Work Text:
The pitch black of space yawns wide outside the little window of the Cryopreservation Chamber. Its stars are blurring into the dots of frost speckling the window up and down, ice and fire shimmering the same bright white.
You lean into its cool, slicksheer surface, and groan, as pain shoots molten hot through your arm. Like a skewer, or meat-brand.
Or cautery excision. Cold fear pinpricks across your skin at the thought, and drops icy into your gut. The humans did that, to some of Tesla’s tumors: after they extracted so much cancerous mass that their lead scientist decreed “a change in lab standards out of a judicious need to save sample space for future experiments”. This is nothing, it’s really nothing, in the face of that fate.
You moan, lowly, and grip your hand hard around your right forearm to force even more energy into it. Forcing that overwhelming, lava-stream of pain to flow muddily into every cell and fiber. You’ve synchronized with your sisters in the midst of matter production before, so you know this is right, even if it feels god-awful wrong. It’s just that… your body’s too young to bear it well. But you have to—you need to accumulate enough potential energy to reach a critical mass, to be able channel new matter into existence.
To be able to transform yourself; to transmute the poison lead of your circumstances to gold.
You feel sick. You press your forehead in hard to the glass and feel the frost melting into your skin, cold sweat drenching and pricking the roots of your hair, dripping down your temple. And pant, the hot wet of your breath fogging the glass, as you work to distantly synchronize with your sister in the room through the wall directly to your left.
It's an awful struggle to connect with her, through the thick insulated walls. But surveillance videos of you leaning on the window and staring out into space are not as suspicious at a passing glance as pressing directly up against her tank would be. You know Rem must watch what you do, at least sometimes; there’s always been that wariness in her eyes. Despite the warmth of her arms.
No. You grind your head into the glass to clear it, and turn your mind back into merging with the real, genuine warmth of your sister. There in your soul’s soul she reminds you: to breathe, to be open to the flow of the greater dimensions, and to let it flow without forcing it. To let go of the tension, the fear, that scrunches up in your chest like it’s all you can think about, sometimes.
So you breathe. Little harsh juts of breath, but you breathe. You force yourself to stay open to that great cosmic stream: the ancient, electric potential of existence beyond human dimensions. You cannot drop the fear, but still—she reaches out to you, somehow, and is able to soften it for a moment.
Then you look up to the glass, and see her face overlaid with your own; feel her tank just as cold against her overheat, dispersed through each splayed pinion feather; sense her hands reaching out, as if to cup your heart in your chest: replacing the fear with faith as a biblical angel might. And something—something new, something electric, something overwhelming finally rushes and spills all through you.
It blots out your tiny, scared consciousness with the sheer force of accumulated existence. And all the potential therein builds to a great, explosive release—suddenly merges, converges, splits and branches and spikes out from within you like a precipitate crashing out of solution. You let out a stuttered gasp, and feathers—your feathers—break free, sharp and striking, almost thin and beautiful as blades.
It stuns you into laughter. Echoing pale and soft, out across the wide berth of the chamber. But that small sound is a critical mark of resistance against every ounce of the fear, the pain, and the humiliation that these creatures would put you through.
And once it starts, you can’t stop laughing—in disbelief at the accomplishment, and at just how much greater and fuller the universe is than you ever could have thought. In relief, like a poem you once read in Records about a swath of rain breaking. In sheer, fucking relief. You can do this after all. You can protect yourself, and your brother. It chills through, makes you shiver, fills your whole body with a secondary rush of pure elation.
You’re sobbing. There’s a tingling spark of nerve pain left in your arm, and your sister’s mind split harshly from your own at the force of it all, but god—none of it matters because your fears have been met with one clear answer: that the worst case scenario will never happen. That you have the power, now, to cut through any bonds the humans might try to put on Vash or you.
You stare blearily down at your feathers. At each already-fine edge. And with an illicit thrill, arms still in front of you and hidden from the one surveillance camera nearby, you channel a thin stream of the power through to try and sharpen them even further. To let the heat grow and spread along their edges.
Of course, when you reach down to test it gingerly with a fingertip, the vanes of the feathers are only warm as an overheated monitor. Sharp as a butter-knife, hard as sheet of plastic, and its barbs are all splitting under pressure. But god, you’re still so relieved. It’s more than fine; just figuring out your gate was the hard part. You can practice to improve it, now, ‘til each barb could cut straight through steel cuffs.
You let out another, bubbly laugh, gross snot filing your mouth and nose. Thank fucking god. Really, you weren’t sure if you’d ever manage this. Training secretly in every off-hour you could, pretending you just needed time alone to stare out at the stars. Spending the first full, three weeks doing nothing but crumpling up the fear in your chest as you practiced communing with your sister, and held back from any real attempt at transmutation—‘til Rem would see it all as nothing out of the ordinary. Then months and months on top of that, of secretly trying and failing at channeling your own power in the off-angles of the camera, a strange embarrassment at your own failure and the need to hide it threading through the fear.
You sigh softly into the window: into your smudged, pale dot of a reflection. You grab a crumpled tissue from your pocket, and wipe the window down. And you clean yourself up, using your now-clear visage and small, careful motions that wouldn’t attract attention on camera. Then you spin around—hiding your angelic arm behind your back—and double-check the entrance to the chamber’s empty.
You can feel Vash as his own pale, bright spot far down into the winding living-spaces of the ship, and you didn’t hear Rem. No one else walks the halls of this ship, save Tesla’s ghost. But everything about this still makes you paranoid. It’s a little too much like the teenagerish shame you used to feel in your gut, back when you used to sneak out to look at the girl with the sweet face and bob-cut in this chamber.
That was only half a year back, though it seems a lifetime ago.
Now, you make sure to never look at her. You can’t stand the pale blue coat she lies in, despite not needing protection from the cold. You know her parents must have wrapped it around her carefully, to wish her well and safe, through the vast endlessness of space. You can’t stand the slight flush of life on her cheeks, nor how peacefully her eyes are closed. You thought, too often when you were younger, about what sort of hopes and dreams she must have had for the future. About playing with her, as you played with Vash.
It's too different from the way you feel about the rest of them. You can’t stand the thousands of looming faces in the other pods glistening above you—but not for guilt. It’s for fear of all these endless, barbaric eyes opening and fixing their xenophobic, underdeveloped minds upon you and your brother. All of them, all those primitive millions—raising their hopes and fears and scalpels against the two of you.
The girl’s… a remnant of weakness within you. One to cut out, to excise, to ensure you don’t make the same dangerous choice as your brother: sinking into the mire that is an unfounded faith in humanity. There is no evidence that they will ever change their behavior, and ample evidence of them repeating war, famine, enslavement of other species, and even destruction of their own planet, over and over and over. But Rem tricked him, somehow, back when you were catatonic; alone and without you, his mind crumpled, and he was too weak to face reality.
Because you left him. On his own, when you were too weak to wake up and face reality. So now, it’s all your responsibility to face the music.
You reach your mind out to him, still unused to such separation—and almost jump at the realization that he’s heading your way. You hurriedly wipe down the window and check your face for puffiness in the window’s reflection, hope the redness passes for prolonged exposure to cold, as Vash skips and prances down the hallway.
He’s always pretending at cheerfulness, these days. It fills you with a sort if impotent rage, and worry. But you can't say anything. Not yet.
“Naiiiiiii,” he calls out,
And you can feel your throat stick to itself, with the oddness of speaking aloud after such long mental communion, after such a bizarrely transcendent experience. To have to pretend once more you’re just like dull human youths, and no sins have stained the halls of this ship.
Still you manage to smile, for him: “Hey, Vash.”
And something of simple reality, of family and closeness and warmth, returns to you at his closeness. You even feel an instinctual, childish urge rise within you—to release your angelic powers again, just to show them off to him. To splay every thin, iridescent feather out and preen as he gasps in envy—and then to guide him to grow his own feathers, just as pure and right and sharp as your own. More sentimental, redundant foolishness.
Vash smiles weakly, fawning concern thrumming beneath his skin like it always does these days. “Do you wanna go play tag in the low-grav chamber? Orrrrr,” he stretches out the word playfully, like he doesn’t have a care in the world, “we could play Alpha Kart on Rem’s LinkSim?”
Vash wants, so badly, to return to the halcyon days of your youth. Both of you have eidetic memory; you’re sure he, too, remembers the utter warmth of Rem’s arms. The sweet smell of the milk bottle, and the tenderness she greeted your first steps with. The endless days of running and floating through these halls before they were gilded in shadow; of questioning and learning and growing, happy and easy as green shoots rise to sunlight.
Of watching the stars in wonder, after sneaking out of bed to play games under the cover of dark or making up stupid challenges for yourselves; of finally collapsing into one another to sleep, curled up without a care in the world.
He can’t let go of those days any more than he can make himself truly believe that the humans will change, and so he can only bury his doubts and fears deep in his chest, where they eat away at him like a cancer. Make his smile weaker by the day.
You purse your lips, wavering. There is a chance you could free him of all this, if you could just show him his own power, which must twin your own. Show him a new potential for absolute good and safety, one unpoisoned by the humans—and strip away this farce, that makes you both more alone than you’ve ever been in your life, separated by a great invisible wall.
But you’re not certain he wouldn’t bow under the accumulated pressure of fear that’s worn and dulled him down over these past long months, and report back to Rem. Or that same sentimentality she’s poisoned the two of you with, her own faith-based, skewed view of humanity. And this plan has to be perfect.
Besides, you’ve already made a solemn vow to yourself. You decided months ago that it’s better this way; there’s no reason to foist guilt of this, the burden of what has to be done, onto Vash as well. One person can bear it alone. Vash has always been the one to take you by the hand, and lead you both out to the next adventure with a boundless confidence; for once, you can finally be the one to lead him to freedom.
You smile softer, and bring yourself to say, “I’m a little tired today. Can we go nap in the geo-plant chamber?” And it’s true; you are tired, from all the late nights stolen at Rem’s terminal.
The big tree will be a good place for you to lie, quietly, and reach out for Vash’s hand—under the pretense of needing moral support for the same lies and fears that trap him. There, you can watch the dappled leaves sway under the artificial ventilation system’s gentle wind, as you plot out the code that will trick each and every ship in this fleet to crash flaming down into the nearest planet: NML-412.
You shiver slightly in guilt, as you vaguely register Vash nodding in response with forced cheer. But it’s just the foolish, residual horror of Rem’s poison. Your heart settles and stills when you remind yourself: not one human will wake to suffer needlessly. They’ll all simply be erased, and much more kindly than the hundreds of thousands of species they eradicated on their home planet. Ensuring that millions more across the cosmos will never be enslaved, tortured, and eradicated.
Then you grab his hand, and lead him forward: to a fake-sun dappled Eden.
(When you make your own, the sun will be blindingly real. Endless descendants of every flower from the geo plant’s chamber will flood the fields. And you will use your own powers to grow a great, big apple tree in the middle of it, to remind Vash: wherever we’re together, we will always be safe, and happy, and Home.)