#wolfwood is admiring how much his little brother has recovered back at the bar and stayed far away from this mess

[vamp-bites]

So. Uh. Hi. Hello.

I was wondering if you could... Offer some haunted knives au crumbs.... I need to know in excruciating detail about this new ring of Legato hell.

How did u sense that I nearly doubled the word count on my doc for this au the day u sent this... unfortunately I wasn't hashing out the Legato bits but I can tell u what I've got anyway

So far my plan for Legato in this au is not extensive but he will haunt Knives out of the corner of his eye from the point Knives first sets foot back in Octovern to when he's finally face to face with him again in an alleyway in December.

I wanna have Legato haunting him be more of a source of horror for Knives instead of annoyance like Wolfwood, but end with them having a conversation that sort of closes the door on the "Millions Knives" persona for Knives, he officially divorces himself from that identity through divorcing himself from Legato. Legato, to Knives, represents everything he's trying to leave behind him so when this ghost comes crawling out of its grave and clawing at his leg and vouching for its eternal loyalty to him he freaks out and tries his hardest to kick him off him.

at this point Knives has told Vash that he's no longer gonna be "Millions Knives" and will from here on out be just "Knives: a citizen of NoMan's Land" and to make good on his word he believes he needs to leave Legato behind but he's also realizing that he was this guys whole world in life and now that he's dead Knives is the only living entity on the planet that can see/communicate with him and he doesn't know what to do about that because the last thing he wants to do right now is keep Legato around because he feels like every minute he spends with his ghost lurking over him is a minute wasted regressing back from the little progress he's started to make.

basically, Legato needs to pass on and accept rejection and Knives needs to move on and leave his old self behind. and they cannot do that together. so Knives uses a shred of power to physically touch Legato in order to shove him away from him and leaves him in that alleyway.

as of now i haven't 100% decided how Legato ends up but just leaving him in that alleyway doesn't feel right so I'm thinking that later on, when Knives has gotten a bit more of a solid sense of self than he starts off with in the story and the mere presence of Legato doesn't feel like a black hole anymore, he finds him again, still there but slowly fading into a ghostly sludge of a vengeful spirit that can't move on, and they make some amount of peace with each other and Legato passes on. I'm still workshopping it tho

P.S. Knives does ask Legato whether he was in love with him and Legato says he actually isn't sure and its not a yes but its not a no and Knives, local aromantic who recently discovered that romance is not exclusively a human construct, doesn't know what to do with that information because the idea of a human being in human-love with him places him within a human social system that he previously considered himself completely above and suddenly he feels way too much like a normal person having normal person experiences and he finds it uncomfortable because he just decided to play the role of "person" like a week ago and he's new to it

P.P.S. there is a chance their entire initial encounter happens while Knives is slightly tipsy and/or hungover because in my timeline it happens right after he gets drunk for the first time with Livio