Chapter Text
Vash approaches the final battle with blood that burns his veins and lungs that feel like they carry more agony than air. His heart stutters in his chest, and he can only cling to his determination to finish the fight and hope it lasts long enough to bring the world to peace.
He faces his brother, like he’s looking at a twisted mirror of himself. Both of them have black hair now, and too much blood on their hands. A part of him still aches to return to simpler times—before the fall, before they knew Tessla, before—but he has no use for impossible fantasies, and his brother stands opposite him, and people he needs to protect stand behind him. So he fights. Someone once told him that there is no peace without war, and he can’t argue with that now. His gun is heavy in his hand, and he points at Nai with a leaden heart.
I could still forgive you.
He hesitates. For the space of one pained breath. He looks back through the years at his brother and at himself, wondering where it all went wrong—wondering if there was a chance for peace from the start.
I can’t forgive myself.
The battle ends, but peace does not come easily, and Vash knows he has little time left if any. There are still so many things to do—so many things to rebuild, and he promised to go back to the orphanage to visit the kids for—
But he is mortal, though it never bothered him before. Gravity grows stronger with each passing day, and the only limbs that function as they should are the ones not built from flesh and bone.
Sometimes he thinks he should be happy. Vash has his brother by his side and a garden in his lungs. His days are peaceful but never calm, and sleep becomes more elusive than ever. The dark shadows beneath his eyes deepen until his companions nearly beg him to take a rest, and even then, he insists he can still help until Nai drags him off.
= = =
The dust settles after the war, and the angels return to the ground. Nai steps back and bears witness as the ashes begin to settle. The barren planet begins to turn green, only in a few places at first, but vegetation grows. He steps back as the curtain falls and then raises on the dawn of a new era. He still doesn’t like them, but they have learned to behave themselves, and even if they haven’t, his power is spent. He possesses no more strength to fight, nor even the motivation to do so. Only one thing matters—his brother is dying and no one can save him.
Vash suffers from a foolish human disease (from love, of course, from love). As he once suffered for the love of every human, now he seems to suffer just for one. All Nai can do is watch him wither. And all Vash does is smile an empty smile and make him promise he’ll be good in a world without him.
Vash finds them a place to stay. Close enough to a city to be able to reach it if needed, but far enough away that no one will stumble upon their doorstep by accident. It’s close, too, to the location of the orphanage.
Before Vash grows too weak, he makes his brother accompany him to the new location of the orphanage. Though Vash’s exhaustion is visible, he still smiles for the children, lets them hang from his arms and pull him over. Nai waits to the side, standing quietly in the shadow of the newly-constructed building. One or two of the children stray his way, and he watches them cautiously, wondering why he needs to be there at all.
These children are wide-eyed and curious. Smiling and laughing despite whatever circumstances brought them to an orphanage in the first place. Nai’s gaze follows Vash running across the yard, trailed by five or six little humans. For a moment, he hears the echo of laughter from the cold corridors of a spaceship and Rem’s voice telling them not to run too fast lest they fall. An unfamiliar heaviness settles in his chest.
As they make their way back home, Vash looks at him curiously . “Will you visit them again?” The when I’m gone remains unspoken.
Nai glances at his brother. Vash has always been on the leaner side, but now he is little more than bone. The hollows of his cheeks are steeped in shadow, and even the usual smile he pulls onto his face looks tired.
“I’ll think about it,” Nai answers. “But they won’t want to see me if you’re not there.”
“You don’t know that.” Vash lets his eyes close for a moment. “Give them a chance?”
Give them a chance, Nai echoes to himself. Hasn’t he given them enough? Vash always trusts them one more time.
Always one more time.
= = =
Vash’s friends visit once. The two girls look sad enough Nai lets them in without fuss. He doesn’t bother to ask their names as he steps back from the door and lets them across the threshold of their small house on a remote hill. Vash seems happy to see them so Nai steps back. These humans, these girls, were by his brother’s side and they never hurt him. So he steps back. He waits in another room, not listening to the whispers that echo down the hall.
The girls pause by the door before they leave.
“How long?” Meryl asks.
Nai shakes his head, sharply, just once. But it communicates enough. Tears pool in the corner of her eyes and her lip trembles.
“The garden—in front—it’s beautiful.”
Nai stares at her. It’s hardly more than a collection of half-withered things trying to survive, like his brother (like himself.)
“You could plant gladioli—for him—for his strength and for remembrance,” she says with a tight smile. “It’s a human tradition, but—please,” she adds. “Even now, there aren’t many of us who know who to thank, and the history books won’t tell his story as they should. You’re—" she pauses. “You are the only one who can preserve his memory. The rest of us will be gone in fifty years.”
“It’s nice to meet you!” Milly calls over her shoulder as they walk toward the garden gate, her voice bright despite the tears, and he wonders how she can even bear to smile at him. “Take care of Vash for us!”
Nai manages a nod before they disappear from sight. He still thinks them foolish and fragile, but they will outlive his brother. He could hate them for it—if he had the strength left to care.
He shuts the door and returns to Vash’s bedside. His red coat hangs on a hook by the front door, as if ready for him to grab on the way out, and his room is small and clean with a window that opens to the garden. The room is sparsely furnished with a bed, a chair, and a small table. Nai glances at the single rose in a small glass box on the table, the vase of purple aconite, and the small picture frame, and then at his brother.
“They were both crying as they left.”
Vash offers a weak smile. His eyes are red.
“They told me to take care of you,” Nai tells him. He swallows, hesitates. “To remember you.”
Vash manages a smile though the tears well up in his eyes once more.
Nai takes a tissue from the tissue box on the table and holds it out. “How unsightly.”
“You need to be okay.” Vash blows his nose with shaking hands. “Someone needs to watch over them.”
“Still thinking of those humans,” Nai says distastefully, then sighs. “They’ll live.”
“For yourself, too.”
Nai hesitates. “I’m not a crybaby like you, I’ll be fine.” It is not the first lie he has told Vash, but it will probably be the last. If he repeats it enough, maybe someday it will be true.
Vash grows weaker. His messy black hair fans out over the pillow and his eyes lose their shine. Nai stays in the room with him, even when Vash tells him to go eat or sleep.
“I don’t need to do those things,” Nai reminds him.
Vash offers a small smile. “You look tired, Nai.”
“So do you.” He is not gentle by nature, but he wipes the sweat from Vash’s forehead with a soft touch. What else is he to do, when his brother is dying from the poison growing in his lungs and worrying about everyone but himself.
“I’m sorry,” Vash murmurs.
“You shouldn’t be sorry,” Nai says. “What could you be sorry for?”
Vash touches his hand. His skin is cold, like all warmth has already abandoned him. “I broke a promise—Rem told me not to leave you by yourself.”
“I told you, I’ll be fine.”
“Not now.” He grips Nai’s hand harder, though with barely any strength. “Before—when we were younger—I shouldn’t have—“
“Hush.” Nai places his hand over Vash’s like he can impart some of his own warmth and by doing so, keep Vash even a moment longer. He’s not fool enough to believe it will work. Though he may have craved this sort of apology once, all he wants is for his brother to live, and even that seems to be too much to ask for now. The days when he could blame humans for tearing his brother apart were easy, and he supposes he still can, but while he could fight legions, he has no power to stop the flowers rooted in his brother’s chest.
“You don’t need to be sorry for that.” Nai says, and he struggles to keep his voice steady, hoping Vash doesn’t notice.
“And I’m sorry for breaking that promise a second time, I’m sorry you have to take care of yourself, I'm sorry I have to leave.”
Nai shushes him again, more harshly this time. “You need to stop being sorry,” he says. “There’s nothing you need to regret.”
Vash remains quiet for a moment. “Sometimes I think I should regret loving him. He would have lived longer.” He hesitates again. “Do you think he would forgive me?”
Nai glances at the purple flowers on the bedside table—Wolfsbane. How poisonous. How perfect. To take his brother away one last time.
“For what?” Nai asks.
“For loving him.”
“He made a choice,” Nai says without looking Vash in the eye. He cannot pretend to understand humans, or even Vash, but he knows this much. “For the roses with their thorns, for the red geraniums Rem once loved, for you. He made a choice.” He turns back to his brother. “To love is to sacrifice,” he whispers and waits in silence until Vash falls into an uneasy slumber.
= = =
“Where did you…” Nai hesitates to take a breath, to wonder if he’s even allowed to ask this question, to wonder if Vash will answer. “Where did you bury him?”
Vash turns his head to look at him with a rustle of movement against the pillow, his eyebrows raised with a genuine curiosity but his expression guarded. “Why do you want to know?”
Nai doesn’t know how to tell him that he doesn’t want to separate them in the end. That he hates how Vash suffers but can’t hate that Vash was loved so well. That he never understood love before, but thinks he might now—when he counts the fresh blooms of aconite every time he visits Vash’s room and sees how gently holds them even as they poison him.
“I’ll bring you there,” Nai says quietly. To be with him. To rest. To say goodbye.
Vash observes him for another moment before turning to glance out the window. “You won’t find it without me.”
The journey passes uneventfully and too quickly.
Vash touches the cross scratched into the wall, leaning on Nai for support. His fingers clench and he coughs again. Petals fall from his lips and splatter his hand with blood as he tries to catch them.
= = =
“Don’t cry now.”
Vash smiles through newly shed tears. “Don’t follow too soon. I hope you learn to love this world and the people that inhabit it. I hope you learn to forgive. And I wish I could be there to see it, but since so can’t I’ll pass Rem’s promise on to you—take care of Nai.”
“Thank you,” Vash says. “For everything.”
Nai waits a minute longer, holding his breath until he knows that Vash has left him behind once more.
It rains.
For the first time in a century, it rains.