Vash didn't look away, not even for a moment. His face actually eased out on the words came, except for the part where Knives had forced him to do damage, when his eyebrows scrunched in his own remembered pain, and the admission the n of Wolfwood's terror, which still somehow hurt, even if he might have known it. When it had all come out, he raised his right hand and wiped those tears with a thumb, gently, so gently.

"Intensional or not, it doesn't make the lives taken any less. That's why in this way, the sheer enormity of what I've caused cannot be denied... No. I can't deny it. But... It's not quite like that. It's not that I let them hurt me as penance, though sometimes my body moves before I can think." Now he was calm, in a way, because he could relieve a little of what was hurting wolfwood.

"What I'm trying to do, what helps, is to protect someone, to help someone, to relieve someone else's pain. Sometimes that means that I get hurt in the process, but that is less pain than is relieved when I help. I'm not trying to get hurt, it's that I don't mind getting hurt as much." It was the truth. For all the difference it might make, probably not...

Then he took a deep breath.

"I fought. I always fight. But I turned JuLai into a crater, destroying everyone there, because I try tried to fly out into space with something dangerous, and then fell. The impact... The impact that I made, personally, obliterated the entire city.

"Fighting against doing harm can still kill people. That is why I won't kill even more. Why it's so hard to see others get hurt and just stand by. When I know I'll live.

" It's why everyone else's life seems so much more precious to me. Everyone else can lose that life. And I... I'll just wake up again."