trust.

[Danicka Musil] She hasn't been up here for very long whenever Lukas makes his way to his bedroom. The door is locked behind her, and she has his keys. Maybe she was too drunk to consider that a problem. Maybe she assumes he can get in by other means. There's no telling.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Perhaps it's all but stereotypical that Lukas would turn a social gathering, a party, into an arena to discuss pack business.

Nevertheless, the conversation with Edwin wraps up efficiently enough. After the Ragabash departs, Lukas mounts the staircase to the second floor, passing the now-empty common room on his way to his door.

Which is locked, under his hand. He looks at it a moment, half-puzzled. Then he knocks.

[Danicka Musil] She is not a deep sleeper. He's felt her limp, warm, and heavy against him more than a few times now. He's woken to find her arm and leg wrapped around him, her hand over his heart and her brow resting against the base of his neck. He's fallen asleep on his back with her cheek to his chest, half her body draped over him. He's stirred and touched her as she sleeps, and she's reacted. With a sigh, with a wriggling, with any number of responses to stimuli. Danicka sleeps well, but it takes no special talent to wake her.

Because she is also given more to wakefulness and alertness than sleep, more inclined to be aware than oblivious. So soon enough he hears rustling, and the creak of springs as she rises, and he can all but feel her light footsteps across the floor. The door unlocks, and opens a crack, and Danicka looks out, squinting against the light, to see that it's him.

"Mmm," is all she says, as though in confirmation, and turns to walk away again, heading back to his bed. Her shoes are by his desk, but her trenchcoat and pants are nowhere to be seen. They're hanging in his closet, which is closed. Danicka's locket is on his desk, filling the space above it with the scent of sandalwood and roses. She's in her sweater and a pair of pale pink underwear, and as soon as she reaches his bed she all but flops back onto it, squirming and kicking her legs back under the topmost quilt.

"Mmph," she adds, once she's there.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] It's colder in his room than in the commons. That's as much a phenomenon of the air ducts as it is his insistence on keeping the window open a crack, even in November.

She's in underwear and a sweater, though, and when she lets him in he catches her by the waist before she can turn away again, pulling her against him and wrapping his arms around. A pause, eyes closed, body curved to hers. Then he kisses the side of her neck, lets her go.

She goes back to bed. He re-locks the door, then goes to close his window. After, he goes to his bed, sitting on the edge, aware of a sudden, deep ache in himself:

I want this woman in my bed.
Every night.

that he banishes with a deep breath. Half-pivoting, he puts his hand out, strokes her hair back.

"Myslel jsem, že chceš jít domů?"

[Danicka Musil] Danicka neither tenses nor struggles when he wraps his arm around her and pulls her close. She rests easily against him, bare thighs to his slack-covered ones, absorbing some of his warmth and quietly accepting the affection, the closeness, without doing much in return. Her arms do come around him after a moment, though. Her hands do gently stroke his back, pat him a couple of times.

She gets under the quilt while he sits down beside her legs, and she lays on her right side so she can tuck her chin close to her chest and look at him. Her eyes close when he touches her hair, and then she nods -- with effort -- a couple of times.

"Jo. Jen ... potřeba vystřízlivět první."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "Budu řídit." His hand lingers a moment. Then Lukas gets up, the mattress shifting as his weight leaves it. In the darkness, his slacks are black; his shirt is ghostly, the most visible thing about him. His back, turned, is straight -- something quietly proud about the way he holds himself.

He gets his coat out, slipping into it. Then her clothes, which he brings back to bed for her.

"No tak," he urges gently. "Proč jste tolik pít?"

[Danicka Musil] "Will you drive my car?" Danicka asks him as he gets up, slipping between Czech and English with thoughtless ease, as though she can't tell which language she's speaking right now. Her eyes have a metallic glint in this light, gray with hints of silver, til she rolls this way or that way and the light changes enough that he can see their true color.

She lingers for a little while, then throws back the quilt with an exaggerated motion of her arm, baring her legs and the pale panties that are almost the same color as her skin without a lamp to clarify the difference.

He brings her the pair of khakis from one hanger, the trench from another. She smiles up at him and makes no effort to put either of them on, lifting both arms from the elbows and waggling her fists in the air.

"Tradici," she answers, then launches into: "And who does Mama teach, to mend and tend and fix, preparing her to marry whomever Papa picks? The daughterrrs! The daughters!"

Danicka claps her hands once over her head, and laughs. "Tradition!"

And laughs more.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "Do you want me to?" he responds. She flings the quilt back; she doesn't start putting her clothes on. He promptly turns her coat over, wool side to her bare legs, and lays it over her again.

"It's tradition for you to get shitfaced on thanksgiving?" he sounds vaguely amused; mostly bemused.

[Danicka Musil] "Yes," Danicka answers, nodding and giggling, her hands falling. There's a coat over her legs, but it's not long enough to cover her from waist to toes. Her feet wiggle out at the end, her hips are still half-bared. She stretches as her laughter fades, yawning, and nods benignly up at him again. "I had a friend. In New York. And my family never really celebrated the holiday. And she started getting me drunk on Thanksgiving and goading me into telling people what I think. The truth. And then I went to New Orleans. And when I came back I got drunk one year and told her about the baby and Christian and the abortion and she stopped being my friend.

"But!" Danicka goes on, lifting a finger only to drop it again, looking a bit weary now, "it is a good tradition."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] A flicker of a pause: baby, Christian, abortion. Then it passes.

"Is that why you laid into the Fang downstairs?" he asks, his tone light enough. Since she refuses to dress herself, he shakes her slacks out, lays them on the bed, then starts looking under and beside his bed for her socks and shoes. "In the name of truth?"

[Danicka Musil] [Perception + Empathy -1 (waaasteeed)]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 3, 6, 7, 8, 9 (Success x 4 at target 6)

[Danicka Musil] At her worst -- at her most exhausted, her most altered -- Danicka is still more perceptive than the vast majority of people Lukas knows. She's told him she knew before he did that he wanted her, and it's the truth. She could tell, being driven home in his car wearing a green silk dress under a thick white coat and every last inch of her smelling faintly of his packmate's attentions, that he was glad she did not want Sam. That he was ferociously trying to stamp that reaction down because of the importance his pack has to him. That he'd spent part of the night listening to her fuck someone else and could not, entirely, tolerate it. She knew. She went into her apartment and showered the night off her skin, washing it and almost all of the memory of it away like she'd done so many times before,

and had thought about him as she did. And had thought about him as she went to sleep, finally, her room filled with dawning sunlight. When she woke she found herself staring at the wall, his name and his being on her mind before she was even completely conscious. She did not remember much about being with Sam. She remembered every moment of the car ride home with Lukas.

This is the only time she has ever told him that she had an abortion. He's known she's been pregnant twice. He knows what happened the first time. But what she says now is new, and as she looks up at him she can see the Ahroun flickering from shock to figuring it out, putting two and two together and coming up with one more painful truth. She can see the way he shifts from one topic to another as he shakes her slacks out. And then she's distracted.

"No," Danicka insists slowly, heavily, starting to push herself up on her elbows so she can reach for her pants, "I laid into the Fang downstairs because she came here dressed like that solely for your benefit, twirling around like a odstraňovač nátěrů and pouting because you're taken only to turn around and act like her breeding makes her superior."

Danicka scoffs and struggles with her pants, peering in the dark for which leg goes in which hole. "Since her fucking behavior sure as hell doesn't." She finds her way, lays back down, and wriggles into her khakis, tugging them up onto her hips and zipping and clasping them, looking at the ceiling. "Fucking Fangs. They act like garish buffoons and expect the rest of us to be impressed. They have no manners when they try to have them, and no grace or subtlety when they try their hand at condescension.

"I have better carriage and decorum than the moronic Fangs in this city, and my father was a cabinetmaker," she concludes, sitting up and pointing at the desk. "Shoes're there."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "Baby," Lukas puts his hands over Danicka's, stilling her efforts to pull her pants back on. "Did you think for a single instant that I could possibly be interested in what she had to offer?"

[Danicka Musil] Lukas gets neither a 'yes' nor a 'no' in answer to that question. Danicka starts laughing. It isn't a chuckle, or a restrained giggle. It's a laugh that starts in her belly and makes her tremble, her eyes squeezing shut with hilarity and her head tipping back. She laughs for some time, until actual tears squeeze out past her eyelashes.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "If you didn't think that," Lukas continues evenly, hilarity notwithstanding, "then why does it even matter to you what she does, what she wears, or how rude she was being? What is she doing that could possibly harm you?

"You said it yourself. You have better carriage and decorum. Beyond that, you have more intelligence, more wit, a mind of your own, a future beyond cubs and genealogies and gilded cages. You're her better in every way. Anyone with a mind can see that."

Danicka had not, a moment ago, seen disappointment in Lukas. She saw that he did not want to be the object of their jealousies; she saw that he was concerned, perhaps, that she thought his love of her was anything but complete.

If she looks now, it would be different. There would be something like disappointment there.

"So why," he finishes, "would you even deign to bicker back at her, or any other Fang?"

[Danicka Musil] The laughter fades into giggles, and into snickers, and then a soft sigh as it leaves her completely. She has her hand under his, and does not move it. He speaks to her, level and thoughtful, and it only makes her frown. She looks considering at first, and then something in the way he looks at her makes her sit up -- slowly, because the room is spinning lazily and teetering a bit. Her frown deepens as she looks at him.

"You," she says firmly, "have missed the point entirely."

Their hands are laying together as comfortably as sleeping children, packed wolves, on her lap. They seem separate from the conversation, from Danicka's frown and tone, and yet the gentleness that even the slightest contact adds to their interaction can't be understated.

"It wasn't about you," Danicka goes on, softening her words as they leave her mouth, because these ones in particular can so often be taken as a slap in the face, a scolding for arrogance. "She is... low. And so obviously so."

She pauses there, and snickers, delighted. "I rhymed." It takes a moment for Danicka to calm down again, shaking it off and firmly grabbing a hold of her senses so she can continue speaking.

"But then she insulted me. And the..." she searches for a word, sighs it out: "transparency of it all was pathetic." Danicka leans over and touches her brow to his for a moment, closes her eyes, then lets her head slide down the side of his face to his shoulder. She exhales, resting there a moment as though sitting up is just too exhausting for her to contemplate any longer. "Baby, think less of me if you will, but I didn't snark at her because I felt threatened. I don't smirk at Kate behind her back or in Czech because I'm scared of her. I know very well the places that I excel and they falter. I do it...because..."

She pauses there, and pulls back, and moves his hand gently away from her waist so she can finish clasping her slacks. Her legs slide to the side, and she begins to search for the floor with her bare feet. "Baví mě to."

The way she once said: I am when he said -- so softly -- I don't think you're capable of cruelty.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] That silences Lukas. The fact that she told him at all, so bluntly, surprises him -- but less than it did half a year ago. What she told him, though, makes his eyebrows flit together; makes him search for words.

She told him, once, that she's capable of cruelty. He remembers that, and he remembers that she told him two men have loved her; he adds these facts to what she just said, a name, an act, a decision. Ultimately, though, Lukas doesn't really believe that of her. If one gets philosophical about it, if one gets cynical about it, it's possible that on some level Lukas doesn't believe anyone other than the Garou and the Wyrm, the monsters and the monsters, capable of cruelty and malice and hate and destruction.

He stops searching for something to say. He sits back. It's hard to define who lets go of whom first. He's still watching her seconds later. As she swings her feet to the floor, his eyes finally cut away. There's a beat of pause. Then he gets up and goes to retrieve her shoes, handing them to her as he turns back.

"Thank you for being honest," he says finally, "and for not trying to paint it as something loftier than it is."

A beat of pause. Then he holds his hand out for hers.

"Did you still want me to drive?"

[Danicka Musil] [Perception + Empathy -1 (I love vodka! :D)]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 2, 2, 3, 5, 9, 10 (Success x 2 at target 6) Re-rolls: 1

[Danicka Musil] They deserve it.

She would not call it cruelty, however malicious it may seem to enjoy the ability to insult someone to their face without them knowing it. And she can do it without switching languages. Lukas has seen it. He knows how expertly Danicka can hide a verbal slap, couching it in a charming smile and a turn of phrase. He can see the way her eyes glint sometimes with the knowledge that they are simply too dense, or too full of themselves, to realize they are being humiliated rather than sincerely praised. She gets off on it: not just mocking them and getting away with it, but on the very fact that she is, as he said... better. Cleverer.

In her mind, they earn it. By their very stupidity, by their self-involvement, by their arrogance, they ask to be knocked down a peg or two. They ask to be belitted. In her mind, the smirking taunt and the eyerolling behind their backs is the natural and proper consequence for what she deems pathetic, what she calls low. But she does not try to tell him that this is a calling in life, a noble vocation, to teach Fangs and others a lesson.

Simply: she enjoys it.

Danicka watches him get up, and her brows pull together.

"Do you?" she asks quietly, which is not a response to either of the things he just said.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] His hand stays where it is in the air between them. Lukas frowns, a quick expression, confusion.

"Do I what? Want to drive?"

[Danicka Musil] "Think less of me."

She is sitting on the edge of his bed, her hands in her lap, her toes on the cold carpet. The frown on her upturned face is a small, aching thing. It is not something she would have shown him months ago. It is not something she would show him quite so easily, even now, while sober.

And when she speaks, it is barely above a whisper.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] When his eyebrows draw further together, it's not confusion.

"Danička, miluji tě." They rarely say it this way: matter-of-factly, a statement rather than a form of worship. "Nothing could ever make me think less of you."

He holds his hand out further, offering it to her, opening the fingers to let hers through if she takes it.

"But," he adds, slower, "I think and act differently from you in this. I don't mock a person for his weakness. I sometimes try to help them. More often I simply pity them. But then, in the end I remember their weaknesses in case I ever need to use that knowledge. And there's nothing commendable about that; nothing that would give me the right to think less of you."

[Danicka Musil] To look at them, to know what they really are -- that he is not a man living in luxury but a monster, that she is not an independent woman but the broken kin of monsters -- no one would imagine that Lukas is the one with compassion enough to reach out to the faltering, that Danicka is the one whose gaze lacks sympathy for the weak. It is a rare thing for her to nurture, for her to feel pity. It is rarer still for her to care about the thoughts and feelings of others beyond how it affects her, how they might hurt her.

It isn't hard to understand how they developed like this, what priorities they were given from an early age. When Lukas was still a teenager, his outlook on the world still forming, he was taken under the wing of a Hungarian Philodox of the tribe. It would be ridiculous to pretend that Promised-Rain did not have powerful influence over the molding of the young Ahroun's attitude, now so gelled that it will possibly never change. Just as it would be foolish to imagine that Danicka can, after all these years, offer to the world what she was never given.

Ex nihilo nihil fit.

Still his hand is held out, open. Danicka finally takes it, and puts pressure on it as she rises to her feet.

Even as drunk as she is, and unable to simply shift and burn the vodka out of her system, she doesn't wobble. She puts effort into keeping herself from swaying, and squeezes his hand once before letting go and walking over to her boots. Danicka reaches into them and sits on his desk chair to put her socks on, drawing them up under her pant legs. She pulls each boot on, snug around her calves, and barely remembers to pick up her locket, pocketing it rather than putting it back on. She looks around for her trench coat

and it's there, in his hand again, held out to her. She smiles faintly as she puts it on, shrugging it over her shoulders and sweeping her hair out from under the collar with a practiced, familiar gesture. Her purse is picked up, and when she's ready to go, she seeks his hand again.

"Did I tell you that my roommate is in Vermont?" she asks, genuinely wondering, as they exit his room.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas huffs a laugh under his breath.

"Yes," he says. Her hand is held warm in his -- and then he takes it in his other arm, loops it through the crook of his elbow. Not because this is more gentlemanly, but because this brings her closer.

And because it's raining outside, or has been in spats all day. On his way out of his room, he picks up his umbrella where it stands folded against the corner. The door shuts behind them, locking on its own. The Brotherhood is quiet around them as they descend the stairs. In the kitchen, some sleepy-looking kin are cleaning up the aftereffects of the feast.

Lukas doesn't tell Danicka that when he found her lazing in his bed, too drunk to move, he thought seriously about picking her up and telling her to wrap her arms and legs around him; to cloak herself in his coat and ride on his back like a child piggybacking; to hold on while he climbed out the window with her and went out that way so she wouldn't have to dress, wouldn't have to be presentable, wouldn't have to act like she wasn't

absofuckinglutely sloshed.

as she passed before the eyes of strangers and near-strangers.

Danicka didn't need this, in the end, and one wouldn't necessarily expect a world-class master of masks and social graces like her to. She stands without swaying. They walk down together, and out into the parking lot where he finds her slate-blue Infiniti. Unlocking the doors, he hands her into the passenger's side, then circles around to get in the driver's.

He's driven this car once, coming back from a Polish restaurant where they ate traditional Polish fare and drank Polish potato vodka and moved from sitting across from one another like civilized adults to sitting beside one another like children to cuddling like teenagers to, finally, all but mauling one another's faces like animals. The controls are vaguely familiar to him. He adjusts the seat and the mirrors and the steering wheel, and then starts the ignition.

"What's he doing in Vermont?"

[Danicka Musil] They talk as they leave, as he takes his umbrella and she holds onto his arm to help steady herself as much as to stay close to him. She goes down the stairs slowly but not gingerly, her feet firmly placed. He can feel the tension in her, the sheer effort to maintain grace despite the amount of alcohol in her system and the drowsiness lingering from brief sleep.

"Visiting his mother," she explains, as far as Paul is concerned. It doesn't really matter. It's Thanksgiving; Paul is human (and all of them are mortal). Of course he's with his family for the holiday. Of course he's out of the city, out of the state, seeing the parent who will still talk to him.

They pass by the employees of the Brotherhood in silence, exit through the alleyway into the light rain. Danicka has no idea what Lukas thought of before, how he considered getting her out of there in a thoroughly undignified fashion just because

together, alone, they do not worry much about dignity.

She hands him her eyes from her purse as they go to the car, and he hits a button to unlock the doors, opens one for her. Danicka slides into the seat with a sigh. It takes her until he's settled in his own seat to get her belt on across her chest and lap, fumbling while he's adjusting mirrors and the like.

"Have you... thought any more about what we talked about before?" she asks, as he's pulling out of the parking lot, the wipers moving slowly, the stereo playing from the middle of a song with a male vocalist singing

...I will run, if I can keep up with you I'll stay young forever...

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Briefly caught off guard, Lukas replies with the first thing on his mind, which is indication in and of itself that what he doesn't discuss immediately and what he forgets are two things altogether:

"Christian?"

A moment later, clicking his own seatbelt, "Or getting a place that's ours?"

[Danicka Musil] Her jaw tenses at the name, though she was all but laughing when she said it herself. "Getting a place," she clarifies quietly, a moment later, and looks out the window.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] He senses the tension in her, though this time they aren't touching; she isn't leaning into his arm as they move down the stairs that challenge her inebriated balance. Lukas glances briefly at Danicka, then away. And he leaves the subject of Christian be; nods, maneuvering her car carefully down the quiet streets.

"I have." Lake Shore Drive winds through some of Chicago's most expensive neighborhoods; near the Caern, however, the scenery is industrial and unpretty and the streets are ill-lit, probably rife with crime at night. The headlights are bright, though, cutting effortlessly through the gloom. "I've been looking since the day after we talked about it, actually. The market's good right now. A lot of foreclosure homes up for sale for ridiculous prices, which drives the entire market down. It's -- "

he trails off; realizes she probably doesn't care about the market trend. Realizes she probably already knows. There's a pause. Then he says, "There were a few places I liked. They're not very impressive." He laughs under his breath, half-embarrassedly. "They're actually closer to hovels. But the neighborhoods around them were decent. The umbral spirits were congenial, or at least benign, and I wouldn't worry about your safety if you were there without me.

"Do you want to see them?"

[Danicka Musil] This is a warmer topic than the one hinted at when he said the name of the man she'd mentioned up in his room. Danicka eases almost immediately, too inebriated to hold on to any one thought for very long. She may have already forgotten telling him that her friend, an unnamed woman in New York City, ceased speaking to her when Danicka got smashed and told her of the decision she'd made all those years ago.

However many it was.

She takes her eyes off the glass when Lukas tells her he's been looking since the ninth, and her eyebrows go up. Her lips are parted, faintly curved; she looks vaguely, innocently happy for a moment, even as he starts to delve into the market and the economy and why these 'hovels' are even cheaper right now than they would be otherwise.

The truth is, Danicka has always lived in lovely homes. He's seen the house she grew up in, the house he visited on occasion and ran rampant through because it was so much bigger than the single room his family occupied for a time. He can likely imagine the sort of homes -- plural -- that she inhabited while she worked for the Sokolovs, never far from Yelizaveta except for her days off. He can imagine her sitting in the back seat of towncars with her charge, the windows tinted to keep gawkers from peering in at the Silver Fang and her Shadow Lord governess. He can surmise without difficulty what kind of abode stood on the Sokolovs' land in New Orleans, and he's been in her apartment here enough times.

It does not take much less than what she's used to for Lukas to be concerned about how impressive they are. To call them 'hovels'.

Danicka tips her head to the side, blinking slowly. Lazily. "Right now?" she says, sounding a bit lost.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "Before I buy one," he replies. "Now, if you want. But maybe when the sun is up." He's straightfaced; if he's teasing her, it's hard to tell.

[Danicka Musil] "Do you..."

She stops there, frowns, and looks at her hands in her lap. The song changes to one about a cigarette. Or one that uses a cigarette as a metaphor. Something. It's low, the volume down and the music background more than anything else.

"Do you want my help buying it?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Once, a question like that would have made him fiercely defensive, even retaliatory. Then again, once, she would've never asked him if he thought less of her as though that mattered, when a moment ago she told him she wouldn't care.

Lukas turns to cast Danicka a quick, wry smile. "I can manage, Danička." His eyes go back to the road. He makes a right; the Loop slides by across the river, glittering even at this hour. Not too far ahead: Danicka's apartment and all its glamour, all its million-dollar views. What she pays for rent in two months is enough to buy some of the 'hovels' he's looked at.

"Unless you wanted something nicer," he adds -- not spitefully, but perhaps a little worriedly.

[Danicka Musil] Her eyes close, and she smiles. It's slow, and it's bright, and when she can't contain it any longer, she laughs. The sound is not the boisterous, uncontrolled sound of amusement she let out when he asked her if she thought she had anything whatsoever to worry about where Genevre was concerned. It is not the giggle she released when she realized she'd rhymed while she tried to explain herself. It's soft. And inexpicable. And happy.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] And not entirely comprehensible, from Lukas's perspective. He looks at her again -- a glance of his eyes, as much as he can afford while driving. The corners of his mouth flirt upward too, an irresistible reaction to her happiness, but with a touch of uncertainty.

"What?"

[Danicka Musil] "It just..." she laughs again, her eyes opening as she turns her head and looks at him. "You reminded me of that first night, is all. Just now."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] He's briefly baffled. His mind runs through the way she looked dressing in the grey light of dawn, or what little there was of it shafting through the imperfect closure of the curtains. From there, to the air conditioner that rattled as it blasted cold air into the room, and how the room stayed cold even after he turned it off; how it was cold, but he didn't feel it, while he was fucking her, and fucking her, and fucking her, and fucking her; how afterward he covered her shoulder with his hand and asked

(if he could keep her warm)

if she was cold, and how she answered no, but tucked her feet under his anyway.

And back. The way they fought against one another in slow and subtle ways. The way they gave in with that first kiss, and again and again. The way they left Mr. C's together and he brought her to the lowest, shabbiest motel he could think of, and

he has it, then. And he laughs too, quietly.

"Where we are doesn't matter," he quotes her back to herself, and turns to smile at her through the changing lights that cast through the windshield. "We can look in the morning if you want. Or if you want me to surprise you, I can do that too."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] [paws!]

[Danicka Musil] It is not dawn yet, and won't be for a very, very long time. Morning's light will be gray and dim, wintry and pale even through her enormous windows, but it won't be the same as the way it was that morning as she dressed at the foot of the bed, covering the skin he'd watched bared bit by bit a few hours before. Her apartment is cool but it won't be as frigid as it was the first time he fucked her, or the second or third or fourth, and there won't be the same system shock of feverish heat and rage against the chill in the air.

He may hold her, and keep her warm, but it won't be the same as that morning. She tells him, now, if she's cold. She seeks his body heat, even asks for it, rather than simply accepting it when it's given.

Danicka is looking at him when he figures it out, and smiles when he laughs.

"I trust you," is all she says.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] That ends his laughter. It doesn't snip it off, or cut it down; but it winds his laughter to an end all the same. He quiets. He's quiet.

Then, "I know."

That's quiet. She didn't always trust him; he knows that. He didn't always believe what she said and she didn't always trust him. That was painful every single time she said it, but he didn't show it because showing it would be weakness, and he didn't believe her when she said

I'm yours until the full moon

or that she didn't want it to end, or that she was capable of loyalty at all.

Sometimes it hurts him now to think of how little they trusted each other once. Sometimes he's ashamed of the way he treated her, and the things he thought of her, and the things he said to his pack about her, belittling her, denigrating her, casting her as a whore, a slut, a woman whose only and inscrutable purpose was havoc and games.

He takes his right hand off the wheel, and he reaches for hers again. When she gives it to him -- if she gives it to him -- he draws it to his mouth. His eyes on the road, he kisses her hand, his mouth warm on her palm; then warm as he takes her fingers into his mouth, the index and the middle, sucking gently at her fingertips. There's nothing lascivious or seductive about it. He performs this act as an act of love, a demonstration of adoration, gently.

[Danicka Musil] Sometimes when they say they love each other, it's an outcry of that same adoration. It's worship. He's inside her and she's gasping and they're both sweating and they have to say something to seal themselves, to make them whole again after a shattering of heart and body and spirit alike. Sometimes when he kisses her hand like this, her palm and her fingertips, when he sucks on her fingers, it's like a pilgrim kissing the icon of a saint, reverent and yet without the cold, perfunctory sense of duty.

Instead it's this: warm. Sensual without inviting immediate sexuality. Pilgrims do not know their saints the way that he shows he knows her when he does this. And she touches his lips, not in blessing but in recognition of her own, watches him not in divine interest but with a quiet ache of love.

Eventually he lowers her hand, holds it as he drives or lets it go. And it doesn't take very long to get to her apartment, or to the parking garage underneath Kingsbury Plaza. The stereo in the car goes quiet. The concrete cave is silent. There is not much light in here. Danicka hesitates a moment, then leans over and kisses his cheek, lingeringly.

And whispers, lips moving against his skin: "Miluji tě."

And though she said this first to him, she does not say this as often as he does, whether when they're making love or when they're simply looking at each other across the way. Every time, it's like a secret. Like something sacred. Like a prayer, if not worship.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas leans into the first kiss. Leans into Danicka, his temple to her brow, as she whispers against his cheek.

It's been some time since his last shave; she's known him long enough that she's probably able to guesstimate just how long by the length of his beard-bristle. She knows he always shaves clean. She knows he shaves with a straight razor, brushing foam on with a badger-fur brush, rinsing afterward with cool water. She's seen him shave a few times, in his room and in her bathroom, standing in front of her mirror naked in the morning after making love to her the night before, and ten minutes before, with the room still steamy from their shower.

Lukas closes his eyes now, resting his head against hers like animals nesting. A concrete cave is exactly how he thinks of her garage, sometimes. A glass and steel and concrete and drywall den is how he thinks of her home. Asphalt canyons, the streets. Concrete bluffs, the buildings. He pretends to be human -- better than most Garou, and better even than some kin -- but he is not; never will be.

His hand rises, curves over the back of her neck. And then he turns his head and kisses her, softly but slowly, his mouth closed but warm, warm against hers.

"Let me take you to bed," he whispers back, his lips brushing hers with every word. "Let me hold you tonight."

[Danicka Musil] Several times, she's watched him shave. She's laid in his bed or sat and dried her hair while he's gone through the grooming ritual, yet she's never gotten a tub of glycerine soap and another brush and another straight razor for him to keep in her apartment. He does not have a segment of closet to hang up clothes to leave there, no drawer for his socks and boxer-briefs. There is a second toothbrush in her bathroom. Every time she comes to the Brotherhood, she brings whatever she needs in case she stays. They've made no other overtures of shared space.

His room is his territory. By the laws of the nation, so is her apartment. By the concord of their relationship, 23-C in Kingsbury Plaza is Danicka's den. Not his. Not the tribe's. It is hers to share or forbid at her leisure, even if he is the only Garou who would respect it. He may be the only one she expects to.

But Lukas has never seen Danicka shave her legs. He sees bar soap and shampoo and conditioner in her shower, sees a wooden scrub-brush with a woven strap to slip one's hand through. He's seen the gentler soap she uses on her face. He's never seen a razor in there. He's never seen any other colorful acoutrements. Her bathroom is clean and almost spartan, decorated by a set of candles and little else, just as her bedroom is sparsely decorated, the walls bare. Just as her living room does not even have curtains.

Most of the warmth of her den comes from her. From the fact that it's hers.

She tastes faintly of vodka when he kisses her. Her eyes close at the touch to the back of her neck, and her breath sighs when they part. She opens her eyes look at him, nodding. "Každou noc," she murmurs to him, and kisses him again.

Every night that they're together, she means. Every night that they get to sleep in the same bed, she means. Not every night, period. Not having him in her bed every evening, waking to find him in lazy repose, not expecting to have breakfast with him every morning until the abrupt and heartbreaking day that he dies. She just means: every night that they're together.

That's all. Surely that's all.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] This kiss is shorter than the rest -- his lips barely seal around hers before he's drawing back, far enough to see her eyes.

"Každou noc?" he repeats softly.

[Danicka Musil] This isn't fair to either of them. She's drunk -- because it's tradition. She's saying almost everything that comes into her head -- because she's drunk, and because it's tradition. So he talks about holding her tonight, taking her to her bed and keeping her against his body, and she says

every night like an invitation, like an affirmation, like something elusive and impossible, and now they have to clarify.

Because she's drunk. And because they can't.

"...When we can," she whispers, because that is what she always meant. That is what she thinks she meant, or wants to mean, or knows she is permitted to mean.

Danicka reaches down and unclasps her seatbelt, picks up her purse. "Let's go up."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas is larger than Danicka; broader through the shoulders and chest, taller, more massive. He doesn't turn sideways to face her as she did partly because the seatbelt and steering wheel constrains him, and partly because it's more effort for him to fit in the tight space than it is for her.

His right arm wraps backward behind her neck, though. The embrace is a little awkward; it wouldn't let her curl against his chest the way she would if they were in bed, if they were together the way he wants to be

(every night.)

right now. Still, it's contact, and his fingers sift gently through her hair when she says the words that, for a moment, make a trace of longing skim through his eyes; makes a lance of something dangerously close to disappointment, or pain, scar through the center of his chest.

He says nothing, though. His hand falls from her a moment later, and he draws a deep breath. Reason reasserts itself. Logic. "Yeah," he says, quietly, and unbuckles his own seatbelt.

They'll take the elevator up together, standing beside each other. Their hands will be at their sides when the doors close, but midway up he'll reach out and slide his arm around her waist. She'll lean into the side of his chest. She's still drunk, so drunk; he worries about that a little, quietly, amorphously, even though he knows she can take care of herself and knows her limits. When the doors open he walks her to her door.

They won't bother turning on the lights. Paul isn't home, but they won't even make love in the living room with its glorious view. He'll take her to bed as he promised to, as he said he would, as he wants her to, because in a way that's even rarer than making love to her.

He'll bring a glass of water to bed tonight, and it won't be for himself. They'll shed their clothes haphazardly and tumble amidst comforters and pillows, and find each other in the sheets. He'll draw her close and wrap her in his arms, close to his body, skin to skin, naked and primal and together. She'll sleep first. He'll stay awake a little longer, listening to the silence, until his primitive mind settles and believes that it's safe here, that he can sleep, that she'll be protected and safe in his arms while they sleep.

In the morning, which will actually be closer to noon, they'll make love; they'll shower; they'll have breakfast or order something from the sandwich bar downstairs. He'll lounge around with her until mid-afternoon and they'll talk about random things, and at one point he'll tell her what he remembers about his childhood home with the orange trees, but he won't ask her about Christian again because she doesn't want to talk about it and

truthfully, he doesn't really want to know

and he won't ask her about the house again, the den he wants to make for them, because he wants to make it. For them. For her. And he wants, foolishly and rather boyishly, to surprise her with it; to have it bought and paid for and won; to tinker with it and fix it up and make it habitable, make it acceptable, before presenting it to his mate.

And, far more simply: because she trusts him.