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Responsibility’s infinitudes didn’t weigh him down into cool, smooth concrete. They didn’t shape him into Knives, serrated statue. They made him run.
Vash does not make it far: a bridge to dull Nai’s honed gaze. A sprawling park to muffle duty’s hard consonants. A town to turn him unfamiliar. A borough to barricade.
Talk of tyranny, anonymous violence, arms trafficking at the docks eastward: it all finds him anyway. It perks his ears back toward wood frames, where the grid plan streets give up and take to wandering.
He knew them by rote as a boy. He would shut his eyes and wander the neighborhood without a misstep, its virtuoso.
– Save whenever Nai swooped in to cover his eyes and get a startle out of him.
“Guess who?” A laughing dare.
As though there were anybody else fluttering around their gilded cage.
In spring’s full majesty, the city's frozen falls of wisteria could almost soften portraits of a childhood half-lived: he and Nai in their starched Sunday best. Vash with eyes red-rimmed from confession. Nai, his confessor, with mouth thinned to a pale line: disappointment with him.
Twins singled out for power.
Vash does not make it far – a town, a borough. And it's here, comfortably lost amid the tenement clutter, that Vash bounds up the claustrophobic staircase to Roberto's small press office. Meryl and Wolfwood are on the landing waiting for him, and their faces tell him they have been discussing him. With hands folded in preparation to beseech, Meryl clears her throat and asks them both to take a day-trip on Wolfwood's motorcycle. A grin alights on Vash's face, and so Meryl hurries: let Vash himself, if he would, go and assess Millions Knives' illicit activity in this bayside community-cum-Saverem Family compound.
“So I’m the prodigal twin's chauffeur now?” Wolfwood steps in, some ribbing to jog Vash out of his sudden quiet.
Vash's smile is taut before he covers it with his hand. He presses his foot against a squeaky floorboard, and again. “Meryl, I’m no journalist,” he reminds her.
“Infamously! But you know what to look for, and you know how to look.” She waves her splashy tabloid at Vash: it’s her baby, still missing some teeth. She wants impact. She wants an exposé. “To point a light on this city’s seedy underbelly,” she pronounces with such verve that she might be confronting Millions Knives, arms dealer and all-around terror, himself, “is vitally important work, Vash. Someone’s simply got to do it. And you are the best one to investigate. Well –- no, I suppose I may be the best one to investigate; I have been just waiting to snatch up a story with some meat on its bones; I’ve cut my teeth on everything else Mr. De Niro has thrown my way now; but, well, circumstance – ”
“Circumstance selected me, is all,” Vash offers her. Never mind that he’s made his name fleeing it.
“Just so! Now, you two: get to snooping. Off you go,” directs Meryl, ignoring the pall that bears Vash’s head low and locks his gaze to the ground as he slings a leg over Wolfwood’s motorcycle.
*
No journalist, and no born actor. Wolfwood reminds him of this.
“Be honest now. You ever think about it?” Wolfwood picks at the problem like a scab. “You ever want it?”
“Not a whit,” Vash says, so decisively that it could be the end of it. But: “I'm a poor fit for his right hand anyway.”
“You’re his phantom limb,” curl of white smoke, “then.”
“So you say.” Smile smudges faint.
“So he’d say,” says Wolfwood. He starts the motorcycle anyway.
*
(It is winter, and Knives’ identical stature has stretched to overtake Vash's, his shadow gulping down the gambling dens, the dance hall Vash loved, the docks. Insatiable.
Knives’ knuckles are kissed. Are cracked against temple and rib.
Knives glides over the mess of his making, his heels sucking into viscera.
– Legato will buff out all complaint from his fine leather shoes. Cologne to banish the reek of viscera. Cufflinks clean as ice. Business or a higher calling?
On the day Vash began running, Elendira invited him to admire. “It’s quite a wake he leaves,” she remarked.
Bile had risen in his throat. His knees knocked together, coltish, when he had staggered forth with the intent to undo Nai’s gleeful cruelty. Ears ringing. Too late. He was too late.
Legato’s lip curled at the sight of him.
Need some air, Vash had said. Need something else. A song playing somewhere gentler; a drink to deliver him to fairer climes. Anywhere but here.
Knives rose from his dirty work, red-drenched and montane, to take him into his arms. To hold him.
He fled from Knives’ arms. He ran until he ran out of breath, and then hitched a ride crouched on a tram like a storybook stowaway, and then hopped onto the cycle of a dark-headed seminarian who decided – one look at Vash – to shirk off spring semester for the city.)
*
“Mother Mary, they’re gonna skin me alive. All his goons, limb by limb. Sure. Everyone gets a turn,” Wolfwood mutters around his bent cigarette.
“Not so long as you’re with me,” Vash decides. “I’d call 'em off.” He holds Wolfwood tight around his chest and feels Wolfwood’s sternum jump with a snort.
They skid on the cobblestone, tires squealing. The sound ricochets with a bullet’s anarchy against the towers of travertine and wood, the warm-toned houses, the limestone stairways veiled by dusk. Under their ride, the fallen magnolia and wisteria grind into a fragrant pulp.
Their ingress is unceremonious. Could Knives expect much more from his rebellious half, the sirocco whirling beneath Knives’ sheer cliff?
Off switches the engine in the town square. Vash slips from the safety of the seat only when Wolfwood elbows him.
Women in slim dresses are walking down to the dance hall with arms linked, their excitement bright enough to defeat the dark. The men maundering about under Knives’ purview posture like they want to be Knives, looking every bit the reckoning in their finely tailored suits. Fear can breed a devotion unrivaled.
What is it that Knives so fears, then?
He beams a quick goodbye to Wolfwood and Wolfwood flicks his cigarette butt onto the pathway in reply. Cocks his head with a frown to watch Vash slip on by the rill of flat-capped competition caught in Knives' orbit.
Window egress open. Vash slides inside to a subterranean labyrinth beneath the dance hall. Rough-spun trousers, suspenders and jacket, shoe soles stuck with flower petals: he would have never made it past Legato’s dress code inspection.
Meryl’s seedy underbelly is festooned with lights that quiver and wink in the dim; they make a runway for Vash to pursue the sound of laughter. The hallway opens up to a warm, gin-soaked speakeasy brimming with the privileged few.
Under the band’s cheery rhythm, the scuff and squeak of dancing feet beckon to Vash: loosen the armor, try on joy for size again.
No other way but through. Vash pulls off his glasses, runs his hand through tousled hair, and dips into the crowd.
With silvering smiles and knowing eyes, the revelers crest and ebb about him. He swims through the moat they make, dodging the sweat-sheened couples and rippling between the flotillas of bright young things who collide against each other and blame the drink. Some faces he might know; old associates, family allies. Head tilted to the music, smile easy-coming now, Vash lets himself drift a while.
Wine cellar, next room over. Beyond that, the dingy backroom stacked with barrels of what Elendira dubbed ‘coffin varnish’ sits ready to turn a profit. And the arsenal, its guns and powder, is – he doesn’t know. The maze has snaked bigger and deeper under Knives’ purview, and depths darker, since he’s been away. How much should he expect to find? He ought to know this. Where is it headed? What to tell a notebook? He ought to use it, this diary, to – what, inventory rifles, submachine guns, every instance in his life he marked Knives criminal? Every instance he, every bit as guilty, nevertheless smiled to hear Nai’s name uttered? Count here the hours he spent waiting for Nai to return hale, the days he spent waiting on the change in Nai he knew was coming, until it wasn’t.
Count on Knives to build a palace in praise of bestial power.
Vash presses on with the patience of a wavelet, letting himself be touched and exchanging exhilaration, until someone knocks into him, and then another. A girl – and her partner exclaiming that her heel has broken.
He laughs with her, a pretty girl, and stumbles, his notebook nearly toppling out of his trouser pocket –
Hands slip against his waist to steady him. Vash startles backward against a hard, warm incline: sharp lines; cologne crawling into his nostrils.
Guess who?
Vash lets the hands turn him around.
Familiarity arrives with a near-violent immediacy, renders him pliant as a ball-jointed doll. Stilled in his brother’s grasp, he looks at Knives.
Knives smiles at Vash's silence: he’s always been partial to music, always despised small talk. And so they listen together.
With cold, fond eyes Knives regards Vash.
And then he moves Vash effortlessly. They glide from the surge of others' limbs into a corner cleared of revelers, stone walls having receded as if in anticipation of the space Knives would claim for himself and his brother.
And they do.
It’s funny.
Vash breathes a queasy laugh. He lets himself be swayed. They’re dancing. How about that?
– He would even believe it. He would believe Knives has the power to move walls.
He would believe it, but to consider it at all dizzies him.
The music is slow enough to rock him into a thing sedate, if he were to let it. A thing just pleased to see Knives pleased, perhaps.
He cannot give himself to it. His gaze darts away, grounding him. Knives grips his hand as they dance: closed position, a bid to keep Vash against himself rather than genteel waltz.
“I got curious,” Vash dumbly begins when he can bear it no longer.
Sweat trickles down his temple. Conflict bruises his expression. He is obvious.
Knives smiles at that, too.
“You can ask your brother anything.” Knives’ voice colludes with the music.
“Hah,” Vash answers. “Where do I begin.”
Vash leans himself away from the close brush of chest, hip. Instinct had asked for intimacy: how readily he’d given in to it.
Knives is unencumbered by his usual fawn suit jacket. Shirtsleeves, Sunday School white, slip crisp against Vash’s shoulder.
But Knives has rolled up his sleeves.
The temperature spikes; Vash’s attention goes total on the hand claiming his, and its bare forearm. His lips part with a question that won’t arrive.
“Vash,” Knives says.
Instinct: Vash meets his gaze immediately. “What are you doing, Nai?”
“We have so much to do here,” Knives says. His tone is indulgent, as one would speak to a misguided but well-intentioned student. “And I will catch you up, now that you have returned.”
Vash shakes his head, thrown. “I’m only visiting, that’s all. I only wanted to see – “
Without preamble Knives is moving and taking Vash with him. A force of nature, the moat of merrymakers parts for him. This garden of peacock green and rose, tulle and satin, wilt as they reach the wilds just beyond the door.
Smell of gunpowder, of swill.
Vash schools his expression neutral. He has walked these halls before.
(Not like this.)
“I have grown us,” Knives tells him. Hand leaves his, falls to the small of his back to shepherd him on. “This town with its streets once wildernesses, and those courtyards where we would find each other until fear of our enemies salted the earth: I have grown them up for you and me. Our legacy roots here now, unfettered.”
Vash’s hand falls to his pocket; paper and pen, a refuge. A gift from another life, the one he'd escaped to live. “But tell me what it is,” he challenges, “that waters them, Nai.” He would hear Knives say it. He would rather run but he would hear it from Knives. “What waters you?”
Knives turns to favor Vash with his unyielding attention. “Survival,” he says, “is not abject, Vash.” His fingers press through Vash's jacket to play at the Y the suspender straps make between Vash's shoulderblades. Up go Vash’s shoulders; action and reaction. “I’d have you understand this before you clip your own wings and crash, for their sake.”
The backroom beside the wine cellar is already occupied when Knives ushers Vash inside. Someone, red-centered and crushed into unfamiliarity like the flowers trodden outside, lies in the corner. Too late.
Vash backs up against the door.
Elendira has warmed up the other for Knives, she says, toeing a man who struggles to upright himself against a chair. Proof: she has arranged her victim’s nails thoughtfully on the desk where she leans.
Vash recognizes the man for a bootlegger, a jailbird. Knives rolls his shoulders and regards his guest with a clinical interest.
This man laughs and spits blood when his swollen gaze alights on Knives. The spray marks him and Vash both: murderers. Knives, Nai, Knives – sleeves rolled up – smiles at the offense.
The man heaves himself to his feet with a roar.
“Wait,” sputters Vash from the doorway. “Wait!”
Is he speaking his own argot? No one hears him. The man lobs his mangled hand at Knives’ jaw and for his efforts Knives slams him bodily into the wall. A wet crack; a grunt. Elendira’s eyebrows raise like she may start laughing.
Knives’ steel-toed boot smashes into the man’s middle: the bootlegger drops to his knees and writhes, commanded by pain to move. Knives watches his handiwork.
“Elendira,” murmurs Knives then. Elendira hands him his brass knuckles – custom-made, a beautiful fit, edges serrated. With dispassion Knives slides his fingers through.
“Look at me,” Knives requests of the man.
Vash finds himself panting. Knives has grown into destruction. He has grown into flight. His feet, his runner’s feet, root him to the sticky floor.
“Nai, that’s,” Vash tries. His voice arrives oneiric, slurred. “That’s enough, it’s enough now – “
“I said look at me,” Knives, preoccupied, tells the ailing man. He assists: fist twisting into stained vest to haul his victim up to a woozy sit, before his first blow cracks the man’s cheekbone and, the second slices it open. Copper miasma sickens the air.
Unthinking, Vash throws himself at Knives. His arm slings around Knives’ neck to pry him away, and Knives is ready: he rises; he hooks Vash in with a powerful hold. He does. He crumples him against his body, stranger’s blood an artless smear between them.
Vash fends him off – tries.
Knives drags him from the backroom to the wine cellar’s privacy.
Elendira primly shuts the door behind them.
“Is this what you wanted from me?” Knives seethes. His body shoves against Vash’s, sending him staggering into shelves; the back of Vash’s head thunks against wood. Knives reaches to cradle his skull, his love insistent. “Is this the vengeance you came to see?”
Vash ducks his head to refuse Knives and wriggles, stopstopstop, a whirl of struggle that Knives weathers by force of will until Vash is mired, breathless, suspenders slipped from his shoulders. Flattened and airless against the dusty shelves, he is about as useless as a trophy propped upon it.
A hand shoves down into his pocket and out the pen slips, notebook fluttering after. There they languish in defeat on the earthen floor.
Knives’ hand remains inside his pocket, territorial against his thigh.
“Tell me.” Knives’ tone edges into threatening.
“I needed you to stop you,” Vash hushes, conviction in spite. The heel of his hand pushes at Knives’ heart. “I needed a way to stop this.”
“To stop surviving,” Knives supplies for him, baring his teeth. He brings them close to Vash’s ear. A whisper. A frisson. Can Knives feel it? Vash’s hand ceases its pushing. Instead, it clutches.
“To stop seeing you safe,” Knives murmurs.
“Nai, no, I won’t thank you for this – “
Knives’ cologne finds him again, a woozy relief from the smell of blood clinging to them both. Knives’ fingers press into his thigh, drag upward, inward. “Safe and whole.”
“Please.”
“Yes.” The syllable moves against Vash’s ear. Lips smiling with a private joke. “Tell me I need to stop this.”
“Stop this,” Vash manages.
Knives halts. His lips, unspeaking, nudge against Vash’s ear: shell, tragus, lobe.
Vash squirms.
A heady quiet passes between them before Knives meets his small resistance.
Knives' mouth sweeps along Vash’s jaw. Hand at the base of Vash's skull, Knives keeps him still to lick away a spatter of blood from his chin.
“Oh-oh,” starts Vash.
- Laps up the violence's dirt from Vash's jawline. Vash is dirty; Knives is –
Tongue hot against another drop of mess at the hollow of his throat. A precise stroke, followed by the push of lips.
Tongue wet, laving at his clavicle.
“Nai – “
Knives’ lips pause against the pulse fluttering there.
The cellar is heavy as a fog, Vash’s breathing harsh, his knees knocking against his brother’s. His legs move, and with them moves Knives’ hand.
He breathes. His head tips back.
Collateral damage undone.
Knives lists back to assess him in the dim. “Now nothing ever happened,” he announces simply.
He licks his lips. He steps away from Vash. He watches Vash with eyes cold, fond.
Vash should run. He thinks. He has been running.
But his feet are halted here: are waiting on Knives, Knives who has been waiting on him, Knives whose hands shook to hold him.