The Puckerman brothers mounted their horses outside The Canary Cage, riding together side-by-side to the outskirts of town. They were a fearsome duo to behold – one older than the other, but both with the same striking features, the same piercing dark eyes, the same swift hand on the draw, the same rigid seat as they rode, like harbingers of wrath, sent to earth by the Almighty himself.

They'd been working at Blaine's saloon for some time now, keeping the peace at his place while no sheriff was in town. The job at Blaine's was open-ended. They came and went as they pleased, as long as nothing was pressing. They had gotten a lead on a job in San Antonio. It paid a bit less, but money wasn't the allure. Lima was a dead town. Nothing ever happened there, and nothing would happen at The Canary Cage as long as Blaine were around. Neither man liked to admit it, but where they both were quick with their pistols, Blaine Anderson might have been a hair quicker. The Canary Cage was safe without them.

The Puckerman brothers weren't babysitters.

They were preparing to head to Texas, with Blaine's blessing, but just as they'd gotten their provisions packed, Blaine invited them both to his balcony and told them that he had something on the horizon, something big, something that would satisfy their thirst and pay handsomely – with half on hand, and half later on, plus a bonus if the job came through.

They were told what they needed to know, about some asshole outside of town beating the crap out of his husband, and Noah smiled.

“No need for all the foreplay, boss,” he'd said. “We'll take the job. Texas can close her pretty legs and wait.”

Like Blaine, they weren't men who liked to play the waiting game, but Noah and Blaine in particular had history, so the brothers were willing to wait, and hung around the saloon to see how things panned out.

They'd been talking to Blaine about taking action on their own when that bloodied man stumbled in, beaten half-dead.

That was their signal to get to work.

They rode in silence until the road came to a fork. Jake and Noah stopped at the crossroad, standing together one last time before they went their separate ways, to tackle their journeys alone.

“Stay outta trouble, little brother,” Noah said, putting an arm out for Jake to take.

“You, too, big brother,” Jake said, grasping Noah's arm below the elbow and holding it tight, while Noah did the same.

Jake's brother was only six years older than him, but the gap in their ages seemed monumental due to their upbringing.

Noah and Jake were born of the same shiftless father, but came out of different mothers.

Jake's mother was the daughter of a Chicago socialite. Jake had been given the benefit of a fine education and a comfortable, city life. Noah had been brought up in the city, too, but his mother worked as a laundress. His mother used to say that they were so poor, the mice had more food to eat than they did. Noah's mother worked her fingers to the bone, and did the best she could stretching what meager money they had, but when times were rough, Noah sometimes had nothing but his mother's boxes of starch to stop his stomach grumbling. Noah spent his young life stealing, scraping, and taking odd jobs to support them both. He dreamed of giving his mother the kind of life that Jake's mother had handed to her, but that just wasn't in the stars for them.

When his mother couldn't find work, and had to turn to sporting to make ends meet, Noah started fighting for money in the hopes of buying out her contract. Noah had nothing against whores as a rule, but it broke his heart to see his mother become one.

At the time, he was only twelve.

And yet, regardless of their differences, both boys became hired guns, and ended up together in Lima, Ohio, when Blaine Anderson swooped in to set up shop.

When money ran thin, they always had Blaine to go to for work.

But Noah had been through so much more as a hired gun than Jake had. He'd seen things most men hadn't at twice his age. Noah traveled with a regiment when he was barely more than fourteen, and been trained as a scout. He'd been shot twice – once in the arm, once in the leg, captured by Indians, and nearly scalped, but he got away. It was an exciting story, one that he could use to his advantage to gain the admiration of men and women, but he didn't. Very few people actually heard it from Noah's lips, and that was one of the reasons why Jake looked up to him so much.

With his charm and his rugged looks, Noah was notoriously popular with the ladies. Jake supposed that his brother probably had a kid in most cities from there to the west coast, but it didn't feel right prying. Jake knew Noah sent much of his earnings to his mother, but he'd also caught his brother wiring money to nameless places numerous times before, without explanation. But the state of his suspected parenthood didn't mean that Noah wasn't a good man. An honest man. A loyal man. He gave all to whom he loved, which included his brother, his mother in St. Louis, and Kitty Wilde.

Noah was a passionate man, and a bit reckless. Every time Jake parted ways with his brother, he always feared it would be the last.

Jake looked at him hard, eyes not leaving his face until his brother's smirk lit his eyes.

“You'll see me again,” Noah said, assuming the reason his brother was reluctant to leave. “I mean, someone needs to protect Kitty from you constantly trying to turn her into an honest woman.”

“Never,” Jake said, tightening his grip. “She only has eyes for you.”

“Funny” - Noah laughed - “because I feel the same about you, brother.” Noah shook Jake's arm once. “Be swift.”

“Be safe,” Jake said.

They unclasped arms. They turned their horses in separate directions and rode away.

Each brother had an important message to deliver.

Noah headed off to Defiance, to the home of Kurt's family…or what was left of his family. With a hearty sack of coin hidden in a false seam of his saddle bag, he would help Kurt's stepmother and sister-in-law take only what they could carry and leave, run far away from their house, and Defiance, and never look back.

Jake's message, though, was of a distinctly different nature.

He rode to the house where Kurt had been living. Correction - the prison where he had been shackled, raped, and beaten. Jake was told to use his discretion in how he handled David, but that nothing short of death was off the books.

Blaine felt that killing David wasn't the best idea. They may not have a sheriff in town, but a revenge killing could still be construed unjustifiable homicide. If Kurt were a woman, it might end different, but not for a man, and with Jake being mulatto, there'd be little question. With the money Paul Karofsky had, he could get any number of lawmen or hired guns out to Lima in no time flat.

Paul wouldn't know right away to pin anything on Jake, but he'd have Kurt killed out of spite.

Besides, Blaine wanted David to suffer, and live with his suffering the way he had forced Kurt to do.

Jake had plans of confronting David in his home, figuring he'd be passed out asleep. If he wasn't there, well then Jake would deliver half his message now, and lie in wait to deliver the rest. But Jake met David on the road, heading to the house. From the description Blaine had given him, this man could be no one but. Even if Blaine hadn't told him a single other distinguishing feature, the man's overwhelming size was a sure-fire giveaway. From the looks of it, his torn, filthy clothes, and his exaggerated limp, David had been thrown from his horse, and Jake knew why. In David's meaty fist, he held a leather crop. He'd probably gone hard at the poor animal. Jake didn't see the horse around. If it didn't head for the hills, it most likely made its way home.

David walked quite steadily. He swayed from left to right, but he didn't stumble, which meant he wasn't drunk enough to make beating him senseless too much of a crime.

Jake rounded in front of the man and stopped him, standing in position to block what sliver of the moon hung in the sky.

“David?” Jake asked. “David Karofsky?”

David blinked at him dumbly, tilting his head and squinting his eyes. With the horseman in front of him backlit, David couldn't make out the man's face, but he still tried to sort out where he'd met this man before, and how he'd know his name.

“Yeah?” David garbled. “I'm Dav…I'm David Karofsky. Who wants to know?”

“I do,” Jake said, and nothing more. He jumped down from his saddle. David inferred his aim and backed away, but Jake overtook David easily.

“Wha---what d'ya think you're doin'?” David roared as Jake bound his wrists behind his back in his own metal shackles, covered in Kurt's sticky blood.

“What you like to do,” Jake chided. “Ain't it a hoot?”

Jake tethered David by a length of rope round his neck to the saddle horn of his horse. David struggled to break free, or get a headbutt in, but Jake sidestepped him, letting the burly man sink to his knees. Jake made no move to help the man to his feet. He'd follow along however he managed. Jake re-mounted his horse and set out at a walk, dragging David down the dirt road the rest of the way to the house.

Jake didn't take his horse to a gallop. He didn't want to break the man's neck. He brought his horse's walk down to half-pace, but David still stumbled. He fell a few times. He spent a bit on his knees, choking, with his neck pulled up at an angle, scrambling to keep up.

David was near unconscious by the time they made it to the house. Jake untied David from his horse. It seemed cruel to the animal to keep them tied together. But he left David cuffed, pushing his face into the dirt with the toe of his boot.

“Stay,” Jake commanded, then turned his sights toward the house.

Jake wasted no time, storming into the house and ripping it apart. He overturned every stitch of furniture, plucked up every floor board, and tore apart every pathetic piece of David's clothing. He had been told to search for anything of value: money, jewelry, but mostly anything that might belong to Kurt, including one item in particular that Jake ended up finding hidden beneath false planks in the bedroom floor -  a wood chest with the name ‘Hummel' burned into the top.

Jake loaded the chest and a few other items into David's buckboard. They might be Kurt's things. Jake knew little about Kurt, truth be told, but from what he'd heard from Kitty and Brittany, Jake determined that along with the chest, at the very least, the sewing machine he came across might be Kurt's, along with some bolts of fine fabric he found stuffed into one of the chifferobes.

Once the buckboard was packed, and the house gone over, Jake went inside one last time with a box of matches and a bottle he brought with him of Old Malt Whiskey. He took a mouthful, sprayed the curtains with alcohol, and set them ablaze. He lit the bedsheets. He lit the rugs. He headed to the kitchen and the living room, and lit anything made of dried, untreated wood that he could find.

It was an older house, with a sun-scorched roof and termite damage, in need of repair. It went up like kindling.

Lima didn't employ a fire crew. The closest one was several towns over, and the volunteers would be dead to the world or drunk at this hour. This house would be ashes long before David could get anyone to come to his aid.

David lifted his head at the sound of flames snapping and popping, crackling like lightning hitting a rod. He blinked the dirt from his eyes, but grains clung to his lashes, turning to mud when his eyes watered. He tried his best to stand. If he could get to his feet, he thought, then he could take down this asshole, even with his hands tied behind his back - no question. David refused to put up with being robbed. He wasn't about to let someone coming out here and take what's his.

But David was affected by drink and knocks to his skull. And he was cuffed.

Jake was sober and hadn't been touched.

It was an easy thing for Jake to turn on the larger man as he worked on getting to his feet. Jake pistol-whipped him soundly. When he had David down, Jake took the knife from his belt – a real Bowie knife that he liked to keep razor sharp, for close encounters.

Noah didn't fancy knives. He didn't like getting into any fight that he couldn't win with a gun from a reasonable distance.

But Jake was a hands on sort of man, not too repulsed to look straight in a man's face when he gutted him.

His Bowie knife was a personal favorite. It happened to be a gift from his older brother.

Jake wedged the knife beneath the collar of David's shirt and ripped through it, cutting the material off David's body in a single slice. Jake laid him flat on the ground with a kick to his shoulder, and did the pants, too. Then he went after him the way David had done to Kurt, with the bullwhip hanging off his saddle. Snap after snap, he covered David's back in raised marks, crisscrossing x's, then went over them again, flailing pieces of skin off his back.

David might have screamed. He might have cried. He probably begged Jake to stop, offered him money if he would, threatened him when that didn't work. Jake didn't hear him, nor did he care. He was doing a job. He was getting paid. The fact that this bastard deserved everything he was getting made it better, but it didn't make a difference.

When Jake was through, he left David in the dirt, naked, cuffed, whipped, his house burning to cinders.

“I'm taking your buckboard and your horse as payment for having to ride all the way out here to beat your sorry ass,” Jake said, securing the buckboard to both horses. David moaned and clawed, trying his last to get up and fight, but Jake turned and pistol-whipped him one more time behind the right ear, for good measure. He shoved David back down with the heel of his boot, his spur cutting into his neck – nowhere serious, but he bled like a stuck pig all the same. Jake climbed into the driver's seat of the buckboard, taking a look down at David's wrecked body.

“Consider this a message, you steaming pile of horse shit,” Jake said, “and listen good. Don't go looking for your husband. He ain't yours no more. And if you know whats good for you, youll make yourself gone.”

David didn't look up, he didn't move, but Jake knew the man had heard. He was frozen, waiting for Jake to go away.

Praying that he would go.

The way Kurt used to do.

It made Jake want to vomit.

He turned the horses and buckboard around, and rode off back towards town.