don't need [Dani] apologies

[Rafael Herman Thomas]

God, he hated it when she did this.

A furious glance up at the clock only infuriated him more as he realized just how late it was getting, but he was also partially aware that it was not the clock’s fault. Damn it. Another lap of pacing around the house. Another glance at the clock. A growl, a moment of quiet, and then another lap. This had been his routine for at least an hour now, padding around the house like a fiend even though his muscles ached and groaned from last night’s transformation. But his own aches and pains didn’t matter at all in that moment – his mind was fixated on one thing, and it was on the fact that Dani wasn’t home yet. And it was almost an hour past the time she’d specified that she’d be home.

Now, that wasn’t to say that Rafael had planned on doing anything else other than fret. He almost never slept for several nights after the full moon. While this moon’s transformation had gone by without any horrendous hitches, and he’d spent most of it curled up with a bobcat at his side, they still… bothered him. In fact, they terrified him. Haunted him. Because the truth of the matter was, Rafael had spent far more full moons doing something else entirely different than just resting. The number of moons he’d fought and torn apart fellow werewolves far outnumbered the ones he’d spent curled up in some healer’s living room like a lapdog. When he transformed, he could still hear the cheers and screams of the crowd, feel the snapping of jaws and claws raking through his fur. Feel the life draining from his opponents as he shook them like ragdolls-

A growl exploded from Rafael’s throat as he resisted the urge to throw something, anything. If he started down that road, he’d be a storm by the time Dani got home – because no matter how late it was, he always had the faith that she would make it back, because she always did. And he had to keep himself under control. He didn’t want her worrying about him on top of everything else when she got home, and Rafy also just didn’t want to lose his temper. He hated being the beast that he loathed so much, and yet, half the time, it felt like it was the only thing he knew how to be.

Huffing to himself, Rafael went back to his pacing. An hour and fifteen- no, make that sixteen, minutes that she was late. If it even got remotely close to two hours, he’d be on the streets hunting her down. Or, at least, hunting down the reason that she was late. Because, in the end, he could never blame Dani for anything; she could do no wrong as far as he was concerned. If she was late, it wasn’t her fault, and if anyone had done anything to her… another growl ripped from his throat. As much as he despised being the beast, it was very much a real entity inside him, and had the tendency to manifest itself when he was most angry. Even now, after the full moon, when the moon was at its weakest. Ten years of conditioning to become the animal inside him… it didn’t reverse that easy. And so here he was. Pacing like a caged wolf with growls escaping him every few minutes as dark thoughts continued an onslaught in his brain.

That is, until the lock turned.

Immediately, Rafael’s entire frame seemed to transform. He was no longer a caged beast, but rather a dog waiting for his owner to come through the door. He perked up, and was already moving into position to make it look as though he hadn’t been losing his mind over her being late. So, by the time she walked in the door, he was simply able to ask, ”What happened?” There was no need for a follow-up, or an explanation. She’d know what he was asking: ’Why were you late? And do I have to murder anyone?’ He was, after all, a rather protective werewolf.

[Daniella Maria Santos]

Shit. Dani was more than just running late, she was horrendously late. Normally, when she was dancing, she was home and in the door by three in the morning, but it was already going on four fifteen, and she still hadn’t walked through the door. It wasn’t her fault, really, it was the fault of the man who had stopped her on her way out the door and tried for a… little more than she was ready or willing to give much of anybody at this point in her life. Of course, he hadn’t been happy about it, and had even gone so far to pin her wrists on either side of her head, and probably would have succeeded in his… endeavors, had one club owner not come up and knocked him flat with one punch, spitting on his unconscious body and ushering her back inside, mostly to make sure that she was alright and to give her a drink to help settle her nerves a bit. A drink that she had taken, but only pretended to sip it, keeping her lips tightly pressed against the rim of the glass on the off chance that yet another man whose eye she had caught was going to try something.

As it were, it didn’t appear that was the case, though Daniella did find herself walking home alone at just after four in the morning instead of accompanied by someone. Truthfully she preferred it that way, she could take care of herself, despite the moment of weakness and general submission in the face of danger almost an hour ago, and walking alone gave her time to just… be herself. To think. To decompress. Despite the youthful look of the 22 year old that was currently heading towards her home in the lower east side, all the way from midtown west, with her shoulders hunched up slightly towards her ears and a determined look on her face, she put herself through a fair amount of stress, and not just because of the profession she had chosen so long ago. The stage had its own stressors, sure, but it didn’t cause anywhere near as much stress as her other job. The one she did by night. The one that her mother had taught her so many years ago. The one that she didn’t tell anybody about out of fear for her clients, and to some extent, her fear for herself.

Rafael, the man she knew was waiting for her in her home, probably wearing a track in the floor as he paced, was one of her former clients, but having nowhere else to go when she was done with him, well, she had kind of “taken him in” so to speak. She didn’t do that to every werewolf that ended up on her doorstep, she couldn’t let herself: she had neither the rooms, nor the funds, nor the security to put all of them up, but she had done a decent job at finding people across the bay to take them in until they were healed up and had found a niche of their own in the city. It wasn’t a rehabilitation program, though it sounded like one sometimes, she was saving them… though from what, most people didn’t know. She didn’t trust them to. Daniella had charged herself with saving werewolves from the fighting pits. It was a noble job, in her mind, and one that she knew she wanted to do, and was good at, but there was the small fact that she just wasn’t good enough sometimes. There were times when she had to admit she wasn’t perfect. Hell, maybe she wasn’t even good, but she was doing everything she could to help every single person who ended up on her doorstep.

Speaking of her doorstep… Danielle turned her key in the lock and pushed the door open, watching at Rafe’s eyes turned at her, and smiling in the most apologetic smile that she could, shutting the door tight behind her and turning to look at the man she had grown to see as an older brother. “Don’t worry, I’m fine, I just got a little held up at the club after work.” Pulling off her jacket, she hung it on the back of the chair and walked into her bedroom, pulling off her glitzy, clingy dress and changing into something a little more casual and comfortable. She would be up for a long time, just in case someone came along needing her help. Reaching behind her, she pulled her long hair up and secured it with a few pins to keep it off her face and walked back out into the living room where Rafe was still waiting for her, and sat down on the couch, relaxing back and sighing gently, patting the space next to her. “Come on, sit down, you’ve got to be hurting right now.” Looking up at him she smiled, pushing down her urge to get up and start taking care of him. “Really, I’m fine, promise.”

[Rafael Herman Thomas]

There was nobody that Rafael Thomas was more protective of, perhaps, than the young woman who just walked through that door. But, anyone who knew their story for a second would completely understand why:

She’d found him dying in an alleyway just a few years ago. Blood everywhere – gashes and bruises and goodness knows what else had peppered his body, as he’d slowly been bleeding out in the street. He’d hadn’t had the strength to fight her as she’d managed to move him back to her apartment. Otherwise, at that moment in time, he would have asked her to let him die. Let him move on, let him be free. But the werewolf had only laid there demurely, shuffling mindlessly on as she guided him to lay down, and stayed still as she healed him. Having drifted in and out of consciousness for… days, when he’d finally woken up, he’d expected a beating. Or his least favorite… well. Something worse. From the moment he was better, he’d trailed after her like a servant, saying nothing even when she addressed him, but always doing something when he was asked to do it. Until, finally after weeks of staying with her, he’d spoken to her for the very first time in sheer confusion, asking,

”How much did you pay for me?”

He’d expected to go back into the ring, that the vicious cycle would begin again and that soon enough he’d be back to tearing apart other werewolves. But Daniella Santos hadn’t done that. Instead, she’d saved him – given him a new name, a new identity… new life. And for that, there had been no repayment that the newly named Rafael could offer, besides a simple vow: a vow that he would protect her with his life, and protect others the best that he could. Even though that meant, as the past few years had indicated, ripping apart someone else sometimes, for the sake of a loved one’s protection. And with Dani… well, as far as Rafael was concerned, she needed a lot of protecting. (After all, there was a reason that he’d been banned from the clubs where she danced after a single night of following her to work.)

Her apologetic smile, and her spoken apology, did nothing to appease him, and it was rather clear from the way Rafael stood back. He watched her with narrowed blue eyes, arms still folded tightly across his chest, and said nothing as he watched her take her jacket off. He was a man of little words, most of his thoughts conveyed through actions. Like now, how he didn’t move, frozen in his place, the suspicion in his expression and stance communicating one clear thing: ”I don’t believe you.” Rafy wanted to see, and make sure of things for himself. So he lifted his nose and sniffed the air, like that might give him some hints, and he kept a very close eye on her.

As Dani moved past him to go and change, Rafael followed. Personal boundaries, or at least understanding them, was not one of his strong-suits – and truthfully, as the dancer took off her clothes and put new ones on, there was nothing there that Rafael hadn’t seen before. He stood there in the door way, not watching her with any kind of sexual interest, simply just watching her, keeping an eye on her. His blue eyes followed every movement, looking for any hints of damage to her perfect skin – oh, Rafy was no stranger to the healer’s beauty, he was just able to view it objectively.

See, Rafael was no stranger to women, or to Dani. While the pair of them were certainly not a couple in any sense of the word, there was no denying that there’d been… encounters, when he’d first come to her. Sexual ones. He could look at her objectively now, perhaps only because he had looked at her sexually in the past, and had long since… grown desensitized to her, in the way he had virtually become desensitized to all women. At first, he’d likely held genuine affection, genuine love for the dancer, but in the end… it was the only way he knew how to express gratitude. Because he’d been trained that way, later in his life, and in the end, that was what a relationship with Dani had turned into. He’d done it because he’d thought it was what she wanted, and it was the only way he knew to repay her for all that she’d done. But now he knew that there were so many other ways to repay one’s debt, and protection was his primary means of doing so.

Which was why, though he said nothing, a rage fired in him when he caught the flashes of purple and blue and black on little patches of skin. Rafael noted how she especially tried to hide those, but her efforts had been in vain. He’d seen them.

Eventually, Dani moved back to the couch, but Rafael stayed standing, hovering nearby with that same distrusting look on his face. And he very well might have stayed standing, had she not ordered him to sit with her – and when Daniella ordered him to do something, he did it. ”I’m fine,” was all he answered. Yes, his muscles strained and ached, his head was pounding, and he was exhausted, but to Rafael, that was fine compared to some of the transformations that he’d been through. But none of that mattered – what mattered were the people he deemed worthy of his affections, and at this point? Dani was the only one.

Which was why he scowled when she tried to assure him that she was fine, and a quiet growl escaped his throat as he resumed his pacing and continued to eye her with disapproval. ”Don’t promise me with lies. I saw that you’re not fine. Tell me what happened, and who did that to you.” Flame was in his blue eyes – the fire of vengeance. You did not touch Daniella Santos, or anyone that Rafael cared about for that matter, and get away with it.

[Daniella Maria Santos]

The history between Daniella Santos and Rafael Thomas was… complicated to say the least. She had found him, broken and almost bleeding, had been led to him by some of the few werewolves that she had helped in the community who had stuck around, helping her to run her little underground healing ring. Not that she asked for money, those who wanted to repay her for her services… she either kept them around in certain alleyways where she knew a ring had to be operating or were particularly dangerous for people like her to be walking. Not that she needed security, not really… when it came right down to it, she could defend herself, when she had enough of a warning. However, what had happened tonight… she had been caught completely off guard by it, and a part of her knew with every fiber of her being that she was just lucky the owner of the bar had come when he did, or what might have happened next… well she didn't like to think about it. At all.

But Rafael was different. She had been interested in assisting many wolves in the past, she had taken a certain… liking to him. There was something about the broken way that he looked at her, the way that he couldn't seem to understand emotions and feelings and love the way that others, even werewolves, could that intrigued her. But he was more than just an intrigue to her, he was a lost soul who needed her help, her guidance… he needed her in a lot more ways than she needed him, though to say that she couldn't benefit from his presence… well that would be a lie. For whatever the reason, she had taken him into her home, nursed him back to health… and let him stay. She would never forget the first time he spoke to her, asking a question that she never thought she would hear, and that she sincerely hoped she would never hear again.

"How much did you pay for me?"

That question was enough for her to want to cry. How much cruelty had this poor man been through? What horrors had he endured in those rings, fighting for his life? But over time, he had opened up to her, trusting her, caring about her… and the feelings had been returned. There had been certain… encounters that honestly felt strange to her now that they were so close in an almost sibling capacity. His middle name, Herman, had even been derived from "hermano", the Spanish name for "brother", and since that was her Native language… it made sense. They might have even shared a last name if she hadn't been worried about the implications of it… particularly with her being considered an immigrant, even if she was a second generation one. All those thoughts ran through her mind as she looked at him now, knowing full well that he was likely to catch her in the lie that she had just told him. No, if she was being honest, she wasn't "alright". She was sore as hell from being pinned against a wall, and she was on edge from the entire incident, but that wasn't something that she could exactly tell Rafe right now.

"I'm fine." Daniella couldn't help but arch her eyebrow; Rafael had always played off his pain, preferring to focus on other people instead of himself, and it was that trait that consistently left her in a kind of awe. He was selfless… and in a lot of ways, self-depreciating. Still, she would let it go for the time being, and would just make him something later to take away a good portion of the pain, as she always did. And then.. He got sharp with her, and she felt herself flinch back slightly, rubbing one wrist with the opposite hand, where the pain she hadn't realized she had been feeling had begun to bloom once more. "Rafe…" She looked up at him, and she saw the fire in those blue eyes, one that she recognized easily, and she knew she wouldn't be able to persuade him into believing that she was fine. "I am fine, really. There was a John at the club who got a little handsy, the owner took care of it, and him. It's... Nothing you need to worry about." She turned her eyes up to look at the werewolf who was probably looking at her with a mixture of incredulity and a slight bit of anger that someone had dared touch her. "Please, Rafy... it looks a lot worse than it is."

tag; Rafael Herman Thomas
notes; So I hope this is okay<33
template by eliza @ tb && adoxography

[Rafael Herman Thomas]

Being a werewolf was all Rafael knew – the only world he recognized was one he saw through a monster’s eyes, because being a monster was all he could ever remember being. Other people had memories of childhood, of families that loved them (or hated them), of friendships and pets and human things. His first memory was of burning pain, and then ripping a rabbit to shreds because the wolf was starving. He didn’t know what it was like, being human, and while he was a monster, the monster within him lent Rafael certain advantages. Advantages that he used.

Advantages like being able to see that she wasn’t alright. Hearing the pickup of her heart rate. Smelling the slightest tinge of fear mixed with the exotic scent that was just Dani. It was smelling that fear that made something in Rafael’s jaw pop as his teeth ground together. A growl ripped forth from his throat – a guttural, vicious noise that hurt in a throat already raw from the shouts and cries from his transformation the night before – as the werewolf turned away from her and went back to that furious pacing. It was quite literally all he could truly do to keep from ripping something (or someone) apart, or breaking something, or harming himself. He wasn’t upset with Dani. No, of course he wasn’t. If there was one human being he could never truly be upset with, angry at, it was her. No.

He was upset with himself. He hadn’t been there, and he hadn’t protected her.

And when he saw her flinch out of the corner of his eye, saw her rubbing her wrist, the werewolf rounded on her once again, stalking up to the couch and standing over her with a scrutinizing gaze. Only the sound of his name cooled his burning ire, but only slightly, for the moment an explanation came forth, another snarl burst forward. ”John who?” He’d find him. He would find him and teach him a lesson that he would not soon forget, a message that he wished he was able to send to all men who thought themselves above the beautiful dancer sitting in front of him. Nobody touched Daniella Santos without her consent. And most certainly, nobody harmed her. That was a death sentence, as far as he was concerned. And more than anything, now that he had a definitive answer and a vague idea of what had happened, he wanted to tear this man limb from limb. Or at least give him several good blows to the face, ribs, and probably something strong to his reproductive organs to boot.

”No. Don’t say that. Someone hurt you.” Rafael made a frustrated noise as he turned away from her and retreated towards a corner as he angrily reached up to tug at the roots of his hair, a rumbling grumble rising out of his chest as he struggled desperately not to lash out. The anger had built up, and he was just so… so…

Why hadn’t he been there? Dani didn’t deserve to be harassed, to be hurt, she didn’t… she deserved only the absolute best that this world had to offer. She had given him new life, a reason to hope, a reason to try and make himself better. She brought light into lives of darkness – why would anyone ever want to harm her? It was a thought that boggled but frustrated him, and made him want to roar into the night. It was he who deserved the harm, the late night encounters with people who wished him ill. It was also he who had vowed to protect her, and no matter how much she insisted that he couldn’t always be there, that she was fine, that she could take care of herself…

The only thing stopping him from going out there to hunt the son of a bitch down himself right this very second was that Dani was here, and that he couldn’t leave her alone. It didn’t even factor in that his muscles ached terribly, screaming for him to sit down or rest, or that his head hurt, or that there were bruises on his ribs where bones hadn’t quite… clicked back together properly. Maybe he was getting old. (Old, at twenty-five.)

”What… what do you need?” His voice was suddenly hoarse, quiet, as he glanced over his shoulder at her, until realizing that he just needed to… keep his eyes on her. Just to be sure she wouldn’t disappear, or that something else might not happen. Perhaps it was absurd to be worried about it whilst they were in her own home, but- ”Tell me what you need. Tell me how to help. It’ll be done.” And so it would. She knew it would. Because it was no secret that he would do anything for her.