Trigun is copyright (c) Yasuhiro Nightow and Young King Ours.
Blinding sand. Blinding heat. Blinding pain.
Blind, he walked through the empty city, then stumbled and fell ... and passed out from the pain ... and woke, and wished he hadn't.
He had to walk or he would die. So he walked, though he wondered why he bothered... while the thirst grew to pain, and the pain... passed beyond real, until he was walking in a dream.
The time came when he couldn't walk any more, so he crawled, dragging himself awkwardly through rubble-strewn alleys. Nothing... nothing lived in the whole town. Not even dogs, not even ghosts.... He knew it couldn't be so, knew there had to be people here somewhere. They couldn't all be dead... Sometimes he'd see something through his fading vision, a flash at the corner of his eye. He'd turn his head and see only the blowing sand and the broken towers of dead, blackened buildings.
Death, everywhere. He stumbled over bodies, and at first his stomach lurched at the sight of them, and then he didn't really care... and then he started to wonder if he could eat them....
Sickened by his own thoughts, but too exhausted and hurting to care, he slumped at last in a dark corner of the rubble, and waited to die.
The trouble with waiting to die is that there's nothing else to do while you wait...
Memory came, with all its many torments, through the long hours of a blazing red sunset. And the thirst, and the pain, and worst of all the guilt and agony in his heart. His desire for death made him ashamed, but he just couldn't fight any more. He'd tried to do the right thing. He'd tried so hard.
The stars came out, sharp as knife blades in the clear black sky. He gazed up at them and wanted to laugh at the cruel irony, that the last thing he saw would be the stars. He didn't have the strength to laugh. He tried to curl around himself and keep warm, as the brutal heat of the desert day faded into a brutally cold desert night. Sometimes the heat of his fever was so great that he didn't notice the cold. Then the chills set in, and he gritted his teeth against the agonizing shaking.
Thirsty, so thirsty...
"Hey. Hey, mister."
He raised his head slowly, squinted in the dark alley, and eventually, by starlight and the distant glow in the sky, he made out the kid squatting not too far away. The kid stared back at him, schooling his small face into an expression of studious indifference. Despite his own pain, the dying man's heart ached, that this world had taught children to hide their emotions in order to survive. He felt responsible somehow.
"You sick, Mister?"
"Something like that," the dying man whispered hoarsely.
The kid frowned, and got up, backing away. "Is it catching?"
"No. Please ... please don't go away. Don't leave me alone. I'm not contagious, I'm just ... hurt..." He doubled over, shivering in agony. When he looked up, the alley was empty. The child was gone.
He closed his eyes. He was so tired. Tired of fighting. Tired of running. His dry tongue ached, pressed against the roof of his mouth.
Dying of thirst in the desert. How appropriate...
"Hey, mister."
He opened his eyes again. The kid was back, squatting in front of him.
"I thought you went away," he whispered. "Or I hallucinated you."
"Naw. I brought you this." The kid held out a battered leather bag. The dying man knew what it was before he even saw it; he could almost smell the dampness around the old-fashioned stopper, and he tried to reach for it, but his good arm was too weak, and could only twitch feebly in the dust.
The kid unstoppered the canteen for him, and poured water into his mouth, a little bit at a time, trying not to touch him as if he were a leper. Lukewarm, stale water never tasted so good. He couldn't even stop to think until the canteen was upended, empty, and the kid took it away. He let his head fall down.
"Hey, mister?"
"I'm all right," he murmured. Talking was a little easier now that his throat wasn't so dry. "Hey... that's not all the water you had, is it?"
The boy looked away. "I can get more," he said. The casualness looked forced.
"Well... thank you for sharing what you had. Thank you."
"Hey. My mom told me to help people if they need it."
"She sounds like a smart lady, your mom," he said, though he suspected as the words left his mouth what the kid would say next, and sure enough:
"She's dead."
"Oh," he said. He should have known; everyone in this town was dead, or dying, and it was his fault, mostly. He wanted to offer sympathy, but suspected nothing he could say would touch the child's closed-down eyes.
Still, the boy had given him water, possibly the only water he had.
"I'm Vash."
"I'm Nicholas," the boy said.
"Thank you for the water, Nicholas."
"I can't give you anything else. I can't help you much, Mister."
"That may be all I need," Vash said. And kindness... the kindness meant more than the water to him right now.
The boy stared at Vash through his shaggy black hair, then looked away. "I gotta go, or they'll come looking for me," he said. He got up and left, without another word.
Vash let his head fall back down, and he must have slept, because the hell of July faded into the hell of memory, until he woke with a faint gasp, and raised his head.
The night was almost over. A reddish desert sunrise blotted out the stars.
He'd lived to see another day, and he wasn't sure if he was glad or not.
Vash tried to move, and as well as the expected pain, encountered unexpected resistance to his movement. He explored with the fingers of his one remaining hand, and felt the ragged edges of fabric. A blanket. Somebody'd thrown a blanket over him.
He had one guess who.
A canteen lay near his face. Vash prodded at it, and felt the heavy sloshing. Full.
He managed to sit up a little, and tuck the blanket around himself.
"Thank you," he said out loud, to the desert morning, but the only answer was the wind moaning between the abandoned buildings. The kid was long gone, of course.
He lifted the canteen, and drank a little, forcing himself to take it in slow sips. The water burned his throat like bitter tears. He wondered what the kid had suffered to get this water for him. To leave it for him. If the boy was even now dying of thirst, as Vash himself had almost done.
"You shouldn't have done it," he said, to the wind and the dead, to the emptiness around and inside him. "I'm not worth it. You wouldn't have done this if you knew who I was."