Work Text:
They called him in to identify the body, which was really just too cruel. If Nicholas D. Wolfwood hadn’t known that his ties to Knives had been obscured so entirely that even the other Gung-Ho Guns didn’t know who he was, he would have thought it was some sort of attempted revenge brought by the others who had loved Vash, no matter how small, but as it was he could only think that it was some sort of attempt to give him closure, or maybe company policy: Nicholas had been Vash’s emergency contact for the better part of the past year, which had been nice when Vash was alive but was now like salt in the wound.
He arrived at the Bernardelli Insurance Company when it opened its doors, and was slightly relieved to see that neither Meryl nor Millie was there to greet him. He didn’t ask the employee's name—the man would be dead soon enough anyways, since Vash had really been the only person who stood even the slightest chance of stopping Knives’s plots—and, once they were in the elevator, lit a cigarette and tried and failed to feel something at the insurance worker’s disgusted face and concealed coughs. If Vash were here, he would have made Nicholas put it out, would have smiled at the insurance worker and charmed him into forgiveness—but Vash wasn’t, was he, because Nicholas had led him right to Knives, had stood downstairs with Elendira and smoked and listened to them fight, and then had taken his money and left. He genuinely hadn’t thought he’d ever hear or think about his former mark again, but—well, first he’d found himself thinking about Vash, at all hours and in all situations, and now the Bernardelli Insurance Company had called him in to identify his body.
And it wasn’t even fucking necessary, was the thing. Everybody knew Vash the Stampede, and if they didn’t know him personally they knew someone who did. Everyone loved him. Nicholas didn’t know why he was necessary, why he’d agreed to come here when he’d gotten the phone call—
Except he did know. He had come in part because he had hoped that he’d be able to say, No, of course that isn’t that spiky-headed idiot, you’ve got the wrong guy, and he had come in part because he thought he owed it to Vash, and he had come in part because there was a not insignificant part of him that went wherever he was called, because who knew if Knives was behind it, and if he was then the orphanage might suffer if Nicholas didn’t show up, and if he was Nicholas might get a chance to spring Vash free—except Vash was dead now, and he had been called to identify the body, and maybe this was why Nicholas had really come, and not because of anything to do with his former employer. He didn’t know. He didn’t want to think about it.
Nicholas extinguished his cigarette when he got to the entrance to the morgue and tossed it in the nearest garbage can, and then, stripped of any chances to linger in a place where Vash’s death wasn’t a complete certainty, stepped inside and followed the employee to where a body lay on a slab, covered in a white sheet.
Nicholas pulled the sheet back and touched the face underneath, as still and cold as a tree in winter. There was the yellow hair; there, the black undercut, slightly overgrown. Vash’s red coat was gone, exposing the place flesh met metal prosthesis, and Nicholas wondered briefly, desperately, why they’d kept that on when they’d taken everything else away from him. Vash didn’t even retain his gun.
Nicholas removed the sheet fully, let it drop to the floor, scanned the body that he had grown so familiar with over years of acquaintance. There, the old familiar scars; here, new ones, shiny and white and alien, and probably there because of Nicholas’s betrayal. He put his hand on Vash’s chest and felt for a heartbeat and found nothing but cold, waxy skin and a hard nipple and the same rough scars he’d always felt when he put his hand there in the past.
“Yeah,” Nicholas said, taking his hand away. “That’s him.”
He took the body with him when he left, wrapped again in the sheet to preserve its dignity and keep him from having to look at Vash’s dead face. He threw it in the sidecar of his new motorcycle—bought with blood money, thirty pieces of fucking silver, paid for by the end of Vash’s goddamn life, and yet he’d invested in the damn sidecar somehow still expecting that Vash would ride in it one day—and drove straight down the highway to Immaculate Conception, the church he’d started going to once he was out of Knives’s employ and the Eye of Micheal had been informed bloodily that if they fucked with him again in any way that affected people who were not Nicholas D. Wolfwood, they’d regret it even more than they regretted training up a soft failure like him—and Chapel never really shut up about how much he regretted training up a soft goddamn failure like Nicholas D. Wolfwood.
This time of day, nobody was at the church other than the youth group having a picnic outside, which had been dwindling before he arrived but now included a small gaggle of teenage girls who hadn’t quite gotten the message that Nicholas was gay yet, even though he’d brought Vash here alive, once, and made out with him in the sacristy. Nicholas liked kids, though, so he still greeted them all by name as he passed them by, carrying Vash’s corpse as he went, and entered the church. Obviously they couldn’t hold a funeral now—there were way too many people who needed invitations—but Nicholas was known and liked, here, and he could get a funeral for Vash for free, and maybe Vash would have preferred a secular funeral to a Catholic one (Vash had never really been one for organized religion, though he had said he loved how much Nicholas valued his faith) but, to hell with it, a secular funeral would cost more money that Nicholas didn’t really have, since he’d spent his thirty pieces of metaphorical silver like it had burnt a hole in his pocket, and anyway funerals were more for the living than the dead.
He got it set up nice and easy for three days later, and invited everyone he knew Vash knew and took an ad out in the paper. He bought a copy of the newspaper and cut out the ad and mailed it to Knives at three in the morning, wasted in the church office with only Vash’s corpse for company, and regretted it severely in the morning when stricken with the thought that Knives might actually show up. Then the hotels in town started filling up, and Nicholas comforted himself with the fact that so many people had known Vash, so many people had loved him, that Knives might just literally not be able to fit inside the church for the funeral.
…Unless he sicced Legato on the attendees, in which case a lot more people would be able to fit into the church, and also Vash’s funeral would have a death count. That would be a real shitty way to celebrate his life.
He should not have sent the newspaper ad.
He should not have made a lot of the choices that he had, but he’d made them anyway.
Knives was going to kill everybody sooner or later, so what did it matter?
Vash was already dead, so what did it matter?
As long as nobody at the orphanage was hurt, it didn’t. They were the only ones Nicholas could protect, so they were the only ones he should care about. It didn’t matter that Vash was dead. It didn’t matter that nobody could or would stop Knives. Nothing mattered anymore. Nothing at all.