Palm of Paradise, or, Pope Story Pope Story Yay.

Really astoundingly pointless, self-indulgent KV AU frolics! Of wonderment! Why is it the pope story? Because your Mom is hot. Okay.

Warnings for incest, yaoi, graphic to semi-graphic sexuality, naughty language, violence, and probably a mess load of other fun things I just haven't gotten around to writing yet. Hooray, hooray, Psyche is going to hell to play Parchisi with the nazi pope and the makers of Inu Yasha.

Vash hummed, a rattling purr deep in his coppery throat that meant, after hours of rutting, he was finally sated.

He stretched languidly into his lover's side, making a kittenish and very immasculine bleat meant to plead affection. Knives complied, sliding his pale face tenderly along his duality's golden one and stamping tiny, childish kisses along the slanting noble jawline so very indistinguishable from his own. Vash flushed a fine peony-pink in pleasure at the attention.

"Vash, brother..."

"Yeaaaah..."

"If you ever scream that loud again this early in the morning I'm taking out your vocal chords."

"I love you too, Knives." Vash said sweetly, purposefully tangling the long ankles that huddled together beneath the moist bedsheets.

Knives struggled admirably for a moment to knit his brow into a scowl but, as unfortunate fate dictated, it caved into slitted gaze and an adoring curve of mouth, the absolute normality during the countless hours shared with his twin. Vash, chin supported on laced fingers, watched him break with something akin to a despot's amusement, observing his unfailing restrained, irrepresibly powerful elder brother shatter beneath his ruddy fingertips and uneducated tongue. Vash tucked his long nose into the poigant crook of Knives' shoulder and smirked lazily against the skin, already resubmerged in the seductive tides of slumber.

"We should get up soon."

"Mm-hmm."

"It's getting light. It has to be at least six..."

"Mm-hmm..."

"Vash, are you listening to me? Lazy spoiled brat."

"You're a brat."

"Quit fucking around," Knives scolded mildly, slinging his legs over the mattress and sitting up. Vash's nasal whine rose relflexively to his back and, rolling his eyes, he stood and skirted away quickly from his brother's groping fingers.

"Ten more minutes, Knives!"

"You have ten more minutes. I'm taking a shower."

"Five more minutes."

"Vash..."

"One more minute! Stay with me one more minute." Vash finally sat up, sprawling foreward and catching the elder by his sinew-lined wrist. He turned it and held the pearly underside adoringly to his cheek, tilting his face to brush his lip against it just so.

'Like ice cream,' he said inwardly, delighted, watching Knives melt.

"One more minute," he agreed in very false begrudgement, resting back down alongside his twin.

"Five more minutes," Vash corrected.

"Five more minutes."

Vash woke considerably less comfortable then he drifted off in, crushed against the pockmarked wall by no looming torso but a mass of cold blankets. Bleary-eyed, yawning around his fists, he struggled from the embrace of cloth gone unpleasantly slick with drying perspiration (among other things) and teetered just slightly on the carpet before moving for the threshold, focus turned on the bemused grumble of running water from behind the bathroom door.

"Morning, Knives." he muttered gently, pushing up the toilet seat with his naked foot to relieve himself.

"You are so lazy, Vash. It's seven-thirty, if you hadn't woken by the time I dried I would of had to pour ice water on you again."

"You're so mean."

"You ask for it."

"Hmph."

"Come here, Vashu. Let me wash your hair." asked Knives, pushing aside the glossy curtain to peer with genuine curiosity at his twin.

"I washed last night. Besides, I'm not coming near a naked you until I can sit down again."

Knives split into a fit of not unkind laughter at this and Vash, swallowing a drowsy nausea, grinned. The grin deepened as the steaming flow was cut short and his brother, debauched snarl not reaching the affection smoldering in his silvery eyes, moved to hold him.

His arms slid easilly around Vash, gliding on the younger's powdery complexion and the wet of bathing, fitting in their customary slot atop his brother's sloping hipbone, Vash's forehead pressing trustingly against the smooth expanse of his shoulder, as if they were not really seperated at all. Which, he supposed, they were.

Through a curtain of sleep-mussed sulfur, Knives observed their sinless consummation in the clouded mirror.

Vash was warm, soft, the little-boy saintliness and purity of his nature piercing the intimidating extents of his beauty as the raging desert dawn pierces mist. Gilded in bronze, all green and gold, leaf and honey, goodness and tenderness and virtue, an entity composed entirely of freckled autumn sunlight, dappled and glorious, hedonistically sweet beneath his caretaker-brother's eyes and muscular arms. And Knives...

Knives was... different. The same height, same proportions, same features -- but whereas Vash was the life-giving star of Apollo, he was the moon; cruel, glacial, stunningly lovely but dangerously so. Pale. Powerful. A statuesque carved swan of the lunar galleries, mighty marble wings folded about an adorably anodyne dove. Cold against Vash's warmth. Hard against Vash's softness. And somehow, painfully, inexorably, venging and vicious against Vash's sublime holiness.

They stood there, silent, smiling, and looking very much like a baby sephira embracing the Morning Star. Knives' smile grew inexplicably spiteful, and he swallowed his malice by pressing three of his twin's shapely fingertips to his mouth.

"I wish you wouldn't gel your hair up like you do, Vashu."

"I wish you hadn't carved all of yours off." He lifted his face and his hand to fondle one of Knives' flaccid curls with the tiniest taint of sadness that bit just perceptibly at Knives' belly.

"I'll grow it out again."

"Then, I'll wear my hair down more often."

"You know we're both lying."

"I know," said Vash, turning in the envelopment and scrubbing down the mirror over the sink with an inverted hand, "but it seems nice to tell eachother we will.

"Lies are never nice."

"Sometimes they are. Sometimes you have to." He shook out his chrysanthemum mane and reached for the comb wading in the gathered moisture in the belly of the sink.

"Naiive little Vashu." Knives bent his head to trace the faint ribbon of violet trailing down his brother's neck. It tasted of sleep, and luxury, and the powdered sugar he was forever begging his brother to guzzle with a fraction more consideration for his gorgeous Greco-Roman figure. And it tasted of himself. Delicious.

"I'm not naiive..."

"The truth is the most important thing in the world, Vash. Remember that."

"I thought love was most important, and sex, and me."

"Okay, sex is the most important. But truth is in the top two."

"Asshole." Vash giggled, pulling his face from his brother's mouth in teasing denial and shoving mildly at his shoulder.

"Hurry up, school starts in thirty." A little nuzzle of lip, forced on Vash's evading chin. "Haul ass."

"Get off my ass or I'll never make it."

"Ooooo, baby brother, is that an invitation?"

"Eeep! Knives!" Knives laughed again at the lovely deep vermillion that smeared across Vash's face, withdrawing his hands from his nether regions and retreating before Vash's indignant swatting.

"Thirty minutes, Vash."

"I want donuts for breakfast."

"Well, you're not getting any goddamn donuts. You're getting a little chub."

"I'm not!"

"You are. You're having toast for breakfast."

"I'm not..."

"Vash."

Vash, given up glaring down his brother with gel-slicked hands running his tresses nearly a foot skyward, jutted his lower lip in a ridiculous pout.

"If you loved me you'd let me eat what I like."

"Oh, shit, Vash," Knives sighed, gathering his jeans from the hallway alongside the bathroom and sliding them along his left leg, "do we have to do this every morning?"

"If you loved me you'd let me have donuts."

"According to you, Vash, the only way to prove my love for you is to let you sit around watching Cartoon Network twenty-three hours a day, drinking soda and popping donuts until you were a blonde pre-Subway Jared."

"That's right."

"Not gonna happen. You're not getting any goddamn donuts."

"If I don't get donuts today," Vash said evenly, removing hair product from his hands with an appropriately snide swipe, "you don't get me tonight."

As it turned out, Vash got his goddamn donuts, afterall.

Knives is OOC, yeah? But, like, it's so appropriate to make him sweet and big-brotherly to Vashu and then a bloodthirsty misanthropic psycho to everyone else in the world. Don't ask me what it's appropriate to. To like, Knivesism. Which is now a major religion. In my world.

It'll suck less later. I swear to you. I swear.

To be continued, like, probably one day. Once the human race has been converted to computer data.

MIND BUTTERFLY ARTISTIC INTEGRITY