Author(s) Note: Well, I can't believe this thing is being resurrected, but it is. Those of you who hung out in this fandom a long, long time ago might remember a certain little story called "Oh Dear God."
Well, DeadLegato was pestered quite a bit to resurrect this fic, but she wouldn't do it (mainly because she doesn't know where she put the original files and she wasn't willing to dig through piles of disks to try to find it). So this is a "rewrite" of the DeadLegato original, since she doesn't remember a lot of the details and I don't remember all the exact details about this story, especially a lot of the character names (which were really great names, sadly), but those of us on this end shall do our best to recreate the original story. If you were around early enough in the fandom to remember it, feel free to drop us a line.
Takes place after the end of the anime, and contains liberal amounts of OOC for Knives.
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The wind was blowing with the crisp smell of overturned dirt from the new well. The town was in an overall good mood because of the water that gushed forth, promising to give life to their dying lands and shriveled crops. Meryl had even seemingly adjusted to being a target of much butt-slapping and man handling, and the city workers had grudgingly accepted that a woman could be one of them. Of course, Milly had been a rather masculine specimen of a woman in the first place.
Vash mostly remained at the house, puttering around, poking at the tender leaves of young onions trying to come out of the sandy dirt. His brother was still out of it, but at the slightest breath of a whimper Vash would be inside and at his side, holding his brother's hand and waiting for those iced blue eyes to open again.
By the time the first fast-growing radishes were ready to be pulled out of the ground, Knives was up and moving about again, though in a hazy sort of manner. It had been about a month since what could have been their "final" showdown when Knives' head suddenly cleared.
He'd been sitting, poking his oatmeal repeatedly with a fork as if afraid that the lumpy concoction that had sprung out of Meryl's limited cooking abilities, when suddenly he'd looked up. The haze had gone from his eyes, and he's begun shouting at the top of his lungs about why his amazing personage was being forced to share a table with not only a spider… but two female spiders.
"Sorry, Knives," Vash said, putting down a cup of tea on the table. "But you're going to have to get used to it. Milly and Meryl are my friends, and I'm not sending them away just because you have issues with your fear of humans."
"I'm not afraid of those disgusting spiders. I refuse to share a table with them. Their smell makes me too sick to eat."
"Actually, that smell is probably you. You could really use a bath. Now get down off the ceiling, Knives."
"But I can smell them from up here," he fussed as Vash pried him down and forced him back into his chair.
"You've been living with them up until now without having any problems with them. Now come on, we're finally back together again. Isn't this what you wanted?"
Knives looked up. "Is it what you wanted, brother?" he asked in return, his voice dull and contained barbed hints of pain and hope at the same time.
"Yes."
"Then throw the spiders out. I can make even a dirty little hubble like this into Eden if I have you."
Vash resisted the very strong urge to start slamming his head repeatedly into the table. But then, isn't pushing your buttons exactly why siblings were created in the first place? Vash just took a deep breath. "You're going to have to get used to them. Right, Meryl?"
"I'll kill them all!"
"Good luck using your angel arm when I buried our guns somewhere out in the desert."
Knives eyes filled up with an indescribable horror. "You… you…"
Vash took a sip of his tea, noticing it was a bit on the bitter side, and choosing to add a half lump of sugar. "Yep. And if you want them back, you're going to have to dig up all the sand in the desert to find them."
Knives stood up, slamming his hands onto the table hard enough to make the little white porcelain cups shake. "You just watch me then, I will!" he snarled as he snatched up a gardening shovel from the porch and stormed outside. Vash wondered if he should stop him. After all, he was in just his white pajamas…
"He'll be back," Vash mused instead.
About five minutes later, Knives did storm back in. "The spade hurt my hands. You, human! Dig for me!" he said, pushing the shovel in Meryl's face.
Vash tucked a very unhappy Knives into bed that night. "Oh, come on now, she did not leave a hand print on your face."
"My face, my face, my beautiful face," Knives muttered obsessively, as he done all day after Meryl had responded to his comment about getting her lazy spider self out in the desert and starting digging for him. "I feel sick."
"I'm not surprised, running around out in the sun all day after being inside for nearly a month. You should take it easier," Vash replied, trying to sound as motherly as possible for someone with his personality.
"Going off to work this morning, girls?" Vash asked, boiling water on top of the stove.
"You should get a job, too," Meryl snapped in response. "We do all the work to pay the bills around here."
"But I clean the house and weed the garden and take care of Knives!" Vash protested, making a pout that was eerily similar and yet different from Knives' pout. "I think he's sick, anyway. I heard him in the bathroom all morning this morning."
"Yes, we know. Thanks to his bathroom hogging I'm probably going to be late," Meryl muttered angrily, grabbing the little baggie lunch Vash had prepared and her shoes as she stormed out the door.
Vash frowned. "What's so funny, Milly?"
"We got out and work and Mr. Vash, you're a… you're a househusband!"
Vash's face turned slightly greenish. "No I'm not! I'm… I'm a live-at-home caretaker."
Milly laughed again and picked up her lunch. "You should have a cute little apron to wear, Mr. Vash. Have fun with your soap operas and knitting club!"
"Yeah, and I'll make sure the baby's diaper is changed," Vash finally joked back, jerking his head slightly in the direction of Knives' bedroom. The two broke into a moment of hysterical, shared laughter as Milly picked up her lunchbag and headed out for the day, leaving Vash to his live-at-home-caretaker duties.
By the end of the next week, however, Vash had begun to become very worried about Knives. His sickness hadn't let up, and he was starting to look slightly greenish with dark circles around his eyes. Everything seemed to irritate him, from the feel of the sheets against his skin (too scratchy) to the feel of his own underwear (too tight) to the taste of food (bad appetite from throwing up half the things he ate).
Vash stood over the dishes, dark circles under his own eyes from the constant strain of having to care for Knives' illness. "Vash, you look horrible. Maybe you should get some rest and let Milly and I take care of Knives."
"No, he'd never allow that. He still calls you spiders every chance he gets. I'm just worried… what if something happened to him during our fight? He could be sick and dying, and I could just be standing here letting him die."
"Then you should get him to a doctor… or an engineer…" Meryl mused. Her hand moved forward, as if to touch Vash's shoulder, and then retracted. It wasn't her way to violate the personal space of another unless she was pounding them senseless for an infraction.
"I'm worried that if we take him on a steamer, he'll try to blow it up."
"Yes… that… unfortunately, sounds very much like your brother." Meryl paused. "Milly's doing a good job of holding in the fact that she really blames him for Wolfwood's death."
"I know, she's really a big saint of a woman in more ways than one," Vash sighed, nearly dropping a blue plate for this exhaustion. Meryl pulled it gently out of his scarred fingers. "Go to bed, Vash. You really need some sleep."
Vash slowly made his way to the room he'd been sharing with Knives. As soon as the footsteps grew close enough for Knives to determine that the heavy thuds were Vash's boots, moaning and groaning began filtering out of the room. Vash matched his pale blonde brother's groans with his own. Wouldn't Knives ever let him sleep?
Ignoring Knives' whining, Vash collapsed into the scratchy brown sheets of his own bed. Sand, he thought miserably. No matter how many times he shook out the sheets, sand.
"Vash, I feel bloated, my stomach is tight, and I threw up again," Knives whimpered three times in a row, each time more loudly than the last. Vash sat up, frown lines creasing his face. He seemed to have finally started aging, if only from the stress of Knives' constant baby-like demands.
"We'll have to take you to a doctor then, no other choice."
Knives pulled the blankets up over his head. "No, I am not letting some human spider put rough hands on my delicate skin and touch me in hideous ways, and I am most certainly not going to "bend over" even if commanded to do so by a gun-toting doctor maniac."
"Knives, it's for your own good! You were always like this, remember back on the ship when Rem would try to give you cherry cough syrup and you'd hide your head in the pillowcase and Rem would tell you not to because she was worried that you'd-"
"If I have to hear one more Rem story, I'm going to puke. Again. I was there, Vash. I don't need to hear the story."
Vash grunted, irritated with how Knives' shortness always cut down Vash's attempts at cheering his twin up. "Fine, then, I was only trying to cheer you up. I'm going to take you to a doctor whether you like it or not. I hope I can find one with some knowledge of plants, other than one from the not-so-flying-anymore ship. I'd be afraid one of those doctors would take revenge on you."
"As human spiders would, revenge and jealousy over my greatness."
"Go to sleep, Knives. Go to sleep." In all truth, even with Knives as sick as he was, it was the doctor they were going to have to go see that Vash felt sorry for. He hoped the poor guy, or girl as the case might happen to be, had a thick enough skin to deal with his brother…
"Vaaaaaaaash, there's a single grain of sand in my pillow! Get it out, I can't sleep!"
… Because Vash was certainly unsure if he could.
To Be Continued…