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Nai learns the meaning of the word “twin” early. For all he can remember, it’s the first word Rem Saverem ever teaches him. Twin: a being more like you than anything else in the world, who came from the same place that you did at the same time. To hear her tell the story, though, they didn’t exactly come out the same way.
“Nai, you shrieked the whole while,” Rem giggles. “So loudly you woke up half the ship. Vash arrived without a single noise just behind you, and we didn’t even realize there were two until you bapped him in the face.”
“Like this?” asks Nai innocently, and reaches through the half-foot space between them to tap Vash’s forehead with his fist. Vash, the big baby, scrunches up his expression and glares.
“Nai,” he whines.
“It didn’t even hurt,” Nai says, scoffing. But then Vash looks at him with his round, sea-glass green eyes, all downturned like a sad puppy’s, and Nai—
Well, Nai caves like a house of cards in a gale. He wraps his fingers in the collar of Vash’s shirt and tugs him over on the bench to lie with his head in Nai’s lap. “There, there,” he grumbles. “You big baby.”
Rem is cooing at them, so Nai ignores her. He’s busy carding his fingers through the fine corn silk of his brother’s hair and marveling at the fact that even if they’re twins, they’re not exactly the same. Vash’s eyes are greener, warmer like the fields in the pictures Rem had shown them of Earth’s grasslands. His hair looks yellower, too. Like gold.
Nai, in comparison, looks bleached. Washed out. Like all the pigment in him had been stolen by his little brother. The thing is, he doesn’t mind. Let Vash have all the colors, because Vash, no matter what, is his. All the colors are his by default then, too.
There are other differences. Subtler ones. Vash is louder, more outspoken. He laughs freely and he feels everything so strongly that he never manages to hide it. Whether it’s happiness, or the occasional bout of melancholy, or pain. He’s easy to read.
And Nai—Nai knows he’s quieter. Taciturn. Some of the people on the ship wonder if Vash got all of the colors and all of the emotions, too. But they’re wrong.
He and Vash—they’re Plants. And Plants were engineered to feel.
It’s a Wednesday when it happens for the first time. He and Vash are roughhousing, having temporarily escaped the watchful eyes of their mother. He doesn’t know why it started. Maybe Vash made a crack about the piano scale he messed up that morning, something silly. Something stupid. Nai remembers having his fist balled up in Vash’s hair and Vash reaching, stretching, yowling his name in protest when—
He feels it. He feels Vash’s hand in his hair. But Vash’s hands are nowhere near his hair. They’re flapping around, batting at Nai’s arms as Vash crie,s “Nai, lemme go, I didn’t mean it!”
Experimentally, Nai pulls.
Pain erupts across his own scalp as Vash bursts into tears. “I’m going to kick your ass,” he blubbers. He must have learned that from one of the mechanics on the ship. The thought fades as Nai lets go of his brother’s hair and stares at his own hand like it betrayed him. And it had, hadn’t it?
“Vash,” says Nai, interrupting his twin’s tantrum, “punch me.”
“What?”
“Punch me,” Nai repeats. Vash looks at him curiously, his eyes still wet and shiny but not leaking, not anymore. He raises his fist before putting it down.
“I won’t stoop to your level,” he says, sniffing like Rem does when she’s putting on a disappointed face.
“Please?” tries Nai. He makes the best approximation he possibly can of Vash’s sweetest pleading expression. They have the same face, dammit! It should work on him!
Really, it has the opposite of the intended effect. Vash giggles at him. “Fine,” he says, mischief in the curve of his mouth, and grazes Nai’s shoulder with the most feather-light of punches. “There. Happy now?”
Nai looks at him witheringly. Nothing for it, he thinks, and walks over to the wall of the room. He rears his head back and—
“Nai, what’re you—!”
Blinding pain slashes through his skull. Dimly, he hears Vash cry out. In sympathy, or because he felt it too? He turns slightly to look at his brother, whose pudgy hands are clutched tight to his forehead. He’s crying again, big fat tears, and he stumbles over to Nai with an expression of rigid agony.
Nai immediately feels like the worst brother in the world.
He drops into a sitting position and drags Vash into his arms, murmuring soothing nothings into his hair. He apologizes once, twice. Three times. Presses a kiss to Vash’s brow and holds him tightly even as his own skin smarts. “Vash, Vash, Vash,” he whispers. His twin sniffles in his arms but doesn’t move, content in the circle of Nai’s body. It strikes him that he wants this always, which is a thought he doesn’t know what to do with.
They sit there for a long time.
When Nai tells Rem what happened—and of course he tells Rem what happened, he needs to make sure it never happens again—she frets, and she clicks her tongue in worry, and she has him and Vash poke each other at varying intensities until the sensation passes an unseen threshold and transfers over. Vash thinks it’s hilarious, because of course he does, while Nai has a feeling growing in the pit of his stomach that’s dark and ugly.
“Gentle touches don’t cross,” she says contemplatively. “Only when the nociceptors—oh, sorry Vash, that means the cells that sense pain—fire does the sensation carry over…oh, how strange!”
Rem consults with the other scientists on their ship. He’s not supposed to be there for it, but he’s small and the vents are large, so he sits in on their meeting with Vash at his side.
“We’ve never had two Independents before,” points out one of the scientists. The one with the sad eyes—Conrad. “Much less twins. Had Tesla lived, we would have had a baseline to see if this phenomenon occurs with singular Independents.”
Tesla? Vash mouths. Nai doesn’t reply, too focused on the conversation below.
“A moot point,” says Rem, her voice harsher than Nai has ever heard it. “For obvious reasons. More relevantly, has this been documented in the Dependent Plants before? Saito, you’ve been working with the tanks for longer than me.”
Saito’s a nervous looking man with a forrgettable face. He fiddles with his clipboard, clearly uncomfortable with the spotlight, and clears his throat. “Not quite,” he admits. “There’s instances of them reacting to each other, particularly when one is in distress due to, I don’t know, high salinity levels or something, but we weren’t even aware Plants could feel pain until we discovered Independents. We always figured it was some evolution of the volatile organic compound-based signaling methods that regular vegetation uses. But this—Dr. Saverem, you’ve known this—we’re treading on entirely new ground here.”
He squeaks. “Pardon the pun...”
Nai can’t see Rem’s face from his vantage point, but whatever expression she’s got on, it’s enough to make Saito flinch back.
“In summary,” she says, deceptively soft, “we’ve no idea.”
“As usual, when it comes to them,” mutters another scientist. “We should have kept Tesla around for longer.”
Rem slams her clipboard down with a loud crash, making both Nai and Vash flinch back, and walks out of the meeting.
Nai makes eye contact with Vash and his brother nods grimly. This warrants further investigation. Some calculated snooping, even. Maybe breaking into the data room.
Vash’s fingers are more nimble than Nai’s, so he sets to work cracking the complicated lock on the server room door. Nai’s feet are faster, so he loiters at the mouth of the hallway, scuffing his feet every now and then to tell Vash—in that language only twins know—we’re safe, we’re safe, we’re safe. Once he hears the soft sigh of the door opening, he takes one last peek into the adjacent corridors before darting inside. They shut the door together.
It’s this room that Nai, decades later, considers their Tree of Knowledge. Rem, the snake. The files detailing Tesla’s torture and death, the apple. The bitter knowledge that they’ve never been anything more than scientific curiosities to be used, abused, and exploited like their Dependent sisters—like their Independent sister, which Nai can’t ever think about without feeling like his chest is ripping in half—the sudden awareness of their nakedness.
Vash doesn’t take it well. Neither does Nai, who feels, rather than sees, the tumult of hatred and rage rising in his brother. It must hurt him, he realizes faintly. It must hurt to feel so much. So it’s with no small amount of shameful gratitude that he gives into the black spots in his vision and passes out.
When he wakes, it’s to a teary Vash and a Rem with blood staining her white shirt. She’s got her long fingers wrapped around his hand. And Vash—
I’msorryI’msorryI’msorryI’msorry
There’s a pounding in his head as his heart beats a vicious tattoo from under his ribs. He feels like he’s too big for his skin.
Rem explains. Rem apologizes. Rem promises she’ll never let what happened to Tesla happen to them.
But Nai remembers how Vash’s file had been right next to Tesla’s. How his own had been under a different category. He remembers the clinical curiosity of Rem’s coworkers, all of them scientists, all of them complicit.
He looks at Vash, who’s still crying—he’d stabbed Rem out of anger, and yet now he weeps?—and knows, with the sort of certainty afforded to children who grow up too fast, that his twin won’t be able to do what needs to be done. But that’s what Nai is for.
He’s the older brother. He’ll shoulder this for them both.
—
(In the weeks and months after the Fall, Nai becomes accustomed to pain. None of it, of course, is his.
The gnawing sensation of an empty stomach. The dull ache of fists pounding against a wall. The hoarse throat from yelling without water. They’re starving his brother, Nai thinks, killing intent bubbling under his skin. He doesn’t know if it’s his, or if it’s Tesla’s, or if it’s Vash’s. He’s started to go blurry at the edges. God, he needs to see Vash.
He gets his wish. But Vash is standing in front of him with innocence on his tongue and wide eyes full of naivete, as if he hadn’t seen Tesla’s body floating in those tanks. There is a human woman who looks so much like Rem that Knives, half-drunk on rage— whose rage, Knives?— keeps overlapping her image with his mother’s. Mother, mother, mother. The mother he killed. He’ll kill her again, if he needs to. Over and over and over.
And then Vash opens a Gate in his arm, and Knives just…moves.
It takes a split second for the agony to hit. It bowls him over, sends him crashing to his knees as he clutches his shoulder. His own arm, still there—the shrieking agony of a knife slicing through it—the muscle solid and real under his fingers—the sudden lightness on that side of his body—it’s too much. The animal noise that comes out of his mouth shames him.
Somewhere inside of him, Tesla is screaming.
He’s done this all wrong. He has to fix it.)
—
Vash still remembers the first time he’d seen his brother, so many years after he’d lost his arm. He’s at some inn, fifty iles south of November, give or take, and he’s fixing up their sad flower patch as a favor. The perpetual Gunsmoke summer doesn’t really lend itself for anything more water-dependent than cacti, but the innkeeper’s wife had a green thumb and a tenacious attitude that had led her to plant a small patch of red geraniums in the alley next to the inn.
He’s pulling up a spiky, stubborn weed when he hears footsteps. Soft ones, scuffling deliberately so that he’s not startled—they spark a familiar burst of adrenaline in his gut. Vash doesn’t look up. He just pretends he doesn’t hear them and lays another weed in the pile to his right.
There’s dirt under his nails and sweat beading on his back. The footsteps have stopped at the mouth of the alley, and shadow falls across the wilting flowers. Still, he doesn’t look up.
He waits thirty agonizingly long seconds before sitting back on his haunches and letting out a long sigh. “It’s been a while,” he says then. “Nai.”
“Hey, Vash,” says his brother. Vash turns his head just enough to see the tall figure leaning on the wall of the inn, arms crossed. His twin looks good, Vash concedes. The baggy overcoat does nothing to hide how his shoulders have filled out in the several years since they’d last seen each other, and his skin is a healthy shade now—a far cry from the sallow, jaundiced teenager Vash had known. But it’s his face that puts Vash on the back foot.
He looks—impossibly—lucid. Like the anger and desperation of those years after the Fall have washed off of him.
But Vash still dreams of the blood coating Nai’s fingers, sometimes. His screams.
“I see you’ve been doing better,” says Nai, propping his chin in his hand and surveying the patch of geraniums. “Rem still haunting you?”
Vash bares his teeth. “Still having nightmares about Tesla?”
Nai smiles back at him, strained. “I see you haven’t changed at all.”
“No,” says Vash. He rocks back on his heels and straightens, dusting off his hands on his pants. His trousers are always dusty, anyway.
It’s been thirty years. Six years of earning Brad and Luida’s trust and another twenty-four of wandering. Thirty years of building a life worth living. Of course, it’s only once he feels safe in his own skin that here comes Nai, nearly on the anniversary of their separation, sauntering into this beautiful thing Vash carved out with his bare hands like nothing’s changed at all, like he’s ready to shatter it.
Vash finds, suddenly, that he’s exhausted. It’s only eleven in the morning.
“What are you doing here?” he asks, with barely any bite. “Don’t you have humans to kill? Plants to steal?”
“What, I can’t come see my baby brother?” asks Nai. A little mocking, a little teasing. A little fond. Like nothing really has changed, like they’re children and still love each other, like they still sleep in the same bed. Like Nai still presses those innocent, butterfly-light kisses into Vash’s hair when they wake up in the mornings over his nose, up his neck and into the crook of his jaw.
An awful feeling crawls under Vash’s skin and whispers its name into his ear: fear.
He doesn’t even have his gun. It’s on his nightstand in his room, and God, he should have known better than to come out without it.
He stands his ground anyway.
“Who told you I was here?” he demands instead of answering the question.
Nai just smiles.
“I want you to leave,” says Vash.
“After all the time I spent looking for you?” says Nai, wrinkling his eyebrows. “That’s ridiculous. I just found you, and it’s been so long.”
Vash suddenly feels very small—it’s familiar, in the way that walking the halls of SEED ships would be familiar, or in the way the smell of birthday cake makes him think of Rem and better days. Nai had always been good at that, making him feel strange and silly and wrong.
“I told you back then never to come looking for me.”
Nai shakes his head in mock disappointment. “How could I not? We’re twins, Vash. As close to what the humans call ‘soulmates’ as anything could possibly be. I can no more stay away from you forever than cut my own arm off.”
He smiles then, bitter and tragic and beautiful. “I did that for you, you know.”
Vash flexes his prosthetic fingers. “I didn’t ask you to.”
“You couldn’t have,” says Nai.
Vash sees something, then, that he doesn’t think Nai meant for him to see. It’s subtle, hidden in the way his brother’s shoulders are held tense and taut, the minute strain in his jaw, the shallow wrinkle between his eyebrows.
He stands in one smooth movement. “What’s wrong?” he asks, still cautious, still fearful. But there’s concern rising inside of him, an old impulse that can’t be quelled.
Nai looks at him, unreadable. “Nothing,” he says, and he’s lying. Vash knows it in his bones. That’s all the warning he gets before his twin’s face drains of all color and he slumps onto the ground.
Vash catches him, because of course he does, because he can’t just let Nai fall. That’s why he’d been leaning against the wall, he realizes. He puts a hand to his brother’s forehead and finds that he’s running so hot it nearly burns. “Nai,” he says urgently. “Nai, what’s wrong? Come on, you can’t just show up like this because you’re sick and you need someone to take care of you. Not after everything you’ve done.”
His brother quirks a dry smile at him. “So what?” he says, voice hoarse and trailing off. “You’re still my brother, aren’t you?”
A brief, violent fantasy: dragging Nai up to his room and putting a bullet in his skull. Vash wonders if it would kill him, too, with their strange rebound. He wonders, traitorously, if he would like it.
“I could leave you here for the military police to find and kill,” he grits out then. He can see it: Millions Knives, hauled off and executed. The bounty on his own head finally gone. And a life, this one more beautiful than the last, free from the creeping fear of his twin coming to upend everything he’s built.
“You won’t,” says Nai, with such arrogant certainty that Vash’s frustration threatens to spike. But the look on his face is so soft, so sure. Like they’re still those children on SEED05. Like Rem is just in the next room, with her gentle hands and smiling mouth and endless, endless forgiveness. Like the last few decades never happened at all.
Vash throws him over his shoulder. “You’re a piece of shit,” he says. He repeats it, just to make sure Nai hears.
Nai’s dry laugh follows them into the inn and up the stairs. Vash cradles it in his hands and names it hope.
—
(Nai gets better, because Vash has had to take care of his own health for so long that it’s no trouble to nurse him back to full capacity. He thinks that Nai will leave as soon as he’s able, and go back to his foolhardy quest to steal every Plant, massacre every human. He’s got his gun trained on his brother the whole time just in case.
And yet—Nai doesn’t leave. There’s a determined set to his mouth, mulishly stubborn, shining with conviction. It’s a look Vash has seen in the mirror a dozen times.
“I’m staying with you,” he says, which makes Vash do a double take.
“Why?” he asks, balking.
Nai reaches out. He points at Vash’s chest, and traces every scar with his finger. Every bullet wound, every slash of a knife, every burn and every old injury. “I’ve felt every last one of those,” he says matter-of-factly, “because you refuse to defend yourself. So I’ll do it.”
“Defend me?” Vash asks, stunned stupid.
“Someone has to,” says Nai. “I’m sick of being in pain.”
Vash doesn’t tell him that he’s been shouldering Nai’s agony, too. That he’s felt every shriek of anger and every gaping pit of grief. It’s why he looks at his brother for a long moment, aching for a past that can’t be relieved and a future he had tasted—a future without Nai. He doesn’t want to throw it away.
But that’s his twin, sitting on his bed, still half-feverish and looking at him with a blazing expression of fierce certainty.
“Fine,” says Vash, and puts down the gun.
Maybe there’s still a future for them both.)