I looked into your eyes
and I saw a reflection
of a coward that you and I both hate very much.

By the time he was fifteen, Pete MacIntosh had tagged along on enough gang assignments to know that everything wasn't as it seemed. Half the time the people his brother dealt drugs to would not be home, and if they were, they were nice enough to offer a beer or a hit of whatever Wade Hamilton had smuggled in from Texas.

To Pete, dealing was more fascinating than it was exciting, and one of the foundational reasons why he respected his older brother so much. He couldn't understand why the leader of the Shepard gang - Tim - treated his own blood like shit under his shoe - except his sister, who had a reputation as bad as her trucker's mouth - and was curious as to why his brother hadn't taken over the gang while Tim was incarcerated.

Now Tim Shepard was back on the streets, back for revenge, and Pete clutched the heater to his side a little tighter. Not only was it one of the first times he'd been given an assignment to do by himself but it was important, and he couldn't help being nervous, more so, Nick pointed out earlier, than he should've been.

It was the middle of the night and the city was black, the few streetlamps offering pale strips of light as he passed under them. He scowled, wishing that his brother hadn't refused to let him borrow the truck. The seats, stained with Wade's blood from the week before, were a grisly sight to whoever was unfortunate enough to be sitting in the cab.

Shepard's territory took up most of the neighborhood that border-lined downtown, along with a few side streets, and Pete jogged down each one, his breath coming out in white puffs. The metal of the gun felt heavier in his sweaty palms than it did when Wade gave it to him that afternoon, like it wasn't supposed to be there, but he ignored the thought and shoved it into the waistband of his jeans.

He was surprised at how easy it was to find the street. It jutted out from an alleyway smelling of cat piss and cheap alcohol and ran in a straight line for five blocks and then took a left angle, and as he passed each house with their shades pulled and no lights on, his muscles were burning and he was having trouble thinking straight.

His tongue was sticking to the roof of his dry mouth, and he was sure that if he ran into anyone, whoever they were, he'd shoot them without a second glance. Gritting his teeth, he pulled the gun out and clutched it to the side of his abdomen, eyes scanning for the number Wade'd forced him to soon as he saw the four digits imprinted on the white paint of a mailbox half a block farther down, he could've thrown up out of pure shock.

He slowed his pace when he approached the dimly-lit house and swallowed, footsteps heavy on the old wood of the front porch. He could see bodies moving through the curtains, slivers of yellow light slipping onto the dry grass, and raised his hand to the door. Before he could knock, however, it swung open and he was left staring into a pair of black eyes.

xxx

Curly had been watching the kid since he'd shown up on the front lawn.

Tim was in their bedroom upstairs, had been since they'd come home from Dairy Dream hours before, and Angela… Angela was at Sylvia's or something. The beers made his memory foggy, and he stared at the kid - his face was familiar, like Curly'd seen him around school or at the drag races, but he couldn't place it to a particular name.

"You need somethin'?"

"You Tim Shepard?" The kid lifted his chin as he said this, a hint of defiance and an Irish accent on the edge of his words.

"That's what they call me," Curly lied, and he grinned. "But the girls, they refer to me as the -"

Just then, Tim came into view, shirtless and hovering over Curly's shoulder.

"Who's this?" he asked, grabbing the back of Curly's shirt and shoving him aside, out of the doorway and behind him instead. His gaze was fixed on the gun tucked at the stranger's side. He couldn't tell if it was loaded or not, and this pissed him off because the last thing he needed was for him or Curly to get shot, for fuck's sake.

"Pete MacIntosh," the kid answered, his voice clipped. He couldn't have been older than Curly, but at the last name Tim's blood ran cold. He'd heard of a MacIntosh before, Nick, who was Wade Hamilton's second-in-command. The guy was a heavy drug dealer and user when he wasn't on the street, ruthless and had enough charm in his remaining brain cells to escape one murder rap after another.

"You get lost? This ain't your side of town," Tim said.

"So what? I can go wherever I want."

"Oh, yeah? Then why the fuck don't you get the hell outta here?"

Curly swore under his breath at his brother's sudden stupidity. There was a goddamn heater a foot away from him and Tim wasn't moving an inch. He just stood there glaring, like if he did so hard enough the kid would get the message and leave. But nothing was that simple, Curly was beginning to realize, because when it came down to it, Tim would have the last say. Always had, always would.

Without another word, Pete brought his arms up so that the barrel of the gun was in Tim's line of vision. His thumb moved over the trigger, and there was a clicking noise as the chambers rotated, a bullet slipping into the empty slot. "You sure you wanna do this?"

Tim scoffed, and before he had the chance to change his mind, he lunged for Pete, cuffing him over the head. The gun flew into the house while being knocked out of Pete's hand, and then they were on the ground, rolling over each other. Pete tried to fight back, but his energy was drained, he was too weak to give back any solid punches. Within a matter of seconds Tim had him pinned to the ground and was yelling to Curly, asking if he was okay, if he could hand him the gun.

Curly nodded, his ears ringing, and picked up the discarded heater. He crossed the threshold and Tim grabbed the gun from his hands, doing something to it too fast before putting it to Pete's temple. Pete had pulled himself up off the ground and was now leaning against the porch railing, breathing hard, a trickle of blood coming out of his mouth.

"He's gonna come after you," he warned, amused at how Tim frowned. "He sent me out to do it, start the war. I was supposed to fucking shoot you, an' everything." He motioned this last part with his hands, gave a short laugh, and then stopped, blood choking off his words as it dripped down his chin. Curly thought Pete was, and looked, insane - his face was bloody, and his eyes, half-open, followed Tim's every move.

"I've got it two-to-one that the fucker ain't even prepared. What'd you say to that, Curl?" Tim was mad, and almost never swore when he was because, he'd told Curly once, that it was a waste of air - he couldn't get the shits and fucks and damns out fast enough.

He moved his gaze to his brother's, and his eyes were two black holes, anger burning in them. Curly'd rarely seen Tim this upset, just a handful of times, and the last time he could remember it was when their father up and left, and that was well over several years ago.

"He sure ain't," Curly said, the words thick on his tongue. He looked to his brother for guidance, but his head was turned, already hunting for the next best thing. Tim barked something at Pete, who nodded, and then, surprisingly, backed off the porch and disappeared into the night. Once Pete's footsteps faded down the street, he bent over and swept up the objects that had fallen to the ground - and Curly noticed as they moved into the light that they were bullets. And then they were gone, just like that, into Tim's jeans pocket, along with the heater.

Roughly, he made a noise in the back of his throat and brushed Curly aside and went into the house, acting as if his brother hadn't been there to see what he'd done, not at all.

Curly grabbed his arm, though, and begged, "Wait."

Tim stopped halfway down the hall. He turned his head, inclined it to the right. "What, you need a fucking replay? You were right-the-goddamn-there."

"The bullets… you took them out. Why?"

"There're a lot of things you won't understand, Curl. Everything's more complicated than you'd think."

"Bullshit," Curly called, and Tim had to pry his hand off his arm. It dropped to Curly's side, and it was clear how much this affected him, having found himself once again in the dark. But Tim was beyond this, beyond feeling, and as he climbed the stairs, he told himself that Curly was better than him, that he wouldn't make the same mistakes. Because if he wasn't, God help them both, there was nothing else to hope for.

xxx

Since the afternoon they'd found Wade at the beach, Nick MacIntosh couldn't get his mind off what he'd seen. Greasing back his hair in the mornings, he'd stare at his hands, once covered in his best friend's blood, and cringe; other times, when it was dusk, he'd walk around his front yard, debating whether or not to attempt another cleaning of his truck's cab seats. Try as he might, to no avail the stains grew and grew, and the amount of cigarettes he lit overflowed the ashtray on the kitchen counter.

To him, the ongoing feud between Wade and Tim was just a part of Tulsa's underground history - it'd almost always existed, and wasn't the type of fight that could be brushed away and forgotten as the years went on. And at times, sure it was tenuous, keeping track of what was happening and what was going to happen, but he'd managed to do it, survive. The gang was his air, his food, and his shelter, and he'd forced his brother to adopt the same beliefs, who did so without a single argument. Coming from a second-generation Irish American household, expectations had been set low, and he'd done little to achieve beyond them.

It was around one in the morning when he heard the basement door open, and then the soft patter of feet down the concrete stairs that led into Nick's so-called bedroom. Half-asleep on his mattress that served more as a place to have sex than to sleep, he sat up and called, "Pete, that you?"

"Yeah," came Pete's muffled reply. In the dim shadows, Nick could see his brother messing around with the crates pushed alongside the cement bricks, where there was an endless supply of band-aids and disinfectants and dishrags. Next to the crates, there was a make-shift bathroom with no toilet, just an old sink and a showerhead attached to the wall. The faucet sputtered and then turned on, spraying cold water everywhere as Pete grabbed a rag and ran it under the stream.

He'd been hit mostly in the face, the largest amount of blood spilling from his nose, and he pressed the rag to it and held it there, breathing in through his mouth. His other wounds were minor scrapes and bruises, nothing that would cause much pain.

"Shepard's gang jump you?" Nick asked, and though Pete knew it was out of pure curiosity, he grimaced and felt the lie slip through his teeth.

"If you say it like that, then yeah," he said, "but it ain't anything I can't clean up myself."

And it wasn't, really - at least, that's what he kept telling himself.