Disclaimer in previous chapters. Please see Author's Notes at the end. This is a direct continuance of the last chapter.
Content Warning: Mild tearjerk warning.
-x-
Knives withdrew before the full effect had set in, watching through the glass as the prescribed energy crackled through the conducting liquid and into Vash's body. It was a series of eight shocks, tightening his muscles on the molecular level. Each one resulted in a short seizure, interrupted by the next.
An astonishingly simple process. He should have realized it.
His brother was totally helpless. He could not wake. He could not shield. He could not use the most rudimentary telepathic power.
When he himself had been inhibited in that room, with his own telepathy fading, the spider had had unheralded access. He had reached out to its mind to leave commands, but that road had been two way. On its own, the human did not have enough mental talent to realize she had spent her entire life blindingly groping at other minds. But by extending his own thoughts into her mind, he had unthinkingly allowed feedback back in.
And without a way to shield, to filter, he had been helpless to stop the incursion. One that the human garbage would not have had the presence of mind to realize was occurring.
And with his shields down, she had stirred up the dust in his mind. That was all Rem was. Dust. A few shining particles of matter floating in the upper atmosphere, if not completely burned away long ago.
And even as nothing more than a ghost, she was a useful tool to encourage Vash to loosen his grip on his block.
Based on the agony beneath his forced grimace, Vash was finding the process highly unpleasant. If he would stop actively resisting the energy, if he would just loosen his grip on his own damned Gate, it wouldn't hurt. This pain was his own doing, and Knives refused to feel sympathy as the final shock was administered, leaving Vash's body twitching the last of the excess energy away.
He didn't need the alarms on the equipment to tell him that Vash had survived. Much as he wanted to be a human, he wasn't. Perhaps the point was finally driven home.
Perhaps he would remember the nightmares when he woke. Perhaps the old man was right, Vash's dreams were nothing more than a warped reflection of reality.
He could only hope he'd removed the warp.
". . . Knives . . ."
He turned at the voice, surprised to see the old man watching him. He had expected the human to be reliant upon his screens and his machinery. His old eyes had long since begun their deterioration. It was more than irritating that he seemed to have such clarity of thought.
The old man was apparently waiting for something. "Was it successful?"
Was it successful indeed. Surviving the process didn't mean they'd managed to actually force his cells to accept the surrogate energy.
A brief scan of Vash's mind showed no attempt to shield. He left his brother, still trembling in the serum, and studied his own console. Cellular activity was off the chart, but of course it was too soon for it to have normalized from the exposure. They wouldn't know for several hours.
Perhaps that was why the old man asked him, instead of asking the computer.
Damn that man.
Damn him for finding the way when that spider had all but handed it to him. And damn her for what she had done to his mind.
If you stop fighting, it will stop hurting. He had told her that, unable to break her shields. Shields that should have been as weak as his own. Shields that should have been inhibited. How was it possible she had overcome him?
It occurred to him, belatedly, that studying her brain after the fact would be pointless. The level of damage to the organ was catastrophic.
And like Vash, it was her own doing.
It was her own doing.
Knives increased the sensitivity of the logs, returning to the tube to observe his brother. Vash was breathing the serum, his unconscious mind winning the fight against reflex and the fear of drowning. The convulsions had all but stopped, and he was as stable inside the tube as out. Another round might be necessary, once they had results to compare the data against, and Knives saw no reason to remove him.
Let everyone see what his dream had done to him. Let him be on display, in that pathetic body, for all to see. It might be worth parading his pet humans through, just so they could not longer pretend they had not caused this.
Knives glanced over his shoulder at the old man, who had eyes only for his brother. There were many expressions on his face, but the overriding one was the same one he had tried unsuccessfully to wipe from his brother, over and over again.
"Why do you continue to hope?"
The old human seemed surprised by the question. "Without hope, what is life?" he asked, as if rhetorically.
"When my brother recovers, if indeed he does, he will finish what he began on the New Kennedy."
The old man tilted his head. "Perhaps," he allowed. "Vash has always been a man of his word. I am sure he will keep his despite your not holding up your end of the bargain."
Knives let his eyes flash, but it was without heat. His mind was strangely calm. "Have you forgotten the method of suicide you chose –"
"I did nothing you had not already done," the old man interrupted. "Vash kept his word to you, and look at him. Take a good look! Is saving her life going to take that same toll on you?"
A flawed conclusion, Vash's condition was a combination of a hundred years' worth of mistakes, driven by her. He was not going to save her.
He'd tried, once.
Vash, take care of Knives!
"She doesn't want to be saved." His calm was fading. "She chose her path."
But she . . . the spider, she hadn't chosen the humans. Not really.
If you stop fighting, it will stop hurting!
She had stopped fighting him. It had given her power, but she hadn't made that choice to take that power, she hadn't made that choice to save the humans.
She had tried to save all of them.
She was the same bundle of contradictions.
Knives found himself studying his brother. Floating there, his toes just brushing the bottom of the tube. He was in one piece. All his pieces fit inside of one tube. But it could have been her. It could have been their sister. His body was just as frail. He knew Vash was alive, but his body was so empty. His eyes, if they were open, would be so empty.
He might never see that blue again.
I know it hurts, Knives. I'm sorry I hurt you.
If anything happens to you during the reactor project, I will wipe them out.
I know.
If you betray me-
I won't.
Vash, it will fail. You understand that, right?
If we do nothing, we keep hurting. If you're so certain they're not going to change, then we have to.
But he was right, goddammit! He had been right! The humans had hold of him, and they did exactly what he'd said they would.
And what the old man, who had the same knowledge, had not.
What the spider, with her knowledge, had not.
She had seen. She knew. So why . . . why didn't she fight?
How could she love Vash, and love them too?
How could she?
"Millie Thompson would never choose to die." The old man's voice was far away, he ignored it. He turned on his heels and he headed for the elevator without a second thought. There wasn't time to hesitate. He had to know.
He had to know.
The suns were blinding as he exited on the surface. But he didn't need to see. He knew where she was. She hadn't moved. She couldn't. One of the others was there, beside her, but it didn't matter. She was easy enough to silence, easy enough to ignore.
She wasn't Rem.
He stopped only a few short yarz from her, he didn't need to be that close. When he closed his eyes, the cutting white light disappeared, and he could see the rectangular nothingness beneath the stones of his street. He knew where the path had been. It was easy to build across that gap, easier than it should have been. And he didn't have a choice, the path had to be bi-directional.
She needed to be able to answer. He had to know.
Knives came to the end of the bridge, and was confronted with the same brilliant light he had just escaped.
However, not all the suns were in the sky. Not even the sky was in the sky. All of the colors of Vash's Eden were in play, but they were swirled together without pattern. A piece of solar paneling was sticking out of the head of a young human boy, who did not appear to be upset about it. Part of a front door was winging through the air with a worm in its beak, and the breeze smelled of tea, cotton, and plastic.
He took a step forward, and the lawn gave way like incredibly soft, thick mud.
He was too late. The damage was too great. Her mind had already fallen apart.
He glared at the pudding-grass beneath his feet, forcing it into the same types of leaves from Vash's mind. The solar panel was easy to reassemble, and the pieces that were missing were easy to extrapolate. There should be the rest of the door, it would have the same whorl pattern. The red bricks, with their ceramic whites and yellows, made up the porch. The steam was from the teakettle. The fabric was clothes hanging out to dry in the suns. The gravel brown was shingles.
It was a house.
He put the sky back where it belonged, trying not to add too much of Vash's details. There were gaps he could not easily see the pattern to, so he left the void in the shape of another human child to run where it wished, even when that was directly into the side of the house.
He had to find her. He didn't want his mind's projection of her. Then he would never know.
The inside of the house was just as chaotic as the outside. A pair of legs, one furry, trotted in an endless circle around the top of a lampshade. There were many more human figures in the house, some recognizably a single person, others strange combinations of eyes and hands and a smile. Somewhere, one of them was humming tunelessly, but the sound seemed to be coming from inside a human chest that was hovering in front of a stove. The boiling pot was upside down.
There was enough left of a stairway for Knives to reconstruct it, and he followed it upwards. These rooms were in more disarray than the ground floor, with insulation functioning as the ceiling lights and the beams of the floor above the carpeting.
And all around him, a cacophony of noise. A sand steamer was docking, a room full of typewriters going full speed. Lots of soft shuffles, as if someone was in the room, quietly breathing. It was above even that that he caught a few strands of something familiar.
That song.
Rem used to sing that song.
It seemed to be coming from up, and Knives decided that what appeared to be an intact window on the slanted ceiling of a violently pink room was actually supposed to be there. He reached up, unhooked the latch, and pushed it open, before levering himself up through the hole.
He was on the roof, now, the shingles rough against his palm, and there was a green couch beside the window. There was no one on it.
Still, the song could be heard, slightly more clearly, and Knives looked with more than his eyes. He had grabbed her easily enough when the bond had still been there, how was it so hard to find her now?
But he had done a lot more damage in the intervening time. Too much.
"Rem!" She was still here. This world wouldn't exist if she wasn't. "Where are you!"
The song stopped, as if the singer had been momentarily interrupted, but after a moment it started up again. It was very faint.
"Rem!"
"Go away!" It was muffled and childlike, and it came directly from the sofa.
Knives stared at the piece of furniture a moment, then he circled it, paying close attention to the steep pitch of the roof.
Bloodshot eyes glared at him from behind a mass of hair, and she hugged her knees closer to her chest. Her hands were twisted together, clutching herself as tightly as possible.
He almost felt relief. She was still here.
You hurt me.
"You hurt yourself," he snapped, before he could catch himself. "Why? Why did you do that?"
Her eyes narrowed a little, apparently in contemplation. "Because I had to," she said simply.
He crouched down in front of her, studying her. She was literally holding herself together; he watched the breeze take a bit of the white fabric of her shirt and the moment it left the rest it tuned into half a teacup and shattered on the shingles.
"Why?" Why did you let me in?
Her eyes closed, and he saw the lines of weariness etched permanently into her pale skin. "If . . . if I show you . . . then can I say goodbye?"
He studied her, not understanding, and she loosened the death grip she had on her wrist, and haltingly held out her hand.
-x-
It was just like it was with the thomas calf.
Meryl kept rubbing her hand, she didn't know what else to do. It had long gone cold. She could still feel a pulse, but not much of one, not on this side. Shock, Doc had said she'd fall into shock and there was nothing they could do, but –
But she just couldn't sit here and listen to Millie cry.
"So . . . on the fifth night, those shards strike the face of the earth over and over . . ."
Half of Millie's face screwed up and she moaned inarticulately. It didn't even sound human.
"Sound life," Meryl managed, almost in a whisper.
At first she'd tried to go and get help, but not even the strokes could smother Millie's terror at finding herself alone. The fog was long gone, it was late afternoon and the shade was now pleasantly cool. Shouting for help had only served to frighten Millie more, and talking to her seemed to help, but eventually there weren't any other ways to say she was sorry.
So she did what she had done for the thomas calf, while they waited for her father to come back. She did what her grandmother did for her, when she was young and sick and scared.
And Millie couldn't really complain about her tone deafness. It was that same grandmother who had told her one morning that the only way she could carry a tune was in a bucket. Maybe those moans weren't Millie's attempt to sing along. Maybe it really was a cry of pain.
Meryl smiled tremulously at her friend's dilated eye. "So . . .," she crooned, "On the sixth night, those signals bring travelers together."
Millie let out a keening grunt where "sound life" would fit into the song.
Those signals that had brought travelers together. Millie's disappearance. Vash's disappearance. Wolfwood's lighter. The ship. They were the pebble's children. The ones who had never fallen from the sky.
She wished she had never snapped at Millie. She wouldn't have mailed the letter that night, they would have gotten on a sandsteamer and –
And Vash would still have been on that ship. Nothing would have stopped this.
"So . . . on the seventh night, a weightless ship races to the sky . . . "
She swallowed the lump in her throat. It was making singing damn hard. Doc's weightless ship had done the reverse. And since they'd taken the New Kennedy's Plant, it was never going to race to the sky again.
The only thing headed for the sky was her partner. Her friend. Her sister.
Meryl closed her eyes, blinking out the tears, and took a deep breath. Millie missed her cue.
"So . . ." It shook, and Meryl refused to open her eyes. "On the eighth morning, a song from-"
"-sssomewhere reaches my ears . . ."
Meryl left her eyes closed, but she laughed, and it somehow came out like a sob.
"The last time you sang, sempai, was . . ." It trailed off, sleepy and a little slurred. "When we were celebrating at the bar."
When the first of the new power generators had turned on for the first time.
"You made me," she pointed out, then laughed again. She was hysterical, obviously, if she was hearing voices, but somehow she couldn't bring herself to break the spell. To open her eyes and see the truth. It was nicer to think Millie was talking back. "That was a good night."
That was the first time they'd dared to hope the twins' compromise could actually work.
"There were lots of good nights," Millie corrected. "Beautiful sunsets – oh, I hope the hotel hung onto your luggage! The cross stitch you were doing!"
Meryl couldn't help herself. Her eyes flew open to stare down at Millie in consternation. "Of all the things to –"
But the words died on her lips.
-x-
Meryl had been crying.
The woman stared down at her, her grey eyes shocked and waterlogged and heartbroken, and Millie tried for a smile. In answer, the older girl dropped her hand to rub her eyes, hard enough to rub them out of her skull entirely.
Millie reached up, it was harder than it should have been and her arm felt like it was at least twice as heavy as the boulder at the bottom of the well, and she grabbed Meryl's right wrist, stopping her.
"Don't cry, sempai." She tried to smile again, so big that it would split her face. "It doesn't hurt."
She'd always wondered why Mr. Vash and Mr. Nicholas had smiled like that. Now she knew she'd been right.
Meryl tried halfheartedly to pull her wrist away, and Millie tried not to look hurt. But Meryl didn't mean it; a second later, her hand was trapped between Meryl's, and the other girl was only a few inches from her face.
"Millie?" It cracked. "Millie?"
"I'm sorry," she said, and she meant it. "Really, sempai, I am. I know you don't want to be alone and Mr. Knives doesn't trust you yet and Mr. Vash hasn't woken up yet, but he will, he really will, and-"
"Millie, you're babbling." Meryl's voice was all business, and she reached down and gently shifted a lock of hair off her forehead. "How do you feel? Do you feel okay? Is it tingly anywhere?"
Goodbyes were always really hard. She hated them.
"It doesn't hurt," she repeated. "Sempai, tell my family what happened, okay? If they don't hear from me they'll worry."
"Tell them yourself." The grip on her hand was much stronger than before. Much as she might pretend otherwise, she knew what was happening. Millie swallowed back her tears and kept smiling.
"And don't you forget, Miss Meryl Stryfe, that you're the best partner a girl could have wished for!"
"Stop it!" Of course she sounded cross, it was the same tone she used when she wanted but didn't want to hear what was in Mr. Vash's letters. "Stop it, Millie, you're going to be okay-"
"Keep an eye on Mr. Vash and Mr. Knives."
"Don't, Millie. Just don't-"
"And tell Miss Elizabeth and Mr. Carter and Doc that I said hi." Why weren't they here? Confused, Millie craned up, trying to look around Meryl's head – and she gasped.
His smile was warmer than the suns, she hadn't realized how cold she was until she saw it. "Hey, Tall Girl."
She was speechless. She couldn't even form a sentence, her lips just wouldn't work, and his easy grin widened. "Whoa, way to make a guy feel like a hundred double dollars. Don't tell me your hand is going to leap from your throat again?"
And then he reached past Meryl's shoulder, and offered her his hand.
Millie blinked at him a moment, then hesitantly reached out. His grip was calloused but gentle, he pulled her to her feet effortlessly.
"Sorry for making you wait."
Millie swallowed hard, then threw her arms around his neck, and breathed in deeply the scents of cigarettes and bourbon. "Mr. Priest," she whispered.
His voice rumbled up through his chest, a low laugh, and his arms came up around her waist, holding her close. Just like he had that night.
"Come on, big girl. Got something to show you."
-x-
The doors hissed open again, barely twenty minutes after they had closed, and Doc tried not to hope. It was too soon for any data to be back on Vash, and the way he had left, perhaps-
But the footsteps coming down the corridor didn't sound much like Knives.
Doc pushed the stool away from the equipment so he had more room to stand. He knew she wasn't capable of walking, was it perhaps one of the others carrying her? If so, Vash couldn't be removed from the tube instantly, they'd need someplace to put her and the gelfoam bed was the best option –
The shuffling footsteps did not seem to be in any hurry, and Doc hesitated, eyes straining down the dark corridor. There was a shape, it wasn't one of Knives' caretakers –
And Doc saw his mistake.
Knives stumbled into the main laboratory, holding his forefinger beneath his nose. His eyes were half open, badly glazed, and once he had made it into the light he moved his hand, as if confused by the blood on his white glove. It was running down his face, and down his neck from his ears –
He stumbled, landing hard on his knees, and after remaining perfectly balanced for a moment, he slowly pitched face first onto the floor.
He didn't move again.
-x-
Author's Notes: Hey, look! Something happened!
You should have noticed a direct quote from the prequel, Compromise, specifically where Vash and Knives agree to Vash's plan.
Also, I bounced back and forth between anime and manga, so to be clear – in the anime, Rem sang a song called "Sound Life" frequently (you can google for the lyrics), and it's apparently a song that Meryl's grandmother sang to her, and Kaite sang it at the end of the BDN arc. I know many of you were hoping for Millie to pull through, but that was not in the cards for her. I know some of you were hanging onto this fic just to find that out, and I wouldn't blame you for bailing, but we haven't quite seen the last of Millie Thompson.