Chapter One

He wasn't for sure about exactly what had happened that morning. His dreams and how he remembered the pale white-blue light falling across kitchen tile told him it was sometime around five, maybe six AM. He was awake. He couldn't sleep. But was he a drug addict or an insomniac? It didn't matter, because he no longer remembered, or no longer cared to remember.

The doctors told him he had been shot in the head with a Colt .45 style handgun at surprisingly close range, though he couldn't quite recall ever having pleaded for his life, then or otherwise. Now, like the heroine of Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill", he had gone into a brief coma, and few had hope of him ever recovering- much less doing it so well, and in such a short amount of time. But unlike Uma Thurman's character, "The Bride", he was not left helpless in a catatonic state for four years or even two, and to the extent of his knowledge, he hadn't been coma-raped during his stay at the medical institution even once.

The doctors had told him- once his hair had grown back, milky blonde, and he could not stop fingering the long scar from where his brains had splattered against the wall and his skull had caved in, should have killed him, through the watery confusion of liquid morphine- the doctors had told him his assailant had been a tall Caucasian male, around 6'2 or 6'4, wearing a white coat and dark sunglasses; all of this according to an anonymous eye witness who's name had been witheld. They had described him as looking something like 20 or 24, though the attacker's age didn't matter, not really.

Whatever the hell their exact words had been, this mystery assailant had sounded a lot like his faithful Legato, from the coat to the assumed height and ethnic background. But they had it wrong. Legato Bluesummers was a pawn. Not the type to blow a gaping black hole through his Master's cranium on a whim after years and years of dutiful service.

The doctors had asked him if this description fit anyone he'd known before the incident, perhaps an enemy he'd had, either directly or indirectly, or a close family member or friend turned awry? A co-worker perhaps? He'd told them no. Because that did not sound like his Legato. And in his heart, he knew it had been Vash. But why had he done it? Why had he ever been involved in the first place? It made him sick to his stomach, thinking of how he had dragged his own twin brother into his mess. The only other human being he had ever loved.

That was back in a time when Vash had been new, wide-eyed and head over heels, looking for some kind of dangerous adventure that he himself had been more than willing to provide for him, for a high price. And it made him sicker to think of how Vash had inevitably been the one who'd decided to end it once and for all, in the most effective way he knew how. The way Knives himself had taught him to end it; with the dropping of a heartbeat, and the falter of a pulse. But there was too much time for thinking in this place.

And this is how he has been living out his days.

They force-feed him a few more pills, to sedate and subdue, to turn him eventually from homicidal psychopath to basic retard. The kind that would claw his unyielding padded walls when he felt afraid and would look forward to "Movie Night" with the other stunted, drooling morons in his ward, because he hadn't been touched in years and the thought of another person's face other than those he remembered from time to time was both welcome and exciting or because by then, he would have become a devout Julia Roberts fan (because a bootleg copy of Pretty Woman was what they had lying around).

Pills, pills, pills.

Pills for breakfast, pills for lunch, pills for dinner, pills inbetween meals, pills to keep him functional, pills to stop the shaking and pills to stop the thinking. Pills to put him to sleep at night, morphine-induced dreams to stop the pain. Three orange ones, two pink ones, a few red ones, some were green, and then, the white pill for dessert. The one that made him itch and tremble. The one that made him sick.

Gross. Really pathetic. He tongues them again and scowls, receiving a look from his attendant as she edges her way out of the cell-blocked containment room and he pretends to swallow down his sticky euphoria, sucking on the somehow sweet colored coating before the medicine starts to give a bitter kick and he slips it into his socks. Sometimes it would stain and sometimes it didn't, but when it did he'd shove them rolled up into his underwear, filmy white elastic, because there was no place else they didn't check, which made the nurses that came in and out of this room, different shifts but the same people every day wonder, why is this patient barefoot? What did he do with his white ankle socks? And when he showed his pill-stained teeth, they quickly made up rumors and spoke in quiet, conspiring voices about number 112, Millions Knives, on their schedualed lunch breaks.

But they did that anyway. Because not only was he the victim of a horrible violent act, a once great power reduced to complete and utter shit, but he was also completely, homicidally, criminally, and now legally insane.

He could remember a time when he would have killed a man for even looking at him crookedly, let alone stirring shit behind his back. He could remember a time when he would walk into a room and all would drop to their knees or immediately shut their running mouths, never hesitating to get him exactly what he wanted, when he wanted. Bada-bing-bada-boom.

Or . . .when force was required, he'd have Legato fuck them up, really fuck them up, with nothing more than an easy command or a snap of his fingers. He could remember a time when there was a Legato. But what had happened to those people? Had they all abandoned ship after Vash had hammered the last nail into his coffin? Why had no one come to see him at his hospital? A Hallmark card would have been nice. At least another bullet to the head, point blank range this time, same gun, different motive, to end this never ending train of masochistic bullshit that he was choking on every fucking day of his life.

But even if they had been brave enough to come to see him after the incident, he'd never know. He'd been in a coma for almost two years before waking up- with almost full recovery. Nothing short of astounding really, but he wasn't even human, after all. He wasn't anything anymore.

People he'd known turned into memories turned into deluded visions, voices, and what could have been the last shreds of elusive feeling. And feelings? Melted slowly under his skin, burning into everything else so that they either meant nothing to him anymore or meant so much to him that they kept crawling and crawling and his mind was constantly itching with their presence. The spiders in his dreams, weaving endless and inconsistent webs that neither began nor had an end that he could coherently foresee.

But Hallmark cards were always still worth believing in, if there was nothing else. And as far as he was concerned, there was nothing else.

Because I console myself that Hallmark cards are true
I really do