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Despite everything, Wolfwood knew how to be gentle. His hands have never, will never, be as soft and cool as the matron of the orphanage’s had been when he knew her, but he could still channel that softness when needed.
Like today, when Meryl was grazed by a stray bullet in yet another shootout.
He had hardly thought about it in the moment, too preoccupied with trying to staunch the bleeding to stop and think about why it was a bad idea.
He had been standing close to her when it happened, keeping an eye on the swish of Vash's coat as he darted around the town's center. Not close enough to her to stop the stray bullet from skipping off a wall and into her shoulder, but close enough to catch her when she cried out and her knees buckled.
Vaguely, he heard Vash shout Meryl’s name through the gunfire. Trusting Vash to wrap things up on his own, Wolfwood lowered Meryl the rest of the way to the ground, keeping his back to the town’s center just in case.
He couldn’t tell at the time if her tears were from pain or panic or both, so he reacted in the only way he knew how- He pulled her shaking hands away from the gash in her shoulder and into one of his own, using the other mostly to put pressure on the wound and partly to hide the sight of her own blood from her.
He held her firm and steady against him, absently soothing his thumb over the back of Meryl’s palm. While subtly assessing the wound, he kept muttering little ‘you’re okays’ into her hair, only stopping when her breathing slowed to something that sounded less like hyperventilating.
With one hand pressed into the red patch on her coat and the other still tangled in hers, he pulled her up gently, wincing at every hiss and gasp she made as they stood up. Once steady, Meryl pulled away from him and for just a moment, despite the pain still tightening her features, he could swear she was studying him.
Vash ran up to them shortly after, already fussing over Meryl. He spared Wolfwood a quick up and own glance, before slinging his prosthetic arm around Meryl's waist, already urging her toward the van. He was quick to turn and fuss over Wolfwood and the gunshot wounds he had already dosed off. Scoffing at Vash’s mother henning, he turned and grabbed the Punisher and followed close behind.
Hours later, stood at the top of a sand dune and smoking his fourth cigarette of the evening, he turns his back to the makeshift little camp they’d set up. Vash is still anxiously pacing about, having been chased away from the van by Roberto. It's making him feel all jittery.
Roberto grumbled at Vash around the cigarette dangling from his mouth, “Quit hovering, Stampede, I need steady hands for this.”
Meryl is settled in the front seat, a canteen in one hand and her ruined jacket in the other as Roberto stitches the gash in her shoulder. It was truly a lucky miss, the bullet had just gone through her shoulder right above where he collar bone sits barely missing the delicate bones there, but the bullet hadn’t gone through clean.
She hisses at every push and pull of the needle. Vash flinches at the sounds from clear across the camp, and truthfully, Wolfwood isn’t doing much better. Meryl had shown herself to be tough and tenacious in the short time they’d known each other. Some color was already returning to her cheeks, so he knew she was alright, but he felt his own shoulders tensing with each pained squeak that left her.
Between Meryl’s pained sounds and Vash pausing in his pacing to throw long glances towards Wolfwood, he was going to smoke through the whole pack before second sundown.
Distractedly burning through the filter of a cigarette is never pleasant, but this time, the ashy taste it leaves in Wolfwood’s mouth is especially acrid. He coughs around the burn and kicks the spent end into the sand to join the rest. He's tempted to light another, but he hears Roberto let out one of his signature old man groan-sighs and step back from the van.
Wolfwood turns just in time to watch Roberto awkwardly pat Meryl’s knee and step away to throw the bloodied gauze into the fire, no doubt already planning the thorough ass chewing he's going to give Meryl for getting involved in the Stampede's antics.
Vash is at her side before the smoke from Roberto’s groan can dissipate, mismatched hands fluttering around her. Wolfwood sighs in relief, pulling another cigarette from the crumpled pack in his blazer.
He's content to watch them all come down from the adrenaline high of their day and smoke himself silly under the guise of ‘keeping watch’- and he plans on doing just that as he digs around in the pocket of his blazer for his lighter. He had just brought the flame up to the crumpled cigarette in his lips when he freezes.
Two sets of big, blue eyes stare at him from the Jeep. They pause and hold his gaze when he catches them.
Those bastards are talkin’ about me…
Meryl has her injured arm tucked against her side; eyes narrowed at Wolfwood. Faintly, he wonders what she's mad at him about this time. She doesn’t look as angry as she had when he last tried to steal her hat, or when he tried feeding her worm meat, or when he offered to buy her a booster seat from a little shop they’d passed so she could see over the steering wheel, instead, she looks contemplative, head tilted ever so slightly. She looks more like a reporter than ever with that little furrow between her eyebrows, all she's missing is her little her notepad and pen. When their eyes met, her face softens and she smiles at him. Uncomfortable, Wolfwood looks to the other set of baby blues
Vash has that stupid look on his face again. Nearly the same one he made in the belly of the sand worm, eyes crinkled with fond approval. ‘He’s a good guy.' he’d said, 'I can see it in his eyes’ , well, if Vash looked closer now, all he’d see is the borderline nuclear flush creeping up into Nicholas’s face at their weirdly friendly scrutiny. He turns around so fast he nearly gets whiplash..
The second sun has just dipped below the horizon when Wolfwood finally finds the courage (he ran out of cigarettes) to return to their little camp. Roberto nods at him as he approaches and lifts his flask toward him. Weird. Roberto hasn’t shown Wolfwood anything other than plain suspicion at worst and bored neutrality at best. Awkwardly, he nods back and makes his way over to the van, ready to call on the blonde idiot to take watch and succumb to another night of contorting himself into a pretzel to sleep not-so-comfortably in the backseat.
“Undertaker!”
Wolfwood wouldn’t admit to getting startled by a 5-foot-tall reporter if someone held a gun to his head, but he damn sure nearly has a heart attack.
Vash bolts up from where he'd been lounging in the passenger seat, “Wolfwood!”
Fuck. Vash definitely saw.
Already plotting how to get swallowed by another grand worm, Wolfwood turns to the two blue eyed menaces peering at him from inside the van. Meryl is perched as she always is in the driver’s seat and Vash sprawls across the passenger seat, sticking his tongue out in concentration. His long legs are folded haphazardly against the dashboard. He's holding Meryl’s white coat in his hands, prosthetic inside the coat to hold the stained tear up to the light, flesh hand holding a needle and thread. The bottle-green of his prosthetic glints as he tilts it this way and that, no doubt planning how to stitch up the jacket in the most complicated way possible.
“Perfect timing! You any good at sewing?” Vash holds the sewing needle out to him with a grin.
“No?”
“Me neither!”
That's plain bullshit if Wolfwood's ever heard it. He had watched Vash sew a perfect line of stitches into the lining of his dumb red jacket only days after they’d met. Before he can point it out though, Vash is up, thrusting the jacket and needle into Wolfwood’s hands. “I’ll take watch while you guys figure it out, m'kay? Let me know if you need anything!”
And like that, the spikey bastard is off.
He examines the rougher edges, “Hate to break it to ya, little lady but this might be a lost cause.”
Meryl just huffs and rolls her eyes at him, jerking her chin at the passenger seat. That's as close to an invitation as he's gonna get so, qith a shrug, he shakes off the worst of the sand that clings to him and clambers in beside her. He settles alarmingly easily into the distinctly Roberto shaped impression in the seat. He spreads the jacket over his lap to examine the bloodied hole in the right shoulder. Someone, probably Vash, had tried to coax some of the blood out with water but the stain still stands out stark and pinkish red against the white fabric.
The edges of the tear are jagged, nearly threadbare. Whether it's from the bullet or the scrubbing is anyone’s guess. Resigning himself, he takes the sewing needle and starts poking around the edges. Meryl takes a deep breath from beside him.
“Thank you.” She's not looking at him, gazing past the windshield into the dunes instead. Another neon worm swarm is just starting to meander over the horizon.
“Not done yet. Could still be a disaster.”
“Not about that. About… earlier.”
“What about it? Drunkle’s the one who patched ya up.” He pricks his finger with the needle. He doesn’t hiss but when she turns toward him, she definitely sees him pull the thread back through the way it came and start over. She doesn't speak for minute, just watching him fight with the stitching with an odd little smile on her face. He feels himself flush as she watches his clumsy attempts at stitching with his uncooperative fingers.
The needle feels tiny and foreign in his hands. He hasn’t had to do anything like this since the orphanage, before his ‘growth spurt’.
“You know, for a guy who eats worms, you can be kinda sweet when you wanna be.”
He looses a long groan, "Ugh, not you too, Shortie. Don’t let that Spikey idiot fool you. Just doin’ what I need to.”
“Like hugging people?” She says with a shit-eating grin.
“Like makin’ sure my ride doesn’t keel over!”
She laughs, “Okay, Wolfwood.”
He shoots her a withering glance and squints at the sleeve in his hand. He angles it into the moonlight for a better angle sticks the needle back through, “We on a last-name basis now, Short-stack?”
“Depends. You gonna use mine?”
“Never.”
She reaches out like she’s going to smack Wolfwood’s arm but the big grin on her face falters when the move pulls on the stitches in her shoulder.
“Simmer down, Shortie. Here,” he finishes the last messy stitch and ties it off. He cuts the thread with a sharp canine and passes the jacket to her, “Good as new.”
Luckily, Meryl must still be feeling some kind of affection for him because she stifles a laugh into the back of her hand at the shaky line holding the sleeve of her coat together. Wolfwood is too busy pointedly angling his flushed face towards the open window grumbling about it to see how she grins fondly and runs a reverent finger along the poorly repaired tear.
He’s just about to lean the seat back and be done with it all when a knock on the car door startles the fuck out of him.
Vaguely, he wonders when he started letting his guard down enough to stop listening for footsteps in the sand.
Roberto is standing on the other with an unlit cigarette dangling beneath his downturned mustache. He raises a bushy eyebrow at Wolfwood and waggles his flask in a shoo motion. It sounds distinctly emptier than it did at the campfire. He must be making a face because Roberto’s mustache twitches upward and Meryl starts to giggle in earnest behind him.
“Yeah, yeah.” Wolfwood grumbles and begrudgingly climbs out of the seat and no sooner have his feet touched the ground has he snatched a cigarette from the open pack in Roberto’s shirt pocket. Fair payment for the horrors of being appreciated, he thinks. He stalks away before Roberto can grouch, not in any kind of mood to hear Meryl whine about how cigarette smoke clings to the upholstery.
Without thinking, his feet lead him straight to his quarry. Vash the Stampede is laying with his back against the sand dune Wolfwood had been smoking on earlier and if it wasn’t for the dorky grin on his perpetually sun kissed face, Wolfwood might think he was asleep.
“Keeping watch, huh?”
Vash makes a real show of cracking an eye open and stretching out against the sand with a yawn. He sits up straight, flopping his long legs out and kicking up dust before making binoculars out of his hands and looking around in a wide semi-circle. There’s nothing in any direction for several iles. “Looks clear to me!”
He flops back down and hits Wolfwood with a blindingly smile, patting the sand next to him. Wolfwood looks to the glowing green worm swarm above them for strength and hopes to whatever god is listening that Zazie isn’t paying them any attention.
He flops back into the sand next to Vash with a grunt.
It’s quiet between them. Both content to lay in the sand and stare up into the glowing sky. Usually, the moons and stars are bright enough to illuminate the night enough, but the worm swarm glows brighter, bathing the sand around them in a greenish glow. Wolfwood lets his eyes slip closed as he puffs on his cigarette. Vash shifts and speaks up from beside him.
“Keeping watch, huh?”
Wolfwood opens his eyes and is greeted with the sight of Vash the Stampede propped on an elbow, leaning over him. His orange glasses are tilted in a way that reflects Wolfwood’s own face back at him, hiding Vash’s eyes, but the soft smile that has been stuck on his face since throwing Wolfwood under the ‘nice guy’ bus earlier hasn’t faded any.
Nicholas tries his best to scowl up at him from around the smile fighting to settle on his own mouth and blows his last lungful of smoke into that infuriating face, aiming for the beauty mark just underneath his eye. Vash doesn’t even cough, the bastard. His grin widens for a moment, showing teeth before he flops back down into the sand. He’s still staring at Wolfwood behind those goofy orange glasses.
“Thank you.”
Nicholas lets out a smokey groan and throws his hands up. “What’s the deal with you guys today?”
Vash looks puzzled for a moment before finally looking back towards the sky with a shrug letting his grin soften again. “I’m really glad you were there to make sure Meryl was okay.”
Wolfwood lays back again with a huff, thinking back to the shootout. Surely whatever he had done was normal right? He thinks back to his training under Chapel. Granted it was miserable and he had never really trained alongside anyone he actually cared for, but he was still taught some basic field medicine in the event he or another member of the Eye was caught without vials.
Catch the body before it hits the dirt. Check. Stop the bleeding. Check. Assess the wound. Check. Hold their hands and whisper words of comfort until they calm down...
Huh.
For the third or fourth that evening he catches himself flushing something fierce. While he’s trying to piece together if the hand holding was something he picked up from living in the orphanage with Livio or not, Vash has shifted his gaze back onto Wolfwood.
Nicholas can tell he’s taking too much time trying to get his face under control when Vash lets out an almost inaudible sigh and looks away.
“I’m so sorry. It’s my fault you both got hurt.”
“The hell are you talkin’ about, Spikey?” Now it’s Wolfwood’s turn to lean over.
Vash is steadfastly avoiding his eyes now, looking somewhere off into the distance. Distantly, he realizes the worm swarm is petering off, leaving the desert around them to fade back into the cool blue of night. Vash finally meets his eye, the fond smile has left his face, replaced by that painful façade Wolfwood hates.
“You should get some rest, Wolfwood. You got shot too, remember?”
Surely, Vash must know about the vials. No regular human could just walk off as many body shots as he had taken that day and be totally fine. Wolfwood is tempted to punch Vash’s stupid, beautiful face for trying to act dumb. Anything to get that horribly sad smile off him. He flicks his nose instead and Vash startles, face turning hilariously grumpy and pink.
“C’mon Spikey, don’t be dense. It’s no one’s fault but the assholes shootin’ at us today,” He looks away. The pout Vash is sporting as he rubs his nose is borderline lethal. “If anything, we should be thankin’ you for dealin’ with ‘em as quick as ya did.”
Vash just sighs, frustrated. He looks away again, frowning at the rolling sand dunes. The silence surrounding them isn’t tense, but Nicholas can tell that if he keeps up, they’re just going to go in circles until the suns rise.
“Hey,” he says, poking Vash in the side, earning him a little ‘eep.’ “You need to fix the stitches in Shortie’s jacket, I can’t sew for shit.”
“You actually tried to sew it?” He huffs a soft not-quite-laugh, turning on his side to face Wolfwood, “I was going to fix it in the morning, I didn’t think you’d want to.”
Wolfwood turns to face Vash in the sand, “I-you- what the hell, Blondie! You gave me the needle!”
“You said you didn’t know how! I thought you’d put it away!” Vash raises an apologetic hand, looking sheepish.
Wolfwood wants nothing more than to bury that stupid spikey head in the sand, so he does. He pushes over and wrestles Vash deeper into the dune, laughing at the high-pitched squawk Vash makes when he gets it in his mouth and well, payback’s a bitch. Vash twists under Wolfwood and rolls them down the dune.
After a moment of flailing and a few elbowed ribs Wolfwood sits up and splutters, spitting sand out of his mouth and groaning at the course feeling of it under his shirt. Vash isn’t faring much better and Wolfwood barks a laugh at the sight of him.
He landed ass over elbows at the bottom, his jacket having flopped over his head, making him look like a Tomas with its head buried in the sand, his scrawny ass wiggling in the air while he tries to excavate himself. He sits up sputtering and between spitting the sand out of his mouth, he’s laughing. Vash looks up the dune at Wolfwood, even with crooked glasses and sandy teeth, it’s the most genuine smile he’s seen from the blonde yet.
Something in his chest flutters.
“You should smile more, Spikey. It suits you.”
Vash falters for just a moment, looking up at him with wide eyes. He fixes the glasses on his nose and angles them down, hiding them behind the reflected light again.
After a moment he starts laughing, the leer he’s shooting Wolfwood is downright predatory. He would recognize that troublesome glint in his eye anywhere.
Nicholas frequently saw it in the other children at the orphanage when they got it in their heads that they could gang up on their big brother Nico. Now, Wolfwood knows Vash means business.
“Welp, goodnight!” He turns and scrambles through spilling sand back up the dune, Vash hot on his heels.
Meryl and Roberto who were, up until then, dozing in the peaceful silence of the van share a look when they hear a screech that sounds suspiciously like Wolfwood followed by Vash’s raucous laughter floating from the sand. Roberto’s mustache quirks in annoyance, but Meryl smiles, catching his sleeve before he can go grouch at them, shaking her head.