Work Text:
The keys in Vash’s hands jingle against his prosthetic, a tremulous alarm bell. It takes five careful tries to fit it into the motel doorknob. Wolfwood, floating on a tether so thin that he can’t feel or move his hands, tries to place his arm near the doorknob to help open it. Vash cranks it open wholesale so fast that Wolfwood’s heavy fingers slip off (Wolfwood receives a perfect picture of his head cracking open against the doorframe, splitting through flesh and bone, and he pushes it aside without a further thought) and staggers through, kicking the door shut behind them with his heel. Wolfwood tries to stand up. His body still a leaden weight around Vash’s shoulders.
The floor pitches underneath him no matter how he tries to pin it down. They settle together on the bed, arguably sitting upright, pitched inwards towards each other on the bed’s hapless springs. Vash leans down and fights the buckles on his boots.
Wolfwood tries to pick out his face. It’s hard for some reason. It’s no face at all. It’s the same shapes over and over again, the eyes are also impossible, fractal. Polygonal. He strains, and gets Vash’s eyebrows for a second, and then it slips from his grasp and he is a jumble of shapes again, and Wolfwood is so far away that all he can feel is the roots of his teeth buzzing with blood. Wolfwood spies his hand, unfeeling, on the shoulder of Vash’s coat, the only shape that is complete and that makes sense. Relief spills through him far away. It will catch up with him later. “Vash,” Wolfwood murmurs, the sound delayed. Vash pauses halfway through kicking off his boots. Wolfwood’s head shakes no without any real direction from his mind, only to say, nothing important. It was to feel the sound buzz through his mouth and to quiet the way his gums are feeling. That’s all.
Vash kicks off his boots, bang bang clatter, against the wall next to the motel door. He leans down again to pull off Wolfwood’s shoes. His tethered orbit swings close enough that he can work his feet out of shoes and socks. Sand showers on top of the floor, scattering there. Caked sand wrinkles when Wolfwood flexes his feet.
Vash stands and shuffles off his coat. He drapes it over the floor lamp and turns the lightbulb glow even dimmer, warmer, than before. He pulls Wolfwood standing upright, who now feels the floor steady and still and he the one wobbling, and wrestles off his jacket, dusty and wrinkled. Unbuttons his shirt, and discovers a wealth of sand packed close to Wolfwood’s skin that falls off in sheets and smashes on the floor without a sound.
Alarm spikes through him and in record time Wolfwood presses his hand to his heart with only a three-second delay. Finds it beating there, fast. Birdlike. It must be someone else’s blood on his shirt. He retreats mercifully far again.
Vash says something. It starts in his chest, goes through his throat and mouth and a little through his nose, and from there it travels the speed of sound to Wolfwood’s ears, registers there as a vibration against a tiny drum and by these small and humble movements an electrical signal registers and goes to the right parts of his brain to be processed as sound, then language. “Shit,” he says, “the shower. Hold on,” and he disappears.
Wolfwood is standing on his own just fine, as long as he doesn’t move. A few seconds later Wolfwood connects his disappearance and the sounds happening behind the closet door–the bathroom. The shower. Water roars through a pipe and strikes a surface in the bathroom and makes white noise in there. Wolfwood remembers that his body is thirsty. He swallows dryly and feels his throat click, feels his teeth crunch down on grit. There’s sand in his mouth. His mouth?
He sticks his fingers in there. Bad idea. His hands are also covered in sand and a little bit of blood. His brain pushes the perfect picture of a revolver in his mouth (gunmetal gunpowder gray, heavy, cold, feels the back of his head blow open, cratering, painting the wall behind him with the inside of his head, insisting, promising to him it would feel good). He pulls his fingers clumsily from his mouth and forgets why he–remembers that there is sand in there. Right. The sand.
He’s thirsty. It’s not important. Nothing is important nor ever will be again. He digs out three pocketfuls of sand from his pants and finds a lighter in there, shakes the sand out of the cap. His hand flicks it open and shut. Muscle memory. (The perfect picture of his bones twisting inward, of his ribs drawing in to claw and bore and split apart. Coupled with a hitched-breath feeling and relief so complete it drowns him.) He can’t feel his hands.
Vash is back. He is saying something again. His hand is on Wolfwood’s shoulder. Wolfwood, a terrible friend, who is ten thousand light years removed from this motel and the sand in his mouth, stumbles obligingly along wherever Vash is leading, reaches up and taps a heavy hand on Vash’s to lie and say I’m here. He thinks his body is tired. It is hard to move.
The bathroom is tiled and filling with steam. Wolfwood nearly walks into the shower before realizing that the door is only half open and he still has pants on. He fumbles his belt buckle twice. Vash tries to help and between the two of them it’s ten tries before it finally loosens and Wolfwood leans his shoulders on Vash again to wrestle them off. The steam makes the bottoms roll up. Sand falls in sheets off him again, softening the floor, sticking to the bottoms of his feet. He lends his distant, blurry hands to the fight against Vash’s compression sleeve. His vest. His leggings. Vash reaches up to take off his prosthetic, talking again, muted in the steam.
There is a stranger in the mirror.
It is Wolfwood if he were a little more tired, a little older, a little bloodier. Sand follows the hidden lines next to his mouth that will learn to wrinkle if he makes it another twenty or thirty years. It showers down from his hairline. Gasping, heaving for breath in a dog-tired way. His right hand is pressed around a wet red wound in his ribcage, and a bone sticks out there–
It’s no bone. It’s a long ceramic-white spear.
It shifts up and down with every breath he takes. It gleams in the light over the mirror, matte, a needle, an oversized claw, a long white thorn from the throat of the largest sand worm in the world. Fresh blood wicks into the grain. He reaches up to try and pull it out.
The light goes out.
Just like that shadow hollows him out, blues and greens again, and the light is from the floor lamp, warm, and he can hear Vash, talking again. Never stopped talking. Made him nervous. His voice a waterfall against the white noise of the shower water going to waste. His hand warm and still on Wolfwood’s collarbone. He turned off the light, Wolfwood realizes eight seconds too late and an interstellar void away. Vash says, mouth-air-ear-brain, “Go in, I’ll be right after you,” and Wolfwood pries the shower door open and mostly closes it behind him.
The water is stinging hot. It beats against his scalp. He lifts his face to it and feels cuts open on his forehead His lips are chapped. He leans against the tile wall.
Vash opens and shuts the shower door behind him, a gust of cooler air rushing around his ankles and steam swirling around his head. Vash sighs. He fumbles with something, snaps a bottle open and shut, and daubs a palmful of cold gel on the top of Wolfwood’s head. Something about the steam makes the world a little more real, matches Wolfwood’s blurry body somehow perfectly and makes it easy to be standing, be upright, be right now where Vash is working soap into his hair against the bed of sand that has cemented itself there.
He breathes in a little bit of the shower water and starts coughing. Vash spins him around with a sudsy hand on his arm. The hot water opens more wounds on Wolfwood’s back. Vash’s face is still just shapes, barely there in the dark and the steam, but they aren’t seasick anymore, and Wolfwood can more or less make out the eyes and nose and mouth. He finds the shape of Vash’s shoulder and holds on to it to be doubly steady. The scars there are familiar. He finds to his complete surprise that he can feel them,
(The perfect picture of a red line splitting him open into a mouth the ribs teeth the organs a tongue biting into him shutter-fast a perfect, perfect picture, messy and confused in the dark)
can feel the whorls of his fingerprints and the silvered skin of old scars and he pulls his hand down to the center of his chest, to feel Vash’s sternum creaking. He is so tired, he remembers. His body is cast from lead and softened by the heat.
Vash finds more soap somewhere, a thin bar that smells like nothing until it wears down to the orange center, and smells fresh. Wolfwood takes it into his lungs like smoke.
They have to trade the towel. Wolfwood has the thing pressed upon him, even though he’s not the one with a metal arm socket, so he dries off quickly and leaves a corner of the towel untouched, for Vash to work around the wire ends with. Wolfwood gets dressed in a spare set of Vash’s clothes from his duffel bag standing up and tosses back the thin blankets before sitting down on the bed. Every drop of energy he had left in him falls away from him, and so do the questions, and the fear, and the blur–all but the dimness that comes from being awake for too long. He rubs the sheets underneath his fingers. He sees one of the littler moons outside the window. The glass has warped somewhat from the years.
Vash walks out of the bathroom wearing his compression things and nothing else. Settles his prosthetic arm on the rickety table next to the bed. He lays down behind Wolfwood across the bed, so his head is next to Wolfwood’s hip, and just stares at him for a minute. Wolfwood looks down eventually. His face is startled out of being shapes because for once Vash’s hair is trying to lay down, except at the roots, where it’s doing its damndest to stick straight out.
The Punisher is missing. He just realized. He’ll have to get a new gun somewhere else, like a normal person. It might even be easy.
“What are you thinking about?” Vash says, very quietly.
“I think I forgot something,” Wolfwood says. His voice sounds like shit.
“Oh,” Vash says, and contrives to look as guilt-free as possible. Something pools superheated in Wolfwood’s mouth. The cuts on his forehead sting fiercely when he frowns.
“Vash.” He says. Carefully.
“Yeah,” Vash says, investigating the ceiling.
“Where the fuck is my bike.”
“Let’s talk in the morning,” Vash says. “For sure.”
“Mother fucker,” Wolfwood swears. A nervous little memory is rattling around in his head that sounds like a bike exploding.
“You said you forgave me,” Vash says.
Wolfwood just looks at him for a minute. He notes that the earring has been ripped out at some point and left a scab badly healing. “You owe me a bike” goes through several filters, including exhaustion and Wolfwood’s foul mouth, and ends up as, “Fuck me sideways.”
That starts Vash off. He giggles a squeaky-toy laugh, exacerbated because he’s on his back, presses his face into his hand in an effort to stop and be serious, and can’t. He is crying. The laugh-crying slopes dangerously off to actual tears. Big sobs that sound like he’s near coughing up a lung. Vash cries a lot, about dropping a donut, about butterflies, about good days, about roadkill. He never cries like this.
Wolfwood leans back a little bit to hoist him up and draw him into a two-handed hug. Wolfwood can hear his feet shifting behind him on the blankets, and Vash’s hand twists away from his face and into his shirt. He is gone silent, breathless. It pricks at Wolfwood’s eyes. The room is filled with just wet breathing for a little while. It’s not a fancy hug, Wolfwood hated it when people rubbed his back as a kid and how he doesn’t know how to do it without making it awkward, so he holds on a little tighter and presses his cheek to the top of Vash’s wet hair. Just breathing, for a little while.
“I love you,” Vash says, muffled, into Wolfwood’s shirt.
“I love you too.” He gets the words out quick before his throat closes up. He closes his eyes–they’re burning.
They uncurl after an eon to find a position on the mattress that the springs do not stab into and share the blankets as the heat bleeds out into the icy Gunsmoke night and the steam turns to moisture threatening to drip down the windowpanes. Vash’s breath is soft against Wolfwood’s face. He doesn’t want to get up and turn off the lamp, but it’s bothering him, so he pulls the blankets up over his head, turns onto his belly, and falls dreamlessly asleep.