Work Text:
Wolfwood shrugs off his suit jacket, tossing the punisher alongside it near the door. The motel they’re staying in tonight is as dingy as the next in no man’s land, dilapidated in all of its poorly up-kept glory. He deftly lights a fresh smoke, filling the air with a burnt tang that accompanies the certain sun-soaked calm which he knows will result in yet another empty cigarette box later in the night. Lord knows he fuckin needs it this time.
The beaten old bed in the corner groans in discontent under Vash’s weight. Wolfwood eyes the gunman, observing the way his long, gloved fingers tremble just slightly when he grasps the gaudy buckles of his boots. To say that Wolfwood himself wasn’t shaken by their hell of a day would be a lie, but it was almost shocking to see this wear on Vash. In the years they’d traveled together Nicholas had become quite familiar with Vash’s compulsory habit of hiding behind that blindingly cheerful, charismatic facade. The same facade that could not compensate for cold nights under which wolfwood heard him cry out in his sleep, beg for one more life that would serve as repentance for a sin apparent to no one but him.
Vash breathes steadily, cycles through the motions of setting his pack down, pulling out his sleep clothes, ridding himself of all of the leather covering the thick, mottled, scar tissue that rips valleys into pale, silky skin.
“Yer awful quiet tonight spikes,” Wolfwood drawls, shaking his cigarette on the ash tray, before sitting down on the bed with Vash, backs facing each other.
Vash swallows, forces the familiar lump of guilt down his throat. Just another sin in a sea ten iles wide. He wonders if Wolfwood would know about that.
“Just a little tired today, funny how three shootouts in one afternoon can wipe a guy out!” Vash flops backwards dramatically into the scarce warmth of threadbare sheets, faux smile plastered from one rosy cheek to the other.
“Tired, huh.” Nicholas huffs, tugging on his sleep shirt. His eyes slip down to Vash’s figure in front of him, splayed hair creating a golden halo that rustles in night’s wind. He follows the gaze of those soft blue eyes, leading up to the window, opened halfway to display a pleasant view of the town they’ve stopped at. Vash’s expression is no longer molded into something meant to placate wolfwood, but rather into an expression carefully blank.
“Do ya wanna use the bathroom first or should I?” Wolfwood shifts his weight onto one arm, staring and the sandy carpet beneath his feet.
…
“Oi. I’m talkin to ya tongari”
…
“Oi!”
Wolfwood pushes himself forward on the mattress, positioned so that his figure drapes over Vash’s, hand raised to smack the daze out of the bastard’s head.
He falters.
Vash clenches his jaw tight as he can, bites his tongue until the salt of tears mixes with the iron tang of blood. This isn’t Nick’s burden to bear, isn’t more weight for him to shoulder alongside the punshier’s, hefted across the desert sands. Something as terrible, as fragile, as selfish as this- will never be wolfwood’s burden, Vash reminds himself.
Fat teardrops roll down the horizontal plane of vash’s face, his neck turned into the mattress in a futile attempt to hide the way his bottom lip quivers in its grimace.
“Tongari” Nicholas says quietly, softly, tender like something he hasn’t known since early mornings in the orphanage. Guilt wraps around his heart and drags it into his stomach.
Vash doesn’t, can’t, can’t ever answer.
“Vash”
A burden. A burden 6 feet tall, 150 years old. The burden of millions of lives, ended before they could even start.
Tan hands slide up scarred flesh, soothe skin unknown to touch for a century. Vash exhales, desperately wishing that this sick adoration, terrible devotion, could spare just one more life.
Under a priest’s worship, it blooms. Nick pets unruly blond locks away from a forehead sticky with blood, and gazes into wet oceans of blue full of fear, full of want.
Vash prays to Nicholas’s god. He prays this time not for a million lives at julai, not for a thousand lives at jenora rock, but for just one.
Vash is pulled up from the bed, and against nick’s warmth, gangly legs wrapped loosely around his waist. He tries to choke back a sob, but it falls from his mouth before he can.
He desperately clutches at wolfwood’s fuzzy chest, to feel for himself that there is no wound, only stark, clean, flesh where the serum had sewn him together.
Suddenly wolfwood understands. Punisher swung too slow to guard himself, buckshot to the chest. Wakefulness had come to him 2 seconds too slow, Vash clawing over blood soaked fabric, looking for the little blue vials that had taken his humanity. His hands shook so hard he struggled to open the damn thing.
“2 millimeters from your heart”, Vash had said on the walk back from the sheriffs office. Smile as wide as the sun.
“I thought you were- thought you were gone”, Vash whispers, voice trembling and heavy with tears. His hands, one pearlescent peach, one bottle green, grip his shoulders. Vash sways as if it was the only thing tethering him to this world. Wolfwood wraps thick arms around his lower back, pulling him closer against his chest. He goes without restraint this time, shoving his face into the crease of nick’s shoulder, breathing in sweat and smoke.
“Yer alright”, Wolfwood says back. He doesn’t know the words to tell him what he means. Vash sighs wetly when nick strokes a hand down his spine, massaging at an especially rugged scar before sliding his hand back up to scritch at the scruffy hair on his nape.
On some level, wolfwood understands. Vash the stampede cares for everyone, loves everyone even as his body begins to fail from the wounds inflicted by the humans he so wholly trusts. He knows that he will continue to love, even with nothing left to give. But wolfwood isn’t human. He hasn’t been human since he was a child on a metal table, and even before that, before the orphanage even, he was already a killer. He already knew sand soaked in blood, his father’s body too heavy for thin arms, the stench of death pungent in arid desert heat.
Wolfwood imagines that his soul, something so blackened with every life he’s taken, had been that way even before it landed in this body, soaked to the bone with sin as it is now. This was not something Vash could understand.
The something between him and Vash that had grown like poisoned root was now coiled tight around them, holding them together in a way neither man could free himself from. Nicholas D. Wolfwood had never been a man of restraint- not when he had pulled his first trigger, not when he had trudged home splattered with another man’s innards after his first assignment, not when he was begged to spare a life, not when he blew razlo’s jaw off his skull. But now, he is hesitant. To love Vash would mean to ruin an angel, and while he may be a shitty priest, he loathed to add this sin in particular to his ledger.
Vash’s warbled cries of his name slow to a mumble pressed to his throat, body lax against his front. Wolfwood presses his lips to the crown of Vash’s head in a timid excuse of a kiss.
“I’m just fine tongari, no need to worry that pretty little head about it.” Wolfwood’s voice is a quiet rumble that Vash presses himself into.
Vash comes back to himself tucked into Nicholas’s arms. He pushes away from warmed skin with a whine.
This wasn’t something he could ever deserve. To allow himself to have wolfwood, to pretend that Vash wasn’t the very reason nick’s body had been contorted and manipulated into a weapon, the very reason humanity suffered on this barren planet at all, would be unfathomably selfish.
“Look at me Vash.” Wolfwood takes his flesh wrist into his palm, rubbing circles into bony, pale flesh.
“Can we talk about…this now?” He doesn’t say it, but vash knows it has to do with drunken touches, and mornings where they find themselves closer on the bed than they had been the night before. Stolen glances across shabby motel rooms, donuts bought with the last of their scarce double-dollars. Vash thinks desperately that Nicholas was rarely open like this, willing to share the emotion locked up being darkened shades. He wonders if wolfwood has thought about having this conversation as much as Vash had.
Wolfwood sighs. He looks down at the joined hands between them before he begins to speak.
“Look we both know what we want, even if you can’t get it in yer spikey head that I..I want that too. An if you really don’t want this, not because of some self deprecating bullshit, I’ll leave you be, but I..”, he runs a hand anxiously through his hair. “I think you should let yourself have this, have me because you deserve something good for once in yer damn life. Ya never fuckin take.” Pink rises on dark skin, and wolfwood grinds his teeth into his cigarette.
Vash wants so deeply that it feels as if molten heat has twisted itself around his spine to lock his body curled in on itself. He looks up at Nicholas, dark hair gleaming in early moonlight, dress shirt rumpled where Vash had been pressed against him. He thinks that wolfwood must be able to see the answer in his eyes, pleading at him behind budding tears.
“I-I can’t wolfwood I’m not like you- I’m not even human. I don’t get close to people because I always hurt them, and I’m already responsible for so many lives” Tears begin to roll down his cheeks again, his features scrunched up in anguish.
“I want it too, but you don’t understand, wolfwood. This- you aren’t something I can just- What if julai happens again? I’m so used to shutting people out, and it’s lonely, but what else can I do? I don’t-” vash is cut off, pulled back up against wolfwood. Vash should push him away, should tell him to go back to December, that Ms. Melanie could use more hands, that he’d be alright on his own, but he doesn’t. Instead, he lets himself be held, lets wolfwood press his lips first to the bridge of his nose, then under one eye where tears streak his skin, and finally to his own lips.
Vash sighs, tucks himself further into wolfwood’s heat, letting wolfwood nip and bite at him. Nicholas runs one hand soothingly up and down his back, and the other cradles his face, making Vash instinctively nuzzle into the warmth.
“I’ve got you” wolfwood murmurs into his skin, sending a shuddering warmth through his body. Overwhelmed by his touches, Vash retreats to push his head into nicholas’s neck, earning a huff, and a kiss to the shell of his ear. Vash knows he should separate from him, should peel back the parts of himself that have become hopelessly intertwined with wolfwood, but he finds that he cannot. Feeling dizzy with affection, Vash kisses Nicholas- soft, and pliant, and slow. A deep rumble starts in Vash’s chest, and he pulls wolfwood’s hand up to feel it while he presses kisses against his neck.
“Nick” vash gasps, sated and pleasured. His thoughts dwindle down to blinding need for touch.
“Cute” Nicholas whispers into his temple, threading fingers through fine, silky strands. His hand moves lower, to pet at his sides, where he is reminded of Vash’s injury, crusting his leather undersuit with blood. He gently pushes Vash away.
“Need to clean you up first, hm?”
Vash whines in displeasure, brain having long melted out of his ears. He blinks slowly as if his eyelids were stuck together.
"gonna give you a bath before I patch you up alright?" wolfwood moves as if to carry him, snapping vash awake from his daze.
"O-oh it's okay, I can walk myself", Vash laughs, something small and nervous. Blush rises to his cheeks as he wonders how ridiculous it would look for a grown man with a frame as large as vash's to be carried like that. The thought makes him hyperaware of the way he was currently leaning towards Nicholas, like a flower seeking sunlight.
“C’mere”, wolfwood drawls anyways, beckoning for Vash to settle against his chest once more.
Well, the humanoid typhoon had never been a man of dignity.
He crawls over to where Nicholas sits, and snuggles into the safety of his chest, allowing arms to curl under his thighs. Wolfwood walks carefully into the small bathroom, making sure not to bump his bundle on any part of the doorframe.
Drowsiness overcomes Vash as a warm bath is drawn, and he begins to drift, grip on wolfwood’s shirt loosening. Sticky leather is coaxed off of damp skin, and Vash is left in his boxers, blushing fiercely, eager to submerge his body into the tub. Hot water burns the areas of his skin still possessing sensation, causing him to hiss, and bob in and out of the water in an attempt to acclimate himself. Wolfwood laughs long, and low, uncaring as his clothes are splashed in the process.
“You done fighting it tongari? I ain’t waiting here all night”
“Waiting…for what?” Vash pauses his dance, eyebrows knitting together in confusion.
“For you to let me clean ya off”, he huffs impatiently, as if that little statement, in this dimly lit motel bathroom didn’t mean so much more. Meant sleepy kisses in the morning, cold desert nights spent pressed together, afternoons wasted lying around, just to enjoy the other’s company.
“Ok”- vash doesn’t protest this time, smiles even. Something as domestic as this, shampoo massaged gently into hair, calloused hands washing away the day’s grime, is something he’s never imagined himself allowed to have- something simple done only because Nicholas wants to care for him.
Vash begins to doze off while wolfwood dries him. Sleep takes him the second he’s set back on the bed, stretching out languidly to rest his head on a muscled chest. Warm palms come to rest around his waist, and encourage him to push a thigh over Nicholas’s body.
Vash sleeps so deeply that he drools a little puddle on wolfwood’s skin.
Nicholas doesn’t mind.