Chapter Text
The thing that Meryl Stryfe remembered most clearly about Nicholas D. Wolfwood was that he changed like a sand dune.
Subtle, ponderous, and invisible to the naked eye; he changed like the shifting of sands buffeted by the planet’s winds, sending the loose layer flying high into the sky with each gust and pushing the grains over onto the next hill. In the act of moving those grains, another dune’s sand would arrive and plant itself in the crystalline matrix that had just been vacated. The process would repeat, and repeat, as the outside world beat down on him, and by the time Meryl Stryfe looked back up at his face, he was made of completely different flesh. Completely different sand—and yet he looked the same. His face had not changed, and his clothes did not fit better, and his cross did not look less heavy. His eyes were still hidden; a cigarette still hung from his mouth, and he smelled like smoke and the acrid tang of tar blending with lit gunpowder.
So, considering all of that, Meryl Stryfe thought that it was only appropriate that she reunited with him how she had met him for the first time: by hitting him with her car.
“…Ma’am?”
Not unkindly, it was Milly who broke the silence that followed the crash-slam of Nicholas D. Wolfwood flying over the hood of the company jeep. She looked at Meryl with those wide blue eyes, blinking so as to flutter her lashes and convey to Meryl, “What do we do now?” without any of the pressure that came along with the statement. What did they do now? It was up to Meryl, after all; she was the senior, and Milly was her junior, and Meryl was supposed to be the one guiding her into a life of career success and journalistic fulfillment. Not turning her into an accomplice for the vehicular manslaughter of someone who’d once saved Meryl’s life.
“Milly,” Meryl said eventually, sucking on her lips until she could taste her own waxy chapstick, “how do you feel about… fudging an incident report?”
“Very badly, ma’am,” Milly replied honestly. “My mama raised a girl who knew when to lie and when to tell the truth.”
“I think most people prefer to say their parents raised them ‘honestly’.”
Milly shrugged, easy and unbothered. She drummed her fingertips on her pants, and Meryl counted each tap-tap-tap like it’d lengthen the time she had before she had to face the music. “Well, telling the truth matters the most when somebody else is trying to lie, right?” she smiled then, turning that radiance on Meryl—and Meryl knew, from the feeling of the guilty curl in her gut, that it was a deliberate choice of Milly’s to make that smile of hers reach Meryl so bright and earnestly. “In this case, I think it’s important we go help that poor man before we start worrying about anything else, don’t you?”
In the two-and-a-bit years she’d known Milly, Meryl had learned just what it felt like to be played like a fiddle. To have her strings pulled, making a song sing from her that rang out more true than she’d usually let herself be. It wasn’t manipulation; she wasn’t being bullied into behaving in a way that someone else wanted from her, conforming to the desires of her superiors or her past “professors” or “mentors” or “people who certainly knew what was best for her, emotionally and morally.” Milly just had this knack for opening doors and knowing what to say that’d get Meryl to step through them.
(In the past, she would’ve looked at the same door and jiggled the handle and found it locked. The plaque on the door would’ve read “The Good Way,” and Meryl would have to sigh and move onto the next door. “The Only Way Possible,” would be the next one, and Meryl would have to read the scrawl of handwritten graffiti underneath that said: “FOR PEOPLE LIKE YOU.” She didn’t have enough influence; she didn’t have enough power. Too inexorably human, she was. But when she tried to covet those things, she’d find another door in her path—and this one would be locked, again, just like the others.
But Milly, despite the innocence and the air of light-hearted contentment she cultivated like a farmer’s beloved tomato plant, carried lock picks in her pocket. She had a habit of holding open doors with a cheery, “After you, ma’am!” that made Meryl’s heart swell. Meryl was lucky this woman had sought her out—and she reminded herself, with a resolute pat on the back and a squaring of her shoulders, that Milly had done so out of respect for Meryl’s dedication to the truth.)
The car door felt heavier than usual when Meryl unlatched the lock and pushed it open. The sand crunched under her boots as she trudged towards a pair of spindly black legs sticking out of the ground. Instead of her embarrassment, Meryl focused on the sound of her own heartbeat in her ear and the matching steps of Milly following behind her. Yup, that was definitely Nicholas D. Wolfwood and the Punisher… in the path of her jeep, again. At least this time she hit him because she was excited instead of bordering on the edge of elderly-induced road-rage.
“Oh, God,” Meryl muttered, putting a hand over her face. “How’d this happen again…?” She added a second hand when the legs started wriggling angrily; a distressed keen escaped her throat when she thought she heard muffled yelling from beneath the ground. Her cheeks were burning with shame. “I didn’t mean to…”
“Want me to get him, Miss Meryl?” Milly asked, unlatching her hands from behind her back to flex an arm. “I had to pull my biggest sister’s little sons out of the sand all the time after they started burying themselves for fun; I’ve got lots of practice.”
Meryl, less person and more human-shaped blob that wanted to disappear into the dirt, nodded her head.
Cracking her knuckles, Milly positioned herself above Wolfwood’s disappeared torso, avoiding his flailing feet with the practiced grace of someone both familiar with combat and chaotic home life. He was missing a shoe—who was surprised? Loafers in the desert were a bad idea, ask anybody with any common sense. In the meantime, Meryl started scanning for where it’d flown—and his toes barely missed her bangs. Milly snagged one ankle like a baseball catcher bracing for a fastball and then the other, and Wolfwood stopped moving abruptly when her strong grip hooked behind his knees.
“It’s okay!” Milly, bless her heart, leaned down and took the time to reassure him. “We’re helping you, promise!” Looking at Meryl, she added, “Hehe, he stopped like a cat that knows you’re helping it down from the roof.” A petulant kick had her giggling and resuming her work; she gently tried pushing his legs in a circle, to loosen the sand around his body before a heavy “Hyup—!” had Nicholas D. Wolfwood flying through the air for a second time that day.
He didn’t land with a crunch this time, though, because Milly caught him and flipped him upright before his back could hit the ground. Despite this, Nicholas still screamed; a string of profanities that never should be uttered by a man of God came pouring out of his mouth and didn’t stop pouring, even after he was back on his feet. Sand rained from his shirt and open suit jacket, and he staggered, arms thrown out to his sides to capture his balance. Milly kept a hand under his elbow so he didn’t drop back on his ass. She pursued him when he tried to reflexively shove her away.
Nicholas D. Wolfwood hacked up a glob of sand and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His chest was heaving, hair a mess and cool-guy persona in total disarray. It made Meryl feel all the worse, having been the cause of his second near-miss with one of Bernardelli’s company vehicles.
“There, there,” Milly said, patting his back when he doubled over to cough again. “Not breathing for a few minutes isn’t very fun. Take your time, sir.”
Wolfwood took off his sunglasses, using the tail of his shirt to wipe his face and head. More sand fell out of his thick, dark hair than Meryl thought possible, and she was reminded of her earlier comparison; just like the sand dunes, he looked and sounded and acted all the same. His voice was the same. The flapping hand he pushed at Milly to get her to back off was the same. Looking at him, an identical replica of the man she’d parted ways with after Julai, made her feel like two and a half years hadn’t passed at all.
But Nicholas D. Wolfwood, with that uniquely merciful cruelty of his, reminded her of all that had changed by squinting up at Milly and saying: “…Jeez, Drunkle, you clean up nice. Makes sense I’d see ya down here in Hell, though.”
Meryl’s hand trembled. The one that pulled her Derringer’s trigger. Milly, turning the full force of those big blue eyes on Wolfwood, started to laugh.
“Oh, but I have some great new for you, sir—you’re still very much alive and kickin’!” In the space he’d made between them, Milly held out her hand to shake. “Which means I get the pleasure of introducing myself to you! Hi there! My name’s Milly Thompson,” she said, waiting for him to reciprocate, “and this is my partner, Meryl Stryfe!”
Nicholas looked past her hand; in fact, he somehow managed to look past the whole of Milly Thompson, who was quite a lot of woman to behold. Multiple emotions flashed across his face in record time, and it was only when rage had cemented itself as the dominant feeling of the hour did Nicholas replace his sunglasses on his nose.
“—Stryfe!” he snapped, puffing up despite how the sand still plastered across his cheeks brought his attempt at a threat display out back and shot it in the head. “I knew that was your goddamn car when it didn’t start slowin’ down!”
“Hi, Wolfwood…” Meryl crooned, sheepishly peeking between two fingers. She put his missing loafer she’d found between herself and him like a peace offering. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
“That’s all you have to say to me?! Hi?! How about a frickin’ apology first?”
The bluster was all the same Nicholas of her memories, the same as his sand dune, but Meryl felt it wash over the places it used to get under her skin like a harmless breeze. A thicker face and experience and maybe a bit of a smaller-by-necessity ego contributed to this shift in their dynamic. Somehow, his glasses had survived the impact and not been lost to Milly’s tugging. Miracle of miracles, because Meryl thought that if she had to look him in the eye right now, she might genuinely start laughing. Oh, thank God that she had changed, even if this man did not in ways that made her want to sigh and lean into his familiarity.
“—I’m sorry!” Meryl slapped her hands together, bowing at the waist. “I’m so, so sorry, Wolfwood! I’ll pay you the twenty-thousand this time, I swear!”
“You’d better be, princess,” Nicholas muttered, leering down at her. The strut was for show, or maybe mostly for her; a recount of the first time they’d ever met, a point of connection they both shared. The twenty-thousand was her offer to enter the dance, and Nicholas took it gladly with a princess in hand. “If not fer the hospital bill, then fer the emotional damage.”
Milly’s smile suddenly brightened, going from megawatts to gigawatts faster than an electricity plant could suffuse the power grid. “Oh, Wolfwood? As in Nicholas D. Wolfwood?”
Wolfwood snatched his loafer out of Meryl’s hand, hopping on one foot to hook it over his heel. “The one and only,” he said. “Why, heard of me or somethin’?”
“Lots and lots!” Milly giggled. Wolfwood balked; Meryl took note of how he only needed three fond words spoken by a pretty girl to pop his confidence like a balloon. Milly laced her hands behind her back again, rolling back and forth on the balls of her feet as her eyes darted towards the sky. “Meryl’s told me all about you, after all!” she recounted, gazing to the right. “I feel like I already know you from how much she’s gone on and on about all that time you spent traveling together and—”
“Milly—!” Meryl yelped.
“Sorry, ma’am,” Milly said, smiling. “I’m just real excited I finally get to meet him.” With a new degree of respect—though it wasn’t much more respect than before, because Milly by default treated everyone around her with a gentleness that they didn’t always deserve—she reached out to brush the remaining sand out of Wolfwood’s hair. “—Pardon me, Mister Wolfwood the Undertaker.”
Nicholas stared at her as she did, transfixed—or frozen by how forward she was being. Or possibly a combination of both. A cocktail sloshing back and forth in a cup, he didn’t move an inch as Milly cleaned him. She smiled when he finally coughed and shifted around, reaching into his suit pocket for a cigarette and his lighter.
“Do what you want,” he said eventually, thumbing the catch of his lighter and biting down on his cigarette. Milly didn’t seem to mind the smell.
Meryl was gripping the hem of her jacket until her knuckles turned white. A complicated, old grief was roiling in her stomach, and the sight of an old companion was no balm on her soul. It came with smallness, the kind that translated word-for-word into helplessness no amount of learning or proficiency with her old mentor’s gun could wave away. She was still Meryl Stryfe, and Nicholas was still D. Wolfwood, and even after two years, their reunion felt—like it was missing somebody. Something. Like it was the footnote in a greater narrative she had yet to understand.
Wolfwood’s familiar drawl shook her out of the reverie. “What’s the matter, little lady?” he asked, though he made no attempt to get handsy for her attention. That was one difference, Meryl realized with a start; he had yet to attempt to touch her. He hadn’t shoved anything in her face, be it bill of service or roasted worm meat. It felt wrong. “You know better than anyone that it takes more than a truck to do me in.”
She could fix the wrongness. It was that feeling that’d driven her for the past two years; the need to fix what was wrong with the world, correcting the lies and sharing a more hopeful message. When something didn’t line up right, she felt the need to get her hands on it in order to set it back on track. The world didn’t make sense, so Meryl made sense out of the world. Maybe, in the act of doing so, the good she did could balance out the old grief.
“Wolfwood…” Meryl inhaled, squeezing her eyes shut in order to not die of shame when she said: “Can I hug you?”
“No the hell you cannot,” was Wolfwood’s gut-response.
“Please?”
Milly clapped her hands together, giggling. “Oh, how sweet!”
Meryl cracked an eye open. Wolfwood looked at Milly, then at Meryl, then he grumbled. Grumbled some more. Grumble, grumble, argh, shite. Milly’s eyes shone when he put a hand to his chin and started scratching at his stubble. Kept scratching, scratched his neck, his collar, his stomach, and just when Meryl was about to ask if he had a worm in his clothes or something from his kiss with three-feet-under, he finally answered.
“…Fine,” he muttered, holding out a single arm, “c’mere, shortie. You get ten seconds.”
Meryl closed the space between them, putting one foot in front of the other. She crossed the sands with caution, half-expecting him to go up in smoke if she made too much noise—but he remained, and soon enough she was in front of him, and then she reached up with shaking arms in order to hug Nicholas D. Wolfwood.
He hugged her the same, too, as he had two years ago.
(What else had there been to do after Julai, but lie in each other’s arms and think about the third person that was meant to be there with them? About what you’d seen, what you’d learned, and how nobody but the man whose heart was beating in tandem with yours would believe you? It had worn down on Meryl, living in a world that told the story of Julai in words that simply weren’t true. People didn’t believe in survivors even more so than they didn’t believe the words said by those who claimed to be. Who could’ve survived a disaster like that? Who could’ve been in the heart of the city to witness the catastrophe and made their way to a safe distance? Meryl Stryfe and Nicholas D. Wolfwood, that was who; though the former of the two only could claim such a title because the latter had turned back and saved her.
She remembered the feeling of his arm around her waist, as he ran with her and the Punisher over rooftops towards the edge of the city. The pulsing, pounding heartbeat of his wrist pressed against her stomach; the sound of his breathing going ragged and his knees shaking from impact after impact, and the power it took to push himself through. Meryl had thought she was going to die multiple times that day, but never more so than when she saw the ground disappear beneath his feet and felt the rush of air as gravity claimed their conjoined form.
Nicholas saved her because he’d gone back for Vash, like how she needed to be saved because she’d gone back for Vash a little sooner than he had. She wouldn’t have known what to do if he hadn’t gone back for Vash. Would Vash have stopped fighting his brother for long enough to catch her? Would her fingers have been strong enough to catch the edge of the citadel’s roof? Or would she have plummeted, down and down and down, like she still did in her nightmares whenever she relived that night?
Sleeping with her forehead against Nicholas’ chest and his broad palm splayed between her shoulders had kept those nightmares away in the months that followed. And she, too, hoped that gripping his shirt and keeping her legs tangled between his could remind his own nightmares that he’d kept her safe from the tragedy of Julai. They were both still breathing and existing. They were both still alive.
—They didn’t know if Vash was.
So they parted to cover more ground; Meryl searched the cities, Nicholas searched the ruins. Home ship augmented her work after Nicholas dropped off the radar. And then Meryl met Milly.
And Back at HQ, Meryl had received an anonymous note addressed to her tip box at Bernardelli that contained a single sentence: “Found the gun.”
It had been the last she’d heard from Nicholas D. Wolfwood in over a year.)
The asshole didn’t bend down for her to reach his neck, so Meryl went for his waist, instead. She wound her arms around his midsection and pressed her face into his shirt, inhaling grit and feeling her own greed when he only graced her with an awkward hand on her shoulder. She squeezed, and kept squeezing as she counted the seconds in her head. Four. Five. Six. Seven.
When she touched the mental eight, Wolfwood melted. Three words from a pretty girl, eight seconds from a friend to break him; he sagged like a bundle of sticks with its rubber band snapped, dropping his cigarette in order to cup the back of her neck with his palm. His fingers tugged on her grown-out undercut, pinching short strands between his thumb and index. His hand was warm, deceptively soft. A guy like him should’ve had calloused hands from swinging his gun around, Meryl thought, but she’d seen the reason why he didn’t with her own eyes and it made her squeeze him tighter. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Wolfwood didn’t let her go.
“It’s been longer than ten seconds,” Meryl whispered into his shoulder.
“Shut up and soak it in,” Wolfwood replied. She heard the stutter in his inhale, felt the exhale through his nose ruffle her hair. “‘Cause it’s not gonna happen again… Meryl Stryfe.”
* * *
(“Let me help you get that cross into the truck, Mister Undertaker! It’s the least I can do for you for Miss Meryl, since we can’t actually pay you twenty thousand dollars. Just sit back, relax, and keep on recovering!”
“Oi, be careful with that, big lady, it’s pretty—uh, heavy… Where’d ya say you found this girl again, Stryfe?”
“More like where did she find me, Wolfwood.”)