Chapter Text
"Wolfwood-"
Wolfwood snapped his attention from his sad little shot of cheap alcohol towards Meryl, only to find an expression he certainly didn't want to see. She was looking with wide eyes somewhere behind his shoulder, jaw on the floor and blush high on her cheeks – it was an expression of bad ideas and imminent damnation.
Whatever caught her interest on the dancefloor of the Gunsmoke, Wolfwood wanted no part in it.
"I know we said no more wingmanning after what happened with Livio, but-"
"No," Wolfwood shook his head very determinedly. No matter how many times they got talked into entertaining the friends of Meryl's dibs, it ended bad, horrible, or pure catastrophic. He survived it enough times to have a frame of reference, but not enough times to be certain of the surviving part.
"How was I supposed to know Razlo is a maniac?" Meryl stirred her shot like it was good wine, trying to look innocent. It didn't work. It really didn't.
"A maniac and Livio's brother, don't forget that part," Wolfwood reminded her. Going after Jasmine was enough of a madness, sending Livio after her friend with a face tattoo was like a punchline in a cosmic joke. Truly the worst example of their numerous failures. Sure, Livio got a brother and Meryl a night of kinky sex out of it, but all Wolfwood got was a migraine that came and went coincidentally related to Razlo's presence in a room.
"He looked fine to me."
"He looked like Livio. They're twins. How none of you noticed will be forever beyond me."
Meryl was too busy eyeing the dancefloor to answer, which could mean bad things only. Wolfwood sighed, contemplated drinking what little alcohol was left and using an exit strategy exclusively for kings (my tummy hurts, but you stay and have fun) or the less impactful but actually true peasant strategy (have a deadline tomorrow, but you stay and have fun).
"We're not doin' this," he said pre-emptively, deciding to wait it out. He hoped that whoever caught Meryl's attention would start vomiting in the middle of the dancefloor – worked one time, could work again.
No such luck. Meryl decided to go for it.
"Nicholas," she pleaded, looking small and pitiful while being small but miles and miles from being pitiful. She was a manipulative bitch and Wolfwood didn't regret meeting her only because she always paid her half of the rent on time. "Nico, Nick-"
"Not going to work."
"Woowoo," she pushed, knowing very well he would do anything to stop her from calling him that. It wasn't fucking fair. "She's dressed in sunflower overall-"
"Shut up," Wolfwood groaned. "That's exactly what you've said about Elendira. 'She wears patterns, Woowoo, how bad can it be?' The answer is very! We've learned that!"
"Her friend is hot," Meryl tried. "Like damn, I would hit that hot. Exactly your type, too."
"Then fuck her and her friend, they might be down for a threesome."
Meryl sighed, eyes not once leaving the dancefloor. She was focused with hunter's precision, and Wolfwood knew exactly how it felt to be at the other side of that look. Meryl had a special knack for sleeping with all of her friends first and befriending them second. Strangely, it always worked in her favour.
"You seriously need to get laid," she said after a too-short bout of silence.
The bad part was that she meant it. The worst part was that she was probably right, not that Wolfwood would ever say that out loud without combusting on the spot with the force of her 'I told you so' look.
"I need to finish my essay and get Angelina fixed," he countered. "Quickie in a bathroom is the perfect opposite of what I need."
"You sound like an old man."
"I sound like a student," Wolfwood downed his shot and lit up another cigarette, let the rush of alcohol and nicotine burn him back-to-back. "Just because you're ahead of your work, Short-stack…"
Meryl shot him a look.
"You're jealous Roberto likes me while Professor Chapel hates your guts."
"You call him Roberto for fucks sake. If I tried to call Chapel Arthur, he would crucify me on sight."
Meryl's eyebrow flied up.
"His name is Arthur? I thought it was, like, Azazel or something."
"I don't know his fuckin' name, alright," Wolfwood deadpanned. "But he's gonna kick my ass straight out if I don't get Livio to write the better half of my essays and I swear he's tryin' to start a cult in the Abrahamic religions class. I know enough."
"Uh-huh," Meryl said eloquently. Her attention was back on the dancefloor. Great.
Wolfwood rolled his eyes and turned around with the sole intention to mock her. Needless to say, it backfired.
Hard.
It wasn't his first mistake of the night, it wasn't even the second nor the third, but it proved to be the gravelly lethal one as he immediately clocked sunflower overall girl in the midst of swarming bodies.
She was tall. Possibly taller than him.
She was also built like a fucking tank and the sunflower print did absolutely nothing to cover that fact. Wolfwood had a sneaking suspicion that if it came to arm wrestling, he would've been crushed into ashes. And she would do it with a smile on her face, because despite packing more muscle than most of the dudebros in Livio's favourite gym, she laughed while twirling through the dancefloor in a way that should've been prohibited.
She looked kind. She looked like she wanted to be exactly where she was, like being in the midst of sweaty bodies and infernal heat brought her endless joy, and Wolfwood swallowed down the bitter envy which welled inside him – only to cough it up again when he noticed just who matched her rhythm.
Wolfwood ignored Meryl's smug eyebrow as he struggled to process the vision. He was slightly drunk, that was a given. But his imagination probably wasn't good enough to dream up the guy weaving through the dancefloor beside the sunflower girl with a smile just as big and joyful as her.
Red, long-sleeved crop top, black turtleneck, blonde hair defying gravity in spikes Wolfwood immediately ached to ruin. He was tall and strong enough to withstand the push and pull of dancing with the most terrifying woman Wolfwood had ever laid his eyes on; his shoulders to waist ratio likely bended the laws of biology.
Wolfwood couldn't say who was in charge of the dance. They seamlessly alternated lead however it suited them, somehow graceful despite the horrible club music and crowded floor. They should've looked ridiculously out of place between all those strugglers who barely bobbed their heads to the beat and awkwardly flailed their hands. Instead, they looked like their feet didn't touch the ground; they looked like gods suited to be captured on ancient Greek pottery in black and red.
Wolfwood wasn't drunk enough for this. Or perhaps he was too drunk, seeing as he couldn't draw his eyes from the flex of the spiky-haired guy's arms like a man hypnotized out of his wits.
He took a drag of his cigarette, only to find out it burned down to the filter while he was staring. Which meant he was staring for a considerable amount of time. In fact, he had yet to stop.
Fuck.
"None of those people are from this fuckin' planet," Wolfwood managed to choke out through his parched throat, unsticking his eyes from the dancefloor purely by some dumb combination of luck and faith.
"Told ya," Meryl snickered at him. "So, do you have my back, wolf?"
Wolfwood was going to regret this so hard.
It turned out that not even popping additional two buttons of his shirt could save Wolfwood from drowning in sweat about three minutes into their pathetic search mission.
They somehow lost sight of the pair, which was truly a feat, seeing as both the sunflower and the spike towered over the general population, and they almost lost each other in the chaos due to Meryl's shortness and apparent wish to get stepped on.
The third time it happened, she looked ready to start biting ankles. The fourth time, Wolfwood was about to join her. His eyes prickled from someone's potent perfume smelling like an entire botanic garden, he got groped on, smacked into the face, and all that trouble yielded exactly no fucking results.
He was half-convinced the pair was some kind of group hallucination. He was also half-ready to ask for another drink of the same stuff. In the end, he decided to fuck it all to hell and back.
"C'mon, Shortie," he called over the music that somehow got even worse. "Let's go!"
"What?"
"Let's fuckin' go!"
Meryl looked at him without an ounce of understanding, and Wolfwood decided to just grab her and hit the bricks. There was some sort of commotion at the front doors, so he marched towards the flickering lights of the back exit, ignoring Meryl's futile protests the whole way.
He put her down once they were outside. The clear air flooded his senses like a blessing – he lit a cigarette to counter it.
"You're no fun," Meryl told him, arms crossed. Someone spilled a drink on her white top, but Wolfwood refused to point it out just yet.
"I tried being fun. It didn't fuckin' work."
"Only because I had to convince you it's worth it!"
"It would probably end in a disaster, anyway," Wolfwood shrugged and leaned against the wall. Meryl mirrored him, bravely ignoring the smell of urine and all the mental images that came with it.
"Where's your faith, priest?" she asked, her pointy elbow finding Wolfwood's ribs.
"It died when I met ya."
"You-"
The affronted answer died at her lips so suddenly Wolfwood looked up from his cigarette, only to be an involuntary witness of yet another revelation of the night.
Sunflower girl and spike guy sprinted down the street – a bit wobbly but with impressive speed, Sunflower holding two whole fucking steering wheels and Spikey clutching a stack of papers to his chest like his life depended on it. He was leaving a trail behind. It didn't seem to faze him.
Laughter followed them, ringing bright and warm and joyful into the dead of night, and it might've been the sound of Wolfwood's downfall.
Wrong, his downfall might've been the second he and Meryl were noticed, stuck against a wall in the dirtiest corner in existence as they were. Spikey and Sunflower exchanged a look without a word and jogged towards them.
Wolfwood could feel Meryl freeze beside him.
"Uh, hi, do you have a light?" Spikey called, looking every bit like he wanted to wave at them if his hands weren't full, voice just on the right side of breathless to warrant stupid, stupid ideas.
Wolfwood flipped out his lighter. Spikey's eyes were hidden behind orange-tinted sunglasses, and Wolfwood was grateful for his own when he found himself at the receiving end of a smile with the capacity to blind him otherwise.
Sunflower beamed as she took the lighter, a second sun rising, and then they set the papers in Spikey's hands on fire.
"Hey, stop that!" someone yelled from around the corner before Wolfwood or Meryl could react. Footsteps followed in rapid succession – a whole crowd of people with common aim and apparently a great motivation.
Spikey dropped the burning pile to the ground and let himself be tugged into their original direction by Sunflower's steely grip, looking a bit reluctant before breaking into a sprint again.
"Thanks!" he shouted over his shoulder with a salute and another smile. "And sorry for the trouble!"
"You should probably run!" Sunflower added, too sweetly for someone urging them to flee from what could very well be a crime scene.
Wolfwood didn't need to be told twice. He might've not known what the fuck was going on, but he could recognize police issued boots slamming onto concrete as well as every other orphan growing up in the system. He ducked into a shady alley on reflex, dragging Meryl with him just in time for the storm to miss them.
They got back into their apartment late, panting, and so high on adrenaline that sleep seemed like an abstract concept.
Meryl was nervously giggling the whole way up the stairs. Wolfwood started cracking as he missed the keyhole third time in a row.
"What," Meryl said, finally stumbling over the threshold. "What was that?"
They exchanged a look – it set them off in fits of laughter like a spark blowing up a storage of gunpowder.
"Your taste in people is fuckin' abysmal, Shortie," Wolfwood cackled, feeling every bit a lunatic. "They were stealing steering wheels from the fuckin' cops."
"You don't know that," Meryl countered. She was laughing harder than Wolfwood had ever seen her, complete with red cheeks and tears streaming down her face. He would make fun of her if he wasn't busy trying to breathe through his nose without choking on his own tongue. They didn't even bother to make it into their shared area; the miniature hallway had to deal with them both as they slid down the wall in a heap of two laughing idiots.
"Yeah, but I can take a wild fuckin' guess," he wheezed. "Who even steals those? And how?"
"I can't believe you handed them your favourite lighter," Meryl smacked him half-heartedly on the shoulder.
Wolfwood sputtered.
"He went 'Uh, hi, can I have your light?' and you just…" she waved her hands around in an all-encompassing motion. "No hesitation. No questions. What the fuck."
"It was so stupid- it took me by surprise, okay?" Wolfwood wanted to stop laughing, but it was beyond his control, apparently. He jabbed Meryl into her ribs hard enough to make her squirm. "At least I didn't freeze!"
"What? I didn't freeze!" Meryl flailed. "I was temporarily stunned, if anything!"
"Temporarily stunned my ass, you would still be stuck at the wall, eyeing Sunflower's arms, if it weren't for my-"
"As if you weren't staring at the blonde's-"
"He's hot, alright, I have eyes!"
Meryl snickered.
"He wears sunglasses at night. He's practically your soulmate."
Wolfwood glared at her. Menacingly. Unfortunately for him, his death glare stopped working on Meryl about three years ago when she saw him faceplant into a pile of fresh horseshit. One just didn't walk out of that one unscathed.
"Shut up," he said.
"Only if you go with me to Gunsmoke next week," Meryl bargained. She drove a high price for her silence, indeed, but it wasn't like Wolfwood didn't expect it.
He groaned, anyway. "Why would I do that?"
"Your lighter was stolen," Meryl deadpanned, and that was it.
Wolfwood was fucked.