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There is an easy warmth to it. The day in day out of a predicable life. Though Vash’s definition of predictable is about as wiggly and questionable as his definition of hurt or excitement. But there is something so tempting and soothing in the ritual of it all; of pretending to be an insurance agent with Milly Thompson. It's convenient. More than pleasant. And it's much much easier to gain access to a plant for a quick inspection when you have an insurance badge. Makes his job of singing his sisters back to sleep much easier. Makes tweaking the machines easier. Just makes his purpose in life smoother.
As Milly shoulders open the door after a long day of red tape, Vash follows after, the toes of his boots catching the floor boards as he shuffles in boneless, some part of his soul still dipped in cold abyss of his sister tank. He deposits himself on the bed and flopped face down, his mind all full of a nameless buzz- if he chases it he’ll sleep, he’ll sleep for a long while and he'll dream. He will sleep and the dreams will have him until they decide to let him go. If he fights it he’ll have a migraine. So he lays still. Trying to stay in the middle place of here and now without asking anything of his nervous system.
“Vash- your boots. No boots on the bed,” Milly says lightly smacking the back of his calf.
“Mrmmmmm.” He complains.
“Cat noises don’t take your boots off Mr. The Stampede.” She says. But she’s busy putting her things down. Busy setting her fuck off huge worm-grade stungun against the wall. Busy grabbing up Vash’s bag, still hanging out off his elbow. They both know he’s not going to move a got-damn inch yet, but usually he manages to make her laugh about it.
He rolls over with a groan and looks down at his boots- his good boots, the boots he wont realize till they are gone and it's fifty years later that were the best boots, his favorite boots- and feeling the worlds greatest amount of no thank you lets his legs slide off the bed. Asks; “hows that.”
“Oh Pathetic~” She says in that lilting sunshine sort of tone. Like he's just her very large disagreeable cat. Like they have not had some version of this conversation every time he has asked one of his sisters to come back from the brink. “Are you going to fall sleep?” she asks after a moment with a little more sympathy. Maybe more than he deserves.
“I’m trying not to,” He tells the ceiling. Because sometimes he sleeps for too long after, more than twelve hours, and sometimes waking up is too hard. Sometimes the dreams linger on him and makes reality fuzzy for a few days. Sometimes twelve hours is more than enough time for everything to go to shit. He hears her shake the sand out of her jacket and hang it, her movements, the little sounds of her almost memorized. And usually- in the predictable way that traveling with some one falls into rituals and patterns she would disappear into the bathroom for a little bit. And while she was gone he’d rally himself. Take off his boots. Take off his jacket. Decide if he was sleeping with his jeans on or not. They are both deeply creature of habit, so when she sits on the edge of the bed it sends a start through him- the pattern's broken. Normalcy banished. The fight or flight waking up in him for no good reason. And its not because of her closeness- no they’ve been in each other's faces- in each other's bed for the last three months. She's been a sweet treat. The kind he has rarely allowed himself even when he can find some one who wants to be touched how he likes to touch. Even when he finds some one who touches him the way he wants to be touched- which is sparingly, particularly, gingerly.
She tugs at the arm of his coat, and with all her easy farm girl strength maneuvers him out of it. Like he is merely a tamale of a man who needs to be unwrapped.
“Am I being unsaddled like a Tomas?” He asks her. He tries to make the frown on his face something else. anything else.
“Mhmm, you usually say something clever when I ask you to take your boots off, so I understand the situation must be dire,” she says. And it's hard to tell with her when she’s teasing him or she’s being so earnest it feels the same, or sometimes it's both at once.
He is looking up at her, feeling like he’d never said anything clever in his life actually. Finding less cleverness inside himself every moment he looks into her broad honest face and keen blue eyes. Her hair is wild from a long day of running around town in the dry wind and her lips set in a stubborn sort of smile, something about them like the petals of a rose- she’s beautiful in a careless sort of way. She’s just Milly, just the way god made her, perfect for all her rough edges. If he could keep Milly in little jar with a stick he thinks maybe he would. Maybe she’d be the kind of person he’d take back to ship 3- but Milly had a big family she loved and he had known her only three months- Milly was a part of linear time and he needed to not forget that- needed to remember how easily his heart would try to staple him to some one who'd evaporate like the last sip in a canteen.
“-Hey don’t look so sad,” She says softly ,“Was talking with this plant extra hard, or?”
That takes him off guard.
“Yes? No? just- She really liked my teeth,” He says tries to laugh it all off as one of his passing moody habbits. The whole time he had been trying to explain the predicament to his Sister she had been trying to crawl into his head to inspect his teeth. So he’d stood there in front of the tank with his fingers intermittently in his mouth- he wondered what that must have looked like. “Imagine talking about astrophysics with a toddler, but the toddler knows more than you.”
“No wonder you're always exhausted after.” She has never asked him how or why he can do what he does. The sky is blue. Vash can talk to plants. And it's not a naivety, it's a kind of trust; that he can and he does .And for her that is good enough.
Once she's persuaded him out of his coat and hung it on the bed post- her arms are long and she doesn't even need to stretch- she pulls one of his long legs into her laps and starts at the buckles of his boots. She’s undoing them all the way, which isn’t strictly necessary to negotiate his narrow feet out of the boots and it will be a pain to do them all the way up again later. Something hot burns in him to let her do something he knows he can do himself, but he lets her. He fucking lets her. And he knows he’s going to regret it. Not now. No. Nothing is better right now. It's like letting himself have another whiskey. Another cigarette. Pleasure now, pain latter. He’s going to let Milly Thomson baby him, and he’s going to have to carry it. He is already ninety-seven and carrying so many things. She pulls off his boot and it goes thunk onto the floor and then she negotiates his other leg up into her lap. And he has so much leg she almost laughs, and looks smug when she gets him where she wants him, like she's done a magic trick. She shucks that second boot off of and lets it joins the twin on the floor. While she's got him there she wraps her hand around his skinny ankle, just to see if she can- and she can- just like his wrists, just like she can wrap both hands around his waist and her thumbs nearly meet at his belly button.
“Do you need me to love on you, or pretend you're not miserable,” she asks. She runs her hand up the full length of his leg, ankle to thigh and back and he knows the answer he wants. He knows the answer he deserves to give.
“I’m not miserable. I’m just tired,” He says with such an air of confidence that it's laughable. Because he has had his good arm bent up over his face so he can hide in the crook of his elbow.
“Mmmm so I’m imagining all these puppy dog looks you're giving me?”
“That’s just how my face is!” He says, peeking out at her.
She leans over, puts a hand on his chest and lets the curtain of her hair fall between them and the rest of the world. She is so tall- she is such a big lady- that she can reach him like that, even with his knees over her lap like they are. He does not feel small often and always Milly makes him feel like he is figuratively and literally something that can fit in her pocket- something worth keeping. It makes it so hard to remember what he deserves as he feels his face go red as a bottle of hot sauce.
“Are you sure?” she asks, the smile spreading from her eyes into the perfect bow of her lips. “Pretty sure your face does all kinds of things actually. Like this-” She adds and pokes his nose. He can feel his face doing several somethings and she giggles- Leans in real slow. And he knows. He knows and he trusts that if he turns his head away she’ll kiss his cheek, tease him a little more and go take a shower. But he is boneless and the soft ache that lives at the bottom of his soul has caught up to him and she is so warm and full and here- looking at him like she is the real source of everything good about sun.
He’s weak. He's so weak and he’s been weak almost a hundred other times before as he stretches his arms up around her neck. It's so easy when they come together; the way she’s careful not to put her weight on him, careful not to touch too much of him at once, careful to keep her hands off the tender parts of him- all the little things that have historically made getting loved on complicated. Sometimes just looming over him like this was too much, but the shape of Milly is so familiar now, months of repetition helped.
He lets her kiss him just how she likes to- it’s one thing he’s never been picky about. She’s aggressive, in a way that’s surprising for her sweetness. Something in her predatory and saltwater born that wants to smother him so completely, even though that’s the opposite of what he wants- and there is something in the restraint of the tide of her intensity that always makes him especially melty. The way she is gentle with him on purpose when she didn't have to be, he wouldn't complain too much if she wasn't, but she is and she cares. She cares so much he taste it, all lemon Meringue and earl grey tea of it.
Maybe she was right? Maybe he was pretending not to be miserable. Maybe the best way to pretend he wasn’t was to get loved on a little? In fifty years would it be better or worse to have let himself be loved by Milly Thompson? And the fear of finding out is bright like a star in his mind when he kisses her back- so much so that she squeaks into him and he laughs- the kiss dissolving into something graceless and unromantic but full of something greater than the sum of intimacy’s performative parts.
She muffles her laughter into him and plants a kiss on the crook of his neck that makes him wriggle.
“You’re not very good at pretending anyway-” He says in defeat.
“Oh no~ the truth, not the truth,” She says in feigned distress and slips a hand up his shirt to hear what kind of noises he’ll make. And the truth was that she cared. And not letting himself have her wouldn’t change that- was stupid to let it go to waste.