Ten years ago, Harper had been searching. What for, she hadn’t known. It hadn’t been a hunger lurking, dissatisfied, inside of her or even an ache like it was now. It had simply been an awareness of the desire for opportunity, a desire for a new horizon.

She’d spent time in the desert, adept at navigating the wastelands, wrapped in scarves and scavenging the drifter towns. She’d visited the oasis so skillfully tucked between the vast, sloping dunes before exploring the ranches on the edge of mountains. Then she’d wondered to the seaside, called by the salt on the wind and pushed by the threat from the East where the nightmarish rumors suggested more truth than hearsay.

Even then, Hamu was a bustling port. The culture allowed for an easier, more affluent way of life, with diligent shifters eager for opportunity working alongside a range of humans. Bars swarmed with prospectors, restaurants brimmed with the smell of savory and sweet scents, enticing the citizens to come inside, and brothels tempted in the same fashion with their welcoming women cooing from balconies or doorways. Harper found work at Oakworm, a brothel claiming to be dignified with women ripe and unbruised. Old Martha had needed help, so she’d kept the men’s hands away from her and busied herself with the books and overseeing the girls.

Nearly forty, Zane Steiner had been at the peak of manhood then: well-defined arms with ropey muscle, a head full of dark hair, only the whisper of wrinkles around his devious eyes, a confident gait from a lifetime of entitlement and success. When he visited Oakworm, he didn’t come for the girls; he didn’t need to. He came for the atmosphere, to be doted on, and to watch.

He had been searching too.


--


“Harper,” he says, his hands in your hair, his mouth at your neck, your shoulder, your breast. “Harper. Harper. Harper.” Like a liturgy, as though you’re something worth worshipping, as though the sound and shape of your name in his mouth is divine.

You’ve never heard it said that way. It makes your skin prickle every time, like soft fingers down your spine.

When he trails his mouth lower and then lower still, you fist his hair. He makes you shake until your thighs are sore, until, laughing and gasping, you slap at his shoulders to make him stop, your body humming with tired pleasure in a way you’ve never experienced before. Oriol wears a smug smile, wet with the taste of you, and lazily kisses behind your knee.


--



Cato reminds her of caramel, the kind of indulgence that sticks to your teeth, the kind you should only have a little of. He has a wide grin that, much to her surprise, makes her smile in return. He’s boyish, as blonde as the sun, with a lean grace. He doesn’t look surprised to see her; he looks like he’s been waiting for her his entire life.

Harper’s wary by this eagerness. She was hoping he’d look mistreated, worn down, hungry, even just bored. She could have worked better with disenfranchisement. Instead, he’s more like that cat who ate the canary. She buys him a drink and a hot meal in a pub across the street from the one he works at. Drinking only coffee herself, she watches the way he watches her.

“A man I know said you were pretty well known around these parts. Popular.” Harper’s voice, as always, is even.

“Well, I must be famous enough for you to have found me off of just that description. What do you think? Do I look good enough for all the gossip?” he asks between spoonfuls of stew.

“I think you’re probably trouble.”

Cato shrugs. “Some people like trouble. You look like you might.”

She feels herself smile again, but it’s more softly this time. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“I could. If you’d like.” That shrug again, like it was all the same to him either way, like she wasn’t offering him a golden opportunity wrapped in a satin bow.

Harper shakes her head slowly.

He licks his spoon, his eyes shining, and sits back in his chair. He can’t be more than nineteen, cocksure and raging with confidence, alluring precisely because of the way he’s so comfortable. “You have beautiful skin, d’you know? Like cream.”

“Is that important to you? Beauty?”

“Isn’t it important to everyone?”

She shakes her head a second time. He lifts his eyebrows and leans a little closer to the table, his elbows digging into the old wood, framing his bowl of stew. “I think you’re a bluffer.”

“Takes one to know one, kid.”


--


“Can I sleep in here?” Oriol asks from your doorway, his arms full of bedding.

You look up from the book you’re reading, startled. “What? ...Why?” He’s only been here for a month, so you aren’t used to his voice or the sound of his steps in the middle of the night. You aren’t used to him, plain and simple, and you haven’t quite tucked aside your anger at his betrayal. His request seems out of place, but your steady pulse knocks too quickly at your wrists. Something inside of your flutters with heavy wings.

“It’s storming,” he says, as though this is a logical response. His huffs his hair out of his eyes, waiting.

“I don’t think Zane would-”

“He’s gone.”

“Gone? Where?”

“He left late this afternoon. To visit the Everstons.”

“Oh.” You’re struck by the news. Why didn’t you know this? Something on your face must reveal your surprise because he shuffles his bedding in his arms and smiles in a way that’s reassuring. Or hopeful? You can’t tell.

“He said something about the need for discretion or some such shit,” he says.

You don’t answer, but you close your book. Oriol seems to take that as an invitation because he walks in, settling the comforters on the floor in front of your bed. The silence that fills the spaces beyond the sound of thunder and the rain hitting the windows isn’t uncomfortable, but you’re unsure. Maybe it’s because you can smell his skin. It’s distracting. Like heat and oak and night time waters.

“You don’t have to do that,” you say after a moment. “Sleep on the ground.”

“What?” It’s his turn to sound surprised.

“I’m just saying. It’s a big bed.”

You don’t know why you offer. You wait for panic to seize you, but it doesn’t come. This in itself is disorienting.

When Oriol climbs on top of your bed, it’s with a grin that makes you think of his brother.


--


Kissing him is like coming home.


--

Newbies! About a year before the actual planned story line takes place, so this is all background and dynamics.


-------

“I dwell with a strangely aching heart...” - Robert Frost


There is nothing Harper appreciates more than order. There is a calmness to everything having its proper place, to routine, to control. Meticulous, methodical, careful - they’re adjectives she values and words she lives by. Spontaneity causes panic, hot as a fire, to blossom in her chest, along with the fear of not knowing, of impotent empty-handedness and a will that lacks agency or direction.

This is why she’s the type of woman who, lying in bed, stares at the ceiling and makes lists in her head rather than turning her face into the pillow to seek sleep. The type of woman who wakes without an alarm, as the first rays of light barely breach the gap between the curtains, and why she does not linger in bed. The type of woman who walks with a purpose, her back held straight, her gaze always direct.

It’s that gaze which makes her infamous in the Steiner estate rather than her need for efficiency or her demand for perfection. It isn’t so much a look of fearlessness or boldness but one that is focused and highly alert so that all of her attention is centered. With her wintry eyes, it’s a chilling force to endure, like a blizzard or the bite of frost. So the servants in the estate call her Dagger on account of that cold, disapproving look she often directs their way, the one that makes them fidget and wring their hands and bow their heads. It’s never to her face and always out of sight, but Harper knows anyway. She knows and does not mind because she’s always thought there was something appropriate in the title. She is not, after all, a delicate thing with a lilting voice.

Her paleness, her leanness, could be contrary to the point, but the heat and the sun and her very own blood burned away the chance for her to be anything other than capable long ago. She is built for perseverance; she is no ornament. Her nose is a little too wide for the sharp angles of her face, and her jaw is strong (a trait that only intensifies whenever she shifts to feathers and red, leathery skin). She does not bruise easy; she does not shrink at the sight of blood; she does not gag at raw meat. She likes terrible smells - rotting bones spoiling in the kitchen, a carcass festering in the midday sun, a water-wrecked corpse dragged to the shore. The cries from the fighting pits excite her. She is not soft.

And yet …

And yet, Harper has started pressing her nose to the corner of Zane’s shoulder when she lies with him in his bed. She likes to smell the parts of him that are distinctly human, the sweat beneath his arms, the ink beneath his nails, the pallid, ordinary blood coursing through his veins. Without thinking, she has licked the salt of his skin from the inside of his elbow in a way that makes him laugh, loud and jarring, as though he were startled. She has brushed her fingers against his neck, as purposeful as a signature, when adjusting his collars over the silk of his business ties.

When he does not ask her to his bed, she wonders why, and then she wonders why she wonders. The lists she makes in her head circle back to him, like a current, until she twists in her sheets and feels hot enough to blister.

When she cannot abide it anymore, she wakes even earlier than usual, dressing quickly in the dark with nimble fingers, and forces herself not to pause in front of his closed door on her way downstairs. Her strides are quick, deliberate, unfaltering, but each one feels heavier than the last until she begins taking the steps in two. The cook in the kitchen is the only other person awake, but Harper does not stop to say hello. The churning noises and wafting scents make her nauseous. She is endlessly thirsty. She does not allow herself any water, as an atonement, and walks the entire way to the docks, ignorant to the lush beauty of the surrounding landscape or the harmonic, lulling crash of the waves and the briny smell of the sea in the air.

Most of the vendors are preparing for the morning. The smell of fish is strong and the sounds of the men working are loud - the heaving of the lines, the shouting of orders, the loading and unloading of crates. Harper buys three oysters from a stand and sucks them raw into her mouth. They’re slick and unsatisfying. She tosses the pearly shells into the water and keeps walking, traveling the perimeter of each dock.

There’s nothing beyond her but the ocean, deep and restless.

It doesn’t soothe.

She stays anyway.





“I could use another,” Zane says by way of introduction, swirling the last of the melted ice in his glass, when she returns in the afternoon. He’s in the office, although the ornate furniture and bountiful floor-to-ceiling bookcases make the space seem more like a small library.

“Say please.”

“Please,” he replies promptly, but he’s already holding out his glass, and she’s already taking it.
He hasn’t looked at her. His feet are kicked up on the same desk he’s been using for the past eight years and his collar is unbuttoned. There’s a small stack of supply orders in his hand. He leafs through the first few pages before shuffling them to the back of the group. A knot of frustration is beginning to crease the space between his eyebrows.

Harper pours him a finger of whiskey and adds one ice cube from the cart near the desk. With her back to him, she can focus on the coldness of the glass, of the dry, leafy smell of the whiskey.

“Did I miss a shipment today?” he asks, although the question is merely his way of interrogating her; they both know there wasn’t a shipment.

“No, but there’s always news on the docks. If you’re willing to listen.”

Zane makes a noncommittal noise, and she hands him his drink, balancing her weight on the edge of his desk in the space not crowded by his feet.

“Is that from the Isle?” she asks. “Let me guess... Mosaic for Eda’s wading pool.”

Zane tosses the papers on the desk and leans back further in his chair, the leather a rich chocolate that’s grown accustomed to bearing his weight. “No, no. It’s for the compounds in the East. That family is notoriously private with all of their affairs, but Harrow has no problem showing us how much he trusts us by making his usual difficult demands.” Harper gives a smirk and nods. “So, what is the news then?”

“The oysters are in season.”

“And?”

“And the cook is an early riser, which is an undesirable trait if you’re as heavy-footed as she is. She’ll wake the whole house.”

“Better than the old one. The Pacific man? Meanest cook alive, I swear. Genius with a roast though.”

“Is that why you loved him more than you love me?”

Zane doesn’t answer, but when he takes a drink, Harper sees the smear of whiskey left on his mouth. She grins at him, her lips pale and her teeth hidden, before sliding off the desk.

“Don’t drink too many of those,” she says on her way out.

“Harper.”

She’s reached the doorway when he says her name. She stops with her hand on the frame, the trim white and carved. She doesn’t look back.

“Why don’t you go back to your usual hours tomorrow? I know how much routine matters to you.”

“Sure, boss.”

“And Harper … ”

She’s almost around the corner. She has to turn back. Her hand finds the frame again, only this time she’s facing him, her gaze unfaltering. She lifts her pale eyebrows.

“Send in Sienna.”

“Say please,” she says.





Sienna is a waif of a thing with large brown eyes and quick hands who spends most of her days tidying the rooms in the main house and tending to Zane’s less official needs. Harper barely speaks to her, and she finds her smell assaulting: wet, buried dirt and dry grass, a sharp acidic undertone of anxiousness, like lemons.

Harper can still smell the girl on Zane in the morning.

It’s the lemons she detects first when he, not bothering to knock, walks into her bedroom. Hers is modest in comparison to his, the bed made up in sand-colored linens with coppery soft curtains that flutter in the wind when she leaves the windows open to catch the breeze from the water. The furniture is all golden oak that had to be shipped from the Arabian sea. The walls are papered in a wood pattern, a hundred birch trees in muted tones of beige lining the room with their thin branches arching from one to the other. She has two bookcases and few visible personal touches. Unsurprisingly, there is no clutter. It’s a space intended for its functions.

She has already been awake for an hour and is sitting at her vanity; she catches his reflection in her mirror and pauses with a tube of nude lipstick in her hand. That smell again, of sharp citrus, hits her and makes her nose wrinkle.

It’s ten steps from the door to her vanity, and Zane takes them in silence. Harper feels a twist low in her belly and a spike in her pulse.

When he stands behind her and gathers her hair from her neck, she rolls her head back with the action, feeling his fingers find anchor at the base of her skull. She should care more, she thinks, as he tilts her head to the left and stoops to mouth the tender spot below her ear. She can feel the scratch of his beard that needs to be shaved, and she still smells lemon, but she arches at the sensation anyway and reaches behind her to cup him through his jeans.

Zane leaves her door open, and they don’t bother moving to the bed. He wants her stretched across the golden oak floors for the others to possibly see, to hear. She opens to him anyway and enjoys the greedy, demanding way he fumbles with her shirt and tugs at her jeans. He doesn’t waste time. Pushing between her thighs, he drives into her in one quick tear, a hand at her throat and the other bracing against the floor.

She doesn’t know who this is for, him or her. She should care more, she thinks again, before losing herself to the pressure aching inside of her.





“I want to talk to you about something,” he says afterwards.

She’s been looking at his face, at all the small changes time has started to collect. He’s still handsome enough to be smug, but there’s a sprinkling of grey to his dark hair, and the lines on his forehead are deepening. His statement feels like an opening shot, startling her, and it’s an unfair one considering he’s already zipped up his jeans and buckled his belt. He’s tucking in his shirt while she’s still undressed, her own shirt unbuttoned and her breasts exposed. Her underwear is caught around her knees along with her jeans. She adjusts those first, lifting her hips to slide them up in one fluid movement. She doesn’t break eye contact, but she doesn’t reply.

“About an opportunity,” he continues. “I need you to check out an investment possibility in the Alaskan gulf.”

Harper keeps her tone level. “The gulf? That will take at least a month.”

“Hardly,” he says, without much conviction.

“Are you sure this isn’t a punishment?”

“What?” His brow furrows, and he grabs her arm, helping her to her feet.

She doesn’t reply to that either. Her shirt is still open revealing the long slice of her stomach.

Zane gives a confused laugh, gesturing in the air with one hand. “What’s all this then? Long hours at the docks. Waking up before dawn. Cryptically mentioning punishment. What’s bothering you?”

Harper shakes her head dismissively and works the buttons of her shirt, fastening them one by one. “I hate sea travel. It’s not meant for … I would have preferred a visit to the Eastern compounds. The desert I can handle.”

When Zane catches her by the jaw, his thumb digging into the side of her chin, she does not flinch. “You’ll handle what I tell you to. When I say sit, you do it. When I say come, you fucking run. Remember?”

“I didn’t forget.”

Zane brushes his thumb across her bottom lip. “Good.” He stares until she flicks her eyes away then presses a kiss to her temple. “You can leave in a week.”

Before she leaves, he’ll tell her that absence makes the heart grow fonder. He’ll mock her, she thinks, and she’ll feel panic spread like wildfire from her stomach to her heart. It’s an organ she’s always found useless, a perfunctory part of her that’s never factored into her way of life.

But now Harper will listen to it yearn.

This was supposed to be the opening section of a much larger piece. But it's been sitting around for so long that I forgot where I was supposed to be going with it. Figured I could post this bit at least.


--



Augusta has grown.

It's the first thing Maximus thinks as he's lead into Albtraum's executive suite. They've had the generators restored since The Incident, but he can see that they're supplementing the emergency lighting with candles, so the room is full of shadows. There's a low fire burning in a stone hearth, and the smell of cinder is everywhere. In the middle of it all, his daughter sits. Pretentious. Self-Assured. Vindicated.

Augusta is his eldest, but Maximus sometimes confuses her for another one of his offsprings, one of his younger daughters from his third wife. He's less surprised by her demeanor and more surprised that she's at the writing desk, a gigantic structure made of solid oak, square and masculine in its cut. Harrow had always leaned against it when entertaining diplomats or conducting meetings, but Augusta claims the center seat. Her ankles are crossed one over the other, modest-like, one foot bare, her left toes balancing inside the tortuous straps of a leather stiletto. It's only when she tilts her head up at the sound of his approaching that he sees the full length of her face, all the dips and planes that adulthood has sharpened and life has weathered.

She's beautiful, but she makes no attempt to hide her cruelty from her beauty. No amount of cosmetics could soften the hardness of her mouth, of her eyes. Her hair falls against one side of her face and down her back, the ends blunt and harsh. Her nails are clear and sharp.

"Do you want me to make nice?" Augusta asks by way of greeting, pausing in her writing. The tip of her fountain pen hovers, bold with fresh ink, above a stack of official looking letters. "Father arrives and corrals the disobedient children?"

Maximus wraps his knuckles around the top of his cane and taps the tiled floor absently. "This is why I married you off," he says at last, "because of your untempered spirit."

Beside Augusta, a predator cat growls, the sound low and threatening. The hair on the back of its neck rises, a rigid line following the length of its spine. It's too large to be anything but a shifter, and even next to that gigantic desk, it looks huge. For one brief moment, before he can compose himself, Maximus is startled. He hadn't noticed the beast laying beside Augusta, it's gold eyes full of intelligence and anger. A younger Maximus would have seen it immediately, but he hasn't been young for some time. He's nearing eighty. His eyes are milky, and he needs his cane more than he would like to admit. There's not much left beneath his expensive suit; he used to be a broad bull of a man, but age has weakened him. Even his voice rasps with death.

Augusta is looking at him. She sits back in the chair and drops a hand to the mountain lion's head, the way one might do to a loyal dog, her fingers idling above its brow. Its amber hair smooths, but the creature keeps staring, its eyes as defiant as Augusta's.

"And how well did that work out, father? Or can you even remember?"

Harrow mumbles something unintelligible, the slurred words jerking into the conversation from behind Augusta. He's slumped in a corner chair, half folded into himself, his mouth slack from too much whiskey, his voice a croak of impotent anger. Maximus hadn't noticed him before either.

"What's that?" Augusta asks over her shoulder. Beneath her stroking fingers, the lion starts to purr. The sound is worse than its growl.

Maximus lifts his grey eyebrows, frowning. "Sober him up. He has work to do."

"No."

He looks as though lightning has struck him between the eyes. "What did you say?"

"I said no. In fact, let's bring him another bottle. If we're lucky, he'll drown himself in whiskey, and we can say goodbye to all his foolishness." She gestures to a plain girl in a khaki colored uniform, and the girl skitters off without hesitating.

Maximus stutters on his breath. Augusta waits, scratching behind the lion's ear, and it closes its bright eyes, it's tail making a lazy, long sweep above the floor. In the background, Harrow mutters a line from a lullaby and shifts drunkenly. His eyes are only half open, but they're red and unfocused. Maximus stares at his son, trying to will him into action by the sheer force of his gaze, but there's no power in his eyes anymore, and Harrow's too busy pining over his swan to notice. His swan and his kingdom and his pride.

Augusta clears her throat. Light. Demure. Ladylike.

"Was there anything else, father? Because if not, I have a number of correspondences to address to assure the remaining compounds." She flicks her pen with her right hand, gesturing to the letter.

Maximus' mouth is a thin, grim line. It's white and wrinkled, like the rest of him. For a moment, he considers confronting his eldest, of stalking forward and cracking his knuckles across her mouth the way he had when she was a child, the way he had when her mother had also become too impertinent for her own good. Again, his hand curls tight around his cane, and he shifts his weight. He manages one step closer before the lion's eyes have opened, have pinned him with their stare. It bares its teeth like it can read his thoughts.

"Let's discuss this more over dinner," Augusta suggests before she begins to write again, the scratch of the pen deafening. At the same time, the maid returns. She's carrying a fresh bottle of whiskey.

Just a little warm up/blurb.

There's really nothing in this to suggest that the girl is a prostitute, unless maybe you squint and look real close? Originally I wanted to develop a priest and a prostitute in a Western setting, but the thing with driving by the seat of your pants while writing is that ... well, your writing just develops as you go. So! Ta da.

~~~~


Won’t you just let me pretend
this is the love I need?
And I will grow
out of all the empty words I often speak.
WAXAHATCHEE





Sourstone is a forgotten town. It’s tucked behind what the locals refer to as The Black Woods, a patch of forest a few acres long, as full of thorns and old oaks as a tick full of blood. Except for Timber Creek winding its way precariously through the thicket, the Black Woods are nearly impenetrable, so most everybody has to trudge the long, lone path circling the perimeter of the forest if they want to find the town.

In his early days, before he was considered a local, Father Bathe used to sit on his back porch at dusk and he’d see a woman out in those trees. The White Woman, he called her, a slip of a thing in porcelain colored lace with eyes as blue as an Arizona sky. Sometimes she would seem to be smiling at him. Sometimes he wouldn’t be able to see her face, and he’d swear she was crying along with the owls and the foxes and all those other night creatures that were just starting to emerge. He’d only just begun to drink in those days, a few cautious sips from the bottle after dinner, and while he’d needed those sips to strengthen his resolve against the godless territory he’d suddenly found himself in, he knew the White Woman wasn’t a drinker’s delusion. She’d had too much light around her; she’d shone bright against all the dark trees. Back then, he’d thought everything was a spiritual sign, and the Woman was no different.

Bathe never told anyone about her, but sometimes the Sourstone urchins would babble about seeing a lady lost in the woods. Once, a child went missing, and the bereaved mother blamed it on a woman in white, a woman luring her baby into the woods, as evil as a fairytale witch. Bathe never questioned the mother about it, but he’d held her hand and bowed his head and prayed to St. Anthony. They never found the child, but the White Woman stayed around.

By the time Bathe is fifty, she’s a Sourstone legend, a bit of local myth, a story whispered by weary parents into the ears of naughty children. Bathe hasn’t seen her himself in over three decades, either because she’s taken offense to the amount of whiskey he now drinks or because God no longer sees him worthy of receiving His signs, but he can still picture those dusky nights, still see the glimpse of a slender figure on the brink of the woods, beckoning to him with a sad smile and a silver arm; he can still remember the sound of a woman whose cries reminded him of an owl’s trill.





He finds Modesty on his property line a week later as the sun starts to dip down over the horizon. She’s unconscious and covered in cuts from thorns and branches. Her bare feet are bloody. She’s wearing white.

Bathe thinks he’s caught himself a soiled dove.





What she sees first is the white of his collar, a pristine ivory square staring out at her sharply from the base of an older man’s throat. His shirt is black and sharply creased, like it’s new or well ironed, but all the darkness makes his build hard to identify when he looms so closely above her. His face comes into focus slowly. It’s lined and weathered with cracks -- above his bushy eyebrows, at the corners of his eyes, framing the sides of his mouth -- but it is not an unkind face. The man has the nose of a hawk and bloodshot eyes; his hair is the muted brown of dead leaves, but the grey at his temples gives him a more studious look than the alcohol on his breath reveals.

When he realizes she’s looking, he sits back on a three-legged stool beside the couch she’s been placed on. He’s tall, solidly built like a farmer or laborer, but he hunches to hide it.

“What’s that about?” she asks by way of an introduction, looking at the white square on his neck again. Her voice is scratchy, and she’s never been so thirsty in all of her life.

“It’s a clerical collar.”

“You’re a man of the cloth.”

“Yes,” he says, but something in the way his eyes draw together and his mouth grimaces makes her think otherwise. “I’m Father Bathe. I found you on my property. You seemed to have come from the woods, although I don’t know how. Can you tell me what happened?”

“My name’s Modesty.”

“And?”

She shrugs a bony but smooth shoulder. She wants something to drink, but she doesn’t want to ask for it.

“Rest some more.” Father Bathe has a confident and soothing voice. He pats her hand the way docile men are supposed to. Modesty can remember many things, even now in the fog of wakefulness, but not the last time a man touched her so passively.





The girl, Modesty, falls back to sleep within two minutes. Her eyes blink rapidly for one second, and then she sighs before turning her head into the couch pillow. Her hair, a red bronze like certain coins, falls against her cheek. Bathe thinks about tucking it back behind her ear, but he decides not to. He’s already been intrusive enough by cleaning the scratches on her arms and legs and bandaging her feet. He knows how far the freckles run up her calves and how they slope beyond her shoulders, decorating her back like constellations.

He lets her rest.

He doesn’t think of going for help. Sourstone residents mostly keep to themselves except for church meetings on Sundays, and it’s only Wednesday, and she’s only a girl.





She stays until her feet have healed. And then she stays longer.





“I think you could be a sign,” he tells her over a third glass of whiskey on a night that is dark with sin. He’s starting to slur his words and his mouth is wet. His eyes seem hungry when he looks at her from his hunched position against the table.

“A sign from who?”

Bathe stares at her, hard. She's been with him a month and sometimes he has trouble remembering her name, although her face comes to him often. He clears his throat. “That’s what I’m tryin’ to figure out.”

Modesty smiles and stretches out her foot. She rubs his ankle with his toe.






When Bathe thinks back on his time with her, he’ll wonder at how easily he let the devil through his door.

Sooooo, Haven has been on my mind lately. Probably due to the copious amount of Lady Gaga I've been listening to while driving around in this Virginia heat. I'm glad I followed my gut and decided to write with the siblings.

Originally, I was going to do the first half from Luke's POV and then write a second half with a different scene from Haven's POV that thematically connected, but ... I didn't want to push my luck. I'm happy with how this came out.

Thanks to my muffinpants for being encouraging and for finding a suitable quote for me to snag!


( hear my sinner's prayer )

This is total nonsense and not the best prose, but it was fun!

Wasteland/Albtraum Harry Potter AU! Set many, many, many years after the whole main HP story line because I wanted new professors.


---



I wish that we were magic
So we wouldn’t be so young and tragic
- Dead Man’s Bones


Augusta wears a key around her neck, tiny and rusted and not at all like her other jewelry she favors - the expensive gems that decorate her ears and fingers. The Vries have as much money as they have family history; theirs is a pure-blooded lineage that can be traced back to the 1600s, so most of the other Slytherins like to think the key is linked to that past, a relic from some archaic time.

Arletta stretches herself across the brunette’s neatly made bed, using two of the plush pillows to prop herself up. “Auggie, really, what is the deal with that ugly necklace? What’s it open? A chest of Merlin’s?”

“Don’t call me that.” As the eldest of the Vries, Augusta has worked hard to live up to the expectations set by her father and her family - she is a serious girl, beguiling when necessary, but she doesn’t smile often, and she certainly doesn’t have the time for nicknames. She turns another page of her Potions textbook and tries to ignore her roommate.

“So serious,” Arletta complains with a huff and a roll of her eyes. Although not as famous or long-reaching as the Vries, Arlette’s family history is one of impressive fortune, so she’s never understood Augusta’s need to turn her nose up at her.

“Just because you’re snogging my brother and cohabitating with me this year, doesn’t mean we’re friends.”

“Obviously,” Arletta frowns, scooting off the brunette’s bed. Not for the first time, Arletta wishes she had been paired with another of her housemates; the dungeons are cold enough without Augusta’s added presence.

“What time is it?” Augusta asks after a few minutes, scribbling the last of her notes onto her parchment and closing her textbook.

“Almost lockdown.”

“I’ll be back before then.”

“But -” Arletta watches as the 7th year grabs a cloak from the back of the door and a small purple bag that she loops around her wrist before ducking out of the room, as chilly as an October wind.







“Professor?” It’s a formality, really, this title of his that she says so quietly, slipping through the wet earth beneath the whomping willow. Augusta has her wand out in front of her, the tip glowing bright, and her necklace clutched in the other hand.

Some years back, it had been considered a threat to the student body to have a werewolf on the staff, and attitudes haven’t changed much at Hogwarts or even other wizarding academies. But Radomir hadn’t always been cursed; he’s only been suffering lycanthropy for the last two years. Augusta was the first to discover his secret, and somehow that had ended them both here.

At the end of the earthen tunnel, there’s the foundation of what once had been a haunted, ramshackle cottage, with only the basement remaining. The Committee for Historical Preservation had kept the shrieking shack as a monument of sorts, but it had been closed to the public for years. Hogwarts, however, has a history of leaving pathways open for curious students, or at least those clever enough to research the old Dark Arts and First and Second Wizarding Wars. A few hours in the library and some time practicing her hedge enchantments, and Augusta knew just how to handle her professor’s secret.

The Vries are always opportunistic.

She unlocks the cage door he’d built himself with her key; her eyes flick to all the teeth trapped in his tired smile then down to the fresh line of cuts across his abdomen. More than his clothes are shredded, but a quick flourish from her wand has his skin stitch itself together before their eyes. He grunts his gratitude.

Augusta hands him his effects, all his personal items kept safe in a purple bottomless bag the size of a coin purse. “You’ve missed a week of your Ancient Studies course. We’re covering Egyptian spells. It’s difficult because of the prononciation. The Headmaster seems to think you’re suffering from a congenital blood disease.”

“How do you know that?” Radomir asks, pulling a shirt over his broad frame, working the buttons nimbly. With his frame, he looks as though he should be teaching the Dark Arts or how to care for dangerous creatures, like dragons or the giant squid in the Great Lake, but he’s more scholar than brute.

Augusta shrugs. “I have my ways.” There’s a hint of her beguiling nature there, a serpentine kind of slyness to the cut of her eyes.

Radomir flashes a half grin at her. “I’m not surprised.” He touches the dark fall of her hair when he passes, his fingers hesitating at the curve of her jaw. She’s severely beautiful, wrapped up in the uniform of her house, the green and silver stripes of her tie and skirt complimenting the sharp angles of her face, the small expanse of her waist that he can bridge between his giant hands, the slope of her nose that he’s found himself memorizing.

Augusta smiles, the turn of her lips feeling foreign.



--



There’s a dead woman in the North Tower. Some of the students leaving their Divination class catch the occasional glimpse of her - a pale, shivering shroud of silver - but they leave her to her sadness, thinking that Ravenclaw’s ghost prefers solitude.

Lene mentions her, the Silver Lady, during Care of Magical Creatures, hauling a bucket of cream-sweetened apples and fresh wheat from the stables. The students have been split into small groups and assigned some sort of fantastical beast to groom; she may be the first student alive to ever be disappointed in handling a unicorn, but she can’t help enviably eyeing Roman and Kim who have been assigned to a thestral. Lene can’t actually see the winged horse that Roman is feeding a bloodied rabbit to, but she knows it’s there.

Palmer sees Lene’s interest and rolls his eyes. “You can’t be serious. You can only see those things if you’ve really seen death. Up close and personal. Plus, Professor Waters must be insane to have students around them. They’re illegal to breed by the Ministry, ridiculously dangerous, predatory animals with a level four classification …” he pauses, and a familiar glint, like light on onyx, brightens his eyes. “How much do you think one would go for? There’s always a market for the rare and the dangerous.”

Sunniva smacks his arm, a quick, sharp gesture. “If you paid attention to the lecture, you’d know that Hogwarts’ thestrals are properly fed and well trained. They would only attack if seriously threatened.” She’s perched carefully on the top railing of fencing in the yarded area, and Palmer shuffles to her side with a frown, rubbing his shoulder.

“I think she’s lonely,” Eda says quietly, running a brush down the side of the unicorn’s coat, drawing all of their attention back to the original topic at hand. “The Silver Lady.”

The unicorn is brighter and purer than snow, its hooves gold, it’s attitude one of easy, entitled serenity. It seems content to be momentarily bridled, content to be push its velvet nose into Lene’s hand when she offers it one of her apples. “Why?”

Eda shrugs, the gesture soft and somehow delicate beneath the fabric of her prim school blouse. “People don’t usually choose solitude. Not permanently. They just become accustomed to it, and then they forget how to be social again. It’s probably the same with ghosts.”

Palmer raises an eyebrow. “You shock me with your ability to be insightful.”

“That’s because you’re sidetracked by her breasts. You forget she has a brain,” Lene says, feeding the unicorn another apple.

Eda blushes and ducks her eyes, but there’s a coy smile on her lips anyway. Sunniva smirks knowingly, elbowing Palmer’s side when he frowns like a petulant child.




Chason Waters became a professor at Hogwarts only six years ago, but he builds an easy rapport with his students as a dark-eyed, sly grinning, attentive teacher. His calloused hands handle everything from flobberworms to fire crabs with the same easy, practiced skill. When he huffs his hair out of his eyes and demonstrates the proper handling of a bowtruckle for Tuesday’s class, the stick-like figure winding its sharp fingers around his right knuckles like vines, a good portion of the female students sigh dreamily.

“They’re slipperier than slug spawn,” Chason reminds the class, using his left hand as a safety net beneath his right.

“So’s half the class,” Roman quips, earning a snicker from Palmer beside him. They’re in the third row and they knock elbows, jabbing each other like first-years instead of seniors.

Chason sends the boys a disapproving glance. “And very sensitive creatures. They can be prone to biting when their feelings are hurt, so be delicate.”

“Not really my speciality, Professor,” Lene says with a noticeably wrinkled brow. She had accidentally cracked three of her five fairy eggs within the first ten minutes of last week’s class, much to Eda’s dismay.

“Tell me about it,” Roman murmurs, absentmindedly rubbing his bruised side from where Lene had slammed into him during Quidditch practice.

“Mind your fingers then, Lene.” Chason unceremoniously lets the bowtruckle slip from his hand onto Lene’s desk where the tree-dweller promptly loops its curved fingers around her wrist and crawls up her arm, chittering in a friendly manner.



-



Roman shoves an entire fried sausage into his mouth during breakfast in the Great Hall, following it up with two slices of bacon before guzzling a glass of orange juice. Lene’s expression is horrified.

“You know,” she says, spreading butter daintily on a biscuit, “you don’t have to eat like a lion to establish yourself as a Gryffindor.”

“I still don’t understand your sorting, honestly,” Palmer chimes in, swinging a leg over the bench seat, his silver and green tie looking shockingly out of place amidst all the gold and red around him. “You should have been with me and Sun.”

“Yeah,” Lene scoffs, looking at Palmer as though he’s insane, “you and Sun and the Vries.”

“I like the Vries,” Roman says with a casual shrug.

Lene aims her expression of incredulity at Roman. “And I like the cruciatus curse.”

“Seriously. They’re cool, and associating with them boosts my own popularity thanks to proximity alone. That’s an elite crowd.”

“See? Wrong sorting.” Palmer reaches over Lene for a cup of hot coffee, narrowly avoiding a sharp jab to his side.

“Well, I still think you have a moral compass somewhere inside of that dead heart of yours,” she mumbles, taking a bite of her biscuit. “Maybe you’re just waiting to prove yourself.”

Palmer doesn’t catch it, but Roman winks at Lene before attacking another fried sausage.




-



“You know father expects Baldric to propose by the end of the school year,” Harrow tells his sister. He stares at her porridge as though it’s gruel and opts for a slice of cured ham, cutting into it with a knife sharp enough to gleam. They’re three tables over from the Gryffindors.

It should have been difficult to look elite amongst a house primarily full of arrogant, if not ambitious, students, but the Vries manage it well with a section of the Slytherin table to themselves and their inner circle. Their isolation is a coveted thing. Arletta sits beside Harrow, her red hair a burning halo around her face, and pretends to ignore the siblings’ conversation.

Augusta tucks a piece of her dark hair behind her ear, her amber eyes turning to shoot a sideways glance of annoyance at Harrow. “Does he expect the same of you and Arletta here?” She adds a few raspberries and a pour of vanilla-flavored cream into her porridge.

As if on cue, Arletta perks up. “I’d be happy to be your sister, Auggie.”

Neither Harrow or Augusta favor Arletta with a response.

“There’s been some gossip,” Harrow says after a moment, leaning more comfortably against the edge of the table. Arletta winds her arm around his, her fingers stroking the inside of his wrist playfully with her nails.

Augusta raises an eyebrow. “I wonder from who.” She stares at Arletta like the girl’s a leech.

“What are you up to? And why do I think it has something to do with that Ancient Studies professor?”

Harrow is one year younger than Augusta, but he has the look of a predatory shark. His grin could rival Roman’s. Augusta takes a bite of her porridge, the raspberry tart on her tongue, and smiles around her spoon with a shrug.

So, I started this a month ago, and I never went back to finish it. It turns out that Roman and Emere are too similar to be interesting. No conflict. Nadda. Nothing.

Here's the bits I managed:


I want to give in
to my dark self destruction.
I will find you there.
- Anonymous

They’re trying to destroy
something inside that
doesn’t belong.
- Anonymous


At three in the morning, all he can hear is the hum of traffic outside their window and the sharp way she cuts then inhales, strikes then drags, drinks then sniffs. Emere’s eyes are red-rimmed and unfocused, like they’ve spent too much time knocking against her skull. There’s a shake to her fingertips. Her blood must be thin, coursing through her veins with all the ferocity and speed of a runaway train.

He isn’t much better, truth be told, but Roman has always been a king of composure. His hands do not shake. There’s sweat stains under his arms and a wild, James Dean glare in his eyes, but he’s otherwise collected. He leans forward, plucking the cigarette from her hand, taking a drag as she absently swipes her fingers through his loose hair before settling back onto the couch. She pushes her bare feet into his lap, one leg bouncing, the muscles in her thigh twitching beneath her skin.

“What time is it?” She’s smoked so many cigarettes, her voice has that match-strike sound, all grit and stone.

“A little past three.”

Her leg keeps bouncing. He pets her calf, stroking down to her ankle and back up.

“Are you tired?”

Roman stares at her, judging her seriousness, and grins when she smirks. “I won’t sleep for days. You?”

“I have a meeting at eight.”

He glances back at his watch. “Five hours.”

“Just enough time,” she murmurs, swallowing a mouthful of gin and vermouth before she rearranges herself and slinks into his lap, a dusky arm thrown over his shoulders, her mouth catching at his bottom lip, the scratch of his beard as harsh as gravel.





Their Mondays are like their Wednesdays are like their Fridays. Rinse and repeat. A copy of a copy.

She never smells like cigarette smoke or scotch or chemicals. He never looks tired or out done or misused.

Sometimes she sleeps against his shoulder in the back of a taxi, her dark hair tangled and tousled against his broad jaw. He keeps a hand on her thigh, his fingers brushing old scars beneath the hem of her dress.





She takes shots of vodka standing half-naked in the loft’s open kitchen, a hip cocked to the side, wearing one of his work-out tanks and nothing else. It’s five in the afternoon, but she shouldn’t be home - she has a list of appointments longer than the Hudson that have her booked for the next week solid - and she definitely shouldn’t be three sheets to the wind. It’s early, even by Emere’s standards, but she already has that feral cat look about her, the angry, ready-for-a-fight attitude she adopts steadily, hour by hour, as the day progresses into night. It’s usually worse after half a bottle of Ketel One. Roman considers himself lucky, even if the hair on the back of his neck stands up in warning.

He loosens his tie, sidestepping a knocked over vase on his way into the kitchen, and pours himself a shot. While he’s at it, he pours her another one, and leaves the cap off the bottle. He’s a whole head taller than her and he makes good use of the height, looking at the cabinets in front of him rather than down at her. Trying to catch her gaze would be like willingly looking into Medusa’s stare.

“Bad day, dear?” he asks.

Emere takes the shot as an answer and slams the glass down on the counter. “Fuck you.”

Roman lifts his own glass to his lips and tips it back smoothly, the burn settling down his throat and into his chest with the glow of an afterthought. He pours another round. She reaches for hers, and he swats away her hand.

“Hold on, let me catch up, and we’ll see what happens.”

He tips his shot back again, surprised by the sound of her laughter.

OUR FEARS CANNOT PROTECT US.
- Reyna Biddy


Dead man walking.

The expression means something different here – more literal than figurative. The pack murmur beneath their breath as he walks amongst them, as they step out of his path as though he were a pariah, which Roman suspects he is. An outsider. Unwelcome. Foreign with his lifeless heart, chalky skin, and mystic blood.

He’s unsuited for domestic life, although Moray Mountain is a harsh environment; it’s sun-bleached, dust-covered, rock-laden, but the pack has embraced the terrain and used it for coverage. Like animals whose motley hide and assorted feathers allow them to hide in plain sight, the pack has found a way to manipulate the landscape: well-worn trails seemingly disappear into boulder curves, thorny brush cover rusted vehicles, and the mountain itself has been carved into cabins and labyrinthine rooms. The pack is hard to find, intentionally so, and the homebase tucked into the middle of the mountain path is a fortress – stoic, unwelcoming, as stark as the bedrock of its foundation. It’s a home intended for one family, one audience. Roman is not welcome.

It is not so much his look that marks Roman as an intruder (the Moray pack is itself a hierarchy of variety: long-limbed colts run next to coal-skinned boys with bear hearts, women with skin made leathery by age hand freshly washed linens to men with crane-like heights), the hard manner in which he strikes his consonants, or even his careless powerful way of being. It is his foreignness: utterly alien, immediately noticeable. He has no scent for the wind to carry, no pulse for their ears to judge, no warmth. Worse yet, he does not lower his eyes. He does not beseech. He stands next to Lene with easy entitlement, tainting her grass-scent with the smell of graves.

Dead man.

Dead man walking.







“They don’t understand,” Lene tells him on their first night, self-conscious over the cold, distant welcome her family and friends have given Roman, assuming his silence is a sign of his discontent. Later, he will find some measure of kinship in the Moray’s children, but for now she’s the only one who stands close, who sometimes places her hand in the crook of his elbow, who finds the unnatural coldness of his skin a welcome difference against her own burning heat.

Roman wipes grit from his jaw, his hands covered in mountain dirt from where he’d climbed the ascending rocky path earlier. “Why would they?”

“Give them time. You have plenty of that.” She tries for a smile, lightly jabbing his side with her elbow.

He shakes his head. “They don’t need time, liebchen. They do not understand because they do not want to. That never changes.”

“Wait and see. Once they realize you aren’t going to try eating everything with a pulse–”

“Some things aren’t supposed to be mixed.”

Lene is silent for a moment, considering the implications of what he’s said, before she looks away from him. “We aren’t like that here. We aren’t one of the compounds, and this isn’t Albtraum. Anders isn’t Harrow.”

“A world of negations, yes? … And yet,” Roman murmurs, letting his unfinished sentiment linger while he turns his eyes up to the stark, fearless moon. He hasn’t seen one so bright in years. It isn’t comforting.

Lene follows his gaze. She feels cold although the night is mild.

“You broke their rules. Bringing me here.”

“I’ve been breaking their rules for years,” she says, trying to laugh. “Hell, who I am is technically an affront to our entire lifestyle. I’m an anomaly.”

“In a nest–”

“Pack,” she corrects.

“Those who refused to follow the laws were driven out in order to maintain stability. You have to deal with dissenters swiftly. Often violently. You have seen this, I think.”

It’s Lene’s turn to shake her head. “Anders is my brother. He won’t exile me. Besides, this is different. He knows you’re part of the resistance.”

“The resistance,” Roman sneers, shaping the word as an insult. “What do I resist? No, I am trying to survive.”

“Story of your life, old man. Survival covers all manner of sins.”

Roman watches Lene’s profile, her full lips pulled down in an expression of disapproval, her blonde hair catching at her jaw and sticking to the sides of her neck. She’s cherubic – disarmingly, misleadingly so.

He takes her hand, her skin hot against his, and she startles at the gesture. She can’t remember him ever having done it before.

“I don’t know what sin is,” he tells her, and she knows he’s telling the truth.







What the Moray cannot bring themselves to see is all the aspects of Roman that Lene has found herself surprised to value. (She hesitates to say love, as though mentioning this single word would shatter the unspoken commitment that has grown so steadily between them over the years, but in the back of her mind she knows where her heart is.)

She thinks of him after the fall, in the immediate wake of so much chaos and confusion, when Albtraum had been plunged into fire, screams, panic. He had been calm, eerily so, only his eyes had taken on a hawkish, predatory alertness. When he’d found her, two backpacks slung over his shoulder as though they were about to do nothing more than hike through an easy spring trail, she’d laughed at his impossible composure.

The emergency system within the compound had taken over by then, and his face had flickered between red and shadow. There was only one casualty as they hurried towards the location of the loading docks, Roman having already secured an old SUV for their trip through the desert, and it was a young guard whose face Lene couldn’t identify. He’d opened his mouth to say something to Roman – an order, perhaps, to go back the way they’d come, or a question about their whereabouts – but Roman had already approached him, and for a moment it looked as though the two men would hug before Roman’s hands snapped the guard’s neck. His body had crumbled, falling to the floor, as weightless as a feather. Roman had looked back once. Red and shadow. Eyes alert.

He hadn’t been different in the desert. Lene drove, her foot pressing the pedal to the floormat, Roman covering the windows with old blankets, prepping for dawn’s approach. She’d found his confidence infectious, all her senses heightened, ready, and although her eyes kept straying to the rearview mirror – expecting to see a line of guards in trucks and similar SUVs, packed with guns and fully aware of the treachery played on them – all she could see was smoke from the burning building. All she could hear were screams. Even miles later, she’d thought she’d never escape those cries.

They ran out of gas with a day’s journey remaining to the rendezvous point. It was nighttime when it happened, the SUV gasping and choking its way towards death. Roman had cut the ignition then watched the sky, judging the distance, and in the near pitch-black, Lene could see the fine blue of his veins, the extreme whiteness of his skin. She wondered how he’d ever been able to pose as human.

They traveled by foot until the sun halted them. Lene had watched as Roman buried himself within the sand, his muscles straining and rolling beneath his skin, his hands shoveling away mound after mound, seeking the cool darkness of the deeper layers. She’d spent the day scouting, working away at the last of their provisions, calculating their distance with their crudely drawn map and her own memory.

When he emerged from the desert – a pale specter, coated in sand as a second-skin – he’d looked all the more inhuman. To Lene, he’d seemed strong. An ancient force, birthed from the belly of the earth itself.

That otherworldliness had only continued to grow. In the absence of humans, Roman’s differences shined all the brighter.

It’s that noticeable, marked distinction in him that speaks to her own alienation and plight. He’d told her once that he was not the only of his kind, that man’s desire to attack, destroy, and control preternatural life had forced his ancient line into hiding and deep sleep – a hibernation of self-preservation – but she’s yet to meet any other. Just as she’s yet to meet another quite like herself. Her pack thinks Roman is not the most deserving of her loyalty, of her affections – she knows this too, as she knows that her brother disagrees with her choice, whole-heartedly and without much attempt to reconcile the tension this has caused between them as siblings and as leaders within the community. Knight disagrees as well, partially to keep the peace between him and Anders, but because he wants more for Lene. Hers is a history of pain, a pain specific to that of the outsider, and she knows he thinks there’s no hope for healing those old wounds if she continues down the path she’s on. Where she sees a merging, they see disruption.

They all think it. He is a threat instead of a weapon. A liability.

Which now makes her one too.







Lene tells him as much as he drinks from her thigh, her fingers in his hair, his teeth sharp enough that she barely feels their presence – just the quiver of his mouth. It makes her back arch, her skin tingle, turn to gooseflesh. This is after. After her argument with Anders, after Knight’s silent disapproval, after the pack’s resentment towards her and her decision to bring Roman here, jeopardizing them, has turned from a simmer into a boil. This is after Lene defeated the first contender for her position within the pack, after she had to meet the gaze of her family and see them, suddenly, as strangers.

Roman opens one eye and glances up at her, one of his big hands stroking the skin behind her knee, the other at her hip. She’s sitting on her bed, wearing one of his shirts and only one of his shirts, skin smelling of salt and pine, and he’s kneeling between her legs, as naked as the day he was ripped from his mother’s body, Lene’s blood hot in his mouth, coppery with old secrets and bitter with unshared history. The sun still lingers, fresh as a wound, on the horizon, and he can feel its warmth from where his cheek presses against her thigh. Leisurely, savoring the rush of her blood, he pricks his tongue and licks the small puncture wounds, healing them before sitting back on his heels. There’s a glaze over his hazel eyes, her blood still circulating through him, making him punch-drunk, making him keen. If she reached down between their bodies, Lene knows she’d find him hard.

“Which do you think I am? A threat?” he asks finally, like he’s just now remembered the conversation, mouth still red, fingers more curious in the way they roam her leg and side. He’s distracted, reaching up under his shirt that she’s wearing to cup one of her breasts, a thumb idly tracing across her nipple.

“Are you asking me if I’m naïve enough to assume your life has been all fangs and fucking, old man?” She tugs on a chunk of his hair pointedly, making him dip forward until his mouth is back near her thigh.

He laughs. “That would sum up six centuries of living most concisely.”

When Roman slides his palms beneath her, she leans back, stretching her arms above her head. Looking up at the carved ceiling, she sucks in a breath of air as his mouth crawls further up her leg, his less dangerous, more human teeth dragging over her skin. She turns her face into a pillow. This is the room of her adolescence, the mattress firm with its quilts smelling of old cotton, so she should feel more comfortable than she does. Instead, there’s a tangle of knots in her stomach.

Lene pushes a foot into his chest, halting his progression up her body.

Roman quirks an eyebrow.

“I’ve never seen you …” she hesitates, searching for the words that gnaw at the back of her throat. All this time, but she’s sometimes uncertain how to talk to him.

“Tear a throat? Pull out a heart? Kill a child? Rape a woman? Break someone’s jaw and eat the tongue?” His voice is light, but there’s a fog in his eyes again. He sits back once more, catching her foot this time when she tries swiping at his head, cupping it between his white palms.

She props herself up on her elbows, studying his face. “You’ve done all that.”

It isn’t a question, but Roman only shrugs.

She frowns, and Roman rolls his eyes, digging his thumbs uncomfortably into the arch of her foot. She pulls free, annoyed.

“Not for survival,” she clarifies. “That’s what you won’t say, right? You’ve done terrible things because it’s your nature, because you can, because in the hierarchy of life, your kind is always on top and fuck everything else? It’s survival of the fittest.”

At times like this, Roman thinks Lene only entered his life to serve as the conscience he so desperately needs. He hears her in his head often, judgmental in a way that doesn’t sound judgmental, but philosophical, prosaic, even sometimes sarcastic, like the start of a mockery or a debate. He thinks he’ll always hear her, that he’s taken something from her that she didn’t know she was giving. An unfair truth, but a truth all the same.

“What’s your point, liebchen?” He grabs his jeans, the ones he’d worn all through the desert, the ones that still smell of campfire and salt, and slides them on with an ease and casualness that’s infuriating. He’s still hard. He has to tuck himself into his jeans, and the look he gives her is pointed. He’d much rather be fucking than talking.

So would she, but Lene can’t untangle herself from the mix of emotions she’s feeling and the surrealness of being here, at her home, with a corpse as a companion. Instead of grabbing him by the loopholes of his jeans and pulling him onto the bed, she sits up, folds her arms over her chest in a defiant gesture that does nothing but make her feel childish. Why is she angry? Nervous? Sad? What is it she’s fearing? She’s not sure how to answer his question.

Her emotions resonate inside of him, more muted and dim, but still there – flickering like sparks inside of his veins. A result of the circle their blood makes, the connection thrumming, turning him into a receptacle. He blinks, trying to make sense of this most human of responses, and then Roman surprises her when he takes two steps forward, his hands on either side of her face, his mouth on hers, his tongue licking her teeth. She can taste her own blood. She drops her arms. Presses her hands to his bare chest.

“What is it?” he asks again, softer this time, his voice a whisper that lands against her lips. His forehead touches hers, his eyes challenging.

She takes a breath for reassurance. “… Would you be able to do those terrible things again? If you needed to? If it comes to that?”

It’s an easy answer.







The meeting is called a month later.

Anders sits at the start of the circle, his blonde hair pulled back at the nape of his neck, his elbows on his knees and his hands between them. It’s a position of calm, but Roman knows that every complaint his pack lodges, every dispute, settles like stone on top of his young shoulders and threatens to break him. His desire to lead them is a burden, and the effort it takes to lead them well is crushing him, slowly but acutely. Lene sits by his left, Knight at his right, and Roman stands a step behind Lene – not in the circle, but not far from it.

Only Lene’s mouth looks worried. She’s caught her bottom lip between her teeth. Her eyes are angry, and Roman thinks that’s good. Anger can be useful.

“He doesn’t belong.” Alec, middle-aged and greying at the temples, speaks for a third of the congregation that’s gathered to discuss, for yet another time, Roman’s presence.

“He hasn’t hurt any of us or brought trouble,” Anders responds, shielding the weariness in his voice. “He is a member of the resistance. I do not want to make a habit of rejecting members of this pack purely on …” He pauses, uncertain.

“Species,” Knight offers.

“Oddities,” Lene suggests, speaking for herself as well as Roman.

“He hasn’t proven himself,” A fox by the name of Jalyn says, her eyes like arrows that shoot past Lene’s shoulder and into Roman’s chest.

“But I have.” Lene’s voice is sure, confident, assertive without an edge of meanness. “And I speak for him.”

“You shouldn’t speak for any of us,” Jalyn threatens, turning her harsh gaze on Lene. “You shouldn’t belong either. We all think it.”

“You do not have the authority to speak for all of us present here, so guard your tongue,” Anders says.

When he intercedes as the leader, Jalyn has the grace to look cowed. “My apologies, Alpha.” Her subservience is a mask she brings to her face when convenient, but Anders gives a small nod of acknowledgement regardless.

“We do not doubt that Lene has done well for this pack or that she is capable of earning her position here,” Alec begins, placing a hand on Jalyn’s shoulder. “We’ve all seen how she can defend herself, how she works for our benefit, but Jalyn is right. One’s strength does not merit another’s placement. We all earn our right to be here. This outsider should earn his.”

Roman folds his arms over his chest, shifting his weight to his heels. He follows the conversation, although he’s already certain of where it will end. He’s lived too many similar moments.

“He should fight,” a faceless voice from the back of the group speaks up. The crowd murmurs their agreement.

“No.” Anders says, immediate, his hands still loose between his knees.

“Wait,” Lene says, placing a hand gently on Anders’ arm. “I will fight as his proxy. We can solve this in one shot.”

“No,” Roman says, speaking for the first time, his voice reverberating with his natural harsh cadence.

There’s a collective snarl from half of the pack, as though Roman’s interruption has struck them as distasteful. Someone near his left spits on his boot. He ignores it and does not uncross his arms or move from his place behind Lene. “I will fight.”

“It isn’t your fight,” Lene murmurs, turning her head to look up at him, a scowl slicing the lower half of her face. “It’s me they’re really upset with.”

The smile Roman gives her is indulging. “You know better than that.” He looks to Anders, nodding. “I accept.”

For the first time since the meeting began, Anders curls his hands into fists.

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.


---



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.

Ugh. I hate it when your mind doesn't want to cooperate with your desire to write. Like, c'mon, brain! Get with the picture!

This was supposed to be a warm up, which it was, but it's nowhere near how I wanted to write the scene.

However, Haven is a hottie. Her outfit: http://celebmafia.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/farah-holt-free-people-collection-2015_1.jpg


-----


David notices her because of her breakfast: a flaking, butter-soaked apple turnover topped with two dollops of fluffy cream. She cuts big pieces with a fork and savors the balance of cream and tart chunks of apple in each bite, wiping flakes of pastry from the corner of her mouth with her fingertips. She’s been his waitress at the Cala D’Or Yacht Club before, but her tits are too small and her mouth too thin – he glanced past her until she would turn away and then, at most, he would admire the shape of her ass or the long stretch of her legs before returning to his scotch and cigar. But now, claiming his place at the bar three stools down from where she’s eating, David’s caught by the glimmer of her diamond earrings and her chipped red polish and the way her lipstick smears against the corner of her cup of black coffee.

It’s too early, even for a Saturday, to order a scotch, but he does it anyway.

Haven glances at him, and he motions to her rapidly disappearing breakfast. “My wife used to do that. Eat dessert for breakfast.”

“Sounds like a good woman then,” Haven says with a smile.

“Maybe.” He shrugs a shoulder noncommittedly and watches her lick a bit of cream from her finger.

“What does she eat now?”

In truth, David doesn’t know. He hasn’t shared a breakfast with Rowena in more than six months. “She’s become something of a health nut,” he lies. “It’s all egg whites and avocado toast these days.”

Haven shakes her head as if she’s disappointed by this news then stands up, leaning forward to put her empty plate and mug closer to the edge of the bar. “My shift starts in ten minutes, if you’ll be needing a table.”

He won’t be, but he nods anyway. When she walks off, presumably to don the customary black blazers all the waitresses wear with their navy colored skirts, he watches her the entire time.





“So how’d you end up here?” he asks her three drinks later. The club has started to fill up with the usual crowd – silver-haired would-be sailors and rich patrons with nothing better to do with their weekend – but Haven has circled back to his table repeatedly, fetching him refills of his scotch without being told to, suggesting he order the Oysters Rockefeller because they’re on special, and making no comment about his lack of company.

Haven shifts a stack of menus to her hip. “I’m part-timing while my brother figures out how we can get rich quick.”

David surprises himself by laughing, and she flashes him a bright smile, one that is all teeth. “But really,” she says, picking up his unused menu and adding it to her stack, “I like the view here, and I need something to do while I figure out my life. I was back home for a while, taking care of my dad. Lost a little time doing that.”

“Family,” David says, and he means it good-naturedly, like they’re comrades, but Haven thinks he sounds disgruntled.

“More of a burden then a blessing sometimes, right?”

His grin is all the confirmation she needs.

She writes her number on his credit card receipt and isn’t surprised when he calls her the next day.





“Where are you off to?” Luke asks, an eyebrow raised, his expression difficult to read.

“Got a date,” Haven says with a smirk, adding another chunk of silver and gold bangles to her left wrist. She has a matching set on her other wrist, a half-open cuff on her upper left arm, and ten distressed bracelets cupping the flesh of her right. Every time she moves, she sounds musical.

Her dress is a slip of a thing, white embellished cotton that flutters down her body gracefully, cutting across her thighs like a whisper. Luke watches as she slips on high heels that cage her feet, the black fabric knotting behind her ankles. It’s the kind of outfit women wear when they expect to be undressed quickly, but he doesn’t tell her to stay home or to be careful. He doesn't tell her anything.





She is unlike every other woman David has ever met. He keeps an apartment in the city, a high-rise expensive piece of property that he’s brought women to before, but she doesn’t seem to even take in the luxury of the place. When he asks if she wants a glass of wine, she opens the bottle herself, and she sits on his leather couch with her legs curled under her, wine glass in one hand, and a flip of a smirk on her mouth.

He makes a dinner they do not eat.

He doesn’t call it a date, and he never promises her anything. When he kisses her, she acts as though she’s been waiting for it all night – her mouth opening to him easily, hungrily, tasting of merlot and strawberry lip balm. She doesn’t mention his wedding ring or the wife he alluded to at the yacht club. She opens to him without hesitation, and he pushes her dress up her hips with the hurry of a desperate man.

He’s a selfish fuck – something Haven was already expecting – but she moans encouragement into his ear and hooks her legs around his waist anyway. She arches her back when she’s expected to, kisses at his stubbled jaw, fakes an orgasm as he slices between her thighs and curses into her shoulder.

Afterwards, she’s surprised when he strokes her calf. There’s a tenderness to the way his fingers skim her skin. He pushes away her hair from her face and kisses her again, full-mouthed, like he’s trying to claim something he’s already caught.

She finishes her wine before leaving and takes the money he gives her for a taxi ride she doesn’t use.





“Fun time?” Luke asks when she comes home. He’s in the kitchen, eating a late-night snack of cereal, and he can smell the sex on her and see how her mouth is stained from the merlot.

She shrugs a shoulder, pushing a hand back through her hair. “Not really.”

“So no second date then?”

“Why? Would you be jealous if there was?”

He makes a noise that doesn’t quite answer her question, and she pulls herself up onto the counter across from him, her jewelry shivering against her wrists and arms. He puts his bowl down and then he’s there, knocking her knees open to stand between her legs, his hands warm on her hips. He leans in, nose close to her collarbone, and she sweeps her fingers through his hair, dragging them down the back of his neck.

She shivers when he drags his teeth across her pulse.