[Danicka] She's dressed far more warmly for the vernal equinox than she was for the winter solstice, ironically. Danicka's jeans are tucked into her boots, and she has a green hat on over her pale hair, a heavy black wool coat on, a cream-colored scarf bound up under it. Her hands are in her pockets. She brings no food or drink with her, not this time, tromping up from the parking lot towards the fire.
When she reaches it, she goes straight for it, if only to warm herself after her walk.
[Wyrmbreaker] Out of the tents, into the cold.
At thirty-some-odd degrees, with a light snow falling, it doesn't feel as though spring has come. Then again, that isn't quite what the rite is about anymore. Once, their guide said, spring would not come without a reawakening. These days, Lukas suspects the rite has more to do with a more personal reawakening; a spring of the soul. A cleansing. A rebirthing. A moving-on.
He'll have time, later, to muse on the events of the rite; the depths they traveled to, the wheel of seasons spinning before their very eyes. For now, it's the equinox, it's the bonfire, it's his kin and his kind gathered around the flame that beats back the winter, and his mate at the fireside.
Lukas has a plate of food in hand, hot but quickly cooling. His gait is familiar, and his presence, and Danicka knows it's him long before he comes to stand beside her, offering her what is his.
And turning his head and bending to her, laying his brow briefly against her hair, breathing in.
"Hi," he says, simple, quiet.
[Danicka] Every one of these bonfires Danicka has been to has come after a separate rite, one shared with mortals and perhaps a few other Kinfolk. She always arrives late, her eyes bright with whatever rituals -- and wine -- she's had with those who, in their way, are trying to connect with Gaia even if they don't know her by that name. Danicka doesn't talk often to Lukas about her devotion to the spirit world that she cannot touch, the pulse of the invisible that she cannot quite feel. She doesn't tell him that she envies him the ability to speak with and touch the spirits, the one thing about the Garou that she wishes she could grasp herself.
Danicka has never wished to Change. She does not crave power. She does, however, long to be close to their Mother. However she can.
The only time she's seemed dressed for ceremony, however, was the winter solstice, with that crown of dried roses and that long, black gown he'd helped her slip out of at their den. Lukas almost never sees Danicka in black, the supposed color their tribe. Tonight's no exception: her coat is black, but everything else about her is in color. Earth tones, particularly, though a sleepy and barely-woken earth. Her hands are in her pockets when he comes over, and she smiles at him, unaware of what's transpired since the last time she saw him.
"Hi," she says back, and closes her eyes for a moment while their heads touch. She's not in heels. He has to bend over quite far to do this. She nuzzles her nose gently against him, and then opens her eyes as he pulls away, taking her hand from her pocket and reaching over to take a bite of food from his plate. Because he offered. "How'd it go?" she asks, noting his... rather disheveled appearance.
[Wyrmbreaker] "I..."
He pauses; considers. She takes food from his plate, which is heaped almost exclusively with meats. Beef steak, cut into strips. Pork, pulled from the side of a whole roast pig. Lamb shank. A baked potato buried under all that, and the only greenery he intends to eat tonight sprinkled atop: chives on sour cream.
"We did well as a group," he says, then. "Some of us failed. Most succeeded. We gave things up to the season and the rite, or had them taken if we could not bear to. And we were given things in return. Tokens. Insights."
Take everything. Give it back.
"Miluju tě, můj lodní důstojník," Lukas says then: quiet but intense, his eyes on the fire, the fire reflected in his eyes. "Miluju tě tak velmi."
[Danicka] A thin line appears in Danicka's brow. She's chewing slowly on a piece of roasted pork, and when she's swallowed she licks quickly and demurely at the grease left on her fingertips, the very tip of her tongue flicking rapid and pink between her digits. She puts her hand back in her pocket, because she's already eaten, and taking food from his plate was as much ritual as anything. Her other hand, she reaches out with to find his. Slips it in. Lets his palm keep it warm.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
Because the fire is in his eyes, and because of the way his hand folds just so around her own.
[Wyrmbreaker] His hand wraps around hers, warm, though hers are not cold. Nothing about her is cold: he's known that since the first time he touched her, hand to hand in a dark, strobelit club.
And he nods. Once, a little hesitantly. Then again, sure now. He turns to her briefly -- her flat heels set her nearly a foot beneath him, but he finds her eyes easily enough. He doesn't tug on her hand but nods her forward instead, around to the far side of the bonfire, quieter.
There Lukas lets go Danicka's hand briefly, hands her his plate to hold while he hauls one of the split-log benches a little closer to the fire. When she sits, he sits beside her, the outside of his knee touching hers.
There's a quiet. Then, as she starts to hand him his plate back, he pulls from his pocket a child's glove, silver-threaded, sprinkled with sparkles. This he passes to Danicka on the open palm of his hand like a relic.
"There were seven of us," he says softly, "and we passed seven gates of the underworld, each one a trial. Only the difficulty was not that the spirits wanted us to fail. They wanted us to succeed. But each gate was a... a frailty in one of us. Or a disconnect. Something to be overcome, ourselves against ourselves. The metis, Blood Summons, had to allow his mind to rest when his body was exhausted. Lila, the Child of Gaia, had to lead a pack and teach a pack of cubs. I don't know exactly what was tested for them. It was all very personal."
He's so quiet this could be solemn, a recitation like a liturgy. It's not, though. There's a quiet happiness in him, which shows in a certain inflection of his voice; a faint curve of his mouth; the way he seems to examine the memories as he speaks of them, thoughtfully, carefully.
"My gate was the last," he says. "It was you. Or... you as you could be a few years from now. And our den." A pause. "And our children."
[Danicka] She thinks sometimes about the night she met him, before she knew that they'd met as children. She thinks about the deep surge of attraction, of pure and unfettered want that had gone through her. She doesn't regret touching his hand and drawing back, nor does she regret that he took his leave of her and Gabriella and that she drove Gabriella home and dropped her off and went home to get herself off under the covers. It would have been so empty, fucking him in her car or his or the bathroom or in some nearby by-the-hour motel. They would have used each other.
And she's glad, quietly so, that they've never really used each other. No matter how often at the beginning they may have tried to make it about the sex, about fulfilling their rampant desire for one another so that they could go on with their lives. She's happy, looking back, knowing that from the very beginning, they were making love to each other.
It seems saccharine, so she doesn't speak of it aloud, but... maybe she will. Not tonight.
Danicka walks with him, feet crunching on still-dead grass and frost and snow, and holds his plate with both bare hands while he moves the bench. People laugh and talk loudly around them. Yell. Fight. Someone strums a guitar, not quite performing but just idly playing. She sits down with him, and as she hands the plate back he takes something out of his pocket and hands it over to her. She frowns at it, bewildered, but she also knows: tokens. insights.
She listens. Rubs her thumb over the glove in her hand, reflecting on just how... small it is.
Almost drops it when he says that he saw her at his gate. She looks at him then, over and up, frowning. "That's.. "
Doesn't say it. Not fair. Fucked up.
Danicka looks back at the glove. Thinks: ow.
[Wyrmbreaker] "That was hard," he finishes for her. Or perhaps it's just an admission. A confession of guilt: it was hard. I was almost too weak to bear it.
Almost. But not.
Which she must know of him, too. That her mate is not infallibly strong. That the first time they met, he was so deeply attracted to her he had to convince himself he was indifferent, that he disliked her. That he had to act as though he didn't mind that Sam wanted to date her, that Sam's idea of asking for permission was I'm going to take Danicka out -- that's cool, right?, mispronouncing her name all the while; that he had to act as though he didn't mind driving her home with his brother's smell all over her, when he wanted her for himself.
He is neither infallible, nor always strong. Sometimes he is weak. Sometimes he is afraid of the truth, or not quite able to control himself. Once, he nearly frenzied on her. Once, he fucked her hard enough to hurt. Once, he kept her from leaving the room and terrified her.
He has not, however, been so weak that he's failed totally, completely, and beyond all hope of redemption. He has never done that, and perhaps will never allow himself to be so utterly beaten.
She knows that, too. Because she knows him.
"But it was important," he says. "I think I needed to see it. I needed to live it, if only for a few moments. Being with you like that, I mean. Sharing as much of our lives as we could. I needed to know how hard it was, and I needed to know that it was ... worth it."
He can't quite look at her; feels awkward, which is a rare thing; feels uncertain and embarrassed. There's another pause before he adds:
"Please don't think I'm pressuring you to do anything. Anything at all. That's not my intention. I'm telling you because I think I try so hard to prevent some possible hurt or loss or pain that ..."
A trail-off, incomplete. They're sitting side by side, and his forearms are laid across his knees, his hands moving slowly, absently together, the thumb of one rubbing across the palm of the other. Creases there: life line, heart line, the supposed destiny of a man writ on his most undeniably human feature.
"Baby, I'm just trying to say: I don't want to let fear guide my choices."
[Danicka] This time, Danicka doesn't ask him if he failed, or if he succeeded. If he sacrificed, or if what was needed for the gate had to be taken from him. He would tell her, openly if not easily, if he had broken at the very last. He has never kept his failures from her, hidden them, glossed over them as though they do not matter.
All she does is look at the glove in her hand, feeling its softness broken by the scratchy thread that makes it sparkle, while Lukas tells her what he learned in the rite. He asks her not to think he's trying to pressure her; a huff of a laugh, hard to understand -- maybe just overcome -- comes out of her mouth as he says it.
She presses her lips together, and closes her eyes tightly, and wraps her hand around that tiny glove. Even in her hand, so much smaller than his, it's impossibly little. Made to fit a five year-old's hand, made to stretch to fit five year-old fingers. Not really all that fine, like the gloves Danicka chooses for herself. Just something to spend five or ten dollars on at Target. Not even made for warmth, really, but brightly colored to catch the eye of a child who doesn't think about how much something costs, or about how useful it is.
For a long time, Danicka doesn't say anything back, even after she opens her eyes and opens her hand and looks down at that little glove again.
They both know how much it means to her to be going to school, how much she enjoys her classes. How proud she is of how very, very well she's doing. They both know how long her life was bound down to family, and then to Fangs, and how it's only been since October that she's had any real freedom, because now Vladislav cannot come to Chicago and simply take her back at will.
Then she turns to him, and there's brightness in her eyes reflecting the fire, revealing welling tears. "Tell me about them."
[Wyrmbreaker] He does look over at her, then. He looks when she makes that sound, that exhale that wants to be a laugh but doesn't quite make it. He looks as she presses her lips together and closes her eyes, closes her hand around the glove. His eyes are keen, intense, searching, concerned.
When she opens her eyes and asks about their nonexistent children, though, Lukas frowns. He shakes his head immediately, denying the request because it hurts her, denying her information because it'll hurt her, denying her until he remembers:
I try so hard to prevent some possible hurt.
"They're not real yet," he reminds her gently. "They might never be. Even if we ... had children, a thousand things could change."
For a moment she might think that's all he'll tell her: a no without saying so. It's only a pause, though, a space to collect his thoughts.
Then, very softly: "We had three. We named the eldest Klára, because when you carried her we talked about how it was when we met. How you could always see me so clearly. How I wanted to see you so clearly. We called her Klárinka. She loved to talk. She loved to run and shout and play. She was a good sister. That's her glove. She lost them before you took her ice skating," a smile ghosts, "and she had to wear different ones, and they weren't as warm because they didn't have sparklies. I was going to buy her a bicycle. She was almost five.
"Then there's Petříček. You named him. I didn't like the name at first, but it fits him. He was quiet. Clever. He had your chin," he reaches out, touches her, runs his thumb gently over her chin, "and my eyes. He wore glasses. It broke my heart when we found out he needed them, because he was still so young.
"Zlatuška was our youngest. She always wanted to be held. Not like Klárinka at her age at all. It drove you insane sometimes," Lukas laughs quietly, "and you called her buclatý dítě. Because she was. At dinnertime she was a little monster. If you let her near food unsupervised you'd be sorry."
Lukas is quiet for a little while, then, tilting his head back to bare his throat, to look at the stars. He searches their pattern, looks for words. Lowers his eyes back to his mate's, reaches out to her again, strokes her cheek.
"It wasn't easy, having them. I wasn't there when they were born. I couldn't see them for weeks afterward, and then only in tiny increments, a little more at a time, until they could stand to be near me. Even then, I'd be gone for days at a time. You had to take care of them by yourself so often. You had to take time off from school. We couldn't really," a faint huff of a laugh, "waste money going to the W or the Omni to fuck on someone else's sheets. A hundred fifty thousand dollars each: that's what a kid costs on average, age zero to eighteen. We had to keep that in mind.
"You were tired a lot. When I did come home, I came home late. We fought sometimes. Usually over stupid things. Sometimes over important things. Sometimes I'd have to leave again because my pack needed me. Sometimes, because I couldn't handle being there, or they couldn't handle me being there. Once I almost snapped.
"We didn't have the sort of life you see on TV. We didn't even have the sort of life my parents did. What little we did have, we had to fight for. Every single day.
"I don't even know if you were happy like that."
It's on the last that he has to look away again. He didn't cry when he saw his future, one possible future: he didn't weep when his child flinched from him, though he wanted to sob. Lukas's eyes sting, though, which is not something he's familiar with; not an impulse he remembers even when Mrena died. Even when Sampson died. Hands clasped, elbows on knees, Lukas presses his thumbs against the bridge of his nose, closes his eyes fiercely for a moment.
Another quiet. Open again.
"But when I thought I was being asked to give up even the possibility of what we had, I couldn't bear the thought."
[Wyrmbreaker] [that was the wrong number. try HALF A MILLION DOLLARS EACH. O_O]
[Danicka] [O_O]
[Wyrmbreaker] [$150k was just college. *LOL*]
[Danicka] [Danicka: *starts throwing condoms at Lukas again*]
[Wyrmbreaker] [*lit LOL*]
[Danicka] Hurt, he sees in those tears welling up in her eyes. Because he knows that when she weeps from happiness she laughs, that the tears seem to sparkle even when there's no light. This isn't quite joy, that wetness in her eyes, turning them vibrant green, gold-green, like summer, like late spring. It isn't quite hurt, though, either. She's overcome.
Because Lukas went into the spirit world and descended gate after gate, and intuition tells her how much more each gate must have taken from the participants, and at its very peak, at its most demanding,
it showed him her. And their children, who he tells her about now. Klara, Petr, Zlata. They may never exist. They might not bear those names. Lukas might die, Danicka might. A thousand things could change -- more than a thousand. But he saw the potential for what instinct tells him he wants every time he loses himself in her, every time she looks at him over her bare shoulder and he aches to be inside of her, every time he sees the way she hums while cooking or touches his hair in comfort and he knows:
Their children would be strong. Beautiful. No matter their sex, no matter their names. If they were chatterboxes. If they needed glasses. If they wanted to be held all the time, if they barely knew their father and if it took them decades to understand he kept himself from them because he loved them and could not bear to hurt or scare them, and not because he didn't care.
Klara, Petr and Zlata may never exist. Might not be the way Lukas saw them. Spirits can't tell the future any more than Lukas and Danicka can. Those spirits in particular could only delve into his soul, find the disconnect, find what it would take to bridge that gap, test him to see if he would be willing to cross that bridge.
While he talks, Lukas touches Danicka. Her face, when he tells her that Petr's was so similar. Her eyes close when he tells her she called their youngest, a child both cuddly and monstrous, 'chubby baby'. It was not her test. The spirits could not reach into her and pull out names and thoughts and fears that are her own. Even when he asked, they could not tell him if Danicka would be happy like that.
With him gone during the births. With him coming home late if at all. Hearing her children, her newborns, her cubs shrieking in primal terror if he reached out to try and touch them while they nursed, and what kind of visceral, vicious reaction that would have to cause in her. The spirits didn't know Danicka. Those memories of his are ephemera, built out of fog and dust.
But as he tells her about what he knew of that life, seen so briefly, she finds nothing that she thinks it would not be like that.
Truth be told, she can't even tell him that yes, even with three children and a mortgage, they could damn well afford to go to the W for a night and fuck each other senseless. That they could afford a nanny. She doesn't know, herself, just how much she could be raking in if she had a decent accountant. It's almost tax time. She's going to get someone else to do it for her, since she's in school now and her finances are so different. If she's lucky, someone will tell her:
you need to start investing
and in a year she'll have the sort of financial package that makes the Bellamonte's lives so comfortable.
But Lukas didn't know that. Doesn't. So the spirits wouldn't take that from him, give him a different image. And who knows: anything could happen. A thousand things. Yet: would she be tired. Would they fight. Would he have to leave. Would he come close to snapping. Would their children need him to just go away for their own health and safety.
Yes.
Danicka's quiet as he touches her, mostly looking at the glove in her hand. Occasionally she looks at him, watches his face, sees the fight in him. And she's never see him like that, his eyes tight and his chest seeming to cave in. She knows what he's struggling against, and she reaches for his hand, unfolding it and putting the glove back in it.
"I know... we've said that if I got pregnant, we'd have to lose each other," she says quietly, "but a part of me's never believed that." She pauses there, and takes a breath -- a deep one. "Because I don't think I could stand it. Leaving you. Being yours but being alone."
Her hand still covers his. "I don't know if that's the life I want. If I want children at all. Or if I'm strong enough to fight every day like you said. But I want to be with you. And stay with you." She shakes her head a little. "Even if it's hard."
[Danicka] [Addendum:]
What she doesn't say is what they both know, what he's already murmured beside the fire:
Because it would be worth it.
[Wyrmbreaker] There's a tension in Lukas's hand when she takes it, a reflexive resistance because he wants to keep his hands close to himself, he wants to protect himself.
Then: he relaxes. Because it's Danicka. Because he doesn't have to protect himself against her anymore, and never did. Because she would protect him as far and as much as her frail body and slight strength can, and more.
So Lukas relinquishes his hand to her, lets her take it and unfold it, replace the tiny glove in it. This sends another spike of -- not pain, no, but overcomeness through him. Makes him swallow, makes him inhale. His hand closes around it, the thin-knit wool soft, the thread and sparkles faintly scratchy.
His eyes stay on hers, though: those eyes whose opacity and depth were reflected in Klara's, even if their hue was not. Emotion flashes through his eyes in turn, and across his face -- too quickly to read easily except as a flicker in the brow, something almost like a wince across the eyes, a turn of the mouth, and then
his free hand going to her cheek, opening over her jaw and into her hair. Lukas leans in, then, kisses her sudden and deep, with something very much like need. He missed her. He's been away a single night; a week; an entire turn of the seasons, and he's missed her.
Afterward, his breath is warm across her lips. He touches her gently, thoughtlessly, his fingers stroking her skin, combing back her hair.
"That's all I want, baby," he whispers. "That's all. I just want to have a life together, as much as we can. Whatever that might mean. And without fear of what might be."
[Danicka] She has nothing to say to that. Doesn't want to stop kissing him when he presses his mouth to hers like that, when they toss privacy and all of it out the window and simply lock their lips together on the far side of the fire. Nobody's watching them, anyway. Nobody cares. They have their own relationships to puzzle out, their own conversations, their own struggles. Because this isn't an easy life, Kin and Garou together. Maybe it was never meant to be.
Because it's life.
She puts her hands on his chest, under the lapels of his coat, and smells on him half a dozen seasons, more than the traditional western world recognizes. She smells woodsmoke and dinnertime in his hair, earth on his skin, food and drink from this very bonfire, springtime mud that seeped into his clothing. And it makes her laugh softly into the kiss, even though a few spare tears roll out of her eyes. She puts her hands in his hair and holds him there, kissing him, overwhelmed.
She has nothing to say. Nothing at all. But she does anyway:
"Ano."
And again, she kisses him, sniffing moisture, laughing as their brows touch. "Ano."
[Wyrmbreaker] Rock and sand, too: the hard, cool smell of one, the shiftless smell of the other. Rainwater, both the drenching slow rain of spring and the pelting hard rain of autumn. Snow and snowmelt.
And spring. And spring.
They hold each other like that, his hands to her cheeks, hers against his chest, under his coat. Most of his ritemates have had a chance to wash, at least perfunctorily, and some to change into borrowed, spiritual clothing made material by the rite. By his success, the same way the green stone was made real, and the tiny glove now tucked safe in his pocket -- not as a memento of his imaginary children but as a reminder of the promise he made to the spirits, and the promise they make each other:
to live without fear.
But we digress. The point is: Lukas has not had a chance to wash. His leather coat is scratched and gashed, dirty and smudged. His pants are stiff from getting wet and drying again, mud caked around the cuffs. There are twigs in his hair. Dirt and sand.
Beneath, though, he's himself. The same body, the same skin. The same beating heart.
His hands return to hers, cover hers over his chest. He rises. He doesn't know where his plate of food went, and he doesn't really care. "Vezmi mě někam," he says. "Je mi jedno kde."
[Danicka] Perhaps they'll not talk about it again. Maybe that glove will find its way into some secret, protected place in the den where they don't have to look at it -- deal with its promises and possibilities -- every day. But where they know it's safe. Where they know that they can go, and take it out, and where Lukas can remember his trial and Danicka can remember
right now.
"Home," she says, as he stands, before she herself gets up off the bench. Not out here with the snow and flame and spring just a mere shadow in their minds, but home. For that last rest before warmth starts to truly return, before the new shoots and sprouts that the rite-takers saw in the woods stretch themselves towards the sun.
"Home," Danicka says again, and pulls on his hand.
[Wyrmbreaker] Home, then.
They leave his dinner where it is. Cleanup volunteers or small forest animals will find it in the morning. The bonfire is still blazing behind them, roaring up ten or fifteen feet, licking at the cold crisp air that still snaps with the last of winter's chill. Their shadows dance and waver across the forest floor ahead of them, fading as darkness falls.
It's a half-moon overhead, past the zenith, leaning toward the horizon. Their hands are bare, and linked, as they find their way through the sparse woods, down the slope to the parking lot where dozens of cars -- but not nearly as many cars as there are bonfire-goers -- wait for their owners.
"I didn't drive," Lukas says. She did. They take her car, and perhaps she still looks at it and remembers spiders; he looks at it and remembers the love they made in it, in the passenger's seat where he sits now, muddy and dirty and scratched and
refreshed. Calm. Warmed, inside to out.
It's a shorter drive from the woods to their den than it is back to the city. It's dark most of the way there, highways and small roads. As she drives, he tells her about the rest of the rite, quietly: each of the gates in turn, who faced what and how; as much as he could see, anyway. She can hear a faint displeasure when he speaks of the metis refusing to just lie down and sleep. Muted horror when he speaks of what happened to Adamidas; revulsion, at what happened when Joey picked the boy up. A sort of quiet, shared pride at how well Lila did. Appreciation when he tells her how Lila spoke to encourage him before his gate. Something closer to remembered terror when Katherine simply vanished. Wonder, when he tells her who their ritesmistress was, as much as he knew. He did not see her again after he went downstairs. Does not know, yet, how close to death she was. Will wonder, when he hears, if she would have died if he had failed.
Is glad he did not know. If he had known, the choice would not have been truly his. And then he would have failed, anyway.
He tells her about Kora's guitar, and the songs she played. And what he thought of in the chasm, when the bell commanded him to love. He tells her about hunting, later, during Lila's rite -- not in wolf but in man-form, heart pounding, feet pounding the forest floor, and he muses now that maybe he did that because of Kora's gate.
He still doesn't know what happened in Katherine's gate, but he saw mingled exhaustion, wear, and resolve in her eyes. Which was enough.
He doesn't really say much more about his own gate, and what he saw there. He does say, though, toward the end -- when she's turning onto their street --
"I'd like to come home to you more often, if you'll let me."
[Danicka] There are things he tells her that she doesn't want to hear. Something in his voice or in his eyes as they drive makes her tense and she stops him, even interrupting if she has to. Danicka doesn't want to hear anything about Adamidas's gate after he had his hand --. She doesn't want to hear anything about what Joey's gatekeeper did to her after he crawled up on her and --. She's uncomfortable with a great deal of it. Those were not her tests. She does not want to endure the memory of them. Worse: the imagining of them, the visualization, so much worse -- always -- than reality.
Danicka is sad about the ritemistress. It's written across her brow in that faint frown. She doesn't understand, but Danicka, perhaps, is one of the last people who would need perfect understanding in order to simply trust that gut instinct of compassion. Of unspoken gratitude, because she was Lukas's guide for a time.
She likes hearing about the rest, though. The fire and the songs, the chasm and his heart opening up, the hunt, the way he hunted, the way it made him feel. She's smiling faintly as they head into the driveway, her thumb hitting the button to make the door roll upwards. Her hands flex on the wheel as she glances over at him, pulling into their garage.
"Why wouldn't I let you?"
[Wyrmbreaker] Lukas laughs a little under his breath, a touch embarrassed. "I don't want to come home from some rite having suddenly seen the light and end up turning your world upside-down," he says.
The garage door squeals as it goes up. Lukas thinks to himself: I need to put some oil on that tomorrow morning. Something about that warms him, too. The naturalness of that thought; the mundanity of the little task he schedules for himself.
[Danicka] Danicka doesn't press the button to send the door downward again just yet. Half-moon light flickers into the garage, illuminating their surroundings just enough for them to see by, dimly. She turns off her car and shakes her head a little at him, opening the driver's side door. "Still..." she says, when he's opened his door and left the Infiniti, when the doors are closed again and she's shouldering the bag she pulled out from the backseat, "I don't see why I wouldn't let you come home to me."
She walks around the front of the car, walking towards him. "I haven't even ...really processed what you told me. Or what you showed me. But I'm not afraid of you wrecking my life. I haven't feared that for a long time."
[Wyrmbreaker] "I think," Lukas says, honestly and with more than a touch of rue, "I'm just being a worrywart again, láska."
He comes around the front of the car, too, meeting her there, taking her bag from her and shouldering it himself -- a sort of thoughtless, automatic courtesy that was less courtesy and more protection. It's not as though Danicka couldn't handle a bag, though.
"I know what I saw and felt and remembered and chose affected me. But I don't want to come home so dazzled by this one event, so determined to do what I want rather than what I think is best or safest that I trample over what you want. I'm just being careful."
He pauses at the side door of the garage, hand on the handle, turning to face her.
Honest question: "Am I being too careful?"
[Danicka] She presses the button by the side door, and the garage door rattles and squeaks as it lowers, taking the moonlight away, delving them both back into shadow. He can see her, though, even before he opens the side door. He can see her smile gently up at him.
"Only if you think that you'll really trample me if you don't ask first, or if you think I won't speak up if what you want rolls over what I want," she says quietly, reaching up to touch his cheek for a moment. She may as well be saying: yes. You pretty, pretty idiot.
[Wyrmbreaker] Lukas holds her bag like a sling: draped back over his shoulder rather than under his arm, the straps gripped in one hand. As she reaches up to touch his face, he bends his head a little to meet her hand, rubbing his cheek against her caress like a wild thing. He lays a kiss against her palm when their eyes meet.
"Okay," he says quietly, and then smiles. "I want to come home to you more often." No if you'll let me this time. No implicit uncertainty in the tone.
The darkness in the garage lasts only until his hand turns the doorknob. Then there's light again, albeit a more shadowed, indirect light. From the moon, and refracted from the streetlights to the snow. The patch of concrete from the garage to the front door is covered. After this snowstorm -- the last of the season, Lukas hopes -- he'll get to work pulling that concrete up. Battering it to pieces with a sledgehammer, hauling it away bit by bit, tilling the earth beneath and fertilizing it, dumping topsoil on until it's plantable.
For now, the concrete is still there beneath the snow, solid and ungiving. Their footsteps trail across it. He waits for her to unlock the door. He doesn't even have his keys with him. He left them back at the Brotherhood.
[Danicka] It's a big bag, with a big strap. It hangs softly on his lower back the way he holds it, filled with clothes, mostly. A few small bags with various odds and ends. A paperback; whatever it is she's reading now when she has time on the train or when she thinks she might wake up before he does, lounge beside him or make coffee downstairs while he stays asleep in their bed. Danicka's hand is still on his face when he restates what he said before, this time firmer. Certain. Not expecting her to say no. Not wondering if she'll say yes. Not commenting either way on what might come from her, which takes more trust than one might think.
He has to trust that she won't take offense at the lack of if you'll let me. That she won't take the lack of a question as refusal to listen to an answer. He has to trust that Danicka will be honest, which was always the hardest thing for him to do, and something she doesn't always trust herself to do, even now.
Her thumb rubs over his cheek as he kisses her palm, and his mind might flash: the gatekeeper who took her form did the same thing. With the same hand. It took everything he knows of her, every memory, every imagining he's had, and built a spirit-version of her and her touch. It took the light in her eyes when she looks at him. It was so very much like her. It was not her.
It was Danicka as she lives in him, though. And maybe it warms him, or gratifies him, to know that she is so much like his picture of her. To know that he does not just imagine her a certain way for some reason, to know that the first thoughts the spirits could take from him were so close to how she really is.
Later on, he'll destroy the concrete. And Danicka will want to get flagstones to wind from garage to door. It will be an entirely different sort of path. Narrower. Meandering. Surrounded by things that grow. Not just great big slabs of concrete.
The door opens to the great big slabs of concrete, though, and Danicka moves on through the door, towards their den, taking her keys out of her coat pocket and saying, in lieu of I'd like that or I want that, too:
"I've been thinking for a few months now about giving you keys to my place."
[Wyrmbreaker] To that, his reaction is entirely nonverbal. It's the turn of his head, quick and startled; the quickening of his breath, too, and its shallowing, as though he thought she or what she's said were some sort of skittish wild thing that would dart away if he so much as breathed too heavily.
Here, at the door, the streetlight hits the wood siding on the house, hits their faces, illuminates the surprise on his, the flickering of his eyes between hers. He doesn't know what to say. His lips part: a sip of a breath. The only thing that comes to mind is patently ridiculous:
"But it's your den."
[Danicka] "Yes," she says slowly, as though she's talking to someone much younger than a full-grown man, a Fostern of the Nation, her mate, her boyfriend of a year or so, "I'm aware of that."
She twists her key in the lock, and turns the knob, and opens their front door, giving a slight shiver. She holds the door for him as he comes in after her, wiggling her feet out of her boots and tucking them on the nearby mat. Lukas closes the door, or lets it close. Locks it thoughtlessly, like habit, despite his expression, his... shock.
Danicka reaches up and takes her hat off, sliding it from her hair. She looks up at him, before they try to climb the stairs. "We have this place. And everything in it is ours. We change things when we come here, but... I know we're both thinking of each other when we do. What the other will be okay with. Or like. Or might want. And we don't do that in our own dens. We just get -- and do -- what we want."
She turns, putting her hand on the rail, and starts to head upstairs, glancing back at him as he follows. Or as he stands there stock-still, who knows. She waits for him, if she needs to.
"I know you're not going to do that with my den. Because it's mine. And you were wary even of getting the den because you didn't want me to think you were trying to absorb my life or something. I don't think you will. I don't think you're going to even bother going there, unless you know I'm there."
At the top of the stairs, she opens the door to the living room, immediately going for the thermostat, shucking her coat after turning it up to 70. She looks at him. "I know it's my den. But you're my mate. And ...I wouldn't mind you coming home to me there, too. And not needing me to be awake to buzz you in. And not being... a guest."
[Wyrmbreaker] Danicka does need to wait for him. Because he is standing there thunderstruck, at least until she glances back at him and he realizes he's behaving like an idiot.
And then he's pushing his feet from his shoes, one foot and then the other, in motion again, effortless in his motion again. When the shoes are set aside he follows her up the half-flight of stairs, not thinking now of oiling the garage door hinge or tearing up the concrete to put down earth and soil and plants and flagstones --
which he doesn't even know she wants, too, yet --
but thinking, only, of being able to go to that great glass tower that's always seemed impenetrable to him, always seemed something that was so exclusively hers that he was always -- well. A guest.
Only he wouldn't be, like this. He'd be able to let himself in. And take the elevators up. And let himself in again, and take off his shoes just like this, and shed his coat just like this, and crawl into a bed already warm with his mate's body heat, and wrap himself around her, and sleep.
And that would be different, somehow, than calling in advance. Agreeing to meet her there, or here, or at the Brotherhood, or at the W. That would be different, even, from coming here and happening to find her here some night. Because it's her den.
And he's her mate.
And he wouldn't be a guest.
She's turning the heat up, now. He's standing there in the living room with his coat off in one hand, her bag in the other. He says, aching and quiet, "Baby, I'd love that."
[Danicka] She is saying to him: I won't scream if I open my eyes and find you in my room. Because I know now you won't have come through the Gauntlet, you won't be pushing your way in. Because it's been a year. And you never have.
She's saying: It's okay if I come home and find you waiting for me there. Because it might surprise me, and it'll take some getting used to, but it's okay. I'd like it.
And she's telling him: You're a part of my life.
Even if she's not giving voice to any of that, as she lets her coat slide off her shoulders and as she turns back to look at him, at his face with that expression and his voice with that tone. Danicka looks at him, gentling, and smiles. "I was this close," she tells him, holding up her hand and putting thumb and forefinger terribly close together, "to giving you a keycard to the front door and my code to the garage and a key to my apartment for Christmas, but... I wasn't really sure at the time if that was what I wanted. Or what would be good for us. But now..."
She lowers her hand, standing there with him, looking at him. "So. I'll get on that, then."
[Wyrmbreaker] There's a world of tumultuous emotion in Lukas right now that cannot quite be encapsulated by words like ache or happiness because it was so far beyond both. He's simply, and once again, overcome.
Lukas lowers his head after a moment, exhaling like he's amazed, laughing like he's astounded.
"You know what's insane?" he asks, quiet, and raises his eyes to hers again. "That's what I wanted. To come home to you. Just like that. Not calling and meeting somewhere, or calling and coming over, or having you come over. To be able to come home to you. I just didn't know how to ask for it, or what to ask for."
His throat moves, swallowing; then his chest, a deep breath.
"Bože, Danička, pojď sem."
When she does, if she does, he meets her in the middle. His arms wrap around her. He bows to her, bends to her, kisses her temple and her cheek, her face, her mouth: adoration that's a sliver away from ferocity.
[Danicka] It wasn't even hours ago that he saw a version of her in her early thirties -- and that's not so long from now, Christ, that's maybe five or six years -- with her hair coming down from where she had it pinned back off her face. It wasn't even hours ago that Lukas saw her with a baculaté dítě squirming on her hip and gnawing wetly on her own fist -- teething, you know -- that she was handing off to him so she could mash the damn potatoes. In that briefly glimpsed vision, that dim potential of a would-be reality, coming home to Danicka was still
-- with three children, with an oak in the back yard, with a two-car garage and Legos scattered hither and yon, with his presence there so familiar that Danicka didn't even seem shocked at the crowd of Garou coming with him --
a rare and precious thing.
You know what's insane?
Her head tips to one side, questioning. Because she genuinely doesn't know what he's going to say next, what he's telling her is so crazy about this conversation. What he says makes her brows pull together, makes her ache, and she's moving towards him before he tells her to come, because she wants to comfort him. Or hold him together, like she does sometimes after they make love, like she does sometimes whether he needs it or not.
Her arms come around his waist, her face buried in his chest. But he's kissing her -- all over -- and she tips her head back, laughing when his mouth comes to her face, when he searches blindly and ferally for her mouth, inhaling her breath, her laughter.
[Wyrmbreaker] In seconds, the bottom drops out of that kiss the way he drops her bag, his jacket: deepens into some all-consuming, a wildfire. His hands are on her face, cupping her mouth to his; he's kissing her like he needs this, and needs her, which is of course the truth.
This is also the truth: Lukas needs to stop talking now. He cannot handle anymore. He cannot handle another profundity, another truth, the off chance that his mate might tell him something else so good, so amazing, that he'll just shatter from it like cheap glass. It's literally more than he can take. His passion has something in common with the sort of passion that follows a near-death experience: a furious and fervent reassertion of life, of vitality, of i'm still here and of so are you.
Later, as they lie in bed together after making love, or maybe as they awaken tomorrow, he'll hold her and tell her:
I think if you told me anything else good I would've lost my mind.
And they'd laugh about it, but she'd sense, too, that he was being serious. Or at least, honest. Which is a little pitiful, really: that he thinks he's not built for so much happiness at once. He thinks maybe he's not created for it, not wired to accept it. It floods all the gates, overloads all the wires, blows the circuits and melts the switches. He can't handle it,
though maybe that's not so much what he was made for or created for, but merely what he's allowed himself so far.
And he'll tell her that he wants to give her a copy of his key at the Brotherhood, too. And that he'd love it if she came some night and let herself in. Left her overnight bag on his desk and changed out of her clothes and wrapped herself around him as he slept. Let him wake up to her.
He'll tell her this, later. Right now, his mind is empty of everything but sudden, searing want. All the lights are still off. His hands are as hot as his mouth. They stumble over his jacket as he presses her back against the wall beside the thermostat. The closet door rattles in its frame as her shoulder hits it. His hands slide heavy down her body, cup her breasts through her coat, the feel of which makes him growl against her mouth
and then he pauses, forces himself to slow down, closes his eyes and rests his face against hers and, panting, pulls his hands back to himself to start undoing the buttons of his shirt. One at a time, taking his time.
"Potřebuji tě," he breathes, like this too is a confession.
[Danicka] Oh, if he could tell her now I can't take anymore, she would understand. Understands as it is, the way he kisses her like that, the way he shudders when her back hits the wall, the way he growls when he caresses her. She has her arms around his neck and he's half-lifted her as it is because her steps stumbled as they moved backwards. One of Danicka's arms has come up away from him, her hand grasping at the flatness of the wall and, upon finding no purchase, gone into his hair instead to hold on there.
She understands. Because she's broken into gasping sobs, tears filling her eyes and shaking her to the very core, because of how happy he's made her. She's hurt, physically, from the feeling that she's not big enough to hold everything she's feeling, she doesn't have enough room in herself to feel things like joy or home or safe or
loved.
Danicka knows that feeling, that sense of faint cracks appearing all over oneself, threatening to shatter everything. She won't laugh in the morning when he tells her I would've lost my mind. She'll stroke his hair back and nuzzle his face, breathe the scent of him in, move her naked body more into his naked arms and just
hold him.
Or rather: let him hold her. Because she understands that need, too. To hold onto something, to someone, as though keeping them close can staunch some wound that's been opened up, can heal some terrifying rift torn into the fabric of who you are. She won't laugh, because as pitiful as it might be, she understands. Neither of them grew up to believe that they were made to feel... happy. As simple as that. Neither of them grew up thinking that happiness was something to be striven for, that it was something one was allowed to have whether deserved or not, that it was something of a purpose to existence itself.
Something in him has been reawoken. Danicka shudders against him when she realizes it, tipping her head back so his mouth can travel along her throat, and she's reaching for his belt and the fastenings at the waist of his jeans while he's unbuttoning his shirt, and then his hands are on her jeans to get them off, to yank them down, and his hands are under her sweater, and their mouths are together and Danicka is breathing
Just pull them aside, baby
in his ear when his fingers stroke over the cotton between her legs, because she's not telling him to slow down. In fact, when he does, she's pulling his mouth to hers again, swallowing the last aspirated syllable. She is not taking her time.
[Wyrmbreaker] There's sand in his hair. Her fingers push through bits of bark and flecks of detritus. Miniscule pebbles and crushed dry autumn-leaves patter to the carpet. He meant to wash when he got home. He meant to take a shower, wash the seven seasons of seven gates of the underworld from his skin. He meant to take her to their bed and love her amidst cotton and down, but
she doesn't slow down when he does. She has his belt open in a second, his pants in two, and then hunger snaps inside him like a viper and his hands are all but tearing at the fastenings of her jeans and they're both tugging, both pulling and peeling and panting and
just pull them aside makes him groan the way he does when she takes him in her mouth, or licks his nipple as she rides his cock, or
tells him to just pull her panties aside and fuck her like that.
He scoops her up. The closet door rattles again: her back against it, his body to hers, crowding her against the wall; his hips between her thighs. His pants and his boxerbriefs are down around his ankles and his shirt is hanging open and her jeans are still looped around one ankle and he grabs at it twice before finally tugging it off her foot, tumbled to the ground.
He pulls her panties aside. There's no hesitation after this. He doesn't have a free hand to guide himself into her; grinds against her instead, rubs his hard cock over her over and over again, a mimicry of sex that's so fucking good, so fucking hot in and of itself that he almost loses his mind to it. He's slick and hot in seconds, and she's gasping every time he slides over her clit, and he's panting against her mouth as he shifts his hips, shifts her against the wall. His jeans rustle around his feet as he widens his stance.
The door thuds in its frame again as he slides into her in one firm stroke, snarling as he does so; sinks into her until his hips are flush to hers and their combined weight presses them against the wall. Stillness for a second. "Oh my god," he gasps, and then she's pulling his mouth to hers again, or he's simply seeking her mouth with his, and
hands under her rear, cradling her between wall and arms and body, he starts fucking her. It's been a handful of seconds since that first kiss. Since they hit the wall together. A minute, maybe two at most. Her sweater is still on, soft against his chest where his shirt falls open, and when he notices this he bends to her, grips her sweater between his teeth because he doesn't have a hand free to do this, either, bites at it like an animal with no better means, and says, "Take it off.
"Fuck, baby, take it off. Let me see you."
[Danicka] One of her legs comes up around his waist, bare suddenly, pink from the scrape of denim. She kicks her other leg behind him, wildly, snarling into his mouth til the jeans finally just come off, yanked by his hand in one sure swipe so Danicka can fold him in against her body like she does. Like she always does. Her hands are in his hair, his filthy, sweat-soaked, dirt-ridden hair, and it's clear now that she couldn't care less, just like she didn't care that he was covered in blood and grime that night that she ruined her pretty brown dress by getting into the shower with him, just like she didn't care when she exited her car the first time she came to this house and he had dust from cleaning and working all over him and she was in cashmere but she threw her arms around him anyway and clung to him, trembling from happiness.
The elastic of her panties winds and digs in her skin but she barely feels it, hardly notices the twist of fabric once Lukas is rubbing himself on her like that, fucking her without fucking her. She squirms, trying to get him inside her, swearing when the slick, soft head of his cock strokes over her clit, gasping out little moans when he starts just riding her like that, up against the wall, halfway on the closet door, bucking his hips like he's already inside her. Danicka's teeth go on edge from want, but when he finally finds his way into her, her mouth opens soundlessly.
For the second time she reaches behind herself, searching for something to hold onto, and there's just the flat, featureless wall. She arches her back, but it only presses her harder against him, her cunt clenching around his cock as he pushes himself into her. She's not still. She's writhing, panting softly, trying to adjust to the feel of him in her pussy and trying to fuck him at once, moaning when he puts his hands on her ass to hold her. To move her. To fuck her.
She doesn't get her sweater off right away when he tells her to. She can't. She's lost for a minute, hand on the wall and hand in his hair, back arched and head tipped, bouncing her hips as best she can against his thrusts, mindlessly uttering
That's it. Oh fuck, that's it, baby. That's it. Yeah. Fuck, yeah.
And it's only after they've found some kind of rhythm, some kind of acceptable satisfaction for their drive, that she realizes she's sweating, and she tears her sweater off like it's strangling her, tossing it to the side, grabbing his face and kissing him,
hard.
Her bra's strap slides down one shoulder. Her sweater was green. Her bra is peach-colored, embellished with black lace, and he's seen this before -- which is honestly kind of rare, with Danicka's overwhelming collection of lingerie -- but it hardly matters right now, when he's grabbing the satiny cups and pulling them down so he can see her breasts. Paw at them, cup them, stroke and squeeze them while he pounds himself into her again and again and again, listening to the way she moans for it.
For him.
[Wyrmbreaker] Lukas growls when she grabs him and kisses him like that: a rough, pleased sound muffled into her mouth. It's a primal, feral fuck up against the wall: her hand in his hair, his hands on her ass or under her thighs, supporting her weight while he flexes into her with all the force of his lower back, his lower body.
Their clothes are hanging off their bodies like they couldn't even quite make it to full nudity, nevermind up the stairs and into bed. She pulls her sweater off at last, flinging off somewhere. He pulls her bra aside. His mouth tears and bites at her as he makes his way down her neck, lifting her up and almost off his cock briefly to bend to her, to suck her tits.
Then he's lowering her again, slowly, deliberately slow, right back onto his cock. Snarling low in his throat as he does, his mouth to her neck, then to her earlobe. His saliva is still wet on her breast when he cups her, caresses and fondles her while he moves into her. Her nipple is hard against the palm of his hand, and he rubs her mercilessly, slowly, his hand heavy and warm on her flesh.
One hand, first. Then both. She's riding on his hips like this, and he's pressing her to the wall. It's her strength as much as his that holds her up. There isn't enough room to move freely. He grinds into her nonetheless, ceaselessly, pushing her bra up now, pulling it up like a second shirt.
Her hair lifts when it goes over her head. Falls back down over her shoulders and his. He kisses her as he drops her bra to the floor, silently now, breathing her in.
His own shirt too a moment later, his shoulders bare and sheening in the faint light from the windows, twisting with muscle as he wraps one arm under her again. She keeps reaching back over her head, looking for some grasp or handhold, some anchor. He follows her shoulder to her arm to her wrist to her hand, links their fingers, twines them. Holds her hand to the featureless wall, each the other's anchorpoint now, gripping down as the kiss opens up, deepens, tapers into gasping and panting.
"I love your tits," he breathes. "I love your body. Fuck, ty jsi tak těsný. Mmph--"
She's the one that kisses him this time. He receives, and reciprocates. He guides her hand from the wall to his shoulder, to the back of his neck, his hair. When his hand returns to her ass to support her, to hold her aloft, he lowers his head, watches himself
drawing out, slick and wet and hard, and fucking back into her. Slow, the first time. Smoothly. Then faster.
No words there, when he opens his mouth. Just a sound. And again, and another, that same wordless vowel, lower and rougher. And again, muffled this time, his mouth to hers. Her breasts brush his chest. Bounce when he starts pounding into her in earnest, thinking of how much he wanted this when he was in the first gate of the underworld, in that sleepy meadow with no sun but sunshine all the same, with flowering plants everywhere, with pollen golden in the air and mated animals mating all around him and him by himself, with others but alone, without his mate, without
this,
while the raw need of it roared through his blood and lit him full of liquid fire.
"Ach, Bože, chci tě tak moc." He breathes this out, ragged, as though he weren't already fucking her like this. This hard, this thoroughly. "Miluju, který těsné, horké kunda."
[Danicka] The things they don't tell each other are usually left in the dark because there's no need to say them. Danicka doesn't stop him to tell him she loves fucking him because he growls and snarls and bites at her just as often as he trails his lips slow and soft across her skin. She doesn't need to stop to tell him what it does to her when he goes at her like this, when he makes those sounds of primal, thoughtless pleasure, because he can feel what it does to her. Lukas can feel every quiver of reaction in Danicka's body like this, every tight squeeze of her cunt bearing down on his cock, every sudden jerk and writhe of her when he hits her just right, just like that, which is all she bothers to say aloud.
Just like that. Right there. Yeah. Yeah.
Oh, but he tells her this time. Tells her he loves her breasts even when he can't stop touching them, can't keep his hands and mouth off of her, can't stop looking down to watch her body taking his. For awhile, even, they're just grinding together against the wall, barely holding themselves up. She slips, back sliding down the drywall, and she wraps her arms instinctively around his neck, pulls herself up and rides back down on his cock, lets out a hard, voiced Ah! as she bends over him, as his face is buried in her breasts, as his hands come back to her ass to hold her again.
She can't be silent when they kiss, or when he finally takes off his shirt. She can't stop moaning, can't stop her hands across the bared planes of his back or the impeccable definition of his chest. Danicka fucking loves his body. And she doesn't say it. She rubs herself all over him, though, and she touches him, and she whimpers when he finds her arm and strokes his hand up and pins her wrist to the wall, muttering to her in two languages.
She likes it, when he watches the way he does. She watches him, the tightening expression on his face, and then her gaze drifts down to his cock, to her wet cunt, to the almost hypnotic slide of their bodies together. "Faster," she says softly, imploring, and whimpers when he does it, when he starts fucking her hard and fast again, when he starts chasing down their pleasure like harrying prey to the ground.
It's not quite a golden, sleepy meadow, where that need was left so yawning and unsatisifed. But it's their den, warming with the furnace and with their body heat, and his mate is naked now but for the socks she had on under her boots and the panties he's pulled aside to fuck her, and she's telling him
not that she loves his body, not that she loves it when he fucks her like this, just
"Yes. Yes. Fuck, baby, don't stop. Don't fucking stop, I'm gonna come...!"
[Wyrmbreaker] No, this is no sleepy meadow replete with the problem of warmth and summer. This is no lazy mating in the afternoon sunshine when two of a kind might lie down together and fall apart and roll around and drowse and do it all over again.
This is the night after the day: because at equinox, they are still equal. This is when the sun is down and the night is dark and winter is nipping at the heels again, and creatures are reminded of the reason behind the fuck: the necessity of heat, of procreation, of survival of the species. Of survival.
He fucks her like he can't survive without this. Like their kind won't survive without it. Like the world will go up in flames without it. He fucks her like a hunt or a chase, like a last desperate hunt before the starving pack is too weak to bring down prey, and they grasp at each other and bite and groan, and she tells him faster and don't stop and his only answer is a low, rough growl on which he fastens his teeth in her shoulder and starts
hammering her
so hard that the closet door is thumping in its frame and if they'd hung any pictures on the goddamn wall, the nails would be shaken out of the drywall by now.
Sometimes there's a sort of sexual courtesy in Lukas. He'll hold back for her. He'll try to remember to fuck her just so, or grind against her just like that, or reach down and stroke her clit while he's moving into her until she goes rigid and bucks and screams against his hand, onto his cock. Sometimes. Not right now. Right now, he's chasing his own pleasure; he's pounding it from her. He's taking her in a very basic sense of the word: taking what she has to give, taking the taste of her sweat on his tongue and the shudder of her body when he bites her like that; taking the sounds she's making, the little cries and gasps, taking the feel of her cunt and the tightness and the wetness, the strength of her thighs around him, of her arms around his neck and her hands on his back.
He's taking everything she offers,
and in taking it, giving it all back,
bearing her against the wall when his orgasm lights him up from the inside out, pinning her there with his body, holding her caught between his teeth and his hands and his cock, nailing her there over and over with short, hard grinds of his hips against hers, his cock inside her, grunting and snarling like an animal as he comes into her.
[Danicka] It isn't warm enough to fuck outside. Hasn't been warm enough for months and months now, won't be warm enough for weeks and weeks. There's no question that Danicka would, that Danicka would lay down in some meadow with him and dig her nails into his back and cry out in pleasure as he thrust into her. She rode him in the woods. Bent over and let her weight rest on his arms, on his hands, took him like that because they couldn't stop, becuse once wasn't enough.
Once is rarely enough, for them. Maybe it's because they see each other so rarely, but that can't be all there is to it. The first time, sure, they could chalk it up to the fact that they'd waited and denied themselves, even if just for a couple of weeks, and that neither of them really thought it would happen again. The very fact that they took as much of their fill of each other as they could, though, that should have tipped them off that their want was nigh unto inexhaustable. That it wasn't even just sexual hunger clawing its way up out of them with every kiss, that it was some rabid attempt to let their very cores twine together somehow, even if they had to wreck each other to do it.
Sometimes they do wreck each other. End up holding on for dear life afterwards, sweating and trembling and gasping for breath. Clinging to one another for protection. Clinging to one another to protect.
Tonight, Lukas has been utterly overcome by what he's been through. By not only the rite, by the way every gate hammered at them all in some way, but by talking to his mate afterward. The way she cried, or near enough, when he showed her half the pair of missing gloves worn by an imaginary daughter with eyes that matched the color of his and the character of hers. And then coming back here and hearing everything she told him, every welcoming word, every gentle tug to let him know it was alright: she wants him in her life, and she isn't afraid,
and she loves him,
which is close to what she says now, crying out as her spine arches and a guttural shriek reaches the ceiling from her throat. She swears in Russian, bucking her hips back against him and all but screaming: "Ach bože, to je ono. Fuck, baby,to je ono. To je to, co chci. Mám rád vaše kurva kohout," she all but snarls, locking her mouth to his for a moment, moaning into his throat as she rides, bound between his body and the wall, and if she weren't so close to coming already the way he's fucking her right now might not do anything for her, might not give her what she needs, but
there she is, groaning loud and open-throated again as he tears his mouth off of hers and bows his head to just fuck her, pound her against the wall like he fucking needs it,
and he does.
"Yeah," Danicka gasps, squeezing him tighter in her legs, in her pussy, eyes closed and head back, caught right on a razor's edge of pleasure. "There... right there... fuck! Fuck, Lukáš, dej mi to! To je ono! To je o-- ah! Ah, fuck!"
Mindless, thoughtless, searing pleasure overtakes her then, stripping sense from her words, stripping all illusions of withholding from her as she comes, almost unaware of his own orgasm just before or just after or god, during, her own. She holds onto him, taking what he gives her, riding his cock like she has a right to whatever his body can do to her, and later when he peels her out of them it might blow his mind how wet her panties are, how slick her inner thighs, how fucking good it was when he had her.
Right now he's not thinking. And Danicka's barely even human, screaming as she comes, falling apart into tatters and gasps, until all she can do is pant. Her head lolls forward til she rests her brow on his shoulder, her legs trembling around him, threatening to slide, to lose all grip. She whimpers a little on a couple of exhales. It's been minutes. Or days. Or something. She squirms a little on him, as though to shift him inside her and make herself feel him again.
"Miluji tě," she says, and then laughs softly, holding him more tightly now as though saying the words gave her strength. "And I love fucking you. And I love your body. God." She pants that laugh, closes her eyes and lays down on his shoulder. "God, you're amazing."
[Wyrmbreaker] That was insane.
That was so far beyond the boundaries of sanity and sense. What they did to each other was on the level of supernovae and thermonuclear detonations: armageddons of the mind. He can't even hold it in his mind: the sensations burst through his mind and shattered every firmament, every structure so utterly that he has only the most imperfect memories left over thereafter -- some vague impression of her hands slapping or clawing at his back, some vague image of her head thrown back, and all of it, all of it, so awash and lit up by his own pleasure that the details blur.
They've wrecked each other. They've razed each other to the ground, took everything as though they had a right to it, which they did, and gave it all back in altered, incandescent form.
His mind is the same blazing whiteness his world was when the final gate was surmounted, empty and pure as snow, as perfect ash from which thoughts are reborn only a long time later, only slowly.
Slowly does he become aware of his own harsh breathing. Of the rigid ache in his forearms from holding onto her, from holding her where she is, from holding her right there so he could fuck her just like that.
Slowly, he becomes aware of the faint whimpers she gives every time her pussy pulses on him, or his cock jerks inside her. And the trembling of her legs. And how both of them are destroyed right now, are hanging on to each other like survivors of some cataclysm, are barely able to support one another's weight.
Slowly, he hears her tell him she loves him. He kisses her shoulder, the faint toothmarks where he bit down, tongues them gently as though he could heal them. She goes on and he still hasn't evolved language yet, hasn't developed words. He kisses her neck instead, gently and slowly, his mouth warm as spring, as summer. And she lays her head on his shoulder. And he relaxes into her, leaning against her, leaning into her and the wall and...
He could almost sleep like this. Just like this, standing, pressed together, wrapped together, still penetrating her, still filling her.
"Nechci nechat ty," he whispers, and kisses her softly at the junction of jaw and neck and ear, shifts against her -- slowly -- flexes gently into and against her. "Miluju bytí v tobě."
[Danicka] If it was minutes before Danicka could move or speak, and Lukas can't find words for some time after that, there's no telling how long it will be before they can bear to part physically. She breathes slowly, forcing herself to inhale deep and exhale entirely, trying to stop her panting. The den is warm now, but they wouldn't necessarily notice. Their skin is hot to the touch, feverish, flametouched. It will be another few minutes before air starts to evaporate the sweat on their flesh or caress them to cool them. Maybe by then they will know something other than one another's names and a few spare words of adoration in whatever tongues their minds reach for most readily.
Her back is sore. Her hips from slamming against the wall. He hasn't hurt her this time. Maybe she's bruised. Maybe she'll ache until she gets into a hot bath, but it won't last long. They've had rough sex before. They'll have rough sex again. He's less afraid of letting go, now, than he used to be. Danicka was never afraid of it. She always knew that being with him carried with it a potential loss of control on his part, and she always knew what could happen to her. She has never, for a day, had any illusions about Lukas. Who he is. What he's like.
She's pretended, for the sake of others, to be surprised by his behavior, or to not understand it. She has allowed herself to be angry with him, hurt by him, feel betrayed, but she's never quite been utterly at a loss as to why he does the things he does the way he does them. Even when every fiber of her being has screamed that it was wrong,
like when he walked out on her, all those months ago, when leaving each other destroyed both of them for a span of a week. Maybe a few days more. Time blurred into drugs and drink and dancing and random strangers, stood still when they found each other for an island of moments in the middle of it all, surrounded by colored lights and desperation and anger and most of all, Lukas's fear of what might be.
Which he has let go of, now. Or is trying to.
Good enough.
Danicka's last exhale is a sigh. "I'd challenge you to get us upstairs without pulling out, but I think the potential for both of us being seriously injured is a little too great." She turns her head, rubbing her face on his shoulder, and kisses his jawline, his neck, his earlobe. She smiles against his flesh, breathing in his scent. "Vezmi mě horní poschodí a my budeme mýt. A pak si můžete být uvnitř mě znovu.
Her teeth nip at his earlobe. Her smile spreads into a grin.
"Je jaro. Měli bychom měl by to kurva jako králíci."
[Wyrmbreaker] Lukas laughs at that, a sudden exhale of mirth. And happiness. That, too. Again, when she explains what she thinks the season implies. When the mirth fades there's only happiness.
"Jaro," he repeats, drowsily, as though he were just learning the word, the concept.
And Lukas nuzzles the side of his mate's face and neck as she does his, eyes closed, slowly, savoringly, lazily. Here and there, he kisses her. She nips him. He says ow sleepily, not at all meaning it, and kisses her shoulder in return. Mmm.
It's another minute or so before he finally gathers his will to move. She can feel his body shifting before he even begins to move: the birth of that motion in the core muscles, the center of his balance. He straightens. His weight goes to his legs, his feet. He lifts her from the wall and his spine curves to compensate. He turns his face to hers, finds her mouth and kisses her, slowly now, lingeringly, gasping softly as he draws her up, pulls out of her.
A softer, smaller kiss follows the long one. And then he sets her gently down, stepping out of his socks and pants at last.
He leaves his clothes where they are. The truth is they probably won't even make it into the shower. In the bathroom, he'll take her panties off for her, peel them off her hips and down her legs, down to the floor. And when he sees how wet they are, how wet her pussy still is, how slick her inner thighs, it'll get him breathing hard again. His heart will hammer in his chest and his cock will harden again, though he'll try to hold back unless or until she tells him, or shows him, that it's okay.
Because it was rough, the way they coupled downstairs. Because she's his mate. Because he's careful with her when he can be, and gentle when he can be,
even when he wants to bend her over the bathroom counter and fuck her all over again.
[Danicka] He told her that as he fell into a chasm, laughing, he thought of a dozen things he loved, but only spoke aloud: Jaro.
A very long time ago, she asked him and he asked her what they most wanted, right that moment. And he wanted the see. And she wanted: Jaro.
To this day, Lukas hasn't told her that his first thought, lying in bed with one arm around her and her eyes cast towards the window of their hotel room, that she was spring. That sometimes he opens his olive-toned hand over her pale belly and thinks of how she will look -- how he knows, now, that she looks -- when spring and summer begin to shine down on her, turning her golden and even warmer to the eyes. Perhaps he hasn't even though about the fact that at the very edge of winter, the gatekeeper at the end of the rite chose her form to show him things that could be promised and striven for, warmth and light in the middle of a blizzard, hope and love at the end of the day no matter what had been endured to get there.
Jaro.
Danicka arches when he lifts her up, breathing in deeply. She lets him lift her, lets her weight rest on his hands, which might be unfair, but...she trusts him. And she knows how strong he is, how sometimes he takes his hands and his mouth off of her because if he really lets go he will hurt her. He needs his strength to fight, and to survive, and to protect. She doesn't resent it. She adores him for it, and lets it be. He is stronger than she is. And that is alright.
So: he lifts her from the wall and she smiles down at him, hair curtaining her face, color in her cheeks. She looks at him with affection, deep and bright as a pool reflecting a summer sunrise, her hands smooth and light on his shoulders. She kisses him gently when he turns his face up to meet hers, whimpers once quietly in his mouth as he pulls out of her body. Her hands tighten on him, and the kiss deepens, as though to compensate for their withdrawawl from one another.
Her socks come all the way up her calves. They are yellow. There are little white bows on the front, just under her knees. Stockings, really, the sort of ultra-feminine thing she wears under her boots and her jeans and under her coat where no one at all but she might see them. She and he, if he meets her somewhere, if he takes her somewhere. If he takes her home.
Danicka doesn't stop to get her jeans, or her bra, or her sweater. She runs her fingers through her hair and adjusts her panties again, laughing softly, murmuring something that sounds like sticky, but she doesn't stop. She heads to the stairs and walks up them, one hand on the railing, and her heart is already beating a little faster all over again
and watching her walk up ahead of him, so is his.
When Lukas puts his hands on her hips in the bathroom, his cock is hard but he's trying -- oh, he's trying -- not to press it against her ass, not to grind into her through those thin, wet panties, because if he does that he won't be able to stop himself. Danicka looks at him over her shoulder, over and up, to see for herself what's already reflected to her in the bathroom mirror: her mate's face, his eyes stormy with renewed want, his brow tight with lust, his jaw partly, subtly clenched.
And looking down at her body, he'll see her arch her back just so, brushing her ass against him, which makes him pant and tighten his hands for a moment on her hips. She'll purr something, probably meaningless, in his native tongue. Ask him some question about whether or not he can wait, even as she's putting her hands on the bathroom counter at the edge of the sink and leaning forward
just so,
which presses her back against him and obliterates any chance for a coherent answer.
She leaves her handprint on the mirror later, smacking it flat and sudden against the pristine surface while he's fucking her, this time with her panties yanked down her legs and off, leaving traceries of comingled cum on her inner thighs, making an utter and complete mess of her. He looks as savage as he did when he entered their imaginary house at his gate, twigs in his hair and dirt here and there, sweat leaving streaks over his skin. He can see her breasts bounce when he rails her, and he can see her face as she cries out -- and when she's too overwhelmed to cry out -- and because the bathroom is tiled and they're facing glass her screams echo around him when she comes,
when he folds over her and plays with her clit and snarls in her ear that it's so fucking good, which sets her off like a gasoline trail catching fire, makes her buck back against him and ride his hand and his cock and come on him just as hard and tight and wet as it was downstairs.
It's rough the second time, too. In a way. That doesn't change the fact that afterward, just like before, he holds her as tightly as he dares, covering her and keeping her close to his chest, until they can breathe again. Until they remember how to speak. Until they have something, anything, more than the slow flexes of their lower bodies that make them moan softly, gasp, whimper, groan.
She reaches back with her hand some time after, resting it on the back of his neck. "Miluji tě. Miluju tě tak moc, Lukáš."
Danicka wants to take a bath, after they've showered. She wants to fill the tub that they stood in as they washed sweat and cum and grime off of each other. There's a small pile of twigs on the side of the tub that she pulled from his hair. His clothes may be mudstained for all time, now, but it doesn't matter. Danicka wants to take a bath. It's a smallish tub, but they curl up in it together, his legs bent and opened so she can sit between his thighs, leaning on his chest. Her legs are flung over one of his, over the side of the tub, toes dripping on the tile. She smiles at her toes, smiles as she listens to his heartbeat, as he kisses her hairline. Laughs, for no reason, and tells him again when he asks:
"Jen jsem tě rád."
The bed is made. They pull down the covers together. She's dried her hair, which took awhile. He's brought up water from the kitchen. They slip between the sheets and this time Danicka doesn't turn her back to his chest to be held. She lays along his side, curled under his arm, one leg over his, her hand on his chest. Her breathing is steady and their bed is warm, but
she doesn't sleep.
This time it's Danicka reaching for him, sliding her hand up to his face and turning him to look at her, to kiss her. "Miluj mě. Miluj mě znovu, lodní důstojník."
As though that is his name. Or simply: who he is, to her, right now. In their den, bringing his other arm around her, kissing her more deeply, finding her legs folding him in and her hands stroking up over his body and
this time they're quiet. For no reason they can name, or even attempt to. This time their gasps are soft as he flexes his hips and pushes into her, this time she doesn't scream when she comes, this time he muffles his groans against her breasts as he's filling her. This time he stays inside of her for a long, long time afterward, even after they roll onto their sides and start to recover. They're awake for awhile, though they don't talk.
Danicka touches his hair.
Lukas touches her face.
She nuzzles him before she lifts her hips and withdraws, kisses his chest softly before she turns over, as though to promise that she's not going anywhere. She's not leaving him. She's nestling back in under the covers, against his chest, while he waits for her to settle before wrapping his arm around her and covering her shins with his own, covering her breast with his hand and feeling her heart beating against the base of his palm.
Just as it should be.
celebration.
9 years ago