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It’s rare, but things do grow on the surface of Noman’s Land.
They look nothing like the common desert plants that had been on Earth, but in the ways that matter, they’re almost eerily similar. The plants are relentless in holding onto the scarce liquid and nutrients offered by this planet, and in order to keep it to themselves they’ve developed defense mechanisms that leave them tough-skinned and with sharp parts that would make any attempt to take a bite out of them especially painful.
But humans hadn’t been deterred by the spikes of cacti on Earth, so it makes sense they’re not deterred by the spikes of these new desert plants either.
The way Wolfwood holds the oddly shaped fruit in his hands is practiced; his fingers are spread out along its oblong length, slotted between the dark, pronged needles that are poking out from it. A clear warning that he’s easily ignoring.
“There was a whole patch near the o– where I grew up for some reason. We kids called them urchin fruits,” he says.
Vash perks up. “Why’d you call them that?” he asks.
Wolfwood shrugs. “One of the old folks in town used to talk about things called ‘sea urchins’ with spines all over them like this,” he gestures with the spiny fruit in his hands. “So it kinda started as a joke to make fun of him since he sounded crazy, but then it stuck.”
Ah, so it was someone with some holdover knowledge from Earth. Maybe that old man had been the son of one of the original SEEDS passengers and had been told stories of ocean life when he’d been young. Vash can’t quite suppress the fond smile that tilts the corner of his lips when he thinks of how enduring human memories can be, preserved when passed from generation to generation. “That’s kinda interesting.”
Wolfwood shrugs again, and digs his pocket knife into the tough skin of the fruit.
At Wolfwood’s elbow, Meryl is leaning none too subtly into his space to stare with interest at the fruit. Her eyes are gleaming in the low light of their campfire. “What does it taste like?”
“Try for yourself,” Woolfwood says. He has finally cut enough that he’s able to break off a piece of thick rind, revealing the pulpy purple insides of the fruit. He carves out a wedge, and the juice stains his skin when he pries it out and passes the morsel to Meryl.
She takes it carefully, then looks it over from every angle.
“You’re supposed to eat it, not study it,” Wolfwood says.
Meryl sticks her tongue out at him, then pops the piece of fruit into her mouth.
“Oh!” she says with immediate delight. “It’s sweet!”
She reaches out with her sticky fingers for more, but Wolfwood leans away. “Everybody’s gotta get their share first before you get any more, Shortie.”
Then he cuts out another piece, and passes it to Vash.
Vash takes his glove off, and takes the fruit with his flesh and blood hand. It’d slip too easily from the sleek grip of his glass prosthetic. Like Meryl, he can’t help but look it over a bit curiously as well. This fruit is new to him, probably something that has only recently started growing on the planet's surface. But even if Vash had seen these fruits before now, even at his hungriest he has never seen a need to take from the planet’s fragile ecosystem, so he wouldn’t have eaten it anyways.
He puts it in his mouth and starts to chew, waiting for a burst of sweet flavor, but an odd tanginess coats his tongue instead. It pangs sharply against the back of his throat, and his face scrunches up involuntarily. “It’s not sweet at all, it’s sour!”
Both Meryl and Wolfwood give him odd looks. “Maybe your taste buds are so burnt out on sugar from all the donuts you eat that you can’t taste it anymore,” Wolfwood snarks.
Vash forces himself to swallow the last pieces of fruit that are stuck in his teeth, then huffs. “Or maybe you two don’t know what something sweet should taste like.”
It’s not his strongest rebuttal, and they all know it.
“Gimme another piece,” Vash says, shooting his hand out with the palm up. “I bet I just got a funky slice.”
Wolfwood rolls his eyes, but after getting himself a piece and passing another to Meryl, he hands Vash another, bigger, slice.
“Well Blondie, give it a test,” Wolfwood goads. "See if it's sweet this time or prove that you've got faulty taste buds."
Vash knows he should probably only take a small testing bite at first, but he’s feeling a bit petty and he has a point to prove now. He puts the whole piece in his mouth and makes a show of biting down.
The tanginess of this piece is even stronger. It almost tastes metallic now when compounded on the aftertaste of the first piece. He gags before he can stop himself, his throat refusing to swallow the fruit outright, but he doesn’t lose it, he holds the piece in his mouth.
“Oh c’mon Spikey,” Wolfwood says with exasperation, while Meryl leaps to his side and grips his shoulder so he doesn’t pitch forwards into their campfire. "No need to be such a drama queen."
“You guys can have it,” Vash gasps, wiping the spit from his lips after just barely managing to choke down the piece of fruit. “It’s way too sour for me.”
“Fine by me,” Wolfwood says. He eagerly goes right back to pulling the rind apart, and begins obnoxiously slurping the juice.
Meryl gives Vash another concerned look, but lets go of his shoulder after he gives her a reassuring smile. She quickly goes back to bothering Wolfwood, trying to get more of the fruit from his hands since she doesn’t have a knife to cut up one of her own.
Vash pulls his knees to his chest, rests his chin on them, and watches his friends as they bicker. Behind him, he can hear Roberto snoring like a chainsaw as he sleeps in the van, and beyond that, the gentle buzz of worm wings as the drones emerge from the sand for their nightly flight.
The longer he sits there quietly, the more aware he becomes of the way the inside of his throat still feels thick and irritated, and how the terrible taste of the fruit still lingers.
He reaches for his canteen, drags it over the sand towards himself, and then takes a deep gulp of the water inside. But when he stops to breathe, he still chokes. The water hadn’t been of any help in loosening up his throat.
“Vash?” Meryl’s concerned voice drifts to him.
“I’m fine,” he says hoarsely after catching his breath. “Think that fruit just dried out my mouth a bit.”
She doesn’t look put at ease by that, not even when Vash smiles at her again.
“Your face looks red,” Meryl says.
“Probably from the fire,” Vash answers. He stands before she can get closer.
Meryl and Wolfwood’s faces blur before his eyes as a wave of dizziness crashes over him. He staggers, and chokes again when his startled gasp fails to reach his lungs. Nothing but wheezing makes it in or out of his throat.
Then, something in the back of his mind shifts. Its presence is intrusive and cold, and it moves like a heavy mechanical gear, pushing its way forward until it has managed to force a place for itself among the other parts that keep Vash operational. Once there, it immediately kicks into a fast, panicked spin.
It shreds his mind, tearing his thoughts apart, and floodgates meant to stay shut are broken open. The terror and fear that had been held back behind them rush out and drown Vash's heart.
(If Vash were able to see himself from the outside, from the point of view that Meryl and Wolfwood have, he would see the pupils of his eyes shrink down to pinpricks. He would see his face go pale, his breathing become labored. He would see the sweat that starts dripping down the sides of his face and neck, and soaks the high collar of his coat.
He would see the way he instinctively reaches for his gun.)
Fear isn’t an emotion Vash is familiar with, not in the way he knows anger, or dread, or worry. There are very few moments in his life that he can point to and say there, that was a time when I was truly, deeply afraid.
Seeing Tesla. Watching Rem bleed out in front of him. Feeling the SEEDS ship he was born on shudder under his feet. Any time he looked into his brother’s eyes and saw nothing but the cold, hollow depths of Nai’s fury.
Right now.
Bone-deep terror has him quaking and his breaths coming shorter and shorter. He doesn't know what to do, so he fumbles with the snap of his holster, just so he can get his hand around the grip of his gun and feel the grounding warmth of the metal.
"Easy, Blondie," he hears Wolfwood say. "We're all friends here."
Vash feels his ribs rattle, constricting around his empty lungs, as he shudders and stares at the two humans in front of him. His vision trembles, but he can tell that Wolfwood has Meryl behind him, an arm stretched out to keep her back.
The Punisher is leaning against the nearby trailer. Wolfwood left it just a few feet away on purpose. Close enough to grab quickly, far enough to feign relaxation.
Wolfwood is fast. Inhumanly fast. Vash knows this. But without the Punisher in his hands, it’ll still take him a moment to grab it and get it ready to fire.
Vash can get pretty far away in that time.
Before Wolfwood or Meryl can say anything or try to stop him, he spins around and bolts out of the campfire’s circle of light. The darkness of the desert swallows him up without hesitation.
(Meryl tries to follow, before Wolfwood pulls her back. He tells her you don’t chase things that already think they’re being hunted unless you have the tools to hunt with.
But this is Vash, she tries to say.
Didn’t you see the look in his eye? He isn’t Vash right now.)
If Vash had heard, he’d refute all of that. He doesn’t feel like he’s being hunted. There’s nothing specific he’s running from. The only thing fueling him right now, pushing his feet faster and faster, is pure terror, aimless and suffocating, that is telling him that to stay alive, he has to get away.
With each pounding heartbeat, it repeats; run.
So Vash runs.
It’s easy, so far out in the desert and away from civilization that they are, to just run without being stopped by anything. Their group had been staying clear of towns since the business on the Sand Steamer, making their way towards July by skirting around the edge of December and its satellite towns. If they heard a single hint of Vash’s name being whispered, they got in the van and kept moving.
The most here that could stop Vash are old rusty windmills, rotting barns, and the occasional piece of a SEEDS wreck deemed too useless to justify trying to move it closer to the city.
But in this darkness, he sees none of it.
He does eventually trip, and when he looks back to see what tripped him, a red hand is sticking out of the sand, and it has a tight grip on his ankle.
Vash kicks it off with a short cry that he strangles in the back of his throat, and scrambles away as the body the hand is attached to pries itself up out of the sand. More hands and bodies begin to surface from the sand behind it, as if following the lead of the first dead thing that had reached out to Vash.
And Vash is small. Small and scared and bruised and there is fire springing to life around him, trapping him in a horrible cage of rubble and melting cryo-pods filled with humans who will never wake up to the new life they were promised. A hot glaze pours over his vision, staining the dark night a deep wine red. His skin sizzles where his palms touch the molten sand.
“I’m sorry,” he gasps, mouth moving with the muscle memory of gasping the same words over a hundred years ago. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry—"
“Vash.”
The hard voice cuts through Vash’s babbling. He freezes, then slowly begins to uncurl, bringing his arms down from where they’d wrapped around his head when he’d been unaware.
Nai stands behind him, his large formless cloak cutting a gleaming silhouette of silver out of the darkness.
“You’re not really here,” Vash says with numb lips. He stands, and raises his gun between them, pinning his gaze on his brother and forgetting all about the sea of the dead that is roiling behind him. “You can’t be.”
Nai looks at Vash with pity, and then Vash’s hands wrapped around his gun with disappointment. “I heard your fear,” he says. “All of us did.”
It’s a lie. Vash knows it’s a lie. He believes that the other Plants might have felt the echoes of his emotions, though they wouldn’t have been able to call it fear. But Nai has never been able to hear him, no matter how loud he screamed.
He keeps his gun up, aimed, finger off the trigger but safety disengaged.
Nai hasn’t brought his blades out yet, but Vash knows all too well how quickly they can appear and strike.
“What do you want?” Vash asks.
“To help you,” Nai says. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, Vash.”
Another lie.
“Go back to your city,” Vash hisses, feeling the words crawl out of his throat. “I know you’re there. I’ll be there soon to meet you.”
Nai ignores him, and takes a bloody footstep forward.
Vash fires his gun. The shot goes wide into the night. He doesn’t notice. To him, it embeds itself in the sand at Nai’s feet. The sand littered with chopped limbs and flayed flesh.
“Stay back,” Vash warns, pretending he isn’t shaking.
Nai’s blades slither from his back. “I’m getting very tired,” he says slowly. “Of you throwing tantrums and pointing that damned gun at me.”
Vash sucks in a ragged breath, the smoke of the fire around him scraping down his throat. At least, if it becomes a fight, it’s just him. He ran so far into the desert, there’s no possibility of Meryl, Roberto, or Wolfwood getting caught in the crossfire.
So his heart stops when he sees a neon cross of green light approaching through the darkness.
Panic seizes his hands, making his fingers pull the trigger, and he shoots for Nai’s shoulder. He needs Nai to leave now.
There’s a flash of orange as the bullet glances off a blade and sparks violently.
(Wolfwood bites out a curse when another loud gunshot rings out. But he doesn’t bother ducking or bringing the Punisher in front of him as a shield; he can see Vash’s back, so he’s in no danger of Vash aiming at him.)
“What was that shot for, little brother?” Nai asks. He spreads his arms out, as if genuinely questioning, but Vash knows it’s a show of Nai’s confidence. Look at me. Right here in front of you. And your bullets have never reached me.
Vash grits his teeth. Heart pounding, he fires again before he’s even aware that he’s doing it.
Then again, then again.
Another shot. Another lost bullet. They’re finding homes buried in the chests and skulls of the corpses still present on the edges of Vash’s vision. He’ll never get those bullets back. He’ll have to buy more.
His breaths are coming faster and shorter, and his eyes are bright and wild.
“Your aim is still terrible!” Nai taunts. “Are you even trying to hit me? Do you even want to protect humans from me?”
“Of course I do!” Vash shouts back, harmonizing with another gunshot.
“Prove it,” Nai says darkly, grinning at something over Vash’s shoulder.
Vash turns, and there Wolfwood is. He’s standing there, Punisher in his arms, but still exposed, human, vulnerable.
“Spikey, you gotta calm down,” Wolfwood says.
Vash trembles, eyes flicking between Wolfwood and Nai.
His vision spins–the heat of the fire is cooking him alive —and then in the split second that his gun’s aim wavers–
There’s a flash of burning silver, and then Wolfwood’s body falls in segments. His legs, his stomach, his chest, his neck. Nai cut clean through in every place he intended to. Even the Punisher was sliced neatly wherever it stood in the way between Nai’s blades and Wolfwood.
Vash stares unseeingly at the jumbled pieces of Wolfwood’s body, every sound muted beneath a high pitched ringing in his ears. Dark red blood gushes seemingly without end, and the thirsty sand accepts it with an open mouth.
“Vash, please calm down,” Wolfwood’s disembodied voice says. “Look at me, Blondie, c’mon, open your eyes. You’re gonna fuckin’ choke if you don’t calm down–”
“You didn’t even try to stop me,” Nai says.
Vash turns with a ragged roar to charge his brother, but a weight slams into his back and sends him falling face first into the sand. He kicks and screams, reaching furiously for his brother’s smug grin as Wolfwood’s dead body grips his shoulders with two bloody hands and drags him down into the blood red sand.
“Wait, Shortie, don’t–!”
Two slimmer hands reach from out of nowhere, wrapping around Vash’s middle as a body pushes into his side. He looks down, and Tesla stares back at him with half of her face caved in, one eye melting in its socket from the heat of the fire, thick globs of veiny pink dripping down her face like horrible tears.
Vash thinks he starts sobbing, he isn’t sure. There’s too much happening.
He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe.
“God fucking damnit!”
There’s a loud crack! as something hits Vash at the base of his skull. The pain is bright and sharp for only a moment, and then he knows no more.
The tight feeling of his chest filling with air, pressing his ribs against the inside of his skin, is what gradually pulls Vash back to consciousness. His senses return one by one after that, like switches being flicked on, until his entire system has come back online and a steady hum works through his veins.
The next thing he feels after that is a damp pressure on his head, moisture rolling down his temples and into his hair. It shifts when he does, and then is adjusted, smoothed down over his forehead to keep his head cool.
Vash blinks open his eyes, and the blur of color at his side slowly solidifies into Meryl's familiar form. She freezes when she notices his eyes on her, and searches them for something before saying awkwardly, “How are you feeling?”
“Uhm,” Vash starts, but he doesn’t get further than that. His tongue is thick and heavy in his mouth, and his throat burns on the inside. He winces and brings a hand up to press against his Adam’s apple.
“You don’t seem to be panicking,” Meryl says, as she takes away the moist towel that had been the thing draped across Vash’s forehead. “Does your throat hurt?”
Vash manages, slowly, to nod.
Meryl turns and reaches behind her, hand returning with a canteen that she helps Vash sit up and take into his own hands. It’s then that Vash realizes they’re no longer in the desert, but instead in a quiet motel room; Vash is laying on the only bed, and Meryl has one of the only two chairs pulled right up to the side. In the corner, a nice if tacky floor lamp is doing as much as it can to illuminate the room.
For the life of him, Vash can’t remember what might’ve gotten him to this state. His memory of the night before is covered with static, and it sits between his other memories with jagged edges that don’t match up. He remembers feeling hot, and that it felt like his heart was being squeezed, but not much more.
“What happened?” he asks, after slowly drinking some water and making sure his throat won’t kill him for trying to talk.
Meryl bites her lip, but she’s never been one to shy away from telling someone the truth. “We think it was–” she starts.
The door creaking loudly as Wolfwood shoves it open interrupts her. Vash sees his eyes go wide behind his sunglasses when he notices Vash is awake, but he quickly recovers, tucking the relief and concern away.
“Well, looks like sleeping beauty finally decided to wake up,” he drawls, walking over and snagging the second chair with the toe of his shoe, dragging it into place so he can sit backwards on it and face Vash. “So,” he flashes a toothy grin, “How’d we do with our bedside service?”
Vash snorts, but his throat protests even that. “Meryl was doing a fine job of taking care of me,” he rasps with a smirk.
“I was the one who dragged your heavy ass in here!” Wolfwood immediately protests. “Show some gratitude!”
“Where’s Roberto?” Vash asks.
“Watching the van,” Meryl answers while Wolfwood splutters. The small size of the room somewhat answers that question for Vash as well. There’s no way Roberto would want to be here while there is already barely enough room for three.
Vash nods with understanding, takes another drink from the canteen—a sip now, he knows any more than that will likely make him sick—and then after sheepishly putting a hand on the back of his head he says, “Sorry you guys had to take care of me. Did I get hurt or something?”
Meryl tries to explain again, but Wolfwood beats her to it. “It was the fruit, for sure,” he says. “You had a bad reaction to it and it came on quick. Instant high fever, tossin’ and turnin’, crying like a little baby, the works.”
(His hand shakes as he lights up a cigarette, ignoring Meryl’s protest at doing it in the small room, and he’s sure Vash sees the tremble, sure Vash knows there are things he’s not being told. But if Vash truly doesn’t remember, Wolfwood won’t be the one to be the one to tell him what that fruit really did to him. The way his entire system seemed to reject it at once. The way it had flooded him with a panic so intense he began hallucinating. The way the delirium had overtaken him and that he’d screamed and fought and had bared his sharp fang-like teeth and fired his gun at nothing.
The way his breathing had stopped completely the moment Wolfwood knocked him out. The way Meryl had held Vash in her lap and pressed her ear to his chest, both of them holding their own breath until Meryl had heard the steady, if far away, beat of his heart. The relief they both breathed out.
Before this, Wolfwood had been suspicious of Vash the Stampede and his many inhuman feats. Now, he knows he’d been right.
So no, Wolfwood won’t be telling him a single thing.)
“Really?” Vash asks. He leans back in the bed, back propped up by his pillow, and his eyes go a bit distant. Quickly, he shakes himself out of it, and flashes both Wolfwood and Meryl a shining smile. “Glad I discovered this allergy with you guys around rather than some more unsavory types!”
“I’m glad too,” Meryl says, tone soft with relief. A beat passes, her own words register in her mind, and she scrambles to add, “I mean, not that I’m glad you had such a bad allergic reaction! No one should be glad about that—but I’m glad you were here you know?”
(While Meryl had been watching Vash through the night, switching in and out cold towel compresses to keep his temperature down, her mind had drifted off to somewhere colder and quieter.
The thought had come to her with all the chill of the desert at night; what would have happened to Vash the Stampede if he’d eaten one of those fruits while totally, utterly, alone?
Meryl decided she didn’t want to think about it. She still doesn’t)
Vash chuckles wearily. “I know.”
“Looks like that delicious fruit is off the menu for you forever now, Blondie,” Wolfwood says.
“I think I can live without it,” Vash replies. He rubs at his throat again. Something about the way it's burning doesn’t line up exactly with the story of an allergic reaction. His throat is undeniably tight because of the fruit, but there’s a raw feeling, like someone had scraped the inside of his throat with a spoon, underneath that. As if he’d been screaming. “Yeah, that one taste was more than enough.”