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The disaster on the Sand Steamer rattles a whole bunch of things loose – secrets, confidence, moderate aspects of sanity – but Wolfwood’s head is holding together until Vash starts fucking sleep-talking.
Not sleep-muttering, which was previously a logical but annoying extension of his inability to shut up at appropriate times. Anyone might be excused for nightmares after – that, but Wolfwood is absolutely sure he hasn’t started monologuing in his sleep about it. Roberto would have thrown him out of the truck.
Wolfwood is torn from the confused morass of being just awake enough to be aware the blood on his tongue and face is a nightmare but not enough to do anything about it when Vash pipes up, clear as a bell, “Rem, why is the sky blue?”
Vash hasn’t said a word for going on three days now, so this shocks Wolfwood awake as much as Meryl nearly swerving into a sand dune. Roberto rouses with a grumble. The moon is bright enough Wolfwood can meet Meryl’s wide eyes in the mirror, before they both look back at Vash.
“Ultraviolet,” Vash says, like he’s trying to puzzle out a textbook.
Roberto yanks his face from where he’s been roughly rubbing his eyes and looks back at Vash, now fully awake. He cranes around far enough to make eye contact with Wolfwood, but he’s too rattled to make a thing about it.
On cue, Vash whines “Na-ai, I’m not stupid. Rem is more fun than the videos, you think so too.”
The truck is perfectly silent besides the sound of the sand under the tires, leaving space for the ghost to say his piece in the conversation. Wolfwood stares into the silvery smears of the sand stretching away in every direction through the dusty window. He pulls out a cigarette.
“Blue is a good color,” Vash says, happy again. “I’m glad all the lights are blue. Except it gets a little boring. Can we make the lights yellow? Oh, or red? I want red – Nai, shut up, I just –” and he whines, juvenile and annoyed.
Wolfwood chews on his cigarette, but aborts the automatic followup before actually lighting it. Vash hasn’t spoken, hasn’t eaten, only swallowed a mouthful of water when Meryl got close to tears. Wolfwood is going to have to start force-feeding him soon, if he can’t snap Vash out of it. This is the first time he’s looked truly asleep, vigorous bickering with another child notwithstanding. His tone jumps up and down octaves and volumes while his face remains slack, mostly immobile save bare twitches here and there. He keeps saying that name, and Wolfwood cannot connect this conversational pattern that he’s heard dozens of times between kids at the orphanage and the more childish of the experiments and the man waiting underneath JuLai. He should pull out a sucker instead of wasting a perfectly good cigarette, but the thought of something sweet makes his mouth water unpleasantly.
“I think it’s nice the pods are blue,” Vash says. He’s starting to sound sleepy in his sleep. “It’s like sleeping in a pool, or a piece of sky. And when everyone wakes up, we can see the real sunsets and go swimming and eat peaches…”
He trails off, as suddenly as he started. Wolfwood turns back to the window and watches the desert go by until his eyes burn.