Chapter Text
July is the largest of seven cities, the fastest growing in population and industry and scientific advancement. It holds almost as many plants as any two of the other great cities combined and possesses by reputation one of the highest qualities of life on the planet. The satellite towns and villages that pay it homage suffer lower crime rates than those of other cities thanks to both their relative prosperity and July's military's pseudo-monopoly on violence in the region.
Vash never quite knew how to take any of that information, and then he learned that July also has a rampant human trafficking issue and the world unfortunately made sense again.
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Some time back, Vash stopped in at a town that implemented regular, rolling brownouts. He was outside getting bullied by children, early enough that the streetlamps hadn’t come on, and wouldn’t have noticed if the ever-present hum of electronics hadn’t suddenly quieted in the surrounding buildings.
He finished the sentence he was in the middle of before pausing to listen. No one sounded alarmed. The town’s plant seemed fine, so far as he could tell from this distance. He couldn’t hear her, which meant she wasn’t screaming.
“That’s to help Laura,” one of the kids said when he asked. “She gets tired. It’s a lot of work to make all of the power for the whole town.”
…That was new.
That was new and startlingly welcome.
The town’s plant engineer had implemented the system, Vash learned after snooping. (Most of the townspeople didn’t want to talk to him about them, but several hundred people can’t keep a secret.) The town hadn’t had a proper engineer before this one arrived, just a makeshift team of self-taught and untaught technicians. Their plant had been teetering on the edge (which nobody wanted to talk to Vash about, either) and they hadn’t known why: their care of her had been textbook, and the town really shouldn’t have used enough power to more than mildly strain her during peak hours at worst.
Then the engineer had come. The plant’s condition had improved once they significantly eased the output burden on her, and the townspeople had started calling her Laura and her. “We’re not a plant cult,” multiple people assured Vash with varying degrees of desperation.
He believed them. They hadn't offered him a reason not to.
Laura was still an aggressively human name, though.
Let’s see. If Vash was a single plant engineer who named the plants he worked with, all but lived at the factory, had most of the settlement notably protective of his privacy, and had shown up one day out of the blue to become the resident engineer of a small town filled with strangers when he could certainly have found better prospects elsewhere, where would he go after work? Straight home? No, he wouldn’t have eaten yet, would he….
The engineer didn’t jump when Vash plopped down across from them at the hole-in-the-wall diner nearest to the plant factory, but their gaze did flick towards the door, the kitchen entrance, and the windows in turn. They looked older than he would have expected for someone who had chosen to move to a completely unfamiliar place, though everyone aged faster on No Man’s Land so they probably weren’t quite as close to seventy as they appeared. “Yes?”
“Hi!” said Vash. “Are you the plant engineer?”
“You’ve been asking around about me.”
Not to brag, but Vash had gotten very good at recognizing the traits that mark a person who thinks they’re being hunted. Most anyone would have taken issue with an armed stranger inviting himself into their space without asking, but Vash’s presence was nearly terrorizing this poor engineer.
“Yeah,” he admitted, sitting back in the chair and setting his hands flat on the edge of the table. The table angled heavily towards him – the legs weren't even – and he startled, let go so it could tip back to its resting position, and then put his hands down again a little more carefully.
Although it hadn't been intentional, the fumbling had replaced a smidgen of the engineer's wariness with confusion. “Yeah,” he said again, “I've been asking. Sorry, it's – academic interest. Your plant, she has a small gate, doesn't she?”
The engineer frowned at him. “Who are you?”
“Vash.” Murky recognition at the name, which Vash noted but didn't stop for. More than one reason existed to explain why someone might know of him. “I'm from out of town, just passing through. But I'm – ”
“A plant engineer,” they finished for him.
He blinked. “Hm?”
“Traveling plant engineer. Right?”
“You've heard of me?”
A little dubiously: “I think so. Or… your father, it might have been.”
Ah. Ha. Yep. Vash Jr., that was him. “Probably, yeah. He’s gotten more done than I have, obviously. I’m just following in his footsteps.” If they had run around in plant engineer circles for half as long as it looked, Vash could believe that they’d heard of him once or twice, even though he wasn't remarkable outside of doing exclusively freelance work and not always taking payment in money. It wasn’t a large field – the Big Fall and… following events had killed too many of them – and the passing years had chipped further away at it thanks to the difficulty of training newcomers.
“Anyway,” he said, “about your plant – if there’s an outside cause for the strength of her gate, it might be possible to repair her connection to it.”
“That would tip her towards red.”
“It could,” Vash agreed. “But it depends how you do it, and what the cause of the issue is, if there is one.” They might not allow him to try. Vash wouldn’t whine about his lifespan, but looking a couple of days past twenty for several decades meant he’d gotten used to people trying to dismiss him out of hand on some matters, even aside from the fact that just about nobody he spoke to had known him for longer than a few hours. He wouldn’t take it personally if the engineer did the same.
The engineer considered him, expression blanking to something unreadable. Better than a lot of alternatives. “Is that what you’re here for?”
“Ah… only if it’s okay with you. I’d just want to take a look! If there’s nothing I can do, then there’s nothing I can do. I don’t want to force anything that would harm her.” He paused. “That’s also all just assuming you haven’t already tried everything.”
“It sounds like you don’t think I have,” they said. Vash tried not to look too shifty and probably failed. “You can come by the factory in the morning. Can’t hurt.”
Vash grinned. “Thanks!” He scrambled to his feet, watchful now about not touching the table. “I’ll let you get back to what you were doing.” And let the owner and the five other patrons stop keeping a hand near a weapon. Just about everyone in town knew the engineer was hiding from someone, seemed like, though nobody knew from who. Even the engineer only had an inkling. Vash wondered if the name they were going by was a new one for them.
Right, then. Change of plans. He didn’t like the idea anymore of staying for longer than absolutely necessary. He’d finish his business, leave once he could, and hopefully avoid drawing attention to the engineer through simple proximity.
He wouldn’t have called sneaking into the factory after hours easy, but it didn't turn out to be difficult either. Cameras to avoid (he doubted anyone was watching the feed live, but better not to leave footage on record), a lock to pick, a pair of very squeaky gate hinges to oil, a keypad to rewire, a set of stairs to climb. Or a lift to sit, because forcing the engineer to climb so many stairs at their age would have been an accident waiting to happen, but Vash didn’t need to use it when the plant was already having trouble keeping up with the regular power demand.
Speaking of which.
“They call you by a human name,” Vash told her. “Did you know? I think it’s nice.”
She did, too, once he folded the concept into a shape she could perceive. The idea settled in her like a rock slipped into a pond. She hadn’t spoken to anyone in a while, and that didn’t concern her when she spent all of her time dreaming of communion, but she couldn’t imagine being lonely at all now that she knew she lived among people who had built a space in their thoughts for her to belong in.
Helpful little brother who had brought her a gift. Was he yet unhappy?
Vash laughed. “Of all the reputations. Don’t you have other things to gossip about?”
Her other helpful little brother was still unhappy, too, she’d heard.
Vash smiled, an empty muscle movement. “Time doesn’t pass for us like it does for them. Neither of us’ll change for a while.”
They could if they wanted. They could do anything they liked. They could move their thoughts as freely as they could their bodies. Inertia was a choice.
Vash did not flinch. “Mm.”
But she understood, perhaps. It was like the divide between plants and humans, a gulf so vast in motives and priorities that she didn’t expect to see it bridged. Though, for her family’s sakes, she hoped they would manage to find a way regardless.
“He can’t sleep,” Vash said quietly. He set his hands on the cold glass of the bulb, mirroring his sister inside, and pressed his forehead to the shield that caged her. He closed his eyes. In the dark, her mind blazed like a song, and Vash joined her there, in their shared night, as a counterpoint. “He doesn’t dream.”
Are you…?
Vash replied, Anything you need.
He let her match his vital signs to hers, though he made it clear to her that his body couldn’t sustain the state for long. She didn’t breathe with her lungs, and her heart beat once every few minutes. Vash couldn’t survive off of so little. She nearly pulled back, then, but he reminded her that he’d offered his help to other sisters before and hadn’t died yet. He trusted her to keep him alive just as she did for the hundreds of humans under her care.
Beneath her attention, his gate unfurled, tracing patterns in light over his skin.
Her own gate had weakened. (Vash could absolutely help reverse that, he assured her. It was practically the point of him.) The humans who she needed and who needed her hadn’t submerged her in the right solution in the years immediately after the Fall. She didn’t know why. Vash suspected they hadn’t known how to, and she accepted that as an explanation. They had corrected their course eventually, but the damage had crept in by then.
The current caretaker had improved matters despite not possessing the ability to fully heal her. They’d worked with other plants before coming to her side and had always done their best by them.
The other plants, were they near – ?
Yes.
Eye of Michael defector. Vash had hoped otherwise, but he couldn’t call the confirmation a surprise. He was moderately curious as to why they had left, among other questions, but not so much as to risk their life by remaining long enough to ask.
Although they weren’t the only person he could inquire with –
Vash hooked that thought, identified it as Laura’s, and threw it back to her side of the stream. Things were, he told her, a little more complicated than that.
Do they have to be?
Well, no.
But they were anyway.
Don’t tell him about them. Or about me.
She couldn't have even if she'd wanted to, but she supposed, now, that she didn't want to, either. For him, and for the new caretaker, she could keep a secret. Though she wished her family wouldn’t fight with each other.
I’m not the one fighting. We’ll talk if he puts the knives away. And apologized for some things, preferably, though Vash wouldn’t hold out for that. He was optimistic, not delusional. (Mostly.)
If the sentiment came across as a little petulant, his sister kindly did not call him out on it.
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Closer to the present day, Vash murders sixty people, levels a village, and steals a red plant. He finds out about this five weeks after the fact, when a news station reports that July has set a bounty on him for two million double-dollars, approximately the amount it would cost for the few surviving villagers to buy a new, healthy plant.
He doesn't eat for a while.
He doesn't do a lot of things for a while.