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Vash doesn’t know exactly what it did to him, all the effort he expended pulling Knives down from on high.
At a certain point he’d stopped thinking, stopped planning. He’d considered and considered for seven months, splitting his focus between planning and making Legato struggle — an ignoble goal, maybe, but sometimes there wasn’t time for a delicate, persuasive touch when trying with all his might to wiggle his fingers would give Knives’ poor prideful fool a seven month migraine that eventually let Vash take full advantage of Wolfwood’s intervention —
(He needs to stop thinking Wolfwood’s name.)
Anyway. He’d done enough planning, enough drawing of conclusions, that when it came time, he didn’t think about the exact operation of charging bullets with the energy of his core or soul or gate or whatever it was called, he could probably ask Chronica but he didn’t really care.
He’d just done it.
The consequences hadn’t mattered. The fact that it charred his skin and cracked his nails and made his eyes ache and his fingers twitch didn’t matter. There was the whole world to save.
But the world’s saved, now. Knives is gone, and Vash’s hand, his one remaining hand, has something wrong with it.
It’s not rot, not a rash, not the unraveling decay that had taken Knives even before he’d decided to go gently — the bastard, the ass, he was the only one who could have explained anything.
It’s just. Wrong.
Fine lines run up from cracked, yellowing nails, most concentrated at his fingertips, numbing sensation and slowing his movements, spiderwebbing outwards across his hand and up his arm, to his elbow, concentrating again in a tight knot of pain there, centered in a shattered spot at the crook of his elbow, needle-scarred from bad IV placement — another Knives special, goddamn it — before continuing up to his shoulder, aching there too, but quieter.
They’re just cracks. Like in porcelain — like in the glaze on ceramics, not structurally unsound yet but a bad sign of what’s to come.
It’s hard to get a sense for how they feel, given he now has two hands that struggle to pick up fine sensations, but — they’re definitely cracks.
He’s crumbling. Falling apart.
And it’s hard to… care.
Even when he notices it crawling across his back, down his spine. Even when his fingernails chip off. Even when the exhaustion he’d felt immediately after it all ended returns with a violence, keeps him bedridden and lying low for days.
Knives had vanished. There wasn’t a body to bury. The kid had said he turned into a tree , but the cloak he’d been wearing was on the ground a few feet away, when Vash bolted up from the depth of sleep and staggered outside, just a moment too late. There was no wind that could have blown it out of the branches.
Maybe Vash will do the same. Just crumble to dust.
It should scare him. He should… cry, or something. Should start making visits, tying up loose ends, saying goodbye.
But there’s an appeal to it he can’t shake, just disappearing into myth. He’s sure Vash the Stampede won’t die with him, will linger on in imitators and old wives’ tales and pulpy news pieces. He’ll drift on the wind like the dust that remains of him.
He should tell the girls.
But Milly would cry, and Meryl would never leave well enough alone, would try to get him to fix it and he doesn’t—
He doesn’t want to fix it.
Luida might have ideas. Brad might be able to replace bits of him as they crumble.
The Federation’s scientists might have an answer, an easy cure, to poisoning himself with his own power, or whatever it is he’s done.
Or.
Or he could just…
Wolfwood had easy solutions too. He didn’t take any of them, before he went like a bat out of hell, like a moth to a lamp, to his death.
This would be much easier than Wolfwood’s slow, bloody, miserable, drug-overdose death. Vash could just sit down and wait.
Without thinking about it, just like he didn’t think about charging bullets with the energy of a small star with his bare hand, he starts walking toward December.
Somewhere on the way, he decides what he’s going to do when he gets there.
Maybe that’s what brings him to Marlon’s door — guilt, maybe. Closing the loop. It was those bullets that started this, something makes him sure of it. Or just exhaustion, seeking familiarity before…
“Sit down,” Marlon says, in a tone that brooks no argument, as soon as he lets Vash into his house, still exactly where it was before everything went to hell and back, somehow. “You’ve got that look on your face.”
Vash, regretting his pit stop already, sits. There’s a couch, but he picks the stiff wooden chair next to it. “What look?”
Marlon’s expression is steely with something like disdain. “The same look that man of yours had, when he asked me to fix up a motorcycle and load it with machine gun ammo for him, and he’d come by to pick it up.”
Anger and grief seize Vash simultaneously by the throat. “You—” he starts, struggling around the enormity of it like a mouthful of toffee. “ You— ”
“I didn’t know it was a suicide mission until afterwards,” Marlon says, all flat and dull. “But I know that look now. You had it too, when you showed up here afterwards for all those bullets. What are you doing now, huh?”
Vash pulls his glove off with his teeth and holds out his hand.
Marlon steps up close to him, crouches down, takes his hand in both of his. His hands are warm, calloused, careworn, like his father’s had been before him.
He squeezes tight.
The last time someone squeezed Vash’s hand was months ago. Meryl—
“Hey, shh, it’s okay,” Marlon says, letting go with one hand to lean towards the cluttered coffee table and snatch up what’s probably a mostly-clean rag. Vash has worse problems than whatever machine grease he might get on his face when he wipes his nose, presses the rag against his eyes to try to stifle the tears.
It would be so damn easy just to die.
“Fuck,” Vash spits out.
Marlon nods.
He waits for Vash to calm down.
“Now, here’s what you’re going to do,” Marlon says, when Vash is settled, getting to his feet and planting his hands on his hips. “You’re going to tell me who to call.”
Vash balks.
Marlon doesn’t. “Your girls, or your ship.”
“They’re not mine,” Vash warbles. “Wolfwood wasn’t either.”
Unconvinced, apparently, Marlon just sighs. “You’ve got an orbit, Vash. Pretending you don’t just gets you wandering yourself into the sun and bringing all your satellites down with you.”
Vash buries his face in the rag again.
“Not the girls,” he manages, finally. He can’t take that, not right now.
Marlon’s footsteps move away.
Vash stares at his hands. Tremoring. His prosthetic worn down and unmaintained, his skin cracked like old pottery.
“Fuck,” he repeats, quietly.
Not thinking isn’t going to get him any further. It usually doesn’t. He knew that. And yet—
“I’m in a bad way,” he says, still mostly to his hands, when Marlon gets back.
Apparently feeling merciful, Marlon doesn’t mock him for the obviousness of that. Instead, he goes over to the kitchen and puts on the kettle.
“Four days,” he says, when he returns with a mug in each hand. “For the ship to get here to pick you up. You’ve got that long to sort yourself out.”
Vash feels his wrung-out, suddenly-fearful heart make an effort to cry again. He swallows it, takes the proffered mug. “Can I stay here?”
Marlon ruffles his hair. “Yeah. You’d better. Don’t learn every lesson the hard way, okay?”
The tea is warm and soothing against his throat, sweet on his tongue, warm in his stomach. It warms his fingertips, cracked and numb as they are.
Easier, maybe. To crumble away.
But not better.
Maybe there’s no way of avoiding it anyway. Maybe it’s sooner rather than later regardless of what he does. Maybe he can’t solve himself like a puzzle box and live.
He has four days to get himself used to hoping that’s not true.