you're too young & eager to love

More WWI AU! Because why not?



----




The war is slow like cold syrup, like the white plague, like burning driftwood. It's slow enough to cause a bone-deep hurt, the kind no doctor's scalpel can cut free.

It gives them time, and time can be an abscess.






It's Calder who watches Roman with pity. This shouldn't be as surprising as it is - Calder's wife had died young, and although he doesn't speak of it often, Roman understands that Calder saw too much, so now he thinks friendship means sparing Roman the pain of a simile experience. But Calder has always been the one in their troupe most prone to silence, the one comfortable in it, easy and confident in his tasks but lacking the dangerous arrogance of a younger man. He has rejected the idea of glory, unlike Palmer, and speaks of redemption instead. With his hair silvering at the temples and his gaze steady, Roman had assumed Calder would finish the war fully aware that they were all simply treading water. Instead, he has turned into a red-eyed dog, endlessly gnawing at the same bone.

"Sunniva says it's her lungs," Calder begins one night, working the straight edge of a carving chisel into a smooth hunk of basswood. Like most men under duress, he likes to keep his hands busy and his mind focused.

Roman folds his arms behind his head and leans back, turning his gaze to the inky sky. The nights are becoming colder and he suddenly wishes he'd kept his coat even though there's a fire blazing like a beacon between them. Palmer, aware of where the conversation is headed, makes for his tent. He had liked Roman's tales of Paris prostitutes when they were full of laughter and filth, but he doesn't have the stomach for a story so clearly ending in tragedy. It's Sunniva that stops him. She holds up her hand and shakes her head. He sits back down, frowning, eyes dark, and takes the tin of lukewarm coffee she’d been drinking for himself.

"And she won't see a doctor?" Calder prods, glancing to Sunniva as the nurse for confirmation.

When she is silent, Roman says, "I think she wants her dignity."

"Dignity," Calder scoffs with a note of wonderment, like he's forgotten the meaning of the word.
"There's none of that where she's headed. You won't know her anymore. In the end. You understand this, right? The pain will make her someone else entirely."

"Then I will love who she becomes," Roman says candidly, meeting Calder's gaze over the campfire.

Palmer looks surprised and uncomfortable by his friend's admission, like a child caught between bickering parents. He glances sideways at Sunniva, but her face is blank, as clean and cold as snow.
Calder grunts his disapproval, slicing another chunk of wood from the block between his hands. "You have no idea what you're saying."

"I think he does."

Three sets of eyes turn to Sunniva. Roman smiles, just a little, and she nods her head at him in that easy familiar way of theirs.

"He's a soldier, Calder. We're all soldiers. Roman more than any of us has never been afraid of death. You should know that. He’ll stand through it." She doesn't chastise him. Her voice is even, steady, but not angry.

Calder frowns. "But don't you see -"

"No, I don't," she interrupts, a note of finality creeping into her voice.

Palmer groans, sweeping his hands through his hair, and stands, brandishing the now empty tin of coffee like a child’s toy gun. "Who gives a fuck?" Despite herself, Sunniva laughs, looking up at him and his obvious disgruntlement. "I want to get home. Then we can all sit around and judge one another for our terrible choices. Preferably over a bottle a bourbon and a hand of cards."
Roman murmurs something that only Calder hears, but it makes the older man wince.

"I'm packing it up, boys.” Palmer tosses the cup to Sunniva who catches it easily before wiping his hands on the front of his pants. “I suggest you do the same. Calder, no more advice. Roman, maybe take a night off from fucking. Sunshine, I'll be in the third tent if you find yourself needing comforting in the middle of the night."

"Comforting?"

"From the nightmares, sweetheart."

Roman crosses one ankle over the other, stretching himself further into the grass beneath him. “Does that offer extend to everyone here, or just her?”

“Not to you, it doesn’t,” Palmer shouts over his shoulder. “You’re too fucking tall for the tent.”

Calder laughs first, melting the lingering tension in the circle, and then Roman, Sunniva joining last with a smile and a knowing roll of her eyes.






Two days later, the wind picks up, and Roman flips the collar of his coat against his face as he walks further away from the frontline. The Paris streets are cracked and ashen, but his feet know the way; he walks in long strides past the boulangerie with its fresh-bread smell, past the charcuterie where all the meats have long since been emptied from the shelves, past the wide-eyed kids in scuffed shoes playing hopscotch, and then he walks some more. He can feel the eyes of Paris on his back. The city has become a window, the stares of all the lost and distraught watching distrustfully behind curtains of faded lace and broken glass.

The Quartier Pigalle is far from the frontline, but the streets are squalid all the same, a dirty newspaper shade of grey. Overhead, the last remnants of light are fading, leaving the sky a dreary stone color. Roman nods at a homeless man sitting with his hands between his knees on a street bench and turns the corner.

The brothel with the blue door at the end of the street is one of many such establishments, but on Rue Blanche most of the shops have been boarded shut. Even debauchery is difficult to sell during wartime - the brothels that remain exist because of the soldiers, because dying men refuse to go to their graves as virgins, because a woman's flesh, even flesh you had to pay for, was comforting after a kill. As if aware of their economical purpose, there are already officers in uniform draping themselves against the sides of buildings, speaking into the ears of the early working girls, undoubtedly offering franc notes that are worthless thanks to the recent issuing of ration cards. Roman has seen the people of Paris dutifully lugging the small yellow squares to their corner markets, filling their hand-held baskets with whatever scraps can be found. He knows most of the girls will take the officers’ money anyway and hide the bills beneath floor boards or under mattresses, planning for peace and a better day.

He heads up the stairs to the blue door and knocks. His other hand stays in his coat pocket, fingers curled around a bottle of morphine.





Adira’s room smells like dead flowers. It’s a smell Roman associates with graveyards.

She has the window open to let in the cold breeze, and she’s brushing her damp hair, a flush on her cheeks. Perched on the edge of her solitary stool with a thin robe covering an even thinner dress, Adira looks cold and hot all at once. She rumbles a cough as a greeting, working the brush in short, quick strokes. Roman places the morphine on top of the oak chest, near her dwindling provisions, and she eyes it with immediate distrust, a scowl twisting her thin mouth.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est, soldat?” She asks.

“You know what it is.”

“It looks like pity.”

“Really? I think it looks like medicine.”

“Va te faire enculer.” She spits, slamming her brush down and pulling her robe closer around her thin shoulders.

“Say that again,” Roman quips, crossing the small room to throw himself onto the bed, the old spring squeaking in protest. “The difference between French and German is that your language makes everything sound romantic. Even insults.”

“Mon Dieu,” Adira sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose and closing her eyes. Another cough shakes her skeletal body, but it’s short – a tremor rather than an earthquake. When she finds her voice, she joins him on the bed, her robe splitting to show her legs. “Did you see Madame Beville?”

“Yes. She’s as relentless as a curse, that one. Were you aware, liebchen, that your hourly rate has doubled since last week?”

She laughs, the sound husky, and touches his jaw, feeling the smoothness of his skin. “You look better with a beard.”

He ducks his head, biting at her fingers until she swats him. Roman wraps his arm around the column of her waist and pulls her to him. When he tries to kiss her, she presses two cold fingers to his mouth.

“You probably shouldn’t kiss me anymore. Between me and the war, you will never get home.”

But he kisses her anyway, cupping her face as he likes to, tilting her mouth up for him to devour.






Adira is painful like the winding coils of a serpent, like the relentless crash of ocean waves, like the harsh rattle of death.

She is the war as much as the battle between the trenches. She leaves him just as scarred and twisted.