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It all started because of a little old lady (a lady still a handful of decades younger than Vash, but he wasn’t about to bring it up). Vash had been about to step in between her and a trio of men who apparently had nothing better to do than hassle an old woman out of her groceries, but she set them straight with a few well-aimed strikes of her very heavy-looking cane. Also watching the scene, Wolfwood snorted out a laugh as the men hobbled out of whacking distance, so amused that he moved first to help her gather the groceries she’d dropped in favor of fighting back. Vash followed, but they’d already managed to collect everything before he could lend a hand.
“Why, thank you,” she said as she returned a crusty loaf of bread to her bag, an expectant air to the end of her sentence.
“Nicholas,” Wolfwood said, almost bashful.
“Thank you, Nicholas,” the woman said. “It’s nice to meet a decent young man.”
This was aimed half at Wolfwood and half at the men now recovered enough to flee. Vash smiled wide as Wolfwood did not look at him.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “You get home safe now.”
The woman grinned and brandished her cane. “I most certainly will.”
As she walked away, Vash leaned into Wolfwood’s space and whispered, gleefully, “ Decent .”
Wolfwood shoved him, hard, and then grabbed the back of his coat before he could carry his exaggerated stumbling into the road. “Shut it, Blondie.”
It wasn’t Wolfwood helping a stranger that kept rolling around Vash’s thoughts or the fact that he’d been called decent and seemed flustered for it (though both things delighted him). It was the introduction.
To Vash, Wolfwood was, well, Wolfwood . He knew there was a Nicholas D. to precede it, but it never occurred to him to use the Nicholas part, and now he was curious. He let it stew for a while, even though Wolfwood caught on to his contemplation almost immediately; he eyed Vash with suspicion and then seemed to decide to wait it out, so Vash did, too.
Trudging through a new town in search of something cheap to eat, Vash decides he’s sat on it long enough.
“Should I be calling you Nicholas?” he asks.
Wolfwood’s head whips toward him, his face scrunched in a frown. “What?”
“It’s your name,” Vash says.
“Yes, I know that,” Wolfwood replies, his usual snap lacking its bite, tempered by confusion. “ This is what you’ve been keeping me awake thinking about?”
“I wasn’t keeping you awake!” Vash says. “I was just wondering is all.”
“I could smell the smoke coming outta that spiky head,” Wolfwood says. “Worried you were gonna break something.”
“None of this answers my question,” Vash points out.
Wolfwood rolls his eyes. “Because you answer so many of mine.” But he squints at Vash and says, “Do you want to call me Nicholas?”
“Not if you don’t want me to,” Vash says.
Wolfwood frowns again, going quiet as he contemplates the subject. “I think it would be weird,” he decides after they’ve come across a stall selling all kinds of food on a stick and join the short end-of-the-day line.
Vash hums, fishing out the money they’ve pooled for meals while Wolfwood orders. “Bad weird?”
“Weird,” Wolfwood repeats with a shrug. “You can try it, I guess.”
Wolfwood hands him something covered in crisp batter. Vash smiles.
“Thank you, Nicholas,” he says. It feels wrong coming out of his mouth—like, actually, he forgot Wolfwood’s name and is trying the next closest thing; Wolfwood is already shaking his head. “Mm, no, I don’t think so.”
“Definitely not,” Wolfwood agrees.
They eat while they walk back towards the slightly nicer than usual motel they shelled out for for the night; they were feeling indulgent, giving themselves a reprieve after a long stretch of sleeping rough and being chased away from settlements.
“What about Nick?” Vash asks when they’re in their room.
“No one calls me that,” Wolfwood answers, muffled as he pulls on a long sleeve shirt—stolen from Vash’s bag.
“I could be the first,” Vash offers, watching him ruffle his hair into even more of a disarray.
“Or you could not,” Wolfwood replies.
“Nicky!” Vash exclaims as he’s brushing his teeth, mouth full of toothpaste.
“Was I supposed to understand that?” Wolfwood calls from his seat in the window.
Vash spits and leans out the doorway to see his frowning face. “Nicky.”
The frown turns into another scrunch. “ No .”
“Nico,” Vash tries when they’ve retired to the beds, which are bigger than the ones they usually squeeze both of themselves into. Wolfwood goes very still, and Vash catches the tail end of something hurt in his eyes. He winces. “Not that one, either, then.”
Wolfwood lets out a breath, nearly a huff, and shakes his head. After a minute, he looks at Vash and says, “Is this some weird roundabout way you’re trying to get me to call you Vash?”
“No,” Vash says. “Although now that I think about it, you could stand to call me dumbass less.”
“You’d have to stop letting it suit you first,” Wolfwood says, smiling as Vash grumbles under his breath, the most childish of comebacks besides sticking out his tongue, which he also does. Wolfwood pulls his eyelids down with his middle fingers and blows a raspberry. Vash refuses to laugh, but Wolfwood grins like he did anyway.
(Later, later, later , Wolfwood finds him sitting in the last vestiges of sunlight. It’s too warm for the blanket around his shoulders, but he can’t bring himself to let go of it yet. Rather than join him on the low stone wall, Wolfwood sits on the ground beside his feet. The smoke from his cigarette drifts into Vash’s face.
“The other kids called me Nico,” he says. Vash fixes his eyes to the top of his head. “The little ones. But Ms. Melanie always called me Nicholas.”
He rests his head against Vash’s knee, the curve of a distant smile just visible before it fades. Vash risks tangling his fingers in the hair that always sticks up at the crown of his head. Wolfwood leans into the touch, stubbing out his cigarette in the dirt.
“A lifetime ago,” he says.)