Archive of Our Own

“You really piss me off.”

“I’m sorry!”

“All of your s-stupid ideals in your dumb, floppy head. Hell, even your smile—” he coughs, spits out a mouthful of sand and blood. “Your smile is the most stupid thing about—are you crying?”

“You keep yelling at me! I didn’t even do anything wrong this time!” Vash huffs, voice climbing into whining territory. “And now you’re calling me ugly! I’m delicate, you know. What else do you want me to do?”

Bullets spray over their heads, sending concrete shards cracking against Wolfwood’s crooked sunglasses. Fire lances through his whole damn body as he hauls Punisher further up with a scream, trying to protect their backs. Mostly Vash’s. Wolfwood’s already got a few holes in him, so what’s a few more?

“I want you to do something about these fuckers before we get shot in the ass!”

“Why doesn’t this town have alleys—” Vash mutters, mostly to himself. He struggles to take even more of Wolfwood’s weight while they hobble along, prosthetic fingers digging in like the bullets in his chewed-up ribcage.

“Will you forgive me if I keep your ass from getting shot?”

“It’s a start.” He stumbles, but Vash hauls him closer before he can destabilize them both. “I’ll at least consider not punching you in your stupid pretty boy face.”

“I’m going to protect your ass so hard.”

“Promises, promises.”

“There’s our exit,” Vash breathes, but Wolfwood’s blurring vision confuses the street and sky with the searing sun-bleached paleness of the town’s buildings. He coughs again on a mouthful of blood and swallows it back, sending his stomach clenching and lurching. He hopes whatever exit Vash is seeing is a good one. Maybe he got them back to their vehicle?

“Sweet chariot,” he slurs and startles out of his stupor when Vash makes a high-pitched, distressed sound that is decidedly not whining. “What? What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong is that you’re sounding like you’re dying! Stop that!” Vash shrieks straight into his goddamned ear.

Or maybe that’s the sound of the rocket that streaks over their heads and demolishes a building ahead of them. Vash dives to make it through the avalanche of destruction before it crushes them. Wolfwood’s head goes funny as soon as their feet leave the ground, sky and sand and stone churning like the sick agony in his gut.

Vash curls around him like he’s something worth protecting, and then it’s—impact, fire, painpainpain, and he

he loses—

—time, it—falls out of orbit—

—slouches into red and light and please, it hurts, it hurts—

—and he’s spinning out, choking on the silence between Vash’s heartbeats—

When he comes to, he’s sitting propped up against a wall with a lapful of Vash and long fingers pawing inside of his shirt. It’s dark, wherever they are. He’s so, so tired. There are muffled barks of gunfire and shouting somewhere outside the bubble of Vash’s body heat.

“Warm,” he mumbles. The fire in his stomach is freezing his bones, and he shivers uncontrollably, breath hitching with each spasm. There’s smoke on his tongue. Blood in his throat. That’s about the usual, isn’t it? Dust and sand in his nose and mouth, gumming his eyelids together. They’re too heavy. He’s too heavy.

He hurts. He’s nothing but a skin suit turned inside out, raw and exposed. He’s black and red and rotten, it hurts, it hurts—

“Nicholas.”

Why does he always, always have to hurt?

“Nicholas,” Vash says, voice sharp in a way it never gets, and even wrung out and delirious, Wolfwood tips his chin toward the sound. A halo of sun-hazy smoke burns a silhouette in his vision. Delicate white lines glow around pretty blue eyes, like the filigree on a holy book.

“There’s the sky,” he mumbles around a mouthful of blackened blood.

“Shut up.”

“Mm. Like it when you’re bossy.”

“Stop talking like you’re dying,” Vash’s command blurs with a wet warble.

Such a crybaby.

Glass breaks, the sound more familiar than his own pulse draining from his ears and soaking the hot sand beneath him. A hand cradles the side of his face—the blood-soaked fabric of Vash’s glove, and the warm flesh of his fingers. So gentle with Wolfwood it grates. So gentle it nearly pulverizes his already-broken body into dust.

“Come on,” Vash says, so close his breath puffs over his nose. Are they about to kiss? He doesn’t feel too good, but he’s always up for kissing Vash.

“Swallow for me.”

Wolfwood coughs a battered laugh. He wants to say, “don’t I always, sweet thing?” But it all comes out as a wounded, pathetic wheeze. Christ, he really does sound like he’s dying, doesn’t he?

Cool glass, burnt lips. Viscous liquid sliding bitterly down his throat.

He inhales smoke and dust, then gags on a silent scream. Bones snap, muscles twist, and his whole damn body burns as nerves re-thread their frayed edges together. Everything is tighter than before, like a new body that’s got to be worn in before it can be worn out. His heart rate gallops at a pace that would punch anyone else six feet under.

Hands cradle his head through it. Lips kiss his hairline. A gentle grounding even as lightning inflates his chest like a balloon and sends him sailing into the endless blue sky.

“Shit, holy shit,” Vash chants under his breath, between each kiss. “You’re alive, that was so close, you’re alive. Nick, Nick.”

“You better,” Wolfwood pants between spasms, “be watching our fucking backs.”

“I am, I am, I swear,” Vash says, kissing Wolfwood's eyebrow. It’s suffocating. But his body feels like it’s flayed open, like the world is pouring into it, so he leans into the claustrophobia of Vash’s panicked affection and starts to breathe easier.

“You liar,” Wolfwood groans, head lolling against the hard wall behind him. The serum roars in his ears. His vision sharpens and his head buzzes with too much input and not enough processing. They’re tucked in an alley, steeped in darkness because of the smoldering rubble blocking their way. Overhead, black smoke smudges out the burning suns.

His eyes are bruises inside of his head, but he finds Punisher discarded beside them, uncomfortably out of reach.

With his foot back out of the grave, Wolfwood admits that Vash looks less like an angel burnished in white and more like he’s had a building drop on him. He’s red-faced and splotchy, half of his hair drooping over one eye and half sticking up like ruffled feathers.

(And he’s still the prettiest thing Wolfwood’s ever laid eyes on.)

How much had he missed? Had a building dropped on them?

“What’s the situation?”

“I protected your ass,” Vash breathes. Blood is trickling from his nose and forehead, seeping into the corner of his mouth, caking between his teeth. “So, so hard.”

Somewhere, something explodes. Several people scream. Wolfwood has to trap Vash’s shoulders in a bruising grip to keep the dope from swanning off to play hero. Vash winces. This soon after the serum, with his own body feeling like an ill-fitted suit, he can’t quite control his strength. His muscles are too rigid, a spring wound too tight over his bones, crushing them the same way he crushes Vash’s arms.

Vash doesn’t fight it, so Wolfwood doesn’t let go.

“Look me in the eye, Blondie. And repeat after me.”

“Repeat after me,” Vash parrots dutifully, like the little shit he is.

“I, Vash the Stampede, Broom for Brains, Dumb of Ass, Bearer of the Stupid Face—”

“There you go hurting my feelings again,” Vash says, but he’s smiling. A real one. As soft as mashed fucking potatoes. It pisses Wolfwood off enough to slam that pretty face into the concrete. Or into his own face. He hasn’t decided just yet.

“—will save my own life for once and get out of town without making an ass of myself.”

“You’re talking about my ass a lot.”

And then Vash kisses him.

It’s hot and disgusting with blood and grit in their teeth. It’s you’re alive, I almost lost you. Vash bears down on him, bullying into his mouth like he’s starving. Wolfwood’s bruising hands fall from his shoulders to his hips, pulling him flush against a body that was mangled all to hell just a few minutes ago and is now incandescent with adrenaline and need.

(The serum pulses through his veins, tugs taut muscles like puppet strings, howls in his head—

fuck or kill, fuck or kill—with his fingers stretching around the curve of Vash’s hips, it’s such an easy decision.)

There’s a shift of rubble, a cascade of pebbles that pierces through the clamor and straight into his hypersensitive head. He moves faster than Vash—a rarity, and only because the serum is singing-rushing-screaming through him.

He pulls Vash’s gun from his holster, aims, and fires before Vash’s tongue finishes retreating from his mouth.

The man crawling through the gap in their rubble-laden blockade cries out and slumps, incognizant with a bleeding shoulder. Blessedly, his body acts to plug the gap in their defenses, at least temporarily.

“Damn,” Vash rasps, wide-eyed and shivering as Wolfwood slowly slides the gun back into the thigh holster. “Nick, that was so—”

He never really finds out what “that” was. But Vash shoves his tongue down his throat again, so he can guess.

A different kind of heat swoops low in his belly. His heart kicks back up to inhuman speeds as he grinds up against Vash, extorting a little whimper from swollen, bloodied lips.

fuck or kill, fuck or—

“Gotta get you out of here,” Vash says with a parting kiss that Wolfwood doesn’t oblige. He threads red-stained fingers into golden hair and rolls up into Vash again, swallowing another punched-out cry like it's the sweetest water.

“Think you’re confused about who’s gotta take care of who, sweetheart,” Wolfwood rumbles.

“I’m taking care of you,” Vash says, going for cocky and ending up sounding wrecked. “I promised you I’d protect your ass. It’s a really good ass.”

Wolfwood tattoos his fingerprints into Vash’s skin, through his layers of thick clothes, and thinks fuck or kill and mine.

“Lead the way.”

Vash does not, in fact, keep his head down and run. Or well, he does, but straight towards a burning fucking building. They save people from their own dipshittery. He doesn’t think anyone dies, this time. At least, not that he can tell.

Vash leads the remnants of their pursuers out of town. There’s a chase over the sand. A grenade or two. An explosion.

Wolfwood gets shot in the ass.

The next town isn’t far, but they drive right by it. Being near the outskirts of one of the Seven Cities means that clusters of civilization are huddled closer together, and it only takes a little over two hours to skid to a halt two towns over.

Wolfwood is in a foul mood the entire ride, laid out belly-down on the back seat to accommodate his shot-up ass, swearing up an irate storm at the world in general and Vash’s driving specifically. He shivers through the serum’s withdrawal, panting and sweating and mean. He rolls another vial between his fingers but doesn’t take it yet. He has some accelerated healing even without it, so the bleeding is sluggish. The pain is—well. It’s pain. Bruising, burning, and something to ground him because he can’t smoke with his face smashed into the seat.

It’s stupid to take too many too close together when he can give his body a little time to regulate between doses. Which he knows already, Blondie, why don’t you focus on getting us to a motel alive, alright?

He does take it as they approach the town because he’d been shot in the ass and his healing isn’t good enough to let him sit or sleep comfortably tonight otherwise. He curls into the back of the seat as it takes his body again, heart pounding, pulse howling, muscles wound too tight around the ache in his marrow. Shards of glass crunch in his teeth, cut his tongue only to heal over. Another cold sweat washes over him, leaving him sick and angry and hard.

fuck or kill, fuck or—

Vash is so worried about him he can almost taste it between the glass dust on his lips, but Wolfwood doesn’t say anything and Vash doesn’t, either. Can’t talk peace with a drug that burns him out and leaves behind a wounded, cornered beast.

Instead, Vash busies himself with a shoddy disguise—coat off and folded into his duffle, glasses tucked into a side pocket. This close to a City, most towns operate as suburbs. They’re bigger than the shambling populaces out in the boonies, each with a plant or three of their own and flush with trade. Basic amenities here will be luxurious compared to their usual fare. But the proximity makes them both antsy. Communication is more uniform between towns and the City, making it all the harder to stay ahead of rumors about the Humanoid Typhoon and his dumbass self-proclaimed bodyguard. He’s glad Vash isn’t tempting their already shitty fate by leaving the trademark coat on.

“We really need to get our own vehicle. Meryl is going to be so mad at us,” he laments, leaning out of Wolfwood’s view to observe whatever damage has been done to Shortstack’s car.

“Leave me the hell out of it,” Wolfwood grouses. Aches open up like lacerations inside his body as the serum spills through him, only to be swept away by the very same poison that caused them. Heat lightning sparks in his chest, in his head. He grinds his hips against the seat only once, a moan turning into a growl of frustration as he digs his fingers into the material instead, ignoring the distinct pop pop of holes bursting under the pressure.

It’s miserable taking the serum outside of a fight, with nowhere to conduct the energy arcing through him. His body wants to run, to hurt and kill or fuck. Or maybe all of the above at once.

He makes himself exhale steadily out through his nose, idly watching as Vash pulls out a shirt from the duffle and uses it to wipe the flaking blood from his face.

“Is that my fucking shirt?”

“I think it’s your walking shirt, actually,” Vash quips, then neatly dodges Wolfwood’s over-fueled grab for his smart mouth.

“I hate you.”

“Yeah,” Vash says, sounding a little too genuinely sad. “I’m so sorry about your ass.” And then, because he thinks Wolfwood has given him an opening, “is there anything I can do—the serum, it looks like—”

“I’m right as sin,” Wolfwood interrupts, because he hadn’t given an opening. “Or I will be as soon as I take it out of your ass.”

“I don’t think that’s how that phrase—and what do you even mean by—”

“Shut up and let’s get a room already.” But he doesn’t make a move to get up. He’s half-concerned that any friction against his dick is going to have him humping against the seat like a dog. And sure he’s no gentleman, but he does actually try to keep it classy. Or at least half-way dignified. He’s also not sure what he’ll do if he gets Vash in his hands before they’re in the privacy of a room.

“How about you meet me at the back? You’re too bloody.”

What’s left of his clothes are matted with it, scraping unbearably against his heated, buzzing skin. But the thought of letting Vash out of his sight right now has his jaw clenching.

“Gimme that shirt then,” he says through his teeth, reaching out to the wrinkled fabric. Vash dodges back out of reach again.

“Nuh-uh,” Vash says. “Can’t let anyone else see you in your fucking shirt. I might get jealous.”

And then he’s gone, leaving Wolfwood groaning with a too-familiar mix of arousal and pissed off.

Later, the end of his cigarette burns orange in their moons-bathed room. The window is opened out to a decently nice view of the street below them, a soft wind blowing their gauzy curtains. It’s uncharacteristically hot for the evening, or maybe he’s still overheated from two doses so close to each other today. He tilts his head and blows out a stream of smoke, back sticking uncomfortably against the plain headboard.

They hadn’t made it to the shower yet—hell, they’d barely made it to the bed. And now the comforter under them is blackened and grimy with sand and dried blood, gritty with sand and sweat and cum. It itches and scratches his bare ass and thighs. As good as it feels to recline in the hum of sated pleasure and nicotine, he knows he’s got to get them cleaned up.

Vash is already dozing, sprawled over his legs with his cheek squished against his thigh, snoring lightly with his feet hanging off the bed. His hand curls around Wolfwood’s hip, fingers loose with sleep. Moonlight refracts eerily in his prosthetic, neatly placed on the nightstand next to the ashtray and Vash’s gun.

Embers burn on the inhale and dim on the exhale as Wolfwood unabashedly admires the scarred planes of Vash’s body. The tension that lives in those wiry, lithe muscles is gone for now, leaving behind softened curves and slopes.

There’s nothing soft about the pink painted on his bare ass, still practically glowing with heat in the moonlight. Wolfwood can still feel the sting on his palms, the feel of soft, fevered flesh as he grabbed a handful after each sharp slap.

Wolfwood had promised to take the shitshow that was their day out of Vash’s ass. He wasn’t in the habit of breaking his promises.

He leaves his cigarette hanging between his lips as he reaches down, touching one pinkened and sore cheek so gently he barely feels the skin beneath his fingers. He wants to call the touch soothing, maybe even apologetic. But in truth, it just feels proprietary.

(Not that Wolfwood’s been able to call anything his in a long, long time. Maybe not ever. He touches Vash and thinks mine, he’s mine, and knows it’s one of the greatest lies he’s ever told. But he’s long-practiced at denying the inevitable, and this is no different.)

His eyes catch on the mess leaking between Vash’s legs and drying on the wrecked comforter. He leans forward, gingerly sliding his middle finger down between rosy cheeks to explore tacky, puffy folds until Vash sighs and squirms, unconsciously hitching a knee further up the bed and opening himself up for Wolfwood’s touch.

Wolfwood is still half-hard, basking in the unhurried, building hunger of arousal and the fullness of the pleasure lingering heavily in his bones while nicotine soothed the glass-sharp edges of the meds still heating up his head. He strokes over the petals that bloom so easily under his touch, and thinks about plunging two fingers straight into that open body. He imagines the gasp as Vash wakes to Wolfwood pushing his cum back inside him, pictures the tantalizing shift of muscles under shimmering skin as he dances for him on the end of his fingertips.

He can’t even blame the serum this time. His head is hot and his skin prickly with it, but the urgency has receded like a sandstorm over the horizon, curbed by the bruises on Vash’s body and the smoke in his lungs. And all that’s left is himself and the bestial, carnal thing inside him that wants to glut itself on Vash’s pretty little screams.

With effort, he moves his hand away, choosing to bump his knuckles up the knobs of Vash’s spine, watching a trail of bioluminescent lines ripple sleepily in his wake.

An angel fell into Wolfwood’s lap and what does he do? Bruise him. Wreck him.

Ruin him.

He picks up Vash’s hand, letting it rest in the cradle of his palm. A dark bruise surrounds the deceptively boney and delicate shape of his wrist.

(Vash on his knees, face in the comforter, arm twisted behind his back with Wolfwood’s fingers crushing his wrist as he fucks his name out of smothered lips.

“So pretty hangin’ off my cock, sweetheart.”

Vash clenching around him at the praise, whimpering as Wolfwood traces a finger over a ropey gouge in his side, the feathery touch gentle in contrast to the deep red of his abused ass. In contrast to the slap of Wolfwood’s hips against his skin as the fuck-kill-fuck-mine pushes him over the line from brutal to savage.

Vash so warm and tight and alive around him, looking so goddamned desperate with his chubby cock dribbling on the bed and slick glistening down his thighs. Desperate and unable to do anything but scream and beg as Wolfwood uses him. All of that mouthiness, all of that sass and determination reduced to brainless, wanton moans.

He comes, but Wolfwood keeps fucking him. He cries, squirming, trying to crawl away from overstimulation at the same time he rolls his hips backward, like he’s just as hungry as Wolfwood, just as animal. Like he loves the shipwreck Wolfwood makes of his body.

“Give me another one, angel. You can do that, right?”

Vash’s whole body dances with light as he screams into the bed.)

He moves the cigarette and lifts that bruised wrist to his lips.

“Getting soft on me?” Vash’s voice is hardly more than a whisper, made raw and dry by tears and the shape of Wolfwood’s name.

Wolfwood meets dazed blue eyes and very deliberately kisses his wrist again. Sweetly. Reverently. All of the things Wolfwood isn’t but Vash deserves.

And then he cuts a grin at him, bringing Vash’s hand between his thighs.

“Don’t know, Blondie. Wanna feel for yourself?”

Vash squawks and yanks out of his grasp, smacking Wolfwood hard in his ribs, doubling him over to wheeze on his laughter.

“I hate it here,” Vash says miserably, nose and mouth smashed into Wolfwood’s thigh.

Wolfwood lightly flicks the shell of a pinkened ear. “Come on, get up. Shower time.”

Vash sighs pathetically. “Can’t. Ass hurts.”

He reaches down, gives one rounded cheek a few sympathetic pats. Vash whines and tries to writhe away from the touch.

“Poor princess,” he sighs. “Guess you’re sleeping on the floor.”

“Nooo,” he warbles, looking up at him with overly-widened eyes, trying to look pitiful and mostly accomplishing vaguely deranged. “You wouldn’t do that to me, would you?”

“I will if you don’t shower.”

“But it hurts.” He oversells it by poking his lip out.

“You really need to get acting lessons,” Wolfwood sighs, smoke curling in the room as he snubs his cigarette in the ashtray. He hooks his fingers under Vash’s chin, pulls his head up, forcing his back to arch in an achingly beautiful curve as Wolfwood bows his head and kisses him.

As usual, the shower is too fucking small for two grown men.

As usual, Vash only has to bat his stupid eyelashes to get Wolfwood to stumble inside of it with him anyway. He grumbles as his calf scrapes against the concrete wall and swears when his elbow smacks into the tight, cold corner.

A shower with warm water is rare, though. Staying on the outskirts of one of the Seven definitely has its perks. Wolfwood kind of likes the way Vash goes all limp like a mushy noodle as soon as it hits his back.

Him hissing like a cat and trying to climb over Wolfwood when the water hits his still-pink ass is not as cute. Especially when a bony knee about breaks his rib.

It devolves into a weird naked slap fight after that, shoulders and knuckles banging painfully against the concrete as much as each other. It ends with Vash’s face pressed into his chest, hand holding onto his shoulder for dear life as he laughs so hard his body shakes but no sound comes out.

Wolfwood hates sharing a shower. But when Vash laughs like that, so relaxed and unselfconscious, Wolfwood supposes he hates it a little less.

He shampoos Vash’s hair for him. Mostly because he likes the way Vash’s eyes roll back when he kneads the soap into his scalp. And then it turns into him washing Vash’s body—mostly because Vash lets him, which is a rarity without a lot more bickering involved. And a little bit because the bruise on his wrist looks darker in the light of the bathroom.

He’s not sure what the twist in his gut is about—they’re (he’s) always rough, after the serum. And Vash likes it that way—not as much as sweet and slow, not as much Wolfwood’s face between his legs, shuddering and pliant as he’s brought over the edge again and again by tongue and fingers. But he likes the roughness, sometimes. Likes the bruise of impact, the sting of teeth, the meanness of being fucked.

But there’s something about the way Vash is acting now that’s unsettling him. About the way he sews their bodies together and makes it nearly impossible for Wolfwood to finish gently running the soaped cloth over the scars and dips and crevices of his skin.

“Move a little Blondie, let me get your front,” he says and doesn’t even get any sass back. Vash keeps his arm around Wolfwood and steps back, hardly freeing up enough space to wedge his hand between them. “Great, thanks,” he snarks, but gets to work when it becomes clear Vash isn’t planning on moving.

He’s still learning which scars are sensitive and which are not. How to be careful cleaning and rinsing around the port in his arm, the grate over his heart. It’s made even harder in about ten different ways when Vash leans forward again, resting his forehead against Wolfwood’s collarbone.

“We’re going to run out of warm water,” Wolfwood sighs, letting Vash plaster himself to his front again. He soaps his hands to wash his backside, not wanting the material of the cloth to irritate the sore skin.

Vash tilts his head and trails kisses across his shoulder. It’s tentative and sweet, full of something like—he doesn’t know. Devotion? Supplication? It makes his chest tighten. Vash deserves this gentle worship, not him.

“You gonna tell me what’s up?”

Vash hums, tongue darting out to lick the water from Wolfwood’s skin.

He’s reminded yet again that Vash is probably the most stubborn, immovable asshole on the entire planet. And he’s chronically allergic to straightforward conversation, unless it’s a self-righteous sermon about the sanctity of life or some shit.

If he doesn’t answer right away, he won’t at all.

The water is turning lukewarm when Vash crowds Wolfwood against the concrete wall, making him grimace when the cold, grainy texture digs into his back.

“Hey, watch it,” he grumbles, but is distracted when Vash finally leans away of his own volition. Not far, just enough to work his hand between them and trace the curve of Wolfwood’s waist, the softness of his lower belly. His fingers drag over the wet, unblemished skin.

And, because he’s gotten so damn good lately at reading those wide blue eyes, the dip of brows, the twist of that pretty mouth, Wolfwood suddenly knows. He wants to kick himself for being too stupid and selfish to get it before now.

“Hey, I’m alright,” he says, softer this time. (As soft as mashed fucking potatoes, God help him or kill him, he doesn’t know which.) He cradles the side of Vash’s head with one hand, thumbing gently at his earring. “I’m alright. I’ve been alright for most of the day. Right as sin.”

Because Vash’s fingers are outlining where he’d been riddled with bullets not even eight hours ago. Where he’d nearly punched out on life’s big timeclock before either of them had the time to administer the serum. Not that he’d have died from that. Maybe. Probably. He’s been in worse shape before. And he was already a damn cockroach before the experiments made him… well, whatever he is now.

Still. It’d been enough to put him on his ass. And he’d had to leave Vash to haul them out of there—fending off bullets and rockets and falling buildings, trying desperately to find a place to shove the poison down Wolfwood’s throat before he bled out in his arms.

“I really don’t think that’s how that saying goes,” Vash mutters. His voice sounds as wet as his droopy hair looks. Wolfwood pushes it aside, out of his eyes, only for Vash to lower his chin, hiding from his gaze and focusing on the idle patterns he makes out of Wolfwood’s invisible scars.

“It ain’t your fault, is what I’m sayin’.”

And it wasn’t. He’d been too cocky against a handful of lowlifes. He’d been watching how Vash seemed to dance as he took out his opponents with his fists while avoiding bullets at point-blank range. Hell, he’d even been laughing when he protected Vash’s back by batting his attacker away with Punisher like it was a toy and not a weapon of mass destruction. And Vash hadn’t even turned his head—didn’t give him one of those grateful looks, like he was continually surprised someone would protect him. He’d kept on fighting, because he’d known Wolfwood would be there.

Wolfwood had felt strong then, and hadn’t even felt the age-old twist at knowing what it cost him to be that strong. He was fighting back-to-back with Vash, and that’s all there was to him and to the world in those few moments, and it had been good.

It’d been fun.

And then there was an explosion, and he’d taken his eyes off of his enemies for a second, just one second—

“Wolfwood, get up! Please!”

“Stay away from him!”

Vash doesn’t say anything for a long time. The water goes cold, hits his back until he starts trembling in Wolfwood’s arms.

“Come on, Blondie.” But Wolfwood’s the one who shuffles them around until he can reach the shower handle. He somehow gets them out without falling over each other, and he towels them both dry as best he can. Vash is still shivering, so he kisses his forehead. He doesn’t know what else to do.

Vash lifts a knee in a silent plea that Wolfwood is helpless against. He carries Vash out of the bathroom with still-damp legs wrapped heavily around his hips. Vash has to duck to avoid cracking his skull on the door frame, curling over and around Wolfwood’s face until he can’t hardly see where he’s walking.

Vash decides to kiss him while he struggles to pull the ruined bedspread off of the bed with one hand, the other trying to keep his clingy bundle from slipping and pulling them both to the floor.

“You gonna help me out, or what?”

“Well, yeah, that’s why we’re doing this whole naked kissing thing,” Vash says, suddenly verbal again and being a smartass about it.

“Let go, sweetheart,” Wolfwood whispers into Vash’s throat, following it with a gentle scrape of his teeth.

“Don’t make me yet,” Vash breathes. “Just a little longer.”

Yeah, Wolfwood thinks. That’s about right. It doesn’t happen a lot, but sometimes Vash gets stupid with skin hunger. Those are the nights that he burrows so deeply into Wolfwood it’s like he’s trying to crawl into the safety of his rib cage. If they’re sleeping, Vash will wind himself around Wolfwood so tightly it feels like he’s tied down to the bed.

(Some nights he’s fine with this. Other nights he has to kick back a surge of panic at being tied down in a vulnerable position. Those nights, if he can stomach it, he’ll make Vash let go, turn him around and plaster himself along the curve of his back. Sometimes it’s still too much and he has to sit at the open window and smoke while Vash shivers around a pillow, quietly bereft and apologetic.

It pisses him off, though. That they are still taking the things he wants from him, even all of these years later.)

If they’re fucking, Vash wants Wolfwood laid out on top of him, caging him in with his body. Wants it slow and sweet, and always, always begs for him to “stay inside a little longer, Nico, please, wanna feel you, please—”

“Sorry,” Vash sighs. But he somehow wraps himself even tighter around Wolfwood, so he’s not sorry at all, as per usual.

“Didn’t even say please.”

“Please, Nick, please,” Vash murmurs so, so sweetly in his ear. “Don’t let go.”

Even with enhanced balance and strength, they end up falling on the bed in a crush of limbs, cursing, and laughter. It’s not the gentle, reverent offering Wolfwood had been aiming for, but he doesn’t care when he swallows down Vash’s giggles, when Vash squirms so beautifully under him in an effort to arrange himself without sacrificing even an inch of Wolfwood’s skin against his.

They kiss for a long time. He’d found out, early on, back when he stayed pissed off at the walking dumpster fire more than he didn’t, that Vash hadn’t been kissed much over his long life. Which, to be fair, it’s not like Wolfwood had that much more experience, either. But even back then, when Vash was a job, a self-righteous martyr that made Wolfwood’s teeth clench, he’d thought what a travesty it was that no one had shown him just how good kissing could be.

So when Vash is like this—starving for intimacy and unusually open about it, when the only thing he wants to chase is the feel of Wolfwood’s skin against his—Wolfwood makes kissing Vash into a goddamned art form.

It’s a slow exploration of a familiar mouth. A mapping of tongue and teeth and lips. He’s aggressive when Vash sighs, licking inside, fucking his mouth and chasing every breath. He’s sweet when Vash moans, kissing the corners, not daring to obstruct the sound of his name leaving those lips.

Vash settles his shoulders into the bed, lets Wolfwood kiss him stupid, lets him lay feather-soft presses of his lips against the fading bruises on his throat.

But there’s still something a little off—not wrong. Not bad. Vash sighs and hums, but his legs and arm only squeeze tighter around Wolfwood, bringing him impossibly closer, protecting him like he had earlier today from the falling building. Like Wolfwood needed it, like he deserved it.

“Come on, angel,” he murmurs. “When I said you could choke me, this isn’t exactly what I had in mind.”

Vash snorts, and it’s the ugliest sound. Wolfwood finds himself kissing his nose anyway, because it turns out he’s the biggest sucker on this shitty planet, and someone should really put him out of his misery.

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Vash says reproachfully. But he lets up, only to work his hand between them again, fingers skating over the smooth skin of Wolfwood’s abdomen.

“See?” He says, moving a hand from Vash’s hair to pat at his own side like a salesman trying to oversell a pair of shitty used tires. “Patched up like new. Good for another ten thousand iles.”

Blue eyes start to well with tears.

“Oh shit,” he says, thumbing at the tender skin under tear ducts, inanely trying to push the tears back into unfairly bright eyes. “What’s the matter, crybaby? Stop that.”

Vash snorts again, wetter than before. Wolfwood’s stupid heart might be made up of mashed potatoes, but no way is he kissing that.

“Don’t you dare snot on me.”

Vash’s eyebrows crinkle into a pout. “You ruin everything.”

“Ruined you,” he grins and runs a finger pad over the shell of Vash’s reddening ear.

Vash huffs, but he keeps his hand on Wolfwood’s stomach. The touch is so gentle his chest feels concave with it, like there’s a black hole inside of him devouring him from the inside out.

(That’s the grand ol’ irony, isn’t it? Wolfwood can make Vash look like an angel profaned—boneless and fucked out, face wet with tears and his inner thighs sticky with cum—but it’s really Wolfwood who gets ruined. Vash—tough, stubborn, immovable Vash stays the same. Wolfwood gets twisted up inside, gets infected with hope.)

“There were four bullet holes here,” Vash whispers, four of his fingers spread out over unmarked skin.

Wolfwood hums, following Vash’s gaze down his own body, throat tightening for reasons he can’t name.

Vash presses the heel of his hand against Wolfwood’s sternum. “This is where it started, though. Buckshot to the heart.”

Honestly? Wolfwood didn’t even remember that part. That must have been it, though. Buckshot to the chest would be enough to stop even him for a minute. It might have even shocked his system enough to make him freeze.

And then get riddled with bullets in the stomach in payment for the malfunctioning of his human body.

But he’s not sure about the look in Vash’s eyes. Or, well. He does know that look, because Wolfwood has observed and cataloged a frankly embarrassing mental photo album of all of Vash’s expressions. It’s a sad one. Wistful. Full of weight and guilt and grief. He knows that look, he’s just not sure why he’s on the receiving end of it.

It sort of pisses him off. Makes him feel like he’s backed in a corner, sets his teeth on edge. It makes him want to wipe that look off Vash’s face.

“It’s all good, see?” He taps his chest with two fingers. “Not a scratch. Ready for our next joyride.”

Vash exhales a half-laugh out of his nose. He meets Wolfwood’s eyes.

“Hey,” Wolfwood says. “Foul play.”

Vash crinkles a brow in silent question.

“No eye contact in this position. We agreed. It’s a verbal contract.”

“You said not during sex. This isn’t sex.”

“It feels like there might be sex soon,” Wolfwood mutters. “With you gropin’ me and all.”

He snorts. Wolfwood hates how cute it sounds. Hates that “cute” is even in his vocabulary, and that he associates it with this lanky bastard.

“I just don’t understand how you can put your face, you know—down there—” Vash gestures vaguely.

“Smooth,” Wolfwood snarks. “Real mature.”

“—but making eye contact during missionary is too intimate.”

That’s because looking into Vash’s eyes while they’re wrapped up in each other, while Wolfwood is so deep inside him that they’re sharing the same skin, gives him ideas. Like sleepy mornings with coffee and cigarettes. Like a porch swing and dinners with mashed potatoes or some shit.

(And it’s not like Vash has any ground to stand on—the first time Wolfwood took him like this, with Vash on his back and wrapped around Wolfwood like a serpent, he’d spent the entire time with his eyes closed, or looking at Wolfwood’s shoulder.)

“You break contract all of the time, then,” Vash says, and there must be an invisible line connected between the corner of his mouth and Wolfwood’s chest, because his heart trips a beat every time Vash smiles. “Can’t keep your eyes to yourself.”

“False accusation,” he grumbles. “I’m a man of my word, you know.”

(He’s right, of course. Wolfwood broke it almost as soon as he said it. It’s too tempting to watch Vash’s eyes go wide and vulnerable with wonder, like the pleasure and gentle touches to his body are new, like they’re something he never thought he’d have.

Like Wolfwood is something he never thought he’d have.

It shreds him up with that dreaded hope, every time. But Wolfwood is, admittedly, a bit of a masochist. The promise of pain only makes him chase it even more, endlessly and helplessly.)

Vash’s hand is still skimming over skin, sending a flush of arousal down his spine and into his belly. He tears his gaze away from Wolfwood long enough to eye his prosthetic on the table, like he’s thinking of putting it back on just to hold Wolfwood with both hands.

“Where’s your pretty head at tonight, princess?” Wolfwood wonders.

Another eye roll at the nickname. “I don’t know,” he mutters. “Honestly, it’s just—your skin. You don’t scar at all?”

Wolfwood kisses him then, because he always does whenever he’s reminded of Vash’s scars. He doesn’t kiss for Vash’s sake. Vash himself isn’t necessarily self-conscious about them. He rather not show them off, and definitely doesn’t want to talk about them, but he’s never shied away from Wolfwood touching them unless they were sensitive. He’s said that they’re just as much part of him as his prosthetic, and Wolfwood thinks Vash believes that on any given good day.

Wolfwood kisses him for selfish purposes. Kisses him because the thought of humans—of Millions fucking Knives—touching him, hurting him, grinding him up and spitting him out and still demanding more of him makes something black and ugly rear up inside of him. He kisses to remind himself that Vash is here, with him. He kisses to keep the violence in him at bay.

“Are you distracting me?” Vash asks when Wolfwood pulls away.

“You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?” he rasps into pinkened lips. “Woah, shit—”

The room spins as Vash flips them. He’s going for sexy, and fuck, it is hot as hell that this man could slap him through the floor if he ever took the notion. But the bed is barely a full size, and Vash about sends them crashing over the edge. There’s a lot of undignified naked flailing to keep them from going over, made all the more difficult by the undignified naked giggle-snorting.

“I’m sorry,” Vash wheezes into Wolfwood’s chest. “Holy shit, your face—”

More giggle-snorting. Wolfwood feels embarrassed for the guy, really.

“Shut up, Blondie,” he grumbles, reaching down to pinch Vash’s nose, making him choke and flail on his own laughter.

They lay there like that for a long minute, with Wolfwood idly tracing a shiny, silky scar on Vash’s shoulder and Vash spasming with random bursts of leftover laughter that he tries to tuck away and hide somewhere in the spaces between Wolfwood’s ribs.

The impending crash from two vials of serum is still a couple of hours away. His pulse is still thrumming, heart a little too fast, and he’s thinking about another smoke to take off the edge. He’s thinking about trailing those fingers down Vash’s side and up his back. He’s thinking about Vash sitting on his face, his hands wrapped around strong thighs, pulling them apart, pulling him lower as honeyed slick slides down his chin.

But Vash is kissing his chest, right where the buckshot supposedly stunned his heart for a few seconds too long earlier, and he finds himself opening his mouth for something stupid to come out, instead.

“I don’t scar.”

Vash’s eyes travel over the terrain of his unmarred body to pin him with a sharp, glowing gaze.

“Not any more.” He licks his lips, wishes there were a cigarette to gnaw, wishes he hadn’t even said anything in the first place. But he can still taste Vash on his tongue, and the echoes of his laughter thrum in his ears louder than the pulse of serum, for once. He’s drunk with it, drunk with Vash. And maybe, well. Maybe he doesn’t ever really know what he’s doing, when it comes to Vash.

“Not even the scars I had before.” He reaches up slowly, points to his own chin and looks at the gleam of Vash’s earring instead of his face. “I had one here—I don’t really remember how big it was. Or the exact shape. But I fell when I was a kid. I was feeding the thomas chicks, and the bucket was too heavy. Could barely lift it, wasn’t paying attention to where I was going. I don’t remember why I was doing it—I was too young for that chore. I tripped and fell onto the edge of the bucket, busted my chin wide open.”

He hasn’t thought of this in years. He didn’t even know he remembered it. But now it’s like he’s speaking it back into his body. He can smell the close odor of the thomas pen, the excrement and hay and seed. He remembers his vision blurring as he struggled not to cry, and Miss Melanie’s face warping into view. Her big, calloused hands gently cradling his head.

He doesn’t know… how he feels. To have a piece of Nico back, when that kid had been erased from his skin so long ago.

His chin itches, right where he remembers the scar used to be. He scratches at it.

“There was so much blood,” he whispers. “All of the other kids around me cried about it. They were so loud. I didn’t, uh. Cry.”

“Putting on a brave face, huh?”

He’d wanted to cry. He remembers the sharp headache from fighting back his sobs. It wasn’t bravery. He just… hadn’t seen the point.

But Vash is listening to him with his chin propped on the back of his hand, which is still splayed over Wolfwood’s heart. Like, for this one moment, Wolfwood is his entire world. How can he not indulge himself, just this once?

“I was a pretty brave kid,” he boasts. “There was no actin’ to it.”

“I bet you cried when you were alone and no one was watching,” Vash murmurs, the corners of his eyes crinkling with fondness. Wolfwood knows then, without a doubt, that that’s probably what Vash did, for years and years. Up until he told himself he didn’t have the right to cry at all.

“Of course I did,” he scoffs. And he had, he remembers now. But not—he doesn’t think it had been because of the stretch of the cut under the bandage, or the pull of the bruise or the ache of his busted gums.

It had been because of Miss Melanie’s gentle touch on the side of his face as she cleaned the wound. Her sweet, worried eyes. Afterward, he was perfectly capable of walking to the cafeteria for dinner, but, somehow, she had known that he hadn’t wanted to. She brought him a tray to his bed in their tiny infirmary—piled high with an extra helping of mashed potatoes, his favorite—and had sat with him with her own dinner in quiet companionship.

She didn’t have mashed potatoes on her plate. She’d given him her own serving.

“I’m sorry,” he thought he remembered her saying. “I should have been watching. I’ll do better.” Maybe he’s dreaming now, making up memories to fill in the gaps of the story. But he doesn’t think so.

No adult had ever touched him as gently as Miss Melanie had. No adult had ever, ever apologized. No other adult had ever bothered to know that he liked mashed potatoes the best. He hadn’t known what to do with the storm inside his chest, so, when Miss Melanie left with their empty plates, he’d cried and cried alone in the little infirmary.

Vash kisses his chin.

“I also had a scar here,” Wolfwood insists immediately, pointing to his lips.

“Oh really?” Vash laughs, playing along. “And what’s the story about that one?”

“There was this big dipshit kid who was an even bigger pain in the ass.”

“Ah, rumble in the courtyard against the big bad bully.”

“He was hurting,” Wolfwood says slowly, stretching his mind, trying to remember. He’d forgotten the kid’s name. He can’t think of it, not for the life of him. “And, hell. Not like I could get mad at him for that. But then he pushed around Liv—some of the other kids.”

“And little you would never have put up with that.”

“Hey, how would you know?”

“Because big you wouldn’t, either.”

Wolfwood rolls his eyes. “One day you’re going to figure out I’m not as nice as you think I am.”

Vash makes a show of looking down at their naked bodies and back up again. “You’re right,” he says, voice as dry as the desert. “I don’t know anything about you at all.”

He’s probably right. Wolfwood would rather throw himself out the goddamned window than think about how much of the ugly parts inside of him Vash sees.

“He was four times my size,” he continues. Which is a lie. The kid had really only been an inch or two taller, and just as skinny. “And he was three years older.” They’d been about the same age, he thinks. “He split my lip so bad it scarred.” Another lie. The kid had broken Wolfwood’s nose. He’d had a fat, swollen face for days.

He taps his bottom lip again, in a completely different spot than what he first pointed to, looking up imploringly. “Right here.”

“A kiss for our honest hero,” Vash says, mockingly serious. But he does kiss Wolfwood as sweetly as he’d kissed his chin.

He grips the back of Vash’s head, digging nails into his scalp as he brings him in again for a kiss that is much less sweet. He’s too rough, he knows that. Too bruising, too demanding. But, just like all of those years ago, there’s a storm in his chest and he doesn’t know what to do with it.

Kissing Vash is always a good place to start, though.

(The most obvious lip scar, of course, are the glass vials he cracks between his teeth. If he were allowed to scar, his mouth would be a riot of them. What would his lips look like now, after all of the glass he’s bit into? What would be left of his gums, of his tongue? He imagines holes in his cheeks, windows to his cracked teeth. He recoils from the image of himself—maw bloody and hungry and monstrous—and kisses Vash harder.)

It’s not too long before Vash’s lips trail down his throat to worry at his sternum again.

“It’s really buggin’ ya today, huh?”

“It felt like a close call today,” he whispers into Wolfwood’s skin, balancing all of his weight on Wolfwood so he can splay his hand over his belly. “Closer than usual.”

“I—” he cuts himself off, because what’s he going to say? I’ve had closer? I’ve had my bones crushed and twisted by that blue-haired freak and didn’t even need the meds to stay conscious through it?

“Keep telling you,” he says instead. “I’m pretty sturdy. They got me good, but it wouldn’t have—even without the meds. I would have been fine, if I needed to be.”

Vash’s smile is watery, at best. Such a crybaby. He reaches up, brushes Wolfwood’s hair out of his eyes in a casual gesture somehow more intimate than the press of their naked bodies. He gently grabs Vash’s wrist before it can retreat, holding it below the fading bruise, stroking his thumb along the soft skin of the inner wrist.

Now he can name the twist in his gut he felt earlier in the shower, when he’d looked at the bruise and felt like there was a matching one wrapped around his throat.

He’d about clocked out for good in Vash’s arms today. Or, at least, Vash had thought so. He’d been worried about Wolfwood, sick with anger, shame, and panic. He knows this, because it’s what he feels whenever Vash’s idiot kind heart leaves him broken and bloody for Wolfwood to pick up and put back together. He’d needed reassurance that Wolfwood was alive, he’d needed what they’re doing now—their bodies intertwined to sate the skin hunger. He’d needed slow and sweet. And what had Wolfwood done? Let the fucking meds turn him into a beast, let him take and take—

(Well now, Wolfwood isn’t in the habit of lying to himself. The experiments and the serum didn’t transform him into something he wasn’t already. The serum wasn’t the one that made a red and purple bruise out of Vash’s body to curb its hunger. It didn’t make Vash cry pretty, pretty tears. That was all Wolfwood—selfish and rotten. As poisonous as the meds in his bloodstream.)

The storm in him picks up its fury. Arousal and shame war within him as he chokes on unsayable things he’s never had a chance to learn the words for.

He doesn’t know what to do about it except to move Vash’s hand to his left side and press curled knuckles against the skin under his arm.

“When I was on one of my first, uh,” he breathes out, licks his lips. He had not thought this through. “One time, I wasn’t too far out from November. There was a ranch with a barbed wire fence. I didn’t want to walk all the way around the damned thing when I could cut through the property, so. I climbed the fence.”

The memory sweeps through him. He hadn’t—he hadn’t really thought of it in a while. But now he feels his ears heat with a blush and he covers his eyes with his hand, trying to stifle an embarrassed laugh. His tongue flicks over his lips, looking to play with a smoke that’s not there.

“It was so dumb. All of these—all of these, uh. Enhancements.” All of the goddamned training. “And my pants got caught in a waist-high fence trying to climb it.”

“You fell into it,” Vash finishes, sounding strained. Like he wants to laugh with Wolfwood but is too caught up in the image of someone falling into barbed wire.

“I got tangled up in it!” Wolfwood scoffs, but another chuckle bubbles past his lips. “I couldn’t get the damned thing off! The more pissed I got, the tighter it’d get.”

He remembers kicking Punisher when he finally did get free—because it was big and heavy and utterly fucking useless when it came to fighting off barbed wire.

He’d completely shredded his clothes. Had finally rolled out of the mess with barely a scrap left on him. Barely a scrap of flesh either, it’d felt like, though really the worst damage had been his side.

He’d had to take a vial of serum. He remembered wondering if it’d finally cure his idiocy.

“The rancher found me, not too long after that. I have no idea what she made of me.” A tattered, bloody man with no wounds bent under the weight of his cross. “But she figured I was the reason some of her herd was missing. She whacked me with her hat until I agreed to help her look for them. It took hours.”

He blinks up at the moonlit ceiling. He doesn’t really remember her face too well. Just graying hair, that damned hat that she swung by the string to harangue him with, and sun-faded clothes. She’d blistered his ears with her never-ending cussing. And when he’d finally escaped her crazy clutches, she’d slapped a bag with four sticks of jerky in his hand. “You must be starving. Get on outta here.”

A sound leaves Vash that is somewhere between a snort and a bleat, and he buries his face into Wolfwood’s skin to suffocate the sound before it can get even more embarrassing.

“I’m sorry,” Vash says as he laughs, and still manages to sound actually sorry. “I’m sorry, that’s—that’s horrible. I can’t imagine getting caught up in barbed wire, holy shit. But—” the laughter pressed into his body tickles, so he pokes at Vash’s face, which only earns him more giggles.

He’s laughing, too. Tongue curling behind his teeth, trying to swallow some of it before it gets too loud.

He’s never thought about the barbed wire and the mean lady rancher and laughed before. Even the part with the lady and the hat. Him writhing on the ground, barbed wire digging into his skin, that had been—that had been fucking miserable. He’d been too angry—that he was even there in the first place, that his stupidity got him in this situation, that even though it was agonizing with blood and sweat and sand, it still didn’t compare to what they had done to him.

Mostly, he’d just felt lonely. It had wrapped up his heart, his throat, just as sharply as the barbed wire. Torn and twisted him up inside so much that it never quite healed, even after he drank the serum.

He hadn’t even found the lady with the hat funny. He’d never told anyone about her—about her blistering words, and her gruff kindness with the food. It was hilarious, in retrospect. But it’s hard to laugh, when you have no one to share a funny story with. It just starts to feel sad.

Vash settles with a sigh, and then starts giggling harder and higher-pitched.

“It’s just—it’s not that different. From how you met us.” Another helpless giggle. “You went from getting tangled up in barbed wire to getting hit by a car.”

“Stryfe is a fucking menace behind the wheel,” he grouses. Because that had definitely not been the plan. He’d figured that a bleeding heart like Vash was reported to be would see a starving man and convince his companions to pull over—not have those troublesome companions run him over.

“I’m so sorry, I know that had to hurt.”

“You don’t sound too sorry.”

Vash’s shoulders shake, and Wolfwood can’t help but spread his palms over them just to feel the sheer joy—that he caused—thrumming under that pretty skin.

“Hey, princess, this story didn’t come for free, you know.”

“Right, right,” Vash chokes, coming up for air. He presses a kiss to Wolfwood’s side. “All better?”

“Don’t know. That seemed like a half-ass apology.”

“That’s because it wasn’t an apology,” Vash scoffs, but he traces the curve of him with his lips, starting at the side of his pectoral and winding down his waist. Wolfwood sighs into it, content.

Eventually, Wolfwood takes Vash’s hand and brushes it over both of his own shoulders.

“I’ve been shot here… a lot,” Wolfwood murmurs.

Vash blinks and Wolfwood shrugs.

“Most of the time, to aim Punisher, I have to face the enemy head on, shoulders square. It’s big enough to protect my stomach, but my shoulders get chewed up.” Which makes it hard to keep holding on to Punisher. Makes him tip a vial back way earlier in a fight than he usually intends to. “Too many to count. The next one will be a grain in a sea of sand.”

If he hadn’t had the meds, he probably wouldn’t have shoulders left. What’s he even saying? If he hadn’t had the meds, he’d be dead. He’d be dead today. And Vash would be dead, too. Or captured and hurt.

…Livio had shot him in the shoulders, in the collarbone, two years ago. But those marks were gone—gone like his little brother disappearing over the side of the steamer and into the sand.

Vash is sad about the sea of invisible bullet wounds in his shoulders, Wolfwood can tell. But he doesn’t try to cover it with a smile, and it’s not exactly pity. He bows his head, peppering the smooth skin with kisses, covering the flash of emotion with the hair falling over his eyes.

But Wolfwood sees it, anyway. And it takes him too long to place it, because it’s rare to see it etched in those soft features.

Anger. Anger for Wolfwood. The same kind that chokes him up every time he sees the desecration humanity has made of Vash’s body. Like he’s chewing the glass of directionless, useless resentment.

No one’s—no one’s ever been angry for Wolfwood.

The anger is as intimate as Vash’s naked body pressed against his, as Wolfwood opening up about scars he doesn’t have and laughing together in the moonlight. He feels absolutely flayed by Vash’s… what? Protectiveness? Possessiveness?

(He doesn’t call it love. That’d been burned out of him years ago, hadn’t it? Wiped clean by the serum, just like his scars.)

Teeth make a rosary of bruise-colored beads on his collarbone, and he stretches into the network of pleasure firing in his veins.

“A flagpole,” he says, eventually. He points to just below his navel.

Vash raises his head, blinks, looks down at his finger and then back up to his face.

“A flagpole?”

“A flagpole.”

Vash bites his lip, staring down between their bodies.

“You want to know?”

“It sounds awful,” Vash admits queasily. He’s already gripping Wolfwood heavily around his waist, like he’s trying to keep him safe from a threat that’s not even there. “And yet.”

“And yet?”

“I’m picturing, like. Someone throwing it like a javelin. But how did they even get it?” He bites his lip harder. “It’s going to keep me up at night. Tell me. I can handle it.”

Wolfwood snorts, brings him up by the chin to kiss his worried lip from between his teeth.

“I fell.”

“You fell? Onto a flagpole?”

“Running over rooftops is an art form. It took a while to get the hang of it.”

Vash keeps staring, shifting his weight back on his knees for balance so he can place his palm over the soft pouch of Wolfwood’s lower belly. Silence stretches between them and Wolfwood considers that maybe he’s gone too far and killed the mood. If there’s even a mood. It sort of feels like one, despite them talking around some pretty nasty injuries. He feels like he’s inside-out, the storm in his chest licking the underside of his skin. And still arousal and need hums quietly underneath it all.

And then Vash laughs, teetering on his knees as he raises his hand to try and smother it, like Wolfwood can’t hear his stupid ugly snickering.

“I’m—I’m so sorry,” he wheezes. “It’s just—it’s just that they call me a human disaster.” When he opens his eyes again, lashes damp with mirthful tears, Wolfwood forgets he’s being laughed at because his eyes are glowing. It’s not as bright as when he’s talking with another plant, and not everywhere. But at the corner of his eyes—behind his eyes—there’s a faint light that makes his blue eyes burn eerie and beautiful in the room.

(Starlight in his skin, moonlight in his eyes. Vash is a sky full of constellations and Wolfwood’s the stargazer who’s somehow been allowed to touch him.)

“If only they knew—you’re a walking hazard sign! Mostly to yourself—holy shit, Nick. Holy shit. You’re the worst.”

“Hey,” he scowls. “I don’t want to hear that from you, of all people.”

Vash’s head drops in his hand. “I don’t—” he breaks off into near-hysterical giggles. “Nick, Nick, I gotta tell you…” he lowers his voice into a whisper. “I don’t think you were very good at your job.”

“Shut up,” he grumbles, viciously pinching the meat of Vash’s thigh until he howls and flops back down way too hard into Wolfwood’s stomach.

“Watch your head, Needle-Noggin’,” he wheezes.

“Sorry, sorry,” he says, not sounding sorry at all. “Here, was it?” He asks, then sucks hard at the softness of his belly before he gets confirmation.

Heat blooms out from the touch, spreading out into Wolfwood’s hips and thighs.

“You just might make me tell you everything, if you keep going on like that.”

“Oh? Deepest, darkest secrets and desires?”

“And then some.” He digs his fingers into still-damp hair. “And then the mystery and thrill will be gone.”

“You never were that mysterious.”

“Thrilling though, right?”

“If you want to think so,” Vash says as he trails kisses up Wolfwood’s body, pausing to twist his tongue around a nipple.

“Since when were you such a tease,” he grumbles, arching up into that mouth.

“Since always. Vash the Tease. That’s what they call me.”

“That’s the lamest stripper name I’ve ever heard.”

“Are you insulting my profession?”

“Not at all, princess. Just you.”

Vash bites down wide over his chest, the flat of his tongue laving at the nipple as he does, and Wolfwood’s snark gets caught up in the gasp that spills past his lips.

“Sorry, you were saying something?” Vash asks, feigning innocence as he slowly licks at the red teeth marks he left behind.

“Shut up and get back to work.”

“Mm, yes, sir.”

And what the hell else is Wolfwood supposed to do with that? Not grind up against Vash’s body?

Little broken gasps puff over his skin as Vash chases the friction. Vash’s pretty cock is tentatively edging out from its hood again, growing in length and girth with each thrust. He opens his legs wider, adjusting for a better position, and Wolfwood can suddenly smell the sweetness and the tang of Vash’s slick.

They take their time, though. Vash is content in the want, in the torturous unraveling of unmet pleasure. (And Wolfwood, hand cradled over a wrist that is still a little bruised, can be content in the ache, too. As long as it’s Vash.)

He traces shimmering lines while Vash makes an altar out of his throat, palms scars when Vash licks into his mouth. He thumbs at the one on the right shoulder, because it always makes Vash sigh. Because he’s spent hours and hours memorizing every etching into pretty skin, folding them into his heart like Scripture.

(The only holy words he’d ever bother remembering.)

Vash is a covenant of pain and blood, a prophecy of sacrifice. But between Wolfwood’s hands, Vash is composed of whimpers and sighs, a hymn of shivering pleasure.

He spreads his hand over the grate protecting Vash’s heart. And he wonders, would you ever share the story of your body with me?

It’s selfish. And he knows it’s not the same as nostalgic stories of a bucket of thomas feed and a schoolyard bully, or darkly humorous ones about barbed wire and flagpoles. Those are the palatable stories, the ones that barely have any baggage attached to them.

Vash can heal most injuries. Can push out bullets, can knit together the cut of a blade. So it’s the devastating wounds that scar. The ones made with jagged edges, with too many bullets at once to heal, with fire and explosions, with hate and fear. The baggage tied to the corner of each scar keeps them open and raw.

He knows there are very few stories etched into that skin that Vash would consider palatable. But Wolfwood is a thing of hunger. If it’s Vash, he wants to know. Even if it’s hard to swallow.

Vash must sense Wolfwood’s curiosity. Or maybe this is Vash wanting to share unprompted—a miracle, if Wolfwood ever saw one. Whatever the case, Vash shifts his weight, balances on his knees so he can twine his fingers with Wolfwood’s. He moves their joined hands from the metal grate to a braided scar under his arm, roughly in a mirror image to the invisible barbed wire scars they laughed about on Wolfwood’s body.

Vash takes a breath, releases it. Wolfwood holds his.

“There was—one time. When some bounty hunters caught up to me. It was early on? Before the picture in the bounty poster, I mean. There was some confusion about what I looked like. Uhm. Funnily enough, there were two mercenary groups in the area, each with members that sort of fit similar descriptions. So they started going after each other for the bounty. They were tearing each other up and getting the whole town caught in the middle. And, well! They were looking for me? So! Uh. Hey, you should promise that you won’t get mad at me.”

“Too late.” Wolfwood deadpans. “You did not tell two different groups of bounty hunters who were you. You did not just hand yourself over to them on a silver fucking platter.”

“Hey,” Vash says, that nervous look flitting away in favor of a pout. “Don’t be mean, either.”

Wolfwood wraps his fingers around Vash’s chin and jaw, pulling him in for a searing kiss. It’s not an apology, but maybe it’s a promise.

“Honestly? Knowing you, it probably worked. Somehow.”

Vash actually beams at that. “Yeah! Well, I mean. I was captured, so that was a thing I had to deal with eventually. But they stopped fighting! Even started working together!”

“The Lord works in mysterious ways,” Wolfwood says, dryly. Vash definitely hears the tone, but he also cheerfully ignores it.

“Right? They were actually pretty funny! They didn’t even notice when I untied myself the first night. Just gave me a flask of whiskey and taught me a really great card game.” His eyebrows raise a little, like he’s surprised. “I’d forgotten about that.”

“Do you remember how to play it?”

“What?”

“The game.”

“Oh!” Long lashes flutter in thought. “Yeah, I think I do, actually.”

“Good. You can teach us.”

“Us?”

“Yeah. Stryfe and the big woman.”

“Man, I think I’ll pass. I’m done with Milly beating my ass at cards.”

Wolfwood’s fingers stroke the ropey scar.

“So tell me.”

“I think I probably could have gotten away from them without issue. Before anything too bad happened. I wasn’t bound anymore, I was eating with them around the campfires. I think some of them were actually pretty sorry about the whole thing.”

Wolfwood snorts. There’s that optimism again. It pisses Wolfwood off. It awes him, because, despite everything, it can work. It might not have saved July, but it saved this fucking miserable planet. It saved the orphanage. It… saved Livio.

(Depending on your definition of “saved”, anyway.)

“The… July military police came one morning. Giant tanks seemed to come from the sand itself, and ran up on our little convoy before anyone realized it. Demanded to hand me over.”

And they did, didn’t they? Wolfwood thinks grimly. Hell, he’d seen it happen before with his own eyes. You liked them, were kind to them, but you were always just a meal ticket to them.

“I—one of the leaders was in the car with me and he told me that he was going to tell July to pull over. And when he got out of the car, he was going to leave the keys in the ignition. And that I should try to run.”

Wolfwood’s eyebrows climb. “You’re shitting me?”

“My charm does work on more people than just you, you know.”

“Fuck you. You’re about as charming as a broom.” And then, because he knows it’ll make Vash laugh (and because, sometimes, he genuinely wonders), “but who else has your so-called charm worked on, Blondie?”

Vash does smile at that, kissing the corner of his mouth. He doesn’t answer, though, grinning wider when Wolfwood scowls up at him.

“July police are fucking crazy. Did you know that? They—they caught up to me in Jenora Rock, too. And they were just going to bomb the whole town? To make the duel more flashy?”

“Stryfe told me,” Wolfwood sighs. He hated the big cities. They called the far-flung villages the boonies, full of stupid rednecks and lawless men. But something about the Seven were rotten, in his opinion. Opulent, almost beautiful, if anything man-made could be called that on this miserable planet. But they were wrong in a lot of ways, and it was always jarringly evident in their leadership and police forces.

“I don’t… actually remember it all. The bounty hunters pulled over. The police… didn’t. There was no time for me to even make it to the driver’s seat. Before, uh. Before the tank rammed into us, and the fire started.”

Wolfwood flips them on the bed—a little more gracefully than Vash’s attempt, thankfully. He kisses Vash’s brow once before moving to Vash’s side, pressing his lips against the scar Vash got while his enemies-turned-allies likely died around him. While he tried to save them, maybe, if he was conscious enough. Only for them to stumble into the meat grinder that was July’s fancy government-issued artillery.

Fingers wind into the hair at the back of his head, like Vash is anchoring himself before he continues.

“I’m not sure what happened.” Vash is a shit liar when he’s forced to tell one directly. So Wolfwood knows it’s a lie, but he decides to run his tongue along the texture of the scar instead. “Woke up in their custody.” Truth. “I… didn’t stay with them long.” Lie. “Got out as soon as I could.” Truth. “And stayed away from July and the bigger cities for a long, long time.”

The implications are left between them. If Vash had stayed closer to July, would Knives have gotten to him sooner?

Would Vash have gotten to Nai sooner?

“...I should have done the window story,” Vash whispers. “I’m sorry.”

Wolfwood huffs through his nose. He needs a fucking cigarette. He very, very gently scrapes his teeth on the skin just around the scar, holding on to Vash tighter when he shudders.

“Window story?” Wolfwood asks, kissing up his body before teasing at a pink nipple.

“Turns out, there’s an artform for jumping out of windows, too.” He distractedly pats at his chest and stomach. Wolfwood can’t make out much in the patchwork that is his chest, but he does see smaller, shallower scars on his belly.

“Christ, did you belly flop through it?”

“Maybe,” Vash sighs, a little ruefully. “There also may have been a… series of windows. Anyway.” Now it’s Vash’s turn to push on Wolfwood’s head impatiently. “Get back to the tongue stuff. And the teeth stuff. It’s good.”

“It’s just—the physics of it doesn’t work.”

Vash tugs his hair, and the spark of pain fizzes all the way down his spine. “Nick.”

“Alright, princess,” Wolfwood mocks, but dutifully kisses at the white, shallow scars around his navel.

“Oh,” Vash sighs, arching his back, pressing his belly further against the scruff of Wolfwood’s chin. “Oh, yes. Hairy face thing. Also good. Keep doing that.” He pulls on his hair again to underline his demand.

He huffs, halfway thinks of snarking back but then Vash spreads his legs and Wolfwood’s head goes funny with the smell of his arousal. He starts salivating like a goddamned dog. He swallows hard against the pools gathering in the corners of his mouth, working himself lower until the tapered end of Vash’s cock bumps against his chin and dribbles beads of sticky pre-cum against the line of his jaw.

“Please sit on my face,” he blurts out, because his head is too stuffed with cotton to think of anything less desperate to say. The response punched out of Vash is somewhere between a moan and a laugh.

“Jesus fuck, Nick.”

“Mm,” Wolfwood hums into the skin beneath his lips. “You’re absolutely right. Gonna come in you again first, then you can sit on my face while I eat it all out.”

Vash babbles an incoherent response and tugs on his hair again without letting up this time. The sharp sting turns into one long stretch of pleasant pain.

“I do so much better with goals, you know.”

“Do you ever shut up?” Vash grumbles.

“Don’t talk bad about yourself like tha—ah,” he breaks off with a hitch when nails dig into his scalp. He answers the abuse with a scrape of his teeth over the tender skin of Vash’s belly.

“Kiss me?” Vash asks.

“I’d like to know what you think I’ve been doing.”

“C’mon, you contrary bastard.” Fingers spread over the back of his head, cup the base of his neck. “Please, Nick?”

“Well, I don’t know,” he drawls even as he lifts himself up on his elbows. Because he’s always followed Vash, hasn’t he? There’s never been any other choice, as far as he can recall. “I guess since you asked nice—”

Vash shuts him up with a kiss, pulling his hair again to keep him there, leaving Wolfwood no room but to open up and take it.

“Thank you,” Vash breathes against his mouth when they part again.

“Hah?” Wolfwood tries huffs, somewhat confused and definitely dazed by the addictive taste of Vash on his tongue. “Trust me, sweetheart, eating you out is my heavenly commission—”

Vash slaps his hand over his mouth and Wolfwood raises his eyebrows like, really? This is what makes you blush?

“For—telling me. About your scars. I’m covering your mouth so you don’t get snarky.” Wolfwood scowls. Vash kisses the back of his own hand, like he’s kissing Wolfwood through it. It’s cute. He fucking hates cute.

“Your—the enhancements only erase them from the skin.” Vash continues after licking his lips. “I’m just saying that—all that happened to you is still there. You’re still there. Right? And you shared some of it with me. Thank you.”

Wolfwood scowls harder. He licks Vash’s palm, annoyed when he doesn’t even flinch.

(Something about those glowing blue eyes, about the small and real smile on Vash’s face keeps him from even thinking of knocking the hand away.)

“If I let you go, are you going to be an asshole?”

Wolfwood takes a long moment to consider.

“Come on,” Vash wheedles, kissing the crease between his brows. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

He rolls his eyes, nods his head, and licks his lips when Vash lets him go. “I can’t believe you’d think I’d be an asshole. That hurts, princess. I mean. You’re, you know. Mashed potatoes, or whatever. It’s, uh. Good. Yeah.”

Vash blinks. Whispers, “what the fuck?” Blinks again. He’s clearly waiting for an explanation for whatever the hell just came out of Wolfwood’s dumbass mouth.

Well, he’s not getting one. They can both die confused.

He’s also not going to say some dipshit thing like—what? You’re welcome? You’re welcome for talking about the scars I don’t have? Or, I only told you the absolute surface of the horror story that is my body. I think the serum might have wiped out more than my skin, I think it wiped my heart, my fucking soul. But I do think of porch swings and quiet dinners with mashed potatoes sometimes when you smile at me, so there’s that?

“What do you want?” He asks instead.

“To know if calling me mashed potatoes was an insult,” Vash immediately responds.

“Vash,” he rasps, and is treated to Vash’s starlight eyes going wide and unblinking, staring up at him with his lips parted in wonder like he always does when Wolfwood uses that tone. “What do you want?”

“To ride you,” he says. “But I want to…” He licks his lips and then whispers like he’s keeping a secret from himself, “I want you to keep holding me.”

“Yeah, pretty thing,” he says between sweet, reverent kisses to Vash’s throat, making sure to rub the roughness of his chest against the vulnerable skin. “So good for me,” he praises, and makes sure to touch his lips to the salt that beads on Vash’s eyes. “I’m gonna give you what you want.”

And he does.

He moves to sit with his back against the headboard. Vash straddles his lap, hips rocking down against him before they’re even settled. Their cocks drag together, the nodes on Vash’s length giving frenetic stimulation in contrast to the wet, velvet heat of his unfurling petals.

Wolfwood slides his hands up and down Vash’s back—a thing of strong, graceful beauty he doesn’t even have to see to appreciate. He spreads out and holds the ripple of muscle in his palms, thumbs at the soft dip under a sharp shoulder blade. He bumps his fingers achingly slow down the corridor of Vash’s spine, then repeats it until Vash gasps and leans into the touch, dancing beautifully like a pale flame in the dark room.

He feels them, then—the thin but deep and jagged scars along Vash’s spine. Scars from where his own brother had shoved his murder tentacles straight into Vash’s neural network and invaded him like a virus. If the other scars on his body are a covenant in blood, these at the base of his neck and down his spine is Cain’s betrayal. A violation most unholy.

He swallows the urge to dig his fingertips in, to try and annihilate Knives and the cross of guilt he dared to lay on someone like Vash. Wolfwood is not a gentle creature, but he swallows the bitter hate like glass and traces these scars like every other on his lover’s body—lightly, reverently, respectful of the stories known and unknown behind each of them. It’s the least Vash deserves, and the least he can give.

(And light touches make Vash curl into him, make him quake in Wolfwood’s arms. A stranger to kindness, he unravels and blooms at each soft touch.)

“Nick,” Vash hums, bearing down on him with a long, wet kiss. “Please.” His hand braces against Wolfwood’s chest, thumb sliding along the healed-over buckshot wounds, over scars that never got a chance to form. And, again, more quietly, like Wolfwood isn’t meant to hear it— “thank you.”

There’s a storm in his chest. And he can feel all of his scars—the one that were burnt clean by the serum. The scar on his chin, the taste of tears and mashed potatoes. The barbed wire, the glass in his gums, the flagpole. His skin is clean, but it feels like the hurt is tattooed on the underside of his skin.

What good is a near-perfect healing, if it only makes him blank? If it only makes him so smooth that everything—touch, pain, pleasure, laughter, memories, himself—just slides right off?

His throat is tight, his heart is a web of fractures. “Thank you,” Vash had said to Wolfwood, of all people. What a beautiful dumbass.

He makes sure Vash is steady before reaching between them and moving their hands to Wolfwood’s cheekbone. He’s not going to say some dumbass thing like you’re welcome, and he’s certainly not sure how to say thank you, thank you, you beautiful, terrible angel.

But he can do this.

“Brass knuckles,” he says, and doesn’t say, from the brother of the woman I killed. I don’t remember their names. I think you would have remembered. I think you maybe could have saved them both. Or died with them.

Vash kisses his cheek even as he entwines their hands, palm-to-palm. “Cooking grease.” From the orphanage. It’d been a shiny pink scar for months and months, until the poison coursing through his veins knit new skin over it. It’d taken him years to even remember that it had been there at all.

And then, while Vash is kissing the palm of his hand, he uses his other to guide fingers to his throat. “Wire.” Is all he says. And then, trying not to shake, he rubs the back of Vash’s knuckles down his sternum. “Scalpel.”

They cut me up, he doesn’t say. Skinned me like an animal for its useful parts. That’s all I was. A resource. He doesn’t say, I think the clinical way they did it burned out the humanity in me before the meds ever did.

Vash’s neck bows beautifully to drop a kiss on his chest and Wolfwood thinks, what the hell am I doing? He’s got Vash in his arms, wet and wanting on his lap, skin singing with starlight, and here he is picking at scars on a soul that isn’t there anymore. And yet his aching desire only simmers brighter, stoked with every rasp of skin.

He waits for Vash to lean back. His lashes are wet, but there aren’t tears that Wolfwood can find in his eyes. They stay there for a minute, and he takes that time to wonder why he’s breathing so hard already. Their hands stay loosely entwined with each other, hovering between their bodies.

Wolfwood waits with a silent question he’s not sure he wants to ask.

Then, Vash pulls his hand to the pins in his shoulder, swallows, and says, “a building.” Wolfwood stretches to kiss the shoulder, lips studying the changes in texture, as Vash skims the tips of Wolfwood’s fingers against the perpetually-raw patch of knotted skin on his back. “Fire.”

Wolfwood can’t reach there, so he just kisses Vash on the mouth while his fingers lightly caress the outermost skin surrounding the scar.

Vash sighs, chest heaving, shaking on each exhale as he brings their hands to his throat. There’s not a scar there. Or maybe there is—if the light is right, and Wolfwood squints. But whatever the injury was there must have been moderate enough to heal.

Or serious enough for Vash to expend some of his life energy to heal.

“Rope,” he whispers. Wolfwood swallows down words he doesn’t know how to say and instead cups the back of Vash’s neck, kissing that long, beautiful throat so gently a starburst of geometric lines ripple out from where his lips meet skin.

His head tries to fill in the stories Vash doesn’t say, but that’s an exercise in rage, and the turmoil inside him is volatile enough. Instead, he holds Vash’s hand tighter, kisses him sweeter.

“Sword,” Wolfwood says, bumping their hands against his thigh.

That makes Vash pause. “Sword?”

“Sword,” Woflwood confirms, fighting a grin. The story behind it is far from funny, but the bewildered wrinkle in Vash’s brow inexplicably soothes the jagged edges.

“Rocket launcher,” Vash returns, moving their hands against his hip.

“Show off.”

“Amateur,” Vash scoffs, a tilt to his mouth that’s sadder than a smile has any right to be.

Wolfwood rolls his hips up into Vash, choking on a moan because he feels so open and vulnerable and Vash feels so fucking good. He does it again, harder, just to see Vash bounce in his lap, just to watch the memorizing the way his lips part on a silent gasp.

“Nick,” he gasps. “Oh, oh, please.”

“Please what?” He teases. He’s so hard he hurts, knows he’s not going to last much longer, but still can’t help but rile Vash up.

He pulls at Vash until he’s standing higher on his knees so Wolfwood can position his cock at the wet, tight entrance. He slides the head between sopping petals until honey glistens down the length. Then he rubs it over Vash’s hole before pulling away meanly, making Vash writhe as slim hips rut against empty air, chasing and begging with every inch of his body.

“Fuck you,” Vash swears but any bite to it is taken away by his hoarse whimper.

“‘s what I’m waiting for, princess. Sure you’re trying hard enough?”

He thinks he might have actually gotten slapped for that, if Vash were a little more coherent and didn’t need his hand braced on Wolfwood’s shoulder for balance. He still tries, only for his hand to slip to his throat, pressing against his larynx in a way that elicits a spark of sharp pain and makes the muscles convulse involuntarily. Wolfwood hurriedly grips the base of his cock, not wanting to be dragged over the edge until he’s inside of Vash.

Vash’s cheeks are red with frustration and arousal and it’s oh so pretty with the flush of starlight under his skin.

“C’mon, angel,” he says against Vash’s panting mouth, and accepts the bruising sting of preternaturally sharp teeth biting his lip as his punishment for the teasing. “Sing for me.”

Vash sits himself slowly with quaking thighs. The tight press into his soft, warm body has Wolfwood’s head falling forward with a groan that chokes itself on the hand still around his throat. And then he’s seated to the hilt with Vash clenching around him, trying to work him in impossibly deeper, like he’ll never be full enough.

“Easy,” Wolfwood breathes, bringing Vash’s forehead against his.

“Look who’s talking,” Vash manages between shuddering breaths. It’s true, Wolfwood’s toes are already curling in the sheets, muscles twitching with the dual urges to fuck up into Vash and to slow down so he doesn’t embarrass himself. Still, it’s big talk from someone who’s got drool glistening at the corner of his mouth.

“You really piss me off.” And he doesn’t say, I think you’re porch swings and sunsets and mashed fucking potatoes.

“I know,” Vash says. “Please shut up and fuck me,” he whispers, even as he’s the one to lift himself up on his dick and roll back down again. Wolfwood thinks he probably means, shut up and hold me like you promised.

He wraps his arms around Vash, holds him as tightly as he can while trying to thrust up into close, velvety heat. Vash falls into Wolfwood, slides his hand from his throat to the back of his head, holding him in place for as many kisses as he wants, for as many kisses as it takes until their mouths ache. Vash’s skin shimmers and it’s like a sky’s worth of constellations fold over Wolfwood, shielding them both in a cocoon of gentle light.

But Wolfwood can’t get enough of and tries to hold him even closer, wanting Vash on his skin and under it. Wanting him imprinted so deeply the serum could never wash this away from him.

He keeps guiding their joined hands over his body, over scars long since vanished. He doesn’t really know why he’s keeping this up, why he’s insisting on this silent pilgrimage over pain that no longer matters.

Except with each touch, with each mute acknowledgement of a buried scar, he feels more real than he has in a long, long time. Like pieces of himself being painfully restitched into his bones and he’s more Nicholas. More human.

He pulls knuckles over his ear, and doesn’t say, shrapnel near about took it off.

He bumps their hands against his side and doesn’t say, I thought I’d disarmed my target, but I was so, so wrong—it’s why you scare the hell out of me, turning your back on people.

He presses into his gut, and bites at Vash’s throat instead of saying, they tested to see if I could take a beating if I were captured, and if I could escape with broken ribs and a broken arm—and if I could kill everyone on my way out.

Vash kisses everywhere they touch, following a trail of Wolfwood’s invisible scars with tongue and teeth. When he can’t bend to kiss his stomach, he just kisses his mouth, hard, as if he could reach the spot from the inside out.

In turn, Vash moves their hands over his own body. Wolfwood has spent hours exploring these same scars, but having Vash guide him is a revelation more profound. No more words are coming from Vash either, no more stories.

But they’ve existed between the lines together from the very first day they met, so while Wolfwood doesn’t know the words, doesn’t know the details of the pain Vash guides him through, he understands.

Shakily, he rests his forehead against Vash’s as he forces their combined hands down hard on his hip. Hard enough to bruise. He doesn’t say, they held me down here. They held me down while they tried to see how much they could take from me. It was brutal and I thought I was going to burst from the inside out. They called it training, but they laughed while they hurt me. They laughed and laughed.

Vash, in response, brings Wolfwood’s hand over his leg, which is shaking so pretty with his slow fucking. He spreads out Wolfwood’s fingers, moves them inward over tender skin into the inner crease of his thigh, barely brushing against the puffiness of his swollen petals.

Then Vash makes him press down, hard enough to bruise.

Wolfwood doesn’t know what that means—if it’s the same miserable implications of his own, or if it’s something else. Knows he’ll never ask, and Vash will probably never tell.

(And it’s not the same. Wolfwood’s body is a tool. What they did—even when they laughed and laughed, even when they were silent like it was a job, like they were punching a clock—was like forging a weapon. He had to be built, broken, and re-built.

If these same savage hurts happened to Vash—and he holds him closer at the thought, kisses him gently, digs his fingers in more possessively—then it was a desecration. Violation. A sin of the lowest order.)

Wolfwood works his fingers from the crush of Vash’s hand and turns the touch to gentleness. He skates finger pads over the skin, just shy of a tickle, until Vash gasps and shivers. He grinds down with Wolfwood deep inside him, chasing his own pleasure.

They keep mapping their own bodies for the other. Except, sooner than later, it turns from they hurt me here, they hurt me into kiss me, touch me, bite me until their scars—seen and unseen—are just for them.

He knows when Vash is close—sees how his long lashes flutter, how he curls in on himself. He reaches between them, Vash’s hand still in his, and wraps their joined fingers around his hard, dribbling cock.

The moons shine on Vash’s hair, on his collarbone and shoulders as he throws his head back with a broken psalm on parted lips.

And Vash shines back.

“Get up, princess. Time to go,” Woflwood calls as he bursts through their hotel room door. The morning sun glares brightly into all four corners, highlighting a human-shaped lump that’s buried in a tight ball under the covers.

He opens Vash’s duffle, digging down past the red coat to pull out a fresh set of clothes for him. He balls them up and pelts them hard at the lump, eliciting a bleating moan from the bed.

“Rise and shine, seize the day and all of that. Aren’t you an annoying morning person? Time to be annoying.”

Another bleat and a stirring of sheets echoes behind him as he gathers their soiled clothes from yesterday.

“‘M tired. And starving.” The bed complains.

“Oh, shit, you’re right. I brought you doughnuts,” Wolfwood grumbles, checking his goddamned pockets of all things before clicking his tongue in annoyance at himself.

“Doughnuts?” The bed asks, hopeful.

“Where’d—?” He turns, finding a crumpled paper bag slumped sadly next to the door frame where he had dropped them.

“Sprinkles?” The bed asks.

“Yes, you big baby. Here. Eat.” He strides over, lifts the corner of the rucked sheets, and tosses the bag in like he’s tossing in a grenade.

“Ow—oh! Doughnuts!” The sheets start making weird cooing gremlin noises. Wolfwood must have had one too many hits to the head, because he finds it cute. He makes a face at himself and stuffs their dirty clothes into Vash’s duffle.

“Get your arm on, honey, we’re going out on the town.”

“Really? I thought it’d be nice to stay in today.” Or at least, that’s what Wolfwood thinks he says—most of its garbled by a mouthful of doughnut.

“You never take me anywhere nice. Makes a guy feel some type of way.”

Vash pops out of the sheets with half of a doughnut hanging from his mouth. His hair sticks straight up from his forehead and out like a fan. He’s got chocolate on his cheek and probably all over the goddamned sheets.

Vash tongues the rest of the doughnut into his mouth, cheeks bulging ridiculously, and swallows. He squints. “What’s going on?”

“I just think it’s a nice, sunny day. Hate to waste it.”

“It’s always sunny.” But Vash gets up and starts getting his pants on, a process that is slowed immensely because he keeps stopping to eat.

Wolfwood strides across the room in two steps, bends and grabs the waistband of Vash’s pants from around his knees, and pulls them up in one harsh jerk that sends Vash sprawling back down on the bed with a squawk.

“What? I’m helping.” He dodges a wayward heel to the shoulder, but gets nailed by the one to his thigh. “Be still. Enjoy your doughnuts.”

“Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” Vash asks, staring morosely up at the ceiling as Wolfwood wrestles with his pants. He doesn’t stop eating.

“Something always is!” Wolfwood says cheerfully. From between his teeth.

He rests a knee next to Vash’s hip and leans across him and the bed for the prosthetic, gun and glasses. He slows down when he reattaches the arm, making sure everything is aligned and secure before gently rubbing the muscles of his upper arm with his palms and the heels of his hands. “Good?”

“Yeah,” Vash mumbles around his last mouthful, rolling his shoulder as he stands. “What’s going on? Are we running?” He reaches for his shirt at the same time Wolfwood kneels in front of him with the thigh holster, making Vash freeze comically with his shirt clutched to his chest. “What are you—woah.”

Wolfwood eyes him up the length of his body and tightens the buckle of his holster even more, grinning.

“What’s the hold up, Blondie?”

“Well, that—that’s uh. A thing. That’s happening.” Here, he gestures to his thigh and all of Wolfwood. “It’s just weird because now it sort of feels like we should be getting undressed?”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Wolfwood says as he tucks in the last strap and slides the gun in the holster. He leans forward and bites Vash’s inner thigh through his pants, right over one of the leather straps.

“Oh,” Vash shudders, collapsing in on himself until he has to brace his hands on Wolfwood’s shoulders. “Are we really not going to do something about this now, or—shit, why are you bleeding?”

“Because I got shot,” Wolfwood says airily as he leans back. “Put your boots on.”

“Stop bossing me around!” Vash hisses, hands hovering from his boots to Wolfwood’s shoulder and back again like he can’t quite decide what to do. “What do you mean you got shot? It’s not even eight in the morning!”

Wolfwood tilts his head. “I don’t think the time of morning has anything to do with whether or not anyone gets shot.”

“I mean what did you do? You only left the room like, what? Not even an hour ago?”

“I think we’re experiencing a role reversal here, and I don’t like it,” he grumbles as he stands.

“Come here, let me see—”

“Hey, quit pawin’ at me! It’s just a graze.”

“It is not, I can see an actual hole in your shirt—oh, good. Two holes.”

“Healed, aren’t they?”

“You took a vial?”

“Well, yeah—I got shot. And there were extenuating circumstances.”

“Oh,” Vash says, looking sad. “I’m sorry.”

Wolfwood’s going to strangle someone. Probably Vash. Maybe even himself.

“For what?”

Vash finally gives up trying to manhandle him and just steps around to view the damage.

“Well, it’s usually my fault? That’s what you shout at me, like. All of the time.”

“And you listen?” Wolfwood asks incredulously. “Well, hate to break it to you, Blondie, but this miserable planet doesn’t actually revolve around you—” he breaks off when lips press against the raw skin exposed by the hole in his shirt.

“Oh, hey,” Vash says brightly. “You can shut up. Neat.” And then he kisses the other healed-over bullet hole, his prosthetic hand moving to gently hold his other shoulder.

He swallows, glad for his sunglasses even when he knows they’ve never hid jack shit from Vash. He tilts his head, cutting his eyes over his shoulder to meet Vash’s soft gaze.

“Big talk from someone with doughnut all over his face. You look like you stuck a finger in an electrical outlet.”

Vash rears back, gasping, dropping his shirt in favor of reaching up with both hands to try and smooth down his wild hair. “You are so mean.”

Wolfwood catches his shirt before it can hit the floor and immediately yanks one of Vash’s arms, trying to force it on. “I told you to put your shirt on!”

Vash shrieks, still trying to fix his hair with one hand while pushing his other against Wolfwood’s face to ward him off.

Naturally, it devolves into a slap fight.

They freeze when a crash resonates a couple of floors below them, followed by a clamor of indecipherable shouting.

Vash blinks at him. His shirt is on backwards, and only one arm and his head has managed to get in the proper holes.

“Extenuating circumstances, huh?” Vash asks as he hurriedly fights against his own shirt.

Wolfwood doesn’t even try to claim that the noise downstairs isn’t here for him. Instead, satisfied that Blondie is finally getting moving on his own, he hurriedly gathers their things, checking the bathroom to make sure they don’t leave behind anything important.

“There might have been an asshole in the bakery line,” Wolfwood grumbles. “And a nice lady with a kid. And really hot coffee.”

“You’re saying a bunch of words but not telling me what they mean.” Vash quickly checks the chamber of his gun before holstering again and diving for his shoes, hopping around like a dumbass trying to pull them on instead of untying them.

“And a vehicular collision.”

“What? Why were you in a car?”

Wolfwood’s silent.

“Oh my God, you weren’t in a car! You got hit by one. Again!”

The shouting below gets louder.

“You got hit by a car and shot in less than an hour while trying to get doughnuts.”

“Hey, maybe shut up and get moving, Blondie?”

“You’re a walking hazard sign,” Vash says, and it’s unbearably fond. Wolfwood grimaces in disgust.

“Hey, just thought of another scar. The one from yesterday that’s your fault, remember?” He points to his ass. “You should kiss it.”

Vash rolls his eyes, raising his prosthetic to flip him off, which causes him to drop his boot. Off balance, he stumbles, accidentally kicking the boot under the bed.

Thundering footsteps crash up the stairs.

“Oh shit!” Vash hits the floor, wedging his arm under the bed, scrambling for his boot. “Shit, shit—hey, no, come on, come back here!”

“Blondie,” Wolfwood growls, tying off the duffle and hefting Punisher. “We gotta go now.”

“I’ve almost got it!”

“Leave it!”

“What, no! It’s my shoe!”

The crescendo of shouting means that the angry mob is now on their floor.

“Time’s up!” He drops the duffle and pulls Vash up by the waist of his pants.

“Got it!” Vash cheers from the floor, nearly smacking Wolfwood in the head with his brandished boot.

“Great, we’re going now.”

“Going how? Oh. Shit.”

Wolfwood runs for the window, hand still in Vash’s clothes because he’s a slippery bastard who will disappear on him if he turns his head for one goddamned second. Vash bleats and squawks, lunging and managing to grab his duffle with the hand not clutching onto his boot.

He whips Punisher in front of him like a shield, the crack and crash of the window breaking ringing in his ears.

And then the wind is in his face, Vash is in his hands, and they’re free-falling against the impossibly blue sky.

end.