Chapter Text
“Hey, that girl…” Meryl starts.
Roberto glances at her. He wasn’t going to bring it up, but leave it to the girl. She shoots back with something defiant, in the right.
“She looked a lot like you. Is she your sister?”
After all, they are reporters. They should be trying to gather information on the Stampede, on the off chance either one of them make it out of here to reclaim their mediocre salary and put any of it down in writing. The thing is: she’s right, the girl did look like Vash. A whole hell of a lot. Neither of them have seen Big Brother yet face to face, but if they are twins, the girl probably looks a whole hell of a lot like him, too.
Vash’s face goes through a one-two-three of emotion Roberto is too hazed with blood loss to care enough to parse. He doesn’t pause in his wrapping of the wound. Not bad, he’d said. Missed all the vitals, he’d said. And maybe a man with as many scars as Vash would know.
“Ah, you really think she looks like me?” Vash is quiet a moment, staring intently at the stretch of gauze he pulled from his pack. “I’m happy. Actually, she’s mine.”
“Your what?”
“My daughter.”
Vash’s smile is too damn bright and too damn fake except maybe it isn’t all fake. It’s the way he pulls the gauze a little too tight as he ties it off that tells Roberto he’s as close as he gets to scared about what he’s said.
“You have a child? ” Meryl asks, and usually it’s Roberto who’s sticking his whole foot in his mouth and making a meal out of it.
“Newbie…”
But Vash is unfazed. “Yeah.”
“That’s g—great. How old is she?”
He doesn’t need to count. “Three,” he says without hesitation. “Four in a little while.” His odd accent catches the words the way it almost never does, making them rough around the edges, like he’s humble about it or shy about it.
Meryl swallows audibly and tries to do the unspoken conversation thing with Roberto that she’s been trying to get going for weeks here. Roberto reads her loud and clear and it’s only because he’s feeling magnanimous about it that he asks for her, “So Knives. He take her?”
“No. We all agreed. Well, sort of.” He shifts, eyes wrinkling as he scratches some non-existent itch on his shoulder. “Nai takes better care of her than I could.”
Roberto laughs. And then remembers his guts aren’t all where they should be and regrets it. “No offense, but your brother doesn’t seem like a big fan of kids.”
Vash laughs, too, but it lacks his usual humor. “He’s good with her.”
But he still won’t meet their eyes.
Vash comes to Knives of his own free will, beyond Conrad’s wildest predictions. But then, their knowledge of the Independents was never what it should have been. What it needed to be. Even a hundred years of research have done little to clarify those points beyond biology. Motivation. He knows what motivates Knives: love. And he knows what motivates the younger: love, also.
It’s when the two come together that study fails him.
The younger shows up out of the night, through the front door of all places. He knocks. Conrad hears of this later from Legato who simply cannot believe what an idiot Knives has for a brother. Zazie is thrilled—Zazie pulls him right in.
Knives is something altogether else.
By the time Conrad is called from his lab, it’s to the sight of the little brother sitting quietly in the wide sitting room that was once Conrad’s own study before all that was his was ceded to Knives. His arms are wrapped around his body peculiarly, green over red. Knives’ arms are folded too. He’s standing a tense two yards from Vash, no more.
Knives swivels his head to Conrad as he walks in, and Vash does, too, in one motion. They are twins, despite everything.
Vash, he realizes, has been crying.
“Examine him,” Knives orders. And Conrad does.
A miracle. He didn’t believe in such thing until the first tank plant birthed Tesla. Now, a second miracle, though neither of the twins seem to think so.
Vash has a permanent, drawn expression on his face, like he’s going to be sick. Knives is peculiarly quiet, less like he has nothing to say and more like he thinks he might be in trouble for something. It’s such a foreign look that Conrad can hardly believe that’s what it is—until he watches Knives unfold his arms and then think for a full minute before laying a hand on Vash’s shoulder.
He flinches, violently. Knives doesn’t remove his hand.
“I want,” he says, “to talk to the doctor alone.”
The doctor. Like Conrad hadn’t known them both before they knew anything. One of the precious few Rem trusted with this secret, before the fall.
Knives’ jaw tenses visibly. He raises his head and, wonder of wonders, withdraws his hand. Wordlessly, he walks from the room. The door shuts behind him. At last, Vash looks at him, for the first time since he stripped his jacket and shirt and undid his belt. His pile of clothes sit beside him on the long couch. He keeps one hand bunched in the red fabric. His eyes are bright without the glasses on.
Conrad wonders what it says about him that this is the twin that inspires the greater measure of fear in him.
This one is breakable. And yet there is defiance in him. If he breaks, it will be by his will alone. This is Knives’ only weak point.
“It’s not going to work, right,” Vash says. “It’s going to die.”
“No,” says Conrad with some shock. “I’ll have to run more tests but there’s no reason to think so.”
“But—” his gaze falls; his grip on the cloth tenses, “--we’re brothers. And that. That doesn’t work.”
DNA, he realizes. That’s what the boy is talking about. Genetic errors. Mutations.
“You aren’t human. Neither of you are.” They have a sample size of three for the chromosomes of Independent plants and even an entire team of his best scientists could not wrap their way around the question of what they were. “It doesn’t work the same way. The child will be healthy.” It will, in all likelihood, be as they are, and Tesla was. Perfect forms, near perfect copies. He wonders if it will copy Knives’ production or Vash’s odd reverse of it. If it will present as any gender, or none. The notion of it is outdated, unable to encompass what they are—clearly, if this has happened.
He wonders at that, with an unscientific curiosity: how, exactly, has this happened between these two?
“You don’t know that.”
Very softly, and hopefully so softly that the man listening in the hall won’t hear, he says, “I can remove it.”
Vash’s jaw works. “No,” he says finally, and it’s well that he does. They both know Knives would never allow it. Not if the child is his. “Nai,” he says softly. Conrad waits for him to finish the sentence, but he doesn’t, and then the door opens.
Knives walks through, as if he was called for, and evidently he was. This time he doesn’t hesitate to put a hand on Vash’s shoulder, except he slides it up to his neck. Vash tips against it oddly, letting Knives’ wrist support his head for a moment. Words pass between them, of one sort or another.
This is how it happened. He sees now.
Knives’ odd absences—those that returned them no plant, no research, nothing of value. Well, they’ve brought him something of value now. He wonders if the younger was given a choice in it or if Knives’ will is for him as it is for all of them: inexorable.
“Leave us,” Knives says.
Conrad does. When he turns to close the door behind him, they are still as they were: hand in hair, cheek against wrist, eyes locked.
“I can’t do it,” Vash says. “Look at me.”
He isn’t weeping now, but he was. His eyes are red-rimmed. It’s rare they’re otherwise. In the month since he came to them, Conrad has seen him do little other than worry. He explained it to Knives as best he could in human terms, loath as Knives is to acknowledge that his brother is, in more ways than he can understand, human. Hormones, perhaps. Anxiety. Common eventualities with a situation so unexpected.
It does nothing to assuage Knives. He’s formed himself into a cage around his brother, metal and body both. “You can,” he says almost sweetly. “Even humans can do it.”
“I’m not human,” Vash says.
The role reversal would be funny under any other circumstance. “No, you’re better,” Knives says, and then glances to the side. “Conrad,” he orders almost gently.
What he’s ordering is nebulous. It doesn’t matter. Conrad comes closer, as close as he dares. The child isn’t due for some time still, by every metric and standard Conrad can hold this to—which isn’t many. It still isn’t showing. It might never. He thinks of Tesla’s abnormal smallness when she first appeared, far smaller than any human child, as if to make up for the speed at which she later grew.
“The tests are normal. There’s nothing wrong with the child.”
Vash grips his hair. “There’s something wrong with me!” he almost shouts. It’s the first time Conrad has ever heard him raise his voice.
He must be talking about his body. The metal holding his spine together, the facet of his arm which is empty of its prosthetic now, the grate over his heart and the wreckage of scar on his shoulder. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” Conrad assures him.
“Vash,” Knives murmurs, nose to cheek, lips to mouth. “Shhh.”
Vash’s fingers are digging into his brother’s arm. “I know—I know, but—”
“Shh,” he repeats, as if soothing an animal. Knives folds over him. They become one thing. “Shhh. Conrad—” He nods to the door.
Conrad takes the dismissal, happy to do so when a soft sound follows, wet and muffled. A moan.
He wonders when it started. How long it took Knives to seek his brother out again after he took his arm, and how long after it took for them to reach this intimacy. Or if perhaps even before they left the ship, they were doing this. The miracle then is that it took a century and a half for a child to come of it. Had Rem known, it would have broken her. Conrad can feel nothing for it. Not disgust, nor condemnation. A distant, scientific fascination, perhaps.
The sound of their coupling chases him down the hall. He cautioned Knives against it, suggested that his brother’s body might be too weak for such exertion, but Knives had only smiled in his placid way and said, It calms him.
How an act that leaves bruises could be calming is beyond him. At every check up, Vash’s body has new marks, pressed into his hips, bit into his neck and thighs, but if he has objections, Conrad has never heard them voiced. Vash cleaves to Knives. They’re never parted now.
A growl echoes up the corridor behind him. Legato, coming toward him, pauses. His expression sours. “Again?” he asks.
They aren’t human. They aren’t quite animals either. Perhaps they are something better and worse than both.
For three months, they remain together in waiting. Vash keeps to his brother’s side; the rest of those inhabiting the tower see little of him. What goes on behind closed doors is easy enough to guess. It is, Conrad supposes, some sort of hundred and fifty year honeymoon. Legato moans about it endlessly. Why that creature, why that weak thing, and Zazie laughs. Don’t say that in front of Knives.
No. Indeed: no one says anything to Vash in front of Knives. Or about him. Zazie gets away with talking to the boy at all because, irony of ironies, Vash is fond of children and child-shaped creatures.
Conrad sees him daily. His other work surfers for his absence, but he studied plants for a reason. This is the first time this process has been studied. The research will likely die with him, but it dulls none of his interest. It’s remarkably human and utterly different. They don’t have the same organs as humans, but whenever Conrad suggests a more invasive series of tests, Knives looks at him as though he might be expendable after all.
“So, if this works, he’s going to make a baby plant. I didn’t know they could do that,” Zazie muses, perched on a control panel not made for sitting on.
“No one did,” Conrad says.
“Oh.” Zazie kicks his legs. “Then I guess Knives really likes fucking him, huh?”
Conrad can’t dignify that with an answer. If he had one it would be: obviously.
“Is little brother going to be okay?” Zazie asks it with indifference, but it may be that in his endless wavering of loyalty between humans and plants, he has a single favorite.
“Yes.” He says it to make it so, still focused on the tests he’s been poring over all night. Soon now. Very soon. He and the child both will survive. There is no alternative.
In his arrogance, he truly believed this.
It is the first and only time he hears Knives in pain. It is, since the slow death of Tesla at his hands, the worst night of his too-long life. The boy—the man—on the bed is bleeding and has been for some hours. His brother is beside him, hand over his chest, as if in the even that Vash’s heart stops beating, he will be there to will life back into it. With some shock, Conrad realizes that these two are the closest he ever got to children of his own. And what would a parent not do for a child?
There is a choice to be made. Vash’s eyes have been closed for a long while now, so he leaves it to Knives, but he shouldn’t have bothered asking; the answer is unequivocal.
“Save him,” Knives orders in a voice so tight it no longer has any veneer of humanity to it. “If you can’t save them both.”
There’s no hesitation. Even now, even in this moment, Knives loves a single thing. He will make a worse parent even than Conrad did. “I will try.”
Knives doesn’t look at him. “No. You’ll succeed. If he dies, I will spend the rest of my days on this worthless planet hunting your kind to extinction.”
Conrad wonders if he would stop there, or if the planet’s original inhabitants would be treated to the same fate. If grief makes monsters, what does it make of man who already is one?
“Sorry,” Vash murmurs with surprising coherence. His eyes open, red around the edges.
“Stop apologizing,” Knives all but snarls at him.
Vash’s eyes roll to Knives. He’s smiling. “It’s okay, Nai.”
It isn’t. In no universe is their an outcome here that doesn’t end in wreck and ruin. But then Vash’s gaze slides to Conrad. “Right?”
He’s often thought that of the two of them, Conrad, in his guilt, went with the wrong one. Vash was the weaker of the two, the needier. He was wrong. Vash in this moment, even in this moment, is the stronger of the two.
For the first time in a long time, Conrad has a reason to try other than his guilt.
They live. The both of them. But not without compromise.
Their original theory of plants and No Man’s Land bears out: there is something fundamental about the planet that disagrees with them. This is why they fail. The child will, too, without intervention. It’s a theory he’s held for some time in his pet project for the betterment of humanity; until now, he’s lacked a proper subject. The addition of human DNA, he believes, will solve this. He has a subject in hand already—a thing more survivable than the average of its kind. All of this he explains to Knives in private. Vash is with the child, as he always is now, in its weakening health.
It’s testament to love that when he tells Knives what they’ll have to do to keep it alive, he merely nods. “Do it. If it will keep him happy, do it.”
And even here, Conrad thinks, even in this moment, his love extends to a single being. He pities the child he will save. He pities himself for what he has let himself become.
Most of all, he pities Vash.
For a little while, he can imagine that Knives is, for the first time in his life, truly happy.
The child gains a dark eye but retains the twins coloring. It can go no more than three days without needing to sleep as a tank plant does. On these days, Vash stays with it, seated on the floor with his legs crossed, talking to himself and to it both. He seems in no hurry to name it or assign it gender. They he comes to call the child in a peculiar approximation of the way Knives speaks of all plants: like a collective. It is no less precious.
When Vash waits with them beside the tank, the true surprise is that Knives is likely to be found there, too. They talk, the two of them, and not only to the child but to each other. Quiet conversations. Laughter. Knives can laugh.
A two, now three person universe. Exactly as Knives wanted it.
His efforts in collecting plants lag and then drop off entirely. Conrad has no complaint; it allows his research to progress unobserved. The hardest part of his job becomes finding ways to keep Legato busy such that he has something to do other than stare out windows and lament the vagaries of this reality. Zazie goes with him in the hopes that they will annoy each other into some form of success in their given mission, which is no more or less than finding every backwater town, farm, and pit stop with a functioning or non functioning plant.
The thought he first had, that this pair are as close to his own as he has come or will come, haunts him.
He is there when the child takes their first tottering steps, from Vash’s arms into Knives’ at two months. He’s there when they say their first word at six months. He’s there at eight, when they’ve gained a will, a personality, a favorite color, enough speech to make these things known.
He’s there at ten months, when she creates a twist of metal from thin air for the first time.
Knives is seated on the floor, the child in his lap. Vash is nearby, not quite hovering, though he does tend to. He has eyes for little else, though Conrad notes a series of bruises on the back of his neck when he dips his head. He has time for at least one other thing.
Knives is letting metal twist out from his fingers, letting it catch the light to Elendira’s delight. She watches intently, with an echo of Knives’ stillness and dignity. It’s odd in a creature that can’t string together a sentence. When she reaches for it, Vash flinches, and Knives jerks it out of reach before he dulls the edge. “See?” he says to her. What exactly she’s supposed to see is unclear, but she nods, as if some deep wisdom is being imparted to her.
She looks at Vash. “Can you?” she asks.
He laughs. “No, I can’t. Only d—only Nai can do that.”
“Oh.”
“Vash can do something much more incredible.”
He raises a skeptical brow. “Can I?”
“Yes. Vash made you.” Knives’ arm tightens around the child; she tips her head back to stare at him. And then she laughs and scrambles out of his grip.
He lets her go easily as she runs to Vash and wraps her small arms around him. In human terms, she seems to be no more than three years old. It’s incredible progress, despite the slowing her human DNA seems to have contributed. The odd eyes are the only outward sign; she has no notion of her full biology yet and if Knives has his way she’ll never know. Conrad has taken to observing the three of them when he can get away with it. It’s vanity. Perhaps he’ll be able to convince himself that he’s done right by either of them or the child. Done something right. One thing.
She hangs off Vash the way she never would off of Knives, and leans in close to his cheek, to whisper something in his ear. A small hand cups around her mouth to keep it secret. Vash presses a hand to her back as he listens.
His expression freezes in place, and then—panic. He holds her that bit tighter, and glances between Knives and Conrad. “You what?”
She pulls away and raises a hand. From nothing, from nowhere, from thin air and another dimension, a wire of metal appears and begins to reweave over and over on itself until it resembles nothing so much as a nail.
“See?” she says, still seeking no one’s approval but Vash’s. His smile comes, but Conrad reads it for what it is: the sure knowledge that his daughter is a thing unlike him. Distance and pride and fear in equal measure.
“Elendira,” he says roughly. “That’s amazing .”
She wraps her arms back around his neck and turns shyly to Knives who is watching placidly. He nods and smiles. “See?” he says to Vash. “You did well.” He rises from his seat and goes to them. “Show me,” he tells Elendira, and she does. Knives allows his blades to appear, a half dozen in loose array around him. The girl makes two, and three, and by four seems to flag.
The younger brother sits there, in the cage of metal the two of them have made, and not once does his smile falter.
Later, he knows what this was: the first crack.
Knives senses it. More often now, Conrad is called to take the girl for an hour, for a night, for a day. On an evening when she’s in the tank that is still required to sustain her life, they join one another in the room with the piano. What begins as melodious echoing down through the halls and into the lab becomes discordant, random—the younger’s voice is nothing like Knives’. Nothing of his calm and composure. And the high cry of it always sounds more of pain than pleasure.
It must be pleasure. He wouldn’t stay if it were otherwise. They wouldn’t be in this situation if it were otherwise.
For his own sanity, he has to believe that.
Only once does he witness this for himself, by pure bad luck and terrible chance of walking into his own study at the wrong time. It’s the silence that fools him.
The younger is seated on the desk—on Conrad’s desk—with his shirt pulled up and held between his teeth. The image sears to his mind: drool, the fluttering black of his eyelashes, against the high red of his cheeks. Knives kneeled on the floor, wide hands on his thighs, a leg hitched over his shoulders and crooked around him to keep him in close, his face buried between the younger’s legs. The smell of the room was overwhelming, and yet nothing like human sex. Too metallic, too sweet, too strange.
At the sound of the door, Knives rears back and turns his narrowed gaze to Conrad. His bangs are fallen over his forehead, dripping damp. A line of wet trails down his chin. He wipes it with the back of his hand that does nothing to dispel the image. In the half second it takes Conrad to close the door again, the tableau sears into his mind.
He finds in it a terrible humor. So, there is one man Knives’ will kneel for. And yet it will do nothing to save either of them from what’s coming.
Two months later, Legato and Zazie return. Their list is exhaustive. Every plant and every dying plant—every dead plant, too. Plans a hundred years in the making are coming to a head and Knives is playing house with the pawn he means to sacrifice for an ideal. He will drive himself mad with this ending, and Conrad will be able to do nothing but help him on his way there.
Knives is sitting in the sun against a window on the upper level, his head tipped back against the sear of sun coming through the glass. He's sleeping, or pretending to. In his arms, Vash lies in a sprawl. Elendira is sleeping against both of them, head tipped into Vash’s lap. At a year, she appears no more than four. Neither Knives nor the girl require sleep—which is why it’s so humorous that Vash seems to be the only one awake.
A book is sitting open in his hands. Conrad recognizes it as the one Knives still obsesses over. If he knew what humans on earth had done for that book, he might have more caution with it.
“Reading?” Conrad asks.
Vash smiles at him, though there’s a pinch in his brow. “Trying to.”
“It’s a heavy book.”
Vash lifts it a couple inches. “You’re telling me.” It isn’t what Conrad meant, and they both know it. He lets it fall back to his legs. “I tried to read it when we were kids, but I guess I’m not much of a reader.”
“Not many people read that one for fun.”
“Nai did.”
“Can I speak to him?” Conrad isn’t sure why he’s asking permission, but Vash has the sort of demeanor that makes one want to make him happy. Knives forces compliance; Vash begs it. He nods and turns his head, whispering something quiet to his brother who comes awake as if he was ever otherwise and presses a kiss to Vash’s open mouth. It’s lingering. Doting. Instead of disentangling himself from his brother and their child, he allows his gate to slide from around his waist as he rises. Vash resettles against it, Elendira more fully in his arms. He gives them both a small wave as they leave the room.
Out of sight, Knives’ smile drops from his face. Out of earshot, he stops. “I hope this is important.”
Conrad hands over the sheaf of papers he’s carrying. The report is cleaned up from Legato’s too-small too-dark scrawl and Zazie’s chaotic attempt at writing and spelling with hands controlled by a hivemind. It lists in perfect rows statuses and locations. Knives scans down the list, reading faster than even Conrad could.
“We don’t have any time left,” Knives informs him, as if Conrad was the one who spent the morning dozing with his lover.
“No,” Conrad confirms. He glances back to the room where Vash and Elendira are resting. Knives’ gaze follows his. “What will you tell him?”
“Nothing.”
Nothing.
In his singular love, Knives loses sight of many things. It is a terrible irony, Conrad thinks, that the thing most obscured is the object of that love. Knives has formed an ideal of that thing and though he’s shared a womb, a bed, blood, and a child with Vash, he understands little of his brother.
Vash is his twin. His ideals make him no less intelligent than Knives, no less quick, no less able. No less stubborn and determined.
And Vash has seen more of people. Vash knows when he’s being lied to.
Knives nods to the girl in Vash’s arms. “She needs care.” His smile is hard-edged. “Will you let your humans put her in a vat? Will you let them use her?”
Vash is silent. His eyes are obscured behind the glasses and the glittering red of the hanging lanterns that line the hall he was walking toward that ends in the lower exit from the facility, out into July City.
“You can’t leave,” Knives repeats placidly. “She can’t. It’s impossible.” Knives is calm, still, assured in this victory.
“Okay,” Vash says softly. He sets the girl down. Knives watches the motion with widening eyes. “Nai and I are going to talk for a little while, so why don’t you go with Conrad?”
She looks confused. Conrad takes her hand. Knives barks a warning at him: “Leave her.” He pretends he hasn’t heard. Vash kneels. He kisses her forehead.
“I love you. I love you so much,” he tells the girl.
Their world is falling apart around them. The insular family, the year of happiness they had. Knives begins to laugh.
“Humans,” Knives is saying in disbelief. “You’re choosing humans over your own daughter. Over your own brother.” His laughter becomes manic. Vash doesn’t blink. His expression is fixed.
The girl’s grip on his hand tightens. Conrad keeps his steps steady as he walks her down the hall.
“You’re choosing, too,” Vash says.
“I’m choosing us. ”
“Then that doesn’t include me anymore.”
“You’ll be back.”
“No, I won’t,” Vash murmurs after a moment. Conrad believes him. It’s Knives’ deepest flaw that he cannot.
Behind them, the sound of metal sliding against metal, sliding against air, echoes sharply. Conrad pauses to pick the girl up, swinging her into his arms. He presses her face to his chest when she tries to look over his shoulder.
Knives' voice is faint when it comes. “I’m not letting you leave again.”
The sound of Vash hitting the wall is fainter still.
Vash leaves. Knives can’t look at the girl anymore.
She will grow up, Conrad thinks, to be just like him.