because you can talk to me.

[Lukas] It hasn't been an hour since the carnage in the streets.

The bodies were loaded into the back of Mackenzie's car. Lukas rode shotgun while Mackenzie drove them out to the woods, where Lukas unloaded the car and thanked Mackenzie. She drove off; he left the bodies -- what remained of them -- out for the sun.

Now he's walking back to the Brotherhood. He could run on four legs. He could fly. He chooses to walk because it affords him time and solitude; it gives him a chance to call Danicka up.

The phone rings. Twice. She picks up, sounding pleasant. He cuts to the chase.

"Are you all right?"

[Danicka] Nothing happened. She did not fire the gun he gave her for the first time at a target that wasn't made of paper. She did not feel cold, grasping hands on her arms, trying to pull her in for a Kiss. She did not watch that thing get its leg torn off by a werewolf in hispo. She did not see Caleb in crinos. She didn't. She didn't. She didn't.

Danicka is at home, her gun is unloaded again. Her hands are clean but she hasn't showered. She can taste coffee in her mouth still from just a few sips she took of it. She's hiding in her room, sitting on the floor by her bed. She answers the phone like

nothing happened.

But he still asks if she's all right. "Why wouldn't I be?" Beat. "Is something going on?"

[Lukas] Danicka is one of the best liars in this city, if not the state, and her lies are as much lies of omission as they are of commission. This particular one is something of both.

There's a silence. And Danicka, brilliant liar that she is, knows when one of them just fell flat.

But he doesn't rage at her. He doesn't run over, charge up to her apartment and batter down the door. Demand if she's all right. Demand that she tells him everything, everything. Demand more of her than she can give.

There's just a silence, and though she can't tell from her end, it's not a stormy one; it's not one where he's biting back his temper. He's looking for a path through the mire, that's all.

"I was on the street with you," he says at last, gently, "a little under an hour ago. I was the black war-wolf."

[Danicka] She...did not know that. Danicka doesn't say a word in response, for close to five full seconds. Conversationally, and over the phone, that's a very long time. She doesn't try to backpedal. She doesn't sheepishly admit that he caught her. She hears the underlying carefulness of his tone, and her first reaction is not embarrassment or fear but a hard flash of shame.

Danicka closes her eyes. "Oh."

A second later she clears her throat. "Are you okay?" Last she saw, that black war-wolf wasn't bleeding. And he's calling her, so she knows he's not horrendously injured. But she asks.

[Lukas] Oh, she says. He tries to think of something to say to dull the edge of it, but before he comes up with anything she speaks again.

"I'm fine." There's no underlying hum of traffic from his end, but a rhythm in his voice tells her he's walking. "Are you?"

[Danicka] "You were there," she says mildly, "you know I got away all right." She sounds distant. Not from anger. Not from him.

Maybe from him.

[Lukas] "I didn't mean if you were injured. I meant if you're all right."

[Danicka] There's rustling in the background. Paper. "I'm all right. Except for firing off a few shots, it was nothing new."

[Lukas] (empathy! +2phone)
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 1, 2, 2, 8 (Success x 1 at target 8) [WP]

[Lukas] It's Saturday night. Early Sunday morning now, technically. He got back from New York last night. She got back today. His books are still somewhere in transit, a big, plain, brown cardboard box, worthless, priceless. His pack is down by yet another one, three left out of eight, out of nine.

And she's all right. She's not in pieces. She's not injured either, but he remembers her running from him on the street, running from all of them, but most especially running from the white Crinos with the sword, the same Garou she'd asked to escort her to the station.

There's another silence on his end. Then, "I'm sorry I didn't go after you. There were bodies, and ... I wasn't certain you could handle it, either."

[Danicka] "Thank you." An odd answer, considering that what he is saying is an apology for not chasing her down. She's thanking him for that, not for the apology itself. "I don't... sometimes I can handle the near-forms, but it's hard."

Her voice is quiet, and then: "I probably would have just yelled at you if you'd come after me then, even looking the way I know you," she sighs.

[Lukas] Another pause. "Chápu."

She can hear him walking in the silence -- distant footfalls, the crunch of roadside gravel. This silence is longer than the previous ones, but a little less tense; a little softer. He lets her listen to his breathing, and listens to hers across miles and miles of airspace.

After a while he says, "Do you want me to come over?"

[Danicka] The moon is full. She knows that, strangely, Garou can be easier to deal with after a battle, but that Ahrouns by their very nature are never 'easy' to deal with. Danicka pauses after that, in considering silence, and then takes a breath.

"Yeah."

[Lukas] "Okay. I'll be there in about two hours."

He hangs up not long after. Lukas has the time sense of a Rolex. It was a long way back from Tekakwitha, even aerially at the speed of a running wolf. He stopped by the Brotherhood first, showering, changing. A hour and fifty-seven minutes from the end of the call, Danicka's intercom rings. If she answers, he says simply: "Je to Lukáš."

Upstairs, at her door, he looks almost nothing like the jet hispo on the Bronzeville street three hours ago. The blood is gone. The black claws and the bared white teeth. The carnage, the gore, the ferocity, the violence.

What remains is the color and thickness of the hair, black for black; and the eyes, icy blue.

Lukas's rage is at a low ebb. It's depleted, whittled down to a single tongue of blue-hot flame somewhere deep in the boiler room of his soul. His will is sapped too; it leaves him somehow paler, a diminished echo of himself. He looks a little tired, but he can't seem to help, or even notice, the smile that lifts the corners of his mouth when she opens the door and he looks at her.

"Hey," he says. He's dressed casually, truly casually, which is rarity for him: rumpled, darkwashed jeans that one might find at any gap or banana republic, a plain long-sleeved t-shirt, white, with the sleeves tugged up to the elbows. Also, he has a bag over his shoulder, a small duffle.

[Danicka] An hour and fifty-seven minutes gives Danicka more time to settle herself in than Lukas has. He has to walk, or fly. He washes, he changes his clothes, and in all that time Danicka has done much of the same. She showers, and dries her hair, and changes into a pair of soft, pale blue lounge pants. The t-shirt she pulls on is an orangish-pink that isn't quite red enough to be 'salmon', and in white bears a stylized piece of cake with a speech bubble saying I am nutritious. with The cake is a liar. underneath the slice itself.

She puts her hair up in a ponytail to get it off her face, tidies up the apartment, and after the dishes are done, checks the clock and orders a meat-lover's pizza. Large. The other pizza is a small, and veggie. She has thirty minutes, and in that thirty minutes she shoves her feet into sneakers, grabs her keys, and heads down quickly to the corner store for a six-pack.

When Lukas buzzes the intercom, a delivery boy is leaving the front door and glancing sidelong at him. When Danicka opens the door to 23-C her hair is down again, the apartment smells like pizza, and she grins when she sees him. No, not just grins: beams. Glows. As soon as the door is closed and locked behind him once more, she puts her hands on his shoulders and hoists herself up around him, wrapping her legs around his waist.

"Lee's sleeping at her studio," she informs him, looping her arms around his neck.

[Lukas] There was a time when Danicka's sometimes unfettered happiness confused Lukas. It made him wonder what the trick was; it made him wonder what happened to the previous mood, why she wasn't consistent, what the explanation was. He doesn't wonder anymore. Consistency is for children and pets. She's neither.

Tonight, she hoists herself up and he simply wraps an arm under her rump, supporting her weight on him when he unslings the duffle and leaves it near the door. His smile breaks into a grin and he laughs under his breath; tilts his chin up and kisses her. The last time he saw her -- well.

Technically, it was on the street three hours ago. But the time before that was Thursday, lunchtime at a Greek place down in SoHo where the restaurant itself was tiny, crammed into a triangular space at the apex of a corner building, and most of the seating spilled out onto the sidewalk, and the entire block smelled like lamb and spices and olives. They knew her name, or a version of it; were familiar with her; were intensely interested in her quieter, blue-eyed companion who smiled at her often and everyone else much less often, and ate obscene amounts of lamb-and-beef gyros.

After that, nothing but a phone call in the car between New York City and the Adirondacks, and something of an emergency trip home. Oh, and a tracking number for the package, due sometime later this week.

Two and a half days apart isn't an eternity for them. This kiss is not utterly ravenous, but it's nothing close to modest either. When their mouths part his hand squeezes her ass gently, then gives her a pat. If she doesn't want to let go he carries her into the apartment, and then into the kitchen.

"You got pizza? I'm helping myself to a slice."

[Danicka] "I got pizza," she answers, and does not let go of him. So her arms stay around his neck, and her legs stay around his waist, and he carries her without struggle down theh all and into the kitchen. "One of these days I'm going to get some lamb ground at the butcher's and make a pizza with it," she says thoughtfully, as he's walking and flipping open the larger pizza box. "There's beer in the fridge, by the way."

Danicka is still wrapped around him. She is over half a foot shorter than him, and on the thin side even then. Lukas is essentially manufactured for warfare; looking at his body when he's falling asleep next to her in some hotel room or another she can imagine what he looked like as a teenager, compact but broad-shouldered, his chest thinner than it is now. Fewer scars. Fives years ago he probably could not have carried her with quite this much ease.

Eventually, though, she does unwind her legs and slide down his body, socked feet touching the tiled floor of the kitchen so she can get her own dinner. It's been three hours since what happened on the street. And Danicka, genuinely, seems to be fine. She smells like the same soap she's always used, smells faintly of the softener she uses on her clothes when she launders them.

"I figured you'd be hungry. Unless you stopped to eat after all that," she mentions, opening the fridge to grab a couple of beers before going to the smaller pizza box.

[Lukas] After he sets her down, Lukas's back is briefly turned as he flips open the larger pizza box, homing in on the smell of meat and cheese. The buttondown shirts he wears are generally cut closer, with sharper seams; they downplay the breadth of his shoulders and the depth of his chest. In the soft pullover, his torso seems imposing, his back a graven monolith of strength.

"Lamb pizza?" Lukas looks dubious and amused. "Let me know how that works out."

Five years ago he wasn't this strong. Five years before that he wasn't this tall, either. She did not know him in the years between his First Change and now; did not know him after the age of eight or nine, in fact. She missed his growth spurts and his gangly early-adolescence when he was all legs and elbows; she missed when that filled out into a stocky, compact sturdiness that, in his seventeen year, abruptly sprouted overnight into a lean, sinewy height.

That's filling out again. Muscle is building on the scaffold of broad, thick bone. She's seen him stand stark naked in various light; she knows his body is hard and wasteless, and still retains something of the leanness of youth. His hipbones still ride close to the surface; sometimes when he stretches full-length she can see the shadow of ribs under his muscle and skin. She can likely imagine the sort of husky, heavy musculature he's destined for if he lives to be her mother's age.

He flips the box closed again, having torn a slice from the pie. Strings of cheese are clinging to his hands. He lowers the pizza cheese-first into his mouth, catching a dollop of sausage before it can slide to the floor. With one hand he untwists the cap on one beer, then the other.

"I didn't," stop to eat. He could go on, tell her that he rushed here as soon as possible, but he doesn't dramatize. It isn't strictly true, anyway. He stopped for a shower and a change of clothes. He stopped to pack a second change of clothes in his bag before coming here. "I had an apple on my way out, though."

Lukas takes a gulp of beer. Then he leans back against her fridge, watching her for a moment. She genuinely seems fine. He watches her anyway.

"How'd you get back from O'Hare? Cab?"

[Danicka] He knows now why Danicka's body has trouble holding onto weight, why at age seven she was closer in size to five-year-old Lukas and why by the time he turned eight she was actually a little smaller. He knows why her arms weren't strong enough to hold her in a tree. He knows that she is probably never going to be all that large, that she's lucky to have achieved the height she has. It was never an eating disorder or just living in New York City; it was screaming in terror when she should have been calmly suckling away in infancy.

That doesn't explain why she loses her appetite when stressed, but that's not an uncommon reaction. He can tell, when she hands him a beer and keeps one for herself, that she's intending to have a beer and some pizza with her... boyfriend. She opens up the smaller box to get out a couple of slices of veggie-covered pizza, sliding them onto a plate rather than immediately into her mouth, and he knows that she can't be all that shaken up, because she seems like she intends to eat more than a few bites.

Danicka slides her foot across the tile and lays her toes on top of his shoe, leaning against the counter and taking a bite while he's lowering his first bite into his mouth. She shakes her head at him. "Oh, an apple," she echoes, mock-teasing. She rolls her head on her shoulders; her neck cracks. "Subway. Blue Line goes zip, right here."

After another bite, she reaches for her beer, twists the cap off, and takes a drink. "So why'd you have to rush back here so fast?"

[Lukas] For a woman so at ease with what Lukas calls masks of social graces, Danicka is curiously feral just below the surface. She bares her teeth when she fucks, claws him open when she comes. She eats when she feels all right and she doesn't when she doesn't. She trusts him sometimes like a child, holding onto him as though she knows he won't let her fall.

When he breaks her trust she's wary as a wild thing, untamed again, sidling closer by steps and degrees.

"Call me next time," he says. "I'll give you a lift." Beat. Wry, "When I have a car again."

She wants to know why he rushed back so fast. A shadow crosses his face. Once upon a time he told her: I won't discuss my packmate with you. He takes a bite of pizza silently, washes it down with beer.

Then he says, "Sam disgraced himself and the pack again. He picked a fight over Gabriella for no reason I can readily comprehend and refused direct orders to stand down." The pause may be only in Danicka's imagination. "So we severed him from the totem."

[Danicka] "...Oh."

Her single syllable, single word, single vowel sound, isn't voiced in surprise, or even masked amusement. Danicka certainly does not look amused. He has to remember how many times they made love where she pressed her hands flat against his back or grabbed the headboard or the sheets so that she would not rake her fingernails down his flesh as she did in the shower weeks ago. He has to remember that baring her teeth at him was something forbidden, is something new, but it was always there: the savagery, the animalism in the way she lets herself be with him.

The way they tucked their feet together, here and there, the way she breathed -- deep and steady -- the first time they slept together. She was not curled into his arms but laid at his back, her hand over his heart, as though her small hand could keep it from being pierced, or broken, or bruised. As though he was the one that needed to be held onto...kept.

She half-smiled when he mentioned the car, but that was all. The conversation moved on, moves on, and they discuss Sam. They don't talk about Sam, about pack matters, about much of anything concerning the Garou Nation. Danicka is not smiling now. Her brow furrows, her lips tight at the corners as though in a wince, not quite a frown, not quite anything but a brief flicker of empathy.

"That had to hurt."

She doesn't say who.

[Lukas] "It was necessary." He doesn't say for whom, either.

Lukas can be cold sometimes, hard as stone. We're Shadow Lords. He finishes his slice and twists around for another, his plain t-shirt pulling into lines of torsion, stretching across the planes and angles and curvature of his body beneath. He pulls a second slice loose backhandedly, swivels it around to bite into it.

Silence while he chews, while he swallows, takes a drink.

"It's been on the wind for a long time now. There was once, soon after Katherine disappeared -- " he suddenly finds it unnecessary to go into detail. Lukas just shrugs. "He's been on thin ice, but I suppose we hoped -- I hoped he'd find his way again."

A beat or two.

It's not immediately clear why he says this, "It wasn't because of you."

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

[Danicka] Necessary is how he has described her before. Pieces is how he has described what happens when you don't have what's necessary. Pieces is what they would be in, if they did not also do what was necessary. Danicka understands. She could not fathom, once upon a time, how he could think of her that way. But necessity itself, she understands. She always has.

Lukas leaves out details, and Danicka watches him, eating her two slices of veggie pizza slower than he eats his meatlover's. She sips her beer slowly, trying not to tip her head back and increase the amount of air she swallows. He trails off once, and corrects himself later, and then he tells her it wasn't her.

She tips her head to the side. "I wasn't afraid of that," she says gently, in reassurance, and then reaches for a paper towel to wipe her mouth. Danicka belches quietly behind her hand, murmurs a demure S dovolením, and moves on, meeting his eyes: "What happened? Just after Katherine disappeared?"

[Lukas] Lukas looks at her for a moment. There's something alert, quizzical, not quite human about his regard. A beat later it resolves.

This is true curiosity: "Why do you want to know, Danička?"

[Danicka] Her answer is immediate, and unapologetic, and she doesn't shy from meeting his eyes. Earlier tonight she shot at a monster almost as large as a crinos. She felt the cold hands and non-breath of something bloodsucking and hungry flail at her skin and was aiming her firearm at its skull when Lukas tore its leg off, ripped it open.

"Because you can talk to me."

[Lukas] The Ahroun -- who barely feels like an Ahroun tonight, with his Rage depleted, his will sapped -- considers this for a moment. Then he finishes off his slice of pizza, turns to wipe his mouth and his hands on one of the small square napkins that had come with the delivery. He turns back while he's cleaning his fingers off one by one, and it's not until he finishes that he tosses it aside and holds his hand out to her.

"Come here," he says.

She's still eating. He turns her around, fits her against him where he leans against the fridge. His arms encircle her waist and he tips his head down, presses his mouth briefly to the crown of her head.

When Lukas speaks she feels him as much as she hears him, his chest vibrating behind her, against her back. The account is simple, unadorned -- unapologetic as her answer had been.

"After Kate disappeared, the pack was leaderless," he says. "I took command. Mrena challenged for Alpha, which I recognized. Sam challenged as well. He'd been stepping out of line for some time by then, snapping at his betters within and without the pack. I told him he'd never be Alpha so long as I was a part of the pack. He challenged my dominance outright; tried to foment rebellion. So I tore his throat out.

"It was the second time. There was another time, earlier, for more or less the same reason. But that night he wouldn't accept defeat. He said some pretty outrageous shit. I turned my back on him but I didn't sever the bond. A few days later he was all apologies, so I gave in against my better judgment and gave him another chance."

Lukas is quiet for a while. She can't see his face, but he's frowning; his hand is locked tightly around his wrist, gripping himself so he doesn't squeeze her.

After some time he finishes, "It was a stupid, sentimental, weak thing to do. But he was my brother, and had been for years."

[Danicka] Still holding her plate, and eating her pizza, Danicka abandons her beer when Lukas tells her to Come here. She walks over, turns around easily, and rests her back against his chest as she takes another bite. Mmm. Bell peppers. He kisses her head she shares a small smile with herself, with the dim reflection in the dark windowpanes that curve outward, giving her a view that she and Liadan pay handsomely for. He's warm, even with his Rage dimmed to embers and --

-- so I tore his throat out.

His lover flinches slightly in his arms, tensing and then relaxing instantly, a reaction far more intense than her response to what happened earlier tonight. It's bizarre, how shaken she was when she was shot, how terrified she is when reminded of what the Garou are capable of, and yet how calm she seems about the incident out in Bronzeville. She despises Sam. Yet: she flinches when she is reminded that the beast standing at her back, holding her around the waist and kissing her hair, bloodied his jaws in Sam's throat.

And it wasn't the first time he'd done this. Danicka flinches, then takes another bite, chewing more slowly. She doesn't say a word. She feels the tension in his forearm where it lays across her stomach, in his wrists where one hand grips bone and flesh. She swallows.

"If you only gave people one or two chances, we wouldn't be here," she says after a moment, her voice held low. "But for what it's worth...I believe in you. i believe that you would do the right thing."

Beat.

"Or what's necessary."

[Lukas] Close as they are, it would be impossible not to notice she flinches every time he mentions or alludes to tearing Sam's throat out. Lukas doesn't think it's out of long-latent feelings for Sam, or anything of the sort. He suspects it has more to do with what he is; what he's capable of, and does; where he stands, and the fact that she can't see him.

And that he has his arms around her, hand locked to wrist.

She tells him -- what she tells him. It's a piece of truth. It's also something that's neither absolution nor condonement nor censure nor... anything at all, really, except what she thinks. And what she believes: about him and of him.

His arms unlock from around her. He bows his head to her, kisses her shoulder the way he does, as if to tell her he's coming back, or not going away, or not letting go of her.

Then, unwinding, his arms fall from around her midriff. His hands curve over her hips gently. He holds her like this instead while he thinks about what she said. Briefly, his mouth presses to her cheek, then her temple. The side of his jaw rests against the side of her forehead.

For all intents and purposes, he came here to comfort her, or to keep her company, or to make her feel somehow less alone. Strange, that in some way he's the one to receive these things from her.

"Děkuji vám," he murmurs.