meeting the parents.

Danicka

A week passes. It's no longer the bitter end of February, but try telling the weather that. The moon waxes to half, gibbous, full, then

another week goes by.

Then the moon wanes all too slowly, and the grocery stores stock up on Easter candy and neon-colored plastic grass while throwing a bone to St. Patrick's and putting a few clovers here and there. Liquor stores buy extra cases of Guinness and Jameson. People who do not live in hospitals make party plans, or drinking-alone plans, Lukas's mother calls him even more than usual, asking him when he can come by for dinner. When they can see him again. When he's going to come home and eat a real meal for once. Every time she calls him she sounds a little more strained, a little more frustrated, a little more worried.

He doesn't see the blonde woman with the odd accent again. Not openly, sitting in the booth next to his at the coffee shop, and not out of the corner of his eye. If she's there, he doesn't catch her in a sidelong glance. He hears nothing from the woman who said she would be in touch.

It's shortly before St. Patrick's Day when he finally does have a night he can go over and have dinner with his parents. They eat early, and it's so close to the equinox, that the sky is that sherbet color, layered pink and orange and purple, all of them pastel-pale. The moon is waning half, but it isn't visible yet. It's a nice night: cool but not windy, the air promising spring soon.

The lights are on at home, waiting for him.

Lukas

It's not that Lukas dislikes his parents, or that he doesn't want to see them more than he does. It's just that he hates going home when he's tired, because then he's cranky and irritable and his parents fret about whether or not he's overworked, underslept, if he needs a day off. Because of course he is, and of course he is, and of course he does, but that's the truth for everyone slogging through a residency. Particularly a surgical one. Everyone in this field has to go through this. It's part of the training. It's a rite of passage, and on the other side was a rewarding career and, frankly, a sizable paycheck.

They don't get that, though. They're his parents. They want him to be well-rested and happy. In an ironic turnaround of so many grade-school lectures, they can't see the long-term. They just see the here and now.

So he works out a compromise. He doesn't go home when he's tired. He waits until he has a couple days off, which is a rare luxury. He's showered and shaved and hit the gym; he's even cooked himself a reasonable meal or two. With vegetables. And protein that didn't come out of a freezer.

His shirt is freshly changed and his jeans are old and comfortable and clean when Lukas takes the subway uptown. His parents haven't moved since he was in middle school. This is the same stop he got off at every day in junior high and high school. The same stop he used flying back into JFK from college and medical school. He walks east the same block, north the same block and a half, bounds up the same stone steps to knock on the same familiar door.

And then he tries the knob; shakes his head a little when it turns. He keeps trying to tell his parents it's not safe to leave your front door unlocked in New York City. They insist they only do it when they know he's coming over. He insists it's not safe, but they're as stubborn as he is.

"Mom? Dad?" he calls. The door thuds shut. Lukas steps out of his shoes, sets his shoulderbag down. He peels his coat off and hangs it in the closet, then heads for the kitchen. "Jsem doma."

Danicka

The neighborhood changes. Places do that when you aren't looking; they become disturbingly new, forgetting what was important to you and replacing it with very expensive pieces of nothingness that make you feel empty when you look.

But the brownstone hasn't. His parents are not flighty or impetuous people, they do not change anything drastically or quickly. His mother will always want to know if he's eating enough and if it's good, if he's healthy. His father will always think he is not getting enough rest. They will always be proud of him for working so hard and always worry about the fallout of that hard work on his body, on his life, on their potential for grandchildren. They were relatively young when they had Anezka; they don't see why their own children can't be more obliging.

The door comes open, and inside the house is warm and he can smell dinner. He's stepping out of his shoes and peeling out of his coat when he feels it. Senses it. Something's wrong. He's in his home, and that animal part of him that knows the air in the den of his blood-pack has its hackles rising, the skin around its maw tightening back in a wary snarl. And it's not enough to be so precognizant to realize she's here, because it's been close to a month and 'she' hasn't been 'anywhere', and Lukas's instincts are nowhere near that visionary, but they are enough to tell him well before he switches to Czech that something is wrong.

But there's Marjeta, coming as soon as she heard the door thudding closed, and she's got a bit of strain at the corners of her eyes, but she's smiling. She welcomes him as she welcomes him, tells him:

"We have a visitor." And then, maybe, he knows.

Lukas

Lukas is not an obtuse man. He feels it, seconds after entering his parent's home. Something's wrong, someone else is here, for a spinetingling second he thinks maybe no one will answer. But then - Lukas is also a controlled man, not often prone to outbursts (that incident with Gretchen the scrub nurse notwithstanding) and certainly not prone to hysterical flights of fancy. There is a pause as he's shedding his coat. Then he finishes, turning as he hears his mother coming to greet him.

We have a visitor, she says, rather lightly, as though a neighbor has come to call at that orange-groved manor he only dimly remembers. Sometimes he's not sure there was even a grove. Sometimes he's not sure it wasn't just a large house with a very small staff, but then

it doesn't matter. He's in America now; it's all about independence and what you can do with your own hands, your own mind.

He gives his mother a one-armed hug, kissing her cheek. "I noticed," he says. This is also lightly spoken. "Everything all right?" And he leaves his shoes at the door, padding his way in. He is a large man, tall, and his footsteps radiate across the floors.

Danicka

Oh yes, yes, of course, everything is fine. But she's holding his arm and leading him or guiding him or urging him down the hallway towards the living room, the room that even when he was a child was kept rather differently than places he or his sister might play (or wreck). In that room is his father, sitting in one chair. Another chair, its back angled a bit toward the door, holds their visitor, who has long legs sheathed in black, low black heels, long blonde (golden) hair.

She leans forward a touch, twisting to look at Lukas and his mother as they come in. Something happens in her eyes, which are an even darker green in this room than they were in that awfully-lit diner. Worse, though, she's more lovely. Her skin is fair from winter, but he can see the angles of her jaw and the slant of her eyelashes more clearly somehow, more defined, as though the shadows in the room have laid themselves upon her only where they will put her to her best effect.

At least she's wearing a shirt. It's as well-fitted as the suit, which is actually not the exact same suit -- the lapels are different, a satin shawl collar instead of the classic cut -- and a dusky blue, buttoned up all the way to her clavicles, the collar Mandarin. He can also see, since her hair is tucked back behind one ear, that she wears earrings. Gold knots in her lobes, teardrop pearls dangling below.

His father wants to know, is assuming: you remember the Musils? your friend Danicka? as though this is not all highly unusual, is not a little frightening.

The Musils. They did play together, when he and his family were fresh off the boat and New York City was so massive, so incomprehensible. Miloslav Musil volunteered with Czech families to help them pass citizenship tests, help them learn English, help them acclimate. He understood, too, the desire to move in this country without assimilating to it in every respect. Without forgetting, entirely, where you came from. And he had two children, himself. The older was much older, a clever and quick-witted boy who learned how to charm people early, early in life. Charismatic, but more than a little competitive with his sister, even though she was a half-decade his junior. He was always very nice to Anezka. He let Lukas borrow his old clothes when he ate too many kolace and threw up.

There was that day when they climbed the oak in the back yard and Lukas taunted Danicka. Then she climbed up to the very same branch and he fell because -- he doesn't remember why, he wasn't pushed, it wasn't that, but he fell and scraped his knees, bruised his arm. It hurt, though, and the shock jarred even him enough to want to go inside, go to his parents, but it was the Musil's older boy who stopped him, not wanting Lukas to get in trouble for climbing the tree in the first place, and

something else he wanted to avoid, but Lukas probably doesn't remember that because Vladislav didn't say it aloud,

so he helped Lukas wash his knees, and he didn't make fun of him for having tears or fear in his eyes at all, he just said see? it's fine, you're not even really hurt. it's okay, I've fallen out of that tree a hundred times. scared me every time. which was a lie, but he made it sound so believable. And of course Lukas said he hadn't been scared at all and Vladik just laughed, said: well, you must be a lot tougher than I am.

The girl, though. So small in childhood but then, both she and her brother were a little on the thin side. So excited to meet other children who spoke Czech, like she did. So dismayed to find out that they didn't also speak Russian, like she did. So talkative. So decisive in her choice, right away, holding Anezka's hand and saying that they were going to be friends now, looking at Lukas and saying he could play with Vladislav, as though she were in charge of these things, as though she took for granted that if she told her big brother to do something, he had to.

So competitive, too, when she was doing homework or playing games and her brother was in the room. He was indulgent up to a point, and then his temper would snap and Danicka would snap back, snap ten times as loud, as hard, as frustrated. So much more emotional. Vladik tread softly around her, but he was protective. She was his baby sister, after all.

The girls played endlessly together, up in Danicka's room and out in the back yard. Anezka would tell Lukas all the things Danicka told him, except for the secrets of course, about how Danicka's mother was a Garou, and that Danicka was going to be Garou as well, that she was going to be a Theurge and talk to spirits. There were secrets about that, though, things Danicka made Anezka swear to secrecy because they were girls, and they had to have that bond to be friends, that exclusion of others to be all the closer. She never really paid Lukas much mind at first, until that one visit, that one day

when she climbed up after him into the oak tree and he fell. She knows it was her fault. She knows it was the way she looked at him, the way she came so close to stalking him, the way she was on the verge of shaking that branch just to punish him, make him see who was really stronger there. She was, perhaps, eight years old. The need for exerting dominance was already so strong.

He didn't get hurt, not really. Didn't break his arm or his leg, didn't cry or bleed other than a few drops from one knee. He was fine. But she watched Vladislav sneak him back in through the back door to clean up a little before any parents got upset, and she knew that Vladislav was protecting her. Their mother would know, and she would have been so furious. The Kvasnickas would know, surely they knew by now what Danicka was going to become, and if they found out that she'd scared their younger child into falling out of a tree then

they might not keep visiting

and Danicka would lose the only friends she really had.

Lukas doesn't know that side of it. Doesn't know the side where heavy remorse sank so deeply into Danicka that it, in no uncertain terms, changed her forever. What he knows, if he remembers it at all, is that she was a lot nicer after that. She and Anezka retreated into her room to play by themselves less, and so Vladislav...well, he didn't have to hang out with a six year old as much. They'd color together. Play together. Run around the house being noisy together. And Danicka was always pink-cheeked from exertion and she liked being 'it' during tag way more than being chased but she never tackled them to the ground and bit into their necks like some well-buried instinct was telling her to.

She was still better friends with Anezka than Lukas, of course, but,

she was friends with him, too. Enough so that the first time he played doctor was with that tiny blonde girl, only it was with a stethescope that his father had brought home from someplace, somehow, and he was really very serious about the whole thing. He took notes in a special notebook with his special metallic blue pencil. Listened to Anezka's heart and Danicka's heart and said hmm, frowning at his notes as he scribbled down prescriptions.

When she was ten, and he was nine: that was really when he took notice of just how fast her heart was going, how fierce the beating of it was. How different from his own, and from his sister's. He probably does not remember how stiffly she would sit then, how she'd almost hold her breath, how he'd have to tell her to breathe, just like the real doctor did with him.

There was their mother, too. He saw her once, maybe twice. She was a ferocious thing, terrifying to behold, and he was glad he did not see her more than that.

His friend Danicka. She lays her hand on the armrests of the chair, rising to her feet as she turns toward him. It is all one motion, smooth without being snakelike, the gesture a contained, deliberate one that yet has grace to it.

"Lukáš," she says. He may or may not notice how stiffly she stands, how she's almost holding her breath.

Lukas

His parents' house, much like all the other rowhouses in this old part of New York, is deeper and taller than it is wide. There is a basement; there is an upstairs, and a small attic. The living room is barely larger than the kitchen, though, and to get there you had to get out of the entryway first, so it's not until Lukas comes through the door that he sees that their visitor is, in fact, that woman from the cafe.

And he's angry. Instantly. Are you serious, he thinks, jaw clenching. First she follows him - he's quite sure she followed him - while he was trying to get thirty minutes of blankminded rest in the middle of his third call in a week. Now she shows up in his home, in his family home where his father keeps his books and his mother keeps her knitting, sits in their living room, stinks up the whole place with her

Rage. That's what it is. That's what it always was, though he didn't know it until she came close enough to him that primitive terror-lust shafted through him like an arrow.

Lukas takes a breath, the sort of measured breath he takes sometimes in the middle of a procedure because Gretchen was insisting on doing everything the way it's always been done again. He lets it out, he gets his anger under control, he smiles tightly with his black eyebrows lowered over his cold eyes.

"Really," he says. He holds his hand out. They might as well shake; they're strangers to each other now. He barely even remembers being five years old, then eight, then eleven. It was so long ago; he has more important things to keep in his brain. "Here I thought you were just my stalker. First you find me where I work, and now you show up in my parents' living room with zero notice. What's next? Am I going to find you tucked into my bed?"

"Lukáš." Marjeta is hushed; appalled.

The first time they met, Anezka was proud to try her new English and introduced herself with a hand stuck out, all but bobbing on the balls of her feet. Lukas did not hide behind his father or anything of the sort, but he waited, watchful, until he was nudged forward. He gave his greetings in Czech and refused to speak English. The first time Danicka heard him speak English, it was already nearly flawless, pronunciation and grammar. When Anezka and Danicka disappeared upstairs, Vladik found his babysitting job was surprisingly easy: Lukas spent most of his time reading. He liked Miloslav's books. He liked Vladik's books too, the ones from school, even the ones Vladik himself found insufferably boring.

It was an unmistakable pattern. Anezka was always the outspoken one, the hellion of the family. When the Kvasnickas came over, the Musils' door would so often burst open, a little blonde girl nearly vaulting down the steps to collide with a little darkhaired girl tumbling out of the back seat. Lukas, not so sunny as his sister, more serious and far more stubborn, trailed behind. Usually he was getting his little backpack out of his car. He always brought books, even when he came to play. Sometimes he carried something Anezka had brought to share, and had cleanly forgotten in her excitement to be with her friend. Not Lukas, though. He had a long memory.

Once, they climbed trees. He competed with Anezka, with Danicka, with anyone he could. He fell; he didn't cry. He was very angry at himself for falling in front of everyone. He was angrier at the tree. He glared at the tree. The next time he came over, he went mutely to the backyard and he climbed and climbed and climbed until his father saw how high up he was and got angry and told him to come down here, NOW. Even then he wouldn't. He looked down, he saw his father, his jaw squared and he deliberately climbed one branch higher.

Afterward he got spanked, but he was grimly satisfied. That afternoon he was more laid back. Danicka was nicer, too. She wanted him to play with them as well. He didn't really, but at least he went upstairs with the girls and lay down on the rug where they were doing whatever girls do. He was still reading, sometimes glancing over to see what the giggling was about.

When he got the stethoscope he was very very serious about what he was doing. He got angry when Anezka wouldn't stay still: he didn't pout, but he took the stethoscope out of his ears and put it away and went resolutely back to his book. That was how Lukas's anger manifested, even as a child. It was a controlled, cold thing that he bent into a sort of drive,

except on those rare, memorable occasions when it got out of hand. There was once when Anezka wouldn't stop interrupting him as he tried to read aloud. Correcting his words, teasing him for mispronouncing the longer ones. He lost his temper, suddenly and startlingly. He threw the book at her face as hard as he could, which was already pretty hard, and hit her in the eye. Anezka burst into tears. Lukas was very sorry afterward, he felt awful, he ran to get his mom and his dad and anyone else who could help,

but it doesn't change the fact that he did it.

He's older now, of course. And he's wiser. He knows himself better. He knows he has that line, he knows he has a temper that he can usually divert into something more productive but not always. He tries to control it. So those words come out of his mouth and his mother is shocked, and he knows she has a right to be. That was poorly done. Still holding Danicka's hand, he gives a little shake of his head.

"I apologize," he says. "That was out of line. The situation's a little odd. I don't quite know how to react."

Danicka

He is not still holding Danicka's hand.

That anger in him sets itself tooth to tooth, is rising up so fast and so firm in how right he knows he must be to be angry in the first place. He takes a breath, he takes control, and then he sharpens his smile like a weapon and oils it with his words til they whistle in the air with the strike. They do shake. She takes his hand, and her own is surprisingly soft and terribly warm, but her eyes hold very little expectation or expression of warmth between them.

Something moves in her eyes, and a muscle moves in her cheek, as Lukas speaks. She removes her hand smoothly, but quickly, and he can see how deliberately she turns her eyes aside for a moment, resisting the urge to

break him with her will alone.

Those eyes do come back, even as his mother is saying his name, shocked, horrified by his behavior. Find his eyes. They are exactly the same ones he had when he was a child, and yet they're so much harder, so angry right now. Hers haven't changed much at all. They are still so rich, so intent, hiding some inner world that she never, at her most exuberant or emotional, let other people see... much less let them into.

She remembers him bringing things Anezka meant to and had forgotten about.

She remembers realizing, far too late, that he didn't speak English for a long time because he was embarrassed of sounding stupid, being laughed at, being a fool.

She remembers being confused, and a little galled, as he climbed her tree in defiance of his father.

But the memories stop soon after that. When Lukas was around ten and both girls were quickly entering puberty and they were visiting less and less anyway and he wasn't really playing doctor anymore, but Danicka was retreating, become quieter, her friendship with Anezka seemed to be dissolving, and they could all tell that her rage was growing, that she was getting harder and harder to deal with, more and more uncomfortable to be around, and

he hasn't heard anything about the Musils, or Danicka, until this moment. With her standing in his living room, taking her hand away from his as the air positively goes cold around her, as his mother looks at him, more afraid than angry.

They don't know this woman. A few moments pass and she doesn't snap. No blood is shed. No one is thrown through sheetrock. But there is that moment, that breath, when it could have happened. According to some: should have.

Her arms are folded now, low and against her stomach. She's watching him. She has no response to his apology or admission that he was out of line; he was, but there's no absolution or even acceptance from her right now. He talks to her like an equal; she watches him like a science experiment.

Her head nods to the side. "Sit," she says, the word just barely on the 'invitation' side of a directive. "We'll talk, and then I will leave you and your family to your meal."

Lukas

A second ago Lukas was feeling rather ashamed of himself. Quite ungentlemanly. A discredit to his upbringing. Now he finds his outrage has come roaring back. He stares at this woman for a second, disbelieving.

He is not the same as his parents, who were raised in the heart of Shadow Lord territory, who lived their whole lives under the protective and sometimes overbearing gaze of their savage cousins. He was a driven, headstrong boy and he grew into a driven, willful man. A leader, though not one that leads because he is adored. A bit of an alpha male, sometimes disliked for his attitude and conviction, but then - he does get the job done.

He's not used to this sort of behavior. This assumption of superiority simply by birth, before anything has been measured or compared. He's certainly not used to being all but ordered about. A beat or two. Then, with a huff of humorless laughter, he takes a seat on the couch. And his mother retreats, and he can hear his father's voice in the other room, but cannot make out the words.

"All right," he says. He looks different than he did the other night: more focused, the lines already forming in his brow deeper. "Let's talk, then."

Lukas

[let's make that: and his parents retreat!]

Danicka

"Stay," she says to his parents as they move to leave the two of them alone, and it's no better than when she told him to sit. Sit. Stay. Heel.

Her voice is calm, and low -- almost quiet. She's softspoken, but even if she were not Garou there would be an undeniable, unassailable firmity in her words. She expects to be listened to. She expects to be respected, attended to, obeyed. Danicka is moving back to the chair she was sitting in earlier, between he and his family

and the door.

She looks at Lukas for only a moment, noting the difference from a few weeks ago and tonight: the shaved jaw, the clarity in his eyes, the signals that he has taken care of himself. All right, then. It's just a moment, and then she speaks.

"You are correct in saying this is an odd situation," she begins. "And I apologize for any discomfort I've caused you. It was not my intention." She doesn't disclaim, profess that she has her reasons; of course she has her reasons. She assumes most people do. She assumes they will understand, without being told, that she wasn't simply acting on a whim.

"This would be simpler if you had a close Garou relative," Danicka goes on, "but I have spent the last several weeks searching for some relative of yours who has the blood and found none... available," she says, when the word could be 'living', when she is being kind and not saying that the only relation she could find has severed all but the most deeply buried connections he has to the Kvasnicka line, a relation she would be ashamed to bring up, something like that. She made a judgement call: a relative who was so many times removed that he did not even know these people existed was not important.

"You are currently under the protection of the Shadow Lord Elder at the Sept of the Green," she informs them, without mentioning the name of this wolf, as though it would mean anything to them, "who, if he is doing his job, has sent you some kind of notice of the fact."

There's a beat of a pause. "I have challenged him for the honor of taking over guardianship of your family within this city. This would include Anežka, of course. He has set the challenge for me and it is... ongoing." She is looking at all of them, a vague directional watching, but a couple of times her eyes do flick specifically to Lukas, not so much gauging his reaction as just... looking at him. Seeing him. "Nothing is required of any of you, and I am sure your guardianship has changed several times without you even being aware, but due to the history between our families, I wished you to know."

Lukas

There's a moment when Lukas looks to his father for confirmation and receives it in the form of a slight nod, silent. Yes: they had some notice of the challenge, the turnover of the claim over their largely unconnected, but so very richly bred, family. And some part of Lukas wishes he'd said something, done something, given him some warning, but then - he gets it. It's so surreal. It's so far away from what Lukas knows, what Lukas lives, that it would only bewilder and confuse him.

Except it would also prepare him, in some way, for this. For that woman showing up while he's working. For that woman to follow him home, all the way home to where he felt safe as a child. For her to sit across from him and inform him, like it's a done deal already, of a challenge, of claim, of guardianship - as though any of that made any sense to him at all.

Lukas wonders what she's supposed to be guarding him from. The monsters in the night, he supposes, though the only one he knows is her.

His parents say nothing. They nod to this news and that's it. He looks at them, and then he looks at Danicka. He leans back in the couch; considers her with his brow furrowed, his mouth set.

"Why?" he asks. Blunt; bold. "Why now? Why us?"

Danicka

They were raised in this, his parents, back in the old world. They knew -- albeit distantly -- of the war, the wrangling of their cousins, the distant relatives who controlled their lives and yet took little notice of them. They were precious, and the story of how Jaroslav and Marjeta were permitted to marry insteady of being mated to worthy Garou is not one we are concerned with telling right now, but

they are still precious. And they have produced two very precious children, as well, yet: neither one has bred true. Their line can't be dying, they're too strong still, but perhaps this is the beginning of the end. No more wolves. Just ages and ages of purely bred, purely blooded Kin who will, generation by generation, forget what they are: the families of monsters.

Except that there's one of them, sitting in an armchair in their living room, who is no longer a skinny little girl with a bizarre personality. No more exuberance mixed with sharp temper mixed with deep, personal thoughts she refuses to share or explain. She's very controlled. She's very calm. She's still pretty slender.

Lukas looks at his father for confirmation; she notices that. She doesn't know -- she can't, right? -- how he's been living, all of this far outside of his realm of thought or concern. His parents nod to this news, perhaps picking up more easily than Lukas that she wouldn't be informing them of any of this unless -- yes -- it were very close to being a 'done deal'. She has gone quiet, and so he asks her his question. It's a fair one.

So her eyes turn to him. "Because you were my friends," she tells them -- him -- as far as 'why' goes. "And now, because my rank and clout allow me to challenge for this without dishonoring my pack, myself, our tribe, or your family. It would have been inappropriate before, and dangerous -- no one should try to hold something they aren't strong enough to keep."

Lukas

"Friends."

Lukas quirks an eyebrow. And then he says the second shocking thing in about as many moments - something that horrifies his mother, not just because it's so impolite but because it's so dangerous.

"Do you always talk about your friends like they're objects?"

Danicka

Her eyes are steady on him. He's testing. Like a cub might test, only he's not in her pack. He's not under her guard.

Yet.

For a very long moment, Danicka is silent. She watches him.

Lukas

The thing is, he's not testing her. He's ... upset. One moment his life is proceeding more or less as planned. The next, he's become some sort of trading card, and this inscrutable woman-wolf is sitting in his living room telling him

that he's a friend.

So he bristles. He riles to that. He snaps, like an animal backed against a corner. And she looks at him levelly, and he looks back, and after some time he closes his eyes, pinches the bridge of his nose with his fingertips.

"So is that it? You consider us friends, so you'll challenge for us, and now you've informed us."

Danicka

"Were friends," she says calmly, reminder and correction. "I would not presume friendship after fifteen years."

Which is, more or less, how long it's been. So there that part of it is: she's challenging because of a friendship that existed a decade and a half ago. Anezka isn't even here, and she, really, was the one Danick was friends with. But it means something to her. Eneough to challenge for them. Enough to take on the responsibility of an entire family. Enough to do... whatever it is the Shadow Lord elder is having her do to prove she's worthy of this.

Even if they aren't her friends anymore.

Her hands unfold and go to the armrests again. "The challenge is already underway. It should be completed soon," she tells them as she rises to her feet again. "I'll let you know the outcome."

Jaroslav and Marjeta begin to rise, or speak, and she shakes her head, her hand stalling them. "I'll see myself out." A pause, while she wages some quiet internal argument with herself. Eventually it's clear which half wins: "Please lock your door," she says, her voice slightly stiff, the emphasis on the first word a little unfamiliar, out of place, and trying so hard -- failing, mostly -- to get away from sounding like an order.

Lukas

"Wait."

Lukas is standing too. He just got here, but he stands and he follows, he goes to the closet and gets his coat, steps into his shoes.

"I'll walk you out."

Danicka

When Jaroslav and Marjeta began to rise to stop her, or help her, or be ...well, polite, she stopped them. Her hands idly adjust the fall of her suit jacket, but she is turning to leave after telling them to lock their damn door -- though in nicer words than that. She is leaving, and no need to trouble themselves, go back to their meals, nothing more to see here.

Lukas says wait and she pauses, glancing at him, and he's standing up. She's quite stiff, quite watchful, staring at him the way she always seems to. He gets up, and makes a move forward, so she thinks a half-second, then turns and continues walking. She neither waits for him not stops him.

Behind Lukas, Marjeta looks at Jaroslav.

At the door, Danicka has no shoes to put on or coat to don, but Lukas is grabbing these things quickly. Her hands slip into her pockets, and she allows him to open the door for her onto the steps. The air is cool outside again, the moon beginning to become visible in the pale blue sky that is only just barely tinged with purple now. Danicka takes the first two steps down, unhurried.

Lukas

The first polite thing Lukas has managed to do tonight is open the door for Danicka. And they look so right doing it: the male tall and strong and dark, the female slender and lovely and golden. Except it feels odd to him. It feels odd because he knows what she is, and it's beyond the edge of belief. It's completely outside his rational world. And it's real. He knows it is, because he looks in her eyes

and an animal, wild, inscrutable, looks back at him.

The door shuts behind them. She doesn't have a coat. He puts his hands in the pocket of his. They walk for about half a block. Maybe she's headed for the subway. Maybe they're just walking. After a while, he looks at her.

"You doesn't make sense to me," he says plainly. "Nothing about you makes sense to me. What you are. Why you're here. Why now, why after so many years. What you could possibly want from us."

There was light left in the sky when he came here. It's gone now, all except for the faintest trace of blue in the sky, deep and resonant. His eyes have a little of that quality. The color is different - lighter, colder - but the resonance, the vividness, the lucidity.

"When I was young," he muses, "my parents told me about the ... Tribe. They taught me everything. It's not that I don't know the truth. But I've lived so long without having to worry about any of that, or having to contribute to any of that. I don't even have anything to contribute. I don't have the sort of connections or resources that would be of any use to anyone. And you don't need my skills, because you heal faster than I could ever patch you up.

"So I'd almost forgotten about it. The truth, I mean. And it's unreal, being faced with it all. Some part of me -- a big part of me -- wishes you'd just go away and leave my family alone. Leave me alone, let me live my life pretending I don't know."

A pause. The streetlights are just beginning to come on. He turns to her, he folds his arms across his chest. It's an unconsciously self-protective gesture that draws his shoulders inward.

"But then some part of me doesn't want that at all. It's easy to blind yourself to the truth but that doesn't mean it's right. And I want to ... know the truth. I think that's why this -- " he makes a gesture between the two of them, " -- this whole thing is so frustrating to me. You do these things that don't seem to connect at all, but you don't strike me as the impulsive, irrational sort. You're like a blank wall, and there's something behind it that you're just not showing me. I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want."

He stops there, lips compressing for a moment, looking away and back.

"Who are you, really?"

Danicka

This is a tendency he developed later in life, this habit of thinking quietly, angrily, stewing until the words all rush out of him, all at once, everything on his mind and in his heart that he can bear to get out there. Well no, that's not entirely true: he bottled things up when he was a boy, too. Bottled them until they broke. But this is different.

Either way, she doesn't quite expect it. Danicka walks down the stairs and Lukas follows her. Her heels tap quietly on the pavement; she's going west for now, and doesn't seem to be walking toward a car anywhere. To walk her out would mean to walk her to the door, perhaps the stoop, but then go back inside and have dinner with his parents. He is not walking her out. He just... walks with her, and

there is no telling him how she feels about that. No schematic exists for her to show him.

You don't make sense is the first thing out of her mouth, and she simply glances at him, quirks an eyebrow. What she is, why she's here, why now, even though he knows the answer to one and she's given him the answer to the other two. Nothing is required of them, and yet he wonders what she could possibly want. There's a look in her eyes, faint and soft, before she looks forward again, walking along the way. She looks monied, he doesn't look too shabby. She'll be left alone because he's male, he walks with her, he's tall and broad-shouldered. Just by walking with her and -- ironically -- scaring off the violent-minded,

he is sparing them from her. It's arguable that even Lukas doesn't realize that. Danicka, at least, isn't currently thinking about it.

He's not useful, he argues. Connections, resources, skills -- what does he have, what could any of his family have, that would be useful to her? Reconsider, it almost seems to say. Really, you don't want us. We can't help you. That isn't what he's saying, but on some level... on some level, that's how it sounds. Especially when he flat-out says a moment later: go away. Leave us alone.

There's a tight, hard furrow to her brow for a moment, a slightly deeper inhale on one breath than the next. But she keeps walking, and she keeps silent. His eyes come over to her, his arms crossing, and she keeps her steady pace, her steady stride, putting ever more distance between herself and his family's home but not much between herself and him.

The more he says, the more she wants to know what it is he really wants. But he gets to the end and he wants to know who she is. It's not an easy answer. Blank wall, he says. She's affronted by his expectation that if she's not showing him something then he has some sort of right to ask. He's presumptuous, telling her what he thinks of her, spilling his guts as though he doesn't have to be afraid, and it's irritating her... to a point. There are other reactions, more bewildering, that she doesn't have the time right now to analyze.

Finally she pauses, halting her steps mid-street to look at him. "Sometimes answers don't fit in words," she says, which sounds half-proverb, half-riddle. She does go on, though:

"If I fail this challenge," and even the way she says it suggests how dim a possibility that is at this point, whatever it is she's doing to win it, "then it is all moot. Nothing changes for any of you, and I go about reclaiming whatever face I've lost." There's a pause. "There is also the stipulation that if I fail, I am to separate myself from your family entirely, except in matters of life and death. If I fail, then you will not ever have to see me again."

For a second there she's tight, she's withdrawn, she seems almost angry. Only a second.

"But I do not undertake challenges of this kind -- or any other -- lightly. I would not have begun if I intended or expected to fail, or if I saw any cause for any Garou to be against it. So I will indulge, and speculate: I do not seek this because of you or your family's usefulness to me, either in contribution or as leverage. I want..."

the barest pause,

"...to take care of you."

Lukas

It's strange, but what she says there - you will not ever have to see me again - pangs oddly in him. It makes him feel lonely, as though he had been shown something remarkable and refulgent for a moment before it was taken away. She seems withdrawn, almost angry. He looks away; seems almost uncomfortable.

Then she goes on. Assures him of her confidence in her own victory. How like a Shadow Lord, he would think, if he had any real idea what Shadow Lords are like. But he doesn't. He hasn't lived in that world for so long; though, ironically, it could be argued that that world has never really left his blood. Intense, focused, deliberate, driven: he is so much a son of Thunder, and he doesn't even know it.

And: she tells him what she wants. And Lukas has made this sound before, this short, sharp, unvocalized, humorless laugh. It is a disbelieving sound, but not one that says you're lying. You're a liar. It's wholly different. It's one that says:

I can't believe what I'm hearing. It's outside what I understand.

"I don't need you to take care of me," he says. For what it's worth, this is almost gentle. "I can take care of myself."

And another pause. A long one. Then this:

"Are you looking for a ... mate? Is that what this is about?"

Danicka

[perception + empathy] 6, 9, 6, 6, 8, 3 (5 suxx)

Lukas

[Lukas is puzzled and consequently a little bit frustrated because he doesn't deal well with puzzles he can't solve. He isn't sure what she wants, exactly, or why. She's answering his questions but not really answering them to the depth and thoroughness he wants: he knows that ostensibly doing this because they knew each other once upon a time, but that hardly seems sufficient, and even she's admitted they aren't friends anymore. The only logical thing he can come up with is that she's reached the age or rank or something where she's decided to pass on her genes and somehow deemed him worthy. But that raises issues of its own. He doesn't know why him, specifically - again, that we-used-to-be-friends thing seems so flimsy. So either she's picking his name out of a hat, or else she's been watching him for some time, and both are frankly sort of disturbing to consider. Then there's the whole issue of how he feels about this mythical beast suddenly stepping into his life and wanting to 'guard' him or 'take care' of him, neither of which sits well with him. And then, beneath all that, there's the inexplicable, totally irrational fact that he is, as he would put it, 'drawn' to her. Nothing else makes sense, but he knows this for a fact: he would be sorry if he never saw her again.]

Danicka

"It's not about what you need," she says, and it's so quick, it's so sudden, it's almost sharp. It's almost a snap of her teeth at him. He doesn't understand anything. He doesn't know anything. What should he -- not just kin but very nearly lost kin, so unaware of what the world of Garou is about -- know about taking care of things that are your own blood, that are your memory, that are your markers of where one world ends and another begins, where that boundary is, why it matters, why any of it --

Her shoulders round down, slowly, as though she's pushing them back from rising in agitation. She exhales. They both pause. For a long time.

It takes him a moment to find that word, there, that damnable word. When he does, her eyes flick quickly to his, direct for a moment, but no more open than they were before.

In the end she does not give him any more of a satisfying, satisfactory answer than before, but it is still... rather telling. "As I told you the other night," which was weeks ago now, hard to remember precisely through the sleep deprivation and sheer amount of work he does, "there is interest that may lead to an offer."

Lukas

Say this much for him: Lukas's will is pure iron. Even as a boy he was willful, nearly obstinate. One imagines he's only honed that over the years, turned it into an instrument and a tool that has gotten him rather far in life. He has impressive credentials behind him; impressive training; every indication of an impressive future.

He doesn't flinch, even when she nearly snaps at him. But something in his eyes suggests he wanted to.

And then, later: if he were still a boy, he might have snapped then. At the very least, he might have packed up his toys and grimly gone back to his book. At worst, he might have thrown something, shouted abruptly, done something that would have landed him in a world of trouble. He's not a boy now, but for a reckless, insane moment he wants to grab this eldritch creature and shake her.

He doesn't. He takes one of those long measured breaths. It comes out a little faster than it ought to.

"Do you ever just say what you mean?" It's a rhetorical question. They've stopped walking, and by now the sky is quite dark. "At least answer me this much. Why me? Where did this 'interest' even come from? For god's sake, did you pick my name off a list?"

Danicka

The rhetorical question is a rude one, and she ignores the rest of what he says because of it. Her own temper tightens, too, and she takes a step toward him. He's much taller than she is, and she does not, can not loom over him. The intimidation she uses has nothing to do with physical size. It's that look she gives him, that inhuman wildness lurking in the shadows of her eyes, that dominance that, well, perhaps

had something to do with making him fall out of a tree when he was small, far too small and too young to defend himself against his own primordial terror.

"It may not seem like it to you, but I have afforded your family courtesy well beyond what is due, and I have given you a great deal more patience than you've shown yourself deserving of, Lukas. You will stop demanding more of me than you have any right to ask simply to satisfy your frustration and you will speak to me with far more respect than you have been."

Lukas

For once, it's not outrage that lights up his eyes. It's not defiance and anger that squares his jaw. She comes at him. His brow knits suddenly, spasmodically, and he tightens the fold of his arms across his chest, but

he looks sad. Disappointed, and maybe a little hurt. Her words fall into silence. It is too early in the year still for crickets and night-insects.

Gently: "That's the precedent you want to set?"

Another pause. Long. He's aware of a bottled frustration in himself; aware of running into wall after wall, every which way he tries to see into her. He's aware, too, of something he has little experience with: a sort of trapped helplessness, like an animal in a cage. The feeling of being utterly and unequivocally outmatched in every sense.

"I am drawn to you," he admits eventually. "I can't explain it. There are a thousand things wrong with how you've forced yourself back into my life, and I don't think you can even see it. In spite of that, I would be sorry, I think, if you lost your challenge and I never saw you again. And if my number is up and it's time for me to Serve The Tribe, I can think of worse things than an arranged marriage to you.

"But I don't know you. I don't know anything about you. So I can't trust you. And what you just said made me feel ... degraded in a way that injures any hope of trust or affection between us. The very fact that you hold all the answers, all the power, and threaten me when I ask you to cede even a little of it makes me feel degraded.

"I suppose if you decide interest has turned into an offer, I wouldn't have any way of refusing. But if you're looking for something more than a slave or a servant or a sperm-donor, this is not the way to go about it."

Danicka

Suddenly gentle, suddenly hurt and disappointed -- it only seems to inflame her further, make her angrier. She wants to send him flying. She wants to push him to the ground and hurt him until he turns soft. His arms cross and her teeth come so, so close baring at him in a warning far more intense -- and far more easily understood -- than any threat given in words. The words out of his mouth make her want to open his throat. There's several reasons why she waited so long to see him, or speak to his parents. The moon is only half now. That's one of them.

He goes on, though, and she shakes something off, gives an animal twist of her neck away from him. In the shadows around her one can almost see her fur laying down flat again, only

she isn't furred. She's smooth skin and soft hair and she looks very human, very fragile even, until you see her eyes. That's when it's impossible to mistake her for human, especially now. Especially when he knows. He doesn't know her deed name, or if she has a pack, or what being a pack means, or what her status is, or her rank -- or what that rank means. She could be a fresh Cliath and still be dangerous to him. She was eight years old and she was dangerous to him.

She is forcing calm on herself. Every other word her temper spikes, but she settles. She setthes. She makes herself look at him again, and some of what he says... soothes, even if it's only a little.

I can think of worse things

Her jaw moves, something flashing in her eyes. But it isn't anger. It's something deeper, and it hurts, and there's no easy name for it. After the rest of what he says, she's silent for a long time. The cold doesn't seem to be bothering her: but then, it wouldn't.

"It was not my intention," she says finally, her voice quiet, "to degrade you." There's another pause, and her nostrils flare as she exhales, gives a single short shake of her head. "But you must be more careful how you speak to me. You have been rude time and again tonight and I can't... stand for that, no matter how unhappy you are with how I've gone about this. Demanding what you want, when you want it, how you want it is not a precedent you should set with me, either.

"Or any Garou."

Lukas

"I wish you wouldn't do that. I wish you wouldn't make it about -- " the words almost stick in his throat, " -- werewolves and kinfolk. I know you don't want me to get injured because of what I say, but I don't want to apologize for being rude just because you're a werewolf and might eat me if I don't. That cheapens it, don't you see? I want to apologize because it's the right thing to do when you've been an ass.

"So, I apologize. I felt like my privacy has been intruded upon and my world turned upside down. But that's still no excuse for how I greeted you in my parents' home. You were a guest, and I treated you very... very poorly. I'm embarrassed, and I'm sorry."

He takes a pause, raises a hand, rubs his face for a moment. He looks tired again. He has to work in the morning. That seems surreal right now: a different world entirely, and he wonders when it was, exactly, that he slipped out of that normal, mundane world and into this one.

"As for the rest of it, all I want are some answers. Just one, really: why me. And if you can't or won't answer that right now, then at least tell me when you might."

Danicka

"How am I to know?" she asks. "If you even recognize that you're being..." a moment of hesitation here "an ass? That you aren't just puffing out your chest and snapping at any Garou you see simply because you don't want to be cowed? How should I know that it isn't you making some kind of rash, foolish point?"

Those questions are almost rhetorical, too: there's no way she could know, not after fifteen years, that Lukas isn't just a barking alpha male type jock surgeon who waves it around because he can, because it proves something, because in his world he gets what he wants, when he wants it, goddammit. No way for her to know, even after that apology in front of his mother, if he really recognized what he was doing.

What he was risking.

She doesn't argue with the rest, though. That it cheapens it. And she certainly doesn't argue with his apology. He mentions feeling like his privacy is violated, his home stomped into, his life changed completely outside of his control, and she... winces. She looks away, a pang of that expression mutilating her features for a second before they return to normal. Her eyes come slowly back to him.

All he wants are answers. If not all of them, this one. If not now, when. Danicka, true to form, thinks a long time before she speaks. When she does, it is after she takes a breath and lets it out slowly.

"You were... my friends," which is the same answer she's given before, which seems so flimsy to him because he just doesn't know. "Then you came around less, then not at all. I knew why." She doesn't say why. She assumes Lukas knows, too, even after all this time, forgetting that it can't have shaped his entire life the way it has hers. Well; if he doesn't know, maybe his parents will explain it to him.

"A few years later, after I changed, I was fostered in Prague. I spent many years there. Then Vienna, for awhile." A long while, it sounds like. It explains her strangely blended accent, at least. "A few other places. When I came back to the states I spent some time in New Orleans. Chicago. When I finally came back to New York, I went to Stark Falls first, and stayed there for a time. It took me a long time to come back to New York City. I've already lived a life more full than any human and even many Garou. I've seen things there aren't words to describe, felt things that seemed to last an eternity but were only an eyeblink to those around me. I have buried and burned packmates whose thoughts and hearts had existed simultaneously with my own."

She stops there, but only for a moment, and after that moment her voice has gotten rather quiet. Quiet, really, to hide the fact that it also aches:

"And in all that time, there was not a day that went by that I didn't think of you."

Lukas

Here at last, then, the truth he asked her for. Why, he kept asking, why, why, because nothing she told him made sense, nothing added up, she herself dashed apart the few reasons that seemed plausible.

They are not friends anymore. She didn't pick him out of a hat. She lived more than most live in a lifetime in that decade or so they were apart. She thought about him every day.

And that's an admission so painfully honest that he feels almost ashamed for her; the same instinct that would make him turn away from the sight of an unexpectedly naked woman. This is a nakedness far more profound than what was under her coat the last time they met, which may as well have been the first. It's a nakedness of the soul, and he can't bear to look at her for a second.

Then he does. His eyes are remarkable things, clear and sharp as crystals, pale as a gas flame. He looks at her, and they are standing on a street under trees leafless with winter, and suddenly and unexpectedly he wants to put his hands on her face. Bring her closer. Kiss her mouth. See if those teeth are as sharp and deadly as his gut tells him. See what lay beneath that one

maddening

button.

But he doesn't. He just looks at her for some time. Then he shakes his head.

"Except it wasn't me. It was the Lukáš you knew when we were children. Or maybe even the Lukáš you imagined. But they're shadows; memories and imaginations. They aren't the same as me. We don't really know each other, Dani ka, do we?"

He's quiet then. He thinks for a moment, his head down, looking at the pavement between their feet. The disconnect between vision and instinct is jarring. She seems so slender and slight. She doesn't look anything like the monster his every primitive impulse tells him she is.

"Can we try something?" He says this like he's offering a truce. "My shift's over at 6pm next Friday, and I have Saturday off. I'm at 700 West on Broadway and 192nd. Unit 8Q. Would you like to come for dinner?

"Say around eight."

[AND BECAUSE I KNOW YOU'RE GONNA LOOK IT UP ANYWAY:

http://hudson192.com/apartments/1-br-apartments/

look at unit Q.]

Danicka

It is a painful truth, and it is laid out so raw and naked that he is ashamed on her behalf. There's no shame in Danicka's eyes though, only a sort of determined resignation. The fact is, she rarely lies, but she also rarely gives anyone the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He can't understand this intuitively about her, seeing only that she has hidden so much from him already, but she does so to protect herself. She does so when the truth is too weak, too much of an exposure, too much for her to bear.

But why me, he keeps asking. Why me, he says, and she decides that if he's earned very little else, he should at least know that much. It's an embarrassing, even silly answer:

Because I fell in love with you when I was ten.

So she didn't pick his name out of a hat. She didn't just stalk him, either, checking his credentials against her internal list of acceptable traits. She hasn't quite explained in depth why now, why suddenly she's decided to take on the responsibility of four extra kin for the potential to take one of them as a mate when -- quite frankly -- she should have chosen a mate some years ago, just to have more time to carry and birth cubs. There's something else there, some reason she hung on to his name, his person, for so long that she came back to it years later and worked to gain influence and strength and clout

so she could challenge for him with some hope of success.

It says something about her, but he perhaps doesn't intuit this either, that she didn't try to get into his life, date him, get to know him, before she challenged. A whole other world of information about the type of wolf she is, and the type of female, held in the fact that she did not even approach him, talk to him, let him see her, until she was almost completely certain that she could win this challenge that's been set before her. In a way, it says everything about her.

When he looks at her again, she has one hand in her pocket still, the other resting comfortably at her side. There's a look he gives her, something in his eyes or his stance or his scent, that gives that momentary urge of his away. She's still paying such close attention to him -- in truth, has been paying close attention to him all evening -- that she sees it for what it is: want, sudden and utterly inexplicable, even to Lukas, but especially to Danicka.

She is aware, at least a little bit, of how her behavior must seem to him. Of how frustrated and intruded upon he feels. She knows he must be displeased at coming back to his sire and dam's den and finding a stranger there. She does...see that, though dimly, and despite the fact that she knows these things are necessary, that this is the way it must be done. So when he looks at her again and for a split second she can see that he wants ...something, her pupils dilate slightly in response.

Nothing happens. Nothing should happen. Except this: more words. She gives him a dry look. It almost seems to say really? tell me more. and the only reason it does not come off as blisteringly condescending is that her mouth is a bit wry, her eyebrow a little quirked, his comment so obvious that she doesn't even deign to respond to it directly. For a moment, though, there's a bit of humor in her expression, something other than the stiff, serious, businesslike demeanor she's shown him so far -- and something other than raw self-disclosure.

And what could she say to that anyway? That it still matters to her? That she knows that, how could he think she's so foolish as to not understand that? Maybe she should tell him why she thought of him so often, for so long, or why it was enough for her to go on when she came back to New York, or... maybe she could tell him a lot of things that she doesn't, explain herself more than she has, give him some better reason for her behavior.

But he's kin. He's not even her kin. She doesn't owe him any more explanation. Not yet, and not right now, when the last words she said are still fresh and bloody between them.

Her attention perks slightly when he asks -- offers -- that they 'try something'. It's curiosity, though a patient breed of it. And then he asks her to dinner -- dinner at his place, in fact -- a little over a week from now. Her eyes are a little wider than they were a moment before, her surprise mildly expressed but genuine.

There's a pause that lasts a little too long, right there. Some of that is simple thought: the moon will be new then, about to begin waxing again. Some of that pause is just coping with her surprise, her desire to ask him why, what does he want, why would he want that, but the truth is she doesn't want him to take it back. She doesn't want to ask and have the invitation withdrawn. She doesn't want him to change his mind, at least not with her standing right there in front of him. She finally takes a breath, exhaling silently.

"I will ask," she tells him. For permission, it sounds like.

Lukas

Lukas's smile is a small, wry thing. She needs to ask. For permission, it sounds like. It's a painful reminder of how very stratified her world is. He is meant to answer to her. She is meant to answer to ... whoever her superior is. And so on and so forth, he imagines. She can't even have dinner with him without permission.

What liberties she's allowed him, then. From his standpoint, she's unbearably oppressive; coming into his life, staring at him, claiming his family, informing him that if things go well, if there is interest, she may make an offer. But from her standpoint --

she's held back. She's been so careful. She doesn't want to risk familiarity, attachment, if nothing can come of it. She's approached him on his territory rather than summoning him to hers. She's come into his home as a guest, suffered his insolence and his questions, given him answers that strip bare her soul. She's given so much ground already. He keeps asking for more.

"Well," he says, something like a sigh. "All right, then. Maybe I'll see you next Friday." A pause. He extends his hand. "Goodnight, Dani ka."

Danicka

He'll ask her over for dinner, and she'll ask for permission to go. It would be laughable, a doctor in the beginning of his residency and a werewolf of mid rank -- which in this day and age is a rather high one to achieve without dying -- except these rules are very real to her. They determine how she lives, they affect her packmates, it's the difference between having a chance to see where this goes and being forbidden to ever so much as look at him again.

And he's never even met the wolf who supposedly holds the reins here, who determines whether or not Lukas can have dinner at his place with this woman.

That, too, is part of her why. Because they were all friends, once.

Danicka gives him a nod. Maybe next Friday: yes. He holds out his hand, tells her goodnight, and she wants to offer to walk him back to his doorstep but something tells her this would be more insulting than anything else, and when weighed and measured, not strictly necessary as far as his welfare goes. She exhales the desire to, and takes his hand, not firmly shaking it but simply giving it a squeeze before she releases it again. "Goodnight, Lukáš."