Chapter 2: Whisky and Embers
T
he silence after was heavier than the peat-laden dark outside. Callum lay slumped over Finlay, his weight pressing his brother into the hard wood of the table. His own breath roared in his ears, a dying storm. The smell of sex, sour whisky, and cold sweat filled the kitchen, choking the life from the old ghosts.
Beneath him, Finlay was utterly still. His ragged panting had stopped. He might have been dead.
Callum pushed himself up, his arms trembling. He slid out of Finlay’s body with a soft, wet sound that made his stomach lurch. Seed and spit smeared pale on Finlay’s thighs and the dark wood. Callum fumbled with his trousers, yanking them up, avoiding his brother’s eyes.
Finlay didn’t move. He stared at the smoke-blackened ceiling, his shirt torn open, his trousers around his ankles. A single tear had traced a clean path through the dirt on his temple, into his hairline. He looked sacked. Hollowed.
“Get up,” Callum said, his voice gravel.
Finlay’s eyes shifted. They focused on Callum, but there was no recognition in them. Just a vast, blank weariness. He slowly pushed himself onto his elbows, wincing as he moved. He looked down at himself, at the mess, his expression unreadable. Without a word, he pulled his trousers up, his movements stiff, clumsy. The button was gone. He held them closed with a fist.
The drip from the eaves outside was the only sound. A clock’s heartbeat.
Callum turned away. He righted the whisky bottle, rescued the last inch of amber fluid, and drained it. The burn was nothing. He felt scorched clean inside, a barren field after a wildfire. He grabbed his oilskin from the hook by the door.
“Where are you going?” Finlay’s voice was thin, scraped raw.
“The flock. They’ll be spooked.” He didn’t look back.
The pre-dawn air was a knife, cleaving through the stink of the house and the fever on his skin. He walked into the darkness, letting the cold bite him. The moon was a sliver behind racing cloud, casting just enough grey light to see the path to the sheepfold. His mind was a blank static. He focused on the physical: the suck of his boots in the mud, the ache in his lower back, the raw, scraped feeling on his lips.
He spent an hour among the sheep, a solid, silent presence calming them. The routine of it—checking for injury, counting heads, feeling the dense wool for wetness—anchored him. The count was still short. Three ewes. He’d find them, or he wouldn’t. The world kept turning.
By the time the first dirty grey light smudged the eastern horizon, the numbness had receded, replaced by a slow, churning shame. It sat in his gut like a stone. He saw Finlay’s tear-tracked face. The way he’d just… taken it. The way he’d asked for it to hurt.
He leaned against the cold stone of the fold, forehead pressed to the rough rock. The same wall his father had been propped against. A dry sob racked him, once, violent and silent. No tears came. He had none left.
When he returned to the house, the kitchen was empty. The table had been wiped clean. A pot of strong tea sat on the cold range. Finlay’s door at the end of the short hall was closed.
Callum made himself eat stale bread. He drank the lukewarm tea. He sat at the scrubbed table and watched the sky lighten through the small window. The weight of the croft, the debt, the staring emptiness of the days to come, settled on him. It was his now. All of it.
Finlay emerged near midday. He’d changed into clean clothes—dark jeans, a grey jumper that hung on his lean frame. His face was carefully blank, his movements precise. He filled the kettle, lit the gas ring.
“I’ll need to get back to Glasgow,” he said, his back to Callum. “Tomorrow, maybe. Need to see if my job’s still there.”
Callum stared at his brother’s spine. The words were a physical blow. He’d known it was coming, but the finality of it, so soon after… after everything, left him winded. The silence would return, absolute. He’d be alone with the ghost in the ground and the one in his head.
“Right,” Callum managed.
“I’ll help you look for the missing ewes today,” Finlay said, still not turning. “Before I go.”
They went out into a flat, still day. The storm had washed the sky a hard, clear blue. The land steamed where the weak sun touched it. They walked without speaking, taking separate ridges, scanning the dips and burns for white shapes. Callum’s eyes kept straying to Finlay, a distant, solitary figure against the vastness of the moor. He looked like he was already gone.
It was Finlay who found them. Not lost. Dead. All three ewes, tangled in a mass of old fencing in a gully, their fleeces waterlogged, their legs broken from the panicked fall. They’d drowned in the peat-stained runoff.
“Fuck,” Finlay whispered, standing at the edge of the gully.
Callum clambered down, his boots sinking into the cold muck. He checked each one. No saving the meat. A total loss. He straightened up, a slow burn of fury replacing the shame. Three ewes. Nearly a full lambing season’s income, gone. Because of the storm. Because of the old man’s neglect of the fences. Because of everything.
He pulled the fencing pliers from his belt and began the grim work of cutting the wire, freeing the heavy, sodden carcasses. Finlay climbed down to help. They worked in a grim, functional silence, hauling the dead weight up the slippery bank. The stench of wet wool and death filled the air.
Back at the croft, they hosed the worst of the muck off their boots by the outside tap. The sun was already dipping, casting long, cold shadows.
“I’ll pack,” Finlay said, avoiding Callum’s eyes.
“Wait.”
The word surprised them both. Finlay stopped, his hand on the door.
Callum didn’t know what he was asking for. Forgiveness? Understanding? He had no right to either. He looked at his brother’s tired, closed-off face. He saw the boy in the barn. The man on the table. The loss was a physical pain.
“Stay,” Callum said, the word rough. “One more night.”
Finlay’s jaw tightened. He looked out over the darkening moor, towards the rowan tree and the raw earth. “Why?”
“Because I’m asking.”
A long pause. The wind picked up, whispering over the heather.
“Alright,” Finlay said, so quiet it was almost lost. “One more night.”
The evening was a fragile, brittle thing. They ate tinned soup in silence. The absence of their father was a roaring presence in the room. Every creak of the house was his footstep. Every silence was his disapproval. Callum could feel the poetry book under the loose floorboard by his bed, its secret words screaming in his head.
He drank whisky. Finlay drank tea, staring into the fire.
“Do you remember,” Finlay said suddenly, his voice startling in the quiet, “the poem he’d make us recite? The one about the stones?”
Callum stiffened. He remembered. A grim, violent old ballad about betrayal and a burial in a cairn. Their father would make them stand and say it, line by line, after a beating. To “toughen the tongue.”
“Aye,” Callum grunted.
Finlay recited the first line, his Glasgow accent flattening the Gaelic. It sounded wrong, stripped of its music, leaving only the threat.
“Stop,” Callum said.
“Why?” Finlay’s eyes glittered in the firelight. Challenging. “It’s just a memory now, isn’t it? He’s just a memory. We can say what we like.”
“It’s not just a memory.” Callum took a swallow of whisky. “It’s in the fucking walls.”
“Then burn it down,” Finlay shot back, a sudden, vicious heat in his voice. “Burn the whole damn place and start over.”
“With what?” Callum’s laugh was a short, bitter bark. “This is all there is.”
“It’s a tomb, Cal. And you’re volunteering to be the corpse.”
The words hung between them, sharp and true. Callum felt them pierce the numbness. He looked at his brother, really looked. Saw not the victim, but a man forged in the same fire, twisted into a different, sharper shape. A shape that could cut.
He stood up. The chair legs screeched. He walked to Finlay, looming over him. Finlay didn’t flinch. He looked up, defiant, waiting for the blow.
Callum didn’t hit him. He reached down, grabbed the front of Finlay’s jumper, and hauled him to his feet. It wasn’t like the night before. There was no drunken frenzy, no blind rage. This was deliberate. A choice.
“You think you get to say that,” Callum growled, their faces inches apart. “You think you get to judge from your flat in Glasgow. You left. You got out.”
“I had to!” Finlay shouted, shoving against Callum’s chest. It was like pushing a stone wall. “He would have killed me! And you just fucking stood there!”
The old accusation, the core of the rot. It landed, and it burned.
Callum’s control snapped, but it was a cold snap. He didn’t shove Finlay onto the table. He marched him backwards, down the short, dark hall, and into the tiny bedroom he’d slept in as a boy. He kicked the door shut.
The room was barely more than a cupboard, dominated by a narrow iron bedframe. Moonlight filtered through a small, dirty window.
“You want to talk about standing there?” Callum hissed, spinning Finlay around and pinning him face-first against the cold plaster wall. He pressed his full weight against him, his mouth at Finlay’s ear. “You were there in the barn too, Fin. You didn’t say no then either.”
Finlay shuddered. He went still. Then he slammed his head back, catching Callum on the chin. Callum grunted, his grip loosening for a second. Finlay twisted, his elbow catching Callum in the ribs. It wasn’t a fight; it was a frenzy of pain and release. They grappled in the tiny space, knocking over a wooden chair, breathing in ragged, hateful gasps. It was their father’s language, the only one they truly knew.
Callum got an arm around Finlay’s throat, not choking, just restraining. With his other hand, he yanked at Finlay’s belt, then his own. The fight bled out of Finlay all at once, replaced by a limp, tense acceptance. Callum freed his cock, already hard from the rage and the wrestling. He spit into his hand, worked himself roughly.
“This what you came back for?” Callum snarled, pushing Finlay’s jeans down over his hips. “This what you remember?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He pressed the head of his cock against Finlay’s tight entrance and pushed. There was no gentle breach. He shoved in, one brutal, claiming stroke, sheathing himself to the hilt in the tight, dry heat.
Finlay cried out, a sharp, pained sound muffled by the wall. His body arched, then went rigid. Callum held there, buried inside him, both of them panting. The intimacy was worse than the violence. Callum could feel every clench, every tremble of Finlay’s body around him. He dropped his forehead between Finlay’s shoulder blades.
He began to move. Not the frantic, punishing pace of the night before, but a slow, deep, relentless rhythm. Each withdrawal was almost complete, each thrust a hard, full re-possession. The wet sound of their joining filled the small room. Callum fucked him with a grim, focused intensity, his hands braced on the wall on either side of Finlay’s head.
“You don’t get to leave me here with him,” Callum breathed, the words hot against Finlay’s neck. “You don’t get to say I just stood there. I stayed. I fucking stayed.”
Finlay was silent for a long time, just taking it, his body jolting with each thrust. Then, a sob broke from him. “I know,” he choked out. “I know you did.”
He pushed back against Callum, meeting his strokes. The fight was gone. This was something else. A raw, ugly communion. Callum slid a hand around Finlay’s hip, found his brother’s cock, hard and leaking. He gripped him, his calloused fingers working in time with his thrusts.
“Fuck, Cal,” Finlay gasped, his head dropping. His body was tightening, coiling. Callum could feel his own climax building, a deep, unavoidable pressure. He fucked into him harder, faster, his balls slapping against Finlay’s skin. The friction, the heat, the sheer wrongness of it, hurtled him towards the edge.
Finlay came first, with a shuddering groan, his release striping the plaster wall. The clench of his body around Callum’s cock was the final trigger. Callum drove in one last, deep time, burying himself as deep as he could go, and emptied himself inside his brother with a low, torn groan that was half agony, half relief.
They collapsed against the wall, a heap of tangled limbs and spent rage. Callum slipped out, his softened cock wet. He rested his weight against Finlay’s back, his breath stirring Finlay’s hair. The room smelled of sex and dust and old pain.
After a long time, Finlay spoke, his voice cracked and small. “I can’t stay, Cal.”
Callum closed his eyes. He’d known. Hearing it was a fresh wound. “I know.”
“But I can come back.”
Callum went still.
Finlay shifted, turning his head slightly. “Not forever. But… I can come back.”
It wasn’t forgiveness. It wasn’t salvation. It was a thread. A thin, frayed line cast across the darkness between them. Callum didn’t trust himself to speak. He nodded, his beard scraping against Finlay’s shoulder.
They untangled themselves, wordlessly pulling up their clothes. Finlay sat on the edge of the narrow bed. Callum leaned against the door, the weight of the world back on his shoulders, but shifted, somehow. Different.
“I found your book,” Finlay said softly, not looking at him. “When I was cleaning up. The poetry. It’s… it’s good, Cal.”
Callum’s blood ran cold. Then, just as quickly, a strange warmth followed. His deepest secret, known. He gave a single, stiff nod.
Finlay stood. He walked past Callum, out of the room, leaving the door open. Callum listened to his footsteps fade down the hall. He looked at the smeared wall, the overturned chair.
He righted the chair. He went to the window and looked out at the night, at the stars sharp above the black hump of the moor. Under the rowan tree, the raw earth was invisible in the dark.
He would get up at first light. He would mend the fence where the ewes had died. He would check the flock. The work was all there was.
But maybe, now, it wouldn’t be all.
But maybe, now, it wouldn’t be all.
Dawn came grey and wet, a slow seep of light through the perpetual damp. Callum was already moving when he heard Finlay stirring in the back room. The familiar rituals of the croft anchored him: banking the peat fire, the sharp smell of the match, the hiss of the kettle finding its voice. He fried eggs in silence, the fat spitting. His body ached in unfamiliar places, a deep muscular soreness layered over a sharper, internal shame.
Finlay appeared, dressed for travel, his small bag by the door.He looked raw, like he hadn’t slept. They ate without speaking, the clink of cutlery on plates loud in the quiet. The poetry book, its existence now acknowledged, felt like a third person at the table.
“I’ll walk you to the bus,” Callum said, scraping his chair back.“It’s at the end of the track. I know the way.”
“I’ll walk you.”
Finlay gave a faint, resigned shrug. They stepped out into a fine, cold drizzle that misted their faces. The world was all muted greens and greys, the path a dark ribbon through the heather. They walked a foot apart, the only sounds their footsteps and the distant, mournful cry of a curlew.
At the rusty gate marking the end of the MacLeod land, Finlay stopped. He looked back towards the house, a low, dark shape against the moor. “You’ll be alright?”
“The work’s here,” Callum said, his standard answer.It felt hollow now.
Finlay shifted his bag on his shoulder.He opened his mouth, closed it, then spoke. “That book… it’s beautiful, Cal.The words for the light on the water. I didn’t know you saw things like that.”
Callum felt exposed, flayed open. His secret self, the soft underbelly, was lying in the damp grass between them. He grunted, looking away. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.” Finlay’s voice was firm. “It’s the only true thing in that whole fucking house.”
The bus appeared then, a speck of white far down the single-track road. The finality of it tightened Callum’s chest.This was it.The silence would return, deeper and more profound. He’d be alone with the ghost and the poetry and the three dead ewes rotting in the ditch.
He turned to Finlay, a sudden, desperate conviction seizing him. He couldn’t let him leave with just words between them. Words were his father’s currency, used to belittle and control. He needed to seal this, to mark this moment in the only language that felt real to them, a language of physical consequence.“Wait,” Callum said, his voice low.
He grabbed Finlay’s arm, not gently, and pulled him off the track, behind the high, gnarled bulk of the gatepost. It was a small shelter from the road, a pocket of wet earth and old stone.“What are you doing? The bus—”
Callum shoved him back against the rough, damp stone. He kissed him, a hard, claiming press of lips that was more threat than affection.Finlay’s bag dropped into the mud. He made a sound of protest, pushing at Callum’s chest, but his resistance was perfunctory, already dissolving into a familiar, dreaded compliance.
“You don’t get to say things like that,” Callum growled against his mouth, his hands rough on Finlay’s hips. “You don’t get to look at my fucking soul and then just get on a bus.”
He unbuttoned Finlay’s jeans with frantic, calloused fingers, yanking them down around his thighs. The cold air bit at their exposed skin.Callum fumbled with his own fly, his breath white in the damp air. He was already hard, driven by a panic that felt like rage. He spat into his palm, the gesture crude and elemental.He turned Finlay around, facing the stone. He pressed his chest against his brother’s back, one arm locking across Finlay’s collarbone. With his other hand, he guided himself.He didn’t prepare him, didn’t wait. He just pushed, a brutal, unwavering invasion, forcing his way into the tight, clenching heat.
Finlay cried out, a sharp, pained sound swallowed by the vast moor. His forehead cracked against the gatepost.His hands scrabbled against the wet stone for purchase. Callum didn’t stop. He buried himself to the root in one violent, complete stroke, a consummation of possession and loss.
He held there, impaling him, feeling Finlay’s body shudder and fight the intrusion.Then he pulled back and drove into him again, setting a relentless, punishing rhythm. The gatepost shuddered with each thrust.It was nothing like the grim communion of the night before. This was pure assertion, a raw and ugly stamp of ownership against the coming absence.
“You’ll remember this,” Callum choked out, his face buried in Finlay’s neck. “You’ll feel this when you’re on that fucking bus. You’ll feel me.”
Finlay was silent now, his body rigid, taking it.His silence was worse than any cry. Callum fucked him harder, each slam of his hips a desperate punctuation against the void. He felt his orgasm building, a tidal wave of anger and need. He reached around, his hand rough on Finlay’s cock, jerking him in time with his thrusts.
The bus horn sounded, distant but insistent.The sound seemed to trigger something in both of them. Finlay came first, with a shuddering gasp, his release spurting over Callum’s fist and the cold stone.The violent clench of his body pushed Callum over the edge. He hammered into him one final, searing time, and emptied himself deep inside his brother with a guttural, broken sound.For a moment they stayed locked like that, joined, panting steam into the drizzle. The bus horn blared again, closer now.Callum pulled out, a sudden, cold separation. Finlay slumped forward, his jeans still around his knees, his forehead resting on the stone.
Callum fastened his own trousers, his fingers numb. He couldn’t look at what he’d done.Finlay pulled his clothes up, his movements slow, mechanical. He wiped his face with a trembling hand, not looking at Callum.He picked his bag from the mud.
The bus was idling at the end of the track, its doors open. A plume of diesel exhaust stained the clean, wet air.Finlay took a step towards it, then paused. He didn’t turn around.His voice, when it came, was flat, devoid of everything.
“I’ll come back,” he said.
Then he walked to the bus, climbed the steps, and disappeared inside without a backward glance.The doors hissed shut. The engine groaned, and the vehicle pulled away, becoming a shrinking red speck in the grey landscape.
Callum stood by the gatepost, the smell of sex and stone and damp earth clinging to him. He raised a hand to his face, caught the faint, coppery scent of Finlay’s skin on his fingers. The hollow inside him was no longer silent. It was filled with the echo of the bus engine and the phantom sensation of a body giving way beneath his own.
He turned and walked back towards the croft, towards the work, towards the silence.The poetry book waited under the floorboard. The dead ewes waited in the ditch. The new grave waited under the rowan tree.