Chapter Text
It’s disorienting waking up to a room that’s entirely white, no matter how accustomed to it you are. The bed, the sheets, the floor, the walls. It’s all a pure, bright white.
A whine. A stretch. The sheets pool around your hips as you sit up, and had you not noticed your lover was missing, maybe the distant but familiar sound of piano keys being struck would’ve fallen on deaf ears. You hum. He did this often. With no need to sleep or eat the ways humans do, Nai frequently laid with you until you were asleep, only to slip away and leave the bed cold before you woke. You understood it. You couldn’t exactly expect the man to lay motionless with nothing but his thoughts for hours just so you had a cuddle buddy. Not that he was a cuddler anyway.
Your mind begins to clear, drowsiness fading from your brain, taking the possibility of falling back asleep with it. Your clock said it was 05:21. Far too early, but you were up now.
Dragging yourself from the comfort of your bed, dressed only in a button-down sleep shirt and your underwear, you leave your room, and follow the melodic sound of the piano to your lover.
Nai didn’t like people intruding. He didn’t like humans first and foremost so the fact you had not only managed to circumvent those feelings, but wriggle yourself deep enough beneath his skin that he allowed you to push otherwise hard boundaries, was quite something. Only you can wander into his solitude with no repercussions. Invade in his privacy and be met with nothing but acceptance.
He’s engrossed in his playing when you enter. Back to you, hands moving furiously yet with elegance across the keys. It’s always the same tune he plays, one you’ve never heard before, only from him. It’s beautiful. It’s emotional, and you suspect it may be the only taste of any kind of emotion he will grant himself. You’re certain the song means something to him. Sentimental, although he’d probably never admit it. And you just watch, enamored by him and his talent, until the final chords are struck and Nai’s hands go still.
Silence.
“I was under the impression humans thought it rude to stare.”
You smile.
“Sometimes. It can be a complement though, if what you’re staring at is pretty.”
You hear him blow a humoured puff of air through his nose, before he’s turning over his shoulder to look at you, a smirk on his pale lips.
“Are you going to come here? Or am I to come to you?”
An eye roll and a laugh heralds your movement towards the Independent, and he moves to the side of the bench to make space for you as you take your seat. A kiss is placed against your temple, his favoured display of affection, and you look at the dark keys in front of you.
“Your kind confuses me,” he begins simply, and you look at him with a cocked head and raised brows, prompting him to continue, “staring can be construed as rude, but also as flattering. You are meant to know which only with context clues. It’s ridiculous.”
You nod in agreement, turning your attention back to the grand piano before you, following the great expanse of it upwards to the haunting form a dead Plant situated at the top.
“Luckily for you, you won’t have to worry about figuring us out for long, will you?”
Nai goes silent then. And the chill that fills room quickly alerts you to the fact you may have struck a nerve. You glance at him, to find the blonde already staring at you through a frown.
“You’re perhaps the most enigmatic of them all.”
“Me?” You balk.
“You.”
“Pray tell.”
Nai scoffs, looking away from you and reaching out to the piano, striking a single index finger down onto one of the keys.
“You are human. And you’re aware of my plans, and yet, here you sit. Devoted to me. My lover, knowing of the imminent genocide soon to come, and agreeing with it despite your own humanity.”
Your lips purse together, watching as he repeatedly strikes down upon random keys, the notes hitting your ears not nearly as beautiful and methodic as before, but just as haunting. You’re not entirely sure what to say to that. To him. You recognise it’s contradictory to be in agreement of the liberation of the Plants, knowing that if Nai accomplishes his life’s work, you will ultimately die when No-Man’s becomes uninhabitable without their aid. But the Plants had been exploited for far too long. Trapped in oversized jars, leached off of until the day they died, and for what? For humanity to inevitably turn the already inhospitable planet into another wasteland? For centuries of labour to be for nothing?
Is it worse to enslave a race to ensure the survival of another? Or liberate that race and doom the other to their death?
The right answer is entirely subjective. But you’d made your choice.
“… I can ensure you survive. Somehow.”
You feel your eyes go wide in your skull. Feel your heart stop. He’s looking at you again. Entirely serious, and you stare at him with those wide eyes as you try and process what you have been told. That was never what had been pitched to you. Nai had always made it clear to you that every human was to be scoured off of the planet. That the Plants must be set free to create a better world for not just him, or them. But his brother too. Vash.
Not one human would be the exception.
The Humanoid known to many as Millions Knives isn’t sure what to expect when you utter his name beneath your breath, an honour only you and his brother held. Thinks that when you lean into his personal space, embrace him with shaky arms and hide your face in his neck, that perhaps you’re relieved. Happy that his affection for you had reached such heights you would be the only human to survive what was soon to come. Humans were like that. Would do anything to survive. When their lives are threatened, there’s seldom anything off the table they’d do to save their skin.
But you do none of that.
“You can’t.”
Nai goes stiff.
“What?”
It’s the first time you’ve heard him taken entirely off guard, and he forcefully extracts himself from your embrace as he looks at you, eyes cold and confused and angry.
“You can’t do that, love.”
“And why not?”
“I’ve already made my peace with dying.”
“Well, become un-at-peace with it-!”
“What about Vash?”
His expression darkens further at the mention of his brother. His voice is strained, trembles at the back of his throat as he speaks,
“What about him?”
You sigh, fixing him with a look he can’t quite place. Sadness, maybe, or melancholy. It’s emotional, whatever it is, and your eyes are turning glassy.
“From what you’ve told me, your brother seems dead-set on stopping you and your plan, doesn’t he? He’s fond of us humans. Doesn’t want to see us all die.”
“Correct.”
“How would he feel if, after all this, after you achieve your goals and set free your siblings, you kept one human alive? He will experience loss. And he may never forgive you for it. But, if after all the loss he’s going to endure, he comes to find that you get to keep a human you hold dear, while he is left with none… I think any chance you’d stand at redemption would be snuffed clean. And your Utopia would be for nothing.”
Nai doesn’t like admitting he’s wrong. He doesn’t like admitting someone else is right even more, especially not a human, and especially on a subject as sensitive as this. But he is wrong. And you are right. He can’t bring himself to vocalise that as he stares at you, finding, for the first time in his over-century long life, that there’s water filling his eyes. Instead, he pulls you back into his body, embracing you tightly and squeezing closed those bright, icy blue eyes of his.
You stay that way for a while. In somber silence, clinging to his muscular frame until you find the courage to mumble.
“Let’s not spend our time together sitting in dread.”
He doesn’t answer.
“You left me alone again, you know,” you chastise, forcing some life back into your voice, “you really need to stop leaving me alone in bed.”
He huffs again, finally, rasps against your hair, “you’d have me lay next to you, awake, for hours?”
Your laughter fills the room as you lean away once more to look at him, tears clinging to your cheeks, but humour and joy filling your eyes. His brow creases in confusion as you kiss him, giggle against his lips and sigh.
“Oh, Nai. You want to kill every human, and yet you’re far too human yourself.”
“Pardon?”
“You would make your life’s work be for nothing just for my sake, but won’t lie in bed with me for a few hours? How contradictory.”
Nai rolls his eyes. You kiss him again.
“You’re more man than I think you’ll ever know.”