you're too young & eager to love

I felt compelled to post an entry! I am alive. I do exist. I am not a figure of the internet's imagination.

Since I have a full-time teaching gig until the end of the year, my spare time consists of grading student papers and planning lessons. And reading books that I'm making my students read, because it turns out I haven't read the majority of the 11th-12th grade curriculum. Oh well.

Things I'm planning/hoping on writing soon:

Hannibal/Alana/Will angsty threesome porn! It must happen.
Emere/Brando incest angst. I just can't let it go. This is my guilty, perverted, deranged pleasure.

I think I can, I think I can, I think I can …

This might be crap, but I don't caaareeee. I'm just excited to write something.

A little Roman warm-up thing!

--


Roman has had too much to drink. He knows this intellectually and feels it physically; he should care, but he doesn’t. And while the finest of whiskeys (at least of the remaining limited supplies) can’t quite satiate his real thirst, he’s learned to appreciate the distraction, even after all these years. More importantly, he’s still the most sober of Harrow’s elite inner council – a sorority of the affluent and privileged, a circle of yes-men for the compound’s young president – but, he supposes, that isn’t really saying much. Harrow, three feet away, is hardly sitting straight, his half empty drink dangling from his fingers, his eyes bloodshot and cruel. His savagery is more apparent whenever he’s drunk too much; it comes out in his unbridled gaze, his slack madman’s grin, his boisterous voice. The other three men are in various states of intoxicated undress – a crumpled suit jacket is on the floor, ties are hanging from their necks or slipping from their once meticulous knots, and dress shirts are unbuttoned more and more. This, Roman knows, is thanks to the companions.

They’re a small group tonight, only five or so, including Harrow’s swan. Ita is the only claimed companion; the others are desperate prospects, hoping to attach themselves to one of the councilmen. They have accepted their roles in this world, and they cling to the delusion that affiliation and ownership will bring them some level of comfort, some veil of privilege and safety. It’s a blind dream, but Roman has seen it before in the eyes of many dying souls. Their flames are all but burnt out. He can smell that much on them.

There’s a coppery haired girl fidgeting with her dress in the corner, the gossamer material translucent, mesh-like, and meant to highlight her budding curves. All Roman can see is a child, barely thirteen, trussed up like a five-cent trinket. Yesterday’s trash. But he opens his arms to her anyway, his predatory grin diluted from the whiskey, and he turns his face into the crook of her neck when she crawls into his lap. She is dainty, delicate, and he still has the deep, sinister urge to break her bones, to drink her marrow, to swallow the current of her life. Instead, he nips at her prominent collarbone, the bristle of his beard scratching her peach skin, and runs his calloused palms down her naked arms, feeling the downy of her hair rise with his touch.

She smells like ripening fruit and fear – it’s a potent combination and it goes straight to his head.

He palms her thin calves, tugs at her makeshift dress, moves his mouth to the delicate spot where her jaw meets her ear. He murmurs something to her in German, all brutish, drunken charm, and she giggles. A flair of innocence in an otherwise tarnished husk. He had forgotten how much he missed broken, easily bruised things. He wants to tear away her clothing, bite at the underside of her prepubescent breasts, cup the backs of her thighs in his large hands, and bury his teeth into the pulsing vein at her neck. He wants so much that he groans, audibly, and the child laughs again, a silvery, tinkling laugh as she twists his hair between her fingers in feigned affection.

It’s the groan that ruins it. Roman isn’t known for revealing much – vulnerability, desire, anger – he’s a stoic, part of Harrow’s foundational architecture, as smooth as stone. When the veneer cracks, it’s enough to catch Harrow’s attention. Something in the air stills, thickens with tension, and Roman sees the outline of the other man’s body from the corner of his vision when he opens his eyes. He slides one hand to the inside of the prospect’s thigh, keeps the other on her hip in a gesture of territorial claiming, and uses his solder’s voice to grumble a bemused “Fuck off, yeah?”

Harrow sways. He barks a laugh, but the noise is harsh and bitter and he kicks at Roman’s foot like a petulant toddler seeking attention. “Apologize. You’re overstepping. What do – what do you have here, hmm?” He’s slurring, grabbing the top of Roman’s chair, making the girl cringe and curl closer to the other man, already feeling, foolishly, safer in his arms. Harrow notices and the whiskey causes his dangerous temper to curdle; he snatches her by the coppery length of her hair, pulls her from Roman’s lap, and slaps her across the mouth until she bleeds. When she makes the mistake of trying to run away, one of the others on the council trips her, laughing at the cry she makes when she hits the floor at a hard, awkward angle.

Like a lion attacking prey, Harrow is on her, kicking at her exposed sides and then her arms when she tries to cover herself. He yells till he froths at the mouth, cawing about respect and the impertinence of beasts. He rages until he stumbles backward, losing his balance, and it’s Roman that catches him by the arm, Roman that claps him on the back in a mock-salute, Roman that tells him enough is enough. Harrow, wild-eyed, shrugs free from the brunette before meeting his gaze. They stare at each other for a heavy moment, weighing the tension between them, before Roman laughs and turns away, picking up his discarded whiskey. “If you wanted to share, all you had to do was ask.”

It’s enough to make the room laugh, and the men’s mirth almost covers the sounds of the girl’s hitching, pained breaths.

“Kim!” Harrow barks towards the closed doors, stepping back towards his second in command, laying a hand on the back of his neck in a surprisingly forward gesture of intimacy. Roman gives Harrow the rest of his whiskey, distracting him when he tries to yell for his striker once more.

“I will handle it. Just bring me a replacement, yes?”

His hand has the cold feel of death when he grasps the shifter’s arm and yanks her, unkindly, to her feet. She has the rasping, wheezing cries of someone with a broken rib. Roman can smell the blood inside of her and the closer, fresher blood smeared across her mouth. He keeps his eyes forward and steels his resolve, pushing through the door with his shoulder, ignoring the glance of pity that he catches in Ita’s eyes.

He doesn’t look back. The girl is dragging her feet, hardly walking, an empty bundle of weight in his hold. Part of him thinks it would be best if he found some dark corner, some midnight alley near the loading docks, and soothed away the pain of her existence with a quick rip and deep swallow. But Kim has already seen him – she of the expressionless gaze, of the cold blood and merciless whip – and is taking the offensive whelp away.

She gives Roman a curt nod, but he doesn’t return it.

One more for today!

Inspired, somewhat, by this photo:

http://web.stagram.com/p/683589469448069196_180077455

I'm not sure why, really. Mostly because I like the idea of him wearing this when he first meets Lene and her scoffing and saying that he looks like he should be in Cuba. Then he'd be impressed that she even knows what is/was Cuba.

Thanks to Sasha-Muffin-Pants for giving me a prompt to focus on!

--




“A hungry man can’t see right or wrong. He just sees food.”

--

You wake in the night with a hunger that is palpable.

You wake in the night with a hunger so bright that it’s colorful – plum, heart red, organ slick, tangerine spheres, copper and salt fountains, an oasis of strawberry victims. Your mouth is dry, and your corpse’s breath sticks in your throat. You curl your hand around the Spartan edge of your bedframe until the wood threatens to splinter. Your mouth is caught in a snarl, like the vicious expression of a starved canine, and you know what your eyes look like: the eyes of wolves, prowling, determined to find a meal.

Here, in the last moments of the deep dark of the compound, in your isolated, medicinal quarters, you force yourself to relax. To uncurl your hand and feel the cotton fibers of the sheets beneath your body. You count to one thousand, a number for every year you’ve walked the earth, and then you count again. You do this seven times before your jaw relaxes, before your fangs retract, before you can see anything other than vermillion.

You consider yourself too old to feel this way. Too old to fall victim to the baser needs of your biology. You’re as tight as an arrow, all your preternatural senses keening, and if you could remember what it felt like to be a boy on the edge of manhood then you would know that this was the same. You can hear the heartbeats of everyone within a ten mile radius; all their heated smells, all their vivid tastes, beasts and humans alike, swell against you until you’re close to gnawing your own wrist. You would laugh if you weren’t exasperated. If you weren’t anxious. If you didn’t know the reason for this sudden awareness, for this yearning, for this budding possibility that stripped you of your resolve.

The possibility of your lack of control angers you because it frightens you.

You think Adira would be disappointed, but the thought makes you smile. Her with the sleight frame but iron will. Her who taught you what the word survival truly meant: self-preservation.

Above all other costs.

--

Sometimes, when you are alone, she sits with you. She’ll lean against your window frame as you talk, slipping into the old language of the fatherland, her arms folded, wearing those light spring dresses that you remember her wearing in the dead of winter. Dresses that showed off her slender, finely shaped calves. Her tiny ankles covered by leather boots meant for male soldiers. Her skeletal fingers gloveless and, miraculously to those who saw, unaffected by the cold. If you can remember her well enough (and you always can), there will be snow in her auburn hair, her cherry bud mouth the only part of her that is womanly. Even in her dress, she is devoid of feminine curves – as straight as a boy, yet she possessed a ferocity that was tangible, so much that the even the Reichsleiter were unnerved by her.

She rarely wore the proper attire or insignia until you made her, and then you both adopted the all-black uniform of the SS. The Nazi Party’s ideologies were less easy to wear, but Adira’s particular brand of adaptability conformed to any situation. Such is survival, she would murmur, when you’re hiding amongst men.

You still make sense of that lesson now.

The Insurgence knows this.

They know most everything. Some of the information in your record you provided willingly. Other details, the ones more secret and intimate, they found for themselves. Time reveals anything, even in a world that is drastically changing, although you can’t help but think that this new radicalization is just another repetition.

Cycles of ash and rebirth.

Human hatred and fear: the great catalysts.

--

Calev does not come to you.

You do not invite him like you invite your maker. His is not a conjuring you summon. He is one of those quiet things, one of those details of your long life that you hold, painfully, to yourself. He is etched into your marrow, and there he will remain.

Adira had not approved then and, even after, her opinion did not change much.

You had stood inside the camp barracks, the collars of your coats turned up, with your Kommandant emblem blaring as a warning on your uniform and Adira’s riding crop clutched firmly in her little hand. She lashed out at the occasional passing prisoner, barking a rebuke in her accented German. Even though she was more than a foot smaller than you, she had a reputation for merciless that kept most everyone else at a distance. But the yard was mostly empty given the late hour, the freezing temperatures, and the threat of more snow.

Inside the nearest barrack, crammed somewhere on top of the wooden bunk beds, you could smell him. Smell the death and disease and despair.

“He’s dying,” You told her as if that was explanation enough for your recent infatuation, careful to whisper in Adira’s native tongue.

“Look around. They’re all dying. This place is death, liebling. … It stinks of rot and decay and shit.”

You laughed. It was harsh, like the wind. “Are you not – ”

“Welche schuld! Welche schuld! Wo war diese schuld vor einem monat?” She punctuated her scoffing reproach with her crop, tapping it pointedly against your leg, until you caught it firmly and glared downward. She rarely spoke German with you – the harsh sounding language was maintained for appearances and condemnation only.

Adira sighed, like a disapproving mother, and looked back to the barrack in question. “You will do what you want, in the end, my love. We always do, eventually.”

And you had.

But like an inexperienced child, you waited too long and bore the consequences for decades to come.

--

Your hunger makes you impatient, turns you on edge, but worst of all it makes you guilty.

You close your eyes and think of gaunt, skeletal faces. Of walking corpses unlike that of which you are. You press your knuckles to your eyes and will away your ghosts, these burdens of your particular, unique past.

Before you were assigned to the compound, when you were only a step below The Insurgence council figures themselves, most of the members still referred to you as Kommandant. The younger members were merely following in the footsteps of the older, hardened recruits; they were too young to know the weight behind the title. But the others understood, and they meant it as a mockery, a jab to your status and character.

You embraced it as you had embraced it originally. Your reputation had always preceded you.

That, too, does not change. You establish a new kind of notoriety – one carried from the mouths of the elite women, the prospectives, or the sometimes-borrowed companions. After two years by his side, Harrow has much to say about you as well: your loyalty is blood-deep, and you have proven it so much that, on good days (or bad ones, really), you sometimes forget what your true mission is. The Insurgence understands; any dedicated soldier risks delving too deeply, which is why they send you your contact. A break from the role you play. She will better you, the coded letter informs you. She will strengthen your determination, offer the chance for companionship, and satisfy your desire for nourishment.

Their euphemism makes you laugh. Donors are hardly so willing, you think.

The seed is planted all the same, and the possibility of all that they suggest fills you with a need you thought you had long discarded.

Logic tells you that she will be a set of eyes and ears – a rat, meant more for reporting than stabilizing.

But your hunger says differently.