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Vash is a reticent drinker, at least when he starts. Quiet and dreamy, watching the ceiling lights of the tavern like nothing has ever interested him more. His thoughts grow distant, a butterfly net held to the stars, catching whatever he can hold before he drifts back down.
"What if we started an orphanage?" Vash murmurs, as if it's to his glass of whiskey.
Wolfwood chuckles, throwing his head back into it at the last second. "You'n I are the last people fit for that, don'cha think?"
"Why's that? You did it not too long ago."
"Yeah, I was by myself," Wolfwood murmurs, still playful but trying to keep his profile low. He always worries too much that he's blabbed around too many bystanders and some stupid thing that he's said will get one of them killed. "S'easier."
"That hurts," Vash pouts, as if Wolfwood is insulting his skillset. "I play with kids all the time, too."
"They do love you," Wolfwood muses. "The kiddos back at Hopeland woulda loved to meet you."
Vash has entered the second phase of his drinking, once he's swallowed down the last of his watered-down first drink. He starts smiling without remembering he's doing it, his pale eyes going sweet and dreamy. He leans over and plucks Wolfwood's alight cigarette from between his lips, taking his own drag as if in mimicry.
He can get drunk, but he can't get addicted to anything. His body craves nothing but what it needs to survive, and evidently, even that seems half-optional. He's laughing as he pulls it from his mouth, handing it back.
"Most other guys'da clocked you for a move like that," Wolfwood quips around the filter.
"But you're a man of God," Vash innocently rebuffs.
He's learning too fast.
☽
☾
By drink three, Vash is swaying bodily from side to side like a lazy metronome, eyes closed and smiling like a dope. Wolfwood smirks even as he leans away. Alcohol doesn't give him that pleasant buzz anymore. It just brings him back to functioning.
"What'd we need for a whole orphanage?" Vash slowly slurs, sharp elbows digging into the table, chin resting on his long fingers. His feet kick and fidget, but he mostly manages not to kick Wolfwood.
Until Vash knocks him right in the shin, and Wolfwood curses.
"Well," he chokes, still more interested in the subject at hand, "a roof, 'n a buncha rooms are a start. Beds, as many as you can scrounge. Toys, and stuff. Lotsa books."
"Books?" Vash blinks. " 'bout what?"
Wolfwood hums in consideration. "Books about Earth, I guess. Folk tales. Stuff 'bout the world. Actually…maybe the less we tell 'em about the world right now…"
Vash's lips purse, a pretty contrast to the tinny piano notes clunking from the radio in the corner. "I think they should learn to love their world first."
"Hm. So we lie to 'em?"
"Not lie," Vash insists. "Just wait."
Wolfwood would usually say something smart here, just to have the last word, but his bleary eyes fall on a rip in the sleeve of deep red fabric - from a knife, or a bullet, it's impossible to tell. All this talk of orphanages has stirred something in him, almost motherly.
"Take off your jacket," Wolfwood asks, putting out his cigarette and digging around in his bag. By the time he looks back up, Vash has wordlessly complied.
"A sewing needle?" Vash asks, peering over the table at the little box that Wolfwood has opened. In fact, it's quite a few sewing needles, but Wolfwood digresses.
"Bad show to go around with holes in your clothes," Wolfwood explains. Vash folds up his jacket with grace and care, like someone spent a long time showing him how to do it right. He hands it to Wolfwood with all the gentleness of passing him a newborn.
Wolfwood tears off a length of red thread with his teeth, setting quickly to pinning his workspace. It's not ideal, and he's drunk enough that his stitches might be a little sloppy, but he can't stare at this any longer.
Meanwhile, Vash leans forward so his chin rests on the table, arms swinging underneath it as if to hide them. Wolfwood doesn't think about the arch it puts in Vash's back, the curve of his tank top along his waist.
"Cold?" Wolfwood asks, clenching a needle between his teeth instead of a cigarette.
"No," Vash answers unhelpfully.
"You coulda said no to this," Wolfwood reminds him.
"I had no reason to."
As if Vash the Stampede does everything for a reason. Wolfwood threads the needle and focuses fully on his work - or, he tries, but Vash is still sitting like a dumbass.
He huffs, as if smoke will rise from his throat, setting the jacket and threaded needle down. He shucks off his own jacket and tosses it playfully at Vash's face. After his melodramatic little oof, Vash gazes at the offering like a gift of spun silk, and quickly slumps it over his shoulders. It's too small for Vash to wear properly, but it seems to make him feel comfortable enough to sit up, pour another drink.
"Don't look at me like that," Wolfwood grunts as he catches a glimpse of Vash's longing gaze, eyes the perfect blue of an Earth sky from old picture books. His fingers busy themselves, over and under, until the rip is closed.
☽
☾
Vash gets through four drinks before he's truly publicly indecent, and Wolfwood sees fit to tug him back to their motel room. Meryl had turned down the prospect of sharing a room with Vash, and Milly has decided to stick with her.
It's not really a decision that Wolfwood makes, to sit on his own bed beside Vash's. It's like some cosmic pieces are clicking into place, the way breath enters and leaves his lungs without much conscious thought.
"This is a no smoking room," Vash says. He's looking out the window, up at the radiance of the moons. He still wears his jacket.
"Shit," Wolfwood grits. He puts out his cigarette on the ratty cuff of his shirt.
"Wolfwood?"
"Vash."
" 'm thirsty."
Wolfwood gives a dry chuckle. "Didn't do much good tellin' you to hydrate when water's at a premium, yeah? Here, I got somethin'."
He digs through his bag and finds a little flask, tossing it to Vash, who juggles but ultimately catches it. Vash squints at the label.
"Holy water?"
Wolfwood shrugs. "Water's water."
"What's holy about it?"
"I blessed it."
"Wow," Vash breathes. "What'd ya say?"
"Just drink it, needle noggin."
"I wanna know! Or I might really die of thirst out here!"
There's that childlike pitch to this voice that's existed for well over a century. The mirth that can only be shared with someone he's put all his faith into. Wolfwood wants to ask to borrow it, if he can have some part-time custody of Vash's love for humanity.
"Fine. I said…Our Father who art in Heaven, may this anointment carry the spirit of your blood, and wash away the sins of all who are cleansed by it, Amen."
Wolfwood looks up; Vash has been draining the flask since the rehash of the prayer had begun, like he's afraid to part it from his lips before it's over.
"Or somethin' like that," Wolfwood quickly amends.
"Tastes good," Vash informs him, turning fully toward the window. Closing in on himself, waiting for the sun.
☽
☾
There hadn't been anything remarkable about that night; up to the full rise of the moon, it feels just as blissful and irritating and bewildering as any other day with Vash. Until Vash finally slumps in his own bed, eyes closing as his glasses sit crookedly on his face.
Wolfwood, to his own credit, has no qualms about being shirtless in Vash's presence; it's not like there's anything scandalous to protect Vash's virgin eyes from. But Vash still has his big red jacket pulled tight around him. It feels silly to protest, but -
"Dunno how to relax, huh?" Wolfwood's smirk shimmers with borrowed charm.
"It's nothing that needs to be seen," Vash answers quietly.
"Says who?" Wolfwood kicks back onto his bed, as if trying to demonstrate. "You can pretend I'm not here, if it helps. Do whatever you've gotta do to get some good sleep."
Vash sighs, and Wolfwood waits, trying to have the patience not to watch him. He hears Vash finally slip his jacket off, and pretends to drift off.
Wolfwood waits for long minutes, then turns onto his side. Vash has shed his tank top as well, and the moonlight casts a glowing halo over deep gashes and protrusions of metal, bones bolted back together. Wolfwood feels like he should be surprised, but it clicks into the spiraling puzzle of Vash easy as anything. Is this what that dummy was so worried about?
This is the toll taken on a man who must make a decision between love and peace, and stubbornly chooses both. It's human nature to hunt Vash at every opportunity, be it power or money or boredom, and it's that nature that Vash bounds for in restless circles.
Wolfwood can't stop that circling. He's got enough of his own chases. But he can stop and admire, and give Vash a chance to breathe every so often.
"N'ck," Vash slurs, heavy with sleep and drink. Wolfwood thinks he must be sleeptalking.
"I'm here," Wolfwood confirms.
"I, rr…emember everything."
"You're gonna have to speak up, needle head."
One of Vash's arms lifts, beckoning Wolfwood toward him with a single finger even as he still faces the window. Wolfwood makes the choice over and over again every second he spends rolling out of soft sheets to lean over Vash's bed, to watch the moons with him.
"S'meone told me," Vash continues, only slightly clearer, "p'ple drink to f'rget. But…but I remember all their names."
Wolfwood holds Vash's outstretched palm between both of his own. He thinks he might hear Vash quietly sob.
"Please don't leave," Vash says, a flower opening to the sun even if it burns him.
Whether Vash means right now, tonight, tomorrow, a week from now…Wolfwood doesn't know. But he can comply anyway. Slowly, he sits on the edge of Vash's bed, careful as he drapes himself across Vash's back. He only brushes unbroken skin, and only when he has to.
"Think they lied," Wolfwood answered. "I remember, too."
He prays that Vash doesn't turn around, hopes he'll eventually lull himself to sleep. If he sees Vash's face now, there's no way that Wolfwood won't kiss him, and now's not the time.
(Maybe in the morning, before Meryl starts banging on their door, when the sun has just barely started to brighten the room. Vash's hair will be tousled from sleep, and he'll look at Wolfwood with those puppy eyes, and maybe he'll give into that impulse - )
He must not have prayed right, because Vash whips around, his gaze bright and wet. Wolfwood's thought about this drunk and sober, dreaming and awake, but no state of mind has prepared him for the softness of Vash's lips, the way they ebb and flow like a tide beneath a celestial body.
Their breaths feed each other as they drift off, hands drifting careful over shoulders and chests, the haze and blur of alcohol and nicotine failing to dull the holiness they build from a pillar of sand.