Chapter Text
It flows like terrible water overhead, the curling smoke, blue-black against the night sky.
The flood, oh great flood , those roiling waters inverted, scorching the eyes, the lungs like curled claws from the inside. Dry wood splintering like thunderclaps. A thousand molten sparks, forgotten fireflies fleeing the ark, whistle into the night air before falling back as ghostly snow.
The roar of the blaze drowns out the purr and gasp and thrum, the hum of the engine below them seeming to blend with the scream of the earth from behind.
Vash curls his knees to his chest and listens to the howl of the conflagration behind them fade. His brother sits in the driver’s seat, backlit by flames, a terrible halo. An angel in his own right, tight-lipped salvation, white-knuckling at ten and two. He looks older.
It is their eighteenth birthday.
—
Knives pulls over only after the smoke is out of sight. His shoulders don’t lower one bit.
Vash stumble-walks off the road and pitches forward, feeling the tickle of dried grass at his forehead as he heaves, hands fisting in rough ground. He retches until it’s dry, heaving and praying, the prayers becoming wordless and animal in the oppressive blackness on all sides. Hot tears stream down his cheeks to mix with acrid breath, remembering hellfire. He tries not to think of what lays behind them. Verses whispered fearfully to him come to life, the promised fire and brimstone come early, the too-sweet smell of something else beyond wood and cloth and shelter, something cut short, too close to his own heart beating blood furiously through his veins.
It’s real, he whispers, his vision spinning, but it comes out as a whimpered wail through grit teeth. It’s real, and there’s no going back.
—
They drive into the black unlit night.
No cars pass for hours. The suffocating darkness makes Vash feel like they’ve been picked up and set apart from the rest of the world, like some kind of metaphysical time out. The hum of the road turns horror into mundanity, and soon Vash lets it lull him into a stupor. He lets his thoughts move through him like winds over prairie grass, errant waves that rustle and pass.
Knives’ grasp on the wheel slowly shifts from a white-knuckled haunting to his regular determined grip. His sharp face is stark in the moonlight, staring, as always, straight ahead. Vash imagines he can see his purpose shining from his eyes like the beam of a lighthouse before them.
It’s hard to see anything out the windows as the night blurs by. Vash’s fingers itch to fidget with something. The radio dial stares at him on the dashboard, and he knows that there are tapes under his seat, but the idea of outside sounds feels like a kind of violence in this moment. He stuffs his hands into his jacket pockets instead and lets his right hand fiddle with the wooden handle of the pocket knife he finds there. He tries to focus on the smoothness of the polished wood, how it transitions to the metal hinge, worries his thumbnail against the rivets. The hands that gave him this knife were ragged, the voice gruff. Don’t lose it, kid. You might need it someday. Brad’s face, young but weathered by the sun, winks across his thoughts.
A smile with a crooked front tooth. Don’t tell your mother.
Vash’s breath seizes in his throat.
It takes him a moment to realize that time is not stuttering, Knives is just slowing the car down and pulling off to the side of the road.
Vash watches numbly as Knives stomps out of the car, feels the dull jostle of the trunk being popped open. He tries to puppet his leaden limbs to solidify, to stand up to follow Knives.
He watches Knives take a can of gasoline out of the trunk and begin to fill up the tank manually. His features are unreadable in the dark, so Vash doesn’t look, instead turning his focus back to the trunk. It’s very full. There are blankets, a bunch of cans haphazardly scattered like they were thrown in. Another can of gasoline. A shitty tent—a hand-me-down given to them as kids that they barely fit in now— and some flashlights, some candles, and some clothes, also thrown in hastily. Vash recognizes his favorite winter coat, a garish red slash across the chaos and entangled with Knives’ blue one. A single Bible sits atop a pile of socks.
Most of all, there’s cash. Not scattered loose, but folded in little places that Vash knows that Knives hides it— in a particular pair of socks, tucked off to the side. In his own jacket, pockets bulging. Tucked inside a worn winter hat. In the Bible, where the pages have been cut away.
Knives has been saving cash. Knives has been saving cash for a long time.
The thought sits in his stomach like a stone, so heavily that the sound of Knives’ boots on the gravel startles him.
—
They sleep, or try to, in the back of the car that first night. Knives keeps the windows rolled down, and a breeze comes in green-sweet from the dewy grass that rustles around them. The gentle wind is cool with the coming of spring, the prairie grass wafting sweet in their nostrils as the dust from the car settles, pulled off to the side of the road. Their limbs are cramped, and Vash struggles to get comfortable, suddenly noticing the dig of the seatbelt into his hip, the way things in his pockets jab at him as he tries to relax. He closes his eyes. The rustle of the grass outside is hypnotic and lulls him to a fitful sleep, remembered prayers haunting him like ghosts.
For God does speak—now one way, now another— though no one perceives it.
In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on people as they slumber in their beds, he may speak in their ears — Job 33:14
—
Vash remembers, and dreams.
They find a snake in the tall grass one afternoon, in the lazy yawn of a summer day. Knives alerts them both to its presence by letting out such a prissy gasp that Vash doubles over laughing, almost shoving them both over onto the hapless animal. They watch, fascinated, as it slithers daintily past. Like Adam and Eve, Vash blurts out, though the creature seems so much less sinister than the stories suggest.
Knives grips Vash’s wrist and turns to him with eyes that reflect the metallic blue of the August sky. I’ll be Adam. You be Eve.
Vash feels something twist and drop in his ribcage. His brother’s eyes are lit like matches. He wonders if he should shake himself free from Knives’ grasp, but there’s no one else around. He holds his breath for a moment and listens for the sounds of footsteps, of voices calling them back, but there are none.
They take their own personal Eden, Vash remembers, that summer, that time before knowledge in the waning days of their boyhood. When it was just greenery all around, the rustle of leaves, and peace like a held breath.
He tries to hold onto those memories of summer, of Knives’ fingers curled around his wrist, when the readings didn’t feel so heavy, when Rem’s voice didn’t shake, when Knives became all silent. When his matchstick eyes dulled then lit in irregular flickers, when Revelations spilled from his lips, when Eden was replaced with Endings, with fire and judgment and crackling flesh.
His brother’s eyes burst into flame and spread black and horrible, and Vash runs, breath hoarse with half-remembered prayers stitched together. He runs and runs and throws himself into the brambles and bracken of the garden, the smell of smoke trailing behind him,
and arms wrap around him, and this time it’s Knives pressing him into the earth, the warmth of an embrace pushing downwards, creaking and growing like old wood,
hellfire on all sides with arms braced around them, stay here, stay here, it’s hot out there.
Branches like fences, arms pried open creaking, splintering,
reverberations as their feet hit the ground, running like it burns beneath them
and they’re home free, and its bright
It’s bright.
Vash wakes up to the sun coming through the windshield like a burning spear.
—
In better days, Knives’ preference to drive in silence was a funny quirk. Today, neck aching from sleeping, skin buzzing from overstimulation and lack of sleep, Vash feels like he’s going insane.
He tries not to visibly fidget and looks at the fields they pass, driving to a place that apparently only Knives knows. Vash knows that there are tapes shoved under the seat. He could turn on the radio right now, even twist the dial to the lowest setting. Just to have something, anything other than the sound of his own breathing and the monotony of the road.
Knives reaches into his jacket— beaten brown leather, a hand-me-down from one of the compound members—and wordlessly hands Vash an apple. Vash takes it and tries to focus on the crisp sweetness that floods his mouth, remembering when Knives first got that jacket. The man—Christopher— had ruffled Knives’ hair and thrown it over his shoulders, laughing as Knives—Nai, as they called him when they were little—staggered under the weight of the heavy leather of an adult man’s coat. It had dwarfed him, and they’d all had a good laugh, except for Knives, scowling. But he had refused to give it back.
Vash didn’t think that anyone had expected Knives to grow into it the way he had, not so well. He looks at the veins in his brother’s hands that rise over strong tendons, thick knuckles. His nails are trimmed and clean. The scant hair on his forearms reflects the harsh sunlight.
He lets himself stare at Knives, watching the sun reflect off of his gossamer eyebrows, his furrowed expression, his cornsilk hair. Waits for Knives to finally cave to his staring.
Knives does, and snaps his accusatory pale gaze at Vash. What are you looking at?
Vash doesn’t have a good answer for that. He feels his voice stir in his chest like a small, tired animal and instead asks Knives where they are going. His tone is rough with sleeplessness. His eyes are still heavy.
Knives’ gaze softens and he turns back to the wheel, not slowing down.
West , Knives replies. They’re going west.
What’s west? Vash looks at the gored apple in his hand like it will somehow give him the answer.
You always go West, Knives explains, and Vash doesn’t ask further. West like his old cowboy movies.
Vash closes his eyes and remembers sneaking up to the TV room, bruised knees on the carpet, his brother’s rapture at John Wayne’s garbled voice, the gentle warbling slur of black hat versus white hat lines shouted at mutual gunpoint. Muffled threats and the grainy rumble of hooves, the pop zip pop of celluloid gunfire. The tinny sound of music wailing through an old CRT television. Mournful justice is served, sometimes with the tip of a hat, sometimes with a nod, sometimes that ambling trot into the sunset.
Knives drives straight, and doesn’t amble.
-
Hours later, they decide they need food and gas, and opportunity presents itself on the horizon.
It takes about an hour of arguing in increasing volume before they decide not to rob the gas station. Or rather, Vash decides for them by opening the car door and threatening to jump out and start walking. If Knives has the means to rob a store, has a gun or anything else, Vash doesn’t want to know about it, and he tells Knives as such. Knives’ mouth pulls tight in a pout and the line between his brows deepens, but Vash knows he’s won when Knives just hisses at him to close the damn door already.
Vash has to remind himself to breathe manually while Knives pulls into the gas station to fill up the car. The weight of their previous argument hangs heavily around them. He avoids the instinct to whip around and see if they are being watched. Would anyone even know to look for them?
He suddenly feels sick again and pushes the thoughts that twist his throat down into his sour stomach, and decides to get some snacks. Every step away from the car feels like he’s surprised by the gravity of it, the contact with the rough pavement. Even the gentle sound of the a ringing bell as he shoves open the gas station door is startling.
The man at the gas station counter is hunched over a newspaper, squinting through a pair of oversized glasses and mumbling. Vash says a tiny prayer of apology before pocketing as many snacks that will fit in his coat. Jerky, small things that won’t be missed, that won’t rustle too much. Adrenaline shoots from his fingertips to his core as he touches the forbidden items, as if he’s breaking through some kind of force field. The man at the counter doesn’t budge or look up, barely looks at Vash when he asks to use the bathroom, a feeble excuse for coming in there in the first place.
His own face looks haggardly back at him in the stained mirror, gaunt and colorless. The skin around his eyes is dark, his mouth pulled tight. He lets his gaze unfocus and decides to look away.
Vash has always hated breaking rules. God can see, you know, he hears Rem’s voice rustling his subconscious, a cheer-coated threat, so close it’s as if her lips brush the back of his neck. She’d always handed them rules that way. It wasn’t her judgment they needed to fear. She was just the messenger of something larger, vast and powerful and merciless. She was just trying to protect them.
The weight of his theft hangs heavily in his pockets as he washes his hands, walks with his head down past the man at the counter. It’s what we have to do, he tells himself.
Is this just life now , he doesn’t let himself ask, but he feels the question queueing in the back of his consciousness.
The chime of the door as he steps back outside reminds him that he’s still holding his breath and counting his heartbeats, one, two, three, four, five, waiting to hear a shout, waiting for a chase behind him. There’s a lone pay phone at the edge of the building. He wants to run towards it, then feels something like laughter-but-worse building. Who would he call?
No chase comes, even after Vash is forced to gasp lungfuls of air back into his chest. He leans against the car to catch his breath, feeling Knives’ perplexed gaze on him.
“Car’s full,” Knives says. “Let’s go.”
And Vash nods, as if he could do anything else.
The car hums to life and they drive away. The shakiness in Vash’s chest settles as he pulls at a stick of jerky with his teeth, feeling like a lion in one of Knives’ more gruesome National Geographics that he used to keep stashed under his bed. The salt feels good. He downs a soda quickly, wincing as the bubbles go down too sharply.
Knives is not a bad driver, Vash realizes.
“Where did you learn to drive like this?” he asks.
“Brad,” Knives replies dryly, his words flat.
Vash swallows the sourness in his throat and asks softly, “You learned a lot from him, huh?” Hopes for good memories, tries not to think of walls of flames.
Instead, Knives’ face goes pale. He stares straight ahead, saying nothing. Vash watches his Adam’s apple jump in hitching swallows as the road hums on either side of them, the wind coming in through the windows as they drive steadily. The flatness on all sides is lulling, eerie. Time feels it stretches taut and suffocating around them, like if he turns this way or that he can go back, forward, pull it around his fingers like a rubber band and see what’s underneath, on the inside.
—
The night yawns before them, a cobalt blue seeping through the changing sky, turning ultramarine and seeming to darken with every mile. Vash catches a few pinlights of stars peeking through. He rolls down the window and lets his arm dangle into the wind, enjoying the resistance against his fingers, the way the breeze brushes his scant arm hair. The sunlight is starting to make him freckle.
Cornfields run together on either side of the road, one to the next like an endless patchwork quilt, scented like fresh green and lush soil.
Vash closes his eyes and pretends they’re going home. He pretends that Knives is driving them home after a long day, a stressful day of nightmares and an unfamiliar world like a too-wide howl. Tries to reconstruct remembered routine.
They would go home and wake up. Vash would hear Knives thumping around first thing in the morning, getting dressed, tight-lipped, on his way to go out for another “job.” He never specified what kind of job, but Father Conrad assured Vash that his brother was being good. His gnarled hands would rest in both of their hair and Knives would school his face into stone and Vash would beam, and Knives would disappear with Brad until later in the evening. Just work to bring in a little more money, Father Conrad said.
When Vash asked about the work, Conrad would turn his eyes on him. “ We all have our place,” he would explain softly. “We are all chosen in different ways. Your brother has been chosen for his. Soon perhaps we will find your place as well.”
His eyes would crinkle with a hidden mirth, and somehow, like clockwork, Rem would find Vash and hurry him away before the Father could say more.
Vash thinks of Rem’s dark hair, always scented with a hint of floral shampoo that wafted after her like a secret garden. He remembers pressing his face into that hair and inhaling. Such a beautiful liver-chestnut-brown, so unlike his and Knives’ blond hair and pale coloring…
“She wasn’t our mother, you know.”
Knives’ voice startles Vash into the present, so much that he chokes on air. Knives can’t read minds, he reminds himself. He can read Vash just fine, though. Too well. He glances over at Knives, still staring straight ahead, grey tiredness washing out the thin skin of his eyes. He looks bruised, even in his stalwart strength.
“Maybe.” It’s all Vash will allow himself.
He remembers asking Rem, “Where did we come from?”
She would smile, a particular kind of light twinkling in her eyes. “Oh, my dears. When God offers you a blessing in arm’s reach, you cannot let it pass by.”
He would ask several times since, but that was all she would say: variations of the same thing, sometimes with more poetic prayer, sometimes less. One time she said it in earshot of Brad, who only laughed in response. But it wasn’t much of a laugh. Barely a laugh. A laugh like the bark of a frightened dog.
—
Knives sets up the tent this time, off the side of the road past another cornfield and beyond.
“There’s nobody here,” he explains, as if Vash cannot see that for himself. There has been nobody for miles, for hours. They lay down a blanket this time, the luxury of being able to lie flat on the grass. “A motel is only worth it if there’s nowhere else to hide,” Knives adds, and Vash wishes he could shove the words back into his mouth.
They don’t crawl into the tent until it’s dark.
There’s something to this. The sound of the zipper as it closes them off from the world into a closer, more intimate darkness. The way he can hear Knives’ jacket creaking as he crams it into the shape of a makeshift pillow. The soft scratch of the blanket as they settle in, pulling it atop them both.
It’s the same tent, Vash remembers, that they used to use when they were kids. He and Knives would camp out in the backyard, sneaking a flashlight and whatever snacks and pencils and paper they could pilfer into their dark little sanctuary.
They were supposed to tell ghost stories, Vash heard from one of the other kids in a golden passing moment of opportunity—it was rare to run into other children on the compound, something about “trying to keep everyone busy” according to Rem. With this forbidden tidbit in mind, Vash would give it his best attempt, flashlight shining under his chin, trying to make hand-shadows on the wall of the tent and his best ghost noises as Knives alternated between laughing at him and frowning at him— “that’s not even scary, Vash”— until they were shoving each other, then shushing each other, trying not to get caught.
They had gotten caught repeatedly, of course. Rem would hide her laughter behind a hand. Father Conrad would scold them, tell Knives he should know better. Not Vash, for some reason.
Two boys the same age, but Knives had always seemed older.
But that isn’t true— Vash realizes. Knives had always been the crybaby. He’d been the first to cry out when he stubbed his toe, or that one time that Rem left them alone too long in the fields, or when they found a dead bird curled up beneath the windowsill. Knives’ tears had run rivers down his small face, his watery blue eyes showing an anguish that Vash feared drowning in. Vash was always the one to wrap his arms around a shaking Knives, to comfort them both at first. He’d been the strong one for so long, when Rem said, “Vash, take care of your brother.” Knives had been sensitive, he had emoted, he had cried. He had been the crybaby.
Until one day he wasn’t. He stopped crying, stopped emoting, stopped laughing as loud.
Vash lies in the dark and tries to remember when exactly his brother had curled in on himself like a fist. He feels a heaviness in his chest like a knot in his lungs, pushing all the air out.
Knives had kept the tent, all this time.
Vash looks over to Knives, turned on his side and almost curled in on himself, breaths quiet in the deathly-still dark. He feels a sudden twist in his chest and reaches for his sleeping brother. He can barely see the faint outline of Knives’ broad shoulders, straining his threadbare white t-shirt, rough under Vash’s fingers as Vash’s throat clenches with his own boldness.
He hasn’t touched Knives on purpose in years, not like this. Up close, he can smell Knives’ unique scent, comforting and warm, almost grassy with a hint of sweat and something sharp. Knives’ shoulders tense, muscles rippling like a startled horse before slackening. Vash pauses—waits until he’s sure that Knives isn’t going to swing at him— and then wraps himself around Knives’ back. It’s so much broader than he remembers.
He swears he feels a shiver from Knives, but he doesn’t say anything else. Vash’s heartbeat slows from its speedy pounding to a steadier drum as he pulls the blanket over them in the cool spring air. He tucks his arm around Knives into his trim waist, comforted by the breath there. The smell of Knives’ jacket is familiar, and soothes him to sleep.
—
They sleep like that until morning, until Vash wakes up with pins and needles shooting down his arm. Retribution for sleeping on his side, Knives mumbles. Vash watches his face for any acknowledgement of the night before, but there is none. Knives says nothing about Vash curling around him in the night, about pulling Vash’s arm tighter over his waist, nor about the minute shift of his hips closer to Vash’s as they woke up, neither of them willing to part just yet. Vash rolls over and lies on his back, willing the feeling back into his arms as Knives crawls out of the tent, the zipper a strange tone mixing with the birdsong twittering around them. He feels warmth coming back to his extremities and steadies his breathing.
The morning prairie on all sides feels like new grass, new breath, new air. It’s a beautiful day. Vash’s stomach growls. He feels in his pocket for more jerky, then decides he’s had enough.
“I want breakfast,” Vash declares, surprising them both, and Knives’ expression is so quizzical that Vash almost laughs out loud, and it emboldens him. “Good breakfast,” he adds.
Knives looks like he’s approaching his own laugh. He shakes his head, but a quirk at the right corner of his mouth betrays him. “Get in the car.”
They drive a short way with the radio on, tinny rock playing at a low but pleasant volume. Knives’ shoulders seem to be less tense, his grip less tight, and Vash feels something approximating a wary peace.
Vash is surprised when Knives steers them towards a small town, hours past the last one.
When they turn into the diner parking lot, he pumps his fist in the air and whoops, ignoring Knives’ derisive snort. A tired-looking middle-aged woman with her hair in a tight bun takes their order, raising her penciled-on eyebrows at Vash’s growing excitement as he adds to their order. Bacon and sausage both, scrambled eggs, hungry man breakfast, pancakes. Vash orders for both of them while Knives stares at him impassively, sipping his black coffee. He feels so boyishly excited at the prospect of food, like a dog thumping its tail, watching his catlike brother’s content stillness.
He spoons sugar and cream into his own coffee, enjoying the increasingly disgusted look on Knives’ face as he does.
“It’s not even coffee when you do that,” Knives complains, looking pained. “It’s just sugar. Like a drink for children.” He sips his own black coffee with its single scoop of sugar, spooned in when he thought Vash had looked away. “We might as well get you a sippy cup with some juice.”
“You like sugar too,” Vash retorts, delighted. “You just won’t admit it.” He kicks Knives under the table. “Now that you’re a man , and all.” He’s been enjoying Knives’ newfound posturing that seems to have only increased since their last birthday. Knives scowls. The coffee is picking up his mood and energy, combined with last night’s unusually restful sleep for the first time in days.
“We are both grown men,” Knives argues, kicking him back, grown-mannish-ly, barely a nudge with his boot.
Grown men . Vash barks a faint laugh. As if they were both far aged beyond their eighteen years.
“I’m going to ask for whipped cream for my coffee,” Vash says, feeling his own grin widen as Knives’ frown deepens. “I’m a grown man and I’m not afraid to ask for sprinkles, too, and—“
Their food arrives.
The bacon is crisp, nearly burnt, the sausage a perfect salty-sweet-savory. The hash browns are crisp, the eggs just right. Vash could cry, swears he feels a tear in his eyes as he digs into his food. He loses time to the decadence of it, the way the flavors meld together, blissful. The coffee is mediocre in a way that in itself is perfect.
He looks up from his half-finished plate to see Knives carefully cutting into one of his sausages with a fork and knife. Knives has never been good at eating, but he does eat when Vash is there. Vash watches the strong cords of his forearms work, the veins in his hands as he brings the fork to his mouth. He eats daintily for someone so strong.
“Where do you want to sleep tonight?”
Knives’ soft tone interrupts Vash’s staring. A piece of egg falls gracelessly from his fork.
He thinks about Knives’ broad back, settling, and swallows. “Tent is fine.” Vash’s ears feel hot. He shoves his last bite of egg in his mouth and concentrates on the savory taste. He distantly remembers vague history lessons, grand feasts of ages before them in tall-tale language. Kings have eaten less well than this , he thinks. “We’ve been lucky with the weather so far. Let’s savor it, yeah?”
Knives nods.
They get waylaid by an old woman in the parking lot, struggling with her bags. Vash insists on carrying everything for her while she coos over him, Knives following behind them with his hands in his pockets. He holds out an arm though for a bag eventually though, wordlessly helping. She hands them a crisp $10 like it’s nothing, and Vash’s eyes light up.
“Looks like breakfast was free because you can’t leave well enough alone,” Knives says as Vash practically skips to the car.
“Knives, she was like a million years old!” Vash grins. “You know we weren’t just going to let her do that by herself.”
“You weren’t,” Knives grouses. “How did she get all those bags in the first place?”
“Overzealous grocery trips over those millions of years, probably.”
They pick up some groceries next door— Vash pilfers two apples, one for each of them— and hop back in the car, considerably buoyed. The road flashes by them, a bright and washed-out grey in the afternoon sun.
They make good time, going wherever they are going. West , Vash thinks, and shuts that door of his mind before it opens too far. Just west . No need to open that door further, no need to ruin a good day, one second at a time, one minute, one hour, one day at a time, all speeding past them rhythmically like the yellow-gold lines on the pavement ahead.
He leans forward and turns the radio volume up, singing along every so often to Knives’ dismay.
The sky shines a sharp metallic blue on them in the afternoon sun as they drive, the smell of dust and cattle acrid in their nostrils. After the umpteenth stretch of farmland, Vash demands they pull over “to pet some cows.” Knives looks skeptical, but then watches with arms folded, then shaking with inaudible laughter, as Vash bounds too quickly towards the cows and they lazily canter away.
They both stretch their limbs and Vash tosses Knives an apple. They eat their fruit like children, messy and victorious and without schedule.
“Cows don’t like it when you run at them,” Knives says simply when Vash dejectedly stumbles into the car.
“Don’t look so pleased with yourself,” Vash grumbles. “Are you a cow whisperer? You going to lasso them yourself, Lone Ranger?” He stands up and chucks the apple core into a field, overextending his posture clownishly, mimicking a baseball pitcher, twist, wrench, flick on the end of the wrist to get that extra distance. He and Knives watch it soar into the grass. “They’ll probably at least like that, when they find it.”
“Maybe.” Knives quietly finishes his apple, and gently places it on the grass next to them. He nudges Vash’s boot with his own, and Vash nudges back.
The shadows grow long as they stretch their limbs some more. The golden hour sun casts over Knives’ features dramatically as he drives. He looks like a sad boyish lead in a film, Vash thinks, watching the sunset turn from gold to pink to a periwinkle blue, night falling around them like a gentle shroud fluttering down.
They eventually pull off to the side of the road, and Knives pops the trunk and begins setting up the tent haphazardly on the grass while Vash drags out their portable camping stove. They eat canned soup, barely heated, wordlessly but peacefully. Vash looks at the quiet sky and the stars twinkling into view. They’ve been lucky with the weather so far. No rains yet, no punitive floods from above. He shoves visions of curling smoke back into drawers in his mind, shuts them tight. The soup is salty and flat, savory and shallow in taste. Vash flexes his toes in his boots and realizes how ready he is to sleep.
He lets Knives continue fussing with the tent and their scant blankets and ambles over to the trunk to close it. There’s a bit of light left before the pitch black sets in, illuminating more things that had been previously hidden by blankets. Notebooks.
He recognizes his own from a year or two back, and some beyond, thumbs through the pages. Written scrawl, notes from their home-school lessons, some more readable than others. He’d had to learn not to press the pencil so hard into the page in his focus. Notes on history, science, lessons that always felt incomplete. Musings on art, when they were allowed to look at it. A drawing of a hand, carefully copied from a plate in a book, raised veins mimicking marble.
Behind his own notebooks—always red, when he could choose the color—a smaller one sticks out. Leather-bound, the pages curling at the edges. He looks over at the tent, where Knives must be waiting, and, seeing no eyes staring back at him, picks up the notebook. It looks small in his grown hands. The corners of the cover are weathered, the handwriting familiar. Rem’s. Knives had saved Rem’s notebook. His breath rises in his gullet like a fishhook, hitches coming up and hurts like hell going back down.
He pockets the notebook, shoving it in his jacket. He’ll look at it later, when it’s light outside.
—
In the time-halted darkness of the tent, Vash sifts through old childhood memories that rise like an unbidden tide.
-
Hushed conversations and arguments circle and buzz around the enclave, mumbles of “education” and “enrichment.”
“Come now,” says an aunt. “Surely we can’t expect them to read those same books over and over?”
Rem’s mouth becomes a thin line and the light leaves her eyes for a moment in a way that makes Vash’s gut sour, but the expression fades like errant cloud cover.
Yes, she’ll take them to the library, she says.
Knives’ head snaps up from his book so fast that Vash can the creak of his chair. They’ve never been allowed to go themselves.
“As long as the books are appropriate,” she adds, looking at the both of them.
Vash nods as reassuringly as he can. Whatever an inappropriate book might be, he will try to avoid it.
Rem herds them much like the flock she lauds in their devotionals. Her hands are warm on Vash’s shoulder blades as he and Knives are shuffled through the dimly lit library. It’s small, like many things around here. She tells them not to wander far from her line of sight.
“Of course,” Vash says, and Knives nods.
She finds him later huddled over a creaking table in the minuscule Art section, the spine of a giant book crinkling softly as he opens it like a holy book. The Works of Michelangelo. He feels his spine straighten as she stands over him, expectantly.
“Sistine Chapel,” Vash says weakly, the words tumbling out of his mouth and crackling into a whisper as he points to the curling title on the page.
He flips through translucent delicate pages so thin they rattle in the turning, holding his breath in terrified care, until he reaches a color plate of the Sistine Chapel. He lets his pointer finger rest on the plate of God and Adam. God as an old man reclines, heavily muscled, highlights on his skin like light through water, a finger outstretched towards Adam. Adam, for his part, gazes at his god, jaw set, eyes wide and dubious, reclining but with his hand lazily outstretched.
Vash brings his face closer to the musty page.There’s a fear in the eyes of the first man, this god’s first draft and creation, that feels like a pointer finger tapping against Vash’s throat. Pay attention, pay attention, it taps along with his pulse. The whites of those eyes, the lips set. The smile that one shows when one doesn’t want to show fear. And yet, his outstretched hand dangles so nonchalantly. Of course, Father, it says. On your own time.
He hears Rem make a sound of approval, then soft footsteps padding in Knives’ direction. His own breath comes out in a shaking exhale as the sound of her hovering recedes.
There are more color plates. He lets himself turn the pages with trembling fingers.
Plates of men reclining, men twisted, men under duress, curvaceous strength. Limbs askew, faces turned heavenwards, bugles and muscles that feel obscene. Prisoners and slaves emerging from marble, rough-hewn wombs giving way to smooth creations in captivity. His mouth feels dry, his face warm. His heart pounds like a dull fist flexing in his chest. He can feel the blood moving in his body strangely. Is this godliness, a threatening absence? Do these writhing bodies in various states of duress please God? There is something about the contortion that reminds Vash of darker things, the curling fingers of sin and warp and flesh.
He turns the page nervously.
A corpse, larger than life, a life in between, draped on a mother that looms weeping, the marble dry of tears yet polished to a sheen. Pieta, it reads. This too takes the breath from his throat and gives him pause. There are close-ups on the faces, smooth and sorrowful. The folded fabric, delicately pinched between the fingers of a graceful hand.
He traces a finger over the veins of that marble hand, as if they’ll raise to meet him through the photograph.
He wonders at that cool hand, those raised veins like rivulets of water. Looks at his own hands, smaller and softer. Thinks of Knives’ identical hands, the way they press their palms together and interlace their fingers in the darkness of night. They’ve marveled at their sameness. Rem’s hands are soft, her fingernails almond-shaped and long, where Vash and Knives’ are more square.
“You boys grow so fast,” she’s taken to saying. Her hands feel smaller these days.
He looks down at their hands clasped together and her hands are small, and his hands are suddenly large, and he feels a rushing in his chest. Rem is looking at him with sad dark eyes, and he is suddenly being pulled by a great current. He hears her humming a lullaby that’s drowned out by the rushing of water, a roar of a flood that crackles and turns from grey to a brilliant orange, crashing above him and curling into smoke and flames and the creaks of wood and screams—
—
Vash awakens with a start, sweat freezing cold on his face, tears tracking at the corners of his eyes. He begins to shake, drawing his coat around him and feeling about for a blanket. Knives is still beside him, his broad back to him like a shield.
His heart beats in his chest like it’s fighting to escape. He wants to let it, but he cannot. He bites down another wail and shakes, curls and then slowly slackens, flattens out with exhaustion. His muscles become liquid with weariness, and he presses his face into the divot of Knives’ shoulder blades and inhales the familiar scent of the only home he has left.
He drifts into a haunted sleep.