#DON'T FALL FOR IT JUST SHOOT HIM VASH

[bakughosts]

how real hunger has a real taste

Trigun Stampede ✮ Wolfwood/f!Reader, 18k. Also on AO3!

You want everything. You want the real and the not, who he is and what he sells people. You want to run your thumb across his jaw without the expectation of anything else afterwards. A touch for the sake of a touch. You’re struggling with understanding whether these thoughts are because of who he is or because he’s the closest thing you’ve had to an object of affection since—ever. Maybe if you closed your eyes, it wouldn’t matter if it was him or someone else. (It matters. And then he inevitably betrays you.)

notes: mutual pining, angst, wolfwood in early twenties but looks older & reader implied to be in mid-to-late twenties, a little praise kink for the both of you, love confessions (but who knows if they're real? definitely not you), spoilers for all of trigun stampede s1 (HEAVILY canon reliant so it probably won't make sense if you haven’t seen it; if you don't have the time etc. and still want to read this, reading on from 'before julai' should be just un-confusing enough to work for you hopefully???)

The Fall of JuLai

It’s not like Nick thinks he’s a good person by any means. 

He delivered Vash to JuLai Tower like he was supposed to, and even though he begrudgingly likes the guy, Nick knows that he doesn’t stand a chance against his brother. His ‘do no harm’ bullshit is gonna put paid to that. Meryl and Roberto are there, too, because they're nosy and got swept up in all the things happening on this hellish planet that Nick has too much to do with. You’re there for the same reason—and when you had your chance to leave, to get out of the city safely, you didn’t. Because you’re entirely too idealistic and you’re delusional enough to believe that Vash can save the world.

The streets of JuLai are crawling with vines and blooming flora, petals and leaves black as the heart of a killer. Fluorescent blue pestles illuminate ruined homes, collapsed buildings, bodies. Some moving, some not. 

People are crying out, begging for help—from others, from God, which is funny considering Nick has known since long before he signed his pastoral contract that there’s no way any God could’ve seen this planet and not been disgusted enough to destroy it.

Navigating the streets is easier now that there aren’t guards shooting at him every five minutes. He ignores the people around him—the moving ones and the motionless ones. Kicks rubble as he walks much too slowly towards the exit of the crumbling city. The cigarette that he bummed off of Roberto is mintier than the Skulls he usually smokes. He didn’t know you could get menthols these days. The taste is unpleasant. Explains why the old man always smelled a little like toothpaste under all that stale tobacco.

Roberto’s dead now. His blood is still drying on the floor of the elevator where his life abruptly ended. These people are going to die if they haven’t already. Meryl is going to die. Vash is going to die. You are going to die.

So no, Nick doesn’t think he’s a good person. He never has.

But his freedom is his own. The orphanage is safe. His family—whatever remnants are left, without Livio—are all safe. That’s what being the bad guy gets you, because no one gives a rat’s ass about how good you are. No one cares about anything but themselves. No one was gonna give Nick his freedom, give the orphanage its safety. Not without something in return.

He’s moving so goddamn slow that you wouldn’t expect him to have just given up everything—to have betrayed the only people that were kind to him, that cared about him when he saw his brother die, when his childhood home was almost obliterated. If he doesn’t start running, he’s gonna go down with this city, and all of it will have been for nothing.

He can’t stop thinking about the look on your face when you realized what he’d done.

Meryl’s nattering is something he hardly remembers, something about him being unbelievable, I thought better of you, why isn’t everyone a goody-fuckin’-two-shoes like me, but every time he blinks, he can see you in perfect resolution, like there’s a screen on the back of his eyelids replaying his worst memories.

You hadn’t even said anything. That was the worst part.

The street beneath his feet shudders, the entire city groaning, the metal hull on which it stands screaming out in protest. Nick stops. He stops moving, all because he can’t get you out of his goddamn head, like you’re some sort of worm that’s crawled its way in there, all cozy and nested where he wants you least.

Knives is gonna tear you apart. You and the bratty reporter. You’re strong—you’ve shown that to him in your travels, that you’re not one to back down from a good fight, and he liked seeing a gun in your hand, fire in your eyes, blood on your teeth—but Knives is on a whole other level. Even Nick couldn’t take him out, and he’s a freak of nature thanks to all the shit Conrad did to him. 

He and Vash moved a fifteen-ton ion cannon with their bare hands because they were built to, and you’re up there in that tower all soft and kind and human . 

“Fuck.” His cigarette burns down to the filter, the taste more like plastic than mint. His cross is heavy, shoulder protesting the one-handed hold with which he carries it. He’s not going back there. He did all this for a reason. He saved his own hide because he’s a bad person and that’s what bad people do. You shouldn’t have expected more from him. 

Even though you did. Even though sometimes you looked at him and he really thought—and don’t get him wrong, it’s because you’re delusional—that you might’ve actually believed he could be a better person.

“Fuck.”

He’s back in the building before the butt of his cigarette has a chance to hit the ground.

Following Meryl seems to be a bad idea, but you do it anyway. Even as she calls after Vash, climbing through the broken window of JuLai Tower’s penthouse office, even as you hear the sound of metal hitting metal, knives and bullets clashing in violent bursts of embers, even with Doctor Conrad behind you—a man who, not even fifteen minutes ago, you would have ripped apart with your bare hands—you keep going.

What else are you going to do? What else is left?

There’s the gleam of silver, the sound of something very sharp slicing the very air, and before you’re able to get outside, Meryl is thrown across the roof of the tower, the dome of the office collapsing inwards. Glass tumbles down on your shoulders and you have to move—that’s all you’ve ever known. Just keep moving.

You’re out of the window frame and running towards her in an instant, lungs burning, but Meryl is still rolling, still sliding towards the downturned side of the roof edge, and you’re going to lose her, you realize—she’s going to fall.

Maybe you call out to her—you’re not sure. Your throat is raw already from yelling, your bones aching from the multiple injuries you’ve sustained. You’ll die here too, most likely.

The realization feels peaceful in a very empty way.

But before it can settle in, you see a familiar figure—a dark suit, a too-large gun in the shape of a cross, and Meryl is yelling, “Undertaker?” and Nick is there and you hate him for coming back.

When you reach them, he barely looks you in the eye. Just motions to his shoulders, asks, “Think you can hold on?”

You don’t want this man to be your salvation. You don’t want him to have anything he can possibly use to redeem himself. But you’re not going to die because of your pride. You let him turn and kneel before you, and your arms are around his neck and he’s got his gun in one arm and Meryl in the other and you’re flying—

Honest to god flying through the air, falling far off the top of the tower and then further, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, Nick taking the brunt of each fall. You have to close your eyes or you’re going to throw up, and your legs are wrapped so tightly around his waist that you think you could cut him in half, and he smells like Roberto’s menthol cigarettes—and you knew something was different about him, that he was inhumanly strong, but the way he waltzes through the city from rooftop to rooftop while carrying a couple hundred pounds of extra weight is simply incomprehensible.

Things don’t feel real because there’s no way this could be really happening. You feel the wind against your face, the dulled impact of Nick’s feet hitting hard concrete and metal, and you can hear his labored breathing, hear Meryl scream for him to hold her tighter or she’s gonna fall, hear the gunshots of soldiers on ground level who have still, for some reason, decided that you are the enemy they should be after and not the miles-tall Plant aberration that’s growing out of JuLai Tower.

You can’t open your eyes even when Nick stops moving, when you’re far outside of the city. Even when his gun is on the ground, when he’s put down Meryl and lowered himself so your knees are on the desert floor. Prying your arms from around his neck would feel the same as dying.

Gently, Nick does this for you—moves your arms, but not off of him completely. Enough that he can turn so you’re both kneeling and facing each other, and only then do you open your eyes. He lost his sunglasses at some point during the escape. JuLai is a mess of pulsing blue behind him. He says your name very, very quietly. Your hands are curled at the back of his neck, fingers carding through the hair at his nape because at this point it’s instinct. His eyes are so dark they look black, and there’s blood smudged on his cheek, and your first instinct is to wipe it away for him—to remove any sign of hurt, any sign of injury. 

But Vash is gone, and Nick's the one that made sure it happened. 

You push away from him so quickly that you fall on your ass, sand dusted in a cloud around you. Maybe he was going to say something, some other half-assed excuse, but the hull of the ship that JuLai grows from groans loud, its metal body screaming for help into the desert night as if it’s not far past the point of salvation. The roots that pulse from the city begin to recede, crawling back through the holes they’ve made in infrastructure, curling back up to the top of the tower.

Much more quietly than it should, the largest city on the planet creaks, falls, and goes completely dark.

Before JuLai

Nothing annoys Nick more than routine gun maintenance, and the fight on the Sandsteamer had really done a number on the Punisher.

He always hated the way the doctor called him that—this is your duty, Punisher, this is what I created you for—as if he was nothing but an extension of his weapon. Though that’s all he’s really supposed to be. An executioner, an undertaker, a priest. A sentient trigger.

He doesn’t let things like that get to him. Seeing his brother as what he’d become, seeing him kill himself to escape the life he was living because he wanted to be just like Nick—

None of it gets to him. He doesn’t let it. He doesn’t care.

You sit down next to him when he’s in the middle of oiling one of the crossgun’s many chambers, kicking up sand in your wake. He probably shouldn’t have decided to sit out here to clean his gun, but where else is he gonna do it? In the car? Everything on the planet is covered in sand. He’ll have to deal with it. Still, he gives you a nasty side-eye for putting him back about three minutes of work.

“Am I interrupting? Sorry,” you say, and he can tell you’re not. “Thought you were gonna help us set up camp.”

“I’m busy.”

“You can get hot and heavy with your cross later. Meryl needs help getting a fire started.”

He doesn’t look at you. Doesn’t want to. The cloth he uses to clean the chambers is black with grease and he wonders when he’ll have to tear a piece of his shirt off to replace it with and he wonders if you got hurt earlier keeping the Bad Lads Gang off the reporter duo and he wonders what he could possibly do to get you to quit staring at him. His collar feels too tight even though the buttons start four inches down his chest. “Get Blondie to do it.”

At the top of the dune closest to camp, Nick has an excellent view of the stretch of absolutely fucking nothing that surrounds you all. Vash said his home was near here—needed to get his prosthetic arm fixed up by the people that built it. He probably isn’t in good shape to help anyone do anything. You both know that.

The wind pushes the dunes further out, transforming the desert into a rippling, golden sea. The sun is about to set, the sand already cast a shade of light pink by oncoming dusk. You’re silent for long enough that Nick is forced to look at you, which he doesn’t do often because it always makes him feel a bit hot under the collar, a bit hunted. He can’t explain it. Sure as hell doesn’t like it, though.

You’re not even paying attention to him. Instead, you take in the wide open desert as if it’s the first time you’re seeing it, and the sun touches your face soft like a lover and—there’s a pang of something in his stomach. Like jealousy. 

He can’t escape you. It isn’t like the others don’t try with him—he has to deal with Vash, who thinks he can befriend the entire fucking planet and bombards Nick with friendly remarks that he’s dying to see turn into banter; Meryl, who isn’t interested in him as more than a journalistic pursuit but still asks some very pointed questions; Roberto, who offers him a smoke every now and then and thanks him for doing shit that he didn’t do for anyone but himself in the first place.

And then he has to deal with you, too, but you approach him in a different way. A way he isn’t used to—not that he’s used to any of it—but that he can stomach. You’re open with him, but you don’t inundate him with things he doesn’t care about. You ask questions when they’re necessary. You give him disapproving looks when he runs his mouth a bit too much and much more pleased looks when he lets Vash wax poetic about saving the universe from evil. He finds himself shutting up sometimes just to see it—the slight curve of your lips, fond exasperation at Vash’s unyielding hope, a silent thank you in the pointed look you send his way.

“You grew up there?” you ask. “At that orphanage?”

You’ve decided, it seems, that these questions are necessary. He’d talked about the orphanage at some point in front of you, so he’s not exactly surprised that you know about it. Still, he’s in a shitty mood and he doesn’t want to talk about this with anyone. Especially you, even though most days you’re the person he’d be most willing to tell. “I never liked twenty questions. Too much talking involved.”

“I already know the answer,” you say.

“Then you shouldn’t have asked the question. That’s not how you win.”

“I’m trying to—I don’t know. Is it so ridiculous for me to ask you something personal every once in a while?”

He scoffs. “You’ve got more questions than bullets. And you fire them quicker, too.”

You fix him with a look, and he can only hold your eyes for a moment before looking back at his gun. Too much shit to do to get distracted, anyways. 

“How long have we been traveling together?”

“I dunno,” he says. “Couple months. Why?”

You shrug, and he can see it in his peripherals. You move fluidly, in a way he catches himself noticing too often. “Are you gonna tell any of us something real about yourself?”

“You should talk to Meryl,” he says. “I’m sure she could find you some kind of job in investigative journalism. Or maybe you could do some cam work, since you’re so far up my ass.”

“Fuck off, Wolfwood,” you say, but he can see the edge of your grin, hear the mirth in your voice. Something he likes about you: his attitude doesn’t piss you off. You take it in stride and on occasion, give it back. 

“I was here first,” he reminds you. “You should be the one doing the fucking off.”

You don’t fuck off. You sit next to him and things feel heavy but no heavier than they always do. 

He wants to hear you say his first name—a misplaced thought that he shouldn’t have had, like finding a coin in your pocket after it's already been through the dryer. (He’d kill to find a town with a laundromat, but they’re few and far between.) Wolfwood is so impersonal, what everyone he’s ever traveled with has called him. Punisher is out of the question. Nicholas he likes even less, somehow, because it feels like a name that was taken from him when he was too young to ask for it back. But thinking about the idea of you saying fuck off, Nick, or Nico, or whatever the hell you want to call him and trying badly to hide that little smile from him has his heart racing a thousand miles a minute. He looks at you and realizes what a bad idea it is because once he starts, he can't stop.

You frown—ruminative. Something’s on your mind. Something he’s worried you might try to tell him. “Are you ever, maybe…” you begin. Your words are quiet, measured. “Would you ever tell me something real?”

Nick’s hands are too clammy to keep working on the intricate parts of his gun. You’re setting him back even more. He hates it when you ask questions like this. He hates it when you mention the thing that sits between the two of you, the quiet understanding that even though you’d been a gun-for-hire traipsing around the planet and Nick had been tortured until his fucking eyes bled, you can somehow understand each other. He wants to knock you down a peg. To get you to leave him alone before he says something he’ll regret telling you. “I don’t know how you got the idea that you’re special,” he says, and the air in his lungs feels like too much for his body to hold, “but you’re not.”

You stare at him, hurt slowly curling your lips downwards. He shrugs his shoulders as if this isn’t how he wanted you to react and goes back to cleaning his gun. Tries to let himself breathe. It’s difficult. His big fucking mouth is gonna get him in trouble again if you don’t say something soon, or slap him, or leave, or—something. Nick doesn’t apologize for things. Never finds himself wanting to like he does right now.

“Forget it,” you say, standing to leave. “You—fuck. No, forget it.” 

You won’t look at him and he hates that you won’t. Some days it’s all he wants.

Traveling with Wolfwood is torture when he’s in a bad mood. He’s barely spoken to you since your conversation a few days ago—hasn’t even looked at you. That sucks for multiple reasons, but partially because today it’s you, him, and Vash in the backseat of the car, Roberto in the passenger (as always), and Meryl driving. 

You like Meryl—she’s sweet, and she has a lot of grit—but you don’t like the way she drives. The three of you slide all over the backseat like butter across a hot pan, your seat belts barely holding you in place each time she takes a hard turn—you’re in a desert, for Christ’s sake, and your destination is a straight line away from you, so you have no idea why she has to steer somewhere new every thirty seconds.

Vash had (without Meryl noticing, which would save everyone an earful) arranged the order of seating so you wouldn’t get crushed between him and Wolfwood, and took the driver’s-side seat so his prosthetic wouldn’t smack into whoever sat to his left and leave them with some nasty bruises.

Every two minutes your entire body slams into Wolfwood’s side, and he was already in a sour mood—by the time you reach the town you’ll be staying in for the night, he’s steaming, practically shoving Vash out of the car so he can leave the enclosed space he’s been forced to share with you.

Sometimes—or maybe more than sometimes, because you think about it often—you want to tell Wolfwood how childish he can be. You want to tell him that there’s more to life than smoking and sulking. But you prefer him when he isn’t giving you the cold shoulder, so you keep it to yourself.

The motel you find is cheap and clean. Well—clean might be a strong word, but at least it isn’t bug-infested like the last place you stayed, so everyone agrees to stay in town an extra day in order to rest. 

You all have lunch together (where Wolfwood ignores you), play games of pool in the motel lobby (where Wolfwood decides to go back to his room when you and him are finally up against each other), and even share a few drinks at the town’s bar after the sun sets (where Wolfwood flirts with any person that even so much as glances his way all night).

It’s not like you want to watch him shoot whiskey, head back and the long line of his throat exposed. It’s not like you want to hear the depth of his voice, its seductive edge, when he gets the bartender wrapped around his finger in under a minute flat. There’s just nowhere else to look, nothing else to listen to. The bartender leans in, smiling softly, as Wolfwood tells her something secret that has her face dusted a pretty pink. 

There’s a hand in front of you, snapping, and Meryl is asking you, “Are you even paying attention to me?”

“Yes,” you lie, “of course I am.”

She rolls her eyes. “What’d I just say?”

You genuinely have no idea. You didn’t even realize that Vash and Roberto had left the table, both fully concentrated on a game of darts across the bar.

“Yeah, thought so. Look—can you do something about it?”

“I still don’t know what you were talking about—”

“New subject. Keep up,” she says. “Can you and the Undertaker stop fighting? His moods drive me up the wall.”

Your eyes narrow. She’s doing that Meryl-thing where she asks you a question about something you’ve never established because she wants you to confirm whether or not it’s true. The amount of times Vash has been caught out by this technique is comical. 

“We’re not fighting,” you say. Fighting implies more than lukewarm camaraderie and routine disgruntlement. Fighting implies caring enough about each other to fight about something.

“Uh-huh,” she says, and you both watch as Wolfwood looks at the bartender and grins, all pretty white teeth, before glancing back at the table where you and Meryl sit. “So he’s doing this to, what, make me jealous?”

“I’m not jealous,” you say, and the speed with which the words leave your lips has already damned you. “And he’s not—it’s not for me. It’s—he’s just being Wolfwood. What else do you expect? He likes the attention.”

Meryl only looks smug when she gets someone to say something she wants them to say, and she looks very, very smug. 

“We’re staying here extra time to rest,” you tell her, “not to—do whatever he’s doing. I’m not jealous, I’m annoyed. If I have to cover his ass in a firefight because he spent his spare time with some—some random, then I’m gonna be pissed.”

“Some random,” Meryl parrots, using her fingers to put quotes around the word. “Would you rather it not be someone random, then?”

You stand too quickly, the booze going to your head. You haven’t had that much to drink, you don’t think, but you sway a little on your feet. “I’m not going to be the one that lets down the team,” you tell her. “So I’m gonna get some sleep. For the team.”

Meryl hmms, amused, playing at believing you. “Go get some sleep for the team. We all appreciate your sacrifices.”

You laugh, and though you can only see him from your peripherals, you think you see Wolfwood’s head turn just a little. Probably looking for back-ups in case the bartender loses interest.

The walk to the motel is brisk and cold with the sun finally in bed for the night, and you hate the way you think about the slope of Wolfwood’s throat and the points of his canines when he grins and the darkness of his eyes peering over the rim of his sunglasses when he glanced back towards you—

You sigh, stopping outside your door and pushing your thumb and middle finger against your closed eyes, as if you can massage the images out of your sight permanently.

You can’t. No matter how hard you try. And you know why—really, it isn’t even buried that deep down. You like his cocky grin and dry sense of humor and the way his inky hair falls soft across his forehead. You like the way his hands look when he cleans his gun, long and pretty fingers removing and reloading clips of bullets that he clicks into place one-by-one with his thumb, quick and confident. You like talking to him in the middle of the night when you camp out in the desert and everyone else is asleep, and even though you’re both in your sleeping bags, you look up at the same stars and tell each other about your worst fights or about the people you used to know, and sometimes he makes you laugh so hard that you have to cover your mouth in fear of waking everyone else.

Sometimes, you think that—maybe he feels something like that too. Maybe there are things he likes about you that he keeps to himself, little secrets lined up like cigarettes in a pack. But he keeps you at arm’s length and it kills you. No matter how much he gives you, it’s never enough, and he knows it. You know a lot about him, but you don’t know him.

So when he flirted with the bartender, it wasn’t him trying to make you jealous. Because making you jealous implies that he wants something from you. 

Maybe he just wants to fuck you. That’s another fairly viable option, but not your favorite. It’s not like you’re asking him to profess his undying love—that doesn’t exist out here. You meet people and you form tenuous connections and you enjoy the time you have until it inevitably finds its end. Law of the wasteland. 

You just want something a little more real. You want him to like things about you the way you like things about him.

If it’s a physical connection he’s looking for, he can find it with the bartender once her shift is over. You’re in travel clothes still, cargo pants and the most worn shirt you own, and you’re covered in desert grit besides. The bartender is clean and pretty and much more accessible.

He can do whatever he wants. He just lost someone. Even if you were on the other side of the Sandsteamer, you’re positive you could've heard Wolfwood cry out when Livio’s body tipped over the side of the ship and melted into the sea of sand below. Maybe fucking away the pain is what he wants to do. And that’s fine.

When you get to the door of your room, you hear hurried footsteps and your hand is on your hip, finger already ghosting the trigger of your holstered pistol—but it’s him. Not enough for him to plague your thoughts, apparently. He had to follow you back to the motel and remind you that you aren’t going to be able to escape him for the foreseeable future.

“Why’d you leave?” he asks. Blunt, for him. You wonder how much whiskey he’s had. There’s a cigarette in his mouth and the smell of tobacco overwhelms you, makes you want one yourself. Smoking’s an expensive habit.

“Got tired,” you say. You’re pretty sure he knows you’re lying. It’s hard for you to not speak out of bitterness after you've had a little too much to drink. “I didn’t think you’d care that I left.” 

You don’t know how to define what you feel for him. It’s a soft spot, maybe. You like the way he looks at you. You like the way he seems to enjoy you looking at him. Maybe you’re both vain. Maybe you’re both lonely. Whatever it is, it’s been going on for too long and you’re tired of the uncertainty. 

“Nightcap?” he asks. You hadn’t noticed the bottle in his hand, some unlabeled, murky brown liquid.

“Have one with Vash.”

“I don’t want one with him.”

“What do you want, Wolfwood?”

He meets you at the door, and sometimes you forget how tall he is. But not right now. His hand covers yours on the door handle, cigarette between two fingers, and he’s standing closer to you than he ever has outside of a fight. Nothing you’ve felt has been as warm as his skin against yours. The ash that falls on your hand burns a little. “I want to have a drink with you,” he says. “And I want to tell you something real.”

“You’re drunk,” you tell him. His palm is softer than you expected it to be. “But I’ll humor you.”

When he grins, there’s something animal to it—something on the wrong side of feral. He pushes your door open and you follow him inside, sealing your fate for the evening.

There are no chairs in your room, so the both of you sit on the floor, backs against the foot of the twin-sized bed. There are no glasses either, so you both take turns with the bottle, choking a little after each sip. Whatever’s in there could level even the rowdiest bars in November, where you’ve seen more bourbon consumed in one night by your then-traveling companions than you’ve seen altogether in one location since.

“This your way of apologizing to me?�� you ask.

He laughs a little then takes a long swig of liquor, inhales sharply through his teeth as the liquid burns down his throat. “I owe my fair share of apologies. What am I sorry for, exactly?”

What are you going to say to that? He hurt your feelings? He didn’t call you special, like some sort of child that needs the recognition, the assurance? He gave you the cold shoulder for a couple days? The way he’d laugh himself to death would definitely bruise your ego more than you can handle. “Tell me what you want to tell me or get out.”

“Don’t sound too eager,” he says. He hands you the bottle, whittling down his cigarette. The smoke that escapes his lips seems to sit between you instead of floating upwards and dispersing. Everything is hazy, soft-edged. “What do you wanna know?”

You wonder if you’ll only get one question, or if he’ll have patience for more. You wonder what the hell you’re even doing here, sitting on the floor with him, making progressively worse decisions. “Who was he to you?” you settle on. “The person that attacked us on the Sandsteamer?”

“No foreplay, huh? Getting right to the main event?”

You try to hide the choking noise that wants to escape you by taking a sip of the booze, but this makes you choke harder, and you have to cough for a few moments before you can even begin to consider a response that doesn’t bring your mind closer to Wolfwood and foreplay. Once you’re able to breathe again, you manage to say, “You were the one that said you wanted to tell me something real.”

He pulls one knee up, leaning forward to rest his elbow on it, and you watch as he cracks his knuckles slow and loud. Not a threat—a nervous tic. You’ve seen him do it after confrontations with Vash, after Meryl asks a question that hits too close to home. “He was, uh… someone I knew when I was a kid. Someone I was supposed to take care of. But I didn’t do a very good job.”

You’re sure he’s also thinking about Livio falling hundreds of feet to the planet’s surface, the sound of the gunshot when he killed himself, Wolfwood calling his name, crying out as he watched this person that he was supposed to take care of meet an untimely and awful end.

Guilt is something that everyone on Gunsmoke is familiar with. Its constant presence doesn’t make it any lighter to carry, any easier to share. Wolfwood bears far more than the cross on his back. The look on his face tells you he already knows where your mind is going and that he doesn’t want to talk about it. He holds out his cigarette to you in lieu of speaking.

You accept what he offers. Close your lips around the filter, try not to think about his lips touching the same place, about the nicotine you could probably taste on him. The drag you take doesn’t feel deep enough. 

“Your turn now,” he says, his deep voice almost too loud in the small room. “I want something real.”

You clear your throat, hand the cigarette back. “I give you real things all the time. You just never reciprocate.”

“My stuff comes with a price. Not my fault you give yours out for free.” Without his sunglasses, his stare is piercing. It makes you feel warm all over. 

Your fingers brush his as you both reach for the neck of the bottle, and neither of you move away. As if the liquor is a safe-ground where contact is okay. It doesn’t have to be questioned, because there’s reasonable doubt when it comes to either of you wanting to touch the other. The problem is that you’ve never wanted so badly to touch someone before now. 

“Tell me something,” he says.

“I want you to kiss me.”

His brows raise, shocked by your boldness maybe, but the cigarette is already out of his mouth and he’s flattening it against the floorboards beside him. His tongue darts out to wet his bottom lip and you need to know what he would feel like against you more than you need to breathe. “Yeah? You want that?”

You nod and everything else is forgotten. The liquor is pushed aside, his body flush against yours, his big hand cupping your jaw, and—how long has it been since you’ve been touched like this? 

His lips find yours too easily, the first kisses slow, exploratory, but he’s impatient—this shouldn’t surprise you. His tongue slides against yours, permission for more granted without the question ever being asked. You want him messy—you want him warm and whole and unrestrained. Every slide of his skin against yours feels electric, sparks flaring and wires buzzing. 

“This good?” he asks—as if he’s worried, as if this isn’t what you’ve wanted for weeks .

You can only hum in response, pulling him back to you by the lapel of his blazer—his dumb fucking blazer that he fills out so perfectly, all wide shoulders and strong arms and—it needs to come off. 

Pushing it down his arms yields little in terms of results, but he takes over for you, carelessly tossing it across the room before returning to the kiss, allowing your hands to run across his chest, up to his muscled shoulders, twining your fingers in his soft hair.

He doesn’t push—just takes what you give him, which means you have to give him more, breaking the kiss and hooking your leg over his lap to straddle him. 

“Fuck, okay,” he says, more to himself than you. His hands find your hips and squeeze, eyes locked on the touch, pulling you closer to him. Through his slacks, you can already feel how painfully hard he is for you. “Okay,” he repeats.

His uncertainty begins to worry you. You tilt his head up carefully, forefinger crooked under his chin. His stubble is rough against your hand and you can’t help smoothing your thumb across the cut of his jaw. “Wolfwood—you know we don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

“Are you—? Of course I want to,” he says, incredulous even though only a moment ago he looked absolutely at a loss for what to do with you. His hands move past the boundary of your shirt, warm palms against your sides, fingers digging into your skin a little desperately. “Fuck, baby, of course I want to.”

“But there’s something on your mind.”

From the way he pauses, you gather that there’s more than just one thing on his mind. He looks conflicted. His hands are still warm against you, and he squeezes your sides once again, warmly, before responding. “Use my name.”

“Okay,” you say, soft. You move your hands to the back of his neck, carding your fingers through his hair. It feels so good to touch someone after so long—but it also feels so good to touch him, specifically, after wondering what it would be like for all those months. “I can do that.”

“Nick.”

Something about the way he tells you this makes you laugh. “Do you think I didn’t know your name?”

He looks up at you, unimpressed. Even if you’re joking, he doesn’t like to be made a fool. “Didn’t want you to call me Nicholas.”

“Okay,” you concede, leaning closer to him. You won’t ask the reason because you’re sure it’s locked behind at least six boundaries you aren’t allowed to push. Into his ear, you whisper, “Is there anything else you want, Nick?”

You can feel his cock twitch against you, and he tries and fails to bite back a groan, exhaling hard, his lips ghosting your neck, the curve of your jaw. “Can you, uh—I just need to know that you… want this. You’ve gotta tell me. Keep telling me.”

Seeing him vulnerable is something you’re not used to. You get the sense that he’s not entirely comfortable with it either. He kisses your shoulder, bites softly at the junction of your neck, intent on not looking at you, you think, before you answer. 

“I’ve wanted this for a while,” you tell him, because it’s easier for you, too, when you don’t have to look at him as you say these things. “I’ve wanted—I want you.”

Before you can say more he takes your chin in his hand, pulls your mouth to his and kisses you hard, his teeth knocking against yours, and stands—stands while you’re in his lap, inhuman strength displayed in such a careless action. Your arms tighten around his shoulders, but his hands are on the underside of your thighs, holding you as if you’re lighter than air. He takes you to the bed and your back hits the mattress, a little dust springing up from the threadbare comforter. 

Looking at him above you is a religious experience. His eyes are black, clouded with lust, lips kiss-reddened, face flushed.

There’s an unparalleled need in his expression, his movements. He pulls your cargos off impressively fast, his knees hitting the wood floor hard enough that the impact rings through your bones as well as his. You’re wearing boxer briefs, you realize, because underwear is at a premium out here in the desert, and they’re fine but they don’t exactly make you feel sexy. Your face flushes a little, suddenly so worried about what he thinks of you, what parts of you appeal to him. “Nick—”

“What do you need, pretty girl?” He kisses the inside of your thigh after asking you this, eyes never leaving yours.

Christ—the pet name alone could kill you, but the look on his face is worse. Desperation doesn’t even begin to cover it.

His long fingers dip into the top of your briefs, and suddenly whatever you’re wearing doesn’t feel all that important. “I’m gonna take these off. That okay?”

You nod because you’ve been rendered unable to speak and he takes care of everything for you. He returns as soon as he’s physically able, kissing the inside of each thigh with a reverence you wouldn’t have ever expected to see from him. It draws a sigh from you, and it’s so nice to be touched, to feel Nick’s skin against yours, to feel the heat of his breath between your thighs.

The second his tongue is against you he groans, vibrations running straight through your body. “All for me, huh?” he asks, half-lidded eyes meeting yours, and you miss the heat of his mouth already. “I’m gonna make you feel so good. So good, I promise.” 

He kisses the inside of your leg once more and wraps his arms around your thighs, pulling you closer to the edge of the bed, closer to him, and he eats you out like a man starved—there’s some sort of technique to it, but it’s lost in the fervor of his movements, in the desperation of his mouth, in the depth of the noises he makes, like he’s been waiting for this for months and now doesn’t know what to do with all the pent up want inside of him.

You tell him he’s doing so good, so perfect, treating me so well, and the encouragement spurs him on, but when he’s opening you up with his long, pretty fingers, when he curls them inside of you just right, your words lose their shape. 

You’re at the edge before you realized you were approaching it, and Nick doesn’t stop his movements. He’s intent on getting you off, tongue moving in rhythm and fingers hitting the perfect spot, his other hand gripping your thigh hard enough to bruise. There’s nothing you want more right now than for him to mark you, to stake some sort of claim on you. To want you for more than just this. 

On instinct, your fingers curl into his hair, guiding him to where you need him—and a second too late you worry that it’s too much, that he won’t like it, but when your grip loosens and you begin to pull away, he grabs your wrist and places your hand back on his head, urging you to take what you need.

And you do—his soft hair thick between your fingers, your grip tightening as you pull him into perfect position, as he lets out a half-broken noise against you, grip tightening painfully on your thigh. His fingers reach a feverish speed and that’s all it takes—you cum hard against his face, your legs tensing around his head, and he couldn’t pull away if he tried. 

But he doesn’t—he works you through your orgasm until you’re oversensitive, until you’re tugging at his hair to get him to stop, until words come back to you and all you can say is please, please, Nick, please.

When he finally relents, he’s breathless, his mouth and chin shimmering and slick. He wipes his face off on the inside of your thigh, which instinctually you want to give him shit for, but immediately after he licks up the mess, placing a kiss to your sensitive skin when he’s finished. “Was that good, baby?” he asks, his breaths heavy, arms still loosely wrapped around your thighs.

He can’t possibly be serious. Yes, it was good. You don’t think anyone will ever be able to follow that up, and all he’s done so far is eat you out.

His face lights up wickedly, and—you said that out loud, you realize, without meaning to. You can’t find it within yourself to care. It would be embarrassing if it wasn’t so wholly true. “So far, huh?” he asks. “Think you can take more?”

You tug at his shoulder because you want him close—you want to kiss him again, because you’ve gone so long not kissing him that even now, only five minutes feels like too long without. He follows your commands with no complaint, a knee up on the bed, leaning over you to kiss you and you can taste yourself on him, on his swollen lips and the wet slide of his tongue.

“Nick,” you say when he gives you a moment to breathe, and—you had an idea of what you were going to say, but you can’t fully reach it. Any time you’ve slept with someone, it’s been quick and perfunctory. Either you ask them to fuck you or they do the same, and that’s that. But this is so different. You want him to fuck you more than anything, but telling him that you want him to fuck you feels too small for what you actually want from him. 

You want everything. You want the real and the not, who he is and what he sells people. You want him to kiss you when you’re not in a bed in a cheap motel, and you want to sleep next to him, and you want to run your thumb across the stubble on his face without the expectation of anything else afterwards. A touch for the sake of a touch.

You’re struggling with understanding whether these thoughts are because of who he is or because he’s the closest thing you’ve had to an object of affection since—ever. You want him to touch you again. Maybe if you closed your eyes, it wouldn’t matter if it was him or someone else.

“I know,” he says, and he doesn’t because he can’t, because everything that’s going through your head isn’t allowed because that’s not how the world works. Because you think even if you closed your eyes, he’d be the only thing in your head, just his name on a loop and the sounds he makes behind it. He kisses the corner of your mouth and you wish you were in a different reality entirely. “Give me—five minutes, and I’ll be good.”

So he knows what you’re asking for. And he can’t give it to you right now. “Did you already—?”

He stops you before you get further. “It’s—I, uh. Fuck.” His olive skin hides any blush that’s not very deep, but there’s pink staining his cheeks, painting the tips of his ears. “Yeah. You just—yeah.”

“Oh my god.”

“Look, if you’re gonna have an attitude about it—”

“I want you so badly,” you say, and nothing has ever been more true. You’re kissing him before you can stop yourself and you’d thought five minutes was a generous estimate, but that’s really all it takes, his body pinning you to the bed, your hips moving beneath him, your hands running up his back and fisting in his hair. You pull at his shirt, barely buttoned now. “Take it off?”

It didn’t even need to be a question. He stands and his shirt is on the floor in seconds, his slacks following quickly behind. His skin glows in the low light, dark hairs peppering his chest and trailing lower, and you can’t stop yourself from reaching out, running a hand up his stomach, feeling the indents of long-healed scars and the coarseness of his hair. When he breathes out, it’s shaky, poorly controlled. He, too, is wearing boxer briefs, and even though this is normal because they're best for the heat, you somehow feel less self-conscious about anything from earlier. He’s hard again, the boxers stained dark because he came while eating you out which you wouldn’t have believed possible before right now and he’s so disgustingly sexy without even trying that you need him to fuck you right now, actually.

You’d been too enraptured watching him to undress, and his patience is short. Your shirt is pulled up over your head and quick work is made of your bra, and Nick’s breath comes out a little less steady when he palms your breasts, when one hand runs up your sternum, up the column of your throat, before tilting your head up for a surprisingly soft kiss.

He smacks the side of your ass lightly, herding you up the mattress, laying you out fully. When he’s fully undressed, when he’s completely yours to admire, you can’t take your eyes off the precum rolling down the tip of his cock, down the incredibly pretty length of him.

The things you would do to this man if you had time—which you do, but it really seems like you don’t, the pent up energy making you both hazy, rushing you towards what you need. With him on top of you there’s barely any room to move, the twin not built to hold a man as large as Nick, let alone a second person. 

He kisses down the length of your neck and your eyes flutter closed. You tell him how pretty he is, how badly you want him, and his hands squeeze your hips in response, pulling your body so, so close to his. He’s hard against your thigh and you need him right now—you could die tomorrow and be happy if you could just have him inside you this instant. He sucks a bruise into the skin right above your collarbone, and you’re too far gone to worry about whether or not your traveling clothes will cover it tomorrow. “This okay?” he asks, moving a hand between the two of you to position himself at your entrance and ever so slightly push.

“You don’t ever have to ask,” you tell him, voice almost too breathy to be heard, because you would have him whenever, wherever—whatever he wanted. 

Slowly, he thrusts inside, and each inch has your legs clenching tighter around him, your nails digging into his perfect shoulders, most assuredly leaving marks. When he bottoms out you basically whimper—it’s embarrassing, the sounds he’s coaxing from you. 

But you can’t help it—he’s so deep you can barely breathe, and his face is buried into the curve of your neck, moans muffled by your skin, teeth digging into your shoulder.

“Kiss me,” you manage to stutter out, the pace he sets slow and deep, and you want him closer, somehow, as if you could have him living in your skin and it wouldn’t be deep enough. 

He does what you ask, hips snapping to yours, the old mattress squeaking in protest beneath you. The kisses are sloppy, wet, at some points your tongues simply pressed together. He pants something against your mouth—your name, you think, though it’s too quiet for you to know for sure—and with each kiss his thrusts get sharper, deeper, hitting spots you didn’t even know existed. 

Your vision spirals at the edges, white and black stars sparkling in your peripherals. And in the center, Nick: pupils blown, lips a perfect pink, cheeks reddened, and his eyes always, always meeting yours when they can, as if it’s essential whenever your lips aren’t slick against his, like he wants to be connected to you in every way possible.

“Want you to cum again,” he murmurs. “You can do that for me, right?”

All you have to do is hum an affirmative and his hand is between your bodies, thumb honing in on your clit and rubbing tight circles, his pace measured and even and so, so deep, and the closer you get the harder it is to keep your eyes open, to stop yourself from curling into him.

His forehead is flush against yours, his explicit groans all breaths against your mouth. “Look at me, pretty girl,” he says. “I wanna see you.”

You moan his name like a prayer, your eyes opening, still so close to him and he’s beautiful—sweat dripping down his forehead, face so open and earnest, as if this is the closest he’s ever come to being completely vulnerable with you.

It only takes a few more thrusts, his cock curved in the perfect way to hit the right spot inside of you, and you’re coming apart, arms wrapping around his neck and fingers gripping his hair and his name on your lips over and over, because he’s the one that did this and you want him to know that you’re only thinking of him. 

Your vision is blank, head hazy. It takes a long moment for you to feel like you’re a part of your body again, Nick still fucking into you, thrusts becoming sloppy, his hands gripping your hips, fingers digging in so hard you’d be surprised if they weren’t meeting bone. He mumbles something into your neck that you can’t hear, and you can feel his muscles tense, and you say please don’t pull out and he’s cumming inside you while holding your hips flush to his, and he keeps saying things to you like he can’t stop himself. When your senses return to you, you realize he’s saying so good, baby, knew you’d take me so good—and then, out of nowhere, “Love you. Fuck, I love you.”

After a moment, Nick pulls out, his chest heaving with heavy breaths. He lays his head against your chest, one hand curled into your hair, the other gently tracing your side.

You can feel the exact moment that he realizes what he said. 

His entire body tenses, his hand stills, and it reminds you of the way a prey animal locks up when it knows it’s been spotted. When panic fills it so intensely that all bodily autonomy is removed.

What he said isn’t true, obviously. The words barely faze you. There are people in some towns that you can pay to sit in a room with you and tell you how much they love you, that they would do anything for you, that they would die for you. There are so few people scattered across the desert. If you’re a lonely traveler passing through, or even someone city-based but just as alone, being able to say you love someone and hear it back is intoxicating. The chances of anyone saying it to you organically are essentially non-existent. 

It’s certainly not something you’d have expected someone like Nick to be into, but who are you to shame him for the things he likes? He wants praise, he wants to feel wanted, he wants to tell someone that he loves them—there are much crazier things he could like. You’re fine with this.

What you’re not as fine with is the strained look on his face when he pushes himself up on his elbows, the way his words tumble out so quickly when he says, “I didn’t mean that.”

“It’s okay,” you say, but a stupid part of you stings in the face of such an emphatic rejection of any feelings he could have for you. “I know.”

Connections on Gunsmoke are forged fast and broken bullet-quick. You could meet someone and travel with them for a week and convince yourself you were in love with them because they’re the only person you talk to, the only person to offer you kind touches and pretty words. But those connections aren’t real. They don’t have weight to them, a foundation to stand on.

You and Nick don’t really know each other, despite the nights you’ve spent talking. Despite the ways he’s made you laugh and the ways you’ve made him smile genuinely—even if it’s a small ghost of a thing that doesn’t often grace his handsome face. Logically, he doesn’t love you. You don’t love him. There’s not even a fraction of you that’s tempted to say it because you know it’s not true. 

And yet, a small part of you yearns to have something like that—to have Nick tell you he loves you and mean it, and for you to love him back.

His face is red despite the aplomb with which you handled everything. He doesn’t quite look you in the eyes. “I’m, uh… Damn. I’m sorry.”

“For what?” You still like him being close to you. You like the way he touches you, the way he looks at you. You don’t want this to ruin the chance of getting to do this again.

“That was—a lot.”

You run the back of your knuckles across his stubbled jaw, pull him towards you with a hand on the back of his head. He follows without any complaint, even kisses you back when you lean up to kiss him, which really was a gamble because some people don’t like any kind of affection once the sex is over. “You can tell me you love me if that’s what you like,” you murmur against his lips. “I can say it too, if you want.”

He breathes in deep—his exhale almost sounds like a sigh, as if he’s about to deliver bad news but has to gear up for it first.

“If you want to do this again,” you say, pulling back to look him in the eyes—to make sure he knows you’re serious. Maybe you shouldn’t have been so presumptuous. “If you don’t, we can go back to how it was before. That would be okay.”

“I want this,” he tells you, eyes flicking to your lips for an instant. “I mean—I want to do this again.”

Smiling at him is easy. Identifying the warmth you feel in your chest is harder.

He kisses you and you sink into the comfort of him, his easy grins and soft moans and light touches. He only stops to ask you very quietly if he should be worried about finishing inside of you, but years of radiation exposure from the dual suns have taken care of any risks there. In turn, you ask him to stay the night. The questions both somehow feel extremely intimate even though they’re normal questions to ask someone you’ve just slept with. He doesn’t hesitate to say yes, and you think—maybe this will end well. Maybe it’ll be exactly what you need for the limited amount of time you have it. 

When he falls asleep, he has one hand on the back of your head, holding you to his chest, and the other in yours, your fingers loosely intertwined. It’s sweet in a way you’ve never experienced.

Maybe this will end well, but you’re almost entirely sure it won’t.

For the next three days of travel to Ship Three—or Home, as Blondie calls it, which is a stupid name—Nick feels like he’s dying. He chain-smokes faster than normal, burning through a pack every couple hours. It’s like his skin is being express-washed with sandpaper and bleach. He wants to touch you so badly it burns.

And you just sit there all pretty, in the back seat next to him and in front of the campfire and on the car’s hood when you have to pull over because Roberto gets too sick from the driving and the alcohol. You sew up the bullet holes in his blazer because of course you’d do that for him, and you laugh at Vash’s jokes and talk to Meryl about the time you both spent in November and you look at Nick and smile like it’s nothing—like your eyes on him don’t drive him insane. 

He gets lucky on your final night of travel, everyone asleep except the two of you, and he takes his time kissing you against the side of the equipment trailer, the car shielding the two of you from your snoring companions.

He’s not gonna ask you to say you love him—when you told him you’d say it if he wanted you to, it felt like there was a bug crawling around in his stomach, an unnameable feeling that he didn’t ever want to experience again.

Saying he loved you in the first place was embarrassing as hell for multiple reasons. First off, he’s pretty sure he doesn’t. Secondly, it was his goal when he approached you that night to play it cool, and he ended up finishing before he’d even started because of how good you tasted, how much he liked the way you pulled his hair, how pretty you sounded saying his name—and then on top of that, you let him cum inside you and you felt so good, so fucking right, and he spilled those words because in that moment, he loved you like absolutely nothing else.

He’s half-hard thinking about it, kissing you slow and deep because fuck, he loves the way you sigh into him when he kisses you like this, the way your hands grip the open sides of his shirt right below the collar as if you wouldn’t let him pull away if he tried. 

There’s not a second where he’s not tempted to mark you, to suck a deep bruise into your neck right below the jawline so everyone knows exactly what’s happening when they’re not looking. But he won’t. He won’t. He’ll be good. He’ll stop kissing you, he’ll ask if you want to lie with him for a little before you go to sleep, he’ll talk to you until you begin to nod off.

Let it never be said that Nicholas D. Wolfwood isn’t a paragon of restraint. He’s the king of it.

The only slight relief he gets is when you all arrive where Vash grew up, when you get to stay in rooms that are a little more private. When he can sleep next to you at night, sometimes after he fucks you as quiet as possible so no one but him gets to hear the noises you make and sometimes after he doesn’t. 

He thinks it should only be about the sex—that’s what everything else he’s ever done with someone has been about. But he gets possessive over your time. He likes to listen to your soft breathing as he falls asleep, likes to feel the weight of you against his chest. Likes when you wake up before him and trace the angles of his face and the planes of his chest with a feather-light touch until he’s up too, and he could never be mad about losing sleep over you.

And he’s a shitty person for doing this. For letting you sleep in his arms, for enjoying the way your hands feel on his skin. There’s so much you don’t know about him, but that doesn’t stop you from asking. He can’t tell you his actual age, he can’t tell you exactly what made him into the freak he is, he can’t explain to you why Livio was after Vash and how he was like a brother to Nick. He doesn’t want to disappoint you, doesn’t want you to pity him. And most importantly—

He can’t tell you what his mission is. The cost of his freedom. You’d never forgive him.

He tries not to lie to you. He avoids questions, omits information where he can. And he knows that this is essentially lying. It’s the same as a broken promise. He’s a hypocrite for calling out Vash’s lies while adding on to his own burning pyre.

This doesn’t stop him from wanting you. He takes back all the paragon shit—Nick has never been very good at denying himself what he wants.

It’s when you’re having breakfast with everyone on an unremarkable morning that Nick reaches his breaking point. Vash’s foster parents are keeping you all fed well, vegetables grown in actual gardens and meat cloned from animal cells on your plates every day.

Nick doesn’t eat breakfast—doesn’t need as much food as other people. He has his coffee like always, a cigarette soon to follow. He sits next to you because that’s his unspoken and permanent spot during meals and at the campfire and absolutely anywhere else. He leans back in his seat, sips from his mug, chimes in on the chatter when he has something to say. Everyone else is chowing down, and Vash says some stupid joke about forgetting what greens taste like when they’re not covered in sand, and you laugh—and something snaps in him.

Nothing big. It’s wishbone-small, the slightest crack. But it’s enough.

He drapes his arm across your seat, cups the back of your neck with his hand, strokes his thumb over the dip of your spine right below your hairline. You swallow hard and he can feel the vibration in his palm.

Everyone is silent. You turn to look at him slowly and he can feel the heat that crawls up your neck. He thought you might be mad—but your eyes are wide, mouth parted in surprise, as if you thought he wouldn’t want everyone to know you were his, as if he’d never claim you publicly.

He’d do a lot more to you publicly if you’d let him, but he doesn’t want to push his luck.

“What?” he asks, as if this is something perfectly normal for him to be doing. He looks between the four of you, and every single one of you is looking at him dumbstruck. “Guess staring problems are an epidemic.”

Vash’s face is a deep pink. He stutters out, “Wow, guys—congrats. Or, uh—I mean. That’s nice that you’re… that—”

“It’s just puppy love, kid, you don’t have to make it awkward,” Roberto says—and Nick barely stops himself from bodily flinching at that word. It shouldn’t be spoken in the context of the two of you so soon after his mistake. “Let the Undertaker have his moment in peace.”

Peace isn’t what Nick was aiming to achieve by touching you like this—but he still got what he wanted. You and Meryl are staring at each other, communicating in a series of complicated eyebrow maneuvers. Vash is looking anywhere but Nick. Roberto, somehow the voice of reason in all this, is already shoveling the rest of his breakfast into his mouth.

He’s itching for a cigarette. He slides his thumb over your soft skin once more, then stands, curling a finger under your chin to tilt your face up. You don’t protest as he leans down, as he kisses you softly and extremely chastely. It’s not like he doesn’t know that he’s pushing boundaries right now, that you might be pissed at him for this. He’s not gonna stick his tongue down your throat in front of everyone. But he couldn’t stop himself from having just one kiss. 

Whatever broke inside him couldn’t be patched up, and he just—he needed everyone to know what you were. That you were something. That he was the one that’d take care of you if you needed it, that he was the one you were sleeping next to every night, that he was yours.

“Nick…?” You don’t look angry with him. Just confused. Concerned, maybe.

“Gonna go out for a smoke.” He knows you don’t like him smoking next to you while you’re eating, or he’d already have a cigarette lit between his fingers. His thumb swipes across your lower lip because he has a hard time keeping his hands off you once they’re on. 

He turns from the table and heads towards the hallway—where he’ll be breaking out his smokes, because he’s not walking through the entire damn ship to have a cigarette if they haven’t complained about him smoking inside yet. 

Before he makes it to the door, he hears Meryl loudly whispering at you, questions pouring from her lips, and Roberto saying, “Christ, Newbie, let her breathe.”

Outside the mess hall, Nick turns to the wall of the hallway. Presses his forehead against the cool metal. He’s an idiot for doing things like this. For acting on impulse. For not being entirely honest with you.

Maybe if he could get his contract from the church, you’d understand. You’d see the clauses on there that he remembers watching Conrad write— if this contract is breached, the Hopeland Orphanage will be destroyed and the lives of every child that resides within will be forfeit. You’d see the thick black line at the bottom that he was forced to sign when he was too young to know what a signature was. Vash wanted to see his brother anyway. All he had to do was deliver the kid to Knives. It wouldn’t even be extra work on Nick’s part. 

But he knows you well enough now. Too well to ignore the fact that you don’t forgive easily.

And this still doesn’t stop him, because he’s an awful person. Blondie’s arm puts you back a few weeks—weeks spent gathering materials and waiting for the old scientist to finish his repairs. 

And even as you spend more and more time with him, holding his hand when you walk into the mess hall for breakfast, laying against his chest as you read old books from the ship’s small library, kissing him goodbye when you or he take turns helping out on scavenging trips, he doesn’t tell you the entire truth. 

Even as he finds such simple happiness in talking to you about your day, even as he finds some kind of divinity in the way you moan his name, in the way your nails scrape against his scalp when he fucks you—always face to face, because he loves the way you look at him, like he’s the only thing that exists to you—even then, he doesn’t give you the most delicate, secret parts of him.

Just once—just one time while he has you laid out beneath him, while he has you in his ear telling him what a good job he’s doing, he considers taking you up on what you’d proposed to him all those months ago. He thinks about what it would sound like if you told him you loved him, even if you didn’t mean it, and he cums so unexpectedly that his vision whites out, that he feels a tipsy sort of dizziness, that you ask him if everything is okay after.

You mess with his head. He doesn’t know whether he likes it or hates it. Doesn’t matter how he feels about it, really—wouldn’t stop it from happening every time you smile at him after you’ve been away from him for a little while, the first time you woke up in his arms and said morning, handsome and every time after that.

When Brad finally tells everyone that he’s almost done with Vash’s repairs, Nick is disappointed. He wants time. He’s only had a month of this. He wants all the time in the world and more because he’s greedy and needs every part of you.

Only a few days later, you’re in the mess hall for dinner and Wolfwood is coming back from helping Blondie scavenge around for old ship parts. There are specific metals the scientist needs for his final repairs, all located in burnt out scraps of fallen spaceships that litter the wasteland around Ship Three. He’s been gone for eight hours and it’s been too damn long with you out of his sight.

It’s later in the evening—most of the crew have cleared out, but stragglers sit at the tables around the edges of the room and chat tiredly. You’re already done with your meal and Nick is so ready to pick you up and carry you all the way back to his room and get you in his shower, because he can’t wait to touch you until after he’s clean, free of the sweat and sand that feel like a second skin at this point. 

Except you’re talking to some asshole with a lopsided smile on his face, obviously already half in love with you. The guy isn’t even your type. Too soft, baby-faced, completely untested by Gunsmoke and its inhabitants. He looks like he wouldn’t know how to shoot a gun if Nick put one in his hand with the safety off and positioned his finger on the trigger.

He leans the Punisher against whatever’s closest to him and its weight causes the metal table it falls against to scrape across the floor harshly. You turn to look at him and you smile so softly despite the loud noise, and maybe he’ll just hoist you out of your chair and carry you to his room right now even though you’d complain about him being rude to this wet rag that wants to fuck you.

You greet him when he sits in the chair next to you and he missed your voice so much. The guy you were talking to looks at Nick, brows raised, as if expecting—what, that you’d actually want this asshole? Over him?

Nick shoots the guy a withering glare, then puts his arm around your shoulders lazily, murmuring hey, pretty girl into your hair while this idiot keeps staring at him as if it could intimidate him into leaving.

“I’ve heard about you. The Undertaker, right?” the guy asks, holding his hand out, as if Nick would actually shake it. “I’m—”

“Leaving,” Nick says. “Unless you’re looking for a problem.”

You turn to look at him, his name a protest on your tongue, but the guy is already getting up, muttering to himself about Nick having awful manners. Doesn’t matter—he’d rather have every person on this ship hate him if it meant keeping you to himself.

“You can’t talk to people like that,” you say.

“I didn’t like the way he was looking at you.” He could see the hunger in that asshole’s eyes, no matter how well he was hiding it from you. “He wanted something that wasn’t his.”

“Nick…” You pull back a little further away from him to really look at him, and he curls his arm around your shoulder because he doesn’t want you further away. He wants you against the wall of his shower right now, and then maybe on the countertop next to the sink, and then preferably in his bed for the rest of the night. “Maybe… we should go somewhere more quiet. To talk.”

Dread settles into his stomach so quickly that it’s like being hit by a bullet to the gut—and Nick’s taken plenty of those over the years, but none have felt quite as cold and heavy as this. He refuses to panic right now. “To talk,” he repeats.

You must see it in his eyes—the fear. Your hand is on his cheek in an instant, and you kiss him so soft and chaste, exactly like the first time he kissed you in front of everyone, and he feels safer. His heart stops beating out of his chest, the dread in his stomach warms to a tepid anxiety. He’s beginning to like kisses like these. Still not as much as when he can really kiss you the way he wants, long and deep and thorough, but there’s something in the simplicity of them that pleases him. They’re a message more than anything. An assurance. You still like him. You still want him.

Regardless, he follows you to your room with a stone in his throat. He’s not a big talker. Not when it comes to serious stuff. And this feels serious. You start pacing and his pulse quickens again, a raging beat against his sternum, an echo that rattles around his head.

When you stop, it’s sudden enough to rock you in place a little, as if you didn’t realize you were going to cease moving before it happened. “Sometimes,” you say, not looking at him, “you say things.”

He waits, but you don’t continue. “I tend to do that.”

“Nick—unless I’m not understanding things right, we’re not… we’re not together.”

Refusing to panic seems to be something he’s no longer good at. “We’re not together,” he repeats, because he’s an idiot that can’t string two words together if you haven’t already said them.

“Okay, that’s—that’s what I thought. I didn’t think you… yeah.” You still won’t look at him. You’re picking at your cuticles so hard that there’s already a little blood on your fingers.

His immediate instinct is to stop you—to step forward and take your hands in his, to smooth his thumbs over the wounds you’ve given yourself. “Look at me.”

When you look at him, your eyes are full of an emotion that Nick can’t name. Not desire—but want, on a certain level. There’s something you want that he can’t give you.

And he knows what it is. He’s not an idiot. He knows that the way you smile at him isn’t the way you smile at someone you’re not together with. He knows you don’t give him those reassuring kisses because you don’t want to be together with him. You don’t ever press him about it because this kind of stuff doesn’t happen. People don’t connect like this. Whatever the two of you are doing—it’s fragile, and you’re ready for it to fall apart at a moment’s notice. He is, too.

If there wasn’t so much he wasn’t telling you, then—he doesn’t even want to think about it. Because maybe he’d like that too. Maybe he’d be able to give you parts of what you want, to be enough of what you need in order for you to be happy. 

You’d do it for him, no question. You already do it for him. 

“I’m not great at this,” he tells you. He’s not. He’s slept with a lot of people, but that’s easy on Gunsmoke. If you’re even a little good looking, half the planet wants you. But he hasn’t held anything more real than that, hasn’t felt the weight of it in his palm. “But I want… just you.”

You bite the inside of your lip, unsure—because what has he given you, really, beyond vague answers and truths that aren’t fully fleshed out? He can understand your hesitance. You’re so devastatingly beautiful and he wishes he wasn’t a piece of shit.

“Okay,” is your eventual response. 

He can tell that what he said wasn’t enough. But it’s all he can give you. It’s selfish of him to want reciprocation, he knows. “Do you…?” 

“Yes,” you say, but you look so sad and he keeps fucking up more and more. “Just you.”

He wishes he could see what kind of thoughts are running through your head—whether you hate him now, whether you’re okay with just this, whether he could ever make you forgive him for everything he’s about to do.

“Kiss me,” you tell him. “Please.”

How could he deny you that?

He doesn’t take you to his shower but you don’t seem to mind the grit and sweat of the desert on his skin—you’re pliant underneath him, you come apart on his hands, you kiss him like you mean it, and when he’s inside you and he whispers I love you, I love you, I love you into your skin, you don’t question whether it’s real or not and he doesn’t tell you.

You don’t say it back, but he didn’t ask you to.

After JuLai

There’s nowhere you can go but Home.

The entire coast of the Great Sand Ocean is covered in the debris of JuLai, and even then—no Sandsteamer is going to stop on a random stretch of coast to take you somewhere safe. If you can all make it to Home, Meryl can go north to November, Nick can go back to December, and you can figure out what you’re going to do since you didn’t have the good fortune to die.

So many people didn’t make it. You should be happy you’re still alive. But traveling with Nick makes you wish that someone else was here instead of you.

Vash is nowhere to be found. You don’t think he’s dead—because it’s him. Even with everything that happened to him in that tower, you have such a strong belief that he lived through Knives’s torture, through that bright pink light in the sky that exploded up into space, through the collapse of the world’s largest city.

Maybe that’s naive. But if you can go look for him after you get situated, that’s—something. You can do something and not feel so empty. Or you could follow Meryl to November, become a gun-for-hire like you’d been for so many years.

It’s a week's journey to Home on foot. You barely sleep. You and Meryl take turns keeping watch at night, always right beside each other, because there’s no way you could trust Nick to keep the two of you safe after everything.

But you can’t kick him out of your little group, either, because you’re without cover and without your weapon, lost somewhere in the escape, and Meryl’s Derringer only has three low-caliber shots before the bullets Roberto gave her are gone.

As much as you hate it, he’d be your only chance of survival if you got caught in a firefight out here.

Nick doesn’t seem willing to leave, either. He doesn’t speak to either of you—out of shame, you wonder, or because he simply doesn’t care?—but he nods when you say that Home should be your next destination, follows quietly when Meryl begins to lead the trek with her unflappable sense of direction, smokes cigarette after cigarette until his borrowed pack of menthols runs out and he gets twitchy, bouncing his leg whenever he sits down, toying with the buckles on the cover of his gun tirelessly.

The noise doesn’t bother you when you’re walking, but in the middle of the night, it sounds like a fucking alarm going off. And he doesn’t sleep—at least, you never see him unconscious during your trek, even though you know firsthand that he’s capable of sleeping—but obviously there’s a lot he hasn’t told you about himself.

The night before you get to Home, it’s too much for you—you’re about to wake Meryl for her watch, and you haven’t had a good night’s sleep in a week, and he’s flicking a buckle open and closed, and you find the half-finished pack of cigarettes in your pocket that, before everything, you’d been holding for him.

There are no campfires these nights. You don’t have the resources, and you sure as shit don’t want to be spotted by anyone that might be heading to JuLai to scavenge its corpse. In the shine of the five moons, you make your way over to him—he’s never too close, maybe because he’s trying to be conscientious. 

He looks up at you, surprised, and—he’s terrible enough to have something like hope on his face. It’s not a good look on him.

“Here,” you say, and you hold out the crumpled pack of cigarettes. He takes it from you slowly, like you’ll scare if he moves too quickly. “You need to stop fiddling with shit so I can get a good night’s sleep.”

“Thanks,” he says, but you’re already walking back towards Meryl, shaking her from sleep. 

The sound of his lighter clicking, the sound of him taking a deep drag and exhaling a long moment later—it’s so familiar. You’ve fallen asleep to that many nights over the past month or so, when Nick hadn’t been able to rest without a little nicotine to calm him down. He was always thinking hard when you were quiet in his arms, something in his eyes that spoke of conflict. You wonder now if he was thinking about the things he was keeping from you. The way he was about to betray you.

Meryl eyes the lit cigarette in Nick’s mouth when she wakes up, but she doesn’t look at you with any kind of judgment. She squeezes your hand and smiles at you, quietly says, “It’s okay. You need some rest.”

Maybe she’s talking about the noise that kept you awake every night—maybe she’s talking about something less tangible, an unrest that lives deep within you. You still don’t sleep well, and it’s his fault. Without the sound of the buckles clicking, you can hear him smoke, hear his deep breaths in the silence of the night. When you dream, it’s a hazy memory on loop, Nick holding you close and whispering things he didn’t mean.

Luida cries when you arrive and tell her what happened. You can’t blame her—you want to cry too. It’s all you’ve wanted to do for days. You just want to get to a room where you can be by yourself and finally, finally be allowed to feel.

Brad tells you that the room you’d stayed in is exactly how you left it, and you leave Meryl talking to the two of them, leave Nick leaning against the wall next to his gun, quietly smoking one of the last cigarettes from the pack you’d given him.

You get to your room, untouched to the point that it still smells a little like the body wash you used the last time you showered here, a little like stale smoke from when Nick would come to you at night because he basically refused to sleep if it wasn’t next to you, and you find that you can’t even do what you’ve wanted to do this whole time.

There are no tears. There’s no terrible cracking of the makeshift foundation you’d built to hold yourself up over the past few days. No collapse, no city falling dark. There’s nothing.

You shower and sit on the tiled floor, letting the spray hit your hair, your back, until the water goes lukewarm. Even after you’ve scrubbed every inch of your skin, you can still feel the desert on you, sand under your nails, baked into your hair, seared into your bones. You lay in your bed in clean clothes—truly clean clothes for the first time in more than a week, comfy pajama shorts and an actual sweater—and all you can do is stare at the ceiling, waiting to sleep, or to sink into the sheets and melt away, or to simply cease to exist.

He comes to your door in the middle of the night, knocks and waits outside, as if he couldn’t simply open the door himself. They don’t lock. People on this ship are respectful about privacy. There’s a large part of you that wants to leave him out there. He won’t come in if you don’t let him. You may not know a lot about him, but you’re at least sure of that. 

When you open the door, he’s flicking the butt of a finished cigarette to the ground. It bounces, crosses the threshold of your room. “Shit—didn’t mean to do that,” he says. I didn’t mean it, you hear. “Didn’t even think you’d see me, to be honest.”

“Do you need something, Wolfwood?” you ask. Whenever you’re not speaking your jaw is clenched so tightly that you can hear your molars grind against each other. He’s doing irreparable damage to your teeth. “Or are we done here?”

His face falls—not that it hadn’t been in a state that could be classified as ��fallen’ before that—and he jams his hands in his pockets, swaying back on his heels, looking more above you than at you. The mask he wears to hide his thoughts from you doesn’t fit very well anymore. “I’m leaving,” he says. 

It’s what you wanted him to do, but it doesn’t stop you from inhaling sharp, from feeling a sudden pain against your ribs. 

“Thought I’d, uh…” He shakes his head. He’s replaced his sunglasses, or maybe he had them the whole time, and you can’t see his eyes in the hallway’s ambient night-time lighting. “Nah, never mind. Get some sleep. Maybe I’ll see you around.”

He turns to leave and the lapel of his jacket is suddenly in your hand, sandworn and stitched through. You sewed up the bullet hole that rests snug beneath your thumb. You ran your fingers over the skin of his chest not long after that, marveling at its smoothness, the lack of scars to follow the wound. You thought then: was he disappointed that he didn’t have any marks to show for the trauma he’d endured? Or did he prefer that—a blank canvas that let him pretend that everything he’d ever known hadn’t really happened?

You had eventually come to the conclusion that he didn’t care. His scars were littered across bone and organ, never to be shown to another person. The cross he bore was his own terrible burden to shoulder.

Back then, you had been okay with that. After everything that happened, you shouldn’t care. You should let him shoulder the weight. You should let him leave. 

There are more holes in the blazer now, wounds he picked up on the way to his betrayal. “Let me fix this for you.”

He says your name small, quiet, the same way he’d said it when JuLai was burning with life behind him, exploding in flowers and vines.

“Before you go,” you say. You have no idea what you’re doing. “I want to fix it before you go.”

He swallows, nods. You can tell he wishes he had a cigarette right now. “Alright. If you want."

It takes a moment for you to let go of him, as if he’d melt into sand once you let go, as if this is only an apparition before you and your grip is the only thing tying him to the physical realm. 

He doesn’t melt. He doesn’t fade away. He follows you into your room and shrugs off his blazer, offers it to you. 

You take it from him silently. The sewing kit you use is somewhere in your travel bag, right where you left it before you were stolen away to JuLai. The sooner it’s unearthed from your stockpiled life, the sooner he’ll be gone. You should get it. “What did you come here for?”

He leans back against the doorframe, arms crossed, fingers drumming against his side. After a moment he takes his sunglasses off, puts them down on the table at the end of your bed. Drags a hand down his face like he’s the most exhausted he’s ever been. “There’s not a lot I can give you. I don't have much.”

You weren’t asking him for anything. You bite your tongue when you go to remind him of this.

“But I have answers now. The ones you wanted. Before.” He clears his throat. “If you still want them.”

You shouldn’t. You shouldn’t. 

When you don’t stop him, he continues. “I had a contract.”

“A contract.”

“The people that drew it up weren’t above breaking a couple bones to get me to sign it. ‘Cause I’d just heal up, right?” He laughs, and it’s an awful, bitter noise. “I’d be back in one piece so they could break the same bones again.”

You’re quiet.

He holds out a crumpled piece of paper, obviously balled up at some point in time—at the top: Pastoral Contract. At the bottom: Nicholas D. Wolfwood in a series of childish curls and shaky lines. Nick had written the terms of his contract out in the careful cursive of someone still learning to use it. The word ‘receive’ is misspelled. “How old…?”

“Nine,” he says. “I’d just turned nine.”

The first thought that crosses your mind: how many people has he killed in his time as a pastor, and could he remember each one if he tried? “How long have you—”

“I’m twenty-two.”

You’re stunned into silence. There had been no question in your mind that Nick was older than you by at least four or five years. 

If things weren’t the way they were, he’d probably make a joke about looking good for his age. If things weren’t the way they were, you’d be examining how much his age matches up with the way he acts, his impulsiveness and brashness and possessiveness, the way he couldn’t even handle someone else looking at you.

But this is how things are, and you can only stare at him. “How.”

“Conrad created his perfect weapon. I paid a price.”

You sit on the floor. You’re not sure why. You just can’t be standing anymore. 

Nick looks at you for a moment, quiet—then slides down the doorframe, joining you. The room is small enough that there’s only a foot or so between you. His knees are bent, forearms resting across them, and he somehow looks small like this. Like there’s a weight compressing him, curling his edges closer to his center.

“You weren’t—when we… was it your first time?”

His eyes snap to yours and he’s incredulous, amused, unable to stop himself from laughing. “You didn’t defile my innocence, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Something about his smile makes you want to scream. He looks so soft when he’s not being entirely too serious, the kind of soft you can’t fully comprehend until it’s felt, like the leaves of lamb’s-ear you touched in Home’s gardens when Vash told you I have something to show you that you’re gonna love. Because you’ve always longed for softer things, for things that have no chance of survival in the desert. “How long have you… looked older?”

“Since I signed my contract.”

You try not to think about it and fail. How old did he look when he was nine? How old was he when the church he worked for sent him out on his first terrible assignments? You know what he’s done—you’d known the reputation of Nicholas the Punisher long before you met him—and though innocence isn’t something you find in spades on Gunsmoke, you can’t help but feel a gut-wrenching sadness because his had been ripped from him so early. When did he take his first life? When was the first time someone took advantage of him at such a young age without even realizing they were doing it?

Nick hates it when people pity him. He knows he was dealt shit cards—he didn’t hesitate to let you know that anytime he told you the smallest details about his childhood. Now you have the big details, and you’re positive he wants you to pity him even less. 

You toy with the collar of his jacket, resting atop your crossed legs, because you have to do something with your hands. You have to have somewhere to look other than him. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“You really think that would’ve gone over well?”

How could he even be asking that question?

“Yeah, I do. You know how Vash is.” Was, your mind supplies. You’re so, so tired. “He would’ve understood. He would’ve gone with you anyway if he knew what you were being forced to do. He would’ve jumped at the opportunity to help you. He cared about you so much.”

He cared about all of you. And you’d all failed him. He was the only fully good person you’d ever met and you all failed him.

“He knew,” Nick says. “Before he got to Knives—we talked about it.”

You know without having to ask that Vash forgave him. He’d probably pieced it together already and forgiven Nick long before they even got to JuLai. There’s cotton in your throat, your tongue is a stone. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

A memory crosses your mind—sitting in the desert with him atop a sand dune, his gun laid out before him, telling you that you shouldn’t think you’re special.

If he’d told you everything, maybe you’d be sitting with him and Vash and Meryl and Roberto in a bar in JuLai, drinking to your victory. Maybe you’d be here with everyone, and Luida wouldn’t have let out that awful noise when you told her about Vash—a long, drawn-out note that she couldn’t hold inside, a keening that begged the question of why? and tapered off into silence. 

Maybe nothing would have changed at all.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I should have. I just—I didn’t want to disappoint you. I thought that if I didn’t give you all of me, then it’d be easier when we… when I did what I had to. When things were over.”

So he’d also known from the start that things wouldn’t end well.

“I would’ve done anything for you,” you tell him. It’s embarrassing to say out loud. You shouldn’t have said it in the first place—shouldn’t have even thought it. But you’re past keeping things from one another, it seems.

He stretches out his long legs, leans a little closer toward you. His hand reaches out towards you, an invitation to be taken or refused. “C’mere for a minute?”

You let him hold you. Your legs are across his lap, your body pressed into his chest, your arms curled around him so tight that it can’t be comfortable on his end. He has your head tucked beneath his chin, one hand on your hair and the other pulling you closer by the thigh, like he could crawl into your skin if he just had you close enough. 

“Was it easier?” you ask him.

“No,” he murmurs into your hair. “I think it made things worse.”

“How?”

“I didn’t want things to be over. Still don’t.” His hand tightens on your thigh, his entire body shifting to get you closer. “I know I’m selfish for that. You don’t have to tell me.”

Maybe you’re selfish, too. Maybe the words are softening the wall around your heart because if you were in his position, you probably would’ve done the same thing. You still can’t forgive him. “Nick,” you say. Pull back and look at him. 

“What do you need, sweet thing?” His voice is quiet when he asks this. It reminds you of the first time you kissed him—the first time he said those three heavy words to you, accidental whispers that held no meaning. 

“I want you to tell me you love me.” Even if it’s not real. Even if it’s just for right now. Even if it’s something he only murmurs into your skin when he’s between your thighs, when he makes you see the face of God in the way he touches you.

You expect him to kiss you. To start this final goodbye. But he doesn’t. He pulls you close to him again, lays his cheek against the top of your head. “‘Course I love you.” 

It’s nothing above a whisper. It’s a breath released into the air, something you wouldn’t hear if everything else wasn’t completely silent. But it makes you feel like crying and maybe you don’t hate him like you thought you did, but why shouldn’t you? All this wasteland has taught you to do is never trust people. Nick showed you exactly what Gunsmoke had already shown you a million times over. There’s not a person you know outside of Vash and Meryl that hasn’t betrayed you at least once. 

You’ve committed your fair share of betrayals, too. Law of the wasteland.

When you pull away from him, he looks a little panicked—but all you do is perch yourself on his lap, your knees boxing him in on either side, your face above his. “Could you ever mean it?”

He looks up at you blankly.

“If we stayed together. If we traveled. Or settled down, whatever,” you say. “Could you ever be able to say that and mean it?”

His brows scrunch, confusion painting his handsome face. “I mean it now,” he says, as if it’s obvious. 

And it’s like everything comes to a screeching halt inside you: all the hurt, all the exhaustion, all the emptiness. Emotions flood into the cavity of your chest so quickly that you’re drowning, your lungs full of too many things that aren’t air. 

Because this doesn’t happen. Not on Gunsmoke. Not to you.

“How do you know it’s real?”

“How would I know it’s not? Is there a checklist I should be consulting?”

You don’t know how to answer that because you feel like there should be a checklist, something that was left behind on the planets before Gunsmoke, burnt up in the crashes of the ships that populated the planet. Something you’ll never know the contents of—only that it existed.

“I know because it’s how I feel. Not gonna argue with myself on that,” Nick says, and maybe it’s that simple. He cups your face with a warm, careful hand and you melt into the contact. The first time you’d touched him like this, you worried that it might’ve been the contact alone that you liked. Not the person providing it.

But you know now that anyone else could touch you like this and you wouldn’t feel even a shadow of the way he makes you feel.

“You’re being awful quiet,” he says.

“You hurt me really badly, Nick.”

“I know,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

You think he is. You want to stay angry with him but he makes it hard. He made a mistake. He didn’t trust anyone enough to share his burdens. And could you blame him for that? You know firsthand how frightening it feels to trust someone. To want to.

“Would you want that? Us—together?” you ask.

“Yeah, I want that.” He laughs, as if any of this is remotely amusing. “Thought I made it clear.”

“You’d have to tell me everything,” you say. “Be honest about whatever I ask.”

“For you, anything,” he says, because he’s a corny idiot who likes his one-liners too much and it’s this stupid line above anything else that actually brings tears to your eyes, that makes you realize how badly you would’ve missed him if he’d left without saying goodbye, how much you want to keep him and how much you want him to keep you.

You still don’t know what to do, so instead you kiss him and he kisses you back and he feels exactly like he did the last time you’d been together like this. Things devolve quickly, as they often do between you. He pulls your hips against his to create friction and you missed him. It’s messy and his teeth find their way into the kisses a little too often and he can’t even stomach moving from the floor before he touches you, it seems, because he’s already pushing your sleep shorts to the side, feeling exactly how badly you want him. 

“Shit,” he breathes. “Shit, I’m sorry, baby. I can’t wait.”

He unzips his slacks and pulls them down along with his boxers, just enough for him to free his cock, and you inhale sharply when he pulls you further into his lap, ruts against you, coating himself in your slick wetness. The noise he makes is haunting, a little broken.

You cup his head with your hands, fingers twined into his hair, and kiss him hard, licking into his mouth, grinding against his pretty length. He makes sounds you want to lock up and keep under your bed. He says your name as if it’s the name of God. “Can’t wait,” he repeats. “Need you to take it. Be good and take it for me, pretty girl.”

He positions himself so you can sink down onto his length, shorts pushed to the side, strong hands guiding your hips slowly. It hurts a little more than usual, but everything is so rushed, so feral, that it doesn’t really bother you. The warmth of having him so close, the delicious stretch of him inside you, the way he groans when he bottoms out—it’s all worth the pain. 

It’s almost a disappointment when he goes still, when he waits for you to acclimate to his size. “Okay?” he manages to ask, because he always has to make sure you’re okay with things, even when he’s being reckless. 

You nod and you don’t even get a chance to move against him—his feet are planted on the floor, still in his dumb little loafers, and his hands hold you exactly where he needs you for him to thrust into you over and over again, root to tip, so fucking deep that you can feel him in your stomach. 

Your hands are pressed flat against the wall behind him, your face buried in the crook of his shoulder to muffle the noises you can’t keep yourself from making. He just feels so good—so perfect inside of you and against you, where he was made to be, and you tell him this because he needs to know.

His hand finds the small of your back and pushes you into an arch that has you seeing stars with every thrust. Not even pressing your mouth to his skin can quiet the moans he’s eliciting from you, so you bite down on the junction of his neck and shoulder and he whines, body tensing, arms circling your waist to pull you against him in a crushing embrace as he buries himself deep inside of you. He twitches hard, talking without a thought like he always does when he finishes, saying that he needs you, saying that you’re the only person that's ever made him feel like this, saying that you’re the only person he ever wants to do this with for the rest of his life.

After his body loosens up, after he pulls out and his breathing slows to something manageable, he says, “One of these days I’m gonna be able to last more than a minute. Just need you to stop feeling that perfect.”

You laugh—honest to God laugh, and you want him so badly and you’re still so turned on and he’s exactly what you’ve always wanted. “You think that’s ever gonna happen?”

“Oh, absolutely not,” he says. His teeth nip at your bottom lip, the ghost of a bite. A hallmark of want. “Are you gonna let me take care of you?”

Always. You’ll always let him take care of you.

He carries you to the bed and your shorts are gone, your sweater is gone, your sense of dignity is gone because you would give this man anything right now. He lays you out and takes his time pulling you apart, breaking you down with his tongue, his hands, his long, pretty fingers.

When he finally gets you off he keeps going, driving you to a point where you can’t handle any more and then pushing you through it, and when you reach your second peak, he laps up everything you give him, sighing soft against you.

He tries to wipe his face off like usual and you stop him, pull him to you, gaze at the shimmering mixture of your slick and his cum that covers the lower half of his face. You run the flat of your tongue up his chin and you could get drunk simply off the taste of the two of you together. His eyes are half-lidded when you pull away, and he whispers, “Christ, you’re perfect,” almost more to himself than you. When he kisses you, he holds you so close you can hardly breathe.

The after with him is always soft. He undresses himself because you’re undressed, then holds you gently, kisses your hair, tells you sweet things that he’d never say in public.

At least—that he wouldn’t before. Maybe things are different now.

You’ve been lying together, quiet, for a long while before he says, “I’m not gonna ask you to say it back.”

The air conditioning kicks on, a low drone that hums through the room like a distant insect swarm. You feel frozen, unsure what to do with your body.

“But do you think you ever could?”

You sit up because everything suddenly feels too heavy. Your face feels hot. You’ve never been good at thinking through your emotions because you haven’t had to. You’ve been a mercenary for a long time. You’ve killed a lot of people for a lot less than they were worth. You’ve traveled with so many companions over the years that you can’t remember all of their faces anymore. There’s never been anyone you’ve had to think over your feelings for—it’s been either like or dislike for so long that it feels like it’s all you know.

The things you feel for Nick, though—would they be classified as like? Or something more? He makes you laugh. He makes you so frustrated you could scream. He makes you want to travel to places you’ve already been just so you can see them together. He makes you want to cry, sometimes, because you’re scared of this, and you forgot what fear was much too long ago to feel comfortable with it now.

“How can I know?”

He looks a little hurt by this. He’s terrible at hiding his emotions even though he thinks he’s good at it.

“Genuinely, Nick. I haven’t… had anyone like you. I haven’t wanted to be with anyone like this. I haven’t cared about anyone like this.” You look at his jacket, discarded on the floor, still riddled with bullet holes that you were supposed to fix. “But how do I know if that’s enough?”

He sits too, takes your hands in his. He’s always so beautiful like this—when he’s taken off all the armor he shields himself with and lets you touch what’s underneath. “It’s enough for me.”

You look at your hands, fingers intertwined with his. “I could, I think.”

“Don’t want you to feel pressured,” he tells you. “Just—if it happens, you know, I’d appreciate it if you’d clue me in.”

“I can do that,” you say, and you can, because he doesn’t look disappointed that you didn’t do something you weren’t ready to do. He doesn’t look angry. He smiles at you, so warm and genuine that your heart feels like it’s cracking open, like everything inside you is spilling out. “I do. I already do.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I love you.” You cover your mouth with a hand after you say it, because it feels so heavy and damning. But it feels so right , too, and you don’t know what to do with that. How to fit the rightness into the way you’ve built your life on the foundation of so many wrongs. After a long moment where he waits for you to collect yourself, you’re able to lower your hand. “I love you,” you tell him. “I want it to be enough.”

“It is,” he says, thumb caressing the back of your hand. “It’ll always be enough.” 

You’ve never expected to get everything you want in life, and you most definitely won’t. But you can have this. This delicate thing that you’ve been building together, despite the missteps. Despite the fear. And it’ll be okay, because there’s no checklist. No requirements. You just love him, and he loves you back, and you're both allowed to decide what that means.

It’s enough. It’s more than enough.

[gamerbot-22]

Could you do a headcanon about Vash being the father of twins?

Me, reading this prompt for the first time: Aww, how cute, Vash as a dad! Me, reading this prompt a second time, really honing in on the "twins" part: Oh. Vash as a dad to twins... Okay. Fuck yes. Love where your head's at.

Vash the Stampede as a Father to Twins

TW/CWs: A LOT of angst semi-balanced out with Vash shenanigans (Vashenanigans, if you would), no reader insert here, written with no particular version of Vash in mind so feel free to slot in your fave, mentions of children in danger with nothing explicit happening, barely proofread and I appreciate spellchecks!

A/N: This was the first ask I got while I was out on vacation in CO and getting hit upside the head with the angst potential of this while I was mid-latte-made-by-my-best-friend was an insane experience (in a good way!) Sorry if you were looking for something entirely lighthearted, I just could not let go of the potential of this once I saw it.

Likes and Reblogs appreciated, Requests are Open, and it’s all under the cut!

The dividers in this post were made by @/saradika ☆

So right off the bat, I'm not going to concern myself too much about the biological parentage of these hypothetical twins because in my heart of hearts I do not think Vash would care. Like it does not matter to him if these kids came from him, someone else, or the sands of Gunsmoke itself, he is going to love these kids to the stars and back.

I think he's a very hands-on parent to the point of being overbearing at times. He is a Wanted Outlaw whether he wants to be or not, and he knows that there are a lot of hardened people out there in the desert that would not think twice about shooting a kid, so he gets even more defensive than he normally does in his fighting. He probably picks up a couple more scars making sure his kids don't get a scratch on them.

As hands-on as he is, I think it goes without saying that Vash is incredibly gentle. His scoldings for fights and bad behavior are stern, but he never gets loud. He saves that for if his twins are in active danger, so they know immediately when they need to start running away or hiding.

Building off the gentleness, he really pushes for his twins to get along and watch out for each other, almost directly quoting Rem when he tells them to take care of one another. He doesn't talk about their Uncle Nai very often, but the kids aren't stupid. They know their dad misses his brother, and doesn't want his kids to know the heartbreak that comes with losing your best friend.

Phew, on a lighter note! When there's downtime I think Vash just goes full jungle gym if that's the way his kids want to play. He has one looped around his neck and the other hanging off his prosthetic like a monkey, all three of them laughing and smiling in the shade while they catch their breath. He tells them silly stories and they play dumb games and he is weak to his kids asking for sweets whenever they go places. More than once the three of them have eaten enough donuts to just be down for the count for a day or so, which just means they're all in a big pile in bed or in the shade just relaxing and waiting for the collective tummy hurt to pass.

I also think that after a while the three of 'em all laugh and smile the exact same. Like if you tell them a funny joke you get a literal harmonized choir of laughter and giggling as they lean against each other or fall into the sand. They're all cutie patooties, even if there's not much of a family resemblance between father and children.

And despite what I said earlier about Vash being a bit more ready to throw himself in harm's way to protect his kids, I think he actually starts to take better care of himself for them. Yes, he's spent the better part of a century and a half protecting people, but none of those people (save a very small handful) have ever really depended on him the way his twins have. If he goes, there will be no one to protect them, especially if he dies out in the desert, far away from any towns or settlements. So he eats more, drinks more water, and actually starts to carry more medical supplies with him than he usually did (he even gets some cute character bandages for the little cuts and scratches.)

The night he first met his children, he swore a vow to himself and to them that he would live to see them reach the future. No matter what. And I think that means when the kids are older--say, mid-teens at the youngest--Vash starts to like... gently suggest they stay in the different towns they pass through. It becomes part of the routine of stopping somewhere: They find an inn, they get some food, Vash tries to sell his kids on staying in the nice, warm inn for a bit while he goes on, and they stay for a while until something happens and they're forced to move on.

It's not that he doesn't love these kids--he loves them more than he thought he could love anyone--but he can't... imagine them thriving in the life he's living, wandering aimlessly across the desert looking for some non-existent paradise that doesn't know Vash's face just so the three of them can have some peace and quiet. His children's lives, finite as they might be (depending on where you think these kids came from) are worth their weight in gold to Vash. It makes him understand why Rem stayed behind on the SEEDS ship to give him and Nai a chance, and it breaks him into a thousand pieces every time he thinks about it. If a life without him means they have a chance at something safe and normal, then it's a price Vash is more than willing to pay.

[fuck-you-upmusicbracket]

Wait For Me (Hadestown)

I hear the walls repeating/The falling of my feet and/It sounds like drumming/And I am not alone/I hear the rocks and stones/Echoing my song/I'm coming!

"There's hope and longing and need, there's fear and pain and anger. I can't really articulate how this works so well but it really sells Orpheus's journey down in a single song. Also if you've seen an IRL production of hadestown the light work is just amazing."

Sunlight (Hozier)

All the tales the same/Told before and told again/A soul that's born in cold and rain/Knows sunlight, sunlight, sunlight/And at last can grant a name/To a buried and a burning flame/As love and its decisive pain/Oh, my sunlight, sunlight, sunlight

But whose heart would not take flight/Betray the moon as acolyte/On first and fierce affirming sight of/Sunlight, sunlight, sunlight/I had been lost to you, sunlight/And flew like a moth to you, sunlight, oh, sunlight/Oh, your love is sunlight

"I come down with the shivers and start hyperventilating when i hear this song and it makes me want to go outside which is the scariest part"

"I'm not gonna go full infodump here but this song is Peak Vash and Nicholas D. Wolfwood from Trigun-- specifically Nick's feelings towards Vash. Vash's (literal) evil twin brother Knives hired (read: threatened to eradicate the orphanage he kidnapped Nick from as a child if he didn't do what he was told) Nick to act as bodyguard for Vash and guide him to where Knives wants him to go so he can manipulate him for his own gain. Like, he chose the name Knives. This bitch is crazy beyond crazy but this ain't about him. Nick starts out 100% willing to guide Vash like a lamb to slaughter because he HAS to for the orphanage, and this is just some random guy he doesn't know or care about. But then he gets to know Vash, how good of a person he is despite the shit the world (and Knives) has put him through. How he'd rather risk his own life and health than kill another person because he believes he doesn't get to make that choice for people. And despite being someone who'd rather shoot first, pray for them after, Nick starts trying to wound rather than kill just because Vash doesn't like it. It puts them both at risk and he fusses and argues about it and still kills sometimes but he tries anyways. Eventually he decides that he'll do what he can to protect Vash from Knives without provoking him to destroy the orphanage. He ends up caring about him deeply against his own will to the point that his idea of Eden would be to live with Vash and their friends in a peaceful world where none of them have to fight and die. In the manga, Nick's dying request is to see Vash smile again- the genuine smile that he's complimented every time he's seen it. Vash can't give him that, because he knows Nick would see that it was a forced smile. Instead, he just sits with him until he dies. Afterwards, Vash kills willingly for the first time in his entire life (over 150 years. He's not human btw) in order to protect Nick's childhood friend Livio. He wouldn't just do that for just any friend or ally, no, that was out of love. Love so strong he could go against his own mother's teachings that all life matters and people don't get to choose when a life ends, the thing that has kept Vash pacifist all these years, to keep someone that mattered to Nick alive. So while Nick never knew that Vash cared for him the same way he did him, the fact matters that he does."

[mediocreanomaly]

Love your soulmate au for vashwood so much. What if it was with reader and knives?

Knives would be so confused with feeling random pains like a stubbed toe or a random pinch.

🌻Hope you have a good day🌻

Authors note: Yo! ofcourse I had to turn this into a post!!! My main story will be Vashwood but I'm basing this in the same world as the Vashwood x reader stuff, consider this a little side story I might expand on if it gets enough love lol you don't have to read the other parts to understand this tho

Read the Vashwood Parts Here!: Part 1 | Part 2

Read Part 2 Here!

Knives X Reader Soulmate AU

•Knives had learned about soulmates during his studies with Rem, a person all humans had that was tethered to them in some sort of spiritual or metaphysical sense, one that could feel your pain.

•It was stupid. In all honesty he was glad he wasn't human so he didn't have to deal with something so tedious. It would only slow him down, he couldn't imagine how humans dealt with such a hindrance

•He often listened to Vash ramble on about soulmates and offered little assurance, often saying things like "We aren't human, Vash. We don't have soulmates," "You shouldn't want a soulmate anyways it's a pain for no reason," "Will you stop talking about it already? It's beneath us"

•After the fall Knives all but forgets soulmates even exist. He's focused on bigger things and he doesn't have a soulmate anyway so the thought is nonexistent

•Then the oddest thing happens. He's busy destroying a town attempting to take their plant, it's a routine stop, when he swears he feels a pain shoot through his foot

•He quickly whips his head around, looking around to figure out what exactly could have done that but there's nothing but his own destruction. Weird.

•He thinks about it for a couple days because he isn't used to getting hurt but reluctantly chalks it up to him somehow being careless with his blades, even though that explanation doesn't really sit right with him it's the only thing that makes sense

•Then, a couple months later, in the sanctuary of his own quarters, he feels a burn across his hand. He furrows his brow and slowly looks over his hand over and over to see where the burn is coming from yet there's no mark, just the feeling

•Fool him once shame on him fool him twice....

•He marches down to Conrad's office, irritated about whatever's happening. Conrad listens as he explains the two incidents, how there's no mark, how it's annoying and distracting him from more important matters

•Conrad nods and says he's going to run an experiment, before Knives can fully ask what says experiment is Conrad reaches over and roughly jabs him in the side

•Safe to say Conrad almost lost his head that day. In fact Knives blades were pressed to his neck when he felt a returning jab in his arm

•Once Knives realizes what's happening he's furious. He's a superior being he doesn't need a soulmate he's been fine with out one for a century, he doesn't even understand, why now? Why when he's so close to achieving his plans?

•After this he makes it a top priority to kill you.

What? You thought he was going to be merciful just because you're his soulmate? This whole thing is just a bump in the road of his plans, it'll be easy. He'll kill you and then he doesn't have to worry about feeling your pain. Besides, right now it's just a stubbed toe or a burn but come tomorrow he can't afford to be distracted if you break an arm or get shot

•So he rampages towns non-stop, trying to find you, hoping he'll feel his own blade for a split second before it can go back to normal

•During his rampages...is when you join Dr.Conrad in his studies. You were a plant specialist, the most renowned in your field, yet...the more you studied plants, the more you interacted and saw...the more you hated humans for how you used them

•You felt humans didn't deserve plants, didn't deserve the sentient life force the human race had created, so when you found out about Dr.Conrad you'd practically begged him to let you join the cause

•So ironically Knives was pretty much wasting his time being out causing mass destruction, if he had stayed he might've put the pieces together a bit faster, but he didn't

•Unlike Vash, Knives doesn't really let himself get hurt, he does the hurting so Knives doesn't realize you're his soulmate for a long time, but this is good because if he realized right off the bat you'd probably be dead

•Instead he slowly comes to learn of your existence. He doesn't really care much about you one way or the other when he first meets you. Your Conrads help? Okay. That's it, that's all there is really he doesn't care

•Yet for some reason...every time he passes through to speak with Conrad he can't help but watch you work while he pretends to be focusing on whatever the man was saying

•It's almost maddening because he doesn't understand why you, of all people, have caught his attention, so he starts trying to interact with you more. It's a little unnerving at first, I mean...it's Knives. He either silently stands over you as you work or makes less than nice comments about how you're doing things wrong

•But you aren't deterred. In fact, you're pretty interested in Knives. You've studied plants your whole life but Knives...Knives is something different, something more. So you use the time he hovers to ask him questions about himself, how his gate works, if he sleeps or eats, logging each difference between him and humans and him and other plants

•Maybe it's the way your brain is wired from interacting with so many plants, maybe it's the fact Knives seems to pay particular attention to you,(maybe it's the fact you're soulmates lmao) but you're basically the only one who can read him. You don't know how but you pick up on the slight mouth twitches, the shifts in his shoulders, the difference between his "I'm annoyed" grimace and his "I'm enjoying this but I don't want you to know" grimace

•He won't admit it to you, not yet, but he's starting to feel...fond of you. He'll pretend he needs to speak to Conrad about the progress of his experiments but really he's just there to answer whatever questions you have and to talk to you in return

•Now don't forget, you can feel your soulmate's pain...and this is Trigun. You are the first to realize you're soulmates. How you might ask? Well let's put it this way, would you want to feel yourself getting destroyed during the events of Ja'Lai?

•The Ja'Lai incident. It's possibly the worst pain you've ever felt in your life, despite the way Knives grits his teeth through it till the end to an average person? It's unbearable. You black out multiple times from the feeling, body lying in a heap as you try to figure out what's happening

•Once you hear about what happened in Ja'Lai...you instantly know. Luckily (and much to his protest) Legato eventually lets you help nurse Knives back to health

•You sit on the side of Knives bed, your own body still feeling like you have third-degree burns as you watch the body of the man you'd been falling for. You knew he didn't want a soulmate, part of you wondered if you should even tell him when he wakes up...

•Well...who knows how he'll respond. It doesn't matter now, though; he won't be waking up any time soon, so you have time to come up with a plan. Let's just hope your previous time with him has proved enough to win him over.

[beanibon]

Hey hey, different anon but that Vash arguing with reader angst was so good, could I request a Wolfwood version? (Because let's be honest as much as I love him he'd be the one to say something he didn't mean in an argument)

Nicholas Arguing with S/O

TW: angst, some swearing.

Rage seeped like lava in his veins, blood boiled as anger caused his heart to pound furiously. Nicholas was livid, even more so when you appeared like nothing was wrong.

You could have fucking died!

The Punisher was slammed into the ground, in favour of grabbing your shoulders, hands shaking you in anger.

"You could've fucking died! What is wrong with you!?" Nicholas yelled, just speaking such fears had him shaking. What if I lost you?

"You were hurt, I watched them shoot hundreds of holes in you, h-how are you still-"

"That doesn't fucking matter, what matters is you being a moron and running through a shootout! What is wrong with you!?" Your eyes dragged along his torso, bullet holes evident from the torn cloth and blood soaked fabric. Yet he was perfectly fine, how?

Nicholas's yelling brought you back, the Undertaker reprimanding you from stepping in. Then it happened, a sentence in which should have never been spoken.

"I don't need your pathetic help, you're useless to me in gunfight! When will you learn, that all I need from you is to get out of my way!" Wolfwood's breathing was erratic, teeth clenched and grinded together. Had he not realised what he had said?

Your tears were instant, even as Vash intervened. The words spoken between them both weren't heard by you, quiet sobs had the town corner fall into silence.

Only then did Wolfwood recognise the hurt he spat at you, the pain he brought upon that angelic soul.

He reached for you, yet you moved away. You moved to be comforted by someone else.

Nicholas watched with agony, heart shattering as you ran to Vash, arms enveloping the blonde in a desperate hug. Your cries had him feeling sick, nauseous as Vash looked between you two, hesitantly hugging you back.

That was all he needed, picking up Punisher as Nicholas looked back once more, before walking off. The sound of your cries repeating in his mind, all because he was too stupid to keep his damn mouth shut.

[bendycxmet]

Happy New Year—Vash the Stampede

summary: bringing in the new year with that special someone

content: 830 words. fluff, some drinking, teasing vash, the gangs all here

a/n: happy new year yall! lets celebrate the new year with some vash kisses

new years eve. you didn't think it possible that you and the crew could actually catch a break to embrace the festivities but here you were. vash had recommended this quaint little bar he often visited over the years as he weaved through countless towns.

a lively band played in the corner, an upbeat melody sweeping everyone on their feet and onto the dancefloor. you sipped on a cocktail in the corner with the girls, chatting and giggling as the alcohol took effect. your eyes searched for your partner, spotting him standing opposite of nicholas, the latter wiggling his eyebrows as he leaned in. vash looked down, almost as if in thought, before glancing sideways at you over his shoulder. a shudder ran through your body at the look in his eyes.

what's he thinking?

"-and that's when i decided to throw caution to the wind and swing on the guy!" milly drunkenly blabbered, head slamming onto the table right after.

"milly, you didn't do that. you cried yourself to sleep one night because you accidentally stepped on a tomas' foot. anyways we were there. y/n, don't you remember that day?" 

you giggled at meryl's slurring. "c'mon meryl, let's humor her for once and just accept-" 

one second you're staring at your friend's pouting face, and then the next your whole world goes black and an enveloping warmth covers your mouth. you barely get a chance to recover and realize what's happening when the feeling passes and you see meryl and milly's aghast faces. 

you cover your mouth, shooting your gaze upwards to find vash smiling down at you, pink dusting his cheeks. 

"we have two more hours left till the new year mayfly. expect the unexpected." he winked at you, leaving you with that bit of advice before walking back to the bar. you hadn't revealed to the group yet that you and vash had become a thing. to be fair, it was just last week that he confessed to you. 

"and you weren't gonna tell us?!"

….

throughout the night, just when you relaxed from vash’s first kiss, your world would fade back into darkness as vash would come back in to steal your breath away, but only for a second. you were beginning to feel on edge, heeding his previous warning.

still sitting in the booth with the girls, you feel hands slither around your neck, before they tilt your head back. you catch a glimpse of vash’s quirked grin before he seals his lips against yours again.

"so you're not gonna tell me what you're up to? i mean not that i'm complaining, but still." you asked after he pulled away.

he only chuckled before extending his hand out to you. 

"wanna dance again? I gave you a long enough break. we have a couple more minutes before the countdown." he wiggles his fingers, inviting you along. you sigh teasingly, sliding your fingers into his palm, before he hoists you up and onto the dancefloor.

his hands slide around your waist, pulling you closer as your hands fall around his neck. the band’s music entrances the horde of people on the floor, nicholas and the girls following after you two to dance. vash’s face comes to rest near your ear.

"left you wondering why i kept kissing you tonight?"

"it was a surprise, a nice one, but maybe we should've told everyone we were a thing before you came to smash your lips against me." you tease your finger into his side, eliciting a boyish laugh from him that rang into your ear.

the band abruptly ends their song, before yelling out to the crowd.

"alright everyone, the new year is upon us, so grab that special someone and saddle up! don't get too graphic though, no one wants to see that. go across the street to the inn for that. count with us now! 10! 9!-" every person in the bar is on their feet, glasses raised, and voices chanting the countdown.

you feel vash squeeze your sides, begging for your attention to be back on him. you peer up at him, both of you saying the last couple of seconds together.

"2! 1! happy new year!" confetti explodes as screams fill the air around you. none of that matters. all that matters is vash closing the distance between you two, only this time he indulges you in a kiss that lasts more than a second. he pulls back slightly, nuzzling his nose against yours before saying a number. you quirk your eyebrow at that. 

"were you counting? the number of kisses i gave you signifies this new year, a year i get to spend with you." you blush at his words, heart fluttering. 

"let's keep the number going, for all the next couple of years i want to spend with you, vash." 

you see several emotions swim in his eyes before he's leaning back in.

"happy new year mayfly."

"happy new year vash."

masterlist

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[chibivesicle]

Asks that I will never really answer. My apologies; life gets busy and I get distracted.

I'm dropping these here today, so I can clear out some of the asks from my inbox. Apologies for some of these going back to when Trigun Stampede was still airing. >_< If I don't have a clear and concise answer, I'll let things sit in the inbox but they occasionally do fall off my radar.

Uuummm sorry Anon, I meant to give this more of a response but as I got angrier at Stampede, I just couldn't bring myself to give you a well thought out reply. My overall vibes for the Christian themes that were missing in Stampede had to do how they kept a lot of the surface content, images/style/design from the original but with the sci-fi emphasis removed the weird esoteric Christian stuff and made it look that way. Vash was more willing to engage with others in the original manga/'98 anime based on what Rem taught him. Yet, we never get why he does what he does in Stampede. By changing Wolfwood from being a traveling preacher where Vash lambasts him with 'thou shall not kill' the nuance of his character's moral conflict is lost. He's a trained killer for a quasi-religious organization that might be using a Zia in a really not cool way. We also do not see him act in a self-sacrificing way, which he does from the get go in the original. The angelic body horror was gone, replaced by a sci-fi reading of plants and the concept of plant worship was missing in there as well. There is a lot of internal dialogue that many of the characters pose through the anime and manga and its just gone from Stampede and it revolves around forgiveness, violence, and justice.

For me, the complete re-interpretation of the world and loss of the moral conflict that all characters show hurt the Christian (and Buddhist) themes that underpinned the original. It really came down to how the characters acted and talked. There is no point to a gunslinger who is almost completely passive when one who is active but uses a non-lethal method based on principle. There is a chapter where Vash gets taunted by some enemy for how bad his target practice is until they determine he was that accurate at shooting someone but not killing them. The best way to summarize is that they took some of the aesthetics of the original and didn't follow through on how the characters acted. There is so much contemplation in the original and that is missing in the remake.

Let's just make this a list: 1.) Leo would actually have a real girlfriend. I already have issues with White, I think adding her in as a quasi-girlfriend was a disservice to Leo's character. 2.) Zapp would be white. Less of a manwhore perhaps? 3.) Chain would be cute as opposed to cold and distant. No drinking assholes under the table and vomiting in her bathroom later. See Meryl Stryfe.

4.) K.K. would have boobs, and somehow be more sexy than an awkward and doting mother. See Rem and Luida. 5.) Steven's scar would be smaller or missing to make him a real lady killer. Either they'd lean way too far into Steven's shady side or they'd clean it up completely. Like he'd wink at women as opposed to sleeping with them to get intel. Be Klaus #1 fan! But like all the time, making himself to work too much. His hangry side would either be missing or played up for laughs. 6.) Zed would be dropped because he's the non-human team member. What's the point of having him? 7.) Luciana Estevez would only appear in her super sexy doctor form not her silly clone or normal form.

8.) They would try to create lore and filler to explain things that you have to assume are just how things work. Or they would info dump as opposed to leaving it up to you to worry about things and figure it out from the context. 9.) The entire cast gets aged down, because having a bunch of 30+ cast members who don't have all their shit together is too embarrassing aka very realistic. e.g. K.K. has a house husband (not a good mother like Rem and Luida in Stampede), Steven will die single and alone, Daniel will die single and alone, Patrick carries a torch for Guinness but is single, Abrams is a walking disaster.

10.) Character designs which are super unique and fun, especially in the manga all get 'isekai treatment' were they look homogeneous. The whole point of the diversity of the cast is lost. Women are short and cute, men are tall and slender or tall and buff. No other options.

11.) They attempt to rationalize the 13 Kings and give deep meaning behind their behaviors. Which maybe we will get that someday, but part of the fun is how fucking chaotic they are.

12.) Hellsalem's Lot is an empty city. Somehow, the city lacks people on the streets and we don't get the rooftop betting scene between the giant stomping creature and super-sized Riel. Sex, drugs, gambling are minimized in their version.

13.) The entire Prosfair story line is cut because it is so fucking bizarre and awesome; they wouldn't understand the point of the entire game.

14.) The OST is bad.

[greetingfromthedead]

C5: Birdbrain

For more information on the series (tags, CW, etc) click the banner!

Series Rating: 18+ / Explicit

Chapter: 5/84

Words: 2.1k

No particular warnings for this chapter.

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Vash has blabbers almost non-stop since he packed up the camp and took course towards the town he had mentioned. It provides a welcome distraction from your uncontrollable thoughts, but as you listen to his adventures and wonder how he's still alive, you notice the slight awkwardness in his voice and words. It's not quite natural; it's more about filling the silence. He tries his best to rope you into the conversation, but with no success. You just can't find the words to match his energy and his overflowing optimism towards humanity, no matter if they seem to shoot at him or not. Vash has left out that he has a $$500,000 bounty on his head, so people sound even more unreasonable to you than they did before.

After a few hours of walking, Vash suggests a small rest. The tomas, who he had been lead by their headgear, makes little noises as you stop and you take the initiative to remove the saddle and put Vash's stuff on the ground. The man in red watches for a second as you take off everything but the headgear.

"What you doing?" he asks with amusement in his voice as he sits down on his rolled-up mat to drink some water.

"I think they're itchy from the saddle," you say without turning away from the bird, petting their long neck. Happy bird noises are puffed into your ear as they lower their whole body so you can pet their head better. A few strokes along the beak, and the tomas starts to dig into the sand, sending a cloud of the fine particles flying. You narrow your eyes and turn away, holding your breath, as the creature flings sand onto themselves with their wings.

"I think you're right," Vash manages to voice out between the coughing as he has taken the blunt of the flinging sand. The tomas rubs their long neck and head onto the sandy ground, and when they finally get on their feet again, you see sand seeping out from between their feathers. Making what could be described as cooing sounds, the bird comes closer and starts rubbing their neck onto you, almost pushing you over and leaving dusty marks on your dark shirt.

"Yes, yes, I'm glad you're enjoying yourself, you dirty bird," you laugh as you start to deflect the tomas' affections.

"You're good with her," Vash says, brushing the sand off his clothes as he gets up.

"Yeah, well, I spent a lot of time traveling around with them." The tomas is almost making circles around you, going one way, then the other, occasionally getting between you and the man. Stomping her feet, she has her head low and playful. Once again, she disappears behind you, and you're ready for her to stick her head through under your arm, but instead she gives a strong push with her head into your back, and you stagger forward a few steps, your own head low, trying to find balance. You don't fall, and as you look up, you see that Vash has stepped closer and has both his arms out, ready to catch you.

"Sit down, you annoying birdbrain," you spit out, no actual malice in your tone.

"What? Me?" Vash looks surprised as he puts one of his hands on the back of his head and pointing at himself with the other.

"Well, it's not what I meant, but..." you joke.

He laughs as he sees the bird lying down against your feet.

"She likes you," he smiles.

"You think?" You shoot back and laugh. You feel so light.

"Yeah, I can't blame her. There's a lot to like about you!" His eyes are closed in the smile as you are taken by surprise, and your face flushes crimson for a moment. It is so unusual for you, having spent most of the 50 years of your last roamaround alone, away from people.

Vash means every word he says, seeing you ever so slowly show your true colors behind the mask of anger and distance. You seem to unfurl almost like one of his sisters, revealing their true beauty. You are kind, gentle, and just, toward others at least. The way you seem to look at yourself still concerns him, however. He knows there is so much more about you, but maybe he can make you see that life ain't too bad and help you make sense of things in your head. As he opens his eyes and looks back at you, he sees you turning your face away from him, your cheeks a shade pinker than they were before, and it makes him very happy.

Vash has to saddle the tomas by himself because the bird won't let you out of her sight. It was even a struggle for the man to get the creature off of you, her having put her head in your lap as you sat down. Now it's Vash gearing up the bird and the tomas nipping at you as soon as you try to step away.

A few harsh words don't make a difference to the bird, and you find yourself muttering under your breath a lot.

"Alright, all good to go. Come on!" You hear Vash, and you hadn't even noticed when he had gotten onto the bird. He holds out his human arm to you.

"Oh, eh, I'm fine walking," you mutter as you pat the bird.

"But then we are still going at human speed; we lost some time with you playing with my tomas. Let's make up for it; I think she prefers it too. Also, a gentleman like me could never risk being seen riding a tomas while a pretty lady just walks!" He smiles with his arm still stretched out.

"I wasn't..." you try to argue, but your voice trails off. It makes sense what he had said, except for the last part, and you gently address the bird as you stroke down her neck, "Would you please get down for me?"

The bird lets out a happy little sound and kneels down to the surprise of Vash, who almost keels over. You ignore his hand and make your way towards his back.

"Come, sit in front of me! Otherwise, you won't see anything! Don't worry, I can see over you just fine." He smiles, seemingly carefree.

"I'm good here..." but he doesn't leave you much of a choice as he slides further towards the back of the saddle, leaving you no room there. Damn that man. He has the reins in his metal hand, and the other arm is now outstretched further back. He looks like he is inviting you into a hug. You suck your lips into a fine line, biting down, and let out a sigh as you relent.

You climb onto the saddle between his legs and hold onto the edge of the saddle, back as straight as a stick, leaning forward to leave as much space between the two of you as possible, but as his other hand grabs the reins too, both of his arms seem to rest against the sides of yours.

"Perfect," he says, giving a little yank to signal the bird to get up and moving. You feel his breath in your hair, and it sends a shiver up your back. All you can hope is that he didn't notice.

Except he did notice and is already thinking of ways to misuse that little trick. The tomas moves forward quicker than you would on foot, with a slight bounce in every step. You try to adjust; it's so familiar to you, yet the fact that you share the bird with another makes it so new.

"I told you about my adventures. You want to tell me about yours? What did you do? Where did you go?" You hear his soft voice in your ear, closer than expected, and it makes you lean even more forward. The grip on the saddle tightens, and your face starts burning up a bit, partially from his voice, partially because you know he felt your body move away from him, slightly rubbing against his long arms.

"Well, I... didn't do too much. Nothing action packed like you at least," you try deflecting the question. As the tomas moves, occasionally his legs touch yours, no matter how tiny you try to be, and you aren't sure if it's entirely an accident.

"Come on, tell me, where have you been to?" He encourages you, and some memories flood back into your head.

"Well, after the crash, I just took off. I walked as far west as I could, and when I was met by uncrossable sand, I turned north and went as far as my legs took me. I think I spent close to twenty years wandering before I found my way back to the crash sites."

"Woooow!" His voice is full of adoration. "I've never been that far. What did you find?"

"Just more sand and rocks. Caverns so deep that you can't see the bottom. Caves large enough for grand worms to have a party. Air vents under the sands, making the dunes bubble with air so toxic that not a single living being can inhabit it, not to mention the sand swallowing up anything thrown into it. Up north, the air is a lot colder, the nights are freezing, the days are not much better, and the nights and days can last for more than a month. I never came across any other life forms but worms, though. I never found anything biological; no water either. But it was still beautiful; the sands are a different color if you go far enough; some dunes are bright yellow, some are almost purple, and some are red and pink. I saw volcanoes, and the sand covered in soot."

"It sounds incredible! I'm sure you've seen more than most people can even imagine!" His voice truly does sound full of wonder. "But I'm glad you found your way back. I wouldn't be here listening to you otherwise."

His tone fills you with comfort and a strange warmth again. Your body relaxes a bit, and as you stop holding so tightly onto the saddle, your legs start to touch his. You decide not to pay it any attention and make it his problem if he doesn't like it.

"Yeah, after years, I found myself back; it happened by accident, actually. I saw what had come of the aftermath of the crash. The way they had set up the Plants, their scrappy little houses made from spaceship parts, some had been built with the natural stones. I saw them build their lives back up from pieces that were left over. I was too scared to get close. I spent more years watching them as an outsider than I did trying to be part of them. After a while, I started trading clothes here, food there, some water in exchange for bullets. I didn't need those things, but they did, to survive. And it gave me an excuse to see them up close again, to see who they are. I couldn't stay anywhere long; people were bound to notice how I didn't need to consume anything; sometimes I got careless enough for them to see how wounds didn't bother me either; or when I returned to a city after years, I looked like I hadn't aged a day. People are scared of their own mortality, and they took it out on me. They chased me out like vermin."

You had said too much; you had once again gotten too careless, and the thoughts just slipped out of your mouth. You didn't realize how your back had relaxed, and suddenly feet his stomach and chest against you as he inches closer to you, an ever-so-slight squeeze from his arms either side of you and a quiet yet serious voice in your ear.

"I am very sorry that was your experience. They truly are scared and defenseless sometimes, which makes them do and say horrible things. But they aren't all that bad; most of them are good people. I hope you get to feel it too."

Vash pulls back, biting his lip, remembering you scolding the bird earlier after she almost pushed you over, and thinks he is just as stupid as his tomas. Why had he said that? Why did he word it like that?

They? Why does it sound like he is excluding himself from people and also almost like he is excluding you too? The last part makes sense; all things considered, you don't seem human, and you don't feel human. Is he just saying that he isn't like the others? It seemed to be true, as he has shown you nothing but kindness and compassion.

Vash leans back again, looking at the horizon ahead, leaving a tiny gap between your bodies, but as your shoulders relax more, you find yourself ever so lightly leaning into him. Vash is happy to feel you against him, wishing to see the expression on your face. Hopefully, you hadn't noticed his slip-up.

For more information and chapters, check out the MASTERLIST.

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[kindaoptimisticsquirrel]

Trigun Bookclub Trimax Vol8 Part2

Vol01: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3  | Vol02: Part 1 | Part 2

Trimax: Vol01 Part 1 Vol01 Part 2 | Vol02 Part 1 Vol02 Part 2 |

Vol 03 Part 1 | Vol03 Part2 | Vol04 Part1 | Vol04 Part2 | Vol05 |

Vol06 | Vol07 | Vol08 Part1 | Vol08 Part2

Oh hell yeah we'll get to one of my favourite spreads of the whole series in this Part.

I will also not excuse any swearing that I'm doing while writing this review.

Now I don't think I got this on my first read through, but the sound here ("Gakin") sounds very much like no bullet was loaded? Sooo I guess Wolfwood very cleverly anticipated this move by Legato so we have him double-tricking him! Good boy! (I haven't read all bookclub posts to vol8 yet, if smb else already said this, whoops)

He's free...but instant knock-out. Ouch.

"Oh no fucker, I WON'T have you staring at my bf's ass." (loosely interpreted Wolfwood's thoughts)

If he missed, does this mean Legato changed the trajectory of the bullets with his powers? Sounds like a wild thing to do (but I'm not sure if it's a wild thing for HIM or completely within his normal powers?)

THIS shit was not part of the plan.

Reclaimed his ass (good for him)

This panel of Livio shooting behin him and saying "Amen"? It's pretty fucking cool.

Much less cool is that he's shooting Wolfwood.

And now Chapel literally casting judgement upon Wolfwood from above. God has this boy not suffered enough?

It's started, guys. The inner thoughs of Wolfwood...You know when I started reading Trigun, I had just watched ep4 or 5 of Trigun and I thought Wolfwood was "just" another cool character, but basically a sidekick to the main character Vash. Then I binged the manga in 3 days and saw that, although none of the other characters like Meryl and Milly are any less fleshed out or any less important, next to Vash he's probably the only one about whom we get so so much wonderful insight. So much deep character feelings, so much thoughts...and I'm so so in love with his inner monologues. They hurt to read but they show he's not just the cool priest with the machine gun, but he's hurting, he's self doubting, he's vulnerable and afraid at times and he has wishes too...

And when he's sitting there, riddled with bullets, it's the thought of Livio and how he still has to save him, that manages to get him to keep going.

They were friends, brothers! Memories of happier times...

Which fucker shot my Wolfwood.

Gnaring, biting, chomping on wood.

It's coming it's coming

SJAKD fskfa Vash literally answering his prayer. Cradling Wolfwood in his wings gently!! And protecting him from the bullets. And also being turned to him with his body, partly shielding Wolfwood with himself, too. This whole page. is so...romantic. And that feels almost like it doesn't even describe it accurately. This is most definitely the part where I really started to ship them, but then, is it romantic or platonic? It doesn't really matter because as much as you want to or NOT want to interpret into their relationship at this point, to me it's clear that there's some kind of love here that's based on their mutual understanding, trust, and how they both have supported each other until this point.

sjkADfaf *sighs*

Big fan of this Vash drawing with this pose here.

Reading this for the thousandth time and falling only deeper into the Vashwood hole.

Knives your vulnerability is showing again.

Cheeky bastard! (I say with love)

The right page is absolutely beautiful. And I love how the panel on the left pages insinuates how they are bumping againest the ship on their way through very comedy-style.

Next chapter! Chapter 5:

I'm cherishing every panel where we see them close and caring about each other. Imagining Vash gently leaning Wolfwood against the rock after catching them both from the fall (did they land on his feathers or did they fly to the earth? I'd have loved to know how they did it)

Love that panel at the bottom of Wolfwood! And, Vash with his hair down (and cloak off) like this looks soo young! More like Wolfwood's age instead of 150 haha

Baby Wolfwood Baby Wolfwood

The situation is turned into a funny one on the next page, but these pleas, they are very much real and urgent and from the bottom of Wolfwood's heart...and he rarely ever begs or asks for anything.

Marlon!! So so happy to get some characters back that we know, and he's a very lovable character!! And, of course, Meryl <3

Knowing that his friends are there to back him up, even from afar, he looks more sure of himself. Because you're not alone!

And THEN you had to go and ruin the atmosphere, Wolfwood. Because you just WALKED AWAY you big idiot

Anybody else got reminded of the Cowboy Bebop ending notes?

And that's all of the Vol8 recap I'm gonna do. There's one more chapter but I don't really feel like doing that, others have already discussed it anyway, so that's it for me! Now I can really dig into vol9 this week, oh lord I can't wait.

[hikennosabo]

trimax vol 14 random thoughts (ch 1-4)

hoooo boy. time to steel myself to read this volume again for the sake of writing this post. i press onward...

but first i must ask:

why is milly getting mike wazowski'd on the joke cover.

i love this joke cover actually, legato and knives in particular are cracking me up

and as for the inner illustration we have a lovely group picture and--

KNIVES SMILING!!!! AAHHHH!!!! an actual, genuine smile from him!!!!! ;____;

okay, okay, time to start actually reading...

chapter 1:

i think nightow is trying to kill us by showing so much of vash with his blonde hair... on the covers, in this flashback... blonde vash almost looks like a completely different character. but the only thing that changed was his hair... *unrolls list* and his clothes, and the haunted look in his eyes, and his will to live, and...

"that is how i lived my life"... he's mentally preparing himself to do the deed...

there are a lot of compositions in this chapter that i like, especially because vash's stark black color scheme is so cool, but i especially like watching legato zip around lol.

the earth ship crashed... uhh... is chronica okay? was her role in this story really to show up, fail to avenge domina, and then die?

knives smiling again!!! --but this time it's an evil smile!!! he genuinely looks cute here...

legato is over here waxing poetic about vash being his narrative foil as they have a fight to the death. i wouldn't expect anything else from him.

BABY ELENDIRA!!!! tristamp took this design and ran, huh?

this next sequence... hmmm... i'm not really sure how to put this. the buildup to legato's death that doesn't come because vash doesn't pull the trigger... it would almost be funny if it wasn't so fucked up. like, even within the narrative itself, it's presented as if this is the time for him to die. he has a flashback, he waxes poetic about his death... and then in that moment... it doesn't happen. even after vash tried to steel himself earlier in the chapter.

i dunno... i'm just sad...

THE MOUNTING DREAD OF REALIZING WHO HE'S TALKING ABOUT...... (also i like their expressions here)

AND THE INSANE PAGE-TURN SPREAD OF LIVIO BEING HELD HOSTAGE..... AAAAAUUUGHGHHGH

i don't know if this is another thing that nightow nabbed from the 98 anime - legato holding vash's friend(s) hostage to get him to shoot - but it's really SUCH a legato move... i said in my last post that legato is the most "the same" across the adaptations and he REALLY is. using the same tactic in the same scenario... "make your choice and break"...

but it's EVEN MORE fucked up than in 98 lol... when i said livio was gonna have an interesting time trying to stand up with the state his body was in i DID NOT THINK THIS WOULD HAPPEN!!! OKAY???

oh, but being afraid to scroll and being met with an image of wolfwood... wolfwood, fully visible...!! he was admittedly a sight for sore eyes in this dire scenario... even though he plays directly into the tragedy of this entire affair. vash has to shoot to save livio, who wolfwood gave his life for...

chapter 2:

oh jeez... whose voice is this? is this razlo? (there's no profanity, so maybe not...) livio talking to himself? or is it... wolfwood...?

and vash is now completely broken. his entire worldview, everything about how he's lived up until now, falling apart around him...

"did it feel like this for you, too?" hmmm... it flashes back to the scene with wolfwood, but in this moment i'm actually remembering meryl's words about how it felt when she shot someone for the first time.

...they successfully attached the cable to the ark, but i'm imagining knives feeling an itch and smacking it like a mosquito LOL

WHAT DID YOU GUYS EVEN COME HERE FOR, HUH?? DID YOU FORGET???

>0<!!!!

traveling across the galaxy like... like sephiroth... wanting to fly around and destroy planets... okay... i'd promise to stop making sephiroth comparisons but they make it so easy.

he is so small and so sad

wahh... vash needs this... both the physical comfort and the words. he needs it but i don't think he's even aware it's happening...

chapter 3:

clever bastard indeed! look, he's even smiling like, haha yeah i am a clever bastard!!

how to put this... i like that it's a kid's thoughts that get projected. because kids are kids... and they're a purer expression of human need than adults who can be caught up in bias or like, social expectations. if it had been an adult who got hit with the feather, things might have turned out differently, but it's a natural reaction for people to want to help a kid...? gah, i don't know how to word this!!

and it's interesting that the plants' attempt to communicate with humans also forces the humans to communicate with each other, because that's how plants communicate amongst themselves...

he's separate, but he can still... control it? like, he made it teleport, so he can still control it, right? at least to a degree...

yes, i like this, i like how it's not easy, i like how even though knives is in the wrong about pretty much everything and is just using plant abuse to justify his own actions, we're not just ignoring the fact that abuse did happen and needs to be addressed.

and yet, the plants also remember the good times. nightow is really good at distilling the full scope of human nature into vignettes like this...

huh? balance of primordial energy?! reigniting an age-old conflict?!?! dude, you can't just drop that on us without EXPANDING ON IT?! WHAT DO YOU MEAN??

chapter 4:

vash's... dream? is this a dream? or is it more literal, like he's on the verge of dying... so he sees all his dead acquaintances in the afterlife... but he can't join them yet, he still has something to do...

UGGGHHHH, WOLFWOOD, I MISS YOU SO MUCH.......

he looks so young here :(

the earth guy (does he have a name?) praying before firing on the ark as if it will grant him absolution... lol. lmao, even. we've seen characters pray a few times over the course of this story, mostly wolfwood, and vash that one time... idr if anyone else prays? but this guy? this guy's prayer? i have to laugh.

he is fucking LUCKY that knives was able to block that. i also love the irony in knives's actions saving the people below.

that's so cool... i know i'm supposed to be like, "oh no, he's so powerful, that's scary, how will they beat him now?" but instead i'm just amazed at the sheer display of power LOL

what a gorgeous spread... the wings... jaw... teeth?! are so cool-looking...

meryl and milly are so resilient... it's been said a million times lol but they really do represent the best in humanity. it's a shame that they've gotten less screentime (page time?) in the latter half of the manga, but none of what relatively little they do get has felt wasted. staying strong and doing what they can... they're so cool...

uueeee... i'll cover the rest of the chapters in another post... usually when i do 2-part writeups i write both of them and post them one after another, but i haven't written part 2 yet... i'm delaying the inevitable because i know i'm going to cry reading the last couple of chapters again lmao...

[barrenmockingbird]

ao3 is down which means i've gone feral so k/v snippet under the cut, don't expect greatness this is very unfinished

cw: dubcon (i promise vash wants it but also heat fuckery and Emotions), intersex plant anatomy, plantcest ment (duh, but nothing explicit), uuuuuh mentions of blood but nothing graphic

Nai is there, in his dreams. He’s always there, really, but his blooms make it harder to forget how much he misses his brother. The last time they’d been anywhere near each other before Jenora Rock was during a bloom, maybe sixty years ago now, and it was catastrophic. The town Vash had hidden himself in was nearly leveled as Nai fought to get to him, and he barely remembers gathering his things and running through the haze of the desert. He dreams of that night vividly, of the smell of his brother’s responding bloom haunting him in the hundred or so years that have passed since then.

.

Vash’s chest aches as his eyes shoot open, disoriented for a moment in the moonlight before he remembers where he is. The ache between his legs has intensified and he hesitantly traces his hand down his body, shivering as the breeze cools the sweat on his skin.

‘So sensitive.’ Nai’s voice taunts from his dreams, and he stifles a whimper despite the lack of anyone around to hear him. Vash pushes himself to sit up, fumbling for his water as the breeze makes his makeshift curtain rustle. He looks down at himself, eyebrows shooting up to his hairline when he sees just how much slick he’s stained his blanket and the mattress beneath it with. His brow furrows as he drags his fingers through the little puddle it’s made, frowning.

Vash doesn’t usually slick like this when he's alone, some part of him understanding that there is no mate for him to ease the way for, that Nai isn’t there.

Something catches his attention as the breeze picks up and he sniffs at the air, and his eyes go wide. There’s a particular scent in the air, ever familiar despite how long it’s been since he last encountered it, and his body responds in kind when he realizes what - or rather who - is coming. More slick gushes from his cunt, pheromones flaring wildly as his biology calls for his mate.

Vash panics.

He isn’t so far gone that he’s entirely helpless, but as he dresses the oversensitivity ramps up and makes him whine. He slaps a hand to his mouth to stifle it, and he haphazardly looks around for something to cover up the smell of his bloom. But, just like when he’d gotten there, the room is almost barren, and he curses himself for not settling closer to the center of town. The smell of blood and rot had been thicker there and would have been able to conceal his scent, and he curses again, louder as he struggles to pull his boots on and tie the laces with shaking hands.

Vash knocks over his canteen in his haste to pack his things away and bites back a frustrated cry as he picks it up, double checking how much water is still inside before he tucks it safely into his pack. The wind blows again and the smell of Nai’s bloom thickens around him. It makes him light-headed in a way his own bloom doesn’t anymore, knees weak and cunt clenching around nothing. He wants viscerally, wants to fall into Nai’s arms and just let him take care of this, let him taste and fuck into his battered body. Vash shakes the feeling off as much as he can, trying to ignore the instinctual urge to stay right where he is, to let his mate come to him and soothe the ache between his legs and in his belly. He has to struggle to keep control of himself and not give in to his biology. He clings to the reminder that his friends are still somewhere in this town, hopefully asleep and unaware of what danger they’re in.

[lotus-mirage]

Trigun Stampede episode 7 liveblog

Man I said this two-parter is really focused on Wolfwood, but this episode has his name as the title

Oh I see the destination is an additional threat to him. Huh. I wonder what the purpose of that is? Like just to mess with him, or to make the journey seem appropriately menaced, or what?

I didn't notice before, but it is incredibly funny that the letters front and center are B and L

I feel like half of Wolfwood's gun is like ammo storage lmao, he goes through that fast

Oh actual emoting from Livio! Not looking particularly cognizant, but it's something.

Oh there's Meryl and Roberto! Would not have figured that's how they managed to tag along, but if it works it works haha

The boing noises as the desert raiders are thrown around are fantastic

Vash is wielding his gun, backhand, like a blunt weapon. Possibly as a gauntlet idk. Still. Makes sense for him, but not something I've ever seen before lol

Mmmmhmm and now the "monsters" and "not human" assertions are being foiled.

Between Livio and Rollo, seems like they kinda get stuck on a single sentiment?

"It would have been better without you around" ...ah. I did not expect that and don't know how to respond to it.

Wow, uh. I mean we knew Vash was incredibly accurate at aiming before, but to redirect someone else's gun to land a clean shot (particularly one that has as much heft as Wolfwood's) is rather uncanny.

that method of getting another Worm actually made me gag ugh.

wait hold up what was happening with Livio's reflection. I don't think I recognize it?

Eef. Thought that was how it'd end, but didn't expect him to shoot and fall over the side. (I suppose it's possible that the 'if there isn't a body, they're probably not dead' rule applies here though)

"I just wanted to spread the good word. That's all." You know I think this does in fact hold true to the, uh. Real world weight? That this sort of phrase carries.

Okay this is the first we've heard of a topic that Wolfwood apparently has disagreements with the Eye of Michael over. ...Actually that was on an assumption that it's a decision on an action, not a religious thing. It's Wolfwood's initial verbal disagreement on religion, isn't it.

Switched to Eng dub for a second 'cause I wasn't sure who said the next couple lines, but yeah I think it's clearer that it's about Wolfwood's denial.

Wait speaking of that's also a Christian term too right. Like Judas denies Jesus or something? I know the term is used in relation to those two in particular but I don't actually know the specifics. It's like "one of you will deny me" or "one of you will betray me" and I don't remember which.

Not sure if that really matters in this case, though, since I don't think Bluesummers quite maps to Jesus lol. Anyways.

Okay yeah "Punisher" is definitely being used in relation to Wolfwood himself. Noted.

Lmao the "Hi!~" being in English really sold it

Ooh, worldbuilding. Spacefaring age, okay.

Wait if they're running around to all the controls, where are the people originally driving the ship?

Yay, character exploration and development from Meryl! (and Roberto to a lesser extent)

Oh wait the kid that fell in the first town is alive?? I guess I saw him moving a bit at the end there, but it was a long fall and I thought maybe it was his mom's movements while carrying him.

:0 Vash's arm fractured! Frankly I didn't know it could do that. That's not good.

Oh lmao it's the disproportionate response "Wolfwood..." that kept being memed on.

Oh NOW the title comes up!

Actually wait I saw something on this a while ago, too. They were talking about he asserts he's "the Punisher," then "Nicholas the Punisher," and then the framing basically hits him with a "no :)" That's so funny. Also kind of tragic. But still funny.

Oh hey this is the first time we've seen Vash in this sort of situation since he was a 'plant technician' in the first episode.

it can move in there!?

oh that looks really painful

it's humanoid already!?

maybe I leaned too far into the "oh it's kind of egg shaped" assumption lol

Oop, yep, I guess Livio's not dead. Or uh. Might be dead but isn't out of the picture?

Alright yeah Vash looks pretty out of it.

...was that him hitting the ground? oof.

End Notes:

Again not really much to say here! We got some character details, some worldbuilding details, lots of character development & solidification of relationships, and now some immediate threads to be followed up on (Vash's arm and the Plant reveal thing). Feeling much more invested than when I started the series and interested in seeing how this conversation goes!

I will say. The plant did not look uh. very intimidating. kind of reminds me of the... neopets fairies? I don't think that's right, but like some similar franchise kind of had similar vibes, shape-wise.

...is this the first time the Plant stuff got fully revealed in the show? I went in knowing and haven't been keeping track. I know it was established that Vash is a) non-human b) fell from a spaceship onto the planet and c) had 'relatives' in pods on said spaceship. Not to mention his twin also having pretty obvious markings. But I'm curious about the reasons for the pacing of these reveals, since we got so much of Wolfwood's backstory just last episode.

[forgivenpunishment]

❰❰ SUPPORT ❱❱ sender comforts receiver after a loss / traumatic event.

@eventheodds [outlaw] || self-indulgent meme

❰❰ SUPPORT ❱❱ sender comforts receiver after a loss / traumatic event.

"All both of you do is get in my way—all both of you do is get in my way—but why can't I pull the trigger?" The Chapel wearing Wolfwood's skin stares down the barrel of the Punisher, meeting Meryl's wide sapphire eyes. Vash crawls through the dirt nearby, gun in hand as he recovers from the blow from the flat side of the massive weapon. If Wolfwood wanted to kill Meryl, he would've by now.

Rodney and Orchard, his pupils, lie close to each other, both unconscious. Wolfwood knows they're unconscious because for some reason he knows that the dusty blond and the rebellious outlaw journalist wouldn't kill them. He's never met them before! Why should he know something like that?

The only thing in the way of himself and solving one of the many thorns in his side is a single pull of his weapon's centerpiece. Why can't he do it? Why do those damn eyes look so familiar? Why does it make his heart hurt, like it's about to burst out of his chest?

Legato's voice hisses in his earpiece, 'Kill them or I'll do it for you.'

He finds himself shaking his head, even as the threads of fate pull at his fingers—urging him to pull the trigger.

Despite everything, everything he's done to them, all they regard him with is reverence—like he's just who they want to see, or even... a friend? Is that recognition? It's not fear—why isn't it fear...?

Vash, finally recovering, pushes himself in front of the Punisher's barrel and holds it taut to his forehead. He can see the conflict rushing behind Wolfwood's eyes and controls his breathing before speaking calmly, quietly, "Wolfwood. You know us from before this happened to you. I'm not going to hurt you any more than I have. I surrender, okay?"

Are these tears falling down his cheeks?

There was a 'before?'

The blond takes a deep breath and shifts the barrel over his heart, trusting in him, Chapel, for some reason. This man... he trusts him. With his life, even.

Legato's marionette-like grasp on him tightens, threatening to blot out his mind altogether. Against his superior's will, he looks to his two teenage apprentices to make sure they're okay, then back to the shining gemstone eyes gleaming up at him matched with the softest smile he's ever seen directed at him. Why can't he shoot?

Look at yourself, Wolfwood. You're a damn shame. You know these two. Think.

Before the blue freak can pull on his fingers, Wolfwood moves his hand to the side of the gun, away from the trigger. The reporter gently grasps his ankle, pleading to him with just her expression. He can't bring himself to shake her off.

"I... knew you both," Chapel stammers in a rare moment of weakness, "How can you trust me when I'm like this now? St-stop looking at me like that—I... You can't—don't say it, don't fucking say it—"

He's not sure what he means when the words spill out, or maybe he does. Maybe some piece of him long since buried is crawling from its grave to haunt him. "You were gone! Both of you were gone!"

When was the last time he referred to himself as Wolfwood before today? He can't remember.

[fuck-you-upmusicbracket]

Sunlight (Hozier)

All the tales the same/Told before and told again/A soul that's born in cold and rain/Knows sunlight, sunlight, sunlight/And at last can grant a name/To a buried and a burning flame/As love and its decisive pain/Oh, my sunlight, sunlight, sunlight

But whose heart would not take flight/Betray the moon as acolyte/On first and fierce affirming sight of/Sunlight, sunlight, sunlight/I had been lost to you, sunlight/And flew like a moth to you, sunlight, oh, sunlight/Oh, your love is sunlight

"I come down with the shivers and start hyperventilating when i hear this song and it makes me want to go outside which is the scariest part"

"I'm not gonna go full infodump here but this song is Peak Vash and Nicholas D. Wolfwood from Trigun-- specifically Nick's feelings towards Vash. Vash's (literal) evil twin brother Knives hired (read: threatened to eradicate the orphanage he kidnapped Nick from as a child if he didn't do what he was told) Nick to act as bodyguard for Vash and guide him to where Knives wants him to go so he can manipulate him for his own gain. Like, he chose the name Knives. This bitch is crazy beyond crazy but this ain't about him. Nick starts out 100% willing to guide Vash like a lamb to slaughter because he HAS to for the orphanage, and this is just some random guy he doesn't know or care about. But then he gets to know Vash, how good of a person he is despite the shit the world (and Knives) has put him through. How he'd rather risk his own life and health than kill another person because he believes he doesn't get to make that choice for people. And despite being someone who'd rather shoot first, pray for them after, Nick starts trying to wound rather than kill just because Vash doesn't like it. It puts them both at risk and he fusses and argues about it and still kills sometimes but he tries anyways. Eventually he decides that he'll do what he can to protect Vash from Knives without provoking him to destroy the orphanage. He ends up caring about him deeply against his own will to the point that his idea of Eden would be to live with Vash and their friends in a peaceful world where none of them have to fight and die. In the manga, Nick's dying request is to see Vash smile again- the genuine smile that he's complimented every time he's seen it. Vash can't give him that, because he knows Nick would see that it was a forced smile. Instead, he just sits with him until he dies. Afterwards, Vash kills willingly for the first time in his entire life (over 150 years. He's not human btw) in order to protect Nick's childhood friend Livio. He wouldn't just do that for just any friend or ally, no, that was out of love. Love so strong he could go against his own mother's teachings that all life matters and people don't get to choose when a life ends, the thing that has kept Vash pacifist all these years, to keep someone that mattered to Nick alive. So while Nick never knew that Vash cared for him the same way he did him, the fact matters that he does."

Your Body, My Temple (Will Wood)

So, when the cattle fall dead and the waters run red, I'll be your lamb's blood on the wall/God isn't dead, but that's exactly what I've been dreading after all the meek inherited fuck all/Jesus Christ, I will die for my own damn sins if you help those who help themselves/My superstitions, your visage, my visions furtherin' the fever of your fervor, for believing, I will

I'll be your blessing in disguise, whip the mask off my good side/I'm all stripped down naked for you but still asking you to loosen up my buttons, baby/You've got my whole world in your hands, got that little blue spot/And you really ain't got no idea how much this thing orbits you, now, do you honey?

"the DEDICATION, the DEVOTION to whoever you can imagine is being sung to...the imagery is so so so good 😩 it's so catchy, it gets stuck in my head every time i listen to it, the emotions are just so good...you can imagine an individual so deeply infatuated with their lover to the point of revering them as holy, to the point of death...the way the word choice just flows so smoothly is so good aughhh- its also got surprisingly good loopability, in my opinion. 10/10 i want to beam this song into my brain it makes me froth from the mouth and shiver like a rabid animal and i'll be DAMNED if i don't make an oc inspired by it eventually. all the lyrics are peak. i am getting riled up just thinking about this song, will wood is elite"

"1. I want to sing this to my Muse. (If I had one...) 2. Will Wood songs just slap. 3. I've listened to the CHnT podcast, and get *all* the references! (Pink Elephant Man starts a cult dedicated to the camp nurse) 4. I'm using this song for the antagonist of my story, who gives yandere vibes."

[sideblog-usernametaken]

(Don't know how I missed this until just now)

Adding a Read More here because this is going to be long and spoilery:

1) Stampede isn't a prequel it's a reimagining of Trigun.

It's certainly not a prequel to either version of the original cannons because it merges the Fifth Moon and July incidents. Plus it rearranges when characters meet, completely alters backstories, creates new characters, and changes the fates of others. There is no world where the events of Stampede take place in the same universe as the manga or '98 anime.

It's not a prequel to Stargaze either because that's not how prequels work. A prequel is something written after a established work that takes place before the events of the original. A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a prequel. Wicked is a prequel. Stampede and Stargaze are set in the same chronological order as they were made in, so by definition Stampede can't be a prequel.

"Prologue" is arguably correct, but when a prologue ends up being 1/2 to 1/3rd of the full work (Depending on if Stargaze gets 12 episodes or 24) then it's just the story. And even if Stampede does qualify as a prologue, that doesn't mean it can't be judged as it is right now.

2) Stampede has substantial character development it's just different from the original Trigun.

I know this section is nitpicky but I genuinely loathe how "It's a prequel!" or "It's a prologue!" is used to deflect genuine criticism of the series and how it stands as an adaptation. Prequels can have problems, prologues can have problems, but that doesn't matter because those aren't really what Stampede is. Stampede is the first Season of a Two Season show, which means his characterization in Stampede is about half the characterization the show is going to give him.

Over the course of Stampede we find out that Vash feels incredibly guilty about the Big Fall as well as all the lives he couldn't save after. He basically tries to starve himself to death once he makes contact with people in the immediate wake of the Big Fall. We find out that that's because he apparently gave Knives the codes he needed and Knives gaslit him into thinking that makes him an intentional accomplice (Which by the way, dumb plot point. There is no reason to keep those codes away from Knives but still let Vash access them. They could've gone for basically anything else around the Big Fall as a source of guilt like being unable to convince Rem to get in the escape pod or not recognizing that Knives was unstable etc.) which makes him feel responsible for all the suffering on No Man's land.

On top of that, he also has an inferiority complex because he can't get his Plant abilities to activate the same way that Knives can. So he can't try to materially make up for the Big Fall by producing something and he still needs to consume precious resources to survive, which makes him feel worse than useless. He feels alienated from both Plants and humanity because he's not a human and he can't do what Plants are supposed to do.

His arc over the course of Stampede is learning that he isn't at fault for what his brother chooses to do and that he has inherent value beyond his potential use as a battery. After the Big Fall, once he discovers he can help Plants in a way humans can't (Which also helps the humans he believes he stranded) he realizes he's not a waste of resources. He breaks out of Knives weird mind control thing at the end of the season and fights him as an equal instead of rolling over to let himself be used.

This is a developed character.

Again, Stampede is not necessarily a bad anime it's just not a good adaptation of the source material. This is essentially a different character who could've had their own original IP instead of using Trigun as a set dressing.

Vash, in both versions of the original, was shown very early on to be wearing a metaphorical mask. We didn't get to see what was under the mask, but we knew it was there. In the manga one of the first things he does is shoot a guy in the face ~5 times with a toy gun faster than anyone else can react or even process what he did. This carries the implicit threat of "I can do that with a real gun so don't try me" which someone else in the scene verbalizes. One. Of. Vash's. First. Gags. Is. Threatening. Someone. And he does it twice in the '98 episode that adapted that chapter.

The problem isn't that Vash is an undeveloped or underdeveloped character in Stampede, the problem is that this characterization is directly contributing to people simply ignoring the most interesting parts of his character in the originals. The '98 anime makes significant changes with its adaptation as well, but it still remains true to his characterization revolving around his relationship to pacifism instead of his relationship to guilt. Like, he still has guilt but it's not the main part of his character.

Meanwhile in Stampede's first episode Vash gets tied up multiple times and doesn't resist when someone after him, and only after him, decides to beat him up. The only time he takes direct action is when the town is at risk. This is a character who's so overwhelmed with guilt they don't care about their own wellbeing. This characterization is closer to original Vash after the Fifth Moon incident than it is to his attitude before July. And it's important to note that that characterization only lasts for about a chapter or two because he's trying to escape his past to have some sense of normality and have people not be scared senseless by him. It was another mask.

3) Whatever Stargaze does it cannot fix the problems that Stampede has as an adaptation.

(Side note: Trigun Maximum shows that Vash has been putting on a mask to put others at ease since he was a child [before the Big Fall] and that he has always hidden his true emotions until he hits a breaking point [when he tries to commit suicide to spite Rem and when he tries to kill her after she stops him from doing that]. In '98 they show us exactly when pacifism became an active choice for him in that version [he almost kills Knives with a rock after the Big Fall but stops himself] and the moment he decides that sometimes non-lethal violence is necessary to save lives [he shoots Knives in the leg when he finds out he hasn't given up on his "kill all the humans so make a Plant paradise" ideas]. We don't really get anything comparable to these moments in Stampede because it is about guilt instead of pacifism.)

Honestly, for a long time I figured I'd reserve judgment on Stampede until Season 2 came out. After all it's a reimagining so maybe Stargaze would make up for Stampede's faults. But then it occured to me that it doesn't really matter what Stargaze does:

They decide to continue focusing on guilt -> The same problem about Vash's character being so dramatically changed is still there.

They decide to adapt Trigun Maximum as closely to the original as they can despite how much they changed and how much time they have -> Why dramatically alter Vash's character for such a large chunk of the series if the plan is to go back to the original cannon for the last act?

They decide to move past Vash's guilt but don't focus on pacifism -> Then that's still diverging from the original principles of his character.

Stargaze does center on pacifism again but goes a different direction than the manga or '98 -> Why weren't those elements incorporated into Stampede?

Stargaze cannot change how Stampede handled Vash (Or literally any of the other characters from the original, trust me I could make 20 page paper on this if I expanded beyong just Vash) so it's irrelevant to the discussion.

See what bugs me about the babygirl-ification of Vash is because the whole reason he was cool as a character to me was because he acted silly and rakeish and was such a pacifist to the point of being ridiculous-- but he also was capable of great violence. Of anger. The fascade would slip at times and show the lonely, sad man beneath. But it also showed the rage. The power. As capable of destruction as Knives himself.

He isn't a "uwu baby". He is a weapon of mass destruction who chooses love. Who chooses peace.

[peachyloveswriting]

If you’ve done this prompt before, I apologize, but what about red string of fate with Vash? But they stumble into one another at the worst times like during a shoot out in a town or a robbery!

I have never written for this before, as a matter of fact soulmates is one of my favorite subjects to touch on. If I could get anymore with different soulmate AU's that would be awesome!

You Picked The Worst Possible Time to Show up --- Vash the Stampede

SUMMARY: it's funny how you happened to meet your soulmate, and during a shootout of all situations.

"Everyone get down!"

You look towards the commotion at the front of the saloon, standing in the doorway is a tall fattened man. In his hands he holds a gun pointed at the people inside, annoyance on his face. Screams erupt around you as people drop to their knees and cower in fear, you don't bother to move, raising the last of your whiskey to your lips before slamming it back down on the counter. Suddenly, heavy clamoring footsteps make their way to you and cold metal is pressed to your temple.

"I said get down!" He shoves at your head with the barrel of his gun.

You cut your eyes at him, your hand itching to grab your gun. The man's eyes bore into your own, there's intent to kill behind those eyes yet the tension only rises. "You should probably just listen to him." A voice says from behind you.

From the corner of your eyes you can see a blond in a red coat looking up at you through the guise of yellow tinted shades. "What he said!" He shoves your head again. You grimace, pulling your gun from the holster. "Like hell!" Knocking the gun away from your head you whip your gun back upz catching him on the side of the head. He cries out in pain, shakily pointing the gun at you again.

There's a tug at your pinky finger right as the gun goes off, in a red blur the man who was cowering behind you had pulled his gun and shot the bullet away from you. It happened so fast that the man in front of you began to tremble in shock, turning on his heel he began his way out the saloon. Jolting forward, you begin to chase after the man with Blondie still at your heels. The closer he gets to your side the more noticeable the tug at your finger is.

"Please don't kill him!" The blonde cries.

Before you can open your mouth to speak, a voice cries out from behind you. "That's him! Vash the Stampede! After him."

The blonde looks back in a panic, suddenly something is tugging at you hand. Gunfire lights up the dirt behind you. Heart pounding furiously in your chest you gasp in surprise, the blonde is leading you forward without ever touching you. Somehow he's faster than he was before, it becomes hard not to trip over your own feet.

"What's happening?!"

He cuts a tight turn, pulling you with. Unable to stop yourself in time, you stumble and fall forwards on top of him, your faces only inches apart. Your eyes widen in shock as he lifts a finger to his lips signalling for you to be quiet. His breath is fanning your face, the close proximity brings a bright red flush to your cheeks.

"Shh..." Footsteps thunder past the cut, you stay still, your heart pounding in your hearts as you wait for them to grow distant. Slowly lowering the finger from hai mouth, he nods. "We can move."

You release a breath you hadn't realized you were holding before as you moved to sit back. "You're-" a sudden sharp tug at your finger keeps you from sitting back all the way. Worried you might be caught in something you're surprised to find a blood red string looped around your pinky. It tugs taut just inches away from Vash's hand connecting them both.

Your eyes widen, your gaze falling to his face. "My soulmate is Vash the Stampede!?"

Panicking, he hurriedly hushes you. "You picked the worst possible time to show up." His eyes narrowed for a moment while he listened for footsteps.

"you're gonna have some explaining to do, you know that right?" You ask sternly.

His bright blue eyes meet you again with a nod. "You do too. Till then we're stuck like this." He lifts your hands as a gesture. "let's get out of here first."