Author's Legal Disclaimer: I don't own Trigun; all characters, the setting, and the basic storyline are copyright of People Who Are Not Me. This is a work of fan fiction, intended for entertainment purposes only. No profit is being made from this work. Haunted is copyrighted to Atlantic Records and Poe, and is used without permission, for entertainment purposes only.
Author's Storyline Disclaimer: This fanfic contains spoilers for the entire series. I haven't written much of anything for a long time, much less a song fic (I've only written one other song fic, and I didn't even know what it was at the time!), but when I picked up the CD Haunted (which I found excellent) I knew I that I had to do the title track for Trigun.
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PART 1
Come here
Pretty please
Can you tell me where I am?…
You... won't you say something…
I need to get my bearings
I'm lost
And the shadows keep on changing…
Vash spent the first few months after they fell from the heavens in a state of mental shock. He followed Knives like a bemused puppy, unable to reconcile his love for his brother with his hatred for Rem's murderer, unable to wrap his mind around the concept that Knives was somehow both. Intellectually, he knew it was true. Knives had made no effort to lie about what he had done, and didn't understand why Vash found it so surprising. Oh, he'd shown some passing regret for Rem's death, but only because Rem's death had hurt Vash. For the deaths of everyone else on the ship, for Capitan Joey and the others, he expressed no remorse, only the cold conviction that they'd gotten what they had deserved for their treatment of the twins.
For the hard existence he'd cursed the innocent sleeping humans to, a scrabbling life on a barren desert world, he showed no regret, no remorse, only a smoldering anger that he hadn't succeeded in exterminating them.
Vash spent those few years he spent with Knives feeling like he was caught in a fever-hallucination; nothing felt quite real, as if reality itself kept swirling around him, always changing, never stable enough for him to begin to reorient himself. His days were haunted by what he saw: hundreds, thousands of people reeling from the catastrophic way their lives had been changed, his brother changed, hardened, and the anguish of the plants as they labored to make the world fit for human habitation and often failed. His nights were haunted by dreams of fields of red flowers, of a slim figure with long, dark hair, and the soft, haunting cords of a song, looping over, and over, and over…
It literally took Vash decades to even begin to come to terms with what had happened. Vash wasn't stupid, of course—he was, despite his often silly nature, highly intelligent—but he was emotionally very innocent. He couldn't help himself; Vash preferred to see the best in people, no matter their faults. His love, once given, was never revoked.
He was never quite able to stop loving Knives, though for a long time he desperately wished he could.
And I'm haunted
By the lives that I have loved
And actions I have hated
I'm haunted
By the lives that wove the web
Inside my haunted head…
In his dreams, Vash could almost touch her. She stood eternally young and beautiful in a field of green alien to the desert planet, surrounded by swirls of red petals and perfume, long after the first generation of refugees had been buried in the harsh desert sand. He changed in his dreams as he grew from a little boy to a young man, far faster than human nature dictated was possible. She, however, remained the same, untouched by time and unblemished by fading memory.
Knives had been confident that given time, Vash would come to forget Rem. Knives suspected much about their nature that he didn't share with his brother, and he had thought that, given their impossibly long life-spans, that Vash would be able to let his memories of Rem go. It might take years, or decades, or centuries, but Knives was content to wait. He could afford to wait Vash out, to bring Vash gradually around to his way of thinking. He blamed Rem directly for Vash's soft nature, his eternal optimism about the worth of lesser beings, but she was only a lesser being herself. Her effect on his long life could only be limited.
So he went on, studying the humans as they struggled to build new lives on the world they came to call Gunsmoke, planning, studying, and experimenting, and including his brother in his plans. Though Vash still objected to Knives's fixation, he remained with his twin, and made no moves to stop him. While Knives found his stubborn refusal to see the light highly irritating, he took Vash's continued presence as a sign that his influence would eventually override Rem's. He became so confident that Vash would never leave him that he felt quite confident in leaving Vash alone for an entire year, as Knives made use of the scientific facilities deep in the bowels of one of the crashed ships, making the guns. There was no real reason for him to just leave Vash outside—he was positive Vash wouldn't interfere, and his help might have been useful--but thought that the time alone would teach Vash a few things.
It did, though not the lessons that Knives had been hoping for.
All Vash could see in his mind's eye as he shot his brother was Rem, and Rem's gentle disapproval for what he had done. As Knives lay bleeding in the sand, not badly wounded but utterly shocked by his twin's betrayal, Vash could only take the guns and run, trying to keep back his tears.
Whether he was running from his brother, his own actions, or Rem's reproachful face, even he didn't know.
Don't cry,
There's always a way
Here in November in this house of leaves
We'll pray
Please, I know it's hard to believe
To see a perfect forest
Through so many splintered trees
You and me
And these shadows keep on changing…