*

They've just about gotten the place into something more than a shack. It's insulated, and the windows are
new. Michael makes good money doing repairs on people's snowmobiles and trucks.

Sammy makes less tutoring the local Inuit children, but he likes it, and that's the most important thing.

Michael knows Sammy wishes he'd lighten up some, but they wouldn't be here, like this, if it wasn't for him.

Sammy hadn't even gotten to graduate.

And he'd insisted it was his choice to leave, to follow Michael after their grandfather had kicked him out, but...

But.

It never should've started.

And it had been Michael who started it.

Michael who'd never gotten the scent of his brother out of his head, even long after all the vampire-related
mess was burnt and gone.

Never forgotten the thud of Sammy's heart under his palm, sleekly hairless skin and bath-damp hair and...
the hunger hadn't so much gone away as changed.

Or maybe changed back.

Michael knows he's fucked up.

Michael knows he fucked up.

But, for a while, it'd been... easy.

Crawling into each other's beds, into the shower.

Once bent over the kitchen table because Sammy had still been growing and Michael had wanted to see...

What it was like.

Doesn't remember much beyond hot and sweet and Sammy's shocked little gasps above him, those strong,
good hands moving restless all over him as Sammy. Took him.

The way Sammy had held him after.

The way he'd needed to be held.

Though as stupid as it had been to do it in the kitchen, that wasn't what had gotten them caught.

That...

Sometimes, when Michael is surrounded by grey slush and the scent of oil for vehicles he won't be able to
afford anytime soon, he can blame Sammy.

Sammy who had never once said no.

Sammy who had... thrown himself into this thing between them, always wanting harder and faster and new
and Sammy who'd been jerking himself off that day.

Jerking himself off and staring at a magazine that wasn't one of Grandpa's ancient Playboys.

Michael remembers the way the sunlight had been too bright for him to see the glossy pages at first, the way
he'd just assumed...

And he'd never been able to stay away from his brother, not when he was like this. Blue eyes wide and sweat
on his upper lip. Naked to the waist in the summer heat, filled out since... since they'd started, but still so lean
and the magazine...

God, where had he even found it?

Men. Boys. Tied up and tortured and beaten and Sammy stroking himself and he remembers --

"Michael, please... can we?"

Flashes of reddened skin, of Sammy's eyes, wide and unfocused. Bedsheet-ties twisting as Sammy writhed.

Flash of his grandfather's eyes on them both as Michael pounded into his brother, unable to stop even when
the smell of vomit reached the bed.

Later, coming back to the house to find his things stacked outside. Forcing himself not to listen to the
argument going on just inside the door.

Michael remembers those first few months on the road, and after he'd arrived here. The peace of them.

There'd been a rightness to getting kicked out, a freedom he'd never thought he'd actually have.

A chance to get his life together. To make a life away from...that.

Over the minute Sammy walked in the door, of course.

No one knows they're brothers here.

No one's tried to find either of them, which is probably for the best.

And Sammy...

Sammy always holds him when he needs it.