Chapter Text
Get somewhere isolated. Talk things through. It was time to bravely traverse the intellectual, the realm of reason, the much lauded practices of debate and philosophy. Vash wasn’t sure what sort of plan that was, exactly. Wasn’t sure how he had meant to carry it out, what sort of sudden complete personality change he had expected from himself. From either of them. He drove his cranky little jeep straight from what had turned into yet another ground zero to a ghost town a hundred iles west of Little Jersey. Too out of the way to blow up the settlement, but close enough to human life that Vash didn’t feel on the verge of panic. Not too much, anyway. Not all the way.
Not much philosophy got discussed that night.
Knives' breath hitched, his teeth shining with fury in the low light as Vash re-wrapped the bandages around his ribs.
“Enough already,” he snarled, dripping sweat, his arms too torn to shove his brother away, “You’re making it worse.”
“You are the world’s biggest hypocrite,” Vash neatly retorted, jerking the straps of linen too tight on purpose. “Give me a reason not to torture you, a little.”
Knives whimpered, but had no comeback. By his own logic, there was nothing he could say. He had shed his minions, lost his high stakes gamble, and been carried off like a hunting trophy by the man he was in love with, his brother whom he mistakenly thought might do him the favor of killing him when he won. The agony of his wounds was only surpassed by the burning humiliation of being reduced to this, a lump of inert flesh in his absurdly caring hands. Hands that were on him for the first time in over eighty years. In this tiny bedroom designed for a human child, he could smell Vash’s exertion, his leather, his breath. He was real. He was here. The bandages re-tied, Vash’s flesh and blood palm was now resting quietly on Knives’ bare belly. Through the red pain smearing most of his senses, the outline of that hand shone white and clean.
“I don’t have any…” Vash started, and then sounded uncertain of his words. Knives breathed heavily as he looked up at him, and noticed his brother looked as hazy as he felt. Was he seducing him, somehow, from this pathetic position? Is this what turned him on these days? Vash tried words again. “I don’t have any real medicine. For the pain. It stopped working on me, years ago, so I stopped wasting my time with it.”
“I didn’t ask,” Knives replied, but his entire mind was on that hand. Solid. Warm. Touching him with as much of its surface as it could.
“You didn’t, no.” Vash agreed. His hand trailed lower, slid into the suit still clinging to Knives’ skin, sticky with sweat and dust and blood. Knives squirmed with a pained sound, uncertain. His limbs were on fire.
“Vash…”
He got, in response, a low and condescending whistle. Vash’s fingers were warm and firm against his cunt, spreading him open, rubbing him exactly right, but this was exactly the wrong time, exactly the wrong place.
“You’re really wet, Knives. Did you even realize you were this wet? It’s not just me, is it? It’s gotta be the bullets, too.”
“It’s you,” Knives snarled, gasping when Vash’s fingers were suddenly entering him - this wasn’t fair, he had no recourse, he couldn’t move, could not register pleasure over all of the agony. “It could only be you. Don’t…be disgusting.”
“It’s not disgusting for me,” Vash hummed, as he felt Knives clench over his fingers, watched his hips shudder, in spite of himself, watched the way his chest expanded inside of the mostly intact suit, his slightly too-tight bandages. Knives was bleeding into the dingy mattress from five openings and gushing warm heat into his palm from a sixth. It was the opposite of disgusting. “After all these years, I finally get to indulge you in a bit of masochism. It’s about time, honestly.”
“No,” Knives fervently insisted, but what he was insisting was getting less clear. Vash was inside of him. Vash was firmly massaging his yet-untouched cunt, newly grown after his twenty five years of slumber, and he was in no state to enjoy it. Vash was tenderly, lovingly, relentlessly seeking him out, his arm tireless as he rubbed and finger-fucked him through the pain, pulled him against it, under it, until a peek of pure-white pleasure started to surface in its waves, shuddered through him like a warning. Knives’ voice was venom. “You spite me.”
“Absolutely,” Vash replied, with a certainty Knives was shocked by. “You deserve it. You deserve much worse than this.”
Knives couldn’t answer that time. He wasn’t ready. None of this was right. He wasn’t supposed to be pinioned like this, blistering and ripped to shreds, to receive Vash’s love precisely and only when he could not possibly return it. His body was shaking, something was coming, was already here, upon him, rushing up on him from his finger-stuffed cunt up through his belly, down into his bleeding thighs, shaking him in his core as he bore down on his brother’s hand, as he came with a sensation that was more wretched than bliss, shudders and heavy huffing that only seemed to make the rigor of his wounds all the louder.
“Hurts,” he whimpered, without intending to, tears flowing freely. Vash was even closer to him now, his scent was heavier. His tongue was soft on each of his cheeks. “Hurts…it hurts…”
“Yeah,” Vash replied. His hand was still buried in him as deep as it would go, his voice was rough. Knives didn’t know that voice. He thought he knew every sound his brother could make. He didn’t like that there was a new one, now. When his body stopped twitching, when his nerves settled back down into regular agony rather than pure blistering torture, he squirmed again, tried to part his legs a bit more, to invite his brother’s body down onto his, into his. Vash wasn’t taking the hint.
“Think you can sleep a bit, Knives?”
Probably. He could barely see. Sleep would be the only escape as far as he could tell. Vash’s fingers were still tight inside of him.
“You should at least fuck me, first.”
“Just did.”
“Vash.”
“Put it out of your head, Knives.” Vash drew his fingers out of him, slowly, and zipped his suit up with that lewdly dripping hand. His fingers were dark with blood. He had not been gentle.
“Stop. You have no right to…” Knives gasped, and then his grip on reality…broke, his consciousness gave up its tenuous hold, the stress of holding on too much to bear. Something like breath was unfurling out of him, rapidly, into the evening, something he'd been holding in that he couldn't keep any longer. “Wrong…it’s all wrong.”
“If it puts you to sleep and gives me a moment’s peace, it’s all good.”
And it did just that. Vash held his brother until he was limp, until he was wheezing quietly. The smell of his blood in the stifling hot room was sweeter than a human’s would have been. Cleaner, he was almost ashamed to admit. All it took was the snick of his belt and an unzipped fly to get his dick and his hand into contact, sticky with his brother’s slick, with his pain. He held Knives with his robotic arm as he slept, and took earnest care of himself with the other. He licked a splatter of blood off of the nape of his neck, slowly, and was rewarded with a sleepy moan. Poor thing acted like every time getting shot was the first time. Like a virgin. Which he was, wasn’t he. The blood on his hand…Vash’s cock shuddered in his fist at the thought. When he closed his eyes he saw bullet holes. He let himself see them. They tightened around him in time with his fingers, and he muffled himself against his brother’s bleeding shoulder as he came.
Night was easy, after that. Night was one long sigh of relief.
In the morning, the land outside was grassy and lush. Birds were pecking at seeds that had apparated overnight. Tiny saplings grew only yars from the house. A few shy blossoms, bright yellow, tiny and round, showed their faces to the sun.
“Knives, look what you did!”
“I didn’t. I couldn’t have. I only do things like this on purpose. You can’t milk geoplants out of me.”
“Clearly I can, and should!”
Vash had propped his brother up on a wooden chair facing the new green earth. He was eating a loaf of bread voraciously. He kept offering Knives bites of the stuff, and he kept turning his head away in disdain. Before that morning, Knives would never have entertained the thought of growing a front lawn in his sleep. But Knives remembered that release, after he came, after he went boneless. He suspected that Vash’s presumption was uncomfortably close to the truth.
“We should stay somewhere closer to humans tonight. They’ll be able to spread the flora after we leave. We could terraform half the planet if we play our cards right.”
“It was a fluke,” Knives ground his teeth. “It’s not going to happen again, especially while I'm crippled.”
Vash’s answering smile glinted with mischief that bordered on malice.
There was a barn just far enough outside of the next town, a small and nameless place that seemed to pride itself on isolation. Vash went into town to buy water and fresh meat, mingle with the locals. Knives was able to move his toes, twitch his fingers a little, laid up and still sticky in a pile of hay, covered by a dusty sheet. He spent the entire day like that, staring at the rafters and breathing in the scent of animals that no longer lived here, that had moved on or been slaughtered before this coop’s abandonment. Vash returned after night had fallen, and asked him to eat something called a salmon sandwich. He pouted when Knives refused, but gathered himself.
“Breakfast tomorrow, then. For sure.”
Then he began stripping off all of his clothing.
It was dizzying, somehow, watching Vash slowly get naked as he remained forcibly inert and clothed. Vash’s outfit had so many little straps and snaps, so many bits and pieces to detach until he was finally unclasped from his leather halter top. It practically needed to be unplugged from his ribs. The skeleton of leather and metal that went over his jeans was not much easier a process. Patches of his ruined flesh appeared only inch by inch, one scarred moment at a time.
He’s going to touch me again, Knives thought, surprised by how light-headed the idea made him. Frightened, even. He’s going to do whatever he likes. How is this who my brother has become?
Sure enough, as soon as he was finally nude, Vash slid himself into the excuse for a bed behind him and turned his injured brother onto his side despite his pained protest. He nuzzled against the shaved down fuzz at the back of Knives’ neck, and reveled in the resulting shudder.
“Excited, Knives?” he asked, as he unzipped his brother’s suit, but once again refused to fully strip him. He slid both his organic and mechanical hands into the fabric this time, exploring both the pure and wounded sides of his chest. “I bet you’re even wetter tonight than you were yesterday.”
“This isn’t…” Knives had to pause, to gasp. The pain wasn’t less, the shuddering from his wounds wasn’t diminished. But Vash’s fingertips sparked fire of their own. His anticipation of Vash’s stroking was corrupting his nervous system, which was rapidly rewiring itself according to Vash’s programming instead of his. “Since when are you like this. This isn’t how we are.”
“Surprise!” Vash laughed, his mirth as genuine as it was baffling. “I re-wrote the script. Haven’t you caught on by now?”
His organic hand was dipping low into Knives’ suit, headed not for his sex but for his thigh, his right thigh, which bore Vash’s fresh bullet wound as well as the old mark, from all those years ago. Even in this new body the scar had returned, puckered and twinkling, a foreboding hint of what Vash could do to him. Knives had no doubt the new wounds would scar, too. It was the mechanical hand that sought out his cunt tonight, spread him open with cool, unnervingly smooth fingers. Knives gave a fresh heave of frustration.
“Don’t…don’t touch me with that thing. Switch. Use your real hand, Vash.”
“You should know better than to tell me what you don’t want, Knives,” Vash hummed, as he pushed two, then three of the bionic fingers into his wet heat. Knives stifled a groan, then spasmed. He wanted it to be different. He wanted it to feel different, having this robotic thing shoved into him rather than the warm, familiar fingers that were his own flesh and blood. But his body betrayed him with eagerness, with frantic pulses. It’s all Vash, his nerves seemed to say, as Vash expertly found and then began rubbing against the sweet spot in his upper curve, causing him to turn the little he could in Vash’s hold, to squirm despite his agonizing immobility.
“I want red flowers this time,” Vash sighed, not sounding entirely lucid. Had he gotten drunk while he was in town? It didn’t seem likely. But Knives felt it, too, along with the pain. They were both drunk. Drunk on each other. “Pretty please? Red. I want to see real geraniums.”
“You…” Knives was panting, holding out, holding onto the fraction of control he had over his body, the way it shook and buckled under Vash’s caress, the way it hungered for the stiffness he could feel against his backside, kept separate from him through the suit. “You’ll have to treat me right…if you want to make requests.”
“Hahh…” Vash was humping him now, shamelessly rubbing against him as he plundered him with his mechanical limb, using his heat and his shape without using him correctly, without binding himself to him like a proper fucking mate with manners should. “Guess we’ll…just wait and see…then…”
“Vash,” Knives said it with the intention of sounding stern, but it smeared at the end, and then he repeated himself, uttering his name as if repetition could convince him to end this bizarre torture. “Vash…I’m here. I’m right here. You can have all of me.”
“I know,” Vash said, and sounded genuinely in ecstasy as he did, as he kissed his neck, as he burrowed his hips against Knives’ clothed behind, as he brought his brother closer and closer to that white crest again, pleasure that blotted away all this searing pain, all this stress. “That’s exactly what I’m doing.”
Knives came, hot, shuddering, and miserable on his brother’s toy hand, full of metal, full of Vash’s voice. The liquid he soaked himself with was hotter and more abundant than the night before, a rush of slick that turned into rushing water, accompanying his groans, his helpless little twitches. Then, on top of it all, that release again. His mind went somewhere between waking and defeated. Vash was purring into his ear, his flesh hand was caressing his belly again, his chest. Good boy. Good boy. See? Even you can be good, sometimes.
The green surrounding the barn was twice as wide as the previous day’s lawn. There were little tufts that might grow into bushes someday, a marshy patch that hinted at a spring, maybe even a well. Most impressive was a patch of sunflowers already three feet high, demure and matronly in the dawn.
“It’s good. It’s really good, but they’re definitely not geraniums. You’ll get it right next time,” Vash said, chewing absently on his half of the salmon sandwich. “We’ll just have to keep trying.”
Knives glowered at the sunflowers, as he swallowed his own bite of the food. Vash offered him another morsel without comment, just a happy, open smile, and Knives ate it from his fingers. It was salty and filling. The bread had a softness to it he hadn’t expected, especially after being left out overnight.
“I’m not giving you any damn geraniums. Make your own if you want them that bad.”
Vash chewed the last bite of the sandwich, and dusted his hands off from the crumbs.
“Yup. We’ll just have to keep on trying.”
Knives’ wounds were nearly healed by the time they made it to the outskirts of Augusta. Vash had been monitoring him carefully, praising him for healing so well, and then alternately turning stone cold and silent, those ridiculous glasses he always wore could do an uncanny job of hiding his eyes, his expression.
“Don’t you run,” he had whispered the night before, now that Knives had the strength to grasp his wrists as he plunged both his hands against him at once, rubbing and fucking relentlessly despite Knives’ active attempt to close his thighs, to reduce the intensity of his assault. “Don’t think you can run, now that you can walk a little. You’re still mine.”
Blue poppies covered nearly an ile of what had previously been cracked earth just outside of New Oregon.
The mood shifted once they entered the ruins of Augusta. Vash was quiet, and Knives found himself without much to say, either. Vash stopped the jeep outside of a saloon with its roof blown off, and walked. Knives had to push himself hard to keep up with him, each step a reminder of how much his body had been through the past few weeks, how hard it was working to heal itself. He had a notion, faintly, that he could just stop. Remain still. Sink to the ground and let Vash walk on without him, return to belligerently reclaim him, or whatever else he would do. But pride pushed him forward, what little of it he clung to. He kept Vash’s leather-clad back solidly in his sights, the scars creeping into view through the open window in his top his roadmap. One foot in front of the other. Keep his back in front of you at all times.
“Do you hear that?” Vash whispered, once they reached the city center. The wind whistled here, turning Augusta’s hollow bones into a musical instrument, singing the ghostly tune of Vash’s guilt, of Knives’ crimes. Then, straining - another sound.
“Water,” Knives answered, shivering with a sudden need. It sounded like a spring. Enough to drink, surely. Maybe even enough to bathe in.
Impossibly, it turned out to be an actual bathhouse. Maybe it had had a roof before Vash was last here, maybe it had always been open to the air around it, but some human had built a classic Greek style bathhouse here, furnished with pools and fountains and columns and all of it was still miraculously circulating water through its many concrete oases. Knives strode ahead as quickly as his aching legs would take him, heading right for the nearest pool. He winced as he stripped out of his suit, His arms and tender ribs protested, but it was so long overdue, caked as he was in mud and muck and month-old blood and the continually perpetuated arousal Vash wouldn’t give him a rest from. He caught Vash eyeing the ruined suit and bandages as he tossed them aside, as if he wanted to retrieve the filthy things, as if he had a use for them, somehow. The water was only slightly cooler than the afternoon sun, but it was cool enough . He dove in. He swam gently to the bottom of the pool and turned himself over, looked back up at the surface, at the sunlight sparkling down. Vash’s figure hovered in blurry black and gold. His glasses were two orange circles visibly glinting even through the water’s filter. He closed his eyes, enjoyed a slow breath in and out, the way he’d taught himself to when immersed. He could stay here as long as he liked. If Vash weren’t here, that was. If Vash would leave him alone for a moment, he could fully recover his strength in a place like this, and come back to himself properly once more.
There was a huge splash as Vash hit the water, sunk to the bottom to land on his feet and stand above him. Aside from his precious sunglasses, he hadn’t removed any of his clothing. Knives spent a moment silently glaring up at him, Vash smiled back, and then quite suddenly Vash’s hands were on his waist, lifting him easily, pulling him from beneath the water’s surface to above it, just about holding him above his head.
“Not trying to drown yourself, are you, Knives?”
“I can breathe under water. Can’t you?”
“Not last I checked. That aside, this seems like a perfect place to spend some quality time together, don’t you think?”
He did. He did and he didn’t. Nothing Vash had planned matched what he wanted to happen. He was soaking wet, rejuvenated, his aches for once beginning to fade, but a nervous squirm was starting up in his stomach. He wanted to hide away from that gentle smile, from the warm, possessive hands on his waist guiding him towards the pool’s edge.
“Vash…”
“It’s okay, Knives. You know I’ve got you.” He was setting Knives on the concrete edge of the water, settling himself between his thighs. Knives watched his tongue flick across his lips and had a sudden urge to scramble backwards, to claw his way free. His cunt did not agree.
“It’s almost too bad, you know…I was really getting into the way you smelled.”
“The number of repulsive habits humans have gifted you with is truly astonishing.”
“It doesn’t matter. It only takes a little teasing to get you back.” Both of Vash’s hands were clawing into his tense thighs, the metal one distinctly sharper and more painful on his freshly-rinsed skin. He took his time nuzzling against him, kissing him, sucking the drips of fresh water off of his cunt as if they came from him, which, after a few more minutes, they began to.
Give, Vash said, the first time he’d reached out mentally since this depraved little road trip began. I want you sweet, for once. Can’t I have that? Just this once?
Your brother wasn’t born sweet, Vash the Stampede.
Pretend. Just play pretend. Lie back and play pretend with me.
He still had more resistance in him, after that. But not much. Vash’s kisses were gentle, then his licking was thorough . He parted him with his tongue, slowly sucked every inch of him, lapped up and hungrily swallowed every drop of water the attention provided him, eating him raw. Melt was the command Knives’ own voice gave him, startling, out of nowhere. Just melt. What does it matter. How is this not exactly the paradise you dreamed of?
So he lay back, and gave himself up. He had to cover his eyes to block out the sun, but Vash didn’t mind, didn’t chastise him. Vash only had praise for him right now, praise for his skin, his healing wounds, his flavor, his beautifully submissive posture. He marked pink and then red lines into his thighs, clawing his own pleasure into his brother’s skin as his tongue fucked him closer and closer to ecstacy. His sucking mouth swallowed his clit whole, ravishing him without pause, not a single break in his gluttony.
“I…hh…Vash…”
“Mh-hm…mm-hm.”
“I love…I love you, Vash. I do. You’re staying, right? For good, this time…Vash…”
I love you, Knives. Be good for me. Be good.
Be good. Come for me. Be good. Grow the flowers I ask you to. Be good. Eat when I feed you, come when I call you. His head was swimming. The sun was in his eyes and his body was shaking with rapture beyond his control. He could practically picture the vines as if they were exploding out of his back, draping the entire bathhouse in lush greenery, in a sort of hyacinthian rain forest the likes of which this world had never seen, didn’t deserve to see, not really.
Don’t give it to them, Knives delivered, feeling the pain in his thighs now that the largest crest of his pleasure had ended. Let’s keep this for us. Let’s keep it a secret, Vash. Just for us, this time.
“I love you, Knives,” Vash offered in response, hazy, dizzy, drunk again. Knives realized with something close to awe that the water was milky around Vash’s waist. His hand had never left his thighs, but he’d somehow managed to come, untouched, just from eating him. “Let’s find somewhere cool to sleep.”
Knives lay stark naked in a hammock deep in the shadows of the bathhouse, with Vash on his chest, just as bare, a three-limbed monster weighing him down, making each of his breaths slow and exquisitely difficult. He thought he saw, across the pool, the silhouette of a little black cat trot across the horizon, take a look at them from a distance, and then continue on.
They left that forest behind, an astonishing array of urban trees with twisting trunks sprouting in every direction out of Augusta’s crumbled sandstone center, already far more beautiful than it ever was when inhabited by humans.
“There’s a place for us,” Vash said as Knives clothed himself in a scavenged linen shirt and a pair of old jeans, protected from the nuclear event of the fifth moon by a flimsy shower-room locker. “We’re not quite there yet.”
Each stop they made, Knives lost his mind a little more. Each stop they made, Vash’s kisses were sweeter, his touch more pleasure than pain. Knives even began to accept the fact that Vash wasn’t going to mate him, not properly. He began to think that maybe this endless cycle of pleasure and deep dark sleep, waking to new growth each morning, a ravenous new appetite, might be enough. Each night they spent together, Knives was more certain than ever that he couldn’t go back. He couldn’t go back to life without this. If he had to spend even one more night without Vash pressed to his side, he was sure he wouldn’t survive.
The sign ahead was once a billboard, towering dozens of yars above the heads of the travelers taking this road. Now the dunes had come to claim the highway and the billboard alike, but their jeep managed to slip through the sand, perhaps thanks to nothing but Vash’s sheer will. Knives could not claim to have a perfect geographical map of Gunsmoke in his head, an idea of where they were and where they were going. Perhaps he once did. But the landscape had changed so much while he slept.
A few words peeked above the sand dune as they drove past.
Fifty iles to July.
There wasn’t anything there. July was an infamous crater, a hole in the ground now half filled with sand, a darkly ominous circle that was half golden grains and half blackened char, a natural settling of bright and twinkling emptiness versus dark and deeply disturbed devastation. If they wanted shelter here, they would have to build it.
“I have a tent,” Vash said simply, pulling a previously ignored sack out of the Jeep’s boot, and began his forward march towards the edge of the crater. “Let’s get as close as we can to the center.”
Nothing but the hot sun was their company, out here. No breeze. No sign of life. No crag of rock that would remind one of human inhabitants, millions of them, less than thirty years ago. It was all smoothed over. Peaceful. Lifeless as he had always wanted it to be, blissfully blank. In so many ways, it was perfect.
The sky was turning red by the time they reached the center of the pit. Knives thought he might have seen a scorpion, at one point. He couldn’t be sure. Maybe not even that. Vash began setting up the tent, pleasantly surprised when Knives began wordlessly helping him. It was nostalgic. How many times had they made do with even less than this, when they were still growing? Knives distinctly recalled how Vash had followed him from dune to dune, back then, how it was Vash who whimpered in the night, needed to be held, needed his nightmares gently quelled. Maybe they’d get back there, soon. Knives was just about fully healed, after all. Maybe he only had to endure a little more of this gross posturing before Vash would crumple and fold in his arms again, sobbing like the babe he was, the Vash who needed him more than Knives needed him back.
The fire they made flickered quietly as if it were the only thing alive in the world, as if they themselves were ghostly observers by comparison. Vash closed the small gap between their bodies, and pressed his thigh to Knives’.
“Want to find out what I have planned for tonight?”
Knives shuddered, a ripple going through him from that press of contact, from his right thigh through the rest of his body. He shut his eyes tight a long moment, and then breathed out, and looked to the horizon.
“I killed so many people here,” he replied. The night-time sky still had a little hint of red to it, a blush of purple. What he was feeling was not regret. “I died here, too.”
“I remember,” Vash answered, after a pause. “I was the one who killed you, after all.”
Vash began fidgeting with his hands. The curve of his shoulders, which had seemed so relaxed a moment ago, were now tense. His guard was up. Knives grabbed him roughly by the collar, and kissed him.
Every touch was bruising. Knives crawled on top of his brother, but then Vash flipped him over, pinning him to the black sand. They tussled like that, stealing kisses that were more teeth than tongue between wrestling back and forth, for what might have been hours, scratching and biting and wounding each other, exchanging no words, no sounds other than huffed grunts or angry bits of surprise. A swelling urge was threatening, building each time he was forced onto his back, each time Vash pinned his aching wrists above his head. He could use his power, his innate gift in this landscape of nothing. Wouldn’t that be poetry. Faced with futility, the angel of destruction saw no recourse other than to swallow himself and his brother into a black hole, to blink them both out of existence, finally and truly free from the human parasites they had struggled against for so long. Vash caught both of his hands in his, and pressed them to his chest.
“It’s…” Vash gasped, the first word he had managed to speak in an hour, and still more of a moan. “It’s going crazy. It’s out of control.”
His heart. It was pulsing like mad against his palms. Suddenly Knives had an inkling what this was all about, how Vash had managed to be drunk without getting drunk every night, the specific way they were poisoning and feeding each other.
“Are you going to make me say it,” Knives hissed, straining once to get his hands free, and then growling in fury when he couldn’t. Suddenly Vash’s grip was quite unbreakable. “Are you really going to make me spell it out for you, again.”
“No,” Vash gulped, helpless, for once. At his mercy. “No. I get it. I get it, Knives.” He lifted them both out of the sand, his hands never letting go of Knives’. He backed them towards the tent, then, clumsily, toppled them into it. Sleeping bags, practically identical to the ones they had as kids, cushioned the fall. Vash’s hands were suddenly everywhere, peeling off both their clothes, unclipping first this belt than that, and everything was starting to fit.
“I’ll try, this time,” Knives said, Vash’s delirium as contagious as his inebriation. “I’ll try to make them red in the morning. Because you’ll earn it, won’t you? Your little reward.”
“Yes,” Vash whimpered, as he fell on top of him, as he bit, his teeth finding neck and shoulder, his hips finding his brothers with no effort, his dripping cock finally at the entrance of Knives’ cunt, all of him shaking, on the verge of panic, but he stopped short, rigid. As if he needed permission. “Please.”
“Again,” Knives panted, feeling like he might have already been insane, before this, but now he was, for sure. This was it. This was it. He would be sure to remain alive for more of this. “Beg.”
“Please, Knives,” Vash was as forthcoming with his groveling as he had been with his commands. He was crying. “Please, please say yes, please let me…”
“Shh,” Knives soothed, and placed each of his hands onto his brother’s shaking, desperate frame. He held him in place as he pushed himself onto him, braced his feet at the edge of the pitiful tent so he could slot his hips forward, taking Vash’s cock into his slick cunt in one smooth, encompassing motion. For an instant, he was simply filled, and felt no pain, no pleasure, even, nothing but calm. Then reality returned, and his eyes watered - he was suddenly vibrating, pushed all the way to climax from just this insertion, release steaming out of him, unbidden, in shudders, in water, in horrible little whines.
“Thank you,” Vash was moaning, collapsed into him, gripping him close with his good arm, the mechanical one limp at his side, useless as if it had been detached. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” He choked each devotion out as his body moved for itself, fucking his overwhelmed brother into a state of true melting, churning him until the delineation between their forms was no more. Knives struggled and slipped, tried to get hold of what was happening, how badly he wanted this. He’d always been able to hold his brother inside of him, before, to swallow him, to become a smug observer of the way Vash fell to pieces, the way he lost himself. Now Vash’s panic was his, Vash’s desperation was his desperation, Vash’s frantic heartbeat was throbbing his own out of control, chest to chest as they were, hard metal and ragged scar the only firm patches against their otherwise liquid flesh. He couldn’t keep count of how many times his body bridged ecstasy. It felt like he came every time Vash thrust into him, or else it was one long climax that refused to quit, that was determined to drain him of what little lucid thought he had left. Vash was drooling, open-mouthed, his eyes were far, far away, as if his own nerves, his own need for the landscape of his brother’s insides were a journey he was taking. He had no words of warning for when his release was ready, for when he started pouring seed into Knives, hot sticky liquid alike the sticky pool of molten body they were, distinct and one at the same time, forcibly lush, fertile.
“You make a better dog than I do,” Knives whispered. His throat was hoarse. “We need to teach you your manners again.”
“I love you, Knives.” Vash replied, sleepier than his brother, more wrung out. Happier.
Red geraniums blossomed, their size unnatural, their spread across the barren pit of July continual. By morning there was a forest of them, seven feet high or more. If there was a flimsy tent in the center of it all, if two bodies were intertwined, there, peaceful and at rest, the flowers hid them quite thoroughly from view.