Disclaimer in previous chapter. Please see Author's Notes at the end.
-x-
"Let me see."
He tugged his right arm closer to himself, away from her prying fingers. It already hurt a lot, and it was hot, and her hands were always warm, so it would only hurt more if she touched it.
"I just want to look," Rem murmured, in that soothing voice of hers. "Just one little look. Is that okay?"
He bit down on his trembling bottom lip, then gave a little nod. He was cupping his fingers around it so that he wasn't touching it either, and he peeled his left hand back a little – just a little. The cool air stung, and he covered it back up with a whimper.
"Oh, that's just a little scratch," Rem chided him. "We can fix that up no problem!"
She laid her hand lightly on top of his head, stroking his hair, and that made him feel a little better. Then she ruffled it backwards, and used her hand to gently steer him towards the door, and away from the relative safety of his bed. Knives tried very hard to stop crying as they walked down the halls, because he couldn't see very well and he was afraid he might still be out there.
But there were no shapes at all in the hallway, and Rem propelled him into a room he hadn't ever visited before. It was very bright; the walls and ceiling were all a soft white and there were gleaming benches filled with cream and black equipment. He recognized a microscope, and there was a robotic arm that looked very cool, and then Rem was wiping his face with a paper towel.
The paper was rough, and he pulled away with a little whine of protest and looked up to see her smiling at him.
"There you are!" she declared, and then gently picked him up and set him down on the counter.
It was cool through his shorts, but not too terribly cold, and he glanced around uncertainly as she crossed the aisle to one of the many transparent cabinets, gently depressing the bottom corner of the polymer door. It slid open soundlessly, and she started rooting around.
". . . is this your lab?"
Rem turned and gave him a bright smile. "Mmm-hmm," she confirmed. "Well, one of them. We have several on the ship. But they're all filled with things that could be dangerous, so I don't want you or Vash to come in here without an adult, okay?"
Knives made sure he was sitting very still, and not leaning on anything behind him. Rem came back over and patted his knee comfortingly.
"Now let's get you all patched up."
She had what looked like a stainless steel jar, and she unscrewed the wide-mouthed top to reveal something that looked wet, like oily paste.
"Can you let go for a second?"
He sniffled the snot out of his nose. "Will . . . will it hurt?"
She shook her head. "Nope! It's an antibiotic ointment, and it will make it feel much better."
Somewhat uncertainly he peeled his left hand away from his wrist. In the bright light it looked even worse, all red and puffy, and there were bright red drops of blood in one of the deeper scratches. Just seeing it made it hurt more, and he tried not to cry too loudly when Rem gently took his wrist in her hands.
"You scraped it on something, huh?" Her voice was very sympathetic, and her fingers were quite gentle as she dabbed the oily paste on. It stung when she touched him, but when he flinched her hand became like iron, and he couldn't pull away. He squirmed and made an unhappy sound.
"Hold still, Knives -"
And then the stinging faded, just like she'd promised.
Rem gave him a smile and let him go, screwing the cap back on her metal jar. "That will keep it from getting infected while it heals," she told him, unwrapping something flat that looked like paper. It had a very sharp odor.
Knives rotated his wrist uncertainly, but the hot feeling was fading. The ointment cooled it very comfortably. It looked really wet, and he experimentally poked the very edge of what she had smeared. It was thick, and hard to wipe off.
"Does it keep out bacteria by covering it up?"
"Bacteria can't grow on it," she explained, holding up the big rectangular bandage. "And if bacteria touches it, it dies. Do you know what bacteria looks like?"
He nodded slowly. They'd seen bacteria in the computers. They were too small to see with your eyes, you needed a microscope. Some of them were shaped like noodles, and some like eggs, and some were totally round, and then some were really long, like fat straws. They came in all colors and had funny textures.
"When bacteria touches this, it makes the cells walls go pop!, like a bubble."
But . . . "But we're on a spaceship," he said slowly. "How could bacteria get on the ship with us? Is it dirty in here?"
Rem laughed. "This room is very clean," she promised him seriously. "But bacteria is all around us. You're covered in it."
Knives flinched back, holding his hands off of himself, and she laughed again. "You have dozens of kinds of bacteria on your skin, and your hair, and even between your toes. Some of it is even good for you."
He blinked up at her, completely taken aback, and she patted his tummy. "Right in there, you have bacteria that helps you digest food."
He had bacteria inside him?! "Ewww!"
"When the bacteria helps us, it's called a symbiotic relationship."
She took advantage of his disgust and wrapped the self-adhering bandage around his wrist. "A symbiotic relationship?" But that was hardly the most important thing she'd said. "How did the bacteria get inside me?"
The door at the end of the lab slid open, and Mary stepped through. She looked surprised to see them.
"Oh! What's going on here?"
Rem glanced over, smoothing down the bandage. Knives was surprise when it didn't hurt, not even a little. "Knives got a scrape."
"Poor guy! But I bet Rem fixed you all up."
Knives nodded, touching the bandage. It felt strange on his skin, almost like skin itself, but when he touched it, he could only feel it with his fingertips, and not the skin on his arm. He put his fingernail under the edge experimentally, just to see how it pulled up.
"Don't touch it," Rem instructed sternly. "We'll take it off tomorrow and see how it's doing."
Mary opened one of the other cabinets and took out a blue notebook. "Where's Vash?"
"He's still sleeping in the rec room." Rem held out her hands, and Knives obediently leaned forward and wrapped his arms around her neck. She gave him a hug, then moved to set him down on his feet, and he clung stubbornly. She laughed a little and moved him to her hip, and he laid his head down under her chin.
"Rem, how does bacteria get inside people? Are they born with it?" And then, how did it get into their moms?
"Well, it's on the food you eat," Rem explained, turning to lean against the counter. "And your body is specially designed to let the bacteria into certain places, and keep it out of others."
"Oh, we're learning about science today?" Mary came over and patted him on the back. "You have all kinds of bacteria in your digestive track, you know. And it's very important that it stays put. If you didn't have any, it would make you sick."
Knives shot straight up in Rem's arms. "But, Rem! You put the ointment on me!"
She gave him a mischievous smile. "I didn't make you eat it, did I?"
Oh. He relaxed a little, but still sat up straight so he could see her face. "So why do we want to kill the bacteria on my scrape? Won't the ointment get in my blood and then go to my tummy?"
Mary looked surprised. "Wow," she commented. "Looks like you're raising a little scientist right there!"
"He's a smart one!" Rem replied proudly. "The ointment we put on you only kills the bacteria it touches. There won't be enough of it in your blood to kill the good bacteria. Now remember, bacteria is only good when it's in the right place. If the good bacteria in your tummy escaped and got into, say, your eyes, it would make you sick."
"So it can be good and bad?"
She nodded. "Yep. You give it a home, and in turn it helps you by breaking down chemicals in your food that your body couldn't without it. That's a symbiotic relationship."
Knives considered that. It seemed alright when she explained it like that. It had a cozy home in his tummy, and food to eat, and in turn it helped him by making his food more nutritious. "Sort of like the crew of a ship?"
Mary hmmed. "I suppose it's like that," she agreed. "We live inside the ship, and help keep it running, and if we ended up in the wrong parts, we would certainly mess things up."
"Like if you got in the engine," Knives suggested. "It would introduce water and carbon into the fission reaction. The reaction would change, and the contamination would be hard to get out. And the steam you'd generate would elevate the internal pressure past its safe level."
Mary was giving him a strange look. It wasn't quite the same look he gave them. But it was not at all like the look Rem was giving him. Rem looked very pleased. Mary didn't.
"How do you know that, Knives?"
"I built a model of the engine." He said it uncertainly. He was allowed, wasn't he? "In the simulator. If you introduce the elements that make up the human body, it would hamper the reaction between helium and nitrogen because the nitrogen would get captured by other reactions."
"You built a model of our engines . . . by yourself?"
He nodded. However, Rem shook her head.
"Yes I did!"
"Did you?" She was watching him closely. "Think about it, Knives. How did you learn about helium?"
Had he said something wrong? "We learned about the elements in study."
Rem nodded. "And what do we do when we study?"
" . . . we read?"
"That's right." She looked pleased, so he relaxed a little, but he still wasn't sure how reading meant that he hadn't made the engine model by himself.
"Where do you think the data came from?"
"The computer?"
She smiled. "Well, yes, but how do you think it got there?"
Well, that was easy. "Someone programmed it."
"Exactly." She turned, so that they were both facing the equipment in the laboratory. "So someone, a long time ago, studied helium. They did all kinds of experiments in a lab like this one. They tried to combine helium with other elements, and when they couldn't, they recorded that result. It must have taken them a long time to test all the elements with helium, right?"
He thought about it, then nodded.
"It probably took him several years. So he recorded his results carefully. And then the next person who wanted to learn about helium read his notes, instead of doing all the experiments himself. He could read the results, and try new experiments based on the data from the previous ones. He could get further in his study, because the work done before he ever started saved him all of that time."
Oh. "So whoever learned about helium helped me build my model?" Knives paused. "But what if he made a mistake in his experiments?"
Rem's eyebrows lifted, like they did when she saw something she thought was fascinating. "That's a good question. That's where all science comes from. Scientists ask questions, and then they do experiments, and record the results. Then other scientists do the same experiments, just to make sure they get the same results. So when the third round of scientists start studying, they can be sure that the previous experiments – and what they learned from them – is right."
Rem used her chin to gesture around them. "That microscope was built by hundreds of people. Some people studied lenses, and some people studied plastics, and some people studied light. And all of their work combined left us with this microscope. That's how people built the ship. They built it on the work of the people who came before."
Knives looked around the lab. Everything in it had been built by hundreds or thousands of people? "Does that mean that you can never do anything by yourself?"
"There are things you can do by yourself," Mary answered. "For example, you can clean up your own dishes, can't you? Just because someone else made the plate doesn't mean they made the mess."
The corner of Rem's mouth turned up. "Did someone leave his snack plate on the counter again?"
But Mary was smiling. That strange look she'd had was gone. "Yes, in fact I think two someones."
"Sorry," Knives mumbled. But he could tell immediately he wasn't in any trouble.
"Apology accepted, future scientist!"
Future scientist. Knives looked around the lab again. Rem was a scientist. But even so . . . "I want to be an engineer," he decided. "It's more fun to build things than it is to watch them."
Rem leaned off the counter and headed towards the hallway door, still carrying him. "I see! Engineer it is. What do you think Vash wants to be?"
Knives thought about it as the three of them left the lab. Vash liked to watch things, but he wasn't patient enough to wait to see what would happen. "I think he should be an artist," he finally concluded. "He likes to draw."
"Speaking of, I am sure he's woken by now," Rem murmured. "I will collect my engineer and my artist and we will learn about doing dishes next, how's that."
"Then they'll be the only two on the crew who do," Mary noted. "Are you all better now, Knives?"
He had forgotten completely about the scrape, and looked down at his bandage. It was all smooth and neat. "Uh-huh."
"That's good. But for today, you better dry, instead of washing. You want to keep your bandage clean and dry, okay?"
"Mm-hmm."
"Good boy." Mary gave them a wave and then she and her blue notebook headed back towards the bridge.
Rem turned in the opposite direction, towards the rec room. "Let's go see what Rembrandt has gotten himself into."
"Who's Rembrandt?"
The rec room door opened, but no bright light came flooding out to meet him. Confused, Knives opened his eyes.
It was dim, the lights were diffuse and seemed to be coming up from below him. He turned his head, it rolled easily on something soft but it started to pound immediately, and the world shifted nauseatingly beneath him. Knives closed his eyes, swallowing the urge to vomit, and took a deep breath.
The ceiling of his lab.
Knives opened them again, bringing his hand up to his aching head. He was lying flat on his back, and he turned, more cautiously this time, to see a waveform on a nearby screen. Brainwaves, from the pattern, and his fingers found what felt like a dry patch of skin on his temple.
Knives put a fingernail under the edge, fingering it for a second before pulling the sensor off. The waveform flatlined.
He sat up, acutely aware of the unhappiness of his inner ear, and suffered through several waves of dizziness. A sharp poke inside his left elbow stopped him from moving the arm, and he traced the line to a bag of clear fluid, attached to a pole at the side of the bed.
"Ah."
Knives withdrew the catheter from his arm, using his thumb instead of telekinesis to put pressure on the vessel. He dropped the line but the old man didn't seem overly concerned about his concoction leaking to the floor. He simply turned off the monitor. He had changed clothes at some point, now in an ivory shirt that was far too large for him.
One of Vash's shirts.
"I thought perhaps you might sleep through the night," the old man murmured, then gestured at the ceiling. Knives didn't need to look to know what the human was pointing at. The observation cam. "I took the liberty of recording everything from the moment I gained access to the system. I assumed you would want to review it."
The last thing he could remember was Rem . . .
No.
It wasn't.
Knives closed his eyes as the effort of focusing them into a glare exacerbated the headache. He heard fabric shifting. "You have quite the concussion, my dear fellow, but no permanent damage. The scans are available for you to evaluate if you wish. I've taken the liberty of turning down the lighting. When last I checked, your pupils were still dilated."
Why. Why would the old man do that.
". . . do you think this proves anything?"
He focused on the old human, who was sitting heavily on a stool. Doc simply shrugged. "I don't have anything to prove to you."
His head hurt too much to deal with this.
Knives swung his legs over the side of the bed, noting that his bodysuit had been cut down the front to allow access to his chest and arms. There were no marks, but Wright or Librett had to have helped the old man, and they knew well the rule they had broken. He would deal with them later.
"If you would be inclined," the old man continued blandly, "I am happy to administer anti-inflammatories, and something for the pain. Your acolytes would not permit anything but simple saline."
Knives gave him a look he hoped conveyed all the hate and fury he was slightly too nauseated to express with his voice. He didn't dare touch his telepathy. As expected, the old man's lips grew into a wide smile.
"I think you'll be just fine," he noted, as if to himself. "I'll be right back."
He clambered slowly to his feet, but he looked extremely frail, and moved as a man his age ought to. He supposedly had seen Earth, yet he couldn't have been over eighty, at least in years spent outside of cold sleep.
Why did that matter?
Knives pulled one of the rolling consoles over, irritated at finding it so close and handy. The old man thought he knew him, did he? He was halfway through the fast-forwarded footage when the human reappeared, not with a syringe but with a selection of pills and a glass of clear liquid.
"I am afraid these are from the New Kennedy," he said as if in apology. "However, they should do the trick." He set the small metal tray on the table beside the gelfoam bed, and gestured at the console. "You're almost to the good part."
So far, it appeared all the doctor had done was what he claimed. Wright had indeed touched him, only on the bodysuit, and the human had then run some basic diagnostic scans, and treated him. No additional tests. No drawing of blood or other fluids. There was nothing in his hand as he had run the IV line, and he watched the old man mixing saline by hand, under Wright's careful stare. No indication of taking any type of additional liberty. In fact, the old man had even dressed the small cut he'd gotten on his arm.
Humans and their damned sentimentalism.
However, then the doctor disappeared from the monitor's view, and the footage switched to the primary laboratory. The old man went through his bag and administered several injections to himself. Then he sat still for quite some time at Knives' preferred console, pouring over the reports on Vash. Knives stopped the playback, remoting into the other console.
The summary report was right there, waiting for him on the main screen. It wasn't ideal, certainly, but it was above zero.
Significantly.
"Vash is unconscious," Doc told him, and the relief in his voice was hard to miss. "There's no activity from his Gate, unfortunately, but his coma lightened about an hour ago. I knew you would want to review the results before taking further action, but I have made several suggestions."
The cells were active, but they were working now off stored energy. They were accustomed to getting a steady stream of Gate energy, rather than doses of it. The organelles had become active, processing what it had received, but they were already starting to relax again into inactivity.
"There is enough residual energy stored in the bulb buffer to expose him," Doc continued unnecessarily. "I would have summoned Fron, but she appeared to be occupied with other matters."
Knives glanced up at the old man, careful to keep his head as still as possible. So he knew . . . "And would you have treated me, old man, had you known?"
Doc was pale, but his gaze was unwavering. "I knew," he replied sternly. "I knew the moment you returned without her that she was lost. She was a beautiful human, Knives, inside and out, and she deserved to be saved."
His head ached too badly to rehash the argument, and belated he remembered the pills. A glance told him what they were; nothing strong enough to incapacitate him. Even the act of swallowing them hurt.
Knives glanced at the data again, then remoted into the battery array. He had asked his sisters for raw energy, and they had provided it. It wasn't quite the same frequency as Fron had given him, so many years ago, but it might do.
Pumping that energy into the tube was just as easy as exposing Vash to it on the table; he could do it from here, and he did, adjusting the levels so that it did not arc through his body so much as traverse the more conductive serum. He would have preferred to get some indication of what Vash was thinking, but he knew full well that it was ill advised. He wasn't even quite sure he knew what had happened.
He knew that if he looked, he would find a hideous gash through the path that led out of his mind's city. A gaping hole where that bridge he had built had been. It wasn't that the bricks themselves would be gone – some of the blocks of his own road would be damaged as well.
If not for the spider, it might have happened anyway. The path to Vash's mind would look the same.
He must not have severed the connection in time. If he had tried to hold her mind any longer, it might have killed him.
In a way, that was reassuring. He'd assumed if he'd been linked to Vash's mind when he had been fooled into believing Vash was dying, he too would perish. It appeared that hypothesis was correct. But he'd had to, to get his answers. She had been falling apart. She'd held out her hand, and he had taken it –
His head throbbed, and Knives closed his eyes briefly against it. It hurt to even remember.
It was a problem for another time. He was vulnerable, had been seen as vulnerable by at least Wright. That was something he needed to address. And killing Wright was not a desirable option. Librett could not survive without him. Much like he and Vash, they were a matched set. He would never deprive one of the other. If he had to kill Wright, he would have to kill them both.
Leaving him with no one to keep an eye on the humans.
Because they were not directly injecting energy into Vash's cells, the reporting was much faster. His cells were actively absorbing the energy that was around them. The old man had been correct; once they had shocked them into functioning, the energy absorption was working properly. Vash's Gate would normally have been producing this energy, and it would have been flowing through his body.
. . . through his body, not around it. It was fallacious to think this was normal.
Knives made a note to complete a study on his own Gate and cells as soon as the old man was incapacitated. Given the trauma he had suffered and the amount of time he had spent conscious and mobile, it was somewhat impressive the elderly human was still moving at all.
The monitors on Vash's brainwaves showed additional activity, and Knives closed down the experiment. His brother was now closer than ever before to a normal sleep pattern.
The old man saw it as well. "So it works," he murmured. The relief that had been in his voice previously was curbed.
Knives pinned him with his eyes. "Are you regretting condemning him to my 'dominance'?"
The old human sucked in a deep breath, and released it with something akin to regret. "Your issues notwithstanding, we've just sentenced him to life in Eden without parole. I'm not sure that is something for which I should receive his thanks."
-x-
Although the blanket was something he was taking advantage of even now, he would have traded it and all of Elizabeth's efforts to get them a hot water heater.
"How long has she been in there?"
Elizabeth was picking at the ivory paste with her fork, assembling it into something rather than actually eating it. "She's not used to that kind of labor."
He'd woken only after they were mostly through the room. Hadn't even heard them enter. The insurance woman had been sweaty and bone tired, with dirt almost up to her knees, and his employer's expression had been entirely unnecessary.
He'd buried more than one man. He knew.
He knew what kind of work that was. And he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that the hot showers he'd subjected himself to thereafter had been a necessary part of the process.
She had been in there for the better part of half an hour. She was doing exactly what she didn't need to do. She was making herself numb.
The problem was, numb didn't make anything better. He should know, and he didn't need a cold shower to get there. Even rubbing his fingertips together netted him almost no tactile feedback. No hunger, no soreness at lying on the floor. No sharp pain of any kind, just ache. His limbs were as difficult to manipulate as they had been before.
He was no better than he had been this morning.
And he knew she knew it.
Carter stared at the ceiling, listening to the running water in their closet of a bathroom. It wasn't warm by any stretch, but the water wasn't cold enough to drive her out for a long time. Hours. She'd be blue and shivering, and the last thing they needed was another one of them out of commission.
"Any sign of the old guy?"
The fork stilled in the paste, and she shook her head. "One of our guards provided the shovel. I doubt he was allowed to see her, there was no sign she was receiving any kind of treatment." Her eyes drifted across the room, searching her memory. "He would be valuable to Knives, and I'm certain if he meant to throw him away, we would have found him by Thompson. He's still alive."
That was not necessarily probable. Thompson being discarded was not just convenient for Knives, it was a clear message to them that they were all disposable, no matter how useful they had proven to be. Vash being on death's door was the only thing keeping them alive, and if the old man had failed to help, he might have simply been killed. Hell, with his arm rotting, he might have died in a corner somewhere without anyone noticing. Just because it wasn't as public as Thompson didn't mean much.
All it meant was that past service was no guarantee of survival. It mean that Elizabeth herself was not off limits. And that was first and foremost his problem.
There was no protecting her from the floor. The only way to make her indispensable was to make her the only person who had something Knives wanted. Knives wanted his brother to recover. If Elizabeth had a key to enable that, she would be temporarily off limits.
"If you had a Plant in a bulb with Vash's symptoms, what would you do?"
She didn't look surprised by the question. "We'd force a Last Run," she said immediately. "A Plant not producing energy is worthless." She gave him a dry smile. "Not the answer you were hoping for, I'm guessing."
Certainly not the one Knives would want. "What if that wasn't an option."
She shrugged, then gave up on the paste and set the plate on the ground. "We'd use the bulb infrastructure to try to force energy production. Change the angles, change the drugs. Apply every stimulant we have. But Vash isn't a normal Plant. His physiology is different."
Aaron was silent, letting her work through it. "We might try exposing one bulb to another," she mused. "I read an internal paper on Plants showing premature failure. Bringing a healthy Plant, even in a sedation state, into close proximity to the failing Plant showed modest increases in energy production. It was never enough to cause a full recovery, but it allowed the Plant in December to continue functioning for some months after a Last Run would normally have been initiated."
That didn't do them much good. Vash was being exposed to all kinds of healthy Plants. The place was literally crawling with them.
"If you're asking how I can make myself necessary, I've been working on that for a while." She stretched her legs out in front of her, rolling her head on her shoulders to look towards the bathroom, where the sound of running water hadn't abated. "I can't imagine there's anything I can add to what Knives and presumably Doc are trying. There is no way Knives would let me put Vash in a bulb, even if it was the only thing that would save his life."
Carter thought about that. "Do you still want to?"
"Save Vash?" Her eyes were distant. "For a long time, I wanted him dead. It might not have been his idea, but it was his Gate that killed my parents. It didn't matter that he was the one who picked me up and saved me. Now . . ." She pursed her lips. "I don't know . . . " There was a long pause. "I know you saw right through 'Eriks'. He wasn't himself."
She might struggle to say it, but the meaning was clear.
He'd hated visits from 'Eriks,' the guy had rubbed him wrong even before he knew who Eriks really was. That guy had been hauling more than Plants on his back, and he was too damn skinny to shoulder the weight he was trying to carry.
They had fought for Vash the Stampede. Millie Thompson had died for him. But after all this time, after a hundred years of getting the short end of the shaft, was anything left to fight for them.
-x-
Water.
It sounded like water. A running brook of it, gurgling and tumbling and bubbling over the pebbles in the rec room. It sounded like the aquifer beneath the mansion. It was wet and happy and welcome.
He listened to it for some time. There was green, on the other side of his eyelids, and light. Not terribly bright. Not like the suns. Maybe he was in shade, beneath the tree. He remembered laying beneath it, watching the light dappling through the leaves -
The ground beneath him gave way suddenly, and his eyes flew open.
He had gathered himself for the fall, his arms raised, and in the green liquid his wrist looked weirdly thin. There was only one. His prosthetic was missing.
Vash took a breath, and impossibly, he felt the exchange of liquid in his lungs. It didn't hurt. It didn't feel like drowning. It was more effort than breathing air, the temperature difference was more pronounced.
Shocked, he looked past his hand, into a distorted laboratory.
He was in a tube.
Vash froze completely, and the tension in his frame made him float several inches. No one was moving out there, that he could see. The lights were dimmer than they ought to be for a working lab. The glass and the colored liquid he was floating in made seeing detail almost impossible.
He was in a tube. They'd put him in a tube.
Like Tessla.
He whimpered, but there was no sound. The water wasn't enough to move his vocal chords. He stretched out his hand, surprised when he could touch the glass, surprised when he could feel it. His other arm looked elongated, the stump was far too long, and he held his liquid breath before he dared to look any further down.
His abdomen wasn't open. His organs weren't floating there in the green with him, exposed and riddled with tumors. His toes could just brush the bottom of the tube.
He was whole.
There was no metal. The pins, the staples, the grill – all of it was gone. They'd taken it out when they'd-
They'd-
There was motion, outside of the tube. A figure.
They knew he was awake.
The lights outside the tube brightened, and Vash flinched towards the back of the tube. They knew he was awake.
He had to get out of here.
Vash looked up, frantically trying to find a weak point in the arc of the glass. There was no air at the surface, no visible means of opening the tube from the inside. It would be strong, used to the pressures of the liquids inside, and he had no metal to break the glass.
They had taken it away.
He braced his feet against the glass in front of him, wedging himself tightly before he brought his left arm back, hard, driving his elbow into the glass. It held. He tried again, then used his right heel, trying to push through the cylinder with as much strength as he could gather.
It wasn't enough.
The tube held.
The figure in front of the tube was gesturing, but all he could hear were the bubbles of the aerator. He kicked again, changing the angle and gasping in the green water. It was harder to breathe than air, he wasn't getting enough oxygen from it, and white spots joined the bubbles around him. He was panicking, he knew it but he couldn't -
"-ash, stop!" It was immediate and authoritative, coming from the green all around him.
He froze, scanning the tube frantically, and there was a dull slap. The flat of a hand was pressed up against the glass. It was a smaller hand than his own, about chest high.
"Calm down, idiot." The growl was distorted by the liquid, but heart-stoppingly familiar. "You're going to hyperventilate."
Vash kept gasping, kept braced against the glass, and he watched the hand. It disappeared, and then knuckles rapped on the glass.
Shave and-a-hair-cut.
But that voice –
Vash hesitated, sucking hard on the liquid atmosphere, then slowly untangled himself, drifting back towards the center of the cylinder. This wasn't possible. This was a nightmare.
That was Knives' voice.
But that hand . . . it wasn't Knives. Whoever was out there was far too short.
Vash let himself sink just slightly, pressing up against the glass. Whoever it was, they were wearing a white coat, they were bald, and much shorter than he'd thought –
The angle of the glass made his face a wavy mess, but that smile . . .
Vash blinked, completely collapsing inside the cylinder.
That was Doc.
"I'm draining the liquid now."
The aerator spun up with a roaring boil, and a current sucked him to the bottom of the tube. There was enough room to crouch, and Vash watched apprehensively as the liquid's surface approached. It broke above his head, cold, and the air burned his eyes. He squeezed them shut, forcing a hard exhale as his head was entirely clear of the water. The warm water flooded out of his mouth and nose, and he clenched his diaphragm as tight as he could.
Then he waited a beat, and tried to suck in a breath of air.
The green water, that had been so soothing in his lungs, became fire. He knew it would feel like drowning, the exchange from liquid to gas, but his coughs were too weak to clear his lungs. Without his liquid support, he didn't even have the strength to hold himself up. The world turned him head over heels, and he clung to the grating at the bottom of the cylinder and struggled to get rid of the water.
He couldn't.
It seemed like he'd swallowed and then vomited the volume of the entire cylinder before he became aware of his body, curled on his side, hanging off the edge of something. He was too weak to pick up his head, too weak to close his mouth, but he could finally take shallow, shallow breaths without choking. Someone was pushing his back.
Vash dared to open his eyes. Just barely; the green water left in them burned unbearably, and the light was too bright.
He was pushed onto his back, choking again when he could feel the water sloshing around the bottom of his lungs. Something hard was on his chest, it wouldn't let him turn over again, and then it crushed down into him. It helped; the water was ejected, squirting up the back of his throat and out his nose when he closed his mouth to swallow.
It also felt like he'd just broken a couple ribs.
For the first time since leaving the tube, Vash felt like he could breathe, and he left his eyes closed and concentrated only on that one, simple task.
Just breathe.
Someone was talking. It sounded like Doc, but it couldn't be. It couldn't be. Doc wasn't involved. And Knives –
Knives would never have let Doc put him in a tube. Never. If it was Doc, he would be dead. He would be a bloodied splatter on the wall. Doc hadn't been there. Doc hadn't been with the others, it wasn't his ship.
It wasn't his crew that had done it.
Vash tried once again to open his eyes. They watered badly, but mercifully there was no light directly over his face, and he could see.
Doc was talking, he could see his lips moving but there was too much water in his ears to hear. The older man looked up, and then Knives swam into view.
. . . K-Knives?
A heavy, suffocating silence met his inquiry. There was no sense of his brother there at all.
Knives focused on him, said something curt.
But he couldn't hear it.
Knives stared at him, clearly waiting for a response, and Vash closed his eyes.
-x-
Author's Notes: Well, he was awake for a few minutes . . . ::dodges bricks:: Now that our boy is finally with us, I guess we'll see what he thinks of everything that's happened. I have learned from my previous long bouts of introspection that they're hell on pacing, so I'm going to try something a little different with the next chapter. You guys can let me know if it works (or doesn't.) At least we're in the homestretch. . . . kinda. I anticipate about six more chapters before we're finished. Which means prolly closer to twelve, if PAA or Trial and Error were any indication . . .