#and i've already put my faith in how you saw fit -- typhoonvash.

[wolfwoocl]

[ FAKE ]: the sender (who has just been crying in private) hastily wipes away their tears and tries to greet the receiver casually (to varying degrees of success).

If he’s being honest (and he’s rarely honest these days, whether to himself or to anyone stupid enough to get close to him) a not so insignificant and so very primal part of him is simply terrified in a way he can’t even put into words as he steps carefully over the roots spiraling out from the center of the room like ink running off a piece of paper. He can ignore all that, because this is Vash. Any sense of visceral horror he has is completely eclipsed by his concern for the figure huddled in the tangled mess of roots and ethereal flowers in front of him.

“Needle-noggin…” As he gets closer, he realizes there are eyes on the roots too. A couple of them may have blinked at him in the dim light spilling in through the crack in the door, pupils dilated and jiggling into focus. Right, going to ignore that.

Dislodging any further hesitation with a rough shake of his head, he crouches down next to the mass of writhing roots. 

“Hey,” he echoes, while Vash looks at him as though they’re doing nothing more than greeting each other from opposite sides of the town promenade. He’ll keep acting like it too, if that’s what helps. “Missed you at lunch.”

The burning filter of his cigarette glows in a thin ring of light as he draws in a breath against it, then exhales to the side as he reaches out, tentative, before resting his hand gently on Vash’s shoulder. 

“’s a nice day out.”

He is so good at this.

[wolfwoocl]

[WOUND]: after the receiver has been wounded, the sender tries to keep them calm and conscious by cupping their face in their hands and talking to them to keep them focused.

"I ever tell you your eyes are beautiful?" Wolfwood slurs dreamily as the world begins to fade from the corners of his vision. Up close, far away; distance was never really an issue. 

His hands are starting to feel cold. Blood loss tends to do that. Shock skipped him right over the 'rage against the powers that be for dear life' stage and right into the calm waters of acceptance. Or maybe that's because it's Vash steadying him now, and for all his boneheaded ideas the Humanoid Typhoon manages one way or another to find solutions to problems most people would have never bothered to fix.

Take for example, the highly trained assassin parading about the desert under the guise of a priest now bleeding out on Vash the Stampede's lap. At least he never claimed to be a good priest. That’d be comedic. A laugh starts to bubble up in his throat but dies into a cough and a raggedy breath speckled with blood.

Compared to his twin brother, Vash is practically a saint. Presently, there are two Vashes now in his vision. He's pretty sure the other one isn't Vash's brother.

Yeah. Leave it to Vash to decide that some random shithead at first glance is worth fixing. 

“Stupid…” he mutters, berating himself as he clumsily paws at the crumpled front of his jacket. He can’t get his fingers to curl enough to peel it back. The blood isn’t helping. Slick and slippery and goddamn frustrating. Where the hell is it all coming from?

[wolfwoocl]

"Where did you go?"

“Who wants t’know?” he asks, purposely obtuse. It would be so easy to lie, like smearing ink across a page to obscure any real meaning behind the words. The filter caught between his teeth wags as he stuffs his hands into his pockets and leans up against the wall space adjacent to the door of Vash’s room.

His cigarette isn’t lit. The people of Ship Three hadn’t much taken kindly to the sight of them when he pulled one from his breast pocket without the chance of even putting it up to his lips. Sure, folks were nice enough on the outside. Their stares, however, judged him differently than their words and welcomes. A wild animal loosed in their hallways.

This is not his first time surrounded wall to wall by spacefaring technology. He has no particular love for it. Not the immaculate surfaces, the sanitized smell, brushed metals, and confined spaces. 

So he did the logical thing.

“Went for a walk,” Wolfwood answers, looking at Vash. More specifically, he went looking for some part of this damn ship that didn’t smell like scrubbed air. The green dome would have been his first choice, but there were too many people there. 

From his pocket, Wolfwood pinches the quill of a bright blue feather and flicks it off in Vash’s direction.

“Found the onboard tomas stalls.”

[wolfwoocl]

"When was the last time you took a break?"

"Since your spiky ass started complicating my life? Never." Wolfwood barks a laugh from somewhere behind the other side of the shitty hovel they’ve chosen to haunt. It’s a good thing that Vash cannot see his face from here, because he isn’t sure he could wrangle it into something that looks human at present. Not with the exquisite cocktail of self-loathing, regret, guilt, and fear threading through his veins.

What they have chosen is little more than a lean-to supporting itself off the side of some neglected warehouse in the far reaches of JuLai’s towering splendor. 

Not that anything in JuLai is truly abandoned.

Every piece has its place. Every fixture, every building, every person, because that’s just how Conrad Williams is, because the good Priest fancies himself a temporarily embarrassed God and playing with human lives is the closest Knives has ever allowed him to come to such heights. Just as the delusional rise to the top, the disillusioned fall to the bottom. The forgotten. The lepers. JuLai’s underbelly is not a pretty one; riddled with open sores and beggars and refuse. A place out of sight of mind, for high society to turn up their noses and scoff at when they deign to remember that it exists. 

If only it were bigger, it would take them longer to climb it. If only Wolfwood could do anything but count the hours they have left. If only he could count those hours on more than one hand.

In every trade, Vash the Stampede always seems to lose. This time, he’s part of the deal and he doesn’t even know it. Maybe he does, and maybe Vash has already forgiven him, because that would be the Vash thing to do and that just makes it fucking worse. 

“The Military Police are all on high alert looking for you, Tongari. No point in getting caught right on their doorstep.” A plume of smoke escapes the corner of his mouth as he stifles the urge to scoff at himself. “It’s fine. We’re already this close. I’ll keep watch ‘til we get there, and you can get all the beauty sleep you need.”