Tempest Wind (Vash x F!Reader)

Blame

"I don't know," he sighs.

"At least my demon is dead. Nobody survived but me. A whole ship... gone. If he wasn't chasing me around, maybe he could have done something... Others were able to activate their gravity Plants; maybe he could have too... And where were the others? Did they just let him do these horrible things to me? Did they approve?"

"I... I wish I knew. I wish I knew all the answers."

"Where's my bag? The tablet... it has some kinds of logs on it..." You lean forward to look around the room.

Vash lets go of your hands and reaches out, picking up the tablet from the small sidetable and handing it to you.

"I thought you might want to have a look at it again," he says, avoiding your eyes as if embarrassed, and you take the folded up device into your hands. You sigh deeply, your fingers tracing along the edge of the device. There is no use in prolonging and dragging this out again. You pull apart the two sides of the tablet to be greeted with the same view of the folder containing your information: "Project HUMAN, subject 0325". You know there are more logs hidden in there that you haven't read yet, videos you haven't watched till the end. There are probably more terrors left to uncover, but you don't want to remember all that. Tonight, you want to know who to blame, what his name was, and how nobody stopped him.

Your fingers hesitate for a moment before touching the profile button, pulling up the ID of a man. The memories come flooding back as you see the picture of the man. He doesn't look evil; there is no malice or craziness in his eyes. He doesn't remind you of a villain, just a regular person, yet you are reminded of the expression he had while looming over you. His face contorted in sickly curiosity as he sliced you open or injected you with yet another concoction of chemicals. He has straw blonde hair and green eyes, yet his skin is pale white, like he has never seen sunlight before.

"Is that him?" Vash asks quietly, and you nod.

Signs of aging grace his face; wrinkles by his eyes tell you he used to smile a lot, but you don't remember him like that. The lines on his forehead are more familiar to you, and the expression he made accentuated them as his brow furrowed in concentration. This picture barely resembles the man you knew. You look to the side to find out he was 44 as of the Great Fall, meaning he was around 33 when he thawed you out and started his work. He's from Earth and had a brilliant career as a molecular genetics technologist before he was recruited for this mission. He continued in the same position on the crew. You look up to see his name: Gabriel Vazquez.

"Vazquez..." Vash's brows move closer together. "Doesn't William Conrad call himself Revenant Vazquez?"

"I don't know..." Your voice is hollow as you keep staring at the innocent face on the screen.

You push aside the profile to open up the folder called Logs. You wonder what Brad found to include them. You see the files in there; they are dated, and you start from the beginning. You see the logs, but you also notice how the date is colored in and there are notes added; you assume they are from Brad.

06:00, February 20th, 2439 - Deep Cryosleep Wake up protocol initiated, Gabriel Vazquez.

This is the earliest log about him waking up; he was chosen to be part of the skeleton crew keeping the ship functioning while the large majority was in cold sleep. Typically, there would be five people awake at a time, each on a 5 year rotation. The wake-up protocol wakes you from the deep cold sleep, you serve your 5 years and go back to sleep to be replaced by someone else.

08:00, March 4th, 2440 - Cold sleep pod 7: Wake up initiated - Gabriel Vazquez.

08:15, March 4th, 2440 - Warning: Cold sleep pod 7 - malfunction detected. Corrective actions needed. Status: Silenced.

08:00, March 5th, 2440 - Cold sleep pod 7: Wake up initiated - Gabriel Vazquez.

08:15, March 5th, 2440 - Warning: Cold sleep pod 7 - malfunction detected. Corrective actions needed. Status: Silenced.

08:00, March 6th, 2440 - Cold sleep pod 7: Wake up initiated - Gabriel Vazquez.

08:15, March 6th, 2440 - Warning: Cold sleep pod 7 - malfunction detected. Corrective actions needed. Status: Silenced.

The list goes on, and the dates cut off at the 30 day mark.

This was his pod, and after over a year of using it, it had a malfunction. I'm not sure what kind, because since the warning was silent, nobody saw it and went to check on it. He kept using it.

08:00, April 21st, 2440 - Cold sleep pod 7: Wake up initiated - Gabriel Vazquez.

08:15, April 21st, 2440 - Warning: Cold sleep pod 7 - malfunction detected. Corrective actions needed. Status: Silenced.

08:15, April 21st, 2440 - Warning: Cold sleep pod 7 - irregular neurological signals detected in sleeper Gabriel Vazquez. Check-in is strongly advised! Status: Silenced.

My guess is that the unfixed malfunction in pod 7 caused some form of brain damage that went unnoticed by the other crew members because of the silenced warnings. I couldn't find why they were silenced.

You look through the logs, and you see that shortly after April 21st, 2440 he started accessing a lot of different files regarding Plants and Independents, including one called "Project Tesla". A year later, the warnings from pod 7 got more urgent, to the point where they were no longer silenced, and other crew members actually went to check on it but had no success in fixing it. One day after that, the wake-up protocol was manually altered. Gabriel Vazquez made it so that the Deep Cryosleep wake-up protocol was halted completely, and the other pods besides 7 would no longer wake their inhabitants either. He made it so that he was alone on the ship. Nobody could interfere in his work.

"I was alone with him... Nobody could save me..." You exhale deeply.

"He was obsessed with you..." Vash says quietly as he looks through the last log. It is very long, including all the times within the year before he woke you that he looked you up.

"And..." you are at a loss. "I can't even truly blame him... He wasn't a bad man... he wasn't a monster to begin with... he was sick. It was nothing more than a string of unfortunate events... the pod made him go crazy, and the more he used it, the worse it got... He wasn't born evil, yet here I am, the result of his evil deeds."