yes or no.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] We should talk, he'd said. They didn't.
Call me tomorrow, she'd said, and Lukas does.

The message on Danicka's phone is simple. It's not even voicemail. It's just text:

Ontourage, 2am? Txt me when you get here.

It's closer to 3am now. He's been here before, this nightclub a block off the Mile proper; he barely remembers it. It's lost in the blur of a hellish week. He might as well be seeing this for the first time: the stairs down to the subterranean main room, the million-dollar lighting, the walls of subwoofers. This place plays mostly bass-heavy dance-friendly hiphop, though Lukas isn't dancing. He's not in the main room, either, but a level below, where the music trends toward house, and the booths are large and deep and semi-private, shaded by gauze curtains.

It's dark down here. Strobe lighting occasionally casts dancing bodies into stark freezeframe. Other than that there's only a sense of movement, kinetic energy, summer heat. Lukas is nursing a toxic-green drink, taking up an entire booth by himself, his legs stretched along the seating, his shoulders against the cushions. His shirt is pale grey. It's open at the collar, short sleeved. His jeans are darker grey, stonewashed, distressed.

He's also barefoot. He's not sure where he left his shoes, but he's sure he'll find them later on.

[Danicka Musil] It bothers her that the name of the club is Ontourage. Partly because a part of her minds the spelling. Partly because she vaguely remembers being here at the beginning of May, the same hellish week Lukas vaguely recalls. They did not come here on the same night, at the same time. That week, Danicka went on with her life, for the most part. She went to see friends who have nothing to do with the Nation. She ruined a relationship. She called her father. She picked up her dry cleaning. She did not, as Lukas did, hop from club to club to club to motel room to alleyway. She pretended that she was okay.

Because dropping that pretense had done her absolutely no good. Begging him not to go had done absolutely no good. Pretending ended up being less frightening, even though it was more painful, because pretending she was all right was famililar.

So roughly twenty-four hours -- less than that, but close enough -- pass between walking out of the Brotherhood to go to the subway and walking into Ontourage. She's no longer stoned. She's no longer feeling the effects of any amount of alcohol. She's wearing a pair of tight, dark boot-cut jeans and a light brown top that bares her shoulders and most of her back. The last time she was here, she was on Ecstasy.

She pulls her phone out when she gets to the main dancefloor and sends a text: Marco!

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] It's late, but Lukas isn't tired. He's fucking nocturnal. Not even crepuscular; nocturnal. He is, however, stretched out, relaxed, chilled.

The four-to-the-floor beats of house music pound through his bones. He almost misses his phone vibration, but the light catches his eye and he picks it up. When he flips it open the screen illuminates his face, and the brief smile that ghosts over it.

Polo. Downstairs, in the booths.

Not very precise directions, but then, Danicka is resourceful and his booth's curtain is drawn back. There's a small, square coffee table in the center of the booth, lit by two or three tea lights floating in a glass bowl. Beside it he's accrued a few empty glasses. When she shows up he doesn't bother to get up, though he does clip his phone closed and tuck it away.

And he reaches his hand out to her, the other tucked back behind his neck. "Ahoj, láska." Somehow the Czech that flows so easily and naturally between them in glittering hotel rooms, in her beautiful apartment, even in his tiny room at the Brotherhood, sounds exotic and unfamiliar in these surroundings. "Jsem trochu opilý."

[Danicka Musil] So down again, to the level where the music is not quite so energetic and where she expects to find the man she refers to her as her 'boyfriend', when he does not ever really call her his 'girlfriend', because among the people he spends all of his time with, all he has to say is mine. The directions he gives her aren't precise but they don't need to be; she thinks

He'll find me.

She's wearing heels but not her highest, and she does not quite reach 5'8". The music even here is loud enough that she can barely hear his greeting, but no matter. Her eyes flick to his bare feet, then back to his face. Danicka's smile, when she takes his hand and laces their fingers, is more than a little wry. She straddles him on the booth's bench, keeping her hips off his lap for the time being. Her eyebrows flick up.

"I should take advantage of you, then," she says sagely, nodding.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Her fingers feel slender and soft between his. Her palm is warm, though, and when she straddles him just like that, Lukas thinks of the woods, the sycamores and oaks. He thinks that he loves her unashamedness, that she doesn't play at coyness and modesty.

Besides; it's dark here. And it's a goddamn nightclub. They're far from the only couple getting close. Compared to what's going on in some booths, on the dance floor, this is ... well; what it is. A greeting. A hello, lover.

She smiles, wry. He smiles back, a little lopsidedly. Then he sits up and kisses her, briefly, lightly, his smile never faltering. His mouth tastes like whatever mixed concoction he's been drinking, sweet and tangy with a heavy undertone of alcohol.

"Miluji tě. Víte, že?"

And Lukas lays back again, shifting his torso to stretch out flat on the curving seats, his chest expanding and falling with a deep breath. His hands are warm through her jeans. The lights in the club color her skin and her hair this shade and that, blue and green and purple. He reaches up after a moment to lay his hand to her face as if to remind himself by touch what color her skin really is.

Golden. Golden as the sun, as summer.

Miluji tě, he thinks to himself. And there's a part of him that knows he should talk to her about what he meant to talk to her about last night; what she said, in which language, in front of whom; how she makes it hard for him not to have to choose between pack and kin, sister and ...

... girlfriend, is the term Danicka might use. Mate is the term he hasn't earned yet. Mine; then. What's mine. That which is mine. She who is mine.

That works.

He doesn't feel like talking about it right now. Kate and Danicka, Danicka and Kate, and Sam, and ... all that shit last night. His hand comes to her arm, and he tugs her gently down. "Pojď sem. Lež dolů se mnou."

The bassline thrums right through the furniture beneath him. It thrums right through his chest, his lungs, his bones.

[Danicka Musil] For awhile he touches her, murmurs endearments to her, one the sort of thing said usually between husbands and wives, mates, not people who are dating. Danicka said it to him the first time just before he left her. He said it to her the first time before he left her. She seems faintly taken aback that he is saying it in near-public, though the booths are reasonably private. Her hand is not in his pants, his hand is not up her shirt, but they're unmistakably lovers, were there any eyes looking that might make such a mistake or not.

Her eyes flicker with mild surprise, neither happy nor displeased. She tastes his drinks on his lips, huffs out a breath that could be laughter. "Ano, já vím," she murmurs in response, then shifts her balance on him as he lays back.

Danicka shakes her head at him, even as he's touching her face and sighing and thinking to himself mine and love. When he tugs, she laughs lightly and shakes her head, pulling against his urging even though the moon is waxing. "You said we need to talk. I said we will." Her head tips to one side, hair falling across one bare shoulder. "Are you going to make me into a liar?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Something in Lukas's face changes in a way that's hard to pin. Something folds up, something shutters. His hand slips off her arm; he raises himself on his elbows.

"You're right," he says. "We should probably go somewhere a little quieter."

And yet he'd invited her here. That he doesn't feel like talking about it right now is a lie. He hadn't felt like talking about it again: he, Lukas, who had once forced discussion after discussion of what she wants, what she intends, what she's doing, where she's doing, whether or not she wants him, or Sam, or ...

It's easier for me to let myself love you, he said, and not worry about what came before or after.

Still. He's sitting up now, reaching over to the low table to pick up his drink and drain it. Then he's looking on the floor for his shoes, which he took off god-knows-where, and they're not in this booth so he thinks maybe he'll have to look in the next.

[Danicka Musil] [perception + empathy: you saw this coming, admit it]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 4, 5, 6, 7, 7, 9, 10 (Success x 5 at target 6) Re-rolls: 1

[Danicka Musil] For anyone else, it might be hard to pin, but Danicka watches Lukas's features shift, watches the light in his eyes flicker, and she quickly reaches forward as he's starting to move up on his elbows. Her hand to his cheek, her eyes to his eyes. She leans towards him. "We don't have to," she says, a little quieter now because she's closer. "If it's not worth it, we don't have to."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] This arrests him for a moment, and arrested, he looks at her: her hand to his cheek. His eyes to hers.

"I think we do have to," he says, and covers her hand with his for a moment. Then he swings his legs off the seat, shifting her around with him if she hasn't climbed off first. He gets up, and then he bends double to search for his shoes.

"Just a minute."

He goes to the neighboring booth, and the one beside that. He interrupts a group of twenty-somethings out for a saturday night on the town, and several of them are quite drunk, and all of them look up at him with a mixture of bemusement and startlement when he excuses himself and looks under their feet, under the seats, until he finds his shoes.

When he comes back Lukas has his shoes on. He holds his hand out to Danicka to pull her up from the seat if she hasn't stood already. Momentarily he pauses, long enough to press a kiss to her knuckles. Then he turns and leads her across the smaller basement dancefloor, up the stairs, across the larger main room's dancefloor.

It's full blown summer outside, warmer than it was in the club. He didn't bring a coat and doesn't need one. He has a new car now, which he alluded to a time or two, but this will be her first time in it. In a way, he's sorry for that. The first time he realized I want this woman, or even began to realize it, was in the front seat of the MKZ.

Now it's a BMW, a smaller, sportier coupe than the MKZ. Its lights flash as he unlocks it. When they're inside he starts the engine, looks at her.

"Do you want to go somewhere?"

[Danicka Musil] Apparently it's worth it. Danicka takes a sip of air when he says this, touches her brow to his, and then starts to slide off of his lap. She stands up and hangs out nearby while he looks for his shoes, looking vaguely amused. The look doesn't change when he kisses her knuckles; she just wiggles her fingers slightly so that her knuckles dance across his lips, and then she slides her palm down to twine their fingers together again.

They're leaving. It's not the shortest amount of time she's spent at a nightclub. She walks out with him, her steps stretching to match his, falling behind him again as they wind through the crowd. It isn't hard; people move out of his way. Tonight they don't look like they think he's going to yank her arm out of its socket and then kill her on the way home, but he is still an Ahroun.

He still makes them wary.

Outside her shirt flutters slightly in the breeze. She doesn't ask if they're taking a subway; she just follows him to his car, but she doesn't get in. "No," she says, quite flatly, when he starts to open the driver's side door.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] He drives anyway -- not far, but away from the immediate vicinity of the club; the Mile. He parks two or three blocks down, in the shadow of a skyscraper that, by day, might reveal itself to be a bank, an investment company, something of the sort.

The M3's engine falls quiet. The car is black-on-black; the interior is all dark leather. He pulls leaves the keys in the ignition, thumbing the windows down a little to let in a crossbreeze.

And then there's a silence. Lukas is frowning through the windshield; she can almost sense him putting his thoughts in order. At last he turns toward her, shifting to wedge his back against the door, his shoulder against the seat. The BMW is a little smaller than the MKZ. It hadn't been easy then; it's even harder now.

"I wish you wouldn't speak poorly of my packmates while you pretend otherwise, Danička. It's a cowardly, ungenerous thing to do. You don't have to love my pack. I don't even care if you speak your mind about them when we're alone. But they are my pack, and when you do something like that, you force me to choose between them and you. How can I blame Katherine for speaking poorly of you in secret while she smiles to your face while you do the same thing?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] (goddammit, misread the post. DLP.)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas's eyebrows go up. Then he shuts the door again.

"Have you got a better idea?"

[Danicka Musil] She hasn't let go of his hand, and she doesn't now. She doesn't tug on him as he has, so often, with her... as she sometimes does, too. "I drove here, and you're the one that said you're a little drunk." Danicka jerks her head towards the valet. "Come on."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas shrugs. "As you like." The locks on the BMW click back down. He waits with her as the valet brings her car around. She'd mentioned in New York City that she doesn't know why she bought a car when the El was just fine. Apparently she's had a change of heart.

"Nice," he comments when the valet brings her G37x around. He gets in the passenger's side, shuts the door, reaches for the seatbelt. "Where are we going?"

[Danicka Musil] No questions. No insistence that he's fine to drive. No vicious argument in the parking lot over what the fuck he thinks he's doing, no shrill shrieking to hand her his fucking keys. None of that, now. Danicka just walks him to the valet station, and soon enough a uniformed young man not cool enough or old enough to work behind the bar but with a perfect driving record pulls up in Danicka's new toy.

She takes the keys back, gets in, and buckles herself in before starting to pull out. The car smells as new as it is; there's a familiar leather bag in the backseat. He's seen it plenty of times by now.

"For all I care," she says, the speakers starting up in the middle of the song she was listening to before she came here, "we head north and chill out at Lake Geneva."

The music is coming from a microSD card stuck into a USB reader, plugged into the face of the stereo. It's small, and black, and it blends in. And it's two girls singing at them over guitars, the volume turned low before she stepped out of the car at Ontourage: ...oh, I, I feel like I wouldn't like me if I met me...

She glances at him. "Where do you want to go?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas thinks for a moment. "The W." Of course. "But park in the lot for a little while. We can talk in the car."

[Danicka Musil] Her eyebrows flick up slightly, but she nods, and starts driving towards the W on Lakeshore. It doesn't occur to her that this is the first time Lukas has been in the car with her while she's been driving, but it is. He drove her old car once. She rode in his plenty of times. She drives well, but cautiously, and occasionally her hand flicks towards a manual transmission that isn't there. It's an adjustment.

Tegan and Sara give way to a song from Garbage's self-titled album. They don't get to the end of it before they're at the hotel they've spent so many nights at she's lost count, but after turning off the car and unbuckling her safety belt, Danicka doesn't move to get out of the car. She just twists in her chair to look at him.

"Why do you want to talk in the car?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] It's not a long drive. Danicka's apartment; the Mile; the Lakeshore W -- they're all within a few minutes of each other. The city glitters behind them when they park. He watches the streets for most of the trip, but when she parks he turns toward her.

"Because I think we might argue," he says simply, "and I don't want to bring it where I want to make love to you."

[Danicka Musil] One of her eyebrows lifts. "As though you would never want to make love to me in the car."

She doesn't remember the time she offered this, and he rejected it. She doesn't remember because she'd been drinking with a restaurant's staff for three hours after closing.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] The corners of Lukas's lips flick up; the smile doesn't quite make it to fruition. He undoes his seatbelt and faces her.

He's never been one to beat around the bush unnecessarily. There's a beat of pause, as though to prepare himself -- like a breath before a dive.

Then he gets right into it. "I wish you wouldn't speak poorly of my packmates while you pretend otherwise, Danička. It's a cowardly, ungenerous thing to do. You don't have to love my pack. I don't even care if you speak your mind about them when we're alone. But they are my pack, and when you do something like that, you force me to choose between them and you. How can I blame Katherine for denigrating you in secret while she smiles to your face, when you do the same thing?"

[Danicka Musil] She accepts the speech with what looks like patience, and her eyes don't twinge at the corners or wince with shuttering lids. She just watches him, and when he's done, she shakes her head slightly, shrugs one shoulder.

"Katherine is free to say whatever she wishes to me, in secret or otherwise, and she knows it." A beat. She blinks once, tips her head slightly to the side. "If I cannot learn to control my tongue better when intoxicated, I will work harder at simply keeping silent."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "Danička," Lukas says, and it's he who winces, however slightly, "I'm not trying to oppress you or keep you silent. I'm just telling you it pains me when Katherine acts like a bitch toward you, and it pains me when you act like a bitch toward Katherine.

"She's my pack-sister. You're my lover. Don't you see how it leaves me caught in the middle?"

[Danicka Musil] "You don't have to 'oppress' me," she says levelly. "I've known the rules longer than you have."

And that is true. There were no Garou in his immediate family until the day he Changed... until the day he knew he would Change. Danicka looks away from him, out the windowshield, and exhales.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "That's not the point."

[Danicka Musil] "I made the fucking point last night," she says, this time not quite as level, but not quite snapping. Not yet. She hasn't lost her temper, hasn't started smacking the steering wheel in frustration. She frowns at him again. "You think I like the idea of you forcing me to say things they don't want to hear, getting smacked for it or worse, and watching you choose them over me? I think once was enough; I'm pretty sure you agree."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "Absolutely." This comes swiftly, not quite bitten off at the edges -- not yet. "Which is why I'd appreciate it if you didn't give me reason to choose them over you, or you over them."

[Danicka Musil] "And I said last night that I understood," she returns, her voice smooth with patience, with grace, with a sort of sympathetic tenderness. "There's not much of a choice to be made."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas turns away abruptly. There's a hard silence.

"I fucking hate it when you do that," he says, low. "I hate it when you close up like that, put me on the other side of the line."

[Danicka Musil] Her silence is not quite so hard. It lasts longer, like the sea outlasts land. It errodes what they stand on, fills the car, makes everything smell of decay even though when they inhale all they can really smell is new leather. She stares at the hotel through the window, then turns and looks at him.

"I will not give you any more reason to have to choose. But that means I have to stay on my side, and it means I have to keep silent, and it means I have to... do and be what I'm supposed to."

She looks at the curve of his ear. She doesn't know why such a thing should matter to her, and so intensely, right this very second, but that line and the shadow behind it make her ache, suddenly, and she can't understand it.

"I am not going to talk to you about them when we're alone together. I never wanted to even when you kept asking."

This pause is not so long.

"I know where the line is. I just think you don't like being reminded it's there."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] I am not going to talk to you about them when we're alone together, she says, and though she's snapped at him for just this in the past, he interrupts her.

"No, don't."

It's a kneejerk response, as reflexive as a twitch of a limb to a noxious stimulus. Afterward, if she finishes, he listens; gives her his profile, but listens.

There's a brief silence. Then he turns toward her again.

"Don't say that. I won't make it so that we can't talk about this topic or that. I love your honesty, Danička. I wouldn't give it up for the world. What I can't stand is the deceit, and the goddamn ... snideness. It's not what you have to say about Kate; it's that you'd say it while she stands three feet away in a language you know she doesn't understand.

"It puts me in a position where either I have to throw you under the bus and force you to admit what you've said -- or keep my silence and become an accessory to what you've done."

[Danicka Musil] She's shut down on him for interrupting her before. Walked away. Said not a word, as though the act of interrupting her proved his unwillingness to listen. This time, she doesn't snap at him, and she doesn't get out of the car, and she finishes what she has to say. It's been a long time since the last time he interrupted her.

And then they're facing each other again. He finishes, and she tips her head. "I know," she says, quieter, and this time meaning, quite firmly: Chápu.

"I cannot be who I am without lying. If I hold my tongue, it's a lie. If I speak up in Czech, it's a lie. If I speak to you alone and watch it mean nothing anywhere in your life but when you're in bed with me, it's a lie. Everything... is a fucking lie, because if I don't hide it, I'm going to get my throat torn out."

Again.

She doesn't even seem to notice that she's crying. She refuses to acknowledge that she's never said that before. She refuses to face the fact that this is the truth, and the most hated one, and so she cannot stop to admit that it makes her angry, or makes her hurt, or makes her frightened for her life. She just speaks, as calmly as before, ignoring the hitches in the words, the pauses, the wetness in her eyes that becomes wetness on her cheeks.

"I told you. I won't do it anymore." Why does she sound like she's begging? "I don't want that for you. So I'm not going to, okay?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Please don't cry, he said to her once. I can't bear it.

He can't even look at her as tears start spilling down her cheeks. He thinks of the way the night began, texting her to meet him at Ontourage; thinks of the easy, familiar way she straddled his body like she has a right to him, like he has a right to her. He looks at the way the lights of the W reflect across the other cars in the lot, and a brief silence spins out.

"I will not," he says then, low, perhaps angry, "allow anyone to hurt you, Danička. Anyone."

Perhaps that's a lie. It most certainly is a promise he can't make; one that will take a lifetime to keep. He makes it anyway, because this is as reflexive as saying No, don't; as reflexive as snarling Mine! at Katherine the night of the bonfire.

"And it doesn't mean nothing. Every last thing you say means something to me. But what the hell do you expect me to do, Danička? Live my life according to the things we say to one another? Turn my back on my packmates because you don't like them? I don't think you mean for me to do anything of the sort."

[Danicka Musil] [WP: Uhoh]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 1, 4, 4, 5, 10 (Failure at target 6)

[Danicka Musil] He doesn't get to the part where he tells her that it doesn't mean nothing.

Not before Danicka snaps.

"Don't fucking lie to me, Kvasnička!"

His last name, or his human one. The name that his mother and father and sister still use, the name that to them means something other than the bloodline they all come from. The name that is on his birth certificate, the papers granting him and his family citizenship in the United States, his driver's license, his financial records. The name he has asked her, plainly, not to call him. Lukáš, or Lukášek, he's said. He likes those better. Never has he told her that she can call him 'Luke'. And she doesn't even know who 'Wyrmbreaker' is.

She calls him that when she knows he doesn't like it. Or should. Did he tell her, when she wasn't drunk? Is she saying it now to push him back? To goad him into proving that he is no more the mortal son of the Kvasničkas or the descendant of House Žerotín than he is a pup or a clown?

"It would be one thing if you honestly thought you could stop it, but you know it's a lie, so don't fucking say it."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] It's the second time in as many days that someone has implied or outright called him a liar. What makes it worse is that the first was a packmate. The second, explicit, is Danicka Musil.

A band of muscle stands starkly out in Lukas's cheek, pulled from cheekbone to corner of jaw. He clenches his teeth against the sudden rage in his blood. A beat goes by; then another.

Then he pushes the door open and gets out without another word.

[Danicka Musil] Her hands go on the steering wheel and she puts her forehead against its upper curve. She thinks for a moment of just snatching the keys up again, turning on the engine, and driving home. Let the bastard walk. Let him go back to Ontourage, drive back to the Brotherhood, sleep alone if he wants to walk away.

She thinks of the last time he walked away and the blood rushes in her ears so fast she thinks she might pass out. And if this were New York and she were eight, nine years younger, she might just slam her hand on the horn and demand his attention that way. But this isn't New York and he's not some guy who she wants to give one last warning before edging her car towards his goddamn legs.

Not that she ever --

The driver's side door opens and she steps out halfway, standing up behind the door itself. "Prosím, nenechávej!" she calls, so there is no mistake. So there is only one person it's meant for.

And she hates herself while she does it. Because she's done it before. It did no good then. And if she sounds hopeless now, resigned now, it's because she has surrendered, all the same.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] This isn't New York. This is Chicago. This is the W, the same one he walked away from her at nearly two months ago, shipwrecking both of them almost beyond repair in the process.

It's different this time. He's not leaving because he's leaving; he's leaving because -- well. She wouldn't know why. But it's different: because her door opens, she gets out, she calls after him, and he stops. For a second or two Lukas is simply stock-still, like a statue. His back is turned, his shoulders broad and hard as marble; if it were for the riffling of the lake wind through his hair and the fluttering of his shirt, he might not be alive at all.

Then he turns. He comes back, doesn't get into the car, circles around the car and goes at her and comes to her and wraps his arm around her waist, around her shoulders, too quickly to be resisted.

He pulls her to him. The embrace is nearly crushing. His heart his hammering in his chest. He holds her in a burning, ferocious silence for some time; an eternity, a few seconds.

"It's not that I want to make promises I can't keep, Danička." Not even a millimeter of space comes between them. He turns his head to speak directly in her ear, harsh and low. "It's that I can't stand the thought of you hurt. If anyone raised a hand to you now, I'd tear his fucking throat out."

This is not a comforting thing to hear. He isn't murmuring it softly to make her feel safe. He isn't telling her he would protect her, would keep her safe. He's electric with tension. He's telling her if anyone raised a hand to her, blood would spill and heads would roll.

"So don't accuse me of deliberately lying to you," he finishes. And then he lets her go.

[Danicka Musil] He could be a statue wearing clothes, a dead man propped up. Then his clothes would move, his hair would wave. Hers tosses in the wind, unruly and coiling into curls that make her look like she belongs in a different century. It passes, because all one has to do is look at the color on her lips, the necklace around her throat, the clothes, the car, the surroundings, the way she talks above a whisper.

Her face is still wet. Her eyes only water further because of the wind coming off the lake. He's not leaving her, and on some level she knows that, but it punches her in the gut to watch him walk away, knowing he's angry, or knowing he's hurt, knowing something is wrong or he wouldn't. She hates this, too. It feels like weakness to know and to care. It feels like a failure, somehow.

Danicka does not hate it when he comes back, pulling against him. She goes willingly, if a bit stiffly, unsure of what's going to happen next. What happens next is words in her ear and his heat against her, all around her for a moment. She winces at what he says, but he can't see it. And then:

he lets her go. She steps back, looks at him. Her eyes are steady. Her voice is soft. "Everyone who has ever said they would keep me safe, or not allow another to hurt me... has been lying. Because you can't keep it from happening, and you know it. It doesn't comfort me. It doesn't make me feel like everything is going to be okay. It doesn't make me feel better, knowing that they'd be punished." There's only the barest pause: "And I'm not going to hide behind you. You're not a bodyguard or an attack dog."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "I'd hate if you expected me to protect you." There's no pause on his end; not until that's spoken, anyway. Then there's a beat. "It's because you don't that I want to try."

Unbidden, a memory swims to the surface: the night she flung herself into his room at the Brotherhood because Sam had appeared in Glabro, and she was frightened. Do you expect me to protect you? he'd asked her; it was almost mockery. She looked him in the eye and replied so levelly that he was ashamed of his tone:

No.

And he had thought, even then: I would. The thought was as painful as a wound, because it had felt like weakness to know and to care.

He steps back from that memory. He takes a step back in their conversation as well. "I didn't say any of that to comfort you. I said it because -- " it's the truth, is what he was about to say. But the words catch. He thinks a moment. "Because I wish it were the truth," he finishes.

[Danicka Musil] What he says is a revelation... and not. Sometimes when the truth is spoken it sounds like it was always there, if it is simple enough, and familiar enough, and if the evidence of it has been seen long before the words made it out alive. Danicka watches him, possibly remembering the same thing he is, possibly thinking of the years and years she spent in her mother and father's house, possibly thinking of that trip to New York City and the brunch she had with Vladislav and...

Gaia only knows what she thinks of. She has too many memories tied to this conversation to sift through safely.

Danicka's eyes on him are somewhat merciless, not because her gaze is hard or unforgiving but because she doesn't look away. She doesn't give him a shadow to hide in. And she sees... everything. Or close enough. Then her brows draw together slightly. She rests her hands on his waist, one on each side, leaning slightly against the roof of her car.

"I have always... loved... that you don't make a habit of making me promises you can't keep, or telling me I'm safe when I'm not." Her wince clears slightly, then returns. "I've always been thankful for it. And you... don't want me to just tell you what you want to hear, or what I think will placate you. So why would I tell you that something is fair, when it's not? Or that it won't hurt, when it does?

"You're the only person I think I can be honest with even half the time, miláčku. Why would I tell you that the truth is what you want it to be, when that just makes you like everyone else?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] This has been true since the very start:

It's easier for them when they're in contact. Their deepest communication has always been without words. They speak to each other with their bodies. They fight with their words.

They stay close. Her hands are at his waist. She leans against her car and their legs are intercrossed; after a moment, his hand, which had dropped to his side, rises again to cup gently over her forearm.

He looks at this contact for a moment. Head bent, eyes downcast, he looks like a penitent; he looks like he's in prayer.

"Chápu," he says, and his eyes find hers again. "But I didn't mean to lie."

A moment passes; he raises his hand to her face. With far more care and far less skill than she herself would have employed, his thumb sweeps her cheek clean. His palm cups her face a moment later.

"It does mean something," he adds, "what you say to me when we're alone."

[Danicka Musil] For Danicka, wiping away someone's tears was never something she did with the tender affection of a mother, or a friend. She handed Yelizaveta tissues. She used her sleeve or a towel to help wipe the faces of children she watched when she was barely into adolescence herself. Her thumb does not gently stroke anyone's cheek to dry it, and she all but flinches away when Lukas does so now.

All but. She remains where she is, only now becoming fully aware that she ever cried at all, and after a rapid blink, she relaxes again. The wind pulls at them, does not move them. It whistles around them as though they are peaks and valleys and caves and outcroppings, moves her hair like grass. Unlike last night, when he put his hand on her elbow to guide her, she doesn't pull away from him.

"I know you didn't," she says softly. "That's why I'll tell you, when you say something that I know can't be true."

Which may as well be: I will not let you lie to me. I will not let you lie to yourself.

Danicka takes a deep breath, her breasts lifting and then slowly letting down again as she exhales long and slow. "That's..." she trails off, stops herself from being dismissive, and tries again: "I know it means something to you. But I also know it does not, and can't, make any difference. I'm not going to help you get accused of letting your opinions be manipulated by a fucking kinswoman. So why even bother talking about it? I'm not going to do it anymore.

"So we can just... stop, okay?"

Please?

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "Yeah."

His hand drops from her face; a moment later, from her arm. He finds her hand.

"Let's go in." He nods at her bag. "You want to bring that?"

[Danicka Musil] It remains unresolved, but not for lack of trying. It's not something either of them can change, even if they wanted to, and whether they want to or not is debatable. It's one of those arguments that has no happy ending, no neat bow. Danicka turns her head as he drops his hand, twisting around to get into the car --

"Yeah,"

-- and reaching behind the front seat to grab her bag. She pulls it out after her and hangs it from one shoulder. She takes his hand, but there's little life in the gesture. Maybe it means something that she does it anyway; maybe it doesn't mean anything worth saying.

Danicka closes the car door with her hip, hitting a button on her key fob before they start to walk away. "I like the beemer."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas gives a faint huff of a laugh. "It's fast," is all he says about the M3.

They've been at this hotel a half-dozen times or more now. He never thought, at the beginning of all this, that they'd develop a favorite hotel; a favored destination. This isn't the first time they've parked in the self-serve lot, either, and walked in together.

He lets her hand go a little ways before the front doors. The gesture was half-empty, anyway. The lobby seems very bright after the darkness outside. They don't keep track of who paid for which hotel. He goes to the counter tonight, signing this, initialing that, passing his american express over.

"Room 2612, sir," the receptionist tells him. "Twenty-sixth floor, on your left."

They're not alone at the elevator bank. There's another couple there, early 40s, successful-looking. The woman clutches her husband's arm and casts Danicka several glances, somewhere between morbidly curious, pitying, and judgmental. When the elevator arrives, Lukas and Danicka get on first. The other couple hesitates a moment before stepping into the elevator car themselves. They keep themselves pressed almost against the door.

[Danicka Musil] And that makes her laugh, more fully and perhaps more genuinely than his, her hand tightening in his briefly. "I approve," she says drolly, but that's all.

But he lets her hand go, and this time he pays because he gets to the counter first. Danicka goes to wait at the elevator. The couple in their forties look at her, and she's in no mood, apparently. When their gazes trend towards pitying, towards disdainful, she simply snaps: "Fuck off, all right?"

They don't look at her again on the way up. She crosses her arms over her torso, stares at the numbers, and stands so that her arm barely touches his.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] The elevator stops on the 18th floor. The other couple gets off. As the doors close, they can hear the woman muttering something about bitch and was only concerned. Lukas is positively zen in his nonresponsiveness. The floor under their feet lift. They continue to rise, and then he glances toward Danicka briefly.

A moment later he's smiling. A moment after that he laughs silently behind closed lips, lowering his head to hide it. "That was sort of impressive," he admits.

The 26th floor. The doors open and he lets her go ahead of him, barring the door with his hand until he's past it.

[Danicka Musil] "Save the fucking concern for when you throw your hip out, you fat hag," Danicka snaps as the woman and her husband are exiting the elevator. The doors slide closed again, the former governess and caregiver of children looks at the wall, and then Lukas laughs.

There's no response. Eight floors later she walks out, turning slightly only to hold out her hand for the room key.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] For lack of response, Lukas's humor dies again. There are two room keys; Lukas hands her one. While she unlocks the door, he takes his wallet out and slips the other keycard in behind his driver's license.

These rooms are starting to become familiar. It's a little jarring for him to see the same beds, the same furnishings, the same towels and curtains and closets and shelves, and yet smell something so utterly different from the last room, and the one before, and the one before. He follows Danicka in and slips his shoes off, then closes the door behind them.

The thermostat is set is 74. He dials it down to 70. The air conditioning starts to hum, and Lukas goes to open the drapes on the windows.

[Danicka Musil] She remembers, vaguely, standing in a hotel room hallway while Martin fumbled with the key card to his suite. She remembers taking it from him and sliding it down til the light turned green, taking it back out, opening it for him. She remembers sprawling in a chair in her short green dress, taking down her hair and removing her jewelry. She remembers him touching her, out of the blue, as she bent over the glass coffee table and used a rolled-up dollar bill to snort a line of coke thinner than the ones he was making for himself, because he seemed to think the then-twenty two year-old could not handle more than that.

Slow down.

Sometimes she still thinks about that night when entering a swanky hotel, just as she still thinks about other men and women she's gone to hotel rooms with, whether in high-rises or roadside dives. A thousand memories deluge her every moment of her life, and there are times when her thoughts are so cluttered she wonders how she survives any new information, any new experience, any sudden shift of emotion.

Crossing the room in her heels, she puts her bag on the bed and goes to the dresser, picking up a leather folio as Lukas changes the temperature, removes his shoes once again, and opens the drapes. "Are you hungry --?"

There was more to that sentence that she cut off. Stopped herself. Again.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "No."

Danicka knows Lukas's roots. She saw some of it, filtered through a haze of time. She heard about the rest: we had to leave almost everything behind.

He did not grow up with the sort of money the Bellamontes have always had, or the sort of money Danicka has now. But somehow, somewhere along the way he learned to spend with the best of them; to swipe the cards and sign the receipts, to fork over the twenties, the fifties, the hundreds; to know how to comport himself at expensive restaurants and five-star establishments. He behaves like he knows what he's doing at a place like the W, like he belongs.

Maybe he has memories like hers: anonymous fucks in a hundred other hotels. Maybe he spent the nights carousing with friends, with packmates, with Edward Bellamonte in Las Vegas, in Atlantic City, in New York and Boston. He doesn't talk about it; not because he's hiding it, but because it isn't important to him.

He whisks back the sheer inner curtains as well. Then he turns to face her, crossing the room toward her.

"What else were you going to say?"

[Danicka Musil] She hides everything. Even if it isn't important. How long did she hide the fact that she plays computer games, how far under her bed are the toyboxes pushed, how hard does she hold him at arm's length sometimes? Inconsequential or innocuous details of her life have remained hidden from him -- and everyone -- for months. He didn't even know that she had sisters til recently. She kept quiet on the fact that they were children together until his parents told him about it. Danicka hides things as her first and often unquestioned instinct.

After last night, especially, she does not want Martin to ever come up in conversation again. Even the thought of him, briefly, makes her think of what Katherine said, what Katherine did, and she wants to break something.

Her hands are very soft as she closes the folio and sets it back down on the dresser. Leather whispers against wood. The city comes in through the windows, or the image of it, distant and unreal. The moon is half full and reminds them that there is nothing good in the world that does not find its match and equal in something bad. She feels Lukas walking towards her more than sees him, and the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. It happens almost every time, either because he frightens her or because his nearness causes some other reaction, and her lips part to sip at the air.

"I was going to tease you about always eating lamb," she says, "but it wasn't very funny." A faint smirk, looking at the phone on the dresser beside the menu she just sat down. "And it didn't seem like a good time."

[Danicka Musil] [*whistles*]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 4, 6, 8, 9, 9, 9 (Success x 4 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] She's not looking at him. She misses the slight tilt of his head, questioning.

Gently: "Why did it seem like a good time?"

[Danicka Musil] "You don't usually appreciate being teased," she says simply, "and we've already fought once tonight, and snapped at each other last night, and... I just..."

Danicka closes her eyes and breathes. When her eyes open, she drops the lie, and it was flawless, and he couldn't see through her. The shift is almost tangible, even though she doesn't look at him. She does, however, drop her hand to her side and move it enough so that her knuckles brush against his. It's a fleeting touch, but it means something, perhaps more than their hands holding on the way into the hotel did earlier.

If she didn't tell him now, he wouldn't have known.

"I was going to ask you if you were hungry of if you just wanted to fuck me." This is a heavy pause, though only a moment long. "And I stopped because it was cruel."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] The lie was flawless. He probably couldn't have seen through her if he tried, and tried hard. He hadn't even tried. That was how perfect it was: not a single chink in the armor exposed, not a single crack in the wall.

He would've never known.
She chooses to drop it.

Lukas can't identify why something inside him twists. That she lied. That she dropped the lie. That she touches him like that. That she was going to give him the choice of eating or fucking. That she thought to use the latter as a weapon, a blade leveled at his heart. That she chose not to.

Sometimes looking at Danicka makes him feel like something inside him is collapsing on itself, like an ancient ruin toppling inward; like a dying star imploding under its own mass. So he looks away from her after a moment. Her knuckles brushed his. His fingers extend now, return the glancing touch; wrap around hers gently, like plants twining.

"Come here," he whispers.

The embrace in the parking lot didn't carry advance warning. It broke like a thunderstorm. If she lets him, this one is slower: a steady tightening of his arms, a spreading of his fingers over her back.

He doesn't ask her why she lied. What he asks her is, "Why did you tell me the truth?"

[Danicka Musil] Asking Danicka why she lies is akin to asking her why she hides her laughter, why she sleeps alone, why she does not tell Lukas that every Friday she calls her father and every Tuesday and Thursday she goes to the firing range, that on mornings when she gets up early enough she goes to the gym at Kingsbury Plaza, cranks the incline on the treadmill, and runs until her skin is flushed and she thinks she, too, is going to have a heart attack. He does not see all the ways she copes, all the little things, all the moments when she nearly shatters under the pressure of her own lying, all the comfort she takes in telling the people at her dry cleaners stories about who she is that aren't true.

Everywhere she goes, she's someone else, and he doesn't know, because he is so rarely with her. He saw a glimpse, in New York City, at some little restaurant where they had lunch and everyone wanted to know who the handsome boy was, and were oddly unafraid of him because they seemed to have so much trust in Danicka. She would not bring someone dangerous into their midst. They believed it blindly, wholly, and though they didn't welcome him like family, they openly asked questions about whether or not he was going to marry her, she was getting so old.

She comes to him, and lets their hands move together, and lays her head on his shoulder as though this is what she wanted earlier anyway. It wasn't. But that's how it feels, when she finally does. Her arms stay at her sides, one hand wound about his, fingers all tangled.

The question hurts. Not because of the implication that she is a liar, that telling the truth is strange. She knows. God, she knows, and she's tired. She walks out of room sometimes and wonders why she said what she did, why she hid what she felt she had to. Sometimes she does it because she's scared. Sometimes because she wants something. Sometimes it just... happens.

But telling the truth. That's the one that's deliberate, that takes real effort.

"I didn't know what else to do," she says finally, against the pale gray fabric of his shirt, her eyes on the window. "I didn't know how else to get back to you."

As though she'd gone somewhere.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] It doesn't strike Lukas as strange that Danicka speaks of getting back to him, as though she'd gone somewhere. That makes perfect sense to him. Sometimes the distance between them is not physical. It's in the words they say to each other, the things they will and will not tell each other.

Her head is on his shoulder. In her shoes, she can just make it. He looks at the room as she looks out the window. There's an edging of pale grey, his shirt, in her vision; in his, a slice of textured gold, her hair. Their hands are linked. It leaves his free hand to wrap around her, and his arm encircles her shoulders, drawing her close to him.

"Jsem rád že jste mi to řekl." He closes his eyes for a moment, bowing his head to the top of hers, laying his lips against her hair for a moment.

"Neopouštěj mě, lásko."

[Danicka Musil] Last night at the Brotherhood she entered, sweeping through the room and sprawling in a chair, rattling off in Czech a description of her evening that was for Lukas alone. She did not want two strangers and Katherine Bellamonte to know her state, to know where she had been or what she'd been up to. It hurt when he exposed her, when he answered her in English. Telling her to stop being rude had not stung, but the answer in the group's common language had.

Now she opens her mouth and murmurs in the rolling language that is half throaty and half purred, the language she heard from birth in her father's voice, the language he knew before any others. When they met she had to be encouraged to speak to Lukas and Anezka in English to help them learn, but when the adults were away, she almost always spoke to them in Czech.

"Nevím, co chceš abych udělal," she says, sounding tired. "Nemůžu říct pravdu na vás, ale ne někoho jiného. Je jednodušší lhát všem."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] There's a silence as he puzzles over her words. His hands are rarely still on her. Slow -- but rarely still. His thumb was sweeping small arcs across her shoulderblade, but that pauses for a moment as he thinks. Then it resumes.

"Nevím, co chci od vás, buď." His chest rises against her as he draws a breath, lets it out; almost a sigh. "Já jenom ... já nechcete mít na výběr mezi vámi a moje sourozence. Bez ohledu na to co dělám, je to špatný výběr. To je vše co jsem chtěl od vás. Předpokládám, že je to sobecké mě."

His hand slips from her shoulders then, drifts to her hip. His arm rings her waist. He holds her against him gently, but firmly, as though he thought she might

(leave)

slip away if he didn't. A moment goes by. "Nechci vám lhát na mě, he adds. "Pokud můžete, chci říci abys mi pravdu."

[Danicka Musil] It's bigger than that. Bigger than what happened with Katherine the previous night, bigger than what happed with Sam in winter, before Lukas ever touched her. Lukas does not hear, or does not understand, exactly what she means. It happens. Words are the sources of misunderstandings. His heart beating underneath her ear and his chest moving against her cheek makes more sense and is harder to misinterpret.

Like her hand tightening in his before he separated them. Like her knuckles brushing his fingers before he laced them back together. Like not looking at him. Like resting against him now.

"I'm not talking about them!" she says suddenly, and sharply, the words edged with exhaustion more than exasperation, a weariness that has nothing to do with how much sleep she's had or how much work she's done. Her shoulders are tense against him, her free hand curling into a tight, unseen fist for a moment. "I'm done talking about them."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Like a second, darker heartbeat, Lukas's rage gives a hard spike at that. He wants to shout at her that it's her own goddamn fault, lying one minute and telling some fragmentary truth the next; he wants to shout at her that he was the confused one, the wronged party, when downstairs she told him she didn't want to talk about it anymore and, and --

It's not something he can help, reacting to anger with rage: no more than she can keep her heartrate from jumping when she's frightened. Danicka will never understand what it's like to have rage, to have a touch of the Destroyer leashed in your own flesh and blood, to have something that sharpens every sense, makes every sensation, every emotion, that much more vivid.

She understands what it's like to live with rage. She knows what it was like growing up with an Ahroun for a mother, and not just any Ahroun, but Night Warder, a legend amongst her people, a warrior amongst warriors. She knows what it was like, growing up with someone like Vladislav. Neither of them could truly help their rage, either. They could control it -- and may or may not have -- but they could not conquer it, ever.

It's not an excuse. Not for anything. But it is a fact.

It passes, though. Lukas, because he cannot conquer his rage, controls it. He bites it back and he lets her go if she wants to go; he holds on, otherwise, as though she might ...

... calm him, somehow. As though tense as she is, they might be able to hold on to one another and find shelter.

"Then tell me what you're talking about, Danička," Lukas says. He gives her as much patience as he can dredge up in himself. "Explain it to me. I misunderstood."

[Danicka Musil] That tension in her shoulders coils tighter when she feels his Rage strain against his control. Her hand flinches in his as though she expects to be struck, as though in a mere second she's going to either go limp against him to accept what's coming to her or try to wriggle away so she can get out of his immediate space. One reaction implies trust. One is the way she coped with her mother when she was a child, before she realized that trying to get away only made her angrier, that her trust was misplaced because her mother could not help what she was.

She could have controlled it better.

She could have gone away.

There's any number of things Night Warder could have done differently. There's a litany of things she did not change, chances she didn't take, efforts she didn't put forth. Danicka could condemn her. She doesn't. She told Lukas that night as they left the aquarium that she understood, at least in adulthood, what her mother had been trying to do. It doesn't make it any better, what she actually did, how it actually affected her daughter. Danicka tries to be understanding. Even with the blood rushing in her ears and imagery springing to mind of Lukas tearing her apart. It churns her stomach and makes her unsteady on her feet, but all she does is close her eyes.

And count to five.

And then back down to one.

She takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, not to sigh but to steady herself, to remember that this is Lukas and the moon isn't full and he's never tried to hurt her in anger, he's never taken advantage of her wrist in his hand to snap it, he is like and unlike her mother, he is like and unlike all of them. A dozen screaming voices tell her not to calm down, and not to trust, and she does so anyway.

"Jste jediný, můžu dát pravdu.

"Jste jediný, kdo chce, je ode mě."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Jste jediný, můžu dát pravdu, she says. Jste jediný, kdo chce, je ode mě.
Jste jediný, he hears.

Lukas tries to remember what it was like five months ago, standing on the waterfront with the winter wind blasting across his skin, chilling them to the core. He tries to remember what it was like to not trust her like this, not trust her at all; to wonder if she was capable of loyalty, if she'd even consider being with a Garou, if she was even capable of love. To wonder if she was capable of saying:

Jste jediný. Ty a žádné jiné.

"Dejte ruce okolo mne," he murmurs. He can think of nothing else to say to what she's told him that isn't trite, or pointless, or unnecessary. He doesn't think he needs to say anything but this. "Drží mě."

[Danicka Musil] Of course she was loyal. She'd been affronted and angry that he's doubted it, that he'd questioned whether or not she was even capable of it. She had spent her whole life protecting her family regardless of what went on within the four walls of their home. She spent her entire adolescence keeping the secrets of a family almost as fucked up as her own, the secrets of a young girl who still is more insane than even Katherine-fucking-Bellamonte. How dare he ask her if she was able be loyal, to treat someone she was fucking with anything but disposable regard.

And at the same time she'd known: that wasn't what he meant, at all. Long before he went with her to that motel room, long before she confessed that she was falling in love with him, long before they realized that they had no idea what they were doing but they had to see this through, he had been asking her: Could you love me? Me and only me, me and no other?

Was she capable of loving?

That day, had the question been explicit, the answer might have been, too: No. No I'm not.

Tonight, she turns her face into his chest and wiggles her hand out of his, wraps her arms around his waist, as if to say: Ano. Ano, jsem.

"Jste první člověk, kterou jsem kdy miloval," she sighs after awhile, speaking into his chest, into his heart. "Nemusíte zacházet mi cestu moje matka zachází můj otec." Danicka tilts her head back to look up at him, a frown of consternation and thought furrowing her features. "Děláš mě chtějí být stejná osoba bez ohledu na to, kde jsem."

Breathing in, she starts to step back, to pull away. "But that's impossible, and it makes me angry. It makes me angry at you for making me feel that way."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas is a strange creature: a cynical idealist; a pessimistic dreamer.

He wants to live in a world where he can say I would protect you from anything and not be lying. He wants to live in a world where he can say Be yourself, always, and if anyone tries to stop you...

I'd protect you.

But he's not so idealistic, so naive, so stupid as to think this is possible. She's right, though it makes him wince to know it. That's impossible. And this makes her angry, and it makes her angry at him for making her want that; and it makes him angry at her for unblinding him to the truth, for stripping down the facades and the barriers, the backdrops and the props, and showing him the truth as it is.

That he will never be able to protect her from everything. He is not omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient. He cannot follow her around protecting her, and even if he could, he'd never, ever be able to protect her from himself.

So he lets her draw away, though for a second his arm doesn't move; he's unwilling to let go. It passes. She steps back. Where she lay, his body feels cold now. He wants to fold his arms, as though to retain what warmth he remembers.

"I don't know what to tell you," he confesses. "I don't know how to solve the dilemma for you." A pause, and then, wry, "You don't need me to solve anything for you."

[Danicka Musil] "I wasn't asking you to, anyway," she says quietly, with tension but without rancor. With understanding. She hasn't let go of him but she is still moving back, lifting her head from his chest so she can see him, tilting it back so she can look at his face.

He can no more tell her that it is alright to be herself than he can tell her nothing bad will ever happen to her again. It's a hazard of love, to think you can say that sort of thing, or make that sort of thing happen. It's a pit trap, thinking you can protect someone else.

Air passes between them, conditioned and cool. "There is no solution," she says with a small shrug. "This is just how things are." And she steps aside, going to sit on the edge of the bed, leaning over to unbuckle the thin strap of one shoe.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "Jo," he agrees. That is how things are.

She moves past him. He turns to follow her with his eyes, leaning back against the low dresser, bracing his palms at the edge but stopping short of levering himself up to sit on it. When Danicka leans over, her hair curtains her face. Lukas looks away, out the window at the lake which, by night, is merely an expanse of darkness. Overcast, the sky overhead glows with the reflected light of the city.

He straightens up, turns around. While her shoes drop to the carpet, he goes to the minibar and finds himself a miniature bottle of scotch. He twists the cap off, the metal seal snapping audibly, and takes a swallow that accounts for half the bottle. The rest he passes to Danicka when he comes to sit beside her, depressing the edge of the mattress by a few inches.

She took her shoes off. He takes his socks off, shaking them out and tossing them across a few feet's worth of floorspace to land on the dresser.

"There was one more thing," he says. "I'm sorry if I made you feel exposed last night when I told them what Sam did. I was just ... so tired of everyone thinking him some kind of victim because he was the only one telling stories."

[Danicka Musil] She removes her left shoe and sets it down, then the right. They do not drop aimlessly this time, but she picks them up and takes the over to the dresser, the toes butting up against the drawers. While he is quiet, looking at the city and the lake, she reaches behind her neck and unfastens the thin golden necklace she's been wearing all night, letting it coil on top of the dresser in a shining pile of metal. Her feet are bare, her toes glossy but colorless, and silent as they pad back over the carpet to the bed. She sits down again,

and Lukas sits beside her, holding out a small bottle. She takes it, finishes it off, and stares at the little label for awhile while he takes off his socks. They sit in silence, not quite solemn not even quite companionable, until Lukas speaks again.

Danicka lowers the bottle to her knee but doesn't let go of it, turning her head so she can look at him over the smooth line of her tanned shoulder. Her lips touch, but don't go pale with pressure against one another. As he finishes up, she turns her head again, eyes tracking back to the little bottle in her hand. The scotch burned. It rankled on its way down. It's warming her belly now, a tiny flame that will die soon enough.

"It wouldn't have bothered me if I thought it would really make any difference."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] There's a beat of pause. As easily as she reads him, she can readily tell that Lukas is suddenly annoyed in spite of himself. The silence is not for effect, or dramatic purpose. It's him trying to keep ahold of his temper.

"It makes a difference, Danička," he says levelly. "It might not make much of a difference to Katherine, but it makes a difference that Sam's tribesman knows what the hell kind of Garou he really is."

[Danicka Musil] This time her lips do press together, not out of anger but a need for silence, the same need for silence that he finds in himself. She seeks control, finds it more easily than he does -- because she does not have to fight down Rage along with her temper. Danicka twists around, finds the trashcan with her eyes, and throws the empty bottle into it. It rattles the bag, and she turns back to her boyfriend. Her guardian.

She makes a decision for him, possibly unfair, and instead says: "I'll rephrase. The difference it makes, the difference that actually affects me and not the tribal politics of the sept, is that a woman who hates me because she's threatened by me and a self-righteous little whelp of a complete stranger to me now both have cause to see me as a victim. Whatever difference it makes to you or to them, it does not make my life any easier for Garou to know that Samuel fucking Modine is a rapist waiting to happen."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] For a long time Lukas is silent, and this time it's not because he's trying to hold down he's temper. This time he's just unable to find the words. He doesn't know what the fuck to say.

"Is that all that matters to you?" This is what he finally comes up with. "Whether something makes your life easier or harder for you, and nevermind what the truth is?"

[Danicka Musil] "That's all that matters to anyone, Lukáš."

She's harsh, and she's cold when she says those words. The syllables chop each other up, hard and sharp and causing war wounds as though they simply don't know what else to do, what else to be.

"You think you're the only one I say wants the truth from me because I think I'm unloved, or that I don't matter? They don't want the truth, period, and will ignore it even if you hand it right to them. It will make no difference, in the long run, that Sam hit me or that he did what he did to me in the club. It will not matter, to anyone, whether he made my life harder, until it is just another round of ammunition for them when he makes their life harder. Even yo--"

She stops.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] He knows exactly what she was going to say. If Lukas didn't know, he wouldn't be this angry; his fingers wouldn't be digging into the edge of the bed, and his body wouldn't be all but snapping with tension.

Still -- and very quietly:

"Finish your sentence."

[Danicka Musil] [WP]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 2, 2, 4, 5, 6 (Failure at target 7)

[Danicka Musil] All she can do is shake her head this time. And shrink from him, her shoulders inward and her throat moving as she swallows. She takes a breath, physically recoiling by minute, almost imperceptible degrees, and shakes her head a second time. "I can't."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "Finish your fucking sentence, Danička."

The invective is a slash of temper through the middle of his sentence. Other than that, he's ruthlessly calm, his hands gripping the edge of the bed like talons; his shoulders bunched. He doesn't look at her.

[Danicka Musil] [WP: Aaauuugh.]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 3, 4, 5, 8, 9 (Success x 2 at target 8)

[Danicka Musil] "You're scaring me."

She says it quietly, this time pulling back enough that she moves on the bed, pulling into herself and away from him. She can't get far -- if she were not as in control of herself as she is, she would simply run, bare feet or no, across the room and out the door.

The way she says it sounds like: I can't, again.

And also like: Please.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas was raised by a father who carried books in his mind, who understood the absolutes of math and physics and cold logic, who believed in responsibility and duty and honor. Wyrmbreaker was fostered by a Philodox of the waning moon, a man who saw in absolutes as clear-cut as the light and dark sides of the moon. Right and wrong, greater and lesser, dominance and submission, just and unjust, war and peace, life and death, law and crime, order and retribution.

Somewhere along the way, he was molded into who he is, and the creature he is believes wholeheartedly, fiercely, in accountability. He holds himself accountable for his own actions. His cleaving to the truth, his disdain for deceit, is really only an extension of this; not an obsession in and of itself but an offshoot of his basic self-accountability.

The corollary is, of course, that he expects others to be held accountable for their own actions as well. And there is a part of him, deeply engrained, the same part that made him backhand a kinswoman for disobeying and putting herself in danger, the same part that made him shove a kinsman's face into a toilet for refusing to admit the consequences of his behavior --

There's a part of him that wants to seize Danicka by the throat and force the words out of her. To finish what she began. To follow through, and accept the fruits of her own bitter harvest.

It takes an effort to remind himself, no, no, he cannot do that. To do something like that would be an irrevocable ending, a shattering of something irreplaceable, a destruction far more irreversible than his walking out of the W nearly two months ago while she wept for him to stop, don't go, stay, please.

It takes nearly everything he has to remember that what he has here in Danicka, with Danicka, is far more precious than even honor, even cause and effect, even accountability.

Lukas forces relaxation into his fingers. He leans forward slowly, planting his elbows on his knees, covering his face with his hands and lowering his head until his fingers rake back through his hair. Something in his posture brings to mind a silent scream, a howl of sheer and soundless frustration.

"I am so tired," he says at last, so quiet that even the distant rumble of the air conditioning threatens to overwhelm it, "of your inventing method after method to accuse me of selfishness. You, whose only fucking concern appears to be whether or not something makes your life easier.

"I do what I do because I love you. Not because I want something beautiful on my arm, not because I want someone irreproachable in my bed. Because I love you. Do you understand that?"

A beat.

"Because if you think that makes me selfish, Danička, I don't know what world you live in."

[Danicka Musil] Danicka is frozen. She is afraid to move, because he might hit her. She is afraid to speak, because he might clench the words and the air out of her throat. She is afraid to breathe, because he might view it as a challenge, and that will be unacceptable. The fact that this is Lukas, who played with her on a rug, chasing the rainbows that the sun cast through the prisms in the windows, does not change how frightened she is. He is no more than little boy now than she is a little girl who can't climb trees.

It's hard, when she's this scared, to remember that this is Lukas, and he's never struck her -- in five whole months, as though this is anything more than a drop in the bucket -- and he loves her so much he seems to tear himself apart at the seams sometimes from it. It is just as hard now as it was when he told her he would not lose his temper and strike her, and she called him a liar for it.

Essentially.

She still wants to run away. Out the door, down the hall, barefoot and as wild as she was in the woods but this time with something dangerous behind her, left behind if he didn't chase after. She is afraid to run away because then he might stop her, might grab her elbow and this time wrench it hard enough that something breaks. She is afraid to run away because he'll stop her, and she's afraid to let him stop her because if he hurts her then he won't love her anymore, and worse, she might not love him.

After he speaks, she's quiet for a very long time.

When she speaks, her voice is incredibly soft.

"When Sam made me want him in the cafe, and you knew what he was doing, you didn't stop him. When I came to you the first time to ask you to please tell him to stay away from me, you left me alone with him in the kitchen at the Brotherhood. When I came to you again to ask you to please, please keep him away from me, you told me I could bother you with it if he did it again."

A pause. Just to breathe.

"It was before we ever made love. I know. It was before I really meant anything to you. He stayed in your pack. I tried to make some kind of peace with him so that maybe he wouldn't get so angry that he'd do that to me again -- maybe show up in my bedroom one night, jump in through the spirit world like Katherine -- because you made it very clear you weren't going to do anything about it."

This pause is more deliberate.

"After we made love, or after he made you angry, I don't know, then you told him to stay away from your Kin. And months later, when you are sick and tired of how people pity him and how he lies, when Katherine gets on your nerves with talking shit about me, then... what he did to me is ammunition."

She stands up, crosses two feet of carpeting to the dresser. "If my only concern were really what makes my life easier, I'd never bother telling you the truth, and I wouldn't be with you. I wasn't about to call you selfish. No more than anyone else."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Instinct tells Lukas to fight back when attacked, and when Danicka lays it out for him -- line by line, word by word -- he feels cornered; he feels threatened; he feels attacked.

But it's not an attack. It's accountability all over again. These are the things he did, one by one. These are the choices he made five, six months ago, when he thought he could cut his want for her out of his like a cancer and move on. That he loves her now, that he would not do these things now, changes nothing.

Cause and effect. Action and consequence.

Lukas lowers his hands from his head. He half-turns, enough to reveal his profile, the cut of his brow, the line of his nose. And then further, straightening up to look her in the eye as she rises and goes to the dresser.

"Danička, I'm not proud of many of the things I did at the start of all this. I don't have excuses for any of them. But I do have some explanations. Will you hear me out?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] (out of his? wtf? out of himself.)

[Danicka Musil] [Correction: Like, ages ago: "It will make no difference, in the long run, that Sam hit me or that he did what he did to me in the club." Should be 'cafe', not 'club'.]

[Danicka Musil] Her eyes aren't his. She has her back to him, and right now that's a sort of trust -- when she's admitted she's scared of him right now, too scared to speak when he's clutching the edge of the bed and all but snarling at her -- but it's not the same as eye contact. She is resting her palms on the dresser and starting to slip her feet into her shoes once more. There's a resigned slope to her shoulders.

They talked about what happened last night in the car because he didn't want to bring an argument into the place where he wanted to make love to her. They're not making love. She was angry with him all the way up here, taking it out on some old couple in the elevator, and as soon as they started talking about truth and lies and what matters again they started arguing again. She's tired, and she's giving up, and she's putting on her shoes.

But she pauses when he asks her if she'll hear him out. She looks at him over her shoulder, her hair sliding across her half-bared back. "...Some of the things that matter deeply to you don't matter at all to me. And it makes you furious when you find that out. You believe things that I don't, and can't, and you get angry at me because I don't believe in them. You act like you know what I'm thinking, or what I'm going to say, even when most of the time you're proven wrong."

She straightens. Her shoes aren't on. She turns around, looking at him with a deep frown. "Then you throw 'I do what I do because I love you' at me like... when you scare the shit out of me, or grab a hold of me when you know I hate it, or...

"Fuck, Lukáš, I wasn't even fucking calling you selfish and you defended yourself with loving me so that you could look down your nose at me for the only fucking way I know how to survive without losing my fucking mind. I wasn't asking for any explanations. I just wanted you to stop looking at me like I'm a monster because I know better than to see nobility or honor where there's only self-serving bullshit."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] She throws so much at him at once that he has no chance, no possibility of responding to all of it at once. A part of him wants to bury his head in his head again; scream; open his jaws and tear something apart.

So he closes his fucking mouth instead, stares at her when she speaks, waits for her to finish. And when she's finished, there's five seconds' worth of silence before:

"Are you finished?"

[Danicka Musil] What she says to him then is in Russian. It is almost certainly a brief stream of cursing suitable for the daughter of either an Ahroun or a longshoreman. She turns around again and shoves her feet into her shoes, bending at the waist to strap them around her ankles. Her balance on the heels is perfect, though these aren't the highest ones he's seen her in before. She stands up straight again, hair tossed back off her shoulders, but she doesn't pick up her necklace. She is walking around the side of the bed towards her purse.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "What makes me furious," he raises his voice to ride right over hers as she launches into Russian. Why the fuck not. He can't understand what she's saying; she doesn't intend him to. She's not communicating, so he's not interrupting. It makes sense to him.

"What makes me furious is that you raze me to the ground for reading you wrong when you do everything in your goddamn power to make certain I do." She's putting her shoes on and he's getting to his feet. "What makes me furious is that when I tell you I do things for you out of love, you turn it around on me and call it self-serving bullshit. What makes me furious is you refuse to admit this is tantamount to calling me selfish over, and over, and over."

She's going for her purse now. He doesn't intercept her, though surely he could; he follows her instead, a scant foot behind her.

"What makes me furious," he goes right on, "is that you believe your way of seeing the world is the only way. I'm going to beat you, honor is a lie, truth is nothing, everyone's selfish in the end, and god forbid anyone say differently. Once you've made up your fucking mind, anyone who disagrees with you is either a liar or a fool. I can admit fault when I see it in myself, Danička, but you can't even entertain the notion that your little view of the world might be anything but perfectly accurate.

"And what makes me furious," he's standing in her way when she turns toward the door, "is that you can unleash whatever the fuck you want on me, but I don't even get a chance to explain. Sit the fuck down. I'm not done."

[Danicka Musil] When Danicka bends over the bed to get to her purse, she does not grab the strap and loop it over her head. She reaches into it, takes out her wallet, shoves it into the back pocket of her jeans after a quick check to see if there's cash inside. There is. The purse stays where it is, while he talks. While the Russian fades out, because sooner or later everyone runs out of cuss words. She just keeps her mouth shut, even though her hands are shaking.

And she doesn't interrupt him, either. She circles around the bed, trying to keep at least three feet between them, failing more often than not because the room isn't that large, it's not like the suites they got the first couple of times, and because he's following her around. He won't let the distance grow, and so she shakes. He's angry, so she shakes. But she doesn't break down and beg him to leave her alone, please don't hurt her. It's possible that takes more effort than she wants him to know. It's possible that it's easier, because it's him.

Wherever she is planning on going, she doesn't need her necklace, apparently, or whatever is in her bag. Danicka turns around at the entryway, thinking that maybe if she faces him he will stop following her. Maybe she'll stop, at least, thinking he means to bite her throat open if she doesn't give him the right answer. Sit the fuck down, he says.

In her mind it's someone else's voice.

And she snaps.

"First: I do everything in my goddamn power to try and let you know me. I fail at it. A lot. I'm sorry that I fail. I'm sorry that it's this hard for me.

"Second: I never called your love self-serving bullshit. I call everyone else's pretenses that they are good, or honest, or noble bullshit. I call their apologies and their protectiveness self-serving. Not you.

"Third: you're the one who thinks that selfishness is inherently wrong somehow. I never said it was! I just don't think people should pretend they're above that when none of them are!"

She knows she's going to get hit. She knows that yelling at an Ahroun is a good way to get her jaw dislocated. The color is high in her cheeks and she has none of his often ruthless calm, not a drop of her careful serenity, not a stitch of that mask he's referred to both as something he loves and something he despises. She's raising her voice at him, and at not him.

"Fourth: I can disprove the shit everybody tries to feed me by reminding them of things that happened hours ago, maybe weeks. I have yet to have anyone prove to me that the vast majority of people, mortal, Garou, or Kin, are not sniveling assholes who cover up their whining by lying to themselves and everyone else.

"Fifth," and her voice is almost shrill now, she's so angry, a sharp-edged torrent of fury and hurt and frustration, "you are the only one who is different! Don't fucking try to make me believe that I can expect the same out of anyone else, because I can't!"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "How can you say that?"

He seizes on her last point, perhaps because it is the last, or perhaps because that's the first time in all this long and muddled and furious argument that he even begins to see where she's coming from; what she's railing against. It's the same thing she was railing against earlier, ironically. I'm not talking about them, she'd said, meaning Kate, meaning Sam. I'm not talking about you, she might as well say now.

She's talking about ... everyone else. Everyone.

"How can you judge everyone like that," he continues, "instantly, all-encompassingly, when you don't even know them? You tell me I'm different, but you thought I was the same once. You judged me then and you've proved yourself wrong. How the hell can you justify doing it all over again?"

[Danicka Musil] "I didn't prove myself wrong about you, you did. And a solid half of the things I knew about you then are still true," she says levelly, but not with malice. It's just, as she said before, the way things are. But her voice doesn't stay even remotely calm for long. She takes a deep breath, blinking her eyes because she is suddenly reeling from everything she just shouted at him. Not said. Not snapped. Nearly screamed.

"You said you can admit fault and I can't entertain the notion that I might be wrong? Where do you get off? Do you have any idea how many chances I give anyone if they show the slightest shred of being worth it?"

Her eyes are pale. Not quite venom, not quite emerald, but a mere breath of color around her dilated pupils. "I wish they didn't turn out to be the fools and monsters they are more often. I justify expecting cruelty and idiocy because even from the best, that is inevitably what I get."

What I give.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] There's a short silence.

"Kurva drát," he bursts out suddenly. "I don't even know what the fuck we're arguing about. I was angry because I thought you were calling me selfish. Then I was angry because you dredge up shit from six months ago and then refuse to so much as let me explain what the fuck I was doing. I don't know why we're discussing the intrinsic nature of man and Garou."

Another short pause. Then he looks down at her feet, her shoes, back at her.

"Where are you going?"

[Danicka Musil] Her head drops suddenly, like a string's been cut, and she covers her face with her hands. Danicka takes a deep breath before she does anything else, exhales before she lifts her head again.

"Baby, I don't think you're selfish. I think you do things that are selfish sometimes, but it isn't like I don't forgive it. I'm not exactly qualified to judge."

There's a problem, too: he calls it judgement, her view on other people. She calls it realism. Acceptance.

"I dredged up what happened months ago because you kept snapping at me to finish my sentence. So I told you what I was going to say. I don't want an explanation because I'm afraid that it'll just... mean nothing to me, and then it'll hurt again, and I don't... I don't want to go back to not trusting you."

Her eyes are filled with tears. She doesn't have the will to blink them away and let them fall, not until she tries to speak again: "I was just going to go downstairs and get a drink." Her hair falls forward; she reaches up and runs her fingers through it, pushes it back.

[Danicka Musil] [Belated: -1 WP. All this fighting! And speaking her mind! EEE.]

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Momentarily, Lukas breaks eye contact. He casts about himself. There's the dresser; there's the bed. And the armchairs. He pulls one up, sinks into it like a soldier at the end of a long march, or a wounded man collapsing. He doesn't bother to sit straight, or even sprawl properly -- he just lets himself drop down, legs akimbo, slouched.

"Well, I want to explain," he says. "I need to explain, because so much of what you saw was a deliberate fucking lie. It doesn't make what I did any less ... selfish or self-preserving. But it's not entirely the way you imagine it."

Short and choppy, his exhale: something like a mirthless laugh. He glances at the door, back to her. "Go on, go get your drink."

[Danicka Musil] "Don't assume you know how I imagine it just because I'm angry and hurt over it," she snaps. "Stop fucking assuming you know what I think of you based on what I don't say."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] His hand comes down on the arm of the chair, his palm ringing off the leather. "Then tell me, Danička. For fuck's sake, tell me what you think."

[Danicka Musil] He's in an armchair; she's standing in the entryway, leaning now against one wall, watching him as the distance between them grows and as breathing gets easier. Her face is wet again. It feels sticky from earlier, now-dried tears that he only half wiped away. Before last night, she hadn't seen him since the bonfire, and now they can't stop fighting. It's exhausting, and depressing, and reminds her why sometimes it doesn't seem so bad that they only see each other once every week most of the time, only make love a few times a month. She's not entirely sure she could handle this on a more regular basis.

Even if that's what she wants, more than anything, just as often.

"I think... that you're a good man. I think you're honorable. I think wish other people were better than they are because they probably could be, if they wanted to. I think you're disappointed, more than anything else, when they aren't." She swallows, and her throat moves tightly with it. "I think you fight your own cynicism, and mine, as hard as you do because if you give into it, you'll give up, and I hate myself sometimes for fighting just as hard against your idealism because I'm so scared of getting hurt when the world doesn't live up to it.

"I think you love me, and the last time someone did that I broke him in half, so a part of me is constantly saying that there must be something wrong with you, to want me."

She tips her head against the wall, watches him. "I think you're sometimes intensely arrogant, and then you turn around and I... can't think of a time when you haven't, once you realized where you'd gone wrong, admit that you could have done better, and I admire and hate you for it. I think you fool yourself a lot about others, and I don't understand why, when they don't deserve the benefit of your doubt. I think..."

Danicka lets her eyes float upward, fixes her stare on the ceiling. She is silent for a moment, considering, and then exhales.

"I think what you call loyalty is actually devotion, and I've never cared about anything enough to devote myself to it." There's a long pause here, three seconds, then five, then six. "As much as I think you blind yourself to the worst sometimes, I know you see more clearly than that. And I think that one of these days you're going to see so clearly that you end up just like me, trusting no one and believing in less, and then I'll have ruined you, and... "

She shrugs, dropping her eyes, shaking her head, and doesn't finish. That was the end, anyway. She looks at the floor.

"I think I'm afraid to hear anything that reminds me that you're just as capable of cruelty as I am."

[Danicka Musil] [Thaaat's another -1WP]

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] They wear each other out like this as much as they've ever worn each other out making love, and far less pleasantly.

She flays her will to the bone to give him what he asks for, and demands: the truth, the truth, the truth. She makes it harder and harder for herself to stand being in the same room as him, the same building, the same city.

Now she's at the entryway, leaning against the wall as though that might support her. He's sprawled in an armchair as though he's exhausted.

She tells him what she sees of him; not just in those isolated incidents five, six months ago but in all the time she's known him -- which is not the truth, either, because she knew him a long time ago, too, when he was a boy, a noisy, energetic little boy fresh to these shores. Even then his eyes were of the sky: blue like a summer's noon, blue like lightning.

When she's finished she's looking at the floor. He's looking at her, and she can feel his rage so clearly now with her will stripped down, her self-protective wall hammered low. Moments tick by, and then he exhales.

"I think you see what I want to be," he says. "And maybe when I'm with you it's -- easier for me to try to be that man. But I think you don't see all the ways I can be such a coward. And selfish. I don't think I would be so angry when I hear selfish in your words if it weren't at least a little bit true."

Pause.

"Everything I did those first weeks, I ultimately did for myself. Everything. Pack loyalty; devotion, whatever the fuck, was only a goddamned veneer. The flimsiest of masks.

"From the morning I took you home, I didn't really give a fuck about Sam. Every time we talked, every question I asked, I had myself in the back of my mind. I told myself I was watching out for my brother when really I wanted to know if it was too late to pursue you myself. I told myself all I wanted to know was whether or not you were interested and then I could let it go, when I couldn't have let it go if my life depended on it. I was pursuing you. In my own surreptitious, underhanded way, I was after you.

"And I was so intrigued by you, Danička. I couldn't trust that. I couldn't believe it of myself. Me. Intrigued with a kinswoman; a silly, emptyheaded, submissive little girl by all accounts. One that apparently had no compunctions about climbing in bed with a stupid little boy like Sam at that. So it had to be your fault, something you were doing. You had to be after something, in it for your own twisted reasons, playing your own sick little game that I would not be a victim to.

"That's why I never protected you. Oh, sure, it was because I wanted to protect Sam, protect the integrity of my pack, and because I wanted you to take responsibility for your own mess. But at the base of it all: I wanted you to think I would never raise a finger to help you. I wanted you to think you meant nothing to me, nothing whatsoever, so that whatever game you were playing, turning brother against brother or beguiling me or ... whatever it was you were trying to do, it would fail.

"It was self-preservation, you see." Hasn't he said that before? "I had to keep you away from me with everything I had, because if I thought if I didn't, I'd crumble like a house of cards and you could do whatever the fuck you wanted with me. I was afraid you'd take it all, everything I had or was, and give nothing back."

Another.

"For all that, if Sam had tried to leave with you in the cafe that day, I would have never allowed it. And if Sam had tried to hit you again that night at the Brotherhood, I would have stopped him. I suppose this means nothing now; I have no proof, nothing but what I say now. But it's the truth. I would have stopped him, and fuck pack unity."

A last silence, stretching long than the last. His eyes fall from her, drift across the room, aimless. Come back to her.

"I suppose more than anything else, that's why I wanted -- I needed you to stop putting me in a position to choose between you and my packmates. Because I don't think I can keep up this damned pretense anymore."

[Danicka Musil] The whole time he speaks, she looks at the floor. It's true that right now she can barely stand to be in this room. And the things that come to her mind to do to make herself feel better and stronger are horrific. Right now she's not even sure anything would work the way it's supposed to. Right now she doesn't want to get away with something wicked in order to feel more comfortable in her own skin again. She looks at the carpet, and after awhile she closes her eyes. He's not a blue-eyed little boy eating too many kolache. He's an Ahroun, and she feels as weak as a little girl hiding in a dark cupboard, trying to smell her father's hands in the cabinetry he made himself.

She wears herself out, but it's for him, and it's doing something that should not exhaust her so much. She thinks of how ironic it is that sometimes she is so desperate for her own safety that she will burn herself out lying, and how she'll burn herself out just as much trying to tell the truth. It makes her bitter, and in a way it makes her want to give up, too. She lifts her hand and covers her eyes, even though her head is already ducked, because she really has nothing else to protect her other than adages like out of sight, out of mind. Maybe if he can't see that she's weak, tired, and afraid, he won't be drawn to attack her.

Love enters into it, but too late. Instinct comes first. Training comes first. Love takes effort to believe in.

She is hard to believe in. And when he tells her that he thought she was playing a game, she flashes back to him asking her that very question. What kind of game. What the fuck. She almost flinches when he mentions climbing into bed with Sam. She clenches her jaw when he calls all that her own mess. It makes her angry, and it flares up only to go out in the face of his Rage like a candle giving up the ghost when hit by the shockwave from a bomb going off. Brother against brother, beguiling him, all the things imagined of her.

Her hand drops from her eyes, but she is still staring into her own eyelids, hiding in the dark, as he finishes. For awhile, Danicka just stands there, her shoulders drooping like a caryatid who is about to fall under her stone. She takes a deep breath and sighs, slowly lifting her head and looking across the room at him.

"What kind of a game did you all think I could have been playing?" she asks, almost wincing at the thought, looking lost. "What did any of you have that you thought I wanted?"

The questions may as well be rhetorical. She leaves the wall, but has to push her hand flat against it to do so. And she has to stop and think for a moment before she crosses over to the bed and sits on its edge, facing him. One of her long legs folds inward, the other draping over the side of the bed. She looks at him with a furrow in her brow, considering whether or not to tell him what, in the end, she decides to simply say:

"I fucked Sam because I had never had sex with a werewolf before," she says quietly, knowing he probably will not like hearing this, "and because I hadn't gotten laid in nearly four weeks, and because I knew he would be easy, whatever boyishly moral ideals he thought he held."

It's rather blunt.

"I never wanted him. I never wanted Martin, either. I wanted you, and I hated myself for wanting you, and you wouldn't have me, anyway."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] What kind of game -- "I don't know."
What did any of you have -- "Nothing."

She fucked Sam because -- he closes his eyes, a flicker of a wince, and keeps them shut.
She never wanted him. "I know that."
Or Martin. "I know that."
She wanted him. She hated herself for wanting him.

"I know that, Danička." Softer each time.

Unconsciously, he mirrors her earlier posture: slumps down in the armchair until he can bring his hand up to bracket his temples, shade his eyes. The back of his hand looks strong and lean, all tendon and bone, muscle. No excess.

"I know that now."

After a while his hand drops. He doesn't have the strength to keep it up anymore. He leans back, lets his head sink back against the armchair, opens his eyes to the ceiling, the corner of the room, before letting his gaze drop back to her.

"It's not the way I think now. I don't know why I thought like that, or why I behaved that way." No, that's not true. "I know exactly why: because I'm a fucking coward and an asshole. I don't ... think that anymore. Any of that."

A brief span of silence.

"I just needed you to know the truth, because the truth is I never even had pack loyalty to hide behind." A short, stripped breath of a laugh. "That's how good and honorable I am."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 1, 3, 3, 6 (Failure at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] (SHADOW LORDS DON'T FAIL!)
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 2, 2, 2, 3, 6, 10 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Danicka Musil] Out of nowhere, Danicka mentions her former roommate right alongside his former packmate, one of whom she disdainfully said she was not 'fucking' when Lukas asked. That was before he stood in front of her in a motel room and removed her bra, pulled down her panties. That was before she touched him, willingly and luxuriously, for the first time... ever. That was before they kissed. That was before they tried to fuck each other like she was a whore and he was a bastard, that was before the first time they learned that it couldn't be just a fuck.

This, even, was before she got up from her chair and told him that she would fuck his brains out in any hotel in the city. Before she promised to make him come so hard he would see eternity. Before he told her that if he didn't come inside of her or break someone's face in ten minutes he would lose his goddamn mind.

Why were you with Martin last night? Fucking him too?

The question she'd dodged.

And no, I am not 'fucking' Martin.

The answer she'd given.

Sitting on the bed, he answers her in cascades of soft words, wincing away from her blunt and dismissive reasons for fucking Sam Modine, reasoning that the Fenrir himself could never be expected to accept. She never lied to Sam. She never pretended, really, to want anything more from him than sex. She kissed him only because it was the only way to get him to stop stammering around and fluttering his hands at romance, the only way to get his blood to divert from brain to cock so that he would stop fantasizing, for a little while at least, about the chances that they were ever going to go out again. She kissed him to shut him up, manipulate him, get what she wanted from him.

She kissed Lukas because she could not bear, any longer, not to be close to him. She kissed him because it struck her, out of nowhere, how badly she wanted things to be different with him, even back when she didn't understand why.

Lukas's words fall softer and softer. I know. I know. I know. Danicka watches him sink and something in her twists. She feels an urge to go to him, not because he is in pain but because he is hers, and when he tips his head back it bares his throat not in submission but in trust. To her it feels like a plea for mercy, and she takes a deep breath. She tells herself, like a mantra, that he is what he is, and she loves him, and he would not be the same man she loves if he were not everything he is:

a monster

an asshole

a coward.

"I don't think you're a coward. Or an asshole," she says quietly. "It's not like I was never afraid to let you... mean anything to me. It's not like I never did anything to hurt you, or prove how little you meant to me." Her head tips, and she winces briefly. "...I do love you."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas has sunk so low in the armchair that he's almost prone now. His hands are on the arms of the chair; they lever his arms up almost horizontally from the shoulder joints. His body is slung in a low arc from the nape of his neck to the small of his back, one at the back cushion, one at the edge of the seat. His legs are sprawled.

He could be a man deep in relaxation, but he's not. This is something closer to

(i know.
i know.
i know that now.)

total fucking capitulation. I can't think of a time when you haven't, once you realized where you'd gone wrong, admit that you could have done better, she said, and this is nothing if not a prime example of just that. He could have done a whole lot better. He could have done everything differently, but that would have changed everything, too, and he has no idea where they might have ended up then.

It doesn't matter. The path they walk is the one they chose. And he looks at her as she says what she says, and there isn't enough left in him even to summon up a ghost of a smile.

So Lukas just looks at Danicka. The woman he loves. He looks at her frankly, openly, unabashedly, and there's something animal about the way he can just stare at her like this, unself-conscious.

"Tě miluju," he says finally: a white flag on the battered ramparts.

A short quiet. Then, very gently, because goddammit he does not want to start another fight: "Is that why you slept with Martin and lied about it?" This is another assumption, a leap of logic he takes for granted. "To prove how little I meant?"

[Danicka Musil] The lights from the city and the reflection of the windows hits her where she sits on the edge of the bed, her legs as composed as a dancer's even though she's not athletic, not even necessarily that graceful. Lukas is in shadow, his back to the light and his eyes on her. Whatever their physical attitudes, they are both... blasted. Destroyed. Decimated in the wake of an argument literally unlike any they've ever had.

He's nearly always known the ferocity lingering under the surface with her, saw it before he saw her naked the first time but knew it instinctively the first time he pulled her breast into his mouth and heard the way she moaned, felt the way she rolled her hips more insistently as she rode him. But she's never really yelled at him like she did tonight, never really fought back like this.

She is changing. They are.

And she had to have known it was coming, because when he brings Martin back up, Danicka does not startle. She doesn't even move. She watches him, not quite clinging to him as she has so often in the aftermath of what they are capable of doing to each other. She is not sure how he is going to respond when she speaks, so she doesn't go to him and touch him. For now, in her uncertainty of his Rage -- which exists despite her trust in him -- she keeps her distance..

"I lied about it --" she doesn't even try to explain how her mind worked it out so it wasn't really a lie, that Lukas just asked if she was fucking Martin, like it was a recurring thing, a regular thing, and so it wasn't a lie when she said no, but Danicka just admits it now: "-- because it was none of your business. The first time I slept with him was years ago, and like most of the times I had sex with him, I don't think he even remembers it."

She pauses there, considering leaving it, then sighs. She shouldn't tell him this much, but truthfully, she simply doesn't know any better. Or she does, and she doesn't care, she's tired of hiding things. Or she knows, and isn't sure that the rules for everyone else apply to Lukas. "One time, and the only time I think he was sober enough to remember it, I fucked him because I wanted you, and I knew you wanted me, but you wouldn't take me.

"And once, I fucked him because you pushed his head in a toilet three days after we made love for the first time... and I hated you for disappointing me." She tenses slightly. Her voice quiets, and as her words trail off, she nods slightly. "That time... I fucked him to try and prove how little you meant to me."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Truth be told, that was entirely too much information. That was far beyond what information he expected from her, or ever wanted from her. Lukas wasn't terribly surprised to feel the pieces fall together, to realize that Danicka had, in fact, gone to bed with Ilari Martin. They were living together, for fuck's sake, and Danicka was not shy, and Danicka was...

...tak zkurvený krásný.

But he hadn't thought, hadn't realized they went back for years. He supposes he'd always thought they'd met here. Maybe they were guildmates, for all he fucking knew. And he hadn't thought --

"You told me," he says, and he doesn't sound angry; he sounds wondering, baffled, "you would be as loyal as I was."

[Danicka Musil] Neither of them have ever been in a relationship before. No girlfriends for him, no girlfriends or boyfriends for her. She's always been -- relatively -- discreet about her affairs, but never for the sake of sparing someone's heart or peace of mind. There have always been a dozen other reasons to keep quiet, and in a rush of desire to let Lukas in when this whole argument keeps coming back to the fact that she doesn't even when it's been clear that the crux of the argument was not about self-disclosure... Danicka says too much.

On some level: she doesn't know any better. On another: she should have known anyway. She is tired, and unable to resist herself any more than she can stand against his Rage, and so she tells him more than he asked for, more than he wanted.

They've already fought so much tonight. She winces when he answers, looks at her hand. "And you told me you wanted to make a whore of me," she says quietly, but that's not really the explanation, so that's not where she leaves it. Her eyes find his again. "After that night, I didn't think we were ever going to get together again. I didn't think you wanted it." Wanted me. "And after what you did to Martin, I didn't want to... want to be with you again. I didn't think I wanted to be with you again."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "I don't want your fucking excuses."

The words tear out of him, crackle across the distance like lightning. He hadn't even realized they were in him until they weren't anymore. He didn't recognize the anger blistering under the surface until the surface broke and the anger pulled him under; it seems a separate entity from him, and his mind is as clear and cool, or as fever-clear, as it ever was.

Lukas closes his eyes. The corner of his jaw moves, flexes, releases.

Not an excuse. Not an excuse. An explanation. He clings to that, follows that thought out of the anger the way a surfer in a stormy ocean follows his surfboard's leash back to the light and the air. His hand comes up to shade his eyes again, to pinch at the bridge of his nose, open over the width of his brow.

And drop.

"Have you..." he doesn't know how to ask this; he doesn't even know what he might do if the answer is yes. If the answer is no, "Was that the only time you were with someone else?" He thinks for a moment, thinks of the week they spent apart, thinks of the women he fucked, thinks of the way she looked at 550, lazy, gorgeous, a slut, and he adds, "While we were together."

[Danicka Musil] This time there's no chance for her to do anything but flinch. She can't try not to; at this point trying would be too tiring. So Danicka flinches away from the lash of his voice even as the tone of it and the very words make her go pale and furious in her own right. She looks down, looks away, looks at the carpet beside the armchair instead of looking at the man in it. The anger is no longer in him but she is numbed almost instantly by it, as though her skin ceases to feel because it cannot tolerate the cold.

She doesn't look up. "We weren't together then."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "I said I don't want -- "

He snaps his mouth shut until he can get himself back under control. His anger spikes again and again out of his control, like a heart hammering out of rhythm.

" 'I will be as loyal as you are.' That's what you said. I didn't make you say that. I didn't expect it and I didn't believe it. You said it. ...Christ. Why the fuck am I surprised? This was right after you lied to me about Martin. What the fuck else? Huh? Was it or wasn't it the only fucking time, Danička?"

It's not a pulse anymore. It's a steady onslaught; fury.

[Danicka Musil] "I'm leaving."

It's that simple, and that sudden. She reaches for her purse; the necklace can stay. She's shaking, and she's turning white under her tan, and she's getting up now, off the bed and towards the door.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] She can hear him suck a breath the instant before he bellows at her, "It's a fucking yes or no question, Danička!"

[Danicka Musil] She doesn't respond, and she doesn't look back. She would be running if she had no control left. As it is, she has just enough to remember how to use the handle on the door to let herself out into the hallway.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Danicka doesn't make it out into the hall. She reaches for the handle of the door and Lukas explodes out of the armchair. She pulls the door open and he's across the room faster than she can see, faster than she can think, and his hand comes down on the door and he slams it shut.

Rage lingers in the air like ozone in the aftermath of a lightning strike. "Ptal jsem se tě kurva otázku." When he turns to her his eyes are an animal's, all pupil. "Ano nebo ne."

[Danicka Musil] She screams.

Well: half a shriek escapes her, yanked back as surely as the door slams, cutting off her own exit. Danicka closes her eyes and trembles, pressing her lips together to stop that half-voice cry of terror from becoming anything more. She isn't crying, but she's shaking both from fear and from the effort of trying to stop shaking. He has no idea what he's doing.

Or he doesn't care. And that's worse. She thinks to herself: he should know.

She shakes her head. "Nemůžu. Prosím, Lukáš, nemůžu. Prosím, přestaň. Miluji tě, a jen vám, prosím, přestaň."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas knows exactly what he's doing. He knows, and it's not that he doesn't care; it's that he can't stop and --

Nemůžu, he thinks; he doesn't know if his mind is simply echoing her, grasping something of hers that he can hold, that he can make his own, and repeating it back to himself. Nemůžu, nemůžu, nemůžu.

Nemůžu tento udělat do ní.

Truth: he can't even begin to fathom what he might do if the answer was no. No, that wasn't the only time. No, he's not the only one, even if she says he is, because she's a goddamn liar, and maybe she's lying to him right now because she's afraid, she's terrified for her life, and god knows Danicka Musil will go to all lengths to survive. No, she's no more loyal to him than any cat in heat, than any slut, any whore, any harlot.

Truth: he doesn't know if he would care at all.

The first time he went to bed with her, it all hinged on that one line, all of it: I will be as loyal as you are. That was the lynchpin, the crux, the fulcrum on which all his lust, all his want, all his frustration, all the events of the past two weeks had balanced. The second time was after two lengthy discussions of terms and conditions, of faith and fidelity, of what they could promise one another.

The first time he went to bed with her after their week apart, he hadn't asked for anything at all. He was ready to give over everything, anything, and all she asked for was --

him.

And all he wants is --

her.

"Promiňte." Is that the best he can do? Every time he crosses the line, this one or that; promiňte. His hand leaves the door, slides off and claps softly to his side. He looks at her for a moment, can't bear to look at her longer because of what he did to her, and because of what she did, and because of what she won't tell him, and because he doesn't care, he doesn't care, it doesn't matter, he just wants to know the truth.

Truth: he doesn't know if the damage he caused tonight is repairable.

"Promiňte." He walks away from her, back into the room; he doesn't turn. "Je mi to líto. Ty by měly jít. Jen jít."

[Danicka Musil] He has never been this afraid in his life. She can't imagine him being this scared, because it's not the fear of imminent death, or unavoidable pain. It's not the fact that he could hurt her, or kill her. It's the fact that she can't fight back. She can't make him stop without begging, without letting him see how weak she is. She can't do anything but try to stop shaking. She can't do anything but shake. She can't do anything but plead for him to stop, knowing that's just as likely to make him hurt her.

She can't be anything but weak.

Helpless.

And Lukas can't do this to her, but he does. Knowing that her brother used to do Gaia knows what to her, knowing that her mother abused her father and possibly her, knowing that she should be covered in scars and more frightened of life than she seems to be, he does it. Knowing less than he could, because she hasn't gotten around to telling him about the patriarch of the Sokolovs or her own father or any of the goddamn details... or because she can't bear to tell him because she'll ruin him, or this... or because she knows that if she tells him more than he wants to hear, this will be the result.

He can't do this to her. But he does.

When he takes his hand off the door a rush of air leaves her and she stares at it like she can barely see it, like she can't even hear him. She doesn't move. She just shakes, her eyes now wide and unblinking. He says he's sorry. He moves away. And before he gets to ty by she has wrenched the door back open, and she runs. Before he changes his mind. Before her heart beats out of her chest.

When the clerk in the lobby sees her rush from elevator to door, walking quickly but with apparent calm, seeing wild panic in her eyes even though Danicka has gotten enough of her composure back not to run across the marble floor...

When the clerk sees the woman that came in with that man looking like she just saw her life flash before her eyes...

When the clerk sees Danicka leave, she's not surprised.