Chapter Text
Despite the massive cross he carries everywhere he goes, Wolfwood is not a religious man. Not by a long shot.
He’s read the Bible, because damn near everyone on this shithole of a planet has at some point, but he never devoted himself to the scripture. He never learned the prayers, never sang to the angels’ glory, never saw God’s image in any of the shattered charge station mirrors he’s ever made reluctant eye contact with. The relationship he has with faith is purely transactional; he pulls the trigger, and he has faith bullets will come out.
Over the course of his life, Nicholas D. Wolfwood will come to know one hymn, and one hymn alone.
In time, it will be the only one that matters to him. It will be his downfall and his salvation in equal measure, the only light that shines when all other lights go out.
In time.
But for now, this story will start at the beginning, and at the beginning, that hymn is nothing more than a faint buzz that clouds his dwindling senses while he’s bleeding out in the back seat of Meryl’s truck.
He’s a little too concussed to realize it, but that hymn also is the first thing he comes to know about Vash the Stampede.
--
Wolfwood hears it with a conscious mind for the first time when the two of them are alone in the worm. Soft, near silent, a melody that even his enhanced hearing has trouble picking out, buried as it is under the subaudible bellowing of wormsong.
He hears it again when they’re crouched together in an alley, hiding from the conspicuous lack of rail gun fire. Monev is out creeping amongst the graves, so there’s nothing to shroud the tune, no screaming or muttering, no blind violence. There’s nothing to stop Monev from following it straight to them, either, but Wolfwood has one finger on Punisher’s trigger and both eyes on the open end of the alley, and he would love to see this asshole try.
He hears it a third time when he’s chasing the others into the bowels of the sand steamer, racing at their heels through cramped halls and up entirely too many stairs, to a room that no one has touched since humanity’s dreams of the stars died in a rain of fire. The pointy fuck not only has the breath to keep up this rush, but for this little habit of his, too? Wolfwood would be more impressed if he wasn’t so busy wheezing through the consequences of smoking a pack a day.
They spend exactly one week together. That’s all it takes for Millions Knives to cross too many lines, to draw his brother out of self-imposed exile with a fury. And, over the course of that week, it isn’t hard for Wolfwood to put together a pattern.
Vash hums when he’s nervous.
It’s the same song every time. Something soft and curling, unfettered by words yet speaking in sad volumes, the weight of a century’s guilt riding on its long broken back. He barely even seems to realize that he’s doing it, but Wolfwood doesn’t bother asking him what it means.
After all, he’s not supposed to care that much.
Now, they’ve finally reached the end of the arduous road leading to July. As they walk down the final hallway toward judgment, Wolfwood completes his duty and guides them, all the while running his mouth. He must sound so obvious, but he doesn’t have it in him to be subtle right now. He just keeps spewing all kinds of hurtful bullshit that he doesn’t mean, making childish noise to fill the perfect silence.
Vash isn’t humming.
Dimly, Wolfwood realizes that he hasn’t been for a while. Not once since they set out across the desert toward July, not even with half a dozen guns trained on him with malicious intent. Not even when he looked Wolfwood in the eye and gently told him he’d been on to him since day one. Not during any of his tirades, any of his verbal assaults designed to shove Vash away and keep him there.
And then, at the end of it all, Vash has the fucking audacity to turn that sad little smile on him, and to thank him. Like Wolfwood has ever done anything to make him happy. Like he’s ever been anything but a curse.
Watching Vash move forward alone is the hardest thing Wolfwood has ever done. Regret tightens its iron grip around his throat, but even if he could speak, he has nothing worth offering. After all this, after everything he’s done, what could he possibly say that would convince either of them to run away, let alone together? Why would Vash ever even want to?
They both knew this was always going to happen. The hourglass containing the time they would spend together was always going to run out. It was inevitable.
And yet, here in this endless desert wasteland humanity has been damned to wander, Wolfwood finds himself clinging desperately to a single grain of sand.
A flicker of red fabric disappears around the corner. The grain slips away from his reaching fingers. The seven days that Nicholas the Punisher knew Vash the Stampede are gone, and his contract is complete. Wolfwood gets to walk away a new man, knowing that Hopeland and all the budding souls it will ever shelter are safe from the Eye of Michael’s harvests.
Of course, it’s all temporary. That safety will only last until Knives decides to stop playing with his food. When his siege begins, no one will be safe.
His batshit plan will take time, though, and Wolfwood runs out of that faster than the average human. He has enough years ahead of him to reap the benefits of this trade before his betrayal yields apocalyptic fruit. Maybe he’ll even get to die first. He may never have to live with the consequences of his actions.
With the world at his fingertips, Wolfwood turns and walks away.
The harrowing certainty that he just lost everything follows with him.
--
The average denizen of No Man’s Land does not know what a flower is.
They might’ve heard folk legends from the Spacefaring Age or read about them in the Bible, different forms of ancient scripture breathing life into an impossible green fantasy, but none of them understand, not really. To them, a plant is nothing but a single round seed floating in a glass tank, a fearful power always on the verge of dying and taking entire towns with them.
The aberration that blossoms from the tallest tower in July is more alien to them than fire and brimstone. They’re only human, so they react in the way humans always do when faced with things they don’t understand.
They try to kill it.
The colossus senses the hail of gunfire and mortar shells, and fumbles blindly to defend itself from pain. It does not feel the crush of bone or the spill of blood. It is simply too vast to be aware of the tiny, insignificant lives it consumes in its retaliation.
Within minutes of the first flowers blooming, most of the front line soldiers have been made into crimson smears by a nameless violence none of them know to call roots.
Keeping to his creed of self-preservation above all else, Wolfwood endeavors not to be among them.
--
Busy as he is trying to hold himself together, Wolfwood doesn’t notice it right away.
While he’s still in July, the cacophony of the upper class screaming and crushing each other in their desperation to fall from their topless towers to the dirt like everyone else blocks out all other sound. He can’t hear, can’t think, can’t even breathe for all the mortal terror clotting in the dry air.
He flees the city using the only route none of these privileged fucks would ever even consider. The sole upshot is, at least the trash chute is a privileged fuck trash chute. There’s barely even any trash down here in all of July’s squandered opulence.
On the outskirts, sitting in the sand and staring helplessly as the end times pulls itself to its feet, Wolfwood still doesn’t notice it. The air is alive and humming with frenzied wormsong long before Zazie the Beast flutters by, and long after they’ve fucked off to wherever it is they hide when the humans are stirring up catastrophe again.
It’s only once the eerie silence between sentence and execution has fallen that Wolfwood hears it.
The sound is even quieter now. He has to strain to hear it, but when he finally catches that single thread, it blooms in his grasp. A familiar melody opens up for him like the glowing starbursts flourishing from the strange life forms swaying past him, around him, black tendrils giving him a careful berth where nothing else has been spared.
Vash is humming.
Wolfwood knows this the same way he knows his own name. The air is still with anticipation, but that song is everywhere around him, its soft, sad drone carrying Vash’s despair to the ends of the world. The sound of it is heartbreaking.
Without really knowing why, Wolfwood reaches toward a fluttering purple petal as it passes by.
The moment the pads of his trembling fingers brush against the flower’s living softness, the whole world falls to pieces around him.
Sudden as a gunshot, he’s too aware of too many things. The pervasive ache of Vash’s misery drives him to his knees, thrumming between his charred lungs and shaking in his bones. He feels the loss, the hopelessness, but more than anything, he feels the looming weight of a simple truth no mortal could ever hope to wrap their head around.
Wolfwood is blessed in knowing that someday, the sinister clockwork running his fucked up science experiment of a body will stop ticking out his time, and he’ll finally be allowed to rest.
Vash is damned in knowing that he’s going to wallow in this suffering until there’s no more time left to tick.
Paradise, seethes a frigid whisper from deep within the spindling dark. A utopia for you and me, little brother. Don’t you want that?
Knives’ oppressive sweetness is as bladed as he is. It drills a shrieking migraine into every hidden corner of Wolfwood’s skull, sends blood pouring from his eyes, his nose, his ears, ruthlessly emptying his veins to make room for the twin meld of the divine.
Mortals were never meant to behold angels, let alone be possessed by them. No matter how briefly.
Just as his fluttering pulse starts to dwindle, every overloaded system sizzling out under the strain of too much power in too little time, he hears a voice he didn’t expect. Although maybe he should’ve. God knows he’s seen her sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong enough times.
As if bubbling through a glass of water, Wolfwood barely makes out Meryl’s frantic screams of Vash’s name. Over and over, squeakier and squeakier, praying for a way to save him, to save everyone. There’s another voice, too, another woman calling to Vash gently, guiding him without sick intent, bringing him out of his brother’s darkness and into the sickly green glow of a place Wolfwood doesn’t recognize.
They’re so close. They’re all so close. Vash is stirring. He just needs—
Even crumpled on the cold ground in a pool of his own blood, circled by a writhing nest of roots, Wolfwood knows where his phials are. He finds one and brings it to his teeth in an automatic movement, the same motion he always has when he feels the spark of life beginning to bleed out through all his stab wounds and bullet holes.
Then, while he’s still being crushed in the tightening grasp of borrowed madness never meant for mortal eyes, Wolfwood reaches one delirious hand through the thinning veil between this world and somewhere else entirely.
His fingertips find moving fabric. He can’t see it, but he knows it’s red.
With a pained groan, Wolfwood gives Vash a good shove between the shoulders. Someone around here has to.
All at once, everything stops. The deafening clamor, the crushing weight of immortality, the guiding lights of Meryl and someone just as important calling Vash’s name. The roots stop too, but since they’d never threatened him to begin with, Wolfwood barely notices. He doesn’t notice the shining comet trail of divinity rebuked, either, but he’ll be remembering the towering rage in Knives’ voice for a long time.
Somewhere in some universe, a door closes.
Wolfwood’s holy torment is ended, but he’s given no time to recover.
He’s barely bitten open the phial and let gravity work before he becomes aware of his flowery nest retreating. His eyes are still out, and now his ears too, but he doesn’t need them to feel the shape of movement.
Without thought, he flails out one numb hand to Punisher. The other, he wraps around a cluster of shaking tendrils, and before the serum can revitalize his good judgment, Wolfwood allows the fleeing roots to carry him straight to the heart of the receding colossus.
--
No Man’s very own Lazarus, Wolfwood rises from the dead to the sounds of gunshots and shattering glass.
His head still hurts like a bitch, but he shoves that aside when he hears Vash’s voice, straining with effort between singing metal strikes. The roots had dropped him somewhere on the roof of Knives’ tower, and by some stroke of luck, that’s where the twin furies end up as well.
Unfortunately, it barely takes more than a second’s observation of traded blows for Wolfwood to reach a devastating conclusion.
No matter how badly he wants to, he cannot help Vash now.
Both of these brothers are monsters. The way they move is impossible, treating gravity like a suspension fluid tailored to their whims and lashing out in ways only two halves of the same soul could hope to parry. If Wolfwood so much as shows his face, Knives will turn him into mincemeat, and then the cracks tessellating Vash’s spirit might finally give way. Wolfwood may not think he’s anything special, but for some reason, Vash does, and that’s enough to soothe his restless trigger finger.
For once, he makes the right choice. Just in time for something else that’s important to Vash to fling herself into oblivion.
This much he can do. This is why he came back. This is the reason he’s here.
Wolfwood’s body moves before he tells it to. He throws himself through the razor gauntlet Knives has laced through the air all around them and dives after Meryl’s panicked screams, grabbing her hand just before she flies over the edge of the roof.
“Undertaker!” she wheezes, even now unwilling to trust his name to her lips. He can’t blame her.
It doesn’t take much observation to gather that Meryl probably needs more help than this. She’s weathering half her body weight in adrenaline right now, her heart hammering as loud and fast as the flashing blows lighting up the sky behind them, so Wolfwood makes a decision for them both.
“I’m just here to pay up for the cigarettes,” he lies, a dead man’s bounty weighing heavy in his pocket. With Punisher braced against metal plates, he hauls her tiny ass up and under one arm, moving safely away from the edge.
As he turns to look for an exit, death whispers just iches over his head and ricochets off of Punisher in a shower of sparks.
The part of Wolfwood that’s still human screams at him to freeze, to make himself small, to not attract attention. The part of him that’s been permanently dosed up on something Zazie blithely refers to as ‘God juice’ for over half a decade knows better than that.
Knives pays for his distraction with a firm boot to the gut, which Vash does not look like he regrets at all, and Wolfwood scrambles to take the chance he’s been so generously given.
Ever incapable of stopping his mouth from running, he snarls, “What kind of idiot challenges Millions Knives like that?!”
It’s all he can do, but he does it. He knows Vash can hear him, and he knows Vash will understand the words he means.
‘You better fucking win.’
(Where Wolfwood is concerned, even the words between the lines are stubbornly contrary. Elendira told him earlier that no matter how many layers he peels back, he’s made of bastard all the way down, and he’s starting to think she has a point.)
While he’s hoisting Meryl’s weight into a more secure grip, Wolfwood spares time for one last assurance.
“He’s way out of our league,” he grouses. “Time to go.”
‘I’m leaving this to you,’ he means. ‘We’re fucking off somewhere safe. Don’t worry about us.’
Then, while he’s still feeling stupid and serum-spry, Wolfwood turns and casts both of them down from the top of the world.
As they fall, Meryl curses him to the ends of this world and the next. Then, because she still has time to kill before they land, she makes up a few more and curses him to the ends of those ones too. For good measure.
He can’t hear her over the sound of him saving her impulsive ass.
--
The trash chute is as direct a route the second time as it was the first. Meryl looks around at all of July’s wastefulness with disbelief, and then disdain, which Wolfwood finds grimly vindicating.
By the time they scramble up the cliffside and turn back to the city, Vash and Knives have taken to the air, as angels are wont to do. What Meryl needs a heavy pair of binoculars to see, Wolfwood’s unnaturally enhanced eyes can tell plain as day, tracing those dancing lights through the skyscrapers in showers of sparks, rains of broken glass, and sudden power outages.
Even so, when those lights stop what they’re doing, then shoot straight up into the sky, it’s Meryl who reasons out what Vash’s plan is.
“I knew it,” she says, still trembling with adrenaline. “He’s trying to release the energy into space.”
Wolfwood hates that statement, and he hates even more that she’s right. “What?” he barks, hoping that if he points out how batshit insane this is, that something will change. “But if he does that, it’ll tear him apart!”
Nothing changes, of course.
All they can do is watch as the brothers’ holy war breaks through the atmosphere, twinkling stars against the jeweled backdrop of the universe, with no guarantee that either of them will ever come back down.
In the oppressive silence that falls in their wake, a soft hum of static jolts Meryl and Wolfwood both out of their horrified reverie.
“What was that?” Meryl bleats, whipping her head around in a slight panic. Wolfwood glances around too, but then the static grows louder, a trail of unfamiliar sound leading straight to one of his pockets.
With numb fingers, Wolfwood pulls out the tangled white wires of Vash’s earbuds.
He never took these from Vash. Hell, the last time he saw them was a lifetime ago, when they set their thomases free before illegally entering the city. The curious technology had since slipped his mind.
Dimly, he remembers Vash brushing past him in that final hallway. It was the only normal part of their day, but Wolfwood was so agitated that he hadn’t even noticed. He sure as shit didn’t notice the sleight of hand that tucked these tiny speakers into his pocket for him to find later.
And now, here they are. Sitting in his palm like they belong there, lights flashing in sequence as they hone in on a signal Wolfwood didn’t even know existed.
With a quiet ding, the earbuds connect, and Knives’ snarling voice seethes in the cool night air.
Wolfwood and Meryl each scramble for an earbud. They crack their skulls together in their rush, and he has to bend down awkwardly so she can reach, but none of that matters.
Vash’s earbuds link them to the open line between Knives and his disciples, and together they listen in as two estranged brothers duke it out to decide the fate of every human on the planet.
Knives is already well into a frothing rant, based on his sloppy scream of, “How long are you going to let them hunt you?!”
Wolfwood knows that Vash is the only living thing capable of winning against Knives. He’s known it from the beginning, even if it was hard to believe sometimes, with as haplessly goofy as he can be. The faith has always been there, and has only gotten stronger the harder Wolfwood ignored it.
The determination in Vash’s answer still inflates a dizzying swell of shock and pride in Wolfwood’s chest.
“Even if they hunt me, I’ll just run away!” Vash cries, with all the conviction of a man who’s been running for more than a century. Wolfwood’s wide eyes sting from staring so intently at a quiet patch of sand. “I’ll run, and run, and run, and keep running as far as I have to!”
Vash’s voice cracks, but Wolfwood could pick out the sound of his smile from any distance so long as he can hear that quiet, hitching laugh.
“And then, when things calm down, I’ll quietly settle by their side again,” Vash sniffles. The very recent memory of endless scars hits Wolfwood like a brick, all those jagged attempts at healing that Vash has deemed worth suffering, so long as he gets to be around people.
Then, breath catching around a tiny sob, the warmest, sweetest, most unconditionally loving creature in the universe proudly chokes out, “I’m Vash the Stampede.”
Wolfwood can hear the moment Millions Knives’ icy heart shatters like glass. It happens to be the same moment that Wolfwood’s blows up until it takes up his whole rib cage, flooding his entire being with an emotion he thought long lost to him, and the same moment that Meryl’s soft weeping escapes the cage of her fingers over her mouth.
Since he’s already stooped over, it doesn’t take him much effort to drop his weight, sitting heavily atop a dune of sand with his burning eyes cast toward No Man’s embattled heavens. The earbud pops out of his ear, but he can still hear the anguish, the disbelief in Knives’ strangled voice when he screams, “After more than a century—”
The death of this world chokes on his own turmoil. Wolfwood doesn’t need to see his face to imagine how broken he looks.
Knives sobs like an abandoned child, gnashing at the break in his composure with hellish teeth until every ugly emotion he’s been bottling up for two hundred years spills out of him at once.
“—That’s the best answer you could come up with?!”
The tiny speck that Vash became flares up blinding. It must be a surge of his power, some outburst of holy radiation that fries Knives’ transmitter, because a trilling, electric whine cuts through the audio feed at the same time. Wolfwood glances over in time to see the lights on Vash’s earbuds fade out, leaving him and Meryl in haunted silence.
With nothing but their shivering breath to keep time ticking onward, a beam of pure energy ignites the night sky in a glorious blaze. The light is so bright it hurts to look at, splattering the desert and everything in it with a violent purple glow.
Then, Vash’s star becomes a plummeting meteor, its glittering trail flickering in frantic sparks like a fly caught in a worm zapper.
Wolfwood doesn’t need their words to know something is wrong.
He can smell it crackling in the air, the ozone stench of danger that bubbles up from the ancient parts of his evolution, some animal instinct that can taste the otherworldly agony radiating from that blinding light. When an angel mourns, all God’s children mourn with him.
Vash’s dimming radiance gathers to him, a dull, dying sun. In the stillness before the supernova, Wolfwood can almost hear him screaming.
He watches that star fall from Heaven with ice in his veins.
Then there is light.
--
When he regains consciousness, the first thing Wolfwood does is take stock.
Arms, check. Legs, check. Dick, check. Punisher, check but a few feet to the right. Everything else, check, check, fucking ow, check.
He’s intact for the most part, but one of his eardrums is busted. He can’t hear anything on his left side, can barely even feel the trickle of blood leaking from his ear and down his jaw. That sucks ass, since he has to let this damage lie for a while. He can’t dose again so soon without much more serious risks.
That’s right. He already dosed today. He had no choice, because apparently one of the major symptoms of divine intervention is massive internal hemorrhaging.
Divine intervention.
Vash.
Wolfwood is up like a shot, but no matter where he looks, he doesn’t see July.
In the pitch black of desert night, that jewel of a city shines bright enough to navigate by from halfway across the continent. So why can’t he find it?
He’s just starting to panic when Meryl stirs, a miserable groan crawling from her scratchy throat. There’s nothing he can do to help her, so he keeps searching, fear threading itself all through him the longer he searches the horizon.
Then Meryl sits up, and with her big, bloodshot eyes, finds the thing Wolfwood’s fearful lizard brain had been desperately trying not to see. Her horrified gasp is merely confirmation of the worst possible outcome, and the starting gun behind his heart’s rapid descent through his stomach and down beneath the sand.
He can’t find July because the city is gone.
In place of the largest human settlement on the planet, perhaps in the entire universe, is a massive, smoking crater. A ring of recycled ship debris and fragile No Man’s glass surrounds the crystallized edges, purple embers still glowing in fits and sparks.
“All those people,” Meryl whispers, tears cutting streaks through the sand coating her face. “All those lives—”
Wolfwood doesn’t know where the thought comes from, nor the certainty, but it pours from his cracked lips before he can stop it.
“He’s never going to forgive himself.”
Wolfwood knows he’s right. He thinks the appalled look on Meryl’s face is her coming to terms with that.
Then she turns toward him and sobs, “You can’t—you can’t possibly believe he’s still alive.”
The venomous, fearful rage those words instill in Wolfwood’s boiling blood is so intense it scares him. This does not stop him from unleashing it upon Meryl.
“Would you do me a favor and use the brain God gave you?” he snarls, digging through the sand filling his chest pocket for Roberto’s cigarettes. “You saw the two of them, him and Knives. They’re fucking monsters, princess. Abominations like them don’t die, they just go into hiding—”
The crack of Meryl’s palm across his cheek rings through the deathly silence. He barely flinches.
Slowly, he brings one hand to his face to soothe the faint sting, and in the tense space between them, something like understanding takes root.
He doesn’t know how to thank her. She just stopped him from crossing a line that he never would’ve forgiven himself for, twisting the tearful prayers of their only angel into fuel for his wretched obsession with forcing people to hate him. The guilt would have driven him away from Vash entirely, alive or—or otherwise.
Since she’s the reasonable one, Meryl breaks first. Her little shoulders hitch, her hands fisted so tight in her lap that her nails must bite into her skin, but even that pinch isn’t enough to staunch the blubbering flow of tears now cascading down her flushed cheeks.
When Wolfwood awkwardly holds one arm out, she flies into his chest, knocking the wind out of him.
The echoes of her wailing misery vanish beyond the fireblasted glass dunes. Her mourning is almost loud enough to mask the hitching sobs he fails to bury in her disastrous hair.
--
The news crews are gathering like flies by the time the parent sun rises. Even Meryl’s editor-in-chief shows up to the scene of the crime for a good gander, but he only has to take one look at her harrowed face to understand that neither of them are fit to answer questions. Especially not Wolfwood, who has already aimed several different guns at several different reporters.
Mostly for the public’s safety, the chief hides the two of them out of sight and makes up some story about rushing them to the hospital in December. Wolfwood might be more appreciative if that lie didn’t hinge on keeping him caged in a tiny trailer with nothing but Meryl and their wildly revolving door of unhealthy coping mechanisms.
They drink, he smokes, she rambles. Sometimes the way they talk brushes up against vulnerability, but most often it’s dry sarcasm and catty quips. Sometimes they don’t talk at all, and instead glare at opposite walls to avoid accidentally making eye contact. Sometimes one touched nerve erupts into a full-on brawl, which is how Wolfwood learns that Meryl has a preternatural talent for slipping any and all forms of stranglehold.
In short, they get along in exile. So much so, in fact, that they both survive it.
As with all things, the gathering of journalistic vultures comes to a close after a few days. The crater hasn’t changed, after all, not beyond the lingering fires finally burning themselves out, and the chain link fence that goes up around it. The thousands of pictures they’ve taken will probably last for years’ worth of reporting.
In the hustle and bustle of a caravan forming, no one notices Meryl and Wolfwood stepping out of their prison cell and into the dawning suns.
“Are you sure you won’t come with me?” she asks, for what must be the hundredth time. He doesn’t know why she bothers; he answers the same way every time.
“There’s nothing for me in December,” he grumbles around an unlit cigarette, patting around all his pockets for matches. “I’ll be fine, princess. You go publish your little book or whatever. I got places to be.”
Meryl gives him the same flat look she’s given him every other time he’s insisted that he has somewhere else to go. It annoys him, but he can’t blame her for it, seeing as both of them know it’s a fucking lie.
With Vash and Knives missing, showing neither hide nor golden hair anywhere on this Godforsaken planet, Wolfwood has lost his footing completely. The Eye of Michael has been equally silent, despite having plenty of insidious ways of getting his attention. Even Zazie has made themselves scarce, having commanded every worm in a thousand ile radius to retreat deep into the sands.
He’s used to being alone. Now, though, he’s directionless and leaderless, lost without an order to compel his tired corpse.
So, as Meryl’s truck shrinks into the distance, Wolfwood does the only thing he can think of.
His eyes carefully avoiding the hole in the world, he picks up Punisher, and he goes home.