Vash looks unhealthy and sleepless, bordering on sick. Could they get sick? He doesn't have old habits to fall back into, one year in over a hundred not enough to burn patterns of behavior into place but he is immediately worried anyway, a frown tugging at his lips while he raises a hand to gently rub one calloused thumb over Vash's cheek. "It's been a hundred and fifty four years," he says, the guilt of that time span strangling and unhappy. "since I've seen you in anything but dreams. Imagining what you would have looked like grown, what you might have sounded like." Though nightmares would be more accurate, a decades long affair with knowing he killed the only close family he'd ever have, and this was guilty too, a twisted mess of painful joy and loss and how dare he even think about being happy when his brother was still dead? "Imagining who you might have grown to become."

It was a little bit odd how quick Vash was to obey, but he probably would do exactly the same if a request was made of him, so it passes by. There's so much that would be strange and unnerving if he'd spent even a moment after the Fall with his brother, Knives has so many easy excuses why that come to mind without ever thinking anything is wrong. "I .. I don't know what to say. You're .. alive." Alive is a whisper, afraid if it was said louder the moment would shatter and the cold reality of absence would set back in.