A/N: I am a sucker for brother dynamics, and even though the Russian brothers were terribly villainous...well...OK I HAD FEELS SO SUE ME.
Warning: mildly gory.
These violent delights have violent ends.
It is shame. His, and therefore yours, because you felt these things together. To be faceless—to be but a broken body, dismembered—he deserved more.
You grind your teeth and count curses like bullets, but the blood grows no warmer on your hands.
He was always the one to lose hope, but that was because he was the only one who had it. Now, you think of his hope and his hopelessness as futile, as pebbles scattered worthlessly against steel.
Anger. Only anger. You wring blood and bile from the rag, and set to work again.
They will burn for this. They will feel fear, and shame. Let them die in blood and piss, groveling.
"They will suffer," you tell him—what is left of him—and you say it in your own tongue.
Speak English, Vladimir, he would say. It will make them more—accepting. Let them have that.
Nyet. No. They will have nothing.
For it came to nothing, the dreams of a forgotten time. You suffered this misery together, this shame—you have borne it, and he has borne it, and he died in it.
You will not die like this.
But you cannot live like this, either. Not without him. Anatoly and his hope.
"Brother," you whisper. "Moy brat."
He left you neither hope, nor hopelessness.
He only left you alone.