you're too young & eager to love

Writing! Woo! It's been so long.

Ignore the flashback where I clearly struggle with the correct tense. Fuck it. I proof read, but there's probably still some typos. You know how it goes.

Heeereeeee we goooooo!



( to die )

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.

Posting some bits! I'm not unhappy with this, per say, but I also wasn't sure what tone or mood I wanted for the overall piece. I still want to do the whole Roman-pack-fight eventually.

The conversation is supposed to be between Roman and Knight, but it sounded too formal and melodramatic.

-------


"He isn't blood. And he isn't family."




He is cold. With her palm pressed above his dead heart, his skin feels the way glass or metal does.





"This is not up for discussion," Anders says, using his stern voice, but there's a softness around his eyes and mouth - a questioning look - that seems to ask why. Why shouldn't it be discussed? His allegiances are to his pack; Roman is an outsider.

Lene steels his shoulders. He tilts his chin up in a gesture of defiance. He is silent and sure. The pack has not seen him in this shape for some time now. He knows their ways - how what you earn here is determined by strength and capability rather than gender, but he's always thought they listen to him more, respect him more, in the guise of a man.

Roman looks more relaxed than he should. He sits with his elbows on his knees, his shirt threadbare and cut off at the shoulders, showing the fine muscles in his arms. His hair is loose, slipping against his jaw, and when Lene catches his eye, Roman grins - his teeth are very white in the darkness.





"You know you don't smell like anything? Nothing. You're the absence of a scent."

"So I have been told."





"You think you can win? That you can persevere? Outlast their malice by hiding in these western mountains? I know men. I've seen what they are capable of, how they hate what they do not understand, how they fear what they cannot create or control. They are weeds. They will cover everything until there is nothing left, and then they will turn on themselves. It is what they do."

"You speak like you aren't one of them."

"I haven't been for many years now."

"So why are you here? Why did you join the insurgence?"

"What else was there to do?"

"The last man standing."

"Until the sky falls."

"And her? She has enough protectors. If you're staying because you feel obligated, don't. You aren't doing her any favors. Prolonging the inevitable."

Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
- “Scheherazade”


Praise this beautiful, terrible world where we are opened
and crushed, where the kiss comes from a mouth that bites.
- “The Diver”





She hungers.

Roman can feel the yearning roll off her – silent, heated waves crashing through the air and landing against his dead skin. He isn’t sure if their connection is because of the blood they share, the thick, heady stuff he takes from her regularly (because he hungers too, he hungers more than he needs) and the drops he’s offered her over their many months together making a circle of their life, or simply because proximity has granted him an intimate awareness. But he can feel it: clear, obvious, undiluted. He runs his tongue against the sharp points of his fangs. He glances at her from beneath his eyelashes, body still against the floor, his hands behind his head and legs stretched forward. He has kept the room sparse, ever militant with his lack of need to display affection or familiarity, and made himself a marble statue posed in relaxation.

“Feeling needy, kid?” he asks.

Lene closes the wooden door separating her bedroom from the smaller, darker back room before shoving her hands into her pockets, her weight shifting to one hip. “No,” she lies. “Being home feels –”

“Home is never how you remember it as. Trust me.”

She rolls her eyes and kicks at one of his bare feet. “I was going to say good. It feels good.”

He moves so suddenly, so like the wolves lambs learn to fear, and snatches her foot. When he pulls, Lene tumbles, her small body awkwardly responding to pressure and gravity, while the beast inside of her instinctively charges with anger at the unexpected attack even as she outwardly laughs. She lands on the carpeted floor with a thud, the stone ground beneath sturdier than her bones. Roman crawls forward, ignoring the way her right knee jams into his rib, her left leg with her newly freed foot wrapping loosely around his hip, his hand pinning her elbow, her fingers in his long hair until they are half-holding, half-wrestling each other’s bodies.

“You smell like the sun,” he murmurs once the skip in her pulse has calmed, his wide nose near her neck, his teeth on her ear. He can lick the dust from her skin.

“You don’t smell like anything, old man.”

She pushes a palm into his face, the coarseness of his beard scratching her fingertips. He nips at her knuckles until she laughs again. It’s a sound like the wind through fresh grass. He’s more used to her nighttime sounds, to her sighs like nightingales and her vixen cries. Lene grins with her hair in her eyes and feels his body move above hers, his hands anchoring at her hips, until she’s rolled and is straddling his sharp waist. One of his palms slips across her stomach, pushing the fabric of her shirt up.

He raises an eyebrow at the bruise blossoming against her ribs and the welts only freshly fading.

“What is this?” Roman asks.

“Nothing.”

He digs his fingers in, hard enough to hurt, and sees the way Lene tries to hide her wince. She sighs, a huff of annoyance, reaching down to halt his hand by his wrist. “Nothing. The usual contenders, welcoming me home.”

“Ah, I see. You disappointed them by bringing me here, so they doubt you. Do you want me to eat them?”

“Oh, that’ll help. You’re a thousand-year-old child.”

Roman’s expression goes blank like ivory. He bites his own thumb then smears the blood across her welts. Lene accepts this, her eyelids shivering at the sensation of pinpricks near her ribs. Gradually, she shifts her weight, stretching herself slowly above him, bracketing his head with her elbows, the ends of her hair trailing across his collarbones, making a curtain around his long face.

“You don’t know what it’s like. A family. A pack.” she whispers.

“A nest. We call them nests, and they are dangerous. They breed stupidity and hunger and greed, liebchen.”

“Not here. It’s different here. We’re different.”

He tucks a piece of hair behind her ear, a soft gesture unlike almost all of his others. “So everyone thinks, kid.” He doesn’t ask what she means – which we she is referencing. Him or her family.

In the brief silence that follows, she touches his forehead with hers. Roman’s sinewy – not as broad around the chest as Lene had originally surmised him being, his narrow figure hidden behind heavy jackets and expensive suits, his length tapering into a finely muscled abdomen and defined hips sharp enough to batter against her thighs – but he’s a brick of a man. She can feel his solidity beneath her, his cold strength that has become a comfort to her, and for a moment it is enough. She had wanted to tell him about family, about a kinship different than heredity and genetics, how blood and bond can forge affinity, but she thinks he already understands. He’s simultaneously been a lover and a son, a father and a brother. She’s still not sure how to articulate her place in the history of his personal hierarchy; she doesn’t know how to ask.

Lene feels it as part of her desire, all those anxious and burning pains she’s felt low in her belly ever since they crossed the desert in Knight’s SUV.

Roman doesn’t wait. He feels the way her hunger is a quake, an ache that matches his, and sits them up. His arms circle her slender back, his fingers sliding along the nape of her neck until he can fist the blonde length of hair. She loops her arms around his shoulders, kissing him softer than she had intended to. She appreciates it when he bites her bottom lip; she likes it more when it’s rough, when she can feel the push and pull of him linger on her body.

“Your brother,” he says afterwards, when they are naked and lying close together, speaking against the curve of her arm, “do I have to call him Alpha too?”

Lene rolls her eyes. “Shut up.”

“He has longer hair than I pictured.”

“As if you ever sat around picturing my brother.”

“And his friend. He has long hair too.”

“Is this really what you want to be doing? Talking about men?” She shoves her wrist against his mouth, her skin knocking against his teeth. “Isn’t it feeding time?”

Roman does not respond to the bait. “I am wondering if you have a pattern. In the type of men who hold your affections.” He smirks, and she can feel the tiny stretch of his lips.

She punches him in the shoulder. “You’re a dick.”

His face splits when he laughs, his mouth wide and teeth white. His eyes crinkle at the edges. (This is how she likes to think of him when he’s being particularly difficult, when she’s having trouble deciphering whether his morals exist, or when his smug leers infuriate her. His laughter makes him surprising; he’s humanized by it.)

Outside the bedroom, all the way on the deck, Anders can hear the muddled sounds of Roman’s laugh traveling up through the maze of corridors. It pierces his ears like a warning signal.






The pack follows Anders. The majority keep their distance from Roman and are less than warm to Lene. They watch her with judgmental gazes. They whisper behind her back. But even this is a kind of homecoming. A familiar burden. It is Roman that she is unsure of, watching his tall figure stalking the trails, learning the area’s geography by night. She tags along too often, feeling like an unwanted shadow in her own house, showing him the paths from her childhood and the worn parts of the mountain that hide their secrets from the world.

After a week, she is still uncertain, still aware of the tense mood lingering around the trainers in the fighting pits, the old women stocking the storage units in the caverns, the children as they bathe, her brother as he watches.

She doesn’t think any of the pack has spoken to Roman outside of formal introductions, so she’s surprised to see a girl marching up to them as they descend a cliff path close to the main house, Lene’s boots skidding against the rock. Roman is a step ahead of her, pushing a hand back through his hair, glancing past the approaching figure to the giant face of the moon behind her. Lene realizes the girl is Rebecca, a brunette whose grown three feet since Lene saw her last, her body now at the brink of womanhood.

“Mama says you’re dead.” Rebecca tells Roman before Lene can even say hello, sure in her wording, her freckled arms folded over her chest in the age-old stance of adolescent defiance.

Everything about her is skinny, from her waist to her legs. Even her hair is thin, like straw, and Lene, still half-bent from where she’d been brushing the mountain grit off her legs, sucks in an air of breath without meaning too. He’ll eat her alive, she thinks, craning her head to the left to judge Roman’s reaction.

He arches an eyebrow but keeps his tone even. “Your mother sounds like an observant woman,” he says, glancing sideways at Lene with a hint of amusement in his hazel eyes.

“What do your teeth look like?” Rebecca asks, unabashed.

Lene waves her hands in the air in a gesture of shock. “Hello, rudeness alert. Young lady, you go tell your mama that I -” She’s cut off by the sound of Roman’s snarl and the way his body shifts in her periphery. He puts his hands on his thighs, crouching forward into Rebecca’s young face with the same predatory swiftness that Lene has come to know well. She finds herself holding her breath again, seeing his face contort, seeing the savagery in his expression and the glint of the moon on his descended fangs. Rebecca yelps in surprise, shrinking back.

Lene can see Anders, ten feet off, stalking towards them. She grabs Roman’s arm hard and pulls, but he is stone, not budging, and to her surprise Rebecca’s yelp has turned to giggling.

“Cool!” the girl exclaims with a grin, and Lene realizes Roman is smiling.

He doesn’t move when Rebecca touches one of his fangs with the tip of her finger, feeling the point.

“That’s enough,” Anders declares once he’s within earshot.

Rebecca lingers until Lene gives her a hard look, then she drops her hand reluctantly, stepping around and partly behind her legs. Lene places her hand atop the girl’s head, watching her brother watch Roman with open disapproval. Roman retracts his fangs before standing. He has to look down at Anders, a fact that Lene knows irritates him more.

“Is this where you tell me that I am a guest, and I should behave myself?” he asks, and Lene elbows his side.

Anders frowns. “You’re a guest,” he says, but nothing else.

Roman makes a noncommittal noise, not quite a hum, before continuing down the path towards the cabin. His shoulder hits Anders in passing, and he growls even though he’s staring at Lene.

“It will get better,” she tells her brother, squaring her shoulders despite her desire to expose the vulnerable white of her belly.






It starts with the children, so for a while Lene thinks she’s right.

Children are less carved by the word, more resilient and able to see past the fears of others. Rebecca becomes the ringleader, the springboard for the others to use as a gauge in ways that Lene can never be. Rebecca is not different; she was born into the pack and embraced by it – normal in all of their eyes. Willful. Beautiful only in her gracelessness and growing coltish limbs. She has a horse’s wild heart, the beast inside of her passed down from her father’s line, skipping the predator that is her mother’s shape.

She lingers near Roman during dinner hours, quiet except for the occasional smile she sends in his direction, until the lingering becomes a welcoming. When Roman slips down the mountain, headed towards the cold night sands of the desert, she follows his tracks dutifully. They return before dawn, sometimes side-by-side, sometimes with her legs thrown over his shoulders and her body hunched above him, her arms gripping his neck like winding ropes. They morph into one large figure, an amalgamation of monsters.

Before long, the pair doubles. Triples. Forms a group.

Harper has a lisp, but Roman smells scales beneath her skin, and a cunning that belies her shy speech. Isaac has eyes as dark as sage. He smells like forest things, like ancient oaks, but he barely comes to Roman’s thigh. Judah never speaks. He tags along reluctantly. Rebecca says he was rescued from the worst of the drifter cities only a few months ago; she’s surprised he follows at all. Bailey is the loudest – braying with laughter easily, the most untouched by hardship, the loveliest in her innocence – and she likes to cling to Roman’s elbow until he lifts his arm, her feet dangling above the ground, toes dragging over rocks and dust.

Lene keeps her face impassive except for when she grins at Knight’s raised eyebrow and shrugs a shoulder. She doesn’t say anything.

Sometimes she joins in their walks. Sometimes they tussle like she used to when she was their age. She lets their young bodies pile into and over her. She gets elbows in her face, knees in her ribs, laughter in her ear. Roman plucks them off of her one by one. He hooks them by their arms or the backs of their shirts and calls her name, searching for her beneath a pile of squirming kids. As easily as pulling weeds after a fresh rain. Their fingers splay, grasping at empty air. Once, Lene tackled Roman head-first, his arm still circled around Harper’s waist, and the three of them had caused tracks in the dirt.

He’d looked up at her from the ground, a smear of grit across his cheek, and laughed.

Harper had butted her head against Lene’s and scrambled over them, reaching for Judah’s nearby leg. When Lene stood, she’d offered Roman her hand like she’d done it a hundred times.

“Tell us about before,” Rebecca had demanded on their return back.

“Before?” Roman asked, picking a shrub from Lene’s hair.

“Before this, she means.” Bailey clarified.

“There was more color,” Roman said, “and men were kinder.”

Lene had looked at him with disbelief. Men had always burned hearts, her grandmother had said, but she appreciates the lie for what it is.


It’s better, she had thought. It’s getting better.

It isn’t the first time she’s been wrong.

Aaaaah. I don’t really know what I’m doing. I was happy with this, once upon a time, but I kept fiddling with it and it somehow got more jumbled in the editing process. Maybe? It just looks very different from what it was like when it started. I don’t think that’s how editing is supposed to work. Or it could be because I edited while sick. Sick!brain has never helped anyone.

The timing for this is all over the place. Aaaalllll over the place. It’s supposed to be when Roman and Lene are with her pack in the desert after they’re forced to flee the Compound, with flashbacks from previously. But I had to scrap the flashbacks because they weren’t working. I also tried to incorporate Calev. Maybe I’m trying to tackle too much.

Ugh.

Here we go.

--


I am having a private conversation with my sister.

My sister, Anders says, the way another man might have said my wife back when strangers used to ask to intercede on a dance.

Lene notices it, and her mouth crinkles into a smirk that makes Roman’s perpetually wolfish grin flash all the more dangerously. She shrugs dismissively, and Anders sighs with all the pent up frustration of a leader tired of mediating between the fine line of duty and obligation.

She punches him on his shoulder playfully (which does everything except help) as she ducks beneath the flap of the tent opening, circling close to Roman, his fingers already hooking into the crook of her elbow. It’s a territorial hold. She wonders just when that happened – when the way he held her changed from a predator’s snarl to a lover’s claim. Lene thinks there’s only so much difference between the two, but it’s enough.

Outside, the fires are burning, blazing, shielding them from the cold of the wasteland. There are children here. They dart between campgrounds, playing, momentarily fearless, while the adults prepare the beds for the evening, finish the cleaning from dinner. A few pass around skins of wine while trading stories or smoke the last remaining cigars that have traveled with them for thousands of miles. Lene absorbs everything, as though her thirst has just now, within these past few nights, been quenched. She can breathe again.

Roman, as she expected, adjusts quickly. She is still getting used to the sight of him – unwrapped from his meticulous suits, free of a silk tie, his cedar hair brushing into his eyes and against the wide span of his jaw, scraping the back of his neck. He wears shirts of linen, pushing up the sleeves, and old jeans that they stole from abandoned homes. He either does not feel the sand – how it gets everywhere – or he does not mind it. He looks as threadbare as the rest of them, but it’s not his appearance that causes the others to distance himself. He is, yet again, one amongst hundreds. These are shifters, and they smell the curious emptiness of his bones, the lingering scent of death that is buried somewhere in his veins. Lene thinks back to that first night, after the remnants of cactus salad and rice had been cleared (the type of substance he does not touch). Roman had insisted on helping the women as they cleaned with an intensity that had almost frightened them. So, Lene had passed him battered dish after battered dish, studying him. It was as if he were doing some sort of penance. She watched as he braced himself against the well, handling each plate and spoon like a relic, careful to use as little water as possible. He never joined the conversation around them.

They all look at him, the seemingly young man with his meager wardrobe and deceptively soft voice, and think he’s bringing death in his wake. Then they look at Lene, and they try to understand, just like they always have.

--

He’s not as standoffish as he seems, doesn’t flinch or pull back when she burrows into his shoulder or takes his hand, even in front of others. Never one to initiate contact, though, except in bed, where he’s got the surest hands she’s ever known. Sometimes she finds fingertip-bruises on her hipbones, circling her thighs. He notices once but the knowledge does not gentle him.

She thought he would like her less soft, that he might like smooth planes to feminine curves, but she finds that he favors her female shape. He doesn’t say so, but she knows – he prefers her as a woman, because it was as a woman that he could truly make her his. A quick tear. A deep plunge.

Roman never asks if she enjoys it; he doesn’t need to. He is aware of every flutter in her pulse, every raised degree in body temperature, the imperceptible tightening of thigh muscles; she knows he knows when a wicked grin crosses his face. She’d like to see his control crack, to see desperation and desire cross his face, watch him shatter in her hands. She might have, once—the file The Insurgence has on him suggested that Roman had been a bruised, fragile thing when he first arrived—but the man she knows now seems like an outcropping of stone, weather-warped but upright and unmovable.

Some people are rocks in a river. Lene is already beginning to suspect that she’ll have to divert her course for him.

--

It’s almost a year of them working together (being together?) at the Compound before he tells her about Calev. It doesn’t bother her much that he waited so long to tell her; she’s seen the closing of enough lives, both suddenly and slowly, to know that grief is not a straight line, that there are no rules for how long it will take to pass. It bothers her, though—in some ill-defined way that she doesn’t want to examine too closely—that he had told Harrow the night they met (she knows this because the conversation was overheard, and even here the walls still talk, and although it was only a shred of the true story, it is enough for her to feel bothered now).

His past is a mass grave that she stands at the edge of, peering down, trying to make out the shapes of corpses. Trying not to fall in after them.

He can tell immediately by her lack of surprise that she already knew, and the raw, open look on his face shuts down immediately, like the slamming of a heavy door. It’s not her fault, she tells herself angrily after he’s left; Roman understands how debriefings work, and he had willingly provided all of the information in his file to the council. More importantly, she had never asked to be partnered with a man who, after all his hundreds of years, could not put his grief into words.

Sometimes, she thinks she’s just something there to fill in the space left by the ones who came before her. She doesn’t say this to him, but she wonders if their life together is an experiment on his part, an attempt at walking around in the world like one of the living.

She pities him. But this time it isn’t enough.

This world has no need for pity.

--