5 minutes.

[Lukas] It's just past 8pm, the 10th of May.

The last time Lukas spoke to Danicka was a little over twelve hours ago. The last he saw of her was how she looked with her back to the bathroom's glistening dark walls, her hair shining a muted gold, her skin asking to be bared and touched behind that one remaining button on her shirt.

The last time he fucked her was ...

... too long ago to remember. It doesn't matter now, anyway; that's not why he's calling her. And he is: calling her, that is, from his own room. The clip-on light at his headboard is on. He can remember her reaching up to turn it off, after she'd dropped her earrings into his nightstand drawer. He's on his landline, the handset held to his ear as he waits for her phone to ring.

He's not sure what he was expecting: voicemail, or perhaps just a hangup. He's not sure what he expected to say to her. When she picks up it all flies out of his head, just like that. There's a long silence after her greeting, if there was one.

Then: "Do you still have your gun? And the talens I gave you?"

[Danicka] The number that shows up on the screen of Danicka's iPhone is Unknown. She recognizes the area code, vaguely. She hasn't slept more than a few hours between dawn, when she finally came home and showered, and now, when she is finishing up the one meal she decided she could stomach today. Setting her fork down and pausing the movie on the television screen, she accepts the call and puts the phone to her ear in one motion.

Her voice sounds polite. Professional. Warm, not distant, but it's almost immediately obvious that she does not know whose voice to expect: "Hello?"

After silence, it turns out to be his.

She tenses, allowing her unseen body to go completely rigid, allowing it to manifest some outward sign of the way her heart is being crushed inside of her chest, allowing herself to reveal physically that she cannot quite breathe, before she answers. The politeness isn't gone. The professionalism is. The warmth is pulled back, as though it needs to go somewhere it can be protected.

"Yes."

[Lukas] "Okay. Good."

She's not the only one guarding herself; she's just doing a better job of hiding it. There's a long pause. She can't hear him licking his lips, nor sitting on the edge of his bed, nor laying his elbows on his knees and folding his ahroun's frame nearly double.

What she can hear is the silence. It goes on for some time.

Finally: "I need you to do something for me. I'm going to text you an address in about half an hour. I need you to hold onto that address and leave your phone on. If I don't call you again by this time tomorrow night, I need you to call Milo Maevsky and give him the address I gave you. Do you have his phone number? It's 312-555-2711. I also need you to tell him that whatever he needs to know, he can find in the Battleground Realm. Can you remember that?"

[Danicka] Her eyes close at I need you to do something for me. Of course he does. She opens her eyes, makes herself listen, and there is no sound on her end of rustling paper or a scratching pen. Just a pause, and then:

"You gave me his number when you told me he held the claim on me," she says mildly, her tone almost soothing. One could imagine her telling a child It was just a dream in thise voice. "I can remember that," she adds in assurance, then asks calmly...the professionalism sneaking back in..."Is there anything else?"

[Lukas] "I need to see you."

It's out of his mouth before he can call it back. She can't see him lower his head to his hand either; the heel of it pressed to his brow.

"I just -- "

There's a silence; ten seconds, which doesn't sound like a long time, but is a conversational eternity. Then he raises his head and looks at his clock radio, the numbers red against a dark background.

"Look, where are you?"

[Danicka] The only reason Lukas has ten seconds of silence is because Danicka forces herself not to say what comes to mind. She picks up her fork again. He doesn't know she has it in her hand, doesn't know what she might be doing with it, cannot see her to know that there's almost no blood in her face right now. She's pale as a sheet, all but shaking. From anger? From grief?

He can't see her. For all he knows she's flipping through a magazine, maybe considering changing her hair while she pretends to listen to him. For all he knows she's in the bathroom at some conquest's house. For all he knows, she is moving on with her life, or going back to whatever it was before he came into it.

"No," she says softly, barely audible. "You don't get to do that."

[Lukas] There's a twist of something in him, something so fierce and intense he has no name for it. No one has a name for it. It has something in common with anger, and with pain, and with rage, and with loss. It makes his raise his forehead and beat it lightly against his hand; close his eyes.

The pauses are interminable.

"No," quietly, "I don't."

[Danicka] "Then," and this pause is brief, just enough for a half-breath, "why did you try?"

[Lukas] A blaze of anger, sharp and livid, like a meteorite scoring the sky. "Do you understand the meaning of need, Dani�ka?"

He's one to ask.

[Lukas] (Danička, too.)

[Danicka] She exhales through her nostrils, more of a sigh than a snort or a huff. It's slow; he can imagine her eyes closing. Maybe he does. Maybe all he can think of is that hard, sharp twist inside of him that touches on Rage as much as...nausea. Grief. Near-physical agony.

Her eyes open. He won't know the difference. "You'll survive."

[Lukas] (be a man!)

[Lukas] If he had his wits about him --

If he had his wits about him, he wouldn't have called at all. If he hadn't stumbled home after ten of the worst fucking nights of his life, tumbled into bed and slept a ragged six hours before waking up to the sudden and awful knowledge that his sister was dead, his sister that he shouted at, snarled at, threw out of his presence because he was too fucking weak to keep it together when a goddamn romance ended, of all things; because he was too fucking weak to withstand something so simple and devastating as love --

If none of this had happened, none of this would be happening. That truth is self-evident. But if he had his wits about him, he wouldn't have called. If he had his wits about him, he would hang up now, or the very first time she said No.

If he had even a shred of his control left, his pride, his reserve, whatever the fuck you want to call it -- he might've tried to explain what he needed from her, exactly, or wanted, or why he tried at all.

But he doesn't. All that's left

(are pieces)

is the slow wrench of something coming apart; of too much loss too fast. It's more than he can bear: a critical mass of grief and fury collapsing on itself, dropping the bottom out of his world, tearing a singularity into the fabric of whatever it is he might be made of.

"Prosím," he says. For what it's worth, he doesn't howl at her, he doesn't shout, he doesn't plead. He's not pleading, but he is begging; this is a strange and stripped sort of begging, just a murmur, pared of almost all volume and emotion, aimless. He doesn't even know what he's asking for. "Prosím, Danička. Prosím."

[Danicka] [Perception + Empathy // +1 (Phone), +1 (You ASS, You Broke Up With Me!)]

[Danicka] He has no right to ask this of her. Demand, maybe. He may have the right to order her to perform some task, to tell her where she is and let him into her apartment. He could even force her to comfort him, or feign it, if he needed it. She is his Kinfolk, and she has never called the number she has for Milo Maevsky. But she is not his girlfriend anymore. She's not his lover, because he has made it quite clear that he doesn't want that from her anymore. He doesn't want her body, and he doesn't want her love, and even if he does, he will not let her give it to him.

Danicka does not have to stay on the phone. He has told her what she needs to do with the information he passes along. He has told her he needs and the last time she told him I need it didn't matter at all to him what she needed. He walked away. Over and over, he held back. He turned away. He left. So she would be well within rights to hang up the phone now, damn the consequences. She owes him nothing.

That is what she's about to do, and then she hears his voice, raked down to the bones, burnt to bedrock: Please. She could kill him. She could scream at him now, she is so angry. Digging that fork into her thigh is doing no good this time. She is so angry she's shaking, furious that less than twenty-four hours ago he was pushing her away for what she sincerely intended to be the last time, and now he's calling her. He needs. And now he begs.

She hears something behind her name in his voice, and she pauses.

"...what happened?" she asks, still quiet, as though to invite him to talk to her she has to whisper. Like she's doing something wrong.

[Lukas] (PULL IT TOGETHER!)

[Lukas] There's a noise outside -- might be Sam and Sampson passing his door on their way out to scout, to recon; might be something so prosaic as one of the other residents, someone for whom the world isn't currently falling apart, tripping over a knot in the floorboards. It makes Lukas's head snap up, and it makes him turn guiltily to the door as though his walls were glass and any moment now someone might look in and see the wreckage.

Except -- there would be little enough to see, even if they could see him. His face may as well be stone. His eyes are fierce and bleak; dry. He takes a breath, silently. When he lowers his brow back to the cradle of his thumb and forefinger, it's somehow more the posture of a man in thought than a man ruined.

"I made a mistake," he says. "I made a lot of mistakes, and I think most of them are irrevocable. I just ... " this pause is different; he's putting words together in his mind. "I just needed you to know I made a mistake. Last night. And a week ago. And I'm sorry."

A beat. "I'm not looking for forgiveness."

[Danicka] On her end there's not any sound. She lives in an apartment with thick walls and air conditioning; she has a roommate who is currently in Tokyo, of all places, so she is alone, and everything is silent around her. No music, no movie, and he is too far away to hear or sense the undercurrents of electronics buzzing, buzzing away with their expensive reservoirs of energy. As far as he can tell she's as alone as she was when he walked out of the women's bathroom at 550.

He made a mistake. And she...doesn't say anything for awhile, even after he informs her that sorry or not, he's not looking for forgiveness.

"Then how will you find it?"

[Lukas] Is she being philosophical? Is she fucking with his head? He can't read her voice; he can barely read her at all.

For all he knows she's at home alone, putting the pieces back together. For all he knows she's at someone else's home, and the pieces have been put back together. For all he knows she's moved on already, swept him off her desk; she might be reading a magazine while she pretends to listen to him, mouths pithy little phrases back at him to make him think she gave half a shit.

"I suppose I don't expect to."

[Danicka] I miss you so much I feel like I'm dying.

And she bites it back better than he could hold in the fact that he wants -- no, 'needs' -- to see her. Which he cannot have. Which she refuses and denies to him because he cannot just walk out on her and then come find a home in her arms eighteen hours later. He cannot do what he did last week and ruin her, wreck her, break her like that...and then with a word be welcomed again. He can't have her.

The truth is that she's not reading a magazine but sitting perfectly still on her couch, legs tucked up and one arm around her knees now, the fork set aside because it wasn't helping anyway. The truth is that her voice is slightly muffled now, because she is bowing her head to her knees and speaking to him in the dark cave made by her arms and legs and shoulders.

"There's something you're not telling me." Beat. "This isn't a sudden fit of remorse."

[Lukas] "Christ, Danička, does it really matter, what exactly is going on?"

There's an odd half-heartedness to this curl of temper -- as though he were giving up the ghost of anger even before it's rightfully manifested. She only has to wait. Three or four seconds later he speaks again; toneless now, full of strange and measured pauses.

"Mrena died." He glances at the clock. "About half an hour ago. I don't know how or why yet, nor by whose hand.

"Last week, after I ... left the W, I didn't go home. I spent a week living in the Holiday Inn off Michigan. She came to see me. I grabbed her by the throat and threw her out. That was the last time I ever saw her.

"Tonight, or maybe tomorrow, we'll be going to try and ... recover the body, and ... "

It trails off; not because he can't continue, but because the details are drifting away from him; they're peeling back, layer by layer, becoming unimportant. He thinks for a moment, listening to the silence.

"I just wanted to see you again."

[Danicka] The memories that are oldest always hit her hardest. They crash like waves, burn her like hot oil jumping from the pan. They're old memories, too, ten years or more gone from current mental occupation. But death is a funny thing. It never ages, it never gets old, it never stops reminding you of what you've lost. It never stops being just as awkward, and confusing, as it was when you were fourteen. Or twenty-four.

She hears him tell her that Mrena died, and takes a deep breath. She was not close to Mrena. She didn't know Mrena, and she feels no particular sorrow for the young woman. They are Garou. They die. They die young, and they die suddenly. The deep breath she takes is not for her own sake. It is because of what he says next, describing the last time he saw his packmate and the female they both share a Tribe with. They're going...to recover a body.

This is something she's used to. She was used to it when she took his car keys and ran from whatever it was he and Sam faced in an alleyway across the street from a restaurant he'd invited her to. Danicka had never expected to see him again then, either.

He falls into quiet yet again, admitting that he just wanted to see her. And she is quiet, too, before she makes a decision:

"There's a subway stop on North Clark and West Division. I can be there in fifteen minutes."

[Lukas] Lukas looks at the clock: it's 8:06pm.

Not half an hour ago. Not even twenty minutes ago. The minutes have stretched and warped; he's lost his grasp of time.

"Okay." A beat. "I have to be back here at 8:30. And my brothers have my car."

Which leaves them... maybe five minutes. He wonders if this qualifies as weakness; as insanity. He doesn't give a fuck. He's already standing up, going to his desk, pushing through the paraphernalia in his topmost drawer until he finds a small, square mirror; the one he shaved with once, while she lay on his bed in clothes that looked like pajamas.

[Danicka] They're going to be cutting it close. Lukas, really; Danicka has nowhere to be but home, no one expecting her. She could be like his own personal whore, at his beck and call, coming when he snaps his fingers and leaving again when housekeeping knocks on the door. She could be distracting him from the War, from his packmate's death, doing something utterly wrong by agreeing to meet him when he should be with his pack or he should be getting ready to go at a moment's notice.

If either of these are the case, she doesn't care. She stood up and moved towards the door as soon as he said Okay, her heart beating faster and her...hating it for doing so, despising the fact that she's this weak and yet simultaneously dismissing the very thought of things like failure, weakness, and distraction.

"I'll be there." She hangs up, the phone goes into her purse, and her feet go into her shoes and she doesn't even stop to grab a jacket.

=========

It takes her seven minutes to walk what would take someone going at a strolling page twice as long. Danicka is wearing sneakers, blue ones with white brand-name swooshes on the outsides. She all but runs in them, not to rush or because she is panicked but because she is conscientious of her time and the subway schedule. She barely makes the red line, squeezing into the doors. It's a short ride, four minutes, and she doesn't bother taking a seat.

When she jogs up the stairs out of the subway station and emerges in front of a CVS, across the street from a Dunkin Donuts and a 31 Flavors, she is wearing jeans and a longsleeved, dusky blue t-shirt. Her bag is slung over one shoulder, crossing her torso, and her hair is up in a ponytail. It's been thirteen minutes since she hung up on him. Her cheeks aren't flushed and she isn't sweating but she does, even before she's left the stairwell completely, look for him.

[Lukas] Lukas doesn't have a subway. He has four legs and a wolf form, though, and he doesn't all-but-run; he does run. He runs until the wind rakes his fur back, until his lungs are aching and his sides are heaving, and his tongue has expanded and flattened to cool his overheating blood.

He sidesteps back into the Realm atop the CVS. His phone comes out of his pocket while he's climbing down the fire escape. He calls Caleb, as he said he would, only he's not calling from his room anymore. He doesn't try to pretend he's still at the Brotherhood. He doesn't even try to hide where he really is. It's somehow become important that his packmates knew exactly where he was:

Sam and Sampson have gone scouting. I'm meeting Danička. When you get to the Brotherhood, wait there for me. I'll be back at 8:30.

He hangs up, jumps down the last six feet to the asphalt, lands in an easy, coiled crouch. It's 8:18; a minute later Danicka is jogging up the stairs, her bag over her shoulder, every inch the city girl with her quick-clip gait, her alert eyes. She's casual in her jeans and her long-sleeve t-shirt; she looks like she might be on her way back home from the gym with her hair in a ponytail like that, sneakers on her feet.

She comes up the stairs she's looking for him and he's already seen her. Her hair shines golden even in the gathering dusk, but it's not just that. He'd know her anywhere.

He's -- christ, he's in what she would recognize as his pajamas, a white logoless t-shirt and soft drawstring pants. He has shoes on his feet but no socks. He doesn't even have a pocket for his cellphone, so he just holds it in his hand. He crosses the sidewalk toward her and someone's grandma heading home with her old-lady purse clutched in her hand skitters away from him like he might mug her though he doesn't even look at her, barely even registers her in his awareness except to reflexively step around her; and then he's in front of Danicka, his rage crackling around him like a lightning storm.

Lukas doesn't pause, not even for an instant. He pulls her to him and his cellphone is a hard blade against her back because he doesn't even have the presence of mind to not press that hand against her. His back is bowed across their height differential. He bends to her, wraps her into him, says nothing; his chest strains against her when he inhales. People are staring because normal people, sane people don't hug one another like this on the street. They simply don't.

[Danicka] She has always been remarkably, frighteningly good at hiding what she is feeling or thinking from others. She looks natural here, as though she's running out to grab a prescription or to get some coffee or cross another street and drop off a couple of DVDs at Blockbuster. It's cold enough that someone as thin as her might want a jacket, but she comes from a city just as easily chilled as this one and she comes from bloodlines that keep her hands warmer than her heart. Danicka looks for him and finds him easily, but not instantly, and --

-- she doesn't run to him. Her steps do not launch her into his arms; she doesn't bury her face in his chest or invite him to lean on her shoulder to grieve his fallen packmate. Danicka moves out of the flow of foot traffic, but she does not move towards Lukas. And when he engulfs her, the heat of him palpable even through his...well, pajamas...she does not put her arms around him. She allows him to embrace her, tightly and all but crushing her to his chest, and she thinks

I hate you. I hate you so much.

as though this will make her believe it.

Danicka is not the first to step away, to make some point or to drive it home that he no longer has any right to hold her like this. Some of the people who see them wonder at the way he wraps himself around her like they are about to get bombed, like the world is about to end in fiery wrath. Some of them wonder at the way she tenses, closes her eyes, and seems to wait for it to be over.

Except for the very last moment, when she moves her head as if by instinct to rest her temple to his cheek. For a moment.

When he lets her go, she steps back, looks up at him. "Is there are decent chance that you're going to die?" she asks, quietly. They are, after all, in public.

[Lukas] She's stiff in his arms; her hands don't find their place around his waist, at his kidneys, across the broad wedge of his back. She could be a mannequin, except at the very end, but he holds her anyway.

You'd think he never told her to just go home, or that she'll survive, or no, no, no. You'd think the world was about to end in fiery wrath, and by holding her like this he might be able to stave off the inevitable a little longer, or give her what protection he might have to give in his very blood and bones; prolong her life by a millisecond, a femtosecond, a flash.

It's nothing so dramatic as that. Traffic passes on the street. CVS's doors open and some college-aged guy comes out putting his receipt in his bag with his bottle of contact solution. The world turns and life goes on.

They draw apart. You'd think he'd never held her to him like that at all, the way they regard one another now, quiet, across a measurable gulf of distance. Her questions makes him wince and frown; it makes him look away.

"I didn't come here to talk about that."

[Lukas] (question. singular.)

[Danicka] Despite herself she is breathing faster, and he can chalk this up to her jogging up the stairs or his Rage or both; it's all the same. She crosses her arms loosely over her midriff as she watches him, as far away and untouchable as she was the first night he met her while she sat with Gabriella in SmartBar. Farther away, even. It is, a moment later, as though he's never held her, and he will never hold her again. There is this small mercy: she does not look at him with complete indifference. She does not look at him as though he means nothing to her.

He loves her and she loves him. He grips her hard so that life should not drag her from this moment. He wants all future to cease. He wants to topple with his arms round her off this moment's bring and into nothing, or everlasting...or whatever there is.

But Danicka looks at him and does not press him to her body, does not lay little bites along his neck and ear as she might have in another lifetime, a week ago or last night if he had made love to her and felt her sweat rolling down and mingling with his own. She makes him no promises to open his skull and cast his thoughts like lots or like stars spiraling out for her to sift through like gemstones. She is not inside of him right now. she is far, far away, and yet held hostage just as surely as if he had clamped a manacle around her wrist and chained her to him when he wrapped his arms around her like that. So she does not move.

"I'm not asking out of sentimentality," she says levelly. "I have half a dozen of those goddamn bandages you kept shoving at me and if there's not much of a chance you'll need them then there's no need to give them back to you now, but if you might, then you're a fucking idiot not to take them."

I hate you. I hate you so much. I won't bear it if you die.

[Lukas] Now he's not only frowning but nearly scowling. She folds her arms and he tries to put his hands on his hips, abruptly exasperated, only the cell is still in his hand, so he drops his hands back to his side and looks at her across the distance.

He was wrong; the gulf is not measurable. There's an immeasurable distance between them; they are not nothing to one another, and she's tattooed in his bones, but she's never been farther away from him in his life.

"If I thought I'd need Bandages, I'd make more." He's as quiet as she was. They're in public. "This isn't some... mindless glory or death vengeance spree. If I needed preparation, I'd make preparations. I gave those to you; I didn't come here to take them back, either."

[Danicka] If she were holding herself just a little differently, she would look as though she's cold. She would look as though she's trying to hold herself together. Nothing like a brutal death in the family to crystallize a person, though; nothing like sudden and bone-snapping loss to give you a little clarity. As it is, Danicka doesn't look cold. She doesn't feel like she's fourteen years old again, her hair unwieldy in its length and thickness, her dress stiff against her skin and tree bark rough against her back, wishing for a cigarette and feeling an unfamiliar stabbing, clenching pain in her lower abdomen. She feels younger than that, and more frightened, and in far more pain.

All she does is stand there, her arms crossed and her eyes unblinking, watching him in silence. She doesn't know what he wants from her and cannot explain why she is here. So she has nothing she can say. Nothing safe.

[Lukas] I didn't come here to talk about that, he's said. I didn't come here to take them back.
I didn't come here to...

What he hasn't told her is why he is here. What he came here to do. He hasn't told her because he doesn't know; he hadn't thought beyond I need to see you and I want to see you and please, over and over, crumbling out of him when he couldn't find a single other thing left in his mind to say, or do, or explain.

You'd think that never happened too, now. She watches him in silence and he frowns at the sidewalk, the windows of the CVS in which he can see them reflected, but only dimly -- the light is failing out here. It's 8:21.

It's strange: he has no experience with loss. Both his parents are alive and well. His sister did not grow up to brutalize him. His packmates have drifted off, spun off one by one, but even that's different. Even that is not the same as the brutal wrenching pain of a totem bond torn asunder; a hundred avian voices screaming as one.

Even that is not the same as telling a woman, I am in love with you, and two weeks later, We are not capable. Even that is not the same as telling her I can't and

and seeing her on the street, at the top of the stairs to the El station, between a CVS and a Dunkin Donuts, and the sunday night pedestrians walking to their amorphous, unknown destinations. He looks back at her; it's not fair, and has never been fair, that she looks and smells and feels like home to him.

Now it's 8:22, and he's starting to think maybe he should just go now that he's seen her; had his look. It would be unspeakably cruel to ask her or request of her half the things he wants to ask and request when there's every chance that he'll never see her again. It would be unbearable if the answer was no, no, no.

At last, the only thing he can think to say is: "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have asked you to -- I don't have -- I have no reason." It's a strange sort of faltering: sentences that don't so much cut off or trail off as they simply end, as though it were perfectly normal for them to end midstream like this. There's a faint wince behind his eyes when he looks at her. "I shouldn't have."

[Danicka] Eight minutes until he has to be back at the Brotherhood of Thieves, and were he a human being it would take him twice that long to walk it. Eight minutes, until he told his surviving packmates that he would be there, as their Alpha and brother. Right now one of them is driving like a bat out of hell to get to the Brotherhood. Right now two of them are stalking, scouting, trying to find out what happened to Mrena without themselves getting killed. Right now a whole handful of them are lost in the Umbra and one of them is decomposing and one of the is standing in front of the woman he loves and she is looking at him with a blank expression and eyes overwhelming in their fullness, their intensity, their life.

Seven and a half minutes. He speaks, stammering out half-sentences and confusion, revealing quite openly his inability to explain what the fuck they're both doing here, wasting his time and hauling her out of her apartment. But she was the one who told him no, that he couldn't ask to see her just because he needed to, just because he was desperate to hold her one last time. Not when stone cold sober she told him she needed him and he informed her that she was drunk and should go home. Not, perhaps, ever again, will he have the right to tell her I need and know that she will reach out and help him.

Except.

I need, he'd said. And a little later: I can be there in fifteen minutes, she'd said. Even now.

Seven minutes, while she stands there in seeming impassivity, holding her loss and her awareness of its far-reaching, life-infecting wound close to her heart, where it can't be shared. She pushed him away as hard as she could bear to push him when he brought up her brother, a week ago. And he doesn't even know what Night Warder, the vaunted hero of East Coast stories, was really like. He doesn't know so much about her, understands only pieces of what he does know, and after tonight, after losing Mrena and realizing what this feels like, he may only be more certain that he cannot keep her, because then one day he will inevitably lose her.

Danicka looks back at him. "Chápu," she gives him finally, quietly. She glances to the side, then back to him. Her arms unfold, and one of them reaches out, and the backs of her knuckles graze his forearm. She nods her head in the direction she saw him come from, minutes ago. "Je to v pořádku. You should go back."

Her hand falls back to her side.

[Lukas]

[Lukas] It happens without his consent, and not entirely even with his knowledge: as her hand is falling away, his is coming up. He catches her arm, as easily and solidly and naturally as a gifted player catches a high flyball.

Her forearm fits his palm like that: easily, solidly, naturally. Her frame is slight; she's thin almost to the point of skinny, and this makes her five-six height seem more than it is, except, of course, when she stands before him like this, in flat-heeled shoes.

There's a pulse in the center of his palm. What she has of the changing blood keeps her skin warm even on a cold day, with no jacket. What he has of the changing blood makes his touch almost scaldingly hot. When he pulled her into him at the start, held her for long that passerbies were staring, were perhaps beginning to wonder if they could help that woman, the heat he'd built up from the run, from the rage, from himself, was almost shocking.

His eyes are on hers; he's staring at her. He's looking at her the way he does when he tries to read her, but he's not trying to read her.

"Zůstaň," he says. It's barely audible over the sound of traffic.

[Danicka] [Willpower -1]

[Danicka] Outside of a nightclub or a nightclub bathroom, even though they have gone past sunset and into darkness, he should be able to tell that the female he may as well own as far as their tribe is concerned...is thinner than she was when he left her lying in bed at the W. Even clothed, even in the dark, it would be easier to tell than it would have been at 550. Holding her against him he would have felt it; holding her arm he can tell that she has shaved at least a few pounds off of her frame.

He knows -- god, sometimes what he knows about her is painfully intimate, painfully private, despite all he is unaware of -- that she has trouble eating when she's stressed. That she once looked at a grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich like it would knock her out if she tried to keep it down. When she is happy, or at least stable, she has no such trouble: she eats well, she takes care of herself, she enjoys crispy banana rolls. When her roommate is in the hospital or her first love has left her...she loses weight.

It is not his fault. It is not even his responsibility. She'll level out again whether he tries to make her a sandwich or not. She'll figure out a way to be all right whether he tries to love her again or not. She has been through -- strangely -- cycles of brutality and grief so removed from his experience he may not be able to fathom them. There is a difference between nearly losing your life to a monster and nearly losing it to your flesh and blood. There is a difference between being chased down and hunted by a twisted spirit and hiding in the dark from your family.

Most women who have been through what she has been through should be simpering, quivering, tremulous creatures. And she can pretend to be that like a master. But the fact that she can look into Lukas's eyes and is not afraid of him...

...it's miraculous.

He holds onto her arm, his pulse beating in his palm like a stigmata. It's so hot she thinks he might be bleeding, but she doesn't look. She looks at his face.

"I love you," she says softly, in that voice -- It was just a dream. It wasn't real. You can sleep. You're safe. -- that has to ache to hear, "but you can't stay." Are they still talking about now? Are they ever? She works her arm gently out from his, if she can. "So I'm going to go," she says, still gentle, taking a step back from him, back towards the subway station, her eyes staying on his.

"We'll talk again."

And unless he grabs for her again, lunges for her and tightens his hold on her arm, she is heading back down the concrete steps, returning to the underworld that brought her to him in the first place.