Work Text:
“I need a favor,” Wolfwood says. Tries to sound a little less desperate than he feels.
Vash looks up. Sets down the little screwdriver he’s using to do some kind of tune-up on his prosthetic. “What kind of favor?”
Wolfwood curls his hands into fists against his thighs, drops his gaze so he won’t have to see Vash looking at him. “I need you to hit me.”
Silence.
Then: “Why?”
“I need—” frustration and humiliation war in Wolfwood’s chest, but — he’s already started admitting it, he can’t stop now. “It — fuck.”
Here’s the part where the humiliation would get worse because he’d start tearing up, full wobbly-voiced, flush-faced, snot-nosed irrepressible stress-crying, embarrassing and awful and hard to stop once he starts. Easy to lose himself in, the raw wound of upset opening up in his chest, sudden permission he didn’t mean to give granted to all the grief in him to start pouring out. There shouldn’t be enough water in his system to spare for all the tears that come, but dehydration falls by the wayside to grief.
Except it doesn’t, because he can’t. Just can’t. The wretched pressure of it comes, the knot of stress in his chest and throat and at his temples, his voice curls up and dies, his head clamors and rings with overlapping misery, but since he parted ways with Meryl — since he ditched her, shit miserable person that he is — after July, he hasn’t been able to cry.
That should be a relief. He hates crying. Hates the stress-induced tears most of all, how they come over him all at once, always belatedly, an adrenaline crash he can never adapt to. He hates the ache of it, head and heart and eyes and throat, guts twisted nauseously tight from sobbing. Hates the mess, the tears and snot and the spit that runs from his mouth when he has to hang his jaw open like a panting dog to get any air in. Hates the shaking, the tremors and the spasms, hates the hiccups, hates how his voice breaks. Hates how it makes people look at him.
But at least when he cries about it, it stops. He can get it out of him, the stress and the hurt and the hollow memory of pain the vials wipe away. He forces it out, cleans the wound no matter how badly it stings, sleeps it off.
Now it just sticks in his chest. Curls up tight and painful in his gut. Leaves him shaky and sleepless and without relief, stomach aching and eyes entirely dry.
It’s been days. He’s desperate. Desperate, and selfish, and pitiful.
“It’s—” he tries again. To put it into words is mortifying. Silencing. “Everything. All the — all the awful. It’s all… piled up. In me. I can’t get it loose. I need you to, to do something, to… to… kick the door in.”
Vash is silent for another painful moment, what might be heartbeats but feels like years. There’s a faint click as he closes the lid of his toolbox.
Wolfwood feels his nose twitch, his face crumpling into the motions of crying without managing actual tears. Not even a dry sob. Just the echoes of it.
“Come here,” Vash says.
A jolt runs straight down Wolfwood’s spine. Fear or anticipation, relief or surprise or something else entirely, he doesn’t know. But it lifts him from the edge of the bed, leads him over to where Vash has risen too, standing beside the table, unreadable.
Wolfwood is certain, suddenly, that he’s done something to disappoint him. His face crumples again, anticipating the way the twist of shame in his gut should send him stumbling over the edge, but the tears still don’t come.
Vash looks at him, steady and searching. “There are other things I could try,” he says. “I don’t have to hit you.”
“I want you to hit me,” Wolfwood says. He can imagine the other things. Vash might hug him, touch his hands and his face and the center of his chest, run his fingers through his hair, rub a thumb over the place the tears knot up in his throat. Nice things, sweet things, things he doesn’t deserve. Things that might not ever reach him through the static buzz laid over his skin. That might disappoint Vash more if they don’t work. “It’s just… faster.”
Silence again, hesitation, so Wolfwood pulls the last ace from his sleeve:
“Please?”
Vash slaps him.
Hard, not as hard as Wolfwood knows Vash can hit if he tries, but still hard enough to knock Wolfwood’s head sideways, send his sunglasses spinning off, clattering against the floor. The sound it makes is loud, the ringing it starts in Wolfwood’s ear is louder.
Something shifts in his chest, like the sand moving as a Great Worm passes beneath. Wolfwood’s stomach clenches around a sob that doesn’t come.
“Again?” Vash asks.
Wolfwood nods.
Vash hits him again. The same cheek. He’s too nice to hit Wolfwood with his prosthetic. Too nice to even backhand him. Just these open-palmed smacks. Softened. Disciplinary. Like he’s a disobedient kid.
“Again?”
Wolfwood’s voice takes a few tries to get out of his throat. His cheek is warm and achy like a fresh wound. He needs it to hurt more or it’s going to kill him. “Hit me until I break.”
Vash’s expression twitches a little bit like Wolfwood’s did. Emotion moving under the surface, trapped bug wings fluttering.
But he does hit Wolfwood again.
The third time feels like it barely touches him, the fourth makes him feel like he’s going to be sick, the fifth is when the burning starts to spread across his face and he doesn’t know if it’s from the impact or from the tears he’s trying to summon.
He won’t know until he’s already crying. He never does, can never predict it — he just feels awful and then he feels a different kind of awful and his face is wet. Like a sudden storm.
The sixth doesn’t feel like anything at all.
Vash shakes out his hand. His face is such a flat mask it’s starting to be terrifying.
“Wolfwood?” he asks.
His nose is starting to run. That’s a start. “Yeah?”
“That was the last one.”
Oh.
Wolfwood nods, disappointment resting over his shoulders like a leaden blanket. That’s… fine, that’s fine. He has backup plans. It’s always easy to find someone itching for a fight, in a town like this, precarious and unprotected, always in danger of disappearing into the sand.
Vash clicks his fingers, like he’s calling a thomas to heel. “Wolfwood, look at me,” he says.
Not sure when he’d stopped looking, Wolfwood brings his gaze back to Vash’s face.
“Hey,” Vash says. “You’re okay.”
Wolfwood barks a laugh. His face hurts to move it, cheek stinging raw. He might have a black eye tomorrow. “Not really.”
Vash’s hand, the meat of his palm reddened from impact, settles softly on Wolfwood’s cheek, thumbs under his eye, and rubs dampness down his cheek.
Oh.
“You’re okay,” Vash repeats.
Wolfwood finally feels the heat in his face, not just the sting of being hit but the burning in his sinuses and behind his eyes, tears starting to catch in his lashes and pool at the corners.
“Oh,” he manages. “It worked.”
Vash’s hand slides down the side of his neck to squeeze his shoulder. “I wasn’t sure, but I trusted your judgment.”
Wolfwood hiccups. Tears are dripping off his face now, falling like the rare rainfalls, hot and insistent, stinging against his raw cheek, forcing his eyes to narrow. “Well, that was your first mistake.”
“Come here,” Vash says, so much softer this time, and pulls Wolfwood in, letting him hide his face in his shoulder, martyr that he is, taking the mess onto himself.
Vash is warm and sturdy and secure — like the join of his neck and shoulder were made for a broken wreck like Wolfwood to hide in. The fabric of his turtleneck soaks up the relentless tears and Vash doesn’t even seem to mind.
“You don’t,” Wolfwood tries, because he has to, because this is too much to ask from someone he’s hurt so badly already. “Have to, you can — go.”
But — mercifully — Vash is reliable in never giving ground once he’s planted his feet somewhere. “I don’t have anywhere to be.”
Wolfwood tries to answer, tries to deny him thrice like Peter denied Jesus, see if damnation comes for him then, selfish and ungrateful as he is — but instead a sob wrenches out of him, loud and awful even muffled by Vash’s shoulder, and he barely gets a breath in before another one follows it.
Vash’s arm wraps around his waist, the other hand cradling the back of his neck, working up to run through his hair, the same hand that hit him until he broke, just like he asked, and Wolfwood doesn’t know how he’s going to survive this.
He doesn’t deserve it.
But he can’t make Vash throw him aside, can’t do anything to bring his ire. Nothing short of a gunfight breaking out would shift Vash’s attention from some poor thing in need and Wolfwood had bared his heart for a hope at relief and now he has it and knows in the pit of his stomach he should have just suffered.
He deserves to suffer.
Vash pets through Wolfwood’s hair, and Wolfwood sobs so hard he gags. Maybe Vash would stop holding him so tenderly if he threw up on him, but there’s nothing in his stomach. He hasn’t been able to eat, heart lodged in his throat.
He still hates crying and it still doesn’t hurt nearly enough—
The fabric under his face is sodden and overwarm and uncomfortable, but when he tries to shift his weight, tries to pull away, and Vash’s grip loosens to let him, his knees buckle.
Vash catches him, easily.
Holds him upright, all but carries him back over to the bed and settles him down without ever letting go of him, keeping his arm around Wolfwood’s shoulders as he sits beside him and looks into his face like he’s searching for some answer to what’s wrong with Wolfwood that isn’t the obvious.
“Wolfwood—” Vash starts, in a tone that probably isn’t actually admonishing, but sounds enough like it that Wolfwood’s face crumples up and he sucks a breath in like a kid about to have a tantrum. “Easy,” Vash goes on, much gentler. “Easy, just breathe, you’re okay.”
He’s not okay, and he wishes Vash would stop saying it. He knows what he means — that Wolfwood is not, imminently, in the midst of some calamity or devastation that would merit bawling his lungs out, but that he isn’t going to be punished for crying like a fucking kid anyway, and also that he should probably try not to pass out on the floor in the process — but Wolfwood isn’t fucking okay.
Vash starts rubbing his back, gently, like it’s going to fix him, and rests his other hand on Wolfwood’s knee, painfully certain points of contact even when Wolfwood buries his face in his hands.
It would have been better for him to suffer in silence. Let the pain chew through him until the wave crested and broke in some other way. He deserves that far more than this. Than any of this.
Hiding from Vash’s tender, piercing gaze doesn’t do anything to help Wolfwood stop crying, not when Vash is still so present, touching him and holding him and murmuring quiet comforting things, his warm breath ghosting over Wolfwood’s temple and the shell of his ear and the backs of his hands.
“I’m sorry,” Vash murmurs, when Wolfwood’s sobs dwindle to gasps — more out of exhaustion than anything else. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
You should have hurt me worse, Wolfwood thinks. “Didn’t,” he rasps, instead, voice muffled by his hands. “Just busted it all out of me. Like I asked you.”
Vash takes a sharp little breath. His hand slides back back to Wolfwood’s shoulder, pulling him close, a half-embrace. Wolfwood drops his hands from his face and wipes them on his thighs, staring through a film of tears past Vash’s knees at the hotel’s dingy carpet.
“I’m sorry it hurts so much, then,” Vash says, and then has the gall to make a noise of concern when Wolfwood chokes on a miserable sob.
You can’t save me, Wolfwood would say, if he were braver, or if he could speak around the fresh wave of crying that’s doing its damndest to shake him apart. You’re wasting your time.
But Wolfwood’s the one who asked for help. He’s the one wasting Vash’s time.
He knew that already, which doesn’t make it hurt less.
Vash will stay with him regardless, comfort him regardless, and Wolfwood is selfishly grateful for it. To be allowed to impose on him like this.
Eventually, it all leaves him.
All the shaking, all the sobbing, all the relentless tears. His head is pounding, his face and neck and shirt collar, along with his sleeves and Vash’s shoulder, are soaked or drying sticky with tears. His stomach aches like a stab wound.
But it’s left him, the wretchedness — he’s broken it down to parts and let it force its way out of him. Just the wreckage is left.
In the wreckage of him, Vash fusses. Coddles. Wolfwood pretends to be too tired to stop him, to object to Vash taking off Wolfwood’s shoes and jacket, bringing him water and a meal bar that tastes like sawdust in his mouth, tucking him into bed.
Really, Wolfwood’s mostly too tired to deny himself.
He could make Vash stop. But he’s selfish and he’s a coward and no one’s tucked him in for so long that it would make him cry again, if he wasn’t so damn tired.
“You’re okay,” Vash says, again. He kisses Wolfwood’s cheek, right where he hit him, the broken-open place where all the pain rushed out, probably nothing more than a bruise. “You’re okay, Wolfwood.”
He isn’t, he isn’t — but Vash climbs into bed with him, pulls him warm and secure against his chest, holds him close and holds him safe even now, even now that Wolfwood’s asked so much of him that he can’t ask anything more — so… maybe, in way, he is.