Work Text:
Wolfwood gets a video call from his mother-in-law at seven-thirty PM on a Thursday.
It’s late enough for a call to be bordering on impolite. Wolfwood picks up instead of letting it go to voicemail because Mrs. Rem isn’t the type to butt into the lives of her kids without good cause, which means there’s a reason Rem is calling Wolfwood instead of her son at this hour. Paperwork can wait. Vash is out of town for work, and that combined with the situation is enough to immediately put Wolfwood on-edge. He props his phone up on its stand and picks up the call. “Hello?”
“Thank god I caught you,” Rem says. She looks frazzled on Wolfwood’s phone screen, like she’s been running her hands through her hair. Wolfwood feels his shoulders drop and de-escalation patter rise up in him reflexively—ma’am, looks like somethin’s eatin’ at you, could you help me figure out what’s goin’ on—before Rem cuts across all of it with, “Tess was in a fenderbender and Kni found out.”
Wolfwood flinches reflexively; Rem’s harried expression immediately morphs into one of shocked remorse. “Sorry! Oh god, I’m so sorry, Nicholas!” she exclaims before she quickly clarifies, “Nobody’s hurt! Thank goodness. But Kni’s already halfway to Nevada—” Characteristically dramatic of him. “—and he’s going to be out there until Tess’s car gets fixed up. He left without telling me—” That was kinda unusual. Kni was a momma’s boy; it wasn’t like him to go haring across state lines without giving his mother even a perfunctory heads up. “I had no idea until I got a call from Razlo when he made them take a break—”
Rem stops. She swallows the rest of her words, takes a deep breath, and visibly pulls herself together as Wolfwood resists the urge to turn off his camera so he can check his text messages. After about half a minute Rem tells him in a much more controlled tone of voice, “I’m telling Alex to remind me to send Livio and Razlo each a box of mooncakes when I make them this year. They’re not allergic to nuts, right?”
“No, ma’am.” Wolfwood realizes he’s bouncing his left leg. Sloppy. He presses down on his knee to make it stop. He’s careful to keep his tone casual and easy as he asks, “They let you know that Kni was on the move?”
“Yes, that’s right.” Rem rubs at her forehead, staring at some point off-screen as she tries to recall something that had been relayed to her. “Livio said that he and Razlo and Elendira are all taking turns driving. They’re not letting Kni near the wheel.”
Wolfwood nods. Alright. Good. Liv and Raz are good kids. They’ll be fine as long as they’re together. “Good call.” He rubs at his left knee, willing the long muscles of his thigh to untense. It’s fine. Things are fine. “How’re you holdin’ up, ma’am?” he asks conversationally. “Anythin’ I can lend a hand with?”
Rem jumps. “Fuck.” She makes an apologetic face at Wolfwood for the apparently-reflexive expletive. “I’m so all over the place at the moment—no. No, don’t worry about me, I’ve got Alex. I wanted to call you because Kni called Vash.”
Ah, fuck. Wolfwood can’t help the way he goes intent and focused. “When’s Vash’s flight gettin’ in? Did he tell you?”
“Twenty-fifteen Pacific time.” Rem smiles at him sympathetically as Wolfwood immediately starts moving, packing up his paperwork.
Wolfwood’s brain is so preoccupied with running down the list of airlines that might have a nonstop flight to Nevada within the next hour that it takes a second for all of Rem’s words to fully register. He stops short when they do. “Pacific time?” he asks just to make sure, relief, disbelief, and hope warring in him. “Not Mountain?”
“He’s coming back home,” Rem confirms. Her smile crumples a little at the edges, the corners of her lips turning up into an oxymoronic expression that Wolfwood has seen too many times on a different face. Wolfwood doesn’t like that sad smile any better on her than he does on Vash. “He should land within the hour. He’s coming home, Nicholas.”
Relief wins. He can’t help the way his shoulders sag or the way he briefly closes his eyes. He can’t look back at his phone screen when he opens them; Wolfwood doesn’t think he can bear to see this woman, Vash’s mother, pitying him. He starts packing up his paperwork again to have something to do with his hands. He asks the surface of his desk, “Which airport?” He has to swallow to steady his voice. “I’ll pick him up and get him home, ma’am. He’ll be okay.”
Rem exhales like Wolfwood’s lifted a great weight off her shoulders. “I know he will. He’s in good hands.” She gives him Vash’s flight info. “Thank you,” she says sincerely afterwards. “I know it’s a work night.”
Wolfwood shrugs. He’s packed all his work away and still can’t quite look at his phone; he starts off looking at some point just to the side of it and finds his gaze wandering towards Vash’s workstation lined up next to his, empty and with its electronics dark. “It’s what I signed up for; duty don’t wait.” He shakes himself at the reminder. He makes himself look at Rem. She’s watching him, and her eyes are so sad and so kind. “You take care of yourself, ma’am. I’ll take care of Spikey.”
Rem smiles at him. “You’re too good to us, Nicholas.” Then she abruptly glances offscreen, tracks something a short distance, and makes a face, quickly followed by several more faces. That’s probably Alex then. Rem seems to remember that she’s still on the phone, shoots Wolfwood a quick, embarrassed sidelong glance, and then laughs sheepishly. She reminds Nicholas a lot of Vash here, too. “I’ll let you go,” she says. “Let me know if Vash and you are okay to visit this weekend?”
“Will do, ma’am. You have a good night.”
“We’ll try!”
Wolfwood hangs up. He sits in the ringing silence of the empty apartment and stares at the candid photo of Vash he has set as his phone home screen until his phone automatically locks. He realizes his left leg isn’t actually bouncing. It’s trembling.
Wolfwood puts his hand back down on his knee and presses until it stills. Then he pushes himself to his feet. Right. Right. He has a job to do.
Wolfwood texts Vash, Call me when you touch down. Then he calls Vash and leaves him a voicemail saying exactly the same thing, just to boost his chances that Vash actually does it.
Wolfwood still ends up calling five more times after eight-fifteen. Every one of them rings until it goes to voicemail.
At five minutes to nine, Wolfwood gets a call from Vash. When he picks up and swaps to video, Vash’s face swims into view. He’s standing against some nondescript stretch of airport terminal wall; the sound of unfiltered foot traffic and the occasional announcement blares through the speakers of Wolfwood’s phone. Vash looks rumpled and deeply uncomfortable, like he’d taken several unsatisfying catnaps in his clothes. His eyes are red-rimmed as well as bloodshot and his cheeks are pale in a way that makes his smattering of sun-freckles and his teardrop mole stand out. His lips are terribly chapped. It’s frankly unfair how pretty he still is despite all of it. He’s looking at some point about four inches above the front camera lens. “Hello?” Vash says. He sounds as rough as he looks. “Is this—”
Wolfwood leans into the camera and tips down his shades. With precise enunciation, he declares, “Wolfwood. Nicholas. D. Saverem-Wolfwood.”
Wolfwood watches his words fall into Vash’s ears. There’s a beat. Vash visibly processes what Wolfwood had said—and then his face instantly brightens like the sun coming out from behind cloudcover. His eyes snap down to the camera lens; they’re blue in that moment, blue like a cloudless sky. He exclaims, “Wolfwood!” with such a familiar, naked delight that Wolfwood feels a flutter in his tight stomach. “Ah, wait, hang on, let me—” Vash surges into a flurry of movement, juggling his phone, his black dufflebag, and the contents of his red duster’s pockets; it’s chaotic, but Wolfwood likes this energy better than the careful stillness that Vash had been holding himself with when he’d picked up. Wolfwood still winces when Vash drops his phone.
“Sorry!” Wolfwood gets treated to a lovely view up Vash’s nostrils when he bends to pick up his phone. “Sorry. Here I am—” Vash plugs in a pair of earbuds and the ambient roar of the airport terminal drops instantly. He absentmindedly dusts off his phone, blinks at Wolfwood on his screen, and then, apropos of nothing, asks, “When did you stop smoking?”
Wolfwood asks, around the toothpick in his mouth, “How d’ya know I quit?”
Vash wiggles his fingers in an airy motion. “They’re not yellow anymore,” he says and doesn’t elaborate any further; he shifts conversational gears instead. “There’s a caravan downstairs, right?” Wolfwood feels his stomach sink as he curses internally. It couldn’t be easy, could it? “You don’t need to pick me up; I can find a ride.” Vash has that fake smile on that Wolfwood so hates and loves, that smile that Vash wears when he’s hurting and trying to make the best of it. “Knives said—” A brief, sudden wave of utter loss and confusion washes across Vash’s face, pinching his pretty features; whatever thought had caused it obviously distresses him but he still manages to hitch his smile back into place. “Nai went to find Tesla.” Vash’s voice is so fucking steady. Bright like nothing’s wrong. “That’s what he told me. He’s out east, heading to New Reno. I think I’ll be able to catch up with him in a couple of days—”
“Liv’s takin’ care of him,” Wolfwood interrupts. If he’s being honest, he says it as much to reassure Vash as to make him stop talking. He hates it when Vash gets lost like this; it upsets the both of them. Wolfwood resists the urge to gun Angelina’s engine, the urge to slam into the airport terminal and hunt Vash down; he needs a gentle touch here. If he pushes too hard right now Vash will spook and bail.
He sets his hook. Wolfwood tells Vash, “Yer momma told me to take care of you.” Wolfwood watches surprise, suspicion, and then that damnable smile flick back into place across Vash’s face. Nicholas repeats, “Rem told me to bring you home in one piece.”
Vash’s smile flickers again. “Rem this time?” he says to himself, smiling all the while. Wolfwood knows how to look past it; he searches and finds the terrible, unmoored fear in Vash’s blue, blue eyes. “Not Knives?” Vash’s gaze goes unfocused, turns inwards. He can’t remember—no. He can remember, but he only remembers the wrong thing. He remembers, but it’s not the world he knows. He remembers—or does he? Does he really? Is he remembering wrong? But if his memories are wrong, why do they feel so real? Is it the world that’s actually wrong? His stare slowly drifts away from the camera. “Isn’t……” he whispers. “Isn’t Rem dea—?”
“Oi! Vash!” Wolfwood barks. When Vash straightens, his eyes darting back to his phone from the surprise of Wolfwood calling his actual name, Nicholas sets his line. He says, “Bluebird. Yer migratin’ on me: come back. Yer Vash Saverem, and yer momma’s expectin’ you to text her when you get back to our place.”
Sinker. Vash mouths the word our?, bemusement visibly writ across his brow, and then something makes him glance off-camera, down at the hand that’s holding his phone. It’s red, colored by a port wine stain that Nicholas knows goes all the way up to his bicep. The silver of Vash’s wedding ring stands out starkly against its maroon. The jewelry had caught the airport terminal’s lights, and its sparkle had caught Vash’s eye.
Vash stares at it narrowly for a heartbeat, and then he lights up in realization when he registers what a ring on that finger of his left hand must mean. He looks back at his phone, and Wolfwood has already pulled his left driving glove off, is holding up his own hand to show the camera the matching ring on his finger. Vash looks between it, Wolfwood, and his own ring a couple of times, and (thank God) the light that shines in his blue-green eyes is at least familiar now, if still muddy.
“I—” Vash tries. He abruptly brings his phone closer to his face, taps a few times at the screen with a growing familiarity, and then starts flicking his thumb. His eyes dart from place to place as he pores over what’s on his screen. “I’m Vash Saverem,” he murmurs. He’s looking at the gallery of photos on his phone. “That’s right.”
Nicholas’s stomach untwists slightly. He breathes a silent sigh of relief. “There’s more pictures in yer wallet, if you need the reminder again and can’t remember how to get into yer phone,” Nicholas tells his husband. “Can you get outta the buildin’ for me?”
Vash looks up towards the ceiling, properly registering the signage now. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I—” As he reads, Vash pulls a sunglasses case out of one of the pockets of his duster purely by touch. He cracks it open with his forearm and free hand and slips on the pair of round, amber-tinted shades that had been inside. “Oh, Nicholas,” he says. He looks back down at his phone. His face is all apologetic regret. He looks worn and terribly tired. He’s somehow still beautiful. “I’m sorry. It might take me a bit?”
Wolfwood tugs his glove back on to redirect the aimless urge to stroke Vash’s cheek. “Don’t ‘pologize,” he grumbles. “Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had to hunt you down in an airport. ‘Least yer coat’s eye-catchin’.” Wolfwood tucks his sunglasses into one pocket and his mangled toothpick into another then grabs his helmet so he can put it on. “Just don’t cross any streets, please.” He double-checks to make sure his phone’s clipped in securely and then he forcibly lightens his tone. “Stay on call as long as you can, honey. Lemme hear yer pretty voice.”
Vash laughs and gives him a weak smile. At least this one’s sincere. “Charmer,” he says. “Put yourself on mute if you’re gonna call and drive; I like my eardrums where they are.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Nicholas grumbles. “ETA ten minutes to pickup.”
Wolfwood tries to not let his pessimism win as he speeds down the highway, Angelina thrumming underneath him. He doesn’t have any real reason to believe that Vash won’t be okay. Vash looks fine on the phone, his tiredness and current funny camera angle aside. He’d been responsive, had been able to answer questions. His deductive reasoning was intact: he’d been able to figure out that he and Wolfwood were married on his own. He’d remembered enough of his own life to recall the safety nets he’d put in place and had started looking through his photos on his own. He had a better sense of self-preservation this time around. He wasn’t an idiot; he was on the phone with Wolfwood right now; and this is a kinder world. Vash will be fine. Ten minutes is nothing. Vash might even take ten minutes to even get out of the damn airport.
Wolfwood frets anyway. Ten minutes was enough time to get into trouble if you were Vash the Stampede; Vash isn’t Vash the Stampede anymore; and Wolfwood doesn’t know if Vash really remembers that he isn’t. His brain coldly runs through nightmare scenarios: Vash tries to leave the pickup terminal and gets hit by a car, bleeds out as Wolfwood helplessly watches. Vash spooks and runs, hangs up and disappears into the city, and Wolfwood doesn’t have the strength to hunt him down, to follow. Not anymore.
Wolfwood curses and triple-checks he’s clear to change lanes. The universe has a sick fucking sense of humor: of course something like this would happen the first long business trip Vash took since they’d gotten married. Vash hasn’t gotten this stressed since—since Wolfwood’s—he tightens his grip on Angelina’s throttle and tries to ignore how loud his breaths somehow are inside his helmet. He tries to ignore how his twisted-up stomach is starting to hurt.
“Cut that out.” Nicholas blinks. He refocuses his eyes—fuck, had he actually zoned out while driving?—and picks up his chin to focus on the road. It’s not the highway; looks like he’d safely autopiloted himself through the right exit. Thank God there’s light traffic tonight. At the bottom of his field of vision, Vash adjusts the way he’s holding his phone (depriving Wolfwood of the double-chin view he’d been graced with until now) and gives the lens a smile. “Don’t brood,” he adds teasingly, though there’s an undercurrent of sincerity to his words that reveals how seriously he’s taking the situation. “I’m almost out; you’ll see me soon. Though, uh.” Vash glances up, probably looking at another sign. “I might not be at the right terminal?”
Nicholas tilts his head quizzically, nonverbally asking which terminal he’s at. Vash tells him. Wolfwood blasphemes as the sign for its turnoff whips past him with impeccable timing, dramatically wilts, and then picks himself back up the next second. Vash, who’d been watching his muted pantomime, makes a sympathetic noise.
Wolfwood uses his right hand to draw a quick circle in the air with his finger. Vash says, “Sure, don’t worry. I can hang tight while you take another circuit.” He pauses for a second. “Sorry.”
Wolfwood gives him an emphatic thumbs down, rejecting his apology. Vash’s tired giggle gets him through the indignity of having to drive around the entire damn airport another time.
Wolfwood pulls into the concrete pickup terminal, his stomach twisted into a tight fist in him, and starts scanning the people waiting for their rides. Thankfully, it doesn’t take too long; Wolfwood only has to endure a minute of families glaring at him for Angelina’s noise before he spots Vash’s red coat. He finds a clear spot on the curb not too close to Vash and pulls up, cutting Angelina’s engine before any too-tired kids start crying.
Vash stays visibly aloof and standoffish where he waits several yards away; he’s radiating an air of being bigger than he already is and the other folks waiting have unconsciously given him a radius of personal space. He’d tracked Wolfwood driving through the pickup bay, is eying Wolfwood sidelong, and doesn’t budge until Wolfwood pulls off his helmet. His posturing drops the second he recognizes Wolfwood; Vash hangs up their call and hustles over to him, though his steps do slow and pause as he takes in Wolfwood’s bike and her sidecar.
“… Is she still Angelina?” Vash asks as he walks up. His eyes are flicking over her black and chrome and the sidecar—or, more specifically, the custom detailing of a stylized, slender, spread wing that swoops down the length of the sidecar.
“‘Course.” Wolfwood takes the time Vash is using to study Vash, making sure the other man’s still in one piece. He’s still all broad shoulders and nipped-in waist, still all red coat and black leather, still all piercing eyes and round amber shooting glasses. He’d taken the time to fuss himself back into better order, pulling his hair back off his face and putting on gloves; it makes Wolfwood smile wryly even as his heart aches. Vash was vain in the funniest ways, yeah, but him tidying his appearance right now was probably both self-soothing and defensive. Folks didn’t wanna fuck with the six-foot-something stranger showing barely any skin, who somehow still looked like a runway model even after a multi-hour flight. Who could blame ‘em? It wasn’t normal, was uncanny enough to avoid, and Vash was scared enough to take ruthless advantage of that human instinct right now. He’d honed himself as pretty as a knife’s edge, like he was his twin, all to try and make sure the world didn’t try to kick him while he was already down.
Wolfwood can tell he just wants to go home. So he leans towards Vash and raises his closer hand, gesturing for Vash to pass him his dufflebag so he can strap it behind him. He continues his earlier thought as he does: “Wouldn’t feel right without her, yeah? Yer helmet’s on the seat.”
Vash peers into the sidecar. “So it is.” He sounds a little bemused as he examines the scarlet and gold helmet. “Wolfwood… I’m sorry, but I—”
Wolfwood knows the next thing out of Vash’s mouth is going to be some kind of apology for being scared enough to not be soft, some kind of sorry for being tired and stressed enough to not be in his right mind. Nicholas doesn’t want to hear it. He interrupts, “Right. Knew I forgot somethin’,” and without further warning, he leans back towards Vash, gets a handful of the front of Vash’s coat, and yanks his husband in for a kiss.
Vash’s body remembers, even if his mind’s still got one foot in the grave. He folds, tips his head, meets Wolfwood’s lips with his own in a reflexive, automatic motion born of three-and-a-half years of dating, one year engaged, and seven months of marriage. Their kiss is chaste and quick, Vash’s lips chapped against Wolfwood’s own, but it’s like setting flint to steel: when they pull apart, Nicholas is relieved to see a familiar fire now burning at the back of Vash’s blue-green eyes.
“I could have stabbed you,” Vash hisses, scandalized at how easily Wolfwood’s defenses had dropped. His indignation doesn’t take away from the fact that he’s blushing. “What if I didn’t still remember we were married?? I could have hurt you—”
“With what knife? You didn’t check any bags,” Nicholas points out. Vash sulkily drops himself into the sidecar; Nicholas looks down at him and can’t resist teasing him a little more. “‘Sides. You wouldn’t’ve stabbed me on reflex: you wanted to kiss me back then, too. Helmet on.”
Vash scowls at him, but he does tuck his glasses away to pull his helmet on. Like with the kiss, his hands seem to remember the motions once it’s on his head, Vash checking the tightness of the straps and the fit in a series of small, familiar motions that Wolfwood remembers from countless other rides they’d taken together, in this life.
Vash buckles himself in and gets himself settled. Nicholas looks down at him and, for a moment, the world fades away. The dim concrete terminal, booming with traffic and flashing with reflecting headlights, the wet tarmac, damp and cold from nightfall and autumn settling in—they don’t matter. What matters is that Vash is at his side.
Nicholas reaches down and grabs Vash’s shoulder. He doesn’t know why he does it, only that in that moment he’d needed to, to confirm that Vash was really there—but he regrets his moment of weakness the second he feels Vash flinch under his hand. Wolfwood makes himself pull back as slowly as he usually would, pretending like he hadn’t felt Vash shy at his touch, and takes that same time to try and get his now-scattered thoughts to line back up. By the time Vash tilts his head up towards him like nothing’s wrong, he’s remembered he does have something for his husband, something he can use as a good-enough excuse for touching Vash.
Vash tenses fractionally when Wolfwood unzips his riding jacket enough to reach into its inner breast pocket; and then he visibly brightens when Wolfwood hands him a folded pocketknife. Vash accepts it from Wolfwood’s hand, strokes his gloved thumb over its crimson enamel handle, then disengages the lock and opens the knife without a second of hesitation. Wolfwood lets himself be glad at that: Vash recognizes the weapon.
“It ain’t a gun,” Wolfwood murmurs to him. “But you’d told me before it was better than nothin’.”
Vash looks back up at him, and Wolfwood doesn’t need to see his face to know that he’s smiling honestly. He can hear it in Vash’s voice as Vash tells him, “It is.” Vash closes the knife without looking at it, dexterous despite his gloves, and disappears it into his coat. “Thank you, Wolfwood.”
“Don’t mention it.” That honest smile is reward enough, is more than he deserves in the first place. He sits himself straight on Angelina so he can pull on his own helmet. “Hang in there,” he tells Vash. “I’ll get us home safe and sound.”
Wolfwood can hear the smile in Vash’s voice go hollow and fake when Vash fibs, “I never doubted it.”
Wolfwood hauls Vash’s duffle up the stairs; Vash’s protests and Wolfwood’s rebuffs (exchanged in whispers so they won’t disturb the neighbors) get them through the front door. When it shuts behind them, Wolfwood turns on-heel as quick as a snake and closes the short distance between him and Vash. He doesn’t bother being nice about backing the other man into the front door, goes so far as to pin Vash in place with one hand splayed in the middle of Vash’s chest.
Wolfwood looks up at Vash. He mulishly squares his jaw when he finds Vash already looking at some point about half a foot above his head, determinedly not meeting his eyes. They have an entire argument in stubborn, stalemated silence, as Wolfwood leans in closer and closer and Vash’s eyes creep towards the ceiling. A full minute passes before Vash cracks and mutters, “But you’re mad at me.”
Wolfwood reflexively snaps, “I’m mad ‘cause yer already tryin’ to dodge my help.” Then his words and tone actually hit his ears and he winces. Hell. He gusts out a sigh. Well, that went right to shit real quick, huh? It was sorta funny: he has almost a decade of exposure to Vash between two lives and yet one of the quickest ways to set him off is still Vash trying to squirm his way out of help he doesn’t feel he deserves. It never stopped being insulting; like Nicholas would offer a hand to just anybody.
Kinder. He can be kinder; he can do better than that piss-poor attempt. Wolfwood rocks more of his own weight back onto his own feet. “Look,” he tries, “just ‘cause I’m pissed ‘cause I’m worried don’t mean I don’t wanna help.” He bites back we’ve talked about this; Vash might not even remember right now that they had. His memories could get spotty whenever he was this stressed, like he was a paint-by-number finished with Vash the Stampede’s key. “I can’t—” Wolfwood takes his hand off of Vash’s chest to make a circling gesture; and then slowly, as he thinks hard, he gently lays his hand back down.
Nicholas says, “I can’t say I get it: my rememberin’ don’t work like yours. I don’t… get lost like you do on bad days. I don’t ever get to a place where I reach for Vash Saverem and only come up with Vash the Stampede.” He hesitates, picking over his words. “But we do get back to who we are in almost the same way. You told me once it was like solvin’ a puzzle? You’d used that piece there, and that meant it couldn’t be used here; you lived a life that you couldn’t’ve lived on No Man’s Land, and that meant you weren’t there. There was stuff you couldn’t do as Vash the Stampede, that you could as Vash Saverem. And ‘cause you had the proof you did those things, that meant you couldn’t be Vash the Stampede. You’d have to be Vash Saverem.
“And I—” Nicholas reflexively closes his teeth over the admission of weakness in his mouth; he forces himself to grit it out despite himself. “There ain’t a thing I can do to keep you from rememberin’.” Dammit. He wishes there was. “But… But that don’t mean I can’t give you a hand with the remindin’? I wanna help—it—” It’s the least he can do for Vash. “You get so scared in yer own damn home—” and it upsets Nicholas, too, to see Vash so scared. Vash deserves better than living scared again. So much better.
Standing in the entryway of their apartment, Nicholas tells Vash, “Lemme help you get you back in yer own head.” He says, “It fuckin’ kills me t’stand here an’ watch you hurt yerself tryin’ t’do it all on yer own again, just like back then, just ‘cause you remember feelin’ like y’didn’t deserve the help.” He says, “That was then, an’ this is now. We ain’t those men no more. Vash Saverem knows that. He told me he had the proof of it—”
And here Wolfwood finds he can’t keep looking at Vash, because Vash is looking back at him with something wide and wondering and almost reverent in his seafoam eyes. The dim entryway light limns his blond helmet hair into a gold halo, softens the bags underneath his eyes and colors his complexion into rosy warmth. He’s beautiful, and Nicholas can’t stand the way he’s being so gently witnessed, like him blindly running his mouth is actually a marvel to behold. Nicholas ducks his head and squares his shoulders, determined to at least finish saying his piece, twisting stomach be damned.
In a voice that feels terrifyingly fragile, he tells his hand on Vash’s chest, “You told me Vash the Stampede wasn’t the marryin’ type. But here we are, sharin’ a last name. An’ that—you told me—”
The dim light catches on the band on his finger. Wolfwood stares at it for a second, momentarily hypnotized by its dull sparkle, before he realizes all in a rush what it means: Wolfwood had put his left hand on Vash. He’d reflexively picked up Vash’s luggage with his right and slung it over his shoulder like how he’d used to carry the Punisher a lifetime ago. He even has his fingers tangled with the duffle’s straps like he’d used to hold the Punisher’s. He feels the unaccustomed strain in his unaugmented knuckles and wrist.
Cold shudders through him and settles in his bones; his knotted stomach drops to his feet, tearing through his flimsy, paper courage along the way. Oh God, he is a liar. He’s still a liar: he’s had almost thirty years of a blessed second chance, yet he is truly still the man he’d always been. He had told Vash we, but the truth was that Nicholas has not changed. His hands still do harm, cannot keep from it, had even scared Vash already tonight.
He can’t—it feels blasphemous for him to say that Vash changed for him. It feels too prideful to say that Vash changed so he could finally have and hold Nicholas. It feels like Wolfwood would be inviting calamity to cut their second chance short if he speaks aloud the idea that Vash chose Nicholas over his duty. That, this time around, Vash had picked Nicholas over the world.
He can’t. He cannot dare to. Vash had spent an impossible lifetime wishing he was anything other than the aftermath of his own existence; he deserves better than to have his accomplishments besmirched by Nicholas’s latest failed attempt at being anything worthy of his regard.
So, instead, Wolfwood throws back his head. He jerks his shoulders and spine straight. He brandishes his left hand and its wedding ring in Vash’s stupid, handsome, utterly besotted face and declares the only thing he knows he can say is true: “You think I’d make this kinda promise lightly, Needle-noggin?? I ain’t that kinda man—so let me fuckin’ spoil you fer once!”
Silence rings in their apartment. Wolfwood tries to not think about his burning face, about how he’s almost-certainly blushing as red as a tomato, about how he’s trying so hard to not collapse under the weight of his own embarrassment. He also tries to not examine Vash’s expression too closely, because Vash is looking at Wolfwood with every line of his face softened with awe. Vash looks like he’s witnessing a quiet miracle unfold, like he’s watching dawn break after a long night, and, God, what right does Vash have to look like that when it’s Wolfwood that’s been so blessed? Wolfwood’s eyes and throat burn.
(…He’ll try again. He’ll give trying to be better another go. Vash deserves that, too, right? The least Nicholas can do is try.)
Vash’s seafoam eyes go even softer. They shine in the entryway light, and the first tears fall, crystalline. Wolfwood clicks his tongue and wipes one away. He says, “C’mon Spikey.” He swallows, clears his throat, and ignores the roughness of his own voice to add, “Ain’t no need fer that.”
“I’m just happy,” Vash says. He smiles, closes his eyes, and leans into Wolfwood’s touch. “So happy. So happy you’re here.”
And what can Wolfwood say in the face of that? He lets Vash cry his tears of joy and gratitude a couple of minutes longer, Vash’s duffle carefully deposited on the floor so he can use both hands to wipe Vash’s tears. In due time, he gently tells Vash, “Yer gonna give yerself a headache like that,” with his rough voice as soft as it’ll go.
Vash sniffles and nods. He’s getting blotchy. His nose is cherry red. There’s a tremendous, bittersweet warmth living in Wolfwood’s chest that persists even through Vash wiping his running nose on the sleeve of his red duster. Gross. “I know you got a hanky,” Wolfwood tells him, fond reminder and soft scolding all in one. “Unless you lost the one I stuck in that peacock coat of yers.”
Vash brightens at that reminder; he pulls away and fishes in the inner breast pocket of his duster until he extracts a neatly-folded paisley square. Wolfwood lets his hands slowly drop (ignoring his tingling palms and fingers) and watches like a hawk as Vash wipes his cheeks and eyes and then unfolds the square to blow his nose.
When Vash is done, Wolfwood sticks out his open hand. Vash clutches his soiled handkerchief in his fist and leans away. He sounds genuinely scandalized when he protests, “I can wash it myself!”
“You need to wash yer everythin’ else first,” Wolfwood counters. “Don’t bring airport crud into my nice, clean house.” That’s a lie. Wolfwood needs to vacuum and dust. He’d been planning to do it in two more days, when Vash had been due to come home. “Lemme sweat the small stuff.” It’s the least he can do. He wiggles his fingers expectantly. “You wanna eat?”
Vash hesitates. “I’m not really hungry,” he starts; then he pouts at the stern look on Wolfwood’s face. “I can wash it while I’m washing myself,” he insists.
“I’ll make somethin’ light. You ain’t goin’ to bed on an empty stomach.”
“It’s a weeknight! You’ve got work in the morning.”
“It’ll take me twenty minutes, tops. I got food made.” Another half-lie: he does have food made, but it’s not really a proper meal.
Vash narrows his eyes, and Wolfwood internally curses. Vash stares down at Wolfwood as intently as Wolfwood is staring at him; he’s very obviously thinking hard, doing some sort of internal calculus, though it doesn’t take longer than three heartbeats.
“Just one dish,” Vash tells him. “And come talk to me. I want a proper shave with a proper razor, so you’ll still have time to cook even after keeping me company. I don’t care about how messy the house is or isn’t, so spend that time with me.” Vash must catch whatever Wolfwood’s face reflexively does when he’s caught flatfooted in his first lie, because he earnestly adds, “If you deprive me of the chance to sleep in your sheets, I will cry.”
Wolfwood caves in the face of Vash’s big, begging eyes. “Fine,” he grumbles. Vash smiles at him, gracious in his victory, and puts his crumpled, used handkerchief into Wolfwood’s still-outstretched hand. “Sticky burr.” Vash’s smile breaks into a smug grin. “You gonna let me get into somethin’ more comfy, or are you gonna stick to me all through that, too?”
“Please get into houseclothes.” Vash is laughing with just his eyes. The obvious fondness that shines in them alongside his mirth takes all the sting out of the fact that he’s laughing at Wolfwood. “You’ll know where to find me.”
Wolfwood grunts in acknowledgment, shoves Vash’s hanky into his jeans pocket, and shucks his riding jacket and shoes. As Vash starts taking his own outers off (already fussily brushing road dirt off his coat’s red leather and wiping his snotty sleeve onto his undershirt), Wolfwood picks up Vash’s duffle and retreats into the apartment, passing by the closed door to their study and turning on the lights when he enters their living room.
A lamp here and a lamp there bring the place into focus. Their furniture is mostly secondhand, salvaged from estate sales, and had come with them from their first apartment half a state away; the pieces had been in storage until seven months ago. The rest are things that they’d bought new over the past months and were still breaking in. Wolfwood puts Vash’s luggage down next to their black, leather couch, where it’ll live until it gets unpacked, and double-checks to make sure the walkway is clear so neither he nor Vash will get tangled up in it.
He takes a couple of seconds more to make sure everything in the living room is as he’d left it, absently kneading at his left hip as he does. The décor is, admittedly, still more to Vash’s tastes (he likes leather and dark wood and saturated colors where he can get them), but Nicholas has left his mark here and there. The handmade patchwork quilt folded and draped over the back of the couch: an impulse estate sale purchase because Wolfwood couldn’t bear to see such a work of love get donated to a thrift store. The matching sets of white, cotton curtains: made by Wolfwood, because he had hated every single option at the furniture stores and had decided to make them his own damn self. The covered sewing machine set up on a short workbench in the corner: Wolfwood’s, a gift from Vash on Wolfwood’s twenty-fifth birthday.
Good. Everything looks as it should. Safe as houses. Wolfwood gets himself back into motion, starting across the living room towards their kitchen, and then he slows when he hears a scuffing step behind him.
He looks over his shoulder. Vash shuffles up in his wake and stops to drape the jeans and shirt he’d been wearing over his duffle, obviously assigning both as dirty laundry. He’s down to his undershirt and boxer-briefs; as Wolfwood watches, he peels his shirt off, leaving him in just his skivvies. Wolfwood drags his eyes down Vash’s ruffled blond hair, across the broad breadth of his shoulders, down Vash’s lean arms and the softness at his belly. He lingers on the lengths of Vash’s bare, toned legs and their wiry runner’s muscle; he admires the way said muscle flexes under the layer of fat that’s collected on Vash’s thighs and ass and stomach. It’s a satisfying, tangible testament to years of Wolfwood’s cooking and easier living in this kinder life.
Vash deserves softer edges. They match the sincere smiles he wears more often these days. Wolfwood feels a flicker of pride at having had a hand in putting both on the man.
Right. He has a job to do.
Wolfwood gets himself moving again. He makes a quick pit stop at the terracotta planters in their tiny dining room space to pluck a generous sprig of spearmint and a long green onion leaf; herbs in hand, he rounds the corner into the kitchen proper and turns on the overhead light. The old wiring in the building makes it flicker for a second, but it eventually lights up the long, narrow, windowless room; Wolfwood doesn’t love the layout (if he and Vash tried to walk side-by-side in it, they’d bump shoulders), but he can’t complain about the countertops and cabinets that line it.
He does a cursory, reflexive check here, too: wicker fruit bowls, check. The unraveling, dollar store oven mitt and trivets, relics from Wolfwood’s first apartment, hanging from magnetic clips on the side of the fridge, check. The years-old faded, red apron he’d impulsively bought from a restaurant supply store a month after meeting Vash again, check. Their coffee machine, Wolfwood’s Zojirushi water boiler, both check. The artwork collection on the fridge, comprised entirely of pieces gifted to Wolfwood from his kids at work, safe.
Satisfied, Wolfwood trundles over to the sink and parks himself on the anti-fatigue mat Vash had put there months ago. He puts his herbs on the counter for later; and then, in the safety of the kitchen, he pulls Vash’s handkerchief out of his pocket. Nicholas spares a few seconds to listen for the sounds of Vash in the bathroom, making sure his husband won’t catch him in the middle of longing too hard; and then, when he’s certain he’s in the clear, he buries his nose in the paisley fabric.
Nicholas breathes in deep. Vash’s handkerchief smells like cotton and salt water and Vash, colored by its time in Vash’s hand and against Vash’s face and in the inner breast pocket of the coat Vash wears the most. It settles something inside Nicholas that’s felt unmoored ever since Vash left home almost a week ago. He nuzzles into the fabric, just a little, and sighs as tension unwinds from his spine. He’d missed this. He’d missed Vash, and now Vash is back. Vash is back: Vash is home.
(Home. Nicholas’s stomach nervously twists at the thought. Sometimes it still felt like a dream, that he was allowed to live with Vash. Sometimes it still felt like a dream that he was allowed to live at all. Wolfwood thinks he should have been condemned to eternal hellfire for the sins of his past life; yet, here he is, getting butterflies in his stomach as he stands wasting time at the kitchen sink.)
Wolfwood pulls his face out of Vash’s handkerchief. He leans against the counter, rubs the back of his wrist against his forehead, and screws his eyes tightly closed for just a second. Eggs, he thinks to himself, getting himself back on track. Tomato. Green onion. He has rice he can reheat and he’s got leftover soup. That’s a light meal, enough food so Vash won’t go to bed hungry but not too much that he’ll get indigestion. The last thing Vash needs tonight is bad dreams.
Wolfwood shakes himself. He gets back to work.
Wolfwood first washes his hands and face and his dirty bowl from dinner; then he uses the little bottle of laundry detergent (actually a repurposed Elmer’s glue bottle) he has stashed under the sink to wash Vash’s handkerchief. When he’s done with that, he washes the mint and the green onion leaf, flicking the water from both. The green onion goes on a paper towel; the mint, gently crushed between Wolfwood’s fingers, goes into a metal water bottle he takes down from a cupboard. He adds ice from a freezer tray, gives the bottle a brief, thorough shake to bruise the mint further, fills it with water, listening to the ice pop, and screws on the lid.
He takes it with him as he crosses the apartment, going to their bedroom on the entire other end of it. It’s dim in that space, but he doesn’t bother turning the lights on: he’s just going to be there for a few moments. Their bed and its antique wooden frame and the absurd, one-hundred-percent-organic-supima-cotton too-nice sheets Vash had insisted on loom in a bulky, king-sized mass that Wolfwood ignores as he quickly tidies all his used towels into the hamper. He hangs Vash’s handkerchief in a now-open space on the laundry rack; after, he sheds his jeans, shakes them out, and then hangs them on the back of the door on the empty hook waiting for them. One pair of sweats, slippers, and a knit cardigan later, and he’s knocking on the bathroom door so Vash won’t get startled out of his skin when Wolfwood barges in.
“I’m in the shower!” He knows that. He can hear the water running. “It’s open!”
“Brought you water.” Wolfwood squeezes into their microscopic bathroom (leaving the door cracked so he won’t smother in the steam) and checks that the toilet lid’s down before seating himself. He sloshes the water bottle after he’s settled, letting Vash hear the ice clink against its metal walls.
Vash pops his head out from behind the shower curtain, spraying Wolfwood with a few drops of water in the process. “Oh, thanks!” He’s flushed rosy red from the heat of the water, and his fine hair is plastered to his forehead and the back of his neck. He looks a little like a soaked rat, the image leagues away from the flash and flair of Vash’s public persona. Wolfwood knows he must have smiled in some stupid way at the sight, because Vash smiles back at him in a flash of teeth.
Wolfwood unscrews the top of the water bottle and trades hands so he can pass it up to Vash over the skinny shelving unit that separates the toilet from the tub; he makes sure the other man has a solid hold on the bottle’s silicone grip before he lets go. When Vash leans down to take it, their hands brush. Wolfwood’s fingers tingle as he watches Vash: leaned half out of the shower, dripping on the edge of the tub, red as a steamed crab, and beautiful. Wolfwood watches a drop of water track its way down the length of Vash’s bobbing throat as his husband drinks.
“Phew! Boy does that hit.” Vash gasps as he lowers the bottle. “Thank you, dearest.” Wolfwood reaches up to receive the bottle, sloshes it, and raises an eyebrow at Vash at its weight. Vash has the grace to look a little sheepish. “Didn’t realize how thirsty I was.”
“I’ll fill it again.”
“Later.” Wolfwood settles his weight back down. Vash gives him a tiny, grateful smile before disappearing back behind the shower curtain. “What’d I miss?” he asks, voice raised to be heard over the rush of the water. “Catch me up on all the hot goss, Wolfwood.”
Wolfwood snorts (because their life is quiet and he likes it that way) but obliges. He tells Vash about the past almost-week: about how he’s been seeing teachers go in and out of the elementary school across the street for their start-of-the-year planning. About how he sympathizes with how much work they’re doing, ‘cause God knows his own pile of paperwork doesn’t feel like it’s getting any smaller. He tells Vash about accidentally falling asleep on the couch after work on Tuesday. About the conversations he’d had with their usual Sunday farmer’s market vendors, about how they said hi. About how he’d bought peaches. About how he’d actually gotten to eat them properly ripe and soft since Vash was out of town. He sneers when Vash teases him for no-doubt doing it standing over the sink. (He had.)
Wolfwood talks, stealing sips from Vash’s water bottle here and there, as Vash gets through shampoo and conditioner and body wash. The scent of bath products mixes, green and floral, with the nose of mint in Vash’s water. Wolfwood fills his lungs with perfumed steam, soaks in the humid heat, and shifts his weight, trying to get more comfortable. Eventually he ends up slouching and tipping his head back against the toilet tank: it’s the best position he can find. He lets his eyes close as the sound of the shower spray blurs into a dull roar in his ears. It’s pleasant white noise, comforting and familiar background to the sounds of Vash washing off the dirt of the road. Nicholas knows this sound, has heard it many times before. It sounds like…
It sounds like the hush of a sandstorm against a closed window.
He bolts upright. “M&M gonna ship your gear back?” his mouth asks. He swallows afterwards, swallows down the taste of water-thinned bile and blind panic that has risen up the back of his throat. He shouldn’t have been reminded of sandstorms; he shouldn’t have been half-remembering being crammed into a tiny bathroom with Vash the Stampede as Vash took the first shower, the two of them forced into sharing close quarters by a lack of hotel room options due to the number of travelers seeking shelter from the storm.
He still had been.
He’s fine. He’s fine. Vash is here in the shower, balancing on one foot as he conscientiously scrubs between his toes with a washcloth. Vash is here, in their home, and not in fucking Nevada with Knives and Livio and Razlo and the Crimsonnail.
A brief silence falls. Wolfwood counts his pulse throbbing in his teeth—one, two, three, four—before Vash’s shadow, seen through the shower curtain, puts his foot carefully down. “Yeah,” Vash says, and he suddenly sounds so tired. Guilt hits Wolfwood low and fast; his stomach twists around the cold water in it. He shouldn’t have brought up work again, not when Vash had obviously cut his business trip short to fly back. “I really owe them. Again.”
“I’ll text ‘em later,” Wolfwood says. He’s proud of how casual his voice comes out. How easy. Like they’re just getting a care package and not all of Vash Saverem’s photography gear. Like they didn’t have to ship everything back from the worksite that Vash the Stampede had bailed from because the sister that had been butchered a lifetime ago had been put into danger. “And I’ll bake ‘em somethin’ when they’re back in town. Tipsy plum cake, maybe.”
Vash cuts the water (the dull roar of not-really-sand disappears. Wolfwood’s shoulders drop fractionally.) The shower curtain rings rattle when Vash pulls it back. Vash stands dripping in the tub, still as red as a steamed crab, still beautiful, and he smiles a smile at Wolfwood that’s all guilt and heartsore edges. “Thanks, Wolfwood. I’m grateful; I owe you for a lot, too.”
Wolfwood looks up at Vash and thinks that the sight is both familiar and not. He knows Vash the Stampede and that sorry smile. He knows Vash Saverem, sporting a luminous halo made of shower steam and the bathroom lights—familiar and still sorry, so damn sorry.
Wolfwood pushes himself to his feet and stands on the bathmat so there’s nowhere for Vash to run to. He makes a little c’mere gesture, and Vash obligingly leans down. Nicholas holds Vash’s chin and gently tilts his face so he can press a chaste, reverent kiss to the teardrop mole underneath Vash’s left eye. He tilts Vash’s face so he can press his next against Vash’s brow. Vash smells like lemongrass and vetiver. His skin is hot underneath Wolfwood’s mouth.
Vash breathes out a sigh, closes his eyes, and presses his forehead to Wolfwood’s. Wolfwood presses back. They stand like that, sharing humid breaths for far, far longer than they’d have dared to as Vash the Stampede and Nicholas the Punisher. In this better, kinder life, they don’t have to hide behind flimsy excuses to share the tender comfort they both crave. Thank God, Wolfwood thinks, even as bittersweet grief for missed chances fills him. A lifetime ago, they couldn’t have had this. A lifetime ago, Wolfwood had di—
Vash moves, and his hands come up to loosely tangle in Wolfwood’s hair. The tip of his nose skims down part of Nicholas’s as he hangs his head. “You’re so good to me,” Vash murmurs. He sniffles.
Don’t cry, Nicholas wants to say. This ain’t worth cryin’ over. This kindness is a fraction of what the world owes you. You didn’t even rest after your last death; you just came back to do it all over again. You crazy bastard. Who gives up a place in heaven just to walk the wretched earth again?
Wolfwood doesn’t say any of that. Instead, he asks, “You want the rest of yer water?”
Vash breathes out a shaky laugh. “Sure,” he says. “Just a little.” He straightens, pulls away, wipes the tears from his cheeks, and accepts the water bottle even when Wolfwood is a little slow in passing it to him. He takes a few long sips, Wolfwood watching him all the while. He’s still as red as a steamed crab, still water-flattened blond hair, still beautiful. “You need to go cook,” Vash tells him when he gives it back.
“I can stay.”
“I need to shave.”
“I can stay,” Wolfwood repeats, his tone surlier. He’ll stay if Vash wants, needs the company.
Vash’s aquamarine eyes soften even as a fire flickers into life in the pits of them. He reaches down, out over the rim of the tub, and brushes his fingers against Wolfwood’s cheek. His fingertips catch against Wolfwood’s five o’clock shadow, and Wolfwood resists the urge to push into the touch. It itches. He’d meant to shave tonight before his sudden change in plans. Vash drags his touch, feather-light, down the plane of his cheek, down the length of Wolfwood’s neck, and Wolfwood’s skin burns in its wake. Vash stops over the front of Wolfwood’s right shoulder. He hesitates for a fraction of a second; and then he suddenly pushes the heel of his hand into it, hard.
Wolfwood loses his feet. He doesn’t even have the time to curse as he tries to brace himself with his left leg; he staggers for a highwire heartbeat, overbalancing, when it can’t take his full weight. Fear and confused betrayal spark through him—and then Vash fists that same hand in Wolfwood’s shirt and catches him.
Wolfwood tries to steady his breaths as belated adrenaline floods his system. He can’t look Vash in the eyes; he just stares down at Vash’s hand tight in white cotton as Vash holds his deadweight in place. Shame replaces the fear; Wolfwood gets his feet under himself again. Vash had barely pushed him. He hadn’t even been able to handle only that much? Vash needs him tonight; he had to be strong for Vash tonight; and yet he’d staggered. Master Chapel would have had his hide for his sorry performance.
Vash loosens his hold when he’s sure Wolfwood’s standing under his own power again. He spreads his hand against Wolfwood’s chest; Wolfwood keeps staring at it. He still can’t look Vash in the eyes. He focuses instead on the way Vash’s wedding ring is dully shining in the steamy bathroom light. Vash murmurs, “Nicholas.” Wolfwood flinches away in surprise, adrenaline spiking again, when Vash’s other hand brushes a knuckle under his chin; then Nicholas inhales sharply, realizing what he’s done, and jerks his eyes up to Vash’s.
Vash’s face is sorrowful and lined with a guilty pain. “Nico,” he whispers. “Sorry: I scared you.” He had. It doesn’t make the apology easier to bear. “You didn’t realize?” He hadn’t. He’d been too caught up in keeping an eye on Vash, in trying to preserve the miracle of Vash, in trying to keep Vash here with him where it was safe.
The self-loathing and misery surging up his throat makes his sinuses and the backs of his eyes burn. Safe. Hah. Like there was anything Nicholas could do to keep a home safe when he’d had a bullet cut out of his shoulder, when he had ten screws between his bellybutton and his knee. Like there was anything he could do to keep a home safe when he needed the rod threaded into his femur to even stand. Like there was anything he could do to keep a home safe when sitting on a hard toilet lid for only twenty fucking minutes in the humid hotbox of their bathroom had been enough to make his stupid back and leg and hip weak, ache.
In this life, Nicholas had gotten himself run over and had proceeded to die under the knife. (Nicholas remembers the smell of antiseptic.) In this life, Nicholas is only a man and could die from just that. (He remembers the way it smells when combined with his blood.) Nicholas the Punisher has been brought so low: a lifetime ago, he’d been an assassin of the Eye of Michael. (His shallow breaths are loud in his ears.) A lifetime ago, he would have recovered without a scratch. (He can feel his pulse in his teeth.) If he’d had the serum in this life he wouldn’t have died—(Wait.) and he wouldn’t be so—he’d—
(No?)
No? That’s not right. (That’s not right.) He doesn’t—(Something is wrong.) He shouldn’t want…? (He’s wrong? He’s wrong. He’s the thing that’s wrong.)
That’s right. Aren’t I supposed to be dead——?
(A lifetime ago Nicholas had been born in the dirt of a ditch and had been fatted as a lamb was for slaughter; a lifetime ago Nicholas had been promised to be a carpenter and had been handed a gun; a lifetime ago Nicholas had been bent and broken and reborn as the Punisher. A lifetime ago a boy had been born and raised like chattel and all his efforts to be a good son, to protect the only hopeful Eden he’d known had come to naught, because in the end he could not defy his nature: he’d still been only meat, only a beast, only something to be shaped and slaughtered by the hands of others. There’s a whistling hole in his chest shaped like the hollow whites of his brother’s eyes as he’d fired five bullets into his heart [please live] and he’s a killer, he’s a monster, he’s the Punisher; he can taste the Bride in his mouth, and he is cold and afraid and hurting here in the shadow of the valley of death [i’m sorry] and there’s white confetti flickering against a boundless blue sky [this is all i can give you] and Vash is so warm by his side [please live] as he smiles and he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead, he should be dead—!)
“Nicholas.” There’s a hot hand holding the back of his head, its fingers splayed over his nape. “Nicholas D. Saverem-Wolfwood.”
Nicholas claws out of the memory. He inhales sharply, a corpse filling its lungs, and chokes on the air. “Bastard,” he wheezes out around his coughs. Lemongrass. Vetiver. Neither had grown on No Man’s Land. Neither plant had grown on No Man’s Land, and so he cannot be on No Man’s Land; the only Nicholas a Vash had known on No Man’s Land had been Nicholas the Punisher; he is not on No Man’s Land; and so the Nicholas-that-he-is must be Nicholas Saverem-Wolfwood, alive and married to Vash. A fat, reflexive tear rolls hot down his cheek. “Jes—jes’ ask if ‘m feelin’ like shit next time.”
“Sorry. Sorry.” Nicholas accepts that apology with a mollified grumble. The world comes back to him in bits and pieces as he slowly catches his breath, as refracted despair and confusion and adrenaline ebb out of him. He’s okay. He’s okay. He’s in their tiny-ass bathroom. Vash is here with him. There’s a hot hand that has shifted to cup his nape. There’s a hot hand at the small of his back. There’s a bony forehead pressed to his. “Look at me?”
Nicholas cracks open his eyes and doesn’t flinch when all he sees is sea-green. Vash is staring at him like a freak, like Nicholas hung the moon, is staring at him the same way he sometimes keeps his eyes open during kisses so he can keep looking at Nicholas; and it makes Nicholas feel so flattered and also so aggravated. Why is his husband such a freak. Nicholas flicks Vash on the softest part of his naked belly; Vash starts at the pain and then visibly relaxes, reassured that Nicholas is back with him, before he whines, “Nicoooooo, I’m trying to be nice and say sorry.”
“Y’already said sorry.” Nicholas grabs Vash’s belly this time, pinching a roll of fat between his forefinger and thumb. “Apology accepted.” He belatedly puts the pieces of their respective positions together; he’d been wrong earlier about being able to keep Vash in the tub if Nicholas stayed on the bathmat. Vash did have a place to go—into Wolfwood. Their feet are tangled together on the mat, and the hand on Nicholas’s back is to protect it from the hard edge of the sink he’s been pressed against. One of Vash’s long, currently very naked and very wet thighs is slotted between Nicholas’s own to make the fit work.
“I meant it earlier when I said you’re so good to me,” Vash tells him earnestly. That makes Nicholas pay attention to him again. “I’m feeling a lot better—I’m here—I love you—I’m—I—will you stop fondling me??” Vash sucks in his gut, which tugs it out of Nicholas’s squeezing fingers. “I’m trying to be a supportive husband and it’s really hard when you’re using my stomach as a stress ball!!”
“Can I hold you?” Nicholas asks. He’d also belatedly realized what it was that he’d been craving ever since he’d picked Vash up from the airport. He wants the warm, living weight of Vash in his arms.
Vash’s stupid, pretty face goes stunned-slack. He rears his head back just enough so they’re not both going cross-eyed trying to keep each other in focus, and Nicholas watches with interest as Vash’s pretty eyes seem to go more blue, as his pupils bloom black. His hair’s starting to dry and stick up in dandelion clumps. He’s still red. He’s still beautiful.
Vash’s gaze drops to Nicholas’s mouth. Nicholas can’t help the fond smile that curves his lips. He tilts his head just a little, and Vash leans in as though magnetized, closer and closer and closer until—
Until Vash groans dramatically and drops his forehead onto Nicholas’s shoulder.
Nicholas snorts, the moment broken. He ruffles his hand through Vash’s silky hair, making it stick up even more, and teases him with, “Givin’ me mixed signals, Spikey.”
“If I let you hold me,” Vash explains, his voice muffled by Nicholas’s cardigan, “I’m not going to get dinner.”
Nicholas frowns. “I ain’t gonna let you starve, Needle-noggin.”
Vash huffs. “If I let you hold me,” he clarifies, “all I’m gonna have is dessert.” And then before Nicholas really has the time to get confused, he shifts his weight.
Oh. Oh. That’s his husband’s dick. That’s his husband’s dick, as hot as the rest of him and stiff enough to press insistently into the fabric at the top of Nicholas’s right thigh. Nicholas is suddenly aware of how naked Vash is, of how he’s cooled down enough for his red skin to be the same shade as his sex flush, of how Vash’s thigh is flexing between his legs, of the little puffs of breath Vash is huffing against the side of his neck. Vash smells like lemongrass and vetiver and, underneath it, of clean skin and just a hint of sweat and Vash. Nicholas’s hand tightens involuntarily in Vash’s hair.
Vash cants his hips away, satisfied that he’d made his point. He sounds simultaneously smug and also childishly cranky as he adds, “And I’m hungry. Like, actually hungry. Not just hungry for you.”
Nicholas can’t help it: he laughs. “Yer impossible,” he tells Vash. He gently smacks Vash’s flank, which earns him a bratty whine and a wriggle. “C’mon, up. You still want a shave, and I need to cook.”
Vash grumbles. Then he says, into Nicholas’s shoulder, “Don’t use the wok.” Don’t push yourself. “I’ll be okay on my own for ten minutes, really. And I’ll come find you if I’m not. You did good.”
Nicholas pets Vash’s hair back into place. “Make it fifteen. Take yer time: neither of us are exactly fightin’ fit right now, and I know that razor’s damn sharp.” Don’t push yourself either. “And…” Nicholas swallows, pushing down the old, familiar fears that bubble up in him at the prospect of showing his belly. “I need a break anyway,” he admits, his voice low. “So you got the time.”
There’s a pause during which Nicholas internally cringes at himself; it takes everything in him to not flinch away when Vash suddenly turns his head and presses his lips to Nicholas’s pulse. Vash mouths I love you into his neck, and then Nicholas grunts and shivers as Vash makes his sharp canines the punctuation. He manages, “No marks—I gotta work tomorrow—” even as a part of him thrills at the idea of Vash affirming his love by bruising his jugular.
Vash sighs gustily in his ear. He regretfully licks the spot he’d grazed. “Raincheck.”
“Promises, promises.” Nicholas shifts his weight as Vash moves; they straighten in tandem, two halves working as a whole. Nicholas pushes them off the sink, and Vash pulls Nicholas back upright. They untangle their feet like dancing a waltz in reverse, like Wolfwood just got dipped; then Nicholas clicks his tongue when he notices the long wet spot Vash’s leg had left on the inner thighs of his sweats. Vash smirks at him. His grin is a little too predatory to be sweet.
He steps back just barely enough to let Nicholas shimmy out the bathroom door; Nicholas grumbles, “Sticky,” at him when Vash immediately follows him out. Then Nicholas groans, “Shit,” when he finally puts all of his weight onto his bad leg. He grabs for the bathroom doorframe with his closest hand, reflexive insurance to keep himself from kissing the floor, and that sends a twinge of pain through his right shoulder. “Fuck.”
“Woah, hey!” Vash’s arms are warm through Wolfwood’s clothes when he wraps them around him; he takes Wolfwood’s weight. Nicholas’s gratitude wins out over his shame: his leg hadn’t given out, but it had hurt like a bitch, sharp and sudden and more than he’d been expecting it to. That spangle of pain was a warning sign he should actually pay attention to. He gets his better leg under him with Vash’s help. “This is worse than usual.” Yeah, he’s well fucking aware. “What do you think—”
Vash cuts himself off. Nicholas feels the way his arms go tighter, the way all of Vash goes still. Nicholas doesn’t need to turn around to see the guilty expression Vash is wearing; he just drives an elbow back and lets himself be satisfied at Vash’s overdramatic oof! when it hits him.
“Cut that shit out,” Nicholas growls. “I’m gettin’ a divorce if you tell me takin’ my beautiful Angelina out for a ride was a bad idea.” He doesn’t regret picking Vash up from the airport in style. Not when the image of Wolfwood astride a black motorbike, sidecar at the ready, was familiar enough to both Vash the Stampede and Vash Saverem to coax Vash close enough to catch.
“How can I help?” It’s not exactly an apology (they’ve been with each other long enough to know that Vash literally saying sorry in this situation would just end up pissing the both of them off), so Nicholas actually answers.
“Can you grab a bellywarmer and Pani for me? She’s parked by the bed.” Yeah, he could make it to the couch unassisted, but that’s just his pride talking. There’s no real point to keeping up his tough front now, not when Vash already knows he’s hurting and not when Vash has already seen Wolfwood in worse condition.
“Yes, chef.” Nicholas can’t help but smile at that particular pet name. Vash makes sure Nicholas is stably leaned against the wall before he lets go; his bare feet plap on the floorboards as he scurries off to grab Nick’s cane.
Nicholas can’t help his choked-back laugh when Vash rounds the bedroom doorframe again, Pani and fabric in hand. “What?” Vash asks even as he hustles up. “What’s so funny?”
“Yer giblets’re—” Nicholas makes a limp-wristed motion and then holds out his hand afterwards so Vash can pass his cane and the innerwear over. “—just, flappin’ in the breeze.” Vash reflexively looks down at his mostly-soft cock and balls, which are jiggling with every step. He looks back up at Nicholas and makes a face at him. “Y’could’a put on underwear, y’know; waitin’ a few more seconds wouldn’t’ve killed me.”
“This is the thanks I get for my good deeds.” Vash fake-sniffles even as he intently watches Nicholas stabilize himself with the help of Pani’s tripod legs. “Vicious mockery.”
“It’s cute.” It’s precious. Vash makes an indignant noise even as he leans in at Nicholas’s c’mere gesture; his utter lack of hesitation warms Nicholas’s heart. Vash the Stampede hadn’t been the marrying type, but Vash Saverem was worried about his husband—as well as comfortable enough in his own skin and assured enough of his safety to not give a second thought to whether or not his literal softest bits were on display. Vash trusts Wolfwood, and Wolfwood… well, Nicholas trusts Vash more than he’d ever be able to say.
Vash brightens when Nicholas pecks him on the cheek. “There,” Nicholas says. “Proper thanks.”
“One more for the road? For good behavior?” Vash laughs when Nicholas mock-swats at him. “Okay, okay, I’m shaving, I’m shaving, I’ll go shave.” He hesitates for a moment as he watches Nicholas straighten. “You’re sure—?”
Wolfwood cuts him off. “We tripped over each other.” Both Nicholas and Vash are trying to be softer men in this kinder, easier life. And sometimes it’s hard to be soft when their heads are too full of their last lives, when they get too caught up in their worries. Sometimes they push each other too hard while trying to get through to each other. “You didn’t know and I didn’t know. It was an honest mistake, and I still trust you.” Vash looks like he’s gonna cry again. Nicholas starts making his way towards their couch before they both start getting maudlin, flapping a hand at Vash in dismissal. “Put on some damn underwear! Yer undercarriage’s gettin’ cold!”
Vash laughs, bright as bells, and finally gets going. Nicholas plops himself down on their couch, uses one of Pani’s rubber feet to flip the closest power strip back on, and wraps himself up in a jumbo-sized heating pad from bellybutton to thighs. He sighs as it starts warming up, just savoring for a second the primal comfort in being able to have warm-on-demand, and then braces both hands on Pani’s grip. He leans his forehead against them and tells himself he’s got the time to sit idle. He’s got the time to just sit with himself.
Nicholas takes stock. Physical’s marginally easier, so he starts there: he’s hurting, obviously, sore in the bones of his core and down his left leg, but also up his back and around his knee from how he’d unconsciously been overcompensating. Luckily though, he and Vash had caught him pushing too hard before it had put him out of commission; he’ll take something before he goes to bed. He should put food in his stomach to help with that; with that thought he realizes he’s feeling a little hollow, a little thirsty. He knows he’d eaten dinner, so why…?
Nicholas winces internally when he remembers ‘dinner’ had been rice-in-soup, bolted down between stretches to loosen up to ride Angelina. That had been over an hour ago; Nicholas mentally revises Vash’s—now their—dinner plans. No wonder his stomach was bothering him; it was twisted up as much from hunger as it was from nerves. “Gonna finish yer water,” he calls out to Vash without looking up; he knows Vash is within earshot by the clink and clunk of Vash setting up for a ‘proper shave’ on their minimal bathroom counterspace.
“Go for it!” Vash calls back, acknowledgment and permission all in one. “More where that came from!”
In this life, Wolfwood can grow mint and green onion on their windowsill. In this life, they don’t have to ration water. In this life, ice doesn’t cost anything special to make. In this life, Wolfwood finishes Vash’s water and lets his brief twinge of guilt pass through him, letting it go after. There’s nothing to forgive. The needs of his flesh are not a sin.
What else does his body need? Nicholas screws the top back onto Vash’s waterbottle and takes stock again. There’s another soft ache in him separate from the aftermath of his surgeries; it’s settled diffuse in his chest and belly like heartsickness. Nicholas identifies it as skin-hunger after a few seconds of consideration. It’s not the boiling lust that Vash’s body produces, but it’s as close of a need as Wolfwood’s body can conjure up for him on such short notice; it’s barely been slaked by the brief kisses and brushes of contact he and Vash had shared tonight.
Nicholas has missed Vash while he’s been away, and Nicholas closes his eyes as that thought makes a bittersweet wave of longing swell through him, leaving his skin prickling in its wake. To have and to hold, in sickness and health—he just has to hang in there a little longer. Vash is home and more than willing to be held. Nicholas turns his head on his folded hands and opens his eyes to look at the bathroom. Vash’s elbow and part of his arm flick in and out of the doorway as he strops his razorblade; Nicholas finds himself smiling at the familiar sight of Vash’s focused, precise motions too big for the small room.
That takes care of the needs of the body. Now, what of the needs of the soul? Nicholas feels his smile wilt as he remembers his memory, Nicholas the Punisher’s memory. The afterimages of his despair and self-loathing are still rattling around somewhere in his gut; they bubble up in him when he remembers again that he’d outlived his last life.
(In that life, Nicholas had died aged somewhere between sixteen and twenty-seven; in this life, Nicholas had been twenty-seven, too, when he’d died on an operating table. In this life, it hadn’t been a fight with his brothers; in this life, it had been Nicholas trying to de-escalate a furious, grieving mother and feeling a bright, hot, familiar-yet-not pain knock him off his feet. In this life, it had been Nicholas detachedly staring down the wild glare of her headlights as her engine had roared with a demon’s voice in the concrete confines of a parking garage—and then it had been nothing coherent at all.
Nicholas remembers feeling a grim sort of satisfaction at how he’d successfully redirected the danger onto just him; then he remembers being shot and realizing all in a mortal rush that he’d misjudged. He remembers wondering if this was how Vash the Stampede had gotten so many scars. He remembers hoping Vash would actually cry this time.)
Nicholas hunches his shoulders. He is not Nicholas the Punisher. Not anymore. But sometimes, when he’s full of fear and self-hatred and hurting in just the right ways, he’s close enough; and that’s when Nicholas’s memories become his again.
He makes himself sit and pick through his emotional unease. His fear is easy enough to identify: he’s afraid for Vash’s well-being, both physical and mental. He’s also afraid for his own well-being, because Vash the Stampede wasn’t the marrying type and there would always be a part of Nicholas that was afraid of being abandoned yet again. The self-loathing follows on the heels of that: he’d been too much of a burden to keep. He’d needed too much in a way that couldn’t be satisfied, that had taken from others. He’d tried to give back, because it wasn’t fair to just take, because he could be more than just someone who would only take, and, in both lives, he’d pushed himself too far trying to prove that to his satisfaction.
(In this life, Nicholas had woken up to Vash crammed into an uncomfortable hospital chair. His boyfriend had had greasy hair and dark bags underneath his eyes and had been beautiful. So beautiful, still. Vash had noticed he’d swum up back into consciousness; he’d leaned in.
“Welcome back,” Vash had told him. “Don’t fucking scare me like that again. Please.”)
His muscles don’t need to carry any more tension tonight, so Nicholas tries to sit with his feelings instead of shoving them back off to the side. He tells himself that Vash is home. Vash is safe. Vash had found his way back to himself with Nicholas’s help, and Nicholas was treasured for the blessing of his very existence. He is living proof of an impossible thing that Vash the Stampede could have never had. On No Man’s Land, Nicholas had died aged somewhere between sixteen and twenty-seven, and in this life Nicholas is almost thirty and had happily married Vash.
How far they’ve come. That was worth something very precious indeed.
Nicholas rubs his forehead and sits back. He feels a little hollow, a little cored out, but less restless than he had been. He checks the time, turns off the heating pad and the power strip, shimmies himself into his bellywarmer to retain as much of the warmth as he can, and gets himself back onto his feet. Right. Back to work: he and Vash will both feel better for some hot food in them.
In the kitchen, Nicholas gets himself into his apron and gets everything he needs out of the fridge, then lets himself get lost in the easy, familiar mechanics of prep. Standing on another anti-fatigue mat, leaning most of his weight into the counter, he chops up the green onion and one largish tomato plucked from one of his wicker fruit baskets. Wolfwood sets both ingredients aside, drags a stainless steel mixing bowl closer, and cracks four eggs into it; he whisks them together, adding a splash of milk and a generous shake of white pepper, and starts his medium-small frypan heating. (He would use their wok, could manage it one-handed, but, well. Vash would be unhappy, and the frypan will do. It’s ten-oh-five PM on a Thursday, and the world won’t end if the stir-fried tomatoes-and-eggs aren’t the best thing Vash has ever put into his mouth.)
Nicholas serves up two bowls of rice in the meantime and puts them in the microwave to warm, then he tosses half his chopped scallions into the hot oil of the pan, letting them sizzle for just a couple of seconds before he dumps in the eggs. Scrambling them’s easy, familiar work; he adds the tomato when they’re barely congealed and stirs them all together so there’s little bits of egg smeared across the larger tomato chunks. He takes the rice out of the microwave while he waits for the tomato to cook off a little, exchanges it for the tupperware of leftover soup, and sets it to heat while he lightly salts the contents of the pan and plates it.
Just in time: Nicholas holds the pan and his cooking chopsticks out stiffly in front of him as a pair of arms wind around his waist. “Mmmmmm—smells good.” Vash noses into the crook of his neck; his hands gently knead at Wolfwood’s belly. Vash’s hair is a puff of blond in the corner of Nicholas’s vision, barely tamed, and he smells like lemongrass and vetiver and his cedar aftershave.
“Hot pan,” Nicholas replies dryly, half-scold and half well-worn banter. “Careful.”
“Smells good enough to eat,” Vash continues, by all appearances not listening (though he does stop squirming so Nicholas can safely put his used pan onto a cold burner to cool). He waits until Nicholas’s hands are empty to gently scrape teeth against his skin; Nicholas manages to swallow his tiny moan, though he can’t do anything about the way he slightly tips his head or the way he leans his weight back into Vash.
Unfortunately, that moment’s all that he can give his husband: they still have to eat. “I smell like stir-fry.” More banter, though this comment has more than a grain of truth in it: Nicholas does now smell like tomato-and-eggs. Part of him cringes internally at the thought of bringing it into their bed, but he puts the feeling aside. There’s still work to do.
Nicholas pats Vash’s hands and pulls away to get the soup out of the microwave. “Grab us a serving spoon and a spoon for the soup.” Ah, the green onions. He puts the soup tupperware down and tosses his saved scallions on top of the tomatoes-and-eggs as a garnish. “And a knife. There’s meat in it.”
“You’re spoiling me.” Vash lasciviously squeezes Nicholas’s thighs and ass when he pulls away; Nicholas aims a gentle elbow behind him and taps Vash’s diaphragm.
“I know yer memory ain’t that shit. I said I would, didn’t I?”
“You did.” Then Vash tosses the used, slightly-damp towel that he’d apparently still had onto Nicholas’s head, effectively obscuring his sight, and ignores Nicholas’s surprised spluttering to vigorously scrub his head through it with both hands.
Wolfwood flails at him; he emerges from the towel indignant and as red as a tomato when Vash (giggling like a horrible little ghost) lets him go. By the time Nico’s collected himself and his dignity, Vash already has the ingredients put away and all the food on the dining room table.
“The hell was that for??” Wolfwood finally manages. He tries to scrape his hair back into some kind of order.
“Don’t stick your head under the tap,” Vash replies sunnily. “That should be good enough until morning, right?” He plops himself down in his seat. “C’mon, let’s eat before it gets cold.”
Nicholas stands in their kitchen, holding Vash’s towel in one hand and Pani’s grip in his other. He stares at Vash in just his boxers sitting pretty and so patient at their tiny dining room table set for two. He feels some vast, unnameable love well up in his chest.
Vash looks at him, expression softening into one full of fondness and understanding. It wrinkles the corners of Vash’s eyes into crow’s feet. The feeling in Nicholas’s chest deepens in response. Ah. What a blessing it was to be able to witness Vash aging from a place at his side. “You’ve got a funny look on your face, Wolfwood,” Vash says. His voice is so gentle.
Nicholas scrubs the towel across his hair himself as he stumps to the table, getting out more of the smell of stir-fry. “I could’a used the shower stool,” he grumbles as he goes.
“Tub’s slippery and you’d have to get it out of storage.” Vash watches Nicholas thump down and rub the towel over his forearms and hands. “And it’s getting late, and it’s been a long day. Shower in the morning. I can give you a shave, too, that way.”
Nicholas’s thick hair smells like lemongrass and vetiver, like cedar and Vash. “Fine,” he concedes. “Eat,” he orders as he drapes Vash’s towel over Pani’s grip.
“Yes, chef,” Vash chirps. “Hungry?”
“Just toppin’ off.” While Vash splits the stir-fry, Nicholas cuts up the slab of quick-salt-cured pork loin in the soup, stealing a sip of the broth after just to confirm that it’s still good (there’s no reason it wouldn’t be.) It’s a little on the salty side, but that’s fine; Vash doesn’t mind it.
They eat in mutual, agreeable silence, their feet tangled underneath their little dining room table. Vash has more of the tomatoes, less of the eggs, more of the soup and most of the meat and tofu in it. Nicholas passes on the chili sauce tonight for the sake of his stomach and finishes what’s left as-is, the napa and sweet potato vermicelli in the soup doing work to offset the salty-savory of the broth. He eats his rice, polishes off the eggs, and then throws back a pill with the dregs in his bowl.
Vash makes a sympathetic face at him. “Hurting?” He gets up and collects their dirty dishes.
“Sore.” Nicholas gives up his apron when Vash rounds the table and harasses him for it; Vash puts it on over his bare chest and goes to wash everything that needs to be washed. Nicholas pillows his chin in one hand and watches him do it. Ridiculous man. Their shared silence is companionable and familiar, colored by hundreds of other meals they’d had together. Wolfwood thinks he’s smiling the same funny smile he had been before.
God. Nicholas loves him. He loves him. He loves him so much.
He gets himself back onto his feet, throwing Vash’s towel over his shoulder as he does. The smell of green things fills his nose as he makes his way back into the kitchen; Vash glances over at the movement and tells him, “I’m almost done; you don’t hafta get up.”
“Gettin’ dessert,” Nicholas grunts. He goes to the fridge and opens it; he stands there for a moment with the door open as he feels for the right fruit; and then he withdraws holding a white peach, the firmest of those he has, because Vash is weird and likes them crunchy.
He gets himself and Pani over to the sink, jockeying for position with Vash, who gives him the space when he sees what Wolfwood is holding. Nicholas pulls down a dessert plate and a paring knife, gives the fruit a rinse in one of the gaps of Vash’s washing, and starts peeling the peach. Its light, sweet fragrance mixes with the smell of green things wrapped around Nicholas.
Vash turns off the tap when he finishes the washing, dries his hands on the apron, and leans on the counter. He casually loops an ankle around Wolfwood’s and winds fingers into the hem of his cardigan, blue-green eyes watching Wolfwood work. When Nicholas carves off a hemisphere of the peach, offering the slice to him, Vash leans in. He’s trusting Nicholas to not flinch away, to hold still. His lashes are pale fans, graceful against his cheeks. His mouth slips open; his tongue is red against his white teeth when he digs them into the fruit; Vash drags the flesh off the flat of the blade, working it into his mouth as he tips his head back. His pink lips are shiny with sweet juice.
His groan is nigh-orgasmic when he bites down. Nicholas chuckles as he keeps slicing the peach, depositing the other hemisphere and the remaining long chunks of flesh around the pit onto the dessert plate. “Good, yeah?”
Vash nods rapidly as he chews, his eyes shut in rapture. Nicholas watches a drop of juice bead at the corner of his mouth and resists the urge to lick it up. Vash swallows, and Nicholas watches the long line of his throat bob. “So good. More?” Vash begs, his face all big, glittering seafoam eyes. Nicholas nudges the plate closer to him. Vash watches Wolfwood, who is licking the paring knife clean, with the same intense focus he’d once put towards landing an impossible, non-lethal shot. He begs, “More?”
Nicholas gives in. He feeds Vash the slices of peach, and Vash eats them from his hand one by one, his eyes fixed all the while on Nicholas gnawing the remaining flesh off of the pit. When there’s no fruit left, Vash runs his soft, red tongue over and between Wolfwood’s fingers, licking the nectar off of Nico’s knuckles, his palm, his wrist. When he’s done, Vash reaches for Wolfwood’s other hand wordlessly. Nick gives it to him without even a token protest.
Vash cleans that hand, too; and, when he’s done, he breathes, “Delicious,” into the flutter of Wolfwood’s pulse at his wrist.
Nicholas pulls Vash up into a kiss. He’s absurd, ridiculous, infuriating; what else is he to do? God, he loves him. Vash’s mouth is open and hot and sticky-sweet against Wolfwood’s. Vash’s hands roam across the breadth of Wolfwood’s back, kneading at muscle, tracing the line of his spine. Nicholas tangles a hand in Vash’s hair as he licks across Vash’s tongue, his teeth, his hard palate. He sucks and bites gently on Vash’s lower lip and Vash moans into their mouths.
Nicholas shapes the words, Welcome home, into their kiss, and Vash’s lungs hitch on a sob.
“Yes,” he says, pulling back just far enough to say it. He’s started crying again. “Yes, yes, thank you. I’m back. I’m back. I’m here.”
When Nicholas wraps his arm around Vash’s waist, Vash surges into him. And on any other night, on any other homecoming, Wolfwood would have been able to catch him—but this night, this homecoming, Vash bowling into him makes him lose his feet. Wolfwood gets tackled into the edge of the counter; the small of his back and his bad hip hit the unyielding granite edge and Nicholas involuntarily flinches into their kiss as white pain sears up his spine.
Vash yanks his mouth back like he’d been scalded. “Sorry!” he yelps. His hands have stilled, are hovering an inch above Wolfwood’s back. For a split second, unbridled fear and guilt shine in his blue-green eyes; then, just like that, they’re gone, hidden behind a smile that Wolfwood hates.
Fuck. “Spikey,” Nicholas tries, over Vash’s rambling (“Oh no, look at the time; it’s getting so late; we should go to sleep; you have work in the morning.”) “Vash.”
Vash shuts his mouth when Wolfwood pulls him back in by the hand he still has in his hair. Nicholas presses their foreheads together hard, hard enough to hurt a little. “You’ve got me,” Nicholas tells him. “Promise. I’m here, I wanna dance—just, not against the sink when it’s been a long day. Yeah?” When Vash hesitates, Nicholas says, “I’ve got yer back.”
Vash screws his eyes closed. He wraps his arms around himself, breathes in through his nose. “Yeah,” he returns. His smile cracks, goes a little melancholy at the edges, but at least it’s real. “Yeah, you do.” He visibly wrestles with himself for a moment before he opens his eyes. He asks, “Can we go to bed?”
“To start.” He’s not going to let Vash pack his want away as easy as that. Not when they’ve spent the night flirting with each other, not when Vash had spent a lifetime denying himself want, not when they’re both needing touch—but Wolfwood does recognize when Vash needs to call a time out. He lets Vash pull away, retreat from his arms. “I’ll be along.” He hopes Vash takes his words as a promise instead of a threat.
Vash pulls away. He looks back at him once, twice, but does go. Wolfwood stands for a long second in the now-empty kitchen, feeling the phantom weight of Vash in his arms, before he breathes a soundless sigh. He rinses the dessert plate and paring knife. He fishes Vash’s waterbottle out of the drying rack. He adds a few cubes of ice, pours in water, screws on the top. The motions are easy, mechanical. Something concrete that he can do to help.
(When he’s done, he lets himself pause long enough to cover the small of his back with his palm. He hopes the counter won’t leave a bruise. He knows it probably will. The dull hurt of it throbs with his pulse under his hand. Wolfwood lets two heartbeats pass; then he pushes the pain aside and gets himself back into motion.)
“Brought us water,” he says in their bedroom. “Puttin’ it here.” He leaves the bottle on his nightstand next to the lamp Vash had turned on and determinedly doesn’t linger, even though Vash is curled up in their bed in a miserable huddle with his back facing the door. Vash is hugging his pillow, and the penknife Vash keeps underneath it is nowhere in sight; that means it’s probably on Vash’s person; and that means Vash feels safer at that moment with a weapon.
Nicholas lingering to fuss would only make things worse, so he doesn’t comment on it. He just gets his sleep shirt, a washcloth, a pair of socks, and makes his way back out to the bathroom. When he’s done in there, he does his nightly rounds: he takes a circuit around their apartment, checking he turned off the stove, checking the latches on the windows, the lock on the front door, and turning off all the lights as he goes.
When he gets back into the bedroom, the top to the waterbottle has been unscrewed. Vash’s mother-of-pearl-inlaid pocketknife is sitting on his nightstand with the safety lock engaged. Vash stirs when Nicholas shuts the door behind him; he uncurls and rolls partly onto his back so he can just look at Nicholas as Nicholas crosses the layered rugs around their bed, as he parks Pani within reach, as he sits down, as he gets his legs up.
Nicholas breaks the silence. “Talk to me, bluebird,” he prods. “What’s goin’ on in that pretty head of yers?”
Vash lets go of his pillow; he rolls over entirely so he can hesitantly reach out to Nicholas. When he’s safely wrapped up in Wolfwood’s arms, he murmurs, “Tess got into a car accident.” Starting at the very top, huh? Well, Wolfwood’s content to let Vash work his way around to the meat of his woes. “She’s fine, just bruised up, same for the other driver, but the car will have to be replaced.” Wolfwood grimaces internally: any accident bad enough to total a car was probably nasty. He’s glad Tess is okay.
Vash burrows closer, takes a bracing breath that he follows with a slower one as he inhales the scent of clean laundry and Wolfwood. He says, “Kni called. And you know how careful he is about only calling when we both know we’re okay for it.” Wolfwood does. In this life, haunted by what they’d done to each other the last time around, Vash and Knives have never parted ways. They work hard to keep it that way. “So I picked up ‘cause—‘cause he’d only call if it was important; so I picked up; and he told me in the middle of me wrapping up my shoot that Tess had totaled her car and that she was in the hospital. And I—I—” Vash’s fingers have closed on the front of Wolfwood’s sleep shirt; they’re clenched tightly enough to strain the fabric. Wolfwood feels the way it pulls against the breadth of his shoulders. “I felt…”
Vash buries his face in Wolfwood’s chest, overwhelmed again at just the recollection. Wolfwood hums something wordless and soft and cards his fingers through Vash’s hair like he’s soothing Vash after a nightmare. Vash says, his voice steady like nothing’s wrong, “Tess only wanted one of us there; she said she didn’t have the patience to watch us trip over each other trying to drive her around.” Yeah, okay. Wolfwood couldn’t blame her. Vash upset was bad enough; Vash and Kni both upset and occupying the same space was a magnitude worse. “And I—I don’t know. I told Kni I’d play rock-paper-scissors with him to figure out who should go because we both wanted to go, because we both wanted to help her; and Kni looked at me and—” Vash’s voice cracks. He shudders. He drags in a sticking breath.
Vash tells Wolfwood, “Kni asked me if there wasn’t someplace else I wanted to be. If I didn’t want to be there more right then in that very moment. And I looked at him in the middle of packing on my phone screen and I… and I realized he was right. He was right. I wanted—I needed to know that you were okay.” What. What? “That you were safe.” Why? “So I—” Vash is laughing shaky, broken little giggles even as he wets Wolfwood’s skin with tears. “I told him that. And he, he made a face, you know the one, that one he does when he catches us necking—” Wolfwood does know that face; it’s the only coherent thought his brain can dredge up from the tumult Vash’s words have thrown it into. “And he—he told me to go home. So. So I did. Sorry. I’m sorry. I know you weren’t expecting me back so soon; and I’m sorry; but here I am.”
Nicholas slowly starts petting Vash again. He says, carefully, instinctively feeling his way through the words, “You could’a called me.”
Vash tightens his grip just a little more. If he was any closer, he’d be crawling his way into Nicholas’s chest. “Yeah,” he sighs. “I could’ve.” He confesses, “It wouldn’t’ve been enough.”
What the hell does that mean? “I ain’t followin’, Spikey.”
Vash pulls away. Wolfwood is reluctant to let him go until it becomes clear Vash isn’t fleeing; he’s just giving himself enough room to look Nicholas in the eyes. Vash’s stare is the blue of a polar glacier, crystalline with tears. “You have no idea what it was like,” Vash states. He splays one hand across Nicholas’s chest. His voice hardens. “You have no idea what it was like to get a call from your boyfriend’s workplace because your boyfriend had gotten shot and run over by a car and you were his emergency contact. In your quiet, easy, second chance, somehow the man that you had kissed on the mouth that same morning was, at that very second, dying; and there was nothing you could fucking do to save him. Again.”
Nicholas opens his mouth. No words come out. He closes his mouth. Vash’s hand feels like it weighs a million pounds on his chest. Vash’s stare burns.
“I dropped everything back then,” Vash whispers. “Nothing else mattered. The only thing I could think about was that I had to be with you.”
Nicholas opens his mouth. He manages to say, weakly, “But I didn’t get hurt this time.”
“You—” Vash gusts out a breath, shuddering as he does. Some of the awful tension that had been winding him tighter and tighter dissipates. He droops until he’s mashing his forehead against the hand he has on Nicholas’s chest. “You didn’t. But it didn’t matter—getting that call from Kni? It was too close. It was too close to what had happened with you. And I… I—I’m sorry. I freaked out.” A note of resigned frustration colors his voice. “I freaked out and made a mess for everyone to clean up again. Kni, Livio, Razlo, Meryl, Milly, you…”
Wolfwood rubs Vash’s back, strokes one long line up from his tailbone to the back of his head to give himself the time to think. He’s still—he can’t untangle much from the snarl in his head just yet, but he does manage to ask, “You got off the plane and told me you were needin’ to get to Tess?” He realizes, as he says that, that the tightness he feels in his chest and belly are connected to a newly-formed, aching hurt and confusion. If Vash had wanted to see him so bad, why had he still had to work so hard to get Vash home? Vash didn’t—Vash isn’t lying, Nick is sure of that. But if Vash had needed to see him so bad that he’d dropped everything and booked a ticket for the next flight back home, why had Vash tried to bail so fast once he’d got here? Why had he kept on trying to dodge Wolfwood’s help if he knew they were married and what it meant?
(A quiet voice in Wolfwood whispers, Vash the Stampede ain’t the marryin’ type: he was runnin’ away from you. You think he wanted a tagalong to mind?)
“I didn’t remember.” Vash’s voice is so fragile. So quiet and soft and sorry, so damn sorry. “When I got off the plane, I only really remembered what had happened to you in our last life. When I saw you on the call, I knew you were okay, and that was enough for me right then. I knew we had to still be allies, because of how you were there for me, but I didn’t remember we were married until you reminded me. And being married… all I knew was that meant that I still trusted you to have my back, for as long as you’d have me, and we’d wanted the world to know.
“I didn’t remember exactly why we’d gotten married until I was almost done with my shower.” He’s not crying. The sorrow and guilt he’s feeling go beyond tears this time. “What happened to you this time, what it did to you, that I’d almost lost you again… That was the entire reason I got on that plane. It was so important—and I somehow still…”
Vash lifts his head. He looks Nicholas in the eyes, and Wolfwood sees in them that Vash knows the full weight of what he had done. Vash knows that he had tried to run away from Wolfwood at the airport. Vash knows that he had shied away from Wolfwood’s extended hand. Vash knows that he had hated how he could tell that Wolfwood had dropped everything to help him. Vash knows that he had been scared by Wolfwood’s devotion, because he knew that Wolfwood was the kind of man willing to put his life on the line for his love. A lifetime ago, Vash had told himself he was sparing Wolfwood the hurt, that he was keeping Wolfwood safe. A lifetime ago, he had tried to shoulder his pain himself because it was his, because he could, because doing everything himself was familiar and safe. A lifetime ago, Vash had faced his brother alone because Vash hadn’t thought himself worthy enough of the precious gift of help he had been offered.
(A lifetime ago, Vash had abandoned Wolfwood and his bloody, unworthy hands at the bottom of a long flight of stairs. A lifetime ago, Vash had said, If your only solution is to kill, then stay out of this, Wolfwood.
A lifetime ago, Wolfwood had been reminded of the sheer size of the gulf of skill that yawned between Vash and him. He had almost fallen to his knees at just Knives waking up, and he had known then that he was nothing in the twin’s eyes. He had known then that Vash had been so kind. That he had been indulging Wolfwood’s hope that they could be allies, that Wolfwood could realistically do anything to help Vash, that he could be anything more than a weak, fallible, selfish human to Vash.
Wolfwood had gone to face his brother and his mentor alone. It was the least he could do. Wolfwood could not relieve Vash of the weight of the world, but he could keep from adding to it. Vash needed to rest. He had more to worry about than Wolfwood. It was Wolfwood’s problem and his alone.
He could do this. He had to do this. He had to try.)
There’s a warm hand holding the side of his neck. “Nicholas.” Wolfwood refocuses his eyes. Vash’s thumb is rubbing circles at the corner of his jaw. “It wasn’t you. It wasn’t anything you did or didn’t do.” Vash’s eyes are so knowing and so sad and so, so sorry. “I wasn’t careful enough: I didn’t pack rescue meds and stressed myself out on the flight with nothing to do but think about Tesla and bury—” His steady voice catches. “—what had happened to you. I didn’t… I didn’t mean to scare you.” His sympathetic expression wavers. He breaks their stare. He whispers, “Sometimes it feels like all I’ve ever done is scare you. I don’t know if sorry’s enough. Not when I keep hurting you.”
Indignation and surprise flare up in Wolfwood’s chest. “That ain’t true.” He grabs Vash’s wrist before Vash can pull away, keeping Vash’s hand on his neck. “Vash. You know that ain’t true. I wouldn’t’ve married you if all you did was hurt me.” Vash is so careful. So considerate. So damn kind.
Vash’s face twists and catches someplace between a sob and a smile. “I literally just hurt you!” he snarls. “I made you remember—I did it earlier—you wouldn’t be hurting so bad right now if you didn’t have to come out and get me, if I’d remembered earlier what you’d gone through—”
“I could smack you right now.” Wolfwood lets go of Vash’s wrist, and, before Vash has the time to actually pull away, he grabs Vash’s face. He squashes Vash’s cheeks together. “You jackass.” He swings up his other arm, and Vash goes cross-eyed as Wolfwood’s knuckle grazes the tip of his nose.
His wedding band glints in the bedroom light where it graces Nicholas’s hand. With his voice rumbling in his chest, Nicholas asks, “Do you regret this?”
Vash stares at the ring for a split second. Then his eyes widen and dart to Nicholas’s. “Nyo. Nyever—ugh, you—!” He crankily shoves at Nicholas’s wrist; Nicholas lets him go so Vash can properly enunciate. “Asshole. I could never regret marrying you. But—”
Nicholas cuts him off. “What does this mean?” He waggles his fist a bit for emphasis; he smirks a little when Vash visibly considers biting it, his annoyance at Nicholas’s antics winning out over his guilt for a moment. “C’mon Spikey, I know you know what symbolic representation is; yer fancypants private schoolin’ was good fer that, yeah?” He asks in a schoolteacher’s lilt, “What does my ring represent?”
Vash sulks at him. “It’s a promise,” he mutters. “But—”
“You know I trust you?” That stops Vash short. Nicholas’s focus sharpens. He waits, watching Vash like a hawk; Vash closes his eyes like that’d spare him the force of Nicholas’s regard.
“I know what you’re doing,” Vash grumbles. There’s no bite to his words. “Yeah, I trust you like you trust me. Shitty priest.”
“Ex-priest. I paid my dues to the good Lord last time around,” Nicholas counters. “If you trust me then listen: you might’ve run off, but you came back.”
“You’re still one of God’s favorites. I just have you on loan.” Vash’s mouth twists like he’s tasting something bitter. “I still hurt you.”
“Almighty God, please forgive him his transgression: he don’t mean it,” Nicholas says reflexively before he clicks his tongue. “Don’t blaspheme.” He flicks at Vash’s waist in a light reprimand; Vash pulls a face at him. “Now. Yer wearin’ one of these rings, too. I know you don’t make promises lightly; so that means you’ve got my back, too. An’ I trust you like you trust me; so I know that when you hurt me like this, when we set each other off, when we’re rough with each other, you ain’t doin’ the hurtin’ fer hurtin’s sake. You’d rip yerself to shreds before you’d choose t’raise a hand ‘gainst me.”
“You can’t say that.” Vash’s voice goes strained. “You can’t say that, Wolfwood. Maybe I might not consciously choose, but I’ll still bite if I’m scared. You know what kinda stuff I do when I lose my head, and this time around I’ll fight tooth and nail for my life.”
“You think I don’t know you can be a real mean sonuvabitch?” (Do you want to know what I see when I look at you? I see a man forcing himself to play the devil even as his heart cries out.) “Trust me to knock you on yer ass if you deserve it. You do the same fer me.”
Vash stills at that. He opens his eyes. He says, “You didn’t, back then. You didn’t this time around.” He’s looking at some point four inches above Nicholas’s head. “Even though we were dating. Even though we said we were trying to do better than before. When it came down to brass tacks, you let me keep you at arm’s length so I could feel safe; and I let you because it was easy. We had our parts; we already knew all the steps; and it was so easy that I almost lost you again.”
“Vash. Hey.” Nicholas loosens his fist. He uses that hand to tilt Vash’s chin down. “Spikey. Look at me?” When Vash reluctantly meets his eyes, Nicholas says, “It takes two to tango. We talked ‘bout this.” Vash’s mouth trembles. “Talked it to death an’ back, even. We decided we were gonna do somethin’ ‘bout it, ‘cause we knew we’d just had a near miss and didn’t want it to happen again. Remember?”
Vash nods. Nicholas tells him, “I love you. Yer not Vash the Stampede anymore. Yer not Vash the Stampede ‘cause you made yerself into a man able to make this promise to me.” Nicholas lifts his hand. Vash’s eyes catch on his ring.
His resolve fails: Vash’s composure cracks on a sharp sob. “Fuck,” he curses through his crying. “Fuck! Nicholas.” His voice has gone raw, hoarse with his tears. “I was so scared—I was so, so scared; I thought I’d lost you again; all I heard was Tess and car accident and hospital and all I could think about after that was sitting by your hospital bed for weeks counting your heartbeat, reading and rereading your chart and getting reminded of Tesla’s specimen notes every time I did—seeing what was left of her every time I looked at you and all the tubes and wires you were hooked up with—getting chased out by the nurses every night ‘cause I wasn’t your fucking spouse and having to spend hours praying your pulse wouldn’t stop; then I thought about your heart giving out in the middle of the night while I was on a fucking business trip; and then about coming home too late and having to ID your body; and then I couldn’t stop remembering the way things ended last time and burying you alone and the aftertaste of Bride in my mouth and the way the sand felt under my nails and how I’d buried so many people over the years, but it was totally different when it was you—” He’s breathing too-fast too-quick, wet and labored by the end of his spill of words. “And it was all I could think about on the flight. You were dead; I buried you; we’d run out of time; you were dead; I buried you; we’d run out of time; you were dead; I buried you; you’d said sorry to me before the end. Like you were wasting my time, like it was your fault I got so attached—you wouldn’t have even died like that if you hadn’t met me—I barely even thought about Tess! When it was her that was hurt, when she was why Knives and I—how could I? How could I forget? About her, about you—it’s not even been two years—I’m, I, I’m the fucking worst—”
“You ain’t.” Nicholas pulls Vash down and Vash crumples completely. He smothers his ragged sobs in the front of Nicholas’s sleep shirt as Nicholas rubs up and down his long back. “Yer strong is what you are. Yer so damn strong and so damn brave and you care so damn much.” Vash hiccups, a denial caught in his throat. “Shh.” Nicholas tangles his hand in Vash’s hair. “Hey. C’mon, Spikey. You know you ain’t gonna convince me otherwise.” He guides Vash to the slope of his chest. “You came back, and here I am. You’ve got me now. You’ve got me. Come Hell or high water. ‘Til death do us part.”
Nicholas’s heart throbs in his chest; his pulse rings under Vash’s ear. Nicholas holds Vash and lets his heart beat a steady tempo that he matches with his breaths as he holds Vash. “You can’t blame yerself,” he tells Vash. “Not even ‘bout Tess. Not when yer brother gave you his blessin’ to come back home to me.” Vash makes a gurgling noise like there’s blood in his windpipe. Nicholas squeezes him. “C’mon, Vash. Breathe with me.” Vash shudders against him. His chest expands in the circle of Wolfwood’s arms when he drags in a sticking breath. “There you go. You’ve got it. You’ve got me. I’m here.”
Nicholas lies on their marriage bed squashed underneath Vash’s weight. He runs his hands up and down Vash’s scarless back, mapping instead the softness at his hips and waist and the strength still in his broad shoulders. Vash’s chest rises and falls in the circle of his arms, stutter-start until his lungs finally catch Nicholas’s tempo. Nicholas keeps telling Vash that he’s brave, that he’s strong, that he’s safe, that he has him. He murmurs his faith to the man in his arms as Vash cries and cries and cries, and Nicholas feels bittersweet tenderness swell and ebb in him as he does. He hates Vash hurt, but, too, he feels terribly blessed to be able to comfort Vash. To be able to ease even a fraction of Vash’s pain. His sweet man and his bleeding heart…
For better or worse, nothing can last forever. Even this pain will pass. Nicholas holds Vash until Vash cries himself out, until Vash has no tears left to mark the horror and panic that he’d held at bay all through the hours until now. He’s so strong and so small in Nicholas’s arms. Vash’s voice is a fragile thread of gossamer burnt rough by his sobs when he whispers, “I love you.” He admits, “I’m havin’ a really hard time believing right now that I’m anything good, but… I trust you. I do.”
“Good ‘n evil are relative anyway. Take it from an ex-priest.” Nicholas chuckles when Vash halfheartedly swats at him.
He gently tips them onto their sides. Vash clings to him like a limpet, stubbornly hiding his face in the front of Nick’s soaked shirt. Wolfwood laughs again as he gently shakes Vash’s shoulder, unable to prop himself up on an elbow for how Vash is stuck to him. “C’mon, love. Water.”
Nicholas doesn’t need to see Vash’s face to know he’s sulking, but Vash does loosen his grip enough to let Nicholas snag the waterbottle. Nicholas’s heart twinges a bit when Vash sits up enough to drink from it. His husband’s got puffy, bloodshot eyes and snot on his upper lip and his complexion looks like an uncooked pizza, all globs of white and red. He looks awful. He looks beautiful.
“You apologize to me for cryin’ and I really will smack you,” Nicholas tells him as Vash pulls the bottle away from his lips. “If you gotta say anythin’, say thanks.”
Vash makes a face at him, obviously caught out. It really does his current look no favors. “Thank you,” Vash snips, his words enunciated as crisply as a Catholic schoolboy’s when leading grace for the first time. Nicholas snickers. “Can I at least say sorry for flying home early with like, forty minutes notice?”
“What’s there to ‘pologize for?” Nicholas stretches out next to Vash. He closes his eyes and lets himself savor the way he can still feel Vash nearby. The subtle sounds of his breaths. The dip of his weight in their bed. The human, animal warmth of him. An ache deferred stirs under Nicholas’s breastbone. He rubs absently at it and then grimaces at his sopping shirtfront. Right. He should deal with that. “It was a family emergency.” Vash makes an exasperated noise above him. “You wanna wash yer face?”
Slender, strong fingers weave into Nicholas’s hair. Vash scratches his nails against Nicholas’s scalp. It feels really good. “I am still sorry,” he murmurs. “I… get so intense. I scare myself sometimes,” he admits. “I know it scares you, too. Sometimes.”
“You’ve got big feelins.” He really needs to get up. Change his shirt. Wipe down his chest, get a washcloth for Vash’s poor face. Refill the waterbottle. “Matches the rest of you, the way you fill up a room. It don’t put me off. It’s honest. It’s…” Hell. It’s getting late, isn’t it? Nicholas makes a circling gesture with one hand without opening his eyes, determined to at least finish his thought. “I ain’t scared of you. Not anymore; I knew what I was gettin’ into when I put that ring on you. Only makes me scared for you. Or for me.” Nicholas falls silent, suddenly aware of what he’s saying. He doesn’t dare open his eyes; he’s not brave enough to find out what expression is on Vash’s face. “Sorry. Don’t take that the wrong way: I wasn’t lyin’, really. I trust you. I know yer safe.”
“I know. Old habits.” Vash’s hand doesn’t falter. His voice is steady. Fond. “Besides. You’re a shit liar.” He chuckles softly when Nicholas groans at him. “What did you wanna say?”
Vash deserves his honesty. Nicholas tells him, “I can’t hate the way you feel things when it’s how it let you live long enough t’meet me. Yeah, yer anger, yer fear—but yer resolve, too. Yer forgiveness and hope. The way yer determined to love. Even yer stubbornness, even if it drives me up the wall some days.”
Vash sighs. “My envy. My greed,” he points out. “My appetite’s enough to knock you off your feet. Literally. And it’s not fair to either of us if I hoard you.”
“It ain’t. But…” Oh hell. He can’t say this. He can’t say it, but he should, because Vash deserves to hear it. Nicholas squirms across their sheets blindly until he finds Vash’s hip. He buries his face against it. With his face mashed against the seam of Vash’s boxers, he mumbles, “I don’t like how bad you scared yerself this time; try to not do that again. But the rest of it… Sometimes is okay. It’s… kinda flatterin’. Makes me feel wanted in a special way. So, even if you flew back just to make yerself feel better, it means—it matters a lot to me that you came back to me fer it.” His voice drops even lower. He mashes his face harder into Vash’s hip, burrowing into the crevice between it and the mattress. “So don’t say sorry to me ‘bout it. Makes me feel like you regret wantin’ me.”
Vash inhales sharply. “Nicholas—never. Not like that. I just… I wish it were easier for the both of us. You deserve—”
“You do, too.” Nicholas shoves himself upright, unearthing himself suddenly. His self-consciousness is eating him alive; he’s done with this conversation. That’s enough vulnerability for tonight. “Here, tell ya what. I’ll let’cha make it up to me. Lemme give you dessert.”
Vash’s face visibly shifts from sympathetic pain to confusion as Nicholas plucks the waterbottle from his hand; Nick unceremoniously thumps it back on the bedside table. “I already had dessert?” Vash asks. And then he says, “Oh. Oh!” when Nicholas crawls between his legs and pins Vash’s left thigh down under his own right.
Nick grins down at him. “Weeeell then,” he drawls. “It’s a good thing you’ve always got room fer sweets, yeah?”
Vash’s pupils dilate even as he scoffs. “Yeah, yeah, laugh it up.” His bravado’s entirely belied by the way his dick twitches in his boxers, making the fabric shift; Nicholas does snicker at that. Vash grabs at Nick’s thigh when he wedges it under Vash’s other hip. “You gonna be okay for work?” Vash adds a little more seriously. “It is late.”
Nicholas looks down at Vash, at Vash still tearstained pink and white, at Vash and his wild hair, at Vash still so careful and thoughtful even on the cusp of conjugal sex. The heartsick ache in him surges into something not quite hunger. He rolls his hips once, experimentally, and feels it blossom into tender want at the way Vash gasps and goes loose.
Nick hooks two fingers in Vash’s waistband and tugs his boxers down to hook under his nuts, revealing Vash in one fell swoop. His husband’s just starting to get hard; Nicholas gets to work on that, wrapping one hand around his length, the other cupping his balls. Nicholas swallows his chuckle when he thinks that this is easy, familiar work—but it is.
Nicholas gently tugs at Vash’s scrotum, rubbing the pad of his thumb in small circles in the dip between the swells of his nuts in his sac. He’s stroking Vash at the same time with his other hand, working him over from base to tip at an easy pace, squeezing tighter at the root and easing off as he pulls. Vash is easy, generous here like he is everywhere else: the loose squish and give of soft cock fades fast under Nick’s attentions as Vash starts to fill out.
“Missed me?” Nick teases. Vash groans and covers his face; his hips twitch up. Nick watches the tendons at the tops of his thighs flex under his creamy skin. He turns the hand he has on Vash’s balls and digs into his boxers; the angle’s awkward, but he’s rewarded by the way Vash startles. The skin on Vash’s forearms visibly tightens into gooseflesh at the feeling of knuckles dragging down his taint. When Nick circles a finger joint around the dry, catching clench of Vash’s asshole, Vash’s cock jumps in his hand.
“So pretty,” Nick coos. “You liked that, huh?” Vash is big enough at this point that Nick feels each stroke in his forearm, his muscles flexing and relaxing in an easy tempo. He’s grown about as much as he’s gonna, though he’s not quite stiff enough that Nick doesn’t find it cute the way Vash’s length flops around when his fist bottoms out. Nick draws circles around Vash’s hole and keeps jacking him until the slide becomes a little sticky from the way Vash’s skin is heating up.
Vash whines when Nicholas lets go of him. “Shhh,” Wolfwood soothes absently. He rocks his hips as he leans over to slide open the top drawer of the nearest bedside table; Vash takes the stimulation offered and ruts up into the bulge of Nick’s package with little kicks of his hips. “Yeah, like that. That’s good, Spikey.”
“Nicholas.” Vash grabs at his knees, his thigh. His fingertips dig in. “Missed you—please, please, please—”
“Greedy.” Nick says the word like a pet name. He shifts his weight enough to free Vash’s leg; Vash immediately wraps both around his waist and pulls himself closer. “Impatient.” Well, he can’t scold Vash too much: the new position does let Wolfwood work a hand around to the small of Vash’s back. He grabs Vash’s waistband there and says, “C’mon, Blondie. Off.”
Vash rocks his hips and his cock rolls across his groin with the motion. He ruts once, twice, against Nick like he just can’t help himself. His balls are a warm, soft, solid weight that rustles through the wiry hair speckling the lowest slope of Nick’s belly. Vash’s stomach hollows, briefly showing off the very bottom of his ribcage. “Nick,” he whines. His nipples are hard. Nick indulges him; he drops the bottle of lube onto the sheets at his hip and covers one pink bud with his palm. He rolls the heel of his hand against it, grinding it down into the give of Vash’s chest. “A-h!”
“Talk to me, honey.” Nick eases up, replaces his palm with his fingers. He pinches Vash’s nipple between two of them and tugs the way Vash likes: just shy of too hard. Vash arches, his mouth dropping open, and then contracts, tugging against Nick’s hold so he’s pulling on his tit even harder. He’s flushing pink in hectic blotches, blood coloring in the irregular wreck of his complexion in a different way. “With the way yer dick was dancin’, I reckon you want somethin’ up that greedy hole of yers. Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Vash breathes. “Yeah, yeah, yeah—” Then some of the need clears from his blown-black eyes. “Wait—what time—”
“Not enough fer me to cum in you, if that’s what yer wantin’.” He rubs Vash’s belly apologetically as Vash groans in disappointment. “My fingers or a toy.”
Vash ponders his choices for a few seconds, then he sighs as through gravely put-upon. “Toy.” He unwinds his legs, presses them together, stretches them straight, and then holds himself up with his tensed core in an impressive display so Nick can tug his boxers off his hips and down, down, down his thighs. When they get to Vash’s knees, Vash flicks them out of Wolfwood’s reach; then he proceeds to nearly fold himself in half so he can yank them the rest of the way off himself. He launches them off the side of the bed with a swing of a shin.
Nicholas watches them plop onto the floor with a raised brow. “What, you plannin’ to sleep in yer birthday suit tonight?”
“We~ll.” Vash stretches out his legs and then splays them open. He drifts hands across the creamy expanses of his inner thighs; the red of his port wine stain is a pretty contrast against the white. Vash quirks his lips into a smirk when he catches Nick tracking his motions. “The sheets are already dirty, right? And you still need to shower in the morning. If you’re willing to lend your husband a thigh for the night…” His smirk stretches into an absolutely wicked grin when Nick’s eyes snap up to his. “I’ll be good,” Vash cajoles, his voice as sweet and as thick as honey. “So good. I won’t even wake you up, promise.”
It’s not just idle dirty talk. Vash’s got the skill to back up what he’s saying, is the thing: they’ve been with each other long enough for Vash to have learned what will wake Nicholas up. Heat settles between Nicholas’s hips as he remembers emerging from sleep to the aftermath of Vash’s love smeared across his skin. The thought of Vash working one, two, more peaks out of himself with a careful, gentle grind against the thick of Nick’s thigh is insanely tantalizing; Vash would get himself off with his fist flying over his cock, rubbing his taint and the back of his sac and the base of the toy Nick’s gonna put in him against Nick, taking what he needs from what Nicholas has provided him. Wolfwood would wake up in the morning to Vash fucked out and Vash’s cum marking Nicholas as his.
“You should sleep,” Nicholas tries. “You’ve been on yer feet all day.”
Vash’s smile goes a little melancholy. “Well,” he concedes. “I’ll try.”
Ah. Nicholas apologetically rubs one of Vash’s knees. Now they both know that Vash probably won’t be able to settle tonight; a few orgasms will just be consolation for bad insomnia. “Got it,” Wolfwood says. “Toy and thigh it is.”
Vash visibly brightens. He lets his hands wander a little further down; he tilts his hips into his palms and then spreads his fingers, holding himself open so Wolfwood can get a good look at his asshole, which is as pretty and as pink as the rest of him. “In that case.” His eyes darken. “Lend a guy a hand?”
Nicholas responds by leaning in. He brushes the backs of his fingers up the slope of Vash’s taint; he traces the subtle swell of it up the seam. Up and up he goes, taking his time as he feels Vash’s pulse flutter eagerly in the delicate, blushing skin; up and up and up he goes until he reaches its peak. With that same gentleness with which he’d touched Vash until now, he takes Vash’s balls in hand and just holds them, letting them both feel their weight solid and warm in the cup of his hand; Vash hums, but his brows pull in as his mouth turns down into a pout. He doesn’t squirm, but he does grumble something to himself underneath his breath. Nick pivots his plans in that next split second at the sound.
He gently lays his precious cargo a little to the side, letting Vash’s scrotum spill itself into the crease of his thigh and groin under its own velvety weight—and then, without any further preamble, he lands a short, sharp, hard, knuckle-popping flick right on the now-exposed, vulnerable root of Vash’s ballsack.
Vash’s entire body lurches violently. “Hck—!” His eyes are wide and sightless. His cock squirts a long, thin line of clear pre onto his tender belly. “Nic—olas—?!” Wolfwood’s name comes out more like a cough as Vash chokes on it. Wolfwood raises his brows and rubs soothing circles against the slope of Vash’s abdomen. That’d worked better than he’d thought it would. “Ough—!” More pre. Vash’s asshole clenches and then loosens. “Fuck! Shit! Ah!” Vash sags; his chest heaves. His mouth gapes open so, so red. Nicholas idly wonders if he’d cum, or if the difference was close enough that it didn’t matter.
“Y’ain’t usually this into pain.” Vash also didn’t usually pull against Nick’s fingers like wanted Wolfwood to yank his nipple right off, and it’s been a long time since he’d been bratty like this in bed. Nick shifts, runs that same soothing hand up Vash’s heaving side. “Pretty for it, though,” he hums. Vash looks good wanting.
Vash whimpers; then he outright whines when Nick pulls away and drops the bottle of lube onto his chest, following it with two foil condom packets. “Niiiiiick—what happened to spoilin’ me?”
“How much sleep you want me to get tonight, Blondie?” He pauses his perusal of the sex toys in that drawer to pat Vash across his tacky groin, taking the opportunity to groom Vash’s strawberry blond pubes against the grain with his fingers. Vash curls his lip at him for his temerity. It makes him look a little too much like his twin, so Nicholas pinches his nose closed in retaliation.
Vash kicks his left shoulder (gently) at it, so Nicholas lets go, closing his hand around Vash’s ankle instead. He leaves it there, rubbing his thumb against Vash’s skin as he goes back to debating between a prostate massager and a plug. Vash heaves a too-loud sigh, but doesn’t say anything else; less than five minutes later, Nick hears the very, very quiet squelch of Vash circling his hole with condom-covered fingers. Then the muscles under Nick’s fingers flex all at once.
He pats Vash. He grumbles, “Slow down, will ya? We got time: you don’t gotta do two at once.”
“Oh, you tell me to do the work, then you bitch about how I’m doin’ a bad job?” Vash’s heel lifts off of Nicholas’s shoulder as his foot points; a particularly wet noise accompanies it. “Hah. Suck it up.” The slick sounds start coming regularly as Vash starts fucking himself on his fingers. The only impact it has on his composure is the way it thins his voice just a hair. Nick shifts his weight. “You know, I’m feeling very underappreciated here.”
“I’m gonna give you a toy with a knot if you keep bitchin’.”
Vash gasps indignantly. “Do you want me to be sore??”
“Think yer workin’ up to it yerself with the way you opened yerself up,” Nicholas points out dryly. He finally turns back to Vash and drops the metal plug he’d picked down on Vash’s belly.
Vash yelps at the cold. His asshole flutters around his fingers when he startles. Nicholas watches Vash take in the toy, watches Vash flush an even darker shade of pink when he registers which plug it is: over a pound of stainless steel cast in pretty, curving lines from its tip through its handle, and Vash has already committed to having it in him for hours.
Vash glances back up at Wolfwood. Nicholas teases him gently, fondly: “Good enough company for ya?”
“Ah. Yeah—” Vash’s voice breaks in the middle of the word. He swallows, grins sheepishly up at Nicholas, and adds, “Think that’ll help keep me occupied.”
“Good.” Nicholas takes a moment to just look at Vash (who has turned his attention back to the toy with a hungry kind of focus). Vash’s eyes are red-rimmed; his wild hair is starting to stick to his temples with sweat. He’s fully erect, his cock stiff enough to bob with his motions. There’s a gossamer thread of pre connecting his red tip and its wet slit to his tensing abdomen. He’s holding himself open with his left hand, port-wine red a shock against his pale thigh and ass, his forearm a red band around his leg. He’s fucking himself with his right, and he’s managed to bottom out on his fingers, his thumb pinching the condom against their bases so he doesn’t lose it. He has a pianists’ hands. He’s using them to pull himself open. Nicholas catches just a peek of the ruby-red inside of his asshole when Vash scissors his fingers apart, and the raw intimacy of it lands in his gut like a rock.
His cock kicks. Nicholas stares down at his lap for a long heartbeat, his brain lagging a beat behind. He palms his bulge, and his breath hisses out of him involuntarily; his hand comes away just a little damp.
Wolfwood wriggles under Vash’s splayed legs, suddenly preoccupied with catching up with his body; he’d thought the ache in his groin was just the screws playing havoc in his pelvis. He’s already sore (had been sore, had pushed it aside because he’d had a job to do, still has a job to do), but his dick is tender in a different way that he’d also accidentally pushed aside. He manages to shuffle his shorts off his hips without throwing Vash’s legs off, and the noise that falls out of him when his cock pops free of the fabric is something stuck between a gasp and a questioning hum. He’s… he’s hard enough to jut, hard enough that the urgency of feels good outweighs the tactile weirdness of touching himself and feeling his flesh involuntarily react. He holds himself in three fingers and strokes down, and the motion peels the red, damp head of his cock out of his foreskin. An inadequate relief immediately twines together with need and tangles up in the sweet-sore ache of skin-hunger that’s still filling him; it’s like a butterfly hitting a spiderweb.
“Nicholas?” His eyes snap open (when had he closed them?) “What’s wrong—oh!” Wolfwood’s eyes dart to Vash’s face.
“Sorry.” The word drops out of him when he opens his mouth; the oddity of it momentarily makes him dizzy. Had he meant to say that? Was that what he’d wanted to say? He’s not certain what he’s apologizing for. “Maybe we had enough time?” His hand is on his cock. His hand’s holding his cock. His cock is hot and stiff in his hand; he feels his pulse in his fingers and his dick and in his teeth. He remembers the disappointed way Vash had sighed when he’d been told he couldn’t have Wolfwood’s cock tonight. He asks, “Do you—” He waggles his dick just a little. “—You can still have the toy later, too…?”
(Part of him protests even as he says the words. He’s tired and he’s hurting around the edge of the painkiller and he has to work tomorrow. He hadn’t planned to put his dick in Vash. The rest of him says he shouldn’t be selfish: it’s just a boner. There’s not that much functional difference between his cock and his thigh. Flesh is flesh. He can spare that much of himself for Vash. Vash had cried his broken heart out on Wolfwood’s chest less than an hour ago; shouldn’t he answer Vash’s fervor in kind? Wouldn’t it be the kindest thing he could do?)
“Nico?”
Wolfwood blinks. “Yeah?”
“Nico.” Wolfwood looks down at his lap. Vash has hooked a few of the fingers of his left hand over Wolfwood’s wrist. It’s an awkward angle for the both of them. “Flower of my heart.” Wolfwood looks up at Vash. His husband’s eyes are knowing and full of an abiding love. “Star of my eyes.” Vash loves him. Vash loves him. Vash loves him, and Vash loves whatever of Nicholas he wants to give. Whatever Nicholas is happy to give him is enough. More than enough. Is a blessing all on its own.
“I got it, I got it.” His face feels hot. He appreciates the reminder, had needed it, but Vash is also so— “Ya don’t gotta lay it on that thick. I’m here.”
Vash smiles at him. His fingertips move, petting a fond, rewarding circle against the soft inside of Nicholas’s wrist. He lets his hand drop after to pluck once at the fabric of Nicholas’s shorts. “Lemme get my legs out of the way.” Vash sighs a little nonsense noise of pleasure as he moves to pull his fingers out of his ass; Nicholas belatedly realizes he’d managed to get three up there at some point.
Vash pulls his knees up to his chest. Nicholas doesn’t even watch him fuss the condom inside out; he’s preoccupied with the way the motion makes Vash’s hole stretch. Vash has worked his rim red and a little puffy. As Nicholas watches, Vash drops his hand back to his hole, smearing lube across it; it flinches at the cold, contracts like a mouth closing until Vash makes himself relax. He comes back for a second pass, and his fingers bump over the divide between the muscle and the flesh, catching on the edges of his hole.
“Dearest.” Nicholas jolts at the gentle prod from Vash; he drops his eyes so he won’t get distracted again and shifts his weight, careful of his bad leg, so he can get his shorts off. Nicholas folds them up and tosses them in the vague direction of his bedside table. He tries to not think about his cock and balls; he knows from experience that if he tries to face his pleasure head-on he’s just going to psych himself out of it.
“Your bones botherin’ you? You need to lie down?” Vash passes him the toy; he’s put the other condom on it. Nicholas takes a second again just to admire it and its curves and savor the thought that it’s gonna be in Vash very, very soon.
He answers Vash, “Yeah. But let’s get this in you first.”
Vash holds his cheeks open. He smiles. “Darling, I’m all yours.”
Nicholas presses the tip of the plug to his husband’s hole, and he starts to push it in. He catches Vash’s hip with his free hand; he gets his good leg over Vash’s again to keep him in place when Vash reflexively squirms. “It’s cold,” Vash whines. It’s slippery, too, the condom generously coated in lube. Nicholas tightens his grip so Vash can’t flinch away.
He pushes the toy in and in and in inexorably, steady, unyielding. Steel slips into Vash, silver disappearing behind the stretched red perimeter of his body; Nicholas savors the slight resistance, the drag of Vash’s inner walls against the material that increases the further down the toy Vash is pushed. “Faster,” Vash groans. “Nicholas—faster—”
“No.” Vash keens at the single word. His balls draw up a little. He claws for Nicholas’s wrist and ends up grabbing the hand on his hip. He wraps his other hand around just the tip of his dick; he tucks his fingers around the flare of its crown and firmly drags the pad of his thumb against his leaking slit.
His hips flinch a fraction down, away from the intense sensation. The muscles in his stomach jump. Vash rubs himself again, and he fucks himself down onto the toy with how much he wants to get away from the sweet torture. He starts circling his thumb, unrelenting, nasty and mean with himself, his head thrown back. Nicholas watches his Adam’s apple bob as noise spills out of Vash. He sounds like he’s hurting. He sounds like he likes it. “Faster,” Vash begs.
“I told you no.” Vash digs the tip of his finger, the curve of his nail, into his slit. He drops half an inch onto the plug all at once even as he howls.
He screams even louder when Nicholas rips the toy back out of him.
“FuCK! Oh, oh, Nick, Nick—” His hole gapes open for a second, busted wide by the stretch of the plug. It throbs, twitching once, twice, before it clenches closed and squeezes out a few drops of lube; then it relaxes into some used, slack state somewhere between tight and fucked out as Vash melts, as he stops playing with himself.
“Yer in a mood tonight,” Nicholas observes almost idly. He lets go of Vash’s hip, convinced for now that the other man will behave, and takes Vash’s sac in hand. He lifts it up and out of the way, experimentally tugging just a hair too hard; a fresh torrent of pleading, eager noise spills out of Vash. He’s still holding on to Nicholas’s wrist. “You gonna cum just from me bullyin’ you?” He puts the tip of the toy back to Vash’s empty hole, and it blooms around the steel, Vash eagerly relaxing to welcome it. “Lemme see you play with your tits, honey.”
Vash lets go of his cock, lets go of Nicholas’s wrist. His hands fly up to his nipples, plucking and tugging at both until they’re standing red and piqued against his flushing skin. His face is wrecked: he’s crying again. His mouth hangs open, greedily gasping for air. He can’t seem to open his eyes more than halfway, and his irises have been eaten by his pupils. Nicholas starts sinking the toy back into Vash at exactly the same pace he had before, and this time Vash doesn’t wriggle. He just keeps rubbing and cupping and flicking at his chest until his nipples are tender and oversensitive; Nicholas watches him keep going even after they hit the point of hurting, as Vash sobs with pleasure at how bad they feel.
He rewards Vash by going a little faster, savoring the way the drag has lessened this time. Nick sinks the plug into Vash until it hits where he’d been before, and this time he keeps going, too. Vash’s red rim thins as it’s forced into accepting cool steel: Vash stretches further and further, opened up by the unyielding bulk of the toy Nicholas is pushing into him. “Breathe, Spikey.” He tugs gently at his balls. Vash’s chest jumps in a sob. “Not quite. Try again.”
This time Vash does manage to drag in a shuddering, full lungful of air. “Good,” Nick praises. “You can touch yer cock now if you’d prefer.” Vash’s hands dart down; he fists his dick in both hands. “You can cum, too, but I’m gonna keep puttin’ this toy in you just like this.” Vash’s eyes focus just long enough for him to level a betrayed look at Nick. He chuckles at it.
Vash hits the widest part of the plug. He’s not even doing anything with his dick; he’s just holding it and trembling like a leaf, too afraid of cumming to jack himself. His belly’s a wet mess, a canvas painted with pre and lube and a shred of one of the foil condom wrappers. He’s blotchy and snotty, his composure wrecked by his desperation and the anticipation of having the toy fully in him; but he’s also not fighting Nicholas for control anymore. He’s so patiently taking what Nick gives him at the pace that Nick’s giving it to him. “So good, honey. Just like that.” Nicholas smiles at how Vash visibly preens at the praise. “Pretty for me,” he finishes, and then he pushes the plug past its widest point.
Vash’s greedy hole sucks down the rest of it, gobbling up its remaining length. Nicholas helps it along by cramming the last inch of the toy down into Vash, who seals up tight behind its bulk as his soft body yields to Nick’s force. Wolfwood pulls his fingers out of the ring that forms the base once the plug is seated, and then he takes a long, long moment to just admire the way the ring’s hoop bobs up and down as Vash’s back wholesale comes off the mattress, as his ass clenches again and again and again and again around the heavy, chill, unyielding weight now sheathed in his gut. His cock twitches and throbs in time with the toy’s wiggling. Nothing comes out at first; it’s only after his painfully-hard length stops jumping that Vash leaks a long, gummy string of pearlescent cum out of his piss slit, the fluid puddling tacky in his bellybutton. A long, debauched moan trickles out of Vash, too, matching the belated way his overripe body helplessly oozes its pleasure.
“It’s in,” Nicholas announces unnecessarily. Vash kicks at him halfheartedly for it. He’s shaking with the aftermath of yet another something close enough to an orgasm; he shakes even harder when Nick lets go of his ballsack to frame his cock with two fingers. He rubs circles at its base like it’s a giant clit, and Vash’s hips twitch up into it involuntarily. The motion must jostle the plug, because Vash’s cock flexes. Nicholas does it again and again until it turns into a self-perpetuating feedback cycle: Vash squeezes the plug inside his hole like he’s fucking himself, the hard bulk of it pressing against the back of his cock from the inside and making it drool. “Feelin’ good?” he asks.
Vash audibly swallows. His throat clicks. “So good.” Vash sounds like he’s on cloud nine. His voice is hazy, dropped low in his chest and rough from his tears. His eyes are unfocused and almost completely shut. He’s holding his cock like he’d forgotten to let go. “So, so good.”
“Good.” Nicholas peels off his sleep shirt and uses it to mop up as much of the mess on Vash’s belly as he can. It’s a tender action that utterly contrasts the way he then drives his hand down into Vash’s lower belly, crushing Vash’s guts between the weight of his body and the unyielding fist of the metal plug.
Vash chokes on nothing at the sudden, unexpected spike of intense sensation; he curls reflexively like he’s trying to protect his vulnerable underbelly, and then he arches when his defensively-tightened muscles drive the tip of the plug back up into his prostate. He thrashes weakly but can’t get out from under Wolfwood’s pinning hand. His eyes roll back, and he grits out a grating, overwhelmed sound, too breathless to even scream about the pleasure he’s giving himself: the round base of the toy is waggling again, bobbling with his writhing and the way his internal muscles are convulsing. He’s drooling and overcome, terribly sensitive, his red tongue sticking out past his white teeth in the gape of his maw, and Nick grinds the heel of his hand into Vash’s body especially hard for the length of one, two long heartbeats, listening to Vash breathlessly gag, until he pushes himself off all at once.
Vash drops like a discarded ragdoll. His head lolls, neck unable to hold up its weight; his knees and anklebones are touching the sheets, his legs splayed flat and wide. His arms are boneless; his hands have slid off his cock. Said cock is the only hard thing about him in that moment: it stands flushing red-purple, trembling-stiff and erect enough for the veins to throb. Vash’s balls are drawn up tight beneath his length, huddling together in his sac like they’re seeking shelter inside his body cavity, and he’s leaking a stream of breathy vowels alongside a slow, thick drip of translucent fluid that bubbles up from his cockslit. His tears clump his lashes together and his eyes are unfocused and filled only with the impending gratification of his pleasure.
He’s close to cumming, needs only a little more love, and Wolfwood should be able to manage that much tonight.
Nicholas silently begs his shaking muscles to give him just a little more, just a little bit more, he’s almost done, and slowly, carefully lays himself down. He tries to keep his motions smooth: he doesn’t want to jostle Vash into accidentally blowing his load. He breathes a sigh of relief when he settles without Vash apparently noticing.
The change in position also eases some of the encompassing ache that’s grown to sit dull and heavy in his lower half; with it lessened, he’s better able to parse what’s from his dick and what’s from his screwed-together bones. He palms his cock and finds himself harder than he had been. His eyes flutter briefly closed as pleasure sparks up his spine just from his assessing touch. He’s more aroused than he thought he’d be, but his orgasm, if he wants it, will still be a bit more work.
Nick opens his eyes and watches Vash shudder, watches the way his face twists and his fingers twitch. Nicholas listens to Vash’s heaving breaths and his little, helpless sounds of pleasure and jacks himself idly, trying to not think too hard about chasing the ebbs and surges of his physical pleasure: it won’t matter whether or not he wants to cum if he gets too in his own head over it. His only real goal tonight is to get Vash off; Vash is almost there; and Nicholas… Nicholas can take a quick break as Vash comes back down. Yeah. Yeah. That should be okay.
He pushes himself closer to Vash and turns on his side. He rests his forehead against the cusp of Vash’s sweaty shoulder and steals a few seconds to just… just breathe. Vash smells like lemongrass and cedar and the tang of sex. He fishes for Vash’s closest elbow and tugs it closer; Vash’s hand slides limply off his damp hip. Nicholas traces fingers down the soft inside of the crook of Vash’s arm, down his forearm, down to his hand. He laces their fingers together. Vash doesn’t react for a handful of seconds; then his hand closes, locking Nicholas in place.
Wolfwood picks up his head. Lets go of himself to slowly push himself up onto one elbow. “Still good, honey?” he rumbles.
Vash’s throat bobs as he swallows. He blinks his sticky, puffy eyes open and stares unseeing at the ceiling as he visibly tries to get his thoughts to congeal. “Ni—cholas,” he moans.
“I’m here.”
Vash hums. “Feels good,” he slurs. “So good. Hurts good.” His free hand flops uselessly towards his cock. He rocks his hips with the motion, probably trying to get the two to meet, and gasps when that shifts the toy and sets off another round of fireworks. “God!—so much—!”
“Had enough?”
Vash lolls his head towards Nicholas. Nicholas can’t help himself; he pushes himself up enough to kiss Vash’s slack mouth, drool and all. Vash sighs, “Nico,” into the meet of their mouths. When Wolfwood pulls away, he moans, “More.”
“Wanna cum?” Then Nicholas pauses and chuckles to himself. He clarifies, “From yer cock this time.”
A flame flickers to life in Vash’s blown-black eyes. It clears some of the fog in his blitzed stare. “Yessss,” he hisses, eager, hungry; he makes a floppy, uncoordinated attempt to roll over onto his side and cries out, felled again by his body’s eagerness to fuck itself with the toy up its ass. He goes limp and shuddery; Wolfwood rubs the arch of his foot up Vash’s calf and watches Vash wreck himself on the plug he had picked.
When Vash is done (or close enough to done), Nicholas tugs on their still-linked hands. “C’mon, Spikey,” he says. “Let’s go for a ride.”
Vash blinks his gummy eyes open as Wolfwood rolls onto his back. He watches blearily as Nicholas starts stroking himself in earnest, and then he perks up when Nick pops open the lube. Nicholas notices and dryly tells him, “Don’t get too excited. Yer not puttin’ yer cock in me tonight.” He pours a little slick onto his length, shoulders twitching at the cold, and closes his fist. His next stroke squelches. His eyes drop closed at the cool glide of it. In the temporary shelter of the darkness behind his eyelids, he tries to puzzle out how he’s going to make this work. He doesn’t think he can manage being upright long enough to get Vash to cum. If he stays lying down, that’d mean the angle wouldn’t be the best to frot at. Maybe Vash can sit on his thighs? That wouldn’t be the best, but that might be the best he can manage: he doesn’t think he can take most of Vash’s weight on his hips tonight…
Wolfwood ghosts his other hand up to his groin. He’d been cut open to save his life, and this was one of the things that remained: Nicholas feathers his fingertips down the vertical scar that runs from below his bellybutton to just shy of the base of his cock. Wolfwood finds the hard crest of his pubic bone with the pads of his fingers and gently pushes down on it. It twinges at him for the insult, and his brows pull together involuntarily. Ouch. No good, then. Maybe he could get Vash to sit on his chest so he could suck him off…?
A frustrated, longing noise from Vash makes him open his eyes. He turns his head and finds Vash now on his front, struggling to prop himself up on one elbow; his other hand is down between his legs. Nicholas catches a glimpse of Vash’s fingers splayed at the base of his straining cock around the heaving rise and fall of his chest. Smacked down yet again by his own pleasure, huh. Vash had fallen on his face this time, and half of it is awkwardly mashed into their sheets.
Nicholas realizes in the next second that Vash is looking at him. There’s still a pleasure-haze filming his eyes, but the intensity of his stare scorches holes in it: Vash’s stare burns. The viper in the Garden must have watched the forbidden fruit of the Tree take, swell, and ripen; and Vash is looking at Nicholas in the same way the Serpent must have contemplated the fruit. Vash stares at Nicholas as though Nicholas is heavy with the breadth of humanity’s potential. Vash is staring at Nicholas as though Nicholas is something precious that Vash intends to steal out from under God’s watchful gaze to use selfishly and wholly for himself.
In his surprise at being regarded so intensely, so covetously, Wolfwood’s tired, unworthy hands fumble his hold on his strength. His control fails him.
Pleasure hits Nicholas as though it were a white-hot bullet; it buries itself in his bared belly and tunnels into his spine. Nicholas gasps with it, his limbs jerking like he could curl around its wound, and then a wall of fire roars down his every nerve like his flesh was only dry kindling for the flame. Heat washes through him and leaves his lips, his fingertips, his tits, his inner thighs buzzing; it raises sweat at his brow and pools static-y at the lowest points of his core. It scorches him tender and sensitive: Nicholas squeezes his eyes back closed as he fights for air, suddenly consciously aware of the glide of his near-naked body against their sheets, his hair standing up at his nape and on his arms.
He realizes, belatedly, that he’d lost track of himself and his own pleasure again at some point. He’d been too focused on Vash and Vash’s beautiful body—but his own body had still been keeping the score. And Vash, Vash and his naked, obvious want, Vash and his consuming greed, Vash and his focused devotion have torn down the flimsy veil Wolfwood’s brain had draped over Nicholas’s need. Vash’s encompassing want has managed to knock Nicholas’s body, heart, and head into alignment. He convulsively squeezes the base of his cock because something surges up in him like cumming and he doesn’t want it, he doesn’t want it yet; he keens high in his sinuses when he feels himself leak onto his knuckles despite it.
It’s so much. It’s too much. Something in him cringes away from the heights of his own pleasure. The alignment slips—he feels it slip, he feels his arousal start to drain through his fingers like trying to hold on to water—and panic locks his muscles as he desperately tries to keep it, to get it back. He needs it; Vash wants it; and he’s trying so hard to be kind, good to him—
“Nicholas,” Vash hisses through gritted teeth. “Nicholas. Look at me.”
Nicholas forces open his eyes. Vash has dragged himself closer; he’s still staring at Nicholas with those same burning eyes; he’s reaching, reaching, reaching for him; and, reflexively, Nicholas grabs for his offered hand. They catch each other. “Vash,” Nicholas breathes; then he gasps when Vash bodily hauls Nicholas to him.
They meet in the middle of their marriage bed. Vash falls upon him: their kiss is graceless, sloppy, peppered with too much tongue and Vash’s shocked little moans of Nicholas, Nicholas, Nicholas. Nicholas can’t keep his eyes open through it—turns out he’s exhausted, had almost certainly pushed himself too far—but every time he manages to wrestle his lids back open he drowns in Vash’s hungry, black stare and the thin hellfire blue corona of his burning irises.
Vash is going to devour him whole. “Vash.” Nicholas comes up for air. “Vash.” He pushes gently at Vash’s chest; Vash makes an angry noise of denial and closes his teeth on the meat of his shoulder. Nicholas helplessly hitches out a high noise at the sting, and then Vash’s hands find his tits and no no no, oh no, when had he gotten so keyed up—
“Vash!” His voice breaks in the middle of his husband’s name when Vash sucks a nipple into his mouth. He cries out, “No—please!”
Vash goes totally still. He carefully pulls off of Nicholas, stiff and self-conscious in a way he hadn’t been all night, but before he can actually get anywhere (physically, mentally, anywhere at all), Nicholas flops out a tingling hand and grabs at the first bit of the man he blindly lands on. “Wanna,” Nicholas manages around his too-small lungs, trying to explain. His fingers sink into the flesh at Vash’s waist. “Want you, want it. Jes’—let’s—” He blindly fumbles his hand across his husband’s belly until his knuckles bump into the hot, hard line of Vash’s cock. His own hips hitch up into nothing at the contact, making his own dick sway. “Together. Please.” When Vash hesitates, Nicholas forces his eyes open. His lids are heavy, so he doesn’t get very far, but it’s enough. When their gazes meet, Nicholas sees that Vash has tucked away that boundless hunger in him nice and neat, pretending like it’d never slipped its leash—but Nicholas has known this man across two lifetimes and he doesn’t want Vash to pretend anymore.
Nicholas breathes in. He says, “C’mon, Spikey. You gonna leave a guy hangin’ after a hello like that?”
Something in Vash’s face shifts. A bittersweet fondness twists his mouth; his eyes crinkle into crow’s feet at the corners as he smiles like he does when he cries. “Nicholas,” he hums. He speaks the name like it’s a prayer. A blessing. Nicholas’s heart flutters even as heat twinges in his belly and chest. Something must shift in his expression, because Vash’s soft regard goes a little hungry. His eyes drift to Nicholas’s mouth. Vash sways just a fraction closer, his weight shifting—and then his eyes cross a little, his pink lips part, and he drops his head to Nicholas’s chest with an airy little moan.
“Hah—Nicholas—this fucking toy you picked—!” Nicholas huffs out a laugh as Vash bitches against his collarbone. Whoops. Right. “It’s so heavy; it’s juicing my grundle like a goddamn lemon in this position.” He splutters at that one: Vash’s rude mouth always catches him off-guard. “You really did not make this easy. I’m gonna cum if I take it out and I’m gonna cum if I leave it in.”
“Guess yer hot spot’s stuck between a rock and a hard plac—ow!” Vash belligerently licks the spot he’d bitten like he’s trying to scrape the skin off of it; Nicholas hisses and squirms underneath him.
“How close are you? ‘Cause I’m not gonna last long.” Vash starts shimmying himself across the sheets sideways. “Ah! Christ!” Nicholas’s dick twitches at the sound; he shivers and throws his forearm over his eyes as it leaks a bead of pre. There’s a distinct pause. “Oh. Nicholas, really? For me?”
What a stupid question. “Who else?” Vash is a burning, heaving weight pressed against Nicholas’s flank and hip, draped over his thigh. One of his bony knees is somewhere in the vicinity of Nicholas’s armpit. One of his bony elbows is digging into the side of his knee. Vash pants humid and labored against his inner thighs, teasing against his undercarriage, and Nicholas is hot, he’s so hot, overheated and sticky and wanting.
He lets go of his dick because he keeps playing with it, just rubbing three fingers over the same square inch-and-a-half at his base for the stimulation, and it’s too much, is enough to cum off of. He drifts his hand up his body instead, tracks heat up the slope of his groin and against the grain of his body hair until he brushes his knuckles against the nipple Vash had started sucking on. It’s hard, too, and he twitches at the whisper of contact, his belly and thighs tensing. He smears his thumb against the slick, pebbled boundary of his areola and starts up a slow, circling grind; the contrast of texture as he crosses from skin to skin and the tugging pull at the meat of his pec underneath the pressure feels good, is just enough sensation to coast on. “Any time now, Blondie,” he mumbles.
Nicholas yelps when Vash explodes into a flurry of movement: he hadn’t realized Vash had been watching. Vash scrambles over the thigh he’d been draped over, crying his pleasure all the while; he tumbles in a graceless sprawl half over Nicholas’s shin but doesn’t stop; Vash drags himself into the startled space Nicholas makes for him and then pushes himself upright with his fingers clenched around the knobs of Nicholas’s knees. His fingertips are going to leave bruises, and the thought makes Nicholas shiver from head to toe.
Vash flings Nicholas’s knees apart like he’s throwing wide the gates; he bullies himself into the space he makes, shuffling himself up the sheets as his greedy, searching hands shove at the muscle of both of Nicholas’s thighs, fighting against their rebound to make more and more and more room for him. Some of those demanding presses are going to bruise, too, and Nicholas’s voice cracks when he calls out, “Vash—!”
Vash grabs his hips in answer. He’s obviously given up on holding in how good the toy is making him feel; it’s just as obvious he doesn’t care about how he sounds as he pants and whines and cries like a dog in heat. He’s using that focus for something else: his eyes are that hungry, devouring black and hellfire blue again. The weight of his stare is almost palpable as he drags his gaze up the length of Nicholas’s body; he rakes his eyes up Nicholas’s cock, the taper of his waist, the rapid rise and fall of his generous chest, the line of his neck, his gasping mouth, and then finds Nicholas where he’s peeking out at him from underneath his forearm.
“You drive me crazy,” Vash snarls; his voice is all unvarnished, ecstatic joy. “Look—look at what you’re doing to me.”
Vash is—Vash is wide, black hole eyes rimmed with tears; Vash is blond hair soaked dark with sweat at his temples and down his neck; Vash is a shade of sex-flushed red that eats up his sun freckles. Vash is the muscles in his neck strung tight with tension. Vash is broad shoulders hunched like he’s hiding Nicholas and his need from the world, hoarding him just for himself. Vash is flexing muscle in his trembling forearms as he kneads the flesh over Nicholas’s patched-together pelvis, is thumbs digging into the softer give of his groin just inside the hard bones of his hips; he’s the billowing heave of his ribs; he’s his core clenched tight against the undertow of his pleasure. He’s his hips twitching, shaking with effort, is his trembling cock standing demanding, swaying with every motion, framed by his pubes soaked to a truer shade of red, is his balls drawn tight underneath. “Nicholas,” Vash growls, and he’s so, so eager and wanting, he wants Nicholas—
Nicholas parts his kiss-stung lips. He reaches out for Vash with the arm he’d been hiding behind, his hand splayed and straining. Every place they’re touching is a blaze, is clinging flame, and it’s not enough, not enough, not enough; he needs more. He moans, “Please.”
The last of Vash’s restraint falls. Vash lifts Wolfwood’s hips with a careless confidence that he’s too wound up to hide and bodily hauls Nick down the bed until their hips meet with a smack. Nicholas jolts at the contact, at the sudden branding heat of another body against his balls and his taint and just the very edge of his asshole; it knocks another moan out of him and he curls his fingers against the taut plane of Vash’s belly now pressed against his hand. He digs in his nails when Vash pushes him just a fraction away, protesting, “Please—” and Vash tells him, “Not enough—not enough, not enough; closer—”
Vash pins down Nicholas’s right hip and drags his hand down his thigh with that same expectant force, pushing it back to the bed. He rocks his weight to drag his leg over Nicholas’s, and it’s so obvious it feels so good for him, so good it hurts as the toy presses against him inside; it’s just as obvious that Vash does not give a flying fuck about it at that precise moment. He’s snarling against the distraction of it, resentful of how it steals even a fraction of his focus from Nicholas, and after he successfully mounts Nicholas’s leg he immediately hitches Nicholas’s bad one over the top of his thigh and grabs at Nicholas again to haul them back together.
Vash handles Nicholas with a casual, unconscious ownership, and it makes Nicholas burn even hotter, makes their hips smacking together again in a scissoring fit even better, better enough to make Nico instinctively roll his core against the contact. A shocked little noise drops out of him at how good it feels: good, so good, good enough to make his head spin—and then Vash strips Nicholas’s cock once and Nico’s back comes off the bed.
“Vash!” Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck—his hand is so hot. “Vash, Vash—” He cries out, his vision blurring when there’s a shock of wet cold against his dick; he’s trembling when he looks down. He catches Vash with his hand cupped underneath Nicholas’s length, palm filled with lube and Wolfwood’s cock, Vash tossing the bottle aside because it’s served its purpose; and then Vash presses his cock against Nicholas’s and closes his hand around them both.
Wolfwood is—Nicholas is—he can’t think of anything; he can’t think of anything around how it feels to have Vash’s searing hot length squeezed against his, how it feels to have Vash’s big hand and his beautiful pianist’s fingers closed around both their cocks, how hot and wet their join is. Vash is fluttering skin taut over a bloodsoaked core bumping and grinding against Nicholas, and the eagerness that makes Vash clumsy only adds to Nicholas’s own need. Nicholas is—he tries to pick out anything around the want that’s making his hips rabbit-kick. He’s—there’s a—he’s rutting against a hard ridge, some glide of a different texture, a band of it—
Nicholas realizes that Vash had wrapped his left hand around them, that the thing he’s rutting against is Vash’s wedding ring; then he’s cumming?, oh, he’s going to cum now, ah, fuck, ah ah ah, Vash, Vash Vash VashVashVash—!
“Nicholas.” Vash is frotting against him like he’s fucking him, running his mouth as he does. “So good for me; let me see it, I want to see—” He’s staring down at Nicholas, unblinking, ravenous, intent. “I’m here. I’m here, I’m here—!”
Nicholas smears his palm across the mess between them and wraps his left hand around them, too. The rapturous noise Vash makes drives Nicholas to the very edge; he teeters on the precipice, straining and eager for the last push he needs, trying to keep his unfocusing eyes on Vash, Vash, Vash—
And then Vash breathes, “Shit,” and violently grinds to a shuddering stop.
Nicholas’s mouth drops open. His lust-addled brain can’t make heads or tails of what’s happening for a long second; it’s not until Vash grinds all of his weight into Nicholas, tensing, flexing as he does that Nicholas realizes Vash is cumming. Vash thrusts once, twice into their hands, his pace rattling, arrhythmic, stutter-stop, and his burning gaze is turned entirely inwards now. He’s chasing his pleasure through its peak, weakly squirting white between them, and using the toy and Wolfwood to do so.
Wolfwood stares up at Vash wrecked and still beautiful so far away above him. He’s not proud of the pained little warble that falls out of him when irrational loneliness tears a hole through his chest. He wriggles vainly against Vash. It’s not enough, it won’t be enough: he already instinctively knows he doesn’t have enough friction to push himself over his own edge. He wants the relief; it hurts—but he… he doesn’t actually need it, does he? It hadn’t been on the table tonight. Fuck, it’s so—it’s so late. They should stop. They’re both tired. He’d been working tonight to get Vash off. Vash came. That means Wolfwood did his job; and that… that should be enough for him, right?
Right?
Wolfwood waits for the satisfaction of a job well-done to fill him, trying to not think of it as just consolation for his flagging arousal. It comes, but, oh, it comes weak and thin and somehow only makes Wolfwood feel worse. Horrifyingly, he feels his eyes prick with tears. He’s still pathetically rocking his hips up into Vash’s slack hand like that’ll get him anywhere. He makes himself stop; he lets himself go when his stomach turns at the texture of his wilting cock in his palm. He tries to marshal his spinning thoughts instead. He should—they’re both wet between their bellies, he should get them something to clean up with when Vash comes down, refill the waterbottle while he’s up, he, he can do that much at least—
“Nico?” He jolts when clumsy fingers daub at his cheek; he refocuses his eyes. Vash is staring down at him with such concern and love— “Oh, sweetheart—no, don’t do that—” Vash tugs at Nicholas’s wrist, trying to move the hand that Nico had reflexively thrown up to hide behind. “Fuck, I’m sorry. Let me see you?”
He doesn’t want to be seen. He knows he’s too tired and upset at this point to hide anything from Vash’s sharp eyes. “‘S okay. Jes’ an accident.” Really, he should be flattered that Vash had been so distracted by him that he’d lost track of how close he was. “Didn’t mean to…” Hurt him. Vash never meant to hurt him. Not like this. He still doesn’t move his hand. He still can’t get his voice to steady. It’s still too wavering, too thin, too weak. He can’t manage better.
He’s so tired. He doesn’t have anything else he can give. This is all he can do.
“Yeah.” Vash’s voice is so soft. So soothing. Apologetic and sorry, so damn sorry. It makes the hole in Nicholas’s chest cave in. He doesn’t want Vash to sound like that. He made Vash sound like that. He’d been trying to make Vash happy tonight. Vash is even quieter, his tone gone cajoling, when he adds, “Let me make it up to you anyway?”
He should refuse. He knows he should. Vash is tired, too. He makes himself point that out. “You came. You should sleep.” His voice rasps. He can’t stop his words from shaking. He hates it. He hates, too, that he felt the need to say anything.
He should make Vash rest. He should push Vash away. The thought feels dull and heavy and lies aching at the bottom of the dry well that is the hole in his chest.
“You’ve been taking care of me,” Vash whispers to him. “So I’ve got some energy to spare. Promise.” Vash’s breath puffs against his fingers. Vash asks, “Let me help?” Vash’s lips brush against the tender inside of his wrist. “I want to, Nicholas. I really, really want to.”
He’s going to cry. He knows he’s going to cry like an exhausted child if he opens his mouth, if he has to say one more damn word; if he starts crying he knows he’s not going to stop; and at this point he wants to cum more than he wants to cry; so he doesn’t say a thing. Nicholas lies underneath Vash, too ashamed to look at the man that loves him, and just nods. He doesn’t need to see Vash to know that Vash lights up at his acceptance.
Vash moves against him. Vash stretches himself out on top of Nicholas; he lays himself down and lets the weight of his upper half fall into him more and more and more until he’s folded up like a pretzel to squash Wolfwood into their bed. He’s… he’s heavy. He’s heavy and hot and unmistakeable on top of Nicholas, and his so-familiar, comforting weight somehow seals closed the fraying edges of the hole in Wolfwood’s chest. Vash hooks his chin over Nick’s shoulder, then he adjusts the way Nicholas’s left leg is propped up so that it rests across Vash’s leg. Nick’s heel squishes against the meat of Vash’s knobbly ass, and Vash worms his other arm underneath the both of them. He holds Nicholas so he can wrap his fingers around Wolfwood’s nape. His wedding band sits, hard, against one of the bones of Nico’s spine.
Vash gently rocks his entire body in a rolling wave, and Nicholas’s body lights up in response. The friction is sticking, a little too tacky, a little too much, and it’s perfect, perfect, somehow just what he needs. He involuntarily breathes a quiet, longing sound, and his flagging cock trapped between them starts to fill again. Vash grabs as much of one of Wolfwood’s buttocks as he can, tips up his head, and nips at Nicholas’s fingers, obviously still wanting Nico to move his hand. He rolls his body again, insistent even in his generosity, and it, it feels so good that Nico tangles his fingers in Vash’s hair instead.
Vash lets out an airy sigh of satisfaction tinged with hunger. “There you are.” He moves on top of him, heavy like a storm front rolling in. “Easy. Easy. There you go,” he hums. “Just let me lend you a hand, Nick. Nicholas. Nico. Hah… Flower of my heart. Star of my eyes.” He squeezes Nicholas’s ass, encouraging him to roll his hips against him. “My dearest, darling Wolfwood. I’m here, and you’re here with me.”
Nicholas breathes out a shaky breath. He is. Oh, he is; the proof is undeniable, is pushed hot and skintight against him with all of Vash’s weight. Vash presses achingly gentle, lingering kisses against Wolfwood’s jawline. He rocks his body against him, setting an easy pace. When Nicholas dares chance a glance at Vash, he finds that same serpent’s covetousness in his eyes—but, too, a deep reverence. An abiding devotion. “Love you,” Vash whispers to him.
He does. God, he does. Nicholas hitches out a small, wobbling noise; then he closes his eyes and just lets himself feel. It’s easy: what they’re doing is so easy, easy enough to get lost in. Nicholas doesn’t have to do a thing. He just basks in Vash’s living heat, in the security of Vash’s weight on top of him, in the swells of pleasure that slowly fill his belly as his cock and tits catch against Vash. Vash is scratching his fingers through the short hair on the back of Nicholas’s head, is squeezing his neck, matching the pulse of his greedy hand kneading Nicholas’s ass. Nicholas spreads his legs a little wider and wishes, briefly, that he’d cleaned himself out before bed. He thinks about Vash pushing into him with this same insistent patience, rucking up Nicholas’s sleep shirt so he could press himself skin-to-skin against the entire length of Nicholas’s bare back. Nicholas remembers how even the tender ache of being breached turns sweet, so sweet, when Vash bears him down to their marriage bed underneath his weight.
His hips stutter. He lets go of the sheets and fumbles up his arm to wrap it around Vash, holding on to his shoulder. He doesn’t have to ask; Vash picks up the pace; and Nicholas’s heart swells with an abject tenderness. It fills in the hole in his chest. Vash is so good to him. He’s so good for him. Vash breathes muggy and humid in the crook of Nicholas’s neck, and he’s just watching Nicholas, his hunger and focus turned entirely again to Nicholas’s own completion. Nicholas’s eyes flutter. “Feels good?” Vash asks, and the total silliness of the question makes Nicholas laugh. Vash is so sweet. So kind to ask. Of course it feels good. Vash is so good to him.
Nicholas nods. He answers Vash with the gentle rake of his fingernails down the back of Vash’s shoulder before his hand drifts back up to hold him again; he answers him with his hand petting through Vash’s hair. He lets his eyes slip back closed. Vash is safe. Vash is home. “Ah!” Vash is safe. Vash is home. The joy of both those things fills his chest as though it had overflowed his brimming heart: Vash is safe and he loves him and he’s here. He’s here. He’s here for him. He tips his face towards Vash’s, parts his lips, and silently asks for a kiss.
Vash obliges. Vash kisses him and kisses him and kisses him until Nicholas’s head spins, until he’s giddy with happiness and a lack of air. He tries to catch his breath against Vash’s cheek and finds he can’t; a fragment of nonsense vowel-sound drops from his red lips when he realizes. He’s close; he’s close again, coaxed back up onto that edge by Vash’s hands and Vash’s mouth and Vash’s sweet, insistent everything that urges Nicholas to want more.
More. He does want more. His hips rock against Vash’s, urgent now, and Vash squeezes his nape again at it. He gives Nicholas a little shake, making his head roll, and then he drags his nails down, down, down the side of his neck, one shoulderblade, his flank, his hip. Nicholas arches into the sensation as much as he can until Vash digs between the both of them. Vash wriggles, and then his cock is lined up against Nicholas’s again; Nicholas moans when he realizes Vash hasn’t gone completely soft. His dick is still hard enough to not be just loose flesh when squashed against Nicholas’s throbbing length. It’s flattering: the idea that Vash is enraptured enough by Nicholas that his satiated, exhausted body can still muster a response is terribly, terribly flattering. Nicholas remembers Vash snarling, You drive me crazy, and his fingers tighten in Vash’s hair.
Oh, he’s close. He’s almost there. He hitches in a breath and reflexively holds it as he squirms against Vash, rubbing his nipples against the sweaty plane of Vash’s chest; his hips fuck up into Vash’s offered hand. Vash’s wedding ring is hard against his dick, and Nicholas’s head is pleasantly floaty from oxygen deprivation by the time he empties his lungs, huffing in Vash’s ear. “Close?” Vash breathes, and Nicholas laughs breathlessly in answer. Isn’t it obvious? “Yeah, you are,” Vash hums. “Good. Good. Just like that, Nicholas.”
Yes. Yeah. He just needs a little more, just a little—he nips at Vash’s earlobe and then he tugs Vash closer to his throat. Vash instinctively burrows into the offered heat, then he inhales sharply when he realizes that Nicholas isn’t letting up, that Nicholas is guiding him even closer. He hesitates for a split second when his lips kiss Nicholas’s skin.
Nicholas begs, “Please,” and Vash keens like a man dealt a mortal blow at that single word.
Bright pain flowers against Nicholas’s neck; Nicholas cries out once, a bird’s song greeting the break of day, and cums. Vash’s hand on his cock works him gently through his pleasure. Each wave pushes through him hot and sweet enough to make his teeth ache; it would hurt if he could focus on it; but Vash isn’t letting him. He’s insistent, unrelenting, a heavy, sticky, dragging wall of contact down his entire front, in his arms, moaning in Nico’s ear as he rides a sympathetic high. Nicholas rocks with his pace, his entire body shifting on the sheets, and Vash is giving him so much that Nicholas can’t focus on how his orgasm feels—he can only feel it, is feeling it as Vash coaxes his pleasure into blooming, pooling as a warm, roseate sea that Vash so kindly and unhesitatingly drowns him in.
Nicholas drifts.
There’s something hot and soft and wet rhythmically laving at his neck. There’s a smothering, crushing, familiar weight breathing raggedly on top of him. Vash stops licking Nicholas to whine in his ear; and then he makes a satisfied noise tinged with a hint of victory and sits back on his haunches.
A thready keen slips out of Nicholas before he realizes he’s going to make the sound. Vash immediately rasps, “Sorry sweetheart; I promise I wanna cuddle; just gimme a second—” before he mutters a curse. Nicholas exerts an enormous effort and cracks open one eye just in time to watch Vash peel the toy out of its condom and pitch the plug onto a clean patch of their sheets with a smidge more vindictiveness than strictly necessary. Is he seriously jealous of an inanimate object? Ridiculous man. He snorts at Vash, and Vash flashes him a toothy grin even as he busily wads the used condom up in a tissue.
“Thought y’wanted company?” Nicholas manages, and then he can’t say anything else as Vash cups his face in both his hands and falls into him, gently tilting him up to kiss. Vash’s tenderness doesn’t make their kiss any less hungry, though Vash gentles his mouth as Nicholas fumbles to respond underneath him.
Vash presses his lips to the corner of Nicholas’s parted lips. “It was distracting. Pissed me off,” he explains. “I’ll put it back in later if I want.” He helps ease Nicholas’s leg off of his hip, flips up a furthest corner of their dirty topsheet, and wipes away the worst of the mess on them with it. Gross. Ugh. Whatever. It needs to get washed anyway. Vash plants a kiss on Nicholas’s forehead like he knows he’s internally fussing about the state of their linens (he does know) and wants to distract him.
Vash leans over Nicholas when he’s done and pulls the other side of the sheets up; he lies down next to Wolfwood as he does and the fabric bundles Nicholas up so he rolls half onto Vash. “Gonna squash you,” Wolfwood protests, to which Vash tells him, “No you won’t. Let me have this.”
Vash’s hand strokes up Nicholas’s back; he rakes his nails just-shy of gentle up the dip of Wolfwood’s spine, slowly traces the shape of a shoulderblade. Pleasure shivers through Nicholas like spiraling embers, like Vash had prodded at the ashes of a hearth flame. Nico burrows his face into the slope of Vash’s shoulder, grabs Vash’s elbow, and gently tugs it back to the bed. Vash chuckles and his chest shudders underneath Nicholas. He relents and tangles their fingers instead, squirms his other arm out just enough from under Nicholas so he can hold Wolfwood’s hip.
Nicholas lets his eyes droop half-closed. He savors the feeling of their held hands, the feeling of warm fingers and palm around his bad hip. Vash is heavy and breathing underneath him, sticking a little bit as damp skin brushes against damp skin. He smells like lemongrass and cedar and sex and sweat; it’s the same smell that’s pressed into the sheet wrapped around Wolfwood. The fabric is light against his skin but enough of a taut presence that it’s a steady reminder that he’s covered up, that he’s not showing his bare back to the world. Nicholas lets his eyes drop closed. Vash…
Vash should have some water. He should have some water, too. He should get up and get them a wet washcloth. Sleep clothes for himself. Ugh. Probably some more med—Nicholas yelps when Vash pinches him on the lovehandle. His head pops up in indignation; Vash pouts at him.
“The hell was that for??” Wolfwood demands.
“Stop thinking so hard,” Vash retorts. Nicholas smacks at his hand when its fingers tighten threateningly again. “Will you just—” Vash grabs his ass instead. “It’s obviously been too long since I last spoiled you. Here. Let me start making it up to you.”
Alarm flares up in Wolfwood. “Hang on now—”
“How do I love thee?” Vash begins. “Shall I count the ways?” Vash’s hand tightens, pinning Nicholas to him. He’s staring Nicholas down with a defiant gleam in his sea-green eyes. “Shall I compare thee to a summer day? Or shall I tell you that it was love at first remembrance?” Vash shapes his words with his obscene pink lips, his mouth mercilessly precise with his diction. “That love was more thicker than forget? That love was an ever-fix’d mark? That I remembered honey beaded on your lips and licked the sugar off the walls of my memory?” He’s sitting up, pressing himself closer and closer. “That I solely love the lotus?” He breathes the words between them as though imparting his greatest weakness to just Nicholas: “And how could I not? When its pure blossom grows from the mud, yet remains unstained? What a noble flower. It’s beautiful. In my opinion, is at its prettiest and most precious when it shines dew-gilt in the morning light. When it’s rosy with dawn. Blooming big on its straight stem, caressed by the water, yet still modest even as it sways…” Vash’s voice goes impossibly softer, drops to hum resonant in his chest. He thrums, “Dearest one. The flower that blooms in my heart? It is, as it’s always been, a bright lommf!”
“Okay!! Okay!” Wolfwood doesn’t dare move the hand he’d clapped over Vash’s mouth; if he blushes any harder he’s going to pop something. “You made yer point! I’ll stop an’ smell the roses.” Vash’s eyes crinkle up at the corners in a triumphant smile. Nicholas wrinkles his nose at it even as he tentatively lifts his hand off of Vash’s face.
Vash flops back down. “Was that so hard?” he teases as Nicholas lies down on top of him.
Nicholas groans. “Yer a menace.” He closes his eyes as the alarm finishes ebbing out of him, leaving behind just exhaustion, squirming bashfulness at accepting an emphatic affirmation of Vash’s stalwart love, and his answering, abiding love for Vash. “Love you, too,” he grumbles.
Vash pets through his hair in silent apology, though the smile is still flitting across his face. His hand eventually slows and drifts down to knead gently at Wolfwood’s neck; Vash massages the muscles at the base of his skull and their connector points on his shoulders, his back, keeps going afterwards. Vash works the tension out of Nicholas as he makes his way back down to his butt, and it’s… Nicholas is so tired, wants nothing more than to rest (and resents it), but it’s better with Vash easing out the worst of the knots. Underneath the exhaustion, he’s satiated—still a little skin-hungry, but it’s being satisfied by the basic, basal comfort that comes from Vash looping his heel around Nicholas’s, in the way Vash’s patient hand works Nicholas into putty, in the way Vash pillows his cheek against the top of Nicholas’s head. Nicholas is soft and warm and full, so full of love. Wrapped up in Vash’s arms with Vash absently humming some song in his ear, he’s safe. He’s safe. He’s safe. He’s…
Nicholas wakes up just enough to questioningly trill when Vash eases out from under him; he slits his eyes open and blearily peers up at Vash. Vash bends over him, their bedroom lights turning his wild hair into a frizzy halo, and gently rubs his thumb at the corner of his jaw. “Need to pee,” Vash murmurs. “Go back to sleep.”
Wolfwood grunts and wraps his arms around the pillow Vash had replaced himself with, burying his face in it. It smells like green things, like Vash’s fancy shampoo and conditioner, and a little like Wolfwood from how he’d been doing the same thing every night the past almost-week while his husband had been gone. Nicholas dozes, slipping in and out of deeper sleep; he rouses when their bedroom door clicks closed.
The bed dips just a little when Vash kneels on it. Vash pets a gentle hand down Wolfwood’s back over the sheet, and Nicholas mumbles, “M’up,” before he gets an elbow underneath himself. He knuckles at one of his gummy eyes, can’t help the yawn that cracks his jaw, and carefully levers himself into sitting on his right hip. He grimaces at the itchy-sticky sensation of drying cum in his pubes and absently scratches at it; he wakes up a little more and outright scowls when its flaky tackiness gets under his nails. Every damn time—
“Here.” Nicholas automatically accepts the wet, warm washcloth Vash passes him; he holds it for a second as his brain processes it, finishing waking up as it does. He turns his head and looks at the bed as Vash crawls onto it to press his side against Nicholas’s back; Vash has put away the toy and the lube and cleared the bed of empty condom packets. There’s a gently-steaming washbasin on the bedside table next to a thermos and two rice socks wrapped up in one of Wolfwood’s bellywarmers. The caddy that has all their prescription bottles in it has been wedged in a cracked-open drawer.
“Y’coulda gotten me up to lend a hand,” Nicholas eventually mutters. Guilt chews at him; he’d meant to spoil Vash tonight and instead had buckled at the finish line. That he’d failed Vash was bad enough; what was worse was that he’d made Vash feel bad—and then, insult to injury, he hadn’t even woken up as Vash had worked—
Vash reaches around him and gently takes his wrist. He guides Wolfwood’s hand and the warm washcloth it’s holding to Nicholas’s chest. “I could tell you were tired,” Vash hums. “So I tagged in ‘cause I wanted to.” His voice is warm and a little rough from how much crying he’d done tonight; it’s soft and so terribly fond. “You’re being sweet on me even when you’re taking care of yourself. You’ll feel better once you’re a little more put together, and I want that. Trust me. I’ve got your back.”
Nicholas gives in. He wipes himself down from temples to ankles, cleans under his fingernails as Vash lazily mouths at his nape. Vash helps him get the length of his spine, his asscrack, his undercarriage. As Nicholas strips off his socks, Vash gently lays his hand against the small of his back. He smooths his palm over the surgical scars and against where Nicholas had hit it on the edge of the counter earlier in the evening. “Did it bruise?” Nicholas asks.
“Not yet. But I’ll check in the morning, too. I can help put some arnica on it if it needs it.” Vash keeps running his hand over the same spot like it’s a worry stone, like he’s counting a rosary. Nicholas glances over his shoulder and finds Vash scrutinizing the skin under his palm with a bittersweet focus, like he’s committing it to memory. Nicholas reaches back and briefly lays his hand over Vash’s; Vash glances up at him with apologetic acceptance in his eyes before he skims his hand over Nicholas’s hip. Vash traces the front of Nicholas’s thigh down, down until Vash fits his hand over some of the bruises that are already starting to purple on Wolfwood’s knee.
“You gonna be okay for work tomorrow with these?” Vash moves his hand to Wolfwood’s inner thigh when Nicholas shifts his weight to clean the soles of his feet and between his toes. “I’m not complaining, but…”
Vash trails off. He pulls away. Nicholas doesn’t need to see his face to know that he’s studying the pattern of bites he’d left across Nicholas’s shoulders, that he’s regretting the part of him that gets so overcome by the joy of having that it’s willing to hurt the man he loves to mark him.
Nicholas’s back is cold. He says, “It’s jes’ admin t’morrow; they should heal up before we start seein’ kids.” He finds one of his hands drifting up towards his throat; he touches where Vash had bitten him. It’s hot underneath his fingertips. It might not bruise, but it’ll be a visible mark. He presses against it lightly; his eyes drop almost closed when it dully throbs. “‘Sides,” he sighs. “I don’t mind marks you mean to make, remember? I know they’re a special kinda love.”
A lifetime ago, Vash the Stampede had held only one human above the mob: Rem Saverem. He had held humanity at arm’s length because to raise another to her heights was anathema to his chosen creed of peace and love of all.
In this life, Vash Saverem had chosen Nicholas D. Wolfwood. These bruises and bites are like their paired wedding rings: they are a promise, an anchor, an affirmation ‘til death did them part once more. Vash is here; he is home; and he had left these marks. Nicholas hangs onto that. He presses against the bite again, and he sways with the dull throb of pain that pulses through him.
This is his. This is something that is his and only his, something gifted to Nicholas that he doesn’t have to share with anyone else. This is something that kind, sweet, dear Vash would give only to him.
Vash slowly moulds himself to Wolfwood’s back. He’s a long, liquid line of heat against his spine. “I remember,” he whispers. He slowly sighs a shaking, emotional breath against the side of Nicholas’s neck. His lungs hitch when Nicholas instinctively tips his head a little to the side, baring more of himself to Vash. “I love you. You’re so—” He brushes his lips against Nicholas’s skin. He admits to Wolfwood’s pulse, “Darling, the things you do to me… I really, really want another round. But not tonight. I’m tired, and you need to sleep.”
Nicholas laughs. He can’t help it. Vash wants him, wants him, wants him, and the joy of that is irrepressible. “You’ll get a stomachache if y’have too many sweets,” he teases. He glances over his shoulder and Vash is just watching him. There’s still some of that viper’s covetousness in his stare. It’s enough to make Nicholas look at Vash through his lashes, hiding his bashfulness with a bat of his eyes. “Save some fer tomorrow.”
Vash gives him a helpless little smile. “Well, fruit does taste sweeter when it’s ripe,” he agrees. He pulls away just enough to trade Wolfwood the washcloth for the bundle of clothes he’s holding. He adds, as Nicholas sorts through his pajamas, “You really do spoil me every day, you know. You just can’t help yourself. You’re so good to me.”
Nicholas raises a brow and wiggles the pair of briefs Vash had picked for him at his husband; it’s not a pair Wolfwood would have chosen for himself. “Butterin’ me up, huh?” The underwear in question had been spared from the bin by impassioned plea from Vash. Nicholas had dryly asked if utilitarian cotton did it for him; with huge eyes, Vash had told him that the fabric was worn thin enough that he could see Nick’s dick and balls through it.
Vash’s smile goes a little smug. He chuckles a little. With his voice dropped half an octave, its tone turned as pitch as a night sea, he hums, “Is it working?”
Nicholas puts them on because he’s getting cold, that’s all. It is in no way because Vash’s voice makes his stomach flip.
The shirt is in a similar state, some high-school-era event-freebie of Vash’s that had been worn into disintegration; this one Vash likes because the holes in the armpits were, at this point, stretched big enough that he could get his hands in to grope at Nicholas’s tits without taking the shirt off (Wolfwood had smacked him for that explanation, but he’d let the shirt stay.) The socks, however, are on the exact opposite end of the spectrum: they’re some imported silk affair meant for high-end parties as Vash’s plus-one. Nicholas checks the tops; they’re elastic, which means these are the first pair Vash had managed to cajole Nicholas into accepting after they’d started seriously dating.
Wolfwood turns his head and stares at Vash from out the corner of his eye. Vash has the good grace to blush a little underneath Nick’s unimpressed expression. “Guess bluebirds are territorial,” Nicholas remarks before he slides the socks on, adjusting the lay of the elastic over his calves after. He can’t quite manage to keep the amusement and teasing out of his voice; it only encourages Vash, who perks up and drapes his arms over Wolfwood’s shoulders.
“You’ve got my thigh and the toy I picked for the night,” Nicholas tells him as he starts picking through their pill bottles, indulging Vash’s sticky, hampering deadweight. “You want anythin’ more?”
“Can I eat you out?” Vash’s reply is immediate and eager.
Nicholas pauses and makes a face at him over his shoulder. “Vash, I’m gross as hell right now. No: you ain’t puttin’ that forked tongue of yers in me when I’ll be kissin’ yer mouth in the mornin’.” He picks out a bottle, pops it open, and shakes out a selection of cut-up pills into the top to consider.
“Fiiiine.” Vash sounds like he’d expected to be turned down. “Then just your ass—with nothing going into any orifices, scout’s honor—and a raincheck on the rest. Gimme Saturday.” He refuses the pill top with a little shake of his head and hand. “I’ll take one if I wear myself out, promise.”
Nicholas sighs at him but doesn’t push it. He washes down a quartered pill with the herbal tea in the thermos, drinks a little more when Vash nips at his neck, puts everything back into its place, and tells Vash, “Evenin’ half of Saturday. Yer momma wants to know if yer gonna visit her, and we need groceries. I’ll give you Sunday mornin’ as trade.”
Vash brightens. A sleepy Sunday morning with Nicholas’s sleep schedule destroyed from the night before is a treat indeed; and, as Nicholas had said, Vash had a bottomless appetite for sweets. “Deal!” Vash chirps; then he helps haul Nicholas off their bed so they can strip the topsheet and turn down the covers.
Nicholas leans against Vash as they do; when he crawls into their bed, Vash follows him in. Vash plops the rice socks down onto Nico’s groin, one on either side where he’d dug his thumbs in, and arranges himself around Wolfwood as Nicholas sighs in relief at the warmth.
“I’m happy yer home,” Nicholas murmurs to Vash as he gets settled. “Welcome back.”
“Oh Nicholas… It’s good to be home,” Vash returns with warmth. He mashes his face into Nick’s shoulder, wraps an arm around his waist and kicks a leg over his knee. “Thank you, dearest. Sleep well.”
Nicholas tips his head on his pillow and rubs his cheek against the riot of Vash’s hair. “Mmm. See you in the mornin’…” Vash smells nice. He’s a comforting, breathing warmth sprawled on top of him, anchoring Nicholas to this body and this life. Nicholas’s eyes drift closed. He can rest. He should rest. He wants to rest. For tomorrow, and whatever tomorrow will bring…
Nicholas D. Saverem-Wolfwood falls asleep half-curled into Vash, feeling so ardently, so entirely, and so dearly loved.