To my reviewers Alder-Elma, buttercup22, Aine of Knockaine, RperQueen, and Celesma: BIG THANK YOU! You all rock! And since Aine suggested I write a second chapter, double credits for her!
Right. Second chapter. Longer, but not necessarily better. Warning: contains overly flowery bits. Blame essay-related stress.
This is actually the third rewrite of this story; it kept getting deleted by my flashdrive. By the way, always back up your flashdrive stuff on a hard drive, they're temperamental little buggers and prone to deleting large swathes of your essay the night before it's due.
I've tried to draw on Vash's more philosophical side, which is a little hard since you don't often see it, so it's ended up a bit OOC. Meh. Never mind, tell me what you think.
No poem this time, but if you want you can listen to the song 'Patience' by Guns n' Roses. And no, I don't claim credit for the song, either.
Disclaimer: Well, since I didn't own Trigun last chapter, what makes you think I'll own it now?
It was like being in a furnace. No, scratch that: it was like being in a furnace while carrying a body, with pants that chafed mightily and several painful gunshot wounds. Vash stopped walking, and looked up at the suns. The heat was merciless this time of day – better take a rest, he decided. Getting dehydrated would do nobody any good.
Knives slid off his shoulder with a muffled whump.
"Sorry" he muttered, a little insincerely.
He paused to spill a little water in his brother's mouth and take a drink. A broad smile was beginning to inch across Vash's face, almost unconsciously. If anyone but a comatose psychopath and a very disinterested feline was around, they would have marvelled at how the air around the world's most wanted man seemed to sparkle.
"You need to give them a chance, you know. There are some good people out there who deserve life. You'll meet some of them soon." A happy warmth coloured his words.
The dry rattle of sand in the wind was his only reply. The silence didn't fool him; unconscious or no, Vash could still feel his brother cataloguing a series of insults, injuries and idiocies to be used as evidence against him. Should he add more grist to the mill? Better not, if he was going to introduce his brother to the world.
He sat back, his mind drifting towards other things. There was an ache beginning to build in his chest that had absolutely nothing to do with his wounds. It had taken a very long time for him to recognise it as love. It had grown so slowly, creeping over him like… like a… a rash. Ha – the rash metaphor would be good for some Meryl-baiting. The thought bought her image to mind; small form taut with anger, face flushed, chest heaving, bristling like an offended cat.
Beautiful, yet scary.
Most people only saw her dedication, iron will and vicious temper, (he knew them well – after all, he'd been on the receiving end of all three), qualities that made her admirable but hard to like. Very few people ever saw that underneath was a soft, kind, and self-sacrificing woman with very deep feelings. Once he'd seen that part of her, keeping distance between them got harder and harder.
He sighed. Before, he'd worried Knives would find her and kill her because of her closeness to him. He'd held back because she would inevitably age and die while he would stay the same – immortality was cruel. He'd wander throughout the world forever, while those around him lived and died, their passing brief as geranium flowers…
But she'd shown him something about that the day he saw Rem in her.
"You once told me they weren't worth anything because their lives were so short," he said to the inert lump he called brother, "but you're wrong. They are important."
He stopped, remembering. Meryl's face. Rem's face. Both speaking the same words; love, peace, hope. One message across time.
"If you love someone," he continued, "they will never truly die. They'll live on inside you, in the people around you. Even though you'll have to let them go, they won't desert you."
Vash got the distinct impression his brother was entirely unimpressed by this discovery.
"No pleasing you, huh?"
He knew the little time he'd be able to spend with Meryl wouldn't be easy or enough. Even though he loved her, someone accepting and understanding, the great gulf of mortality still came between them.
Even with the price, she was still worth it.
That was the meaning of love and peace, right? Have patience and perseverance, and always keep the hope that you'll find love again in your heart.
He stood and stretched - time was moving on, and he had somewhere he needed to be. The black cat sitting on his brother was shooed away, and the dead weight of his brother resettled on his shoulder.
"Let's go home."
Little note: I thought that maybe you could take the bit where Vash sees Rem's face superimposed over Meryl's as Vash understanding that people don't abandon you when they die, that Rem hadn't abandoned him, that our loved ones live on in other people, and that Rem's ideas are still around and are making a difference. I also think that Rem's death was made far more traumatic because of the way she died, the fact that it was sudden, and it was Vash's first experience of death (which does make a difference). I thought that maybe this and the fact that Vash had just defeated his brother would give him a bit of a spur to seize the moment and find some happiness. I guess I belong to the 'better to love and loose than a lifetime of the unrequited stuff' school of thought. Hmm… I also waffle too much.