Not as I do by Alaena Night

Chapter from: Snippets and Snapshots


Notes: Because I was thinking that Knives is right. Poor Vash really is one big contradiction in some ways.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Do as I say, not as I do.

It's a phrase that fits him so well. He says that people shouldn't be alone, and yet the isolation he forces on himself is the most painful sort of loneliness. He says, "Settle down," but has damned himself to a life of wandering. He protects innocence even as his own burns away with his agonized tears.

"Don't cry," he says...but I hear him at night.

To him, suicide is a horrible thing, yet it's his body that takes the bullets for those he tries to protect, his life that is torn away with each passing year. He always says that the ticket to the future is blank. Why, then, does his past control his life?

Forgive, he says, and yet each of his sins is a knife that cuts away at his heart.

I know he smiles...and I know that he does look toward the future, but the pains he forces himself to bear make me want to take them for him and hold them no matter the weight. To work together and to share one's burdens—though that man encourages both, he exercises neither.

"Love and Peace!" he says, but he denies them to himself in order to give them to others.

I love him, yet I hate him for what he's doing to himself. All I can do is watch as he smiles his empty smiles and as the light of life fades from his eyes.