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- Reverse Will
At the break of dawn, when the dust is still and the sands are cold to the touch, Vash sees a black smudge on the horizon bleeding into the top of the sun. He doesn’t get up from his rocker while he waits for his coffee to cool and watches the smudge take on a stronger shape. It walks sluggishly on two long legs, never breaking its pace. As though guiding the figure straight to Vash and his little hideout, the sun rolls out a beam of light like a smooth carpet. An imaginary red laser burns into his forehead, and he’s already planned an escape route before he sets his coffee mug onto the porch, never to be sipped. But just as he’s ready to outrun the sunlight, the figure becomes so sharp it could cut him. Shock petrifies his legs. It’s the only reason why he doesn’t fall to his knees like a sinner sniveling at confession.
The priest is here, wearing the same suit he was buried in.
The grayish hue of Wolfwood's skin darkens like a storm cloud as he approaches. Rusty bloodstains cling to the wrinkled collar of his once white undershirt. His black hairs don’t tousle with the morning's first gust of wind, too matted to move, and his expression is unreadable, concealed by a pair of dark sunglasses. There should be a crack down the center of one lens. Vash knows because he fixated on it as he held Wolfwood’s hand for as long as he could before he folded the glasses inside, before the muscles got stiff.
“Nic—?” He’s too afraid to say it, as though it’s the magic word that completes the trick and makes Wolfwood vanish into thin air.
The rotten porch steps creak under his weight when he regains his strength and drags his feet down all but one. Wolfwood freezes. For a moment it feels like that day ended differently, like they are casually reuniting after a brief parting of ways. But the bullet holes in Wolfwood's suit, where splotches of dried blood harden the fabric, tell the story exactly as Vash regrets it.
Wolfwood, don't say stupid things.
Driven by a growing ache that he doesn't think anyone else is capable of soothing, he dares to step out into the sea of sand.
“How?” he tries to say when he catches his fractured reflection in the glass.
Wolfwood's mouth droops open, as though he's about to explain the unexplainable, but nothing comes out. A visible tremor interrupts him, ricochets up his leg and bends it at an awkward angle before sentencing him to his knees. He goes down without so much as a whimper but Vash manages to catch him before the sand swallows him whole.
“Nicholas!” he cries out, his heart slamming into his ribcage like it needs to escape. When his fingers instinctively wrap around the nape of Wolfwood's neck, he can tell things are even more wrong than they appear. He bites off his glove and cradles Wolfwood's head in his hands before it can bob precariously like an infant's, trying to control his panic as he internally scrambles to make sense of it all.
He has to carry him inside, nearly two hundred pounds of useless weight that feels like it triples by the time he gets Wolfwood situated on the rotting mattress in the middle of the living room. He spends the rest of the day hovering, tangling and untangling the dread knotted in his belly while he watches in disbelief the gentle rise and fall of Wolfwood's chest as he sleeps. I buried him alive. That's the conclusion he comes to; it's the only one that makes any sense.
He gasps himself awake after accidently drifting off a couple times between dusk and the next dawn. The sunlight slowly spills through the windows and cruelly points out every dirt-clogged fingernail and flake of blood that has yet to be dealt with. He doesn't know how much longer he can stand it—the waiting. Selfishly, he feels like he's already waited long enough, as though Wolfwood has kept him waiting all this time as some sort of punishment.
Vash hesitantly thumbs the first button of Wolfwood's suit, hoping it'll just pop off itself. When that doesn't happen, he unbuttons it, and when that doesn't feel like the worst thing he's ever done, he unbuttons all the upper garments until the other man’s bare chest is on display.
It's like nothing ever healed. The wounds are stanched with dirt, filthy but not infected.
When Vash glances over, Wolfwood’s face is a lot closer than it was, attentively tilted forward. His eyes are obscured by a sheen of black glass.
“I'm sorry!” Vash squeaks, quickly retracting his hands. “I'm just trying to understand how...”
A part of him almost expects Wolfwood to blow up at him in that mouthy way he does. Splinter the silence. Make it all manageable. But his flat expression is painted on.
Vash swallows a lump in his throat. “You must be hungry.”
Using scrapes the previous owner left behind, he makes them both a breakfast of coffee and not-coffee beans, and things almost feel normal. Wolfwood looks down at the mush, which Vash shoveled into the cleanest bowl he could find because he wanted it to look presentable or appetizing or something. Even though the Wolfwood he remembers would never turn away a free meal; he'd eat anything straight from a can as long as he could open it.
From behind the glasses, his eyes appear sealed shut. But, somehow, it looks like he's looking through his eyelids, and there is a profound lack of interest.
- Act of God
“Well, ain’t that a miracle?”
He’d use the word liberally. Or maybe Wolfwood attracted many miracles in his lifetime. Maybe the universe rotated around him, producing its happy little accidents solely for the priest to witness, to make up for the cards it had dealt him and prove life wasn't as rotten as the upbringing that made him live the life he led.
“Well, now yer talkin' 'bout God,” the Wolfwood in Vash's mind says with a wicked smile.
Vash always leaned in when Wolfwood had something to say about God.
The bar in Vash's mind gives Wolfwood a glass of whisky to sip. “Our planet's like a baby, if ya think 'bout it. Reacts on its impulses. No ill will. But God” —the ice cubes crack open— “He knows exactly what He's doin' when He’s doin’ it.”
- Rattenkönig
It's a miracle the cabin hasn't caved in on itself yet. Vash can't be sure how long it's been abandoned but long enough for a family of rats to eat through the drywall. (He doesn't bother them and they don't bother him.) The pipes haven't completely rusted over and the water usually comes out clear.
It darkens and thickens when Wolfwood silently lowers himself into the bathtub. Vash holds out a washcloth and tries not to stare at the gangly limbs awkwardly folding themselves wherever they'll fit. The man still hasn't said a word, but as long as Vash doesn’t hear any complaints—he’d love to hear one, honestly—he’ll stay. He's too scared to leave him unsupervised, anyway. Wolfwood doesn't bother to wring the cloth before scrubbing himself up and down in slow strokes. His natural bronze pigment seems to fade with the grime, and his skin begins to remind Vash of driftwood left out in the hot sun. Strands of inky hair float to the surface and cling to the stained porcelain, whipping their tails at the soft current. His hand falls into the water with a heavy plunk , unintended, like he does not possess the strength to keep going.
“Let me,” Vash says, retrieving another cloth that he wets under the spout. Instead of scrubbing, he lightly dabs at the wounds. The motion feels a little less intimate, a little less familiar, but he opts for it because something about Wolfwood's skin looks paper-thin, like it will rip away if too much force is used.
“I understand if you're upset with me,” he gently probes. “I said some stupid things.”
He anticipates blood on the cloth. Even just a speck from something accidentally reopened. But there's nothing but dirt.
“I was wondering” — dab, dab — “how did you find me? It seems impossible, even for you.”
Wolfwood's eyes are plainly shut behind the sunglasses. Everything else is piled on the floor unceremoniously, even his rosary.
“Can I take these off?” Vash asks, reaching for the accessory that has staked its claim on the other man's face.
Wolfwood flinches away.
He stays locked in that position, slightly veered to one side in protest, straining when Vash carefully pours water over his head and promises he'll feel better soon.
The tub won't drain. Vash has to fish out two fistfuls of runny muck before it does. He drops them onto the tile with a wet splat . It’s all hair.
- The Lover's Suite
He's clean, but he doesn't smell the way he used to. A little like sweat, and a little sweet from the candies he used to dye his tongue with. And there was something else that lingered. Sometimes it was there and sometimes it wasn't, and it depended entirely on whether he had a good chunk of change to spend when they went into the nice part of town—when there were nice parts. His scent would weave itself into the threads of the bedsheets, of every mattress of every hotel they ever stayed at.
The nicotine lingered too, of course. His favorite breakfast was a cigarette and whatever coffee the hotel was serving in a foam cup. He'd leave a little liquid at the bottom so he could douse the cigarette when he was done.
“No one's going to want to talk to you with your breath smelling like that,” Vash said.
“You talk ta me,” Wolfwood mused, with a knowing glint in his eye, with the cup carefully crushed in his hand. “You love talkin' ta me. Innit funny?”
From their borrowed balcony, they watched a couple exit down the steps of a church hand-in-hand, trailed by thunderous applause and chiming bells. Vash always wondered why the man didn't wear white too.
“Spikey, whatcha think 'bout all that?”
“I think good for them.”
“Y'know fifty percent of marriages end in divorce.”
“Does that mean the other fifty percent end in death?”
Wolfwood chuckled. His hair and eyes were so obviously brown. Vash always thought he looked best just like that—all his hard edges softened by the light. His smile gracefully crinked the corners of his eyes and turned Vash's heart into hot wax.
“Suppose so.”
- Crucible
They don't get worse but they don't get any better either. The wounds are a constellation of swiss-cheese holes stippling the expanse of Wolfwood's chest; just another thing that lends to his peculiar state.
This is the longest Vash has ever seen him without a line of smoke chasing after him. But it’s not like he's hard to find.
There is a kitchen table, three-legged and bound to the dusty hardwood, that he retreats to every morning. He curls up to its splintered underbelly like a dog seeking shelter, and he won't eat, sleep, or speak. Most of his activities he saves until after the sun ducks behind the horizon. Activities include: staring-not-staring at the walls, flaring his nostrils at things Vash fails to see, and violently shivering no matter what warmth Vash wraps him in (and painstakingly wrestling those things off).
But there is one thing Vash thinks he has figured out, and it's brought him some peace of mind: the sunglasses.
He meets Wolfwood in his favorite spot, leaving room so he doesn't feel pinned against the table, and asks, “Is the light hurting your eyes?”
He can't let himself think about how heavy the earth must have been, how trying to breathe must have felt like drowning, or how hungry that darkness was, so it’s just easier to ask, “Is the light hurting your eyes?”
Wolfwood weakly turns his head but it hardly feels like being acknowledged. His mouth goes slightly ajar and oozes an odor more foul than coffee and cigarettes combined—but what's worse is the silence that follows.
“What was that cologne you used to wear?” Vash presses the back of his hand to his eyes, fending off a building pressure. “Do you remember? It smelled of burnt...something. It was nice.”
Wolfwood sits up. Or tries to. His forearm brushes the table and gets caught on a fat splinter. Before Vash is able to pull out the spear, Wolfwood’s skin tears like old wallpaper, coming up in one long strip from wrist to elbow. What’s underneath is barely red. It reminds Vash of dried jerky.
He swallows his panic. The moment he gets desperate, he’ll fall apart. And then he’ll be useless.
“It's okay,” he says.
Wolfwood doesn’t seem to be alarmed, as though he doesn’t even realize what happened.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”
- Hymn/Him
Some shrieking thing wakes Vash in the middle of the night.
The rosary hangs off Wolfwood’s neck like a loose leash as he crawls on his hands and knees. The moonlight hits the window frame and carves a black cross into his back, but Vash's attention lands on the four squares illuminating where the silver skin splits apart to reveal an alcove of rot.
That horrible shriek commands an audience, quickly winning Vash back. His eyes spiral before they find a toothy little mouth snapping wildly at the air, screaming out in anguish while the hairball it’s attached to wiggles helplessly inside of a bigger mouth with bigger teeth. A fleck of light hits the rat's black eyes. There is a tragic spark of intelligence wobbling inside them, a fear that grips all living things.
Glass crunches under Wolfwood's palms. The remnants of his sunglasses. Vash's heart doesn’t want to go on when he meets his eyes.
They're gone. Two holes stare back. Two voids shooting back into his empty skull, melted into goo and probably soaked into the earth long before he ever crawled out of it.
He's just a husk. There's nothing left to save, no sadness or confusion or rage to cling on to. Vash sees nothing but a creature reacting, the same way a beheaded snake might still bite if disturbed.
Blood gushes down Wolfwood's chin, sharpening his hairs to a point, and the rat's wrinkly tail goes limp.
- Prayer
Vash contemplates his gun.
- Null Sun Never Come
The flies find him first. Wolfwood sits motionless on the rocker with his hands crumpled in his lap, facing the horizon line. Vash collapses on the porch, by his feet, and together they watch the sun levitate. The light presents Vash with the same thing it did some days ago, with what he refused to see all along: a corpse.