8:13pm

Change was not a jog in the park for Dominik Wiedman, especially when he was left to his own devices.  The more he pensively tried to work out who he was, where he was going, and how his future demanded a full 180 of him, the more he fixated on anything that might ground him in being the person he already was - a vicious animal and rugged, violent layabout.  He liked that about himself!  Or, at least, he was terrified about releasing himself of some very carefully guarded burdens and vices; his identity was carefully sculpted and widely reinforced.  He was finding that it was much easier to stay the same than to suddenly become a decent human being.

Maybe that was why he was sitting in the dark in Niobe Thursby's apartment this Tuesday evening, waiting patiently for her to arrive home from her work at the Daily Prophet.  He hadn't been invited, exactly.  He let himself in, knowing that she would be passionately on edge to find him there.  He was feeling that he at least owed it to Niobe to explain why he wasn't here all the time for her.  Why they could alas no longer bonk.  It'd been ages since he'd seen her.  He couldn't keep stringing her along like this.  It was just cruel....

A part of him enjoyed such cruelties, of course.  But this was where the Dominik we know and the Dominik we all hope for clashed into one fused being of confusing turmoil.  Hate Niobe / love Niobe.  Ditch Niobe / hold Niobe.  Marry Dolly / bachelor life in misery.  Babies / booze.  Groomed gentle Wizard / smelly unshaven punk in black.  There were too many choices in life, after all.  He settled on having to see Niobe - who reinforced his animality and his horrible nature quite nicely.  But he had to tell her the real reason for his holding her at arms length.  He had to tell her he was moving on.
   

Niobe had come home, upped the stairs to her floor, and undid the locks.  Another night coming home to a dark empty flat.  Perhaps tonight she'd find Maggie and go out.  So what if it was Tuesday? She was feeling sociable.  All this she thought as she shut the door behind her, set down her bag and keys.

She didn't see Dominik sitting there until she was nearly on top of him.  She'd turned to light the lamp near her big chair, when the bulk of him startled her senseless.

Niobe actually screamed out a few startled, frightened yelps! Every woman, muggle or magic, has played out the particulars of being set upon alone in the apartment, rehearsed the brave wild-cat fending off of the intruder.  But her planned brash cry of defiance and territorialness that should have began the incident was lost.  In favor of a few startled, breathy yelps.

She'd jumped away, knocking over the lamp and side-table in the process.  Her wand was drawn and a spell misfired - something spastic with no incantation. 

What followed was more along the lines of what she imagined.  Angry shouting.

"DOMINIK! YOU BLOODY ARSEHOLE I'LL KILL YOU RIGHT FECKING NOW! THE HELL, MAN!"  she charged at him and gave him a rough push away.

"What the SHIT are you doing in! My! House! You're insane! AUGH!"

She was so amped up on the adrenaline of believing she was about to be murdered that she didn't realize she was happy to see him.  Because he was an entertaining, lovely-faced, pathetic ex-boyfriend. And Niobe liked having those.

Despite how horrible it was to do it (considering the bad news he had brought with him), Dominik just couldn't resist staying quiet as a mouse as she turned her key in the lock and came in to her studio - he'd wanted to surprise her!  But also his senses perked in the darkness and he felt sharp as a pin with his scent on something, like a cat on the prowl.  He had to admit to himself that he found some amount of pleasure in her fear response once she made out the shape of a body next to her, then melting into a lovely sort of explosive rage, meant only for him. 

A dopey wisp of a smile even dared cross his face as she shoved and batted at him, verbal vomit tearing into his soul with fire!

Dominik wasn't anything that would hurt her, but, he had needlessly frightened her to pieces.  Maybe that's what he was going for?  Heightened stress in body reactions were good fun for Dominik Wiedman.  The thought occurred to him; he could do that again.  But, no!  He was forgetting what he had to do. 

What he had to do was horrible, horrible business.  He couldn't provide her with a sense of false safety only to go about breaking her heart!  He cleared his throat, straightening his long black coat with a sense of sudden purpose.

"I've got to tell you something!" he said, importantly. 

"You and me, we are solid good fun! - incredible even - don't get me wrong now, I love us.  But now I've turned a new leaf, made of me a new man, and not another day will I stand to think of you in sadness and suffering alone without me at your side!  What I've done to you is cruel and it was unkind.  No!"  He held a hand out in front of him to silence her (not even noticing if she had seemed ready to say anything). 

"Now," he said, "it wasn't fair, but I've got to do the right thing because I'm a good man, now, and I follow through on my word and I do what must be done for the good of everyone!  Niobe!  I'm breaking up with you!"

She was furious but filled with vinegar now - her evening plans had been given a brightness.  Dominik - she'd pushed him off her ages ago because he was a horrible force for only disaster.  Getting in fights, threatening her friends, coming around all the time, presuming things were the way they weren't... But now he was here and she wanted his crazy company.  He was a bastard for showing up, and showing up how he did, but he was here - let's us make the best of it. 

Still frazzled from the near-killing and counterattack, she stood square on her feet and pushed her floppy, thick dreadlocks away from her head, leaving her hands there at her temples a moment.  She listened to Dominik, waiting on him to get past whatever soft excuse he had so she could get on with her idea.  Signature.  No.  Calaveras!  Then they'd -

What? What the hell was he on about?  Her face turned to accusatory puzzlement, and she moved to interject, but he stopped her.  He stopped her?

He finished his piece, his dark eyebrows sincere and handsome on his brow, a look of real earnestness on his face, of merciful sacrifice.  Niobe couldn't believe it. 

"Dominik..." she started with incredulous slowness.  "We," she pointed between them, "we were not together! I broke off our silly bonking ages ago."

She shook her head in confused and afflicted surrender.  Was he raiding his crazy sister's cauldron again?

"What the shit are you on about? Can that bollocks and get your coat.  Come on with me to Calaveras and we'd drown that nonsense on my sickle.  You daft, crazy person."

She was done with whatever win-me-back ploy he had.  All was forgiven.  Can we please go have a good time now like before?  She was already making motions to do the same.

Dominik hadn't prepared himself for this sort of development.  He stood and stared at her in awe.  She couldn't be serious!

He knew he should say, No!  Stop right there, lady, I'm serious!  But tempted as he was with total forgiveness from Niobe, and Niobe all to his own again for a night out on the town, and then?  Sweet Salazar, this was bad, bad, horrible, terrible news.  He felt his heart start to flutter and he knew right away he had gotten this all reversed.  He still had feelings for her!  He was not resolved! and he was trying to get closure! and now he was - 

"Okay."

Dominik's brow flattened in subtle consternation.  He shrugged his coat to straighten it out on his shoulders.  "Wait, no," he said, evidently murky in the cranial region.  "What are you -" he stopped himself.  Had to.  He couldn't really bare to push any wrong buttons in her now - if he broke up with her for real, then he really would be alone in this.  Did he believe enough in his ability to please Dolores... enough to have her as his girl any time soon?  How could he pretend that he was ready for such a privilege when the whole Summer he'd been trying - only to come to the fact that he was comfortable being a wanker and didn't know how to be anything different?

He looked at Niobe, incredulous.  "What do you mean, Calaveras?  I have my dignity, you know!  You're done with our silly bonking, you say?  Well then tell it to my face that you don't want my love, and I'll leave you right now!"

Niobe paused in her going out preparations, her hand frozen up holding her hair in place, an elastic waiting between her teeth.  She felt like she was in a Samuel Beckett play, bless his aburd Irish brain.  Dominik was really breaking up with her - or at least he believed as much.

In a swift movement, she tied up her hair, freeing up her hands so they could fold across her chest.  And freeing up her teeth so she could clack 'em at this amorous thug of a wizard. 

"Love.  Honestly."  She rolled her eyes mightily.

"Why are you here, then? Why are you ever here? Because you and I have a rollicking bloody good time together.  Do you want to marry me, Dominik? Do you want us to have children, Dom?  Shall we get a proper cottage and love each other?"  Despite her exhaustion with him, there was something sad in her voice.

She hated having this kind of talk.  Why did it have to be such a thing with him!  He was singularly unbelievable to sleep with, he was dangerous, exciting, and supurbly unpredictable.  And he could keep up.  So why wasn't he now.  Why was there all this?

She took a few steps closer and reached out to put a hand gentle on his waist.  "The hell, mate.  C'mon."

Things sort of... slowed down, then.  She slowed down, then.  Dominik was waiting on the head of a pin, for what, he couldn't tell anymore.  He actually didn't know what he wanted - only that he was waiting with bated breath for her response to what he'd said, as if it really, truly mattered.  It did matter to him, and he was starting to see that again.  He was acting like a bloody wronged femme or something, and their roles were dreadfully reversed.  Actually he liked it that way, to some degree.  But she was surely making a point of it - did he really want to be weak?  Didn't he want to destroy and take chances?  Didn't he want to feel again?

She was - right there.  She even sounded... remorseful, and hopeful.  Dubious and willing to overlook his strange foibles, even.  Salazar.

"Wha ... wha," Dominik stuttered, quieted by what she'd said but still wanting to protest.  "I...."

Well what could he have possibly said?  He was in all subtle ways desperately trying to cling to who he was, without having to change things up - because he was happy being miserable!  He liked being an animal!  And he still felt that it was right to fight that instinct off; yet here she was with a deeply tempting invitation.  And she was so overbearingly convincing with her hand gentle on his waist, and her big brown eyes looking into him like that, challenging him to accept what he was and what he wanted.  His heart was even racing as he looked at her.  He swallowed hard, trying hard to think clearly and actually answer her.  But he wasn't smart enough to break contact.

"I don't know about anything any more, Niobe.  I've been trying to behave for months and I've just been alone, feeling like a vampire forced to live on Ministry surplus blood."  He allowed his eyes to wander over her, thoroughly at odds with himself.  "I do want you to at least - need me." 

But it was too late, cause he'd pressed his face to hers in a kiss and let the animal out on the loose again.

Niobe saw her life from the outside for one clear moment as she leaned into Dominik's frustrated, beard-scratchy kiss.  It was not altogether admirable, her life.  From that clear moment outside of her own knotty head, she saw herself as equally manipulative and addle-brained and misgiven as Dom.  This was all terrible and shoddy, this whole business of who was after who.

She stepped back from him, not able to help a pleased little grin.  Pleased at the human contact, at the feeling of a kiss.  At being wanted.  Yes.  Dom had been gone for months and the only thing Niobe had been able to substitute was fancying that earnest Dreogan Eleor and wondering about that limpy Jonas Trevelyan, little flights that offered very little against her carnal and legal adventures with Dominik Wiedman. 

Niobe was silent, not sure what to do.  The kiss had awoken some potent humors.  She ran her palm round the nape of her neck and tried to give Dominik the courtesy of an honest considered answer.  She was good at that, just not with him.

"I don't know, mate," she admitted with a defeated little shrug.  It was a shit answer considering all he'd said to her, what he was asking for.  She didn't want to talk about this.  It was too painful and light-shedding.  Couldn't things stay dim and frantic, like this dark little flat?  With shadowy corners and the mysterious unknown that could be filled with danger and adrenaline?

"I do need you," she finally said, ashamed she was to admit it.  He moved around him to the covered windows that were leaking in streetlights.  She fiddled with them, letting in a bigger slice of illumination to cast some sharp shadows.

"Like the sea needs storms." (To toss ships around, make sailors love their mothers, to churn up krakens...)  "I need you as you are, not some weepy git lacking in confidence.  I'm bloody glad you're here! I admit it.  Maybe it was a mistake before, throwing you out.  But!"

She stopped him this time, at least from assuming too much.  "But I'm not giving in to some bollocks old tale of romance and doting and definitions.  I don't want that," she said with a shake of her back-lit head.

As they pulled off of each other, Dominik's brain reeled.  He watched her every movement, staidly silent.  His hands found the insides of his coat pockets soon as they were off of her, his shoulders gathering slightly up toward his ears.  He was quite aware of her tempting little look of pleasure - and that had been quite an exhilarating kiss, very uncontrollable, deeply wanted, highly satisfying... but now that they had stopped the fires, he was a little embarrassed with himself.

Then, she said exactly what he'd wanted to hear - I do need you!  The words were stunning.  In that moment, he was pretty sure his heart broke!  He felt hollowed, then got chills all up his neck and goosebumps and was left staring ahead at nothing as she walked round to the window.  He fancied her a poet in the moments following, letting her words sink deeply into him.  Some of them hurt, others cast shadows as tangible as those cast by the street lights streaming in from London outside her window.  As her words took on a more colloquial din, he moved to look at her again.  There was an urgency in his step but he came to a quick halt at her abrupt conjunction. 

"You realize I'm thirty years old now," he said.  He knew she was older than him - and clearly she wasn't letting age tell her what to do with her life, but he thought he'd have to show the reasons why he shouldn't do this - if not for her then for himself.  And if not for himself, then for all the people behind the scenes who would thwap him in the face!  He certainly had plenty of those, and he was making real progress by trying to incorporate their opinions into his decision-making process rather than acting now and dealing with the consequences later.  Had all of this happened a few months earlier, he was pretty sure he'd have her out of those clothes by now.

"I know I'm still young but - that's fecking old when you're the eldest in a line that has certain expectations," he had to add.  "I like living hard, and I want you," Dominik trailed off, clearly at odds with himself and also very embarrassed.  He wanted nothing more than to not care what other people thought, though he clearly yearned to please the prestigious pureblood community.  He felt very dirty admitting that to her. 

Dominik Wiedman did not want to grow up.

That poor man.  Niobe hadn't considered...

"Who's in your ear, mate?"  She asked him, actually feeling for him.  Niobe's and Dom's had never been a coddling, nurturing partnership where one supported the other and feelings were shared.  More like they usually goaded, bullied and necked the other into some interesting turn of events.  They didn't help each other, or mend wounds.  But apparently today was a day of strange tides.  Niobe sat back on the wooden window sill.

"Your family...? Who? I can't presume to understand what it's like being a Wiedman," and all their pureblooded malarky," but I know damn well what thirty feels like.  There's no spellbook in real life.  You follow your own heart.  Do what you want.  Spend too much time trying to sort everyone else out and you'll get torn up."

She gestured, indicating that all of this was torn up.  Their current aching conversation was torn up, and caused by people who weren't even here, or so Niobe now suspected.

She shrugged.  She felt annoyed, stoppered up, rejected, and now like she was some shoulder devil.  But whatever.  Whatever he had to do, he'd do it. 

"So this is it? You're a responsible adult now and everyone'll be happy?"  She didn't say it nastily.

There was a long stretch of heavy-browed silence as Dominik looked at her, looked round at the flat he was standing in, and stewed with her words.  Didn't being a Wiedman mean following your own heart, on some level?  He was damn proud of Daz, after all, and she'd hardly followed any sort of spell book.  And really, what harm could be caused by a slight delay, if that's all this was?

He gave his heart a good solid minute to tell him what it thought.  Then he took a few steps toward her, saying, "Nah." 

A devious little grin and a cock of the head and Dominik held a sturdy hand out to her.  It was a symbolic gesture more than anything, because if she let him help her up, she'd be agreeing to something.

"My heart's not ready to grow up just yet," he told her.  "So I'll be your confident beast and keep my weepy bollocks under wrap, if you'll be my Witch and call it a proper thing.  No babies, no marriage, no bloody perfect cottage fairy-tale or unreal expectations.  Just be my girl.  That's just a wee bit more than bonking."

Dom knew that this couldn't go on forever, probably, but - he did have to admit to himself that this was what he'd wanted.  Being with Niobe was insane, but it was also somehow natural.  And he did so like to do whatever the hell he wanted, and to be a bad, bad man.  He'd just have to grow up fully later on, after his last crazy stretch of Quidditch.  He definitely was done with being single and celibate, to say the least.

Niobe couldn't help but enjoy watching Dominik think.  Watch him navigate through the strange tides that pulled and pushed on him. As if there were thirty moons swirling around him exerting upon his humors.  She waited patiently watching his brows move, his posture change, the small movement of his shoulders rising and falling with his breath.

And then, like a good lad, like the great lug for whom's attention she sparred for, he gave it to her.  His hand out stretched and a posit so ... undesirable that hey may have well proposed marriage.  Or the guillotine.

She pursed her lips and shook her head.  "You devil."

He'd turned the tides. Probably not just to vex her, but it did.  She'd waiting on his choice to stay or go, but instead he'd proposed terms.  And they were not ideal. 

To see Dom, to partner with him publicly (and privately), to be his and him hers.  An engagement with a beginning and therefore and end.  Expectations, terms, conditions, expiration dates, and measured, measured definitions. 

His hand was there for her, and she wanted to take it.  Gods what a precipice. 

"This will end badly," she said, brightness returning to her face.  She took his hand and slid down from the sill. 

"Let us merrily to the brink then.  Calavaras?"

The offer was given and hung on the air along with his outstretched hand, an offer strangely cloaked as simple and straightforward in the chaotic airs between them.  In the precipice of those slow-stretching moments, however, Dominik felt his heart increase with the pull of looming danger.  She was very, very right.  This would end badly.

The pull of those tides and moons became so intense that for a small stretch of time he felt he could have broken into a cold sweat.  But the moment passed quickly and a loose grin found his lips as her feet hit the ground.

"Calaveras," agreed Dominik, his tone nonchalant but light-hearted and upbeat.  Contrarily, he cupped a hand round the side of her face to swipe a thumb over her smooth cheek in as quick a motion of fondness as he could muster. 

He hadn't taken off his long, black jacket or his boots, so all he had to do to be ready was shrug his shoulders and sniff deeply to suck down his newly remodeled reality.  He was going to be in loads of trouble for this.  He'd be having to recalculate his immediate plans, or else invent a new notion of romance for himself.  One, it was seeming, where love didn't factor in, agreements ruled the land, and having a reluctant girlfriend didn't exclude one from participating in the ever-important hunt for a successful marriage. 

What was messiest of all was the fact that Dominik Wiedman was not quite cured of his obsession.