Benevolence
The first time Wolfwood met her, it was little more than a flash in a fizzling pan of blooming constellations.
The night had been especially dark, void of all the usual shades of teal and violet that would normally streak the skies, a limitless, star-filled inky night.
Then, she had been but a small child, wandering the cold dunes with hunger in her belly and nothing in her eyes. She pulled and tucked at the tattered shawl around her shoulders in an attempt to fend from the edge of the blowing sand, her short fingers only managing to rub some more dirt into the fabric.
She walked, eyes fixed on the dunes, always imagining what might lay beneath. She walked on and the moonless skies darkened further, she walked on, and they relented, softly, kindly. There was light anew, and somewhere beyond the horizon, a new day glowed.
Her feet were already numb to the journey, her mind numb to the sensation. She trudged on, nonetheless. The path forward had, at some point, become all that she could feel, all she could think about, and as everything else began to gradually lose meaning, she in turn became the path itself. It wouldn’t be long, she promised herself; it wouldn’t be long.
It had been some days already, though she could’ve sworn each hour was a year of its own. It would be another day yet before she was to come across the thing.
She remembered that night, that cold and empty loneliness, that faraway, silver-dotted sky, that hazy whisper of a horizon that somehow felt even further away than the blind stars in the distance. She remembered it all, perhaps much better than what had come after.
It was a dusty piece of something. It must have been something, at some point, a desert-dwelling rodent or some especially malnourished fox, some sort of a cat. It lay there, abandoned in what felt like the split middle of the path forward, even as there were no stones to mark the road, no signs to point the way.
It looked like it must’ve been dead a good while then.
Wolfwood stood above it, perhaps a metre or twenty back, and she felt strangely static. Like a single grain of sand in a sea of yellow dust, like she had also, as the tiny carcass, been...
It felt eternal, in a way, yet finite all the same.
Her feet carried her to the thing, and she crouched, even as her mouth twisted in disgust. In the orange light of the morning, it almost looked like it was trembling. It was a sad, dusty pile of meat and fur, and at a closer look, it didn’t seem that dead at all.
“Poor critter, eh?” A voice sounded then, from somewhere behind Wolfwood, and her entire body shook with how alien it felt to hear another person speak after such a long while. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.”
Not far to the side, under a dune just tall enough to cover her frame from the oncoming path forward, sat She.
At that time, Wolfwood would later recall, she looked strangely out of sync with the sandy hills she had crawled across; oddly timeless in a place broken down to its very atoms by time persistent.
Her red coat was in tatters; it seemed to be more so made up of burnt holes and cleaved tears and jagged bullet marks than any fabric left in one piece. A pair of round, yellow sunglasses sat pushed up into messy black hair, one lens cracked, the other missing completely.
A single, thin strand of blonde struck a sharp contrast with the greasy black.
Resting a gloved hand on her thigh, she spent a considerable bit of time pushing herself to her feet, more stumbling than walking over to take a closer look at the thing. Her other arm seemed to be missing entirely. “Do you think we can save it?”
Wolfwood didn’t even glance at her. Anyone that wanted to save another’s life in this place was nothing but a fool. It would take a town and good luck for either of them to leave with their life. And here this strange fool was, wanting to save a thing that was more flesh than fur.
“No, that’s not the right question, is it?” The fool chattered on by herself, letting out a pained huff and kneeling beside the thing to lean closer. “The question shouldn’t be whether we want to save it or not. It should be: do you want to save it, Wolfwood?”
The fool looked up at her then, eyes sharp, evaluating. It was the first time that Wolfwood had heard of that name, the first of millions, the first of a lifetime of counting. She was waiting for an answer, and Wolfwood hated that she had to make an effort to croak one out.
“You’re... you’re wrong. It doesn’t matter if I want to save it.” She thought about how to make sense of the myriad things she was feeling, “The question is... your first one was right.”
She averted her eyes, gaze wandering beyond the dunes. She uttered, “And the answer is no.”
“We can’t save it.” I can’t save it. “But if there is someone who can, they will.” She thought of angels and golden sunlight as the words left her mouth, and saw the fool gently cradling the thing in her palm when she looked up.
Years later, when she recalled that first meeting, Wolfwood could have sworn that Vash the Stampede looked more radiant cradling that broken little thing, covered in a mockery of what she would later come to know as her signature look, than any one rose-cheeked angel dancing on the church reliefs.
***
Vash had walked with her for a good another couple of years then.
They were slow, slower than Wolfwood had gotten used to, but it was better than having to walk the path on her own, much better, indescribably better. Vash had wrapped the thing into some rag he was wearing, and held it so that the sharp sun didn’t heat its wound, that the radiant blue skies didn’t hurt its eyes.
It survived, miraculously, somehow. In the end, Wolfwood had no idea how long they had walked alongside each other, only that the blisters on her feet burst then thickened again, only that when the walled town appeared on the horizon, it seemed more a mirage, a foul trick of the mind than what it had truly been; salvation incarnate.
Their parting came a short while after.
Vash seemed in horrible shape, worse than she had been back among the dunes.
Wolfwood wanted to ask her, oh, how she wanted to. Curiosity was all but killing her. But whenever she was about to ask, it was as if the other was able to sense it, grinning and only ever replying “Don’t even worry your pretty little head about that.”
She seemed to be... Wolfwood didn’t want to say it, she didn’t even want to think it.
Somehow, she could feel when the day had come. She shot up from the shabby little bed at the inn, head muddled and thoughts all piling together, and she knew she was alone.
She knew it intrinsically, just as she had known back among the endless hills of towering sand, just as she knew the path that wound ahead of her.
She knew that Vash the Stampede had left her behind. That she would not come back, not any time soon, not ever if her condition was as bad as it looked.
She thought she would never see her again.
Oh, how wrong she was.