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You are born, the two of you, like light from a dying star.
The universe is large, a sprawling, endless mass of violent expansion. You don’t know that when you take your first breath. Maybe you sense it and that’s why you cry. Something like that—the universe, the vast spread of unfeeling, black space—must have pressed in on you, a vacant gasp against your small ears.
The thing is, you don’t remember any of this.
You were born as something else died and you will not understand what that means until so much later. (That to have life, you need also to have death.)
At the time, crying at the violence of it—at being forced into existence from nothing—all you know is that there is something here now that there wasn’t before. You are here now when you weren’t before.
The world is cold and space is endless.
It is a true, bitter thing.
It will eat you alive if you let it.
But when you turn, there is someone else there. A small hand in your hand, a small nose against your nose.
His warmth pressed against your warmth, a puff of his breath on your cheek. His cry, when he cries—and he does cry—makes you quiet.
You are just born, a tiny, scared thing.
You take your brother’s hand and he takes yours.
Together, you finally fall asleep.
The thing about being a twin is that nothing is ever your own. There is something about being a set of something that makes it seem as though everything must come in a set. This is true even though you are on a ship of millions of sleeping humans.
There is only one person awake and even she thinks of you as a pair.
You don’t mind. It’s hard to be angry at that sort of thing. (You think of yourself as a pair too.)
You share your clothes with him, your hair, your smile, your eyes. The differences are subtle. His hair is the color of spun gold and yours is the color of straw. When he laughs, his shoulders shake with the effort. When you laugh, it’s a quiet, almost muted thing. You have a mark under your right eye and he has a mark under his left. They are small, in the face of so much the same, but still, they—
Sometimes, the differences make you angry. Sometimes, you take his hand against your own and measure to the fingertips.
“Could we be the same person?” you asked him once. It had felt urgent to determine, a hook in your gut. “Tell me, Vash. Are we the same?”
He always indulges you when you’re like this. He has a smile that’s for Rem and a smile that’s for you and sometimes you’re jealous they’re not one and the same. This time when he smiled, you could tell he thought you’d told a joke.
“No, Knives,” he said and wrinkled his nose. “We’re different people, aren’t we?”
He let go of your hand and you felt disappointment slide down your spine. It lasted a second. Then he laughed and threw his arms around you.
“We’re twins,” he said. “It would be boring if we were the same.”
You don’t know about that.
You’ve thought about it sometimes. If you were born together and share everything together, doesn’t it make sense that you will die together too? But how would that work unless you were the same? Two different lives couldn’t be so perfectly intertwined.
Anyway, Vash can’t die before you. You’ll kill him if he does.
You share a birthday with him and you think that’s your favorite day of the endless, remarkable year.
“Blow out the candle!” Rem says and she laughs like you’re meant to be grateful for it.
It’s not that you don’t like her. Rem is your mother, or close enough to it. She’s kind, she’s hopeful, she’s giving. She adores you and Vash. There’s something about her that you don’t trust. You can’t tell what it might be and Vash would never hear you if you tried to figure it out.
“Why?” you mutter, a dumb hat on your head. “I don’t get it.”
“Do it, Knives!” Vash says and his shoulder is pressed against yours. “Rem said so, so we have to!”
You turn your head to him and are going to say whatever comes to mind—the first thought at the tip of your barbed tongue.
But then he smiles at you and you forget what had annoyed you to begin with. He bumps his shoulder into yours and touches your chin.
Every part of you feels like starlight.
“Let’s do it together, Knives,” your twin says. He smiles and it’s the soft one, the bright one, meant just for you. “I want to share my birthday with you.”
You look into his eyes—your eyes—and you hope that one day he will know they are for you and for you only.
“Stupid,” you say, but it’s not mean like you sometimes can get. “I’m your twin. We always share our birthdays together.”
Vash laughs at that. You roll your eyes.
Together, you bend forward and blow out the candle.
That’s half the story.
The things you share, the ways in which you are both perfect parallels, two halves of the same sentence, twin electrons spinning around the same atomic core. In every way that counts, you and your brother share everything.
Nothing is ever your own.
That’s the lie though, or at least the half-truth.
You share everything with Vash, except for one thing.
Vash looks at the sleeping humans, at the dark reaches of space spread all around you, and all he sees is potential.
What you see is death.
This is where you differ.
He gets hope, sweetness, belief.
Fear is something that was created for you and you alone.
You’re the one who finds Tesla.
Remember that, Vash.
The glimmer of a girl with a face like a reflection. It wasn’t the files that had drawn your attention, it was a gut-feeling, something sharp at the back of your neck.
Like calls to like, you once read.
It’s easy to see a girl you don’t know and forgive the woman who has been lying to you because you think you cannot survive without her love.
Vash wears his grief so obviously, but the thing about grieving is that it is used to heal. Vash cries. He tries to take his anger out on Rem. Then, when his tears are spent, he forgives her.
You have no desire to heal.
You don’t know how he does it. You and he are the same in every way that counts, but you think he was made for kindness and you were made for something harder. You try to forgive Rem—the woman who raised you both, the woman who cuts your hair, and treats your brother with such kindness. You try to forgive the person your brother loves, but maybe that’s exactly why you can’t.
There is no space in your heart to forgive.
When you close your eyes, all you can see is the glimmer of a girl with a face like a reflection.
She’s asleep in a tube.
The parts of her that remain.
All of that—the betrayal, the screaming, the big fall, the dying.
Isn’t it all a bit…overblown?
Like yes, you killed all of those people, but how many of them killed you? Tried to kill you?
You don’t understand why Vash looks at you like you’ve ruined his heart.
“Why, Knives?” he asks you. He’s staggering over his own feet. “Why did you do that? How could you?”
“What do you mean how could I?” you ask and it’s a genuine question. “How could I have not?”
He doesn’t understand, or he refuses to. He always was too soft for the people who would one day kill him.
You reach out to touch him and he cringes away. It hurts more than you could have imagined.
“Why are you acting like this?” you ask Vash. “It was us or them, Vash. It’s always us or them.”
“You’re wrong,” he spits out. He’s crying again. God, he’s always crying. “It didn’t have to be like that. You killed Rem, you killed Rem!”
Who is Rem to you? You want to ask. Who was she, this human woman who did nothing but offer shallow forms of love? Was she the person you were born with, the second pulse in your heart, the electricity at the base of your spine? Were you split from the same pieces of matter; were you created together, two alien plants born of another alien mother?
When you took your first breath, when you woke up and cried, was she the one who turned toward you and held your hand?
She is not me, you want to say. She is not me she is not me she is not me.
Vash has never been apart from you. You have shared the same things—the same breaths, the same life—since the day you were born.
You wrap your hand around the back of his neck and pull him close.
“You’re mine,” you say. “Don’t forget that.”
You kiss him on the mouth and before he can do it, you shove him away.
You do not see him again for a hundred and fifty years.
In that time, things change.
You change, he changes.
Humans, though. They don’t change.
They rise up from a landscape of dust and do to this planet what they did to their old one. What did Rem save but the same people who had killed everything else?
You see the destruction they cause, the death.
They kill each other, hurt each other. Why is it only bad when you do it?
The plants—
You see them too. You know what they are used for, what humans continue to do to them.
They would do it to you too, to Vash too, given half a chance. It would not even cross their selfish human minds to not.
You tried to tell your brother this, you think. A hundred and fifty years ago, you saw the proof of their potential, the potential of their evil.
Why were you abandoned for seeing far enough ahead to read the writing of your own destruction?
In all of the time you have been apart, Vash has wandered and you have hunted. It isn’t because you hate him, or because you want to hurt him.
You want to show him. You want to prove to him that what you did, you did for the two of you.
Sometimes you have to hurt the things you love the most.
Anyway, this wouldn’t be a problem if the thing you loved the most ever tried to see things from your perspective. What a brat.
“Why do you chase him, Knives-sama?” one of your slaves asks. The blue-haired one with the fervor in his eyes. “Is he important enough for this?”
If you could explain to a human what it means to be two halves of a whole, to share a universe with one other person. A hundred and fifty years could not drive you a part. Not two hundred or three hundred or four.
Eons would not be enough to make either of you forget your mouth against his.
(He had only resisted for a moment, you remember. His hand on your chest, his mouth open against your own.
He has always loved you back. The problem is that there was always Rem.)
“You wouldn’t understand,” you tell Legato coldly. You turn from him and feel the angel’s feathers along the back of your neck. “And I am not going to waste my time telling you.”
Angel arms, a blast carving a crater in the moon. Dark hair and dying timelines.
When the doctor tells you what it means, you scream.
“He can’t die,” you scream, destroying everything. One by one you decimate. “He can’t die he can’t die he can’t die.”
You will not let Vash be taken from you by anything, not even by his own body.
Once, when you were still both young and angry and hurt, you briefly crossed paths.
“Why did this happen?” he asked you. “It didn’t have to be like this. You’re my brother, Knives. We were never supposed to be apart.”
You have never been able to explain to you that this is the result of that, the natural conclusion of that sentiment.
There can be a world that wants to hurt you both—that wants to take and take and take from your sweet, perfect brother—and there can be a world where you can protect him the best way you know how.
“I’m doing this for us,” you say. “Why can’t you understand that?”
“I wonder sometimes.”
You find yourself irritated.
“What?” you say. “What does that mean?”
Vash—older now, maybe fifty—swallows scars that he thinks you haven’t noticed.
“It can’t just be us,” he says. “We need other people, Knives.”
You scoff.
“It was just us for a year and it was fine. We didn’t need anyone.”
“You’re wrong,” Vash says and there’s an edge to his voice he only ever gets when he’s talking about—“We had Rem.”
You feel bile rise in your throat.
“Rem Rem Rem,” you say, mocking him. “When are you going to give that up? She was nothing to us.”
“She loved us,” Vash says. “It doesn’t matter if you never loved her back.”
That is a complicated lie and an even worse truth.
“Don’t talk to me about her again,” you say, angry and bitter. “I never want to hear that bitch’s name again.”
That’s when you feel a hand on your jaw. He turns you to face him, his grip like a vise on your skin.
“I don’t care how you feel about her,” he says. “Don’t disrespect Rem.”
You look as disgusted as you feel. You try to tear away, move back, but he doesn’t let you go.
“You’re mine too,” he says and you stop before you can break anything.
Your chest tight, your eyes wide. Every part of you held so terribly still.
“I think you forget that sometimes,” he says. He brushes his thumb against your chin. “We were born together. You’re just as much mine as I am yours.”
You don’t know what to say to that. For the first time in fifty years, you’re at a loss.
“Kiss me,” you ask him. Beg.
And you think he will. For the first time in fifty years, you let yourself feel something other than fear.
The gentle press of his fingers and then he lets go.
“No,” Vash says. Then, “I’ll save you first.”
You think about that for another fifty years.
The ache in your chest, the gnawing in your stomach. A lifetime of wanting, of needing to protect someone who is adamant that if there is a cost, he doesn’t want to be saved.
Well, twins can play that game.
There is nothing to save here because you aren’t wrong.
And even if you were, you wouldn’t want to be.
So what happens after all of that?
What is there to be saved when—
Jeneora Rock, and the Fifth Moon, and angel arms, and satellites, and a priest slumped against a cross.
—Vash asks for salvation and you ask for destruction.
How could you ever meet in the middle again?
How could you ever find love among two such different brothers?
A war between two halves of one whole could only ever end in one way.
There could only ever be one winner.
It just figures that it would be him.
“I liked you better as a blond,” you say, panting. Blood on your hands, blood against the back of your neck.
The sky unfolds above you both, ink-black and treacherous. Around you swirls the clay-colored dust of a world you’re still not sure about.
“There’s always hair dye,” he says and you laugh.
It hurts you to do so.
He puts your arm around his shoulder, his hand at your waist.
“You didn’t save me,” you say. “Don’t think you did.”
“Knives,” he says and your name is a sigh in his mouth.
“I’ll regroup,” you say. “I’ll come again.”
“Shush,” he says and he helps you sit down on a rock that will seat you both. “Enough.”
You’re too old to throw a tantrum, but the thought does cross your mind.
It hurts to sit down, but your brother’s hand on your side helps.
“Do you hate me?” you ask. Here, at the end of all things, it seems the only thing you have left to know.
He doesn’t say anything for long enough to be an answer.
“Yeah,” he says. “And no.”
He sighs again.
“You killed so many people, Knives,” he says.
“I don’t regret it,” you say. “I’m not you, Vash. I will never regret it.”
“All of this time and you still don’t understand, do you?”
You don’t know what he’s talking about. It hurts a bit to breathe. You grit your teeth and try to turn away.
He doesn’t let you.
His fingertips on your jaw again. He turns your face toward his.
“What?” you ask bitterly. “Are you going to say that horrid woman’s name again?”
“You’re already bleeding,” your brother says and smiles. “I’m not trying to actually kill you.”
You make a disgusted face and he laughs.
When you were both younger and he laughed, you would want to make him do it again. You would want to make him smile, make him linger, make him close his eyes again and again and again.
Now, a hundred and fifty—and some, you’re not sure of the exact number anymore—years later, you feel yourself wanting the same thing again.
How can the one person you love the most in the world—in the universe, in this life and all others—be the one person you never stop fighting?
Isn’t he tired? Aren’t you?
“We were never the same,” Vash says. “I never wanted you to be me.”
You open your mouth and close it. The truth hurts nearly as much as your injuries.
Is that what this has been about? All of these years? All of these lives?
The one fundamental, irreconcilable difference. You, who wants him and he, who wants others.
You can’t forget that. You don’t think you can forgive it either.
His eyes are so blue in the warm, setting sun. His hair black where once it was gold. You miss it. You have always missed him.
“You didn’t save me,” you repeat. “Do you understand, Vash? Don’t think you have.”
“Okay, Knives,” Vash says. He wipes the blood from your cheek. “Okay.”
Then, closing his eyes, he leans forward and kisses you.
You are born, the two of you, like light from a dying star.
There is no escaping a truth like that, a love like that. For better or worse, as much destruction as it has caused.
He has ever been yours, and you have ever been his. That is what this whole war—this whole life—has been about.
His fingers slide between yours.
Your brother takes your hand, and you take his.