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Night on this planet is surprisingly cold. The delicate chill in the air is reminiscent of a room lined with pods; with people, peacefully sleeping. Of boys, always in a pair, looking out at the expanse of resting forms and seeing only hope and friendship and futures. Of a mother, warm hands contrasting the nip settled into her boy’s noses as she pinched them. You have to wear your coats when you go in there, she’d scold them for the millionth time that week.
Night on this planet reminds him of things he wishes he could forget. Of family, smiles, laughs, of her, and the absence of this ache that has long since been rooted in his soul. It branches, coiling around him like a particularly unruly vine. An invasive species. Not unlike himself, he supposes.
The night is quiet. It is unyielding and, as Knives stares at his murky reflection in the window, nearly unable to recognize himself anymore, night is suffocating. Morning will bring a breath of relief, he knows, it will come with distractions and irritations— but he must survive his solitude, first.
Sometimes he doubts himself. His grand scheme. Is this what he wants, what he destroys to create? This yawning abyss.
His sisters do not reach out to him after dark. He’s shut them out. They know he mourns, that he yearns and that it makes him angry. Not at them, they are innocent, but at him. He is angry with her. His family, his first family, before there was plant and human. Before there was blood and warmth; to be kept safe and to be erased.
When had the lines become so blurry? How had they? Why does he hate each step he takes forward? Why? Why does he want to go back, to undo it all, and to curl into her arms? Why is it that he stares at the moon and pictures her, huddled with her boys, and aches? He wants to beg for her forgiveness; to sob into her open arms and feel the safety of her hold. It’s been so long.
Had he imagined that safety all along? Was it ever real? He can remember her smile, the love, so vividly. But he was a child of only a year. Had it simply been an imprint, forged by the need to feel safe? Had it always been a lie?
She sent them out alone. Protect Vash, she’d said. It was unnecessary. He’d always protect Vash, his baby brother. The only one who ever understood. Yet, they walk such different paths, now. Just as Rem had sent them off together, Vash turned away. Protect Vash. She knew. She must have known. Is that why she turned from him? Had her final moments been full of rage, of hate? It’s likely, he thinks.
Protection. Safety. These things are not easily won. They are not won through her gentleness or Vash’s pure forgiveness. They are won through blood. They rise through the rot of damaged things. (Like himself)
With a damp face and reddening eyes reflected back at him, he knows why he regrets. He knows, but he is scared. That fear is a wild animal housed in him. A wild animal that does not know gentle things anymore. Rabid and incurable. It yearns, howling at the moon until its voice breaks, for a mother it fears. He hates her. He needs her. He’s forgotten her face.
In little bubbles of memory, it comes to him whenever his eyes linger on the dark strands sprouting from his scalp. They looked like her, didn’t they? Somehow. They could pass as her children. Their genetics were so separated from her, yet they’d looked like her. Like her pale, little ghosts. Tiny little specters clung to her thighs as they hid from the expansive, scary world.
On nights like these, he searches for her in his faded reflection. If he cannot see himself, maybe, maybe he can see her there, instead. Beaded tears blur his vision.
He begs his reflection to warp, to become her. He needs to see her. He needs to see, to remember, his mother. Rem. Even her name sounds unfamiliar to him, now, with how he’s lost her to his anger. To his fear. Please.
His breath trembles, burbling in his throat around a barely contained sob. He shudders. He squeezes his eyes shut, letting new tear tracks form.
He is an angry child. A scared child. A hurt, lonely little thing curled in the corner and wanting. Needing. He hates these things about himself. He wishes they would die in his memories with her. He wishes he could kill these aspects of himself as easily as he has the softness in humans. A softness that never existed, that you imagined because you wanted it to be there, that he has not realized is false, part of him croons. But she’d been so soft, she had loved us, she had held us, protected us, the opposite yowls. His body feels cold. Leaden. He remains, in part, that useless child. That tender, fainting boy. It enrages him. It claws up his esophagus and forces itself out, forces itself to be known, in a sob— one that leaves his throat raw and his chest tight.
Warmth blooms against his quivering spine. Large hands, calloused yet kind. His body still feels heavy, and immobile, but the cold slowly leaks from him along with sleep and dreamed memories.
Rough fingertips brush against his wet cheekbone, brushing damp hair from his face to be tucked behind his ear. Slightly chapped lips press a sweet kiss to his forehead as his eyes flutter open. His eyelashes are matted with salty tears. The light bleeding through the window burns. A shadow casts above his face, a large body shielding him. Being so gentle and kind to him. A human, of all things, warped as he may be, brings him back to himself. Back to the version of himself that is healing. Albeit slowly.
“Are you okay?”
The loneliness of night has been tenderly rubbed away, these past few years. He has so much to atone for, more than anyone could ever hope to atone for even in his extended years, but he wants to. He wants to fix what he’s done wrong.
She has found him. Vash has found him. Livio, now, too. They saw the foolish child trembling in his palace of thorns and they gently guided him down, safe and sound, to somewhere soft.
His reflection is his own, is her’s. He does not need to search for either of them anymore.
“I am.”