★ --;; The mist of rain slowly dampening the earth hadn't been paid any mind as Vash had rushed here, to where the quiet radiation of his mind had desperately drug him towards its mirror. Unstyled hair has quickly started to fall flat around his ears, against his forehead, as the shoulders of his sweater darken, rooted as he finds himself. His feet are just as frozen as his mouth, making them both do so a skill that not very many have ever had.
Watching the movements of Millions Knives feels like seeing something not quite as it should be-- a human shape set off kilter, as though it never learned the intricacies of the process. Or-- more fittingly-- had never cared to learn. A reminder staring Vash in the face of just how removed they both really were, are, stripped back from so much humanity that he'd spent a century and then some wrapping around himself. Sharp, fluid yet disjointed all at once, jagged despite the smoothness of his skin, in stark contrast to Vash and the ease with which he's come to walk through the world with all his ramshackle parts.
Is it strange, then, to be relieved to see them?
Maybe it doesn't even matter, with how short the feeling lasts as a whole; fractions of it sliced away as his brother was so skilled at doing.
"No one killed me," Vash finally says, throat tight.
Loss's guiding hand has been such a constant in Vash's life that now, not even for the first time on this island, it's difficult to know what to do without it cruelly ripping the rug of itself out from underneath him, no regard for the scars it had already carved in nerves and muscle and memory. He's not sure if the fact that the pull is only half-hearted makes it any better or any worse as he stares at Knives, the pitch-black rot that now marks them both.
That singular question serves as an answer in and of itself; that this is not the brother that had left him with deafening silence for a second time but one plucked from yet another pinprick of time, one that had not yet granted them the same gifts of momentary, relative, equilibrium.
"Didn't think you were one to believe in the afterlife, anyway."
He still hasn't moved. He should. He should. But nearly 150 and then some of hurt, of anger, of fear, don't merely vanish with forgiveness, having been embedded so deeply in the DNA of them both.
Still, Vash takes the steps-- one, then another, herculean. The soles of his boots feel like they're full of concrete. Still, the gap between them feels impossibly wide, even though it can't be more than a handful of feet.
"Besides," he quips, a reach for the steadying of himself. "I'm pretty damn hard to get rid of. Figured you'd know that by now."
