This story takes place after the end of Trigun's anime series. On the Firefly side of things... What was that? Huh? Canon? What's that?
As always, don't take it too seriously. I may not be the best writer in the world (that honor goes to the team of Barb and J.C. Hendee), so forgive my ineptitude. If there is any. If it turns out I'm awesome, that's fine : )
Vash the Stampede was well over a century old. He'd seen his share of strange things, from a gunslinging samurai to a giant man who shot his own fists at people. The thing was, most of his experience had to do with guns, crossbows - basically, projectiles.
The knife at his throat was really throwing him off his game.
"AAAAGH! THAT'S A KNIFE! WHO USES A KNIFE?! THAT'S NOT FAIR!"
The man holding the knife flinched. His beady, narrow eyes flicked back and forth between the wanted poster in his hand and Vash himself.
"This better be a joke. If you ain't the Humanoid Typhoon, I'm gonna be mighty angry."
Vash's face (contorted in a ridiculous caricature of paralyzed fear until now) shrank into a quizzical look. "So if I am the Humanoid Typhoon, you'll be... happy?"
The burly man thought about this for a second. Finally, he nodded. "Yep, that's about right. Now, if you're him, I'd like to know before I slice your throat." He attempted a friendly smile and came out with a scary one. "Gives me a nice fuzzy feeling in my belly to think I get me sixty billion for somethin' so small."
Vash's eye twitched a tiny bit. "So... small?"
The burly man laughed. "Of course! Sixty billion for one life is just about perfect for me! And if that one life is a big-shot like Vash the Stampede, so much the better!"
Vash's eye twitched a little more. "You'd... kill me... for money?"
The burly man laughed again. "Oh-so-easily. You're money in the bank, little man. And it's time to collect."
Three gunshots rang in Vash's ears. The silver revolver in his hands kicked hard up into the man's arm, and all of a sudden Vash didn't have a knife to his throat anymore.
"Sorry, but you're overextended. I'm closing your account," Vash deadpanned.
The burly guy was flopping on the floor like a fish on a hook, clutching his leg and cussing up a dust devil. "Mother ******' ***t eatin' pile of **********' giraffe intestines! I'll r*** the *k** off your mother's ****** with a rusty pair of *******s! I'll f*** on your dog's ***** while he's e****'! I'll blow up your house! I'll blow off your ****! I'll-"
"How do you pronounce all that?!" Vash asked suddenly.
"WHAT THE F*** ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!"
Vash waved his hand. "Doesn't matter. Hey, guy. What's your name?"
"MY NAME IS GO FU-"
Vash karate-chopped him on the neck.
He soon discovered he didn't know karate.
"I'LL F***IN' S*** YOUR FACE ON A D**'S C***!"
Vash elected to pistol-whip the man silent. This time, it worked with relatively less censorship.
Vash sighed. "You put too much of a price on money, dude. Really. Money's not everything." Vash thought for a second. "Sure, it can buy a lot of stuff..." He thought for another moment. "I mean, really, a lot of stuff, but not everything. No, what you need to work for is..."
He stood up, put on his trademark dopey grin, and made a peace sign.
"Love, and, PEACE!"
The knife guy stared at him.
"Love, and, PEACE!"
The guy shook his head. In one second, Vash loomed over him like an anvil, smile like a skull, peace sign diving like a falcon at his eye.
"LOVE AND PEACE!" Vash screamed in his ear.
The guy screamed, too. He didn't make any words, exactly, unless "LAZPUGIFUH" is a word.
"Close enough for me!" Vash's smile was dopey again, and the peace sign was... well, a peace sign.
The guy who (until recently) had a knife looked at him strangely. "Are you really...? Are you really Vash the Stampede? Humanoid Typhoon, God's left hand, and all that scary stuff?"
"Yep, that's me!" Vash piped. "One hundred percent pure homegrown homicidal maniac, gunman and escape artist extraordinaire!" He bowed to him. "At my service. Now, if you'll excuse me, it's time for my daily murder spree!"
Without another word, he drew his revolver and started firing into the air and laughing wildly as he dashed for the outskirts of town.
The rest was kind of a blur. All Vash knew was, he got away before anyone started shooting at him. Well, maybe that one guy at the edge of town, but he might've been aiming for that sign.
Well, he could hope. Or wish.
Right now, he wished something incredible would happen, something that would make an atheist believe in God. Something that would make Knives give up his confusing mission... whatever it was. Something that could make Vash believe there was someone else out there...
At that very moment, something enormous soared over his head for several seconds and flew over the next dune.
He stood there with a stupid look on his face for some time.
When he finally got moving, it was a dead run going faster than any run he'd ever made. He climbed over the dune like an angry lizard chasing a doughnut made of flies. He got to the top of the dune and peeked over the side.
Vash the Stampede had seen a lot of weird things in his day, make no mistake.
Hypnotic demon eyes? Check.
Literal ghost towns? Au naturale.
Magical Christian laser arm cannons? Every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
The spaceship in front of him?
...
Ah, he needed to rewrite that list anyway.
For Malcolm Reynolds, Jayne Cobb, Kaylee Frye, River Tam, her brother Dr. Simon Tam, Inara Serra, Shepherd Book, Hoban Washburne and his wife Zoë, on the other hand... well, they were used to it.
"Zoë, would you set up the star-mappy-thingamajiggy? We gotta fix our location. This doesn't look like any Alliance space I ever saw," Mal called over his shoulder while he stood at the bottom of the Serenity's ramp.
"Yes, sir," Zoë said in a clipped, professional voice.
"And tell your husband to work on landing this bucket o' rust. I could feel that last dune ticklin' my feet as we came in!"
"I'll tell him, sir," Zoë lied.
Mal squinted around at the world he and his crew had found themselves on.
Sand piled around them in giant piles of sand.
It was pretty boring. Simon would probably haul out some technical facts about the cellular structure of microscopic something-or-other, but Mal just saw a lot of his least favorite kind of sand: sand. Sand everywhere. There was so much sand it filled the whole horizon and there was STILL enough sand to make huge piles of the stuff pile around his ship.
God, he hated sand.
Figures his ship would crash on a place like this. If it wasn't the Alliance, it was the Reavers, and if it wasn't the Reavers it was bounty hunters, and if it wasn't them it was corrupt businessmen, and if it wasn't them it was Niska, and if it wasn't Niska it was one of the other thousands o' people Mal and the crew managed to piss off in their wake.
Still, as long as he kept his feet under him, he could'a had a million people on his tail and it wouldn't matter. He had the Serenity. And on top of that, he had his crew.
Oh yeah, and Inara.
"I thought we were going to crash," came sultry feminine voice from the top of the ramp.
"Speak o' the devil..." Mal muttered.
"And she shall appear," came a monotone voice at his elbow.
"Gah! How long have you been there?!" Mal demanded of River, Simon's black-haired sister, as she knelt down and scooped up a handful of sand.
"I've always been here," River informed him.
Mal shook off the rest of his startle-y jolt, managed to tear his gaze away from the psycho-screwdriver that called itself River Tam, and forced it to settle on the far less terrifying image of Inara Serra.
"I was wondering when you were gonna join us, Inara," he called to her. "I mean, ain't sand supposed to be one o' them Companion therapy things or somethin'?"
"You're thinking of mineral-enriched mud," Inara corrected, "and no, I'm not joining you. I just wanted to get a breath of fresh air. It was getting very stale in there."
"I'm inclined to agree," added Simon as he lurched his way over the top of the ramp. "Some sterile desert air might do wonders for our risk of infection... as long as there aren't any airborne pathogens on this planet, you idiot. Did you ever wonder why this place was a desert?"
"Moses wandered in Sinai for forty years," declared Shepherd Book as he stepped past Simon. "And his people live on even now. There is purity in the desert."
"Well, I prefer impurity," Simon replied. "It's a lot nicer."
"Me, I'm purty impure myself," came a voice that made Simon twitch. A shadow broke off one of the walls and crept into the light. "Matter o' fact, I'm hankerin' for a woman just as impure as me at the moment," Jayne continued as he stretched out his bulky self in the brutal sunlight.
Kaylee ducked around the other guys, dashed to the bottom of the ramp, and flopped onto the ground. "Ain't it pretty out here?" she asked no one in particular. "All this here sand looks like glass from up the top o' the ramp!"
Wash - the pilot - finally made his way to the door. "So, Kaylee," he called down the ramp, "are you gonna set up the picnic basket, or should I? I mean, look at the view! There's a nice pile of sand right there! And a little over there? Some more sand. And you see that sand right on the edge of the horizon? It's sand!"
"Stow it, Wash," Mal called back. "We ain't here for sightseeing! I'm just hopin' Kaylee can get the old girl's engine fixed before some locals come callin' and - "
"HEY! HEY GUYS! IS THAT A SPACESHIP?!"
"Damn it!" Mal shouted.