Chapter Text
Spring has entered into its final battle with summer. Its defeat is inevitable but it's putting up a fight, trading cold fronts and icy rain for days nearing triple digits. It's an altogether unpredictable sort of month.
Vash likes to say that it's the type of weather where if you leave the house without a jacket in the morning, you're dead, but if you still have that jacket on by noon, you're also dead.
He’d like to say that the changing of the seasons is a bigger deal, that it maybe brings more time off or some exciting new prospect, but really all that the change in seasons means is that he can no longer skimp on getting the pricey deodorant when he goes shopping. Damn.
Life is the same, friends are the same, work is the same.
Coffee shops don't really have on and off seasons, caffeine addiction what it is nowadays, and given that they sell everything from hot tar pitch to what are essentially milkshakes with a splash of coffee, people really just never stop coming.
That's where he finds himself most days of the week, serving coffee and selling books, bussing tables, and sweeping floors. It's a good little store, staffed mainly by people Vash is friendly with (except his manager, the douche) so Vash generally has a good time.
Things aren't any different today. Milly's on shift and the two of them flit around each other like hummingbirds, making drinks and serving pastries. Their shop has a really good selection of pastries that are all made inhouse and the employees are encouraged to take home anything that's left at the end of the day. It's a big help when money is tight.
He's finishing a dine-in order, a caramel vanilla latte with a pump of hazelnut syrup and chocolate powder on top, when his grip on the drink goes slack and it crashes to the floor.
He stares down at the mess at his feet blankly, mind processing for a long moment, before he snaps back into action. "Ah, so clumsy!" he laughs, kneeling down to start picking up the shards of glass.
His manager glowers at him. He'd scold him but he clearly doesn't want to tempt the disability discrimination gods because he keeps his mouth shut.
Vash just laughs. "Ah, sorry, sorry, take it out of my paycheck, my bad." he says. He quickly mops and sweeps up the glass before remaking the waiting customer's order. He apologizes for the delay with a free chocolate chip cookie set to the side of the mug and a big smile. "Sorry about the wait."
The customer is one of their regulars and an easy-going fellow. He returns the smile, unperturbed.
When he returns to the counter, Milly's got a furrow between her brows. "What was that about? You okay?" she asks. At 6'2", he has to look slightly up at his friend.
"I'm fine, it's just..." He glances to the window where for a second, just a second, he'd sworn he'd seen... He plasters a big smile on his face even though his stomach is doing flips. "I dunno, I just got distracted for a second. You know me, butterfingers, ahaha." He laughs hollowly.
Milly still frowns but nods in understanding. "If you need to take a break, let me know and I'll cover for you, okay?"
His smile melts into something genuine. "Thank you, Milly." he says.
She beams at him. "Of course!"
+++
By the time he gets off his shift and bikes home, it's stiflingly hot.
He's the first one back so he goes around opening windows and turning on fans to air the place out. They have a portable swamp cooler they can pull out of the closet when it starts getting warm enough but it's not quite worth it yet. Tomorrow's supposed to be in the sixties.
Within half an hour or so, the house is nice and cool and he lazily flicks through twitter on his phone while dozing on the couch in basketball shorts and one of Nai's oversized tees that he turned into a crop top. It’s like a sail on him.
He gets up after a while and makes a pitcher of tea, figures the boys will like that after such a warm day, though they'll probably go for beer first.
He reheats some of the pasta Rem had sent over the other day in a big tupperware and scarfs it down like a man starved. He swears his mother's love language is pasta, given or received. Of course, he's not complaining when he's starfished out on the bed, sighing in contentment with a full belly. He rarely gets to lay like this given their sleeping arrangements, so it's nice to bask for a while.
When he finally peels himself from the bed to toss the paper plate away, he notices how full the trash can is. He gives the performance of a lifetime to the few flies that have managed to slip inside, lamenting his fate while pretending that he's not going to put his shoes on and take the damn trash down to the street. Tomorrow morning is when trash is collected, anyway, so if he doesn't get it out now, high chance that he'll forget about it.
He can't shake the feeling in his gut from earlier, like he'd seen something that had put him on edge. The entire time down the stairs and out the alley, he feels like he's being watched. It's like when you're a kid and you close the bedroom door and are hit with the sudden urge to sprint to your bed and dive under the covers before the invisible monsters get you. He takes the stairs by twos and slams the door behind him. It's not until he's back in the apartment with the door securely locked behind him that he realizes what he's done and feels rather silly.
He needs to relax.
He flicks on the fairy lights strung over the window as it starts to get darker out. It's not quite that late but the clouds rolling in look like rain.
Nai is the first to arrive home. "Feels like rain out." He says as he strips his outside clothes and tosses them into the dirty clothes hamper. He doesn't bother with a shirt, sweaty from his own bike ride, just puts on a pair of blue basketball shorts and makes himself a bowl of cereal.
Vash raises a brow. "Must've been a bad day if you're breaking out the processed carbs and sugar for dinner." he says.
Nai makes a noncommittal sound. "I'm tutoring a kid who's pretending to be dumb so he can keep spending time with me."
Vash bites his lip to stifle his laughter. "Is that the Bluesummers kid you were talking about?"
Nai sighs. "That's the one. I'm caught between wanting to tell his parents he's faking and really, really enjoying that fat two hundred double dollars and a tip every week for tutoring his lonely ass."
Vash can't help it, he laughs.
Nai rolls his eyes at his brother. "You're a lot of help, Vash, thanks."
Vash grins at him. "Love you." he says.
Nai grumbles. "Love you too, brat."
He and his brother have always been close. Since conception, one could say, since the Saverem boys are twins.
Wolfwood is the next to arrive home. He works most days as an apprentice carpenter and when he's not doing that, he's around town doing odd jobs. He's by far the sweatiest of them, shucking his jeans off and tossing them at the basket and missing completely, hitting Vash in the face.
Vash squawks indignantly but Wolfwood and Nai just laugh at him.
Wolfwood pops into the bathroom and rinses off, muttering something about 'fiberglass' before returning a few minutes later and parking himself in front of the oscillating fan on the floor.
Nai brings him a glass of iced tea which he takes gratefully. "Thanks, babe." he says.
The three of them are best friends but Nai and Wolfwood are boyfriends.
Wolfwood had initially been kicked out of his home by a bigoted foster parent for fooling around with a boy from school and couch surfed for a lot of years. When that was unsustainable, Nai asked Vash if it would be cool if his boyfriend stayed with them for a while.
Vash had been hesitant, of course, but he and Wolfwood got on like a house on fire so Vash was at least willing to try.
It had gone, and is still going, swimmingly.
From then on, ‘Nai and Vash’ had turned into ‘Nai, Vash, and Wolfwood’, and Vash could scarcely imagine a time where Wolfwood wasn't in their life or their bed.
That's the other thing that people may find strange: the three of them share a bed.
It started with a king-sized mattress left by the previous tenants in their shithole apartment. Cheap college kids that they were, the twins decided-- fuck it-- and just shared the bed. It was too heavy to lug down the stairs, even with the aid of friends, so it stayed.
When Wolfwood moved in, he initially slept on the couch, or Vash would when he and Nai wanted to canoodle. However, Vash is an aggressively cuddly drunk, so it wasn't long before the three of them fell into bed together in a heap (platonically, mind you, they're still brothers ). Once the dam was broken, the three of them spent more nights together than apart. The bed's big enough for it, anyways.
"Your phone is ringing." Nai says.
Vash blinks out of his reverie and grabs his phone from the bedside table where it'd been charging. "Ah! It's Rem!" he cheers. Answering it, he greets. "Hi mama!"
Their mother had been twelve years old when she gave birth to them, and thanks to complications from such a young body going through such a traumatic process, the twins were left orphans at one day old. For a decade or so, the two of them were cycled through the foster care system, never staying anywhere for long, often forced apart only to reunite and be forced apart soon after. It wasn't until Rem that their life gained any sort of stability.
It had taken a lot of years, the system being what it is, but since the day they turned fourteen, Rem has officially been their mother.
They'd been placed with her at eleven, twins who'd suffered more than any children should. She'd taken them in and let her claws sink in with all the ferocity of a mama bear.
He'll never forget that first day, a scant year after the car accident that left Vash a dual amputee, both an arm and a leg missing and his body covered in myriad scars. Since the accident, when Vash wasn't in the hospital, the twins had bounced from foster to foster, over eighteen of them in twelve months. Reuniting only to part over and over again.
At first, it was only going to be Vash placed with Rem but when she found out that the child she was receiving was part of a set, she'd contacted their case worker to see if there was any way to have Nai placed with her, as well.
Nai's current foster was fed up with him, the older twin having had 'troubled' stamped on his file from hither to thither, so plans were made and executed and both boys arrived on her doorstep soon after.
She sat them down that first day over a lunch of dinosaur chicken nuggets and juice boxes and explained that she understood they'd been through a lot but she hoped they stayed with her for a good long while.
Unable to help himself, Nai had lashed out, told her that she was just going to be like all the rest, that she'd get her check at the end of the month and drop them back off with their caseworker to head to new families. That's how it had been since they could remember and he didn't expect her to be any different.
Vash had just cried, expecting the worst. There were a lot of years where he did little else but cry.
Rem hadn't argued with them, just told them that it was okay to feel angry, to cry, and tucked them into beds in a shared room. Usually, fosters preferred to keep boys and girls separate but Rem hadn't bothered. She made them pancakes in the morning.
When a month came and went and they weren't returned, Vash let himself feel something like hope, and when six months came and went and Rem was talking about plans with the twins next year , Nai stopped treating her with outright contempt.
When they were thirteen, Rem sat them down and explained that because of local regulations, fosters could only harbor the same children in their homes for three years at a time and that their three years were coming to an end, so they had a decision to make.
Nai had immediately fallen into a defensive role, assuming the worst, that she was getting rid of them.
Vash had started crying, assuming the same thing.
At least they were predictable.
"So we're going back?" Nai had spat, small fists clenched so hard that his fingernails had drawn blood.
"Are they going to separate us?" Vash asked in a small voice.
Nai scoffed. "Of course they are, you're disabled and I've got behavioral issues and we're teenagers. Nobody's gonna want both of us at the same time. They're gonna separate us. Again." he said, tears welling in his eyes.
Rem had made a noise, fists on her hips. "Aiyah, will you two let me talk? I'm not giving you up!" she cried.
They both paused to look at her, cautiously hopeful.
She repositioned herself to be closer to them, sitting on the coffee table at their knees, and carefully explained what adoption was. "It'll take a few months to process the paperwork but once it's done, it'll mean that you two are mine. Forever. You can stay with me for as long as you like. If... if that's something you two want, that is."
Vash had broken down in tears, happy tears, but tears nonetheless, and nodded profusely.
Nai had finally let go, let himself be held by his soon-to-be-mother. "Please..." he'd begged.
She laughed, her hug so tight around the both of them and tears wetting their shoulders. "Then it's settled, you two are stuck with me."
Now, she laughs brightly. "You ever gonna get sick of calling me mama?" Rem asks.
"Never." Vash says dreamily. He'd started saying it in high school, had just slipped out of him one day.
Rem had pulled him into a hug and hadn't let go until he squeaked.
"Good." she hums happily.
Nai makes a gagging noise from his place on the couch, having guessed their current conversation as it was far from their first time having it.
Vash smacks him from the bed. "Mm, Nai says hello." he says.
Nai rolls his eyes.
"Aww, tell him I said hello and I love him." she says.
Vash repeats back the message and Nai's responding, "Love you, too."
Wolfwood chuckles at their antics.
"How's Nicholas?" Rem asks, probably having heard his telltale laugh.
"Iunno. How are you, Nicholas ?" he teases. Everyone calls Wolfwood, well, Wolfwood. A few of the people he did odd jobs for call him Nick, but that was rare.
"Gettin' there." Wolfwood drawls, holding up his iced tea.
Vash laughs as he repeats the message and his mother laughs in response at his impression of his friend.
"What's up?" Vash finally asks.
"Oh, right, I actually called for a reason." Rem laughs.
Vash hums. "D'ju need something?"
"Well, I heard something the other day when I was talking to a friend and it sounded familiar, so I wanted to ask, were you or Nai ever placed with a family called the Conrads?" she asks.
"Hmm. Sounds familiar? But it's been so long and it's hard to remember stuff from that time." he says. "Why, what happened?"
"Well, the Conrad’s son recently got out of prison. He was the one who was convicted for medical malpractice and manslaughter a little over a decade ago. You might be too young to really remember it but it was the talk of the town for a while." she says.
Something hot and sharp piques in Vash's gut. "That rings a bell..." he says.
"Yeah, he'd get black out high before operating on patients, even pediatric patients. He lost six people before he was arrested. My boyfriend at the time was on the jury and every day he'd come home with just the most haunted look on his face; it was awful." she says.
His heart thrums in his chest, his fingers feel numb.
Like a hammer to the head, she continues, unaware of his current state. "His name is William Conrad, if you've ever heard someone talking about him. It was quite the scandal."
"He... got out of prison?" Vash asks. His vision is beginning to tunnel.
The television blares with a gunfight, maybe the showdown at the OK Corral, though Vash can't be certain.
"Yeah, his sentence was something like fifteen years but I guess he got out early by teaching some religious thing, some drug and alcohol counseling course or something." she says.
Vash nods, then remembers that his mother cannot see him. "Hey, mama, I'm, ah. I've got a thing, I'll call you back, okay?" His chest is so tight and he can't breathe. Just hold it together for one more minute, his mother can't know. No one can know.
A cowboy monologues on the screen and Vash can't understand a word of it, is certain, even, that Nai must've accidentally hit the remote and changed the audio language.
He's not sure what Rem says but it's a question.
Taking a shot in the dark he says, "I'm fine, love you, bye!" in as cheery a voice as he can manage, and hangs up the phone.
With little warning, everything goes black.