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Nai’s head is spinning. His vision is filled with blurred red, a single staring eye piercing through the haze. Nausea churns in his gut as two shrill screams ring in his ears. What’s happening? Where is he? Where is Vash?
Suddenly, an arm comes around him, blocking out the ever staring eye. A familiar voice starts speaking frantically, individual words muffled, indistinguishable over the ringing in his ears. One of the screams cuts off but the other keeps echoing throughout the room.
“-ai! Nai!”
A head moves into his shaky field of vision, a pair of purple eyes locking on to his, causing him to flinch, needing more than anything to avoid the awful gaze of that eye, staring, staring!
“Nai! Please, please calm down. I need you to stop screaming for me, okay? Deep breaths, you can do this.”
Screaming? He’s not… Oh. That voice is his. He takes a deep breath, then another. Soon the sounds of his ragged breathing and a soft sniffling are the only sounds left in the room.
As his head begins to clear, Nai blindly reaches out with a trembling hand, relieved when an identical hand grabs it firmly. Vash is here. He’s safe. Nai looks up at Rem’s tear streaked face, her arms wrapped firmly around the both of them, turning them away from the horror that lies in this room.
“Wha–” Nai coughs, throat still raw from screaming, “What is this? What happened?”
“Nai, Vash, I am so so sorry. Please, I’ll explain, I promise. But let’s get out of this room first, okay? I think we all need a minute to calm down away from all this,” Rem replies, never losing her grip on either twin as she guides them slowly out of the room.
Once they reach the Biodome, Rem seats all of them on the grass, pulling them to her side once again. Her eyes have dried, but they have a look of sorrow and shame that Nai had never before seen in their caretaker’s typically cheerful countenance.
Then, she proceeds to open her mouth and finish the job of shattering everything Nai thought he knew about his world. She tells them how Vash and Nai are in fact, the second known birth of independent plants. That they have, or should have had, a big sister alongside them. But that the uniqueness of an independent’s existence was too intriguing for the human scientists who viewed plants as nothing but resources. And so they ruined it, they ruined her with their countless experiments and tests.
Rem explains how humans are only woken up a few at a time in rotating batches in order to keep the ship running, and how she was woken up near the end of Tesla’s life. How she was too late, too powerless to do anything. And how when she discovered the twins in the plant chamber at the beginning of her next wake cycle, she decided that she would protect them. Lying to the other scientists about Nai’s powers, lying to the other ships about having woken up the other humans meant to help take care of the ship with her during this wake cycle, lying to Nai and Vash about Tesla in order to give them a chance to grow up without fear.
By the time Rem is finished, the ship’s automatic light cycle is growing dim to encourage those with a circadian rhythm to go to sleep. She walks them back to their room.
Smiling weakly, Rem crouches down, looking both boys in the eyes. “I know this is a lot to take in. You probably have a lot of questions and a lot of different feelings about this. But I hope you know I’ll be here for you, and that I love you both, so much.”
Nai says nothing, but leans into her goodnight hug, as Vash beside him murmurs, “I love you too, Rem.”
After she leaves, Vash asks, “Nai, I know you don’t sleep, but just this once, could you lie down with me like you used to? I don’t want to be alone today.”
Nai manages a weak smile, “Of course, Vash.”
Together, they huddle under the blankets, each lost in their own thoughts. As Vash slowly drifts off to sleep, Nai wonders what it must have been like for Tesla. More scared than he is now, no brother by her side for warmth, no Rem to wish her goodnight. Nothing but pain, treated as nothing more than a simple resource for greedy humans. Powerless to stop them.
Shivering, he hugs Vash closer to his side. Then taking a deep breath, he summons a knife to the back of his hand. It’s small still, only barely making it past the knuckle. But he knows his knives are incredibly sharp, and his control over the shape and size improves each time he practices. And so, sitting in the dark, that’s what he does, summoning the blade over and over, straining to make it that much longer, that much faster.
The next morning, all three of them are quiet and subdued. Conversation is stilted, and no one seems to want to do any of the usual games or lessons. But, slowly, over the course of the next few weeks, things begin to return to normal, with a few new permanent changes. Rem increases the pace of their lessons, seemingly trying to rush through all of the information they’ll need to survive as adults. Vash gets clinger, rarely ever more than an arm’s width away from either Rem or Nai. For his part, Nai begins to study human history, desperately trying to understand how things came to this.
The other change was the nights. For those who slept, sleep became full of nightmares, and it became a common sight to see eyebags on Vash’s and Rem’s faces. For Nai, night was a different kind of nightmare. Using his nightly freedom to explore the ship unsupervised, he sneaks back into the plant room which everyone else has been avoiding since that fateful day. And there he reads all of the terrible, disgusting notes left by the scientists about the nature of independent plants.
Often, Nai is left feeling sick to his stomach. The violations to Tesla’s body are countless. But in a sickening way, he is often left feeling reassured. For at the end of each experiment, the scientists come to definite conclusions, seemingly satisfied with the results. There will be no need for any new scientists to evaluate just how long Vash, as a food eating plant, can go without food in comparison to humans, as they have already found out through Tesla. There will be no need to examine the effects of sleep deprivation on independent plants. There will be no need for scan after scan after scan in search for answers on their physical makeup, until tumors are bulging underneath skin.
One thing that does become clear after all his reading, is that Tesla is like Vash. Closer to humans with her physical limitations, and no powers beyond her ability to sync with other plants. Just as Rem always told him, Nai will need to keep his powers under wraps whenever the other humans are woken up. He must make it appear that independent plants are all the same, just like their dependent counterparts, in order to keep the sickening hands of the scientists away.
But this is okay, Nai can handle this. Nai will never blindly trust a human. And his weakness is also his strength. If his powers are discovered, he will be free to use them to defend himself. He is already older than Tesla ever was, and if the scientists ever come for him, the outcome will not be the same.
He can handle this. He has to, for both himself and for Vash. Even now, their older sister is protecting them from beyond the grave. Giving the humans their answers, while giving her kin a dire warning of what will happen if they let their guard down. And now Nai, as the only remaining elder sibling, will need to take up the mantle. Ensure that her sacrifice will never, ever, happen again.
Finally, Nai reaches the last file on Tesla. It has been weeks of sneaking off in the middle of the night, reading as much as he could stomach in one sitting. For a while now, Nai has felt certain he already had the answers he needed. He has understood the depths of the depravity that humans will sink to in horrible, gruesome detail, and he now understands how he and Vash will need to protect themselves. But, still, he reads on. If this is all that is left of Tesla, then he will read it because she deserves to be remembered. He will not turn away.
Still, he is relieved to be nearly done with his self-appointed task. Every new file is a weight on his soul, and besides that, running out of files means that this is the last experiment Tesla had to endure before finally being put to rest.
As has become his custom, Nai grabs the tablet connected to this room’s mainframe, and sits in the corner of the room, his knees hugged to his chest. With a few practiced taps, he opens up Tesla’s final data file.
This file is speculating about whether one independent can be used to create others. As already established in previous research, plants do not have reproductive organs as humans do, no womb to carry a child within. As far as the scientists can tell, Tesla herself was made in the higher dimension, and somehow brought into this one by the dependent plants.
However, the file then moves on to theorize that independents could be forced into connecting to this higher dimension in such a way that gives humans control over when new independents are born instead. It goes on to explain how one of the few organs that plants do have that humans do not have exists where the womb would normally be, and seems to be involved in regulation of energy from the higher dimension. By manipulating this connection to the higher dimension, it may be possible to pull more plants into this one. The existence of this organ is externally visible by particular plant markings which do not follow the usual geometric patterns found on the rest of the body.
Various tests are then described, listing off the different invasive ways the humans attempted to activate this organ. Eventually, they overload Tesla’s abdomen with so much energy in an attempt to get a response, that they damage the energy organ badly.
Nai’s hands are shaking, as he reads the concluding paragraphs.
“ ..subject T is no longer suitable for tests… ”
“ ...keep the subject alive in stasis in case of organ reformation… ”
“ ...top priority will be given to gaining control over the production of independent plants… ”
The tablet clatters to the floor as Nai bends over, gagging. Nothing comes out, as it has been months since Nai has last bothered to eat. Tears stream down his face as he realizes that Tesla is still alive, still suffering as he had been playing around, arrogantly believing that he understood what lines humans would and would not cross. If Nai had been in Tesla’s place, he at least might have been granted the mercy of death, as he had no marks like the one described in the notes –
His body freezes as a new wave of terror crashes over him. Vash. He has never seen all of Vash’s marks, always either too focused on the feeling of their mental connection, or wearing too much clothing to see it all. He has always assumed their marks were the same, sharing in that as they did everything else, but –
Scrambling up, Nai sprints through the hall, uncaring about hiding where he is coming from as he normally took care to do when leaving Tesla’s room this close to the beginning of the others’ wake cycle.
Nai bursts into their bedroom, just as Vash is pulling on his clothes to begin the day. He shoves Vash onto the ground, yanking Vash’s half-on bodysuit down to his hips with frantic hands.
“Sync with me!” Nai screams, bringing their foreheads together painfully in his rush to get into position. “I need to see! Connect right now, Vash!”
“Nai –” starts Vash, expression shocked and frightened.
“Now, Vash!”
Closing his eyes, Vash obeys, letting his internal energy fall into sync with Nai’s, the harmony of their power making their energy glow gently right underneath their skin. And to Nai’s wide, horrified eyes, the oh so familiar lines of Vash’s plant markings coming to life on his torso spread slowly until they reach his lower abdomen, revealing the shape of a glowing heart.
“No,” he breathes, shaking from his position above his brother.
“Nai?” Vash finally speaks, opening his eyes to look at Nai, releasing the energy synchronization, but still glowing with power. “What’s wrong? Please, you're scaring me!”
At the sight of Vash’s eyes, lit from within with energy, so much like Tesla’s, whose piercing stare Nai can still see whenever he closes his eyes, Nai scrambles off Vash. Breathing hard, Nai chokes out a noncommittal answer as he runs out of their room.
Rem, who had been coming down the hallway to see what the commotion was about, calls out after him, but Nai shoves past her and keeps running blindly. He runs and runs, and when he finally comes to, he realizes he is once again back in the room where this all started. Back to the site of Tesla’s desecration, not even given the mercy of being put to rest, and instead being left as a rotting monument to the human’s sins.
His head spins, as all his plans to keep them safe once the humans awoke start to crack. Vash, it’s Vash, not Nai, who will be their target! Vash, who is weak and trusting. Vash, who would walk off a cliff if he was simply asked by a friendly face.
There are too many humans for Nai to fend them off all by himself, he’s still not strong enough, there’s not enough time!
Starting to pace, Nai’s foot catches on the edge of the geranium Rem still leaves in this room out of respect for Tesla. Rem! Maybe with her help, he can keep Vash safe? But no, that’s not good enough. Rem said it herself; she couldn’t save Tesla. All she can do is lie. Weak, helpless Rem will not make a difference. Once the rest of the humans are awake, that won’t be enough, nothing will be enough. Brain whirring, Nai realizes that the only way to stop this will be to stop the rest of the humans from waking up in the first place.
Yes, that could work, Nai thinks to himself, mind already furiously working over the code he’d need to add to the ships. Thanks to Vash having long since discovered the admin password, this will take weeks instead of months. He just prays that he will be able to do this fast enough to keep them safe. Then finally they will be safe, Tesla will be put to rest, and the lies will end. And for the first time in their lives, they will finally have peace.