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The draw of tragedies, someone had once told Vash, was not the pain of the ending, but the hope that came before it, the strength of the wish that things would be all right. It was intoxicating, that hope, and all the more so when it was doomed. The rush of adrenaline that came with a shout, a skipped step on a staircase, a quick intake of breath, a gunshot. No one watched tragedies for their endings, but for the promise of a hope so captivating it could make someone believe for a moment in a happy ending even if they knew from the start that it was doomed to fail.
The woman who had said that was long dead, caught by a bullet that had festered into an infection of the brain. When Vash returned to the town he had met her in some twenty years later, he found nothing but the bare skeletons of buildings jutting from the sand, half-buried, empty as the bulb of the dead geoplant that nestled at its border.
Vash had always hated tragedies.
“What’s on your mind, Spikey?”
The voice was rough, low, familiar as wind and heat. Vash turned towards Wolfwood and breathed in tobacco smoke and sweat and cedar. He hadn’t heard the other man enter the hotel room, which was a little concerning; he hadn’t meant to let his guard down so completely.
“Nothing,” he said brightly. “Nothing at all.” A smile pulled at dry lips; Wolfwood glowered and stepped closer.
“Nothin’, huh?” Wolfwood plucked the sunglasses off Vash’s face and squinted at him, then tossed the glasses on the small table that Vash had been hovering beside. “You hurt?” Broad, calloused hands slid over Vash’s coat, probing for injuries, and Vash let out a squeak.
“I’m fine!” he yelped. “It’s really nothing.”
Wolfwood grunted, unconvinced. His fingers lingered at an old bloodstain that had never quite come out; the bright red of Vash’s coat disguised the appearance, but not the lingering stiffness of the fabric. He prodded the area for another moment, then huffed in annoyance and let his hands fall to rest on Vash’s hips.
“Okay, so maybe you weren’t fuckin’ shot when I wasn’t looking, but how many times I gotta tell ya? If it’s botherin’ you, it ain’t ‘nothing.’”
Vash widened his smile; Wolfwood’s glare deepened.
“Aw, worried about me?” Vash chirped. “I’m the Humanoid Typhoon, you know! If anything, I should be worried about you.”
“Is that what this is about?”
Wolfwood leaned in until his forehead touched Vash’s. The movement was not exactly gentle, not by normal standards, but from Wolfwood, it was tantamount to a caress. He was worried, then. Sometimes, Vash hated how perceptive that man was. How perceptive they both were, really. Too perceptive for their own good. Vash felt his smile slip.
“Don’t,” he said softly. “Please. I don’t wanna talk about this tonight.” It came out slightly more pleading than he had meant it to.
Wolfwood’s eyes flickered momentarily to Vash’s lips. They both stood there for a moment, near enough to taste one another’s breath on the air. The wind threw dust at the window, rattled the sill, shifted the dunes outside; the suns were setting, and the stark chill of the lightless desert would descend fast. Vash shivered, and Wolfwood’s fingers tightened almost imperceptibly, warm through the red coat.
Then someone dropped a glass at the bar downstairs, and they both turned away from each other at the same time.
What are you doing, Vash? You’re supposed to be leaving. You’re supposed to be keeping him safe. He breathed in slow, breathed out even slower.
The one man in the world he needed more than anything to stay alive. The one man in the world he could not hope to save. He knew how this story would end; it was always the same.
Vash had always hated tragedies.
Wolfwood cleared his throat. “I’m gonna get a drink,” he said roughly. “You comin’?”
Vash plastered the smile back on his face. “You go ahead. I’ll join you later.”
Wolfwood looked him up and down, clearly suspicious, but nodded. “Fine,” he said. “But I better not come back up here later and find you sulking, y’hear?”
Vash laughed. “Don’t be silly. Save me a drink, will you?”
Wolfwood squinted at him for another moment, but then finally left, muttering something incoherent under his breath. The door shut behind him, and Vash let his shoulders drop. The Punisher loomed beside the door, and Vash felt as if it were watching him with cold eyes, judging, knowing. He swallowed hard. He grabbed the pack of cigarettes that Wolfwood had left on the bedside table and stuffed them into his pocket.
He was running out of time.
He put on his sunglasses, took a deep breath, and opened the window.
All he had to do was make sure the story never ended. All he had to do was drag it out. Everything would be fine. (Nothing would be fine.) It would all be fine. (Nothing ever was.)
It was too high up to jump straight down, but only a short leap from the roof of the next building over, and then a quick dash from there to an accessible fire escape. There was a spare thomas at the hotel, one they rented out to travelers; Vash had asked about it at the front desk the night before.
The last dregs of daylight reflected crimson off the endless sand. Vash ushered the thomas from its meager stables, leaving a handful of cash and a silent apology behind, and rode away.
One of the problems with thomases was that they couldn’t ride forever. It was one thing to push Angelina II (or was it III, now?) until she coughed gasoline and sputtered miserably to a stop, but a living creature required a bit more consideration. Vash could only ride for about seven hours in good conscience before he had to give the animal a proper break.
There were a few hours of darkness left, so Vash made a small campfire to huddle at. There was no cover anywhere nearby, so he was out in the open, and this would make him even more obvious, but he couldn’t find it in himself to care. It was his first time in a long while spending a night alone; he didn’t want to spend it in the dark, too.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the pack of cigarettes, turning it over in his hand. There were warnings plastered on the back of the container – danger, hazard, poison. Wolfwood shouldn’t smoke them. That was the only reason Vash had taken them, one last gibe, one last unasked-for favor.
The fact that when he lit one and set it in the sand next to him like the world’s worst incense, it felt almost like Wolfwood was there with him – well. No one had to know about that. Vash tipped his head back and looked at the thomas.
“You won’t tell, will you, Angie?” he murmured to her.
She was asleep, her head nestled comfortably in her feathers. Vash let out a soft sigh.
It was better this way. Wolfwood would come after him eventually – he would have to – but Vash could keep on running, and running, and running, and if Wolfwood never caught up, then- then-
Then the game of tag went on forever, and nobody had to die.
Wolfwood was not the first man Vash had ever loved.
“You have so much love to give, Vash,” Rem had once told him. “You’re going to have so many people, someday, to share that with. I can’t wait to find out who you choose to give that gift.” (And, of course, she never had.)
At the time, it had been a compliment, meant and taken as one, but a century and a half had come and gone and an arm was the least important piece of himself that Vash had lost in the interim.
When he was young (not truly young, he had been a child when the ships had fallen but already he felt old, old, and older with every step – his appearance was frozen in a mockery of youth, but nothing aged the soul like guilt), there had been a Plant engineer with a soft laugh, soft hair, soft lips. He had been gentle, energetic, fascinated by his work, fascinated by Vash, and Vash had reciprocated enthusiastically. They had spent a year together that Vash had thought would be a lifetime. The man had contracted radiation poisoning, and Vash ran. For years, Vash had wondered if it had been the proximity that had done it, and took to wearing gloves at all times, avoiding skin-to-skin contact with humans. It was a slow, painful death that took the first person Vash had kissed, and Vash was not even there to see it, too afraid he would make things even worse, not knowing how to help but by leaving.
A decade passed. There was a farmer, the polar opposite of the first man, gruff and ill-tempered but staunchly dedicated to helping people however he could. He had found Vash passed out in the desert from dehydration, separated by a run of bad luck from his brother, and dragged him home through the sand, what would have been an hour’s walk unencumbered. Vash had stayed with that man for several months, joined his efforts to make the soil arable, made him rest, made him smile.
Knives had found them and thought Vash had been kept there against his will. The farmer was dead before Vash could even open his mouth to explain.
Knives apologized afterwards. (Back then, he still knew how.) He helped Vash bury the man. The soil never bore anything but more sand.
Thirty years alone. There was a bus driver – six months, then dead of heat stroke. Twelve more years. A dancer – three months together, a month apart, two weeks of desperate nights tangled in each other, and then shot in the head by a jealous ex. Fifteen years. A builder, sweet and unknown, tucked away in a small town, a blessed year and a half, a silver blade through his carotid, blood on his lips. Year after year after year, decades that passed beyond counting.
Wolfwood.
Vash awoke to the sound of a motorcycle revving.
He squinted. One sun was up, the other still just peeking over the horizon, and there, casting a shadow over him-
“Shit!” Vash scrambled to his feet. “Wolfwood! Uh, fancy seeing you here!”
Wolfwood looked, for lack of a better word, pissed. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Hm?” He looked around slowly, taking his time to stretch his arms, adjust to the light, try to think of an excuse. How the hell had Wolfwood caught up so fast?
Wolfwood stepped closer and brushed sand roughly from Vash’s hair. “What did you do, roll around on the ground? God, I can’t fuckin’ believe you – I turn around for ten goddamn minutes, and what do you do? Elope with a fuckin’ bird. Mother of shit.” He threw the thomas a nasty look. A cigarette was burning dangerously close to his lips, and there were circles under his eyes; evidently, he hadn’t slept. Guilt curdled in Vash’s stomach.
“Aw, don’t bring Angie into it! It’s not her fault!” Vash held up his hands placatingly.
“You’re on a first-name basis with it?! ‘Angie,’ fuck’s sake, was Angelina III not good enough for you?”
Vash forced a laugh. “Don’t be silly! Uh… I just… uh…” Just say something, Vash. Literally anything. Make something up. “I had… plans?”
“With yer feathered friend here, yeah, I gathered that.” Wolfwood spat out his cigarette. “Come on, blondie, what’s this really about?”
Vash wilted, and Wolfwood’s expression softened. A hand clamped onto Vash’s shoulder, steady, grounding, and he looked up to see Wolfwood looking at him with brow pinched, mouth in a tight line, breaths measured. Not really angry; concerned. Upset.
“Is it about the fight?” Wolfwood said, when Vash continued to be silent.
Vash swallowed. “Which one?” he said lightly. “You’ll have to be more specific. I get into a lot of those.”
“You know the one.”
(He knew the one. Five days ago, the two of them had been ambushed in the middle of a town Vash had thought was safe. Bounty hunters had gotten the drop on them, and they had only been after Vash, of course, but Wolfwood got involved anyway, of course, and ten-to-one weren’t anywhere close to the worst odds the two of them had faced, but one had gotten lucky. Vash had kicked a woman’s gun out of her hand and then lost track of her, but then she had picked up a broken bottle and tried to slash at him from behind. Wolfwood had leapt in her way, and Vash had turned at the vicious spray of blood against his coat. It took only a few more seconds to subdue the rest of the bounty hunters and find a shed to hide in, Wolfwood’s hand clamped firmly over his neck the whole way, looking dangerously pale. The wound was too close to Wolfwood’s airway to keep proper pressure on it, and he had pulled out a vial but choked on blood. Vash was certain that his heart stopped for at least moment before whatever was in those things finally kicked in and the injury was knitting itself back together and Wolfwood was back to normal, spitting red and complaining only of the taste. But his blood still dripped, still warm, from Vash’s fingers, and Vash had seen the flicker of fear in Wolfwood’s dark eyes when he had opened his mouth and been unable to breathe through his own mangled flesh.)
Vash smiled harder. “No, of course not.”
Wolfwood took a deep breath. “Then… Is it about last night? Or the night before last, whatever, I guess it’s technically morning now.”
Vash blinked, momentarily thrown. “What?” He flushed. “Oh! No, no, god, of course not, why would it be?” He tried frantically to remember if something had been off that last time they had shared a bed, but Wolfwood visibly relaxed as soon as Vash spoke.
“Oh. Good.” He threw an arm around Vash’s shoulders. “So it was the fight. You still worried on my account?”
Vash swallowed. The urge to lean into Wolfwood’s touch was almost overwhelming. He had convinced himself that this would work, that he wouldn’t see Wolfwood again for heaven knows how long, if ever, and it had been less than a day since they’d been together but he already ached with it. God, I don’t want to be alone again, he thought miserably.
“I just…” Vash began, and hesitated. Wolfwood stilled, and looked at him, patient.
Vash took a breath. “I just… think you’d be safer. If I go.”
Wolfwood was quiet for a moment. “Ain’t none of us’re safe on this godforsaken rock, blondie,” he said at last, voice soft. “Folks like me ain’t meant for long lives.” His hand was steady on Vash’s shoulder, and he was almost whispering into Vash’s ear, as though afraid someone might overhear him. “Let me choose to spend mine with you.”
Vash wanted to kiss him. He wanted to cry. He wanted to run into the desert and be swallowed by this mistake of a planet. He wanted to confess everything he had ever done wrong to the assassin with his beautiful arm around Vash.
Vash didn’t realize he had actually begun to cry until Wolfwood’s hand came up and brushed a tear from his cheek.
“C’mon, Spikey, no need to cry about it. No need to run off into the wilderness about it, either, come to think of it.” Wolfwood tilted Vash’s chin up, careful, and ever so gently pressed their lips together. Vash closed his eyes and tried to memorize the feel of it, the taste of smoke and burnt coffee, the warmth of sun-warmed skin, the smell of cigarettes and cedar and sweat and a hint of soap, the sound of Wolfwood’s voice catching in his throat, everything, everything. If I stay like this forever, Vash thought, nothing can go wrong.
But Vash was the first to pull away. “Sorry,” he murmured.
“S’all right,” Wolfwood said gruffly. “Just give a guy some warning next time, eh?” He threw Vash a crooked smile, and Vash’s heart fluttered.
Wolfwood was not the first man he had ever loved, but Vash was quite certain that he would be the last.
“Step on it, Needles, Angelina’s waitin’,” Wolfwood said, already striding over to the motorcycle. “And I still owe you a drink.”
For a moment, Vash considered running. It wouldn’t work, but it would be time wasted, time alive. Even a few moments. A few moments more.
It would never be enough.
Vash climbed into the sidecar and closed his eyes. He didn’t want to watch the world pass by. He had always hated tragedies.