chained by freedom

Held together by sinews of air and flesh barely clinging to life, Charles quickly took the vodka into his mouth and let the crystal heat slide down his throat, burning a single, scorching track along his insides as he winced at the sore mixture of water and ethanol. Contrary to popular belief, death does not make you any less of a lightweight.

"I thought you didn't drink."

Charles's turned with wide eyes the color of the sky, a stark contrast to the flickering fires in the lamps all around them. He looked up to a wry smile grinning down at him, stretching happy lines over a strong, square jaw. Skin crinkled next to twinkling blue eyes nearly identical to Charles and, for a moment, his heart skipped with excitement.

"Adam?" he asked, the sides of his mouth twitching up with fond recognition.

The man grinned even further and pulled Charles into his chest, his arms wrapping around him with a warmth that stole the Vila's breath away. With a breathy laugh, Charles squeezed him impossibly closer and gripped his coat, reveling in the familial comfort he'd thought had all but abandoned him. 

"Yebat', Charles! Where have you been, I haven't seen you since you left Moscow," Adam laughed, pulling away and taking the seat next to him. 

"I've been here since I left. How are you?" he asked, looking his cousin over with a gentle smile. There was a time, Charles remembered, when they did nothing but live in each other's presence. If he looked close enough, he could still see the faint scar on Adam's cheek from taking a fist to the face for Charles. Pedik, the older boy had called him and Adam started swinging. 

"Fucking amazing," Adam said with a laugh, tilting his head back as he paused with the total elation, "I just moved in with a girl here."

"Another one?" Charles asked, his lips quirking up with a rare smile.

"Hey, zatknis, you jerk."

Like they'd never left each other's sides, they fell into step, quick tongues and quicker insults filling each other with contentment and ease. Glancing up at his cousin, Charles felt himself feeling with substance, not so hollow and transparent with grief. His veins filled with the life he'd forgotten, warming his pallid form in time with what his heart would feel like if it had a rhythm. He parted his lips to ask more about the girl who'd claimed Adam's fickle heart this year, grinning just slightly before hesitating. Glancing up, he saw his cousin's face contort with a protective scowl at a man approaching them.

"You're with someone?" the fat man asked, dropping his sausage fingers onto Charles's shoulder. The warmth of Adam's company went out of him and the frosty hatred once again filled his heart with malice and his eyes with homicide. A former client, a loathsome man that made the bile creep up Charles's throat, stood hovering over his back with hot breath.

"Charles," Adam nearly growled, on the edge of his seat and obviously fuming with the intrustion. Charles opened his eyes and his cousin froze, stiffening visibly as he stared back into Charles's heated gaze, his pupils blown wide with the growing need in his gut, the trembling ache for vengeance making his hands shake. 

"It's fine, Adam. I'll come find you later." Charles tilted his head back and kissed the man's grotesque fingers softly, almost respectfully, before lacing them between his own. Light blue eyes eclipsed with pitch black, Charles guided the large man out the door and disappeared with him into the misty Russian night.

--

Scarlet colored the insides of Charles's wrists, dotting the spaces there like cologne as he peered down at the mangled thing below him, still twitching with broken life. Charles nudged a trembling hand with his toe, scowling at the fat fuck gasping for air. His ribs stood like great canyons out of the cavern of his chest, shooting up with the force of being dropped hundreds of feet from the air. Muscles clutched at the stark white calcium reaching up to the sky like a man on his knees, reaching to god. Charles wiped the taste of the man off his lips, spitting the rest of him into the gaping wound in his chest as he sputtered and drowned in his own sanguine. 

Forgiveness was far from this man as judgment gripped him tight.

Justice freed him, warmed him in the midst of snow and waste. He soaked in the cold like the home he'd finally found, the only one who would take him as he was. Charles barely heard the choked whimpers of his victim with the wind tousling his hair, whispering praises in his ear, promising its obedience to the Vila as it danced across his goose-flecked skin. This, this was true life.

At the sound of his name, Charles turned slowly, his chin held high with no sign of remorse. He made no move to hide his deed, instead running his fingers through his hair and spreading the blood on his wrist over his forehead, a sign of victory in the face of his cousin. "Moved in with a girl, huh?" he scoffed, his jaw clenching tight when his voice betrayed his slight contrition, his regret that it had to be this way.

"Charles, what happened to you?" Adam asked, calm, collected, the same sort of repentant bloodlust in his eyes as was in his cousin's. He held a wooden stake firm in his fist, eyes the color of sunny days and winter mornings turned stormy and cold.

"Would my answer stop you from trying to kill me?" Charles bared his naked chest to his cousin, inviting him to drive the pike hard and fast into the hollow of him, to add his scarlet signature to the gore below.

"Stop fucking around, you fucking prick! What the fuck happened! I thought we were family! I thought it was you and me, Charles!" Adam bellowed, his commanding voice cracking and echoing through the dead forest between hanging branches and cracking bark.

Charles snapped, pounding his clenched fist into the tree just beside him. "I died, Adam!"

Silence.

"I died and none of you came for me. My body is rotting somewhere near a fucking river and none of you fucking cared. No one. Not one of you. Don't you dare call me your family." The old wounds in him tore open, despair dripping off his words as he pointed at Adam, at the hunter he never knew. The trees stilled and even the wind cowered between the two Thomsons, their anger careening off each other in waves of turgid force. 

Adam's eyes flitted to Charles's right and the Vila looked and found emptiness. Where a fir tree had stood, proud though barren in the winter months, mist now intermingled and met in space they could not have shared before. Settled in the snow was the skeleton of the tree, jackknifed at the level of Charles's knees, an impression carved deep just where Charles' fist had landed in the wood.

"I can't let you go, Charles," Adam ground out between clenched teeth, taking the few strides to close the frigid space between them. Charles flinched to move, but the trained killer was fast, immediately taking the Vila by the arm and jutting the sharp spike against the soft under Charles's jaw.

Before Adam could dive forward and finish his work, the pair of them were surrounded by blue, their feet dangling against cotton-white clouds. "Whenever you're ready."

Charles waited, his eyes half-lidded with numb acceptance. Gambling or not, the emptiness could not be sated, the terrible ache in his hollow bones could not be cured. For two years he'd been searching for a way to fill his void, to give himself a soul where he knew there was none, to stifle the burning need to kill the wrongdoers of the great black pit they lived in. Nothing was worth his effort, his time, his sympathy, but the sweet feeling of revenge, of justice, coursing through his dusty heart. 

"We were blood once," Adam whispered, the slightest plea in his voice, something like an appeal for pardon. It was his duty, Charles could see the desperation in his eyes. Adam had always been a hard worker, despite his child-like tendencies.

In a moment, the invisible support Charles willed beneath Adam fell away and he dropped a few inches, throwing him far off balance. Charles slammed his elbow into his cousin's temple, sending the hunter into darkness.

In the next, they were on the forest floor. Charles carefully laid the last of his family in the snow. He eyed the nasty, purple welt rising near Adam's eye and watched the slow rise and fall of Adam's chest under his thick coat. With a flick of his wrist, the snow blew away from the unconscious hunter in every direction, leaving him on a bed of icy umbrage. A vision of a boy identical to himself, the brother he never had, crossed his mind. They lay in a field together, their chests rising and falling in tandem as they fantasized their futures, always promising to weave in and out of each other's lives, two parts of an entire tapestry waiting to be woven.