Chapter Text
He didn’t know what he was feeling.
It was Yuliy in front of him, there was no denying it. White streak in his dark hair. Sapphire eyes. Mikhail blinked and saw a little boy on a snowy mountain slope complaining about how the climb made his legs ache.
He blinked again and the years traveled through him. He didn’t even know how many. A decade maybe? Time didn’t mean much anymore. Still… Yuliy was no longer that little boy. He was almost a man now, maybe a year or two shy. And a warrior. Mikhail had seen that much already.
A Jaeger.
Mikhail had a vague notion that he was supposed to hate him. That was what the voice of Yevgraf whispered in his ear like a persistent mosquito. Shoot to kill. He didn’t know if he could hate anymore. He didn’t hate the vampires as he once had. He’d loathed the creatures who’d destroyed his home with every fiber of his soul. He remembered distantly the fire that bled through every atom in his body, the boiling, festering, rotten thing that set his very veins ablaze. He’d hated and hated and hated until it carved out everything in him and cauterized what was left. He’d hated so much it had almost killed him, and that wouldn’t do when his mother pleaded for her sons to survive with her last breath. He’d let the flames burn themselves out, not even holding embers for Yevgraf anymore. Indifference made an iron wall around his heart.
One look from Yuliy and there were chinks in the metal. That feeble thing his wall was guarding was sputtering to life sending a pulse to his temples and warmth into the veins that had long been stagnant and cold. He hadn’t heard his own heartbeat since the day Yevgraf’s fangs had broken his skin saving his life while simultaneously ending it. The blood that flowed through him now felt like liquid gold. He couldn’t stop the corners of his mouth from stabbing into his cheeks. Had he lost control of his own face? Did the Jaegers have powers he didn’t know about?
A distant memory stirred of a little dark-haired boy wearing the same expression Mikhail could feel on his own face, both in the present and in the past. The little Sirius cubs weren’t being attacked or controlled. They were free and happy and, for the time being, safe.
Normal people would call it a smile.
“Brother?” Mikhail couldn’t properly hear the word, but he could see Yuliy’s mouth forming it, not in Japanese, but in their own tongue. Brothers. That was what they were, wasn’t it? Or were they only vampire and Jaeger?
He didn’t know, so he left before his mouth could make the decision for him. He bounded over the rooftops, feeling so light that a stray wind might just carry him away.
Joy, he realized. He felt joy.