Ivan Press

[Ivan Press] No reply seems necessary to that. Ivan merely nods. She walks - so slowly - to his bathroom. Disappears around that corner and down that short, wide hall, all the world at her feet to her left, all of Ivan's belongings, his things, his outfits and belts and ties and coats, in those vast closets on the right.

The bathroom may as well be a spa. May as well be a temple to cleanliness and self-adoration. The furnishings are dark stone. The tub is the size of a jacuzzi. The shower is surrounded by sheer glass; the glass and the chrome and the stone and all of it, all of it, is polished within an inch of its life.

There are mirrors everywhere.


Ivan supposes that's unpleasant for her. Her own pregnant form, grotesquely fat in those shark-black eyes of hers, reflected back at her from every angle. Oh well. Can't be helped. At the least, he wouldn't be there to stare at her. To see what's become of her. That's a kindness, perhaps to them both.

He strips the bed, takes that and his clothes and her shoes; dumps them in the hallway outside his bedroom on his way to one of the guest rooms. A second shower turns on, hot water from multiple angles bathing him clean, washing sweat and cum off his skin. He finishes before she does; he gives her the courtesy of not barging into his closet, so close to the bathroom, and wears a towel down the stairs.


By the time Hilary emerges, the pile of soiled linens outside the bedroom door is gone. Her luggage has been moved to the master bedroom, set up on stands. There are fresh toiletries set out for her on the sink: tumbler and toothbrush and toothpaste and lotions, creams, perfumes, though surely she has her own. Towels; robes; nightwear.

Nevermind that she's only here for one night. Nevermind that in the morning she'll go to her own apartment, which she's never even seen before, but that's all right. If she doesn't like it, she'll simply snap her fingers and have somebody redecorate.

The bed has been remade. Fresh sheets. Fresh bedding. Not a trace of the mess they made. On the bed there's a tray; on the tray is a light breakfast, eggs and fruit and yogurt, thin slices of toast. Milk. Orange juice. Cranberry juice.

The penthouse is enormously quiet. Sunlight is beginning to burn through morning clouds, shimmering off the lake. Very distantly, if she listens carefully -- something like eighty feet away and a story down -- she can hear Ivan's voice, the details lost. He stays downstairs. He doesn't come to her

until she's grazed at her breakfast. Until she's found and lowered the shades. Until the bedroom is dark and warm and private, the sheets cool and smooth; until her head rests on one of his pillows, her body beneath his sheets. Every article is fresh and clean, but all the same some essence of him remains. There's no doubt that this is his bedroom. His bed, where no starving swan ever spent the night.

At some point she sleeps. At some other point, later, he joins her; soundlessly tossing his towel aside, slipping under the sheets with her. There's almost no way to hold her now. He slides his arm around her ribs, high above the great curve of her belly. His hand finds her breast for a moment, cradles it gently, almost thoughtfully. Then he nuzzles against the back of her neck and closes his eyes.


At some point, he wakes and leaves. She sleeps on as though sleep were the only refuge given to her now. The sun rises to its apex; passes it. The day grows unseasonably warm, though it'll be cold again by midweek. Sometime in the midafternoon, two or three or four, the mattress indents faintly as Ivan sits on its edge.

He touches her hair. Strokes her cheek. Wakes her like this, with gentle, patient contact. When her eyes finally open, he speaks quietly.

"It's still early. About three-twenty. But I thought we could go to your new apartments and have a look around. If there's anything out of order, I'll have it fixed in the next day or two. After that, we'll take an early dinner before we attend your show. Apparently they'll be dancing to Rachmaninoff, Górecki and Ravel -- and some other composers I've never heard of."

His fingertips trace the fine curve of her cheekbone. Her body lost under the sheets, she's as lovely as she ever was. Her eyes are as fathomlessly dark as they ever were. So much for a baby being the answer to all of Woman's problems.

"It should be nice," he finishes.

[Hilary Durante] Another woman would feel shame, guilt, embarrassment at having someone else clean up all that. The linens and her coat, the strap of her bag where her hand touched it as she drew it off her shoulder. Hilary drops them at Ivan's feet to inform him someone should clean them and walks away. It isn't a calculated attempt at showing the world how little she cares, how above such concerns she is. Hilary just doesn't think of it. It needs to be cleaned. Someone will clean it.

The truth is that if she were to return and find it all there still, she would be angry. And, if she lived alone and there were no servants to have left it for in the first place, if she had no one to be angry with, Hilary would clean it all herself, and it would mean as little to her as dropping it on the ground fro someone else.

It's the last time she'll see Ivan for hours. She doesn't look over her shoulder, and soon enough the bathroom door slides shut. Soon after that, the water turns on.


A long time later, longer than she'd need to wash off the remainder of Ivan's pleasure, Hilary leaves the shower and wraps herself in a robe. She lays out her jewelry. Takes off her bracelets; her rings she hasn't worn in weeks, but they're on slender cords around her neck, and she removes them as well though they didn't get dirty. She combs her hair and dries it, glossy and straight and thick. And walking back out into Ivan's room she finds her luggage set up as if this were a hotel, as if she had a right to be here.

She wonders if the maids and servants Ivan surrounds himself with wonder, due to all his lavishing of attention on her even when he can't fuck her, even when she's repugnant, if the baby is his. She assumes it doesn't matter. They probably don't care. And she doesn't really wonder for long.

There's her jewelry cleaner. She goes back to the bathroom to soak the silver, the gold, the gemstones, cleaning them carefully as though this isn't the sort of thing she'd have a maid do normally. Hilary doesn't think of calling anyone. She saw the breakfast laid out for her. She saw the toiletries brought by some silent maid while she was showering. She uses a few. She sets her bangles and rings out to dry, removes her small gold earrings, cleans them as well.

When she eats, she does so still wearing the robe that, though fluffy and clean, has the essence of Ivan on its fibers. She chews the tasteless toast, the bland but sweet yogurt, the eggs that she seasons with pepper and hot sauce to make them palatable. Fucking Russians, she thinks, though she herself has as much English and Dutch ancestry as French. As though she really were Unbreakable Hearth, born in some southerly, hot climate eating peppers off the vine like apples.

The breakfast isn't scraped from the plate. She eats well, though, obediently, and drinks juice and a little bit of milk, though the thought of milk makes her angry right now. She goes to brush her teeth, and changes into the silk pajamas. Not the nightgown that was also set out, just to give her options. Hilary wonders if some servant was given twenty minutes or less to go, find, and buy maternity nightwear. She wonders if that servant, uncertain of size or how many months along she is, bought several pairs and sets. She wonders how much of a maternity wardrobe Ivan already has available now, or will.

It's all musing, silent and empty, while she does up the fine, pearlescent buttons to close the silk over her body. Her back is to the mirror. She doesn't look down at what she's doing much.


Hilary understands rooms like this. She finds the button to close the shades without trouble and presses it. They whisper across the glass, following her footsteps to the bed. Carefully gets down on it and crawls to the middle, sitting there for a moment.

Calls into the dark questioningly, quietly -- too quietly for him to ever actually hear her:

"Ivan?"


She waits in the silence for a moment, the way she used to wait for her brother's ghost to come visit her because somehow she'd convinced herself that if she called him at midnight, if she was all by herself and she asked him to please, please come back, he'd come visit her. And she'd be able to convince him to come back for good. To not be gone.

Hilary just waits for a moment, thoughtless, her mind empty, not even remembering. She listens for footsteps that don't come, and she doesn't even quite expect them to. So soon enough she lays down, gets herself under the covers, and lays her head on the pillow where he could fuck, sleep with, and profess his true love to, as many women as he might like. She doesn't know how different she is to him. She doesn't think about it.

Like death, really, or the point of living. It just never comes to mind.


When Ivan does come, as perhaps the ghost of her brother used to come once she'd fallen asleep and couldn't see him anyway, Hilary doesn't stir, not even when he cradles her breast, which feels so different to him, so much larger. Her breathing is different than the last time he slept with her; different from the first time he slept with her. Heavier, more labored; he can almost feel the impending end of this pregnancy in the air around her, feel it in her body when he puts his arm around her. It's like a storm warning, an oppression tightening like a vise on his ears. Soon. Very soon.


Hilary sleeps so much now. Breathing takes work. Getting Ivan off was a lot of effort, and she didn't even do much. She traveled all night to come to him. She slept fitfully, drugged, on the plane. She's in a different time zone. She's aching from travel, sore, out of sorts. Her anger exhausts her. So, too, does the sheer amount of work that goes into refusing to exist in her own body. In sleep, as in that broken-down place she goes with Ivan, she has no choice. She seems soft and sane and human. She never talks about her dreams. Ivan never asks her about them, and no one else does, either. That's probably for the best.


He's been watching her, and sits as she begins to stir, as she starts to move, turning her head, waking slowly on her own. The bed shifts, which awakens her more, and she opens her eyes to him, blinking them a couple of times. A few locks of hair cover her face, and she reaches up to brush them back, crossing with his fingers on her cheek for a moment.

"Bobby McFerrin," she says, her voice soft, rasping from sleep, "has done some impressive arrangements for choreography." She licks her lips and swallows, closing her eyes again for a moment. "Mostly improvisational modern dance, and jazz. It's not to my style or taste, but it can and should be appreciated for what it is."

His fingers are on her cheek. She lets them rest there, closed away in the dark, a long pause before she speaks again, her eyes still closed. "I think you'll like it. There's a lot of glass." She breathes, sighs softly as though still asleep. "You like things that break in lots of pieces."

[Ivan Press] Who knows what his servants say to each other. The younger ones who were not of a generation that understands the worth of silence and the price of words. The younger ones who are young enough to have dreamt of democracy and equality and all those ideals and dreams of the young that don't even exist in America, much less in the Garou Nation. Who knows what they whispered in those mad dying months of last summer, when he took this lovely, refined, cold woman out on the lake and brutalized her, chained her down, fucked her for hours, made her make noises that normal sane humans do not make.

Who knows what they said to each other, moving that same woman's belonging into their master's bedroom. She's so heavily pregnant now, and they're sure it's his. She's reputedly someone else's property, someone they've met, that Spanish Galliard with the refined, old-world manners; with the savage smolder of rage in his eyes; with the clasped hands, as though otherwise he might choke the life from someone's throat.

Perhaps they worry for Ivan's. Likely not. Their loyalty is based on necessity, on threat, on what was shamed into them when they were much younger:

illbred
penniless
burden to the tribe.


Ivan has never been penniless in his life. He does not know what it is like to be penniless. He cannot imagine it. He cannot imagine what it is like to work for his living. His parents don't and can't, either, unless you count attending the occasional charity gala and rubbing elbows with the occasional senator or governor 'work'. Likely Ivan doesn't even know where his family's wealth comes from these days, only that it flows endlessly and freely as a waterfall.

They were involved in the earliest age of telecommunications; he knows that much. They made their bones during the first Great War. That war was as good for them as it was disastrous for their noble landed and titled brethren back home were slaughtered so brutally. Cut down like wheat to make room for socialism, for progress. After that, the Presses must have expanded. They had their fingers in the industrial-military complex long before it had that name. They had their hands in atomic energy, in America's war machine, in the rise of the internet when telecom went digital.

There's one tiny core of the family privy to such things. Some great-uncle of his and that man's son, and his son. The rest: social hooks on which to hang the influence of the family. Contact farms. Connection mongerers. Bargaining chips.

Ivan isn't even responsible for that much. He's too precious for that. His sole responsibility, it seems, is to stay alive. To convince the Tribe and the Nation that this family has not completely gone to weaver-rot. All he's ever known was infinite luxury. He would be shocked to discover Hilary cleaned her own jewelry. Perhaps even in Lausanne, and certainly in Meillerie, she saw just how unused he is to a simpler life. Too intelligent to truly be lost, he nevertheless had a certain air about him when performing simple, mundane tasks.

He liked buying that silly shell bracelet for her. It may have been the cheapest, most worthless, most sentimental thing he's ever had his royal hands on.


He does not come to her when she calls him. Like any ghost, he cannot hear the voices of the living.


In the afternoon, he sits at her bedside in the indirect light of day. She speaks to him of some creature named Bobby McFerrin; he's not even sure if she's dreaming until she says the rest. His mouth moves, faint, a little wistful. Then even that smile fades:

you like things that break.

His hand is a little heavier on her face, a little more deliberate, stroking her cheek, stroking her hair. This has nothing to do with anything she's said. He says it anyway,

"I might be in love with you."

And there it is, quiet and naked and unashamed. Unafraid. There's vulnerability to him, but not about this. He's never known rejection in his life, either.

A moment later he draws his hand back, takes a breath, and stands.

"I'll let you get dressed and have Dmitri bring the car around again. You'll find his driving less alarming than mine."

[Hilary Durante] It may be -- no, there is no doubt of it, it must be utterly new to Ivan to wonder about the life and childhood of one of his fucks. To feel curiosity that is more than passing, interest that is unnerving to him in its sincerity. How odd, to look at a lovely woman -- much less an older woman -- and wonder who she is, and why she does what she does, and what it is she's feeling if she's feeling anything at all. How unsettling to be rather certain that this, like everything else, cannot last. That he won't stay curious and interested forever, which means he will eventually lose whatever it is he feels when he thinks of her, looks at her. How maddening to not want to lose it. Not want to shatter it into a million pieces just because he can.

If Hilary understands for more than fleeting seconds the destruction and havoc she's wreaked on Ivan's life, she seems to pay it no more mind than she's paid any of the other lives she's twisted and warped just by passing through them. Cordelia. Christian. The Durantes. Countless others, all left in her glittering wake, abandoned to drown in black water while she looks up at fireworks.

She knows that Ivan is the first Garou of his line in generations. She knows that if she has a paleskinned baby whose it is, and that especially if it is born true, it will be precious. Not to Ivan. To his family. Proof that they aren't a lost line, worthless to the war and good only for churning out more servants and mates for better Fangs, real Garou. The fact that she wants him to miss her, to need her like she needs him, tells him plainly enough that she does think about whether she matters or not. She tries to believe that he lavishes such attention on her because she's meaningful to him, not because it's possible that the brat she's carrying would be useful to his family.


The shades cover most of the room in shadow, though it isn't complete blackout at the moment. He can see in the dim light the paleness of her cheek contrasted starkly against the rich darkness of her hair, the blackness of her eyes. Noting how much he likes thinks that he can shatter into hundreds of pieces may be the greatest insight she's ever shown into him; the cars, the glass, her.

He tells her he might love her. She closes her eyes slowly, opens them with no more hurry. "But how would you know?" she whispers back, a rhetorical question just as the statement itself required no answer. It's an aching truth, though there's no dismissal in it, no inherent rejection. She almost sounds genuine in her curiosity; how would a creature like Ivan know? So he says might, and she gives him back nothing at all but even greater doubt than he might have already of his own capacity, his own willingness to do something like love.

Nevermind her own dubious capacity, her own questionable will.

His fingers slide away; she turns her head and catches them up with her hand, holds them to her mouth for a moment. Not to kiss them, not to lick. He can feel her breathing as he tells her that they'll go soon. She holds him there as though in symbolism of his mouth covering her face, holding back her screams so no one will hear her begging him -- not to stop, but to give her more.

Hilary nods. "Yes, Ivan," she answers quietly, and lets him go.


In perhaps thirty minutes she's coming out of his bedroom again, dressed in entirely different clothes. The dress is long and, like so much of what she wears now, designed with as much attention to comfort as to minimizing her belly as much as possible. She wears sandals. Unlike when she came off the plane, these have a small heel, a wedge of an inch and a half or two from heel through arch, and she seems to have zero trouble keeping her balance, zero complaint. The dress is a subtle green, but deep as envy. There are accents in thin, burnished gold rope, giving the gown an almost Grecian look.

Her earrings, too, drop in golden chandeleirs from her earlobes, hung with drops of some amber-colored gemstone. She's done something to her hair, scrunched it with something, brought out more of that natural wave. Her hair smells like almonds and vanilla. Were it not for the gold bracelets, the earrings, the way she carries herself, she might be accused of trying too hard to fit the earth mother look that so many pregnant women give up and embrace just because somehow they feel accepted, empowered.

Hilary wears green like it's the color of jealousy and wealth and venom, even now. There's wickedness to the curl in her hair, a regality in her jewelry, a defiance in the way she wears shoes that show off that pedicure. The dress is sleeveless; her arms look fine. She wraps a shawl around herself all the same.

[Ivan Press] Were he a different man, more learned, more interested in the world and the sky and the stars, he might compare her to a black hole. The shattered and lightless remnants of something brilliant and beautiful. Infinitely black. Infinitely destructive. Tearing her way through other people's lives; ripping them apart, flinging the dying pieces to the far ends of the universe.

Not out of malice. Not out of any particular care, even. Simply because it is her nature now; there is nothing else that much rage, that much brokenness, can do.


In the warm darkness of his room, it's like an eclipse twilight: traceries of sunlight through impenetrable shadow. He tells her he might be in love with her. She asks him how he would know. He wouldn't. He has nothing to say to that, merely a small shake of his head that she can barely see. He starts to draw away. She catches his hand and presses it to her mouth,

not like a lover, but as though to stem her own pleading. Give her more. More love, more adoration, more light that she could suck into herself to fill an unfillable void.

When she speaks again, it's what she says so often:

Yes, Ivan.


Later on he waits for her at the bottom of the stairs. She dresses like jealousy and wealth and poison. He stands and looks up at her. She comes down the steps very slowly, but there's no hint that her balance is precarious, that that almost ready to be born parasite inside her is in any danger of being harmed in a nasty fall. There's so much light in this living room of his, so much ridiculous air and space, that even someone of Ivan's stature - metaphorical and physical - seems dwarfed.

He steps forward as she steps off the staircase. For a moment it seems he might offer her his arm. Then he slides his arm around her instead, his hand over her hip anchoring her to his side as he guides her to the elevator.

"161 West Kinzie, wasn't it?"

[Hilary Durante] There's really no discussion of love between them. With Hilary it breaks down to need. The need to be brutalized to connect with herself -- or him. The need to be shattered, his need to be the shatterer -- whatever needs they might fulfill for each other. She comes close sometimes to being able to feel the depth and breadth of emotion, of everything, but those times are rare. And right now she can barely remember all the times she's felt like that.

Very carefully, very slowly, Hilary descends the staircase, her dress held up in front slightly, her eyes cast downward only briefly, here and there. Her balance is flawless, her grace not entirely gone. But it's nothing like the way she used to move, where ever step was art. It's nothing compared to what they're going to see tonight.

On the last step, Hilary puts her hands on his face, leans over him, and kisses him. The scent of her comes over him like a wave, and the taste of her mouth, the mint in her toothpaste, the endless soft wetness of her mouth. One hand slides down to his throat, her palm precariously, lethally, but so lightly covering his pulse, the touch thoughtless as she lets a quiet moan go into his breath.

When it parts -- when he lets it part, when it ends however it ends -- her footsteps tap-thump on the floor as she steps down. Those footsteps didn't used to be so heavy. He, yet again, draws her as close as physically possible while still retaining the ability to move. Hilary has a clutch with her now, and inside of it is almost all that she had in the bag she had on the plane, the bag that miraculously had reappeared, along with her coat, when she got out of his bed.

"Mm," she says, in affirmation, and presses her lips together, walking with him to the exit.