Chapter Text
July City is still young when Vash first hears of God.
The God of July is a god of bounty, it's said. Of justice and reparations, too, and of blood and storms and sickness, because a god's kindness means little if he is only ever kind. All humans are born having already sinned, but those who make efforts to redeem themselves will feast at his endless table after death. His heaven is a plentiful one, an oasis with suns whose heat never burns and more water than all of humanity could ever drink and more food than they could ever eat. God provides.
The Eye of Michael is the first plant cult in the new world. The other plant cults that follow it through the years will all diverge from that same root.
In a town not far from July, a priest holds a sermon in a public meeting hall booked for the next several hours for the purpose. Foldable seats fill the room, and people fill the seats, though the back two rows remain largely empty. When Vash settles in near the door, no one spares him a second glance, but when he leaves silently halfway through, smiling sheepishly and making apologetic gestures, the people sitting closest to him watch him go with disapproval.
He buys what supplies he needs, and then he takes a courier job delivering cases of letters and small packages to Hopeland. Despite never staying in a single area for long, he's built a reputation for being reliable with this sort of work, which is sorely appreciated in a world where messengers regularly get eaten by worms or are robbed by bandits or collude with bandits or die of thirst after heading a few degrees in the wrong direction.
Letters in hand, he leaves without spending the night and doesn't come so near July again for a century and a half.
---
Within a generation, humanity carves out their niche in No Man's Land.
Their position is new and volatile still, but they've laid out the foundations and begun to build upon them. Settlements formed around plants, high walls to protect from sandstorms and raiders (not everyone was lucky enough to land near a plant during the Big Fall), thriving industries in repurposing spaceship materials.
Vash makes himself useful. In their initial desperation for resources, the humans exhausted so many plants that, for a while, he spends most of his waking hours following the fading echoes of his sisters' voices.
He finds dozens of stranded groups that way, humans who fell with a plant but not a communication device, and brings them into contact with the nearest spaceships. He helps with construction, as an architect for the groups that don't quite know how buildings work and as extra muscle for those that do. He negotiates peace between raiders and the villages they'd been fighting – the villages thought they had finite resources that they needed to hoard, but, once he connects them with the spaceships and they discover that humanity retained access to tens of thousands of plants, that excuse falls away.
This is the first time Vash meets humans who don't understand that he's not one of them.
He falls in love.
He loved them before he ever knew them, of course. The concept of them – naturally destructive animals capable of creating even more than what they ruin, and who as a whole always strive to do that, even if it's harder, even if they have to make sacrifices for it. Creatures with drive and potential enough to become anything they put their minds to.
A species of people like Rem. How could he have done anything but love them?
And then he meets them, really meets them – greets them as equals and kin, mingles with them, talks to them – and they're everything he imagined. There's so much depth to every single one of them.
They're also, unfortunately, terribly vulnerable.
It doesn't take much to send a life off course, he learns. Anything capable of hurting Vash does worse to them.
So he'll become their shield. He'll stand between them and the dangers they're too frail to risk against, even if those dangers are other humans. He can't bear watching them hurt each other, but he can survive most of what they might throw at him.
He wants to start doing right by them, and… to atone for future harm.
There's so much that he won't be able to save them from, and a good portion of it will be his fault.
---
Twenty-three years after the Fall, Vash knows enough about humans and enough about weapons to recognize the sound of leather creasing against a gun grip.
He whips around to look, and he spots a figure across the street leveling a pistol at him.
“What – ” He retreats, raising his hands, and doesn't have a hard time making himself look lost and startled and pathetic because he is lost and startled and pathetic.
Is he getting mugged? It happens with unusual frequency – he has the face of someone who would follow a stranger into a dark alley at night, he's been informed, which… fair, yeah, he's done that a couple of times – but in broad daylight in the middle of town? He's not the only pedestrian carrying a visible weapon, so it's not that they mean to attack more people and want to take out the main resistance first, either.
Has he wronged them somehow? But he doesn’t forget faces, and this one he doesn’t recognize.
He ducks before they pull the trigger, and the bullet bores a hole through the wall of the general store behind him. It doesn't strike anyone inside – he would have deflected it if it might have – but he freezes for a split second anyway, caught flat-footed.
Whatever the attacker's motive, they don't have enough experience with firearms to have considered the possibility of collateral damage. Why is a stranger who doesn't know how to handle a gun trying to shoot him on the street?
“Hey – ” he begins, voice high, and breaks off to scramble out of the paths of the second and third bullets.
The fourth goes wide towards a window with someone behind it, and he leaps in front of the shot to intercept it. He yelps as it bounces off of his left arm. The prosthetic doesn't damage easily, but he receives nearly a full range of sensory output from the limb; although it doesn't register pain, impacts aren't comfortable, either.
Alright, enough of this. He jumps an unremarkable height, pulls himself onto a shop's eaves, and clambers up another story to perch on the roof. They won't shoot a bystander by accident if they stop aiming towards street level.
“Are you a gunman or not?” the shooter yells. “Draw your weapon!”
Vash darts a glance to his gun holster as if noticing it for the first time. “It's a prop,” he shouts back. “Can't we talk this out? Whatever you've got against me, is violence really – ”
Violence is really.
Five rounds, and now they switch the gun out for a second, identical pistol. A bit of an unconventional tactic, but if they're not the quickest at reloading then Vash supposes they have to compensate somehow.
Well, they don't have to. They could stop firing instead. But people generally mean well, and this one really seems to dislike him, and they’ve stopped accidentally threatening bystanders, so he’ll hold off on taking action until he can hear their reasons.
“Draw! Stop running!”
“I really dunno who you think I am!”
The shooter, both guns spent, stops to reload very, very slowly. Their right arm from the elbow down moves oddly clumsily. The rustle when they bend their elbow doesn't match leather against skin, either. “Red coat. Blond hair. Glasses. A heavy revolver. Don't play innocent. You're Vash,” they spit, “former lieutenant of the Bloodhounds gang.”
What.
“The what gang?” Someone framed him? A courier and occasional plant engineer who hasn't been in this town for an hour? He waves his arms frantically. A lot of people are watching from windows and behind cover; he needs to clear the misunderstanding before they get the wrong idea, too. “There's a mistake here – ”
The shooter snarls and snatches the glove from their right hand, exposing a metal prosthetic gleaming dully in the sunlight. Not Space Age technology, that one; Vash curls his own artificial fingers into a loose fist, then relaxes.
“You escaped justice once, when the other Bloodhounds were captured! But I'm bringing you in,” they declare, even though they've tried to aim exclusively at Vash's vitals.
Tried, only. No harm done.
At least he finally understands the situation. He hasn't dealt with similar before, but, since the problem stems from a mistaken identity, he needs to convince them he's not a ranking member of the gang that lost them their arm. Pretty straightforward.
He remembers Rem telling them she loved them, the long fall through darkness and fire, Nai in the wreckage confessing between laughter, his own helplessness through it all, and he bursts into tears. Big, hot, gloopy tears that smear across his glasses, complemented by a snotty nose, bawling, the works. He can't distinguish more than blurs through the water across his glasses, but the shooter-colored blob stops moving.
“I dunno anything about that!” he wails. Dignity exists to get people hurt. “I don't know why you're trying to kill me! I haven't been here before! I was gonna pass through without stopping but there's an inn and I miss sleeping in a bed!”
For a solid fifteen seconds, he only hears the wind and his own sobbing.
Then an onlooker calls, “You've got the wrong guy.”
“No, but….” The shooter stands frozen. Vash sniffles loudly, takes off his glasses, and scrubs at his face with his sleeve. “I was sure…. You fit the description.”
“I'm Vash,” he blubbers, wiping the tinted lenses dry on his coat and fitting them back on before the suns can light up the plant markings in his eyes, “but I just carry mail. I dunno about any gang members.”
The shooter stares, slow realization dawning. “Someone framed you. Why?”
He shrugs.
With a touch of desperation: “How'd you get that arm? That's lost technology.”
“Found it in the desert.” Unlikely, but just barely plausible enough that he can imagine it happening to someone ridiculously lucky. Also, would they really accuse him of lying immediately after they tried to murder him? “There's a lot of remnants from the Space Age buried under the sand.”
The shooter gapes at him. They seem nice, really. He's happy they've stopped firing at him; that was stressful. “But… why would….”
He gives them another couple of seconds to reorient before he ventures, “Can I climb down now?”
“Yeah,” says the erstwhile shooter. “Yeah. Sorry.”
He lets his foot slip on his way down the wall, and he falls the rest of the distance to hit the ground on his rear. He stands stiffly, wincing but laughing off the pain. It shouldn’t even bruise. “Nah, I'm good, I'm good,” he says when the shooter looks like they might come over to help.
“I don't understand,” they say. “Who would have….”
“That makes two of us,” Vash mutters, and sniffles again. “Who did you hear it from?”
“My sister-in-law told me. She – um, she heard it from her friend, who… had to hear it from somewhere….”
Who on earth cares enough about Vash to so thoroughly seed a rumor that dangerous –
Vash inhales, holds his next blink for a fraction of an instant longer, then opens his eyes.
So. The grace period's ended.
One day he'll learn to stop asking questions he doesn't want to consider the answers to.
Maybe today, even! He starts by not wondering about the motive behind slandering him, because it's none of his business until someone forces it to be. A human attacked him, and a human backed off, and no one got hurt. No point was proven. It's a lovely day.
“That many people've heard it?” he says, wide-eyed. “Who're the Bloodhounds?”
“A marauder gang from years back. They hurt a lot of people all across the region before the military police arrested them.” They chew the inside of their cheek, hesitating, and then they add, “A lot of people.”
Vash stills, genuinely dumbstruck. He can't manage multiple aggressors if it comes to that.
Law enforcement won't buy the slander, so at the very least he shouldn't have to worry about trouble from that sector, but the much larger percentage of the population who don't have access to police records will. They already have. He can't repeat this encounter with every single revenge-seeker who might come chasing after the rumor – someone will get injured eventually.
“What do I do?” he cries.
Collect his tomas and run. This will blow over so long as no one actively maintains the story, and he has time to spare. He'll wait it out from a safe distance –
“…The sheriff's office might be willing to put you up until someone sorts this out,” the shooter offers. “It'd be safest for you. Um, I can show you if you don't know the way.”
– or that. That would work, too. It'd be the path of least resistance, if he cares about that kind of thing.
But his circumstances have changed. Humanity's had their time to shore up their walls, Vash has had his time to help them, and now his location's known. Starting from this moment, he's a danger to everyone around him.
He has no interest in discovering whatever the fallout will be if he stands his ground.
“I don't wanna make trouble for anyone,” he says, shoulders slumping. He shakes his head. “I'll just leave. It'll be easier.”
“If you're sure,” says the shooter uncertainly. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah.” Vash offers a wobbly smile. “Wasn't your fault, you shouldn't worry about it.”
“I… if you say so.”
They're watching him like he's an alien, which he finds he… doesn't really care for. Maybe they thought he would get angry at the situation, or at them. Should he have gotten angry at them? But he doesn't want to. They didn't do anything wrong, and he likes them.
Some of the look fades. They say quietly, carefully, “How did you make an enemy like this?”
Vash's smile becomes a little more real. Oh, he does love them, even if he'd rather talk about anything else. Mark that down as another reason to leave quickly. They tried to initiate a shoot-out with a gunman when they barely have any idea how to aim. He won't have more attention drawn to them; they'd never survive it.
“Deliberately,” he answers, and in that moment means it.
---
A well-kept tomas with no major health conditions remains a working animal for forty years. Vash's tomas starts flagging at thirty.
Over the next few days after he notices, he alternates more than usual between riding and leading her. He'd prefer to not ride at all to spare her the weight, but even an ill tomas runs faster than him over short periods, and they need to reach a vet soon. With every passing morning it becomes harder to coerce her into eating.
Luckily, tomas vets are abundant; most settlements have at least one out of necessity. Vash stops in at a small town that will not exist in fifteen years and pulls Donut across the final stretch.
“Has she been sick before?” the vet asks while they look her over.
They sound as if they already know the answer, which doesn't bode well. “The last time was early last year,” he says anyway. “There was a flu outbreak in Inepril. She caught it for a few days there, but she got better and then she was fine. She's been fine.”
The vet purses their lips. “She's not the first tomas I've seen with these symptoms. There've been others since that outbreak.”
“So you know how to treat it?”
“No,” they say. “There is no treatment for this. No one knows enough about the flu strain yet. Maybe that'll change eventually, but as of this instant she won't last the week. Some toma who caught that flu and recovered – when they go through a major stressor or get worked too hard, their health declines just like this. You're best off selling her to the butcher and using the money to buy a new bird.”
For a long, long moment, Vash can't find the words to respond with.
He understands and accepts that humans are pragmatic creatures stranded on a world that selects for that trait. He really does. They farm plants for resources until the plants break under the strain, and then they force a Last Run to exploit even the plant's death. They use toma for labor and eggs, and, when the toma grow too old and too weak and too slow, they cut the birds apart to take what value remains, meat for food and fat for candlelight and feathers for clothing and bones for simple tools. They use each other, too, and him, if in different ways and with more care.
Given the chance, they might scour the planet clean with the same efficiency. If they mean to survive, they don't have a choice. He and Nai took that from them.
But even so.
“I've had her for thirty years,” he says.
When they get worked too hard. Did he – ? For nine years, they've traveled at least a dozen iles essentially every day. He can count on one hand the number of times he's slept in the same bed for two nights in a row. He tries not to ride her or have her run without a reason for it, and for the vast majority of the time he leads her at a walking pace while she only carries their supplies, but that's not the same as actual rest.
The vet's expression suddenly turns stricken. “Oh… you don't look….”
Vash smiles wanly. “I'm older than I look.”
“That was out of line. I'm sorry. I thought….”
Ah, they thought a twenty-year old with no experience bought an older bird for cheap and ruined her within a year. They've had a few cases similar to that come through already, it sounds like, so Vash can understand the confusion. But that was still a little cruel to the hypothetical owner.
They continue, “And you're a nomad, aren't you? Some of the others who came in with toma like this were. You hadn't heard.”
Vash laughs because there's not much else he can do. “That's not really an excuse.” Even without knowing about the issue, he probably could have caught it before it progressed so far if he'd paid more attention. There have to have been warning signs.
In the end, the vet still recommends euthanization. She isn't going to recover, and delaying the inevitable does nothing except lengthen the amount of time she spends ill.
Vash thanks them for the diagnosis, then coaxes Donut to her feet and leads her out.
He doesn't normally stay in a single place past one night, but he remains in the town for most of a week. On the final day, Donut doesn't wake at all. Come afternoon, she passes in her sleep, and Vash cries until the tears have wrung him dry, then shifts her head off of his lap and stands on legs that itch from sitting too long.
He borrows a shovel and buries Donut at the town's outskirts. It would be best to sell the body, but he's always been more sentimental than practical, if less so than Nai. Until that habit kills him, he has no intention of changing.
Afterwards, he doesn't linger long: he's already spent far too much time here. He donates his uneaten tomas feed to the vet, reorganizes his supplies to fit on one person's back, and walks into the desert as night falls.
A pit stop sits fairly near the town, a couple of days' travel by foot. Vash stops in at it to stock up on extra water and ask the owners if they've heard any news worth sharing lately, but he's barely stepped through the doorway before a courier sitting at a corner table leaps to their feet and says, “Vash?”
Vash has never met this person in his life. “Ah?” He hasn't closed the door behind him. He can run very quickly, and then he can temporarily steal one of the two toma tied outside to run even more quickly.
“I've got a delivery for you.”
Oh.
Oh, no.
“You do?” He looks around wild-eyed, hoping for someone else in the room so that the courier can turn out to be talking to them instead. One of the owners is coming down the stairs, but the sign outside has their name on it and it does not say Vash. Maybe they go by a nickname –
“What, you weren't expecting one?” The courier blinks before visibly deciding this doesn't count as part of their job. “Well, you've got one anyway. Did you see the toma out there?”
“I… yeah.”
“Right. The prettier one is yours.”
“…Oh. Is it.”
Every time.
Every time.
What's the point? A bribe? An apology? (Probably not an apology.) A reminder? He doesn't need more of those when he cleans his gun once a week and after every use. He doesn't need presents, either, or false charges, or hitmen, or any of the surprises that get thrown his way. He really doesn't need them.
“He's a good bird,” the courier offers after a beat. “And anything's better than traveling on foot, yeah? Someone spent a lot of money buying him and getting him to you.”
“Yeah.” He tries to keep his voice steady, but the word comes out a little strangled anyway.
A gun, a life, a planet, a bird. He can't refuse the charity. The last and only messenger he's turned away got sent back to him as a head in a bucket of gore. Maybe once someone gains the ability to command physics to obey, asking for what they want instead of simply imposing their will on reality feels like wasted effort.
Vash names the tomas Billions, which helps him feel better for all of a second before he remembers he doesn't actually enjoy pettiness. He can't manage a different name, though – thinking feels harder than it should – and the tomas will hardly object, so he lets the issue go.
He prods under the feathers, checking for surgery scars. He doesn't expect to find a transmitter, but it doesn't hurt to confirm. “You're not responsible for any of this,” he assures Billions, who ignores him.
The courier was right: Billions is an uncommonly pretty bird. Something about the color when his feathers catch the light makes him shine nearly metallic.
Maybe that's for the better. He looks different enough from Donut that Vash feels less like he's just replacing Donut with a younger model almost before the corpse has cooled. She spent decades as his only constant contact; he loves humans, but they don't return the sentiment if they know him for too long. Ten years is as far as he can stretch a friendship before “I age really, really well” stops cutting it.
And Vash doesn’t do great alone.
“Ah, I need to buy tomas feed again….” He trails off as he opens the saddlebags. (Billions' tack comes as part of the delivery, too, because… well, why not. Might as well go the full ile.) “Huh! There's enough feed in here to last for a while. That was thoughtful of him.”