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“The preacher gave his life for you,” Brad says firmly, tapping his fist against Livio’s shoulder, the closest thing he can manage as a reassuring gesture for a murderer six inches taller than him. “And Vash the Stampede vouched for you. That counts for something.”
He’s not sure how he expects Livio to react, but all but collapsing against the bank of sinks in tears certainly wasn’t it.
“Sorry,” Livio croaks, before Brad can so much as ask if he’s alright. “Sorry, I’m sorry, it’s been a really long—” he drags a hand down his face, scrubbing at the corner of his eye with the heel of his hand. “—day. Week. Six months. I don’t know.”
Something snags in Brad’s chest, pulls taught. “He was your friend too, wasn’t he?”
Livio drags in a breath, his face still half-hidden in his palm. “Nicholas? Yeah, we, uh…” he swallows thickly. “We knew each other as kids. Same orphanage. Ended up in the Eye of Michael together, and then both employed by, uh, Knives.” He drops his hand, staring at Brad with grief written plain on his face, eyes childishly wide, like he’s searching for some kind of absolution. “Funny how it happens, huh.”
“Yeah,” Brad manages. He’s known that the preacher had insider knowledge ever since the plan to raid the Ark to get Vash out, but to hear it from Livio’s mouth still feels like having ice-cold water splashed in his face. “Funny.”
He has to reach up to properly squeeze Livio’s shoulder, but he does his best. “Listen, we don’t have much time. Maybe until daylight. Vash is with Luida and the others, they’ll probably be talking strategy a few hours. Why don’t you come with me? I’ll get us some drinks, and maybe we can figure out something to do with your hair.”
Livio gives him a slow once-over. “ You’re going to tell me what to do with my hair?”
Brad scoffs, caught off guard. “You’re not really in the position to be making digs about hairstyle, punk.”
“Punk?” Livio echoes, brow furrowing. He runs a hand through his hair, turning to look in the mirror. “I mean, I guess? I let Razlo cut it, but he’s not a punk, he’s just a brat.” Livio touches the mirror, just over his tattooed eye. “Sorry,” he murmurs, so quietly Brad’s pretty sure he wasn’t meant to hear it.
Razlo. Brad heard the name at some point, in the mess of parallel stories, as Livio and Vash talked over each other trying to explain what happened to the preacher. Someone else who participated in the fight, another dead friend, both, neither. It had been hard to focus on more than the bare details; Vash trying to find a good way to say our friend is dead and I brought his killer home instead.
“I’ve got some clippers,” Brad says. “Let’s see what we can do.”
It might be their last night alive. Any night could be, at this point, that’s just the world they’re in, now, but especially tonight.
There are worse ways to spend it, Brad figures, than on the floor of his room with a few bottles of beer and decent company.
He wishes Vash were here, instead of spending the night going over the details of a plan that might just be a suicide mission. He wishes Jessica were here. He wishes the preacher were here, instead of his killer.
But he gets what he gets—and Livio is decent company, as much as Brad wishes he wasn’t, so he could give him his damn haircut and then ask him to leave. He keeps meaning to, and then he just keeps listening.
Livio doesn’t talk like an unrepentant killer, or even like a repentant one. He sounds a little bit like Vash—an exhausted idealist, wandering between lofty statements about putting good in the world and straightforward details that remind Brad what he is.
(“He wants people to congregate,” Livio says, staring somewhere past Brad’s shoulder, after Brad describes the refugee camps in December. “It makes it easier for him.”)
Unlike Vash, though, he’s quiet, mostly speaking when spoken to. He nurses his beer like he keeps forgetting it’s in his hands until Brad takes a sip of his, carrying a familiar unsurety in his broad shoulders.
It’s the same way the preacher held himself, when he was on the ship. Like he was expecting the other shoe to drop at any moment.
“So he was one of yours?” Brad says. “The preacher? Is that why—” you killed him hangs off the end of the sentence, but Brad bites down it.
Livio nods. “There’s places set aside among the Gung-Ho Guns for Punishers—graduates, uh, the exemplary among the Eye of Michael. Razlo and I—” he makes a vague hand gesture that Brad doesn’t quite parse, “—we were two of them, and Nico was the other.”
“And you all turned traitor.”
Livio smiles crookedly. “You know how Vash is.”
That pulls a smile out of Brad, too. “Yeah. I do.”
They look at each other, look away. Livio sets his bottle on the ground and tips it up on its edge, turning it in slow circles with one finger on the rim.
“What are you going to do when this is over?” Livio asks.
Brad laughs. He doesn’t mean to—it just rushes out of him, all at once, as startled as he is amused. The last person to ask him about the future was Jessica, months ago, and he didn’t have an answer for her, even then, when it looked a little more like they were going to survive this.
“I don’t know,” he says, honestly. “I haven’t thought about more than getting through the next few days in months now. Rest, I hope. Get a full night’s sleep. Drink. Get laid, maybe. What about you?”
Livio almost tips his bottle over, catching the neck between two fingers, gently folding it back against his palm. He takes a sip, tilting his head back, baring the stubbly line of his throat, adam’s apple bobbing as he drinks. “Part of me doubts that Knives will let me live,” he says, flipping the emptied bottle in his hand, gripping the neck like he’s testing its viability as a weapon. A drop of beer runs down his wrist. “The rest of me knows that he doesn’t give a damn about me. Chapel was the one with an ascended sense of loyalty, and he’s dead too.”
“So?” Brad prompts, popping the cap off a new bottle of beer and passing it to Livio, trading empty for full and adding the empty to the slowly-growing collection beside him.
“If I live,” Livio says. “I’m going to make sure the kids from that orphanage are all safe, and that they get settled back in the church, or wherever they choose to rebuild. And then—”
The sentence trails off and gets lost. Brad doesn’t ask him to finish it. He’s not entirely sure he wants to know, what Livio will do when he feels like he’s paid his dues. It sparks a dull ache of concern in his chest.
He shouldn’t be concerned. Not for this man. Not after what he’s done. Not when Brad hugged Vash, just once in the time since he’s been back on the ship, and felt the way he crumpled, his body curling in, clinging, before he carefully loosened his grip and straightened up, eyes only barely wet.
Brad shouldn’t give a damn about Livio. It shouldn’t be enough that Vash cares about him. Vash’s endless mercy shouldn’t overwrite what he’s done.
“You’re glaring at me,” Livio says, mildly. He picks at the paper on his beer bottle.
“He’s always like this with people like you, isn’t he?” Brad says, instead of I should want to put a bullet between your eyes, but I’m too damn obsessed with Vash’s damn idealism. “Vash.”
Livio looks up at him, flicking his hair out of his eyes. “You know him much better than I do.”
Brad tries to meet his gaze, and his eyes slide away, down the lines of his tattoo, to the tech fitted over where his ear would be, the fuzz of pale hair growing in. “I don’t think I do.”
Before Livio can reply, Brad sets his bottle down and stands up.
“Come on, let’s do something about that hair.”
Livio doesn’t argue. He mirrors Brad, down to the individual motion—setting down the beer bottle, uncrossing his legs, pushing his hair out of his face as he rises. After a moment on his feet, he adjusts himself to stand the way Brad is standing, dropping his hands from where he’d clasped his own elbows behind his back down to his sides, adjusting his weight slightly.
Brad sits him down sideways the seat of the toilet—there isn’t a personal shower in the room’s narrow bathroom, Brad isn’t that important—and stands behind him, running his fingers through the short length of hair over one side of his head. Livio shivers slightly, which Brad politely ignores.
“Okay,” he decides, as if he’s gleaned anything more than what guard to use on his clippers. “I can work with this. Take your shirt off.”
Livio turns his head slightly, frowning. “Do I have to?”
Brad shrugs. “Unless you want to get hair on it.”
Livio makes an uncertain mmm noise, but he pulls his shirt off. It’s a little mesmerizing—the shirt wasn’t hiding all that much in the first place, he’s clearly built like a brick shithouse, but, hey—even with the world ending, Brad can appreciate good back muscles.
This is a murderer, Brad reminds himself, firmly. Just because Vash keeps bringing home strays he stole from his brother’s backyard doesn’t mean you have to like all of them.
Turning away, he finds the clippers and fits the half-inch guard over the blade, pretending he doesn’t feel Livio’s eyes on his back.
“Close your eyes,” Brad says, as he turns back around with the clippers and a pair of scissors. Livio twists to face the wall again and obligingly shuts his eyes, shivering again when Brad’s hand comes to rest on his shoulder.
Brad gathers up the shock of white hair in one hand and cuts through it, dropping it into a pile on the ground. Livio exhales, harshly.
It’s quiet, then—just the hum of the clippers and the faint sounds of breathing, for the few minutes it takes to even everything out. It’s not particularly masterful work, but it gets the job done.
“Check it out,” Brad tells him, brushing hair from Livio’s broad shoulders.
He has to back out of the bathroom so Livio can look in the mirror, leaning against the doorway to watch him run a hand through the fresh buzz, turning his head back and forth to examine it.
Finally, he nods, turning to smile at Brad. “Thanks. Do you have a razor, too? I don’t think the scruff works for me.”
“Yeah, hang on,” Brad steps back into the bathroom, hip-checking Livio out of the way—which doesn’t accomplish anything, because, as stated, brick shithouse , but he does get the idea and move out of the way so Brad can pull the mirror cabinet open and get the razor and shaving cream out. “Uh,” he shoves both into Livio’s hands. “I’ll leave you to it.”
Livio’s expression falters just slightly, but he doesn’t say anything, letting Brad close the door between them.
What is wrong with you? Brad asks himself, sincerely. He doesn’t have answer for himself, as much as he turns it over in his head as he wanders the room, gathering up the beer bottles and stacking them in a line on the shelf. He’ll take them down to recycling in the morning, if they’re all still alive by then.
The only bottle that’s still mostly full is Livio’s, so Brad takes it as payment for the haircut, sitting down on the bed and waiting for Livio to be done cleaning himself up.
He looks entirely different when he steps out of the bathroom. The exhaustion is still in his eyes, but he’s smiling, carrying himself a little less like he’s burning up inside.
“I feel better,” he says, firmly, like he’s trying to assure himself that it’s true. “Thank you,”
Brad makes himself stop looking. “You thanked me already.”
Livio makes a noise like he’s going to say something, then stops, drawing in a breath. “Why are you doing this,” he asks. “If you hate me?”
“I don’t hate you,” Brad scoffs. “Believe me, if I hated you, you’d know.”
“Oh,” Livio murmurs. “Huh. Still, though. Why?”
Brad looks up at him. “Because if Vash is right… if he’s right that there’s something in everyone that’s worth saving, it might make all of this worthwhile.”
Livio takes a breath and lets it out slowly. He leans his back against the wall and slides down it, sinking to the floor and hugging his knees to his chest.
“I hope so,” he says, at length, his breath jagged and unsteady. “Or else he died for nothing.”
Brad doesn’t have to ask who he is. The preacher’s presence is so thick in the air he might as well still be here, except for the fact that his death hangs even thicker.
“I’m sure,” Brad starts, then stops, swallowing hard. “He’d be proud of you.”
Livio presses his fingers against his eyes and laughs, harsh and shuddering. “I hope so.” He rubs his nose, scoffs quietly. “He’s not as easily won as Vash. Vash is proud of the suns for rising in the morning.”
Feeling magnanimous, feeling kind, Brad sits down beside Livio and rests a hand on his knee. “Sometimes that’s all it takes. Maybe they rise because they know he’ll be proud of them.”
Livio processes that for a moment, then his somber face breaks into a grin. “Maybe so.”