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“Sorry!” Vash quickly apologizes to the person he just knocked shoulders with as he rushes down the street. They yell something at him, but Vash doesn’t have time to dwell on it. He’s late.
The long, red duster sweeps across the concrete sidewalks of December as Vash picks up the pace. A large digital clock glows with the current time atop a building that looms taller than Vash ever thought the skies of Gunsmoke would ever see. He has about five minutes to make it the last few blocks to the library before he ruins his impeccable record of being the most punctual volunteer.
December Public Library sits at the city's center as a beacon of resources and knowledge. Vash explored every nook and cranny of the building once it opened and across the decades as it received expansions and new subject-area wings. But there’s one part of the library he’s always been more partial to than any other.
Vash takes the front steps into the library two-by-two and shoves himself through the revolving doors. Thanks to more Sundays than he can count spent on this specific route, his body autopilots through the first floor, past the circulation desk, and through the colorful archway decorated with twining flowers and leaves cradling open books.
“I nearly thought you’d be late!” the head of the children’s library department stands by the reference desk with a hand on her hip and a wicked smirk on her lips.
“I would never,” Vash gasps, and then he places a solemn hand on his chest. “It’s of utmost importance to me to not disappoint the kids and honor my duty to them.”
“Of course,” she laughs. “They’d never get mad at you; they love you. Plus, they’re waiting for you. I hear that one of the little ones found a book for you to read today.”
Vash gives her a playful salute as he slinks away to the extensive reading area that turns into Sunday Storytime. The carpet here is a bright and lush green that resembles grass, and it’s interspersed with spots of color as the flowers dotting the landscape. A single chair sits at the front of the space made from gnarled wood as though the piece of furniture has its own story to tell. As soon as Vash’s heavy boots thud against the floor, a chorus of young voices calls out for him.
“Mr. Vash!”
“Vash is here!”
Around 30 children regularly turn up for Sunday Storytime at the library, whether at their own request or their parents trying to find something for them to do away from the house for a few hours. Somedays, there are more kids, and somedays, there are fewer, but no matter how many are present, Vash settles himself down onto the reading chair in front of the smattering of young faces staring at him from where they sit cross-legged on the floor. At some point, he became the kids’ favorite volunteer on Storytime Sunday, which his young fans say is because he does all the voices “really good.” The librarians claim it’s because he has a way with kids, listening to all their tales in turn and nodding thoughtfully at even their smallest strifes of lost pencils and scraped knees.
“Hello, everyone!” Vash greets them cheerily. “You better have all been very nice to your parents this last week.”
The kids yell back their various responses, creating a cacophony that would be frowned upon in any other part of the library, but here, it’s welcomed.
“Good, good,” Vash nods. “Did you all pick what you want me to read today?”
“I did!” A hand shoots up from the front row. “I found this book. One of the characters looks like you.”
“Oh?” Vash lifts an eyebrow. “What is it?”
The young boy pushes up from the floor and hobbles over with a large picture book in his hands. Vash takes it from him and barely manages to suppress a gasp.
“See,” the boy says and points at the cover. “It looks like you with your spikey hair and long jacket. But your hair is too dark.”
Unconsciously, Vash lifts his prosthetic hand to comb through dark locks that haven’t shimmered blonde in the suns’ of Gunsmoke for millennia. “So he does,” Vash whispers, eyes still glued to the cover: Les Enfants . He doesn’t even know the last time he saw the book. He lowers his hand to touch the cover where a younger version of him sits on the sidecar of a wretched motorcycle, and then he forces himself to look at the drawing of his companion.
He doesn’t try to think about Wolfwood often because sometimes, no matter how long, some memories still gnaw and eat away at his heart. It’s unfortunate, then, that Nicholas D. Wolfwood managed to write his name into Vash’s ribs that protect that specific organ. He doesn’t go a day without thinking about the priest, especially since he settled down in December. The stylized versions of himself and Wolfwood in the illustration add a layer of uncanny impersonality to the drawings, but they still leave him shaken.
“Are you okay, Mr. Vash?” the little boy who brought the book asks.
“What?” Vash asks, ripping his eyes away from the book and smiling at the boy instead.
“You’re crying,” the boy says, and as a child tends to do, he doesn’t hold back his following action of reaching out and wiping away the single tear trailing down Vash’s cheek. He hadn’t even noticed it.
“Oh,” Vash’s eyes widen. “I think there was something in my eye.”
“You looked sad,” the boy says, “but you were smiling.”
Smile, spikey.
“I’m okay,” Vash assures. "Why don’t you settle back down, and I’ll start reading.”
Vash racks his brain for the last time he held a copy of this book or even saw one. So much of the planet’s history became wrapped up in myth versus truth debates that talk of plants and someone called “Vash the Stampede” transformed into fiction. Wistful sighs would accompany statements of how fantastic it would have been if the planet was founded by survivors of a fallen spaceship and were saved by an ethereal creature who walked among them as a human man. What did anyone today know of Nicholas D. Wolfwood, Millions Knives, Meryl Stryfe, and Milly Thompson? At least the girls’ names are remembered for their contributions to journalism and broadcasting these days, with the November University School of Journalism renaming itself after the two of them.
It’s not lost on Vash, whether he tries to forget it or not, that where December Public Library stands today, there once was an orphanage named Hopeland where his best friend lay to rest.
Cracking open the book, an audible creak sounds as though no one has bothered to visit this story in years and years. Vash wonders why it even received a modern reprint unless it’s from some independent publishing company partial to reviving long-forgotten stories.
“Okay, today we’re going to be reading Les Enfants . Let’s begin,” Vash smiles at the kids while trying to keep his voice in check. “Long ago, people lived simple lives…” The story starts as any good fairytale does, with the people of the planet pulling themselves up by the bootstraps to survive. “Then everything changed. It all started with Lost July, but truly changed with Fifth Moon.”
No one believes that July truly existed these days, scraping aside its history as though one of Vash’s biggest sins can be forgiven through a collective lack of belief. The hole in the moon proves challenging to explain, with the history book rewriting it as an accident when the Earth contingent attempted to establish a worldwide satellite system on Gunsmoke. Either way, no one learns in the classroom that Vash the Stampede caused both.
“In the midst of the chaos, two men began a long journey,” Vash continues. “Vash the Stampede, known as the Humanoid Typhoon, and,” Vash pauses and takes a deep breath. He only ever says the following name as a prayer on lonely nights, which tend to number more than Vash would like to admit. “Nicholas D. Wolfwood.”
“You even have the same name as him!” One of the kids cries out. “Is your last name Stampede?”
Vash grins. “Saverem.” At least according to all the paperwork he meticulously recreates for himself every few decades while sneaking into government databases to erase his last iteration.
“Did your parents like this book a lot?” Another child asks. “Maybe they named you after it!” The kids all chime together in agreement that this simply must be the reason that Vash has the same name as the hero of this book.
“Maybe they were!” Vash replies gently. “I’m sure he’s super cool, just like me.”
The kids all giggle at that. “You’re so silly, Mr. Vash!”
Vash keeps reading. “They set out to find Vash’s brother, Millions Knives.” A pause again. The scent of an apple orchard materializes around Vash, along with the pang of lost times of innocence. He tries to keep reading, but the rest of the sentence doesn’t seem too kid-friendly. “Who was plotting against all of humankind,” Vash rushes to change the words as he flips the page, hoping no one noticed.
“Millions Knives?” A child seated near the back pipes up. “Did he have a million knives?”
Vash laughs softly. “Maybe we’ll find out.” He thinks about hours spent lying in the grassy environment on the Project SEEDS ship, not of jagged weapons dripping with blood.
He manages to read a few more sentences before another heavy stone gets placed upon his chest. “One day Wolfwood said to Vash: the day will come when you’ll have to choose. You can’t keep pushing your luck, one day it won’t work no more.” Vash laughs to himself. It’s not precisely what Wolfwood said, but it's close enough. If Vash were to close his eyes, he could almost hear that rough, gravely voice complaining again. He runs a finger over the drawing of Wolfwood with his arm around Vash’s neck and turns the page before he loses the conviction to keep going.
The following pages recreate Knives’s harsh words about humanity, making Vash wince as he attempts to lessen their blow, but in the end, Vash realizes he can’t. After he recites the cold, impartial words of his brother’s command for Legato to see Vash’s suffering, he glances around the room. The children continue to sit enraptured by the story, and it seems even the adults—parents and librarians alike—appear pulled into what they all believe to be a fantasy of the past.
“Meryl was kidnapped. To save her, Wolfwood fought Midvalley, and Vash fought Gauntlet,” Vash reads. He remembers how panic crept up his throat when he realized that the Gung-Ho Guns took Knives’s words to heart and weaponized Vash’s care for humans and his bond with Meryl. Vash wants to believe that at that moment, long ago, he knew that with Wolfwood, he would successfully rescue her, but there was always nagging in the back of his head, a small, terrible thing that would attempt to lure Vash down an unlit path to the abyss of sorrow.
“It was then…” Vash takes a deep breath, “something unusual happened to Vash.”
Phantom prickling spreads down Vash’s spine. From the depth, Vash’s body still conjures up the sensation of wings breaking through his skin and sprouting bright and broad—wings that shrouded Wolfwood and wanted to protect all of humanity. Looking out at the children seated in front of him, Vash supposed he did accomplish that much, at least.
“Was Vash an angel?” a child asks.
“Hey, angel,” Wolfwood used to say.
“Not really, no,” Vash shakes his head. “What do you think an angel is?”
The kid scrunches up his nose in thought. “A messenger of god,” he recited perfectly, no doubt learned in a church’s Sunday School with religion now resembling what it had been on Earth and not what the Eye of Michael had been preaching.
“Well,” Vash says, “see what you think by the end of the story.” Vash knows how this story ends, and he doesn’t think it bodes well for his divinity.
Vash presses on. “He learned the truth of who he and his brother truly were, what they had done, and what he had to do.” Turning the page, Vash inhales sharply at the illustration of a woman with long, black hair. Rem. A familiar ache that he’s lived with for longer than anything else in his life settles into his heart, pulsing dully as his eyes struggle to move on from this caricature of the woman who taught Vash to love and cherish those around him. Her name sits clumsily on his tongue when Vash reads it, as though his conscience wants to reject the memory, no longer feeling as though he deserves it.
“One day, they both learned that they were born from a plant,” Vash reads the next part, and a few kids laugh gently.
“That’s so silly!” one of them cries. “How can a person be born from a plant?”
The answer spills out of Vash before he processes the words. “A miracle.”
And a curse, but Vash doesn’t say that part out loud. Either way, the children nod and settle down for Vash to continue on. As he recites the words about Knives’s decision to rid the planet of humans and the long slumber he undertook to prepare for The Ark, Vash’s blood goes cold even as his heart seems to beat an ile a minute. He knows what comes next.
Reading Livio’s name causes memories of laughing children and hot workdays out in the sun to drift back into Vash’s thoughts. They warm him like an afternoon break for iced tea made by Miss Melanie. Vash can almost hear the way she used to scold Livio when he would try and swipe a second glass after quickly gulping down his first. Vash thinks that Livio would also like that the grounds of Hopeland still host laughing children.
Another page gets flipped, and Vash meets an illustration of himself and Wolfwood standing back-to-back. They really did fight well together. Having Wolfwood at his side in a gunfight made Vash feel safe in a way he didn’t know was possible. Skills learned as a trained assassin transformed into an easy spin of Punisher to protect those who could not defend themselves. Wolfwood claimed he was a terrible priest, but he spread a different kind of gospel with Punisher—Vash’s.
Vash knows what comes next in this story, and he doesn’t need to read it to know. Every moment of the following pages remains etched into a far recess of his brain that he avoids revisiting at all costs. Sleep usually leads him down the path to those particular memories, playing them back to his helpless sleeping form as he screams and screams for God not to allow this to happen yet again. As he reads about Livio and Chapel, Vash drifts away. These are just words on a page to him now, and he steels himself for the following page.
Taking the thin piece of paper between his fingers, Vash sighs and lets the paper whisper to him as it turns. One black-and-white page reveals another, and there they are.
“It was the fate of those who carried the cross,” Vash reads. But what about those who get left behind, he thinks to himself. “Then they sat and talked.”
Sand whips around Vash, and he’s transported back to a time of myth and legend when he was a famous outlaw and Wolfwood was a hired assassin. During this time, the two of them argued and prodded at each other like they couldn’t stand being in the same room when, in reality, Vash found a camaraderie with someone in a meaningful way that he never expected.
“Smile, needle-noggin…” The words sound so wrong in Vash’s voice. Everything is wrong. “It suits you when you do. It was harsh of me to say all your smiles were empty.” Vash never even had the opportunity to tell Wolfwood that he didn’t mind it, that it had been refreshing to have someone simply understand him.
“Wolfwood…don’t say stupid things.” It’s not quite what he said, but it doesn’t help lessen the blow. “And then…”
Vash presses his hand against the illustration of him and Wolfwood on the couch. The liquor bottle lies forgotten on the ground as Vash stares into the distance. Wolfwood’s hand has fallen to his side, fingers just barely grazing the sand. The page swims in front of his eyes, sliding in and out of focus as a haze clouds his vision.
“Mr. Vash,” a small voice addresses him, and there’s a tug at his sleeve. A few of the children have risen and come to his side, patting him on the arm and head. “It’s okay.”
“Oh,” Vash startles, but the children don’t move away. More tears slip down his face, dipping over his chin and down his neck until they disappear under the dark collar of his shirt. “I’m sorry.”
“Vash.” Someone else says his name, and Vash turns his head to meet the devastatingly sympathetic face of a librarian. “Is everything okay?”
Vash swallows to find his voice and nods. “I think I might just be a little under the weather!” He tries to laugh, but there’s something a little wet about it, a little thick as his voice gets weighed down with the burden of a past never meant to be remembered like this. “Maybe I’ll call it here.” The book snaps closed in his hands, and he thrusts it into the hands of the librarian instead.
“It’s okay to cry.” Vash wants to turn to the child who just reassured him, but he’s confident that if he opens his mouth now, the only thing he’ll be able to form is a terrible sob. Instead, he gives a little wave and tight-lipped smile as he slips away from the Children’s Section of December Public Library and back into the city streets.
December’s heart beats steadily around him. Sometimes, Vash thinks he’s crossed the planet more times than there are stars in the sky, but he always ends up back here. In his travels, he’s met all sorts of people. Vash has even managed to cross paths with some journalists and priests again. People get drawn into the Humanoid Typhoon, not knowing anything about him, and he lets them, he really does. Making acquaintances is easy, but friends often prove to be a struggle to maintain when he’s wishy-washy about presenting any information about himself or his past, but there have been some. Vash has managed to let other people in like he did all those years ago when the hole in the Fifth Moon was still fresh.
But those three will always be different. Something about Meryl, Milly, and Wolfwood will always stay with him as though they’re written into his very skin; lived experience actually made flesh. When he’s lucky, his brain will allow him to see them again in his dreams as they sit and argue at a saloon or get sidetracked by a small town’s local attractions.
Reaching into the deep inside pocket of his jacket, Vash’s fingers meet frail paper. He’s dedicated more time than he can admit to conserving this single item. It’s not often that he pulls it out. Unfolding it, Vash’s breath hitches as he sees four smiling faces staring back at him. He doesn't even remember where they were when they took this picture, but all that matters to Vash is that it’s Meryl, Milly, Wolfwood, and him together.
Some days are more difficult than others, and their names might mean nothing to the people of Gunsmoke in this era, but, for Vash, the fact they all lived at one point and he knew them is reason enough to trek on and make sure someone remembers.