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Wolfwood’s eyes glow.
Vash barely notices it, at first. It’s only right after he takes one of those strange blue vials that they actually glow, as if lit from within, but even when the drugs have finished whatever they’re doing in his system, there’s a faint reddish reflectiveness to his irises.
Usually his sunglasses hide it, but right now, sitting on top of Milly and Meryl’s van in the dark, his sunglasses are off, vanished into the pocket of his jacket.
It’s a show of trust that Vash doesn’t want to fracture.
And it’s showing off the reflective glow in his eyes.
Vash doesn’t think he knows.
“It’s called tapetum lucidum, you know.” Vash says, as casually as he can muster.
Wolfwood’s hands twitch on the cigarette he’s lighting. “What?”
Vash pushes his own sunglasses up onto his forehead, letting the moonlight overhead catch his eyes and the blueish shimmer of Plant markings hidden in the sclera. “It’s a night vision thing.”
For a moment, Wolfwood’s face is uncomprehending. Then panic lances over his features, and he scrambles for his sunglasses, almost getting them onto his face before Vash manages to catch his wrist.
“It’s okay,” Vash insists. “It’s pretty.”
Wolfwood resists Vash’s grip for a moment, but Vash holds him fast, and Wolfwood eventually relents with a sigh.
“It’s not,” he mutters. “ Pretty. ”
Vash doesn’t push it.
There’s something Wolfwood still hasn’t told him, something Vash is decently sure Meryl knows in some detail but Vash can only piece together from what he hears and sees, in brief flashes.
Wolfwood doesn’t want to explain, that much Vash understands. He holds it all inside him until it cracks out in brief forays into honesty, then clams up again, welds the cracks closed.
Everything Vash knows, he wishes he could un-know. Wishes he could unmake from existence, everything Knives and Conrad did, if Rollo was taken as a child was Wolfwood a child too—?
“I mean,” Wolfwood says, shoulders drawing up tense and defensive, one of those cracks opening up on his face, a raw wound of uncertainty — shame, old hurt, that ever-present chasm of despair that threatens behind his eyes, that Vash can see just as clearly as the earnest kindness, no matter how much he tries to hide both by the same mechanism he hides the faint red shine. “Yours are, nice, they’re not — I mean, you don’t exactly look like a feral street cat.”
Vash realizes he’s still holding Wolfwood’s wrist, a little too tightly. He loosens his grip, and Wolfwood drops his sunglasses to clatter onto the roof of the van, catching Vash by two fingers and pulling his hand close again, wrapping both hands over his to fidget with his fingers, head ducked to his chest.
“It’s useful, seeing in the dark,” Vash tries to redirect. “I can’t imagine going without it.”
Wolfwood’s mouth twitches in what might be a smile, rubbing a thumb over Vash’s gun calluses. “That’s true.”
What did they do to you? Vash doesn’t ask, letting Wolfwood soothe himself touching and bending his fingers, those big hands not nearly as calloused as they should be for how old Wolfwood looks and how confidently he handles his weapon. What did they do?
Why did they make you like me?
Vash’s hand twitches without his input, and Wolfwood flinches in turn. “Sorry,” he says, and then what Vash had been expecting happens — Wolfwood’s eyes squeeze shut, hiding the red shine, and tears run down his cheeks.
“Hey,” Vash starts. “Hey, hey hey, it’s okay.” He catches Wolfwood’s face in his hands, rubs his thumbs across his cheeks. “Look at me.”
It takes a moment, but Wolfwood’s eyes open to look at him again, half-drowned in tears.
His eyes just look like his eyes, not like anything was done to them, but Vash is sure, suddenly, certain that someone laid that thin layer of tissue behind his retina by hand.
“I’m sorry,” Vash says. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Wolfwood scoffs, his expression screwing up against the tears, to no avail. “Not—” he hiccups. “Scared, I just…”
He trails off, curls in on himself, pressing his face into Vash’s hands in a way that squishes his cheeks adorably.
Not fear. Shame, at any guess.
Vash can understand that much.
He stays still, stays quiet, knowing better than to try to apply the miniscule bandage of reassurance to the bullet wound of — whatever the word for this thing they share is. The horror of their own existence. The wrongness of it.
Dysphoria, Rem had called that sense of body wrongness , but she’d been talking about his and Nai’s genders, then, and Vash hadn’t felt dysphoric about that, just… preferential.
How he feels about the way his body looks under his clothes has nothing on the sick feeling he gets about how his body looks inside, what unfurls from him—
“I’m sorry,” Vash repeats, softer. He rubs his thumbs under Wolfwood’s eyes, clearing away the falling tears, repeating the motion when more fall in their place. It must’ve hurt, what they did to you. It must hurt, to be like me, and not even have the reassurance that it’s still just you, despite how unlike you it looks.
Wolfwood’s shoulders hitch on a sob. “Not your fault I’m some kind of freak.”
That’s debatable, given Knives, but — Vash can’t bring himself to have that argument instead of the more important one. “You’re not, Wolfwood.”
“Don’t fuck around,” Wolfwood practically snarls, but he can’t hold the anger on his face. It melts into a desperate, longing sorrow, tear-soaked and trembling. “I’m—”
Vash squishes his face to stop him. “You’re just you,” he says, as though he can make it true by force. Whatever was done to Wolfwood, all the monstrosity Knives and Conrad and whoever the hell else tried to blight him with, he’s still Wolfwood. “A little kitty-cat eyeshine can’t change that.”
Wolfwood makes a face like he wants to argue. “Not a kitty-cat,” he says, earnestly, like he’s winding up for it, and then his wet face cracks with laughter. “You bastard, you made me say kitty-cat on purpose.”
“It worked, didn’t it?” Vash teases, leaning in close to bump his forehead against Wolfwood’s, a gesture of comfort he knows appeals more to Plants than people, but he can’t stop himself.
Still laughing and still crying, Wolfwood leans hard into the contact, shiny-red eyes opening squeezing shut for a moment before they open again, the small flood in his eyes finally draining without refilling again, and Vash wipes the tears away, thumbs into Wolfwood’s lashes to catch the lingering moisture there too, which has the added benefit of making him twitch like a bothered cat.
“You’re so—” Wolfwood starts, and then trails off again, abruptly. He sniffles. “Tongari, I’m good, you can let me go now.”
Vash squishes his face one last time, then drops his hands, grinning. “Kitty-cat.”
Wolfwood throws his weight against him, too delicately to be called a tackle, but hard enough to shake the van, and they both laugh until something thunks against the roof underneath them, probably Meryl throwing a shoe.
That just makes them laugh a little bit harder.