you're too young & eager to love

This is a warm-up! Blowing off cobwebs and whatnot so that I can hopefully finish this Augusta piece that I've been working on, here and there, for a few months. Thanks to my Muffin who, as always, came through like a champ and requested some Sun and Roman war-time AU. Moral ambivalence and all that.

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“You know what, sometimes it seems to me we're living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what's good and what isn't, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves... And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves.” – Olga Tokarczuk

“I am a phantom built out of pain.” – Olga Tokarczuk





If weariness had a smell, it would be this—gun oil and blood, dirt-rot, the nauseating sweet-stench of death and mustard gas. It’s Roman’s smell now too; he knows it, he’s aware, and it doesn’t matter how many showers he manages or how long he takes scrubbing the dirt beneath his fingernails, the trenches have become a part of him. The war is something he wears. He can’t wash it away, so he’s learned to accept it, to stop fighting for unattainable change.

Before the accident, before she loses her leg, Sunniva’s smell is medicinal: sterility, the metal of a syringe, blood and antiseptic, the lemon soap all the nurses seem to use. Roman finds it refreshing, and he marvels at the way her hair always smells clean, but he never tells her this. Instead, he brings her tiny trinkets whenever he returns from a stint in the trenches. Sometimes they’re literal trinkets–silk handkerchiefs (which she has no use for), a delicate silver ring that fits her pinky finger (equally useless but somehow charming), a lighter made from a used brass bullet casing (more practical). This time, he brings her a brown chicken egg, a handful of blueberries wrapped in a woman’s checkered dish towel, and a tin of molasses candy.

She looks up from where she’s washing her hands in a basin of red-stained water when he walks into her tent and raises her eyebrows. “How did you get this bounty?”

“I fished a boy’s body out of a well in Verdun.”

“That’s terrible,” she says, without any real emotion in her voice.

“He’d been fouling up their water. The mother was in hysterics. Her shoes scraped the pavement the entire time her husband was dragging her off.”

“What an interesting detail to remember.”

Roman shrugs as Sunniva wipes her hands dry, then she takes the food. She’s the most careful with the egg, tucking it gingerly atop some towels within a little metal bowl before nestling the blueberries in an empty coffee tin. The candy she opens, offering one to Roman. He shakes his head and takes a seat on her empty cot.

“You’ve been gone a while,” she says while unwrapping one of the molasses pieces. The candy is dark and shiny between her fingertips, just barely sticky at the top.

“Not so long,” he lies, lighting a cigarette. The smoke wafts up around his head, and she can tell how tired he is by the way he stretches his legs out in front of him and rolls his head on his neck, once, twice, a third time, his eyes closed. Something at the top of his shoulder, near the base of his neck, pops, and he cringes.

She sucks the piece of candy into her mouth and lets the warm, smoky flavor sit on her tongue. It’s a small delicacy, but beneath the sweetness she thinks that she can taste something else—a sickly treacle taste, like rotten fruit.

“So how did you really get it? The food?” she asks after a moment, rolling the candy from one side of her mouth to the other.

Roman’s eyes are still shut, and he doesn’t open them. He sucks on the end of his cigarette instead, hard. “The candy is from a dead Boche’s pocket. The blueberries from the side of the Voie Sacree.”

“And the egg?”

“For fishing the boy from the well. That part is true, except the father said he had half a dozen eggs, not one. What do I do with one egg? I asked him when he came back with it, after he dragged the woman away. I didn’t haul a corpse out of a well for one egg. He said a bunch of ugly things in French then, but you know how their language is. Even the ugly bits sound pretty. ”

“That’s why you did it, then, for the eggs.” It isn’t a question, and she looks at him blankly, at his relaxed posture, the dirt smeared across his face, the cigarette dangling between his thin lips, and the thatch of scruff covering his jaw and climbing up the sides of his cheeks. She can see the chain of his dog tags against his neck, the tags themselves tucked beneath the faded olive-brown of his open uniform collar. It’s as dirty as the rest of him.

He doesn’t reply to her, but he rolls his head on his neck again. Feels the same stiffness in his muscles.

When the candy is small enough to bite through, Sunniva crushes it between her back molars. Roman opens one eye, pitching the cigarette to the dirt floor. He grinds the tip out with his boot. “Does it taste like it came from a dead German?”

“No more than the egg will taste like grief.”

“Sehr gut,” he murmurs, and pushes himself to his feet.

He doesn’t say goodbye.