Chapter Text
The next few days passed in a molasses-slow fog of lab techs and nurses, pain and pain meds, groggy discomfort and an increasing desperation to be allowed to bathe. When he was awake, Nick was never as out of it as he had been upon first waking up post-surgery – but when the pain came rolling in, it was no joke, and he looked forward to the sweet release of hydromorphone whenever it flooded down his IV.
He understood why they weaned his doses down pretty quickly, but still. As the reality fully grew on him that he had been shot in the fucking chest, he did not look forward to being discharged and having to go home and just... live with the fact that he had been shot. Point blank. Terrifyingly close to his heart.
Vash was always there, sleeping uncomfortably in the fold-out recliner in the corner or puttering around the room, taking care of small tasks and listening attentively whenever a doctor put in an appearance. But there were other visitors, too. Kaite appeared the first second he was allowed in the room and yelled at everyone, although it was obvious he had spent a lot of time recently crying. Brad and Jessica stopped by, absolutely stunned by the entire event, and Jessica would not stop hugging Nick and Vash in turns until Brad had to physically hold her back. He told Nick not to worry about the funeral home – they'd gotten some extra hands in, and Father Hill from All Saints had stepped in to handle the family consultations. Bill Conrad had even called, expressed his shock and sympathy, and said Nick could have all the paid time off he could possibly need.
Livio arrived on the afternoon of the second day, bullied Vash out of the room to go get some real food and a shower, and sat down in the chair next to Nick's bed. Across the room, Knives was still sleeping. He'd started waking up a little bit here and there, but he always slid back into a nap within an hour.
Livio stared at Nick, looking tired and unamused.
Finally, Nick demanded, “What?”
Livio just shook his head. “You're alive,” he said.
Nick started to cross his arms, remembered that he absolutely could not do that because ow, and ended up just balling his hands into fists in his lap. “No regrets,” he told Livio. “If it hadn't been me, it would've been Vash. With better aim.”
“Yeah, I know.” Livio leaned back in the chair and rubbed his face. “I'm not mad at you, exactly. I mean, I am. But also I can't be.” He sighed heavily. “Just... wishing it could've been me, maybe. I know how to get shot, done it before. Wish I could be... being shot, for you, now.”
Nick let out a long breath and unclenched his fists. “Yeah, I'd trade,” he said. “Can't say I'm loving the experience.”
Livio snorted a humorless laugh. “If you ever need to talk,” he said, after a while. “If you, like. Have nightmares. I mean, you're going to have nightmares. The first time you hear a sudden, loud noise, let me tell you...”
“Hey,” Nick said gently. “I'm familiar with PTSD. Already had a taste or two in my time.”
“Oh. Right.”
“But thanks,” Nick said. “And I will. Talk to you, I mean. As the resident expert in getting shot.”
Livio shrugged one shoulder. “Or Hop, even,” he said. “Hop's in a support group for vets and he's like, certified and everything. Probably better at talking than me.”
“Hey,” Nick said. “Kiddo. I lived, I'm fine. I can see you digging yourself a hole, so stop it.”
Livio huffed, shifted in his seat and gave Nick a sardonic smile.
Nick told him, “I promise that if I ever get killed, I will haunt you so specifically that you'll wish you could get rid of me.”
Finally, Livio snorted a laugh. “Okay, okay,” he said. He looked across the room, changed the topic. “How's sleeping beauty doing?”
Nick filled him in as best he could with thirdhand information from the doctors, via Vash. Apparently sometime in the day between confronting Legato alone and when Vash and Nick had found them, Legato had managed to fully sedate Knives and put an IV catheter in his arm. That way Legato could push frequent microdoses of his special blend of crazy. Mostly ketamine, with a dash of chloral hydrate and a soupçon of LSD. Pharmacology major, Nick had finally remembered.
The 'clarity' Legato had so valued would have been like an out-of-body experience, fully dissociating Knives from his own sense of self or emotions, any feelings of human discomfort. Knives probably spent the day feeling godlike, it was true. But also extremely suggestible, slow, and unable to get his own body to obey his mind. Follow that up with a sharp rap of concrete-floor-on-skull, and it would be a miracle if he even remembered any of the last week.
By the time Vash came back to take over from Livio, Knives had woken up a little and managed to ask for water. He was none too thrilled to be given the water by Livio, which was fair – Nick wasn't sure they'd ever exchanged two words before now. And two words was about as much as Knives could manage at the moment. He seemed to have a hard time holding a thought for long enough to get it out, and his speech was a little garbled. Aphasia could linger after a neurological event, according to the doctors.
Livio gave Nick a fist bump on his way out to save him the pain of being hugged. Sitting up and talking for a while had left Nick exhausted, and for the first time, he was on the verge of slipping off to a sleep that wasn't dictated by opiates.
Over at the other bed, the twins were talking quietly. Nick caught the thread as Vash was asking, “- year it is?”
Knives said, “Don' parrot... par. Parrot me. Fuck.”
Vash gave a small laugh and said, “Sorry, not trying to patronize you. But they did say to keep checking with you about memory. What did you have for breakfast a few hours ago?”
“Soup,” Knives said, petulantly. “Tasted like pennies.”
“Okay, good.” Vash paused for a long moment, then asked, “Do you... is anything coming back? About, you know?”
Knives was quiet for even longer. Vash started to say something else, but before he could get a syllable out, Knives interrupted him. “Isn't... all clear. But. I ruhhm. Rumorber. Uh. I know. That he shot you. Can see it.” Knives tapped his temple. “So. A little.”
“Okay,” Vash said quietly. “But he didn't shoot me.”
Knives shook his head. “Not – I know that. I meant -”
“Almost shot, right? Aimed at me.”
Knives nodded, and winced.
“Yeah, stop scrambling your head any more,” Vash said, putting more cheer into his tone. “You're good to be discharged tomorrow, they said. System all clean already, they're just gonna watch that egg on your head a little longer to see if it hatches.”
Knives reached out and slapped Vash's shoulder, having seemingly forgotten that Nick was there to witness him being childish. Vash laughed and leaned over to give Knives a quick hug, which left Knives looking harassed and affronted.
“Where's my radio?” Knives asked.
Vash squinted at him. Knives huffed with frustration and mimicked texting on an invisible phone. Vash tried to repress a smile and reached over to the bedside table, where multiple phones were all plugged in to charge. He found the right one and handed it over. “Cops released it from evidence last night,” he said, smile fading. “It was in Legato's pocket.”
Knives took it, holding tight. It took him a couple of tries to get his password in. He stared at the screen and said, “She's called a lot.”
“Call her back,” Vash told him.
“I don't want to talk to her like this.”
Vash reached over and ruffled the top of his hair, above the bandage. “I talked to her yesterday, she knows what's up. And she's coming back to town the day after tomorrow. It was the soonest she could get a flight.”
Knives looked up sharply at Vash, alarmed. “Day affect tomor – affect – afffect damn it -”
Vash patted his arm. “Just try texting,” he said.
He got up and left Knives to sweat over texting Elendira, and came over to Nick's bed again, sitting on the edge of the mattress and reaching up to brush hair off Nick's forehead.
Sleepily, Nick asked, “When'm I gettin' outta here, doc?”
“Not tomorrow,” Vash said firmly.
Nick grumbled, “Thought it wasn't too bad.”
“'Not too bad' for getting shot in the chest is still pretty damn bad,” Vash told him.
“But they gotta let me go sometime.”
Vash sighed. “Yeah, I don't know. Two, three more days, maybe?”
Nick hummed. He was already drifting off.
Vash brushed fingers through his hair again and quietly said, “I don't like the idea of you going home alone.”
“Hmm,” was all Nick could manage.
“I know how to recover from a hospital stay. I know wound care.” Vash sighed again. “I just don't know how to take care of both you.”
Groggily, Nick said, “Don't. Not your job.”
“Of course caring about you isn't my job,” Vash said. “No one could pay me enough to put up with your shit. That kind of thing can only be volunteer work.”
Nick grinned and closed his eyes. “Love you,” he mumbled.
He'd almost slipped off to sleep when he heard Vash return a quiet, “Love you, too.”
-
By his fourth day in the hospital, Nick was ready to mutiny. He could move without much difficulty, he hadn't had decent coffee or a fucking cigarette in almost a week, and he wanted to crawl out of his own skin because no one would let him shower. Scrub down with a damp hand towel, yes, but not shower. It was different.
On day five the doctors finally cut him loose. After an hour-long lecture on wound dressings that felt like being back in a mortuary science class, an orderly hustled him into a wheelchair and took him down all the elevators and long hallways to the front door. Much as Nick wanted to complain that he wasn't an invalid, he actually didn't mind being saved the walk. He'd tried pacing around his room and already found out that he lost his breath alarmingly fast.
Angelina was back at his apartment; Livio had gone and gotten her for him. Nick needed to figure out somewhere to store her, though, because no way in hell was he going to be driving a motorcycle until his chest didn't feel like it was about to burst like an overripe melon from the lightest jostling.
Vash was otherwise occupied with closing down the garden center when Nick got discharged. He'd offered to come to the hospital to drive Nick home, but Nick didn't want the first time he witnessed Vash's reportedly atrocious driving skills to be when Nick already felt like he was on the verge of having a heart attack. So Brad ended up being Nick's chauffeur back to his apartment.
“How're you feeling?” Brad asked, casting him a worried look as he gingerly lowered himself into the passenger seat.
“Oh,” Nick groaned, “like I got hit by a house. No big.”
“You sure you're supposed to leave the hospital? I feel like I should talk to your doctor -”
“Get me out of here,” Nick all but growled, “or I'll put sappy love poems in Jessica's desk and sign them from you for a month.”
“Damn, fine,” said Brad, going pink at the ears.
Back in his apartment for the first time in... what, almost two weeks? Nick took stock of the place and heaved a sigh, kicking an abandoned sock across the floor. Brad had left him a big container of homemade soup, so he shuffled into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and winced. It could have been worse, he supposed. At least the only things to go off were dairy; he didn't have any rotting fruit or veg. That meant it was a good thing he was terrible at buying fresh produce, right? Right.
He tackled throwing a bunch of stuff in the kitchen trash, cinching the bag, and pulling it out of the can – but he couldn't then also make it out the door, down the stairs, and heave the bag over into the dumpster. He didn't think raising his arms like that would be physically possible for a while. So he just sighed, put a new bag in the can, and retreated to the bathroom.
He'd managed to get hold of a couple of skin-adhesive waterproof bandage covers at the hospital pharmacy. It took some struggling to get one on, because the placement of his wound was awkward, but at long, long last he finally got into a hot shower. He just stood there, basking in it, for who knew how long. No shower had ever felt so good in his life. Not even a hot shower after a day outside in the depths of December's slushiest winter could compare to scalding away stale panic sweat and the stink of fear.
Later, scrubbed clean and warmed through, Nick laid in his bed all bundled up in blankets and listened to the quiet. The apartment was so silent, the sound of his own thumping heart made him uneasy.
He felt as raw as a fresh wound. Something about being home, being back in the real world, brought the insanity of the last week into sharper focus. He found himself struggling to get his mind off of the feeling of gripping so tightly to a thin wrist that he could feel bones grinding against each other. Or the image of Vash abruptly dropping, even though Nick knew, now, that it had been a deliberate dive, not a fall. Or the sound of a melodious, beguiling voice telling him to make impossible choices with no good outcomes. Himself or Vash, Livio or Melanie, kill or die -
He startled awake, choked on a yell and bit his tongue. He'd drifted into a doze, memory shifting seamlessly into dreams. Jerking awake had wrenched something in his side.
He laid there throbbing with pain and feeling sorry for himself for a few minutes, until he miserably dragged himself out of bed to go get some of his prescription painkillers and heat up a bowl of soup.
On the sofa, bowl in one hand, he finally thought to check his phone. Vash had texted him about half an hour ago.
did you get home ok?
how are you feeling
do you need space?
sorry
Nick put the soup on the coffee table, suddenly too sick to stomach it. He didn't bother to text, just called.
Vash sounded hesitant when he answered. “Hi?”
“I fell asleep,” Nick said. “I was asleep, I didn't see the questions.”
“Oh.” Vash let out a breath that sounded relieved. “Sorry, I, uh. Was just feeling like I've been too clingy or something.”
“Can you come over?” Nick asked plaintively.
“Yeah,” Vash said immediately. “Give me just a – I'll be right there, hang on.”
No more than twenty minutes later, there was a knock at the door. Nick yanked it open and fell into Vash as much as Vash crashed into him. Somehow Vash got the door closed and locked, but all Nick could do was keep his face in Vash's neck and struggle to breathe.
Crying hurt. Even through the meds he'd taken, each sharp, hiccuped breath sent deep throbs of pain through his whole right side. He let Vash lead him back to the couch and help him sit, but he refused to let go. Vash's prosthetic hand was cupped over the back of his head, his real arm wrapped tight over Nick's shoulders.
“Come on,” Vash murmured into his hair. “You're okay, it's okay. I should've come with you from the hospital -”
Nick held onto a handful of the back of Vash's coat with a death grip and croaked out, “No, not you, don't apologize. I don't – I'm fine, I'm really fine -”
“You're not fine,” Vash told him. “Don't say that. Don't be like me.”
Nick held on harder and let the emotional train wreck inside of him keep happening. There was no point trying to stop it all, the whole belated pileup of panic and terror and rage. The flood swept through him like a river full of razor-sharp debris after the breaking of a dam.
Finally, he got his breathing under control. He felt dizzy, sick, lethargic. He said, “I don't need space. Opposite of space.”
“Yeah,” Vash said. “I let anxiety get the better of me, I'm -”
“Stop being sorry,” Nick begged. “Just be here.”
Vash fell silent. He lowered his face to press it against Nick's neck. They sat like that for a long time, just breathing each other in.
At length, Vash raised his head and sniffed. He let go of Nick's back so he could wipe his sleeve under his nose. “Not going anywhere,” he said, a little hoarse. He glanced around. “Is that soup? Have you not eaten anything?”
Over the next hour, normalcy reasserted itself. Nick's mind slowed from its panicked racing, and after Vash reheated the soup again, Nick found that he was starving. After he inhaled some food, his headache and dizziness nearly vanished. He went back for a second bowl.
“How'd you get here?” Nick asked between bites.
Vash laughed. “Knives drove me. And I didn't ask him to, okay, I just said I was taking the car and he jumped in front of me like he was trying to take a bullet.”
Laughing hurt his ribs, but it was also such a relief to be able to treat the last week with some levity. “I need to see these legendary driving skills someday, Spikey.”
Vash scoffed, but he was smiling. “I was getting pretty bored and lonely at home anyway. You know Knives is literally playing chess with Elendira over the phone? All evening, out of the blue, he just blurts out something like 'bishop to E5' and I remember there's a whole-ass other person on speaker phone who can hear everything I say.”
“Yeah? What kind of incriminating stuff have you said?”
“Uh.” Vash paused to think. “That I think Jurassic Park III is actually pretty good?”
Laughing really hurt, but Nick didn't want to stop.
-
Six months ago, Nick would have been chomping at the bit to get back to work. Being trapped at home, forced into post-surgery bed rest, left alone with no structure to his days and only his thoughts for company, would have left him an utter wreck. He'd have been dragging his half-healed ass back into the office before Christmas.
But it wasn't six months ago, and he wasn't alone anymore. When Nick tentatively asked for three weeks' leave, Bill Conrad only asked if he was sure that was enough. Vash essentially moved into Nick's apartment, and the place had never seen so much visitor traffic. Meryl and Milly brought food like they thought they were feeding a family of ten, not a pair of grown men perfectly capable of cooking for themselves. Brad was constantly asking if Nick needed anything. Livio would come over on his days off and gleefully overstay his welcome by hours, sitting between Nick and Vash on the couch while they watched movies and then being a little shit about it when he left (“got him nice and antsy for you, bro, get in there”) which was both endearing and infuriating.
Shock of shocks, even Knives came in one afternoon. He was stiff and awkward, terrible at small talk, but sometimes Nick got a glimpse of the passionate eloquence that was buried under there – if he got started on philosophy, or if Vash prompted him to talk about his gene experiments. He talked like he was lecturing a class, but he had a nice voice and a fluid manner that made listening to him pleasant, even when Nick didn't understand half of what he was saying. Nick could understand how he'd once leveraged a dangerous amount of influence over a group of susceptible people.
When Vash excused himself to the bathroom, Knives cleared his throat, glanced at the hallway where Vash had disappeared, and told Nick, “Thank you.”
Nick raised an eyebrow. “You're welcome.”
Knives cast him a rankled glare, but it felt like it was just a habit now. Nick felt pretty comfortable in his grasp of who Knives was, what made him tick. If he needed to be outwardly prickly in order to protect the fragility at his core, then Nick didn't have to take it personally. Knives said, “I'm serious. You saved his life. You didn't have to do any of what you did.”
Nick shook his head. “Yeah, I kinda did. You know I did.” He glanced at the hall door, too. “He matters too much.”
Knives was quiet for a second. “You matter, too. So. Accept my gratitude. Please.”
That was... downright gushy, for Knives. Nick found himself touched. “Okay,” he said. “Thanks. And you make three, you know.”
“Pardon?”
“You. You matter.”
Knives didn't say anything.
Nick brought his voice down low and said, “You want to feel like you deserve having him for a brother? First step is accepting that he loves you. Which means that you are worth being loved, whether you think you are or not.”
Knives gave him a long, neutral look.
Nick shrugged one shoulder. “If you trust his judgment on anything, then you have to trust his judgment on you. His life is better with you in it. You don't get to argue about that, it's just a fact. So, deal with it.”
Knives' expression cracked the smallest amount: Nick caught fleeting regret, disbelief, fear, maybe even longing. For just a moment, Knives looked very young. His gaze fell to the floor.
Nick added, “Oh, and concede that he gets to be the Luke Skywalker twin. I mean, come on, getting a hand chopped off has to earn you something, right?”
Knives abruptly looked back up, startled into outrage, mouth halfway open to say something, but just then Vash reappeared in the hallway door and cried, “Yeah! What he said.”
Knives blinked too many times, mouthed for a moment, then said, supremely petulant, “I don't want to be Leia!”
Nick told him, “But you are kinda a princess, there, princess.”
Gleefully, Vash said, “Come on, she's the smart, ambitious one who's better at being a leader and everything! It works!”
Deadpan, Nick said, “But even though I am Han Solo, we are not kissing.”
Knives descended into a spluttering defense of himself, and the three of them spent a delightful half hour in the most childish arguments about who got to be who, who would win in a fight, and all manner of other elementary school nonsense. By the end, Knives had finally accepted his fate as Princess Leia and Nick had even seen him crack a smile. Before he left, Vash gave him a big hug and he even hugged back, patting Vash on the back before dodging out the door, color high in his cheeks.
And later that evening, when Vash dropped an “I love you,” Nick managed to nail a perfectly timed, “I know.”
-
On Christmas morning, although they'd sworn they weren't going to do anything for it, Vash handed over a small, wrapped box. It was a new lighter, engraved all over with a pattern of ivy.
“It's silly, but. Uh.” Vash shrugged, pink in the face. “Flower meanings? Is a whole thing? And ivy is, um, fidelity. Closeness. Because you can't make it let go of something it's attached itself to. And it's evergreen, so... it means winter always ends, eventually. Things get better.”
Which made it feel extremely silly, much later in the day, when Nick sheepishly gave Vash his present he'd sworn not to get. Milly had snuck it to him secretly. It was all four volumes of the Roman gladiator comic Vash had been checking out at the bookstore.
Vash laughed himself sick, and Christmas evening was spent reading silly smut together on the couch and getting inspired.
Even with the healing gunshot wound, it was the best Christmas Nick could remember.
-
FIN
---------------
Bonus trivia that I never found a good place to slide into the story:
Elendira's delivery driver is Zazie, who is nonbinary, they/them, and is a speed demon who street races and loves fast cars.
Wolfwood does get a car. Also he witnesses Vash's driving one time, and vows never to let the man behind a steering wheel again.
In his brief foray into bioterrorism, Knives primarily worked on growing castor beans and refining ricin, an incredibly lethal toxin that is super illegal to make (although it isn't illegal to grow castor bean plants, which are common ornamentals!). He kept his notes from back then not because he was considering following through on them, but in case he ever decided to take the fall for what he'd worked on. I mean... this is a human Knives, in a universe without a Tessla incident or Plant exploitation, so... as radicalized as he got, he's still significantly less extremist than in canon.
I went with pharmacology expertise for Legato because it was the closest I could get to 'taking control of peoples' bodies' as a superpower – low doses of ketamine induce dissociation, and chloral hydrate is a hypnotic that slows the nervous system and reaction time.
After finally having some serious conversations about it, Vash admits that he got in the habit of hiding his arm mostly because he thought having attention brought to it all the time was just compounding how guilty Knives felt about the accident. Meanwhile Knives got neurotically overprotective because he thought Vash was hiding it out of self-loathing. Anyway, everyone gets therapy because that's what I create AUs FOR, damn it. By the next summer, Vash wears short sleeves at work when he feels like it.
Notes on the rainbow soup of this AU: Wolfwood has settled on the bi label and isn't interested in thinking about it any harder. If Vash were to pick a label he'd probably go with pan, but mainly because the flag is the most colorful; he is happy with just being fluid and undefined.
This Knives – I could never quite work this into the main story, but I think he's been going through some self-discovery off screen and is realizing that he's asexual (and sex-repulsed) and maybe also aromantic. This has partly come from talking with Elendira, who is aro as well (and also trans, as in canon!). They do end up as a couple, because they fit together very well, enjoy each others' company and support each others' goals.
Knives has to do some re-evaluating of his own feelings of disgust towards all of humanity because he never could quite square the circle of why human beings, on average, are motivated so profoundly by something he finds so unbearable to consider. He has to work on learning when he's projecting, how to consider viewpoints that aren't his own, and how to trust that other people are generally honest and not trying to gaslight him.
When Knives starts wearing an ace ring and awkwardly explains it to Vash, Vash feels immediately vindicated for the fact that he's never quite felt right about joking about Knives' sexuality/saying he needs to get laid/etc. Wolfwood also feels kinda bad about making assumptions. Knives did not expect acceptance to be so easy, and he relaxes a lot about Vash's relationship after that. (Meryl and Milly hear about this turn of events also, and start unsubtly sneaking some ace-protagonist novels over to the garden center. Knives protests but also avidly reads them.)
Finally, for the record, trillium (also called birthroot) can symbolize spiritualism, conscientiousness, precision, and recovery. Extremely Vash. Ivy, as mentioned there at the end, means fidelity, attachment, and immortality, which works beautifully for Wolfwood (who in both anime and manga does sort of appear after death as almost a guiding spirit, which no one else ever does...).
Trillium is very tied to birth, beginnings, growth, life, spring, etc, while ivy is more associated with winter, age, antiquity, growing on churches and graves, death. Vash and Wolfwood work at places that directly deal with life and death; they both are stewards of nature in their own ways, opposite sides of the coin. In canon, Wolfwood's willingness to accept death as a necessary part of life is not depicted as a bad thing – if anything, Vash has to learn that insisting on everything staying alive, always, is a childish impossibility. So, I really liked the symbolism of balance with the title and the AU setup and just -wave hands- the whole thing.
I'll admit that I picked the title by my usual method, which goes: “-starts to post fic on AO3- oh for fucks sake, I need a title, I always forget to title. What song am I currently listening to? Is it relevant? Can I make it relevant? Uhhhh sure, that's a nice turn of phrase... okay, plug it in.” BUT that said, I do think Don't Carry It All is spot-on for the tone and message of this AU and is also a nice Trigun song in general.
“Raise a glass to the turnings of the season
And watch it as it arcs towards the sun
You must bear your neighbor's burden within reason
And your labors will be borne when all is done.”
-