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It’s a little breezy, like a storm is approaching. It’s cruel, how time doesn’t stop, how the Earth remains on its axis, despite one man’s world having fallen mere seconds before.
Vash moves, and the couch complains against the weight shift, the sound searingly loud against the numbness of his brain, the static buzzing in his ears. He wants to turn around, look at the man next to him. Vash wants him to call out to him, waits to feel his hand on his arm, but it never comes. The hand he so desperately wants is limp on the edge of the cushion, his fingers brushing against the neck of the bottle they’ve been drinking from.
It’s too far away.
Vash decides to do the other man a favour, and turns his head. He stops midway, just as the tip of his shoes enters in his field of vision. He catches the hem of his pant leg, and he sees a smidge of blood on it.
He squeezes his eyes shut, and whips his head back, looking straight in front of him. The sky is crystal clear, and the suns are behind him. He feels their warmth at the back of his head, and he doesn’t even need to squint to look ahead of himself.
“It’s a beautiful day” he speaks up, his voice hoarse. The other would usually grunt, asking him what alternatives did they have. This time, he doesn’t. If being quiet is an admission of agreement, there won’t ever be one spoken louder than this, Vash figures.
Every pump of his heart seems to spread venom through his veins, and his chest feels hollow, like his ribcage has been split open and each of his organs has been removed, one after one. He knows they’re still right there, though, because they all hurt him with each breath he takes.
The hand is still in his field of vision. If he concentrates hard enough, he can almost see the fingers spasming, reaching for the bottle, reaching for him.
When you wait your whole life for something to happen, you end up dreading the moment it does. When Vash’s fingers brush against Wolfwood’s palm, it’s like taking a breath after holding it in, almost to the point of passing out. The air comes in, and it’s painful, lungs expanding to make up for the lack of oxygen. His mouth is too dry, and his tongue feels alien against his teeth. The hand against his feels too light, but he finds it hard to move it around, flesh going cold resting heavily against his own palm.
It’s not cold yet, though, there’s leftover warmth, even if Vash can’t tell if it’s from his blood or the suns. The difference would either break or make him, yet he doesn’t indulge himself in thinking about an answer: he will exist in the space between the two for the time being.
Wolfwood and him shared touches before. An hand on a shoulder, pulling the other away from a bullet, or simply out of the way when they weren’t paying attention to the street. A light touch on the small of their back, when the space was too narrow and they needed to pass. Fingers brushing against the other’s forearm, on accident, or maybe not, depending on who you were asking.
Touching his palm like this, though, feels different. Vash doesn’t know what drowning feels like, but from his memories of when he was a kid, playing on the ship with Rem and Knives, he compares the feeling to coming up for air after holding his head underwater, trying to grab an apple with his teeth, except the water comes up to his nose, and he can’t breath well, taking shallow breaths and inhaling more water than air.
His chest feels full, and then empty again. Someone filled him up and then sucked all the warmth out, the whiplash numbing his brain to the point thinking is almost a strenuous task.
Wolfwood and him shared touches before; none of them as honest as feeling palm against palm, fingers slotting together like they were made for it.
Vash had wondered how it would feel like. He watched people walking through town markets in the early mornings, hand in hand, faces straight as if they weren’t holding their whole world in the palm of their hands.
That’s something he thinks about often, holding his whole world in his hands. He has never known the feeling, except for a few hours before, when he caught Wolfwood in his arm, his flesh hand pushing against his back, expecting to meet hard bones and muscle, and instead feeling a heartbeat slowing. An escape of life against his fingertips, slipping through his fingers like water, each heartbeat falling off his hands like grain of sand in an hourglass.
Vash knows the feeling again, now, eyes fixated on their joint hands. Wolfwood’s warmth sticks to him and he can’t seem to be able to give it back, a parting gift he doesn’t want to accept, despite showing his open hands to receive it.
He wants to drop Wolfwood’s hand, but knows that if he does, he will have to get up from that couch, and do something about the pale and cold body next to him. His squeezes their hands, and he’s met with rigid muscles.
He raises their joint hands up to his mouth, and brushes his lips against each of Wolfwood’s knuckles. He tastes blood, but they’re soft under his touch, despite the roughness of his palm and fingers, despite the cuts and scars littering them.
How foolish the mind is, when it tries to protect but ends up hurting. Vash wonders how Wolfwood’s face would have had scrunched up, if he did that before. A day, a few weeks, a couple of months earlier, in a bare room in the middle of a nameless city, moonlight streaming in from the open window, and their breaths so close they could be breathing in the same air.
But he didn’t do it then, and the face he’s met with is perfectly still, a sick depiction of the man he once was.
The lack of reaction burns him, a deep feeling of shame snaking its way through his body, making him jolt. His legs move on their own accord, and he’s suddenly standing in front of the body, their hands still joined in the air between them. The bridge between life and death is held together by shaky fingers and rigid muscles, yet Vash knows it won’t ever fall, if he so desires.
“Let’s go, Nicholas, what do you say?” Vash smiles despite himself, watching the slightly bowed head of the man in front of him, the soft fall of his hair on his forehead.
His name feels heavy on his tongue, but he carries it anyway, rolls it around his mouth, feels it scrape against his teeth. For a moment, he’s only a vessel for that name, one last chance to make it live.
He bends down, and cradles Wolfwood’s head, making it rest gently against his shoulder.
“It’s time you let yourself rest for a bit” he murmurs, scratching his scalp, carding his fingers through the knotted hair, brushing it until his fingers don’t catch up on anything anymore.
Vash hoists him up, one of his arms supporting Wolfwood’s legs, the other his back. He manages to keep holding his hand, even if it’s just the his final knuckle against Wolfwood’s. He wants him to linger as long as he can, despite the coldness of his once too warm skin. He wants to commit it to memory.
The body pressing against his chest should feel heavier than what it is. Vash realizes this as he gently drops Wolfwood on the sand. Gravity pulls him forward, one leg bent, one arm resting on the knee, and the other resting sideways on the ground. His head falls on his chest, and his other hand lays limply on the sand, fingernails brushing against the grains. Vash comes back for the Punisher, slightly digging to fix it in place behind the man. The pose is somewhat familiar, a callback to days long gone, meetings they should’ve avoided.
“A well prepared dead guy, indeed” Vash tells to the wind, palm resting against the white cloth covering the cross.
He starts digging with the setting suns heating up his back, sweat rolling off his forehead, down his nose. The eyes of a dead man look right through him, his rigid hands clinging to his ribs, pulling, trying to find a space where to fit, one last resting place where they can haunt him until the end of his days, an accusation echoing everytime he takes a breath. Vash regrets not being able to shape himself to give it to them.
He feels Wolfwood’s gaze on him, and turns around. Hope hurts more than it should, when it’s inevitably met with the harsh reality of the facts. Wolfwood’s head is still hanging low against his chest, the crown of his head looking brownish against the setting suns.
“Don’t look at me,” Vash begs, against all logic, lips quivering. “Please, don’t look at me”
Wolfwood isn’t, but perhaps his God is, because Vash feels eyes following him with each jerk of his muscles. Feels a burning gaze on his face, following the hot tears that stain his cheeks. He wishes he had someone to scream at, someone to blame the looking on, but there’s no one around except him and the corpse of the one man he couldn’t afford to lose.
When Vash puts Wolfwood’s body in the grave he dug, he lets his fingers linger on his cheek. His flesh hand tingles with the need to touch, to get the last chance to remember the skin of Nicholas D. Wolfwood.
But Vash knows better than to give in to the impulse. He already has things to remember him by: sunkissed fingers dragging him to the dancefloor late at night at a bar. Strong hands holding him up as they walked up the stairs. A deep and rumbling voice mumbling just outside his room, then from the bed next his. Whispered “good mornings” and “good nights”, spoken from turned backs as they shared the only remaining bed available in the inn.
Nicholas D. Wolfwood was more than the cold pale skin against his glove. He was more than the blood splotches covering his face, dirtying his clothes.
Vash pets his hair, combs his fingers through the dirty strands, before cupping the man’s cheek.
“Rest well,” he says. “You did enough”
The first drop of dirt covers Wolfwood's hands, which lay gently on his stomach. The second hits his chest. By the time Vash covered Wolfwood’s face with sand, he lost count of how many times he shoveled it back into the grave.
His hands feel dirty, the underside of his nails filled with grains of sand, and he can’t help but think about how Wolfwood deserved more than this, more than a makeshift grave, clothes still dirty and sand filling every tear in his shirt.
On a planet like Gunsmoke no one is owed anything: peace, life, love, a decent burial. Vash wishes he had the time to build a coffin, to sew together a new suit. He doesn’t, and Wolfwood is buried in nothing but sand. He’s sure he wouldn’t complain, the one thing he would be content to have: a simple resting place, near the only home he ever knew.
The grave is left unmarked, despite the slab of stone Vash puts on top of it, a wobbly cross engraved on it. Vash thinks Wolfwood would be content with just that, but the truth is he can’t bear to write the name down. A death set in stone, the fall of all his hopes.
He smiles at Punisher, the moons making their way in the sky, and he’s suddenly left with a strange, familiar feeling.
He’s hungry, and he knows Wolfwood left him with one more mouth to feed.