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The sun went down a couple of hours ago, and these days Annikah is usually awake all day playing sentry and using the quiet time with no disturbances to go deep into her studies. Once the sun sets she tends to have a little bit of attention to lavish on her loves, and then she goes out to hunt while they're getting ready for their nights.
She's just now coming back, through the front door to their converted warehouse of a home. It's become a common thing for her end up naked when she's at home, but generally she's at least clothed when she goes out. She WAS clothed when she went out tonight. Yet, for some reason, she's topless when she comes back in, and decidedly a bit of a mess. She's covered in scrapes and dirt.
She's also carrying the bent remains of her bike, which she often uses to get around town. Not her motorcycle, her bicycle.
Back when she still breathed, she had a sleep corset and a corset she wore when going out, since decades of wearing a corset, even as a ghoul, will utterly destroy your abdominal muscles. This isn't a thing which remains a problem once you're dead, of course, and so Artje's improbable biology doesn't require hardware. She enjoys this, and never wears her sleep corsets around the warehouse anymore unless she's feeling emotionally worn out and needs the pressure around herself.
This, of course, is all prelude to saying that she's wearing one today, its lines visible underneath the silk of her sleep clothing as she shifts and moves. She comes padding out barefoot -- an intimacy for her partners only, usually -- and tips her head to one side. "Did you... fight... your bike?"
Annikah has to pause and tilts her head, watching Artje, when she comes out barefoot but in her sleep corset. She drops the bike where she's standing and hurries toward Artje, arms extended toward her. Dirty arms.
"Are you okay? Oh." She glances back at the bike. "No, someone hit me with their truck. Who the fuck needs a truck that big in Philly, anyway? Are you okay?"
"You're dirty," Artje offers in a voice that sounds mildly reproachful, but not really. She doesn't reject the hug, though: instead she slips into her wife's arms and lays her head on Annikah's shoulder. "Did you punch their truck?" She knows better than to think that Annikah would punch a person, because she knows what happens to people when Annikah punches them. The words 'fine red mist' come into play.
A soft huff of breath. "We went to see the Sakima last night. It went well -- I think -- but." But, indeed. "And I talked to Titania the other night. Rather, she tracked me down. Interrupted a lovely dinner I had planned."
"No, the dirt is Annikah-y," Annikah says as she wraps Artje in a hug. "While your hands are back there, do you think you could get the knife out? I can't quite reach it and I think it's stuck wedged in some bones." Sometimes she's the worst.
"I'll have you know I did not punch their truck, but there were four people in the truck and they decided just hitting me wasn't enough, they had to get out and give me shit about denting the thing." Hopefully she still didn't punch them. Much.
She leans back from hugging Arjte to look her love in the eyes. "I'm glad it went well. you think. How did things to with Titania? Do she and I need to have a... talk?"
She laughs at that. "Mmm, well, whatever it is, there's dirt on my silk now," she answers, and then pulls back her head for a moment, squinting at Annikah. "A knife?" This doesn't seem unusual, mind, and she reaches back to tug the knife from her wife's back, pulling back to examine it. "Cheap steel," comes her mutter. "They didn't even stab you with a useful knife. This is a piece of garbage." The blade gets flung onto the floor with a clatter, and she holds up her bloody hand, briefly distracted by the vitae on it. Just one little taste would finish their binding, forever. The Toreador blinks rapidly and turns her attention back to Annikah then. "Mmm?"
"Oh, yes. With the Sakima, it went well." She frowns a little bit. "Titania... " she trails off. "Well, she apologized," Artje begins, wrapping her arms back around Annikah and absently petting the knife wound in her back. There, there, tough girl.
"There's Annikah on your silk now, too," Annikah adds with a grin, knowing full well she's being a bit of a brat. She doesn't even wince when the knife is pulled out, like she didn't really notice that it was there except, maybe, for when it bumped against something. "Thanks," she says. "If someone is going to stab me, at least they should have the courtesy to leave me with something worth keeping."
She reaches out and takes Artje's hand in her own, not caring if she gets her own vitae on it. "I know," she says. "But only with Jean-Louis, okay? Until it's done."
She pulls Artje to her when the Daeva's arms go around her. There's no knife wound any more. "At least she apologized. That's something. Unless it wasn't a very good apology, I suppose."
"Hans will be very annoyed later," comes the response from the little Daeva, though she seems not terribly bothered about whether or not her ghoul will be annoyed by cleaning vitae out of her peignoir. Again. It won't be the first time and it won't be the last. Still, she manages to make it sound playfully chiding, tipping her head to the side and smiling sharply. The hand which holds hers keeps her in control -- not that there ever seemed to be any real chance of her getting out of control -- and her attention goes fully back to the Gangrel.
"I know," she agrees. "Until it's done." And rather than lunging towards the Vitae on their hands, she leans in -- gently -- to place a shivering kiss on her love's lips.
"Mmm." A beat. "She didn't actually connect it until I explained it to her that she had offended me by giving offense to the Elysium and through it, its Keeper, one of the heads of my Family. I told her she needed to go and speak with Sora Kan -- to make her recompense there -- whatever Sora Kan desires." Her fingers curl down Annikah's spine, and the other hand clasped in hers has Artje striking up a lazy waltz, that most Viennese of dances. "She speaks like she's the only one who ever lost people. So lost in her own grief and denied anger."
"That, and I think she's just a brat in need of a proper tamer." The little Toreador rolls her eyes.
"That's why he gets paid the big bucks," Annikah says with a smile. "Some day I'll find something he can't get out of silk. The Greek gods supposedly bleed ichor, right? I wonder if I can find one of them. Just hang around some hotties waiting for Zeus to show up and fuck them as a goat or something."
She shuts up to kiss Artje back.
"We'll see if she does it. Makes her apologies." Annikah falls easily into the waltz, having definitely learned the steps of this since meeting Artje. Despite being born and raised in Vienna she hadn't learned it, prior to that. Of course, Artje is the one who leads. "You would know a thing or two about taming brats, too. Is that something you need to talk about, after the conversation? Not brat taming, I mean grief, and anger, and people lost. I'm happy to listen if the conversation stirred up old feelings." (edited)
"Indeed." And she does pay her ghoul well -- his bank account looks an awful lot like hers did twenty years ago, prepared for whenever he decides to leave service, one way or the other.
There's a long silence, in which Artje just looks up at Annikah, auburn curls falling over her shoulders lazily and swaying in time with the three-four time steps. She keeps perfect time, one-two-three around and around the floor. At one point, her toe comes near the knife she discarded and she kicks it out of the way again with an absent gesture. Her hazel eyes turn their gaze away after a turn or two around the floor. "You have never been forced to make the choice between death and returning to bonded servitude," Artje says quietly. "Or survived a building falling on you when bombs drop from the sky. And for those things, 'nika, I envy you." (edited)
"I haven't, my love," Annikah agrees, and for someone with the strength she has she sure can hold the people she loves tenderly. "I wish you hadn't had to experience them either. I've had my own hardships, sure, but I don't think it's useful for us to compare them, only to support each other in the ways we manage to live with their effects."
She leans forward to kiss Artje's forehead. "I'll do whatever I can to keep you from facing similar hardships again."
A wobbly, soft little smile when she's kissed on the forehead. "I didn't mean it as a comparison, really. I just -- " Don't know how to talk about these things, at all? "The sugar goes in the middle." As if that explains it all. Artje developed her own little coping mechanisms because she had to, because for so long there was nobody else. Her, and her service, and the man the Carthians called Le Capitaine.
Her delicate arm tightens around Annikah, and she tucks her head in against her shoulder. "I know. I wouldn't trust to do this otherwise. If it wasn't going to be us, always us. Us against the world. I don't trust anyone else."
"Oh, I know. Sorry, I didn't mean to imply you were comparing. I was mostly stopping myself from mentioning the things I've gone through, because it has no bearing on what you did." Annikah cradles Artje against her. "I always feel honored that you trust me so much. I try very hard to be worthy of it. I know I can be a bit... me... sometimes. I just try to be sure 'me' is someone others can trust. Likewise, I wouldn't do this if I didn't trust both of you. The shackles of the vinculum can be terrible, and I love my freedom. I just don't feel the need to be free of either of you."
She takes in a deep, purposeful breath so that she can let out a sigh. "I see it differently," Artje confesses. "Perhaps it is because I have spent so much of my life in a bond which was not mutual, or because I spent so long bonded, period." And still they dance, around and around, circles and spirals, neverending. "I have felt, in my way, unmoored for so long. Unprotected. Not -- not because you and Jean-Louis wouldn't protect me until the end of time, or won't -- but because I know how vulnerable it feels to be bound to someone who isn't bound to you, and I know how ... frightening it can be to be afraid that someone will trick you, or end up with that control over you."
"I find the same kind of freedom in knowing I will be bound to both of you that you find in this." And there, she leans her head in slightly and kisses the chain of Annikah's day collar, that gold which matches the slim gold chain locked around Artje's left wrist. "There is a freedom in knowing to whom you belong, and to whom you are bound. There is a safety in that surety. And I hunger for that with both of you. Desperately."
"I can see your perspective," Annikah says, after listening to her share the way that she views it. "I don't share it, but I can understand it." She follows where Artje leads and smiles an answer to the kiss on her collar. "I've had one bond where I didn't feel protected at all, just owned, and one mutual one where..." she laughs. "Well, you've met Elsa. I love my sire, but being bonded to her and eager to go along with her every wild scheme did not exactly lead to feeling secure and less vulnerable in my existence."
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