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The doctor mentioned something about it, when they were all getting herded through post-boarding checkups. The shuttle ride, that had been new, although he’d been too busy quieting down crying kids to pay much attention to the moment when gravity got left behind and everyone went weightless against the straps of their seats. Standing firm again on the ship’s deck and seeing their dustball of a planet get smaller and smaller below, that had definitely been new. But stripping and sitting on a cold plastic chair in a too-thin paper gown while some guy with a clipboard asked him questions—yeah, Wolfwood has done that before.
They got tripped up on the second one, after his name: “How old are you?”
“Uh, well, maybe you could help me out with that.”
“Come again?”
There was the hair, first of all. He’d kind of wondered whether it’d go back, after he downed another vial, although it doesn’t look too bad. But things just hurt now, in a way they never used to. He’s tired, real tired, although he doesn’t sleep for days at a time anymore like he did at Hopeland.
He gets by all right, so he hasn’t wanted to mention it, not when he can still remember Vash and Livio’s faces when he first woke up. But he thought he could count on Doctor Clipboard—it was a portable screen here, actually—not to rat him out. Only it was a lot to explain, from the very beginning, and in the end they took some blood samples and left that part blank.
Things didn’t get much better from there, since Wolfwood got testy about the handful of injections he was supposed to be stuck with and the doctor said it was required for everyone aboard an Earth Federation ship and Wolfwood said they could drop him off back home if it was like that. He only gave in when he heard one of the kids on the other side of the flimsy divider—it was Joey, who was always collecting interesting-looking rocks until his pockets were weighed down with them—Joey said something about being brave like his big brothers when he got his shots and Wolfwood kind of crumpled. Then went off again like a lit match when Doctor Clipboard handed him a box of nicotine patches and told him smoking was forbidden on this vessel.
So by that point, he hadn’t been paying too much attention to what the doctor was reading off about potential problems that meant he should see the medical staff. Vertigo, nausea. Nothing he’d notice all that much, considering how things have been going since he got scraped off the edge of death and dragged back into life with someone else’s blood in his veins. He’s not really my brother, Wolfwood had said—that’s a good joke, now.
“Very rarely, people’s brains can respond strangely to being in space, especially if it’s their first time,” the doctor told him somewhere in the middle of that thought. “They can imagine they see things, or hear things, that aren’t there. If anything like that starts to bother you, let us know.”
Yeah, all right, thanks, pleasure to meet you, hope it doesn’t happen again. He’s pretty sure he didn’t say that last part before he got dressed. Then he rejoined the mass of humanity in the cargo bay that’d been repurposed as a point of entry for the No Man’s Land refugees the fleet hadn’t expected to be taking in.
It’s funny, how apologetic folks on the ship get about the close quarters and tight resources, considering Wolfwood’s never been this comfortable in his life. The Earth Federation had a while to sort everything out, between receiving the initial transmission and bringing up the last passengers, but there’s only so much to go around. Everyone, crew and newcomers, is sleeping two to a room—huge rooms you can make warmer or cooler by pressing a button, with beds that fold into the wall, with mattresses made out of some kind of fancy material that molds itself to your body. That first day, he almost thinks he’ll need to find help to drag Livio out, but dinner gets him motivated to emerge from his blanket nest.
And then they’re in this gigantic cafeteria with a row of machines that, according to a helpful crew member, will give them any food they want. Wolfwood scrolls through the options until his head starts to hurt and he chooses spaghetti and meatballs because it’s the first thing he can think of. A little door in the machine opens with a puff of warm air that smells like tomato sauce. There’s a breadstick on the side.
He sits down next to Livio, who has a steak on the plate in front of him, and they stare at each other a bit, until Livio finally shrugs and digs in. Wolfwood gets some pasta on his fork and takes a bite.
At first, it’s perfectly cooked noodles and what can’t be but definitely taste like fresh herbs, and then he’s choking because his mouth is filled up with dirt. He closes his eyes and feels the weight of it everywhere, in his nostrils, his ears. Pressing down.
“Hey, you good, man?” He blinks as Livio pushes his glass of water closer to him. “Slow down, drink.”
Wolfwood manages to swallow and take a sip. It tastes like water.
The Eye had done a lot of bullshit to them in the name of training, just-in-case scenarios that’d still never measured up to the nonsense Wolfwood had run into in practice. So he can say with confidence that he knows what being buried feels like. Not at all what eating spaghetti should feel like, that’s for sure. This kind of thing hasn’t happened in a while, and he doesn’t know if the memory’s ever been so real before. But the checkup, the new place . . . it would make sense for him to be out of sorts.
“You good?” Livio asks again.
“Yeah, fine. Ate too fast—guess I’m not used to having a meal that isn’t mostly thoma jerky. How’s your steak?”
Livio, bless him, just answers, “Amazing!”
Wolfwood keeps picking at his own plate. The second bite tastes like regular pasta again, and there’s no reason to waste food, even if he can’t quite enjoy it anymore. But something else is bothering him.
“You know who should be going crazy for this?” he asks.
“Vash,” Livio says immediately. The two of them get along surprisingly well, considering the first couple times they’d met.
Wolfwood nods. He hasn’t seen Vash since the shuttle—the Humanoid Typhoon doesn’t need to be lumped in with the rest of the rabble, seems like. Typhoon or not, though, he never misses dinner.
“I’m gonna see if I can find him,” Wolfwood says. “Eat the rest of mine if you want.”
He goes back to the machines and gets informed by the screen that he’s already been issued his meal, which is apparently what the crew were talking about when they were being sorry for the short rations. Fair enough. But he must’ve made some kind of face at the display, because the same person who’d helped him and Livio before comes over. They’ve got a shaggy haircut that Wolfwood can’t place as particularly masculine or feminine, and their uniform is similar to what most of the folks from Vash’s ship wore, only darker and more streamlined.
“Do you need any help?”
“Real nice of you to ask,” Wolfwood says, letting some drawl slip into his voice—can’t hurt to try a bit of charm. “I was just going to get something for a friend of mine. Don’t know if these make exceptions, though.”
“Oh! He should come by himself, if he can.”
Wolfwood’s sigh is more genuine than he expects. “I’ve told him the same thing. But he gets overwhelmed sometimes. This is all . . . it’s kind of a lot, you know?”
A few minutes later, he’s holding a tray with a slice of chocolate cake—the machines don’t seem to do individual donuts, and he’s not looking forward to breaking the news—and he’s got Vash’s room number, which required having his hand held through using a whole different computer system. He feels old, and not even the way he usually does nowadays.
Walking through the hallways is weird, too. This place is big enough that he passes plenty of people, but no one he knows, and some of the crew members give him odd looks that start when they see what he’s carrying and mostly go away when they notice he’s dressed like an outsider. He’d imagined others might be bringing their meals back to their rooms for a quiet night in, but maybe everyone eats in the cafeteria around here. He feels old, yeah, and he feels like he’s young again, learning all the rules the adults made about how to be a person.
He knocks on Vash’s door. Knocks again and calls “Spikey, open up!” because the longer the silence goes on, the more certain he is that Vash is lying around in there moping.
Finally, the door slides open, and Vash grins and says, “Hey, Wolfwood!”
“Brought you something.” Wolfwood shoves the cake out in front of him and uses the momentum to barge into the room before Vash can try to politely get rid of him. Once he’s inside, he realizes that there are two beds here, too, and he might be forcing himself into someone else’s living space. He sets the tray down on the table by the window anyway.
“Wow, um, thank you?” Vash hovers behind him for a second before pulling out both chairs and saying, “Well, you’re my guest, so have a seat.”
Wolfwood sits. Vash looks at his dessert like if he takes a bite, it might bite him.
This is the part where they should be making conversation, maybe, and Wolfwood comes back to something he’s been turning over in his head: He doesn’t know how well he’s supposed to know the guy. Better than anyone else he’s ever met, in a lot of ways. They were attached at the hip for the craziest road trip Wolfwood’s ever been on, but then there’d been those years apart, and after that . . . they’d hardly talked, once they’d finished saving each other’s lives.
“So, who do they have you bunking with?” Wolfwood asks, because the question’s burning a hole in the back of his throat.
“It’s just me,” Vash says, directing his lopsided smile somewhere over Wolfwood’s shoulder. “They said I get special consideration.”
“Hm. I guess you’re used to it. I mean, like your room on the Home ship.” Wolfwood decides to shut up at least a sentence too late.
“I guess.” Vash takes a bite of cake. “This is really tasty. I should share—want some?”
“There’s only one fork, dummy.”
“Oh, yeah.”
The window beside them is a big round hole in the wall, covered with a sheet of transparent material. Wolfwood and Livio had stood in front of theirs for a long time when they first arrived, and then, by mutual agreement, hit the switch that turned the circle opaque, shutting out the stars. It’s like lying on your back in the deep desert, the way they’d shine down so sharp you could almost feel them pricking at your eyes, only they’re right there. Nearly close enough to touch, if you aren’t afraid of the film about the dangers of decompression the refugees had been shown.
The view is manageable for now, since the angle of the light makes Vash and Wolfwood’s reflections more vivid than the stars. Wolfwood zones out some, staring through his, until he notices—his hair’s black. He sits very still and looks up, at where his silver fringe falls over his forehead. Looks back at the black-haired man in the window and notices more differences, white button-down, broader shoulders. The other Nicholas raises an eyebrow, and Wolfwood bites his tongue so he doesn’t make any noise, and Vash says, “Hey, are you good?”
His eyes flick to Vash, and when he looks back, it’s just him in the window again. “Yes!” Wolfwood snaps, confused and scared and sick of being asked that. His reflection’s mouth moves, too—he makes sure of it.
“Jeez, okay.” Vash shrugs and licks some frosting off his finger. “Did you know Plants make all this food? I tried to see if I could meet them, but the captain said not yet.”
He says it like it’s a piece of trivia, but it must mean something more, his sisters left in the tanks after the others flew away to who-knows-where. Does he miss them? Wolfwood almost asks, but he’s worried his voice will shake, so he just grunts in a way he hopes counts as a response.
“For real, though. You seem tired. Have you been sleeping all right?”
Sometimes when Wolfwood glances at Vash, for a moment he looks wrong. It’s the black hair on him, too, with the goofy strands in the front. Wolfwood’s still spent more time remembering how he used to be than seeing him in the flesh, although that gap’s getting pretty narrow. His big, sad eyes are always the same, because now he’s worried about Wolfwood—damn it.
“Just worn out from the trip,” Wolfwood says, adding a yawn that he doesn’t even have to fake. “Maybe I should turn in early.”
They say their goodnights and Wolfwood finds his way to his room. Livio’s not back yet, hopefully because he’s making friends somewhere. Wolfwood puts on the too-soft sleep clothes that were laid out on a shelf, and dims the lights until only the faintest glow comes up from the base of the walls, and sinks into bed.
In his dream, the other Nicholas is there.
“Who the hell are you?” Wolfwood demands.
They’re sitting in a booth at a diner, but in the way of dreams, somehow he knows it’s also the schoolroom at the orphanage. Some of the other patrons give him dirty looks for raising his voice, and one of his classmates shushes him.
His double leans back and lights a cigarette without his usual flourish. “C’mon, kid, use your brain. I’m you.”
“No, I’m me,” Wolfwood replies, stupidly. “And who’re you calling kid? Only one of us here’s got greys.”
“Exactly!” The other one sits up straight and points at Wolfwood like he’s said something revelatory. Then he’s distracted by Miss Melanie coming over and pouring them both coffee.
Wolfwood reaches for his cup, but his hand goes right through it. Things are getting fuzzy.
“This fuckin’ sucks,” a voice, his voice, says from far away. “Listen, okay? We both made the same choice. But you didn’t end up having to pay for it. What’re you gonna do with your free ride?”
And then he hears someone banging around, tripping into the corner of the dresser. “Sorry,” Livio half-whispers when Wolfwood rolls over and pulls the sheets over his head.
What was he dreaming about? Doesn’t matter. For the rest of the night it’s only darkness in his head.
It’s an eight-month trip to the solar system the fleet was originally bound for, and Wolfwood goes two weeks of that without anything else happening to make him feel like he’s losing his mind. Maybe he really was just all scrambled when he first came aboard, he decides. At least there’s enough to do around here to keep him from dwelling on it.
He and Livio find the gym, and even if he isn’t what he used to be, they raise plenty of eyebrows among the non-augmented crew members. The computer in their room has access to basically all of human culture, according to one of the navigation staff he gets to chatting with, and he begins a quest to figure out what Vash is talking about when he references movies no one else could’ve possibly seen. He’s invited to lunch with Milly and Milly’s entire family, which is kind of surreal, although it does make him less homesick for the cozy chaos of the orphanage, now that the kids are settling into the ship’s childcare and education system.
That’s the thing—he’s got no mission and no one to look after. In between hits for the Eye, he’d collapse like the dead and crawl back out of his grave when it came time for the next job. Now, as far from death as any other lucky specimen of humanity, he has no clue what to do, so he starts bothering people.
No, the child minders don’t need any help from someone whose last proper schooling happened when he was twelve, although he’s always welcome to visit. No, they’re all good on stacking and sorting cargo, but he can check back once they’re at their destination. One of the workers from the geoplant happens to overhear the end of that conversation, though, which is how he starts his second career as a gardener.
“Everyone on board is assigned to a rotation in the dome at some point—we’ve found that it’s good for well-being, since it reminds you of home,” his new boss, a biologist named Sonia, tells him. “We were giving the No Man’s Landers some time to settle in, but if you’re looking for something to do, we’re happy to have you.”
A lot of the crew have this particular way of saying the name of their planet, running it all together so it’s more like Nomanslanders. Wolfwood doesn’t know what they’re supposed to call the ship folk, besides ship folk.
“Put me to work,” he says.
He expects it to be like the rebuilding around Octovern, hauling around wheelbarrows and digging with shovels, but Sonia has him carrying these tiny seedlings and nestling them into the ground. It doesn’t remind him of home, unless you count what Knives had done with the place, which he does not.
All of the gardeners are spread out across their own patches of soil, so there isn’t usually anyone around to talk to.
“I know a friend of yours,” Wolfwood says to the sprout he’s settling in the dirt, even though Vash has told him again and again that the name “Plant” means something completely different. At this point, it’s just fun to get a rise out of him. “You’re a lot easier to deal with, though. You stay in place where I can see ya.”
He isn’t sure where the man himself has been, these past weeks, although Wolfwood hasn’t been doing much searching. He’d like to, he really would. But probably the last thing Vash needs while he’s finding his way in this new world is Wolfwood and Wolfwood’s problems, a reminder of a struggle that ended up with his brother turning into a lake. That strange time that’s grown to eclipse all of Wolfwood’s life—to someone like Vash, it must be the length of a heartbeat.
He’s about to straighten up from where he’s kneeling when he smells smoke. Wolfwood looks around for the fire, but it’s just another sunny day under the geodome, and the scent’s so strong there should be burning right under his nose. He remembers something else from the safety films, how alarms would sound and a section of the ship would get sealed off if excess heat was detected. It’s quiet.
As hallucinations go, this one’s pleasant, with how much he’s been craving a cigarette. Two of those bullshit nicotine patches slapped on his shoulder, and it’s nowhere close to the relief of breathing in a long drag and letting it out. He stays where he is until the smell disappears, replaced by the foreign aroma of grass and leaves.
Later, he catches his reflection in the dome. Black, and bent to carry something heavy, even though the Punisher’s locked up in storage. He usually lies down for a nap when he’s finished up with his shift, but today he heads for Meryl and Milly’s room.
Meryl answers the door, and her fingers are smudged with ink—she’s used to the computers from working at headquarters, she’d said, but she still sticks with her pen and notebook for drafting.
Wolfwood asks, “Is Milly in? I have to talk to Zazie.”
“Oh, hi. Milly should be back soon, but—wait, the bug?”
“Yeah.” He amends his strategy. “Is the bug in?”
“I’m going to need more specifics,” Meryl says, but she steps aside to let him through.
Out of the rooms he’s been to so far, this one is the most lived-in, with the desk covered by a mishmash of Meryl and Milly’s papers organized according to a system only they understand, and a colorful collection of blankets and pillows that Milly somehow smuggled aboard. One of the blankets is slung halfway over a glass tank. Meryl pulls the fabric aside, looking sheepish, which isn’t a typical Meryl expression.
“Milly says it needs light, but it’s hard to concentrate with it right next to me, so when she’s not around . . .”
“I’ll keep your secret,” Wolfwood says as he takes off his sunglasses and peers inside. The worm larva is crawling around, doing the things worm larvae do. It’s got some sand and rocks and a heat lamp.
He looks over his shoulder at Meryl, resolutely refusing to feel silly. “Could we maybe get some privacy?”
Meryl stays put. “Okay, no, you’re explaining yourself. I mean, you can say whatever you want to it, but it never says anything back. I’m not even sure whether it’s really Zazie anymore. Milly talks to it all the time, so I’d know.”
Well, shit. Wolfwood straightens up and pushes his hair out of his face. “I was . . . Zazie knows about being more than one person. Creature. Being in more than one place at the same time. I did have conversations with them through these little guys, before. And I wanted to ask about—all that.”
To his surprise, rather than hitting him with a full clip of questions, Meryl sighs and slumps down on one of the pillow-covered chairs. “Do you have to start saying crazy stuff, too? I’m used to everyone else talking about higher-dimensional planes, or bioengineered superior beings, or whatever, but you used to just shrug and ask when we were stopping for food. It was weirdly reliable. It’s one of the things I missed, after Julai.”
Wolfwood fiddles with the arm of his glasses—dumb habit, picked up now that he can’t keep his hands busy with a lighter. That’s how she sees him? There’s one part he definitely can’t let pass by. “You missed me?” he asks with a smirk.
Meryl straightens up a bit. “That’s not what I said! There’s an important difference in phrasing there!”
“Yeah, yeah. Missed you, too. Let’s not spend another year barely seeing each other now that we’re both stuck in this metal box.”
The smell of smoke comes back, for just a second. It’s—softer, sweeter, somehow approving. What does he even mean by that? He’s going nuts for sure, but he can’t bring it up to Meryl, not when she needs him to be reliable. She’s already staring at him like she doesn’t know who he is because he decided to say something genuine and break from their usual bickering routine.
“Sure. Of course. I guess he doesn’t have to be the only reason we’re together,” she finally says. Before Wolfwood can open his mouth to ask what she means by that, she adds, “We can—get drinks?”
Then they both burst into unexpected laughter, because it feels ridiculous to be scheduling something like this, instead of being stuck in each other’s company between firefights or while scraping out survival from a half-dead, half-born-again landscape. That’s how Milly finds them, when she shows up: teary-eyed with their sides aching.
He’s standing on the cliffs above a canyon and it’s going to rain, something he’s never seen but has heard old folks talk about. The light changes as if the suns are setting, but the air changes, too. A sensation like static prickles on the back of his neck as he looks down at his other self sitting with his legs hanging over the edge.
“You’re . . . haunting me,” Wolfwood says, thinking of stories told in the dark, about the men whose restless souls rise up from chasms like this one every forty years when the floods come. “I’m for hell, I know. But do you gotta bother me when I’m still alive?”
The man below him tips his head back. “Are you alive?”
The place where Wolfwood’s heart would be, if this wasn’t a dream, kicks in his chest.
“Well, clearly,” he says. “Since I’m here and you’re the one doing horror movie shit to mess with me.” He’s getting way better at movies, and it’s helped him realize some things.
“What would ya do if you knew you were alive?”
The first few raindrops are falling, and one lands on Wolfwood’s nose, colder than he’d imagined. Another goes straight through the other him and splashes onto the rock below.
He used to think about it every so often, like a game to stave off travel boredom. If he were one of the people in this or that town, a real person, who would he be? Once he tried to get Vash to play it with him, but it seemed like it made Vash depressed, and Wolfwood kept getting stuck on an answer he couldn’t give: that one, that couple sitting on a bench, holding hands in the afternoon sun. Fucked up.
“I’m working on figuring it out, all right? You’ve gotta give me time.”
“I thought I had time. Not much, but some.” The ghost throws a pebble into the canyon, hard overhand toss. “Nope.”
Wolfwood tries to understand how everything’s gotten flipped, but it’s tough to think now that he’s the one fading. Something passes through him like a sheet of rain, another dark shape. It sits down next to his shadow, shoulders knocking together, and it runs a hand through his hair to brush the water droplets away.
“Who’s—” Wolfwood struggles to say.
“’S my memory. Get your own.”
He goes to the shipboard bar for the first time alone, since Meryl is a terror who somehow creates deadlines for herself even when she’s millions of miles away from a real printing apparatus. He forgives her, since he’s generous like that.
The bar isn’t actually a bar. The architects of this vessel, who provided for everything people need and plenty of things they don’t, left out a place exclusively for sitting around drinking, probably because it didn’t fit the elevated vibe or something similarly stupid. But the Nomanslanders have different ideas about vibes. Less than a month since they got on board, and some forward thinkers have taken an unused lab, filled it with a bunch of unwanted furniture, and topped it up with all the alcohol you can get if you skip breakfast on occasion and ask for booze instead. It’s invitation only, real swanky: Wolfwood heard about it from the guy who used to sell him moonshine back on the ground.
They’ve done it up pretty well. Meryl might’ve called it historically accurate, if she had come along, which is a disturbing thought. Mismatched stools leaning at drunken angles, people sitting on them getting drunker, a dart board—and yep, standing in front of it, an ex-blond idiot.
“I should’ve expected to find you here,” Wolfwood says, stepping up behind him when he’s in the middle of a throw. The dart lands on the bullseye anyway. No, he’d known Vash would be here, and had to convince himself he didn’t know, in order to get down the hallway and through the door.
“Wolfwood!” Vash says as he spins to face him. “Wanna have a turn?”
“No. Nuh-uh. No way.” The woman standing nearby shakes her head before going for her throw, hitting it slightly off center. “This one’s got a different trick every round, and you ain’t about to be the next.”
“Ma’am,” Wolfwood says, “are you aware of who you’re playing against?”
For all his sins, he’s not even sure how you’d cheat at this game, but he can tell Vash has way more darts than necessary both in his hands and secreted in various other locations on his person.
“That’s all right then,” Vash interrupts. “I fold.”
Wolfwood snorts loudly and puts a hand on his shoulder, guiding him to the lab bench that’s serving as a bartop. So maybe Wolfwood had started early with the last of the moonshine he’d snuck into his luggage. It’s working out well for him so far, better than the last time they’d met and much more like it used to be.
“What’ve you been up to?” Vash asks when they’ve got drinks in front of them. Garnished with paper umbrellas—who brought those aboard?
Wolfwood does his best to think. “I’m a gardener now. Know everything about plants.”
“Really.”
Vash’s expression is so inscrutable that Wolfwood shelves his jokes about trees and says, “What about you? The girls’ve been telling me they miss you.” Not that they’ve actually said that to him, but he’s sure it’s true.
“Huh. I just saw Milly yesterday.” Vash shrugs. “I’ve finally gotten to spend time with the Plants—the other ones. It’s weird, like . . . meeting some distant cousin you’ve heard of a few times, but they know all about you.”
Wolfwood has no idea what that’s like, and neither does Vash. “Sounds lonely,” Wolfwood tries.
“Yeah.”
Never mind, this is the worst. In the past, when they were moping around on barstools, they’d be a lot less sober. Wolfwood orders more drinks. It turns out you can make general requests, but it all comes down to what the bartender’s got on hand that evening, and it seems like everyone’s embracing the randomness.
“What’s this s’posed to be?” Wolfwood grumbles, several glasses later. The label said Bride, and the whiskey tastes terrible, like the wrong end of three shots of the vials. No, it is the vials, burning in his sinuses.
The bartender hefts the bottle proudly. “One of the last few that came from planetside!”
When Vash pushes away his own serving, Wolfwood takes that shot, too. Still terrible.
Vash thumps his back as he coughs. “Dude, what’s going on with you?”
“Got this ghost,” Wolfwood wheezes. “And sometimes I do things ’cause it seems like it pisses him off.”
“Uh huh.” Neither of them is wearing their sunglasses, and it’s a lot, when Vash looks at him straight on. “You know, I think we might be done for the night.”
“’M being serious. I’m not drunk.” Wolfwood’s metabolism is more like an ordinary person’s now, sure, but he hasn’t turned into that much of a lightweight.
“Okay . . .” Vash lets the word trail off as he doodles nonsense in the condensation on the metal counter. “Wait! I’ve got an idea. It’ll either calm you down or freak you out more.”
To this offer of the entire spectrum of emotional experience, Wolfwood responds, “All right.”
Vash grabs him by the arm and hustles him out of the bar. They head into a part of the ship where Wolfwood’s never been—he thinks this is where the engine is, and everything that keeps it running. The door they go through leads to a sort of airlock, and on the other side there’s nothing. Big empty room, all four walls made of the transparent window material.
“Get ready,” Vash says, which makes Wolfwood shift onto the balls of his feet and square his shoulders. He’s so used to absurd things happening after those two words that it’s barely a shock when Vash taps on a panel and the gravity goes away.
He does flounder some, figuring out what to do with his limbs and which direction is up. There are metal handholds set into all of the walls, which is helpful. Meanwhile, Vash floats into the middle of the room and hangs there in space.
“Relaxing, right?”
Wolfwood kicks off what maybe used to be the ceiling and considers this while he tries to get closer to Vash. It’s disorienting, and he doesn’t know where to look because he doesn’t want to see his reflection. He realizes what’s missing at the same moment he figures out he’s going to overshoot Vash and go sailing past: For the first time in a long time, nothing in particular hurts. Huh.
Vash reaches out a hand and Wolfwood automatically grabs it, keeping hold as they spin around slowly. Somehow, Vash moves in a way that counterbalances him and brings them to a stop.
“This is where you’ve been?” Wolfwood asks. Everything about Vash is graceful here, like it’s stripped away all the flailing he does on the ground and left behind only the moments when he’s a bullet cutting straight for its target. His hair’s still fluttering a bit from their momentum, and Wolfwood thinks of the Plants drifting in their tanks.
“Sometimes.” Vash shrugs, reminding Wolfwood that their fingers are still intertwined. He doesn’t pull away. “It’s supposed to be somewhere for people to do fitness stuff in zero G, I think? But it’s usually empty. Nice and quiet.”
“Sounds perfect for you,” Wolfwood replies.
Vash either doesn’t catch the sarcasm or doesn’t care, because he says, “So tell me about your ghost.”
Wolfwood looks down, and he can’t see the two of them reflected at all, just a shimmering carpet of nebulae. Great time for him to get shy. “The fellow who checked me over when we first got here, he said it can happen with space travel. You can start seeing things that aren’t real. And feeling things.”
When he looks up again, Vash meets his eyes. “But you don’t think that’s what’s going on, do you?”
No, but . . . “You’re taking this too well. What, you seen a ghost before?”
Vash smiles, the first time he has all night, and it’s sad enough to have its own weight. “Kind of. She turned out to be real, though.”
“Oh,” Wolfwood says. “Mine definitely can’t be. Is yours . . . still around?”
“No. I’m alone.” Vash’s face does something else complicated then, and a twitch runs through his arm before he finally takes back his hand. Wolfwood’s known from the beginning that all his fumbling’s fake—he doesn’t do anything he doesn’t mean to. Except, apparently, say what he’s just said. “That’s not fair of me. There are almost three thousand people on this ship, did you know?”
And none of them’s his brother, Wolfwood fills in. One person like him in all the universe that he’s seen—maybe two?—and they’re gone.
Wolfwood has to say something, but everything rising in his chest is crazy, or selfish, or both. I think I’ve been in love with you for four years, except I didn’t realize until I almost died. This was the second time I held your hand and that was the first and maybe there could be more. But if all that’s true, would it be enough for you? Would I be good enough for you?
The problem is that this extra chance at life has made him a coward, because now he knows what it’s like to lose. The big one, the thing all his minor losses were practice for. What he thought he could face, since he carried it on his shoulder every day, but in the end it turned aside and passed him by for no reason he can understand.
“I didn’t know that,” Wolfwood replies. “Too many—no wonder you’re hiding out here. The quiet is pretty nice.”
Vash stares out at the stars, or at nothing, and so does Wolfwood. Their ghosts are silent between them.
Another dream that night. He’s nowhere to be seen in it—he can’t see his double, at any rate.
Vash is there instead, looking different in a way he can’t place. Something about the jacket? Then the jacket stops being an issue. Wolfwood’s hands move like they’re someone else’s and he isn’t afraid he’ll use them to hurt.
He’s had dreams like this. This isn’t the difficult part. Half of him doesn’t believe that, the half that knows where to sink his teeth into Vash’s neck so he keens in a way that could never come from a human throat. The other half tells it to shut up. He could’ve pinned Vash against the wall of that gas station like he’d wanted to the very first day, and he’d still be fucked, because once he had known how to care for people and then he’d had it beaten out of him. He’s not made for it anymore.
There’s a body beneath him and he doesn’t feel anything. He feels everything, so much that it wakes him all tangled in the sheets like a shroud, fever-hot. It’s morning, late morning—he’s stopped trusting his sense of what time it is without sunlight, but there’s a display on the wall—and he’s alone. Wolfwood stumbles to the shower.
The shower had been one of the most intimidating things about the whole ship, originally. As far as he could figure out, it never shut off, not unless he closed the tap himself. He’d stayed in a few nice places before—killed people in a few nice places—and even their showers ran on timers. Eventually, Sonia at the geoplant explained it to him, about the recycling system, and now he’ll stand under the water for ages, letting it beat down on his back until Livio threatens to smash the door’s locking mechanism.
He clenches his teeth and gets in while it’s still cold. His throat’s dry, and he coughs. Tastes iron. When he spits on the spotless white floor, it’s red, and he coughs again, red flecks getting on his hands.
His first idea, which is to say, “Shit. Goddamn. What the hell,” isn’t a good one, because it brings up more blood. His second is to take some soap and scrub the blood off his skin, which doesn’t work. That’s helpful—this is all in his head, then.
But he still has to ride it out, choking on gore and imagining what he’d like to do to the other him. Wolfwood’s already had to go through this bit in real life, too, and that motherfucker doesn’t have to be a sore loser just because he presumably hadn’t made it. This realization is what starts Wolfwood shaking. Even when he turns the water scalding hot, he doesn’t stop.
He’s lying on his back on his bed—before that, he must’ve toweled off and gotten partway dressed, because he’s wearing a t-shirt and boxers. The door opens and closes. Either a minute or an hour later, Livio looms over him and says, “Bad day?”
“Christ, yeah.” Wolfwood hauls himself into a seated position, rubbing his palms against his eyes until he feels like he’s woken up for the second time that morning. “Weird day. Weird month.”
Livio keeps looking down at him. “Why’s that?” he asks, which Wolfwood typically would make fun of him for, considering where they are right now.
Instead, he says, “I keep seeing—a person I was?” No, that’s not right. “Maybe someone I was supposed to be?”
“That makes sense,” Livio replies, which Wolfwood should’ve expected.
They’ve talked some about this kind of thing, nightmares and a list of the most vulnerable parts of the human body running through your head when you’re just trying to remember what you wanted at the store. Wolfwood’s decided the ghost is different, though, despite how everything’s gotten mixed up just now. It’s not exactly what Livio and Razlo have—had—going on, either, but maybe that’s closer.
When Wolfwood doesn’t elaborate, Livio says, “Have you tried asking him what he’s hanging around for?”
Wolfwood frowns. “I’ve got a pretty good idea.”
“Sometimes it’s still nice to be asked.”
He’s no longer interested in pleasantries, but at this point, he’ll try anything. Almost anything, he thinks, and then gets irritated at himself for thinking it.
Wolfwood walks back into the bathroom and looks in the mirror. It’s him, grey hair and dark circles and all. “What do you want,” he says anyway.
His reflection stays the same, but he doesn’t turn away. Even when he stops scowling, there’s a divot between his eyebrows that he hasn’t noticed before. Keep making that face and you’ll get stuck like that, Miss Melanie used to warn him. He has a tiny scar on his jaw, from getting clipped by a wooden board when they were putting up temporary housing near the launch site. It’s the first one he’s been able to keep since he was a kid scraping his knees.
It was terrifying, back then, watching himself change in ways he’d never asked for. Now it feels more like a second chance. A second chance to screw even more things up, probably, but he doesn’t know what else he can do.
“Fine,” he tells himself. “Fine, okay, you win.”
Livio waits for him to reemerge and start pulling on a pair of pants before asking, “How’d it go?”
“We’ll see,” Wolfwood says.
The thing about the ship is that everywhere mostly looks the same, smooth metal and featureless corridors, an endless source of deja vu. When he ends up in front of Vash’s door, it’s like he’s done all this before—he reaches out to knock and feels an echo of the last time he was here.
“Wolfwood! I didn’t expect to see you,” Vash says.
“You busy or something?” Wolfwood asks. He doesn’t seem busy—he seems like he also might’ve just woken up, dressed down to his black turtleneck with his jacket hung up behind him.
“Nah. But I thought you might start avoiding me again,” Vash replies as Wolfwood comes inside.
“I’m not—I can’t believe you’d accuse me of that, spikey,” Wolfwood’s startled into rambling. “That’s mean. What, are you mean now?”
Vash sits on the edge of the bed and props his chin on his elbow, like he’s really thinking about it. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Does that mean I’ve gotta be nice, then?” Wolfwood asks, with the aim of further derailing the conversation.
“You’re always nice to me,” Vash says immediately. He uncurls from his slouch and pats the mattress next to him.
Wolfwood can’t help snorting at that before settling himself down by Vash’s side. If you count dragging someone through the desert to the end of days, literally dragging him sometimes, your blood and his mixing in the sand and your voice hoarse in his ear from shouting about how everything he believes is nothing better than a story a child tells himself to hide from the world—if you count that as nice, then sure. Wolfwood doesn’t know if Vash has ever met nice.
He’s not here to argue, though. They’ve already done plenty of that. “I never finished telling you about my ghost,” he says.
They’re facing away from the window, but Wolfwood knows what he’d see if he turned around. He doesn’t move, and Vash makes a humming sound, listening.
“I saw myself,” Wolfwood says. “Myself if things were different, I suppose.”
“Good different, or bad different?” Vash asks when Wolfwood stumbles over where to go next.
“Hah. Wish I knew. He died. Sometimes I think I’m jealous.”
Vash nods, once, his head sinking toward his chest.
The motion pulls at the last of the tethers Wolfwood’s tied around himself, snaps the fraying edge, and Wolfwood reaches out to cup Vash’s chin in his fingers. Vash’s lips part, surprise or fear.
“But I thought,” Wolfwood says, his hand steady, “I don’t want to die if I haven’t done this.”
When they kiss, for a second, it tastes like smoke. Wolfwood supposes he can’t begrudge his shadow this last moment, before a weight settles over his shoulders and then disappears. Out into the spaces between the stars or wherever he came from. He’s gone, and Wolfwood’s feeling everything the living get to feel, hot breath and warm skin and a quick pulse under his hand.
He can tell when Vash is overthinking, though—has a finely honed instinct for it. He nips at Vash’s lip, admonishing, and then Vash pulls back, brushing his nose against Wolfwood’s before he goes.
“So that’s it?” Vash is flushed, but he’s frowning, in the way that’s always made Wolfwood want to do something to get the expression off his face. Typically involving violence, but now there are other options. “It’s that easy?”
Wolfwood laughs, jostling Vash where their knees knock together. “What about any of this do you think is meant be easy?”
There’s a whole future beyond this, the line the ship’s tracing toward wherever they’re going. And unknown years to follow. If Vash wants to get into any of that, Wolfwood could be game, but Vash is also the one who taught him about surrender.
“Nothing, I guess,” Vash says to himself, to Wolfwood, and then kisses him again.