Decker Rohl

Danicka
But they don't.
That idea running fleetingly and silently through both their minds all night has been the same, but it has been a dream. No knowledge they had of each other in Chicago, dim and distant, could have led them to the revelations about each other they've had tonight. When he thinks of her now he will have two lives, two pictures, one seen out of each eye that somehow blend together into a whole person. That slip of a girl, her hair short and edged, her heart a molten core beneath several layers of slowly hardening ice.
There are six.
I didn't ask what you wanted.
I would try to love you, but I don't know how.
And this woman, fully grown, her hair long and soft, her eyes still as wide and unfathomable, her clothing so fine and her life so, so very far from his. They meet in the center of his vision, and he knows that middle part of her in a way that even her mate never could, because it lives in him, too. Despite the differences, despite the vast chasm between their lives and their destinies, despite her in silk and he in hide,
whatever souls are made of, theirs are the same. Cut from one cloth, sewn into different garments. They are alike, but they were never made for each other.
She does not belong here.
He does not belong with her.
They do not belong together.

It's Decker waking that stirs Danicka. Even unconscious, some part of her recognizes that the beast is no longer slumbering. It will be stretching, it will be hungry, it will begin stalking again. It wouldn't be the cold that woke her now, of course; under two thick furs and wrapped in this wolf's arms, Danicka wakes with sweat dampening the hairs along her scalp, sticking them to her temples in fine tendrils of moisture-darkened color; gold to bronze. She feels the cold, though, and it startles her eyes when she blinks them open. He feels her wake when she breathes in.
She smells the fur and the fire and the antiquity of it all, feels heavy and fearsomely strong arms around her, and then
realizes
it is not her mate. And her soul howls.
This is not something Danicka feels often. She hardly would know how to describe it. It's what she felt when she miscarried, though she has not told Lukas that, has not told Decker that, does not and would not speak of it in such personal terms. Her spirit was screaming, insane and inconsolable, even if outwardly she washed herself and brushed her hair and refused to cry and proceeded with life as though she forgot that her spirit ever felt such a thing.
It is not what she felt when her mother died, or even when Lukas left the hotel room, left her, moments after she admitted that she loved him. On both those occasions, she felt a sort of lightheaded numbness, the shock too sharp to even process, too hard to even name as one emotion or another.
Waking this morning, held by a wolf who is not her mate, not her utter companion, Danicka's soul begins keening, begins howling for him, crying out across god knows how many miles, begging him to hear her.
She closes her eyes again, trying to quiet herself, comfort herself. She is going back to him. It will be okay. He isn't gone. He is waiting for her. She exhales, and rubs the heel of her hand over her eyes, sniffs, and turns to Decker again. Her arm slips back over his waist. She misses that warm, lazy bonelessness of her husband in bed with her some mornings; Decker is hard as stone, so firm she can barely feel him breathing and is not sure she would be able to feel his heartbeat if she touched his chest. It is different. As her head rests on his arm and her eyes open to look into his, Danicka begins to remember who Decker is.

Alabama. Wanted to drive eighteen wheelers. He could go anywhere, be anything, be free. Likes blue. Killed his mother when he changed, tried to kill his father and couldn't, survived when his father killed him. The look in his eyes when she touched his face last night, just before they slept, like he was begging her not to stop even though letting her touch that lingering ember of softness in his heart was threatening to ignite it,
make him love her,
make him weak,
make him destroy her life.
Decker is going to go to New York City. Sometime. Probably soon. He's going to kill her brother. Not in any formal challenge, and away from any pack who might sprinkle Death Dust over his corpse. He's going to beat him until his corpse is unrecognizable. He's going to tell him why. For who. He's going to walk away. Her father and sister in law and her nieces and nephews will be safer, happier, their lives kinder. Danicka will not worry about what will happen if both her mate and her half-sister die, leaving all of them without a guardian among the Garou other than the Theurge who is just too crafty to get himself killed, the one she has no power to threaten or run from.
He'll be dead. Decker will have given her that much.
Looking at him, wordless still, Danicka thinks of all the things he told her last night on the drive, all the things he showed her just a matter of hours ago in the caern, memorizes his face. Sees him, she thinks, clearer than anyone ever has. Understands him, and -- hardest to bear, of all -- knows he understands her, too.
Whatever souls are made of, theirs are the same.

Of course they leave the bed, the furs holding her scent along with his now. Of course she washes up with ice cold water, shivering, gasping at it hitting her face. Of course she wraps herself up in jacket and coat and gloves again. Of course he feeds her: some bread, which is all she seems to want.
They leave without fanfare or looks back. Danicka does not abandon his den forever with some attachment to it. She will not miss it. She will not bother to remember its arrangement or its scent, though the truth is,
if she were eighty and changed upon it, she would walk through that narrow doorway and remember everything about this night without hesitation or falter. She would remember his scent tonight, his face looking at hers in bed, remember the way he held her ten years ago when she told him she was so sore, asked him to please just hold her.
Maybe they get looks. Maybe more of the Fenrir see her, smell her, notice her. Maybe the kin talk; there are gossips in every tribe, no matter what they think of themselves compared to each other. Maybe he lays the fur over her again; maybe with the sun up it is warm enough that her coat is enough. Maybe he changes for the walk; maybe not, if she reaches out for his hand in time, holds it before he thinks to shift. Maybe her hand in his fur again, between his withers, as they head back to the garage and his car.
Silent as a vigil, as a procession, as a funeral march.

The drive is long, and longer still because they stop to get some coffee, a bit more food for Danicka, though that doesn't take much time. Halfway back she wants to tell him to pull over, please, because she is all but overcome with the desire to weep. She wants to tell him not to go back to Storm Hammer, to come with her, to live near her, just be there, don't be out of her life, don't be gone,
but Danicka only looks out the window, holding that cup of coffee between her palms, seeing her own faint reflection suspended in the glass against trees, against powerlines, against whatever they pass. She does not cry. She does not ask him for anything.

He has to take her to the hotel. That's where her suitcase and all her thing are. She still has more than enough time to shower and pack and get to the airport from here, since originally her plan was to stay all morning and afternoon for the tail-end of the conference. She never changed her flight. She never debated whether to call Lukas and let him know she was coming home early or just surprise him.
But sitting outside the hotel in his car, Danicka doesn't get out instantly. She and he have said hardly anything to each other all this time, ever since waking up. Practicalities, mostly, necessities, quick questions with quick answers about tangible, immediate things. Washing, food, coffee, gas. Now she looks at him, still smelling like she's his when she's not, and then
leans over to him, puts her hand on the back of his neck, and bows her head. Touches their brows together, breathing the same air, holding him like that for several very long moments. Her eyes are closed. Her hand on the back of his neck is bare and warm, the same place she touched him moments after he said Wanna go again? and right after she said Yeah, reaching for him, pulling him over her because once was never enough. It never could have been.
Several long moments. Then her head lifts, her hand slips away. She lets him go.

When she gets out of the car, and closes it behind her, and walks to the hotel, Danicka does not look back. She thinks he'll understand that. Partly: she can't bear to see him watching her, or watch him leave her. And also because: they are past the point of looking back. They both are.
It seems like she should have said something. That she won't ever forget him. That she'll always remember him and what he has done for her. That knowing him for two nights of her life has changed that life, shown her a reflection of herself she never could have understood without him. She wants him to know that he is a part of her, that they are two of a kind, that she believes one day they will meet again when they wear new faces, carry new memories. She should have said goodbye, but at the very end of it all, Danicka has nothing to give him but her silence.
She thinks: he already knows all of that. He already understands. Because whatever souls are made of,
theirs are the same.
Silence
Morning is as merciless as anything else in the far north. It is fierce and bright and cold, and what light steals in between the miniscule slits and cracks of the thatching falls searing across the dirt floor, the furs. They open their eyes in unstable light, the Modi quiescent just a little longer, his body hard under her arm. The Shadow Lord tells herself she will be home soon. She is going back to what is hers. The keening in her soul quiets. She stays a little longer with this wolf, who is not hers, and who can never have a claim over her.
He closes his eyes a little longer. A handful of minutes, no more. Then, on a swift inhale, he sits up. Swings his feet to the dirt floor.
And so they rise, they dress, they wash with water so cold it takes their breath. They eat some of last night's bread. Danicka doesn't want chicken soup; Silence lifts the pot in one hand and drinks directly from the lip. Then he opens the door to his cottage, which is to say he pins back the heavy skins and shoves aside the wood slab, rather like a caveman rolling a stone out of the entrance of his cave. That searing mid-morning light leaves a brilliant white oblong on the floor, so bright that it lights even the shadows. It is a clear day outside. The sky is an impossible, crystalline blue, and the ground is blindingly white.
They were likely the very last souls in Storm Hammer to sleep last night, and equally likely the last to rise. The Sept is alive: smoke drifting from the huts and the langhúses; farmers in the fields. The percussive, metallic music of the blacksmith. The scent of new bread, reheated stew. Beef and venison and cabbage. Potatoes. The sudden stench of someone dumping their chamberpot in a ditch. The shriek of children, playing in those precious few years before they'll be expected to work, to pitch in, to pull their own weight just like everyone else.
Life is tenacious. It goes on. It finds a way, always. There is life here, as cold and stark and grim as the north seemed by night. There is life, and it is hardy, and rough, and hotblooded against the chill. She does not belong here, but some people do. These people do.
And Danicka is right: these kin and wolves of Fenris are prone to the same social urges that stir any people. They look at her as she passes, surprised or shocked or delighted or puzzled. Tongues wag; she can't understand half of what they say; many of them aren't speaking English at all. Precious few of them recognize her, or her mother in her. A little girl runs up to Danicka as she's passing the Caern's heart; she's blonde and blue-eyed and perhaps seven or eight, and she stuffs something into Danicka's gloved hand before running away again. It's a pebble, pale blue and veined in white, pretty, worthless. Decker eyes it a moment, then shakes his head with a snort.
" 's my half-sister," he says. It's one of the few things they say to each other that morning. "My old man has like a dozen bastards. She pro'lly likes yer hair. Obsessed with blondes lately now that she's discovered she is one."
Out from the village, then. Out, away from the huts and the houses and the pigpens and the chicken coops. With the sun up and the weather finally, sluggishly turning toward a short Minnesota summer, they don't need fur. He carries the fur she wrapped around herself last night, has it folded and draped over one shoulder. It looks right on him. Barbaric. He walks in his human form; wants to, anyway. He's glad when Danicka takes his hand, and though he says nothing of it, his hand squeezes hers through their gloves. Just once.
They pass the last of the farms. They pass the trophypoles. Different guardians this morning, wiser about keeping their mouths shut. One of them nods to Danicka, and she knows from the look in his eyes that he, too, knows who she is. Out a little farther, and they're at the crest of the hill where the Caern's spiritual curtain wall lies. Decker pauses there just briefly. He glances over his shoulder. Perhaps Danicka doesn't.
They cross the wall. The world swims, comes back together. They are alone.
The drive is long. They stop for coffee, a snack. Once or twice, he thinks maybe she's going to say something, maybe she'll ask him for something he has no right to give her. He's afraid she'll speak because he doesn't know that he has it in him to deny her now any more than he would have last night, had she reached for him. She doesn't, in the end. She keeps her peace. He keeps his. The sun reaches an apex and begins to slide into the west. Slowly, slowly, human civilization reasserts itself. Silence looks more and more out of place. He doesn't belong at all, not one bit, when he finally pulls to a stop in front of her hotel. His eyes scan the building; then they come back to her.
Maybe he should say something. That he won't ever forget her. That they are two of a kind, and even if they were never meant for one another they are the same. They've changed each other. Maybe he should reassure her that he'll be all right. Maybe he should give her some way to contact him, some emergency means in case she's endangered, in case she's alone, in case she changes her mind.
He doesn't. Easier this way. When she leans toward him, pulls him toward her, he goes without resistance. His eyes close; his brow rests to hers. Anyone would think they were lovers, but he doesn't try to kiss her. It doesn't cross his mind. He doesn't interrupt the sanctity of the moment, or grasp at it. He lets it wash through him, like sunlight through an open doorway, lighting even the shadows. A very long time passes, and then
she draws back.
He smiles a little as she looks at him. It's such a subtle expression on the hardness of his features that it's nearly impossible to discern. Just the barest curvature of the lip. Just the slightest softening around the eyes. They don't speak, and a moment later she gets out of his car. She doesn't look back, and he doesn't blame her for that, or hate her for it, or forgive her for it. There's nothing to forgive. He understands: they're past the point of looking back.
When the door shuts behind her he turns out of the parking lot. He doesn't look back, either.
--
A few weeks go by. Perhaps a month or two. And then the night is dark and the moon is full and all the Sept of the Green is gathering for the moot. Heals by Pain leaves the house he shares with his mate. There's something waiting for him on the street, sitting at the curb. It rises when it hears the snick of the door locking. It moves like a python, the utter steadiness of unspeakable strength. Fenris is the savage brother of Jormangandr, the world serpent; in their own mythology, the Fenrir are closer to the Wyrm than any other tribe. Destruction makes a home in their hearts.
Once upon a time Heals by Pain called the Stark Falls Sept the backwaters, the sticks. One can imagine what he'd think of Storm Hammer. Besides, Silence really is from the backwaters, the sticks. Long before he turned into a barbarian he was called all manner of things. Hick, redneck, dumb as a post. Never to his face, though. God knows what Heals by Pain thinks to see the wolf that approaches him now, dressed in animal hides and skins. What he thinks when the wolf calls him by name. Says:
Yer sister sent me.
Says:
Ya broke a covenant every time ya raised yer hand to her. You owe her. Tha debt is pain, fear, 'n one life. She'll mourn ya when yer dead.
Heals by Pain never shows up at the moot. His packmates feel his link blink out of existence. They look for him for days and days; they find his corpse nearly a week later, battered beyond recognition, dishonor carved into his brow in Fenrir runes.
And then of course there's an investigation. Spirits are consulted, records are checked. A Warclaw, a Fenrir and a Full-Moon, was in the area a few days prior. Hunting some Wyrm-wolf from New England to the Chesapeake, it seems. He has a history of violence. A history of murder. He has a reputation for having a quick temper, a brutal hand. He's done something like this before on numerous occasions, carving dishonor into the hides of his enemies. Or victims. Who knows what poor Heals by Pain might have said or done; who knows how he brought Silence of the Fenrir's wrath down on his head.
The proof isn't solid, of course. It's circumstantial at best. Still; everyone knows who did it. But then there's the matter of the rank of the offender, his position, his affiliations. There's the fact that Storm Hammer is a hornet's nest on the best of days, ever so ready to fall on any perceived offense. There's the fact that Heals by Pain had a lot of 'friends' while he was alive, associates kept in line by implicit threat of retaliation, creatures bound by the ropes of their own shady dealings. None of that matters now that he's dead. Every rope, every bond, every string is cut.
In the end, it's rather firmly suggested that Silence not return to the Sept of the Green again. That any business the Nation's Warclaws might have with that Sept ought to be conducted by his compatriots who were better able to restrain themselves. Heals by Pain's things, along with what influence he retains in death, are summarily divided amongst his packmates. He passes into memory.
Another week goes by. Someone finally remembers to notify his kin. His mate gets a visit from a young Galliard who dreads the task.
His sister gets a phone call.

Silence
It is mercy, when she falls asleep. So maybe it's a form of cowardice that he suggested it. Or maybe, painfully, it's a sort of mercy from him as well. She must be tired. Who wouldn't be, after being up all day and half the night. After being with him, in the corona of his rage, for hours. After the things they spoke of. After the way he kissed her palm, and the way she drew away.
Her arm rests over him. His rests over her. They are as close as lovers. Closer than lovers. He can't remember Imogen ever leaning on him like this. He can't remember that once-mate of his ever sleeping close beside him, touching him, holding him. His rage was too much for her, or perhaps it was her own solitude, her own pride all along. It doesn't matter anymore. That life is gone; a handful of ashes and a memory.

As he promised, Decker wakes her as they draw nearer, saying her name again and again until she stirs. The clock on the dashboard doesn't work. Her watch or her cellphone tells her it's been about two hours. He's turning off the freeway onto a highway, and then from the highway onto a small country road, unmarked, barely paved. Frost skims the asphalt, ghostly as it passes under their headlights. He drives for a time, miles and miles. Eventually they arrive at a solitary barn, a dark hulking shadow in the night, unmarked, unexplained.
He turns off the road. Gravel crunches under the tires. "Stay here," he says, and gets out. This far north, April is cold. His breath steams white as he unlocks the barn doors. The hinges are rusted or frozen -- stiff as corpses. He forces them open -- swings the doors wide. A couple other cars inside, big sturdy utilitarian ones. As he comes back, he circles behind. Opens the third door and rustles around the back. It's a coupe; the trunk contiguous with the cabin. Chill air drenches Danicka almost immediately; abates only slightly when he slams the door shuts again. He gets back into the car, smelling like the cold, handing her something -- a fur -- the skin of some slain beast. Nothing luxurious about it. The hide is tanned stiff. The hairs are coarse and long, faintly musky. It'll keep her warm, though.
"Wrap it around yerself," he says. "Cold out, 'n we's walkin'."
They park inside. As soon as he kills the engine the cold begins to encroach. In seconds they'll be able to see their breath in the car. He tugs rough gloves on; laces his clothing tight against the wind. When he gets out, he comes around to her side of the car. He's not all frost after all. He still burns, a pillar of flame, a lightning storm. This car doesn't have a stuck door, but he opens it for her anyway; because her presence throws him into the past, perhaps. The gesture throws him into the past.
She rises out of the car. There's a strange, hard sort of pain in his eyes as he looks at her: golden, wrapped in fur, like some queen of winter, some prophecy of a spring that was never meant for him. He steps back. Slams the door when she's clear of its arc.
"C'mon," he says. The barn door, too, is shut and locked, hiding its contents away.
Outside, the land is flat, monotonous with darkness and residual snow. There are no lights. There is no warmth. There is no sign of any sort of civilization whatsoever, no matter how primitive, beyond this one barn they're soon to leave behind. Overhead, the sky seems enormous; merciless. Bonechilling cold gives a clarity to the air. There are more stars here than she'll ever see in Chicago, but the spaces between them are a velvet, devouring black. A naked wind rakes unopposed over these northern plains.
Silence
It is mercy, when she falls asleep. So maybe it's a form of cowardice that he suggested it. Or maybe, painfully, it's a sort of mercy from him as well. She must be tired. Who wouldn't be, after being up all day and half the night. After being with him, in the corona of his rage, for hours. After the things they spoke of. After the way he kissed her palm, and the way she drew away.
Her arm rests over him. His rests over her. They are as close as lovers. Closer than lovers. He can't remember Imogen ever leaning on him like this. He can't remember that once-mate of his ever sleeping close beside him, touching him, holding him. His rage was too much for her, or perhaps it was her own solitude, her own pride all along. It doesn't matter anymore. That life is gone; a handful of ashes and a memory.
As he promised, Decker wakes her as they draw nearer, saying her name again and again until she stirs. The clock on the dashboard doesn't work. Her watch or her cellphone tells her it's been about two hours. He's turning off the freeway onto a highway, and then from the highway onto a small country road, unmarked, barely paved. Frost skims the asphalt, ghostly as it passes under their headlights. He drives for a time, miles and miles. Eventually they arrive at a solitary barn, a dark hulking shadow in the night, unmarked, unexplained.
He turns off the road. Gravel crunches under the tires. "Stay here," he says, and gets out. This far north, April is cold. His breath steams white as he unlocks the barn doors. The hinges are rusted or frozen -- stiff as corpses. He forces them open -- swings the doors wide. A couple other cars inside, big sturdy utilitarian ones. As he comes back, he circles behind. Opens the third door and rustles around the back. It's a coupe; the trunk contiguous with the cabin. Chill air drenches Danicka almost immediately; abates only slightly when he slams the door shuts again. He gets back into the car, smelling like the cold, handing her something -- a fur -- the skin of some slain beast. Nothing luxurious about it. The hide is tanned stiff. The hairs are coarse and long, faintly musky. It'll keep her warm, though.
"Wrap it around yerself," he says. "Cold out, 'n we's walkin'."
They park inside. As soon as he kills the engine the cold begins to encroach. In seconds they'll be able to see their breath in the car. He tugs rough gloves on; laces his clothing tight against the wind. When he gets out, he comes around to her side of the car. He's not all frost after all. He still burns, a pillar of flame, a lightning storm. This car doesn't have a stuck door, but he opens it for her anyway; because her presence throws him into the past, perhaps. The gesture throws him into the past.
She rises out of the car. There's a strange, hard sort of pain in his eyes as he looks at her: golden, wrapped in fur, like some queen of winter, some prophecy of a spring that was never meant for him. He steps back. Slams the door when she's clear of its arc.
"C'mon," he says. The barn door, too, is shut and locked, hiding its contents away.
Outside, the land is flat, monotonous with darkness and residual snow. There are no lights. There is no warmth. There is no sign of any sort of civilization whatsoever, no matter how primitive, beyond this one barn they're soon to leave behind. Overhead, the sky seems enormous; merciless. Bonechilling cold gives a clarity to the air. There are more stars here than she'll ever see in Chicago, but the spaces between them are a velvet, devouring black. A naked wind rakes unopposed over these northern plains.

"Y'alright?" he asks, low, as they start to walk. He seems to pick a random direction: deeper into the white. "It gon' scare ya if I go wolfskin fer tha walk?"
Danicka
A couple of hours is long enough to dream. She does, vivid and lustrous like her dreams seldom are. Danicka hardly even remembers them most times, but lately they've been intense enough to confuse her once she returns to waking reality. She dreams of her mate, sleeping like this against a beast made of muscle and bone and rage, her arm covering him almost protectively. She dreams about Lukas walking next to her, silent as though he's in a form that can't manage words she'll understand, though he wears a human face. She dreams of winter, even though they are cresting on spring now. He's troubled by something, a fear deeper for him than the loss of his own life or even the loss of hers. He won't speak, though, and Danicka is afraid to make him. Afraid to make him say it. Afraid to hear it, because in her dream, speaking it makes it real.
Danicka, says a voice that isn't her mate's, over and over, low and twanging. He can't pronounce her name for shit, some sleepy part of her mind thinks. Some mindless aggravation with Americans -- though she was born here just as surely as Decker was -- stirs her to wakefulness as much as anything else.
Her eyes open. She doesn't look at the clock or at her phone. She looks at the road ahead, frosted despite the time of year. It troubles her more. They've gone back in time. They've entered a realm where dire wolves rule, where winter is too strong to ever abate. It's not where she belongs, and she knows this on as instant and primitive a level as she knew in her dream that naming a fear would bring it to life. They don't speak. She breathes more deeply as she sits up, her neck and shoulders sore and tight. Danicka rubs at the aching spots, cracking her neck, sighing. The road gets smaller and the night gets darker, with no streetlamps to light the way. Headlights and stars, mostly. Frost like silver lacing across the roads and through their breath.
Danicka brushes sleep out of her eyes, taking another full breath and looking at Decker. He drives. She looks forward again, waiting for something to change. Eventually it does: the barn appears, and when he tells her to stay, she doesn't want to argue. For all she knows there's some kind of portal in that barn leading, in truth, back in time. It would not be the first time something like that has happened to her, after all. But he opens creaking doors and it is, in fact, just a barn. A garage, in fact. She follows him with her eyes as he circles around to the back of his own car, twisting to watch him.
Then, like he really is her mate, like any of this is okay, he brings her a skin. It still smells a bit like the animal it was. It smells like tanning and like the sweat of whomever slept with it last. Probably Decker himself. Danicka covers herself with it, silent. The car moves again, then goes dead and still, the growling engine sleeping again. She reaches, picking up her bag, and Decker comes around to her door, opening it. Something weirdly chivalrous about that, though they have gone back to a time before chivalry. Danicka rises up to her feet, in between the metal of the car and the meat of Decker. She adjusts the fur, wraps it around her shoulders and her body, her hair all the paler against the dark, coarse hairs of whatever animal was killed to feed and warm the kinfolk. He is looking at her, and she looks up at him, catching that ache in his eyes. She doesn't remark on it.
C'mon, he says, and she starts to walk alongside him, her heels making quiet thuds on the floor of the barn until they leave it, then almost no sound at all when they do. She looks up, the starlight reflecting off the frost that coats the plain. There are places where winter truly never dies, where spring is a few weeks of sunlight bordered by cold and dark, where the rainy and humid verdancy of lowlands and vineyards is nothing more than a fantasy. Yet that's where she belongs. That is where she comes from, and what her blood smells of. As she starts walking with him, it is hard not to look down and expect to see the frost melting beneath her feet, the grass unfurling into new green shoots. But no: her breath clouds as thickly as his, and the air does not grow warmer just because she's there.
She looks at him when he questions her. At least the ground is hard, she's thinking. Her shoes don't sink into it. But he asks, and her brow furrows a bit. "No," she says, her voice only loud enough to be heard over whatever wind swirls around them. "Only the in-between forms."
For some reason, though, she reaches out to him. From under the fur her arm slips out, her hand coming up to his face. She touches him there, her palm still holding onto some warmth as it aligns to his jaw. She can't remember if she ever touched him like this in New Orleans; she doubts it. But she does now, her thumb moving over the roughness of his cheek, looking at him for a few moments before the face she's familiar with changes again, becomes unrecognizable. A few seconds, and her hand is already growing cold. It withdraws, perhaps too soon, perhaps because of the cold, perhaps because of that kiss he burned into her other hand before she went to sleep. She steps back then, to give him room. Or give it to herself.
Silence
She sleeps; she dreams. And Hamlet was wrong after all because there's no peace in that rest. Her dreams are haunted by ghosts and heartache. A little later she wakes into darkness, into a cold as deep as winter, though spring has long since settled in more southern climes. No flowers spring under her feet. You are the spring, her mate wanted to say to her once, but perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps she is winter after all, the solstice, the deepest black of night.
In her waking world she walks beside a wolf who is not her mate, cloaked in furs that he has stripped from who knows what. Prey, certainly. Some large antlered thing taken in the last flush of autumn, when even the trees are laid bare. Or prey of another sort entirely, perhaps. Some twisted, hulking, three-eyed thing, slavering with malice, mad with corruption; shorn of its hide as a final, cannibalistic gesture of dominance. It could be. Silence wouldn't hesitate to wear his enemy's pelt. He wouldn't hesitate to drape it over Danicka, either; wouldn't be afraid that some lingering tremor of corruption might have escaped the cleansing rituals, the preparations and the tanning. Wouldn't be afraid that her soul was somehow too frail and pure and weak to handle such a thing.
He knows she is not weak. He knew it from the start, when he offered her blood-spoils in the form of a rumpled twenty-dollar bill. In this, too, he understood her instinctively, unquestioningly, without proof or need of proof.
Only the in-between forms, she says. Which he did not know or suspect about her before. He doesn't comment; he doesn't look at her with pity or disgust, either. Just nods, a loose jerk of his chin upward.
She touches his face. He doesn't flinch, but his brow furrows and a line etches itself between his eyebrows. He doesn't cover her hand with his. He does lean into it, very slightly, the hard angles and rough stubble of his cheek pressing to her palm.
Just moments. Then he drops from beneath her hand, hits the ground almost silently. Four paws, thick fur of his own. Steel grey. White across the shoulders, a blaze down the chest. He is not large in his human form, not for his bloodline, but he is monstrous in the other ones. His withers come up past her waist. He licks his muzzle, whuffs white into the air, and leads her into the aimless darkness.
A hundred yards, two hundred, a thousand go by. Silence's pawfalls are quiet but not silent, a smooth lope, tireless. His breathing is deep and even. He doesn't loll his tongue out. More than half a mile in the stark cold, and then -- without warning -- her head feels light, the ground shifts soundlessly beneath her feet. Her vision blurs for a second. Then it clears, but something's changed. There are lights ahead, much closer than logic dictates. She should have seen them minutes ago. She should have seen them from the barn, but she didn't.
She sees them now: fires burning in the dark, smouldering down to embers as the night approaches dawn. A village, a crude clustering of langhúses attended by smaller cottages with abutting chicken coops, pig pens, cattle runs; surrounded in turn by small plots of farmland. There's a path at their feet now, hardpacked dirt. A few hundred yards down the road stands a set of four trophypoles, hung with all manner of grisly paraphernalia. The newest are still fresh, dripping blood or putrefaction. The oldest are desiccated and crumbling to dust, collapsing down from the trophypoles when the wind gusts too strongly.
A pair of guardians stand watch near the trophypoles, huddling on the windless side of a hide tent. They would be boys anywhere else in this country: fifteen or sixteen, lanky, awkward at the joints. They are men here, guardian wolves of the Storm Hammer, Cliaths who have bloodied their teeth and earned their names. One wears his white-blond hair long and shaggy. The other is somewhat darker, his hair shorn short. When they see movement in the darkness they grow visibly alert, the dark-haired one reaching down to lift a throwing-spear from the ground at his feet.
His voice comes to them distantly, half-tattered by the wind: Identify yourselves!
Beside Danicka, the Modi is in his man-shape again. The change was instantaneous. He rolls his neck on his shoulders and he lengthens his stride just a little, just enough to step in front of her.
"I AM SILENCE," he shouts across the distance, the loudest she has ever, ever heard him, "Athro, Modi, sworn ta Storm Hammer. This's Danicka of tha Shadow Lords, who is my guest."
He can't pronounce her name for shit. Nevertheless, it seems to satisfy the guardians. The spear is lowered, though not yet set down. The reply comes to them:
Approach.
Danicka
Danicka does not think about where the fur came from. She does not choke on the smell and she doesn't grimace at its weight, because in the end it is warm and the night is cold and she is an animal at her core, just as they all are. She holds it as tight as she can around herself. Pauses a moment before they start walking to pull her slim but well-lined gloves from her coat pocket and put them on, puts up the hood of her coat from underneath the fur. When she begins walking alongside him, she walks slowly; the ground is uneven and she's in heels. But she doesn't complain about that, either.
After a short while, her hand comes to rest on his withers. Her gloved hand buries itself in his own fur, thick with winter, and then curls, gently holding on as though to keep from losing him in the dark. There's no danger of that. None whatsoever. She does it anyway, and does not have to bend to reach for him. Her grip is firm, familiar with mammals, and remains where it is for the rest of the walk.
Which is not as long as she is expecting. The ground changes, and Decker's sharpened ears can hear Danicka's sudden -- and startled, on the verge of frightened -- intake of breath. Her hand tightens for a moment on his fur, and it must be for balance more than comfort --
who would reach out to him for comfort?
-- because it relaxes a moment later, when her feet steady on the ground once more. She does not like this. It is reminiscent of the sensation of a werewolf slipping through the penumbra and appearing out of nowhere, a sensation she has feared and hated since childhood. There is even an unspoken but unviolated law in both her dens that Lukas will not do that to her. Tonight it takes her a moment to calm down, to see the difference, to understand that this is Storm Hammer and that this invisible line is a protective one. It is a shield.
After that initial clench of unease, Danicka sighs. She does understand. And a part of her, secretive and in love with hiding places, even appreciates it. Even if, for a moment, she's not entirely sure they haven't stepped back in time.
Her hand does not clutch again at Decker's fur when she sees the guardians. When the guardians rise, spear in hand, shouting into the dark. She stands beside him, and withdraws her hand slowly. Every movement slow. A second later, the creature beside her isn't a wolf anymore but a broad-shouldered man again, and he moves a step in front of her, putting himself between that spear and her body. His could take it. Hers could not. She does not flinch from the sound of his voice. He says her name, though, and her tribe, and that nearly makes her flinch. She glances at him, then at the guardians. They say to approach.
A part of her wants to take his hand as they start walking again. She doesn't. She does look at the two young wolves as they pass, though, her head covered by a black wool hood and her body covered by a thick pelt of dark fur. Gold hair spills out nonetheless, though, frames her face, makes the green of her eyes all the darker when she glances at them. She does not look like a Fenrir. She does not look like a Fang. She doesn't look like a Shadow Lord, either.
But she smells like one.
Silence
Danicka isn't sure she hasn't stepped back in time. She has before, and she may as well have now. It's the same sort of world, the same sort of self-sustained, hidden bubble of a world. Garou surrounded and supported by their kin, living off the land and what grows and walks on it, guarding their territory, baring teeth to all intruders. So has it been; so shall it be.
Bidden to approach, they do -- not that Silence ever stopped walking. He slowed, a little. He moved in front of her. He would have taken that spear for her. Taken it, ripped it out of his gut, snapped it in half, jammed the pieces into the eyes of the one who threw it, maybe. The guardian's body could have taken it too. In this Sept, that sort of behavior, which would beyond the pale in a different Sept, would be perfectly acceptable. Condoned. Considered quite well-deserved, even: a guardian who can't see the difference between friend and foe wouldn't deserve to see at all for a while.
This guardian can see the difference. "Rhya," he says to Silence. His nod is returned silently: a jerk of the Modi's chin upward, an old mannerism from those days on the streets, in the cities, squatting in the guts of dismal asbestos-strewn buildings. The guardian turns his attention on Danicka, wary, suspicious maybe. His shaggy-haired vigilmate sniffs in her direction openly. She doesn't look like a Fenrir, or a Fang, or a Lord. She smells like one, though, and one of remarkable breeding. The fairhaired guardian's face registers surprise. Then he puts his hand on his compatriot's shoulder. They must be packmates; the spearthrower glances quickly, almost sharply at him, then lowers his spear to the ground and takes his seat again.
"Welcome to Storm Hammer, kinswoman," the fairhaired one says. "Your mother was known to us. When I was a cub I learned her stories along with our own. We respected her strength." His eyes shift to Silence. "Happy for you, Rhya."
"Shutcher fuckin' face. You don't know nothin'."
The guardians exchange a glance as they pass. Danicka can hear them conversing quietly in her wake. Night Warder's daughter, she hears. Seven silver lances.

If Decker has heard the stories too -- and he must have, if they tell them here at Storm Hammer. If even the youngest Skalds know them well enough to recognize the bloodline on sight. He's a Full Moon himself, an Athro himself now. The same rank Night Warder was when she died, though not the same rank Night Warder was when she was buried. But if he's heard the stories -- he doesn't start talking about them. Asking her the details, the stories, what was it like to be the child of a legend.
He doesn't need to ask. He knows what it's like.
He nods toward the trophypoles instead as they pass them. "Wyrmpoles," he says. "This's tha southern approach. Four more at tha east, 'n tha west. Nine in tha north, 'cause Fenris comes ta us from tha north." A faint, thin sort of amusement. "Wanna look good fer him.
"Everythin' 'tween tha trophypoles is tha Caern proper. 's funny, back in Chicago we ain't let tha kin in tha Caern. Here they all live in tha Caern. Pertected, right in tha middle. Tha bawn's much bigger. We been on it since tha farmhouse. It goes all tha way north inta the treeline, 'n past. 's where tha cubs are sent ta hunt, to feed tha kin. 'n ta learn."
They walk on. Distances are deceptive here. It's a long way past the guardpost til the village. Far in the distance, indistinct with night, they can barely make out those nine trophypoles that mark the northernmost border of the Caern's physical incarnation. They pass those tiny farms ripped out of winter and wilderness's greedy grasp through sheer tenacity. The earth is still icy, but the plowing has already begun. The fields lie waiting for the planting, once the night-frosts subside. The animal pens are all empty, the livestock crowded into what shelter there is to share warmth through the darkness.
As they approach the village, Decker nods toward one of the larger buildings. "My father's an Elder too," he says. " 's his langhús there. Him 'n his pack, 'n all his kinfolk."
Danicka
Decker slowed; Danicka stopped entirely. She looked down at the frost-laced ground as though inspecting something on it, but her eyes are unfocused; faraway. She has not shown this side of herself in some time, but she was always a master of this art. To be quiet but not broken. To be pleasing but not pandering. To submit to wolves, not disgust them. It's a fine line, weaving delicately between all the different things that can set off a Garou's rage to lethal reaction.
When she begins walking again, she lifts her eyes only enough to find her steps ahead of her. The fur is long, particularly on her, and one end trails the ground behind her feet. She passes uncomfortably close to the guardians, and they do not pull back. They stare at her, watch her, tracking her with their eyes. Danicka pretends not to see it. She flicks her eyes at one as he sniffs, drawing in as much of her scent as he can past the musk of the fur and the more familiar smell of Decker. But he's not really just catching her scent, then. It's spirit. She glances at him, and it's in the lines of her surprisingly sharp jaw and the soft roundness to her nose, the broad curve of her forehead, the pale gold of her hair. She looks like her. She's always looked startlingly like her mother. Painfully so.
And they recognize her. Night Warder, not Danicka, though one lives in the other's features and scent and spirit and nightmares.
That glance she gives the two young wolves is guarded and careful at once. The one who sniffed compliments her, in a manner of speaking. Welcomes her. She wants to snap at him that her mother wasn't known to them at all. She wants to tell him he doesn't know a god damn thing about her mother, but the truth is that in some ways he knows more than Danicka does. In some ways, he knows more of her life than Danicka ever will. Even Danicka knows that in the end, the mate and children and den that her mother had were never really the center of her life. It was the sept. It was the pack. It was the war.
But then he compliments Decker. Happy for him. Good to bring back the daughter of a respected, strong Ahroun as your mate. Her soul feels like a clever and brave one, despite being a Shadow Lord. Maybe that makes it better still, to bring back the kinswoman of Thunder as his own. Besides: she's lovely. Danicka only blinks, lowering her eyes again, and doesn't contradict. Doesn't have to; Decker tells him to shut his face. She does hear them, as she and Decker walk past. It's not the first time she's heard those exact words whispered in her wake. It's just been a very, very, very long time.
Her gloved hand does find his then, as he's talking to her about the Wyrmpoles, trophy poles. She isn't really listening. Smooth, supple leather just slides into Decker's palm, against the rougher leather of his own gloves. She doesn't try to lace their fingers. Danicka says nothing about the poles for impressing Fenris, or the boundaries of the caern. She has been almost entirely silent since waking up. Now is no different: she doesn't want to ask what sort of kin would choose to live here, in this day and age, because she doesn't want to hear about how many of them might not be here by choice. Pertected, right in tha middle. She doesn't want to tell him what that sounds like to her. Why bother? She didn't come here to pity the kin of Fenris.

too.
That word makes Danicka look over and up at him before she ever looks at the building his nod indicated. She looks at it for a few moments, a few very long moments, before turning back to Decker.
"But not you."
Silence
"Naw," the Modi agrees. "Not me. 'm his only Trueborn son, but I ain't his pack 'n I ain't his kin."
The building he indicated is one of the largest and most impressive in the village; a sign of indisputable status. It, like the other langhúses, is built on a low stone footing, with a steeply sloping roof that comes almost right down to the ground. The frame is heavy, hard wood, etched with runes and the crude likenesses of wolves and their prey. Two enormous bears are carved into the pillars that flank the great double doors. The roof itself is thatch piled thick. There are no chimneys for cold and snow to get in through, no windows to let heat escape; smoke filters through the roof and the cracks in the walls. It's completely medieval, but it, like so many other things the Fenrir own and enjoy, is built for the cold. Practical and survivable through any winter.
His father's house, like the rest of the village, is quiet at this time of night. Too late for the Garou to be still boasting or drinking or fighting or fucking. Too early for the kin to have risen to see to their chores, their crafts, all the silent and uncelebrated things they do to keep this village, this bizarre and anachronistic world alive. They pass it. The carven bears snarl at them silently, their paws holding the roof aloft like Atlas bearing the world. Then some smaller buildings: a foundry, a forge, a woodcarver's workshop, a weaver's loom. A butcher. A baker. Another sprawling langhús a stone's throw from the obvious center of the village: tha Sept Alpha, says Decker.
He nods in the other direction, then. An open area there: the center of the village and the caern. An enormous stone hammer stands on end, taller than a Crinos, adorned by glyphs, ringed by runestones.
"Tha heart'a tha Caern," Silence says, standing beside Danicka, "where Þunraz tha Storm God lives in the Umbra. Story is tha Caern used ta be Wendigo, hundreds 'n hundreds'a years ago. Nine packs'a nine came from tha Fenrir lands, commanded by Fenris himself. They sailed the oceans to the western shores. When they got here they tore their ships apart 'n rebuilt them as smaller vessels, too small to go home in, but big enough to thread the rivers. Three'a tha packs split up 'n founded new Septs 'n settlements. Three'a them died tryin'. 'n three'a tha packs, the strongest packs with tha baddest Alphas, followed the rivers all tha way inta the continent.
"They eventually found their way here. Way the Skalds tell it, the Wendigo were weak 'n corrupt, so obsessed with they cannibal totem-spirit that they was turnin' on each other, eatin' each other in bloody rituals. Wendigo pro'lly tell it diff'rent. Anyway, tha Fenrir descended on tha Caern. Three packs, nine wolves each, one under tha Sea Dragon, one under tha Snow Witch, 'n one under tha Storm God. Three packs fightin' fer nine-times-nine days 'n nights against hundreds'a Wendigo 'n they kin.
"Everybody dies. 's how most stories go fer my tribe. All tha Wendigo 'cept the Sept Alpha 'n his two brothers. All tha Fenrir 'cept tha Storm Alpha. So they had one last battle, three on one, that went on from dusk til dawn til dusk again. 'n the Storm Alpha killed the brothers, 'n he killed tha Wendigo Alpha, 'n he drove off tha Wendigo caern spirit. Then, mortally wounded, he crawls to the Caern's heart. He bleeds out. Right over there. 'n as he dies his lifesblood charges tha Caern 'n opens tha moonbridge. All tha warriors from his home Sept come pouring through to take the Caern. In his honor they make Þunraz tha spirit of the Caern. 'n that's how this became the Storm Hammer."
It's about as archetypal a Fenrir story as they come. Hard to say what Decker thinks of it, though. He obviously knows it well. He must see the raw heroism in bleeding to death so a Caern could be born; he must see that, with his own history. But the's not like the Fenrir here, the ones who were born and raised in this cloistered iron bubble, where all that is Fenrir is righteous and mighty, and all that is not is worthless. He's had packmates who were Fianna, who were Bone Gnawers, who were Glass Walkers; tribes that even the progressive Get sneer at. He's lived in the guts of the city. Fought the low war.
Lives here now, though. Wears skins and roughspun cloth like the rest. He shrugs, a slow roll of his shoulders. Starts walking again.
"They still tell that story at every single Moot. Tha Skalds do it better'n me, know all tha names 'n shit. Cub Skalds don't pass they Rite'a Passage if they cain't tell it right. The kid out front, tha blond one, I heard he ain't told it so good. 's why they called him Iron-Tongue." A faint, snorted laugh. " 'nother one overdid it last spring, threw in all this random shit 'bout tha Storm Alpha cryin' his eyes out as he bled ta death 'cause he thought he'd failed Fenris. They named that one Weepin'-Warrior."
Danicka
Just a few words, just once, and that's all Danicka has said since she woke up beneath his arm. She listens. Looks at the house his father lives in, looks at the heart of the caern, listens to the stories. But all of that is Storm Hammer, and though a part of the reason she is here is ostensibly so she can see this place he inhabits now, something else is rising up in the back of her mind, and it hurts. It hurts terribly.
She is still holding his hand. Unremarked, though perhaps seen by those guardians as they walked away. Even through two layers of leather she can feel the heat radiating off of him, keeping at least that hand warm. He begins walking again, talking about the Skalds and their failures at telling the story, the names they were saddled with as a result. Danicka does not start walking again. She hangs back, holding his hand still, til their arms extend and he stops or tears himself away.
She doesn't think he'll let go. She thinks he'll look back.
When he does, she looks at him with that furrow between her brows, that ache that has barely left her. Her skin is pale and her cheeks are red from the cold. Her breath is steaming and she's shaking slightly.
"Take me to your den," she tells him, quietly, and surely this is because she's cold and surely this is because it is as much a reason as any why she's here, but
just as surely,
she has to know the effect those words will have on him, would have on any wolf who has had her and wants her again, still. Surely she knows what it sounds like to him. She says it anyway.
Silence
He didn't say anything when she took his hand. He was showing her the trophypoles. The measure and span of the Caern. He'd looked down, though, a quick flick of his eyes to her hand in his.
She's still holding his hand now. Neither of them say anything about it. Neither of them really even acknowledge it, not until he starts to walk away, and she stays. He stops, then. Almost immediately. He stops and he turns, he looks at her. She's shaking. He doesn't think it's just the cold. The words impact him somewhere inside, and for a moment it's hard for him to remember who she is. Whose she is.
His hand firms just a little. "I am," he says, and tugs her gently toward him. "C'mon."

They leave the caern's heart behind, and the palpable throb of energy that surrounds the stone monolith. The night seems to grow darker and deeper with every passing moment, though they're closer to dawn than to midnight now. No insect chirp in the darkness; it's too cold still. Summers here are so short, choked between early frost, late snow. They pass smaller cottages, some with log walls, some with waut and dabble, a few with stone.
The one he takes her to is quite small; easily one of the smallest homes in the village. He'd be lucky if there were a hundred square feet inside. The footprint is exceedingly simple: just a square. Looking at it, Danicka might suspect Decker built it himself, and she'd be right. She might suspect he's not very good at building houses, and she'd also be right. The walls are stone, but it's uneven, every stone a different size, some of them sticking out. In some places, mortar alone fills sizable gaps. The roof is lumpy and thatched, and apparently putting in a proper door was beyond his skills. A huge slab of wood rests over the entrance, crude but effective. It would take inhuman strength to move it alone. And besides, the keep out message is unmistakable.
Silence lets her hand go so he can open his 'door', heaving the slab aside. Behind it, two layers of heavy hides block errant gusts of wind. He pulls them back to reveal a doorway so narrow that Danicka can just barely fit without contorting. Decker, when he follows, has to turn his shoulders sideways; stoop.
When they're inside, he drags the slab of wood back over the door. Lets the skins fall, tugging them to seal the cracks. It's dark inside. No windows. It smells like dried straw, woodsmoked, salted meat. There's a scratch, a hiss of a match lighting, and then the Modi cups the tiny flame to a broad-based candle, which he places in a wall sconce.
By that light Danicka can see his den. It's as humble as anyone might have expected. The floor is dirt. There's a trap door in the middle, which is to say: there's another slab of wood covering a hole. Probably some sort of cold storage, where he could sequester snow and ice from the winter and keep perishable food cool through the summer. There's a bed against one wall: a wood frame a foot or so off the ground padded with a mattress that is quite obviously just straw sewn into a sack. Furs not unlike she one she's wrapped in, dark and coarse and warm, are piled three or four layers deep on the bed.
Opposite it is a fireplace which dominates most of the wall. No chimney here either; just a high, sharply sloped ceiling. She can see the underside of the thatching through the wood frame of the roof, and the blackened area at the apex where smoke tends to collect. On one side of the fire, closer to the door, are stacks of firewood, perhaps a half-dozen buckets, a scrubbing brush, and a bar of yellow soap that would probably strip the skin off a lesser creature. Some of the buckets are filled, the water skinned over with ice.
On the other side of the fire is a heavy wooden table. There's a cleaver on the table, a meat knife, a skinning knife. Also a large fork and a spoon large enough to double as a ladle. A small black-iron pot. A very old, battery-operated portable TV -- the only object in the entire cottage that looks anything but medieval. A set of whittling knives; a few blocks of wood caught somewhere between being pieces of trees and pieces of art. Cured sausages and salted meats hang from hooks over the table. A head of cabbage, icy shards clinging to the leaves, is jabbed precariously on the point of a hook. There's a sack of potatoes, a couple onions, a small bag of salt, and a single bench under the table. He pulls the bench next to the fireplace for Danicka before crouching down to start a fire.
"Tha water in the metal buckets is fer drinkin'," he says, stacking kindling, stacking logs. "Boiled. The water in tha big wood buckets is fer washin'. If yer hungry, tha darker-colored sausages are good. One'a tha kin made 'em, not me. 'r I kin try 'n stew somethin'." He glances over his shoulder -- not at her but at the trapdoor, brow furrowed, thinking. "Got a haunch'a elk down there."
He strikes another match along his thigh. Leans forward to coax smoke out of wood, fire out of smoke.
Danicka
Danicka doubts any woman has ever said those words to Decker before. She knows even before they begin walking away from the center of the caern that he lives alone. He sleeps without pack or kin huddled around him in the dark. She knows long before they come to his den -- his hut, his cave -- that it will be an ugly, rough place.
He tugs her toward him a bit, his hand harder on hers, and she breathes in as she steps closer. Lets him pull her.

The smell of the hut strikes her. All the smells of this place, from the moment he put the fur around her to the moment when he moves the wood and opens the hide flaps and takes her into his den. Here all the smells huddle together, meat and sweat and animal skin and smoke, Decker himself, strength and rage. Being in such a small space alone with him is unsettling. But out of the wind it's at least a few degrees warmer, and Danicka reaches up to remove her hood. She doesn't look around; it's dark and there's no point.
Decker comes in behind her and for a moment she wonders what will happen next. If he'll pull her to him there, tug and yank and rip clothing to get to her, have her on the ground -- which feels hard-packed under her feet. It's a fleeting thought, and yet it's not altogether wild or unrealistic.
Instead, he turns on a light. This, like most things, is made from someone's hands. The candle was. The sconce is. It's still dim, but somehow it seems warmer just to have something to see it all by. Danicka looks around then, taking in the furs and the bed, the board across the floor. Truthfully she has no conception of what that might be, why there's a hole in his floor covered by wood. Everything about this place makes it clear how much she does not belong here. Everything in Storm Hammer is Fenrir. She imagines that every wolf and every kinfolk in this place is Fenrir or has been adopted by Fenrir. The houses and huts, the weapons, the runes --
and then her.
Though her hair is light, its golden color is more honeyed than the white-blond of the Norse descendants living here. Her eyes sometimes look blue, but only in daylight and even then they are mottled with amber and green. She does not look stocky or strong. She looks like lifting even the smallest hatchet to split kindling would be too much for her, like she'd never be able to carry home so much as a brace of rabbits, and like childbirth would be a rare and dangerous thing for her. At least when compared to the kinfolk of the Get, Danicka looks... fragile. It's a good thing they came at night. If more than those two guardians had seen her, a great many pairs of eyes would be watching her, judging her. Danicka doesn't imagine anyone would make her survival their problem.
Danicka looks around, taking everything in, and then she walks over to the bench that he drags out. Still wrapped in fur, she sits down on it and watches him as he starts building a fire. She thinks she might be thirsty, might be hungry, but right now the smells of this place feel overwhelming, as though her senses have become preternaturally heightened. She doesn't feel like eating, and then -- quite suddenly -- Decker mentions the dark sausages and her gorge rises with precipitous speed. She coughs suddenly, glove over her mouth, looking down and shaking a bit when it passes. Swallows thickly and gives a small shake of her head.
The fire is starting to stir. Danicka moves over to one of the metal buckets, taking the spoon with her. She uses that to drink, slowly though, warming the water in her mouth before she swallows it.
Silence
Danicka's pretty subtle about her physical reaction to the mention of food -- or maybe it's where she's with, and who she's with. She doesn't retch audibly. She doesn't go green around the gills. Not enough to notice, anyway.
She does cough. And Decker does have good ears. She'll remember that, because he demonstrated it twice in the short span of their acquaintance. Once when she kicked that bottle over, and he looked not at the smashed glass but up at the girl that caused it to smash. Once when they were going up to the hotel room she'd rented for the night
so they could fuck each other senseless
and some self-righteous jerk said something unkind, and he turned, and he looked for a moment like he might put someone's head through a wall. It was a strange, savage sort of protective instinct.
So is this. He stops what he's doing. There's a curl of smoke from the fireplace; the very slightest beginnings of a fire. He turns, a hulking, beastly shape crouched as he is: all thick shoulders and triangular torso. Curved spine. Shadowed brow. He frowns at her for a moment. Then he finishes building the fire quickly, efficiently, practicedly. Gets up and comes over to her, wherever she is now. Puts his hand on her arm, the round of her shoulder. Gets her attention and waits for her to look at him.
She finds him looking back at her. That quick frown hasn't faded. "Y'alright?" he asks, low.
Danicka
Still wrapped in furs, still wearing her gloves, Danicka waits for the fire to catch on well enough to start warming this place. She is sitting on his bench at this table, huddled against the cold, and when she coughs, it does sound... a little sick. Not like something just tickled her throat. It sounds like a gag turned into a cough, and that's the sound that Decker reacts to, the one that brings him over to her side, frowning like that.
By then, though, she's not coughing. She doesn't look pale or dizzy or anything of the sort. She is, in fact, looking to see if there's bread or something somewhere. Something bland, something filling. But Decker comes over, and his hand is heavy even at its gentlest. She looks at his hand, then at his face, meeting his eyes. That isn't easy, and after a moment she closes her own, turning until her brow rests against his wrist, thick and bony.
"Tired," she murmurs. "I should eat something, but I just feel a little unsettled. I don't think sausage or cabbage is a good idea."
Her eyes open, and she looks back up at him. "Or haunch of elk." A touch of humor there, a tug at her mouth, a glint in her eyes.
Silence
It seems to reassure him a bit when she meets his eyes. She leans against his wrist, and there's a pulse there, palpable amongst the tendons and cords. The bones, the flesh. An unfamiliar tenderness lives suddenly in him. He frowns at the top of her head, the slope of her brow.
Then he steps forward. He cradles her head, her shoulders; holds her for a moment against the pillar of his body. The cloth beneath her forehead is rough and hard. The same could be said of his torso. Nothing about him is particularly comforting. Most of the time he doesn't even try, but right now, he does.
A moment later they draw apart. She looks for something to eat; something that's not sausage or cabbage or elk. The corner of his mouth moves a little. "Wait fer me," he says.

He's gone for a little while. She's left alone in his primitive den while the fire crackles higher. There's one thing to be said for a total lack of windows and chimneys: heat doesn't escape very fast. It builds quickly once there's a fire. In moments, it's quite warm inside.
The door opening brings another blast of cold. Silence shoulders his way in. He has something under his arm, wrapped in cloth. A small, crude pot in the other hand, which he hangs over the fire.
"'s nice sometimes bein' an Athro." He's smirking a bit when he hands the wrapped bundle to Danicka. It turns out to be a hunk of cheese and half a loaf of bread, crusty, a little dried on the broken end but still soft enough inside. "The Fosterns down tha way had chicken soup."
Danicka
He holds her. Danicka isn't expecting it, and it makes her breath sharpen slightly just as Decker lays his hands on her, cradles her. She doesn't startle though, and it seems to pain her more than anything else. It doesn't seem to frighten her at all. She does not hold him back just then, though; she holds the fur around her body and allows him to trespass where he ought not to. Where she ought not to let him.
They pull apart, and he leaves. Tells her to wait, and of course she never did but she will now. He leaves, and the hut grows warmer with every passing crackle of the fire.
After a while, Danicka sheds the fur. She leaves it around her hips, falling all over her thighs and the bench. She takes off her gloves and tucks them into her purse. A few more moments pass, and she unbuttons her wool coat, letting air touch her blouse again. She doesn't shiver when Decker comes back in, but her eyes check the sky, and thus the time.
He got chicken noodle soup from the Fosterns down the way. A tiny smirk flickers over her lips, and then she smiles softly, achingly, at him. "Thank you," she says, as they begin to lay out this luxurious spread. Something easy and bland. Something you give the sick, really. She wonders if she's sick or if she's just exhausted, stressed, hurting inside. Any of it could be true; they're at the tail end of flu season and she's been pushing herself at school, she just returned from an overseas trip, it's cold outdoors and when she isn't studying sometimes she is wondering if she is somehow hamstringing herself, unable to get pregnant because of lingering fear that one day
Lukas might hurt them. Hurt her.
Danicka isn't about to unburden herself to Decker about her life, though. Her mate, her love, her fears, any of it. She isn't going to unburden herself to Lukas, either. But the last few months have worn at her, and it shows in the corners of her eyes -- or it would, if Decker knew what she looked like last fall or last summer. Ten summers ago is hardly anything he can compare to.
In time, they eat. Danicka has shed her coat now, too, wearing a cream silk blouse beneath a cropped, stone-gray wool jacket that has delicate ruffles at the cuffs and along the hem. Layer upon layer. She doesn't take off her shoes and tuck her legs up, though she wants to. She does not want to get too comfortable here, because in the end she's going to leave and --
at the same time she knows she's fooling herself. She is going to come into his den that he made warm for her and eat the food he brought for her, and she is going to climb onto that stack of furs and sleep in his arms and that memory will always be there, just like the one of her in his truck, her hand gripping the bar, her head thrown back, her sweat on his skin.
Danicka dips bread in soup, drinks ice-cold water, not knowing what she will tell Lukas, if she ever tells him about this at all. Not knowing if wanting Decker means she loves Lukas less, never loved him at all, has never been capable of love, is, in fact,
broken. Damaged.
So she is quiet. Unsettlingly quiet, has been since a long time ago in the car, to the point of protracted silences that would be awkward if she weren't sitting with someone like him. Even so, it's possible it bothers him. She eats, slowly and carefully because the mere mention of sausage made her nauseous a little while ago, and she does not burden the air with her talking.
Silence
There's no telling what goes on behind her eyes. What she thinks about; what thoughts turn in her mind. She's opaque to him. A stone egg, Lukas called her once. Decker doesn't make allusions: she's just unfathomable. He doesn't even try.
He can tell she's troubled, though. He has some guesses why. He doesn't talk about them. There's no point. He was never one for talking, anyway. They break bread and eat cheese. After a while the tiny pot of leftover soup is hot, and he brings it over, sets it in front of Danicka. He doesn't even have bowls. They eat like savages, sitting side by side on that rough bench, dipping bread into a pot still scaldingly hot if they were to accidentally brush it.
His eyes are on the fire. It's hypnotic. His hands crack the crust, rend the bread open. He pulls the soft innards out, dips, lifts his head to snap up the remains. He licks his fingers clean; he speaks as though half in a dream.
"Maybe if you was my mate," he says, "I wouldn'a fergotten how ta love ya."
A few beats go by. He's not a dreamer. He's hard and realistic to the point of pessimism. He has no illusions:
"But I guess you woulda still run in the end."
Danicka
He doesn't know her well enough to know this, or understand the reasons for it, but the more relaxed Danicka gets, the more she eats. She is uneasy now, and very sad, and eats slowly. She doesn't touch the cheese. After a while, she shrugs out of her little jacket, as well. Between the heat of the fire and the closeness of the wolf, the hut is growing steadily warmer to her. He can see the outlines of her arms inside that silk blouse, even in the half-light. The firelight makes her hair seem darker in places than it is, makes certain hairs light up as though gleaming in the sun.
Decker says he might not have forgotten to love her, how to love her, if she was his. Danicka looks up, pausing, and then looks at him. Maybe. But she doesn't know. Neither of them do, and they are well past any point in either of their lives where they might have had a chance to find out. She thinks in some ways it's better not to know; they can imagine it's true, rather than having to face it becoming ashes in their mouths.
She does not want to imagine how Imogen felt, though the truth is Danicka's perception of Imogen is such that she doubts Imogen let herself feel much at all other than annoyance or disappointment. Mostly, she does not want to imagine Lukas unlearning how to love her It happened slowly for Decker and Imogen, but the real breakage happened when he was on his Athro challenge.
Danicka is quite sure that by the time her first child is born, Lukas will no longer be an Adren. She doesn't want to think of what will become of her then. If.
Decker concludes, though, that she might have run anyway. Danicka looks back at the food they're sharing, the soup that he is mostly eating, the bread that she is slowly chewing away at. She's quiet for a second, and a long enough second that it seems she -- again -- has nothing to say. But she does. Even if it's brutal. Even if it hurts. The truth, Danicka has always thought, is rarely gentle.
"I don't belong here," she tells him quietly, as the fire cracks and as a log pops, splits, releasing a burst of sparks flying upward. "I don't think I would have belonged among the Eagles or with you in Chicago. But here, especially..." her head shakes slightly, her eyes skimming away and looking at nothing. "I study engineering physics. Materials. I've been trying to reverse-engineer an energy weapon I took from these bizarre creatures that my mate and I fought... god. Going on two years ago, now. I'm solitary, and I don't mind keeping to myself, but I love my family. My half-sister has six children, four of whom live in the states now. Two of whom are wolves. Shadow Lords. I carved the symbol of my mate's pack totem into the rafters of our den, because he's a Czech storm god. There's an oak in our backyard that's Awake, another symbol of that totem but also --" she doesn't know how to explain this. She pauses there and exhales. "Another symbol of how well my mate knows me, and how much he loves me, and how much that den is my home now because the one I was born in became a nightmare, and I still missed it when I lost it."
Danicka uses a bit of bread and just idly stirs the soup, looking for a bite of chicken, or maybe just soaking up broth or maybe just finding something to do with her hands. "I have a cat. She's declawed and I got her at a shelter because I know what it's like to have your strength and your defenses broken off from you in pieces, and because I know that doesn't mean you're worthless or weak. She's orange. I named her Kandovny, because that's Czech for candy, and because my mate's favorite treat in the whole damn world is a candied orange kolache. And he adores that stupid cat even though she ignores him.
"All our family -- minus my brother and his wife, of course -- came to our den for Christmas. And there was all this awkwardness because his sister doesn't want kids but her boyfriend does but otherwise they're perfect for each other. My mate thinks my older niece still has a crush on him but she's ready to have sex with her boyfriend. My sister is still wearing scarves because her hair is slow to grow out from all the chemo and she doesn't like how it looks all spiky and short. My father has Alzheimer's. Lukas's parents sort of... check in on him and take care of him a little these days, because they're all in New York. But I worry. He was middle-aged when I was born, and his life has been... painful."
She isn't even pretending to eat now. She's just unfurling her life, as it is now, as it is back home, the words tumbling out of her as though she's been saving them up. "My nephew and other niece are both Garou. He changed not so long ago, under the same moon my brother was born under. Lukas arranged for him to go to the same sept he was fostered in, though, to help keep him safe from Vladislav. Irena hasn't changed yet, but it's coming. Faster than anyone is ready for, I think. She's an Ahroun. She's going to come live with us -- or near us, at least -- when she changes. She and Lukas are special friends right now, because her father died when she was tiny and because he's going to be her mentor, and it makes me so sad to think of how much that will change when the time comes, even though if it doesn't change it will make her weak. Weak to the point of being pathetic. And we can't have that. It will kill her."
Danicka sets down the bread and lifts her hands to her face, covering her eyes because her hand has begun to feel cool again and because her head feels like it's burning. "I'm trying to get pregnant. I want to have children with Lukas. I want to have a whole damn pack's worth of babies with him and raise them in our den even if we never have enough room, even if we're stacking people on top of each other during the holidays and the little ones are wailing and colicky and even if Lukas's mother won't shut up with the advice and even if Lukas can't be there because he scares his own sons and daughters."
Her hand moves, and wipes away a tear or two that have slipped past her lower lashes. She sniffs, shaking her head, lifting a piece of bread again. Not looking at Decker. "That's where I belong," she says, but her voice has fallen. "That's my home, and my life, and I don't know if I would have run from you anyway, but even though right now a part of me loves you and wants you and wants to stay here and be with you..."
the truth, then. He's not a cub, he's not a Cliath, he's not a dreamer or a fool. He could pull a spear out of his gut, spit a bullet out of his mouth. So: the truth, harder than any bullet and sharper than any spearhead.
Danicka, mid-sentence, looks at him, her brow furrowed and her expression torn,
heartbreaking, even.
"...I'm glad I ran. Because I don't belong here. And I think you do."
Silence
He needed to hear that. Hard as it was, sharp as it was, he needed to hear it. All of it. He needs to hear who she is, the details of her life outside these two discrete bubbles of time where they are together. He needs to hear who she loves, who's out there for her, who she wants to be, what she wants to do. He needs to hear how different she is from him, because when he's with her all he can see is the intersection of their lives. Their souls.
He doesn't look at her as she speaks. He keeps on staring at the fire, the bread forgotten in his hands, the pot forgotten between their feet. Firelight brings shadow and sunlight into her hair. Firelight makes him starker than ever, hollowing out the orbits of his eyes, shading the musculature in his arm.
She's glad she ran, she says. And his eyes close for a moment. Open. It would be a lie to say he's glad, too. He's not glad. But:
"You was right ta run."
He looks down. His hunk of bread is down to crust, and he's absently shredding it between his hands, pulling it to pieces, bits, crumbs. He tosses a handful into the fire. Dusts his palms off.
" 'Cause yer right. Ya don't belong here. You could, if ya wanted to. You could adapt. Yer strong enough. But you'd hafta put out a light somewhere inside. Only darkness 'n cold 'n hardness survives here." A small pause. He doesn't mean Storm Hammer, in the end. He doesn't mean the medieval conditions, the lack of electricity and running water and any of the inventions of the last hundred, five hundred, thousand years. He means: "With me."
He stands. And he reaches into the fireplace, fearless, grasps the unsinged end of a burning log, tugs it. Collapses the fire; scatters the heart. Lets it burn a little lower, lessening the roar, the heat. Straightening, he dusts charcoal off his fingertips, then turns to level his eyes on hers.
" 'm glad ya let me see it," he says. Quiet now. " 's a kind'a mercy."
Danicka
When they met, they were not so different at all. When they met again, their lives had already veered so far apart that they couldn't even fathom it. But there was still that core similarity, solitude, sameness. They are vastly different. It doesn't mean they don't understand each other.
As when Decker closes his eyes before opening them again. As when he says that she was right. Danicka watches him, thinking of her life and family and future, all these things that he does not have and will not have. It is okay. It is where he belongs now. It doesn't mean it doesn't ache like a bone remembering a fracture during a storm.
She smirks, sidelong and sad, when he says she could belong here. She could adapt, because she's strong. It's really in those four words: if ya wanted to. And it's in the words he doesn't say for a couple of moments, either: with me. Danicka doesn't want to. Even to be with him. And it would be the same in the end: her wanting to be loved, him not remembering how, her trying to pull him back into the world, him born to leave it behind. Bloodily. In the end, she isn't dark or cold or hard. She is spring, like her mate once thought. And she is soft, as that wolf-born once said of her. Sunlight dappled on green leaves. But even Danicka couldn't bring summer to Storm Hammer.
"I think there's a bit more with you than that," Danicka whispers. She means him wrapping her in fur, holding her to his body, feeding her, closing his eyes. Even if that only exists right now because she sits with him in this hut, she's seen it. It isn't dark or cold or hard. But maybe that's what he means, what he already knows: they can exist, these warm and gentle things. They just can't survive.
"But I won't tell," she adds, just as quiet, and he stands. He grabs burning wood and breaks it apart, stirs the fire. He's preparing it, wordlessly and without announcement, for the two of them to bed down together. Danicka reaches down, hair falling across her cheeks, and unzips the sides of her boots, slipping her feet out from them. She doesn't set her feet on the earthen floor, though. She tucks them up onto the bench, into the furs around her lap, looking up at him when he looks to her. He mentions mercy. She doesn't think it was that merciful. Only honest. Raw and a bit cold but honest.
Without answering, Danicka holds her hand out to him. Perhaps it meant something between he and Imogen, whose hand was extended and whose palm was turned up, but Danicka reaches for him or takes his hand as thoughtlessly and uncomplicatedly as she says his name. "C'mere," she murmurs, her words fuzzing together. "I want to go to bed but I don't want to get my socks dirty."
She smiles.
Silence
She doesn't think it's mercy -- and neither would anyone else. Decker's not afraid of the bitter truth, though. He's old friends with bitter truth. Truths like: he was born to kill. Truths like: he was born to die. Truths like: his kind, the hard, cold, violent ones like him, are necessary in this war but will have no place whatsoever in whatever world might come after Apocalypse. The Fenrir mythology doesn't even cover the aftermath. There's Ragnarok, and then there is nothing. Not for the Fenris-wolves. That world will belong to the softer, gentler, brighter souls their violence will save. They are born to die so that others can live.
So: it's mercy, when she tells him she doesn't belong here. When she reminds him that no matter how much she feels like she could be the same as him, she could be his, she is not. When she tells him all the reasons they are not the same, and never will be. When she tells him all this,
extinguishes foolish hope,
it is mercy. He can go on, then. Freeze over and become cold again. She's right in this, too. There's more to him than hardness and darkness and cold. But it would be easier if there wasn't.
She takes her shoes off. He looks at her socks, bemused. He can't remember the last time he saw a kinswoman wearing clothes like her. Clothes made by machine, each one the same as the last, the fabrics fine and soft, the stitches even. Layer after layer, for comfort, for style, not necessarily for practicality. She wants to keep her socks clean, she says. He takes her hand.
Then he bends to her, slides his shoulder under his hand. His arms under her. She swings effortlessly free of gravity's pull; he could literally toss her twenty feet into the air and catch her again. He kicks the bench aside, wood banging noisily on wood as it hits a tableleg. When they first stepped in here she wondered if he'd bear her to the ground, tear at her clothes. As he lowers her to the crude bed, pawing aside three layers of furs to lay her atop the fourth, her scent is all around him and the thought is in his mind. Night Warder's daughter. Strong enough, if she wanted to be. But the Greeks knew the truth of it: the queen of winter was really the goddess of spring.
She doesn't belong here.
He kneels beside her, back to the fire. Shadowed. His hands work bone toggles from their little nooses. His coat whumpfs to the ground: not leather after all, Danicka can see now, but the entire hide - underside out, dense fur on the inside. He tugs knots loose, claws his roughspun inner shirt up his back, strips it over his head and drops that, too. His pants are some sort of animal hide, shapeless, tied into place with a rope. His hands hesitate at the rope. Then he leaves it tied; doesn't undress entirely.
There's the scar she remembers, crossing his thorax. There's the new one he told her about, huge, ugly, disemboweling. And something else too: the ink-black tattoo on his left arm, jagged and insidious, a full sleeve from the back of his hand all the way to his shoulder, to his left pectoral.
"Scoot," he says, even though truthfully there's no much scooting to be done on his narrow, narrow cot. He shakes out one of the furs, folds it lengthwise, and then stuffs it between her and the cold stone wall. The other two he layers over them, fur facing skin. When he lowers himself beside Danicka, he feels different from the wolf that usually shares her bed. He doesn't have Lukas's height, the sprawling size of his frame. He doesn't have Lukas's gentleness, either, the lazy grumbling warm bonelessness of that other Ahroun, who sometimes wraps her up in his arms and presses his brow to the back of her neck and refuses to wake up for hours and hours.
Silence would never be secretly pleased that a deer had visited his den. He wouldn't think of it as a guest. He wouldn't think at all; he'd tear its throat open and gorge himself on its flesh.
Beside her, he feels coiled, taut, hot, hard as bone. As though all his impossible strength were overheated and compressed into a shell too small for it, and the only way he can keep from simply detonating is to turn to stone. There's still a dim ruddy glow from the fire, but the heat is beginning to give way to the chill. He pulls the furs up; he doesn't close his eyes. Not yet.
Danicka
Silk blouse, soft socks that are as pale-colored as her shirt. When he picks her up, Danicka goes easily to him, as though she's used to being moved around like this, lifted up and set down somewhere else. She has that in common with her housecat, too. Sometimes she bristles. Sometimes she purrs. And were he not covered by that heavy coat, that rough shirt, he would be able to feel the heat of her skin through her thin sleeves. He would feel her heartbeat.
When Decker sets her on top of his furs, his bed, Danicka does not lay herself back just yet. She doesn't want him to carry her to his bed, lay her down, move over her. She doesn't want to be lying on her back looking up at him, her breath shallow and her skin shivering, asking for warmth. That would, she already knows, be a bit more than either of them can be asked to take. So, sitting up, she helps arrange furs around them. Tucks this one down, the one he folds to the wall. Lifts the others, which are heavy to her, to cover her feet.
She imagines the Fenrir, whatever they tell themselves about themselves, gossip as much as any other tribe, any other people. That tendency is individual, not tribal. All the same, she doesn't expect there to be much talk of Decker bringing a Shadow Lord kinswoman to his bed for one night and then driving away with her sometime the next morning. Even this Shadow Lord kinswoman, whose mother is known to them, whose mate is not. Danicka is glad of that. She knows that in the end, her mother was known for just how much it took to kill her. How high a percentage of her packmates made it out alive because their enemies focused on her strength. It isn't a thing she wants Lukas to be remembered for.
Danicka glances at him, eyes casting to the side, when he undresses. Part of the way. She's wearing her slacks and her blouse still, shedding only shoes and coat. He strips down to his breeches, baring scars that are just as lethal as the one that crosses Lukas's midsection. The tattoo is unfamilar, and it makes her blink. She doesn't ask, though. She doesn't run her fingers over it when
he comes to bed with her, larger and stronger and yet no more frightening to her than the first time.
That's when she lays back. When Decker gets into bed and lays out on his side, faces her. She turns to him, faces him as he pulls the furs over their bodies. There isn't much room between them -- no room to scoot. Just a few inches. Enough space for her hand to lay between layers of fur, enough for her fingertips to creep across those inches and touch his, just barely lacing. His fingertip, then one of hers, then one of his, then one of hers. So different. She and Lukas have always seemed to know just how to sleep together. It doesn't matter who holds who, even. But they hold each other. Their bed is bigger than this one, but not too big. They could take up all the space of a king if they wanted. It was crowded, almost enough to roll Lukas out of bed, when Irena and Emanek snuggled into bed with them that morning. But they don't need a bigger bed. They don't want one. Danicka imagines that if they had bed taking up the entire width of their bedroom, Lukas would still sleep with her wrapped up in his arms, his brow touching her back. Or she would hold him, her hand covering his heart, his back to her chest.
Blinking slowly as the dim light dies, Danicka breathes in and exhales. That hand touching his between the furs lifts up and emerges from their covers. The backs of her knuckles smooth across his temple, down his cheekbone, touch his jawline. The smoothed, polished arcs of her fingernails brush across the very corner of his lips. It's intimate. It's dangerous, too, all of this. She wants to kiss him. She knows the cost of kissing him is her life. Her whole life, taking bruises for her foolishness. She knows if she kisses him, she might not stop his hands up her back, his body pressed to hers, his sweat covering her until she is subsumed completely by his scent.
But it isn't his child she wants. Or his love.
Her eyes close. She sighs, and her hand slides away to where it was before, tucked away under the covers. She folds her arms close to her chest, in between their chests, and moves closer. Bows her head, tucks herself underneath his chin, and if he holds her,
she lets him.
Silence
His breath is held when she reaches out to him. She could be holding it in those soft hands of hers; the cup of her palm as the backs of her fingertips trail over his face. He's frozen; he's afraid if he kisses her hand she'll stop. He's afraid he won't be able to stop. He's afraid she won't stop, she'll kiss him, because
for all his strength, all the remarkable, impossible strength of his body, which may never be matched or exceeded by anyone else she meets in her entire lifetime --
for all that, he's not sure he has even a fraction of the strength necessary to stop her. To remind herof what she has, which is everything he will never have, and how precious it is; how fragile, how easily lost.
In the end she draws away. And he breathes again, a ragged exhale that he can't quite hide. She tucks her hands close to herself. Tucks herself close to him. After a moment, he settles his arm around her. And after another, his embrace tightens by a small degree. He holds her close.
The fire becomes embers, dull red in the night. Everything else is a warm, breathing darkness. He closes his eyes. He thinks of New Orleans. The white heat of afternoons on the Gulf Coast. The summer rain, the multicolored glow of Bourbon Street reflecting off windows and wet streets. The way the air smelled -- humidity, magnolias, wet asphalt, French-Louisiana cooking, decay in the swamps, vampires in the streets. He thinks of her walking out onto the porch behind him, and when he turned he had his first good look at her. He thinks of her at the water's edge tonight, turning to look at him when he fell into step beside her.
And: he thinks of her eyes opening as she lay beneath him. His hand on her breastbone, feeling for her heartbeat. She asked him what happened. Then she said:
I can't get enough of you, either.
And later:
We both knew this was one night.
He knows this is one night. Some part of him wants to stay awake, remember every moment. He knows he'll regret it if he did. She gave him one night, and then one night more. He takes it. He lets his thoughts and memories go. Moments later he's heavy and still, breathing deeply, evenly.
Danicka
It's possible no one will ever touch him like this again. That isn't to say he won't have women warming his bed here and there, or even every night. That isn't to say he won't end up having children one way or the other. Even lying here with him, Danicka thinks of that. She can imagine a kinswoman, even several kinswomen, wanting a strong child but not a mate, doing their duty without the burden of putting up with being tied down to someone like an Ahroun. She doesn't know if that's something frowned upon or encouraged or just ignored in Storm Hammer, but she knows it happens. She wouldn't be surprised if Decker leaves a legacy of bastards any more than she'd be surprised if young women wanted to crawl in between these furs for a night or three just to fuck. Just to get fucked.
But even now, looking at him holding his breath like that, she thinks: no one is ever going to touch him like this again. It makes her ache for him, lost in a sorrow for him that he is quickly becoming too cold to even feel. She doesn't touch his scalp, the short-shorn hairs there. She only touches his cheek like that, his jaw, all hard bone beneath her fingers. No: her knuckles. Bone to bone. Hardness to hardness. As gently as she can.
They do not kiss. They cross lines, like making a sacrifice, to go back in time. She curls into him and he wraps around her and she closes her eyes, remembering waking in a much softer bed than this to find him crouched over her, his tension and his near panic as stonily silent as anything else. Even back then, there was a coldness to him that she understood. Understands. Decker's arms tighten again, but carefully, because he can't possibly have grown to this strength and not know that he could crush her if he isn't careful. She waits til he eases. Til he relaxes. She does not think of New Orleans or Chicago or New York or Lukas or Christian or that party or the twenty dollar bill or the way he tore the bottle from her hand and kissed her, ate at her mouth that first time.
Danicka thinks of lying in that bed with him. If she hadn't gotten up and left. If she'd stayed, just for the night, and slept against him like this. Though ten years have gone by and her hair is longer, her clothing finer, her heart softer, her backbone harder, she goes back there without any effort. Exhausted as she was then, she is now, though for different reasons. She falls easily asleep next to him. With him.
The firelight dims to nothingness, casting them in blackness. The house is built for warmth, so there are few places for heat to get out or light to get in, but even so, when the sun begins to rise not long after their breathing steadies, the sunlight comes in through tiny cracks, dazzling in their focus. A hint of that light catches on Danicka's hair, the tips of Decker's hair. She sweats in his arms and under his furs and in her clothes, warmed by the hides but mostly by him. At some point she shifts in sleep, rolls onto her back, doesn't leave his arms. They sleep like lovers or mates. They sleep like they've known each other their whole lives, through the sunrise.
Like she belongs here.
Like they belong together.