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Most of Wolfwood’s body works like it’s supposed to.
That’s a miracle in and of itself, given what it’s been put through. None of his organs failed — that was a possibility, Conrad’s told him. The most important muscles — shoulders, biceps, abs — developed somewhere in the realm of normal, not bulging and overgrown or totally insubstantial.
Wolfwood’s grateful for all that, of course. Grateful that he turned out well enough to keep his face. Grateful he didn’t need any more of himself replaced, after everything about him was remade, from child into man.
But for as functional as he is, no matter how much worse he knows it could be, he knows something’s still wrong.
The further down his limbs, the more wrong he gets.
His shoulders are fine enough. His upper arms. His thighs. All serviceable.
But his elbows and knees are too bony, like the joints didn’t quite grow to match his new body. His forearms and calves won’t build muscle no matter how much he walks or how long he carries the Punisher.
His feet never feel like they’re quite holding his weight. His hands, no matter how long he stares at them, never look like his.
Wolfwood tries not to let it get to him.
None of his body is his own. Not even the functional parts. Not his heart, not his lungs, not his muscles, no scrap of skin or millimeter of bone.
But it just feels that much worse in his hands.
His hands. His hands — it would be easier if they weren’t his hands, couldn’t be mistaken for his own at all. Didn’t have all his calluses, new and old, didn’t have the scar on one knuckle from some accident with a cooking knife in the orphanage kitchen one otherwise perfect day.
(It’s hard not to think of those days as perfect, even though he knows they couldn’t possibly be. Knows, in hindsight, when his gaze falls on children about the age he was before — before he was taken, before he grew, before he changed — that he was too young to be making dinner by himself whether he injured himself or not. But dinner had to be made, and it was good. He managed not to bleed in it.)
Those hands, that had once made dinner and rocked bassinets and held chubby fingers on the way to the outhouse and back, changed diapers and sheets and folded laundry, are the same as his hands now.
Bloodstained.
Not simply a killer’s hands. Not simply trained on death and gunmetal, not simply accustomed to every kind of suffering, his own and others. An assassin’s hands — raised and trained to kill as work, in perpetuity.
Under obligation to be as efficient as possible.
Then again — for all Chapel’s praise, Wolfwood knows he turned out better than expected. He was a scrawny orphan from a backwater town.
But he’d worked hard, like he always did. Aimed to please, because that was how you kept yourself safe around adults that had your life in their hands.
Wolfwood was good at killing.
Sometimes, he thinks Nicholas had been even better.
With those child’s hands, that child’s body. Unchanged, shaped only by one foot set in front of the other, every morning after the night before, dull steel honed to a sharp edge.
That child was still somewhere in Wolfwood, holding the Punisher tight in the same hands. The same hands not yet stained with so much blood. Hands guilty by association, but not by action.
Made unworthy by gunpowder, not yet by blood.
But they’re the same hands.
Wolfwood doesn’t remember if he ever believed in God, knows it’s been a long time since he has if he ever did, but — sometimes he still deigns to pray.
He bows his head over his filthy hands and prays that the children these hands once cared for — when they were young and sullied only by whatever it was in him the Eye found and pried out, painted him with the rot hiding inside him like a dead man painted in his own artery-blood — that they, at least might be spared the guilt of association.
That the wolf, the wolf raised among the lambs, had left no blood on them, left no teeth with them, raised the few he tried to raise with better habits than he — the wolf, the murderer, the killer.
Wolfwood prays for their salvation.
It’s with his hands clasped in prayer that Wolfwood is found.
Sitting out on the rooftop in the dark, in the cold. His cigarette burned out between his teeth, the quiet tears of the supplicant falling onto his hands, wrapped around the handmade crucifix Aunt Melanie had pressed into his unsullied palms, when he wasn’t Wolfwood, wasn’t Nicholas, was only Nico.
He doesn’t know when he started to cry. He doesn’t remember the last time he did — prayer’s never done this to him before. It’s hard to move a nonbeliever with the silence they expected to hear as answer to even the most desperate prayer.
Vash, crossing the rooftop in sweeping strides, entirely steady despite his ridiculous boots and the slope of the tiles, feels like an angel — for all that he must be the most prayed-against thing on this damn planet.
Wolfwood would know.
But he knows better now — if God made anything, sent anyone, it would be Vash. Avenging angel with the singular blade of his vengeance turned only towards his mirror image, an undirected rage of as many knives as the bodies of humanity can hold.
In the palms of his ruined hands, Wolfwood sees the children he’d pray to any listening God to save, reduced to blood and ash.
He sobs into the silence.
Vash sits down at Wolfwood’s side. Doesn’t touch him. Doesn’t break the quiet.
Just stays there. Not quite like an angel, more like something else, something at once too soft and too sharp to name.
Keeps Wolfwood company as he weeps, all the prayer gone from him.
“Sorry,” Wolfwood says, when he recovers his voice. He stares, seeing but unseeing, at the tears streaking his knuckles, caught in the grooves of his palms, wetting the cord of his crucifix. “I — I don’t know why I…”
Vash makes a sympathetic noise. “It just hits, sometimes. Worse than it feels like it should.”
Wolfwood doesn’t feel hit at all. Just… sore. Nauseous. If it — all of it, everything he’s been chewing at — had hit him, hard enough to leave him as battered as he feels, he hadn’t felt the blows.
Sometimes it’s hard to feel anything at all.
His heart, sometimes.
But his arms, his hands, his legs and feet — not quite so often.
Out of everyone in the world, Vash surely understands. His arms aren’t his own, either. One prosthetic and the other that terrible thing hiding under his skin, raw howling light.
Wolfwood just shrugs, though — because they don’t talk about what Vash is.
If they did, they’d have to talk about what Wolfwood is, what’s waiting for them at the end of the road.
The not-secret of it lives in them, between them, waiting quietly to be spat out like a lost tooth.
“It could stand to hit a little harder,” Wolfwood says. His face is tacky with dried tears, there’s a pit in his stomach he knows won’t fill even with food, even with liquor, even with smoke. “‘Least then I could put up a fight.”
Vash shrugs too. He takes a breath like he’s going to speak, stops short of whatever it is.
Instead, he covers Wolfwood’s hands with his, squeezes just tight enough to feel. “Let’s go inside.”
Wolfwood, in thanks, offers a hand and helps Vash to his feet.
Gives his limbs some meaning back, as they help to bear his weight.