Work Text:
“Are you ever going to explain what you’re upset at Vash about?” Meryl asks.
Wolfwood startles, almost spilling the mug of tea in his hands. He glances past her, at Vash, like he expects him to pop up at the sound of his name, but he stays asleep, folded up on the couch beside Meryl, just a tuft of black hair and the scarred tops of his shoulders peeking out from under a blanket.
He’s been sleeping a lot lately. Deep and long, concerningly still, at any time of day or night.
Wolfwood looks at him for a long time, then looks away. “I’m not upset.”
Meryl sticks her leg out towards him. “Go on, pull the other one.”
Half a smile twitches Wolfwood’s mouth, even as he scoffs in annoyance. “It’s more complicated than that.”
“Well, you’re being weird, and it’s making him sad,” Meryl says, crossing her legs at the ankle. “Neither of you will explain what happened. You don’t have to let me help, I just want to understand what the problem is.”
Wolfwood sets his mug down on the coffee table and sits back in the armchair he’s all but claimed as his own. “You’re already doing enough, letting us freeload.”
It’s Meryl’s turn to scoff at him. “ Freeload. This apartment’s never been so clean. Besides, it’s basically my fault that you can’t just live your lives, so I owe you this much.”
“Don’t let Needle-noggin hear you talking like that,” Wolfwood warns her, something unavoidably bitter buried in his voice.
Meryl can’t stand him, sometimes. “Wolfwood.”
Wolfwood doesn't look at her.
“What are you trying to spare me from?”
That gets Wolfwood’s attention. He flinches again, winding his hands together as if in prayer. “It’s not your business, little miss.”
Meryl picks up the throw pillow at her elbow and chucks it at his head. Wolfwood blocks it with his forearms and stares at her like she’s grown a second head.
“Rude!” Meryl huffs. “Why isn’t it my business? It can’t be worse than what I’ve already seen.” She tilts her head toward Vash. “I still have nightmares that look like his memories, you’re not going to scare me more than that.”
Wolfwood’s face twitches into a wan smile. “First time’s always the worst,” he half-mumbles. Then he drops his gaze again, twisting and squeezing his hands together until his knuckles pop. Breathes in deep, breathes out slow. “I was dead.”
Meryl takes a moment to process that. “What?”
“I was dead,” Wolfwood repeats. He stops wringing his hands and unbuttons his shirt with trembling fingers, tracing the scar tissue covering most of his chest.
Meryl’s seen it before, wondered how he could have survived a wound like that, but she never would have guessed…
“Wasn’t even this that killed me,” Wolfwood goes on, as if hearing her thoughts. “I made a bad bet, and I had to pay up. Got through the fight, and then my heart stopped.”
Despite all her assurances, despite the fact that it’s true she’s heard worse, seen worse, Meryl still feels her head start to spin. She hugs her knees to her chest, swallows a tangle of emotions and a swell of nausea. “Drugs? From your…”
She trails off. On another evening like this, sitting up while Vash slept, he’d told her just enough to get the picture of why he hadn't told her anything before — about the circumstances he’d been in, the sort of people that had raised him and what they had done to keep him in line.
Meryl’s decided not to ask for anything more. Not to look into it, even though she knows almost for certain that she could. Now that she’s off the Vash hunt, NMLB would send her on any mission she asked for. She could dig up the dirt on what remained of Wolfwood’s old cult.
But she won’t do that to him.
Wolfwood nods, staring past her, past Vash. “I knew it would be the end of the line. So imagine my surprise when I woke up in a hospital bed. Almost thought I’d dreamed everything since the last time that happened. But—” his eyes refocus. He looks at Vash, sleeping peacefully. “Vash wasn’t there. He fucked off to save the world.”
Meryl lets all that sink in. It doesn’t take as long as she thought it would. Stranger things have happened, all told. “I don’t understand.”
Wolfwood makes a sound that’s almost a laugh, bitter and weary. “He needed everything he had for that fight with Knives. He shouldn’t even have been where I was, the rest of the world is more important than my fuckups. But no, he made sure to use the kind of power that punched a crater in the fifth moon to restart my heart before he fucked off to martyr himself.”
Meryl feels numb, staticky as a bad signal. “He told me he would come back.”
“And you believed him?” Wolfwood asks, lips peeling back from his teeth in a humorless grin.
She had. She’d hoped, at least. Hoped loud enough to drown out any other possibility.
Wolfwood picks his mug back up and takes a long sip. “I’m not even pissed at him,” he says. “I just think it was cruel, is all. To put me in the position of wondering if he wouldn’t have died if he hadn’t bothered to save me.”
“But he didn’t die.”
“Not for lack of trying.”
Meryl follows his gaze to Vash’s sleeping form. “Did he tell you that?”
Wolfwood sighs heavily. “Not in so many words, but I got the gist.”
“And now you’re giving him the cold shoulder for it?”
It comes out a little too harsh, and she’s about to apologize when Wolfwood answers, cutting her off. “I’m not trying to. I just—” his voice drops. “I did the same thing to him.”
Something dull and fearful and cold settles in the pit of Meryl’s stomach. “What?”
Wolfwood scoffs, almost to himself. Bitter, self-deprecating. “That’s why the fight went so bad. I made the call that it was more important for him to save the whole damn world than back me up, whether I needed him to or not. And to… spite me, or God knows what, for going off on my own, he made sure I’d live long enough to know it wasn’t ever my call to make, what he did with his life, or what I did with mine.”
“Or he just didn’t want you to die.”
Wolfwood looks at her, the expression on his face going soft-edged with uncertainty. “What?”
Meryl shrugs. “He doesn’t always think before he throws himself into things, you know that. Maybe he just… panicked.”
“That’s on him, then,” Wolfwood says. “Bad taste.”
Ears ringing, Meryl sits up a little straighter. “Could you hand me that pillow back?”
Wolfwood does.
Meryl throws it at him again, harder, and Wolfwood’s instinctive flinch isn’t quite fast enough to knock it away from his face this time. He blinks at her, tea splashed down his half-open shirt, wide-eyed, hair ruffled on one side. “The hell?”
“So you’re both filthy hypocrites,” Meryl says. “Get over it.”
Wolfwood balks. “What?” he repeats.
“You’re not the only ones who spent those seven months wishing you could fix everything by throwing yourselves into the fire,” Meryl tells him. “And knowing that if anyone else suggested it, you’d never agree to let them. It just empathy during a crisis, it makes you lose perspective.”
With trembling hands, Wolfwood sets his mug back down, flicks spilled tea off his fingertips. “Yeah?”
Meryl hums reassuringly. “He didn’t save you out of spite, Wolfwood. He just loves you.”
“Oh,” Wolfwood rasps.
He stares past Meryl at Vash for a moment, then buries his face in his hands and starts to cry, almost silent except for his quaking shoulders.
Meryl lets him take all the time he needs.
They have the rest of their lives, after all.