*yawns again* I almost didn't write this, this evening.

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"I thought you had everything planned out," he commented after she fell silent.

"I have plans, but they're really more goals than carefully detailed schemes. Save the world, save the plants, terraform the planet, learn to paint. I mean, right now I'm working towards the first goal, but it's not so much a plan as it is me trying to take advantage of the choices offered me." She sighed again and sat back in the chair. "I'm really not very good at explaining things, and honestly? I think that I'm not a very good choice to be the ambassador for a species. But who can I shirk this responsibility onto? Knives? Not even a choice. Vash? He has much more practice shirking responsibility than I do. Ace and Alex are too young, and so that just leaves me."

"What makes you a bad choice?"

"I'm no sort of diplomat. You saw me; given the first opportunity I took out your guards. I'm used to a very quick solution to problems, the sort where people just do what I say because otherwise they'll learn a quick and painful lesson. I mean, I'm trying to be better about that, but some behavioral patterns are hard to break. And it doesn't help when you encourage such behavior by introducing an element of threat," she continued, waggling a finger. "I know about threats, and I know how to get rid of them quickly. But doing so does not help me look like less of a threat to you." She scowled down at the floor. "All it achieves is fear, and that's the last thing I want."

Silence stretched between them, Anne looking at the floor and one of the prone bodies of the guard there, Mark pouting, and her boss thinking things through.

"Why do you not want us to fear you? The actions of Vash and Knives and yourself have not been such to inspire trust."

"I was not the aggressor when I rescued Ace. You guys were. I just want to be clear on that."

"You killed him," growled Mark, but Anne ignored him.

"And as far as Vash and Knives go, honestly, what you have there, or what you had, are basically two scared boys. For over a century Vash was afraid to get close to anyone, afraid of mortality. One can hardly blame him; he watched almost everyone he cared for die before he was a year old. Then he had to watch as the remaining link to his past slowly slaughtered people who had done him no harm, and especially killed those that Vash might grow close to. Did you know that Vash was drawn to July by rumors that a relative of his mother figure lived there? Rumors planted by his brother I might add, for the explicit purpose of making his brother kill. If it weren't for the fact that Meryl is even more stubborn than him, he might still be running.

"And Knives is even more of a basket case than Vash. Abused as a child for being different, he grew to fear all humans. One of the problems with smart children is that they can rationalize actions that a more mature person cannot. And Knives decided that the only way that he would be safe, the only way he could keep his brother safe was to destroy that which he feared. And after making a decision for genocide, it is very hard to make yourself change your mind, to decide that the atrocities that you have performed were not in the name of a better cause. What does that make you, then? No better than a monster," she answered. "So he kept fighting, long after a sane man would have given up. His fear was all he had left to cling to." She paused.

"I fail to see where this is supposed to be reassuring," pointed out her boss.

"The reassuring part is that life is not static. People can learn to move beyond who they were. Vash has decided to become a part of a real society. Perhaps it's a small one, comprised mostly of Meryl and Millie, but he has made the commitment to be a part of the real world, the one where people do die. For a nomad like him that is a huge step.

"And Knives, too, has joined a community. It may just be Vash, Ace, Alex, and I, but it is much safer to have him answerable to moralities outside of his own. Basically, that's what communities do: we enforce the highest standards of morality on all members. Any society does this; it's how humans order the chaos of the cosmos.

"Besides," she pointed out, "I can kick Knives' butt if he tries to make trouble, and I am much more committed to peace than I am to keeping that boy happy." She fell silent again, and hoped that she had said the right things.

Her boss leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. The room fell silent again, and Anne resumed watching the twitching foot of the man beside her. She couldn't tell if he was waking up yet or not, and if he was waking up, how he was going to wake up. He might be groggy, or he might wake up a threat, so she kept a close eye on him.

Plus it was an excuse to look somewhere else.

"I don't think I want to kill you right now," her boss said abruptly. "You have said some interesting things, shown some interesting talents. The threat you pose may outweigh the benefits of your healing, but this is not a decision to be made lightly, quickly, or by one person. So you get a reprieve.

"You may go back to your job, but Mark will shadow you everywhere you go. Stay close, and do not try anything or I will instruct him to kill you."