Mercymorn The First begins to read, and suddenly she is drawn into halls of steel and chrome, floating in a vast sea of stars. Perhaps it's nostalgic.
Mercymorn reads of two young boys and a woman with kind eyes and a sad smile who took care of them. She reads of how the woman was alone on the ship, keeping watch over the thousands of humans in cryo-sleep, until she found those two as infants and took them in, watching them grow and grow over a year.
She reads of the boys wondering if the humans will be friends with them, when they awaken. Of the first time they met one, after Rem. The hope it brings.
"We can work through a few little differences," Knives says. "If we just talk to each other...we can come to understand one another."
They don't take it well. One collapses from the shock; the other lingers in consciousness but is absent in spirit, refusing to eat, needing to be physically dragged from the chamber which holds the remnants of Tesla's corpse. The first he speaks is to accuse her of deceit, of raising them only to continue the experiments. She swears up and down that she'd never be involved such a thing again, that she desperately regrets not putting a stop to it the first time.
Kill me, he demands. Just...kill me! This place...there's nothing but humans here!
His face grows gaunt from starvation; he does not speak further until she brings an apple and a knife to cut it with, one day. He saves up his strength for the moment it's left unattended, and steel live in his fingers and aimed at his throat, but she catches the blade midway, staining it crimson with her fingers.
"Is that your answer? You're going to throw everything away so easily?"
She doesn't know what she's talking about, and for a moment everything feels clear and finished when the blade finds its mark in her again; he thinks he may be free of the specter of Tesla's pain until the moment where she collapses by his feet and he suddenly can't stop screaming, tears ripping out of him in wild sobs.
In the story, Mercymorn the First hears one she learned before, from the being who is neither man nor necromancy. The story about the blank ticket which could take you anywhere, if only you lived to fill it in. The woman called Rem implores Vash to live, and he does.
The three of them do, in fact, as Knives awakens. As Rem confesses a second time, and he appears to forgive. They're happy, one might think. It could've stayed this way until it was time to return to cold sleep -- and yet of course, it couldn't at all. The ship malfunctions, and Rem can either save them and herself, or them and the still-sleeping crew.
She doesn't choose herself. It is the last time Vash will ever see her alive.
cw: unethical experimentation, death, attempted suicide, attempted murder
Mercymorn reads of two young boys and a woman with kind eyes and a sad smile who took care of them. She reads of how the woman was alone on the ship, keeping watch over the thousands of humans in cryo-sleep, until she found those two as infants and took them in, watching them grow and grow over a year.
She reads of the boys wondering if the humans will be friends with them, when they awaken. Of the first time they met one, after Rem. The hope it brings.
"We can work through a few little differences," Knives says. "If we just talk to each other...we can come to understand one another."
She follows the boys as they sneak in where they're not allowed, and find something they never should've seen.
They don't take it well. One collapses from the shock; the other lingers in consciousness but is absent in spirit, refusing to eat, needing to be physically dragged from the chamber which holds the remnants of Tesla's corpse. The first he speaks is to accuse her of deceit, of raising them only to continue the experiments. She swears up and down that she'd never be involved such a thing again, that she desperately regrets not putting a stop to it the first time.
Kill me, he demands. Just...kill me! This place...there's nothing but humans here!
His face grows gaunt from starvation; he does not speak further until she brings an apple and a knife to cut it with, one day. He saves up his strength for the moment it's left unattended, and steel live in his fingers and aimed at his throat, but she catches the blade midway, staining it crimson with her fingers.
"Is that your answer? You're going to throw everything away so easily?"
She doesn't know what she's talking about, and for a moment everything feels clear and finished when the blade finds its mark in her again; he thinks he may be free of the specter of Tesla's pain until the moment where she collapses by his feet and he suddenly can't stop screaming, tears ripping out of him in wild sobs.
In the story, Mercymorn the First hears one she learned before, from the being who is neither man nor necromancy. The story about the blank ticket which could take you anywhere, if only you lived to fill it in. The woman called Rem implores Vash to live, and he does.
The three of them do, in fact, as Knives awakens. As Rem confesses a second time, and he appears to forgive. They're happy, one might think. It could've stayed this way until it was time to return to cold sleep -- and yet of course, it couldn't at all. The ship malfunctions, and Rem can either save them and herself, or them and the still-sleeping crew.
She doesn't choose herself. It is the last time Vash will ever see her alive.