Chapter Text
∎ 4 ∎ ∎ ∎
He made music for Vash, before the fall.
9 ∎ ∎
Vash stares down at his fingers and tries to remember the tune.
Between the two of them, he was the one better at reading sheet music, at hearing a song and repeating it later with the percussion of keys, but Nai could make music. Make it. Out of thin air and his own imagination, testing sounds in their bed at night, giggling to himself at a particular combination he found particularly satisfying, pressing his new sounds into Vash’s shoulder. He didn’t need the sleep that Vash did. But he was never too loud. Even if he had been, Vash could have slept through it.
Creative. That's what Rem called him. Creative, and so funny! So, so funny, she would grit out, reaching for him, trying to rub his hair into a mess for his teasing. Your brother, he’s got big ideas. A wry smile. Rem’s hair falling across her face. Maybe she knew, even then, all the ideas Nai had. Such wonderful and strange ideas.
Vash never knew half of what was going on in his brother's head, but when Nai made music for him, it didn’t feel that way.
Between his fingers, he twists the fine black hair back and forth, this way and that in the light, trying to catch a shade of gold in it. Nothing. It's dark, like soot.
He wonders if Nai still sings.
∎ ∎
As he plays, he imagines.
In the ruin of the fallen fleet, on the plant carrier he spent three weeks of careful calculations ensuring would survive the collapse, a single piano survives. Over the years he's added to its grandeur. He imagines Vash, sat beside him, watching in his wonder, leaning against Nai. In his memory, Vash is always a child, but this one is older. Still small, but big enough. He imagines how hard it would be to play with one arm so occupied, but Knives imagines himself ever-so skilled and more than capable of bearing that small a burden.
The burden of his love would be a glory.
“If you ever get lost,” Knives says to him in this dream, “I’ll play this piano, and you'll know where I am.”
His fingers fly across the keys, playing both their parts. Vash leans against him, and laughs. He imagines this, and the heat of Vash's sweet breath filling their space. Knives would breathe him in, and Vash would say, “I always know where you are.”
“But if you don’t,” Knives says out loud, murmurs it, barely audible as the keys playing his song for him, mimicking the beat of his heart at his brother’s imagined closeness.
In his dreams, Vash is always close. Never more than a reach away. Never past the edge of his sight. His smell, his breath, the beating red blood of his bleeding heart. It's all there. All for him.
“But Nai,” the Vash he's dreaming says, grinning wild. “We’re always together.” The song ends. It can only go on so long.
This dream, as all dreams do, shatters.
3 ∎
Vash walks into July with not a single prayer left to his name. He sets his pack down at the outskirts, on a jut rock that looks amenable to the task, and follows it with the gun, and then the red jacket. By the time Nai can be rousted from the city, his curiosity the only draw Vash has over him now, it’s nightfall. Three moons hang in the sky. The red one is full. Not true red, not like the jacket, not like blood, but a hazed pink, like the Earth sunsets Rem showed them on the ship’s drive.
Nai takes a night to arrive. If he’s waiting for the dark, for privacy, or if it took him that long to sense Vash’s presence, he can’t tell. Vash is always aware of him. They exist like the binary stars sinking below the horizon.
His brother’s steps slow as he approaches. Barefoot. When Vash first tried on shoes on the ship, he laughed and indulged it. You aren’t human. Playing dress up, he thought it was. But you can’t play dress up with a heart, and that’s where the real difference was, what really counted, what drove them apart. The glittering blades he keeps wrapped around him in a permanent defense aren’t on display, but Vash knows they could reach whatever distance now sits between them and drag him in or drive him away or draw his blood. This has been true for longer than it hasn’t.
“Vash,” he says, kindly. “I wasn’t expecting you so soon.”
It’s late. They both know that. It’s late. If he’d come a year ago, a decade ago, a lifetime ago, maybe something would be left worth saving. But now, Nai sits upon July like a beast guarding a corpse it has no interest in eating, waiting for something fresh to be drawn in by the scent. Vash has known this for what feels like a century and must be closer to, oh, fifty years. Why July? he wondered to himself. Why be with people if Nai hated them so much?
But this is why. Nai knows what Vash loves: humans, and his brother. Better to keep both in the same place and wait for the inevitable.
“Sorry I'm late,” he offers, and lets himself study Nai’s face, or what he can of it from inside the hood his brother wears. Vash is hardly better. The coat and turtleneck hide so much, and the glasses, and his long bangs. Nai’s hands are what draw his gaze and keep it. No matter what else he’s seen them do, he can only ever imagine those fingers playing over a piano.
He closes his eyes and drops his head. That’s the memory. If he’s going to keep one, that’s it.
Nai says, indulgent, almost teasing, “I can forgive you.”
The words are tinged with his new brand of madness, that subdued calm that lets him walk through blood and keep walking. Lie or truth, it’s irrelevant. His forgiveness isn’t the point.
Vash reaches behind him and picks up the gun Nai gave him, once upon a time. Its weight is a familiar comfort. He tests it in his hand. At the edge of his vision, Nai cocks his head. The shroud falls away to reveal him. Pale hair, pale eyes, a curious smile. “You're still carrying that old thing. What are you going to do with it?”
It should be obvious. Only one thing to do with a gun, really. He flips it forward and checks the chamber—not full, but one good bullet is enough to make the point he needs to. He's got three.
“Vash,” Nai says again, confusion coloring the humor now, overcoming it. “What are you doing?” Repetition. He asks the same questions of Vash over and over without realizing it. Whose side are you on? Are you going to shoot me? Nai takes a step forward.
“I have a proposal,” Vash says, hating the way his voice shakes. The word hits the way he means it to; he watches it shiver up Nai’s spine. He watches Nai’s fingers twitch.
He watches Nai freeze as Vash brings the gun to his own temple.
The cloak around Nai dissipates from its form and reveals itself for what it is: joints of sharpened metal, layer over layer, as intrinsic to his brother as Nai’s soft hair and his cornflower eyes. Vash, even now, can’t help but be mesmerized. Nai has this power over him—if he knew how to use it better, he might have won this argument a century ago.
“You wouldn’t,” Nai says lightly. And: “Vash, really.”
He cocks the gun.
Nai twitches not an inch, but the blades disappear, exposing his torso and chest entirely, and remanifest poised in mid-air inches from Vash's face. Their movement is almost faster than Vash’s eyes can follow. Every point aims toward him, toward the gun, toward his arm. His last good one, and fuck he hopes Nai isn’t going to take that, too.
This idea wasn’t his. It was Meryl’s, though she hadn’t meant it to be. She was the first to figure it out, over their third whiskey at some back-of-the-back edge-of-civilization bar. It’s funny he never hurts you. And Vash had said: He hurts me. And she said, not listening: That’s what he’s scared of, isn’t it? You leaving him for good.
And he'd thought: I left him a long time ago. But not, as she put it, for good.
What’s more, she was right. Is right. The consistent fear of their shared lives has been this: that Vash would leave him in a way that couldn’t be taken back. A truth comforting and hard learned, however, is that the harder you try to hold onto something, the faster it will slip away. He used to try on the ship, in the meander of water than ran through the botanical deck of their ship. Vash gathering it in his fingers to try to take a sip, watching it slip away through his fist. Just hold it, Nai would say, bringing his own cupped hands to his own thin lips and drinking. Be gentle. But it never worked.
Before it’s a moot point, he has to make good on it.
“I have a proposal,” he repeats.
Nai’s expression fractures almost imperceptibly. “I’m listening.”
“Come with me.”
The blades ripple in air. “Where?”
“Anywhere. And,” the sticking point, the reason he’s got a loaded gun pressed to his temple, “don’t hurt anyone. It doesn’t have to be forever. For a little while.” For any time. Any time at all.
His gaze softens in pity. “How long?”
“A year.” He has that long. He has to have that long, at least. No time at all, in the span of their lives. Nai is quiet, still, watching him. A spare breeze catches his hair. The red moon over his shoulder casts enough light to color him soft and pink.
“And?”
“And I’ll stay with you, after. I’ll go with you. I’ll do what you want.” His hand is starting to ache from the iron hold he has around the grip of the gun.
No ripple this time, no shudder, no motion that indicates Nai has heard, until he roughs out a laugh. “How noble. Am I supposed to believe that? Vash.” Vash , he says. Vash , like he knows all the ways Vash won’t be able to hold to this promise.
“You don’t have to believe me. I’m giving you a choice.” His voice is more confident than he feels.
“Then: no. My answer is no.”
Vash pulls the trigger.
He’s used to human reflexes. Humans are slow. Vash isn’t, and neither is his brother. It occurs in slow motion: the trigger depresses, the gun jerks on the recoil, the smell and heat of combustion floods his nostrils. He’s watching Nai for the jump in his throat, the seize in his muscle, the fatal shock that reverberates through his gaze and his body and all his glittering blades.
Vash’s plan is poor, in truth. He doesn’t know what the gun will do to him at this range. It isn’t likely to kill him, but that isn’t the point.
Nai can’t call his bluffs for shit.
The rush of pain never comes. Instead, the world spins around him, and he’s on his back in the sand with a dull pain in his hand. The gun is gone; the palm of his hand is bisected by the blade pinning it to the ground. His vision fills with nothing but Nai, with his thick muscles, their heaving under the strain of his panicked breath. The look on his heavy brows is a rare one. It’s been a long time since anything Vash did could really piss him off.
“No,” Nai says.
His voice is the stuff of better memories. A sloppy kiss on his forehead before bed. A tap on his shoulder, and a chin set there, the two of them looking across the stars in a rough embrace. Lyric nonsense spilling from Nai’s lips in the form of a song with no accompaniment at all, only for the joy of singing and having Vash hear him. Years now. So many years since then.
Nai summons a blade in his hand, this one more intimate than the vines of metal pinning Vash’s hand. It looks like a sword, jagged edged and as beautiful as the rest of Nai, as well honed. It reaches Vash’s cheek and drags the side and then settles beneath his chin, against the pulse point at the side of his throat where he can feel his blood pumping in terror—true terror. He’s scared of Nai, now, and this too has been truer for longer than it hasn’t. It happens this way. Rem told him that human brains build pathways like this, that they remember pain like this. Maybe his brain is human enough to work the same.
A thought comes to him: the knife piercing his neck, blood bubbling out between his lips, against Nai’s fingers. Nai holding him and letting his brother’s life paint him in color. But it isn’t Vash’s thought. It’s Nai’s, finding its way in at their proximity, and it’s painted with desire so profound that Vash’s head tips back involuntarily. He imagines it from his own perspective, not as the horror it is, but as Nai sees it. The unbelievable heat of his blood spilling. Nai’s arms around him. And no secrets left between them, no betrayal. Only his life between Nai’s fingers, his body held close and precious.
It’s a fucking odd thought for a man who’s nightmare is seeing him dead. A hundred years of madness. He shudders. Nai’s eyes follow the motion obsessively.
This, Vash thinks, is why they can’t be together.
“Is this your new play?” Nai asks roughly. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”
Play? No. It’s proof. That’s all Vash needed: proof that there’s still one thing Nai cares about too much to be rational about. If he were rational, he would have hunted Vash years ago, kept him in suspended solitude, safe. He would have done that, and called it love. Vash has wondered for years why he didn't. And again, back at Jeneora, when Nai tapped his fingers to the gun and left Vash standing, or when he let Vash fire on him without retaliation. When he brought down the city and let not a single pebble fall on Vash.
He wants Vash—but he wants Vash whole and free more than he wants Vash empty. He needs Vash alive. That means something.
“I’m giving you a choice,” Vash repeats.
The point of the blade is still tipped against his jugular. “A year,” Nai says, still in disbelief, “for the rest of your life.”
He can’t nod.
“In a year, a dozen more of our kind will be gone. I can’t afford a year.” Nai drops the blade from Vash’s neck, and with a violent motion, stabs at something Vash can’t see. The gun, he realizes, by the short sound of tearing metal. It’s in him to be sad about losing it, but then Nai retracts the blade still pinning his hand to the ground, and fuck does it hurt.
He pulls the hand in to his chest and cradles it.
Nai watches this critically, and then slides his gaze to the side, catching the full, red disc hanging in the sky behind him. “A month,” he murmurs. “And after that, you’ll stop this foolishness.” His voice shakes. "You'll come back to me."
A month. No—it’s too short. It’s not enough time. He meets Nai’s gaze and knows it’s all he’s going to get.
“A month,” he agrees, voice almost too tight to leave his chest. “And I'll never leave again.”
It’s a poor lie. Nai knows; Vash can see he knows, but he can see what it does to Nai, too. The metal appendages poised around him flutter involuntarily, Nai’s heart bare on his sleeve in that way. He misses Vash, at least as much as Vash misses him. It’s a cruel pressure point to press.
But Nai isn't the only one who can be cruel.