you're too young & eager to love

Roman and Adira - 1920s AU but technically set during his time as a WWI soldier. Not quite as porn-centric as I had originally wanted, but I'm very happy with establishing the foundation of their relationship and capturing the certain mood that I wanted.

Reference pictures:

Roman: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/ee/91/25/ee9125861376471e1b24940e6a20952f--man-magazine-dream-man.jpg
Adira: http://contributormagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/assets/images/MAGNUS%20LANDSCAPES/hannar2.jpg


I blame Google for any potential translation problems. Google and the fact that I haven't studied/spoken/read French since high school.


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She isn't beautiful. Her nose is too large for her otherwise delicate features and crowds her cheeks; her eyes are close together; her lips are thin, pale slivers of chapped skin; her jaw angles down into a point, completing the severe cut of her diamond-shaped face. She is knobby knees knocking together and skeletal wrists, hips that are sharpened bone, collarbones like glass, dishwater blonde hair limp with grease. A scarecrow on city streets.
She's the type of woman Roman can quite literally throw over his shoulder without having to worry about being weighed down.
She's the type of woman that, in another war, would find herself behind barbed wire.
In this one, she kneels on her knees until the cobblestone has bruised them and takes soldiers in her mouth for bottles of wine and day-old bread. In this one, she washes between her legs with rainwater and vinegar and feels grateful that the brothels opened their doors to the impoverished women of Paris. She doesn't know how to feel pity - for herself or for others - but she knows how to survive, how to adapt, how to sequester.
Roman finds her in the worn-down, red-tinged Quartier Pigalle district, somewhere between the Moulin Rouge and the Sacré-Coeur – a grim place where only the drunks and the hungry belong. He smokes a hand-rolled cigarette, leaning against a damp alley with one foot cocked back against the brick, because he wants to be lost in a ruined world - because dark, sad streets have thick shadows that coat his conscious. He's still preoccupied with the image of a German boy's head splitting open on account of his rifle's bullet, a boy as perfect as boys could be, hardly fair to even call him a man, with blue eyes like ocean swells and a strong, clean jaw that had fallen open in the last second of his life as if shock was all he'd felt, the way one was shocked by a sudden burst of cold wind and nothing more. Roman remembers how red his blood had looked on the rich, dark soil of no-man's land. He’d laid there between the territorial trenches since dawn, and he'd waited for the kill, his hawk eyes trained to hunt. Just as he waited for the cover of darkness to crawl back to the parapet, moving slowly by inches, the smell of death and dirt against his cheek and an emptiness in his gut that hurt more than remorse ever could have.
His reward was civilian clothes, the scratch of stubble at his jaw, and three days of leave in a city burnt and billowing ash, damp with grime and malady. So when the blonde stumbles out of the brothel's dimly lit doorway, he takes one look at her and understands: she's exactly what he deserves.





The prostitute wears a straight shift of faded white with black hosiery on her matchstick legs and her hair hangs in her face. There's more than a few rips in the legwear, and Roman traces the length of one thin tear from the outside of her thigh to the side of her knee with his eyes. She's wrapped an old shawl around her shoulders, either to protect from the damp in the air or to hide a stretch of yellowing bruises on her upper arms. When Roman offers her a cigarette, she peers up at him with the eyes of a wolf.
"Que veux tu pour ça?" She asks in a voice like gravel scratching beneath the heel of a boot.
Roman taps his left ear and shrugs, gesturing his lack of understanding.
The blonde rolls her eyes but slips into English that, though heavily accented, is fluid. "This is for free?"
"A gift from abroad, darling."
"No such thing, I think," she says but takes the cigarette anyway, rolling up on her toes to accept the light he offers next. "From a soldier."
"Maybe you aren't being appreciative." He pitches his finished cigarette to the ground but does not move from the wall. Listening to her speak is like listening to a cat's purr.
"Pardon?"
"Not being appreciative. You're not ..." he twirls his fingers in the air, circling in his mind for the word. "Not grateful for us being here."
The woman's eyes are leather brown but in the street lights they look amber. Again, Roman thinks of a wolf when she stares at him, fearless and angry, tilting her chin up to exhale a plume of smoke near his face. "Oh, so you are a funny soldier, yes? A regular Charlie Chaplin. Funny to come to France and fight with boys and fuck their girls and burn their city and die in mud and shit."
"Your English is sehr gut, Fräulein. Sehr gut."
She recoils as if struck. When she flicks her unfinished cigarette to the ground, she flicks it directly at his boot. "A kraut?"
"Americanized, liebchen. My grandfather was the original kraut. I work for the red, white, and blue now. Or the blue, white, and red. Das ist mir Wurst."
She pulls her shawl closer to her, clutching the ends over her breasts in a poor imitation of a modest woman. She still looks uncertain, but Roman glances back to the brothel entrance pointedly. "I'll pay. And not with molded bread," he tells her.
At this, the woman laughs. "With what then? Money? With these rations? I would prefer the bread, chéri."
Roman's smile widens and becomes a grin. It isn't cheerful, but she takes his hand anyway and leads him to the door.





The prostitute’s room is at the top of a rickety set of stairs that ascend immediately from the brothel’s dark foyer, off to the left and identical in its weariness to the other women’s doors. The room is small and lacks warmth, creating an atmosphere Roman has become familiar with while in France. The ceiling is water-stained and the wallpaper peels away from the walls in long strips like yellow skin. There’s a lumpy mattress covered in colorful quilts in the corner, a solitary lamp glowing dimly atop a stack of wooden crates, and a chest pushed against the main wall that harbors what little possessions and clothing the woman still has. There’s a basin of water, a chipped pitcher, and a small assortment of food and jars on a cutting board on top of the chest. She’s propped a wrought-iron stool next to it. Roman wonders how often she’s sat there, eating rotten fruit as she peers out of the adjacent window, bracing herself for another night.
He has a small tin of canned corn beef and a package of biscuits in his coat pocket, leftovers from his rations in the trenches. He's learned to keep necessities on him. The woman has a half empty bottle of wine and a wedge of cheese wrapped in linen. Between the two of them, it is a feast.
Roman knows the kind of hunger war brings though, so he props open the can with a knife he keeps holstered in his boot and offers it to the woman first. She takes it without hesitation, watching him with her large eyes as she breaks a piece of bread and uses it to scoop out a chunk of greyish-pink meat. She eats quickly. Roman is reminded of feral dogs who swallow without tasting and bare their teeth at any hand that threatens to take their scavenged meal. After a few bites, she offers the can back to him, but he waves her away and sits on the edge of the bed. He lights a cigarette and pulls a flask from his jacket. She seems amused by this, by his seemingly depthless pockets and the possible delights they could store.
“Do you have a name?” He asks around the filter of his cigarette.
“Adira. Et toi?” She pours a glass of wine after wiping crumbs from her mouth, rewrapping the remaining bread and storing it with the canned beef next to the cheese on the top of the chest.
“Roman.”
“Like the conquerors, yes?”
“Some people would say they were diplomats, but yes.”
“And you? Which are you? A diplomat or a conqueror?”
“If soldiers conquer, then that’s what I am.” He shrugs and flicks ash onto the floor.
“Good, you won’t cry then like some of the others. I hate a man who cries.”
She’s so serious in her conviction that Roman laughs, the sound loud in the small confinement of her room. He grins at her, watching as she removes her shawl and takes a drink of wine. “No, mademoiselle, I won’t cry.”
When Adira drapes the shawl over the back of the stool, the faded cotton the color of old teeth, Roman can see the thinness of her arms and he’s reminded of his father’s ivory piano keys – how light they were beneath his fingers, how easy to push. He takes his coat off slowly, laying it over the edge of the bed closest to him, then rests his elbows on his knees, his fingers interlacing between them. There’s no music in the way she moves, no attempt at seduction as she crosses the room to sit beside him, placing the wine on the nearby stacked crates beforehand.
He turns his face to look at her, and she touches his jaw lightly with the tips of her dirty fingers. “Are you here to forget?” She asks him mildly.
“No,” he says and turns his mouth into her palm.





He doesn’t remove his shirt or his pants or his boots. Adira rolls down her stockings because she cannot afford to rip them more than they already are while the shift she wears is barely worth protecting, but she’s surprised when Roman slips the straps down her arms then pulls away the dress as though he’s unwrapping a present. She isn’t used to being so exposed, but she doesn’t make any attempt to cover herself.
Roman knows little of fear and even less of cowardice, a characteristic Adira realizes by the way he runs his hands over the bruises on her body, how his eyes take in the cuts and scars littering her skin with nothing more than a precursory glance. He kisses her as man unafraid of disease, openmouthed despite the sour taste of her tongue and the way her lips scratch his. He holds her face in his large hands, and she can’t remember the last time anyone kissed her without pity or desperation.
Instead, he seems to want to swallow her whole, a carrion-crow come to pick at her bones.





Adira smooths a hand back through his hair, the strands long on top and an ashy shade of chestnut. She catches the back of his clean neck near the collar of his shirt when he continues to kiss her. He smells like the grave, like dirt and water and rust, the kind of war smell that no amount of washing can get rid of, but he’s warm and solid and ready for her and she arches up to him.
She’s a pale line beneath him, her fully naked body a stark contrast against his civilian clothes. She doesn’t complain. She cups him against his thigh, hard, and breathes a mouthful of French that lands against his shoulder as a murmur. His stubble of beard scratches her throat when he leans down to pull his mouth across her jugular, the vein there thick but weak, a fever-hot path for his tongue to follow. He cups her breasts between his hands. They’re shaped like tears, full in his palms, and her nipples tighten when he scrapes them with his teeth.
There’s a feral look to the way she tosses her head back against the old pillows, the blankets beneath them accenting the sudden color that has brightened her cheeks. Her mouth is rubbed raw from where he’d kissed her. When her eyes flutter as she undoes his trousers and pushes them down, lower against his hips, Roman thinks the look is practiced. He doesn’t mind. He’ll fuck her because he can, because she’s been bought, because the body she loans him is as damaged as his own and he thinks there’s a form of justice, of decency, in calling a spade a spade.
Adira guides him inside of her, and then he holds her open at the thighs, his fingers spreading wide over her skin and pushing her down into the mattress as she bears his weight and his full, hard thrusts. Her breasts shake from the rhythm, and she digs her hands into the blankets rather than his shoulders or his back.
When she turns her cappuccino eyes up at him, he moves one hand to her neck. She is pale limestone; if he squeezed, she would crumble. The smile that curves her mouth is amused, full of recognition, and she arches her spine into a wider half-circle, drops her head back to offer up more of her throat.
Part of him thinks it would be a kindness to end her life now, but she isn’t the enemy, and her bed is not the trench. He keeps a grip on her neck anyway, one hand still pinning her thigh, but he kisses her for a second time.
She won’t tell him, but Adira will think it is similar to dying.





After, they share a cigarette. She coughs into her pillow, a wet, hacking noise that seems to rattle inside of her chest even after she’s caught her breath.
“That will only get worse when winter hits, liebchen,” Roman says, their fingers brushing as she passes the smoke.
Adira makes a hum of acknowledgement and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. He can’t be certain for sure, but he thinks she’s expecting to see blood.
“You should see a doctor.”
She laughs at him, leaning over the bed to grab her dress from the floor. “Oui. I’ll do that.”
“I know a nurse – ”
“You’re a good man,” she says, interrupting him with the coldness in her voice and the sudden glare of her eyes as she moves away from his body warmth, “but I do not need your charity.”
He arches an eyebrow at her, his arm curled above his head in a leisurely pose, and takes a drag on his cigarette before responding. “Why do women always do that? Confuse kindness for goodness and pride for strength?”
Adira doesn’t say anything. She slips her toes into the foot of one stocking, smoothing it up the thin curve of her leg then does the same with the other. “Come,” she says, tucking her hair behind her ears once she’s strapped her feet into a pair of worn lace-up boots and stood. “You aren’t the only lonely soldier in Paris.”
Roman swings his long legs over the bed and stands, taking his wrinkled jacket from the bed corner. His clothes smell like sweat and sex and the room’s dampness. He’ll turn his nose into his collar in the morning and smell sickness instead.





When Roman returns to American soil, two years after the war has ended, she will be dead.

He’ll taste her in the back of his throat as a memory, a vulture picking at a ghost.