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Every so often Wolfwood stares at his face for hours at a time, wondering who the creature reflected back at him is. The man staring at him has some of his features, but distorted and stretched across bone that was too big for his skull. The man moves when he does; it is, for all intents and purposes, him, but he cannot help but expect softer angles and a layer of baby fat not yet ready to leave his face.
He has long since accepted that mirrors weren’t for him, not that it mattered. Unless it was to clean up blood from his face, he has never been asked to use one. Wolfwood has gotten very good at keeping blood from splattering on him when doing his more up-close jobs.
It is an unfortunate day when he is faced with a gas station bathroom that has the gall to pretend it’s classy with the single mirror above the sink. Wolfwood, doing his best not to step in the puddles of what he hopes is just piss and nothing nastier, doesn’t have the time to brace himself or pointedly not look into the damn piece of glass.
It’s grimier than most mirrors, which makes sense considering it’s in a gas station bathroom, with splotchy hopefully-dirt and mud staining his reflection a sort of gritty texture.
The man stares back at him, grimacing. Wolfwood hates that it has been years, and he still does not think of that man as him. Wolfwood realizes that it has been years, and the face he would recognize in the mirror would no longer be his either, even if he hadn’t been ripped apart and stuffed into the monstrous skin-suit he now has to live in.
Two days later, his bar crawl and subsequent bar brawls lead to him staring at yet another mirror. The black eye and busted lip mar his visage, but they distort the man who haunts him and don’t hold traces of who he was before that he will never get back. They’re all because of himself, as he is now: a fucked-up disaster who can’t go two minutes without getting into a fight or binge drinking between jobs.
He knows the serum could make it all go away. It is probably for the best that he drinks some, because the bleeding from his nose is still flowing steadily and his head is pounding harder than ever. He can’t make himself take it just yet, not when he will just have to look at the man in the mirror emerge from behind the wreckage he’s made of his face.
Wolfwood leaves through the back door, growling at one poor bastard who tries to ask him if he needs help, and into the dark alley behind the bar. It reeks of vomit and piss and booze with alcohol levels that could probably kill a man. He sits there, blue vial loosely swinging between his index finger and thumb, for a while.
Wolfwood downs the serum in the dark of a back alley where no one can see the man he becomes, least of all himself.
It’s on one of his early missions that he really realizes that he can never go back to the way he was.
He was eight when he took the test and they took him from the orphanage, nine and a half when they finally let him outside again for the first time, and he thinks he is ten at this point. Two years is so long that sometimes it feels like the eight before weren’t real.
Wolfwood fidgets, not exactly sure what to do now that his mission is over. He’s still not all that used to killing people (yet), especially not without one of the Eye of Michael members whispering about what Legato will do to him if he fails. At least he didn’t have to worry about one of the older members scolding him when he got sick after killing the target. He made it to the toilet to puke, so he shouldn’t have left anything to identify him with behind.
He has a few days before he has to meet with the men who will take him back, and he wasn’t told what to do. The target had come back early, and he did his job. But now he doesn’t know what to do. Wolfwood thinks and decides that he can have a day or two off since he can’t exactly do much else other than wait for the pickup time.
Making up his mind, Wolfwood nods to himself and starts to leave the bathroom where he had been sick; he stops himself before he can get through the door and goes to the sink. Now all he needs to do is clean up.
He hates having to do that. But he knows that things will be even worse if he doesn’t make sure his face is clean of blood and other nasty stuff. Scrubbing his face with his hands, he thinks he has done the job, but he knows he will have to check. Bracing himself, he raises his head to look in the mirror and is thankful that the stranger’s face is clean. Wolfwood is quick to look away from the sharp gaze of the man in the mirror; he looks mean and angry and Wolfwood hates him.
He leaves the target’s house, careful not to leave anything behind as well as avoiding the mess he had made of the man. Wolfwood has seen many corpses in his too-short life, but the ones he makes himself still leave him a little sick.
Away from all of the bloodshed and the death, Wolfwood is in a much better mood. He has his allowance—they called it something else, but he can’t remember what because he had been excited at having an allowance—and he wonders what he is going to do with his next few days off.
He already has a bed for the next few nights; that was the first thing he did, because he knew he would be tired and get people’s attention if he got an inn room just after someone got murdered. And sneaking out meant that no one saw him leave, so he has an excuse if anyone comes to ask. It’s pretty clever if he does say so himself, imagining the sort of praise he used to get from Ms. Melanie when he did something particularly smart.
The planning and thinking ahead of things makes his head hurt sometimes. Wolfwood was never stupid, but the way things clicked together one after the other after the operation used to make him confused and upset. It still does, but he learned not to complain after the first time he got too loud about it.
Wolfwood decides he’s going to get some of that good-looking food from the vendor he had spotted down the road. He manages to sneak back into the room he has booked without being seen and leaves the inn loudly enough that the innkeeper will definitely think he has been there the whole time that the murder happened. He’s had to relearn how to be sneaky, but it is so much easier for him to get people’s attention now.
It’s hot out, but nothing he isn’t used to. The trouble is that he has nothing else to think about except for the heat and how it’s going to make him stinky in the way that grownups get stinky when they sweat.
He spots the playground when he is strolling down the street, looking over when he hears the sound of kids laughing. It’s been years since he last heard it, and thoughts of laughter and taking care of thomas with the younger kids come to mind for the first time in a while. He tries to keep those memories locked away from the Eye of Michael.
Making his way over, just on the outskirts of the yard, he watches the other kids play. It’s a wealthier place than the orphanage ever was, so there is actual playground equipment instead of rocks and walls left over from old broken buildings. Still, it sounds the same. He can almost feel the worm leg between his fingers, preparing to make some makeshift cigarettes for Livio and him to share.
He grits his teeth and stops that train of thought; he’s doing this to protect Livio and the rest of the orphanage; he can’t miss them right now or he might start to doubt or regret.
“Hey, mister,” he hears from his left, not realizing he’s being spoken to until he feels a light tug on his arm. “Mister, are you okay?”
It’s still a shock to see how small other children are compared to him now; he never sees real kids anymore, in his line of work. Maybe that’s why Wolfwood pauses, unsure of how to answer the question.
He used to be good with meeting new kids in the orphanage, but that was before he turned into this.
“No,” he says, bluntly.
The other boy gives him a questioning look, eyes squinting from the glare of the sun as they look up at him. It makes Wolfwood nervous; long silences after answering a question means he answered wrong, and answering wrong meant Legato would twist and break him again.
Instead of punishment, the other boy digs into his pockets before pulling out a lollipop, holding it out to Wolfwood. He stares at it for a few seconds before taking it from the other’s hand; the difference in size makes something in Wolfwood lurch.
“Thanks,” he starts, because Ms. Melanie had always taught those under her care to be polite. He sits criss-cross on the ground before taking off the wrapper and sticking the candy in his mouth. It is sweet, and he is reminded of the times when he could save up some coins and afford himself a candy or two.
The other boy watches him. Wolfwood stares back. They keep like this until the kid blinks, eyes watering a bit from how long they had been open.
“I win,” Wolfwood grins, leaning forward. As he talks, the lollipop in his mouth moves, the stick of it bopping the kid’s nose mockingly.
The kid glares at him, pouting. There’s no heat behind it, nothing to indicate that it’s serious or a threat or about to be a fight. Instead, the kid just goes, “No fair! You didn’t even say we were playing! I didn’t even know I wasn’t supposed to blink!”
“But you knew what game I won, so you knew what game we were playing,” Wolfwood smirks. The kid thinks on this—just a second long enough for Wolfwood to feel the gap between them that the Eye of Michael made—and nods.
“Fine, but I get to choose the next game!” The kid shouts this,, even though Wolfwood is more than close enough to hear. He nods at the declaration; it makes sense. “But no tag, you’re too tall.”
Wolfwood, being taller than most his age, loses the next game of hide and go seek spectacularly. It’s the most (the only) fun he has had since he was eight, loser or not.
“I can teach you some cool tricks,” Wolfwood says, conspiratorially. It’s been a long time since he’s had the chance to teach another kid his age something and be a big brother again. It’s not Livio, but that’s for the better; Livio doesn’t have to get hurt, no one has to get hurt, and he can still numb the wound the other orphans’ absence makes.
He gets out his lighter, going through the motions that he had to relearn with these big, clumsy hands. The other boy leans close, tracking every move and asking him to repeat what he doesn’t understand. Wolfwood can almost pretend that it’s one of the others leaning against him, giggling as they hide from Ms. Melanie and the chores she’ll have them do.
.
“Hey! You!” Wolfwood briefly wonders why no one is answering the yelling man before he feels a hand grab his shoulder and tug. The man looks kind of like the lollipop kid, if a bit more round around the middle and hairier. And angrier.
Wolfwood’s lack of an answer irritates the man further.
“Yeah, you! What the fuck are you doing with my son? Who are you? I’ve never seen you before; why are you in a playground?”
Wolfwood doesn’t know why this guy is asking these questions, or why he’s asking them so quickly, or why he’s so angry.
“I’m playing,” Wolfwood tells the man. That just makes the other angrier, and the man is looking at him the way Ms. Melanie looked at some of the people that would come to try and ‘adopt’ his fellow orphans. Something in him feels sick.
“Just playing!” He repeats, because it’s a playground, what else would he be doing?
There’s something in his brain that feels like he should know, but the man keeps yelling before it can make sense to him. All he gets is searing panic and a smell like blood and metal and whatever substance they had the machine put into him.
“Playing? Playing?! That’s bullshit,” the man yells at him, dragging him up to face him. Wolfwood knows he’s strong enough that he could decide to stay sitting or hurt this man, even kill this man. He doesn’t. Instead, he looks down and realizes that he has to look down to see the angry man’s face. He’s taller than the angry man, and he knows that it’s normal to be taller than people, but this is a grownup, this kid’s father, and Wolfwood towers over him.
In the space where he is lost in the spiral of thoughts, what he was trying to understand clicks into place.
Wolfwood is ten, Wolfwood is a monster, Wolfwood is—
“—an adult!” The man’s voice gets louder, attracting the stares of others. “What the fuck do you mean you were playing, you sick fuck?”
.
Wolfwood loses them before the quickly growing mob of angry parents can catch up to him. He escapes to his motel room, locking the door, closing the blinds, and curling up under the thin sheet that they call a blanket here.
That part of him that always exposes the problems he has, digs them up, sorts through them and clicks it into his head without letting him know, that part of him makes the connection between him and the kid and the adults that Ms. Melanie said to not go around, especially alone.
A memory appears, clear as day, of when he was younger and witnessed one of the Bad Men lure a younger brother over and sit him on his lap and call it innocent, except then it shifts and it’s Wolfwood and he says it’s just playing except he’s not like the kid anymore, he can’t tell himself apart from the adults anymore. Wolfwood feels sick because he is the bad man now, the adult, the predator, never safe again.
He wraps the blanket tighter around himself, not bothering to turn on the lights when the dark creeps into the room. It’s not as if the monsters are in the darkness anymore. There’s only one monster here, and it’s—
.
“Wolfwood,” he grumbles. It’s been months, and he’s still learning to not only keep away from people but to push them away from him. He’s tried to be a grownup, but it’s hard to act like one when all he knows is from the outside. So instead he pushes everyone away so he doesn’t have to act. It usually works.
“Nice name.” The woman across from him takes a sip of her cold drink, and the lipstick leaves a stain on the glass. She laps at it with her tongue, and Wolfwood wonders why she does; he’s tasted lipstick before—an unfortunate dare that ended in him getting scolded by Ms. Melanie and having to hand over his candy money for a month—and he knows it tastes gross.
She notices his staring and winks at him. He isn’t sure why; winks are for when something’s a secret and your cohort needs a signal. Maybe the secret is that she’s got messed up taste buds and likes licking lipstick? He doesn’t like the taste, but he has tasted it, so he winks back.
.
The thing that grew like a tumor on him during the surgery never listens to him. He had spent time in his cell, thinking he had pissed himself, and the piss looking like that meant he was dying. Sometimes he would wake up, and it would move without his permission, and it would hurt, and the only way for it to stop was to paw at it until he pissed the white-stuff again, and it felt awful, and he had cried for the first time in a long while when that happened.
Taking the serum did not fix it, and he does not know why.
Legato had gone to him after the third time it had happened and the guards’ laughing at him had gotten loud enough to irritate the man. Wolfwood had been sure he was going to get his body pushed and pulled and distorted and broken even more, but for once Legato had done nothing but stare at him with what might have been emotion on his face.
“Cold showers help. You will be allowed to have a cold shower in the mornings.”
When Legato turned out to be right, Wolfwood had felt thankful to the man who was his jailer and torturer and had caused this in the first place. Legato never did anything approaching kind again, so Wolfwood had never had to sort through those contradictions in his head.
.
Wolfwood is curled up in the corner of a shower stall, not caring what he looks like, waiting for it to go away. He can’t look at it, so he’s doing his best to cover it with the hulking body he still isn’t used to.
The woman, whose smudged lipstick Wolfwood knows tastes as bad as he remembers, knocks on the door to the bathroom. He doesn’t say anything, just watching as the door slowly opens and she makes her way in holding fresh towels.
“You’re gonna catch a cold that way, hun,” she says, tone careful and hesitant. “You still have most of your clothes on, so I got you some towels to cover yourself with. I don’t think you wanna continue, am I right?”
Wolfwood nods; he won’t catch a cold, doesn’t think he can anymore, but he is shivering. Whether from the water soaking through his clothes or the comedown from his panicked state, he doesn’t know.
The woman moves slowly, her hand telegraphing where it’s going to go. Wolfwood still flinches when it gets too close, even though he knows she’s only reaching for the shower knob. With the noise of the shower gone, his clattering teeth are all that more audible.
“M’sorry,” he says. He sounds like a kid again, for once, but the timbre is still too deep for him to shake off the feeling of wrong whenever he has to deal with his body.
“For what?” The woman asks lightly. “You didn’t do nothin’ wrong. Was I going too fast? This your first time?”
“First time what?” Wolfwood furrows his brows, tucks his head more into his knees. He doesn’t want to think about any more interactions with that in the future, and this lady acts like he’ll have many. “M’sorry ’cause it got all stiff and gross again.”
Something about his words troubles the woman. She looks him over, not in the way that made him feel shivery before but in a more worried way. It reminds him a bit of Ms. Melanie when she thought he was hiding an injury or pretending that he wasn’t tired and didn’t need to go to bed.
“Hun,” the woman says quietly, almost a whisper. Wolfwood can hear her as clearly as if she spoke into his ear. “Hun, how old are you?”
He shrugs. He doesn’t look her in the eye.
“An adult.”
.
Wolfwood learns a lot that night from the nice lady.
It’s calming to be treated gently after his panic. There’s no punishment, no isolation, no threats of ‘Livio would surely perform better; maybe we should get him instead’. She doesn’t get close again, and she even offers to sleep on the ratty couch instead of in the bed. He likes her.
She also teaches him things. He doesn’t like thinking about it, but she says it’s important and that he needs to learn it so nothing like this happens again. She stays away as she explains the body adults have, only looking at him to ask a question or make sure he follows what she’s saying.
The lady isn’t the best teacher; she goes off into different directions when she talks, but she always makes her way back, and the way his brain click click clicks things together now makes it easy for him to fit the concepts into place.
“Being an adult is stupid,” he grumbles. The discipline he has, the kind that keeps him quiet and safe, has eroded over the night. He’s too tired for that, and he doesn’t think that this woman can hurt him any more than what’s already happened.
“Yeah, it is,” the woman says, a distant melancholy in her words. “And, I’m sorry. I didn’t know, but I’m still so sorry.”
“For what?” Wolfwood asks, under the covers despite the heat of the desert not having left quite yet. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
There’s a chuckle, sad and bitter, and the woman sighs.
“Yes, I did. You’ll figure it out when you get older.”
.
Wolfwood hauls the Punisher behind him, weight not even registering anymore. He’s been getting more free rein on how to accomplish the tasks they give him, trusting him to be able to do the job and get out without fuss. Or, without any witnesses to do said fussing .
Wolfwood knows that what he’s doing is terrible, the sort of stuff that stains the soul, but he continues doing it. Because as long as he’s the one doing this, no one else has to. He’s already dirty, stained, too-old, too-young. There’s nothing left of him to tarnish; it’s already too late for him to go to that place that Ms. Melanie sometimes talked about, up in the sky.
But maybe if he just destroys himself enough, he won’t be too weak to protect those back in December.
.
He’s not sure if it’s nostalgia or not, but there is a tugging in his chest when he sees the trashed cigarette machine in the back of an alley. There is nothing left, except for one opened box of cigarettes. There are two, nestled against one another in the cold.
He takes one, sticks it in his mouth, and lights it up. It makes him cough in a way that the old worm-legs never did, but he continues to inhale. He tips it in the direction of the lone cigarette in the lone box and lets out something that isn’t a laugh but isn’t a sob either. “Finally got to taste some grownup cigarettes. Bet you’d be jealous, Livio. Too bad you gotta wait—”
He pauses; he doesn’t remember how many years until Livio becomes an adult, a real adult.
And here Wolfwood comes to the realization that between the more independence in his missions and the lack of time in a place that had a rigid schedule, he’s lost track of the days that pass. Wolfwood cannot tell how old he is. The old timeframe of ‘probably-ten’ feels like a long time ago, but it also feels like there was no time between then and now.
Is he still a child? Did he grow up? He hasn’t been one for a long time, and he never got the chance to. Maybe he’ll just have to force himself to become an Adult whether he likes it or not.
.
He takes to keeping a pack of cigarettes on him as a way of reminding himself that he has grown out of the worm-legs of childhood.
He takes to keeping lollipops with him as a reminder of why even if he were free, he can never escape having been turned into this mishmash of ill intention and too-big, too-strong, too-dangerous.
Reminding himself of the cage prevents him from getting too close to the bars that shock and hurt and make him bleed and cry. There are enough sins ceaselessly tunneling under his skin already; no need to add more.
.
Wolfwood doesn’t know much about Adults, aside from what he can glean from the ones around him in the Eye of Michael, and he is fairly sure that they aren’t the best example of normal. He watches, before or after killing his mark, and tries to keep track of the usual behaviors that the adults exhibit.
It’s entirely by accident that he learns the way that most adults pass the time on No Man’s Land: drinking.
.
Wolfwood usually buys a drink and either leaves it be or pretends to sip at it; the alcohol tastes gross, and the nice lady told him to be careful of drinks.
Unfortunately, his mark is taking so damn long to get to a location where Wolfwood can kill him and get the job over with that the only way for him not to attract attention is to actually drink his drink.
It tastes disgusting, pure stubborn will the only thing keeping him from gagging, but he continues on. The barkeep is already suspicious from how slow he’s drinking, and he’s given himself the goal of being an Adult anyways. It’s not like he expected that to be anything but painful, so he might as well get used to it.
.
It’s a messy job, as messy as he was allowed anyways, but this one didn’t have discretion as a requirement, so it’s all okay in the end. A bit more drag-down knock-out than most, but nothing that would get him punishment.
Wolfwood wakes up with a headache that makes him take a trip to the toilet to vomit, something he hasn’t had to do after a job for a while now. At least this time it’s not from being near and disposing of a body in the frigid nights or under the burning, putrefying suns. In fact, he could barely remember what had happened the night before—beyond the vague knowledge that he had done his job.
When he goes to wash the bile from his chapped lips, he winces at how it stings to the touch. Looking up at the mirror, something he is very adept at doing at this point, he sees the angry man that used to be him. But also, distorted. Bruises swelling change the contours of his face and the almost sickly pallor that the morning’s sickness has given him changes the shade of his skin enough that if he squints, he can pretend it’s not him. He can see a stranger and not some twisted monster that slid under his skin and started using, disfiguring, his face.
His head is killing him, his memories are a blur, and he has never felt this miserable in his whole life.
But the man in the mirror does not look like Wolfwood, he does not look like Big Brother Nico, he just looks like a stranger. It’s the first time in a long while he hasn’t had to look away from the reflection. For once it’s a man and not a monster in the mirror; it’s a man he does not know, a man that he chose with every punch thrown and gulp of horrid liquor down his throat.
Life goes on, though.
When Wolfwood takes the serum, he is far from the mirror, unwilling to see the transformation he will undergo.
He knows that this is going to be the only reprieve he gets, a pattern of destruction he won’t be able to kick for the scant few minutes he gets to sit in skin that doesn’t sit wrong on his face because it is no longer his face he sees.
Wolfwood dares ask, once and only once, how old he is.
“I don’t know,” is the answer he gets. “Does it matter?”
He plasters a fake smirk on his lips, and his hands are in his pockets to hide their shaking behind an aura of cool indifference.
“Nah, just wonderin’.”
It doesn’t, not really. Wolfwood will always be the one who had to grow up too fast. So it doesn't matter that his body just got the chance to catch up quicker than usual.
(It does matter. It does matter, so much. He was a child, and now he always will be. He is an adult, and now he will never get to grow up. He’s trapped, and he wants to know for how long, just to be sure that this face—that will never feel right—would have been his by now.)
He needs a cigarette and a drink. It's not like anyone will stop him; he's an Adult and he can handle himself just fine.