The Aftertaste
(A Knives-centric character study.) An exploration of the psychic bond between Knives and Vash. It was meant to be sacred, but after Tesla and July, it became a conduit for raw, distorted emotion.
Chapter 1: The Bitter Aftertaste
Chapter Text
It had always left an aftertaste, that quizzical bond the two of them shared since infancy. Neither Knives nor Vash could explain it, and Rem, human as she was, could never truly comprehend it. But the twins, in the earliest stages of their childhood aboard the ship, carried a quiet, fragile hope of belonging despite knowing even then how distant they were from it. The bond they shared, they understood with certainty, was not something humans possessed.
The bond between the brothers was something no one could ever explain precisely.
No matter where they were, distance never mattered. It was the constant awareness of the other’s presence, knowing what the other was doing, what mood he was in, what he was feeling. Happiness was a warm fuzz in the heart; anxiety pricked like needles; anger burned; sadness hollowed them out from the inside. Both of them, Knives and Vash, carried it. It was sacred. No one knew about it but them. And years later, even when they forced themselves to forget, forced the memory of it deep down or outside their own bodies, they still always knew what the other was feeling.
That bond was as natural as breathing. But with time - with the mounting complications aboard the ship and the visceral discovery of Tesla’s inhumane end it grew erratic, invasive. As children (and now, in Knives’ recollection), there were moments when it became impossible to tell which emotions belonged to him and which belonged to the other. They had taken the revelation of Tesla’s suffering differently, instinctively, violently so but both had taken it deeply. The pain overlapped until it blurred.
Whose was the despair of realizing they would never truly belong among humans? Whose was the suffocating hopelessness, the terror of being reduced to something disposable? Whose was the sharp, burning sense of betrayal after placing so much faith in coexistence after daring to hope? The bond folded those emotions together, doubled them, multiplied them, until grief and fury became indistinguishable.
And so Knives, barely a year old in truth, trapped in the body of a thirteen-year-old boy, made the only logical decision he could grasp. He cut his own hair. Just to see himself as different from Vash. The ship's shears were cold and heavy in his hand. The sound of each cut was a sharp, final snick in the silent room, and as the locks of white fell, he felt a phantom lightness on his own scalp, and a simultaneous, distant tug of confusion from Vash, somewhere else on the ship. Even if it was impossible to feel it at that moment.
For decades, the bond was unbearable. It made it far too easy to find each other anywhere in the world, like an open wound that never closed. But after the July Incident, it didn’t merely ache. It ruptured.
The destruction was not distant; it screamed through the bond. The city’s collapse, the countless lives snuffed out in an instant, the sheer magnitude of it, everything tore through Knives and rebounded, echoing back at him with unbearable force. In the following hours, a phantom taste of blood and charged ions, the scent of a city burning, coated his tongue Vash's sensory overload became his own. The connection turned volatile, poisoned by rage and loss, by intent made irreversible. After July, it was no longer a shared awareness. It was a battlefield. Two days later, a wave of nauseating, salt-wet grief so profound it stole his breath washed over him. Vash was crying. Knives, in his ark, screamed a torrent of furious justification into the void of their connection, hoping to drown it out.
When life took its bitter turns, the bitterness of the bond intensified until it was nearly impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.
The bond did not carry intention, only force.
It delivered emotion stripped of explanation, raw and unfiltered, and so it twisted meaning as easily as it carried pain. What one brother felt, the other received, considered, sharpened by distance and circumstance, until the original source became unrecognisable.
Vash’s anger, so often directed at him, reached Knives without its true target, something Knives only realised during their heated debates and deadly matches. It arrived as heat, as pressure, as accusation. Knives, being Knives, never took it as something aimed at him personally; he understood it instead as rage toward humans, toward the world that had hurt them both. And when humans hurt Vash as they inevitably did, drawn by the bounty, by fear, by greed, that pain surged through the bond and ignited into fury inside Knives, feeding everything he had already come to believe.
It worked in reverse just as cruelly.
Knives’ hurt deep, aching, unbearably personal, over Vash choosing humanity over him did not reach Vash as longing or grief. It reached him as bitterness. As coldness. As rejection. Vash felt it and folded inward, mistaking Knives’ despair for malice, for hatred, for something irredeemable. The distortion was absolute. On rare occasions, a flicker of Knives' quiet contentment while communing with his plants would reach Vash as a smug, gloating satisfaction. A pulse of Vash's protective, desperate love for a struggling human settlement would ring in Knives as a foolish, strategic attachment to fragile, temporary things.
Neither of them ever received the why. Only the wound.
And so the bond became a mirror that distorted rather than reflected, each brother unknowingly antagonising the other’s trauma. Pain answered pain. Anger bred anger. Grief multiplied itself until it filled the space between them, vast and unbridgeable.
What bound them together did not heal them.
It made the damage echo. It left an aftertaste - not of the sacred bond it once was, but of the poison they had made of it.
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A lot of my inspiration for diving into these emotional bonds comes from an incredible Trigun 1998 fanfic, "Tension" by SWP_Plus. (here's an old ff account of the author with 52 yummy chapters) If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend it—amazing POVs from our favorite girls and a must-read for any fan. Go check it out!
Thanks for reading! _________________________________________________________
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