Chapter Text
He comes to awareness choking on dirt and with the weight of the world on his chest.
Panic is the first and only thing he knows. A familiar feeling, and he readily gives himself over to it. His body belongs to nothing else but blind instinct and adrenaline; this isn't the time or place for anything more than that.
His lungs collapse a little further every time he tries and fails to breathe, but his damned mortal body can’t stop trying, like some tragically doomed idiot pushing a boulder up a hill — a futile, hopeless task, but the only thing he has.
Dirt fills his mouth, bitter and metallic and sandy, and his throat spasms around the intrusion, torn between trying to breathe and trying to swallow. He’s unable to do either, but that doesn't stop his body from attempting to force nonexistent air into his lungs, pushing dirt down his clogged throat with involuntary muscle contractions that send rivers of pain through every nerve.
He keeps his mouth closed, after that. Inhales the earth through his nose instead.
When he opens his eyes, they burn like hellfire. There’s no liquid left in him to blink away the pain, just more dirt. It’s dark as pitch anyway, so he squeezes them shut again, trapping grit behind his eyelids. The sting of it almost feels like crying.
His arms are crossed over his chest, his right hand pressed against his frantic heart by the weight. Every throbbing heartbeat screams at him to run, fight, run, fight, run, fight, run —
There is nowhere to run save for death's embrace.
So he fights.
He writhes, body shuddering, brain asphyxiating, every limb straining against the earth holding him in place, but the pressure does not release. This unbearable heaviness is all there is, and he's being crushed by it.
Well after the point a normal human would have surrendered, the world finally begins to shift around him. The dirt under his body packs tighter. Above him, the dirt begins to loosen. The weight on his chest retreats just enough to draw out his hellish existence. Inch by agonizing inch, his limbs free themselves.
For far too long, he fumbles blindly. Useless flailing only further prolongs the suffering, but rationality is out of his grasp. His body is doing everything it can just to keep fighting.
He is nothing but fingers clawing at dark earth and a desperate, human need to live.
And then his fingers scratch at hard stone. The panic flares. A choked gasp sends more dirt pouring down his throat. For half a delirious moment, he has the first and only coherent thought he’s had since waking. It’d be a pretty pathetic way to go, drowning on a planet with no water.
But when his hands find the end of the stone and curl around a flat edge, coherence gives way once again to single-minded fight for survival. He crawls around the stone — as much as crawling is a thing he is capable of, having just been born into this nightmare of crushing earth — and continues his push upward.
His right hand breaches the surface first. He only knows it has because he can feel sun on his skin, a sharp contrast to the cold beneath the surface. His other hand isn’t far behind, fingers grasping for open air and warmth.
There's nobody there to pull him out, so he does it himself.
He hauls his body halfway out of the ground before he dares to open his eyes. The suns are ruthless — high noon bears down on him with all its sharp, molten teeth, and his world goes from suffocating black to a white so bright he forces his eyes closed again before they can melt out of his skull. A kaleidoscope of colors swirls behind his eyelids, but he's not sure if it's an afterimage from the suns, or from the last thing his eyes have a clear memory of.
His first breath doesn’t come until after he expels the contents of his stomach and lungs back into the hole he crawled out of.
It’s only when he rolls over, gasping, convulsing in the dirt, dusty bile dripping down his chin, that he remembers — he never should have woken up at all.
He comes to awareness slower, the second time. The panic hasn't quieted or settled, but he’s had practice living past his expiration date before, and the recovery process is almost as automatic as the panic had been. Though the primal fear of death still shrieks in the back of his mind, it’s becoming easier to push aside in favor of reacquainting himself with reality.
Blind instinct is handing his mind and body back, and he's been left to piece himself together in the aftermath.
And so Nicholas D. Wolfwood begins to remember what life feels like.
The first — and perhaps only — thing he is aware of is the pain.
As he takes stock of his limbs, identifying their continued existence one by one, the only sensation he can articulate is everything fucking hurts. Including parts of his body that he didn’t know could hurt, which is saying something, considering the bullet-filled life he lived.
Lived.
Lives?
Is he even alive?
Did he even die at all?
It's a stupid question. Of course he died. He remembers every torturous second of it, right up to the moment his heart broke, and then a few seconds after, when a horrible silence filled the space where his pulse used to be.
He turns his face into his elbow and counts his heartbeats, reassuring himself that they're actually there. His chest throbs with pain for each uneven thu-thump, but he manages to count into the dozens before he loses track of the numbers amongst the pain.
Every wheezing breath he takes along the way is excruciating and rattles his entire body, but he eventually convinces his lungs that they’re safe from further damage. Tentative breaths become full. His ribs expand and find no resistance. He revels in the horrid dry, dusty, desert air of No Man’s Land the way only a recently dead man could.
The ground under him feels solid and real, and there's a breeze teasing the back of his neck, and somewhere in the near-distance, church bells are ringing.
If this is hell, then hell sure feels an awful lot like home.
Wolfwood rolls onto his back and opens his eyes. Above him, he sees nothing but open sky.
The suns are less brutal now, softened by their descent towards the horizon. Everything’s tinged a warm golden color that makes his chest ache — some metaphysical part of himself that isn’t hurting because the empty spaces in his body were recently filled with dirt, but because of the empty space in his soul that’s afraid he won't live long enough to see it filled to capacity.
He never did figure out how to hold onto hope without it killing him.
But that’s a problem for later, when every heartbeat doesn’t feel like grains of sand trickling through his fingers. Right now, he needs to make sure this second chance lasts more than a few hours. This is not the time for thinking of what he left behind. It’s not the time for wondering what happened and where is he and is anyone even —
Wolfwood clenches his fists until the pain is all he feels. Not the time, he tells himself, ruthlessly locking those questions away in the back of his mind. He needs to focus on what he can see and feel and touch, not what he wants to.
He never figured out how to want something without it killing him either.
The pain helps. It’s hard for his thoughts to hold onto anything intangible for long enough to hurt when the very real pain of being alive again is enough to claim all his attention.
Wolfwood pushes himself up to a sitting position and stares down at his body. It certainly looks like he just climbed out of his own grave. Every inch of visible skin is covered in dirt, and he’d feel confident betting his second lease on life that the parts of his body he can’t see are similarly coated. There’s probably dirt in his veins. He’ll probably be carrying a grave’s worth of dirt inside him until he dies a second time. Every breath he takes tastes of dirt. Every time he moves to inspect another limb, more dirt flakes off his body. His clothes are covered in dirt too, so much that he can’t even be sure if this was the suit he died in, or if someone kindly switched out his old suit for a nicer one.
I hope not, he thinks as he picks at the cuffs of his sleeves. Would’ve been a waste of perfectly fine cloth.
His fingernails are buried under dirt caked with blood — he faintly recalls desperate scratching against rough stone — but his flesh isn't rotting off his bones and he doesn’t see or feel any gaping wounds.
He doesn't know if he was dead long enough to rot, but he should probably have gaping wounds, shouldn’t he?
Before that thought can gain enough ground to replay the moments leading up to his death, his eyes settle on a slab of stone just shy of the hole he rose from.
That would be the rock he didn’t have the strength to roll away.
Wolfwood's limbs are still getting their bearings, so he drags himself across the ground to get closer and takes it in while slumped over the rectangular slab. It's roughly cut and chipped in several places. A sharp corner digs into his ribs. Flecks of dried blood scratch along one edge of the stone, and his fingertips twinge where they’re scraped raw.
Even a blind man would know that this is a gravestone. There’s a cross chiseled onto the surface.
The events leading up to his demise sweep over him like a sandstorm.
Chapel. Razlo. Livio. Miss Melanie and the kids. Fighting back to back with— With the truest friend he’d had. Two vials too many. One last drink sitting side by side with the man he’d wanted to spend the rest of his life with. Asking him to smile. Shreds of a rainbow falling from the sky, welcoming him home.
He clutches his chest. Presses his forehead to the cross. Tries to remember how to breathe again. He only just relearned, so it takes a few shaky attempts before he's stable.
Don’t fall apart so easy, he chides himself, near hysterically. What kinda stupid ass man gets lucky enough to cheat death then wastes his time weeping over his own damn grave?
But someone — and he knows who — didn’t just bury him. Someone buried Wolfwood six feet deep in a marked grave. Painstakingly carved a cross onto hard stone. For him.
On this planet, that’s the kind of thing you only do for someone you loved.
Loved.
Love?
Wolfwood’s entire being aches with the acceptance of it . He places a hand on the sun warmed stone and slides his fingers into the chiseled cross, tracing it and trying to adjust to this new breed of agony.
It could almost be a cruel joke, burying Wolfwood under the same symbol he carried as a weapon, the same symbol he used to punish, but he knows it wasn’t meant that way. It was probably meant as a peace offering: “Please accept him into heaven, he's one of yours.”
Yeah. That’s probably it. That big dumb stupid spiky blond idiot probably begged God to welcome Wolfwood to paradise.
And then God took one look at him and spat him back out.
Wolfwood lets out a wheeze of a laugh — it’s really more of a whimper — and focuses on the pain — the physical pain — again.
What’s almost worse than the gravestone is what he finds at the foot of it; an offering of whiskey and his favorite brand of cigarettes.
What kinda stupid ass man wastes perfectly good booze and cigarettes on a dead guy?
The same kind that would take the time to bury a sinner like him. And it kinda pisses him off, how grateful he is for this unnecessary kindness. It almost feels like someone's about to pop up out of nowhere with an, "I knew you'd come back for these," but you wouldn't bury someone you think is coming back for the gifts you’ve left them unless you hated them.
And he's already established that the gravestone proves otherwise.
So just a tangible memory, then. Something to help ease the fear that oblivion is all there is. A desperate wish that some aspect of the recipient still exists, and will feel less alone by knowing they'd been remembered.
Wolfwood's not sure he wants to think about being remembered. Being remembered means being mourned. And that just makes him want to crawl back into his grave and die all over again, but this time it'll be the guilt that takes him out, and he won't have anyone to blame for it but himself.
He was an idiot to hope that anything he said those last few moments would lessen the blow.
No ruminating, he tells himself. Focus up.
A quick search of his person turns up no way to light the cigarettes, because apparently giving a dead man a way to light up from beyond the grave is a step too far. He dumps a comical amount of dirt from one of his pockets and slips the box into his pants for safekeeping.
The booze, on the other hand, he can indulge in. It’s the good stuff — not quite top shelf, but maybe second from the top. Better than almost anything he could afford when he was alive. The first time. This time, too, since his pockets turned up empty in the search for his lighter. It certainly would've been nice if someone was considerate enough to bury him with a few hundred double dollars. But then again, dead men don’t need cash.
They do need a drink, though. Or at least this one does.
Wolfwood unscrews the lid of the whiskey, flicks it into the grave, and downs half the bottle in one go.
He throws it back up immediately.
Wolfwood stares at the puddle, watching it seep into the thirsty desert dirt, his throat burning in both directions, and feels like a fucking idiot.
He wipes his face with the back of a hand and allows himself a minute of self-hatred (turns out he’s the kinda man who wastes perfectly good booze), then a minute of guilt (he wasted perfectly good booze), before sipping the rest at a more reasonable pace.
The first sip tastes like sand and stomach acid more than it does whiskey, and he swirls it around in his mouth a few times before reluctantly spitting it out.
The second sip goes down his throat like water.
He gets drunk embarrassingly fast with nothing in his stomach to lessen the blow. By the time he’s licking the last drop from the rim of the bottle, the suns have tipped over the horizon and Wolfwood feels about ready to tip over too. He sways back and forth from his seat at the foot of his grave. The alcohol’s warmth is shielding him from the chilly desert night, but not from the way his mind keeps wandering to the hole a few feet away.
Would he rise again, with the suns, if he sunk under the horizon a second time? Or would the planet swallow him as he swallowed the planet, in an endless ouroboros of dirt?
Ashes to ashes, and dirt to dirt, or something like that.
Was Wolfwood human enough, in the end, to be granted that mercy? Or is that why he’s still alive — too much of an abomination against nature to slide peacefully into the natural cycle of things?
He lifts the bottle to his lips again, forgetting that it’s empty. The rush of disappointment is enough to pull him out of his rapidly spiraling thoughts.
In that brief clarity, Wolfwood tries to focus on his more tangible — and therefore more easily solved — problems.
He’s hungry, in that familiar “haven’t had anything to eat in multiple days,” sort of way. He’d been able to ignore it at first, courtesy of a lifetime of practice on top of everything else going on in his body, but now that it’s starting to sink in that this whole being alive thing might actually stick, the hunger is beginning to rear its head, gnawing at his innards with an almost sadistic fervor.
At least it means you’re probably still human, he tells himself. Only humans suffer like this.
But that’s not exactly true, is it? Wolfwood caused someone so much suffering that they buried him, after all.
And that’s a thought that hovers too close to a dangerous precipice. Not right now, he reminds himself.
Wolfwood lays on his gravestone and tries to will away the nausea and dizziness and gaping emptiness of both his stomach and his soul. He fails, utterly and completely and miserably. Everything still hurts and now the stars are spinning.
He’d kill for a donut right about now.
But killing never did bring anything good in the end, did it?
The third time Wolfwood comes to awareness, his empty stomach is trying to eat itself and he has a hangover so bad it almost makes him wish he was dead again.
The suns are back at their favorite routine; punishing him for existing in their presence. He’s got a stabbing headache that spikes every time he squints open his eyes. His mouth is so dry you could use it to strike a match. His skin feels somehow both clammy and on fire.
Couldn’t have picked a shadier spot to stick me in the ground, could ya, Needle Noggin?
Even just that brief, rhetorical question is enough to make him throw up what little liquid remains in his stomach. He groans, curling in on his cramping abdomen, shivering despite the heat.
Don’t think about it. Don’t think about him digging in the dirt for you. Don't think about him gently arranging your limbs. Don’t think about him laying your body to rest.
Don’t think about him at all, actually.
Wolfwood presses his hands to his face. And maybe the dehydration is a blessing in disguise, because it means that the shuddering, gasping breaths he takes aren’t accompanied by tears.
Once he’s gotten himself under control again, he assesses his surroundings.
The orphanage is behind him, silent as a grave and still heavily scarred from the fight to defend it. Every bullet hole in the stone walls of his youth pierces him with a complex emotion he has no words for, but that makes his heart yearn and his body ache for something it can’t have.
He can never go back to his childhood. It’s dead and buried under bullets and blood. His sins brought those same things to the very doorstep he’d tried shielding from them, and only the grace of an angel had spared them from it.
Wolfwood lost many things to the Eye of Michael, his life the least among them. But the most important things were saved, in the end: Miss Melanie and the kids, Livio and—
Stop bein’ an idiot, he scolds himself. You don’t know that.
Wolfwood has no frame of reference for how long it’s been since he died, aside from the knowledge that a grave ain't an easy thing to make, and neither is a headstone. The unnatural silence could mean that they’re all still alive, whisked to safety far, far away from here, or it could mean that they’re all dead anyway, despite everything. His sacrifice may have only prolonged their suffering.
He saved them from Chapel, but did someone save them from Millions Knives?
Wolfwood tears his gaze away from the orphanage. Even if they are alive, he doesn’t know if he’s ready to face them until he’s sure blood will never taint his hands again. And he’s not sure he’d be able to get out of explaining to Miss Melanie that he’d died and then somehow stopped being dead. Not when he hasn't wrapped his head around it himself.
Not when this — being alive — still seems too fragile, too tentative.
False hope is a cruel thing, and he doesn’t wish it on them.
Or maybe he’s still just a coward, even after everything.
Either way, he won’t find answers at an empty grave. He needs to find other people. If there are other people. A heaviness sinks in at the realization. The residents of the orphanage weren’t the only people in danger. If Knives wasn't stopped, Wolfwood might be the only human left on this planet.
There’d be no greater punishment for failure than that.
The city of December sits on the horizon about a few iles directly toward the suns, which is just peachy. The hazy smudge of the downed spaceship wavers in the heat. Wolfwood pats his pocket on instinct and his heart stumbles when he feels the familiar press of sunglasses against his heart.
They’re a little bent, and a lot dirty, but otherwise undamaged. He sucks together all the saliva he can muster from the depths of his throat, spits on the lenses, then wipes the dirt off with the cleanest article of clothing he has to his name: the inside of his left sock.
Once he’s got his glasses as clean as he can manage, which is not very clean at all, Wolfwood stumbles to his feet for the first time since he crawled out of the dirt. His stomach threatens to escape again, but he manages to swallow it down and remain standing.
A small victory, but he'll take what he can get.
Something about leaving behind a desecrated grave — even if it’s his own and he has the right to do whatever he fucking pleases with it — feels shameful.
Wolfwood pushes loose dirt back into his hole and tramps it down until it’s level. It still looks like someone dug up a dead guy, robbed him blind, did a piss poor job hiding the evidence, and then vomited on the ground multiple times to top it off, but at least it doesn’t look like the corpse walked away.
Even if that's exactly what it did.
Wolfwood takes one last look at his final resting place; within sight of home but not so close as to be a burden, a slab of stone lovingly carved with the symbol Wolfwood carried to his death, the now empty bottle of whiskey and the cigarettes in his pocket.
All in all, better than he probably deserved, more than he could have hoped for, and enough to make him feel like something he did in this godforsaken desert might have done more good than harm.
And then Wolfwood finally lets himself acknowledge the final remaining grave offering.
Jammed in the dirt, wrapped in cloth, and heavy with all the mercy it never gave its owner, stands the Punisher.