A/N: I thought I would have this up much sooner. Once again we're in India's point of view. Sloppy, I know. I highly recommend Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 23 in F Minor Op. 57 (or Appassionata). Hope you enjoy! R&R, pretty please.

I rationalize with myself that if you are going to do bad you must commit yourself wholly to do bad. Make it an art form. Become a master of the worst. I rationalize with myself that it is better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.

I did something worse instead of something bad.

Something is off. Perhaps time and distance have made this more apparent. At first, there was the rush of the new uncertainty, the thrill of becoming what is most feared, the satisfaction of being known. But time and distance have replaced these feelings with something akin to guilt. It is a foreign discomfort to me, regret. With this regret has come something even more discomfiting – resentment.

At some point in life your sense of direction forks so starkly, nearly violent in its divergence. I had two hands to play and I worry I may have played them wrong. The hand I chose feels right but in this rightness I feel wrong.

As a child and later a young adult there was only one thing of which I was absolutely certain. There was only one person I was certain I loved. I was sure my father loved me. I was sure I loved my father. I knew my father was afraid of me, but even with this fear he never once shied away from me. He would not allow his fear to get the best of him. He was a man who kept his word, his commitment, that tacit oath to take responsibility as a father. Perhaps it was that unflinching familial love that allowed me to love him in return. Sometimes I think it was this love that blinded me of my father's faults.

I never had any trouble seeing my mother's faults nor the faults of the others, relatives and classmates and the help. The faults of prey were always so clear to me, but that is to be expected. Sharks can smell blood a mile away; cougars can hear the distress call of the cottontail from the other side of the mountain. People like my mother were easy to read, imperfections on display. Somehow my father's faults got lost in translation.

I thought it was my father who gave me shoes on my birthday. Every year that happy surprise in a white shoe box with the goldenrod ribbon – it solidified that oblivious daughterly love. If had paid any objective attention I would have noticed the tightness behind my father's smile every time he saw me in my new saddle shoes, the hint of bitterness in his voice when he asked if they fit alright, how well they suited me. When he returned from those trips he never explained, I would have felt him looking at me when I didn't know it, would have sensed the guarded suspicion, the anxious worrying.

I could see my father around holidays sifting through the mail for that characteristic penmanship, his keen nose picking up the scent of phenol from India ink. I could see my father seated at his desk with the envelope silent on the leather ink blotter, as if expecting it to bite. I could see my father holding the envelope in his hands and reading Charlie's flawless calligraphy, noting the false address on the front and somehow relieved by the inconspicuous red stamp on the back assuring him his younger brother was right where he belonged. Every letter was opened when I found the stack in the locked drawer. So my father, without conscience, had slid the sterling silver letter opener easily through the envelope and read each one. Every one of Charlie's secret messages to me was subject to my father's judgment.

What did my father see in those letters? With each new letter, did the words invoke some fresh fear?

"Didn't you ever wonder why I never wrote back?" I ask him with my back still turned.

"I don't question you, India," Charlie declares, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides.

If I had paid any attention at all, I would have known whenever my father looked at me he was seeing Charlie in another form.

Charlie loved Richard because his older brother understood him, but Richard treated his love for Charlie as an obligation. I loved my father because he understood me, but he never once treated me like a burden.

My father always knew when it was time to go back into the woods. He would call me into his office to clean the rifles. I could smell the gun oil and the sharpness of the solvent and it was like a promise of what was to come. I liked how stiff the bristles were on the copper barrel brushes, how abrasive they were on my skin. I liked setting out all the pieces in descending order from which they would come back together again. I liked studying all the parts of what could take it all away, such simple parts made of metal and wood. And I oiled all the important parts with care, conscious of not putting too much oil on, avoiding the areas where no oil should go. My rifle was the most important thing I owned; it gave me the release I needed every so often. And that was what it was – a need. My father could sense that, so each time he called me into his den to the clean the rifles, it always seemed perfectly timed.

I needed the hunt. I needed the stillness and the quiet, to disappear into the background. I needed the stalk, the infinite number of leaves and the everchanging clouds above. I needed the ache in my shoulders and lower back from lying on my stomach in the grass all day, the itch from grass tickling at my ears and neck.

I needed the kill, the smell of the gun shot residue on my knuckles, the strike of the shell as it flipped up into the air with a wisp of smoke from the barrel, and that fresh spray of blood from something that was no longer beating. I needed the ringing in my ears, the buck of the stock hard against my shoulder. The body of the bird still warm in my hands, the vibrant plumage soft against my fingertips, the blood cooling as it drips through the feathers.

I let myself enjoy it. I didn't know how much my enjoyment perturbed my father.

My father never gave me a choice where Charlie was concerned, because he knew which choice I would make. He was certain I would do something worse instead of something bad if Charlie were involved. Am I angry because I am not angry? Am I resentful because I am not regretful?

What were my father's last thoughts? Did he think of little Jonathon buried under only two feet of sand, just enough to keep him under? Was he surprised?

If I believed anything about my father it would be his utter lack of surprise when Charlie slid back into the SUV with a jagged rock balanced in the palm of his hand. If anyone was capable of unending familial love it was my father, in his nature to forgive and lean into the punches his family dealt him. My father forgave Charlie for killing Jonathon. I know that. But he never forgot. I imagine in his last moments my father even forgave Charlie for killing him, reached kindly for his younger brother to assure him everything was alright even as his skull caved in.

The truth is I can always find faults where there are none. From his actions I can reason my father feared me. But it is also from those same actions I can conclude he loved me as selflessly and ungrudgingly as he was capable. Hindsight is 20/20, and I know my father did everything he could to ensure I would not end up like Charlie locked up in some mental ward for the better half of my life. My father was not afraid of me. He was afraid of what the world would try to do to me if they found out. He was afraid of what Charlie could bring out in me.

What I worry about is what I know my father hoped as he slid into the nothing place that succeeds death. I know he hoped I would do something bad instead of something worse.

"Do you regret killing him?" I ask finally, unsure if I want to know the answer.

Charlie takes a step back and looks at his hands, as if seeing his brother's blood still streaked across his palms. What did he think when he tossed that rock out into the river, watched that sharp black thing sail through the air and disappear into the rapids? "I didn't want to do it if that is what you're asking," Charlie says so lowly it is nearly a whisper. "I wouldn't have done it if he had just taken me home. I just wanted him to take me home, to let me meet you, India. He wouldn't even allow me that much. He took me out of one prison just to send me into exile."

"How could you do it?"

Charlie chuckles to himself, wrings his hands in front of him as if washing the blood off in an imaginary sink. "You should know better than anybody."

"Didn't you love him?"

Charlie's eyes go wide and he has to laugh again to keep from getting angry. "What do you think of this new prison cell, India?" he wonders, gesturing at the apartment with his arms spread wide. "It's comfortable isn't it? Pleasant, mostly private, everything you or I would want to get by. Crawford was much the same. I had all the books I could ever want to read. I had a piano. If I wanted to learn something, Richie would send me a tutor. I should have wanted for nothing. But, we were not meant to live in our heads, India. Lambs live in their heads.

"Richie must have figured since Crawford kept me busy all those years that this would be more than enough. But, what is here? Perhaps he didn't know me as well as he thought to think Crawford was ever enough for me. I endured Crawford for him because I thought that was where he wanted me. Just like you, India, I wanted Richie to love me. The difference is, I guess, that Richie did love you. And maybe he loved me to, in his own way.

"Richie only ever looked at me like an animal that needed to be kept caged. Sometimes I think you look at me like an animal that needs to be put down," Charlie confesses.

"That would make me a hypocrite," I reason.

Charlie smiles his smug knowing smile. "Condemn me and you condemn yourself."

Perhaps we are that single lucky prime couplet, a pair of odds and ends that can only divide into ourselves but somehow adjacent to one another in the sequence. Who else could we possibly divide into but each other? What did my father expect? Was I supposed to go on to college and meet some future date rapist like Whip or Chris Pitts? Was I supposed to backpack in France with my perfect French accent and play piano for the expats only to return to Stoker manor and replay the whole original scene of my parent's marriage? My father must have known I was always going to be alone. I was never going to get married or have children or take on the haunt of that manor. My father endured that haunt. I was the haunt, me and Charlie.

That is the origin of my resentment. Sure I could have done something bad instead of something worse like sending a bullet through my mother's skull. And that may have been enough to release me. I didn't need Charlie to show me what I was. Nothing my father could have done would have prevented me becoming what I am, what I had always been, what he always saw but was too afraid to say aloud. It was always going to end the same way with the gun in my hands whether the recipient of the bullet was my mother, my father, or Charlie himself. So, I resent my father for his disappointed hopes, for holding me to a standard he should have known I would not meet.

My father forgave Charlie in his last moments. Of this I am absolutely certain. It must have been sometime between blows that my father came to his final epiphany, solidified in that last agonal sigh when Charlie slipped the sunglasses from his eyes and put them on, Richard Stoker staring down that awkwardly bright smile with all the screws screwed in wrong. Richard had seen that smile before on his own daughter when I would reach for the dead animals he taught me to hunt and kill. Not so much teeth but unnerving just the same, self-satisfied and nearly euphoric. My father was not a dumb man. Not a one of his machinations and manipulations had prevented Charlie's last act, and my father, my good man, resigned himself to the fate he had forestalled for nearly two decades. Not only his fate but my mother's, Charlie's, mine. I imagine my father also forgave me for what I was always going to do.

Charlie, my prime neighbor, comes to stand next to me and presses a few keys. His shoulder brushes mine.

I count 135 windows on the building opposite ours. I can see my father's shadow behind the driver's side window of the burning SUV silhouetted by twilight. I can see Charlie standing a fair distance from the blazing vehicle, watching the flames and the smoke and the sparks from behind my father's sunglasses.

Charlie never once lied to me about what he did. He never made up any stories for me, lies that he used to placate the prey. On the staircase the night of the wake, he had sincerely apologized for my loss, aware that while he had gained the world I had lost mine. In the dining room that night, privately amused that my mother thought he had chosen an older wine to charm her, he had admitted to me the wine was chosen to honor the year of my birth, his secret message to me. As my mother succumbed to the haze of summer wine and swooned in my uncle's arms, Charlie had watched me through the gap in the curtains, fondled my mother while he could not tear his eyes away from me. While he could play the part of fool with my mother, he calmly took the keys with me, showing me his hand. Without hesitation Charlie bound Whip and gladly handed him over for my revenge, strangled the kid and buried him in the Stoker garden without once telling me to keep quiet about it, confident I wouldn't breathe a word about it. For weeks he seemed an enigma to me, but again hindsight is 20/20. With me Charlie's cards had always been on the table.

"Charlie."

Without a second thought, he turns to look at me, and I have to stand up on my tiptoes to bring my lips to his, my hand curling along his cleanly shaven jawline. He lets me kiss him chaste once. It feels like forever since I have touched him, and when he grabs me I grab back almost as urgently. He hefts me up onto the piano keys, playing a tone of discord, and I have to grab the edge of the piano, my palms playing a similar off tune.

No more perfectly combed hair that always looks purposefully windswept when I rake my fingers down his scalp to get him to groan. No more neatly looped leather belt when I am undoing the buckle, feeling his abdomen shudder.

He tries to say something, swallows, blinks like he is looking through a fog. His hands are clasped around my neck tilting my jaw up to look at him, and his mouth is so close to mine. "Will you play a duet with me?"

I kiss him on the corner of his mouth where the edges of his lips turn up just slightly, a natural smile just like mine even when we are frowning, kiss him on his dimple. "We are playing it." He mms when I break the bridge of his slacks.

Charlie nods absentmindedly, kisses me full on the mouth while I hike the skirt of my nightgown up around my hips. He keeps me looking at him while I cannot see what is going on down there, and the sudden entrance makes me gasp after a choked whimper. He swallows it though and gathers me up in his arms. Each punctuated snap of his hips makes my bottom play a new and undiscovered chord, and I reach one shaky hand down to counter the dissonance with a quick melody cut short by another thrust. His hand tangles in my nearly black hair unruly from sleep and wrenches my head back, buries his face against my neck, traces his tongue up one strained tendon. His other hand comes down over my own, our fingers playing a jumbled tune together.

My bottom nearly slips from the keys and I think we are both going to tumble to the floor in a hot mess, but his hand leaves my hair to snatch my thigh and wrap it around his hips so he can use the leverage to keep me pinned up on the piano. He chuckles breathlessly, smiles small, and then kisses me softly. "I'd never drop you."

I lean my head forward to press my brow to his, stare down into those empty centers of his electric blue eyes.

I think to myself, you read it in books and hear it in music and see it in all the others, but somehow it feels always unreachable to you. I waited patiently, carried out my days in the woods, wandering the school halls, hiding and hurting and keeping silent. I honed my senses so finely and discreetly, listened so intently for the sign I was sure to come. Perhaps like Charlie I too knew without knowing. He would come. All I had to do was be patient. And in that moment to see him, to feel that unfamiliar headiness come on without warning, pale and swooning as I stumbled back into the kitchen to find Mrs. McGarrick. The sensing that in the gravity of my loss I would gain so much more.

My climax comes on without warning, something animal hitching in my throat when I grip Charlie's shoulders with unabashed fervor. My hands travel down to his hips to pull him closer, and he gets the cue to do it harder, snaps his hips forward so my lower back digs into the piano fall behind me. My going tugs Charlie over the edge as well, and he has to slam his hand onto the piano lid to keep his bearings.

After, we are both trembling and clutching at one another. I gather the lapels of his button up shirt in my hands, the pale blue cotton now wrinkled and damp with sweat, yank him closer to kiss him again, again, again. Charlie keeps me wrapped up in his arms as he falls backwards, drops to sit on the piano bench with me gathered up on his lap.

Dawn is disappearing and giving way to the full of the day. With my whole body wrapped around his seated on the piano bench, we could not come closer. My face buried in the crook between his neck and shoulder, I hear him start the opening chords of Beethoven's Appassionata, its previously somber tone overwritten by our recent act. I trace shapes on the nape of his neck, my fingertips catching beads of sweat. I can feel the pulse in his neck, satisfied with its steadiness, its strength and surety.

Quiet enough that whatever powers be could not hear, words for us alone. "I love you."