let go.

[Danicka] Two cars went to Kingsbury Plaza last night, one silvery blue and one glossy black. One nearly brand new, one less than ten years old and well-kept. The black one, the BMW, got there first. Parked at the curb, where the driver -- tall, swarthy, a walking threat of death under the nearly full moon -- got out and made his way into the building and up to the twenty-third floor. Apartment C was, upon his entry, discovered to be in the same state of general disarray as it usually is after the weekend, some dishes in the sink and books on the coffee table and shopping bags from all along the Mile still hanging out in the hallway, waiting for their contents to be de-tagged and dealt with.

Michael Kors. La Perla. Miu Miu. Her usual haunts, so to speak.

The Infiniti arrived maybe fifteen minutes later, drawing into underground parking. Its occupant, a slender blonde in jeans and heels, was carrying a hemp grocery tote with her as she entered the garage elevator and hit the 23 button. She was yawning when she emerged on her floor, running her fingers through her thick hair and scritching sleepily at her scalp. It was a long night. Not draining, not exhausting, not full of fighting or stress, but it was late when she walked across the heavy, patterned carpet to Apartment C and turned her key in the lock.

She was smiling, when she locked the door behind her and went inside, finding Lukas wherever he'd chosen to wait for her. She was smilng, when she slid her arms around his waist and buried her face in his chest and breathed him in.

The evening was quiet after that. Danicka put away her groceries: a pint of raspberry sorbet, some broccoli and sugar snap peas and hummus, a loaf of bread, several cups of yogurt -- she likes strawberry banana and white chocolate cranberry and key lime and vanilla, it seems -- and a half-dozen eggs. Odds and ends. A bag of tortilla chips she bought on impulse, some stupidly high-end hexagon-shaped things with flax seeds in them that she swore are totally worth the four dollar price tag on a 6oz bag of chips.

She told him: I hope you didn't peek in those, nodding at the bags in the hall as she took off her heels near the door and hung up her jacket in the front closet. Her camisole was the casual sort, lace around the straps and low-cut collar, ribbed cotton that feels like silk, peach-colored. When she took his hand and led him into her bedroom, and he closed the door behind himself, the dark took over. Only moonlight and dim city light in the south end of the apartment.

When she peeled the camisole off her body and dropped it to the floor, Lukas put her hands on her waist. Slid them around to her lower back, stepped forward, held her against his front. Danicka, in jeans and... well, in jeans, put her arms around him and nuzzled his chest. Whispered:

Let's go to bed.

Class in not-enough hours. A decent commute from here to the University of Chicago by transit, since she almost never drives herself there. Gotta have time in the morning to dress and to get herself together and have some breakfast. And when they went to bed, Danicka came to him naked, naked because he was there and he is her mate. Worn out by the day and night, it took her awhile to fall asleep with a monster at her back, holding her to his chest, circling her with his arms and covering her legs with one of his own. So Lukas held her a little looser. Stayed close and in contact but eased off of her, sensing the flares of instinctive tension rising to the surface every time she got close to drifting away.

Then Danicka drifted away. And Lukas waited, and slid closer, and held her a bit tighter, and let himself follow.


On the morning of her twenty-sixth birthday, Danicka stirs awake to her alarm. Taps it off, snoozes with her mate for another nine, ten minutes. Drags herself up after that, reaching back to smooth her hand down his shoulder and arm as she slides away from his body. Soothes him with meaningless sounds, whispers that she'll come back before she leaves for the day. Lukas stays in her bed while she showers, while she dries her hair and puts on her makeup in the bathroom. Her Monday class is a lab, and it's painfully early. Who is ready to learn at seven in the fucking morning, anyway? She's the most put-together person there every time, lounging at her table with her partner with her hair done and her clothes matching while half the other students wear pajamas and perform their assignments with bleary eyes.

She comes back to her bedroom after going to the kitchen. There's a travel mug of coffee in her hand; she sets it on the nightstand next to a piece of buttered toast on a napkin and a cup of yogurt with a little spoon atop the lid: she's going to be eating on the way, it seems, thanks to those ten extra minutes. It's okay. She told him this the first time he stayed over and she had an early class:

Stay in bed. And: It's okay. I'll eat breakfast on the way. Shh. Go back to sleep.

Danicka leans over him, knees to the mattress, and kisses his brow. His arms almost -- almost -- come up to wrap around her, to pull her down, to bring her back to sleep with him. Shh, she whispers, her breath smelling of mint as she rests her face along his and nuzzles his cheek, scratchy with shadow, I gotta go. I'll call you later.

She has to go. So she goes, locking the door behind her as though he would need any such protection, taking her coffee and her backpack and her toast and her yogurt and walking in the early morning to the nearest station. While she's on the train heading southward, Lukas is in her bed in her apartment. Everything is quiet. The sun just barely touches the prism in the window enough to cast a tiny rainbow on the carpet. He sleeps, and


Sometime before lunch, his iPhone goes off with a message from Danicka, who has classes one after the other from seven to eleven-thirty three times a week. Burnham Harbor, 9:30?

[Lukas] They've seen each other perhaps two or three times since the night at the museum. Lukas has a key to his mate's building now, and to her condo. He doesn't have to wait until he has enough time to make plans to see her. He doesn't have to wait until she has enough time to see him, and have dinner with him, and stroll down a street with him, and make love for hours.

He can come by at night just to hold her and sleep. He can decide, returning from some patrol or some battle or some night out on the town, that he doesn't want to go back to the Brotherhood where he'll sleep alone in his narrow bed. He can decide to drive past the Brotherhood and along the river's edge, all the way to 520 N. Kingsbury where he can park on the street and let himself in, and up, and in again.

He can crawl into bed with her at one in the morning after tax day and wrap his arms around her and whisper in her ear, I have conquered the known taxes.

He can slip into her warm bed early, early in the morning of the 23rd, hours before she's going to get up and go to class, and say nothing at all except shh. go back to sleep. before following her under himself.

It doesn't mean he doesn't want her, though, when they return to her apartment together last night, and he helps her put away her groceries, and assures her he didn't peek, and watches her strip down to nothing. It doesn't mean he isn't lazily aroused and holding back when he gets into bed with her, his breathing just a little unsteadily as they scoot together, as their bodies touch.

It doesn't mean he tries to convince her to put off sleep a little longer, either. It doesn't mean he tries to touch her, fondle her, convince her to fuck. It's late. He knows she has an early class. And he knows she's tired, and can't even quite stand to sleep with him holding her as close as he'd like to.

So he lies still, and breathes evenly, and gives her room. And after she's asleep, he holds her a little closer and thinks to himself: precious. mine. mate.


Not-enough hours later, her alarm is going off and he's thinking too early! She taps her alarm off and he thinks yes, this is good, it's too early for his mate to get up and she's not getting up, and he holds her a little closer, grunting some vague annoyance at the alarm and the hour that want to steal her from him but failed, hah.

Then ten minutes later her alarm goes off again and he says too early! aloud this time, except what comes out is mmgh nng-hghn. She slips out of his arms and his hand follows her instinctively and trails sleepily down her arm, and then she's out of bed and telling her she'll come back, which is good, so he rolls on his stomach and drowses while she showers and gets her breakfast. When she comes back again she's put together, fresh-faced, dressed, lovely, and he opens an eye and watches her approach across a snowy landscape of sheets and comforters.

He doesn't say anything. He doesn't say, but you haven't had breakfast or but you haven't slept enough. She can see it in his eyes, though: her worrywart of a mate is looking at her little cup of yogurt and her toast, looking at her in the pale morning light, and his brow creases a little where he lays.

So she tells him it's okay. She'll eat on the way. She leans down and he turns lazily on his back, starting to reach for her. She says she has to go. He makes a vaguely disappointed sound in his throat, nuzzling her back with a sleepy heaviness, breathing deep as she straightens away from him.

"Všechno nejlepší k narozeninám," he murmurs, the first human words he's managed today.

A few moments later he hears the front door close quietly and lock from the outside. Then it's quiet.


Yes-enough hours later, his iPhone dings and he wakes up. He paws it over, opens one eye to look at it. He's not sure where Burnham Harbor is or where it is, but he answers anyway: OK!

He leaves her apartment around one in the afternoon. Before he leaves he makes egg sandwiches, leaving two wrapped in cellophane in her fridge with a post-it note stuck atop: Sustenance for Wednesday morning!


9:15pm, Lukas parks in the harbor's lot. It's after sundown and parking's free. It's a short hike to the water's edge, and springtime is a time of uncertain weather in Chicago -- rather cool tonight, not quite chilly. He wears a light leather coat, which is a rich warm brown. His jeans are a dark blue close enough to grey not to matter, but his shirt is sleek and white, the buttons hidden behind a smooth flap. There are faint patterns embroidered in the lower right, but it's white on white, invisible without direct light.

He carries a messenger bag over his shoulder -- a rather large one, earth-toned, which looks stuffed rather full of ... well, stuff. Waiting for her, he looks alert; happy.

[Danicka] She's waiting for him at the harbor. There was another text soon after the first: J dock!

Later on, she came home from classes. She saw the egg sandwiches in the fridge and shook her head at her mate providing for her at over twice what she's even able to eat. She makes a mental note to take the second sandwich for her lab partner. He knows she's in her mid-twenties, and that she's engaged. He is making the grave mistake of comparing the girls he dates to his lab partner, but then: he's only nineteen. He thinks he knows what he's doing.

Danicka's afternoon goes by in a rush of errands that Lukas isn't privy to, and much later that night, the moon up and the sky dark otherwise, she sees him from where she stands on the docks and waves. She's wearing a long, light-colored skirt over a pair of flat, soft-soled boots, and charmingly enough, she's holding a silver shawl around her shoulders and arms, on top of the pink sweater and the plain white camisole beneath that. Her hair is down, loose, windtousled. She has nothing with her.

She tells him, when he walks over to her, that all her things are already on the boat.


It's called the Crescendo, it lives in J-20. The captain is a man who looks to be in his fifties or early sixties, white-toothed and tan-skinned, whose eyes squint when he smiles. His name is Mike, and he's been doing this for something like a quarter of a century. The fact that he manages to shake Lukas's hand when they board, with little more than a sudden twitch in his cheek and sharp flash of wariness in his eyes says something about the sort of man he is. He doesn't tell them his life story. He's here to take them out on the Lake.

For Danicka's birthday.

She's aglow with delight, during the whole process of boarding and Mike explaining the spiel he goes through with everyone, every time. While he's doing so, there's a deliveryman from Fox & Obel with food and wine. Danicka is, apparently, making the most out of her newfound ability to spend without stress. At least for special occasions. The food goes belowdeck to wait for them. Mike tells them they'll be heading out in about ten minutes, and leaves them be. He's bundled up. He's got a big old thermos of coffee and a lunchbox somewhere. He's done this before, too: sailed all night, for a couple or few people who can afford to sleep on the water.

Most of the time, from dock to spiel, Danicka's holding Lukas's hand. And all the time, she's smiling. Excitedly. When Mike starts to go through his checks, she finally turns to Lukas, beaming. "Neat, huh?"

[Lukas] Lukas wasn't sure what Danicka had planned, driving in. He thought perhaps she'd found a restaurant on the pier, some swanky place of white tablecloths and water views; or perhaps some noisy little fish shack where all the food they serve is flavored only with salt, pepper and lemon. It's not until she says already on the boat that he realizes they're going sailing.

And then he's delighted, grinning. He says he hasn't been on a boat since some random harbor cruise with the Bellamontes in Boston. He kisses her softly, and then he follows her down to the docks.

When they board, Lukas is politely deferential to their captain, more respectful of those ancient laws of hospitality and rank than your average human. Respect for your host and your captain may have been lost from most of modern culture, but they persist in small, closed pockets of society: on ships, in Caerns. The Shadow Lord understands. And he listens, carefully, as the human explains their intended route. He pays close attention as Mike gives them a brief tour of the small vessel, shows them what areas are theirs to roam about, what is off-limits. He studies the life jackets carefully, remembers where they're stored; looks at the radio room and listens to how to broadcast, in unlikely event of emergency, a distress signal. Even when a deliveryman brings their dinner aboard, he keeps his attention on Mike until the spiel is over.

Then they're left alone. The captain goes to run his checks before leaving the docks, and Danicka is beaming, and Lukas, serious and attentive through all the introductory spiel, grins back, squeezing her hand gently.

"It's wonderful," he says. "Where did the idea come from?"

[Danicka] "I was driving by," she says, and that's all there is to it: she was driving by the docks and saw a sign, or saw a poster, and thought That would be so cool.

She reaches down, lacing their fingers and stepping closer. "I have this image in my head of being able to see the stars better out on the water, and I'm quite looking forward to that." Smiles again, warmly, looking up at him. "I had them bring breakfast for tomorrow, too. We can make mimosas and eat quiche and french toast with vanilla butter sauce."

Her eyebrows wiggle a bit at that, as though she's said something salacious. "I bet you brought me presents," she goes on, shamelessly, and grins.

[Lukas] Something about that endears him, tugs at him, makes him lean into her and kiss her temple. "Happy birthday, baby," he says softly, which -- she can tell by the way he says it -- is code for i love you.

so much.

Beneath their feet, an engine starts to rumble: a smooth, even, low note that soon drops out of their awareness. They're not moving yet, but the very fact that they're preparing to makes Lukas shift with unabashed eagerness, looking lakeward into the wind.

He looks back when she speaks again. Her grin makes him grin; makes him shift his bag over his shoulder. "I did," he confesses, "and in the plural, too. Do you want them now?"

[Danicka] "Ooh!" she says, a single, churning note of delight. "Plural."

Danicka stands on her toes. She wraps her shawl tighter around herself and kisses him quickly on the lips, remembering from myriad other experiences the way the boat will pull underneath them, the way sailing at night will be like sailing on glass. It's too cold yet for swimming, especially nightswimming. Technically, sailing season isn't for another two weeks. Technically.

She smiles, eyes -- simply put -- twinkling. "Let's get some wine from below, and some snacks. And then: yes. Gimme gimme."

[Lukas] In a strange sense, a quick kiss like that takes more familiarity than the long, hungry ones they began with. This takes more trust -- that the other party won't move away, startled. That they won't try to deepen the kiss, or hold you there, or bump into you.

She lifts herself to her toes. Their hands still linked, he touches her on her free elbow, lightly, as his eyes close. She plants a gentle kiss on his lips and he smiles before she's even drawing away.

"I was a little indecisive," he continues, taking up the conversation again without missing a beat. "Also, I like getting you stuff. It satisfies my instinct to provide."

Behind them, the cabin door reopens and Capt. Mike emerges, telling them they're about to get going. The craft is small enough that a crew of one is enough. On the docks, an assistant unmoors the sailboat, throwing the loose line down to the deck. As Mike goes to adjust the tack and unfurl the sails, Lukas nods toward the cabin door.

"Come on," he says. They'll give Mike room to work.

The door into the cabin is small, low enough that Capt. Mike needed to duck slightly to get in. Lukas has to actually bend to fit, and when the door closes behind him the ambient sounds of the lake fade away. The belowdecks open up. Though not quite large, there's room to move about; room to breathe. Windows set just above the waterline give a few of the dark harbor. Lukas ducks his head to look out one before setting his bag down in the salon area.

They're beginning to move. They can feel themselves turning, the maneuvering engine cycling up under their feet. Dinner, whatever it is that Danicka may have ordered, is accompanied by wine. Lukas, his feet unconsciously planted a little wider against the gentle rocking beneath his feet, pours two glasses. Outside, ships slide by: small sailboats, a catamaran, a very large motor yacht, and then the end of the pier and the open lake.

Lukas hands Danicka her glass. There are cheeses, smoked salmon, crackers: he doesn't bother building himself neat little snacks, instead snagging chilled salmon right off the plate and eating it off his fingers.

"This is great," he admits quietly, "but I almost feel a little bad. You planned for my birthday, and you planned for your own. I wish I'd had time to do something more for you."

[Danicka] A part of her wants to stay on deck as they pull out onto the lake. She can't explain why. She doesn't think there's much to see that can't be enjoyed from below. Ultimately, presents win out. Wine and snacks win out over watching water churn up white behind them. Danicka nuzzles him on his jawline, smooth now, as they pull apart and start to head downward, Mike and his assistant calling to each other one last time before they head out for the night.

In awhile, he'll open his thermos and pour himself some hot coffee. Down below, his passengers will have wine and champagne and salmon and cheese and trout canapes on cucumber slices. Danicka laughs as they walk down, ducking into the cabin, at Lukas's instinct to provide. "Like with egg sandwiches?" she teases, and lets her shawl drop down her shoulders to her elbows as they stand up a little straighter down below.

She chooses to sit, as Lukas stands and pours, nabbing a bite of salmon. She chooses some cheese, and smiles happily to herself as she bites into it, watching her mate. The smile fades a little, naturally, but she tips her head as he admits feeling... well. A little bad. And why.

"I like getting you things, too," she says, though she doesn't offer reasoning. Instinct to provide. Or simple joy in giving. "I like... doing whatever I want, too." This, also, is something of an admission. "Last year I didn't really do anything for my birthday. But this year I'm twenty-six. And my birthday's the twenty-sixth. It should be lucky. I wanted to do something special."

Danicka smiles again, as she takes her wine glass from him, looking up at him. "Lukášek, you can do whatever you want for me, whenever you want. And I will be grateful, and pleased, and very likely quite endeared." A little laugh, her smile breaking towards a grin. "To be honest, I know that any time we're together you might get called away. Any night that I... get you all to myself, I guess... is special."

[Lukas] While Danicka teases him on the egg sandwiches -- the two rather large, protein-and-carb-laden sandwiches -- Lukas is peering into the boxes, curious. Looking for meat, possibly. Appetizers are well and good, but the best meals he can remember in his mate's presence were the ones where they ate until they were drowsy and full: heavy polish dinners, stew after art museum soup-and-salads, barbecue at the bonfires. His eyes flick up to her; he laughs.

"Oh," mildly, inexplicably abashed. "You found them already."

She sits, then. He stays standing. Truth is, he wants to be abovedecks too. He wants to give the captain time to set their course and leave the boat motoring as he retires to his own quarters, but Lukas wants to see the stars. He wants to see the water turn white in their wake, and what fish they might be leap from the surface of the lake ten, twenty miles from shore.

He listens, though. And his brow furrows faintly with ache when she says time with him is special. That he might get called away. That there's every possibility that out of the blue he'll need to literally turn the boat around, or jump overboard, because somewhere his packmates are rallying for a hunt.

There's a hesitation. Then he moves toward her, setting his glass on the table, sitting beside her after all. He leans over, elbows on knees. He looks at his hands, then at her.

"I love every moment I can spend with you," he says quietly. "Even if we're just ... watching a movie. Or sleeping. It's all precious to me."

[Danicka] He's abashed, and she's so fond of him so suddenly she wants to pull him to her, pull him down to where she sits on the curving cushioned bench, pull him close and warm and near to her, right against her heart til he can feel it beating. Instead:

Danicka smiles, and she reaches over and grazes his hand with the fingertips of her own, her other hand on her wineglass's stem. It's a crisp, sweet white, balanced between the dry and the fruity, smooth on the tongue. She watches him, knowing any second now it could be Kate or Theron or one of the other ones calling to him for help or to war, a call she won't even hear. Or perhaps a call on his phone from a septmate. Something about the Hive, the war effort, that can't go to voicemail.

Lukas comes closer, and sits beside her. Danicka stays right where she is, forcing him to be right next to and against her. Forcing their legs to press together. She lays her head on his shoulderblade when he leans forward, and listens to his breathing from there, hears his words resonate in his chest.

She smiles, and lifts her head, looking at him. "Have I told you," she says musingly after a pause, picking up her glass to take a sip, "how happy it makes me when you just... come over and crawl into bed with me at any old hour?" She sips, and leans over to rub her nose gently against his temple, still smiling. Whatever else flickers to the surface of their conversation, she's happy. She should be: it's her birthday.

"I don't know if you're waiting for an invitation, but ...there's room in my closet for some of your things. There's room in the bathroom. If you want to leave clothes there, or something." A pause. "I could get you another straight-razor. Dr. Whitby swears by this Colonol Conk shaving soap. Or some Wyborowa. Or ...you know. Things."

She sips again. "The only thing of yours in my apartment are the books," Danicka says, more quietly. "And I just realized, with you coming over more... maybe you were waiting for me to tell you it was okay."

[Lukas] It doesn't take much force for Lukas to sit beside her. To be right next to her. To press his leg to hers through their respective clothes: her stockings and skirt, his jeans. It is, amazingly enough, no great sacrifice for Lukas to be close to his mate.

And he loves her casual intimacies. He loves that yesterday at the pool hall, she slid her arm around him and rested her head against the side of his chest. He loves that now, she lays her head on his back, leans against him as he speaks. It makes him close his eyes just to enjoy that contact more. It makes him breathe deeper.

When she speaks, he raises his head. He looks at her, surprise flickering over his face, chased by pure, uncomplicated happiness. "I didn't know that," he says quietly. "I do now. Thank you."

He reaches out for his glass, then, taking another sip; reaching for salmon, for cheese and water crackers. Nothing heavier than light foods, which is probably for the best in the long run. Lukas has an ignominious history with his stomach, after all, even if that history is now nearly twenty years old.

"I did notice you had a new nightstand. I wasn't sure what it meant." And after a moment, "If you want to leave things in room 2, I can clear out a shelf in the closet for you." He laughs a little; it's almost ridiculous, offering up tiny patches of territory in his tiny patch of territory. "Or maybe a drawer."

Another pause.

"Lean on me again," he says softly.

[Danicka] A little over twenty-four hours ago they were in Mr. C's, where she propositioned him and told him she'd make him see eternity if he would just fuck her already. Where, months later, he completely lost his shit when she was too high and drunk to remember a word of it, furious because she looked at him like she didn't know him, like he didn't matter, and he latched that fury onto the men who were posturing for her attention, lashed out with it to Danicka herself as though she were inviting the attention, asking for it,

when the real pain and wrath of it all was that the message was beating like a hammer on his head: not mine. not mine. not mine. Which he could not bear, even then.

Danicka has no stockings on under that long skirt, but he doesn't know that. Maybe she should: it's chilly, though the cabin below is nice and warm. She seems a little sad, stroking his back with her hand, that he didn't know he could leave a pair of shoes or a change of clothes at her place. A little sad, and understanding all the same. Because he has, from the beginning, respected her space as just that: hers. He has, from the start, done everything he could not to take away what little freedom she's waited her entire life for.

Danicka leans over and kisses his cheek, while they take a few more bites of their snacks. Danicka seems to particularly enjoy the trout pâté on those cucumber slices. There's no koláče to be found, birthday or no birthday. No heavy, cream-filled pastries. No lamb or beef. No potatoes or pasta. Everything is easy on the stomach. Most of it can be found grown in the earth or caught from the sea. The rest can be taken from animals without their life: cheese, for example. Eggs, in the quiche they'll have for breakfast. It isn't simple fare, but there's enough of it to feed something like eight people.

Later tonight Danicka will end up going to the captain with a platter. Were she at a party on a boat and not with her mate, on her birthday, she might bring him food and end up talking to him all night. She might spend the evening listening to him as he sails. She has a habit of going off with one or two people away from the larger group and just... finding out who they are. Sometimes she never sees them again.

Tonight, however, as it creeps towards two and three in the morning, she'll take Mike some food because they have too much and all he has are sandwiches and coffee. Tell him, as she gives him some of the truffles she ordered in place of cake, that it's her birthday. He'll wish her a happy one, and she'll tell him to enjoy the food,

and go back outside to look at the stars with her mate, her shawl and his arm wrapped around her, a blanket over their laps, the water slapping soft and familiar against the sides of the Crescendo.

For now, though, she stays close to that mate of hers in the cabin down below, stroking his back and smiling, laughing quietly. Truth be told, she doesn't really need to leave anything at his place. She's used to being able to quickly throw anything she might need into a large purse and sling it over her shoulder before going on a date. Danicka is, if nothing else, resourceful. But she will, in the end, leave a few things there. Tokens, more than real necessities. And honestly... more for his sake than her own.

"I'd like that," she says softly, and it isn't a lie. She smiles warmly, closing her eyes and laying her head on him like she was before. "I wasn't even sure you'd like going out on a boat," she confesses. "I'm glad you do." Her hand rests flat and gentle on his lower back, and her wine glass is held steady on the tabletop.

Time passes. They nibble. They sip. They sit quiet and together, in respective peace, til Danicka murmurs: "Let's heat up some plates of the actual dinner and go up. I'll tell you everything I ever learned about constellations. Which is: making them up."

[Lukas] Freedom is a rare thing in the Garou Nation. It was an easier pill to swallow a few hundred or thousand years ago, before the advent of the enlightenment, of the philosophy of liberty and free will and self-determinism. These days, with all the western world around them clamoring for everyone to find themselves! and do what you want!, it's hard enough for those of Gaia to resign themselves to the fact that they were, in fact, born for a single fatal purpose.

It's harder still for their kin, and particularly the kin of the Shadow Lords, who are taught from birth that their place is to serve and support the trueborn warriors of Gaia. That their entire purpose is to stand as second to their mightier cousins. That freedom is a delusion.

It took twenty-four years for Danicka to claim any amount of freedom at all that was not surreptitious or forbidden. Lukas knows that now, even if he still doesn't know what exactly happened between the time she went to work for the Sokolovs and Chicago. He knows that her freedom is hard-won, and yet so very important to who she is.

His mate is a wild thing. To change that would be to change who she is, irreversibly.

So: yes. He's careful, perhaps painfully so, sometimes, not to take away what little freedom she's waited her entire life for. He's careful to stay far, far on this side of the line she draws for him, that she keeps erasing and redrawing closer and closer as she lets him in more and more.

It was only a few weeks ago that she gave him a key to her apartment. It's only tonight that he understands she doesn't only mean, now you can visit me unannounced. She also means, now you can leave traces of yourself in my territory. You are welcome in my den.

And this makes her a little sad. Which makes him ache, because he's not sad. She strokes his back and he reaches out to touch her leg, to cover her knee with his warm hand.

"Don't be sad," he says to her. "I'm not sad. I'm happy."

A little after that, she kisses his cheek. And he offers to clear out a little room in his room. And she says she'd like that, and lays her head on him, and he breathes deep again and thinks of his love, which is like a physical force opening the chambers of his heart.


Time passes.


They eat, and though the food is light, there's a lot of it. Lukas takes his time; he doesn't scarf it down. They hear the motor cut out, and the sails snap as the captain lets them out. From the window they can see the moon climb higher, so very nearly full that it tugs on Lukas's soul.

He tells her that he hasn't been on very many boats. He says before Boston and the Bellamontes' lavish lifestyle, the only other boats he can remember being on were the ferries in the New York area, and maybe the one at Niagara. He's not sure. He was young when his parents took him there. Their roadtrips grew scarcer as his rage grew greater.

After that they're quiet for a while, and then she suggests heating up dinner and going back up. "I'd like that," he echoes her, and smiles.

[Danicka] Things could have happened to her in childhood that would have taken that core of wildness in her and shattered it irrevocably, damaged her almost beyond repair. In some ways she is: the part of her mind bolstered by blood kinship to werewolves, the part of her that should be able to withstand the sight of them in their tearing, crushing, annihilating war froms... it's cracked. She should be stronger than she is. She struggles for her strength more than most Kinfolk.

Sometimes it can't help but be frustrating to see them, the ones who were not snapped in half in some way at age three or four, quailing in the face of all danger. Sometimes she hates that she can't help but be terrified. Sometimes she feels ashamed; she hears Lukas shout for the other Garou to shift to hispo and wonders if it's in part because he does not want her to bolt in horror from them.

In the end though, that core of her stayed safe, somehow. Protected. The part of her that is Who She Is was kept held behind boundaries and walls she built to keep it away from Them, and what They could do to her. She let it out, wriggling and wild, even though she knew she could be punished for it. Shamed for it. Broken for it. She let it out, in moments that she suffered great backlash for.

Once upon a time, that soft, flat belly of hers held the beginnings of a baby belonging to a teenaged kinsman.

Then she went to New Orleans and the Garou there were aware of the precious little Fang princess living in that mansion not far from swamps. She walked around abandoned gardens in cutoff jeans and old sweaters and listened to bullfrogs talking like old men in the night. She paid attention to snakes. She went clubbing night after night after night until she fell into bed back at the house with Yelizaveta long asleep and one of the men-at-arms between her legs and the other --

It was easier to be free in New Orleans, when she was just out of high school and the entire country was wondering what the fuck had just happened to them in New York and the Garou kept their distance because they had their own problems, namely a city full of motherfucking vampires lurking around every mortal they could sip from.

This is the first time in her life that Danicka has been free, and able to be open about it. Do what she wants with her days and her nights. Do what she wants with her body and her home. Do what she wants for her birthday and her money. Be herself. Find out who that is. Be happy with little things like egg sandwiches and video games; be happy with luxuries like renting a boat all night to sail around Lake Michigan with her boyfriend drinking wine and watching the stars.

"I'm not sad," she whispers, smiling quirkily at the edges of her mouth, shaking her head. "I'm not sad, silly Lukášek."

She's not. She closes her eyes and rests with him, telling the truth tonight, in everything.


They talk about boats. The Bellamontes and Boston. She tells him about the ports of New Orleans and South Louisiana, she tells him about how Lizzy wanted to go on a cruise when she was thirteen but her parents thought it tacky, tells him about spending bits of last summer and spring sailing with random people she'd met in Chicago. It isn't often she talks about these non-friends; tonight she tells him little stories about sunburns on her nose and drunk idiots and getting stoned, which is why she got the sunburn in the first place and also why she now owns one of those huge, floppy straw hats that nearly shades her entire upper half.

It isn't much; a couple of tangential stories about people he'll never meet, that she's forgotten or nearly so, who do not matter and never did. Idle talk. They both remember the ferries. They talk about Coney Island and how after the umpteenth school trip there it just wasn't as cool anymore, but still pretty awesome that they could go to the beach in New York. She confesses a love for frozen chocolate-dipped bananas.

Lukas is learning that Danicka has quite the taste for banana-themed desserts, actually.

"I need potassium," she says archly, tossing her hair off her shoulder when he mentions it. "What can I say?"

They quiet down.


They uncover metal dishes of food from the caterers and Lukas realizes that even at the smallest portions it's enough to serve eight people. No matter; she can afford it, and they both know it. They make plates, and heat them up, wiggling around in the tiny galley area together. "Truffles," she says, pointing to a flat black box with a burgundy lid, "dooon't forget truffles. They're my birthday treat. They are full of amazing." And she waves a hand. They've finished their wine.

They uncork champagne.

They ascend to the deck again, and they're miles and miles out into the lake by now, the stars overhead competing with her lover's moon. Danicka points to a collection of them in the southern sky, leaning over to Lukas. She balances plate in one hand, glass of champagne in the other. "That one," she murmurs knowledgably, "is called Skiing Bunny. Slalom."

A serious nod. A sip of champagne.

[Lukas] Abovedecks, the night has become cool and damp. There's nothing to break the wind sweeping down from the Canadian north here on the lake; nothing to warm it. It picks up moisture from the lake and blows into their faces, cold. The lake is placid and smooth, though, the storm-swells of winter dying down with the spring. The moon is enormous, reflecting on the black water.

Capt. Mike has reefed the mainsail, lashed the headsail down tight. The yacht is moving slower now, angling steadily northeast, skimming smoothly over the glassy water. The captain looks up at his passengers as they emerge, and they exchange subdued pleasantries. Chicago is, by now, a distant light behind them. A vast blackness stretches out ahead of them, and to either side. Above them, the nearly full moon courses amidst a million glittering stars.

Lukas takes off his shoes, tipping his head back as Danicka points out the Skiing Bunny. He looks for a while, then glances down as he climbs up on the deck.

"I see it," he says, mock-serious. "I thought for a moment it was the Pine Tree, but I was mistaking the slalom for the boughs."

Behind them, Mike snorts, amused.

Lukas reaches down to give Danicka a hand up, then. After a glance to their captain for permission, he leads her out across the upperdeck of the ship, crouching to maintain balance, one hand balancing truffles and champagne, other hand gripping the guardrail. This sailboat isn't large enough to stand upright without risking falling overboard, but there's room enough to sit at the bow and hang their feet over the side. Now and then, skimming over a small swell, water sprays onto their feet.

It's not warm out here. Lukas puts his arm around Danicka, holds her close for warmth, and passes her the box of truffles. Some of them have rolled out of their hollows during the clamber down the deck.

"How about," he closes one eye, then points at a random scatter of stars in the northeastern sky, "that one?"

[Danicka] She was careful about her choice of boots tonight. They hug her legs. They're soft in the sole. She cleared them with Mike when she first came aboard. Danicka keeps them snug on her feet, lifts her shawl as they walk back up to the deck, and wraps it around herself. She stays near Lukas, and when they sit on the upperdeck, she folds her legs to one side, tucks her skirt under her calves, and leans against the seated Ahroun. It means she almost has to lean on him, just for the sake of safety and balance.

Danicka stays warm and dry. Lukas's toes get splashed, and she smiles at it. She plucks a truffle from the box, looks up at the stars while she takes a bite, and Mmms thoughtfully. "That," she says after swallowing, is Presents My Boyfriend Forgot To Give Me Because He Was Distracted By Snacks."

They hear a choked laugh from the captain.

[Lukas] Lukas laughs too, bumping Danicka gently. Or he would be bumping her if she weren't already leaning into him. As is, it's more of a gentle sway in her direction, and then back again.

"Maybe," he says slowly, taking the time to eat a truffle and have a sip of champagne, "I'm just drawing out the suspense. Have you thought of that?"

He balances his champagne glass carefully on the gently curving deck and leans back on his hands. The wind blows his hair back, chills the lakewater on his feet. He's glad of his leather jacket now, which is more windtight than spun wool.

He tips his head toward Danicka, nuzzling her golden hair gently, closing his eyes when a flyaway strand blows into his face.

"Ask me for something," he says quietly.

[Danicka] That gentle sway makes Danicka put her free hand on his leg, a smooth motion that is nonetheless a quick reaction. Most of the time, when they're not alone together and they're not sequestered away from sight of humanity, all of Danicka's actions are thought through. It might be a split second of consideration for the repercussions, but she thinks about what she does before she does it.

She thinks about how it will look, and what could happen to her because of it. She does it less with Lukas than she once did, but even her putting her hand on his leg to steady herself just-in-case has an underlying note of pause. A fragment of hesitation before she does it, which makes it hard to determine if she had an impulse she followed through on or spun the action out of nothing.

"Hmm," she says, hand relaxing further as the sway ends. She turns more into his side, closer to his warmth. "No, I hadn't thought of it. But now that I do, I still think it was the snacks. Your downfall."

Her nose and lips nuzzle him under his ear. He can smell her shampoo and conditioner, a light botanical scent that flies away soon from his senses' grasp.

"Like what?" Danicka says, her laugh matching his tone. "Do you have a magic bag that will produce whatever I ask for?"

[Lukas] There's a thoughtless mammalian enjoyment in the way he tilts his head to allow her easier access. To let her nuzzle him under his ear. Close to his throat. Close to the large, important blood vessels that feed blood to his brain and drain it away again, where one clean slice could incapacitate him in seconds and kill him within the minute.

There's a thoughtless trust in that. There is no fragment of hesitation in the way he lets her close. But then, Lukas didn't grow up in the sort of environment and situation that would necessitate constant wariness, constant calculation.

"You're right," he allows. "It was the snacks. Evil, evil snacks."

Then his eyes open again. Nothing but blackness out there -- and very distantly, the lights of some ship out on the water, some large, cargo-bearing vessel motoring across the great lakes. Lukas watches it idly, his mind on his mate, on the scent of her light and ephemeral, snatched away by the wind almost as soon as he catches it, and on her warmth pressed to his shoulder, his side.

"No," he replies slowly -- lazily, "but if I can get it for you, I will."

There was a time he would have never asked or offered. A time when he would've never dared.

[Danicka] In Lukas's case, that clean slice would begin regenerating the same moment it occurred. In the second he would be incapacitated by it his body would force past the injuries, come back roaring. It would take more than one. It would take a shotgun blast to the head following that, it would take silver. And if one managed to kill him, push him past that brink...

...there's every chance he would back moments later, rising up from death in an all-out frenzy.

And this is why it's risky to threaten a werewolf, or try to kill one. Not worth it. This is why even the most stubborn, angry, put-upon Kinfolk eventually bend their necks. Might makes right. Near-immortality makes one into something of a walking, hotblooded god.

Or, tonight: a lazing one, his vulnerabilities to the mortal beside him invisible and secret and the lake spray chilling his toes and bared ankles. Danicka breathes in his scent, as she has been wont to do lately, and if her smile had a sound it would purr against his neck when he confesses that yes. It was the goddamn smoked salmon. A glass of wine, half a glass of champagne: it's already going to her head. She has a strong alcohol tolerance, but tonight she's letting herself go a little.

She relaxes into his side. She doesn't look at the lake or the other boats or even the stars right now.

"Chci jen tebe, moje laska," she whispers. "To je všechno, co jsem kdy chtěla."

[Lukas] Sometimes Lukas is like this: nuzzling, animal, thoughtless, as though he'd totally forgotten how to use his hands -- those marvelous appendages so recently awarded by the great march of evolution. He leans his brow to her temple, nudges gently at her and at her until her head turns, and her chin lifts, and his mouth finds hers.

He can taste champagne and chocolate on her tongue: the former sparkling and light, the latter dark, rich, bittersweet.

"Vím," he murmurs. And then quiet: his brow resting to hers, eyes closed.

And then, not quiet. Smiling, eyes opening. "But tough luck. I got you presents anyway."

The bow skips over another small swell. His feet get sprayed again, making him stretch his toes out and wiggle them. He looks past his feet, past the water, to the almost-invisible line of the horizon separating dark from dark.

"Do you remember," he says quietly, "how I asked you what you wanted last year, and you told me jaro?"

[Danicka] The boat is doing most of the work now. Mike stands and drinks his coffee from his thermos's lid, letting his mind wander, letting it go over whatever it goes over when he's minding the safety of his passengers while otherwise ignoring them.

They are nothing if not intimate, though, even with an audience of one. It's in the way he held her, then leaned back only to have her body follow his, to stay close. It's in the way they nuzzle each other, back and forth, lips and noses and cheeks rubbing together with a slow, lazy version of the eagerness often seen in animal greetings. It's in the way Lukas kisses her without preamble, without hesitation, tasting her mouth with open sensuality that has the blonde woman's eyes closing as she sinks into it.

"Mmm," she murmurs happily when they part, and he tells her he got her gifts anyway. "Presents." Just as before, a low, pleased echo of her earlier, equally shameless delight.

Danicka rubs her nose on his face gently, then draws back, looking down at his toes as well. She nods, when he asks his question. "Though I don't see what that has to do with the presents you keep teasing me with."

[Lukas] [at her and at her = at her and against her]

[Lukas] A smile flickers over his mouth; fades.

"The first thing in my mind was, jste jsou jaro."

He admits this softly, with a touch of embarrassment. It's such a silly, romantic thought to have. Melodramatic. A schoolboy's half formed ideas of love, the sort of starry-eyed adoration that comes between bursts of untempered lust.

He tells her anyway: because he'll tell her nothing but truth tonight. And then, sighing, "I think I was falling for you from the very start."

[Danicka] That stills her for a moment. She remembers that. She doesn't remember if it was night or if it was morning. She doesn't remember if it was the Omni or the Affinia or the W. She remembers broad windows, and she remembers that Lukas had just fucked her to sweating and screaming in whatever king-sized bed they were in at the time. She remembers catching her breath, though she doesn't remember if she was lying on her side with his body behind her or if she was lying against him, her head resting on his chest and his fingers in her hair.

Danicka remembers that when she asked him the same question, what he wanted most was the sea. Neither of them wanted money or a certain food or a person. They didn't say they wanted some feeling. They wanted elements, and powerful ones, primal ones: the turning of seasons and awakening of the earth. The deep swell of the ocean, greatest shareholder of the planet, home of monsters greater than any Elder.

Danicka is still when he admits his first, unspoken thought. She puts her hand on his chest, fingers light above his heart, under his leather jacket.


They were at the Affinia. It was the night she told him she wasn't ready for this to end. He hurt her when he fucked her, and she loved him anyway, which is the real reason she trembled, and wept, and held onto him afterward, telling him

I have you.

As though he was the only one falling apart, because he was realizing he could not do without her, when Danicka was shattering from the inside out with the same knowledge.

They argued and they tore into each other with their words, retreating back into safe anger, safe assumptions, safe lies, all the things they could possibly put between themselves to keep the other at a distance. Until she admitted that even with everything else, the fear that he would hurt her, the wreckage her life could become, the damage done by other hands, being with him was worth it.

Being with him raw, and even rough, her heart flayed open in a way it had never been before, where she knew she was utterly and to her very core at his mercy.

Worth it.

She laid beside him and rested her head on his chest, her back to the window and the dark night beyond the glass. It was the first time she'd ever laid like that with him, held in the crook of his arm and covering his foot with one of her own. It rained outside, stormed, and he promised her that when she needed him to simply leave something be and stop questioning her, all she had to tell him was that: leave it be. And he would.

They kissed and they made love slowly -- until it wasn't slow at all -- and she came on him, arching and crying out. He waited til she told him to lay her down and he did, and he spent himself in her. Lost himself in her. Where she told him he belonged, touching him and kissing him afterward with lingering softness. At the time her tenderness had no expression in words. She could not bring it down to that level yet.

They teased each other. She asked him to stay and he could not cope with what she was doing to him, how happy she made him. They pretended to accept that their relationship was headed nowhere good. Nowhere good for her, so vulnerable to his violence. Nowhere good for him, left to pick up the pieces if she left him.

They made love. He held her as though to remind himself she was still there, watched her as she slept, did not sleep himself for a long, long time afterward.

That was how it was, and she remembers all of it. Just not all at once.


"Me too," Danicka whispers, his heart beating against her fingertips. "I loved you for so long before I could bear to tell you."

[Lukas] Somehow, even with fifty-degree wind blowing in his face, Lukas is warm. That's what Danicka finds under his jacket: warmth, and the solidity of his body. The strong curve of his pectoral muscle against her hand, between his beating heart and her waiting palm.

He closes his eyes as she stills. He's not worried. He isn't afraid that what he said might make her draw away or turn away or reject him, or laugh at him. He's just --

awash, suddenly, with tenderness; with adoration. He has to close his eyes to contain it.

When she answers, the wind nearly steals her whisper. He leans into her again and answers her the only way he knows how: his mouth finding hers, kissing her, breathing her in.

Afterward he picks up his champagne and drains it, sets the glass aside. He lets himself sink down on the cool deck. Overhead, the sails ripple gently in the wind. The moon is nearly overhead, and follows them as they skim across this vast blackness. He's reminded of the autumn equinox: a time of harvest, a time when the leaves fall from the trees, a time to gather your loved ones close in preparation for the winter. This is the opposite side of the wheel now, but the night is still cool and he wants her close.

"Let's stay here for a little while," he says. "I'll keep you warm."

[Danicka] Of course he's warm. This is why Danicka is only in a shawl, despite the wind and the cold water and the chilled champagne. She curls close to him, because she knows she won't be allowed to fall or shiver, and because she feels no shame or silliness -- this far from shore, with the only observer a man who has seen enough not to judge, a man whose judgement would not matter -- for simply letting Lukas be fast, and strong, and protective.

She knows it satisfies some needs of his, too. So she relaxes, and relaxes into him, and after awhile she turns her head so she can lean against Lukas's chest and watch the stars while they sail.

Quiet, for a very long time. Danicka doesn't say anything, but sits with him so that he can put his arms around her from behind. She holds his arms over her chest, covering both their hands with the ends of her shawl, doing little more than breathing.

They eat from the plates they warmed and brought up. Occasionally she whispers the names of constellations. Some of them are even real.


An hour later, give or take, and their plates are empty and the city is so far away it does nothing but glitter on the dark horizon. Danicka shivers, once. For the first time.

[Lukas] By then, Lukas has drawn his feet up out of the lake's reach. He's tucked one under the opposite thigh for warmth, switching occasionally, and he's comfortable where he lays, cool but not cold, saying little now.

Danicka points out: slalom bunny. bird of paradise. pacman. ms. pacman. Andromeda in her chair. Ursa Major and Minor, the great bears of the north.

Lukas nuzzles her now and then. He drowses, because that's what he does when he's with her, and idle, and full. That's what you do when you're idle and full and lazy, and your mate is close and warm.

Then -- she shivers. And his eyes flick open. He lies there a moment longer, watching the sail snap and flutter overhead. The wind has died down to nearly nothing as the hour grows later and temperatures even out with the night. Lukas sits up, looking over the guardrail to the open water, then down at Danicka.

"You're cold," he murmurs. "Let's go in."


They walk back along the length of the deck, which is faintly wet now with condensation. Lukas holds on to the guardrail with one hand, his other wrapped around Danicka's. Capt. Mike nods at them as they pass him and duck into the cabin. Later tonight, just before he drops anchor for the night and goes into the fore cabin to grab a few hours' shut-eye, Danicka will bring him a late plate, leftovers from dinner. For now, he sails on, sipping hot coffee from his thermos, watching the horizon for the occasional passing ship.


The temperature gradient between inside and outside is noticeable now. It's warm belowdecks, the lights on, their food still laid out on the table. Lukas snacks on the pate and the salmon. Then he lifts his messenger bag and hoists it over his shoulder, ushering Danicka toward the larger aft cabin.

"Bring the wine," he suggests. "And the truffles."

[Danicka] They both have very good balance for a pair of folks who are never at sea, or even on a lake. Danicka walks lightly, holding Lukas's hand and carrying empty plates and glasses in her other hand. Her shawl slips, but she does not shiver again; she tells her body they're going inside, down below, where it's warm. Her body, beaten into submission a very long time ago when she learned not to tremble from fear, relinquishes its control and waits for that warmth.

After putting the dishes somewhere safe, it takes no urging to get Danicka to head aft, skirting a table, going in to sit herself on the edge of the bed. She moves pillows aside and when Lukas follows her, he can see her overnight bag tossed at the foot of said bed. Maybe they brought wine and truffles; Danicka seemed to have less interest in grabbing them than in getting to some soft place where she might curl up with him, closer and more intimate than on deck.

She slips her feet from her boots, letting them sit on the floor, and he might catch sight of fleur de lis on her stockings. He knows those, knows they end just below her knee, creamy white and full of eyelets hinting at flesh.

Danicka smiles at him when he follows, with whatever he brings.

"Presents," she says eagerly, and grins.

[Lukas] Lukas closes the door behind them. It's narrow, and the rich wood paneling doesn't quite disguise that it's portal-shaped; that in event of disaster it can be closed to form a barrier for a leak, and may even be watertight. The windows -- portholes -- are black with night, but what light they cast reflects off water. The constant, gentle rocking of the floor and the walls and everything around them reminds them indelibly of where they are, of the leagues of water beneath them.

Still. It's warm in here. There's electricity, hot water, perhaps even a television. Clean sheets, soft pillows; a surprisingly comfortable, well-appointed bed.

Danicka takes off her boots. Lukas realizes he left his shoes in the cockpit, but it's all right. He'll get it in the morning. He sheds his coat and tucks it onto a shelf, then comes to sit beside his mate.

"Presents," he agrees, and opens his messenger's bag. There are multiple wrapped gifts in there. The wrapping isn't very good, the edges wobbly, the corners not quite squared off. Apparently the courtesy his parents instilled in him never quite made it to gift-giving. He smiles a little crookedly as he picks one out and hands it to her.

"That," he says, "is actually not so much a present as it is a replacement."

[Danicka] They rock, down there. They sway with the lake, enormous and sealike. Danicka, somehow, finds it comforting, though they are not of a people that are particularly seafaring. It is not hard to see the similarities between Danicka herself and deep, dark water: unfathomable, unknowable, simultaneously capable of being cold and lifegiving; crushing and buoying. She takes off her shawl and simply lets it fall on top of her boots. Nevermind the fineness of its weave, nevermind how much it cost. Her pink sweater was protected from spray outside, so she's dry.

She lounges on the bed, long skirt draping over her legs, propping herself up on her elbow as Lukas joins her. She's grinning, and she grins only brighter when Lukas finally gives her the promised gifts. Danicka has never been greedy, but there's a definite shamelessness to her sometimes that is decidedly animal, or decidely selfish. One or the other or both.

In any case, she's quite pleased to see the products of Lukas's indecisiveness and self-satisfaction of his desire to provide for her. She slides into a seated position when he hands her the first one, clapping her hands lightly. He tells her what he does, and she chuckles throatily as she takes it, then -- as her fingers are working deftly under the tape to unwrap it -- flicks her eyes up and over at him.

"You know," his mate, his lover, his female, is saying, "the ones you broke were not my only pair."

She says this as though only an idiot would keep only a single pair of manacles in their fucking closet. Bites her lower lip. Grins at him and -- before the box is completely opened -- leans over it quickly and captures his mouth, one hand on his cheek, all but biting the kiss onto his lips with her fervor.

It doesn't last. Danicka is, after all, capable of focusing intently on projects. Right now her project is opening her presents, which she goes at now with happy concentration.

[Lukas] "I'm not surprised," he says, "but I broke those."

As though that made all the difference. As though what he breaks, he is obliged to replace. Only -- it's not that. It's not obligation. He wants to replace them. That's why he waited so many months. That's why he bothered to wrap it.

Poorly.

His kiss is not shy, when she leans into him like that. She's lain beside him for most of an hour. He saw what stockings she wears under those boots, and he remembers seeing them for the first time. He's thrown back to those first days again, remembering the mistrust, the uncertainty, the undeniable intensity of what was undeniably their lovemaking. He thinks, I loved you for so long before I could bear to tell you.

And -- she draws away.

His breathing is a little unsteadily. His eyes, slower to open than hers. She wants the rest of her presents, and he has to laugh, reaching into that largish messenger bag like some sort of shadow lord santa.

The rest of the presents are also wrapped poorly. He hands her something that's almost undeniably a book. A very, very large book. It's not a novel, he assures her. Or a medical dictionary. It turns out to be A Survey of Everything. He tells her it claims to teach you a little about everything, ever. Enough to whet your appetite, supposedly. He has no idea if that's actually true. He skimmed a few pages. He thought it was a neat idea. He thought maybe she can use it if she's not sure what electives to take.

Then there's a DVD-sized box, which turns out to be a computer game. It's Aion. It's an MMO. For when she's bored of WoW, he says. Under that there's a 90-day WoW gamecard. For when she's not bored of WoW, he says.

Next, another book, which is a novel. It's Crime and Punishment. In Russian. It's mostly a joke.

After that, a gift card to some independent cafe -- not the Blue Chalk. And then a small, stiff card, textured, folded once over, unmarked. Opened, it reveals a date and a time and a place: dinner reservations at Spring in about a week.

Then, a standard, felt-covered jewelry box. No engagement ring or anything of the sort inside. A very old, tarnished, cheap pewter ring, instead, tacky and coarsely made, depicting what might be a snarling wolf. Or an anteater. Impossible to tell, really.

"I wore that for about six months straight when I was maybe ten or eleven," he says with a smile. "I thought it was badass."

Beneath that, a matte black box, flat and square, tied with a thin ribbon in a darker shade of black. Inside, a bracelet: genuine jewelry, elegant and subdued. Three intertwined hoops, two thin and smooth, one thicker, flat, delicately inscribed with a leaf-and-vine pattern. It looks like it might be white gold, or platinum.

It's silver.

There are only two gifts after that. Lukas pauses, though. He's a little nervous, watching realization dawn for her. He doesn't know what she'll think of the gesture.

[Danicka] The manacles turn out not to be anything particularly imaginative. They resemble the ones he broke very closely. Danicka keeps to herself that all she had to do, really, was find someone to repair the link or two on the chain that were snapped or strained. She still has the pair he 'broke'. She does not buy junk, and she does not throw away a perfectly good pair of leather cuffs just because the silly chain got yanked all but in half.

She actually looks quite pleased by the books, though that isn't surprising. She flips through the Survey thoughtfully, pausing at a page here and there before setting it aside. She perks at the Russian version of Crime and Punishment, either not getting the joke or simply not seeing it as one. She may associate the language with her mother, just as she associates Czech with home, family, private things and personal matters, but this is literature. Literature has, for her mind, only its own inner associations, disconnected from particular people.

Smiles, at his nod to her geekery. She's never played Aion, she says. She reads the box as wrapping paper accumulates around her. One has to wonder the last time Danicka had anything like this: a pile of gifts, like it was a party. After awhile, she's moved to sit cross-legged on the bed, her skirt loose enough to lay over her lap and gather on the bedspread.

Coffee. Reservations. Danicka's eyes meet his when she opens the card. "Thank you, baby," she murmurs, and leans over again to kiss him. This time softly, this time on his cheek. "Maybe we'll get through the main course this time."

It could happen.

He can see the way her breathing levels out for a moment, on the verge of being held, when she sees the small jewelry box. It's hard to tell what her reaction is, whether it's wariness or anticipation or what. No matter, really: she opens it and smiles quirkly, taking the ring out and looking at it, rubbing at the tarnish with the pad of her thumb. She laughs at his explanation. "I had one of those dragon-claw necklaces during middle school. You know, where its gripping some glass marble? I kept it in my locker. Oh, and pentacle earrings. I was so cool," she informs him, and puts the ring on her left middle finger before reaching for the next gift.

There's more, though. Danicka reaches for the other jewelry box, knowing from its shape and its ribbon that it isn't going to be some leftover from his childhood, some token he's kept all this time or something he told his parents to go looking for in boxes of his old things so they could send it to him. She tips her head to the side and deftly, neatly undoes the ribbon completely. She doesn't simply push it off the corners, but lets the silk pool on her lap while she lifts the lid.

"Oh," is the first thing she says, the first sound she makes, when the gleaming bracelet reveals itself. It's delicacy and lightness reflect her. The leaves, the vines. She's touched, and it shows, because this is the first such gift he's ever given her. And it's perfect for her. "Oh, Lukáš."

Of course she assumes it's white gold. She lifts it from its cushioned hiding place, which is her first hint. The weight of it is different than what she expects, and she is detail-oriented enough, perceptive enough, to notice. She's been given enough jewelry, some of it grotesquely expensive, most of it bought for the image it would project of the buyer rather than any mind to her style, to what she would wear it with or where, or how it would look laying on her wrist.

Tonight, Danicka's jewelry is as it almost always is, subdued enough that it seems a part of her. No rings on her fingers, but gold-set garnets dangling small and round from simple posts. The garnets are of the pale variety, almost pink rather than deep, rich red. They've been glinting all night whenever her hair has moved. Her necklace is gold as well, the chain so light she can barely feel it resting on her collarbone. It matches her earrings, really: the two sides of the chain meet at either end of a row of similarly-shaded garnets, the center stone a tiny bit larger than the ones flanking it.

The bracelet will not go with what she's wearing right now. Nor does the little pewter ring, truth be told, but Danicka reaches up and pushes her hair aside, taking off her necklace. Her earrings, then. They get set into the box where the bracelet once was, pushed aside, her lobes and throat bare now. She smiles, softly and fondly and with a bit of an ache that is tenderness rather than pain,

and as she's slipping it onto her right wrist she sees the tiny stamp on the inside of the bracelet.

92.5

She pauses with her left hand on the jewelry, her right wrist poised, the bracelet halfway down. Danicka looks up and over at Lukas, finding him watching her. If anything, her expression is a little bit... lost. Unsure. Maybe it isn't the first time ever, but it's rare enough a look for her that it's striking:

I don't understand.

[Lukas] Danicka unwraps gift after gift. It's not two dozen; in fact, he mentions at one point -- It's not that I'm trying to match you gift for gift. I just ... saw a lot of things I wanted you to have. -- but it's still several, many, a lot.

After a while, she moves up to sit crosslegged in the center of the bed, which is very nearly queen-sized, though slightly rounded at the back end to fit the contour of the sailboat's stern. After a while, he pulls himself up onto the bed as well, stretching out, laid back on his elbows with one leg bent over the side of the bed, the other foot resting on the edge.

Wrapping paper -- some of it elegant, some of it loud, some of it silly -- begins to accumulate. He makes no move to brush it away when it falls over his chest, when it blankets him like snow. He hands her one gift after another, quietly, waiting until she's finished exploring one before moving on to the next.

And he watches her while she unwraps them. Watches her with a faint smile, and with a warmth in his chest: because it's her birthday. Because she's 26, and that means it's special, because her birthday is on the 26th. Because she's happy, and he's sharing her happiness.

Only when she gets to the silver bracelet does he grow a little more alert. When she notices what it is, she looks at him. She looks unsure. He looks a little nervous, a little shy. They're both such rare expressions on these two.

He sits up, wrapping paper shifting gently off his chest. "I noticed you never wear silver," he says softly. "I didn't know if it was by choice or if it was because you were never allowed to.

"I just wanted you to know," he adds, "that it's okay. I don't mind. I trust you with silver."

[Danicka] I know, she says gently, when he assures her he's not trying to just match what she did for him for his birthday, for Christmas. Danicka moves closer, then, as he's laying out and she's still sitting up. She sits so that he could easily encircle her hips with his arm if he chose. So yes: he gets covered soon in castoff wrapping paper, simply because she grins when she drops it and it wafts down to fall on his chest. Balloons, on that piece. Silver swirls on black on this one. Clouds on a blue sky. More balloons! Trendy navy blue with lime-green hoops and slashes.

A piece of paper falls over his face and she brushes it aside a moment later, leaning over to kiss him, touching his face again, cupping his jaw in her hand. His old ring is warming to her body heat, but the metal still feels cold where it touches his skin for a moment. When she withdraws she brushes her thumb across his cheek, looking in his eyes, smiling that lopsided, semi-hesitant smile. Happy. She pulls away, more reluctant, and he hands her another wrapped present.

Gift after gift.


There's two more after this, but Danicka is paused on the bracelet. She allows it to fall around her wrist when she sees the expression on his face, the way he, too, looks a bit nervous. It means something, maybe, that she doesn't have to explain the look on her face. She doesn't have to ask him what this means, though because of what he is and what she knows, she knows it isn't meaningless. Danicka just looks at him, and Lukas explains.

...if it was because you were never allowed to.

He knows her well enough to know she could hide that flicker of recognition that passes through her eyes just then. Then again, he also knows that a year ago, he didn't know her well enough to have understood it in the first place. A year ago, Lukas would have seen only emotion, a flash of it like prey darting through the underbrush, but he would have had no idea what it was, no sense of fox or rabbit or even something larger, something more sustaining. Now, knowing what he knows

about Night Warder

about Heals by Pain

about the books Danicka had and the family she grew up in and the Fangs that employed her for nigh unto a decade,

he sees that flicker and knows it in truth. Yes, Danicka's eyes are telling him, even as she's looking back at the bracelet, that is what it was. Gaia only knows what would have happened to her -- what might have indeed happened to her in reality -- if she'd been discovered wearing or buying or considering silver jewelry. Harmless, really. What could she do to a werewolf with a ring, a pair of hoops, a bracelet like this?

But there's more to it than that, it seems. Danicka remembers the silver collar they put on Lukas underground, and how if she were like him, the sight of it and what it was doing to him would have sent her into a fucking frenzy. As it was, she was scared to leave him, she was scared something might happen to him. She was just... scared. Maybe he thought that meant she understood, completely. Yet:

"It won't hurt you, will it?" Danicka asks quietly, as it falls with soft clinks and metallic whispers around her wrist. She looks at it, and then she looks at him. "If I wear it around you, I mean."

She doesn't know.

She just knows: bad.

[Lukas] Ow, he thinks when he sees the truth of it. It hurts to know that she was never allowed even a frivolity that might, in some warped world, be mistaken for insolence and rebellion. That she was not allowed to wear silver jewelry not because anyone could ever think Danicka capable of harming a werewolf with a ring or a bracelet or a necklace. Look at her: thin even now, on the verge of frail. Shooting a magnum .44 left her sore for days. Lifting much more than forty or fifty pounds would be impossible for her.

Not to mention, they don't even make jewelry out of pure silver. It's an alloy, too low-content to burn a werewolf.

And even so: forbidden. Not allowed. Gaia only knows what would have happened to her. What might have happened to her, that he was not able to protect her from.

He knows. He knows, of course, that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and all those trite sayings. He knows, also, that sometimes in real life what doesn't kill you can break you. Well, she's not broken: she survived what happened to her on her own. She did not need him to protect her, and still does not need him to protect her.

Sometimes she lets him, though. And that makes it hurt all the more to know: he was not there. He can never go back and be there.

So he takes her face in his hands -- so gently. She's looking at the bracelet, the three delicate hoops about her wrist, not quite fastened. He brings her face to his and rests his brow to hers and breathes, just breathes.

"It doesn't hurt me," he says. "Even if it could, I trust you. I know you won't hurt me."

[Danicka] For creatures like them, trust is never an unspoken. It's never taken for granted, it's never easy. The way Shadow Lords are raised, it's something you're hesitant to give and scornful to receive.

Usually.

Lukas kisses her, or seems like he's about to, but what he really does is hold her where they can speak with their eyes closed and their faces in contact, where they can hear the nuances of feeling in one another's breaths. Danicka closes her eyes, letting the bangles fall finally, and leans into the hands he puts on her, rests her forehead against his. He tells he he trusts her, something he doesn't even need to trust.

Because, let's face it, even with silver, Danicka is not much of a threat. Not to someone, something like him. And ultimately, not to Lukasek. Her Lukasek. She cannot read his mind right now and know how badly he wishes he could go back and be a part of her life, protect her from the worst somehow. So she cannot tell him she's glad it worked out the way it did, because she doesn't know if they would have this otherwise.

And this is, to an extent... everything.

Danicka nuzzles him gently after a few moments, the her eyelashes flutter against his eyebrows as her eyes open. "I love it," she whispers, like a confession, smiling. "I really do."

[Lukas] A breath away, Lukas's eyes open as well. He grins -- that sudden expression capable of changing the stark lines of his face, the stark blue of his eyes. His hand touches her cheek again, covers it. He kisses her lightly.

"I'm glad," he says, after. "They had it white gold too. I would've exchanged it if you weren't comfortable wearing silver, but ... I'm glad."

He paws some of the wrapping papers off his lap where they'd fallen when he rose. The messenger bag is almost emptied out now -- only a change of clothes and some toiletries remaining alongside two wrapped gifts. He hands the first to her. It's unmistakably a mug, even before she unwraps it. It's not until the wrapping paper falls away from a chipped handle that it's recognizable as his mug, the one with the picture of a ten-year-old Lukas and his family at Ellis Island stamped onto the ceramic.

"It's just a mug," he says quietly, "but I nearly flipped over it once. But it's not worth it. It doesn't represent anything or mean anything. It's just a thing.

"I wanted you to have it. And I don't want you to treat it like it's priceless."

[Danicka] The paper on the mug is some of the plainest, and there's a hole punched where the awkward job of wrapping and the jostling of being with all the others in his bag poked through. She can tell it's a mug, but doesn't assign any special meaning to it. An odd gift, especially after the ring from his childhood, the bracelet that explicitly states his trust in her and his knowledge of her. She's not a particularly fiendish coffee drinker. She likes it fine enough. Not even that big on tea, really.

Danicka unwraps it and her brow wrinkles sudden, an aching expression flying down over her face. She holds it gingerly, eyes limpid with remorse as she turns it over and over in her hands. She'd been afraid it had been broken completely, irrevocably. After throwing it across the room, she'd been afraid that she'd broken what they had: completely, irrevocably.

Lukas tells her it's just a thing, just a mug, and it's not worth the anger he spent on it, but they both know better. And Danicka says so.

"It wasn't the mug," she says quietly, cradling it in her lap. Like it's precious, even if it isn't priceless. Her eyes lift to his. "It was how it made you feel." Her fingertips stroke over the ceramic gently; touch his face and the faces of his family idly. Danicka looks down at it. "I didn't think you'd forgive me for that. It wasn't even that it was so bad, just... so thoughtless. Like I didn't care about you at all."

[Lukas] "Baby..."

His hand covers hers, stilling her fingers, the thoughtless stroking.

"Danička, I forgave you a long time ago. And later I realized there was nothing to forgive. It's just a thing. It's not even like my parents are dead or my sister gone or this is my only memory of them. It's just a mug, and I almost -- "

He doesn't employ the casual euphemism this time: flipped. He says it,

" -- frenzied over it. I could have killed you over a mug. A piece of dinnerware you couldn't have known meant anything." His hand over hers squeezes gently, relents. "Don't feel bad, láska."

[Danicka] Her hand touches his in return, in response, as welcoming and as natural as, say,

buds opening after a long winter, when the sun comes out. Danicka has almost never been cold to him. Angry, occasionally, short-lived and quickly dissipated as it is. She has held him at arm's length, she has run from him, she has gone limp against his grip because by god then he might at least not break her bones. She's been afraid of him, but if he looks through his memory the instances of her being cold are countable on a few fingers.

She laces their hands together, slowly sliding her fingers in between his longer, thicker digits that are, nonetheless, almost as soft as her own. He doesn't have the hands he should, the hands of someone who works and kills. Danicka looks at them and thinks of the way they feel between her fingers, and the way they feel on her face.

It's sad, how genuine her heartbreak over this is. She hurt something that was his. She showed him I don't care. I don't care that it's yours. I don't care if it means anything. I don't care about you. And he tells her: Don't feel bad.

Danicka leans over and kisses him in the center of his forehead, as softly as she knows how. The way some people kiss children, afraid of waking them. Her eyes are open when she pulls away, and they find his. "Zbožňuji tě," she murmurs.

[Lukas] They've drawn closer by instinct in the course of this casual ritual. They've kissed each other again and again, touched each other, made contact and kept it. He closes his eyes as she kisses him like a blessing; opens them again when she speaks.

"Vím," he says again, hardly above a whisper.

A beat passes, though, and then his brow furrows faintly. It's something about the intensity of her remorse and heartbreak, how strong and genuine it is even after -- god, a year. Lukas draws a quiet breath.

"Did you?" A pause. "Know what it meant to me then," he adds. "Did you try to break it to hurt me?"

[Danicka] "No," she says immediately, her brows tugging hard together again. "No, baby. I wasn't even trying to break it. I threw it because I was angry. And the problem isn't that I knew what it meant to you then; I feel bad because for a split second when I was that angry, I didn't care."

[Lukas] Almost by reflex his hand rises; his thumb touches the furrow in her brow as though to smooth it. "Okay," he says quietly. He thinks for a moment. Then, "There's nothing to forgive. Even if you had thrown it to hurt me, I would have forgiven you."

Which brings them back to: "Don't feel bad anymore. Things were so different a year ago."

[Danicka] Her nose wrinkles as he touches her forehead, trying to smooth away the furrow. It's a wrinkle of amusement, almost childish. Danicka tips her head far back enough to nudge his thumb with her nose, and kisses the base of it. She shifts presents -- including the mug -- aside and kicks wrapping paper out of her way, then... simply crawls onto him, urging him to lie on his back while she moves to lie comfortably atop him, all but burrowing to his chest, sliding her arms around his sides and placing her hands underneath him.

Still one gift left. "Mmm," Danicka says though, holding him.

[Lukas] Lukas shifts the messenger bag out of the way as Danicka crawls through loosely-stacked piles of crumpled wrapping paper to climb astride him. He lays back as she urges him down, smiling, wrapping his arms around her as she burrows.

Colored paper everywhere. Gifts sliding and colliding on the bed. Books, gift cards, computer games, knickknacks of a deeper, more meaningful nature. His silly ring from boyhood still sits on her finger. He reflects that what had fit his index or middle finger as a growing but still prepubescent boy fits hers as an adult. He holds her a little tighter, adoring, protective.

A deep breath, rising against her, falling again. He closes his eyes and lets the sailboat rock him. Modern ships don't creak and groan anymore under good conditions. It's quiet, and warm, brightly lit, the small confines cozy with wood-tones and soft bedding. "Moje láska," he whispers in her ear, naming her for what she is. "Mé srdce."

[Danicka] She thinks that must be it: the last gift. Danicka didn't go rifling through his messenger back, but looked pleased and surprised and curious at turns every time he took something new out. She wears the ring and bracelet, her other jewelry removed and put in one of the gift boxes, and the silver presses gently into his side where she holds him, the bangles having pushed up her wrist somewhat.

"Mmm," Danicka says again, as though in answer. She nuzzles his chest thoughtlessly, kisses him through his clothes. "We're getting up tomorrow to watch the sunrise on deck," she murmurs to him. "Then heading back to shore. So if you want to sleep soon, let me make a plate for the captain and then I'll come to bed with you."

[Lukas] "I want to make love to you."

That's honest, frank, and unsurprising. His hands drift over her back, then crisscross as he holds her a little tighter again.

"And," he adds, "I want you to open your last present." He nudges her with his nose, turning her face toward the messenger bag laying open-flapped on the bed beside them.

It's a tiny, tiny box this time, no larger than an inch and a half cubed, if that. This, too, is tied with a miniscule ribbon.

"Be careful," he murmurs; the first time he's cautioned her of such.

[Danicka] "Vím," Danicka says softly, in response. He isn't hard. His cock isn't pressing against her through his clothes and hers. He isn't stroking his hands down to her ass or rolling her onto her back, fitting himself between her legs and pushing up her skirt. But she knows. And there is nothing overtly or overly lascivious about it.

They have been making love since the first time they kissed, no matter how rough or how lurid the sex, no matter how openthroated their moaning, no matter how fast or demanding the fucking has been. This is why he could not say anything when she called it that the first time, sitting in his car outside the Shedd. He'd looked at her suddenly and sharply, but he couldn't deny it.

Her eyes brighten when he mentions one last present. Danicka makes a gurgling, pleased sound that wiggles up out of her as she reaches into the bag for the last time. She grins, waiting, and then looks tenderly at the box, as though it's a puppy. It can't be a puppy, if it fits in a box that small. Danicka, still resting most of her weight on his body, props herself up on one elbow to his side and reaches for her left hand for the box. They lounge, her laying between his legs and against his chest, almost on her side,

and she carefully unties the wee ribbon, dropping it onto his shirt before she opens the tiny, tiny box to look inside.

[Lukas] Lukas doesn't mind, and never has, when Danicka rests her weight on his body. When she uses his chest as a working surface to put a plate of food on, or to lean over on her forearms, or to open a present on. He tucks a hand under his head to look down at her undoing the tiny ribbon on the tiny box, lifting the lid

to find an acorn inside. Nothing more or less. The budding sprout is just beginning to nudge the acorn lid aside. If she touches it, the oak-nut feels faintly warm, as though it had been carried in someone's pocket all this time.

"It's an oak of Perun," he explains quietly, "my totem. Spirit made material. I saw the house you made out of the twigs from the underworld. I thought you wouldn't mind.

"Most oaks this young wouldn't be able to withstand my rage if I Awoke them, but this one is different. I thought we could plant it at the den when we get back."

[Danicka] Another woman, given a box that size, would have thought it was another ring. Would have thought: the first one was a joke, the snarling wolf made of pewter. Would have thought this was the long-awaited proposal, the diamond, the symbol to mortal society that she was legally taken and bound to another person. And now would be the time for fanning her face and crying and Yes, yes! Of course I'll marry you!

Danicka, however, was raised in a family where her mother never took her father's name because her mother and father were never married. Her expectations are different. Her go-to thoughts are different. Marriage tacked onto mateship is something she sees in Silver Fangs, and she despises Silver Fangs. Even Vladislav and Emilie are only husband and wife by commonlaw.

She sees the acorn and there's no sudden flash of disappointment, quickly hidden. Just curiosity turning, quickly, to a slowly curving smile and an affectionate observation of the acorn. She touches it with one finger, stroking its cap, and discovers the beginning of growth. So gentle, she is. As though this is a child, or a small animal, or something she has to be careful not to harm.

Her mate mentions the twig house, and she smiles, looking at him again. Carefully, Danicka closes the box again, sets it on top of some of the other gifts, and braces her hands on the bedspread to either side of his head. She lowers herself over him, hair curtaining either side of their faces, and kisses him.

Of course I don't mind. It may as well be aloud. It may as well be: Thank you.

[Lukas] It's wholly possible that Lukas will never ask Danicka to marry him. That Danicka will never hint that she wants him to. It's a human custom, after all. As far as Lukas is concerned, there's no greater level of connection or commitment he could possibly express. She's his mate. She claimed him on the solstice, and he her. Even the spirits of time recognize her as mated; recognize that she is bound to another, and another to her.

Sometimes he thinks that even if one of them were to die, he would remember her when their spirits reached the Homelands. He thinks they would find each other there.

Gifts and wrapping paper shift on the bed as he arches up against her. Deepens the kiss she initiates, and closes his eyes as he sinks into it. The overhead lights leave a faint reddish glow through the delicate skin of his eyelids, and after a while, as his mouth opens to hers and his hands do indeed begin to stroke down her back to mold over her ass, he turns a small distance away.

Enough to whisper, "Let's turn out the lights and go to bed."

[Danicka] Nobody has ever told Danicka she has a chance to go to the Shadow Lord homelands when she dies. That is a place for Garou. Kinfolk don't wear silver. Cutting her hair was, when she was 14, an act of rebellion and disrespect against her deceased mother deserving of a beating and even more sinister punishments. This was her reality, growing up. She doesn't know there is some spiritual place where the sense of her breeding -- the meadows, the homefires, the wildflowers -- unfurls at the feet of impossibly dark, tall mountains where it is always night and where there are always storms washing across the stone.

If she knew, she would assume that one day when time stops for her, or him, she'll find him there. They might have to meet halfway between cold rock and warm earth, storm and grain, but if he is a wolf and she is a woman he will lay his head in her lap. And if they're reversed -- if her soul, part animal, is expressed there on four legs and with sharp teeth, she will curl against him in a safe-hidden den at night all the same, nursing the spirits of cubs never born in life.

This is not a den. They're out on the lake, below deck in a well-appointed cabin, wrapping paper and gifts scattered about, rocking gently. Water laps at the porthole windows. They kiss, and he runs his hands over her, finds her body the same soft shape as it ever was beneath the fabric of her skirt. She breathes in, starts to pull away.

"I'm just going to make the captain a plate," Danicka says again, nuzzling his cheek, starting to slip away. "Warm up the bed for me. I'll be right back."

[Lukas] Lukas makes a wordless sound of protest as she starts to pull away, but he doesn't stop her. She stands. He lies where he is, raising himself on his elbows amidst a sliding sea of wrapping paper and gifts, watching her with eyes gone hungry and wide-pupilled.

He swallows, exhales. And he nods.

"Spěchat zpět."


Abovedecks, Danicka will find the captain taking down the genoa sail, sheathing it in a weatherproof cover for the night. The mainsail is tightly reefed, reduced to a fraction of its full size. The anchor -- which looks nothing like the traditional anchors stamped on popeye's forearms -- is ready to go overboard, chaining them down for a few hours while Capt. Mike catches a nap before sailing them back in the morning.

It'll be a rather exhausting night for the old sailor, all told. He's used to it, though. Perhaps he fished in his youth. Perhaps he was with the navy, or some merchant shipping line. He's slept and sailed in shifts before. He's also going to be several hundred dollars richer -- if not a thousand or more.

And: he has late night snacks brought to him by the pretty blonde who chartered this boat in the first place. He has more of a spine than most humans, but he'll wonder what on earth she sees in that seething sociopath of a boyfriend, anyway.


While Danicka's gone, Lukas gathers up her gifts and the wrapping paper. He's reminded of eating shellfish: you always end up with a far larger mess than you start with. If he can find a wastebasket in the room, that's where the wrappers go. Otherwise, he balls them up and leaves them on a shelf, rather like chaotic origami. The gifts he puts together, stacked neatly, the acorn back in its tiny box, protected.

And while she's gone, he brushes his teeth in the head; takes a quick shower, washes lakewater off his lower legs. There are towels stashed neatly in a small shelf whose door folds down to form an ironing board or a changing table, in case someone brought a small child aboard. Everything here is cunningly designed, every iota of space functional. When he returns to the aft cabin, he turns down the sheets and gets in bed, sliding to the inside, closer to the cool, curving wall.

There he waits for her, lights off now, moonlight slanting narrowly through the portholes set high in the walls, just above the waterline. If they stand on the bed they can look out across the flat expanse of the lake. He doesn't stand and look. He waits, one hand tucked under his pillow beneath his head, listening to the faint sounds of footsteps overhead, feeling the bed rock gently beneath him as their speed slows to a standstill on the water.

[Danicka] While Lukas cleans up the wrapping paper, Danicka stands in the galley in stockinged feet, making up a plate of the seafood and vegetables and other light, easy-to-eat foods she ordered for the night. She heats some of it up. She gets a bottle of water and covers the plate with a napkin. She puts a truffle on the edge of it, smiling to herself as paper and bedding rustles.

From where he is, Lukas can hear only dimly what goes on. He doesn't know Danicka finds Captain Mike and, smiling warmly, offers him the food. Tells him it's nothing when he says that's kind of her. She laughs, tells him there's no way they could eat it all themselves. He wishes her a happy birthday again as she's leaving him to his meal and his rest, and the birthday girl wishes him sweet dreams.

Lukas is getting into bed when Danicka comes back down. She sees him, naked and clean from his shower, and kisses him quickly where she can reach -- his bicep, murmuring for him to go ahead, she's just going to wash up.

And so she does. She covers food and puts away what she can. He can hear her moving around, hears her when she goes to the head and washes her face and brushes her teeth and gets herself ready for bed the same way she would if they were at any one of three dens. He lays in bed, the lights off and the boat slowing to its own silence, waiting for his mate.

When Danicka comes to the cabin, she closes the door behind her and it's nearly pitch black inside. He can hear her clothes whispering off of her, hear as she drops them here and there, or folds them neatly, or whatever she does with them. Danicka's desire never roused beyond a sort of distant consideration as she laid atop him, even as he kissed her harder and urged her to come to bed, even when she told him I know when he murmured that he wanted to make love to her.

It's been over two weeks. Last night she took off her shirt and wrapped her arms around him and when they got into her bed he was half-hard, hungry for her, patient only because his instinct to protect was stronger than his instinct to fuck, and he knew she had to wake up early.

When she unfolds the edge of the bedspread and climbs onto the bed beside him, legs slipping under the sheets and sliding against his own, Lukas feels her body come to nestle against his own and she's utterly naked. Her skin is smooth, slightly cool from being exposed to air for a few moments but still warmer than most women would be. She flows into his arms easily enough, as he pulls the covers up around her. No matter that he really is warm enough to have the bed heated by now simply by his presence.

Danicka wraps her arms around his waist when she comes to him, barely visible if at all in the dark, and just... breathes.

[Lukas] There are a few running lights out in the main cabin, even when all the rest are turned down. There's some light coming from the portholes, too.

That light silhouettes Danicka as she opens the cabin door. She's slender enough, slight enough, to fit easily through where Lukas had to duck; where Lukas's shoulders nearly filled the breadth of the door. Then that door closes with a quiet click, and it's very dark in the aft cabin.

She can hear the sheets stirring faintly as he draws himself up on one elbow. She can hear him breathing slowly, deliberately, as she undresses. She comes across the short distance, and then her knee hits the bed, and then she's sliding under the covers and he's laying back down and his lips part, and he exhales as quietly as he can, when he feels her naked beside him, her arms wrapping around him.

He is aroused now. Nothing more than the smell of her in the room; the sound of her taking her clothes off, from that shawl to that camisole to that skirt to those stockings with the lilies of france stitched onto the silk. Imagining each piece as it comes loose, or falls. Listening to them whisper to the floor.

Nothing more than the weight of her coming across the mattress, lying beside him.

His eyes are closed. He's controlling himself, because he's not sure she wants to make love; because the last thing he wants is to push. He holds her against his body and tells himself he doesn't actually need to fuck her tonight, which may not be entirely true; tells himself he would be all right with it if she just wanted to sleep. Which is true.

His chest rises and falls against her as he breathes. He wraps her up in his arms to warm her.

[Danicka] Lukas's skin is hot to the touch. Where her hand rests on his chest, Danicka feels that heat searing her palm and wrapping around her fingers like a warm cloud. The thought occurs to her that she could let herself vanish into that cloud just by sinking more against him, pressing to him more closely. Perhaps that's true.

Under her fingertips, which are not lightly stroking his flesh but resting as still and heavy as though she is about to sleep, Danicka can almost feel the want in him. It vibrates up from his core and seems to make his skin tingle against her own.

I want to make love to you.

Hurry back.

She remembers the way his breath started to edge very close to panting when he touched her, when he was kissing her. She remembers the noise of protest and resistance when she pulled away to perform her little act of kindness for the night. She remembers his hands on her, touching her the way they haven't in weeks, and Danicka knows very well she's given him almost nothing to go on to know whether she wants him back, too. She doesn't wonder why he rests like he does now, breathing deliberately, as though preparing himself to hold her and sleep.

Danicka shifts beside him, opening her legs and laying one of her thighs over his. The heat of his thigh, the hardness of it, presses slightly against her, and though he can't see it, her eyes close.

"To je v pořádku," she whispers, laying a soft, small kiss on his chest.

[Lukas] It's so dark in here that there are only impressions; vague hints and glimpses of one another. They're miles from the city, miles from that endless glow of sodium and halogen and neon, elements set afire by electricity to cast light on the dark face of the planet.

Here there's only moonlight, and the brilliance of the hundreds and thousands of stars that, indeed, they can see better here than in the city. Earlier, abovedecks, they could see an unbelievable brilliance of stars, a burning sky full of them, with the center of their own galaxy a diffuse, cloudy sprawl across the sky.

So: he doesn't see her close her eyes. He feels her moving closer, though, shifting her leg over and between his, brushing against his thigh. He feels her mouth press to his bare chest, and she feels his chest rise with a steep, shallow breath.

"Miluj mě," he whispers.

His hands beneath the covers are sure and strong. He shifts her thighs open wider, straddling his hips now, straddling the hardening shaft of his cock. When she presses against him like that, his head tilts back and he stifles a groan. He's aware of the close confines of the sailboat; the human not so very far away. He breathes as quietly as he can, air stealing in and out of his lungs, between his parted lips, sighing through his nostrils when he kisses her.

"Pomalé a sladká, láska."

[Danicka] In the Republic, there is a vast difference between Mám tě rád and Miluji tě. One is everyday. You can say it in public. You share it with your boyfriend or your girlfriend when you want to express that burning, pressing affection that wells up in your hormonal pubescent chest. It is the casual fondness passed between husband and wife before they part in the morning, a kiss laid on a cheek. When Danicka said it to Lukas one night as he left her at her door it was not distance, not a way to push him a way, but a gentle familiarity.

The other is whispered on anniversaries, murmured into ears privately. It is said behind closed doors, in bed, in moments of vulnerability and darkness and exposure. Miluji tě is deeper, though Mám tě rád is no less heartfelt.

Danicka told Lukas Miluji tě for the first time at the W, tears in her eyes and on her cheeks, begging him not to leave her, she was sorry she pushed him away, she didn't want to lose him, please, please,

I love you.

She was wearing the birthday gift he'd given her, a set of purple and black lace and satin lingerie. Not normally a gift a man gives a women two and a half months into a relationship. Not normally a gift that would be considered acceptable to give to the literal territory of another wolf that he was trespassing upon again and again, every time he fell into bed with her or lifted her against the wall and fucked her like their lives depended on it. She was wearing lingerie and they hadn't made love in ages and he'd come in her mouth and they'd laid comfortably and warmly in bed together

and in an eyeblink they were fighting. It fell apart. They fell apart, and she whispered that she loved him, loved him the way that mates love, the way you love the one you want to spend your life with, and then for a week their minds and lives and wills burned to ashes and cinders, soot and smoke.


Miluj mě, Lukas whispers, his hands guiding her under the covers. Danicka parts her legs further as she slides onto him, straddles him and lays atop his chest. Her breathing is quickening now that his hands are on her again, and the brush of his cock and her cunt together makes Lukas hide a groan of pleasure, makes Danicka gasp quietly. Her hands are on his chest.

Miluji tě, she whispers back, and as her hands move he can feel the light scrape of metal, as well as its smooth pressure: the ring she still wears on her left middle finger.

And the silver around her right wrist. Silver, which she was always afraid of wearing because it might get her hurt. Silver, which she was afraid of tonight only because it might hurt him.

Danicka leans over him, the bangles of the bracelet speaking quietly as they chime and whisper against each other with her movement. She opens her mouth, parting his lips with her own, and kisses him: soft, humid, and slow. In the dark, Lukas feels her hand small and warm reaching between them, taking him in hand to guide him to her pussy. She gasps into his mouth at the first press of his head against her slit, gasps again when she starts to rub against him, work herself onto him. She opens her mouth to capture his moans, his answering pants for air, and slowly

so fucking slowly,

sinks down onto him until they are deeply, entirely together.


It's been a long time since they've bothered to reach for a condom before making love. They both know that with her it's a bit risky: her bloodline, at least on her father's side, is notoriously fertile. Her half-sister has six children. Danicka herself has been pregnant twice, once on birth control.

That's what he senses sometimes when he scents her, that's what he knows other males catch when they flare their nostrils and notice her breeding. That's why she brings to mind rich, cultivated fields and wildflowers and springtime and a warm hearth with sleeping, well-fed cubs nearby and protected. That's why every time he comes inside of her there is a part of him that is chasing instinct as much as pleasure, driven to breed on her as much as he's driven to

ji miluju.

Now they don't bother anymore. And not because he challenged for her and took her from Vladislav, not because now he has full rights to have cubs with Danicka if he wishes. Not because she's his, now, as she has been since the summer solstice when she took him, and gave herself in return. Because: she's admitted, to herself first -- and more importantly -- that she would welcome his children, if they came. Even if she's not ready. Even if it means living the life he's not sure would make her happy, the life that would be a daily risk of frenzy and trauma even as it's a life of daily warmth and contentment.

When you get right down to it, though, they don't bother anymore partly just because they don't want to anymore. Because Danicka likes the way he fucks her when there's nothing between them, likes the way he loses himself. Because Lukas, feeling her around him with no barrier, no numbing prophylactic, nothing, loses his mind, too.


They have to be quiet. Mike's overhead, even if he's napping now. Fell asleep fast, due to weariness and long practice and the comfort of being out on the water.

They're quiet anyway, as Danicka starts to rock on top of him, slow, kissing him still. She doesn't go faster until she pushes herself up and starts to ride him at a gentle trot. His eyes have adjusted enough to see the shadows caressing her body, lining and painting her torso, cupping her breasts just before his hands do. She starts to make... those noises. And his head falls back as he gasps for it, holding onto her hips, moving up into her when he wants more, when desire starts to unravel in him, becoming strict, vital necessity.

They're less quiet, when Danicka picks up her pace and just fucks him now, the bedding pooled around her thighs, being kicked out of the way, off his legs. They're both letting out truncated, stifled moans, trying their damndest not to cry out loud and wake up the captain, trying to make love without disturbing anything but the sheets and each other.

In the end, it's the female of the pair who can't stay silent. She braces herself over Lukas, folding over him as she bounces on his cock, sweat slicking both their skins, a thin line of it wetting her spine, making her hips and ass slippery under his hands. Get on top of me, she whimpers, whispers, literally biting back a much louder moan than she can get away with. Baby, lay me back and fuck me, make me come --

and she doesn't have to tell him a third time, because Lukas, panting raggedly by now, is flipping her over and groaning as her legs open wide for him. At the end he's pounding her, biting her shoulder or the pillow under her to keep himself quiet, to bury his groans, and she's turning her head to do the same, hiding moans in his shoulder and opening her mouth to bite at the pillowcase, the pillow itself, as her hair dances where it spreads across the covers.

Danicka rarely tells him in words that she's coming, that she's almost there, but he knows. He knows when he slides into her like that and she makes that sound that if he does it again, and again, and again she's going to swear like she does and buck her hips, thrash suddenly under him. He knows when he stops and grinds into her, circling his hips between her legs that she's going to throw her head back and moan, which is the only time he has to cover her mouth, or kiss her, or hide her face into his shoulder again to just keep her quiet while she

comes on his cock, comes under him, working her hips in hard, tight jolts. Her cunt is grabbing at his cock, holding him where he is, and when he comes it's just like that, grabbing a hold of her or the mattress and pumping his cum into her even as she's still shuddering, trembling, and whimpering under his body.

They slow to rocking after the muted, muffled shrieking and the muted, muffled growling quiets. They move together slowly again, so fucking slowly, his cock sliding in and out of his mate a few last times, a few long strokes that send ripples of lingering pleasure through her. Her hands splay on his back, and her legs wrap close around his waist. She pants, head turned to the side, eyes closed, sweat along her brow and temple, lips parted for every staggered breath.

"Miluji tě," Danicka whispers. "Ach můj zasranej Boha, miluji tě tak moc."

[Lukas] Afterward, they rock together on the bed. The bed rocks under them; the boat rocks on the lake; the world rocks all around them. It's dark, though his eyes have adjusted enough to see the subtle shadows and highlights of her body. It's dark because his eyes are closed, and his brow presses to the pillow, and his hands are clutching the bedspread, gripping it instead of her because he didn't want to hurt her when he lost control, and lost himself, and lost his mind to her.

His back is wet with the clean sweat of simple exertion. He still smells of whatever soap he brought or found on board. Still smells like his shower in the tiny, cramped little head. He still smells like himself, and like her. His body shifts over her and under her hands, between her leg; shifting his weight so as not to crush her. Shifting to press into her again, gently, moaning quietly as he does -- like he can't bear to stop

loving her. Just like this.

Eventually his breathing slows and steadies. His heart stops racing in his chest. He kisses her as she turns her head like a swimmer coming up for air, pulling breath from the darkness, giving it back in words. He kisses her temple, and her cheek flushed warm, and her neck. His lips part. He nips at her skin. Shudders run down his back, and then he bows his head to just rest against her for a moment.

"Můj lodní důstojník," he murmurs. Senselessly, thoughtlessly affectionate, the way he nuzzles her, the way he kisses her, bites gently at her, breathes her in. "Moje."

A little later, he finds the strength to push himself up on his elbows. His back bows over her, and now his mouth is exploring her collarbone; is kissing her breast, sucking gently at her nipples. Different now: this, and the sort of visceral, hungry way he went at her while they made love. Slower, lazier, more contemplative: he learns her by taste and touch, adoring her body inch by inch, patient now. He loves her like this -- overcome in the wake of her orgasm, eyes closed, slowly coming back together again. He loves seeing her like this, and feeling her like this; his cock still inside her, her pussy still clenching around him now and then.

He wraps her up after a while. He wraps his arms around her, holding his own weight so he doesn't crush her. I could stay like this, he thinks to himself. We could stay here.

[Danicka] And she... smells like sex. Smells like sweat. Smells like herself, and like Lukas, and like the night air she just came down from. She smells like her shampoo and conditioner and the lotion she puts on her body after her showers. She smells so familiar like this it aches. Feels so familiar. Feels right, coming down from her orgasm all around him, whimpering softly when he pushes his cock into her again, as though he just wants to watch the way she reacts to it, feel the way she clenches, the way her back arches gently.

His mate. His. He whispers it all, nuzzling and kissing her, and Danicka is too wrecked to do much more than move her hand to the back of his neck and hold him. Stroke his hair when he starts to laze his mouth across her, and she stays where she is, quiet and still. She breathes, more and more deeply and steadily with each passing minute. Her legs unfold from him as he comes to rest against her finally, holding her.

Danicka says nothing. She's awake, he knows it from the way she breathes and feels under him, but she's quiet. She keeps her eyes closed and just... stays like this, like he's thinking. She murmurs meaninglessly as he moves: could be his name. Could just be sounds, no different than the ones the lake makes against the sides of the boat. Just as natural. Just as patient.

Her right hand moves on him, the bracelet dragging on his skin for a moment. She breathes in, exhales slowly. "Take it off for me?" she asks, sounding drowsy.

[Lukas] It doesn't hurt him. That bracelet. The silver. He can still feel it, though. 92.5% silver, alloyed for hardness. Plated in almost-pure silver, too thin a layer to really do much damage even if he were in a different form, but --

even so. Enough that his skin is starkly aware of it. Enough that when it drags over his shoulderblade, he shivers a little, then ducks his head to kiss her mouth as if to reassure her:

it's okay.

it doesn't hurt me.

The truth is he wants to fuck her again. The truth is he can rarely get enough of her. The first night was one of the few nights they let each other have one another over and over and over and over until both of them were worn to the edge of exhaustion, until they were literally at the edge of endurance. They did it then because everything was unsure. Everything was up in the air. Neither of them were quite sure they would ever come to that pass again.

Since then, they've taken it easier. This became more than a one night stand. More than a brief tryst. More than anything they could've foreseen or expected or planned for, and as days rolled to weeks to months, he began to trust that they could, against all odds, somehow last. Somehow be. He learned patience. He learned to give her time, give her room. He learned to wait.

And when she moves, when she asks him to take the bracelet off for her, he shifts over her. His head turns. He looks at the metal glittering in the uncertain light. His hand moves, rising; his fingers fold very gently around her wrist. He's reminded of another night, a different sort of bracelet altogether; manacles around his wrists, that he gave to her to remove when all was said and done.

Thinking of that, and that intensity, and that trust, Lukas turns back to her and kisses her mouth. His free hand strokes over her hair; cups the back of her head. He kisses her mouth like he recognizes her, and knows her -- like his body remembers her. Which it does.

When they draw apart, he shifts aside, turning on his shoulder beside her. He's careful as he turns. He wants to stay inside her. They move slowly, carefully, and eventually he settles beside her, drawing the bangles off her wrist, past her hand. Lukas is on the inside of the bunk for once, because his instinct whispers to him that the vast cold waters just on the other side of that wall are more dangerous than the small door and the single human somewhere on the other side of it. Stretching over her, he lays the bracelet on the tiny nightstand and, on the return trip, settles his hand over her stomach, thumb tracing an arc over her belly.

"Miluji tě," he says, watching her skin move under the path of his thumb. He props himself up on an elbow, leans down to kiss her sternum. He's said this before -- "Jsi tak krásná pro mě."

[Danicka] Beautiful, he says.

Precious, she thinks.

As the bracelet comes off her wrist and their bodies turn on the -- let's face it -- bed that is somewhere between the quality of his mattress at the brotherhood and hers at Kingsbury Plaza, Danicka folds her arms loosely around his neck. His old pewter ring is still on her hand, though it's doubtful she'lll wear it on a regular basis after tonight. It's a memento, not a promise, just as the mug is a sentiment, not a memory itself. It's the last thing she has on tonight, though, after everything else has come off and away from her.

She touches his face and, seeing him dimly in the dark, kisses him softly again, and again. Slow and sweet, like he said at the beginning. She believes now that she can stay with him without panicking or going mad. She believes he can come back to her. She does not need to take him again and again every time she sees him as though to imprint the feeling of his body into her very skin, into her bones, as though this will keep them together no matter what happens, no matter if he dies tomorrow. She does not need to make love to him until she's a screaming, trembling wreck only to run away before dawn, terrified of how open she becomes when she's with him.

But that does not mean Danicka does not want him. She touches his face and moves with him as they roll to their sides, her legs shifting and her hips, too, rolling gently to make sure he stays inside of her even as they move. They know each other's bodies. They know one another's movements.

She knows he doesn't want to push her, and never has. To some extent she knows a part of that is tied to how he treated her at the very beginning, and tied also, always, to the sheer unavoidable power differential that exists because of what they are: not human. Danicka knows why he did not ask to leave clothes or incidentals at her place even after she gave him a card and code and key. She knows that if she closes the door, he won't break it down.

Because though Lukas doesn't know some of the memories that linger in the dark recesses of Danicka's mind, he knows there's never been another werewolf in her life who controlled themselves enough to give her some pretense of space, autonomy, or freedom. He knows she did not belong to herself. He knows that, ironically, Danicka did not belong to herself until he took her from her family to be his, to be his own.

Right now she doesn't have the words to tell him that she never expects him to do anything for her birthdays or for name days or holidays, because the only gift he ever needed to give her is the one he already has: the freedom to get a fucking life of her own.

The gratitude he shows in his smile, when she shares it with him. Freely. Happily.

"Moje láska," Danicka whispers tenderly, turning onto her side with him instead of laying on her back still. She follows him, stays close to him, and as her eyes close and her mouth finds his she lifts her hips up and then slides back down again. She sighs into his mouth. She takes his hand in her hand and moves it, slow and gentle (and sweet) down to her ass. Rides against him again, a little harder this time.

"Oh, moje láska."


Afterwards this time she's lying on top of him, her head on his chest, her heart slamming behind her breastbone and his heart slamming against her ear. She can barely breathe. He can barely breathe. This time there's a bite mark on his chest and this time she's not lightly sheened with sweat but rather saturated with it, and the blankets have been so kicked away and tangled at their feet that it's going to be a struggle to find them later. Danicka is clinging to him as though he's a shore and she's a shipwreck, and their lower bodies -- the twitching of his cock, the pulsing of her cunt -- are the tides, threatening to drag her down and under and away into some kind of madness that will demand she let go of her mate. Her home.

"Oh,mygod," she whispers, the words slurring together, more breathed than spoken. "Oh my god, Lukáš." Oh my god, again and again, murmuring itself into silence and waves against the boat.

Danicka shivers. It's wholly different than the way she did abovedeck, looking at the stars. "I think my birthday is technically over," she whispers, after she can breathe again, and laughs softly where she lays on him. "I also think if we make love again it'll wake up the captain."

Her face turns towards him. She kisses his chest, smiling against his skin. "And maybe some lake monsters."

[Lukas] This time, they face each other, side by side on the bed.

This time, they hold each other close, their hands exploring one another's backs, flanks, thighs, as they move together.

This time he bites her shoulder as he comes, seizing her in his teeth as gently as he can, wrapping his arms around her to hold her right where she is as he grinds up into her, over and over, groaning.

And after --

After, he can barely catch his breath. He's panting into the darkness, one arm looped around her back, the other flung out across to the edge of the bed. The blankets are half on the ground. The sheets smell like them now. The cabin smells like them, is warm with the heat they've shed, resounds dimly with the sound of their breathing, their whispers.

His eyes are closed. He laughs, his eyes still closed, as she speaks of lake monsters. "The Monster of Loch Michigan," he murmurs, nonsensical. "We'll call it the Michie." And, "Mmm," when she kisses his chest. He loves it when she does that. It makes him feel adored.

A little later, "I don't want your birthday to be over yet."

His farflung hand returns, finds her back, strokes over the curve of her spine. Beautiful. Precious. The cubs his mind fabricated and the spirit world echoed are not named after them, and yet every last one of them is named after them. Clarity. Stone. Gold. The connections are too many to name, like a spider's web in the morning, glittering with dew.

"I want you to stay happy like this."

[Danicka] "You're ridiculous," she says fondly, touching his arm as he names the monster that does not live underneath the boat they're in. There could be, technically, any number of beasts dwelling in Lake Michigan that the mortal world refuses to be aware of, that live so deep they might never come out of the water beyond a peek every hundred years or so. There might be things far, far down below the surface that are no more malevolent nor friendly than the Wyld itself, the water itself.

Right now that's not what's on her mind, though. She's tender with him now, as though he needs protecting, needs her covering him like she is. Her hair could be a cloak, her body a shield, but against what?

So he wraps his arm around her and holds her close, touching her back and feeling the sweat evaporating there, drying there. She laughs softly when he says he doesn't want her birthday to be over yet. "But it is," she insists, and he says he wants her to be happy, and somehow that makes her brow furrow slightly. Danicka lifts her head a little to look at him, the boat rocking slowly. They couldn't feel it, really, while they were making love. She pushes his hair off his brow, his damp and smooth brow.

"Baby... do you think I'm not often happy?"

[Lukas] His eyes are still closed. He moves against her stroking hand thoughtlessly, breathing in. The rise of his chest lifts her as well, the way the lakewater lifts the ship.

They open when she speaks, though, those devastatingly clear eyes. He looks at her, and now his smooth brow furrows gently. He raises his hand to her face, which he can see dimly in the moonlight that bounces off the water, that slants in through the porthole.

"I think... you deserve more happiness than you've been given." His face twists faintly, winces, as he says this. "I just want you to be happy now. Because of all the times you were hurt before. And all the times I hurt you. I just -- "

His sentence ends there, half-completed. His eyes close for a moment, moving beneath his eyelids; open again.

"I can't change the past. Or protect you from it. So when you're happy now, it's ... "

The word is in the air between them before he ever speaks it.

" ... precious to me."

[Danicka] When she shakes her head gently to that, it moves her cheek and her hair against the palm of his hand. "I don't want you to treat me like that, though," she says.

They're both quiet now. The whole world is reduced to this boat, bobbing in the water as it will until sunrise. So everything is dark, and cool, and surrounded. They are as alone as they ever are. They murmur, and whisper, and it feels natural.

"You make me happy," she says, and she has said it before, but it isn't something that comes out of her mouth that often. "And it's happier than I've ever been, but it doesn't need the shadow to make it precious. Moments like this don't need to go on forever to be worth having waited for them."

She puts her hand over his hand to keep it where it us, turns, and kisses his palm. Danicka turns back to him, lowers closer to him, his fingers slipping into her hair. She's smiling, softly. "It's okay that my birthday's over. It doesn't mean I stop feeling this way."

Which she knows it not strictly what he meant. Danicka curls into his arms, against his chest, seeking his warmth as the sweat wicks off of her skin, cooling it second by second. "I like my life, Lukášek. I like being with you."

[Lukas] In a way, that's exactly what he meant. Her birthday means she's happy, and her happiness is precious to him because it's rare. Perhaps not rare between them anymore, but rare in the grand scheme of things; rare when one lays down the twenty-six years of her life and examines them. Here the abuses. Here the terrors. Here the irreparable breaking of some part of her, one of the few meagre birthrights accorded to the kin of werewolves.

Here, where they met. Here, where they met again. Here, where she began to find her own freedoms. Here, where her freedom intersected his, and paradoxically, was not snuffed out but amplified.

It took a quarter of a century for her to be even a little free. Her happiness has been rare -- and precious -- and so he has a hard time letting go of even this one small symbol of it. A birthday. A day in which her birth and her existence is celebrated. He always did have a hard time letting go of things: his fear. His wariness. His attachment to meaningless things. His control.

She's always helped him let go. Just let go.

He nuzzles against her temple as she lays herself back down atop him. A long breath in. A long breath out.

"Okay," he whispers, and lets the day go.

[Danicka] There's a multitude of reasons why the spirits of the underworld and the true ritemasters of spring chose the form of a green-eyed, blonde-haired woman in her early thirties to guard the gate leading from death to life, winter to spring. To guard the gate and keep it closed until this particular wolf was willing to just.

Let.

Go.

Of his fear of her unhappiness. Of his fear of destroying what little elements of life he could carve out for himself against the ravages of war and heartbreak. Of his fear of repeating her life: doing to her what Laura did to Miloslav, doing to their children what Laura and Vladislav did to her. Of so much fear.

There's some honor and nobility in the way Lukas has always used his fear. He doesn't hide. He doesn't cower. He pushes not for the fear to simply go away but tries to build up whatever is opposite that fear. It isn't the same as seeing the fear for what it is: almost always an illusion, a belief in false evidence that only appears to be real. It isn't the same as really letting go of fears that only hold him back. Of all ways to be cautious in life, caution in love is the most damaging to true happiness.

So the underworld came to him, taking on the form not just of a woman but of an entire life with that woman. His great terror. And it was not his test to see it for an illusion and reject it. His test, which he learned, was to see his fear as the illusion.

Lukas lets go, breathing with his mate laying on top of him. She is happy. She's holding him, kissing him, and he's buried still inside of her, welcomed to her in a way he never was at the beginning. She wants him to stay. He can stay here with her, and know as he holds her that she's not only safe and protected and fed and resting but happy. And beneath that, perhaps wrapped tight in his mind and heart, the knowledge that he --

under a full moon, the moot so close that rage is clawing at the inside of his skin, the moon when he is the most dangerous and has literally almost snapped and killed her in the past

-- is an intrinsic part of that happiness.

His mate's breathing begins to even out. It isn't natural for them to be out on the water like this. They're creatures of the land, simply put. Her ancestors were such harvesters that the fetish weapon in her half-sister's possession -- that will, one day, pass to the younger Miloslav, as his Full Moon sister Irena will not need weapons other than her claws -- is a goddamn sickle. Once upon a time, her father worked in vineyards. Once upon a time, her forefathers and mothers only went on the riverwater to sail heaps of grapes and casks of wine down to larger cities, larger ports.

Still: Danicka is worn out. An early morning, a long day, a late night. Food in her belly, her mate inside her body, his arms around her, and the sky so very dark and so very far above them. She begins to breathe herself closer to sleep, as though leading by example:

Let go.

[Lukas] It's a little while longer before Lukas follows his mate into sleep.

In that little while, he strokes his hands down her back. He rubs her back gently, in soothing circles, while she relaxes on him, around him, into him. He breathes with her, gently, slowly, deeply, and when her rhythms shift from waking to sleeping, his hands gradually still.

He wraps his arms gently around her. He holds her and keeps her warm, thinking that it was nice waking up to her this morning. It's nice falling asleep with her tonight. That's a rare thing for them, even now that he's begun to drop by her place just to be with her, just to sleep. It's still a rare thing to bookend the day like that with one another.

He thinks, also, that it was a good night. He thinks that he likes sailing, and that he likes sailing with her. He thinks Slalom Bunny is a much better constellation than Draco or Pegasus.

He thinks it'll be nice watching the sun rise over the lake in a few hours, bundled up in blankets, sharing hot coffee and quiche.

He thinks it's a precious thing, a gift, that she sleeps with him like this now. So easily, so trustingly, even when the moon is a sliver away from full. That she can withstand his rage like this -- she who used to go heartwrenchingly placid and limp and unresisting if he so much as raised his voice to her -- is a gift. That she holds him like this, as though she were the one protecting him, is a gift.

Enough; time to sleep. Lukas's thumb sweeps one more half-circle across Danicka's shoulderblade, and then he closes his eyes and

lets go.


Eventually, the heat of their lovemaking will dissipate. Eventually he'll wake and stir beneath her, lowering her gently to the bed, to the warm hollow his body has made. If she stirs or wakes, he kisses her gently on the shoulder or the upper arm so she knows he's coming back. Then he fishes the blankets from the foot of the bed, from the floor where it's spilled, and draws them up and over them both.

Then he wraps himself around her again. They sleep lazily entwined tonight, face to face, his hand over her back as though to ward her.


Morning comes as a dim grey light. On the nightstand, someone's iPhone buzzes a quiet alarm. Lukas is heavily asleep then, groggily rousing as she turns away to silence the buzzer. He wraps his arms tighter around her and pulls her back against his body, her back to his front now, holding her warm and secure the same way he did a little less than 24 hours ago.

They drowse a little longer.

Then it's Lukas's eyes that open. The light has changed: from grey to blue, and then to a dawn-touched rosiness. He remembers the sunrise. He raises himself on his elbow, and then sits up, shivering once as the cool air hits his upper body. Yawning hugely, he scrubs sleep from his face. Once more, he kisses her on the shoulder, murmurs for her to sleep a little longer while he goes heat up breakfast.

He has a fresh change of clothes in his bag. He expected to spend the night at her place, or perhaps the brotherhood, or perhaps the den -- he pulls on lounge pants and a plain undershirt, which he puts on backwards at first. When he notices the collar's all wrong, the fit all funny, he pulls it off and tries again, laughing at himself.

His broad back disappearing through the aft cabin door: that's the last she sees of him for a while. She can hear him in the head, though, brushing his teeth, splashing water on his face.

The skipper is already up and about by the time Lukas gets around to heating up breakfast on the little stove. Yawning, the Shadow Lord exchanges quiet hellos with Mike, mentioning that he was welcome to share their breakfast as he stirs orange juice with champagne, adds a dash of grenadine, garnishes with kiwi and pineapple from last night's fruit platters.

Little by little, the smell of quiche and french toast permeate the cabin. By the time Lukas goes back into the aft cabin to wake Danicka, breakfast is ready, and he looks awake.


They watch the sunrise quietly from the stern. The bow of the ship is pointed west now, bound back for Chicago. It's too cold to swim, too cold to even trail their feet in the water, but they sit side by side on the swim platform nonetheless, wrapped in a blanket, eating french toast and quiche that steam in the cool morning air.

The rising sun paints the clouds: red to pink to brilliant, searing gold. When dawn breaks, Lukas leans gently against Danicka for a moment, turning to rest his brow to her hair.

Later on, while Danicka and the captain chat, Lukas takes the dishes belowdecks; puts their leftovers in the fridge for Capt. Mike if he wants them; disposes of the trash. He packs their things, too, and makes the bed. When everything's prepared for their disembarking, he comes back abovedecks. The sun is bright over the deep blue of the lake by then, and Chicago's skyline is beginning to glitter on the horizon.

They spend their time lazing on the deck, leaning over the stern. They watch their boat churn the water to white foam in their wake, and they watch the lake break against the bow. Perhaps Danicka suns herself. Perhaps Lukas naps. There's more wind by day, and they're sailing downwind now. They make better time on the return trip than on the trip out, though it's possible Lukas wishes they'd go slower.

It's about nine, ten in the morning when they pull into the docks. A little after that, they're at Danicka's car, where she can all but feel his reluctance to let her go. Lukas pulls her against him and holds her for a while, quiet, before kissing her softly and thanking her for sharing her birthday with him.

He steps back as she gets in. He waves as she pulls out, and after she turns out of the parking lot he goes to find his own car.


Much later, at the end of the month or whenever he remembers to send those little packets of mpegs, she'll find one corresponding to the morning of the 27th. It's shot in his room. He's sprawling in bed, the blinds closed, looking sleepy, looking ready to nap for another six or eight hours.

I just got back from sailing with you, he tells the camera. And I just saw a seagull outside the BroHo. It reminded me of you.

He talks for a while longer, about seabirds, about Coney Island and visiting Anezka out in L.A. and seeing a real beach. He talks about sixth grade camp, goes on a tangent about petrified wood, and yawns in the middle of a story about the pine trees at the Sept of Stark Falls.

At the end of all of it, though:

I miss you already. And I love you.

He clicks the recording off. Sets his iPhone aside, rolls over, and sleeps.