Knives’ laughter rings in Vash’s ears long after he’s gone.

Long after the tinnitus of gunfire fades away, long after the last of the surging wave of light sinks back into the barren earth. Long after Vash’s hammering heartbeat settles to slow, violent thuds.

Vash presses his fingers into his temples.

Tries to find the edges of himself.

Distantly, he can feel his scalp burning. It stops just before the middle of his hairline. Halved, and halved again — he can imagine it repeating, theoretically infinite exponential decay, until whatever was left was less than the electrical output necessary for function.

Knives, he’s sure, knows the numbers.

Vash knows only that he has enough.

Enough to finish this.

It’s a familiar wound, by now, really. Barely a pain at all, for all that it settles like rot into some part of him deeper than the marrow of his bones. Just the ache of absence.

Something missing — used up, irrecoverable.

Something’s missing.

It goes through him like a spasm, the noise. Loud and blunt and ragged at the end where it trails off into a cough. Frustration, he thinks, hearing it reverberate against half-toppled walls. Too hollow for anger, too pitted for grief. Just a wordless yell of fuck this, cutting off Knives’ echoing laughter like a snipped thread.

For the first time in what might be minutes, Vash takes a breath.

Ozone and copper hit the back of his throat.

There’s still a little liquor in his glass. Vash drinks without pausing for thought, and it does nothing to stymie the stench of rotten metal sticking to the roof of his mouth.

It just burns, like all good liquor should. Nothing good doesn’t hurt a little on the way down.

He looks around for the bottle—

Looks up instead, quick. Hurts his neck a little doing it, gets a pop-crunch out of two vertebrae that have held an ache between them for a decade, finally loosening their grip.

The Ark is moving west. Seeking undefended prey.

December. Octovern. All the townships in between, though he doubts there are many left that haven’t evacuated into the cities, seeking some semblance of a stronghold.

It won’t do them much good.

But that’s what Vash is for.

Stiff, aching with effort from raw skin to overtaxed muscle down to the core of him emptied by another half, Vash rises to his feet. He stretches his arms over his head, gets another pop-pop-click out of his spine. Nausea bubbles through him, sourceless and brief, then a cold sweat that leaves his head tingling warm and his vision swimming, and then the last of the adrenaline burns itself up and he — is.

He just is.

Just being won’t be enough, though — he needs to meet the Ark in December, and he can’t move faster than an airship on foot. He’ll have to rendezvous with Brad — he’ll know to stop, or double back. Vash hadn’t had time to tell him to, but Brad will know. He’s clever like that.

He’ll need to find something to cross the distance, sooner rather than later, but not so soon he’s wasting time by standing here. The airships unburdened with — with whatever the word is for what Knives has become — could reach December in a night. The Ark is, by Vash’s best guess, just shy of half as fast, if Knives is saving the true power of it for the very end, which he must be.

Always a sense of dramatics.

Then again, Vash is just as bad.

So — he has until the morning, if he sets out with the first sunrise. A little longer, if he can find a vehicle, if—

Vash braces against another surge of nausea, hot in the back of his throat. No, not nausea. Anger, swarming like hungry worm larvae over a layer of something thick and cold and untenable.

He swallows it all.

There’s work to do.

He has time to do it.

And maybe, once it’s done, a little time to rest.

The body sits like it’s already taking its rest. Like it’s just fallen asleep there, limbs akimbo, chin dropped to its chest.

Vash wonders if he would assume the man on the couch was sleeping, if he was unfamiliar with death. Maybe, for a moment — for the length of time before it would seem strange for the chest not to rise and fall, for the lashes not to twitch, the loose strands of hair in front of his mouth not to ruffle on an exhale.

Well — the blood would probably give the corpse away as a corpse.

Nothing loses that much blood and lives for long.

This man, longer than most, but — multiply by zero, you’ll still come up with nothing.

“Come on, up we get,” Vash says. Hears himself say, really — from somewhere far from the man in red and the corpse in the same — black and white and too much red.

The man in red slings the corpse’s arm over his shoulder, hefts him like a sack of grain into his arms. like a particularly short adult would carry a particularly tall child, gathering the gangly limbs in, taking the weight, since a corpse, even more so than a sleeping child, can’t bear its own weight.

“I’m sure, with all those kids, there’s a bathhouse around here.”

He takes a step.

It takes more effort than he knew he had left to give.

Another.

Another.

“Man, talk about dead weight,” Vash says.

No one’s listening, so he laughs in lieu of an audience, too loud and too long.

Another.

He carries the corpse towards one of the few structures fully standing, hoping it is what he needs, step by slow, deliberate step. He has time. Just enough time to do this the right way, a luxury he can so rarely afford the dead.

“It would be you, wouldn’t it,” he murmurs to the body in his arms.

The building’s door is unlocked and ajar. It creaks open when the dead man’s dangling hand knocks against it.

Vash almost jumps out of his skin at the sound, laughs again. “Thanks,” he tells the corpse.

Its eyes are slightly open, just a sliver of cornea under his lashes — those too, caked in drying blood.

Stomach turning over, Vash pulls his gaze away and steps inside.

By some small miracle, it is a bathhouse. There’s a pump in the center, probably drawing on the same water source as the well outside. He doubts the main building had running water even when it wasn’t half-wrecked — it’s an old building, far out in the boonies, barely a smudge on the map of December’s outlying territories.

If it weren’t for that smudge, this would have been a massacre. If it weren’t for what Vash had been told about the orphanage, half-muffled into a squashed hotel pillow, late enough at night that Vash still isn’t sure if it was him that was supposed to hear it, but thank God he did—

Any slower, any slower at all, and the children would have died.

But any quicker, maybe, just maybe—

There’s a ring of buckets around the pump. Just convenient storage, given that the rest of the small room is taken up with benches and stacked washtubs and racks laden with towels and blocks of soap, but it does look a little bit like a shrine to bathtime.

Under the window, light cast across it, there’s a table, a basket of laundry half-folded, half strewn across it.

Hours ago, there were lives being lived here.

Vash lays his burden on the table, the corpse’s limbs dangling loose, and piles the laundry out of the way. He rescues from it a few worn-out washcloths and rags, and a few loose strips of fabric — they were probably headbands, or scraps rescued and washed for a rag bag they’ll now never reach — to bind his sleeves rolled up and out of the way.

He doesn’t always have the chance to prepare bodies for burial. But he owes the dead as much respect as he can give them, more than just a hole in the ground if he’s able.

This dead man, more than most.

It always feels wrong to strip a corpse down. At least this corpse holds no surprises — Vash has seen him naked before, naked and alive, dripping water on dingy hotel carpet as he crossed the room to snatch the only towel from around Vash’s shoulders to scrub his hair dry. Lighting a cigarette, taking his damn time.

Vash runs a tub of cold water and goes through the suit’s few pockets. Nothing but a crumpled box, the lid torn off, two cigarettes left.

He stows it away, along with the sunglasses, the gun in its holster, the spare clip and loose bullets.

The one remaining vial.

He leaves tattered, bloodstained fabric to soak. There’s no saving it, but he can do something to make it presentable.

He owes this man that much.

It’s a little too Biblical, washing the dust from cracked heels, but there’s no better place to start. Feet, ankles, shins, knees.

Thighs, hips, groin. Vash heaves the corpse onto its side, washes his back, up his shoulders, the back of his neck.

“Sorry it isn’t warm,” he tells the unmoving shoulders. Neither of them can feel the warmth. Through leather, through metal, through death.

Blood smears across his hands. Stained water drips from the edge of the table. Vash works through every rag in the discarded laundry basket, as he cleans the gore from the corpse’s stomach, chest, throat—

His face.

No one’s handsome in death, not really. Even before the rot sets in. Looking at a dead man’s face always sets a crawling, itching buzz up Vash’s spine, pinches tight in his gut. It’s wrong, just wrong, the muscles too slack, the eyes and mouth too still, the pallor setting in.

But, god, if anyone could wear death well, it would be this man.

Vash’s hands are shaking, quivering all the way up to the elbows. He drops the blood-sodden rag, pulls another piece of fabric from the laundry basket.

It’s a shirt. A child’s shirt, once maybe blue or green, now faded to almost grey by undoubtedly years of wear and washing.

His hands won’t steady. Not enough to wipe the corpse’s face clean, like he deserves. There’s blood in his eyelashes, in his teeth. Tears cut clean ribbons through the crimson but there aren’t tears enough in the world to wash the all the blood away—

Vash bangs his hands hard against the table. It rattles hard, the corpse jolts atop it, Vash jolts, takes two steps back.

“Sorry,” he tells the body, every muscle in him tensed to flee, heart rabbiting against his ribs.

But he owes him. He owes him everything, but he can only give him this.

Vash paces the bathhouse, wringing his bloody hands as they refuse to steady, frustration pulling his lips back from his teeth, a snarl caught in the back of his throat.

I can’t, he hears himself thinking. I can’t I can’t I can’t.

He can, of course. He has to. There will be no sinking to the ground in exhaustion or despair. There will be no relenting. Knives won’t stop, so Vash can’t either. Knives can, so Vash must.

There’s work to do.

Vash stares down at his hands. There’s a fine tremor in his fingers, but they’re steady enough. His heart is still hammering fit to choke him but—

He washes the corpse’s face. His hair.

Turns away, to the washbasin. Kneels so quickly someone watching — no one’s watching, no one is left alive to see him — might think it was a barely-controlled fall. Scrubs the blood from the sodden clothes.

His hands are shaking again, his heart kicks—

There won’t be time to hang the clothes to dry—

Something unfurls, hot and rancid like blood gone to rot in his veins, something cracks like a thunderclap, his scalp sears.

The washbasin lies in two pieces.

Steam curls around Vash’s wrists.

The clothes in his hands are dry. Stained, still — but dry.

Vash huffs, blows a drifting feather away from his face.

He gets to his feet.

Work to do. Work to do.

Still plenty of time before rigor mortis sets in. Plenty of time to dress the man for burial.

His fingers struggle with the buttons of the stained white shirt.

I can’t, he thinks, and now he isn’t sure he’s wrong. Maybe he really can’t do that — cover this man, this man, with sand and soil.

But he couldn’t bear the alternative. Leaving him to rot, like the dead man out on the killing field, smeared and spattered. Vash didn’t save him.

Didn’t try.

He decided his own fate, that man.

This man, the corpse in Vash’s arms — when did he lift him up? He doesn’t remember, only knows he’s holding him now, cradling him against his chest, carrying him out of the bathhouse into the scorching sun—

He chose his own fate, too.

The sun hits Vash’s skin. It hurts. It hurts, it hurts—

Shroud.

He needs a shroud.

For a place meant for the young, it certainly has everything Vash needs for a burial.

Clean white sheets. A shovel.

Vash carries his burdens past the killing field, between the damaged buildings, to a patch of sandy soil a stone’s throw from one of the doors. There’s a little shade here, just enough that it’ll make the work a little less punishing.

He lays the sheet out flat, lays the corpse down on it. Wonders if it ever covered his bed, when he lived here as a child. If there could ever be a better place for a man to die, than in the home that loved him best—

“You really should be grateful,” Vash tells the dead man. “This is a terrible place to dig a grave, the soil’s going to fight me the whole way. I know you’d heckle me all the same no matter how much you did appreciate it, but, still!”

He digs the shovel deep into the sandy ground, heaves the loose soil he scoops up well out of the way.

This isn’t the first grave he’s dug in the desert.

Maybe, by some mercy, it'll be the last.

“I know your tricks,” he calls, over the sound of his work, without raising his gaze from it. “Your bark’s worse than your bite. I’ve never met someone with such a chip on their shoulder about wanting—”

Something clicks in the back of Vash’s throat as he swallows.

There’s one good thing about digging a grave.

Particularly digging down in sandy soil, fighting against gravity trying to spill the whole thing back inward at every inch of progress.

It takes time. Effort. Focus.

Everything Vash has, and a little more after that. Aggravating, mind-numbing work.

He feels the shovel in his hands, the give and resistance of the sand and soil. The air slowly cooling as the suns set. The strain building in his shoulders and back.

Nothing else.

The else is still there, gathered like a distant sandstorm, like roiling clouds, but the work delays it. Keeps it distant, keeps it quiet.

Effortful work and dull, throbbing pain.

No better medicine for—

For—

Grief is too small a word. Too plain, too simple, too constant a companion. Vash knows grief, it’s written as deep into his body as any scar, it lays heavy over the full length of his life, wrapped around his memories, immovable and certain.

That’s just a fact of his lifespan. He outlives.

Outliving is not what he’s done here.

Vash leans against the side of the grave, entirely in the shadow of sand and soil. Six feet deep. The only difficulty left is climbing back out without destabilizing the entire damn thing, and—

And.

He chafes against comparing anything to losing Rem. Even this — devastation too broad for simple grief, the terror of outliving, that soft-edged word, someone he thought would be with him, if not forever, then for longer.

There had never been, can never be, anything like it. Everyone that died with her, everyone that she saved. Knives — the fact he’d lost him too, that very moment, without even knowing.

He’d been alive for a year, and the world was ending.

It’s been a hundred and fifty years.

The world is ending.

He should have cared more about the world ending, when it was Rem.

He should care more about the world ending, now that it’s Wolfwood.

Vash climbs out of Wolfwood’s grave, knocking sand back into it, but not enough to ruin it.

Looks down at him, laid out on his shroud, in his bloodstained suit. Too still to be sleeping.

Wolfwood was never still, when he slept. His whole body moved with each breath, and he twitched often, hands splaying out and curling up.

On the coldest nights, he would seek out any nearby warmth.

He wants for nothing, now.

Not warmth, not food, not water — not even a cigarette.

Vash curls his raw, stiffened fingers into his own pocket. Wolfwood’s cigarettes are still there, but no lighter, no matches. Nothing to light even a spark.

His legs carry him towards the orphanage. He can hear himself breathing, loud and strained, as he pushes through the door and finds himself in a kitchen.

More tiny miracles — one of the drawers has a box of matches.

Matches retrieved, Vash shuts the drawer, but stops before he turns away again. Braces his free hand against the edge of the counter. His knees threaten, for a moment, to give.

But only for a moment. There’s still work to do.

“Here,” he tells Wolfwood’s terrible, unmoving face, once he’s made his way back across the sand. “Wouldn’t want you to go without.”

Vash keeps the handgun, the bullets, the vial. Tucks the sunglasses and the cigarettes and the orphanage’s matches into his pocket, right where he always kept them. Takes the edge of the shroud—

He didn’t have to bury Rem.

“Wolfwood—”

It’ll be easier to cover him with sand, if he’s gone already. The man wrapped in the white sheet could be any man, any of the men Vash has buried.

Wolfwood had prayed over some of them. Quietly, muffled behind his hand, like the little cross in his palm was God Himself.

Vash can’t remember where Wolfwood kept it, that cross. Maybe it’s gone, lost to the sand like the last of his matches. Maybe it burned up when Vash forced his sodden clothes dry. Maybe he left it behind.

Doesn’t matter, really.

Vash doesn’t know any prayers.

And he knows no one’s listening.

No one’s listening.

...No one that can help him.

It surges up in him, horrifically, with his hands still fisted tight and helpless in Wolfwood’s shroud. The grief, trapped inside itself, trapped inside his ribs, trying to shake him apart, trying to unmake him, like it unmade the Vash that still had a mother, that still had a brother, that still loved his brother, but there’s work to do, there’s work to do, there’s work to do—

Smile, Spikey.

STOP LOOKING AT ME