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Vash wasn’t a religious man, but he still sent up a small prayer of gratitude to the inventor of prosthetics. After some consideration, he sent one to Brad too, as he’d made the specific prosthetic attached to his shoulder. It was simply polite.
He knew he was on the edge of hysterical exhaustion when his brain suggested including Nai in this train of gratitude. You know, for freeing up the space for said prosthetic.
As if.
He wasn’t that far gone yet.
. . . give it an hour or two, maybe then.
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Unlike normal fleshy-blobby arms made of soft-tissue and tender muscles, prosthetics had the awesome advantage of not cramping up when forced to do the same darn repetitive motion for hours on end.
Like, for example, clanging a jagged metal pipe against a broken support beam at an increasingly painful angle in order to guide potential rescuers to dig in their direction.
God, let there be rescuers.
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Vash paused his clanktastic emergency signal and strained his ears.
Yes. There.
Far above, somewhere to their right. A soft murmur of shifting debris and shouted instructions.
Far, far above.
Inhaling sharply, Vash shifted the warm weight atop him. His flesh hand dug between blood-slick shoulder blades, fingertips throbbing with the fluttering pulse of enduring hope.
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“Soon,” he whispered against tangled black hair.
“Soon, soon, soon,” he repeated: a comfort, a lullaby, a prayer.
No response. Not that he expected any.
His prosthetic—so useful; thank God, thank Brad, thank fucking Nai—flexed around the broken pipe and anew, he sounded his guiding siren.
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When the Ark had collapsed under and around them, for a moment, just a fraction of it, Vash was content to let it be. As the floor fell away, he closed his eyes and let the floating inertia of freefall take hold of his body.
Then he heard it.
One would expect the voice of reason bringing clarity to one’s mind to be full of wisdom and authority. Sad to say, in this case, one would be sorely disappointed.
Vash’s life had rarely, if ever, run along expectations.
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It was no enlightening koan or faith stoking bible verse that snapped him out of encroaching numbness, but an indignant cry of “Seriously? After all the bullshit, this too??”
And Vash thought, you know what, he is right and should say it louder: it was ripe time someone else got the shit end of the bull too, it didn’t always have to be them.
His next immediate thought was, eyes snapping open with a panicked lurch, that if he was falling, then logic dictated that Wolfwood was too, and oh my god that idiot’s gonna splatter his brain on the landing.
He had not.
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But it had been close.
Way too close.
Pressing the line of his jaw against the still miraculously intact skull resting against his shoulder, Vash tried to recall their speedy tumble through the falling debris.
There were vines. And feathers. Not all of them his own.
Clutching his idiot close, screaming at him to hold on.
A thundering cascade of heavy machinery making fast friends with the sandy terrain.
The fading echo of sudden, unbearable silence.
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Breathing, arid and heavy. Dust scratching through throat, through lungs, metallic tang in the air.
Blink. Can’t see. Blink again.
Blind?
Dark.
Shift, move, take note. Pinned. Alive. Wet and warm.
Wet and warm?
Metallic tang in the air.
Don’t panic.
Pain? Yes. Had worse, manageable.
Broken? Yes, multiple fractures. Fixable.
Bleeding? No.
Metallic tang in the air.
Bleeding? Only scratches.
Wet and warm. Spreading.
Bleeding? Yes.
Yes, a lot.
Just not him.
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Once they got rescued, Vash would lie through his teeth and tell the girls that he’d reacted with cool composure to finding a jagged piece of debris sticking out from Wolfwood’s abdomen. There was no one to say otherwise; by the time the undertaker shook himself awake with a pained groan, Vash had mostly finished with his panicked weeping.
“Stop that,” Wolfwood had slurred. “Yer snot’s in my hair.”
Vash ignored his grousing. “Where do you keep your magic juice? I can’t find the ampules.”
He’d been blindly patting him down with trembling hands, cautious of accidentally aggravating the slowly seeping wound. At least the debris was plugging it up somewhat, Vash thought with forced cheer.
Wolfwood remained quiet.
“Hey. Hey, Wolfwood, don’t fall—”
“Hush, just thinking.” Another bout of silence. “I’m pretty sure I’m all out.”
“Oh.”
“Your brother is a damn freak with knives.”
“Well. He has millions of them.”
Wolfwood groped around for Vash’s shoulder to give it a reassuring squeeze. “Is fine. Even if I had some left… Already drank like two too many. Shouldn’t be chugging them.”
Vash swallowed. “What happens if you do?”
“Sever constipation,” Wolfwood said gravely.
“What?”
“Bloating like you’ve never seen before, Spikes. For weeks.”
Vash bumped his head against Wolfwood’s with a groan. “You are so full of shit.”
“Exactly!”
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They kept up a veneer of light, inane chatter while Vash blindly felt around their little corner of the crash site.
Little was an apt descriptor.
Claustrophobic even better.
Not that it mattered much. With their legs pinned and Wolfwood severely wounded, they wouldn’t be moving around even if they had the space to. At least suffocation wasn’t a concern: if he concentrated hard enough, Vash could feel a small current of air weakly breezing by his right hip.
Out of other tasks, he grabbed the broken piece of pipe he’d found wedged under his neck and embarked on his quest of luring down a rescue team.
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Wolfwood jolted awake at the unexpected racket, wincing as the movement pulled at his wound. “Wuzzat? Something coming?”
“Sorry, it’s only me. I’m trying to get the attention of anyone who might be digging through the remains.”
“What if it’s the wrong kind of people?”
Vash shrugged. “Still better than slowly dying of thirst in a hole. Also, Ship Three was on standby near the Ark. They should get to us before anyone else.”
“Mm, if you say so,” Wolfwood mumbled, mind already slipping back under the thick blanket of oblivion.
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Vash gently shook him. “Hey. You shouldn’t fall asleep.”
“Don’t think that’s up to me at this point,” Wolfwood sighed. His breath tickled the sensitive nerves on the side of Vash’s neck. “Doncha worry yer spikey head. Is just a nap, I ain’t dying yet. Have too much to do.”
“Like?”
“Make a man out of Livio.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Vash asked through a suppressed snort.
“Ugh, I mean make him a—a person,” Wolfwood grumbled. “He’s been with the Eye too long. He doesn’t know how to people anymore.”
Vash’s expression sobered. “He has been through an awful lot. I’m sure he will be happy to receive your guidance.”
“S’not worth much. Been hoping to rope the girls into teaching him.”
“Why not me?”
Wolfwood clicked his tongue. “Ya have no clue how to people either.”
“I very much do!” Vash cried in mock offense. “I’ll have you know, I excel at peopling!”
“Normal people?”
“Well,” Vash hedged, “you haven’t mentioned the normal part before.”
“My case: rested.”
“Besides, this is not how you use the verb peopling correctly. For future reference.”
Wolfwood, the petulant little bastard, angled his chin up to blow a slobbering raspberry right into Vash’s ear.
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“What else?” Vash asked, once he was done shrieking in disgust.
“Hopeland,” came the immediate response. “Some of the Eye bastards’re still out there. Need to make sure they ain’t starting shit with my kids.” A long sigh. “Need a new job too. Well paying. They’re so small, yet they eat so much.”
“I could help!”
Vash cringed at himself. His offer had left his mouth with an eagerness edging on desperation.
“Yea?”
“That is—if you are okay with me hanging around. After all this.”
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Vash’s grip faltered on the metal pipe in the ensuing silence. Fuck, he’d put his foot knee-deep in his mouth, hadn’t he? Now Wolfwood would definitely kick him to the curb once they were finished with saving the world and other associated bullshit.
He was so busy trying to spit into his own eyes in reproach, that he nearly missed Wolfwood’s quiet “That would be nice.”
Oh.
Oh!
“Yea,” Vash replied, totally suave and not sweating bullets at all.
Nailed it! Another flawless victory to Love and Peace!
“Not sure how you’ll help out though,” Wolfwood continued, unaware of the self-congratulatory rave party going on inside Vash’s head. “Not very employable, are ya?”
The party grinded to a premature halt. “I’m sure Meryl won’t mind teaching me some marketable skills alongside Livio.”
“Ha! Finally admitting you can’t people after all?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Vash grumbled, “Add making a man out of me to your agenda too.”
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“I can do that,” Wolfwood hummed in a tone that tended to herald trouble. “Now the question is: what kind of man do you want me to make you? A normal one?” He paused, hesitant. “Or perhaps… an honest one?”
Vash frowned into the darkness. “Are you calling me a liar? I know I sometimes bend the truth to—” he choked on his own tongue as his brain belatedly caught up with the implications of Wolfwood’s question. “Hrk-khh-honst?”
“Nice talk. I’m going back to sleep now,” Wolfwood abruptly declared.
“Wait, wait, you can’t just—”
“I’m losing consciousness as we speak,” Wolfwood droned, body going limp.
The motherfucker actually passed out, leaving Vash alone with his screeching thoughts.
Surely… Surely, Wolfwood hadn’t meant it that way?
If Vash’s feet weren’t pinned under what he estimated to be a ton of scrap metal, he would be giddily kicking them in the air.
The only way to find out for certain was to interrogate Wolfwood when he next woke up. By all means necessary. Including blackmail. Perhaps some light torture. As the saying goes, all is fair in love and peace. Love and war. Whatever. The latter wasn’t the relevant part anyway.
Until then, Vash tentatively restarted the victory rave in his head and threw in some jolly jugglers for good measure.
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That had been four hours ago.
His mindscape party had long petered out after the imaginary jugglers dropped their balls around the two-hour mark and began unionizing against him.
Now his only entertainment, if you could call it that, came from his traitorous hindbrain, which was trying to trick him into feeling cramps in his left arm, even though his prosthetic was still, invariably, incapable of producing such sensations. The human mind—or in his case, the independent plant mind—was truly an uncooperative basket of horseshit sometimes.
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The cacophony of their rescuers—Vash was pretty sure it was Ship Three, one couldn’t easily mistake Brad’s shouting for anyone else’s—had grown steadily closer to their position.
So slow though. So incredibly slow.
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It was a selfish impulse to bemoan their speed when they had no obligation to excavate him from this tomb of his own making. In all honesty he was grateful to them beyond human words.
It was just. . .
His rationality had taken a backseat to bone deep exhaustion. His manners lay knocked out in the trunk. Everything else was thrown out and left for roadkill.
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The temptation of oblivion was like a frosted donut.
With sprinkles on top.
Pink ones.
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The crew must have an approximate idea of their location by now.
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A small nap shouldn’t hurt their chances of survival.
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His arm was a perpetual motion machine at this point. It would continue its clanging even if he fell off the edge of awareness.
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He would—he would just…
…rest his eyes…
…for a moment.
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Vash lurched upright with a gasp. The pipe, abandoned, clattered to the ground.
“Wolfwood?”
No response, only the sound of his own harsh breaths filled the cramped cavern.
The hand pressed into Wolfwood’s back scrambled for purchase, digging into skin to feel out the comforting thrum of life below the surface.
His fingers must’ve gone numb.
Yeah.
“Hey, Wolfwood? It’s time to wake up. The rescue is nearly here.”
Vash took a fortifying breath. It shuddered wetly on the way out.
“Come, you don’t want to worry Milly, do you?”
It’s fine. It’s fine. It’sfineit’sfineit’sfineit’sfineit’sfine.
“Meryl will mock you till your eighties if she finds you drooling in your sleep.”
It wasn’t. It really wasn’t. It might never be fine again.
“Please. You have so much to do.”
It’s funny how the absence of sound can ring in your ears like a deafening call.
Vash wasn’t a religious man. He didn’t pray.
Time passed, seconds or years. Probably just hours.
The murmur from above got louder, the voices distinctive. They were calling for two people.
Slow, too slow. There was only one left.
Vash closed his eyes against the darkness. It made no difference.
The voices continued to call: desperate, familiar.
Damn. One couldn’t even be left well alone to rest in dubious peace on this hell-planet.
He swept a hand across the ground in search of his good old friend, the jagged metal pipe. His other arm he kept around the cooling shape of lost tomorrows.
There was much to do in the outside world, no time to laze about half-buried in a pit.
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An assassin to reintegrate into society.
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Finding a new job, something besides professional outlaw.
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Preferably lucrative; apparently orphans could eat their own weight just at breakfast alone.
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And then. . .
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There was no then.
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In this lifetime, Vash the Stampede was not meant to be an honest man.