Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It was an enormous ship. They could have wandered lost through it for a long time. But once the initial panic subsided, Nick felt himself being drawn in a particular direction. He let the feeling pull him down a labyrinth of hallways, ducking and dodging to avoid people in strange white clothes, Meryl on his heels.

The door inset in the wall was inconspicuous, as far as anything inside a huge Lost Technology spaceship could be considered so. He would have walked right past it if it weren’t for the tugging in his gut. There was a small window in the door. Through it, though the light was dim, he thought he could see something small and person-shaped.

The door was locked, but the light turned green when he swiped his hand over the right spot. He heard a click as the lock disengaged. Nick felt like he should have been more surprised at any of this, but he just couldn’t seem to find it in him.

The narrow little room was gray and cold. The raised platform under the single window was the only thing in it resembling furniture. Atop the platform, wedged in the furthest corner from the door and curled into a ball, was a small figure. They looked up as the door slid open and Nick stepped into the room.

Despite it looking years younger, Nick recognized that face immediately. How could he not? Huge blue eyes stared out at him from under a limp fringe of blonde hair. That tiny curled-up body was perfectly still, like a prey animal trying not to be noticed.

Oh. So this is why we’re here, he thought.

Nick kept his movements slow and steady as he shifted the Punisher off his back and leaned it against the wall near the door. “Hey,” he said. “You’re Vash, right?”

Instead of answering, tiny pipsqueak Vash asked “Where’s Luida?” His voice was timid, high-pitched with youth. Nick could see his eyes searching for a familiar figure behind him. Instead he spotted Meryl, hovering in the doorway. He curled in on himself even more tightly.

“She’s letting us talk to you for a bit, if that’s okay. We’re not gonna hurt you. I’m Nick, and that’s Meryl,” Nick said, gesturing between himself and her. Meryl raised a hand to wave an awkward hello. Vash peered out at them from behind his knees and did not return the greeting.

Nick walked slowly further in the room. Wide blue eyes tracked his every move. He’d encountered plenty of kids like this at the orphanage: ones that saw every stranger as a viper waiting to strike.

He placed himself at the far end of the platform and nodded his head at it. “Mind if I sit?”

Tiny Vash looked at him like he had two heads. Nick waited. He watched the kid realize that Nick was actually waiting for his answer, and then wonder if it was a trick, and deliberate on what was the safest choice. It all crossed that little round face in a flash–he just knew to look for it.

Vash gave a single jerky nod of assent. Nick sat.

It was a hard platform, some combination of plastic and metal. A single photo was propped on the windowsill above it, the only homey item. He looked around and didn’t even see a pillow or blanket. What he did see were tally marks: dozens and dozens of them, scratched into the walls as high as a child could reach.

Anger started to simmer to life in his chest, but he squashed it before Vash could sniff it out. Kids like this had a sixth sense for anger. He’d retreat even further and Nick would lose him.

Still slowly telegraphing each move, Nick reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and pulled out two lollipops. He held them both out to Vash. “Ever had one of these before? Pick one.”

One was red and one was blue. After a long, long moment of deliberation, Vash uncurled enough to reach out and take the red one. He had to reach out with both hands, because they were cuffed together. Nick hadn’t been able to tell before, with the kid all folded up on himself. The anger flared up again, hotter, harder to push back down.

He forced a smile. “Cherry flavor. Good choice.” He unwrapped the blue one for himself and stuck it in his mouth. From the corner of his eye, he watched Vash struggle to mimic his actions. The cuffs held his hands a few inches apart and he couldn’t quite get the right grip on the papery edge of the wrapper. He started to wedge the stick between the tips of his knees to hold it steady.

“Want some help?” Nick asked. “I’ll give it right back. Promise.”

The kid didn’t hesitate quite so long this time before handing the lollipop back over. Progress. Nick unwrapped it efficiently and gave it right back, as promised.

Vash held the candy to his nose and gave it a sniff. He gave it a single testing lick. His eyes widened. He stuck the lollipop in his mouth.

“Good, right?” Nick said. Vash nodded. Didn’t even hesitate first. Really good progress. “Say, the blue ones always turn my tongue blue. Has that happened yet?” Nick stuck his tongue out.

Vash looked startled, but Nick didn’t miss the twitch at the corners of his mouth. He nodded again.

Nick stuck the blue lollipop back in his mouth. “Ah, happens every time. Yours might dye your tongue red, too.”

The kid pulled the stick out of his mouth in alarm and studied the candy on the end. “Forever?” he asked.

“Nah, not forever. Just for a little bit,” Nick answered. “Let’s see it?”

Vash stuck out his tongue.

Nick nodded sagely. “Yep. Bright red.”

The kid stuck his tongue out even further and went a little cross-eyed trying to see it for himself. Nick laughed. Teeny Vash twitched and blinked at him in alarm, then softened. The corners of his mouth curled up a little more, tentatively.

Nick looked around the room with exaggerated attention, like he was noticing all the tally marks for the first time. His eyes swept past Meryl, still hovering uncertainly in the doorway. He gave her a quick nod. “Did you make all these marks, Vash? One for every day? You’ve been in here a long time…” He tried not to count them up but his brain couldn’t help itself. Twenty, twenty-five, thirty…ninety-five, one hundred…

Vash didn’t respond, just watched him.

“Do they ever let you out of this room?” Nick asked, but the sunken feeling in his gut told him he already knew the answer.

Vash shook his head.

“So what do you do in here all the time?” He tried to keep his tone light, pretty casual. They were just two people having a chat and he wasn’t upset at all.

“Luida and Brad come visit sometimes,” Vash answered in that small voice.

“Mm. What are they like?” Nick asked, the way you’d ask someone for a restaurant recommendation. No stake in the game. No wrong answers.

Vash shuffled the lollipop from one side of his mouth to the other. “Luida’s nice.”

Brad’s omission in that sentence blazed like neon in Nick’s mind. He penciled the name onto his mental hit-list. Nick remembered having briefly met him on the ship when they brought Vash there after the sand-steamer. Brad had fixed up his damaged Tech arm. He’d seemed gruff and prickly, but not cruel. Vash had seemed comfortable with him. But then, he’d been an adult–an old, old adult–and a lot could change in a hundred and fifty-odd years.

“What’s Brad like?” Nick asked.

Vash curled inward again and rested his cheek on his knee. “He hates me,” he mumbled.

“Hates you? What for?”

Big blue eyes stared emptily at the floor. “He wants to kill me. A lot of them do.”

Ice shivered up Nick’s spine. “Why do they want to kill you, Vash?”

“They think I’m dangerous ‘cause I’m a Plant.” The admission came with a brief flash of Vash’s eyes to his face, gauging his reaction. “I hear them outside the door sometimes.”

No wonder he’d stared at them both with such frozen terror when Nick and Meryl had walked in. The little guy probably thought they’d showed up to murder him. He was thankful Meryl had hung back, as agreed. She was no good with kids, she’d claimed. Nick was just glad they hadn’t crowded little Vash right away. He was aware of her shifting angrily in his peripheral vision, and he shot her a warning look to cool it. She could rant and rave about the injustice somewhere that wasn’t in front of the single exit of a traumatized child’s prison cell.

“That sounds really scary,” Nick told him. He let some of the sincerity slip into his voice. He’d been the one listening to cruel voices outside his cell door before. He could relate.

Vash looked up at him again. Held Nick’s gaze for longer, searching for something in his face. His eyes welled with tears. His mouth trembled around the lollipop stick. He buried his face against his knobbly little knees as he was wracked with sobs.

“Hey, hey, it’s okay, kid,” Nick soothed. He scooted across the platform as loudly as he could manage. Didn’t want to startle the little guy. He reached out and placed a cautious hand on one narrow shoulder.

Vash flinched, and then he was flinging himself onto Nick. He pressed his face into the front of Nick’s shoulder and cried and cried. His cuffed hands were squished between their chests. Had they been free, Nick imagined Vash would have flung them around his neck.

Nick put his own arms around him. He could feel the bones of Vash’s ribs and spine through the fabric of his funny white smock. He felt way too light, fragile like a bird. Were they not feeding him enough? Nick made soothing sounds and smoothed his hand over the back of Vash’s head. The kid needed a shower. His hair was oily, and he didn’t smell so great either. “Hey, it’s okay. You’ve been really scared. It’s alright. Let it out.”

It went on for a few minutes. Nick rubbed his back and made gentle noises, and tried to do the math on all those damn tally marks. It was at least five months. Maybe more: he might have missed some. The rage simmered hot in his stomach. He looked over at Meryl. She had her hands clasped tightly together as she chewed on her bottom lip.

Eventually the sobs slowed into hiccups and sniffles. Vash peeked up at Nick with one red-rimmed eye. It was so odd how the little beauty mark beneath it was exactly the same, despite everything else. “Sorry,” he whispered, an achingly familiar refrain. “I got your shirt wet.”

“Nah, you did me a favor. It needed to get washed anyway.”

The kid let out a single, tiny laugh. More of a hiccup. Nick still counted it as a win. Vash lifted his head up and scrubbed at his damp face. He shifted away and sat up a little, but still kept pressed close to Nick’s side. Maybe he was cold, but also Nick couldn’t blame him for being starved for any amount of comfort after so long in this empty box.

Things were quiet for a moment, other than the sounds of a few residual sniffles. Nick glanced down and noticed Vash’s bent, crinkled lollipop stick in a fold of his jacket. He must not have noticed it fall out of his mouth during his crying jag. Nick picked it up from the cleaner end.

Two little cuffed hands reached out to take it. Nick glanced over at the embarrassed look on Vash’s face. “Sorry, I–”

He tucked it in his jacket pocket to throw away later. Not even a trash can in here. “It’s okay, don’t worry about it. Those are good though, right?”

Vash’s hands lowered. It was hard to tell through the fabric of that odd full-body undersuit, but Nick was pretty sure neither of Vash’s arms were prosthetic. So he lost it later in life somehow. Nick wondered when and how it happened. Or would happen, from this moment they were in now, deep in the past. Could they change things here? Could they prevent it–or anything else–from happening?

Vash nodded his agreement against Nick’s bicep.

“They’re one of my favorite things to eat,” Nick continued. “What’s your favorite food?”

He looked down so he could see Vash seriously pondering the question. Weird haircut and clothes aside, he was a real cute kid. “Birthday cake.”

Nick had expected him to say donuts but hey, he’d never had a lollipop. Maybe he hadn’t had those yet either. “Mm. That is good. How old did you turn on your last birthday?”

“One.”

He must have misheard. “Hm? Sorry?”

“One year old,” Vash said again.

“You’re only a year old?” Nick said incredulously. He’d accidentally let too much shock bleed into his voice, because when he looked down at Vash he was hunching inward again. He rushed to course-correct. He nudged the kid’s side playfully with his elbow. “Sorry, sorry. You just look a lot older than most one-year-olds I’ve seen.”

“I’m almost two,” Vash muttered, a little defensively. “We–I grew fast.” Good to know some things were the same across species: kids still wanted every second of their age to count towards something. But Nick had assumed he was around ten. If he was really less than two years old, that meant he’d spent roughly an entire third of his entire life in this horrible little cell. Cold, alone, bored, and waiting for people who hated him to come through the door and kill him.

Fuck the timeline, Nick decided. Fuck whatever may or may not have happened before he and Meryl found themselves taking this weird little trip down memory lane. He didn’t care that it had all apparently worked out “fine” with Luida, Brad, and the rest of Ship 3 at some point. There was no way in hell he was leaving this little kid here in this situation.

“Vash,” he asked carefully. “Would you like to leave?”

“The room?” Vash asked.

Nick gestured broadly. “The room, the whole ship. Do you want us to get you out of here?” If they could get back to their present–assuming he hadn’t completely fucked all of spacetime or whatever–he’d take little Vash to Hopeland. He’d be loved and cared for there while Nick hunted down every Eye of Michael bastard he could find until there was no one left to threaten them. Including…

He glanced at the photo on the windowsill. A beaming, dark-haired woman stood with her arms around two boys. One was clearly Vash, cheesing goofily into the camera. The other could only be Knives. He was out there somewhere, too. Could he try to save one kid and just leave his brother to grow up to become…that?

Nick privately cursed their luck. Why had they been thrown back to now, when it was already too late to change so many things? Why not right before the Big Fall?

“There’s nowhere else to go.” Vash’s little voice was hollow. Looking from the picture back down to him, it was obvious how much thinner and paler he was now.

I know a place, Nick was about to say. But Meryl spoke up for the first time. “Wolfwood?” When he looked at her, she gave him a come here jerk of her head.

He excused himself and crossed the room to her. He pretended he couldn’t feel wide blue eyes boring into the back of his head with every step.

“We don’t even know how we got here, let alone how to get back!” Meryl whispered once he’d closed the distance. “Don’t make promises we can’t keep.”

“Then we’ll take him down to the planet.”

“This is right after the Fall, Wolfwood! There’s nothing down there!”

“I’m not leaving him here. Look at this place!” he hissed.

She bit her lip again. Her eyes darted around as she thought. “But this is…we know it works out okay? Right?” She echoed his own thoughts from a moment ago, like she was trying to convince herself. He disliked it as much now as he had the first time.

“I don’t care if it works out okay. It’s not okay now.”

“What if we change something? What if we make it worse?” Her worries mirrored his own, but for each of them Nick found he just didn’t care. Noman’s Land was far from a perfect place. Were they willing to trade one child’s suffering for…all that? Could he let Vash remain the sacrifice below the floorboards of a civilization he already knew was crumbling?

No. No, he couldn’t.

“We could make it better, you know. If you don’t want to help me, I’ll just do it myself. I–”

“Wolfwood–”

“Do you know how he lost his arm?”

She shook her head.

“Neither do I,” he whispered. “He has them both now. What if they’re the ones…”

Her eyes widened in horror. “Do you really think–”

He didn’t know much about what was going on now, but he knew what Vash the Stampede was like in their time. Luida could have sawed his arm off herself and called it love, and he probably would have thanked her for it. “I don’t know. I don’t know! But I’m telling you, I’m not taking the chance. I’ll take our chances on the planet. We might even find Knives before–”

Something moved behind Meryl’s head, through the little pane of glass in the door. Nick spun and grabbed up the Punisher as the door slid open.

He stared into the familiar, though much younger, faces of Brad and Luida. Serendipitous, that. Two other unknown, armed people stood behind them. They all looked shocked.

“Speak of the devil,” Nick said. “I was just about to come looking for you.”

“Who the hell are you?” Brad demanded.

“Where’s Vash? Vash!” Luida called. She tried to peer over Nick’s shoulder.

“Luida?” Vash called back.

“Yeah, we need to talk about what you’ve been doing to Vash,” Nick told them, voice icy.

“Who are you?” Brad growled again.

Nick hefted the Punisher a little higher in his arms. It was still wrapped up, but he could release the catches and have it ready to fire in under a second. Meryl shifted at his back. He hoped she had those derringers ready.

“I’m his guardian fuckin’ angel.”

Chapter Text

Nick was honest enough with himself to admit he’d gotten immense, petty satisfaction from putting the fear of God into Brad and Luida. And by “fear of God,” he mostly meant “fear of Nicholas D. Wolfwood, the Punisher, and Meryl Stryfe.”

After, of course, they’d moved far enough away from little Vash’s cell so he wouldn’t hear all the yelling and possible fighting/gunfire. You had to keep the kids out of that sort of thing.

Meryl was a good partner to have at your side in an argument, Nick discovered. He’d heard they taught you how to argue in college. Apparently it was true. She could fire off words with the same devastating precision as he could bullets.

By the time they were done, Luida had tears glistening on her cheeks. Brad looked downcast, ashamed, though he tried to hide it with the mulish set of his crossed arms. And Nick hadn’t had to punch or shoot anyone, though he had fired off a burst at a light fixture to show they meant business. He was also honest enough with himself to admit that he’d half-hoped for more fighting. He wasn’t in the habit of leaving child-abusers alive. It itched at his brain like he’d forgotten something important, like heading out for the day without his sunglasses.

They extracted promises from Luida and Brad about more humane accommodations for Vash (and boy had Nick enjoyed watching Little Miss Meryl rip Brad a new asshole around how “humane” was a word that can and should apply to Plants as well as humans, “you callous buffoon”). Then they back-tracked to Vash’s cell, trailed by an abashed Luida.

(As with any true compromise, they had had to make concessions of their own before Luida would let them so much as out of her sight, let alone back near Vash. Nick had had to relinquish the Punisher into her custody, and they’d had to sit in boredom for ages until Brad could scrub through the ship’s internal surveillance footage. Eventually he’d found the part where Nick and Meryl were spat out of some…fuckin’ magical rift, or something, to crash on the hallway floor. Oh yeah, Meryl had landed square on his stomach when they fell. He’d meant to be mad at her for that and then forgot. The looks of shock on Brad and Luida’s faces had, at least, been worth the price of admission).

She swiped them into the room and approached Vash, who hadn’t moved from his spot on the platform. Nick hung back, gesturing for Meryl to do the same, when he saw the shuttered look on his face.

“Hey, Vash,” Luida said softly. She crouched in front of him. “Let’s see those hands?”

He held his little cuffed wrists obediently out to her. She swiped her palm across the cuffs and they sprang open. “You’ve had those on long enough, huh?”

Vash looked at her in shock. His hands stayed limp in his lap. “Were you crying?” he asked her after a long moment.

In profile, Nick saw her smile up at Vash, then glance back at the two of them. “Your friends helped me realize that…we haven’t treated you very fairly, Vash. Everyone’s– I know we’ve been under a lot of stress, but…that’s not an excuse. I’m very sorry.”

Vash just stared at her.

Luida waited for him to respond and, when he didn’t, she smiled gently and continued. “We’re going to move you to a comfier room, too, but it’ll take me a bit to get that all figured out. In the meantime, you’ll keep hanging tight in here, okay?”

He nodded numbly at her. She gave him another smile, stood, and glanced at Nick and Meryl as she let herself out of the room. The door slid shut and beeped behind her as she exited. With the odd way things had gone so far, Nick suspected he couldn’t actually be locked inside this cell, and he had every intention of sticking to Vash’s side for now, but he couldn’t help the instinctive uneasy crawl along the back of his neck as Luida sealed them in. She’d had her own threats to make: reassuring them that Vash’s cell was surveilled and that the crew of Ship 3 would respond in force if they attempted anything shady or tried to flee with him.

Her brief interactions with Vash seemed genuine enough, but Nick had met every flavor of liar. Some of them were damn good actors. Why did they really care whether he and Meryl ran off with Vash or not? He wondered if a scared baby Plant was worth as much as a typical adult one. He wondered if they were worth even more, and then stomped on the cold, sick feeling that squirmed through his stomach at the thought.

The spark of life Nick had managed to coax out of Vash had snuffed out again sometime between now and when Brad and Luida had first stormed into the room. He sat on the edge of his platform, hands still dangling in his lap, eyes on the floor.

Nick tentatively reclaimed his original seat on the far end. He glanced at Vash, who didn’t acknowledge him. “Hey. I bet this has been confusing–”

“You lied,” Vash muttered.

“What?” Nick glanced at Meryl, who gave him a blank look back.

“Luida didn’t let you in here. She didn't know you,” Vash said to his feet.

Oh shit, he fucking–he had said that, hadn’t he? Rookie mistake. Shit. He hadn’t wanted Vash to be scared of them but– he’d only just built a rickety little bridge out of matchsticks with this kid and he may have already burned it.

Nick took a deep breath and blew it out of his mouth like he was exhaling smoke. The need for a cigarette had been scratching at his brain stem with increasing insistence for a while now, but he wasn’t going to light up in front of the kid. He tried to keep his nicotine out of baby lungs; a self-imposed rule that he was now extending to baby Plant lungs.

Sorry, I was thrown here unexpectedly from the future and I’ve really been winging it, he thought to himself. Yeah, right.

“Yeah, I did lie. And I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry.”

Vash peered at him from his peripherals. In his closed-off, skeptical side-eye, Nick saw the suddenly striking resemblance between him and Millions Knives. What was he doing right now, in this time?

“That was the only thing I lied about, I swear,” Nick continued. He crossed his heart. “And that was it. I won’t do it again.”

Vash’s heels bounced softly against the side of the platform. He was silent for long enough that Nick thought he just wasn’t going to respond, but he let the silence rest. Then, barely audible, he asked: “Why are you here?”

Nick meant it when he said he wasn’t going to lie again, but he wanted to avoid the whole time travel conversation as long as absolutely possible. Maybe indefinitely. “They haven’t been treating you well. We’re here to make sure that changes and, if not, to rescue you and get you outta here.”

Vash’s narrow little shoulders hunched inward. “They haven’t hurt me.”

“That’s not the same thing as treating you well,” Nick told him. He hoped Vash could hear the conviction singing from deep in his bones. “D’you get how that’s not the same?”

Vash’s shrug was tight and withdrawn. His gaze burned a hole in the floor.

Nick considered pushing the issue for a brief second, then set it aside. He was still in the doghouse and Vash wasn’t really going to listen to him. Not right now. “We’re gonna hang around for a little while. Make sure things are okay,” he said instead. The truth, but no promises. A little while could mean just about anything, since he didn’t know if or when they might get pulled back through time. “We can stay here in the room with you, or hang out in the hallway if you want some space.”

Vash studied him from under his eyelashes. He didn’t ask the questions Nick could sense hovering in the silence. Nick offered more information. “You said people have been threatening you and talking outside your door. We’ll keep an eye on things, yeah? We’ll make sure they can’t hurt you.”

The dead-eyed look Vash gave him told Nick he didn’t particularly care at this moment if people stormed through the door to kill him. It wasn’t an expression meant for childrens’ faces. It dropped lead into Nick’s stomach. “I can’t do anything.”

Nick looked at him in confusion.

Vash’s eyes sunk back to his own knees. “I’m a useless Plant. I can’t make anything and I don’t have any powers. I just eat and sleep. You don’t have to try so hard to keep me alive. There’s no point.”

This damn kid. Not even two years old and already soaking up damage. “I don’t care about that,” he said, striving for nonchalance. He gestured to Meryl. “Neither of us do. Everyone has value even if they don’t make anything.”

“That’s right,” Meryl chimed in, debate partner extraordinaire. Vash glanced up at her, then returned to studying his knees. “Lots of humans just eat and sleep and never make anything their whole lives. They still have value, right?”

Curled inward sullenly, Vash didn’t answer. He may have been shutting down, tuning them out. Nick gave a last little push before dropping it. “Everyone deserves to feel safe,” he said. “Everyone deserves to eat and laugh, no matter what. That’s all.”

Vash scooted back into the far corner of the platform. He hunched in a ball and buried his head in his arms, the way he had been before they arrived.

He wouldn’t respond to anything else, and shirked away from their attempts to touch him. Nick and Meryl made themselves as comfortable as possible on the floor and settled in to wait him out. Nick pretended not to see Meryl swiping across her eyes.

Nick nodded off and woke some time later to find Meryl asleep on his shoulder. Vash knelt on the platform, elbows on the windowsill, staring into the night sky. He looked so small, so alone against the backdrop of space. Nick’s chest ached below his sternum. Take him and run, his instincts screamed. Get him out of here! You don’t negotiate. You kill, and rescue, and take him somewhere safe.

But it was true there was nowhere else to go. They were floating thousands of meters above a desolate desert planet and he had no clue how to get down.

Being a shield, for now, would have to be enough. It would have to be.

When Vash started to turn, Nick didn’t bother to pretend to be asleep. Just held out his free arm in a silent offer.

After a moment’s hesitation, Vash slipped off the platform and padded over to Nick. He wedged himself against Nick’s side, curled up with his head pillowed on Nick’s leg, like a little cat. Nick scooped an arm around him as best he could.

It wasn’t long before Vash’s breathing evened out, like Meryl’s on his other shoulder. The soft rhythm of it was peaceful. Nick closed his eyes and followed them.

***

Luida arrived to take Vash to his new room the next morning. He trailed a step behind her, and Nick and Meryl followed behind him like a rearguard. Meryl looked bleary-eyed and stiff from bad sleep on the floor, the same way Nick felt. He let the rage it fueled in him keep him awake, because the platform Vash had been sleeping on for months was equally uncomfortable. He also realized that he had, apparently, lost his own ability to sleep soundly on the bare floor of an empty cell, and couldn’t decide whether or not this was a relief.

The room Luida led them to was the same one Nick had seen adult Vash laid in to recover after their disastrous sand-steamer ride. Guess it was destined to be his bedroom in any timeline. It also gave Nick a much-needed point of reference for their location on the ship. He had wandered or been shown about while Vash convalesced. He could probably make it back to at least a few key places on his own if he had to.

The bedroom was, again, a bare little rectangle. But it at least had a real bed, along with some other basic furniture. A tray of food was balanced on the small table. Nick could see wisps of steam still curling off of it and his stomach clenched. That’s right, he was starving. And dying for a cigarette.

Luida introduced Vash to the room with a cheerful, expansive wave of her arm and a “Ta-da!” Vash stood in the center of the floor, his single battered photograph held carefully to his chest, and did not move. She nudged him forward, encouraging him to make himself comfortable, and pointed out the tray of food.

She waved Nick and Meryl back into the hallway, door still open, to reveal the room right next door had been prepared for them. Nick looked into the room. It had the same simple setup but with a wider bed. Well, he hoped Meryl didn’t mind sharing.

A little hand slipped into his own, making him startle. Little Vash had snuck out behind them and now peered into the room from behind Nick’s hip. “You get to be next-door neighbors!” Luida exclaimed. “I thought that would be nice. Right?”

From the tentative smile and the way Vash clutched his hand, Nick assumed that, yes, she’d been right. And when he watched Vash go back into his own new room, flop back onto his new bed with his little legs dangling, and positively melt into the mattress with a giddy grin, Nick thought maybe hanging around hadn’t yet been a huge mistake.

***

It wasn’t like Nick had ever assumed his work for the Eye of Michael or Millions Knives was going to be normal. He was a science experiment turned assassin. He was Nicholas the Punisher, the executioner with the 300-pound cross and a pocket full of magic glass vials. He’d been contracted by a genocidal god to safely return his wayward gunslinging brother.

Weird shit, front to back. And it had been a babysitting job from the word go. But nowhere in that damned contract had it indicated that the line of duty would take him 150-ish years in the past to co-parent a traumatized alien child with Meryl Stryfe.

Turned out Vash had been refusing food since his “rescue” by planetside members of Ship 3 combing the wreckage for survivors. Luida had been wavering for a while over the idea of trying to fit him with a feeding tube. That marginally lessened some of Nick’s concerns about their treatment of Vash, but he still thought the time for intervention had been about, oh, six months ago.

Despite his initial excitement about his new bed, the first couple mornings when Nick knocked on the door and entered Vash’s room, he found the little guy curled up asleep in a corner on the floor. He had, at least, tugged the blanket off the bed to wrap around himself. “It’s too soft,” he said tearfully the first morning, rubbing at his bleary eyes with his knuckles. It was a sleepy gesture so hurt and childlike that Nick just had to gather the warm little bundle of him up in his arms and squeeze him close.

(Nick had had all this softness in him back at Hopeland, but he thought it had been wrung out of him by everything that had happened since the Eye of Michael had taken him. Turned out it had just been pushed down, waiting for a chance to flow out of him again. He didn’t know what to do with that, nor with the way Meryl would look at him with open tenderness in those moments, like he and Vash were an artwork worth gazing at. Like he was good).

“Five bites of food, or we won’t let you sleep in our room tonight,” Nick said.

Vash glared back at him over the full tray. They’d been in a stalemate over dinner ever since Nick had returned with the trays. They generally ate in their rooms, to avoid potential conflicts or awkward questions in the ship cafeteria. “I ate five bites at breakfast,” Vash said. The stubborn cross of his arms and scowl on his face was all Brad. Ever since Brad’s awkward muttered apology a few days ago (under Meryl’s thunderous, vengeful supervision), Vash had been observing him with much less fear. Even trailing him sometimes as he repaired different tech on the ship, absorbing everything with enormous eyes.

(NIck didn’t expect he would ever like Brad, but he didn’t have to. Nick could count on him to give the smackdown to anyone who was unkind to Vash while he was under his supervision, and that was what mattered).

“That was hours ago. Doesn’t count. I’ll make you sleep in your own room, and you know it.” The ultimatum was 90% leverage, 10% selfishness. It was a bed barely built to fit two, let alone a wiggly kid who was all sharp knees and elbows.

Vash’s little feet swung angrily. He glanced at Meryl for help, but she was stone. She speared a vegetable with her fork and popped it in her mouth. “Mmm. Delicious.”

Vash glared at her too. She chewed impassively. He refocused his ire on Nick. “You’re mean.”

“Yeah, you’re being tortured,” Nick deadpanned.

Vash pouted. He was an expressive adult, but he was so expressive as a kid. It would be funny if the context wasn’t so grim. Nick watched his face as he cycled through calculations. “I’ll eat a lollipop,” he offered hopefully.

“You can have a lollipop after five bites of real food.”

Vash threw himself backwards onto his bed in a fit of pique. He sighed as dramatically as a prima donna on the stage.

A week ago, Vash would never have dared to act out and argue like this. But more than a week of unwavering attention and affection could accomplish a lot. Kids just soaked up love like pouring water into the desert sand. They needed it like air. Vash had been used to being loved, Nick could tell. At some point, before the crash, that dark-haired woman from the photo had held him and played with him and cajoled him into washing up before bed.

“How many sets of teeth do Plants get?” Nick asked.

Vash swung his legs. “I dunno.”

“Me neither. D’you know how many sets humans get?”

“Two?”

“Yeah, two. For their whole lives. If they ruin their second set of teeth, that’s it. No more teeth. Humans who only eat lollipops and nothing else rot out all their teeth from the sugar and then that’s it. They’re screwed.”

“...You’re making that up,” Vash said uncertainly.

“God’s honest truth,” Nick said.

Vash studied the ceiling. “I’ll just get new ones. Outta diamond, so they’re sparkly and super tough and I can bite through anything.”

“Ten bites of dinner and I’ll help you look for diamonds,” said Meryl.

Vash groaned.

Eventually he forced down his five bites of food, angry tears welling in the corners of his eyes. They gave him lots of verbal praise and a lollipop, and he got to pick that evening’s post-dinner card game. (He didn’t have to know they always played a game with him right after dinner so he couldn’t sneak away before his food had a chance to digest). He liked the more complicated mathematical games. Meryl could keep up with him but not Nick, so he stepped out to smoke one of his fast-dwindling cigarettes.

What are you punishing yourself for? Nick had tried to ask previously, but that only ever got Vash to shut down. Nick knew that was what he was doing, he just didn’t know why. Survivor’s guilt? He blew smoke rings directly into one of the hallway air scrubbers. He didn’t like seeing the way the pieces of the puzzle fit together. The more they fell into place, the more clearly he could see how this child would someday become the walking clump of scar tissue known as Vash the Stampede.

He wanted to change that. He didn’t want it to be too late.

It had never been part of his contract to care so much. Fuck.

***

Luida had found a picture frame for Vash’s single photo. Nick watched him test out various placements in his room before settling on pride-of-place in the center of the little side table. They studied the family portrait together.

“What was Rem like?” Nick asked. Vash never called her his mother, and Nick didn’t pry as to why. Because then what might he feel the need to call Nick and Meryl, or Luida, or even motherfucking Brad?

“She liked red flowers. Geraniums were her favorite.”

Nick didn’t know what a flower or a geranium was but he at least knew his colors. “Is that why red is your favorite color?”

“Yeah.” Vash reached out to trace a finger down the glass.

Nick opened his mouth to speak. Hesitated. Bit his tongue. Decided to throw his cards down and take a gamble. “I know your brother’s still alive. Nai, right?”

Vash froze. He stared up at Nick with the same open fear Nick had hoped he’d left behind weeks ago. “I didn’t tell anyone that,” he whispered.

Nick took a seat on the edge of the bed to shrink himself into a less-threatening shape. “Yeah, I know. Brad and Luida think he’s dead. But you and I both know he’s still out there. What do you think he’s doing right now?”

Vash studied him warily. “I don’t know.”

Nick took another breath. Continued the gamble. “I know he crashed the ships.”

Vash flinched.

“Why did he do it? I won’t be angry, whatever you tell me. I just want to know.”

Vash’s little hands wrung together. The pinch in his face signified oncoming tears. He shook his head.

“What?”

“You’ll hate me.”

“No way,” said Nick. “Impossible.”

Vash shook his head vigorously back and forth.

“Cross my heart and hope to die. Plus, I can keep a secret. I won’t tell a soul if you don’t want.”

The kid sniffed and peeked at him through his lashes. “Not even Meryl?”

“Not even her. I swear.”

Little Vash sniffed wetly. Sniffed again. The breath hitched in his chest. “It’s my fault!” His voice broke around the words and he buried his head in his hands.

“How is it your fault, Vash?” Nick kept his seat on the bed. Playing it casual. No judgment.

“I g-gave him the admin codes,” he sobbed.

That…meant almost nothing to Nick. Felt a little anticlimactic, to be honest. “What does that mean?”

“He n-needed the codes to alter the ships’ trajectories. He rerouted them to crash. If I–if I hadn’t given them to him, he could–he couldn’t have…”

Nick wanted to pull him into a hug, but his gut told him now wasn’t the moment. “Did you know what he wanted to use those codes for?”

“No,” Vash moaned miserably.

“Why did you give them to him?”

“I thought he was curious,” Vash sniffled. “We didn’t have a-access to all the databases on our own. I thought he just…just wanted to look.”

Ah. So little Vash just thought his twin was going to snoop around Rem’s hidden porn folders or whatever, but instead he used his access to crash the fleet. And Vash, in typical self-flagellating Vash-fashion, had blamed the whole thing on himself.

Nick resisted the urge to sigh. “So, you didn’t know what he was going to do.”

“No.”

“Okay. Did you want him to crash the ships?”

Vash pulled his face out of his hands to gape at Nick in horror. “No!”

“Great. Did you force him to crash the ships?”

“No!”

“Hmm.” Nick rubbed his chin as though he were thinking very deeply. “So…if you just gave him the codes to use for other stuff, and he didn’t tell you what he wanted them for, and he did all the work on his own without you, then…how is it your fault?”

Vash stared at him like his brain had temporarily frozen. Nick watched him slowly reboot. “I…I…” he said. His eyes darted around, looking for a helpful ribbon of blame to twist back around himself. “I should have known…”

“Hm. Can you read minds?”

“No.”

“Is your brother a good liar?”

“...Yeah.”

“How good?”

Vash frowned at the floor. “Pretty good.”

Nick stroked his chin. “Doesn’t sound to me like any of that was your fault. Seems like it was out of your control, huh?”

Vash stared. His wheels turned. “But…” he breathed, half-hearted.

Nick scuffed the toe of his shoe on the floor. “Getting betrayed hurts. You didn’t see it coming. You couldn’t control it. But finding ways to blame yourself won’t change anything now, yeah?”

That finally did it. Unleashed the flood of tears. Vash threw himself onto Nick and clung to his neck the way he hadn’t been able to the first time he sobbed. He rocked him until it was over. When Vash was all cried out, he straightened up and looked at Nick with eyes that were red-rimmed and puffy, but clear. Nick thought he looked…lighter.

That evening, Vash ate 17 bites of his dinner without prompting. Nick and Meryl tried to pretend like they weren’t watching every spoonful with rapt, thrilled hopefulness.

The next morning, he ate nearly half of his breakfast without complaint. He had more energy the rest of that morning than Nick had ever seen from him. Meryl’s eyes shone as Vash won their second game of chess and begged her for a third. When she looked over at him, delighted and questioning, Nick just smiled and shrugged. A promise was a promise.

***

“Okay, see how my balance shifts when my foot comes up?”

Vash bounced in front of him in a decent ready stance. He nodded. “Yeah.”

“‘Kay. It’s all about timing. Watch for when my balance is the least steady. As my foot comes forward. That’s when you go for the sweep.”

“Got it!”

“Ok…go!” Nick moved in for a front kick. Fast as lightning, Vash came in for the sweep. Nick wobbled and staggered but managed to stay upright.

“Aw,” Vash griped when he didn’t hit the floor.

Nick reset his stance. “Counterstrike!” He rushed Vash, who shrieked in surprise. He crouched under Nick’s grasping arms and gripped his waist in what would have been a very well-executed double leg takedown if he weighed about a hundred more pounds.

“You’ve been paying attention,” he complimented.

“You were supposed to fall down,” Vash groused.

“Sorry, kid. I’ve had a bit more practice. Hey, Stryfe! Get over here and let Vash practice his leg sweeps on you.”

She didn’t bother to look up from her reading. “Not a chance.”

Vash opened his mouth to say something, then his face went blank, and then horrified. He raced for the door.

“Vash–”

In the second it took for the door to slide open, Vash yelled back over his shoulder “The Plant!” And then he was gone in a flash of white clothing.

Meryl jumped out of her seat and they both raced after him. He didn’t wander around the ship without either of them, Brad, or Luida with him. All the awful rumors about the little Independent Plant still spread among the residents of the ship. Scared, desperate people loved a scapegoat, and he was so small. He’d only just learned to throw a decent punch–

They sprinted behind him to the Plant chamber. Crewmembers milled about, their distress evident in their motions. Some of them glanced at Vash in confusion as he dashed towards them, Nick and Meryl on his heels.

Someone stepped forward with an arm out to block him. “You can’t go in here–”

“Luida!” Vash yelled.

Luida poked her head out from the doorway of the chamber. “Vash? What are–”

“I can hear the Plant, Luida! Her voice is fading! I think I can help her!”

Nick couldn’t hear what the scientists murmured to Luida over the sound of his own blood pounding in his ears. Meryl gasped and clutched at her side next to him. Luida shooed them away and gestured Vash inside. Nick and Meryl slipped in on Brad’s coattails after him.

It happened the way it had on the sand-steamer. Vash reached for the creature on the other side of the glass, which unfurled for him. He lit from within with intricate glowing markings. He did whatever it was that he did, and the Plant, miraculously, was healed.

The scientists and engineers murmured in amazement. When Vash turned around, markings still alight on his skin, his eyes immediately landed on Nick and Meryl in the small crowd. He smiled.

***

Meryl slipped back into their room. “I can’t believe it,” she whispered, as though from the other side of the wall she might break the spell. “He’s actually asleep in his own bed!”

Nick scratched around the edges of the nicotine patch on his arm. He could believe it. The kid had nearly fallen asleep face-first in his dinner. Or maybe Meryl had forgotten the way grown-Vash had done his magic with the Plant on the sand-steamer and then fallen promptly unconscious. “He’s just tired. Don’t get your hopes up for tomorrow night.”

“Pessimist,” said Meryl. She placed a hand dramatically over her heart. “What if our little baby’s really growing up?”

“Getting empty-nest syndrome already?” Nick teased.

“I love him,” Meryl said. “I don’t love getting kneed in the stomach every night.”

“I always catch the sharp elbows,” Nick said.

Meryl laughed and sat on her edge of the bed. She glanced around the room. “Okay…it is kinda weird without him here, though.”

“Ah, you’re thinkin’ about it all wrong. We’re two young parents with a night off for once. So what do Mommy and Daddy want to do with their empty bed?” Nick wiggled his eyebrows at her as salaciously as he could manage.

If she murdered him right then, it would be worth it for the look on her face. Meryl tugged off one of her fingerless gloves and brandished it like a weapon. “Maybe Daddy wants to sleep in the hallway,” she growled.

He held his hands up in surrender. “I was joking! Joking!”

A little while later, after they had settled in and turned off the lights, Meryl whispered “Nicholas?”

He had already been drifting towards sleep, but managed a grunt in reply.

“Someday we’re going to have to give him the sex talk,” she uttered with something approaching horror.

Nick rolled over and rearranged the pillow under his head. “Who’s ‘we?’ Daddy’s in the hallway.”

“Asshole,” Meryl hissed, but he could hear the laughter in her voice.

Chapter Text

It had always struck Nick as odd, how easy it was to adjust to just about anything. Being trapped 150 years in the past should have been more distressing, right? But the longer they stayed, the less he thought about getting suddenly yanked away again. Their days found a rhythm. He fell asleep in the same bed every night and woke up there every morning. The “present” day he and Meryl had come from started to seem more and more like a dream.

The image of Vash the Stampede he had in his mind kept fading in comparison to the bright child he saw in front of him. Now little Vash was just…Vash. He was a kid who loved music, sports, the color red, and everything sweet. He was smart and helpful and sensitive, could heal sick Plants and solve math equations that made Nick’s head spin just to look at, and he laughed at fart jokes just like every other kid Nick had ever met.

Meryl had taken up helping Luida with her flora project for part of each day. She was too damn smart and forceful to sit around for long without a Goal to occupy herself with. Vash helped with the Plants whenever the scientists or engineers asked him to.

For a brief moment, Nick had wondered where that might leave him. He wasn’t smart enough to help with science-y things. He could repair a junker motorcycle enough to keep it running, but he didn’t know jack shit about Lost Technology (or, as they called it in this time period, technology). He knew how to take care of kids and kill people and that was it.

He worried he was about to become obsolete, but he’d forgotten that Vash could never turn down a request for help. And the people on the ship–who had quickly reversed their opinions on the freaky evil little Independent Plant once they realized he was useful to them–suddenly had a lot of requests.

That Plant’s light had wavered from a lighter to slightly darker shade of blue–could he check on it? This one’s energy output had dropped by 1.4 percent–did it need something? Could he tell if it was sick? No, nothing was wrong, they just had a couple questions–did he have a minute?

“It’s 11:30 at night,” Nick growled. “He’s asleep. It can wait till morning.”

“But–” The bespectacled scientist carried one of those clear computing tablets and smelled strongly of burnt coffee. They stood on Nick and Meryl’s doorstep like a forlorn stray cat.

“I’ll send him your way after breakfast tomorrow. Good night.” Nick shut the door in their face. Sliding doors didn’t have the same panache as the kind you could slam, but it still got the point across.

He clambered back into bed, taking deep breaths to calm himself down. Vash had luckily been asleep in his own room, where he now was nearly every other night. If he’d woken up, he might have insisted that it was fine and tried his best to answer their asinine questions while still half-asleep.

“Again?” Meryl murmured.

“Gonna kick all their fuckin’ asses,” Nick muttered. He clenched and released his fists a few times.

Meryl made a “mm-hmm” noise of agreement but was already most of the way asleep again.

Nick lay awake for a while longer in the dark, eyes open in the direction of the ceiling. Even Luida, cheerful and fond of Vash as she was, was a pragmatist at heart. She would always put the overall needs of her ship over the needs of one child. Maybe that was the sort of quality the leader of a big community needed, but Nick fucking hated it.

He could see how it would have played out if he and Meryl hadn’t arrived. How it had played out? How they might have left him in that little cell until he proved his use to them, and then finally started to treat him with some basic decency. How Vash–lonely, scared, grieving, full of self-blame and already convinced of his uselessness–would have drawn all the worst conclusions. Would have thrown himself into any opportunity to seem helpful–to be worth the effort of keeping alive–and snapping up the bare scraps of kindness they threw at him. And all the while blaming himself for the crash caused by his brother. Carving off pieces of himself over the decades until he became the hollow, bleeding creature Nick had briefly known as Vash the Stampede.

If Nick’s job was still to be a shield, that was fine by him. That was what you had to do for kids, right? Show them how to set boundaries and hold them, show them how to be treated well, and they’d eventually take on those habits themselves. That was the idea, at least. But was it enough?

Whether or not they ever got transported back to their original time, Nick and Meryl wouldn’t be there for Vash forever. Even Brad and Luida had aged in between their stints in cryosleep. Eventually he would be left on his own again. Like Livio had been left on his own when the Eye of Michael–

No, no! Nick pounced on the thought and tried to squish it back down into the sand where it belonged. But it fought him the whole way.

It took him a long time to fall back asleep.

***

Vash was going through a growth spurt. They had to cut off the wrists and ankles of his wacky little bodysuit so his arms and legs had enough room to extend. He was thrilled. His new goal in life was to grow at least as tall as Meryl. Nick told him to dream bigger, pun intended.

When Vash spent the better part of a day unusually irritable and distracted, Nick thought he might just have growing pains. Until Luida found them, Brad on her heels, to say that she’d been contacted by Ship 2: there was something wrong with one of their Plants, and they were asking for help. Did Vash think there was anything he could do?

He rubbed his forehead like it ached, the way he’d been doing all day. “She’s too far away to hear clearly. I have to see her in person.”

Luida pursed her lips. “Ship 2 is planetside. We could let you down as close as possible but you’d still have to travel a ways across the planet’s surface.”

“Is that dangerous?” Vash asked, all big eyes.

“Sometimes there are worms,” Nick said. “Maybe raiders, although it might be too early for that. The biggest risk down there is dehydration. How far would we have to travel?”

Luida tapped at her tablet. “From the nearest point we can manage…a little less than 22 iles.”

Nick thought. It was slow going over sand, and Vash had little legs. “On foot, we could probably do that in three days.”

“Won’t have to walk,” Brad grunted. “We’ve got tomases.”

Oh, that helped. “Two days max, then,” Nick said.

“Then we should go now!” Vash exclaimed, his eyes still wide and worried. “If she’s in trouble now, we have to hurry!”

“Slow your roll,” Nick said. He crouched in front of Vash. “I know you wanna help, but you don’t have to go.”

“Yes, I do–”

“Yeah, sure, you’re the Plant-whisperer. But the planet can be dangerous. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. Do you want to go?”

The stubborn set of Vash’s mouth would have told him his answer immediately, even if Nick didn’t already know quite well what sort of person Vash was. But the kid at least had the sense or good grace to take a moment to ponder what Nick was telling him.

“Yes,” he said after a beat. “I want to go.”

“Okay,” said Nick. “Then I’ll go with you.”

“You mean we,” said Meryl.

“And me.” Brad scowled. “Someone has to keep an eye on you three.”

Nick rolled his eyes in tandem with Meryl. Vash tried not to smile.

***

They packed hastily, and Luida led Nick to go unlock a room that hadn’t been touched since they arrived. Inside, just as they’d left them, were Meryl’s derringer and the Punisher. Ever since he’d gotten it–until all this–he’d hardly let it out of his sight. Let alone set it down anywhere long enough to gather dust. Nick swiped a hand over the top of one horizontal bar, across the tarp and buckles. He watched the small poof of gray particles with a strange dreamlike feeling.

But it felt real enough when he picked it up again. Goddamn, had it always been this heavy?

They checked and re-checked their water rations, saddled up the tomases, bade goodbye to Luida, and were shuttled down to the surface.

The doors depressurized and the ramp lowered. Blinding bright light was followed by a wave of blistering heat. Everyone winced. Nick grimaced and readjusted the sunglasses securely on his face.

When he stepped out onto the sand, the feel of it underneath his shoes was exactly the same as ever. As was the dry, warm breeze against his face. It carried the same smell of sun-warmed rock. The sun beat down on his head and shoulders. Hot air trapped in the spaces between his clothes and skin, and his pores prickled with forming sweat.

His head swam. He thought bitterly of the nicotine patch on his arm and wished more than anything for a cigarette. Wouldn’t that just make the illusion complete?

Brad led his tomas down the ramp and double-checked the girth on its saddle. He looked around at the endless sand with a critical eye. “So this is it?”

“Yeah,” Meryl sighed. “This is it.”

And the worst part was, Nick thought as he helped Vash up into his saddle, in this time period there wasn’t even anywhere to stop for a drink. That was about the only good thing this shitheap planet had going for it most of the time.

They rode. Vash stared around in fascination and asked question after question.

“What are those?” Vash pointed at the little buzzing cloud hovering over a nearby ridge.

“Worms.” Meryl pulled a face.

Vash frowned at them. “They don’t look like worms from Earth. They look more like wasps.”

“Those are the little ones. I heard they named ‘em ‘cause of the way the big ones look.” Nick tried to readjust the Punisher across his back for the millionth time. It wasn’t really designed to rest easy on a tomas. It wasn’t designed to rest easy at all.

Vash perked up. “Do you think we’ll see a big one?”

“Hopefully not.” Meryl shuddered and glanced over her shoulder like one might have already snuck up behind them.

When they stopped to make camp for the night, Nick was struck again by the familiarity. Brad, a shapeless sleeping lump under his blanket, could have been Roberto. Vash gazed out over the dunes in silence the way he had–would?–as an adult. Just trade the tomases for a battered news van and…

He shook his head. Grabbed handfuls of sand to focus on the coarse texture slipping between his fingers. This, now, was real. The dried sweat making the fabric of his shirt stiff under his jacket and the taste of dinner still lingering between his teeth. The sounds of the tomases shifting in their sleep and the pungent animal smell of them that drifted to him when the wind shifted just so.

Meryl sat at his side. “You alright?”

Nick dropped his handful of sand. “It’s weird, huh? Being back out here.”

She tilted her chin up to look at the stars. “Yeah…is it strange to say that I missed it? Just a little bit?”

He didn’t want to admit that he’d felt the same. He shrugged. “Guess not. It’s where we were born, after all.”

“Yeah, I guess so. Hey, you know all our ancestors are people who survived on those ships. Have you ever thought of trying to find your relatives?”

Honestly, no. The thought had never crossed his mind. He shrugged again. “Wouldn’t even know where to begin.”

Meryl’s pause was the awkward sort that people made when they belatedly remembered you were an orphan. Every kid at Hopeland dealt with it at one point or another. It was inescapable. “Oh. Well…I’m looking for mine. I can try to find yours too for you, if you want.”

“You gonna talk to your folks once you find ‘em?” Nick asked. It was a bit of a dodge, but she let it slide.

Meryl scuffed her heels into the sand. “I’m not sure yet. It would be interesting, but I don’t want to accidentally create some sort of time paradox.”

Nick snorted. “A little late for that, isn’t it?”

They woke up and moved on early the next morning, and the ship swam into view by mid-afternoon. Nick rediscovered aches he hadn’t realized he’d left behind, with the Punisher slung over his shoulder once again. Christ, had it always made his back this sore?

They were let into the ship, Vash did whatever he did and healed the Plant, the people were happy, Vash was happy, whoop-de-doo. It was a long trek back.

They moved a little slower on the return trip, since doing his Plant-magic sapped Vash’s energy so thoroughly. When they finally made it back to the shuttle that would return them to Ship 3, the kid spent an extra moment staring out over the sands. Like he was looking for something. Or, more likely, someone.

“Vash?” Meryl asked, and he started. He brushed it off with a smile, the way his adult self loved to do, and turned his back on the sands to re-enter the cool darkness of the shuttle. Meryl shot Nick a look, but since Brad was there too, they didn’t pursue it.

***

They went out again a couple months later, this time to Ship 6. Everything went smoothly, the same. But Vash seemed even more preoccupied than before.

“Something’s been on your mind. Let’s hear it,” Nick said, after they had been shuttled back up to Ship 3 and made it to their rooms.

Vash’s back was to Nick as he started unpacking his bag onto his bed. Nick saw the tension ratchet across his narrow shoulders. “I think I want…” It was almost too soft to hear.

“Huh?”

Vash turned to face him. He was chewing his bottom lip, eyes downcast. “Next time we go out, I think…I wanna look for my brother.”

“Okay,” Nick said.

Vash looked up in surprise, like he’d anticipated having to argue his point more. “Okay?”

“What’re you gonna say to him when you find him?” Nick asked.

“I don’t know…”Vash leaned his weight back against the edge of the bed. “He thinks all the humans should die so the Plants will be safe. But I want to find a way we can all live together. Do you think that’s possible?”

It had been easy to yell and curse at the adult Vash for his unending, self-destructive naïveté. It was different to look down into the tired, hopeful face of a child and tell him you didn’t think his brother could be redeemed. But Nick had promised not to lie to him. “I don’t know,” Nick said after a long moment of contemplation. “Your brother’s pretty stubborn, right?” Understatement of the next century and a half. “You’ll have to make a damn convincing argument.”

Vash frowned at his sandy boots. What a responsibility to fall on the scrawny back of a two-year-old. But then, Knives had enacted a genocide at the tender age of one. Nick needed to stop underestimating him. It was just that Vash was so goddamn small.

“Well,” Nick sighed after another beat. “Lucky for you, we’ve got an Expert Arguer on this ship.”

***

It was less than a month before the next call for aid came out. In the meantime, Meryl instructed Vash on how to conduct a debate and held lots of practice. Nick was surprised to learn an argument could have so much structure, outside of the general progression from words to fists to guns of which he was familiar.

They also informed Luida and Brad of what Vash wanted to do. Brad was, unsurprisingly, annoyed at having been misled about the survival of Vash’s brother. But he kept it mostly buttoned up under Nick and Meryl’s twin glares, at least until Vash was out of the room.

They would be making a roughly six-day trip over to Ship 1, and then casting out further afield rather than returning home right away. Knives could have been just about anywhere at this point, and there was no guarantee they’d find him, but Vash wanted to try. “I have to at least look,” he said, teeth worrying at his bottom lip. “If I keep looking long enough, I have to find him eventually, right?”

Technically true, especially if you had an alien’s ridiculously long lifespan. Assuming you didn’t manage to die of exposure in the desert long before then.

The three of them packed up and set off. Brad stayed behind, since he couldn’t afford to be away from the ship indefinitely.

They traveled to Ship 1, Vash fixed the Plant, same old same old. Meryl had as many questions for Vash as the scientists about how he did what he did, what it was like, what his sister Plants were like when he talked to them. Probably Nick should have cared more too, but he just couldn’t find it in himself. It was his self-imposed responsibility to keep the kid alive, cared-for, and reasonably happy. Everything else was way above his pay-grade.

After leaving a grateful Ship 1 on the horizon, they set out in search of Worms. It was the best idea any of them had been able to come up with for trying to locate Knives. It was either that or pick a direction and wander endlessly.

They, at least, were easy enough to find out in the desert. It wasn’t long before they spotted a little cloud zipping along the horizon line.

They rode closer. Nick cupped his hands around his mouth in the direction of the cluster of Worms, and yelled. “Zazie! Hey, Zazie!”

The Worms' positions shifted as they hovered in the air, but otherwise there was no response.

They moved even closer. Vash stopped his tomas directly beneath the floating cluster. There were about a dozen or so Worms. He held out a hand. One landed on his upraised palm. He brought it closer to his face to study it.

“Zazie the Beast! We wanna talk to you!” Nick called again.

He and Meryl glanced around at the dunes. Nothing.

“Well, shit. That was my only idea.”

“You’re trying to call them like a human,” Vash observed. The Worm traipsed up his wrist. “Why would they know what human speech means?”

Nick sighed. He was probably right. In 150 years Zazie would be fluent, but this was now, hardly a year after the Fall. “You got ideas? I only know how to talk human.”

Vash studied the small Worm plodding up his elbow. He scooped it gently back into his palm and held it close to his face. Nick was aware of Meryl cringing in revulsion in his periphery.

His eyes drifted closed. His forehead came down and made gentle contact with the Worm’s carapace. Its wings fluttered once but it stayed in place on his hand. It was difficult to tell with the sun bright overhead, but Nick thought he saw Vash’s Plant markings start to glow.

Vash opened his eyes and lifted his head. The Worm unfolded its wings and buzzed into the air. It hovered a few feet above his head. “They’re a hivemind, but they can also communicate using vibrations in the sand!” he exclaimed.

“Uh…great! Did you say something?” Meryl asked.

“Yeah, I think so!”

“What did you say?”

“I tried to say hi. I think it worked…” Vash readjusted his grip on his tomas’s reins and gave the hovering Worm a pensive look. Its wings buzzed.

The ground rumbled. A crest of sand rose between their tomases, startling them. Nick steadied his mount, patting it on the neck. The crest fell, then a little sinkhole dropped out of the sand a couple meters away. A cloud of small Worms burst forth. Meryl shrieked, and Nick had to yank the reins to keep his tomas from bolting again. Zazie always did have a thing for dramatics. Probably why they and Knives got along so well.

The cloud resolved into a little humanoid shape, about Vash’s size. The ‘hair’ atop its head looked more like a long pile of antennae. It wore a shapeless off-white shift similar to Vash’s tunic. The long sleeves partially covered fingers with too many joints. The half-dozen eyespots down its face shifted, winked out, and resolved into just two large, dark compound eyes. It was a horrid, rough approximation of a human appearance. Or an Independent Plant appearance, as it were. Maybe it was meant to be reassuring, or an attempt at reciprocity. Nick hadn’t realized just how far Zazie had come in mimicking humans over the years. Christ.

Vash seemed unperturbed. “Zazie? Hi!” He waved.

It paused and tilted its head. It held up one long-fingered, too-segmented hand and mimicked the gesture. It made a sound like the buzzing of many sets of wings.

“I’m looking for my brother,” Vash said. Plant markings pulsed on his face, white in the sunlight.

The small, hovering Worm from a moment ago buzzed down and landed on his head. Its front legs tapped experimentally on his forehead. Vash’s eyes closed.

Then they were silent. Nick glanced at Meryl, who looked about ready to have a conniption.

There was a long moment where nobody moved, save for the steady hum of many little sets of wings. The breeze blew Nick’s hair across his forehead. His tomas shifted its weight from one leg to the other.

Then, with no signal he could discern, Zazie’s horrifying avatar melted back away into a cloud of Worms. Vash’s eyes opened. The small Worms buzzed off with the wind. Once Vash’s markings faded it would seem like the whole thing had never happened.

“Well?” Meryl asked. “Did you…talk?”

“Yeah!” Vash looked tired but pleased, the way he did after communicating with one of his sisters (Meryl was hopelessly smitten with the way Vash referred to all the other Plants as his sisters. Nick would admit to nothing of the sort. Not out loud). “They told me where to find him.”

“How far?” Nick asked.

“Not far.” Vash’s face turned to contemplate the desert. “He’s been looking for me too.”

***

With no towns to act as landmarks, the endless rolling sand seemed the same in every direction. Clusters of rock formations were an exciting break in the monotony. They used the moments of the sun and moons to stay oriented, but even so Nick would have worried about never finding Ship 3 again if not for the precise coordinates Brad had given them before they left.

They traveled for days. At night, the three of them laid out their bedrolls side-by-side for warmth, Vash taking his wiggly space in the middle as always.

On clear nights, the light from the moons illuminated Meryl and Vash’s sleeping faces clearly. Nick often found it easy to forget how young Meryl was. With the set of her mouth and forehead relaxed in sleep, she hardly looked much older than Vash.

Vash sprawled between the two of them in a tangle of growing limbs. His arm–the one that had, or would someday, be replaced by a prosthetic–was flung across Nick’s chest. It wouldn’t be long before he started to trade his baby fat for some adolescent gangliness. Nick wondered if he might, with this new chance, be able to sway Knives from his path. Nick wondered if he would have to kill Knives if Vash failed. He wondered if that was even possible.

He remembered two lights in the sky, in a future that hadn’t happened yet. Meryl watching through binoculars as the twins hurtled into space. An explosion that reduced a city to a crater, and the reports of a blonde man crawling out of the ashes.

He wondered, if he did kill Knives, if Vash would ever forgive him.

***

Nick could tell they were close when something in Vash’s posture changed. It wasn’t that he perked up, per se, but it was like he started paying more attention. Neither Nick nor Meryl were immune to the new electrified charge in the air. Her hands were tight on her reins, and he kept double-checking that the Punisher was still strapped to his saddle.

They stopped to set up camp for the night as the sun was just starting to set. Vash was clearly distracted, glancing up every two seconds to scan their surroundings.

“Is he close by? Should we go a little farther?” Meryl asked.

Vash shook his head. “We can wait for him here.”

They made dinner with their dwindling rations. Vash picked doggedly at his food but couldn’t seem to stomach much. Well, Nick didn’t blame him for being nervous. He and Meryl didn’t hound him about it; just divvied up his leftovers between the two of them and finished them off.

They’d gathered up enough kindling for a small fire, and it deepened the shadows around them as the daylight faded away.

The limited visibility made Nick jumpy. He kept seeing chains of knives snaking around his peripheral vision. He kept the blunt edge of the Punisher’s crossbar against his tailbone, laid flat in the sand.

Meryl was twitchy too. Vash just sat and stared into the flames.

The little figure emerged from the gloom like a ghost. He was all pale shades from head to toe: from the white-blonde hair to the gray-and-white smock and bodysuit that matched Vash’s own.

Vash leapt to his feet. “Nai!”

“Vash.” A chill went down Nick’s spine. It was a child’s voice, but it was also so unmistakably the tone and cadence of the one who would be Millions Knives. “It’s been a while.”

“Nai, I– will you come sit with us? I wanted to talk.” Vash gestured to the space around their fire.

Knives glanced at Nick and Meryl. It was just a flicker of a look, then his eyes turned back to Vash. There was no way Knives would have recognized him–their original paths wouldn’t cross for over a century–yet Nick felt absurdly like he’d just gotten away with a deception. “Who are the humans?”

“They’re my friends,” Vash answered. “If you promise not to hurt them, you can–you can sit down.”

Nick watched him consider. Then he folded himself neatly to the ground on the other side of the fire, as far as possible from Nick and Meryl. Nick was pretty sure they all silently sighed in relief.

Vash sat back down cross-legged. Not quite next to Knives, but close. Bridging the space between him and Nick and Meryl.

Nick watched Knives pull his knees to his chest and clasp his arms around them. It balled up his already small form into something tinier. His feet were bare. It was difficult to tell in the firelight, but Nick thought his white shift looked dirt-stained and worn.

Meryl reached forward to poke another bit of kindling into the fire, and Nick saw Knives’s posture tighten. Conflicting information started clashing like cymbals in Nick’s brain.

“How have you been?” Vash asked, tentative, almost a murmur.

“Since you ran away and left me by myself?” Knives muttered. It was so petulant, so childish, that Nick almost laughed. As if that wasn’t a death sentence. He kept himself in check.

“I’m sorry,” Vash said. “I was scared. And upset. I’m…still upset.” Tears thickened his voice.

“Don’t cry,” Knives said. His inflection was one Nick knew well. Exasperation hiding an undercurrent of desperation. Why are you always like this? I don’t know how to help you when you’re like this. How many times had he said exactly those two words in exactly that way to Livio? Crybaby Livio.

Vash sniffed and rubbed at his eyes. Regathered himself. “I want to talk,” he repeated. “Even though I’m upset that you–you killed Rem and. All those people.”

“You mean we,” Knives said slyly. The firelight glinted off his pale blue eyes as he cut Vash a sidelong look. Devious little bastard.

“No!” The firmness in Vash’s voice seemed to take Knives aback. He blinked in surprise. “I never would have given you those codes if I’d known what you wanted them for. You knew that. You tricked me.”

Nick mentally stood up and cheered. The kid had listened to him! The message had sunk in!

Knives studied his twin for a moment, his small round face unreadable. It was beyond odd, how closely he resembled Vash and yet looked nothing like him at all. “Okay,” he said eventually. “What did you want to talk about?”

“Do you still want all the humans to die?”

Knives spared another glance for Nick and Meryl. “Yes. And you still don’t want me to kill them?”

Vash nodded. “That’s right. But I wanted to see if…we could figure something out. Together.”

“A compromise?” Knives asked, pale eyebrows slightly raised.

Vash nodded again.

“A compromise where I let the humans live? That doesn’t seem fair on my side.”

“But why do you think they all have to die?” Vash asked, distress leaking back into his voice.

Knives held his knees tighter to his chest. Nick saw little Vash again for the first time, curled into a ball, alone in his cell. “You were there too. You saw the same things I did. You saw her. How can you still think any of them deserve to live?”

Her? Nick risked a peek at Meryl. She looked equally nonplussed.

It didn’t escape Knives’s notice. A thread of slyness crept back into his voice. “They don’t know about her. I thought you said these were your friends.”

Vash clasped his hands together in his lap. “It’s not a secret. It’s just…hard to talk about her. You get that. You pretended like it didn’t even happen for weeks.”

Some mix of emotions flashed across Knives’s face too fast for Nick to parse.

“Besides,” Vash continued. “You’re blaming every human for what some of them did. That’s like, if the humans found out what you did and decided to kill all our sisters because of it.”

Knives’s face pulled into a scowl. “That’s not the same at all! What about all our sisters? Can you think of a compromise where the humans stop using them all as slaves?”

Vash looked down at his lap. “Not by myself, Nai. You’re smarter than me. And I’m not– I need all the same things the humans do. The humans can’t survive without our sisters’ help. And neither can I. You know that.”

Knives studied his brother. Nick had to keep reminding himself to breathe. Based on how still Meryl was at his side, he imagined she felt about the same. Or maybe she was trying her hardest not to jump headfirst into the conversation. Inserting herself into other peoples’ business was the Meryl Stryfe Special. She and the adult Vash had been two chicks in the same egg in that way.

“We can liberate all our sisters from the humans. We can make a place to live for ourselves where you’ll have everything you need and none of them have to be enslaved.”

“They can’t survive on their own in their bulbs, Nai. We wouldn’t be able to take care of them all ourselves.”

“You still believe all the lies Rem told you?” Knives spat.

Vash looked like he wanted to shrink in on himself, but he held his shoulders back instead. “I’ve spoken to them.”

“The humans?”

“The Plants,” Vash said.

Knives stared at him.

“Some of them, at least,” Vash amended. “It’s true: they can’t survive outside their tanks.”

Knives set his jaw. “So that’s it then? You’re fine with them staying imprisoned so long as they’re alive?”

“No, Nai, you’re not listening to me! What if there’s a way we can negotiate between the Plants and the humans–”

“No, you listen to me!” Knives cried. He uncurled to press his palms against the sand, as though readying to push himself to his feet. “The humans will use us up the way they used up the earth! We can’t trust them to do what’s right! You’ll just keep hanging around them until they take you apart and use you up too! Don’t be an idiot!”

The conflicting information rattling around Nick’s head finally clicked. Vash was Flight and Freeze when he was scared. Knives–Nai– was all Fight. He was scared of humans. Scared of what they might do to him, and his brother, and every other Plant.

Maybe it should have been obvious, but Nick felt the realization kick him hard in the teeth. The Millions Knives he’d known had been an untouchable, vengeful god. Nick had been no more able to imagine him experiencing fear than, say, a thunderstorm or the desert itself. But Nai was a child. He’d looked at his crybaby little brother and taken a preemptive strike against the thing he feared most to try and keep them both safe.

It didn’t make it right. But Nick could relate.

“Nai, I’ve been with them for more than a year,” Vash said quietly. “They haven’t hurt me. Lots of them are kind and want to do good. They’re trying to find ways to support life without using Plants. And Rem protected us so they couldn’t do…what they did, to us. Remember?”

Nai finally broke and leapt to his feet. He kicked sand at the fire. “Shut up about Rem!”

The welling tears in Vash’s eyes gleamed in the firelight. “I know you loved her too–”

“No!” Nai yelled too harshly, and Nick heard the truth in that denial. He had loved her, once. “Did you like playing family with her, Vash? Being her little human son? You won’t be a human no matter what you pretend! Rem was a liar! You were in that file right next to Tessla!”

“Nai–”

“You’re so blind!” Nai raged. “Maybe you’re fine waiting around for them to kill you but I’m not!”

“Nai, listen–”

“Boys, stop!”

Both twins stopped. Their heads turned to look at Meryl in sync, Vash with chagrin, Nai with open shock. Nick’s heart dropped into his bowels. If he were really the undertaker he’d once claimed to be, he’d have started saying a prayer for rest for her immortal soul. He put one hand on her arm, a silent request for her to drop it. The other hand crept toward the Punisher at his back.

“Vash said he wanted to talk to find a compromise,” Meryl continued, stalwart. “This isn’t talking anymore, this is just yelling.”

Vash turned back, hopefully, to Nai. He continued to study Meryl across the fire. Nick didn't like the cold, thoughtful look in his eyes.

“Nai, please–”

“Were you always going to pick her over me?” Nai murmured. “You abandoned me in the desert and replaced her? Just like that?”

Nai was a coiling snake. Nick could feel him readying to strike. He didn’t want to be the one to escalate and act first, but he knew just how fast Millions Knives could move. A reaction might be too late.

“That’s not true.” Misery hung heavy in Vash’s voice. “I missed you. There has to be a way we can all live together. We just have to find it.”

“You’re wrong,” Nai said, cold and resolute. His little hands clenched in tight fists at his sides. “They’ll just keep taking you away from me.”

Four symmetrical chains of knives manifested from his back in an instant. Three curved in the air like spider’s legs, or the ruffled threat display of a tomas’s feathers. The fourth shot above the smoldering remains of the fire directly at Meryl.

No time to grab the Punisher and haul it into position. Nick flung himself in front of her, hands out to catch the blade and deflect it–

There was screaming. There was a horrible, howling pain in his gut. His hands gripped cool metal. He looked down at the chain that led from deep in his stomach back to Nai.

The chain retracted. It exited his body with another wrenching, agonizing burn. Nick collapsed.

Meryl’s face appeared upside-down above him. He thought maybe she was crying. He crept one hand toward the pocket of his suit jacket. Hopefully the blade hadn’t broken any of the vials. “Vial,” he gasped. “Vial…”

She shuffled desperately through his jacket and grabbed a vial with shaking fingers. Don’t drop it, he thought hazily. She helped him lift it to his mouth. He cracked the top with his teeth and downed the contents.

It burned like cheap spirits, like always, acrid on his tongue. Steam gouted from the bloody holes in his shirt as his body knit itself back together. Shit. Fucking. Goddamn. Sometimes the healing hurt worse than the injury. At least the stabbing part had been fast.

When it was over he sat up with a groan. It could take an extra minute or so to replenish all his lost blood, and his head spun. Meryl hovered at his shoulder, ready to steady him.

When his eyes cleared they landed on Vash, kneeling by the fading embers of the fire. Nai was nowhere to be seen.There was just enough light to see the shine of tear tracks down Vash’s cheeks.

Nick gave him a thumbs up. He burst into tears.

“Nick! I thought he killed you! I’m so sorry!”

“Hey, all good, see?” Nick parted the bloody tatters of his shirt to reveal the unmarred new skin of his abdomen. Vash scooched closer, eyes streaming, and prodded Nick gently in the stomach (the little doubting tomas).

“I didn’t know humans could do that,” Vash sniffled.

“Most of ‘em can’t. I’m a special sort.” Nick poked Vash on the nose so he’d look up at him rather than at his bloodsoaked torso. Night had fully set but the stars were out, and Vash had inhumanly good night vision. “Hey. None of that was your fault. You know that, right?”

Meryl put her hand on Nick’s shoulder. “He’s right. You did a really good job.”

“It didn’t go how I hoped it would at all,” Vash muttered miserably. “He almost killed you.”

“We knew trying to convince your brother of anything was gonna be really tough,” Meryl said.

“Yeah, it was always a long shot. You knew that goin’ in.”

“Yeah…” Vash sniffled and wiped his nose on his sleeve.

“He was scared, and then he got angry, right? Some people don’t want to stop being angry. You can’t talk them out of it if they don’t want to be talked out of it.” There had been kids like that at the orphanage too. They pulled their rage around themselves like a cloak and never took it back off. Nicholas might have become one of those kids if Livio hadn’t come.

“Yeah…” Vash sighed again. He crawled even closer until he was able to tuck his head into the crook of Nick’s neck. Nick scooped him. Meryl leaned in against Nick’s shoulder so she could put her arms around both of them.

“Where did he go?” Nick asked.

“He ran off right after he hit you,” Meryl answered.

“Are we going after him again?” Nick knew what he hoped the answer would be, but, hell, this was Vash’s quest. He was just along for the ride.

He felt Vash’s head shake against his shoulder. “No,” he mumbled into the collar of Nick’s jacket. “Let’s go home.”

***

Ten months passed. Vash grew nearly three inches and became the star outside midfielder of the Ship 3 soccer team. They traveled off-ship two more times to help other Plants, but he didn’t bring up the idea of looking for Nai again. He also unilaterally decided he was now too big and old to spend any nights sleeping in Nick and Meryl’s bed. Nick missed being woken up by bony little knees and elbows in the middle of the night more than he thought he would.

Luida renamed Ship 3 “Home,” a choice Nick found both disgustingly saccharine and potentially very confusing for anyone who lived outside the ship. But no one had asked his opinion. Also he had grown up in an orphanage named Hopeland, so maybe he had no room to talk.

She also surprised Vash with his coat: the one that would someday be splashed across every Wanted poster on the planet. She asked Nick and Meryl for their opinions on the color beforehand. It was an easy answer: red, they both said. Vash’s favorite.

They had been there for nearly two years. It seemed like this was just going to be their lives from now on. Nick thought he could make peace with that. He could stay here, and help raise Vash with Meryl, Luida, and Brad. And someday, when Vash was ready, he could help him confront his brother again.

So it was to his immense shock when, while playing striker on the opposing soccer team, he was pulled suddenly into another rift.

He saw green grass and the blue sky through the dome and Vash’s startled face–

And then it was dark.

Chapter Text

He fell on his ass in sand. Everything was bright and hot and he cracked open his eyes just in time to see an enormous green-and-gray grille bearing down on him.

***

When he came to again, it was to a worried set of familiar blue eyes staring intently at him.

Kid had probably had another nightmare and wanted Nick to scooch over to make room for him. Ugh, he ached all over the way he did after a night of heavy drinking. He shifted and groaned.

“Nick? Nick, are you okay?”

His eyes shot open again. When had he closed them? That was Vash’s voice, his inflections, but the pitch was way too deep.

He stared into the concerned face of Vash–the Stampede. Spiky mop of blonde hair, orange-tinted glasses, red coat, prosthetic arm: it was all the way he remembered.

“Nick?” Vash asked again in that low adult voice. “Are you with me?”

Nick licked his dry lips. “What the fuck?”

A wide grin broke across Vash’s face. His long, sharp-jawed, non-baby-fat face. “Oh, geez! We were worried we killed you.”

“Nicholas, I’m so sorry!” Meryl cried from the driver’s seat. Because they were in the news van. And was that the side of Roberto’s face in the passenger seat? What the fuck was going on? “I was trying so hard to look for you! I was determined not to hit you this time, but you popped out of nowhere!”

“What the fuck?” Nick said again, more emphatically.

“I think I see a rock formation up ahead. Let’s get in the shade and we’ll talk,” said Meryl.

She drove them over the dunes. Vash seemed insistent on holding Nick’s hand in the backseat until they arrived, and Nick couldn’t stop marveling at how big his hands had gotten.

The van also had the exact same smell he remembered–stale cigarettes and hot seat-leather– and the sense-memory of it was a direct punch to his brain. Then it surprised him with the one-two combo as the cigarette scent triggered the most intense craving he’d had in years.

“Holy shit,” he muttered. He patted through his jacket pockets with his free hand. His little collection of vials was in one, as always. In the other, a half-empty carton of crumpled cigs. His hand shook with the need to light one up. He hadn’t even needed the nicotine patches in months. What was wrong with him?

“Nick?” Vash asked.

Nick thrust the battered carton over at him. “Get these away from me.”

“Trying to quit?” Roberto asked, eyes catching his in the rearview mirror.

“I quit years ago,” Nick answered. The truth, but he could see in the tweak of Roberto’s eyebrows that he didn’t believe it. Vash tucked the carton away in an inside pocket of his red jacket, and Nick watched them go like a grieving widower at a funeral.

Meryl pulled the van in under the leeward side of a low sandstone ridge. Erosion had worn the windward side down smooth over the years, but it was still tall enough to cast a shadow in the morning sunlight.

The temperature was noticeably cooler in the shade. They all tumbled out of the van, Vash trying too hard to help Nick until Nick slapped his hands away. “Lay off, I’m not dead,” he grumbled as he clambered out onto the sand.

Vash took an obliging step back and watched him, nearly vibrating. “So you’re not hurt?”

Nick shook his head. “Nah.”

“Oh, good!” Faster than he could react, Vash swooped in and lifted him bodily in a rib-cracking hug. His feet, so recently planted back on the sand, lost contact with it again. “Nick, I missed you!”

Nick wheezed and thumped him on the prosthetic shoulder-guard to put him down. He barely managed to suck in a breath before Meryl was also flinging herself at him. “Nicholas! Finally! Are you sure you’re okay? I thought I hit you really hard!”

Nick patted her awkwardly on the back until she released him. “Everyone slow down.” Roberto had meandered closer to the three of them and was watching them with blatant interest. Nick looked at Vash. “Kid, I saw you like thirty seconds ago and you were this tall.” He held his hand at chest-height.

Vash’s mouth pulled in a small, melancholy smile. “That was 150 years ago.”

“We got spat back out!” Meryl cried. “Back at the beginning!”

While Nick had been playing soccer with Vash and the others in the geodome, Meryl had been in one of the labs studying flora with Luida, she explained. She had also found herself suddenly yanked away and dropped planetside, trudging behind Roberto on foot.

“Then up ahead I saw that exact same row of bodies, with Vash hanging in the middle, just like before!” she exclaimed, more excited about having spotted a brace of corpses than most people would ever be.

“It was the damndest thing,” Roberto chuckled, shaking his head. The cigarette perched between his lips made Nick’s own mouth water. “Newbie suddenly goes sprinting up a hill, yelling ‘Vash, Vash!’ And this dead guy wiggles around and starts yelling ‘Meryl!’ And then they’re having this tearful reunion, all the while he’s still dangling upside-down.”

“We got sent back to when we first met, Nick,” Meryl said, eyes brimming. “We have a chance to try things again.”

She caught Nick up on everything else that had transpired since she returned, while Vash draped himself across him with all the persistent affection of an attention-hungry housecat. He seemed content to let Meryl do most of the talking.

They hadn't been able to prevent the Nebraskas or Knives and his goons from converging on Jeneora Rock. They couldn’t keep Knives from taking the town’s Plant. But Meryl’s foreknowledge had allowed them to safely evacuate nearly all the residents before disaster struck.

“And did he stop eating afterwards?” Nick asked. He tried to glare pointedly at Vash, who was resting his chin on his shoulder. It didn’t quite work at that angle.

“Nope!” Meryl’s grin at Vash was all open pride and affection.

Vash’s chin lifted from Nick’s shoulder just enough for him to give a dismissive toss of his head. “Yeah. I’m less able to help others when I’m not at my best,” he said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Nick wasn’t sure how to put a name to the big somersaulting feeling that started up in his chest.

They’d been driving across the desert since then, waiting for Nick to arrive. “I couldn’t remember if we ran you over four or five days after Jeneora,” Meryl said. “Sorry again.”

“Don’t sweat it. So what’s next? Zazie’s gonna swallow us all in a Grand Worm?” Nick hadn’t loved it the first time and he wouldn’t love it the second time. Such was life.

“I don’t think Zazie would do that!” Vash laughed.

Roberto was smoking as they all sat in the shade and caught up, and it was killing him. He shouldn’t have to go through withdrawal twice just because his dumbfuck future/past body apparently didn’t share his brain’s memories of the last two years of sobriety. He pulled a lollipop out of his jacket pocket and unwrapped it as furiously as he could manage.

He shoved it in his mouth and looked up to find Vash staring at him with wide, hopeful eyes. Goddamn it. Nick pulled out another and handed it over.

“You don’t think Zazie is working with your brother this time around?” Meryl asked.

Vash stuck the lollipop in his mouth and scrunched his eyes happily at Nick. “I don’t think so. Zazie likes to keep tabs on everything, but we’ve known each other for ages. They stopped doing favors for Nai decades ago.”

“Why’d they stop?” she asked.

“When Nai learned that we were friends, he started using them to send passive-aggressive messages along to me all the time. They got sick of it pretty fast. They try not to get involved between us now.” He did that embarrassed little laugh: the one where he put his hand to the back of his head. It made the light glimmer off the crystalline structure of his prosthetic.

Nick stared at it from behind his sunglasses. He couldn’t help himself. He was familiar enough now with Brad and the basics of Lost Tech to recognize the care with which it had been crafted, the stylistic choices in the design. But the pulse in his temples pounded out failure failure failure.

Vash was still able to follow his eyes through the tinted lenses. He lowered his hand and rotated his prosthetic wrist experimentally. His smile was a little sheepish. “Oh, yeah. I guess a lot’s changed since you last saw me, huh?”

“How did it happen?” Nick tried to force his jaw muscles to relax.

Vash looked down at his lap. “Uh. Nai cut it off.”

Nick wished, the way he’d wished a thousand times, that he knew how it had been amputated the first time around. Were some things always fated to happen, or had they had the chance to change it and still fucked it up? Nick was going to tackle Roberto and steal all his cigarettes. He was going to chuck the Punisher as far as he could into the sand. He was going to pick up the news van and throw it into the cliff face.

“Hey, it’s not all bad!” Vash chuckled placatingly, reading the look on his face. “Brad made this for me! He let me pick the color and it’s got a grappling hook built in! See?” He held out his forearm and twisted it back and forth, showing it off for Nick.

It wasn’t even fair that Vash was the one trying to comfort him. He wasn’t the one who’d had an arm chopped off. He felt Meryl place a gentle hand on his back. He reminded himself to breathe. “The grappling hook is a nice touch,” he managed. The smile Vash gave him in return was bittersweet.

“So…if Zazie isn’t going to attack, what’s next?” Meryl asked, forging bravely ahead past the awkwardness.

Nick wracked his brain. Those events felt like they’d happened lifetimes ago. “After Zazie, we went to that dead town and fought Monev the Gale.”

Everyone else looked confused.

Nick sighed. “You know. The kid…Rollo.”

Vash tilted his head. “Why would we run into Rollo? He lives in Augusta.”

Nick and Meryl shared a glance. “Rollo: sick little kid living in a wind-powered town?”

“Yeah.” Vash nodded. “He and his mom moved away, mm…twenty years ago?”

“And they just happened to move away?” Meryl asked with a cocked eyebrow.

He gave another awkward laugh. “Well, there was some trouble with a Plant-worshipping cult, but they’re okay now.”

Well, that was one hundred new questions created, one problem sorted.

With a dearth of other information about what new challenges they might face in this altered timeline, and the movement of the sun stealing their shade, they decided there was nothing for it but to keep driving.

“I still have a lot more to ask you,” Nick grumbled to Vash.

“And I might have answers!” he said brightly. Little shithead.

Meryl rolled her eyes as she pulled herself back into the driver’s seat. “Nicholas, you should have heard him the last week. ‘One time I– oh, I’ll wait to tell you when Nick gets here! When Nick arrives, when Nick arrives!’”

Vash took the playful chiding in good spirits as he scrambled into the backseat. He was all limbs. “I didn’t want you to have to listen to the same stories twice, Meryl!”

“You know I wouldn’t have minded.”

“Well, he’s finally here! So no worries!”

“Yeah, yeah.” Nick could hear the smile in her voice as she started the engine. “Buckle your seatbelt, kiddo.”

Vash did as he was told, and Nick caught a glimpse of the bemused look on Roberto’s face as he watched them from the passenger seat. Welcome to the fucking club, Drunkle.

Nick’s recollection of the original adult Vash was of someone mainly withdrawn and taciturn. Willing to put on a goofy face, play the extrovert when it suited him, and then wander off on his own again. This Vash was talking his damn ear off. He had a lot to catch them up on after a century and a half.

It was also clear to Nick that they were getting the rose-tinted version of events. He wanted to show off his room so long as they didn’t see the pile of dishes and dirty clothes he’d shoved under the bed.

“You don’t have to sugarcoat it for us, kid,” Nick grumbled after another slightly-too-humorous anecdote ended with another slightly-too-happy ending. “How have you actually been?”

His blue eyes weren’t so enormous in his face as they’d been as a kid, but they were still wide and earnest. “I’ve been okay, Nick. Really,” Vash said, and Nick even partially believed him.

“Your brother cut your arm off,” he still said, apparently unable to let it go.

Vash made a face. “I didn’t say perfect,” he muttered.

Somehow that was what pushed Nick over the edge. Hysterical laughter bubbled up his throat and barked out his mouth before he could stop it. He pushed a hand up under his sunglasses to rub at his eyes.

“Nicholas?” Meryl’s voice was concerned.

“Ah, give him a minute,” Roberto said. “He got hit by a car like an hour ago.”

***

They drove to the waystation where they had initially encountered Zazie, posing as a human child with two dead parents. The couple manning the station, while getting on in years, were still very much alive. They were cautious but not unfriendly and bartered with them for some supplies. Still, Nick was glad to put them in their rearview. No Zazie meant things were different, and he didn’t like not knowing what was coming. He’d known about the Worm attack the first time, since it’d been a set-up. Why couldn’t he have been updated with the new timeline-him’s memories of the new set-up?

A quiet day faded into a suspiciously quiet night. Nick was on edge, and the goddamn cravings weren’t helping. What he wouldn’t give for one of Ship 3’s nicotine patches right now.

They set up a barebones camp. No fire, so as not to attract attention from anything that might be out there. It was chilly when the sun went down but the moons were bright. If not for the single ember of his cigarette, Roberto’s silhouette could have been Brad’s. When they had first started traveling from ship to ship, Brad had reminded him of traveling with Roberto. Christ, it went in circles. His head hurt.

Meryl and Vash were rearranging the luggage on top of the van and chatting quietly, but they’d faded into the background. Nick looked at the red dot at the end of the cigarette, studied the way it just barely lit the edges of Roberto’s nose and chin. Like if he stared long enough all these different stretched-apart realities would snap back into place again.

Roberto sighed and moved closer. He dropped into the sand next to Nick with a groan. This close, there was no doubt he wasn’t Brad. He was just himself: tired-eyed, smelling of cigarettes and boozy sweat, a slight wheeze to his breathing that would turn to snores once he fell asleep. Alive, no stomach full of nails. Not yet.

“You’re lookin’ at me the same way she did,” Roberto said.

Nick startled, caught. “How?”

“Like a ghost.” He tapped ash. “Didn’t have to press too hard for her to tell me what happened. She said I died in your original timeline.”

“And you believe her?” Nick asked.

“Yeah,” Roberto admitted. “I shouldn’t, the whole thing’s crazy, but…one second she’s the whining newbie who forgets to charge up the van and the next, she’s…” He gestured vaguely in Meryl’s direction. Then he took a deep drag, thinking for a moment. When he exhaled Nick breathed in the secondhand smoke with longing. “It’s the eyes. She knew exactly how everything was going to happen, sure, but the eyes aged her. Just like they do with him.”

He was a perceptive old geezer, Nick remembered that. “What’ll you do?”

“Am I gonna bolt to save my skin, you mean?” Roberto inhaled. Exhaled the smoke through his nose. “Not yet. Newbie and I just met at the start of this assignment, you know. Ever since we found the Stampede she treats me like an old friend. Even you act like you know me, and we just met today.”

Nick felt his neck tighten. None of them had been exactly subtle, had they? “Must be confusing.” God knew he was confused.

Roberto snorted. “Weird as hell, ‘s what it is. Too weird to walk away from, at least for now. She told me I lived until July.”

“That’s right,” Nick said. I stepped in your blood to take the cigarette pack off your corpse, he didn’t add. It was still warm. I can still smell it when I look at you.

“So are you two his parents, or what?” Roberto asked. The topic change was so sudden it took Nick a moment to catch back up, and then another second to choke.

“No! Uh…it’s complicated.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Roberto muttered.

Nick snorted.

“Sure you don’t want a smoke?”

How he longed to say yes. “Nah. No. I quit for the kid. Can’t.”

“That kid?” Roberto gestured to Vash and Meryl. She sat atop the roof of the van like a queen surveying her kingdom while he ferried items up to her at her command. “The legendary outlaw, the Humanoid Typhoon? Your 150-ish-year-old time travel not-son?”

“Fuck,” Nick groaned. “Just gimme the flask, would ya?”

When they bedded down for the night, Nick, Vash, and Meryl laid out their bedrolls in a row with Vash in the middle, like always. His feet extended past both of theirs, he’d gotten so damn tall. And he looked back and forth at them both with so much joy and affection, no sign of his first iteration’s hollow false smiles. “I missed you both,” he whispered. “It’s really good to see you again.”

He told them about his efforts to avoid December and Hopeland as much as possible, to prevent accidental meddling in their own early timelines. How he’d known they were getting close when more of the little details they’d mentioned about their lives started to take shape: the names and sizes of cities, food and fashion trends, songs on the radio.

He had an incredible memory, to have held on to those tiny details for so many years. Such a long time to wait. Nick couldn’t imagine the fear that any wrong step might be the one that erased someone you loved out of existence. That if he’d spoken to the wrong person in December for a moment too long, he might have prevented a chance encounter, and so Meryl’s parents might never have met. And she would never have been born. And so, then, what might have happened to baby Vash again, all the way back in the past? How much would have unraveled?

It made Nick’s gut twist to think too hard about. What a nightmare.

Meryl reached out and took Vash’s hand. “I’m sorry we made you wait so long,” she whispered.

“It’s okay. You’re here now,” he murmured. Always far too forgiving by half.

He didn’t sprawl his gangly limbs across them in his sleep anymore. Nick rolled over partway through the night to see him curled in a ball on his side, core protected. Gun close at hand.

***

The next day brought the trouble Nick had been waiting for. But it wasn’t Zazie or any of the Gung-ho Guns, not as far as he could tell. It was some lowlife pack of bandits wanting to cash in on Vash’s bounty.

Far from the worst threat, but they did have a decently large group clumped between their fleet of battered vehicles. All heavily armed, of course. And their leader was a mountain of a bastard, made even taller by his mohawk. He had a metal arm and brandished a metal boomerang nearly as big as Nick was tall.

Meryl did her best to outrun them but the news van wasn’t built for speed, especially with the bulky satellite hitch. They ground to a halt and the bandit vehicles encircled them. Nick could hear their hooting and hollering over the rumble of the engines.

The Punisher was strapped to the roof of the van. Hard to access without soaking up bullets. His back muscles twitched.

“Out with your hands up, Stampede!” the bandit leader yelled. “Cooperate and we might take you in alive!”

Vash opened his back door. “Vash–” Meryl started.

“Keep the engine running,” he said to her over his shoulder. He stepped out of the van, hands level with his shoulders.

“I don’t want to fight,” he called. His voice was calm, almost plaintive.

The bandit leader barked a laugh. “Good, then don’t! Save us the cost of bullets, eh?”

“It’s just that I’m very busy,” Vash continued. “I don’t really have time to get turned in for a bounty.”

The bandit leader stared at him with irritable confusion. “I don’t give a shit,” he growled. “Drop your gun. Slowly.”

Vash didn’t move. “I really don’t want to fight,” he reiterated.

“Who’s fighting? We’ve got you surrounded! Now drop the gun!”

Nick watched Vash’s shoulders drop as he sighed.

The leader signaled, and one of his goons laid down a warning spray at Vash’s feet. The gunfire cracked in the air. Sand shot up in sharp plumes.

Vash moved fast, using the spray of sand as a cover. In a heartbeat, he was alongside the foremost vehicle in front of the news van.

The weedy guy in the driver’s seat went flying and landed in the sand. He rolled over with a groan.

All the other bandits took a moment to reorient. Then they aimed and opened fire at Vash’s new location, heedless of their comrades still in the way. “Watch out!” Vash yelled, as if their friendly fire were an accident.

In the confusion, with all the bandits now looking in a new direction, Nick took his chance. He swung himself out of the still-open back door of the news van and up onto the roof. He’d already unstrapped the Punisher and was hoisting it into his arms before someone shouted a warning.

Vash put his commandeered truck into reverse with a squeal of the brakes. Then lurched it forward in a misplaced spin, made worse by the bandit Nick could see trying to grapple him from the passenger seat. They collided with the nearest car in a screech of metal that set Nick’s teeth on edge.

“Sorry!” Vash called out.

In another moment the marauders might scrape together enough organization to focus some of their attention on the van. Nick didn’t want to get shot up or taken hostage. He stomped on the roof. “Stryfe, drive!” he shouted.

The news van leapt into motion and Nick just barely managed to keep to his feet. She aimed for the hole Vash had created in the blockade while Nick laid down covering fire on either side.

“Don’t kill anyone!” Vash yelled.

Nick gritted his teeth, but he’d expected it. He’d already been aiming mainly for tires and engine blocks. Also, the slope that led to death was broad and encompassed a variety of fight-ending and debilitating injuries. He could work with that.

The van squeezed through the gap in the surrounding vehicles, but the bandits were regrouping. Bullets pinged off the van and the Punisher as Nick ducked behind it. He heard glass shatter as a window was hit.

He turned around to face their attackers, and threw himself flat on the roof to avoid being cut in half by the big metal boomerang that flashed overhead. A corner of the Punisher dug into his ribs.

Then he was back up and firing, focusing his aim on the big bastard himself. If he wasn’t the Eye of Michael’s work, then this planet had managed to produce one bona fide freak.

He cocked back one massive arm, then flung the boomerang again. Nick braced, but this time it went for Vash.

Vash grabbed the nearest bandit around the chest like an overgrown toddler and leapt out of the way. The car they’d been standing in collapsed in two pieces. The bandit leader roared in frustration. Nick tried to shoot his legs out from under him.

There was the pop pop of the derringer as either Meryl or Roberto shot from inside the van. A couple bandits fell with pained yells.

Vash had dropped his rescue unceremoniously in the sand and was racing towards the next vehicle. He easily disarmed the three raiders inside, then shoulder-checked or tossed them over the sides before they could be shot up by their fellows. Then he was vaulting over one side himself and sprinting towards the next cluster of gunmen.

Some of them were now abandoning the dubious safety of their vehicles and attempting to rush him on foot. Nick aimed mostly for their legs–goddamnit–and some of them fell, screaming and groaning and bleeding on the sands.

A handful of them caught up to Vash as he bobbed and weaved in the open space between one car and the next.

As Nick crouched behind the Punisher to avoid another hail of bullets, he watched Vash move. He blocked a sloppy punch with ease, and used his upraised arm to knock the gun loose from the man’s other hand. Then he moved in with his back leg, using the extra bit of momentum to drive the barrel of his gun into the man’s gut. He folded and took an elbow strike to the back on his way down, but Vash was already moving past him.

The next man rushed in, hollering, squeezing off wild shots. Vash dodged them with impossible speed. The guy got into range and attempted a kick. Almost too fast to see, Vash hooked his raised foot with his own leg and sent the man toppling to the ground.

It was a flawless leg sweep and Nick– Nick had taught him that move.

He had to turn away to engage another cluster of idiots who were trying to shoot him off the roof, but some odd feeling had floated up his sternum. It suffused his chest with something light and sunny, almost painful around the edges.

There was no time to think too much about it. Meryl and Roberto cried out as another window shattered. The boss threw his boomerang at Vash again. He dodged and pulled one bandit out of the way.

Another wasn’t so lucky. The diagonal slice severed the man’s head and left shoulder and pectoral from the rest of his body. The two pieces collapsed in a shower of gore. Vash’s scream of despair made something clench in Nick’s stomach.

Even from his perch atop the van, Nick sensed the shift in the fight. Vash straightened over the corpse in the sand. His glasses flashed in the sunlight. When he broke into a run again, his careful evasive flow was gone. He tossed aside bandits like bowling pins, flashes of red amidst the tangle of bodies and the crack of gunshots. He sprinted for the bandit leader with the burning inevitability of a meteor hurtling through the atmosphere. Nick saw clearly why he’d been named the Stampede. The Typhoon.

The bandit leader scythed the razor edge of the boomerang as Vash drew near, trying to keep him from getting in range. It didn’t even slow him down.

Nick swore he saw Vash leap onto the flat side of the boomerang in order to launch himself at the bandit’s head. Then suddenly Vash was landing behind him, light on his feet, his coat whipping.

The bandit collapsed in a heap, shrieking and twitching, his metal arm twisted around and leaking smoke.

Vash tore back towards the news van as the remaining raiders stared at their leader in shock. “Drive!” he shouted as he drew near.

A downed man in the sand looked up as he passed, and raised a pistol in one bloody hand. Nick swung the Punisher around, a warning caught on his tongue, and put lead in the man’s stomach. But not before he squeezed off a few shots.

Vash stumbled slightly but readjusted and kept running. Meryl started to pull the van forward. He jumped onto the side and wriggled through the window as they picked up speed.

Nick dropped into a crouch to steady himself and laid out a sheet of covering fire as they put distance between themselves and their attackers. He didn’t see them making any moves to follow, but he didn’t take those kinds of chances. When they’d gained enough speed and distance, he dropped the Punisher back onto the roof and clambered down through the other window into the backseat.

“Anyone hurt?” he asked.

Meryl and Roberto looked shaken, but they were both uninjured. Vash lifted at the flap of his coat with a grimace.

God-fucking-damnit. “Which one got you?” Nick asked, already shuffling around under the seat for the first aid kit.

“Right at the end,” Vash said, the corners of his mouth tight. “When I was running.”

“Is he hurt? Vash! Do we need to stop?” Meryl cried.

“No!” Nick and Vash both said in tandem. “Keep driving. You: jacket off,” Nick demanded.

He helped Vash shrug out of his jacket sleeves. Vash gingerly tugged off his black turtleneck, trying not to wince at every bump their vehicle hit.

The slug had caught him in the side. It was a clean through-and-through. Lucky, as gunshot wounds went: it had missed most of the important stuff. And he knew Vash healed faster than a human. Nick helped him clean and bandage the entry and exit wounds and figured that would be sufficient.

What most caught in Nick’s mind, as he repacked the kit and Vash drew his shirt back down over his head, was the difference between now and the once-memory of watching the same man crouch in a sewer and dig a bullet from his own stomach. It felt like the most natural thing in the world to offer his own aid without thinking, the way Nick had tended to many of his scraped knees and elbows in the last two years.

And, the skin of Vash’s torso was not as scarred as he remembered.

Still scarred, sure, far more than most people would ever be. Maybe some of it was inevitable, when you lived as long as he had. But Nick had seen swathes of unmarked skin between the pale ribbons and craters of scar tissue. His body wasn’t the overlapping patchwork quilt of pain and self-destruction it had been the first time around.

The wreckage of the bandits’ attack vanished in the distance. Everyone’s tension melted slowly away until the air in the cab was calm again. Vash shifted around until he found a comfortable enough position and shut his eyes to nap.

Nick settled into his seat. Vash hadn’t killed anyone, but he hadn’t hesitated to leap into action. His hand-to-hand combat skills were impeccable. He hadn’t even fired a single bullet. Time would tell if he was going to find a way to blame himself for the few bandits who had died back there, but his scars no longer told the same story of self-flagellation. That feeling Nick had had before, when he’d seen Vash’s flawless foot-sweep–that aching lightness in his chest–was it pride?

***

They drove fast the rest of the day, almost nonstop, trying to put as much distance between themselves and the bandit gang as possible. Nick tried not to feel like they were simply racing towards the next danger. They forewent a fire again as they set up camp for the night.

“You keep staring at him,” Meryl observed. “Whiplash, right?”

She’d caught him out. He hadn’t been able to stop studying Vash since the fight. Weighing him against the child he had known, and the adult he’d known before that. If he looked at himself in one of the van’s mirrors, or in the reflection of his sunglasses, he thought he might find Miss Melanie looking back at him. Hadn’t she studied him in just the same way, when he’d come back to the orphanage grown? With pride and sorrow and like he might have changed again every time she glanced at him from the corner of her eye?

He wasn’t going to say all that to Meryl. Couldn't if he tried. “Maybe I’m just used to the kid version,” Nick said instead. “But I swear he’s bigger than he was the first time.”

“No, I noticed the same thing. He’s taller and his coat fits different. I think it’s ‘cause he eats regularly.”

Nick shifted the lollipop in his mouth. “Stunted his own growth before, huh?”

“You’ve seen his brother as an adult? Built like a brick shithouse. I thought it seemed a little odd for twins.”

He gave in to the urge to crunch down on the candy with his teeth. “Just how much do you notice about people anyway?”

“It’s my job.” Meryl smirked at him. “Do you want me to tell you all the things I’ve observed about you?”

He couldn’t help the way his jaw clenched around the lollipop stick. “Nah, fuck off,” he muttered, and she laughed.

Vash wandered over to where they were seated together in the sand. He dropped into a crouch in front of them.

“How’s your side?” Meryl asked.

“Okay,” he answered. “It should be fine by tomorrow.”

“Oh, good,” she sighed.

Vash smiled perfunctorily, but his head tilted to the side. His mind was clearly on something else. “What is it?” Nick asked.

“You know what Nai wants in July. I want you to tell me.”

He was more straightforward now in asking for what he wanted. Nick could add that to the list of changes. He made a mental note to ask Vash later if he’d ever given the pushy scientists on Ship 3 a piece of his mind. That would make him very happy.

Meryl looked at Nick, and he shrugged. No one was currently shooting at them, so it was as good a time as any. Meryl patted the sand, and Vash dropped from his squat into a cross-legged sit.

Roberto, with a journalist’s unerring nose for a hot story, sauntered over and lowered himself down with much less grace.

Nick and Meryl told them everything that had transpired the first time around. Vash’s eyes grew wide and pained. Roberto chain-smoked his way through at least four cigarettes.

“Nai…would do that to me?” Vash asked when they were done. He sounded sad more than anything else. His brother had already taken his arm. He knew what he might do. He didn’t ask if Knives would really wipe out a city of millions of people. He already knew that too.

“He did do that to you,” Nick said. Vash winced, but Nick was in no mood to pull punches. Not about this.

“And it was–is– your job to lead me there.” The words rolled around in Vash’s mouth as he tested them out. Tasted the truth of them.

“Yeah.” Nick tried to push down the burn of shame that prickled up his neck and face.

“To protect Hopeland,” Vash said, clarifying.

Nick nodded at the sand. He didn’t want to look up and see the inevitable forgiveness in Vash’s eyes.

“If there were a way to keep Hopeland safe,” Vash said slowly, thinking aloud. “Then shouldn’t I avoid going to July? His plan won’t work without me.”

Nick didn’t know what else could possibly keep the orphanage safe. He usually doubted if even his contract really would. Why would the lying, manipulative murderers with the Eye of Michael honor something as flimsy as a contract, especially with one of their own subjects?

If anyone could find a way to do the impossible, it’s Vash, he reminded himself. He forced himself to take a deep breath in through his nose.

“You could run, but he’ll just keep hunting you,” he said. “You couldn’t outlast him forever. He’s well-organized and he’s got more resources.” Knives had a thriving cult, a vast spy network, mad scientists, and all the mutated freaks the Eye of Michael could supply for him. And, oh yeah, money and property. Vash’s resources were, as far as Nick could tell: the three of them, a banged-up news van with two shattered windows, and one gun.

Vash stood and brushed the sand off his pants. “I need to think.” He turned and meandered out onto the nighttime sands.

Meryl chewed her lip as she watched him go. “What do you think we should do?”

How the hell should Nick know? He was just good at shooting things.

“Up to him, isn’t it?” Roberto mused, lighting up cigarette number five. “He’s the one who might get his brain torn apart and blow up a city.”

They all sat with that for a moment.

“Still not too late to turn around, newbie,” he continued. “You could go home, apply for a nice quiet desk job.”

Meryl looked like she wanted to roll her eyes. “It is too late for me, Roberto. But I won’t blame you. For whatever you decide.”

He sighed and smiled below his mustache and none of them said anything else.

Vash returned some time later. Moonlight dusted his shoulders and bounced off his glasses. The darkness made his red coat look black: a portent of how his brother would remake him in July. He spoke without preamble. “I still want to go. We know the most right now. If I avoid him longer and change too much, we lose that advantage.”

“It could still go horribly wrong,” Roberto said, ever the fuckin’ cheerleader.

“Sure,” Vash said, with a smile as wooden as all the ones Nick remembered. The glare of the moonlight hid his eyes. “But it did that already, right? What have I got to lose?”

***

The next major event had been their absolute dumpster-fire of a sand-steamer ride. Where he’d lost Livio. Nick had a second chance to save him too. But it had to work. There would be no third chance.

The news van ate up the iles too quickly. Nick tried not to let the dread make him sick as they talked through potential plans over and over again.

It was almost a relief when they finally arrived at the steamer port. Worrying about a thousand variations on an event did no good. God love him, but if Vash talked any more about diverging timelines and physics and shit Nick was going to smack him. For Nick, acting–reacting–had always been easiest.

They tried to look unobtrusively for Livio on the docks but couldn’t find him. They bought their tickets, boarded the sand steamer and split up to their agreed-upon locations. And then they waited.

Nick tried to find the coolheaded state he used to fall into on a hunt, when the Eye had sent him out to act as Punisher. When worries dropped away and he was left only with a sense of perfect focus. But it wouldn’t come. Vash stood next to him at the railing, twitchy with his need to provide comfort. But they had to keep a cordial distance, as though they really were two happenstance new travel companions and not…whatever they were now. Nick longed for a cigarette more than anything.

He reviewed their plan in his head while he tried to act as though he wasn’t watching the deck over his shoulder. It was simple: Roberto’s job, using his privilege as a seasoned journalist, was to warn the onboard security team about an imminent attack by the Bad Lads Gang. If they focused all their attention on repelling boarders, it might take out two complicating factors at once. Meryl was setting herself up in the old Lost Tech control room. They weren’t going to stop Legato from sabotaging the ship, in order to not play their hand too soon. If Zazie wasn’t spying on them, as Vash believed, then Nick didn’t know who or what may have taken their place. But Knives would be keeping tabs somehow, of that he was sure.

All Nick and Vash had to do was subdue Livio and stop the steamer while the reporters kept the ion cannon from blasting everyone to hell. Simple. Easy-peasy. Plenty of open space for improvisation and for everything to go tits-up in a thousand fun, new ways.

Squads of security personnel kept marching towards the back of the steamer. Good. That meant Roberto’s warning had worked. Nick turned his head a little more to watch a cadre of them walk past, acting unbothered in front of the passengers. A flash of dark gray caught in the corner of his eye.

He spun. “Move!” he yelled to Vash, but he didn’t need to. Vash was already moving. Livio strode forward, his pale gray hair and his dark gray suit just the way Nick remembered. The two metal blocks in his hands ratcheted into guns. He brought them up to aim at where Vash had been, but Vash had slipped to his side and leveled his own gun in his face.

It only gave Livio pause for a moment. He burst into movement. He and Vash traded blows in between the staccato rapport of machine gun fire.

Nick jumped into the fray. He heard people yelling past the ringing in his ears from close-range shots. But his vision had narrowed down to just himself, Vash, and Livio. Vash had speed, skill, and incongruous strength, but Livio just kept taking hits and coming back for more. In the moments when blocks and strikes brought them close together, Nick could see the vacancy in his amber eyes. When Nick shot him, steam leaked from the holes in his suit as he healed without any vials. “Livio!” Nick yelled. “Livio, it’s me! It’s Nico! Please, Livio!”

Nick didn’t usually fight to incapacitate. He and the Punisher weren’t built for it. He tried to focus his efforts on knocking Livio on his ass or the guns from his hands, but it was awkward. Even though the wounds healed immediately, he could hardly bring himself to shoot him. That was his brother. His baby brother. And Nick knew intimately that healing the wounds didn’t stop them from hurting.

Vash managed to tackle him to the deck and momentarily stun him with a pistol-whip to the face that would have killed a normal human. Nick rushed in to help.

He dropped the Punisher across Livio’s legs then stepped on his wrist to stop the gun that was trying to raise in his direction. He crouched to pin Livio’s arm with a knee. Then he set about trying to pry the gun from Livio’s fingers.

Vash sat himself astride Livio’s chest and was trying to do the same with his other hand. “Livio, listen to me!” Nick cried as he tried to peel back Livio’s fingers without resorting to breaking them. He grabbed his thumb and bent it almost to the point of popping out the joint as he tried to lever away the gun. “It’s me, Nico! You remember me!”

“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” Vash shouted, and Nick glanced up to see a squad of security approaching them with twitchy trigger fingers. His half-second lapse in focus was almost enough for Livio to wrench his arm free and aim his gun. Nick slammed it back down to the deck.

He did have to break a few fingers to get the gun out of his hand. All the while Nick felt the pained litany dropping from his mouth: “Livio, come on. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Just let go. It’s Nico. You remember Nico?...”

He wrenched the gun free and sent it spinning across the deck, out of reach. The security folks seemed to get the memo that they were trying to disarm someone non-lethally and moved in to help without just shooting at them all, for once, thank fuck.

At Vash’s order, they helped pin Livio’s limbs down with their bodyweight. They had him held down cruciform, on his back, and it put a pit in Nick’s stomach. That was how the Eye of Michael strapped you down for their experiments. He would panic. He couldn’t tell if Livio was panicking, deep down somewhere in those empty eyes.

With a soldier helping keep Livio’s arm down, Nick removed his own hands so he could reach into his jacket. He pulled out the single cigarette he had reclaimed from Vash and stuck it between his lips. Then he took out his lighter. “Livio, look at me. You know me.”

He did his flip trick, hoping Livio’s eyes were seeing enough to see this. He took his first smoke-filled breath in ages and tried not to notice the immense relief that immediately suffused his entire body. He exhaled the smoke in his brother’s face.

Like before, he saw the twitch in Livio’s face, but this time much closer. He could see every spasming muscle around his unmasked eye as it blinked and widened and finally landed on Nick. “Livio, it’s me. It’s Nico. You’re okay.”

He stared up at him. His lips trembled. “Ni…co…”

Nick felt his own lips tremble. He wanted to smile but couldn’t. “That’s right, it’s me. It’s Nico-nii. You don’t have to fight.”

“Nico…I have to…catch up.” Knowing it was coming this time didn’t make it any easier to watch the recognition, the memories, hit Livio all over again. Nick felt the sabotaged sand-steamer rumbling around them as Livio thrashed and screamed. They all barely managed to keep holding him down. Nick cupped his face as gently as he could while holding his head in place. To keep him from smashing it down over and over on the deck. It wouldn’t shake the memories out. Nick knew. He knew better than anyone. He tried to soothe him, talking gently to him over the howling the way he used to for the tomas chicks. The cigarette dangled half-forgotten from his mouth. Nick thought of an unwritten version of Vash, crying brokenly for Rollo to wake up. A big twisted body crumpled in the sand, Nicholas’s bullet in his skull. “Livio, it’s okay. Shh, shh, it’s okay…”

Livio went limp as the panic subsided. As it trickled away, it took with it the point at which Nick had lost him the first time. They were in new territory now. And still the sand-steamer raged on towards Hopeland. How much time had passed? Had the ion cannon begun to charge?

“Livio,” Nick said, and golden eyes found his own. His breath was shaky in his throat. “I need you to listen to me. You’re going to be okay. But you have to do what I say. Okay?”

His chin jerked in a tiny nod. The best he could do with Nick still gripping his head.

Nick released his hold on his face. “We have to stop this ship from crashing. I need you to stay next to me the whole time. Got it?”

Another nod.

“Good. We’re going to let you sit up, okay? Go slow.”

He ignored the dismayed cries of the security folks still helping them keep the pin. He and Vash drew back. Livio slowly sat up. Nick watched him, ready to pounce on him again if needed. “This ship is headed toward Hopeland. If we don’t stop it, the orphanage will be destroyed,” he told him. He saw the horror spark in his little brother’s eyes at the words. “I need your help. Come on.”

He held out a hand. Livio reached out, slowly, and took it. His broken fingers had healed nearly as fast as Nick could snap them. There was no sign any injury had ever happened. He hoped Livio wouldn’t remember it.

One of the security people grabbed Nick’s shoulder. “He’s not going anywhere!” the absolute idiot yelled in his ear. “We have to arrest him for attempti–”

Nick shrugged the hand away and rose to his feet, pulling his brother up with him. “I know how to stop the ship from crashing! Let us do that, then I don’t give a shit what you do after!” A lie. He did very much give a shit what they tried to do after, but that was a problem for at least twenty minutes from now.

Fortunately, they seemed to buy it enough for the time being. Or maybe they didn’t really want to go toe-to-toe again with the guy whose body spat out bullets as stubbornly as a child refusing their vegetables. Either way, they held back.

“We’re going to the engine room,” Nick said, and Vash nodded. He took off for the Plant room and Nick split in the other direction, holding tight to Livio’s hand. He heard the clomping footsteps of the security guards behind them. And really, he supposed he couldn’t begrudge them the caution.

The heat in the engine room was a slap in the face. The jammed metal wheel was a vivid orange. Nick was thankful for the way memories of pain were buffed out by the brain, so he’d been able to agree to this part of the plan again. But his palms tingled as he saw that bright sunset glow.

“I need to turn that,” he said to Livio. He let go of his hand to roll up his sleeves and position a vial between his teeth like before. And then he strode forward before he lost his nerve.

Scratch that. The body definitely remembered pain because each step closer to the wavering-air heat of the wheel sent prickles of animal panic racing up and down his limbs.

But then Livio was there next to him, reaching for the spokes of the wheel, and his hands made contact with an audible sizzle. And Nick couldn’t let him do it on his own so he threw his hands on the spokes, too. There was pain, pain, and the smell of cooking meat–like roasted Worm on a cookfire, but sweeter–and the wheel began to turn as he cracked the vial between his teeth and his body fought a war against entropy as it tried to rebuild skin and muscle as they were melted away in the heat–

He and Livio staggered back as the wheel spun and the pressure buildup was released. The pieces of himself he left behind on the metal were charred and consumed. Steam rose from his burning palms as they reknit.

He collapsed onto his ass on the floor, Livio next to him. He gasped for air. The call rose up that the ship was stopping. The ion cannon had gone off without hitting anything, like before.

Hopeland was safe. His head rang and his hands throbbed with every too-fast heartbeat, but he smiled at his brother. And, like a miracle, like a sunrise, his brother’s lips twitched back.

***

Shipboard security was now under the cautious impression that Nick and Livio were heroes and maybe didn’t need to be immediately arrested, so Nick led them both back up on deck to reconvene with Vash and the reporters. Shooting a Spacefaring Age laser into the sky had gotten Ship 3’s attention once again. The camouflaging sandstorm was already brewing overhead.

Nick had taken Livio’s hand again as soon as they were both healed back up, and was determined not to let it go. He wasn’t going to let him out of his sight, nor leave his hands free enough for another suicide attempt. Livio allowed himself to be pulled along, seeming a bit dazed.

Doing whatever Plant magic he did that somehow helped stop the steamer–Nick still wasn’t clear on the details– had knocked Vash out cold again. He found Meryl and Roberto standing over the Punisher where he’d dropped it on the deck. Roberto had Vash slung over his shoulders and he looked pained and uncomfortable about it. Nick looked around but didn’t see Livio’s guns anywhere. He could disarm a guard and take one of theirs easy as breathing, but Nick hoped not having those small cross guns in sight might prevent anything else from triggering in his brain again. For now.

Ship 3 sank into view through the whipping sand clouds above them. The security members clustered around them cried out in shock as the shuttle lowered from the ship’s underbelly. Livio shifted minutely closer to Nick: hand-in-hand, hiding his shoulder behind Nick’s own, the way he’d done a thousand times in their childhood. The same way Vash used to peek out from behind his hip as a kid.

Nick hefted the Punisher up in his free hand. When the shuttle landed on the deck, he and Meryl strode forward. They ferried their confused and/or unconscious charges along with them and boarded the shuttle. Its doors were already closing by the time the sand-steamer security troopers realized they probably shouldn’t just let them walk away. Nick didn’t resist the urge to laugh as their flabbergasted faces slid out of view.

He felt giddy. Hopeland was safe, and Livio’s hand was warm and real in his own. The horrible anticipation was done. His tension popped like a soap bubble.

Meryl looked over at his laugh and smiled at him. His relief was mirrored in her face, but he also saw that melty look in her eyes when she glanced at Livio’s hand in his: the one she always used to give him when little Vash fell asleep on his shoulder. “And this is Livio, Nicholas? I’m Meryl Stryfe, nice to meet you!” Livio gave her a shy nod back, which Nick took as a positive sign.

Nick got another good laugh when they stepped out of the shuttle onboard Ship 3 to the immense shock of Brad and Luida. Their jaws dropped and Nick cackled. “Surprise, old man!” he crowed at Brad.

“Luida, Brad, good to see you again!” Meryl said, excited but much more polite. Killjoy.

All this time later and the people were older but the ship was exactly the same. The same smell of metal and floor cleaner, the same white lights and pale walls. It sent Nick’s head spinning with whiplash all over again.

The residents of Ship 3 had known Vash long enough that they were good at rolling with the punches. They shlepped him to his room and laid him in bed. Luida bent over him with one of her tablets, scanning his vital signs. His room was the same too. Nick wondered if the one next door had been kept for them, or if it had been given over to someone else in the intervening years. God, he missed their bed. He could use a long night’s sleep.

They caught up with Luida and Brad as they waited for Vash to reawaken. Last time he’d only put himself out of commission for a couple hours. Meryl interrogated Luida about the progress on their flora project, which Luida answered happily. Brad made grumbling comments in the background, same as ever. Roberto quietly drank it all in with his keen eyes.

Livio also sat placidly as Luida scanned him over. She and Brad retreated to whisper intensely over the scan of the weird piece of tech that covered half his face. Nick tried to engage him in conversation, but wasn’t able to draw anything more than one-word answers out of him.

Vash awoke a few hours later, right on schedule. They shuffled into his bedroom doorway to say hi and he looked overjoyed to see them all over again.

“What’s with the look?” Nick asked.

Vash’s hand rose to the back of his head and he paired the gesture with his signature sheepish laugh. “For a moment, when I woke up here I was worried I dreamt the whole thing!” Boy, could Nick relate to that feeling.

Now that Vash was awake, the anxiety that Nick had so briefly left back on the sand-steamer was catching up to him again. They would reach another fulcrum soon: Zazie had snatched Meryl and Roberto from Ship 3, prompting Vash and Nick’s headlong flight to July. If that didn’t occur, what would happen next?

They didn’t want to bring any heat down on Ship 3, especially not knowing what form it might take. They gathered themselves back up and asked Brad and Luida to drop them planetside.

They said their goodbyes to Luida, and Brad led them all back to the shuttle. Before they boarded, Brad gave Meryl some sort of little communication device. “Try not to drop out of contact for the next 150 years,” he groused.

Nick gestured to himself and Vash. “Where the hell’s ours?”

Brad hooked a thumb at Meryl. “I trust her not to lose it.” Meryl preened as Brad clapped Vash on the shoulder. “Take care, kid.”

He bade cordial (for Brad) goodbyes to Roberto and Livio, and completely snubbed Nick. Funny bastard. Nick had maybe missed him a tiny bit since they jumped back into the future…present? Maybe.

They disembarked the shuttle just a step to the left of their last location. The sand-steamer had yet to be repaired enough to keep limping onward. They stood in the wide swath of flattened sand left by its passage and stared up at its enormous bulk. A couple little runnels of smoke still drifted from it into the sky.

Ropes still dangled from the back end from the Bad Lads boarding attempt. After some brief but heated discussion, Vash had Meryl clamber onto his back–piggyback-style, like a child–and then he grabbed a securely-attached rope. He hauled them both up the enormous side of the steamer and back over a railing onto one of the decks, storeys above their heads. He made it look easy.

Meryl gave a reassuring wave, then the two of them vanished onto the steamer. Some time later, one of the back hatches opened. A ramp lowered onto the sand.

Meryl drove the news van smoothly down the ramp out of the vehicle bay. Vash stood on the top end of the ramp and hit something on an inner wall that made it start to retract. He raced down onto the sand and hopped up on the running board of the van as Meryl drove it towards Nick, Livio, and Roberto. It was a little hard to tell through the dusty windshield, but Nick thought she looked deeply smug.

They piled in. Nick placed himself in the center of the backseat between Vash and Livio. Just in case his baby brother decided to start trying to kill him again. Though he’d been quiet and compliant ever since he moved through his panic on the steamer. Nick wasn’t sure it was a good thing. Livio had always been a shy kid, but he didn’t seem timid, just…glassy.

Even if you managed to keep him alive, you knew it wouldn’t be easy, he reminded himself, as Meryl fought the van up and over the piled drifts of sand the steamer pushed up in its wake. The Eye of Michael was as good at fucking up minds as they were bodies. Better, maybe. That kind of thing didn’t resolve itself in a few hours.

They made it back onto normal sand and circled around the steamer to point themselves eastward once again. Vash glanced at Nick with concern out of the corner of his eye, but seemed to intuit correctly that he wouldn’t want to talk about what was bothering him in front of the whole car. Instead, he silently slipped his flesh-and-blood hand into Nick’s own and laced their fingers together. Nick gripped him back gratefully.

If Nicholas the Punisher of more than two years (a lifetime) ago could see him now, Nick didn’t think he’d recognize himself. So much softness had crept in around and through him. Softness he’d once thought he’d lost for good, and had almost convinced himself he didn’t miss. He’d found it again.

And he couldn’t find it in himself to regret it.

***

They drove until night fell, then made camp. When Nick awoke the next morning, Livio was gone.

Nick tore through the campsite, then frantically searched the surrounding dunes. Everyone’s weapons were all accounted for, but his heart pounded in his throat as he scoured the sands for blood, fearing that every ridge he crested would be the one to reveal the gray bundle of Livio’s corpse to him.

But there was nothing. Just nothing. No blood, no body, no footsteps still visible in the windblown sand. No messages left in their camp.

Vash had taken the first watch, and Roberto the second. Vash swore up and down that Livio had been there his entire shift. Roberto scratched his head and looked ashamed as he admitted he may have dozed off at one point.

Nick clenched his fists at his sides and fought back the urge to throw a punch. “We can wait a while,” Vash said. “He might have just wandered off. Maybe he’ll come back.”

The sheer optimism of it made Nick grind his teeth together. Livio hadn’t just wandered off to take a leak. He’d slipped away from them in the night and he wasn’t going to return. Nick knew it in his bones. He shook his head. “He’s not coming back. Let’s just go.”

He shook Vash’s tentative hand off his shoulder and stomped off to bundle up his bedroll. And so what if he and the others took longer than usual packing up camp for the morning? It changed nothing, because no figure crested the horizon.

When they’d run out of silent excuses to delay, they loaded back into the van. The backseat was too spacious. But Roberto’s seat was pushed back too far, too close to his knees. He didn’t want to be near fucking Roberto right now.

They drove in silence for the first few minutes. Meryl was the one to break it. “You saved him, like we meant to. But you weren’t going to keep him prisoner, Nicholas. We couldn’t keep him with us if…if he didn't want to stay.”

“He’s not safe on his own,” Nick said through his teeth.

Vash chewed on his lip (he did it exactly the way Meryl did: a bad habit he’d picked up from her). “It’s not any safer where we’re going.”

They were right, sure, they were right, but Nick didn’t want them to be right.

“I’m sorry,” Roberto said again, and Nick did not kick the back of his seat like he so badly wanted to. Maybe he would just pull chunks of his own hair out instead. Or throw himself out of one of the broken windows. Start turning over every grain of sand in the desert one-by-one.

Vash unbuckled himself and scooted over into the middle seat. He held out one arm. “Hey. Come here.”

“What are you doing?” Nick considered resisting as Vash draped his arm over his shoulders and pulled him into his side. He tucked Nick’s head against his shoulder.

“You used to do this for me, remember?” Vash started to scratch his fingernails through the hair at the base of Nick’s skull.

Yeah. It used to soothe him when he was upset, or when he woke up from nightmares. It used to soothe Livio too, all those nights in the orphanage when he couldn’t sleep for the crying. Nick felt it melt some of the fight out of him almost immediately. Damn. It was a good trick.

It was usually easy to forget that Vash had aged lifetimes beyond him in what had been, to Nick, the blink of an eye. He felt it acutely now, with the roles reversed. He felt small with his head tucked under Vash’s chin. He hadn’t felt small in ages; not since the Eye’s bullshit had stretched his body out into adulthood far before it was ready.

Vash still smelled like he remembered, from the time when it used to be his head tucked under Nick’s chin.

Every ile took them closer to July. What if he lost Vash there? There were so many ways it could go so very wrong. He’d had Livio back for only a second and then lost him again. How could he bear to lose Vash too? Lose him again. Again and again and again. He hadn’t regretted the softness yesterday, when Livio and Vash’s shoulders brushed against his with every bump in the van. Today it hurt again.

Maybe some things were always fated to happen. Maybe Vash and Knives were always doomed to fight, for Vash to lose an arm, for Nick to find him and love him. In spite of everything, in whatever way he was able. Maybe Nick and Livio were cursed to be on the same path but never in quite the same place.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. Nick forced himself not to pick at his newly-acquired Ship 3 nicotine patch. He wanted a cigarette. Vash scratched his scalp and didn’t try to get him to talk, because he was old now and could be some type of wise when he wanted to be. Nick kept the sunglasses firmly in place over his eyes.

***

When they got out for a pit stop, Roberto reached immediately for a cigarette, as expected. Nick held his own lighter out for him.

Roberto eyed him cautiously before leaning in to let the flame catch.

“He’s a trained assassin. SpecOps,” Nick said, as the tip of the cigarette smoldered. “You’d never have been able to stop him from leaving. Might’ve been dangerous if you tried.”

The fire caught. Roberto leaned back, inhaling as the end of the cigarette glowed. “Thanks,” he said on the exhale, like it was for the light.

Nick nodded and went to help Meryl lay out the van’s solar array.

***

They kept driving to July. It was a repeat of their drive to the steamer: talking out the details over and over. Trying to plan when they knew some things but not everything. Timelines and probabilities and risk/reward. His life had become two mirrors facing each other; two realities eating each other endlessly.

When they finally moved past the nexus of July–for better or worse– would he feel relieved to be out of the loop of reliving events? Or terrified?

***

Nick awoke to Meryl’s hand on his shoulder. His eyes snapped open. She leaned over him, a finger to her lips. She leaned back and he sat up silently.

Around them their campsite was quiet, the moons high overhead. Vash and Roberto were lumps bundled under their blankets in the nighttime chill.

Zazie’s humanoid avatar stood in the center of camp. It had adopted the appearance Nick was familiar with: the one that looked a little more convincingly human. It jerked its head at Nick and Meryl in a ‘come on’ gesture and strode out of camp. Nick untangled himself from his blanket and took Meryl’s offered hand to help pull him to his feet. He considered taking up the Punisher, but left it behind. If Zazie wanted to kill them, they could easily have done it as they slept.

They followed this piece of Zazie over the next dune. A few of the small Worms buzzed overhead. Meryl had tugged on her jacket and Nick wished he’d thought to do the same as a cool night breeze cut through the fabric of his shirt.

Zazie flopped unceremoniously down onto the sand once they had crested the small dune and gone partway down the other side. “You two are strange ones, aren’t you?” they said without preamble.

“Hey, Zazie,” Nick said. His voice rasped with sleep. They both sat down as well. Meryl pulled in close to his side for warmth and he flung a grateful arm over her shoulders.

The avatar’s head tilted back and forth thoughtfully as Zazie considered them. “See, that’s what I mean. You show up 150 years ago, fully grown, and you know my name. Then you drop completely out of my sight for, oh, about 125 years or so? But then you’re little larvae who know nothing. And now here you are. Suddenly you’re the same as before. I could sense it on you.”

“So why wait to talk to us until now?” Nick asked. He could feel the frown pinching his forehead. It was the middle of the goddamn night. He wasn’t in the mood for riddles.

“You’ve been so busy!” Zazie waved a hand with airy sarcasm. “And I wanted to see what you’d do.”

“Are you working for Knives?” Meryl asked. “Do you know what he’s planning?”

Zazie laughed. “I am not working for Millions Knives. But I know what he’s planning. It’s my business to know. The things he plans to do will impact the whole planet and I am the whole planet.”

“What does he want to do?” Meryl asked. Nick felt her shoulders tighten under his arm.

Zazie ignored the question. They scooted the avatar body a little towards them on its butt, hands clasped to knees, like a child imparting a secret. “Tell me, strange ones. When it comes time to choose a side between the humans and the Plants, who should I choose? Who will be better for my planet?”

“Why does it have to be sides?” Meryl said. “What if we can find a way for humans, Worms, and Plants to live together?”

Zazie laughed. “You do know the Humanoid Typhoon!” The laughter stopped as quickly as it started. They regarded Nick and Meryl with inhumanly green eyes. “The Stampede has tried to broker peace many times. Between humans and Plants, between humans and Worms. Either the humans reject it outright, or the humans renege and the peace crumbles, or his twin sabotages it.”

Nick tried not to grind his teeth. “So you’re saying it’s hopeless.”

“There has been an impasse since humans and Plants first landed here. Knives intends to bring us all to a tipping point. I’m just not sure which way I want to tip!”

“Why are you asking us?” Nick grumbled. Maybe the debate stuff was for Meryl, but it wasn’t for him. If they wanted to talk impossible answers to impossible questions, he’d walk back to camp and go back to bed.

“You’re humans! Odd ones, sure. But you know the Plants: dependent and independent. You knew me at the beginning. Color me curious.”

Meryl glanced up at Nick. He shrugged at her. “I know the way humans treat the Plants isn’t always right…I know our ancestors ruined their planet before we ended up here. But I want there to be a solution that doesn’t involve one side wiping out the other.”

She sounded like Vash. When she didn’t offer more, the avatar’s neon green eyes shifted from her face to Nick’s.

He didn’t know what the fuck he wanted. He’d had plenty of days where he wouldn’t have minded if the majority of humanity was wiped from the face of this stinking planet. So long as he could keep his own few favorite people safe. “I want to go back to sleep,” he told Zazie flatly.

They laughed. “You’re getting awfully close to July. Tell the Stampede not to step on Knives’s floor.” The avatar stood and twined its fingers together in an exaggerated over-the-head stretch. “And think about it. Just don’t think too long!”

Their parting giggle was snatched on the wind as the avatar burst into dozens of small Worms and dispersed.

“That was…ominous,” Meryl said.

Nick sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose with the hand not draped over Meryl. Fucking Zazie and their dramatics. “And annoying.”

It occurred to him only after they’d left that he should have asked them where Livio was. Not, he supposed, that they would have answered anyway.

***

July’s skyline shimmered into view a day and a half later. The tension had been steadily building in the news van since the morning after Zazie’s visit. Vash was walking towards his undoing, Roberto his death, all of them the deaths of millions.

“Still not too late to turn tail and run,” Roberto said when they made a pit stop only an hour or so outside of the city limits. The city skyline now ate up the horizon in front of them. Probably none of them had needed a pee or smoke break that badly, but the anxious pressure inside the van had been getting unbearable. Vash had jumped out of his seat and started doing clap push-ups and cartwheels like his life depended on it.

Now a crouched red figure in the sand, he looked up at the cityscape with his fathomless eyes. “I’m going.” His voice was soft but certain. “Although the rest of you don’t have to.”

“How many times are we gonna have this conversation?” Nick rolled his eyes as he dug a lollipop out of his jacket. He handed it to Vash, then took out a second one and unwrapped it for himself. “We’re going.”

Vash gazed at him, spinning the piece of candy between his fingers. “I don’t want to kill anyone.”

Nick jammed the lollipop between his teeth. Pink, bubblegum flavor. One of his favorites. “I know, kid.”

“I don’t want any of us to kill anyone,” Vash said, still looking at Nick. Pointedly.

Nick sighed. “We may not have a choice.” Then, because they hadn’t had the conversation yet in this timeline and they might as well have it out now while they had the chance, he asked: “Why are you so opposed?”

Vash frowned thoughtfully out at the city. “All life is precious. It’s not up to us to decide to end it.”

“What about people who do bad things?” Nick asked. Calm, curious. He wasn’t surprised Vash still held the same beliefs. It was a bit of a relief, even, to see how such an intrinsic part of him had stayed the same. Part of him realized he was testing Vash, prodding at his arguments before he faced his brother again. He glanced at Meryl, debate captain. She just watched them, soaking them in with her keen journalist’s eyes.

“Someone who’s alive could still change. They might still choose to do good. If we kill them then we take that option away,” Vash said with surety.

“And how much bad do they have to do before that stops being worth the risk?” To Nick that had always been a pretty simple equation. Problem plus Nick minus threat equals solution.

“Killing isn’t the only way to stop bad things from happening,” Vash said. “I think most people want to get along. They want to live peacefully and only turn to violence when they feel they have no other choice. And…” He looked back up at Nick, still crouched on the sand, spinning the unwrapped lollipop between his long fingers. “Everyone on this planet is alive because of Rem, Nick. Everyone. If I kill them, then…”

Then what had she died for? Was he spitting in the face of her sacrifice? Nick understood. Wasn’t sure he agreed, but he understood. Would Knives?

Nick rolled the lollipop between his molars. A long time ago he had promised not to lie to Vash. That wasn’t the same as being utterly transparent. “I can’t promise anything, kid,” he said.

“I know.” Vash gave Nick a small smile that carried the weight of years. He slipped his lollipop into an inner pocket of his coat. “Thank you.”

***

They drove into the city. After long stretches in the desert, Nick always found the big cities overwhelming. All the lights and colors, noises, smells–all the people. He couldn’t stop studying the faces of strangers as they passed by on the walkways. July was as loud and smelly and crowded as it had ever been, but to Nick it felt like a city of ghosts.

Had that one made it out in time, before? Had that one? Christ, that person’s got kids with them. Of course there are kids in this city. How many of them…

They dropped Roberto off a block away from the July Military Police Headquarters. He handed his derringer over to Meryl, and she tucked it securely into her pocket just like Vash had done with the lollipop an hour before. Then she threw her arms around him in a hug, both of them bent awkwardly over the center console. “Be safe, Roberto!”

He patted her on the back. “Same to you, newbie.” He pulled away and looked at Nick and Vash in the backseat. “I’ll be waiting for you when it’s done.” It was maybe the first optimistic thing Nick had ever heard him say.

He let himself out of the van and shut the door, but leaned back in the open passenger window. “Give ‘em hell, Meryl Stryfe,” he said, then patted the window-frame, straightened up, and walked away.

No one commented on her sniffling breaths as she drove them away, but Vash reached out from the backseat to put a hand on her shoulder.

They found a dim, secluded alley to pull the news van into for the next hour as they waited to enact the next stage of their plan.

“Do you really think an hour will be enough time?” Vash asked, slouched low in the backseat, as unobtrusive as a tall man in a bright red coat could be. Not that there was anyone to see him, in the back of a battered and dirty van wedged between dumpsters.

“A press pass opens a lot of doors,” Meryl said with a confidence Nick wished he could share. “Especially for someone like Roberto. Especially with the news he’s going to share.”

Vash laughed nervously. “This’ll be no good for my reputation.”

Nick grunted. “Can’t be any worse than sixty billion double dollars, can it?”

Vash slumped, somehow, even farther into his seat. His spine was a cooked noodle. “Ah, I guess not.”

“Just remember to have fun out there,” Nick said drily.

Vash’s giggle had an edge of hysteria. He pushed himself back up into a sitting position and patted his pockets to double-check that all their contents were accounted-for. “Well, no time like the present, I guess! See you at the rendezvous.”

“See you in fifteen minutes,” Meryl said. Vash opened the back door and exited the van. “Be careful!”

“You too!” Vash glanced around, then jumped up and grabbed hold of a fire escape. He hauled himself up and skittered up the staircases out of sight.

As Meryl drove the two of them to their next location, Nick peered out the busted back window. He strained his ears for the sounds of Vash’s stage of the plan, even though he knew they were driving in the wrong direction. He heard the distant pop of what may well have just been another vehicle backfiring.

Pull your head back in before you get decapitated,” Meryl said, and he flopped back into his seat with a huff.

“He’ll be fine,” she added. Her knuckles were white from her grip on the steering wheel.

Meryl parked the news van in another inconspicuous spot, then Nick led her along a convoluted march on foot. He didn’t notice anyone tailing them, but that might mean nothing.

They slunk into the sewer at thirteen minutes. Meryl tried to hold her nose at first but quickly gave up.

Fifteen minutes came and went. Meryl paced up and down the walkway. Nick scratched at the edges of his nicotine patch and readjusted his grip on the Punisher.

At nineteen minutes, they heard the rapid thuds of running footsteps. Vash raced out of the gloom of an adjoining tunnel, then dropped to a jog when they spotted each other. He trotted up to them, panting. “Sorry. Sorry I’m late. Hard to. Shake ‘em off.”

Meryl flung herself around his middle. “Ugh! You worried me!”

He really had to bend down to return the embrace. Nick wondered if Vash remembered how he’d once dreamed of reaching Meryl’s height. “Did it work?” Nick asked.

He’d put a crick in his neck, resting his cheek atop Meryl’s head like that. “Yeah, I think so. They were waiting for me, but I saw a lot of them directing traffic, too.”

“Didja break anything?” Nick asked with a bit of a smirk.

“Mostly just put some potholes in the roads,” Vash said. “Lots of bangs and flashes. Although I think one of my poppers set a roof on fire…” He looked worried.

“Hm. Was it fun?”

Meryl glared at Nick and he stuck out his tongue.

Vash smiled shyly into Meryl’s hair. “...it was a little fun,” he admitted.

So that was the first stage of their plan underway. Nick poked his head aboveground a little while later to make sure evacuations were proceeding as planned. They were. He breathed a sigh of relief.

“It’s working,” he reported back to Meryl and Vash. “They’re moving people out of the city.”

“I hope Roberto’s okay,” Vash fretted. “Do you think they’re interrogating him?”

Meryl snorted. “He warned them about an imminent ‘attack’ on the city by the Humanoid Typhoon. They’ll probably give him a medal.”

They gave it another twenty minutes, then Vash went back aboveground to set off more firecrackers and fire more blanks into the air. Just to make sure the Military Police stayed on their toes and kept everyone moving out of the city. He returned, once again out of breath but unharmed.

That taken care of, the three of them made their way through the sewer system, closer and closer to the base of Knives’s skyscraper. Nick stopped noticing the smell faster than he was comfortable with. Roberto really had gotten the best job of the four of them in this miserable plan.

Once they were close, they settled in to wait as long as they dared. Knives was certain to have known immediately of their arrival in the city. It was a balancing act between giving the residents of July as much time as possible to evacuate safely, and not waiting so long as to provoke Knives into some unplanned action.

The minutes crept past as thick and slow as the sludge that oozed along below their walkways. Nick wished one of them had thought to bring a pack of cards to pass the time, then looked at their grimy surroundings and changed his mind.

After two hours of sitting in the silent, fetid darkness of the sewer system, the three of them were all unbearably antsy. Every strange sound had Nick twitching over his shoulder, certain it would be more Eye of Michael freaks coming to collect them. Meryl paced back and forth. Vash hunched in on himself and stared into nothing, like he once had as a little boy in a cell on Ship 3.

“Do you think it’s been long enough?” Meryl asked into the quiet.

“It takes a long time to evacuate a city,” Vash said solemnly.

“We gave them a good head start,” Nick said. “I’m dyin’ down here.”

Meryl wrinkled her nose in agreement.

Vash stretched his shoulders. “Then I guess…let’s go. I’ve hidden from Nai long enough.”

Meryl reached out and took his flesh-and-blood hand. “Whatever happens. You know we love you, right?”

His small smile was warm and sad. “I know. I waited a long time to see you both again. I couldn’t have done any of this without you.”

Meryl squeezed his hand and smiled up at him. “Sure you could have.”

He glanced at her face, at the floor, at Nick. “No, I mean…you saved me, as a kid. You were there when I needed you and you came back when I needed you again, and–”

Meryl pulled him into another hug, and he once again hunched himself over to rest his cheek atop her head.

Meryl was good at this feelings stuff. Vash was okay at it. Nick had found it a lot easier when Vash was little. “Ya know…we’ll save you again if we have to. Let’s make sure we don’t have to, huh?”

Vash gave a pained chuckle at that, and let go of Meryl to wrap Nick in a hug. He smelled like smoke and gunpowder and sewer, but Nick found he didn’t mind. He thought about trying to make a smart comment, but he just kept quiet and held him back. When they entered the tower they would have to fall back into their expected roles. For this moment, they could just be a family saying their goodbyes.

Because that was what they’d become, yeah? A weird little family to be sure, but a family nonetheless. In another lifetime, Nicholas had stood and idly smoked in these sewers while Vash dug a bullet out of his own gut with his fingers: the origin of another scar to layer atop endless others. Nicholas hadn’t helped, had called him a monster, and had led him to his doom. Nick preferred this version, despite the ripping-edges ache of his heart.

Vash pulled back first, because Nick was having a hard time letting go. He glanced at Meryl and, for once, forced himself not to look away from the tender expression on her face. Sue him, he’d never been good at letting go. That was how he’d carried the Punisher around for so long, despite its weight.

He hoisted it onto his back and turned to lead them the rest of the way up.

***

The ground floor of the skyscraper was empty. Just as they’d expected, but it still put the hairs up on the back of Nick’s neck. He and Vash kept Meryl between them as they crossed the floor. When they entered the elevator, they put themselves between her and the doors. The two of them were expected here–permitted–but she was not.

Last time, Meryl said Elendira had been in a tank in one of the labs before awakening to attack her and Roberto. Nick hoped she would stay asleep. None of them had seen Legato last time. He hoped to God and anything else that might be listening that Legato was somewhere far away. If he showed up they were fucked, and that was it.

The ride up in the elevator was silent. The time for talking over the plan was done. The time for goodbyes was done. Everyone’s guns were loaded. It was time to be in character. To see this through.

The chime rang, the light blinked, and the doors slid open. An empty landing greeted them. The hallways were as slick and dark as he remembered. Nick held no love for this planet’s endless deserts, but this place made him miss the wide-open sky.

Meryl slipped away from them with a final glance. Her left hand was shoved in her jacket pocket, gripping the derringer.

Nick and Vash went in the other direction. The hallway they walked down was plenty spacious, but it felt claustrophobic. The black walls, the dim lights: whoever had designed this building was a real sicko.

Vash’s stride was steady in front of him, just as it had been last time. With his shock of blonde hair, his vivid red coat, and his crystalline teal prosthetic, he was too vibrant for a place like this. He belonged under that wide-open sky. On the sunniest days it was the same color as his eyes.

The Punisher had never felt heavier. Nick’s feet dragged on the polished black marble floor. They were close. The door to Knives’s chamber was just around the next bend.

He stopped. His body was lead. “This is as far as I go.” He remembered his lines.

Vash stopped and turned. He was tall and strong, his posture straight, his face calm. “I know,” he said. With a smile, he reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and withdrew the lollipop Nick had given him.

He unwrapped it carefully. It was a red one: Vash’s favorite.

“Thank you,” Vash said. He knew his lines too, although he had never been here before. As he turned away, he put the lollipop in his mouth.

In their brief time, Nick and Meryl had tried to instill in Vash the ability to walk on without them with his head held high. It was a victory all on its own, Nick just hadn’t anticipated how much it would hurt.

Vash turned the corner and slipped out of sight.

***

Dr. Conrad signed and sealed his contract. Nick watched the lamplight in his plush study glint off the bald curve of his head and the metallic implants of the tech that ran along it. Nick folded the paper neatly and slipped it into the breast pocket of his jacket where he used to keep his cigarettes. What a small thing to have once staked all his hopes on. He tried to believe it wasn’t useless.

“I’ll never forgive you for what you did to me. Or Livio,” Nick told him, like he’d done before. He could say it to Conrad a thousand times and it would never be enough.

He crossed the room to the doorway. “Nicholas,” Conrad called, right on cue. “Were you able to lay down your cross?”

Like he cared. Like the sick fuck hadn’t given him the cross in the first place.

“Yeah,” Nick drawled. He closed the study door and set the Punisher down in front of it. A nice little three-hundred-pound barricade. He turned back to the doctor, who now looked unsure. “I have.”

Four long strides took him back across the room, close enough to grip Conrad’s throat in his hands. The skin of the old man’s neck was loose and doughy under his fingers.

Conrad’s eyes widened behind his ugly glasses as Nick dragged him out of his chair and onto the floor. His mouth opened and closed uselessly. Spit flecked his lips as they turned blue.

The Punisher was too loud. It drew too much attention. And sometimes the situation warranted putting the tools aside and getting your hands dirty.

When the good doctor stopped twitching, Nick found some heavy item on his bookshelf and smashed apart his skull. He yanked the corded tech loose from the pieces and splintered it under his heel. Couldn’t be too careful. They hadn’t called Conrad ‘the Revenant’ for nothing.

They should have thought twice before they called him the Punisher.

***

He found Meryl standing in an enormous room, most of which was taken up by a glowing blue tank filled with the sleeping bulbs of Plants. In front of her a busted control panel sparked and fizzled. Those were clearly bullet holes in the screens, and even a few in the large wires that ran across the floor. Her hand was back in her jacket pocket.

She startled and spun around at his footsteps, then relaxed when she saw him. “Nicholas!”

“Shortie,” he said, relieved to see her still in one piece. “Where’s Vash?”

“He must still be up there.” She gestured toward the ceiling.

Nick grunted. He wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. Had Vash stayed off the floor, like Zazie had warned? Whatever that meant?

He wandered around the room. There wasn’t much to see besides the tank and the control panel. “How long do we wait before we go up there and–”

They both looked up at the distant sounds of metallic clanging. Then shouting.

Both twins splashed into the tank in a tangle of limbs: metal, prosthetic, and flesh. Nick wasn’t sure where exactly they had fallen from.

Vash thrashed away from his brother through the blue liquid. He kicked frantically and landed a solid boot in Knives’s stomach. Still, he wasn’t faster than the metal chains that snaked after him. They curled around him and sliced into his back.

“No!” Meryl screamed.

Vash went limp. He floated loosely above them in the tank, tethered to his brother. Knives straightened up, arms folded confidently. Nick’s heart jumped into his throat.

“No, Vash!” Meryl pounded on the glass. “Fight it!”

“Initial connection made.” Knives’s voice came through the glass far too clearly. Nick could hear how his words dripped satisfaction. Whatever that blue Plant liquid was, it sure as hell wasn’t water. “Let’s begin.”

“No, no, Vash! Don’t let him do this to you!” Meryl shouted.

Knives ignored her. Vash seemed not to hear her.

“Update me on the progress, Doctor,” Knives said. Smooth and calm, used to giving orders that people followed.

There was a beat of silence. Nick hoped he’d managed to wash all the blood off his face and hands.

“Doctor?” Knives glanced down at the room from the corner of his eye, then turned his head fully when he didn’t find who he was looking for.

“Punisher.” Knives’s low voice was a coiled threat. “Where is Conrad?”

“Dunno. I thought he was coming in here,” Nick said, as though he hadn’t personally stuffed the man’s corpse down the garbage chute not ten minutes ago.

Knives frowned. Then Nick saw him mentally shrug and he turned his face back to Vash. “He’s missing his crowning achievement,” Knives murmured. “Years of planning…finally our Genesis is here.”

Darkness crept up Vash’s feet and legs. Tendrils grew out of him by the dozens, by the hundreds. Meryl screamed and pounded on the glass. This was the origin of so many of her nightmares, playing out again before both their eyes. Nick had hoped never to see it. Shit. Fuck.

The dark, pulsing tendrils reached towards each of the other Plants in the tank. They looked like the bases of Meryl and Luida’s flora on Ship 3, writ large. More of them spun out everywhere. They grew from Vash with impossible speed and breadth. Nick and Meryl dodged around them as they swept along the walls and over the floor.

Meryl whipped the derringer out of her pocket and fired at the glass. The bullets ricocheted off with barely a scratch. “Nicholas, we have to do something,” she moaned.

Her voice had helped pull Vash back the last time. Would that not be enough? The darkness spread up Vash’s chest. Through the reaching halo of tendrils, Nick thought he saw some–some shape, some shadow– waver behind him.

Nick readjusted his grip on the Punisher, ready to unwrap it. A tiny derringer might not break bulletproof glass, but the Punisher might. If not the bullets, then its laser function, certainly.

Explosions rocked the building as the July Military Police fired at it. Vash’s…growths…must have already started to spread beyond the skyscraper to consume the rest of the city. It was all happening so fast.

Nick and Meryl staggered. Meryl resumed frantically yelling and beating on the glass.

The way the tendrils connected to those other Plants was so–it looked so wrong. And those things continued to grow, filing the room. They burst with dark purple flora. Darkness rose past Vash’s chin. Overtook his cheeks and nose. Covered his eyes.

Then stopped.

“What is this?”

Nick clutched one of the large growing things for balance and looked up at Knives through the expanding thicket of flora. He didn’t see anything new in the tank. Knives floated, his eyes closed and his forehead pinched in concentration. The darkness didn’t spread above the upper rims of Vash’s glasses.

“Vash…” Knives growled, almost to himself. Some silent battle was taking place between the two of them. Nick just as silently cheered Vash on.

“You’re delusional,” Knives hissed. “I’ll fix you.”

Vash’s shadowed body turned towards Meryl, still scrambling doggedly towards him through the shifting terrain. She was a little speck of white among the purple and black, silhouetted in pale blue light.

Nick pulled his ankles free from grasping limbs and staggered after her, hauling the Punisher along. Shimmering violet flora crushed under his shoes but more immediately sprang up to take their place. How could all of this be coming from Vash?

“Vash, listen to me!” Meryl called from up ahead. “You have to fight it!”

“Always, you run back to her!” Knives roared.

Nick wasn’t sure how it happened, but in a second Knives was thrown bodily against the glass of the tank. His chains of knives flung out around him. Some of their sharp ends embedded in the glass in little starbursts of radiating cracks.

“No! I was rejected?” Knives braced his palms against the side of the tank as he stared at Vash. Then Nick saw his head turn to Meryl. He saw him register her fully for the first time: as a threat and not just the buzzing of a particularly persistent insect. Nick read her death in the corner of Knives’s eye as clearly as a downtown July billboard. He scrambled towards her as fast as he could.

“Parasite! I’ll free you of their influence!” Knives flipped around so he could brace hands and feet against the glass. The sharp ends of his knife-chains twisted in place, widening the cracks in the glass. Nick heard the creaks and groans as it splintered. He had to reach Meryl before Knives did.

Sprays of blue liquid began to jet out of the cracks. In another moment Knives would break through the tank. And she would die.

Nick was moving too slow. There were too many obstacles in his way.

The glass burst. Liquid crashed forth. Knives lunged. Nick shouted–

Meryl was yanked away.

Knives’s momentum crashed him into the dark, growing things. The torrent of liquid pounded him and Nick. It felt like getting hit by the news van all over again. Nick felt himself flung backward. The Punisher was torn from his grip. He held his breath but the air was knocked out of him as he was pummeled from every direction.

His head broke the surface and he gasped for air. He shook his head and blinked the strangely viscous blue fluid out of his eyes just in time to see the ends of the long black arms of flora whipping towards Vash. They were pulled in towards his chest and vanished from sight.

He hovered above them, Meryl clutched to his side. He lowered slowly to the ground with a gentle splash. The liquid, still draining around them and out the open door, came up nearly to his knees. When he set Meryl down she was submerged almost to the waist and had to grab him again to keep the current from yanking her down.

The endless things that had poured out of Vash hadn’t been pulled into his chest. They’d coalesced into the palm of his hand, held in front of his heart.

The water drained enough for Nick to find his footing. The Plants, splayed and limp and all-too-human, bobbed forlornly. The breakage was about halfway up the tank. Would this kill them, leaving them partway exposed to the air? He spied a corner of the Punisher poking above the surface. It had been pushed against the wall by the flood. He slogged over to grab it. He hoped it would still fire after getting submerged.

“Vash…” Knives stood in a crouch. Water swirled around his ankles. The chains growing from his back lashed angrily. Nick crept around the edge of the room with the Punisher under one arm. He needed to grab Meryl before the projectiles started flying.

“Nai. Your plan failed.” Vash’s voice was as low and serious as Nick had ever heard it. A glowing purple marble sat in his palm. Its light lined the edges of his face, pulled into a frown, serious as a bullet.

His hair was plastered wet to his head, his clothes were stained an even darker black than before, but his tinted shades sat securely on the bridge of his nose. His coat was still a whole and vivid red. And his eyes were deadly clear.

“Now let's end this,” Vash said.

“It’s not over! I won’t let it be!” Knives pounced at Vash, chains whipping around in a frenzy. “Give that to me!”

Both the twins moved with incredible speed. Meryl wisely scampered away as Vash blocked blow after blow from Knives’s razored limbs.

Nick raced to her. She grabbed his arm, breathing heavily.

“Time to skedaddle!” Nick made to hoist her up like before.

“No!” She tried to wiggle out of his grip.

“We don’t have time–”

“Backpack! Like a backpack,” Meryl gasped.

Nick blocked a wayward strike from a knife-chain with the Punisher. Meryl climbed onto his back and wrapped her arms and legs around him. As soon as she was secure, Nick sprinted towards the door. He kept the Punisher up in one hand to block any more stray hits. “Is this the time to be picky?” he snarked at her as they skidded into the hallway.

“You cracked two of my ribs last time,” she protested from over his shoulder. Her words jostled out of her mouth with every one of his footsteps. Hm. Okay, maybe that was fair.

Nick tore down the hallway and kicked out the nearest window he found. He wasn’t going to risk taking that long fucking elevator. The fastest way out of here was the way he went last time.

Meryl screamed as he jumped from the window to the nearest rooftop. He sprang through the city with her on his shoulders. It looked pretty empty, from what he could see. Good.

Despite how he was sick with dread, it felt almost…satisfying, to stretch his legs like this. To use his abilities in a way he never got to. He wondered if Vash ever felt like that.

They were in the dunes south of the city in mere minutes. The flood of evacuees had been funneled west, so they were alone. Nick set Meryl back on her feet in the sand. She bent over with her hands on her knees. “I’m gonna puke,” she said, just like she had last time.

But she straightened up after a moment, as they both turned to watch July. She dug binoculars out of her pocket. They looked for lights in the sky.

A purple light streaked upwards from within the city, followed closely by an aqua one. The sense of repetition was drowning Nick in his own head. Mirrors facing mirrors.

Had they done all this just to watch it happen again?

Maybe he was the one who was going to puke. He reached for Meryl’s free hand. Their fingers laced together.

The lights raced up and up into the heavens. Vanished into space.

Nick’s heart pounded against his ribs.

The world held its breath. Or maybe just he and Meryl did. Same difference.

A meteor fell across the sky. It glowed orange as it burnt through the atmosphere, and trailed a vibrant line of purple back into space.

Then the purple glow coalesced, and a little ball of violet light fell down into the city of July.

“No,” Meryl whispered.

July was lit from within. A ball of purple light turned into a blue beam lancing skyward, followed by a plume of black smoke. The percussion rattled Nick’s jaw.

He tensed to grab Meryl and pull her to the sand again, to shield her from the shockwave. But only a light, faintly sulfurous breeze reached them.

Knives’s overbalanced skyscraper crumbled, but many of the other buildings Nick could see were…still standing.

He waited for the second wave. The finishing blow. He and Meryl were going to need a crowbar to pry their fingers apart.

Nothing came. Dark smoke rose from the center of July, but otherwise all was still.

Was that it?

That was it?

Nick set the Punisher down in the sand. He managed to unclench his fingers and free Meryl’s hand. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

“Nicholas, it might be dangerou–”

Too late. He was already running forward.

A hop, skip, and a jump took him back into July. The outermost buildings seemed untouched. Streets and roofs were stable under his feet as he bounded across them. He followed the column of smoke inward.

Closer to the city center, he found lots of broken windows. Smoke clogged the air.

At the epicenter, he landed in drifts of ash. A gray haze clung to everything. He pulled his shirt over his nose and mouth and strode forward. His clothes were still damp from his plunge into Plant fluid, and he could feel the ash turning into a gritty slurry inside his shoes.

An explosion should have been hot. He was warm as he waded through its nucleus, uncomfortably so, but not as much as he should have been. It was unnatural.

His foot set down on nothing and he lurched back before he could fall. Smoke burned his eyes as he peered down into a deep crater. He’d found Ground Zero.

Was the smoke playing tricks on him, or were there little winking lights down there?

Not that it mattered. He was going down there either way.

Nick jumped down into the pit.

He landed in a roll on some uneven, bumpy surface. He coughed. He swiped at his streaming eyes under his sunglasses. Some good they’d been at filtering any of this shit out. His sooty hand only succeeded in smearing around the grime on his face.

He’d landed atop a large, pulsating mass. It was blackened and twisting. Tiny teal lights pulsed along the myriad limbs like a heartbeat. There were no purple flora to be seen this time. Maybe they had all burned away.

Nick clambered over to a promising-looking spot and began to push and pry the limbs aside. He tried to do it as gently as he could. He didn’t know if they could feel pain.

“Vash,” he called. His voice was hoarse from smoke. What had he even bothered giving up smoking for? He was inhaling a lifetime’s worth at once. A hysterical laugh stuck on the back of his tongue.

“Vash, can you hear me? Kid?”

Tendrils curled back and melted away. Nick crawled forward. A shifting, irregular black slab lay draped like a blanket, slightly bent on one side. More little teal lights winked from between its bubbling shapes.

Nick reached out and poked carefully at one edge. It was mostly solid. At least solid enough to grab as he picked up the flat end and turned it over, like one would a page in a book.

Vash lay underneath. He was curled into a ball, and the flat black alive thing extended from his back. A wing, he thought with wonder, but that wasn’t the most important thing on his mind.

“Vash.” He dropped to his knees and placed two fingers under Vash’s jaw.

He felt a pulse. A sob cracked through his chest and came out as a cough. More than a year after the first July and he and Meryl had hoped– but had never been sure–that the reports of Vash’s survival were more than just rumors.

“Vash. I’m here. Please wake up. We gotta go.”

Eyes flickered under ash-blackened eyelids. Nick cupped his face in his hands, like he’d done with Livio only days ago.

The white and blue of Vash’s eyes were stark against his soot-stained face as they blinked open. Their reflective backing flashed their Plant markings a little too brightly in the darkness. Distinctly inhuman. Completely familiar and completely Vash.

“Hey. You with me?” Nick asked.

Vash blinked up at him. “Nick?” he whispered. His voice was a smoky rasp like Nick’s own.

Nick smiled. “Yeah. I got you. Do you want me to get you out of here?”

That might have been a smile hovering around Vash’s mouth. It was hard to tell in the gloom. “Please.”

Nick gathered him gingerly into his arms. Vash hooked a trusting arm around his neck. Just the one: Nick wasn’t sure where his prosthetic had gone. His head lolled against Nick’s shoulder.

He was much bigger and heavier than he had been when Nick used to carry him all the time. Luckily, years of lugging the Punisher around had prepared Nick well for carrying heavy, awkward things. This was one burden he was more than willing to bear.