Vash the Stampede. As we all surely know, one of anime's most complex characters. He is a very determined, honestly caring, sometimes ruthless man. No matter how long or how hard you press, you will get nary a blink from Vash the Stampede. But... the second you stop, he pushes back. Harder, heavier, stronger than you could ever believe. And when Vash is really pressed, he gives a performance that can rock the world or blast a hole in the moon.
He's lived far, far longer than many people, and he'll probably live a lot longer yet. He's seen several generations come and go in his time, with a deep connection in each life he leaves behind. He hides his helplessness and existential despair beneath the façade of a carefree, happy-go-lucky wanderer 'searching for the mayfly called love'.
But what if his façade were a bit different? What kind of changes would the world see? How would it stay the same?
This is the question I submit to you then, dear reader: what if Vash's façade was that of a coward?
P.S.: I just had to throw in the Shadowrun reference. Don't hate me.
Rewired Stampede Profiles
Case File one of four:
Coward
April City. 9 o'clock in the morning.
Four men came walking in. The patterns of their clothes had some common threads among them; the three headbands between the four of them had an identical pattern of sectioning triangles, while every pair of pants had an odd stitch going up the front of each leg. A sleeveless cargo vest, frayed at the edges and a bit stained, adorned their shoulders like gritty ornaments.
Their styles of dress differed from there, though; the largest one holding up the rear had only that much plus a crossed bandolier of ammunition, a bare minimum of material. He kept his hands near a pair of folding machine guns on the back of his hips. The shortest of them wore a white button-up shirt; its only purpose seemed to be to keep the gunpowder from his lever-action shotgun off his bare skin as he glanced down every alleyway they passed. The clean-cut one holding the right side of the formation held a pistol loosely up each sleeve, casting his gaze more subtly than his jumpy friend.
But the fourth member was different. A shroud swirled around his body, obscuring his arms behind an eye-proof barrier of shifting fabric. His hands flashed out from under it occasionally, showing a few odd twitches. His eyes flashed wildly as he looked around with surreptitious ease.
The dirt road beneath their feet was filthy. Old abandoned scraps of dry-rotted paper clung to the sides of a few buildings. Some stray dogs huddled around a corner, heads darting around nervously at any human that passed. A hanging sign tallied the number of reported crimes for the day. The robberies clocked in at about a hundred. Assaults stood at six times that.
Murders were in the low seventies.
The group walked on. Their eyes, one and all, were fixed forward. Indomitable. Looking for their bounty.
Ahead of them and above them, a second-story window grew a fracture with a slight kek.
The four men walked on.
The window shattered as a brown-haired man in chaps smashed through it, sailing backwards out into the hot morning air on Gunsmoke. Even as he was falling, the shortest one whipped his shotgun at him. He didn't fire.
The guy from the window landed on the ground with a painful thump. He bounced once, heavily, and his breath hitched for an instant before he let out the most painful shriek any of the men had ever heard.
"GAAAAAH! AAAKH... guh-HAAAAAGH! GAAAAAKH-KUH-KAAAAAAAGH!"
It went on and on, no thoughts behind the words, rushing horribly out of his body in an agonized stream of breath. A barrage of splintered metal and huge glass shards piled out of his gut, spilling blood onto the street dust. Eventually, one word formed itself from the broken noise:
"D-doc... doctor. DOCTOOOR!"
The short man looked almost embarrassed as he put his gun away.
"Yeesh. What a sight," he muttered.
The big man nodded.
The four men walked over him, ignoring his screams for a doctor.
A couple of pedestrians gathered around the injured guy. One of them - a kid - asked, "Hey... are you okay?"
The big man heard someone say back, "He's got a pile of shrapnel stuck in his guts."
There was a short, knowing sort of pause. Then, just as they were slipping out of earshot, the big man caught the last words: "He don't need a doctor so much as a priest..."
The four men marched on.
Elsewhere...
"Winners" played off in the corner while he ate. He enjoyed the tribal rhythm it gave to his mealtime, sort of like he was off playing cowboys-and-indians or something. The hems of his tattered red coat drifted over the sides of his chair while he ate, resembling nothing quite as much as a pair of folded crimson wings. He held a battered knife in his left hand, and a tarnished fork in his right; the utensils held two choice slices of syrup-slathered pancake each.
The bits of pancake somehow found their way into his mouth through his massive grin.
The waitress looked over at him.
He froze for an instant, let out a soft 'eek' and ducked under the tablecloth to get away from her gaze.
The waitress giggled a bit. "More coffee?" she asked.
He peeked nervously out from the edge of the tablecloth. His sky-colored eyes were wobbling and watering in their sockets as he nodded frantically.
The waitress smiled at him and walked closer to his table, taking the coffee pot with her. She moved slowly and smoothly, taking care that the coffee didn't slosh around in a way that would scare her customer.
Even so, the man dove back under the tablecloth and did not emerge.
The waitress filled up his cup and stepped back a few paces.
A leather-coated arm snaked up under the tablecloth and made the cup disappear. A moment later, the maple-y plate followed its beverage-oriented cousin in its amazing vanishing act.
Yet another moment later, they appeared again, clattering slightly. They came with a tiny scrap of paper.
The waitress drew closer and picked up the paper.
It was a photorealistic drawing of her, licking her lips and holding up a stack of pancakes, slathered in maple syrup under a pile of melting butter.
Underneath were two words: "More, please."
She flipped it over.
On the back was a drawing of the man himself, rubbing his belly and holding up a double dollar. Three words, this time: "I tip well."
Off on the other side of the diner, the other two patrons were engaged in a lengthy debate.
"Mom, buy me a gun," said one of them.
"And what are you holding at this very moment?" replied a haggard-looking woman with oily black hair.
"No, a real gun would be cooler!" countered an auburn-topped boy of twelve or thirteen years as he lovingly cradled his toy airgun to his chest. "I'll clean the chicken coop every day!"
"He's here." The shrouded man's arms emerged from the fabric, bringing out a pump-action shotgun. "Watch your back. Shoot straight. Conserve ammo. And never, ever cut a deal with Knives."
The man in the red coat cocked his head to one side. The comical look of fear that gripped his eyes vanished for an instant.
The waitress flinched.
The man in the red coat squealed and dove under the table.
"C'mon, mom, can't I have one?!" the boy whined.
The waitress perked up as she heard shoes approaching the door. She gave her apron a casual wipe-off, stepped slightly away from the man's table, and casually turned her back to the door.
The shrouded man flung the door open with his left hand.
The waitress turned - not slow, but not too fast either - and cried, "Oh! Welco..."
The man in the shroud leveled a shotgun at her and shot.
She flinched.
The man's shotgun went ch-chak and erupted in a cone of white fire.
She twitched.
The shotgun spat another cartridge from its chamber and crashed out another wall of lead.
A pellet grazed the waitress' ear and she realized... he wasn't aiming at her.
Then the windows exploded, carrying a storm of glass and metal and a furious stuttering rush of noise and edges and hellfire and the wind pitched everything all around the restaurant into a frenzy of wild death and all of a sudden everything fell silent.
Everything was silent.
Everything was still.
"WAAAAAAAAHHHH!"
The boy with the toy airgun was screaming.
The waitress turned slowly.
Sprawled on the floor was the coated man, crimson fluid leaking out of his body. His face pressed mercifully against the floor, hiding the vaporized crater that it was by now. His beautiful red coat - ragged to begin with - seemed like nothing more than a mass of holes. His spiky blond hair splayed out in a red-gold sunburst.
The table was split roughly in half from corner to corner. The same bullets that cut the table made gigantic craters and burns from scattered gunpowder in the wall behind it, too, turning the mellow meadow pattern into a landscape of Hell.
The door opened again. A huge man, a short, jumpy man with a scar, and a clean-cut man in a suit came in. Each of them wore matching bandannas with triangles on them.
Silence ruled again for a minute.
The clean one's mouth twitched. "Heh... we got him."
The scarred one smirked. "Ha... ha ha..."
"HA ha ha ha ha ha ha a ha haaaa!" shouted the big man as he dropped his guns. They clattered to the floor. "We did it! Sixty billion bucks! We're gonna be famous! Just think of the headlines on the news satellite!"
The jumpy one hoisted his shotgun and joined in. "'Famous outlaw gunned down in the outskirts of April City! Bounty collectors livin' large in wood mansions'! And all 'cause of Juan's plan!"
The clean one began laughing as he dropped his pistol. "Hey, hey! I thought I got us the guns, Al!"
The jumpy one - Al - waved him off. "Okay then, Davey! Maybe you didn't sit on your rusty old kiester while the rest of us went off and earned us a sixty billion double-dollar bounty!"
The shrouded one said nothing as he crept closer to the body and brought out a sleek pistol.
The big one went quiet as he looked over. "Hey... ain'tcha being a bit too cautious there, Magnus? With all this blood? Even if the guy was still alive, he'd be kinda hard-pressed to move!"
Magnus didn't even hear what Juan was saying anymore. He was watching for movements. With their current mark, he was NOT taking chances. Even with all those shots... even with all the red on the floor... this was God's Left Hand of Destruction. The Devil of Lost July. The Humanoid Typhoon.
He pulled his pistol closer to the man's head.
Juan looked over at the waitress and smiled at her.
"Oh, don't look so down! We'll fix this place up in no time!"
The waitress blinked.
"Oh, really?!"
"You bet! With this guy's head, we're billionaires now!"
The same voice cried out, "Oh, thank God! I was so scared!"
Juan paused. The waitress hadn't moved her mouth at all... wait...
He turned around.
"I mean, I was scared this nice lady wasn't gonna have a shop anymore!" explained Vash the Stampede. One of his arms draped over Magnus' stiff shoulders as he leaned in, his face was soaked red, and his voice was trembling, but he seemed far less dead than he had any right to be.
The restaurant fell silent again.
"...You reek of tomato," Juan said numbly.
Vash sniffed, then whimpered. "Oh, no! Not again! I was wearing a ketchup bottle on my head when I got shot at! Again!" He looked to the floor. "Uh... well, since you guys are repairing the shop and all... could you pay my laundry bill, too? I mean, you were shooting at me and..."
Juan huffed. "Sorry, kid. Tell you what..." He bent to the floor and retrieved one of his machine guns. "I'll give you a ONE WAY TICKET TO HELL!"
His gun came up in a flash.
Vash let out a high-pitched "EEK!" at the same instant he pulled the trigger on a revolver six times. The echo of the shots hung in the air for a long time.
Six suction-cup-tipped darts hung off of the would-be bounty hunters' faces.
"Don't do that!" Vash squealed. "I always get so scared when people point guns at me!"
Davey blinked. "Wh... what the hell... are you...?!"
Vash flinched. "Oh, jeez! Do I have to?! I get so nervous when I have to talk about me! It's making me so jumpy lately! It's like I have a bounty on my head or something!"
The bounty hunters exchanged glances with each other.
"Don't you... DON'T YOU DARE MOCK US!" Juan yelled as he raised his gun again.
Vash smiled at him.
The gun drew a bead on Vash's forehead as he pulled the trigger.
Click.
Vash sighed. "Don't try and scare me! Lord knows I'm scared enough. But jeez... didn't you know you ran out of ammo first?! All you guys ran out of ammo!" He paused. "Uh, except Magnus. But I took his gun away, so don't worry!"
The waitress tapped his shoulder.
"Eep!" he cried.
"How... did you know...?"
Vash cringed. His wobbly, watery blue eyes looked up at her as he answered,
"I counted."