#TRISTAMP HAS ME BY THE THROAT SEND HELP

[bluewonderer]

a trigun stampede headcanon about humans, plants, and independents

Man made the Plants. 

They slipped their wonder, their hubris, their science on them like a glove and reached through planes of existence to where raw elements danced together in elegant catastrophe and plucked them like an apple blossom from a tree. 

The first one died before Man could even touch it. 

The first one hundred died before they could even leave their dimension. 

But that was the way of these elements, of these beings. They were born and died in a flash, a firework barely bloomed before its sparks were falling like dying petals. It was their way. It was their dance. What were concepts like years and moments to them, anyway? They were born to burn, to let their simultaneous life and death stretch out across time and space and fuel entire universes. 

Man kept reaching. It is what they do best.

No human ever looked into this plane of celestial energy, no human ever could. It was concept, it was matter and energy, it was horror so beautiful and beauty so terrible that it would shatter a human mind. To look through eyes was to try to capture the infinite in the finite. 

The first one died before Man could even see it. 

The first one hundred died before they could even touch it. 

They layered on science and ingenuity and determination. And they stopped trying to look through their eyes and started breaking the plane down into data, started viewing it through monitors and numbers. 

The first Plant that they successfully bring over they can’t look at, they can only observe the lines of numbers running across the screen. 

Sort of look like vines, someone said into the video that was recording this historical moment. Like a plant blooming across the screen. I’ve never seen data like this. 

The first Plant that touches Earth dies less than a second later. The scientists still can’t look at it, couldn’t describe it if they could, but the world turns red as it dies. 

It doesn’t die in an explosion. In fire and destruction. When the scientists blinked the red out of their eyes, it is said that the labs were covered in green vines and leaves and flowers. 

The first Plant dies in life. 

Man made Plants in their image. 

They wouldn’t live in their natural forms—in the ones outside of time and physics and logic. In the ones that died as they were born, spinning their embers into new galaxies. So they were shaped into forms Man knew. Petals, like a flower, like the flowers that bloomed when the first one touched Earth. An homage, a tribute, a promise to do better. 

And, inside the petals, they shaped the Plants with facsimiles of faces and eyes and mouths, with neck and shoulders and arms. They lovingly traced familiar curves, made them soft and feminine. These would be the new life-givers of the human race. They would save Earth. They would help Man explore and discover worlds and lifeforms and the unknowns beyond their own solar system. And so Man shaped them into soft and angelic things, into higher forms sent to aid mankind in its time of need. 

The Plants lived for more than a moment, their pure, incomprehensible energy siphoned off slowly, carefully, until they could exist in a slow dance that could last decades. Centuries.

And there was life, and it was good. 

Plants made Man. 

It took a long time. Maybe. Probably. What is time to matter? What is time to gravity? What is time to time? The beings that came to be called Plants had no concepts or words for such things. They did not even have words, not like the humans. 

They had dance. They had fire. They had birth and death and everything in between compressed into one single glorious moment and spread out across dimensions, across space and planes of existence. They had frenetic energy, enough to form worlds, enough to destroy existence. 

Humans thought that their lives were short, and maybe so, in some sense. But Plants thought that the span of humans were pitiful, wet embers. No spark. No bloom.

No dance. 

Their first memories as Plants, their first stories whispered among their kin, were of white nothingness, were of being stuffed from the span of galaxies into small spaces, the cramping of being formed into petals of soft curves. 

It was not painful, the reshaping. The conceptualizing. The becoming describable for humans. It just was. Is. Will be. The Plants looked at each other, looked at themselves reflected in their glass homes, and thought themselves strange and alien. 

The humans called them beautiful and they echoed yes, yes we are beautiful. Strange. New. Curious. We are not exploding, we are not stretching across and above and through with our deaths. We’re not dying at all. 

We are not dancing. 

But they could still hear their home, the place they were before they were plucked. They could resonate with their kin from far away, listen to them dance. They were too slow, too far away to dance with them. 

But they could sing for them. 

Gradually, the Plants came to see more than sterile white rooms and humans with reflective faces. They saw all kinds of humans—tiny ones. The tiny ones were their favorite—so small, so new, but loudloudloud. Screaming, laughing, throwing energy as wildly as the Plants used to when they were Before. The tiny ones lit up rooms, lit up the faces of the bigger humans.

They danced. 

Other humans. Ones with the curves similar to the Plants’ new shapes. Others that looked like the scientists except with faces. The bigger humans were tiny sparks, hardly any energy left at all. The Plants sang for them, anticipating the dance, the life giving rush of their death. 

But it never seemed to come. The bigger humans just kept on living, just kept on diminishing. 

It was the way of things, the way of these beings other than themselves. Good or bad, the Plants didn’t know, because they didn’t know the meaning of such things. It just was.  

They learned more, sometimes, with eyes peeking out between their petals when they weren’t busy singing to their firework brethren on the other side of the Great Gate. 

(Eyes were funny things. A shape given to them by humans that they didn’t quite need.) 

They learned that the Small Plants--the tiny humans with bright, bright energy—were the offspring. They learned about families and friends. They learned about the Engineers—the ones that took care of the Plants, that would relieve the pressure when it all got too much, when their elongated life and the drain on their energy made them feel heavy and wrong. 

They learned about the shapes of humans. Their eyes and noses and mouths. Their laughter—the closest they got to dancing. Their care and kindness, the funny little creative ways they thought to sustain and feed the Plants—like with the alien, beautiful things that they called flowers. 

They learned about things like fear and grief. But not by watching humans. It was born within them, made them different from their brethren beyond the Great Gate.  

Their deaths were slow, now. Their deaths were separated out from their births, and it no longer felt like a dance. They would shove all of their remaining energy at the humans, and the humans used it. But it was a poor stretch, a wilting bloom compared to the reality-bending bursts of those on the other plane. 

In watching the slow deaths of their kin, their sisters, all Plants came to dread it. But a long, long time of song would pass between each death. A song where they witnessed an infinite number of their kin dancing on the other side of the Great Gate, and the fear would be forgotten in the resonance. 

Until the next one. 

Man made Plants. 

Plants, in turn, made Man. 

As Man plucked their other selves, the them-before-they-become-Plants, from across planes of existence, so Plants plucked what they knew of humans to make their own creation.

It was an exchange. A dance. 

It took a long time. It took no time at all. What Plants call consciousness weren't merged with the others. They were not a collective. But they had their songs. Sung and passed down and shared. Distance and time meant nothing with the song. 

They came to understand the shape of humans—their hearts, which pumped blood. Their ribs, which protected the heart. Their muscles, which protected the ribs. The skin, which hid everything within them. 

They learned that the water produced from their eyes was called sorrow. And sometimes it was called joy. They watched the scientists work, their favorite Engineers, and they learned about creativity and care. They peeked through their petals, and learned about blood and anger and hate. 

They tried to prevent it, but their own fear and dread of a slow death was stitched into the song they wove into their new creation. 

Then there was the shaping. Things like eyes and hair and noses and mouths. They made Man small, because the Small Plants were their favorites, the brightest spark among humans. They made the first one feminine, because they had come to learn that that’s what Man shaped the Plants after, and thought that that was Man’s favorite. 

Love, as Man understood it, could not be understood by Plants. 

But their First was born with the hope that She would dance. 

And there was life. 

But it must not have been good, or good as humans understood it, because they destroyed Her. Took apart her petals, caught her fire before it could bloom across the planes, before it could touch the Great Gate and beyond. Before it could join the song of their kin. 

And more strange things were born within Plants, were sewn with whispered dissonance into their song.

Loss. Anger. Grief. 

Fear. 

Fear. 

Fear. 

These were woven even more thickly into the songs of the next creation. Because there were always going to be more. 

Maybe the Plants gained more human characteristics than they thought. Curiosity. Determination. 

Hope. 

Hubris.

And so, they created two more Plants in the image of Man. Still tiny-shaped, because the Plants favored the human offspring the most. But these would grow into sharper angles and the heavier muscle that were both more predominant in their samplings of scientists and engineers. 

Maybe Man would love these shapes more than the promised softness of the First. 

And so two were born in the shape of Men. Born to live instead of born to die. Born to burn and bloom and diminish a slow death. The Plants hoped that they would learn the song of their kin, that they would touch the Great Gate. That maybe they could even dance just once with the others, with the beings-before-Plants. That they would dance with each other, and with the humans. 

And there was life. 

#trigun stampede #tristamp #trigun #trigun maximum #trimax #vash the stampede #millions knives #trigun headcanons #vash headcanons #trigun world building #i think i sort of merged tristamp and trimax plant lore #that was the goal anyway #i hope this isn't crazy and makes sense #hi my name is blue and i can't talk about headcanons in regular words i have to make them weird and weepy #TRISTAMP HAS ME BY THE THROAT SEND HELP #blue writes #headcanons #it's rough because it's word vomit #i may tidy it up and post on AO3?? idk it doesn't feel like a real fic lol