Title: you can’t sleep in this box with me
Fandom: Trigun
Rating: PG/Teen
Length: 200 words
Content notes: angst, grief, past character death, alcohol
Author notes: post-manga. “clear” as in “obvious”.
Summary: Vash drinks with an old friend and airs a long-held grievance.



“I knew, you know,” Vash says, quietly. “Almost from the start.”

He holds the bottle in his hand up to his face, squinting through the brown glass. Maybe a few glasses left, if he was pouring glasses. There isn’t really a point of doing anything but drinking from the bottle. Just to make his arbitrary time limit a little shorter, he pours some out, into the sand.

“I mean, why else—” his voice breaks. He rubs his free hand across his eyes. “Why else would you care so much? Why else would you put up with me?”

He fits the bottle to his lips and drinks, like a man dying of thirst. But give a man dying of thirst a bottle of alcohol and he won’t die any slower. Just happier.

“I mean,” Vash scoffs, hiccuping a little. “You loved me eventually. And I knew what you were,” he scrubs the tears from his eyes, fixes his gaze on the grave. “I knew what you were doing. And I loved you from the start anyway.”

He sloshes the last of the liquor onto the stone, watching it pool in the grooves of the cross. “So there.” He covers his mouth to muffle a sob, even though Wolfwood’s dead, and not there to hear him cry. “I win.”