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More WWI AU! Because why not?



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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.

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.

“Mein Kommandant,” she murmurs, her mouth like blood, rich in crimson, pressed to his cold ear. “Aufwachen.”

He reaches, his hand settling against the side of her face. He smears his thumb, hard, across her lips.



She had a smallness about her that belied her true strength. Adira had large hands with dull nails, but she was delicate everywhere else. Her weak chin, her thin lips, her half-sunken eyes and the sharpness of her bones. He could count her ribs when she stretched her arms above her head.

He liked to drag his teeth over the ridges and dips of skeleton beneath her skin. Her sliver of hip. The round rock of bone where her hand met her wrist. The threat of her severe elbow. The protruding twin icicles that were her collarbones.

He is a statue in comparison, a solid, perfect specimen of the male form, all his bones and muscles carved into an ideal shape. She could straddle his prone body and feel weightless above him or hide beneath, sheltered by his formidable width, a brittle carcass tucked close to his heart. She would place her palm against his side and stomach and follow the cut of his body with her long fingers. There is a deep line on either side of his abdomen, charting his hips, that she liked to trace.



Roman remembers her in snow. The crunch of her heavy boots on ice, how pale she was, in a world blanketed in white. The black of her leather riding crop in her hand. The collar of her uniform turned up against her neck and cheeks.

He remembers her in cut-off dresses, thin fabric slashed off at the thigh, the brightness from a pearl dangling from her left ear. He remembers when she used to speak French, her most fluent language, and the syrupy quality of her voice. She used to smell first of man’s cologne and then of cigarette ash; there was no bottom note, no lasting scent (he knows it is the same with him). This was an era of decadence, before the wars, with jarring, feverish music and never ending liquor.

The blood boiled then.



She sinks her teeth into his wrist and feels the groan leave his mouth.

The blood is thick, primordial, sticky with strength. It splashes hot against her tongue. Roman takes her own arm to his mouth and completes the circle.

Rolling, rolling, rolling.

Keep these pieces rolling.

--



Harrow asks about your mother, and you can’t remember her except for the shadow of pressure that might be small, calloused hands on your shoulders, the twist of a smile that could be another woman’s mouth, another mother’s expression. She had blonde hair. Or was it more brown?

You tell him about your second mother instead, the one whose blood replaced the first.

“She was very strong. Vain. Reliable and complicated and surprisingly affectionate.”

“What happened to her?” Harrow has the look of someone who is waiting for a slip to occur. You have been by his side for two years now, and he still cannot trust you completely. You understand the urge to protect yourself, the inability to break down walls. You are not offended, and maybe that’s why he’s able to have these conversations with you. A sharing of not-secrets and hidden alibis. An explanation for the way men are how they are.

You roll your shoulders in a shrug and throw down another card from the collection in your hand. You almost have a royal flush. “What happens to all mothers.”

“She is dead?”

You fight the urge to smile. You’re both dead, but you’re both alive too. So much more alive than the human across from you. You feel a nostalgia for blood and ignore it. “Lost, rather.”

“I do not understand.”

“Children outgrow their parents. It is inevitable. What of your mother?”

Harrow’s tight-lipped smile is secretive. He pours himself another glass of whiskey and changes the subject.



Adira speaks French; it makes her German softer (her English is poor, but you won’t realize that yet). She is not conventionally pretty for the time period – her chin is weak, her hair an off shade of auburn, her hands large for how small her body is. She is almost elfish, her body caught somewhere between adolescence and adulthood. Her hips look as though they’ve only started to round, but the top of her body is boy-like and flat. You realize you are much taller than her before she even stands.

She is too young to be out so late, you think, but she asks you to buy her a coffee, and you do. She doesn’t drink it but cups it between her palms, breathing in the warmth and scent hungrily.

You think she is a child of the streets. Another vagabond orphan looking for a soldier’s bed. You tell her as much and she laughs, brazen, loud. It startles you.

When your hair falls forward against your face, she brushes it aside in a gesture of intimacy that is just as jarring. You are not used to a woman being so forward. Your mother would have told you it was inappropriate, unladylike, but you never did listen to her much. You find yourself studying Adira’s knees, the hem of her dress rucked up high from the angle of her body, and they are very white. Practically translucent. You brush your knuckles across them impulsively and she does not rebuke you.

You have had many whores. Some you have paid for and some you have taken for free.

This will not be so different, you think, leaving a tip for the waitress on the counter when Adira asks you to escort her home.



Afterwards, she tells you that she has been watching you for months. Your sturdy gait, the way you throw your head back when you laugh, how you crush women to your mouth as though they are something to be devoured.

She is naked and straddling you, her bones deceivingly fragile, her body as weightless as snow. There is still blood on her plump mouth. The wounds in her neck from where you greedily tried to latch on to her have not yet healed; they trickle red tauntingly. The sheets are torn and sticky with your life and hers and the mix of death and rebirth. She says she is four hundred years old and you, her soldier, are her very first.

She isn’t really sure what she’s doing.

You cradle her face in your newly dead hands and try to kiss her.



She teaches you everything. You are a quick learner, which delights her. She is remarkably open, as though she has spread herself before you and is prepared to give everything. When she disappears without a backward glance or hint of a warning, you panic like a five year old.

You are crushed with a sense of abandonment and loneliness that threatens to drive you mad. Your sadness makes you irresponsible and you let your hunger free from restraint. You create a tantrum with the lives of others.

It doesn’t help.

You think of walking into the sun, and you test your will in the early morning dawn, feeling your flesh scald before the daylight even breaks.
After a month, you wake to her presence in the house. She is playing the piano softly but expertly and when you try to embrace her she throws you back, sends you against the wall. You could have been a fly hovering too close, annoying her concentration.

You are wounded and then you are furious. You launch yourself at her again, but she just as easily counters you. This time, she offers you a hand up, and you snarl at her.

“Next time, become angry first. Do not give room to grief. It is a useless emotion when you live as long as us.”

You bring yourself to your knees, and she lets you wrap your arms around her thin waist, lets your bury your face into the thin fabric of her dress. She tsks and chides and calls you weak, but her voice is affectionate and she strokes your hair.



She has not let you inside of her since the night she first made you.

She speaks about your relationship in terms you do not understand. Blood bonds that are synonymous with mothers, sisters, and lovers. A kinship without words appropriate enough to connate true meaning. Adira laughs at your discomfort, murmurs mocking words of pacification, and brings you whores as presents. She likes to watch you with them, the twist of their human bodies against yours, the dominating way you hold them by their neck with one hand as you thrust into them. You let her watch, enjoy it even, but you look for the signs of disapproval that flicker onto her face – a twitch of her mouth, a narrowing gaze, a tap of her fingers against the arm of her chair. This is how you learn to love her from afar.

Sometimes you are too brutal. You have broken bones and split necks.
She helps you with the mess.

She brings men home, men with dark eyes and darker intentions. She does not give you the same luxury of watching, but your preternatural ears can hear every groan and whimper. You imagine her sinking her teeth into their necks at the brink of orgasm, draining their life as she trembles with fulfillment. She is always rosy-cheeked and affectionate afterwards, smelling like human sweat and joyous death, letting you lick her fingers from where the blood has stained them.

You do not know the lesson here. Only that you are aching with envy and jealousy, that the gulf inside of your threatens to break free and never rebuild. You turn on her with words and betrayal and anything that might wound. She listens to your tirades with a practiced patience and infuriating smile.

Adira says, “Only when you stop wanting can you be free to conquer.”

You tell her you have been conquering for years, and she laughs dismissively at you. “You know nothing about conquering, soldier.”



The world changes but the both of you do not.

You know there are others like you that exist. You have seen them, but Adira believes in isolation. Nests are problematic, she says. They breed pack mentalities and, more often then not, disintegrate after a few centuries. Survival correlates with one’s ability to adapt. Do not form relationships that you would not die for.

“Vulnerability is a leisure we cannot afford.”

But you love her - in the way men love Gods, the way small children worship parents, and with the protective nature of siblings. You tell her as much, lifting her thin body up into your arms, pressing kisses to her mouth, cheeks, eyelids.

It has been seventy years, and she smiles approvingly. “So now you know.”

That night, you bury your teeth into the tender crook of her elbow, and she lifts your arm to do the same to your wrist. She crawls onto your lap, her legs hooking around your waist, and does not stop you when you dip your hand between your bodies, your fingers reaching between her thighs. Adira croons and for two hundred years you never sleep alone again.



The expansion of the west did not separate you. The advancement of industry and technology had little barring on your life. Neither did the world wars or the split of Europe. Now, the earth is turning to deserts and institutions and ideologies crumble, replaced with worse alternatives.

It is the savagery of men and their sudden awareness of preternatural entities that shakes the foundation on which you stand. The humans find the lycanthropes first, then the shifters. Camps that mirror the experiments and purposes of their European predecessors are built.

“We are smarter than those beasts.”

Adira scoffs. “You are a fool to think that what affects others cannot affect us. You, of all people, should know that, mein Kommandant.”

“But we are not born, not like the animals. We are human.”

“Were. We were human. They will think we are corpses and, more importantly, a threat. Shifters cannot offer immortality. They will drain us, recreate our blood, then kill us … if we are lucky.”

You kiss the center of her palm, trying to soothe away her worry, and she pushes your face to the side with her soft fingertips.



The desert is greater, wider, and the days are longer now. The sun threatens to rise soon, but for now the lingering darkness is a mercy. The humans are coming, and Adira has fear in her eyes. You have never truly seen it before, not in her.

“We will burn, Roman.” She says it plainly, already believing it true.

“Fire?” You ask.

Fire, the humans hunting them echo across the dunes, and in their faces they have the same expression your fellow Germans once wore. War and hate and animal cravings. Kill or be killed. Humans make useful things, but underneath they are the same as they were when the world was younger.

Fight or flight. Your instinct must be broken, for you do neither. Adira must take you by the throat (you have somehow forgotten how much stronger she still is than you) and shove you into the direction of the last blessed moments of darkness.

“The east!” She yells, turning her back to you, a small woman facing an impending danger. You catch a glimpse of enjoyment in her eyes, a will that overpowers her fear, and you remember her love of challenges.

The rising sun is causing her skin to begin to blister.



You are not a child anymore. You know the tricks of your body, the power of your blood, and you run at a speed that causes you to blur. Before the sun breaks the horizon, you take to the skies. You are not a child, but the exertion of so much strength exhausts you instantly. It is will and will alone that causes you to concentrate, but you fall to the ground within moments of your feet hitting wet rock.

An ocean. One of the lasts.

You remember it from your human youth, the cave where you and your brothers hid. You crawl into its shelter, too drained to stay awake.



The Insurgence finds you.

They do not find Adira.

They tell you that these things happen, as though the current state of affairs is common and predictable. They tell you to honor her memory, to make a stand, that you are valuable and they can do good with you.

The implication being that you haven’t been doing good until this moment. The implication being that your maker is dead, ash on the winds, and there is no time to wonder.

But you do, because there was no and has not been any ache inside of you. No shred to mark the moment of your severing with her. You would know, you tell them, you would know if she was no longer in this world. They do not argue with you, but they accept your denial as a side effect of grief.



Harrow asks about your mother, and you tell him that she was always one to believe in reckonings.