"Jesus, blondie," Wolfwood wheezes, bent in half over a backend restaurant dumpster. There's garbage and debris all over his clothes now and he reeks of stale cheese. This city is an actual hellhole and being wanted for a lofty monetary sum does nothing to improve the experience whatsoever. "You're one popular bastard, aintcha?"
Vash smiles bleakly, watching a cadre of overglorified thugs née police scamper off, shouting profanity. Something heavy drapes over his shoulders, dipping for days and days now. There's a pair of moles between his shorn hairline and the hem of his stopsign red coat, tiny and tinier, smaller than the one under his eye, and Nicholas wonders briefly, if he has more elsewhere and he also wonders, what the f*ck is wrong with him.
"Hi sweetheart," Vash says, which startles Wolfwood badly and makes his innards do a Thing—until Vash reaches behind and pulls a handful of soot smirched creature out of his crumpled hood. It meows and struggles briefly for propriety's sake but ultimately gives up and purrs when Vash scratches between its ears. "How did you get here?" Vash coos under his breath. Tiny paws flex with a lazy yawn from the cuphold of his gloves.
"The cat?" Wolfwood clarifies as he shrugs trash off his blazer and hefts his gun back onto his shoulder. He has a strong urge to smoke.
"Meow," says the cat and starts kneading Vash's coat sleeves.
The corners of Vash's eyes go softly pinched and it makes him look older, indulging. He doesn't look at Wolfwood. "She's from Octovern."
"You're pulling my leg—that's like thousands of iles from here."
"Maybe she's on a tour," Vash offers wryly. Then, more subdued, "We should go." The cat lurches out while he lowers it between ripped boxes, and trots away, tail up. When Wolfwood turns to look Vash has faded into the alleyway shadows; Nicholas feels his hackles rise and he deliberately doesn't look because he doesn't need to. There's a suspicious scuffle and speeding footsteps which make Vash's breath tighten—Nicholas barely grips the Punisher before Vash is herding him away into the overcrowded lights of the nighttime district.
"Damn, blondie," he mutters sullenly, "not a moment's rest with you, is there?"
The corner of Vash's smile turns pained.
They catch breath once the streets become crowded increasingly with weekend July folk and tourists, inebriated and loose. Some of the pipes leak onto cracked pavement, an incredible waste among other luxuries, a splash of a puddle under Vash's mocs, neon purples and cyans and lurid pinks bouncing off every reflective surface. Something glints.
"Nine o'clock," Nicholas mutters. Vash doesn't look—suddenly there's a hand just shy of Wolfwood's waist, goddamnit blondie,which makes him stumble sideways and down, down, down.
"Where'd they go?!" There's a crash and a series of very unimpressed meows. They wait, crouched against the descending stairwell, until the footsteps fade.
He hadn't even noticed the steps, slotted crookedly between a casino entrance and a loudly blaring cabaret bar. The steps go down abruptly, padded with cheap plastic carpet; the walls here are covered in graffiti, scratched off advertisem*nts and outdated posters. There are indents and grips along one side, too. Even this seedy little part of Gunsmoke had once been the inside of a spacefaring ship.
At the bottom of the stairs the door sits heavyset and half-rusted. Nicholas realizes Vash's hand had been lingering only when it disappears to open the door. The inside greets them with murmuring voices and the occasional clatter of dishware from behind the barstand situated close to the entrance. The bar itself doesn't appear busy, yet there are stragglers clustered at various locations: near the bottle racks, strung down along the center, in freestanding little tables near the tiny empty stage. The sounds from outside cut almost immediately as the door hinges shut behind. Wolfwood trails with little complaint when Vash ducks between tables up to front.
The man behind the counter is graying at the temples as he eyes up Wolfwood and Wolfwood's gun, then turns to Vash with an expression of defeated consternation. "Bringin' trouble to my doorstep again?"
"Hello James," Vash says warmly as he slides onto a barstool, ankles crossing. It's mesmerizing except Wolfwood can't imagine how ankles can possibly be so thin.
Vash speaks to the bartender in mild, friendly tones—Nicholas tries not to think about it, about Vash and his damned ankles, about yesterday on the sand steamer, about tomorrow, god knows where, about today, here, with the ghost of warmth under his ribs in the shape of Vash's hand, and fails at that spectacularly. He wants urgently to have a smoke. When he reaches to shake one out, though, Vash catches his wrist and shakes his head.
"Wolfwood," he admonishes softly and nods at the sign behind the counter, aggressively red and hand drawn.
"Oh c'mon," Wolfwood complains—he's allowed this one vice in present circ*mstances; it’s all metal anyways. "They never actually care."
Vash leans close, right up to Wolfwood's ear, and it should be illegal for Vash specifically to do that. "James lost his previous bar to arson." Vash's breath is faint and hot against his shell, and, yeah, that makes Nicholas duck his head and leave his pack alone. Turning back to the bartender Vash smiles. "How's Lily—the kids?"
"Out of town, m'fraid," the man says and shakes his head ruefully. "Gone all the way to December for summer, those rascals." He shines a glass, while a smattering of patrons suddenly cheer at the TV propped up in the corner. "Hun's gonna blow a gasket you turned up just when she's out."
Vash laughs, a short, bright little thing.
"Popular with the ladies, are we blondie?" Wolfwood teases and the bartender snorts audibly.
"Terribly," James says dryly. "Helped my wife deliver all of our daughters."
"Daughters?" Wolfwood stares at Vash. "Daughters—plural?"
"Triplets," says James with poorly concealed amusem*nt. He puts down his rag and leans against the metal casing of the counter. "Now pick your poison and get lost."
Vash ushers them into a private little booth facing away from the entrance, not readily visible but conveniently overlooking other exits, then waltzes away for their order before Wolfwood can so much as open his mouth. There's a splatter of neon from outside the ground level window, refracting through thick, glossy glass; the hum of ventilation circulating air lazily.
The bar is very obviously family-run, in the stitched padding of the chairs and the placement of furniture, the picture frames hung on the wall behind the bar counter. They're amateur shots, worn and loved through. The owner's kids, girls, barely adolescent in some, turn out to be fully grown adults with families of their own in others.
An arm cuts through his vision before he can venture further down that particular wormhole, with a basket of potato skins and sliders, followed by a dark co*cktail—espresso martini, really blondie?—while Vash sits down with an old fashioned of something dark and neat.
Nicholas realizes they haven't eaten in hours when his stomach lurches in loud delight at the sight of food. Vash nudges the basket in his direction wordlessly and settles back against the stitched padding, shoulders broad, straight, as he watches the rest of the bar with a distant expression. The ice bobs inside his glass when he shifts weight to the side—like this his profile is shadowed and starkly defined, a straight nose and lashes for ages and high set cheekbones, features handsome enough to tempt anyone. Nicholas polishes half of the food with little effort, and can't help himself:
"So you're an obstetrician now."
It's visible, the way Vash suppresses a sigh even though his face doesn't change. "Life happens in unexpected ways, Wolfwood."
"Sure does."
Vash's eyes flicker as racecars streak over the blinking TV screen, and he doesn't offer a response. He drinks slowly, not quite savoring but not rushing, and when he puts the glass down it makes a tiny clinkagainst lacquered wood. "You have questions."
He can't just—"Blondie, they've kids of their own," he says. "How the hell do you look ages younger than kids you helped deliver?"
There's a very heavily pregnant pause. "...Good skincare?" Vash offers weakly. Nicholas groans and downs at least a third of his co*cktail. It's bitter and the caffeinated chocolate hits before the vodka does.
How old even are you, he thinks and then asks anyway.
Vash swishes the dredges of his own poison around the bottom of his glass as he stares inside, pensive and a little amused. "That's very rude of you to ask."
Nicholas flushes and frowns, embarrassed. "Last time I checked you're not a lady."
"Very astute in your observations, too," Vash says, then downs the rest of his glass and gets up. Wolfwood feels sharply like he's messed up without knowing how.
"It can't be that bad," Nicholas says after him with little hope.
Vash shoots a wry look over his shoulder, and there's just a glimpse of some unfathomable grievance before it's gone. "I'll tell you another time." He winks and weaves out of earshot. A commentator screams from the TV as a car barrels straight through the finish line. Money is exchanged with little fanfare.
Trying to pin Vash down in a conversation feels like trying to catch sunspots between the church pews. The closer they are to the heart of July the more Vash seems to withdraw into a place Wolfwood cannot follow, going reticent, going cold. He's present but taciturn; he's avoiding Wolfwood's attention the same way he's avoiding the attention of the police, the hunters and even Wolfwood's sanctified employer.
Nicholas focuses on the bitter edge to the taste because it distracts him from the sourness in the pit of his stomach. At the barstand the crowd erupts in the noises of a lost bet; the old TV switches between Formula Two desert races and the second episode of BBC Pride and Prejudice. In the absence of Vash the sounds grow distant and blur into an unobtrusive racket.
Years ago, when Nicholas had still been just Nico, he'd had night terrors—though perhaps that’s too strong a word, because Nicholas never had been a loud child. When he'd sit and stare at the scrappy walls, sleepless from yet another nightmare, Livio would slither into his covers, burrowing under the woolen blankets, and say, don't be sad, 'kay Nico? like he hadn't bawled his eyes over thoma dinner just a couple of hours ago. If you're scared, or upset, or you don't feel good. I'll be here.
What a promise that had been—doesn't count for much of anything since Livio had gone ahead and shot his brains out. Now it’s just an annoying reminder that there's something deeply wrong with Wolfwood that Wolfwood is deliberately choosing to ignore.
You will make this shot, Chapel had said years ago, completely, immovably placid. There were others, unconscious or dead, those who failed. You will, Nicholas. It was never meant as an encouragement—it was the only possible outcome. They never cleaned the bodies, a little reminder.
When he looks up Vash is no longer by the bar; instead he's ambling around the decrepit old piano in the corner of the stage with a refilled glass. The pianist is absent, but it doesn't seem to bother anyone. The only sounds outside the silence are murmurs and the occasional filthy snork every time Mr. Collins appears on screen.
Vash hesitates—but Wolfwood has always been an instigator. "You play?" he asks from behind.
Vash doesn't startle but it's a very near thing that makes his smile strain. "I used to," Vash admits, and winces when the old bench creaks under his ministrations. "It's been a long time."
"Go on then," Wolfwood shoves him, not unkindly. "Play a jig, Mary."
"You're an awful Mrs. Bennet," Vash says sullenly, flickering his damned watercolor eyes, but then, "Okay," he says with a shy and stupidly pretty smile. "Just a little then."
'Just a little' makes the bar pianist on break slam his hat against the barcounter and shake his head. The piano itself is criminally out of tune while some keys are missing and the makeshift bench creaks but it matters not at all; where reticence is to be expected Vash, instead, looks completely at home. His fingers feel over the keys, familiarizing, a chord, a scale, something faintly familiar here and there, before he breathes deeper and they take off into artistically haphazard flight, except that it makes perfect sense put together. There are soft clinks from the way his left hand connects with the instrument; it immediately turns heads, how clear cut it sounds, the way things do when someone has known, loved and done it for a long time.
"C'mon blondie," Nicholas props an elbow over the pianotop and watches cerulean eyes flash when he looks up and he's reminded out of nowhere, of the way Vash glows among his sisters.
Oblivious, Vash shifts harmony without looking down, left hand wandering over a few different chords, probing. Some squeak out of turn and Vash cringes sheepishly until he finds a moderately tuned key and sets off into something vaguely waltzy and virtuosic. The bartender dials down the background music as the more amorously paired tables get up to dance with each other, to flock around Vash's little impromptu performance.
One piece turns to another, popular tunes mixed with things Wolfwood has only heard on old Earth tapes wandering around scratchy radio waves; nothing possibly taught on Gunsmoke anymore, pieces where harmonies change rapidly, where the melody is delicate, complicated and ever-evolving—timeless the way Vash is, always beautiful. He's no longer looking at Wolfwood, shifting over the entire keyboard in cascades and openwork technique. The resolution makes the entire bar burst.
"Another!"
"A song now!"
"About love!"
"Oh, I'm not much of a singer." Vash shakes his head. "Anyone else perhaps?"
Wolfwood doesn't know what he's doing. He's in a bar with a target, with The Target, a day before the termination of his contract, running away from killers exactly like him, and he's making a mistake, half-done and half-drunk and half in, half in—
Human error, says Chapel in his mind, will always get you killed, Nicholas. Wolfwood knocks the glass back and feels it spread, stinging and sharply warm. He leans over Vash, bracketing, and grabs a few chords until they sound somewhat more recognizable.
Vash feels warm and tense and when Wolfwood looks he's red and watching him with single-focused attention. "You play?" he asks, mesmerized, like he's discovering Nicholas all over again.
"No," says Nicholas briskly, vodka burning the back of his mouth, and then clears his throat and harmonizes from the bottom of his vocal chords and up. Vash's eyes widen before he turns and picks up the turns Nicholas plopped, with natural care and precision, putting them together into something familiar.
The words slur a little, because the memory is distant though uncomplicated. He used to loop Fly Me To The Moon until Mrs. Melanie confiscated his little duplicator, and they played it sometimes in the elevators in Michael, absurdly. It's easy, with Vash, even though Nicholas hasn't done it in a long time. His throat burns a little by the end, perhaps from the alcohol, or the strain on his vocals, or because he also used to watch the moons with Livio and listen, before the device got taken away, before Nicholas got taken away, before Livio got taken away, forever.
"In other words," he sings and then his throat closes up and he hums the last notes because he's never been able to do the song properly, not really.
They do more—things Wolfwood hummed under his breath in the reporters' car, a couple of hits, easy and unhurried, in light of things. After a particularly appreciated performance Vash cheers him from the instrument with his glass during applause, eyes crinkled and mortifyingly fond. In the TV Mr. Darcy gallops on his horse to town, with renewed purpose.
It's a shame but not a surprise, that it doesn't last—the heavyset door bounces off the wall with a round of "hands up!" which is cue for them to book it.
"You, you—sing," Vash says immediately after the trapdoor closes behind them, all the way on the other side of the pleasure district where light floods the streets and projectors cast shadows into the skies. He whirls around with the drink he never put down, cyclonic. "You," he says, still breathless from the chase, as if it's something of paramount importance to him.
"I used to," Wolfwood parrots with a grumble as he shakes out a cigarette, scanning other rooftops. "A long time ago," but all the sarcasm is dampened by embarrassment. Vash turns to him, openly curious.
"How—when?"
"Choir." Nicholas looks away because he never learned how to handle the full brunt of Vash's attention. "Just a little." Nicholas's just a little and Vash's just a little seem to be vastly different from each other, just like a great number of other things.
He fidgets with his lighter, then lights the stick deftly and without thought, pulling a drag and feeling it settle in the back of his throat, next to the martini. "You've got an impressive resume yourself." Gunman, obstetrician, pianist—gods, blondie. "Can't believe I've been traveling with a walking jazzman all this time and you didn't even bother to tell me. For shame, doc."
"You're—hah—you're ridiculous, Wolfwood," Vash laughs breathlessly and then stops with a bubbly smile and laughs again. It's effervescent and it makes Wolfwood's insides itch. He glows—and it's not very metaphorical either.
"You got a little," Nicholas says dryly, walking closer, a moth to flame, a thief to gold, "a little something on your face there, blondie."
"Huh—oh." Vash blinks and startles badly, looking at climbing scripture shimmering merrily from the slit of his wrist and his neck and the lights around, up his face, writing themselves into his hair and eyes. "I—I," he stutters, breath picking up and he looks so terribly lost in that moment Nicholas's heart drops.
Vash flinches but he doesn't run when Nicholas bumps against him; when he leans and grounds despite his best intentions, despite his promise and his mission and any sort of common sense because he's a small, small man in a world that has things like gods and dimensions walking through broken cities.
"Can barely see the sky from here, huh?" he says instead of all of that, and Vash blinks and follows his gaze to where the light pollution of July covers most of the stars. Out in the desert you can see each as though nestled in the palm of your hand; here Nicholas can see just one.
Vash slides off his lenses and clicks them shut. Wolfwood has only seen his bare face once before, tired and miserable and not entirely there after piloting the sandsteamer away from the orphanage. Now Vash closes his eyes and breathes in, piloting something else. A shadow of a grimace crosses his face briefly and then he's not glowing anymore.
It's—not what Wolfwood wanted.
Sometimes it's hard to think of Vash as anything other than an openly wounded natural phenomenon but now, a little drunk and a little lost and a little human, Vash looks just an arm's reach away.
" 'n otha words," Vash hums and it's lilting and soft-edged and not at all like Wolfwood did it, even in jest.
"I don't sound like that," Nicholas says defensively, because he can't have that bad of a drawl.
"Of course you don't," Vash agrees easily and props his elbow on the old rickety railings. Wolfwood can watch July burn bright off his expression. Someone yells obscenities and is answered in kind; in the dumpster several cats have a vicious war before scampering off with loud screams and thumping. Someone runs through the night, chased by whistles, July in its usual outfit: sinful, sad and terribly human.
Wolfwood thumbs the railing, bent and out of shape, but it doesn't give. "Have you been here before?"
"Yes," says Vash softly and doesn't elaborate, lost in thought. He never looks up at the tower; below a couple fight, then kiss, then fight again. He watches one of the girls storm off with a flipped finger and he looks endeared.
Wolfwood shivers—what are they doing here? They both know where this is going and it frustrates him, that Vash comes willingly. Anguish runs hot in the soft space between Wolfwood's ribs and his misgivings, fire and burning alcohol: why? Why must he do it? It's stupid and senseless and naive, and how does he expect to find salvation in the future when he's given up so much of himself that some pieces stopped growing back?
"We were born here," Vash says, bringing Wolfwood out of his shattered musings.
"What?"
Vash gestures vaguely and it makes booze splash over the rim of his glass—Vash giggles, just a little, because apparently he does get tipsy after all. He's shockingly stunning like this: unraveled, reddened, exposed. There's a faint chill to being so high up, so deep into the night. Wolfwood shivers.
"In July?" he asks, feeling stupid when Vash shakes his head ruefully. We, he'd said, and Wolfwood knows without having to think.
"Mhm," says Vash, features tilted away. "It wasn't called that yet." He seems, in that moment, as far as the faded stars above.
Nicholas doesn't know what to say about that so when Vash turns to him again Nicholas kisses him. It happens like a gunshot—by the time he realizes what's happened it's already done. Human error, whispers Chapel in his mind, but it's far too late.
Vash blinks and his profile is painted a neon blue, then pink and purple from the flashing billboards down below. When his eyes flicker they reflect something else entirely.
"Again?" Vash asks so quietly Nicholas doesn't react, until Vash leans and repeats again, hopelessly fractured, "Wolfwood, again?"
He opens his mouth but this time Wolfwood's meeting him halfway and it's like he's lifted the veil between them and draped it over their heads. Vash's hair is soft and giving under his fingers, the buzz of his undercut plush and warm just like the rest of him. His back arches and he tastes like citrus and whiskey and apples, fresh and sweet on his tongue, but the way Vash whimpers into his mouth tastes like nothing sober. There's smoke dying on the rooftop where it fell from Wolfwood's nerveless fingers.
"Again," Vash demands when they part for air. Perhaps it was meant as a plea, because when Wolfwood shifts for a better angle Vash follows him desperately, half-scared, like vines around wood. It should frighten, that someone like Vash the Stampede has him by his heart, curled glass fingers, safety off, but all Wolfwood feels is drunken exhilaration.
"Don't go," Vash says, quietly, almost like he doesn't mean to say it out loud. Exactly like he doesn't mean to say it out loud.
"I'm not going," Wolfwood promises anyway, mindlessly, because he is, in all things crucial, a heathen.
The bathwater feels like christening in his mouth—whole cities doomed by permanent dryspell and dehydration and here Nicholas is, submerged and still dying of thirst. It's a cursed city, July. He could drown and he still wouldn’t have enough.
Vash's fingers scrub through his hair, and when Nicholas twists in the tub he leans obediently to get devoured. It's not enough—it's not enough—but it’s pulling him in, under, closer. It's not enough, Vash’s lips mouthing at his jawline, at his pulsepoint.
"W'lfwood," Vash rasps. It makes the water holy.
Damp blonde hair curls over the pillow, gold darkened and frazzled where Wolfwood's fingers run through and push it back up his scalp; when Vash sinks into the bed they both smell like the same cheap vanilla soap from the hotel shower they've imposed on in the last half hour. Vash shivers—they kiss again and it turns very hot very quickly, a knee pushed up between Vash's legs, a thumb down Wolfwood's adonis; chests conjoined.
Vash's prosthetic fingertips are cold where they skirt up and down the divots of Wolfwood's brand but Vash's face radiates hotly against Wolfwood's face even as it crumples. He traces the lines just below Wolfwood’s nape, the circle, down and up, and down again—carved so deeply into a cross that they never healed.
Vash makes a sharply pained and miserable sound and pushes up against Wolfwood to his elbows to reach with his warm hand, but Wolfwood catches it and presses his mouth, his tongue to Vash's blistered callouses, his knuckles, making his way up. The way Vash’s tendons tense and ripple under taut, wiry skin is intoxicating. Wolfwood only stops when he tastes skin so rough it scratches; in the dim light he has to squint to properly see why.
There's a horrific scar running across the only limb Vash still has left intact, one of the deepest amongst the others in his body. It curdles sour in the pit of Wolfwood's stomach, as he rubs his thumbs along the rough, uneven ridge. The implications—how deliberate it must have been. This was not an accident.
"Got that one after the…" Vash blinks and starts again, more subdued, like it embarasses him. "After the legs." He swallows. "I've never been good with symmetry," he laughs, just before he offers Wolfwood all of his mechanics. "Off?" And then, "please?"
God. What is Wolfwood left to do?
Undressing Vash in the bath had been like taking off pieces of Vash himself: his glasses, his coat, his boots, difficult to unlace and to tug off mechanical feet. Ankles, too thin to be real. Nicholas would be a liar if he said it doesn't take considerable effort to steady his hands as he unlatches one shin, and then an entire leg with a knee and half a thigh. Vash looks at him with something almost wholly indecipherable except that it has nothing in common with fear. The air is taut like a bowstring and it might be the way Vash trembles, imperceptibly.
What's left after his arm is gone makes Vash seem very small. Nicholas has no other word to describe it, even though it fits ill to Vash; the way his towering, broad-shouldered shape is replaced by a creature barely half Nicholas's weight, regarding him with unearthly eyes. Their color gleams just a shade away from a human's—the flashing lights outside blink off the door mirror and reflect in one of Vash's eyes in plant markings.
"f*ckin’ hell," Wolfwood says helplessly.
Vash purses his lips. "Mhm—no, not yet."
Wolfwood barks a laugh, surprised out of him. Then he's in Vash's space and kissing him silly all over again and again.
When Vash colors it happens violently and in splotches, skin betraying him easily, and eagerly, down his shoulders and chest. The places Wolfwood licks stay red and darkened, and the ones he—"ah!"—bites swell so quickly there's little else he needs to do to make them stay. When he pushes down, and down again, the heel of his hand against—”oh, oh blondie,”—thighs lock around his arm and wrist. Wolfwood pushes his hair back through his fingers, drying in unruly curls, and Vash ducks his head into it, starved, then glances up, because Nicholas has stopped entirely, because he’s forgotten to properly breathe. He holds Nicholas's gaze before squeezing his wrist tightly with his legs and slowly pushing up into his open palm, until the inside of Nicholas's palm rests over his clothed c*nt.
The day is marked with discoveries: that Vash has an obnoxiously long skill set, that Vash is likely made fifty percent body mass of metal—that Vash likes his puss* cradled and fingered just as much as he likes rocking himself open with tiny jolts until Nicholas meets him again and again and he sinks into pliancy and little aborted gasps.
"Bet this wasn't how you expected your evening to go," Nicholas chuckles, very distracted indeed.
"Not, a-ah, not expected, no," Vash says with a strange inflection, like perhaps the thought of f*cking Wolfwood was not wholly out of the scope of probability. Then Nicholas brushes something that makes Vash’s hips buck and eyes go wide as he flushes, somehow, even worse.
Nicholas locks in, slick and spit oozing down his fingers and he has him in crosshairs, finally. "C'mon," he says, rolling his wrist to elevate the pace, inside tightening impossibly narrow, pulsing. "Open up, open up sweetheart," and that elicits a reaction—Vash grabs his other hand to moan open-mouthed and suckle on his fingers.
"There you go," Nicholas mutters, pleased.
It shocks, how easily Vash takes to him, how easily Wolfwood takes to Vash—whose hand slides down Nicholas's sternum, unhurried like his on-stage improvs, until it reaches the clothed outline of Wolfwood's dick, the movement soft and undemanding and so infuriating, because it makes Nicholas, somehow, even harder.
Vash's shaky inhale makes him slow and stop and when he slides his fingers free he thumbs Vash's cl*t a few times just to hear his ribcage rattle with whines. Vash tastes sweet and clear when Nicholas licks him off his fingers, and his slit glows ember red, teased open, and when Wolfwood looks up he catches Vash watching him suck Vash off his middle finger with undivided, rapt attention—Jesus Christ.
He's unbuckled in seconds, pressed heavily against the tendons between Vash's thighs and mound, rocking intermittently. His folds are feverishly warm when, "sh*t,” he rolls his hips up, "ahn—" and down, slotting them together, like the divot of Vash's puss* was made to fit around Nicholas, f*ck, f*ck—around him Vash is furnace hot and molten—the tip of his dick catches once, twice. It sinks on the third and Vash reaches up to him with a desperate, needy sound. Wolfwood leans until Vash hangs off his neck, so that when Nicholas hefts him up and then down, Vash can do nothing about it—he dismantles.
"What are you," Wolfwood breathes into Vash's neck. What are you? Who are you? he thinks, a man-made god—is that why you are so breakable? Vash hiccups, mouthing things that aren't truths or lies.
Wolfwood snaps them back together and watches all of it trickle out of the corners of Vash’s eyes. He wants to stay this way, to keep Vash in a place that would stop turning him inside out. Fetch, they said—but now Wolfwood can't let go.
After dozens of ebbing heat strokes he begins to lose pace, rhythm amping frantically out of control. He’s far too close when he startles from a loud noise—Vash's earring blips from the nightstand, a tiny tune, minimalistic, the beginning of a birthday song. Nicholas gives another roll against Vash's sweet spot, holds, and feels his dick get choked tightly enough to be forced still and he breathes heavily through his nose and doesn't cum. When he can look again the digital clock is a bright red 00:02 against the darkness of the room.
"I'm a sesquicentennial now," Vash hiccups underneath him, breathless. He shuffles a little. One knee tries to lock Wolfwood in place but Vash doesn't have enough leverage or limb to succeed and it's horrible, horrible, he wants to scream, he wants Vash to have the means to hold on to the things he wants to, wants to be a thing Vash wants to hold on to.
"How the f*ck did your mouth do that," says Nicholas instead and boxes Vash against the damp pillow to kiss him again, thoroughly and painstakingly, with little room for air or open noise. By the time they part he’s completely disengaged from formulated thought, using only instinct to shift his weight off and away so Vash can keep his arm from ripping the sheets. He has to pull out to move; Vash breathes a small oh when Nicholas pops out and shimmies a little, irises bright and hazy at the edges.
"It means I'm really old," Vash elaborates—the way he always does, explaining nothing at all—and he sounds loose and floating, lips red and bitten. Nicholas slides his hand down Vash’s body, the trajectory of Nicholas's thumbs over his sternum tracked surreptitiously—there's something there, in the way Vash unwinds when he’s looking, when he can see what’s done to him. Nicholas acknowledges his words with a distracted sound, engrossed by the map of Vash's extensive scarring. "You asked," Vash adds and something vague shutters in the back of his mind from earlier in the evening, their stilted conversation.
Oh. "Craddle robber, are we?" Nicholas smirks and smirks harder at the way Vash flushes crimson.
"Wait—" The tendons of his thighs tense and Vash bucks a little, which means that Nicholas gets a mouthful of nipple instead of just a taste. Vash whines in abject surprise, "Wolf-ngh! Wolfwood, wait, are you—"
Nicholas teeths softly around a pec; Vash breathes so sharply the air whistles on the way out. There's an edge of thready panic to the way he says it, "Wolfwood, how old—"
"Old enough, sweetheart," Wolfwood promises and then parts Vash's folds between his tongue and lips and Vash has nothing coherent to offer anymore. "Happy birthday," Wolfwood says under his breath. He's not sure if Vash hears him, over how loudly and desperately Vash whimpers for him and how Wolfwood sucks him off over and over and over. He stops just once, and then licks inside just as Vash tries to take a breath. Thick, plush thighs bracket Nicholas’s head and settle over his shoulders when he nuzzles the hood of Vash’s cl*t.
There's nothing to hook him there, no shins, no feet, no thorns—he slips with a cut-off whine onto Wolfwood's forearms, screws and metal driving between his thumbs and lifelines, shoulder blades sharp and jutting like broken wing bones and when Nicholas pulls him back up onto his tongue with a growl he arches.
Eventually Vash's voice goes high enough to crack on a shallow inhale; Wolfwood withdraws, spit stringing between his tongue and Vash's flushed puss*, breaking as he straightens to his knees and waits. Vash has thrown his hand over his eyes, face red and rubbed raw against the sheets, heartbeat stuttering through paper-thin skin. Nicholas angles downwards with borrowed patience, waits, waits again—then slams back inside without resistance, and Vash goes off like fireworks.
It's seismic, and Wolfwood f*cks into him the entire time, f*cks him through it, until he can't clench his fingers anymore, until he reaches for Wolfwood even though it means completely letting go of all ground. "Ah, ah, ah, ah," Vash mewls from where he clings and rocks, convulsing.
By the time Nicholas has him back flush against his front, stuffing him full every time he shifts, cl*t cradled by the V of Wolfwood's middle and ring fingers, hand thumbing the sides of his throat sporadically, stroking the inside of his mouth—Vash starts mouthing nonsense around his fingers, unfinished sentences and disjointed words, little things squeezed out in brittle, desperate shapes.
" 's my fault." Vash sounds far away, like the faded stars, like they're in a confessional rather than guts deep in each other. " 's my fault ev'one died. 's my fault m'—m'sisters're dying. That 'm—ah," Vash breaks off, fingers digging into the seams of Wolfwood's restraint as he grips for dear life.
He's a pastor, for god's sake. "Why's it your fault?"
"The password," Vash chokes. "If 'nly I, 'f only—never gave—ngh!"
"What," Nicholas grunts, the sounds turning loud and filthy and incessant. "What password?"
"Nai," Vash sobs, like that single syllable cost him everything, his life, mind and sanity.
Nicholas lets go of Vash’s cl*t to run both thumbs in circles around his neck; aims, and then squeezes the sides of his throat as he f*cks in, once, twice, thrice, and Vash goes loose, before kicking desperately , violently, hand in Wolfwood's hair.
"Don't—ngh," Vash pleads, "don't stop, don't," and maybe there’s a please meant afterwards but he doesn't have enough oxygen anymore.
"God, blondie—Vash," Nicholas chokes, pulling out half way, almost all the way, the tip of his dick kissing Vash’s entrance, god, god, oh god—
He slams home.
"Don't g—" and then Vash is gone.
Nicholas doesn’t believe in fate or predestination; that he's destined for anything other than what his unfortunate present shapes him to be. He's always thought himself perfectly ordinary, but broken enough, fissured from the inside and welded back together so erroneously that the most important parts of him no longer work the way they're meant to. Yet he is still, under twisted cords and missing cogs, very achingly human. There's a small but vocal part of Nicholas's brain telling him that this is bad, this is dangerous, that he’s falling hard, has already fallen hard, that this is far more than he’s equipped to handle. Nicholas's unfortunate wiring also means that he’s rather bad at listening even when the call comes from inside the house—which is what ultimately brings him to the present.
" 'n otha w'rds..." It’s barely audible, what Vash mumbles into the pillow; hums, rather, somewhere far far away, as if he's not in Wolfwood's hands at all, as if he's not fitted against Wolfwood like a jigsaw piece, singing himself a lullaby.
You shouldn't have come, you shouldn't have come. He wants to say, you shouldn't have come to this wretched city at all.
Instead he winds the sheets tighter around them both, against a shiver trying to build up between them like an unwelcome intruder. The night city lights from the drafty window behind are muted through the sheer drapes, casting flickering shadows and spots over curling blond hair and tiny under-eye crinkles.
Nicholas thumbs the inside of Vash's hand and watches his fingers curl, nails carefully filed and shiny, the only five he has left. When he looks, Vash is somewhere else entirely, wandering wherever it is angels go in the baby hours of the morning when they're too tired of whatever god's earth this damned planet is. He puts his hand to Vash's, pushes his fingers apart with his own and wills something, anything at all, to happen.
He waits with patience that he doesn't own, even as Vash's fingers go lax and slip to thread between Wolfwood's in sleep. He waits and waits and nothing happens, until there's a crash outside followed by a flashing siren and speeding tires. When Wolfwood turns back to see if Vash woke he thinks something flits like fireflies between their joined hands—but it's gone before he can tell for sure.
Watching the second coming unfold from the sidelines is a surprisingly detached experience. For iles and iles around worms flee; there are screams and the screech of tires clamoring in the distance, down below where people are trying to outrun what still hasn't dawned as completely inevitable.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man, witnessing the apocalypse alone, must be in want of a drink. For a lack of that instead there's a pile of smoking stubs in the sand. His gun feels heavier than usual. Punishing. The stick is foul in his mouth and cloying as he breathes up through his nose where smoke pulls over stars, stars from whence humanity were felled like paper planes. He thinks absently about James the bartender and his three daughters, and the staticky TV with the romance drama; he thinks, today is Vash's birthday. It feels surreal, untethered.
Those two are ripping the world apart and no one on this planet has the power to stop them, Zazie had told him before vanishing in barely concealed alarm.
He might wake up tomorrow—he'll find his own meals, and have no one to share them with; he'll start his own fires and track steps through the desert sands and whatever danger he may or may not find will be his own and nobody else's. It's unsettling, how the reality of it doesn't sink in yet. His world has ended more times than he can count on his fingers: when his parents were killed in their own house, when he was killed on the metal table, when Livio killed himself in front of him—what's one more time?
It will take some getting used to, the great and daunting After—like coming to Hopeland, like learning what it's like to be dead in a living body, like when all that was good and comfortable about his borrowed life had been ripped out from under his feet.
"Meow," says something and rubs against his ankle.
Wolfwood looks down in surprise, then sighs. He picks the cat by the scruff and watches it struggle with enthusiastic effort. The drag stuck in his mouth tickles the back of his throat so he blows it out and hisses when tiny claws dig heedlessly into his skin.
Human error, his mind whispers traitorously.
He flicks the cigarette and stubs it with the sole of his shoe. When he tries to pry the little thing off it latches onto his sleeves and refuses to be removed, hooks and thorns. He lifts the critter to his face. "You're in so much trouble," he tells it as a matter of fact. It stares back at him and meows indignantly.
Again, Vash had asked, tasting like apples and whiskey and Nicholas. Vash, who’d answered the call, bared his neck and took to the leash and came to the butcher, hummed himself a lullaby and laid with his head down obediently, and then he’d flickered his damned watercolor eyes up at Wolfwood in the neon lights of July and he'd whispered, don't go.
"I'm not going, dammit," Wolfwood growls and puts the trembling thing down. He watches it trot off into the sands, then grabs one of the retracting vines and comes hither: because he'd promised, because he has the heart of a traitor, because there's a tomorrow where no one is waiting for him. Because there's humming in his head and a lullaby in his heart and he's a fool who couldn't, who cannot, who won't—
"I'm not going anywhere.”
