Run through by brother/lover, relax into the pain and sleep as though dead. Nubuck horn is not the same as living wood. Arch subtly into the burn, wait out the family drama with twin holes through rib and breast. One grazed your heart (you can feel it bleeding sluggish-cold blood into your long-dead lungs), and both had punched solidly through bone. If you still needed to breathe you would be drowning in your own blood while he killed your father. Nothing would change. None of it would ever change for you.

You can feel his hunger, thrumming against skin and mated blood to blood. Listen to his first kill, the best kill, the one that sets you both free and just wait it out, twin spires of pain almost like pleasure in the aftermath. And just wait for it to all go away.

The next day dawned California-perfect, a little cold maybe beneath the clearing sky as the sun edged red over the eastern-lying mountains, dappling the stretch of fence lining the front drive in warming light. Sammy found him there, walking easy to him wrapped in his block-pattern bathrobe against the chill, Nanook at his heels, blonde hair still darkened with dust and blood.

"Hey," Michael rasped, shifting on the fence-rail before the hesitant look in his brother's eyes.

"Yeah," Sammy said, opening his mouth as though to continue, lips closing gently without another sound and he clambered up onto the top rail to lean against Michael's shoulder. Michael glanced at him from the corner of his eye, turned back to watching the sun. He could feel Sam's warmth even through the robe and his dust-streaked leather jacket, Sammy's breath steaming gently in the chill. He hadn't thought he'd ever see the sun again, hadn't thought he'd feel Sammy's trusting warmth curled next to him for protection. His protection, and it still hurt to remember Sammy flinching from his touch.

The sun was bright on the horizon, shifting to gold as it rose higher above the endless stretch of forest. Sammy shifted against his side, impatient, robe falling open to reveal yesterday's bloodied clothes beneath as the air warmed and pulsed in a rising wind.

"You okay, Michael?" Sammy asked finally, looking up at his (Michael's) profile with those trusting blue eyes.

"Sure, Sammy," he said, smiling a little and feeling it stretch (sincere and not at all bitter) at the split flesh and bruised cheek. The wind was warm, coming in off the ocean, and Sammy seemed content to sit quietly with him and watch the light pain strips and shadows of the landscape gold. Neither mentioned David's body (missing in the first grey pre-dawn light). Neither mentioned the hunger.

There was no money to bring in help for clean-up or repair. The Frog brothers offered to help, emerging from a tangle of rubble around midday to take their turn scrubbing out shattered porcelain. Star had vanished in the night, Laddie too, presumably with David though no one was sure. Grandpa had shut himself in with the true dead and a case of root beer, and Mom had started on the kitchen, declaring it her highest priority with her same old silly smile.

Max's body had disintegrated in the fire, he guessed, working side by side with Sammy to clear out enough rubble to begin repairs. The exposed ceiling beams were intact, and nothing in the feel of the house truly suggested structural damage. For all the terror of last night, they had sustained mainly cosmetic injuries. Painful, but it could be recovered from.

They worked steadily, quietly, listening to Edgar and Alan in the next room recounting the night in hyperbolic excitement, sweating in the growing warmth of the day until Michael stripped off jacket and eventually shirt and Sammy had tossed down his robe. The hunger was only intermittent in the light, as though fading as it had come, emerging in frozen moments of watching the flex of tendons in Sammy's forearms, captured in the thrum of blood at Sammy's throat. Hours until he was caught staring, midstep with an armful of broken rock, Sammy's eyes going wide and startled over slightly-parted pink lips, sweat streaking the dust at the fine skin of his temples, hair dirty and wild and sticking up where he'd run his fingers through it. Michael licked his lips, blinked, and the moment broke, Sammy's eyes deepening to soft blue and understanding. Michael shook his head (too much like pity, too much like the trust he no longer deserved) and turned away with his burden, stepped out into the sun where at least the ocean-borne wind cooled the prickling sweat.

They'd created a pile of debris near the porch where the shattered fireplace stones would have to be sorted for salvage, and Michael dropped his load carelessly to the sandy earth, cursing under his breath when a rock bounced free and clipped his shin. Stepped back a limping step, listened to the wind and to Sammy following him out onto the porch. The hunger throbbed, died. Sammy never moved down the steps, and Michael turned from the rubble pile with a question in his eyes, feeling the sun hot on the top of his head and warm on his bare skin. Sammy shivered, and Michael frowned, moved to step forward, but Sammy said "Mom fixed lunch," smiled nervously, and ran back inside.

Michael stayed in the sun for a bit longer, wind cool in his sweat-tangled hair, feeling for fangs that had vanished in the night with David and Star and another life he would never lead.

There was unacknowledged the possibility that David might come back, Grandpa and Mom barricaded in one room, Michael and Sammy huddled together in the other. It had to remain unspoken (none of them more than sponged less-dirty with water from the ground pump at the horse-trough, all the pipes in the house shattered or corroded or bent into rosaritic shapes), Michael curled around his brother as though he could still protect him, Sammy curled into his side as though he (Sammy) still trusted him (Michael) to at least try. He lay in the dark fighting the hunger, wishing bone served as wood, wishing he'd sent Sammy home with the Frog brothers or at least into the other room, Nanook whining at him from the floor almost in warning. The hunger muted, settled; he breathed in Sammy's scent, clean boy-smell even with the dirt, felt it calm his heart like a lodestone: made to keep him sane. Knew somehow David wouldn't be back, not tonight. Pressed Sammy tighter into the circle of his arms, ignored the sleep-muddled protest, and drifted into sleep.

The days stretched longer into the infinite light of August, heat lying sticky over every movement in the shattered house. There was no air conditioning, of course, barely even money for food as the bathroom and kitchen were steadily replaced piece by too-expensive piece, Michael and Sam working as close to naked as possible in tattered cutoffs and old sneakers, skin browning in the long days, losing every trace of vampiric pale. The fear died eventually, as fear must. Santa Carla had become quiet, comparatively, plagued with purely human evil and they never went into town anymore, joining Grandpa in his voluntary exile. Sammy went back to sleeping with closet door shut, hall door open when he slept alone, everyone ignoring Michael's occasional bad night to linger around the new kitchen table in the morning, seated in willful solidarity around carved wood as if to appease the lingering hunger with something else.

When Michael slept he slept at night, rising with the dawn as if to mate with the sun, working on repairs to the roof in order to absorb the light as he tanned ever darker shades of honey-gold, hair streaking until he almost looked like Sammy's brother, both blue-eyed and Michael a few shades closer to fair. Except Sammy's hair bleached almost white, eyes and teeth bright against his darkened skin and he was smiling again, almost as much as he'd smiled before. They still worked together, still slept together when Michael didn't feel the hunger, grew silent and strange only speaking when in the presence of others. They were happy, anyway, not needing to speak, not to each other; there was the sun and the ocean wind and Grandpa was inside all day replacing the pipes with salvaged copper piping from the Santa Carla dump, and Mom seemed more distant than she'd been, smiling faintly the same old smile but distant. She still went to town, had found another job on the boardwalk selling souvenirs to tourists though she might become a manager soon and the Frog brothers coming around to help less and less as the work only increased and their guilt faded.

So sometimes Mom worked late, though there were no more attempts at dating and she was always home before dark. Mom was gone, and Grandpa stayed in his workshop all day tinkering with lengths of pipe and they working on the roof, patching with pine boards and split cedar shingles cut from the woods bordering Grandpa's land. Michael spent the mornings splitting shingles instead of working out, even Sammy broadening with the endless repairs.

They were quiet, Michael smiling less as Sammy smiled more, the hunger shifting purpose before the bright smile and sun-touched skin, shifting and hiding coiled lower in his belly and they were almost never apart anymore, Sammy's eyes trusting-blue all the time, even when the hunger came in the middle of the night, tightening Michael's half-sleeping hold and breathing deep the scent at Sammy's neck. Perhaps trusting for a reason. Michael never bit down.

His lips at Sammy's throat seemed like a natural progression, forcing the hunger away from a dim memory of copper-bright blood into newer perceptions of the smooth skin and warm, his cock hardening instead of his belly until it seemed like an improvement, Sammy wriggling against him in the stifling dark of the endless August heat spell. School would start soon, but for now it was just them, together, side by side on the roof (which saved Michael's life or at least a broken leg when the ladder fell from beneath him and Sammy pulled him up with adrenaline or work-strengthened arms to sprawl panting together across fresh-cut cedar shakes) and curled together in the night, Sammy not leaving for the hunger but pressing into it, hard against Michael's thigh and it never seemed like anything harmful or wrong to rub softly one against the other, murmuring wordless comfort, hands tangling in hair or ghosting across sweat-slick skin beneath just the sheet because it was far too hot for the blanket.

And there were moments of clarity, full stretches of long-pulsing minutes in the bright light up on the roof in which he knew that it was wrong, that it was harmful, that his need his hunger was taking this from Sammy, but then Sammy would smile, to all appearances unchanged and whole and Nanook yelping cheerfully from the ground below and Michael would feel compelled to smile back and return to whatever task the clarity had interrupted. In the rhythmic pounding of hammer and nail it was easy to drift in a waking fantasy of everything he would do (was willing to do) to protect his brother. That it took the form of protection seemed less strange than it should, everything wound up with David and Max and the way Sammy smiled at only him.

And the roof inevitably was finished, and school inevitably began, Sammy a sophomore and Michael beginning his senior year, entering the drab concrete building with none of the trepidation reserved for vampires' lairs. It was a school of outcasts and groups of outcasts, same as the rest of the city rotted in its own neverending carnival atmosphere, decadence bleeding into the very people as though Santa Carla actively worked to attract the misfits, the loners, the skinheads and pimps and Hell's Angels rejects and ex-hippies all lost in the haze of California sunshine. Compared to the rest, they were almost normal. Just quiet, and close, in a continuation of summer habits rarely talking, only Sammy smiling, eating lunch together and returning home as soon as the bell rang to work on the house. There was always the house, as though something fundamental about it had been changed and suddenly everything needed repair. As though the attack had rendered the house vulnerable to further decay. A fanciful idea, but one bandied about between them in the longer twilit days of fall.

School was no obstacle to this, not really. There was no specificity to the days, nothing to capture his attention and the moments of clarity came so rarely now that he only once wondered whether Sammy should try to make new friends. Instead of wondering he clung, and Mom began coming home later, barely beating the night and some nights closing the door on full twilight.

Before Halloween Sammy hit a growth spurt, shooting up three inches in height and finally gaining the Emerson shoulders, broad with muscle, wandering around too skinny (like he'd been stretched thin) for a few weeks before the rest of him caught up, Michael watching the process with something like a proprietary pride as the skin roughened, the voice deepened and they became that much closer to equality. Harder now to curl both in the twin bed, Sammy's blue-eyed innocence marred by more than just the passing of time. Harder now to overpower his brother in the playful wrestling that usually devolved into equally playful sex, all of it carried out in the same inclusive silence, so utterly inclusive in the sense of being equally exclusive of anything else. No one else was allowed in.

He could barely remember a time now when it hadn't been like this, when there hadn't been a lean hard form pressed next to his in the bed and in the shower, when the hunger hadn't been shared between them like everything else. Autumn deepening, creeping toward Thanksgiving and they were rewiring the last room, Sammy's unused room and the task left to last unless someone requested a fresh coat of paint or new bath fixtures. They could afford either now, Mom's promotion and raise leading to offers of new clothing or even a television if they did well in school, the smile fixed firmly in place (and Michael had brief flashes of her asking if they were still friends, heartbreaking moment remembering when she still cared, really cared, the last time she was fully present in the house or in her life) and not wearing the faded sad dresses anymore but suddenly it was all business casual and Michael realized he no longer knew what his mother did for a living, only knew that she went into town every day some time after they left for school and returned late in the night, the fear of vampires fading with the year and the shorter days almost destroying any need or desire to care.

By Christmas Sammy had his MTV, Michael a new jacket to replace the one destroyed by flame and blood and ichor, though Grandpa was the only one to reference even its existence. They were forgetting. It was utterly necessary to forget, but sometimes Sammy held him in the night instead of allowing himself to be held, and sometimes the hunger felt more like a terribly creeping despair amid the lingering feeling of being watched through the endless nights, all of it lost in the ennui of the Santa Carla winter. Without the sun the city was dead, carnival shut down and tourists fled to even warmer climes, nothing but the spray of the sea and now-empty stretches of sand where in the summer droves of idiot-victims laid themselves out banquet-like.

Michael walked the empty beaches sometimes, in the dead-time of winter break, the new year bringing little joy to the dirty sand and polluted water (if he scuffed up used condoms and soda cans on these walks he tried not to think about it) but perhaps a sense that things would eventually change. It was inevitable. He would graduate soon, an event that had seemed so far away, and the walks became longer as his desperate, increasingly circular thoughts became more difficult to escape, Sammy growing angrier with each later return. As though he sensed that he was losing his brother, however slowly. There was no clarity now, just the hunger and Michael's growing sense of the inevitable.

Sammy fucked him for the first time after their first day back to school for spring term, lured him home in the January air (California-winter, never colder than mid-fifties) and pressed him gently to the mattress of their bed, no longer even a question of sharing and Michael expecting the same slow frottage that had served them till now, Sammy's eyes bright and knowing beneath hair allowed to grow dark away from the sun. "It's okay," he whispered, Michael never questioning that or Sammy's intent beneath the flex of his brother's hips, fingers gentle and circling and if he'd never considered this before he didn't refuse it now. Grandpa was out for the day, delivering his handiwork, and Mom wouldn't be back until late, and the weak winter sunlight was golden on Sammy's winter-pale skin, and his own cock was hard and leaking on the both of them. "Do it," he husked, thighs spread and hunger thrumming, feeling the most bizarre sense of rightness that he could protect Sammy even in this. Sammy's fingers pressing him open felt like the same love in trusting blue eyes, pink lips innocent smothering his moans and he arched into the touch, feeling only silky skin and the first stubble that Sammy was only too proud to shave every morning whether it needed it or not, fingers longer than they had been finding his prostate and wringing a strangled cry, head flung back to stare at the sun-dappled ceiling as his brother slid inside.

The first time he fucked Sammy was over Spring Break, and if it would have felt too much like control before, Sammy had shot up another few inches and no longer had to lean up on tiptoe to kiss, standing of a height now and muscled from a winter of stocking the wood stove for what warmth they didn't hoard to themselves, for what warmth was needed in the Santa Carla spring. Chilly and grey with the hills just sprouting brighter green amid the tangled chaparral and tall pines. They made love in the lengthening light beneath the wind in the pines. Michael wrestled him to the sandy soil and for the first time knew in the flexing muscle beneath his hands that Sammy could stop him if he wanted, could turn them over and force Michael down, and Sammy just smiled up at him brightly and pressed nothing more than his cock against Michael's cock through dirt-stained denim. His bike leaned against a tree, smell of gas in the clean air and Sammy whispering endearments in his ear: "I have lube in my pocket." "I've been waiting for this." "I love you, bro." As always faint stir of distress drowned in trusting blue eyes, Sammy's soft smile and the utterly unexpected feeling of pressing inside him. Mosquito hawks droned in the slow air, sun warm in the chill wind and Sammy open and shuddering beneath him, as close now as they'd ever been, as equal as they ever would be.

A/N Title taken from "Catapult" by the Counting Crows.