Archive of Our Own ^beta

It happened first like this:

Vash the Stampede, famed wanderer and evader of all things scheduled and organized, started the day by calling down the hallway of the building he shared with his partners (and tentatively called “home” until the next big disaster) to announce his early-morning departure—without giving a single one of them a heads-up about his plans.

“I’m heading out!” declared the ex-outlaw, ex-sixty-billion double-dollar bounty, but still-wanted-by-the-Earth-government man for crimes he only sort-of committed.

(Does it count if you only committed half of the crime, but they’re still chasing you for the full crime? Escaping with his significantly-more-wanted brother wasn’t exactly Vash’s most law-abiding moment (in a long life containing very few law-abiding moments in the first place!) but it wasn’t like he was harboring an apple tree-shaped brother in his backyard. He just hasn’t… told the Earth government the whole story, per se. Not his fault they keep coming after him with giant tanks and big, blazing guns, and that they haven’t given him much of a chance to tell his side of the truth without the looming threat of Millions-bullets-to-the-face. It’s a cruel, cruel conundrum they’ve stuck him in. Simply unfair.)

Meryl Stryfe, one of three lights of his life and permanent-yet-beloved barnacles on his person, narrowed her eyes at him immediately, disapproval on her face.

Seated at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, her reading glasses, and her rival’s newspaper—the Terran-Corp News Agency, the TCNA, said with all the malice and enmity Vash’s forgiving mind was capable of conjuring in honor of his affections for one Miss Meryl Stryfe—fluffed out before her, she was a picture of domesticity. A picture of pretty angry domesticity, though. Not the sweet and giggly kind; less of the “Thank you for cooking breakfast, dear!” kind, and more of the “Who’s setting fire to my kitchen?” kind. Vash rubbed the back of his neck guiltily when her gaze raked up and down the old gray jumpsuit he was wearing and the bag of paint brushes slung over his shoulder.

“…What’s that for?” Meryl asked, prim and crisp, enunciated in a way that meant she was hardly thrilled by the surprise he’d just sprung on her—even though she did genuinely enjoy some surprises, contrary to what one might expect knowing her on a surface-level. She was a bit of an adrenaline junkie. But she was still the organized Meryl Stryfe, and Vash was now disrupting that organization. “It’s barely seven in the morning, Vash. We had plans today, remember?”

“Ahhh, Nath is repainting his store today and he needed some extra hands!” Vash held out the hands he intended to offer to Milly’s favorite local baker. Sure, he only has one hand technically, but Nath—Nathanial, Nathanial John-Polo, but he didn’t like people calling him that because his family name left him with a bad taste in his mouth—probably would’ve accepted his assistance even if Vash taped a paintbrush to the stump of his arm and called it a hero’s Herculean task. With all his kids living so far away, the old man was that desperate.

Question number 2 came next: “Will you still be back in time for dinner?”

It was risky when she had to ask multiple clarifying questions, he knew this for a fact. The more questions she had to ask because her concerns were dodged or evaded, the more unhappy she became, especially in the early morning. Something about being too pushy and not liking when she had to act that way, her inquiries being treated like bullets instead of an attempt at extending care. Vash swallowed. He didn’t like making her unhappy, though he was catastrophically good at it.

“Well, I’ve no clue!” Vash replied as fast as non-humanly possible, just for her. “We just had all these brushes left over from redoing the hallway, so I thought I’d bring ‘em over. Waste not, want not, you know? There’s a lot of work to cover, Nath wants the outside and the inside redone, and you know how Miss John-Polo’s back has been bad lately, so it’s just going to be me and him and Yancy and Peterson covering the whole building. I don’t know when he’ll be letting us go, but I’m pretty sure he wants the whole project done in the next two days. He has a big order he’ll need to ship out for his daughter’s wedding by Friday and he’s worried the paint fumes might sink into the batter.” Vash scratched his cheek with his shoulder when he realized Meryl’s expression had started to crumple, wringing the strap of his bag with his hand. Oops. He must’ve said something. “Ah—was there, was there something special going on tonight?”

“…Milly’s cooking her mother’s risotto for us tonight to celebrate,” Meryl said softly. Her hands were clasped tightly around the newspaper’s edges; Vash could hear the paper crunching between her fingers. “She’s been waiting for the store to restock on mushrooms for weeks so she could make it. She told you last night, didn’t she?”

“Oh, it, ahh, slipped my mind.” It didn’t slip his mind, but Vash also didn’t say I didn’t realize you wanted me there to watch the process? because he knew it’d just make things worse. Happy to be there, happy to eat. But his witty, twitchy chatter while cooking something slow and tedious? Not always welcomed with open arms. “I’ll try and make it back by, er, eight?”

Of course Meryl wanted him there. Of course Milly wanted him to participate, stir the pot a little so all of their love could flavor it. Of course even Wolfwood wanted to sit down and have a meal with him after how hard the girls had been working the past few weeks. It isn’t their problem that Vash isn’t always good at believing that to be an option he can choose at this point in his life. Old habits and impossible standards, mostly for himself. They don’t like it when he starts throwing the word earn around, especially over things like cohabiting with the people he loves that also love him and trading turns to stir a pot of broth and rice.

Celebrate—they were supposed to celebrate that Meryl and Milly’s first season of Noman-Terran interviews had been approved by the planet’s central government as “nationally-valuable media” and would be shunted off into space to inform the rest of the human cosmos about their little sandy planet. It was a phenomenal breakthrough. It was incredible. Vash couldn’t be prouder of how they’d chosen to spread their message, the story of humanity’s survival, and its will to communicate and collaborate and love with the known universe. The anthology of all the people his Insurance Girls got in touch with to tell their sides of the story ranged wildly from Miss Luida, to Mister Vance from the Earth Forces, to ex-Gung-ho Gun Livio the Double-Fang, and even Brilliant Dynamites frickin’ Neons.

(How about that? How about that? A single human can’t bring about enough lasting change on her own? Fat chance of that being true when Vash’s girls are fed enough resources and spite to power a nuclear reactor: MerylMilly score-one, Millions Knives score-zero.)

“Our program’s live finale ends at four,” Meryl added, “and we wanted to be home to start chopping by five-fifteen. We’ll likely be finished long before that.”

“Ahaa, that’s okay, then, just leave me some leftovers so I don’t go hungry! I’m looking forward to trying her cooking. It’ll be nice to enjoy after a long day of hard work.” Vash tried to smile kindly. To keep the posture lighthearted. Easy, unburdened, silly and carefree. Still, Meryl was looking at him like… that. Meaning that she saw through it with ease. “I’ll try to see if Nath will let me leave early, but whew, I doubt it. The old man has to counteract how much sugar he puts in his cakes by bein’ as sour as a lime.”

He wasn’t keen on putting what “that” looked like into words, but if Vash had to while held at gunpoint (common occurrence), he would have said it looked something like resignation; like she wanted to say something else, but knew from experience just how ineffective her words would be. Vash didn’t like that he made her feel that way. He wasn’t sure how to change it. Her words were strong, powerful, world-changing; if it weren’t for Meryl’s words, they wouldn’t be celebrating in the first place.

—The worst part of “that” was that Vash couldn’t find a hint of surprise in it.

“…You do that, please,” Meryl said quietly. She raised up her newspaper then, obscuring her face from him. “Close the door quietly. Nick and Milly are still sleeping.”

Vash felt the resignation by that point, too. “Will do—bye-bye, see you later,” he said to her. He almost wished she’d try and say something else. Maybe, maybe, this time his brain would agree with it. Once Meryl stayed silent for long enough that he knew she wasn’t going to speak again, Vash added, “And apologize to Milly for me, please.”

And under her breath, before Vash could completely slip out of earshot, Meryl murmured: “But it’ll be cold by then, idiot…”

He could always microwave Milly’s risotto. It’s about as nice of a treat as he—ah, he shouldn’t think that. They’d probably be able to tell. Into the secret little box it goes—so it doesn’t become their responsibility, too.

-

It happened a second time like this:

In a high and whittling voice from his perch on the stepladder, Vash had whined, “Are you seeing this, Wolfwood?”

Wolfwood’s head didn’t appear over the other side of the half-built shed, so he was certainly not seeing it.

“The Lord blesseth me with mighty good eyes,” Wolfwood muttered from the safety of where Vash couldn’t poke him to get him to look, “but I can’t see through a solid hunka’ wood, Spikey.”

“That lady over there…” Vash murmured. “Ah, that poor soul…”

They were building a shed. Not something Vash nor Wolfwood were unfamiliar with, but neither a task they performed everyday. For all the competence between them, it was… well, it was humble. It wasn’t the prettiest shed; it was just a little box, higher on one side and lower on the other, with a simple slanted roof so the sand could slide off. It was for Wolfwood’s newfound woodworking tools, Milly’s garden pliers, and one of Meryl’s filing cabinets. Vash would’ve added his own little thing to the shed, too, if he had a little thing to store in the first place besides his collection of trinkets. The compromise, in an effort to include him, was that they’d be painting it red.

(Bullets? Leather-working? A tiny room to practice his balance in close-quarters with an egg and some coins hanging from the ceiling? A backup storage for his metric ton of hair gel? Vash traveled light. Vash lived light, even when he liked putting down roots in other ways. People and connections, not places and registrations. His knickknacks were all kept in his pockets instead of on shelves or in a storage space because he liked having them close by. There was no reason to change that as long as the others genuinely needed the space more than him, right?)

They had little more than a basic frame of synthwood up after about an hour of working. One wall was halfway done; Vash was securing the top bolts while Wolfwood secured the bottom. In order to put a distraught hand over his mouth and gape at what injustice he was witnessing, though, Vash had to let go of the board they were currently working on—and Wolfwood snapped a frazzled “Oi! Irresponsible!” when it started to lean towards him.

“—Do not,” Wolfwood pushed against the board, “leave me,” and kept pushing until it bent in the other direction and dug into Vash’s back, “hangin’, Jesus. What are you lookin’ at that’s gotcha so burnt up?” His head finally appeared over the half-built wall to squint at Vash first (very important step, can’t have his ire being left unknown), before squinting at what Vash was squinting at. “—That lady over there?”

“She’s herding all of those children, all by herself,” Vash said, wiping away a tear. Wolfwood gave him a disbelieving look. “She looks like she’s having trouble…”

Wolfwood crossed his arms over the top of the frame and leaned into his elbows. “She looks like she’s doin’ a damn good job of it, Spikey,” Wolfwood countered. “Put some respect on her name.”

The  lady in question, a local school teacher, was guiding a gaggle of about two dozen laughing and shouting kids across the street, likely on their way for lunch or an adventure. One troublemaker was tucked under her arm and wriggling like a fish. The rest were keeping within ten feet of her even as they went exploring, like little moons trapped in her orbit. Really, she was doing a marvelous job of keeping that many curious little hands in check while out in the unforgiving wilds. And yet…

Vash shook his head. “But she’s all by herself… Shouldn’t she have an assistant?”

“Nope. Lookit her go.” Wolfwood gestured when the woman dutifully scooped up a second troublemaker. The rest of the kids chittered and giggled, pointing at her as she hung the girl upside down over her shoulder. “That? That’s not trouble. That’s a missus that knows her way ‘round children.” He spoke from experience, Vash knew. “She’ll be okay, Spikey. Better we don’t interrupt a master at her task and give her two more heads to keep track of.”

And yet—the first troublemaker let out a “Squee!” as they broke free of their distracted teacher’s grip and bolted towards an alley. Vash was down and off the ladder before they’d even broken the perigee.

“Ah, hey—!”

“Spikey,” Wolfwood warned.

“Five minutes, I’ll just go get them where they’re goin’ safely,” Vash said over his shoulder. When he turned back around, he saw that the teacher had already caught the runaway child—wow, good job, ma’am, that was impressive—but Vash was on a mission, and it wasn’t a mission that would take very long in the first place. Just a little detour. A break for his hands. Helping people helped his focus, and kept him on task for longer. It was good for the brain, food for the soul, heat for the heart and hearth.

Wolfwood grumbled something under his breath, but dutifully began to follow Vash. 

“Not you too, Wolfwood!” Vash held out the flat of his hands. “You can keep going, really—I’ll be back before you get to the other sides. You don’t need to trouble yourself with this, too.”

With his hands shoved in his pockets, Wolfwood said, “Sure ya will,” while blowing a puff of air up at his bangs.

There was a smudge of dust on his forehead and sweat stains under his arms. His stubble was starting to get a little overgrown, and his longer hair was plastered against his neck from the intense heat of the suns. It wasn’t as hot today as it usually was on Gunsmoke, but still sweltering enough—and Vash found it terribly cute when Wolfwood’s mouth pulled into a crooked frown, only a pursed bottom lip away from a pout.

“I will,” Vash insisted. Cute. Really, really cute. Dangerously.

“You know the weather's good today.”

It was true. Did he want help, or to help? Knowing Wolfwood, it was probably the latter. Wherever Vash went, he went, even if the horizontal detours made him grouchy and prone to eyeing the path forwards with wistful longing when he thought Vash wasn’t watching. He was so, so aware of the bigger picture, the places where his help was needed the most and where he could provide answers for people with none. But his heart always drove him to care about the little things, too: the unimportant chore, the wishy-washy want instead of the need, the lonely child. He just cared about it all, like he cared now about Vash wanting to help a person that didn’t really need it and also how he cared about finishing a gift for Milly and Meryl. Wolfwood’s care just never seemed to run dry.

“I know,” Vash agreed softly.

“…Go do yer thing, Spikey,” Wolfwood said at last with a shrug and a crooked smile. “I’m not savin’ any work fer you.”

He meant that far too literally.

—Roughly two hours later, a field trip across half the town, a bonk to the crown of his skull after getting tackled by a tween-horde, and a half-dozen box of donuts as an apology, Vash returned to the site of the shed to find it near-finished. The synthwood frame was completed, pristinely-assembled parallel lines of plastic making up the walls and leaving no spaces for sand to slip in-between. Wolfwood was whistling as he drove the last nails into the door hinges and made sure that they’d stay in place even with a little violence—after all, there was no guarantee that Milly wouldn’t accidentally pull the door off its hinges if it wasn’t screwed in properly. Lessons learned and past history and whatnot. Their big girl was a strong girl; Wolfwood was also a strong guy, so if the shed’s door could hold up to him yanking on it a little bit, she’d be fine.

“Ah, hey,” the strong guy in question greeted him as Vash slunk guiltily into the yard. “Took ya long enough. Didn’t know when the weather was gunna turn, so I didn’t wait up for ya.”

Once he was close enough, Vash licked his thumb and reached out to wipe a dust stain on Wolfwood’s cheek. Wolfwood’s instantaneous augh, gross, told him that everything wasn’t all wrong and terrible like it should’ve been, but Vash still felt guilty as he raked his eyes up and down the result of Wolfwood’s Vashless work.

“Ahh… Donut?” Vash offered, lifting the lid of the box.

Wolfwood raised an eyebrow, surveying the thoroughly decimated array. “You’re hopin’ I take that leftover half, aren’tcha?”

“Wolfwood,” Vash said quickly, “I’m sorry, you shouldn’t have had to do all of that alone.” He jerked his head at the project they’d set out to complete together. “I meant it when I said I’d help you, you know.”

He didn’t look bothered. He—well, he should have looked bothered. This kind of thing usually bothered people, and it had certainly bothered Wolfwood in the past. But Wolfwood just regarded him with an expression that wasn’t as prickly and irritated and bothered as he had every right to be—but it was “that” again.

“Well, s’not painted or anything yet. We’re still not done,” Wolfwood pointed out reasonably.

“I’ll take care of that,” Vash insisted. “Don’t you want to balance it out? So fair’s fair? You can take the day off tomorrow and I’ll finish it all up.”

“Uh, sure?” At last, a little bit of a peace offering was accepted—Wolfwood plucked the only whole donut remaining in the box, before glancing up at the twin suns. Late in the evening. A whole afternoon spent working on his own. “—I’ll save this for later, I guess. Whaddaya want for dinner?”

“I really am sorry,” Vash said. It felt like an inverse. No swooping in at the last minute to have each other’s backs—no, he’d swooped out in the first inning, over something inconsequential when something heavily consequential could’ve happened in his absence. Meryl was out, and Milly was in the house, and sure, if Wolfwood really had needed help, he could’ve gone in and asked for her to hold the boards for him, but…

Wolfwood breezed past Vash. “Alfredo or marinara?” he mused, taking an indulgent bite of the donut he’d snagged, contrary to his prior statement. Not enough to spoil his dinner, but just enough to tease. He licked his lips and added, “If you don’t choose fast, I’m choosin’ for ya.”

“Whichever you like more,” Vash said. “Consider it an apology.”

“Spikey, it’s a damn shed fer my own shit.” Wolfwood took another bite of donut he definitely deserved. “Apologize to me by makin’ a damn choice and not makin’ me have to think.”

“Ahh—Alfredo, then, please,” Vash said quickly, scratching the back of his neck. Meryl liked it more, because she liked to wear white and marinara tended to be a hazard. She’d be happier coming home to a not-hazardous dinner. But, ah, marinara was a little easier to make if they were just going to be dumping tomato chunks in a pot, and alfredo required a roux, and they might be low on parmesan…

Wolfwood clapped him on the shoulder when Vash came up to stand beside him. “Good man,” he said. “Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“No…”

Vash was good at many things. One of those things was digging his long, wiggly finger skin-deep into everybody else’s lives; he liked getting to know people on principle, he liked hearing their stories, he liked to learn about their love and what drove them to get up in the morning and maybe, maybe, he liked getting to share a little bit in that love. No matter how old he got, each one still felt special. Sometimes, people asked him if the stories blended together—and his confident answer would always be no, because there’s always something that makes them unique.

So what was it about this—the give and take, the exchange of goods and services, the love and the be-loved—that prevented him from offering something special of his own right back, for this very special man of his?

He was too used to being this way. Too used to… “that”.

Vash followed Wolfwood back into the house and started looking for a bucket of red paint right away.

-

It happened a third time like this:

Vash hoisted his traveling bag up on his shoulder with a hyup! and a satisfied smile. He’d call it a new “getting his shit together” record if he cared to keep track of that sort of detail, but mostly, he was just glad he would be catching the bus on time. It was a short notice kind of trip, so the only two things he’d been worried about were what to not pack and how to time his departure. With both of those neatly taken care of, he started down the stairs and—

“Where are you going, Mister Vash?” Milly Thompson asked brightly, standing in the middle of the entryway with a bowl of steaming water in her hands. Milly said most things brightly, so this was no surprise to Vash; what came more as a shock was how tired she looked despite the brightness, dark circles under her eyes and a haggard hunch to her posture.

Startled into directness, Vash asked, “Are you feeling alright, Milly?”

“Please don’t dodge the question, Mister Vash.” Milly sniffed deeply from her bowl. Vash could catch a whiff of lavender oil from it. “—I inhaled a cloud of pollen on accident while cleaning Miss John-Polo’s yard.” True to character, she still gave him a wobbly smile. “I’m a little… stuffy today.”

Vash gave her the answer she wanted without much fanfare; a sick Milly was rare, but a sleep-deprived Milly was more commonplace with her writing habits. He knew that the little angel of patience perched on her shoulder tended to conveniently take its PTO whenever she ended up low on hours, and Vash didn’t think it would be wise to push her.

“Lina’s finally graduating from her middle school,” Vash said, referring to how they’d only just finished reconstructing the building. In Lina’s words: she was an eighth grader for way too long. To talk to Milly, he kept his voice a lot quieter than Lina’s had been in that moment. “She just called to ask me to come and stand in for the ceremony, since Sheryl’s still having those muscle spasms in her legs.”

“Oh,” Milly said. “Just this morning, Mister Vash?”

Vash shrugged. “Ehh… about fifteen minutes ago?”

Milly’s eyes, cloudy as they were, widened. “That’s on real short notice.”

“I know, I know,” Vash said. “I’ll be back before you know it, really. It’s not a big deal. Or it is a big deal—to Lina, that is. I don’t want to be late for her again.”

Milly licked her lips, slow to process his words. Her nose wrinkled at the taste of lavender on her tongue. “Do you… want any of us to come with you?” she asked at last. “Did you tell Miss Meryl? Or Mister Wolfwood?”

“Not quite yet,” Vash said sheepishly, putting a shushing finger to his lips. “Mind letting them know where I’m off to once they’re awake so they don’t worry too much? Didn’t wanna disturb them.”

“They’re always going to worry, Vash,” Milly said. Ah, oops—there went his usual epithet. That meant it was time for serious Milly. “You shouldn’t just leave without telling them where you’re going.”

“Ah… sorry, Milly,” Vash said. He at least owed her another use of her name with no nonsense, matching her soft blow for soft blow. “Guess I’m just not used to having someone to tell.”

Milly gave him a look. A heavy, tired look, not the kind of look he’d ever expect to see on a face like hers, but Vash also knew better than to expect only the expected when it came to Milly Thompson. She surprised him in ways he never thought he could ever be surprised. She caught him off guard faster than the few old gunmen who’d ever rivaled him. He was never bored of how she kept him on his toes, though sometimes it could get…

“—I do wish you’d try and get used to it a little bit faster, Mister Vash,” Milly said to him. It felt imploring, hopeful. It made Vash feel guilty. It made Vash feel loved. “We don’t mean to rush you. But it can be… difficult, sometimes.”

“For them?” Vash asked her.

“And for me,” said Milly. “We’ll wait, of course. But that doesn’t mean it… doesn’t hurt.” Then, she sighed, a slow exhale out through her clogged nose that ended on a struggling wheeze. “…When do you think you’ll be back?”

Vash put the guilt and the love and the hope and the feelings all into a little box. It was Thursday. The graduation was on Friday. Lina would say she hated him if he left right after and didn’t spend Saturday with her to catch up on all they’d missed of each other. “Ehh—Sunday?” Vash scratched his chin. He knew Milly was watching the lazy movement, eyes honed in on his mannerisms to try and find… anything, really. Anything real. Vash didn’t know how to give it to her. He didn’t know if there was anything to give her. “Monday…?” He shrugged helplessly. “You know how the buses have been lately. Cancelled, cancelled, rescheduled, cancelled. It’s way too hectic these days!”

“I do, Mister Vash.” Milly nodded. The bobbing of her head kept going long after she spoke those four words; up, down, up, down, her eyelids fluttering with it. There was a smile on her face when she finally said, “I hope you have fun. Please say hi to Lina for all of us.”

“Thank you,” Vash said quietly, and he hoped she knew just how much he meant it.

That sentiment, if anything about him, was real. Gratitude that they’d wait for him if need be. Relief that he could find them again once the dust settled. The cautious re-approach was an old dance Vash knew all too well, and it was one he was good at—but it didn’t mean it was one he loved to follow. The knowledge that he’d be approaching the familiar, however, made the anticipation of the outcome feel more exciting than the tension of the present. The “them” he’d approach had three names now: Milly Thompson, Meryl Stryfe, and Nicholas D. Wolfwood. He’d come back to them. He would. He trusted them. Now he just had to trust himself—and they, him.

(That was always the hard part. Vash could trust in a person, their nature, and what motivated them easily once he got to know them. He’d met enough people to see the patterns that emerged; self-interest at odds with altruism at odds with survival at odds with empathy. Humanity, as a whole, was beautifully predictable in their unpredictability. He loved their abundance of choice. He loved that he could still trust they’d make the kind decision with the thousands upon thousands of cruel ones at their fingertips.

What was difficult for Vash was trusting that they’d trust him; and he knew this was less a poor reflection on them so much as it was a poor reflection on himself. Because of his knowledge, he knew what he looked like to them and their eyes, and what “that” was was untrustworthy. Consistently inconsistent. Reliable as a storm on the horizon on a sunny day. Carrying burdens all by himself, since he was the only one who could. People still loved him despite this, but he knew they knew he was always on a time limit. He had to be able to disappear by nature of his wanted status, and getting to know Vash meant knowing of his bounty’s nature—this nature, his nature, one and the same. The one that meant the closer he got, the looser he had to hold by necessity. For their safety. For his own… peace of mind. Or something.

By necessity. Necessity. Now that his bounty was back, he kept telling himself it was a necessary handicap as much as concealing his prosthetic arm or ensuring his face and hair remained recognizable. Never get stuck, or your permanence might become a liability. What if he found you? What if he found what was important to you? What if he took it away again?

Was it necessary anymore? Millions Knives was dead. Meryl was close to clearing his name with the Earth Forces. Would it always be necessary? Or was he just making excuses—stuck in the familiar, afraid of the change he so loved in humans finally digging its fingers into him?

He wanted to stay. He wanted a small little life. He wanted a pillow to rest his head on at night and a mattress on a creaky bed frame Wolfwood built by hand. He wanted knitted socks with holes worn through the toes Milly made for him and a book to read published by Meryl to sit on his nightstand. He wanted Livio to bring over Melanie’s tomas-meat casserole and for it to be in the fridge for him to snack on at midnight when he couldn’t sleep and he wanted Meryl’s favorite tea in a mug Milly sculpted in her pottery class and to stir sugar into his drink with a spoon Wolfwood carved on an overcast day because they had nothing better to do. And he wanted Luida to bring them mangos from Octovern’s big plant dome and Brad to modify his prosthetic to have a simple multitool instead of a machine gun and he wanted Jessica to not have to worry about hiding her father’s recipe for curry to keep Vash visiting for her cooking, because he’d come and visit just to say hello instead. And he wanted to lose to Razlo at chess again and play with the neighborhood cat and see Lina graduate highschool next and help Sheryl clean her house when her back was too sore and maybe teach another child about the constellations and maybe, maybe, a part of him really wanted to visit Dr. Bond and little Carlito and bake a pie out of his brother’s shitty apples, just to make him angry—angry as hell from the Hell he was certainly making himself the king of. Maybe he’ll leave two slices on the twin, unmarked graves outside of Octovern, one for each of his brother’s fellow damned. Maybe he’ll leave another on an empty plot of churned dirt, shaded by an old cross. He wanted, wanted, wanted.

—He wanted to change to become unchanging. And to be changed by the things that he loved. The paradox-thoughts made his head hurt.)

Vash kept telling himself they’d still be here when he got back, even as the rest of him was struck by the feeling that he’d just done something terribly wrong.

-

It happened a fourth time like this:

“It’s blasphemous!” Meryl Stryfe cried.

It was a nice day outside, for once. Vash sipped the cutesy pink milkshake they’d gotten half-off by holding hands in front of the register. It wasn’t like they’d swindled the café for the treat—they were together, smoochin’ and the likes, but public displays of affection weren’t exactly standard for neither him nor Meryl, unless it got them something for cheaper, and Meryl loved things for cheaper so her money could go towards more important things, like vacations with Milly and nice purses—but Vash still felt a little guilty. Not guilty-guilty, like the other, bigger things Vash was always feeling guilty about, but just enough that whenever he took a drag of strawberry milk and whipped cream he felt… Well, he felt guilty. It tasted like manipulation. Performative romanticism. Oh, woe his moral heart and his desire for private affections. He wondered if Meryl felt the same way.

“Blasphemous,” Vash restates.

Probably not. She was too preoccupied with—

“Don’t they have any respect for their elders? For who started the whole trend of news networks on No Man’s Land?” Meryl’s palms connected with the rickety plastic table. “No! They just think they can march in here, and take over, and—and try to strong-arm the little guy out!”

“I’m not sure if ‘blasphemy’ is the right word…”

(And was she the elder, or the little guy? Those two usually didn’t go hand-in-hand. Vash did not say this, fearing for his life, and his immoral milkshake being knocked off the table.)

“It’s not my fault I’m not funded by the government!” Meryl was, for lack of a kinder word, pissed beyond belief at her current predicament. “There’s no government to fund me! But oh, I’m sure if there was cash lying around, it’d be thrown at my feet by now as thanks for all the hard work we’re doing. Don’t you agree?”

Dutifully, Vash nodded where he thought Milly might’ve had she born witness to the ongoing Stryfe Rant. “Yes. For sure. They’d pay you double-billions.”

“Oh, just you wait! The next time I see that TCNA producer in person, I’m gonna borrow your steel boots to kick him in the crotch!” A determined Meryl was a Meryl on a mission; frighteningly, her missions more often than not ended in resounding success. Even if the success of that mission wasn’t always a good thing. But she sure did succeed. Yeesh. “Biased reporting, he said! That shameless Noman pride, he said! And must be a liar, nobody actually likes living on this dust bowl? Dust bowl?! I’ll have you know, sir, that this dust bowl is very special to quite a lot of—”

“The milkshake’s really good,” Vash said, pushing it towards her, and praying she wouldn’t recognize it as an attempt to redirect her wrath away from the TCNA producer’s family jewels.

Meryl latched onto the curly straw with a ferocity that would’ve scared a lesser man and sucked.

“—That is good,” she agreed. She then sighed, gusting all of the bravado out of her body and wilting back into her plastic chair. Her cape splayed around her like a sad white blanket. “I’m glad we swindled them for it.”

“You think we swindled them, too?” Vash gasped.

Meryl arched an eyebrow. “Vash, I like holding your hand—don’t make that face—but I don’t make a habit of doing it on command.”

The face in question was an overdramatic curling of his lips, half smile and half hideously whipped giggle. He propped his chin in his hands and wiggled, only a noise short of cooing at her.

“You’re ridiculous,” Meryl scoffed.

“You like holding my hand,” Vash repeated. “Ehe.”

“I’d rather hold your hand than have you grab my cape and get gear grease on the fabric.”

“Ah…” Vash wilted without defending himself, an expert in adding the ‘self’ to the flagellation. “I’m sorry about that, Meryl.”

Meryl, cheeks reddening on cue with a single, deliberately-placed utterance of her name, flapped her hand at him. “I’m joking, Vash.”

When he started to smile, he knew that she knew that he knew she was joking, too.

(Ow. Ouch. Ow. His brain. That was too many layers of ‘knews’ for him to keep track of. This is why he wasn’t in the reporting business with his girls, because that stuff was all rumors and he-knews and she-knews for the battle-hardened writer to wade through. The best Vash could do was tell a long-winded anecdote to keep the heat from reaching him, or anybody else not wearing nonflammable clothing. It was amazing how many thieves or bandits were easily entranced by stories if you told them with enough bravado.)

Catching sight of someone over Meryl’s shoulder, though, Vash gulped. Thinking of thieves and reporters on the same train of thought…

“Um,” Vash said hesitantly, “so about that producer’s crotch meeting my boots.” Meryl, not one for subtly, immediately whipped around to look at what he was looking at before Vash could even say don’t turn around. “Aha… Guess I’m walking home bare-foot today…”

Meryl inhaled sharply, puffing up like a worm larva trying to scare off a predator twice its size. “Oh, for the love of—”

Vash wrapped one hand (flesh, so he did not get gear grease on her clothes) around Meryl’s wrist and one hand (metal, very carefully) around their milkshake and bolted for the inside of the café.

Outside, a TCNA van was parked by the general store across the intersection, and a horde of Terrans with cameras was pouring out of the back doors. Really, Vash counted more than eighteen people in the crew—and they’d all come out of that one little van like it was some sort of Earthy clown car. Two people in particular caught Vash’s eye: the first was a face he recognized from TV, the network’s favorite blonde news anchor named Evelyn Shine, and the second was the producer Meryl had beef with. Extremely bad beef. The only reason Vash recognized the man—because he wasn’t exactly a TV personality nor an outward-facing newscaster or anything of the sort—was because Meryl had a stack of his photographs printed out that she brought to the gun range whenever she wanted to practice with her Derringers. His face, when it wasn’t riddled with .22 short caliber bullet holes, wasn’t half-bad. But he reeked of that Terran businessman grime, even through the tinted windows of the café. No wonder he’d pissed off Vash’s neat and tidy Insurance Girl so much.

With the front of his duster in a vice grip and her other arm around his waist, Meryl fit nicely against his side. Like a limpet on a rock. Or the galaxy’s strongest magnet inflicted upon his poor little scrap of iron. Vash thought the surprise was why she cooperated so readily with his no-warning escape, until she herself started shoving him with the same force into a corner of the café away from the windows faster than Vash could drag her. The young barista behind the counter watched them squabble for a hiding place they could still see out from with a baffled expression on their face.

“Just our luck,” Meryl grumbled, half to herself and half to him, fumbling to remove her cape with one hand. The other was still stubbornly clinging to one of the straps of his coat, like she was expecting him to bolt a second time—and that time would be without her in tow. She continued to speak in a whisper, though there weren’t any other patrons to disturb; everybody else visiting the café for half-off milkshakes was sitting outside in the nicer-than-usual weather. “Pain in the ass—it’s probably the photos from the potluck last week that brought them here.” Finally, she managed to throw her cape over his head, and Vash yelped. “I told Becky not to share those around. The bit of good PR we got wasn’t worth a damn.”

“They were good photos,” Vash’s cape-covered silhouette said, blending in with the cream-colored wallpaper. “You were dressed real nice.”

“And I told you not to dress in red for a reason, you—you—” Meryl cut herself off with a heavy sigh. “Oh, forget it. Mika?”

Vash saw Mika, the barista who was definitely listening in on every word they were saying, jump to attention through a slit in Meryl’s cape. It was not like they had much else to do in an empty café, but come on. At least don’t look so guilty when you get caught eavesdropping.

“Yes, ma’am?” Mika asked.

(Most fans of Meryl and Milly’s show took to calling Meryl ma’am whenever they met her in public, just like Milly did. Her name was hardly ever uttered in the show, after all, because all of Meryl’s intense energy got poured into her stories rather than how she looked while telling them. Vash and Meryl met people in public who called Meryl ma’am with a dedication that surpassed even Vash’s avoidance of the heavy-topic-that-was-names. He couldn’t get a read on whether she liked it or not—but she’d always make sure to respond kindly, because most of the time, it was coming from a place of respect, and not the other way around.)

“Do you have any hidden rooms in your kitchen for a stowaway?” Meryl asked. “Or better yet, a storage freezer with a very strong door?”

Mika, tentatively, nodded. “The first one, ma’am,” they said. Vash watched their eyes flick back and forth between him and Meryl, parsing what elements of the situation they were meant to be privy to. “Freezers are expensive. But we do have a pantry with a lock.” With any luck, they’d draw the ol’ reliable not-my-problem conclusion that customer service representatives were forced by God’s cruel hands and also Marshall Field to specialize in for their own good. “A part-timer kept stealing the rum for the bread puddings. So we had to start storing it in a more secure location…”

“And would you say you’re a good liar, Mika?” Meryl asked.

“…No,” Mika admitted glumly.

Meryl patted Vash’s shoulders in-lieu of patting Mika’s shoulder across the room—both shoulders at the same time, like she was trying to clap and he was simply in the way. “Well, we’ve made better endings out of worse odds. And we’ve managed it before with no collateral. This should be a breeze.”

“No collateral…” Mika echoed. “As in… damage?”

Meryl, the skilled businesswoman that she could’ve been—had she been a little bit less morally-upright and a little more Earthman-grubby—brushed away the concern in Mika’s voice with a delicate wave of her hand. Mika squeezed their eyes shut, pursed their lips, and resigned themself to their upcoming Channel-1 Broadcast-ed fate. Vash thought there were worse fates they could’ve had, including but not limited to his own in the next five minutes.

“Vash,” Meryl said firmly, reaching up and up and up to wrap her cape properly around his neck, “find that pantry and stay out of sight for a little while. I’ll put on a show and distract them.” A nasty smirk split her face in half, wholly at-odds with the supportive reassurance in her tone. Or it wasn’t at-odds, and she was just supportively reassuring him that she was about to be really, really nasty to a TV producer—on his behalf! Partially. There was maybe about a fifty-fifty split between Vash and Meryl’s ego. “They’ll trust my word as a fellow reporter, even if we’re competitors—I can send them running in any direction I want.”

Okay, no, Vash the Stampede, let’s be realistic, here; it was most likely that Meryl’s behavior was point-zero-five percent on behalf of keeping Vash un-filmed by her competitors (who, mind you, were sponsored by the people who wanted to arrest him for saving the known galaxy from his genocidal brother), another point-zero-five percent for her own vindictive satisfaction (an emotion which Meryl rarely allowed herself to indulge in, but when she did, ho-boy did she binge), and ninety-nine percent on Milly’s behalf—because Evelyn Shine once called Milly’s natural shade of dirty blonde hair “dull” while on air, and Meryl, honest to God, had looked at the TV like she wanted to kill her in cold blood. The only reason Meryl didn’t get around to killing Miss Shine in cold blood was because she deliberately chose to preoccupy herself with holding Wolfwood back from killing Miss Shine in cold blood. It was fortunate for Vash the Stampede that their interpersonal bickering eventually led to the abatement of their intrapersonal killing intents, because he would’ve had a terrible time reckoning with saving the life of a person who’d insulted Milly Thompson.

Vash was still Vash, though, and he disliked collateral even more so than their eavesdropping barista, so he told Meryl: “Hey, not the sandworm fields.”

“—What?” Meryl gaped at him. “How did you know?”

“I thought of the nastiest place you could send them and worked backwards from there,” Vash said. “You’re much more predictable than you think you are, sometimes.”

She could be a little wrathful, Vash’s Insurance Girl. That’s where she could be a little predictable. And while she tempered those impulses to the best of her ability, Vash stood by his earlier assessment; a Meryl on a mission was a Meryl who saw her plans through, even if it meant changing direction midway from boot-to-crotch to news-van-into-angry-worm-maw.

—Meryl was still a very, very kind woman, and capable of wonderful things. He swore it. Even if his internal monologue tended to sport as much fear as it did awe of her.

“Vash, listen to me. Wait for me to come find you,” Meryl said. Her full-length cape was more like a capelet around his shoulders, but he supposed it would help to conceal about thirty percent of his bright redness. “I’ll let you know when the coast is clear, and then we can head home and lay low for a few days.” She sighed then, and Vash caught a glimpse of what he thought must’ve been tiredness in her expression. Not physical fatigue, per say, but… “Better safe than sorry, I know.”

Her cape smelled like jasmine-scented fabric softener. Would it be weird to stick his nose in the collar? It was a nice fabric softener. He should start using it on his button-downs. “‘Kay, Meryl,” Vash said. 

“Ask Mika to lock the door to the pantry just in case they barge in here. They’ll help you; you’re a polite, reliable regular, and that means a lot in this business.”

Vash smiled at her. “I know, Meryl.”

Meryl gave him a weird look. Her shoulders, squared and solid with all the earned confidence of Gunsmoke’s finest reporter, suddenly seemed a gust of wind away from caving in. Her arms rose up to wrap around her own elbows. How small her silhouette was, without the fluttering white fabric and the raised collar to protect the back of her neck from the suns, struck him in the same place that guilt tended to bury the knife; Vash’s throat bobbed before she could even say her first word of protest.

“Vash,” Meryl said quietly, “are you still going to be here once I clean this up?”

“I trust that you’ve got this handled,” Vash told her.

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I really do trust you,” Vash insisted. “I know just how good at dealing with them you are.” In fact, he knew nobody better at it, except maybe Luida. Running circles around Terran diplomats had become something of a hobby that Meryl and Luida had bonded over, and they’d shared stories a mere month ago over tea and Jessica’s scones. They were firmly tied on average, but Meryl had a way with the Terran entertainment sector while Luida did better handling pedantic legalities. But Vash knew that Meryl knew that Vash—oh, whatever. “It’s your new specialty, isn’t it? Insurance in the life before, newscasting in the next.”

“You don’t trust the Earth Forces, though,” Meryl filled in for him.

(In every way that he could predict her, she, too, could predict him. She’d been in his head for God’s sake, and it wasn’t even her fault; it was his, back in Dragon’s Nest, when his feathers tore into her brain and carved his untold story into the soft gray matter. When he’d first met Meryl Stryfe, he’d had a feeling that she’d end up learning every single little detail about his life, one way or another. She would dig it up; she would find dirt on him, and he wouldn’t be able to stop her from sating her curiosity and from giving her kindness. Was it an unpleasant feeling? Incredibly so. It did not endear Meryl Stryfe to him at the onset, and it made him want to keep her at two or three arm’s lengths instead of the usual one. People like Meryl with a nose for trouble combined with trouble’s own nose for Vash were a bomb waiting to blow if they spent too much time in his immediate vicinity. He knew, as surely as he knew she’d come to know him in ways he hadn’t been known in over a century, that she’d also be hurt by this knowing.

But did he want her to learn like that? No, no he didn’t. It wasn’t a proportional consequence of her actions; it felt like a narrative punishment.

Sometimes, Vash wished that he could’ve gathered the courage and had the chance to tell her with his own voice before it’d been forced upon her. Maybe Dragon’s Nest wouldn’t have been so traumatizing if she had known even a little about him before knowing all at once; a story of a scar, a connection in a past life, a name of importance like Rem Saverem. He could have softened the blow for her if he’d given an inch from the onset, drip-fed her a few miles over the course of their companionship. She should’ve had an opportunity to learn his story intentionally, with both hers and his dignity intact. Let her brace herself for the pain he’d lived through. It wasn’t an excuse—just an observation from the safety of the retrospect.

But he knew better than to think that inch or that mile would’ve scared her off; Meryl kept coming after him, again and again, even after the distance she had to cover to know him had turned into a marathon. Even when he didn’t deserve that kind of patient tenacity.

He had expressed this to her before, and Meryl told him she wouldn’t have called it a matter of his courage. She was a much more introspective woman than she used to be, and she had even apologized to him right at the beginning of the conversation. She hadn’t considered his feelings before she’d gotten to know him. She’d made assumptions, like all human beings do. But she also said that she never, ever wanted him to think that she’d gotten in over her head with him and his “natural disaster of a life” on accident. She had chosen to be there for him, and every step she took was another affirmation that she wanted to be there for him. It had become a matter of personal conviction from the first time she’d seen him risk his own safety to save a person.

“—I wish I could forget so you could tell me about her yourself,” Meryl had said to him, in a midnight-black room with his hand clasped between hers. “I want to know what words you’d use to describe her.”

The sheets they slept on didn’t smell like jasmine-scented fabric softener; she hadn’t started buying that brand yet. Vash didn’t remember exactly what they smelled like, so his core memory supplied him with the faint scent of geraniums, the oldest relic in his olfactory periphery.

“I just wish that you could forget,” Vash had replied, and felt cruel after it hung in the air between them.

Not because he didn’t want her to know, but because he knew what knowing did to her. He knew what it was like for her to remember experiences that didn’t belong in her mind. She knew his aches, his pains, and his nightmares; she woke up to all three when they blurred too much at the edges. Her confusion, which bled away into distress and fear, when she recognized a person or place that she shouldn’t have. How she would suppress a flinch when the plantsong from the local dome got too loud.

And even with those seven clumsy words, eight messy syllables, and dozens of opportunities for Meryl Stryfe to reflect on all the ways he’d tried to push her away and conclude that her efforts to bridge his gap just weren’t worth it, she still stayed. And he knew, that she knew, that he knew, that she knew…

That he felt selfish for the comfort their reality brought him.)

“…If they do come into the café, I’ll feel better if I can get out of here instead of trapping myself, you know?” Vash said. It felt logical to appeal that way. Meryl understood logic, and she’d be called by that logic to understand where he was coming from, even if she didn’t appreciate the brush-off. “I’ll come back and find you. You can do your thing without any worries for me, Insurance Girl.”

Meryl’s foot tapped an unhappy staccato rhythm on the tiled floor. “I’m trying to help you so you don’t have to worry, Vash. I know it’s not a flawless plan, but it’s…”

“I trust you, Meryl.”

“That’s not what I’m—oh, nevermind.” Meryl pinched the bridge of her nose. She knows, he knows. The words were supposed to be comforting; they weren’t supposed to make him feel sick to his stomach. Maybe it was time for Vash to reevaluate exactly what knowing meant to him. “It doesn’t matter right now.”

“Sorry,” Vash said, even though she already knew.

Meryl adapted to him, like she always did. She began to shove at him from behind, planting both hands against the small of his back and shoving him in the direction of the café counter. “Go! Go hide in the stupid kitchen!” For all the show she made of pushing him, there was very little force behind the action. She was just… leaning against him. A gentle, but insistent weight, light enough for him to scoop up with a single arm. “For cryin’ out loud, move it already!”

Vash craned his neck back to look at her. “I still feel like I need to say it,” he said. She was tucked too closely to him; even when he stretched, he couldn’t see her face. “Even when I’m pretty sure you know…”

He almost made another promise, right then and there, when he felt her forehead touch the space between his shoulderblades. It was only through that point of contact that he could feel the weary, frustrated trembling she was trying desperately to control. Meryl wanted to do more for him, and it was killing her that she couldn’t. Vash’s throat felt tighter than her grip on his jacket; the comparison was further solidified when he slipped away from her, and he didn’t even have to pull.

In the world Vash lived, a balled fist was not meant to be easier to unwind than a lump of guilt blocking his airway. One was all in the head; the other was all in the swing of the arm and the body following through. Fists were how other people kept themselves alive; guilt was how Vash the Stampede kept… something. Maybe he couldn’t identify what yet because it wasn’t as simple as “just guilt.” There was a cocktail of “somethings” to be shaken, and he had the recipe on hand, but no ice and no water and no liquor and no limes and no customers left in the bar and he was drinking alone.

—Vash was drinking alone.

“You’d better go somewhere I can find you,” Meryl Stryfe whispered, face angled towards the floor.

“I’ll try,” Vash said.

“Try hard.” Hard; not harder. The subtlety of the distinction was not lost on him, or how she meant for it to shape her ask. Meryl would not look at him. “Please.”

Vash nodded, and then turned and walked straight past the pantry and out the back of the café, like he knew she knew he would.

-

It happened a fifth time like this:

“Miss Thompson, I think you’re dropping stitches,” Vash said.

“Dropped stitches add character,” Milly said confidently. “Grandma Angie always says you should keep at least three dropped stitches in a project, because it’ll make you be more careful with what you end up knitting. If you don’t wanna unravel it, you’ll be nice to it, and planning from the get-go to be nice means it’ll last longer than a perfect piece you’re so sure you can roughhouse with.”

“Very logical, Miss Thompson,” Vash amended, dropping a stitch immediately to show just how much he believed her. “I’ll defer to your expertise on the matter.”

Milly giggled and poked her foot into his side. “I am teaching you, aren’t I?” She held up her knitting; Vash held up his own mirror-knitting back. “—It looks really good so far, Mister Vash. You’ve got the skills of an old lady, minus the old and minus the lady.”

“Oi, is that a compliment?” Vash asked.

A genuine-article old lady’s voice joined in at that moment, creaky and tired yet loaded with opinions: “It’s a terrible, terrible insult, young man,” Milly’s great-aunt Tabitha, in the big armchair across the living room, piped up. Young man. Heh. Oh, if only, great-aunt Tabitha. “Who would ever want skills with no ladies to go with them?”

Vash glanced over at Milly, who suddenly looked very, very ashamed of what she’d said. Her expression had crumpled, her smile drooping and her eyebrows drawing together to form a distraught crease. The whole sight of her gained a sad little wobble.

With the faux-gravitas of a levitation plant, Vash said, “I think she might be right about that, Miss Thompson.”

Milly sniffled like she was about to cry. It didn’t sound like a true Milly-sniffle, though—too much nostril-flaring, not enough nose-wrinkling, and altogether dry of tears—so Vash was quite confident he was in the clear to spin the joke a little further. Just a little, though. Shouldn’t risk getting too wild with it. His pride was in the middle of this conversation’s road for a-tramplin’, after all, and Milly had a knack for accidentally nailing his ego like an all-star pitcher wearing a blindfold.

“I’m sorry, Mister Vash. I do believe in your lady skills, I never meant to imply otherwise.”

Vash pursed his lips.

Milly’s lips pursed back.

“You can believe me, honest,” she continued. “You’ve got a very impressive resume, Mister Vash, I’ve seen it. We can’t forget that your lady-skills did manage to transcend the known limits of lady-skills and snag Mister Wolfwood.”

—And then she giggled, and Vash started to giggle as well, and Tabitha sighed as Milly dropped more and more stitches in her knitting because she was giggling too much to hold her needles steady. C'est la vie, Vash would’ve said to her, if he wasn’t too busy laughing into a knuckle and trying not to lose more of his work-in-progress to the cruel and unfeeling (warm and kind) that’s-life in question.

“He’d make a very good old lady.” Milly twinkled when she laughed, like stars on a clear night. “Much better than either of us at knitting socks.”

—To make a pair of socks, one must start with a set of circular needles. What size of needles formed that circle was up to the maker, but the project began in a rather familiar way to Vash the Stampede, who’d started making a hat once a few decades ago when he was on a really long bus ride and thought it counted as experience. Would the socks be ribbed, smooth, or textured? Would he add a fun little criss-cross design by knitting and pearling? Would he make them ankle-height, calf, or knee socks? All of the customizations made him dizzy and excited and terrified and gleeful, and also served to remind him why he owned a singular iconic coat and stuck to it. So many options. So many paths to the future. At least Milly had already directed him to pick out the color with that deft decisiveness of hers—a soft, sweet, gentle baby blue.

Milly would also be taking over for him by the time he hit the heel, though that probably wouldn’t be happening any time soon. His stitches might’ve been old-lady-good, but he was no racing tomas when it came to speed. Knitting heels was more complicated than knitting a tube, so he’d leave it to Milly’s expertise, and then he’d take the sock back and finish off the arch and the toes and the—the tie-off? Or was that crochet? Too many hobbies, too much free time, not enough bounty hunters hauling ass to catch his ass. That’s modern Vash the Stampede for ya. What a time to be alive.

And it was not like Vash wasn’t any good at knitting—he actually found that he took to it quite well, deft gunman’s hands and all the micro-repairs he’s had to perform to make a bullet-proof duster last for years under his many belts—but the socks were going to be a gift and the recipient had a thing about seams. Fondly, and with all the understanding in the world, Vash knew that the socks would never get worn if they itched in the wrong places or dug into her feet when she wore them in her shoes.

Scooting without the help of her hands, Milly shimmied closer to Vash so she could properly compare their knitting. Her shoulder wedged itself between his and the couch, and her loose hair tickled his neck as she gobbled up his personal space. Vash went limp like an eel to accommodate more of her, weak-willed and willing to give her anything she wanted to take.

“It does look really good, Mister Vash,” Milly said to him, laying her knitting overtop of his to make sure that the width of the socks was still the same. Two different people with two different styles following the same pattern didn’t always create the same result—tightness of stitches, how they held their needles, and how much tension was in their yarn were a few causes that came to mind—but him and Milly were similar enough that the two tubes of yarn were like little clones of each other. Temperament and approach and opinions. It was nice. She got him, and he got her, though it took some effort at times. The effort was the “nice” part; the deliberateness of getting to know someone beyond the assumptions you made about them based on your own experiences was always a rewarding, if not a constant, everyday process.

Vash let the warmth in his gut melt out through his squinty, smiling eyes. Milly Thompson’s goodness tended to turn him into a bit of a preachy bastard on the inside, even if it didn’t all make its way out of his mouth. He had a gut feeling that she knew—and if she didn’t know know, she at least had an inkling of it, and would figure it out in due time.

“Thank you, Miss Thompson,” he said. “I learned from the best, after all.”

Milly dropped her knitting to cover his mouth with her palms, then squeaked when it started sliding off the needle. Hurriedly, she said, “Oh, dear, you can’t let Tabbie overhear that—she’s a terrible gossip, you know, she’ll start telling Angie that I’m trying to take her hard-earned title just to get her riled up at the next family function.” She tried desperately to hook the loops of yarn back on her needles, whining when one row started to come undone. “—Oh, beans.”

Vash made a finger-gun with his hand and pointed it at his own baby blue tube, being comparatively more well-behaved than Milly’s. Has being well-behaved ever spared someone the wrath of the Humanoid Typhoon? No, never.

“I’ll undo a row in solidarity with you, if you’d like.”

“Please don’t,” Milly said desperately. “Meryl’s birthday is just too close, Mister Vash. We can’t risk being late because I—”

“Aunt Milly,” a kid behind the couch suddenly interrupted.

Milly and Vash looked up in unison to see little Bobby, all not-quite-four-feet of him, peeking over the back of the couch to look at Milly with big, imploring blue eyes. Most of Milly’s relatives had the same or similar eye colors, kept within a standard range of Thomspon blues and mossy green-browns; this kid was no exception, though his were lighter and bluer than most of his siblings, so Vash found being subject to his stare just a tad unnerving. Most of the people with bright blue eyes like that that Vash knew were Independents. But, hey, it’s not like he knew a lot of those, and he knew a hell of a lot of human people that also happened to have really bright blue eyes. Just not… human people that stared at him like he’d personally betrayed them on some profound, cosmic level. Well, that wasn’t a great feeling.

(Jesus, he knew Milly’s little nieces and nephews were protective of her, and he knew kids could be dramatic, but they didn’t have it out for Wolfwood like they did for Meryl and Vash. Meryl and Vash were always targeted at family functions by the kids for taking Milly away from the Thompson family. No matter how nice they played, they still had a gaggle of tiny little enemies with tiny little fists that were primed to throw tiny little punches at their legs. But, oh, no, they loved Wolfwood. Vash could roughhouse with them for hours until they’d all collapsed from exhaustion, and Meryl could bring them complimentary radios and do her show host voice on command, but they remained public enemy numbers 1 and 2 while Wolfwood could stroll up empty-handed to a cookout and pick up a kid by the scruff and be adored.

—Vash couldn’t quite blame them for that one, though. Nicholas D. Wolfwood was pretty easy to adore.)

Ahh, whatever. Unfortunate coincidences. Outta the kid’s control. Vash made a conscious effort to loosen the tension that’d appeared in his shoulders.

“Yes, Bobby?” Milly replied—before remembering that her sister Pam, Bobby’s mother, was always on his case about interrupting people, and that Milly should also contribute to teaching the boy to not cause a ruckus early, but at least he was waiting to speak right now— “Did you and Cassie need something?”

“Aunt Milly,” the kid repeated, trying his best to convey a serious and commanding air at his little age of six, “you said you’d come play Shark Tag with us last time you were here, and then you didn’t, so you promised you’d play with us next time, and now it’s next time, and you’re still not playing with us.”

Vash asked, “What’s Shark Tag?”

“Bobby,” Milly replied just as seriously, “I’m teaching Mister Vash how to knit right now. He’s making a right sock, while I’m making a left sock. I can’t just stop making my sock while he continues, or Miss Meryl won’t end up with a full set ready for her birthday, now, would she? You can’t just gift someone one sock, that’s improper.”

Oh, Milly, perceptive Milly, and her occasional glaring blind spots that stemmed solely from her deep and abiding love for her family, and her faith in the kindness they extended to her extending also to other people without her last name. Dropping Meryl’s name in conversation with a Thompson cousin was like throwing chum into a pool of Sharks (Tag). Meryl’s problem with the kids was that she didn’t know how to baby-talk, so she talked to them like they were little mini-adults; though the majority of kids would actually love this, because they typically thought it meant you respected them, the Thompson kids were too smart. They could sense Meryl’s fear, smell it on her clipped syllables; they knew that she wasn’t talking to them like that because she wanted to, but because it was the only way she could. Which meant she was an easy target, and the “T” in Thompson sure didn’t stand for “tact.” They’d swarm, mercilessly and without developed-frontal-lobe restraint, even on Meryl’s birthday.

“Can’t you teach him later?” Bobby whined.

“He likes lots and lots of guidance,” Milly said. “And it’s my first day off in a while.” She patted Vash’s leg. “I haven’t gotten to see him very much since we started filming the second season. It makes me miss him terribly.”

“Aww,” Vash said. “I’ve missed you too, Milly.”

“Eww,” said Bobby.

“Don’t ‘ew’ your aunt, Bobby,” Tabitha snapped from her armchair.

Bobby regarded Vash with newfound distaste, up and down from his face to his own socked feet. Vash’s hair was getting to that floppy length—the one where it was a bit too long to spike upwards in the style he liked, because it was too heavy and gravity would pull it down too quickly for the amount of effort he put into his appearance—and he hoped it made him look less threatening. Maybe like a nice, sad little puppy, that really loved Miss Thompson just as much as the rest of her relatives and had a decent and reciprocated claim to her heart, instead of a thief’s propensity for spiriting away with innocent maidens. Vash flopped his hair for effect by bobbing his head as he waited for Bobby’s inevitable tiny fist to his dignity.

“I’ve seen your face on wanted posters,” Bobby said to Vash finally. “Are you a criminal?”

Vash laughed, accustomed to this kind of conversation with children. Lots of them saw the people on wanted posters as one-dimensional bad guys that the big, strong government was responsible for putting away; Vash, ever the two-sided soul, saw it as an opportunity to teach them about nuance. It didn’t bother him anymore to be on the receiving end of that kind of accusation. “Well, that depends on who you ask!” he told Bobby.

Bobby glared at him and his non-answer. He then turned to Milly, scowling as he said, “If you don’t come play with me, I’ll turn your criminal boyfriend in.”

“Hey now, that’s not very fair,” Vash said, letting go of his knitting to hold up placating hands. Wow, testy kid. Didn’t even leave him any room for a probing statement about cover-ups and frame jobs to get him thinking about the cruel mistress that was propaganda. “Can’t you at least call me an outlaw? It sounds more dashing than criminal.” He looked over his shoulder at Milly to add, “Don’t you think I’m dashing, Miss Thompson? Back me up here.”

—Milly, unlike Vash, was extremely bothered.

In the few seconds that it took for Bobby to utter his ultimatum and for Vash to brush it off as an everyday matter, Milly Thompson had lunged to her feet, and was looming all six feet of herself over her little cousin with an anger in her eyes that rarely escaped to see the outside world. Her knitting had fallen to the wayside along with the abrupt release of her carefully-controlled fury, and Bobby shrank away from the couch, more startled than afraid. It was difficult to identify Milly’s pure anger from her upset, because she was a crier that shed tears in response to almost any strong emotion. Even now, her face was flushing with the tell-tale sign of sobs on the way, and her eyes were as glassy as they were furious.

“Bobby!” Milly shouted. “Apologize, right now!”

Vash caught her quickly, seeing out of the corner of his eye as Tabitha scurried out of the room. He snatched up their discarded knitting and placed it safely on the coffee table, then stood up beside her and put an arm between Milly and her nephew.

Milly rounded on him before Vash could even utter a word. “—And don’t you say it, Mister Vash!”

Bobby bolted the moment Milly’s eyes left him, though she hardly seemed to notice nor care. Her focus was on latching onto Vash’s inner arm and shoulder and steadying her own shaking with his perfectly still form. Vash’s mouth opened and closed like a fish, going over the options he could’ve chosen from. ‘It’s fine’ was off the table, because it was probably what she’d predicted he was going to say anyway, and thus so was ‘it’s not a big deal’; a playful challenge for Bobby, like ‘you don’t even know the Earth Federation’s phone number!’ wouldn’t be appropriate considering the state Milly was in, either. What did he have left? He’d already used up his usual ‘that’s not fair,’ as well as his evasive and probing questions he liked to utilize to dissipate the heat in the room with a broader topic of conversation. Can’t go all-in on your hatred for Vash the Stampede if you’re also busy thinking about the morality of Gunsmoke’s bounty culture. Did Milly expect him to change the subject? To go back to knitting? To put all of this in a little box and—and dismiss it?

—Well. He was quite good at all of that.

“I know what you’re going to say, Mister Vash, because you always say it.” Milly kept talking before he could. Really, Vash thought, it was probably for the best that she did. “You’re going to forgive him after you find something, anything you agree on, because it’s an easy way to get people to see eye to eye. Because you always do. But he should know better than to say that to you!” Vash twiddled his thumbs, one metal, one flesh, eyes on the ceiling. Milly kept talking. She had a sweet voice on a good day, but today wasn’t a good day. “It’s not your fault! It’s not fair to treat you like you can just be—” and she was sniffling now, full-on proper Milly sniffles, and these were not faked, “—tossed, or turned in, or shoved to the side!”

“It’s okay, Milly,” Vash managed to say when she had to inhale twice to steady her voice. “It’s really okay. I’m not upset.”

“I’m upset!”

“Okay,” Vash agreed. He could see that. They both could. It didn’t change the fact that he was fine, and he was the one who’d just been told by a child that they’d throw him in jail over Shark Tag. That wasn’t a charitable thought, though, so he didn’t voice it.

“You should be upset!” Milly cried.

Vash thought about his answer. He knew Milly’s eyes were on his face, and he knew not looking back at her face was a terrible and evasive behavior that’d give her all the wrong ideas. Collecting himself, Vash sighed, and sank back down into the couch. Milly dutifully followed. She tucked herself up against his side, and it was only when her fingers threaded through his that his gaze left the ceiling and landed on their conjoined hands.

Support in the form of a light squeeze; she wasn’t mad at him. She was mad at the circumstances. She was mad at all the things that Vash regarded with a neutral amount of dissatisfaction, but never with anything stronger than that, because hating what it meant to be Vash the Stampede was like hating the shape of his skeleton, or how his organs fit inside his body cavity. Wasting his precious amount of righteous fury on his own misfortunes wasn’t really Vash’s style. It was just the hand life dealt him; he could either abandon the table entirely, or he could sit down and play his damn best with what he got.

“…Maybe I should be upset,” he agreed, and Milly opened her mouth, but he held up his free hand to ask her to let him finish. “But… Milly, does he know how to dial a phone? Can he reach the wall mount? Does he know who he’d even call?” Vash traced over the back of her hand with his thumb. “I doubt his mum would let him go running down to the station. And even if he did, Sheriff Danny would probably laugh him off. He gets plenty of false Stampede reports every week, not to mention how he never calls any of ‘em in, anyway.” For all they know, the kid didn’t even know the difference between the Federation and the Earth Forces. Gunsmoke’s major powers-that-be had been in a chaotic state of flux ever since the arrival of the Terrans and their giant spaceships with railguns. “I’m sure that even if he meant it, there was no way he could have acted on it. And I think he knew that, too.”

Milly’s cheek landed on his shoulder. He could feel her tracing the shape of his jaw, looking for signs that his teeth might’ve been clenching or his eyebrows were trying not to draw down. “Even if he didn’t mean to go through with it,” she said, shaky yet stern, “he needs to understand that words can hurt.”

“Sure,” Vash agreed, “but you know I’m pretty tough, don’t you?”

Milly frowned at him when he flexed his free arm and simpered like a show-off. Couldn’t see many of his muscles through his sweater, but they were totally still there, he swore it. A retired Typhoon was still a Typhoon with an intense early-morning workout routine, except now it was conducted in his designated exercise space instead of a variety of hotel rooms across the planet.

(His “designated exercise space” came into existence a mere single time after he tried working out in their shared bedroom, and Meryl ended up hunched over the toilet retching at the smell. She’d thought it was the eggs in the fridge gone bad; when Wolfwood informed her that, no, it was in fact one of the idiots she’d willingly chosen to co-habitate with turning himself into a sweaty biohazard in the name of gettin’ gains, she’d looked even more embarrassed than Vash himself felt in that moment, and had promptly curled up into a little ball and refused to talk to anybody but Milly for the rest of the day.)

“…That’s not the point, Vash,” Milly said.

Vash laughed helplessly. “I know, Milly.”

“If you know, why do you even say it?”

Vash ran his tongue over his teeth, tilting his head to the side. One of his legs bent and brought his knee to his chest, an idle movement of comfort as he considered. “I can go play with him. Change his mind about me,” he said at last. “If I become his favorite, he wouldn’t even think about turning me in ever again, eh?”

Never mind that Milly wasn’t asking for a solution. Never mind that it was the antithesis of what she felt should have been.

Milly exhaled sharply through her nose. Snotty as she was, it sounded a little gross.

“…Milly?” Vash tried.

“I still don’t like it, Mister Vash.”

She didn’t specify what. “I don’t like that you have to be the one to fix it,” could’ve been what she meant. “I don’t like that you think it’s your responsibility when it wasn’t your fault,” was another line of thought he could imagine her expressing. “I don’t like that you still aren’t upset. I don’t like how much I can tell you’re used to this.”

“…It’s my family,” she added eventually, and Vash realized he must’ve landed on D: All of the above. “I never thought that they, too, would be…”

In the very, very large crowd of people willing to hurt you.

“Aha, well,” Vash said, scratching the back of his neck, “I don’t really bother taking it personally anymore, you know?”

Milly didn’t answer him. She was busy chewing, Vash could tell; on what happened, on his reaction, on a whole number of things all at once. She was sorting through what she knew of her relatives and what she knew of her chosen family, and how the interaction between those two groups could be anticipated. Vash didn’t like the way that, as she worked through her thoughts and feelings, her face began to take on a queasy, green hue.

Wordlessly, Vash handed her knitting back to her, before continuing to work on his own sock. He listened to the clack-clack of her needles as she started on her next row. He tried to focus on that noise instead of the sound of her crying beginning anew.

Vash resolved himself to figure out the heel on his own.

-

It happened a sixth time like this:

Wolfwood hauled him up and out of his seat before Vash’s lips could even touch his glass of whiskey, and Vash whined about it like he’d been slapped.

To navigate a crowded bar with Vash the Stampede in hand, without losing him, was a feat of genius only a well-trained man like Wolfwood could have pulled off. It also got all ten of that genius’ toes stepped on at least once each, and by the time he’d shouldered Vash into the first dark corner they could claim, he was plenty pissed about it. All of his patience had been spent on keeping his hand clamped around Vash’s slippery red bicep and not losing said bicep in the chaos—and as much as Vash could sing songs about Nicholas D. Wolfwood’s other great traits, like his empathy and his nice, shiny hair, "saintly patience” had not RSVP’d to his one-man poetry slam. And dealing with Vash the Stampede in a bar filled to the brim with bounty hunters famously required saintly patience.

It was on the first floor landing of the bar that Vash now found himself, halfway up the stairs and peeking out between two railings to look at the people below. He could see his abandoned glass from here, half-full of amber whiskey and a perfect cube of ice. Somebody was gonna snag it at this rate. Somebody that didn’t do an afternoon’s worth of work for Mister Yancy to get an on-the-house shot of his premium whiskey was gonna get to drink his little treat. When Vash made a mournful sound in his throat and tried to reach between the rails, Wolfwood let out an “Oi!” and dragged him back into the safety of their obscured dark corner.

Wolfwood had looked stressed when they were down in the bar. Above the mass of bodies and raucous clientele, Wolfwood still looked stressed. “Damn it,” Wolfwood hissed. “That guy was supposed to be in prison for brutalizing his bounty.” He was watching one man in particular: a big, balding guy by the exit with a tattoo of a shotgun wrapped around the circumference of his head.

Unfortunately for that guy, nobody warned him before he got his tat that human skulls were round, and shotguns were straight. It made him look pretty damn stupid to have a double-barrel crossing over his forehead like a painted-on sweatband. From a distance, it looked like—what was that goofy haircut called? Vash did his best to recall. He’d pregamed a little out of excitement for that premium shot of whiskey, so it took him about five full seconds instead of one to sift through his memory for what he was looking for. A friar haircut. That was it, big and popular in religious Earth art. Baldie who brutalized his bounty looked like he had a friar haircut, except instead of hair, it was a poorly-planned tattoo of a shotgun. How very Gunsmoke of him.

“That’s the case for a lot of people these days, isn’t it?” Vash observed. He looked around himself; as far as hidden dark corners went, Wolfwood wasn’t too bad at picking them out. They had a boarded-up window nook to their left, and a crooked painting on the wall, and—oh, look, someone’s old gum! It wasn’t too shabby. Vash had hidden in much less pleasant dark corners.

Wolfwood looked at him sideways when Vash started to adjust the crooked painting. “Must’ve broken out recently.”

“Or his prison exploded. That’s the case for a lot of prisons these days, too.” Vash nodded approvingly when he deemed the painting level. “What’s his name, anyways?”

Wolfwood, honest-to-God, winced. A ripple of discomfort passed through his entire body and then coalesced all of its energy into his face. Sporting the new world-record for number of nose wrinkles made with a single expression, Wolfwood replied, “Don’t make me say it.”

Vash whistled. Since the arrival of the Earth fleet, bounty hunters and criminals had been getting more creative with their names; because of the stiff inter-galactic competition, a lot of the more common configurations were already taken. These days, it wasn’t as simple as declaring yourself Gunman George or Rifle Reginald mid-holdup and expecting it to stick. You had to get registered. You had to be memorable. This phenomenon, as seen from Wolfwood’s visceral reaction, had been to the detriment of everyone else’s cringe tolerance.

“Is it really that bad?” Vash asked curiously.

“Oh, it’s bad.”

Well, if Wolfwood said so, it must’ve been; he was just as in-touch with the happenings across No Man’s Land as Meryl, and he made an effort to keep track of the changing things, like big bounty hunters and Noman-Terran disputes. Wolfwood had become something of a fiend for television since their introduction to No Man’s Land. He liked having it on when he was cooking or cleaning; he liked having it on when he was working out. He said that having the droning noise in the background meant he could focus a little better on whatever mundane task he was doing without his mind wandering to another mundane task that needed doing, ‘cause it would latch onto the sound and be “pacified by the stimulation”. He’d complained about finding himself planning grocery lists mid-laundry wash cycle and losing track of whose generic white socks were whose because of it.

(What strange things to complain about. What wonderful things to complain about. Just a year ago, it would’ve been bullet prices and starving to death and the impending apocalypse brought about by Vash’s shithead brother.

Vash knew Wolfwood was too smart and too high-strung on survival to be able to settle down in a quiet place and not find himself looking for a threat he couldn’t find. Habits were hard to break, and Vash wasn’t exactly keen on breaking Wolfwood more than he already had. So he was happy to let Wolfwood have his TV playing at odd-hours of the day, even when it meant Meryl had to enforce “quiet hours” past 11 P.M., and even when it got a little annoying to listen to broadcasts speculating about Vash the Stampede’s love life and the new color of his hair.

—Come on, people. Couldn’t a wanted man have some privacy?)

“Bad like that guy from a couple of months ago?” Vash prodded. “Elvis Hawaii-Tango?” He outlined the reason for the disapproval in his voice with great efficiency: “Didn’t know who Elvis was, didn’t know where Hawaii is, and couldn’t even dance a tango. Talk about false advertising.”

“Bad in the other way,” Wolfwood said.

“The offensive way?” Vash asked. “The hard-to-remember way? The tired-and-overdone cliché way? Come on, Wolfwood, gimme something to work with! There are a lot of ways for a name to be bad.”

“He’s… Quickshot Quincey Q. King,” Wolfwood said, mouth pressing into a firm line. From how hard he was struggling to maintain that grimace, Vash could tell that Wolfwood’s inner twelve-year-old boy was currently engaged in violent and bloody warfare with Wolfwood the grown-ass man. “Allegedly started out as the more traditional Quickdraw, but it got recorded wrong in the books durin’ the arrest. And, well—fella’s gone and embraced it. Unfortunately fer ever’body else.”

Vash knew better than to bet against twelve-year-olds, though, so he said, “Come again?” much like Mister Quincey Q. King’s partners probably did.

Wolfwood’s face twitched. “I’m not sayin’ that shit, Spikey.” Vash could hear him grinding his jaw hard enough to chip his own teeth. “S’frickin’ tongue twister. Too many ‘Q’s’.”

“Sounds like he may be twisting more than tongues with a name like that,” Vash said, throwing another bone to the twelve-year-old.

Wolfwood kind of looked like he wanted to punch him, but was refraining. Vash stared right back, deadly serious about this kind of war.

“It’s a load of TMI, ain’t it? In addition to, you know, another load…”

“Grow up, will you?” Wolfwood said, looking revolted. “Yer way too old for how happy about this y’look.”

“You grow up,” Vash snipped back. “You’re the one who said it was bad in the first place. I’m lying on the ground, and you’re just feeding me the low-hanging fruit by hand at this point.”

“Ugh.”

Wolfwood ugh’d emphatically with his whole body. He fell forwards to smack his forehead against the wall, and his shoulders heaved up and down in a big gust of a sigh. He held the drawn-out ughhhh for a good eight seconds before sobering up, but not before Vash could clap for his performance. Which made Wolfwood kick him. Vash yelped, but kept it quiet when it looked like Wolfwood was gonna lunge again to cover his mouth.

“—There’s a whole damn group of ‘em around King, too,” Wolfwood muttered, joining Vash in a slouch to watch between the railings. He threw one leg over Vash’s, an attempt at securing him in place on the floor. “Brought a posse with him. I recognize a few of the other ones, too—more thrill-seekers than bounty hunters by the looks of ‘em.”

Vash, ever the chronic thorn in Wolfwood’s side, started untying Wolfwood’s neat shoelaces in order to re-tie them into gaudy, girlish bows. “Yeesh. The kinda guys who’ll…?”

“Start frothin’ at the mouth fer a chance to challenge the Humanoid Typhoon to a gunfight,” Wolfwood finished for him. “Just to say they did it. You know, makes ‘em look tougher.”

“My name does carry a lot of weight,” Vash agreed. “I’m famous.” And then, mournfully, he said, “Ahh, what a shame—guess this means it’s time for me to skip town for a little while. Hope they clear out before the Saturday Market…”

The half-hearted sentence was all it took for Wolfwood to laser in on him like a missile on a pre-coded trajectory. Vash, expressing the intent to disappear into the mist; Wolfwood, heat-seeking and impossible to deter. He loomed over Vash with his whole frame and stared holes into him through his sunglasses, mouth parting to start laying into him.

“—Hi, handsome,” Vash cut him off before he could start. “You’re awfully close.”

Wolfwood loomed closer, gripping one of the rails next to Vash’s head. “Shut up, Spikey.”

“I can see all of your nose hairs from here,” Vash said. He tilted his head to the side as if to inspect the inner cavity in question. “They’re still handsome. Kind of.”

“Skip town? Until next Saturday?” It was the third Wednesday of the month. Saturday Markets happened on the fourth Saturdays of every month, and Milly sold her knitting there. Vash liked helping her set up her stall, because her market neighbor was an old lady named Kim who gave out ginger candies. “Why the hell would ya do that?”

“Hey, the Saturday Market is the only place where I can buy Sarai’s salmon-scented soap. I have my priorities straight.”

“No, I don’t think ya fucking do,” Wolfwood said. “And that’s the problem.”

“There’s a whole lot of bounty hunters down there, Wolfwood, and that’s a whole lot of variables for Lady Luck to play with at my expense,” Vash reasoned. “Imagine what sort of heyday Mister Quickshot would have in public if I ran into him at the grocery store tomorrow. Children shouldn’t be subjected to that kind of scene… so I’ll just stay outta the way until they’re gone.”

Affronted, Wolfwood argued, “Spikey, you live here. Don’t accommodate these shitholes.” 

“Well, yeah—that’s why I’ll be comin’ back here,” Vash said with a smile. That felt nice to say. Really, really nice. He knows where he’ll be coming back to! What a luxury. Hadn’t been something within his budget for years. But he didn’t tell Wolfwood any of that, keeping that sad little joy to himself, because it would be more sad than joy to Wolfwood, even if he could relate.

“In more than a week.”
Vash nodded. “Just to be safe,” he said. “Why, you don’t want me to be the next bounty he brutalizes, do you?”

Wolfwood groaned a loud, long-suffering groan. If they’d swapped places, Vash might’ve been inclined to lunge and cover his mouth for making such a noise. But Vash simply patted him on the shoulder, and sang an unconvincing, “There, there.”

“…Awrite. I ain’t packed for a trip, but we can figure it out on the road, I guess.” Wolfwood started taking a tally on his fingers, counting up plans that made Vash’s own plans falter mid-step. “Oz’s place is on the outskirts and his mama owes me a favor for fixin’ her radiator. We could get some campin’ gear on loan from ‘em and wait it out in the sands.” He paused on his pinky as he chewed on his cheek. “Damn. I think I gave Livio the last of the ration bars we bought last month, so we’ll have to do somethin’ else fer food.”

“You want to come with me?” Vash blinked, before shaking his head vigorously. It made his eyes ache. “No, no, Wolfwood, who would tell Milly and Meryl where I’ve gone and why if you came with me? I can’t be stopping by the house if there’s a bunch of bounty hunters in town. They might see, and end up switching targets.”

Wolfwood stopped counting mid-hand. That tempted-to-punch-him look returned with a vengeance, darkening his expression behind his sunglasses. “You want me to play messenger for you?”

“Why would you come with me?”

“Why wouldn’t I come with ya?”

Vash almost said, “Because you have a home here,” before mentally amending it to “Because we have a home here,” since the first statement would start something he really didn’t want to get into. Complicated stuff, that sense of belonging. There was a difference between living somewhere and calling it home. Vash had lived in places but never called one home; Wolfwood had called a place home but never lived there. He ultimately ended up scrapping the entire point and switching tactics.

“Look, I know you don’t think I’m capable of staying out of trouble—”

Wolfwood interrupted him. “That’s ‘cause you’re not—”

Vash raised twin placating palms and pressed them against the sides of Wolfwood’s neck. He could feel Wolfwood’s pulse through the fingertips on his right hand, elevated and alive. “But, I really will this time, just like you prefer. Typhoon’s honor. I’ll do the waiting, and I’ll be real responsible about it, too.”

“Typhoon’s what?” 

“Once they leave, I’ll slip back into town, and you guys won’t have even noticed my absence.” Vash smoothed his thumbs over Wolfwood’s stubble, like he could wipe the scowl off of his partner’s face with a few gentle swipes of his hand. But Wolfwood’s emotions were more deep-seated than that; he didn’t let them float to the top of his being, where anyone and everyone could shape them as they pleased. “What’ll it take, a couple of days? We can bank on the short attention spans of their archetype. It’s never done me wrong before.”

Wolfwood snorted. “You? Never done wrong?” he echoed incredulously. “What happened to mister ‘everything and their mama’s out to get me’?”

“He’s,” Vash said, “ah, well—he’s trying a bit of optimism, for once.”

“…Ya really want me to stay behind?”

It was said quietly, rolled over in Wolfwood’s mouth and off his tongue before the man seemed able to stop it. It was only a single word off from left paired with behind, which felt a lot worse than what he’d actually said—but his feelings on the matter weren’t lost on Vash, even if awareness and budging did not often go hand in hand for the Stampede. He could be fully aware of Wolfwood, and Wolfwood could be fully aware of him; yet, it did not mean that anything would be easier to communicate. That was just how they were.

“Don’t say it like that,” Vash pleaded. “I just want you to stay.”

Vash and Wolfwood were both unfortunate experts at the art of never saying exactly what and how they felt until it was too late. The script of their “unspokens” would be thicker than the Bible, usable as a bludgeoning weapon during desperate times. There were only so many of those “unspokens” Vash could chalk up to the deep and unwavering trust they had in each other; the unfortunate rest of the chronicle would consist of their deep and unwavering dedication to shouldering weight so their loved ones wouldn’t have to. It was their responsibility alone to bear their burdens; to shirk those responsibilities would be to undermine the very reason they picked up those burdens in the first place.

Was it selfish? Was it unwise? Wolfwood loved this quiet little life as much as Vash did, and they didn’t need to drag out any (kicking and screaming) unspoken words for Vash to know that. He could see it in the moments of juxtaposition; the file of memories Vash had on “Nicholas D. Wolfwood”, Chapel and Punisher and orphan and saint, had changed shape since their first un-fateful encounter in the middle of the desert. It had fattened and gained color, filling with moments that Vash cherished. From the first time they’d shared a drink of water from the same canteen, to the last time they shared a home-cooked meal, there was evidence of peace; there was the comfort of getting to know their neighbors, and integrating into the town’s community; there was painting Milly’s room a soft, sunny yellow when she’d had a rough month; there was falling asleep in the cobbled-together bed that could fit all four of them that was really just two mattresses held together by an oversized fitted sheet. Nicholas D. Wolfwood’s file was no longer a bleak and barren mystery, kept that way by the same line of keep-them-at-arms-length reasoning that Vash himself had trod for years.

(Vash’s “them” might’ve been more broad and steeped in guilt, and Nicholas’ “them” might’ve been more specific and steeped in shame, but the point still stood. How could one’s story be written if there was no one around to write it? Private-by-necessity people like them weren’t exactly keen on dipping their toes into autobibliography, so it’d have to be some other fool (in which they found a kindred spirit) that grew the balls to fish the pen out of the blood.)

Even now, Wolfwood didn’t necessarily hold himself differently; that would’ve been too easy, if he’d managed to slough off his layers of self-preservation with a mere death experience and a plant-propagated heart transplant grown from his own cells and the splash of black hair on Vash’s left temple. The usual muscles, though—the ones that get the body to move in frenetic, survival-driven bursts of brainstem reactions and panic hormones—were losing their mass, genetically modified or not. A slow death, the atrophy of his armor, progressed a little further through his systems with each passing day of peace.

Armor like that became suffocating, and the folks who wore it never lived for very long. Vash knew and could count up the loss of too many. Wolfwood might mourn how he was no longer as primed to explode into action as he used to be, but the man that was slowly revealing his soft underbelly to Vash and Milly and Meryl was a happier version of that very same man.

“—What if I said the same about you?” Wolfwood challenged.

Vash’s throat clicked when he swallowed. He had killed for this man, and then this man had come back, and sometimes he really, really didn’t know what to do with that. How he was expected to act. He had put down a hundred and fifty years of memory to keep this dead man’s memory alive instead, and then this man had come back, in ways she never could. Whose memory was he holding, now that things had turned out this way? Did Vash ever have to hold a memory in the first place? His hands felt empty. His palms itched for weight.

“I would,” Vash croaked, “but you’d have to say it.” That I want you to stay.

Wolfwood sighed, shook his head, and leaned back. Vash did not chase him with his body; only tracked him with his gaze. The lines under Wolfwood’s dark eyes were deep, and as he took off his sunglasses to rub the bridge of his nose, Vash could see the same tiredness in this partner that he’d also seen in Meryl. That he’d seen in Milly. That he’d seen in Luida, decades ago, and that he’d seen in Doc and Sheryl and Lina and Brandon and even in Knives.

—Only on Wolfwood did Vash see it as a little hypocritical.

But there was a difference between Wolfwood’s tiredness and the tiredness that Miss Melanie regarded Wolfwood with: Vash had been privy to, and so, so lucky, to see as it had faded from her face in real time. It came back in small flares of hurt, sometimes, when Wolfwood avoided the orphanage because he didn’t want the kids to see him struggle through the bad weeks. She sent him casseroles to be there in food for him if he didn’t want her to be there in person. It was a sign of slow, incremental progress; the learning, and the re-learning, that they were allowed to be the recipients of grace.

“Vash,” Wolfwood said, holding out a hand to pull Vash to his feet. Vash accepted it faster than strictly necessary. “—I’m not gonna do that to ya.”

“…Thank you, Wolfwood” Vash whispered. “I’ll see you soon. I—” Promise? “—Mean it.”

Their script remained unwritten. The pen sat untouched.

—Yet a pair of blue eyes began to roam, and the snap! of a pair of gloves being pulled on could be heard in the silence. There was fishing to be done, and a biography to be drafted, blood and guts and gore be damned.

There was something that Vash decided he needed to try.

-

For the first time, it happened like this:

“Hello! Can you please cancel my bounty?” Vash asked politely.

Chronica, the Independent from Earth, stared at him in astonishment.

“Sorry, is cancel not the right word?” Vash put a hand to his chin. “It’s been a while since I was last wanted, you know. Do you rescind a bounty? End a bounty? Lose a bounty?” He shook his head doubtfully. “Ah, but that just sounds like you’ve gone and misplaced it. And I don’t quite see you Earth Feds doing that with anything as important to you as, well, money.”

Chronica regained her bearings at a speed befitting of her station. “How did you get in here?” she demanded.

The question wasn’t an answer, so he didn’t give her an answer of his own. “You see, it’s just that I’ve recently decided to take a few things into my own hands,” Vash continued to explain, leaning over the console separating them and tracing a few fancy buttons with his fingertip. “I’ve had many enlightening experiences in my life, but rarely ever enough time to stop moving and reflect on those, you know? Until recently, at least.” He didn’t poke hard enough to depress the buttons, no, that’d probably terrify the ramrod right out of Chronica’s spine, but just enough to indicate that he knew which buttons made the landing ship’s engines roar into overdrive or what keys would unceremoniously eject the pilot’s seat. “And now I’ve found that I have some people in my life that I really, really value. And you’re making their lives really, really difficult, by proxy of what you’re doing to me. Quite unfairly, might I add. It’s rude.” Vash found his own face splitting into a grin, a bubble of giddiness rising in his gut. “—Wow, I’m advocating for my rights, aren’t I? This feels great, does everyone else get to feel like this all of the time?”

Chronica tried to grab him. It was a wild, uncoordinated grab, born more of shock than an actual desire to get her hands on him. There was anger in her eyes that made her look more affronted by his intrusion than afraid, curling her lip and turning her unflappable expression in a wild one-eighty. But, well, if your spaceship keycodes have been using the same unlock-path for the last two hundred years, aren’t you just asking to have your worldhoppers boarded by an old, old man with a very good memory?

Irresponsible, said the Wolfwood in Vash’s head. Irresponsible! agreed the Meryl in Vash’s head. You still look quiet youthful for one-hundred-and-fifty, Mister Vash, giggled the Milly in Vash’s head, and Vash would’ve preened at the head-praise if he weren’t busy dodging an angry full-power Independent going for his throat.

Chronica lunged to her feet from where she’d been kneeling, knocking her cup of green tea off of her chair’s armrest and going—yes, indeed, straight for Vash’s throat. Didn’t play around, this one. She was faster than him by virtue of her whole head of blonde hair, but Vash was nimbler and less civil, and he leapt over the fancy console right as she reached him after taking the long way around.

On the other side of the panel, having effectively traded places with him, Chronica looked at Vash like he’d regrown the Angel Arm and was pointing it straight at her face. She looked at him like he’d just manipulated her into shooting a baby. She looked at him like she really wanted to demand “Who in their right mind jumps over the Earth Military’s expensive and fancy equipment, risking pressing any one of those perfect little buttons and setting off a missile, or a nuke, or an electric nuke, or something even more nefarious?” but had more decorum than that, and thus had decided that she wouldn’t utter a peep—just that she’d glare. Not like she could psychically yell at him in a plant-y way with that active limiter Vash could sense in her brain (the muffled static was a tad unnerving, because it was at-odds with the pressure she exuded). Joke was on her, though; small landing vessels didn’t carry missiles or nukes, so the only thing Vash risked by jumping over the expensive and fancy equipment was disrespecting Chronica’s unpleasant military superiors and their faint-hearted sensibilities.

(Vash, uh, thought. That the small landing vessel didn’t have weapons. He didn’t actually know how much the Earth space fleets had militarized in the last hundred years, and if their “anti-plant” outfitting schemes extended to how they weaponized each and every one of their transports. Or if it was just the “war ships” and the “star destroyers” and the “copyright infringements” that received the whole nine yards of extreme intergalactic-regime force.

“—Irresponsible!”)

“I think I really like how this feels,” Vash said as he danced back a few more feet, dodging Chronica’s next swipe for his collar. “I really, really like this—you there! You’ve been treating me unfairly. I think you should apologize, vite, s'il vous plaît.”

“Why are you speaking French?” Chronica snarled.

Vash made a face right back at her, though it was less of a snarl and more of a judgmental frown. “Do they only teach you how to ask questions and put bounties on poor, innocent men back on Earth?”

Unfortunately, Vash’s attempt at playful banter seemed to make something about this situation click for Chronica, and she composed herself in record time. Quite literally; Vash got to watch as she stuffed her big and fiery outburst into a little box, and her emotions practically melted off of her face like wax until there was nothing but a neutral mask left behind. The muffled static noise from her gate remained muffled and static-y. She folded her hands together and straightened her back; she went through the motions of smoothing out her uniform and tucking two curly sections of hair behind her ears. The exhale that left her mouth was silent, but Vash felt the ambient thrum of power around them change shape as she mastered herself again.

Chronica, serene as a lake of water on a planet without wind, looked at him with those piercing blue Independent eyes and said, “That is also a question, Vash the Stampede.”

“And that’s a statement, Chronica from Earth,” Vash replied, because it turned out he wasn’t very good at stopping himself once he boarded the having-a-spine train, “and not a very apologetic one, might I add.”

Her brow twitched. The power twitched as well. “I cannot rescind your bounty,” Chronica said slowly, enunciating her words in a way that felt like a deliberate counter to how quickly Vash had begun speaking, “because you obstructed Millions Knives from being brought to justice.”

“Now, look here, that’s just a willful misunderstanding." Vash propped one hand on his hip; the other started to spin in circles, flapping and fluttering like a presenter that forgot his laser-pointer and had to make-do with theatrics. “I sure did obstruct Knives quite a lot in my life, long before you lot ever tried to do it.” A point to an invisible graph of the Big Fall; failure 1, but it set him on a proper path of vigilance. A flash to show his wrist that once had a manacle locked on it by a town steeped in radiation, but Chronica didn’t know that; failure 2, but it taught him an important lesson. “It was a hard job, you know? Thankless, too, the whole long time of it.” The eighty or so years of their aimless wandering was Vash’s most successful stint in foiling Knives pre-Millions with a plethora of well-timed “don’t fucking do that”s. But his streak of luck ended in quite the bang at July, and Vash had a bad feeling Chronica did know about that third failure.“—You should be giving me some credit for all my work, here.”

Chronica didn’t give him any credit. At best, he got a C-, and a clipped, “Where is Millions Knives?

“He’s dead,” Vash said. “My brother is dead.”

“Are you certain?” Chronica asked flatly.

Vash choked out a startled noise. It sounded like a laugh to his ears; his brain knew it wasn’t. “Well, that’s a horrible question to ask a person.”

“You are, as of right now, a wanted fugitive,” Chronica said, as if that cancelled out his claim to personhood. For all he knew about the direction Earth politics took, it did. They didn’t exactly come to Gunsmoke and start white-knighting everywhere; if anything, they were more like a middling gray-knight, willing to bend some morals and blow up some cities where the entire remaining population was sheltering for the greater good. Couldn’t go and let Millions Knives and his thousands of rebelling plants escape, now, could they? What a catastrophe. What a tragedy that would’ve been. We should all just go and blow up Octovern.

“Even this planet makes sure its criminals have rights.” Vash stilled his twitching, one muscle at a time. He brought his arms to his sides and folded his hands behind his back. “And trust me, we have a lot of criminals.”

“Do you even know how many people died because of him?” Chronica continued to press.  “Yet you saved him. You ran away with him before we could try him.”

Try him? She must have been thinking of legal systems, juries, and what Meryl would mockingly call “proper bureaucratic procedure”. Trying Millions Knives in a court of law would have become the universe’s new hit comedy show. There wasn’t exactly any room for charitable interpretation when it came to Knives and what he’d managed to achieve when seizing control of one thousand sentient nuclear bombs. “You killed millions of people and destroyed a multi-billion credit fleet,” the juror would declare, rubbing their spectacles and pointing to the indisputable evidence of, well, the solid hundred million or so souls that ceased to exist because of Vash’s brother. And the very expensive warships Knives had loosed those sentient nuclear bombs upon, that the Earth Forces probably cared more about than the souls. “Do you plead guilty to this accusation?”

Millions Knives would not have responded, because he’d decided instead to grow a fucking apple tree.

And Vash the Stampede would not respond, either, because Chronica did not need to know that he was thinking: “I ran away because it’s what I told him we would do together.”

Chronica was watching him cautiously now, because in his act of moving, he’d dared to brush against Peacebringer’s holster. It was almost funny to Vash; the only other Independent he’d known up until that point would’ve called his human weapon useless, and here Chronica was, set on edge before he could even draw. He found it humanized her, ironically. Mortal men reacted to guns in the same way that Chronica did. Chronica was more human than Vash had ever tried to be, and more human than Knives had ever feared to be. Chronica was steeped in human expectations and human experiences and a human point of view. She saw guns as more threatening than angel arms, because all of the other Independents she likely knew could not summon an arm even if they were pushed to the emotional brink thanks to the limiters. Or maybe she just assumed that Vash was, with his coal-black hair and his quiet gate, essentially human—and the most threatening thing that a human being could do to an Independent was to draw a gun.

“I know better than anyone,” Vash told her. It came out angrier than he’d meant it to; he followed it with a pointedly-placed laugh. “I know better than you ever will how many people he killed. I know every single one of them.” Forget Vash’s smiles being empty; that laugh was the emptiest noise he’d ever made. Even now, with years of fulfillment and connection giving his smiles a genuine color, that laugh—that laugh was still broken in a way he didn’t want to waste time on fixing. “I’ve kept count, you know. It didn’t matter how much it hurt me to do so, but I kept count.”

Chronica’s expression hardly showed any reaction. “That’s a morbid admission,” she said. “Though it is congruent with our psychological profile on you.”

(Her gate told a different story: Vash heard a five-beat melody of empathy try to break through the static. Evidently, it failed, so Vash did not show any reaction, either.)

“Don’t give me that. I don’t have to be as nice to you as I have been,” Vash said. As Chronica got tired of this, her unflappable control began to slip. As Vash got tired of this, he got more curt. “But I am a nice person, because I want to be. So I’m going to ask nicely, once again for posterity: please cancel my bounty.”

Chronica stared at him, and then she said, “Why should we?”

“Because I want to live in peace.” Vash stared back, rigid in body as he was in conviction. This was not a moment for him to be willing to sway. But softness came naturally to the one that the plants knew as the red man with the gentle smile, and Vash found himself adding: “…With a little bit of love, too.”

Chronica’s face still did not change. Vash feared that this was the end of the line for him, until he heard it: the melody breaking through the static. A loop of G-C-G-C-G chords, slow and familiar, barely background noise compared to the ambient thrum of her chipped gate. But she was listening to him, and that was enough.

“…I want to live with the people I love and not have to worry that my presence is a threat to their safety,” Vash continued, emboldened. “I want to be able to show them how much that I love them without thinking that every one of my actions is a cruelty, because some day, I’ll be forced to run away.” Bold or not, he did not embellish; he did not have time to sugar-coat his reality with a protective layer of cognitive dissonance. “I have had to live like this for over a century because of my brother.” It was a simple equation, straight and to the point. The burden was heavy; Vash the Stampede wanted to put it down. “I will not continue to live like this because of you.”

Chronica tapped the ship’s console with a fingernail. Tap. Tap. Tap.

At last, she spoke. “…I would have to speak with my superiors.”

“—Do you still have elected presidents?” Vash asked suddenly.

Chronica looked surprised by the change in direction. “Yes, we do. Why do you ask?”

Vash laughed. “Oh, isn’t that just swell?” he said, loosening his posture. “What a win for democracy. We don’t down here, might I add. It’s a little embarrassing, but too many elections ended in shootouts between the top few candidates, so now we’ve mostly got military generals in charge.”

“Fascinating.” Chronica did not sound fascinated, but she took diligent notes all the same. “We hadn’t known that.”

“And you and I both probably know that gunmanship isn’t exactly the best metric to judge a man’s leadership and moral character, haha.”

“Do they still try to call themselves elected leaders?” Chronica asked.

Vash put a finger to his chin, contemplating. Ooh. A point he could return to. “I’m not going to tell you unless you cancel my bounty.”

“It’s rescind,” Chronica corrected.

“Ah! Glad we could get that cleared up.”

“My superiors may be amenable to a trade, of sorts. Your knowledge of this planet and cooperation, in exchange for…”

“Mmmm…” Vash performed the act of continued contemplation, even though he was doing no such thing. “—Nope! I don’t owe you anything.”

Chronica sighed. “Be reasonable.”

“I am.” As quickly as he’d picked it up, Vash dropped the act. And then he continued dropping more acts; the ease, the playfulness, the willingness to negotiate. As quiet as the grave he’d spent a hundred and fifty years dancing two steps ahead of, Vash said to Chronica, “I am painfully reasonable. That’s why I decided to come here today, you know?” He pushed his glasses higher up his nose. “I was too reasonable to settle down with my situation being as it was. And that had started to hurt some people I really, really liked, to a point I started wanting to be unreasonable.” Vash laced his fingers together as he watched the suns setting outside the ship’s viewport. “You could say we’ve both got our own kind of power over each other in this situation, Chronica from Earth. How about I propose we take our fingers off the trigger on the count of three, and walk away from this little skirmish with both our skins intact? I’m too busy fighting to live than to have time to fight with you, too.”

Chronica was watching the sky with him. The ship’s air circulators made the curled ends of her blonde hair flutter. He’d half-expected her to focus back in on Peacebringer—maybe even try to disarm him the moment he got serious. But the red light from the twin suns was bathing a woman standing perfectly still, and the look on her face told him that returning to their conflict was the furthest thing from her mind right now.

“…She said that before,” Chronica said carefully, “and you know it, don’t you?”

—Vash knew Domina because the collective knew Domina, and everything that the collective knew had been unceremoniously dumped upon Vash through that port he’d stuck into his neck, like a sandstorm funneled through a straw. All of the information the Fused Entity had learned about Domina upon assimilating her was within the information they’d burned into his billions of stringy neurons. Her favorite food; her favorite actress; how she’d been cutting her own hair since she was three. There were parts in Domina’s memory about Earth, too, that the collective had learned. If Vash used that knowledge to his advantage, it was really for the advantage of others. People were getting caught in the crossfire between himself and the Earth Forces. Dispelling that conflict with a little bit of faux-rapport was for an objectively greater good.

(Domina always sat with her feet up on her desk.

Chronica told her “Feet, down,” more often than Chronica told her common things like Hello, how are you, and the time. Domina would put her feet down on the floor, watch Chronica out of the corner of her eye, and then return to her elevated sprawl, like she was addicted to the feeling of her blood circulating down into her chest cavity and away from her toes.

In the hours before setting off through the wormhole to No Man’s Land, it happened again. “Domina,” Chronica said to Domina, “feet, down.”

“Hey, Chronica, what do you think it’s gonna be like down there?” was Domina’s response. She didn’t put her space boots on the floor, and neither was she even looking at Chronica. Her eyes had that faraway look that meant she was busy loading a backprocess full of media downloads for the trip through pocket-space. “I mean, they’ve been totally alone for over a hundred years. What do you think the people will be like?”

Chronica took matters into her own hands, and picked up Domina’s leg by the ankle. Through Domina’s startled thrashing, she corrected her comrade’s sitting posture, patting her on the head when she was satisfied Domina was now up to military protocol standards. “—They have likely changed. Perhaps they’ve developed new holidays, or common sayings.”

“That would be nice.”

Domina’s downloading resumed; Chronica could feel her interfacing with the ship dock’s feed, picking and choosing what sort of material she wanted to entertain herself with. A batch-recording of race highlights from the Teegarden system, an electronic opera about human-alien romance, and a ten-hour compilation of deep sea Europan aquarium footage set to classical music whizzed past Chronica’s implant.

“What do you think they will be like, Domina?” Chronica asked. She pinged Domina to request a copy of the Europan footage. The ambient bubbling and the quiet music was good for meditation, as long as the media’s poster made sure to edit out the supergiant mammalian calls that could shatter bone. Domina sent it to her, tagged with a smiley-face.

“That man on the radio message sounded… tired. I have a feeling they’ll be relieved to learn they aren’t alone anymore,” Domina said, shrugging. “They’ve probably been pretty busy fighting to live. I just hope that we’ll be able to help them.”

Chronica agreed. Five minutes later, Domina’s feet returned to the desk, and Chronica unbalanced her chair with a swift kick to teach her a lesson.)

“—Help me, Chronica from Earth,” Vash said. Like she would’ve wanted you to, in her stead. The reference was blatant enough that he would’ve felt kinder caving her nose with a baseball bat. “Maybe, if you’re willing to help me enough, I’ll feel more amenable about helping you, too.”

Chronica stood eerily still as the suns disappeared beneath the horizon. The parent sun sank first as its child stayed aloft, and the half-hour of daylight—a “common saying” on Gunsmoke that the Terrans had yet to learn—called one-shadow began. With a heavy sigh, the Independent that wasn’t Vash’s brother took a few steps towards him, and Vash did not feel fear.

“It will take me some time to bring them around,” Chronica said at last.

“I’m patient.” Vash replied. “My friends, though? Not so much.”

She sounded as tired as everyone else on Gunsmoke when she said, “I have never been skilled at navigating… forgiveness. But I will try.”

“Really?” Vash smiled. “Guess you just aren’t old enough yet.”

Chronica gifted his quip with a narrow glare. “I am one-hundred and thirty-seven years old,” she said.

“Aye… I’m not seeing a fifty in there, so I stand by what I said.”

Vash hadn’t realized how close they were in age. Born in entirely different situations, nearly at the same universal time… Had Chronica experienced more, or less of life than him? Did she know things about humanity that he did not? What would she have done if she were one of the Independents born to Project SEEDS instead of him? How would she have reacted to Tesla? What kind of person would Vash the Stampede be if he had been born on Earth? All of his questions were pointless, but they entertained him nonetheless.

“—Go home, Vash the Stampede,” Chronica interrupted his train of thought. “I can hear you thinking.”

Vash blinked. And before he could stop himself, he asked, “What does it sound like?”

He hardly remembered what Knives sounded like. He hardly remembered what Knives had said he sounded like. It was strange, to know that there was someone new privy to your mind, when you’d always thought it would just be you two until the end of the world.

Chronica, to her credit, gave thought to his indulgent question. With her eyes closed, and a contemplative smile on her face, she replied, “It’s gentle. As the dependent plants said it would be.” Smoothly, Chronica drifted back over to the chair she’d been seated in when Vash arrived. She picked up her fallen mug of tea and set it on the arm, letting her fingertips linger over a set of keys. When she depressed one, Vash heard the clunk-whoosh of the ship’s door sliding open behind him. “But it also yearns,” Chronica added, watching his face as she spoke, “which is why I think that you should be allowed to go home.”

Vash scratched the back of his neck sheepishly. “Well, I’ve never been the kind of guy to ignore good advice.”

Chronica gave him a pointed look. There was no heat behind it, but Vash reacted in an exaggerated fashion all the same.

“Hey, okay, I’m going! I’m gone!” Vash backed towards the open door, feeling a wave of hot evening air caress his back. One lone shadow stretched out next to him when his boots crossed the threshold. “Sheesh. And here I was, waiting for a good time to say thank-you.”

“Say hello to Meryl Stryfe for me,” Chronica said, waving from the console. “I’m a fan of her show.”

“Rescind my bounty!” Vash countered, getting it right this time. He pointed an accusatory finger at her as he walked backwards out the hatch. “Then maybe I’ll let you meet my insurance girls!”

“May I meet Nicholas D. Wolfwood?”

“No!”

“A shame.” Chronica shook her head. “—I will accept your thanks when I’ve righted this. I’m sure I’ll see you soon, Vash.”

The ship’s door closed between them. With a spring in his step and a whistle in his gentle song, Vash the Stampede starting walking back to the place he could confidently called home.

-