Disclaimer and Notes: Trigun is not mine. The anime and manga storylines belong to Yasuhiro Nightow and others. As this was inspired by re-watching the anime while working on a rather large painting, this is an anime-universe story, though there is quite a bit of manga influence general theme-wise.

Rated for graphic descriptions of the natural aftermath of death. Much warning to the squeamish – much nastiness lies ahead. This fic involves dead folks and I am a very descriptive writer. Genfic. Sorry, twincest fans – this was written by an author who tends to see Vash and Knives' relationship as purely a brotherly/enmity thing, so despite some minor nudity, this isn't (intended to be) incesty.

Special thanks to Sunoko/Lahiriel for bouncing around ideas with me and to SailorLilithchan for some of the same, and for her masterful beta reading.

"MIRAGES"

The bruises on his body were fresh. Sweat strung his eyes and his legs ached so badly he felt like the muscles were going to shred off the bone and burst the skin. Pale lights fell across the sky, twinkling pink against pale blue. The lights had been falling from the sky for several days now, and were livid red at night, painting the heavens in blood.

And shed blood is what they represented, chunks of ships still falling down out of the upper atmosphere, burning, the hopes as well as the lives of countless people lost. Vash would have felt sick, had there been anything in his stomach to get sick with.

"Come on, Vash, hurry up!" Knives called, several yards ahead. "We can't waste time, we need to find shelter." He said it so cheerily, as if he had not, days before, beaten his twin to the ground, causing those deep bruises on his body. He said it so brightly, as if he had not, just days before, murdered tens of thousands of peacefully sleeping men, women and children. The lights in the sky twinkled for Knives. The light in his eyes twinkled back.

Vash trudged forward silently, the sand thick beneath his feet, the air around him burning. Rem told him that the world humans were from had one sun. He and his brother had grown up in a small world with no sun – only artificial light and the facsimile of a sun in their ship's recreation room. Warmth he had known, but not heat. Two suns shone in the sky above him. He carried a canteen with him, taken from the escape pod, but his water was almost gone.

There was no part of his body that did not hurt. That was okay with him, though, because the physical pain distracted him from thinking about the multitude of terrible things that had happened, about what he had lost, and about what his own brother had become. If he did not hurt so much, perhaps he would have gone mad.

His legs decided they did not want to carry on. He fell to the sand, first upon one knee, than the other. He knelt and looked off into the distance, tawny-gold and barren.

"Vash! Get up!" Knives demanded angrily. Vash ignored his voice. Something was hissed about weakness. The younger twin watched light dance across landscape of gentle dunes in waves and shimmers, like flowing water.

"Vash!" Knives exclaimed, taking him by the shoulders. "Snap out of it." Gingerly, Knives began to help his brother up. He draped Vash's left arm across his shoulders and let him use his body for support.

This was so very different from being kicked to the ground, or being curtly scolded and threatened when they'd camped at night for beginning to cry. Knives could be utterly cruel, the cold, distant Knives that had murdered so easily, and at the same time, Knives could be concerned and caring, the brother he'd known. All of this was hard for Vash to understand. How could he reconcile "the brother" and "the butcher?"

"There's something out there," Vash whispered with dry lips. "I see something out there, in the desert."

"It's just heat haze, Vash," Knives said. "It's a mirage. They happen in deserts."

Vash limped along with Knives' help and kept staring ahead, into the unbroken land. He saw what he knew to be heat shimmer. She saw something beyond it, a figure - the silhouette of something human.

By sheer will he pulled himself from his brother's grasp and ran, through dry breaths and burning muscles, toward the image he saw. Knives yelled after him, calling him all kinds of epithets, calling him a fool and worse.

"Have to… go!" he called back. "Someone out there! They can help us! Maybe there's a ship!"

"Dammit!" Knives snarled. "I'll kill him! I'll kill all of them! Garbage!"

Vash kept running on. "H-help!" he called out "Please, help us!" He ignored Knives, who was chasing him and yelling. The figure wavered in the heat haze but became more distinct as Vash got closer to it.

It was a woman, plainly dressed, with long, dark hair. She turned around. "R-Rem?" Vash questioned, surprised, the blood running away from his skin as he felt this couldn't be real. An instant later his heart leapt up in unbridled joy. He ran harder. "Rem! Rem! Oh, Rem, you're all right! We've found you!"

"What are you talking about?" Knives demanded, "That woman? She's alive? How dare she!" Knives doubled his efforts at running, as well. He called out beyond his brother; to the person he could not see. "You're supposed to be dead! Dead! You hear me?"

Tears streamed down Vash's face and he opened his arms, fully determined to tackle Rem in a fierce hug and never let her go. The air moved in waves all around her as the sun beat down on the child's back. She vanished.

Vash fell to his hands and knees. He stared out into nothing. He heard Knives' footfalls coming up behind him. "Rem?" he said, and then he lost consciousness.

He awoke to something cold and bothersome on his face and to a strong fish-taste in his mouth. He heard a familiar voice. "Chew, you need eat something to regain your strength."

He complied, then opened his eyes to find Knives above him, dabbing his forehead with a soaked sponge. Knives gave him another forkful of something from a tin. Vash sat up. He blinked and looked around and found that they were underneath the shade of some kind of very large, strange rock. What he could see of the rock was banded in reddish streaks and it was smooth, a kind of sandstone, he guessed.

"You passed out back there," Knives said. "Why didn't you tell me you hadn't been eating?"

"I wanted to save supplies," Vash replied, "and, I guess I just haven't been hungry."

"Nonsense," Knives said in a calm voice. He gave Vash another bite of the fishy-tasting food. "You don't want to kill yourself. You need to drink and eat. This is a harsh environment and we do not know when we'll make it to one of our sisters. You can't let yourself die."

Vash stayed silent and stared at the ground between his legs.

"Eat," Knives ordered, gently.

Vash did so. He swallowed and asked; "What is this stuff, anyway? It tastes weird."

Knives looked at the tin. "Salmon," he said. "Actually, I think it's cat food. I scavenged what I could find from the supply stock in the pod."

Both boys stayed quiet for a long time. The shadow of their shade began lengthening. "Rem's alive," Vash said.

Knives looked at him quizzically, annoyance in his features. "Don't be ridiculous, Vash," he said.

"Rem's alive," Vash repeated, "I saw her in the desert."

"No you didn't," Knives insisted. "You saw a mirage. You were hot, tired and hungry so it's no wonder you started seeing things."

Vash began to grow angry. "I saw her, Knives!" he yelled.

"She's dead!" Knives growled. "We saw the ship explode! You need to stop dreaming! Besides, she was nothing more than a human. It's your own fault you let yourself become so attached to her. We do not need her."

Vash stood up. He shivered. Bitter rage coursed through his bones, even as his bruises throbbed, telling him that a fight right now wasn't a good idea. "She's out there, Knives!" Vash shouted, clenching his fists at his sides. "I am going to find her and I'm not going to let you hurt her!"

Knives sighed and remained sitting where he was. Vash walked several yards away and watched as evening settled over the desert. His head ached. The suns set and all was silence. He looked back over the desert, hoping, just hoping, that Rem would come walking up over one of the hills. He knew that Knives was probably right. He had been exhausted and weak. He also was holding on to some small hope that maybe she wasn't really gone.

That evening the twins camped by the big rock formation. Knives got comfortable in his sleeping bag and fell asleep while Vash sat up, watching the stars, the moons, and the last twinkling crimson bits of shipfall on the horizon. He'd glance over at his brother's face from time to time and listen to his breathing. He was waiting.

Vash wondered how someone responsible for so much death could sleep so peacefully. Mass murder did not bother Knives at all. He treated their own adopted mother, the woman who protected them, cared for them and did nothing but love the both of them as though she were nothing more than an insect or a speck of dirt.

The sound of Knives' breathing changed in pitch. His eyelids stopped twitching. This is what Vash had been waiting for. His twin was deeply asleep. The young Plant gathered a large rock and approached his brother. People, somewhere, were alive on this planet and he would make sure they stayed that way.

Vash lifted the rock above his head and stared at the back of Knives' head. If he did this right, it would be quick and painless. At the very least, he would give Knives mercy. He shivered in the cool night air, filled with fear. He could feel his heart growing cold and it scared him. He reminded himself of the people who remained, their dreams broken on this world, the fight ahead of them. He reminded himself of the crew, which Knives and he had both grown up with, their lessons and their smiling faces. He could admit that he did not miss Steve much, but even he deserved a future. Most of all, Vash thought of Rem.

Rem wouldn't want this, would she? But he was doing this for her. The sleeping figure on the ground stole her away from him. He had to pay for that, he had to –

In his mind, Vash cried out to Rem for help. In his memory, she spoke of the sacredness of life. Vash dropped the rock on the ground and ran. He climbed to the top of the rock formation. He wept and shivered at the horror of what he had almost done until exhaustion took him.

The days passed on and the red streaks in the night skies ceased. Vash and Knives walked on, exploring their new world. Vash scanned the horizon for colony ships and surviving humans. Knives looked for Plant ships and surviving Plants. They discovered gnarled, dry, thorny trees upon which grew strange, hard-skinned fruit. Knives analyzed this fruit with one of the scanners he'd brought with him and found that it was safe for them to eat.

The twins also discovered a multitude of small birds flitting across the desert. The birds weren't like any they had seen before. They did not know if they were native to this planet or if they had escaped some of the crashed vessels somewhere. In any case, these birds were prolific with building little nests in the sand and producing eggs. Vash and Knives ate these eggs. Vash protested when he found Knives setting snares for some of the birds and killing them. Knives would sometimes hold him down and force-feed him the cooked meat.

They found occasional places where the groundwater seeped up through the sand in springs. On this, they also survived, filling every canteen and spare container they had for the journeys ahead. Vash walked strong in the desert, sometimes ahead of Knives, but usually behind. He liked to keep his distance from his brother.

A late afternoon brought shimmering heat and Vash's eyes scanned the flats. He saw a speck beyond drought-cracked earth and he veered toward it. Knives changed direction and followed him. "Where are you going?" he asked, striding up beside him.

"I think I see something," Vash said, squinting.

"I don't see anything."

"Up ahead."

They walked quickly and soon, what Vash saw came to Knives' notice. There was, indeed, something ahead. Vash took off in a run. Knives chased after him.

"It's… it's a person!" Vash said. "Hey! Mister! Over here!" He waved and hollered.

And he fell, on his knees, panting, in front of the person and did not notice that they were not casting a shadow.

"You!" Knives gasped. "You!" he snarled. "I'll kill you!"

Vash looked up. Rem looked down at him. Vash's jaw hung and quavered. "R-R-R…Rem!"

Rem opened her mouth to speak. No words came. A strange sound like radio static came forth instead. Knives rushed forward, the pocketknife he'd used to clean birds with in his hand, murder in his eyes. Vash screamed and jumped between his brother and Rem. Rem stepped backwards and disappeared.

"What the Hell?" Knives said, stopping in his tracks.

Vash stood and stared, equally confused. He reached out to the air – where she was. "She… and you saw her…"

Knives convinced himself later that it was a fevered dream from the heat. Vash analyzed it over and over again in his mind. He convinced himself that Rem was using some kind of communications device, that she had rerouted some of the computers and holographic systems that he had remembered from their ship and was trying to get through to them. Knives called him a fool. Perhaps it was a child's fantasy, but Vash hoped, because he wanted to hope.

Many came days of strange visions. Vash followed one mirage of "Rem" and came upon a spring of water when they were in sore need of it. Another mirage led them to the mostly-intact wreckage of an un-manned supply ship, where they found provisions that were much better than cat food. Sometimes, "Rem" would vanish before they got to where she stood. Sometimes, Vash found her, tried to speak to her, and got static in reply.

He'd tried to give her technical advice on how she might fix whatever communications she was using. He thanked her for helping them. He tried to hug the holographic-looking image. Rem only looked deeply confused and deeply sad. She'd kneel down and try to take him into her arms only to vanish. Knives would jog up behind and wonder why Vash was crying and scold him for his tears.

Vash wondered if he was losing his mind.

One day, they saw the remains of a ship on the horizon, its tail jutting up from the hilly ground. They pressed on toward it until a horrifying aroma hit their noses. Vash shivered. He'd not smelled an odor quite like this before, but a knot formed in the pit of his stomach. It was a very bad smell, but something told him that it was bad in more ways than one.

Knives snorted. "Death stench," he said. Vash blanched. "It's like the garbage in the garbage pods. When filth rots, it stinks. We're probably also smelling things burning." He sniffed again, looking at the main chunk of ship, partially scratched "EEDS" looming above them. "Well, it's probably a total loss. I don't think we'll find anything we can really use in there, besides, I don't want to go near all that rotting filth. It smells horrible and I don't see what I'm looking for."

"You're looking for something?" Vash questioned. He was doing his best to keep his breakfast down, constantly gulping. The smell all around was strange, a scent of burnt metal, and something sweet and sick like vomit, almost musky, and very, very thick. Knives was speaking of garbage, of humans being filth and Vash thought about the scent around him being that of possibly hundreds of rotting people. He promptly lost his breakfast in the sand.

Knives patted him on the back. "Sickening, isn't it? Even dead, they're disgusting. Come on, let's go."

Vash shivered and stared for a few moments at the glistening soupy-chunky mixture of eggs and phlegm on the ground. He brought his head up slowly, wiping a rope of saliva off his chin with the back of his arm. He paused and stared. He saw something upon a hill against the wreckage of the ship. He ran toward the hill.

"What are you doing?" Knives demanded. "Come away from there! There's nothing but stench and decay over there! You'll get yourself sick!"

"There are survivors!" Vash gasped. "I see someone, they need our help!" He panted and pumped his legs as fast as they would go. "We have to help them!"

"Vash, you're crazy!"

Knives followed him as far as the edge of the hill then watched Vash disappear over it. The stench of the wreckage hit him like a wall and he refused to proceed further. There was just no way anything could have survived the wreckage that he saw, if not by initial impact, then by all the rot and disease. If anyone remained alive and injured in that mess after the crash, they were surely dead by now. No healthy person would have stuck around. He watched Vash walk about among the broken, twisted metal and what he assumed were human bodies and pieces thereof. He turned back to walk off ahead into the desert. He'd wait for Vash to come to his senses and join him.

Vash stepped lightly through the sand, metal and glass, pausing to dry heave several times. All around him were broken Coldsleep capsules and their former occupants, lying still, discolored, bloated, burst, or sliced in half by the glass of their former wombs. Vash tip-toed around pieces of bone, disembodied hands with their skin dried tight around the knuckles and finger bones and scraps of clothing and equipment. Most of the corpses were already partially mummified, skin and sinew dried quickly by the twin suns. Still, rotted blood lay in black-brown patches all around.

Strange, reptilian birds and small four-footed creatures played and fought in it all, dining upon the scraps of what once were people with families, friends, hobbies and aspirations, and dreams of a better life. He called out, despite the stench that entered his mouth, curled up upon his tongue and made a happy home there as a dull, nasty taste. He cried out for survivors, hoping to get an answer back. He was greeted with silence. Vash didn't focus on the horrors surrounding him. Instead, his mind was solely on finding and helping the living.

He saw a woman standing next to a chunk of metallic rubble. He blinked several times, then he cried out running.

"Rem!"

As he approached the place where she was, she vanished. Vash cried. "No… no more of this. Not again! Knives is right, I'm losing my mind, I'm losing-"

He noticed something on the ground, and it looked familiar. It was the remains of a spacesuit, and it was somehow familiar to him. It was torn and tossed in many places. Much of it was burnt, the synthetic materials twisted and bubbly. Vash knelt down and touched it lightly, even though it still had much of a body inside of it. His hands shook and curiosity overtook him. He turned the unfortunate person over. The face was unrecognizable. What skin was left on the skull was dried hard. Vash wondered if he should pray. A little golden glint caught his eye.

Something fell out of the spacesuit onto the ground. Vash picked it up and turned it over in his gloved hand. It was a pendant and its chain, covered in corruption, dangled between his fingers. Vash felt numb as in ran a finger along its sleek edges. He recognized this pendant. It was the one he'd seen her wear almost every day of his life. When he turned it around, he saw her name inscribed on the back – Rem Saverem. This was Rem Saverem's communicator.

Vash looked back at the body and felt his mind snap. In the distance, Knives could hear him scream.

After three days, Knives decided that he should go back to the wreckage and try to find his fool of a brother, so he started walking back the way he'd come.

For three days, Vash sat among the wreckage. He shooed the little scavengers away from the corpse of the only mother he'd ever known and held up the pendant to watch it wink in the sun. He got up every once in a while to relieve himself, and he drank absentmindedly from his canteen. He did not eat and felt no hunger. If he slept, he did not know. He could not tell if he was dreaming or awake.

He rocked himself gently, his head between his knees, mumbling "Rem, Rem, Rem…" He didn't want to be here, but didn't have the strength to leave. He did not know if he should bury her. He thought maybe she would feel it unfair to all the others out here, unburied. He did not know what to do. He needed to get up and find Knives if he was going to survive. Perhaps he'd die here, beside her. He did not know what he wanted.

Vash heard a static sound. He looked up. Oh, this couldn't be, not again. His mind was playing tricks on him again. Her face was sad as she looked down on him. Her features were pale. The image of Rem knelt down and reached out to him. She touched his face.

Vash felt the touch. It was cold, like the air from a freezer. He looked up at her, unsure of what to make of this. He did not know if she was some broken holographic image, still on broadcast from the ship, a mirage, a bonafide ghost, or something created by his troubled mind. Despite its chill, the touch felt real. Hope and fear, mingled with pain that was already there came up in his heart.

Rem was dead, but her spirit still lived.

"I'm sorry, Rem," Vash choked. "I didn't save you. Knives… if I had known, I should have known…"

Rem spoke static again, confusion in her semi-transparent features. Vash pointed down at the tattered corpse, and then held up the pendant. Rem's face took on a look of sudden and immediate shock. She looked down at the body and to the pendant, and to Vash. She held out her own arms, and looked at them briefly. She made a gesture that looked to Vash like a sad, resigned sigh.

She reached over and hugged Vash. It would have been a very tight hug had she been corporeal, as it was; it felt to Vash like the gusts of air off the capsules in the Coldsleep rooms. She separated from him and looked down at him very seriously. She opened her mouth, more static, but words began to form. Vash could just make them out. She held him by the shoulders.

"I have to go now," Rem said. "You and Knives have to take care of each other from now on. Take care of Knives." She looked to her body, then back to Vash, and looked like she was going to cry, and not for her own sake, but for his, for what he had to see.

Then she spoke two words very distinctly, in the strong, melodic voice that Vash remembered. "Walk on."

She nodded to him, stood up, and vanished. Vash too, stood up. He walked out to the desert, away from the wreckage. He stared ahead and let his feet carry him. Knives saw him and ran up to him. "Vash! Vash!" he said, but Vash ignored him. He just kept walking, dazed.

"Vash, are you alright?" Knives asked. "Ugh, you stink. Why didn't you come with me? Why did you stay among all that filth for so long? You're sunburnt."

Vash walked silently next to Knives for over an hour. Then he collapsed in a dead faint.

He smelled fresh water and felt cool sand beneath him. Breezes played over him, tickling every part of his skin. After several moments, he realized he was naked. He groaned and sat up wearily. Vash was in the shade and there was a pool of water several feet from him with impossibly blue water. It looked like someone had smeared the ground with cerulean paint. Knives was a few feet away, in the shade, clanking about with pieces of equipment on what appeared to be a makeshift distillery. He was distilling water into a can.

"Oh, you're awake," he said, smiling brightly. "I was worried about you for a while there."

Vash rubbed his hair and crossed his legs. "Where are we?" he asked, "And where are my clothes?"

Knives shambled over to him, proffering the can of water. "Drink this," he instructed. "The water in this spring has too many minerals in it to drink directly, I had to distill it."

Vash drank deeply and felt some of the pain in his head abate. "Where are we? Where are my clothes?" he repeated.

"Isn't it obvious?" Knives replied. "We're at another spring. I had to carry you here. I had to bathe you. Be glad, minerals like that are supposed to be good for your skin. You stank to high heaven, Vash. I washed your clothes and your suit. They're dry. You've been asleep for a day and a half."

"If my clothes are dry, why did you leave me naked?" Vash asked.

"It's been hot. I thought you'd be more comfortable that way," Knives answered simply. "Anyway," he said, getting up and going to a spot in the sun and returning with Vash's clothes, "Here they are if you want to get dressed."

Vash rubbed at his left shoulder, then fell back into the sand.

"Be careful!" Knives demanded. "You're weak. What were you doing all that time in that wreckage, Vash? I waited for three days for you to come to your senses and you didn't even bring back anything useful from parts of the ship."

"Wreckage? Vash asked, sitting up again, rubbing his eyes.

"We found some ship wreckage," Knives said. "I didn't want to go near it because of all the rotting human filth. You went off toward it and hung around it for three days. What were you doing there?" Knives then sneered. "Were you trying to bury all the poor dead humans?"

"What?" Vash asked. "I don't remember it," he said. "I don't remember any of it."

Vash and Knives continued to wander endlessly, finding ways to survive the rigors of the desert, finding and communicating with a few of their Plant sisters that had survived the Fall, their limbs growing long, their bodies growing muscular.

Vash did not remember most of what had happened over the first weeks after the Fall. Knives recounted to him stories of how they'd discovered the desert trees with the hard-skinned fruit and how he'd kept chasing mirages. Vash only shook his head and tried to remember.

Every once in a while, some image, smell, or sound would bring back some ghost of a memory, something he was sure he'd known sometime, from somewhere, but he could not place it. He saw a dead bird in the sand one morning and collapsed, holding his head and screaming, later to not understand why.

Every time he saw a heat haze, a strange sensation would come up in his chest and throat, a feeling of a memory, both pleasant and fearful. Some of the things he seemed to half-remember he wondered if he'd known in dreams. He felt impressions in fleeting thoughts and mirages.

Vash thought about Rem often. He knew that she wanted him to walk on. He knew this strongly, as an absolute truth, though he did not know how he knew this. He had dreams about her sometimes, sometimes peaceful, and sometimes nightmares of watching the mother ship explode and splinter off into the darkness.

He remembered Rem's love of life. It seemed very logical to him that she would want him to keep walking. She wouldn't want him to give up, because she loved him. He needed to take care of Knives. He needed to help and to protect Rem's people, those she had given her life to save. He had to do his best. He had to walk on.

THE END.

Shadsie, 2006