#thinking about just doing a drabble series based on the full lyrics tbh

[shmothman]

hands (put your empty hands in mine)

vash x reader drabble (rated g, 550 words)

Scarred from wrist to fingertip—just like the rest of him—Vash’s hands are never anything but gentle and careful when they wrap around yours. All of him is careful with you, often borderline treating you as if you’re fragile, but can you blame him when human life so often is? It’s only out of love for you; out of fear that you’ll be ripped away from him. Still, he can’t bear to hold on too tight. The guilt (of putting you in danger just by keeping you close) is something he’ll never fully be able to escape, but it’s something you can help lessen, with patience and love and the constant reminder that he is deserving.

At first, even just holding your hand is nearly enough to make him cry. He’s denied himself a great many things over the past hundred and thirty years—affection chief among them—and accepting it now is difficult, even when it’s something he wants more than anything else. Give him some time to get used to it; he’ll be seeking it out constantly before long. Your hand in his becomes an anchor, a comfort, a reminder that you’re here and you’re real and he isn’t alone anymore. You’re nothing short of a miracle, to him.

Though, of course, he gets nervous, especially in the beginning—his hand sweaty and trembling as he gives you a wobbly grin; he might even give you his prosthetic hand to hold (although any other time he favors the other) to keep you from seeing just how nervous he is. Not that you can’t tell. You know him too well for that. He’ll be even more awestruck when you take his right hand anyway, interlacing your fingers with his and giving him a squeeze of reassurance. You don’t mind if his palm is a little bit sweaty. Yours is too.

Not to say that you shy away from his left hand: though the metal gets far too hot to hold beneath the desert suns, it cools in the evening like everything else, and you can sit with him, tracing the nicks and scuffs of it. He doesn’t have much feeling in it, but watching you draw mindless patterns against it makes his heart sing. Still, the fact that it’s a weapon makes him hesitant to touch you with it; he wishes he could keep that part of himself away from you entirely. You coax him out of that melancholy every time, though—especially when you take it and press it to your cheek, swearing the coolness of it feels like heaven.

One surefire way to get him to melt is to brush your lips over his knuckles, or even better, press a kiss to his open palm when he goes to cup your cheek. He’s always red-faced around you, but when you give him such open adoration, your lips against the calluses he’s acquired in all his years as a gunslinger, he lights up like a roman candle, pink to the tips of his ears. (And if you compliment his hands? If you tell him how safe and loved they make you feel? How you love that he chooses to use them for good? For love and peace? Vash has long since decided that he’s yours forever, but this only cements that fact tenfold.)