He had only stepped out for a minute. She had been out herself, at the time, as she occasionally is -- he does not keep track of her comings and goings the way one does not ask a stray cat when it intends to return to be fed again. He himself rarely leaves, save to earn the roof over his head by doing errands for the owner.

It's following one such errand that Vash comes in the room to find Woe on the floor, huddled around herself, shaking and distraught.

He's never liked that name; it has always seemed unkind to associate a person with misery in such an intrinsic way. Even "Vash the Stampede" only carries the implication of destruction and suffering. Instead of invoking that name, then, he does what he did the first time they met and sits down beside her -- only this time, rather than offer his sleeve, he sits so that his intact arm can wrap around her shoulder, and he doesn't speak at all.

Perhaps he can never truly escape the monstrosity of Vash the Stampede and the weight of all the harm he's capable of, but in this moment he wants to exist without those titles and the pain they carry. He just sits, and stares up at the ceiling, and perhaps it's fitting that his own thoughts drift toward Rem as he holds her there. She would know what to say, he thinks. She always did.