Chapter Text
He thought at first that it was a mirage. The desert swelled in waves: sand and heat tasting of salt, and the wind skated along the dunes with enough speed to erase all but three of his footsteps behind him. To this vast expanse of scorched ground, Vash was an invisible man, not that he was man at all, and he sensed no other life. It’d been a week since he’d spoken to someone, days since he’d last tripped over a single rusted bike, even a few hours since he’d stepped daintily over a stray bone. This patch of the planet seemed to sag, rotted crust beneath the sand.
So when a rippling shadow appeared on a dune at the horizon, Vash figured blithely that it was a rare trick of his eyes—or a smudge, perhaps, on his glasses. He held them to the light, squinted suspiciously at the lenses then at the mysterious blotch, which was unmoving and after further scrutiny, resolved into a vaguely human-looking shape, with perhaps a flickering lamp.
Vash frowned and continued on, not overly worried; the only edge of unease prickling his mind was the one that lived there near permanently, a thorn that’d taken residence at their twin birth. Usually, he could tune out the bristle of Nai's consciousness, but as Vash approached, the spiny itch grew stronger, as though he should recognize the collapsed figure.
He was still some distance away when he realized, and stopped dead. Her glow was tremulous, a dying distress beacon, not even bright enough to pale the shadow cast down the dune by the sun behind her. Vash’s heart rose to his throat, and the beat of it propelled him forward. His feet picked up speed, nearly tripping, sand streaming behind him as he climbed up the dune to where she sat, drying in the afternoon sun. Her skin was scaling and flaking off in layers, petal peels scattering with the wind.
The plant tipped her chin up quietly, not even a warble of a word, and blinked woefully. Vash dropped to his knees in front of her, scattering a pile of feathery scales, which wheeled in the air then wilted back down. He opened his mind, reached through the glowing paths he envisioned between them but found only a void. Even as their eyes met, as he tentatively reached and touched his hands to hers, he could not feel her as he could other plants.
Vash understood abruptly what had happened to this ghost of a region: it was her who’d once been the wellspring, and her it would now die with. A terrible grief, thick as tar, clogged his lungs as he watched her and failed, again and again, to connect his mind to hers. He reached with the root of his soul, a part that would graft with hers, share their pain and could heal. Please, he pushed, and pulled, to no avail, then finally slumped in miserable defeat. He’d thought to travel this direction by chance, or so he’d believed, but had it been some sense of her, calling to even a single mate to answer? He hadn’t known; he’d ambled aimlessly, wasted so much time along the way.
And it was too late now. She was a lonely neuron, a being crafted for the single purpose of connecting with others and now only able to pulse into a void, and here he was at last, stumbled upon her body, yet he couldn’t even tell her, not in any way she could understand. “I’m here,” he said, uselessly.
She gave no indication of having heard him: deafened ears or none at all, with her eyes glazed over. Her skin was taking on a red tone, a sickly feverish flush spreading outwards from her chest, and Vash sat helplessly, feeling shattered, until the weak hand in his turned, with effort, and grasped over his wrist, nearly unable to fashion a grip.
He stared, stunned, with wide eyes, as she laboriously towed his hand toward her, then finally snapped from his shock to reach forward himself. Her hand shakily pressed his to her chest, where her heart would be if she had one, where he could, nevertheless, nearly feel it bleeding. To think she was feeling such pain, that she was so scared, and that he could do nothing. His head bent, and he rested his forehead against hers in regret.
She sobbed, just once, an agonized, punched sound that jerked her whole body and his with it, and there, in the desolate, empty, dead desert, he cried for her, until the sun glared crimson along the horizon, until she’d bled so steadily redder she appeared as aflame, until his tears wetted the sand and he’d embraced her, clutching her limp body to his, nearly screaming.
He could not feel her dying, but Vash had shared the languish of a hundred plants before and despaired at the thought that it was likely even worse. He so absolutely wished that he could anchor her, too, as he’d done the others, to take her death for his, that there, in that shared space they couldn’t reach, branches of Vash, an abyssal emptiness between his ribs that yearned to save her, clicked open and enveloped her consciousness entirely.
In moments, she was, then wasn’t, then was—within. Vash gasped, choking on his own breath—on hers?—and clutched at his chest. Her body was slack, dropped to the sand in his surprise, and Vash stared down at his hands, tinted red by the light of her fading body and the setting sun. His vision swam. Had he—killed her?
But inside him was a faintly glowing thread, and it led to something like a bauble hooked within him, and within that was— He had merged with her. He had folded her into himself. It wasn’t until Vash felt her soothing him from some space behind his heart that Vash realized his breath had picked up, panic-stricken. She felt—warm, a motherly wave.
He pressed his hand, the one she’d held, to his own chest. “Are you—okay?” he thought inwards, towards her.
She responded in a twinkle of sensation: an affirmative, a feeling of thanks. Then, learning the sense of words only now as she spoke them, she told him, gently, “I will…sleep.”
And as quietly as slipping into a dream, or from one, Vash’s awareness of her turned to fog, nebulous. The small flame she’d inhabited spread into sparks, melding into his blood, through the barriers of his cells. Vash’s skin alighted with the lines of his plant markings. His spine bent over her corpse, colorless now and so utterly blank; his ribs curved around the spirit of her within.
Vash tipped his head back to stare dully at the dimming sky. Space roamed above them, unseeing as it always was. It did not know the difference between day and night. That was where they belonged, he mourned, where there was no sun to absorb the light of the stars.
The horizon darkened entirely, and Vash sat there longer still, until the sand appeared white by the light of his own markings and the stars were unveiled entirely. Then, under the pale guard of their home, Vash stood and carried her into the dark.
With the sense of her within him, mist seeped into his lungs, it became easier for Vash to recognize their lament. Wilting plants beckoned from everywhere, across plain and dune and seas of sand, burbles of last gasps bent toward him as though he was some nurturing ray of light.
Sometimes he was able to save them, drain the red from their scales. Other times, they’d already passed, hanging dully, suspended in their chambers, townspeople long since evacuated. Mostly, Vash arrived only in time to press his forehead to the blood-glowing glass and absorb their consciousness into him, then use the panic of the town to disappear back into the desert, to the next feeble cry.
At Rock Jeneora was the fourth plant Vash was able to heal, after the ones aboard Home. She’d been the closest to death of the four, a pinkish hue to her chest. He’d been able to reach his mind to touch hers, to share in her gratitude and surprise, her nurturing fondness, as if she was proud of him, in awe as her body knitted itself back together by the life-source energy he shared with her. It was a hypothesis proven true: the energy of the plants he’d absorbed could help heal the ones in need, who could still be saved. Vash couldn’t bring himself to despise the act of fusing, after that; it wasn’t sacrifice but the potential for rebirth, in the single multi-souled organism they were, unbroken.
Along the way, a rather large bounty had fallen upon him, but this far west, Rock Jeneora was isolated enough for him to hang around safely, and between that and the low hum of plants above the town, Vash stayed there often and unashamedly. The people were hospitable, shared their food and drink and local house rules for cards, and a few of the more flirtatious folks treated him sweetly, even if Vash never took up their offers. The towering rock was a welcome beacon on the horizon, a haven for a quick meal or to suture new wounds.
Until—
Until one of their plants shriveled, too far gone for even Vash. Until the bounty hunters. Until Nai.
How long had it been since they’d seen each other? Vash couldn’t remember: an eternity, or more, or less. There’d been one absurd moment, when Vash realized that it was him, truly him, that he wondered if Nai was able to feel how changed Vash was, the plants within him from the past years. The new plants felt bundled around his heart, but Nai had always been branched through every vein of Vash’s, from fingertip to toe to throat.
Vash climbed the stairs of the Rock, closer, closer, the sound—the feeling—of Nai’s fingers on the piano keys like gravity, at the center of which sat a leaden, chasmic horror: Nai was trying to steal the plants.
—“As if plants are something to be owned?” Nai had said, once. “How can I ‘steal’ that which is already ours?”—
Vash shoved into the room Nai waited in and drew his revolver, ignored his heart humming in his throat, a lonely creek. He wouldn’t falter, would protect these people and the plants—
But as Nai stood to his full height and his lips turned upwards, as the shadow of his terribly dear face appeared beneath his hood, Vash froze. Nai need not even have touched him, though he did, to send Vash’s consciousness wheeling through memories and alarm.
Once Vash recovered himself, jolted to awareness, he shook off two layers of stupor: one that Nai had placed him into, vines through his mind, and the other that had overtaken Vash almost like instinct, a too-long space between one heartbeat and another. It didn’t matter that Vash had changed, that he’d absorbed other plants; Nai had rooted in him so early that Vash might as well have grown around him. What a terrible realization to leave lingering in that room, to have to run from as he chased down Nai.
Vash stared him down, his brother in his spiral of blades, and even as he raised his weapon and his eyes marked easy, open targets, there was perhaps a section of him that would’ve liked to slow the planet itself so he wouldn’t have to hurt him. But Vash swallowed his dread, wished in vain for his mind to stop wailing, and shot.
His aim was true but his heart was not. The bullets might as well have been a childish tantrum for how Nai chuckled, how he’d said his name, tongue curling around the syllable like he was licking up Vash’s neck, breathing it directly into his ear. Vash’s eyes helplessly followed Nai's hands as he gestured to him, beckoning, and felt that hand tangling in his hair, coiled in his soul, the stem of his being. Then the sphere of his blades enveloped the town, slashed through it, and left Vash at the epicenter, trying not to collapse into himself into the inky black hole where Nai had stood.
“He’s your brother, yeah?” Rosa asked afterwards, holding the unconscious, ruined body of her son. “You share blood with that monster?”
Yes, Vash thought, grief and shame winding within his ribs. Yes, shared blood, and memory, and soul. Shared body, once upon a time. Nai was his reflection; Vash saw him in mirrors, in water, in the fog of his breath. What had Nai said, back then? “Your life is mine, your pain.” And Vash had heard the whisper in Nai's throat, in his own: his heart, his yearning, too.
Vash’s insides felt like brutalized pulp, riotous waves of regret and memory behind his eyes, churning against his mind. As he left the remnants of the town, Vash’s feelings resolved into anger: at Nai for his guilt and grief; at himself for failing—again; at the sliver of his heart that wasn’t angry but only disappointed and hurt, and at the hope he’d still held.
“Where are you going?” Meryl Stryfe followed him, unwilling to let him disappear into obscurity, into yet another ten years of invisibility.
Vash swallowed before answering. Back. The worst part, he thought, was that the plants within him recognized Nai, too, and sometimes he couldn’t tell if it was them reaching, or him. “To JuLai,” he said eventually. “That’s where he is.”
Meryl bit back her clear torrent of questions, but Vash could imagine what she’d ask. He had no answers regardless. What Rosa had said was true: this wouldn’t have happened to Rock Jeneora if Vash hadn’t been here; they’d been targeted because of him. Nai's attacks seemed to doggedly trace his steps, hoping to coax Vash back, or perhaps erode his footholds until Vash had no choice but to fall back into Nai. But if he returned now, it would only clear the way for Nai to destroy more widely, thoroughly.
Vash was simultaneously the last bastion, a willing hostage humanity didn’t even know it had, and the beacon for Nai's wrath, which jealously fell upon any refuge Vash found so he would never find home away from Nai again.
It was a terrible burden; it was selfish, and greedy. Vash wanted to hate Nai for it but couldn’t. Again and again, his mind replayed the sound of that song ringing from the piano, as well as the way Vash had frozen, facing Nai down. For a moment, he’d envisioned himself sitting on the bench, bumping Nai to scoot over—
Vash felt sick. The bottoms of his boots were wet with blood, muddying the sand in his treads. The fantasy hadn’t even come from him, was the thing; it was Nai who had hoped, in that delirious split second, that Vash would play with him. But Nai's yearning had been twisting into him for a hundred years; it might as well have been Vash’s own.
But he couldn’t—couldn’t allow Nai to have such power over him. Even after all this time apart, Nai hadn’t changed his mind, and Vash couldn’t let himself be swayed any longer. He needed to carve from himself the very notion of wishing, both his and Nai’s. Why long for something that would only rot if it lived?
Meryl’s car was stopped for the night when Vash stepped quietly into the cool, dark desert. He wandered aimlessly for some time, hoping to find in the flat sands some hope, some answer—anything other than what he’d decided on.
His pulse thrummed in his ears, a red static that curled around his vision. He heard nothing; he saw nothing. There would never again be the silhouette of the Rock at the horizon, but even in the pitch black, Vash deliriously saw its ghost. The sound of his name from Nai’s lips tangled at the base of his brain, its whisper sinuous. Vash. Vash. He sank to the ground and sat motionless, wished the desert would engulf him by morning, abrade him to bone. He knew what he needed to do.
It was easy to find his tether to Nai after how close they’d so recently been. No matter how it’d stagnated in their years apart, no matter how Vash had deliberately buried it, below the pale dirt remained the same tangle of roots. It was even easy—horribly habitual—for Vash to find the thread he needed to pluck to catch Nai’s attention; Vash still had trouble with his gate, and for years this had been their code, his way of asking for Nai’s help: I want to see you. He closed his eyes, pulled at the heartstring, and waited.
The artificial fluorescence of their plant-scape greeted Vash, a horizon-less expanse aglow with the lines of their markings. Nai was standing at a range, arms crossed over his chest without his robe, markings along his body apparent and glowing slightly. Vash’s breath caught at the sight, as he felt Nai look him over. Even from a distance, Vash felt he was seeing right through him.
But that was what he’d come to do: lay his soul bare, one last time, and where else to do it than a place where the very floors and walls were their insides turned out? Beneath Vash, charting a path from him to Nai, a blue light pulsed. After a prolonged silence, as Nai eyed Vash curiously, he mirrored Vash by seating himself, but cross-legged—a calm, meditative stance. Vash had to fight not to hug his knees further into his chest.
“Hello, Vash,” Nai said, almost amused. “Missing me already? I didn’t expect to feel your pull so soon. Thought you’d still be…angry.”
“Furious,” Vash bit.
“Mm.” Nai smiled thinly. “Then why did you call?”
Indeed: why? Vash could have done this without seeing Nai at all, without warning him. But he was hopeful, against all hope, that this might be a wake-up call, a sign for him to realize Vash was serious, to open his eyes and see how wide the rift had broken. Perhaps—he was here because he wanted Nai to stop him.
Vash allowed himself a moment to simply gaze and take in all the details of Nai: his soft feathery hair and fierce expression; the harsh tilt of his lips; the kindness of his patience, to sit quietly and wait for Vash now—and for the past hundred years. He was furious, or should have been even more so. But already that was melting into bleak disappointment; how many times had they replayed this conversation? He already knew how it would go.
“I wanted to see you,” he said quietly, and Nai’s bearing thawed before icing back over in suspicion.
“That much is obvious,” he said impatiently, then waited.
Vash didn’t know where to begin. After a moment, he started at the obvious. “The plants you stole—you need to give them back.”
Nai rolled his eyes. “This again? Do I, Vash? Need to?”
“Then,” he scrounged around, “we can come to a compromise, Nai. Take the dying ones. Leave the healthy.”
“So they can be exploited for longer, but still to death? The humans don’t deserve to live if they’re so weak they cannot survive on their own.”
“They don’t need strength for their lives to still have value.”
“How true,” Nai agreed with a sneer. “No, strength is only a necessity if you don’t want to be a parasite. On the other hand, the plants are our sisters. Our brethren. Some are children, and somewhere, dead,” he spat, “one of them was our mother.” Nai crossed his arms. “I won’t abandon our kind. Our family—something that deserves protection.”
Vash couldn’t believe what he was listening to. It was contradictory, so infuriatingly hypocritical, his brain barely managed to hear it at all— “How could you say that?” Vash was across the scape in a moment, grabbing at Nai blindly, vision swimming, and found no purchase but around his shoulders, his neck. “Family—deserves—” he howled, “How can you feel that way, how can you know it, and still—”
Nai smiled, a snarl that would have looked more appropriate bloodied around a jugular. “I won’t value the lives of leeches over that of our own people.” His hand came up to catch Vash’s wrist. “Over you.”
It startled Vash clear of his anger. He stared, wide-eyed, at Nai’s placid expression. Nai lifted an eyebrow and glanced down. Vash’s hand was—was around Nai’s neck. He wrenched himself away, stumbling a few steps back, and stared in horror as Nai touched his own hand to his throat contemplatively. When Nai looked at him, his eyes were dark, half-lidded and heavy. He kept idly tracing where Vash had—nearly choked him—and he looked pleased—
“Do you truly believe that you can ever escape me?” Nai asked, casually, as though there’d been no scuffle. “Do you truly believe you even want to?”
Vash could feel the familiar shrivel of his nerves, that hated bearing Nai’s scorn. “Even if I did,” he said, swallowing, clenching his hand a few times, trying to shake the feeling of Nai from it, “I can’t let myself have you—be with you.”
“You can do whatever you’d like. You can kill me right now, same as you can leave here and kill your friends,” he said it like a sour fruit, “and return to me within the day.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Of course not,” Nai said soothingly, “You can, but you won’t allow yourself to.”
“Unlike someone, I actually care about how my actions affect the people around me.”
“‘People,’” Nai echoed. “Tell me, Vash, how many desert worms have your friends eaten in the time you’ve known them? Are those worms not ‘people’ to someone? Ever tried one yourself?” he sneered. “Perhaps you accidentally stepped on one? You stay in human towns where the pipes run only because they steal life from plants. What about us, Vash? Their children are running around with our people’s energy. Your humans don’t spare it a single thought. They seek your help when a plant is dying, why: because they care, or because they need it to live? Everyone is selfish in this world, Vash. So I will be selfish back.”
Vash was already shaking his head, feeling stricken. “That’s not—”
“You know I’m right,” Nai said. Yes, terribly so. That was the worst part: that Nai was right, but that he was going about it all wrong. “So put an end to this—stalling. Choose, Vash. Say yes, and join me.”
It would be so easy. It was a single word, maybe two, things he’d said countless times: Yes, Nai; I’m coming, Nai; Wait for me, Nai. It was nothing, an exhale imbued with sound. Even silence would do; Nai would assume his assent.
But it tasted like tears on the back of his tongue, an iron crypt in his throat. How could Vash say yes after everything, everyone, that Nai had razed, that Vash had allowed him to? The air for the word was flowing over tombstones.
“I can’t,” Vash said, then corrected, “I won’t.” He mustered himself and exhaled gustily, trying to steel his nerves. “This is why I came here today. I did want to see you, to—”
The sentence died on his lips. Goodbye was a gruesome word. And in the space of the silence, Vash felt Nai realize, fill in the gap. At first Nai’s mouth pulled into a mirthless jeer. “How long has it been now, that you’ve been running from me? Why would now be any different?”
But Vash’s reply was only to close his eyes and inhale, deeply, unsteadily. He reached inward, to the plants he’d fused into himself, and painstakingly began to rouse them, nudging them toward his center. Their consciousnesses were nearly shapeless, their voices overlapped and indistinguishable. Vash coaxed them around the core of his heart, around the root that connected him and Nai, and the mass began melding together like chainmail, hanging from his ribs like baubles.
Nai felt it; Vash felt him felt it. It was that, the last bright bridge between them, so clear and unbroken by everything that had transpired, that convinced Vash wholly that this was a necessary thing. He could not stand against Nai if he was him, if he felt his—pain.
“Vash, what are you—” His jaw was tight. He knew. “You can’t do this.”
His anguish and confusion twisted through Vash. They were bleeding, from somewhere: each other. “This is my selfishness, Nai. That I want to save humans and plants—and you. And if you—if you’re going to fight me on that, and I can’t let you go through with yours, then I have to win. And this is how.”
Nai was suddenly in front of him, eye to eye. Vash felt him reaching into his mind, trying to burrow deeper, but one by one the plants within Vash knitted themselves around his heart and kept Nai out. In lieu, a hand grasped the back of his neck firmly, the base of his skull. “You would go so far?”
Vash reached up and covered Nai’s hand with his own. “You’ve left me no choice.” And he entwined his fingers through Nai’s, palm over knuckles, and pulled Nai off of him, then let go.
A blink, and Nai was gone. The lines along the floor and walls seemed to shift, contorting jaggedly, already afflicted. “Vash?” Nai’s voice echoed through the distorting chamber. It reverberated from no one source—simply Nai’s soul reaching, sounding so lost.
And Vash broke then. His soul was twisting, looking for its missing twin. “I’m sorry, Nai.” He shook but didn’t stop. “I’m sorry.”
“Vash!” Nai’s call was panicked, desperate, ringing in his ears, and Vash felt split open, guts spilled into the rusting, reddening glow of their plant-scape. The plants closed fully around his heart, a protective sheath. Vash plummeted.
He came into himself to bright sky, bright sand. Vash stared unseeingly. His chest had been punctured through. He was laying sideways on the ground, half buried. His body felt tight, the skin of his face stiff, caked with muddy sand. Time passed. Oblivion remained.
Then: “Mr. Vash!” Meryl was running toward him from the car in the distance, stumbling in the sand. With effort, feeling outside his body, Vash pushed himself up. Sand stuck to his cheek, around his eye, dampened by sweat—by tears. He blinked saltwater and sand from his vision. “Vash!” She bent in front of him, catching her breath, then looked him over in wide-eyed concern. “Are you alright? You were—I heard you screaming.” Her voice lowered, “It sounded like you were in pain.”
Vash stilled, then dredged up a single cough of a laugh. “Was I?” He scrubbed the sand from his face, at the corner of his eye and rubbed a hand over his head, off-kilter. His throat felt torn, his voice scratchy; he truly had been screaming. But had it been him? Nai?
Vash pressed a hand to his chest as he rose shakily, Meryl hovering around him. “Do you need—”
“I’m alright,” he said, painting a smile on. It was so quiet in his head, so empty. He was an abyss struggling to stand. “Don’t worry. No pain here.”
It was the truth; he couldn’t feel anything at all.
It was rare to come across men with no heed for their own lives, but perhaps even rarer to meet a priest carrying a cross double his size wearing a tailored suit and loafers in the desert, so Vash supposed it was fitting. It reminded him of a hermit crab with its shell, the way this man had been skulking slowly across the terrain, lugging his cross like a roof. The comparison made Vash smile, just to himself, but earned a snarly glare from the odd undertaker, biting like the smell of cigarette smoke on his clothes, which he wore like a second skin.
It was in the dark stomach of the Grand Worm that the man beneath was revealed: a human blunt and harsh, a deep voice that hung heavy in the darkness, striking something in Vash’s sternum. When the man unveiled his gun, began rupturing the Worm from the inside out, it wasn’t the shots Vash watched but how adeptly the weapon was wielded, how practiced—how dangerous.
“Are those worms not people to someone?” Nai had asked. Vash watched the Grand Worm fall, saw the little child dissolve into a thousand glowing critters, and guilt pinched at him. The man had said the same, as he’d plucked two Worms from the air and eaten them: that one had to save themselves even at the cost of others.
Maybe he was here to kill me, Vash thought, briefly. But he’d saved them, forgone his element of surprise, and Wolfwood’s gruff voice as he nearly spat his name at them was underlaid with something lonely. Maybe it was that Vash was lonely, too, separated from Nai for the first time in a century, that he saw some of him in Wolfwood: the same potential for selfishness, and the same determination, too.
Besides, how would a supposed executioner have eyes that crinkled when he chuckled, even if it was in insult, at Vash’s expenses? And what had he said, as he’d aimed? “You hungry?” And after dramatic pause, “Then eat this!”
Vash smiled as he watched Wolfwood in the light of the stars, worms floating around them. So, he was just a little silly, too. Vash found himself delicately charmed.
“What’re you smiling at, spiky?” Wolfwood glared his way, lighting another cigarette.
“Just that I thought it was cool,” Vash said with a sly grin.
“Eh?”
“Your line, in the Worm.” He flashed Wolfwood a beatific thumbs up. “‘Then eat this!’ Good one.”
Wolfwood, delightfully, flushed. Vash could see it in the dark, mottle high on his cheeks. “You worm-for-brains,” he shoved Vash, “I’ll fucking kill you.”
Vash found himself laughing under Wolfwood’s assault, ducking his head, dancing away from an angry swipe. It emerged from him almost cracked, with fractures from the Rock, from Nai, from the couple at the fuel station.
He shouldn’t have placed such a burden on Wolfwood, even if it was Vash’s own secret confession; no one would ever live up to Nai, and Vash didn’t want to be looking for him in others. But perhaps because of how many times he’d been disappointed searching for something—anything—in Nai and coming up dry, even bloodied, Vash couldn’t help but cling to the glimpse he saw of it in Wolfwood. It was there, beneath the surface: a softer, precious core, diamond in coal, the hollow bone of a bird taking flight. Vash saw it in his eyes, where after so long he hadn’t found it in Nai, and couldn’t bring himself to turn away.
The deep, miserable well Vash stood within, the one that’d sat stagnant and stony for days now, filled with something lighter. It should have hurt; the feeling flowed over his scars, into them. But it was through the open wounds—and the closed one that felt the most raw, sinew cut to bone—that a faint sense of hope leaked in, like ice melted to groundwater, hidden but nurturing under their feet.