Chapter 1

Charlie's POV

Sebastian Monroe is a jackass.

Probably not what you expected me to say huh? Well it's been enough time that not saying it aloud, leaving it to echo in my head has driven me a bit crazy. Saying it aloud, feels so much better than I thought it would. It's been two years. Seven hundred and twenty days, give or take a few in between since I've seen the infamous Sebastian Monroe. The last moments with him he stoked my hair, running it between his fingers as he tilted my chin up with his finger so my eyes met his as he said 'I hope you get everything you've ever wanted Charlie." I didn't. When he walked away he left Miles, Aaron and I to bury everyone we ever loved, mom, grandpa, Priscilla, even Connor. I don't think Monroe really realized what that would do to us, to bury everyone we loved and then try to live like we won the war. It sure as hell didn't feel like winning.

People streamed through the streets whooping and cheering for the new beginning that they found and Miles and I could only look at each other in a question of what to do next. Aaron, well Aaron didn't even bother to care, he just locked himself in his house and shut the world away. Now don't get me wrong, I know why Monroe left, I know how much Connors death broke him, but if he had just stopped for a moment he would have realized how broken I was, how broken Miles was too, how broken we all were. Monroe got the easy way out, running as far as he could and as much as I thought about running after him and hauling his ass back to us, I was more angry than anything that I couldn't do the same thing. But that would mean leaving Miles to fend for himself and I knew Miles, he would be dead with a bottle in his lap by the end of the week if I left. He couldn't survive without me and if we're being honest, I didn't think I could survive without him either.

That's how the first year of our lives went, us trying to survive. We found an old shack on the outskirts of Willouby and together he and I fixed it, me more than him but still, he was more than content to sit it oblivion with a bottle until he passed out. It wasn't until one rainy morning I woke up to silence, not the usual snores from a passed out Miles and knew in my gut that something was wrong. I found him almost a hundred feet from the house, passed out in the rain, shaking from being in the cold all night and I lost it. I knew how hard it was for him to lose mom, it was probably harder for him than for me, but I couldn't do this anymore, I couldn't sit by and watch him kill himself slowly while I tried to survive for the both of us, I was barely surviving as it was.

I had dropped twenty pound, weighing a hundred pounds on a good day and I never seemed to have an appetite no matter how much work I did that day. I didn't remember what happiness felt like, all I felt was numbness with twinges of something that resembled anger on a good day and the bad days seemed to blur together four or five of them at a time and I couldn't remember a single thing from those days. On the better days I forced myself to go into town and get us food and supplies and on those days were when the townspeople looked at me, not in fear anymore like they used to, now it was sympathy and god did I hate it. They whispered around town 'Poor Charlie Matheson, lost everything in the war. Lost herself in the war. Look at her, look how the war wrecked her.' That's where they were wrong, the losses wrecked me, the war made me strong. I was no longer fragile Charlie Matheson needing people to save her, I was now forged of iron and fire from doing unspeakable things to win our war.

The beginning of the second year I had finally found a routine to settle into, hunt, check on Miles, go into town for trades and check on Miles, sleep.

Eventually I opened a bar, a little nook of a black hole that seemed appropriate for a Matheson. Miles approved, or more like he approved of finding a drinking hole that served him top shelf whiskey for free, but still. It eventually got him out of his drunken stupor long enough to help me load the stock into my black hole and sometimes, when he found the men were getting too hands with me, he helped me bartend. But for the most part he sat in his booth in the back of the black hole of a bar drinking whiskey and watching me run my ass off. At least I could keep an eye on him here.

I liked the constant of being busy. It kept my mind off of everything else. Off of death, off of the loneliness, off of the obvious abandonment issues I had. The regulars started pouring in by three in the afternoon, they were the haunted ones, the ones who remembered the war like I did. I didn't judge them for the time of day they showed up at. It could've easily been me. Instead I served them the top shelf whiskey with a pat on the back and let them forget, if only for a few hours until they relived it in their nightmares.

It was a mundane routine. The old commune raised Charlie would have rolled her eyes at me for becoming the boring creature of habit she used to reverently shake her head at knowing, let alone becoming. Yet here I was, boring, lonely and slowly losing what fire I had stored inside of me. There was no more fire, no more hope. There was nothing left.

Bass's POV

The town had changed. There were more smiles, more laughter, just…. More. The war being over had brought life into Willouby, kids streaking by him as peals of laughter burst from them. Two years ago he walked away from a town that seemed haunted, the faces of the townspeople haggard and weathered from grief and surviving. It's hard to believe this is the same town. This town is alive. He wonders if the two people he has left in the world are too.

The gun tucked into the waistband of his jeans is a comfort as he roams the streets of Willouby, the sun beating hot down onto him as throngs of people pass him by. He subtly searches for two familiar faces. He doesn't find them.

He wanders the streets until the setting of the sun forces him to find a room for the night, the timid look from the innkeeper telling him that she knows who he is, and that soon enough, if Miles or Charlie are really here, they'll know too. The bag he has slung over his back hits his room floor with an unceremonious thump as he sits heavily on the thin mattress that lays on the wooden bedframe. His body aches from walking, he barely stopped for more than four hours at a time for four weeks, pushing his body to the limit to get here. Now that he's here though, well he doesn't know where to go from here.

He forces himself to get up off the bed and find himself a cleanish shirt before searching for the innkeeper again, forcing himself to restrain himself from rolling his eyes at her wary look.

"I'm looking for someone with the last name Matheson."

She wrinkles her nose, "Charlie's here, but I wouldn't bother her if I were you though."

"Why not?" he asks, his relief over shadowing her answer.

"Poor girl doesn't do well with company, doesn't do well with much anymore. The war wrecked her. Now she just hides out in the tiny black hole of a bar a block over and serves the people who want to forget and enables her alcoholic uncle."

He must look lost because her timid look grows into something almost protective, "You left her. Everyone either died or left around her. What did you think would happen?"

Guilt washes over him like a tidal wave and he tries to swallow it. "A block over you said?"

She studies him, her brown eyes boring into his before she sighs and nods.

"Thank you." It's probably the most sincere thank you he's given someone in a while.

"Don't be surprised if she doesn't welcome you back. She's an empty little thing now, she isn't the girl you seem remember."

He wants to argue with her, tell her that she must be wrong about Charlie. The Charlie he remembers is fire and iron and sarcastic remarks. This girl he's hearing about sounds like a stranger.

He wanders across the street and down the block, almost dreading what he will find. He just about passes by the bar he's searching for, the innkeeper wasn't kidding about it being a black hole. The wooden door blocking his entrance is worn and is an ashen color and he stares at it as the seconds go by. One, two, three. When he reaches forty seven he forces himself to open the door and as he hears it thud behind him he is welcomed with silence. Surely they can't all recognize him this quickly? He scans the silent crowd but their gazes aren't on him, they're on the woman in the center of the room with the knife to the man's throat.

That's the Charlie he remembers.