[He doesn't remember. He doesn't remember what happened, but he has a terrible creeping dread that might be for the best. Dirt falls on his face, and he thinks for a moment, about not getting up. Something terrible has happened, and he is responsible. That's how the stories are supposed to end, isn't it? With the monster defeated.

But he can hear things up above, the sounds of scrabbling and struggling, someone in need of help, and his body moves without thinking -- and before he knows it, he's up and dangling precariously from your grave instead, upside-down with a high-end metallic arm, scratched and dirty with dust and grime reaching out toward you.]

Need a hand?

[When you think about it, how badly do you need to be saved, really? It's probably fine for it to end here, right. You'd be spared This Nonsense.]

[Vash loves flowers. He doesn't remember many, but he knows he loved them. So perhaps he makes a few...mistakes, trying to stop and literally smell the roses on his way out of the maze. He nearly loses his other arm to one of the one with teeth, and one of the ones with eyeballs keeps him trapped for a good hour until a passing breeze blows his hair in his face and breaks his gaze.

But he reaches the field of lilacs at the end of the maze, and the fear from before seems a thousand miles away. There was a beautiful place like this that he used to know, once. A safe place. (Home.)

It'd be alright to rest here, wouldn't it? He feels like he's been on the move for so, so long with nowhere to go. He curls up on the grass, and lets the scent carry him off somewhere far away as the vines curl around him -- almost protectively, it would seem, to anyone who doesn't know better.]

[Nai is dead. You killed him.

It's the only clue he has to what happened. He doesn't know what it means, and at first, he tries not to dwell. What can he do about it now, after all? No amount of atonement can bring back the dead. Yet the smell follows him all over the Staywell, and somehow he knows he recognizes it. The guilt eats at him and he shoves it down with a smile; a habit of a century and a half is not so easily broken, even without memories. But it spikes one day at the tavern -- amidst some perfectly pleasant smalltalk or other, the words escape him like the contents of one's stomach after a night of entirely too much indulgence:]

I'm afraid of who I might've been. I know I loved my brother, but I killed him anyway. I think I did worse, too.