*strikes pose* Three days!
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Knives caught up with them before they turned the street corner. Anne didn't pause or hold up her stride any and did her best to ignore his presence completely. Mark glanced behind himself a few times, uneasy with the plant at his back, but aside from that his arrival went entirely unregarded.
Knives' eyes narrowed as he pondered how best to make Anne realize that she was wrong. He still hadn't completely given up hope that she might be brought to see that these human vermin that surrounded her were not worthy of the time she had sacrificed for them, but the events of the last few minutes had shaken that hope rather severely. He had known that she would fight him over the lives of the humans, but Ace? He knew that she had a soft place in her heart for the child, or for the person she remembered as a child.
His thoughts, as much as he had allowed his mind to dwell upon the problem, were that she might be less inclined to fight Ace over the lives of the animals. He knew that the young woman agreed with his outlook as they had shared many a talk over the depredations of the vermin.
The ironic fact was that he was hardly the one to blame. Ace had come to them, had sought the two of them out because she knew that he, a fellow plant, was near. That fateful cry that had caught Anne's attention had been a calculated bid to get him to rescue her. Had Anne not gone running off so quickly to save her, she would have sought his attention in his mind, sending out wordless waves of distress until he was compelled to investigate.
But Anne had responded first and she hadn't had a good chance to let her species "slip" out of her, and believing Anne to be just another human, evil and cruel as them all, she had kept it from the two of them. His icy demeanor had frightened her, making her remember the cautions she had gleaned from the plants in the bulbs. They had told her that the mobile plants were not to be trusted, that their goals were more important to them then the lives of their constrained family. Knives and Vash had both contributed to the death of plants, Vash through decades of denying his heritage and Knives in his plots to bring his trusting brother home.
Knives knew that letting Grey and Hopperd in the last SEEDS ship could be disastrous, but he had weighed the threat of humans with technology against the lives of two of his sisters and the scales decreed that they were less important in his scheme. Two innocents, arrayed against the humans who could have helped Vash hunt him down? But the rest of his sisters had not seen things the same. Their lives were just as important to them as his was to him, and they were irked with his cavalier acceptance of their fate.
So Ace had been cautious of them both, but she had quickly fallen in love with Anne. The woman was so competent, so caring, and was the first human she had met that seemed to care about her as a person. She had saved Ace from the men she had coerced to "kidnap" her from the plant, had cared for her, had held her close to keep the terrors away, to keep Knives away as long as he acted a threat.
Ace had laughed as she recounted that bit. A human, saving her from a plant. But it had been touching, as had been her reaction when she had found out that Ace was a plant. Acceptance, and no lessening of the love. It amazed her, thrilled her, gave her hope when she had never thought she would feel any. Perhaps not all humans were horrible after all.
But when all was done not even that love was enough to keep Anne from running away. She saw what being a plant entailed and she couldn't handle it, showed the fear that all humans do when confronted with the unknown, the different.
Small wonder that Ace grew bitter, grew colder. Humans were all alike, all of them, even the ones who professed to care. She avoided Meryl as much as possible while they were all on the ship, a task made easy by the size of it and Meryl's acceptance of her avoidance. The girl made a large enough pain of herself during their meetings that Meryl didn't find herself too hurt by the snubbing.
When Anne turned out to be a plant, the pain that the interim years had dulled flared up again. To be discarded, run away from as if she was a diseased dog, the cavalier disposal of the time they had spent together, and all the hours they could have shared made her bitter and sharp with those around her. Knives understood this, knew why she had needed to run off, knew that Ace held no love for the humans who had never brought her anything but grief.
He knew why the girl had taken herself away from her family, knew that all she needed was time to let the pain of being rejected by both he and Anne to fade. Given that time, he was sure that she would listen when told that her hate would get her nowhere. Grand gestures like the girl was planning would catch her out before they could even come close to fruition. He hadn't worried over the deaths of the humans, had only worried that by confronting Ace too soon that she might be still too lost in the pain of rejection to listen to them to stop. She was rejecting them in response to what she perceived were their actions, and in that dismissal was a refusal to listen to a word they had to say on any subject. She would fight first and listen never if confronted today.
But could he say any of this to Anne? Hardly. She was too worried about the threat to her precious pets to understand that her reaction was one of the worst to the situation they were in. It would only reinforce Ace's belief that they wanted her out of their lives. But if he even tried to explain this to Anne, and even if she listened, she would feel that the physical threat superseded family peace.
So here he was, following along and hoping he could keep someone he loved from being killed.