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“Jesus H. Christ, Spikey,” Wolfwood says, “I think you’ve got more metal than shoulder back here.”
—Considering that Wolfwood is knuckle-deep in Vash’s left lat muscle trying to dig out a stray bullet, Vash does not respond to the quip with anything other than a noncommittal, mysterious hum. He makes sure it sounds mysterious instead of strained, like his throat kind of wants to, by pulling his vocal cords tight enough that it comes out light and airy. Execution-wise, it’s perfect – without any actual executions, because that’s just not his style. He’s got mysterious down in ways that hidden, cloaked figures skulking in back alleys could only wish they could do mysterious. It’s one of Vash’s many cultivated talents.
Seated behind him, Wolfwood makes a pthf. A bunch of consonants strung together, as if he were spitting out the butt of a thoroughly-chewed cigarette into the sand; Vash knows that it means I don’t believe that you don’t know without Wolfwood having to say it out loud. Vash doesn’t prove him right, because that would just be making it too easy for Wolfwood.
It is a lie, because Vash does know; his left shoulder is sixty-six percent metal and wires at this point, courtesy of seven different major injuries, sixteen minor bullet wounds, and Doc’s extensive surgeries done to integrate the base of his mechanical arm into his nervous system. Real fun, the lot of ‘em! Doc did some great work, a true ten-on-ten, would highly recommend to anyone else in the market for a mechanical limb. It’s why Vash always makes sure to thank him whenever he sees the SEEDS colonist in person, and to flex his arm a little bit more than usual so Doc can feel extra proud.
The current, newest bullet in his body is from the drunk man downstairs, lodged between two of the struts that replaced his subscapularis thirty-two years ago. Being shot point-blank of his own volition is better than watching a friend get shot against her will and doing nothing to stop it, though, so Vash is overall quite pleased with himself and the results of the scuffle. No deaths! No fatal injuries! Vash the Stampede has never asked for much more than that. He’s astonishingly easy to please.
—Wolfwood’s fingers are still an inch too shallow. He’s trying not to hurt Vash. Real sweet of him. Vash might have to croon something annoying at him later so he doesn’t go and get too mushy and honest about it.
(Despite his light-hearted tone, Vash knows that his awareness of his own body borders on obsessive. It could be said that how Vash keeps track of every single affliction he’s ever gone through and survived is in essence its own form of self-destruction; the constant reminder of pain, half-healed wounds, and tissues that’ll never be the same would drive any normal man mad.
Too bad Vash values them all. Too bad he’s no normal man. His own capacity for change might be drawn-out by the slow, slow timescale he lives on as a nonhuman, but his body is an entirely different story. That part of him can be changed or unchanged as much as he wants it to be, as rapidly as he wants it to be, and Vash will always want it to be changed if it means that it can change in order to keep another heart beating.
Call it his religion; his bone-deep conviction that, as long as a heart continues to beat, it will always possess the capacity for profound good. It’s all the evidence Vash will ever need to keep walking forwards.)
“...I really am very sorry, Mister Vash,” says Milly Thompson, wringing the blood-stained towel in her hands. The bedside table by her hip is already covered in more blood-stained towels, and there are faint pink splotches on her forearms from when she’d jumped to staunch the bleeding with the first article of clothing she could get her hands on.
(Which happened to be Wolfwood’s jacket, thrust into her hands faster than Vash’s nerves could process that they’d just been severed and that the bullet hadn’t exited the front of his chest, and that he would be in for a very, very long night. Not his first one! And definitely not his last.)
Vash hopes the innkeeper won’t charge them too steep of a cleaning fee, though she did seem apologetic earlier about the scuffle in the tavern downstairs. Misguided drunkards and their egos, not liking when ladies say no. People like that really do need a good talking-to about respecting their fellow man and woman and everything in-between. She’ll probably understand. Vash met her mother, Teresa, when he passed through this town a few decades ago. Teresa was an empathetic soul, and Vash wants to assume that she taught those same values to the daughter that now inherits her establishment.
“Don’t worry about it, Milly, it’s not your fault,” Vash says cheerfully, putting on a big smile to make up for the absence of Milly’s usual one. “Everybody gets shot in the shoulder every now and then! It’s not a big deal.”
Milly, the lady in question who said no, gusts out a heavy sigh. “You are right about that, Mister Vash. Even I’ve been shot in the shoulder a few times, though mostly it was with pellets and little millimeter pistols instead of big and mean handguns like the ones that nasty guy was carrying.” Twiddling her thumbs, she adds, “I just don’t like having’ to see you get hurt, is all.”
Vash puts on his best reassuring expression. Much like Mysterious Vash, Reassuring Vash is one of his best-practiced personas. It can even fool the perceptive likes of Milly Thompson – though it tends to just make Nicholas D. Wolfwood angrier and prone to hand-flapping, so Vash keeps his face angled away from the preacher sitting behind him.
“At least you got in a good, strong punch for me, Miss Thompson!”
Milly giggles then, swinging her arm in a circle as if winding up for another. “Why, you’re so welcome, Mister the Stampede! It’s the least I could do against such a brute—”
“—Big girl, you shouldn’t be in here,” Wolfwood pipes up. Vash can hear him grinding his back teeth, a not-quite-chewing motion he does when he’s on edge. Or focused. He’s probably both on edge and focused on not severing anything important in Vash’s back. Or getting shocked on the sixty-six percent of metal and wires. Only Vash’s ears can pick up on it; Milly still reacts to the sharpness of his tone. “This idiot won’t stop bleedin’. Don’t want you stinkin’ of it, too.”
Vash throws a hurt scowl over his shoulder. “My blood doesn’t stink.”
“Like hell it doesn’t. It’s nasty.” Wolfwood’s free hand, the one not playing with Vash’s un-fun internal anatomy, comes around to smack Vash in the nose. He’s also got Vash’s blood on that one, though significantly less of it. “Take a whiff, Spikey. Or Stinky. Understand the things I’m doin’ for you right now.”
(Detritus and rotten leaf litter are smells that Wolfwood’s probably never come into contact with, so it makes sense that he’s reacting so poorly to them; the human tang of iron being replaced by garlicky phosphorus doesn’t help the case for Vash’s blood not smelling bad. Vash likes garlic, though. Most people like garlic, actually. It’s a very popular flavor. And vampire legends on No Man’s Land hate peppers instead of garlic, so it’s not like Wolfwood could pull the Dracula card on Vash and say that a different immortal being feared by the general public would be on his side of the argument.)
“Dig a little deeper, and then the things can be over and done with,” Vash says, sucking his lips in and bending away from Wolfwood’s bloody palm like an unhappy cat. He holds his breath, refusing to inhale until Wolfwood moves his fingers away.
Wolfwood really drags out his contrarian streak, in ways that only a select few people ever have. It’s the principle of it, or whatever; iron-hard will versus iron-hard will. Often, they dance simply to see who bends first. Pick at each other’s weaknesses, so that they can better protect themselves in the future. Is that symbiotic? Mutualism? It kind of just reminds him of building muscles, having to tear the fibers so that they repair stronger than they were before.
“Ooh, testy.”
“Don’t be crass to the injured, Mister Priest,” Milly scolds.
“Sorry, big girl.” Wolfwood jerks his head towards the door. One leg hangs loose over the edge of the bed and the other is bent and pressed up against Vash’s back, so Vash can feel the tremors when his foot starts to tap. “I meant it, though. You don’t gotta be watching over us no more, I can finish this up until your ma’am gets back with the stitching kit. ‘S too much blood fer a lady like you.”
Milly narrows her eyes and cocks her head to the side. “—You even spend any time on a farm, Mister Priest?” she asks flatly, in such an un-Milly way that Vash gulps and he isn’t even the one it’s being directed at. Yikes! Backtrack fast, Wolfwood, or you’re gonna regret it.
“Give or take a few types a’ livestock, sure.” Wolfwood doesn’t balk, but Wolfwood doesn’t make a habit of pissing off Milly Thompson, so he doesn’t seem to recognize that he’s toeing a line with her Vash has accidentally blundered across multiple times by virtue of being, well, a little bit stupid on purpose to keep suspicions at bay. And sometimes just because being a little bit stupid is easier than being a little bit too competent. People start asking questions when you’re too competent too blatantly. “Old place had some chicks fer eggs.”
If Vash can make a perfect execution look like a lucky fumble, it just makes things easier for everybody. (Easier, how, exactly? That’s a good question. Just easier.) His current fumble of the day is the slicing motion made at his neck that Wolfwood is deliberately ignoring.
“Youngest on the farm had to take the rabbits out back for skinning,” Milly explains simply. “It was messy work, you know. They have a lot of little bones and ligaments you have to watch out for.” Then, doing a violent one-eighty, Milly grins brightly and gives him a big thumbs-up. “So don’t you worry about me, sir, I’m no squeamish sissy! Just focus on helpin’ out Mister Vash and we’ll all be jolly again soon enough.”
Wolfwood forces eye-contact with Vash by leaning his chin over Vash’s shoulder, warm and solid against his back (and kind of irritating the bullet wound, but mostly warm and solid in a vaguely comforting way). “—What the hell, Spikey?”
“Why are you asking me?” Vash side-eyes him back, tempted beyond words to bite the cheek right next to his mouth. It’s very tempting. Though it’d be a little bit hairy, considering Wolfwood hasn’t shaved in a few days.
“You found this girl. You tell me what’s the hell.”
“She knows where meat comes from, unlike some people who think that fish aren’t a real thing,” Vash says. No, he shouldn’t. More loss than gain. Though, to be honest, those are the types of situations Vash is most familiar with. “That’s what’s the hell.”
Milly giggles, bubbly and light. It times itself very poorly to coincide with a big bubble of Vash’s blood dripping out of the hole in his shoulder that Wolfwood hasn’t really done any favors for besides making the hole a little bigger. In retrospect, they really should’ve waited for a pair of tweezers. Vash hears an eugh from behind him and Wolfwood cringing away.
“You two are making no sense. You’re so silly,” she says.
“There’s no way fish are real,” Wolfwood says, voice nasally from plugging his nose. “You’re a liar, Spikey. They’d just drown.”
“Like sea unicorns!” agrees Milly.
“Yeah, just like the sea unicorns,” Wolfwood nods.
Vash doesn’t like having arguments more than one time. He’s only got the space in his heart for one epic simile of an ideological argument in his life, and it’s been taken up by his brother for over a century and festered into a permanent tumor he’s got no chance of replacing with sea unicorns. As much as he’d really like to replace it with sea unicorns. That’d take another surgery, though, and he’s currently using up his DIY procedure of the month for a single freaking bullet. So while Milly and Wolfwood go back and forth recalling all sorts of Earth animals they don’t believe exist, Vash simply sighs, and picks at the hem of his sweatpants dejectedly. Narwhals were real, they just went extinct in the last twenty-first century. And so did the savannah unicorn – the rhinoceros, though some were bicorns – in the century after.
Man, Earth Humanity was really bad at keeping unicorns alive. Good thing there are no uni-worms on No Man’s Land.
Vash looks up from his own lap when Milly’s shadow falls over them, and a gentle finger hovers over the entry wound in his back.
Milly’s always very careful about not touching him unless Vash initiates it first. For some reason (for reasons Vash knows perfectly well), people tend to think of Vash as somebody who loves human touch, physical contact, and any sort of jostling and joyous skinship. He’s not. Milly figured it out first, and Wolfwood figured it out second by watching Milly watch Vash. Kids and teens are a special exception. His fellow adults are not.
(It was like a weight lifting off of his shoulders when they both started being – conscientious. It was kind. It was comforting. It was one less thing that had to bounce around in his head like the bullets in his body and eat up his precious patience and trust. He had spades of both, carefully cultivated and restocked by good deeds when it started to get low, but that didn’t mean he wanted it to be wasted.)
It’s not often that Wolfwood pushes that boundary like he is now, unless it’s explicitly to get a rise out of Vash. Vash has noticed that he especially does so when Vash is in a funk and covering it up poorly, or when Vash is being bothered by something and acting like he’s being bothered by something else to detract from how bothered he is by the first thing. Wolfwood, like the force of nature he is (without even needing to be named a typhoon), just goes for the blanket approach: being nosy. Being pushy. Breaking down Vash’s walls and waiting for Vash to crawl out of the rubble himself, instead of forcing his way inside.
Vash doesn’t always crawl out. Sometimes, he lingers inside, and Wolfwood would just sigh and walk away – but he’d never give up. He’d be back in a few days with a fresh cataphract, a new battering ram to bloody and test the mettle of, right back in Vash’s precious space.
(Seemed he really took “You give up so easily” to heart, and now he was dead-set on proving Vash wrong.
“—You react so much to shit, but none of it’s really real, is it?” Wolfwood once asked him. With his thumbs in Vash’s mouth, pulling on his cheeks. Just to bug him, to get a rise. “Yer unflappable. It pisses me off sometimes.”
“Yoursch pisshing mye ofsh,” Vash replied, when licking didn’t shake Wolfwood’s Eldest Sibling defenses in the slightest. Not an answer. Not the truth. It said too much, either way.
“Yeah.” Wolfwood didn’t let him go. Instead, he used the leverage he had on Vash’s jaw to drag their foreheads together, staring at Vash with those dark brown eyes that both understood so much and knew so little. “Thought so.”)
Once Vash leans into her touch, Milly starts to wipe up the dribble of blood following the grooves of his back scars. Quietly, she says, “Mister Wolfwood, I don’t mean to pry into your expert technique, but I really don’t think we should be letting him bleed this much.”
“Oi, just ‘cause I’m lettin’ you stay doesn’t mean I wantcha back-seat drivin’ my doctorisms,” Wolfwood replies. “He asked me to get this thin’ out. I’m gettin’ it out.”
Vash is bleeding that much because he’s got a lot more veins and arteries in his shoulders than a normal human being, despite how much of his flesh has been replaced by metal. Independents are meant to grow wings. How the hell would the wings work without a good, strong, saturation of capillaries full of blood and oxygen to power them?
Wolfwood and Milly don’t need to know that, so he doesn’t bring it up. He’s allowed to have some of his business stay private even under prying eyes worried about his health. He’s a very private soul, and that’s okay. They still like him – if not on a personal level, then enough to stick around him, at least. Vash can’t really ask for more, knowing his track record.
(Can’t ask for more. Can’t ask for more. In what realm can Vash ask for more? More time with Rem. More patience from Knives. More forgiveness for himself. Sometimes he thinks that asking for the impossible and being denied hurts him less than asking for the reasonable and still coming up empty-handed.)
“Don’t be rude to Milly,” Vash scolds, crossing his arms to look more serious.
His hair has started to flop pathetically with all the sweat he’s producing, so he deploys his physical stature instead of his sharp silhouette to make his point. Many weapons at his disposal, none of them deadly, all of them good for negotiations and peaceful resolutions; he’s adept at using them all. He has to be.
“Don’t move,” Wolfwood snaps back.
Vash doesn’t hide his wince when Wolfwood’s fingers finally catch on the rim of the bullet, making a spike of pain erupt around the area. It doesn’t hurt all that much, but they’ll probably be more mad at him if he stays honest and stoic, unresponsive to any kind of discomfort like he could be if he really wanted to. Accuse him of hiding from them again. A little bit of excess expression makes people more comfortable. Makes them more prone to believing. Vash measures the amount of pain he should allow to leak through into his expression before turning round, pleading eyes on Milly and letting a little tear trickle down his cheek.
Conspiring with no one, Milly hands him a clean towel and whispers, “To bite down on if you need to, Mister Vash.”
“Thank you kindly, Miss Thompson,” Vash whispers back.
“—Gotcha,” Wolfwood says before the towel can get anywhere near Vash’s mouth, pulling the bullet out in one swift motion and holding it up to the dingy inn lighting. He looks at it for all of one second before slamming pressure down on the entry wound with another towel. Vash lets out an ‘oof’ as he’s pushed chest-down onto the bed. Grimacing, Wolfwood adds, “Shit, Spikey, we probably woulda had better luck cuttin’ you open from the front to get this thing out.”
“Please never do that to me, for future reference,” Vash says politely, muffed by the bedsheets. They’re scratchy, and smell like cheap detergent. Better than his garlicky blood. Wolfwood’s missing out on how pleasant they are! Vash should tell him so, to be a gracious little pest. He turns his head, cheek smushed into the mattress by the Punisher-wielding arms pressing down on the hole in his shoulder blade.
“Honestly, Mister Vash, we also could’ve left it in there,” Milly says, back to wringing her hands with worry. Her eyes are fixed squarely on the dark red splotch blossoming under Wolfwood’s hands. “My uncle Jimmothy has at least six bullets just sittin’ in his leg and he still walks just fine, no infections or poisonin’ or nothin’.”
With neither agreement nor denial, Vash smiles and replies, “Eh, we probably could’ve. Too late now!”
(Vash wanted to be able to remember the scar for how he helped Milly, not for how a drunk man tried to put a bullet between the eyes of an innocent woman for telling him to please take his hand off of her waist. The bullet would have reminded him of the latter. The scar will remind him of the former.)
Now, they just have to wait for Meryl to arrive with the stitching kit from the infirmary down the road, after concocting a strong-enough lie that the workers there don’t come to suspect there’s a heavily injured person they can extort for money. The whole lot of them – Vash, Wolfwood, and the girls – are more than a little strapped for cash at the moment after a bus ride gone scammy, and Vash would rather not have to do a dine-and-ditch equivalent on a medical establishment if they were perfectly capable of dealing with the disaster themselves. Doctor stuff is expensive.
“It’ll be okay, big girl,” Wolfwood says, sounding like an attempt at comfort. It would’ve been a good attempt at comfort if Vash wasn’t feeling a little lightheaded and snarky about the whole deal.
Milly’s eyes crinkle. “I know. It’ll be okay, Mister Priest.”
It’ll be fine. Sure? Vash’s conviction joins in, unhelpfully relegated only to his realm of thought instead of spoken out loud. It’s feeling a bit shakier than usual; probably the blood loss catching up to him. He might be tough, but a quarter of a liter is a quarter of a liter.
—The door to the room slams open. Meryl, hanging her head in shame, follows behind as an elderly woman wearing gray scrubs and a lopsided nurse’s cap striding into the room with a bag of medical supplies under her arm. Vash catches Meryl mouth I tried to Milly, and Milly mouth back You did your best, ma’am.
“Vash the Stampede,” the nurse says to announce her presence, dropping her burden on the floor and shooing Wolfwood away. Her white hair is tied up in a neat bun away from her face, generic enough that she could have blended in with any of the other elderly nurses Vash has ever met on his travels. The long knife scar splitting her nose into two neat halves is unmistakable, though, and Vash smiles.
“Ah, Teresa!” Vash greets the familiar face, woozy, “I thought you’d retired soon after the last time we saw each other. You’re looking lovely, by the way!
“My daughter sent for me,” Teresa, flat-faced and unimpressed, jams a finger over her shoulder, “before your little friend could even speak a word of bullshit.”
Meryl looks away guiltily when Vash glances at her and snorts. Truthfully, he didn’t expect any different. Asking Meryl to make up a good lie is like asking Wolfwood to kick a crying kid in the face. Fundamental incompatibilities, Vash could call them.
“It’s not your fault, ma’am, it’s good being the honest type,” Milly whispers to her.
Meryl sighs, sounding embarrassed. “Thank you, Milly.”
“We’ll talk about your bill after the rest of your companions go help Maxine downstairs with all of this laundry,” Teresa says to Vash, pulling out a kit filled with needles of different gauges and placing it directly in Vash’s line of sight. She makes a face at the pile of bloody towels and sheets, wrinkled brow low and unamused. “—Sweet Jesus. It stinks in here.”
Wolfwood smacks Vash’s ankle on the way out. “Hah! I told you so.”
“Can’t I call in that favor?” Vash pleads as she starts to disinfect the area with wipes. “Thirty years ago? Please? For how I scared off your no-good bad-doer dead-beat husband?”
“No,” Teresa says sharply. “I coulda done that myself. All you did was not let me kill ‘im for it, and I’ve been holding that against you since. ” With skilled fingers, she preps the first suture, and Vash swallows when she gives him a nasty smile. “Brace yourself, Stampede.”
—Empathetic indeed.
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