[ open ] and between the wasteland and the sky

[underbluesky]

Who: Vash & YOU
What: Vash has been hermitting, and Trench decided that it's been quite enough of that
When: Early November
Where: Sleeper farm


starters in the comments! if you'd like to plot something, hit me up on plurk @ goodluckmodes

Comments

scars - OTA; cw: blood, injury

[underbluesky]

[It's after he's released from his own bonds that Vash comes back to his senses. Trench has allowed him to live quietly for a few months, and he's kept to himself in that little room at the inn, where the owner does not ask questions and allows him board as long as he continues to do the building's chores, but he has heard whispers of the things that happen.

He'd struggled with the notion of getting involved, thinking himself too monstrous, too dangerous to do anything more than keep himself apart. He had not been the Humanoid Typhoon for nothing; there was a city of rubble and a hole in a moon as testament to what he is capable of, and what he can never allow to happen again.

The festival had only convinced him further that it was better if he stayed away from others in general, knowing his body to already have been warped against his will and finding his mind too easily following the same. And yet ... he has already bled, and no harm has come to anyone. He finds, to the contrary, his own blood has the fragrance of desert blooms, soothing away the hardest edges of fear and pain in the others. He perhaps is more incautious with it than he ought to be, paying no heed to anything that aches or burns as he goes about releasing others' bonds, fending off Zealots with a borrowed nail gun he picked up off one of the racks. And if his breathing is a little heavy when he kneels at your side, when he offers you his shoulder, surely there is nothing to worry about.]

Don't worry, it's going to be alright.

[He smiles as though he believes it. He smiles as though he has been your friend for years, and he only stumbles a little as his blood splashes over your bare feet.]

cw: gore, organ removal

[tealeafs]

[ Chizuru has lost all sense of time and place. It feels like she's been here for an eternity, though it's probably not the case - just the experience by itself making it feel like so much longer, especially when combined with the way her body feels so heavy in this place, and the injuries only making it worse.

Because the girl does look like she's doing really badly. Her skin is pale, and though Vash has at least released her from her bonds already, it doesn't seem like the girl is about to stand up on her own legs. She just sits there, half-crumbled on the ground.

At least the source of her lack of energy is probably pretty apparent, since there's a wound on the lower half of her torso, not super big, but cut open wide enough that there's just a gaping hollow inside of nothing where there definitely should have been one or two organs. And yet it doesn't seem like the girl is dying - instead Chizuru mostly just looks really tired.

Especially in the way she turns her head towards Vash very, very slowly, like it takes her everything just to move a tiny bit. ]

.. you're hurt.

[ It's all she slowly manages to say. You know, as if she isn't hurt as well, and probably worse off too. But she can still see the way blood spills on his end too, landing on her, carrying an odd but kind of nice scent. ]

[underbluesky]

[There is certainly something alarming about looking at a hollow with no organs--but perhaps it is the fact that she is lucid, her eyes not clouding over with that glaze that precedes death, that keeps him from panic. Distantly, a part of his mind notes that a human could not survive such a state. She is something like him, humanlike in appearance but distinctly otherwise. Some time later, he'll be able to wonder what.

In the meantime, Vash simply shakes his head.]

I'm alright. [Read: he's conscious and can still move, which is Fine by Vash standards] Can you stand?

[tealeafs]

[ Usually she would protest the first part of what he's saying a little more. Because if he's hurt like this - then he clearly can't be alright, and Chizuru has met just a few too many men in her life who tend to say they're alright when they clearly aren't to not be suspicious of Vash's current state.

.. but it's not really the situation for it, huh. They might not have the time for it. Maybe. Chizuru's sense of time has been completely messed up by the situation she's stuck in, but something does tell her that they shouldn't linger here. That if she doesn't get away from this place now, she may be stuck like this forever.

So she slowly shakes her head, rather than questioning the state of a stranger when he seems to be trying to provide her such kindness here. ]

No.. [ She hasn't tried, but on the other hand, Chizuru's body feels so limp even to the girl herself that she can already know, even without attempting to stand. ] I.. um..

[ She slowly breathes in. Even though the girl doesn't look like she's dying, she certainly doesn't seem to have a whole lot of energy. ]

Even just.. moving a little bit. T-That feels.. hard. [ She admits, honest about her condition. It's the least she could do if he's truly trying to help her. ]

cw: gore, organ removal, mercymorn

[acidjail]

[Ten thousand years of near invulnerability. Ten thousand years of every insult to the flesh and bone and spirit sloughed off contemptuously to leave a body still frozen perfectly in time, inviolate and incorruptible.

Pain is nothing. She has known worse pain than this. It is the temerity that vexes her most, the utter and unmitigated gall of these people to put their hands upon her in violence and to disassemble her like a fatted calf on a ritual altar. It is the fact of her weakness, of her fragility, of her smallness-

She is unrecognizable when a familiar voice intrudes on her incoherent, bloodless seething, the furiously burning outrage at her core more of what's kept her heart beating than anything else. She is a Lyctor. Even at her most debased, she can take more, give more, and they took from her in buckets and bundles. The inverted Y incision visible through the rent front of her nightshirt is proof of that, as is the green and reeking blood that soaks her head to toe. Her nose is broken badly, so she breathes through her mouth, her eyes swollen to slits. She slumps into his shoulder by necessity, not choice, once he's disconnected her from the net of tubing and the straps to the elevated table they left her on.]

No, it won't.

[She hisses like a dying radiator, digging the fractured fingers of her left hand into the back of his jacket, and this is how he'll know her: no one but the Saint of Woe could manage to still sound so pettish in the midst of all of this.]

Not when I am finished.

[underbluesky]

[There is a certain level of bitter, twisted irony. One of their earliest conversations, she had said nobody is going to just tell you they intend to abduct you for sinister ends, are they? She'd tried to warn him against being too trusting, that even she was someone who preferred to be on the end committing the sinister ends as often as possible -- all the while staying in a space where he was easily vulnerable every night, and remained unharmed the entire time.

To see anyone in such a horrifying state would steal the breath from Vash's lungs, but it's when he hears that voice that he really freezes, goes stiff-silent. For the first time she's known him, the smile fades entirely, for a good ten seconds. Drips of salty water splash on her hand before he smiles through it again, even as his own blood mingles with hers--it smells of desert flowers and feels cool against her skin like aloe.]

Don't worry about that right now. [he half-whispers, voice soft and gentle, as though he were trying to urge an ill child to sleep. he can try to talk her out of some kind of revenge scheme later. when she can sit upright and breathe through her nose and focus her vision.]

Let's escape first. Can you hold onto me?