the failure of self preservation.

[Danicka] And then, Liadan's phone rings. Or vibrates. Or chimes. Whatever.

[Marcus Schwarzkopf] *He takes a few bites of his food and then takes a sip of beer before answering.* "Or were you in fact.

First not a complete stranger since we talked for a whole day, and I got to know you very well in the ride up there. I at least knew your name, what you did for a living, what you'd done with your life, and many other things. So you weren't a stranger. You were Lee and I was Marcus.

Second you are amazing.

And finally why would I treat you any different then I should right now? You said what you needed to say, you said what you felt. You were angry, you disagreed with me. That's okay. Maybe I am blind, then again maybe you are being much too hard on yourself. Maybe you really are as wonderful a person as I see that you are."

*He takes a bite of his sandwich.*

[Wyrmbreaker] (*makes it work*)

A beat later, the Gauntlet tears open again. In materializes Lukas, unzipping his jacket as he crosses the threshold between worlds. It's a cool night, wet, the heat breaking with the rain. The shoulders of his jacket, which is leather and off-white, are dusted with raindrops.

"No, look," they're apparently in the middle of a heated debate, "you can't expect me to defect to the Sox just because I spent two years in Boston. I grew up in the Bronx. We bleed Yankee blue."

He strips the jacket off his shoulders, tosses it onto the sectional. Lukas tosses himself down on the sectional a moment later, kicking his shoes off and swinging his legs up onto the cushions to stretch out full-length.

"Anyway, seriously. What do you think of Marcus and Wahya? I asked Marcus to run with us as a trial thing for a few weeks, and I'm thinking of extending the same offer to Wahya."

[Liadan] Before she can respond to Marcus the theme to Doctor Who blares from underneath Marcus' chair. A few long strides, and Lee is yanking her bag out from under the chair and digging for her phone. She looks at who's calling and her head tilts to the side.

“Hello?”

[Sampson] Floop! From furry to homid, like that. He's in running shorts and a teeshirt, both with the Nike label, both in dark colors to match his dark skin.
"I don't care! Yankees suck. Ovah! and Ovah! You were there long enough! Yankees are weak! Marcus I hear good things of. Wahya.. I think this is!
A good thing. We coudl use the influence! of the wilder side of werewolves! Besides, with Wahya, we are closer to having a full set! Of Tribes in our pack. I always wanted that! We shall be like! PokeTalons!"
He did ask.
HE DID.
Sampson lolls on the floor, disdaining couch cusions in favor of taking up as MUCH space as he can with overlong legs.

[Ant] *Climbs up side of beer*

[Liadan] Lee takes a few steps away from Marcus, turns away to continue the conversation with the person on the other end. "I'm at the Brotherhood. What'd you have in mind?"

[Gina McClaren] *She emerges from the room Marcus and she share, streeetching. Nothing like a catnap to put you in the right state of mind for a leisurely evening. She bounces towards the common's room, jingling announcing her presence long before she's in the room, charms tinkling. She yawns and stops in the commons.*

[Marcus Schwarzkopf] *Marcus looks on the side of his beer, and crushes the Ant with his thumb squashing it, ending its puny existence, oh so brief, so short... But alas it has died and should return to the ether from wence it came.

He rubs the dead Ant body off his thumb onto a napkin before taking a bite of his sandwich and taking a sip of his beer trying not to eavesdrop on Lee's phone call.*

[Liadan] "Because I was hungry." Duh. "Seriously, what did you have in mind? This place is, uh," she glances over her shoulder at Marcus, turns away again. "Well, I just came to eat and maybe see if a friend was around. I totally wouldn't mind being anywhere else right now."

[Wyrmbreaker] "Fuck you," Lukas spits with surprising vitriol. "'04 was a fucking fluke. At least they aren't named after an article of clothing.

"And Marcus is a honorable guy. Not as wise as he'd like to be, but then he's, what, 18? Besides, he's humble. That means he's willing to learn, which is always a good thing." They're probably both thinking of a certain tribesmate of Marcus's now. "As for Wahya -- he's shown himself a capable and selfless Theurge, more concerned for the group than his own personal glory. But the other day his old Alpha and tribesmate came all the way to the Brotherhood to smear his name. Apparently he left that pack without giving so much as a heads-up."

Lukas leaves it at that, open-ended, waiting for the Ragabash to comment.

[Marcus Schwarzkopf] *And with that Marcus picks up his sandwich plate, and beer bottles. He pushes in his chair with his leg, and then heads out of the kitchen up the stairwell toward the common room. His booted footsteps announcing his arrival before he gets to the second floor.*

[Liadan] Lee hears Marcus march up the stairs but doesn't turn to watch. Her eyes fall close for a moment and she sighs. “I'd prefer the Mile, but I need to change first.” She plucks at the hem of her blue tee. “And that would be awesome if you could come get me.”

[Sampson] "Well, it's just baseball. A game for lazy people who want to pretend they aren't playing GOLF. If it was something TRULY athletic, now, maybe it woudl keep my attention."
Jab jab jab.

"Humility in a packmate woudl be a nice change. We don't have even one humble packmate not one at all. Nor have we in some time! Someone should take that part over.
I certainly don't want it.
I am faster than all of you. Toge-- What??"
He sits up straight and stares at his alpha. "They said what about him? Why? I have seen! His name on that totempole many times! He is skilled! He is gaining renown!"

[Gina McClaren] *Ah, the men were talking about baseball, she gives a grin and pipes up.* Allo gents, mind effen I cop a squat an' do me puzzles? *She's all pleasant smile, and lovely voice, waving her puzzle book at Sampson and WyrmBreaker, before she flops down in a chair near the stairs, gypsy skirt swishing, charms rattling.*

[Liadan] Lee laughs. “You're awesome.” She describes a few articles of clothing. Green Chinese halter, black skirt, strappy heels. No one but the Brotherhood staff is left to hear about it. No one else sees Lee end the call, sling her bag over her shoulder, and head outside.

[Liadan] [thanks for the RP guys!]

[Liadan] [har har, scratch that]

[Wyrmbreaker] "The same could be said for Sam," Lukas says wryly. "Skilled."

He lifts his head. Gina. Who's that? A moment's puzzlement, and then he takes a hand from behind his head to raise it in a small wave. "Hey. Go ahead."

Back to the topic at hand, lacing his hands behind his head again, "But skill doesn't make up for lack of loyalty. Granted, Wahya did seem to recognize he should've at least formally said his goodbyes to the totem and the alpha, but ... well; again. Sam was awfully good at apologies too.

"On the other hand, Sam was never so selfless as I've seen Wahya."

[Marcus Schwarzkopf] *Marcus comes up into the common room and nods.* "Hello everyone." *He looks over at Lukas.* "If you are discussing private business I can eat somewhere else. To give you both privacy." *He is carrying a partially eaten sandwich on a plate, and two bottles of Coors, one opened, and one still closed.*

[Wyrmbreaker] "No," Lukas waves Marcus over to the short arm of the sectional, past where Lukas is sprawled. "Actually it's good that you're here. We're discussing Wahya. What'd you hear from his Alpha the other night, anyway?"

[Sampson] "I think you have answered my questions well enough. Invite them, then. Let them run with us, fly with us and see if they can handle the ban. See first hand of their honor!"
Sniff.
Sniff.
Sampson's nose works the air like a good ragabash, and so does his spirit, in a way. Gina enters the room and fills his senses. "Squatting is better done in the restrooms! But if you must, I do not think I would deny you the floor, my tribeswoman."
He stands, to his toweringly um not towering height. Oh, he's tall enough, and being mostly leg (and ears!) probably looks taller than he is, but its nothing to touch the Fenrir, really.

His accent is hell not Chicagoan; the man is from Kenya and sounds it, his English learned all the hell over. "I am! Sampson Musembi! Ragabash of the Silent Striders! Cliath Beta of the Unbroken Circle! Father of many children! Husband to many wonderful wives! Elder of my auspice in Chicago! Asshole often!
And who would you be?"

[Wyrmbreaker] Lukas adds quietly at the end of Sampson's introduction: "And he who speaks as though he always has the capslock on."

[Adam Swift-Arrow] *The Uktena walked though the shadows of the night. Slipping from one to the next as if they reached out to embrace a sibling. He was approaching the brotherhood. Glancing up though the cool night air he ducked down an allley a few doors down from the Brotherhood itself.

Tonight he was dressed in hiking boots. Jeans, a button up shirt and his normal sedate black leather jacket. Hair was dark, as were his eyes. Honey bronzed skin told his ethnictype, and there was a faint sniff of pure blood around him, if you knew to look for such things.*

[Gina McClaren] *She crinkles her nose in a silly expression of thanks to Lukas, shaking out her shoulders and settling into the chair, dragging her feet up under her. When Marcus arrives Gina eyeballs his sandwich and singsongs.* Marcus loves.. there any pickles on tha? Tha I might steal? *Sampson's joke gets a laugh, such a pleasant sound, and she winks.* Well hello Sampson Musembi, tha very busy arsehole. I'm Gina McClaren, kin o' tha striders. Eater o pickles what dinnae belong tae her.. Hopefully. *Its all teasing, even the pleading look to the Fenris.*

[Marcus Schwarzkopf] *Marcus sets his food down for the moment on the table in front of the couch.* "Unfortunately I lost my temper speaking to him. I do not do so well when someone questions my integrity before I have had a chance to even give... my thoughts on the matter. Katherine would be more objective I think on it, since I will no doubt be biased in favor Wahya."

*He offers the unopened bottle of Coors to Lukas.* "But I will speak on it if you wish, and try to remain as objective as I possibly can."

*He smiles at Gina.* "No Gina. Please take the other half I haven't eaten. Feel free."

[Liadan] Líadan is waiting outside of the Brotherhood, leaning against the wall beside the front entrance. She looks unconcerned about the possible risk of a lone woman waiting around this particular neighborhood after dark. Her eyes scan the street, looking for a car that might possibly belong to her roommate.

[Adam Swift-Arrow] *Slipping down the back alley's he paused in the shadow and made sure the place was clear, before moving on up to and into the back door of the brotherhood. Pausing there the young man nodded to the kitchen staff, and manuvering past them with nigh on supernatural grace, he slid by and towards the stairs.

A gentle nod is given to any kitchen kin he passes, then he's ascending on quiet feet. Not that he's trying to sneak. Just that with the grace his totem blesses her children and his natural stealth, it's quiet more or less by default.

At the top of the stairs he paused. Looking around the common room for Marrick. Seeing the others there he nodded to them. Soft voice coming forth, Adam's normal mode of speach* Good evening, all.

Anyone seen Marrick?

[Wyrmbreaker] "I wouldn't ask if I didn't want to hear it," Lukas replies. "Anyway, Kate's biased in her own ways. Everyone is." He reaches up and takes the bottle of beer, planting the butt against his breastbone as he twists the cap off and tosses it onto the coffee table.

Sprawled and relaxed as they are -- were, in the case of Sampson -- both the members of the Unbroken Circle are freshly back from ... a run, a hunt, a flight, something. Lukas's jacket is draped over the back of the sectional; the cuffs of his jeans are dark with moisture wicked up from the ground, turning the navy denim almost black. His shirt is a pale, crisp blue, like his eyes, and his hair is wind-tousled. He smells like the night.

[Danicka] Kingsbury Plaza is actually not that far from the Brotherhood of Thieves, but in terms of neighborhood the two places are like different planets. On Kingsbury Street, the slate blue Infiniti doesn't look too out of place. Nearer to the docks, it's not a car you want to leave in the parking lot for very long. Then again, the Brotherhood of Thieves is like the eye of a storm. Here, the violence you have to worry about isn't from vandals or gangs or drunks. The violence you really have to be concerned with usually takes place on the second floor.

That's where the bloodstains can be found, lurking where steam cleaners and mops and bleach could not get them out.

She parks and gets out, hitting a button on her key fob as she walks towards the door, where her roommate is waiting. Danicka's hair is down and straightened. In one hand is a cloth grocery bag, the ones Danicka uses to go to the supermarket. The woman herself is in tight, dark jeans and a 'shirt' that looks like an electric blue tube top from the front and is actually fastened around her torso with a series of thin ties across her back.

When close enough, she drops the grocery bag from her shoulder and tosses it towards Lee. "I grabbed some of your makeup and threw it in there. Hope you don't mind me messing around in your bathroom. Why are you waiting outside?" she asks, breezing past the redhead to go inside.

[Sampson] "Ahh yes indeed. You smell of the winds of freedom and open roads, Ms Gina! Who may I ask is your protector in Chicago? For these days are growing long and dark, and every other passing is a crossroads in this city. With all the danger that implies!"

He watches her carefully for her answer, and COULD leer ,though perhaps his wives have trained him well for despite her well curved bottom and mountainous bosoms, he does not drool, and his tongue stays well in place!

[Gina McClaren] *She unfurls with a musical tinkle of anklets and bangles, padding barefoot to the sandwich and swooping down on it to sniff it, her hand holding her hair back as she does so. She inspects the ingredients and shrugs, taking the plate with an appreciative smile to Marcus. When she notes Adam he gets a wiggle of fingers in hello, and an appraising look. She turns to Sampson as she's addressed.* I travel me own path fer now. Sampson o' many wives. *A cheeky wink, and a tentative bite of the sandwich.*

[Wyrmbreaker] "Probably in her room," Lukas replies to Adam. "Room ten. Turn right in the hall, right again, and straight down to the end."

[Liadan] “Just, ah, wanted to steer clear of the furballs.” Which is more or less the truth of it. Lee catches the bag and follows her roommate inside. There's a moment's hesitation as she considers changing in one of the bathrooms in the dining area, but the lighting in there isn't as good as the bathroom upstairs. She sighs and heads for the kitchen, up the stairs to the second floor and into a room full of people. The Fianna kinswoman offers a polite smile for the assembled before disappearing down the hall and heading for the bathroom.

[Marcus Schwarzkopf] *Marcus looks at Adam and nods, and then looks back to Lukas.* "Well I believe that Adam believes what he is saying is true. I find it is very troubling when a pack member leaves suddenly like that without explanation. And although they were not in war at the time Wahya left they were planning an operation that hinged on his continued involvement.

However I have a hard time believing all of what Adam says simply because I have fought beside Wahya and from what I have seen with my own two eyes he does not sound like the packmate Adam spoke about.

Still I cannot say for sure either way. Perhaps it is different with lupus, perhaps Wahya is trying to learn how to adapt to human customs and simply misunderstood, and perhaps there is something more to this that both sides are not telling.

Still from what I can tell Wahya did not violate the Litany in the letter of the law, and hurt feelings aside there is nothing more to say on it unless Adam wishes to take it up with the Master of Challenges for a Challenge of Grievance."

[Marrick Fisher] She said she was going to move out tonight, but that involved trying to move her stuff out. Taking pictures, all two of them, off the walls and packing up her things. In a matter of minutes, save for her scent, it would be like Marrick Fisher had never been at the Brotherhood of Thieves, much less lived there for about a month. She was used to this; she had a couple years of practice moving back and forth.

Now, at leaast, she had territory. She had a place to call her own, and now? Well, she even had a bathroom of her own. She didn't want to admit that she would miss Sinclair singing when she caught it. Or that skinny guy who smelled like speed and... nothing. The skinny guy didn't smell like anything, actually, and Marrick had only seen the back of Sampson's head twice, but she would miss the strider. She would miss yelling at people in the hallway.

She would be out of the brotherhood before the full moon was up. She wouldn't be around to see Katherine Bellamonte live up to her end of the bargain. To see if points were made and lessons learned.

It didn't matter, though, because Marrick was getting her own room and a place that was hers. And, on some fundamental level, it pleased the Fury immensely.

She slipped through the back door, but followed the sound of voices. wherever those may be.

[Sampson] "Good. You also have my protection, Miss Gina, while you walk this path of yours, while your feet cross our territory, this City. I do not think! We have another Strider in town.
My wives and I go running, save the one who is very very pregnant now and must only walk, in the mornings! You are welcome to join us, or to walk with Chepchumbi, or not, as you wish!"
His eye bug out a little as she moves, as bells chime around her and all is a dance.
For no one dances like a Silent Strider woman! He will NOT look!
He is a STRONG GAROU!

[Danicka] "Then it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to come to the Brotherhood," Danicka tells her mildly as they cross the dining room floor, weaving through tables.

Through the kitchen door. Danicka, it seems, is not going to be waiting outside for Liadan while she changes and makes herself up. She heads upstairs just behind Lee, her heels tapping softly on the steps. She glances around, and seeing no sign of a certain Silver Fang, she gives a nod to Liadan: "I'll be right out here when you're ready to go," and walks over to the sectional.

She topples onto a cushion beside Lukas, crossing her legs demurely at the ankle and leaning back, looking at the assembled curiously.

[Adam Swift-Arrow] *Adam looked to Lucas and nodded* Thank you, Lucas. *He'd been about to go when... well they started talking about him. Pausing he turned to listen. A brow raised and his head tilted.

He moved out of the way of the stairs. Blinked slowly and listened. Then here came Marrick, the person he'd come looking for. A hand raised and he slowly looked away from Marcus and Lucas and Sampson on the floor and the short lady he hadn't had the pleasure to meet yet.

His soft voice came out* Marrick.... if you had a moment?

*Still his attention was drawn back to the others. Then back to Marrick*

[Jesse Goodkind] Jesse paused outside of the restaurant, briefly looking down the street and then back to the entrance. It looked closed...the streets mostly vacant by this time in the evening. But he had seen a few markings, indications that he was close to 'familiar' territory. He frowned a bit, squatting for a moment as he considered this small dilemma. He was given some brief idea of where to go....but well...he was here at ungodly hours. He had been distracted, loss sense of time, mulling around in his own thoughts. He paused a bit, cocking his head...he somehow doubted that trying to come through the Shadow would be a wise idea. It was also an area he avoided at times...not feeling quite as gifted with dealing with the spirits as others.

He bit his lip, thinking that it was unlikely that he could knock 'Shave and a Haircut' and someone would come to the front door. He glanced towards the alley, finally moving in that direction....that might be the better approach. Granted, a back door was more suspicious to a cop or the like. But if this was the sort of building that didn't want the involvement of too many two-legs, he was sure that cops were generally dissuaded from the area somehow.

As he comes up to the backdoor....it swings open suddenly, catching the lad square in the nose as he stumbles back...hands going to cover the sudden sting and throbbing pain of getting walloped by a swiveling doorway in the alley.

[Gina McClaren] Thank ye peaches. *She says to Sampson, tossing herself on a couch nearby instead of her lonely ole chair. Puzzles forgotten. This was just far more entertaining. A bit of sandwich bounces into her cleavage and is retrieved. And popped into her mouth. Five second rule right? Liadan gets a grin from the exotic woman on the couch, as does Danicka. Finger wiggle wave.*

[Danicka] Her eyes settle on Gina for a moment as she plucks food from her cleavage and eats it. Danicka blinks, tilts her head, and smiles quirkily. It flickers across her expression then fades, and in response to the finger-waggle she gives Gina a wink.

[Marrick Fisher] She looked at Adam for a moment, and while she looked nice, there was always that edge to her. There would always be that edge to her, and admittedly one could only assume that as Marrick grew older, if Marrick grew older, her rage would only get worse. Would only become more tangible and oppressive. She was eighteen years old.

The Fury nodded to the stairs. "C'mon," she said.

and it was off and up the stairs with her. She gave brief acknowledgment to those year her, but her posture, her speech, her manners were not those of an eighteen year old girl. Someone needed to speak with her, and she assumed it was for professional reasons. She reacted accordingly.

"Whassup?"

[Sampson] OK. That makes his eyes bulge. Again.
"Would you like a f-- fork? Miss Gina? Or something! With which to wipe your m-- chest?" His tone is polite.
His reality--
Agony.

[Jesse Goodkind] (...delete last bit about getting hit by the backdoor...)

Jesse paused outside of the backdoor before he finally brought his knuckles against it and gave it a hard rap...two bits, going with his earlier 'Shave and a Haircut' theme in his head.

His eyes glanced back down the alley not seeing anyone before his attention turned back to the door, waiting it would seem.

[Wyrmbreaker] (sorry this took so long! this should take place before Adam leaves the room)

Though Lukas is horizontal, his eyes remain steady and level on Marcus while he speaks. When he finishes, the Ahroun turns to face the ceiling again, hands laced behind his head while he thinks.

When he speaks, he sits up to do it. First, to Adam, "Thanks for your candor with my packmates, Nightcrawler. Your warning was appreciated. I hope there'll be no bad blood between our packs in the future."

Then, to Marcus -- and to Sampson, if the Strider was still listening -- "We'll go ahead and try Wahya out. Until the new moon, I think. If he proves himself ..."

There's a beat of pause. His eyes flicker past Marcus; he glances at Danicka for a moment.

"... we'll accept him. If not, we won't." He finishes his sentence as though he'd never hitched. "We'll talk about this again around the new moon." And he leans back, knocking his beer back, avoiding a spill expertly when Danicka drops down beside him.

"Was that Lee?" he asks Danicka. "Where are you guys going?"

[Gina McClaren] *She looks down, then up, and laughs, wiping the bit of whatever sauce it was off a breast and shrugging before wiping it on the bread and licking the rest off her finger.* Jes' sauce loves. An' who eats a san'wich wi' a fork? *That infuriatingly pleasant laugh again, looking at Sampson like he's full of silliness. Danicka gets a grin and a shrug. Silly Men. A pickle is popped into her mouth.*

[Marcus Schwarzkopf] *Marcus nods to Lukas and then picks up the other half of his sandwich, or what is left of it taking a bite out of it. He sips his beer looking over at Gina for a moment.*

[Adam Swift-Arrow] (( assuming Adam waved when she got to the top of the stairs))

*Adam looked to her and stepped a bit to the side.* Yes, About a week or so ago we spoke on those Dreams brought up at the Moot, you'd asked for us to ask around and see if any other garou or in my case, kin had been having the dreams. If so what kind.

I've asked around the garou and kin of my pack and those related to us. *A slight shake of his head as his soft voice went on. Not a whisper, Adam was just normally soft spoken. you could hear him just fine*

None of my current pack mates had the dreams you spoke of. Though a few have upsetting dreams. Nothing like those we spoke about. Nor have any of the kin that we know and associate with.

So far we've come up with nothing at this point. Doesn't mean there's not more out there. But we just haven't found any yet. I've instructed my pack mates and our kin to ask around to other garou and kin that THEY know. Extending out the web of information gathering.

*Looking over to Lucas when he spoke. Adam bowed his head* It is a hope we share, Wyrmbringer. I too, hope that there will be no bad blood.

*A beat and then he went on* May Wahya find a better fit with your people, than he did ours, and may gaia benifit from two stronger packs. Working together in the war.

*Another bow of his head to the Shadow lord that, so far he'd only seen Honorable actions from. A rarity, but a refreshing one*

[Wyrmbreaker] he meant WyrmBREAKER, right?
to Adam Swift-Arrow

[Wyrmbreaker] (hey man, just assume some NPC answers the door!)
to Jesse Goodkind

[Sampson] The woman is briefly (What color briefs Would she have?) forgotten (Sorta). Sampson's dark dark eyes stare into Adam as he speaks, standing to go move to Lukas's other side, opposite the suddenly too-skinny Danicka.

[Danicka] "That was Lee," she informs the Ahroun, turning her head after winking at Gina to look at him. "And we were going to head out for some drinks. She told me she was here, so I came to pick her up. Brought her some things so we didn't have to go back to the apartment."

Because she keeps eye contact with him while she's talking, she doesn't notice Gina's grin and shrug. She does, however, notice when Adam says Wyrmbringer. Her head snaps around to look at him, but almost instantly after getting him in her sights she drops her eyes from his eyeline to his chin. Almost instantly, she draws back into herself, turning more slowly back around to look at Lukas once more.

[Adam Swift-Arrow] (( sorry Wyrmbreaker. lol it's 230 am on this side of the country!))

[Danicka] [You know, I think her head would still snap around. *does not delete that part of post*]

[Adam Swift-Arrow] sorry. wasn't trying to work in a dig. it's just late. ))

[Wyrmbreaker] ('s all good, i figured it was a typo.)

[Liadan] Once in the bathroom, Lee doesn't bother changing in one of the bathroom stalls, regardless of the fact that anyone might enter while she's changing, man or woman. The bag with her clothing and make-up is set on the floor and she digs through it, seeing what else Danicka was thoughtful enough to add that Lee forgot.

She peels off the t-shirt and jeans, replaces her bra with a strapless one. Then she pulls on the green halter with the white flowers and the obviously Chinese collar. It's low enough in the back that the tattoo on her right shoulder blade is clearly visible. Next is the skirt, a knee length black number that hugs her hips with a slit the goes halfway up her left thigh, offering some room for movement.

Her make-up she keeps simple, just a little shadow, a touch of liner, a bit of mascara and a touch of blush. Her lipstick is light and subdued. There's no saving the damage done to her hair by letting it dry in a clip, so it's returned to said clip, long strands left loose to frame her face. Finally she puts on the strappy heels raise her to a height around 6'1”. She checks herself out one last time, mouth quirking to the side before opening to let loose a resigned sigh. There was nothing she could think to do to make herself look less plain. Less like the geek girl who cleaned up nice.

Her heels clack on the tiled floor of the bathroom, then stop when she reaches carpet. Lee hesitates in the doorway leading back out into the common room, looking somewhat...awkward. A deep breath, and she steps out and stops beside the sectional. Everyone seems to be involved in some sort of Deep Discussion. Lee feels horribly out of place.

To Danicka, “Ready?”

[Jesse Goodkind] Jesse is let in with an odd look...he has to explain that a 'relative' told him to come here and even then it feels like they might call the boys in blue just cause he could be a 'loony'. He thanks them, eventually walking from the back kitchen area to the actual restaurant part of the Brotherhood...looking around and more then a little looking lost as he navigates around.

[Marrick Fisher] "Good to know," she said. Stated. Matter of fact and straight to the point. Brows were knit and she was trying to think of something. Marrick was still thinking of those dreams from the moot. The one Hatchet mentioned and the one Silence did. She was coming up with nothing, no idea for defense except a strong mind and a stronger support net.

Because all the physical strength in the world meant nothing when you were asleep.

That, as far as she was concerned, was a fact.

"Keep an eye out and keep me informed if that changes. Don't think they're the disease, I think they're th' symptom."

[Marcus Schwarzkopf] *Marcus looks over at Lee and his eyes stay on her face. He's stunned, caught flat footed. He swallows a bit and his sandwich is in his hand just forgotten about for the moment. He can't but help to stare at Lee. He does however remember to finish chewing the bite he had in his mouth after about twenty seconds.*

[Adam Swift-Arrow] *Adam's dark eyes went back to Marrick* In that we're in agreement on. *He bowed his head respectfully to her* I'll let you know if any of mine or I come up with anything pertaining to the dreams. My theurge is off on a bit of a vision quest. Hopefully he'll return soon. Perhaps he'll find something.

[Gina McClaren] *Marcus gets a wink as he looks at her, but his eyes drift to Lee and Gina follows them. Oh. that was the girl. A soft look at Marcus. Poor guy. making an ass out of himself. She throws a pickle at the side of his face. SPLECK.*

[Wyrmbreaker] Before Lukas can answer Danicka, Adam speaks. Lukas looks to the other Alpha, nodding once in acknowledgment.

They return their eyes to one another, the Shadow Lord and his kin. The corner of his mouth tilts faintly. "It's my name," he says quietly; for a moment, a few seconds, his attention is perfectly hers. "Lukáš Wyrmbreaker."

Out. For drinks.

Then Liadan is back, and Lukas glances over at the movement at the corner of his eye. "You look lovely, Liadan," he says. It's a compliment, and he means it, but his politeness and Liadan's insecurity together might twist it into merely a courtesy in her mind, an empty gesture.

The next question includes Danicka as well, "Do the two of you want some company?"

[Adam Swift-Arrow] *Adam follows the guys eyes to Liadan. His own brows raising as he looked "up" to her. She was quite pretty. Most of the women around here were rpetty. Even the Ahrouns. It was slightly distracting. A lessor wolf would drool. Thankfully Adam didn't do that. his mate would kill him.*

[Wyrmbreaker] (um. delete the Out. For drinks. i think i meant to write something else but i can't remember what.)

[Danicka] Her head tilts for a moment as Lukas almost half-smiles and tells her that what she just heard was his name. She's been with him since February. She's never heard it before. She blinks once, thoughtful, but then there's a tapping on the floor and she glances up, seeing her roommate. She smiles, but it doesn't quite reach her eyes. Her thoughts are, at least for the moment, still lingering elsewhere. She and Lukas are not touching, though their arms are mere centimeters apart.

"You do look beautiful, Lee," she says fondly, echoing Lukas's statement. When he asks if they want company she glances at him, then lifts an eyebrow at Liadan in question.

[Marrick Fisher] She was about to head to her room, she really was. The Ahroun was more distracted, however, by Lee. Lee was so pretty With her hair done up and her skirt was nice and... and... The Fury tilted her head to the side, then let half of a smile come to her face. This was Lee. Liadan Whelan, who gave her a business card, offered her a modeling job, and knew what she was doing when it came to taking pictures and making it look good.

More importantly, Lidan Whelan owned her look. She just didn't know it yet.

Marrick, ever the eloquent speaker, chose to wave a little hi to make her presence known.

[Adam Swift-Arrow] *Clearing his throat he blinked and peeled his eyes off Liadan, and Marrick and pretty Danicka, and Gina and everyone.* Ok.. I'm... gonna go... Feelng very much less secure in my own physical appearance and go home to my beautiful mate before I develop a complex.

*His hand came up and he waved* Nice seeing everyone.

[Liadan] Everybody. Everybody. Was staring. At Lee. Even the people she didn't know, didn't recognize, whose names she couldn't remember from previous brief meetings.

Everyone was telling her she was pretty. Marcus was staring slack-jawed with a pickle stuck to the side of his face.

All she wants to do is run away and hide. Or at least go back into the bathroom, scrub her face, and change. Because they were all lying. Or just having her on. They were speechless with the sight of her audacity at thinking she could pull off looking like something she so obviously wasn't.

Lukas asks if she and Danicka would like company when they go out. All Lee wants is to leave. She shrugs a pale, faintly freckled shoulder.

[Gina McClaren] *Gina tilts her head at Adam's speech.* Och yer lovely darlin. nae complexes, ye hear? *A cheeky wink.*

[Adam Swift-Arrow] *His smile was gentle for the kind woman and he nodded to her before departing down the stairs* Thanks.

[Marcus Schwarzkopf] *Marcus blinked as the pickle hit his face. He grunted out a little low, but quick and harsh for being knocked back into reality, out of his little reverie. He tossed the little green mayo covered fucker on the plate and wiped off his cheek with the back of his other hand.

Looked back up at Lee, and then down to his sandwich. A little frown still on his face and suddenly he wasn't very hungry anymore so the little stub of the half hoogie was tossed unceremoniously back onto his plate. He picked up his beer, took a sip and made a face as it tasted bitter to him now. He set it back down on the table, and leaned back against the couch lost in a memory.*

[Jesse Goodkind] Jesse eventually stumbles past one doorway into the gathering area of the Brotherhood, coming to a pause when he sees a good number of folks there. He honestly hadn't expected to anyone to actually be up and about, let alone having meals, dressing up and fraternizing.

And with the charisma of a sponge, he lifts his arm in greeting.

"Uh...yo."

[Wyrmbreaker] (btw, if you're wondering about the floorplan:

http://www.chicagodusk.com/index.php?jove=systems&page=62

the big map is the second floor, and everyone's in the common room. the restaurant and kitchen are downstairs)
to Jesse Goodkind

[Curata] Navigating to the Brotherhood wasn’t a problem, especially when you had access to a good network of kinfolk that were capable of giving you proper directions. He had been filled in on everything he needed to know, especially how to get access to the Brotherhood’s back door.

It’s location near the bawn and the caern draws a raised eyebrow from the Fiann as he’d stared at the sign and made his way around. He slips inside, heading up the back stairs.

Curata’s long shadow casts along the wall, the heavy steps of his boots making noise, announcing his presence before he physically draws into line of sight. Black hair falls into his eyes, a brown bomber jacket drawn closed over. One hand resting on the strap of a duffle bag, while the other slides up the railing.

He casts a long look around, heat and rage and the essence of Stag peel off him with each long stride, more rage to be added to the already growing pile of Garou hanging out in the commons.

[Marrick Fisher] Stuff.

Right! Stuff.

The Fury went to go drag some of her things out of her room. She didn't say much; there was work to be done and beds to be made.

[Gina McClaren] *Oh christ. Brooding Marcus, right over there. Miss fixit takes one last bite of the sandwich, and sets it down wistfully. A woman's work was never done. Gina crawls towards him on the couch. Pickle not having had the effect she'd hoped.* Och.. Marcus Two ravens o tha Fenris.. *She plops down beside him, leaning against his shoulder, all softness and curve as she loks up at him, dark eyes mischeivious.* .. yer terrible at pickle tag. *she looks to Jesse and waves with a tinkle of bangles* Alloooo loves!

[Sampson] The Strider-- garou-- MALE-- stands and looks down at Gina.
Sorta.
Then jerks his eyes to his Alpha. He says nothing and a hell of a lot just then, before heading the hell out for a LONG ASS RUN.
LONG LONG TIME.

[Andrew] And a few minutes later, the world realizes there is an over abundance of pretty in the common room and as usual, balances the scales. Wandering out of the bathroom still damp from a shower is the hunchback of the Brotherhood. All scarred flesh and mangled face in loose cotton running shorts that are wet in places. He's still rubbing his head to flick microscopic drops of water from his bristly black hair. The fuck was the commotion about? And who'd been in there while he was showering? He nearly bumps into Lee, coming through the door behind her.

[Danicka] There is so much Rage in this room that normally, Danicka would be gathering her things -- few as they are -- and excusing herself. She does not. She sits beside Lukas, watching Liadan quietly with one curiously raised eyebrow. Though she notices Curata walk up, though she notices Sampson head out, though she notices the pickle on Marcus's young face and so many, many other things, her attention is for the most part centered on her redheaded roommate, who did not grow up her whole life surrounded by Rage.

Danicka did. It did not make Danicka strong. But the skittishness is missing tonight, for some reason. It's merely...tension.

She takes a breath after looking at Lee for that long moment, then turns to look at Lukas. "You, sir, are more than welcome to come with us, but you're the designated driver." Beat. "Obviously," she adds, so dry it could soak up the nearby lake.

Rising to her feet, she tosses her hair off her shoulders and smiles, her green eyes gleaming. She's engaging. She's 5'9" in these heels, her back is almost completely bared because that shirt is just barely hanging on by the strings that keep it attached to her body, and her breeding suggests fertility, suggests strength, suggests mystery. And for a moment, with that toss of her head, she pulls attention to herself, and then she turns that smile solely on Lukas. He's special, you see.

Her hand extends to him. "Let's go somewhere with neon booze."

[Marcus Schwarzkopf] *Marcus gives Gina a half smile he doesn't really feel. He pats her on the thigh near her knee.* "I know. I'm not all that good at pickle tag. Maybe I'll get better in time." *He turns to Lukas.* "Alpha it was good to speak with you. Until the next time." *He stands up and takes his plate and beer bottle.* "And to everyone else good night as well. Please excuse me." *He starts to head out of the common room heading to his own room.*

[Jesse Goodkind] His eyes swiveled over to Gina, as so far she's the only who greeted him back. He glanced to the others, before he walked over a bit, shifting a bit nervously. It had all the body language of a wary wolf with its tail low...a shame he couldn't really communicate that as well. He glanced over at Marcus briefly, then his eyes briefly notice the monstrosity staggering out of the bathroom....he has to visibly not stare before he looks over to Gina and the rest...hesitant.

"So...uh...this is the Brotherhood right....were I can well...uhmm...."

He looks frustrated, subtlety never having been his forte.

[Wyrmbreaker] Lukas snorts faintly as Sampson takes off at a run. Must suck having no control, he thinks. Must be a real drag to be ruled by your dick. Must --

Danicka gets up. She smells like summer rain, like wet earth, like oak and sycamore and brambles; like a new moon and the longest of days. Lukas's nostrils flare. It's not really her scent he picks up, but something more primal than that, more intrinsic to her, as deep as blood and bones.

He takes her hand with a huff of a laugh. The newcomers, the Fiann and the other, awkward fellow, are afford brief, curious glances, but soon enough his attention is back where it

(patří.)

"Mohu já pozvat ho?" he asks, getting up off the couch, pulling his jacket off the back of the sectional and shrugging into it. He glances at Marcus briefly.

[Liadan] From her position beside the sectional, Líadan glances over her shoulder and sees first Curata, whom she would know as Madoc if she really put her mind to, then Andrew standing in the doorway, obviously fresh from the showers. He could have seen her in nothing but her panties for all she knows, and for all she cares.

She doesn't look at Marcus when he passes her to go to his room. In these shoes he's not that much taller than her.

Instead she watches her roommate take the attention of the room. Lee would sag with relief if she could relax enough to actually sag.

Her mouth quirks in a tight lipped smile. “I like this idea,” she says of Danicka's desire for neon booze.”

[Wyrmbreaker] (i have other words besides "brief" and "glance" *headdesk*)

[Gina McClaren] *Gina cocks her head as Marcus flees, patting his hand and giving him a soft intimate smile before he gets up and disappears into his room. She looks around. Where the hell was sampson many wives? Suddenly Gone. Ah well, that was the way with striders. Curata gets a twiddle of fingers. Hot damn. A cheeky smile sent his way. She doesn't see Andrew yet, as he's blocked by Liaden. But she does pat the couch compellingly in an invitation for Jesse to sit.* Spit et oot darlin. Me name's Gina. What ye after?

[Curata] The cluster of rage even makes the rage-minded a bit cautious as he drew to a pause at the top of the stairs. His eyes slid around the room, a glance to those lounging on the couches. He fixes the duffle bag higher on his shoulders, fingers adjusting around the strap. He tucks his free hand into his coat pocket.

People were standing up and beginning to group off, he only knows one face in this entire place. His tall height allowed him to spy Liadan. This makes the Fianna do a double-take, surprised to see the shrinking violet here.

He doesn’t say anything to the kin, nor call out to her, he just watched the way her body language the scant minutes that he eyes her.

[Nessa] Nessa's scarlet sweater comes downstairs from the heights of the Brotherhood; cool air follows her. She's in the loosely crocheted sweater of course, and so is the white eyelet lace bikini under the sweater. One hand hold a... yes. Beach tote, and the other has an empty daquiri glass.

And, a given, there's a throwing knife in a sheath strapped to her right thigh with a strip of white leather.
This is one seriously pale Shadowlord woman.
The commons is a hell of a lot more crowded now than when she'd gone upstairs earlier. Hmm.

[Jesse Goodkind] "Uh...no...nothing..."

He eventually mumbles, though he does go to take a seat on the couch, glancing at her awkwardly before he looked to those there...eyes pausing on Liadan before he glanced at the man coming in behind him. But the eyes eventually moved back to Gina once more.

"I'm Jesse...Jesse Goodkind."

[Marcus Schwarzkopf] (Thanks for the scene. Have fun!)

[Andrew] His magnificently scarred face takes a peek around Lee. Followed partly by his bare - surprise! - also scarred chest. Tiny mini-scars looking like he'd been caught in a tornado that ate a glass factory. His eyes search the room briefly. Redhead. Flick. Taken. Flick. Lukas. Flick. Some guy. Flick. Gina. Oooh. They rest there a second. Then he makes to turn around. Nothing to see here... move along.

[Wyrmbreaker] (erase last line. replace with--)

"Of course I'll drive," Lukas says, getting up off the couch, pulling his jacket off the back of the sectional and shrugging into it. He murmurs a goodbye to Marcus, and then raises his eyebrows at Liadan. "You want shotgun?"

His keys jingle as he fishes them out of his pocket. On his way out, he nods to Gina and Andrew, the former of whom spoke to him, the latter of which he knows. The rest receive gestures of farewell only if they look his way.

For all his height and muscle mass, Lukas is lightfooted as he descends the stairs, quick and sure. At the bottom he turns, looking up to watch the women follow. At the kitchen door, he opens and holds the door. Of course.

[Danicka] There are two women, both smacking of purely bred bloodlines -- though of different flavors, different lands, different tribes -- standing in heels and dressed to go out. Liadan's legs are bared, Danicka's back. They look good. They smell good. For a few moments, at least, they own the fucking room. When Lukas rises to join them, she lifts her eyebrows. "Oh, I'm not leaving my car here. You can drive mine on the way back."

She drops her arm, since Lukas didn't take her offered hand, and turns her head over her shoulder to give those in the room a light wave of goodbye. She has no jacket -- or if she does, it's in her car. "Lee, you should grab one of the boys staring at you and make him come with us. Or the cute girl in the skirt," she tosses back, before descending into the stairwell to meet Lukas in the kitchen.

[Gina McClaren] Well Ello Jesse Goodkind. Better'n badkind. ..*She spots Andrew's retreating form and stands, hollering* Och! Andrew loves!

[Danicka] [Hahahahaha he totally took her hand. *kan reed*]

[Wyrmbreaker] (as if he wouldn't *scoff*)

[Nessa] Danicka and Liadan and Lukas slip away more or less at the same time as Nessa fully enters the common's room. Maybe there was a stairwell greeting, maybe not. The sensation of shadows and mysteries and secrets in the room lessens, likely, with the exodus, but its not all gone.
Might be a few secrets left.
Nessa has very long legs, powerful legs. Not a freckle on them, nothing to mar them save a well healed bullet scar on her left thigh. She waggles three fingertips at those gathered (for that hand has only three remaining), offers a murmured, "Privyet' for greeting, before starting across the floor towards the hallway of rooms.
One last pull at the glass to see if there is any of the sweet and alcoholic frozen drink in the very very bottom? Nope. Dry, dry.

[Danicka] [He might. He might not take it because there are people WATCHING. He doesn't want to seem WEAK. *gasp*]

[Liadan] Líadan's eyes lock onto her roommate, whether the blonde meets her gaze or not. It gives her a place to look that isn't a stranger's face looking at her in this ridiculous outfit. “Shotgun's fine.”

It's one thing to dress up and go out for a night on the town, trolling for thrills, picking up boys or girls. It's quite another to dress up and be stared at constantly. Lee realizes, as she starts to follow her roommate down the stairs, that when she goes out with these two she is going to stand out like a sore thumb. She has half a mind to beg off going out. She has more than half a mind to go out and have neon booze.

Her bag and Danicka's shopping bag are held together in her left hand, her right going to the rail as she descends. She stops two steps down and looks over her shoulder. She's almost away, almost out of range of the massive build up of rage, and she relaxes just a bit. “Any of you boys want to come along?”

[Marrick Fisher] All of Marrick Fisher's worldly possessions fit in a shoebox.

She pulled it out of a drawer on the night stand, placing the nike box on top of it and refusing to open it for the time being. In a way, she should have thought this to be odd. She should have thought that this was strange, that eighteen year old girls were supposed to have whole bedrooms full of stuff. That her walls were supposed to be littered with pictures and posters and shit about colleges or country music stars.

Truth be told, Marrick Fisher's living spaces have always been spartan. She didn't track mud in the house because she never came inside. Marrick never colored on the walls, never put so much as a tack hole in the sheet rock until she was sixteen. Then, she put her fist through it and had to cover it up with the vanity that she never used.

Her knuckles looked fine by morning.
Her mother said that she liked the new place she had put the mirror.

That vanity, however, had been the one thing that Marrick had claimed as hers. She had covered it in pictures, so that only half of the mirror had shown. Along the top and borders, she had shoved Polaroids and three-by-fives. Some were of her brother at graduation. His cap-and-gown, his dark hair, his obvious tan. Grandma had always said he looked like her father. True to form, Marrick's father had the same dark hair, graying in places, arm wrapped around his son's shoulders as though he were the proudest man on earth.

Second string line up for the University of Oklahoma. Playing for OU made you a god, made him Hercules, made him a living legend at school.

It ached to be Derek's sister.

Marrick Fisher also had other pictures that littered her vanity at home, but they were not of family. They were family, in a sense. They were family because of whatever kinship and sisterhood came with being a woman. Pictures of pudgy, red-haired toddlers trying to tear the camera out of the photographer's hand while letting out shrieking giggles. Of some little boy and girl- who were probably thirty by now, holding hands at some creek. Marrick knew the place; that part of Del City had been paved over once May third came through.

It was easier to think of it as progress instead of trying to forget the past. Instead of an attempt to control the land.

It was the parking lot for a Buffalo Wild Wings now. Even when she lived there, Marrick refused to eat it.

And all these pictures, all these visible reminders of home, of what is and was and never shall be and whatever shall be, were weeded through when Marrick left. She kept what was important in that nike shoebox. The most important of which were taped to her wall. She reached over, untaping one of the Polaroids and almost tenderly removing the duct tape. The little girl and the boy in the now-parking-lot-once-oasis, and her family at her brother's graduation.

Both went to go live in the box again.

after clothes were changed [Running shorts, tennis shoes, tee shirt] and her room was made presentable. The Fury reached into her shoebox, fishing something out again. This time, it was a can tab on a string. Well, on a black cord. Not the kind that was intended for fine jewelry. It was, instead, the kind of thing that was intended for kids at summer camp who were learning arts and crafts.

Can tab on a string.

Now, there was a can tab on a string around her neck. She took a moment to step back and look at herself in the mirror. She nodded, then went to take her shoebox.

The Fury walked out of her room, soon to be someone else's room, and shut the door behind her. No trace that Marrick had ever lived there, except her lingering scent. That, too, would fade in time.

[Wyrmbreaker] "Oh really." At the bottom of the stairs, Lukas smiles up, wry. His keys go back into his pocket, and he holds his hand out for hers.

When she hands them over, he holds them in his open palm, thumbing through them until he finds the one that unlocks an Infiniti. By then she's down at the bottom of the stairs, and Lee is still at the top, and --

He just looks at her for a moment, searchingly, a little questioningly.

[Wyrmbreaker]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 4, 6, 7, 7 (Success x 3 at target 6)

[Andrew] He turns back around. Meets Gina's gaze. Smiles a strange crooked smile. Full of fucked up facial expressions and his face snaps around to Redhead. Some random girl. He needed to get out. Gina had given him certain 'advice' along these lines. And he was freshly showered afterall. Showering is what humans did before they went places and interacted with each other. It was important to be clean. And he was, for the moment. And he grunts. "Where to?"

This, directed at Redhead.

[Jesse Goodkind] ...Jesse gave a weak smile....and while Gina was distracted with Andrew...he makes his escape....not accepting the invite, just giving a weak smile towards Lee, as if apologizing without words...before he's moving down the stairwell...past Lukas and Danicka....quick in movement, balanced motions of someone well trained to use his body.

...and padding for the nearest exit. He just didn't do well with crowds...at least not alone. And right now...he was alone. They weren't here...they were all gone...gone their separate ways. It was just him by himself...to say hi...to greet others....to make acquiantances and meetings and everything else in between...and tonight...he couldn't deal with that sort of pressure. Not without snapping...and not the good sort of mental break down snapping but the bad 'oh my god, what the hell did you do to my cousin, you fucker' sort of snaps.

[Danicka] [Where we're going we don't NEED roll labels...]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 5, 5, 6, 7, 9, 9, 10 (Success x 5 at target 6) Re-rolls: 1

[Liadan] A brow quirks at the scarred man. Then she's momentarily distracted as Jesse takes off down the stairs past her. She looks back at the man fresh from the showers.

“Out,” is the reply. “If you're dressed by the time I get to the car, you can come with.” And she turns and continues down the stairs, not at a run, but not at a leisurely pace, either.

[Gina McClaren] ...*she looks..and her nervous friend has disappeared. and now, everyone's leaving. What the hell? Mayonnaise breasts can't make her that disturbing. She stands with a tinkle of charms.* Loves? was et somethen I said?

[Jesse Goodkind] (Sorry to bail...just getting late for me.)

[Wyrmbreaker] (no worries man, thanks for the play!)

[Nessa] Nessa watches the stranger go by, and as the man says nothing to her, she offers nothing, merely walks towards the hall with the bathroom. People come and go in the Brotherhood like Chicago in small.
Tonight it is her turn.

[Gina McClaren] *She chuckles and shrugs. To hell with it. Introductions would happen in the car. She bounces down the stairs after the crowd.*

[Danicka] She does not hand them over. "I said on the way back," she tells him archly, with an amused smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. "My car," she adds possessively, if in jest.

In the kitchen alone with Lukas -- for a few moments, at least, while Liadan considers bringing along an impromptu date or three -- Danicka looks at him, aware that she's being read, aware of why. Jesse comes down the stairs and she glances at him, then steps forward and slides her hand into Lukas's, lacing her fingers through his for a moment. She does not stand on her tippy-toes to kiss his cheek in reassurance, but her hand tightens in his before she draws it back.

She isn't trying to hide how she feels, at least not when they're in the kitchen essentially alone together. Wary. Unsure if she's made the right choice. And yet twisted into the same knot, the exact same knot, that he founds himself tied into. "Chybíš mi," she says quietly, then adds -- as footsteps come down the stairs, signalling Lee's descent -- "Chybí mi to, co jsme měli na slunovrat."

Her hand leaves his. And she steps back.

[Curata] Any of you boys coming along…

It’s probably the only piece of conversation the Fianna’s bothered to pay attention to, up until the scarred one speaks and asks “Where to?” Liadan’s only reply is “Out.”

He is considering this long and hard, watching the kinswoman of his tribe exit down the stairs. Something ticks in his brain about their last conversation at the pub in the Cabrini. It wouldn’t take him long to be ready.

He runs a hand through his hair, shoving it back out of his eyes and produces to stalk after the kin that just went down the stairs.

[Marrick Fisher] (I'm out! thanks for the scenage folks!)

[Andrew] Out. Where the fuck was that? He grunts. Turns and gives Gina a little look. A quirk of a grin, again. It's familiar. It's leering. Just from the scar tissue. He swears. It's intimate.

And he vanishes back down the halls to his room. Right. The women were all dressed up. The dressiest things he had were... cargo pants. And a black t-shirt a size too small that hugs him in ways that would go over well in a club. If he weren't hideously disfigured. He could totally show up at a club that way. With ratty sneakers. Well, that'd be a harder sell. Arm candy goes a long way.

He re-emerges, tumbles down the stairs with well placed feet that keep him from smacking into the ground and ducks out the back door of the Brotherhood following Gina, Taken, and Redhead.

[Nessa] The room is nearly done.
She too, has very little to pack. Her trunk is already done, save the clothes to change into; this was the last to do before leaving. No imprint, and the rest will be ready for the next kin, as soon as the sheets are changed.
Nessa slips into her room, hers for hte next minutes at least. Changing will take little time at all.

[Wyrmbreaker] For a scant few seconds they're alone.

Her hand comes into his. They don't kiss; he doesn't move into her the way he did on the solstice, nuzzling against her cheek, her neck, her hair -- like an animal, like he was picking up her scent and making it his -- but they're alone, and they're together for a moment, and then the moment is passing and he has just enough time to nod.

Then Liadan is leading a pack down the stairs. If Lukas is impressed, his face doesn't show it. He just counts in his head, and then he says, "I better take my car too. You guys can ride with me." Gina is included with the 'guys'. A glance at Danicka and Lee, "Should I follow you?"

[Gina McClaren] *jingle jingle jingle, bounce bounce bounce. happy as can be. all the way down the stairs.*

[Danicka] A scant few seconds. Then Liadan comes downstairs. And Gina. And Curata. And Danicka turns around, eyebrows lifting on her forehead. "Jesus, Lee," she says, laughing openly. She doesn't seem displeased, but she is counting, too, trying to figure out logistics -- until Lukas does that himself. She glances at him, meets his eyes for a second, then nods, heading for the alleyway door. "If you lose me, I'm going where we met."

A beat. "The second time."

She glances at him over her shoulder, smirks gently -- her eyes do, in fact, twinkle -- and then goes out into the alley, into the parking lot, towards the Infiniti as Lukas leads his group to the M3.

[Liadan] Lee has no idea how many people decided to follow her down the stairs. She hears jingling behind her, and steps out of the way to make room for the one person she thinks trailed after her.

Lukas looks behind her, says You guys, and she turns. And her brows raise. Then she looks back at Danicka and shrugs.

“So I'm riding with you?”

[Danicka] "You are indeed, you hot bitch," Danicka says cheerfully, unlocking her car with the press of a button. She opens the driver's side door and slides in, waiting for Lee to sit in the passenger seat before she adds: "I think I'm going to try and lose my boyfriend in traffic."

[Danicka] [Switching to Mag Mile, folks!]

[Gina McClaren] *Gina follows Lukas to his M3, giving a twirl and a swirl of skirts at the prospect of dancing for fun.* Och aye! *She singsongs to Wyrmbreaker in that damndably lovely voice.* Thank ye fer takin me wi' ye loves. (magimile!)

[Wyrmbreaker] The groups are uneven. Two women, one with bare legs and one with a bare back, head toward the precision-engineered piece of japanese speed.

The rest of the flock -- Andrew, Curata, Gina and Lukas -- head toward the black BMW M3: subtler, older, mean-eyed. Lukas's keys come out after all, and he remote-unlocks the doors. When he sinks in he ignites the engine, then waits for the rest to enter before shutting his door and pulls out of his parking lot.

"No problem," he says to Gina, catching her eye in the rearview mirror and smiling.

Lukas has eyes as cold as ice. His smile is real, and it touches his eyes -- but they remain as they are, a blue as pale and fierce as diamonds.

--

On the way over, Lukas introduces himself: name and deedname, rank, auspice, all that. He makes a little smalltalk ... and then Danicka starts zipping through traffic, cutting across lanes, squeezing between drivers. The first two times, Lukas follows patiently, unmindfully.

The third time, he laughs suddenly. "Zkurvysyne," he says. It sounds like a curse. And then he stomps the clutch in, downshifts, and revs the engine after the disappearing Infiniti.

The rest of the drive is silent on his end, focused and swift, slicing through traffic, dashing across yellow lights turning red. Now and again he flashes a grin at himself, sheer white-toothed pleasure. It feels like a game. It feels like a hunt.

At one point, the G37x and the M3 are alone on a long stretch of straightaway. Lukas floors the accelerator, roars up shoulder to shoulder with the slate-blue coupe. His eyes are on the road. His eyes don't move from the road, but his car hovers inches from hers, pacing her mph for mph, and once, once, he glances sideways to look at the blonde across the distance.

Then they're coming up on a slower-moving vehicle. He guns ahead; she catches up; there's not enough room to pass. He falls behind, swerves around the other, and it's off to the races again.

[Danicka] [Dex + Wits + Drive: +1]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 3, 9 (Failure at target 6)
to Wyrmbreaker

[Danicka] [Dex + Wits + Drive: +1b]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 2, 2, 5, 5, 5, 7, 9 (Success x 2 at target 6)
to Wyrmbreaker

[Wyrmbreaker]
Dice Rolled:[ 9 d10 ] 1, 1, 3, 3, 5, 5, 6, 9, 10 (Success x 1 at target 6)
to Danicka

[Danicka] [+2]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 2, 4, 4, 8, 8, 9, 9 (Success x 4 at target 6)
to Wyrmbreaker

[Wyrmbreaker]
Dice Rolled:[ 9 d10 ] 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10 (Success x 6 at target 6)
to Danicka

[Danicka] [+3]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 3, 5, 6, 6, 8, 8, 10 (Success x 5 at target 6)
to Wyrmbreaker

[Wyrmbreaker] f
Dice Rolled:[ 9 d10 ] 1, 5, 5, 6, 8, 8, 8, 9, 9 (Success x 5 at target 6)
to Danicka

[Danicka] [+4]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 9, 10 (Success x 4 at target 6)
to Wyrmbreaker

[Wyrmbreaker]
Dice Rolled:[ 9 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 6, 6, 9, 10 (Success x 3 at target 6)
to Danicka

[Danicka] [+5]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, 10 (Success x 2 at target 6)
to Wyrmbreaker

[Wyrmbreaker]
Dice Rolled:[ 9 d10 ] 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 5, 5, 8 (Failure at target 6)
to Danicka

[Danicka] [+6]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 3, 5, 8, 9 (Success x 2 at target 6) [WP]
to Wyrmbreaker

[Wyrmbreaker]
Dice Rolled:[ 9 d10 ] 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 5, 8 (Failure at target 6)
to Danicka

[Danicka] [+7]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 2, 2, 2, 3, 4, 10, 10 (Success x 2 at target 6)
to Wyrmbreaker

[Wyrmbreaker]
Dice Rolled:[ 9 d10 ] 2, 3, 5, 5, 8, 8, 9, 9, 10 (Success x 5 at target 6)
to Danicka

[Danicka] [+6]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 3
to Wyrmbreaker

[Wyrmbreaker] (+7 ... IN KAHSEENO WE TRUST)
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 6 (Success x 1 at target 6)
to Danicka

[Gina McClaren] *Gina's crammed in the backseat, sitting on the hump in the middle. Why? Best vantage point to see everyone. She introduces herself to Curata with a saucy wink and a handshake. Gina McClaren, strider strumpet, "at yer service." She's go on to say that the battlescarred bit o' glory in the front is Andrew. Letting him fill in his own rank tribe and deed names.*

[Andrew] He is indeed, a battlescarred piece of glory. Or a horribly disfigured monster. Or somewhere in between. It varies from moment to moment. Most of the later. He enjoys the right next to Gina. Bouncing along as they swerve from lane to lane. Gun through lights and screech to halts. It doesn't seem to disturb him.

But then, he doesn't drive. So he has not the faintest clue as to what all the knobs and buttons do and can't backseat drive. He's presented with an altogether more appealing way to pass the car ride. It has a name. It's called Gina.

[Danicka] She was not kidding about trying to lose Lukas in traffic. Danicka goes slowly out of the parking lot, but once they hit the streets she starts weaving. She does not look over her shoulder to see where he is more than a few times, and she mostly just laughs. "Little shit," she says, in English for Lee's benefit, when he pulls ahead of her for awhile. That's when she pushes down on the gas and focuses, her eyes gaining an intense little gleam.

Here are the facts: the M3 is a faster, more powerful car than the G37x. The Infiniti is newer than the BMW. The man behind the wheel of the used black car has more control of his body, is used to the hunt and battle. The woman behind the wheel of the brand-new blue car is only on her second car... ever. She totalled her last one. She hasn't been driving even a full year.

And she matches him, street for street, light for light, almost the entire way there.

When they pull into the parking lot behind SmartBar, it is almost at exactly the same time, and it is not unreasonable to think that their passengers are wondering What the fuck after that. They drove fast, they drove with a certain ferocious intensity, and without either of them holding back an ounce, they... tied. Granted, Lukas got stuck at a red light and seethed silently at the intersection while Danicka went breezing through, but tell her that. She's grinning like a satisfied lioness when she gets out of her car and puts her keys in the wristlet purse she's carrying.

"Sejdeme se v ženské koupelny za pět minut!" she calls over to him, and laughs, heading towards the entrance with Lee.

[Gina McClaren] *Wandering hands are tolerated up to a point, at which she squeals in indignation and feigns snapping her teeth at the feral, eyes flashing with mischief. She stumbles out of the car laughing as they pull up behind Laiden and Danicka.*

[Liadan] Danicka says she's going to try and lose her boyfriend in traffic. Lee is so relieved to command only the attention of her roommate (and that only momentarily) that she's actually able to grin as she buckles her seatbelt.

The blonde darts through traffic, maneuvering the Infiniti like a pro racer. Líadan buffs her nails on her skirt and looks out the window. This is clearly not the first time she's ridden shotgun for a road race. She spent her high school years in Ohio, with all those Midwestern teens and back roads. She's traveled the world, ridden in taxis in small but heavily populated cities. This race is nothing new to her.

So she takes the time to center herself, and mentally prepare for the night ahead. Drinks with Danicka and Lukas would have been awkward enough with her being the third wheel. Now apparently she was going with three dates herself.

They rocket through traffic, to end in a tie. Lee's bag gets traded for a smaller one still in Danicka's grocery bag. This is where she tosses her wallet and a stick of lipstick. She climbs out of the car slowly. Danicka is also in heels, but Lee towers over her anyway.

It's easier to ignore the stares of the crowd than it was the focused attention in the common room. There's a certain kind of confidence that comes to a person who sees themselves in a completely different light than those around them. Lee walks tall, with something like pride but which is not.

[Wyrmbreaker] At one point, Lukas is a car length behind when Danicka catches the tail end of a yellow light. The signal slams to red when she's just entering the intersection. Lukas stomps the brakes; he screeches to a stop, the nose of the car just over the line.

And traffic passes before them. And Lukas sits there, eyes fixed on the disappearing taillights, then on the red. His right hand is wrapped loosely around the gearshift. His left, firmly at the top of the wheel. Left foot keeps the clutch in, ready to go. Right foot hovers over the gas.

The second the lights go green, he jolts into first-gear acceleration so hard everyone gets thrown back. The tires squeal; he's off like a shot, slamming gear to gear.

They slice into their respective parking spaces simultaneously, handling their cars like pros despite having them for less than a month. He cuts the engine and the lights, and as his passengers start to stumble or climb out, Lukas gets out and shuts the door and says,

"Horké malá děvko. Chci kurva ty."

while she's saying Sejdeme se v ženské koupelny za pět minut! It's only after that he smiles; crookedly; turns to watch everyone get out.

"Good?" And then he peels out of his jacket, leaves it in the car, clicks the remote keyless lock, and the locks snap down, and the foglights flash. Lukas starts toward the entrance to SmartBar, where they serve electric blue drinks and he met Danicka the second time, and he doesn't particularly hurry to catch up to the girls of 520 Kingsbury.

[Andrew] There was groping. Squealing. Slapping. And eventually Lukas and Curata are treated to a sickening semi-public display of affection when Andrew sniffs at Gina's jaw and nuzzles it briefly. Then things quiet down.

And they're at the club. The parking lot. Unfolding like origami out of the back of the car. He arches his back. Stretches and cracks joints. Stares up into the air of the Magnificent Mile and has flashbacks of how the blinding brightness of this place covered such whole heartedly human evil in its Umbral reflection.

They've brought me... here. Great. You're in enemy territory, little wolf.

He stiffens his shoulders. Straightens his back. Puts on a terrifying glare straight ahead, and stalks towards the entrance.

[Gina McClaren] *Gina's nearly dancing already, hearing the beat thrumming from the club. She makes for the door with a grin over her shoulder, and a crook of her finger at the stragglers.* Come on noow!

[Curata] The Fianna wasn’t exactly sure what he was getting himself into. He made sure that he was in the front seat, forcing the ugly one into the back with the pikey who didn’t seem to mind being the center of the scarred one’s attention. He is silent during the road trip; the Shadow Lord’s driving doesn’t faze him at all.

He offers very little information about himself, answering only the questions pressed in the introductions. The squeals, slapping and eventually groping from the backseat are simply ignored.

They unfold out of the car, Curata waits until Andrew and his arm candy have falling out of the backseat before he shuts the door, leaving behind his bag and his jacket. The tall Fianna brings up the rear, casting a long look around the parking lot and towards the doors to the SmartBar. He sucks in a deep breath and quietly lets it roll out in a sigh.

[Danicka] What he says, while she's speaking, makes Danicka laugh, but that's all the Czech the rest of the group is treated to for the moment. She drops her father's language and heads inside, accepting the square blue stamp on her hand that they give her after she flashes her ID and heads in. The last time she was here was months ago, and she cajoled them into allowing an underage girl in with her. Danicka can convince anyone of anything, it seems, but she doesn't have to, tonight.

It's a Thursday night, though now it's more like Friday morning, but lots of people have Friday off and so SmartBar is reasonably packed. The music is loud, the drinks are indeed neon in color, and yet Danicka does not head for the bar. She flips her hair off her shoulders and goes straight to the dance floor. She did not come here to look good... even if the original plan was to go out 'for a drink' with her roommate.

It has since turned into something like a double date where one 'couple' is made up of four people. Or else it's a triple date. Danicka doesn't care. Danicka is dancing, throwing herself into the rhythm like she's been here all night.

[Gina McClaren] *Oh yes, dancing is on the agenda. She takes the hand stamp graciously, a flirty grin to the bouncer. She dares you not to be charmed. And its B-line for the dance floor, moving towards Danicka and hollering above the music.* Names Gina..Wha's yer Naame? *The beat is picked up in her hips. Music infectious.*

[Liadan] Lee and Danicka part ways at the door, with the blonde headed for the dance floor and the redhead going for the bar. She orders something neon, knocks it back, orders something less neon and drinks it more slowly. She doesn't try to embarrass herself by sitting on one of the bar stools. Her skirt with its slit is not designed to sit on stools comfortably. Lee turns and leans back against the bar, surveying the room, watching where her “dates” wander off to, when her eyes catch her roommate. The sight of her moving on the dance floor makes Lee smile, a corner of her mouth quirking in a lopsided grin.

[Wyrmbreaker] Lukas pays the cover that Danicka and Liadan and Gina, as Attractive Female Specimens, won't have to. He accepts the stamp, shows his ID, goes in.

He doesn't go for the dance floor. It's not that he doesn't dance, though it's hard to imagine him throwing himself into the music quite the way Danicka does. It's simply that --

-- well. He goes to the bar, following Liadan, and when she sidles up between a college-aged guy and some late-twenties yuppie-type, he moves in beside her. His rage, his height, his deadly clear eyes clear a space at the bar.

Maybe it's old times' sake. He orders the electric-blue drink charmingly titled Adios Motherfucker, and then he turns to Liadan, leaning down to murmur in her ear. Only he's not murmuring. He's shouting. The music is that loud.

"Let me buy you the only no-ulterior-motives drink you're going to get tonight."

[Danicka] "Danicka!" she replies simply but loudly over the music, turning towards Gina and giving her the Americanized version of her name that everyone calls her but Lukas and those few who can pronounce Slavik names correctly. She plays no games about the fact that she is now dancing with the woman who is -- at the moment, thanks to the shoes Danicka's wearing -- nearly a foot shorter than she is. She glances down at Gina as she did not in the Brotherhood's common room, taking her in from the hem of her skirt to the top of her pretty dark hair.

The look is appraising. It doesn't last long. She just grins and dances with young Miss McClaren energetically.

[Andrew] Through some fortune given to Ugly Male Specimens that follow Bouncing Boobed Female Specimens, Andrew passes into the club. His face, the I-hate-you-all-and-will-kill-you look he gives the bouncer, combined with his face, makes the guy wobble on his seat and ignore the man in favor of the bouncing retreating rear-end of Gina.

He calmly follows Redhead to the bar. Flicking his gaze around. The pulse of the club is such that no one can hear the gasps or whisperings his appearance elicits. But they can catch the looks. The moving lips. The startled/shocked/omgrun faces people make.

And the circle around Redhead, Lukas, and the bar gets larger and more empty.

[Liadan] Lukas follows her to the bar and scares away the locals. Lee doesn't mind so much. She didn't come out for drinks as an excuse to get laid. She came out for drinks because it's been a fucking long day and she needed a fucking drink or twelve. But when the boys on either side of her suddenly vacate the area, she can't help but remember a time she went out drinking with another Garou.

You're kind of a shitty wingman. Her mouth curves at the memory.

To Lukas she just smiles her thanks, then looks over her shoulder to shout to the bartender to add her second drink to Lukas' tab.

When Andrew appears, the clear patch around the bar gets bigger. No one wants to get too close to the two men who send shivers down spines for some unaccountable reason. No one can understand why the redhead in the green halter and the black skirt and the heels that carry her height over the six foot mark just stands there. And takes a drip of her drink.

[Mickey] He's in the thick of it, lost in he crowd, an ocean of elbows and knees, of heads thrown back with sweat slicking licking the hair. It's all glorious lights and red and crimson and salmon pink strobed through by white heat light. He's in the center, moving, dancing, losing himself to the beat. Around him is humanity, in all its wasteful excess, liberated by booze and other shit, but him himself is there in his rage and liberation, his out of control spin and desire. He's feeling the beat to his core, like spiritual pulses that demand he dance and give expression to the frustrations and rage that otherwise only find liberation in combat.

Moving, Mickey dances.

[Gina McClaren] *Gina just laughs, twirling and dancing against Danicka. Glad to be out and moving. At just five feet, she's worming her way to the floor and back up, not a far dip when compared to how far the impressive blond behind her has to slither to do the same. She looks towards laiden and the menfolk, and the circle of space given them, a chuckle.*

[Curata] Except for the wary glances that the bouncers give the Fianna as they enter, he doesn’t seem to have too much trouble getting into the bar. Also having to pay the cover until the ladies, he flashed what passed for identification and heads into the bar. He doesn’t follow after the others; instead he circles the entirety of the club to take the long way around to the bar. It allows him to scope out the club, avoid the dance floor and to see what type of meat market this was.

Instantly, he’s avoided by many people, men even Curata’s own height and size will step aside to allow him to pass. He can hear the beat of the music, it sings in his ears, echoes the quick-pulse beat of heart and perhaps stirs some emotion that the Fianna doesn’t display.

He can feel eyes upon him, his head turning until he spots what he’s looking for from his distance. Lukas with Liadan as she has her drinks, and then finally on Andrew; Curata begins to scowl.

He comes up to the side of Andrew, “Take the bubbly one, wolf, ye had in the back seat and quit ogglin’ m’kinswoman.”

[Wyrmbreaker] The bartenders here and young and energetic and attractive. They toss bottles around, play fancy tricks that occasionally backfire. At the far end of the bar, a blonde, tattooed, model-pretty 'tender drops the shotglass she was flinging through the air. It shatters like a bomb. She throws her head back and laughs, and the customer she was flirting with laughs with her.

"Come dance with us! One dance!" A little closer, a group of college girls are trying to cajole a buzzcut, chinstrapped 'tender out onto the floor. He keeps shaking his head and grinning, shouting something about a girlfriend.

Down at Liadan's end of the bar, the bartender gives the redhead a look, half bewildered, half terrified, as she lets one of the two monsters flanking her buy her drink. He won't be surprised if her face turns up on the evening news tomorrow night: MISSING. He thinks about saying something. He decides it's not his fucking business, and he serves up a second helping of Lee's drink alongside Lukas's electric-blue concoction.

Which Lukas takes. The color makes his hand seem darker, his swarthy skin tanned with summer. He looks past her to the two men that had followed her here tonight, both half-wolf, both monsters, and he bends again to Liadan's ear, shout-murmuring:

"If you need anything, or if you want to leave, call Danička's phone. Or mine. Do you have my number?"

[Danicka] Dancing with Gina, Danicka does not have a wide pocket of Rage around her as she would if she were dancing with Lukas, or Curata, or... well, she probably wouldn't dance with Andrew unless she had to, but if he wanted to, that might count as having to. There are people all around her, around them, and they are both beautiful, and eyes as well as bodies draw close to them.

Danicka draws closer to Gina, rests her forearms lightly on the pikey's shoulders as she comes back up from one of her squirming trips downward. The beat has changed, the bassline is heavier now, and she dances closer to the woman she just now introduced herself to. One enterprising young man of the man that look their way sidles up behind her and starts trying to dance with her back.

She looks at him icily over her shoulder and says -- loudly again, over the music, all but shouting it -- "What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

He has no answer, and the scowl on her face is ferocious. Her teeth are almost bared, her eyes turning colors as the lights flash. He backs off, and she turns back to Gina, that grin spreading back over her lips and her forehead smooth before she even faces the Strider Kin completely again. Gina doesn't get to see that viciousness that crossed Danicka's face a half second before. All she sees is the smile, the tossed blonde hair. All she gets to feel are Danicka's hands sliding down her biceps.

[Mickey] Circling and circling in the widening gyre, Mickey doesn't give a shit. It's his space, carved out with sweat equity and desire. The music pumps and beats and pumps and fills him with annihilation. Everywhere is flesh, lit by the lights, made gleaming by sweat, by need, by desire. Out in the center of it all, lost in the crowd, he moves. It's as primal as it is solitary. Fuck the drinks the costumes, the outfits, the sideways glances to see if you're looking. He moves and dances, arms outstretched, head lowered, hair thick with sweat. It's a circular move, it's rounding and circling, and he doesn't care who's watching, who cares. He's tapping into something that the music helps come to the surface.

His wirey body. Tattoos. Hands turned into claws, turned into vicious caresses. Mouth drawn into a rictus grin. Music for the living. Music for the dead. Music for those who, come the end of the night, have trouble telling the difference.

[Gina McClaren] *Gina laughs as Danicka shuts down a would be groper, not having seen the ferocity with which she'd done it. Her voice raises above the music, dizzingly melodic. She waves to the folks at the bar, motioning for them to join them on the dance floor. Come hither! And Mickey appears through the crowd, a whirling dervish of intensity, Gina jerking her head towards to him as she faces Danicka. Mouthing. "look". The curvy strider kin gives Danicka a wink.*

[Andrew] The pulse of the place tugs at him. And he wonders idley if it's possible to become corrupted by humans. Are they a force like the Wyrm? Or Weaver? Can they infect you? Bend your will. But watching the dancers, he's reminded of something primal. It's mating. Mating never followed through with. Unless it was. But essentially, he thought of it as sex standing up. And that could make some sense to him. Wait, there was that human-taint he was thinking about.

He leans against the bar alongside the Redhead. And she drinks things that he assumes must be toxic from how they glow. Obviously she's intent on poisoning herself.

But his train of thought is broken into by the Fianna who sidles up and issues his command. Andrew turns slowly to regard the man steadily. Meeting his eyes. And gives him a crooked-flesh-mangled showing of teeth that could be a smile or a smirk.

And he stays where he is. Even leaning in to shout-whisper something to the redhead.

[Liadan] Leaning back against the bar the way she is, it's difficult to see that Lee is currently just a few inches shorter than Lukas. He leans in to shout in her ear something about calling Danicka, only he says her name differently. Dark eyes meet ice blue through the plastic lenses of her glasses, which she still needs in order to see. She thinks this detracts from her ensemble, but she's never been interested in getting contact lenses.

“I don't,” she shouts back. She doesn't look like her voice should carry so well in this noise, the heavy beat thumping in her chest like a second heartbeat, but it does. “But I'll call Danicka when I'm ready to go.” She stares up at him for a moment, openly surprised and impressed that Scary Man is actually pretty considerate.

Andrew shout-whispers into her other ear, and Lee gives a little start. She turns and looks at the scarred man, and at Curata behind him. She cocks her head at Andrew. “You should try it and find out!”

[Wyrmbreaker] Lukas straightens up, meets Liadan's eyes for a moment. Then, as she turns to shout back at Andrew, Lukas flips his napkin over, gestures at the bartender for a pen. When he gets one, he scribbles his digits down. By then she's done shouting, and he folds the napkin over once and hands it to her.

Behind the bar, their 'tender thinks to himself that if she knows what's good for her, Liadan will never, ever pick up the phone to call the black-haired man to her right.

"Enjoy yourself," he shouts in Liadan's ear, picks up his adios motherfucker, and leaves Liadan to two of her three dates.

[Danicka] Look, say Gina's lips, so Danicka looks. She's still touching Gina idly, dancing closely to her as though they're together, ignoring the gesturing towards the people at the bar that they should join the Strider and the Lord kin out on the dancefloor.

Her eyes fall on Mickey for a moment, but either she's not impressed or not interested, because she turns back around with a wry little smile on her face. She leans in close and half-yells: "I'll be back in a bit. Don't get lost!"

For the second time tonight, she winks at Gina, unwinding from her, removing her knee from between Gina's thighs. She returns all of her body parts to her, then winds through the dancefloor, through the crowd, towards the back wall, the narrow hallway that blocks some of the noise of the music, the black doors with the symbols for Mars and Venus painted on them in white. She goes through the one bearing Venus's symbol.

[Mickey] Oh, then girl, slow it down, bring it down, slow that tempo. Fuck the beat, who cares how everybody else is moving? It's about your own inner gyrations. It's bout how your hips are moving. Around him people rage like wildfire, but fuck 'em. In his own circle, his own primordial dance kingdom, Mickey slows it down. Hands range across his chest, his stomach, pulling his leather jacket open. Sweat is like liquid marzipan across his body. His tattoos are livid. In his own world, hands feeling his own body, Mickey fucks to the music. Hips moving in oscillating rotations of madness, as if a beautiful nubile woman were hump locked onto his crotch, invisibly bucked by each moan lift. Slowly, eyes closed, head thrown back, Mickey ingests the music. It's a liquid ingestion of the music, it's a private moment of communion with everything denied to a Garou. This is not his. This never can be; too close to the surface, the Rage; too close to the skin.

But fuckit. Mickey, eyes closed, makes love to the air, the music, his hands, his skin. And it is mother effing glorious.

[Andrew] His eyebrow quirks. He looks back out at the gyrating mess of people. It's definitely sex while standing up. But there's more to it. It feels like a mating dance to him. Humans moving around each other, getting familiar with each other in a way that requires no speech. The music seem to be there to enforce this no-talking rule. Obnoxiously loud and drowning most speech that isn't intimate. That isn't more about how you talk with your body than your vocalizations.

And this. This he can understand. And his grin grows broader. He turns to the redhead again. And his growly voice slices the music again to speak to her. With a jerk of his head towards the floor.

[Gina McClaren] *Left to her own devices, her attention swings back around to Mickey grooving out in his own little world. Maybe she could change that. She does like a challenge. She moves towards him, hips moving in time with the beat, then double time. One ..two. onetwothreefourfive One two onetwothreeforfive. Apparently sampson wasn't wrong bout strider kin, as Gina breaks out the belly dancing moves and gets close eough to holler* HEY! *Over the music, shooting the tattooed mess a wide grin and a crooked come hither finger.*

[Curata] The Fianna leans against the bar, eyeing Andrew when the scarred one turns to meet his gaze. He arches a single brow at him, watching the ugly visage flash what he can only perceive to be a smirk or smile. He isn’t quite sure on which.

Curata tilts his head over his shoulder, casting a long glance across the dance floor. The pulsating beat of the music maintains his attention for like ten seconds, and then he has turned away from the floor to lean both arms on the bar.

He looks down at the bartender who is likely not going to come up this way, especially if he’s next to Andrew. The Fianna eventually flags him down to lean over and order a beer, then stands back.

As Andrew begins to head to the dance floor, Curata can’t help but watch him curiously, the corners of his mouth curling up just slightly in a small smirk as he shakes his head.

[Liadan] Líadan regards the scarred man with something like curiosity, taking in the marred face, the torn ear, the chunk missing from his nose. She knocks back her drink. Her second is left on the bar with instructions that no one is to touch it on pain of death. Then she turns back to Andrew.

“Sure.” Why the hell not? When he heads for the dance floor, it's with the tall Fianna kinswoman leading the way.

[Mickey] Mickey's eyes open, and across the masses he sights Gina. Her tight body, her hair thrown back, her lips livid with her come hither smile. Eyes aligth with life. Mickey needs no more invitation, no greater dare. He throws his inner meditations to the wind, and let's it rip.

Only people who truly feel the groove can channel it. Not idle statement; he's a Galliard, and music, meter, rhythm rules in his mind. His heart beats to the pound of poetry, his words are all cadence, his steps are rhythm to which his words cajole. So when Gina opens up her own space, beckons him, he can't help but grin and let the music, the urge, the beat, bring him to her.

Up close he comes, and then he's right there, against her, his sweat slicked wirey body but a half inch from her own skin, his hips undulating with the frenetic desire and beat of the ocean tide, following her own movements, mirroring and amplifying her every move. His hand suddenly clasped at the nape of her neck, and his grin is sheer electricity, sheer fucking delight. Who cares what they look like. Who cares what people think. This is physical, this is pure, this is the animal connection that transcends kin Garou human and becomes spiritual.

Becomes raw.

Becomes sex on a stick.

Mickey is afire. Gina is but gasoline on his bonfire. One hand wrapped around the nape of her neck, touching her sweaty skin, hair curled just above his knuckles, he brings his body against hers. Smiling, eyes, afire, letting his lust and love and despair and depression and hatred and hope all burn through in this moment. His body an electric joke cascade.

Ugly as fuck, but as glorious as an imploding star, Mickey dances with Gina. And let's it all rip.

[Wyrmbreaker] This is a house/techno club. The music in here was born on, bred from the dance floor. Four to the floor beats, no doubt whatsoever. The dance floor is one massive of united, fragmentary motion. Around Mickey there's a ring of space, an area cleared in deference to his solitary, the humans entranced and repelled, fascinated, wary. No such buffer zone exists around Gina, who until recently was dancing with the blonde that had nearly left Lukas in the dust on the roads.

And then the space around Ms McClaren magically opens up, even while she's shouting at Mickey. It's Lukas, passing through the dance floor, cutting the crowds like a shark through a school of fish. He touches her arm to alert her to his presence, because it's too fucking noisy in here to talk, and the bass is rolling right through his chest, and this song is half over but it's a club bounce all right, and he stops, he tarries for a while, he slips into the rhythm and moves around and behind Gina, moves with her.

Lukas isn't a flamboyant dancer. This should surprise no one. His feet don't move much. He flows to the music largely with his upper body, his torso, finding the downbeats amongst the four, moving to the rhythm halved. He keeps his hands to himself. He grins at Gina if she looks at him, and when Mickey starts heading over -- or if not Mickey, then some other guy drawn to a girl alone on the dance floor -- he leans down, leans down far, to shout in her ear.

"If you want to go, tell Liadan, all right?"

The song is mixing into the next. The beat changes, slows, muffles, more felt than heard. The synthesizers evaporate. Vocals die out. It's just bassline for a while, one track to the next, beating in the blood. Five feet away, a human couple, caught up in the moment, are mauling one another's faces. A little further away, another clearing opens spontaneously around another pair, humans, strangers to Lukas, strangers to one another until five minutes ago, who have somehow found the same groove in the music. They dance around each other, turning and wheeling, eyes fast on one another, locked in orbit, flashing grins of sheer and unadulterated delight now and then.

They might go home together tonight. They might not. The next song might disrupt what they have, but they have it, right now, in the moment.

Mickey moves in; Lukas peels away from the Strider kin and, downing a swallow of his drink, weaves into the darker reaches of the club, toward the corridor to the bathrooms.

There are two doors. One bears the astrological sign for Mars; the other Venus. Lukas doesn't hesitate, doesn't quail. He chooses Venus, pushing the door open and letting it swing shut behind him without so much as a glance around.

[Andrew] He follows the hips of the Redhead. Because this is about sex, and talking with the body. There are things he finds himself drawn to. Parts that the human half of him screams about. Hey! Fuckhead! (whapwhap) Yeah, over here. Look at THAT. And THAT. That's hot. His eyes trail up and down her backside a few times. And his head tilts to one side curiously as he considers all that blares through his mind in the same flashing neon lights that rim the room.

Pulse. Beat. Shake. Sound. Thump. Thrust. Move down. Jerk. Jangle. Move around. Spin. Jive. Survive. He mostly imitates what the other males in the room are doing. It all starts in the hips. Swing and juke like there's a pivot in his back. Swing around, drop down, thrust up. And it rises up into his torso. Sway side to side. Bounce with the beat. Pump with the sound. And his legs and arms slowly catch on.

[Gina McClaren] *She's all sultry sunshine. Pretty enough to turn a man's head, but it was that attitude that got them crawling back. All teasing happiness as she smiles up at Lukas, shimmying against him and nodding mutely to let him know she'd heard. And she twirls off into Mickey's arms, laughing and crinkling her nose at the galliard as they get down. She's all gyration and shake, hair swishing along her back as her bare feet stick to the dance floor. Her hips mark the bass beet, little strider undulating to the music with a wide grin over her shoulder, hands trailing on Mickey as they move. *

[Curata] The Fianna was not much of a dancer. He doesn’t stop Andrew and Liadan as they go out to the dance floor; he turns in his stance at the bar and watches, more of an observer. With the others gone from the bar, there is only his rage to keep most of the mundanes at bay.

The bartender is a little afraid, bit still uneasy as he brings Curata his beer. His eyes skim around the club, glancing at the people, watching them. He turns to watch the floor once again, quirking an eyebrow when the scarred ones cut a rug.

[Danicka] Every single stall in the women's bathroom but one is taken. Women are in and out, but turn a blind eye when Lukas walks in. The floor is mottled gray-and-black linoleum, the walls gray tile to a halfway point up the wall. After that it's the same purple-blue-black-red murals that adorn the rest of the club. The lights aren't anything special except over the mirrors, where women are re-applying makeup or washing their hands or talking or checking to see just how dilated their pupils are. The handicapped stall is occupied, but when his shoes stop outside of it, the lock flicks open and her hand reaches out to take hold of his front pocket.

The music in here is just as loud as it is out there.

Danicka is breathing heavily, not touching herself as she was the first -- but not the most recent -- time they met in a bathroom stall. She is not wearing a skirt, as she was the first two times, the last two times, the only two times. Her pupils are dilated because of the darkness and because of growing lust, not because of drugs, and she tastes the same way when she flows up against his body and kisses him as she would have if he'd tried to kiss her in the Brotherhood's kitchen -- like the faint memory of mouthwash, like herself, like his lover.

He tastes like an Adios Motherfucker. She moans into his mouth.
to Wyrmbreaker

[Mickey] Mickey can't contain himself. He can't synchronize for long. As good as Gina is. As sultry, vivacious, perfect and supernova. He can't control, refrain, restrain. He dances back, hips thrusting, arms out, as if to embrace the world, eyes closed once more, head moving from side to side. Energy like white fire in his joints, he can't stop, can't stay still, can't keep to one understandable move.

Instead, he becomes refulgent, and spins away, laughing, shaking, bopping, knees bending and electric straightening once more, so that he's a puppet to the music, an instrument, a reed. He loses Gina in the crowd, forgets about her, her existence, her sultry promise, and becomes part of the mass, the swaying conglomerate humanity. The music elevates him, erases his mind, blows him away. Chemicals and booze rage through his veins, his mind, and he is one with the beat, the world, the crashing collapsing existence that he's been forced into.

Off and spinning and gyring and gambling in the ever effing wade. Mickey Perl dissolves into the music, and in so doing, makes it his.

[Liadan] Following Lee onto the dance floor, Andrew can see the way she walks, following the sway of her hips. He can see the way her shirt clasps shut, can see a funny looking tattoo on her right shoulder blade. Her long red hair is held up at the base of her skull by a plain brown clip. He doesn't have long to look.

A space clears around them easily, due to Andrew's Rage. No one wants to get close. Everyone's afraid the scarred man dancing with the beautiful redhead is going to kill her right there in front of everybody. And so everybody does their best to turn their eyes away, to pretend they don't see because it's not their business who dumb girls decide to dance with.

Lee does her best to dance with Andrew, to match his movements, to lean in close and press her body against his only to pull away, just out of reach. Taunting, flirting. She's beautiful, alluring. Those who look, if they look at all, don't understand why a woman who looks like Lee would dance with a man who looks like Andrew. It's not because she finds him charming. It's not because she finds him attractive in some warped way.

She simply doesn't care.

[Gina McClaren] *Gina's laughing as the whirling dervish spins with her for a while, then speeds off with dizzying intensity. It was time for a drink, and so the buxom pikey wipes her forehead and dashes towards poor lonely Curata, disappearing for moments at a time before popping into view again near the bar.*

[Curata] Loneliness is defined as actually feeling alone, you can sit in a room full of people as the Fianna did, and feel alone. He’s doesn’t exactly feel this way, he just happens to be a fish out of water, not quite in his element. The pulsating lights and loud techno music doesn’t quite suit the Fianna’s tastes.

It’s growing near to his moon, and he’s just a bit tenser than normal. He looked around the room and viewed the humans that were dancing on the floor in a different light. It quietly makes him shake his head, he downs the beer, changing up his drink order to shots instead, switching to pure whiskey.

His attention because distracted by a vibration from his back pocket, he fishes out a cellular phone, raising an eyebrow as he checked he text message, and then tucks it back into his pocket.

[Andrew] It takes some time. But as usual, sex is always better with a partner. And it's all about figuring one another out. Likes. Dislikes. Where and how they move. And he starts to mesh with her style. Pushing in close as she nears him. Pressing a meaty thigh between her legs and letting his hands brush past her when they close. Pulling away reluctantly and unleashing more energy as they seperate. Show what you've got where they can see and then show 'em what you're thinking when you're communicating body to body.

A fierce grin takes root on his face. And the burning of Rage. Really just passion. Bottled up. Unleashed on enemies. Diverted like lava from the ones they need to protect. The fury - hate anger love resolve - of Gaia wrapped up and sewn into every fiber of something neither man or wolf.

And he's getting close to unleashing it. Motions jerky and only refined by natural talent. Heat pulses off him in waves that wash over everyone. Some like Redhead stand right in the fire and enjoy it. Some are chased before it, the chaffe, the leaves of the forest moved by the hot wind before an explosion, the people around them. He? He dances on that fire.

[Wyrmbreaker] Not a beat of hesitation between either of them. Their eyes are open, their pupils wide. She tucks her fingers into his pocket and pulls him into her.

They collide like heavenly bodies pulled out of orbit, together.

The heat of the club, its lights and its bodies, didn't touch him. The alcohol is only barely flushing through his veins. His brief jaunt on the dance floor may as well have never been. But when Danicka pours up against him and lets herself into his mouth, he bends his head to hers and kisses her like it was the first, like it's the last, like the half-open stall door doesn't matter, and the heat drizzling through his limbs has a cool rush breaking up his spine, the first vanguard of perspiration.

It's one kiss flowing into the next into the next, the way the beats of one song mixes into the next. His mouth moves over hers; he sucks on her lower lip, then her upper, then the indent beneath her mouth, above the point of her chin. He tilts his head the other way, goes at her cheek, the corner of her mouth. Finds his way back.

Kisses her.

When it stops, he's breathing harder. He reaches behind them and shuts the door the rest of the way, flicks the lock shut. Then he takes her by the hips and he backs her to the wall, to the tile and the paint, seizes her mouth again and savages her again, and all the politeness, the courtesy, the chivalry he displayed out there, out there, goes up in smoke.

"Potřebuji být uvnitř vás," he murmurs into her ear. This is a true murmur, but his mouth is right against the shell of her ear, his lips brushing her skin when he speaks. His hands wrest the button of her jeans open. Lower the zipper.

He turns her around. Her back is all but bare, covered by threads. He kisses her shoulders, nips at her shoulderblades. Her denims are pulled down in one sharp tug; he's bending not at the waist but at the knees, dropping to the floor behind her as he sucks at the dimples just over her hips, licks the line of her spine down to the small of her back.

"Jste mokré pro mě, lásko?"

She might not hear that. Likely she does not. His mouth moves against her skin. His meaning is clear enough anyway when he presses his fingers between her legs, pulls aside whatever scrap of fabric he finds there to slide his fingertips against that hot, slippery cunt that he remembers, that he can't forget, that he can smell and feel, all but taste.
to Danicka

[Gina McClaren] *Gina slips through the crowd and hauls herself up on the barstool beside Curata. Her barefeet dangle as she smiles at him warmly. She orders a cherry whiskey, and leans over to half yell.* What are ye drenken, darlin?

[Curata] Gina slinks her way through the crowd, hauling herself up onto the barstool beside the Fianna. He slams the shot glass down, catching sight of her in the corner of his eye. He turns his head to look at her, blue eyes slid up and down to take a long glance before he speaks.

“Whisky, lass.”

[Gina McClaren] Whiskey et es.. *She says, giving a knowing wink and tipping her own glass back. She drinks it like a champ slamming her glass down in challenge, and gesturing to the bartender to pour them both another. A grin to the bartender before she looks back at Curata, dark eyes flicking over him quickly, She quirks a dark eyebrow and offers to clink glasses.*

[Liadan] Andrew's Rage is growing stronger, washing over Lee in waves of heat, burning more and more as she gets close, pushes her further back when she backs away. The song ends, blends into the next. Lee leans in to shout to Andrew, “I'm going back for my drink.” It's simply too much for her, on this of all days, to be so close to fire. Not after Alex. Not after Marcus. Not after a room full of strangers gawking at her like some prize pig on display.

And just like that she's gone, slipping through the crowd whether Andrew follows or not. She heads back to where she left her drink, which is exactly where she left it. This is probably mostly Curata's doing, by just staying nearby.

Lee picks up the glass and knocks back the liquid like it's water. She pulls a face as the liquid burns its way down her throat and into her stomach. It's not helping, just like the beer earlier didn't help when she was talking to Marcus in the kitchen of The Brotherhood.

She glances over and sees Gina and Curata conversing over who knows what in this noise. Danicka and Lukas have disappeared. Her dark eyes rove the crowd out of habit.

[Curata] Shots were poured, he’d raised up his glass as she offers to click hers to his. He lets the Pikey drink first, his attention not even on her now. His eyes move away from Gina completely, sliding over to the redhead at the bar. He downs the shot, watching Lee. His brows knit together slightly, the beginnings of a frown. Gina is the closest one to see his reaction, whatever it is born out of.

“Salute.” He says to Gina when a second round of shots makes their way, set down by the bartender. Curata lifts his voice over the crowd to call out to the kinswoman of his tribe.

“LEE.”

[Andrew] He's abruptly left without a partner and slowly the fire ebbs away. The beat melds, but hardly changes, and the pulsating rhythm he was following hasn't died away but it's no fun without a partner. He sways and shimmies a few last times out on the floor before following the Redhead back towards the bar.

Someone, braver than they are smart, thinks he's harassing her. Someone, braver than smart, isn't dancing to the music like they aught to and gets in his way. They open their mouth to say something and get elbowed in the stomach and shoulder checked out of the way with hardly a notice from Andrew. It's like reflex. Like a Mac truck, he sets his sights and goes there and be damned with whatever brick walls or squishy humans are in his way.

He lopes to the bar alongside Her and stops. The bartender is ignoring him. He's had liqour before. But only the strongest stuff has ever had any effect. Other than singing nose hairs when he breaths out. Eventually, he goes for the simple expedient of lunging half-way across the bar, grabbing the collar of the bartender, and shouting for something strong and disgusting.

Then he slips back to his feet next to the woman and looks at her. Leaning in dangerously close to speak to her. "What's wrong?"

[Gina McClaren] *The Fianna had a one track mind it seemed. Gina laughs and shakes her head, downing her drink. She looks around. wait..where was the blonde? Danicka? The caramel colored pikey perks up like a busty merecat, and looks around. No sign of her. Gina bounces off the stool with a pat and a wink to Curata, before moving to the washrooms, whiskey hitiing her quickly.*

[Liadan] Lee's head snaps to look at Curata over Gina's head. A smile starts to form when Andrew's back, leaning in close and asking her what's wrong. The smile vanishes, is long gone by the time she turns to face the scarred man.

“I didn't come here to dance,” she says truthfully. The glass in her hand is empty. She sets in on the bar. When the 'tender comes with whatever they've found for Andrew, she signals that she needs another.

[Curata] The Fianna moves from his side of the bar, walking the short distance it would take to bring him to Lee’s other side. Andrew flanking the other, the press of the rage was going to be overwhelming for the girl.

He leans down to speak close to her ear, “Where is yer friend, Lukas?”

[Andrew] He eyes the girl and her rapid downing of drinks. Something clear and very high proof arrives for Andrew. Something meant to be drunk in shots. Something meant to get you smashed after repeated slamming of said glasses. This arrives in a larger glass. And Andrew slaps wrinkled dollar bills on the bar and takes the glass and downs all of it in rapid succession. His eyes water, giving them a maniac gleam. His nose breathes out fumes that could set something on fire. His breath reeks of pure alcohol when he leans in to speak to Redhead.

"Came to poison yourself."

[Gina McClaren] *She comes back from the bathroom, and heads for the bar. Uh oh. Laidan flanked by both wolves. She'd looked uncomfortable to begin with. Gina picks up the pace a little.*

[Liadan] They are too close and the bartenders are too slow to serve the woman trapped between two wolves. Lee fixes her gaze on the dancing crowd, happily meshing together now that the monsters have left the floor.

She turns her head slightly toward the tall dark haired Fianna. “Don't know,” she says mildly.

Andrew leans in close, reeks of alcohol when he tells her she came to poison herself. She turns to him then, head tilted. When she turns away it's not out of despair or disgust or a desire to be looking anywhere at the scarred ball of Rage leaning in so close beside her. It's to contemplate the validity of his words. Finally there's a clunk behind her as a glass is set down. She turns, lifts the glass in a salute to Andrew. “Guess so.”

She drinks this glass slowly, taking her time now. Getting wasted within the first thirty minutes of arriving at a club was something sorority girls did.

[Danicka] They are kissing before they even get the door closed, mauling one another's faces as though it's been even longer than twelve days, eleven, however long it's been since the solstice when he chased her into the woods, when she trapped him in a copse, when she rode him like he belonged to her, when he fucked her like she was his. It's amazing she can even pull him like this against her, looking up into his eyes with lust that needs no mask or escape route. She kisses him with a stifled noise of pleasure as he eats at her mouth.

He chased her tonight and she trapped him and they spoke at once: I want you, I want you, I fucking want you only those weren't the words they used. He called her a hot bitch. She made a demand. Since when do Shadow Lords --

since he met her. Since she tamed him, became responsible forever for him, since he waited quietly while she sidled up alongside him until he could touch her hair and until she could lay her head in his lap. Since she rode him the flickering, multicolored darkness of her apartment and told him she was falling in love with him, when she'd already fallen, when she knew full well that her first confession of love was asking him if he had ever read The Little Prince, and knowing as soon as he replied that he understood why she'd asked.

They are both breathing harder, unleashing the lust they felt when he pursued her tonight, when she just barely evaded him, when they ended up matching each other int his as in so many other things. She shudders when he tells her what he wants, bites his lower lip as though she's furious at him, wraps her arms and legs around him, climbs him like a fucking tree, when he starts to push her backward. Her legs lower again, her heels touch the linoleum again, and she starts to reach for the fastenings of his jeans as he does the same to her.

"Pak mi to dej," she snarls back to the first words he says, wriggling her hips towards him even as she slides her hand in past the metal teeth of his zipper to caress him through his boxer-briefs.

Danicka starts panting then, feeling him against her hand through the thin layer of cotton. She makes a strangled noise of protest when he turns her around but she doesn't resist. She tenses... and relaxes, gasping against the wall, splaying her palms against it as though she's being searched. Behind her he licks, sucks, bites at her, presses kisses against bared flesh. She gasps sharply as he yanks her jeans down, as he finds her in a dark purple chiffon thong that in this light looks nearly black. It's ridiculously soft. It does not conceal the feel or the scent of her at all.

So she doesn't bother to answer his question. She closes her eyes and arches her back as he touches her, rubbing forcefully against his hand. "Buď na mě hodná. Ach, můj milý člověk..."
to Wyrmbreaker

[Curata] “Losing ourselves in our cups, what we do best.” He says to Andrew over Liadan’s head. The Fianna looks away from her, scanning the crowd for any sign of the Shadow Lord.

Certainly not seeing them in the throng of club-goers, he looks over at Lee and Andrew. “See ye rounds, can’t breathe in this meat market.”

He certainly wasn’t going to stop a person from drowning themselves in alcohol if they’d wanted it. The Fianna steps away from the bar, leaving the pair there as he heads out for the door.

[Andrew] He grunts. Fianna and alcohol. It's symbiotic it seems. He's seen it before. But they had other pursuits he remember. His hips are unconsciously bumping a bit with the music as he demands a second drink. "Fuck or Fight. Better for you." This, loudly, to Redhead while they lean on the bar. The still fleeing, post-drink-order, bartender catches it and gives a look at Andrew and the Redhead that clearly says he believes they are psychotic. Certainly he is, she is by association.

[Gina McClaren] *Gina bounces back in time to see Curata making for the door. A wave to his back as she hops up between Andrew and Laidan. She hollers* Drowning yer Soorrows? *A hand to Andrew's shoulder. To some it might seem possessive. Or perhaps she just wants the feral to give the towering redhead some room. She gives Andrew a cheeky grin* Ye wan' tae dance?

[Liadan] The night went from Kinda Promising to Not Fun in record time. But that was just how Lee's day was going, it seemed. The tall handsome Fiann man left her alone with the Skeeze and the Short Girl. Lukas and Danicka are nowhere to be seen. Lukas had said to call one of them if she wanted to leave.

“Excuse me,” she says to Andrew and Gina if they're still around as she pulls her Blackberry from her purse. She walks off to the other end of the bar as she scrolls through the contacts. When she gets to the entry for Vyv she doesn't press the call button, instead stands still for a moment, hastily pressing buttons.

Eventually she does pull the phone to her ear, shouts into the receiver. She heads back to the tall man and the tiny woman. “I'm gonna take off.” She doesn't know what Lukas said to Gina on the dance floor.

[Wyrmbreaker] He can't really hear her. Their words are lost to the thunderous music, the basslines that shiver through the walls, vibrates the cool plaster beneath Danicka's cheek. He can't hear her but he can intuits something of what she means by the way her back arches, and when Danicka goes to university in the fall, if she takes a course in physiology or biology or anything like that she'll learn that this reflex is older than history, older than humanity, the most basic, primal mating response of mammals since the very beginning.

There's something so fucking basic and primal between them. They wear their masks, she far better than he, but they wear them, and they wear them well, and they wear them all the way to the bathroom

or the bedroom
or the hotel
or the wilderness

and then they drop them, they become what they are, and what they are are animals, feral and savage, and he rubs her through the fabric with one hand curved around her hip, slides the fingers of his other hand into her beneath the fabric, puts his mouth to her body and loves her with every he has, tooth and tongue and lip and hand; everything except his straining hard cock, which was already hard when she undid his zipper and touched him, which is so fucking hard now that he can feel his own pulse beating through it, as though it had a direct line, a mainline straight to his heart.

He's out of patience abruptly. He tears her panties down and now her pants are around her ankles, her panties too, and he gets to his feet and wraps his arms around her and lifts her against him, bends her back against him, turns his mouth to her throat like he might tear it out. Fiercely he kisses her, nips at the frail skin of her neck, sucks at the column of tendon.

"Pojď přes sem." He says this like she might move of her own accord, but her feet aren't even touching the ground. He turns toward the back wall of the large handicapped stall, takes two steps toward it and lowers her to the floor. There's a brushed-steel grab bar there, and he nips her ear with his teeth. It's almost a growl, "Chyť to. Ohyb přes pro mě, lásko."

His arms unwind from her. He straightens up, moves back a little. She can hear ... or feel, or sense him taking his wallet out, flipping through the billfold to pull out a condom packet, clips it between his teeth. The wallet returns to his pocket, and then he drops his jeans, and then he drops his boxer briefs, and then he's taking himself in hand and slapping his cock gently against her ass, running his free hand up her back, the criss-crossed ties of her shirt bumping under his fingers.

"Bože, já stýskalo," he sighs this; he almost moans it, and his hips thrust against hers; he grinds his cock against her. "Moc jsi mi chyběl."
to Danicka

[Andrew] Andrew pauses there. The drink plunks down behind him. He swivels to eye it, pay up, and pick it up. Then watches Redhead for a moment. Concerned. A bit. His brows furrow. He seems simultaneously confused and, well, perhaps understanding isn't the right word.

But Gina's there. And he eyes her. And pulls her bodily against him with his free arm. Then downs whatever horrible concoction of clear fluids are in the glass. The downdraft of air from his nostrils reeks of pure alcohol. Maybe they were giving him rubbing alcohol and hoping he'd go throw up somewhere and fuck off.

His eyes fall to Gina's. Then snap back to Lee. He leans in to whisper to the girl.

[Danicka]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 1, 1, 4, 8, 10 (Failure at target 6)
to Wyrmbreaker

[Danicka] SHADOW LORDS DO NOT FUCKING FAIL
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 3, 3, 4, 6, 6 (Failure at target 7)
to Wyrmbreaker

[Gina McClaren] *GIns tilts her head, then shakes it.* NAe darlin.. Ah dinnae dae women. AH dinnae 'ave the touch.

[Liadan] Lee says her goodbyes quickly, and is gone to wait outside for a cab to come and collect her.

[Andrew] He straightens his back again and squeezes Gina's waist. Giving her a strange look. Dinnae dae women. The fuck? But he shakes his head. That one would take quite a while, and possibly some porno, for him to figure out.

He starts after Redhead but she manages to lose him in the crowd. How a six foot redhead accomplishes such things is entirely beyond him. But he drags Gina with him, halfway to the door and finds himself lost in the middle of the dance floor.

With a look of confusion on his face, he turns back to Gina.

[Gina McClaren] come darlin. Dance. We'll catch a cab home. Dinnae mind her. I suspect she's a bit o' a bint. *She smiles encouragingly, tugging him by his belt towards her, and then, towards the dancefloor. Like she can move him if he doesn't want to go..*

[Andrew] He grunts. Flicks a look over his shoulder after the Redhead once more, then returns to the floor with Gina. Letting her pull him along by his waistband. His hands go around her in places that might be slightly inappropriate if it weren't for the fact that others around the place are doing similarly.

[Gina McClaren] *That warm tinkling laugh as she leads him to a free space and begins to dance against him in time to a heavy beat, hips keeping time as she bounces to the music. she presses a hand to his scarred face. A pleased smile to herself as she recognizes the ridge. That one was from a bear. *

[Andrew] His hips start to pick up the rhythm first. Gyrating and jamming against hers. He has to slink himself back, legs bent towards her, to match her height a little closer. One leg working its way between hers like he's seen others on the floor do. One hand finds her ass and squeezes it roughly, pulling her into him. And his torso takes up another beat. Swaying counterpoint to his hips and legs. Muscles in his arm twitching to the thump-thump-thump of the bass. A snarling grin starting to creep over his face.

[Gina McClaren] Good! *She laughs back over her shoulder, grinding down on his leg with a bright smile of encouragement.* Ye dae jes fine! *And the people around them do double takes. Andrew truly must be rich and hung like a T-rex, to justify having Gina pressed up against him. Sporting that face? He had alot of nerve.*

[Andrew] He tries to keep up with her. He's no dancer. But making the same motions standing up with clothes on as when they're horizontal and fucking, that he can mostly handle. It wasn't that hard, certainly. He made it seem pretty simple. His hands became brazen and wandered her body. Things were going to get out of hand, it seemed. And he pressed his face into her hair. She'd have to hope no on came near with a match or his breath and her hair and they'd be alight.

[Gina McClaren] *Oops. Alright. it was definitely time to leave. the feral was getting riled and she didn't want taken for a ride against the wall of a club. Well.. at least not indiscreetly. And were she to leave him alone, he was completely going to get arrested, so she slips her hand into Andrews and tugs him towards the door.* Lets go loves.. Please?

[Danicka] That thong peels down her ass and her hips like it's made of clouds, like it wants to melt right off her skin when he touches it, like his fingers are too hot on her body and his mouth is too hot as it travels across her flesh and like her lust for him is too hot for her to exist even if she's angry, even if she's afraid, even if she knows that one of these days they're going to be mates and he's going to mount her and there's no escape then, she's stuck right where her father always was, she's fucked, her life is fucked, her life is over.

But she gasps for him, and calls him her dear man, because she wants him. Oh god, when he chases her down and she very nearly fucking escapes and when it's all just a lure to get him to come after her anyway she fucking wants him. Because more than she ever has been in her life, she feels powerful. She's going to school. She has her own car, her own apartment, she has bookshelves that are nearly filled and that's at least in part because of him, it's because he trusts her. She has something like a future and that's new, too.

She just does not like what she sees when she imagines that future without him. She is afraid of what she sees when she imagines that future with him. She is trapped between these two things, grief and terror, memory both recent and ancient, and surrounding all of it is the overwhelming sea of desire she feels as he spreads her wetness around and makes her arch her back, a physical

take me
use me
fuck me
yours

and

mine,

all of which are primeval in their ferocity, in their evolutionary demand.

Her hips buck when he fingers her, strokes himself into her like she's some mind-numbed little thing he picked up in a club one night, like he still wants to see how wet she is, how wanting she is, how tight she's going to feel around him when he finally pushes into her. Danicka gasps against the wall and wriggles against his every touch, against his tongue, against whatever he gives her even though it is not what she wants rightfuckingnowdon'tstop

she's snarling at him.

And he takes her in his arms, her feet leaving the floor, and she's unbalanced she has to grab onto the fucking metal bar to get any purchase at all and that's when her heart goes into her throat and the collision of body-melting lust and terrified anger makes her lightheaded. She hasn't had anything to drink, nothing at all, but her mind reels as though she's intoxicated.

"Zastávka kousání mě!" she gasps suddenly, sharply, in a ragged voice that would be a whisper if they weren't trying to speak over music. It's panicked; it's fearful. It's afraid that he's going to rip her throat out if she displeases him, if she doesn't give him right answers, if she doesn't bend when he wants her to bed, or god knows, any number of things. He's going to hurt her, if she doesn't make him happy.

The panic subsides. She shudders as it leaves her, as suddenly as it came. She likes it when he bites her but she nearly had a heart attack when he's telling her to bend over and take it. It's not the supposed hyper-dominance of the words; she could care less. It's his Rage, and the full moon, and a thousand memories that are not his fault, a thousand times when she trusted the monster at her back and was betrayed, a thousand times when someone stronger than her hurt her.

A single time when he slammed the door as she was trying to open it.

A single time when he made her scream in fear and not in pleasure.

What's disturbing is that she does bend over. She grabs onto that railing. She does what he wants, rubs herself back against his cock like she can't help herself even now, whimpers like she wants it even though her shudders have taken on a slightly desperate edge. Danicka turns her head to glance at him over her shoulder, biting her lower lip for a moment before she tells him -- in a voice too audible to be thoughtless:

"Stýskalo se mi po tobě, ale bohu ... zastávka, prosím. Být jemný. Prosím, Lukáš, nemějte mi ub--"

She stops herself there. Closes her eyes. Shoves her hands against the wall to push away from it, turning between his chest and the tile, seeking comfort not in some dark cave of her own creation but in his chest, in his arms. "Je mi to líto," the words come tumbling out of her mouth. "Chci tě. Ale obávám se, příliš."
to Wyrmbreaker

[Andrew] He blinks and seems surprised by the sudden tack. His hands continue roaming over her body and hips gyrating as she tries to guide him towards the door. "What?"

And abruptly, someone is invading their space. Andrew didn't notice it at first. But then there was yelling about something. All speech in here was yelling. Andrew didn't react well at first. When he looked back and saw the guy yelling and gesticulating at Gina, Andrew reacted worse. His fist slung out in a quick hook and caught the guy on the side of the head.

Clubber went down like a baby seal. And Andrew absently forgot the man and trailed after Gina.

[Gina McClaren] *Gina makes to grab a fist, but Andrew was far too fast. Now was definitally the time to leave. She turns to face andrew, tugging hard at his shirt as she backs up.* Come on. Run wi' me! *And she takes off, weaving through the crowd. She was NOT getting arrested tonight. Not again! Run rabbit. Run.*

[Andrew] He blinks. She's tugging at him and running. And now security is coming out of the woodwork and heading towards him. He's baffled by this and excited at the same time. They have special shirts. They look tough and burly. And they're coming for him! He's popular! You like me, you really like me.

But the pikey is tugging at him. Run!

He lets out a sigh. Damned if he should get her in trouble while having fun. He starts after her slowly. And stiffarms a security guy back into a crowd of quickly backing away dancers.

[Gina McClaren] *Running is so much easier with shoes on. And running outside a bar in Chicago was not advisable. She makes it out the door and off the curb, coming down good and hard on a scattered assortment of smashed bottle debris. A high yelp of pain as her running is put to an abrupt end just outside.*

[Andrew] He manages to make it out of the door of the club like a greased pig shooting out a chute. Human bodies are used as the grease. Some of them wearing the funny security shirts. He's propelled along after the pikey with a manic look of excitement on his face. A brawl! Oh, these ones with the writing on their shirts were fun. He stops abruptly, plants his feet, and turns. His fist hooks up and caroms off the shaved head of one man who staggers sideways. Rage warbles off of him like hot air on asphalt. A bouncer throws a punch and catches his lower jaw. His head snaps to the side and he takes a stagger step. Then snaps a kick into the man's mid section. There's a muffled pop. Maybe a rib. People start screaming.

He almost misses the yelp of the pikey in the chaos. His head whips around to see her and his head jerks forward as a bouncer cracks and splits his knuckles on the back, and hardest part, of Andrew's obviously thick skull. Andrew turns, seeming distracted, and grabs the Bouncer nearest him. It's unfortunate the guy isn't familiar with how Andrew fights. He thinks a grapple is safer from flying fists. But with a shuffling step, Andrew throws out his hip and heaves. The man hurtles through the air and slams into one of his fellow shirted friends. They land in a heap of tangled limbs.

And with blurring speed, sheeting Rage off him now, he turns and grabs up the little pickey in one quick scoop. She's flung over his shoulder, hair and other things bouncing. His feet crunch and dig into the broken glass and pavement and he's off fleeing the scene, as they put it.

[Gina McClaren] *A laugh as she's scooped, despite herself, and she's carried off, the bouncers left to assume she's just one more statistic*

[Andrew] He runs. And after a while, it becomes quiet obvious he was made for this. He didn't just enjoy it. He did it well. He leapt over debris in alleys. He vaulted trashcans. She jounces and got shouldered in the gut repeatedly from all the bouncing around. Eventually, they were leaving the Magnificent Mile. Headed for the caern, even as blood dripped from Gina's foot and ran down the back of Andrew's skull from a deep gash on the rear crown of his skull that was slowly knitting itself shut.

[Gina McClaren] Andrew.. Andrew loves.. ANDREW!?*She finally barks, as his shoulder makes contact with her gut one too many times.* Thank ye fer carryin me.. but her hurten me sweetloves... An yer bleeden. Can we gi' a taxi?

[Andrew] He shakes his head. Continuing to carry her along, although the further they get the slower he gets and it turns into more of a jog. "Get you back home. Fix you." He shifts her back a bit more on his shoulder so that now her pelvis is resting on his shoulder. One arm hooked through her knees, which had better remain bent, is the only thing keeping her from toppling over his back face first. Hey, at least she gets to watch his ass as he pounds the pavement.

[Gina McClaren] *the ass watching. Not so much a plus.* Andrew.. yer gintae gie us arrested.. an.. ah'm gintae bite ye. Hard. effen ye dinnae TURN ME THE RIGHT FOOKEN WAY ROUND!!!! *Her voice rises in pitch and volume, and she punches him in the back half heartedly.*

[Andrew] He grunts from the back slap. Kinda tickled. Maybe. He slows enough to do something complicated and quick involving his body stopping and hers continuing to move. It's called momentum. And she hits his arms and he swings her around the RIGHT way. So now he's cradling her in his arms against his chest. "I must get you home. Quit squirming." And he starts running again. Great, now the view improved and she could stare at his face.

[Gina McClaren] *A sigh of relief as she's cradled rather than drug home caveman style. She rests her head against Andre's chest, bouncing raucously as she held on around his neck.* Darlin.. why cannae we..*she lets it drop. if he wanted to run the whole way home, what the hell. Her feet are nearly done bleeding, with the exception of one chunk of glass stubbornly lodged below her little toe.* Thank ye.

[Andrew] He looks down at her. And kisses the top of her head. Picking up speed again. He murmurs, "Just hold on."

Eventually, they get near to the Brotherhood. Closer to the Caern. Where the Veil is weaker and he can reach the spirits better. There, he lays her down carefully on side steps of an entrance into an abandoned warehouse.

His eyes flick around. Up and down the gape between warehouses. It's dark. Busted lights. Ground strewn with drug user's debris, broken bottles, and other things. But she's on the steps. He takes a step back. Pulls his shirt off over his head. Tilts his head back. And begins and eerie keening howl, torn from his throat. Warbling. Calling out to the spirits, or rather, a particular one.

[Gina McClaren] *Gina shivers a little, looking into the warehouse and trying to pick out Andrew's form. Of course it was him howling.. who else would it be. Though she had no idea why he'd suddenly felt the need to detour and howl. Wait.. what was the moon phase? She looks up, feet dangling off the step. A wince. Close to full. She searches for Andrews ugly mug in the dark..singsong quiet and oh so pretty.* ..andrew...?

[Andrew] It becomes like singing. Wrenched from his throat and breaking down into staccato bursts of sing-songing vocalizations. He steps out of the darkness near her and looks down at her foot. Then turns and looks behind him, sing songing again in a sharp bark of noise.

Condensation begins to form on Gina's foot. Like she were holding an iced foot over a boiling pot. Warmth rushes up her foot. Droplets grow, converge, run down her foot and drip off to splatter onto the pavement. Andrew barks out another songy-shout. The blood flow from her foot has stopped. It starts up a little again. And glass begins pushing itself out of her foot. She can feel it moving in her flesh. Working itself free and falling with little tinkles to the ground. Until the wounds are closed.

And then Andrew unsnaps his fly. Takes a few paces from Gina out of respect, pulls himself out, and begins peeing on the wall. It rivulets down the corrugated metal of the side of the warehouse and forms a puddle on the ground. And oddly... seems to catch stray bits of light and... sparkle. What the fuck?

Andrew turns his head, lets out a barking ringing tone, and walks back to Gina. Buttoning up.

[Gina McClaren] *Gina's watching her foot heal in fascination, offering Andrew a soft smile.* Thank ye loves, ye didnae--*Aaaaaaaand now he was peeing. Great. *she turns to look away when - wait.. what? She cocks her head, hair brushing against the step as she leans forward....Why was....no!?* ...have tae dae tha..

[Andrew] He finishes buttoning up his fly and shrugs. He glances back for a moment at the little puddle of glitter pee. Then he's leaning forward and scooping her up again to carry her the couple of blocks back to the Brotherhood. "Ride my back or be carried. Choose."

[Gina McClaren] ...Ah'll ride yer back. I can probably walk now though. *She smiles up at him, content to dangle in his arms.* ...Why ded ye pess a rainbow?

[Andrew] He pulls her arms up around his neck. Then swings her around to his back and reaches back to grab her legs and lift her up onto his broad back piggy-back style. Starting to walk now, more calmly, back towards the brotherhood. "Still no shoes. You don't walk." Especially not with the ground between these warehouses riddled with spent drug needles and broken bottles. His sneakers crunch over them as he walks. "Payment."

[Gina McClaren] *She nods, holding on tight, her plush chest pressed against Andrews back as they bob along. Marveling over her shiny new feet, and the lack of contusions on Andrew from his minibrawl. She shakes her head. Garou. They weebled and they wobbled but they didn't fall down.* thank ye. ded ye 'ave fun?

[Andrew] His head bobs. The blood that had dripped down the back of his head has become hard and crusty. The welt on his jaw had faded already as well. All the marks were gone. He loped along carrying her bouncing on his back. A little wicked smile yanking the edges of his mouth up. "Oh yes."

[Gina McClaren] Good. *She chuckles, hanging onto him like a Koala, resting her head on his shoulder. But for the swish of her skirt in the wind, and the tinkle of her jewelry, she's silent the rest of the way home.*

[Wyrmbreaker] Lukas should have known. How could he not know by now? Time and again he's gone at her too hard, too fast, too roughly, and she's done just this. She's stiffened in his arms, trembled, shuddered not from pleasure but from fear. She's asked him to stop; she's pretended not to be frightened, pretended to be in the moment still, that her tension was lust, that her shaking was desire. When his mind is clear, when he looks back and sifts through his memories, the causes and the effects, he sees it so clearly, of course: he sees the relationship between one moment and the next, how the flash of his hand to the door precluded the possibility of her tolerating his roughness with her now; how the way he'd shouted at her, snarled at her, prevented her from running and made her scream in fear, destroyed the possibility of her withstanding his hunger.

Lukas should have known. He could not have known. Sometimes his time with Danicka is like walking the edge of a razor. The last time they fucked, she let him chase her through the darkness, so far from civilization that he could've torn her to shreds and no one would have ever known. She didn't let him chase her; she lured him. All the way here, she lured him the same way, pushed him, didn't give an inch, raced him down the city streets on four wheels and three hundred some-odd horses the way they raced one another in the woods, on bare feet.

In the parking lot Danicka was life and desire, was vitality, was vibrance. Her hair glittered and her eyes gleamed. She laughed and called out an invitation, a lure. It was like the night at the W never existed.

Except of course it did exist. It happened. He lost his temper; he shouted at her; he chased her down and this time the hunt was real; he slammed her in the room and this time the trap was real.

Stop biting me, she gasps, and to be fair, that's the second, the very instant his teeth leave her skin and his arms unravel.

"Promiňte," is the first word out of his mouth, and he wants to tell her she doesn't have to do this. Any of this. She can reach down and pull her panties up, pull her pants up. She can zip up and button up and walk out of here and he won't stop her; she can collect Liadan and go home. She can drive that lovely slate-blue coupe of hers away and never, ever come back if that's what it takes; he'd say this to her, but --

-- but she doesn't stop. She bends over for him, and she grinds back against him, and it makes his eyes close and it makes him moan aloud. The sound is not entirely pleasure. Lukas rarely moans outright in pleasure. He gasps and he groans, he snarls at her sometimes, he holds his voice in, goes electrically silent. He doesn't moan.

Except: when she tried to break up with him. He moaned then, not aloud but inside himself, a great echoing upwelling of hurt that shook every stone of his foundation.

Except: when he broke up with her. And it was the same then, groundbreaking, devastating, an elemental cry in the very marrow of his bones that echoed for a week, for ten days, for all the time they were apart until it resolved itself into that one word he murmured, stripped-down and broken-apart, over the phone line:

prosím.

Please, I need to see you.

The sound he makes now is a distant echo of that. It fucking breaks his heart because she isn't trying to pretend that she's not frightened; she's not even trying to hold her silence. She lets him in when she begs him to stop, begs him to be gentle, and all the while she doesn't stop herself and he doesn't know how to read this, doesn't know if she does it out of desperate need or desperate fear or both, doesn't know how to deal with it. It fucking breaks his heart that she wants to beg him not to hurt her, and that she bites it back.

"Přestan, Danička," he starts to say. "Nemusíte dělat že."

Only, she's stopped already. And she turns. And he's always known her to run away. He's known her to hide under a blanket, hide behind her hands, hide behind a lie, a mask of normalcy. He's never known her to

do this. To press herself against him, as if the very object of her terror could somehow shield her from harm. For a second Lukas doesn't move. Then he wraps his arms around Danicka, presses her into him, bends his head to hers, bends to her, holds her the way he held her in front of the CVS pharmacy a month, nearly two months ago, as though the world were about to end in fire and ash.

"Je to v pořádku," he murmurs. She can't hear the words. The bassline is still pressing in on her ears. She can feel them though, the vibration of sound in his chest. "Je to v pořádku, láska."
to Danicka

[Danicka] There is no way he can know, without being told, when the intensity of his Rage behind her or his teeth in her will scare her and when it will arouse her. He has no way of knowing, if she does not tell him, that his hands are too rough or his desire too violent. If she had told him that night at the Affinia slow, please... please be gentle he might have been able to stop completely, if his control was to thin to continue without slamming her against the door. She had not told him. She had whispered encouragements, gasped adoration and pleasure, told him to give her more, give her everything, give it to her.

She can go so far away without him knowing. She can lie to his face and he will never know the difference. She can hide everything inside herself, bury it so far that she can smile anyway, and he will think: She is happy. when she is in a panic. No wonder Sam saw what he wanted to see, when she so often almost automatically gives anyone whatever she thinks they want. Whatever she thinks will keep them happy and content, keep their hands off her face and their demands out of her life.

That she tells him she's scared, or hurting, or angry -- for Danicka these are supreme expressions of trust. She trusts that he won't backhand her for telling him No, trusts that he won't hold her down and destroy her when she says Stop, trusts that he will not be angry with her if she flinches. She tries to believe all these things, even after the way they left things at the W. Even after everything, even now, she opens up, and stops herself before she can beg him not to hurt her, because she cannot stand the thought of those words from her lips hurting him.

The life and desire and vitality, the vibrance in her, was never a lie. Neither is the fear. Neither is the way she rolls her hips against him as though nothing can stop how badly she wants him. Neither, still, is the way she shudders -- in pleasure, now, with such a subtle difference between that and panic -- when he moans. The bassline of the music playing outside thuds in the walls. Thuds in the floor. Thuds in the metal bar wrapped in her hands.

But he tells her to stop, and she is already stopping, and she seeks him out like he can somehow be monster and protector at once. He has no idea that this is easy for her because her mother was monster and protector, her brother is monster and protector, Lukas is and has been and forever will be monster and protector. The cognitive dissonance is enough to drive some insane, to try and choose one or the other. Danicka flows into it. She is half-bared and vulnerable and if she were rejecting how exposed she is, if she could not accept being this open to him, she would not wrap her arms so tightly around his neck now and murmuer into his neck:

"Vezmi mě domů," come the words, and then she huffs out a strained laugh, giving a full shudder. "Nevím, kde domov je pro nás. Nezáleží na tom, kde si mě vzít. Já prostě chci jít domů. Já chci jít s tebou."

There is that: the pleading that makes her sound weak, the trust that reveals her courage, the spontaneity of who she is, saying: It does not matter. I do not care.

And what she doesn't say: I want home to be where you are.
to Wyrmbreaker

[Wyrmbreaker] If he could, Lukas would keep Danicka with him just like this, just this close in his arms, until they get to where it is they're going. Until the sun comes up. Until the day breaks and the day grows and the noon comes and they finally wake up, eat, dress --

part.

The very thought of parting is like a razor across his skin, a palpable sort of pain that makes him tighten his hold on her. God, she was so fucking beautiful tonight when she walked up the stairs that he lost track of his thoughts midsentence, and he hadn't expected to see her so soon, so suddenly; at all. This is not a goodbye, she'd said at the Skydeck, but some part of him must not have processed that, or been able to believe it. But that's not the point. The point is: she was so fucking beautiful when she walked in, and so fucking beautiful when she stood up and shook back her hair and her back was all but bare and all he could think of was

are you still mine?
will you still fuck me?

and how soon, where, how could he possibly be with her again, and inside her.

Her back is still bare. But now, bare beneath his hands, it feels vulnerable to him, exposed and fragile. The protective instinct in him is ferociously strong. He protects his pack. He protects his packmates. He protects himself, and he protects her, and it has nothing to do with courtesy or politeness or chivalry. It has something to do with claim, with what he considers his. It has everything to do with what's between him and her.

When she shudders he clasps her into him as though he might protect her from even a thought, a notion that might make her shake like that.

"Jdeme." He doesn't move for a moment. Then he presses his mouth to her temple, steps back -- just enough to pull up his pants, wincing slightly as he tucks himself away, zips up and buttons up. He helps her with her clothing as well, and he wonders where he'll take her, and he thinks briefly that there are four other people out there that got rides from one or the other, and he'll have to find them ways to get home, and

he doesn't give a fuck. He'll figure it out as he goes along. Deftly, he runs his fingers into her hair, straightens the strands where he had pulled them awry while his hands ran through and through her hair during their first, tearing kisses. His palm cups her cheek momentarily. Then Lukas draws back, takes her hand, and he doesn't care either if they're a spectacle walking out of the handicapped stall, doesn't care if there's no doubt whatsoever what they were up to in there, or what everyone assumes they were up to.

The latch on the door clicks open. He pulls it open.
to Danicka

[Danicka] Sometimes when they make love, the perspiration that beads on their skin at the heat and the touch of the other makes them stick together. They lie wrapped in one another's arms and legs afterward, trying to remember how to breathe as separate units, and when they peel apart, their skin clings. When Lukas moves his hips to draw out of her or when Danicka lifts herself off of him, his cock tends to jump and her cunt clenches down as though their very bodies and begging not to be parted.

No. No, please, not yet.

For a little while, Lukas was at her back, between her exposed flank and the rest of the world, but it wasn't the rest of the world that she was afraid of. She told him a long time ago, when Chicago was still half ice, that she did not believe he would never strike her without intent. She told him what he didn't want to hear, that in her mind one day he will lose control and he'll do to her what every other Garou she's ever met has eventually done. They haven't talked about it since then, not really.

She says she trusts him. She says she does not want to go on a walk with him, she just wants to leave the Skydeck because she does not want to give him a chance to disappoint her. She wants to love him. She wants to not be so fucking afraid. She sits beside him when she enters the common room but doesn't touch him until he takes her hand. His name is rattling around in his mind now, the name the Nation knows him by, the name he will be buried with.

Those arms tightening around her to hold her as she trembles could crush her. She knows this. She hears -breaker. She gets it. But he kisses her and steps back to cover himself. She pulls her thong back up over her hips, pulls up her jeans, is clothed again before his hands even reach out to help her. The girl can dress again with a surreal speed; Gaia only knows how many people she's left before they could even get untangled from the sheets.

She drops her eyes and gets her phone out of her purse as he's touching her hair. It takes effort not to... do something. Flinch, maybe. Or fall apart. She gives a single hard shudder and then says quietly: "Lee said she was going to the studio for the night."

Danicka looks up at him as his hand cups her cheek, putting her phone back blindly. There's a pause of consideration before she takes his hand, but she does take his hand as they leave, walking back out into the noise of the music, the crowd, the heavy bassline. The lights flash but most of the club is shadowed. Danicka scans the bar for the dark-haired man and the scarred man that came with them, tries to see the short, curvy girl she'd danced with, but none of Liadan's dates jump to the front of the throng. She doesn't care what happens to them. Well. Maybe Gina.

It's chaos, though, and looking is useless. There's a guy with his nose bleeding and people trying to get him off the dancefloor and security gesticulating and one of the bouncers has a bruised rib. Danicka sighs, but it's silent in the noise. She slides her hand further into Lukas's. This is what they get, bringing Garou to a club.

"Domov, lásku," she says, only as loudly as she has to, and follows him to the parking lot.

Outside it's quieter, even with all the mess going on behind them in the wake of Andrew's departure from the club with Gina. She has no idea if Gina and Andrew are there, or what happened to the other fellow, but she knows where Lee is, and that's enough for her. She reaches into her purse to get her keys. "I'll follow you."

[Wyrmbreaker] Times like this more than ever, Danicka reminds Lukas of a wild thing, a predator in her own right but not an apex one; something not quite timid, but wary, easily startled, easily flashing into fear or fury. It's in her shudders; it's in how she considers his hand before she takes it, as though he can't quite be trusted --

and for all she knows, he can't. He's perhaps proven to her, over and over, though never decisively, that he's untrustworthy.

It's in how she flickers from lust to fear to whatever this is, this half-surrendering plea to be with him, to go home with him, to follow him and not care where home is.

Even as she says: I'll follow you. Meaning she'll drive herself,

He doesn't mind this, though. Lukas never wanted her complete capitulation; would fear it as the first step toward a true, cringing submission. It's enough that her hand is in his, that she tightens their grip and tells him:

Domov, lásku.

They leave the club. Of their small and fragmentary party of six, they're the only ones that remain. Lee left, unhappy, stressed by the day, pawed at by a lupus. Madoc left, perhaps a little dissatisfied, perhaps overwhelmed with the noise. Gina and aforementioned lupus started a goddamn fight and ran away. Security's still cleaning up the mess, but the humans have already forgotten it. Drinks are plentiful and memories are short on the dance floor.

Lukas doesn't lead her through it. They skirt the edges, close to the wall where some men loiter in ones and twos, a drink in hand, their eyelids half-closed, their eyes predatory on the glistening bodies of the girls on the floor; where some couples are hanging out or making out; where groups of friends are shouting at each other, loud because they have to be in order to be heard, loud because they want to be, loud because they're happy. They pass them all, and then the doors are before them, and they exist and more people are still lining up to get in, and the night air is startlingly cool tonight, bracing and fresh.

Before they reach their cars, they part. The lights of the M3 flash as he unlocks the doors. She said she'll follow him. Where? he wonders; he thinks of his narrow bed in the Brotherhood, neighbors on all sides. He thinks of yet another anonymous hotel room, motel room. He thinks of her bed, her room, her apartment drenched and infused with the undefinable, undeniable traceries of her, and he thinks of her saying Lee is at the studio tonight, and he says -- not because he intends to lose her in traffic, but just so she knows, "Váš byt. Oukej?"

He's standing in the vee of the opened driver's door, waiting to sink into the car's front seat.

[Danicka] Holding his hand and walking through the club with him to the exit, Danicka is not shaking. She does not smell of fear or look pale and wan, her eyes are not wide and unblinking. She settles, and her hand is arm in his, as they leave the nightclub. He reads her hesitation to take his hand initially as wariness of him. And maybe it is. They walk out, and whatever caused her to hold back for a moment is left behind as surely as the handicapped stall. Just another one. They've gone to bathrooms like this three times; they've only ever fucked there once.

And she'd been so happy, on the way out of the restaurant that he called her to because of its name and her answer to a question, because the restaurant did not make him think of her but she makes him think of Spring. She'd been so happy to walk with him in the rain, had looked beautiful in the rain, had held his hand then, too.

In the parking lot she decides they'll take their own cars. Neither the BMW nor the Infiniti need to stay on the Mile all night, to end up vandalized, stolen, or ticketed. This may be a nicer area than Cabrini-Green, but it's close, and it's still Chicago. As he opens his door and she gets out her keys to walk over to her own car half an aisle over, she looks back and sees him standing there.

Her apartment.

Danicka is still for a moment, then -- inexplicably -- she both smiles and winces at once, and gives him a nod. "Oukej," she tells him, and her car beeps at her as she unlocks the doors.

This time they don't try to lose one another. They don't race. And when they get to Kingsbury Plaza, she parks underground and he parks across the street, along the street. He can't see her get out of her car, grabbing her small purse and locking the doors behind her as she walks through the parking garage towards the elevator. Her hair swings across her shoulderblades; her heels tap on the concrete floor. He doesn't see her again until she appears in the lobby, exiting the elevator and walking to the front door to let him in, to bring her with her.

This is not the first time they've ridden in the elevator together to go up to her place, but the last time it happened, she kissed him and he left. This time, she's quiet on the way up and she's quiet in the hallway, quiet as she unlocks her door and brings him inside. Their conversations are not for the silences of the elevator, the emptiness in the sconce-lit hall.

He locks her door, or she locks it after he enters. The night gleams in through the expansive windows at the other end of the apartment, visible even from where they stand. Danicka looks up at him, and instead of kissing him, or suggesting they go shower to get the sweat of dancing and arousal and whatever else off of their skin, she takes a breath.

"Jsem tak líto," she says, sighing the words out. Her brow is furrowed, with concern or some other ache that sounds and seems like concern.

[Wyrmbreaker] When the door shuts behind him, Lukas leans back against it to pull his shoes off, one and then the other. They drop to the floor with soft thumps. It's as he's returning his left foot to the floor that she apologizes, with that frown that was close to concern but not quite the same as concern sketched over her brow.

And he looks at her for a moment, searchingly, his clear eyes flickering over her face, her eyes, her mouth. A moment later he straightens, lifting his weight from the door, coming closer to her.

"Nemusíte se omluvit za nic." It's on Lukas's mind to touch her face, and perhaps she can read that: a flicker of a thought in his eyes, like a comet in the sky. It passes. He glances down, finds her hand instead, folds it in his. "Není nic omluvit pro."

A moment's pause before he steps forward, tugging her gently with him.

"Vezmi mě k tvůj posteli. Ukaž mi co jste čtení."

[Danicka] "Ne," Danicka protests, cutting herself off before the word is completely past her lips. But she works herself out of his hands. She does not want to be tugged anywhere right now, and she -- apparently -- does not want it to be left at an apology. "Don't tell me it doesn't mean anything. I know I don't have to."

Her family name is one letter from the word for 'must'. Lukas's family name has a rather grand history, a pedigree known to both man and Garou. Danicka's family name has a different connotation, a different purpose, a different renown. Lukas may not know it. She does. She was raised with it, and by it, and to become it.

She is not angry, but she is insistent, as though it is incredibly important to her that he not brush this aside. As though, to begin with, she feels that it is being brushed aside.

[Wyrmbreaker] So Lukas stops. And he turns. And neither of them have turned on any lights, and the apartment is awash in darkness, the only light there is refracting from the city outside. Her front door is too heavy, too expensive, too well-sealed to leak light around the edges.

They've spent all night in the dark, laser and neon-lit reaches of SmartBar, though, and before and after that, driving on the city's streets by night. His eyes adjust quickly; find hers. He faces her side-on, and then turns further; faces her fully.

"Okay," he says quietly. "Tell me why you're sorry."

[Danicka] The last brightness either of them knew was in the Brotherhood's common room when she showed up to get Liadan. After that it was shadow and the multicolored lights on the street and from the city as they drove, the shadow and multicolored lights of SmartBar, the lonely interior lights of their individual cars as they came back here. Home, she'd said. This is not home for them, because he doesn't live here, and he can't live here. This is the closest they really have, at least for tonight.

Her apartment is lit to the same level as the bar, or the streets. Everything is dim color and vast shadow, taking the color her hair away and turning them both into wraiths. She looks up at him, her shoes still on -- they require unbuckling -- and her eyes are earnest in a way they almost never are, because she almost never is. He sees it because this is her home, and he is her m--

man.

And there is something wildly territorial in her that cannot protect what is hers with fang and claw, but that does not mean she will not protect it. "I wish I was stronger," she finally says, haltingly, as though now that she's here and trying to say it aloud she's not even completely sure what she wants to say. "I hate... being afraid, so much."

[Wyrmbreaker] Lukas's forehead crinkles at that, pulling into a frown that unfolds as slowly as some of his smiles. It's not anger; it's something closer to ache. "Miláčka, přál bych si byl jsem méně hrůza. Nebo více citlivější na vaše reakce. Nebo ..."

A pause for a moment; he considers his words.

"Přál bych si, abys nebyla tak bojí mě, taky. Ale není to všechno tvoje chyba." This is something different, a shade distinct from what he said a moment ago. Another short pause. He adds, gently, "Neznamená to však bolelo mě tolik jako tebe obávat se."

[Danicka] As he has heard her do before, Danicka begins slipping between languages, first: "To není fér k vám," as she reaches up and presses her hands against her face, like she wants to scrub at her cheeks, then: "Když se mě vystrašit, myslím, že asi Sam, ani můj bratr, ani..."

Which is where she drops from his native tongue, her father's tongue, the language that keeps them separate from the other Garou and Kin in the city who speak Russian or French. She's seen Sampson's wives conversing in a corner together, cooing to their children in a language she can't even name. She's listened to Martin and Kate purring to one another in French. She knows what it is like for others, when she and Lukas descend into Czech in their presence, and the secrecy and privacy of it is vital to her but he tells her it's rude and thinking of this, even in her own home, she lets it go for a moment.

"I wish I didn't."

Her voice is very quiet when she says that, her eyes dropping to the center of his chest. "You just... make me wish that I was better than I am. My father was stronger than I am but she broke him so many times, and I can't..."

Her hands slide to cover her face. She breathes out slowly against her palms. "Jste jen bude zhoršovat," she murmurs, half muffled, and then lifts her face to look at him, whispering: "Won't you?" Danicka shakes her head. "I don't know if I'm going to get strong enough. And I want to stay. I don't...

"Nechci vidět den, kdy jsem se musí nechat. Nechci se nechat."

[Wyrmbreaker] Lukas's frown only deepens as Danicka speaks. Abruptly he turns away, exhaling something like a sigh. His arms fold across his chest, hands tucking under his biceps. He leans against the wall of the short hallway between front door and living room, with her bedroom opening to one side and the kitchen to the other.

And he looks out her vast panes of glass for a moment, looking at the city, the river, the lake.

"Proč mučení sami přemýšlet o tom tento?" It comes out a little more clipped, a little more angry than he'd intended. "Yes, you're right. Very likely I'll get worse. Very likely I'll grow stronger and angrier. I'll learn greater control, but very likely it'll only make me colder. I'll turn into a monster -- more of a monster than I already am -- and very possibly one day you won't be able to stand it anymore, and you'll leave me.

"Or I'll die first in some battle.
"Or you'll get cornered by a Spiral.
"Or, for all we know, one of us will flip our fucking car going 120 on the freeway, roll into oncoming traffic and get pulverized by an 18-wheeler.

"What does it matter, Danička?" He could be snarling this; but he's not. He sounds exasperated, frustrated, a little helpless. "You tell me you don't want to leave, but you say it like you're already thinking of leaving. Why would you hedge your bets against a future that isn't written yet?"

A beat of pause. He's assuming again; leaping to conclusions. He closes his eyes and drops the back of his head against the wall, takes a breath. Lowers his head again, looks at her.

"Is that what you're doing? Why are you telling me this?" One of his hands slips free, makes a small, meaningless gesture. "What are you trying to say to me, Danička?"

[Danicka] She's quiet for awhile, when he finishes. As he's speaking, she stands where she is, still in the entryway, still in her barely-there shirt and her heels, her purse still hanging from one wrist. Her earrings are simple but large hoops. He calls himself a monster, mentions battle and a Spiral, but she only flinches when he suggests that one or both of them might die in a car wreck not terribly different from the one that totaled her last -- her first -- car. She crosses her arms over his chest when he asks her what it matters; her face visibly and immediately becomes a mask.

And he asks her, essentially, if she wants to leave him. That's the question beneath the exasperation, the self-protective assumptions, the attempt to plan even when he's blinded by uncertainty, the urge to analyze what he can see of the battlefield even when he knows it's just a fraction. At least, that's how she sees him. She stands there and waits, arms crossed with hands resting on her upper arms, fingers elegantly draped.

Her back is straighter than it was a moment ago. And despite the mask, it's actually not an attempt to hide. It's just her, trying to control how viciously angry she is. When she speaks, she looks calm. Her voice is level. But the fact that she is suddenly furious infuses every word.

"When you complain that I never tell you things, is it just leverage to use in an argument?" she asks, her brows pulling together. "Because up til now I thought... maybe it meant you wanted me to talk to you about what I'm thinking and how I'm feeling. But that's the second time tonight you've tried to shut me down and get me to stop talking about what's on my mind. So do you want me to talk to you, or should I just stop worrying my pretty little fucking head about this shit?"

[Wyrmbreaker] "I want you to talk to me," he replies immediately, close on the heels of her words.

A beat later, "I want to understand what you're trying to say to me, Danička."

[Danicka] For a moment, she stays quiet, and stands firm. Her relaxation is minute and almost imperceptible, at least in terms of the physical manifestation of it. Her back is still straight but not so iron-hard, her shoulders faintly rounded now, her exhale audible but still brief and still quiet. "Promiň, lásko," she murmurs, lifting one hand and rubbing the side of her index finger against her eyebrow.

Her hand drops, and she looks at him.

"If I wanted to leave you, Lukáš, I would have left you," she says, as simply and as clearly as she can, without anger, without exasperation. The words are as pared down as she can make them. Her anger, as always, was short-lived. Fierce, sudden, but now gone. "If I did not want badly to be with you, instead of just resigning myself to being chained to an Ahroun, I wouldn't try to talk to you about all this."

She leans against the opposite wall and lifts one foot, unbuckling her heel and slipping it off her foot. She wiggles her toes, repeats the motion with her other foot until her bare feet are flat against the carpet. She exhales as she does this, a sigh of dawning comfort. "I feel... guilty, and ashamed, when I'm scared of you, because half the time there's a half-dozen other faces and voices going through my mind that aren't you. I'm frustrated. I'm sick of enjoying you and wanting you and suddenly having a goddamn panic attack because I think of something else!"

Her voice raises near the end, as though 'frustrated' and 'sick' don't begin to come close to the actual intensity she feels. Danicka pauses there, taking a breath and letting it out steadily. She closes her eyes, tilting her head back, waiting for the calm to come back. It does. It always does. And when it does, she opens her eyes again and finds his eyes.

"And now I'm pissed at you for trying to tell me that it doesn't matter, or acting like I shouldn't be thinking about the future because there's a chance there might not be one. I'm not a fucking child, Lukáš, and I'm not telling you this to try and figure out a way to change it all, or asking you to tell me what's going to happen. I'd say 'you asked', but you only asked because I wouldn't let you drop it. I'm so fucking... angry at you. I'm angry that after the solstice everything went to shit because it's so goddamn easy for you to see me as a liar and whore and a fickle fucking bitch who doesn't -- and never really did -- want you!"

The calm always comes back. It just doesn't always last.

[Wyrmbreaker] That silence after she speaks of 'frustrated' and 'sick' doesn't last the full duration she might've intended. After a quiet he interjects -- quietly -- "I do want you to talk to me. It's just that when you do, and when you tell me about things that upset you, I want to do something about it.

"It's when I can't that I get frustrated, myself."

And then she's opening her eyes, finding his; they look at each other; she riles herself from calm to anger again, and this is new too. This is as new as her being angry at him at all, as new as her daring to show it. It's as new -- not to this relationship per se, but to Lukas, period, ever since he stopped being Lukas Kvasnicka and became Lukas Wyrmbreaker -- as withstanding her anger without immediate and coldblooded retaliation is to him.

But that's what he does. He listens, and once or twice a frown flashes across his brow, and at the end he drops his brow against the heel of his hand briefly.

Raises it.

"I don't see you as a liar. Or a whore. Or a fickle bitch. This is a fine line to draw, Danička, but I was angry at you because I thought you had lied to me. And I was angry because I thought you were, even then, trying to excuse it.

"I wasn't angry because I thought you might do it again."

[Danicka] "You said you didn't know why you were surprised," she responds flatly, her eyes on him and refusing to deviate. "And even later, you said you weren't anything more than a one night stand to me."

It's no more than a beat, then. There's only a couple of feet between them, empty air and dead space and thick silence. "The last time I felt like you trusted me or believed in me at all was at the bonfire, and it sucks feeling like I've lost that because I told you the truth. And it's worse feeling like you just want to kick it under the rug now and never think about it again."

[Wyrmbreaker] Abruptly -- cornered -- Lukas loses his temper. "What the fuck do you want me to do, Danička? Apologize again? Explain that I say shit in anger that I don't mean later -- again? What? Christ, I am so tired of fighting with you."

[Danicka] "I want you to grow up and stop saying shit you don't mean just because you're pissed off!" she snaps back. "It doesn't stop making me feel like shit when you calm down and I have spent enough of my life listening to the 'I didn't mean it, I was just angry' excuse."

[Wyrmbreaker] "And I want you to quit making me feel like shit for being angry," he shoots right back, "when I had every right."

[Danicka] "Getting angry doesn't give you the right to hurt me!"

She has never spoken to him like this. She has never smacked the wall beside her in fury that has no outlet other than violence. Yelled, yes. Shrieked, at least once. Pleaded. Snapped. She has never roared quite like she does when she says that, color in her cheeks.

[Wyrmbreaker] "I could say the same!" This time he shouts.

[Danicka] That stops her. Not dead in her tracks, blood draining from her face, eyes going wide, body freezing in place so she doesn't risk movement and his wrath. She just stops before she throws something back at him. Maybe she doesn't have anything to throw back at him in response to that. Danicka sighs, dropping her head and putting the heels of her hands to her temples.

She doesn't move, or rub her forehead like that. She just closes her eyes, facing the floor, waiting for her heart to slow down a little. Some part of her is still insisting that she is going to get killed for this, that he won't used a Gift but a talen to heal her but it'll all go the same, otherwise. She tries to tell that part of her to just shut the fuck up for once. She's so tired of listening to it.

She's so tired of fighting with him.

"Tell me," she says quietly, in something that could be mistaken for defeat but is sort of a slow, desperate struggle to craw back out of some pit, scale back up the side of some cliff, as though every syllable is a hand reaching up, grasping the rope, and hauling their combined weight and the weight of their histories up with her, "how I've hurt you, so I can stop."

[Wyrmbreaker] In the time that Danicka stops, stops and lowers her head and brings her hands to her temples, Lukas draws up short, too. He draws a short breath. Lets it go.

When she speaks at last, he slowly sinks against the wall again. He hadn't even realized he'd come off the wall, that he'd turned to face her, turned on her. He rolls back until both his shoulderblades rest again the cool plaster, and now he's side-on to her, giving her his profile, the cut of his chest and abdomen under his button-up, his slouched stance, when usually he stands so straight and self-possessed.

"You already have stopped," he says, quieter now; quiet. "I just meant -- I was dredging up that shit with Ilari Martin again. You were ... hurt because you thought that was it, or angry because of what I did, or ...

"What you did hurt me to find out, even six months after the fact. I don't even know why. Every time I think of it again I come up with new reasons to be hurt. Because I felt lied to and betrayed. Because I thought you were trying to excuse it. Because you didn't tell me earlier. Because you told me at all. Because through all your apologies I never got the sense that you thought you might've been wrong. I admit fault when I see it, Danička. You just apologize and move on. There's a difference."

Lukas stops. There's no use continuing that thread; he'll just get angry again. He lets it go.

"But whatever else," he adds, "this much is true: that's the only time I can readily remember that you've hurt me out of anything but pure self-defense."

[Danicka] It's some time before she answers, and she takes a deep breath before doing so. At least now she doesn't sound angry. She just sounds tired. A little flat.

"Lukáš, if I thought I was wrong to fuck him, I would have admitted fault. And I haven't, and won't, apologize for doing so. We weren't together. I wasn't yours. If you want to know exactly why I let go of the very idea of being loyal to you, it was because you asked me after the first time we came together how many more times we'd fuck before I left you."

Her voice is quiet. Her eyes, strangely, are soft on him. "I thought you went to that motel with me because you wanted to fuck. When you held onto me after I thought you didn't want to let go. And when you said that, I thought you wanted me to leave you. You didn't even leave room for the chance that I might have wanted to stay with you. Or be with you. I didn't... I didn't fuck him to punish you or hurt you, I just wanted not to miss you."

Before he can answer, interject, lose his temper, she takes a sharp, rapid breath and goes on: "It was a long time ago. But if I thought I had broken a promise to you, or lied to you, I would admit it. And if I didn't care about you, I would tell you whatever the fuck I thought you wanted to hear, whether it's true or not. What I'm sorry for is all the time we spent trying to push each other away or not care about one another.

"I probably shouldn't have even told you. Or at least not as much as I did. I just... I suddenly felt like I could tell you anything and it would be okay."

She sounds like she's about to cry, but she doesn't. She sounds like she feels betrayed, but not by him. She sounds like she wants to laugh, but not because she's happy.

[Wyrmbreaker] As Danicka begins to speak, Lukas turns his head to look at her once, a flicker of brilliant pale, the color of his eyes lost to the dark. By the time she gets to we weren't together; I wasn't yours he looks away again. And he bends his knees, slides down the wall without preamble, unhurriedly. He folds in on himself until he's sitting at the base of the wall, his knees drawn up, his back rounded, and he doesn't look at her.

When she gets to I thought you wanted me to leave you, Lukas doesn't lose his temper. He doesn't even quite answer, though he does interrupt.

If this could be called an interruption: the lacing of his fingers together, the press of his thumbs to his temples, the arch of his index fingers over his brow. He closes his eyes and he doesn't raise his voice; he doesn't try to shout her down. He's barely audible.

"Jak jsi mohl myslet že o mně?"

It's an echo of something she's said to him, not so long ago. It doesn't matter if she goes on or if she stops. He's caught in his own silence for a while, the darkness behind his eyelids. They're both caught in their own misery, a new impregnable shell, a stone egg within themselves.

There's just enough light to see the corners of his jaw flex when he swallows. This is no louder: "Vy, kteří vždy mě viděl tak jasně."

[Danicka] The last thing she expects is for him to sink down like that. Danicka watches him with something like wariness, not fear that he's going to lunge and strike but that something both inevitable and apocalyptic is happening. Her breath hitches slightly, silently, as he folds downward. It is a controlled collapse, as natural and gradual as leaves curling or flowers withdrawing into themselves after nightfall. Briefly, poetically, nonsensically, it makes her think of death.

It takes effort, more than she's felt for a very long time, not to go to him and wrap her arms around him. At this point, she thinks he might push her away.

Her eyelids flick closed at the thought, open again.

"Mohl byste mi ať vás drží?" she asks quietly.

[Wyrmbreaker] If she'd said it aloud, her fear that he might push her away, he would've said again:

how could you think that of me?

But she doesn't say it aloud. There's a beat of silence after she finishes, and he doesn't open his eyes, and he doesn't look up, and she's so quiet and he's so quiet and her apartment is so quiet that he swears he can hear the closure of her eyelids, the tiny click her blink makes in the darkness.

Lukas's answer is nonverbal. He only nods, once.

[Danicka] What she sees as he sits there, knees bent and back curled, is that he's hurt -- or angry -- because she thought that he might not want her, that she did not understand him well enough then to know that one of the only reasons he didn't ask her to stay was because he wouldn't ask only to be told No, lay himself on the line only to be kicked to the side. Like Sam.

Would you have rejected me?

But they were never really talking about Sam.

What she knows is that she is still hurt that he could think that she might not want him, except that she told him flat-out that she didn't think she wanted his devotion, or his fidelity. She told him she didn't care if he trusted her. She told him (Chci tě, Lukášek, a úst ochutnávky, jako pomeranče.) she was capable of caring, of having certain people who mattered a little more than others. She told him she was capable of loyalty. Never said love.

Told him, outside a bar where she was being ogled and casually touched by men not him, that she has loved one person in her life. She doesn't remember telling him that. She can't explain that on the waterfront or in any number of beds or even now she could never have told him I could love you because she would have refused to put herself out there. She can't explain that before she fell in love with him, she did not think she was capable of it.

She can't explain: I'm worried that I'm doing it wrong. His slow sink to the ground and the way he speaks now strikes a chord in her, confirming and damning and terrifying, that as badly as she wants to be good at this one goddamn thing, she might be fucking it up. Well. She could explain all this to him, but sometimes it doesn't even occur to her to tell him things he does not know otherwise, or does not ask for.

Danicka steps away from the door and moves onto her knees next to him. She does not sit on her heels but wraps her arms around his shoulders, immediately and unapologetically drawing his head towards her shoulder. It's half comfort. It's half closeness. "Nevím, jestli jsem přání jsme vyrůstali spolu," she murmurs across the top of his hair, looking at the windows down the hall and through the living room rather than down at his scalp. "Ale kéž bych mohl napravit způsoby jsme zranil sebe."

[Wyrmbreaker] There's no hesitation. Lukas doesn't resist; he doesn't pretend at resistance.

He turns his face to her even as she's kneeling behind him. Immediately, fiercely, presses his brow to the lee of her shoulder, his face to her collarbone and her upper chest. She smells like sweat, like dancing, like neon and lasers, like Danicka. His hands cover her shoulder, grip at her bicep; his strength can be terrifying, and he grasps at her like he were drowning, sinking away from the light and the surface; as though she were a lifeline. The breath he draws is a half-drowned heave of air.

Then he wraps the arm nearer her back and around her shoulders, his hand cupping the nape of her neck. It's a returned embrace that would be awkward if it weren't so absolute, so thoughtless, so unashamed. And like this, eyes closed, he holds her for some time, saying nothing.

Her body is thin and breakable compared to his, narrow and fragile; he could snap her neck like this. She wouldn't have a chance. He'd crush her if he lay atop her for any time. She's far too weak to be

protecting him like this. Supporting him like this, lending him what strength is in her. But that's exactly what this is, unmistakably.

"Měla jsem strach a odhalit jak moc chtěl jsem tě." Eventually he does speak, half-muffled into the space between their bodies. "Myslel jsem že ty byste mi rozdrtit."

(It was self-preservation, you see.)

"Kéž by jsi měl vidět skrz moje předstírání. Přál bych musel si abych měl odvahu ukázat ty."

[Danicka] He twists to hold her as she wraps her arms around him, tips her head forward until her hair falls in a curtain on either side of his face. Her hair has grown in the last six months, kept trimmed at the ends but otherwise getting closer to the length it was when she was fourteen than she has let it get in the intervening eleven years. The anniversary of her mother's death is coming up. She doesn't think to connect the length of her hair with the fact that it's July now. There have been other things, more pressing and more unfamiliar, on her mind.

Lukas comes to her like he's seeking succor, comfort, protection as much as he is seeking to hold her, keep her, protect her. If she did not love him he would still be her guardian. If she did not love him, he would still protect her... perhaps above all others, even then. If she did not love him, he would not be in her home, she would not ask to hold him as though afraid he might not want her to after everything they've put each other.

Bitterness and recriminations. Resentment and regrets.

She draws her hand to the back of his head as he touches her neck, and she doesn't flinch. The strength in his hand is intuited as warmth, and she doesn't think about what his name is, what it means, what he could do to her. She thinks of what he has. And testing that, finds only purity. Her eyes close as she bows her head, and she sighs.

A half-dozen things wash through her then, some of them unexpected. Anger at a man who isn't with them anymore, a pang of guilt, a sense of loss. The tremor of a decision, the reminder of something she already knows. A surge, a wave, a sudden rise of tenderness that she does not know what to do with because it is terribly, frighteningly unfamiliar to her.

So her arms tighten around him, and she kisses the top of his head, breathes in the scent of his hair. "Bál jsem se z jak moc jsem chtěla vás. Myslel jsem, že byste mi ublížil." Different from what he said, a little. Nothing he does not know, necessarily. But she knew, even as he spoke into her shoulder, that he had once been afraid, and she knows why.

I thought you would take everything, and give nothing back.

Danicka breathes in deeply again, exhales slowly, and nuzzles her way down the side of his head to press her lips against his temple. "Dokonce i když jsem vás viděl jasně, já bych stále byl strach ze ztráty sám na vás," she whispers. Confesses.

"Můj život je tak nový, aby mě. Je mi líto, moje láska. Myslel jsem, že byste ji ukrást."

[Wyrmbreaker] To the kiss, he responds like a plant moving toward light, blindly, instinctively. He raises his head, turns. He finds her face with his, her mouth with his. It's not really a kiss, this; just a parting of his lips over hers, a mingling of breath.

They confide in one another. They confess to one another. Their sins; their wishes and their hopes, too. The last thing, the only thing to be trapped still in pandora's box was hope. Eden was lost for knowledge. Her mother fucked her and her brother up for love, or at least for devotion. The road to hell.

His hand closing on her thin arm, the back of her neck. His fingers pulling at her skin, and now he does kiss her, sudden as a breaking storm, something closer to need than lust. It grows and then it dissipates. It's not quite consecration. It's not quite absolution. It's something, though.

His brow to hers, he rests a moment.

"Je to v pořádku," he murmurs. "Je to v pořádku nyní."

[Danicka] The first time he came into this apartment, he slept on the couch and she was angry with him in the morning both for how he had behaved the night before and the fact that he had not come into her room and crawled into her bed. The closed door between him and her bedroom had seemed, to him, its own rejection. He hadn't known what to do, and did not know her well enough even then to know that Danicka prizes privacy, a diamond-like gift. He had not known she was only trying to show him respect. She had not known he was doing the same, and they'd slept apart.

The first time they fucked, they had not known how to handle the fact that they had been making love, and she didn't want to stay and give him the idea that he owned her and he didn't want to ask her to stay only to be told no, ideals of loyalty be damned. He laid in bed naked and fighting to stay awake because he could not tolerate falling asleep with her there and waking to find her gone. She dressed, and did something she never did, not unless her escape depended on it, and kissed his mouth before she walked out the door. He had waited til the door closed behind her. She had gone home. And they slept apart.

No matter what, there is going to come that hour when they have to part. Neither of them has a job. But there's the war, and the pack, and she has a roommate who has to come home sometime, and even though all these truths exist and are inescapable, when Lukas kisses her like that -- and like that -- all she can think of is the warmth of his hands on her exposed skin, the protective walls of her apartment, the isolating height of the building, the privacy granted them by the dark.

She reaches back, draws his fingers to the ties of her shirt.

And instead of answering him, she cups her hands around his face and kisses him again, not like a storm or petals parting but deep and slow as a wave curling towards shore, tugged by the primordial force of the same moon that pulls at Lukas... especially now, with the moon so fucking full, so fucking high, so fucking bright in the sky. It will occur to her later that she had a shouting match with an Ahroun on a full or near-full moon and survived without a mark on her. It may make her think of what he said about growing colder with greater control. It may make her think of hundreds of long-past full moons she remembers.

Or maybe she won't think of it at all. Maybe all she'll think of is the way they kissed.

"Potřebuji tě," she gasps against his mouth. "Bože, Lukáš, vezmi mě do postele."

[Wyrmbreaker] The way they kissed.

Again and again it comes back to this. Before anything else, any of the other small and half-hidden signs of affection, devotion, love they've given one another; the words whispered in their beds and the words pulled half-agonized out of their depths -- before all that, there was

the way she kissed him, and he kissed her, that first night when he put her hand on his belt and she drew away and wrapped her arms around him and climbed him like a tree.

There's an echo of that still, here, when she puts her hands on his face. He hasn't shaven in hours, perhaps a day or more; there's stubble on his jaw, and it masks to some degree the flexion of the masseter in his cheek, the shift in the hinge of his jaw, when his mouth opens over hers. She's drawing his hand to the ties of her shirt and the angle is awkward so he pulls back, puts his arm around her the right way, finds the ties himself, and there's four of them, and he tugs them loose one by one and as the ties start to slip out of their eyes he shifts, turning, moves onto his knees, raises her to hers, and then to her feet.

By necessity, the kiss parts. He stays where he is a moment, his fingers quick and deft, but impatient, on her shoes. He gets the straps undone and leaves her to kick them off, because then he's standing and his arms come around her and he scoops her up one-armed, clasps her against his body and carries her down the short dark hallway to the master suite.

The door swings inward. Still no curtains on her windows. The moon's approaching full again; its light casts through the glass and onto the floor, oblong rectangles, and her nearly-full bookshelf carries a whiff of his childhood home, a scent he recalls from a very long time ago mingled amidst with the more recently familiar scents of her, her, her.

Her bedroom. He hasn't kept track, but he has not been here often. It's a privilege, not a right. He's her guardian, not her mate, and even were he her mate, this would remain so -- not because he wouldn't own all that she owns, then, but because the invitation would be hers alone to give or rescind, and the invitation would make all the difference.

The ties on her shirt have slipped almost all the way undone. When he sets her on her bed her shirt sags from her body, and then he snatches it off her body with one hand, leaves it a rag on the floor. He's wanted her since the bathroom, since the race on the roads, since the moment she walked into the Brotherhood, since before that. His eyes are gleaming. He undoes her jeans

(again)

and then he tugs at them, strips them off from her ankles, leaves them puddled on the floor too. Her panties he leaves on for a moment; his hands go to the buttons of his shirt, parting the halves swiftly as a zipper as his fingers work their way down.

[Danicka] Ties undone the shirt falls away without resistance, little more than a rag with a few strings across her back to begin with and not requiring a wiggle of her arms or shrug of her shoulders to crumple between their bodies and be left on the floor of the entryway. She doesn't stop kissing him, doesn't care that his stubble is scraping her chin and her lips and doesn't think that he is going to bite her lips, her tongue, taste her blood tonight. She runs her fingers over his face, makes some noise of aching demand against his mouth, pressing her hips against his chest, his side, whatever part of his body presents itself when she moves to him.

Danicka stands, half-bare and laughing softly, breathily, when his hands graze over her ankles and find her bare, find nothing but flesh and the hems of her jeans. She tugs at him, pulls him up, lets out a rapid sigh of relief when he picks her up finally and takes her into her room. There have been changes; there's a desk now, purchased the day he saw her and Lee for tapas, delivered some time after that. There's all three of her computers atop the blondewood surface, one screen dark and two laptops closed.

One of the shelves between the windows, roughly at eye level, has been emptied of his books and there are frames there, photographs, each one more shadowed and indistinct than the rest and ignored now because after the short hallway there is her bed and her thick, pale green comforter and the near-white sheets and the smell of her in the linen, in the closets, in the bathroom as they pass. Because of that hallway her room is even more like a den, a dark and private place that he comes because he's invited and never at any other time.

He has been here often enough to know the bed's placement even in pitch darkness. The moonlight would keep him from being blind but Danicka kisses him with every step, makes a muffled noise against his mouth that could be a word, or his name, or Prosím. When he sets her on her bed her hands go to his shirt, start tearing buttons from their eyes as he unfastens her jeans again. She folds backward on the bed, unwinding her legs from underneath her so he can pull them off, his shirt half-undone, her body almost completely bared.

She may as well be naked. That purple thong is mostly transparent, a light thatch of hair barely visible through the chiffon, the fabric so soft it's like a whisper. She doesn't peel them off. She gets on her knees again and works on his jeans as he undoes his shirt, both of them wordless for now, her mouth yearning for his again, until she pushes denim and cotton off his hips, shoving them downward as he lets his shirt fall. Her hands go to his waist, her hair falls around her face, her lips wrap around his cock as she takes him, suddenly and without warning or request, as far into her mouth as she can.

[Wyrmbreaker] The buttons of his shirt aren't even half undone by the time Danicka has his jeans unbuttoned and unzipped; he's just finishing by the time she's pushed his jeans off his hips, and then his boxer briefs. The tail of his shirt is in his hands and he forgets to drop it, forgets to open his hands, forgets everything, when she leans down, goes to what would be her hands and knees atop her mattress if she weren't holding him instead, if her hands weren't burning brands into his hips, his waist, the skin of his back.

Lukas lets his head fall back. Or rather, his head simply falls back; there's no thought to this, no resistance or decision or possibility of such. His eyes close and he sucks a breath through his teeth, his chest rising swiftly, and as she takes him deeper he lets it back out, a ragged exhalation on the edge of a shudder.

Slower now, dream-slow, his attention firmly caught elsewhere, he drops the tail of his shirt, undoes the cuffs, peels it from his shoulders and lets it drop.

Now he's naked, his pants pooled around his ankles, and she's all but naked, and her back is an uninterrupted sleekness, and the moonlight strips her of her coloration, leaves her blue-pale, makes her look cool as marble, deceptively cool as a desert by night. He pushes his hands into her hair, lifts the length and the weight in his fingers, pushes it back over her shoulders, strokes it back over and over and he's watching her now, watching her suck his cock, and his breathing is shallow, oft-interrupted, pausing when she licks him there, hitching when she sucks him like that, rushing out in a soft groan when she stops, when she starts, when she takes him deep.

"Baby ... "

It's a murmur, a breath. His eyes shut momentariily; his hands cradle her head; his own falls back again and he shivers through a breath. Open again: the moonlight doesn't strip his eyes of their color. They're pale and blue as they ever are. He strokes her hair back from her brow, tenderly, tenderly, and then he folds over her, bends over her and kisses her back. His hands smooth down her sides, grip at her hips, drag back up.

"Zapněte o tvůj opěradlo, kotě. Roztáhni nohy." He's urging her to do just this with his hands, gently. "Dovolte abych vás chuť."

[Danicka] For a moment, when Lukas bends to kiss her back, they intertwine in a way both awkward and natural. His spine bends skyward as his lips tattoo heat into her skin, and she tightens her grip on his hips. If he stepped away -- as if he could step away -- she would lose her balance completely. His shirt falls, forgotten like the rest of their clothes, like the rest of their night. It's a cruelty towards the world that they share; they just stop caring. It's dark. And they're alone.

Interminable seconds tick forward and become elongated minutes as Lukas tries to control his breathing, as he moans quietly because she slows her mouth on his skin, as he pushes his fingers deeper into her hair because she flicks her tongue over him. She has never leaned over him and kissed a slow trail from his neck to his cock, has never lingered to lick his hip, does not... tease him. When she loves him like this it's always out of nowhere, out of desire, out of whatever vagaries of longing and loss make up the pathways of her lust for him.

Her bed is an island in the dark, a pale-colored haven amidst all the shadow and uncertainty, and though he knows there will be miniscule rainbows cast over the bedspread come morning thanks to the prism in her window, knows that the light-colored wood and walls will pick up the sunlight and brighten everything around him, right now the world is compressed into the most immediate sensations, the most narrowed environment.

Which is the darkness that they barely see one another in. Which is the heat and humidity of her mouth. Which is the sound of her moaning when he calls her

Baby

like that. Which is the slow, reluctant withdrawal of her lips if not her adoration, as her eyes open and she pulls back, pulls herself up the bed, pulls away from him.

She unfolds her legs but does not drape them over the edge of the bed or wrap them around his thighs. She keeps moving up the bed, her eyes on him in the sort of dare she's never risked before. Danicka pulls her legs out of his reach, drags herself towards the headboard, the challenge in the way she looks at him tempered with an inevitable wariness.

[Wyrmbreaker] Withdrawing like that, retreating slowly with a challenge in her eyes, reminds Lukas of the night of the solstice and the way she'd fled from him without ever really fleeing; lured him, led him, took him deep into the woods and down into the lightless deep, past the facade of humanity, past the layers of courtesy and calculation, past the core of honor. Down, down, into the depths of himself where she waited for him, green-eyed and calculating in her own right, dangerous, a hunter herself.

He watches Danicka recede from him, and then he steps out of what's left of his clothes. It's possible he doesn't even realize he reaches for himself until his fingers wrap around his cock and his eyes flicker shut and he draws a short breath because she's left him so wet, so hot, so hard for her. Watching her, he strokes himself at the foot of her bed, watches her move, watches her body moving, watches the sleek muscles turning under her flawless skin, the rounded press of her shoulder joint, the folding and unfolding of her legs.

When she reaches the headboard he slides his knee up onto the mattress. Then the other. A hand touches on the counterpane for balance, but only briefly. He moves up the bed after her, rucking her sheets up ahead of his knees, moving as deliberately and slowly as a man pushing through some viscous fluid.

He parts her legs with his knees. Ducks to one upbent knee, nips at her with his teeth and his lips, follows a slender belt of muscle down her thigh to her hipbone. He's bending over her now, bending the way an animal does to the edge of a pool he means to drink from, kissing and sucking at her skin, but his hands are on his own skin; he strokes his cock slowly, lightly, while he

doesn't quite tease her; no. Tastes her, as he said he would. Bends over her and roves over her skin, learns her by taste and touch, and finally -- when his forward lean threatens to topple and the long weightbearing muscles of his back are starting to ache from maintaining his precarious balance -- presses a palm to the mattress.

He nudges his nose against her, nuzzles apart her lips. When he puts his mouth against her cunt, tastes her wetness, his hand tightens on himself; he gives himself such a long, unequivocal stroke that he muffles a groan against her flesh.

For a while, a long while, he licks and eats at her with a singular, singleminded focus. After a time his hand on the mattress shifts; he braces himself on his elbow instead, pushes her thigh up with his hand, opens her further, opens her up to his mouth. It's not even her pleasure he pursues tonight, per se, but something more like knowledge: to learn her, to know her, to carve some facet of her, some aspect, some sense of her indelibly into his mind. Her taste, and the way her cunt feels against his tongue, to be sure; but also the way her body writhes when he fucks her like this, with his mouth, and the sounds she makes, the way her eyes look in the dark. All these things he takes in, greedily, even as the details and minutiae slip away from him almost as soon as they cross his mind.

It doesn't matter. They filter through him, pass through him like water through cloth, leaving behind traceries of itself even after it's gone.

He doesn't take her all the way. Eventually he turns his face to her thigh, and this time he smears her slick across her skin when he kisses her. His neck and his shoulders are cramped because he never did sink on his stomach, never did move into a more comfortable position, never did stop stroking his cock. He sits back, breathing quietly but swiftly, rolls his head on his shoulders once.

"Dej mi kondom, bejby."

[Danicka] Teasing him is never very high on Danicka's list of pleasures. She is not coy, or hard to get. Even at the beginning all he had to fucking do was reach out and take what was offered. Now, it seems, all he has to do is trust her. Trust that when she dashes through the woods she does not actually want to escape him. Trust that when she pulls herself up the bed instead of simply laying back and opening her legs, it does not mean she thinks so little of herself that she needs pursuit to make her believe he wants her.

He wants her. She watches him follow her up the bed, predatory but not exactly hunting, predatory because that is what he is as much as it is what he does. In the dark her eyes flicker between gold and gray and green, depending on how his shadow falls or what angle he sees her from. She watches him stroke himself as he stands here, as he finally moves after her, stares at him until the shadows of her room and the angle of their bodies makes it impossible. She leans back, half-propped on a pillow, and when he finally comes between her legs, she parts her own thighs unresistingly and reaches up to touch his face with the fingertips of her left hand.

"Nedovolte, aby mě čekat," she purrs, as he starts to bite at her skin, kiss her thigh. Her breath catches, shivers its way through her body as he pulls aside the thin band of fabric that just barely covers her from him. It's wet on his fingers. She's wet on his fingers. On his lips. He's said those words to her before, or she's imagining them in his voice.

Either way. His mouth is on her then, the tip of his tongue stroking her more softly but no less insistently then he strokes his own cock. She arches her back the first time he wraps his lips around her clit, rubs herself against his face with a whimper that implores as much as it demands. Danicka's eyes fall closed, her head tilting back against the pillows as she rolls her hips, tightens her hand in his hair.

"Více," she moans, as he's hiding the sound of his own pleasure against her body, chiffon rubbing against his face along with her body. "To mě poser. Více, lásko."

He gives her more. And Danicka arches her back, pushes against him and tilts towards him and takes pleasure in the way he seeks after her, even if it's not her pleasure, really, that he's seeking. Her whimpers grow in intensity and frequency, her face turned to one side and her right hand grasping the pillow under her head. She cries his name softly, once, squirming against her comforter and wrinkling it, displacing it heedlessly as she loses herself.

As she unravels.

As she falls the fuck apart.

She's panting when he stops, and lets out a protesting, begging moan when he stops, her eyes opening and tracking through the dark to find him. "Co to sakra, Lukáš?" she gasps, only to be told --

Danicka's gaze flickers, her regard darkening with a sudden clench of lust. Her hand tightens on the pillow, her left falling from his head, fingernails raking lightly up her own thigh. With a distinct care to her movements, she puts both hands on the mattress and pushes herself into a sitting position, and then rolls over. On her hands and knees, she stretches over and opens her nightstand, wholly aware of what the fuck she's doing to him when she plucks a foil-wrapped packet from the drawer. She turns back around, faster this time, her own impatience precluding any further ideas on teasing, or tempting, or punishing.

She just moves onto her knees in front of him, tearing open the packet and reaching between them to unroll the condom onto his body. Danicka's left hand presses flat against his chest, holding her balance as she leans in to kiss him, to bite at his lower lip. "You're a son of a bitch, you know that?" she murmurs, half-snarling it, licking her taste off his mouth.

[Wyrmbreaker] She isn't exactly left to her own devices as she goes for her nightstand. He leans forward, plants his hand beside her knees and he nips and sucks at the skin over her shoulderblades, bites gently at the columns of muscle low in her back, at her flank, pushes his face against her cunt from behind and eats at her fiercely, furiously, as if he couldn't get enough.

Which is the truth. He can't get enough of her. He can control his hunger, sometimes. He can rein it in when they're in public, for a while. He can bury it under anger and hurt when they're fighting. He can control it, but not indefinitely, and then sometimes something she does or says or is strikes him like a flint to steel, sparks in his mind and all down his spine, lights him up like a trail of firecrackers. Sometimes he catches her scent and all he can do is follow, want, hunger, take this woman; this not-quite-human, this wild and sometimes wary, sometimes bruised, not quite damaged, never quite broken creature who is his mate

only not. The thought halts him for a second, and then he snarls to banish it, snarls at her to "Pospěš, miláčka." He takes his hand from himself at last, giving a single hard shudder as that hand comes between her legs instead, smears his wetness into hers, slips two fingertips inside her as he sits up. "Chci být vevnitř tobě."

Then she's turning. His hands welcome her. She rises to her knees and he sits back on his heels and she's dealing with the condom though he could've done it himself, would've, but this frees him to touch her body, take her by the waist, rove up her sides and across her ribcage, cup her breasts in his palms. She kisses him and he tears at her mouth unrestrainedly, gasps when she bites him, gasps when she strokes the condom onto his cock.

"Fuck, baby..."

And he's taking her by the hips, moving her onto his lap, over him. He's reaching behind her to pull her thong aside and he's kissing her mouth, kissing her between rushes of murmurs. "Vezměte mě dovnitř," he urges her; it's a quiet sort of desperation. "Vezmi mě to uvnitř tebe, Danička."

[Danicka] Bent at knees and hips to get the requested -- demanded, needed -- condom, Danicka finds herself assaulted from behind, touched and bitten, licked so eagerly that she pushes backward for more, grips the edge of the nightstand as though its flimsy solidity is going to help her if he can't hold back any longer and fucks her like this. She's terribly close to asking him to, or begging him to, when he slides her fingers into her.

She has no idea what he's thinking. On the morning after the solstice, showering dirt and leaves and the residue of earth and sex off her body, she thought of him as her mate and did not snarl away the word. It's what she wants. It's what she's waiting for. She won't ask him again. They've had that conversation, and they both know how things stand. They both know the rules: he, those of the nation. She, those of her family.

It took mere seconds for the lightest of kisses and comforts to become this, a half-moment of his lips brushing hers and her mouth finding his before all the energy and fury poured into their argument was unleashed from its actual source. The 'problem' was always that they cannot stop wanting each other. It's what kept them so wary, so held back, so scared of what would become of them if they surrendered to that overwhelming longing. It's not a problem anymore, but it's still overwhelming. It's still, sometimes, frightening.

Danicka squirms against him, whimpering, as he touches her. It makes the way she turns and comes at him that much more feral, that much more ferocious as she bites at his mouth and licks his slick, hot mouth. His fingertips leave traces and hints of wetness over her breasts; her fingertips stroke his cock and slide down to caress his balls when he's covered.

"Chceš to?" she growls, as he's gasping a curse and an endearment and only seconds before he's taking hold of her to pull her up onto his lap. Danicka exhales in a rush, spreading her legs over him. Her hand is still on his cock. He has barely moved her thong aside, barely spoken, before she holds him tighter and rubs the head of his cock against her cunt, watching his face as he begs her to take him.

She's reminded of the way he first said it, months ago.

Danicka holds onto his shoulder with her free hand and sinks down slowly on him, guiding him into her. Her hand tightens there as she stretches around him, and a moment later both of her hands are holding onto him. Her head ducks forward, forehead going to the side of his neck. She lets out a moan of something like profound relief, as though the feel of him inside her is the alleviation of some intense, prolonged pain. It ends in a gasp, a whimper, her brow leaving his skin. Danicka tilts her head back, arches her spine, and bears down on him further, another whimper escaping.

"Fuck... fuck, Lukáš, mám tolik stýskalo!"

[Wyrmbreaker] In the winter, Danicka reminded him of spring. He wanted to see her in the summer, because he knew even then

(this wasn't something he could strip out of his blood so easily; it wasn't something that he could possibly let go of, give up, relinquish, after a few short months)

that she would be golden, golden as ripe grain, as flaxseed, as gold brocade, as her hair. In the winter, she reminded him of spring, of golden summer, of the ocean, and like the ocean she pours up on him, but she's hotter than the salt ever could be and when she asks him if he wants it his curse dissolves into a rough, growling kiss that she exhales into, that he gasps into when she takes him in hand and rubs him over her.

The kiss spins asunder. They watch each other. His eyelids are heavy, but his eyes gleam like gemstones, hard, gleam like molten iron, hot, afire. He's breathing in hard, short pants as she starts to take him inside, bowing his head to watch, raising his head to watch her face, and his hands are gripping at her waist, at her hips, gripping hard.

"Don't..." tattered, ragged, rough, "...prosím netočím mě čekat."

And then she's letting go his cock, sinking down on his cock, her hands are burning his body as she holds on to him as though she might fall without this, and his arms wrap around her as she moans, as she gasps, as she throws her head back and her back arches under the crossing of his forearms. He bends to her throat; he flashes to SmartBar, the bathroom, the panic that bolted through her when he bit at her neck but he can't help himself, even now, even after all that; he starts to nip at her neck and then turns aside, forcibly, sinks his teeth into her shoulder instead.

"Fuck ... " this first one is so muffled against her skin the word isn't even distinct, only the cadence and the tone, "fuck ... ach můj bože. Dělej, ty boky rolka, lásko. Nepoužívejte vstávat. Pobyt se na mě. Grind that pussy on me, baby."

[Danicka] And Danicka is very obedient. She writhes atop him, not so much riding as pushing their bodies together, as though she could get him deeper, as though they could fuse completely together if she just grinds on him for long enough. There's no flinch as he nibbles her neck, no shudder when he bites her shoulder. This time, she doesn't ask him to please stop biting her. She doesn't cry out in fear. She bucks her hips and gasps, begins to bounce on him slightly, experimentally. "Yeah..." she whimpers, "fuck, yeah, baby."

It's meaningless, in terms of her actual words. Nothing but yes, yes, yes, fuck, yes, nothing but loose affirmatives that what he's doing and what he's saying is all right, it's what she wants. But her voice -- the way she gasps as his hips jerk and the way she moans when his arms flex around her and her belly rubs against his torso -- is infused with something like poetic answer to unasked questions of who they are, what they're doing to each other, what this is.

She flexes her hands on him, digs her fingernails into his skin, and moves faster. Her back unbends, her head comes up, and she locks her eyes with his, lips parted with every panting pull of air. "Bože, jsi tak horká," she snarls, leaning forward to kiss him with the same intensity with which she yelled at him earlier, wrapping her arms around his neck and rolling her hips hard on top of him.

"Tell me you want it," she groans, her cunt clenching down on his cock. "Tell me you fucking love it."

[Wyrmbreaker] And Danicka is nothing like obedient. Never fucking was. Come here, he said to her that first night. Take your clothes off, he said. He never told her to take his pants off for him, but he may as well have; he put her hand on his belt and he knows now, knows damn well she could've whipped his belt open and undone the button, drew down the fly, in a matter of seconds, before he could draw two breaths in succession. But she hadn't. She climbed onto him, and they kissed, and ever since then, from then until now, he can't think of a single instance when her obedience hadn't come with some shred, some edging of intelligence. Of self-determination. Of rebellion.

This is a goddamn rebellion. Since when do Shadow Lords bow to the whims of their kin? Since when do Shadow Lords beg for

(that cunt, that fucking hot cunt)

what's theirs? Since when do Shadow Lords bother to tell their kin what they like, and how much they want it, and...

"Chci který kundo." The roll of her hips drives a sharp groan out of him, as though it were so fucking good it rides the edge of the unbearable. His eyes flicker shut, squeeze shut, fly open again. He finds her eyes. He finds her mouth; he tears at her mouth with his, and he doesn't close his eyes. "Miluju který kundo. Dej mi který kundo."

His palm meets her ass, as sharp as his groan, as sharp as the kiss. Then he rubs his hand over her flesh, grasping, squeezing. Abrupt as that, he rises to stand on his knees. He bears her with him, drives himself deeper with all the upward momentum of his body, and his hands lace together under her, supporting her weight without limiting her motion.

"Come on. To mě poser, Danička. Fuck that cock."

[Danicka] There is nothing gentle about this. They're capable of it, but the last time they made love was nearly two weeks ago and the intensity of it has not lingered with them, satisfied them like some sort of ration but only -- apparently -- made their desire for each other more ferocious. Danicka rides him roughly, rolling her hips -- like he told her to. She stays with him, stays on him -- like he told her to. She grinds her pussy down on his cock and kisses him like she's trying to devour him alive, her heart pounding and her legs spreading wider.

And as he groans out answers, without any more trace of submission in his obedience than can be found in hers, Danicka watches his face. She snarls against his kiss, closes her eyes even as he forces his to stay open, sucks the words off his tongue even as he's telling her what he wants. What he loves. A ragged but not surprised shriek leaves her throat when he slaps her on the ass like that, but it only makes her move faster on him, fuck him harder, bounce on his lap while she holds herself steady with her hands on his shoulders.

"Lay back," she says, breathing the words out all in a rush, even while she's moving herself on him, her body arching as though shot through with electric current. She kisses him again, harder this time, her hair falling all around her face and his, brushing his chest. "Brzy," she whispers, gasping against his lips. "To mě poser, brzy!"

[Wyrmbreaker] His answer:

a muffled noise against her mouth, somewhere between a moan and a snarl, whatever words he might've had lost in her mouth. She told him to lay back. He flips her on her back instead, scooping her off the mattress and toppling with her, catching himself on his palms just in time to avoid falling atop her. His cock slips out of her and he reaches down, finds her, slams himself back inside her unapologetically. For a moment he kisses her like this, fucks her like this, driving down into her cunt with a sudden, feverish intensity.

Mere seconds later his arms wrap around her. He lifts her from the mattress even as he rolls on his back, brings her atop him in a tangle of limbs, her loose hair falling about his face, blinding him. He closes his eyes. This time he stays within her, doesn't come apart from her, throws his head back when she moves on him the first time, lifts his head and kisses her mouth through the screen of her hair, pushes her hair back, kisses her again, and again, and falling back now, arching his back, leaning his weight onto his shoulderblades, onto his planted feet as he flexes his hips upward against her.

"Nechci čekat."

The words growl out of his throat, break against his clenched teeth. His eyes are ferocious, the light behind them savage and hot and unquenchable as a chemical fire. That first night he'd reached for her the second time, saying: I've waited long enough.

He's waited long enough. He grabs her by the hips, urges her faster, fucking bounces her on his cock and when she picks up the rhythm herself he reaches up, cups her breasts, pushes his hand up her neck, over her cheek, slips his thumb between her teeth. His other hand has found her clit. He strokes her mercilessly, fucks her relentlessly.

"Rychlejší, lásko. Jízda mě těžké. To mě poser dokud nepřijdu."

[Danicka] They taste like each other. When they kiss, every time they kiss, they mingle together with lips and tongues as surely and as deeply as his cock buried deeply inside of her. Neither stop to flicker with disgust; Danicka sucks her own wetness of his tongue, licks it off his lips, as though she's only more hungry for him because of it. She's been hungry for him since the solstice, aching for more. Stoned off her ass and half-drunk she'd come to the Brotherhood thinking amorphously of parting her legs and riding him in his narrow bed upstairs, or pushing that thin scarf she wore into his hands and telling him to tie her down. Sitting in her new car outside the W she'd heard him say that he didn't want to argue with her in the place where he wanted to make love to her and a coil of lust had tightened inside of her at the mere thought of it.

She missed him. She missed him badly, especially after that night in the woods, that pre-dawn, primordial mating. She missed him, quite painfully in fact, as she stood on her balcony on the morning of the 24th smoking a cigarette and musing over what they had done, and how, and things he has said to her, things she has done. She wished, looking down at the river, that he was standing behind her, his arms around her, and the smell of him rather than the smell of the Dunhill surrounding her. She aches for him when he isn't there. Every time he questions whether or not she is trying to leave him, or trying to say that she wants to leave him, it twists something vicious and sharp inside of her.

Because she can't blame him for wondering. She has walked away from him before, either unable to withstand his Rage or unable to tolerate the conversation or unable, unable, incapable, weak.

But then there is this. There's muscle flexing under skin and skin slick with sweat and they are both savage, and strong, and ferociously savvy even as they feign submission, toy with the idea of desperation, cover up actual and overwhelming need with words and movements that only allude to it. He slaps her ass as though there's no other fucking choice, no other way to communicate the intensity of his lust. She bounces on him, fucks him, squirms on his lap like the only goddamn reason for his existence is to get her off. He snarls at her to fuck him, fuck that cock, while she demands that he beg for her cunt.

And they obey. And they use one another. And she whimpers: soon. A warning. A plea. A confession.

Danicka falls onto her back, the mattress absorbing their weight rather than bouncing from it, and almost immediately bears down on his cock, wraps her legs tightly around him as he is grabbing his cock and pushing into her again. She moans sharply, loudly, stifled only when he captures her mouth again. Her hands go into his hair, holding his head in place so she can devour his kiss, gasping around his tongue every single time his cock plunges into her. She rakes her nails down the back of his neck and arches again, grinding upward against him with tight, rhythmic thrusts and rapid, gasping moans that tell him how close she is, how fucking --

"Goddammit!" she snarls at him, when he rolls over, when he stops pounding her for even a pair of seconds. Her eyes fly open, vivid green and feral, as she re-settles herself on top of him and presses her palms against his chest. She grinds down on him hard that first time, as though in punishment, but her breathing falls apart at the end, turns ragged and gasping.

Her eyes roll back. "Fuck...fuck, you bastard," she says, all but whimpering, all but mewling the words as she grinds on him again, her fingernails curling into his skin and leaving miniscule half-moon impressions. They never would have fucked like this in February, even March. She wouldn't rake her nails down his back, wouldn't bite him, wouldn't let herself go so far that she might risk making him angry. The first time she abused his flesh like this and he only came at her with intensified, wild desire, she started to trust him.

So much of what is between them that is true or reliable began like this.

His hand moves to cover her breast, covers it because her breasts are small and his hands are large. It's not the only difference between them. His hand is rough, her breast is soft. Her breast is intended for pleasure and nurturing and his hands are meant to destroy as much as they build, as much as they break. Lukas can heal... by shedding his own blood. He can feed her... if he hunts and kills. He can protect her... if he terrifies her in the process. Danicka can tear him apart like this, with her flesh in his mouth and her body moving on his. Take everything. Take all of him.

Give it back.

Her eyes, glazed with arousal, sear into his as he runs his hand up and offers her the digit that separates him from the rest of the beasts of earth. She parts her lips and bites down more gently than he might be expecting, and then his other thumb touches her clit and she shrieks, bites down harder. Danicka's eyes shut suddenly, tightly, as she lifts her hips and then slams them back down. She moves faster on him before the words are even out of his mouth, using his chest to keep herself balanced, leaning over him while she... obeys. While she uses him. While she fucks that cock, rides him harder. While she makes love to him.

When she comes, it's as sudden as a summer storm breaking overhead, a torrent from the sky and a gale wind bending everything in its path. She moans loudly against his hand at her mouth, her eyes wild on his as she swivels her hips, working his cock inside her as her orgasm explodes in pulses through her body. Her teeth part and let his thumb go; she loses his eyes as she throws her head back, becomes weightless, loses all sense of boundary... melts. She knows that surely there's nothing left of her that isn't given over completely to this, nothing that isn't this rolling, clenching, flooding pleasure.

It takes her ten seconds, fifteen, before she starts crying out his name, a desperate near-scream as though if he doesn't answer her or hold onto her or something she's going to die, she's going to fall apart, "Ah... ! God, prosím, Lukáš! LUKÁŠ!"

[Wyrmbreaker] This would not have been possible in February, in March. She would not have let herself savage him like that. She would not have let herself command him like that, demand such things of him. She would not have let herself go like that

and neither would he. He would not have said such things. He would not have given voice to his desire, or his pleasure. He would not have let himself fuck her so unrestrainedly as he had in the woods, in the shower, in new fucking york in front of the vast windows that opened onto the city of cities.

He doesn't know when all this changed, or how. The change was so gradual, so incremental, that he had not felt it; sees it only in retrospect, in glimpses and flashes and realizations. They've come a long way -- that would be the trite, the obvious way to put it, as though they were on some sort of journey together with some destination in mind, some path to trace, some road to follow.

They're not. They move from one season to the next, one day to the next, one fuck to the next, one argument to the --

no; there's never any guarantee, there, that there will ever be a next one. It hurts her to think that he sometimes thinks she means to leave him again, but she can't blame him for this. They know something about trust now, much about love; they still know very little of stability. He's a fucking werewolf. She's impossibly complex. They might never know stability.

Still. From dead of winter to stirring of spring, months and months in this second acquaintanceship of theirs, when the first was so long ago as to almost not matter. He was a child then; so was she. They are neither of them children now.

Dead of winter to earliest spring, to now: the height of summer, incandescent July.

And like a summer storm she breaks over him, like a deluge from the sky, like a hurricane striking the southern shore. Her pleasure flattens everything in its path, makes everything else paler, wan, unimportant, insignificant. He holds her eyes as long as he can; there's nothing but her eyes right now, poison green, bright as flame, consuming all the air in the room. He holds her eyes until he can't anymore -- until she swivels her hips like that and drives him out of his mind.

Then he throws his head back, slams it against the mattress, slams his eyes shut and lets him ride him. A second, two seconds later she's crying out at last, as though in the grip of her orgasm she couldn't even find breath, find air for that. She's crying out and it's wordless, and his thumb is slipping from between her teeth to cup the side of her neck, and she's throwing her head back and he's still working her clit, fucking her cunt, and when the sounds she's making resolve into words, his name

he comes up off the mattress, rushes up against her like a breaking wave. He wraps his arm around her waist, secure as iron, and he pushes his hand into her hair and closes his fingers over the back of her head, fiercely, pulls her mouth to his, fiercely, devours the sound of his name right off her tongue. Endlessly, he kisses her, kisses her while she fucks him like that, rides his cock like that, comes like that, kisses her until suddenly he turns his face to the side, tears a ragged breath out of the air and releases it almost immediately in a short, sharp exclamation of a groan.

"Nepřestávejte."

This is breathlessly quiet, intense and low. He grabs her hips before she can slow, before she can stop. He grabs her and he ramps it right back up again, takes her hips in his hands and makes her fuck him faster, harder, mercilessly hard and fast. His brow is pressed to hers. He looks down their bodies to watch hers moving on his, to watch her plunge down again and again on his cock until he has to close his eyes again. Until he has to open his eyes again, find hers, hold.

A kiss -- roughedged, quick.

"Nepřestávejte." This time it's closer to a growl. "Nepřestávejte, lásko. Nepřestávej. To mě poser. That's it. Keep going. Keep going, baby, you're going to make me -- ach můj bože -- jedu na --"

No more words. His hands grip her hips, slam her down, hold her down while his entire torso, the entirety of his body flexes against and up and into her. The pleasure unzips his vertebrae, lays bare the naked nerves of his body, sets them all afire. He closes his eyes; he's sure if he keeps them open he'll see himself burning from the inside out, blazing with a white-hot, soundless heat. When he comes, the sound he makes is barely audible, a stripped, raw noise, scarcely more than an exhale through clenched teeth.

He wraps his arms around her. He holds her and he finds her mouth blindly and he kisses her. Scarce seconds later he finds his voice and his breath again, pours a diminishing series of panting, shuddering groans into her mouth while his hips buck and jerk against her, while his cock pulses and seizes inside her.

I missed you so much, she said at the beginning of all this. He grasps ineffectually for the words to say the same to her now, but they slip past him. The english, the czech ... it all runs together, none of it makes any sense.

When you held onto me after I thought you didn't want to let go, she'd said before the beginning of all this.

When the kiss parts he only pants into the silence and refuses to let her go.

[Danicka] The truth is, they don't know where they're going, and they never have, because they've never done this before. The question hasn't, and likely won't, come up. It's left to be more simple than that, more concerned with the immediate present: What are you doing to me? What have you done? and not What is this? They both know, unequivocably, what this is. What they are. Danicka, who confesses while drunk or exhausted that she does not know who she is or where she's going, knows without doubt that, if nothing else, she is his. He is hers.

This is not like it was in the woods, and when he throws his head back there are no stars wheeling overhead to dizzy him or distract him. His eyes shut and there is nothing but the darkness to surround him, her heat to drown him, the sound and smell of her just as strong and familiar and necessary as the thick, wet earth and the dawn trying to break over the horizon past the trees. Out in Tekakwitha they were on something like neutral territory, though in fact it was more known to him than to her. Here, Lukas is in her den. Her home. Her territory, and even the moonlight filtering in through her uncovered windows seems to take on a shape and color and sense of her.

The way she sounds when she screams his name is an echo of her earlier words: Potřebuji tě. The way she screams when she loses, again, even the syllables that make up his name, issues a sort of demand to follow: I need you here, I need you now. Her orgasm annihiliates her, takes her away from understanding anything but his hands on her, his cock inside her, his body folding upward to press against her, his arms holding her, his lips suddenly eating at hers as she comes. Danicka screams into his mouth, her hands sliding up his chest to his shoulders, clinging desperately.

When he turns his head away she all but collapses against his shoulder, moaning. She has not stopped riding him, even when her entire body began to shudder so fiercely that she seemed to vibrate like a tuning fork. Don't stop, he tells her, and she doesn't stop. She can't even think of stopping. He looks at their bodies, looks for her eyes, but she's gone somewhere, and the only way she knows where she is is the feel of him under her hands, the bite of his lips when he kisses her. And when the words are ripped out of him, flickering from Czech to English and back again, Danicka lets out a cry and throws her arms around his neck, as though he might dare to lie back or leave her now.

A palpable clench of desire twists inside her body, pulls at him, drags him with her again, again, again, her cunt tightening around his cock even as his hands tighten on her hips. Breath -- a shriek, a gasp -- leaves her only to shoot back in with the suddenness of shock. They close their eyes, and her soft, warm palms run up the back of his neck, fingers tangling in his sweat-dampened hair, her gasp seeking his mouth. When he comes, she sips and swallows that sound from his throat, takes in every groan, gives them back to him in whimpers as she trembles atop him.

He knows that she is sensitive. Tender. Responsive. He knows dozens of words in two languages to describe the reaction of this woman's body to his touch, to his presence, to the way it is between them when they make love, but she has no words, in any of the three she knows, to tell him now

don't stop

or

I'm coming

or

Tolik tě miluji..

She has no words at all, quivering on his lap and moving ever more slowly, more gently on his cock, and so she does not try to do anything but loose those soft, aching noises. Her second orgasm is less intense. More intense. Something altogether different this time. She shivers near the end, tucking her shoulders towards him, burying her face against the side of his neck, clinging to him as the storm or the gods or whatever there is finally begin to let them go, releasing them back to the mundanity and stillness and elemental comfort of existing in their own bodies.

It takes a very long time for her eyes to open again. In the interim, she keeps her arms tight around him as if time itself is even now trying to steal him away from her, as though the night is jealous and wants to take him back. During the day, during the intervening weeks between one meeting and the next, one act of lovemaking and the next, one moment together and the always uncertain promise of the future, Danicka can live comfortably in her own skin and not panic at his absence. But for now, when he is so deep inside of her and her very body and spirit both seem inextricably tangled with his, she cannot imagine letting him go, and she holds him with unashamed, unabashed need strengthening her thin arms.

When her eyes do finally open, she finds she is resting with her head on his shoulder, looking at the windows. Her eyelashes flick down again before rising once more, and she takes a deep breath, her breasts brushing against his chest. Her arms are wrapped around his biceps and shoulders, folded over his scapulae, keeping him right where he is. She can't remember how she got here. How they got here. She closes her eyes again.

She doesn't care.

Her head turns, nose nuzzling his clavicle. Danicka presses a kiss to his skin, breathing deeply again. She is still tremulous at the edges, not shaking or spasming but distinctly and noticably unsteady. Incrementally she sinks closer and closer to stillness, to total relaxation, until even the thought that she might lose him if she lets go calms itself to nothingness. She sighs.

"Řekni mi," she murmurs drowsily, like a child requesting a story, "něco, co jsem vynechal." Her fingertips swirl against his scalp, drawing slow and lazy circles under his hair. "Tell me something from the time when I did not know you."

[Wyrmbreaker] The first night, the first time she told him

Já jsem tady. Já jsem tady.

as though she needed to reassure herself as much as him, he never questioned it. Not even for a second did he wonder what that means: i'm here, when clearly she was right there, right against him, right upon him, right in his arms.

He didn't wonder because it was both natural and necessary that she assures them both of this basic, elemental fact: that she is there, and he is there, that they are both right here, and there's nothing -- not time, not space, not the war nor the nation -- that would split them asunder right now.

They are not weak, nor dependent. They go days without seeing or hearing from one another and this is fine. They do not miss each other terribly, can function without pretense, can function just fine without one another. But right now, right this moment, Lukas is quite certain the world would fucking implode on itself if she were to leave. And they both know -- from hard experience -- that they can function just fine because they can trust that they will see each other again

just like this.

So; they hold one another, and hold to one another. Her thighs are parted over his hips, her legs folded alongside his thighs. His arms are wrapped around her, cradling her, his hands open over her skin. She rests her cheek on his shoulder; she nuzzles his collarbone, kisses the taut upper curvature of his pectorals. Her fingers massage his scalp, the back of his neck, and he drops his mouth to her shoulder in turn, kissing her softly.

They hold one another and hold to one another.

She speaks; he listens, and says nothing for a moment. He thinks, unhurriedly, sifting through his memories. He inhales, and his chest presses against hers. When he lays back he brings her with him, sprawling her atop him as he stretches out on the mattress.

"When I was about thirteen," he says quietly, "it became apparent that I would Change very soon, and the Tribe began to take a special interest in me. Sometimes Garou would come by to meet me and make arrangements with my parents. A Philodox by the name of Istok Ígéret Eső; -- Istok Promised-Rain is the rough translation -- began to pay us visits every few months. He was a wealthy man, somber, taciturn. Being near him felt like standing near a furnace, but he had old-world manners, very gracious. He brought us gifts each time. My mother usually received jewelry of some sort; my sister, flashy little trinkets, makeup, perfume that Istok's daughter had recommended; the sort of thing a teenaged girl would like. At one point he had the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica delivered to our door for my father's library. It took my father and I all afternoon to clear out enough space on the bookshelves to move it all in.

"Me, I got toys and gadgets. He bought me my first mp3 player, back when it was a rare and enviable thing to have one. As my Rage flickered and grew, his visits became more frequent and the toys he gave me weren't really toys at all. Eventually he brought me a sword, very old, the scabbard beaten and battered, the blade bright as the day it was forged. He said it belonged to a distant ancestor of mine. It was a real weapon, battle-tried, balanced. You can imagine how impressed I was. I still have it; it's in my closet at the Brotherhood.

"After I Changed, Istok became my mentor. I don't think anyone was surprised. It was kind of him to do that. To foster me, but also to give us those things, to take the time to meet me. He didn't have to do any of it; most cubs don't even see their mentors until after their First Change, if they even have a mentor of their own. Besides, my parents had learned to be prudent and frugal. Even though we had money to spare by then, my sister and I never got gifts and trinkets and toys that my parents thought we didn't need. It was ... nice to have a fairy godfather for a year, to have the sort of stuff our friends envied us for."

There's a pause while his hands move lazily over Danicka's back, exploring her body, her skin, as though he had never touched her before.

"One day, Istok brought my sister a white-gold choker. After he left, Anežka was prancing around the house looking at herself in the mirrors. She found my mother and I folding the laundry and said we were lucky I was trueborn because otherwise we wouldn't be getting such nice things from Istok. My mother's face went white. She walked across the room, grabbed Anežka by the shoulders, turned her around and slapped her hard across the face.

"It was the first and only time I've ever seen my mother hit anyone. My sister was almost fifteen years old then. She was so surprised she didn't cry. She just stared. My mother called her a stupid, selfish, blind girl, slapped her on the other cheek, and then left the room. Anežka burst into tears and ran into her room. I had no idea what just happened; no one ever talked to me about it.

"Later, my father talked to Anežka for a very long time. I don't know what about. That night Anežka came to my room to apologize. I didn't really know why. We still accepted Istok's gifts with gratitude, but that was the last time my sister ever spoke of anything he gave her."

Lukas draws a long, slow breath. He presses his mouth to Danicka's temple, strokes back her hair, returns his arms around her.

"It was years before I understood everything," he finishes, quiet as he began.

[Danicka] As he speaks, Danicka cannot help but compare a single story from his own adolescence with her life. She lines them up side by side in her mind. If Lukas was thirteen then she was fifteen, thereabouts. She is close to Anezka's age, either older by a little or younger by a little. If she was fifteen then her mother had been dead for awhile, and her brother was twenty, very near to the rank Lukas has not yet achieved. Danicka cannot help but slide slightly to one side when he lays back and pulls her with him, turns so they are on their sides and her leg is still over his hip and then around him. She lays on the pillow or on his arm or both and watches his face as he talks, watches his eyes as she listens.

She's drowsy. Her limbs feel heavy and strengthless but simultaneously a bit unreal, as though her bones are just dreams she had earlier tonight. Dancing with Gina, too, is little more than something she might have imagined. Begging Lukas not to bite her in a sudden twist of panic feels more real, but seems as though it happened a very, very long time ago. Her eyes are alert, though, as much as she wants to sleep. But sleeping means they have to part, if only for a moment, so she does as a child does and asks him to tell her a story -- not so she'll drift off sooner. So that she can stay up a little longer.

Later she'll sleep easily, trusting that he will be there when she wakes up. Later, she'll be able to part from him reluctantly but without agony, trusting that it won't be the last time she sees him. Later, when it has been a day or two, the thought will inevitably occur to her that he could die and it will be a long time before she knows. Hell. He could be gone for months and not die. He could be lost somehow. She knows that she'll think of this, passingly, as she's shopping or making her bed or handwashing lingerie. She is calm because he is hers. She lives with it, when she remembers that he is Gaia's.

Lukas tells her about his mentor. It makes sense to her that his mentor was a Philodox -- her lips quirk slightly when he describes him as somber and taciturn, with old-world manners and a gracious demeanor, but she doesn't interrupt. He mentions the sword still in his closet at the Brotherhood; she doesn't say I know. I saw it. She certainly doesn't tell him about the fetish sickle carried by her half-sister that follows the Musil line, highly prized, or the nephew that will one day inherit it. She has no reason to tell him about the reason she knows about the fetish at all, when it is in Prague still and held by a Garou she has never met in person.

Her hand moves to his bicep, traces his arm lightly. It's rare that she plays with him like this, stroking his skin with her fingertips or fingernails, outlining his muscles by a touch that is neither ticklishly delicate nor rubbing nor raking. It's idle, and thoughtless, and Danicka is rarely thoughtless. She touches his arm like she sometimes touches his hair, tender in a way that she has no business being towards an Ahroun.

When he starts to tell her about the choker, about Anezka 'prancing' -- at that very word, in fact -- Danicka's eyes flick from watching her own hand on his arm to look at his face again. There's a hint of wariness already there, even before she hears him tell her that Anezka, the sort of fifteen year old Danicka never was and never had a chance of being, said they were lucky.

Her eyes are murky again in the dark, mottled green and tawny, animal eyes slowly regaining humanity, evolved intelligence. She doesn't so much as blink when he says that his mother -- whom Danicka vaguely remembers as a soft-spoken woman more likely to barely say two words during an evening as anything else, whom she remembers resenting one day simply because she had expressed surprise that seven-year-old, thin-limbed, smaller-than-Lukas Danicka was going to help her father prepare a meal for all of them -- slapped his sister sharply across both cheeks.

It actually takes effort, however, not to make a sound or give him a visible reaction when he says it was the first and only time he saw his mother hit anyone.

She knows what his father talked to Anezka about. Danicka knows this immediately, intuitively, trusts it beyond reason; she doesn't doubt for a moment that she knows exactly what that conversation entailed. She doesn't need to ask, and Lukas knows why she doesn't need to ask, why her mother slapped Anezka in the first place. She understands, without needing to talk it over, why Lukas didn't know what the hell the problem was until he was older.

Her eyes close for a moment as he kisses her, and when he wraps his arms around her again she moves smoothly into the embrace. She lays her head against his chest and inhales deeply, as though the more of his scent she draws into herself the longer she will remember it, the longer she can keep him. There is no reconciliation between herself and Anezka, each fifteen years old. There's no reconciliation between their brothers, who they were or who they became. She is, on both counts, glad of this.

Danicka is quiet for awhile.

"When I was a sophomore," she says finally, "I hacked into my high school's network and had the PA system blare 'Get What You Give' right when everyone was getting out of first period."

[Wyrmbreaker] Lukas's laugh blurts out of him, surprised, but he doesn't choke it back or rein it in. He lets himself laugh, his chest moving under her cheek, the sound rolling out from somewhere deep within. He laughs the way he always has, since a child, and the way Danicka rarely, if ever does.

When he's finished he thinks about this for a while. "I wouldn't have expected that," he says. "Naively, I would've thought you were a quiet, untroublesome girl."

Then he thinks about the way her eyes flash at him when she crouches over him like an animal and fucks him within an inch of their lives. He thinks about the way she snaps at strangers who irritate her, and the quick clip of her step, four-inch heel or otherwise.

"But I'm not at all surprised," he adds. "Did they ever find out it was you?"

[Danicka] She loves it when he laughs. The first time she saw him smile, saw him laugh, it made her heart quicken suddenly in her chest, made her fight not to break into her own grin. It was as though something in him already called to her, stirred her, and it wasn't desire or longing so much as some spark they were each secretly charged with long before they ever met flying from him to her, igniting joy.

Danicka smiles as Lukas laughs this time, her eyes literally lighting up, the smile soft and quirking awkwardly at the edges, like she's unsure it's okay. She is happy, suddenly and without warning, because he laughs. Because she made him laugh, and not at her, not in mockery of something important to her, but in sheer, simple amusement.

"Everyone thought that," she says, when he says he assumed she would have been quiet and untroublesome then.

She shakes her head at his question. Of course no one ever found out. She snaps at strangers, but just as easily makes them her dear friends. She walks with a sharp clip to her step sometimes, an idle stroll at others, and he has seen both. She can adopt or drop the persona of a Manhattan bitch as easily as any other, from the way she walks to the way she dances to the way she speaks. Sometimes he's seen it, the subtle but rapid shift even as they're walking in a door, going from street to hotel lobby or from nightclub dancefloor to handicapped stall. When they are alone together, she is no more the woman who tossed her hair and commanded attention in the common room than she is the woman who lashed out at a middle-aged couple in the W's elevator.

She's just Danicka.

"No," she answers, nuzzling his chest, wrapping her lips briefly around one nipple to gnaw it with her lips and then releasing it. "The one person I told --" she may as well say The one person I trusted, "-- kept trying to get me to do it again, but I kept telling him that it would only get me caught. Do the same trick enough times and it's not a trick anymore."

She may not realize, saying that, how true that is in battle, in feral politics, in War.

[Wyrmbreaker] Once, Lukas might have assumed that the one person she told was her brother. Or her father, maybe, though Miloslav hardly seems the type to urge her to do it again. Her brother, then, or someone like that; someone trustworthy. Someone she trusts.

He doesn't think that anymore.

He doesn't think anything at all for an electric instant when her mouth is on his chest, her lips on his nipple. His eyes shut for a second, and he draws a sip of air that he releases, after, very slowly. Her words come back together in his mind. He reaches to her face, lifts her head until he can see her. His thumb traces the edge of her mouth, where she may or may not be still smiling. Her quirky smiles pull at something deep inside him, perhaps because they're so different from the brilliant dazzles of smiles one might expect from a woman like her, blonde, beautiful; perhaps because there's something almost uncertain about them, as though she's unsure it's okay to smile. To be happy without retaliation or consequence.

He touches her mouth gently, and then Lukas lifts his head and presses a kiss to her forehead. Settles again, reaching up over his head to fumble a pillow out from under her bedspread, push it under his head.

"Who was that?" he asks. "That was egging you on."

[Danicka] For once, her bed was made when they walked into the bedroom. It's not likely he noticed, with her bare-breasted against him and their mouths locked, her hands pushing into his hair and pulling at his clothes and then her body in nothing but that transparent little thong that is still clinging to her, soaked with sweat, nothing more than pushed away so he could get inside of her. But her bed was made, which only happens about half the time. His books -- her books, now -- line her shelves, forgotten like the rest of the world when they started to make love, slowly seeping back into their mutual consciousness by scent and sight.

Dawn is still hours and hours away. They have all night to do as they do and push at sleep, postpone separation. Danicka tilts her head, looks up at him across the scant distance between them, her smile softening as his thumb -- wet from her cunt, or wet from her mouth -- touches her face. She kisses the side of his thumb, blinks slowly as he kisses her forehead, and then readjust beside him when he gets a pillow out and arranges it to support his head and neck.

Who was that.

Something tightens at the corners of her eyes. When she answers, her voice is soft, and she sounds younger than she is. A decade younger. A girl, more than the woman she's become... but not, really, the girl that she actually was. "My friend Stephen," she whispers, familiarity curling around each sound. "He was Walker Kin." A beat. "I guess I sort of grew up with him. Most of the people I spent time with when I was a kid were other Kinfolk."

[Wyrmbreaker] Lukas does something he never would've done the first night, only the point is wholly moot because she never would've told him so much the first night. They never would've spoken of their lives, the time they 'missed'; she never would've opened up like that, he never would've showed that he cared, she would've never let him see so deeply, and he never would've been able to anyway.

Never mind.

Lukas does what he does. It's not winter anymore. Something flickers over her face, at the corners of her eyes and in her voice. His hand opens over her cheek. A beat; and then he pulls her to him rather suddenly, draws her close and turns her face against his skin, against the crook of his shoulder and neck, as though to

keep her close.
keep her safe.

His hand cups the back of her head, sifting through the strands of her hair. His free arm wraps around her shoulders, the narrow arches of her scapulae palpable against his forearm. He holds her a moment for no reason he can readily name; it's some instinct, some reflex he doesn't stop to question.

"Tell me about him," he says, quietly. And then he closes his eyes for a moment. Because he could hear that she cared, could hear her sadness, could hear her unease, and he thinks to himself: no matter what she says, I will not hurt her again.

[Danicka] When Lukas grabs her like that, tightens his arms and pulls her closer even though they seem inextricably intertwined already as it is, Danicka releases a half-surprised huff of laughter that is, like her eyes, tainted with some decade-old memory or another and the sadness the memory engenders. She leans into him, her uncertainty growing because surely it was a mistake not to say Stephen's name as dismissively as she has any time it's come up in the last nine or ten years, surely it was a mistake to say his name at all.

Sure it was a mistake to do as she has almost never done before and share some random piece of herself without being asked, opening a door for Lukas to ask who egged you on? and now tell me about him. Her heart is beating faster simply because she did this; she told him something he didn't demand, something that has nothing to do with him, and she tries so hard not to do that. She only does that when she's incredibly drunk, or very high, or out of her head in any number of other ways.

But he told her about the year before he Changed, the man who acted at first as fairy godfather and then as mentor, giving gifts not only to Lukas but to his whole family, as though Lukas was some prize and Istok had wanted to curry the favor of even his Kinfolk. Maybe Istok saw in the young Ahroun the importance of family to him, the closeness he shared with his father, mother, sister. Danicka doesn't know if he was a good man or a very manipulative one, and does not necessarily consider the two traits to be mutually exclusive. What she does know is that Lukas is, indeed, something to be sought after. Something to be prized.

She closes her eyes against his chest, aware by intuition why he holds her like this suddenly even if a part of her wants to push at him, kick at him, pull away and run away. She lays her cheek against his pectoral muscle, listens to his heartbeat thudding like a drum in water, and hears

má láska

má láska

má láska

in the rhythm.

"His father was a Ragabash," she says, "and his mother was the sister of... god, I don't even remember. Some sept official. He was a couple of years older than me, so during moots or other meetings or during large-scale battles he came with her to our house. Helped with the little ones, and all." She's told him this part before: she knew how to hold a child on her hip long before she could bear them. Her father worked with Czech immigrants sometimes, but they did not come to te house. They were familiar with many Kin and Garou, but those did not come to the house just to play cards or have dinner.

"I didn't really spend time with him other than that until high school; we were in different schools until then. But then we started hanging out, and he taught me more about computers, and we were just... friends."

She says it like this is a rare thing. Presumably, and understandably, for her it was. Lukas may not know the careful manipulation performed by those who abuse their children or their spouses or their siblings, may not know how tightly they wind their grip, how the secrecy of what they do at home becomes a matter of Love, a matter of whether or not the abuse party is a Good Sister, or Daughter, or Wife. He does not remember, but Anezka does, how hard Danicka pushed the girl her own age, who spoke her language, away. He knows Danicka well now, knows his sister of course, and knows how they could have gotten along. He may or may not realize that this very potential for sympathy and understanding was as much a part of her resentment towards the dark-haired girl as the dominant, alpha-female streak he is so drawn to in her.

That is not what they are talking about. They are talking about Danicka's friend. Stephen.

"Ate lunch together. Played video and computer games. Got each other to do things like... well, hacking into the school's PA system." Beat. She adds, with carefully moderated, carefully affected amusement: "Now, I'm not saying we ever changed the school's records to reflect grades he didn't earn or cover up multiple absences or tardies, I'm just saying that we could have."

The amusement falters. She breathes in. Breathes out. The amusement goes away. She has to steel herself. The last person she told this to beat her within an inch of her life, dragged her back, and then did it again as though for good measure. She is about to break into a cold sweat, trying to convince herself that won't be how Lukas responds. She told Liadan she trusts him.

She trusts him.

"I got pregnant when I was sixteen." Danicka, quite obviously, does not need to tell him who the father was. "It was right before I started working for the Sokolovs."

[Wyrmbreaker] They used to speak of trust like it was the foulest of fouls, a far worse curse than anything they've called each other, said to each other in anger or in lust. They used to never broach the subject at all because trust and love were loosely but inextricably linked, and love was unthinkable, impossible.

If this isn't trust, Lukas doesn't know what is. After everything that happened when he found out about Ilari Martin, after the fight, after the series of fights and the way he cornered her against the hotel door, after the sandblasted day at the Sears Tower -- after all that, she holds him after making love like that, and she tells him:

I got pregnant when I was sixteen.

She might as well tell him:

Stephen, my friend, which is a rare thing for me, who meant something to me, got me pregnant.

While she lived under her mother's roof. Only her mother wasn't alive then anymore; but Vladislav most certainly was.

Danicka steels herself; he can feel it. Lukas's breathing is shallow for a second; she can feel that. No matter what she says, he'd thought; what surprises him, perhaps, is that he isn't angry. He isn't wildly jealous. It was a long time ago. They didn't even know each other then. She owed him, promised him, nothing. Though it shames him to realize this, it makes a difference to him. It makes all the difference. It allows him to wince not for himself but for her; allows him to see through to her.

Maybe she's right; he is selfish after all. Everyone's selfish.

In the end his reply is very quiet, very simple. "What happened then?" he asks, and lets her decide how much to tell, or not.

[Danicka] Stephen, who was her friend, who was a rare thing for her and -- she doesn't say this -- the first of many things for her, got her pregnant. Lukas knows that Danicka is not pregnant now. He can look at her body and decide, no, her breasts are too small, her hips too narrow, this and this and this and he can decide for himself that of the two times she's been pregnant, neither time did she carry a child to term or give birth to Stephen's offspring or some other man's progeny. When she was sixteen, her best friend -- best by default because he was, as far as Lukas knows, the only real 'friend' she had, more than an acquaintance, more than someone held at arm's length like all the rest -- got her pregnant.

And then she wasn't pregnant anymore. And then she went and worked for the Sokolovs for nine years. And she could answer his question like that. What happned then was that her life went on past Stephen and past the pregnancy and into what is now her history.

Danicka rests in his arms and against his chest, neither seeing his wince nor trying to read his mind, because she does not want to know, right now, what he's thinking of her, or of what he's hearing. And she is afraid, thinking of the hotel and thinking of how every time her brother or Sam or Katherine or any other Garou come up he is so angry and she's the only one there to stand in between the source of his anger and the point at which it fades. And when it's Katherine, or Sam, or her brother or her mother or any Garou who dislike her or have hurt her... when it's Martin or whatever drugs she's taken that night or whatever else he might not like... when it's the past, no longer important, or other people, who are not dear to her heart, she can survive his anger, separate it a little.

Not this. She is convinced he will be angry, if not at her than at the world. And she cannot bear the thought of withstanding it when this is one wound that has not and may not ever -- she thinks -- be able to heal. His anger would be like salt, like iodine, like fresh cuts. And tonight, which itself was a sort of healing after everything between the solstice and the way they kissed in the hallway, she can't stand it. She inhales; breathes out a bit raggedly.

"Not tonight. I will tell you, but I just don't..."

want to think about this

"...not tonight."

[Wyrmbreaker] (whee!)
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 1, 5, 9, 10 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[Wyrmbreaker] Not tonight, she says. He hears, Nech to být, Lukáš. Nech to být.

A moment after the breath she draws and releases, he takes one of his own: larger, steadier, audible. Then his arms tighten a notch; he presses his mouth to her temple, and then he turns on his side, lowering her to the mattress, laying her out beside him as he rises up. A second kiss, his mouth to her shoulder, before he moves apart from her.

For a moment Lukas turns away, raising himself on one elbow to rid himself of the condom. His back is unmarked, broad tapering to narrow, a shifting landscape of layered muscles, articulated bone. When he rolls back around he tucks his bedward arm beneath his borrowed pillow, comes back to her.

The other finds its place over her waist. He gathers her near, pulls her into the hollow formed by his body, drawing her thigh over his. Moonlight is still all they have; enough to give some murky indication of the color of her eyes, and the clarity of his.

"Dnes večer ne," he agrees. He kisses her a third time, this time on the mouth, softly. An echo: "Ty jsi tak vzácný aby mě."

[Danicka] Eventually a great many things may come out. Danicka has more secrets than Lukas, more reason for secrety in the first place. She wonders sometimes if he has ever done anything he's truly ashamed of -- not just regretful of, not just sad over, but truly shamed by -- and then asks herself if she really wants to know. The answer has not changed yet in all the time they've known each other: of course she wants to know. So Danicka understands, in her way, why Lukas asks questions that drive too close to memories she would rather not touch on, why some part of her is just as eager to respond honestly as the rest of her is afraid to tell the truth.

When she is out in the sunlight her eyes attain a crystalline blue, the color almost transparent, barely even there. Everywhere else the color squirms between golden-green and venomous and dark leaves and sea glass, cucumber and springtime, gold-dappled meadow, any number of mingled and mottled colors. His eyes burn, or chill, but never quite lose a certain inner light that makes them the color they are, keeps them clear and vivid and intense even when the only light in her room comes from the full moon peeking in at the edges of her windows.

As he rolls away from her and slips out of her, Danicka takes a sip of air that is not quite soft enough to be relief, not yet. The kiss on her temple seemed an answer but she's tense, oh she's nervous, because he gets angry when she withholds things, and he gets angry when she tells him the truth, and she cannot handle his anger when right now something is screaming like a hurricane, shrieking like a tornado, shuddering like an earthquake inside of her. She cannot survive his anger and his own, she can't, not on this.

But on the surface she reaches down, hooks her thumbs in the waist of her panties, peels them off her thighs. They roll and twist and tangle as she draws them down, flicks them off her legs, lets them fall forgotten to the floor. It takes her a moment; it takes him a moment longer to turn back around and pull her close again. She watches him with wariness he can't help but see and that she doesn't even try to hide. It's cruel, that she lets him see it, and so clearly, but honesty with anyone is a new thing to her and there are times when it is all or nothing. He can either see that she is afraid, or he cannot see her at all.

Danicka eases slowly into his arms again, remembering that kiss on her shoulder. It means: I'm coming back. It reminds her of the first time. It reminds her of a few minutes, quiet and private, when they did not doubt each other. She closes her eyes as they kiss, not entirely sure why she's sad --

-- knowing exactly why she's sad.

Her lips move on his, her breath thin because it's a whisper, her voice bland because otherwise she would not be able to speak at all. "Vládík found out I was pregnant, but I wouldn't tell him whose it was. I don't... I don't think he was trying to make me miscarry." A beat. "It's not like he was hitting me in the stomach or something. It just happened." Another pause, not as long this time, and her voice is quieter. "I don't know. It probably would have happened anyway. "

[Wyrmbreaker] Sometime in the spring, after Danicka began to understand that Lukas and his family were close, that Lukas and his sister were close, she understood that for him to realize it had been her brother who beat her, over and over, beat her and healed her and beat her again, would have hurt him simply because it is unimaginable for him. Unimaginable, that the elder sibling would not protect the younger. Unimaginable, that the Garou sibling would hurt the kin.

Danicka hoped he would never find out. He did find out. Perhaps in a way, it was as much a relief as a catastrophe when he did. She wouldn't have to hide that from him anymore. More and more, she's no longer hiding from him. He's learning to let her give him what she will, when she will. She's learning to give him more.

Everything.

Even this: the ugly, painful truths that perhaps he doesn't want to know, but on some level needs to. She tells him what happened then, what Vladik did, and they're face to face and her eyes may be closed but they're so close that she can't possibly mistake the flinch, the wince, the way his arm tightens around her.

Ten years too late, he holds her like he might be able to protect her, or shield her somehow, and he says nothing at all.

[Danicka] "Je mi to líto," she says quietly, wrapping her arms tighter around him as though he, too, needs to be protected somehow. She doesn't like to talk about her brother, she doesn't want Lukas to be exposed to him, has said outright that what she's afraid of is that knowledge and closeness to what she grew up with will ruin Lukas in some way. It is one more hint, like the way she lashed out when he intimated that she is 'damaged', that when she thinks about her life, she is sure that it did actually break her. Ruin her.

Danicka knows as soon as the words are out of her mouth that he is going to tell her not to apologize, that there is nothing to apologize for, so she unwinds her arms from him and moves her hands to cup his face, her torso sliding up against his as she lifts her face to kiss him again. This time it's not a whisper of touch. She kisses him as though it will restore some lost closeness imposed by truth and sadness.

She told him anyway. And kisses him deeply so he doesn't tell her not to be sorry. If nothing else, this deserves some sorrow.

[Wyrmbreaker] She doesn't give him the chance to say anything. His eyes close as she cups his face, because he knows she's going to kiss him. Her intent was in her eyes, and in her touch, and she's done this more often than he can remember, just like this.

His lips part, teeth part when she kisses him. He draws her tongue into his mouth. It's a deep kiss, a slow one, and his hand opens across her back, stroking over her skin.

After it parts his eyes open gradually. He looks at her for a moment. What he says, after all, isn't that she shouldn't be sorry.

He says, "So am I." And he touches her face, gently, as though to remind himself ...

... he doesn't know what he's reminding himself. He kisses her again.

[Danicka] [Ah, shit.]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 3, 3, 4, 9 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[Danicka] Once she sought his mouth blindly, kissed him with certainty even when her eyes were closing and her hands were nowhere near his head. Once she would not kiss him with her hands on his face like this, holding him in place, just as once she would not have dared to rake her fingernails down his back when caught up in the sort of orgasm she has with him because she trusts him, because she trusts herself, because she can let go. Now, though, she touches his face and his hair and kisses him like she has some sort of right, like she has some sort of claim on him.

Or like she finally believes it is safe to show him not just that she wants him, but that she loves him. Maybe even needs him, like she said she did in the hallway. Not in the sense that she can't function without him -- she functions without him day after day. Not in the sense that he is air or light or nourishment. But it's still need. It's esoteric, unnameable, indistinct, but need all the same. And in the riskiest move she has made since the first and only time she experimented with an intravenous narcotic, she's decided somewhere along the line that it's okay for Lukas to know how she feels. What she wants.

"Potřebuji tě, lásko," she murmurs as their mouths part the first time, as he's telling her So am I. Danicka's eyes open, find his, as he touches her face.

She makes a low, aching sound when he kisses her again, a quiet noise of unfolding pain. Her eyelashes fall again, and her arms wrap around his neck, her leg wrapping further around his lower half. "Zůstaň se mnou dnes večer," perhaps unnecessarily, when she gasps away from his mouth. "Oukej? Zůstaň se mnou tak dlouho, dokud můžete."

She kisses him again.

Again.

[Wyrmbreaker] A Garou knows all about claim. Knows about the claiming of land, of renown, of children, of mates. A Shadow Lord knows more than most.

Danicka knows all about claim, too, but most often from the other side of the equation. As the purebred; as the daughter of a mighty Ahroun; as the sister of a respected Theurge. As the raiser of children and, possibly, as the future bearer of children. As the submissive, the lovely, the meek, the obedient, possession, the trinket, the somewhat ill-used toy that would've been such a prize if only...

... if only she weren't veiled.

If only she weren't broken, stripped of the one thing that, beyond even their beauty and breeding and breedability, makes kin useful and necessary to Garou.

Danicka knows all about claim; she knows who holds claim over her, and it's not the one she's kissing right now. It's not the one she's sliding her leg around, and not the one she's drawing toward her body, toward herself.

It's not the one that she claims as her own, hers, mine, moje.

And this is not something a kinswoman of Thunder should know about. This is not a sort of claim Danicka should understand -- since when do Shadow Lords acknowledge the claims of their kin? -- but she does. Lukas understands this too, perhaps not with his human mind or even his Garou, but with his primitive mind, the illogical, primeval, instinct-driven one, the one that sees or scents or feels Danicka and thinks:

mate.
mine.

and the one to which it makes perfect sense that every claim runs both ways; that what you claim claims you; that what you tame becomes your responsibility, forever.

"Okay," he murmurs against her mouth, scarcely more than a whisper. "Dobře, lásko."

She wraps her leg around him and he moves over her; he slides between her thighs and rolls her on her back. Now the moonlight comes from his left side, leaves the right side of his face in shadow. He's warm as a brand against her skin, hot when he moves over her, hot when his hips press her thighs apart.

[Danicka] There are rules Danicka knows because of her upbringing. She was not raised away from the Garou, ignorant of their ways. She was not privy to zny great secrets, but there was no way to avoid, in her household, knowing the way things work in their tribe. She and her father were possessions, prizes, Kinfolk of a line renowned for things like fertility and loyalty, discretion and a deep sense of duty. The Musil Garou: excellent Betas, wise Philodoxes, cunning Theurges and New Moons, strategic Ahrouns, long-memoried Galliards. Not like the Dvoraks. Those wolves were Alphas. Those Kin were fearsome guardians, firm leaders, fiercely intelligent scholars.

She is a little of each of these. All of these. She knows that who holds the claim on her depends in part on where she is; her brother is not her guardian in Chicago simply because he is not in Chicago. Milo, and Lukas after him, are not absolutes. They are proxies, standing in for an Adren they have not and may never meet where Danicka is concerned and deferring, always and ultimately, to him. The claim on her, in Chicago, means almost nothing in the long run, and Danicka knows it.

Still, when she learned that Lukas had challenged Milo for her, it mattered. It was something she had to communicate to her family, so that if something were to happen to her, Heals By Pain would know who to hold accountable. She knows this, understands it without wasting thought on whether or not she likes it or agrees with it or can abide by it. Danicka is not Gabriella Bellamonte. She knows: if a Garou of another tribe attempted to lay a claim on her of any kind, their suffering would pale in comparison to hers.

Looking so much like her mother, smelling in body and spirit like the descendant of the twined Musil and Dvorak bloodlines, Garou see her and know the same thing Lukas senses: she would bear strong, worthy children. Maybe even cubs. They learn of her life and her little domestic and attractive talents, see a sharp enough intellect to run a household but not challenge a mate, and they know she would be a steadfast, reliable Kinfolk to supply them with whatever they might need. She looks into their eyes briefly and tells them what they want to hear, becomes what they want to see, and they are charmed by her.

And then, from when she was eighteen to twenty-four, they would find out that something was wrong with her. She could never be useful in getting the children away safely should a Garou frenzy nearby. She could never be relied upon to keep quiet and still if a Garou had to protect her in warform. Suddenly her appeal would lessen. They would leave. And Vladik...

...well, he would be angry. How could she shame them all by being so weak?

Her family knows about Lukas. They know that some time ago the claim on her changed hands, that a Cliath she used to play with in childhood from a family even older and more glorified than hers, had challenged the Russian Theurge, won, and was now the responsible party should this particular prize -- still useful, still necessary, just less appealing -- be damaged somehow. She had to tell them. And she had to try and explain away Lukas's actions without alluding that she was important to Lukas because she was fucking him. It was not the hardest lie she's ever told. Fell Prayer was busy with other tasks for the tribe. His own sister, see, is a troublemaker. The challenge was a formality, really, Lukas was doing him a favor by taking Danicka off his hands.

But he is still on Vladislav's radar. It's unavoidable. It's to be expected, that after learning this Vladik looked into the Kvasnickas, found out that their trueborn son has no mate. Has listened to a story or two about the Unbroken Circle. His sister lives in California. His mentor was Promised Rain. He lives at that Brotherhood place once owned by that one uppity Lord kinswoman, he is not very far from where Danicka lives. He threw up after eating too many kolache. He was a very silly, wild, loud little boy. Danicka liked him more than Anezka.

What Vladik doesn't know, and wouldn't think of, is the way Lukas looks at Danicka. The way his eyes follow her, the way he turns to her like a plant seeking the sunlight. What he doesn't know is the way Danicka snarls that he is hers, that she has marked him over and over again with cuts or scratches or bruises that last only until Lukas slips into another form, erasing all hint that the weak, thin, demure blonde he's with owns every inch of him as surely as he owns every inch of her. If such ownership can even really exist. In the sense that it does: Lukas belongs here. Belongs to her.

Belongs with her.

So he'll stay as long as he can. Because she needs him. Because he needs to stay.

Danicka wraps her legs around his waist slowly as he turns her onto her back, the thick comforter rustling and whispering under their moving, rolling forms. His body and her body flow together like fingers interlacing, like waters mixing, like a kiss melting. She presses her mouth to his, opens her mouth to his, eases and encourages his tongue past their lips to taste herself on him again. Still. She lies on her back and they haven't made love like this for more than a few moments since that night in his room at the Brotherhood when he told her about the challenge and she told him she would no sooner make excuses for or coddle him than she would for anyone else.

She arches her back when he presses against her, eyes flickering closed only to open again, mouth leaving his only to whisper to him dostat kondom, Lukáš, only to kiss him again, her hands following the lines of his arms, shoulders, back. She knows things about claims. About taming. She knows the rules and some of the laws and she knows

that he's hers. She knows that she is his mate, that she belongs to him in truth even if they are the only two recognize it as such.

Danicka touches his body, runs her fingers into his hair, kisses his mouth and his neck and his chest as he shifts over her to reach into the still-open nightstand drawer. She is very gentle with him, her eyes closed and her palms and her lips and her inner thighs translating, for her, the slow descent into oblivion they find each. And every. Time.

And when he moves inside of her again, her eyes are open, but the only thing to see is him. Her lips are parted, but only to say his name. Everything else falls away. Nothing else matters.