...

Then, as the woman returns to watching the fish, Matthias turns to Caleb. He nods while speaking in that same carefully measured rumble.

"We have met. Milo is my... elder brother."

Again, as his relation to Milo was mentioned, there was that momentary pause... That same dubious expression.

[Gabriella Bellamonte] Matthias had forgotten about her, Lukas as well apparently. There was some woman with strange piercings and hair wandering through, entirely unfamiliar, so she was hardly there in Gabbie's mind. Danicka conversed with her politely, and for some reason it felt distant, hardly involved. Caleb chose to pretend he didn't know her, and that was fine by Gabbie. She didn't even bother to return his nod, or glance his way again when he spoke.

Instead, she focused on Danicka, and grinned a touch when she pointed out how vague Gabbie's response had been.

"Fine then. My days are unhappy." As for the car and the major, Gabriella looked a little confused. "Major? You're attending school?" Such is the way that college students think.

[Danicka] Her pale eyebrows lift a touch, barely even a notch, as she nods. "Mmhmm," is the simple, unverbalized affirmation. "This fall."

[Joss Lehrer] She had caught the glances of the two men, and when Caleb nods, he receives a smile. When Matthias looks at her so carefully, his head tilting in an all too wolfen manner, the smile widens just a touch as she arches a brow slightly.

She seems amused.
And very comfortable in her own skin.

Despite the fact that her gaze seems to be on the fishes - one could surmise that she's actually watching them in the reflection of the glass - or at least keeping track of where everyone is.

[Caleb Delacourt-Alden] Gabriella ignored Caleb. Caleb ignored Gabriella. It was an interesting situation for any that knew something about the two of them, the fact that they did in fact know each other. At this moment, he felt as though the young woman was more a rebellious teenager that needed to get her ass handed to her a few times before she saw to reason. Of course, that also likely wasn't to happen any time soon.

Digression aside, on to more pleasant things. When Joss smiles Caleb's way, his own lips curved. "Good evening," the cajun drawlled to her.

Turning his attention back to Matthias for the moment, he nodded. "Oui," he said. "That was some time ago though. How fare you and yours?"

[Gabriella Bellamonte] "And you've been before?" If there was one thing Gabriella had learned to do with her high-class upbringing, it was to propell a conversation forward. She had to do this all too often, even from a young age, with perfect strangers. She would find one thing that they may mention, even their name if the offered nothing else, and weave a perfect five-minute conversation from what she had. So, of course, this was no trouble when talking to someone she was familiar with.

"What are you going back to study? And what career are you intending to persue?"

[Lukas] Joss has noticed the small impromptu gathering. How could she not? It's a knot of three Garou and their Kin now; the breeding, the blood, the rage in the air is enough to keep mortals shying away for yards.

Of the group, Matthias has noticed her in turn. Lukas too, a moment later. He nods in her direction, politely, without commanding her to approach. Not his place, that. He does say to Matthias, though, "Looks like one of yours." He lifts his chin in Joss' direction.

And stands, a moment later. He's been sitting for some time, and his shirt has ridden up a little at the back, wrinkled. He tugs it straight casually, arches his back in a subtle stretch, and then follows Gabriella over to Danicka.

"Hey." It's a quiet sort of greeting. They don't even hug the way she and Gabriella had, but one would have to be blind to miss the way Lukas looks at her. A beat. Then he reaches into his pocket. "Didn't expect to see you here, but it's just as well. I was going to call you later and return these."

Whatever he hands her, he passes directly into her hand. If she looks, it's a small ziplock bag: her earrings. He's smiling at her when she looks back at him. "There was something else too, but."

He leaves it there, unfinished. Turns to Gabriella. "Listen, do you want to have a chat now? I don't mind doing it in front of Danička, but it's up to you."

[Danicka] [Manipulation + Subterfuge: *whistles*]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 2, 2, 3, 7, 9, 9, 10 (Success x 3 at target 6) Re-rolls: 1

[Joss Lehrer] Caleb says hello, and she lifts her fingers in a wave - the same fingers she's currently licking butter off of again. It's not unusual, considering what they are, that they've all noticed each other. In any other circumstances, if she were but a normal mortal wandering through, she would be completely average to most - average height, average weight (or possibly a slight bit slimmer than average) average looks.

She's anything but average.

The groupings change, and she watches their reflections again - until she is distracted once more by a Dori Fish.

[Danicka] Luckily, she doesn't have to lie.

No. I don't know. I don't know.

Danicka is sipping her smoothie at Gabriella's first question, or assumption, her eyes bland and her expression unreadable but thoughtful, and as her lips part around the straw, her erstwhile 'boyfriend' whose relationship with her does not involve daisies nor rainbows strolls over. The way she looks at him is almost appraising, glancing at his light-colored outfit and then the bag he takes out of his pocket.

Her eyes flick up to him as she takes it with her free hand, moving it to her purse. There are only so many situations where a woman might take off her earrings when she's with a man, only so many reasons Lukas would have them. She doesn't say a word about his there was something else, too, and simply responds to the last thing said..like most people are wont to do.

"It's quite all right," she says, more to Gabriella than to Lukas. "I can just stroll around."

[Matthias Jorgenson] "Mine are well. Yours?"

Matthias nods, rather pointedly avoiding the question as to himself. Then, as Lukas speaks, the hulking form nods again.

"We shall see."

The modi waits to hear Caleb's answer, as is only polite. However, his eyes periodically move to the woman with the popcorn, as if keeping track of her location.

[Lukas] (counterroll!)
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 2, 3, 4, 4, 9 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[Lukas] (grr. and with empathy!)
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 5, 6, 6, 8 (Success x 3 at target 6)

[Gabriella Bellamonte] Lukas palmed a pair of earrings in a baggie to Danicka. Gabbie wasn't ignorant or naive, she had a pretty good idea of why those would be in the Garou's posession. She didn't much care, though. The only place her thoughts strayed to was why on earth Lukas thought he needed to put them in a baggie. All that did was make jewelry look like drugs, and the way they were passed made that illusion all the stronger.

Whatever.

Next the Ahroun was suggesting they 'chat' now, saying that he was fine talking around Danicka if she was. Gabbie had shifted her gaze from the tall dark-haired Monster/Man to the blonde in the slouched brown boots, weighing the options. She liked Danicka, no doubt about that. She would likely tell Danicka precisely what Lukas and she were about to go talk about at a later point. However, she didn't necessarily want the Shadow Lord Kinfolk/friend to see her in the odd chance that she lost her composure, if it may come around to that. She didn't like people seeing her that way.

God Bless Danicka for suggesting that she could stroll around before Gabbie had to ask her to excuse herself. She smiled, the expression genuine as ever and quite thankful, and lifted a hand to pat it lightly to the soft green fabric that covered Danicka's arm. "Thank you. I don't imagine we'll be long."

Then a nod to Lukas, the single gesture saying 'Wherever you like, go ahead.'

[Lukas] (psst, for the record: Lukas would've kept his hand palm-down, and it's reasonably dim in here that gabriella would probably have to actually put effort into looking to figure out what was getting passed)

[Gabriella Bellamonte] (( Then forget the ponderings. :D ))

[Caleb Delacourt-Alden] Joss seemed a pleasant enough woman, so he returned her wave a bit as well as a bit of a nod for her to join them.

Attention back to the Modi, he nodded. "Good to hear. Everything is going smoothly with me and mine," he said. Most everything, he thought with a slight furrow of eyes that was gone in an instant as Lukas lead Gabriella away.

Looking back to Danicka first and then to Joss's popcorn, his stomach rumbled softly. He hadn't thought of getting a drink when he came here. With so much water around, who would need such? Even so.

[Joss Lehrer] He gestures, and the smile warms, slightly, as she taps on the glass next to the Dori Fish (bad Joss!) and sends them scattering with a soft laugh. Then she turns, and makes her way to join Caleb and Matthias. She moves with a certain grace, and the skirt that falls to a length just above the hiking boots on her feet sways with the movement. Her shirt is a simple t-shirt, black as is her skirt, but with a woven glittery gold thread. Simple, her dress. Casual. Comfortable.

Average.

The piercings aren't average - a small stud on each side of her nose, two in her bottom lip, one in each ear. Makes one wonder what else she has pierced... That's neither here nor there, though as she's joined them, and she smiles at them both. Her blood defines her as Fenrir? The warmth of the smile is rather odd, isn't it....

[Danicka] God bless Danicka, and God bless the care Danicka takes to remove her eyes from the Silver Fang and the Shadow Lord. They stride away, wherever they go, and Danicka just sips her smoothie and looks at the sandbar shark.

In a few moments, though, her eyes slide over towards Joss, and then Caleb. Her look is lightly, appreciatively appraising in each case, the way one would consider a piece of modern art, but she doesn't approach them. She vaguely knows who Caleb is, though she's never interacted with him. She knows that he's Garou. That is enough reason for her to stay put, to watch the pretty fishies and the dangerous beasts, and play her part.

She's lovely. She's well-bred. And she's obedient. So she waits for the one who claimed her to come back and collect her. She could stroll around...but she doesn't.

[Lukas] Lukas is only just saying ...going to call you later and return these when Danicka's eyes flick up to his. The light of the aquaria reflect across her irises; brings out the blue, mutes the green. It turns her hair faintly green, though, and her skin pale, making her eerie and remote.

He looks at her for a moment. Whatever he sees in her eyes kills the smile before it's begun to form. He doesn't say anything else after all. Their hands part, she slips the item directly into her purse, and he turns to Gabriella.

It doesn't take them long to decide Lukas and Gabbie will speak alone, and Danicka will wander. The trio becomes two and one again, but a different assortment. They don't go far, the Shadow Lord and the Fang kin; only so far as the manta rays, where Lukas pauses and turns to Gabriella.

His linen shirt catches the light from the water and soaks it up. His eyes are luminous in it. He's foregone the undershirt in deference to the weather; when he folds his arms across his chest his musculature strains at the fabric. Seen from a ways away, silhouetted against the blue and the silent, graceful rays, the Shadow Lord seems very dark, very large compared to the slender girl.

He gets right into it. "Do you suppose, Gabriella," Lukas says quietly, "declaring how little you care for the opinions and feelings of your blood-kin makes you brave, worthy and adult?"

[Matthias Jorgenson] "Greetings..."

Matthias nods to Joss as he speaks, his stern expression giving way to a simple grin. The Rage suffusing the hulking form gives the look a sinister air, but it seems far more pleasant than was typical for him. He moves little, save perhaps to turn so that he faced both Caleb and Joss at the same time... as is only natural when conversing with two people at once.

[Caleb Delacourt-Alden] Lukas and Gabriella move off leaving Danicka behind. The woman looked a bit lost to the Silver Fang's eyes, so with a gesture he invited her to join the trio consisting of Matthias, Joss, and himself. There was a pleasant smile for the Shadow Lord Kin as well, in that she was one of Lukas' and therefore got a free "in" as far as Caleb was concerned.

"I am Caleb Delacourt-Alden," he said to Joss. Then, to Danicka. "Good evening, Madamoiselle Musil."

[Joss Lehrer] "So formal..." she chuckles, and even dips into a little curtsy for Matthias. "Greetings to you as well." She seems amused, and unlike many people, the smile of hers reaches her eyes and glitters there in vibrant blue.

She wipes her hand on her skirt, ridding it of the butter from her popcorn, before offering her hand to Mattias first, than Caleb. "Joss Lehrer."

[Gabriella Bellamonte] Gabriella followed Lukas a step behind, but walking off to his side as opposed to directly behind him. She didn't like to follow people in a straight line, she couldn't see what was coming, just the broad expanse of their backs, because nine times out of ten if she was following someone it was an adult male Garou, and they were so often simply built that way-- the way that human men strived to be, but weren't as often as they wished they could be.

They get without easy eyeshot, in front of the large, broad bodied but terribly short (or long and terribly thin, depending on your point of perception [glass half full/glass half empty]) manta rays. Gabbie cast her eyes to the sea creatures, observing how their 'wings' rippled to help glide them through the water, but Lukas didn't take long to speak. Her expression became lightly puzzled. Curious, but not awfully involved. She turned to look away from the fish (they were fish, right?) and up to the tall, broad, dark man in front of her.

"No... How would it?"

[Lukas] "No?" A black eyebrow shoots up. "Then why are you so adamant about not caring whether or how your actions hurt those who share your lineage? First your brother, then your sister, and now Caleb -- why don't you tell me exactly what you get out of snubbing their attempts to care for you?"

[Danicka] That's his name. Thank Gaia for tender mercies and the habits of people in polite society. She nods to Caleb with a faint smile but she does not wander over to speak to him, Matthias and Joss. She stays where she is, not having been invited, nor given permission, to do otherwise. "Good evening, sir," is all she says, and continues sipping what counts for an evening snack.

Her eyes follow the sharks. The movement of the water ripples on her skin, on her lightcolored skirt, on her fingernails.

[Matthias Jorgenson] "I can be naught but what I am."

The modi laughs quietly at her statement, having taken the ribbing in good humor. Then, still grinning, he answers her in kind.

"Matthias Jorgenson...

You are... new to Chicago?"

He pauses halfway through the sentence, as though deciding how best to phrase the question... As though he were unwilling to settle for anything more or less than was actually desired.

[Gabriella Bellamonte] He drags Katherine and Edward into what is going on between her and Caleb, and this earns him a deadpan stare. She almost seems to take a moment to search for, then find his train of thought. Shaking her head and half ignoring his question, she moves her hand at her side as though she was going to lift it and wave it dismissively, but pauses and instead slips her hands into her pants pockets. They were safer there.

"It has nothing to do with lineage. He pushed his way into my personal business and things became rough. So I'm upset with him." There's a pause, then it's her turn to raise the eyebrow. "Why do you care, Lukas?"

[Caleb Delacourt-Alden] "How does this evening find you?" he asked Danicka. Caleb was at least trying to make conversation with this woman that seemed to have no interest in speaking to any but Lukas. At the very least, he was trying to remain pleasant.

Turning his attention back to the two Fenrir, he nodded a touch. "Well met," he said to Joss. "New to the city, then? Always a pleasure to see new faces."

[Danicka] Caleb's question, for some reason, makes Danicka's lips spread slowly in a gentle, warm smile. She looks over at him as though with new eyes, pondering briefly even as she answers: "Well. Thank you."

Something about her tone underlines the gratitude with sincerity, with the same sort of sparkle that lights in her murky irises. Her looks are diffused by the light down here, and the lack thereof; it is hard to see what she looks like, easier to smell her, to know her as the prize she is...or would be, if someone would simply fill her belly with a child or five. Her bloodline is, after all, known for its fertility. Its loyalty. Its devotion to duty. That's known even to those that don't know her family history; all they have to do is look at her. Smell her.

Her eyes linger on Caleb for a moment, before she tips her head to the side and lets her regard shift slightly. He is conversing with Joss more closely to him, and she a couple of yards away, so she doesn't interrupt further. Something about both of them, the female and the enormous male, makes her want to stay right where she is. They are just too close to the limit of what she can handle, strictly speaking.

[Lukas] "So upset," Lukas's tone is scathingly dry, "that you couldn't wait to tell me all about it. Just like you couldn't wait to tell me all about your little rebellion with -- what was his name, Aidan? -- outside the club that night. I spoke too harshly that night, Gabriella, but the sentiment was true enough. Whatever issues you're working out, that's your business. But if you're going to act out and try to prove how independent and adult you are, the least you could do is learn a little discretion."

A pause. Lukas looks at the manta ray now, the edges of its wings rippling gently as it swims. Then his eyes return to Gabriella.

"I care because he's my brother, and he cares because you're blood-kin to him, and your actions reflect not only on you but on him. If you were my kin, I'd leave you to do as you pleased. But for better or worse, Caleb seems to care about you and what you do with yourself. The least you could do is not act so damn proud to throw his concern back in his teeth."

[Joss Lehrer] He pauses, and she tips her head slightly. He's a very large man, and she's not exactly big herself, but somehow she carries herself well. She is not intimidated by his size, by his rage, by his presence or even that soft laugh. Then again, when one is surrounded by those she grew up with, Matthias is but another in a long line of Modi's she has met, and sometimes even bested.

She offers them her popcorn bucket to share, as she answers the question posed by them both. "Yes, I arrived last night. Just out trying to find my way around."

[Gabriella Bellamonte] Lukas spoke his piece, and for what it was worth Gabriella listened. However, what manner of friendliness she'd held for him when they met some cluster of minutes ago was fading rapidly. By the time he finished, grew quiet to allow her time to respond, she appeared cool with him at best.

In a low tone, she murmered to him.

"I don't need to defend myself from you, Lukas, simply because you don't care. However, if you are trying to convince me to fake affection and appreciation for that man, it is in vain. I don't care for him, it's as simple as that, and without family glaring over my shoulder forcing me to behave in a manner uncomfortable to me, I no longer feel the need to be false."

She pauses, then adds.

"If that's all you had to say, I'd like to take my leave now."

[Matthias Jorgenson] Matthias nods, his eyes drifting to a nearby clock... As a meaty hand reaches into the popcorn bucket. The small handful he grabs appears almost miniscule in his palm, but that nonetheless was the size of an average handful to most people.

"I wish you luck in that. I make my home in Bronzeville, but one such as you might visit Cabrini Green...

I must leave now."

He nods to both Caleb and Joss before continuing.

"Until next we meet."

With that, the modi makes his way toward the exit... The size of the man and the Rage flowing from him causing the crowd beyond the alleyway to start in surprise and split upon his approach.

[Lukas] He's not done yet. He doesn't give her leave to depart.

"I'm not telling you to fake anything," Lukas replies instead, a touch sharply. "I'm telling you to appreciate what family you have left in this city. I'm telling you to grow up.

"As for whether or not I care, Gabbie -- I do. I'm fond of you. I've known you since you were a little girl. I would protect you if it came to that. But I have no patience left for your ... Christ, your immaturity and your self-absorption. It's not the fucking around that rubs me wrong, you know. I could honestly care less, so long as you did it with some modicum of maturity. It's the fact that you seem to take such perverse delight in turning around to rub it in your relatives' faces. You seem to get off on the shock and dismay of your relatives, and I've no respect for that.

"Katherine's gone. Ed's gone. I don't know when they're coming back." Was that harsh? The Shadow Lord's eyes are unflinching: of course they are. A beat. Then, again, gentler this time, "It's time to grow up, Gabbie."

He nods over her shoulder, then. "You can go if you want."

[Gabriella Bellamonte] She seemed okay to simply ignore and let what Lukas was saying slide off her back like water off a duck's. That was the best way to deal with people saying things you didn't want to hear or didn't believe in. That much easier than arguing, trying to make them understand. But when he mentioned rubbing things in relatives faces, her expression went stoney and her eyes flashed something hot, that infamous Bellamonte temper, more prominent in her sister, but present nonetheless in the Kinfolk, the youngest, the black sheep of the family.

She pulls one hand out of her pocket to point a finger up the hall, in the direction where they'd left Caleb, and the way she spoke was best described as a hiss of insult. "He came into my room and confronted me. I didn't need him to know, I didn't want him to. He insulted me, shoved into my business and expected me to be okay with that. I'm not!"

You can go if you want, he says. And so she aims to, spinning about on her heel to briskly take her leave, to get the hell away from Garou, Silver Fangs, Shadow Lords and all.

[Caleb Delacourt-Alden] "Of course," the Silver Fang said to Danicka, returning the smile. So it seemed that she wasn't made of ice after all. If Caleb had been willing to give Mrena and Lukas a chance being rivals of his tribe, he was willing to give Danicka that same chance.

Nodding towards Matthias' departing back, Caleb returned his attention then to the two women. Briefly his eyes alighted on Gabriella's retreating form, looking as though Lukas had said something the woman didn't like. Perhaps, then, he can see exactly what Caleb had to contend with.

"If you like," he said to Joss, "I can lead you back to the Brotherhood of Thieves. It's a bit of a dormitory-slash-cafe and bar for those of us that have a need of it. Good food, and good people. Headquarters," he said with a low-pitched voice meaning the caern, "is near it."

[Lukas] Lukas doesn't stop her; he doesn't say anything back, either. He doesn't flip his lid. He doesn't smash her across the face. There's something in his eyes that's a little worse than that, though. A certain cold patience, a watchfulness.

He's waiting for her to make a mistake.

When her hand comes out of her pocket and flies up, Lukas's reaction is instantaneous, so fast as to be unhurried. His hand unfolds from across his chest and he catches her wrist the way an outfielder catches a high fly ball, easily, solidly, unshakably, long before she has a chance to jab an accusatory finger at Caleb, all the way across the gallery.

The Ahroun's palm is calloused and warm; nearly hot. His fingers form an unbreakable cage of bone. He doesn't squeeze, and he doesn't break her wrist, bruise her skin. It's not even a particularly tight grip. It is, however, enough to hold her utterly still for a second.

Then lowers her hand back to her side. Forcibly, if necessary. His eyes are a clear warning: that was enough.

She finishes what she's saying or she doesn't. He lets her go regardless, not moving to stop her again when she whirls and storms away.

[Joss Lehrer] You may want to go to the Green, he says, and that smile returns as she nods. "I wish very much to go to the 'Green. I've already spoken to one of whom I seek." Perhaps that answers Caleb's comments as well, as he mentions the Brotherhood, and the location of the Caern.

"I have taken a room at the Brotherhood for now - I had been told to seek lodging there when I arrived. As for Headquarters, such things will come in time."

Or not.

"If you'd like to join me on the walk back, though, I would not be adverse to your company." Nice enough. Too nice, likely, for what one might expect of a stereotypical Fenrir.

[Caleb Delacourt-Alden] The only 'Green' he knew of was Cabrini-Green, and if that was what she meant, he nodded. "I can show you the way there as well. I haven't been there in a while, but I don't think its all that far away."

She invited him to come along, and Caleb had no qualms with that. "Certainly."

A look back to Lukas to see exactly how the beta-come-alpha had fared - likely no better than Caleb himself.

[Danicka] There is a soft musical sound from Danicka's purse, a descending series of notes like tiny ball bearings falling against chimes. It isn't unlike rain, but it isn't natural and it doesn't last as long as a rainstorm. She reaches into her bag and takes her iPhone out of a side pocket, and suddenly her eyes light up, and a grin spreads over her mouth. It is broad, and genuine, and bright, that expression.

But what's really telling is that she bounces slightly, her heels lifting off the tile a couple of times in rapid succession. It's downright gleeful.

[Lukas] Lukas looks right back at Caleb as though he were expecting the regard. The two packmates look at each other a moment. If Caleb's trying to read some shred of fury in Lukas, there's little enough. Standing in the dim blue light of the aquaria, the Ahroun looks controlled, calm, unflinching; he looks startlingly ruthless.

His attention moves on after a moment. Danicka has a phone call; it makes her happy. It makes her bounce like a little girl. It makes Lukas wince a little, for reasons that were too complex to explain. He glances again at the manta rays with their great dark wings and their pale underbellies; then he strolls back down the gallery, directly to Danicka this time.

She's on the phone, so he doesn't interrupt. There's a sense -- it's hard to define how she knows, except that she can read every thought in his head half the time, so perhaps it's no surprise that she does know -- that he wants to slip his arm around her and kiss her temple. He contents himself with an inquisitive glance her way: come along with him?

His hands are in his pockets now. He neither offers his hand nor his arm, though on a different occasion he might have.

[Joss Lehrer] "Thank you." she says simply, and takes a last bite of her popcorn, offering the tub toward Caleb once more. If he declines, she moves across the way to dispose of it in the nearest trashcan, wiping her hands on her skirt before she tucks them into the pockets.

He watches Lukas, Lukas watches Danika, who has a happy making text. Joss simply watches them all, the way they interact, the way they carefully do not interact as well. That lingering smile plays across her lips, and she just.. watches.

[Caleb Delacourt-Alden] Their eyes meet briefly, and Caleb gives a slow nod. While he hadn't heard their words, he could readily assume what had transpired between Shadow Lord ahroun and Silver Fang kinfolk. While Lukas looked absolutely ruthless in the dim light, Caleb particularly looked like a battle-weary soldier that had to take care of something beyond his scope of understanding.

True enough, Caleb had younger siblings. Sisters for the most part, but he was not their father. Indeed he wasn't even Gabriella's father or even brother. Aside from tribal bloodlines within House Gleaming Eye they shared no more than that, and truth to tell? Caleb had no idea how to deal with a teenage girl.

"So where're you from?" he said turning to Joss with a disarming smile. A polite nod of thanks was given as he dipped his hand into the bucket of popcorn to withdraw a few pieces.

[Danicka] Not a phone call; a text. She doesn't put the phone to her ear after her little bounce but taps out a response on the touchscreen, grinning all the while. Her eyes flick over when Lukas approaches, but she finishes texting back and then puts the phone back into her purse. She crouches slightly to set her smoothie -- or what's left of it -- on the ground, and then turns, and then...

...throws her arms around his neck. This requires her to lift up on her toes. And that is, apparently, all right. She hugs him close, beaming as her head touches his chest. She is all but vibrating with delight.

[Joss Lehrer] He takes some, so she continues to hold the container a moment later, before she takes the last bites than disposes of the carton. A hand lifts to push her dreads back from her face, over her shoulder to hang heavily down her back before she tucks the hand back into her pocket.

"Minnesota. Storm Hammer."

That may be enough for him to put two and two together and get 15. Or maybe even four. She doesn't give him much more than that, though, to see which way his deductions go. Either he figures that her having sought and found one of the 'Green, the fact she made not indication she intends to find Headquarters, and the Sept she hails from coupled with her breeding means she seeks the Eagles rather than Maelstrom.... or he misses it all completely. Time will tell.

Danicka throws her arms around Lukas, and she arches a brow slightly, but makes no comment on her amusement.

[Caleb Delacourt-Alden] Caleb could try and put two and two together to equal 15, but he really didn't know the connection between Storm Hammer and the Eagles. In truth he really didn't speak to them much aside from when they ventured out of their hidey-hole territory to visit the Brotherhood. Decker Rohl he knew in a professional manner, and knew that he and his dealt in the business of destruction and all-out ass-kickery. At least, that's how the legend is supposed to go.

For the better part of a year Caleb hadn't ventured out of his own hidey-hole in the Tekakwitha Woods for long. Only recently had he ventured out at the urgings of his late alpha.

"Originally i'm from Louisiana. Nine-Swamps." As if she couldn't tell from his obvious cajun accent."

Then Danicka had thrown herself at Lukas, and a slender eyebrow quirked. "Like watching a soap-opera sometimes," he murmured.

[Lukas] Text message, then. He realizes this when she starts typing back. It doesn't change that he goes to her. It doesn't change that he starts to lift his eyebrows at her in silent question.

Danicka throwing her arms around his neck, though, does change things. His arm coming around her waist to catch her up is reflexive; his arm tightening to draw her flush against him is not, and nor is his head bending to hers. At least for the moment, he doesn't seem to care that they were in public, in full view of one packmate, two Garou, and half a hundred humans. He does kiss her temple after all, his lips branding her skin, pressing through strands of her hair.

It's innocuous. They could be good friends ... only there's no way, no human possibility of mistaking them for such. It's something about the way his hand opens over her back, and the way he bends to her, his brow furrowing with the press of his mouth.

It's innocuous; it's unmistakably intimate, a lover's embrace.

When he lets her go, he looks down at her rather solemnly. Danicka's moods are capricious and complete. Once, a while ago, he asked her how she reconciles herself with herself. He doesn't ask that anymore. For all that, he's not the same. His moods are steadier, subtler; like deep ocean currents, slow to change, persistent.

"I'm sorry about earlier," he says, quietly. "I should've waited until we were in private."

[Joss Lehrer] 15 it is. She nods, slightly, having gathered the location of his origins by the accent, though she never pointed it out. She smiles up at him though, briefly. "It usually is. I often wonder if the writers of television dramas are kinfolk..."

Well, often is perhaps not the right word, but there you have it. She's been known to wonder about a great many things. Her curiosity is the primary reason she has attained her rank at such a young age. She enjoys the interaction with the spirits, she enjoys learning answers to questions few others would think to ask..

It is likely that as they walk back toward the Brotherhood, she tells him more of herself. It is possible they discover common ground, that they discover they share a moon, if not a rank. It is possible that they discover she - for all her youth - is effectively his superior in the eyes of the nation, though she does not seem the type to lord if over anyone. She's too.... well. nice. For Fenrir. It's odd. [she must be hiding something.. right?]

Either way, the walk back to the Brotherhood passes in pleasant conversation, a discover of landmarks, of the boundary of Eagle territory, and of course, a safe delivery to the haven of a bar itself, and the room she has taken residence in - room one. It is there that she says a thank you - and closes the door after he takes his leave.

[Danicka] "Doesn't matter," she says cheerfully, as his arm loosens and her heels touch the floor again. She is beaming. She's glowing.

And yes. She's mercurial. Capricious. Her moods shift, and she does not waste her energy where she needn't put it. It's better if the Garou see her as she has always been seen: pretty, and vapid, and useless until she's bred. It's easier that way, and it's familiar. So she doesn't interrupt their conversations, introduce herself, mingle the way she does with other Kinfolk. There's a line. There should be a line, at least; that is how she was brought up.

Her happiness is dramatic, but then, so is the news causing it.

She grins up at Lukas and doesn't step back. She doesn't care, it doesn't matter, it isn't important that they're in public or that he gave her those earrings in front of Gabbie or any of it. "Šárka and the children are coming to America," she says, her eyes gleaming with even more emotion than simple joy, though there is plenty of that.

[Lukas] (w00t lookit my 4 dice)
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 5, 5, 6, 6 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Lukas] She doesn't step back. They disentangle from one another, but they remain close, well within private speaking distance. People see them and think, aw, what a handsome couple. Then they get closer and think, what does she see in him?

None of that matters. Making her angry does matter to him, but apparently no longer to her. She's cheerful; glowing. He looks at her for a moment, curious. Then he nods her toward the exit of the exhibit, his hand touching briefly at the center of her back as they go.

"Who's Šárka?"

[Danicka] Danicka has to pause to pick up the cup she was carrying earlier, but she takes a long drink when she does and almost eagerly starts to walk with him around the tanks and towards the stairs. Closing is soon anyway. There is a light bounce to her step, as though she is restraining further delighted energy and expressions of girlish glee as she walks alongside him. Handsome couple indeed, though a bit mismatched; he's so very dark, and she's so very golden, and they imagine her wrists with friction burns, imagine her face in tears.

Not because she looks so happy, or because she's so slender; because of what he is. They will never know who he is.

"One of my sisters," she answers blithely, as they hit the stairs and start to head upwards.

[Lukas] "Danička?" He pauses; waits til she turns to look at him. A step or two below, their heights are a little more similar. They're nearly eye to eye. He's smiling, but a little quizzically, the way a man smiles when he's laughing along at a joke he missed. "Why are you so relieved?"

[Danicka] Lukas pauses but Danicka, at first, does not. She is still bounding up the steps, and so it is more like three or four steps before she turns to look at him over her shoulder, free hand on the railing and other hand wrapped around her smoothie cup. At his smile, she tips her head a little to the side and smiles right back.

It's strange, and it's strange that it's strange, but she doesn't look upset with him for seeing through her. She doesn't look wary. "Šárka's sick." Which isn't enough. Her smile thins slightly. It's almost a wince. "She has breast cancer. The Tribe has been trying to help her get to the States for a year now for treatment. I have a niece and a nephew that will Change," she adds, as though this explains: otherwise the Tribe wouldn't bother.

Her hand comes off the railing, reaches back to him, palm down. She is telling him things. She is looking in his eyes. "My oldest nephew is older than I am. But he belongs to Sabina, Šárka's twin. She's a Judge."

[Lukas] When she does stop, and turn, Lukas follows her up another step or two.

When she tells him Sarka is sick, that she has breast cancer, the smile on her face thins and the smile on his fades. His eyebrows draw together. He takes her hand when she offers it, holds it when he says:

"I'm sorry."

And he means this, as much as he meant it when he apologized for giving her earrings back in front of Gabriella. He starts walking again, and they're walking a little faster than some of the human traffic around them, a little slower than others. Lukas doesn't let go her hand. His fingers slip between hers and press her palm closer to his.

"I'm glad to hear her visa's approved, though. Is she coming here, or to New York?"

[Danicka] Forty-seven is too young to die. Forty-seven is too young to have all her hair gone, her energy gone. Then again, forty-seven is too old to have never met your baby sister, but this is information Lukas doesn't have yet: Danicka is connected with a surprising depth of emotion to sisters and nieces and nephews that she has never even met in person, only rarely spoken to on the phone, exchanged letters with infrequently. She does not want her sister to die.

In part, because she knows what would happen to her if that happened before the youngest child was of age. But that is selfish. Danicka tries to keep her motives for hoping for her half-sister's life pure; it isn't easy. She is not very pure, herself.

Danicka tugs on his hand, and he steps up and meets her, matches pace with her again, as they head for the doors. Their fingers lace as naturally as her arms had gone around his neck. "New York. The house is big enough...and four of the children are minors." A shadow crosses her expression, fades: "Tadeáš and Zdeňka are going to be staying in Prague."

[Lukas] They're reentering the entry hall now: high ceilings that echo with the footsteps of the visitors, and a broad wall of glass at the front. Outside, the sky is overcast, a little stormy. It looks cold, like winter, but people are in short sleeves, in skirts and shorts. It's warm and humid. It's not winter.

"Tadeáš and Zdeňka are Šárka's adult children?" he asks. There are a lot of names to remember, a lot of connections. He says -- there's something perhaps a touch wistful in his tone -- "You have a big family. I didn't even know you had older sisters." And, because he can add, "Not your mother's daughters though, are they?"

[Danicka] Her family tree gets a new branch every time a Garou mate dies, every time someone survives to mate and bear new children, every time destruction gets turned back into creation. Danicka drops her cup in a trash can as they pass one, even though there's still fluid at the bottom, and looks at him as they walk. She trusts her feet, she trusts her steps even in high heels, and they head towards the door without having to weave in between people because most of them get the hell out of Lukas's way, even on a new moon.

Danicka nods to his guess: her eldest niece and nephew are old enough to, in the eyes of the tribe, be starting their own families. They will stay in Prague and damn well do so. Then he says that she has a big family, and she nods a little more slowly, thinking something else.

"No," she answers, to the last, tightening her hand in his gently as they walk through the front doors and back out into the afternoon as it dips closer and closer towards evening, towards dinnertime. "They were from my father's first mate. Sabina Changed before he even came to America or met my mother." She pauses, as they cross the landing and start heading down the enormous concrete steps in front of the Shedd. She looks up and over at him.

"They're family...but I grew up with just my mother and father and Vládík. I don't feel like I come from a big family."

[Lukas] There's a shadow in Lukas's eyes when she mentions her brother. He turns away to hide it, camouflaging the action as a glance around for taxicabs before he remembers she hates taxicabs. She'd rather walk -- in stacked heels -- than ride taxicabs.

She'd rather ride home in a troubled Ahroun's car, the same car that a different Ahroun had driven her to a restaurant to eat and a dormitory to fuck with, than ride a taxicab.

They descend the steps to the sidewalk. She might still be watching him, but if she is he's watching her feet, as though he didn't quite trust her footing. When she's back on level ground his eyes flick back to hers. He chooses, perhaps with an effort, not to ask her about her brother again.

"It was just me, my sister, and my parents too. It didn't feel like a small family at first because we were all crammed into one room," and this is something he alludes to with no reservation and no shame now, which is perhaps something akin to how she looks at him, looks him in the eye, and tells him about herself, "but later, when we started living in larger places, the space became more noticeable. That was one of the few things I liked about leaving home after my Firsting -- all the other pups all the time.

"I like that about the Brotherhood too," he adds. "Always someone around."

[Danicka] Once upon a time, Lukas's opinion of Vladislav was uncolored by the knowledge that a Theurge had repeatedly beaten Danicka to death's door only to bring her back, uncolored by Evan unwittingly telling him that Danicka's first thought after receiving that Gift again was her brother's name, uncolored by hearing what he heard back from his family in New York recently. But now...he's not a cub in New York anymore, watching the older Garou come and go, and he has overheard Danicka counseling her sister in law how to keep Vladik calm because she is not pregnant (again) and he has seen how Danicka reacted when he mentioned Vladislav hurting her.

She shoved him away as hard and as fast as she could. It doesn't matter if she relented, if she wept, if she begged him to stay after that. He brought up her brother and she all but slapped him in the face with her treatment of him. It is no wonder if he avoids letting her see the look in his eyes, if he doesn't ask -- again -- about a topic she reacts so violently to.

Truth be told, Danicka would rather walk with Lukas than ride in a cab, and would rather ride with Lukas home than take a cab. But that's not what they're talking about.

They're talking about their childhoods again, as they walk down to the parking lot. She notices that he watches her feet but she has run in heels like this and going down stairs is nothing. She hasn't even been drinking.

"Usually my house was just the four of us --" her mother lived with them. Night Warder, Athro Ahroun, known for her sheer ruthlessness, lived with her children, "-- but on full moons sometimes we had other people's children. I babysat a lot, as I got older. I was used to carrying babies around before I was capable of having them," she says, laughing slightly.

"It's kind of nice...having space to myself."

[Lukas] She says it's nice having space to herself. She said, a different night, that she was miserable because she was alone. He doesn't ask her to reconcile this, either, but it's not because he knows she won't. It's because some part of him understands that.

He sleeps on a single bed, in a singlet room. He lives in a building full of Garou and kin.

There's a space of silence between them, punctuated by her heels, the chatter of passing humans. The heat of the day is passing now that the sun is going down behind the clouds. A gust of wind, cool and humid, tugs at the tails of his shirt. He's not sure where they're going; he follows her if she has an idea. Otherwise, he heads for the edge of Grant Park, for Lakeshore drive and the shops and recreation spots along that long and gently curving road.

"Tell me about your mother," he says. "I mean -- not about Night Warder, but about your mother."

[Danicka] [Manipulation + Subterfuge: Oh, She Baked Cookies For My Birthday Party At School]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10 (Success x 1 at target 6) Re-rolls: 1

[Danicka] Neither of them, it seems, can bear to be utterly alone. Neither of them want to be constantly surrounded, with no space to themselves or privacy. She craves the latter to a certain degree, and yet still cannot bring herself to lock her bedroom door at night. He locks his bedroom door and yet stays in the 'dorm' rooms even when he could easily afford a place of his own. They are unevenly matched...but matched all the same.

Her hand in his does not tense when he asks her this -- or rather, tells her to talk to him about her mother. It's not strictly an order; she does not think he will get instantly furious with her if she refuses. In fact, she knows this now. He has given her an out, has told her even the words to use to communicate to him that this is too close, that she does not want to talk about something.

Leave it be.

It's been some time since Danicka thought that Lukas will hurt her if he doesn't hear something he likes. And it's been long enough since the beginning of the month for her to think about how she feels about the fact that she tells him nothing. She keeps so much of herself hidden. Even telling him about her half-sisters was, on some level, difficult. A part of her had wanted to lie, and then to withhold.

And then a very small part of her had wanted him to know.

Her hand does not tense and her breathing does not hitch. She walks with him, their strides -- again -- unevenly matched but getting closer. He slows, she quickens, and they try to keep pace. It's awkward at first. They have to adjust, and it takes effort.

She looks at the lake. And then she looks back at him. "What do you want to know?"

[Lukas]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 1, 4, 5, 6 (Failure at target 6)

[Lukas] (HAIL THE GREATEST GOD, WHOMEVER THAT MAY BE!)
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 3, 3, 5, 6 (Failure at target 7)

[Lukas] (well FINE THEN, he can still look for a lie. HAIL KAHSEENO.)
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 2, 3, 9, 9, 10 (Success x 3 at target 6)

[Lukas] It's not really that he's watching her like a hawk, like some sharp-eyed raptor from his totem flock. It's not that he's waiting for her to lie, waiting for her to fuck up the way he does with other kin, with his opponents, sometimes: waiting for that crack in the armor, that step over the line, that gives him the right to...

...well. To do something terrible.

There was a time when they sat face to face, in a cafe, over drinks neither of them touched. There was a time when she was his opponent, or he thought she was, and he tried so hard to make her just another kin. That time, they had already fucked; or done more than fucking; whatever that was, the night at the trashy motel, on the stripped bed, four times, slower and slower, closer and closer, stripping away the layers of their armor as he'd stripped away the comforters, the blankets, the sheets.

But that time, he'd watched her, waited for her to lie, caught it, flung it in her teeth. You're a liar. And again, You're a liar. And, Do it again and I'll make you sorry.

The third time he dragged her out on the midnight street. A cafe patron tried to get in his way; was sure he would beat this woman, this beautiful blonde with the downcast eyes, her arm limp in his fierce grasp.

But he didn't beat her. Because he knew, even then, that if he had, they would've never -- well.

Never come this far.
Never come to this.

Not that he'd known then just how far this would go; just what seeing this through to the end would have meant. He's seen it through to an end of sorts. It was just the beginning of something wholly different.

All of which only goes to say:

He's not looking for a lie. But she tenses, she hides it, and he notices. He sees her more clearly now, sometimes. He can see deeper into her. And perhaps she tries less to hide what's going on beneath her perfektní skin.

There's a short silence. She looks at the lake, then at him. Under the grey sky, his eyes are scorchingly blue, very pale, like ice. He thinks for a moment. He thinks of her saying, She was angry. In the house. She shifted in the house, because she was angry. He thinks of her saying the first syllable of her brother's name when she was brought back to herself by a different Theurge, with the same Gift.

"I want to know what she was like as a mother," he says, quietly. "I want to know if she was a good mother."

Which is a ridiculous thing to ask, really. Lukas is young, his rage not as great as it could be. He's remarkably controlled for an Ahroun. His control is goddamn everything to him. He prizes it above almost everything else, and time and again it's shredded in his hands, he's lost his grip on it, he's shouted at people, slammed his fists into things; he's frenzied. He knows he would make a terrible, terrible father, if allowed near his own children.

So maybe what he really wants her to say is: yes. Yes, Night Warder was a wonderful mother. Maybe what he really wants to know -- or to hear -- is that there was some buffer, some protection, some ... shield for Danicka, growing up in her brother's shadow.

[Danicka] [Perception + Empathy]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10 (Success x 1 at target 6) Re-rolls: 1

[Danicka] Looking at him, Danicka can see Lukas's eyes sliding over the lake as he speaks, and she senses hesitation. Holding his hand, Danicka can feel Lukas's strength, and knows how destructive it can be...and is made to be. Listening to his voice, Danicka can hear Lukas's...fear? Or maybe a plea, for something he doesn't ever actually want from her.

Lie to me.

She could tell him that the line between Night Warder the Ahroun and Laura Dvorak the mother was always incredibly thin, if not imagined solely by people who were comforted by having faith in its existence. She could tell him that Laura could no more leave her own Rage at the door than she could change the color of the sky. She could tell him the truth, which -- if laid out on the table -- is not only horrific but something she has never told anyone before, and give him that power, and give him that knowledge, and hurt him, and risk herself.

Or she could lie. Rub her thumb over the back of his hand and murmur to him what he wants to hear, what she knows he would like best, and say it so sweetly and so convincingly that he might not be able to see through her, even though he is getting better and better at that the longer this (whatever 'this' is) goes on. A very strong, loud part of Danicka wants to tell him not only that Laura was gentle and warm, that she controlled herself as best she could and got away from the family when she could not. She wants to tell Lukas, because she loves him, that it is possible for a Shadow Lord Ahroun to hold a son or daughter and not feel them tremble with panic, lose control of their bladder, cry because their own parent gives them nightmares.

It takes everything she has to tell him, because she loves him, the truth.

But as though it will protect him somehow, she tightens her hand in his.

"My brother and I were consistently underweight as infants because my mother insisted on nursing us. We couldn't stand to be held, we wouldn't feed, and she wouldn't give up." Her footsteps tap softly on the concrete; she tells him this, and nobody whose name is not Musil -- or whose title is not Doctor -- knows this except for him now, but she doesn't tell him that. She looks straight ahead. "I've told you that the first time I saw her in crinos I was three years old." Danicka takes a breath. She sighs out the truth:

"She threw my father through a wall while Vládík ran me to go hide. He held his hand over my mouth to keep me from screaming, so she wouldn't find us. I thought she was killing my father." Her eyes flick down to the sidewalk; it's strange how detached she sounds, as though all this happened to someone else. But it was a very long time ago. "He was eight."

Danicka keeps walking, and looks up again, looks past Lukas to the lake, then at the moon. Her skirt whispers around her thighs. "When I was thirteen, I was hanging out with some boys from class in their parents' basement and they started feeling me up and messing around with me...I decided to leave, and then of them held onto my arms while the other stuck his hand up my shirt. I screamed, headbutted the one behind me, and ran home.

"Vládík was a Cliath by then. He..."

But she doesn't say what Vládík did. She closes her eyes, and takes a breath, and opens them, looking into the distance ahead like she doesn't see what's there. "The next day my mother took me back to their house. She stood behind me on the porch with her hands on my shoulders and demanded that the parents bring their sons out to face me. She told me to look at them and know that I was better than them. She was so angry her hands left bruises, but she told them...she knew things about them, weaknesses, frailties, and she exposed them both in front of me. She made them cry."

A thin, tight smile stretches her mouth as her forehead furrows, and then her expression clears. "She hurt me. No one spoke to me for the rest of the year because they were so terrified. But she was trying.

"She died about a year later."

[1WP burnt.]

[Lukas] Danicka tightens her her hand in his, as though it will protect him somehow.

And then she tells him. And it's more than she's ever told him before; perhaps more than he can bear to hear. But he asked for it, didn't he? They asked it of each other: everything.

All of you.

And this, assuredly, is a part of her. There was a time when he felt, unconsciously or otherwise, that this was all of her, or at least the origin of her; that if only he could uncover the truth at the root, he could trace out every branching, every stem, every leaf. That's not truth; it was never true. Knowing what he does now, knowing her mother tried to be a good mother

(which is perhaps the most devastating thing of all that she tells him. That Laura was not a monster, that Night Warder was not thoroughly superhuman after all, but fallible: a woman that wanted to nurse her own children, and come home to them at night, and protect her daughter by showing her the frailties and the flaws of others, as only a Shadow Lord can and would. Somehow that makes the rest worst. He wanted to hear Night Warder was a wonderful fucking mother; he expected to hear she was terrible. What he did not expect was to hear that she tried, and failed; worse than failed.)

and ended up a monster; knowing her brother perhaps tried in his way to protect her, and ended up a monster -- well. Knowing these things make some of the pieces come together, but not all.

Lukas thinks he understands what twisted Vladik. He thinks he might understand why Danicka is convinced, and rightfully so, that Lukas will hurt her, break her one day. He understands why the line between protection and oppression blurs for her; he can guess at some of the reasons why, growing up in a house where she scarcely dared to draw a breath out of order, lying, concealment, silence and submission became second nature for her.

What he does not understand:

Where her joy comes from. Why her emotions flicker so quickly from one to the next, unstable and bright as a flame. Why she has prisms on the glass when such a thing would only remind her of her childhood. How she is even capable of love; of opening herself as she has; of offering him something like comfort, something like solace, something like protection when she holds him in the moments after they make love, holds him to her thin body and strokes his hair.

What he does not understand: an ocean to the thimbleful he does.

This is all silent. It happens within Lukas, thoughts tumbling soundlessly into place as she speaks. He says nothing throughout; not a single word. He looks at her as she speaks, trusting his feet to guide him, his brow faintly furrowing, his expression set and unrevealing.

It's imperfect, of course. He never was as good a liar as she. He never had the practice. He can't hide the occasional flickers in his eyes, pain and fury and grief and -- when she tells him what her mother did when she was trying -- a frisson of something like guilt, something like complicity, something like understanding.

Because:

I would have done the same.

Because:

We're Shadow Lords.

She's finished. He's silent. He has nothing to say; absolutely nothing. He looks away after a while, the path they walk down. And then he tightens his hand on hers, as though it will protect her somehow.

[Danicka] All Lukas has to do to know what twisted Vladislav is know that he was Garou, that they knew he would Change as soon as he was born, and set this knowledge against the rippling, echoing backdrop of what Laura said to the boys who had assaulted Danicka:

You are better than them.

This is what she said in the ear of her younger child, of the one who would not Change and could not fight and would never be good for much other than breeding. This is what she whispered in the ear of the child who sat firmly at the bottom of the totem pole in that house, who knew early on that she and her father were beneath her mother and brother, that their word counted for almost nothing and their lives for not much more. To hear that from birth, to look at your own flesh and blood and know that...

...and then to feel Rage growing inside of you, to see your mother tear your father to shreds, to see how easy it was for Garou to get away with, to be forgiven for, to be loved in spite of. There is no sin. There is no morality. There is only weak and strong.

And everyone knew which Danicka had to have been, in that house.

What she's given him tonight is more than she's ever given him before, or given anyone else. Her hand is shaking in his, despite the fact that she is trying not to let it. She isn't cold; the sun is technically up even though it is behind clouds. His hand tightens on hers and she stills somewhat, but he says nothing, and looks away. She saw everything in his eyes before he did. Guilt. Understanding -- though that was for Night Warder, who is long dead now -- and the knowledge Danicka already has and has had from the start.

Her mother was a Cliath Ahroun when Danicka was born. She became a Fostern, in fact, due in part to the renown given her name by having another child, by producing more heirs for the Nation, another generation to fight and breed and die for Gaia. Ahrouns aren't asked to be very Wise; someone should have questioned her wisdom, all the same, when she decided to sleep every night beside her mate and nearly starve her children because they could not stand to be held to her breast. She tried. She should not have. She failed. It was inevitable.

Something else must have happened for Danicka to want a prism in her window, a rainbow on her floor, a man resting his head on her breast after losing himself in her. Something else must have happened in her life, in or outside of that house, for her to be capable of looking at him the way she does and telling him

I love you. I love you so much

and meaning it.

Or perhaps that's simply something unbreakable at her core, untouched by abuse, by terror, by anything that happens to her. She has the capacity to love, despite everything, as though it is as much a part of her as her marrow, as her eye color, as the whorls on her fingerprints.

They walk in silence for another few minutes, only to find themselves at a subway station on E. Roosevelt. Danicka, still holding Lukas's hand, turns to look at him. "...Do you want to go somewhere with me?"

[Lukas] A long time ago, or not a very long time ago at all, Lukas asked Danicka how she reconciles herself with herself. Her answer was: consistency is for children and pets.

This is something of the same. He doesn't know how to reconcile the horrors of her childhood with the woman she is, quite. Consistency is for children, which she is not anymore, and for pets, which she is not either.

Whether there was something else in Danicka's house, in Danicka's history, that allowed Danicka to be the woman she is today is not something Lukas knows, or can possibly know. She hasn't told him; it's as simple as that. He can't read her the way she can him, and even then -- how do you read the history of a woman from her face, except in the crudest terms?

Danicka, cringing on the barren motel bed: You've been beaten before. Which was right. But the rest of that, even, was wrong: He must have known what he was about, to leave you so ...

That word again: perfektní, when she was anything but. Hers is not an unflawed perfection, but flaws healed flawlessly over and over and over.

Nevermind. That's not the point. The point is: he has no way of knowing the rest of her history; and in a way, he doesn't care. He used to think the history of this woman would tell him everything he needed to know about her. Then again, he used to think he would tire of her someday. He never thought he would love her, when he wanted her from the start; loved her from ...

These thoughts in his mind: they spin together and apart, like particles fusing and diffusing at the heart of a reactor.

The point is: he doesn't think that anymore, that the history explains the woman. He thinks perhaps some things are inherent to her, intrinsic, born into her, as deep as the blood that calls to him; the breeding that sighs to him of mountain meadows and the warmth of spring.

He is not a creature of the spring. His hair is as black as volcanic stone, the jagged bones of the earth. His eyes are blue as ice. He turns to her as she does him.

"Yeah." He pauses. He's frowning, and then he's not, and then he's stepping close to her.

There's no reason for this, no rhyme. He cannot reconcile himself with himself. He doesn't know how a moment ago the bones of his chest could have been caving on themselves because he was thinking of her childhood, and why she was always too thin to climb trees like he and his sister, the future ahroun and his big sister, shrieking, robust, energetic little monsters that they were. He doesn't know how looking at her now, he can feel a great up-welling inside him, as though something powerful but slow within him awakens, stretches, pushes aside his viscerae to take the beating chambers of his heart in its warm, crushing jaws.

Lukas kisses Danicka at the top of the subway stairs, which is perhaps what he should have done two weeks ago, but didn't. There are a lot of things he should have done, and didn't.

When he steps back he licks his lips as though to remember her taste. Then: "Where?"

[Danicka] Were Lukas to look at Danicka the way her mother looked at those boys and the way that he looked at Martin once, he might see where bones have been broken and healed, see weak points where if she is struck she will not just go down but lose consciousness. He might see the fissures in her personality, the gaps that can't be closed, the danger she puts herself in because it is the only way she knows how to experience life and maintain some sort of identity beyond her history and her biology.

She is not her body, broken repeatedly and reformed, any more than a shattered and glued clay pot is the wine inside. She is not her history any more than a song is black dots on a sheet of paper.

But he knows now, and that's something. It's the act of giving it to him that matters, as much as anything else. Walking with him instead of walking away, holding his hand instead of pushing him away with a scrap of lingerie passed between them. Or a bag with earrings inside. Just her hand in his, smaller but not cradled. They lace together, equal, but don't allow air between their palms. And that matters, too.

Danicka turns slightly to face him when they get to the subway. He could go to the Brotherhood, she could go home, they could part here and say goodnight as loosely as they did the other night when she took Liadan back to the apartment. She keeps her hand in his, looking up at him with her lips slightly parted as though she's trying not to breathe heavily. She hasn't exerted herself. There's no reason for her pulse or her respirations to be be quickened.

A monster eats his heart inside.

He looks at her and kisses her so, so softly, so slowly, not like a devouring monster but like someone who adores her.

They part, and she exhales, and her eyes slide open. They closed when he kissed her. She got lost in the dark when he kissed her. She aches inside, and her hand tightens in his. "Is it still your favorite hotel?"

[Lukas] His smile is sudden as a spring storm; so is the sort of unadulterated happiness that explodes inside him for no good reason at all. He doesn't draw back after all, or turn to go down the stairs. He kisses her again, and this one is not so soft, not so slow: a quick press of his mouth to hers.

"Yeah," he says again.

Air conditioning wars with the heat of machinery and trains in the subway. They pass layers of warm and cool. At the bottom of the stairs Lukas has to stop to check the map, because he hasn't been carless for very long and because where he needs to go, he tends to take a cab or run on all fours. Or -- at least, he checks the map until Danicka makes it known that she knows where she's going.

He buys a ticket from the machines. She likely has one already. He feeds his to the gatekeeper machine, pulls it out the other end when it lets him through, and all of a sudden there's a rushing rumble of an approaching train, and people are hurrying down the stairs, running down the escalators to catch it. A student squeezes between them, backpack jostling on his back. A young woman, pretty, expensive-looking, breezes past them with her shopping bags bouncing against her legs. Lukas reaches out and catches Danicka's hand; he decides to run too, trotting down the stair in one-twos, running because everyone else is running and because it's fun, though he has no idea whether or not it's the right train.

It is the right train after all. He crowds onto it, makes a space with his body and pulls her after. The doors shut and he huffs out a laugh. It's a weekend, but it's the dinner hour, or close to it, and this is a busy line that leads into the Loop. There's standing room only, so he leans back against the poles and the railings near the door, against the plexiglass shield bearing an ad for some dentist's office or other, and brace his feet wide against the swing and sway of the train.

He stands her between his feet if she'll stay, holds her by the waist, looks out at the lights flashing past in the darkness, then at the reflections of the people inside. He thinks to himself they look like the happiest people in their car, and this is perhaps as much his rage as it is his imagination. He looks at her, the edges of his mouth smiling, and then they're at the next stop and he's straightening up to let people on or off.

The doors shut again. Another stretch -- a short one -- and it's their stop. The station is warmer than the train. He follows her off, and then up the stairs.

"Do you want to get some takeout?" he asks as they emerge into the lakefront air again. "There's a steakhouse about a block past."

[Danicka] [Manipulation + Subterfuge]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 3, 3, 5, 8, 9, 9, 10, 10 (Success x 4 at target 6) Re-rolls: 2

[Danicka] His happiness is sudden; Danicka's can be, but she's shaken still, off her footing because of what she just said to him. It's out there now, out of her control, out of her family, and with not a word on Lukas's part she has no idea what he thinks of her now, how he sees her. She is terrified, and that's why it is and has always been so difficult to tell people...anything...that they do not demand, that they cannot ask for by name. Danicka was uneasy as they walked to the subway station; Danicka is uneasy as they descend into it.

Lukas is happy, and it makes her smile, and it makes her think of her earlier delight, but she withdraws delicately into herself a bit. She doesn't pause at the map but tells him: Miláčku, we just need to get off at Grand. Her ticket is coming out of her purse as she's headed down the stairs, and then her other hand is grabbed, Lukas is running, and she laughs because he's ridiculous, because she would run with him even if he didn't hold her hand, because when they fling themselves into the train her cheeks are slightly flushed.

It is not hard for him to make space for himself. People give it over as though it's his birthright, whether he notices or not. Danicka stands between his feet, leans back on him slightly, but she holds onto the pole...just in case. Just in case he's not enough. In case he --

lets go.

He thinks to himself that they look like the happiest people on the car. They might be. He might not be able to see her, or feel the tension in her waist. But maybe he can. Maybe he can even intuit why it's there.

It isn't a very long ride, regardless of what he knows or doesn't know, can or cannot say while surrounded by mortals, what he thinks or what is true. Her hand is no longer in his, and she doesn't reach for it automatically as they walk back up to the surface of the city. "Um..." she muses thoughtfully, glancing around, then shrugs. "Sure. I was thinking of just getting room service," she adds, looking directly at his eyes then.

He may entirely misread her tension through the journey here in that glance, and see only what is most obvious just then: she hasn't had him in a week.. She's barely even seen him.

[Lukas] (what do you mean probability's stacked against me?)
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 2, 4, 7, 9, 9 (Success x 3 at target 6)

[Lukas] (*thumps chest* HAIL KAHSEENO!)
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 2, 3, 3, 7 (Success x 2 at target 6) [WP]

[Lukas] (>:!)

[Lukas] "Okay," Lukas says, agreeably. "We'll get room service instead."

A beat of pause. Then he falls in step beside her, and they've known each other four months now; they've known each other most their lives, if you want to get technical about it. Still, it's not perfect: he has to slow down, she has to speed up, they search instinctively for a tempo that matches them both.

The W is just a block or two off. It's not far to walk, even in three inch heels, and she's a city girl, anyway, and he could tell because of the way she balanced herself on the subway. Briefly, that had reminded him of the City, though the trains were subtly different and the people were different and the stations were different.

He's quiet now. There's the faintest pink blush in the west; the sun is slipping down. He walks quietly and keeps to himself for a while.

A little later: "Danička," and he looks at her, "is something the matter?"

[Danicka] Happy and agreeable is unsettling. Happy and agreeable could mean that as soon as they're behind a closed door she's going to get it. She's being set up. She's done something wrong by telling him this.

Danicka is not thinking these things. She is thinking far simpler thoughts, far more instinctive, far more embarrassing: she worries if he still loves her, when he does. She wonders if he has missed her, because she has missed him. She tries, with moderate luck, to just let it go. She tries, with grand success, not to show that something is wrong. The fact that Lukas picks up anything at all isn't even chance, it's time; he has a train ride and a walk, not a single glance, to realize that Danicka is being quiet, when in the Shedd she was bouncing like a little girl with joy.

So he asks. Their hands aren't touching now, as the sky starts to change colors, one last Look At Me! Look At Me! before bedtime. She looks out at the lake and harbor, then back to him. There's a moment when it looks like she's going to speak, but stops herself. Her mind retraces its steps, and she tries again:

"I've never told anyone what I told you back there," she says quietly, as though admitting that this means something to her is, in and of itself, a weakness. Maybe once he would have seen it as such; he, who is oh so very honest, so up-front, so loathe to deceive or dissemble.

Or maybe not.

[Lukas] Maybe once he would have seen it as a weakness, or as a rudeness, something inexcusable. He was angry, so angry, when she tried to lie to him; he can't abide dishonesty, no more than he can abide disloyalty, or thought he could not; thought it would rob him of all respect, all regard for a person.

And then he met her. Danicka the liar, the slut, the whore. And he was not ready for her. And she turned his world upside down, and he tore his world apart trying to put it right side up again, and at the end of the day, here they stand again.

She's never told anyone what she told him back there, she says. And he looks at her, and whatever absurd joy drove him running with the human pack down the subway stairs has burnt itself out. He looks at her, rather solemn now, and after a moment -- he holds his hand out to hers again.

It's another thing he can't stop doing over and over again. Like kissing her. Like saying her name.

"Thank you for telling me," he says. A moment. He's looking at her, looking into her, trying to figure out if she wanted him to promise his silence, or acknowledge her gift, or ...

It's neither of these things that she wants. But he can't see that. So he gives her both:

"I won't say a word," he says.

[Danicka] At that Best Western a week ago they discovered -- as though it was lost, ancient knowledge -- that even after tearing themselves and each other apart they could not just fuck, not without her opening and him falling and both of them kissing, kissing over and over like they were breaking a fast. At the W itself, in memory that won't fade no matter how hard they might try, she heard with striking clarity what one of the main problems was: she doesn't tell him. How she feels, what she's thinking, what's happened, why she reacts the way she does.

So this afternoon, this evening, she's tried. Trying, still, to dismantle the wall around her secrets that seems like it was always being built up faster than it could be taken down. It's somewhat frantic work.

He holds his hand out to her, and she looks at it, and looks at him, taking a breath that doesn't get exhaled; it gets drawn, and held even though her lips are slightly apart, as he tells her thank you, as he swears not to tell her secrets, because this is all he can think to do. She slowly lets the air go, because neither of these things are what she wants from him, and she is struggling with asking for what she does want.

Danicka takes his hand, albeit warily, like it's a clawed paw and will overwhelm her, crush her, pierce her skin and break all those fragile, tiny bones. It could. It might. But Lukas won't.

"It's not that," she says weakly, but because she is not weak, she doesn't trail off and leave those words there. She looks from his hand -- their hands -- and finds his eyes. "The last time I saw you, and this time...it's like nothing ever happened, and it's surreal. But at the same time...it's different. And that's..." she shakes her head, glancing down at the buttons on his light-colored shirt, thinking how unfamiliar these clothes are on him in passing, "scary. More than what we had before...scares me."

Her eyes slide back up the buttons, over his throat, past his chin to his mouth, the line of his nose, the brightness of his eyes. "And I think I know some of what you were thinking when you asked about my mother, and I don't know how to deal with that, either."

She swallows, and takes a breath. Shaken as she is, something about this purging seems to be helping, because her back is a bit straighter, her shoulders a little more relaxed, as uneasy as she seems in other ways. "I just...I want you in my life, but I have no idea what's going to happen with us, and those two things together just...makes my heart feel like it's going to beat out of my chest."

[Lukas] For most of that, they don't look at one another. She looks at the buttons of his shirt, his light-colored, summery clothing, and she's right to find them unfamiliar on him. Lukas is a creature of winter, suited to thick, dark fabrics, severe cuts, black wool overcoats with the collar turned up, layers and layers of warm clothing.

In these paler colors, these lighter clothes, he looks -- lighter, himself. He looks like a wolf in sheep's clothing, a thing of darkness and cold masquerading as a thing of light and warmth.

But he is warm. His hand is warm on hers, and that's where his eyes rest while she speaks. They are not quite an arm's reach apart. They're closer to half. He takes her hand in both of his while he listens, and his head is bowed. It's impossible to mistake them for anything but lovers. It's impossible to mistake him for anything but in love, and with her.

Even when she was no longer his, he thought of her as this: the woman he loves.

"I try not to think about the two weeks we spent apart," he says softly, and it's vast, vast irony that Lukas should be saying this to Danicka. "It's ... easier for me if I just focus on what's happening here and now, and don't stop to question where we've been or where we're going, or how things are different, or how they're the same.

"It's easier for me if I just let myself love you, and stop asking questions."

He looks at her now, too. His eyelashes are very dark, as black as his hair. When they lift his eyes are startlingly, transcendentally brilliant: like crystals, pale and glittering, throwing back the light. There is always a hardness in him, even when he looks upon her with love. His eyes will never be the kind to glow with love for her, though they can burn with desire.

"As for what I was thinking," because Lukas is honest, and because Lukas has a track history of just spilling truth out like arterial blood from a wound, "I suppose I was hoping for a pretty lie, and expecting an ugly truth. What made it difficult was that some of the things your mother did ... I might have done myself, in her place."

[Danicka] The irony isn't lost on Danicka. Once upon a time he kept asking her questions: where did she see things going with Sam, would she have rejected him like she did Sam, was she capable of loyalty, was having her worth the inherent risk it seemed to pose to him. Danicka was the one who didn't question herself, or question him, or think about intentions or the future or the past. They would get angry, they would part, and the next time they saw each other it was as though it had never happened. Something's changed.

Now Lukas just wants to love her, and stop asking about the hows and whys.

And Danicka is terrified that he's going to leave her. Or worse...stop loving her.

From the way they stand and the way their eyes don't meet, they could be quietly breaking up. Or talking about where to go for dinner. They've already decided that, though: they're going to go to a hotel room for dinner, and if not eat each other alive, ask for overpriced food to be brought to them. At least at the W it's decent eating. At least at the W they don't have to try and get through appetizers before they can touch each other.

The corner of her mouth quirks out as he explains that he tries not to think of how things have changed, or where they've been or where this is going. It's easier, and she smiles -- genuinely -- because now he sounds like he gets her a little better than he did before. Than she thought he ever could, perhaps. She steps closer to him, even as he's revealing an ugly truth of his own, and turns her face up a bit more so she can continue to meet his eyes.

"You don't remind me of her," she says gently. Not always. "And..."

Danicka takes a deep breath, nervous for some reason. When she speaks, it will be obvious why: "...She thought because we were hers, we would be strong enough to have her live with us, and raise us. She was wrong."

[Lukas] Perhaps it means something that Danicka says she was wrong instead of we weren't. There may be an implicit assignment of blame there, and if Lukas pauses to think about it, he'd be glad it was directed toward the right person. In his mind, anyway.

Or that's what he thinks now, because he's thinking on behalf of Danicka, the woman he loves, with the idea of his own children only a vague abstract in his mind. The truth is if he were to have children of his own, flesh and blood born as much of his genetic material, his spirit, as their mother's, he might feel differently.

Humans are social creatures. Garou, even more so. Family ties matter. Look at him, even now: of all the kin in the goddamn world, there's a scarce handful where every last interaction is not colored and tainted by the overbearing knowledge that he is Garou, and they are kin, and he is better than them. Of those kin, three are family. One is Danicka, and that development was recent and -- sometimes -- still unstable.

Which is a digression, again. Because the point here is: family matters. He keeps his close, even when they're far away. He writes letters to his parents, but only because his parents have lost the ability to regard him as their son, and not their Son, the Ahroun. He phones his sister; goes out to see her when she has a layover. If he has children, regardless of what brilliant foresight he might think he has now, he might well find it impossible to keep away from them.

They're mine. I will protect them.
...but not from myself.

Which, ironically, is something that may be just as true of this woman standing before him as of any imaginary offspring he may or may not one day have.

Still; no matter what Danicka says, where she assigns or does not assign the blame, he keeps her hand in his as she steps closer. A half-step forward of his own, and now her face is turned up to his, and he bends to drop a kiss on her hair; turns his cheek against her brow. It's a momentary connection of the flesh, passing. He doesn't lean into her. They have two points of contact, like chakra on some obscure holy map: brow to jaw, hand to hand.

"She was wrong. But that doesn't mean you're not strong," he says. He presses his mouth to her forehead. "Vím, že jste silní."

[Danicka] Co je doma, to se počítá.

It is not just their blood differentiating them from mortals that makes family so goddamned important. It is not even simply Tribe. Lukas was born in the Czech Republic; Danicka is first generation. He is even more steeped in that culture than she was, and its influence is clearly seen in her at times, especially by someone who has the background necessary to recognize it. What is at home, what is family, counts. Not simply 'counts more'. Sometimes, it is all that does matter.

At least two of the family he has, the 'home' he had, set him gently outside of it when it was clear that he was no longer Lukášek but Wyrmbreaker. It may be significant that Danicka still does not even know this name; to her he is Lukáš.

Lukášek, sometimes.

Moje láska. Even when she wished he was not.

And they dance lightly around the topic that seemed broached when he asked about Night Warder in the first place, the topic he alluded to further when he spoke of what he believes he would do in her place, the topic it is a bad idea to talk about in more detail than as amorphous concept, distant from both of them and the moment they are in now. What does not exist cannot be protected, what is not explicitly spoken of cannot belong to him. What they do not talk about, Danicka erroneously believes, cannot hurt them.

They touch, brow to jaw. Sometimes the staggering of it is different; he rests his brow on her jawline after he comes inside of her, breathes against her neck, his arms still taut to keep his weight off of her. Sometimes their faces align and they communicate silently through the touch, eyes closing to eliminate the distractions of light, of different-colored flesh, leaving nothing but tactile sensation to tell them:

He is here

or

She is alive

or whatever it is they seek when they lay down together.

She's strong, he says. He knows it, he says. Danicka smiles softly to herself, steps back, and begins to walk with him. "So is my father." Her meaning may be hard to intuit instantly, but is there, underlining the words: she is strong. But she is also a grown woman. She is no longer a child, physically and psychologically helpless. She is no longer a teenager, lonely and uncertain. Her father was strong enough to live with an Ahroun.

No child ever could be.

[Lukas] He looks at her -- it's that half-quizzical smile again, as if he's not wholly certain of her, her meaning, her intention. They walk together. After a moment he says, "I didn't just mean after you grew up."

A flicker of memory, he and his sister: When I grow up, I'm going to be a FIREMAN. Oh yeah? Well, when I grow up, I'm going to be an ASTRONAUT.

Lukas didn't become a fireman. He became a monster instead. And Anezka didn't become an astronaut. She's a kin of the Tribe, and though as Lukas's name grows his connections might one day buy her an up-and-coming Garou for a mate, he suspects he'll try hard to find her a good kinfolk mate instead. He'll try to protect her, and she'll finish law school; she'll specialize in corporate law; she'll join a firm and stab backs and cut throats (...because we're Shadow Lords); she'll rake in the cash, gather up strings to pull in the name of the tribe, sell her soul for the sake of the war.

Or perhaps just for herself, by then. Who can say for certain? They're young now, Anezka and Lukas, with their ideals and their echoes of a good childhood still ringing in them. War intrudes; power is seductive. If Lukas ever makes it to Athro, he might not even want to sleep beside his mate every night and try to raise his own children -- not for their own good, but because he couldn't be bothered with them.

His thoughts are strange -- they run the gamut, stretch far beyond the horizons of this conversation. He reels them back, grounds them where they belong.

"I think it takes a sort of strength," Lukas says, "to survive that. And not be ... "

Twisted, he wants to say, but he's afraid she'll know exactly who he's thinking of.

" ... utterly broken by it." This is what he says instead.

[Danicka] [Perception + Empathy: im in ur hedz, reedin ur mindz]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 2, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 10 (Success x 5 at target 6) Re-rolls: 2

[Danicka] As a child, when Danicka spoke up to tell her brother that she was going to be a dancer, or a teacher, or a construction worker, he had told her No.

When she told him that she wasn't going to be a mommy, she was going to play piano forever, he told her No.

At age sixteen she threw in his face that she was never going to be a Garou's mate, that she was going to be with Jared, and he destroyed that, too.

There wasn't ever much room for thinking of being a doctor or lawyer, astronaut or police officer. Danicka's hip was well-accustomed to carrying children before she was a freshman in high school. She knew, because she was told often, that she was beautiful. She knew, because she was told often and stared at even more, that her breeding made her damn near intoxicating to some Garou. She knew, long before she ever threatened to run away with a Glass Walker Kinfolk, that any personal decisions she made about her life were made on borrowed time.

Eventually she would be given away, or fought for, and whether she could get away with fucking around or doing drugs or dancing or attending school or anything of the sort would be up to whatever male had her wrist passed to his hand from her brother's. The fact that she is twenty-five and unmated would be a miracle, if not for the fact that her brother is distracted by his own lack of a family. It would be a miracle if not for the fact that years ago the secret came out that Danicka is useless as soon as Garou shift into their warform, that she is a screaming, sobbing mess and in earlier years would even try to bolt, heedless of whatever was in her way.

Being lovely and well-bred doesn't make up for that sort of potential embarrassment, not in a tribe known for its intolerance of weakness. Maybe if they knew what she was like in bed they wouldn't care. None of them do. No one batted an eyelash when Vladislav allowed his sister to move west. She'll be back, they think.

She starts walking with him, hand in hand, as they had before, towards the W just down the street and around the bend. Danicka looks at him, her gaze having to pass through a fine curtain of pale hair, and for a moment she doesn't answer this. She heard the pause, and because she was trained so early on to listen to silences and hear the lie in them, she muses on it.

"You're thinking about Vládík," she says quietly.

[Lukas] There's a stark instant of pause. It's not physical. He keeps walking, and his hand doesn't suddenly squeeze hers, and he doesn't flash a glance her way.

Nonetheless: a pause. Which she sees, and intuits, because she sees and intuits goddamn everything.

"Yeah," he says then; the truth. Of course. And he looks for something to say, and because he can't tell her I used to think your brother was a good man; I used to think he did his mother's name proud and I think your brother is a monster; I think he's twisted and damaged and utterly broken inside, what he comes up with is:

"I asked my family to make some discreet inquiries about him. What sort of man he is; what sort of Garou. It was just a sort of precaution, initially. I thought if you and I were lovers, sooner or later I would be honor-bound to tell him. I wanted to have some idea of how he might react, or what he might expect, and how best to approach him." Pause. "After the ... night you were shot, I asked because I wanted to know if I was right about him."

He's not looking at her, but there's a wince at the edges of his expression. They can see the W now, a east-facing tower commanding a view of the lake. This is the first time they've walked up.

"I suppose I should've just asked you."

[Danicka] [WP -1]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 3, 3, 4, 6 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[Danicka] Everyone still thinks Vladislav Musil is a good man. He honors his mother, he controls his Kin, he serves his Alpha well. He is a gifted healer and no slouch in battle. They honor him all over New York. Other septs seek his counsel. They know him as Heals-By-Pain, Nightson, Throat-of-Daggers

Miloslav, Danicka, and Emilie Musil know him as Vládík. All of them have bled for him...or because of him. He is a monster. He is twisted and damaged -- isn't that what Lukas said about her, isn't she damaged, didn't he and his mother damage her? -- and utterly broken, but he's the strong one. He is the one with the power, no matter how far she gets from him.

Even Lukas gives him that power.

At least he's honest about it. He tells her why he made the inquiries and Danicka's fingers twitch; she's angry. He tells her that his intention was based on wanting to be honorable, wanting to be honest, and her jaw tightens; she's angry, but she doesn't jerk away. He mentions the night she was shot and her feet stop abruptly on the sidewalk for a moment. She closes her eyes. She is too angry to pretend not to be. She is just barely able to keep herself from withdrawing from him -- again -- or lashing out.

She loves him. She exhales, and opens her eyes, and starts walking again. "I can't blame you for not asking me," she says, as a way of explaining: I understand why you didn't. It doesn't mean she isn't angry. "What did you think you might be 'right' about, after I was shot?"

[Lukas] It's not coincidence, not oversight, that he never mentions what he thought he might have been right about. He didn't want to say it out loud -- because he doesn't want to force her to acknowledge it, and because he doesn't want to think about it himself.

But she stops on the sidewalk. Their hands are still linked, so this makes him stop too, unless he wants to drag her behind him. Which he could do. And has done. Their relationship is scarred and scorched; it has not magically become shining and pure. The past is still there, what he's said to her, done to her, threatened to do. The fact is still there that he is Garou, and she kin, and in his mind her brother is her keeper.

She starts walking again. And she asks him what he thought he was right about, and his face hardens. It's hard for him not to grow angry -- for any number of reasons. It's impossible.

He's deliberately even-toned: "That Vládík was the Theurge who beat you and healed you so he left no mark." A beat. "Am I right?"

[Danicka] [WP -1]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 9, 10, 10, 10 (Success x 4 at target 7)

[Danicka] Yet he thinks about it all the time. About what was done to her, even before he knew what was done. Even now, when he has only snippets, assumptions, estimates based on gathered information and leaps of logic or instinct. He doesn't want to think about these revelations that Vladislav was not the brother who protected his sister -- though he did, he hid her when their mother frenzied and he kept her silent when she wanted to sob. He doesn't want to face the simple fact that the Garou in Danicka's family brutalized and traumatized their Kin rather than saving them from that.

And Vladislav did it with total impunity, and for years -- longer than Lukas wants to know -- before their mother died, even she did not stop him. And Miloslav could not. Danicka, certainly, could barely even survive it, much less keep it from happening.

He is angry, but she doesn't pull away from him. Danicka has been honest tonight but instead of feeling safer around him, she's more worried that something bad is going to happen. She takes a deep breath at the sound of his voice, and nods, her brow furrowing briefly with something not fear, nor anger. It isn't even close to anger. Danicka won't look at him, all the same, as they go towards the front doors of the hotel.

The interior lights hit her skin; she's lost some of the color in her cheeks. She doesn't nod, but something about her answer is an affirmative:

"...He Changed when I was ten."

[Lukas] It's fine that she doesn't look at him. Lukas has a hard time looking at her right now. He has a hard time keeping his hand from clenching into a fist as it wants to, as his other hand has already. The moon is black; this is probably for the best.

"And your mother kn--"

And he stops. Of course she knew. An Ahroun who would tell her kin daughter she was better than them would tell her Garou son he was the same; better than them, better than all of them, the humans, the kin, the sheep.

They're crossing the glittering lobby again, and strange; the last time he was here, he was this angry, this torn up inside too.

He tries again: "I don't understand how a brother could -- "

This halts too. Lukas clamps his jaw shut after that. He has nothing he can reasonably say. They're almost at the reception desk anyway.

[Danicka] [WP -1]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 4, 5, 8, 9 (Success x 2 at target 8)

[Danicka] Danicka's hand, smaller than his and cooler but still warm to the touch, gently eases out of his grasp. Her fingers slip away, to avoid being crushed, to avoid being a temptation as much as to give him the room to clench that fist if he wants to...if he needs to. She takes herself as best she can, as slowly as she can, out of the path of his Rage. Or his anger. They aren't always the same, and she knows that better than most. But she is on edge as they cross the lobby, her steps quickening so she gets to the clerk first, so the clerk doesn't have to face the Ahroun.

She is incredibly fragile, to make herself the buffer between him and the world. The humans. The sheep.

He gets no answer, while she checks them in, gets two key cards, and informs them that no, they have no luggage. This isn't even her I'm-staying-the-night purse. She walks back to him, and hands him a key as though it's habit, her heels tapping as they go towards the elevators. Of course her mother knew. And apparently her brother could, whether he can understand it or not. Danicka does not need to give him any more ugly truths tonight, and she couldn't bear doing so even if it were necessary.

His lover -- he called her that, he said it aloud, she heard it -- waits until they are in the elevator before she speaks again, taking a breath and looking up at the numbers. "Could we stop talking about this for now?"

[Lukas] Lucky for the clerk that Danicka gets there first. Lukas had wanted to take care of the bill, not out of some chivalry or some preassigned gender role -- amongst Garou and kin, those were as often as not flipped; and anyhow, by the ways of the Nation, it would be expected for the kin to foot the bill -- but because he wants someone to snap at, to bark at, to take it out on.

But Danicka beats him to it. So he stops a few feet away, hands in his pockets to hide that he's clenching his fists, looking around the lobby with his blue eyes so pale and fierce no one dares meet them.

Summer colors or not, he's a blizzard, a winter beast. When she comes back to him and hands him a keycard, it must be half a surprise that he's so warm, too: so warm that the air in his immediacy is heated from his presence.

The elevator arrives and they walk on. The ambient noise of the lobby drops away; the doors slide shut. She wants to stop talking about this, and his jaw is instantly tight -- it takes an effort not to snap that she was the one that brought up her brother; that he would be perfectly happy never to discuss this again, ever.

Except that's not true. They were lovers. He's still honorbound. They'll discuss it again at least once.

"I'd like that," he says, low. He's watching the numbers too. His tension leaves him taut as a wire.

[Danicka] [WP -1: Arrrgh.]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 1, 3, 4, 9 (Failure at target 9)

[Danicka] Staunch and stalwart Beta that he is, loyal to the end and beyond the end, Lukas is unquestionably a typical alpha male. Danicka is an atypical alpha female, stealing crayons from another girl for daring to enter her home, learning her only nurturing skills from a nurturing male rather than a caring mother, hiding rather than repressing her intelligence and cunning. They are still there. She is as possessive as she is protective, her gentleness has a firm boundary, and she is coolly, sometimes cruelly calculating at times, so subtly that some choose not to see that it is calculation at all.

His anger terrifies her, makes her think of memories already stirred up. Broken walls, torn cabinetry, screams echoing, footsteps creaking nearer late at night. She remembers the hot, humid rush of a wolf's breath on her hand while she was pretending to be asleep, knowing she was being watched by a monster that did not even have the grace to hide in her closet. She fights, rather furiously, to keep those memories free from Lukas's face, to keep his body from replacing those in her history, to not allow him to be the Shadow Lord who makes her heart race out of anything but love and desire.

And she's alone, in fighting this, because likely he doesn't even realize how hard it is.

They enter the elevator, Danicka struggling to not shatter -- oh she's so strong -- and Lukas struggling not to snap at her, and neither of them able to face the one who is the source of so much of her fear, so much of his anger. Her heart pounds in her chest as they ascend, her hands motionless at her sides, her eyes trained with his on the numbers overhead. Her half-sister is coming to America, so are some of the children, and Emilie is still not pregnant and Vladislav hasn't given up, so his focus is going to be trained on the family he can see and not the sister who is far away...for some time.

Unless, until, Lukas contacts him to let him know that he's fucking that sister. Honorbound, after all. She's prime stock that he's sweating on and coming into. Maybe he should apologize for not asking Vladislav before ever touching her in the first place. Maybe --

two tears will roll down her cheeks before they get to their floor. Maybe two more will, before Lukas looks at her again. She walks out of the elevator ahead of him after all, surreptitiously flicking those tears away, heading for their room a little too quickly.

[Lukas] (omg did i maek u kri?)
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 4, 7, 9, 9, 10 (Success x 3 at target 6)

[Lukas] (WHILE WE'RE AT IT: y did i maek u kri?)
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 4, 5, 7, 10 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Lukas] What is the weight of a teardrop? A few milligrams; a microliter's worth of saline. A faint shadow on the cheek, a glitter in the dim lights of the elevator. The crushing weight of whatever emotion drives her past the point of tolerance. The monster in his chest sinking its teeth into his heart.

He doesn't look at her, not directly. His eyes flicker her way ever so briefly when he catches her crying. She does this silently. She almost always does, because if she makes a noise --

( i'll give you something to cry about )

-- she might catch the pitiless attention of those who cannot tolerate weakness.

The doors open. She flicks the tears away, and the gesture is so practiced and quick he might've never noticed if he hadn't already been looking for it. He follows behind her, but catches up quickly enough so she doesn't have to walk ahead of him. There's hesitation when he reaches for her hand; he'll draw back at the slightest hint of tension. He uses his keycard on the door, pushes it open ahead of her, shuts it and locks it.

In the privacy of their room is where he speaks again. "I'm not angry at you, Danička," he says, voice low. "I'm not angry at all. I'm just -- "

He doesn't know what he is. He's angry, but amorphously so; the target of his anger is an Adren, as far out of his reach as the moon.

[Danicka] The way she cries can be so silent, so subdued, so careful, that it hardly seems genuine. Except he has seen her break down completely, and he has seen her cover her mouth to stifle sobs, and he knows how much she hates to get to that point. He knows that silence in the face of terror was one of the first rules she learned, which is why of all the times Danicka has had to run from danger, she has done so while saving her goddamn breath. She doesn't scream.

Her footsteps are softer on the interior hallway than they were in the lobby or on the concrete or down in the subway station. Here and there tonight he's faced her tension, her fear, her anger, and intuited it more than been told about it. He thinks that she sees so clearly, she sees right through him; he does not realize how much he sees her, how much he picks up on because he's attuned to her body language, because he does, in fact, listen. Which means a lot, since he's really one of the last people she'd expect to do so.

Danicka enters the bedroom with him silently, her hair brushing her shoulders and framing her face.

It's exactly like the room where he left her.

"I know," she says quietly, taking her purse to the bed and turning around, sitting on the corner. Her eyes are bright but mercifully not reflecting the moonlight or the lake; those are both through the windows behind her. Her eyes ache in their own darkness, like deep woods outside the circle of firelight. "And I don't want...to make lists of things we can't talk about. It's just...when I'm with you, I don't want to be thinking of him.

"I don't want to be thinking of anything else."

[Lukas] The room is exactly like the one where he left her. She was crying a moment ago. For a second Lukas isn't sure he hasn't stepped back in time; he's not sure the last four weeks weren't a hallucination, a fever dream, a premonition so this time, this time, he'll save them both the grief and stay.

Stay.

But it's not the same room. It smells different. She looks different too. He's wearing different clothes. She sits on the bed and he leaves his keycard on the shelves near the door. He passes her, nearing and then drawing away, going to open the curtains and let in the last light of day.

It's overcast. Through the glass, the clouds look bruised; the quality of light is changing. Dusk is a subtler thing on a cloudy day, day falling to night by degrees. The light that comes in the window now is faintly blue, as though they were at the Shedd once more, looking out on a vast aquarium.

"I know," he says. He pulls a button loose at his collar; leaves the rest. Turns back to look at her for a moment. "I just hope one day what we have is enough that thinking of him won't matter."

[Danicka] This time she's wearing more than lingerie and desire; he has already gotten past the entryway without pulling his clothes off and telling her not to expect him to go slowly. This time she's with him and not some random man met on a late-night train; she isn't on all fours with an engaged guy fucking her from behind so she doesn't have to look at his face, so she can pretend that she's gone back in time and Lukas hasn't left. It hadn't worked anyway; he felt wrong, he smelled wrong, he kept talking and his voice was all wrong. It was all, all of it, wrong.

Danicka watches him as he passes and turns slightly, following him with not just her eyes but with her body, twisting on the edge of the bed to keep him in her sights. She feels oddly comforted by the fact that she's between her lover and the door, and feels a pang of guilt for feeling that way, too.

Her brow furrows at what he says. "Lukáš... what he did will always hurt me. But it changes nothing between you and I."

[Lukas] "Then don't be afraid to talk about him. He can't touch you from seven hundred miles away."

It's a little too sharply spoken. It's also a goddamn lie. Lukas knows the rules; he abides by the laws. There's a reason he calls every kin claim in the city a guardianship; there's a reason the only kin he'll truly claim as his own are his blood-relatives, scattered though they may be.

Lukas bows his head for a moment, exhales.

He turns away again. He doesn't start stripping. Instead, he finds the hotel guide on the endtable beside the armchair; picks it up and tosses it onto the bed near her. Then he picks up the phone as well -- hotels are amongst the last establishments in the world to still have classical, trapezoidal, landlined phones. He picks up the receiver and puts it to his ear; changes his mind. Hangs it over his shoulder, instead and keeps his finger on the switchhook to keep the line dead. A pause; then he faces her.

"Promiňte," he says, low. "I know it's as much because I react this way as anything else that you don't want to talk about your brother. It just frustrates me. There's absolutely nothing I can do to keep you out of his hands if he wants you back. Vladislav is out of my reach. I can't even challenge him honorably."

A pause. Then Lukas grimaces, and comes to the bed, sets the baseset down, flips open the hotel guide to the room service menu.

"And I know it's not all about me." He feels ridiculous even saying it: hedging his goddamn words as if it might protect his stance somehow.

[Danicka] He lies. He can't touch you but he can. Danicka stares at Lukas mercilessly when he lies to her, perhaps one of the best liars in the city if not in the damned country. He tells her a lie meant to be protective, or dismissive, or she doesn't know what, but she knew it wasn't true when she was still a teenager being sent to New Orleans. She was even farther away from New York City then and it changed nothing; Vladislav still held the other end of the leash that has been around her neck since childhood.

Lukas drops his eyes and exhales; Danicka's eyes relent and she looks away again. She keeps her sweater on but leans over to start taking her boots off, left and then right, revealing knee-high white pointelle stockings underneath. She only has one boot off and is working on the second when he tells her he's sorry.

"It actually isn't about you at all," she says quietly, sliding her right foot out of her boot. Her voice is a sigh, not of exasperation but something like exhaustion. "My not wanting to talk about him, I mean."

She drops her boot. Her back is to him when he comes over to the bed, her body facing the door and the entryway and the bathroom. Her voice softens again, lowers again, til it's almost a whisper. She doesn't look at him. "He'd give me to you in a heartbeat, Lukáš."

[Lukas] His free hand pauses on the room service menu. She can feel his stillness even without seeing it. The room is filled with his rage. It's subtler on a new moon night; it doesn't mean it's not there. With her will stripped down, it feels like the air itself shifts and drags along with him, as though his presence were a magnetic field aligning and realigning the very molecules of the room.

When he stills, the room stills too.

"Do you want me to ask him, then?"

[Danicka] She inhales deeply and exhales slowly when Lukas asks her that, grateful that her eyes are hidden and her face unseen even though he can probably read every iota of tension in her back and neck when it flickers through her. It's hard enough having an Ahroun at her back. It's hard enough loving him. And then he asks her that.

"That's not...why I told you that," she says weakly. "I just don't want you thinking about having to challenge him...or how he might take me away from you."

She starts to peel off her stockings. "We don't have to worry about him." We don't.

I do.

[Lukas] "Danička."

Lukas lowers the phone back to the hook. She can hear it clatter into place, and then he's circling the bed to stand before her. He looks for something -- a chair, a bench -- drops to the floor if there's nothing. His hands are warm over hers, but his rage is there too, an electric searing beneath the skin. He's losing track of the times he's taken off her stockings for her, though it's really only been thrice.

He lays her stocking over the side of the mattress when it's off. Then he looks at her, putting his hands over hers to stop her if she goes for the other one.

"Whether or not he takes you away from me or not isn't the point. What ... worries me is that as long as your brother claims you, he can do whatever the fuck he wants and no one can say anything."

A pause. He's looking at her, intently; perhaps he's trying to read her tension. Maybe he's just watching to see what she thinks, how she reacts.

"I'd still let you go," he says quietly, "regardless of who holds claim."

[Danicka] Where Danicka is sitting there's no chair, no bench, nothing for Lukas to do but crouch or kneel in order to be closer to eye-level with her. It's a wise move; she wouldn't have looked up at him, wouldn't have risked her deferential posture to meet his eyes right now, but when he moves downward she lifts her eyes just a little to look at him. Somehow when she is looking 'down' at him, it's still more equal footing than most Kin can make with the Garou that claims them...at least in their Tribe. Meeting his eyes at all is something she only gradually started doing, and it was even longer before he realized that it wasn't deference or submission at all.

It was a withholding. It was one more way she has developed to protect herself from a world where she can only pretend that she has a choice. Except it seems she has one with him. How they have sex, what they talk about, where this goes, if anywhere other than a few more months of nights spent in hotel rooms until he dies or they fall apart again.

Her left stocking is off, her right is on. It's like a nursery rhyme. Danicka looks at him, very nearly holding her breath, and then swallows quietly and takes a breath. "What are you asking me, miláčku?" she sighs, holding on to the edge of the bed with both hands.

[Lukas] So Lukas kneels -- not on one knee like some moonstruck lover but on both knees, sitting back on his heels, the light gray fabric of his pants pulled into stress lines across his thighs and his hips. And they look at each other, and her hands are holding on to the edge of the bed as though she might fall if she didn't, and as though he wouldn't catch her if she did.

His are relaxed in his lap. He's good at pretending relaxation. He's good at lying, himself; it's just he's not as good as her, and not as deliberate.

"I'm asking you if you want me to claim you." His hands make some small motion. "It's up to you."

[Danicka] Not on one knee, and not with a ring, and not with any of the trappings or even the spirit of something that would make her laugh in the face of any other male...at least the mortals, at least the kinsmen. Danicka's left eyebrow twitches slightly, just barely kept from lifting in what would have been a somewhat dubious expression. She knows what this is not, but all the same...

...she is not entirely sure what it is.

Danicka pauses, and then decides to slide her second stocking off. There are faint impressions under her knees of where the elastic met her skin, holding the socks up underneath her boots, but they will fade. She reaches for him after that, her hands lightly cupping his face. "I think...I'm going to call room service," she says quietly, one of her thumbs stroking his cheek.

And she starts to turn her body, toes going to the carpet, looking for wherever he put the damn menu.

[Lukas] Lukas catches her hand before she draws away. She might think he means to force an answer out of her. Squeeze her hand until her bones grind against one another. Slap her, beat her until she gave not merely an answer but the one he wants to hear.

Or -- maybe she doesn't think that. Maybe somewhere along the way she's realized: he won't. Or at the least, he'll try his best not to.

So that's not why he caught her hand. It's something else entirely -- a turn of his cheek beneath her palm, and his stubble of the day scraping her skin, and then the press of his mouth to the center of her hand. He lets her go after that. The phone is behind her on the bed, its line trailed long and beige across the coverlets. The menu is beside that, turned to the entrees list.

"I want the lamb chops," Lukas says, with something of a rueful smile.

[Danicka] [Perception + Empathy: I'm A Human Mood Ring]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 2, 4, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10 (Success x 4 at target 6) Re-rolls: 1

[Lukas] (i can has empathee?)
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 3, 6, 9, 10 (Success x 3 at target 6)

[Danicka] Of course he wants the lamb chops, says Danicka's wry little smile that she gives him off to the side. She flicks through the menu then, letting the room fall quiet. He doesn't grab her to stop her, to demand that she give him what he wants, everything he wants, and do it now. He lets her go, like he keeps saying he is and will remain willing to even though she knows better. Danicka stays close, crossing her now-bare legs at the ankle, thinking over what she wants to eat tonight, wondering she can even eat when she's reeling like this.

Which she is. The joy of her half-sister's impending arrival and treatment, the terrifying exposed feeling of telling Lukas what sort of mother Night Warder was, the thought of Vladislav like a train pounding in her head, grinding her body to dust under its wheels. And this.

Lukas on his knees (not one knee) asking her (offering) what she wants with only the vaguest hint, subdued, of what it is he wants. A week ago they made love for the first time in Gaia knows how long, because they couldn't not. And now she worries, because she doesn't know where this is going, or what is going to happen, and he just wants to love her without asking so many questions. He wants her, but he asks if she wants him to claim her.

Danicka gnaws softly on her lower lip and asks herself if she wants to have soup and salad or maybe the fish... and a slight furrow appears in her brow. She twists around to reach for the phone, ordering for them both, ordering a bottle of wine to be sent up, and then hanging the receiver back in its cradle. When she turns back to Lukas her hair shifts and falls, sliding back and forth over her shoulder until she becomes still and it can rest.

"It might just be better if we ...just kept things as they are for now," she says quietly, looking for his eyes. "I love you...and I want to be with you. I just want to keep Vládík away from you as long as I can."

[Lukas] While she orders, Lukas plants one hand on the carpet and sinks down. By the time she's finished with her call he's sitting in the middle of the floor, knees drawn up, forearms laid over them. He's pull his shoes off, too, and his socks -- balled the latter up and shoved them into the former.

She wants to keep things as they are. He looks at her with his clear eyes, his gaze so crystalline and transparent that he seems incapable of dissembling, and he nods once.

Danicka goes on -- I just want to keep Vladik away from you as long as I can -- and his brow furrows faintly. It's humid outside, the sky leaden and low. Later this week, it will storm, but not yet. For now, it looks cold outside; it's warm, and oppressive.

"Why?" he asks her.

[Danicka] "Because..."

He wrecks everything good.

Danicka reaches up with her right hand and rubs the backs of her fingers once, gently, across her cheek. It's the gesture of a child who is sleepy, who wants its mother, but she does this thoughtfully, almost meditatively. "I..."

Am scared of what he'd do to you if he knew how much you wanted me.

She shakes her head, closing her eyes as her hand drops to her lap. She furrows her brow tightly, annoyed with herself, and when her eyes open again they're pale green, like the newest leaves. "You know how you said that if you hit me, it would change everything for you?"

[Lukas] Two words. Two incomplete fragments of sentences. He waits: lets her touch her face, close her eyes, frown. He wonders if she's aware of these behaviorisms, these minor gestures she makes: he wonders if she knows how animal they are, how unashamed and not-quite-human.

His answer isn't verbal: it's a nod. He remembers.

[Danicka] She watches him, hands folding in her lap, on top of her pale linen skirt, and sighs. "I'm afraid...if you have anything to do with him...he'll ruin you."

[Lukas] It's his turn to frown -- or rather, the frown beginning on his face realizes itself now. "Ruin me how, Danička?"

[Danicka] "Just..."

She is not the sort to talk with her hands unless she is very drunk, very stoned, or incredibly upset. She is not any of these things, though the last is coming close to the level of agitation he can feel has been rising in her -- falling occasionally only to spike higher on the next bend -- all evening. Danicka makes an aimless, fluttering gesture with both hands, taking a deep breath to make herself calm down.

Her flitting hands move til her fingertips touch her hairline, half-covering her face. She exhales. "I just want...you to be...separate. From all that."

[Lukas] Something like understanding, then: a flicker in his eyes, and a faint raising of his chin. "You mean ruin me for you somehow. Is that it?"

[Danicka] [WP -1]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 3, 4, 4, 7 (Success x 1 at target 7)

[Danicka] The words that come out of her mouth should be accompanied by tears; they sound like they very nearly are, the way her voice thins out to a stripped whisper. "He ruins everything."

[Lukas] On the elevator, Danicka cried. Lukas noticed. He didn't reach for her; he didn't attempt to comfort her. They stood side by side and stared at the numbers. They were fucking Shadow Lords.

Here: it's different somehow. It's private. It's their room, at least for the night. It looks just like the room he left her in. It's not the same; this isn't the same, either.

"Danička." He holds his hand out to her, palm upturned. "Come here."

[Danicka] "No," she says firmly, her hands still covering her face. "I am not crying on the floor."

[Lukas] Lukas has to bow his head. It's a wholly mistimed flicker of humor. When he raises his head again, he lowers his hand.

"I didn't want you to cry on the floor," he replies. "I just wanted to hold you."

[Danicka] She doesn't see it, doesn't intuit it like she seems to see everything else, but he still gets a flash of her temper, dim as it is. "If you want to hold me, then hold me. Don't make me come to you. I'm not going anywhere."

[Lukas] (NOT THE TIME TO LAUGH.)
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[Lukas] They could argue about this. Why should she go to him? She's not going to cry on the floor. He wants to hold her; he can get up and hold her. Why should he go to her? And so on, and so forth, because Shadow Lords do not bow to the whims of their kin; because Danicka should not have to bow to Lukas's whims.

He doesn't argue it. He watches her a moment. The edge of his mouth twitches. He bites it back. It fades a moment later, the last curl of humor dissipating like smoke into a storm.

It's quiet enough in the room that his clothes rustle audibly when he gets up. He goes to her, but he doesn't step between her legs and press her face to his chest. He climbs up on the bed instead, and quiet as the room is, the mattress doesn't creak. It doesn't jostle and roil. Individually wrapped springs, pillow top, $2000 worth of mattress: it buys you this much, at least.

Lukas kneels again, behind Danicka now, his knees bracketing her hips. He folds his arms around her from behind; draws her back, if she'll let him, to rest against his chest.

And he bends his cheek to her temple. Exhales quietly.

"Miluji tě."

And then, perhaps naively, or perhaps honestly: "Jsem udělal všechno, můžu to změnit tento, a jsem selhal. Nemyslím si, že tvůj bratr může dělat mnohem lépe."

[Danicka] If he wants to hold her, he should just hold her. If he wants to claim her, he should tell her: I want you. I want you to be mine, irrevocably and completely. He is the Ahroun, the Shadow Lord, and she is the Kinswoman made to be mutable to his whims, not the other way around. Only it's not about whims, or even demands. She is being prickly, hiding her face in case she starts weeping and refusing to get on the floor as though that will make her weaker. But beneath that there is the unspoken message:

If you want me, take me.

If you want me, I'm here.

I'm not leaving you.

So he moves up behind her, hiding his amusement in part because it's very likely it would make her temper snap in half, or it might just as easily make her break down in tears. At the moment it's just as likely that she would laugh with him, but that's what he gets. She's volatile, and he told her early on he did not want a blank canvas. She is anything but.

Danicka leans back on his chest when he comes up behind her, sighs quietly and lets her hands fall when he wraps his arms around her. She closes her eyes and relaxes, tipping her head back against his shoulder as though this is where she belongs. Tension flows out of her limbs, visible in her shoulderblades and neck before but now tangible as it leaves her in response to his embrace.

"...Ty jsi nejste ním," Danicka whispers, like a secret. "Ty neznáte ho."

[Lukas] Tension flows out of her. In some sort of reciprocal reaction, Lukas's arms tighten a notch around her -- one around her waist, the other wrapping briefly around her shoulders as he bends his head to hers, closes his eyes, hugs her like this, tightly.

She could almost disappear into his embrace. He's nearly twice her weight, ten inches taller, broader, stronger in almost every sense. Not all.

The arm around her shoulders loosens when his embrace does. It drops; his forearms cross over her hips, holding her gently now. He opens his eyes when she speaks, but they're downcast, his gaze skimming past her hands, past her body to rest idle on the floor. They can't stay like this forever, either. His lower legs would fall asleep. She would overheat. Still, he's in no hurry to let go.

"Nedělejte si starosti o mě, lásko," he murmurs. "Nedělejte si starosti."

[Danicka] This time she gives him a quiet, brief huff of mirthless laughter. It makes her shoulders twitch softly against his chest. "Budu se starat o vás když chci," she responds mildly, if a bit distantly.

Her hand reaches up, though, and touches one of his. It's barely there, a momentary touch before she's starting to slide away, leaning forward. Danicka glances at him over her shoulder, or turns her head and flicks her eyes at him through her peripheral vision.

"I'm going to shower."

She doesn't need to. She's not dirty. She has only the thinnest scent of sweat on her skin from walking around town today. "You want to come, or wait out here?"

[Lukas] Lukas's arms loosen as she slides away. He watches her as she gets to her feet, glancing once at the clock radio, thoughtfully.

"How long did room service say they were going to take?"

[Danicka] She slides off the bed, her skirt shifting up and then falling back around her thighs. She pulls her green, loose-knit sweater off her head and tosses it past his side onto the bedspread, leaving her in a camisole. Her feet and legs already bare, she starts to unzip her skirt at the hip. "Um...about fifteen more minutes? I won't be long, I just...need to shower."

Her skirt falls.

[Lukas] Talking about her brother makes her need to shower.

Lukas looks away -- not to hide his reaction but to spare her from seeing the knowledge in his eyes. He looks at the clock radio again, as if to consider, when his mind is already made up.

"I'll join you." He touches his jaw, reflexively. "I could use a shave anyway."

[Danicka] Talking about her brother makes her tense, makes her verge on tears, makes her afraid of Lukas and of Vladislav and of everything that could happen. In the hotel room right now she's the only one who really knows whether or not anything would; she's arguably too close to it to see it clearly. Danicka's clarity concerning her family may be in question, but Lukas does a fair job of holding his tongue and hiding the look in his eyes in case she should turn and see his realization:

Talking about her brother makes her skin crawl.

She's wearing a simple, flesh-colored thong underneath her skirt, but she peels out of her camisole first, stretching with the motion and padding towards the bathroom. "Well, I wasn't going to say anything..." she muses teasingly, before she turns a corner.

A moment later the hot water is turned on. By the time Lukas gets to the bathroom, her thong is hanging on the doorknob and her hair is getting wet.

[Lukas] Having not anticipated seeing her at the Aquarium, Lukas didn't bring any overnight supplies. The bathroom is already steaming up they time he joins her. He shuts the door to keep in the warmth, unboxes one of the W's complimentary safety razors, shakes the packet of shaving cream out of the box.

Her hair is soaked through by the time he strips out of his clothes, leaving them in a puddle on the floor, and switches back the curtain to join her. If her eyes are closed, he touches her to alert her to his presence, and to move her a little ways aside to make room.

With him in the shower, space seems a lot tighter. He lets her shampoo and soap first, his skin wetting by degrees in the spray that skims past her shoulders and over her head. For his part, Lukas rips open the shaving cream, lathers it up between his hands, and -- after ducking his face into the shower stream to wet it -- slathers it over his jaw.

He's not as good with a safety razor as he is with a straight, ironically enough. By the time he finishes he's managed to nick himself twice.

[Danicka] Neither of them are prepared for this tonight. But that's the way it was the first night they fucked, that's the way it was the first time they met at the aquarium, that's the way it's been on those few and now distant-seeming occasions when he's stayed at her place. They don't have changes of clothes handy, or their own toothbrushes. That in itself is a reason to choose hotels of this caliber: here, says the staff, have a razor. Have a toothbrush. Have a hair dryer. Have anything you want, just walk in and fuck each other's brains out and smell like orange and ginger in the morning.

Danicka isn't shampooing her hair this time. She doesn't unwrap the bar of soap and rub it all over her skin. She just stands under the water, rolling her head on her neck, seemingly content to just let the heat and the moisture surround her. She has her eyes closed, even when he gets in behind her. He shaves, quickly as he would with a straight razor, and thus ends up a bit bloody. She has turned around and her eyes are drifting up to him.

It doesn't take but a moment's thought. She steps towards him, water pooling around her feet, and puts her hands behind him, one on the back of his neck and one on the back of his head. "Think we have time?"

[Lukas] There are still streaks of white foam on his face -- thin-scraped lines and arcs like some sort of facepaint. She puts her hands on him and his left hand finds its place at her waist as naturally and easily as it ever did.

He leans down to set the plastic razor on the soap ledge. Then his right hand joins his left. He pulls her to him, flush against him, their skin slick and warm, slipping against one another.

"No," he says, smiling. Then he kisses her. His hands open over her back and he presses her body firmly into his; the kiss deepens and his mouth moves over hers, tilts and opens. His lips and his teeth catch at her chin, her lower lip, back to her mouth. They sway together, into the kiss and out of it, and when it's done he's not really smiling anymore and his cock is hard against her belly. "But I don't care," he finishes. "They can leave it out in the hall."

[Danicka] This is what she wants. This is what she needs. Undo the stories about her mother (she threw him through a wall) and her brother (you're not him) and everything else, every drop, every (I'm asking if you want me to claim you) word that's passed between them tonight, every thought stirred up and unearthed like a corpse that should have remained underground. She kisses him like she wants to pull his very spirit out of him with his breath, holding his head against her own and devouring his lips, tasting his tongue. She breathes heavier when he bites her, shudders when she feels him harden against her skin.

"Fuck me," she says simply, raggedly, shifting her hands on his upper body to brace herself on his shoulders. He's felt this before; the first time, and other times. He's felt the pressure of her hands, the tension in her lower body, just before she pushes off of the ground and pulls herself upward, like he's a mountain to climb, like he's an oak tree to fall out of later.

[Lukas] (SLIPPERY WHEN WET.)
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 1, 5, 6, 8, 9 (Success x 1 at target 7)

[Lukas] There's just a second's worth of warning, her hands pushing on his shoulders, before she's climbing him like a tree and he's scooping her up like --

(one of Lukas's favorite books, and doubtlessly one he'll buy Danicka someday, has a line in it toward the end regarding forbidden lovers and long-denied passion: He picked her up like a pot of begonias. This isn't quite that. He doesn't pick her up like a pot of begonias, or like a load of laundry, or like anything, really, except)

-- herself: wet, slippery, lean and long. He's reminded of a marine mammal, or of some small, cunning night-predator that slips easily in and out of dark places; a stoat, a sable; and then he's not reminded of anything but her because he's turning his face up to hers to kiss her again. She's wrapping her legs around him, winding around him, and he takes her by the hips and, with little preamble, raises her up, lowers her straight down onto his erection.

He's inside her in one smooth stroke. This makes him gasp into her mouth. It makes the muscles at the small of his back clench hard, and it nearly makes him lose his balance. He turns around -- her back brushes the shower curtain -- he sets her against the cool wet tiles without ever letting go her mouth, kisses her, moves in her, three or four slow hard strokes edged in impatience, and then suddenly tears his mouth away and pants against her throat.

"Fuck," he says. She might think he's referring to this act, referring to the mindblowing pleasure of it, or the fact that he hasn't had her in ... christ, how long?; but no, the next word is dropped like a stone, as though he'd forgotten how to formulate sentences, "Condom."

[Danicka] [Willpower -1: Be Good, Danicka]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 4, 4, 5, 7 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[Danicka] It takes effort for him to remain stable in the shower when Danicka shimmies up his body and wraps her legs firmly around his waist. The floor is slippery, their skins are slippery, the tile is slippery, and the water keeps pounding them relentlessly, the heat turning their skins faintly pink despite the swarthiness of his and the golden tan of hers. Lukas manages, however, picking her up even as she's flowing into his arms and working her onto his body. She lets out a harsh cry, either of surprise or pleasure or simply at the suddeness of feeling him inside of her, and folds forward on his shoulder, her eyes closed and her mouth opening against his neck.

"Lukáš..."

She says his name plaintively, in a moan breathed out against his shoulder, the fingers of one hand tangling in his hair and the fingers of the other gripping his shoulderblade. It takes almost no effort at all to nuzzle her face and convince her to move her head, to meet his lips with hers, to kiss him like she was before, deep and aching and ravenous. The tile is chilled against her back, but the water's been running long enough that its beginning to warm up, and she doesn't seem to notice, anyway.

Danicka doesn't stop him. When he starts fucking her against the wall, flexing his hips and thrusting into her, she just groans, holding him tightly to her with her arms and her grasping fingers and her tightening legs. She doesn't stop kissing him, either, panting into his mouth. She fights him, slightly, when he pulls away, and her eyse are venomously green when they open.

It's been a week.

That word comes out of his mouth, the second one, and she takes a deep breath, lolling her head back until it touches the tile. Her breasts lift and fall as she tries to regain her breath, her sense, everything she needs, and then -- reluctantly, as though she has to force herself to do even this -- Danicka nods. "I have some in my bag," she mutters, just barely above a snarl.

Her bag is on the bed.

[Lukas] (nnngh that's FAR.)
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 1, 3, 3, 4, 5 (Botch x 1 at target 6)

[Lukas] He needs to let go. He needs to pull out. He needs to put her down. Lukas knows all this, knows it very well, but push comes to shove and he's not a civilized creature after all, or even a particularly controlled one. He's a beast that wears the guise of a man.

For a second his hands are at her waist to lift her off of him.

In the next he all but dives across the space between. He sucks her nipple into his mouth so savagely that when he lets her loose the seal of his mouth to her skin breaks audibly. His mouth is on her throat then, and he's fucking her again, flexing into her, and faster than before; wrapping his forearms under her thighs to shift the angle of her hips, hoist her against the shower wall, open her legs wider for him.

"Prosím," he mutters into her skin. His teeth scrape her shoulder. "Prosím, Danička, nechte mě pobyt."

[Danicka] [...Well, if you INSIST]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 1, 1, 1, 4 (Botch x 3 at target 7)

[Danicka] She is not in the greatest state of mind to be telling Lukas No, or even Wait. At first it was just her body sliding up against his and then their mouths meeting, his arousal sparking off of her own and then increasing it. At first it was just needing hot water, needing contact, needing his Rage or his sexuality to strike her anger and her sensuality like flint hitting steel. She neesd this, to burn away everything else the way it always does. She needs to feel the way she feels when she's with him.

Her hips squirm against him as he sucks on her breast, his lips and teeth turning her skin red. Danicka pushes her fingers into his hair and whimpers, starting to let out small, gasping cries of pleasure as he comes at her with renewed force, with sudden eagerness. Please, he says, and her hips roll. Let me stay, he pleads, and she groans in acquiesence.

She pulls his face to hers again. She needs to feel the way she feels when they kiss each other, like she is herself, like she is only this. They annihilate the past, shatter any thoughts or questions of the future, and all they're left with is the way their bodies move together, the way their gasps echo off of the tiled walls and ceramic floor of the shower, echoes bouncing in between rapidly falling drops of water.

"Nekončí," she whimpers, a word he heard from her throat for the first time when she was fucking another male. "Nekončí!"

[Lukas] The first time he saw her in his adult life, he was vaguely intrigued by the calculations he sensed behind her eyes; by the way she looked at him as if to judge what he might want to hear from her before answering. The first time he saw her in his adult life, he had no idea who she was, and thought he was as indifferent to her as she seemed toward him.

And then she was in the spare room, and he hadn't even realized Sam knew her, though Sam had asked him if he could date her, and he'd barely thought about it before giving his permission. The first time Lukas heard her say nekončí, it was through two walls and some fifteen or twenty feet of space. The first time he heard the sounds she makes when she gets fucked, when she fucks someone, when she comes, he wasn't even in the room. He was on the common room couch, clenching his teeth until his cheeks ached, telling himself he was happy for Sam and Sam deserved a little happiness, and he didn't even want to go back into his room for fear of hearing his brother going at her like a rutting beast, and he wanted to put something, preferably someone's head, through a wall.

He doesn't know that days after he forbade Sam to go near his kin again, Sam broke that edict. He doesn't know that a few days from now, Sam will track Danicka down to her apartment, to her home, and harass her there. He doesn't know she'll humiliate him utterly for it. It's probably best he doesn't know any of this; it would only drive a wedge between him and his brother, whom he's said to her once: I know he's not as good as I like to think, but I have to pretend he is.

And she said: I don't.

None of that matters now. This time when she says nekončí, she's not saying it for Sam, or for some stranger she met at a nightclub or on the subway. She's not bending over for someone else; she's not pulling another man's hand up under her skirt, or guiding him to the zipper in the back, or guiding him to her cunt.

This time it's been a week since they fucked, and she's not telling him to get away from her, to get a goddamn condom before he thinks about touching her. She's telling him:

Nekončí.

Don't stop.

And he doesn't stop. He fucks her. He gasps against her mouth; bows his head and pants against her neck, opens his eyes to watch himself moving into her, and he's going at her so fast and hard now, a rough fuck, impatient and reckless as a rutting beast, his hands holding her ass, his forearms supporting her thighs; he's pounding her cunt like the world might end if he stopped, or his soul might be saved if he doesn't stop. Some part of him must know he'll regret this later, or at least that he should. He doesn't give a damn.

Lukas closes his eyes again. He puts his mouth to her throat and kisses her, sucks at her skin, follows the belt of muscle up to her jaw, her mouth, and when he kisses her he looses such a sound, low, half-tormented into her mouth, as though he'd been waiting for this for longer than a week. Her hands are in his hair, or grasping at his back. Their tongues are twisting together, fighting; it's not even a kiss anymore, just a meeting of the mouths, of the breath. They're open to each other, surrounded by water and sound, steam, echoes, and his hands are moving her hips now, or perhaps only following the roll of her body; their bodies come together in complement. He shifts his grasp on her -- his left arm tenses, the bicep bunching hard, and he presses his right hand between them, finds her clit and works it as he moves into her again and again and again, filling her fast and hard and deep, and it's becoming impossible to tell what moisture is water, what is sweat, what is the wetness of her cunt slipping down her thighs and slicking over his cock.

"Jedu přijít." These are barely even words. They're sounds, muffled against her mouth; something like a warning, or an apology, or -- something like a plea, perhaps. They haven't been here very long; a handful of minutes, if that, but his control was in tatters before this even started; his tattered control was the reason this started. "Ach můj bože, láska. Jedu přijít."

[Danicka] The last time Lukas had Danicka up against a wall, he hurt her. It was over two months ago that she greeted him at the door to another hotel room wearing nothing under her dress, taking him in her mouth even though he'd warned her that it might happen again, he might lose control again, he might hurt her. Neither of them, now, seem to be thinking about that night, about how he hurt her or how that was the last time they fucked standing up or the last -- only -- time they have fucked without some kind of barrier.

At the moment Danicka is willfully, wholly, entirely giving herself over to what they are doing. She keeps her eyes open because she wants him, because she wants to know it's Lukas holding her, Lukas inside of her, Lukas gasping against her shoulder. She rides him even though her body is grinding equally against a hard tiled wall, digging her fingernails into his shoulders and suddenly, almost viciously raking them down his back. If this were a full moon she might find his hand at her throat then; if this were a full moon she would give herself a concussion against the wall before doing that.

The long pink welts down his skin will be gone in minutes. She writhes between her lover and the wall, something wild and something structured, not sure which is the rock and which is the hard place, forgetting everything and everyone else that might attempt to fill her mind now. This is what she wants. This is what she needs. Outside someone knocks on the door, but Danicka doesn't hear it over the crash of water, and if Lukas hears it he doesn't care. He doesn't stop.

She told him not to stop.

Danicka doesn't usually guide Lukas's hands anymore. She doesn't need to stand up, circle the table to his chair, and tell him that she'll fuck his brains out if he'll just come with her. She doesn't need to tell him it's all right to unzip her dress, or slide her panties down her thighs. She doesn't give him this physical permission unless he's hesitating when he needn't; she almost never tells him to wait, almost never tells him to stop, almost never pushes him away when all she really wants is for him to be as close as another person can physically be.

She doesn't want him to stop.

So many times she's laid on her back or straddled his lap and told him to let go, give it to her. She's kissed him and told him she wants all of him, everything, more. He almost never fucks her like this, never this hard, this fast, this rough, never reckless, especially not after that full moon night in March, but Danicka doesn't suddenly cry out and beg him to slow down, be gentle, please, please. She claws at his back and groans into his mouth as he slams into her, accepting and even meeting his savagery, biting his lower lip as though to...

...to make him go over the edge, to give it to her harder, to answer the helpless-sounding cries and lost little moans with something like fury? Danicka tilts her head back and literally bares her throat, quite possibly one of the stupidest things she could do to a werewolf whose Rage currently outclasses his good sense, whose teeth are so very fucking close to her jugular, who could lose all control and destroy her without meaning to, without wanting to.

She kisses him with a literal growl when their mouths meet again.

She screams when he touches her, a wordless shriek of pleasure, her fingernails pressing hard half-moons into his shoulders. Even as he's moaning, pleading, whatever it is, that he's going to come, he can feel her clenching around his cock, he can feel how close she is.

He can feel how much she needs him. "Lukáš, she begs, his name a keening, destroyed sound. "Fuck me, Lukáš, you bastard...!"

[Lukas] They go at each other recklessly, like animals. It's almost never like this. It was close to this, worse than this, exactly once. The moon was full then. He lost control and he hurt her.

Tonight the moon is not full. The moon is new. So they let go. Or perhaps: he lets go; she lets him; more than that; meets him. And so he

fucks her.

His teeth are scraping her skin and he's all but slamming her against the tile with every thrust. She's clawing welts down his back, which makes him throw his head back with a snarl of mingled surprise and pain and something curiously close to relief. She's snarling at him when she kisses him. She's baring her throat to him -- as if she didn't care that he's a predator because she's a predator too.

She's cursing at him, and she's begging him to fuck her. And he: well; he wants to snarl back at her. He wants to tell her that's exactly what he's doing: fucking her, only the words aren't in him anymore. He can feel how close she is. He has enough -- what, courtesy? -- to try to hold back, to try to make her come first, only no; he doesn't; he doesn't have the courtesy or the control to hold back, so he just

fucks her.

And he does snarl at her, but it's wordless, and it hitches when she clenches around him, bears down on him, and then on a savage lunge he catches her mouth, he crushes her mouth to his and his hand's coming back under her thigh to push her legs up, to raise her knees nearly to either side of his chest while he

fucks her; to open her for him, while he
fucks her.

That's the only thought in his mind right now: open for me, open for me, open for me, and he doesn't know if he means her cunt or her mouth or her eyes or ... her. He doesn't know, or care, he's leaning into her, bearing her legs up, and they've been together often enough, if fourteen nights can be considered often enough, that she recognizes the rigidity that locks his joints down, that squeezes his airways closed; she recognizes the last rough thrust, the way he buries himself in her and bites her, and bucks against her mindlessly, involuntarily, as his orgasm seizes him relentlessly, shreds him, breaks him, tosses him up on the shore in a jumble to put himself back together again.

"Ach můj bože," he saying over and over against her mouth, softly, pantingly, "oh my god, oh my fucking god."

Afterward it's a goddamn miracle they're not in a tangle on the floor of the shower. It's a goddamn miracle his legs haven't given way, and he hasn't dropped her, and they haven't slipped. The knocking at the door that neither of them heard has stopped. Their dinners are cooling on a tray outside. His chest is pressed to hers, her legs are still hiked up, caught along his arms; his hands are gripping her hips and her ass hard enough that his fingers feel stiff when he finally wills himself to relax, to extend them, to let her go.

He lets her legs slip down on either side of him. The motion shifts him inside her, and he presses gently deeper again. The shower's still beating on his back; where they stand, the spray most hits the backs of his thighs, his calves. The room is full of steam. He's rediscovered the use of lips and tongue, and he kisses her again, gently now, without the madness and the fire of a moment past.

Lukas thinks perhaps he should ask her to forgive him: the roughness of the encounter, the lack of a goddamn condom even when he remembered. He tries to put the words together and fails. In the end what he has is:

"...oh my fucking god, Danička."

[Danicka] [Str]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 8 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[Danicka] [And again]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 6 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[Danicka] Swearing at him, bucking against him, biting and scratching at him, it's hard to look at her and think that she is the one tolerating him, receiving him, bearing up and surviving his lust. Danicka's teeth are bared, which is reckless in its own right, as he pushes her legs up higher and buries himself inside her, panting for her like this is air, like this is food, like this is more water to him than what's falling against his shoulders and rolling down his back. Danicka lets out a shriek as he slams into her even harder, one of her hands reaching away from him to grab the shower curtain, clenching in it like it's a sheet.

The fingernails of her left hand are still digging into him, until she comes, and then they rip downward. Her head is resting against the tile, until she comes, and then it slams back against the wall. A few thin lines of blood well up on his back only to be washed away almost instantly. Pain flowers in the back of Danicka's skull like a rose blossoming in a time-lapse film, but she doesn't feel it, not when he's losing himself inside of her and she's right on the edge, time cut in half as though by a razor, not when the line between memory and reality is so completely severed in her thoughts.

Danicka can't kiss him in the end but she opens her eyes, her scream and her shriek dying in her throat, swirling down to gasps just as the water swirls down the drain behind his feet. She locks her eyes on his, bites at his lips but cannot take them or else she won't be able to breathe, not with her orgasm rolling through her. Danicka, relentlessly, doesn't stop squirming down on his cock; she licks his lips, flattens her hand underneath the thin cuts she's given him, shudders in his arms and against his body and all around him.

She says nothing now, as though she's lost the capabilities for coherent speech, as though the most she can do is moan the way she does as she starts to come down, as though that scream and her fingernails in his skin were the closest approximation to communcation she could manage. But he says oh my god, oh my fucking god and he says her name and when the sudden taut arch of her body relaxes, when she realizes that her head is dazed slightly from cracking against the tile, she looks at him as though she understands what he's saying.

Lukas kisses her softer now, is gentle with her now, and her legs relax around his hips. Danicka purrs softly, her exhale of breath a subtle rumble. Her cunt flexes around his cock, slower now, but every time it does her lower lip trembles slightly. She turns her head, and lays down on his shoulder. The one that she didn't just claw. She's let go of the shower curtain, and wraps both arms around him.

"Moje láska," she murmurs. "Ach, moje láska..."

The emphasis is, the first time at least, on moje.

[Lukas] Moje láska.
Moje.
Mine.

Perhaps Lukas should bristle at this. Since when do Shadow Lords bow to the claims of their kin, or something like that. Perhaps when they first met (but not when they first met) he would have. He doesn't care anymore. No, that's not true: he likes it.

He likes it when she wraps him in her limbs like this. When she holds him, and he holds her, and they hold each other in the tatters of the afterglow, only that's not the word for it. The aftermath: that's closer, because what they do to each other is like a war. It's like mutual annihilation. It's like creation; like prayer.

Their bodies are still flexing and clenching to one another, obeying some secret and ancient rhythm they have no control over. Her lower lip trembles as though she were about to cry, only it doesn't when she cries; except for once, maybe twice, she's always cried silently, holding back her sob.

She's not crying now. He kisses her again, closing his mouth over her lower lip, sucking it between his teeth to graze it gently, gently, while he tightens his arms around her.

Then she lays her head on his shoulder. He curves his over hers. They bend to each other like nesting birds, like a bonded pair; like lovers, which they are. He doesn't want to let her go. He doesn't want to let her down, or slip out of her, or ...

"Moje láska," he echoes back to her, as though testing the words. When he says it again it's firmer, and there's a laying-of-claim in it, wholly different and apart from the claims and the customs and the legalities and the crap of the Nation. It's something far more primal, a brand of love, much like the press of his mouth to her neck. "Moje Danička."

[Danicka] Since when do Shadow Lords... begins any number of questions, coming from any number of pairs of lips, at any number of points in her life. Since when can she get away with saying no, with telling him to leave a topic be, or -- above all -- with literally biting and clawing at him? He can easily remember the nights when she wouldn't, the times she would grab something else or forcefully flatten her hands on him so she wouldn't grab his hair or scratch his back like she has tonight. She has been rougher in bed, progressively more free with herself, since the first few times.

He's seen more of the animal in her, the alpha female who would refuse to let his sister color during their childhood because she was an intruder, an interloping female in Danicka's home. He knows she spat the word coward at Katherine Bellamonte, even if Katherine could not understand it without Lukas's intercession, and though neither of them know this, he will surely hear about her snapping at his packmate, a full moon of a notoriously battle-hungry Tribe, even knowing that he could come upstairs and eviscerate her at any second.

And he has seen and felt this, too: the way she holds him afterward, the way she pulls him close when he's on top of her, as though he is not quite the purely dominant, purely in-control creature he might seem. He's felt the way she softens against him when they are both demolished, the way she flows like dust blowing in the wind, cradling him until everything settles again. He may know it and realize that he's loved, and realize that it is not his control, or his Rage, or his power that she adores, just as it is not his vulnerability, his weakness, or anything as simple as one emotion or another that she longs to protect.

All of him, she's said. Everything.

Her eyes close as he speaks, her body folds around him, and she breathes in deeply. Her exhale runs over his shoulder. Time passes. Seconds only, but impossible to count them all, as they melt into one another just as surely as Danicka and Lukas themselves do. And then:

"Mám hlad."

[Lukas] For moments after, they're pressed so close together Lukas can close his eyes and lose track of where one ends and the other begins. It reminds him of the night in her apartment, in her bathtub, the lights off: the water equilibrating their skin temperatures, the boundaries blurring.

Then she says she's hungry. He laughs, his chest moving against hers. He remembers where he is, who she is, who he is. He grows aware of the shower still beating on his lower legs, the faint sting on his back where her nails tore across his skin.

"Let's call them and ask why they haven't sent our food up yet," he says, and kisses her shoulder. There's still a faint imprint of his teeth where he'd bitten her, not hard enough to break the skin but hard enough to leave a stamp in her flesh. He kisses that too, gently, as though to smooth over the hurt.

Then Lukas straightens up, exhaling when she disentangles her legs and he slips out of her. He lowers her carefully, watching her feet find purchase on the slick tub, and then he leans down and kisses her again, a complement to the first kiss in the shower: his back to the water now, and gentler, a winding down rather than a ramping up.

After that Lukas washes quickly, shampooing his hair but not bothering with conditioner, soaping haphazardly. When he steps out he kicks his clothes out of the way and under the sink, to be picked up later tonight, or tomorrow, or whenever the fuck he decides to rejoin the wider world. He pulls one of the bath towels off the rack and shakes it out, scuffing it briskly over his hair before wrapping it around his waist.

Now his hair's in horns and spikes and curls, and water's beaded over his skin and slipping down his body to either drip onto the floor or soak into his towel. After the warmth of the shower, the ambient room air seems cool, raises goosebumps on his skin. If Danicka hasn't already discovered the trays waiting outside, Lukas picks up the hotel phone and dials room service again.

[Danicka] They amuse him, these little reckonings of how incredibly mortal Danicka is, how physical. She tells him things, simple things, about her hunger or her fear, her fear or her frustration, without the pleasant and pleasurable facade given to the rest of the world. He enjoys seeing the shift between how composed she is for the mortals, for the rest of the Nation, and how much of an animal she is with him, broken down to the most basic of needs, the most unfettered of expressions. She is hungry, and she does not politely request that they check on the food.

She just is what she is: hungry. Satisfied in terms of sex, satiated by his body, but her stomach is about to start growling. Lukas's laughter just makes her nuzzle his neck, folding into the warmth of his arms as though she would like to be fed here, without having to move.

Nevermind the fact that her family line is known for its rampant and relentless fertility, or the fact that birth control pill or not she apparently has reason to insist on condoms, all the same. Nevermind the fact that one or both of them should regret their utter inability to stop themselves once he was inside her. She exhales softly as he kisses her shoulder; she can't even remember him biting her, much less feel hurt.

The back of her head throbs a bit, but she doesn't remember why that is, either.

"...kay," she murmurs, and then rather reluctantly lets him set her down. Her legs unfold; she's shaky at first, holding onto his arms until her feet trust the ground. The kiss helps; gives her time to remember what it's like to stand. She doesn't get out of the shower immediately but washes off, a little more thoroughly than he does, but she doesn't wash her hair.

Lukas goes to the phone; Danicka doesn't check the door because as soon as she has dried off outside the shower and rubbed the towel on her hair, she sits down to dry it. The dryer runs quietly in the bathroom, while the clerk downstairs tells him that the computer says their order has been delivered.

[Lukas] Lukas has left the bathroom door open unless Danicka wanted it closed. She can hear him talking on the phone. The hum of the dryer and the distance makes his words indistinct, but the lower frequencies of his voice pass right through the walls; the cadence of his speech, too, is familiar.

After a brief conversation Lukas hangs up. He pads across the floor in bare feet and opens the room door. She can hear him bend down to pick up the trays rather precariously, one in each hand, and kick the door shut behind him. There's a desk, two nightstands and an end table by the armchair, but each of these options would mean they each facing in different directions, so he opts for the bed instead. Silverware clinks; a cork pops.

Lukas comes back into the bathroom with two glasses of wine in hand, one of which he sets on the counter for Danicka. She's nearly done drying her hair, which was only incidentally wet anyway, and he watches her in the mirror, looks at the contrast between them reflected back at them. After she sets the hairdryer down he wraps his arm around her middle, turns to kiss her temple with one eye on the glass, and then faces their reflections again.

"Podívejte se, jak jste krásná," he says softly, and a little wistfully. He doesn't know yet that Danicka is indifferent at best, uncomfortable at worst, when her beauty is complimented. Then again, it wasn't a compliment at all.

[Danicka] The door is open, and Danicka is not sitting in a robe but sitting on a towel in front of the vanity. It's just like the first time they were here, or at least the first time they showered in one of those extravagant suites, except... except he can see her body as she dries her hair, and he can see that her hair has grown slightly. He can see the bite mark on her shoulder still. And she doesn't hum as she dries her hair. She is sitting with her eyes closed, but they open when she feels him enter.

And she smiles at him, or her reflection does.

In time the dryer is set down. She can smell their dinner, cooling but still hot under the metal covers. A moment later his arm slides around her, and she reaches down to lay her hands on his forearm, tilting her head and aligning her body to his. He looks at her in the mirror, and she looks at his shoulder in the mirror, and does her best to ingore what he just said. Which is easy, since she's noticed:

"You're bleeding."

[Lukas] (EMPATHY.)
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 1, 4, 4, 5 (Botch x 1 at target 6)

[Lukas] (DSLKFJSDLKFJDLK)

[Lukas] Lukas isn't surprised to see the scratches on his shoulder. He's an Ahroun, with an Ahroun's consummate awareness of his own physical state: injuries, strains, reserves. His eyes follow hers to his shoulder in reflection, though, and he laughs under his breath.

"I think I'll survive," he says wryly. And then, gentler, "I don't mind it." He watches their reflections, as fascinated as an intelligent animal confronted with the image of itself for the first time. His teeth graze her earlobe, and the edge of his mouth turns up a little as he admits, "It was sort of hot."

He stays where he is for another moment, sitting behind her with his feet set on either side of hers, his waist-tucked towel rucked up and taut against the small of her back. Her hair is dry and warm, caught between his chest and her back in tumbling waves. His free arm encircle her waist, loosely, and after a moment his hand explores her body in gentle sweeps, familiar, with a lover's confidence. When his hand cups her breast he turns his face to her neck and kisses her pulsepoint. The glass of wine tips on his knee, held in his slackening free hand.

And then he comes back to himself. She's hungry and he knows where this is leading. Lukas drops his hands away and lets Danicka get up. "Come on," he says, and takes a swallow of wine. "Let's go eat. I'm rather famished myself."

[Danicka] Truth be told, she's not worried about him. Danicka has seen worse, and experienced worse, but she is somewhat intrigued by the three bright red scratches on his shoulder. She observes thoughtfully, a somewhat pensive expression on her face that wrongly interprets as concerned, as worried, as aghast at what she's done to him. It's believable; this is the girl who did not cry when she fell out of a tree but sobbed when she found out he'd been spanked, and it wasn't even his fault. It's just not reality.

But it passes. For once, a misunderstanding slides by without the world ending. Danicka, with nothing more to do in the bathroom, leans back against Lukas's chest as he sits behind her, noting how he watches himself, how he looks at the way the two of them fit together.

It was sort of hot.

The corner of her mouth twists up in amusement. It fades not out of lack of that amusement but a replacement for it; his hands on her are, for the moment, comforting. She relaxes, melts slightly. It's more free with herself than she perhaps thought she could be after what happened earlier in the month. She watches his hand cover her, takes a deeper breath, and says not a word.

As he rises her eyes follow him, and then she does. Naked, Danicka is as confident as she is in heels and outfits that cost hundreds of dollars. Her hair dry but unstyled falls around her shoulders half-straight, half-wavy, and she simply pushes a few loose strands away from her face. She walks into the room and lays out on the bed on her side, opening her meal with a look of curiosity, as though she's forgotten what it is she ordered. She eats the way she usually eats when she's not avoiding it entirely: neatly, but comfortably. She doesn't hide the fact that she's eating, as though she must be some pristine form of femininity. She licks her fingers when she must. She wipes her mouth with the back of her wrist when she senses a drop of sauce at the corner of her lips.

And she drinks wine. Oh yes. She drinks a glass while she eats, and has a second poured and half-drunk by the time she's decided she's full, even though there's food left on the plate.

Rolling onto her back, Danicka holds the wine glass carefully on her stomach, looking at the ceiling. "I'm going to college this fall."

[Lukas] For his part, Lukas eats sitting crosslegged on the bed, untucking his towel and letting it collapse slowly open onto the comforters. He ordered lamb chops, which comes with a side of garlic mashed potatoes, mint sauce, and some green beans. Danicka has seen him eat with casually impeccable manners but he forsakes them now, choosing instead to eat largely with his hands.

Which is not to say he makes a mess. He doesn't. He's deft and carnivorous, absorbed in the basic gratification of food, tearing meat from the bone with his teeth, tipping his head back to drop green beans in his mouth.

The mashed potatoes, he eats with a fork. That's just pragmatism. And his glass of wine drops too, empties by the time he's half-done, empties again by the time his lambchops are reduced to bones.

He's still eating when Danicka decides she's full and rolls on her back: he still has some mashed potatoes that he intends to finish, though he's about done with the green beans. When she speaks his eyes flicker to her, pale and clear beneath dark eyelashes, dark eyebrows. He finishes chewing and swallows before he answers.

"I thought I overheard you say something about that at the Aquarium. Where are you going?"

[Danicka] "The University of Chicago," she says absently to the ceiling, musing over the words as though they're unfamiliar. They aren't. She rolls them around on her tongue as she would his nipple, or a mouthful of wine, her jaw tensing carelessly.

Danicka sits up, her hair falling down her back again, the bed barely shifting. The plates remain undisturbed as she takes a long drink and finishes off what is left in her glass. Looking at the faint red dregs, she swirls them around the bottom. "I suppose if I'm going there I could transfer if I had to, but...otherwise I'll be here for a few more years."

[Lukas] A shadow crosses his brow, not quite enough for a frown. He'd been preparing another bite of his potatoes, but he stops now to look at her.

"Had you been planning to move on otherwise?"

[Danicka] She looks along the line of her shoulder to find his face, blinking once. "No."

It's as reflexive as breathing, this negation. It's immediate. The rest takes more effort, more time, as she looks back at her glass and decides to go ahead and swallow the very, very last drops of wine before holding her glass out for more. "I just remember the first time we talked about it, you...said you cared because you were trying to figure out if I was leaving Chicago.

"And I thought you might like to know that I'm not."

[Lukas] Danicka holds out her glass for more, and Lukas sets down his fork, picks up the winebottle, uncorks it and refills. It's all an aside to the conversation, something they don't have to think about. It's as natural as breathing that Danicka should hold her glass out, and Lukas should fill it before topping his own off.

He recorks the bottle, sets it aside.

"It was how you said, 'For a few more years'," he quotes, and then shrugs. The motion is powerful and complex. Naked, she can see how his muscles weave together and into the bone, interlinked. "And that you could transfer if you had to. It sounded like -- I don't know. I read more into it than there was."

[Danicka] Her glass filled, Danicka's arm reels it back in, and she sips while he twists the cork back into the mouth of the bottle. They are both excellent at pretending that this is how it has always been, that there was nothing humble about their childhoods. Her father was more than a cabinetmaker, his parents did not clean toilets, they have always had as much money as people like the Bellamontes or the Sokolovs. They were born to this.

Just to sense their breeding, to see her closet, to watch the way they pour wine and drink it, one might think so. But they eat with their hands. They recline naked and unwound. She cracks her head on tile and claws his back when he makes her come. There is no difference between a nightclub and a dive bar, a Motel 6 and the W on Lakeshore.

"You need to stop expecting me to leave you," she says quietly, finally, after she swallows her first sip of her third glass. The words seem addressed to the wine itself, to the rim that so recently met her unadorned, unpainted lips.

[Lukas] Lukas has nothing to say to that. She can feel his eyes on her for a moment, though she doesn't look at him -- at least not initially.

Her eyes are on her wine. It's dark in her glass, a deep opaque burgundy red that would stain the sheets if it spilled. Her lips are unpainted, and she doesn't leave imprints on the edge of her glass. After a moment he looks back to his food, eats the rest of his potatoes, leaves the beans.

The napkin is white, embossed, the fabric thick and absorbent. He wipes his hands off with it and tosses it over what remains of his dinner; pushes his tray aside a bit before he stretches out full-length, antiparallel to the direction she had been lying in. It's his turn to roll onto his back and look at the ceiling, and he pillows his head on one hand.

"I just thought I heard more in what you said than there was," he says at last. "I don't expect anything."

[Danicka] [Perception + Empathy: I Call Shenanigans]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 1, 5, 6, 9, 9, 10 (Success x 2 at target 6) Re-rolls: 1

[Danicka]
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 5, 9 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[Danicka] This is the woman who once slammed two double-shots of vodka one after the other without batting an eyelash. She doesn't answer, but slowly tips her glass back, then her head, and drinks everything in the bowl. She does it slowly, and carefully, but there is at least one drop left at the corner of her mouth that she flicks clean with the tip of her tongue.

She leans over and sets the empty-again glass on the nightstand, turns, and crawls back over the bed to him, her form mellowed from the shower, from sex, from food and wine. She moves with a lazy, languid grace, thoughtless of what her muscles are doing or where her hands are going, until she is right beside him, looking down at him with her eyes closing and opening again in a slow blink.

"I'm afraid," Danicka confesses gradually, the words low but not secretive, "that you still don't believe I want to be with you, or you're never going to believe it, and that you're going to leave me again because of it."

And again. And again. And again.

[Lukas] She crests into his field of vision like a planetary rising, and he shifts his head on the cradle of his hand to face her. Danicka's confession is spoken at the same volume, the same pitch, that some women might speak their seductions, but for all that he calls her beautiful, and hot, and for all that sometimes she makes him lose his mind, she's never been one for overt seduction.

He has no doubt that she could, if she wanted to. She can blend with New York society if she wants to, too. She can attend white-tie functions and not merely fit in but glitter. She can order off-the-cuff at old-money establishments, and she can go through all the right motions.

But that's what they are. Motions. And Danicka, beneath her masks of social graces, is a rawer, more primal creature. She's the type to eat with her hands, naked in bed; drink red wine with red meat; she's the type to crawl to him on all fours, not like a slave but like an animal.

Lukas reaches up and touches her face as though to reassure himself of her warmth.

"I believe you want to be with me right now," he says quietly. "But I don't know the future, and neither do you."

It's an echo of what he said earlier: he's glad to love her now, without thought of past or future. He doesn't want to think of past and future.

Something like that, anyway.

[Danicka] His knowledge of what she is capable of is a double-edged sword. Whatever pleasure he takes in her duplicity is matched by uncertainty. She can be false with so much ease, can fit in wherever she wants; some part of him may wonder if she matches her animalism to his, if it's not who she really is. Some part of him may wonder if she knows him, sees through him, well enough to be exactly what he wants. She can fool anyone.

Lukas believes her, though. The violent desire she shows him when they move together, the simultaneously primitive and poetic way she moves now, and the fact that she wants to be with him...right now. He believes in her. And she lets him touch her face but doesn't move into the palm-to-cheek embrace, just watching him. There's warmth in her flesh, and in her eyes, but something else.

"I wasn't asking for a promise," she says, her tone falling into step with his. "I was just telling you how I feel."

Danicka leans down then, pressing her lips to his brow, like a seal. Or an amen.

[Lukas] (...and something else?)
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 2, 2, 7, 9 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Lukas] Lukas searches her eyes for a moment. Then he closes his own when she leans down. She kisses his brow, which he accepts with the faintest tilt his head up and against her lips. There are two trays on the bed, plus a bottle of wine, plus his glass on his tray, which isn't empty yet. Individually wrapped springs or not, it's a little precarious, but he doesn't care. The food and the pristine counterpane may as well be on a different continent now, so little did it matter.

When Danicka draws back his eyes open again. "Come here," he says. His free hand traces up her forearm, past her elbow to close gently around her bicep. "Lie down with me."

He doesn't need to say the rest: Let me hold you.

[Danicka] They aren't oracles. He can't see the future any more than she can. He can't make her a promise it will take the rest of his life to keep, even when the rest of his life may only account for the next few months, the next few weeks, the rest of this night. It would be easy enough for her to start panicking every time he leaves her site, to give in to the nameless uncertainty that if she lets him go, he will never come back. Danicka is afraid. Danicka remembers what it was like to beg for him not to leave her, not to stop loving her.

She laid on her floor and wept, unable to pick herself up, the week that he did leave, that he did --

-- but then, he never stopped loving her.

She pulls her lips back from his forehead, still looking down at him when his eyelids lift once more. Danicka stares at him for a moment as he touches her, wraps his fingers around her upper arm. Any other situation, any other two people in the Nation, a Garou and their Kin...it might be a firm grip, a wrenching demand, a warning. Come here or else. Lie down or I'll make you sorry. But Lukas doesn't tighten his hand, and Danicka breathes out softly. She lowers her body down to the bedspread and lies on her side, molding her body to the shape of his.

Her right arm drapes lightly over his chest. Her right foot rests gently on the top of his, her knee just barely folded over his knee.

[Lukas] There's an ease in the way they move to one another that belies how new they really are to each other. She lowers herself to his side, drapes her arm over him. His arm opens for her body, then folds over her shoulders. Their feet rest together -- as though they shared a root, isn't that what she thought?

They do share a root. A culture, a language, an ancestry.

Lukas is quiet now, his fingertips brushing back and forth over Danicka's skin, his eyes on the ceiling. His heartbeat is slow and steady. His breathing, quiet. His stomach is full, and the wine is starting to drift into his blood; the echoes of sex are still unwinding through him, making him lazy and replete, satisfied.

Já tady patří, he thinks, and closes his eyes for a moment, and he suspects if he let himself drift he could fall asleep here, no matter the hour, no matter the fact that they're lying naked atop the counterpane and her stockings are still draped over the edge of the bed and her clothes are on the floor, and his are in the bathroom; no matter the trays of food and the bottle of wine. He could just sleep and be content, feel at ease and comfortable and ... safe in Danicka's presence.

It's not that he expects her to protect him though there's something undeniably protective, sometimes, about the way she holds him after they make love. It's different from the safety of a childhood held dear in his parents' care and caring. It's different from the safety of a pack, or of a caern's heart. It has less to do with protection and more to do with trust; with his implicit and intrinsic recognition of her at his heart, at his core, in the marrow of his bones.

He trusted her nearly from the very start to lie behind him, where he could not see her. He trusts her enough to sleep in her presence without a thought, without a start.

Lukas doesn't sleep, though. He opens his eyes again after a moment -- or perhaps it was longer than that, if he dozed, if he drifted. He doesn't think he has. The ceiling looks the same. She feels the same, the very same, as though she's always

(belonged here)

been here. And his hand smooths over her sleek shoulder, down her side. "Don't be afraid," Lukas murmurs, and for a moment he doesn't know why he says this. It's an instinct for protection, perhaps: to keep what's close, close. To keep her safe. A moment later he finds a thread, follows it, "I don't want to leave you ever again."

[Danicka] As they unravel, Lukas picks up dangling threads and examines them, tries to match their colors to the rest of the pattern. He weaves it back in, because he cannot truly tie a knot in it. He weaves it back in, because this is not something he can simply singe off, destroy, cauterize. He tried, and all that did was unravel them both further until they came very close to being nothing more than heaps of would-be tapestries, piles of color and unwound visions left all over the floor.

So he gives this one back to her: I don't want to leave you.

Her eyes close. They were not before, but with her head resting on his bicep, resting against his chest, he could not see it. He feels it now, the way her eyelashes flick his skin like miniscule, painless whips. They fit together, in ways each of them tried to deny, and in ways they have no right to: they have known each other a matter of months, they have fought as much as they have made love, they have hated each other as much as they have craved one another. They have no right to be this close, to know this instantly, to feel this deeply.

Danicka sighs softly, exhaling as though she was holding her breath before he said that, even though she wasn't. Her eyes open again. She stays where she is, curled close to his side, against his ribs, from which popular mythology would suggest she was created in the first place.

"I'm sorry," she murmurs, almost thoughtfully, watching her hand where it lies on his chest, just over his heart. "I just had no idea how much it would hurt to lose you."

This is a lie. She knows it as she says it. She closes her eyes.

[Lukas] His other hand, which had slipped behind his head again, extricates itself. It covers her hand over his heart, and then it finds the spaces between her fingers, slips between, interdigitates, closes.

"Miláčka, you have nothing to be sorry for." It's little more than a whisper. It's not the first time he's said this to her, but every time he's meant it, achingly, because it's true.

There's more there. He could say I should have never left you. Or that week was hell. Or ... something like that; anything like that, some of which he has already said to her on that flayed and tattered night he found her again, they found each other again like children in a storm, vessels of the same scattered fleet in a storm-tossed ocean. They clung together after that first catastrophic lovemaking. They're still, in a sense, clinging together now, or perhaps merely fitting together.

Moments go by, and then he stirs beneath her -- stretches his fingers out until he can snag the edge of his tray, pulls it carefully toward him until he can pick up his wineglass. He lifts his head and drains it, the tendons in his neck standing out in strain. When it's empty he sets it back down on its side, atop his plate, beneath the napkin.

Then he raises himself on his elbow. He can see her now, her hair spread over his arm as he rolls her to her side, and then to her bed. Lukas looks at her as though she were half-new to him, an unexpected occurrence. Which is what she is, in the end. He could've never in a million years anticipated this.

His left hand opens over her right side. He follows the smooth stretch of skin between her lowermost ribs and her pelvic arch, her chest and her hip. His fingers are long; they curve over her side. His eyelashes shade his eyes as he looks at her, looks at his hand on her, the contrast of their skin -- his swarthy, tanning with summer; hers fair, turning golden with the sun.

He leans over her and, with a sort of slow steady warmth like a summer rain, closes his mouth over her nipple. His left leg winds around hers, and his hand is at her hip now. There's something equal parts protective and worshipful and possessive about this, the way he leans over her, covers her with his hand and takes her into his mouth. There's something, too, that brings to mind the way he'd eaten with his fingers, with a drowsy, feral ease, as though she were the next course at dinner.

[Danicka] For being weak, she is sorry, but she doesn't ask forgiveness. For being afraid, she is sorry, but she doesn't promise to change. For being a liar, she levels her eyes others and if they want her to be sorry, she plays very nicely at it. She plays nicely at many things: being demure, being soft, being a seductress. She could easily be the Whore of Babylon, be Lilith, be Eve, blamed for the wickedness of men, the battle of the sexes, the fall from grace. She takes to each mask with equal skill, and accepts the blame with argument, but not because she believes in it.

If that is what they want her to be, that is what she will be.

Lukas doesn't hear the lie, or if he does he doesn't speak of it or drag it out into the light. Enough has been dragged out into the light this evening. Her sisters, her expansive family tree, her mother, her brother, the way thinking of him makes her skin crawl. She has bared herself to Lukas so many times tonight she is losing track, so many times that wrapping her legs around him as he came inside her seemed only natural, seemed only like the next course of action. They have no barrier between them, then or now, and she does not mention it.

Danicka is not crawling over him and taking him into her body again and again like she did the last time they had sex, that cataclysmic night that began with a verbal war and ended with total, utter capitulation. Anything, they said. Everything.

She rolls to her back, eyes open and murky again. He can count the flecks of brown and amber-gold, can see the fuzzy edges of blue that take over her irises when the sunlight hits her face. He can smell the wine on her breath, feel the heat of her skin. She doesn't cool down even though the air conditioning is going; the shower and sex and liquor keep her incredibly warm. Beneath her tan, her cheeks are faintly flushed. She looks the way she does after they have made love, after he has finished with her -- or after she has finished with him -- and he no longer looks at her and thinks

whore. Ready to get fucked. Just got fucked.

Instead: miláčka, he calls her, because that is what she is. To him. Then and now. Especially now.

Danicka breathes in deeply as he sucks her nipple into his mouth, her eyes closing and her lips parting slowly. She is sensitive, moreso now because she is so drowsy, so relaxed, so stirred by the knowledge of what their lovemaking in the shower did to him. She is responsive, because there is no reason, whatsoever, for her to hold back or be wary. They both know well what Lukas is capable of doing to her, what noises she makes when he touches her, how freely and how loudly she will moan for him when he slides into her cunt.

She gasps, though, a soft hint at what will come later. One leg slides up, folds itself alongside his hip. "Baby..." she whispers, "move the tray off the bed."

[Lukas] Lukas's eyes are closed as he licks and sucks at Danicka's breast. When she breathes in her ribcage opens up and her flesh rises with it. There's nothing about her that's static or remotely predictable.

Some time ago -- though Lukas does not know of this, and perhaps never will -- Danicka very nearly ended up the host for a rampaging spirit of the Wyld. Because there's something inside her, beneath the masks of demureness, or softness, or seduction, or whatever else she's capable of, that's no more civilized or restrained or domesticated than he is. There's a flash in her that he catches sometimes, and increasingly more often, that's sheer wildness.

They are confident and at ease in this ridiculously overpriced hotel with its ridiculously overpriced meals and mattresses and furnishings and fixtures. They do not, however, belong here -- no more than hurricanes belong in cages.

The difference is that she wears the masks far, far better than he ever will. She's had a lifetime's worth of practice, literally. Her life has depended on her ability to pretend, to lie, to dissemble. One might wonder if the wildness he glimpses in her is another mask. But of all the things he's distrusted and disbelieved of her, this alone he's never doubted.

When they're naked, they're truly naked.

And she gasps. And her leg wraps itself around the narrow girdle of his hip. And he moves closer to her, sliding over and between her legs, the line of his spine going supple, going languid, as he sinks down over her.

He's at her other breast now, the left, over the quickening beat of her heart. He's going at her a little harder now, but no faster, and when she tells him to mind the tray his eyes open, and he looks up at her, and his eyes are an animal's, black ringed in incandescence.

A muffled sound, half-unwilling -- mmphh -- and Lukas's eyes close for another second. Then he takes his mouth from Danicka's breast, pushes himself up to meet her mouth swiftly, rather suddenly, before he gets up off the bed.

There are two trays. He could move them to the desk, but he doesn't. He takes them off the bed and puts them on the floor, and then -- though she's said nothing of it -- he finds her bag and brings it to her.

While she finds the prophylactics, he turns down the lights in the room; he throws even the sheer inner curtain open. The city, the night, and the lake glisten in at him. He remembers looking out at this city, not from this room exactly but near enough almost not to matter, when the lake was frozen and sleet-bright under the waxing gibbous moon.

Lukas comes back to bed. In the darkness he's a shape defined largely by strength and warmth and rage. He slides his arms around and under Danicka and lifts her, swift and sure, and for a moment she thinks he might spin her around -- but he settles for a half-turn, sinking down on the edge of the bed instead with her astride his lap.

"Jemně této době, dítě," he whispers to her, like a precious and pleasant secret.

[Danicka] Nothing about Lukas's careful civility has, for a moment, fooled Danicka. She knew him for what he was when she met him at the nightclub in January, and was immediately watching him for those signals of savagery that are so carefully hidden in many members of their Tribe. She looked for what was underneath the bright blue drink, the chiding sarcasm directed at Gabriella, the carefully rumpled clothes. She saw the restrained hunger with which he decided to go after the redhead he likely ended up fucking in the bathroom later.

She saw almost instantly that she had a better chance of chance of being left alone if she was a little bit clever, without insulting him. If she acknowledged his ego but did not stroke it or purr into its ear. Danicka knew more about him in a handshake than he could understand about her in months.

He's a monster, an animal. It's in the way he bathes, in the way he eats, in the way he licks at her breasts now, suckling and devouring with impunity that is mingled with an odd and subtle eagerness to please her. Danicka knows him like this, loves him like this, and her breaths deepen and speed up as his hips slide against her inner thighs. It is tempting, more than he might be able to tell, to just wrap her legs around him, grab a hold of him, and guide himside of her again. Fuck the condoms, fuck the trays, fuck the wine glass and the expensive sheets.

Her hands slide up his back, caressing his flesh and feeling the shift and flex of muscle moving underneath his skin. She holds him to her, shivering when he lets go of her breast to look at her. Her eyes open then, watching him, and she expects him now to kiss her, hard, and push her legs apart so he can drive himself inside of her. They do kiss, and hard, but he doesn't enter her. Lukas moves away, his reluctance and perhaps even frustration fueling the efficiency with which he moves the trays off the bed and gets her purse from the floor by the corner.

What does it say about her, that she doesn't even have to look in order to find what her fingers are searching for? She watches him instead, sitting up on the bed to take the purse and slip her hand inside. She drops the strip on the bed after tearing one off, her purse eased back to the floor. Lukas is still not on the bed with her. There's no light but the moon, the stars, the city. It makes her look as mercurial as she is thought to be, when he turns to her again.

There's an unwrapped condom in her hand, and a playfulness in her eyes as she moves into his hands. He lifts her easily, and she goes easily, easier than any encounter he can remember over the last...month, or more. She goes as easily now as she did when he picked her up on the fifteenth of last month, spun in his arms in utter delight at seeing him again. And she smiles, her thighs moving into place on either side of his lap. Danicka wraps her arms around his neck and kisses him instead of answering him. Her kiss is a yes.

And not a lie.

When their mouths part, he hears a soft riiip behind his head, her hands working blindly. She tosses the wrapper over her shoulder, heedless, and then unwinds one arm from his shoulders to reach between them and slowly unroll the condom onto his cock. Her eyes stay on his, watching him react to the mundane, needful act turned sensual, turned seductive. "We should be more careful," she whispers to him, her voice hypnotic in its lowness, its drowsy importance.

Danicka leaves no room for him to answer that. She kisses him again, more firmly this time, less playfully. Her hips lift, her hand still on him, and a moment later she is guiding him to her pussy, gasping into his mouth.

[Lukas] Lukas used to close his eyes every time Danicka kissed him. It was as though he could only bear how naked he was in the face of her kiss if he couldn't see her, if he couldn't see himself and how he was opening to her, revealing everything, caving in.

He doesn't now. Not every time. Most times, but not every time, and not this time. She kisses him and he holds her gently, but not carefully; he presses her against him until he hears her ripping the packet open by touch. Then he allows space to open between them, and when she reaches down he lowers his hands to the mattress, braces them behind him.

Danicka's eyes stay on his and his stay on hers and she rolls the condom on and his eyelids flicker but do not close and he exhales, long and slow and on the very edge of a groan.

She hypnotizes him with her words, her voice, her fingers. She hypnotizes him with the way she tosses the wrapper over her shoulder like it didn't matter. Lukas is in a goddamn trance, in an altered state of mind, an altered state of being. His breathing is coming fast, slipping in and out of his chest. The words filter into his mind but they don't really register. There's no room to answer her, not merely because she kisses him but because he leans forward while she's still speaking, licks her lips as if to eat her words, eat her breath. Then their mouths seal and his eyes shut at last. The kiss is firm and he rocks back, lets her lean against him and raise her hips.

They gasp together, a shared breath. Oh my god... he thinks, and she's lowering herself, coming down on him inch by inch by inch and his eyes are closed and his lips are parted even after the kiss is over. His head falls back as she sheaths him completely.

When he lowers his head again, he finds her mouth by touch and memory. He kisses her again, and kissing her, shifts his weight from his hands. The muscles of his abdomen tauten. He caresses her body, hip to breast, her sides, her waist -- his hands close over her flesh her and there, rub and stroke, and finally settle on her ass, on her hips. He holds her as she begins to ride him. It's hard to say who sets this tempo, but it's slow as a dream, but with a hardness to it, and he's grinding her down against him at the very end of each stroke -- or she's grinding herself -- or --

It doesn't matter. There's an edge of hunger to this, even now, and it's an edge that sharpens, that gleams. He has not stopped kissing her. He pauses sometimes to gasp and breathe, to absorb what she's doing to him, but he doesn't stop. His mouth comes back to hers again and again, sucking kisses from her lips, biting lightly at her chin and her jaw and her neck; returning, always returning, to her mouth.

[Danicka] Most certainly, Danicka tells his body what she wants from it. She tells him how fast, how slow. She lowers herself slowly onto his cock, yes, and she stays there for a moment as his hands wander, as he reacts to being inside her again. She rolls her hips once, grinds gently on him without moving much, to let him feel her wet, and hot, and holding him tight inside of her body. And then she smooths her hands onto his shoulders, locks her eyes with his, and lifts her hips so that he leaves her again, inch by inch, until they are only barely connected.

Just as slowly as before, she slides back down onto him. Danicka's eyes never leave Lukas's, not as she's fighting not to gasp aloud as he moves into her again, not as she's rocking on top of his lap again. He kisses her, caresses her body, and it doesn't stop her: she lifts up again, her body abandoning his almost completely, and then works him back into her cunt a third time.

He can kiss her breasts, her neck, her jaw. He can kiss her mouth when she is close enough, but she moves again, starts to leave him again. Slow. So fucking slow.

[Lukas] Three times she raises and lowers herself onto him, and by the third the aching slowness of it, the deliberation, is fucking killing him.

It's what he asked for, isn't it? Gently. Only this isn't gentle. It's something like maddening. His hands are wandering her body. His palms are pushing over her ribcage to fondle her breasts, and then sweeping around to the narrow wings of her shoulderblades. He presses her against him and they're kissing, he's kissing her mouth when she comes down over him and her neck otherwise, the line of her pulse down to her heart, down to her breastbone. She raises up and he wraps his arms around her back, bends her over it, kisses her breasts, sucks at her until she starts to come down again, and

his thoughts scatter. He pants against the hollow of her throat. This time when she's on him, when she's on his lap and his cock is buried inside her, his hands come to her hips. He holds her in place, firmly, holds himself deep inside her and bites at her neck.

"God, Danička," he murmurs, something like begging, though he doesn't voice what he wants. He doesn't know what he wants. He pushes a hand into the mattress and shifts backwards, gasping when the movement adjusts her on him. They're at the center of the bed now, crosswise. He kisses her again, harder this time, and then lays back.

There's a long of length to him, a lot of height to unfurl across the mattress. There's a lot of strength in the muscles that uncoil and relax. He draws a deep breath and begins to sigh it out, but then she moves again on him, or tenses, clenches him -- something -- and his breath stutters; he throws his head back.

He's lost for a second; lost.

Then he's looking at her again. "Come on." His hands rub over her thighs. He squeezes her ass, and then he's catching her forearms, tugging her down to lean over him. "Ride it, baby. Nedovolte, aby mě čekat na vás."

[Danicka] The woman he's chosen -- for now, for as long as they can stand each other, for until they get tired of each other, whatever disclaimer they may have once used -- is, in essence, a double-edged sword just as so many of her traits are. Gently, he says, and she does this to him. Slowly, he said once, then 'a little faster', and she had started riding him so hard he threw his head back and bit back groans. Danicka can be extraordinarily obedient. Danicka is also wild, and strangely defiant, and even then, it's still...gentle.

The way she's looking at him is soft. The way she moves while he's inside her is tender. Her fingers rubbing the back of his neck and stroking his hair are sweet. She shudders as he touches her, strokes her breasts and her back. She whimpers softly when he grabs her and holds her still, pulls her down and keeps her there. Danicka squirms as though fighting it, but not very hard.

Her arms wrap around his shoulders again, just a split second before she senses that he's about to move, is moving, is laying out on the bed. The bedspread is thoroughly wrinkled by this point, and neither of them care, and it doesn't matter anyway. Danicka grinds down on him as he kisses her like that, bites his lower lip before he lays down. Her eyes have turned vivid again, a saturated and ravenous green. It's a jealous, possessive color.

She bares her teeth at him. She's never done it before.

Danicka shakes off his hands on her forearms, planting her palms on his chest. She swings her hips on him, not gentle at all this time but hard, rough, and demanding. Ride it, he says, and she does. Don't make him wait, he says, and she doesn't. She braces herself on his pectoral muscles, lifts her hips once more...and slams down on him with a ragged, vicious gasp.

"Fuck, yeah..."

[Lukas] She's never bared her teeth at him before.

She's never clawed him hard enough to break skin, either. She's never, ever shaken his grip off. It took her months to stop going limp when he grabs her. Even now that's an uncertain thing, dependent on his mood and hers, the day, the moon.

But she's never bared her teeth at him before. She's never stressed moje quite like that, and --

And she has fucked him beyond the point of tolerance, and she has obeyed with utter defiance, and when he lays back and she plants her palms on his chest her hands are so warm that the heat that builds between their skin is nearly enough to scorch him. He grasps at her wrists when she swings her hips over him, demanding; he clutches at her forearms and throws his head back again, hard enough to thump the mattress.

Her weight settles onto his chest. She braces herself there. This is one thing she's done since the start. There's never been any doubt, any fear that she might be too much for him; but then, Danicka isn't fucking blind. She's not a fucking idiot. She's smart as a whip. There's a cleverness to her that's close to animal cunning. Sometimes he looks at her eyes when she's like this, like this, and she's nothing close to human.

"Oh fuck--" a rush, when she slams down on him. He has to close his eyes. His hands grip her wrists until he forces himself to loosen his fingers, and then he follows her arms up; he cups her small breasts against her sleek body. If she waits for him, his eyes reopen a moment later, and he looks at her, and there's something half-dazed in his eyes, a glaze of want. "Udělej to znovu. Jízda mě."

[Danicka] Danicka does it again, bearing her weight down on her hands as she lifts herself up and then grinds down onto his cock again, gasping aloud as they come together again. "God, you fuck..."

This is not gentle. It is not really any softer than what happened in the shower, though she doesn't claw his chest, doesn't lean over and bite at him. Later, maybe, they'll make love slowly, her ankles crossed over the small of his back or their bodies stretched out and aligned, belly to belly or her back to his chest. Later, maybe, they'll make love just as gently as Lukas wants or as Danicka purrs for, but this isn't very gentle.

And that's all right. Danicka growls deep in her throat as she starts riding Lukas faster, small whimpers rising out of her, her hips flexing every time she swings them. She rubs herself against his shaft, folding over him when a hard wave of pleasure radiates out from her clitoris. As far as their naked bodies are concerned they have only been together for two weeks now. As far as their bodies are concerned there is an eternity between each night they spend together. All the same, she knows him. She knows him intuitively, knows how hard to push him before he starts to get dangerous, knows how much farther than that before she can't handle it.

Truth be told they have never hit either limit, as far as she is concerned.

So she fucks him, her dried and wavy hair bouncing on her shoulders, her eyes opening to look down at him with hunger and possession. And no: it is nothing close to human. She's no more human than he is, not when they're like this. Not when he's inside of her, and they're naked, and she's swirling her hips in a circle to make him gasp, and not when she's moving faster, not when she's crying out his name and not when the moon is coming through the window behind her.

"Lukáš...oh, fuck, baby...Stýskalo se mi po tobě. Bože, I missed having you inside me..."

Danicka's thrusts down against him get harder, maintaining the pace she's worked herself up to. "Fuck...ah...ah, god! Jste nejlepší!"

[Lukas] No; this isn't very gentle at all.

There's a savagery in this. It's reminiscent of sex before pornography, before censorship, before churches and religions and morality. There's a raw claim in the way she's looking at him, and the way his hands are all over her, and when she rubs herself on the shaft of his cock and jackknifes from the pleasure --

He says, a harsh whisper, all sibilants: "Fuck, yes, that's it baby, that's it."

-- his hands sweep instantly around her ribs to clasp over her back. He clasps her to him and he moves them again, flexing his hips up against hers and pushing with his feet to slide them further onto the bed, to give himself room to plant his feet, to give himself leverage to fuck her.

He's letting her go, and she's rising over him again. She's not clawing his chest but he holds her hands there, holds her hands against him and watches her, watches her, the swing of her hair and the writhe of her body. He's touching her body again, all those slender twisting muscles in her back, her stomach, and she's not merely gasping now but crying out, words that leave her in tatters, chimerical, one language and then the other, and he throws his head back and grabs her by the hips and

gives himself over to this. Grabs her and fucks her, fucks her as she rides him. There's nothing gentle about this, nothing at all; he's fucking up into her as fast and hard as she fucks him, and when she cries out, ah, ah, he rises up against her, locks his arm around her and, in one smooth sharklike twist of his body, turns her under him.

The moon is rising outside. The city is silver and blue, but they're not underwater this time. He's panting when he leans over her, puts his weight on his fists and his knees. "Wrap your -- " he begins, but he doesn't have to say that, she's already doing it, he says instead, " -- god, yes -- "

-- and that's cut off too. He leans down and eats at her mouth, bites a kiss onto her, starts fucking her again in the middle of it, just as fast and just as hard as they were going a moment before. When his mouth tears free of hers he lowers his brow to her collarbone for a moment, lets out a low snarling groan against her skin, and then pushes himself up again.

[Danicka] That's all it's ever been. Their roughest sex has an element of sweet acceptance to it, and their slowest, softest lovemaking is edged in animalistic need that borders on violence. The difference tonight is on the verge of frightening: she calls him mine. She marks his body with her fingernails, with her teeth. She fucks him like he or the world owe this to her, to let her have this, to let her have him as though he's some kind of karmic repayment for all the violence done, all the things lost. But if Danicka believed in karma, she would be waiting for its vengeance, not a gift.

So maybe she's just fucking him like this because he is hers, not given but something she reached out and damn well took for herself. She saw him and she wanted to be close to him, to read over his shoulder and feel his warmth through her clothes, to curl up and be comforted simply by being near to his body and his voice. She thought of him later and wanted to do exactly this, wanted him to do exactly what he did to her in the shower. Fuck her. Fuck her until she screamed.

And eventually, she took him.

Lukas, no more passive than she is, thrusts up into her, holds her hips to keep her steady as much as to keep her against his body. She is sweating now, squirming down on his cock and whimpering, making a snarling, almost mewling sound as she gets closer, as he takes her higher, as he --

-- flips her onto her back on the mattress. Danicka's eyes flash open and her hand comes to the back of his head, grabs a hold of his hair. Her teeth are on edge again. "Zmrde zkurvenej," she snarls at him, and yes...her legs go around him. They tighten ferociously, pull him so deep inside her that she lets out a small shriek and bucks her hips, her back arching. Her hand wrenches at his hair, pulls him not to her mouth but to her throat, which...

It's insane. To scratch him. To swear at him, bite at him, fuck him like this, and then bring those teeth of his to her neck.

[Lukas] It's insane.

For them to fuck like this. For her to bare her teeth at him. For her to meet his eyes. For her eyes to flame at him like that; for her to grab him by the hair; for her to pull him deeper like that, just like that, as if --

"God!" His eyes shut. The exclamation is half a gasp. Their backs arch together, complementary. She pulls him in and she shrieks; he pushes into her, slides in to the base of his cock, fists his hand in the sheets beside her shoulders. She pulls him down.

-- as if she doesn't fear him, doesn't fear what he might do, doesn't fear his teeth and the beast that lives under his skin and behind his eyes; the beast that, in another form, would tear her to shreds without a thought; without even wanting to.

There's no difference, really, between the beast in him that kills and maims and the beast in him that'll hold her against a shower wall, hike her legs up around his chest, fuck her cunt until she screamed and writhed and tore his back open. There's no difference between the beast that wants nothing but blood and destruction and the beast that wants nothing but to have her, to keep her, to

claim her.
(moje.)

And his teeth are at her neck now, bared. He holds himself on one hand, one forearm. Her legs are wrapped around him, fiercely, possessively tight, but he finds room to fuck her anyway, finds room to pound her senseless, and now he's panting against her throat, rushes of humid breath; he's pushing his hand into her hair to tip back her head so he can kiss her throat, lick her throat, bite the side of her neck, lightly, and then her shoulder, much harder.

He has nothing left to say to her. He has almost nothing left to give to her that he hasn't already given, except this: the reckless slamming of his body into hers, over and over and over, and the weight of his chest on hers, and the clench of his teeth into her flesh.

[Danicka] "You..."

She snarls this, in his ear because he is biting her neck and her shoulder.

"Get back under me..."

She snarls this, halting between words because of the force of the way he's thrusting into her, gasping when he hits a sweet spot, gasping when he groans.

"Now."

Since when do Shadow Lords bow to the whims of their kin? Especially when said kin are wrapped around them, all arm arms and taut legs. Especially when said kin are getting fucked on top of a hotel bedspread, when he is already so on edge he could snap, he could kill her, he could lose his temper and his patience and break her neck out of a sheer loss of control that she claimed once to be expecting, but perhaps not fearing.

Fear has nothing to do with the demand she makes now. It's almost like anger, or desire with a razored edge of frustration, with a strength she has never, ever dared show even him. She is not petting his hair and cooing his name as an endearment, begging him in Czech to stop. She growls that Now at him like the next thing out of her throat is going to be a scream.

[Lukas] There's a moment --

crystalline, frozen, where he stops. It's barely an eyeblink in the grand scheme of things, but it's there, and it's sharp, and it's stark, and it's dangerous; teetering on some unseen edge over some gaping chasm.

Lukas draws back from her. Rears back as though she'd clawed him, though when she clawed him he hadn't reacted anything like this. This is different, on the brink. His fierce eyes are on Danicka's. She's not merely asking him, not merely telling him but flat-out demanding something of him, and the dominant animal inside him hears the challenge, snarls in response.

He's snarling at her, silently: his lips peeled back from his teeth, his eyes glaring and glassy as an angry wolf's, terrible. What the hell was she thinking? What the hell was she thinking when she bared her throat, clawed his back -- outright demanded that he rolls on his back for her?

A beat goes by. It's only an instant's worth of time in the end.

And then, with a short, growling exhale, he scoops her up. Her body seals to his. Makes him gasp. They burn each other like brands. He kisses her, tears at her mouth with his. He sits back on his heels, and then topples backwards so hard the mattress jounces against the nightstand. This is rough, too, rough and without finesse. He's on his back again, and she's atop him, and now his head is somewhere near the foot of the bed, his knees are drawn up, and if he's slipped out of her in the jumble he takes himself in hand.

"Získat zpět na vrcholu mě." It's dark in the room. Their eyes are fucking incandescent, gleaming in the dark. "Jízda mě."

[Danicka] He doesn't have to tell her, and truth be told, by the time he gets to Jízda mě she is already on him again. Danicka mounts him like before, hands on his chest and pussy sliding down onto his cock, but this time she doesn't grind down slowly. She gets him back inside of her as soon as she can and starts working herself back into the rhythm she had before he so arrogantly, rudely turned her over when she was almost there. In seconds, in less than a minute, she's whimpering again, the small gasps giving way to more full-throated cries.

She rides him. She fucks him, her hands flexing on his chest now, her head thrown back. The sweat on her skin has her hair sticking to her back between her shoulderblades, has tendrils stuck to her cheeks and neck, has her glowing in what moonlight comes through the windows. If there was a moment when she was terrified of him, it passed without note, it passed without a gleam in her eyes. She's so far gone tonight there is no bringing her back, or if there is...he hasn't found that limit, he hasn't hit that wall with her. Not this time. Not tonight.

Danicka starts to lean forward over him farther, grinding her clit against his cock, crying out over and over sounds that may not be his name, may not be anything at all, but mean everything all the same. She kisses him with surprising -- shocking -- gentleness, little brushes of her lips over his, and gasps against his cheeks, against his mouth.

"Baby," she whimpers, writhing under his hands. "Baby, you're going to make me come..."

[Lukas] There's nothing slow about the way she mounts him this time, and if it had been anything but a soft mattress under his head, Lukas would've put a bump on the back of his own head.

But it's not tile. It is a mattress. It's the expensive bed of their expensive room, and the coverlets are hopelessly rumpled, and the blankets are damp with his sweat, and as she plunges down on him he flexes his head back and gasps, his hand coming loose from his cock to fit under her lean thigh.

"Oh -- Danička--"

It shreds; it tatters. She rides him. She fucks him, and he can't remember the last time it was like this. He doesn't think it was ever like this, before. He doesn't think she would have dared; he doesn't think he would have let her; he doesn't think

about anything anymore. She leans forward and he arches his head up, seizes her nipple between his lips, sucks it into his mouth, sucks at her furiously as he starts to fuck her right back, panting when she works that cunt on him just right, makes him drops his head back to the mattress.

There's such an unexpected, wrenching gentleness in her kiss then. His mouth moves to hers, but they catch at each other and lose one another; they're fucking each other too hard, driving each other too close to the brink. Her gasps are curling out over his skin and his eyes are closed, his face taut with pleasure; his lips are moving, but they're barely shaping his breath, and it's only if she pays attention, listens carefully, that she can catch what he's saying, over and over:

"...oh my fuck... oh my god... oh my Danička, mine..."

He's going to make her come. His eyes snap open. They burn, ferocious as starlight. His hands come off her body. He takes her face between his hands and he lunges up to her, kisses her hard, fucks her hard, drops back down.

"Come." His thumb traces her lower lip. His hands are so, so gentle. He traces her face in the darkness. The rest of him isn't anything close to gentle. He doesn't stop fucking her; doesn't flag. His hands seize her hips. He slams her down on his cock, holds her down, grinds into her, lets her go. He just lets her go. He lets her ride.

"Come for me, baby. Přál bych si, aby jste došli."

[Danicka] The headache she had after fucking Lukas in the shower is gone, and she still doesn't know how it came to be. She's not a foolish woman, and it doesn't take a great deal of deductive reasoning to figure out that she must have thrown her head back as Lukas is doing now, that she smacked her head against the tile so hard that she should have seen stars if she wasn't already seeing fireworks.

"Baby," she whimpers, not in response to her name but to what he's doing to her, sucking at her breast, touching her body with hands no less greedy or rough than the rest of him. They're moving so fast and hard on the bed that she's losing track of where she is. They could be at the side, they could be on the floor, they could be on the edge of a cliff, the crest of a wave, they could be about to fall, and she wouldn't know it.

She wouldn't care.

But when they kiss, she cares. Undeniably, wholly, she cares about the way they kiss so softly in the middle of all this, the way his hand touches her face in all this. They have been here before, their lower halves almost warlike in the way they fuck one another while their hands and their mouths and their eyes make a love that's more passionate, that takes its time, that unfurls gently between them. It's bizarre. It's out of place. It's perfect.

Danicka looks almost like she's in pain as she looks down at him, their faces meeting halfway in the air, their mouths introducing themselves to one another. They kiss like they invented it. This is theirs. This is theirs alone, whatever this is. And then she moans, suddenly, past his lips. He can taste it: the wine, the cry, the woman whose absence for a week was hell only because he thought never again. He tastes her, and feels the subtle vibrations of her pleasure through their kiss, vibrations that are overcome a second later by the taut clenching of her cunt around him.

He lets her go. And she lets go. And her eyes find his, holding on to him there, as though that is more trusted than his hands on her hips, than her hands on his chest, than his cock inside of her. She trusts his eyes, trusts him to hold her, even though she falls.

[Lukas] The very first night, the very first time, this is how it was.

Her eyes fast on his, Danicka rode Lukas, because Danicka would not allow him on top of her. She wouldn't let him fuck her like a whore, either, on that stripped-bare bed in that crummy motel room. She wouldn't let him degrade her, and the act, and himself, by turning it into something less than it was.

From the moment I saw her, he said. He said that. Unprompted, uncoerced, he said that himself; and then when she called him to Mr. C's and laid her cards on the table, he tried to pretend it was just another fuck.

It was never just another fuck. This is not just another fuck.

And there's something almost like pain in her face, in the furrow of her brow and the parting of her lips, when they kiss -- when she moans suddenly. He has warning this time. It's not like the night at the inn three blocks from her building. He has warning, he knows where she's heading and when she'll fall, and

and even so, when she comes, he can't take it. Her eyes are on his and he can't look away. He holds her by the hips and he fucks her even when she's stopped, even when she's just riding it out; he fucks her through her orgasm, past it, into his own. Then he's wrapping his arms around her and turning his mouth against her neck and the only word left in him is her name.

Which he gasps, over and over, when he comes inside her, chasing her orgasm by seconds; rigid beneath her as she melts; driving himself into her the way he always does, as though to be anywhere in the whole goddamn universe other than right here, inside her, would mean the death of him.

It's some untold span of seconds before he can bring himself to relax, muscle by muscle, joint by joint. He's holding her so hard he could crush the life from her with a little more effort. He loosens his arms, too, and he's arched his back right off the bed, bend his head to her shoulder and her neck. He lets himself down now, lets himself relax into the mattress, panting.

"Pobyt." This, as soon as he can string sounds into syllables. This, as though he would fall apart if she drew away from him, "Zůstaňte kde jste, Danička."

[Danicka] That first night, it had nothing to do with degradation. When she fucked Sam she let him roll her onto her back, she didn't say a word, and she faked the third orgasm Lukas thought he heard because Sam was an Ahroun, and the moon was heavy if not full, and it didn't matter to her how he fucked her then. It made no difference. So she turned her head to the side, not letting him look into her eyes when he came, and gasped and writhed and made him think she wanted to be there with him, like that.

Just a couple of weeks later, Lukas covered her body not on a narrow Brotherhood bed but a stripped motel mattress, and she told him -- as gently as she knew how, as carefully -- no. Danicka does not need to tell him why she refused to unfasten his jeans and undress him when he put her hands at his waistband; he doesn't need to hear that Sam did this, that suddenly she knew she did not want it to be with Lukas as it had been with his brother.

So she kissed him, wrapping her arms and legs around his body and opening her mouth to him, their shared breaths suddenly filled with gasping desire.

As they are now, as their bodies finally start to let them come down from orgasms that cascaded into one another just as hard and fast as water falling off of cliffsides. Danicka squirms on Lukas's cock as though to milk every last second from her climax, writhing in his arms while her name rushes past his lips again, and again, the way he has heard his own from her mouth before.

But when they relax, when they let go or when they are let down, she curls against his chest, trying to catch her breath. It's hard, when he's holding her that tightly. She pushes against him gently, trying to get him to loosen his grip, murmuring Lásko, prosím... against his shoulder, her ribs expanding as she tries to get enough oxygen in the aftermath. When he does release her a little her shoulders round and she closes her eyes, laying on his upper body like she would be perfectly content to sleep there.

"Nejsem docházky. Je to v pořádku. Nejsem docházky."

[Lukas] She's not leaving. It's okay. She's not leaving.

So little by little his arms loosen. They relax into one another, and into the bed. He's still breathing hard. His feet slide down, his knees straighten. His elbows come down to rest on the mattress, his fingertips curled over the dip of her waist. They don't move for a long time. She seems content to sleep where she is, and for the moment, he's of the same mind.

Fuck the food on the ground. Fuck their clothes everywhere. Fuck taking another shower; fuck the condom still on his cock. Fuck all that. He's content where he is. He's deeply, thoroughly content.

He's happy where he is.

Moments go by. Lukas finds his baselines again. Some alertness returns slowly to him, and his fingers begin to trace her body from mid-back to waist to ass, and back. He stirs a little, tips his head back to let a lock of her hair slip free from under his nose, and then opens his eyes.

"What did you mean," he asks, and there's a faint rasp to his voice -- too many breaths drawn too fast; too long without words, "when you said we should be more careful?"

[Danicka] The room comes back in shapes first, hazy impressions of furniture and walls. Then colors, splashed wildly across the cloudlike pieces of the room. They begin in pastel, in pale hues that steadily darken and sharpen into tangibility. Edges re-form; she remembers where the boundaries of the bed are, the gloss and hardness of the windowglass, the smell of food and wine and the ache in her muscles from the first two rounds of lovemaking they've engaged in tonight.

Her eyes drowsily open; close again. Lukas's hands are on her back, stroking idly and slowly, and she succumbs to the desire to cease all movement, cease all thought, and simply rest on top of him. Until he speaks.

As close as they are he can feel even the faintest flickers of tension. It isn't even emotional, at this level. It's awareness, a shifting from pre-sleep to conscious thought again. She processes the words and pulls herself back from the expectation that she can just curl up on his chest or at his side and yank the covers around them any which way. No matter that they're topsy-turvy on the bed; no matter.

"I mean..." she murmurs, after a few seconds of processing, then a few seconds of thought, her head still lying on his chest, "that we shouldn't fuck around without a condom."

[Lukas] His chest moves beneath her ear as he laughs. The way she lies atop him, her cheek pressed to the broad planes of his pectorals, she can hear his voice resonating through his flesh and bones before she hears it reach her through the air. " 'Fuck around'?" he echoes her, a gentle teasing. The humor in his voice is a mutable, transient thing. It submerges again. He takes a deep breath, but not because he needs to.

"I know you're on contraceptives," he says, quieter now. "Why are you so ... careful?"

There was a halt in that sentence as he looked for the right word. In the end he settles for the one she chose.

[Danicka] Danicka resettles on top of him slightly, sighs in contentment. Her hands are resting on his sides, feeling the steady expansion and relaxation of his ribcage. His body seems to quiver when he chuckles, and it makes her lips curve into a smile that is heartbreakingly fond without the thought I love him ever crossing her mind in the moment.

Why is she so...careful. Or afraid. Or worried. Or insistent. Any number of words would have fit there. She is afraid. She is worried. She does, usually, insist. The first night, she literally threw a strip of condoms at him before she would let him have her. At that point he gave up, laid back, and told her take me inside you in a language that no other Garou or Kinfolk in Chicago can fathom. Her father's native tongue is one place where she cannot hide from Lukas, as she has hidden from so many other people.

She doesn't answer for a few seconds. There are a lot of reasons, but he can hear her slipping backwards, back to the way she used to converse with him, when she opens her mouth to answer him with a question: "Do you want me to have your children?"

It's almost cruelly blunt.

[Lukas] Perhaps it's only fair, after everything he's asked her tonight, that she turns the knife's edge around on him. Or perhaps she's only trying to push him away, to shut him down, with a question she knows he can't properly answer.

And he can't. There's a silence on his end too. As close as they are, she knows when he tenses; she can feel it, the shifting in his body beneath hers. His heart gives a single thud of a beat out of rhythm, and then settles back into it.

"I'd be lying," he replies slowly, "if I told you never. It's not something I've thought explicitly about, but -- Danička, something about you resonates in the marrow of my bones. Something about you tells my very spirit that our children would be strong and worthy, and ..."

He trails off. For anyone else to say this would be utter and complete bullshit. He'd be spewing bad poetry at her; she fucked him senseless and now he was hemorrhaging hyperbole. But this is Lukas, and there's nothing effusive about the way he says this; nothing sentimental.

It's stripped-down, naked; it's stone fact.

"Some instinctive part of me wants that very much." When he picks up again he's all the quieter, barely above a whisper now. "But I can recognize any number of reasons why it's a bad idea, chief among them the fact that I cannot raise a child, so you'll have to be sent away from me.

"So, no."

A pause.

"But that wasn't really what I was asking. I know you're afraid of pregnancy." Another. "I know you've been pregnant before. I guess I'm just asking..."

A conversation full of falters. The real question he wants to ask is, tell me about it. But that seems so unfair now for him to press yet another question onto her, force her to divulge yet another secret. Be a little patient with me, she said, early on. It's something he's taken to heart.

So what he asks instead: "Are you really that worried that oral contraceptives won't be enough?"

It seems a stupid question now. Of course she is.

[Danicka] He is still inside of her. They breathe together, his respirations slower and deeper, hers coming in subtle, slow waves. She can hear his heartbeat; he is covered by her body and her sprawling hair, and their words are blanketed in relaxation. They could never, ever talk about this before making love. They could not talk about this with their clothes on and distance between them. Like this they are both stripped of the walls, the banners, the battlements that make it so very easy to wage war against one another rather than hold each other as the world lies in wasteland all around them.

They tell the truth, when it's the only thing they have left to give, and when it seems like there is nothing left to lose. She tells him that Night Warder tried, and failed, to be a good mother. She tells him that Ahrouns should not raise their children, because look at what happened to her, what became of Vladislav. She tells him that she has sisters who are old enough to be her mother, that one of them is dying. He makes love to her in desperation, she tears him open, he submits to her will, she gives herself over to her own terror.

And he tells her that a part of him -- spiritual, instinctive, not intellectual, not necessarily even heartfelt -- feels drawn to her in a way she's heard before. The children she could have, their strength, their inherent glory because they came from her, came from him. She doesn't recoil. She doesn't tell him what she thinks about this idea, because a moment later he mentions that she would have to be sent away.

Danicka flinches, physically, at the thought. Her hands flex on his chest, her elbows folding in, her body tightening around his as though to hold onto him, as though there are invisible hooks in her back trying to yank her away, and she'll fight them even if they tear her open. She settles again, just in time for him to tell her that she is afraid of pregnancy. That she's been --

The world drops out from under her. He knows he knows how does he know who told him how does he know? Her breathing picks up immediately, and suddenly, though she manages not to start shaking. It's insane, how relaxed she can be on top of him, when just a few months ago she might have peeled herself away from him by now just to get some space between her fragile body and his overwhelming Rage.

She doesn't answer his question, because he knows the answer. She's tense, and her voice is tight as a string pulled taut, plucked thoughtlessly by a passing brush of fingertips: "How do you know that?"

[Lukas] You'll have to be sent away from me, he says, and she flinches, and he wraps his arms around her. It's all so sudden, so simultaneous, that the absolute causality order is unclear. He could be embracing her because his own words made him ache. He could be embracing her because he felt her flinch and it made him ache. He could be embracing her to keep her close, keep her near, against whatever might try to take her away from him.

From this. From their silence together.

His hands open over her back. Are you cold? he asked her, once. He aches when they're like this, because she feels fragile to him, and because he feels razed to the ground sometimes in the wake of their lovemaking, burnt to ash and stone, scorched to the very earth.

Then he goes on, and he tells her what he knows, and the rest of it might as well not matter because the earth, scorched or not, drops from under her. She's suddenly a drawn string, so taut he's afraid to hold her closer for fear that she'll simply snap.

Lukas doesn't let go either, though. His arms remain as they are, wrapped around her. His hands are open over her shoulderblade and her hip.

"You told me," he says. "The night outside Mr. C's. I was angry. We argued about something stupid, and you told me you'd been pregnant twice... beloved twice, in love once. I think that was all you told me."

[Danicka] More than even most Kin, Danicka knows the truth of those words. She has seen children raised by Garou before, has watched them grow progressively more agitated as the parent neared, only to break out into shrieks of terror and anticipated pain. All this before they can even open their eyes, before they can speak. She remembers literally fainting from fear when she was in Kindergarten and her mother came home, Rage sticking to her skin as much as the blood of whatever she had killed that night. She knows. She would have to go away from Lukas. Maybe not leave the city, maybe not leave him entirely, but he could never come to her freely again, nor could she drop everything and go to him as she can now.

Sometimes when Lukas touches her, she goes utterly limp to keep from being shattered. She bends with the touch so that it will not break her. But other times, most of the time, when he wraps her into his arms or reaches for her, she relaxes. When they are alone, she will sometimes become so calm as soon as she feels him. It's counterintuitive, but she'd be the first to say that the truth often is not what you would expect.

Like this truth: he knows because she told him.

Her eyes close tightly, because she told him also that she has been loved twice. She has only been in love once...with him. Her hands smooth over his sides. Danicka's quiet for a few moments, a couple of breaths, and then says softly: "The second time I got pregnant I was on the pill. So. Yes, I'm worried that it's not enough."

[Lukas] The truth is, Lukas did not tell her everything she told him to spite her, or to make her twist in the knowledge of all she divulged, all she spilled forth, while drunk out of her mind, while cranked up on cocaine, while devastated by the thought that they were over. He didn't tell her to rub her face in it, to show her how little her reserve and her silence could amount to in the face of a few mindaltering substances.

He told her because in a way he thought it might put her at ease. To know that this far is how far she stumbled, and no further.

So when she's quiet, his arms fold her a little closer. And then she's smoothing her hands over his sides, over the striated layers of muscle wrapping from his spine to his ribs, and he strokes his hand through the tumble of her hair.

She answers his question. He wants to ask something more -- the circumstances, or the details, or -- but he doesn't. He's quiet after that.

And then he's not. He asks something after all, softly: "Why are you afraid to tell me these things, Danička?"

[Danicka] "It isn't you."

This is the first thing she says, the most important to her: that he knows it is not that she is afraid to tell him these things. She is afraid to talk about them at all. She is afraid because they're true. She's afraid because of what the truth is.

Danicka takes a breath and moves her hands to the bed, pushes herself up slowly, and looks down at his eyes. "Can we get under the covers to talk about this?"

can I be covered, can I be hidden, can I have something so I am not so

exposed

[Lukas] When she sits up the movement draws him out of her. Lukas closes his eyes for a moment. When he reopens them he sits up as well, his arms tensing against his weight. His hands pressed to the mattress behind him, he leans up and catches her mouth, suddenly, but then slowly -- lastingly.

"Yeah," after. She climbs off him and he kneels on the bed, disposing of the condom while she turns down the sheets. He finds his towel discarded on the bedspread and wipes off with it; tosses it on the floor next to the food trays.

The sheets are pleasantly cool when Lukas slips between them. Almost immediately he turns toward Danicka, reaching out to restore contact, reaching out to draw her close again.

[Danicka] What's happened more and more over time is Lukas's careful stepping back from her. He started seeing, early on, how quickly pushing would get Danicka not to a breaking point where she would submit, but an utter limit where she would simply shut down, and shut him out. He learned, rapidly, that threats would not get him what he wanted from her, browbeating would do nothing, and all he could do was sit quietly and wait for her to come up alongside him. Maybe they could look at each other. Words were the sources of misunderstandings, and so he learned to sit quietly, and reach out slowly, and let her move her cheek into the palm of his hand.

When it becomes too much, she can tell him Leave it be. When she asks if they can move, or do something else, he often relents. Less, when the moon is heavy. Sometimes he pushes because she hides so well the progression towards her limit. But other times, it's like this: Danicka requests a break, not because she wants to distract him, not because she needs permission to hold back, but so that he will know

this is difficult

and knowing that, he steps back.

By the time Lukas crawls between the sheets, his lover is already there, naked and sated and aching in a profoundly pleasant way. The sheets are soft, the thread count unfathomable, and Danicka is lying on her back, her arms over her head on the pillow, her body only hidden from the waist down. She turns only slightly to him, remaining supine and languid, her eyes regaining their indistinct coloration.

"I've told you before that I don't want you to know things that will hurt you," she says quietly, and thoughtfully. She's given this some time, while he was cleaning off and while she was pulling back the blankets. "It's also just...I expect to be punished."

[Lukas] She's on her back. Her arms are over her head. Her torso is slender and long, exposed.

Lukas rolls on his stomach beside her. They're near enough that their feet brush and their legs; near enough that when he twists at the waist and props his cheek on his fist, he can easily reach out and lay his arm over her midriff.

His skin is warm. His forearm is hard with muscle, solid as a wood carving; heavy over her stomach. His hand opens over her side and his thumb traces small arcs on her skin, though his eyes don't stray from hers.

And his eyes soften at the first thing she says; wince at the second.

"You don't need to protect me, Danička," he replies, matching her quietness. "And who do you think will punish you? Me?"

[Danicka] The hair on his legs tickles the smooth skin on hers; she smiles lazily. It's brief, and thoughtless, and passing. Danicka turns her head to look at him, but not her body; they do not lean on each other now, but rest beside one another.

"It's not even...conscious, Lukášek." Danicka speaks slowly not to patronize him, but seemingly as though she is just now processing this herself, coming to knowledge mere seconds before she gives it to him. "Sometimes I'll be about to say something, and I want to say it, but then...it's like an instinct kicking in telling me no."

[Lukas] Early on, when Danicka first came to this city, she was told over and over by its Garou inhabitants who noted her hesitations, her demureness, her submissiveness, her fear --

I won't hurt you.
We won't hurt you.
We'll keep you safe.

It is perhaps noteworthy that Lukas has never promised her such a thing. It's perhaps for the best. He would have broken that promise, too, as he broke the one he made when he said, If you lie to me again...

He has hurt her, though not the way she thought. They were through each other, though not forever. They tore away from one another, and then they realized:

This is necessary.

His thumb draws another arc across her soft skin. Then he lays his head down on his bicep, his forearm curling lazily against the crown of his head; the fingertips bending down toward his black hair as he watches her across the landscape of their hotel bed.

Lukas does not promise her anything that will take a lifetime to keep. What he says instead is, "I understand."

Another arc across her skin. Then his palm moves, rubbing slowly and gently across the plane of her abdomen. It comes to a rest. Now his thumb is over her breastbone, and her heart beats against its pad.

"Umím být trpělivý."

[Danicka] Everyone lies. She learned that a long, long time ago. Everyone lies about what they're thinking, what they're feeling. They lie about what they want. They lie about what they've done, or what they would like to do. They lie to feel better, they lie because they have something to gain, they lie because they have something to hide. Everyone lies, and sometimes they don't even have a reason. They never have to. They lie because everyone else wants so, so badly to believe them.

Even now, Lukas can't stop touching her. He caresses her skin rather than merely connecting with it. His thumb moves, his palm sweeps, and she knows that given a few more minutes his mouth will descend and wrap around her nipple or his hand will slide up and cup her breast. He will cover her, or pull her towards him, or harden against her thigh just because she's so near. She knows, and does nothing to discourage it, neither pulling away nor reaching down to make his hand be still.

Danicka looks at the way the moonlight hits his fingers, and his hair. He's so very dark, except when she looks in his eyes.

He tells her what he can do, while he touches her as close to her heart as he can get. She looks away from the moonlight, finds his gaze. "Miluji tě."

If it seems like a non-answer...that's not true. If it seems like not enough...it isn't. But it's what she has. And she gives it freely.

[Lukas] Danicka is not a prophet, but she may as well be one.

Miluji tě, she says. His eyes find hers in return. Even now, in the dimness with only the lights of the city separating darkness from form, she can see his eyes: pale and brilliant where the rest of him is dark, is swarthy, is shadow. He looks at her for a while, and his breathing is shallow; the way he looks at her is almost pained.

"Miluji tě," he answers. It's not an echo. It's a whisper, like a deadly secret. He rolls his weight onto his elbow. Sheets of muscle contract and bunch across his side, his torso, his back, as he rolls toward her. He finds her mouth in the darkness and he kisses her, and she may as well be a prophet because his hand does move to her breast, then, his touch heavy but gentle, his palms rubbing over her nipple until it hardens.

Danicka's arms are flung over her head. Her hair is spread over the pillow, not golden in this light but merely bright, merely pale. Her skin is not golden either, but bright and pale. His skin seems darker than it is against hers; when the kiss parts he watches his hand move over her body, stroking the length of her torso from waist to diaphragm to breast to the underside of her arm, and back.

There's a certain quiet wonder in the way he touches her, sometimes; something in the way he touches her that calls to mind the way he moved over her that night at this same hotel months ago, when the moon was so near to full that he thought, he was afraid it would be the last time. There's something in the way he touches her now that calls to mind that look in his eyes, that sense that she was giving something to him, freely, unasked for, that he wasn't wholly certain he deserved.

Lukas finds her breast again. He cups it in his palm, as though to keep Danicka warm, and he kisses her mouth.