Chapter Text
Knives rests cocooned in a standard containment tank, his angel hair black beneath the petals that hide his humanoid form. The final death match with his brother has left him half-wasted and fragmented without a mission or a family. His brother’s blood still burns his hands.
He does not want hands anymore.
Alone, his body unfurls from a fully human appearance to something more, with a protective, feathery shell that the humans know to be the standard form of a Plant. Like this, he feels less visceral. More ethereal and scattered, in the way of his Mothers and Sisters before him.
“B-brother, please,” Vash’s last gasps echo in his mind, repeating again and again in a cacophony against the usual clarity of his mission to destroy all human life.
He wants to forget.
He wants to unsee. He does not want eyes any longer, and yet eyes are a feature that both humans and Plants share. He closes them beneath the petals, wishing to see only darkness.
“B-brother, please.”
Like this, his body glows. His power flows in a flicker of dangerous red as he sucks the life out of another Plant connected to his pod. She will not be enough to regenerate him, and he wonders why he has even tried to survive.
In his great exhaustion, he finally sleeps for the first time in his unnaturally long life.
Sleep—or death—means he is free of reliving the light die in his brother’s innocent-weary-fearful eyes.
As time passes, sandstorms batter the lab that cradles him, partially burying it. The Sister Plant he has hooked himself to dies in a cry of mindless pain, the last of her energy healing his worst wounds.
His pod still glows an unhealthy, frail red. He fails to wake up.
In the distance, human refugees displaced by bandits and broken Plants raise up a small town. They strike a well of water deep beneath the soil and rejoice, digging in their soles and naming the little spot—hardly a blip for any map—Haven.
“You’re not gonna believe this,” an aged, gruff voice echoes down into the open cavity of the lab one day, wavering with disbelief. “It looks like this might have been a powerplant at some point—maybe an old outpost before the Great Storm last year hit it.”
Another voice, feminine and younger, pipes up, “A Plant? You mean, the old power sources for energy? One that could help us grow food?”
“You got it, kiddo. And it looks like this one is still halfway functioning.” The aged voice grows awed as footsteps drop in.
Old hands, scarred from hard labor, touch the outside of the chamber that houses the hidden body of Knives. “In all my time as engineer, I’ve never seen one survive so long in a Red state. I can’t believe no one’s found it.”
A little voice nears, small pitter patters against the sandy tiles. “And what is a Plant, grandpa? Leo says some people think they’re more like us than, um, you know, flowers and stuff.”
“Your brother might be right,” the old man murmured. Knowledgeable hands run along the ports, grabbing for old cords to hook up the plant to surrounding technology for diagnostics. “They can rearrange—and in the dark, sometimes the petals uncurl, and they almost look like a human.”
The cords jam into ports.
A deep, groaning hum shudders from the containment chamber.
The little girl whines, “Does it hurt them, though? To be used for power like this?”
“Luna, I swear. You worry about every critter that crawls on this planet, don’t you?”
“Grandpa, I mean it. Does it hurt them?” Her small hands are hot, searing against the thick glass.
As the tank whines up, the grandfather turns to old computers, wiping away dust. “Dependent Plants give off natural ambient energy, the same way you and I give off heat, and they can adjust the kind of ‘heat’ they give. Humans simply learned how to harness that heat, so to speak.”
Those little hands pull away, and the girl inspects herself and her dirty, purple dress. “Oh, I see.”
“The trick,” he tells her, “is making sure we don’t demand more than it gives off. Sometimes young hooligans fresh on an apprenticeship think they can get more in the short-term at the cost of hurting the Plant.” He pauses, and glances back at the Plant in the chamber. “And sometimes Plants unleash too much energy and hurt themselves without someone to calm them down. It’s all about balance, you see.”
The Plant glows a weak red, its petals fleshy with feathery shrills. Little pieces of metal litter the water.
Its energy feels frail, as if it has lost the will to live. Next to it, a completely dead Plant rots in the silence. The body appears as a dull, lifeless bulb.
He adds, an edge of curiosity in him, “Never heard of anyone abandoning a still-functioning one, though. Maybe they thought they killed this one, and it’s regenerated enough from the tank water to hold on.”
“Can we help it get better, Grandpa?”
He pats the glass. “Yeah, kiddo, we can help it. And it can help us.”
Knives eventually returns to consciousness in a mild confusion, unsure of the passage of time or even his name. He vaguely recognizes a flow of ambient energy from him—like wind though his hair. Breathing out in an exhale as he stretches his limbs.
It’s not an unpleasant feeling, but one that does alert him that he is doing things, experiencing things, even while holding still.
His encasing shifts in curiosity to reveal his human form beneath. As a petal curls away, his blue eyes peek out from a human face. He realizes that all around him, a new environment—a standard human powerplant—surrounds the tank. Human buildings line the distance beyond the windows.
“B-brother, please.”
The memories reappear like flashes in his mind’s eye.
He recalls his name, and his mission. What he is.
In that instant, his hatred of humans rises like a hot branding rod from his heart. They are harvesting him.
The vermin.
And then as soon as the fire lights within him, it stutters. In looking down at his hands and body, he sees he has regenerated from a frail Red state to a soft, glowing blue.
Something had re-routed a portion of his own ambient energy back into him, to heal him instead of sucking him dry for every last drop of power, as many humans tended to do to Plants.
He stares in a daze at the human town his power is sustaining. The people walk through the streets in clean clothes, and the buildings are simple but sturdy. In the distance, his power has brought forth trees and grass from the barren dirt and sand. A lake sparkles on the edge of a small green park.
The color green.
In his sleep, he has resurrected geraniums, which hug the windows of the lab housing him—like the spindly arms of Rem.
The curiously non-painful feeling of being harvested stays his hand as he dares to feel it for himself, desperate for any justification for killing his brother.
For not believing Rem when she said Dependent Plants are often in harmony.
As time passes, his hands begin to tremble. He falls numb at the realization that he is not in writhing agony. The pull feels like a gentle wave to him—far different than the contorted pain on his Sisters’ faces when he’d harvested them for his own power.
How many Plants had died by his hands, to save them from this sleepy, stretching feeling?
In that moment, his heart—so very human-shaped just like his eyes—wrenches in a deep pain. He closes his eyes and hides behind the petals of his shell once more, willing himself into the meaningless sleep that he aches for, confused, afraid, numb.
He is now fully and utterly alone, with only these bold parasites harvesting him as his company.
What was he fighting for?
He wants to forget still being alive for a little longer. He wants to not be alone for once in his life.
What was he fighting for?
He wants to undo time and pick geraniums with Rem again, but a numbing sleep is easier to obtain than reordering the cosmos.
One day, a little voice wakes him from his sleep. It is familiar, and it is a bright and cheery sound that reminds him of the young Vash giggling to him about cake. “—but I was thinking maybe I could make him something to cheer him up?”
“B-brother, please.”
He reaches out from the petals with a human hand, opening his eyes with a bleary exhaustion and curiosity. Around him, his encasings yawn backward to reveal his human form still hidden by the white flight suit reflecting his plant markings. The petals shift into feathers and tendrils of knives, and his longer, renewed blonde hair swirls about him in waves.
On the other side of the glass, a little girl in a purple dress flinches, and red geraniums falls from her fingers. “Oh!”
Knives stares back at her without sound, inspecting the human parasite with a mild curiosity.
Her eyes are a muddy brown, same as many humans across the planet, and yet instead of fear, they sparkle with sudden and immense delight. “Oh! Oh, Grandpa said you might peek out one day! Hello, Plant, hello!”
He blinks and tilts his head. Even through the liquid of the tank, he hears her as clear as the bells of the church that ring in the background for midday religious services.
She stands up and gives him an awkward curtsey. “I hope you don’t mind me coming to talk. It’s just, well, my brother is sick, and he really likes all the plants that grow from you, and my grandpa runs this place. So I was hoping maybe you could give me some ideas for things I can make him.” She grabs her half-finished flower crown and raises it up to him proudly. “I don’t know if he’ll care for these, but I’m getting really good at them, especially since you keep growing flowers everywhere.”
His long fingers tighten against the glass, and he closes his eyes before he pulls away. Soon, he sits cross-legged on the floor in the chamber, revealing his true form. From his shoulder, a feathery wing shifts, along with tendrils of knives from his torso.
Knives recalls the art of speech and both the sophistication and limitation of human form, that the little girl cannot connect telepathically but has an audible language.
“Speak to me,” he commands, voice hoarse from disuse, “about your brother.”
Instead of the demand of a god, it comes off as a plea.
As it turns out, the little girl is named Luna, and her brother is Leo. They are twins, but she prefers apples while Leo like oranges. More importantly, Leo suffers from a heart condition that leaves him weak and dependent upon others to care for him.
So very, very finite.
Knives’s power sustains the technology for the boy’s medical care, and he briefly takes offense to being used for something so mundane. But Luna reminds him terribly of Vash in her open-hearted mannerisms, and Knives convinces himself that is why he tolerates her instead of eviscerating her.
So many memories of bodies and the feeling of blades jarring against bone—
“B-brother, please.”
She smiles at him and asks, “Do you have a name? Grandpa says Plants usually only have a number, but I ask him all the time if he’s looking after you alright.”
Knives leans back on the palms of his hands as the tendrils of his many blades swirl around him. He fully remembers his own violence now and how easy it would be to decimate the entire town for a laugh—to bring his wayward brother running to save them—
But Vash is dead by his own hand, and so there is no brother to come running. No more fights. No other Plants in the known distance.
All of it, futile.
“…Call me Knives,” he murmurs, voice hoarse. “I am not a number like my Sisters are.”
The little girl giggles. “Knives? Hm, I guess you do look kinda…pointy. But you also have feathers too. I like your wing because it reminds me of birds! Those fly around the town now because of you!”
He cannot help it. His lip twitches, and he dares to preen, as he is still a superior being and it is sensible of the little girl to acknowledge it. “Of course, for I am beyond your comprehension.”
The word flies over her head entirely, and she returns to her pile of flower crowns, asking, “So, um, Mr. Knives, what do you think I should make for my brother, for his gift? I’m all out of ideas.”
Knives considers her request, thinking of his own brother bleeding out in his arms. The little smile on his lips falters. “Gift?”
“Yeah, you know. Something you give because you love someone, or you care about them.”
Knives glances down at his hands. For a brief moment, he hallucinates them still covered in the hot blood of Vash, which ran so very red like any human’s. His expression falls entirely as his face shadows.
Against the glass, he still sees Vash’s reflection within the lines of his own face.
Luna looks up with those muddy brown eyes, and some strange understanding passes through her. “Oh, um, maybe you don’t know much about gifts or brothers.”
“No.” His voice roughens as knives sprout from his wrists. His breath hitches. “I know of what you speak.”
In his pain, the floor rumbles beneath them.
Beyond the chamber, the cords harvesting his ambient energy overload from the disruption of his peace. He breathes unsteadily again, his eyes dilating with the memory of the fatal wound—so accidental and yet so intentional in rage.
Knives’ eyes brighten with tears as an orange tree sprouts outside the complex.
It is around then, as Luna gasps in surprise and delight, running out to inspect the new addition to the town, that Luna’s grandfather opens the door and drops a datapad to the floor in shock.
Grandpa, the old man with a bushy mustache and peppery hair, sits down on a chair, hand over his own heart as he stares at Knives.
The Plant floats near the floor of the chamber, cross-legged with a wing protecting him from the sunlight streaming through the window. He does not meet the grandfather’s gaze as he mourns. He is oddly desperate for the orange tree that he is growing in the square to give the parasite brother of Luna another reason to live on, in place of Vash.
Grandpa—perhaps he has another name, perhaps it does not matter—says quietly, “I didn’t think you were an Independent, son.”
Knives flinches at the familial title but remains focused on the floor as his human eyes shed tear after tear. “What is independence,” he asks, his voice halted, “besides an agonizing awareness of one’s own limitations? The futility of all life?”
The human man does not respond for a time, but manages to say, “If you’re shifting form like a human and carrying on conversation with my granddaughter, then you don’t need to be in that tube. I’ve never heard of an Independent trying to be a Dependent. Usually, your kind like stretching their legs and all, just like us.”
That does it. He looks up, a sudden, pained hatred in his eyes as his blades sharpen, rising behind him in preparation to smash the glass. “I am nothing like you.”
The old man raises his eyebrows. “Yes, I can see that just fine. Still got my sight, thank God.” And then he hesitates, more cautious this time. “I know you also have quite a bit of power to you. Enough to break that glass and probably this whole town a thousand times over. Something about the look of you is familiar, too—like the stories of the knife-loving Independent who destroyed a city a while back.”
Knives does not break the glass. It is his final cocoon of safety.
His blades hesitate as they remain raised for violence, anticipating that the human will seek to harm him in revenge for the city he’d destroyed during some battle or another with Vash.
The grandfather says, voice softening, “How did you end up dying in a tank like a Dependent? We can take care of you, of course, as you’re taking care of us. But it seems a damn shame to not wander around a bit if you can, now that you’re healing.”
Knives’ hands still carry a tremble from great emotion.
Words catch in his throat, for the bodies of his Sisters likely still hang dead in various labs of his own doing, buried under sand. Most of them had not even understood the concept of Independent or Dependent, instead only mildly sentient and limited to self-preservation impulses.
So alone, so very alone—
His form shifts entirely, the feathers and wings and blades interlocking back into an encasing as he floats back in the liquid, away from the old human.
Maybe he hides and gives his energy feely to the humans Vash would have loved, all in atonement.
Maybe it’s fear.
He knows everyone will come to fear and hate him eventually, and he will be alone forever, even if the little girl loves his orange tree and the old man can briefly accept that he is no angel.
The prospering little town of Haven attracts more and more refugees as months pass. The grandfather and Luna struggle to keep the secret that their plant has a humanoid form and could be an Independent, but as with all legends, only the few can access the evidence and most are content just with the story. Luna weaves flower crowns for Knives and reads him the fantastical stories that her brother Leo writes from his sick bed. Grandpa offers him extended rest periods, especially after sand storms that drain the town’s circuits and protective shields.
Over time, the town is increasingly less dependent on him, as humans find joy in growing their own food and generating water from hydrogen and carbon. Creating new types of energy using the dirt alone.
The smart, little parasites.
He grows unfortunately fond of them, to a point that he shows his face more often to Grandpa and Luna simply in want for company, for they neither fear nor hate him—nor do they worship him as some untouchable god. Instead, they speak with him as if he were a confidant-child-brother-son. A strange companion.
He learns them well enough to notice a new wrinkle upon Grandpa’s face or Luna’s newest growth spurt, and for the first time, he begins to fear their inevitable aging.
Without thinking, he checks powerlines into the hospital when Luna admits that her brother is sick again.
And when they leave, he debates if his emotional attachment has to do with wanting to know the end of Leo’s curious stories that Luna reads to him, about elves and sorcerers from Earth. The stories are written painfully slowly, chapter by chapter, with greater stretches of time between them as Leo’s heart weakens. And yet, the stories grow more powerful and detailed as Leo’s mind expands.
It is a strange and unsettling realization, when he admits to himself that he does not want the humans of his town to die.
That he feels…protective of them, even. Needs them in return.
There is some equivalent exchange happening that leaves him with a quiet, soft awe.
The grandfather never speaks of the decimated city again, as if he knows Knives’ protection of Haven is a cosmic balance in some way. But one evening, while the rest of the family is at the hospital awaiting the results of Leo’s latest heart surgery, Grandpa sits down in exhaustion.
“You know,” he says, “a long time ago, before I was a Plant engineer, I did some bad things too. Haunts me sometimes, same as the look in your face.”
A protective petal uncurls, and Knives appears to him within the waters of his chamber, his blue eyes piercing.
The grandfather says with a sigh, toying with a bright red apple in his hands. “The family line—we’re descended from inventors. My great-grandparents used to tell me legends about the huge mansion on Earth that was in the family, before the nuclear war happened. They lived like kings back then.”
Knives tilts his head. “Kings,” he says, his voice muffled through the water but yet a pleasant hum in the plant room. “Like the rulers in Leo’s book, with supposed divine right from God.”
The planet does not have kings. Its humans still worship the god from their home planet, though.
Knives has read the works, used some of the same language to justify his annihilation of humans. His right to rule as a superior being.
The apple spins in the grandfather’s hands uneasily. “And, ah, when the ships fell, they lost everything.” He lowers his eyes, his aged face pulling in pain. “They toiled in the dirt like everyone else, and that was the life handed to me, along with the stories of the Old Days.”
The grandfather’s eyes are a muddy brown like Luna’s, and they mist up with great pain. “When I had limbs that looked as strong as yours, I tried to get my birthright back in any way possible, from anyone I could. And I had to get real low before I realized I was just taking from myself. That’s why I became an engineer, to give back to a lot of people. Help them thrive.”
Knives’ fingers tighten against the glass. “What is low to you, old man? I have known the depravity of humans, and they do not act as you do.”
He never speaks of the early days, between the bright spots of Rem’s love. The swing of a man’s fist crunching against his eye and pulling his hair...
The body of his Independent Sister Tesla floating dismembered in a tank from human experiments.
Grandpa bites into the apple, the juices creasing into his wrinkles, and he chews slowly before swallowing hard and admitting, “I see the same look in your eyes, son. I know some people say Independents don’t have emotions quite like we do, but it’s the same damn look I had when I hurt my own brother.”
Knives’ face cracks, and a raw agony overwhelms him. He pats the glass, more insistent this time. “How do you overcome the emotion, the weight of it? It is an oblivion within me, no matter how I seek to…to change things or atone.”
He knows now he is not a god, not even an angel of a god.
The grandfather gives him an old knowledgeable look. “We can’t bring back the ones we hurt. You can only honor them with the life you have left. Like what we’re doing now, being here to help people.”
Knives’ hands slip from the glass, and he turns away in pain and rising frustration—that there is no easy solution. “You should have let me die in that lab instead, then. I don’t care about humans. I hate you and these chains that do nothing to return the brother I killed. All the siblings I’ve killed. I hate all of it and all things, and I want everything to just die once and for all.”
For a brief moment, his agony unsettles him hard. He does not want any life left—he wants it all to end so that he can feel nothing.
The core of his being lashes out in a whip of unsettled power that sparks the cords and overheats the lights of the facility. They glow too bright, the electrical lines of the entire town lighting far too hot.
“Whoa, there,” the grandfather says, quickly racing to the interface to re-code the tank for balance, eyes wide. The water soon seeps with chemicals that leave him sleepy and mildly euphoric. “What the hell was—? You’re overloading yourself, son!”
Knives cries in the water as stares at the grandfather in great determination to fight the chemicals. To blow them both up and raze all existence on the miserable planet to the ground.
Chains are still chains at the end of the day, even if his Sisters would not have felt pain on behalf of the Haven humans. (Even if Vash would have found it fitting, for him to be harvested by humans after decades of killing them.)
And yet, the chemicals encoding into the water feel like a rope tossed out to a drowning man, and he cannot help but breathe them in as his lungs crunch in want for the numbness.
The tank briefly sparks red, his power still on the edge of frailty with any great exertion.
Grandpa is shaky as he sits back down, holding his chest as his aged heart pounds rapidly—loud enough for Knives to hear it. “Don’t scare me like that,” he pleads. “If you’re gonna have a fit, let’s at least get you out of this tank, or else you’ll overload your own circuits and kill yourself. Probably the rest of us too.”
Knives’ face twitches with a mild, unsettled humor. The chemicals make it difficult to amount any significant fury. “You’re all going to die and leave me anyway. Everyone l-leaves.” He laughs as his long fingers glow with a murderous intent, only for sorrow to sink in. “I am always alone and only a tool to you.”
The old man pulls off his newsboy hat in a frazzle, hesitating as Knives’ breakdown reaches new heights. For better or worse, he activates a drain sequence, the protective liquid around Knives surging into a chamber beneath the tank through vents.
Weightlessness disappears into the heaviness of the planet’s gravity.
Soon, the old man opens a tank panel with a quick unscrewing of bolts, and he reaches out to Knives with a shaky, kind hand.
The action is so entirely based in consent, so open for Knives to say yes.
The electrical fluctuations turn on the grandfather’s old radio, which crackles in with a sermon, “—Do not be hasty in the laying on of hands—fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you—”
In the blur of things, Knives’s breath hitches, and he instinctively reaches out from his circle of oblivion and grabs on.
The human’s hand is warm, the skin rough.
“—and his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly—”
After months in a tank, his limbs are shaky from the planet’s gravity, and he can hardly stand on his own.
“Come on, sunshine,” the old man grumps, bowing hard under the weight of the plant as he places one of Knives’ arms over his shoulder. “Let’s get you some warm tea. Your vitals are unstable, it’s clearly disrupting your brain, and there’s only so much the tank can do to calm you down when it’s not even your natural environment.”
Knives leans against him, mind still muddled. And he is wet and cold, baptized by the air of the human town as the grandfather sets him down in a chair and offers him a warm blanket.
His long, trembling fingers sink into the material as his last bit of emotional control leaves him. His throat burns with harsh, bone-wrenching sobs fit between peals of unstable laughter from the euphoria of the chemicals. “I should have been the one who died,” he rasps. “Not my brother, or my Sisters. It should have been me. I am tired of living and hating and being hated.”
Grandpa sits down beside him, face worn.
In a terribly Rem-like way, he clasps Knives’ hands around the cup of tea, which radiates with a calming warmth. “We only have one life. And maybe yours is a deal longer than mine, but I don’t think this brother of yours would want you to just suffer through it. There’s things worth living for, you know. There’s always things to live for.”
On the offhand, it strikes Knives as peculiarly odd for a human to expend energy to care for the needs of a Plant. It is strange to watch the old man power down the harvesting functions of the tank, and yet here they are.
He breathes it in desperately as hot tears streak down his face, in want for the forgiveness that only his dead brother can give him.
Luna seems to understand that Knives is sad and lonely. She visits him often after visiting her hospitalized brother, being one of only a few humans with access to the building, and she is supremely delighted when she discovers that Knives can exist outside of a tank, even if he is still weak from atrophied muscles. She asks to touch his blades that hang from him, to pet his feathers. “Please, please, pretty please?”
“No,” he says hoarsely. He sits in a daze by the window, feeling the warm of the planet’s sun. He fears human touch and craves it all the same. The heat a confirmation he is not alone. “Those are personal to me, and the blades are too sharp for your human skin.”
Luna tilts back on her heels, biting her lip. “Oh. Um, I see.” She looks back up and clasps her hands together. “What if I braid your hair instead?”
His eyes slide to her. “Braid?”
“Yes,” she says, turning around to flop her own braid. “Like this. It’d help keep your hair out of your eyes?”
As he measures her up, the facility surrounding them hums with regenerative power from his own stores—the grandfather has gotten savvier with recirculating energy and conserving from loss. It makes a Plant tank entirely redundant now, with Haven as the first town almost sustainable.
A result of crunching numbers with Grandpa. Asking questions together.
His voice strains. “That is acceptable to me, so long as you do not tangle or pull my hair.”
Luna is perhaps slightly magical, pulling a hairbrush from out of nowhere, along with brightly colored hair ties. She squeals. “I love hair. I brush Leo’s all the time for him, but it’s not long enough to braid because it won’t grow.”
Soon, the little girl stands on a chair behind him, humming as she braids back Knives’ lengthening locks, her fingers slipping through a few strands that still bleed black.
A permanent mark from Knives’ battle with his brother.
The soft touch inspires his eyes to mist as he recalls Rem’s hands gently snipping his hair. He remembers why he had asked her to cut his hair—so that the mean humans would not pull it when hurting him.
But the memory does not hurt as much as it used to.
He begins to wonder, is this the great power of the universe—to watch the grass grow from a sunlit window as a child babbles in his ear?
(And how long can it last before the peace tumbles down again?)
On a sleepy, sunny afternoon, he receives his answer.
An explosion rocks the north side, and soon the sound of rapid gunfire echoes throughout the square. The distorted sounds and screams awaken him from his slumber on a couch that the grandfather had towed in for him in lieu of his expanding physical independence.
Bandits systematically shoot down doors with maniacal laughter, targeting anything and anyone in their way. “What a lovely town!” one calls. “So many riches, all for the taking—all for us!”
“We’ll get to retire with the help of your precious Plant!”
“What do you think this Plant will sell for?” a bandit calls. “Ten million?”
“Oh, I think we could get twenty!”
Humans scatter in all directions, but many fall under the rain of bullets in the town square, tripping over fine skirts, huddling over small children and loved ones to take bullets for them.
Within the powerplant, Knives suddenly sees red.
He slams against the glass of the window, wide eyes with fury and rage as his Plant markings glow hot down his forehead and cheeks. Thoughts leave him entirely besides the deep, protective impulse within. “How dare they,” he rasps. “The vermin. The absolute parasites. How dare they.”
Bullets shatter into the windows of the lab, into the homes beyond the square.
One strikes into the side of the powerplant.
Knives breaks through the glass, and he steps onto grass with bare feet, his eyes narrowed as the tendrils of his blades rise. His white jumpsuit and face glow with his markings as a plant. His hands tremble with the depth of emotion—that for the first time in many months, he absolutely and truly desires to annihilate something.
“You will not harm my town!” he snarls as he raises his hands, his knives spinning up as he slips through a nearby window. He jumps through bushes and green grass, his wrists procuring more blades.
To the human eye, he is merely a white blur—an angel of death.
He slits the throat of a nearby bandit holding an old woman captive for her jewelry (her name is Maude, Knives knows from listening by his window). The blood splatters Maude’s pretty pink dress but leaves her otherwise unharmed as he grabs for another bandit and tosses him into a building.
The man’s large body crunches deep into the concrete, leaving a bloody impression before crumpling to the ground.
The sudden and wicked violence makes the other bandits of the group pause before they hone in on Knives as their enemy. They raise guns—little, puny things—and shoot bullets at him. “Let’s get him!”
Bullets sear into him, only to quickly push out from his skin and heal over, and he stands tall, licking the blood of the bandit off his wrist, his blades sinking back into his skin. “You fools,” he hisses. “Your own greed is your destruction.”
The other bandits stare in horror at him as they continue to shoot at him, with little effect.
One of them cries, “What the hell is this guy?”
As his blades whirl up, he snarls, “The Plant you seek to steal.” His blades contract around him, the tendrils tightening for a massive unleash of energy. “But I am not wares to sell to the highest bidder. I am owned by no one.”
A few bandits drop their guns and run.
Knives stabs them in the back as they run, and he does so because he is not his brother Vash, who probably would have spared them and even offered them a drink. But in his way, he honors Vash, and he cries in pain at the death upon the streets—the lineages of his smart, little parasites fragmented. “How dare you stain our land. All here are refugees who have found peace. How dare you.”
It feels good to slice blade through spines again.
Some part of him is still fallen, he knows, as he grabs a bandit’s gun and shoots him in the eyes with it. Blood sprays out in an arc.
In the end, no bandit is left, and Knives is left a heaving, teary-eyed mess in the middle of the town square, his white jumpsuit torn with bullet holes and stains of his own blood. His single wing streaks a harsh shadow on the dirt, his many blades falling to the ground. Wildly, he glances around, anticipating that the citizens of Haven will see him as only a demon.
Instead, his eyes land upon little Luna near the park, and his heart gives out at the sight around her. It appears she was taking lunch with her brother, still healing from his last surgery.
Leo is motionless on the ground in a pool of blood from bullets.
“Mr. Knives!” she cries, her voice a searing sound in the expansive silence as she runs to him. “Mr. Knives, please! Please!”
Her bloody hands wrap around his wrist where blades once manifested, and she pulls him forward. “Leo is hurt real bad, Mr. Knives. Please help him? Please!”
His demonic acts have not terrified her; rather, she clings to him as if he is the only logical thing left in the world.
He follows without question, his breath hitching with his exertion. He drops down beside the boy in the blood-stained grass, and he shakily turns the body over.
Luna is a mess of tears, her dress streaked with blood. “Please,” she cries. “Please, my b-brother.”
Knives flinches, his breath hitching.
“B-brother, please.”
She grabs onto his muscled arm again without any fear, begging, “Help save him, please. Whatever you can do.”
It’s the first time he has seen Leo in person, and the boy is frail and clinging to life by a single thread. He is nearly identical to Luna, save for the sharper lines of his face and shorter brown hair. Knives’ throat tightens as he holds the bleeding boy, daring to press his hand against the wound wrenched into his stomach. “I—I cannot heal wounds,” he said. “I do not have that power.”
He cannot do it. He is losing Vash all over again.
Leo is going to die.
The little boy gives a death rattle of a gasp in his arms, his eyes misting, Knives grows weak, his limbs shaking as the blood seeps against his elbows and legs. Likely, running to the hospital would end the boy’s life from the jostling alone. And despite all the drugs in the world, once the spark of life is gone, it is gone.
For all his god-like power, he knows he is as powerless as any human against the onslaught of death.
(Is it kinder to hold Leo, as he had held Vash in the final throes of death?)
Knives turns to Luna, who reaches out to Leo’s bloody hand to hold it. She seems to understand, even as sobs wrack her tiny body.
The entire square is silent as Knives cradles the boy as if he were his own little brother, his angel wing drooping down, his tendrils of blades now docile against the sidewalk.
Knives’ chin quivers with emotion he cannot name.
“Ha, you’re so silly,” he had one teased Vash when they were little children. “No better than a human without any powers.”
“Yeah?” Vash had challenged “Well, you’re not a god either.”
And then, suddenly, a great warmth tickles his senses. A woman drops down beside him, reaching out with a pale arm. “Don’t worry,” she says, her alto voice rushed, “I can help him.” She pulls out from her coat a medical packet and rips it open, sprinkling a strange powder over the boy.
The instant it hits his wound, it glows blue, interacting with his blood to create an oxygen-rich foam. The boy’s brown eyes tinge a strange blue as his mouth opens in awe, his form stilling—not in death, but in suspended animation.
Knives looks up at the human woman in great consternation. “Old Technology,” he rasps. “Where did you get this?”
Her short, black hair lifts in the hot wind as she works, sealing up the wound. “From Home.”
It is then that recognition floods through him.
He knows her.
“The woman who once followed Vash,” he whispers in surprise.
“Yeah, yeah,” Meryl Stryfe retorts, distracted as she pulls a shaky hand away from the boy, “we gotta get this kid to the hospital for a blood transfusion and stitches. The oxygenation will hold him suspended for a while, but not forever.”
Knives’ ears are ringing as he stares at her, and she stares back completely unafraid of him.
“What are you doing here?” he murmurs, voice rough. “Why are you helping me, when you know who I am?”
She shrugs out of her coat, spreading it over the boy without care for the blood that stains the pure white. “I promised Vash I would find you while he’s out of commission. Took me a while to realize you were the potential Independent of Haven.” Despite her disaffected exterior, her hands shake with adrenaline. “But I’d know your violence anywhere.”
Around them, the bodies of thirty bandits lay scattered in pieces. Citizens of Haven search for their loved ones, crying on shoulders, staunching the wounds of the injured.
His heartbeat stalls. “Out of commission?” he repeats.
Meryl says nothing for a time, her hot hands a sear into his arm as she tries to pull him into a stand. “Yeah, you really did a number on him. I’d be a lot more pissed off about it if you weren’t in the middle of a saving a whole town right now.”
Leo does not have forever.
Knives must prioritize.
In the blur toward the hospital, his many blades drag on the ground until he recalls them into his body, leaving him in a fully human form for the first time in two years. “What do you mean,” he demands, his hands protective around the boy in his arms, “out of commission?”
Upon his flight suit, the blood of the boy has sunk in, chilling him. He cannot think of Vash for a time as he runs and bursts into the town’s little hospital, where doctors and nurses are already accepting the wounded. He places the boy on a gurney an old nurse brings to him. The woman is focused on saving life and pauses only in a brief glance at the glowing markings upon Knives’ face from his exertion of power, before thanking him and turning away.
His fingers slip from the boy, catching on Meryl’s bloodied coat, and he stands as only one of the many dazed people in the hall.
Meryl, with her slower stride, arrives with a skid of her shoes, huffing as she leans over. “The idiot’s still in a deep sleep, regenerating,” Meryl says breathlessly. “I promised—I promised I’d find you for him. Once I found you, he told me to tell you something.”
Knives turns to her, his ice eyes overwhelmed with too many emotions. It is all too much. “What?”
Meryl dares to poke his muscled arm. “He told me to say he can’t believe you didn’t even try to bury him.”
That does it. His legs weaken in a strange way, and his ears ring hard as his heart gives out. An agonized noise escapes from the back of his throat as tears blur his vision.
Vash is not dead.
His brother still lives.
He collapses, and Meryl on instinct reaches out without fear.
And that is how Grandpa and Luna find them, with Meryl struggling under his weight and complaining about her back, her arms trembling as he leans against her as a representative of his brother.
His tears slide hot down her unscarred arm.
At the end of things, Knives sits in exhaustion beside the little boy’s bed, wrapped in a blanket that reminds him of the one the grandfather had once given him. He wears human clothes the hospital has procured for him by way of the grateful Maude, and it is a simple white shirt with brown pants too short for his long legs.
They are the extra clothes of Maude’s dead son, who had died in the initial blast.
In his lap, Luna snoozes, her small hands twisted into the fabric of his shirt and a lock of his hair. He holds her tight as he watches over the sleeping Leo and listens to the steady blip of his heart monitor.
His deep voice is a rough, unsteady sound. “You saved the boy and gave him your coat. Was it simply out of fear for my anger if he died?”
Meryl Stryfe sits on the windowsill, resituating one of her skewed gold earrings. Her form shines white in the light and gives her an angelic glow. “I wasn’t thinking about you,” she retorts. “Just trying to do the right thing when someone’s dying in front of you. Speaking of, you doing okay over there, Grandpa?”
The old man holds Leo’s small hand on the other side of the bed, more of his pepper hair shocked white from the attack. His fingers tremble. “F-fine.” He clears his throat and says again, “Better than I was, now that Leo is stable.”
He gives a grateful look to Knives, who is unable to hold the gaze.
Knives looks away with a huff, still sensitive like an exposed, live wire. Luna is crying in her sleep against him, and he strokes her hair as he used to for Vash when he had nightmares as a child.
“Those were some moves you had back there,” the grandfather says. “In all my days, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
His long fingers hesitate on Luna’s hair. “Do you fear or hate me for it now?”
Grandpa pulls away from Leo and readjusts his newsboy hat with a shaky sigh. “Oh, I think we’ve known for a while what you can really do, if you put your mind to it. I’m just grateful you saved us.”
Knives’ eyebrows flew up. “You do not despise my decision to kill your fellow man?”
Meryl moaned. “Please don’t praise him for killing people—it’s the last thing he needs.”
The grandfather raises his eyes to Knives. “When someone targets kids for the hell of it, you know at that point only God can save them. Some people are too far gone to reason with, like those bandits."
Knives pauses, holding the man’s gaze. “And what if I have killed many children in the past?” he challenges, fearful of the inevitable cutting of ties. The end of peace. “Entire families like yours?”
The silence is heavy among them as Meryl tensely watches.
“Ah.” He looks down at his wrinkled hands, hesitating. He does not look half as surprised or scared as Knives expected. “I think God’s done some work on you since then.”
Everyone, Knives determines that night, is a bit of a parasite. Relying on others in some way, no matter how powerful or weak they are.
For all his god-like power, he relies on Leo for his fantasy stories. Grandpa for wisdom. Luna for playing games of chess, braiding hair, and conversation about fauna. Meryl for a connection to his still-living brother. All of them, to stave off the deep, unsettling oblivion of loneliness.
The concept of symbiosis—Rem’s deep beliefs—no longer feels alien, even if he still struggles with Vash’s all-encompassing interpretation.
That is why he stands at the doorway of Leo’s hospital room, face haggard as he holds the sleeping Luna in his arms. “I cannot leave them to travel with you,” he tells Meryl. “They may be a target for more violent parasites, and they cannot protect themselves as I can protect them.”
The human woman’s face slacks with a knowing, mischievous look. “Aw, you like them.”
He raises his chin with a petulance. In the distance, milling humans wave to him tiredly as they pass by. “These parasites are smarter than the others. An anomaly compared to the larger species.”
“Hm, right,” Meryl says dryly. “So, you’re telling me that you can’t go see your brother because you have to protect a town of humans.”
His face twitches.
Meryl leans in, waggling her eyebrows. “He’s going to be so happy about that.”
Knives raises his wrist and activates a blade in warning. “Do not tease me.”
But the human has no fear, and he unfortunately respects that about her. She giggles, pulling away. “What do you want me to say, then?”
The phrase I’m sorry is certainly not in Knives’ vocabulary, no matter how many humans he protects.
He turns away with a grump, his blanket a curtain against the boldness of Meryl. “Tell him that he is in idiot, and I despise him for his great deception against me. I will never forgive him for pretending to die.” He pauses, his voice softening with an unsteady halt. “And I did not intend to kill him that day.”
Knives slips back into the room to watch over Leo through the night.
Meryl says nothing for a time before she leans in and calls lightly, “Okay, but at least get a haircut before he comes to visit, or he won’t recognize you at all.”
He knows Meryl is a smart parasite with a smart mouth, and her ribbing inspires a mix of deep irritation and amusement.
Two sharp blades sear through the air to slam deep into the wall next to her head.
(His blades are merely a tease of a warning. Fangs without a bite.)
“Hey, what the hell?” Meryl yelps. “You could have killed me.”
He inhales and gives her a pleasant smile as he readjusts Luna in his arms, the sunset from the windows streaking against his skin in a pattern racing along his hidden plant markings.
“If I wanted to kill you,” he says slowly, attempting to build a stronger bond of trust, “you would already be dead. Now go retrieve my brother, so that once he has healed, he may see the fruits of my labor here, where Plants are not sacrificed or required for human survival.”
Meryl puzzles over that for a time.
Her lips drop open as she backs away in awe. It hits her for the first time that the city is running.
Without Knives or anyone else in the powerplant.
His eyes hold her gaze in satisfaction of her awe, that for once he has transcended her sense of reality.
That for once, they are not diametrically opposed in intent.
In her trek back to the fallen Home spaceship, Meryl willingly leaves Knives as Haven’s strange, taciturn protector to dole out justice to any—internally or externally—who would dare to wreak havoc upon the growing city.
Knives recognizes it’s a peculiar balance of love and violence, like that of the sheriffs in Rem’s old Western movies.
He’s sure his love-and-peace brother will still whine about that approach one day as they sit in peace under the shade of an orange tree.
For the first time, he looks forward to it.