Canvas
Meryl remembers her grandmother's painting of an old, slightly wilted rosebush. The colors of paint had been so gentle, the petals—red and vibrant like wine bottled in glass—were from an otherworld. Her grandmother's painted roses were images of a time long past, when her grandmother's mother could still remember their scent.
Mechanism
Vash stops each time he takes a bite of the first doughnut. It is his ritual, an attempt to allow thought. So far, he doesn't see just a doughnut, he sees a wheel, a circular cycle. Life and death spin in a circle, he knows this. Life needs death, and death needs life. But if one were not a determinant in the matters of nature and its laws, how could he have saved the spider and the butterfly? The world idly stares back at him each time he looks through the center of the doughnut.
Settlement
There were humans in the world. All humans need other humans—to survive, to dominate, to control, to love, to create. There were dots of civilization populating the world, and through instinct alone, humans who don't know other humans all behave the same way to survive. Knives has always hated humans, but then, during that time, he'd been behaving like one.
Catharsis
When Milly sends home her monthly letters to her family, she thinks she should include why she'd been crying for the past few days. Her mother always tells her that tears are the soul's relief—sometimes, they were releasing, other times they were distracting—but after all, after one cries, they are immediately buoyed. Maybe cigarette smoke has the same effect on someone who's cried other people's tears. She never removes the ash from the cigarette he'd burned on the windowsill.
Contradiction
Meryl never ran from Vash until yesterday. He'd remembered it all, that he'd taken a life, violated his own laws. She'd aided in his torment either way. Death would have been the result in whatever choice he'd made, but she couldn't sit with him while he remembered—she couldn't listen. Her survival became his torment, and now she doubts that he had any laws for those who wished the death of another to continue on living.
Existence
Knives hands a small girl the last of his bread. He doesn't really need to eat it, but the way the girl smiles unabashed and munches away reminds him how connected humans forget they are to the earth. He despises the connectivity, the subtly that binds him to the girl. For plants, though superior and enlightened, rely on the very energy that creates life. He scorns the alikeness, just how he is obsessed with how twin plants can be so dissimilar from each other. The bread withers away faster than the girl can finish eating it. At her dissatisfaction, Knives grins.
Dose
Vash knows the woman in his arms will invite him into her room later—that is his whole reasoning for coming into the rundown pub. She is so eager and fierce, licking the corners of his beer-stained lips, suckling his earlobe, and playing in his hair. She isn't concerned with Vash, just her own desires that shut away caution. She'd been present when he'd destroyed this town and sucked away the people's happiness. She'd only been a small girl.
Will
Meryl kisses Vash when he is free. The town has just hit water earlier in the day, and a drunken free-for-all celebration ensued shortly after. She is buzzed by the liquor, spots Vash atop the hill that is more of a stairway to the fractured moon. His twin rests in the same bed he'd recovered in. She comes before Vash, lifts him to his feet and kisses him on the space between his eyes. They laugh quietly. She is a fool for her wishful thinking, but a foolish champion for trying.
Distance
They make love because she is yelling at him for caring. Humans don't live forever, and it is selfish to think they do. She holds her tongue suddenly and he sighs into the quiet night air. She grasps his hand even if his back is to her, and they unravel each other. When he is asleep, and the wind scrapes against their naked skin, Meryl thinks that humans need to die so that they can see the people they had to say goodbye to. If she says that to Vash, she will be selfish and caring herself.
Limit
Vash never thinks of himself as immortal. He lives far longer than any human, and he hurts and feel pain all the same. But even he knows that his life will expire, and that the fact that he lives makes him mortal. Life involves death, and to be immortal, one needs to outmaneuver both life and death.
Person
Milly sees Wolfwood cry. He is staring out into the rain from the window. She can see his blue reflection and the streak of rain that falls from his glass cheek. He wipes the phantom rain away because it is the closest he can get to touching his soul.
Escape
Meryl studies the amber liquid sloshing about in her shot glass, her little potion. She believes that if she drinks it, she will outlive life. Believing is just harmless, not selfish. So she drinks it and laughs as it burns the back of her throat. She finds Vash passed out on the stairs of the bar's entrance. Together, they make the drunken trip home. Funny, she thinks, I'm competing with a dead woman.
End
The removed bullets in his limbs feels like trails of fire, snapping at his veins, his core. He sees the blue sky from inside of a creaking, moldy building and thinks that he is held captive again on a human ship. He is not plying through the skies, he is not with Vash, he is against him. The pain taking eternal residence in his body prevents him from breaking his brother's hand as it rests on Knives' injured forearm.
Gravity
They make love again, without words, sad and weary while the sun rises to waken the birds. Vash sees the light of day against Meryl's sleeping frame. She slopes and ascends, the golden earring she always wears falls between her shoulder. With his fingers, Vash brushes the juncture, convinced that he can stay.
Light
When Vash smiles like a child, Milly sees Meryl's feelings burbling out of her like a swollen river. She wants to bring this side out of Meryl anytime she can. When they both smile like a child toward each other, Meryl and Vash get along so well. Milly knows this and uses alcohol to her advantage.