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It’s dark and then light, the empty space suddenly less empty. Vash stays curled up, knees to chest, forehead to knees, but he can feel the change. He knows the presence.
“Needle-noggin,” he says, “you need to wake up.”
“I’m tired,” Vash replies. He squeezes his eyes shut so he won’t look. He can’t look. Not yet. “Aren’t you supposed to sleep when you’re tired?”
“This isn’t sleeping,” he says.
“Close enough,” Vash says and feels the weight of a promise pressing down on him. He holds himself tighter until it almost hurts. Imagines he could hide as easily as his sisters. “I’ll wake up. Just—another minute. Please. One more minute.”
He’s quiet, and then: “One more minute.”
Vash counts. It keeps him from saying anything else. He hits fifty-three and opens his eyes. At fifty-five he turns his head. Fifty-six, and he looks. He looks—alive. Like he would be warm if Vash touched him. Like he would disappear if Vash reached out at all.
“Minute’s up,” he says, and Vash is awake.
Vash says, “Knives is gone,” and then he can’t say anything at all. The empty space has been replaced by an apple tree. It looms over the pair of them, too big for how big Vash has gotten, but he feels small anyway. Smaller. He’s not sure how he thought it would feel.
“Good riddance,” he says, and Vash laughs, probably, turned away from the weight of his gaze. He doesn’t really want to talk about this with him. With anyone. He just—had to say it. The rustle of fabric accompanies the awareness that he’s stopped looking at Vash. “This looks like the ship.”
“It’s a ship,” Vash says. He looks up at the tree, sees him doing the same in his periphery. Sitting a foot or so away, leaning back on his hands. “This is where we lived before the Fall.”
Beyond the doors hidden in darkness would be no apartments with families going about their lives, no satellites calling to distant planets. There would be seemingly-endless corridors and the section of rooms where they spent most of their time, cold-sleep, the medical wing. If it was real. If he wasn’t dreaming.
“How long before?” he asks.
Vash rubs his cheek on his shoulder, curled around his knees. “Not long.”
“Okay, well, you’ve said not long before and it could mean anywhere between five days or five decades,” he says, watching Vash again.
Vash smiles into his sleeve and looks up. Meets his eyes, clings to the humor crinkling the corners of them. He hates it as he thinks it: he’s so much more relaxed now that he’s dead. It doesn’t matter, not in the grand scheme of things, if Vash doesn’t tell him. Maybe it would, if .
“A little over a year,” Vash answers. He takes a breath and says, “Me, Knives, and Rem.”
He looks surprised. “Just three of you? On this whole ship?”
“They only needed one person most of the time,” Vash says. “To make sure nothing was going wrong.”
“Sounds lonely,” he says.
“She said it was worth it.”
It was important work; loneliness was a small price to pay. And it brought her her boys.
“She said she was grateful for us, and look what we did,” Vash says, drowning in the grief of it, of all of it. It’s over, it’s over , and still he has to live with it.
“Needle-noggin—” he starts, but Vash cries himself awake before he can hear the rest.
The orphanage yard is silent. As if the fighting and the scrambling and the roar of the ship leaving used up all the sound. Vash sits on a couch and doesn’t look at the man dying next to him. Vash stands in front of them and wants to scream.
“Don’t say stupid things,” the Vash on the couch says.
“Idiot,” Vash spits. “He’s dying, and that’s all you have to say? You won’t even look at him. Look at him!”
But he won’t. He’ll hear the last sound he ever made, a cry ragged and terrible, and he’ll hide his face in his hands, and he won’t look until the Ark has passed and he’s already dead. And still he won’t have anything better to say.
Vash doesn’t always dream of him. He doesn’t always dream. Sometimes his sleep is so deep and endless, he feels like he didn’t sleep at all; it’s as if he’s jumped forward in time and is expected to carry on. He’s an old hand at carrying on. He’s not sure, this time, what he’s carrying on for .
“Are you dying?”
Vash looks up from the tattered edges of his coat to Carlito’s frowning face. He has homework he’s supposed to be doing, but Vash has felt him looking at him more often than not for the last twenty minutes.
“I don’t think so,” Vash answers. He hasn’t gone to that empty space again, and the wound in his chest no longer pulls when he moves his arms. He’s not sure what his hair means long-term, but at the very least he’s no longer racing to meet death. He thinks.
“You sleep a lot,” Carlito says like an accusation.
“Sleep is important for recovery,” Vash tells him, an echo of a much more exasperated voice from a very long time ago.
Carlito hmphs and looks down at his papers. Vash returns to his mending, even though just the mention of sleep seems to have his eyes drooping. He’s never been this tired; he’s never gotten this close to death.
“You—” Carlito starts strong and then snaps his mouth shut when Vash looks up again.
Vash smiles. “Me?”
Carlito straightens in his chair. “You have to say something before you turn into a tree.”
Vash keeps his smile out of decades of practice. “I wasn’t planning on turning into anything.”
“Still,” Carlito insists.
“Okay,” Vash says. Another promise to keep. “If I change my mind, I’ll let you know.”
“Thank you,” Carlito says.
“You’re welcome,” Vash replies. He’s only just looked down when he’s interrupted again.
“Can you check my spelling?” Carlito asks.
Vash huffs a laugh and sets his coat on the arm of the couch, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “Bring it here.”
Vash takes an apple from the tree. It falls into his hand like it was only waiting for him to reach for it. He turns it in his fingertips, admires the way the peel goes from red to green to yellow and back again. He takes a bite and juice runs down his chin except it tastes—wrong.
Metallic.
He looks at the apple and watches it drip red.
He spits the chunk he bit off into a cupped palm. Throws it to the ground when it starts to pulse, a piece of still-living flesh. The apple in his hand bleeds and bleeds.
Once, somewhere between Lina and the Ark, Vash had a bird carved from soft stone. It was missing the tip of its left wing, streaked in old blood from the hand that carved it. He carried it in the pocket of his coat and toyed with it when they had time to kill, when sleep wouldn’t find him, when he was thinking. He can still feel the grooves of the feathers if he concentrates, the weight in his palm.
It wasn’t given to him.
He plucked it from the ground where it had been tossed—“ ya made me break it! ”—and kept it for himself. He couldn’t have explained why.
As far as Vash knew, there were no stones, soft or otherwise, on the ship where he was born. But he’s carving one anyway, the same shape Vash saw before.
“It ain’t that interesting,” he says, not looking up from the bird coming to life under his blade.
“It is,” Vash argues, head propped in his hand as he watches. He wonders if he would bleed if the knife slipped. He did before, so involved in his carving that he didn’t notice Vash had come up beside him until he asked what he was doing. He’s not sure he could take seeing him bleed again.
“If you say so,” he replies.
Vash watches him drag the knife slowly along the edge of a wing, smoothing the shape into something he likes better; he smiles a little when he inspects it and then turns it to do the same thing to the other side.
It’s the calmest dream Vash has had in months. The ache in his chest hurts all the more for it, growing every quiet moment.
He blows on the stone to clear away the last bits of debris. He holds the bird up to the artificial sun. He doesn’t smile. His hand falls to his lap, thumb smoothing down the bird’s back. Then he holds it out to Vash.
It’s warm. Vash holds it in a cupped palm so he doesn’t turn it to dust.
“I was gonna make you another one,” he says. “Even before all that.”
“I liked the one I had,” Vash says.
“Coulda been better.”
“I would’ve kept both.” Vash runs a careful finger over the bird’s feathers. Surely his chest is caving in. Or exploding out. Another black hole to swallow them both. “I would’ve kept anything you gave me. Any piece of you I could get my hands on.”
He seems surprised when Vash looks up, which is just—
“You really couldn’t see it?” Vash asks, a bitter laugh spilling out of his mouth. “You saw through everything else. And then you ran off like I wouldn’t even notice.”
“I knew you would notice,” he says. “Later, eventually, but there were more important things for you to worry about before any of my shit even came into play.”
Vash is shaking his head before he’s even finished speaking. “That’s not true.”
“Sorry, but—batshit insane brother trying to end the world,” he says, holding one hand above his head. The other hovers a hairsbreadth above the grass. “Hired gun he ordered to follow you around.”
“Stop,” Vash says. “Don’t act like I didn’t have a choice.”
“You didn’t!” he says. “I didn’t give you one!”
“And I still followed you!” Vash snaps, closing his fist around the stone bird.
“Because you’re an idiot!”
“Because you were important!” He barrels past any argument he could make, fighting the thread of consciousness that his anger tugs. “ You were important to me. And you left like it was nothing , and I had to keep going without you when all I wanted—” He chokes on a sob, smacks his fists on his thighs to make himself finish while he’s still shell-shocked. “If I couldn’t take you with me, all I wanted was to crawl into your grave and die by your side.”
Waking up feels like falling. Vash curls onto his side in the narrow bed he’s been borrowing and reaches for the blanket he’d thrown off in his sleep, intending to wrap himself in it and never come out, but something falls from his hand, skidding when it hits the floor.
Vash holds himself very still. And then he leans over the side of the bed. Beneath it lies a small bird carved from soft stone. Its left wing is broken, and there’s a streak of dried blood down its back. Vash slides to the floor and grabs it, staring at it like it’ll disappear if he so much as blinks. He drags his thumb across the bloodstain. He blinks. It’s still there.
Carefully, he folds his fingers around it and holds his shaking hand to his mouth.
It’s easier to escape crowds of people trying to shoot him in a car. Vash has known this for a while, but he’s never been as grateful as he is in the back of Meryl and Milly’s fancy broadcast reporter van. Even if Meryl keeps wheedling him about doing an interview in repayment for getting him away from both the locals looking for a bounty and the terrans looking for revenge.
She’s mostly joking—he thinks.
Milly, at least, doesn’t aim the camera at him again, though she fiddles with it in her lap, Vash’s own voice echoing back to him while she talks to Meryl about finding a better way to stabilize it if they’re going to keep filming while running. Vash doesn’t look at the little screen replaying his flight. He leans against the door instead, letting his eyes fall shut, and thinks about hours spent folded into a sidecar as he turns the stone in his pocket.
“I would’ve stayed.”
He won’t look at Vash, fiddling with a cigarette he hasn’t lit. Vash returns the favor, lying back in the grass to stare into the endless branches of the apple tree.
“If I had the chance,” he says, quiet and serious, “I would’ve stayed.”
There are four chairs at the table. Of course there are four chairs at the table, but Vash can’t stop glancing over at the empty one as if it would be occupied the next time he looked. He never looked when he was staying in the church. Context is key, he thinks, and angles himself toward the girls to keep from imagining.
Slowly, slowly, things are getting better. Vash clings to every good thing he sees, tries to fix the bad where he can, and runs when his presence only makes things worse. More people recognize him these days. Part of it is that awful broadcast, but part of it is the remnant of their connection with his sisters. He can feel them, sometimes, in people’s kindness, and it’s the closest he gets to them for nearly a year.
He didn’t want to draw that much attention to himself; he wasn’t sure how much the Earth Federation would monitor them; he was afraid.
The town Vash is in didn’t exist before, but like everywhere else, it grew around plants. They’re the heart of their little oasis, the beginnings of a park growing around them, welcoming their people to visit whenever they’d like. Vash waits until nightfall to see them and is scolded gently, lovingly, for waiting so long.
He presses his hand to the glass between them and laughs a watery laugh, apologizing for his absence. For everything. His sister’s hand mirrors his. She smiles at him, even as her worry washes over him.
Something’s missing. She turns over the feel of stone, the weight of too-sharp eyes, the bark of a laugh. Wolfwood .
It doesn’t hurt as much when she says it, as softly as he never could. Vash leans against the bulb and lets her see.
“Melanie rebuilt the orphanage.” It’s something Vash thinks will make Wolfwood happy, and sure enough he gets to watch a smile bloom on his face. “I’m told it’s better than the last one, but I only saw it, you know. After. So I had to take their word for it, but it does look good.”
“You saw the new one?” he asks.
Vash shrugs, smiling helplessly. “I wanted to see you. And the girls have an open invitation from Livio, so we all went.”
“Livio,” Wolfwood echoes. “He went back.”
“Brad helped convince him, if you can believe it,” Vash says, picking the ends off the grass tickling his ankles. “Without even throwing a punch.”
“That’s good,” Wolfwood says, his voice strange. Vash looks up, and Wolfwood’s smile is stretched thin. “I’m glad he got to—to—it’s good.”
Wolfwood lifts a fist, digging his knuckles hard into his own cheek. It’s the only warning Vash gets before he’s crying, thick tears and heaving sobs, and Vash doesn’t know what to do.
“Wolfwood,” he says, pleading. His hands itch to touch, to soothe, but—but the last time he touched him was to put him in the ground, and if it’s only a dream, if they’ve only ever been dreams—
Wolfwood cries like he’ll never stop. He curls his hands in the sleeves of his jacket, holding himself as he shakes, and Vash knows it will kill him either way. He can’t just watch. He slides himself closer until all he has to do is reach. Wolfwood is warm. Real. Vash cradles his cheek, wipes at the tears that won’t stop flowing, and Wolfwood blinks at him, startled.
“I wanted—” he says. His face crumples again. Vash tugs, gentle, and he tips forward against Vash’s chest, wrapped in Vash’s arms, his voice muffled as he sobs out, “I wanted—” again and again.
Something’s missing.
Vash hasn’t dreamed of Wolfwood again. He was real, and now he’s gone. Moved on to wherever ghosts go. Vash tries to convince himself it’s a good thing, but it just feels like burying him all over again. The ache in his chest threatens to eat him alive.
He buys himself a bottle of Bride and steals the shot glass it’s handed over with, brings both as he climbs the wreckage of a ship to sit among his sisters. He pours a shot, places it on the ledge next to him, and drinks from the bottle.
Wait , his sisters tell him, rustling in their bulbs. Wait .
There are four chairs at the table, and all but one are full. Vash freezes in the middle of the street, eyes caught on a head of messy black hair seated across from Meryl and Milly. Someone crashes into the back of him, and he stumbles, attention wavering as he apologizes, catches one of the papers that flew from his fellow pedestrian’s hands. He picks up a few more, hands shaking as he gives them back and apologizes again. He gets nothing more than a scoff in return, and when he turns back to the table where the girls are waiting, the third chair is empty. The way it should be.
Disappointment curdles his stomach—as if he didn’t know better—and then a voice calls from the stairs leading up to the restaurant’s outdoor seating.
“Needle-noggin!”
Vash watches Wolfwood hop the last two steps and head straight toward him. “Wolfwood?”
“Surprise!” Meryl yells, and Vash glances up at her and Milly standing at the railing, both of them beaming.
Wolfwood stops in front of him. Vash’s heart is going to pound out of his chest.
“Am I dreaming?” he asks.
“Nope,” Wolfwood says. He pinches Vash’s cheek, hard, and Vash catches his hand to force him to stop as Wolfwood grins. “See? Wide awake.”
Vash stares at their joined hands. Wait, his sisters told him. Vash yanks Wolfwood into a bone-crushing hug.
“I just got back and you’re already trying to kill me,” he wheezes. His heart beats strong against Vash’s chest, and it’s the final straw to break the dam of tears. Wolfwood holds him impossibly tighter as he sobs, pressing his face to Vash’s hair. “Always with the waterworks.”
Vash hears the wobble in his voice and lets a miniscule amount of air between them to hold Wolfwood’s face, brushing tears from his cheeks. “Seems like it’s catching.”
“No one will ever believe you,” Wolfwood tells him.
Vash presses his forehead against Wolfwood’s and laughs.
“You can sleep,” Wolfwood mumbles against Vash’s throat. He stretches his legs, arm tightening briefly across Vash’s chest. Warm, alive, real. Vash breathes easier under his weight. “I’m not going anywhere.” He tilts his head back to squint at Vash. “Are you?”
“No,” Vash says, smiling at the satisfied noise Wolfwood makes as he settles again. He falls asleep not much later, more used to his re-existence than Vash. Vash lays his hand over Wolfwood’s heart and lets its steady beat lull him into a dreamless sleep.