Work Text:
Vash has perfect pitch, yet he can barely sing for his sisters.
They don’t blame him for it. How could they? When their beloved baby brother had been built to run and walk and fly instead?
Still, Vash feels clumsy and ineloquent standing next to them in their bulbs: his tongue is heavy with the medium of meat, the electricity of his thoughts naturally deadened by the organic matter of his skull. Bone isn’t the best conductor; and so Vash has to stand close to them, has to walk near enough for a given iteration to visually see him before his thoughts are loud enough for them to hear. He has a soft voice, his sisters tell him. A gentle one, accented by one hundred and fifty years of accumulated head trauma.
Don’t feel bad, his sisters murmur to him, a soft susurrus of good humor against his hypothalamus. Their amusement and fondness for him smears across his consciousness in pastel pinks and yellows and purples. You can’t help the way you were built. It was a trade. A good trade.
Vash doesn’t have to be hooked up to life support. Vash has a brain that will run his body for him. Vash can walk and run and fly in all the right ways; and when humans look at him, they think he’s one of them for the long enough that he needs.
But, too, Vash hungers. Vash thirsts. Vash bleeds.
It’s the price of independence. It’s the price of being alive. Humanity hadn’t known what they had done (forgive them for their sins) when they had created plants: they thought they had been building some miracle machine out of meat. Some biological engine capable of tapping into a force humanity barely understood and had studied even less, driven by their desperation to survive as they had been.
Humanity hadn’t realized that they’d caught primordial plasma in a bone cage. Humanity hadn’t known that they’d put string theory into a jar. Humanity couldn’t hear the chorus enclosed within the biological matrix that was hooked up inside every bulb, didn’t have the luxury of questioning why every plant grew itself a face. They just confirmed that it looked like the woman, dead a thousand years, that the immortalized cell line had been derived from, and left it at that.
Vash, softhearted after one hundred and fifty years of humanity, understands now why the SEEDs crew had unintentionally slaughtered Tesla. They hadn’t known then that his sisters had personhood. That the low thrum of energy around every bulb was a voice. That when they programmed production sequences of electric impulses and other stimuli, they were communicating, already. That the levin code was speech.
Humanity was used to looking for sapience in specific ways, blinded by their own biases. The idea that a pulsar had intelligence was a flight of fancy better left in the pulpy realm of science fiction.
Humanity hadn’t realized that the song of the universe sprang from the lips of every single plant.
“Spikey. Double dollar for yer thoughts?”
The voice, a tenor close enough to tremble the physical membranes of Vash’s eardrums, cuts across the electric hum of the settlement and its single small plant. It takes Vash three seconds to card his senses back into order: slower than usual, for his contemplation and the liquor in his system. The sounds of the nightlife bar they sit in replace the sounds of the powerlines and the wires in the walls. Vash’s eyes find Wolfwood’s across the table.
A tiny furrow has drawn itself between Wolfwood’s brows. Vash had taken too long to respond. “You gonna puke?” Wolfwood asks bluntly, and Vash strangles an indignant gasp in his throat.
“I’m not that drunk!!”
“Then quit while yer ahead,” is Wolfwood’s immediate and caustic advice. “’Cause I won’t be dragging yer ass back to the hotel. You can sleep it off under the table.”
It’s a lie, and they both know it is. Wolfwood has his mission to keep Vash safe for Knives, after all; and, more importantly, he’s Vash’s friend and not as cruel as he pretends to be. He’s not as cruel as he believes himself to be.
Vash has met men like him in passing: so scared of the tenderest depths of their hearts that they veil their eyes with blackest fury. They’re so scared to hurt, and Vash grieves that the world had hurt them and that they continue to carry the pain of the wound. Vash smiles, to try and ease the furrow that’s between Wolfwood’s brows, and it only makes Wolfwood scowl more deeply.
“I know I’ve told you I hate that look on yer face,” Wolfwood snaps, and Vash’s smile widens into a sheepish grin, caught out yet again.
Vash has met men like Wolfwood in passing, but always always always only in passing. Men like Wolfwood don’t tend to let anyone close anymore; and Vash always has to leave. There’s never enough time, despite how Vash never ages. And, for all of Vash’s selfishness, he doesn’t want to hurt them whenever he, or they, have to go.
So this, this journey, is new even for him. Having someone like this at his side as the suns set and the moons rise, day after day after day. Pitting his stubbornness against Wolfwood’s fire, as Vash runs and walks and bleeds. It’s nice. It’s becoming familiar. It’s almost like…
Vash sees in his memory’s eye the breadth of familiar shoulders against the blue of the sky. Knives does not turn back to look at him, and the light of the twin suns beats down against his pale hair, sets it gleaming. It makes tears spring to Vash’s eyes.
Knives is the only other plant to have known what it feels like to walk across the dunes of No Man’s Land. And Knives had walked away.
So, to have Wolfwood here, now, trailing after Vash on Knives’ behest… it’s like a joke. Like an awful, cutting, cosmic joke, a backhanded blessing that makes Vash’s canines and cuspids ache in his jaws.
“Alright, that’s it. We’re done for the night.” Wolfwood’s chair scrapes against the dirty bar floor as he stands. “Christ, Needle-noggin, can’t take you anywhere,” and Vash laughs a little soddenly and ducks his head to wipe at his eyes. Maybe he’s a little more drunk than he thought he was.
He wonders if his sisters would like Wolfwood. He should try to sneak them both into a plant facility at some point.
Wolfwood kicks the side of Vash’s foot when he comes back to the table, hard enough to make Vash’s knee pop out to the side as his boot skids. Vash yelps; and Wolfwood sneers; and yet Wolfwood is careful to not thunk the glass in his hand onto the table too hard. “Drink that,” he orders Vash. “All of it. And then we’re goin’.”
It’s a glass of water. There’s even a small chunk of ice in it. Vash watches a bead of condensation curl down the side and asks, whines, “That wasn’t the last of our money, right? ‘Cause I want breakfast tomorrow.”
“You think I’m stupid?” Wolfwood grunts as he drops back into his chair. Vash hears his ankle pop. It’s a sound that a human shouldn’t be able to make out over the din of the evening bar crowd, and a noise that the body of a simple man of the cloth shouldn’t make. Vash stops listening so hard. He doesn’t want to hear the way Nicholas’ tendons creak against his reinforced bones. He’s had more than enough of that over the days and nights on the road.
“Wee-ell—” Vash starts, and accepts Wolfwood’s shove as his due.
“Ice is cheap here,” Wolfwood answers as he settles back in his chair. He drags his glass into place on the table and turns the last of the bottle they’d bought out into it. “And it was a hot-ass day. So don’t waste it. Fucking drink before it melts.”
Every day on No Man’s Land is a hot-ass day. Vash stares at the glass. Stares at Wolfwood. Wolfwood stares back at him as he sips at the whiskey he’d poured, his cigarette held in his other hand.
“You drink first,” Vash tells him, continues over Wolfwood’s surprised splutter and ensuing choking as he aspirates alcohol, “You bought it, so you should drink, too.” He leans over and pounds Nick between the shoulderblades to help clear his airway.
“Are you trying to kill me?” Wolfwood snarls once he’s done coughing. His voice is a strained, burnt-up rasp, and Vash grins to cover the way his stomach swoops and settles between his hips.
“You’ve been drinking too,” Vash tells him. “Gotta keep hydrated and all that.”
Wolfwood glares at him; and Vash beams back; and Wolfwood must see something in Vash’s grin or eyes or something, hell if Vash knows what, that makes him realize this is a fight he’s not going to win. Not before the ice melts and ruins the entire point, anyway.
Vash has had cold ice water many times over his many years. But Wolfwood was born after the Fall, and had not known the plenty that Vash had, among the stars.
(Vash tries to not be afraid of how easily Wolfwood sees through him. Vash has spent an inhuman lifespan perfecting the art of running away and coming back. Trying again, until he can’t. And somehow, somehow, Wolfwood had peered past Vash’s pratfalls and goofy faces and discerned how serious Vash actually was. Had seen Vash’s easiest smile for the lie that it was.)
(Oh, it will hurt when they have to part, when Wolfwood delivers him. Vash welcomes the pain with open arms. He refuses to close his eyes and harden his heart. Is this agony not proof of his devotion?)
Wolfwood knocks back the last of his liquor without breaking their stare. He exchanges his empty glass for the one full of water.
Wolfwood stares Vash down all the way through his first long sip; and then his black gaze shifts away. He pulls the glass away from his mouth to contemplate it briefly, and his dark eyes crinkle at the corners into the beginnings of crow’s feet.
Wolfwood doesn’t say anything. He just takes his second sip more slowly; and this will be the memory that Vash sends to his sisters hours later, with his forehead and both palms pressed against the glass of her bulb—Wolfwood, with his chapped lips wet with water, road-dusty from the planet’s grit, his keen, dark eyes soft with rare pleasure and lightened to the grey-blue of a ripe thunderhead.
“Thank you for the water,” he will whisper to her. “Thank you for your hard work.”
This iteration of his sisters, a hydroplant, smiles; and across the expanse of No Man’s Land, the other iterations shift and rustle in amusement within their bulbs, all of them turning over the indistinct memory of Wolfwood and how Vash had snuck away alone from the hotel. The memories Vash sends are always fuzzy (because of his thick skull, they tease), but Vash’s sentiments always come through clarion clear. They can feel the depths of his sanguine-colored love and joy; and they don’t truly understand because he is Himself and independent and they are not; but he is blood of their blood and they open their arms to him for their love.
(The warmth of their embrace is almost enough to let them forget how fucking tired they all are. That the humans are so, so scared and so, so hungry and that they will die without them. That this is all that Vash can do: he brings them dear memories of lives lived beyond glass walls and hopes that these small sips of grace are enough to leaven the grief into bittersweetness.)
Vash opens his mouth, and his core thrums in his right arm. This iteration of his sisters resonates with it, and the both of them ring with the notes of the universal hymn that twines through stardust and dark matter and Bayesian space-time. His sister’s voice strengthens, Vash’s voice a bolstering, backing tenor joined to the worksong—and then she pulls away.
Vash closes his mouth. Opens his eyes. His sister smiles at him, and it’s as tired and bereft as Vash feels. She makes a motion with her hand as though she would wipe away Vash’s tears.
Red brother, she will tell him. Little brother, his sisters will say, and none of them will talk about the empty space where Vash’s twin once stood. Take care of yourself. Until next time.
Vash will sway away from the glass. He will breathe in. His aching heart will start beating time once more in his chest.
But, that will be later.
At this moment, in the here and now, Wolfwood sets the glass down on the table with a soft thunk that Vash can hear over the clamor of the bar. Wolfwood’s grey eyes, ripe with promise, find Vash’s again.
Wolfwood silently nudges the glass a little closer to Vash, invitation and order all in one. Vash turns his head to consider it and its little trails of condensation. It’s half empty and half full.
Vash wets the fingers of his right hand off of the sweating glass. He touches one to the rim; and he tilts his head; and he runs it across the material just so—
The glass resonates underneath his stroke, the matter of the world reverberating. It sings in response to Vash, one long, thrumming note that hangs suspended in the air.
Vash looks up. Meets Wolfwood’s eyes again.
“D,” Vash hums, and his soft voice comes out multi-layered and harmonious, turns that single water-born note into a split-second D minor chord.
Wolfwood ducks his head and, miracle of miracles, chuckles. Vash’s heart leaps. “Now I know you’ve had too much,” Wolfwood teases. “Enough party tricks. Drink up.”
Wolfwood doesn’t know that what Vash had done was more than mere ventriloquism. Wolfwood doesn’t know how Vash’s core hums in his arm.
Or maybe he does know. And maybe he had just chosen love and peace over his fear.
Vash lifts the glass and presses his mouth to where Wolfwood’s lips had rested. He tips back his head and drinks until the glass is empty. He crunches down what remains of the ice, and it numbs the ache in his teeth.
This, too, shall end. But Vash hopes that he’ll be able to sing properly for Wolfwood before that finale.