I'm so lazy. Kick my butt and make me work, ok?

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Vash and Alex stumbled into the apartment a hair after eight in the morning, their arrival heralded by sunshine and a bit of grumbling as they bumped into each other. It wasn't exhaustion or clumsiness that made them stumble, but a simple trap left in front of the door.

"Hey, dad, why are our clothes all over the living room floor?" Alex looked out from behind his father at the strange vista that greeted their arrival.

"I have no clue." Vash peered around for his brother, first peeking in the bedroom before locating him at the kitchen table. Alex left him to give the twins some time alone together, and also to get the first completely uninterrupted shower of the past few weeks. He felt very guilty that he was looking forward to enough hot water to get properly clean, but his skin was tingling at the thought.

Vash walked into the kitchen and pulled out a chair, then sat himself gingerly at the edge of it. "Knives," he started hesitantly, pausing for a moment to see if his brother would react. When he didn't even look up from the book he was reading, Vash gamely started the speech he had composed on the walk to the apartment. "Alex and I stopped by to see how Anne is doing. The technicians told us that their monitors had detected no change." He paused again, waiting for some indication that he had been heard. A nod, a noise, looking up from the book, but there was nothing. Time stretched out between them, a moment of silence broken only by the scritch of paper on paper as Knives turned a page. Vash took a deep breath and delivered the news that he knew his brother was not going to want to hear.

"She may be dead."

There was still no response. Knives' breathing was still calm and even, and his lack of reaction made Vash wonder if the shock of what had happened had unhinged his brother's mind a bit more. The reality was that Knives' ability to perceive what he considered true and obvious had never been terribly strong, and this might have been enough to completely separate his brother from the real world.

He let his gaze travel over the partially cleaned kitchen, and thought about the piles of clothes in the living room. Knives never did chores. Chores were for machines to take care of, freeing the superior being for higher pursuits than mere drudgery. Even when they had been children wandering together over Gunsmoke, it had fallen to him to clean their ship suits. That his brother felt superior to him hadn't stuck him as ironic, then.

And then there was the pertinent fact that while Knives had noticed that the clothes on the floor were dirty, the clothes on his body were still stained with Anne's blood. He still had the small smears on his face that had collected there when the three of them were working over her. A few were patchy, indicating that wherever Knives' mind had gone it still was connected enough to his body that he could feel itching. Vash tried to tell himself that this was a good thing, that Knives was only in shock, but he had the sick feeling that he was lying to himself.

With a deep breath, Vash prepared himself for the part of his speech he wished wasn't true. He leaned in and rested his right hand lightly on his twin's shoulder and softly said, "We need to accept the possibility that she might be dead."

There was still no response. A faint flinch was the only indication that Knives had heard him, and as seconds passed Vash wasn't sure if it had been a flinch or just another breath. He sat back in his chair, letting his arm slip down until it dangled at his side. He looked at his brother and wondered what he was supposed to do now that Knives had snapped.

Then his brother placed the book on the table, face down and open to keep his place. "Anne is not dead," he said calmly. "She wants to be, but the bulb is keeping her alive. Anything beyond that is up to me, or to us if you feel like helping." He looked at his brother, clear and calm blue eyes meeting troubled aqua without flinching away.

"We might not be able to bring her back, not if she doesn't want to come."

"I'm not going to give her a choice in the matter. She will live, and with me."

Vash glanced away and sighed. "I don't think it will be that easy."

Knives laughed, one quick bark that surprised Vash's gaze back to his brother. "Of course it won't be. But what makes you think that I am going to fail? I want her, and I will have her."

Vash shook his head slowly, a small smile trying very hard to crease his lips, then looked at the book that his brother was reading while he tried to think of something else to say.

Flames to Ashes, by Kimberley Dawne. The front cover had a stylistic phoenix with the picture of a woman superimposed, bodies lying at her feet. His mind took a moment to make the connection, then his eyes once again snapped towards his brother. "Is that what I think it is?" They had thought to look for this book when they were released from the confines of Knives' ship, but with one thing and another hadn't had the chance to scour the secondhand book stores for one of the few copies they could be sure had traveled from earth with the colonists.

"Indeed. There was a book of Anne's former life somewhere on this planet, and the wench had it hidden behind her refrigerator." Knives picked it up again and continued to read slowly through the pages, his mind carefully weighing each word and image before moving onto the next. Vash leaned back in his chair and whistled slowly before getting up to chase his son out of the shower.