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The worst thing is — well, it’s nowhere near the worst thing, but it feels like it at the time — Wolfwood knows better.
He just knows better, plain and simple. He knows he’s making another careless mistake, another tally counting down until his luck runs out, and he does it anyway.
Carelessness was the second thing the Eye trained out of him, right after insubordination. Either one would get him killed before anything else got the chance.
He’s not an idiot. He can count. Not like Vash can count — every bullet from every gun of every person firing at him, knowing exactly when they’re out of ammo and he has an opening — but Wolfwood can damn well keep track of how many ampoules of Communion he’s bitten into over the course of one fight.
Too many.
It was too many two vials ago, and he knows it, even as he fits the fifth of the day between his teeth where he’d usually put a cigarette.
He shouldn’t have to do this.
Wolfwood knows how to end fights quickly. Third thing they taught him — though given he’s abandoned the first two lessons, it’s no wonder he’s failing to uphold the third as well.
He’ll never know Vash’s lessons better than the Eye’s — the Eye had him first, wired him exactly how they wanted him, he’ll never not have been theirs, no matter what Vash teaches him — but Wolfwood knows what Vash wants from him.
Vash wants him to bleed, so no one else will have to. That’s the purpose of him, the reason he’s been kept despite his treason. He can throw himself into the path of gunfire even better than Vash can. It won’t keep him down for long.
So he doesn’t end the fight quickly. He ends the fight eventually . The only casualty the five split-second deaths between the vial breaking and Communion turning back into blood.
The impacts of bullets feel like they come from far away. It’s someone else’s body thrown from its course, blood soaking into its clothes and spraying from bisected arteries.
It’s someone else’s name that Vash screams at the thud of a body against sand. Someone else’s teeth biting down.
Someone else taking Communion, on his knees in itchy initiation vestments, mouth open to accept—
The Blood Of Christ Fills Him
by the body and blood of christ he shall be redeemed his sins shall be forgiven the light of the Angels shine upon him again by his blood on the sand his sins shall be forgiven — kyrie eleison kyrie eleison kyrie eleison —
you've done well, nicholas.
It’s quiet, eventually.
Even the screaming stops.
There’s an empty space where he should be, a humming buzzing static. The Punisher is under his palm, his fingers stiff around it's grip. It’s the only certain thing in the world.
The only promise he’s ever been made that’s been kept.
Wolfwood rolls onto his back and stares up at the sky. It spins above him, a little nauseatingly.
Closing his eyes doesn’t make it any better, so he opens them again, staring up and away from himself, his empty overwarm body.
Wolfwood doesn’t remember hitting the ground a second time.
He remembers rising up, steam and holy blood and glass in his teeth. Returning fire at the last of the bandit gang that had surrounded them. A spray of bullets at their feet, to throw them off guard before they could shoot him again, more precise shots to their weapons, their knees, their shoulders. Never center mass. Never their leering, sweaty faces.
Maybe it wasn’t enough. Maybe he’s dying too, beating Vash to the perfect-martyr punch.
The thought makes a laugh crackle out of his chest, ragged and wet, like he’s trying to breathe past broken ribs. But his ribs aren’t broken. This body he’s collapsed in is new, untouched, unharmed, whole.
He wheezes again, tries to pull a full breath into his lungs. It doesn’t quite work.
There’s a rush of noise again, coming from somewhere above and at a distance from him. It echoes loudly against the silence, but it still doesn’t reach him. He can barely feel it, in his eardrums or his chest, where sound usually gathers in him, rattling around behind his ribs.
It wasn’t always like that. Only after the Eye took him, changed him. His senses live inside him, now — like he’s still as small as he should’ve been back then, everything reaching through the armor-shell of his grown-up body to clatter and shudder until it reaches his soft insides.
It’s worse — like most things are — when he has too much Communion in his system.
He feels soft. Not just inside. Raw all over, exposed, helpless. Unprotected, unmade, like he might spill out into a rotten mess of gore if he so much as moves.
Formless shapes cover parts of the sky, bringing the noise with them.
Wolfwood doesn’t move, still trying to breathe. The noise is closer now, louder, enough to cut into him, rattling through him like the aftershocks of an explosion. His ribs feel tight, his head aching at the sudden pressure.
He could cover his ears, but he can’t find his arms. Just the hand wrapped over the Punisher, and he can’t let that go.
They’d do something much worse to him than the horrible scrape of noise across his insides if he lost the Punisher.
Wolfwood blinks. The shapes above him turn into faces that he recognizes, and hands reaching for him.
“Don’t!” he croaks. “Don’t touch me, I’ll—” he tries to find the word for it, when happens to him when he’s too full of the Blood of Christ. “I’ll burst.”
One of the figures retreats in a hurry. The other, the one that hurts to look at, gold and red and bottle-green, crouches down over him.
“Wolfwood?”
“Uh-huh?” Wolfwood croaks, because as far as he can tell that was his name.
Something cool touches his forehead. “Are you hurt?”
Yes, something in Wolfwood shrieks. But he knows the hurt is gone. Everything’s healed. It’s just the rotten blood inside of him, Communion curdling against his unworthy soul. “N-nuh.”
“Is he okay?” the other voice asks. Shockingly bright and warm and soft, the kind of earnestness that shouldn't really exist in a place like this, and certainly not anywhere he's touched, any life the rot of his blood has spilled into.
The coolness, a little less so now, warmed by his skin, moves down to his neck, lingers there a moment, thumbing over the hot point of his pulse.
Wolfwood wonders if he's about to die.
The Eye designed him to survive just about anything, even an overdose of Communion, but there's nothing the Blood of Christ can do if his brain loses blood supply. The machine stops running — if he's drowned, strangled, beheaded. Suffocated. Poisoned.
He was taught the easiest way to kill one of his own. Right in the back of the neck, the soft place where skull meets spine, break the bone and sever the spinal cord.
(Blood loss in excess does the same work, slower and messier. Wolfwood's never been the subtle type. For all his training belly-down in the dust with a sniper rifle hugged to his skinny chest, there's one thing he's really good at, and that's making the Punisher sing. )
“I'm okay,” he rasps, because it's very important, he knows, not to worry the bright warm soft voice, even if the hands on his neck are about to kill him.
The colorful blur — slowly starting to resolve into a person-shape — makes a huffy, concerned little noise somewhere above him, almost certainly quieter than it feels.
It feels like a gunshot to the eardrum.
Wolfwood braces himself, but the hands move away from the delicate column of his neck and down to his chest. That's safer. He can take all kinds of abuse to his shoulders, his chest, his ribcage, his abdomen. That, the Blood can work around.
“He's tachycardic,” the spike-topped blur says.
Wolfwood giggles. Honest to God giggles. There's so much wrong with him that he doesn't know where to begin with it. “I know what that word means.”
There's a blue-black blur hovering next to the fluffy-spiky one now. “You look terrible.”
“I feel terrible,” Wolfwood giggles, and then something in the back of his head goes uh oh! with no context whatsoever, and blue-black and fluffy-spiky make the exact same type of noise at the same time.
He just barely manages to roll onto his side and prop himself up on his elbows before he throws up, a horrible insides-colored mess that looks as bad as it feels to heave up, like it's tearing loose from inside of him. He can see bullet shards and little bits of white in the red-pink mess, and he wonders if it counts as getting enough calcium to digest broken pieces of his own ribs and then he throws up again.
There's a moment of clarity somewhere between bouts of retching. Meryl is kneeling on one side of him, her hand in his hair in a gesture that makes his eyes — already streaming from the force of vomiting up more of himself than he should have to give — water unbearably, because she's so good to him and he doesn't deserve it, and hopefully she can't tell.
It doesn't matter anyway. It doesn't matter what she thinks of him, no matter how badly he aches to have her approval, because it's not like Vash will love him when this is all over and done—
Vash.
Vash, holding him up by the chest and one hand on his hip, Vash's easy strength, Vash's terrible outpouring of care. Not terrible like the memory of different hands, bigger hands, warm and certain, when his hair was longer and the thing that made him sick was eating too fast because no one had ever given him that much food before, not for free.
Terrible in a different way, terrible because Vash isn't like Meryl, Vash is bright like the suns are bright, warm like the sand is warm under Wolfwood's forearms as he heaves. Soft like — soft like—
Nothing else is soft like Vash is soft. Not even Meryl — Meryl is still city-raised soft, even though she's shed her layers of white that she thought she'd be able to keep clean, even though she's seen the life leave a man's eyes, even though she has means motive and opportunity to put a bullet right where Wolfwood knows would kill him, in the back of his neck.
He wouldn't even have time to scream.
But Vash wouldn't let her. Vash is soft despite everything, soft under calluses and soft under the terror of his existence and soft under the Sword of Damocles hanging sixty billion double dollars heavy over his head and soft over top of everything he is, nuclear reactor on two skinny legs and he's letting Wolfwood live not because it's better for either of them but because he can't imagine things any other way.
Vash doesn't live in a world where people like Wolfwood get what they deserve.
In that world, none of this would have happened.
Clarity and terror roll through him in waves.
Wolfwood's stomach heaves up nothing. No blood, no bile, no bone. Just muscle spasms, saliva and snot and tears.
There's nothing left in him. Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing—
Wolfwood feels it coming, the Nothing. It rolls his eyes back in his head, drops him weightless and weak—
Then the world rolls itself over on the side, his fall cut off abruptly. Wolfwood makes a terribly embarrassing yelping whine, splaying his limbs out. His head spins in turn, his limbs stuck in the positions they're bent into as he breaks out in a cold sweat.
He knows how this goes. It's as familiar as anything else has ever been. Carried between two bodies, too weak to lift his head, while everything spins violently around him, inside and out and in between.
“You're okay, you're okay,” someone's saying. “I'm sorry, we have to move you, the sun can't be helping—”
Wolfwood's face cracks when he moves, when he opens his mouth to say what sun because all he can see is the sharp white fluorescents, and all that comes out is a heave. Maybe it's dried blood that flakes off his chin and cheeks, maybe it's shreds of him.
It doesn't matter, anyway. There will always be more blood, and whatever of him he loses makes itself anew.
He Is Risen!!
Wolfwood tries to count the footsteps, so he knows how long he has before whatever's next, but they don't echo like they should. Maybe the ringing in his ears is just too loud.
He keeps his eyes shut and waits for it to be over.
you'll be waiting a long time for that, nicholas—
Wolfwood tries to fall out of his body. To let whatever's about to happen to it happen without him. It's not his body, anyway, not really. It hasn't been since they first strapped him down and sent him to the neon-lit nightmare he never really stopped having.
Instead, he falls and keeps falling but never hits the ground, never leaves himself. The hands holding him squeeze tighter and tighter and tighter until he's sure they should be tearing him apart, but he doesn't tear apart, he just keeps being carried onward, onward—
get up, soldier.
He can't get up. He's falling. Or maybe the world is falling, and he's the only steady thing. Him and the hands holding him down, down down.
“Easy!” someone yelps. “Easy, easy, you're okay. You're safe. Don't try to get up.”
Safe?
He's never been safe. There's only one safe place on this planet, and it's down at the bottom of a grave, and he isn't there yet. He's full of the Blood of Christ and empty of himself and his mouth tastes like gore and bile and he wants to cry but it'll just get worse if he does so he doesn't.
Being dead would be too easy.
“Wolfwood—”
No one calls him Wolfwood.
He's Nicholas the Punisher, no one calls him Wolfwood but—
“Tongari?”
Someone swears loudly. Wolfwood tries to flinch, but a bolt of pain throbs from his skull to the base of his spine. He tries to curl away from the noise, but he's lying down, or at least, his back is pressed up against something flat. The room's still squirming around him, refusing to settle on one plane.
“Sorry,” someone says.
The same someone that swore. Meryl?
“Sorry,” Wolfwood echoes. There's a loud droning whine right next to his head, right next to the pain, and he doesn't remember what he's being tested on anymore, just that he's doing something wrong.
Vash is touching him again and it hurts. Hurts more than it usually hurts, like a knife-blade instead of a lighter-flame. Like being pulled apart, slow, stretched like taffy until something gives.
Part of the test, of all the tests, is not ever letting on that it hurts, but maybe Vash won't mind. “Hurts.”
“I know,” Vash says. “I'm sorry.”
But he keeps touching Wolfwood, brushing his hair out of his eyes, even though he has them squeezed shut, arranging him like a doll. Like a corpse. Something cold and wet touches his face, scrubs a little around his mouth and chin and it hurts but there's nothing he can do about it. He doesn't dare open his eyes.
He lies as still as he can and listens to his heart pound, the room rocking steadily behind his closed eyes.
Then Vash stops, and leaves Wolfwood alone. His footsteps move away.
He should be relieved, but it's worse than the pain, to be stranded. He tries to bear it, tries to stomach the way the world spins quicker and harsher without an anchor, even an anchor crushing his ribs with its weight, but instead he cries out like a kicked animal, hears Vash's footstops stop—
Meryl's hands, her gun-calluses overlaid on writer's-calluses, wrap around one of his. He breathes in, hard, like she punched him in the stomach, lets the sound in a helpless sort of whine. The pressure rushes through his nerves the same way the pain did, but never quite reaches pain. Just a vicious sort of ache, compounding and compounding on itself until he doesn't have a choice but to let go and—
—fall.
He's gone, somewhere else, swallowed by nothing at all, before he lands.
It's dark, when he opens his eyes, and he's lying flat on his back on a cold tiled floor, wet towels bunched up under his arms like how Miss Melanie used to deal with kids who had fevers. Meryl is hunched over him, patting at his forehead with a cloth.
“Hi,” he rasps at her upside-down face. She's pretty. She looks slightly less miserable than he feels.
“Oh good, you're conscious,” Meryl chirps, her expression not changing at all. She grabs him by the arms and shuffles him up her lap until he's not completely horizontal, then brings a cup of water into his view from… somewhere. Somewhere outside the little sliver of space that is the bathroom and Wolfwood's too-tight skin.
She tucks the straw between his lips and holds it there until he drinks and drinks and drinks until the straw makes a slurping sound. It's just slightly grounding.
Wolfwood licks his lips, tastes copper. “Am I dying?”
“Just a little bit,” Vash says, from the doorway. “I think you'll be fine.”
“Cool,” Wolfwood wheezes. He's too cold, even though he knows by the the way the cool glass feels like ice he's too hot. “Why am I dying?”
Vash crouches down next to him, his hand coming to rest on Meryl's shoulder in a gesture that makes Wolfwood ache for a reason he can't really name. “I was hoping you would know,” he says. “You told me you couldn't get sick.”
Oh, he's mad at me, Wolfwood thinks. Really, really mad.
It's almost reassuring. Anger, he knows how to deal with.
“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” Wolfwood says, which just makes Vash raise an eyebrow. “Too much of the good stuff.”
Meryl purses her lips. “Did you know that would happen?”
There's no answer that gets Wolfwood out of trouble, so he doesn't even try. “Can I have some more water?”
Vash refills the glass without a word.
“Are you going to make me beg?” Wolfwood asks. Dark spots dance at the edge of his vision, swallowing the space Vash takes up.
Meryl's fingers work through his hair. “Beg for what?”
Wolfwood tries to count the ceiling tiles he can still see, but his vision keeps tunneling. “Tongari knows.”
“Vash, beg for what? What's he talking about?”
Wolfwood shuts his eyes. He's falling again, but slower, pulled down into the dark. Swallowed up, like the sand swallows everything.
Vash doesn't answer, at least not while Wolfwood can hear.
Miss Melanie had a little cross on a beaded string that she carried in her pocket. Sometimes, when it was late, and all the other kids had been put to bed, and just Nico was awake, with Livio following him like a grey-haired shadow, she'd sit on the low futon and pray.
She called it a rosary. When Livio got sick, sicker than he'd ever been before, or ever would be again. While they sat and waited for the fever to break — or not — she'd taught him to pray it, all the beads in order, around and around and around.
There's no one to pray over Wolfwood, so he murmurs the prayers to himself.
“I'm sorry,” someone says, low, one hand on Wolfwood's face, thumbing over his lips.
Wolfwood tries to speak, but all that comes out is a dull rasp of breath. He's burning, hot and liquid inside his aching skin, but he can't stop shivering.
“I'm sorry,” the voice says again, and Wolfwood wishes whoever it is would just get it over with and do whatever it is they're so sorry for.
sometimes, nicholas, we have to do things we don't want to do.
And On The Third Day—
Wolfwood wakes up in a hotel room he doesn't recognize, and the only thing that keeps it from being terrifying is a weight on his chest that he very much does.
He lifts his head, just enough to see the rest of the room. The Punisher's propped up next to the door — which doesn't make sense — and Vash is lying on the other bed, fully dressed, curled up like a kid, which does.
“Fuck'appened?” Wolfwood mumbles, more for the sake of the thing than actually in expectation of an answer. He has vague, contextless snips of memory, a recursive loop of prayer running over the whole thing, pain and incoherence and fever.
Vash bolts upright in a spasm of limbs, like he wasn't asleep at all. He stares at Wolfwood like he can't quite believe he's still there, his expression wide open with relief. Then his face shutters again, turns into that mask of a smile that Wolfwood loves and hates. “I hauled your gun back here. That thing is heavy, Wolfwood, I can't believe you carry it with one hand.”
“How bad was it?” Wolfwood asks, leaning back against the pillow, raising a hand to pet the back of Meryl's head idly. Her hair is a little greasy, like it's been a while since she's had a chance to shower.
“Bad,” Vash says, and Wolfwood hears him drop the smile. “It took two days for that fever to break, and we could barely keep any water in you in the meantime. Don't do that again.”
I wouldn't have to if you'd let me actually shoot people, Wolfwood thinks very hard at him, but doesn't say. Instead, he closes his eyes again. “Goin' back to sleep now.”
“I'll find us some food,” Vash says. “Wolfwood?”
Wolfwood makes a noise at him.
“I'll come back.”
Swallowing the ache that rises in his chest, Wolfwood tangles his fingers in Meryl's hair. She's sleeping soundly. “Yeah,” he mutters. “Food sounds good.”
This time, he doesn't fall even a little, when sleep takes him — but he lands softly, still.