Chapter Text
A raindrop of blood. A flood of tears upon a grave. Feathers of memory, freely given. The trinity awakens a seed in rotten flesh and metamorphosis blooms under the earth. When the grave is void of nutrients, gnarled roots claw their way beyond, seeking the fuel to maintain life. Failing, starving, a threshold is reached. A gate opens, flooding raw energy hot like blood to a hundred mouths. Core stabilized and hunger sated, the power overflow traces roots to their tips and jumps beyond the host.
The roots spread further each day, itching like a wound at the edge of his senses. As the root network expands, so does his awareness. His mind disperses through a million organic strings twining underground. The roots patch some essential missing piece of him, thoughts clear and body gloriously alive for the first time since he'd woken below ground. But the radius expands and his mind scatters, fragments, threatens to shatter. His brain in its bone case cannot expand, only remap itself as data flows in from millions of fresh connections.
Something has to give. He doesn’t know how to stop the damn roots from growing. His control slips, manifesting dark and hostile features in this landscape of his own making. A broken mirror cuts light into jagged pieces: is he doomed to drag others through his shards?
His sister’s soft magenta glow lit the facility’s inner chamber. With so little energy left, Vash had learned to catch things early: if a plant went fully red, he no longer had it in him to bring them back. A red plant had already slipped beyond his reach. When he was a younger, unspent thing, he could have followed; these days, it was difficult enough to catch them when they had just one foot beyond the doorway.
He pressed his face against the tank where his sister drifted. Her eyes tracked him as he approached, but there was no intent behind the gaze: she was distant, fading, nearly lost. Vash’s eyes and skin lit turquoise with edges of soft purple, chromatophores pulsing in the universal language of plants. The oscillation of light and color were the simplest connection he could make with a near-lost sister through the glass. The dim-bright-dim signaled hello, drawing the attention of the other plant’s eyes and pattern-recognizing neurons. Her awareness of this body, so delicate even in full bloom, was choked and broken like a freshly bent stem. He needed to call her back into herself.
If he couldn’t fix her connection to her body, straighten the stem and restore the flow, this facet of her self would die. Though not as complete as human death, Vash found his sisters regarded the process as most basic life forms consider death: it was a fearful thing to avoid as long as possible. With the withering of this body behind glass, a plant’s self as she knew it would be annihilated—so plants saw it as dying in all the ways that mattered.
The magenta plant’s long fingers unfurled, pressing against the glass. Vash pressed his own hands to the exterior of the tank to match. Now that he had this much of her attention, he could try the most important step. He reached out with his mind, calling out a query to connect. Words were neither sent nor rendered in translation, but through electrical and chemical and vibrational impulse, they could each speak and be heard.
hello sister please respond
He repeated himself, calling out again and again into the void.
hello sister hello I am here please meet me here
And when the gentle greeting did not work—as it often didn’t at this stage—he sang to her a question-shape, densely filled with embodied sensations and human emotions. The lure of humanoid experiences would draw them if they weren’t too far gone, luring them like cats to a can opening.
warm-sand-underfoot throat-humming-lullaby sweet-pastry-soft-crunch?
Now he could feel her waking up, siphoning back into her vessel like a cloud stoppering itself into a bottle. He kept signaling, calling her closer.
familiar-voice-calling kissy-noise hand-patting-blankets?
He tried his greeting again.
hello sister please respond
This time he got an answer. It was murky and full of staccato start-stops just a little off rhythm, but it boiled down to a simple:
hello yes here
He rumble-chirped delight in seven frequencies. They basked a moment in togetherness before he pressed onward.
may I tether you may I hold you here now?
yes
With a million little hooks and loops, they latched onto one another. Forming the initial tether was an active process, but once he’d built the bond he could relax a bit. It was as if they’d tied their hands together: she could not fall out of his reach so easily. They could not stay tethered forever—he’d have to leave eventually—but the connection would stabilize her while he figured out how to help.
are you hurt are you in pain?
yes
what hurts?
making too much
are you making too much material?
yes
Although overproduction wasn’t always the issue, it was the most common. Sometimes the humans didn’t know they were pushing plants too far. Sometimes a plant’s maximum capacity dropped, either from age or illness or adverse conditions. Without a skilled engineer keeping watch, a plant could go critical or die in a tragically short span of time.
Sometimes the humans did know. Sometimes they had no choice. Vash was glad that scenario had mostly vanished with the departure of the Earth fleet. Ignorance and accident were so much easier to work with than desperation.
would revising maximum output help?
yes
what level?
20 percent reduction
maximum output reduced 20 percent
gratitude
can I help you any other way?
yes
what do you need?
share more sense-memories?
Vash considered what to share. While his sisters liked all flavor of memories, he did not like to give them anything outright painful. Their favorites seemed to be the complex, specific sense-memories anchored to a time and place. One favorite was ‘eating cheap stew on an empty stomach at an inn after days of rough travel’. They adored the contrast of desperate hunger versus filling, comforting warmth. They also delighted in the concept of a tired traveler reaching shelter: it was entirely alien to them, something to turn over in their minds like a new flavor on the tongue. Another favorite was watching Milly’s reaction to the surprise party her friends threw for her 25th birthday…and her 26th, and her 27th, and her 28th. Vash liked those memories, too: he never got tired of reliving that punchline, like maybe this year we won’t manage to surprise her? But they always did.
Sometimes he’d connect up the moments of one event like puzzle pieces slotting into a fuller, richer picture.
fresh-clean-warm-socks, blanket-wrapped, watching-sandstorm-through-window, wind-howling-outside, waking-up-to-clear-skies, looking-at-stars
more?
making-it-to-new-town, kindly-innkeeper-key-routine, shoulder-check-playful-race-for-nicer-bed, someone-cleaning-sand-out-of-my-prosthetic, someone-here-to-say-goodnight-to
more
motorcycle-startup-rumble-purr, arms-holding-tight-leaning, another-sunrise-together, going-somewhere-but-hopeful-to-someday-go-anywhere. trying-failing-to-remember-last-sunrise-together, sorrow-of-a-hole-shaped-to-fit-someone-specific
He hadn’t meant to include the last pieces. Embarrassed, he tried to pull back, but his sister curled her tendrils tighter in a plea for him to stay. He didn’t like it when his sisters saw and felt his pain. Humans rarely saw beyond his mask, but his sisters reached deeper, feeling as he felt and seeing as he saw.
He had been slipping more lately, letting painful memories through when he had only meant to give his best. Why were so many of his greatest joys pressed close to things that hurt?
He always slept after visiting his sisters. Sometimes the sleep was hardly a nap, just a few minutes to close his eyes and pull his thoughts back into his body. Sometimes he slept for days. It all depended on the labor of the visit. A quick hello might warrant a nap; something like engine-braking a sand-steamer might take a few days.
No matter how long he slept, he always fell into nightmares. His usual nightmares were vivid, but these were something worse, oversaturated in color and clarity and phantom pain. From these nightmares, he couldn’t wake up.
Between nightmares and the embarrassing memory-drops, Vash now dreaded connecting with his sisters. He could push his way through it: if his sister needed help, he would never turn away. But if they didn’t need his help? If it could be avoided? He would avoid it.
The guilt gnawed at him. Wasn’t self-sacrifice his thing? Was anything more fundamental to his life’s philosophy than putting others before himself?
The problem was, he’d become kind of terrified. Physical pain didn’t scare him, but these nightmares? They hurt, they hurt so much, and like a child once burned, his brain screamed at him: painful, dangerous, do not touch.
It wasn’t his sisters’ fault. Once upon a time, the dreams he’d had in the after-sleep were light and soft. To dream in the after-sleep was a spiritual experience, an extension of his connection with plantkind. He saw only beauty, felt only love and peace.
The changes had been in him. He did not like to think about it, those changes and why they’d happened. His sins could not be undone. His ghosts would never be buried, just as his losses would never be unburied.
He’s dead. I buried him.
Vash scrubbed his skin raw in the meager washtub that was Hopeland Orphanage’s communal bath. The children were gone, Melanie was gone: the only ones left were him and Livio, so there was no need to conserve water anymore. He wouldn’t squander it, but he couldn’t stop at one tub, not when there was still so much on his skin, in his hair. There was grave sand matted into his eyelashes and stale blood in his mouth. Scrubbing stained the water, peppering it with little clots of viscera, old blood, and dirt. He ruined three fresh tubs before giving up. He would never be clean of this.
Turning away from the washtub, he looked into the bathroom mirror. Millions Knives looked back, hair half-dark with fatigue. They locked eyes and Vash could not look away. The lips in the reflection moved, but Vash heard nothing. He didn’t need to: he already knew what Nai, what Millions Knives, would have to say. Every time Vash looked in this mirror, Nai repeated the same tired lines.
Will you own your mistakes, brother? It did not have to be this way. You could have saved me. You could have saved our sisters.
Vash shook his head. He didn’t need to speak, didn’t need to respond to this mirror-ghost of his dead brother. At least he knew that right here, right now; the lines of this dream were familiar enough to recognize the dreamscape. He was still working on the part of lucid dreaming where he might actually change a dream, but at least he knew it for what it was.
The bathroom tableau crumbled instantly. He’d jinxed himself and he should have known better. The mirror, the walls, the filthy washtub: all crumbled like quicksand, casting him down into darkness at the bottom of a crude hole. The walls immediately around and beneath him were solid clay, but loose soil and sand was still falling from up above.
He knew where he was, but something was off. Sand and soil rained upon him as he lay on his back in the bottom of the hole. This wasn’t right. It was like seeing his own memory mirrored from the wrong side. Who was filling the hole?
A silhouette loomed in the moonlight. Vash couldn’t see anything beyond the outline, but he didn’t need to. The familiar shape hefted a shovelful of dirt, casting it down into the pit.
“Trade ya.”
The smoky voice hit heavy, playfully wry and devastating.
Vash didn’t struggle. He didn’t speak, didn’t move, as the soil slowly covered him. It blocked his ears, then his eyes, then his nose.
When he woke, he was still choking. Ghost soil filled his lungs; he half-wished it was real.