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“You’re sure this’ll fit?” Wolfwood asks, lifting the hanger dubiously. The shirt is crisp and white, whiter than Wolfwood’s shirts ever manage to stay, with the way he smokes. There’s a decorative sort of stitching down the front, like frills without the frill — folded paneling that looks at once delicate and strong, like gills on the underside of a mushroom.
He wonders, idly, where she got it. With how clean it is — and the fact that she’s wearing an identical one — she probably has a good few of them. Uniform from Bernardelli, maybe.
Milly just tsks at him, giving the lapel of his ruined suit another tug. “Well, you can’t keep wearing this, mister priest, it’s full of holes.”
“ I’m full of holes, honey,” Wolfwood replies. Vash patched him up already, and the damage isn’t quite as bad as it looks from the state of his suit, but still. “I’ll get blood all over your pretty white shirt.”
“That’s all right.” Milly grins. “I have plenty. Bernardelli gives us a budget specifically for clothes. There’s a certain level of professionalism expected from insurance agents, and it’s awful easy to get everything dirty out here.”
So he was mostly right about the shirts. Wolfwood fusses with his own nicotine- and blood-stained button-down with a sudden rush of self-consciousness. “The Lord sees your sacrifice for the good of the poor and unclothed,” he deadpans, drawing a lazy sign off the cross in the air.
Just as intended, Milly’s smile breaks into giggling. “Are you going to change, or are you going to keep being silly?”
Wolfwood feigns an offended gasp. “Me, silly? You wound me, Milly. I’m wounded!” he winces. “Even more wounded.”
Milly makes a gentle sympathetic noise, her hand reaching back out to smooth across the side of his shoulder, one of the few places not spattered with shrapnel and wrapped in bandages, her thumb moving in gentle circles against his upper arm.
Something in Wolfwood’s chest seizes up, entirely without reason or permission. Her compassion, extended so willingly and with such earnestness — something snarled and bitter deep in his gut warns him of accepting things too good to be true, and something bright and warm as a struck match in his heart takes it for the absolution that it feels like it must be.
He could be forgiven, has been forgiven, for coming home to her tattered and bloodstained. She’s cast her eyes over the realities of him and only paused to offer the clothes from her back.
“Mister priest?” Milly asks, the voice gentled, from teasing to something closer to concern. “Are you all right?” she touches her cheek thoughtfully. “Is there something on my face?”
Wolfwood shakes his head, forcing himself to drop his gaze. Miracle enough that he, barely-ordained priest that he is, attracted the attention of one angel on his journey into Hell, much less two. He shouldn’t press his luck with either of them, and Vash has already given him grief today — for the same self-sacrificial shit he does on a daily basis, so it really shouldn’t be such a damn production when Wolfwood does it—
Milly’s hands come to rest against Wolfwood’s jaw, cradling his face and startling the fucking daylights out of him. She murmurs apologetically, thumbs grazing over his cheeks. He wishes, with a sudden intensity so harsh that it’s painful, that he’d shaved this morning, so her hands wouldn’t have to scrape over stubble.
“Are you all right?” she repeats.
No. Not really.
“Just fine, honey,” Wolfwood says, bumping his forehead against hers. He wants to kiss her, but he’s only done that the once, while they were both pretty thoroughly drunk. She’d been shirtless, her bare chest under his hands, but when she’d started on his buttons in turn he’d flinched and fled.
He’s not taking chances trying it again. Not with something this important.
“You’ve got that look on your face,” Milly says, her voice low and gentle, some of the usual chirpy affectation to her voice dropped in favor of a warm note of worry. “Like a spooked toma.”
Spooked is the right word for it — he feels like he’s dancing on hot coals, with his heart if not with his feet. Like any day now, any minute now, this whole precarious arrangement is going to fly out from underneath him, send him sprawling and left alone again, trailing after Vash like a lost dog.
Wolfwood forces himself to breathe, slow and deep, settling the sharp flutter in his chest. “Your hands are warm,” he murmurs. Then, before he can second-guess himself, he shrugs off the tattered jacket, letting it drop to the floor. “How about you help me out of this thing?”
Milly pauses just for a moment. Then she drops her hands — Wolfwood regrets his choices immediately as her touch vanishes from his skin, leaving only the faintest warmth behind — and reaches for his buttons. Wolfwood twitches as her fingers graze over his skin, but he forces himself to let her do it, holding himself still as she pushes the shirt over his shoulders and drags it down his arms.
“Oh,” she murmurs, as her gaze falls on the bandages wrapped around his torso, bringing out that sympathetic hum again. “That doesn’t look comfortable at all.”
It jolts Wolfwood just as badly the second time, his heart leaping into his throat. He fights the flinch — he hadn’t winced at all when Vash pulled buckshot from his chest, but the tenderness of Milly’s hands is far sharper than the pain.
“Not as bad as it looks,” he breathes, keeping his voice quiet so it won’t do something stupid like waver or crack. “Vash wrapped me up like a mummy, it’s really only mmph —”
The words drop from his mouth and then out of his mind entirely as Milly’s lips press against his, a kiss so quick and chaste he almost thinks he imagined it, if not for the way his skin burns with it.
Milly’s smiling, gentle and fond and worried in a way that makes him ache, he doesn’t want to worry her. “I’m very glad you’re all right, mister priest.” She kisses him again, and Wolfwood expects to taste blood in his mouth, for how much it hurts.
“I’m,” Wolfwood wheezes. His fingers are numb. His heart is pounding in his chest. He wants to collapse into her arms and never reemerge. He wants to bring her home. He wants to bring all of them home, her and Meryl and Vash, sit down at the dining room table with the kids swarming around them, swarming and giggling and asking prying questions, he wants to go home—
He takes a step, a breath, crowding up into Milly’s space, like he somehow forgot she was there, lurching toward the door without thinking. Blood rushes to his head—
Hands on his face again, thumbing over his cheekbones. Milly’s voice, warm and sweet as honey, right in his ear, too quiet to be heard over his blood pounding in his ears, but impossible to ignore — the cadence as steady as a heartbeat, some gentle repetition, I’m here, or you’re safe, the same way Wolfwood would talk to a frightened kid.
Slowly, slowly, he starts to breathe again.
“There you are,” Milly says. She kisses the tip of his nose. They’re kneeling, now, forehead to forehead. He’s practically in her lap. She shifts her weight, hooks one leg around his waist, frowns gently at him.
Wolfwood takes a breath, swallows hard around the shame. He lets himself slump, resting his forehead on Milly’s shoulder. “I’m,” he tries again. “I’m sorry.”
Milly slips her fingers into his hair and pulls his head back, looking at him sternly. “What you are, mister priest, is very stubborn. ”
He can’t even argue with her. He shrugs, helplessly, tries for a smile and doesn’t quite stick the landing, but manages something close. “Guilty.”
“You need rest,” Milly tells him firmly, untangling herself from him and rising to her knees. Her hands, warm and calloused and overwhelming, wrap around his elbows. She lifts him up with her as she gets to her feet, with no apparent effort. She’s strong. When she pulls Wolfwood’s arm around her waist and bears up his weight, she doesn’t falter at all.
She’s warm, and she smells at once sweet and earthy, like the desert after the brief, rare rainstorms. Wolfwood leans into her without thinking about it, dizzy with blood loss and the receding claws of panic.
“So I still get to wear your shirt?” Wolfwood asks, his voice coming out hazy and loose.
Milly giggles at him. “After you have some sleep, mister priest.”
She half-guides, half-carries him to the bed and sits him down, then retrieves her spare shirt from the floor and hangs it up in the hotel room’s closet, empty except for Wolfwood’s loafers pushed off to one side and Vash’s coat. He’d stripped it off, pulled on a more unassuming white linen top, and gone out to the bar in a huff.
He’ll be back eventually, softened by drink and not quite apologetic. They’ll share the bed tonight without a word about it, and move on in the morning like it never happened.
That’s how it always goes.
“Mister priest,” Milly scolds, jarring him out of his thoughts before he can chase them too deeply. “Don’t tell me you’re too good for an afternoon nap!”
Wolfwood shakes his head, huffing out something approximating laughter and scrubbing a hand down his face. He lays himself out on top of the covers, tugging the pillow behind his head and smiling up at Milly. “Not at all.” He shivers slightly at the breeze across his bare chest — it’s not quite afternoon anymore; the suns are starting to set, the air rapidly cooling. He’s going to have to pull the blanket over himself when Milly’s not there to watch him struggle with it.
Milly graces him with a smile in return, all proud and gentle and overbright. “Sleep well,” she tells him, and he wants to, just to make her happy. “I’ll bring you some dinner when Meryl gets back with it.”
It hurts to see her go. But only for a moment, before he closes his eyes, breathes deep, and settles toward sleep.
When Wolfwood stirs again, it’s with a shiver, jolting out of some unremembered dream into a cold room. He’d folded the blanket over himself, but an arm and leg have escaped from under the fabric, exposed to the cold.
He drags his eyes open, body thrumming with the aches of recent injury, pushing himself groggily up on one elbow. His eyes drift, then land on the obvious anomaly from the last time he had his eyes open.
The door between the two rooms in the double suite the four of them are staying in for the night is propped open, and he can see Milly through it, sitting in front of the mirror…
…wearing Wolfwood’s jacket?
Wolfwood gives sitting up a more earnest try, managing to get himself upright. His bones feel leaden, his body not quite begging but certainly asking insistently for more rest.
Milly notices him — either hears him shuffling and creaking like an old house, or more likely sees him in the mirror she’s leaning towards. She turns, and the smile on her face is incandescent, unbearable, as she rises to her feet and comes to the door. She has a sewing needle in one hand, the jacket half-buttoned, the same way he wears it. Her shirt unbuttoned too, not quite as much as his would be but still plenty, two or three buttons, the fabric almost disappearing under the broad lapels of his jacket, tie nowhere in sight—
He very carefully looks at her face.
It fits her. It suits her, even bloodstained, only half-stitched.
“How’d you sleep?” Milly asks. She’s wearing his jacket.
“Not enough,” Wolfwood mumbles, rubbing his forehead.
Milly’s smile softens slightly. “Don’t fall asleep yet, I have some dinner for you.” She snags something that’s out of Wolfwood’s sight on the other side of the door and gestures with it — a bag that smells like spices and synthetic salmon.
Suddenly aware of the gnawing hunger in his gut, Wolfwood reaches out, grabbing for the bag as Milly swings it towards him, ignoring the way she giggles at him as he pulls it open.
It’s some kind of unfathomable construction that might have once had machinations of being a wrap, but however long it’s been waiting for Wolfwood to wake up has reduced it to a mess. Undeterred, he bundles up the paper around it and digs in, barely minding the temperature or the gluey texture of the salmon, taking big bites to limit the chances it has to fall apart in his hands.
It tastes fantastic. The headache threatening around Wolfwood’s temples recedes almost immediately. He licks the stray sauce from his fingers and glances back up at Milly. She’s still smiling. Still wearing his jacket.
“Thanks,” Wolfwood says. Looking at her face. Her face. “You’re wearing my jacket.”
“It’s easier to sew like this,” Milly says, gesturing with the needle in her hand, thread trailing from its end to the opposite sleeve. “I don’t want to pull anything too tight.”
Wolfwood narrows his eyes at her. He wouldn’t guess from seeing her that they’d have similar enough builds for her to use herself as even an approximate mannequin, but on second thought — they’re about the same height, both with the fat-over-muscle build of manual labor and weapons training, gone relatively lean from long travel and meager rations. Wolfwood’s shoulders are broader, but Milly fills it out just fine.
“Just don’t stick yourself with the needle,” Wolfwood says.
“Have some more faith in me, mister priest,” Milly chides. She sticks the needle into the blood-spattered lapel of Wolfwood’s jacket — Wolfwood’s jacket , which she’s wearing, the fabric pulled taut over her—
Wolfwood clears his throat. He swings his legs out of bed and stands up so quickly his head spins. Spots dance across his vision, and he instinctively holds out his arms to steady himself.
In just a moment, between one hazy blink and the next, Milly is there, catching him by the elbows, holding him up, and Wolfwood feels a sudden pressure in the back of his throat, like he’s choking on his heart.
“Careful, now,” Milly says, all sunshine and smiles, like Wolfwood doesn’t mark the coming of a sandstorm on the horizon, nearer every day to burying her life under sharp-edged sand.
Like he isn’t a bullet in the chamber of a gun, pressed to the back of Vash’s head.
(Like Milly isn’t the same kind of clever that Vash is, her kind eyes sharp as flint. Why they both pretend Wolfwood is exactly what he says is fucking beyond him.)
The guilt is more dizzying than the hunger and the bloodloss both, harder and harder to swallow with every day that passes.
But Milly’s hands are warm against his bare skin, regardless — she smiles with her eyes, regardless.
Wolfwood swallows. He reaches his hands out, bracing his hands on her chest to steady himself. Pain pricks through the heel of his palm, and he twitches back, just slightly, watching blood bead up.
“I thought you were just saying to be careful with that needle,” Milly chides. She wraps one hand around his wrist and draws it up, fitting her mouth against the bloodied pinprick.
It feels like the world stops, just for a moment. A stutter, like a skipped heartbeat. Milly’s tongue darts out to lick up another drop of blood, and it stutters again.
Wolfwood cups her cheek, smearing blood across her perfect skin, and kisses her. He tastes iron in her mouth, feels the heat of her. Her body presses flush to his, her arms wrapping around him—
He makes himself stop.
“Not here,” he tells her, as they step to arm’s length again, like the steps of a dance. He tilts his head toward the open door. “They’ll never let us hear the end of it.”
If Milly’s disappointed, she hides it well. She kisses his palm again, lets him wipe the blood from her cheek, and squeezes his shoulder fondly. “Get some sleep, mister priest,” she says, all friendly charm. “I don’t think I’ll be able to salvage your shirt, so you can just wear mine until you get a new one, okay?”
“Okay,” Wolfwood breathes. His fingers twitch and his head throbs with sudden craving — for nicotine or for her, he can’t be entirely sure. He settles for what he can have. “Do you happen to have my cigarettes, darling?”
Milly reaches past the lapel of the jacket and roots around for a moment, the fabric pulling away from her chest. Wolfwood very carefully watches her face, tongue jutting out as she searches through the pocket, and eventually emerges with a handful of battered cigarettes and a matchbox, holding them out.
The world stutters again as their hands brush. Wolfwood steps back, tearing his eyes away from her as he lights up, sucking the smoke into his lungs.
Headache ebbing, heart retreating from his throat, Wolfwood slowly starts to feel like himself again. Not the kind of man that falls to pieces over a pretty girl. Not the kind of man that falls to pieces over anything.
Not the kind of man who dreams about taking a girl home.
Just the kind of man who wears her shirts.
Milly’s still smiling over her shoulder, the moment before she closes the door between them.
Wolfwood’s skin aches where her touch lingered.
(He dreams of Milly wearing nothing but his jacket, unbuttoned and hanging loose. He dreams of kissing her he tastes blood in her mouth again, this time from wearing his chapped lips raw. Her lips are smooth and soft. He wants to ask her what she does to keep them so soft, so he can be better to kiss, but dream-Milly winds her hand in his hair and guides him to his knees and, and, and— )
Wolfwood wakes in the dark, overheated and quivering, his body one solid ache from skull to ankles. He shivers, squeezing his eyes shut again, reaching out with his senses for what’s different.
Right. Vash.
Vash is lying beside him in bed, his spine pressed up against Wolfwood’s. He stirs, raising himself on one elbow as Wolfwood sits up and slides his legs off the side of the bed, hugging himself for a moment before he gets up and goes to the window.
“I’m sorry,” Vash says, as Wolfwood leans out into the night, cigarette dangling from his fingers.
“Go back to sleep, Spikey,” Wolfwood replies.
Vash puts his head back down, sighing out a breath that sounds somewhere between relieved and resigned.
Wolfwood stubs his cigarette out on the windowsill and locks himself in the suite bathroom.
He shivers through a cold shower, one hand braced against the tiled wall. Naked and wet-haired and feeling sorry for himself, he crawls back into bed. Vash rolls over without a word, wrapping an arm around him. It’s the prosthetic, cold and firm, but still comforting enough to settle Wolfwood’s heartbeat.
Wolfwood sleeps dreamlessly until the first sun rises.
The shirt fits.
Wolfwood doesn’t know why he expected it not to, seeing how his jacket fit Milly, but something in him jolts with surprise when he does up the bottom three buttons and nothing strains or pops. It’d probably be a little tight in the shoulders if he wore it like she did, but he doesn’t — he wears it like he’d wear his own shirt.
He doesn’t know how he’d bear it, otherwise.
Vash, already dressed, doing his hair in the tiny mirror on the dresser, glances sideways at him, but says nothing.
The suite’s bathroom door is shut, Milly’s singing coming from inside, barely audible under the sound of the shower.
Wolfwood does up one more button and combs his fingers through his hair, working out the knots he ended up with from sleeping on it damp. He finds a pair of clean underwear and pulls his suit pants back on. He feels bare without his jacket, and tucking cigarettes into his pants pocket just feels wrong.
But he’ll make do. Milly’s shirt smells like her, crisp and sweet, so he’ll make do.
Wolfwood’s still standing in the middle of the room when Milly emerges from the bathroom, mostly dressed — no tie, no coat, hair wrapped in a towel — and carrying Wolfwood’s coat over her arm.
“Oh good,” Milly says, her voice like honey on a sore throat, salve on sunburn. “It fits.” She reaches for him, already smiling like the sun, smoothing the open collar of his shirt — her shirt. Her shirt, pulled taut across his shoulders, open across his chest. She undoes the topmost button, smoothes it down again. “There.”
“Not very priestly,” Wolfwood jokes, putting on a rakish grin.
Vash makes a noise like he’s going to say something, then cuts himself off with a hum and strides out of the room, muttering something about breakfast. There’s a strained sadness to the glance he throws over his shoulder.
For his own peace of mind, Wolfwood waves to him, smiling like it’s just a regular day. They’ve talked about it, as much as they ever will. In a few days, it’ll be like nothing happened. They’ll walk together, as easily as if they had a choice in the matter.
Wolfwood takes the jacket from Milly — it’s clean, fresh-smelling, and the stitching is neat. He slips it on over his shoulders, does up a few buttons, pulls the collar of Milly’s shirt loose.
It looks almost the same. The collar is a little narrower, the fabric a little more stiff. He frowns, just slightly. “This is going to smell like cigarettes by the time you get it back.”
Something sad and knowing seeps into Milly’s smile. She rubs her thumb across Wolfwood’s collarbone. “I don’t mind,” she tells him, like a promise.
Just for a moment, Wolfwood lets himself lean into her hand. Lets himself dream of her shirts and his, swaying on the clothesline outside the orphanage.