Sixteen, a trigun fanfic

Sixteen

In sixteen weeks the world came together and fell apart
And then destroyed itself irrevocably.

Disclaim'd.

The first week he went to a new school. He went out for basketball and made a new friend who wrote their number on his left hand in green sharpie and it smeared and he had to scrape all the gum off of the lockers in the gym because he'd accidentally elbowed Coach in the face and gave him a nosebleed that stained his mustache red. He got a slip to get signed for the next day - by the parents that he didn't have - and won three girls over in Algebra with just a smile, and he walked home smiling that same smile for a long time afterwards, even though he got an offer to be driven home and turned it down.

Every night before he went to bed Knives kissed him on the mouth, tasting like wine and metal and soft skin.

The second week he made new friends - newer than the ones he'd made the first week - and made a couple decent grades that Knives would have been proud of. No one ever asked him where he lived and with whom and so he never told them, and never rode home in a buddy's car because he lied about his after school job and made believable excuses.

He began to establish his own reputation and the girls were already saying he was handsome. He thought that if they'd seen his brother, maybe they would disagree.

At home, Knives began to give him longing looks and sometimes offered to scrub his back for him in the bath, because they used to take their baths together and he was only being nice, and maybe he was just a little lonely.

He let him.

The third week and Knives handcuffed him to the bed.

He said no and Knives said yes and threw an arm across him, falling asleep with his whole weight pressed up against his side and his nose buried in the crook of his right shoulder so that he could feel every soft heave of his brother's body as he slept, wrist splintering above his head even as he tucked an arm around his brother's shoulders and let the slow, warm breaths tickling his neck put him to sleep.

He was late for school that morning.

The fourth week, Knives apologized for everything. He smiled and asked only if they could pretend that none of it ever happened. To forgive him.

That night he kissed his cheek and begged him gently to please stay.

And because he had apologized, he did.

The fifth week and he loses the game because his mind is somewhere else and he can't seem to respond. He smiles halfheartedly and tries to persuade with gentle, sheepish looks, his teammates not to hate him, because what would he do if they hated him? No one offers to drive him home, but there are still an encouraging few who tell him he'll get them next week, and he pretends that he agrees.

He feels so shameful and so strangled he can hardly speak, move, breathe. Fifth week, and he can no longer look Knives in the eye.

Not anymore.

The sixth week, and Knives makes love to him for the first time. It hurts and he cries and he doesn't want it. His muffled whimpers of 'no, no, no' only make his brother move that much deeper inside of him, and there's nothing he can do. Nothing against him no one to help him nothing he can do and he bites his tongue to keep from saying things he never meant to say until it bleeds behind his teeth.

Afterwards, Knives soothes his sobs and screaming with a kiss.

The people at school start to give him awkward looks and he hides his bruises with dark clothes and long-sleeved shirts, hoping that they can't see through him like he knows his brother can, and prays that no one knows his secrets.

Seventh week, the sex wasn't enough. Knives becomes frustrated because things have changed between them. He says 'I love you' with his fists and cradles him after like a baby, whispering Vashu, Vashu, Vashu against the inside of his ear, so that he cries harder than before.

And it's almost better because when he goes outside he hears them hissing 'incest' - they've found out about him, he knows - behind his back, and Knives is the only thing that silences his urge to break down before them and plead to disappear and tell them, 'No! It isn't like that!',

because Knives reminds him that he knows better.

Eighth week comes and he drags diamond blades across his skin because that pain blends so slowly and so beautifully into every other pain and the scarring staining ache of it is so complete that for a while he really believes he can forget, and so he tries.

He tells himself that it is better this way.

Ninth week. He finds a note pinned to his locker door that reads 'Incest is Best' in bold black letters.

He is beyond caring but he crumbles it up anyway and rips it into too many tiny pieces, only heading for the two green double-doors when he can no longer see the words burning his fingertips where he touched them in disbelief and hurt and the first frail flutterings of anger, what they meant condemning him to a biblical hell far worse than the sink-pit gouged out for him like a deep tomb beneath the burdened, breaking weight of his shame. He swears that he is never going back.

Knives comforts him with loving words and a shiny new black eye, swollen jaw and skin hanging off his bones as lumps of flesh are sculpted into rope-like scars.

He dies a little more and feels the sink-pit caving in to yield and take him under.

Ten weeks. Everything has been abandoned.

Suddenly he sleeps in his own room, in his own bed, and the one that screams and thrashes through the walls and underneath his brother isn't him.

He has been discarded and replaced.

He knows it hurts, but he didn't know how bad, before.

Now he knows how it hurts.

Eleventh week and he finally finds the courage enough to ask him why. Why it had to be this way. Why like this. Knives doesn't claim to love him more than anything or to have only wanted the best for them, but instead answers his question with another question and a look of distanced nonchalance that cracks something inside of him right down the middle.
The courage is lost and something golden slips away.

Still, it is a small relief to know that Legato has been dismissed for now. He hopes in vain that this will be the last time someone separates them.

Twelve weeks. The self-inflicted lacerations have become so physically evident that he no longer cares enough to hide them.

Because he is scarring and because tears and desperate fingers have dug deep and veiny blue-black caverns - carved and dark and painful underneath his eyes, into his cheeks - there is nothing left of that former beauty which first attracted his brother to him in that forbidden way, and what was once has gone.

Knives makes this obvious to him by growing out his hair and smoking cigarettes and falling asleep with his arms around Legato on the couch, lips curved and bodies intertwined, where he must know he sees them.

He carves the word 'worthless' into his right arm - red wet drip sting spelling out the letters that read w-o-r-t-h-l-e-s-s in blood lines that burn - with a pair of scissors, and wants more and more the thing that so destroyed him, because now that he's alone he can't forget.

Unlucky thirteen. Knives is back.

There are rose petals in the bath and he is smiling and stroking his greasy hair with adoring, tapered fingers, cooing bittersweet lies and apologies that console and consume him although he never says he's sorry, which is the only truth between them.

But it is enough like before so that he welcomes the caresses and the lies that feel so terrible and so warm and so familiar and when Knives is inside of him at last, he claws at him like an animal and begs for more.

It has been fourteen weeks, now, and he is too tired to get out of bed.

'Blood of my blood', he said. 'Flesh of my flesh.' And it was wrong but everything was now and they could never be just brothers, even if it ended.

Legato was asleep on the floor in the next room bleeding. Sometimes they would find themselves alone in the same place and exchange glances, green for gold, from across a room, and he would try to count the scars on Legato's chest because he walked around shirtless and in dark jeans and chugged chocolate milk out of the carton, looking beat up so bad but still so good as he wiped his mouth with the crook of his arm and walked back up the stairs to Knives' room.

He was always gone before there could be breath for words.

In truth, it was a closest thing - Legato's body, that is - to a mirror that he'd seen for about a month then, save for the image of his brother's face - with queasy condescending pink-lipped smile or disdainful nonchalance, and sometimes even twisted in those rare, violent throes of pleasure above him - which used to be so like his own but was changed now so that it hurt to feel the differences, the separation of like skin that never felt a human touch these days while he hid and numbered scar-counts on the plaything's chest; his flesh-mirror because he dared not count his own.

And his brother never held him anymore, and sometimes he told him he should eat or wash his face more often because his lips were cracked and his body sick-smelling with decay and he felt that if he had to bathe another night alone again he'd go to sleep and drown or bleed himself because he was w-o-r-t-h-l-e-s-s, and he was too far gone now for shame.

Let them think what they would.

Nothing could hurt him anymore.

Fifteen weeks in hell and Knives was on the heroin.

Lips coated with spit and foam and poison, needles hanging limp and lifeless from his black-veined, ropey arms and scattered on the floor - a carpet sharp as broken glass - and he was droopy-eyed and sleepy and the blood pumped slower through his jaw, teeth dull and words a jumbled string of consciousness, senseless and sometimes incomprehensible. The pus in his vomit stung outside his mouth like a disease.

Legato was there to nurse him with a warm body and 99-cent snack cakes from the gas station down the street, arms around him to keep him talking. Loving mumbling stupored lips and cocaine rocks, bent silver spoons that put them both to sleep for hours.

One night he came back late, smelling like sweat and smoke and Hugo cologne through the leather of his jacket, the naked white-gold of his chest with clouds of gentle platinum hair curling along his abdomen, and no Legato with him, no Legato lingering in him, on him.

His breaths were heavy as he stumbled and staggered across the room, crossing the small space from the door to his bed and climbing on top of him, sucking in deep droughts of breath as he straddled the bone cage of his hips and clutched wildly at the blankets. He stared, looking depraved and longing and afraid and in need of the only one who shared his soul with him, looking like everything he pretended not to be.

'I'd break myself to shake this hell,' he croaked, whispered, lungs hoarse and cracked and burning broken. 'Save me, Vashu,' he pleaded - voice so scared and so thin - and then, with one last hollow breath, collapsed there on top of him with his head laid against his chest, fingers still clutching tightly at the sheets.

And even though he knew that he was blacked out for the night and wouldn't wake, he didn't move at all beneath him, and only watched his brother breathing - just in case he stopped.

Just in case.

It has been sixteen weeks.

Knives overdosed.

He foamed at the mouth and sweated through his clothes, and then his sheets, begging to die and for his brother Vashu, and Legato didn't know what to do and he was too afraid of the police getting involved to call the hospital, too afraid of the bond between the brothers to bring the other one to him, and still too jealous even now that he would not be the one to save him if he did.

Instead, he kneeled by him and wrapped cold rags around his neck, one laid over his bleak, yellowy red-rimmed eyes, and spoke to him - seemed to be pleading with him - in stroking silky desperate whispers as his liver failed, and he shut down. Repeating: 'Master, Master', and echoes of 'Knives, Knives', trying to keep him awake because it was what he'd done all the other times before and he was not prepared for something like this, and he did not know what to do, and he rolled him over when the vomit started pouring out, acidic and unnatural, in great heaves, and changed his clothes whenever he sweat through them, touching him carefully and lovingly and begging him not to leave, to please, please stay. But it was not enough.

Knives fell asleep and he didn't wake up.

Legato needed a way out, and ran.

He buried his brother in the yard.

He cut himself open for the last time.

He packed a bag of both his and his brother's possessions.

He cried and he prayed and he pretended that he was so empty and so scarred and so irreversibly warped and calloused now, so far down, that he couldn't feel a thing.

I don't feel a thing. Most of all, not regret.

Not for this.

And he was lying to himself but the pain was too tight and the hurt was too clear and he couldn't forget, and he couldn't forget, and he couldn't forget

And he didn't ever want to.

/end.