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Charles is selfish at his core; utterly self possessed; utterly lacking all mercy or restraint or compromise for that which would take him from himself. Anyone who knows him knows it, and most people who don't know him as well. Charles knows it; it's the beating hot heart of him, after all. It isn’t love for Anne and Jack that makes him shout for them to run, and it isn’t mindfulness of the cause. Scrambling in the dirt with the riders bearing down on him, all he wants is to take out a piece of the man who is fucking Eleanor Guthrie.
They all get fucked by Eleanor in the end anyway, but it matters.
The only thing he’s sorry for, locked away under the fort that used to be his, is that he didn’t get to kill the motherfucker. There’s a pleasure in the cell though, an anticipation: he gets to see her again before he dies. He welcomes it; when she comes into his cell he knows she will leave him and he will be left with nothing but the taste of blood in his mouth. That’s how it always is. He would never expect anything different from her.
But it hurts, when she hits him, when she screams. She makes him weak with need, and it terrifies and enrages him—the sensations somewhat dulled after so much relentless repetition in her name—and Eleanor spits on it, hates him, turns away. He wants to kill her father all over again. He wants to make her watch. He wants her to touch him again, even if it's with violence. Charles sucks blood from his teeth, watches her in the corner of his cell, hangs on her every word without bothering to listen.
“You’re an animal,” she tells him, nothing she hasn’t said before, but never with such flat, unrelenting disgust in her voice. Such conviction. She thinks she has him, she owns him, she's seen the beating dog-heart of him.
Charles knows what the fuck he is.
If he were an animal it wouldn’t feel like this.