Pieces of Glass.

A/N: I do not own Trigun. I am making no money. You see? No reason to sue.

Also: Contains implied yaoi, somewhat dark themes. Possible SPOILERS.

“Pieces of glass.”

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It’s not as if he didn’t know he was a bad man. It wasn’t like he was ignorant.

He had known better than anyone did (ok, maybe not as well as Knives, but probably better than anyone else) how badly the priest had sinned in the past. How easy it would be for him to do in the future. His original penchant for trust and second chances had given way over time (eroded like great pillars of rock into single grains of glass) and had slowly become more of a lazy apathy and general disinterest.

Besides, it wasn’t as if he had any great love for his companions anyway.

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They sat in the sand, suns beating down and dryingir sir skin to leathery parchment. He hadn’t seen Meryl in days. Millie in weeks. He supposed he could chalk their disappearances up to stress, or a work reassignment, or some other equally untrue and lame excuse, but the glaring sun and beading sweat and gritty, grinding sand in his teeth made him want to be honest with himself.

Surely they were dead.

Everything was dead on this planet, really.

He glanced at Wolfwood, sitting coolly next to him in his asphyxiating black suit and well-planned sunglasses, soaking up the brutal waves of suns and heat and entire lack of wind. He was smoking a cigarette and occasionally licking the sand and dust from his lips. His Adam’s apple stood out like a bone he had swallowed wrong, his throat working tightly around it as his lungs expanded and contracted pulling in smoke and seemingly never letting it out.

Perhaps the smoke was part of some strange Wolfwood cooling system. Despite the thick, slick sheen of sweat covering the tanned body of the priest like some heat induced placenta, and subsequently soaking the white cotton shirt he wore always opened (never closed to protect from sunburn) he looked far from uncomfortable.

Vash, on the other hand, was nearly ready to slit his own wrists. Not to try and kill himself (he didn’t really believe in suicide anyway, he guessed, despite how many times it had wandered through his mind as an easy out for this whole mess) but more as a way to get the hot hot blood out of his body and onto the sand. And just cool the fuck off, for once.

The sand probably needed it more than he did anyway. It seemed so thirsty.

Neither man talked. Wolfwood, for his part, seemed content to frown strangely and stare directly at the suns through his not-nearly-dark-enough glasses. Perhaps he liked to burn the spots onto his retinas and the blink them into different colors behind his eyelids like Vash occasionally liked to do, especially if he had been drinking during the daytime.

Moons didn’t mark his eyes the same way suns did. And they didn’t hurt to look at.

Well, except for the fifth moon.

Vash thought about mentioning Meryl. Or Millie. Either girl would do, as he was sure both had ended up with the same fate. Wolfwood would leave with one, under the guise of talking in private or some such nonsense, and then the girl would follow him. He suspected Millie had been led away under the pretense of romantic endeavors.

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When the dark haired man had returned without her, Meryl had thrown a panicked fit and Wolfwood had shrugged her off with a noncommittal mumbling, something along the lines of “Hmmm. Sorry. Legato.” He hadn’t even bothered to come up with an excuse that would quell Meryl’s screeching accusations of irresponsibility and whimpers of unfairness. Just implied that Legato had gotten hold of her. As if Legato cared.

It’s not as if Vash cared either, at that point. No, not enough to feel bad for Meryl’s loss, or cry over Millie’s death.

It’s not as if he wasn’t preoccupied with a thousand more important things.


He didn’t mention either girl’s absence or his “suspicion” that was more reality than suspicion and he knew it. Instead he made a quiet, grunting remark, working hard to get his tongue to disengage from the pasty roof of his mouth where is seemed to have glued itself from lack of use over the past few weeks mixed with lack of water and addition of cancerous, boiling heat. A winning recipe for sure.

“You should button that shirt. You’re going to get a sunburn.”

It was a dramatic understatement, and Vash was well aware. Wolfwood’s already dark skin was shining with a polished sort of gloss that was so unhealthy looking it made Vash’s teeth hurt just to look at. It was dark enough and shiny enough to give any onlooker the knowledge that he was not only sunburned, but had been sunburned so often and so badly that the skin was slick like a scar now. It wasn’t red; no Vash’s coat was red. Only geraniums could be red. It was a deep tan that would have been quite attractive except for the sheen and the knowledge that the skin held such heat that nobody would ever possibly want to touch it unless for some godforsaken reason they were cold. Like when they would sit in the desert at night without a fire, and Vash would wrap his arms around Nicholas (he was thought of as Nicholas when they sat like that, more than halfway drunk, but never EVER any other time) to keep his own body warm. And then when the dark haired man would push his hot, throbbing cock inside the blonde, Vash would remember that in a few short hours the suns would be up. The heat of his cock had always reminded Vash of the suns, and the dry unpleasant days and the painful sting of sand gritting in your eye.

Eventually Wolfwood nodded in response to Vash’s almost inaudible statement. But the fact that the man in the red coat hadn’t spoken in so very long (not even to cry out during orgasm) brought his attention away from the sun he was trying to blind himself with and to those half-muttered words.

“Yeah. It feels good.”

Vash thought about the statement for a moment, thought about his quest for resolution with Knives, about the fucked up priest sitting next to him with the blood of some of the only people who had ever really cared about him on his hands. He thought about the man with the blue hair who had certainly gone out of his way to break Vash’s will, spirit, soul, and who he knew still had a card or two up his long white sleeve. He wondered whose skull was laced to his shoulder, and if the skull itself was a scare tactic or some perverse fetish or obsession. He wondered if he lost this long battle, after all his hard work, would his skull go on the opposite shoulder.

He thought about all the people he had saved, and all the people he had TRIED to save, and most recently, all the people he had given up saving.

He hated the man sitting next to him, breathing his raspy breaths and apparently trying to kill himself slowly via heat poisoning or cancer or something equally ridiculous. And he hated the blue haired man who he knew wasn’t the one who had given the order for Wolfwood to execute Meryl and Millie, and every single other person they left in their wake (possibly he hated him BECAUSE he wasn’t that person) and he hated Knives.

That stood alone without any need for explanation.

He tossed his head back, blonde hair whipping in an arc (it hadn’t been up in its normal way for quite some time now) and it caught a ray of sun, glinting, drawing Wolfwood’s attention once again to the man in the red coat, as he unbuttoned his jacket.

It pooled around him. Metal arm was still stuck in its sleeve as he hadn’t even bothered to lift said arm to take the jacket all the way off. Flesh arm worked at the snaps and buckles of his leather body suit until his pale scarred skin showed in a great expanse of chest. He leaned back into the dry, scorching sand and opened his eyes wide, imprinting the blurs of tuns uns on his retinas. He forced his skull deep into the sand, wishing each piece of broken glass were larger, sharper, even just a little. Just enough to make him care about the discomfort. To care about anything.

He blinked the afterimages of the suns into different colors behind his eyelids and prayed for heat poisoning and sunburns. And perhaps a very quick and brutal cancer.

“Can I bum a smoke?”


------End.

A/N: To my fabulous reviewers who have been patiently waiting for a new chapter of Reflections. I’m working on it. It’s just that my muses are avoiding me completely. I’m not sure why.

But suddenly, out of nowhere, I was struck with a dark thought. I hope this portrays the darkness I was going for somewhat. I feel a little unsettled writing it, and I hope you feel a little (or better yet, more than a little) unsettled reading it.

Dark Vash and Dark Wolfwood (as opposed to Angsty Vash/Wolfwood or Smutty Vash/Wolfwood or pretty much any other kind of V and W) are my super secret guilty pleasure. I’ve never written them though. Oh well, even if this sucks, it’s out of my system now, and I can move on.

Also, please kindly remember to leave a review on your way out. Want me to turn this into a multi-chapter endeavor? Review. Love the story or hate it? Review. Grammatical errors? Review.

Please, reviews make my life that much more enjoyable and constantly make bad days good and good days great. Be kind. It only takes a single minute. Besides, I can't very well tell if you all even enjoy my writing at all without reviews!