DISCLAIMER: Trigun and its characters belong to Yasuhiro Nightow.

Lyrics to "The Last Gunfighter Ballad" by Guy Clark

AUTHOR'S NOTE: B.B., Stevie Ray, Lightnin', Howlin', Muddy, Steve Earle, and one Guy Clark…the list goes on longer, and none of them will ever know how their music helped a young boy stay alive in his dark days. Clark, ya sumbitch, you finally made it home, and this world is the poorer for being without you. But you have left us your music. Look down from above and know that means a hell of a lot to me, someone you helped save from the easy way out.

Sunrise

The battle had been fierce, leaving the little town in ruins. Raiders and civilians alike were strewn among the debris, bodies in different poses of death. Dust and gunsmoke were still heavy in the air. Mournful wails had replaced gunfire as the inescapable sound.

"What now?" Nicholas D. Wolfwood, leaving heavily on his cross, barely had enough energy left to ask the question. He willed his arm to move so he could reach for a smoke, but there was no response. He had been up for forty-seven hours, first preparing the town for the battle and then fighting it, and his body was out of fuel.

Vash the Stampede surveyed the scene – buildings pockmarked with bullet holes, some with holes big enough to walk through, others completely collapsed; corpses still while the living wandered, shellshocked. Everything was hazy through the dust and smoke. A few feet away from him, abandoned on the ground, was a child's doll, spattered with blood that was still wet to touch.

Looked at Wolfwood. "Now we tend to the wounded. Bury the dead. Help these people start over."

The priest nodded. Again, he commanded his arm to move. This time, it managed to shakily obey, withdrawing an energy bar from a pocket. "Five minutes."

Vash nodded, turning to Meryl Stryfe and Milly Thompson, who looked equally as worn down as Wolfwood did. "I know it's a lot to ask, but you two need to set up and help the wounded. Find anyone you can to help."

Meryl raised her head, eyes blank from fatigue and battle. "We'll do it," she said, voice raspy from gunsmoke and shouting over the clamor of combat. "Come on, Milly."

Her partner trudged after her.

Vash was as tired as his three companions, but could not afford to surrender to the fatigue. Not while there was still work to be done. While Wolfwood struggled to work his dry mouth enough to chew his energy bar, Vash went to locate a shovel.

The battle to save the town from being pillaged and razed had been the easy part compared to what was coming. Graves had to be dug well away from the town, to prevent the risk of disease and contamination. There was a lot of work ahead, digging graves and identifying bodies and holding burials. Then the rubble would have to be cleared out before any damage could even begin to be repaired.

Rebuilding, both buildings and lives, is a herculean task for survivors. Vash felt it only right to help them start.

Those who could be treated, were. Those who could not be treated were given as much painkiller as could be spared and moved to an area with other untreatables, where a small group of physically unscathed prayed over them as they slowly died. Despite the painkillers, their groans and wails still carried throughout the open air.

Every so often, a family member of an untreatable would turn up and take him or her away, out of sight. A gunshot would be heard, and the family member would be seen taking the body out toward the graves.

It bothered Meryl, but it was put down your loved one or let them die slowly. On Gunsmoke, there were no easy choices.

The heat was almost unbearable, accelerating the decay brought by death and attracting insects whose buzzing became almost as loud as the wailing of the dying and mourning. It was hard enough to breathe the hot air without the damn bugs flying in your nostrils. Water, though clean, was hot inside its bottles, making it almost as unpleasant as the dry-mouth of combat.

Meryl cursed the daytime. It brought heat and bugs and nothing good at all.

Slowly, the day passed, the suns finally sinking low. Still, the work continued, graves dug by moonlight and people nursed by lantern light.

People didn't so much fall asleep as collapse from exhaustion. Such was the case with Wolfwood, falling onto his bedroll, out in seconds. In addition to digging graves with Vash, he had done double-duty, holding burials for identified bodies.

Meryl and Milly split the night into shifts with survivors. It would have been nice to have a doctor, but the town physician was counted among the dead. What they had were his nurse, his receptionist, and two people whose medical experience was CPR training.

It was the nurse's shift now, paired with one of the CPR-trained people.

Meryl had thought, when she finished the first shift and lay down on her bedroll, that she would sleep the sleep of the unconscious, like Wolfwood.

She was wrong. There was no escaping all she had seen that day. Even in her sleep, people cried out for her to save them.

There was Milly's voice, crying for her. Meryl ran toward it, desperate to help her friend. But the others who were dying were too many. She was caught in a sea of hands clutching at her, voices begging her for help, pulling her down even as she struggled to get to Milly –

Meryl sat up with a sharp intake of breath, stifling a scream, looking around rapidly.

It was ok. She was on her bedroll in the nursing area. Milly was on the roll next to hers, sleeping soundly.

Just a nightmare. All it was. Wasn't real.

Meryl pushed herself up, stumbling out of the nursing area, away from all the wreckage. She had to get some air. Clean air. Away.

No need to worry about losing her way in the dark; the moons provided plenty of silver light to see by. Cool air brushed her skin, a breeze ruffling her hair, filling her nose with something other than the smell of death and injury.

A quiet but familiar sound drew her attention – a bottle top being popped off. She walked in that direction.

Vash was sitting on a sand hill, legs crossed, a pack of bottled beer at his side.

"Hey, insurance girl," he said before she could announce herself. "Pop a squat."

"How did you know it was me?" Meryl asked, sitting next to him.

"I'd know you anywhere, just by your presence. You're unmistakable."

Meryl didn't know what to say to that, so she simply accepted a bottle and took a drink. The beer was warm and she wasn't a beer drinker in the first place, but it was infinitely better than the hot water she'd had to make do with all day. Rinsed her mouth and spit with the first mouthful. Swished the second before swallowing, savoring the taste of something that actually had taste.

"I tried to sleep," she said. Tried to focus on one of the moons, but her eyes didn't want to work properly. "It didn't take."

"It will," Vash assured her. "Just not for a while."

They were far enough away from the wounded that it was quiet out here. Sat a while, too compressed from the day's ordeal to really enjoy the quiet, the cool air, the illusion of serenity. Just sat and drank and tried to at least pretend to enjoy it. Tried to imagine it wasn't a brief pause in chaos.

Meryl slowly became aware of a sound. Muttering. What was Vash saying? Something with a rhythm – poetry? He was singing. She turned to pay more attention.

"Now the burn of a bullet is only a scar

And he's back in his chair in front of the bar

And the streets are empty and the blood's all dried

And the dead are dust and the whiskey's inside…"

It was an old song about a gunfighter at the end of his days. Meryl couldn't say why she joined in. Vash turned, surprised, when she did so. Then he smiled as their voices blended.

"He said, I stood in that street before it was paved

Learned shoot or be shot before I could shave

I did it all for the money and fame

Noble was nothin' but feelin' no shame

And nothin' was sacred save stayin' alive

And all that I learned from a Colt .45

Was to curse the smell of the black powder smoke

And the stand in the street at the turn of a joke

Curse the smell of the black powder smoke."

Their bottles clinked. Each drained theirs dry in one long swallow. Vash popped a couple more, giving her one. She took another long swallow.

"Curse the smell of the black powder smoke, and damn this world," she heard herself say.

"You don't really think that," Vash told her softly.

"How can you not? In a little bit the suns will be up again. Another day of dealing with the heat and fighting off bugs and infection and losing."

"Don't focus on the ones you lose. Focus on the ones you save."

"How can I? It feels like for every person we're able to get up and walking again, two more die."

"Feels like it," he agreed. "But without you and Milly and the rest, they all would have died. You do the best you can, Meryl, and accept that's all you can do."

"How can you look at it like that?"

"Because I'd go insane if I don't. Look, I'd save everyone if I could. But I can't. I'm not so good with a gun that I can stop everyone who tries to kill someone else, there's too many pulling the trigger at once. I stop this one from happening, that one happens over there. I go over there and stop another one, somebody else kills back here. The only way for one person to stop it all would be if that one could control minds, turn everyone into mind-controlled puppets and keep them from killing each other. And that wouldn't be worth anything."

"Why?"

"Because nothing's worth a damn without freedom of choice. You're caught up in everything bad right now, and you wouldn't mind it just stopping, but it doesn't work that way. You take away a person's free will, all you've got is an organic robot.

"You can't force people better. That's been tried before, and it backfires every time. People have to choose to be better. That's the only thing that sticks."

"But if you could, at least people would stop killing."

"At what expense? What if you didn't have free will? What if you couldn't make decisions for yourself? No more choice for you. No more banana sundaes. No more deciding what to eat, or what to read, or what to do. No more taking pleasure from doing something you like doing. You're just a nice little robot, able only to do what she's told."

Meryl scowled.

"You want to get rid of the pain, insurance girl, but the only way to do that is get rid of the pleasure, too. Life is a package deal, good and bad. You want one, you have to take the other."

"Seems like the bad keeps outweighing the good."

"Only if we let it, insurance girl. People can change. But not if they can't see that it's possible to. They need people like us to set the example. Bad or good, people need to see they can choose to be better."

Meryl took another drink. "And what happens when they don't?"

There was a tug on the bottle. Another tug, and Vash pulled it out of her hands. Gently guided her chin until she was looking in his eyes.

"No guarantees. People don't come with guarantees. You might not be able to save this one, but you don't know that he's unsaveable, someone else could put him on the right track further down the line. He might be a horrible person, but his son could be the one who gets us off this ball of sand. We don't know the future, and we don't know who is and isn't redeemable."

"What do we do, then?" she asked.

"We hope, and we act in that hope. Hope that everyone chooses to be better. Hope that everyone chooses to stand together. Hope that mankind finally gets its act together. We won't always be right in that hope, but we'll never be right if we surrender it. Come on, watch the suns come up with me."

"And what good will that do?"

"If nothing else, maybe give you something pretty to look at. Maybe remind you that every day is a new start."

Meryl scowled. But she scooted closer. Felt his arm go around her shoulders.

He was right. It was a pretty sight. Silver moonlight gave way to hints of pale yellow, which gave way to orange, finally yielding to a glowing red aura that inflamed the sky itself with dawn's fire, as if the suns themselves were cranky at being woken. The sky would pale soon enough, the day heat beginning with the end of the morning glory, but for now it was just something pretty.

And maybe it was the coolness of the receding night, or his words, or just being here with Vash, quietly watching the sky – but she did feel better about the approaching day. It wasn't going to be easy by any stretch, but she could feel a spark of hope that it would be better than yesterday. That she would be able to save more people than she lost.

Today would be better than yesterday. Tomorrow would be better than today. People would slowly change for the better, as long as people like Vash kept inspiring people like her to fight the good fight. This was the hope Meryl would use to get through each day, until they had the town back on its feet.

On a desert planet where each new day brought heat, struggle, and challenge…two people sat together and found hope in sunrise.