Chapter Text
It's nothing, really.
A graze on the shoulder of his left arm from their daily allotted shootout, barely even deep enough to draw blood. Something that even Wolfwood hadn’t fussed over.
He’d simply checked it once, stuck a colorful band-aid on top, handed him a lollipop with a sarcastic comment about being a good patient, and called it a day. If even Wolfwood wasn't worried about it, then Vash was happy to forget about it and move onto the next town.
So, they had.
The first sign that something might be off is when they stop driving for the night to set up camp.
Vash helps Meryl set up their tent while Wolfwood gets to work on dinner. The task of hammering the stakes into the sand is rarely a problem, unless it’s a particularly windy evening and he can’t get the stake in before the tent starts to blow away. Tonight, though, it makes the ache in his stump hurt more than usual.
He doesn’t honestly think much of it; if anywhere is going to hurt more than usual, it’s what’s left of his left arm. There’s not always an apparent reason for it, and it happens often enough that he almost doesn’t notice it at all.
Between his arm, his legs, and the various scars and scrap metal embedded in his skin, it takes a lot for one specific area to ache enough to stand out.
So he simply rolls his shoulder a few times to ease the tension and settles down for the night, feeling content with good food and better company.
The second sign is the next morning, when he sleeps in.
He’s an early riser—always has been, always will be. It’s rare for someone else to wake up before him, because he has a training routine to keep up with and Meryl and Nicholas are not morning people.
Not only is he the last one to wake, but he has a difficult time when Meryl tries to wake him, as well.
He feels groggy when she shakes him, his vision blurry and his brain sluggish. It’s not unheard of, but it is odd. After decades of traveling on his own and remaining hypervigilant at all times, he’s always ready for a fight—this means that he’s normally a very light sleeper.
But here he is, scrubbing at his eyes with both hands in an attempt to clear the fuzz from his vision. Meryl frowns at him.
“Everything okay, Vash?” she asks, and he waves her off.
“‘M fine,” he mumbles, “Probably just tired ‘cause I overslept.”
It seems likely enough; he’s always run better on less sleep than more, so it’s reasonable to assume he’s just tired from sleeping too much. It doesn’t answer the question of why he’d slept so much in the first place, though.
Meryl gives him an odd look but she doesn’t comment further, for which Vash is grateful. His head feels stuffed with cotton, and he would really rather not do more thinking than is necessary right now.
Wolfwood makes them a light breakfast that Vash only manages to pick at, taking a few small bites before pushing his plate towards Meryl. The other two look at him with that funny expression again, and he finds himself frustrated.
“Not hungry,” he says by way of explanation. It’s not entirely true, but he doesn’t really want to get into the nitty gritty of how sometimes he simply can’t make himself eat in the morning without feeling nauseous. It’s easier to say that he has no appetite.
Neither Meryl nor Wolfwood are happy about his admission, but they know better than to pressure him; he’ll eat when he’s ready. So they split his eggs in half between the two of them, unwilling to waste any food.
They pack up camp and set out on the road again, and even though he’d already slept in, it doesn’t take long for the hum of the engine and the rock of the van’s shitty suspension to lull him to sleep.
When he wakes again, it’s to Wolfwood patting his cheek, an expression somewhere between irritation and concern crossing his features.
“Wuh…?” Vash says, eloquently.
“I said we’re here, Needles,” Nicholas repeats, “We’re in town. Shortie’s inside, getting us a room.” He jabs his thumb in the direction of a building, and Vash assumes it must be the local motel.
He hums in acknowledgement but otherwise doesn’t respond, opening the car door and sliding out. He stretches, groaning at the ache in his muscles; probably from sitting cramped up in the car all day.
And then he realizes—all day?
He looks up at the sky, and sure enough, one of the twin suns has dipped below the horizon. He has to take a moment to frown up at the sky as Wolfwood pulls Punisher from the roof of the car. When he rounds the trailer to stand next to Vash, he taps a cigarette out of his carton and places it between his lips before he looks at the blond with an eyebrow raised.
“You alright there?” he asks, lighting his cigarette. Vash takes another moment to respond.
“Yeah… just, not sure why I’m so tired today, I guess.”
Wolfwood shrugs. “Maybe all that light sleepin’s catching up to you,” he offers.
Vash doesn’t really think so—he’s never had issues with his sleep routine before, unless he’d pushed himself too hard for days on end and ended up passing out for a day or two. But that’s not what’s happening; he hadn’t pushed himself at all recently. All things considered, they’ve had a pretty quiet week.
But he doesn’t know what else it could be, so he just grabs his bag from the top of the car.
“Yeah,” he says, “Maybe.”
“You just gotta take better care of yourself, Spikey,” he says with a playful grin, and he reaches out to ruffle Vash’s hair. He stops after a second, however, stepping closer and causing Vash to cough as he waves away the priest’s second hand smoke.
“The hell, Wolfwood?” he mutters, pushing him away.
“Sorry,” he says, helping to fan the smoke away with a hand, “Just—your hair is weird.” Vash blinks at him.
“My hair is weird,” he echoes, deadpan.
“Yeah, it’s… I dunno, it feels dry. It’s usually really soft.”
Vash isn’t sure what to say to that, so he simply raises his eyebrows. Nicholas huffs.
“Don’t gimme that look, you know I like to mess with your hair,” he scolds.
“You mean you like to pet me? I’m aware,” he responds, smiling at the way Wolfwood turns red and stammers out half-baked excuses.
When Meryl comes back outside, they gather their things and head to their room. They’re in the middle of setting their things down when Wolfwood speaks up.
“Thinking about heading down to the bar,” he says, “You guys wanna join me?”
Just the thought is enough to churn Vash’s stomach; he doesn’t know if it’s the concept of alcohol, the greasy food, or the noise of a bar on a busy evening that does it, but he shakes his head.
“I’m gonna stay here,” he says, “maybe take a shower. You guys go have fun, though.”
They both look at him, and then at each other; some unspoken conversation passing between them that Vash catches but doesn’t understand.
“I’ll stay, too,” Meryl says, “I’ve got some reports to get started on, anyways.” Wolfwood nods, seeming unsure.
“I’ll bring something back for ya, Blondie,” he says, “You gotta eat something, if you can.”
He most certainly can’t, but he smiles anyways. “Thanks, Nico,” he says.
So Wolfwood takes his leave and Vash steps into the shower, sighing contentedly at the feeling of the warm water taking away some of his tension. When Wolfwood returns an hour later with food, Vash is already asleep.
The final straw is sometime in the middle of the night, when Vash wakes violently, gagging once before he scrambles to the bathroom. He has just enough time to shut the door and turn on the light before he’s curled over the toilet, retching into it with a force that makes his whole body hurt.
The cold tile makes his one flesh knee ache, but trying to adjust into a more comfortable position only makes his stomach heave again. So he simply kneels, bent over the toilet until he’s sure he can move again without puking.
When he sits back on his heels, he flushes the contents of his stomach down the drain. No longer distracted by his own vomiting, he’s able to take stock of himself, and he doesn’t like what he comes back with.
His head is pounding and his skin aches as he sits on the bathroom floor, shuddering from the cold sweat that envelops his senses. He feels bad enough that he’s tempted to just lay down where he is, because crawling back to bed sounds like a monumental task, but he knows from experience that such a choice will only make him feel worse when he wakes up.
He’s breathing hard as he pushes himself up off the floor, a shaking weakness in his limbs. He turns towards the sink to wash the acrid taste of stomach acid and iron out of his mouth (throwing up blood is really not a good sign, but he’s taking things one step at a time) but looking into the mirror above the sink makes him feel like he may hurl again, so maybe he should wait on rinsing out his mouth.
He looks back at his reflection for a moment, shell shocked at the thin streak of black in his normally sunny blond hair.
It’s small—a few dark strands, only apparent because of the contrast with the rest of his hair, but it’s still alarming. It doesn’t make any fucking sense.
Some of his hair, the part that he shaves, has turned dark over time—but that had been over the course of years, because of how much energy he’d given to the plants on Ship 3 and the other derelict SEEDs vessels, not randomly in one night, and even that hadn't turned black.
He takes a moment to stare before the panic starts to set in, because he doesn’t know what the hell is wrong. Normally he at least has an idea of what might be going on when he starts to feel shitty—there’s usually an injury that he hasn’t been tending to when stuff like this happens. But he isn’t injured.
And then it hits him like a fucking bus. He is injured.
He practically tears his t-shirt off, turning his shoulder towards the mirror. Even before he’s gotten a good look, he immediately sees the problem; the graze from the other day.
He can’t even see the real cut, because that colorful little band-aid is still over the top of it, but he can see that it’s infected; the skin around it is hot and inflamed, angry red lines radiating from the central point and creeping up towards his collarbone. The bullet must have been poisoned.
Fuck.
Worse still, his prosthetic arm is still connected, as he’d been too tired to remember to take it off the night before. He’s going to have to disconnect it to see how far those lines of infection go and how dire the situation is, and that’s going to suck so bad.
Although, he supposes with his hair turning fucking black, he doesn’t need to see how bad the actual infection is to know that it’s pretty fucking dire.
He almost jumps out of his skin when a quiet knock sounds at the door, and his breath immediately catches in his throat, because oh fuck.
He’s going to have to explain the situation, and Wolfwood is going to be so pissed.
He always hates it when Vash hides stuff like this from them, and while he hadn’t been purposely trying to hide it this time, he knows that he lies so much about his health that nobody will believe that he hadn’t really noticed anything incredibly strange.
He’s used to feeling like shit—even on a good day, he's in pain. Feeling a little worse than usual isn’t exactly uncommon for him.
He doesn’t know if it’s because he feels like trash warmed over or the panic of realizing that something is very wrong, but the thought of Nicholas being mad at him is too much and all he can do is watch in horror as tears well in his eyes, blurring his vision and spilling over his cheeks. He makes a choked sobbing noise, and there’s another knock on the door.
“Vash? Is everything okay?” Meryl murmurs, and Vash can only whine in response. She doesn’t speak for a second, and he worries he’d scared her away before she says, “I’m coming in, okay?”
She opens the door quietly, slipping inside and shutting it behind her before she turns to Vash. He doesn’t know what she sees first, the hair or his arm, but he can hear her quiet little gasp, and he puts his head in his hands, only able to cry harder in response. Meryl wraps her arms around his waist, careful not to jostle his injured arm, rubbing little circles on his back as she hushes him.
She pulls away after a moment to set the lid of the toilet seat down before she guides him to sit down on top of it, still crying into his hands.
“Vash, I need you to tell me what’s going on so that I can help,” she says, and he breathes in a big, shaky breath before he pulls his hands away and nods.
So, he explains. To the best of his ability, anyways; he knows what it means when his hair turns dark thanks to Luida, but it’s never happened so suddenly before, and it doesn’t tell him what he’d been poisoned with.
He gives her a rundown of the symptoms he’s noticed—exhaustion, grogginess, body aches, and now vomiting and what he’d guess is a low-grade fever—but that there could be other things he hadn’t noticed.
“What do you mean?” she asks with a frown. Vash puts his head in his hands again, rubbing at his pounding temples.
“I wasn’t… I wasn’t trying to keep anything from you guys,” he says, miserably, “If I knew it was this bad, I would have said something, but it’s pretty normal for me to feel like shit. I didn’t think about it until I saw my hair. So… that’s the stuff I’ve noticed was a little off. But there could be other things that I’m just… used to already.”
Meryl watches him for a moment with a sad expression before she sighs. “Okay,” she starts, “I don’t know anything about poison, but Nick might, being an assassin and all. I’ll go get him.”
She starts to turn away from Vash, but he grabs her wrist, looking at her with pleading, watery blue eyes.
“Wait,” he says, and he hates how wobbly his voice sounds. She stops, turning to look at him with a questioning glance, and he swallows thickly. “Please don’t, I…” he trails off, looking at the floor as he squeezes his eyes shut.
Meryl places her hand atop his own. “Vash, what’s wrong?”
“He’s… he’s gonna be so mad at me,” he whispers, and he almost breaks down sobbing again. There’s still tears, but he manages to keep his hitching breaths at bay, at least for now.
Meryl turns back around to face him, placing her hands on either side of his face to wipe his tears with her thumbs. He lets his eyes close as Meryl holds him, but he hadn’t missed the expression of sorrowful concern.
“Vash, nobody is going to be mad at you,” she says, and his breath catches on a sob. “Nick just doesn’t know how to worry about the people he loves. He doesn’t like being scared, so he gets upset, instead. But I’ll talk to him, okay? I’ll make sure he doesn’t get mad.”
Vash just nods, not trusting his voice. Meryl wipes one more tear from his cheek before she turns away, slipping out of the bathroom.
He doesn’t know how long he waits there—it could be minutes, it could be hours, for all he’s concerned. Usually, he’s very good at keeping track of time, but he’s just too out of it.
His head feels so damn weird, and with his eyes closed, it feels like the room is spinning. He tries to open them, but even the shitty, dim light of the motel bathroom feels far too bright for the headache hammering away at his temples, so he squeezes them shut again before he can even fully open them.
Finally, the doorknob turns, and while Vash doesn’t open his eyes, he does sit up a little bit as the door creaks open.
“Hey, Spikey,” Wolfwood says, his voice low and rough from sleep. Vash feels bad for waking him.
“Hi,” is all he manages in response, and even that is quiet and sniffly. God, he probably looks so pathetic right now.
Wolfwood clicks his tongue, and the sound makes Vash’s chest ache with anxiety until he speaks again.
“You really feel like shit, huh?” he asks, and Vash really needs to stop crying, because he hasn’t had anything to drink since yesterday morning, and throwing up has surely dehydrated him further, but he can’t help it.
He does feel like shit, and it must be apparent.
Vash always tries his best to seem self-sufficient when he’s not feeling well, often unwilling to show weakness even around those he’s close with. For Nick to clock it immediately means he’s too exhausted to even put in the effort to hide, and that’s never a good sign.
“Mhm,” he hums, voice warbling. His brows pull together as his lower lip trembles, and Wolfwood coos at him—a soft, comforting sound that Vash wouldn’t have thought him capable of when they’d first met.
“S’alright, Angel,” he says, “I’m not mad. I just wanna check some things so we can figure out how to help, okay? Can you open those pretty eyes for me?”
Vash does, slowly, squinting at the way the light makes the pounding in his head sharpen to a knifepoint; but if it will help Wolfwood with what he’s checking for, he can endure it.
He blinks the tears from his vision, now able to see Wolfwood knelt in front of him with a tired smile on his face and Meryl standing behind him, leaning against the door frame.
“There we go. Can you follow my finger with your eyes?”
Nick checks a series of things to determine his symptoms; checks his temperature and heart rate, has him squeeze his outstretched hand, pokes and prods at his neck and jaw, among a few other things.
Once he’s done, he sighs, rubbing at the bridge of his nose.
“Well?” Meryl asks anxiously, having stayed silent the whole time, “Any idea what it is?”
“Not exactly,” Wolfwood says with a frown, “Whatever it is, it’s not worm venom—it can be modified to do other things, but it almost always causes at least mild paralysis and lots of joint pain. He’s able to move just fine, and he has body aches but nothing too terribly intense or focused around the joints.”
Meryl scowls. “But you don’t know what else it could be?”
Wolfwood waves his hand in a sort of so-so motion. “I have a few guesses, but it’s pointless to try and narrow it down,” he says, “Anything that isn’t worm venom-based is rare, and a little place like this isn’t gonna carry the kind of antidote we’d need. We would have to find a bigger settlement—maybe even one of the seven cities.”
“Which is out of the question,” Meryl says, chewing anxiously on her thumbnail. Wolfwood nods.
“Too far, too dangerous for Blondie to go waltzing around in—not to mention that he’s definitely not fit to travel in the desert right now.”
Normally, Vash might be irritated that they’re talking about him like he’s not there, but now he’s only grateful that he doesn’t have to do the thinking himself. He manages to follow along okay, though.
“So…” he starts, frowning, “What do we do?”
Wolfwood fixes him with an apologetic glance. “We get some fever reducers,” he says, “clean up your arm and check it every few hours, and keep you hydrated. About all we can do. But your fever isn’t too high. It’s gonna suck for a few days, but you’ll be okay.”
Vash wishes he hadn’t said that, because one of them always manages to make things worse by jinxing them. But he nods along anyway.
“We’re gonna have to take your arm off,” Wolfwood says, “and that’s probably going to hurt like a bitch. Sorry, ahead of time.”
He holds out his hand and Vash takes a deep breath before placing his prosthetic palm atop Wolfwood’s, reaching out to grasp the bathroom counter with his flesh hand.
“Ready?” Wolfwood asks, and Vash nods, bracing himself against the counter. Wolfwood releases the vacuum suspension before he unlocks the disconnection system, and then twists—
And Vash blacks out.