Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

A star of purple fire flashes back into the atmosphere, no sign of Knives’ molten blue, and Meryl thinks, Maybe Vash will make it.

Then Wolfwood grabs her around the waist again and runs. This time she’s facing backwards, so she watches the descent, the terminal-velocity plunge straight down into the heart of the city. Her silent mantra of Please be fine please be fine turns into blank horror when Julai erupts.

The initial explosion knocks them both to their knees, sprawling in the sand. Meryl glances up to see the dust-storm shockwave rushing toward them, but before she can cry out, Wolfwood grabs her around the waist once more and leaps toward a nearby rock overhang. 

They land beneath it. Wolfwood throws himself overtop her, tucking her head into the cradle of his arm. Then the shockwave hits, dust and sand tearing by so fast she’s certain it would’ve stripped the flesh off her bones if the overhang wasn’t protecting them. “Got you,” Wolfwood says above her, almost against her ear, warm and close. He’s barely out of breath. “Stay down, shortstack. I got you.”

She’s on her belly against gravel and dust, and though she’s sheltered from the worst of it, grit and sand still swirl close. She grabs a handful of the hanging lapel of Wolfwood’s jacket and pulls that over her face. He smells good—cloves and distant smoke, clean sweat. Soap. Warmth. He’d had a shower aboard the SEEDs ship, and so had she, less than a day ago. 

Hell. Less than a day ago. 

Only a day before that, they were nearing Terminal City, tense after the windmill town.

Vash had fumed silently in the back seat, eyes fixed out the window. At the next rest stop, it was Wolfwood who told Meryl what she missed, what Vash promised Rollo, and his failure to keep that promise. She understood, then: Vash’s anger was about so much more than Wolfwood’s kill shot. 

It feels like another lifetime.

She clings to Wolfwood’s lapel and absurd hope. Vash has to make it.

When the dust storm settles, a new one takes its place, smaller and far less terrifying. The SEEDs crew picks them up.

Julai is gone. 

Meryl stands in the control center amid scattered, frantic techs and officers, and watches their shifting screens, surveying the crater where an entire city once stood. There’s nothing left. No buildings, no people, except those who thought to flee at the first sign of trouble, far outside the crater. “Vash did this?” she whispers.

“Knives.” Wolfwood’s quieter than usual. “Knives did this.”

“But…” Her eyes are blurring and spilling over, tears hot on her cheeks. She’s thinking of Vash at Rollo’s side, the way he gripped that giant arm and called Rollo’s name even knowing he was gone. 

That was one person. Not even Vash’s fault, not really. This is a whole city, thousands of lives…

“What about Vash, is—is there any sign of…”

“Wouldn’t be surprised if he made it,” says Brad, but he’s hushed, too. “The guy’s tougher than he looks.”

“And if that cube was made of stuff like him,” adds Luida, “then there’s a chance it didn’t harm him.”

But their scanners don’t find any sign of him, even with knots of refugees already crowding the outskirts of the crater, some laying out bodies that weren’t obliterated but still close enough to the explosion to die. With the dust still in the air, it’s impossible for their computers to pick up faces or identify corpses.

Meryl and Wolfwood are finally herded out of the control room. They must look awful, because Brad shows them to the nearby canteen. But the canteen is in an uproar, already preparing things they can take down to the refugees. 

“We’re helping them,” Meryl says immediately, but when she takes a step forward, she sways, lightheaded. 

“Whoa,” says Wolfwood, a steadying hand on her shoulder. She wants to push him away—I’m fine—but the warmth feels too sweet.

“You look pretty pale,” says Brad. “When’s the last time you slept?” 

“Um.” She slept a little when Vash was unconscious here, but before that—she can’t remember. In the truck, maybe. Before the sand steamer. She remembers stars that stood out burning-white against the dark. Quiet company around the fire, blue eyes warm over sunset lenses.

“I’m getting you a tray and a room,” says Brad. “No arguing.”

“But the—”

“Same goes for you,” Brad tells Wolfwood, who scoffs.

“Don’t need much sleep,” he says. “Put me to work.”

Brad squints at him. “Are you like Vash?”

Meryl’s heart skips. Wolfwood mutters, “I’m worse.”

Brad rolls his eyes. “If you start keeling over, you’re getting a room, too.”

“Whatever.”

She feels odd leaving Wolfwood behind. “You’ll be okay?”

He pins her with a raised brow. 

The thought hits her, as sudden as it is absurd: He’s all I have left. Embarrassed, she grips his lapel. “Just be careful.”

His hand hovers over hers like he might clasp it, but then he drops it. “Yeah.” 

Meryl drops her hand, too, tingling with the unfulfilled promise of touch. Brad directs him to the head of the kitchen staff, then nods Meryl along to load a tray with some wrapped sandwiches and what looks suspiciously like real fruit. Meryl follows, eyelids drooping. She’s weary with grief, and hungry, too, but the allure of getting decent sleep is too tempting to avoid. Maybe things will seem less bleak when she wakes up.

Maybe they’ll have found Vash.

She’s not so weary that she doesn’t notice Brad leading her down a familiar hallway of the living quarters. “Vash’s key is the only one I’ve got on me,” he says, pulling a slip of clear glass from his chest pocket, green monospaced text scrolling across it. “I can get you a different room, but I’d need a technician to open up one of the other—”

“His room is fine.” Heat flutters through her. Is this allowed? What if Vash returns and sees her here?

It must not be a big deal, because once the room’s open—devoid of life except for the framed group photo on the room’s one table—Brad leaves the tray and the glass keycard there and shuts the door.

Now that she’s alone, something deep within her fractures, like cracks spiderwebbing across a glowing-blue tank. Sniffling, Meryl lays Roberto’s derringer on the table with a heavy clunk, toes off her sneakers, and goes right to the narrow mattress. She collapses onto it and buries her nose in the pillow.

Immediately she finds the scent of Vash: faintly citrus-y, from the bar soap he carries with him; faintly clean, like cheap coin laundry detergent, from hell knows how many laundromats they afternooned at on the road; and something so emphatically, clearly Vash that her heart twists up in bittersweet ache.

She closes her eyes, wraps her arms around the pillow, and sniffles herself to sleep.

***

She finds Wolfwood dozing at a table in the canteen, the cross at his side. An empty tray, dishes scraped clean, sits inches from his arms, which he’s using as a pillow. Hesitant, she touches his elbow. “Hey. Undertaker.”

“Hm.” He doesn’t open his eyes. His sunglasses are skewed up his forehead so she can see all of one closed eye. He looks oddly…soft. Vulnerable.

“C’mon,” she says. “Get up, I’ll take you somewhere with a bed.”

“No.” He lifts his head, presses his shades fully on. Sits back slow. His voice scrapes raw. “Do they need more help? I probably got another few hours in me.”

She snorts. “No, you don’t. But I do. We can trade.”

He blinks at her, bleary. “Yeah. Fine.”

He lets her lead the way back to the living quarters. “They put me in Vash’s room,” she says. “D’you—is that…?”

His brows rise above the shades, his lips parting, and for a moment, she’s certain she sees the same anguish in him that she feels in herself. But then his brows drop, his face relaxing into indifference. He says, “Whatever.” 

She hands him the key card. He shuts the door without looking back.

***

She next finds him leaning in a window in the canteen, drinking a mug of what looks like herbal tea, the cross tilted against the ledge beside him. When she gets close, she gets a whiff of his tea. Mint. 

“They found him yet?” he asks.

“Still no.” Her voice is weary even to her own ears.

He huffs and sips from the mug. “At some point here, we’re gonna have to call it.”

She folds her arms tight. “If anyone could’ve survived that explosion—”

“Yeah, it’d be him. But maybe he couldn’t. And didn’t.”

“We don’t know that!”

“Yeah? Then if he’s alive, why can’t this whole lost-tech wonderland find any sign of him?”

“I don’t know, but—”

“Why wouldn’t he have called them down himself?”

Suddenly she’s thinking of sand scarred with tire treads, of Vash framed between them as they disappeared into the starlit horizon. I don’t deserve to cry. “Maybe,” she says, “he thinks he doesn’t deserve their help. Maybe he’s hurt, maybe he—” Her lower lip trembles. “Maybe he thinks we’re dead, too.”

Wolfwood sends her a flat look over his shades. “Wishful thinking, shortstack.”

She nearly kicks him again. “Not everything is terrible just because you say it is.”

“And not everything is sunshine just because you say it is.” 

Her jaw drops, but for once, she’s at a loss for words. 

He looks away, out the window, where sand whips past in a dusty blur. “Look,” he says, “Brad said once it settles down out there, he’d get this thing to drop us off wherever we want. And you’re gonna wanna get your truck back, right.”

She’s trying not to glare, even if Brad’s offer is a relief. She shrugs.

“Well, I’ll go with you. Take you back to November, deliver you safe and sound.”

“Like you delivered Vash to Millions Knives?” she snaps, and Wolfwood flinches like he’s been slapped.

“No,” she says immediately, mortified, “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean—”

“Don’t apologize.” It’s rough, if without vitriol. “You’re right.”

“I agreed to take him there first. It was me as much as it was you.”

That makes him huff, something like amusement. “He was gonna get there with or without us.”

“Yeah.” Her eyes are filling with tears; she smears angrily at them with the heel of her glove. “I hate this.”

“Ain’t my idea of a great time, either.”

She wants Vash here. She wants to burrow in beneath his layers and wrap herself around his narrow waist while he tucks his coat around her, hiding her, pressing his mouth to her hair.

She’s not even sure when those sorts of thoughts began, except that the desert gets cold at night and his eyes were always so warm, and there seemed to be plenty of space beneath the flap of his coat. It became so easy to imagine his arm around her—either one—her leg hitched over his thigh, her ear over his bleeding heart. Then it was easy to imagine looking up, pressing her lips to his neck just above the rise of his collar. Slipping her hand beneath his shirt while he fell apart, panting hard, whimpering, one hand tightening around her side, the other gently tilting her chin up to find her mouth with his. 

She’s fallen hard before, but never like this. Never with someone who daily—hourly—challenged her so deeply. And she wanted him. All of him, whether that meant watching him tremble to pieces between her legs or spending countless more days debating nonsense quandaries to find a crack in his morals. The discovery that he was older than the seven cities should’ve sent her running. Instead it made her ache for him all the more. How lonely it must be. How beautiful, and how cursed.

After Rollo, she started wondering if Wolfwood felt the same way. The way he’d look at Vash, sometimes, so unguarded over the rims of his shades when he thought they were alone—she’d always been tempted to try to sneak a photo of one of those looks, like she did so many other candid portraits over the last few weeks. But the shutter’s double-click would’ve given her away, and she wouldn’t have put it past Wolfwood to yank the film out of the camera and then its cartridge, the long strand trailing and flashing and ruined in the light.

She realizes she’s just standing there in front of Wolfwood, who’s sipping his tea. She says, “D’you really want to take me all the way back to November?”

“It’s not a big deal.”

The hell it isn’t. It’ll be a few weeks of travel. Maybe a bit less, if they can catch a sand steamer out of the cape south of Hopeland. But something in her rails against separating from Wolfwood after all this. If nobody can find Vash, then Wolfwood’s her last connection to him.

She gulps. “Not sure if I can afford your rates, if you’re gonna play bodyguard.”

“Free of charge,” he grunts. “Doubt I’ll be able to cash a check anytime soon, anyway.”

“Okay. Then I accept.”

His half smile is a crooked little thing. She’s struck with a strange and sudden urge to get up on her toes, pull him down by the lapel, and press a kiss to his cheek. 

She doesn't. “Where’d you get tea?”

“Redhead in the kitchen.” Wolfwood gestures with his mug. 

“Thanks.” She starts to trot away, embarrassed, but then turns back. He’s watching her over the rims of his sunglasses again. “Really,” she says, “thank you.”

His eyes slant away. “Don’t mention it.”

She gets the feeling he means it.

***

With no sign of Vash, and the SEEDs crew pushing the limits of what they can do for the refugees, there’s nothing for it but to head back. True to his word, Brad has the ship drop them off where they’d like. Hopeland, where they last left the truck. 

“Please,” Meryl says before they leave Luida behind, “if you hear anything about Vash—”

“We know how to find you,” says Luida, clasping both Meryl’s hands, but the pity in her eyes says that Meryl ought to stop hoping. 

The sand steamer is still parked outside the village, under repairs, surrounded by machines and crew and equipment, swarming it like worms. The truck isn’t on the deck; someone finally suggests that Meryl check the local impound lot.

Which is exactly where it is. She signs it out, showing her ID badge and driver’s license, charging the fine to the Agency. The clerk at the booth ogles Wolfwood’s cross the whole time, beady eyes flickering over it. “Religious guy?” he finally asks. 

Wolfwood bares his teeth in a grin. “Depends on the day.”

Meryl rolls her eyes, thanks the clerk, grabs her keys, and marches toward the truck. 

It’s got about a quarter of the battery left. “Charge station by the south road,” Wolfwood says. 

“Yeah,” she says. That’ll take an hour. And they’ll need some supplies if they’ll be on the road for a few days. Cash, too. “I can pick up some provisions. And I still need to radio headquarters. Tell them about…” Everything. But Roberto in particular. She hadn't thought to ask if the SEEDs ship could reach the Agency, and she and Wolfwood are the only ones who know Roberto is dead. She looks up the hill. “Did you want to—you know, stop home?”

Wolfwood follows her gaze, and his mouth twists. “Not really.”

Damn. “Then you’re gonna be stuck watching me tell headquarters about Roberto.”

Wolfwood huffs. “Still better than showing my face around there.”

She frowns. She wants to pry—Is it because of your friend from the sand steamer? But she guesses orphanages aren’t exactly happy memory factories.

“Okay,” she says, turning the key. “Then let’s find that charge station.”

After, in the lot of Hopeland’s general store, she opens a control panel in the trailer and types in her access code. The sat dish swivels around with a crackle of sand in the joints, and points rigidly at the cloudless sky. She only cries a little when she delivers the news, but she gets some news in return: she's still employed, and her boss wants her back ASAP.

Wolfwood keeps his distance, takes his time inside the store, and for once, she’s glad to be alone.

***

They drive south. The first few days, they barely trade more than a few words; mostly it’s bickering about the radio. The truck is empty, too empty, haunted by missing halves. The third day, she gets sick of it. “Can I ask you something?”

Wolfwood’s shades don’t even turn her way. His elbow is on the open sill, his fingertips braced along the top. An unlit cigarette clings to the shine on the inside of his lower lip. “Shoot.”

“When we were in that lab, Conrad said he…changes people. Tries to improve them. He said you were—”

“Jesus, right for the jugular.”

“You don’t have to answer.”

Wolfwood ditches the cig and smears his hand down his mouth. “He tell you what he did to me?”

“Only that you were one of those people.” She gulps hard. Last night she dreamed of shining metal bands arched over dried pools of blood. It’d been all over the floor, too, in that lab. Worse in the dream.

“Yeah,” says Wolfwood. “I’m Conrad’s fucked-up handiwork. You never wondered why I took forty rounds through the chest on that sand steamer and a single shot of blue juice perked me back up?”

“I was kind of busy noticing Vash glowing all over. And then fainting.” Her fingers twitch on the wheel. She never did get to ask Vash about any of that, or assure him he hadn't scared her away. But the fact that she came back for him—surely he knew. “So the serum…”

“Yeah. Heals me.” 

“What happens when you run out?”

“I don’t run out.”

Well. Good. “It’s kind of incredible, the way it—” She immediately backpedals. “I mean—”

He’s chuckling, a warm, low sound. “I get it.”

“Fine.” She stares out ahead again. “I’m sorry they did that to you.”

She can feel him looking at her for a long moments. “Yeah,” he says eventually. “Me too.”

It’s easier after that. Almost friendly. Maybe even a little less bickering.

They don’t talk about Vash. Not in detail. 

It’s some kind of unspoken agreement, all the louder for not having said it. Meryl wishes she could. Missing him, still not ready to believe he’s gone—it’s an ache in her chest every time she thinks of his easy, hopeful smile. Even his snoring in the back seat. Sometimes she wants to grab Wolfwood and shake the man: Don’t you miss him? Aren’t you desperate to talk about it? 

But if he is, he shows no sign, and the ache becomes sharper.

They board the sand steamer after a week. At this point, it feels silly for Wolfwood to accompany her, because previous disaster aside, sand steamers are notoriously serious about passenger safety. Wolfwood comes along anyway. 

The ship is crowded. November is a stopping point on the way to Julai, so people are heading there to offer their help.

“It’s kind of nice, isn’t it?” Meryl says on the deck one morning, after she and Wolfwood get cornered by a chatty guy who’s heading that way to help build shelters out of the remaining debris. “Gives you hope, when people come together like this.”

Wolfwood breathes out smoke. “You sound like him.” 

She isn’t sure what to think about that.

When the ship docks on the outskirts of November, Wolfwood takes it in. The place is half as tall as Julai but twice as wide, and the streets are clean, the buildings maintained. Mostly. 

He walks her all the way to the front doors of the Agency, cross over his shoulder, fingertips lax beneath the leather bands. She doesn’t tell him that she got the pursers on the sand steamer to schedule the truck for delivery to the Agency lot this afternoon.

“Where are you headed next?” she asks, wishing she had a reason to ask him to stay.

He shrugs, ashing his cigarette. It’s down to a nub. He’s been nursing it since they got off the steamer. “Might see if I can track down where Conrad bolted. See if he’s got anything on…anything.” Vash, Meryl hopes Wolfwood means. 

She tries, “Will you come back and see me?”

Wolfwood watches a handful of interns drift toward the front doors, laughing too loudly, their clothes bright and new. Meryl doesn’t recognize any of them. Their eyes catch on Wolfwood, his cross, hilariously out of place here on the damn sidewalk outside the Agency. They don’t even try to hide the way they gape. He mutters, “Don’t think I fit in with this crowd.”

“Hey, it's not like you have to hang out with my coworkers.” Then, half hopeful, she adds, “You fit in with me.”

It’s a ridiculous thing to say, and the moment it leaves her lips, she expects his scoff.

But when it comes, it’s not cruel. Over the rims of his dark shades, his eyes shine with real fondness. “Might think about it,” he says. He drops the cigarette, crushes it under his loafer. “You take care of yourself, shortstack.”

“Yeah.” She holds her elbows. “You too.”

The wind blows the cigarette away by the time she leaves for the night, but the stain of ash against the concrete lingers for days.

***

“Hey, shortstack.”

She freezes halfway out the Agency’s swinging glass front door, her hand still on it, her whole body warming from crown to heel. 

Wolfwood leans there against the wall, just a step away from the front door, the strapped-up bulk of his cross at his side. His shades cover his eyes, his grin more of a grimace, a half-smoked cigarette clamped in his teeth. 

It’s been six months since he walked away from almost exactly this spot.

She breathes, “Undertaker.”

“Whaddaya know. She remembers me.” 

Meryl inches closer, stunned. “You came back.”

But something’s wrong with him. He’s sweating, covered in a fine sheen that reflects off the sharp knobs of his collarbones. It’s hot today, but not even in the cruelest heat of the western desert did she see him so much as pull at his shirt to cool the skin beneath. His right arm is tucked against his belly. Beneath his right ear, leading down into his collar, she spots a smear of vivid red. 

She blinks at him, sudden dread turning her heart over. “Are you…”

Her eyes catch on the tear through his suit at the top of his right shoulder. It’s soaked, the fabric shining, damp. When he lowers his hand, a fine line of blood darkens the outside of his palm, drips off his littlest finger. She follows the fall, and at his heel, drops have created a splattered island of dark red, shining on the rough concrete.

She thinks of that glaring-white lab, cruel manacles, dark sprays of dried blood. “Your serum,” she finds herself saying, near stumbling over the words. “Where—?” 

He coughs and winces, nearly bites the cig in half. “Used up the last one a few days ago.”

She balks. “What happened to ‘I don’t run out?’”

“Just like you to give me shit about it,” he grunts. 

“Let’s get you to November General. There’s—”

“No hospitals.” Genuine fear pulls tight around the words, the whites of his eyes just visible above his sunglasses. “Just—no hospitals.”

She stares at him, torn between bewilderment and shock. “Well, I can’t help you. I’m not a doctor. Surely someone…”

It’s rough: “Don’t have anyone else.”

Well. She knows better than most what it’s like to not have anyone else to go to. The last few months have taught her it’s a bitter, lonely place, that even surrounded by friends, it’s possible to feel like the only person in the universe.

And she’s missed him. God help her, she’s dreamed of those nights on the road with the two of them.

She wets her lips. “I’ve never taken a bullet out of someone.”

He smirks, and its crookedness makes her heart skip. “Lucky for you, it went clean through.”

That sounds worse. “Never sewn anyone up, either.”

“Don’t need to do that, either. You got a first aid kit?”

She pulled one out of the truck six months ago and dropped it under the bathroom sink. “Yes.”

“Then we’re good.” 

There’s one more thing to ask, and she hates asking it, but… “Anyone following you?”

His smirk drops. “Wouldn’t have come here if there was.”

That settles it. “All right. Let’s go.”

Relief makes his shoulders slump. Which makes him wince. But he pushes himself off the wall. “Where do you—” He sways.

She swoops under his arm, the side without the gunshot wound. A concerning amount of his weight slumps across her shoulders. “Hey!”

And oh, no, he smells exactly the same. Cloves and faint smoke from the cigarettes, cheap motel soap that blends with him in a way that makes her heart pitter-patter. “I’m good,” he says, and it rasps. He straightens up, but squeezes her shoulder—thanks, or reassurance, she’s not sure which. He tips the cross into his grip by tugging the straps. “How close is your place?”

She resists the urge to wring her hands together. “Four blocks.”

“Easy.” He hitches his cross over his left shoulder. “Let’s go.”

***

She takes him to her tidy one-bedroom off Merchant Alley, four stories up and overlooking a backstreet crowded with rusting air-conditioning units and dumpsters. When there’s wind, it blows away the scent of fried things and garbage, enough to open the windows.

Today isn’t one of those days. But the place is big for this part of town, high-ceilinged, actually lets in the light. A ladder between the bathroom and bedroom leads up to a lofted area where her old roommate used to kip, but that she’s turned into an office of sorts.

She ushers Wolfwood inside, and his cross barely fits under the frame. He ducks, breathing a quiet, pained noise that makes her heart ache. 

With him safely inside, she shuts the door, locks it. Tosses her keys in the bowl, drops her jacket on the nearby sofa, slips off her shoes. “Come on,” she says. “Bathroom.”

He stands there, awkward and tall, the shoulder of his suit even more saturated without his constant pressure on it. “Gonna bleed all over your carpet.”

“You can clean it up once you’re better.” It’s cheap, low-pile greige, speckled with mysterious stains even before she moved in. “This way.”

She crosses to the bathroom, a few quick steps before she drops to a crouch and pulls out the first aid kit. “Okay,” she says, riffling through the contents. “There’s definitely gauze, but—”

But Wolfwood isn’t beside her like she thought. She looks up, out the open door, to see he’s paused a few steps from the entryway, staring at the string of photos hung along the—

Oh, no. The photos.

She’d developed them herself soon after the trip, two and a half rolls of film in the darkroom at work. She cried laughing at some of them in the thick red light. Apparently Vash had taken the camera one day and snapped photos of everyone from the knee down, but so she could tell exactly what was happening. Roberto’s ankles crossed on his pack, cigarette smoke drifting over his boots. Meryl and Wolfwood squared off and squabbling about something, heels dug into the sand, the knuckles of Meryl’s clenched fists only just visible. A view straight down into the footwell in the backseat of the truck, Vash’s boots balancing on their outer edges, perfectly indicating his cheery mood.

Wolfwood had taken the camera, too, had photographed things of absolutely no interest to anyone, but surprisingly artistic, like he actually knew how to manipulate an f-stop. Two cigarette butts in the sand, still trailing thin threads of smoke. A discarded sandwich wrapper at a rest stop. One of the side mirrors of the truck, reflecting two moons. 

There were plenty she’d taken, too, of all of them. A few pointed back at the whole group. A few candid portraits she’d snuck before the victims heard the shutter snap, and either laughed or scowled.

They’re all hanging there along the wall by the door, those photos. Every last one. 

Somehow, Wolfwood seeing them there feels like an even deeper intimacy than having him in her apartment in the first place. 

She goes to stand with him, her face hot. Her whole body feels hot. “Come on. We should look at your shoulder.”

“You got ‘em developed,” he says. Bloody fingertips reach out like he might touch the corner of one. Then he pulls his hand back to himself. It’s a portrait of Vash, a side profile in the sunset, with a soft, unguarded look that’s all at once sad and satisfied. Light gilds the spikes of his hair. His shades are almost invisible from this angle. 

It’s Meryl’s favorite. “You haven’t heard…” she starts.

“Nah.” He glances at her sideways. “Not for lack of trying.”

Wait. So he has been trying? 

“You’re looking for him, too?” It’s breathless. “I thought you thought he was dead.”

“Guy who’s been alive a hundred and fifty years can’t kick off that easy.” Wolfwood finally turns away from the photos, swaying a little. “Take it you haven’t found anything, either.”

Meryl’s throat is tight, threatening tears. Wolfwood hasn’t given up. He really does believe Vash could be alive. Or if he doesn’t, he’s at least willing to humor her. And that’s something. “Not yet,” she says, and draws in a steadying breath. “C’mon. Let’s get you sat down before you pass out.” 

She puts him in the empty tub so he doesn’t get blood all over the bathmat, too, and makes him take off his jacket and shirt while she washes her hands and tries not to stare at him in the mirror.

Wolfwood is beautiful when he’s bare like this. 

He’s also a mess.

The bullet wound trails blood down his chest, smeared where it’s already saturated fabric. Bruises dimple across his left-side ribs. A big ugly purple one, so dark it’s nearly black, rises out of his trousers over his left hip, sitting above his belt. He’s all smooth bronze skin, dark hair, sharp sinews and shadows that hint at the muscle beneath.

“Okay,” she says, kneeling at the side of the tub. She puts on the sealed gloves over her cleaned hands. “Should we—do we clean it first?”

“Yeah.” His voice is rough. “You got an alcohol pad in there?”

“Yes.” It’s ready in her hand, which has started to shake.

“Great. That—just the outside, just pass it over the hole—then shove as much gauze against it as you can.”

She bites down on her lower lip. “Got it.”

He flinches, a quiet, horrible noise of pain grinding past his clenched jaw, as the alcohol touches the chest side of his wound, but he stays still. She’s shaking badly by now, but she manages. When she packs square wads of gauze against the wound, he grinds out another harsh sound and then pants as she tapes the gauze to his warm skin. He’s hairy—not so much it’s troublesome for the tape, but enough. She wishes it wasn’t doing it for her.

She has him lean forward next and cleans the exit wound, and this is worse. Bigger, already bruised all the way around. Looks like a tear rather than a small, neat puncture. “Are you sure I shouldn’t stitch this?”

“Hrm.” No doubt he’s thinking of how much she’s shaking.  “What’s it look like?”

“It’s—like a lopsided letter Y.” 

“How big?” 

She gulps, hovers her fingers over it to measure, and shows Wolfwood.

“Leave it. Stitches’ll just make it worse once I can get my hands on more of the good stuff.” He glances up at her, and she realizes with a start that his shades are sitting on top of his head, and she can see all of his eyes. Bottle-brown. Pained, but relieved. “Hey,” he says, “you’re doing great.”

Her cheeks grow hot again. “If you say so.” She cleans the back wound, too, then reaches for the kit only to realize she’s used up every last packet of gauze on the front side of the wound. “Um.”

“What.”

“We, ah. We used up all the gauze.”

He starts to chuckle, then winces, wheezes. “You got stuff for your—for monthly...things?”

She blinks at him. “What, like a tampon?”

“Yeah.”

“Inside the wound?”

“What? No, just—press a couple of ‘em against it, Jesus.”

“Oh.” That sounds a little better. “Seriously? That’ll work?”

“Yeah.” He’s smiling at her all crooked again. She wants to hate it, but something about it makes her smile back. Her hands are shaking and all this blood is deeply unsettling, but there’s a lightness in her heart she hasn’t felt in months. Have his eyes always been so kind? “Before I bleed out,” he adds, and she flinches back to the medicine cabinet, mortified.

“How,” she says, pulling out a handful of tampons and promptly spilling them everywhere, “damn it—how did you learn all this?”

He snorts. “You don’t wanna know.”

She turns back to him. “Yes, I do.”

His smile turns brittle. “Well. You know I’m one of Conrad’s special cases, right. So once he figured out their little vials worked, they made me train without them. ‘Just in case.’” His first two fingers on each hand drag at the air.

Nausea rises within her. Cleaning up his blood didn’t make her this sick. “They shot you?”

“Yup.”

She barely has the air to whisper, “That’s horrible.”

“Toldja you didn’t wanna know.”

“That’s not what I said.” She bristles, but makes herself open a tampon. “Thank you for telling me.”

Now he’s the one who looks surprised.

She clips the string with the small, sharp scissors in the kit and unfolds the synthetic cotton, spreads it over the wound. Wolfwood grunts but doesn’t flinch. A muscle stands out in his clenched jaw. “Too much?” she asks.

“Nope.”

She presses a second one over the first, then a third, so it resembles the gauze on the other side, then tapes it down tight so it still puts pressure on the wound. “There.”

Wolfwood hauls in a long breath, deep and slow. “That’s better,” he says.

Meryl breathes, too, looking at the tissue-paper scraps of sterile packaging and tampon applicators and spots of blood littering the floor. She pulls off her gloves. “Don’t move,” she says. 

She gets him a glass of water from the filtration system, and when she returns, he’s buttoning himself back in his bloody, torn shirt. “Oh, come on,” she chides. “I can lend you some clothes while we wash those.”

“You think I’m gonna fit into anything you own?”

Meryl rolls her eyes and holds out the glass of water. “My old roommate left some of his stuff, and he was at least as tall as you.”

Wolfwood is already halfway through the glass, somehow not spilling a drop. Her eyes catch on the bob of his throat, the slightest sheen of stubble there and up over his jaw, before she looks away. “I’ve got some painkillers. They aren’t much, but they—”

“Might help.” He’s done with the glass, but clearly doesn’t know where to put it; Meryl takes it, noting the trails of condensation down the side are pink from the blood on his fingers. 

She pulls the pills out of the cabinet, too, breaks off a square with a blister of the strongest stuff she’s got, and holds it out. “Then I’ll get you some more water—”

Wolfwood takes her wrist. Not a strong grip, just enough to ask her to pause, his thumb tucked in the fold of her palm. His hand is warm. His eyes shine with earnestness. “Thank you,” he says, so quiet.

She turns her wrist to fold her hand into his, and it’s huge. Engulfing. Her voice is steady. “I owed you one.”

He huffs. “No, you didn’t.”

“Lost track of how many times you saved my life.” She swallows hard. Her voice snags when she adds, “I missed you.”

He looks away. “Feeling’s mutual, if you can believe it.”

She’s warm all over again. She drops his hand and sits on the edge of the tub, rubbing her knees. “But you never came back to see me.”

“Didn’t think I should, if I couldn’t track down anything useful.”

She gapes at him. “You are more to me than news about Vash.” 

Dark eyes flicker up to hers, uncertain—but the tilt in his brows says he’s desperate to believe her.

“I’ve been looking,” she says, breath hitching. Helping Wolfwood, being so close to him, after so long, when he looks as hollowed-out by loneliness as she feels, when he’s still searching for Vash anyway—“Keeping my ears open for anything. I’ve got our field reporters searching, too. A few people I can trust in the Agency’s network.” Tall, blonde, blue-eyed, she told them. Prosthetic arm that looks like lost tech. 

“But if people already can’t find the Humanoid Typhoon with that bounty on his head—”

“I didn’t tell them to look for the Humanoid Typhoon. I just gave them his description. I said he—” Her breath hitches again. “I said he was family who I wasn’t sure survived Julai.” She rushes on: “But I haven’t been able to leave town to actually search myself, so I have no idea if my contacts are overlooking things, or. Or what. ” She studies her hands, one palm still warm from the heat of Wolfwood’s touch. “He can’t just be gone. I refuse—I know it’s ridiculous after so long, I know it is, and I know it’s even more ridiculous looking for a wanted criminal—but he…”

Wolfwood studies her. Then his good arm spreads along the other edge of the tub, opening up the long line of his body. “C’mere.”

She sobers. “What?”

“Never seen somebody who needs a hug so damn bad. Get in here.”

She’s too bewildered—and he’s too right—to protest. She climbs into the tub between his raised, spread knees. She can’t tuck into his right side, her left, because that’s where the bullet wound is, but there was that massive dark bruise over his left hip. “Your bruise,” she starts, but he tuts a dismissive noise and pulls her down against him, her head settling just below his left shoulder, his left arm around her waist.

He’s warm. Surprisingly cozy. There it is again, cloves, cigs, soap, and, with her nose tucked against his shirt, the faintest trace of laundry detergent. 

This shouldn’t be comfortable, but her eyelids feel heavy. She could fall asleep here. It stirs her hair when he says, “I’ve been looking all over.”

She lifts her head. He wasn’t just saying that to humor her, then. “And still nothing?”

He stares at the opposite wall of the tub. “Tracked down Conrad, tried to get him to tell me what he knew. But he didn’t know shit, either.”

She lays her head back down. “Does he know if Knives made it?”

“Couldn’t tell. He said the guy’s dead, but I dunno if I believe him.”

That’s disconcerting, but if Knives is alive, he’s apparently in no shape to continue his plans.

“But Brad and Luida said there might be a chance,” Wolfwood continues. “And you’re too damn stubborn to give up on it, so. Neither can I.”

She closes her eyes, trying not to squeeze him as tight as all this relief demands. This is bliss. He feels so good, and he’s here, and he’s looking for Vash, too.

For just a moment, she pulls up a familiar fantasy: tucking herself against Vash’s side almost exactly like this. Wolfwood’s heartbeat is steady beneath her ear, maybe a little fast, but considering the blood loss, that makes sense. How would he react if she tilted her mouth up, tugged his collar aside and latched onto his pulse—

No, no, she is not thinking about that. “So the Eye of Michael’s still going. We heard as much, but…”

“Yeah, they’ve got too many satellite locations to go down completely, even without Knives.”

“Are they the ones who shot you?”

His chest shakes once with a silent laugh. “Nah. This was mercs down at Fuller’s Hill.” It’s a day’s walk from the furthest edge of November. Did he drive here? Ride? “Thought I got away clean. Then I didn’t. Knew you were close, and I wasn’t about to let a doctor take a look at me. So.”

Her fingers clench in the loose fabric in the dip of his chest. It’s stiff with blood, but if it doesn’t bother him, it doesn’t bother her, either. “I’m glad you found me,” she whispers.

She’s not sure how much time’s passed when someone says, “Hey. Shortstack.”

She’s too cozy to move. Every limb feels heavy. Did she fall asleep? “Huh.”

“Budge up. I gotta piss.”

What? She lifts her head and finds herself drooling onto Wolfwood’s shirt.

Wolfwood’s shirt. 

Oh, no. No, no, no, she fell asleep against him, she was snuggled up to his side like her favorite fantasy about Vash; hell, while she’s here, why not picture Vash slotted in behind her, knees tucked into the backs of her own, his heavy blue arm wrapped around them both—

“Oh,” she says, batting at the drool stain, and when that does nothing, she quickly presses herself upright without pressing on him. “Sorry, sorry! I didn’t mean—”

But he’s grinning. “You know you snore?”

Her jaw drops. “I do not.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Shut up.” She pushes hair out of her eyes, climbing out of the tub. Her whole right side is warm where she was pressed against him, cooling now that they’ve separated. “Are you hungry? I’m hungry.” She hurries from the bathroom through a snow of discarded packaging. “Feel free to use the shower. Towels in the cabinet. I’ll leave you some clothes.” She closes the door behind her, and goes to the phone to call in a takeout order. 

Dinner shows up soon after. She hurries down to the front door of the building to collect it from the courier.

When she lets herself back into her apartment, Nicholas D. Wolfwood is in her living room, in her old roommate’s violently green pajama shirt and long, loose shorts. His shades are gone completely, not even on the top of his head. His hair is damp; he must have taken her up on the shower, and she can only hope he kept his bandages out of the spray. But now he’s staring at the shelf of trinkets near the window. When he sees her, he picks up one of her high school trophies, hefts it in his palm. “Baseball, huh.”

Her face heats. “Yeah. And?”

“What position did you play?”

“Are you gonna paw through all my stuff?”

“Yeah, probably.” He sets the trophy back on the shelf and pads over to where she’s set the takeout bags on the low table in front of the sofa. “Damn. Smells good.” 

They eat on the floor there, folded knees tucked under the table. Wolfwood’s a surprisingly polite eater even though he looks like he hasn’t eaten in days. He’s dexterous with the chopsticks and actually uses the flurry of napkins. Doesn’t talk with his mouth full, either. He asks her about work. She can’t believe he cares, but she gives him the rundown.

“Kept an eye out for your article about him,” Wolfwood says when the rice is gone. “Must’ve missed it.”

She’s frozen with a mouthful of sesame bun, and gulps. “I wasn’t allowed to run it.”

“That mean you wrote it?”

“Yes. I did.” She’s still reeling. Wolfwood looked for my article. “My boss wouldn’t let me exonerate him. Said it’s better if people have a scapegoat.”

He huffs. “Figures. You still have it?”

Another bite of bun pauses halfway to her lips. “What, the article?”

“Yeah, the article.”

“You. Sorry. You want to read it?”

The smirk on him. “If you still got it.” 

“Maybe.” She does still have it. “Somewhere.” It’s on her tablet, on the home screen, on the table between them. “I can look.”

“Roberto’s obituary was nice, though.”

For a moment, everything she just ate feels like a stone in her belly. But then she looks at him, those brown eyes so vulnerable without his shades, and sees nothing but sincerity. Everything lightens. “Yeah?”

“Didn’t know he broke that story on the seven cities drug bust. I still remember that.”

It was fifteen years ago. She squints at Wolfwood, suddenly realizing she has no idea how old he is. She doesn’t know anything about him, really, except that he’s a chain smoker and one of Conrad’s countless victims, and that Julai took everything from him, too.

And Project SEEDs aside, he’s the only one left other than Meryl who knows that Vash the Stampede is a gentle, tired soul who only got his reputation because his brother couldn’t leave well enough alone. Wolfwood's the only one who misses Vash so much that he can’t even say Vash’s name aloud.

She swaps the bun for her iced milk tea. “Were you part of it?”

“What, the drug bust? Nah. Mostly watched it happen, but the Eye of Michael had a few people involved. Knives did not like that.” He huffs. “A wonder Roberto didn’t make his list.”

“Good for us that he didn’t.” 

“But really,” says Wolfwood. “It was a nice piece of work. Can I get you to write one for me when I finally drop dead?”

Meryl chews her straw. “No.”

“Huh? Why not?”

“Because you’re not allowed to die.”

His smile comes back, slow. Incendiary. 

“And I don’t know anything about you,” she adds. “What would I even write?”

“You could make shit up.”

She feigns shock and throws her balled-up napkin at him. 

He snatches it out of the air. “Yeah, I know. You’re too goody-goody honest journalist to lie.”

She folds her arms. “You don’t need to say it like it’s an insult.”

“Didn’t mean it like one.”

Oh. That puts her on the back foot. So she ignores it. “Well, you know all about me. My job and where I live and my high school trophies.” She flaps a hand at the shelves. “But you…” She looks him over. “I know you work for the Eye of Michael. I know you didn’t take Vash to Knives out of the goodness of your heart.” 

His eyes skate directly down to his dinner, guilty. 

“And,” she adds, “I know by the end that you didn’t like taking him there any more than he liked going. I want to know more than that. So—so can I?” 

He studies her like he’s not sure he’s being mocked, eyes narrowed. Then they relax to an unbothered neutral. “Fine,” he says. “What do you wanna know?”

Immediately, she wants to ask everything, understand everything. But people freeze up when they get asked big questions—tell me about yourself or where’d you come from.

She’s gotta start smaller. 

She has it in an instant, a question she never had the courage to ask on the trip home six months ago. Deep breath. “I…want to know about your friend. The one who attacked you and Vash on the sand steamer.”

Wolfwood's brows shoot straight up. “Livio?”

“He called you—” Nico. Even now she can’t say it. The intimacy would be unbearable. “He knew you. I want to know how, if you…if that’s okay.”

He sets down his drink. “Yeah,” he says. “All right.”

He actually tells her. And when it’s clear he doesn’t want to go on, he asks about Meryl, too, of course starting with “What’s your story, anyway,” and she bites back a smile and tells him.

It’s well after midnight by the time she thinks to check the clock. She’s got work in the morning.

When her roommate left, he took the apartment’s other bed with him, so the couch is the only place for Wolfwood to sleep. She tucks a spare set of sheets around the cushions, stacks blankets there. A few more of her old roommate’s clothes—shorts and a few shirts, pajamas, until they can get the blood out of Wolfwood’s suit—go in a stack with a spare toothbrush still in its packaging, and she sets the bundle on the coffee table. She fluffs the pillow on one end of the sofa. 

“Well,” she says. “This is you.”

Wolfwood stares at the sofa like it’s a down mattress from a primo hotel. “You don’t have to put me up.”

“And you didn’t have to get shot without your serum, but here we are.” She smiles up at him, oddly giddy. She hasn’t smiled so much and meant it in a long time. “If you need anything, my room is…” It’s the only door in the place that isn’t the bathroom, right across from the sofa. But she trails off because suddenly she’s thinking of him opening that door in the middle of the night, leaning in the frame. Lonely out there, shortstack. She shoves the image away. “Just knock. You know where to find water and extra meds, right?”

“Yeah.” He looks so much younger without the shades. There’s a softness that suits him. “Thanks,” he adds.

“Sure.” She turns for her room. “Well—good night.”

“Night.”

It takes a long time to fall asleep. The first half hour, she listens to him—the rustle of fabric, the padding into the kitchen, a water glass filled. Then it’s the couch cushions squeaking as he settles in. 

She thinks of laying against the solid span of his chest earlier. His heartbeat, steady and sure, beneath her ear. She imagines him slipping into bed behind her, pulling her close. Whispering, You got no idea how bad I miss him, too. 

Whispering, Maybe he’d hold you like this.

She grits her teeth and tries counting thomases.