In Media Res 2 - Legato/Knives, Legato/Elendira - R
Title: In Medias Res
Pairing: Mostly Gen actually, with implications of Livio+Vash, Meryl+Chronica, OC+Legato, Legato+Knives, and a moment of LegatoxElendira. An underlying pupose of KxLxE, but you might miss it if you don't think like that.
Word Count: 15,747 EPIC LENGTH
Disclaimer: Don't own it. Love Nightow. Buy the manga. Don't sue me.
Warnings: Significantly unbeta'd. Science fiction themes. Clone/Reincarnation Fiction. Possible spoilers for the end of the series. Transexuality. Genderfuck. Homosexuality. Implied sexual content. Gun violence. Mental Illness. Plant Bitches. Cussing. AU with an Original Character. Also, really dumb ending.
Rating: PG-13 maybe R
This is dedicated to so many people. My girlfriend Hildico for being there for me the whole way through. To Glass Bullet and Skuldchan for providing mucho inspiration whether or not they were aware of it. To my boyfriend Kni7es for being an unconsenting idea dartboard. To Pretentioustfu for just rocking it hardcore. And to Wicked Aylah for help with the title.
“Where are you going?” Legato asks from the couch still stuffing pancakes made from box mix into his mouth.
“Work,” Maria replies, already halfway out the door.
“You trust me?” Legato asks, a far more open ended question then say, “You trust me not to steal all your valuables while you’re gone?” or “You trust me to still be here when you return?” Maria is perceptive and she catches on that she is being, in some way, tested. She stops and sets down her keys in the little key card basket by the door.
“Yes, Bluesummers, I trust you,” she says it like an oath. “Can I go to work now? I’m already almost late.”
“Wouldn’t want that,” he says and puts another fork full of pancakes and synthetic syrup in his mouth.
As soon as the door is shut he sets down his plate and focuses his mind. He follows her through the eyes of their snooping neighbor and some of the people on the street. When she gets in her car he switches to motorists beside her as she passes, taking note of the roads she travels. He stays like this until he’s watching her through the eyes of her coworkers: a plump receptionist behind a smooth polished desk, a smudge-eyed accountant in a navy suit that needs pressing, two bland engineers in coveralls.
He finishes the cold pancakes as quickly as he can and goes to put on only his black clothes. No coat, it’s more conspicuous than he can cover for in this world.
He pockets the spare key cards from Maria’s key basket and heads off on foot, not wanting to risk driving a piece of foreign technology.
It’s a long walk, but not too straining. He’s saving up his cover for when he infiltrates Maria’s office building. It’s worth it too, to slide past security and workers as if he belongs.
He had already suspected that Maria’s mysterious ability to escape his mental grasp had something to do with her work, and the huge metal hemi-sphere she works in seems to support that. Maybe she works for the government.
He’s headed up the corridor to her office, he saw it was filled with rows of machinery, computers, and paperwork, when he is blind sided by that feeling. He was so distracted by Maria’s own mystery, such a small pathetic thing to grasp on to, that he had not even noticed it until it’s like a gunshot through his head. And he knows what that’s like, he realizes.
It sounds like screams, angry, frustrated, and heart-wrenchingly sad screams. Sometimes they’re closer to sobs, but then the expletives pick up again and it’s definitely screaming. He follows it and follows it. Whatever swipecards Maria keeps they allow Legato free range through the entire building. Finally he finds himself winding around a lead labyrinth one door, then another, then another in circles. At the center is sunlight and the biggest Plant bulb he’s ever seen, an entire cluster of female Plants all wound tight at the center filament. That cluster is the source of the screams, the source of the feelings, the almost-messages. Somewhere in that tangle of limbs and feathers is the source of everything.
“Hello?” he asks. The screaming, shouting, cursing, all stops.
And then he starts laughing.
“You came!” rings out in his head. “I knew you’d come! Haha! I told him so! I told him so!”
“Told who so, sir?”
“My brother,” the voice says with so much malice that Legato feels angry by proxy. He makes a fist until his fingernails dig into his palms.
“I,” Legato starts to talk and suddenly realizes that he doesn’t know what he was going to say. It feels as if it’s right there at the tip of his tongue, but he’s forgotten the words that might encapsulate this feeling of anger, failure, and satisfaction all in one.
“I don’t remember him,” Legato says finally.
“What?” Knives seems to snap at him. “How can you not remember that man? What kind of an idiot are you?”
Legato stands staring upwards, but he’s quiet and his mind is surprisingly calm. No giddy happiness in the face of what he’s been looking for, no anger at being yelled out, or embarrassment at having his flaws pointed out. There is only bone-deep peace.
“He killed you,” Knives said after a while. “I wasn’t there, I don’t know what happened exactly, but knowing him he probably shot you. He never mentions it. I’m sure he thinks about it though. You’re the only person he ever remembers killing. He probably thinks you’re the only person he’s ever killed.”
Legato feels a tingling sense of pride that starts somewhere around his fingertips, underneath his fingernails and spreads. It’s not a good kind of pride, decidedly sick and unstable. He understands now in part why he so often wants to be dead, why he killed that scientist for waking him. Death, especially death at the hands of this man, Knives, or that unnamed man, is something that brings him peace and a sense of pride in his self.
“You know who I am,” Legato says.
“Of course I do,” Knives replies.
“You’re a piece of uppity human shit.”
Legato blinks, his addled brain letting that process.
“Should I leave?” He might have been able to keep the confusion out of his voice, but he cannot keep it out of his mind.
“No! Please don’t leave!” Knives snaps immediately, desperate, clawing, he can feel that sharp, painful, blinding light feeling pulling his mind in tightly. It’s really not a pleasant feeling, like being held on a choke chain and simultaneously getting the beginnings of a migraine. Yet, he feels relaxed to have it, as if it is one of the missing pieces in his mind.
“I would never,” Legato says softly.
“You were never all that smart, but you could hold up your end of conversations when you were younger, until our speaking became more annoying than amusing,” Knives laughs. “Even your annoying adult self would be better than the anger and the silence here.”
“But you are-aren’t you among your sisters now?” Legato didn’t realize he was bowed until he’s cocking his head in confusion and looking up through his hair with twisted eyebrows.
“As if. I’ve had a life, an education, experiences. My sisters have nothing to share with me, but love for me and hatred for the humans that enslave them. It was boring within the first decade,” Knives explains. He does sound tired and slightly antsy or desperate, but he holds himself better than Legato feels he could have without a body-recent circumstance not withstanding. Of course Knives can maintain a sense of self while incorporeal, Legato reminds himself, of course. But he isn’t really reminding himself, more learning the awe of it all over again. He feels something like sand whipping across his face, hot and tiny and sharp, and when he sees his reflection in the metal below the bulb he realizes he is blushing.
“Stay here and talk with me,” Knives orders. Legato steps forward, head and shoulders still bowed, and touches both his human hands to the glass of the bulb above his head.
Chronica rode horses long before they boarded the SEEDs ship and she was happy to find out she hadn’t lost the skill in space. She passed it on to Meryl, after they’d become friends. At first she hadn’t been able to do it because the damage to Domina’s mind had been irreversible. Chronica had had the choice to allow her to live with the alien tendrils cutting through her brain or let her die a free, but broken young woman. She’d picked the option that turned her stomach less and made sure that no one even knew Knives’ mind remained absorbed in the mass of Plants they’d taken back with them.
She retired in a flare of glory when they returned in a bigger flare of glory to Earth. For a while she just wrote scientific papers about the things they’d learned from Vash and Knives, but one day she stood in front of the smooth screen walls that made the circular room into a huge gallery for her presentation and she simply got up and walked out of the seminar at which she was a guest of honor.
She retired to a tiny penthouse apartment and when Vash asked her to be his escort to his female friend Millie’s funeral it was actually the first time she’d left her apartment building in months. Meryl, upon loosing her friend, acted totally different from Chronica when she lost Domina. Chronica remembers being angry for so long that she was still angry when she sat beside the haggard looking brunette Humanoid in his already wrinkling not quite black suit. Meryl had come up at some point and they held hands through the service. Like most of the Gunsmoke refugees Meryl never really fit back into society, though she did have the consolation prize of aging spectacularly well. Chronica’s blonde hair already had silver in it, there was wear in her forehead and around her eyes and mouth. Meryl, however, looked the same as when they’d met except she was far better dressed.
Afterwards Chronica felt out of place at the small memorial afterwards, but she stayed with Vash as he leaned hard against the edge of the bar. When he finally unclenched his hands there were dents where his fingers had pressed in hard, the varnish broken and the fake wood product showing, since wood was far too valuable to be used for bars. Meryl was still there and when Vash left without giving Chronica any kind of ride home it was Meryl who gave her a ride.
Chronica taught her how to horseback ride a few years later about a week after she’d moved into Meryl’s attic in her house just slightly less far into the country as Vash’s shack. Gunsmoke people were driven to wide open rural spaces the way Chronica was driven to the highest points in structures. It was pathological and both phenomena had been heavily documented.
Meryl was an extremely capable equestrian, though she was a little frightened of horses for their, to her, odd shape and massive size. Still she put on her brave face every time and mounted the sweet pony that kept Chronica’s mare company.
“It’s gonna be a long ride, couldn’t we have just driven?” Meryl asked, passing her slightly just so she could look Chronica in the face when she spoke to her.
“I need the ride to relax before we discuss the matters at hand,” Chronica seethed, riding high in her saddle. Meryl shook her head and rode ahead on her short stepping pony.
The heavy feeling and the sway of her mare’s body did relax her. The metallic feeling of dental work left her mouth telling her she was no longer grinding her teeth at least. Perhaps she should have just taken a sedative, but Meryl would have looked at her disapprovingly over breakfast for days. Possibly weeks. It depends on if she could do something good to make up for seeming like a chemically dependent pill popper.
By the time they saw Vash’s little shanty pop up against all those weeds Chronica even felt like they might have a plan and even some idea of how to lift the poor man’s spirits.
They tied the horses to his porch posts and entered his house with Meryl’s key and no knocking. It simply wasn’t necessary. Vash would have known they were coming for nearly a mile.
A man met them in the living room, he had been asleep on the couch, but now he looked at them with his hair a mess and dry drool on his face.
“Uhm, hi?” he said.
“Livio!” Meryl shouted happily.
“You’d better be wearing clothes,” Chronica sighed. She was getting a tension headache right between her shoulderblades.
“Vash!” Meryl shouted. “Why is Livio here?”
She acted as if it was the most normal thing to see dead men who’d not even made the journey to Earth suddenly appear in your nonhuman friend’s living rooms asleep in their underwear. Chronica watched Meryl begin a mostly one-sided interrogation disguised as conversation and couldn’t help but smile.
Vash peered out of his bedroom door, obviously tired and rumpled.
“Meryl! Chonica!” he sounded more pleased than confused.
“Vash, I think I may have a plan,” Chronica said.
“I have one too,” he admitted as if it hurt him.
“Oh, me too!” Livio chimed in, wrecking Meryl’s train of questioning.
“Is this about that man and that… man?” Meryl asked. “I thought of a plan too. Someone should make tea.”
“I’ve got it,” Vash said heading for the kitchen. Meryl turned back to Livio, but he was already getting up to follow Vash.
“Let me help!” Livio said, shuffling after Vash like an adopted puppy.
Maria always came home and he was sleeping on the couch and she’d cook or order in and he’d wake up to the smell of food and then touch her shoulder lightly until she looked him in the eyes. She would look him in the eyes and then he’d leave, come home with money stuffed in his boots. There kept being more and more money and it kind of worried her when he counted it out and hid it somewhere in her apartment.
She was already worried about the increasingly large billfolds when her supervisor came to discuss the mediations she’d been taking by the Plant bulb.
“Now Maria, I thought we’d been over this,” he’d say in his thin, overworked voice. “These visits are hazardous for your health and if you insist on taking them I have to insist that you go in for medical treatment every other week.” He looked at her eye and she sat up a little straighter in her chair.
She realized immediately what must be going on, realized that at this very moment that man was probably communing with the nonhumans or something. Suddenly a whole part of his character outside of extremely polite roommate/snarkmaster/prostitute came to light. She bite her lip to keep from smiling.
“I’ll make an appointment this afternoon if I can have the rest of the day off,” Maria bargained.
“Of course, Maria, we can’t have our best engineer on the force up and dying of radiation poisoning,” he joked. She didn’t laugh.
The meeting with the clinician was quick, only twenty minutes of an hour long appointment. He just took her blood and questioned her about the eye and they scheduled a brain scan. She stared mostly at the smooth flat computer he tapped on while he spoke to her, never looking him in his dark blue eyes. All in all, she decided, she was probably smarter than he was, but he probably lived in a house, maybe had a wife and kids judging by the ring impression around his ring finger. She lived in her apartment with the recent addition of a man she’d known for just a few weeks and hadn’t even slept with.
That thought accidentally triggered the thought of sleeping with him. She bit the corner of her lip without noticing it, smoothed her hands over the slick examination table.
“Miss?” the clinician was asking suddenly. “Miss, are you alright?”
She felt herself look temporarly stunned, not a good look in someone of her condition.
“I’m fine, just thinking of what I’m going to do when I get home,” she told him.
“Well, have fun,” he said. “You’re free to go.”
She watched TV, something she never got to do because of work, and waited for Legato to return. She played it out in her head she would accuse him quickly, he would deny following her to work and using her pass cards. She would lay the pressure on and finally he would give. He would sit on the couch and explain it and she would stand over him, menacing and yet enraptured by his tale. She would tell him it was all OK, whatever it was this was unclear in her fantasy, and then…
The front door opened quite casually and Legato stepped through. He didn’t even look shocked or guilty, just set her extra key cards in the basket by the door and came into the living room.
“How was your day?” she asked him. “Have fun communing with the city’s power source?”
Then he glared at her which was all wrong.
“New digital renderings have been made of the three missing suspects in the Winchester Labs murders and robberies,” the television offered, helpfully. She granted it a glance and suddenly the man to her left was staring out of the television, blue hair, gold eyes, sultry pout and all.
“Oh my God,” Maria breathed. “That’s you! What the hell?”
“I imagine you would like an explaination now,” Legato stated the obvious.
“I killed the researchers at Winchester labs,” he continued. “And, I suppose, stole myself.”
“You’re the Winchester labs experiment?”
“Well, there are two others: Elendira the Crimsonnail and Livio the Doublefang.”
“Okay, I’ll hack it.”
“We were from Gunsmoke-”
“The other planet? But that was years ago,” Maria tries to hold onto her belief.
“Ah, well, we didn’t survive to make the journey, but our corpses apparently did,” Legato explains.
“So you’re telling me you’re a zombie?” Maria accuses. “And what about the Plants? A zombie with some kind of alien fetish?”
“… Will you be silent?” He asked finally.
“Oh, fine,” she pouted. “But I’m not sure I believe you.”
“I can make you believe me,” he said, but he didn’t have to because when he was finished she was crying and he knew she believed him anyway.
She wiped her face and stared at him.
“What can I do?” she asked.
The next day he rode shotgun after breakfast on the way to the plant. She escorted him as far as she felt she could safely and then headed to her office. There a blonde woman she didn’t know was waiting for her.
“Maria Valdez, I notice you’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time around the Plants lately,” the woman said immediately.
“Who are you?” Maria asked. “And why is it your business?”
“My name is Chronica,” the woman said, smiling and holding out her hand. Maria didn’t shake it. “I’m doing a murder investigation that concerns the Plant bulb.”
“Fine,” Maria said. “I meditate there. I used to do it until I developed cancer and now that I’m dying, Ms. Chronica, I’ve taken it up again.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” the woman said businesslike.
“No you aren’t, you just wanna catch your murder suspect,” Maria snapped. “Get out of my office, please.”
The woman left with her high heels clicking down the hall, towards the Plant bulb.
Maria sat down at her desk and clenched her fists. She breathed deeply and reached out, heard the hum of the Plants that she could never understand and the English chatter of human beings.
“Legato!” she screamed inside her own head. “Get out! Get out now! Do no be seen! Get out!!”
She could only pray that she was heard.
“Yes, Vash, I’m certain. It was just some girl, an eye-patch wearing cancer patient,” Legato heard Chronica on her cellphone as he slipped passed. He’d felt the need to stick around, but conceal himself.
He slipped into Maria’s office.
“That man will notice the same similarity I noticed,” he announced himself by saying.
“We’ll need to get out of here.”
“Okay,” Maria agreed dropping her stuff and snatching her lunch off her desk. They walked casually out.
“You want to know how I did it,” Maria said while they were in the parking lot.
“Yes, but it’s really not any of my business,” he said politely opening her driver’s side door for her.
“Bullshit, you already know. You made the connection.” She tried not to sound as bitter as she felt.
“Well, yes,” Legato admitted as he slipped into the passenger side. “The way I see it, Maria Valdez, life is a long and painful way to die regardless.”
They were a long while driving before she asked him about the plan, said he had to have a plan. He said drive him to the nicest part of the city she could think of and find a hotel, any hotel. So she did and never felt a need to ask for further details.
It didn’t take a lot of effort. Once you know someone for such a long period of time you can’t ever really separate yourself from them. For Legato this was both good and bad, in this case good. He probably could have done what he wanted without Elendira, but whenever he thought of it he felt the same crushing nihilism that he’d felt when she’d died. They were a trio, not a pair, and no matter how much he might curse it, it was the only thing he knew.
They slipped in without any problems, no one even looked at them. The elevator had shiny fake bronze walls and because it was getting to be late fall they were heated slightly. Maria leaned against them.
“It’s been a long day,” Maria complained.
“Indeed.” The elevator doors opened and their thick soled black shoes sunk into the plush hall carpeting. Thirteenth floor, but the first room; Legato would have laughed if he could have understood why that should be familiar to him. He lifted the heavy knocker before he was even at the door, but it took picking it up and banging it against the door before anyone answered.
“What do you--you!” Elendira was caught off guard and quickly slammed the door in his face. Legato picked up the knocker and pounded the hell out of the metal plate behind it.
“Go away!” Elendira’s shout was only barely muffled by the thick hotel room door. He only pounded harder. He wasn’t going to resort to breaking into her room, but he would if he had to.
“Fine,” she opened the door saying. “What do you want?”
With a moment of calm Legato took the sight of her in. He couldn’t remember that they’d been children together, or much of anything really except the things he felt like he could remember from what Knives had told him. Still he distinctly remembered a flat chested, albeit thin and effeminate, male body smashing its fists through the glass of the isolation tube after he woke up to blood and the astringent smell of preservation chemicals. Of course Elendira had always been a girl, but the breasts were new.
“What?” she asked, glaring at him. “Who’s the fag hag?”
“I’m Maria.”
“Good for you,” Elendira said, dismissing her with a pleasant smile. “Since when could you stand to put it in a woman?”
Elendira leaned against the door jamb and crossed her arms underneath her chest. Her short silk robe was pulled back by the position of her arms and finally it dawned on her that Legato was staring at her in shock. It wasn’t her fault, he didn’t have very many facial expressions.
“For the love of,” she said. “Come in.”
“I’m here about--” he began.
“I know,” Elendira cut him off. “Have a seat.”
“Are those real?” he asked her when she sat down on the plush bed and Maria and Legato sat stiff backed on the equally plush love seat with claw feet. The room was red and more red and a thick white carpet. He couldn’t think of something that suited her more, as she slipped her feet into white fluffy slippers that looked like small Persian cats. Her robe was white silk with a pattern of red flowers and koi and butterflies. She looked nice really, feminine even without make up. Her hair was long and curling up at the ends, He suddenly wondered if she would even be willing to help him.
“They were worth every penny,” she said with a wicked little grin. “And about what you want to ask. The answer’s no.”
“I really think you’ll want to reconsider that,” Legato said coolly, folding his hands over his knees.
“I really don’t think so,” Elendira said, leaning forward a bit. The breasts stunned and confused him for a moment.
“Look, maybe we should discuss this somewhere more private,” Elendira said, standing suddenly and smoothing out her robe. She began to walk away and Legato stood and followed her.
“Isn’t this a bathroom?” he said.
“It’s the best we can do,” Elendira said with a laugh.
“It’s a very nice bathroom. Just what I would expect from you, Elendira.” They shut the door.
Maria looked around for a moment and then stood. The white carpeting swallowed the sound of her foot steps she put her ear against the bathroom door and listened.
"Is this really necessary?" she heard Legato ask.
"Yes, yes it is." Behind closed doors Elendira was not nearly as pleasant or flirty sounding.
"She can still hear us." Maria flushed. Of course now that Legato and her’s thoughts had touched it was probably easy to tell-or he just knew her that well already.
"I don't care about your goddamn floozy." Maria’s original general feeling about the woman as being kind of an evil bitch was suddenly right on mark.
"Don't insult her like that." That would have been sweeter if Maria felt it came out of any kind of affection.
"Don't insult her?! Don't insult me!"
"It isn't what your fevered imagination tells you it is, Elendira, she's simply useful to me." Well, at least, Maria thought, they both knew where they stood.
"Ha! Useful? Well that damn near proves it, you little creep." Alright, that she didn’t understand.
"How so?"
"I know about you and that word. You've got history."
"We do?"
"Of course. I just don't understand why you had to pick now to give heterosexual monogamy a chance."
"I am hardly heterosexual, Elendira, and only as 'monogamous' as I ever was."
"Yeah, right."
"That's why I wanted to talk to you--"
"Shut up, just shut up. You talk to goddamn much."
"What are you--I'm really not all right with this."
"So the floozy's okay, but I'm not? What were you trying to deny earlier? I'm sorry, I seem to have lost my memory."
"Elendira, are you intoxicated?"
"No."
"Then wh--"
"Will you just shut up." Something clattered to the floor, it sounded like metal.
"As you wish."
"You don't mind?"
"I don't mind." Something else hit the ground, something soft. They were moving inside, Legato’s foot steps were heavy and Elendira’s were the slaps of bare feet on tile.
"So you are experimenting with heterosexuality." The wet sucking noise that followed that made Maria’s mind take a swan dive into the gutter.
"No."
"Then you do mind?"
"No."
"Even this?"
"Even this."
"Mmm... really?"
"... really."
"Oh God." She should probably stop listening in.
"Why do you want this?"
"Don't stop for the love of God!"
"... You've still--?"
"Haha, yeah, I hope you don't mind."
"Not at all, not at all."
"Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. I missed you."
"You missed this."
"What the fuck is with you and all this stopping?" Maria could help but laugh so she stifled it with her hand over her mouth and her teeth biting the inside of her cheek.
"Whatever."
"I missed you. I really missed you. No, no, don't stop. Shut up. Oh God. Oh--fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck! Don't stop. Don't you dare fucking stop! I will rip your fucking head--oh God! Yes, yes, yes, just like that. I want--ah--I want you to fuck me. No, not like--yes like that, just like that."
"You missed me?"
"God, yes. Fuck, yes."
"Or you missed this?"
"Yes, but God I fucking missed you."
"You missed me?"
"God, fuck, don't stop. Yes! Yes! I did!"
"Ah--I missed... I missed you too." The sounds were wet and soft and far more raw then when her next door neighbors had sex in the room next to hers when Maria couldn’t sleep at night. Voyuerism was suddenly starting to make sense to her.
"Good."
"Ah! I think--I think--"
"No! Don't stop! Don't say it! I'm not ready! Not like this!"
"Whatever--ah--you want."
"It's just--oh God--tacky like this."
"But you'll never--ah--be--ah--like this--"
"I'll try. I'll--oh fuck--I'll fucking try." Maria’s heart twinged a little in her chest. She felt bad for dismissing Elendira as a superficial bitch, felt bad for judging poorly anyone that Legato would choose to associate with, would choose to seek out. There was a history here she couldn’t understand maybe even if Legato had warned her and explained it. She could hear the moving again picking things up, the water ran in the faucet. Maria slunk back to her seat on the loveseat and felt a little like a bad person.
Elendira stepped out with more color in her lips and cheeks. Her robe was even more loosely tied than before and Legato’s morbid belt buckle was crooked.
“So, girl,” Elendira started. “What’s the plan?”
“I don’t know,” she confessed, confused.
“You must know,” she said. “Legato never makes his own plans.”
Across the street and two blocks down Chronica was letting Vash and Livio into her old high rise apartment.
“Why do you keep this if you don’t live here?” Livio asked her.
“I believe that a woman in this world needs to have investments if she’s smart,” she replied cryptically.
“But you live with Meryl, why have an apartment?” he continued.
“Look, kid, it’s coming in hand at the moment. Don’t question it.” She glared at him and brandished her key card like he didn’t have a foot and about a hundred pounds of muscle on her. He’d been a scrawning thing in all the pictures, but now he was tanned and strong and big and his hair was growing out long around his eyes, covering about half of the mark on his face.
“Why are we doing this again?” Vash asked. They both looked at him, he’d been quiet the whole ride. Chronica nodded and shut the apartment door.
“I’d like for you to all stay here for a while until I can figure out what’s going on in that power plant. All of us know that’s where Knives is situated and no doubt that man is correct in thinking that if the-rouge elements are going to go anywhere it will be straight to him. I am extremely suspicious of one of the engineers there. She’s reckless, has delusions of connecting with the Plants, and her health would give her no need for feelings of self-preservation. She’s exactly the kind of person people like them choose to exploit.”
“I won’t kill her,” Vash said out of nowhere.
“Of course!” Chronica agreed. “I would never ask that of you.”
Vash didn’t reply.
They’d been over Maria’s maps a thousand times. By the time three pairs of dress shoes were clicking their way down the fake-tile halls of the power plant it was already old and boring. The thrill of doing something illegal and surreptitious was gone, there was only, in Legato’s mind, the growing anxiety of meeting Knives. Again, his mind reminded him, meeting him again.
But was it really again if he couldn’t remember ever meeting the man before? Like a hole in his life, he could only remember a light and something wonderful and important and sometimes fragile. But there was no person there… Now there would be, of course, now there would be.
The actually Plant bulb was at the center of the building, lead and concrete and steel separating them from it. Maria used her security clearance. No one even questioned the professional-looking man and woman who followed her. She wasn’t all that rare a sight anyways and the one-eyed girl was often seen as an escort instead of a dignified technician. This time she didn’t mind.
She turned and smiled at Legato, he looked oddly unnerved, not that much like the focused man she’d seen hunched over blue prints and vid screens for the past month or so. Nor did he have the prophet-like look in his eyes that he wore when he followed her home in a daze. He looked a little wild-eyed and nervous. He was almost smiling, at the corners of his mouth at least.
Elendira looked shaken, as well, as shaken as Maria had ever seen her. It was something in the grim cut of her mouth, the way her eyes were wider than usual and they flitted from surface to surface.
Finally they got past the offices, the hallways by technician’s labs. Finally, finally they reached the bulb. The lead was obvious now as she entered one doorway and walked the circle around to the other one. The machine she’d picked up from her tech locker was heavy and slick in her hands. She set it down and gave a moment of silence to the intimidating bulb with its cluster of Plants hanging instead of a tungsten filament. The hum of the energy was almost deafening at first, but only because it was strange. Once your mind adjusted to it, it was almost like white noise. Maria thought she could feel the radiation strike her healthy eye, but knew it was just psychosomatic.
“Ready?” she asked Legato. He tore his eyes away from the bulb for a moment and looked at her to nod.
“Why am I here, again?” Elendira asked, not bothering to look away from the bulb.
“Look out,” Maria told her, watching Legato move towards the mantinence stairway that crawled up the bulb like a centipede.
“Oh yeah,” Elendira murmured, but she didn’t move toward the doorway.
Legato found it surprisingly easy to break in. He used it powers to confuse the locks and his physical strength was all that was needed to open the massive hatch at the top. The ground looked frightfully far away.
The ether around the Plants was something familiar. Yes, he remembered this smell, associated it with pain and blood for some reason, but… it was familiar in a good way nonetheless.
“We need to hurry,” Maria said into his head. He looked down and she had the white machine placed against her face. He took a deep breath, a mix of air and ether, and dove in.
Just at the moment he is most convinced he’s just going to crash into the thick glass bottom and break his neck, the Plant, one of the Plants snatches him up in her arms. It jerks him all wrong especially when she pulls him in. She presses him close and the energy output of the cluster heats his skin and makes his hair and eyes feel dry. He can feel their bodies pressing and conforming to his, but he doesn’t feel anything but women.
He looks into the eyes of the one who caught him. They’re blue. She smiles at him.
“Are there-are there any males?” he asks her. She shakes her head. A sudden complication. He expected maybe, where they found the right mind, they might find the right body. He touches her face and her mind shuffles out of this body like a candle flame jumping to another nearby lamp.
Maria!! He shouts at her and she appears, naked but sexless in his mind.
What? She demands from him.
This one.
Alright.
Maria disappears out of his mind and he wishes she could have taken him with her. Not because at this point he wants to die, but because he… he would have liked to see. Oh well. It’s too late now. The Plant’s eyes open, though they’re slightly unfocused.
“-You!” it shouts before suddenly they’re both falling away from the cluster. Legato twists, and cringes when his back lands hard on the glass. His skull cracks and the wind is knocked out of his battered ribs. The Plant looks even more confused, slightly concussed even.
“Legato,” it says plainly, voice not in tune with body. Then she vomits, hard and retching all over Legato’s suit jacket. It’s really quite alright.
Can you get out? Maria asks into his head.
Yes. It’ll be the easiest thing he’s done all year.
Except of course not physically, it’s a matter of climbing the emergency ladder that’s slick with… something with the Plant in his arms. It takes equal parts mental and physical exertion.
“We’ve got company,” Elendira announces just a moment after they’ve breached the hatch and Knives is taking his own footing in the new body, pushing Legato away when he’s still nearly falling over.
“Who is it?” Knives demands.
“Who do you think?” Elendira snaps, when she realizes her mistake, well, she was thrown off a bit by the body is all.
“-Vash and Livio as expected, Knives-sama,” she repairs.
“The welcoming party, how nice,” he murmurs before leaping off the five story tall bulb. Legato can feel his lifespan shorten.
“Knives-sama!!” the women scream.
Of course, he lands in a cat like crouch, no worse for the wear. Legato jumps after him, but no one seems to worry about his safety.
Knives turns to Maria, just cleaning the machine that enhances her gifts. Her bad eye is exposed, the tumor bulging between her eyelids. She turns her face so he, or she, won’t see it.
“Thank you,” Knives says simply. Behind him, Legato strips off his jacket and button up shirt. Underneath is the black body suit he’s gotten used to. Elendira takes her cues and sheds her out suit jacket, and pulls out the little gun her new cleavage was hiding.
“We know what you’re doing!” Vash shouts before he even appears.
“You won’t succeed!” Livio echoes. They pop around the corner of the second doorway and Livio is made a liar.
“Vash-kun, so nice to see you again.”
“Oh, that’s just not right,” Livio offers.
“You’re not-that’s impossible,” Vash chokes.
Elendira spots their poorly concealed weapons and unlocks the safety on hers.
“No,” Knives commands. “Don’t.” He waves her down.
Knives crosses his arms over a rather ample chest.
“How is it, brother, that these idiots could do in a months time what you claimed so long was ‘impossible’?” he asks. He uncrosses his arms, tucking them behind his back and leaning until his long hair is brushing into Vash’s mouth and his new breasts are almost, but not quite touching him. Vash’s facial muscles visibly twitch.
“Hmmmmm?”
“Could you please stop touching me with those,” Vash leaned far, far back.
“What?”
“Those.”
Knives takes a moment to look down at himself.
“Oh.”
Vash laughs nervously.
“So brother, what are you going to do now?” Knives asks sweetly.
“Kill you,” Vash admits. It’s been on his mind. The same way three guns are now pointed at his skull. Livio is thrown by the third person. He’s only got two hands. But the girl doesn’t look like much, Razlo assures him, so he aims for the blonde and one for the bluenette.
“Hold your fire,” Knives barks. Maria looks to Legato and when he withdraws so does she. They all three of them know they could take Vash out without guns anways. Anyone with half a brain in the room knows that not a one of them really needs a gun. It was hard as hell to get them anyways, put the air of danger and nostalgia made is worth the cost.
“If you’d wanted to kill me, you’d have done it in these past twenty years,” Knives sneers. “I’m no longer interested in you. If you were smart you’d get out of my servants sight. I won’t stop them if they wanted to avenge themselves.”
Legato looks at him suddenly. Elendira gawks. They both smile.
“You’d let them kill me?!” Vash balks.
“Oh, they’re not that stupid,” Knives explains it away. “Or that kind.”
“I don’t trust you,” Vash says. “And if I even suspect for a second-“
“You’d think after all these years I’d want to hear your voice, Vash, but it’s irritating me,” Knives cuts him off and cuts him down.
“What are you planning?!” Vash shouts in desperation. By now Legato is rapt on his master, careful of Vash’s energy levels. Maria is idly listening to the sorrow of the female Plants at their personal loss. Elendira is very deviously eyeing Livio and stroking the trigger of her newly purchased gun.
“I’m going to do what I always said I’d do, only this time I fully intend to succeed. I’ve made my mistakes and learned from them. I claimed to be a defender of my species and the Earth forces claimed to be different, but we all lied, Vash. The way you’re lying now,” Knives was so angry it was impinging on Legato and Maria’s emotions not to mention the dangerous spike in radiation levels.
“You may have the power to kill me, Vash, but you don’t have the balls.”
Livio cracked up. Knives looked at him idly and then back at his obviously emotional and conflicted, but blissfully silent brother.
“Alright, now you can shoot them.”
Elendira started laughing and shot at Livio’s head. He ducked and fled. She cussed and shot after him. Vash shot her gun and blew the barrel off. She glared at him and quickly snatched Maria’s gun out of her hands. Before Vash could make another shot Legato was behind him, arm around his waist, the barrel of his gun pressed against his opponent’s stomach.
“I always knew I’d win,” he whispered, but didn’t fire. He let go of Vash with a shove just as Elendira was about to leave the inner sanctum with her screams about the motherfucking undead pieces of shit. Legato held her in place and let the two good guys make their dramatic and cowardly escape.
“Now what?” Maria asked.
“I’d like a glass of wine,” Knives said. “Hell, a whole bottle.”
x-post'd like your mom
Pairing: Mostly Gen actually, with implications of Livio+Vash, Meryl+Chronica, OC+Legato, Legato+Knives, and a moment of LegatoxElendira. An underlying pupose of KxLxE, but you might miss it if you don't think like that.
Word Count: 15,747 EPIC LENGTH
Disclaimer: Don't own it. Love Nightow. Buy the manga. Don't sue me.
Warnings: Significantly unbeta'd. Science fiction themes. Clone/Reincarnation Fiction. Possible spoilers for the end of the series. Transexuality. Genderfuck. Homosexuality. Implied sexual content. Gun violence. Mental Illness. Plant Bitches. Cussing. AU with an Original Character. Also, really dumb ending.
Rating: PG-13 maybe R
This is dedicated to so many people. My girlfriend Hildico for being there for me the whole way through. To Glass Bullet and Skuldchan for providing mucho inspiration whether or not they were aware of it. To my boyfriend Kni7es for being an unconsenting idea dartboard. To Pretentioustfu for just rocking it hardcore. And to Wicked Aylah for help with the title.
“Where are you going?” Legato asks from the couch still stuffing pancakes made from box mix into his mouth.
“Work,” Maria replies, already halfway out the door.
“You trust me?” Legato asks, a far more open ended question then say, “You trust me not to steal all your valuables while you’re gone?” or “You trust me to still be here when you return?” Maria is perceptive and she catches on that she is being, in some way, tested. She stops and sets down her keys in the little key card basket by the door.
“Yes, Bluesummers, I trust you,” she says it like an oath. “Can I go to work now? I’m already almost late.”
“Wouldn’t want that,” he says and puts another fork full of pancakes and synthetic syrup in his mouth.
As soon as the door is shut he sets down his plate and focuses his mind. He follows her through the eyes of their snooping neighbor and some of the people on the street. When she gets in her car he switches to motorists beside her as she passes, taking note of the roads she travels. He stays like this until he’s watching her through the eyes of her coworkers: a plump receptionist behind a smooth polished desk, a smudge-eyed accountant in a navy suit that needs pressing, two bland engineers in coveralls.
He finishes the cold pancakes as quickly as he can and goes to put on only his black clothes. No coat, it’s more conspicuous than he can cover for in this world.
He pockets the spare key cards from Maria’s key basket and heads off on foot, not wanting to risk driving a piece of foreign technology.
It’s a long walk, but not too straining. He’s saving up his cover for when he infiltrates Maria’s office building. It’s worth it too, to slide past security and workers as if he belongs.
He had already suspected that Maria’s mysterious ability to escape his mental grasp had something to do with her work, and the huge metal hemi-sphere she works in seems to support that. Maybe she works for the government.
He’s headed up the corridor to her office, he saw it was filled with rows of machinery, computers, and paperwork, when he is blind sided by that feeling. He was so distracted by Maria’s own mystery, such a small pathetic thing to grasp on to, that he had not even noticed it until it’s like a gunshot through his head. And he knows what that’s like, he realizes.
It sounds like screams, angry, frustrated, and heart-wrenchingly sad screams. Sometimes they’re closer to sobs, but then the expletives pick up again and it’s definitely screaming. He follows it and follows it. Whatever swipecards Maria keeps they allow Legato free range through the entire building. Finally he finds himself winding around a lead labyrinth one door, then another, then another in circles. At the center is sunlight and the biggest Plant bulb he’s ever seen, an entire cluster of female Plants all wound tight at the center filament. That cluster is the source of the screams, the source of the feelings, the almost-messages. Somewhere in that tangle of limbs and feathers is the source of everything.
“Hello?” he asks. The screaming, shouting, cursing, all stops.
And then he starts laughing.
“You came!” rings out in his head. “I knew you’d come! Haha! I told him so! I told him so!”
“Told who so, sir?”
“My brother,” the voice says with so much malice that Legato feels angry by proxy. He makes a fist until his fingernails dig into his palms.
“I,” Legato starts to talk and suddenly realizes that he doesn’t know what he was going to say. It feels as if it’s right there at the tip of his tongue, but he’s forgotten the words that might encapsulate this feeling of anger, failure, and satisfaction all in one.
“I don’t remember him,” Legato says finally.
“What?” Knives seems to snap at him. “How can you not remember that man? What kind of an idiot are you?”
Legato stands staring upwards, but he’s quiet and his mind is surprisingly calm. No giddy happiness in the face of what he’s been looking for, no anger at being yelled out, or embarrassment at having his flaws pointed out. There is only bone-deep peace.
“He killed you,” Knives said after a while. “I wasn’t there, I don’t know what happened exactly, but knowing him he probably shot you. He never mentions it. I’m sure he thinks about it though. You’re the only person he ever remembers killing. He probably thinks you’re the only person he’s ever killed.”
Legato feels a tingling sense of pride that starts somewhere around his fingertips, underneath his fingernails and spreads. It’s not a good kind of pride, decidedly sick and unstable. He understands now in part why he so often wants to be dead, why he killed that scientist for waking him. Death, especially death at the hands of this man, Knives, or that unnamed man, is something that brings him peace and a sense of pride in his self.
“You know who I am,” Legato says.
“Of course I do,” Knives replies.
“You’re a piece of uppity human shit.”
Legato blinks, his addled brain letting that process.
“Should I leave?” He might have been able to keep the confusion out of his voice, but he cannot keep it out of his mind.
“No! Please don’t leave!” Knives snaps immediately, desperate, clawing, he can feel that sharp, painful, blinding light feeling pulling his mind in tightly. It’s really not a pleasant feeling, like being held on a choke chain and simultaneously getting the beginnings of a migraine. Yet, he feels relaxed to have it, as if it is one of the missing pieces in his mind.
“I would never,” Legato says softly.
“You were never all that smart, but you could hold up your end of conversations when you were younger, until our speaking became more annoying than amusing,” Knives laughs. “Even your annoying adult self would be better than the anger and the silence here.”
“But you are-aren’t you among your sisters now?” Legato didn’t realize he was bowed until he’s cocking his head in confusion and looking up through his hair with twisted eyebrows.
“As if. I’ve had a life, an education, experiences. My sisters have nothing to share with me, but love for me and hatred for the humans that enslave them. It was boring within the first decade,” Knives explains. He does sound tired and slightly antsy or desperate, but he holds himself better than Legato feels he could have without a body-recent circumstance not withstanding. Of course Knives can maintain a sense of self while incorporeal, Legato reminds himself, of course. But he isn’t really reminding himself, more learning the awe of it all over again. He feels something like sand whipping across his face, hot and tiny and sharp, and when he sees his reflection in the metal below the bulb he realizes he is blushing.
“Stay here and talk with me,” Knives orders. Legato steps forward, head and shoulders still bowed, and touches both his human hands to the glass of the bulb above his head.
Chronica rode horses long before they boarded the SEEDs ship and she was happy to find out she hadn’t lost the skill in space. She passed it on to Meryl, after they’d become friends. At first she hadn’t been able to do it because the damage to Domina’s mind had been irreversible. Chronica had had the choice to allow her to live with the alien tendrils cutting through her brain or let her die a free, but broken young woman. She’d picked the option that turned her stomach less and made sure that no one even knew Knives’ mind remained absorbed in the mass of Plants they’d taken back with them.
She retired in a flare of glory when they returned in a bigger flare of glory to Earth. For a while she just wrote scientific papers about the things they’d learned from Vash and Knives, but one day she stood in front of the smooth screen walls that made the circular room into a huge gallery for her presentation and she simply got up and walked out of the seminar at which she was a guest of honor.
She retired to a tiny penthouse apartment and when Vash asked her to be his escort to his female friend Millie’s funeral it was actually the first time she’d left her apartment building in months. Meryl, upon loosing her friend, acted totally different from Chronica when she lost Domina. Chronica remembers being angry for so long that she was still angry when she sat beside the haggard looking brunette Humanoid in his already wrinkling not quite black suit. Meryl had come up at some point and they held hands through the service. Like most of the Gunsmoke refugees Meryl never really fit back into society, though she did have the consolation prize of aging spectacularly well. Chronica’s blonde hair already had silver in it, there was wear in her forehead and around her eyes and mouth. Meryl, however, looked the same as when they’d met except she was far better dressed.
Afterwards Chronica felt out of place at the small memorial afterwards, but she stayed with Vash as he leaned hard against the edge of the bar. When he finally unclenched his hands there were dents where his fingers had pressed in hard, the varnish broken and the fake wood product showing, since wood was far too valuable to be used for bars. Meryl was still there and when Vash left without giving Chronica any kind of ride home it was Meryl who gave her a ride.
Chronica taught her how to horseback ride a few years later about a week after she’d moved into Meryl’s attic in her house just slightly less far into the country as Vash’s shack. Gunsmoke people were driven to wide open rural spaces the way Chronica was driven to the highest points in structures. It was pathological and both phenomena had been heavily documented.
Meryl was an extremely capable equestrian, though she was a little frightened of horses for their, to her, odd shape and massive size. Still she put on her brave face every time and mounted the sweet pony that kept Chronica’s mare company.
“It’s gonna be a long ride, couldn’t we have just driven?” Meryl asked, passing her slightly just so she could look Chronica in the face when she spoke to her.
“I need the ride to relax before we discuss the matters at hand,” Chronica seethed, riding high in her saddle. Meryl shook her head and rode ahead on her short stepping pony.
The heavy feeling and the sway of her mare’s body did relax her. The metallic feeling of dental work left her mouth telling her she was no longer grinding her teeth at least. Perhaps she should have just taken a sedative, but Meryl would have looked at her disapprovingly over breakfast for days. Possibly weeks. It depends on if she could do something good to make up for seeming like a chemically dependent pill popper.
By the time they saw Vash’s little shanty pop up against all those weeds Chronica even felt like they might have a plan and even some idea of how to lift the poor man’s spirits.
They tied the horses to his porch posts and entered his house with Meryl’s key and no knocking. It simply wasn’t necessary. Vash would have known they were coming for nearly a mile.
A man met them in the living room, he had been asleep on the couch, but now he looked at them with his hair a mess and dry drool on his face.
“Uhm, hi?” he said.
“Livio!” Meryl shouted happily.
“You’d better be wearing clothes,” Chronica sighed. She was getting a tension headache right between her shoulderblades.
“Vash!” Meryl shouted. “Why is Livio here?”
She acted as if it was the most normal thing to see dead men who’d not even made the journey to Earth suddenly appear in your nonhuman friend’s living rooms asleep in their underwear. Chronica watched Meryl begin a mostly one-sided interrogation disguised as conversation and couldn’t help but smile.
Vash peered out of his bedroom door, obviously tired and rumpled.
“Meryl! Chonica!” he sounded more pleased than confused.
“Vash, I think I may have a plan,” Chronica said.
“I have one too,” he admitted as if it hurt him.
“Oh, me too!” Livio chimed in, wrecking Meryl’s train of questioning.
“Is this about that man and that… man?” Meryl asked. “I thought of a plan too. Someone should make tea.”
“I’ve got it,” Vash said heading for the kitchen. Meryl turned back to Livio, but he was already getting up to follow Vash.
“Let me help!” Livio said, shuffling after Vash like an adopted puppy.
Maria always came home and he was sleeping on the couch and she’d cook or order in and he’d wake up to the smell of food and then touch her shoulder lightly until she looked him in the eyes. She would look him in the eyes and then he’d leave, come home with money stuffed in his boots. There kept being more and more money and it kind of worried her when he counted it out and hid it somewhere in her apartment.
She was already worried about the increasingly large billfolds when her supervisor came to discuss the mediations she’d been taking by the Plant bulb.
“Now Maria, I thought we’d been over this,” he’d say in his thin, overworked voice. “These visits are hazardous for your health and if you insist on taking them I have to insist that you go in for medical treatment every other week.” He looked at her eye and she sat up a little straighter in her chair.
She realized immediately what must be going on, realized that at this very moment that man was probably communing with the nonhumans or something. Suddenly a whole part of his character outside of extremely polite roommate/snarkmaster/prostitute came to light. She bite her lip to keep from smiling.
“I’ll make an appointment this afternoon if I can have the rest of the day off,” Maria bargained.
“Of course, Maria, we can’t have our best engineer on the force up and dying of radiation poisoning,” he joked. She didn’t laugh.
The meeting with the clinician was quick, only twenty minutes of an hour long appointment. He just took her blood and questioned her about the eye and they scheduled a brain scan. She stared mostly at the smooth flat computer he tapped on while he spoke to her, never looking him in his dark blue eyes. All in all, she decided, she was probably smarter than he was, but he probably lived in a house, maybe had a wife and kids judging by the ring impression around his ring finger. She lived in her apartment with the recent addition of a man she’d known for just a few weeks and hadn’t even slept with.
That thought accidentally triggered the thought of sleeping with him. She bit the corner of her lip without noticing it, smoothed her hands over the slick examination table.
“Miss?” the clinician was asking suddenly. “Miss, are you alright?”
She felt herself look temporarly stunned, not a good look in someone of her condition.
“I’m fine, just thinking of what I’m going to do when I get home,” she told him.
“Well, have fun,” he said. “You’re free to go.”
She watched TV, something she never got to do because of work, and waited for Legato to return. She played it out in her head she would accuse him quickly, he would deny following her to work and using her pass cards. She would lay the pressure on and finally he would give. He would sit on the couch and explain it and she would stand over him, menacing and yet enraptured by his tale. She would tell him it was all OK, whatever it was this was unclear in her fantasy, and then…
The front door opened quite casually and Legato stepped through. He didn’t even look shocked or guilty, just set her extra key cards in the basket by the door and came into the living room.
“How was your day?” she asked him. “Have fun communing with the city’s power source?”
Then he glared at her which was all wrong.
“New digital renderings have been made of the three missing suspects in the Winchester Labs murders and robberies,” the television offered, helpfully. She granted it a glance and suddenly the man to her left was staring out of the television, blue hair, gold eyes, sultry pout and all.
“Oh my God,” Maria breathed. “That’s you! What the hell?”
“I imagine you would like an explaination now,” Legato stated the obvious.
“I killed the researchers at Winchester labs,” he continued. “And, I suppose, stole myself.”
“You’re the Winchester labs experiment?”
“Well, there are two others: Elendira the Crimsonnail and Livio the Doublefang.”
“Okay, I’ll hack it.”
“We were from Gunsmoke-”
“The other planet? But that was years ago,” Maria tries to hold onto her belief.
“Ah, well, we didn’t survive to make the journey, but our corpses apparently did,” Legato explains.
“So you’re telling me you’re a zombie?” Maria accuses. “And what about the Plants? A zombie with some kind of alien fetish?”
“… Will you be silent?” He asked finally.
“Oh, fine,” she pouted. “But I’m not sure I believe you.”
“I can make you believe me,” he said, but he didn’t have to because when he was finished she was crying and he knew she believed him anyway.
She wiped her face and stared at him.
“What can I do?” she asked.
The next day he rode shotgun after breakfast on the way to the plant. She escorted him as far as she felt she could safely and then headed to her office. There a blonde woman she didn’t know was waiting for her.
“Maria Valdez, I notice you’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time around the Plants lately,” the woman said immediately.
“Who are you?” Maria asked. “And why is it your business?”
“My name is Chronica,” the woman said, smiling and holding out her hand. Maria didn’t shake it. “I’m doing a murder investigation that concerns the Plant bulb.”
“Fine,” Maria said. “I meditate there. I used to do it until I developed cancer and now that I’m dying, Ms. Chronica, I’ve taken it up again.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” the woman said businesslike.
“No you aren’t, you just wanna catch your murder suspect,” Maria snapped. “Get out of my office, please.”
The woman left with her high heels clicking down the hall, towards the Plant bulb.
Maria sat down at her desk and clenched her fists. She breathed deeply and reached out, heard the hum of the Plants that she could never understand and the English chatter of human beings.
“Legato!” she screamed inside her own head. “Get out! Get out now! Do no be seen! Get out!!”
She could only pray that she was heard.
“Yes, Vash, I’m certain. It was just some girl, an eye-patch wearing cancer patient,” Legato heard Chronica on her cellphone as he slipped passed. He’d felt the need to stick around, but conceal himself.
He slipped into Maria’s office.
“That man will notice the same similarity I noticed,” he announced himself by saying.
“We’ll need to get out of here.”
“Okay,” Maria agreed dropping her stuff and snatching her lunch off her desk. They walked casually out.
“You want to know how I did it,” Maria said while they were in the parking lot.
“Yes, but it’s really not any of my business,” he said politely opening her driver’s side door for her.
“Bullshit, you already know. You made the connection.” She tried not to sound as bitter as she felt.
“Well, yes,” Legato admitted as he slipped into the passenger side. “The way I see it, Maria Valdez, life is a long and painful way to die regardless.”
They were a long while driving before she asked him about the plan, said he had to have a plan. He said drive him to the nicest part of the city she could think of and find a hotel, any hotel. So she did and never felt a need to ask for further details.
It didn’t take a lot of effort. Once you know someone for such a long period of time you can’t ever really separate yourself from them. For Legato this was both good and bad, in this case good. He probably could have done what he wanted without Elendira, but whenever he thought of it he felt the same crushing nihilism that he’d felt when she’d died. They were a trio, not a pair, and no matter how much he might curse it, it was the only thing he knew.
They slipped in without any problems, no one even looked at them. The elevator had shiny fake bronze walls and because it was getting to be late fall they were heated slightly. Maria leaned against them.
“It’s been a long day,” Maria complained.
“Indeed.” The elevator doors opened and their thick soled black shoes sunk into the plush hall carpeting. Thirteenth floor, but the first room; Legato would have laughed if he could have understood why that should be familiar to him. He lifted the heavy knocker before he was even at the door, but it took picking it up and banging it against the door before anyone answered.
“What do you--you!” Elendira was caught off guard and quickly slammed the door in his face. Legato picked up the knocker and pounded the hell out of the metal plate behind it.
“Go away!” Elendira’s shout was only barely muffled by the thick hotel room door. He only pounded harder. He wasn’t going to resort to breaking into her room, but he would if he had to.
“Fine,” she opened the door saying. “What do you want?”
With a moment of calm Legato took the sight of her in. He couldn’t remember that they’d been children together, or much of anything really except the things he felt like he could remember from what Knives had told him. Still he distinctly remembered a flat chested, albeit thin and effeminate, male body smashing its fists through the glass of the isolation tube after he woke up to blood and the astringent smell of preservation chemicals. Of course Elendira had always been a girl, but the breasts were new.
“What?” she asked, glaring at him. “Who’s the fag hag?”
“I’m Maria.”
“Good for you,” Elendira said, dismissing her with a pleasant smile. “Since when could you stand to put it in a woman?”
Elendira leaned against the door jamb and crossed her arms underneath her chest. Her short silk robe was pulled back by the position of her arms and finally it dawned on her that Legato was staring at her in shock. It wasn’t her fault, he didn’t have very many facial expressions.
“For the love of,” she said. “Come in.”
“I’m here about--” he began.
“I know,” Elendira cut him off. “Have a seat.”
“Are those real?” he asked her when she sat down on the plush bed and Maria and Legato sat stiff backed on the equally plush love seat with claw feet. The room was red and more red and a thick white carpet. He couldn’t think of something that suited her more, as she slipped her feet into white fluffy slippers that looked like small Persian cats. Her robe was white silk with a pattern of red flowers and koi and butterflies. She looked nice really, feminine even without make up. Her hair was long and curling up at the ends, He suddenly wondered if she would even be willing to help him.
“They were worth every penny,” she said with a wicked little grin. “And about what you want to ask. The answer’s no.”
“I really think you’ll want to reconsider that,” Legato said coolly, folding his hands over his knees.
“I really don’t think so,” Elendira said, leaning forward a bit. The breasts stunned and confused him for a moment.
“Look, maybe we should discuss this somewhere more private,” Elendira said, standing suddenly and smoothing out her robe. She began to walk away and Legato stood and followed her.
“Isn’t this a bathroom?” he said.
“It’s the best we can do,” Elendira said with a laugh.
“It’s a very nice bathroom. Just what I would expect from you, Elendira.” They shut the door.
Maria looked around for a moment and then stood. The white carpeting swallowed the sound of her foot steps she put her ear against the bathroom door and listened.
"Is this really necessary?" she heard Legato ask.
"Yes, yes it is." Behind closed doors Elendira was not nearly as pleasant or flirty sounding.
"She can still hear us." Maria flushed. Of course now that Legato and her’s thoughts had touched it was probably easy to tell-or he just knew her that well already.
"I don't care about your goddamn floozy." Maria’s original general feeling about the woman as being kind of an evil bitch was suddenly right on mark.
"Don't insult her like that." That would have been sweeter if Maria felt it came out of any kind of affection.
"Don't insult her?! Don't insult me!"
"It isn't what your fevered imagination tells you it is, Elendira, she's simply useful to me." Well, at least, Maria thought, they both knew where they stood.
"Ha! Useful? Well that damn near proves it, you little creep." Alright, that she didn’t understand.
"How so?"
"I know about you and that word. You've got history."
"We do?"
"Of course. I just don't understand why you had to pick now to give heterosexual monogamy a chance."
"I am hardly heterosexual, Elendira, and only as 'monogamous' as I ever was."
"Yeah, right."
"That's why I wanted to talk to you--"
"Shut up, just shut up. You talk to goddamn much."
"What are you--I'm really not all right with this."
"So the floozy's okay, but I'm not? What were you trying to deny earlier? I'm sorry, I seem to have lost my memory."
"Elendira, are you intoxicated?"
"No."
"Then wh--"
"Will you just shut up." Something clattered to the floor, it sounded like metal.
"As you wish."
"You don't mind?"
"I don't mind." Something else hit the ground, something soft. They were moving inside, Legato’s foot steps were heavy and Elendira’s were the slaps of bare feet on tile.
"So you are experimenting with heterosexuality." The wet sucking noise that followed that made Maria’s mind take a swan dive into the gutter.
"No."
"Then you do mind?"
"No."
"Even this?"
"Even this."
"Mmm... really?"
"... really."
"Oh God." She should probably stop listening in.
"Why do you want this?"
"Don't stop for the love of God!"
"... You've still--?"
"Haha, yeah, I hope you don't mind."
"Not at all, not at all."
"Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. I missed you."
"You missed this."
"What the fuck is with you and all this stopping?" Maria could help but laugh so she stifled it with her hand over her mouth and her teeth biting the inside of her cheek.
"Whatever."
"I missed you. I really missed you. No, no, don't stop. Shut up. Oh God. Oh--fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck! Don't stop. Don't you dare fucking stop! I will rip your fucking head--oh God! Yes, yes, yes, just like that. I want--ah--I want you to fuck me. No, not like--yes like that, just like that."
"You missed me?"
"God, yes. Fuck, yes."
"Or you missed this?"
"Yes, but God I fucking missed you."
"You missed me?"
"God, fuck, don't stop. Yes! Yes! I did!"
"Ah--I missed... I missed you too." The sounds were wet and soft and far more raw then when her next door neighbors had sex in the room next to hers when Maria couldn’t sleep at night. Voyuerism was suddenly starting to make sense to her.
"Good."
"Ah! I think--I think--"
"No! Don't stop! Don't say it! I'm not ready! Not like this!"
"Whatever--ah--you want."
"It's just--oh God--tacky like this."
"But you'll never--ah--be--ah--like this--"
"I'll try. I'll--oh fuck--I'll fucking try." Maria’s heart twinged a little in her chest. She felt bad for dismissing Elendira as a superficial bitch, felt bad for judging poorly anyone that Legato would choose to associate with, would choose to seek out. There was a history here she couldn’t understand maybe even if Legato had warned her and explained it. She could hear the moving again picking things up, the water ran in the faucet. Maria slunk back to her seat on the loveseat and felt a little like a bad person.
Elendira stepped out with more color in her lips and cheeks. Her robe was even more loosely tied than before and Legato’s morbid belt buckle was crooked.
“So, girl,” Elendira started. “What’s the plan?”
“I don’t know,” she confessed, confused.
“You must know,” she said. “Legato never makes his own plans.”
Across the street and two blocks down Chronica was letting Vash and Livio into her old high rise apartment.
“Why do you keep this if you don’t live here?” Livio asked her.
“I believe that a woman in this world needs to have investments if she’s smart,” she replied cryptically.
“But you live with Meryl, why have an apartment?” he continued.
“Look, kid, it’s coming in hand at the moment. Don’t question it.” She glared at him and brandished her key card like he didn’t have a foot and about a hundred pounds of muscle on her. He’d been a scrawning thing in all the pictures, but now he was tanned and strong and big and his hair was growing out long around his eyes, covering about half of the mark on his face.
“Why are we doing this again?” Vash asked. They both looked at him, he’d been quiet the whole ride. Chronica nodded and shut the apartment door.
“I’d like for you to all stay here for a while until I can figure out what’s going on in that power plant. All of us know that’s where Knives is situated and no doubt that man is correct in thinking that if the-rouge elements are going to go anywhere it will be straight to him. I am extremely suspicious of one of the engineers there. She’s reckless, has delusions of connecting with the Plants, and her health would give her no need for feelings of self-preservation. She’s exactly the kind of person people like them choose to exploit.”
“I won’t kill her,” Vash said out of nowhere.
“Of course!” Chronica agreed. “I would never ask that of you.”
Vash didn’t reply.
They’d been over Maria’s maps a thousand times. By the time three pairs of dress shoes were clicking their way down the fake-tile halls of the power plant it was already old and boring. The thrill of doing something illegal and surreptitious was gone, there was only, in Legato’s mind, the growing anxiety of meeting Knives. Again, his mind reminded him, meeting him again.
But was it really again if he couldn’t remember ever meeting the man before? Like a hole in his life, he could only remember a light and something wonderful and important and sometimes fragile. But there was no person there… Now there would be, of course, now there would be.
The actually Plant bulb was at the center of the building, lead and concrete and steel separating them from it. Maria used her security clearance. No one even questioned the professional-looking man and woman who followed her. She wasn’t all that rare a sight anyways and the one-eyed girl was often seen as an escort instead of a dignified technician. This time she didn’t mind.
She turned and smiled at Legato, he looked oddly unnerved, not that much like the focused man she’d seen hunched over blue prints and vid screens for the past month or so. Nor did he have the prophet-like look in his eyes that he wore when he followed her home in a daze. He looked a little wild-eyed and nervous. He was almost smiling, at the corners of his mouth at least.
Elendira looked shaken, as well, as shaken as Maria had ever seen her. It was something in the grim cut of her mouth, the way her eyes were wider than usual and they flitted from surface to surface.
Finally they got past the offices, the hallways by technician’s labs. Finally, finally they reached the bulb. The lead was obvious now as she entered one doorway and walked the circle around to the other one. The machine she’d picked up from her tech locker was heavy and slick in her hands. She set it down and gave a moment of silence to the intimidating bulb with its cluster of Plants hanging instead of a tungsten filament. The hum of the energy was almost deafening at first, but only because it was strange. Once your mind adjusted to it, it was almost like white noise. Maria thought she could feel the radiation strike her healthy eye, but knew it was just psychosomatic.
“Ready?” she asked Legato. He tore his eyes away from the bulb for a moment and looked at her to nod.
“Why am I here, again?” Elendira asked, not bothering to look away from the bulb.
“Look out,” Maria told her, watching Legato move towards the mantinence stairway that crawled up the bulb like a centipede.
“Oh yeah,” Elendira murmured, but she didn’t move toward the doorway.
Legato found it surprisingly easy to break in. He used it powers to confuse the locks and his physical strength was all that was needed to open the massive hatch at the top. The ground looked frightfully far away.
The ether around the Plants was something familiar. Yes, he remembered this smell, associated it with pain and blood for some reason, but… it was familiar in a good way nonetheless.
“We need to hurry,” Maria said into his head. He looked down and she had the white machine placed against her face. He took a deep breath, a mix of air and ether, and dove in.
Just at the moment he is most convinced he’s just going to crash into the thick glass bottom and break his neck, the Plant, one of the Plants snatches him up in her arms. It jerks him all wrong especially when she pulls him in. She presses him close and the energy output of the cluster heats his skin and makes his hair and eyes feel dry. He can feel their bodies pressing and conforming to his, but he doesn’t feel anything but women.
He looks into the eyes of the one who caught him. They’re blue. She smiles at him.
“Are there-are there any males?” he asks her. She shakes her head. A sudden complication. He expected maybe, where they found the right mind, they might find the right body. He touches her face and her mind shuffles out of this body like a candle flame jumping to another nearby lamp.
Maria!! He shouts at her and she appears, naked but sexless in his mind.
What? She demands from him.
This one.
Alright.
Maria disappears out of his mind and he wishes she could have taken him with her. Not because at this point he wants to die, but because he… he would have liked to see. Oh well. It’s too late now. The Plant’s eyes open, though they’re slightly unfocused.
“-You!” it shouts before suddenly they’re both falling away from the cluster. Legato twists, and cringes when his back lands hard on the glass. His skull cracks and the wind is knocked out of his battered ribs. The Plant looks even more confused, slightly concussed even.
“Legato,” it says plainly, voice not in tune with body. Then she vomits, hard and retching all over Legato’s suit jacket. It’s really quite alright.
Can you get out? Maria asks into his head.
Yes. It’ll be the easiest thing he’s done all year.
Except of course not physically, it’s a matter of climbing the emergency ladder that’s slick with… something with the Plant in his arms. It takes equal parts mental and physical exertion.
“We’ve got company,” Elendira announces just a moment after they’ve breached the hatch and Knives is taking his own footing in the new body, pushing Legato away when he’s still nearly falling over.
“Who is it?” Knives demands.
“Who do you think?” Elendira snaps, when she realizes her mistake, well, she was thrown off a bit by the body is all.
“-Vash and Livio as expected, Knives-sama,” she repairs.
“The welcoming party, how nice,” he murmurs before leaping off the five story tall bulb. Legato can feel his lifespan shorten.
“Knives-sama!!” the women scream.
Of course, he lands in a cat like crouch, no worse for the wear. Legato jumps after him, but no one seems to worry about his safety.
Knives turns to Maria, just cleaning the machine that enhances her gifts. Her bad eye is exposed, the tumor bulging between her eyelids. She turns her face so he, or she, won’t see it.
“Thank you,” Knives says simply. Behind him, Legato strips off his jacket and button up shirt. Underneath is the black body suit he’s gotten used to. Elendira takes her cues and sheds her out suit jacket, and pulls out the little gun her new cleavage was hiding.
“We know what you’re doing!” Vash shouts before he even appears.
“You won’t succeed!” Livio echoes. They pop around the corner of the second doorway and Livio is made a liar.
“Vash-kun, so nice to see you again.”
“Oh, that’s just not right,” Livio offers.
“You’re not-that’s impossible,” Vash chokes.
Elendira spots their poorly concealed weapons and unlocks the safety on hers.
“No,” Knives commands. “Don’t.” He waves her down.
Knives crosses his arms over a rather ample chest.
“How is it, brother, that these idiots could do in a months time what you claimed so long was ‘impossible’?” he asks. He uncrosses his arms, tucking them behind his back and leaning until his long hair is brushing into Vash’s mouth and his new breasts are almost, but not quite touching him. Vash’s facial muscles visibly twitch.
“Hmmmmm?”
“Could you please stop touching me with those,” Vash leaned far, far back.
“What?”
“Those.”
Knives takes a moment to look down at himself.
“Oh.”
Vash laughs nervously.
“So brother, what are you going to do now?” Knives asks sweetly.
“Kill you,” Vash admits. It’s been on his mind. The same way three guns are now pointed at his skull. Livio is thrown by the third person. He’s only got two hands. But the girl doesn’t look like much, Razlo assures him, so he aims for the blonde and one for the bluenette.
“Hold your fire,” Knives barks. Maria looks to Legato and when he withdraws so does she. They all three of them know they could take Vash out without guns anways. Anyone with half a brain in the room knows that not a one of them really needs a gun. It was hard as hell to get them anyways, put the air of danger and nostalgia made is worth the cost.
“If you’d wanted to kill me, you’d have done it in these past twenty years,” Knives sneers. “I’m no longer interested in you. If you were smart you’d get out of my servants sight. I won’t stop them if they wanted to avenge themselves.”
Legato looks at him suddenly. Elendira gawks. They both smile.
“You’d let them kill me?!” Vash balks.
“Oh, they’re not that stupid,” Knives explains it away. “Or that kind.”
“I don’t trust you,” Vash says. “And if I even suspect for a second-“
“You’d think after all these years I’d want to hear your voice, Vash, but it’s irritating me,” Knives cuts him off and cuts him down.
“What are you planning?!” Vash shouts in desperation. By now Legato is rapt on his master, careful of Vash’s energy levels. Maria is idly listening to the sorrow of the female Plants at their personal loss. Elendira is very deviously eyeing Livio and stroking the trigger of her newly purchased gun.
“I’m going to do what I always said I’d do, only this time I fully intend to succeed. I’ve made my mistakes and learned from them. I claimed to be a defender of my species and the Earth forces claimed to be different, but we all lied, Vash. The way you’re lying now,” Knives was so angry it was impinging on Legato and Maria’s emotions not to mention the dangerous spike in radiation levels.
“You may have the power to kill me, Vash, but you don’t have the balls.”
Livio cracked up. Knives looked at him idly and then back at his obviously emotional and conflicted, but blissfully silent brother.
“Alright, now you can shoot them.”
Elendira started laughing and shot at Livio’s head. He ducked and fled. She cussed and shot after him. Vash shot her gun and blew the barrel off. She glared at him and quickly snatched Maria’s gun out of her hands. Before Vash could make another shot Legato was behind him, arm around his waist, the barrel of his gun pressed against his opponent’s stomach.
“I always knew I’d win,” he whispered, but didn’t fire. He let go of Vash with a shove just as Elendira was about to leave the inner sanctum with her screams about the motherfucking undead pieces of shit. Legato held her in place and let the two good guys make their dramatic and cowardly escape.
“Now what?” Maria asked.
“I’d like a glass of wine,” Knives said. “Hell, a whole bottle.”
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