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When Wolfwood dies, his patience disappears in static shock and a sudden, aching silence.
Vash knows the world is ending. Even as Knives passes on, even as he can feel the burn in his scalp sizzle and spread, the long-dormant hole in his chest yawns wide and screams, and he cannot find it within himself, not this moment, to care.
This cannot be worse than Rem, than the hundreds of people he has failed to save. He had two years and four months with Wolfwood. He has loved and lost hundreds of times, is a dab hand at patching himself up and moving on from a freshly-dug grave.
The void howls, and Vash bends over, subject to its whims as he whines to the sand.
One hundred and fifty-four years and he hasn’t learned how to lose someone gracefully.
There’s nothing he can do. He knows this. He could have stalled a sister, slowed her hastening towards the end and starve death off for another day. Wolfwood is human. Modified, shoved to the left, but human. The last dregs of his vials are spilled into sand or are slowly cooling in his body, having sped his heart and kept it pumping through endless torment until it could no longer function.
The world is ending, and Vash suddenly, selfishly, stupidly, decides that if God in His heaven won’t give him what he wants he might as well try and take it himself.
Logically, there’s nothing he can do.
Logically, Vash shoves that thought to the back of his skull and bends over Wolfwood’s shoulder. Rem had called them angels, once. She didn’t mean it in the theological sense, or at least he’s pretty sure; her use of the word had been after he and Knives had first gone to make sure the sleeping passengers were safe on their lonesome, asking her later if they were having kind dreams while they drifted. He’d never have applied the term to himself if it were his choice, especially now; an old man with a streak of anger that stretched past the horizon could never be called an angel.
He hopes, now, that he can become what Rem likened them to.
The familiar tingle of electricity flowing in his body spreads to his fingers, and he watches as white pinions curl up and out of his sleeve. It never gets easier, feeling his hair dry up and darken. Something inside him is fed into that void, something he can't get back, and he reaches forward towards his slumped companion’s heart. Wolfwood is-
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-laughing uproariously over his third beer of the night. On average, it takes six more and four shots of distilled stuff to get him well and truly shitfaced. He's not even close to tipsy. Vash is on his sixth shot, and is only barely passing the marker. He knows that if he doesn't keep this pace up he won't be able to sleep in the warm haze he likes to sink into, but Wolfwood has been bright and excited after the road had been kinder to them than usual and he wants to bask for a little longer.
“It's true,” he says, rolling around his empty glass. “They fed on krill- think the smaller worms that float around at night- through their teeth.” Baleen, his mind says. Not teeth. But he'd have to explain what baleen was to Wolfwood, and even though the man was a rapt audience on most nights, Vash doesn't want to lecture.
“Sure,” Wolfwood says, his wide and unfettered grin providing more light than the overhead. “They ate little bugs, and not bigger fish like themselves. Your jokes are getting worse in your old age.”
Vash hums and takes a swig from Wolfwood’s beer instead of reaching for the gin. “Whales weren't fish, really.”
Wolfwood doesn't protest when Vash takes his bottle, which is how he knows he's really in a good mood. “Still. Would've thought they ate people like the bigger wams.”
“There was a Bible story about that,” Vash says, watching as his eyes crinkle at the edges. He would have laugh lines if he hadn’t been shoved into a body older than him. The idea makes him wish for a better time, one where Wolfwood didn’t look like a man in his mid-thirties despite being a good decade younger. “Thought you'd know. What kinda scripture are they teaching to men of the cloth these days?”
“The one where we charge eight double-dollars an hour for funerals and twelve an hour for weddings,” Wolfwood says.
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Strains of a repeated chord are echoing behind him. There is a hand on his shoulder, and Vash can feel it pushing him forward, closer to the join where his fingers are sinking into pools of light in Wolfwood’s chest. A pulsing throbs through his arm, streaking into his chest and spreading upwards to set alight the synapses in his mind. It’s not too dissimilar to how he reaches out to his sisters, just with the glass barrier removed. The smell still makes him sick. The sight is worse, seeing bright sunbursts pulse through Wolfwood’s chest as Vash stretches forward, pushing life into veins that have already grown cold.
He wants. He wants so badly that he can feel the air thrum with it, his desire to reshape reality flowing and pushing him further in, reaching to grasp something that he can pull back through the cage of Wolfwood’s ribs-
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The bed they’ve collapsed into is a species of absolutely dogshit motel beds that they’ve become used to over the months. It’s a poor excuse for a resting place, but it’s free of bedbegs and has running water and a lean-to where they’ve stashed Angelina, so it’s better than camping out in the sands.
Even if they were overcharged for a double and the rates for a room with two singles were through the roof.
Still, Vash can’t find much of a reason to complain, now that he’s had a moment to shower and shake sand out of his coat. Wolfwood sits perched on the windowsill with wisps of smoke curling up and around his face in a way that makes Vash wish he had taken more time over the years to become an artist. There’s a way that the moonlight brushes over his hair and creates a shadow in the dip of his philtrum that is undeniably alluring and untouchable. If he stretched a hand across the divide, Vash is almost sure that his fingers would smear paint instead of reaching for a warm knee.
“You’re staring,” Wolfwood says. He sounds amused, used to the way that Vash turns his gaze on him and watches, barely blinking, in an effort to take in everything he can about the other. “Something on my face?”
He shakes out his arm and repositions the pillow under his head before responding. “Yeah. Left a bit of dirt on it.” Wolfwood’s face is completely clean, had been since he came out of the bathroom with a towel over his head and shivering from the shower.
Two feet and three inches of space is an insurmountable distance. He needs him close.
Wolfwood swipes at his face twice before Vash beckons him closer, only to dip in and lick his cheek.
“Fuck, who raised you?” Wolfwood sputters, laughing as he falls back. He snorts on every third or fourth laugh, and it’s unfairly charming. “Jesus.”
“Think you got the wrong guy,” Vash says, feeling a smile burst across his face in response to Wolfwood’s own.
Wolfwood’s shadow stretches over him for all of a second before he collapses onto Vash, pressing-
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There is a bell
ringing
booming
beating
in his ears
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And Wolfwood is-
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Coughing, hacking up bile and blood and black ichor as Vash’s radiant hand pulls out of his chest. Underneath it, his heart beats once, twice, falters, and holds strong. Threads of blue light stretch out from his heart to trace through his veins before flickering back into nothingness.
Vash can’t breathe. Won’t let himself. He knows his hair might be spent, knows there is maybe a third of it left, going by the tingling on his scalp. But Nicholas-
Alive.
Alive,
Alive,
Breathes steady after spitting out onto the sand, casts his gaze up to heaven, and turns to land on Vash. There is a weight, a conversation, and a long road ahead of them.
When Vash kisses him, he tastes like oil and wet earth and blood.
“Found you,” he says, and breathes in Wolfwood’s surprised laughter.
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