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It starts, simply enough, with the absolutely atrocious crunch that Wolfwood’s wrist makes as he carefully stretches it out and rotates it, and the series of gunshot-loud pop-pop-pops that follow as he gives it another careful turn.
Wolfwood wraps his hand around the offending joint and winces — half from the pain, half from the noise.
“That sounds like it hurt,” Meryl says, after a beat of silence that stretches on slightly too long.
There’s no real point in denying it. “Yep,” Wolfwood agrees. “Sure did.”
Vash makes a sympathetic noise, which for some stupid reason makes Wolfwood’s chest ache. He digs his thumb into his wrist, hiding another wince.
It’s no secret that he shouldn’t be able to carry the Punisher. It weighs twice as much as he does, and it’s so bulky there’s no easy way to carry it.
But it’s supposed to be a secret that he kind of actually can’t carry it. That he can’t do any of the things he does, because it turns out S+ means metabolizing the drug a little too well, means he’ll never put on muscle like the prototypes of the Eye’s freakshow, means he’s still weak under all their augmentations, reinforced in places with titanium rods to keep him from shattering in ways he isn’t meant to.
The cracks aren’t supposed to show.
Meryl isn’t supposed to see anything of note, when her eyes cut over him, but she still stands up, crosses the room to him, and reaches out.
“May I?” she asks.
He wants to tell her she could flay him alive and take his organs out one by one and arrange them in little tableaus to photograph, if she wanted. He keeps his mouth shut.
“Sure.” His voice creaks out of his chest. Vash is watching the two of them, his eyes piercing, his face settled in an unreadable half-smile.
Entirely without warning as to what Wolfwood’s just agreed to, Meryl wraps Wolfwood’s wrist in both of her hands — warm and small, soft in places and starting to callous in others from holding her little derringer, so warm and so gentle — and starts kneading at the joint with the pads of her thumbs, right where it hurts.
A shock goes through Wolfwood’s nerves. Only a fraction of it is the pain — he’s good with pain. If nothing else, he has that, he can tolerate pain. It’s an old friend of his. The oldest friend he has.
He must make some kind of noise, because Meryl looks up, her hands going still, and whatever mewling thing is in Wolfwood’s chest needs her to not stop, so he just nods again, and Meryl keeps massaging at his wrist.
Wolfwood knows better than to hold his breath. Instead, he tries to match it to hers, slow and even while she works whatever magic she’s working, easing the cramp in his hand and even the dull ache running up to his elbow.
Or maybe he’s just being distracted from the pain by the ache clamping tight around his chest, the heat building up in his face.
She shouldn’t be doing this, shouldn’t be this kind, not to someone like him, not with what she’s seen him do. Not with what he did before she and Vash broke his life open like a hail of bullets through a windowpane.
Not when the pain is his Punishment.
“Does it hurt?” Meryl asks. “I can be more gentle.”
If she’s any more gentle it will kill him.
He shakes his head.
Over by the window, Vash moves. He stands up, and his gaze turns, and Wolfwood doesn’t meet it. He drops his eyes to the bedspread he’s sitting on. His own crossed legs feel very far away.
Meryl’s thumb slides up the inside of his wrist.
Wolfwood’s breath catches in his throat.
His face burns. His eyes worst of all. There’s a dull pressure in his sinuses he can’t shake.
Something drips onto the bed, right where Wolfwood’s gaze is fixed. Big and wet, but clear — so not blood.
It’s not until he blinks and another two drops soak into the sheets that he realizes he’s crying, and as soon as he does he can’t stop, vision blurring into shapeless colors, shoulders hitching as his breath catches.
“Hey,” Meryl says. “I can stop if it hurts.”
No, Wolfwood thinks, but his voice won’t work. He turns his hand over, wrapping his fingers around one of Meryl’s wrists, trying to keep her warmth with him a little longer, the gentle brush of her fingers against his skin.
The bed dips as Vash sits down behind him, obviously telegraphing his presence with an unnecessary rustling of fabric before he rests his hand on Wolfwood’s back. He’s so damned gracious it hurts.
Meryl shifts her grip, goes from rubbing his wrist to holding his hand, so warm and firm and there that it hurts, even more than it did, so badly that Wolfwood has to fight to swallow a sob.
He’s still crying, tears rolling down his cheeks, falling in big splashes onto the bed and the legs of his pants. He brings his free hand to his face and tries to wipe the tears away, but he only manages to smear them across his cheeks, and doesn’t even manage to catch the next drop that falls, dripping warm and damp onto his thigh.
“Undertaker,” Meryl says, her voice so gentle around the moniker he wishes it was his name, instead of Nicholas the Punisher. “You don’t have to be all brave, it’s just us here. You’ve been carrying that thing all day, it must really hurt, I’m sorry.”
Wolfwood’s face crumples. His eyes squeeze shut, which makes more tears flood down his cheeks. His lips part and tiny, miserable noise comes out of him, like a kitten mewling.
Vash’s weight leans against him suddenly, his arms wrapping around Wolfwood, palms pressing flat and steadying against his chest, and he doesn’t deserve that, he doesn’t deserve anything, he scrubs at his face with his free hand trying to stop crying stop just stop until Meryl takes that hand too and brings them both up to her face to kiss his knuckles—
How can they touch him. He must be sticky to the touch with blood, the corpse-rot must cling to him like the perfume Meryl used to wear, before July. They must know what he’s done. What he’s done to earn the pain of carrying the Punisher. The slow tearing of his muscles, the slow dislocating of joints, the slow fracturing of bone. Deserved, deserved, deserved.
There’s a high-pitched ringing in his ears, but even through it he can hear himself starting to sob, horribly small and sad and lost, but so loud, like a kid, like a kid with a scraped knee that’s never been so hurt before in their life, crying because it’s the worst anything’s ever been, crying harder when the comfort comes, because nothing’s ever been such a mercy.
It’s not a mercy he deserves. It’s not one he should allow himself.
He should fight their kind hands off of him.
But he doesn’t.
He lets them hold him, until the bawling turns back into quiet weeping.
They pull him down on his side on the bed, arrange him between them, pressed between the warmth of them, always so gentle with every touch, until Wolfwood’s too tired to move, or to cry, or do anything but be held by them, and wait for sleep.