"Victor…"
He grunted in response.
"What did you do?"
Victor looked at his mate. She was kneeling in front of a dresser that sat at the foot of the bed, where he was currently slouching. Ria was so beautiful, so delicate...tiny jolts of electricity shot through his arms as he watched and thought about her. Soft, touchable, inviting. Begging to be grabbed and manhandled. The night shirt she wore showed off her bare back, all those spots swirling around each other in a mesmerizing black pattern that he could stare at forever.
A rumble rose in Victor's chest as he followed the spots down to her rump. She had a pair of silk sleep shorts on, but honestly, her ass was round enough that they didn't cover much. She had already made him agree to no sex while they stayed with the humans, especially at times like this when the family was asleep and not at work or school, and the only reason he had behaved this long was that her body wasn't sending him any signals aside from the usual ones. He didn't give two shits about the humans and their comfort levels, but Ria...he cared about her. So unfortunately, all he could do was sit and watch and wait.
"I didn't do anythin' at all." he said defensively.
"The kid just about pissed his pants."
"The kid was challengin' me."
She looked up at him with the most exasperated expression he had ever seen on anyone's face. "He's a teenager, Victor. How could he possibly-"
"I got a zero tolerance policy."
With a sigh, Ria stood, bringing a book with her over to sit next to him on what used to be the bed she went to sleep in every night. "I know, tiger."
He liked that a little bit. With a tiny smile that Ria couldn't see, Victor pulled her onto his lap, peering down over her shoulder as she opened the little book to reveal dozens and dozens of photographs.
"What're these, Spotty?" he asked, leaning in closer.
"I saved pictures I thought were important," Ria explained, flipping to the very first page. "Made more sense back in the day, when it wasn't so easy to find things like this again."
The first image was in grainy black and white, the small photo printed on thick, musty-smelling paper. A dozen or so girls in leotards stood in two rows, their expressions serious.
"Find me." Ria commanded.
Victor looked at the slightly blurred faces, finally settling on one scrawny kid at the end of the back row. "You were even tiny back then, frail."
"I was 14," she retorted. "But yeah...I was. This is the school I first ended up at. They took me in as an orphan. They never let me do anything there…." The rest of the page was filled with pictures of a small dance academy. She flipped the page. "This was my first time onstage."
The photo in the very top corner was unmistakably Ria. Her hair was short, almost flat against her head, but it was definitely her.
"When was this?" Victor asked quietly.
Ria took the photo out and flipped it over to read the back. "1922." she smiled. "My stage name in the beginning was Lady Ria. Corny, right?"
Victor gingerly took the picture from her and flipped it back over to look at her face again. She was smiling, and her eyes were sparkling almost as much as her dress was. She had two giant feathered fans and more feathers on her head, but none of that mattered compared to her face. Her expression was enchanting, happier than he had ever seen anyone look before. He wanted to see her like that again.
"You can keep it." Ria mumbled. "If you want."
Instead of answering, Victor looked down at her. Her face had changed since 1922. It didn't light up the same way as in the photo, and she seemed...harder. Sadder. It made sense, he supposed, given everything that had happened to her since then, but that didn't mean that he had to like it. He wanted her to be able to be happy like she had been, and he wanted to be the reason that she was.
"What were you doing in 1922?" she asked, pulling him away from his thoughts.
He shrugged. "Movin' around...drinkin' and fightin'."
"Did you ever go to watch dancing girls?"
"Everybody did," he laughed.
She smiled a tiny bit. "Did you ever see me?"
"Darlin', I promise, if I had seen you dance then, I would've remembered it forever." he pressed a kiss against the top of her head. "An' I would'a done more than just watch you…"
Her smiled widened, but she elbowed him in the ribs. "You most certainly would not have. Lady Ria didn't take men back to her dressing room."
"Then who did?"
She flipped to the next page. "The Leopard."
The woman in these photographs was older, bolder, less naive, more luxurious. In the first one, she had a black dress, a white fur robe, and a cigarette; her lips were full, and her eyes were so inviting that Victor almost felt like he could join her then and there. She oozed 1940s sex appeal, and as the years passed in the photographs, she got richer, raunchier, and so much more risque that in the final photo on the page, she wore absolutely nothing at all and was covered only by the taxidermied head of the leopard skin she laid on.
"I remember not enjoying that shoot," Ria said as her eyes followed his. "This one was much better." with a flip, she revealed a page filled with the products of advertisements and fashion portraits. "This one. Here." she pointed to a photo in the center.
She stood in front of a plain white backdrop, a white dress hardly covering her. Four leopards surrounded her, each one staring at the camera, completely obedient. Each wore a diamond collar but no leash, and each collar had a different pendant hanging from it. Ria was holding a cigarette Inbetween her manicured fingers, her other hand resting on her thigh.
"Must've sold a lotta smokes," Victor commented.
"Everything I endorsed sold." Ria said as she let go of the photo album and laid back against him.
"The Leopard, huh?" He asked as he stretched out on his back. She went with him, flipping over to lay on her stomach on top of him.
"Yes sir."
"Think I remember that name."
"Everybody knew my name."
"In a good way, or a bad way?" Victor asked, raising an eyebrow.
She propped herself up with a hand under her chin and smiled mischievously at him. "The Leopard got around." Ria closed her eyes. "I remember going to a lot of parties, and I don't know how half of them ended. It was wild."
"Never was one for parties." Victor grunted.
"I figured. You don't seem like you'd be a huge fan of the kind of places I spent most of my time."
Ria just nodded. "So...tell me something."
Her mate only grunted again in encouragement.
"Why don't you talk about your family?"
"Jimmy's all I got left." Victor said emotionlessly. "We stuck together...shit, for a long time. I took care of the runt."
"He's a runt?"
"Always thought so."
"If you were so close, then why hasn't he visited?"
"We parted ways a while back." Victor wrapped his arms around Ria. "He's been spendin' his time in New York as far as I know."
"Can I meet him?"
A low growl rose in Victor's chest and he tensed. Jimmy was too handsome, too good with women, too good at everything, to meet her. "Don't think so, frail."
She frowned. "Why? He's your brother."
"Runt brother." Victor corrected.
"...right. Runt brother." Ria looked at her grouchy tiger curiously. "Are you afraid of something happening?"
"No." he snapped all too quickly.
A tiny smile pulled at the edges of her lips. "Are you afraid that I would like him more than I like you?"
He hissed in response, picking his head up to meet her gaze with his teeth bared and his eyes narrowed. "Wouldn't matter if you did anyways. I'd rip his spine out if he touched you."
"Then why are you so worried?" she scooted a few inches closer to his face. "I'm stuck with you, Victor. There's no getting rid of me now, no matter how much you want to."
She felt his muscles loosen slightly as some of the tension left them. They had been in each other's company for long enough now that she was only just beginning to accurately gauge his reactions to things like this, and that companionship coupled with her knowledge of big, dumb male ferals told her that he was jealous of his brother and feeling threatened by the possibility of Jimmy sweeping Ria off her feet.
She was flattered that someone liked her enough to worry about her running off with their brother, but she was also getting the feeling that this was something that was going to become a frequent issue. Victor was easily upset and clearly prone to jealousy, and until she found a way to prove that she truly did believe him when he said she belonged to him, she was going to have to put up with him constantly keeping a firm grip on her shoulder.
"Victor?" she asked when he didn't make any reply. He was just looking at her, half in challenge. "Victor, do you believe that I'm your mate?"
"Of course." he scoffed and nodded towards the ugly scar on her neck. "I made it that way."
"But do you believe that we're in this together?"
He was silent for a long, hard moment, just looking at her with his lip raised in a sneer. His expression slowly became softer, though, and after a few seconds, he had relaxed and seemed to be laying comfortably again. "Yes."
"I don't want you to doubt me, Victor." Ria said firmly.
"I don't. I just...don't want you thinkin' you can run off on me. I don't want you thinkin' there's anybody better than me."
"There are dozens of people that are better than you," Ria snorted. "But that doesn't mean anything. That's just life." she smiled softly, reaching up to brush her fingers over his cheek. "Do you remember what I told you on that first day we met?"
"Yes," Victor answered immediately. He didn't think he would ever forget that day. "What about it?"
"I wanted to stay with you," Ria said. "I didn't ask you to let me go. I didn't tell you I didn't want to be your mate. My body has decided it's time to sit down and do what I was made to do, and if that involves you, then I'm not leaving. This is...well." She was beginning to feel foolish. "I'm ready to live with you in your territory. I'm...oh god, this sounds so fucking dumb…"
Victor was beginning to perk up. "No, keep talkin'."
"I'm…" her face was growing pink. "I don't know, I just...want...look. It seems like everybody's after me now. I need help staying alive. At first staying with you was just logical, but now there's something more. I've liked living with you like this. And I like you. And maybe it's just all the hormones making me say it, but I want to stick with you and make vicious little feral babies-"
"Frail," Victor said.
"-and have a little family, and do what...we're...supposed to…." she trailed off, trying to ignore the pink in her cheeks as Victor stared at her.
"Frail." he said quietly, his voice little more than a rumble in his chest. "We will."
She seemed to ignore him. "There's no avoiding it anyway, right? So...god, I sound so fucking stupid."
"Ria," Victor moved a hand to cup the side of her face. "It ain't stupid. But you're overthinkin' this."
She narrowed her eyes quizzically. "How?"
"We're mates. We're gonna do what mates do."
"Fuck and reproduce?"
He snorted. "Yeah, that." he let go of her face to grab the photo they had pulled out of the album. "Don't exactly look like a mother in this."
"I'll never look like one." Ria said, picturing Mary and wrinkling her nose. "Doesn't change the fact that I want to have your cubs."
Victor smirked. "You will."
Ria sighed and rolled off of him. "If I even still can."
Victor snarled. "You think those lab coats…?"
"I don't know. They might've fucked things up enough that...I mean, what if they did something that couldn't be fixed?"
"Everythin' is fine, doll. Everythin' healed. You're good." Victor rolled onto his side and pulled Ria up against him.
"Right," she said, not even half convinced. "Of course."
"You don't believe me."
"I...no. Not really." She sighed again, the breath coming out slightly shaky. "Everything feels so weird. Like...before I was caught, I thought I wanted to keep dancing. You know, lie low for a while and then find a way to get famous again. Or something. I didn't want to be with anybody or anything like that. Like...I was lonely, but it was kind of okay, you know? I had flings. I knew people."
Victor pressed a kiss against the back of her neck in response. He understood loneliness. He was good at living alone, but at the same time, it could be unbearable, and not even on a sexual level; sometimes, you just needed someone to talk to, someone to just be there in the same place you were. He wasn't proud to admit that Jimmy's recent absence had left him a bit bored and, yeah, lonely.
"And then just...spending so much time in that place. It just fucked me up. It made me need to be with someone I could trust. I was so isolated, and it made me so fucking anxious and scared all the time." She squeezed her eyes shut. "And I guess with them trying to...you know. I guess it made me want it too, sort of. And then I guess meeting you made me want it more."
"Spots, why're you explainin' all this?"
She paused for a second. "I guess I'm trying to make it make sense to me. Saying it out loud helps a little, you know?"
"You should sleep," Victor said, rubbing his thumb over the exposed skin on her hip.
"I can't sleep." Ria snapped. "Can't you tell I'm distraught?"
"I know you are. You'll feel better in the morning." he laid his head down next to hers and kissed her ear.
"Fine. I'll try. But you can't be telling me that you're going to sleep this early, Mr. All-I-Need-Is-Two-Hours-A-Night."
"I'm going to stay up." he grumbled.
"And do what?"
"Keep an eye on things."
Ria humphed and adjusted herself to get comfy. "Whatever. No promises that I'll even be able to sleep."
"You will, frail."
And within just a few minutes, Ria's breathing had evened out and deepened, and Victor began hearing her soft snores. This sort of thing had happened before; she would argue and get extremely cross, fighting with him in an almost childish way, before ultimately just passing out from the exhaustion he knew she was experiencing but that she was trying to ignore. Every time it happened, he would stay awake a bit longer than usual to keep an eye on her before allowing himself to settle down and sleep too, and then in the morning, he was usually the first one awake. If Ria did wake up before him, though, he was always extremely grumpy and borderline dangerous. Well, he was always grumpy and borderline dangerous-no, not even borderline, just flat out dangerous-but a sleepy sabretooth was not a happy one, no matter who was doing the waking.
Victor waited up, listening to the sounds of the house, the street outside, and the quiet rain that started up. It was much different from the noise of the forest, especially since it was spring now. All of the scents around him were different, too, and it was off putting. He prided himself on his survival skills-he could handle anything, after all, but this urban life was...not quite his speed. He had fought in cities. He had spent a few nights at a time in cities. But he had never really lived in a city, and he wasn't planning to, what with the only wildlife being raccoons that went through trash cans. He was really starting to miss the irritating bears, and it had only been two days that he and Ria had been away from home.
He stifled a sigh and closed his eyes, burying his face in his mate's hair. He hoped she was happy that they had gone on this trip, because at least then it wouldn't have been for nothing. Hopefully she was happy enough that they wouldn't ever have to come back and they could just forget those humans forever.
That was a stretch, and he knew it. A man could dream, though, and in his dreams, he and Ria were alone, living in the cabin, happy and free of humans. Well, they would be alone at first, but eventually those cubs were going to happen, and then Victor would have more than just himself and his mate to provide and care for. He could do it, though; like he kept telling himself, he was the biggest, strongest thing around. He was confident. Nothing could touch him or Ria or their unborn, currently nonexistent offspring.
His dreams that night were good.