#forget to pray before we say goodnight -- full-of-mercy (wayward).

[angelictyphoon]

“  what are you hiding? and don’t you dare try to lie to me. ”

Memory attributes so much to the shape of a face, the sound of a voice, the scent off their skin. The way wrapped cigarettes bounce around in a crumpled box with too much space when removed from the inner lining of a jacket.

It was there, though. Just for a moment, in plain sight. A cigarette box carefully transferred from his coat and tucked into a small pocket of his bag. Twenty to a set, with only one cigarette left. It could mean nothing, should mean nothing to everyone else outside of what it means to him. Cradled in his palm where no one could see, touching fingertip to filter until he decided that maybe that last cigarette would remain intact. 

“I’m not hiding anything,” Vash growls, protectively hunched over the mouth of his rucksack. He’s just trying to make sure Wolfwood didn’t see it. There’s an important distinction there. Somewhere. His glares have never been convincing enough to dissuade Wolfwood of anything, especially when he has picked up the scent of trouble.

This one. This Wolfwood between the two of them gives him the most grief. Loss has branded them each in their own way, and in that regard Vash suspects they have far too much in common. Too much alike and yet not the same. 

Not the same, and the truth of it resonates like the ringing of a distant bell. 

Of course, luck would have it that it had to be this Wolfwood that could figure him out at a glance. Vash doesn’t smoke. Never once approached the habit except what he spent in Wolfwood’s company.

“It’s just a thing I do every year.”

[angelictyphoon]

Vash makes a face. Brief, but it’s there. A sullen pout. The face he makes when he knows Wolfwood is exactly right and he hates that Wolfwood is exactly right; a familiar exchange in times past and in times adjacent. Some things remain constant.

Gradually, his gaze drifts downward, where his hand remains trapped between the beat of his own heart and the weight of someone else's. He does not lift his eyes again until Wolfwood speaks, and still, looking is so knife-twisting, breathtakingly, difficult. Difficult to look, and impossible to look away. 

I know, Vash opens his mouth to say, cigarette in hand. 

Even with tears burning at the corners of his eyes, he should have seen what was coming. Should have, and despite everything Vash freezes. Time has not helped him reconcile his guilt and never has…but people have. After everything is said and done, Wolfwood is Wolfwood. 

A second trailing ember joins the first cigarette in the sand as his fingers clench into the back of Wolfwood’s jacket and Vash practically throws his entire weight against Wolfood. With his cheek smushed against the side of Nicholas’s face, it is impossible to stifle the shuddering breath drawn past his lips. 

“Yeah.”

Vash exhales, slow and shaky.

“For his sake.” That much he can promise. “Otherwise his ghost’ll probably start whispering in your ear to beat me up over it,” he manages through a self-deprecating laugh. 

“Mmn.” Here, held so close, he cannot help it. He relaxes his right hand, slipping it up past the broad section of Wolfwood’s back and shoulder and trailing mismatched fingers down to the open window of his shirt. While his words may quaver the barest amount, Nicholas’s heart beats steady.  

“Wolfwood–” Vash surprises himself when the sound of that name leaves his lips, but it feels right. It feels right, and Vash cannot help forming the hopeful curve of a small smile even if his cheeks are wet and he can hardly breathe through his nose. “You’re not him. I’m not him. But…that’s alright. We can keep going.” 

The worst thing they could do now is stop. 

“Wherever that takes us.” 

"-Then it wouldn't have shaken out much different."

Nicholas is not certain what possesses him to finish Vash's thought with another quite like that. A flare of fear, maybe, the notion that this man might throw himself away as if it might do anything more than wink another light out of the universe. He chews on that for a heartbeat, two, fingers flexing over the hand they hold captive.

"You died, and there was nothing to stop Knives. He didn't stop at humans. There's no-one left."

Just me. Just you. Just the memories we carry, history in blood and bone and light and life. The bad and the good. Coward, coward, giving up too soon, neither, either, and both.

It's not the same. It can never be the same. The clock cannot be unwound, the bullet cannot be un-fired. For all that is possible, some things remain constant.

"Look, I-"

His voice cracks, grating down to a chesty sound held close and low, but self-censor feels wrong. It feels wrong and very few things have felt right ever since. His small crew is one of those things, those right things. Something to protect, even if he has felt at the fringes, welcomed but circling regardless. He loves them. He can admit to that, already has. That persists.

Because some things remain constant.

"-I'm not him. And you're not him. And this is… it's fucked."

It's fucked, and the tension in his arm slackens, tell-tale, because he moves then. He shifts, turns, pitching his spent cigarette into the sand, tucking a knee up along the berm that has become their perch. The boneyard is silent as anything. Everything is silent except everything that isn't. Where there might have been tavern music or tomas night-calls rolling over the dunes, now there is just hush, the breath of ghosts, the endless wind eddying into their erstwhile shelter.

He turns, and he attempts to gather Vash up into his arms.

Maybe it's unwanted. Maybe it's unwelcome. He is working on instinct, on lessons he has learned, recent and otherwise.

This Vash did not give up. Vash doesn't give up. Neither should he.

"He wasn't alone in the end." God. It is all he can do to keep his voice steady. "He'd forgive you. He'd want your forgiveness too."

[angelictyphoon]

Does this count as taking, to reach out and make a space for himself (or wiggle into one, in this case) uninvited? They are neither innocent nor ignorant and they’ve never made a habit of asking permission except when it was too late to ask. Vash loops an arm around Wolfwood’s knee and tilts his chin into the back of his own hand, neither innocent nor ignorant now no matter how convincing his pout may be. He ceases his wiggling at the very least, sparing them of other basic torments.

The stupid, juvenile glee of affirmation he can revisit another day.

“Know me?!” Astonished, Vash sits up and butts his head up beneath Wolfwood’s jaw hard enough to rattle his teeth. “We just met!”

He would absolutely manage every single one of those things like crossing off a checklist at the grocery store, of course. No terrestrial vehicle stands a chance in the hands or proximity of such a profoundly humanoid disaster. Vash knows it and Wolfwood knows it, and having any certainty at all out here past the cover of a silent orphanage makes him tear up into breathless laughter. 

Gently dabbing away tears with the backs of his fingers, Vash marvels over the idea of now and next and together to the point of purring small ripples through the sand surrounding them. 

“Mmn, a paint job could help,” he agrees. “Something with stripes, maybe? Like a zebra! And purple. Y’know, to match the fuzzy dice.” As if anyone who had ever been born on No Man’s Land had even conceived of the concept of a zebra. Begrudgingly, Vash slumps into Nicholas’s chest. 

“...I guess it won’t be so bad.” 

Especially since he’s not riding alone. He could have boarded without needing (much) convincing or someone to hold his hand along the way if truly pressed for choice, but he’d never been well-prepared when it came to goodbyes and all their finalities. The version that he’d rehearsed couldn’t have been more different, more at odds to everyone waiting for him now.

“Still feels weird,” Vash admits quietly. Like he was supposed to die here eventually, but fate had other plans in mind and never bothered to loop him in on any part of it. “It’s…I can’t just leave forever. I have to come back.”

Someday. Whether there’s anyone that remains, whether they need him or not. 

“My brother’s still out there. In a century…He’ll return.”

How is it that even here, even now, Vash manages to fit perfectly in the spaces afforded to him? Nicholas has one leg crossed over the other one dangling down the short half-wall to the dunes below their perch, and somehow the noodly gunman situates himself just-so.

Wiggles spark something. Contact does too. Wolfwood tenses his jaw and bears it, restraining a response in a way that is its own response, and there is precious little that he can do to conceal that. How can one hide an issue that is a non-issue from someone as perceptive as Vash the Stampede?

Question for the ages.

No matter the world, it seems.

"Like hell I'm lettin' you up there on Angelina. Knowin' you, you'd manage to kickstart her and careen off to God knows where ass-over-teakettle. Don't want you scratchin' the paint," he grouses, leveraging this change in posture to jam his chin down atop Vash's freshly-braided crown with a huff and a glower that is far more of a squint, but what does it matter anyway since nobody is around and about to look at them and there are no mirrors outside of the dreaded transport's for miles?

Yeah, that's the ticket.

And so what if he lets his arms relax around Vash's midsection? It is as natural as anything, just a convenient place for his limbs to come to rest.

It eases the pressure on his back, at that. The lack of weight there is something else entirely. The Punisher was not a necessary haul to this lonely escarpment where the past is silent except for the susurrus of curious worms' wings and the whisper of sand over rows of graves. The dust has settled in on the ruins of Hopeland.

Shadows and salt.

There is nothing for him here, just as there is nothing for Vash here. It is a wonder that he has even agreed to come along at all.

"Took a minute gettin' used to it," he relents, clearing his throat and allowing his voice to rumble wry, shaped with slightly parted lips and the glint of teeth despite everything. "Did the point-A to point-B job though. Might should find somethin' more suitable wherever we end up next. Little lady can barely reach the pedals even with block boosters."

Tap-a-tap his fingers drum on something, idle, familiar, even if maybe he shouldn't act so familiar. Haunted, they are, both of them.

Haunted and determined to live on.

"Suppose we paint it. Somethin' to go with the fuzzy dice."

[angelictyphoon]

Skin to skin, breath to knuckles, lips to curled fingers, salt and sand and cigarette ash. The proximity is devastating for both of them, their hearts on display, their hands unable to move away. They’re transparent, their inhibitions paper thin, and despite all of that and everything, Vash finds breathing easier. Like shaking off a layer of rust, scattering particles of red dust into the wind every time he moves, every time he finds reason to make some banal comment.

Words that ache in his chest, but the ache is a good one.

“Mm, mhm. Good plan,” Vash agrees with an emphatic nod like it was all Nicholas’s idea the whole time. Nevermind the fact that he was the one who brought the question up in the first place.

 They can’t fix the past because the past is fixed. 

The future…Well, he can’t quite fully picture it yet, but he can imagine vague shapes, dancing shadows, low light flickering in the windows, the music of laughter. A possibility rather than an impossibility.

Vash settles back against the front of Wolfwood’s open shirt with aplomb, followed by a brazen wiggling in for good measure. Slumping down tucks him up perfectly beneath Wolfwood’s chin. He distinctly recalls Nicholas not assigning a quantifiable number of minutes to some more time, so he may as well get comfortable. 

Split half of forever here, and the other half on the road. He’s been hard-pressed for choice in a similar dilemma more than once before.

As far as he’s concerned, the truck can stay not ready.

“Hate getting in that thing,” Vash grumbles, blowing a petulant huff through his lips strong enough to flip up an unbound forelock into Nicholas’s face. Climbing into it the first time might have gone something like trying to herd a skittish toma into a small, dark box. Hardly worth complaining about in the face of everything he has gained, but then, when has he ever spared poor Wolfwood’s ear a valid complaint or two?

“I’d rather be strapped to the roof with Angelina.”

"Yeah, well, this one's damn scrawny and can't seem to have a chat without blubberin'..."

Pfft.

Unspoken, Nick's Livio cannot seem to look in his direction without an expression of abject haunted fear. An echo of an echo, is-and-isn't, whatever it is, he does not know. Cannot know. And it hardly matters right now.

Fingers twine with fingers, natural as anything, and Nicholas must pause as his reality - realities - judder together and crash-jumble somewhere in the middle of his frontal lobe. Vash is here, so close and so far, and it cannot be the same as all that was, because what was didn't happen here, not really. It's better that it isn't the same (is it better? maybe it isn't). Different experiences, different lives lived, similar circumstances, but still.

Still.

They are here in this quiet place. Vash has his hand. He has his hand without a fight, and how are the lips feathering over his knuckles so soft when this world is want for water and everything else? They should be chapped. More chapped.

But they aren't.

They aren't, not really, and the way breath curls with each syllable uttered against his skin is distracting.

Maybe not distracting. Maybe electrifying in its own way.

Maybe memories are better made anew. Maybe he is getting ahead of himself.

Nicholas pauses, parts his lips, and breathes, because breathing is important. He may be some reconstructed amalgamation - the specifics escape him at the moment - but he still needs oxygen.

Probably. Yeah.

"Uh..."

A soft clearing of his throat precedes another shift, knees spread and feet dangling from the ruined retaining wall. He could go for another smoke now but he doesn't, letting his unoccupied hand rest somewhere in the neighborhood of the dark-haired Stampede's hip, because that feels right. His other remains engaged, disinclined to retreat just yet.

Is he ready to go back?

Nicholas meets Vash's eyes for a beat, furrowing his brows just-so, and all with a tic of his jaw. Thinking.

Not that he has to think too hard about it.

"Nah. Let's give 'em some more time. Truck ain't ready."

A likely excuse. An open door and an open hand. They may not return here in their lifetimes. Time grows short. Time is something that they have at the moment. Maybe a little indulgence won't hurt much.

[angelictyphoon]

Just the verbal abuse makes his eyes watery all over again. Not because Wolfwood has succeeded in actually hurting his feelings, but because of the pleasant ache in his chest that reaches into the back of his throat with a tightness.

“Hah…”

Okay, so he’s underselling his story a tiny bit.

Experience ought to have taught him by now that Nicholas will call him out on it every time, but that matters less than admitting in his own way that he missed this without using so many words. Missed talking to someone. Missed Wolfwood. That much is obvious, the way tension has completely ebbed from his shoulders, the soothing darkness of the back of his eyelids, the sound of Nicholas’s voice at his back joined with his own thrumming purr.

Not the same, not the same, but who they are is more than enough.

He glances back at his bag, where the final cigarette has now established permanent residence in its crumpled box. Scrapped plans for Nicholas to know, because this is not the first time he has seen through Vash the Stampede and not the last, and for the rest of them to never find out.

No, he can’t allow himself to give up so easily. Not that Wolfwood, Meryl, or any of the others would ever let him.

Nicholas’s hands have slowed against blackened strands of hair, the movements of Wolfwood’s fingers have become drawn out and lingering as they brush against his scalp. A span of a scant few minutes against the years crawling past orbiting suns. Sandscapes blurred together into one endless memory. Vash reaches back as Wolfwood finishes securing the braid, slipping his hand up beneath a callused palm, twining their fingers together and holding Nicholas’s knuckles against the corner of his jaw. 

“Oh, darn, and here I was just getting used to the peace and quiet,” Vash sighs. “Hn. You’re stuck as much as I am.”

So almost everyone is accounted for, in a manner of speaking.

“Pretty sure you’d call every Livio a crybaby.” Little brothers will always be little, no matter how big they get. Vash peers back over his shoulder to offer Wolfwood a smile. “Can’t wait to meet him too.” 

The attention is nice. Contact is nice. Nicholas is mostly nice, and Vash has provided so many excuses to prolong their encounter already. So much has happened, all at once. 

“Ready to go back?” Begrudgingly asked, since Vash so clearly is not. 

The texture is right.

Somewhere in the back of Nicholas' mind, memories stir of straw-colored strands in the in-between light and shadow of a noonday porch overlooking a patch of scraggy weeds and broken cobblestone. Long, long hair, not untended or unkempt, left to grow without any particular need to front or to style.

It ran through his hands like silk but stuck to itself with remarkable ease, chunked and shaped and submitting to the sharp edges of shears with effortless aplomb—and in this case to the separation into three bundles for braiding.

The smell is right. A little lived-in. (A lot lived-in). The musk of life and the salt of tears, sweet ozone and petrichor. Vash taught him the word petrichor, what it meant, what it entailed, its promise and its threat, things seldom seen in their world of sand and blood of gunsmoke.

There are other worlds out there. This is one of them.

Behind Vash, Wolfwood frowns. If anyone were to ask, he would insist that it is a matter of concentration rather than despair at desperate loneliness. He can picture it, the desolation, somehow even worse without anyone to give chase, without anyone to pursue him for a bounty that no longer existed. And worst of all, he knows that Vash is downplaying his experiences.

"Good to know you're still full of shit, Tongari," he rumbles, flicking his wrists to secure the weave of the braid against the top of Vash's head. It won't take long to get the rest of it, but this extended contact with his scalp seemed...right. Wanted. Fond. "Not bad, my ass."

If five years of aimless despair and emptiness was nearly enough to hollow him out, Nicholas can only imagine what twenty would do to someone as vital and as gregarious as Vash the Stampede. Funny how that works, finding a reason to keep going after five years' time. The synchronicity is almost uncanny. He can't just leave it at that though.

"Humans'll find a way. We're good at that." They're good at that, his brain unhelpfully supplies, marking a pause in his hands and a glottal stop click at the back of his throat.

He's almost done with the braid.

He doesn't want to be done with the braid, but he resumes anyway.

"'Fraid you're stuck with us now, though. Just missin' one of our number—Nick found his Livio. Bit of a scrawny crybaby, but he's restin' up somewhere safe."

[angelictyphoon]

Loneliness is a haltingly familiar song. He is used to coming and going, alone. He grew accustomed to longer stretches of absence, nothingness, a speck of red lost in an ocean of sand and buried bones. Laughter ruptures the silence and remnants of spiced smoke fills the gaps. 

True to form, Vash's enthusiastic wiggling wanes to a moue of disappointment as he relents to familiar admonitions. 

“Okay, okay.”

Having availed Wolfwood to the back of his head by rotating around by the inch, Vash tucks his hands into the space formed by his crossed legs and postures as politely as can be while Nicholas's hands sift through his hair and gently teases out minor tangles. 

“It hasn't been too bad,” he offers, conversationally easygoing in a manner that defies the endless sequence of sunrises and sunsets in solitude. If Vash had found a way to absorb the experience of misery away from everyone else and hoard it for himself, Wolfwood would have been the first to know. If his Wolfwood and this one are anything alike, Nicholas has witnessed the attempts and bore the brunt of a handful himself. 

“Like I said before…Those first few years were…” He has an impressive set of options to choose from, ranging from soul-crushing to heart-shattering, but eventually decides on a tepid, “Not great.” 

There was no one left to hide from, no way to hide from himself. Borrowing, or some similar sounding excuse along those lines, from relinquished liquor cabinets and rusted spigots. Vash scratches at the side of his face, casting a look up at the spread of stars over their head as he recounts the passage of time; sharing some of his loneliness. “Avoided the Seven Cities, mostly. Found what was left of smaller towns.”

Devoid of life, of course, save for the hardiest scavengers, the occasional flit of roosting worm-vultures, and the shadows of ghosts watching from dilapidated homes and through broken windows.

“Five years in I found a town with people in it–“ Vash falters on a partially drawn breath, as though he might curse them merely by speaking. “People subsisting entirely off worms and worm-based goods. They never had Plants to begin with. I'd trade stuff I found in other towns. Zazie sometimes pointed me to corpses they couldn't reclaim. Worn leather, bones, chitin. Whatever I had, the townspeople managed to make use of.”

Such settlements were few and far in-between, separated by hundreds of miles of sand and stone. Islands.

“Found a couple other places like that. My wandering became a little less aimless.” He sounds grateful for that. “The longest stretch between towns takes six months to walk.” 

The nicest thing.

Wolfwood grunts a sound somewhere between protest and surprise, mouth twisting down into a frown and eyes narrowing. Inter-dimensional travel, whatever it is that the motley crew does following the whims of the cube, has not indurated him to the strange soul that is Vash the Stampede.

Anything but.

It is all new, even if the ache is a constant companion, intimately familiar. Live with it long enough, it becomes normal. People can survive terrible things, after all. They can become accustomed. It was a horror to find the younger-seeming Vash in that beautiful wasteland of a garden, simultaneously desolate and lush, devastated and deserted but alive in its own twisted way. The notion that this one, this Vash, has survived decades in complete isolation as humanity slowly withers…

It's almost too much to bear.

And at the same time, he cannot afford to let that show. Right?

Shame that he is as transparent to this Vash as to the one holding his heart together sinew by sinew, string by string.

And then he goes and…

Looks at him like that, all shimmering wet eyes, so damned blue it's like staring down at an unfettered sky. He goes and laughs, rusty with disuse but he's trying, he's trying. Beyond the intimacy of this furtive contact while the others either rest, pay their respects, or prepare to move on to the next plane, it strikes at something bruised and fluttering and aching he can scarcely articulate or describe.

Hope.

He's been given more reasons to hope in the last handful of months than he'd had in half a decade.

And now he finds himself blinking with incredulity, brows hiking up toward his hairline. Mouth open, mouth closed, throat cleared, he tears his gaze away from Vash twisting hair around like an ingénue at a crush. Nevermind that he knows what the dark cast means. Nevermind that behind the hand he's lifted to rub at his face and scratch at his scruff he is in fact smirking.

Struggling not to grin like a moron, more like.

The crinkle at the corners of his eyes probably gives him away, damn his lack of sunglasses at night.

"Alright, alright, fine, damn," Nicholas gruffs, putting on put-upon airs even if he'd all but offered, because it was an offer. Now his palms alight on Vash's shoulders and urge him to turn around in his perch. "Think you can keep from vibratin' through the wall for a minute?"

Silliness is a balm. It shocks him how natural it is to fall into it. To just… do, to just be.

Maybe there's something to it, finger-combing long locks, to gently scratching over the scalp on the road to tidying an otherwise unruly mane. Maybe it isn't entirely altruistic.

"Wiggle too much and it'll be all lopsided."

[angelictyphoon]

No yawning void nor a baleful memory forms a wedge between them. Remembrance and remembering, clawing back from a dearth of living to grant wonder and want. The buzz in his chest is almost unbearable, so light and wondrous and warm and everything that he thought he had buried decades before. Familiarity aches, but then, so too does this strange, precious feeling of hope. 

Vash sniffs, more pitiful than a wet cat shown an empty bag of treats, then blinks back up at Wolfwood with shining eyes. 

 “Aw, Wolfwood, that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever done for me.” 

So far, appended, silent, with all the potential that could be bundled into two words that have been unsaid. Inseparable, separated, not reunited, touched with a phrase that resonates within the realm of possibility.  

Terror, rage, loss, trouble and misconceptions tangled therein have given him so many reasons to go, never reasons to stay. Landscapes blurred together, tough and tender days made cherishable through constants allowed them to reach the same conclusions without them having ever having been voiced. Finalities are better left unacknowledged until they cannot be ignored any longer, until they demand to be faced down the barrel of a smoking gun.

A few minutes’ time almost seems too much to ask for in the long shadow of penance. The burden of asking is lighter with both of them to bear it.

Lifting his right hand to gently place his hand along the inside of Wolfwood’s elbow could be ruinous, and there he goes anyway, pressing mismatched fingers in to hold onto Nicholas as Nicholas holds him. 

The desert has, for a long time, been a grave of silence. Now it is dotted with the crackle of a fire, the wry sibilations of winged worms listening in every so often, and hopeful whispers. 

“Now that you mentioned braiding…Is my hair long enough to?” With his left hand, Vash twirls a lock of dark hair around his finger and tilts his head innocently. He can’t keep a straight face. Laughter– his laughter– stands out more than Vash would like. The sound of it is shy, breathed out in small huffs and a flip-flopping at the bottom of his stomach thanks to an awareness that genuine laughter and smiles tended to tease even Wolfwood’s tightest frowns into a warming smirk. 

A bit of silliness means they aren’t totally suffocating. He makes his case, brazen and ridiculous it may be to assume anything, “It flies all over my face when the desert gets really windy! Sometimes the back of my neck gets all hot because of it and ugh, the worst is when it gets into my mouth. What? I’m serious!”

Yeah, you better.

Just an echo of harshness, the barbs of teasing, Nicholas's murmur might well be lost in the susurrus of wind over the arid surroundings and in the resonance of proximity. The purr vibrating low against his neck and clavicle is so familiar it aches, but not like a wound, not like a bruise, not quite. It feels like the first breath after a long dive, deep and greedy and full. A stretch just at the edges of hyper-extension.

Warm. It's so warm, seeping into the cracks and the scars.

Wolfwood keeps his hand moving, slow and rhythmic, scratching gently at Vash's scalp while his own heart flutter-beats in a way that he has become more aware of in the recent past. The others have helped him with that. Meryl and Nick have opened his eyes to it, reminding him of lessons he learned before his world came crashing down.

It is important to persevere. To not give up so easily.

So, then, he does not attempt to hide the quiet marvel in his small smile or the warmth in hooded eyes when Vash looks up. Nevermind the tinge at the edges of his ears. He knows that the slivers of moonlight are more than enough to see by, and he cannot bring himself to worry about it.

They can be vulnerable.

And sure, sure, it is satisfying, gratifying, that Vash relaxes and leans again. It encourages him to lengthen his strumming strokes, shamelessly ruffling long hair from the top of his head all the way to his nape.

"Perfectly legitimate business," he tuts, because it seems that history rhymes, no matter the world. Did this Vash run into the same insanity (and inanity) throughout their travels? Did they ever have the opportunity to sit down and talk? Did they encounter the same hardships?

The past matters, but the present and the future do too. Because they have that luxury. Tomorrows snatched from nothingness. "Decent hand at braidin' too."

Answer, not an answer, momentarily stunned by the look in soulful blue eyes, glittering and pleading and sad and hopeful. Nothing he does could disguise the knit formed between his brows, the struggle to refrain from gawping or barking at such a display.

He stands no chance.

How could he say no?

"Hmmm…"

He graduates to finger-combing, dropping his other hand to rub matching circles on Vash's mid-back, keeping his arms loosely wrapped and ready to open, less a cage and more a tether for the both of them.

A glance away, down and aside, and he clears his throat.

"…was gonna ask the same."

Raspy. Soft. In the note of confession, hesitant to ask too much of someone who has lost so much. Maybe they can be a little selfish in their vulnerability too.

[angelictyphoon]

Funny, how the normalities of decades past can be considered an indulgence. The small crises of yesterday are so precious when only ghosts remain. Gradually, surely, he’s nudging one foot outside the circle he has drawn around himself. Out of the dark and into the light, giving himself permission to live again.

If he trips up every so often, maybe it gives Nicholas a reason to get mad at an actual spikey-headed idiot instead of the memory of one.

“Heh, yeah. That’d be real swell...I’ll give you more ideas as I come up with ‘em, promise.” 

Vash tips his head towards the fingers carding through his hair and purrs. A low, rumbling frequency like a generator humming through a wall, the burble of a sandsteamer engine, or the idling of a motorcycle. Entirely involuntary.

When did the lights go out?

Vash blinks his eyes open, given they ended up closed at some point. When? He’s not entirely sure. He can probably stand to pretend the petting session is not so obviously enjoyable, but then, it’s not like Wolfwood has ever struggled to read him. As if the flush on his face has not already made that apparent enough. As if he has never readily accepted affection with eyes that say yes even if his mouth says no.

It’s alright. He can be vulnerable.

Wolfwood can have the satisfaction this time around. Vash closes his eyes again. Back to the soothing darkness of scruffing fingertips, body heat, and worm spice. 

Only when the low rumble of Wolfwood’s voice breaks the silence again does Vash crack a single eye open to peer at him.

“Didn’t know hair trimming was on your list of skills too. Is that one next to forging signatures or sewing?” 

Not that Vash is opposed in the slightest, however, he fits so nicely in the space between Wolfwood’s arms that inertia asserts itself when he starts getting even the inkling to stand up. This is nice. It’s beyond nice. He might even call it pleasant.

So he asks. The question does not spring forth right away. In fact, no springing happens at all. His request emerges slowly, like a minor inconvenience could shatter this sliver of serenity.

“Do you think…” Blinking at Wolfwood with big, doleful eyes is exceedingly overkill, but now is not the time to hold back on his powers of persuasion. “We could stay like this? Just for a few more minutes? Then we can go back to the others.”

There is a lot.

There is so much.

And it is little wonder, but it is such a wonder.

Vash has spent an entire human generation alone, his only company his memories. He pulled the trigger because he had to. Because the alternative was so, so much worse. This Vash—he was with his companion to the bitter end, and Wolfwood supposes that his own was as well. Dying is still a terrifying prospect, of course.

But to do so with the people you love… maybe there are worse ends, even with the devastation left behind, to know that there is continuation. And while time here might come to an end, it is also a beginning. Vash still has things he looks forward to. Even after everything, Vash still has the capacity, and that never ceases to amaze.

"Tch. Is that all?"

Quiet, rumbling, tut-tease. Nicholas does not say anything about how dark Vash's hair is. He knows the implication. He learned years ago what it means, and now as he looks at it, actually looks at it in the moonlight, he sees how utterly sable every single visible strand is.

Like silver salt-and-pepper in humans, hair color isn't the only indicator of vitality…but it is one of them, testament to hardship and so much more. Stubborn will can allow someone to persevere through terrible things. It would not do to treat Vash as though he is fragile, but understanding plucks and resonates somewhere distant (like the toll of a bell falling from a steeple—like the guttural bone-deep rumble of jet engines ripping through the atmosphere beyond the curve of the horizon).

Before he realizes it, Wolfwood wears a faint, crooked grin while combing his fingers through that dark, dark hair. Careful, precise despite the rough texture of calluses, he seeks to relieve the length of tangles, humming low and quiet at the collection of wants.

"Wander into a new town, piss off the sheriff at a bar fight, help a lady out of a tree, hit the cat distribution lottery, stuff you so full of sweets we gotta find a shitty hotel to sleep it off. Yeah. Sounds like an afternoon."

It's so silly. It's indulgent.

Fuck it.

They've earned some indulgent silliness. Back, forth, he scritch-scratches the base of Vash's nape, jutting his chin to indicate a general direction, a readiness to go and a willingness to stay here for just a while longer.

"Mmm… and we can do somethin' about a haircut too when you're ready. Got a kit back with the others."

[angelictyphoon]

To his credit, the whine that creeps into his voice would have been easily missed if it had been anyone else present except Wolfwood. But it is Wolfwood, so Vash has done himself no favors. 

“That's a loaded question.”

Vash hunches into the high collar of his jacket with one eye squinted closed as Nicholas’s fingers run through his hair. There is way too much of him to hide in plain sight. Does the word ‘bittersweet’ have a cousin? A word that can encompass both giddiness and aching caused by proximity to want.

What a complicated relationship he has with the word want. Wants are unnecessary. Hurting comes from wanting. Yet, he can’t seem to make them go away. Wants. If he does not voice them, he can pretend they do not exist. That Vash the Stampede wants for nothing except what people want to believe, whether that’s mass destruction and mayhem and or love and peace.

“Umm,” he starts, drawing out the ‘m’ against pursed lips and hunching marginally less because this question requires a great deal of his attention. Mostly to make it obvious to Wolfwood that he’s taking his question very seriously. 

First implies there’s going to be a second, a third, maybe even a fourth thing. Daunting.

“I want to get a haircut.”

Funny how major life changes are accompanied so frequently by a visit to the barber’s chair. That’s just the way of things, despite Vash having decided that 'haircut' was the safest option he could come up with this very moment.

He strokes down across the midpoint of a lock of hair all the way to the end, keeping it pinched between his fingers as he examines how far out from his temples he can extend the strands before they go taut. Pitch black, so far from the golden blond he started out with. They haven’t brought up what it means, even if they both know what it means. It’s good, familiar, not talking about the things that they don’t talk about.

“I want to get to know the others better. You. ”

Again, for the first time. The words rush out faster and faster the more excited he gets.

"Crash at a shitty hotel. Get into a bar fight. Help some lady's cat down from a tree. Wander into a town we didn't even know existed because our map accidentally got shot up. Eat fresh donuts. And donut holes. And twists. And bars...And--uh, you get the point. Maybe even piss off the local sheriff! I mean, not everything in that order, but...Be around people again, you know?"

As long as he likes, Wolfwood lets Vash stay tucked into the shelter of his arm and his shoulder, the crumpled collar of a jacket that has seen far worse than a little snot. A worthwhile price to pay for contact like this. So what if he is a mite greedy in the moment?

Willingly offered. Willingly given. Willingly received.

A snort joins the cadence of sniffling, of the silent-not-silent moments bounding breaths, of the noise they make even in stillness just by virtue of existence. Generations of humans living and dying on the surface of Gunsmoke have never seen a river or a lake. Certainly not the ocean. They brought the ocean with them, nascent seas to water the endless planes of sand.

Tears, like love, must have somewhere to go. Tenderness does nothing to stanch their flow, betraying his effort to affect some semblance of calm in catharsis. A counterpoint sounds as barely more than a glottal click in the back of his throat. No matter the time or world, Vash still reads his telegraphs and predicts his responses before the neurons fire.

It is not the same. It cannot be, not after so long, not with the traces they carry, grief sealed over like a precious scar. It does not have to be. The trust is instinctual, as etched into his bones as anything else. The ache is so familiar that he can taste it, bittersweet nostalgia and affection alike.

When Wolfwood meets Vash's gaze, he lets go of the crease of tension between his brows and the clench of his jaw, loosening his arms so that escape is possible if so desired.

"Yeah, well. According to someone smarter than I'll ever be, there's something to be said about not givin' up too easy."

Salient teeth flash in a faint, crooked grin, one that crinkles at the corners of his eyes, self-aware and more than a little wry at the notion of finding hope in dark places.

A light that is still there despite everything.

"Got a while yet, then. 'Fraid you'll have a hard time gettin' rid of us."

Lifetimes. Or not. The blink of an eye.

"So. What do you wanna do first?"

If he uses this as an excuse to reach up and ruffle Vash's hair, well. He has no remorse for it.

[angelictyphoon]

This sort of silence is markedly different from the one he has come to know in the past two decades. Even at rest, humans are not inherently quiet. Sensory gating masks all the noise of living. Drawing breath, circulating blood, the beating of a heart, the blinking of watery eyes. He can hear Wolfwood just as Wolfwood can hear him.

The last cigarette is still safely tucked away in his bag. He can leave it untouched as a memento, as a reminder, so that memories are not all that he has left. 

“No.” Vash makes a distinctly wet noise from where his face is buried behind Wolfwood’s collar. Lost comforts, lost presence, not exactly reclaimed or asked for, given all the same. Chance. Luck. Fate. Some combination of all the above. “Maybe.”

Not much he can do about the runny nose. It all has to go somewhere. 

“I’ll get you a new jacket or something.” In the next world, wherever they go, whatever messes they get into; in this second chance at living. For now, if Nicholas will spoil him by letting him stay here and get a bit of snot all over his clothes, well…that’s plenty good too. 

“Everything that you want for them, you deserve it too.” Vash’s voice is soft, close and tender against the side of Wolfwood’s neck where he can feel the steady cadence of his pulse.

“--I know,” he interrupts before the same advice is turned on him. “I think…I can get there too. But I have some catching up to do to earn it.” The mistakes he made here are too late to fix. Not too late for this group, not too late for other versions of themselves or of their worlds they have yet to meet or see. 

“I want to come back here one day.”

One very specific day: the day that Knives promised him.

Maybe by then the people who live here will have died out or deeply embedded themselves into this ecosystem all on their own. Without assistance or reliance on Plants. He would return to ensure it remained that way.

Vash finally leans back, enough to take in Nicholas’s still-watery gaze and the depth of a mourning that never truly lessened no matter how much time had passed. All that love needed somewhere to go. He understands. Gratitude shines in his own eyes as much as the tears do. 

“Until that day comes, I’ll spend my tomorrows with you. With them.”

Trouble, Vash says. Disasters. Wolfwood snorts, mouth slanting wry, challenging, warm, teasing. He doesn't disagree or dismiss—but he doesn't mind, either.

As if Vash's trouble, no matter how terrible, is truly troublesome to the likes of this crew. Nicholas is an old hand at storm chasing, after all. Some things are different realm to realm, but—us, them, we, they—even with differences in age and experience and horror…perhaps they are not so different after all.

It is overwhelming. All of it has been. Nicholas is anything but numb to it.

He isn't entirely sure he wants to be numb to it.

Sure, there was his spate of howling fury when he landed alone in an ashen heap somewhere he didn't belong. He admitted he was angry, understatement for crushing grief with nowhere to go but the bottom of a bottle, and even that bore nothing out, no respite. Nothing. Cruelty or kindness, borne out with the blessings etched into his blood and bones… And through the most precious blessing of all, he had his life. Whatever that could amount to, he wanted to live.

Still does, he finds.

Even here in the shadow of his own grave. His but not. Even here outside of the silent husk of Hopeland, in the ashes and fading embers of generations of Sinners. Even now, haunted and haunting, ghosts but not. Solid and speaking and leaning and real, and maybe it's uncouth, maybe it's inappropriate, maybe it's undeserved, maybe it isn't unwanted, this attempt. This endeavor to communicate. This appeal, as much as Wolfwood knows how to shape a plea for all his impious impropriety, charlatan of charlatans.

Maybe it's untoward, this embrace, which neither of them seem inclined to break.

"Mm. I did ask nice. You didn't even make me get on my knees to beg pretty," Nicholas rumbles, tucking his chin, mirrored. He even dares to clasp at Vash's dark nape, broad-palmed, squeezing, kneading. In, out, his thumbs slide there and the small of his back, arms relaxed, tensed only enough to hold close. A lot. He hums his agreement. "Wouldn't be much of a guide if I didn't lend a hand, hm?"

He lets the quiet linger for a bit, lets the burning at the corners of his eyes and the tightness in the back of his throat subside. Breathing, listening to breathing, because there is nothing else in the airy hush all around.

"…Oi, Tongari, are you usin' me as a snot rag?" he grumbles, although his play at disgust and his tap-thump at the base of Vash's neck sound more like the edges of laughter than any true reproach.

Maybe it's alright. Maybe this is okay. It surprises him how much he wants to stay like this. Every moment hesitated is a moment lost, though. Perhaps he should start listening to his own damn advice.

[angelictyphoon]

“Ow! Heyyy, I haven’t even done anything yet,” Vash whines, weaponizing his already teary eyes as part of his glittering pout.

Good to know he can rely on Wolfwood as he usually can to be quick on the uptake.

“Hm?” The fact that he manages even the slightest note of question without bursting into incoherence is something of a miracle. From the moment the specters not from his own past appeared over the edge of the mesa he has been overwhelmed. At them, at possibilities, the end of the soft, grave hush of rolling waves of desert sand and the thrum of the swarm in the distant sky. 

Vash closes his eyes, focusing on drawing air through his lungs without succumbing to a mess of hiccups. Focus. The pulse beneath his fingers, the tender murmur against his temple, touch, warm and real and soothing.

“Huh. How can you be so sure that I’m not gonna add to your troubles?” That wouldn’t be unusual at all.

As if he could conceive of not giving his help if asked. Wolfwood asks him, and in spite of the fear of it all, what he could not do before, the chances he let slip between his fingers, the tomorrows that never came, Vash finds himself nodding. He finally lifts the curtain of his lashes, meeting brilliant teal-blue to warm whiskey. 

“Yeah. Guess I could help you out. Since you asked so nice.” Vash huffs out a laugh and this time he tips forward and down past the point of Nicholas's chin to bury into the crook of his neck. A means to wipe the tears off his face and to indulge in a touch of selfishness. 

Stubborn or determined, perhaps it makes no difference. Wolfwood makes distinctions between them, us, but  their losses and triumphs perhaps make them more similar than not. “I figure there’s enough experience with salvaging disasters to go around.” 

They saved him, after all.

“It’s been…” Vash searches for exactly what he wants to say, and he still manages to get a little lost in his own head. “A lot. These past few days. Sometimes it doesn’t feel real. Maybe it will, a week from now. Maybe months from now. After my fiftieth donut or something.  Uh, all that to say… I’m trying to figure it all out. The whole living thing. Might trip up every once in a while.”

What a paradox.

The whole of the Humanoid Typhoon rests against him, held close and warm and real and alive, solid, solid as anything. His weight is a pittance, but the weight he carries is crushing and familiar, transparent as anything no matter the impetus to conceal it, to carry on. Hidden but apparent in motion, in the tuck of chin and the tightening of jaw, Nicholas frowns mightily as Vash's brittle laugh jangles through his senses. Like shards of shrapnel driven through his heart, like lungs full of embers, it hurts just as much as the hollow smiles always did.

"I'll keep an ear out," he rumbles, and for what? Threat, promise, warning, joke at his own expense? Maybe all of the above, punctuated with a flick of finger thumping behind Vash's ear. They are haunted by their own ghosts, by the echoes of possibility. Tomorrows that never dawned.

He looks, sees, connects the sight and the sensation. So gentle. So perilously gentle. His heart still beats even as it aches, bruised behind his ribs, beneath the intimacy of fingertips to skin.

Beneath the sound of his name in Vash's mouth. More than one Wolfwood may travel in their little pack. It may have become more of a title than anything else, a burden shared - like the horrors of the Eye, like the stains it left - but it has a certain substance when given shape so close, so near, so soft.

It is altogether something he never expected to hear again. They are who they are, no matter how life has battered them.

His breath hitches, tangles up on the inhale. Tears burn, falling with a blink-squeeze and blurry reopen. He tips his head, leans brow to dark-haired temple, and reaches to flatten Vash's palm against his chest, because it feels right to do.

The tentative, crooked smile he mirrors feels right too.

"It'll take us places. They're good for that. Learnin' to live, not just survive," he murmurs, wry and low and fond, the pad of his thumb drawing circles over half-gloved knuckles. Since encountering this ragtag group he has had reasons to emote, to inhabit himself as a person again. And so, he gathers his courage, such as it is.

"Vash, I-"

Oh God.

"I'm gonna need your help with somethin'."

Tic-swallow.

"…they've been through Hell, all of 'em. Lost plenty, gained plenty, made plenty of stupid-ass mistakes too. They've got each other, and they've got us."

He lifts his gaze, searching for contact. For understanding. Maybe for forgiveness too.

"Help me keep an eye out. If there's no place that works out all its own, we'll damn well make one."

[angelictyphoon]

There, Wolfwood’s hand closes over his own, and the mere weight of it envelops him as fully as any embrace. Runny eyes, runny nose, red-faced. Starved, and he hates how much it shows. How his whole body trembles as he leans his weight into their joined hands now pressed over his chest, and the line blurs. Just for a moment. Well worn tracts of quarrels and quibbles, like the next town is just around the corner and their evening would be spent hunched together over the counter of the local saloon.

“Nngh. Yeah. Sorry about that. I tend to have that effect on you.” 

Vash draws a halting breath through his nose with a guilty glance cast aside, but does not echo his apology with another. There are critical differences, branching roads and tessellations in the journey of choice that led them to this moment.

He grimaces, stricken, but not without a lifeline to hold onto. 

“The first time he took my hand and pointed my gun to his head, he called me a coward.” Perhaps Wolfwood has done something similar. Teaching moments that involved bared teeth as much as they did closed fists. “The second–” and the last time, “The second time, he held my hand, nudged my finger over the trigger and apologized.”  

For once, Vash the Stampede could see no other way. Whatever the circumstances, “I chose to pull the trigger.”

Vash closes his eyes with a frail laugh. “Knives tried to reason with me after that. Praised me for showing mercy to a sinner, and that he would extend the same consideration for what was left of humanity. I…honestly didn’t hear much of what he was saying to me. He wanted me to come with him, and I remember refusing him.” 

Only silence and the rhythmic tapping of chisel to stone, after that.

“I felt nothing. I was nothing.” He might not have survived otherwise. “It was like that for a long time.” 

The past became as much a home as any. A bramble forest grown from penance, remembrance, longing and loss. In his sleep, in his waking hours, in the long treks over the dunes and through ghost towns. “And then…I just kept going, because I didn’t know what else to do. If I had the chance that your Vash did–” 

"Tch." Nicholas scrunches his nose, cracking the slant of a salient grin as this dark-haired Vash struggles with the smoke, something familiar and unfamiliar both. Maybe with more. Definitely with more. "It's an acquired taste. You're too young to understand."

You'll get it when you get older.

Maybe.

Before he can twist something more clever around his tongue, Vash withdraws his barely-there touch, and it is here and now as the immediate connection dims and breaks that Wolfwood feels. Feels it, a grapple fired up through his gut, hooking in and pulling taut and wrenching hard against his ribs. Cut through the nebulous numbness like a searing arrow, like a fist clenched around the traitorous organ behind his breast, it aches.

It cries out. It cries out as he has always cried out, in wretched silence jammed up behind the dam of his teeth, acid like bile in his throat, even if it was always there in his eyes. Don't go. Don't go, don't let go, don't let it be—

Hiraeth.

A home that isn't his, or never was, and cannot ever be again. Mourned and honored and held and kept precious and close and remembered, longed for, the framework for something new.

Nicholas cannot process that flicker of a notion. The ember of it falls from his grasp, just as ash falls from the cherry of the cigarette half-smoked and momentarily forgotten. His eyes burn. His face burns.

He reaches out before he can even breathe again.

Angles to close the gap because it is feels right for all that it feels so damned raw, for all that it is not his place. Callused and warm and broad his palm closes over the flesh-and-blood hand clutching careworn carmine fabric, squeezing to anchor, desperate for it.

When he finally does inhale, it's wet.

Searing.

"…I was so, so fucking mad."

Lost. Lost. Howling without so much as a goodbye. Understanding can only come when the hurt doesn't take up so much space.

"Started lookin' for him in everything, though."

This is a confession. It's a question. A door opened with the faintest slant of a smile, anointed with tears.

"What about you?"

[angelictyphoon]

We’re here rings like there is some inescapable quality to it. If he tried to run now or merely insinuated the idea– each of them would no doubt put a stop to it. Together, if not individually in their own way. Seasoned storm chasers. 

Loneliness never suited him just fine except that it was a means to an end. Vash exhales, bobs his head in a slow nod while rubbing his eyes with the back of his free hand. The burning in his lungs is some combination of spiced smoke and incalculable relief. 

“Mm,” sniffled in agreement. “Think he’ll be mad if I ask you why you guys like this stuff so much?” Vash briefly withdraws his cigarette and rounds his lips to form paltry smoke rings, only to earn waterier eyes for his trouble and a series of throat-clearing coughs for his boldness. 

Well, he tried.

Through light and waning notes, there are remnants of plant song woven into flesh and bone and a beating heart. Atom by atom, painstakingly and lovingly reconstructed in the aftermath of bloody conflict and a desperate desire to save. Even before Wolfwood has finished his story, Vash understands completely. Without question, he would have done the same, he would have done the same and he almost wishes he had the same chance. All the power of a Final Run, the power to level entire cities or raise them up from the ground, focused and directed at one person. 

Half-life, achieved In saving or surviving, and the irony of it is that is no life the other would have wanted them to live. 

Vash pulls back his hand, trailing fading filaments of light in the darkness before clenching his fingers into the front of his coat for want of something to hold onto. Twenty years and now this; caught between the need to touch and the fear of filling a space he does not deserve. Vash’s stomach roils horribly. 

“Did you look for him again?”

"Hah. Tch."

Despite himself, Nicholas draws his thumb in against the side of Vash's nape. In and out. Circling the centers of stress, he exerts a gentle heartbeat rhythm even as tension eases between broad shoulders. For all that it plucks at something behind his breastbone, he knows it is not the same. It can never be the same. Not for Vash, not for him. The people they knew and loved, know and love, have changed them fundamentally.

It is not the same.

It doesn't have to be.

They simply are, and this Vash has opted to step out of his wasteland prison to join them. To find tomorrows where none exist here.

Some cages are luxurious and attenuating. Some, as he is intimately familiar, galvanize resolve as much as they wear it down. There is still a spark of light and life even despite the suffering.

"Yeah, well, we're here if y'ain't." Alright. It is something he can speak to. He has not been alright, but… having company helps. It is good to not walk alone.

Not for the first time in recent memory, Wolfwood finds himself given to hope. It is good to hear Vash laugh. Good to remember that they are both capable.

When they shift fingertip to fingertip, Nicholas turns his attention down to the flicker of light, to the electric tingle thrumming through his nerves. Breath hitches. Inhale, cigarette crackle, exhale. Wisps of smoke cling to his cheeks before drifting up to the star-strewn sky.

He's there, and it takes Wolfwood a moment to swallow again, to wrangle the sudden crush of air from his lungs. Slow, slow.

"Yeah." Barely voiced. Halting. "Same for you, though. He'll always be there."

The echoes hum, responding to Vash's curiosity without Nicholas' input. Pieces of Vash speak to him, a presence in an absence, the thread of a harmony embedded in a different song.

The dreaming saint sleeps in the heart of a sinner, intertwined inexorably.

"We fought Chapel, Bluesummers, and Livio here." Here, not-here. He looks off into the middle distance, then back aside. "I was dying. He saved my life. Don't know how he did it. I remember… light. And burning. Flying, falling, I don't… I don't know. I landed outside an intact Juneora fifteen years before we met."

[angelictyphoon]

Contact, the promise of it not when it finally reaches him, does not make Vash flinch away. It does still the breath he meant to draw through parted lips, and it does leave his eyes with a bright sheen. His gaze snaps back to Wolfwood before he can stop himself. 

Time stalls. That's nothing new. Not twenty years ago and not twenty years later. The difference could have only been hours, minutes, seconds and Vash can feel that familiar heat crawl across the bridge of his nose as plain as the moment they first met.

Words manage to creep up his throat eventually, even if the smile on his face feels out of place. A smile with a bit of tooth to it, and a teasing slant.

“Maybe when I'm menacing you.” 

Speaking of nick-namesakes, maybe he can believe God capable of love as much as he is capable of wrath.

Laughter follows shortly after, a chiming echo after Wolfwood’s rumbling. Laughter, then quiet, eyes closed, tears pressed free, head tilted, leaning into the warmth of the calloused hand draped over the back of his neck and hair that has grown long. Vash finally releases the tension in his shoulders, to show some measure of ease, because it is impossible to resist as much as it is impossible to mistrust. 

He cracks his eyes open, a glimmer of teal beneath lidded eyes engaged in slow study.

Time flows ever forward, and the passage of it shows. Etched into laugh lines and frowns and silvering temples with bangs that fall too low.  

They’re here now, having lost loved ones and gained others. 

“I’ll be alright.” Attempt to be, more like, but Vash the Stampede never got anywhere without trying. 

So he tries. He reaches up with his own flesh and blood hand, touching fingertips to knuckles, tracing carefully down until their fingers are tip to tip. Warmth spreads, as does a ripple of light and resonance across scarred, paled skin untouched by time. Vash slowly tilts his head, playing on notes of tentative curiosity, surprise, then wonder.  

“He’s there. With you.”

But Wolfwood already knew that.

The same. The same and not. There seems to be something intrinsic etched into the soul-stuff that makes Vash the Stampede who he is. Etched with the pain of solitude, even if he is otherwise unmarked, he remains a wonder. Even with the weight of guilt and grief and more isolation than anyone deserves, he still lives. Penance. Self-flagellation. Determination. Maybe all of the above.

Even mountains wear. Even diamonds can fracture.

The cracks, though, let the light shine through. Love, warmth, ageless, undimmed through the end of his world, he persists. Somehow.

It isn't the elevation that burns at Wolfwood's eyes and at his lungs, and he cannot blame it on the familiar searing comfort of worm-spice and clove. His cigarettes are sweetened at the filter, honey-touched poison in every crackling breath, in every blue-tinged wreath of smoke.

It is an offer, an olive branch, a sacrifice, small and token but alive, against all odds. Votive incense to the ghosts of this place.

Memories, embers, connections.

Close enough to touch, close enough to smell. Vash looks and Nicholas wonders what he sees, even as he holds eye contact with a bob of Adam's apple. He is older than his counterparts present or otherwise. Salt and pepper have begun to peek at his temples, for all that he is in need of grooming. His hair is too long for his general taste, stubble thick at his jaw and his throat.

Not that he has ever had much luck shaving, and not that he is prone to buttoning his shirts. Neither have changed even years after he should have become as the cigarette cherry does.

Flaring bright.

Ash and dust suspended between Yesterdays and Tomorrows.

Worrywood.

Nicholas glides into effortless motion, swinging his hand up—only to bring it down atop Vash's head.

Gently.

His fist unfurls, melting in coal-dark hair to rest cupped over nape and collar. Something calcified in his heart cracks open. He cannot help but to scoff. Once. Twice. His snort breaks into a smoky chuckle, shoulders trembling, even with tears wet on tawny cheeks.

"You're a damned needle-headed menace, Vash Theophilus Stampede."

It aches. God, it aches.

But maybe they can breathe through it.

[angelictyphoon]

They have exchanged no more than a handful of words in the past thirty seconds and Vash can already feel his eyes burning. 

Does he gain or lose another year for accepting the cigarette? It depends, probably, on which way he’s counting. He’d weighted so many years against dropping the count to zero there had never been any accounting for the possibility that the number could go up. Incrementing means...giving his life for the next year, not the last.

It isn’t a trick, as much as Vash squints at the proffered cigarette like he’s staring down the barrel of a loaded gun.

Or maybe it is, bathed in good intentions and wrapped in worm spice and cloves.

Wolfwood is still there, hovering just in his periphery while Vash remains squatting next to his rucksack. Not a revenant. Better than a dream and more solid than any figment of his imagination. Alive as can be. Ignoring him won’t make him any less real. 

He’s close. Close enough to touch, and Vash’s fingers twitch with unbidden yearning even as he leans away from his bag to angle towards Wolfwood. He looks into the eyes of a man who he knows better than anyone he’s never met, whose eyes are still whiskey warm and so extraordinarily kind. The very same gaze he dreamt of so often, only now Vash is awake. 

Astonishingly, frightfully so. 

Vash loosely curls his fingers to cradle the gap of space between himself and the edge of Wolfwood’s outstretched hand before plucking the cigarette and tucking it between his lips.

 He closes his eyes and tips his head up while resting both elbows on the tops of his knees. If he looked up, he could pretend the stream of smoke drawn towards the stars was coming from someone beside him and not the cigarette hanging from his own mouth.

The corner of his lips curls upward in a vague smile. Vash opens his eyes again, forcing himself to look even as tears line the bottom of his eyelids.

“How could I ever forget? I wanted to spend my tomorrows with him.”

It never stops hurting, does it?  

“Worrywood,” Vash accuses, dropping his gaze and looking back out to the darkened waves of the dunes beyond.

Nicholas grunt-clears his throat as if to assuage the sudden strangling tightness therein. This is—

This is harder than he expected. Harder than he could have anticipated. Sure, he hasn't seen a world where it all shakes out. Where everyone survives and remains in touch. Where things are not fundamentally broken, cast in a veil of grief.

It doesn't matter. Not really. Not now. Not in light of visiting these silent grounds, the hand-carved tombstone. What he has told them, and what he carries. Coffin nails, twenty to a pack, not...

Not something else. Not something immediately and physically damaging. He is not blind to sentiment, nor to context. The sight squeezes something behind his breastbone that leaves him breathless.

Grace has suffered tremendously, and these newcomers to his life may as well be living ghosts haunting the edges of his vision.

Wolfwood can see the preternatural youth in the Independent's face, but the exhaustion in his eyes... it's worse than the empty smiles. More like a translucent veneer, as if the hollow has unfurled, a dark star threatening to consume him. Even still, even after all of this, Vash persists. Maybe that is a note of self-flagellation too—and a note of hope.

He ought to be more gentle, maybe. More careful.

"...Ain't what I meant, Tongari," Nicholas sighs, pivoting away from the bag and crouching down at Vash's flank. Almost back to back. Not quite. A modicum of privacy in proximity, it feels natural to guard and monitor, even if no-one remains to collect a bounty that no longer matters.

A moment of quiet passes. Company. Presence. Nicholas plucks his fresh pack of smokes from his breast pocket, tapping it against his knuckles before he pops it open.

Practiced, he flips one stick around, tucking it into the pack filter-first. Just as smoothly, he shakes a cigarette out, lipping it over to the corner of his mouth.

And then he overturns his wrist, offering a new smoke to Vash.

"He'd be glad to be remembered."

Glad that you found him worth remembering.