Chapter Text
There was always something perfect about it - that first point of contact. That moment of penetration as his blades sunk home into the welcoming embrace of his brother's flesh. In that instant, all their years apart meant nothing - they were two halves made whole. Resonant. Connected body and soul. Tied, at last, by something tangible enough it could not be ignored.
Despite all the venom he spat, all he rallied against him, there was a part of Vash that must recognise it too, because he surrendered so easily. The meat and blood of him understood what his mind could not. His nervous system did not perceive an invasion, it perceived a shared bond. All too readily it allowed Knives to pluck at the loose strings of his being and play them to his own tune.
He cut off all external senses.
Shut down motor control.
And just like that, Vash was still. Floating, peaceful, face serene, the glow of his plant markings casting him in a soft blue that dulled the garish red of his coat. His eyes were half lidded, lips parted as the last few bubbles of air slipped from his mouth and trailed away.
Beautiful, was what Knives thought at that moment. When his features weren’t twisted in anger, or anguish, when he only stopped fighting, Vash could be every part the angel Rem had dared to dream they were. It was a sight he wanted to burn into his memory. Vash, as he was meant to be. Vash, together with him. Connected to him.
He could feel the heat of his brother’s flesh where his tendrils were buried. Could feel their heartbeats in sync. The hum of their resonance. There was such bliss in it that Knives wanted to linger, to revel in this long coming reunion and the sensation of the life cradled in his metaphorical palm.
But there was work to be done.
A hundred and fifty years he’d waited, and on this day, the very anniversary of their birth, he would lay the path to paradise. An army of independents, carried by their sisters. The revival of their species. The power to stamp out the infestation of humans across the planet. And Vash… Vash, cured of the poison that had infected him for so long, and ready to stand at his side.
His brother’s mental barriers offered no more resistance than his skin had, parting like butter. One by one Knives rid him of his delusions. And when there was no more resistance to be found, he left Vash's consciousness safe, locked deep within, where it would stay until he was ready to be reborn into their new world.
Everything was going to plan. Their dependant sisters were connected. Vash's gate opened at his prompting, allowing him entrance to the higher dimension. Knives established a link with the core. All that remained was holding fast while the energy travelled across the train he had established, ensuring that the seeds growing within his sisters would possess the souls they needed for independence.
Then one stupid little human went and ruined it all.
It shouldn’t have been possible. He’d ignored her because it was impossible – there was no conceivable way that some nobody, some worthless parasite with nothing but a shrill voice and no way to pierce the glass of the tank, could ever undo the all the hard work he’d spent years of painstaking planning to set into motion.
And yet suddenly he was hurled from the higher plane like lint flicked from a jacket sleeve, flaring his wing and his gate in tandem as he fought to bring himself to a stop.
Synchronisation failed. Core rejected. The way closing behind him and sealing him off from the hope of his species. All those twisting black vines surged back in a riptide, and Knives swallowed down his nausea and gave chase.
He didn’t even get the conciliatory gratification of executing the woman. Vash hauled her out of the path of his tendrils before he could slice her to a red mist, deflecting the blow.
But those vines... the air around them howled. They rushed. Compressed. Gathered in the palm of Vash’s hand, forming a strange crystalline cube.
Power given form. The energy he’d been robbed of, the one he needed.
“It’s over,” his brother said. “Your plan was a failure, Nai. This ends, right now.”
But it wasn’t over – not with that cube still in play.
He could fix this.
He could restart.
“Give me that,” he snarled, lunging.
His brother was never one to surrender his favourite toys though.
It wasn’t a graceful fight – they slammed into each other with more fury than finesse. Bullets pinged against blades. He charged Vash straight through a wall and the fool had the audacity to bite him as they grappled for the cube, then rubbed salt in the wound by hurling him into a row of shelves.
He followed him out the window he crashed through. They faced off beneath the open stars, stepping and retreating, the ebb and flow, making a slow path across the roof.
There was an irony to how ended.
That the woman who had been Knives undoing doomed his brother just the same. If she’d had any sense, she would have fled while she had the chance, but she chose to pursue. She chose to be there. And when she lost her balance, sliding down the slope of the roof toward the sheer drop below, it was here that Vash made his fatal mistake - he allowed himself to be distracted.
Turned to look.
That was all the opening Knives needed to slip a blade through his defences and pierce his calf. He drove it all the way out the other side and into the metal ground, pinning him in place.
Vash roared in pain. His hail of bullets were enough to fend off the first tendrils that came for him, but when the chamber clicked empty it was only a blunt object in his hand. He couldn't dodge. There would be no more of his ridiculous acrobatics. No distance to safely reload.
The rest was an inevitability, even if Vash thrashed and flailed in a pitiful attempt to bat him away - once Knives sunk his blades into his upper back there was nothing he could do to prevent his control from being overridden.
He slumped. Strings cut.
Both their hearts were beating fast, an off rhythm drum that evened as they fell naturally into synch.
Sleep, Knives told him through their bond. I have you. All will be well.
Vash screamed at him in the mindscape he was dropped into, a wretched cry, half rage and half despair as he attempted to chase him through the twisting corridors of the ship they had once grown up in.
Nai, he pleaded. Nai, don't do this! I have to release the energy somewhere safe, you have to let me-
Knives left him there, confident he would not know how to find his way out without another unwelcome interruption. There was no sign of the human woman on the roof anymore so she must have plummeted to her death. Saved him the trouble of disposing of her.
Stooping, he collected the cube from Vash's unresisting fingers, examining it for a few triumphant seconds before returning his attention to his twin.
The glasses on his face were cracked. Knives plucked them off, tossing them away. The gun… The gun, he should probably discard too, but he recognised the model as the same one he'd pushed into Vash's hands the day they'd first reunited after the fall. It was a piece of sentimentality he didn't mind seeing him indulge in, so he tucked it back into his holster for the meantime.
Blood splattered the metal panels of the roof where he'd pinned his leg. He regretted the necessity, just a little, even if Vash was entirely to blame, and Knives blunted his tendril to minimize the damage when he extracted it.
After that there was no sense in further delay. He hoisted Vash by the tendrils still embedded in his back, and turned.
“I have it, Doctor,” he said, holding the cube up for Conrad to see. “Tell me how to use it. Get us back on track.”
He wasn't sure why the man had chosen to follow them outside. He didn't look like he wanted to be there - his hands gripped the neatest support like he feared a strong gust of wind would sweep him from his feet and cast him down to the glittering lights below.
Conrad swallowed. “The energy is unstable.”
“So you already said, but how do I use it? How do I…” He waved the cube at his brother's limp figure. “How do I put it back, so we can restart the procedure?”
“You can't.”
Knives voice went dangerously cold. “Can't?”
There were very few amongst the Eye who would dare to tell him ‘no’. Even Conrad, who had known and served under him for nearly a hundred and fifty years, usually took a little more care to suggest an alternative rather than outright refuse a request.
“There's no time,” the man insisted. “Trying to force it into him may kill him, and if there's a blowback it will take us all out. You need to get rid of it before it explodes-”
He bared his teeth, tightening his grip on the cube. “No! This, this is mine. My way back to the higher dimension.”
“Knives-”
“I'm not going to be denied! Over a century I've waited for this day, I'm not abandoning-”
“I'm not saying-”
“-my cause, just because you're too stupid to put together a solution. You're a scientist. What use are you to me if you can't-”
“You don't need that energy!” Conrad cried. He held his arms up, calmingly, placatingly. “Vash… Vash can generate more. He'll need time to replenish his reserves, but we can try again, I guarantee it.”
The spare tendrils that had been whipping around their feet drew to a stop. Knives narrowed his eyes. He looked at the cube in his hand. His brother. Conrad. The cube again.
“Then this is not the end?”
“No. No, it's not. Just… just help me get rid of it, while there's still time. Our flight systems are undamaged, if we can get enough height, move away from the city, drop it when we're out of range-”
“Out of range?”
Conrad hesitated. He’d realised his mistake, but he still murmured, “The blast zone…”
“Are you protecting these parasites?” Knives scoffed.
He came a step closer, twirling the cube idly in his grip. He could see the man’s disgusting sweat reflected in its crystalline surface. “Would it bother you, Doctor,” he asked lowly, “if I were to drop it right here?”
It clearly took effort for him to tear his gaze away. “I suppose not. Though the… loss of resources would be unfortunate.”
Someday, Knives would kill him.
But not this one.
He flicked a tendril in the direction of the nearest hatch. “Go. Get us the height necessary, then, and I will tell you when we're ready to depart.”
It was blessedly quiet without his nattering. Just him and Vash, alone on the roof in that gentle lull. They’d spent nights like that a long time ago, turning off the artificial sky in the geodome so they could sit and try to map out the constellations. They could have done it in the day, too, but then Rem might join them, so he’d always insisted they sneak out when she was sleeping. Vash hadn’t minded. It had been quite thrilling at one year old – having secret nighttime outings.
He could have tried poking his way into his brothers’s mind and stirring up the memory, but they would argue, and that would taint the peace of the moment, so Knives passed the time in his own way by cutting Vash’s coat to ribbons and feeding it to the wind. It was sacrilegious for him to be adorning himself with SEEDs patches.
When the ship lurched and began to rise, Knives brought him with him to the edge and stood there watching as the tightly packed buildings and neon lights of July city shrank slowly but surely away.
He’d hated it. This place. All that sin, that excess. The squalling mass of humanity. But it had also served as a reminder.
He kept the withered corpses of his dead sisters above his piano for the same reason.
Taking one last look at the crystalline cube, Knives held it out. And let it fall.
Vash was safely stowed away in one of the tanks in Conrad’s lab. The chemical solution would help to heal the hole he’d punched through his leg, as well as any less apparent injuries, though his upper back was no cause for concern. The skin there had sealed over with barely a blemish when Knives finally disconnected his tendrils. He drew a strange satisfaction from the sight, which seemed to him to be evidence that they were always intended to join in such a way.
“It’s not that different from fusing,” Conrad remarked, like he somehow knew what he was thinking and decided he had to spoil his fun.
Knives pretended to inspect Vash’s revolver rather than replying. He wasn’t sure where he would keep it yet, but he would find somewhere. When his brother was ready to stand at his side, Knives would hand it back to him, and Vash would smile and say ‘you kept it’, and Knives would smile in return and say ‘you kept it first’.
It was a pleasant notion.
“The dependants,” he said, changing track entirely. “Did the transfer work, for any of them?”
“No, there wasn’t time. The pregnancies are still viable, but not as independents. Should I begin termination?”
They would have been the first children of the new world. The revival of their species.
But he could not, in good conscience, usher in a generation of helpless bystanders to a war their very survival hinged upon. That would be cruelty.
“Is stasis an option?”
Conrad scratched at his moustache. “Yes, I think that could work. I’d need a few days to set it up, but we have the leeway.”
Knives let out a breath. “Good,” he said, tucking Vash’s gun into the folds of his cloak. “See to it, and alert me when my brother is ready for us to proceed with the plan.”
The ark was not much different in flight than it had been at rest. A gravity plant could keep them aloft without the noisey hum of smaller crafts, and if Elendira wasn’t at the helm then they remained level and steady as they cruised over the open desert. The only real difference was a lack of comings and goings without the elevator shaft to accomodate them.
Knives thought that an improvement.
He didn’t bother himself with the details of lower ranking members of the Eye. They served some purpose, he was sure, but they might as well be ants as far as he was concerned. They were all expendable, and equally indistinguishable from one another.
Every single day they would be riding up and down the elevators like he’d put them there just so they could cavort about the city below, and he would idly dream of cutting the cables, but end up playing piano instead. Now they kept to the halls in silence, bowing low when he passed. It didn’t make him like them any more, but he hadn’t fantasied about kicking any of them off the side of the ship either.
The only real irritant Knives had to deal with at present was the fact Conrad still insisted on the need to wait. Vash was not ready. His energy readings were too low. They could not access the higher plane until he could sustain a portal, reattempting the plan too soon would only lead to Knives being expelled from the core early, and create further setbacks.
He was already sick of hearing the same tired explanation every occasion he asked.
Sometimes he lingered long after the man was done talking and just stood in front of the tank Vash floated in, staring at his twin. Sometimes for hours. He suspected the behaviour unsettled Conrad, even if he was too polite to mention it, but what else was there to occupy him? He knew exactly what needed to done to bring about paradise, and he couldn’t act on it. It was just waiting. Waiting. More waiting.
It had reached a point where Knives was genuinely thrilled when Conrad called him from the lab two weeks into their voyage.
Right up until he broke the news.
Vash was awake. And, currently, making a less than subtle attempt to leave.
That shouldn’t be possible. Knives had been certain he’d trapped his consciousness far too deep to claw his way out without assistance. He’d visited him barely a handful of hours prior, and there had not been even the faintest flicker of emotion on his brother’s face when he gazed up at him. Not a single twitch of his fingers. He was dead to the world, and so he’d expected him to stay, until Knives had need of him.
It shouldn’t. Be. Possible.
But if he wanted answers, he supposed the quickest way to get them was to go to the source.
Vash hadn’t made it all that far from the lab. Knives could only assume that Conrad had distracted him somehow, because there was nothing sluggish about how he strode down the corridor – it was the confident march of someone who had somewhere to be. Steady, and relentless.
He stopped when Knives barred his path though.
They regarded one another.
Vash’s hair was plastered flat, tank fluid soaking his black shirt and pants, sticking the fabric to the lean muscle of his figure and dripping a wet trail behind him.
“How are you awake?” Knives asked.
There had been no human woman banging on the glass to disturb him this time, he was sure of it.
Vash smiled a wan smile. “It’s a secret,” he told him, ever infuriating.
The first thing he’d said to him and Knives already wanted to grab him by the collar and shake him, like there was ever a possibility of rattling some sense into that empty head of his.
“What are you doing, then?” he tried instead. “What are you hoping to accomplish here?”
“Finding my gun would be a nice start.”
“Your gun.”
“Uh huh.”
“And after that?”
Vash shrugged. “After that I think I walk out of here.” He flicked a bead of liquid from his brow before it could drip down into his eye, his tone taking on a low note. “I came to July to negotiate, but you’ve made it pretty clear your not interested. I’ll find another way. And when we meet again, I’ll stop you, for good.”
There was something building in Knives chest, and he only realised it was a laugh when it clawed its way up his throat. “Hilarious. I take it that means you won’t follow Conrad back to the lab if I ask nicely?”
Vash tilted his head the scant fraction he needed to peer behind him.
The old man was lingering at the end of the corridor, but he had the sense not approach further. Conrad was not built for violence. He was better at this – biding his time, waiting for the dust to settle and getting quietly on with his work once the danger had passed.
Vash spared him only a second’s attention before focusing back on Knives.
“Not a chance,” he told him.
He moved fast. A lunge - Knives shot a tendril out to catch him, but his brother twisted and turned the movement into a slide, passing a hair’s breadth beneath the blades and carrying the momentum forward.
It was reckless overconfidence to charge him headfirst like that. Vash should know better. Knives had more than one tendril at his disposal. He sent the second one in a blunted sweep to knock him aside and put an end to things quickly, but Vash didn’t wait for it to collide. He flicked his prosthetic wrist. His grapple pinged, rooted, and reeled him out of its way and into the nearest wall. Landing boots first, he pivoted before gravity had a chance to take hold and sprung at him again.
Knives only managed to follow some of it. He saw Vash sailing through the air. He reeled his tendrils in, trying to track his twin’s trajectory as he flipped neatly over his head. And Knives was quick, far quicker than any human could ever hope to be, but he was a fraction of a second too slow to prevent the kick that slammed into him from behind and hurled him into the wall. He didn’t even see it. Just felt the impact. That sharp burst of pain – blood in his mouth, metal dented beneath his arms.
He growled as he swung around, barely catching the strike aimed for his skull. “Fine. Remember, your brought this on yourself though.”
Vash didn’t waste breath on retorting, and Knives didn’t bother trying to reason with him. They clashed – wrecking the corridor as they went. It was infuriating. And exhilarating. And entirely meaningless. What good was speed and strength, if there was no finishing blow? It didn’t matter how many hits his brother landed, all he was doing was delaying the inevitable, because he couldn’t incapacitate Knives and Knives wasn’t letting him go until he did.
All he needed was one opening. One mistake. And then Vash was his.
He speared him on his tendrils two minutes later with a grunt of satisfaction. The perfect pleasure of wholeness – adrenaline fading, the rush of blood replaced by the twining hum of their joint song, proof of a truth there was no use denying. For all their hissing and spitting, they were never more themselves than when they came together. If they were meant to be at odds then his brother’s body would not pass the reigns to him so readily.
Conrad’s footsteps approached cautiously. Knives lifted his gaze, watching with narrowed eyes as he came to a stop a respectful two meters away.
“May I?”
Knives inclined his head in silent invitation, and the man closed the last of the distance and crouched at Vash’s side. He checked his pupils, his pulse, his ribs, his leg, and lastly dared to examine his upper back, where Knives’ tendrils were firmly embedded. The way he lingered over the area meant he was undoubtedly taking mental notes to type up in the privacy of his lab later.
“Your verdict?” Knives asked sharply, before he could get too distracted.
Conrad sighed. “He’ll have some more bruises, but his wounds from before are healed,” he said. “Don’t put him in another tank, a spare room will do just fine.”
That piqued Knives interest. “Healed? You mean he’s ready to undergo the process again?”
Conrad’s joints cracked as he got to his feet. He pushed his glasses up his nose, and said, in the mild way he often spoke, “I mean Elendira shattered her usual tank for childish dramatics, we’re still expending resources fixing the damage you and Vash made to the communal tank, and he just destroyed a third. I’d rather he break down a door next time rather than cost us valuable equipment.”
Knives considered the long gashes he’d torn along the corridor walls before promptly deciding it was none of his concern.
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“No, he’s not ready,” Conrad said. “There’s a difference between healing physical wounds and replenishing the energy needed to rip down the barrier between here and the higher plane. Have patience.”
“Resting in a tank will not help him replenish that energy faster?”
“No more than in a bed.”
He looked down at his brother, mulling the wisdom of this, but there was not much point to employing a scientist without trusting in their opinion. Conrad had not led him astray yet. Besides, Vash loved pointless human things like lying around and sleeping. Ideally he wouldn’t break free from the prison Knives spun in his mind, not again, but if he did, he might be a little more appreciative about waking up somewhere with mundane comforts rather than the weightless cold of tank solution.
“A room then,” he agreed, lifting Vash into his arms. “Locate one for me.”
“Of course.”
There were parts of the ship that Knives was largely unfamiliar with. He knew the lab, the many plant chambers, his parlour, the bridge – all the important places he was inclined to spend time in for work or for leisure – but he could hardly be expected to show an interest in crew quarters or holding cells.
He suspected it was the latter that Conrad brought him to, given how sparse the room was. The bed looked like little more than a shelf. There were sheets on it, but they seemed thin, a far cry from what he’d had in mind. He supposed he could see about moving Vash somewhere better at a later date. He probably deserved thin sheets after slamming him into a wall like he had.
Laying him down on his side, Knives took the time to remove his boots for him while Conrad hovered awkwardly in the doorway. He set them heels together, facing outward, then hesitated for a moment before unbuckling his holster too.
He didn’t care to do more with an audience.
“No one is to visit him but you,” he instructed, pulling his tendrils from Vash’s back, “and you will tell me the moment he’s ready for us to begin again.”