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Vash…why do you s’pose we were born?
He used to ask his brother while they looked out over the thousands of canisters, each housing its own set of human dreams.
Vash never had a satisfying answer.
He would shrug and say he couldn’t begin to know, with the unspoken implication that it hardly mattered.
There was always a sort of sadness hovering over Vash, even before Tesla, that in a human Knives would have credited to a minor chemical imbalance in the brain.
Not quite enough serotonin.As a child, he’d entertained the idea that his Sisters had wondered what it was like to be human, and that’s where he and Vash had come from.
Then he found the sister who’d been human-shaped like him, before the contusions and the cancers, and he finally understood why he’d been created, why he’d been given the body he lived in.
Infiltration and extermination are so much easier when you can pass for the enemy.
The old airlock door closes behind him with a tired sigh as he shimmies up the outcropping of rock to get a better look at the stars.
The air is a little thin up here, and the cold bites straight through his clothing.
A shiver runs through him, and as he sits he wraps himself in a thin layer of his own glowing energy to ward against the chill.The clarity of the view is worth the discomfort.
The stars seem close enough to reach from here, and not for the first time he wonders if he really could, if he’s capable of shooting out a blade of energy like a pointing finger to touch some distant sun.
He’s cut satellites out of the sky, after all.
And his brother has left a permanent scar on a moon.
If only he had such faith in his lack of limitation, he would seize hold of another place and pull himself across the sky.Somewhere in that canvas of innumerable dots of light, there must be a place where the two of them could live in peace, some untainted world, someplace where humanity could never hope to follow.
An oppressive atmosphere, maybe, or the crushing tug of gravity, or daily rainstorms of acid.He doesn’t turn when he hears the airlock open and the soft footfalls on the stone, accompanied by the faint scent of bottled things that were once alive and growing.
He doesn’t even twitch.
He allows Legato to drape a wool blanket around his shoulders like a cape, moving only to clasp the ends of the blanket under his throat so it doesn’t slide off.“This way you can conserve your energy, Lord Knives,” his servant says gently, and leaves as silently as he came.
Even his breath, that obnoxious neverending cycle of chemical exchange, is almost imperceptible.
Knives opens his mouth to speak, then bites against the inside of his cheek instead until the sharp taste of iron floods his tongue.He pulls the body in on itself, tucking his knees under the wool.
He tries to imagine that Vash is sitting next to him on the rock, saying something about a passing meteor, or the green tinge on a flickering star.
He imagines riding inside of a ship, floating in the 0-g chambers without feeling time pass or caring about time at all, on their way to anywhere.
There are so many things to talk about besides humanity.
The complexity of star systems, the billions of years left in the lifespan of the universe, the unlikeliness of life itself.Any planet that wasn’t suited to supporting human life would most likely kill them, too.
But it’s pleasant to think about paradise, and so very little is pleasant here.Legato has fallen asleep in his chair by the time he goes back inside.
The radio is still playing, something soft, a humming of strings with no words – the closest humans can come, perhaps, to the language of his Sisters.
The volume dial is turned low, but the sound still reverberates in the vastness of the chamber.
The only light is what spills golden out of the tuner, and the clinical glow of the nearest hallway.It seems to be a peaceful sleep, and it stirs a hint of envy in him.His servant shifts and murmurs something unintelligible when Knives drapes the blanket across his lap.
His fingers twitch against the wool, as if chasing the remaining warmth.
A lock of hair falls across his face.
Knives can’t see the blue tint in this light.
Everything is colorless, like a photograph.
Most nights he dreams of Vash.
Sometimes they are still children on the ship, and the dreams are bittersweet.
Other times he dreams of various types of paradise, of whole worlds with just the two of them or others like them, places where his Independent sister is still alive and whole, entire families of Sisters and sisters and even brothers.
And sometimes the dearest dreams of all – that he and Vash were never really born at all, and they still sing with their Sisters, never having names and never knowing solitude.Far more often his dreams of Vash are pain, danger, suffering.
Vash in the hands of humans, scarred and tortured, defiled, and then abandoned.
The flash of hate in Vash’s eyes, the lines of disappointment in his face.
Once he dreamed of his brother’s body, broken and lifeless, still in the sea of his blood, and Legato’s small smile, the spattering of red on his white coat.
He wouldn’t speak to Legato all day after that.
His servant looked to him in his silence with all the usual attentiveness, and if he felt anything in the void of his master’s voice, he did not show it in his face or his own softly spoken words.When he jolts awake, tears himself out of the lies his own mind spews, he repeats over and over to himself the meaning of his existence, the practicalities of the body.
This is all that prevents him, twisted in his sweat-soaked sheets, from trying to claw his way out of his own skin.After he has calmed himself, he listens for his Sisters singing.
They are always singing.
They don’t speak with words, the clumsy strikes of mouth and tongue.
They can toss concepts directly back and forth from one consciousness to another, a dialogue without subtext, where misunderstanding is impossible.
Even in their bulbs, they are never alone.He can never quite harmonize with their conversations, so much like them but not enough.
It’s like looking through one-way glass.
If he could speak to the Sisters, he might ask them to relay to the one who made him, and demand explanations.
Wasn’t it enough to look like them?
Did he have to have the need to eat and sleep and breathe just to stay alive, the repulsive abilities to bleed and shit and dream?He can no longer remember the last time he slept all the way through the night.
He has seen every possible color of the sunsrise, and admired the desolation of the early morning on this world.
He can almost imagine that no one lives there at all, when he watches the suns come up.
He can almost pretend he doesn’t exist.
Legato has never been far behind him, since that first day.
But his attentiveness has turned over these past few weeks to a sort of hovering dotage.
It reminds him, like a poisonous balm, of being parented.It becomes so predictable that for once he can be the one pulling strings.
Neglecting to move to his quarters late into the evening results in softer music from the radio, and a gradual dimming of the lights.
If he goes too many hours without eating, delectable things find their way to his place at the table – the finest cuts of meat, the freshest, brightest fruit the Geoplant has to offer.
If he goes outside at night without a coat, as he does tonight, Legato is ten steps behind with more suitable clothing or a blanket.He turns to look this time, before Legato can wrap the fabric around him, and freezes his servant in his tracks.“That’s unnecessary.
To do this-” gesturing to the dim glow surrounding him “-takes so little energy it doesn’t bear thinking about.”
Even as he says it, he can feel Legato’s eyes on him, zoning in on the dark tuft of hair over his forehead.
He snorts, derisive, and turns his face back to the stars.
“Keep it for yourself.”A few seconds pass, in which Legato’s gears wind slowly enough that he loses patience, casts a withering gaze over his shoulder, and says, “Sit.”Legato sits, wrapping himself hesitantly in the blanket.
The stutter of his breath is a giveaway of all the things inside, the fear, the elation.
It’s disgusting in its predictability.Knives stretches out on his back with his hands supporting his head, for the comfort and the view, but also for the amusement of watching Legato nearly spasm with anxiety over what to do next.
To stay upright when his master is reclining suggests disrespect; to recline next to him is too intimate.
He settles for bending forward and wrapping his arms around his ankles, his face pointed towards the ground.Knives hides his smirk in a theatrical yawn, covering his mouth with one hand, then stretching it out towards the sky, grabbing a fistful of starlight.
“That’s where I was born, you know.”Legato’s head stirs against his legs.
“My lord?”“Up there, in the stars.
Inside of a ship.”
He tucks his hand back underneath his head.
A meteor paints a bright streak amongst the pinpoints.
“The only gravity was artificial.
I was born floating.
I learned to fly before I learned to walk.”Legato has lifted his head high enough to regard him with one bright gold eye from behind the modest curtain of his hair, his gaze suffused with the reverence of a man listening to his god divulge the details of his childhood.
“What does it look like?” he says, his voice breathy with the daring of it.
“From up there?”“…bigger.
Closer.
Brighter and more strange.
…it is very beautiful.”Legato closes his eyes for a moment – trying to imagine it, perhaps.
“Do you want to go back?”Knives can see with startling clarity two paths of time unwinding in front of him.
In one he punishes the nerve of the question, of making him consider the hopeless scenarios of his return – a ship once again full of humans, his servants, true, but humans nonetheless, or if not that than the ache of eternal solitude.
No solace but the taunting of his Sisters’ singing.
It’s not that he can’t imagine ascending back off of this soiled rock with his brother at his side – it is only that the sheer impossibility of it blinds him with pain.
The two children on the ship from long ago might as well be dead for how little is left of them.
All that remains is Vash’s sadness, deep and unnavigable, and Knives’ anger, sharpened over decades to a precise and lethal point.There are many ways to punish such an inquiry – with angry words, with physical pain, with isolation, abandonment.
There are only so many kinds of pain in the universe, after all.But he takes the other path, although it is not a natural reflex for him, because it is quieter, and strains less on his mind.
He grants Legato a small smile, a benevolent god who can’t be bothered to rain down judgement, not just now, with the hour so late and the view so lovely.
“More than anything.”
Why did you do this to me? Vash says, and the blood runs from his mouth, so dark, almost black.
I didn’t know…I didn’t mean to…
It’s such a shame, Conrad tells him, his face calm with just a touch of sadness, in spite of the spikes of sheer energy piercing straight through all of his vital organs.
One less burst of power and he might have lived. Why would you- Vash tries to speak but he coughs instead, heavy and wet, and something comes up, something solid that spatters on the floor.
I didn’t mean to oh god Vash I swear I didn’t know I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry
Lord Knives Lord Knives
He combs his fingers through Vash’s hair, searching for even a hint of gold, and he wraps his other arm around his brother’s chest to steady him but it goes straight through, ribcage caving like rotten fruit.
Lord Knives please
His eyes shoot open so hard and wide it burns, and he takes in a sharp breath like coming up from underwater.
He calls in the power, not soon enough to save the bed – the sheets hang in tatters from the gouged mattress, and little feathers of down from the pillows float in the air like ash.It takes him a few seconds to register the weight against his body as Legato, crouched on the mattress with arms wrapped tight around him.
He takes another few panicked seconds to ensure that his servant is still all in one piece – miraculously, although he can smell blood and see at least one cut that’s gone straight through the sleeve into his arm.
Legato is broadcasting at top volume – he’s usually so careful, especially because he knows Knives is already more sensitive than humans, but now against the sobs that are coming from his mouth Knives can also feel a scream echoing around the inside of his skull.
Don’t leave me don’t leave me don’t leave me
“You’re hurt.”
The words come out so hoarse he wonders if he was screaming in his sleep.
Legato lets him go and flings himself back on the mattress, and instantly the shouting inside of Knives’ head stops, leaving only the sound of Legato weeping.
Knives reaches to push Legato’s hair back from his face, and finds a long cut across his right cheek, oozing a thin line of blood.
Legato is crying like a child, loud and sloppy, his eyes puffy and his nose dripping onto the ruined sheets.
Knives hasn’t seen him cry like this since July.
It’s just as repugnant now as it was then, and almost makes it seem like no time has passed at all.“Don’t do that.
Stop it.”
Legato hiccups and mumbles broken apologies, bowing his head and clenching his hands in his lap.
Knives sighs and grabs his wrists, pulling Legato’s arms out in front of him so he can see the rest of him.
Two more cuts – the one on his arm and one more on the left side of his torso.
He pulls Legato’s shirt, a rough ill-fitting homespun thing, over his head to get a better look.
Surface-level skin damage, not too deep, very little bleeding.
He traces a finger over each line, expending a small amount of power to coax the skin back together, an easy task with the cuts being so clean, and mindlessly licks the blood from the tip of his finger.Legato’s sobs quiet into erratic sniffling, his tongue still tripping over apologies.
“Stop that,” Knives snaps, “you haven’t done anything wrong, only been – extraordinarily foolish.
You might have been killed.”“I don’t care,” his servant retorts, “I couldn’t let you-”
He recovers his intelligence and chokes down the rest of the sentence.
“You can use my room, if you wish.”Knives gives him a curt nod and rises carefully from the remnants of his bed, only to discover that the cotton pants he sleeps in are another of the evening’s casualties, reduced to strips like the sheets.
Legato sagely turns and waits in the hall while he finds another pair, then follows behind him as he walks, back to his usual silent decorum, red-rimmed eyes the only outward sign that he has ever felt anything.He knows the location of Legato’s room, but he hasn’t been inside in years.
It’s part of the old ship, like his own, with a door that slides open when Legato presses his palm to the panel beside it.
It’s small and simple but comfortable, the bed spacious with good quality sheets and the silky, durable kind of duvet that can only be found now in the ruins of the SEEDS ships.
The only other furnishing is a small chair near the foot of the bed where several articles of clothing are draped, and a dark wooden table at the bedside.
The table is covered in an artfully arranged collection of objects – a tortoise shell, the skull of a cat, a slice of stone with the fossilized imprint of some ancient many-legged creature, a long, tawny feather.
The only human-made thing is a narrow-necked green glass vase, which holds a single dried red rose.
Knives runs his fingers along the silky barbs of the feather, then traces the shape of the fossil, feels the ribbing of the hollows left behind by all those limbs.“Is there anything you need, Lord Knives?”He lets the long pointed tooth of the cat poke against the pad of his finger.
“Where do you intend to sleep, Legato?”“I-I don’t know,” he admits, quickly adding, “but I’ll be perfectly fine-”“In your chair by the radio?
Or on the floor, perhaps?
At my feet?”
He turns to face Legato.
“A competent servant is useful to me.
I do not want, neither do I need, a pet, or a mother.”By the dim light built into the walls, he sees a faint flush rise in Legato’s cheeks.
“I – I’m sorry – I didn’t mean-”“You are always sorry.”
He sits on the edge of the bed, spreading his hand against the duvet to indicate the empty space around him.
“You may stay.”Legato’s eyes widen, ever so slightly, easy to miss if not looked for.
“You wish me to-”“I wish you to sleep here.”His servant’s expression flickers, beaming joy and then almost instantly fear, before it settles into something that looks to Knives like resignation, almost like defeat.
His fingers drift to the buttons on his pants, trembling as they work first one, then the other open.
Knives, overwhelmed with realization, rushes to his feet and crosses the space between them in a single stride, catching Legato’s hands before they can ease the cotton from his hips.
“That isn’t necessary,” he hisses.
“That’s another thing I neither need nor want.”Legato’s fingers go limp in his hands.
“I…I don’t know how to be what you need.”I need an equal, Knives thinks.
I need this to end and I need to somehow get over my fear of it ending.
...I need my brother.
“I know,” he says instead.
He lets go of Legato’s hands and does up the buttons on his fly, one, then the other.
“But I see how hard you are trying.”
He sighs and puts his hands lightly on Legato’s hips.
“You don’t need to try so hard.”Legato looks up at him with a faint tremble of his lip and says, almost a little petulant, “I do.”Knives huffs a quiet laugh though his nose and takes Legato by the hand, leading him to the bed and pulling back the covers.
He crouches down on the mattress and Legato follows, until they are lying side by side.
Legato’s eyes are flicking everywhere but at his, and Knives puts a finger to his chin, directs him until they’re looking at each other.
His pupils are wide in the dim light, framed in circles of gold, and he looks frankly terrified.Knives lifts his fingers to Legato’s temple and moves them gently back and forth, trying to soothe some of the fear out of his eyes.
“Do you ever imagine,” he asks, “that you are not human?”Legato’s eyes flutter shut for a moment, and his throat bobs as he swallows.
“All the time.”
He lets the words hang in the air for a few seconds, while Knives keeps petting at his temple.
“Something like…a cat, or a bird, something that doesn’t think about good or evil, or much of anything.
Something that doesn’t live very long, and doesn’t know it’s going to die.
I wish I’d been born like that.
I’d rather have never been born at all, even, than…”
He takes in a shuddery breath.
“I hate that this…this is what you see.
I hate this.
I wish…”
He leans forward into the pillow, muffling his voice.
“I wish I could be like you.”“It’s not so wonderful.
Being like this.”
The words come out flat, and he wishes somehow he could say something else, something more meaningful on the tail of what to the man beside him must have taken a great deal of courage, such a sacrilegious confession.
“It’s a prison.”“Because you look like us?
Because…you look in the mirror and see the face of an enemy?”Knives gives him a wry smile.
“You see?
You are more like me than you realize.”Legato shakes his head against the pillow.
“I’m not.
Because you-”
He reaches out, very carefully, and puts his palm against Knives’ chest.
“You are so much more than us, inside.
We can’t hurt you, unless you let us.
No one can make you do anything.”“Except for you, hm?”Legato snatches his hand away and curls it into a fist.
“Never.
Never again.”“You know, the strange thing is, I actually believe you.”
He smiles and drags his thumb across Legato’s cheek.
“Not that I’d let you try it twice.”
Legato shivers, but the hint of a smile tugs at the corner of his mouth, and Knives chuckles.
“My needs are really very simple,” he explains.
“I need a companion.
Someone skillful with unquestionable loyalty, who wants to see this desert wiped clean as badly as I do.
Not even my own family can give me that.”Legato looks up tentative from under heavy lashes.
“But…I’m human, my lord.”“Just so.”
He furrows his brow, puts on a look of deep thought.
“And you don’t want to see me dirty myself by such lowly association, is that it?”His servant casts his eyes down.
“…yes.”“Then,” Knives whispers, inching closer to him, “I’ll just have to find a way to pull you up, instead.”Legato lifts his eyes to his master again, a heavy exhalation trembling on his mouth, looking for all the world as if someone has just handed him a reason to live, on a silver platter, for the very first time.Knives wraps his arm around his bedmate and draws him in close, until their bodies are pressed together and Legato weaves a shaky arm around him in exchange (and it reminds him keenly of the way Vash used to hold him, sometimes all night, when he was troubled or frightened or simply lonely).
This, this is another weakness of the flesh, the way the sensation of skin on skin floods his brain with all the chemicals of comfort, begins slowly to fill in the gaping empty space left behind so many long years ago.
It’s far more profound than the sensation of satiating hunger or thirst.
It is terrible, but beautiful too, as terrible things so often are.Legato’s eyes swim bright and damp, so close now, and his lip trembles because all of him is trembling, falling to pieces in his master’s arms.
Knives leans in, eyes still open, and presses a kiss to Legato’s shaky lip.
The sound he makes is more akin to someone who’s been dealt a gunshot wound than a kiss, so Knives pulls back with a furrow of concern and goes in a bit more slowly the second time.
Legato manages to recover enough of himself to kiss him back, to lean into it (and Vash used to kiss him, all bright with innocence, on those precious days when the sorrow would lift and he would glow with simple joy at being alive).
Legato’s mouth is warm and soft and absolutely pliant under his, and he fears that his body might respond with that most absolute of revulsive reactions, but even though they are flush together from lip to leg they both stay undemanding and soft.Legato begins to weep again, quietly this time, the wet of his tears mixing all salty in with their kiss.
It’s disgusting, but no more so than his own tears were, when he was still young enough to cry (when he was the chronic crybaby instead of Vash, in the time before he knew things too terrible even to prompt tears).
In some ways he envies his servant this power, this potential for release.“I’d have thought you’d be dried up entirely by now,” he says, and Legato makes a noise somewhere between a burst of laughter and a sob and clings to him, dripping tears onto his shoulder.
Knives cannot find it in himself to be annoyed by it enough to ask him to let go.
Here where no one can see him, except the one person he would trust never to tell another living soul, he clings back.“There’s…something else I can do for you,” Legato says.
“I think.”“What might that be?”“I can keep you from dreaming.”He’s unable to keep himself from sharply exhaling at the hope that swells in his chest at hearing those words.
“You…are welcome to try.”Legato props himself up on his side and combs his fingers through Knives’ hair, resting the pads of his fingers on his scalp.
“I’m going to have to make you sleepier, first.
So I can see – what the shapes of your thoughts look like when you’re dreaming, more or less.”
His forehead scrunches with focus, as if his fingertips are giving him some kind of direct visual connection to his master’s brainwaves.
Knives indeed feels a sudden warm wave of sleepiness, and realizes sharply how vulnerable this will leave him – but worst case scenario Legato kills him in his sleep, and he can think of any number of less pleasant ways to die.There’s a subtle shift inside his head, a sort of freeing emptiness – he feels like he couldn’t worry if he tried.
Legato breathes out and says, “I think that will work.
Anyway it won’t do you any harm.
And…if you do have another nightmare…I’ll be right here.”Knives murmurs affirmation and pulls Legato back into his arms, too sleepy to call him out on even a trace of his presumptuousness.
He has the pleasant feeling of knowing he’ll drop off any second, the exact opposite of a restless, endless night.
As the haze covers his mind like a blanket, he whispers into his servant’s ear.“One day…they will all be gone.
And when you look in the mirror, you won’t see an enemy.
You’ll see only me.”Legato’s fluttery sound of wonder and gratitude is the last thing he hears before falling into a deep and beautifully dreamless sleep.For the first time in months, he doesn’t see the suns come up.