SANCTUM
And yet he continues to dream;
always a dream of love, of hate, of fear.
"Like a rescue let me hold you
My limbs can be the ladder
Let me hold you like a rescue
My eyes can be the candles
Lead you from the castle. . ."
- ECSTASIA p. 181
Never be afraid.
We're going to be okay now.
It's alright to believe we'll be fine.
We'll be fine.
KNIVES, when he looks back on his childhood, recalls the acute awareness of three particular emotions from as early on as the time that he and Vash were joined in the Plant Angel's womb. He did not know their names then, of course. He knows them now.
Love. Hate. Fear.
Love. On the PROJECT SEEDS ship of his and Vash's infancy, love was looking over at his brother from across the width of their cradle, the monosyllabic heartbeats resounding inseperably within both of their tiny chests as loud as a single ticking drum in the silence; the pairs of eyes in the darkness like shards of a two-way mirror; and the familiar way their flesh was crawling with a different kind of blood from the blood all around them, like feathers flowering under the flesh. Intellects always accelerating; the universal connection always there, like a matrimony of their veins; always the same, always intertwined, always together. Transcending the boundaries of space and time and origin. Together.
Later, it was lying in the simulated grass on their backs in the Rec. Room, Vash and himself, with their arms stretched out so that the very ends of their fingertips were close enough to touch. Rem would be there with them; talking sometimes and sometimes asking questions. They laughed, then. He remembered a brilliant flash of his brother's smile and a golden wreath of generated poppies, the crown of flowers worth more to him in that moment than the treasure of any King or Queen of old Earth or any other Earth, the limitless spoils to be obtained, the fathomless riches. All that mattered was the love and adoration of the one who was born and who breathed and slept beside him; his brother, who then, after placing the flower crown lovingly on his head, turned and looked over at Rem for approval; who bounded into her willing arms and laid his head in her lap. His cherubic dream sequences. Geranium, geranium, geranium. Seas and expanses of red geranium.
Love was moving across the ripples of the water at night in their bath, reaching out to touch him and the reality of skin that was there. Like his. Like no one else's. The kind of skin that he inhaled and made him cry and even in the infant stages of their lives, even then, caused his stomach to wrench in delicious forbidden rebellion. Welcome caresses and questioning eyes and smells that sent shivers up his spine. A baptism between them.
They went to sleep at night in the same bed, checkered with the light of innumerable stars and galaxies, without count and without reason, beautiful as they skimmed infinitely across his brother's sleeping cheek. Even their dreams were the same.
That was love.
But it was also love standing on that desert husk of a planet as the skyline swam with red and plumes of smoke, standing above his brother on the dunes and watching with self-satisfied delight as the SEEDS ships careened from the blood colored heavens and crashed one by one into the ugly new world; blazing all the neon colors of his fantasies. Vash screamed and sobbed no matter how many times he beat him to shut him up. He tried to explain to him the concept of Eden in a way he'd understand. But all he wanted was Rem.
Knives dreamed of those times on occasion, the flashbacks intertwining with his dreams. The intensity with which he loved both made him sigh in longing--sorrowful, sinful, destitute--and retch with revulsion. He often woke reaching across the empty space beside him, clutching at the ghost of a ruined, beloved body that wasn't there. He never opened his eyes. He never had to. He could feel the sea of emptiness. And he clenched his fists, so hard his knuckles turned white and throbbed, hating and hating and hating Vash and hating Rem and hating himself and everything because he wasn't there.
Hate. That was something he experienced frequently these days. He felt it every time the smell of human taint managed to invade his many barriers and preventions, coloring his soul and becoming the reek of his lungs. Every time his brother acquired another scar in order to preserve a human life, he felt it. As the terrorist priest inched closer and closer time and time again to Vash, desecrating the purpose of the mission--which was, to bring his brother back to him-- with a bottle of scotch swinging loose in one hand and a kiss like all the darkness scourged from the bottom of the earth, the night kiss, the night broke, the film of stubble that tingled hot against his brother's lips. They shared a single crumpled cigarette; moving in a haze of smoke as Vash drank the liquor straight out of his mouth. And the priest would sigh and Vash would look out across the horizon with the fire of a thousand burial mounds in his eyes, and the priest would laugh and call his smile hollow, beautiful and hollow, and it would hurt because it was the truth.
And when Knives hated, he sent off a Gung-Ho Gun to die or he took Legato in his arms and bent his head against his throat and in their unholy embrace, the knives would shoot out of his perfect limbs, and Legato would slump, bloody, to the floor, with both arms outstretched in reverence, every gorgeous melancholic word that burbled from his lips a hymn of praise as he got up and fell down, got up and fell down. Sometimes he broke bones and fixed them slow, recording the vibrations of his screams as they passed from him and through his own fingertips. Sometimes he raped him like when he was a child from the slave shows. And sometimes their tears mingled, rivers of hate that dripped out of their eyes, seas of boiling glass, raining; and he swore he felt Legato's stomach clench with love through the intensity of his agony. It made him absolutely sick.
And then, fear. That was perhaps the most human of all of the emotions he had either experienced or observed; and therefore, the one he loathed the most. If there was anything that Knives detested, it was fear. The kind that showed on every human face when the death toll was ringing; like a collage of all their life encounters, departures and reunions, joys and sorrows all, completely engulfing the diversity of their expressions like the light from the pictures as they move rapidly across a movie screen. Fear was something he hated to feel but loved to reproduce. Something beautiful and disgusting at once to observe.
The humans, in all their half-assed pride, fell to their knees in the face of pain or death or even dying-- always seeking a way around the darkness, scratching at the pleasure like a welt under the skin, bleeding it and bleeding it until it became ruinous to their very existence. The humans were addicted to pleasure. Loathed to fear. When they were afraid, they became one mass collective mind, functioning as one. The humans were violent and wretched with fear; acting only on impulse and the brutality of instinct. But, when overpowered, they scattered like a mound of ants, running for coverage. Seeking any escape from the pain.
It was fear he saw in Steve as the blows once rained down over his and his brother's head, the knuckles that cracked his face and split his skull, turning their lips swollen and fat, the dark, splitted, blood color of a bruise. He would touch the places tentatively. He would watch them as they blued. He would wonder and continue wondering-- what reason was there for them to be mistreated? What had they ever done to them? And then, in secret, he would heal himself, exploring the limits of his regenerative powers with a child-like marvel.
He had been so naïve, once. Once, he had said that there was no difference between the hearts of people and theirs. That if they could just learn to understand each other, they could build a brighter future for themselves, together.
He had miscalculated by a long-shot.
He knew better now. Vash, too, very soon now, would know.
That was one thing he had always admired about Vash, despite the depth of his stupidity and sentimentalism. He was fearless. No, not fearless; but he continued to live through, no matter what he threw at him, or what hardships he landed in his path. That was something he still very much liked about Vash.
And sometimes he hated and loved him so much with such force that he was driven to the brink of madness, twisting his dreams of Eden to works of homicide, transforming the bond between them gruesomely; wanting to kill him if only to end the pain--and that was so human--but he would crush the humans into nonexistence, and he would free his Sisters, and though he could not imagine being alone for the rest of eternity. . .without his brother there at his side once again. . .he sometimes thought of all the ways he could exterminate his beloved twin, the peaks of suffering that he alone could bring him to until he broke entirely.
And then sometimes he thought that he might meld with him; that if he would defy him. . .if he refused to reform. . .at least he could live on through him, and they would always be together. But Vash was overflowing with potential power. He was a reservoir of destructive energy-- waiting only for the dams to collapse and the levee to break to let all of that massive force wrench free. Vash would, could, overpower him in an instant.
And yet he continued to dream. And he continued to wake up alone, reaching through the empty matter to find what it was that meant so much to him that it was worth such great sacrifices. And sometimes, in that dreamscape, he would find him, floating on a carpet of baby's breath and hyacinth, the golden halo of his hair swimming with red geranium, and both of his arms, ever marked with the scars of humanity, outstretched as though he had been waiting for centuries for them to be joined as it was in the beginning-- when their dreams were still the same. Together they were naked, flowering. Wings sprouted from their vertebrae. Here, everything was forgiven. Here, there were boughs and carpets and oceans of green, water like mermaids, undulating, ephemeral, and he knelt between his brothers thighs, touching the casket of his hips and the clouds of his hair with as much reverence as is shown by any man to their idol in the temple of their god. And those fragmented, two-way mirror eyes would moisten with emotion, as would his own, and he would reach up to brush his fingertips across the ends of the long and golden lashes that shadowed flickers on his brothers cheek, and then. . .before their lips could ever meet . . . Before perfection could be touched, their reunion complete,
The flowers turned to ash petals and the sky darkened; the loving face of his brother grew beastly incisors that bled red into his lips; the glassy eyes became his own; the ground seeped out from under them and ran and ran with rivers of blood that poured unceasingly between their thighs and flooded Eden with a sickly shade of copper smelling darkness. The earth was dank, humid, clutched in clods in his fingers, and his brother stood above him still, so merciless with his half-moon smile of fangs: the mirror image of himself.
In that dream, he threw back his head and screamed in agony so intense as that it shattered the dream world, cracking the bones in his lungs and turning him blind, dumb and speechless, crawling naked through the ash until his skin glowed white through the filth and the reek of death swam in his veins.
The time is now. The time is now. No salvation no Eden no dream only nightmares, only sulfur lakes and mounds of fire; no relief ever; and I never loved you; I never loved you Knives I never loved you no I never did I never did I never. The time is now. Can you see the destruction? The devastation? The rivers of blood stretch out for miles in every direction; the mounds of corpses open up their mouths; to praise you for their deaths, mouths like crucifixes, black and gaping holes. The time is now Knives. And it was all your fault. You were wrong.
I'm never going to love you.
I'm never going to love you.
No, I never did.
Forget about me, Knives.
It doesn't matter anymore.
And then he woke up in a bath of cold sweat, groping desperately in the emptiness, clutching the memories like sand that filtered through his fingers and slipped right through.
And there was Nothing. There. At all.