A/N: Angst ahoy!
9. Between A Rock And...
Vash had always hated hospitals.
In his one hundred plus years, Vash had spent plenty of time in one ward or another, dying or wishing he was. Numerous doctors had been amazed that he healed so quickly and told him he was lucky to be alive. Vash wasn't so sure it was luck.
He lay in a hospital now, most of his body wrapped in gauze and bandages. He felt a sensation of what must have been pain, but the drugs being pumped into him through the IV deadened everything, including his mind. Vash stared up at the ceiling tiles and let the beeping of the monitors make his brain go numb.
Vash hated how lifeless everything was. Everything seemed artificial and emotionless, with the pumps and valves and cords and machines, keeping people alive when they were supposed to be dead. It seemed wrong. Vash remembered Rem telling him about humanity's will to survive, how it was intense, so powerful that they would go to any lengths to ensure it. But what happened to the people who were no longer alive, but didn't have the weakness to die?
How was anyone supposed to recover in such a place? Vash really didn't have a choice in the matter. His body always healed, whether he wanted it to or not.
He stared one of the only windows in the ward. How long had he been there? A few hours? Days? Weeks? Did it even matter? The view from the window was as blank as the interior of the hospital. It was like there was some sort of screen that sucked all the color and vitality out of the landscape. It did the same to all the people as well.
Vash knew why he hated hospitals. Nothing was hidden in hospitals. Everything was sterilized and white and magnified underneath the harsh light. In hospitals, you couldn't hide behind your emotions or labels or expectations. Or your fake smiles. All of the suffering and the anguish that existed outside the hospital was amplified within it, because there was nothing else to take up the space.
In the bed next to him, a man coughed, his chest making faint wheezing noises. Vash watched the pump that filled his lungs with air, a manmade accordion that fed his body oxygen. In, out, in, out, keeping in time with the cluster of life support units around the man's bed. The man's wife was propped up in a chair next the bed, her eyebrows furrowing as she slept fitfully. Vash adverted his eyes. The man wasn't going to make it.
Vash closed his eyes as the timeless question brooded in his mind. Why did he live when others died? But no matter how many times Vash asked himself that question, he could never come up with an answer. That was his problem; too many questions and not enough answers.
What was his purpose? Did he even have one? Vash had spent the majority of his life wandering around this dust ball of a planet, searching for his purpose, a reason to be alive. It had gained him nothing but emptiness and grief and trips to the hospital, nothing but the weight of all the broken people that had strayed across his path. Sometimes Vash thought that maybe his purpose was to wander forever in search of his destiny, like he had somehow fallen through the cracks of meaning and sense when the universe had been created. He was searching for something he wouldn't know, even if he did manage to find it.
So what was the point?
Vash settled back in his bed and let his mind drift away to the beeps of the monitors and the whooshes of the pumps. At this point, Vash usually would have asked Rem what to do, asking her why things happened and why people were the way they were. Vash felt tears prick at his eyes.
But he didn't have the strength to cry. Besides, there was no point in asking questions of someone who left you a long time ago. She had never known the answer either.