Chapter Text
He woke to a familiar, tender warmth in his rib cage: a forgotten nostalgia, a childhood secret. It was many minutes of drowsy haze, basking in sentimental glow, before Vash pulled his face from a too-plush pillow and found himself in Nai’s room. The resulting tumble of confusion woke his other self, somewhere on the ship.
Cold alarm leaked into Vash, a glacier melting at the pole of his head. He slid from under a weighty quilt out of bed and hit his shin on the side table nearby, then, stumbling, out of control of his own body, only accidentally dodged a thick book that toppled to the floor. Lowline fear whined in his ears, dissonance at the base of his brain.
Nai was close, physically and mentally both, and his own disorientation spilled across the bond, an unwieldy set of second senses. Vash staggered around the room blindly, crashing into a desk and chair, and nearly took himself into another table and pot of succulents if not for a flash of muscle memory, from a body that wasn’t his—or wait—
“Sir?” spoke a voice. Vash whirled and found Elendira hovering at the door, shoulders strung tightly, tentative and nervous.
“Sir?” Vash repeated blankly.
Elendira’s eyes widened. “Oh—if you prefer, um, Lord Knives—”
“Knives,” Vash echoed again, and his gaze—too focused, too grey—dipped from Elendira to himself: faintly gleaming plant marks; firm muscle; the sharp pricks of serrated vines at his shoulder blades. Horror collided into Vash like a bullet. His vision blurred, seemed to double, layered with the illusion of his own one hand in the same frozen position, trembling slightly with palm open.
Apprehensively, Vash lifted his—Nai’s—eyes to Elendira, who waited with a concerned expression so thoroughly contrasting the disdain she normally reserved for him. Because he wasn’t him—
The full force of realization detonated from somewhere behind his eyes; the recoil snapped him back into his own body. Vash doubled over in his room, his single arm wrapped around his middle, dry-heaving as his stomach turned. They had—switched? Minds, bodies? He could still feel the outline of Nai within him, a lingering poison. Vash coughed, spitting up saliva and the taste of bile, feverish with a visceral need to purge it. Because there, under the acidic fear, was delight.
“Please,” Vash mumbled. He sank against the foot of the bed, hand pressed over his eyes with enough pressure to ache, to nearly gouge. “Please don’t make me want this.”
But who was he begging: Nai or himself? Vash curled into his knees and mashed his forehead against hard bone, then knocked it there once, twice, again, again—and again—and again—mindless save a raw, snarled tangle of anger, frustration, of heart-rending grief that Nai would do this to him, would steal from Vash even his sense of self, and he was crying, or he thought he was, from a pool of yearning that wished to drown him. He wanted it out; he wanted to be himself; he wanted—he couldn’t tell what he wanted. Again, the dull pain, again, a red-purple bloom of bruise.
Then his forehead met a soft palm instead, and Vash caved inwards, his strings cut. His mind went silent, as though submerged in water. Nai’s fingers curved gently along his head, into the fringe of his hair. “Don’t hurt yourself,” he said. His voice was watery, and Vash peeked, his cheeks were sodden. It was Nai who had cried. He still was; glassy tears welled along his eyes, and in watching him, Vash felt it rise in him, too, at the sheer keen emotion he could feel from Nai, which was already half Vash’s to start.
But when Nai leaned in, arms curling around him, Vash flinched, slanting his body aside. “Don’t touch me,” he said, with little heat. It wasn’t resentful, only: “I feel like if you do, I—I might disappear entirely.”
Nai’s margins were distorted by staticky need and disappointment, prickling sharply at Vash. But after a charged moment, he backed away and allowed Vash to find air in more open space. The room was quiet beyond the hum of the ship, but Vash and Nai’s minds rattled endlessly, layers of their voices clamoring—everything unsaid, what they had, and would—each thought barely even formed before they picked it straight from the other’s mind: a cloud of a thousand conversations, a hundred accusations, a single, screaming prayer. I hate you, I love you, I don’t know what to do, how could you, it hurts, his head, is he okay, please, please don’t, at least we’re together, my soul, the reason I sought life, I would die, I would die, this is death—
“I need—” Vash broke through the fog. He took a breath, then another. “My arm.”
Nai shifted, tumult muting as he refocused. “It’s—I left it at the greenhouse.”
“Okay,” Vash said shakily. He didn’t know if he could walk. He was scared to try, unsure if his body would feel like his. It was uncanny when he pushed up finally, cool metal against two pairs of feet, with the slightest but most vexing shift in his center of gravity. He kept starting to take his next step halfway through one.
Nai trailed Vash like a stray dog, mutely padding behind. Soothing petrichor permeated the halls even more so than before, as though it’d just rained, the ground overturned into something fresh. As they grew closer, acute regret and guilt emanated from Nai, nearly as potent as the earthen scent; good, Vash thought, let him feel bad for what happened yesterday.
But when the doors slid open, Vash stilled. Behind him, Nai had halted much earlier. There was a distance between them, and the ground ahead of Vash seemed to elongate and twist, too, swirling before his eyes. Then his vision layered with Nai’s, and he saw it through memories of red haze, of fury and disappointment and frustration: the places where his blades dug into the dirt and even metal below, the stalks ripped from seed by his hands, the dried splatter on the wall where he’d hurled his harvest.
Vash stepped into the greenhouse, into ravaged earth, torn crops hanging loosely by the threads of their roots, sliced and skewered through. It was ruination. The neat rows of the farm were curved now around a cratered epicenter, from where Nai had exploded. Streaks of mud stained the walls. In places, the soil was so displaced Vash could see metal, and the wet, natural smell was severely heady, a too-sweet overripe thing: on the verge of rot, already forming decay.
A glance back at Nai had Vash suddenly feeling sorry for him. He’d been so gentle using his blades for harvest and supplied the water himself; only yesterday, he’d offered to teach Vash about the crops. How miserable they found themselves now. But Vash could ache and Nai could glean the feeling from him enough to reduce themselves to simply pain, and it wouldn’t change a thing. The blame wasn’t with Vash.
He forged in, trampling loosened soil, and found his prosthetic where Nai had placed it yesterday, half buried in dirt, like a skeleton emerged after burial. He knelt and dusted it off as much as he could, though mostly succeeded in smearing both palms.
“Will it—work still?” Nai asked, behind him.
“Yeah,” said Vash, and inevitably thought of the steps to fix the arm—opening, cleaning, recalibrating—and the last time he’d tinkered with it—Wolfwood. They both flinched.
Nai swallowed acidic jealousy. Vash felt it burn. “That’s—good,” he said finally, lamely.
Vash didn’t respond for a minute. Then: “This is the worst.”
Nai knew what he meant; he’d spent the prior pause as much in Vash’s thoughts as Vash had been. “Is it truly so awful?”
“All I ever wanted was to be my own person,” said Vash. “And it took me so long to figure out what that was. You don’t understand what it was like, growing up the younger twin, the unimpressive twin. We were the only two of our kind, and you were the one who was everything we were supposed to be. Just you. And I was nothing in comparison, had nothing of my own, not even myself. Not until I learned how to use my powers to heal. After a hundred years, maybe the reason I didn’t want to return to you, to choose your side, is because I didn’t want to just be yours again, Nai. Because I wanted to be me. And now—” He cleared his throat. “Well.”
Nai’s eyes glistened, invoking the illusion of great depth. “To be a plant is to be part of something larger,” he said. Vash’s heart sank. “I am myself, but I’m also—them. You.”
“You can’t even understand why I wouldn’t want that for myself?” Vash asked.
“But you do,” said Nai, and Vash could tell the bewilderment was genuine. “You’ve spent years absorbing plants into yourself. Do they not resonate with you? Can you not—feel their spirits? The plants don’t have souls like us, Vash. They are one, and even if we carve ourselves out of those waters for the spans of our lives, in the end, we still return to them. It’s—our nature.”
It was true, and Vash knew Nai meant it as an invitation, to better understand each other, yet he couldn’t help but hear criticism beneath. He had only ever fused with the other plants in desperation, because they’d been run dry. He loved them, yes, and considered them part of himself; but he’d never seen himself as part of them in return. Not like Nai. Vash sagged where he sat, fingers tracing the muddied grooves of his arm. Resignation coated his palette, sour poison to drip down. “Maybe we were always so different,” he said finally.
“What?”
“Maybe,” Vash said, the bleak idea gaining momentum in his mind, “all this time, we’ve been chasing a lie. Deluding ourselves into thinking there was something—some shared vision, or life, or anything—between us. But maybe we never were on the same side, Nai.”
“Don’t say that,” said Nai fiercely. “Don’t even think it.” He sat down next to Vash, right there in the roughened soil. “Vash, my side is you.”
Guilt dropped and spread into Vash at a slow, inexorable pace. “But mine isn’t you,” he said softly. “At least, not entirely. I wanted to have both.” He laughed dryly and added, “Maybe I’m the greedy one.”
“We both were,” said Nai, though unrepentant. “I wanted to be all you needed—all you wanted. For us to be…equal in that way.”
“We are,” said Vash. “But that’s the difference, too. That you wanted me and the plants. And I wanted you and the humans.”
“But…” Nai jerked his head in dissent, a sharp thing, “No, Vash. I won’t—” He took an unsteady breath, but his voice still broke over his next words, “Of all that you could want—that I would give you—” And Vash nearly flinched at the spike of jealous rage. Nai’s hand faltered halfway to Vash before determinedly pressing in, grasping Vash by his shoulder, to his neck, nearly a noose the way his thumb pressed at Vash’s jaw and made him, helplessly, look. “You are a plant,” Nai hissed. “To think of yourself as human. To allow yourself to be stolen, the way our sisters are. Have you no shame? No dignity? No thought for the ones who suffer due to the example you make of yourself? You want to be loved so badly, my poor, lonely Vash,” he sneered, “that you would allow humans to destroy us all, only so long as they thanked you for it afterwards.”
Vash could hardly bear it. He was frozen in place, sternum shattered, diaphragm avulsed, as though skewered from above and into the ground. But at the other end of Nai’s fury, after its vicious scythe had ravaged through Vash and subsided into a harsh, outraged breath, Vash found himself, almost shockingly, battered but still whole. None of what Nai had said was anything Vash hadn’t made his own peace with, long ago. Pride was as scarce as water, sometimes. He said simply, “You treat me like I’m something to own, too, you know.” He pressed his neck against Nai’s hand, reveled in the surge of tactile emotion: luxurious, smooth satisfaction; gratifying surprise; a pulse skittering in fear, from palm to throat and back again.
“You are mine,” Nai snarled, beseeching. He knew, of course: to own Vash was not necessarily to have him. His loyalties had laid for years with people who shunned him. These open arms of cooler waters, at the other end of the desert, might have laid claim by birthright but could never seem to envelop Vash entirely—to drown him quite enough.
“I’m also myself,” said Vash. “And maybe—maybe I would have given myself to you, if only you could’ve accepted that. But you never—” Vash was shaking his head, fervently trying to stave off tears. “Why do you even want me so much, if you hate the person I am?”
At last, Nai released Vash, shoving away to stand. Every thought blared with indignation; his mind wasn’t willing or able to wrap around it, an odd fracturing in the corner of Vash’s. “If I was blindly jumping from a cliff, would you not try to save me? If I turned a gun on myself? So how do you expect me to watch you throw yourself into their bullets and not try to pull you free?”
“Freedom? Oh, is that what you call deciding to kill me yourself? Is it protection to kill my friend—”
“Friend,” Nai scoffed.
“—or to make sure I’m dead enough that they can’t hurt me?” Vash said, damningly quiet. Fatigue was a second layer of skin, seeping from his pores so thickly it was a wonder Nai couldn’t see it. Or maybe he could and simply didn’t care; or maybe Vash’s weariness was catching: when Vash left the greenhouse, Nai didn’t follow.
Vash didn’t wake in Nai’s body again, but he spent most mornings of that week suspended in limbo. Nai was the earlier riser; thus Vash’s alarm became the soft echo of piano. When Vash was hungry, food arrived promptly at his door, usually carried by Livio. Passing thoughts flit across Vash’s mind like moths, fluttering dully with no aim and no perch to settle.
They didn’t see each other in person nor speak, but they didn’t need to. Impressions of Nai were painted on the air, flashes in the corners of Vash’s eyes. He watched Nai play the piano one afternoon—sitting right next to him on the bench, looking down at the keys below their fingers—all from the solace of his room, where he could then turn over in his bed and weep at Nai’s bittersweet joy that Vash would play with him or at least listen.
It was a losing battle, just one in a long war of attrition. Vash had already eroded into tiny grains, and now each of those corroded steadily, eaten into and absorbed by Nai. The half-fusion had been halted rather quickly, but it’d begun a process their souls seemingly considered natural; Vash had to actively fight some mornings, after hours merged in mind asleep, to remember himself. The plants within him helped, as did the memory of Wolfwood. After a week, he took to smoking.
They fought about that, too, from opposite ends of the ship. Nai had piqued with concern when Vash first coughed before he’d realized the cause. Then had come a mire of resentment and disappointment. Pollution, Nai’s mind had snarled. Human-made blight inking the insides of Vash, yet again. His disgust was so visceral, Vash felt the imagined tar in his lungs more than the smoke, and Nai’s frustration set it afire: that Vash would always choose the humans, that he would stain himself to be closer to them, to liken himself in their image, as if they were the gods—
It was around this time, Vash would realize, looking back, that Nai likely made his decision. Although Nai was confusingly considerate in keeping his physical distance, Vash spent much time roaming the islands of his mind. Its blustering wind and torrential waters had calmed some, to uncanny effect. The atmosphere was still but not stiflingly so. Instead, Nai’s consciousness felt…empty.
At first, Vash arrogantly theorized that his proximity had once again soothed Nai. But the lack was wrong, almost startled, as though holding its breath—suffocated. One night, dozing languidly to the sound of Nai’s memories, Vash found himself slipping deeper into that lull. They were children running, climbing trees, burning themselves on the scalding metal of a crashed ship. They were teenagers at seven years of age, Nai considering the remarkable growth of his body as he washed blood from skin, then fearing it, for the human scientists would take notice, too. They were adults in opposite lives, on opposite ends of the planet, Vash outrunning ill repute in bustling towns and Nai liberating a plant from humans though she was already dead, hanging her above his instrument, marking his sanctum with the dread that they might’ve eaten her flesh once she stopped producing food.
Such formative worries. Such savage fears. From them was born Nai’s focal cause, and there, at Nai’s core in the annals of his mind, alongside the foreboding and suspicion that’d made him, Vash happened upon it near involuntarily. It glowed, a hopeful vision so bright it was impossible not to behold: not heaven but a garden beyond, idyllic abode, the sanctuary of mother’s bosom. Paradise, as Nai envisaged, was only what he’d dreamt, or gleaned from the comfort Vash felt around Rem. It was a foraged thing, assembled by pieces of the tiny delights Nai had collected over time, and tears stung at Vash’s eyes to witness how minimal that vision was: Vash, alive and safe; the both of them together, with the other plants; and music. It was not a grand thing. Perhaps it had been, once, the way Nai had forged recklessly, savagely toward it.
But even this, a fantasy of Nai’s most unchecked wishes, had been made diminutive, beaten by time’s hammer—by Vash’s rejections throughout. Vash could feel, beneath the glowing dream, a murkier bog of grief and shame, nauseating, filling the emptied gaps where hope had been pruned like a half-rotted branch, the desires Nai had allowed himself to give up on, seeing them as lost. He had carved his ambitions to something more focused, honed and sharper, upon realizing he could not—would never—attain it all. Vash alive would be enough; he did not need to be happy. The two of them would be together; it did not matter how, or in what state.
Nai’s pragmatism was new to Vash; not that he wouldn’t have always done what was necessary, in his view, but that once, he’d delighted in the destruction of the humans, had slaked his thirst for vengeance in their demise. That fear and fury had been quenched, molten steel drowned in cool water, and their driving force hardened into a more stoic, fatalistic determination.
But why? What had smothered Nai’s zeal? He was hardly himself if he wasn’t ablaze with passion or setting conflagration to sand, and now he felt stilled, half-frozen stagnant waters. Where once an ocean churned, a storm within a sea, Nai was ossifying from the bottom upwards, fossilized riptides and tangled currents—or rather, Vash mused, the waters disappeared as it bundled into an incoming tsunami.
For though he could only make out its silhouette, there was something beneath that surface, some abyssal maw, a wicked, ancient creature formed from decades under immense pressure, that was now being revealed to the light. Was this where Nai’s fervor had been redirected, a secret of fathomless depths? It could only be something dangerous, malicious, for it to feel so dark, absent any color, any light at all.
Was Nai planning on killing the humans? Vash? The plants? Wolfwood had said Nai was soon to enact his plan, that it was too late and had been. Vash’s mere presence, as meek as it’d been so far, wouldn’t stop him. It was a sense of finality, Vash realized. That was what he recognized in Nai. A resigned, firm resolve. A single-minded gaze set far on the horizon, shedding its skeletons of sentimentality.
It was likely, Vash knew with dreadful certainty, that Nai planned to see his vision through despite knowing that Vash would have to either thwart him or be destroyed by it. The world to ash and a nest built by cinders and scrap: Nai’s future could only be pyrrhic, if not to him but to Vash. Vash already knew he wouldn’t survive living in such a world. But he knew, too, that stopping Nai would break Vash fatally. So: either way, Vash had arrived at the end.
He tried not to let Nai pluck the thought from his mind. Each day, when Nai’s consciousness remained inscrutable, a singular tower piercing through clouds to claim heaven, and Vash found, as always, no footholds nor doors, his own resolve solidified. No matter the quiet desires of the plants. No matter the plaintive cry of Nai’s piano. No matter the dreams they shared, ones that sounded with the laughter of children before they’d learned what it meant to be apart.
Vash could no longer justify by passivity allowing Nai to forge onwards without opposition. Their lives—his, the more precious one of his twin, and the plants—could not be weighed as equal to the humans who would die. Life was not something that could be arithmetically balanced, by counting survivors against victims, aid against annihilation. Vash had tried that already, evacuating cities as Nai appeared on the edge of his consciousness or guiltily picking up the pieces afterwards, as if feeble apologies could replace missing limbs. In a sense, he had killed every person Nai had, by failing to stop him, by lying to protect him, by doing nothing at all. Perhaps he did deserve his bounty, after all.
Life was a hardy thing, especially for something so fragile. It wanted so wholly to live that it would reach through stone for sun, would squeeze water from sand. It would kill to survive. In loving life, with all its concomitant graces and sins, Vash understood the humans’ greed for plants as he understood Nai’s carnage. All this time, he’d forgiven both.
But to stand aside now, when Nai planned on destroying everyone, was to find himself on an untenable straw bridge, pretending as though he could not see what hellish sights churned below. And regardless, Vash told himself, what manner of living could even be in the aftermath? What paradise could possibly grow from rotted roots? It did not matter how many seeds were planted in scorched, poisoned soil.
Vash had sworn never to take another life, but perhaps this, too, could be an act of preservation, the way a plant must be pruned to thrive—the way Nai had sliced his arm off to save his body. That missing limb ached now, the prosthetic’s attachment points grinding into his nerves. The void was seeping into him. It already felt like death.
The longer Vash delayed, the more inevitable their confrontation seemed. Time did nothing to assuage the need; Nai didn’t miraculously relent, and the weight of Vash’s decision tightened around his neck every day. Either the guilt of pardoning Nai would strangle Vash or the guilt of fratricide. Was there a word for the murder of one’s own twin? Perhaps nothing could abbreviate so immense—so hideous—a sin. It was an evil that Vash was forced to dwell on, let his bones stew into.
This was why he’d come to July in the first place, before he’d distracted himself with a pitiful attempt to save Nai. Wolfwood had accompanied Vash to stop Millions Knives, his benefactor and god, then died for it because of Vash’s hesitance. His fallen body was now a wall at Vash’s back. He could no longer turn and run into the past. The crossroads had disappeared over the horizon, and Nai had made Vash’s decision for him.
If Vash didn’t act soon, eventually Nai would seek him out, impatience winning over this apologetic attempt at privacy, and the sight of him would douse Vash’s willpower. It had to be now, or it wouldn’t happen at all.
Nai had confiscated Vash’s revolver when he’d first brought him here, but Vash searched Nai’s mind to find its location then reclaimed it from his desk. He knew Nai noticed him doing so, but it was past Vash to care about stealth. What secrets could remain between them?
By the time Vash entered the main room of the tower, which overlooked the city of July, Nai was waiting expectantly for him, and Vash’s gun was in his hand. Nai didn’t ask; Vash didn’t answer. They both knew what was happening. If anything, that wrung, resilient dream within Nai only sharpened.
“If you do this, that’s it,” said Vash, without prompting. “We can never go back.”
“Vash,” Nai sighed. “I have only ever looked forward.” He walked closer, steps echoing, and stopped right upon Vash’s gun. The barrel didn’t shake. Both of them were as steady as the hollowed vacuum of space. “Are you going to kill me?” he asked curiously.
“If that’s what it takes to save everyone.”
Nai looked almost regretful. “Even to the end, you’ll insist on misunderstanding me.”
Vash’s expression contorted. “And you who insisted on destruction from the start,” he said roughly. Before the stalled merge, he never would have sensed the typhoon beneath Nai’s fatalistic calm. Its enigma made Vash want to thrash beneath that serene surface, to be so riotous Nai couldn’t possibly lock him out. He would carve it from Nai if he had to. He would bleed the beast out.
Both their plant markings gleamed with glacial light. Vash’s vision was nearly fogged by it, an aurora along his eyelashes. Nai blurred at the edges, casting them underwater, and they sank: cerulean into cobalt into black. There was no light behind those eyes. Vash invoked his bitter resolve, the imprinted memories of Nai’s wrath as he decimated humans, and the sting of the frayed splinters between them, then pulled his arm back and whipped Nai across the cheek with his gun.
Ricocheting impact. Room in recoil. As Nai lurched to the side, his spike of shock—that Vash would strike him—and Vash’s—that Nai didn’t evade—merged to leave them both dumbfounded for a second. Vash’s own face panged sympathetically. I hit him, he realized dully. Yearning, or what survived of it, spanned the expanse of their bond only thinly. It’d been battered into something not unlike shame: that they had come to this; that they loved each other still; that they had hoped for so long for so little.
Then Nai crashed upon him in a whirlwind of blades, and Vash succumbed to reflex. He wasn’t a twin, wasn’t a brother, wasn’t a plant. He was an animal wrenching itself from argent rapids; only his foresight of Nai’s movements delivered him to air. Vash shot blindly; a window burst. He parried a strike with the barrel of his gun, then threw himself at Nai, shoulder colliding with chest, but felt the breath knocked from his own lungs enough that it interrupted his momentum, and Nai nearly slipped from his grasp as Vash tripped. A single, too-heavy step—his ankle twinging, knee jarring like a cracked gear—and Vash seized Nai around the waist, lifted him, and heaved him across the room as he’d intended.
Nai struck the frame of a window, metal to spine, and the shockwave shattered three of the immense panes on either side of him in quick succession. Glass shards caught the afternoon light, scintillating frantically, like the epileptic static in Vash’s ears.
There was no time for shock nor guilt nor regret. Nai recovered quickly, and barbed vines lashed out, launching Vash to the ground with a swipe of his legs so swift that it was as if the move hauled Vash into the floor itself, outdoing gravity. The metal of his arm clanged, and distorted feedback traveled to his shoulder. Vash heard himself groan, a punched-out cough, before he blinked the starburst dazzle of pain into fainter sparks, rolled to his knees, and found that Nai had, in fact, wrapped his blades around his prosthetic and yanked him down to double the impact.
Vash wrenched instinctively to the side as he pressed to his feet. The floor where he’d been gave way in a pristine line to Nai’s blades. Vash stared at it blankly, heart whipping. Another attack aimed at his legs; Vash deflected, then without pause, ignoring the strangled retch of his shoulder, grasped the vine to jerk Nai off-balance, though he only stumbled two steps before the blades decoupled, suspending in midair before relinking around Nai in a protective sphere.
A pause. Nai, silhouetted by the curtain of broken windows, felt like a void. The room was howling now under the vengeance of unbridled wind, and sand met splinters of glass in a great flurry. They bit at his face, any uncovered skin, but Vash weathered the stings without flinching, perhaps even grateful that they made it difficult to think.
He lunged for Nai, heedless of the net of blades, allowed the thorns to claw across his body, wrested himself free of barbs only to drive himself into the next layer, until Vash entered the hollow nucleus and chased Nai’s startled step backward to topple them both outside. One over the other, clutched together, they rolled wildly down the slope of the tower’s exterior and into choppy air, and under the cloudless sun, Vash could see Nai’s body littered with cuts from the glass, red lines mapping every limb as much as the blue.
They cluttered onto cobblestone nearly atop each other, having stayed their fall by only the force of both their wings together, one intra-dependent entity even still. But Vash didn’t hesitate; there was no returning from halfway down. He drew on instinct, and his first shot went wide, deflected only barely into the ground by a nimble blade. The chamber of Vash’s revolver rotated. The trigger pressed back against his finger. And Nai—
Nai.
Vash jolted back into himself. He was straddling Nai with a gun between his eyes, cracked stone webbing out from behind Nai’s head like a splintered halo. His own incredulity was painted all over Nai’s face. Then—of all emotions—concern flooded into Nai, and Vash saw himself through his twin’s gaze: Vash’s neck and collarbone bloomed red above his ripped collar, and countless tattered holes in his coat and shirt sluggishly leaked blood around where fabric had plastered itself to wounds. Adrenaline smothered his pain, but Vash felt Nai feel each laceration, and the bond smarted, a sad, pathetic flinch.
He thought Nai was enduring only the sensation of Vash’s injuries. But from below the faint glow of Nai’s markings and his shallow welts, the same wounds split open, the skin separating in horrible mimicry to reflect Vash’s. They stared at each other, mirrored lesions and requited bruises, and reached the same chilling conclusion in unison.
Nai gave it voice. “The fusion…” he murmured.
Vash’s mind had already skidded ahead, in dissociative calm. Of course, he thought distantly. It was nearly funny. Truly, he had always known that one’s death would mean the other’s. Why should it matter if it was only their souls or their bodies, as well? It didn’t. It couldn’t. This pause was born out of weakness, and of everything in this moment, Vash could not allow himself such watery defect. If he did, a simple word from Nai would stall him; a more earnest appeal would tumble them back into the same perpetual cycle.
Even now, Nai opened his mouth as if to say something, but Vash didn’t let a noise squeak past his throat before he lifted Nai’s head by the hair and slammed it down, hard. Vash’s vision burst in white. Pain erupted at the back of his head, and he couldn’t help his gasp, a moment of susceptibility that let Nai shove him off and stagger to standing. His eyes were wild, still pained. Vash rolled over, and clenched his hands through the muddied dirt. It bit into his skin with equal aggravation, sharp pebbles and shards of the windows.
What was the point? he thought. What was he doing? He had come here, to this wretched, cursed altar of sacrifice, to die. Every chamber of his heart already lacked life. It didn’t matter how. They were already lost. What boundless, bereft frontier was this, Nai?
Vash had dropped his gun somewhere in the fall, but the ground was littered with glass. He grasped one, edges biting into the lines of his palm. It was quick. Vash didn’t think. Nai’s hand, outstretched and desperate as he lunged toward Vash, was bleeding from the cuts. His body folded in on itself, falling short of Vash, the moment the glass plunged in. Pain, and red, and No, Vash, wait— and Nai was off his knees, already pushing himself up, when Vash stabbed himself again. Blood splattered from Nai’s wound even before Vash pulled the shard out of his own body.
“Vash!” Nai snarled, roaring it nearly, a sound so primal it ripped out of him with claws, an open maw that dug its fangs in, and then Vash was frozen, immobilized by its bite. His hand was nearly at his gut for a third time, but abruptly that hand wasn’t his, and his muscles weren’t his, and his fingers, when they shakily dropped the glass fragment, weren’t his.
Nai forced him to turn onto his back then climbed atop unsteadily, so even if Vash did have control of his body, his weight and fierce, terrifying expression would have pinned him in place. Blood pulsed endlessly from his wounds to Vash’s. They were joined so thoroughly that Vash no longer knew where he began. Nai’s soul was bare to him; he had been swallowed by it.
He found himself in an expanse more black than blue but nevertheless recognizable as their plant scape. Its light was dim and in sections hazily red. They were dying. Vash didn’t know why he was surprised by it, how he could possibly dare when this was his own doing. Permanence was always an unwieldy realization; Vash had thought he’d learned its shape, an immortal being who could heal, whose family lingered in spirit after death, who had always, always had Nai. But now he had found the end of one and the beginning of a different perpetuity.
Vash felt the change the moment before he saw it. The plant-scape appeared to tilt; after a moment’s disorientation, Vash realized it was only the colors shifting, crimson bleeding to one side and cerulean to the other, until they were nearly two distinct scapes. One was being healed and the other drained for it. Was Nai using Vash to—
No, Vash realized, stunned. No, no, he struggled, and wrenched to the surface of his body to shout, “Nai, stop, stop!” But Nai’s hold was too great as it reasserted itself. Once again, Vash’s muscles went rigid. He felt the tether within them tremble, vibrating under the pressure, on the verge of snapping. No matter how Vash struggled, Nai firmly held the upper hand, and panic only drew Vash’s breath steadily shorter. “What are you—”
Half of Vash’s wounds were already closed into fresh scars. The rest were prickling as they stitched back together. But blood spilled from Nai’s injuries still, steadily, the pale light of his skin eclipsed by lava. His markings, from his heart outwards, began to rust. Vash had prepared himself for the sight, but his first instinct was nevertheless worry, then anger, then fear, none of which ended up finding anywhere to land. Nai was immovable, unfazed.
It was that damned, steely fatalism once again, leaching from him at the same weary pace as the blood. It was nearly a passive thing, as though the inevitable had been living beneath his skin, found a home there, for long enough that Nai had made his peace with it.
“Nai, don’t,” Vash said, but he couldn’t stop the cool energy being forced through his body, applying itself to his wounds from within. And all he could feel from Nai was hollow. “Don’t, please, I don’t want to—”
“Live?” Nai laughed hoarsely. “Don’t want to truly watch me die? You’re still too weak to see your plan through.” Blood spilled over the corner of his lips, and his tongue tasted it. He smiled, tinged pink. “Then let me, Vash.”
I was made to protect you.
“No—” Vash breathed. Tears budded in his eyes.
Nai’s expression contorted, seeing them. Vash could feel his pain, this piteous wail, reaching blindly like a forlorn echo. But Nai only gave a mechanical laugh and turned toward the sky for a long moment, basking in its light, blood flowing down the column of his neck, before he tilted his chin down to regard Vash with an air of distance. His hand, so broad and warm and wetted with blood from a cut at its base, pinned Vash at the shoulder, then reconsidered and moved to his neck, holding him in place by his jaw. Then, deliberately, he leaned in close.
“I could feel it, you know, Vash, when you dove into my mind searching for empathy—searching for something within me that you could save. And oh, your disappointment,” he crooned, “that I wasn’t actually blind as you thought I was, that I wasn’t ignorant—only unkind, only heartless.” His hand drew up gently along Vash’s cheek, fingertips tracing a tender line to the corner of his eye. “How long did you hope you could change my mind if only you could make me believe that humans, too, lived lives?” He clicked his tongue sympathetically. “And how devastating it was for you to find out I already knew, but simply didn’t care? Poor Vash.” He thumbed a stray tear that Vash hadn’t even known he’d spilled. “Always apologizing for his monster of a brother. Always crying for him.”
“Nai,” Vash rasped. Something deep within them was collapsing inwards. It hurt, it hurt, why was Nai—
Then Nai sagged slightly atop Vash, fragmenting. “But in the end, you did it,” he said softly.
Vash could hardly find breath. The confession—accusation—was aimed at an undefended flank. He’d thought Nai was trying to attack the humans, yet now he almost seemed like the victim, a brutalized fortress resigned to surrender.
Nai tapped Vash on the chest, right over his heart, and curled his fingers around the metal brackets bracingly. Their pulses were synced. “Ever since that day,” Nai said, and Vash plucked from his mind the sensation of their partial fusion, “I haven’t been able to—” He shook his head, biting angrily, “You’ve infected me with your pathetic sentimentality, your caring, and now—” It was terribly torn, earnest grief for a part of himself Vash realized now he’d tainted. Hadn’t this been his goal, once—to make Nai know and feel what Vash did for human life? Yet Nai’s wretched lament sundered flesh from bone, means from end.
Vash heard what Nai had left unsaid. The scales of Nai’s cause were unbalanced now, with one side given new weight. A million human deaths had once been a favorable outcome. Now, each one meant more, but they all counted as losses. And it was due to Vash, precious values from his heart delivered into Nai with such priority it was impossible to ignore. They were not his own feelings, but Nai couldn’t not feel them regardless, and they were a condemnation of everything he’d been.
All that remained in him, between those two warring sides, was this: a final, pyrrhic recourse. Nai spoke softly but bitterly, “You wondered what I could create, didn’t you? You want to know what they would have used me for?” His wing’s shadow enveloped them in deep shadow. Light danced from the mirrors of Nai’s metal blades, casting stars upon the sand. He was a god, in that moment. Heaven prostrated. “Well, haven’t I told you, Vash?” His voice was too steady; how was he so calm— “I create worlds.”
Blades punctured the ground all around them, a canopy of silver and mirrored light, and Vash felt them as Nai did, vines extending through sand and crust to mantle, and it was wrong, so wrong, that Nai could look so triumphant while he rang only of despair. The ground vibrated, the planet groaning as if roused after long sleep. Grains of sand vibrated, hovering off the ground, before a larger tremor scattered them.
Vash jerked, shoving Nai with body and mind, and at last was allowed to sit up and bear witness. Where Nai had rooted his blades, branches were emerging—tree limbs: real ones, alive ones—already blanketed with bark and softly layered with leaves, and they extended in a near frenzied state, growing thicker and hardier until each stalk was the breadth of a building and even taller. Sand rained from the sky. The branches spread and swelled, twisting and fusing together in rapid inosculation, a single massive organism grafting onto itself to form mountains and valleys.
Every sensation pounded through Vash’s body: limbs growing from him, the pain of it, and the exhaustion. His chest throbbed, breathing labored, from the stab wounds. Humans were screaming but distantly, further than the ringing in his ears. Plumes of dust, rubble, and sand veiled the city’s transformation as buildings were impaled, most crumbling but others lifting from their foundations, torn stone and metal panels hanging by sparking wires.
The branches spread past the horizon, interrupting its smooth, barren level with a towering mountain range. Through Nai, Vash could feel this world-tree extend through and over the entire planet, and nearby, a colossal branch snaked in and out of the sand, creating an enormous channel that split the ground, before it ruptured down the sides and water flooded out, a cascade sparkling and crisp and clear. So ceaselessly it flowed that a river formed, and the dried, shriveling branch disintegrated into soil and dirt, rich decomposition shaping into soft, loamy banks, not too wide but enough to till—enough to grow on.
Vash stared, struck mute by awed, awful understanding. Not only water, as Vash had assumed. Not only gravity, not only food, like the other plants. Nai’s ability was terraforming.
With it, even amongst the racket and grandeur and horror of the world’s metamorphosis, came the starkest awareness—what they would have used him for. Vash could envision it so clearly, he figured that rather than only giving imagination to fear, he was looking at one of Nai’s memories, the anxious, haunting nightmare that his cause had been born from: if he and Vash hadn’t crashed the ships, the humans would have put Nai in one of those tanks. They would have utilized him relentlessly, without pause or mercy. They would have colonized as many planets as they desired, employing Nai as a mindless tool no matter his pain, and he would have been alive and conscious but unable to escape, drowning over and over in that tank.
And—and, Nai’s nightmare besieged, they would have installed Vash right next to him, once they figured what he could do, too. He would have been forced to heal Nai time after time, even when they’d both have hoped to die. And when the humans realized it would kill Vash eventually to sustain it, and that without Vash, they would lose their planet-altering Nai, they would have fed as many plants to him as necessary to keep them both alive.
And for a hundred years, two hundred years, five hundred years, generations of humans would travel galaxies harnessing their life-force, sacrificing their sisters to smooth the gears of two increasingly ragged machines, for that was what they’d have become, then: a single tool of two parts. Eventually, their edges finally too serrated to heal, they would mercifully grind each other to red, rusted dust. It would be a relief.
And then, at last, when it was over, the human scientists would congratulate themselves on a civilization well crafted, a society built by ingenuity instead of exploitation. What a shame it couldn’t last forever, they’d sigh, and they’d toast each other with fine champagne, in glass flutes, stacking finger foods on tiny plates that would end up half-eaten then into the trash, in a building with abundant electricity. They would probably grant someone an award. There would be a speech. No one would know Nai or Vash’s names, or that they’d ever even had ones.
When Vash returned to himself, they were suspended in that weightless moment before grief, as though once more on the ships, as their home gave way to free fall. He felt them hit the atmosphere. He felt them hit the ground. Vash was going to be sick. He felt out of his own body, not even in Nai’s, but in some bleak, hopeless realm where sand slipped between his fingers on its way to bury him. The blades for destruction and his plant nature for creation: Millions Knives was death and life in one, a plant of rebirth and reincarnation. Where Vash could heal and stave off death, Nai was the acceptance of it, that all living things must die, but that death was not the end.
“Nai,” Vash sobbed, into his shoulder. They were pressed against each other, Vash’s hands around Nai, but even the anguished shake of his hands couldn’t match the quiver of Nai’s whole body, falling rapidly into shock. Red blood, red bone, red bruise. Vash tried and tried, shoving desperate energy into Nai, but none of it seemed to reach. The tether was a sallow thread.
Nai sagged into Vash’s hold, and his cheek pressed to his, slippery with blood. “You can’t heal me, Vash. I won’t let you—how many plants it would take to sustain me right now.”
“Nai, I didn’t mean—I didn’t want—”
“Liar,” chided Nai. “Vash, don’t you understand? This is it, my gift to you: the world you wished for. The price is your eternal vigil.”
Tears flowed freely from Vash. “But without you, I—”
Nai mustered his strength and straightened enough to meet Vash’s gaze. He was all Vash could see: around them, the planet was blooming into life, but Nai’s skin was greying, the glow of his markings rusted from purple to red to black, the ashes of wrath. “Hear me, Vash,” he condemned, “This is your penance. You will wander this world as a ghost, an ageless exile, and find no home. You’ll teach the humans to live by their own power and protect the plants until they choose to sleep. You’ll mend this planet’s cracks until it is as immortal as you are—until it rains and forests grow and seasons turn over.” His words were steadily unspooling, fraying. “And—and the humans will live, and the plants will be free, and you will die every day amongst them, Vash. But no one will try to hurt you.” Nai coughed wetly. “You’ll be safe.”
“Nai,” Vash wept. “Please, no.”
Nai seemed to laugh, but his breath was ragged. “Is this not what you wanted, my baby brother? No more of this torment, this torturous distance between us. No more fighting, no more running. Our sisters, safe. You—” Nai’s voice was so weak. His body slumped the short distance between them and laid upon Vash once more, and Vash’s arms hugged him closer, clutched him, and he sobbed and sobbed into his neck, as Nai whispered feebly in his ear, “Vash, I did it,” the faintest wisp of a thing, “Our paradise.”
The sky was red. Had the sun burst? “Nai,” Vash cried. “Nai!” No, Nai, please—please. Please.
But no one was left to implore, to hear him in the dark. Vash was in space again, light years away, watching the planet stare at him, the iris of an eclipsed sun, corona flaring to ring the world alight. He was burning, scorched from throat to lung.
Vash felt Nai’s spirit drain into him, but even as he grasped frantically for its strands, the sense of Nai dissolved, a heavy mist drowning itself in the vast ocean of other plants within Vash. He was indistinguishable from the whole, the amorphous cloud of their sisters. Vash reached into himself frantically, raking the waters apart again and again, a scream echoing against his ribs, but no matter how he plunged in, it only tasted like salt.
The world inverted, turned on an opposite axis. Green and blue lavishly carpeted the landscape. Already, humans cautiously approached the waters, a river sequined by sunlight. Vash stared blankly, devoid of any feeling at all. So this was the fruit borne of their labors. The seed had sprouted, and they reaped at last a bountiful harvest. Here, atop the world-tree, they’d been bestowed the abode of God.
Nai’s body was leaden, and Vash’s markings had faded, too. He was covered only in blood and his crimson coat: a corpse unsteadily standing with his brother cradled in his arms and wandering, dully, into oblivion.
The planet teemed with life, but only Vash remained as a dead thing, an outcast hardly more than a mirage. There was no oasis; he had no reflection. A shore stripped of its waters was nothing but a brittle desert of sand.