Title: Wanting
Author: Digimon Empress Yaten (de yaten)
Notes: Omigod, this came out of nowhere. I meant to write a Bill Conrad piece for my Gunsmoke Shuffle drabble series, but then I decided I would let it be over 100 words because I couldn't cut it down, and somewhere along the way it became Bill/Knives and I decided to convert it to a V-day fic. Mangaverse. The "typo" near the end is not a typo.
Disclaimer: I don't own Trigun or its characters.
Bill Conrad had rarely wanted for anything.
Especially after waking up on Gunsmoke to explanations of The Big Fall and the swift passage of time since he was last conscious. His plant expertise quickly secured him a life that was comfortable, luxurious, and just a tad boring. It also secured him a new life as a doctor slave of Knives.
Knives, who hunted him down on a moonlit night, and crushed his former life with a few words and a few less-than-subtle threats.
Bill did admit that working for the Plant had a few perks. His old employer hadn't been above making him work double shifts purely because he was too cheap to hire a new technician. The gold rings on the greasy fingers told Bill that he could certainly afford another technician, if not an entire team. Plant technicians were rich, but the owners of the Plants were beyond wealthy.
Knives, however, often forced the doctor to stop his work and rest.
"Human bodies are disgustingly frail, and I want you running at full capacity when you help my Sisters."
The first time he was given such an order, and explanation, Bill's weariness had let his thoughts glide to Knives easily: I didn't think you had such a soft spot for me… Knives had swiftly knocked him against a wall, and Bill looked up expecting to be hit further for his comment. He definitely hadn't expected to hear Knives chuckle and smile at him. It made the doctor thoroughly terrified.
It was the eyes that did it, he thought later. For someone bent on the genocide of an entire species, Knives smiled an awful lot.
He smiled when the doctor gaped at a pile of double dollars left on his bed one Valentine's Day - "Make sure you stock up on medical supplies. And I suppose you can buy something for yourself, as well. Maybe a new hat?" - and he smiled when he invited the Doctor to his quarters later on to share a drink, though Knives didn't even touch the expensive, almost-impossible-to-find wine that was poured.
Knives did not smile at first when they later found themselves entangled in the silk bed sheets, with Knives calculating when he should kiss and when he should bite and when a simple touch sufficed, but the smile appeared when he managed to make the doctor break his calm façade and grip the bed sheets in ecstasy (then shame, then fear, when he felt a thick angel-blade pressed against him.)
But no matter how wide or pleasantly Knives smiled, his eyes remained passive. Empty.
Bill Conrad had rarely wanted for anything. But now he wants, desperately, for those blue eyes to look as they had years ago, when they first met - wide, innocent, kind, and warm with real tears.
Those eyes were hard now. Harsh and icy and unforgiving and often stark-raving mad because of the crew's single sin, Tessla – little Tessla strapped down and toothless and aware of nothing but pain.
Yes, Bill Conrad had rarely wanted for anything.
But now he only wants Knives to, maybe-please-won't-you-listen, give up his dreams of murder and blood and metal, and leave behind the endless parade of mass murderers and freaks to live with only him. And maybe Vash, if Vash could be persuaded to come without more slaughter.
"I'll stay with you," the doctor says, after Knives' hair has begun to darken and it will only go downhill from there.
But he knows the second that Knives asks the transvestite about Vash that he is dead, because Vash is important and Bill Conrad is nothing to Knives. And the words that first night after they both smelled like sex but only one of them was bleeding come to him in cuts, "I hate you, you're worthless, you're not Vash."
The impossibly sharp Knives come swiftly after and his last thoughts are the taunting echoes of words he spoke to the Plants once, before The Big Fall, before Knives went mad, before the brothers ever discovered Tessla.
"If you can love someone with all your heart, then it's all right. … Let's walk on together."