Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

(CW for chapter: canon descriptions of violence/destruction, graphic descriptions of injuries and blood, semi-graphic description of a burned body)

He looked back.

It was, in fact, the last of a long line of sins he'd already committed that night - that week - that month - since he'd known The Humanoid Typhoon.

But he looked back anyway.

Julai: the city crumbling like a sandcastle, people fleeing around them in stark terror, plants - whatever Knives had done with Vash's body, with Vash's power - rupturing like the paint balloons he used to drop on people at the orphanage.

Bursts of colors, flames, screams. A spectacle of destruction unlike anything he'd ever seen. Like a sinking ship in an ocean of sand. Like the end of something terrible.

And above the crumbling castle of sand, above the screams and the blood and the laughter from Zazie somewhere over his head, a singular body falling back to the earth like a fading star.

He couldn't see the blond hair from this distance, nor the glint of blue behind those glasses, or the tears he somehow knew were streaming down the soft cheeks, but he knew.

It was like a hole ripped straight through his gut, jagged and more jarring and painful then any bullet he'd taken in the last years. In the last month.

"Vash!!"

The scream ripped from his throat, almost echoed by Meryl under his arm as he threw her.

It wasn't thinking, it wasn't logic, it wasn't the way he did things.

But he threw the small woman anyway, barely aware of her body hitting the sand as he reversed direction, feet sliding in the gritty sand, Punisher grinding into his hip as he bolted, sprinted back toward the city.

Vaguely, like through a dirty lens or a dark cloth, he was aware of fighting up the stream, against the humans swarming out of the doomed city, like rats fleeing a sinking ship, pausing and swarming and scrambling around him.

He felt Punisher bouncing on his hip, smacking off humans and jolting his progress even more awry. He was aware of losing his glasses, of them sliding off his face and falling under the press of feet, but that wasn't what he knew.

He knew he had to catch that falling angel.

And he knew he wasn't going to make it.

Vash's falling figure disappeared into the spires of Julai's infrastructure, and Wolfwood screamed.

The impact waves were like a sandstorm, a wave at sea.

He saw them coming, rising and rippling outward, rolling like a massive wave of destruction, buildings and people and broken plants toppling in the wake of the wave, like a house of cards collapsing into a pit formed from a single body crashing to the earth.

Wolfwood screamed out his name again and then the impact hit and he was thrown, forward, up, airborne with hundreds of other humans who hadn't run far or fast enough to avoid the fallout.

The crash coming back to earth was like nothing else. Like falling into a broken mass of bodies and sand and fragmented metal. Something in his shoulder snapped, twisted, where he still held Punisher, where he had landed half on top of the scarred metal cross.

The pain was secondary. Dull under his senses, like it was trapped under ice, seen but not known. He only knew one thing.

He had to find that fallen body before anyone else did.

It forced him up to his swaying feet while the earth around him was still trembling, while the humans he landed with were still screaming and wailing, while metal and glass rained down around them in the wake of something terrible.

A chunk of glass cut through his hand and he ignored it, the buzzing pain going under the ice with the straining muscles of his shoulder as he jerked Punisher out from the bodies that lay around him.

It never occurred to him to drop it. To stop and turn back and let go.

Of the gun, of the choked emotion in his throat. Of the man in the center of this mess of metal and dead plants and human carnage.

It was like one of those fun house mazes he'd heard about growing up, that a few of the big cities had. Places that were designed to confuse you about finding the center, about getting out.

About finding anyone.

But this maze was bloody and broken and full of screams and cries from the dying. For the dying.

Nicholas knew death. Death was silent and swift and quiet.

This wasn't death. This was hell.

Punisher thumped against his legs as he dragged it across the twisted metal frames of homes, of lost lives. Of a time that would never come back.

He dragged his cross across a lost city, teeth gritted against the buzz of pain under the ice, against the screams fading around him until all he could hear was buzzing in his ears from something he didn't want to name in his own head.

But he never turned back.

That was a sin he had already chosen and there was no more turning around.

The center of the crater was surrounded by twisted metal walls, broken and reshaped with the impact of the fall, of the body slammed into them. Like some sort of iron sentinels, locking the screams of the dying outside. Keeping something in.

His shoulder screamed at him as he hefted Punisher up, less graceful than ever before, and blasted away the broken wall standing guard over that was left of Knives's tower.

In the back of his mind, he realized how ironic it was, how The Punisher was here, destroying the last of the Eye of Michael's stronghold.

Punishing. That was what he was made to do.

But the thought was gone before it truly landed, and he was finally letting the cross fall to the broken ground and crawling into the shattered tower, searching.

It wasn't hard to find.

He wasn't hard to find.

The debris was scattered, circling the body in waves going outward, circles of glass and metal and sand, like holy rings around something sacred.

Blond hair was stained red, black jacket torn open, prosthetic completely gone, limbs tangled and thrown in unnatural positions like a body nailed to a cross.

Nailed down by the jagged metal rod through his side.

"Vash!!"

Nicholas threw himself like a man possessed, knees dislodging the perfect circles around the angel, fingers scrambling over the thin chest, pressing down around the rod, trying to stem the bleeding, other hand coming up to cup the slender chin, turn the face toward himself.

"Vash!!"

Blue eyes stared at him from under bloody eyelashes, brightness faded to a dull ache, faint and far away.

Breath ghosted over his knuckles, faint and fading, and he cursed, slapping the face hard. "Don't you fucking die on me, Vash!! Do you hear me!? Don't you die!!"

The angel's eyes flickered, blinking slowly, and the lips trembled as more tears slid out of those precious eyes.

Nicholas felt fear in that moment, deeper and more profound than he'd ever felt in those years being tormented by The Eye of Michael.

"Do not die on me, Vash." He pleaded, heaving his weight against the spike impaling the other man to the ground. The plant. The angel. "You keep those eyes open, do you hear me??"

Vash's eyes focused on him, bleary and dull, color in them fading in and out, but they didn't close.

"You came... back..." the bloody lips moved slowly, like they were forgetting how to function, how to move, and Nicholas felt the hot trails on his own cheeks to match the ones on the blond's below.

"Yeah." He whispered, heaving again and the spike snapped under his strength, just above Vash's skin. "Yeah, I came back."

Vash's lips trembled a little, the edges flickering like he wanted to smile but he'd forgotten how.

It was wrong. It was so wrong.

It stung and it burned and Nicholas looked away, teeth gritting and wiping hand across his face to leave sand as an excuse for the hot tears falling down on the battered chest under him.

"Common, Vash." He mumbled, reaching down to take the blond's shoulders and lift him up.

Vash hissed, tears doubling as Nicholas lifted him free of the spike, flesh tearing and blood seeping into the white sand under them. He leaned into Wolfwood's arms, boneless and sobbing quietly, blood flooding around them.

Nicholas held him then, arms circling them both, willing his heart beat not to echo as loudly as it seemed in his own chest.

"I'm not going anywhere, Vash, you hear me? And you don't leave me! You can't, ok? We're gonna go get you patched up, ok?"

Just like every time before. Like they'd done so often this month. Vash would smile and thank him with that fake little smile of his and they would both ignore how much pain they could feel in the other's eyes.

Vah sobbed - broken, painful - and Nicholas wrapped an arm around his head, trying to comfort the depth of pain in the sound he knew he could never fully understand.

And that's when his eyes met another set of flickering blue.

There wasn't much left. A managed torso heaving for breath, legs, an arm half burned, and a face partly melted mostly beyond recognizing. A single blue eye flickering and fading in the dark as Knives watched his brother.

His body had made less of an impact, more like a dent in the perfect holy circles of destruction Vash's had created, but his hand was outflung, fingers twitching in the burnt sand around him as he reached for his twin.

Nicholas's lips tightened, his body reacting on its own as he stood and pulled Vash closer, watching Knives's eye fade as he watched a human take his brother away.

Punishment. He was made to punish, without bias. Even the god he was made for.

What was left of Knives's face twisted painfully, his fingers twitching as Nicholas lifted Vash's arm over his shoulder and hefted them both to their feet, Vash leaning against him and unable to support his own weight.

"Common, Vash." He repeated, lowering his own face into the messy, bloody, sandy, blond hair for a moment as he turned them away from the fallen god.

"Let's get out of here."

Chapter Text

(CW for chapter: canon descriptions of violence/destruction, descriptions of injuries & gore, description of getting stitches, panic attack, descriptions of blood & bloody injuries)
(Disclaimer, I know absolutely jack shit about stitches)

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Nicholas knew how they looked. A scruffy, ripped-up man supporting a blond in a black coat bleeding out on the desert with an uncovered gun larger than them both on his back.

But maybe people didn't care. Maybe the act of surviving a drowning city pulled down people's guards, made them kinder.

Maybe Vash just pulled people together like that, even in a cataclysmic catastrophe.

The vehicle that stopped for them was a small bus, already filled with shaken humans with haunted eyes who had seen too much in one night to ever be the same.

But they made room for him - for them - at the back of the bus, helped Nicholas hoist Punisher to the roof, passed back gauze and water and antiseptic to bind up their wounds.

Vash was awake, but Nicholas wouldn't say he was aware as he laid the other man down on the floor of the bus and pulled away to take the offerings from the other passengers. Maybe a sort of floating awareness between awake and asleep that comes from knowing the depths of what he had just caused.

Nicholas bit back the anxiety downing his own throat and tried to keep talking, tried to keep those sad, fading blue eyes on himself. As long as Vash watched him, he was still here. As long as his eyes didn't close, Nicholas couldn't stop trying to save him.

"Hey, Va-" He stopped himself, thinking all the ears behind him in the bus that might not be so deaf if they knew who they'd picked up out of kindness.

"Eriks." He pulled the name from one of the stupid parables they taught in the Eye of Michael's chapels. Something about a man who gave his life to save a lion. Stupid shit that would probably make Vash chuckle and then do the same.

Vash's eyebrows twitched, a shadow of confusion on his brow and Nicholas reached up to cup his cheek without thinking, thumb running along the soft curve of his cheekbone. Sand and blood cracked off under his fingers and something like color returned to Vash's eyes for a second.

"Baby." Nicholas wasn't sure where the nickname came from - it wasn't something he thought about, the nicknames he used for Vash. They just came to his tongue.

Needle Noggin. Spiky. Blondie. Baby.

Baby. Another sin. Nicholas was past caring tonight.

"Baby, hey. We're gonna be ok." He whispered, running his thumb along the soft cheek again.

Vash's breath hitched for a moment, his eyes clearing enough to focus on Nicholas's face before they faded back into the floating sort of awareness, and that was enough to know this sin was going to be repeated.

"These nice people here are gonna give us a ride to the nearest hospital." Nicholas let his hand linger on the soft cheek as he opened Vash's coat with the other.

The hole in Vash's side was ugly, jagged and raw and he had to bite his tongue not to gag.

It wasn't the wound. He'd seen plenty worse, given plenty worse.

It was the fact it was wrong. Someone like Vash, someone who was so good Nicholas didn't even deserve to breathe the same air as him, carrying yet another scar for humanity on his body. Another thing to not heal right, to cause the flicker of constant physical pain that he saw in Vash's loose grin.

Another scar for a world that wanted nothing but to hate the man who gave his body for it.

"- we're gonna ... find a nice place to settle down after that." He caught himself and the silence finally, saw the sway in Vash's eyes and forced words out of his own mouth as he brought both hands down to clean the jagged wound.

"You wanted a cat, right? We can uh. Find a cat and stuff. Maybe I'll... actually start uh, a church or something. We can ..." Fuck. "We can just be us, ok, Babe?"

Babe.

Another sin.

"And uh. We can uh. Find uh... maybe we'll uh..." He floundered, distracted by the amount of blood still sleeping from the wound.

"He's going to need stitches." A voice above him spoke then, and Nicholas jumped, almost flinching.

An older man knelt beside him then, cramped shoulder to shoulder in the narrow bus aisle. "I'm a surgeon. You support his head, I'll see what I can do here."

Nicholas stared for a moment, not understanding. Help?

But then he stood and stepped to Vash's head, dropping down to cradle the bloody blond hair in his lap.

"Thank you." He breathed, choked and broke. "I don't know -"

"It's alright, son." The man smiled, but it was nearly as sad as Vash’s. "My son didn't make it out, you know. He's about the same age as your partner."

Vash whimpered softly as the man's hand started to move at his wound and Nicholas reached out, pulling the blond's hand into his own and locking their fingers as Vash buckled under him.

"I'm sorry." He heard himself mumbling as the man opened the emergency kit that had been passed back and pulled out needle and thread.

He wasn't sure which man he was speaking to.

"It's... it's never easy to lose a child." The surgeon replied, deft fingers threading the needle.

Vash gasped, his body jumping as the needle pierced his skin, and Nicholas squeezed his hand tighter, holding him still in his lap.

"I don't know you or your partner, and I can't say as I'll ever see you again after tonight," the man continued, his hands steady despite Vash's painful twisting. "But I've seen enough death tonight. No one else deserves to die."

Nicholas blinked, ducking his head away, hot tears burning in his eyes that he refused to let fall.

This was what Vash believed in, wasn't it? This part of humanity.

It hurt. It burned under his skin like a brand.

He was never going to be this good and yet Vash...

"He's lucky, whatever it was missed all the vital organs. I imagine he'll have a nasty scar but he should live if we can make it to the hospital in time." The man tied off the thread with quick, practiced ease and motioned for Nicholas to help him turn Vash over. "The other side now."

Vash whimpered, fingers digging into Nicholas's own in sharp pain as they rolled him over, and Nicholas stumbled over his words. "Hey, Baby. Va- Eriks. Look at me, Baby. It's gonna be ok, you're so brave. It's gonna be ok."

Vash's eyes drifted up to him from where he was half turned over in Nicholas's lap; faded, tried, painful, but he didn't close them.

"God you're an angel." Nicholas's throat felt thick and he swallowed back the tears again, running his free hand through Vash's bloody hair. "Just hang on for me, Baby."

Vash whined, flinching as the needle went through again.

"He trusts you." The old man observed, starling Nicholas into breaking gaze with the blond in his lap. The old man wasn't even looking at them. "Most patients wouldn't be this still without anesthesia. He's listening to you."

Nicholas swallowed, breath sticking in his throat and forced a crooked, broken smile. "You hear that, Eriks? You listenin’ to me? Then you gotta get better ok? Gotta get over this like we do everything else and we'll figure it out, ok?"

Vash whimpered again, and Nicholas wasn't sure if it was in response or in pain.

"There." The old man cut the thread and helped Nicholas steady Vash for a moment, "Keep him on his side if you can, for a while. We want to keep pressure off the skin so it can start to heal."

Nicholas nodded, fingers still laced into the blond hair in his lap.

"Now." The old surgeon reached out a bloody hand and Nicholas flinched as it landed on his shoulder. "Let's take care of you, my boy."

Nicholas blinked at him, not understanding as Vash gasped for breath in his lap.

"You can't feel it yet?" The old man nodded, like it was the most logical thing in the world, "You're running on adrenaline, son. You've dislocated your shoulder and your hand's been cut clean through."

And just like that, the ice holding back all the pain and emotions shattered and Nicholas cried out as everything came crashing down at once.

Cutting pain in his hand, his wrist, the slow drip of coagulating blood thickening as it dripped off his hand into Vash's already stained hair. The throb and scream of his twisted shoulder, loud and sharp and consuming where he had forced himself past his own limits, dragging Vash and his cross across the sand without realizing.

And the emotions.

The swimming, floating sort of encompassing knowledge he'd just lived through something life shattering. That he'd never be the same.

And the fear.

The fear Vash wasn't going to be breathing when he found him. The fear those blue eyes wouldn't know him, wouldn't open. The absolute terror that they might still close, fade out in his lap while he sat there watching, unable to help.

"Breath. Do it with me. In, hold. Out. In, hold. Out."

He followed the instructions without really being aware of who told him, how many hands were on his shoulder, how many bodies were surrounding him and Vash.

"Out. In, hold. Out." The woman's voice continued.

"On three, I need you to hold him still while I relocate his arm. Don't let him move." The surgeon's voice, dimly.

"Yeah. Got it." Another voice echoed.

"In, hold. Out. In, hold. Out."

"One."

"In, hold."

"Two."

"Out."

"Nico?"

His eyes snapped down to the bloody body in his lap, to Vash, the blond's eyes blurry and unfocused but his lips trembling as he stared up at Nicholas, still responding to the distress of people he cared about even as he lay there, maybe dying.

"Three."

Nicholas screamed as the surgeon pressed his arm back into place with a pop, more hands holding him steady then he realized, another set of hands cleaning Vash's side under him as Vash's hand clenched in his own.

"Let him breathe, give him some space!" The surgeon was calling, the press of bodies moving back to their places in the bus until only the woman rubbing his back and talking him through the breath exercises and the surgeon remained.

And Vash's scared blue eyes looking up at him.

"In, hold. Out."

Nicholas's breaths were ragged, even trying to keep up with the calm commands, and he couldn't take his eyes from those blue ones in his lap.

He wasn't sure exactly how long they sat there, the woman rubbing his back and the surgeon taking his hand to clean and dress it, only knew that Vash never blinked looking up at him, even when the blond’s own breathing stuttered and he coughed up bile.

"It's good."

He finally came back to himself as the surgeon addressed someone, maybe him?

"Not coughing up blood, that means no internal injuries."

The old man stood then, his knees creaking, and Nicholas realized how much pain he must have been in, kneeling in the cramped uncomfortable aisle of a bus to help two bloody strangers.

"He should be ok if we can make it to the hospital." The man reached out one bloody hand, soiled with Nicholas's own blood mixed with Vash's, and patted Nicholas's shoulder. "Good luck, son."

The man moved back to his seat, and the woman rubbing his back stood then too, returning to her place in the overcrowded seats.

And the couple in the seat next to them stood, gesturing to their own bench for Nicholas and Vash to take, and moved forward to sit double with other passengers.

And he didn't understand, any of it. Any of them. Any of this... unexpected human kindness.

But he thought maybe Vash might as the man in his lap let out a low sigh and clenched their hands together tighter.

Nicholas slid his hand up under Vash's light body, cradling him in his arms, and moved them both up to the bench, laying Vash across his lap and keeping his eyes locked with those blue ones.

"It's gonna be ok." He promised, and maybe for the first time in his life, he actually hoped the words were true.

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Chapter Text

(CW for the chapter: minor descriptions of injuries (compared to the last two), slight blood, removing bloody clothes, smoking.

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The hospital was not prepared for the amount of inquired they were receiving. It was too small, not much more than an outpost with some medical staff and a few gurneys.

Nicholas swallowed, Vash cradled in his arms as he stood in the line of people waiting to check in, hoping to receive help - his own hope sinking to the soles of his feet.

Vash was shaking slightly in his arms, a fever causing sweat to bead on his forehead. Blue eyes still watched Nico, floating and unfocused, but not closing.

Nicholas clutched him tighter. He didn't deserve this. He didn't deserve to hope Vash would be fine. People like him didn't deserve things like hope.

"Sir!" A voice startled him out of his own head and he glanced up to find a nurse dressed in rumpled clothes gesturing to him. "Please, this way!" She swung open the doors to the medical wing and Nicholas blinked at her.

He saw someone wave, glanced over to see a face he recognized as the person who had been cleaning Vash's wounds on the bus, talking to the staff at the check-in desk. The man's own face was covered in caked blood, but he offered a tired smile to Nicholas.

He swallowed, blinking back something in his throat, and followed the nurse down the hall.

She led them to a smaller room, pushing aside the curtain to motion for Nicholas to lay Vash out on the bed there. "He'll have to share a room with someone. We have too many refugees for single rooms, you understand."

The lack of Vash's weight in his arms felt jarring as he stepped back from the bed without breaking the blue eye contact. "Yeah, that's fine as long as you can help him."

The nurse nodded, already moving forward to check over the stitches on Vash's side.

Vash whimpered, his face twitching as he stared at Nicholas, and Nicholas reached out for his hand again on instinct, grabbing the scarred fingers and locking them in his own.

Comfort. For who, he couldn't say.

"Did you do this?" The nurse asked, hands moving over Vash's body as she peeled back his bloody shirt stuck to the skin around the wound. "The stitches?"

"No." Nicholas breathed, squeezing Vash's hand. "Surgeon. On the bus."

"It's very clean for the back of a bus." The woman muttered, still focused on the wound. "He should need an IV bag and maybe a transfusion with how much blood he's lost, but he's already starting to heal. It'll need to be thoroughly cleaned and I want to put him on antibiotics to make sure no infection develops, and he'll need several weeks of rest...but I think he'll make a full recovery."

Nicholas wasn't sure if it was him or Vash who made the strangled sob, but he clenched those scarred fingers tighter in his own. "Thank you." He managed to whisper, broken.

"Mn." The woman stood, peeling off her rubber gloves and glanced over Nicholas himself with a critical eye. "Someone's already seen to you, so I just want you to take it easy for a few days and let one of our staff know if your hand develops anything unusual or doesn't begin to heal."

Nicholas nodded, wordless.

The woman nodded, turning to leave. She paused, hand on the door and turned back. "Do you know this man?" She asked, nodding to Vash.

Nicholas blinked at her.

"For medical records." She clarified. "I need to know who to contact, next of kin, if you know them."

Nicholas glanced back at Vash, those blue eyes staring at him unwavering. "It's me." He replied, not looking away from those eyes. "I'm his ... husband."

Vash's unfocused eyes didn't blink.

"Alright." The nurse agreed without questioning the pause, pulling a small notebook and scribbling something on it, "His name?"

"Eriks. Uh. And I'm ... David. I'm a ... priest."

The woman didn't even look up, "Last name?"

Nicholas hesitated.

"Saverem." Vash whispered, his eyes finally flickering closed. "It's Saverem."

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Nicholas claimed a battered chair out in the waiting area and pulled it behind him, out the battered doors into the shade of the hospital building, dropping down next to Punisher and letting his head fall between his knees.

God fucking shit.

All of this.

Every single part of it.

His shoulder throbbed, his hand ached, and worst of all - the emotions gnawing at the back of his throat like claws, digging in and refusing to let go.

He reached into his jacket for the pack of cigarettes, something to numb the raw thoughts in his head, and flinched as his fingers connected with something wet.

Was he bleeding?

He pulled his hand free and stared at the blue liquid sliding off his fingers. Fucking. Of course. Those vials were tough, but not that tough.

He hissed, half in disgust, half in anger, and pulled the cigarettes from his soaked pocket, glaring at the saturated box like it alone could answer for all of the sins he'd committed in the past twenty four hours.

As if he could even count them all at this point.

He crushed the soaked pack between bruised fingers and hurtled it away, letting his head drop back between his knees with a curse.

The fuck was he doing.

"Hey." A voice spoke above him and he slanted a glare upward, at a man maybe a dozen or so years older than himself, who clearly had seen better days than a fall of Julai.

The man shook his hand under Nicholas's nose again and he realized with a start the man was holding out a pack of smokes to him. "Take 'em. They're the last ones the drugstore had."

Nicholas squinted at him slowly, and the man shrugged.

"You look like you could use 'em more than I could." He replied to the unspoken question.

Nicholas let his hand close on the pack as his eyes dipped, a muttered "Thanks." falling from his lips as he broke the seal and pulled out a stick. The man flicked a lighter open and Nicholas leaned forward to draw the flame into the end of the cigarette.

"You come from Julai too?" The man asked as Nicholas leaned back, drawing in his first breath of smoke.

He nodded.

The man sighed, weighty - heavy with unprocessed emotions - and sat himself down in the sand next to Nicholas's chair, hands fiddling with the lighter as they both stared away across the sand, at the stream of refugees still climbing toward them.

"Was there for work." The man supplied after a while. "Construction."

Nicholas rolled the cigarette in his lips, savoring the taste. It wasn't his normal brand but the taste was alright. "Went with someone." He finally answered.

"Mn." The man's fingers stopped playing with the lighter and he tucked it back into his pocket. "They make it out?"

"Yeah." Nicholas pictured Vash's pale, gaunt face against the soft pillow, finally resting peacefully as the nurse shooed him out of the room. "Just barely."

"Thank god." The man sighed, sounding genuine.

Nicholas slanted a glare at Punisher. At the man. "God had nothing to do with it." He mumbled around the cigarette, fingers clenching in the folds of his shirt. "I left god there."

The man huffed, sort of a short wheezing laugh. "I knew you weren't a preacher with a cross like that." He nodded toward Punisher's exposed metal as it gleamed dully in the shade beside them. "But you gotta admit, you both making it out is something of a miracle."

Nicholas hummed, his mind's eye going back to Vash's perfect, broken form in the sand and twisted metal of that city. "Maybe a god." He allowed. "But it ain't the one I was following."

"Well." The man stood then, dusting off the seat of his pants as he watched the another bus laden with survivors pulling into the small stop. "Now would be a good time for new god."

He turned, offering a hand to Nicholas, "Glad you both made it out. I'm Charles."

Nicholas regarded his hand for a moment before he took it. "David Saverem."

"Good luck to you, David Saverem. I hope whatever place you find to call home is kinder to you than Julai." The man - Charles - nodded firmly, like he was imparting some sort of blessing, and then wandered toward the bus, leaving Nicholas to grind out his filter in the sand at his feet.

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He was startled awake by a hand on his shoulder and almost lashed out on instinct before he realized the person touching him was wearing nurses' clothes.

He could barely make out their face in the darkness of night, starlight and a broken street lamp down the way the only feeble illumination against the overwhelming expanse of sky above them. The almost oppressive blanket of night.

"Mr. Saverem?" The nurse removed their hand and stepped back, sounding exhausted.

Nicholas grunted, settling back into the chair in the sand outside the hospital, bracing against the knot of fear in his chest; bracing for the worst.

God, if those blue eyes never opened again -

"Your husband's resting peacefully now, we gave him a little pain medication. I'm afraid we don't have enough to go around but we did what we could. He should sleep through the night."

Nicholas swallowed, nodding against the cotton in his throat.

The nurse sighed, sounding worn. "There is another patient in the room with him, so It's very cramped, but Dr. Malcom said you're welcome to check in on him now as long as you don't disturb them."

Nicholas wasn't sure if the nurse kept talking after that. He didn't stay to listen, his feet finding their way back into the hospital and down to Vash's room without guidance, chair in hand.

The tiny window in the plaster wall gifted a flicker of the five moons' light into the room, slanting across Vash's tired face where he lay in the dark.

Nicholas barely noticed the other bed, the other patient, as he moved to Vash's bedside and looked down.

They had him laid out on his side so he wouldn't accidentally disturb his wound, a thin blanket covering the bloody stitches on his side. The plant - the man’s - chest was rising and falling in narrow, slow breaths, Vash's scarred fingers curled tightly into the blanket near his head.

He looked so small.

His lips were twitching, brow furrowed in discomfort. Whether it was physical or emotional, Nicholas knew he couldn't say.

The chair plunked down with a soft clatter and he sat, hands in his lap as he watched the angel sleeping.

"God, you frustrate me." He heard himself breathe after a while.

Vash's brow twitched, and Nicholas reached for another cigarette, stopping himself and just playing with the stick in his fingers.

"I wanna slap you so hard, you bitch." He breathed, harsh laugher bubbling in his throat as tears pricked his eyelids, watching Vash sleep. "You and your goddamn goody-two-shoes-save-everyone shit, Vash."

Vash huffed in his sleep, tufts of ruffled hair falling across his nose.

Nicholas reached out to brush it back up, soothing the bloody hair back from that soft face.

"Look at you, huh? Do you even see yourself, Vash? See the mess you've become, the fucking amount of work It's gonna take to put you back together again??"

He snorted, clenching his fist, crushing the cigarette between his fingers. "How am I supposed to leave you like this?? Who's gonna take care of you when I'm gone, you moron??"

Vash whimpered, fingers clenching tight in the sheets and Nicholas reached out again, easing those scarred fingers out of the wrinkled cloth, locking them with his own.

"What did you do to me, you bastard?" He whispered, letting the crushed cigarette fall to the floor as he leaned forward and rested his forehead on the bed beside Vash's chest. "Why can't I just let go of you?"

He swallowed; swallowed back the choking sob of emotions in his throat. "Why do you care about me, you fucking dipshit?? You're too good for us, Vash. No one deserves you."

The fingers in his own squeezed once and Nicholas jolted up to find a sleepy smile on Vash's face as blue eyes blinked at him through a haze of sleep and medication.

"You came back." Vash's lips barely moved, the softest sound, before his eyes drifted closed again.

And Nicholas squeezed his own eyes closed and let his head fall back to the bed. "You fucker. I ... hate you."

"Yeah." Vash breathed, soft, distant like he was already asleep. "M'too...."

And Nicholas knew for damn certain he wasn't saying hate.

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Chapter Text

(CW for Chapter: Mentions of whatever baby plant making thing Nai was using Vash's body to do to the end of Stampede//not in a shippy way, in a creepy way. Mentions of Child experimentations (WW's past) )

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He did odd jobs. Tinkered. Fiddled. Kept his hands busy, around the hospital. Partly because he couldn't pay for the care they were giving Vash, partly because he had to keep his mind occupied or it went spiraling off into places he didn't want to think about.

Places those blue eyes closed and never opened again.

Places those blue eyes looked at him with the same expression he’d glimpsed in them on the Sand Steamer.

He kept his head down, hands busy, and didn't let himself think.

He'd always been good with his hands. That's what people told him. Miss Melanie at the orphanage, Livio when he fixed up his toys. The men he'd hooked up with to blow off old memories after he'd been turned loose on the world as a religious weapon.

They'd all been lying, he decided as he lay upside down in the sand beside the hospital, wiping sweat out of his eyes and cussing out the leaking air conditioning unit that failed to answer to his coaxing.

Then again, maybe his hands were only made for selfish gain.

Trying to be helpful, to be like Vash, to give something back to make up for the ball of guilt weighing in his belly every time the staff called him 'Mr. Saverem' or passed him a portion to eat when he didn't belong here, that was something beyond him.

He cursed as another hole popped open in the tubing, dousing him with water from the pipes and jerked back, sitting up and wiping the dirty sludge clear of his eyes, mumbling colorful phrases under his breath.

Something nudged his arm and he jolted, ready to lash out, and then recognized the blurry shape though his watery vision as the man who had gifted him the last pack of smokes. He grunted, swallowing down the reflex to lash out, and took the rag the man was holding out to him.

"Thought you were moving on." He grumbled, whipping his face clean on the soiled cloth and holding it back out to the man. Charles? Was it?

The man laughed, short and sharp, and Nicholas decided he liked him.

"Yeah, not quite." The man declined the rag with a wave of his hand and then leaned on the faded wall next to Nicholas, looking out over the small outpost around them. "Been looking for ya." He confessed casually, and Nicholas's nerves lit up in suspicion.

He shifted, centering his weight in the sand, ready to propel himself away or lunge in an attack when the conversation took the turn he knew was coming.

"That so?" He mumbled, not raising his eyes to look at the man. "Been here the whole time." He found himself folding the rag, precise squares with practiced fingers, as he tensed, waiting for the blow to fall.

"There's been talk about putting together a party." The man blew out a long breath, sounding winded.

Nicholas felt his gut coil, tensed and waiting.

"Gonna go back to Julai and see about helping any survivors." The man continued, hand patting his pocket until he pulled out his lighter to fiddle with. "Bury the ones we can find who didn't make it out."

Nicholas finally glanced up at him, wary. "The fuck does that have to do with me?"

The man smiled at him, flicking open the lighter. It wasn't an unkind smile. Just sort of sad. Sort of understanding. "I figured you might be interested."

Nicholas stared at him, brow furrowed. The fuck? "That so?" He mumbled, baffled. The fuck would he be interested?

"Word is you're a priest." The man kept playing with the lighter. "They say your husband's pretty banged up, so he'll be here a while. I figured you could use something to keep your hands busy. I know how it is."

He paused, eyes sort of going glassy as he looked over Nicholas's head into something Nicholas couldn't see. "It's hard, seeing them laying there. Knowing they might not ... knowing you can't do a damn thing about it." The way he spoke, the bitter tone to his voice told Nicholas he understood all too well.

The man shook himself from the past with a snap of the lighter, a small, sad smile returning to his lips. "I been there. My wife ..."

Nicholas shifted, glancing away. He wasn't that easy to read, it wasn't like that with him and Vash.

"And. Between you and me, the gun you're carrying is no preacher's toy." The man added, his voice still soft, no malice.

Nicholas slanted another glare up at him, teeth grit. "The fuck do you want?"

The man spread his hands, clam, unhurried. "Look. I made a few mistakes in my youth too. Got into a few things I shouldn't have ... cost me my family."

Nicholas stared at him, trying to parcel the stranger out. What was the end goal here?

"Seem to me, like the fall of Julai will make a man question himself. His beliefs. Maybe his own journey." The man shrugged, "I'm not judging. Lord knows, I made enough of my own choices against His people, but…times like these are terrible. Enough to make you question yourself. Everything's confusing and people take things for what they are, people for who they say they are because they don't want to look deeper.

"People here think you're a priest with a good husband – I'm not saying that you are or that you aren't a churchman. But if you wanted to be one, if you're tired of carrying that gun around … I'm offering you a chance to start something new, Preacher."

Nicholas stared at him, feeling the twitch in his own hands. "What the fuck?"

The man just shrugged and then he nudged the bag at his feet toward Nicholas and walked away. "Figured you might wanna cover that thing up, Mr. Priest." He called back, laughing.

Something clenched in Nicholas's throat and he grabbed for the bag, ripping it open. It was full of messy rags and ropes, enough to cover up Punisher's gleaming barrel.

Nicholas turned to stare after the man. What the fuck? What was that guy's game? Nobody was just ... kind for the sake of kindness. Nobody just ... saw someone else committed to sin and tried to save them.

... nobody but Vash.

Was this what Vash saw in humanity??

It didn't make any sense to Nicholas.

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"Hey." Vash croaked as Nicholas let himself back into the blond's room, faint smile on his dry lips before he started coughing.

"Hey! Easy, Blondie." Nicholas was at the other man's side in a second, easing him up from the pillows with a hand under his thin shoulders so Vash could catch his breath. "You good?"

Vash swallowed dryly, painfully, and forced another smile. This one wasn't real, but Nicholas let it pass. "Yeah, just a cough."

"Better be." He mumbled, snagging the pillow he'd been using last night from his chair next to Vash's bed and tucking it behind the blond's narrow back to keep him upright before he sat himself down. "You caused me enough trouble, Bitch. You're not allowed to cause more."

Vash's pale cheeks flushed -- shame -- Nicholas recognized the emotion even as Vash forced another fake smile, "Ah, yeah, sorry-"

"That was a joke." Nicholas grunted, eyes glued to the threadbare blanket tucked over Vash's thighs. "God, Blondie. Chill."

"Oh." Vash sounded forced-chill. Like he was on edge under the forced relaxation in his voice.

Nicholas sighed and shot a glance at the other bed in the room. It was empty, probably the patient taken out for some air or something.

"You ok?" He asked then, poking at the thin legs under the blanket. They twitched, and Vash grumbled slightly.

"Yeah, I'm fine." Came the reply. Fake, a lie. Nicholas could hear it.

"Vash."

The other man froze for a second before Nicholas heard him sniffle.

"I can't ... I don't ... I don't remember. What happened." The blond seemed to wilt, tears dripping down his cheek as Nicholas raised his eyes to the other man's face.

Vash drew into himself, arm wrapping around his own torso, holding himself. "I don't know what happened. It's my fault, isn't it, though? I hurt so many people ..."

Those tears stung, like an asp bite, and Nicholas's fingers were prying Vash's fingers away from his face, wiping away the drips before the scarred fingers could. "Hey. Vash. Look at me."

He did. The blue eyes turned to him, scared and so full of trust in him it rattled something in Nicholas's chest.

"Vash." He repeated. "Baby."

Vash shuddered, more tears rolling out and Nicholas wiped them away. "You didn't do anything wrong. Your brother ..." He didn't actually know what happened, he wasn't there. But it wasn't hard to assume a man who would let people experiment on children would use his own brother for some twisted shit.

"Your brother did this, ok? You did everything you could to stop him." Meryl had been screaming some fucked up shit about other dimensions and Nai using Vash's body to impregnate other plants, but hell if he knew if any of that was true. "I know you, Needle Noggin. You're good. You're like, genuinely good. Like an angel. Like what people want to believe god is like. Don't you dare, for a fucking second, think this is your fault, Baby."

Vash swallowed, leaning his face into Nicholas's palm as something brightened in the blue eyes focused on Nicholas's face.

"You are the best thing that has ever happened to this god-forsaken planet, Vash Saverem." Nicholas meant it. He genuinely meant it. "You're so good, Baby."

Vash's face cleared for a moment, something warm unfurling in Nicholas's belly at the brightness of his eyes, the timid smile creeping along his lips.

And then he pulled back into that sad shell he kept himself wrapped in, eyes closing as he nuzzled into Nicholas's big calloused palm.

It hurt. Watching him close off like that again, after seeing the sun that could be if only someone cared about Vash the way he cared about humanity. About Nicholas.

"Baby?" The blond echoed after a moment, his voice quiet.

Nicholas snapped his hand away, heat rushing to his face as he looked anywhere but the blushing man in front of himself. "Yeah well. I was afraid they'd throw me out if we weren't like... so uh." He fumbled, cursing again that he'd smoked up the pack within a few hours. "We're ... we're married."

Vash blinked at him, his face making an exaggerated O shape before a blush settled - hard - across his cheeks and nose. "We ... are?" His voice was uncertain, a little shaky, almost a squeak.

"Ye..ah..." Nicholas looked away before he was caught staring. God knew, Vash was so pretty when he was blushing. Fuck.

"I kinda ... married us. Spontaneously. Um." He licked his lips, wishing for a cigarette, anything to take the edge off the feelings curling in his chest. "Had to change your name."

"Vash ... Wolfwood?" Vash ventured, and when Nicholas glanced up at him, he was staring hard at the threadbare blanket in his lap, the blush unfaded on his cheeks.

"Eriks." He replied. "Didn't think Vash was the safest name right now."

"Mn." Vash nodded, jerky, his fingers twisting in the blanket. "Yeah, probably."

"David." Nicholas volunteered after a moment, gesturing to himself. "Eriks and David."

"Oh." Vash's face made a smaller version of the O look. "I wondered who they were talking about, they kept telling me David was so nice and helpful around the hospital."

Nicholas wondered if his cheeks were as red as Vash's yet. "Shut up, Blondie." He grumbled.

Vash giggled, soft, too short, but genuine and Nicholas marveled because that was the first time he'd heard the other man really laugh.

"It's my middle name." He mumbled after a moment, catching himself too late to stop it.

Vash peeked at him from under golden eyelashes.

"But if you tell anyone, I will fucking skin you alive."

A sliver of a smile slid across Vash's face and then was gone. "I thought the D stood for dick." He mumbled and Nicholas was glad he wasn't smoking because FUCK.

"You shit." He managed to mumble around the mess of heat and cotton in his throat. Oh god, was he gonna be thinking about that for a while.

Vash giggled again, and Nicholas wondered at the soft sound. He liked it.

"Eriks and David Wolfwood?" The blond mumbled, changing the subject subtly. He did that a lot, Nicholas had noticed, when he didn't want to talk about something.

Nicholas shook his head, "Eriks and David Saverem."

Vash glanced up at him then, flushing again. "How do you know that name?"

Nicholas frowned, head tilting just a little as he regarded the other man, "You said it. You told the nurse."

"I did?" Vash's nose wrinkled a little as his fingers twisted into the blankets again. "I don't remember that."

Nicholas shrugged, watching those fine fingers work themselves into the threads. "I wouldn't worry about it, Spiky. It's pretty common with trauma survivors, I think. Forgetting the traumatic stuff. Survival instincts, or some shit." Vash was looking at him again, he could feel it, and peeked up at the other man.

Vash's blush was still high on his cheeks, warm, and the way he was looking at Nicholas made him sure his own cheeks were just as warm.

"You sure know a lot." Vash mumbled after a moment, dropping his gaze to his lap.

"I read. Lived through a lot of it." Nicholas shrugged again, licking his lips once more as his fingers itched for a cigarette. "Uh. You don't remember the bus ride?"

Vash's nose wrinkled again in confusion. He'd always done that, Nicholas knew - knew the blond's mannerisms - but without the glasses it made it easier to read the subtle changes to Vash's expression. The way one wrinkle was different then the next.

God, he really was an open book to read.

"Should I?" He mumbled after a moment.

"You never took your eyes off me." Nicholas leaned forward then, head titled just a little to see under that thatch of dirty blond hair, see the way Vash's eyes flickered. "I told you not to and you never did."

Vash's eyes flickered up to meet his gaze, hesitant, something anxious and timid in the look.

"They said you trusted me." Nicholas confessed between them quietly, like it was something precious. Something only they should know.

Because it was.

No one should trust him, he knew it. He was so full of sin and so unworthy of Vash's unwavering trust in him.

It was terrifying.

It felt like searing heat in the pit of his belly when he thought about it.

It made him want to ... to be ... more than he could. So Vash would see his unflagging trust wasn't worthless. Wasn't wasted.

And the worst thing was he knew it didn't matter.

He could have walked off, never looked back at Julai, left Vash to die in the dirt with his brother - a pair of fallen gods, and Vash would still look at him with that unyielding faith he saw in those blue eyes.

"I do." Vash whispered back, his lips trembling a little, and Nicholas knew the words were more than just a confession.

"You're too good, Needle Noggin." He swallowed, biting the inside of his cheek but unable to look away from those blue eyes. "I don't deserve your trust."

"I see you, Nico." Vash replied, and it shook Nicholas like a typhoon. "I see you, I see that person you want to be, the one who cares about kids and his brother and people he loves and wants to be a better person. I see the one who wants to care, so desperately. The one who wants to belong. I see you. You are a good person."

And that was the most terrifying thing to come out of Vash's lips.

Nicholas looked away, eyes fixing on a crack in the ceiling, fingers twitching in need of a cigarette.

He heard Vash shifting on the bed, heard the voices in the hall.

"Who's Saverem?" He finally asked, because neither of them were ready to discuss the thing that had just passed between them.

Vash sighed, soft and slow and sad, and Nicholas regretted asking because this was another one of those invisible scars the blond kept close to his heart and never talked about.

"She raised us. Me and Nai." He sounded so sad, like a bell tolling against the rain, something of fond memories mixed with sorrow and regret. "She was like our mother."

"You miss her?"

"More than anything." Vash's smile was just as sad, a quiet little thing that barely moved his lips. "I wish I could have saved her. Sometimes I think if I'd been a better person-"

"Hey, none of that now." Nicholas poked the thin chest, surprised at the feeling of solid metal under his fingers before he remembered the plate he's seen fused to Vash's skin when the blond had stripped in Julai. He bit back the look of surprise in his face and shook his head. "I'm sure you did all you could."

"I shouldn't have let it happen." Vash's hand came up then, distracted, like he wasn't fully in the room with Wolfwood, like he was somewhere very far away. "It was my fault Nai did this. My fault we all ended up on this planet." He whispered, fine fingers covered with the lace-work of scars tracing Nicholas's own, still pressed against his chest. "If I hadn't -"

Nicholas twisted his hand, catching the wandering fingers before they could drop in self-depreciation. "Nuh huh. You ain't your brother's keeper, no matter what the Bible fucking says, Blondie. Knives made his own damn choices and hurt you because of them." He squeezed those fingers tight, locking them with his own. And he wished, god he wished, he'd ground out that blue eye staring at him back in Julai as he hefted Vash's body and took his angel away. "You ain't responsible for what some psychopath who thought he was god did to us, do you understand?"

Vash's blue eyes flickered up to Nicholas's dark ones.

It hurt. It scared him, the uncertainty he saw in those blue eyes. The way they wavered between disbelief and desperate hope Nicholas was right.

"Baby." Nicholas reached up, moving before he really considered what was happening, free hand tucking behind Vash's head to pull him close, until their foreheads were resting against each other.

Vash's eyes flickered again as the blush settled back on his nose. His breath ghosted, soft and warm, across Nicholas's own lips.

"Believe in me the way I believe in you when you say I'm a good person." Nicholas breathed between them, and god. If he never meant anything else the rest of his life, these words, this moment, this was everything. "You are so good, Vash. You are not responsible for what your brother did to you or to me or to Livio, or to anyone. You are the reason I keep trying. Don't ever, ever question yourself again, Baby. You are everything."

Tears were leaking down Vash's face before he sobbed. Soft, breathy, and then his arm was around Nicholas's shoulder and his face was in Nicholas's neck and he was shaking, sobbing as his thin fingers clenched in the back of Nicholas's shirt.

He held Vash then, his own arms closing around the scarred torso, holding his angel close, fingers threading into that dirty blond hair he adored, rocking them as Vash's sobs turned to shudders turned to shakes.

"Baby. Babe. Vash. Sweetheart. Don't cry. You're so good. Don't cry. I'm right here. Baby. Baby, I got you."

He wasn't sure what sins he whispered into the blond hair, only that he meant every last one of them and that Vash's shaking eased with each one.

"Babe."

Vash sniffed, his fingers finally coming loose from Nicholas's shirt and coming up wipe his nose. "Yeah..?" He tentatively answered, voice watery and tight. "Nico...?"

He never asked how Vash knew that name. In the moment, the moments Vash chose to use it, it never really mattered. Maybe he'd heard Livio use it, or arrived at it on his own conclusion. It didn't matter. It was personal between them.

Nicholas held him tighter, as if that could make the words more true. "It's gonna be alright. I swear."

Vash sniffled again, still watery but less desperate. "Ok." He agreed quietly. And that was enough.

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He dreamed that night of blue eyes.

A blue eye, watching him as he took Vash away from the broken circles of sand in Julai.

Nicholas started awake in the cramped chair, jarring up and clacking his head into Vash's shoulder from where he'd fallen asleep curled over with his head on the blond's hospital bed.

"Nic?" Came the sleepy, concerned voice.

Nicholas couldn't answer, trying to catch his own breath from the vivid memory.

"Nicholas? Love?" Vash's body shifted, sitting up in the bed and he felt slender fingers cupping around his chin, "What's wrong??"

Nicholas shuddered, blinking rapidly in the moonlight until he could see Vash's concerned blue eyes looming over him again. He settled as the fingers traced a soothing line along his jaw, unfamiliar but comfortable in their touch.

"It's nothing." He mumbled, and saw Vash frown in the dark.

Because if he could read Vash like a book, Vash could give a sermon on his sins. He knew the blond saw him and all his wrongdoings just as easily as he saw the sadness and pain hidden away in that slim frame in front of him.

"People been talking about gettin’ together a party to head back to Julai. Check for survivors." He finally mumbled, a change of subject that Vash graciously allowed.

"You were... thinking of going?" The blond half asked, half surmised as his fingers traced along Nicholas's jaw.

He nodded, wordless, sinking into the soft touch like it held his life together. Like it made all the sins of the last month fade away.

Because it did.

"Someone asked for a preacher to come along." He finally responded, catching Vash's hand before it could pull away, pressing it back to his cheek, pressing his lips into that soft palm with its deep scars.

Vash's breath caught for a second and then the fingers spread over his face again. "Please don't try to say Mass, Nico. You suck." He joked.

It wasn't permission, but that was as good as Nicholas knew he was going to get.

"Yeah." He agreed, tilting his head to let those long fingers wind gently into his hair, resting his face on the lean arm as Vash leaned closer. "You still owe me from the last one."

"I still owe you?" Vash's voice was startled, held a trace of laughter. "You volunteered!"

"Suck it up bitch, you owe me $$20k, Blondie." Nicholas let his own lips twist into something like a smirk.

"God, that'll take me a while to repay." Vash mumbled, still joking, still using the humor to cover the sadness.

"Yeah, guess you're stuck with me until then." Nicholas fake grumbled, his own fingers reaching up to wipe the shining tears off Vash's soft cheeks. "Cheer up, Baby." He caught the next tear on the pad of his thumb before it fell, glittering and pure, "I'll be back."

Vash leaned forward, practically out of the bed now, to push his forehead into Nicholas's own, the hitch in his voice almost covered by the tease still lingering in it. "Promise?"

"Yeah." Nicholas cupped the back of his head again, holding his firm, holding him in place, letting the warmth of his hand sink into Vash's skin like something permanent. "I promise."

Vash shuddered, low and cold and scared, and then he was leaning farther in, his lips dry and cracked and scratchy against Nicholas's cheek as they brushed it like a butterfly's wing.

"Please come back."

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Chapter Text

Chapter CW: smoking, religious image/ceremony references in reference to past trauma, descriptions of dead children.

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Charles cast him a look as he fell in beside the other man on the bus, Punisher securely stored atop the vehicle. "Thought you might not make it, friend." The other man commented, tilting the brim of his up with his thumb.

Nicholas grunted, not feeling like answering, and sat himself down on the hard bench, slouching down to cross his arms over his chest.

"Hubby gonna be ok while you're gone?" The other man asked, reaching into his jacket.

Nicholas grunted again, mind going back to the sad look in Vash's eyes as he pulled away from the blond's arm minutes ago. He fucking hoped so.

Charles pulled a new pack of smokes out of his jacket and held them out on a flat palm, like an offering to a skittish toma.

Nicholas slanted a look at him as he snagged them off the other man’s palm. "Fucker."

The man grinned, a little less sad than before and a little more sneer. Something honest and real in the look. "Was hoping you'd come." He shrugged, reaching back into his jacket for his own pack. "Traded for an extra pack this morning."

Nicholas ripped the pack open, pulling out a cigarette and leaning over to let the other man light it. "Lotta faith in me, you prick." He grumbled.

"Nah." Charles gave him that half sneer again, loose and confident and unbiased. "Just hoping."

Nicholas inhaled smoke and rolled his eyes.

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Julai was more torn up in the stark light of day than Nicholas remembered. Maybe there was more truth in forgetting things to protect yourself from trauma than he thought. Maybe it was better Vash never remember exactly what happened here.

They weren't the only group with the same idea of forming a rescue party, he noted as he unloaded from the bus. There were already a number of buses, scooters, even a small sand streamer in the distance. People were already working to clear the edges of the massive sinkhole, a line of graves marching away in a jagged row into the desert like a grim path to the fallen city.

"Here." Charles slapped something to his chest as the other man joined him to look over the mess, sand whipping around their legs. "Gottcha something."

Nicholas raised an eyebrow, catching the small book in one hand as Charles let go. He eyed the cover dubiously. "Prayer book?" He cast a glance at the other man.

"Not judging your ability." The other man shrugged, tugging his hat brim down cordially as he surveyed the twisted wreckage. "Just in case."

Nicholas snorted, half tempted to toss the book away before he gave in and tucked it into his own jacket. "You talk to my husband, or somethin'?" He grumbled, vaguely amused at the idea as he turned and hefted a wrapped Punisher from where the rest of the volunteers were unloading the bus.

"Nah." Charles chuckled, good natured. "But now I'm glad I snagged it." He sighed then, face going somber under his hat as Nicholas turned around to join him again. "Sad, isn't it. How much life was lost in one night."

"Mn." Nicholas grunted without really agreeing.

"Guess we better start seeing who got out." Charles sighed with a sort of finality, and started making his way over to the people already picking through the edges of Julai. Nicholas didn't follow.

He wasn't here to look for survivors, or to bury the dead. He was here to make sure the set of blue eyes he could see in his nightmares wasn't coming back to haunt Vash ever again.

That was what he'd been made for, after all. Punishing. Hunting down sinners and showing them the gates to hell.

The wreckage of Julai lay like a scrambled icon to its broken god, twisted and grotesquely picturesque in its carnage as Nicholas crawled through it, Punisher heavy on his back.

Glass crunched, metal whined under his feet. The air smelled of rot, coying and heavy from the plants and humans that lay decaying in the heat of the sun in their broken metal coffins.

People had gotten out, Nicholas knew that without a doubt. They'd gotten out because of Vash, because of whatever hell he'd put himself through to buy them time.

But there were still plenty who hadn't been so lucky.

Nicholas could barely remember the prayers they'd used to recite before bed at Hopeland. Livio had been the more religious type, between the two of them. He tried not to remember the ones they'd forced him to memorize in the Eye of Michael before being loosed as an avenging hand of God.

He really tried not to remember the ones Legato would sing to him while they broke him down and built him back up again.

But he almost reached for the book of prayers in his pocket when a sheet of metal snapped under his weight and sent him sliding down into a tangle of human bodies that weren't moving.

Children's bodies.

It was almost enough to make him vomit as he scrambled back, using Punisher like a shield.

Fuck, fuck fucking -

They were wearing tabards, probably kids from an orphanage run by the Eye of Michael. Probably luckier to be dead, he found himself thinking, as he cowered behind Punisher, then to be used like he had. Turned into a thing that wasn't quite human, and wasn't quite monster.

He drew a breath, eyes averted from the corpses, and scrambled for a cigarette to steady his nerves.

"David!" A voice shouted from above him, "God, you ok?"

He'd never been happier to see Charles looking down at him from the jagged hole in the metal sheet than he was in that moment. "Fuck no." He called back. "Get me the fuck outta here!"

"Yeah, hold on!" The man's face disappeared and Nicholas smoked, not letting himself look at the kids across the pit until a line was dropped down to him from above.

"You alright?" Charles asked, reaching out to help him up the last bit as he pulled himself out of the hole.

He grunted, shaking himself off and focusing on checking over Punisher to avoid the other man's eyes. "Eh."

"Not gonna have to take you back to your hubby in pieces, am I?" The man joked, probably to lighten the mood, but the idea of the horror on Vash's face and how deeply the blond would blame himself for anything that happened snapped something in Nicholas.

He lunged, seizing the other man's collar and slamming him back into the cracked cement behind them, "The fuck is your game?!" He snarled, nearly biting off the man's face as he grit his teeth, "You're following me, you snake!!"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!!" The man held up both hands, his body still limp and no signs of aggression in him even as Wolfwood pressed him harder into the cement. "Easy there, friend. I'm not here to cause trouble."

Nicholas snarled, teeth snapping, and released him, stepping back to grab for Punisher, nerves tense as he watched the man rise from the sand. "Then what do you want??"

The man wiped a hand across the back of his mouth and shrugged. "Like I said, I just wanna help. You're looking for somebody, aren't you?"

Nicholas eyed him, shifting Punisher to his hip, calculating the best way to spin it for a painless strike hard enough to snap the man's neck.

"I know you're not a priest." The man held up both hands, palms out, peace offering style. "But I still think you could start over if you wanted to."

"I never asked for your opinion, shit head." Nicholas snapped, shifting his weight for the strike.

"But I see how you look when you think about him." The man shrugged again, "Your husband. You wanna give him something better, don't you?" His gaze shifted away, back into a past Nicholas couldn't see. "I know how that feels. I just want to give the two of you the chance I never got with my family."

Nicholas wanted to break his neck, shut his talking up, but he couldn't move, couldn't quite bring himself to commit to the swing. Dammit, Vash. This stupid human kindness thing was shitty.

"I figure," the man finally looked back at him, his face still free of any judgment. "This person you're looking for, they're the one keeping you from giving him that, aren't they?"

Nicholas snarled, dropping Punisher back into the dirt. "If you know that, why follow me?"

"Two sets of eyes are better than one." Charles shrugged again, smiling a little sad, a little understanding.

Nicholas grit his teeth and didn't answer. None of this made sense to him. People didn't just.. help other people. No matter what Vash believed.

"You hoping to find this person dead, or alive?" Charles asked after the silence got thick around them, pushing his hat back on his head.

"If they're not dead," Nicholas growled, fingers clenching against the metal under the cloth covering his cross. "They fucking will be when I'm done."

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The center of the crater looked unchanged as Nicholas half scrambled, half slid down to the twisted tower where the twin plants had crashed back into earth. He paused, catching himself before he set foot in the sand between the last debris and the tower walls, eyeing the tracks there.

He could still pick out his own, coming and leaving from the tower with a distinct trail from Vash's mostly limp form.

But there were more tracks now.

Lighter ones, from slim feet with boots he definitely recognized as belonging to an agent of the Eye of Michael, followed in and out by a heavier tread of someone a good head taller then he was.

Those descriptions could match any number of the Gung-ho Guns, but he had the distinct impression most of them could give a fuck about a dead city and fucking less about a fallen god.

There was one particular follower though, one with blue hair and cruel eyes that always looked more scarred than Nicholas's own, that he knew would come. Devotion that deep was almost admirable.

Nicholas had never understood it before, how Legato could follow his god unwaveringly, through the carnage and suffering Knives was bringing to the world. Through the pain.

But he was starting to understand, when he looked into Vash's eyes, the depth of Legato's fanatical faith. Starting to understand how it felt to believe so deeply, so intensely, that pain was only an afterthought.

It was terrifying.

At least it looked like Legato and his cohort, whichever Gun it was he'd managed to force to follow him, had cleared off already.

But if they'd been here, Nicholas was not going to find who he was looking for. And if he couldn't find the god he was looking for, Vash was never going to stop looking over his shoulder like the world might eat him whole.

And that was even more terrifying, more painful, then the memories Nicholas woke to at night, of blood and children's scream and bodies he didn't know any more.

"What we looking at?" Charles inquired from where he'd stopped beside Nicholas.

It didn't fully startle him but he twitched, drawn sharply from his own thoughts. He grunted, vaguely gesturing at the footprints in the sand, and stepped down, headed toward the hole he'd already blown in the walls surrounding the twins on that night.

"Huh." Came the light grunt behind him as the man followed him. "Friends of yours?"

"Not friends." Nicholas spat the used cigarette from his lips and huffed, realizing the hole into the interior where he'd found Vash was too small for his cross.

"Coworkers?" Charles guessed and Nicholas shot him a glare.

"Not any more." He hissed, dropping the butt of his cross in the sand and leaning it against the walls before he ducked inside.

He wasn't super clear on dragging Vash out of this hole, a little blurry on the details, but he was sure he had. Somehow. There was blood dried against the cracked metal to prove that, and yet, Nicholas was surprised the blond hadn't ended up worse off.

It was tight. Metal scraped at his palms, loose wires dragged over his back, catching at his jacket and he hissed, sliding out of the narrow crack into the circle of sand where Vash's body had made contact with the planet.

And it was empty.

He cursed silently, clenching his fingers into his palms until he probably broke skin.

He should have ground out that single eye in the sand the night he took Vash away. Crushed the god he was supposed to serve under his heel and never looked back.

Legato's footsteps lead over to the smaller impact in the sand, followed by the big ones.

Nicholas scowled, following them over as he read the story the two had left in the circles of earth.

Legato had run, fallen to his knees next to Knives. Pitiful. There was a scrambling, messy sand and one clear handprint tinged with blood, and then the bigger man had pulled him back, looked like held him down or something - the blue haired man must have been in shock, he wouldn't have let someone touch him otherwise - and then the big man returned to the body and that was it.

They left after that, and given that his former god wasn't decaying in the sun in front of him, they must have taken Knives's body with them.

Nicholas rocked back on his heels, reaching for a cigarette as his mind worked.

Did that mean Knives was buried in the graveyard up top? As ‘preacher’, how likely was it the people here would let him dig up the graves to find out?

What if Knives wasn't dead?

"Hey!" Charles was shouting behind him, startling Nicholas out of his thoughts. "David!" He frowned, turning to glance across the crater at the other man.

Charles was standing at a hole in the wall, what had probably once been a doorway in the actual tower but now was just twisted metal. Nicholas hadn't noticed it before in the dark, with his focus on the precious blond bleeding out in his hands.

It looked like neither Legato nor his counterpart had noticed it either, but now Charles was waving to him urgently and then sliding his tall frame through the mangled wreck of a doorway.

"I will leave you behind, you dumbfuck." Nicholas grumbled, stepping over the arches of sand that Vash's body had made rather than breaking them. "If you get stuck it ain't my problem, didn't ask for ya to follow...."

Whatever else he was going to say died in his throat as David appeared through the doorway, kid tucked under each arm.

A fucking kid. Under each arm.

A fucking set of twins, with blue eyes that Nicholas would never be able to forget. They stared at him every time he closed his eyes, from that hospital bed where Vash was waiting for him.

"Fucking..." the breath caught in his throat and he swallowed, staring. Vash's kids?

No, the outlaw barely had enough balls to stare at Nicholas's tits, exposed as they were in his half open shirt before Julai. He wouldn't...

But those blue eyes, he would never forget that shade.

Knives's kids, then?

God didn't exactly strike him as a whore. Much as he was sure Legato would like that.

The blue just stared back at him though, irrefutable.

Vash wasn't human, his mind reminded him then - who knew how plants reproduced? Yeah, he's caught glimpses of the other man's goods through half open hotel bathroom doors before and yeah he always looked pretty human but...

"Just a bunch of broken plants in here." Charles was saying as Nicholas finally broke eye contact with the twins, as the other man glanced back into the mangled room through the doorway. "Wouldn't have seen them except the one was crawling, saw something moving."

Nicholas didn't know shit about plants, fucking hell if anyone on this rock actually did aside from the man in the hospital he was hoping to come back to at the end of all this. But crawling? Already? What the fuck. What the fuck was any of this? He came back to kill god, not play savior to his kids.

This was crazy. Nicholas had seen a lot of crazy shit - hell, he'd done a lot of crazy, stupid, illogical shit in the past month since he'd met Vash, but this...??

"We should get them up topside. Get 'em some food, clothes. Poor kiddos must be starving, I wonder where their mother is?" Charles cooed at the twins, and Nicholas felt his lip roll.

Then one of the twins blinked, that familiar plant-like flickering glow blinking in and out on their face as they did, reminding him of a soft smile and messy blond hair and scared eyes when Vash had realized they were all watching him communicate with his fellow plant on the sand streamer.

He swallowed.

"Probably didn't make it out." He finally ground out between frozen teeth.

"Poor kiddos." Charles was holding out a child toward Nicholas, expecting him to take a kid.

Who in their right mind would hand him a kid? He was not a savior. He wasn't made to be holy, or even good.

They made him to be the avenging angel, the one with broken wings, the one who crushed sinners under his feet. Not play nursemaid.

And he was taking the little independent from the other man, hands shaking just a little as the big blues blinked up at him.

Fuck those eyes. Fuck the way they reminded him of Vash's little giggle in the middle of the night when the world wasn't nearly as harsh or desperate around them.

"I ain't dealing with this." He muttered, partly to the kid. Partly to Vash, who he could see getting all wet eyed and grabby in his mind's eye, partly to Charles as the man climbed out of the ruined doorway. "I am not old or drunk enough for this shit."

Charles laughed then, and both twins looked at the man at the sound, perking up. He shook his head, reaching out to pat Nicholas's shoulder. "It's a miracle both of them made it out alive, you know. Have some sympathy, David."

Nicholas tried not to think about how he'd watched plants popping like balloons struck with needles around him, but the image still lingered and he grunted, propping the toddler sized independent to his hip and turning on his heel. "More than you realize, bitch."

The kid just fisted a little hand in the front of his shirt and he refused to acknowledge how terrifying that was.

Cuz it felt like a hand around his heart.

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Chapter Text

(CW for chapter: Smoking.)

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Nobody questioned two grown men climbing out of the wreckage of Julai with a naked toddler on both their hips.

Nicholas has half expected someone to come up, claim the kids in the name of Millions Knives, or something. Take them away for whatever twisted experiment was next for them.

He almost hefted Punisher as a young woman nearly ran up to them as they entered the tent city that had been lifted up at the edge of the crater, her face dirty as tears streamed down her cheeks.

"I can nurse them." Was all she managed between tears, and Nicholas paused, his cross half straddled under one arm, kid tucked against his chest protectively.

"My son... he didn't...make it." she sniffed, hands clasping and unclasping, "...I'm sure they're hungry."

"Please." Charles agreed, sounding far less suspicious then Nicholas possibly could, and gestured around them, "Do you have a tent?"

The woman nodded, wiping tears with the back of her hand, and led them between canvas and metal poles to a lopsided tent before opening the flap and gesturing inside. Charles passed over his twin without question and glanced at Nicholas.

He hung back, reluctant. Common sense told him people didn't just offer to help like this. What if they took Vash's kids and ran, or ... or worse??

But the twin in his arms whimpered, holding out their hands to their sibling and he hissed, stepping up to pass over the child.

Charles patted his back again as the woman attempted a sad smile at them both and closed the tent flap between them. "It's gonna be fine, David." The other man reassured him. "They're hungry and she can help them."

Nicholas grunted, dropping Punisher down in the sand unceremoniously. He sat, using the cross as a chair, and scowled up at the other man. "I will fucking end you if something happens to those kids."

It wasn't a promise.

Charles chuckled, good natured like always, and sat down in the sand next to him. "You and your hubby have kids?" He asked after a while.

Nicholas slatted another glare at him. "Who's getting pregnant?" He countered, and the other man laughed at that.

"I mean, there's plenty of kids out there who need good homes, good parents to dote on them, friend."

Nicholas hated that. Hated it because he could see Vash in his minds eye, carefully helping a kid dress or make their beds or ... fuck.

"Too dangerous." He grunted back finally.

"For a priest?" The other man countered, soundly slightly smug. "That's what you are, isn't it, David?"

Nicholas hissed between his teeth and grabbed for another cigarette.

"I had a daughter once." Charles watched him light up, his eyes in that sort of far away place Nicholas couldn't see. "Lina."

"She dead?" Nicholas caught the past tense as he blew out the first puff.

"Not her. Me." The other man sighed, pulling out his own cigarette. Nicholas gave him another look. "Might as well be." Charles corrected with a sad sort of resigned shrug. "It's only her and my mom left now... I told myself I'd get out soon as I made enough money, but... well. It wasn't soon enough."

Nicholas eyed him, curious but not curious enough to ask. "They not the forgiving type, I take it." He grumbled between breaths.

"Oh no, they are." Charles's smile was so sad, Nicholas wanted to kick him for how much it reminded him of Vash. "Ma would give the shirt off her back to a dying man, probably adopt any lost soul that ventured across her doorstep. She's just like that... more heart than any one body I know. She just wants folks to have a family, you know?"

"No, I don't know." Nicholas shot back, scowling, and Charles laughed.

"Sorry. Anyway, It's me. I can't go back after what I done. Can't face that sort of kindness... like I don't deserve it, you know?"

Nicholas breathed out, watching the smoke dissipate in the air. That he did understand.

"So I guess that's why I wanna help you and your man." The other man confessed, leaning back in the sand and tilting his hat down over his face. "Can't stand seeing anyone else thinking they don't deserve to be happy or to smile."

Nicholas grunted, not really able to answer, and ground out the cigarette under his heel.

"We'll need a tent." Charles was talking again, and Nicholas was half tuned out of his words. "Kiddos can't sleep out in the open air."

"Yeah. Bugs." Nicholas agreed.

"Eh. Yeah." Charles laughed, agreeing, but for probably a much different reason then Nicholas meant.

Fuck Zazie. Fuck wams.

The other man heaved himself to his feet and rolled his shoulders in a stretch. "Recon I'll go barter one up for us, partner."

"With what?" Nicholas snapped back, short tempered and irritated the longer the twins were out of his sight. He didn't particularly care for them, it was just his nature. To protect. He sort of acted without thinking.

And their eyes, they looked at him like Vash did. With a sort of trust that shook him to the core.

It was kind of terrifying, in a way that was starting to become too familiar the longer he spent with the Humanoid Typhoon.

"Got an extra pack or two of cigs." Charles flashed his inside jacket pocket like a trafficker selling illicit goods, his sneer just a tiny bit naughty. "Figured they might come in handy."

"You shit." Nicholas shot back, but he liked him. Sometimes. For a guy who wasn't Vash or Livio.

Charles chuckled and dripped his hat like it was some big secret between the two of them, and then went strolling off, leaving Nicholas sitting there alone.

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"Sir." A hand on Nicholas's shoulder startled him awake and he jumped, nearly flinging himself from Punisher in an effort to grab it up, and then he realized it was the lady from the tent.

And the twins were laughing at him, one under each of her arms as she stared at him in his half fallen position, probably looking as much like a madman as Vash usually did when the position was reversed.

God damn it. Maybe you did really become the people you fake married. Fucking hell.

The kids giggled again and the lady bounced them on her hips. She must have put them in some of her son's clothes, a little too small and a little too bright for Nicholas's tastes, but Vash would probably enjoy the bright primary colors on them.

"Thanks." He grunted, righting himself and reaching out for the smaller twin. "How much do I owe ya?"

The woman blinked, and then shook her head, refusing subtly. "It's nothing. They needed clothes and food. I'm just... glad I could help." She paused as Nicholas took the smaller kid from her arms. "I don't want to think about more children dying here then already have."

That made him flinch internally, and he grunted, unable to answer. He settled the first twin on his hip and the woman seemed to remember something.

"Here." She turned, tugging something from inside her tent and held it out to him, "You might find a use for it." She explained plainly.

He stared at the dirty cloth, baffled. The fuck??

She smiled a little, one part amused and two parts sad, and set down the other twin. "It's a baby sling." She explained, stepping up to him with the worn cloth in hand. Nicholas moved his arms, confused, but let her wrap the sling around his shoulders and adjust the wide part to hang against his chest.

"You cross it like so." Her fingers were gentle, experienced. "And your son goes here."

She picked up the - boy apparently - from Nicholas's arms and tenderly slid the little child into the baby sling, until the smaller twin was nestled against Nicholas's chest.

He stood there for a moment, frozen, the reality sinking into him that he - the Punisher, the avenging, blood-soaked angel of god - was holding a child on his chest. The fuck?

He really needed a cigarette.

And the little fucker's fist was wrapping in his jacket again as the kid rested his blond head on Nicholas's chest. His weight felt odd in a not completely unpleasant way against Nicholas's skin, a lot less than his cross and a lot more than just a responsibility.

He really, really needed a cigarette.

"It's a little small for them but it's full of love." The woman's eyes were tearing up as she stepped away, swallowing against the memories. "My Billy was a good boy, I'm sure he won't mind sharing."

Nicholas could feel her pain in the way she turned away and bent to pick up the second child, but he didn't know what to say.

He wasn't Vash, he wasn't made for this. For comforting.

"M'sorry." He fumbled, lips clumsy, as he took the second child and settled the other twin on his hip. "I... m'sorry."

She managed a small, sad smile. "You make sure they have a good life, ok? That's enough for me." Nicholas nodded, watching the gentle way she petted back the kid's hair from their faces.

"Are you the father?" She asked after a moment and Nicholas had a whole three seconds of blind white panic which probably showed on his face because she laughed at him and petted his shoulder next.

"You'll do fine. They're good kids, see how they smile? My husband used to say... used to..." she trailed off into a deep sort of sadness that Nicholas's sort of understood. "He used to say you can tell the good people by their smiles." She laughed, more sad sorrow than amusement.

"Do you have a wife?" She asked next, and the panic hadn't settled yet because Nicholas's mouth blurted -

"I have a husband."

And she just nodded, tugging the little socks higher on the smaller twin's feet. "He's going to love them."

Nicholas didn't want to think about that.

"Don't let this little lady bully her brother too much." She patted the larger twin's head and then looked up at Nicholas with a sudden curiosity in her eyes. "You know they're not... human?"

He cursed under his breath. Fucking plant glow shit. "Gotta problem with that?" He grunted back between grit teeth, shifting the kid higher on his hip as he considered the angle at which to balance her so he could scoop up Punisher and crack the lady's skull.

"No." The lady sighed, hands going to the worn pockets of her dress. "I don't. Anything that made it through that mess alive is welcome to living, I say."

Nicholas relaxed fractionally, until the woman leaned back in and lowered her voice.

"But keep them away from the far end of the camp. There's people there... from the tower, the religious group... they've been.. poking around, asking questions, about if anyone saw something - someone - odd." She nodded to the twins. "Someone like them."

Nicholas shifted, tucking the twins closer to his body, as if that made them any less of a target then he was.

A bloody assassin and former gunman from the same religious group. That's where Legato would have taken Knives then. That's where Nicholas had to go, then. To kill a god.

That's what he came here to do.

"Thanks." He mumbled, shifting to bend down and hoist Punisher to his shoulder. "We appreciate it."

He meant him and Vash, but somehow it came out like him and the twins and him and all of them, and the lady just gave him a sad, sad smile.

"Take care of them. Enough people died here." She whispered.

And she was turning away, blinking back tears that stung in the back of Nicholas's throat until the tent flap closed between them.

He drew a breath. The fuck was Vash doing to him.

He shifted the cross higher on his back and turned, starting away from the Eye of Michael's end of camp.

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Charles had acquired them a scrap of canvas barely large enough for two grown men, let alone two men and a set of very active twins.

He looked up in surprise as Wolfwood slung down Punisher in front of the makeshift tent, face brightening in a smile. "Hey there, family man. Got room for anything else on those shoulders?" Nicholas kicked sand at him until the other man vacated the tent with a sputtering laugh, scraping grit out of his eyes.

"Alright, alright, friend! No offense." The man was still chuckling behind him as Nicholas plopped the girl off his hip and then started unloading her brother.

"Stay." He grunted at the girl as she started crawling toward the edge of the ratty blanket Charles had dumped in the sand under the tent, struggling to get her brother's foot out of the baby sling. How the fuck did mothers handle these things??

"Kids don't stay too well." Charles leaned in to help him remove the boy's foot from the sling and catch the girl before she face-planted into the sand. "It's always goin’, goin' for them; the world's one big adventure."

"One big adventure about to get them killed." Nicholas muttered, setting the boy down on the blanket and trying to pry his little fingers off his own jacket. "Let go, you hack."

Charles was laughing again, reaching over to help him. "I really hope your hubby has better language than you do, friend."

Nicholas shuddered as the boy's fingers fell off and he sprang back before either twin could latch onto him again. They just looked at him sadly, blue eyes staring at him and he hissed, digging into his pockets until he found a couple lollipops on the side of his jacket that hadn't been drenched in serum. "Here." He tossed the suckers haphazardly toward Charles and the twins. "Don't fucking looking at me like that, you bastard."

He was talking to the Vash he could see in his mind's eye, giving him a sort of sad, sort of reproachful look.

"I'm going to check out a few things." He mumbled, pushing past those blue eyes in his head, hauling Punisher up from its cradle of sand. "Stay with ‘em and don't let anyone take ‘em anywhere."

Charles shrugged, unwrapping the lollipops for the kids. "Yeah, sure." His eyes were narrowed though, watching Wolfwood's movements. "Should I find you a change of clothes for when you get back, Preacher-man?"

Nicholas paused, cross balanced on his shoulder like the weight of it could ground him. "Probably." He agreed.

Kids didn't need to know the sight of blood this young.

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Chapter Text

CW: sacrilegious religious themes/thoughts, brief mention of suicidal intentions, mentions of gore and blood, murder - But it was deserved imo, brief mentions of body manipulation/horror.

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Nicholas wasn't dumb. He was one of the higher ranked assassins in the church, trained to kill with extreme prejudice by Legato and others. He was god's very own murder angel, the Eye of Michael's falling ax.

He knew he was being followed, almost as soon as it started.

He'd walked through the open area of the tent camp, watched people line up for the food lines and for clothes, blankets. There were already a few charity organizations here with offerings for survivors. It reminded him of the orphanage in a way. He wondered how many of the offerings came from the church, and how much of their souls folks had to sign away to get them. He wondered who they would send, now that he wasn't on the roster of heaven, to collect those debts if folks couldn't pay.

He felt eyes on the back of his head almost as soon as he stepped out of the area, back into the rows of tents. His skin pricked - sort of fear, more like adrenaline. Sort of a morbid excitement, the knowledge he'd be downing the sand in blood in a few moments.

Whoever was following him wasn't from the Eye of Michael, but that meant nothing. He'd already seen evidence of scalpers and mercs picking over the wreckage of the fallen city. Wouldn't surprise him if someone decided to take on a guy like him for the show of it.

He cut to the left, between two tents, and zagged back, half sprinting, half lazily enjoying the chance to do what he was made for.

Whoever it was doubled their pace, probably trying to catch him, but he was easily faster.

In the years since the experiments, since he'd been loosed on the world with the terrible duty to kill god's least favorite people, he'd never found someone who could keep up with him. At least until Vash.

He cut back, back into the alley he'd dodged out of, behind the pursuer, ropes and wound sheets flying off as he raised the gun to his shoulder.

And stopped.

"Fucking!? How are you not dead, you bitch!?"

Meryl Stryfe jumped, tiny frame almost vaulting into the sky, and spun on her heel, finger thrust at him. "It is you, your jerk!!" She screeched, and then seemed to realize Punisher was primed and ready, "Are you gonna shoot me!?"

Nicholas dropped Punisher and glared at the girl, eyes narrowing. "I oughta." He hissed between his teeth, already bending down to pick up the cloth and start rewrapping his gun. "Little fucker."

"You dumped me in the desert and then disappeared and I wanna know where you've been and - and where's Vash!?" She cried, close enough now to jab her finger into his chest as he stood.

He hissed, planting a hand on the top of her head and pushing her to arm's distance even as she swung at him. Tiny girl, tiny arms. "Chill, bitch." He commanded, but she didn't follow his orders like Vash did and just swung harder.

"Where is he!?" She demanded, anger and fear compounding in her voice, "You found him, right!?"

Nicholas let go of her to start wrapping Punisher, dismissive. "Dunno." He grunted. "Why you care?" The ugly undertone in his voice slipped out just a little. The weird clenching he always got in his chest when Vash would smile at her, how he wanted to punt her sometimes so Vash would smile at him like that.

"He's my friend." She sniffed, anger gone as suddenly as it had been there. "If you know where he is, just tell me."

He started tying the rope back around Punisher. "You reporters never know when a good story is dead." He finally replied, letting dead hang in the air between them for longer than he maybe should have, because her face got all scrunchy before she turned away and wiped at her eyes.

Ah, shit. He hadn't truly meant to make her cry.

"What are you doing here?" He asked to change the subject, to distract her, and fuck he was spending too much time with Vash because being kind didn't make it on his list of personal qualities.

"People need help." She replied, not turning back to him, still sounding slightly soggy. "Couldn't just walk away."

Nicholas grit his teeth. "Yeah." He grunted, because that hurt in a way it shouldn't. In a way that made him wonder why Vash looked at him like he was something wonderful when Nicholas didn't even care about people like that.

"Well. Plenty of people to help here." He mumbled, tying off the last knot and standing, Punisher looming awkwardly behind him.

"Yeah." She agreed, finally turning to face him again, no more tears on her face but the streaks still evident. "Why are you still here?"

Nicholas shrugged and reached for a cigarette, lighting it up between his teeth before he answered. "Business with god." He grunted, jerking his chin toward the Eye of Michael’s end of the camp. She rolled her eyes. Nicholas raised an eyebrow.

"Right. I forget you're a selfish prick who only helps people when there's something in it for him." She shot back, and Nicholas almost bit through the cigarette.

"Fuck you, tiny bitch."

She flipped him off, and he kinda liked this side of her as he brushed past her, resuming his walk toward god's fallen kingdom.

"Look, I'm sorry about Roberto, ok?" He called back over his shoulder when he was sure she wasn't following him any longer. "Gramps was an ok guy."

She made a noise but didn't shoot back a sharp reply and he finally stopped, sighing. "And..." He paused, shook his head. "If I did know where Blondie was, I'm sure he'd tell you to be safe and stay outa this."

He was pretty sure he heard her start crying again as he walked away.

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He walked right in.

No one came to question him, no one stopped him. Just – strolled right in, one foot in front of the other, hand in his pocket and massive weapon of death on his shoulder.

Someone even called out "Ay, Punisher!" To him. Nicholas gave a half-hearted wave in return, and kept walking.

He'd only completed his stint in hell, gotten his contract back from god, the same night Julai fell. The number of people who probably knew about him moving on from the roster of the holy people could be counted on three fingers. He hadn't even told Vash.

So nobody stopped the assassin in their midst, no one questioned him walking through their little tent city on his way to the outskirts. On his way to settle a debt with god.

If he knew Legato, and if there was one person in the entire army of god that he knew from years of testing each other's nerves and breaking points, it was the blue haired bitch - Knives wouldn't be in the center of the religious camp.

Sure, there was a big ass tent with poles and flags and guards and shit, all gaudy and bright and eye-catching like a totem of worship ...

But Legato wouldn't keep his lord there, where any assassin with a pair of balls could find him. No, Knives would be in the outskirts, somewhere Legato could keep an eye on him the entire time. Somewhere they could escape from easily if the need arose.

So Wolfwood searched the outskirts of the camp, lighting up cigarettes, circling tents, waiting for the familiar tug of Legato's powers to push him away from somewhere.

He circled the entire camp and came up with nothing. No unfortunately familiar, creepily intimate forces being bent inside his body, forcing him to turn and walk away.

No blue hair and gaunt face.

No god.

He let the used cigarette fall from his lips and ground it out in the dirt with a low hiss. What the fuck. This wasn't like Legato, to not follow a pattern.

"Ey." He waved down one of the passing biologists, or at least a man in the Eye of Michael's stark white lab coats. "Where's the big man?" The man looked at him blankly and waved toward the tent, its poles and banners visible over the ragged fabric rows of his followers.

Nicholas shook his head, frowning. "Legato." He elaborated. "Bluesummers."

He didn't miss the shiver that ran down the man's spine, because everyone knew the name Bluesummers - everyone avoided it.

If Nicholas was god's avenging angel, Legato was god's devil.

"He isn't here." The man mumbled, avoiding Nicholas's eyes as he realized he was probably talking to one of the Guns. Nicholas didn’t correct him. "Haven't seen him since he left a little over a week ago. Dr. Conrad said something about a special mission. I think he took Double Fang and the Beast with him."

Nicholas tilted his head dismissively and the biologist fled as the assassin leaned back against Punisher and drew a slow breath.

Had it not been Legato who took Knives's body then??

There were a number of slimmer people in the Gung-ho Guns, but none of them were bound to a fallen god by strong enough threads to return to a fallen, twisted kingdom. Had to be Legato.

But either he had gone away and taken Knives body with him, or he'd come and retrieved his lord and dumped his body in the tent here ... and then left himself without anyone seeing him? That didn't make any sense.

Even as a child, Nicholas had seen the way Legato looked at Knives. It was short of reverence, more like fanatical devotion. Almost like desperation.

Now that he was older, now that he'd met Vash, Nicholas would almost call the hungry look in Legato's tortured eyes... love.

In some sort of incredibly fucked up, perverse sort of way. Like he was willing to flay himself open for the god he loved.

It was horrifying, in a sort of tantalizing way... because Nicholas could see the same glint in his own eyes sometimes, reflected back in the orange frames on Vash's face.

Nicholas grunted, hefting Punisher to his shoulder, steps slowly finding his way back to the main circle of the religious camp. He plunked himself down at the edge of a circle of followers, Punisher listing behind himself as he watched them play cards. Lingering. Listening.

He was starting to suspect that Knives had actually been taken by Legato and, dead or alive, his body wasn't here in this little fucked up camp of holy people.

But he had to make sure. He had to check the big tent. And that would need to wait until nightfall, because he wasn't dumb.

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He had a thought, sometime toward evening. A brief idea that flashed through his mind so quickly it almost passed with notice. He caught the tail end of it and reeled it back in, mind turning it over.

If that had been Legato's footsteps in the sand, then the bigger man with him might have been Livio. He might not be dead.

Nicholas hadn't spent time with his little brother in ... well since the orphanage actually. They hadn't been allowed to mix, so to speak, after the experiments. During training.

More like Livio's presence had been used to motivate him to keep showing up instead of hanging himself in his cell.

He'd glimpsed the taller frame with gray hair occasionally, usually trotting around after Legato. He assumed it was a subtle threat to keep him in line.

The Gung-ho Guns liked to gossip though, and once he'd been released on the world there were rumors about his brother. Something to know the kid was still alive, at least.

Legato liked him, that's what they said. He was pleased with the Double Fang's obedient nature and how easy he followed orders. Probably in rough contrast to Nicholas's own willful disobedience and harsh commitment to breaking every law he could bend in the Eye of Michael's bible.

Nicholas had never thought about it much - in all honesty, he thought the boy he’d known had been lost in the same way he’d been lost - on the lab table, years ago. Dying somewhere between the blood and the needles and the pain and lost innocence that had only ever been a thin veneer on this forsaken rock anyway.

Of course Vash, somehow Vash, with his beautiful belief in humankind and his willingness to lay down his life for even the most lost soul, of course Vash had helped him find his brother again in the men they'd both become.

And then ... Livio had chosen to blow his own brains out.

Nicholas was blessed in one way, and that was he never really had nightmares. Instead his nights were filled with blood-soaked memories; regrets, the faces and people he couldn’t save, memories of crimson sand under fallen bodies riddled with lead.

Daylight was hardly a relief when the days sometimes faded into one long feedback loop of past traumas sifting through his head before his waking eyes.

Livio's face at that moment, the second before he pulled the trigger, was among the more common.

So was Vash's pale, responseless corpse in the moments before the plant glow faded from his body on the sand streamer, after he'd synced with his fellow plant. How his pulse didn't start, or his chest fill with air until Nicholas had forced his own breath through the still lips.

Nicholas ground his heel into the sand and stood, shaking off the cramps in his legs from sitting for so long. Shaking off the ghosts floating through his head.

If the rumors had been true and Legato did favor the Double Fang as a henchman, and if they had gotten to him in time, or if Razlo had done his Razlo thing, and if those footprints in the sand behind Legato's didn't belong to any of the other Gung-ho Guns, then maybe Livio ...

The shoe size was right, roughly, from what Nicholas could remember of that jumbled fight. The height and the way Livio carried himself now. Not heavy, not light.

He really only knew the man he'd met on the sand streamer as a shell of his brother. But if there was some sort of chance Livio was still alive, then ...

... then what?

He huffed, lifting Punisher to his shoulder and ambling toward the big tent. Then what?

Eventually he’d be forced into the same spot all over again, forced to choose between the two people he cared about most in this forsaken world. Yes, the last time his choice had been weighted by his own desire to be free of the sins he committed for the Eye of Michael.

But now, with those blue eyes staring back at him in his mind, there was no difference in his choice.

"Hey. Where are you going?" A voice called to him and he waved a hand, dismissive, only half focused.

"Stop!" Came another command and the click of a gun safety being knocked off, and that brought him back sharply from a place he never should have let himself wander.

He stopped in place, suddenly aware of the guns trained on him as he hesitated before the big tent, the guards around it ready to fire. He sighed, letting Punisher dip to rest on the sand behind him. He was more careful than this.

When had Vash rubbed off on him this much?

"Jus' visiting." He drawled, patting the pocket of his jacket, checking for more cigarettes, calculating the angles of attack, which bullets would hit first. "Can't a disciple pay his respects to god any more?"

"Put your hands in the air." One of the guards rattled, his voice slightly shaky. "Or we'll shoot."

Nicholas slid the cigarette between his teeth and reached for his lighter. "Ditto." He mumbled around the smell of nicotine as he lit up, snapping the lighter closed.

And fuck it. Killing was an itch that needed to be scratched sometimes.

He could see Vash frowning in his mind's eye even as he dropped his hands to his sides, waiting for the guard to shoot first. Alibi. If Vash ever asked.

But instead one of them lowered his gun, frowning quizzically at Nicholas. "Hey, ain't you The Punisher?"

Nicholas puffed out a breath of smoke and grunted.

The guards lowered their guns, tension relaxing from their shoulders, and motioned him forward. "Fuck. Sorry about that - you can go ahead, he's been expecting you."

And Nicholas just stood there for a second, blinking at them before all the training Legato had pushed him through caught up and pulled him into motion.

"Darn fucking straight he is." He mumbled, no clear idea who the He was or why he was expected, but he could take the opening he was given.

"No weapons." One of the men corrected as he went to hoist his cross to his back again. "Have to set an example for the people, how to approach the lord and stuff."

Nicholas glanced back, eyeing the blank faces of the people deliberately averting their eyes at the edges of the circling tents. "Yeah." He agreed, lips tight. "Real dangerous, the people of god."

The guards motioned him through and he pushed into the tent, nerves singing. Something about this was very wrong.

Legato would have locked him back in his cell for walking into a trap this obvious during training. There was no way Knives was here: this tent had to be for someone else, which led to the question -- who was pulling the strings behind the church when god was away?

It was, predictably, stupidly sterile and almost overly bright inside the tent, like fucking hospital, like a fucking lab, and he knew who he was meeting instantly.

"God, fuck--" He almost turned on his heal and walked straight back out in that moment but the man's voice stopped him.

"I knew you'd come back."

Nicholas stopped, poised to turn away, and sent a sneer toward the good doctor. "Not for you, asshole."

"No." Doctor Conrad agreed from the bed he was laid out on, a horde of medical equipment clustered around his head. "But you're a man troubled by sins of the past, aren't you not, Punisher? I knew you'd come home to right those wrongs."

Nicholas pivoted toward him, rage prickling along the underside of his skin, driving him toward the man who'd stolen his childhood. "You think you know a lot, don't you, you fuck?" He growled, low, fingers balling into fists so tight he could feel his nails digging into his palms. "You think you know people, you twisted old man?! You don't know any of us! You don't know the first thing about me!!"

The doctor coughed, and Nicholas recognized the rattle in his throat, finally saw the IV tube strapped to his wrist and the heart monitor on the other. He must have been caught in the fall.

Good.

"I know my creations." The man replied as the coughing subsided.

Nicholas bristled, jaw clenching on the cigarette between his teeth. "I ain't your creation, you sick monster – You're the one who fucks people's lives and then lords it over them in service to a god they don't even know."

"We gave you a better life. You would have died by now if we hadn't picked you out of the orphanage."

"You gave me shit!!" Nicholas felt raw, like he's been raked over coals and peeled open, and for a moment he wondered how fast the guard would come if he strangled the man in front of him with his bare hands. "You piece of shit, you took my life away!!"

He almost lunged then, but the doctor held up something and his feet wouldn't move. His chest tightened and he just stood there, staring at the battered old gun hanging from the man's hand.

Vash's heavy gun, the barrel a little warped, the notches in the handle for how many times Vash had traded it away for a meal and gotten it back. The memories of the blond hair and intense blue eyes staring down the barrel. Of a sunny smile that didn't quite reach the sadness in the eyes.

And he just stood there, dumbly, as the fucking doctor coughed and the chamber of the barrel rattled a little.

"You came for him." The man finally spoke, clearing his throat as the hacking subsided again. "I knew you would. Have you found him?"

Nicholas reared back a little at that, at the implications in the tone and the words and the voice and snarled. "Fuck off and die."

He meant it literally, but the old bastard on the bed in front of him seemed to take it as Nicholas hadn't found what he was searching for yet.

"I'll make you a contract." The man offered, and Nicholas bared his teeth in a feral growl.

"I'm done with your fucking contracts, old man!!" He snapped, striding across the tent and snatching the heavy gun out of those twisted, warped fingers. "Go die a painful and pitiful death and be thankful I'm not bringing it to you personally."

He turned on his heel then, stalking toward the tent door, head down and shoulder squared.

"We're looking for offspring." More coughing,

He stopped, frozen for the second time.

"More independents, Knives created them through Vash before they died."

That was a sincerely fucked up sentence and Nicholas turned slowly, something like horror spreading through his veins.

And fear.

Those two little faces, and the one waiting for him in the hospital iles away, flashed through his head.

"Why?" He grunted, tone surprisingly neutral for the mix of emotions swelling in his chest.

"They have the same DNA as Knives, we can use their bodies to combine with his consciousness once we find him and create a new birth for him."

Nicholas stared at the man on the bed, horror seeping up his neck, "You think you're god?"

"I'm working for one, yes."

Nicholas felt his lips pull back in disgusted horror. "You actually believe that fucked up, genocidal maniac ... fucking shit, you need to die."

The doctor actually smiled a little at him then and it sent the worst kind of shivers down Nicholas's spine. "Knives can create a new world without pain and suffering. If we rebirth him -"

"Do you even hear yourself!? Do you hear how fucked up that is??" Nicholas hissed, fingers tightening on the grip of Vash's gun. "You would fucking murder those two innocent little kids just to resurrect a fucking devil!?!?"

The old doctor's eyes brightened, almost manic, and Nicholas took a step back.

"You've seen them!" The man on the bed cried, struggling to sit up as the army of sensors around him started blaring and beeping, "Two of them, you say? How big, what sex, do they seem intelligent? Not that it matters, once Knives takes over their consciousness--"

The safety on Vash's gun was rusty, difficult to click off, but it gave under Nicholas's clenched fingers as he raised the gun and cocked it, both hands shaking slightly, emotions flooding high through him. Rage, fear. Something more, something deeper. "I won't let you fucking up anyone else's life, you fucking bastard!"

He pulled the trigger.

Doctor Conrad just sat there calmly as the trigger clicked home on an empty chamber.

"It's not loaded, my son." He chided gently and Nicholas snapped.

The sound of heavy iron cracking into bone was sharp as the crack of a pistol as Nicholas swung. The doctor collapsed back onto the bed, silent.

And then Nicholas turned and walked out of the tent.

The guards outside were talking at him and he shook them off, ignoring their voices, hosting his cross and striding across the camp. He slid Vash's gun into his belt and dug out his lighter, spitting aside the burnt out cigarette.

God, this was funny, wasn't it? In the sort of morally ironic way that had defined Nicholas's life since he became the avenging angel of god. The man who chased down wayward sinners and sent them to their rewards.

The Punisher.

He heard his own dry laughter in the still night, the catch in his throat making it sound chipped and broken as he flipped the lighter in his hand, watching the engraved Eye of Michael symbol catch the moonlight.

Vash wasn't going to approve of this at all.

The things a guy did for his kids, fucking hell.

Nicholas snapped the lighter open, tiny flame bright in the darkness, and tossed the whole thing on the dry canvas tent as he passed out of the religious camp.

"Fire's a gift from god, they say." He grunted to himself, to Vash in his mind's eye, as the camp went up like a pillar of holy hellfire behind him.

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Charles was pacing in the sand in front of their tent as Nicholas approached, looking worried under his battered hat for the first time since Nicholas had met him.

"The hell did you do, Saverem??" The man demanded as he caught sight of Nicholas's silhouette against the pillar of fire at the far end of camp, "What the hell is that??"

"Saying goodbye to my old trade." Nicholas grunted, glancing into the tiny lean-to to assure himself the twins were fine. He could see their little bodies cuddled together under a worn blanket Charles must have salvaged from somewhere. It calmed something inside his chest. "We gotta go."

"Yeah, no shit, that's the Eye of Michael's camp to you just burned down!!" Charles hissed, fists planting on his hips as he faced off against the younger man, face illuminated by the fire behind Nicholas.

"Now you know the truth about me." Nicholas shifted Punisher, again calculating the best angle to strike, waiting for the confrontation he knew was moments away. "Get out of my way." He warned, voice low.

Charles stood there unflinching, hands on his hips, staring him down. He must know by now, picked up the pieces and the clues, know that when Nicholas moved the cross on his back a certain way it meant he was ready to engage.

But still the older man didn't flinch. He just stared at Nicholas, eyes searching the shadowed face in front of him. And then his face softened. "What did they do to you?" His voice was quieter. "I've heard stories."

"Most of them are true." Nicholas acknowledged, watching the other man with a critical eye, still waiting for the string holding them together to snap, "But this time wasn't personal. They want my kids."

Charles frowned then, finally bowing his head a little so his eyes were hidden under the brim of his hat. "Fuck." He cursed, low and quiet, like he was resigning himself to something he couldn't escape.

Nicholas almost swung then, preemptively, because he knew what came next.

What came next was the man choosing to save his own hide, to surrender Vash's kids - whoever kids - to the Eye of Michael to save his own soul from the devil... and Nicholas had already chosen to protect his kids, committed to protecting them like he protected Vash. Because somehow, despite his best efforts, those blue eyes had gotten a hook in his soul.

He wouldn't be turning back now, no matter what the cost.

"Ok." Charles agreed then, lifting his head to stare Nicholas in the eye. "You need to get them out of here."

Nicholas blinked at him, unnerved. What? What kind of human was this guy? People didn't put other people first, they didn't care, they didn't sacrifice themselves for kids they knew weren't even human ...

"Listen, those people are gonna follow you here, we don't have much time. You can drive?" Charles was still talking, sounding authoritative. Like he's been here before.

Nicholas frowned, Punisher hanging loosely on his back as his body buzzed, brows pinched. "Yeah." He conceded. "Motorcycle and four wheels."

"Ok." Charles turned toward the tent, crouching down to lift the blanket from the sleeping children. "Motorpool isn't far, let's try for that."

Nicholas glanced back sharply as someone started screaming toward the fire-lit side of camp. It was too far away to see anything clearly yet, but his chest still felt tight.

"That'll be whoever they sent to look for you." Charles was standing behind him, a sleepy looking twin on either hip, "Common, hurry!"

People were starting to poke their heads out of their own tents as they ran, passing sleepy-eyed strangers, the noise behind them growing.

"Fuck." Nicholas hissed between his teeth as they reached the rows of vehicles parked along the edge of the tent city. "Fuck they're fast."

"Yeah." Charles grunted, nodding toward the rows of trunks, "I trust you know how to hotwire one of these things, Preacher-man?"

Nicholas dropped Punisher, sand spitting up where the metal struck the earth, and chose his ride easily, slinging a leg over the saddle of a heavy bike with a sidecar.

"Knew you were an open top kinda guy." Charles chuckled as Nicholas got the engine jumped and the bike rumbled to life between his thighs.

Something exploded behind them, close, and both men jumped, starting to stare back over their shoulders at the camp.

The fire looked like it was spreading, jumping from one dry tent to the next, and Nicholas could swear he saw a burst of machine gun fire lighting up the night just a few rows back.

Someone else screamed, a man this time, uncomfortably close, and was abruptly cut off.

"Fuck." Charles spat the curse and leaned over to tuck both twins into the sidecar even as the smaller twin started whimpering in fear.

Nicholas's chest clenched and he leaned down to put one hand against the kid's stomach, "Easy, little man." He mumbled, trying to sound reassuring as the little boy clutched at his thick fingers with tiny ones.

"It's gonna be ok, little guy." Charles agreed, smiling at the kids as he stood, removing his hat, "Your dad'll take good care of you."

Nicholas glanced up on reflex to protest the label, and Charles pressed the hat onto his head, cutting him off. "Wha-??"

"We don't have time for goodbye so you just keep riding until they're safe, do you hear me, Saverem?" The older man's face was set, serious and stern, and Nicholas wondered what it might have been like to have a father for a moment.

He nodded, shoving the hat down on his own head, "Yes, sir."

"Good boy." Charles paused, then pulled something from his pocket and pressed it into Nicholas's palm. "There's a little town called Kasted, it's out of the way and quiet. There's a big house there, lot of room. Big front pouch, you can't miss it. Go there. Tell them - tell Ma I'm sorry I couldn't make it home. And tell Lina ... tell her I'm sorry and I'm so proud of her."

Nicholas frowned, fingers closing around the object. He understood the meaning behind the words too well. He knew better than to argue, even if he could see Vash screaming in his mind's eye, trying to barter for a way for them all to make it out alive.

But he wasn't Vash the Stampede.

He was Nicholas the Punisher, and he couldn't see any other way out.

"Why?" He managed to ask as Charles turned away. "Y'don't owe us a thing."

Charles laughed, bending down to host Punisher to his own shoulder. He straightened, the cross resting comfortably against his back, his silhouette startlingly close to Wolfwood's.

"I'm too old to start over, son. And maybe, deep down, I don't really wanna. But you." He glanced back then, smiling like he was sharing a secret, "God just gave you a whole ass family - you better appreciate that gift, son."

Nicholas's stomach looped.

Charles reached up to touch his forehead as if he were tipping a hat in cheerful farewell, and turned his back on Nicholas and the twins, Punisher bouncing on his back as he walked toward the gun fire.

Nicholas could hear Vash screaming in his head, begging, pleading for him to stop, to come back, for Nicholas to figure out a way they could all get out. But he just turned his back on the spreading fire and gunned the motor, sand spraying under the tires as he wiped out and down the rows of vehicles toward the open desert.

A figure leapt into his path from the shadow of a battered truck and he cursed, one hand flying down to pin the twins in place so they wouldn't smack around as the brakes screeched and the bike almost slid sideways.

He cursed, probably more colorful then he should with young ears so close, and he should have fucking clipped her. That would make them even.

"What is going on!?" Meryl screamed at him, hair spiked in every direction from sleeping in the old truck bed, eyes wide as she took in him, the kids, and the camp on fire behind him, "What did you do!??"

Nicholas grit his teeth, keeping his hand on the kids to keep them from squirming out of the sidecar. He could feel little fingers locking around his own again. "God, Meryl, just... keep your nose out of our business, can't you!?"

She stamped one bare foot, fists balled, "Nicholas D Wolfwood, I will scream if you don't tell me what's going on and let me help!!"

Nicholas hissed sharply, teeth bared. He hated that about her. Hated that her first reaction was to help, and his was to hurt.

"I can't..." He hated the way his voice almost wobbled, almost sounded uneven as he glared at the sand between them. "I can't let another person die tonight... not for me."

Meryl stopped short, her eyes going wide, and Nicholas hated that look too.

It struck him then, and he pulled Vash's gun from his belt, tossing it toward the small girl. It landed with a heavy thump in the sand between them as Nicholas rev'd the bike back up, swinging to circle around her.

"If anyone ever asks you," He didn't look at her as he drove around, even though he could feel her eyes on the back of his neck, "If you ever write a report on this... just tell 'em Vash the Stampede and Nicholas the Punisher died in Julai."

She didn't stop him as he drove off into the desert.

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Chapter Text

(CW: self deprecating thoughts/language, brief suggestive language, slightly sacrilegious language/imaging)

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Nicholas recognized the tall, slender figure as he approached the tiny little outpost and the hospital, and cursed under his breath.

Fucking bean pole shouldn't be out of bed yet.

But he definitely recognized the wide shoulders that tapered down to a narrow waist, that bright thatch of almost yellow blond hair - it wasn't like there were any other blonds on this goddamn rock, but even so, that color was burned into Nicholas's memories.

The motor between his legs sputtered, reminding him he'd been pushing the bike along on dregs for the last few miles, and finally choked out as he coasted into the edge of the outpost.

He let the bike come to a stop in the shadow of one the weary houses and leaned forward on the handlebars as the weight of the last few days came falling down on his shoulders, heavy and worn. His eyes fixed the blond near the hospital, soaking the sight of him in like a parched man seeking water.

Vash was sitting, perched like a bird with one leg tucked up under him, on the rickety bench beside the hospital door, fingers fiddling with what looked like a hand-held radio unit. God knows where he got that.

There were still bandages on him, peeking out from under the ratty turtleneck that had seen better days, but they must have let him shower because his hair looked clean. It spiked upward instead of falling forward, a few stubborn wayward pieces falling into the man's furrowed brow to cover those blue eyes Nicholas could see with own eyes closed. He looked so worn; thin and ragged and tired.

And yet, even like this, doing the most mundane thing, covered in bandages and exhausted outside a hospital, the blond didn't look human. Not fully.

No, he looked like something else, something people should be worshiping; something old and powerful and benevolent wrapped up in human skin.

Or maybe that was just how Nicholas saw him. Maybe other people didn't see the things inside that Vash only showed a few people. People he trusted. People like Nicholas.

His chest felt tight, the feeling edging up his throat. It scared him.

It was terrifying, looking at someone who made him feel things he wasn't sure he could fully name. Things he'd seen reflected in Legato's eyes when the blue haired man looked at Knives. Something more than reverence, more than just fanatical worship.

Things people like them weren't supposed to feel.

Nicholas swallowed back the tightness in his throat, his fingers flexing on the handle bars.

Something must have startled Vash, or else he really was more attune to having eyes on him then he let on - Nicholas would lay bets on the second - and suddenly those blue eyes were meeting his.

Vash was on his feet and Nicholas was letting go of the bike, standing to swing himself off it involuntarily, body moving as his heart lurched like he'd been called by name even before he heard the blond's voice.

"Nico!" He heard Vash shouting, heard the speeding footsteps crunching in sand as the other man started running, and he turned, opening his arms.

Vash hit him like a hurricane -- all encompassing, sweeping him off his senses -- as the other man burrowed his face in Nicholas's neck, thin arm squeezing tight around Nicholas's shoulders.

"Nico, Nico, Nico...." Vash was whimpering, his breath hitching, Nicholas could hear the tears in the waiver of his voice.

"Hey..." His own arms were around the slimmer man's waist, that stupid tiny waist he was pretty sure he knew the circumference of before he'd touched it for the first time, "Hey, baby, hey." The hitch in his own voice almost matched Vash's, his heart felt too tight for his chest.

He squeezed, feeling the breath rush out of the blond's lungs as he tightened his hold and Vash pressed himself closer, making already minimal space between them even less.

"You came back." Vash was sobbing, wet tears splashing to Nicholas's shoulders as thin fingers clutched the fabric of his blazer. "You came back."

"Baby...." He didn't think when it came to Vash, he never did. The urge to calm those tears and keep the slimmer man pressed against him until the blond forgot all the horrible things before this moment and the world was only them, it was the only thing that mattered.

"Vash." His hand slid up, cupping the back of the blond's head, fingers rubbing over the coarse undercut, comforting. Holding. Just the two of them. "I'll always come back for you, dipshit."

Vash laughed at the insult, fondly as it was said, short and sharp and wet through the tears, one his genuine laughs, and Nicholas felt more tears drip down his collar.

"Please don't..." Vash didn't finish the sentence, curling his face farther into Nicholas's jaw, wet cheek against Nicholas's, but he didn't have to.

Please don't leave me again.

Nicholas squeezed him tighter, biting his own lip against the emotions threatening to overflow from his eyes. "I don't plan on it, Blondy." He replied, letting his face rest against Vash's. "Never again."

Vash let out a soft sob, fingers practically ripping Nicholas's jacket with how tightly they were wound into the fabric, and then the blond was pulling back.

Nicholas blinked, confused.

Vash didn't go far, just enough to bring their faces together properly, one wet and tear stained with spiky blond hair, one covered in sand and dust and desperately in need of a shave.

Vash kissed him.

Chapped lips, small sharp fangs catching at the corners, and the taste of desperation filled his senses, and then it was gone and Nicholas was chasing it, pulling the blond back in with the hand still on the back of his head, just as desperate.

They collided, messy, hot, inexperienced. Teeth clacked, noses rubbed, Vash gasped as Nicholas bit his lip and tugged, saliva strung between them as they finally parted for breath.

"Fuck." Nicholas heard himself breathe into the space between them as Vash rested his forehead on his own. "Fucking goddamn, Spiky."

Vash made a soft whimper, half embarrassed, half something that made Nicholas was to throw him against the nearest wall and shuck his pants down to his ankles, and those blue eyes skittered away as the blond flushed darker, his nose and cheeks painted red as his long lost jacket. "Y-yeah..." He stammered, licking his bitten lips. "I've been... wanting to do that for...a while."

"What stopped you?" Nicholas chased him, lipping at the red stained cheeks, nipping, nuzzling as Vash's breath caught in encouragement.

"Didn't think you'd do it back." The bond confessed quietly, his thin chest rising and falling against Nicholas's, the blue eyes flittering back to catch Nicholas's for a moment before they fluttered away again. "Thought you were ... the whole cult thing might stop you. Or something."

Or something like I don't deserve you. Vash didn't finish the thought, but he had never needed to even open his mouth for Nicholas to know what he was thinking.

He left a softer kiss on the trembling jaw, felt the way Vash flinched slightly, lost in his own self depreciation, and brought his hand around to cup the blond's chin. The blue eyes skittered over to his like a scared cat, and Nicholas ran his thumb down the gentle curve of Vash's cheekbone. "Sweetheart."

Vash shuddered against him, more tears ready to fall from those precious eyes, and Nicholas's chest felt tighter than ever before.

Nothing Legato or the doctor had put him through had hurt like this. Been as terrifying as this. As opening up his heart for a skinny blond boy who might be his god, who could fit in his arms and make all the blood stains on his soul seem like penitence paid. That his debt was canceled. That everything he'd been through until now was enough. That he was enough.

That he was good enough for the angel in his arms. His angel.

"Vash." He breathed, and the tears finally overflowed from the blue eyes as Vash's face crumpled up again and he clung to Nicholas, tight, wet face tucked in the crook of the Punisher's neck.

"Nico. Nico. Nico." The blond was sobbing his name, repeating it over and over like saying it would bind them together like a marriage vow. Like a wedding band. Like family.

His own cheeks felt wet as he squeezed the blond tighter. "Vash." He whispered into the soft blond locks tickling his face, "My Vash."

Vash's head bobbed, small, eager, and the fingers in his coat tightened again. "Always." Came the watery, broken reply.

Nicholas held him, held him until Vash's sobs turned to sniffles, until the heaving of his chest evened out.

Until little fingers closed around his pant leg and tugged.

"Fucking hell!!"

Vash startled as he yelped, rearing back and instinctively reaching for a missing sidearm had been left behind them in the ruins of Julai, head snapping around as he searched for the conflict.

"God!!" Nicholas managed to hold himself back from snap kicking the little independent away on a knee jerk reaction, but only just. "Why are you like this?!?!"

Vash was frozen, his expression in the stunned O face he made, hand where his gun used to be, as Nicholas leaned down and snatched up the toddler sized kid and tucked him against his hip with a slight scowl.

"Needy little bugger, aren't you?" He grumbled at the smaller twin, adjusting the kid's already too-small shirt over his probably too skinny belly. "Take after your papa, don't you? Fucker."

He glanced back to check the other kid was still in the sidecar, and she was, hands folded innocently in her lap like a fucking saint as her brother's little hands found their way to Nicholas's collar and clung. He exhaled, satisfied the girl hadn't wandered off, and turned back to Vash. To his husband.

"We got kids."

He probably could have worded it better, or softened the blow, or really anything, but the way Vash's eyebrows skyrocketed while his face morphed into an even larger O was almost worth it.

He felt the laughter start in his chest, bubbling up until it spilled out and he was guffawing, loud and raucous and uneven and real as he held his stomach with his free hand.

Maybe it was the stress and utter fucking trauma they'd all been through in the last days, or maybe he'd finally lost his fucking mind. But the little boy on his hip started laughing too, and then the other twin, and finally Vash's lips twitched up in the faintest hitch of amusement and that was enough.

Nicholas leaned in, arm wrapping around that precious slim waist and pulling his blond against his side, smiling. He couldn't remember when he'd smiled like this before. Maybe back in the orphanage with Livio.

"Hey, Mr. Eriks Saverem." He grinned against Vash's soft skin as he nuzzled into the blond's neck. "Wanna go take our little family on a roadtrip to start a church somewhere?"

Vash hiccupped a laugh, confused but amused, and his hand went out to pet back the little boy's blond mop from those eerily similar blue eyes.

"You got any idea where, Hunny?" He quipped back, and Nicholas felt intoxicated with the rush of endorphins from the warmth in that tone.

"Yeah." He grinned, still nuzzling Vash's neck. "I do."

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"Ok, but seriously, Nico," Vash tightened the last of the ropes around the small travel kit they'd scraped together, binding it to the back of the motorcycle. "You have to tell me where the kids came from."

Nicholas leveled a stare at him over the seat of the bike from where he was double checking the engine. "Really, Spiky?"

He knew Vash knew. Or guessed at least. Maybe he didn't remember the horror that had happened in Julai, but he knew Vash knew the kids were independents the moment the blond had laid eyes on them.

Vash kicked sand, his lip popped out petulantly for a moment before he dropped his head and mumbled, "At least tell me they didn't suffer before you got them out."

"Don't think so." Nicholas dropped his head back to the engine, "But it's best we keep them low profile for a while. Church might come after them."

"Haaaaa...." Vash made a low sound, half sarcasm, half the first shade of genuine annoyance Nicholas had heard from him. "Goody."

He sighed, standing to loom over the bike as he wiped his hand on a rag, head cocked to the side as he stared at the blond. "I know damn well we're not leaving them behind, Spiky." Vash gave a one arm shrug as if to apologize for being predictable, as if Nicholas himself hadn't made that choice for them back in July.

"Is Nai still...??" Vash didn't finish the sentence as Nicholas shook his head, tossing down the rag.

"Dunno. Think Legato took him." He replied, brief, turning away to double check the rigging Vash had just tied. More to distract himself and end the conversation then doubt in the other man's work.

"Bluesummers?" Vash echoed, and Nicholas gave a sharp nod. He didn't know Vash knew him.

"Interesting." Vash mumbled, and then there was a silence before the blond sighed heavily and changed the topic himself. "I'll go pick up the kids, Mr. Saverem."

His voice had that awful affected chipperness to it that grated on Nicholas's chest. The one he knew he couldn't fix.

"That's David to you, hubby." He matched the tone as best he could, hoping to at least get a smile as he glanced up at the blond.

Vash's lips quirked - close enough - and then his eyes twinkled with a flash of mischief, "Dave?" He batted his eyelashes teasingly and Nicholas almost stood up and... slugged him.

Or kissed him.

Either.

"David." He grumbled, fighting back his own smile, and went to finish loading the blankets into the sidecar. "That's David to you, Eriks."

Vash's amused twitter was like fucking drugs. Nicholas swore under his breath.

"Like David and Goliath?"

Nicholas squinted as his partner as he dumped the hospital blankets the nurses had given them for the kids in the sidecar. "Who?"

Vash's face did that thing where it went blank because he didn't want people to see his actual reaction, and then he forced a fake smile. "You know, from the Bible??"

Nicholas shook his head, "Ain't in the Eye of Michael's bible, Blondy."

Vash's eyes flickered and the smile turned up a notch. "Ahhh..." He breathed. "Earth bible then. Forget it."

Nicholas grit his teeth as the slimmer man turned away, cursing himself mentally. He didn't understand what he'd stepped on but obviously it triggered Vash.

"Vash." He ventured the blond's real name, soft, plaintive. Coaxing. "We're not gonna get anywhere if you don't tell me shit."

Vash had stopped, his name like an anchor that kept him attuned to Nicholas, and he turned back slowly, face down toward the dirt to hide his eyes. "Nai ... it was his favorite book." He mumbled, slowly, hauntingly, like it hurt to remember back that far. "It's just that .... what happened, you know? I thought I knew him. And then ..." there was a tight, painful smile directed to the ground. "He wrote his own religion ... when did he become someone I don't know?? How did I miss him?"

Nicholas could see the ache in the curve of Vash's shoulders, the blame mixing with pain in the way his fingers clenched against his side.

"Hey. Babe. Look at me." He took a step forward, hands outstretched and tried to smile as Vash obediently looked up at him.

There was so much trust in that gaze it hurt. It bit into the walls of his heart and burned and Nicholas would kill for him.

"Baby." He repeated. "You ... can't be his Keeper any longer. You know that, right?"

Vash's feet shuffled in the dirt a little.

"You've been trying to be this force to keep him in check, to balance him, to pull him back to the person he used to be for so long. To make up for what he's done -- what he did, not you -- for so, so long. But you can't any more, baby. His choices are his, and you can't stop him or control him any more than you can harness a force of nature to your will. You know that, Vash."

Vash's blue eyes were glued to his face, burning. Hot like the desert sand in the heat of midday. Paralyzing.

Nicholas couldn't stop himself from chasing him, from protecting that terrified, trusting gaze any more than he could stop breathing. Not by choice.

"Vash." He breathed, hands still out, searching, "My love. Sweetheart. You can't kill yourself to make up for trusting someone who didn't deserve you. You have to let him go."

Vash let out a painful wheeze, something squeezed up from his chest like a strained sob, the last gasp of an old wound, and threw himself into Nicholas's arms.

He was shaking, thin frame trembling under Nicholas's arms as they closed around the blond, pulling him close.

Nicholas knew Vash wasn't human, he knew the blond could harness powers he couldn't even imagine, that the things he'd seen so far were the very tip of the mountainous force of nature that was the Humanoid Typhoon.

And yet.

Vash's frame was so frail against him, so light and scared and battered. He could feel the myriad of scars littered across perfect skin through the thin turtleneck. It made him seem so delicate, so easily broken. Like someone might push too far and one day the whole boy might shatter like shards of blown glass, worn too thin by the coarse sands of this ugly rock. By human hands that pulled and pushed and tugged him apart when they should have been clasped in prayer to the blond before them.

None of them deserved him, the pretty boy with the sad smile. Not the reporters, not the people, not Knives.

Not Nicholas, with his blood drenched cross and broken past, made to hunt and to hurt and to punish.

And yet Vash's tears were soaking into his shirt again, straining it with something holier than blood, making his heart twist in his chest.

Nicholas held his angel tighter, squeezing until he felt the air flood out of Vash's lungs. He wasn't worthy of this job, but he prayed he'd be enough.

Because hell if he was ever going to let anyone hurt his precious blond ever again.

"You ok, Angel?" He finally breathed as Vash's body stopped trembling.

Vash nodded against his shoulder, wordless, and Nicholas cupped the back of his head, keeping him there as he pressed gentle kisses into the blond's hairline.

"You're beautiful. Perfect. So strong. Amazing." He whispered into the fluff of hair, and meant every word. Vash wiggled in his grasp, embarrassed, and Nicholas released him with another kiss, this one to his cheek. "Pretty." He added and watched Vash's face light up red.

"Nicooooo." The blond whined, ducking is face to the side, shoulders hunching to hide his cheeks, "Stoppppp....."

Nicholas laughed. He couldn't help it. Vash was like drugs, he was helplessly addicted and he didn't care if it was a sin in the bible of Michael.

Nothing as beautiful as Vash could ever be a sin.

"Go get our kids, Mr. Saverem." He teased, grinning as he turned away to finish the final adjustments on the motorcycle. "We should get going."

Vash grumbled behind him, but then there were light footsteps and a kiss planted at the base of his neck and Nicholas smiled to himself.

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Firelight reflected off Vash's eyes differently than human eyes.

Nicholas used to stare at night, when they camped with the reporters, subtly and under his tinted glasses, watching the odd pattern of iridescence that reflected in the plant boy's eyes.

He didn't know where the fuck his glasses had gone. Probably buried somewhere in the rubble of July, left behind like his Punisher and a fallen god. Nothing to hide behind, nothing to shield his wandering gaze out here in the open desert, seated around a fire for warmth in the darkness of night.

Vash was across from him, poking idly at the fire with a long scrub twig, watching the end burning when he left it in the embers for too long.

The twins were wrapped in the hospital blankets, curled together by the side of the fire between him and Vash, motorcycle parked just behind them. Their backs rose and fell in slow, sleepy breaths as they slept through the darkness.

"Do I have something on my face?" Vash mumbled, dropping the stick back into the fire, not quite raising his eyes to meet Nicholas's stare. Acting like he was the one caught in the act, not the other way 'round.

Nicholas grunted. It wasn't really an answer - he saw the insecurity chewing up Vash's face as the blond dropped the twig and drew his palm across his cheeks, and felt a little guilty.

"Ya got pretty eyes." He let it drop between them, like it wasn't something he obsessed about, like those eyes didn't follow him in his dreams every night. Like he hadn't thought about waking up to blue eyes smiling sleepily at him from the next pillow since the day he first saw them.

Vash's cheeks tinted rose and he dropped his gaze. "Yeah?" He sounded uncertain. Insecure.

"Like 'em better without yer glasses in the way." Nicholas shrugged, letting some of the wandering thoughts in his head form on his tongue. "Can see the colors better. Bluer than the sky. Didn't know a blue like that could exist."

"Inhuman blue." Vash mumbled back, finger clenching in the folds of his worn pants as he evaded Nicholas's gaze. "S'not normal."

"You're not normal." Nicholas replied, letting his spine crack as he stretched, groaning slightly at the release of tension, "Neither of us are, Spiky."

Vash huffed, something painful in the sound and Nicholas's eyes snapped back to that perfect face, partly hidden with how Vash was turning away from the firelight now.

"Hey. Baby." He dropped the name like a plea, like a secret between them, like something that kept them tethered together. "Sweetheart. Look at me."

Vash's body didn't move, torso still angled away from the fire, but those blue eyes with the iridescent lines in them turned back to him. Painful. Hurt. Sad.

Nicholas sighed.

His joints popped as he stood, the first time in ages he remembered that happening, and walked the two feet to Vash's side to pitch himself down in the sand beside the blond.

"Poke." He mumbled the sound as he booped Vash's thin hip. Vash huffed but didn't move.

"Poke." He repeated, poking the slender torso. His finger brushed over metal under the turtleneck, but he just grinned up at the blond. "Earth to Spiky."

Vash grumbled, not really peeved but not really happy either.

"Poke. Poke. Poke." Nicholas worked his way up Vash's side and shoulder, until he was poking the side of Vash's neck.

The blond slapped at him, not hard, not enough to get him to stop, but his cheeks were pink even in the darkness.

"Boop." Nicholas tapped his finger lightly on that cute nose and grinned as Vash wrinkled it in response. "Do you know who has the cutest husband?" He teased.

"Solomon from December-town." Vash mumbled without pause and Nicholas groaned, throwing himself back in the sand dramatically.

"Spikyyyyyy!!!" He snorted, laughing, "That's not right - fuck, you're so bitchy when you wanna be moody!"

Vash's ears were as red as his cheeks as Nicholas sat back up and leaned in. "Kiss." He mumbled, pressing his lips to the armless shoulder, right over where he knew the plate on Vash's skin was hidden under his clothes. "The answer is -- I do."

Vash's eyes turned back to him, still defiantly moody, those gleaming plant lines shining against the light. Yet something needy glinted under the defiance, something desperate to be told he was enough.

Nicholas knew that feeling.

"Baby." He inclined his head, keeping his voice as soft as he could. "Whatsa matter?"

Vash sighed then, his body drooping as he finally gave up, gave in, and crumpled into Nicholas like the weight of the entire world was resting on him. "Nico ..." He breathed, face nuzzling into the soft place between Wolfwood's neck and shoulder. "Am I a bad ... thing??"

Nicholas caught his jaw before it could drop, instinctively wrapping his arms around the blond to pull Vash into his lap and hold him properly. "My love, you're not a thing." He corrected, "You are many things, but you are not a thing. You are so fucking good ... I don't even deserve to be in your presence."

Vash huffed dismissively, like he didn't believe Nicholas, and that wasn't acceptable as far as Nicholas was concerned.

"Seriously." Nicholas's hand threaded into the back of Vash's hair, fingers massaging gently as he pressed that precious face farther into the crook of his neck. "You have no idea how precious you are, baby boy. Everyone on this fucking planet owes you so much."

"They owe Rem so much, not me." He heard Vash mumbling into his skin and frowned.

"Who's Rem??"

Vash sniffed. He was silent for a moment, his body lax against Nicholas's like he couldn't bear to hold himself together any longer.

"My mom." He finally whispered.

"Your mom?" Nicholas echoed, a little surprised. Honestly, logically, of course every living thing had a mother but ... somehow he had just never considered a tiny Vash growing up here in this desert full of harsh winds and sharp words.

Vash was too soft for that, too precious. Nicholas had always sort of assumed in the back of his head that someone like that, someone so good so pure so.. godly - someone like Vash could never have come from a place like this.

Gods raised here would be hard and twisted and cruel. Demanding and unforgiving like this planet they were part of. Gods like Knives.

"Ye ..." Vash's voice got lower, quieter, like it hurt to remember. "Rem Saverem. She ... raised us." There was a pause. "Me and Nai."

"Oh." Nicholas breathed into the spiky blond hair, and that made sense. The hurt Vash felt at her loss, the almost desperate need to convince himself, convince his own brother that he could be saved. Could be someone better.

"I'm sorry, babe." He whispered, other hand stroking up and down Vash's spine, over the countless scars and strings of metal he could feel under the thin shirt. "I'm sure she would have been really proud of you."

Vash's derisive snort hurt.

"Yeah." The blond's voice held more venom than Nicholas had ever heard from him before, "I'm sure she'd be so proud of me. All the people I let die at Julai. All the kids I hurt. All the fucking times I couldn't save someone ... I couldn't save Nai ..."

There were hot tears spilling down Nicholas's collar, biting into his bare skin like a brand, like a searing echo of sorrow as Vash's breath heaved hot against his neck. "I fucking failed her, Nico, I fucking ... I failed ..."

"Vash, no." Nicholas wanted to shake him, wanted to slap him, wanted to scream in his face until the blond in his lap didn't believe the words he was spouting any more. But he only clung tight, squeezing the thin frame against his broader one as tightly as he could. "No, you never give up on anyone - not me, not Livio, not anyone! Do you know how many people would have given up on me by now?? Do you not understand how much you've given me? Given us??"

Vash hiccupped against him, breath staggering in his lungs and he rushed on.

"You've done so much. So much, for everyone. For this whole goddamn planet and why? So people will see you as an equal?? So you can prove to them you're not a monster??"

Vash shuddered against him and pushed away, and Nicholas let him go, watching those blue eyes as they came up, painful and scared and wary.

"I know, Vash. I see you, I see what you do. You think I don't feel it too?? The way people look at me, at us? At what we are, what we do? You think I'm not tired of hearing that word thrown at me too??"

Vash drew a shaky breath, his lips parted but no sound coming out. He hadn't pulled away completely, just far enough Nicholas's hands could only settle on his waist.

Nicholas swallowed, trying to put his own feelings into words. Trying to find the right words, the words no one had probably ever told the man in front of him when he was a scared little boy trying to figure out what he was when everyone around him was so different.

"You're enough, you know that? It doesn't matter what you are. You're alive and everyone living deserves to live - didn't you tell me that yourself?? That includes you, Vash Wolfwood-Saverem, the Humanoid Typhoon. Vash the Stampede. Eriks Saverem."

He paused, let out a long breath and glanced down at his own hands on that tiny waist. "And it includes me, Nicholas The Punisher, the personal avenger of god with my blood stained hands and fucked-up faith."

"Nico ..."

"You're the first person to tell me I was good, you know that??" Nicholas didn't let him finish, glanced up to meet those eyes and the iridescent lines gleaming in them. "You looked right at me, you saw what I was with all the blood and the inhuman parts and the fake smile, and you told me I was a good guy."

Vash let out a shuddering breath, his hand sinking down to clap around Nicholas's wrist, eyes shining with unshed tears.

"For a moment, all I wanted in the entire world was to be the man you believed I could be." Nicholas confessed, feeling the way Vash's fingers fluttered on his wrist. "Nothing else mattered in that moment."

Vash's hand left his wrist and a second later soft fingertips brushed against his jaw, the stubble there, sweeping up along his cheekbone and brushing back the shaggy hair long overdue for a trim.

"You are good, Nico. So good." Vash whispered, his body settling back into Nicholas's lap, "You're perfect."

"Vash." He caught the exploring hand, brought it to his lips, "You're perfect. I'm just a man." He pressed the scarred palm to his lips, hard, like he could kiss away all the things in Vash's head if only he tried hard enough. "You, you're an angel."

Vash's cheeks were flushed dark, rose red and stark contrast to the way his eyes gleamed as Nicholas looked back up at him. He tried to duck his face away again and Nicholas caught it in his own palms, forcing the blond to look at him.

"You are my angel, you know that? Vash Saverem. I don't care what the rest of the world calls us, I will never leave your side."

Vash's pupils flooded, his breath tripping in his throat for a moment, cheeks already so hot between Nicholas's palms he thought they might burn. He welcomed them, welcomed the brand, the feeling echoed in his own chest like it might mark him from the inside out as his angel's own.

"That sounds like a proposal, Nicholas." The blond whispered, swallowing hard, his voice unsteady.

"Yeah." Nicholas agreed, "Yeah it does."

Vash's fingers closed around his wrist again, eyes wide and blue and focused on Nicholas like he was the only thing in the entire world Vash could see. "Are you sure??" The blond whispered.

"I already married you, didn't I??" Nicholas replied, leaning forward, leaning into those eyes, "Be pretty fucking stupid of me to let a god like you get away."

Vash hiccupped a short laugh, embarrassed, "I'm not a god." He mumbled, pushing his face forward between Nicholas's palms to meet halfway.

"You already saved me, Spiky." Nicholas grinned, nuzzling their noses together between their hands, "Can't deny what I know is true."

Vash gave his flustered little laugh, adorable, and shrugged, "Yeah, but... you keep finding ways to save me too, Nico. Ways that I didn't know I needed saving."

Nicholas chuckled, grinning, running one finger along those beautiful cheekbones under his hands, "Guess that makes us both gods, not monsters, huh?"

Vash grinned, rolling his eyes, but it was a genuine smile, his body soft and relaxed under Nicholas' hands. "Yeah, I guess." He mumbled.

"Good boy." Nicholas agreed, leaning in to press his lips to Vash's. Vash met him halfway, warm and eager and something like what Nicholas imagined love must taste like.

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"Wolfwood."

He woke to Vash cooing his name.

"Wooof Woooood." the blond giggled, and Nicholas forced his eyes open to find himself facing an empty blanket where his husband had curled up against him the night before.

"No? Might be weird if you call him Wolfwood anyway." Vash was somewhere over by the fire behind him. He flipped over, raising himself out of the sand to catch sight of his blond.

"What about Dada? Huh? Daaaaa daaaaa." Vash elongated the vowels, grinning at the smaller of the twins as he affixed a diaper to his rear. "And I'm Papa. Paaa paaa! Huh?"

The twins just laughed at him, the girl threading her fingers into his hair and tugging and their little man smushing his feet against Vash's shins.

"Ouch!" Vash pouted and then laughed, reaching up to free his hair from her little fingers. "Ok, Ok. No talking yet, I hear ya. Soon though! And then we can read books, if I can find any ... And we can cook! I know some great recipes for us to try."

He was grinning, lifting the girl into his lap as her brother squirmed around on the blanket Vash had spread out for them in the sand until he sat up and reached out for Vash's leg.

Vash petted his head with a smile that made Nicholas's heart thrum with something warm.

"You know, when I was your age, my ..." he paused, a little sad flicker of something on his face before it passed, "Caregiver, my mom, she used to tell us stories about Earth and all the cool things that lived there, like salamanders and horses and elephants." He laughed, making room in his lap for the little boy as the smaller twin climbed into his legs beside his sister. "My brother, your uncle," Another sad flash, "He really liked hearing about the old west and cowboys and outlaws."

Nicholas listened, not daring to breath as Vash combed his scarred fingers through the kid's thick blond hair, forcing it upright into little spikes like his own new hairstyle.

"I know, if you ever got to meet him, he'd adore you. Like I do." the outlaw's face was a little melancholy, a little wistful as he sighed, his gaze going up to the sky. "Sometimes I like to pretend that there's another planet out there, just like this one. With another Vash, just like me. Only he never had anything bad happen to him."

Vash's shoulders rose and fell with the sigh, and then his face tipped down to the kids in his lap again as they both stared up at him. Nicholas could hear the smile in his voice. "Only I suppose that Vash would never have met you, would he? The cutest little sprouts in the whole world!!"

Nicholas bit his lip, trying unsuccessfully to keep the smile off his face as he glanced down at the sand. God. What was Vash doing to him?

"Orrrrr ..." Vash's tone turned singsong, and Nicholas looked up to meet his eyes as his blond twisted to glanced over his shoulder, bright smile on his face, "He wouldn't be married to the most amazing guy in the whole galaxy."

"Geez, Spiky." He sounded choked, even to his own ears. "Ya give me a lotta credit."

Vash beamed at him, shuffling around so the twins could see around him and all three sets of beautiful blue eyes were staring right into Nicholas's soul.

"I dunno, Nico." Vash's head tilted, his smile warm, "You're pretty special to all of us."

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Chapter Text

CW: mentions of death and subside attempts

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Vash was poking his butt.

Nicholas was pretty certain the outlaw has chosen that location intentionally but when he twisted to look down at the three blonds in the sidecar, Vash's face was turned toward the big old house on the outskirts of the tiny town of Kasted, his lips pursed seriously.

"That it?" The man ventured.

Nicholas finally let the engine idle down to a standstill, switched it off and knocked down the kickstand. "Guess so." He grunted.

Vash hummed under his breath, the sound meaning something that hadn't quite landed between them, and then held up one of the twins from his lap for Nicholas to take.

He did, settling the little boy on his hip and brushing back the blond bangs from the kid's eyes. "Gonna need a haircut soon, fucker." He commented, booping the kid's little button nose.

The boy giggled, beaming up at Nicholas with that too similar smile as he reached up for Nicholas's hat. He let the kid take it, shaking out his own unkempt hair.

"You gotta stop calling him that." Vash grumbled as he swung himself and their girl out of the sidecar. "He's gonna think that's his name."

"Eh." Nicholas wasn't big on names, half the kids in Hopeland gave themselves new names once they were old enough. The only one he knew who hadn't had been Livio; but then again, Livio had never told him his name directly either. Maybe Razlo made up their names in the end. Who really knew with those two.

If his brother was still alive ... if he was still traveling with Legato ... if he still remembered Nicholas - too many ifs. Too many places to lose himself if none of them were true. It wasn't worth dwelling on what could be IF, when Vash was right here, alive and certain and real and looking at him reproachfully.

"Can't name 'em." He grumbled, raking his own hair back from his eyes with his free hand before he reached out to snag that tiny waist and pull Vash against his other side. "Then we gotta keep 'em."

Vash smacked his chest, more for the noise because it barely stung, and glared at him, "He can understand you, you know, Nico."

"Oh." Nicholas glanced at the kid on his hip, tug of guilt in his chest, and let go of Vash to tip the brim of the hat until he could see those little blue eyes staring up at him in an anxious face. He sighed, because those eyes stung like Vash's slap hadn't, and tried to smile. "Sorry, buddy. I didn't... I'm not good at this whole..." He trailed off, searching for a less poignant word.

"Dad thing?" Vash supplied, hitting the exact phrase he'd been trying to avoid because it put such a point on... on everything.

Nicholas grimaced. "Yeah...dad thing. Family thing. Fuck. Look, we're not gonna leave either of you, little dude. Vash's... guess we're all here. Together. Or whatever." He mumbled, and reached out to tickle the kid's thin stomach. The boy wiggled, then giggled and the smile was back, brighter, and Nicholas huffed and pinched his cheek with something that was probably affection.

It terrified him, the grip these three blonds had on his chest. His heart.

He wasn't good. He wasn't kind, he wasn't pleasant, he wasn't gentle or patient or soft. He wasn't meant to be a father or a lover, and yet -

The way Vash beamed at him as he swung the larger twin to his own hip made his heart skip.

"Hey." His angel's eyes were soft as Vash leaned in, nuzzling his cheek. "You're gonna do great."

Vash's lips were still chapped and rough against his own as he turned his head to meet the blonds, but the soft, shy grin it pulled from Vash as they parted was worth it. The way Vash's eyes shone with something bright, the way he looked at Nicholas as they parted, it made his chest clench again.

"God, Spiky." He grumbled, tipping his head away, making a show of fixing his kid's shirt to cover the heat on his own cheeks, "You're gonna be the death of me."

Vash laughed, the short sharp one when he was amused but not enough for a full laugh. "I hope not, I'd like to keep you for a while."

Nicholas didn't have to turn his head to know the blond was smiling at him with that thousand watt smile that made him want to drop to his knees and clasp his hands and pray.

He grumbled under his breath, tugging the little boy's too-small shirt down over his tummy with finality and chose the path of a weak man, walking toward the big house with its wide front pouch and the duty he'd promised a friend, instead of looking back at that smile.

He could hear Vash's light footsteps behind him, then the grunt as the slimmer man swung the little girl to the ground and probably took her hand to walk together.

And that was kind of alarming because all things considered, the twins were like, maybe two? Three weeks old?? And the fuck were they supposed to keep kids growing this fast a secret?? The little boy in his arms had already nearly doubled in weight and height since the first time he'd held him, Nicholas could tell.

He supposed he and Vash would need to have their first "parental" talk pretty soon.

Nothing in his relatively short life had ever made him consider being a father. Blood and vengeance didn't mix nicely with childhood; if anyone knew that from experience, it was Nicholas. Parents, children, lovers, all of this was terrifying in a way that a drug-fueled adrenaline rush would never be.

The porch creaked under his shoes as he stepped onto it. Not an old, worn-out kind of sound: more like a used sound. Like something that had seen so much life passing but was still very much present. It wasn't the normal kind of sound he'd come to expect from this planet and it pulled him from his head for a moment, long enough to collect himself to knock on the doorframe of the house. There was a door, but it was open.

Apparently this place didn't see too much crime then, wonder of wonders.

There was a shuffling from inside the house, in the shadows and pools of light from windows that he could see from where they stood, and then a kid ran forward and stood in the doorway, hands on her hips as she stared up at him defiantly. He thought kid, but she was probably early teens. Maybe.

"If you're here to rob us, you'll have to go through me, Mister!!" She declared loudly, unafraid, and Nicholas blinked at her.

He'd kind of pictured this moment, confronting Charles's kid. Having to tell her about her father. But definitely not like this as she glowered up at him and then took a swing at his knee cap.

"Hey! Jeez!!" He leapt backward, nearly colliding with Vash who had twisted in that moment, probably to put himself bodily between Nicholas and their little girl so Nicholas didn't trample her.

"The fuck?!" Nicholas hissed, teeth clenched as the girl in the doorway came after him, both fists swinging, and he instinctively lifted the boy on his hip higher to get him out of the way of any errant blows.

Vash was in front of them then, protective, his reflexes almost faster then before Julai - weaving between the flying fists to catch them both and tuck them behind the girl's back in a firm but harmless hold. "Easy there, Miss!" The blond was chucking uneasily, his fake smile turned up to ten, "We mean you no harm!! Haha!! I mean, who comes to rob someone with their kids along, huh??"

Nicholas felt their own little girl tuck herself against his leg and dropped his hand down to rest on her head. He could almost vividly picture how ... domestic he looked like this, cradling two children. It wasn't something he'd ever pictured before but he didn't hate it. Not when the kids looked like Vash.

The girl in Vash's hold paused, eyes narrowing as she eyed Wolfwood and the twins up and down, but then another voice called from inside the house.

"Lina! Darling, stop beating up our guests! That's hardly welcoming, my Dear."

Vash released the girl instantly, stepping back to push himself against Nicholas's side, the little girl between them, and Nicholas felt the blond's hand circle around his waist to rest on Nicholas's hip.

The woman who padded out of the shadows in the house looked too much like Charles to pretend they were in the wrong place. Her eyes had the same laughter crinkles in the corner as she looked up at them, her smile the same hint of gentle kindness.

"Please forgive my granddaughter," she reached out to pat Lina's head, scolding, "She takes after my Willie and her father."

Nicholas felt Vash's hand tighten on his waist. He'd told the blond things, slowly, over the last week. About Julai. About the kids. About Charles.

He drew a deep breath.

"Your son." His voice came out rougher than he intended, scratchy. "His name was Charles?"

Lina stiffened and glared at him, like she might launch another attack any moment, but her grandmother simply patted her shoulder and the kid stayed put. "You know him then?" She smiled, kind, earnest.

His chest felt tight in the exact opposite way it did when he looked at Vash. It felt like it might squeeze him to death as he struggled for the right words.

"I knew him." He finally managed.

The old woman closed her eyes, pain and sorrow echoed in the way her lips squeezed tight. Lina seemed to realize what those words meant in the same moment and went pale.

"I'm sorry." Vash breathed beside him, like it had been his fault, like he had personally gunned down their son and father. Always the first to apologize, always self sacrificing.

"He ..." Nicholas paused, uncertain. This was not what he was good at. Words, phrases, behind gentle. He could only be direct. Blunt and painful. He's never seen a problem with that until Vash.

"He gave my husband and kids time to escape Julai." Vash spoke up, hand squeezing his waist gently, supportive even as his own body huddled in on itself like he was blaming himself for Charles's death. He probably was.

"They wouldn't be here if not for him." Vash finished, quiet, like he was realizing it was true for the first time. Like he was visualizing a world where Nicholas wasn't right next to him on the porch, where the twins were alone to die or be used by the Eye of Michael back in Julai, where the only thing left for Vash was to keep running and grieving and bleeding his heart out for people who didn't want him.

"I owe him everything." The blond whispered.

"He never… gave me a choice." Nicholas finally managed to add something, stumbling with the words. "He just. Did."

The old woman smiled, opening her eyes as she blinked through the tears running down her face. "Thank you." She whispered.

Nicholas frowned.

People didn't react like that to death. He knew, he's seen it, he'd been the avenging angel of death himself. People didn't smile when their loved ones died. They screamed, they wailed, they threw things. They bartered, they denied. They kicked and screamed and threatened and lashed out. They didn't smile.

He heard Vash chuckle sadly beside him and glanced over. Those blue eyes were overflowing with their own tears, seeping down Vash's gentle cheeks to the quiet, sad smile on the blond's face. "I'm sorry. He was a good man."

Charles's mother nodded, smiling brighter through the tears as she hugged Lina against her side, "He was." She agreed.

Nicholas looked between them, the tears and the shared, sad, sad smiles like they'd both seen things too many times, seen too much in a long life. Like they both knew the pain of loss too intimately, too well. And yet the same sad, sorrowful smile sat on both their faces, like a shared memory.

He didn't understand, but his heart tugged.

"Please." The old woman kept Lina pressed to her side as she turned, gesturing with her cane toward the interior of their house. "Please, come in."

Vash took Nicholas with him as he stepped forward, through the doorway. Took their kids and his husband and their little family into the home, his bangs bouncing as he nodded like he already knew what came next before the old woman spoke again.

"Please tell me about my son."

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Sheryl, that was her name. Sheryl --"But please do call me Granny."

She said it like it was the most natural thing. Like two ragged strangers wrapped in bandages and dirty cloth lugging a set of twins too thin and tall for their own clothes was a normal, everyday occurrence. Like they were family.

"We have toys around here somewhere, for the kids. Lina outgrew them long ago."

Like it was normal to offer two skinny, shaggy blond kids the run of your playroom.

"Would you like some lemonade? We just made cookies."

Like it wasn't a luxury they were being offered, like they weren't two travelers bringing the worst news a parent would ever receive.

Nicholas sat there, at the small round table in the sizeable kitchen, his knees and shoulders bumping into Vash's as the blond wiggled next to him on the padded bench, while the twins tumbled around in the next room chewing on fucking plastic toys. Like plastic wasn't a luxury on the planet of dirt and metal.

He played with the glass of lemonade between his palms, watching the ice - fucking ice?? - melt, realizing he'd never tasted real lemon before.

This whole thing felt surreal. Like a dream. Like a fucking waking daydream. It was almost like Knives, the Eye of Michael, the whole of fucking Julai didn't exist outside these walls.

Except for Vash gently explaining the doctored version of events that lead to Charles's death which they'd previously agreed on, this was what Nicholas imagined heaven must be like.

"I'm so sorry." Vash finished finally, his voice trailing into quiet, into silence beside Nicholas as his face turned down toward the table again, probably blaming himself. "He was a good man." His voice trailed out, and there was only the sounds of the twins playing, the heavy tick tock of the grandfather clock in the next room.

Lina was crying silently, tears running down her face as her grandmother reached out to pet her head.

"Thank you." She repeated, "Thank you for telling us."

Nicholas drew a breath, both at the words and the genuine appreciation in them. He didn't understand, but he thought Vash kind of did, somehow.

"He gave me." He paused, fishing around in his unruined jacket pocket for a moment, "This. To give to you."

He set the locket gently on the table between them, letting the chain drape over it like a curtain before he pushed it toward the pair. "He said.... he said he's sorry he never made it home."

The old woman, Sheryl, hummed sadly, a few more tears leaking down her face as she reached out and took the battered locket like it was a precious thing. The most precious of things in a home filled with luxuries and priceless items. "Me too, Son. Me too." She agreed quietly.

Vash swallowed beside him and Nicholas wrapped an arm around the blond's waist, pulling his man in against his side. Vash let out a shaky breath and let his head rest on Nicholas's shoulder, heavy. Like he was soaking in the warmth from Nicholas's body, letting it leach into his soul and he might never peel off. Like they might stay that way forever.

Nicholas realized Vash was seeking his contact for comfort. His, specifically. Nicholas D Wolfwood, the Punisher.

Vash deserved someone who understood comfort, who understood soft things and delicate touches and someone very much not like Nicholas. But his arm tightened around the blond's waist, and Vash let out a shaky breath into Nicholas's collar before his hand found Nicholas's thigh and squeezed.

Not a suggestive touch, more like Vash was reassuring himself Nicholas was real. Was there. Was the most important thing to him in a house filled with luxury.

Nicholas's chest felt tight and he squeezed that tiny waist tighter.

For a moment, the scene stayed like that, four people around a table, holding to each other for comfort, staring sadly at a locket that bound them together.

Then Sheryl handed the locket to Lina with a sad sort of tender smile, tucking her granddaughter's fingers tightly around the worn silver. "You keep that close to your heart, my dear, and never doubt he loved you so very much."

Lina nodded, her face pinched up in sorrow, but she didn't weep. She only tucked the locket tightly against her chest as more silent tears ran down her face.

"Now." Sheryl drew a deep, slightly unsteady breath and turned a kind smile on the couple across from her. "Forgive me, I've neglected to ask your names."

Vash's head snapped up immediately, drawn from his huddle against Nicholas, blue eyes wide, "I'm Va..... uh, Eriks! And this is my husband David. And the twins are...." He fumbled, panic in the slight flutter of his fingers against Nicholas's thigh.

"Rem and Roberto." Nicholas mumbled, still staring at the condensation on the side of the lemonade glass in front of him. "Family Saverem."

"Yeah." Vash agreed, as if he hadn't stumbled over his own name seconds ago.

But the old lady just smiled at them, the look stained with sorrow from loss but not unkind. "Welcome to our home, Mr. and Mr. Saverem. Do you have lodgings arranged in town?"

"We're just passing through." Nicholas replied before Vash could answer, his voice casual as every nerve in his body went on high alert.

That was an awfully personal question from a grieving woman - it was possible someone of her obvious wealth had trained bodyguards around, even assassins. It wasn't a hard leap to get from the story Vash had relayed to the conclusion that the pair in front of them had more to do with Charles's death then they told. Maybe she even recognized the twins, who knew.

People didn't accept death as graciously as she was pretending. Nicholas had seen it too often. Any moment now, they'd be targets, as soon as the lady in front of them signaled her waiting guards.

His own fingers twitched around Vash's waist, wishing for his cross. His bullets. He shifted, putting his weight in a better spot to throw himself in front of Vash, ready for when the woman dropped the nice act and signaled for her hidden hit men to take aim. To fire.

Her old gray head nodded in response to his words, "Well, we have plenty of room - you'll stay with us until you're ready to move on, I hope? It would very lovely to have some more voices around the house for a few days..."

Vash's fingers were tapping away on his leg, an anxious but silent plea for him not to leap into action and presumably murder someone as the blond smiled back at Charles's mother. "I'd like that, but we need to discuss it before we could possibly accept your kindness." Vash's blue eyes turned to him, flickering with the request for him to relax, "David's hoping to find a new place for a parish as soon as possible, to settle the family. For the kids. He's a priest."

Nicholas grunted, easing the tenseness of his muscles slightly, just to pacify Vash. He didn't know what the fuck a parish was but the way the old woman nodded understandingly, it seemed she did. Presumably something to do with his new-found ability to baptize with water not blood, and preach from the holy book.

Vash had a lot of faith in him that he definitely didn't deserve in that regard. The blond had heard him say prayers that once, after all.

"Of course, of course." The lady smiled, "Take your time. The offer is always open if you'd like to stay for a while. We could... use the company." Her voice trailed off and she glanced at Lina, and Nicholas understood a little. She wanted something to help the teen cope with the loss of a father she'd never known.

He still didn't trust her.

Vash's hand slid off his thigh as he stood, squaring his shoulders to show off his full build as a threat for anyone watching, a promise he wouldn't go down easy. "We'll get out of your hair now." He tried to force a casual smile, was pretty sure it came out as a grimace, and made to grab his kids and leave.

🌱🌱🌱

Vash caught up to him at the motorcycle, blue eyes a little accusatory as he caught Nicholas's arm before he could dump the kids back into the side car.

"You seriously think that kind old lady was going to kill us??" The blond demanded, and Nicholas hated the way his stomach flinched at Vash's tone.

"It's my job, Spiky." He growled back, shaking off the hand, a new sort of feeling rising in his gut; sort of annoyed, sort of angry the man was going to accuse him like that, "Protecting you and the twins."

"That was your job." Vash's voice was sharp, sharp enough to stop him as the blond's hand landed on his hip, an uncharacteristic frown tugging at his lips. "But now you're my husband and your job is to care for your family."

Nicholas cursed, because Vash was nothing like Legato when it came to psychological manipulation, but somehow the word bit deeper, sharp and barbed like the blue haired man's had never been.

"What do you think I'm doing, Blondy??" He demanded, defensive, pissed because that hurt, swinging his hands wide with a kid on either arm. "Protecting you."

"Nico, look at us." Vash's hand was gesturing, erratic, a thing he only did when he was genuinely upset and unable to disassociate from his emotions. "We're covered in blood-stained clothes with bullet holes, we both need a haircut and a shave, you look like you might shank someone in an alley for lack of nicotine, I haven't slept since you left me at the hospital, and our fucking motorcycle is literally on it's last legs."

As if to emphasize his point, he kicked the fender and one of the tail lights popped off with a clatter, dropping the dirt with a puft of sand.

Nicholas huffed.

Vash's hand waved again, lower, slower this time. "The kids need real food and clothes. We need new clothes. We need to sleep and eat and rest somewhere and recuperate as a family, and these people are offering us their home."

Nicholas let his teeth show in a grimace, rolling his head to the side to exaggerate his annoyance. "Vaaaashhhh...."

"Don't full name me." Vash grumbled, his lips pursed in a peeved sort of pout. "Nicholas D Wolfwood-Saverem."

He threw the name like a taunt, his voice lilting up in a childish sort of sneer that Nicholas had never heard from the blond before. For a moment all he could imagine was Vash, baby faced and half his height, facing off against an equally baby faced Knives, arguing like any other set of preteens over who got the last of the snacks.

The image was so vivid he wondered for a moment if it'd actually happened, or if it was something Vash liked to picture to comfort what must have been a traumatic, decidedly un-normal childhood.

His anger was ebbing away; he could never stay mad at Vash for long no matter how hard he tried. Even on the sand streamer, even with how much rage had been bottled up and exploded in the blond's face, even with Livio's suicide....

The moment he'd seen Vash's pale skin, plant markings flickering along his veins and blue eyes rolling up into his head as he turned around and collapsed in the same moment, every drop of anger Nicholas had horded for him had gone.

Nothing mattered as long as Vash was OK. As long as those blue eyes opened again and he could see that faint, pretty blush on those cheeks, the way Vash's nose wrinkled when he really laughed, or the shy, quiet smile he seemed to save for Wolfwood alone... nothing else mattered.

"What?" Vash echoed, and Nicholas realized he'd been mumbling aloud.

"Fuck." He cursed, setting the kids down in the sandy dirt and straightening up to stare at that birthmark on Vash's soft cheek. "You're so stupid, spiky. I hate how stupid it makes me, you know that??"

Vash's whole face crinkled up in a genuinely perplexed look, head tilting to the side as the kids clung to their legs. "Nico??"

Nicholas heaved out an angry sigh, reached out and snagged the collar of that stupid stupid turtleneck that did nothing to hide Vash's figure, and yanked the blond in for a rough kiss.

"Fuck you, blond bitch." He whispered into those chapped lips, other hand coming up to fist in the spiky locks, less venom and more angry passion, "You make me so stupid, I'd give you anything you want." He growled, biting down on the blond's lip.

Vash moaned, high and needy, blue eyes flying open as they both startled apart.

Vash's pale cheeks were stained rose, back of his palm pressed to his lips like he could take back the sound even as those blue eyes focused like lasers on Nicholas's face, begging for more.

Nicholas didn't remember his pants being so tight. "Fuck." He whispered, hand still on the back of Vash's head. "Do that again, babygirl."

Vash's cheeks turned a darker shade of red, "Ah...ah.. out here... the kids.." He stammered broken sentences even as his hand twitched against his mouth, "We... Nico...."

"Yeah." Nicholas understood and hated it, but he eased his fingers out of the blond's hair. "Yeah...right."

Vash took several steps backward, his eyes flickering down to Nicholas's pants, and swallowed.

That wasn't helping things down there, and Nicholas turned to hide himself, nearly throwing their little boy to his butt in the dirt. "Fuck." He swore, bending down to stabilize the kid. "You little buggers are gonna be here every time?"

Vash made some sort of soft protesting noise behind him and Nicholas took a deep breath, let out the frustration and as much of the arousal in his gut as he could, and tried again.

"I mean." He poked the kid's belly. "Maybe we should get you some food, huh, Roberto?" Vash made a pleased hum behind him but Nicholas almost didn't register it as the little boy's whole face lit up, like someone had turned on a light. So the kids really did understand him. Fuck.

He sighed, straightening and staring up at the sky, the weight of a lot of things - things from the past week, the past month, the past years - all sliding down his shoulders.

He hadn't asked for this, for any of it. All he ever wanted was to rid himself of the Eye of Michael's hold and maybe live out a few peaceful years in Hopeland helping out around the place before he inevitably drank himself to death or got caught in a bullet storm and took one lead shot too many.

Now here he was with a whole ass family. A husband and two little kids, three sets of blue eyes staring up at him like he was their world. Like he somehow hung the stars in the sky just for them.

It was so fucking terrifying, aching down to his bones in a way that felt almost...safe. A way that felt almost comforting. Almost like he belonged right here, holding up the sky for these three blonds. For his family.

Funny how a month and a half ago, he'd never even dreamed of blue eyes. Vash just sort of... had a way of sweeping people off their feet, didn't he?

Well. Nicholas wasn't really one to fight nature. God, maybe. But the Humanoid Typhoon?

He heard himself snorting, low and ironic, and shook his head as he watched the blue sky overhead. "Hey, Rem." He called, "You want food?"

The excited little gasp and small hand wrapping around his shouldn't have made his stomach loop like it did, but it did. Roberto's equally small hands tugging on his pants on the other side shouldn't have made the weight of everything on his shoulders feel like less, but it did.

Vash's soft giggle and the arm wrapping around his middle, the soft nose nuzzling into the base of his neck before the weight of a blond head settled on his shoulder shouldn't have made the little town in the middle of nowhere feel like home.

But it did.

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Chapter Text

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Two weeks.

Two weeks they'd been here, staying in the big house with Charles's family, systematically exploring around the town. Nicholas insisted, wanted to know the lay of the land and the lean of her people, so to speak, in the event of a future hasty exit.

He'd even poked his nose into the half finished church leaning to one side at the end of the main street. Vash had watched, amused, and commented that the questionable soundness of the structure might distract the flock from Nicholas's obvious lack of training.

A few people even started to recognize them by name.

"Saverems." they called them. "Eriks and David."

Vash liked it, he could tell by the way the blond's face lit up when someone would call them. When people would call them a "sweet couple" after they'd passed.

He found he didn't mind it either.

Today Vash had talked him into letting the twins come out with them. Taking the whole little family to the local ice cream parlor. Nicholas had laughed at him, but he couldn't really protest when the twins had looked up at him with big blue eyes and a chorused, "Pleeeeeeease!!!" Little fuckers had him wrapped around their rapidly growing fingers, and they knew it.

The first thing they'd ever said was "Papa!" And Vash had nearly lost his shit, tears and squeals and little bouncy hugs all over. Nicholas wasn't sure if he was grinning because of their kids, or at his husband's reaction.

And then Roberto had come running over to tug on Nicholas's pants, little face tilted, and muttered a shy, "Dada?" And Nicholas swore to heaven he had something in his eyes.

"Slow down, fluffy." Nicholas reached out now to push Roberto's ragged bangs out of his face and grimaced, using his own sleeve to wipe the milkshake off the boy's nose and chin, "It's like you've never had ice cream before."

"Nope." the boy blinked at him, all innocent blue eyes. "No ice cream in the desert." His grasp of language was frighteningly good for someone who'd started talking a week ago.

Nicholas chuckled, ruffling the fluffy blond hair. "Try to make sure some of it goes in your mouth there, Sprout." He glanced over to see Rem equally engrossed in her milkshake and a guilty looking Vash looking up at him from his own milkshake, cream dripping off his nose.

"God, Spiky." He could help the bark of laughter as he leaned over to kiss that cute little nose clean. "Don't tell me you've never had ice cream before?"

Vash flushed, pulling his face away before Nicholas could actually lick him clean and scrambling for a napkin, "Not ... that often!" He mumbled, clearly flustered. "We didn't have it when I first ... landed here."

"What??" Nicholas felt his eyes widened as he leaned closer to the blond. "You landed here with the ships??" In retrospect, that explained a lot of things he'd wondered about Vash's past.

Vash's eyes skittered away as he swallowed, a nervous grin on his face, "Does that make any difference to you...? About... about us...??"

There was a story there Nicholas had yet to dig out of the blond but he let it pass for now, just leaning in to scoop a bite out of his husband's glass with a cheeky grin. "I married you, didn’t I?”

“Yeeeeaahhhhh.” Vash drew out the word like he didn’t quite believe it. His lip popped a moment later as he squinted at Nicholas suspiciously. “We never had an actual ceremony, did we?”

Nicholas raised his own eyebrows in reply. “Ya were kinda bleeding out on me at the time, Needle Noggin’.”

Vash’s head lulled to the side in a surprisingly threatening way for him. Nicholas could see the Knives in him sometimes, more often now, as they settled into their lives together and Vash let down more of his walls.

“I wanna wedding.” The blond’s lips were fully pouted now, his chin canted forward just-so, so he could do that thing where he peeped up at Nicholas from under his long eyelashes. The thing he knew Nicholas couldn’t resist. “I want cake and I want dancing and I want a big poofy dress.”

Nicholas leaned back in the booth, scooping Roberto into his lap and pretending to hide his smile by cleaning up their kid’s face. “Uh huh. You gonna look real pretty in a fluffy gown, baby.”

“I ain’t wearing the gown.” Vash replied flatly, “That’s for you.”

Nicholas almost choked on air. “Eh?”

Roberto's head swiveled from one to the other of his parents, eyes wide. Even Rem looked up from her milkshake.

Vash was grinning, wide and wild and just this side of manic, his blue eyes gleaming, “You’re gonna be the prettiest bride, Nico, all dolled up and fancy and with the nicest veil and you’re gonna walk down the aisle to me and I get to see how beautiful you look and… and…”

“Vash.” Nicholas glanced at his husband, concerned at the sudden waver in his voice. “You cryin’??”

“Well, yeah!!” Vash ducked his face, scrubbing at his cheeks with the back of his palm. “I get to say ‘I do’ to you, of course I’m crying!!”

"Why's Papa crying?" Rem asked, and Roberto pipped up to answer before either Vash or Nico could.

"He's sad cuz Dada doesn't have a fancy dress." the smaller twin replied sagely, his little brow drawn together in a concentrated frown. "We should get Dada one."

"Mn!" Rem agreed, sitting up brightly, "The big store has dresses!! We can get one there!!"

Vash snagged the back of her sweater as she went to pop out of the booth, "Hey, whoa there, hold on, partner!" he tugged her back into his lap, laughing. "Your Dad hasn't said yes yet."

“Aw, Baby.” Nicholas reached out, ruffling the fluffy strands of blond hair he adored finding on his shirts more and more often, “If that’s what you really want, Vash … we can make it happen.”

“Even the dress?” Vash pouted, peeked up at him through those damn lashes again. Damn him and his blue eyes.

Nicholas sighed, casting his gaze up to heaven for strength, “Yeah. Even the dress, Babe.”

Vash beamed, leaning in to kiss him. He tasted like strawberry ice cream and sunshine and left Nicholas craving more when he pulled away. He still has milkshake smudged on his nose and Nicholas leaned after him to lick at it.

"Nicoooo....!!" Vash squirmed, half laughing, half protesting, and Nicholas reached out to snag his waist before he fell out of the booth completely.

"Easy, easy, babe!" He was laughing, pulling the blond and both kids back into his side, grabbing a napkin to clean the rest of Vash's face. "We have a reputation to maintain in this town."

Vash laughed, grinning, and snuggled back into his side, humming happily. “Yeah, as a family.”

“As a family.” Nicholas agreed, burying his smile in those soft golden locks.

"Family!" both twins echoed, throwing their arms around Vash's chest, and his blond was laughing again, smile lighting up the whole town.