W.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Danicka's flight is a red-eye out of LaGuardia, taking off after midnight and arriving in Chicago in the middle of the night. Her airport is the smallest in the New York metro area; her flight is an unpopular timeslot. The terminal is quiet, most of the gates deserted, her particular one filled with wan-faced travelers, many of them international flyers waiting on a layover.

They don't turn the PA system down for the small hours of the night. With the hustle and bustle of the day done, the announcements of United Airlines Flight 828, now boarding at Gate 12 are jarringly loud. She hears a flight board, final-call, and depart for Portland, Oregon. She hears another one leave for Houston, Texas. Then it's her flight back to Chicago, Illinois, causing a great and hushed stirring throughout her waiting area as sleeping, napping and drowsing passengers wake one another up and shoulder their carry-ons.

Danicka doesn't have a lot of luggage. She has a carry-on bag, and that's all. The rest of her suitcases and bags are still in Lukas's rental car; even if she's lost all trust in him, she can probably still trust him to mail them to her. Have them shipped to her. Deliver them to her in Chicago.

She has a book, too, which she reads while she waits for her flight. If not for this, some bored traveler or other may have attempted to strike up a conversation with her. Danicka makes friends easily. People are drawn to her: because she's beautiful, and stylish, and wealthy to be sure, but also because she has something special, something unusual that even the humans can sense, even if they do not understand it. People stare at her as she walks through the terminals. They watch her, eyes returning to her again and again in curious, glancing flicks, as she reads her book.

When she gets in line to board, the man in front of her -- single traveler, businessman most likely, middle-aged -- smiles and offers to let her go ahead of him.

When she gets to the gate, Lukas is waiting at the ticket counter, his own boarding pass in hand.

He has no carry-ons. Either everything's checked, or everything's en route via FedEx, or everything's been dumped in the east river. He's changed his clothes since the last time she saw him; a fresh pair of jeans, dark, a fresh shirt, white, and a fresh blazer, dark. The darkness of his attire, of his hair, and the swarthiness of his skin set off the ice-pale of his eyes. Or maybe it's simply the hour, the garish fluorescent lights of the airport. Or maybe it's simply him.

Lukas looks at her for a moment. Then he draws a short breath.

"Danička," he says, quietly, and falls in beside her.

[Danicka Musil] Getting here so early had its downsides. Danicka had made her flight reservation expecting to have to take the time to check several boxes, several pieces of luggage, containers filled with representations of life and memory that are not, will not be enough. She sits at her terminal for close to three hours before her flight is called. And during that time, she reads. She takes out one of her laptops at some point and writes something. Deletes it. Writes it again.

Deletes it. Plays Solitaire.

People stare at her, they sit near her, they look over and consider striking up a conversation. They're glad she's here. She is beautiful, stylish... and bright, and interesting. She looks like she could tell them stories, fall in love with them, explain to them why their woman or their man or their mother or their father is the way they are. Like she'd listen to them.

She also looks like the last thing she wants on earth is to talk to anyone. She looks tired when she pulls out The Sound and the Fury again and flips the pages to the last one she remembers reading. The words swim on the page at first, but she perseveres, and she reads until it's time for her to go back to Chicago and go home. Handing her boarding pass to the attendant, she feels Lukas before she hears him. She doesn't turn, however, until he says her name.

"Pán," she says softy, inclining her head to him.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] There are more Czechs in the New York metropolitan area than in Chicago, but even so, Lukas is the only one within earshot that understands what it is Danicka says to him.

Everyone else is left wondering why the tall man with the eyes that remind them of lightning, with the aura that reminds them, illogically, of monsters in the night, suddenly winces as though the woman whose name he spoke had struck him.

She doesn't look like the type that would strike anyone. She looks interesting, and soft, like a warm hearth, a full home.

A beat or so of silence. The flight attendant is looking at them expectantly, waiting for their boarding passes. Danicka probably hands hers over first; Lukas a second after, as though suddenly remembering.

"...který bolelo."

He takes the ticket stub back from the flight attendant, gives her a skin-deep smile.

[Danicka Musil] He is an Ahroun mentored by a Philodox. She is the half-sister of a Half-Moon but doesn't know Sabina very well, has never seen her in person. She was raised by an Ahroun, taught some secrets of the Nation by a Theurge. Neither of them is, by blood or birth, a Judge. Yet they both understand it. Danicka is hardly balanced but there's a certain neutrality in that, an understanding of what is and isn't just taught to her by experiencing and witnessing how rarely justice and rightness and mortality even matter.

It's skewed. But it's something. And given some of their previous arguments, maybe he won't be so surprised at her reaction when he hides what he says behind another language and a smile. Danicka drags her suitcase along behind her as she boards the puddlejumper, her bag over her shoulder.

"To bylo spravedlivé."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] To which Lukas merely averts his eyes, turns his face away. Whatever his reaction was, he gives to the smooth bland walls of the boarding tunnel. Or the boarding ladder, if Danicka's flight is simply too damn small to be bothered with a proper gate.

He ducks to get inside the small aircraft. The hatch does not fit his height; the ceiling clearance inside doesn't really, either. He has to stoop, and elects to bend slightly at the waist instead, propping his hands on the seats as he passes. There are only a handful; perhaps two dozen, maybe three.

His assigned seat is not next to Danicka's. He sits beside her anyway, glancing down at his ticket stub as he does so. After he's buckled in, he watches to see which of the passengers, if any, was assigned the seat he's commandeered.

It doesn't take the flight long to board. At one point a small, neat man hesitates by Lukas's seat. Then he goes on, takes an empty seat toward the rear of the aircraft. No one asks him to move.

The door closes. The flight attendants -- all two of them -- begin running through safety procedures. Lukas has the aisle seat, one leg sprawled into the corridor, the other knee pressed against the seat in front. He watches the flight attendant for a while, tiredly, carelessly.

"Poté, ty odešel, jsem pásové tvůj bratra dolů." He begins speaking quite without preamble, without warning. His voice is low; conversational, perhaps. Flat. "Chtěl jsem ... k přepadení ho. Zabij ho, možná. Zmrzačit ho, minimálně. Odejít ho poškozené na celý život. Chtěl jsem ho vystavit jako lhář a nečestný monstrum před ta Sept."

His right hand has closed on itself. He rubs his thumb alongside his forefinger for a moment.

"Chtěl jsem, alespoň, aby mu sdělil, nechat ty být. Nebo jiný."

This is the first time he's looked at her in several minutes. At this range, he looks tired, drawn, his jaw dark with beard-bristle.

"Já nic neudělal, Danicka. Bylo to ne moje právo dělat cokoliv." He's not talking about the Nation here. In the Nation, he had every right. There's a pause; then he sighs, "A to za to nestojí."

The plane begins to taxi. He turns forward, rubs his face with his hand for a moment.

"I addressed all your luggage to your apartment and asked front desk to send it out in the morning. It should get there in a few days."

[Danicka Musil] Lukas doesn't argue whether or not it was fair of her to call him that, to call him not Lukáš or Lukášek or lásko or even Kvasnička, for god's sake, but something that would verbally straight-arm him away from her. She cannot, really, hurt him with her hands even if her fingernails or her high heels have left temporary gouges in his flesh. She cannot hurt him by calling him names or telling him he's an asshole. She can't hurt him with the truth, she can't hurt him with lies.

So she hurts him like this: she calls him her lord. Not even the brother of her blood. Not her mate. Not her love. Not the diminutive she used with him for a few years in childhood, the name she murmured into his ear when he would have fucked her like a whore and she whispered for him to stop, please.

Lord. Which is what he is, by tribe and now by the Nation's laws concerning his relationship to her. She belongs to him. On the other hand, if her play at submission were perfect, she would not tell him that hurting him now was fair.

They board in silence after that, Danicka's suitcase going in the overhead compartment and her bag going under the seat in front of her. She seats herself by the window, sighs when he commandeers the seat that belongs to the small, neat man, and looks out the window while they wait to take off. She does not buckle in yet. The sign isn't on. She looks out the window because it feels more open that way. His nearness, his bulk, his Rage, are not quite so oppressive if she pretends they're already in the air.

From the way she looks as he speaks to her, she isn't listening. She's got her elbow on the arm of her seat, her chin resting on the backs of her knuckles, her fingers dangling with casual grace. The attendants finish their spiel soon after Lukas finishes what he has to say. They're moving; she finally buckles herself in. She doesn't look away from the window, even when she feels his eyes on her. She's still in her coat. Her barettes must be in her pocket, still. Her sweater, her clothes, must still smell very, very faintly of her house, of lamb and rosemary and Vladislav, of her father, of the herd of children who asked where she was when they got 'home'.

"Thank you," she says after a little while. It seems quiet, almost perfunctory, at least partly empty. For her luggage. For sending her things along. A beat later, she lowers her hand and turns to look at him. "Lukáš?"

And when he looks at her, when he breathes differently, when he gives her any sort of signal at all that he is listening, she takes a breath and exhales: "Miluji tě se vším, co mám."

That might be enough. She says it with her brows drawn tightly together, her expression pinched somehow. Pained. "Ale já nechci, aby s vámi mluvit, dokud se dostaneme zpátky do Chicaga."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] He does look at her, but it's a brief regard -- he looks away as soon as she says I do not want to talk to you. And his breathing changes again, ramping up, a single angry inhale. Lukas glares straight forward, jaw tight.

"Pro tebe bych udělala všechno. Pro vás, jsem neudělal nic. Co víc chceš ode mne, Danička?"

And a short exhale. He knows what she wants. She wants to be left the fuck alone. There might've been more; he doesn't bother speaking again. Closes his mouth. Closes his eyes. The plane is beginning to turn toward the runway when he lays his head back against the headrest, as though he intends to sleep all the way into O'Hare.

[Danicka Musil] In answer -- and she does answer -- Danicka waits until he has laid his head back, and then her hand comes down and covers his own. Her fingertips graze the thin, stretched flesh over his knuckles but eventually she settles in the softer depressions between them, and she does not take it away for some time.

Everything I have, she said. And everything, nothing he said.

He knows what she wants, and she does not answer him again. Leave her alone. Stop talking. It is not the same as let it go, and it is not the same, at all, as let me go. The plane takes off. Danicka's hand tenses on his and she takes a breath of air. It isn't a phobia of flying, but the nervous tension of the sudden lift, the sense that anything could drop them down again, break their necks, burn them alive. It passes. But initially, her hand grasps his with sudden unease, holding on.

And gentling, when they are in the air. When she exhales. When she leans against the arm of her chair again and closes her eyes.

=========

Somewhere over Pennsylvania, Danicka has turned towards his side. She lays her head on his shoulder, or his upper arm. She is not asleep when she turns, but she is asleep soon after.

=========

It's not a long flight. Danicka is awakened by the seatbelt sign coming back on, dinging at them. She has not drooled. Her hair is slightly askew but it looks devastating rather than ridiculous. Her face is pinker on one side than the other but it only makes her look something like she does after sex, after orgasm. Her eyes, though, are soft and bleary, her lips a bit dry and paler because of it. She licks them and looks out the window, looks down at Chicago and its pre-dawn lights. Her hand is no longer on Lukas's, or in it. She pulled it away in sleep, tucked it under the fold of his coat or between his arm and body or between her own knees, curled it up in her coatsleeve.

"Let's go somewhere," she says, but not as they're circling. Not as they're landing, and she's tensing again, holding the armrest instead of his hand this time, rigid until that sinking, dropping feeling is met by the ground. The words leave her mouth when the seatbelt sign goes off and they're allowed to unbuckle, get up, get their things, leave the plane.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] This is not Lukas's first time flying. She can tell, because his ease is not feigned. He's angry; he's frustrated; he feels blocked-in and thwarted -- but he's not nervous about the flight.

When she touches him a jolt of awareness and recognition goes through him. This isn't nerves, either. For a moment he wants to keep his hand right where it is, stony, immobile; he wants to clench it into a fist, or perhaps draw away altogether.

A beat later the better part of him wins out. His hand relaxes. It does not turn over, but his fingers spread to let hers between.

Their viscerae rise. The ground lifts beneath their feet. They're airborne.

--

Lukas does sleep after all. He drops off into slumber almost immediately, with a warrior's ease: not because he wants to sleep, not because he's relaxed or anywhere close to being at peace, but because he needs it, and because there's nothing else to do. He isn't the type to loll from side to side in sleep; he tips his head back and stays there, still as a statue, quietly breathing.

When she leans into him over Pennsylvania, he wakes. His eyes open for a moment. He inhales -- he thinks to himself, Je to Danička.

Okay.

and closes his eyes again.

--

Morning, when they make their final descent. The first rays of the sun still have not broken over the lake, and at the shore of the lake, the great city of Chicago, which is nonetheless dwarfed in size, population and stature by the greater still city they have so recently left.

Lukas is awake when Danicka wakes, but he hasn't moved at all. He's looking past her, out the window, watching the moonlight glitter on the lake's surface. When she lifts her head, she's more beautiful than any woman has a right to be -- just waking, or at any time of day. He looks at this, too, notes it, recognizes it, lets it pass.

They descend. She's holding the armrest this time. This time, he puts his hand over hers, as though to warm her.

Then they're at the gate and passengers are bolting out of their seats to get to their overhead luggage, and Lukas brought nothing, and Danicka's is right overhead anyway. He can get it later. He stays where he is, watching people hurry to get their things, hurry to call their loved ones, hurry to get away from him, and when she speaks his head turns. He considers her for a moment.

"Okay," he says, quietly. And then the column of waiting passengers starts to move, and Lukas waits for the aisle to clear before unbuckling his seatbelt and standing in the same efficient gesture.

[Danicka Musil] There's a stark change in Danicka by the time they get off the plane and into the terminal. In their two-seat row on the flight she'd been almost completely hidden. The flight attendants, who go everywhere but seem to know no one, would pass by and not look at the sleeping wolf, would not look at the pitifu human female beside him. There was no one outside to look at her through the window, no one on the flight to stare as layer after layer of her guard came down in public in a way it never does.

She curled towards his chest, his shoulder, slept against the muscular softness of another mortal being rather than against the upholstery or the window. She slept with steady, unafraid breaths of air through her nostrils and parted lips. Her hair was tousled. Her cheeks were flushed. She let go.

But they walk down the narrow aisle, even Danicka turning partly sideways to get off the plane, and she starts to shift. The blood drains out of the side of her face, and she runs her hand through her hair to at very least tousle it more uniformly. She stifles a yawn. She walks after him, walks just beside and slightly behind him as they leave the tunnel, her suitcase's wheels clicking on the tile.

"I didn't bring my car here, when I left," she says as they leave the terminals. Even at this hour O'Hare is a madhouse. Her voice is louder as they get into the airport proper, surround themselves with travelers and duty-free shops and TCBY and Starbucks. "I can get us a cab if you have luggage checked."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] They both pretend to be something they're not when they're in public. Lukas's mask is farther than the truth, but Danicka's is more refined, and she has a lot more of them. People call her different names depending on where she goes, who she's talking to. They think she's entirely different people; they think they knows pieces of her history, when all they know is a story she spins for them.

He can almost watch her pulling her masks, or her armor, back on. Layer after layer, moment after moment, until she's simply the lovely blonde with the green eyes and a rather sharply angled jaw giving an edge to otherwise soft features. The blonde getting off the flight from New York City, which makes sense because, look at her, she has to be a city girl; the blonde walking alongside the dark-haired man who was almost certainly her boyfriend from the way he's pulling her luggage, and the way they --

well; no. Their overt closeness, that sort of subtle intimacy they found mid-flight, is gone now. His eyes are clear and sharp; he looks at the overhead signs as they pass.

"I don't," he replies.

He's not used to the weight and size of her suitcase -- smaller than the ones he would use, with a shorter handle. It skitters sideways a few times, tips once or twice, before he gets the hang of it, finds a position that works. All around them, the airport is just beginning to wake up. Travelers are yawning over morning coffee; all the pastries are fresh. They pass a Starbucks. It smells good. The last time he was at O'Hare, he was having coffee with his sister.

"Let's take the El," he says, deciding.

[Danicka Musil] "I don't really mind cabs."

It lacks the air of a confession. The way Danicka says it, no one listening would ever guess she'd said otherwise. No one nearby would think she were doing anything but assuring her boyfriend that a cab's fine, let's just get out of here, honey did you forget we just got off a red eye?

"I just wanted to be near you."

And yet that does sound like a confession, going back to the very beginning of all this, to the first real deception, her first lie to him. Nothing at Smart Bar was untrue. Nothing as she fucked Sam but cried out in Czech knowing Lukas could hear her moaning Yes, whimpering Please, gasping Don't stop was a lie, at least not to him. It's unlikely that he ever thinks about it, probable that he does his best not to, but also possible that he's compared, in his mind, the way she sounded when she was with Sam with the way she sounds

every

single

time

he touches her. After this long there's no denying the difference. After this long there's no doubt that there was too much submission, too much pretty, unattainable girl letting herself be conquered by the wrong boy, too much of exactly what Sam wanted. But that is all in the past, and she isn't reaching back that far. She's only looking back to the moment when he offered, for noble or cunning reasons he made up to cover his real desire, to drive her home.

And she said yes. Because she hates cabs.

Danicka doesn't fight with him over the suitcase. She also doesn't look at him as she looks through her bag to make sure she has her keys close to hand. Either way, she just follows him.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas is looking straight ahead, not because he's trying to ignore her now but because he's looking for signs leading him to ground transportation, to the L. When she speaks -- contradicts quite possibly the first expression of opinion she's ever given him

(because If I did, I hope you wouldn't have to ask was not an opinion)

he turns, looks at her with eyebrows up, skeptical. The look vanishes a second later. His chest feels suddenly tight. Lukas looks at Danicka, saying nothing, his brow furrowing as though troubled; as though confused; as though aching.

The last is closest to what it is. He reaches for her -- wraps his arm around her shoulders, draws her against the side of his chest and kisses her temple once, wordlessly.

Then he lets her go. And walks out of the security check, past the turnoff to the light rail, toward the curb and the cab line.

[Danicka Musil] From the start. They've both admitted it now. She doesn't know when she started falling in love with him. He dropped even in front of Sam that he wanted her from the first moment he saw her. But from the start, a simple: I just wanted...

To be near him. To be close. To spend some time in a car with him away from the members of the Unbroken Circle, the sheep outside the Brotherhood's walls, the Garou, the Kin, the Nation, the tribe, the whole mess of other eyes and hearts and intentions and loyalties. She wasn't even trying to give him a chance to disappoint her, disgust her, anger her.

Just... be around him.

For the second time tonight he steps closer and pulls her suddenly to him, holds her like that. And though she doesn't tense slighty in his arms and stare past him only to tell him to let her go, Danicka does sigh slightly, and she does not melt against him. She waits for him to finish, it seems, even though at the end of it she wraps one arm around his waist and returns some of the contact. It isn't much. It isn't enough.

They go to hail one of the many cabs running through the airport, Lukas handling her suitcase while Danicka climbs into the backseat.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Her luggage thumps into the trunk while Danicka slides into the backseat. A moment later Lukas joins her, the shocks depressing under his weight. The door shuts. He leans forward to tell the cabbie, "W City Center."

They pull away from the curb. He leans back, looks for the seatbelt for a moment before leaving it be. The taxi is a large sedan, roomy in the back; even with his tall frame, there's enough room to go around. They're not squeezed together.

Lukas leans back, closes his eyes for a moment. He caught a couple hours on the plane; about four or five before that, in the afternoon. Before that -- he can't easily remember the last time he slept. He's not sure Danicka slept any better. They're both tired, weary, worn, but he knows that when the morning light hits her she's still going to be as golden as he remembers, a creature of summer.

Lukas turns away. Props his elbow on the edge of the window, rubs his face, his unshaven jaw.

"Jste pořád se na mě rozzlobený?" he asks.

[Danicka Musil] "Not Lakeshore?" she says, suddenly, as soon as he tells the driver where to go. She looks at him in unmasked surprised, too sudden for her -- even her, or maybe just with him, or maybe just tonight -- to hide.

She doesn't really expect an answer. She mostly just seems annoyed with herself for having blurted it out, and sits on her side of the bench to look at her hands in her lap the way she did more than once tonight. It's what she did the last time she was in a cab.

"Ano," she says. Then: "Nějaký," she corrects.

There's enough of a pause there for her to take a breath. "Jsem rád, že jste nic neudělali." Quieter: "Ale nejsem si jistý, jestli to můžu věřit ty hned teď."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] A glance -- "W Lakeshore, then."

And leaning back, an explanation, "Myslel jsem, že City Center byla trochu blíž."

The topic moves on. He asks her what he does. She answers how she does. It makes his mouth tighten into a grimace; makes him look out the window at the passing landscape.

"Věřit mi do dělat co?"

[Danicka Musil] Her eyes flick upward and at the cab driver. She has her hands stretched on her lap, fingers splayed, but they curl together and she takes another deep breath, looking from the back of the driver's head over to Lukas. "Let's talk when we get there." Her eyes offer the unspoken 'please' to come after that, but this is Danicka: what she doesn't say is as calculated, most of the time, as what she does.

"My feet hurt."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas glances her way; then at the cab driver. He lets it go.

Her feet hurt. He looks down at her feet; her shoes. "Take your shoes off," he says, quietly.

Miles go by. O'Hare is a good distance from the center of the city. The cabbie avoids the Loop altogether, coming in from the northwest, merging onto Lake Shore Drive. They've been to this hotel often enough that Lukas recognizes the building, the drive.

While Lukas retrieves his credit card, the cabbie opens Danicka's door and then gets her luggage out from the back. Lukas pays, signs the slip, declines the receipt, gets out. As the cab pulls away, he draws up the handle on her rolling suitcase and tugs it along behind himself, gesturing her ahead of him into the lobby.

His card is still out, so Lukas checks them in. He asks for a nonsmoking room, upper floors; he hesitates for a barely noticeable beat when the receptionist asks if he wants two queen-sized beds or a single king. In the end he goes with the latter, signs for the room, gets his American Express back along with a pair of room keys, one of which he hands to Danicka as he comes away from the desk. They share their elevator with two others who keep very quiet and get off on the 14th floor.

Then they're getting off on the 22nd floor, and he's familiar enough with the hotel now that he doesn't have to read the sign to know which way to go. The lock on 2256 clicks as it unlocks, the LED above it blinking green. Inside, the room is cool, the curtains drawn back, morning light washing the floor.

A sense of deja vu, as he sets her suitcase against the wall, beside the shelves. He shrugs out of his blazer, hangs it up. Loosens his collar, and then sits on the bed to take his shoes and socks off.

"I don't ... really want to talk right now," he says. It's the first thing he's said to her, apart from here, I'll get that walking into the hotel and twenty-one as they entered the elevator, since the brief exchange in the car. "I want to maybe get something to eat. And sleep." A brief wince. "Can we just sleep? Together?"

[Danicka Musil] "I will," she says, keeping her voice matched to his volume, his tone, even the cadence of the way he speaks. It is always so. There's a tidelike pattern between them when they talk, as often devasting in its force as gently rhythmic, natural, and understood as inevitable.

But taking off her shoes in a cab is, apparently, like crying on the floor. Danicka has not and will not and does not need to tell him about literally doing so when he was gone, when he left her in this very fucking hotel and she did not see him for a week, did not hope to have him again. She does not want him imagining her curled on her bedroom floor with her arms around her stomach, choking on sobs, any more than she ever wanted him to be exposed to her brother. Danicka leaves her boots on as the cab heads towards the W, and she does not grimace or sigh or wince as they walk into the lobby.

She holds her back straight, her shoulders squared, her hair smoothed now. If it were not for the stubble on Lukas's jaw people might believe they had not been up all night. She speaks for them at the desk even though he pays and determines where and what sort of room they're getting. Danicka just flicks her gaze sideways at him when he hesitates over getting two queens or a king; she forces a small, wry smile, as though shaking her head inwardly at how tired he is, that he would even have to think about it.

And he's almost never handed her a damn key card here. Danicka takes it, not reading much into the gesture but noting it because it's odd. Coming to hotels from the start, they entered together and fucked, and showered, and fucked again, screwing on top of bedding and against walls without any intention of staying, of going out and coming back. She doesn't need her own key, really. She never has, at least.

It doesn't matter. She puts it in her pocket and forgets about it. Her footsteps are muffled by the thick carpeting in the hall, and again by the even more plus carpets in the room. It's not a suite, but the smaller room they've gotten several times before. It's just like the room where he dumped her, where she hurt him for hurting her by stripping out of the lingerie he'd given her for her birthday and shoving it, carrying her scent still, in his hands. She doesn't mention it. The memory flickers past and make her sigh out of sheer exhaustion.

Lukas goes to the bed. Danicka goes to a chair by the window, unbuttoning her coat and hanging it over the back. She sits down, facing him at an angle, and leans over to unzip her boots one at a time, setting them beside the chair as he speaks. He used to try harder to conceal how he felt: that he wanted her, that he was tired or grieved somehow, that there was anything wrong or anything he wanted that he was not letting her see. And Lukas learned, quickly, how useless it was. How pointless.

Not just because she could see through him. But because je to Danička.

Anger ripples through her. Frustration. He can sense it because she doesn't try to hide it any more than he tries to hide how tired he is right now. She rises and starts to pull off her sweater, revealing the pale gray camisole she's been wearing underneath it. Like her coat, Danicka lays the sweater carefully across the chair, then twists a bit and reaches to her skirt's waistband, undoing a tiny metal hook, drawing down a zipper. She lets it go in a controlled slide off her hips, stepping out of it and laying it on the chair as well. Her panties are...cotton. White. Low cut, leaving a couple of inches of flesh between underwear and camisole. Her hose are black and go up over her knees, cling to her lower thighs with lace-adorned elastic rather than garters and belt. She sits down on the edge of the chair to peel them off, one by one. There are pink impressions on her flesh as reminders of how long she had them on.

"Cokoliv chcete," she sighs, finally, and walks to the bed.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] They're out of resonance tonight. When she wants him to stay, he wants to go. When he wants to hold her, she tells him to let go, let her go. When he wants to talk, she tells him later. When she's ready to talk, he wants --

just to sleep. Just to end this godforsaken day, night, whatever it is, already. Let it be in the past. Let it be gone, if only for a while, because some part of Lukas must remember Danicka curling against his shoulder as they flew from New York City to Chicago; must remember the warmth of her breath, and her body, and the way her hand moved from atop his to the space between his arm and his body, tucking itself there like an animal finding its den.

He watches her for only a few seconds as she begins to undress. When she lowers her skirt he looks away with a short inhale, reaching to undo the rest of his shirt-buttons.

"It's not that I don't want to talk," he says, his voice low. "Just not right now."

That Lukas told the truth when he said I did nothing was never in dispute, but even if she disbelieved him the evidence is clear enough now. There are no fresh wounds on his body, no too-smooth skin where a new wound had just closed. He doesn't smell like sweat and blood under his shirt. She last saw him shirtless, changing, in his room at the inn near her father's house. He has not changed at all.

When his shirt is undone he stands to peel it off, lays it over a separate armchair. Undoes his pants, then, and drops them; tosses them over the armchair as well. Heavy, his shoes thump down beside the chair where he drops them.

His boxer-briefs are soft grey cotton. He leaves them on. The waistband rides low on his hips, where his obliques tuck in, where the thin line of hair running down from his navel starts to widen.

Then he returns to the bed, which she approaches from the opposite side. Lukas dislikes sleeping with the topsheet tucked under the mattress. It makes him feel hemmed in, trapped, claustrophobic. He tugs the sheet out all around his side of the bed before he turns it down, crawls in.

It's about 5 in the morning. He takes a breath, rearranges his pillow.

His throat moves when he swallows.

Softly, "Jsem rád, že nevzal si ty ode mě."

[Danicka Musil] And it's not the first time they've been out of tune, though that's probably for the best. For them both to be angry, for them both to be hurt, for them both to want to be left alone or let go at the same time invites too much danger. It threatens them, not only what they have and what they are to one another but could very well destroy them in a far more literal sense. He can't read her thoughts; she is not sharing them. He just wants to sleep, to be together, and she neither argues nor agrees.

She removes her clothing, but not all of it. She draws down the covers on 'her' side of a bed that doesn't belong to either of them, but does not untuck the topsheet. She likes to have her feet wrapped, though she won't wear socks to bed. He knows this because he finds himself stirring often in bed with her to discover that wriggling, tickling sensation is Danicka tucking her feet underneath or in between his. Occasionally, though rarely, her feet are cold. Inevitably, inexplicably, she sleeps more deeply afterward, even if otherwise she does not reach for him or allow him to hold her tight and nearly immobilized against him.

This time -- when Lukas tells her he just doesn't want to talk right now -- Danicka does not answer at all, neither Whatever you want again or I know or Chapu or, perhaps, Me neither. Not even Okay. She slips her lithe, too-thin body under the sheet and comforter, and he can likely count on one hand the number of times he's gone to bed with her without making love to her, the number of times he's seen her get in bed with any amount of clothing on. It's not a hard and fast rule, but it's hard, when from the beginning their sex life seemed to be the only damn thing between them that worked smoothly or made sense, not to see it as a possible sign that something is wrong.

Not that he needs a sign. Not now.

Danicka lays back without readjusting the pillows behind her, lays on her right side so that she's facing him. "Říkal jsem ti, on že to neudělá," she murmurs, and closes her eyes.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] What Danicka told Lukas, specifically, was that he would give me to you in a heartbeat.

It wasn't ... quite the cakewalk she said it would be. Or rather -- it wasn't the cakewalk he thought she meant it would be, which he never believed it would be, which she, perhaps, never meant for him to believe it would be.

Danicka was always careful to protect Lukas from her brother. From knowledge of what he did, what he had done. Lukas does not think Danicka ever thought any of this would be easy.

He says nothing of this, now. He looks at the ceiling for a moment longer. When he turns his head, she has already closed his eyes. She can hear his head turning on the pillow, though, his hair scritching the pillowcase.

"Jo. Vy dělal."

--

He closes his eyes too. He sleeps, solidly, the day turning by, the sun rising, apexing, descending again. On his back he falls asleep; on his back he wakes up when the light has changed and the sun casts the building's shadow into the water. Sometime in between, though, if Danicka has not gotten out of bed and left, he turns on his side; his hand and his foot crosses the midline of the bed, as though seeking her unconsciously, with something deeper than known and waking intent.