Trigun Fan Fiction ❯ Passing ❯ Chapter 1

The ship's Plants hummed in his head as he walked, attempting to soothe him. They were joyful, and kind. They didn't know how to be any different.

 

They didn't have Legato hounding them, taunting them, sending them messages.

 

"Excuse me! Mister!" The voice came from behind him, and her image in his mind was immediate and sharp, a short dumpy woman with her hair tied up in a duster. He didn't want to talk to her; he *couldn't* talk to her. He wanted to keep on walking, but being rude to her was unthinkable.

 

The corridor was motionless around him and she was standing there, smiling apologetically. "I'm sorry, I don't know your name."

 

She'd lost the apron, but the rest of her was still the same, still as he'd seen her before. Her hair straggled forward in front of her ears, the dusty hem of her skirt swinging below her knees. He wondered where she'd managed to find any dust on board the ship. "It's Vash," he said. He smiled back at her, reached up to rub at his neck. "Um, I only know you as Aunt Melanie, but I can't really call you that."

 

Her smile widened. "Aunt Melanie will do fine. Everyone calls me that the last few years, it seems to stick."

 

"Okay." He stood and said nothing, because he had nothing else he could say.

 

In the silence, her face changed, the smile drifting. Tension through every joint in his body, and this was it and he wasn't going to be able to -

 

"Nicholas," she said quietly. "He...."

 

Wolfwood had loved and respected this woman so much, and this was a part of why, just one small part even from the little he'd seen of her.

 

He wasn't going to have to say it.

 

"No," he said.

 

She closed her eyes for a moment and nodded, then opened them, firm. "Thank you for helping him," she said. "For helping all of us."

 

"Don't." He stared straight ahead, couldn't look at her. She didn't *know.* "Don't thank me. It wasn't enough."

 

"No," she said. "It wasn't. But he thought it was, and that matters."

 

Wolfwood had said that. 'I'm satisfied.' And then he'd sat on the sofa and poured them drinks and Vash had felt like screaming.

 

"Aunt Melanie! Aunt Melanie!" The voice carried along the corridor, shrill like an air-breach siren, and a sandy-headed kid stuck his head around a door. "Christine's eating the scrubber intakes again!"

 

Aunt Melanie looked up at him and smiled. "Everything's new around here. They get into so much trouble." She leaned forward suddenly and wrapped herself around him, pinning his arms to his sides, her head pressed briefly to his chest.

 

He never got used to that. The hugs from grateful people. He was more than fast enough to see them coming, and he never did.

 

This woman, of all people, shouldn't, *couldn't* feel gratitude towards him, and yet she did.

 

She backed away, looking even more rumpled than before, his body warm where she'd been. "I'm taking up too much of your time," she said. "You must be very busy."

 

"Aunt Melanie!" His voice had risen to more of a screech, and now there was a wail of protest out of sight somewhere behind him.

 

"I'm coming!" she called over her shoulder. "Don't just take it away, tell her why she can't!" She looked back to him. "Good luck." She smiled and shook her head. "You're a lot like Nicholas. He always found trouble, that boy, wherever it was, but he always fixed it."

 

She turned away and was gone, remarkably fast for someone her shape.

 

He barely knew her, and somehow he felt like he missed her.

 

He'd told Livio they had to keep on, keep fighting, for this, for Wolfwood's people.

 

He stared along the corridor, and he thought he could believe it.