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He doesn't understand why Peter wants Letha. Okay, she's beautiful, of course she is, Godfrey blood painting her delicate and brutal and a pastel-coloured Mona Lisa with a better smile.
But he doesn't understand why Peter needs Letha in the first place. What exactly can she give him that Roman can't?
Roman is pretty sure he isn't in it for the unborn baby. Peter doesn't have any friends to impress. He didn't come to Hemlock Grove to grow roots. What are they bonding over?
A similar past? The gypsy scion and the all-American sweetheart?
Is the sex really that good? Roman had been under the impression - baby or otherwise - that Letha was previously a virgin. Peter doesn't need the missionary position and sweet nothings, he needs -
Well, isn't that the real mystery.
―
Peter is caution, glory and his mother's shrewd eyes, all wrapped up in one ever-shifting body, contained by nothing but Roman's fingers grappling around his edges and that god-awful waistcoat.
You have to understand: Roman's never had a friend before.
He loves one girl and he's fucked a myriad of others, but friendship - pure, distilled and honest - has never entered the equation, peers mocking and afraid. It's probably Roman's smile, the one his mother adores, that's driving them away: the one that shouts he's out for blood.
Maybe he still doesn't have a friend, because Peter is not Roman's equal. Sure, Roman can compel you to do whatever his heart so desires with nothing but two widened eyes, softening the blow with a combination of good old-fashioned fear and the dead presidents, but Peter -
Peter is fundamentally better than Roman.
Roman is ugly on the inside, this he knows. He can see it between his fingers, smudged beneath coke on a scratched mirror; he can see it in the aftermath of Shelley's smile; he can see it in the joy of Olivia's.
Peter, though - he's beautiful. Eye-popping, jaw-cracking, flesh-eating and beautiful. He makes Roman want to drop his knees in reverence like he's never done before.
He's not worthy. Roman's never had a friend, or an equal. In Peter, he's got something more.
So now, maybe it's not Peter who is chasing Letha - maybe Letha sees what Roman sees. Tangled hair and the potential to bring the world to its knees. The Godfrey name demands the best, after all.
―
Roman wants to devour Peter whole.
Watching him transform, man to beast and back again - jaw-cracking and beautiful - there's no way he couldn't.
It comes to him like waves under the moon's control: he's struck again and again by how badly he wants that glorious side of Peter to be, in part, his. Wants to be to the wolf what the wolf is to him.
He knows it should be impossible to tame the beast or the man, however. He knows he, too, will inevitably succumb to the moon's bidding, by proxy of Peter.
But Roman is vile inside, maybe just as feral as Peter, and undoubtedly more desperate.
He wants Peter to be his, and his calm front - smoke, mirrors and slicked back hair - well, it's not doing a very good job at hiding it.
―
Roman likes the way Peter smokes. Roman likes a lot of things about Peter, from his dry humour to his wolfish smile, his slips of random Romani to his stupid beard, but he particularly likes the way Peter smokes.
It's with intent, like there's a secret at the end of it, and all else be damned, that secret will be his. Like there's little between him and the next moon, and he needs to be thoroughly fucked over before it arrives.
They're tangled up in the hammock - chairs broken by one of those moons, and Roman's stretched like a live-wire between two points of contact: the brush of Peter's fingers as they trade a cigarette, smoke shrouding niceties, and the faintest suggestion of a hand curled around Roman's ankle, digits resting lightly on the hem of Roman's jeans.
Roman's trying to ignore him, but as Peter lets smoke lazily escape his mouth - resembling, for all intents and purposes, a debased and debauched Luna, torn from the sky and forced to bathe in sunlight - there really is nowhere else to look.
Peter catches his eye as the cigarette burns down and smiles slowly, calculating. Roman can hear Lynda pottering about inside the trailer, the TV murmuring honeyed lies and infomercials.
Peter cocks his head, irritatingly mum, and ash sprinkles onto Roman's white shirt.
Roman feels himself going slightly mad with desire, expects any moment now for blood to trickle from Peter's nose and stain his smirk, because Roman, unknowingly, begins listing forward - listing forward -
And in the distance, police sirens scream.
―
Destiny's waiting for him, of course she is, wearing an arch Rumancek grin and a satin dressing gown. She may be smiling when she opens the door, but her eyes are made of flint and she does not invite him in. He didn't expect anything less, so he stands in the doorway and pointedly puts his hands in his pockets, revels in her distain.
By the time Peter barrels breathless through the door, Roman is sat beatifically at the table while Destiny glowers in the kitchen.
A conversion of his fate and heart lines, and he didn't even have to coerce her into telling him.
Peter's DNA may promise danger - but Destiny - Destiny has promised Roman a catastrophe, a disaster to ensnare the dangerous. That's all Roman needs.