Chapter Text
Vash was in the desert, and he was alone.
His feet ached from walking, and his throat from breathing. Sand had gotten into the joints of his arm, and it creaked and tugged with every movement at his stump. His gun, slung at his hip, seemed heavy. His ribs felt too near to his hips and too close to his spine; he couldn’t take a single step without jostling his bones. When was the last time he had eaten? More importantly, when was the last time he had drank?
The desert, before him rose and fell in gentle dunes of sand. The mounds stretched out, forever. Sand grains slithered around him when the wind moved, but the wind did not move often. In the vast nothingness of the empty world, the only sound Vash heard was the soft falls of his feet. He squinted his eyes against the bright silver gild of the twin suns beating down. The light made the sand into metal, the desert into a crucible, a forge.
It was hot. He was sweating, the sweat evaporating off his skin almost immediately. Fine, white crusts of salt dotted his arms, his neck. Before him the wastes stretched out, massive in their infinitude. He had walked this path his whole life; wandering and lost. There was no going back, no remastering flight to traverse the colder void of space. Only the endless forward continuing of it all, one step after another, one second after another. The sun beat down on his head, made him feel light. How long had he been alone?
He was looking for his brother. He was always looking for his brother, and he meant to kill him when he found him. Did he? He was looking for someone.
Vash ascended a dune, thighs straining, mouth open and gasping in the ragged edge of the air. This was the place that had created him by not killing him. Sand ground against him, rubbing at his skin. He was flesh and bone, exposed. This was not a world he belonged to. Not in truth. His roots lay elsewhere.
The desert, pitiless, continued.
Vash stumbled, then sat down hard. He was exhausted to the marrow. Laying back, he let the suns flay him shoulder to hip, thigh to ankle. The sky was blue and beautiful, hung with two great lamps. He closed his eyes against their blinding harshness.
The years had built the love inside of him for this strange, alien creature. This world he did not belong to, that he did not fit into. He was all unlikeness, a rooted creature in a world of sand. Even so, he did not want pain.
To breathe in the desert was painful. To walk was to feel the wind scrape at him. The heat scourged him alive, raking him over the bright, metal strip of the sand. Where they met, Vash and this world he had grown to love, were only wounds.
“What did you do?”
Vash opened his eyes and saw – not his brother. He swallowed around the dryness of his tongue. Wolfwood’s eyes, dark, bored into him with the weight of accusation.
Vash had been alone for a long time. He had been looking for someone. He smiled.
“I love you,” he said, half singsong. “I love you. I love you.”
“What did you do?” Wolfwood was a hot heat beside him, around him. Vash lifted his arms and placed them around him. He wanted Wolfwood. He ate the jagged, alien line of that want, felt it hook as an anchor in his gut. A swell of wet heat. Wolfwood’s hair was the dark silkiness of ink, almost liquid. He was helpless, borne on the dry scrape, the gentle dune of his desire. It rode him like a beast. He felt as a grain of sand, blown among many in a desert storm.
“I loved you,” he said. That was what he had done. He had made himself into someone who could love Wolfwood. He opened his mouth, panting and dry. He was sweating.
“Vash,” Wolfwood said. Hands reached up to take Vash’s face, firm, cool against the red heat of Vash’s skin. Wolfwood’s face was the face of the desert, a rock weathered by wind. He was sweet, sweet as water, and pale as the moon. “I need to know what you took.”
They were in bed, sheets tangled around their joined bodies. Vash’s hips stuttered between Wolfwood’s open thighs. They seemed almost another person’s, those hips that were stuttering like a misfired gun, like a broken string of words, against the sweetness of Wolfwood’s heat. The alien wound of Wolfwood’s heat. Want choked Vash for the omega, the sandpapering sweetness of the scent, the open bloom. The heat.
I love you, he wanted to say. That’s all. Nothing else. I want you because I love you.
He bowed his head. He could hardly breathe through the want lodged inside of him, as a bullet in a wound. He wanted – how he wanted! He was in a desert and alone.
“I don’t know,” Vash whispered at last.
Things had been strange between him and Wolfwood after what had happened. Wolfwood went back on suppressants, and whatever had come between them, a bridge or a crevasse, smoothed once more into the flatness of a footpath. They were, by all appearances, brothers-in-arms once more, chaste companions on the road.
Vash would not have found it so grating if not for how Wolfwood looked at him sometimes. The dark sideways cut of his eyes, always inwards first. The simmering bank of something. However badly it had ended, where they had gone had opened the door and now it would not be locked.
But whatever it was Wolfwood thought or felt or wanted, he kept it behind the guard of his teeth. And for weeks, Vash would only catch the slicing desire of his eyes, as flighty as an old desert bird and just as worn. The feathered brush of Wolfwood’s gaze said nothing, spoke only of secrets hidden.
They spoke the same words, did the same things. They spent long nights under the stars. They wandered into small towns and drank at strange bars. They got into fights and got themselves out of them. They paid for two rooms at the inn, and slept with their bedrolls on opposite sides of the lowbanked fire.
And all the while, something had changed. Broken perhaps. It was not set to rights. He walked with Wolfwood, and the thing between them was not set to rights. It grated at him. He wanted to argue with Wolfwood about it and draw it out between them with fists or words. Vash wanted Wolfwood to yell, or mock him, or laugh at him, or hell, even point a gun at his head again – if that would help.
One starry night, they sheltered together beneath a comb of rock being slowly tunnelled through by the wind. It played like an instrument, the wind on the rock, every breath a wail or a groan. The stars were very bright, lustrous with colour, a river sinking into the night sky. It was strange how they were so beautiful, so numerous, when Vash mostly remembered the view from the ship being a vast darkness. Wolfwood had laughed at something Vash had said, replied with his own low teasing, and was now contentedly puffing away at a cigarette beside the larger smoke of the fire.
Vash, looking at the ruddy sharpness of his hawked face in the red light, was inexpressibly fond. But even so, it was not set to rights! The not-rightness between that sat, an unwelcome third. Wolfwood’s face shifted, imperceptibly. At any moment now he would look up, eyes dark and thoughtful, filled with words unspoken.
Vash, almost desperate, took the plunge.
“Wolfwood,” he said. “About your heat, I – “
But it was too late. Wolfwood had looked up with his eyes dark with soft shadows. And it was doubly too late; Vash had spoken and the shadows cleared. They were bare to each other, everything pared back beneath the stars.
He had suspected. Even so, to see the wound in Wolfwood’s eyes twisted at Vash. Some part of him ached to reach back, to meet that gaze which was a wound with wounds of his own. He longed to soothe the hurt and knew himself to be its perpetrator. Could they not be equals in this? It was not as if, Vash thought, grasping into darkness, he did not have his own scars. But they could not be the same. There was no pain in him like that; they did not hurt the same ways. Wolfwood’s eyes looked at him, clear with all the thoughts he did not say. Filled with the supple shadow of want, wasted. It hurt, almost, to see so clearly. Vash saw the desert in her children, the face of the rock worn by wind singing through the paths the wind had made. He saw to the heart of it, the heart of the wound of it, the yielding, enduring wound.
Wolfwood looked away. His throat, where his scent glands lay dormant, was a rusty, spiralled column in the fire’s dying light. The desert air, to Vash, was clean and empty.
“Forget about it,” Wolfwood said.
“Listen, even if you got your balls chopped, this shit’s gonna make your dick spring up like a fucking desert worm.” The dealer, a lounging man who nonetheless kept sliding his gaze towards the alley’s mouth, shrugged his shoulders. “Trust me, man. I’ve seen them all.”
Vash eyed him, trying not to make his scepticism obvious. Money, precious and hard-earnt, clinked in his pocket.
“I’m not an alpha,” he hedged.
“Yeah man, sure. Listen, don’t matter if you’re beta or even omega. You get this inside you and they’ll be moaning to morning.” A leer, then a sweaty glance. They were in the shadow of a PLANT, whose bulb hung high and humming over the town. The dealer’s smart slacks stuck out beneath his shapeless coat. One of the scientists, perhaps, making a quick buck on the side out of desperate schmucks.
“I’m none of those. I – I never developed.”
“Ah.” The man eyed Vash shrewdly, though not without some pity. He pointed to his neck, a quick jerk of his hand. “Gottem ripped out? Heard they do that some places – hurts like a bitch, huh?”
Vash gave up.
“Will it work for me?”
“Yeah.” The man shrugged again. “Like I said, I’ve seen them all.”
Good enough for Vash. He shook on it, got a small bottle of pills for an exorbitant sum. They looked like candy. It seemed strange, that this operation could be performed by something so small and innocuous. It had taken a team of surgeons to graft Vash’s prosthetic arm on. There was no scar for the desire to join onto, no stump for latching on. He rolled the bottle between his fingers. It would be, he thought, a little like growing wings.
Perhaps it would even make Wolfwood happy.
Wolfwood had lost coherency by the time Vash realised it was a bad idea.
They were pressed into each other, the wrongness of Vash pressed into Wolfwood, the want surging through him like a blade, like a rush of poison. Wolfwood clung to him, saying nothing. His eyes were dark and clear, blown through with lust like a pane of glass. Vash’s body moved, clumsy and ungentle. Everywhere their skin touched sent jolts down to Vash’s cock. His whole body seemed to be at the mercy of his upright cock, buried in heat. The only sensitivity left in the world came from between his legs; he breathed in the cage of it, his body, his body. His cock, buried in Wolfwood, seeking out Wolfwood. His hook of his want, seeking out Wolfwood. The alien trap of his want, which had made him naked. The stump of his arm tingled, and that too was want.
Through bleary eyes Vash noted the movement of his muscles, the stretch of his skin in the jolt of his haunches. His nipples, standing stiff and tight, painful and gilded in want. The line of his stomach, pale like the underside of alien, greenhouse leaves. Where he joined, sweaty and desperate, with Wolfwood. Body, all body. The unrelenting embodiedness. His body moved and he was bound within it. An endless motion machine. The heat was the rolling heat of the desert, brushing on all his endless waste of skin, the pitiless expanse of his nudity. He moved in.
The heat. Was this pleasure? He sought out the heat, burning as he did so. There was something turning his guts into charcoal. He needed to get it out, out, out. Release. It was hot. Sand, burnt into glass. The mirror of himself drove into the heat, burnt himself in the endless crucible of heat. Was this pleasure? The knife of want drove him into the knife of want into the knife of want into the knife of want. It lodged in him, the endless opening breath. His skin was bare, opening like a breath, like a wound. He drove himself into the wound, the red wound. There was no helping it, no fixing it, no fulfilling it. He let go, aching with the ache of letting go. He moved, endless. His hips rolled, back and forth, the duning of sand in the desert. He burned.
He continued, wanting.
The innkeeper had slipped them a note under the door.
Have extended your stay, it read. Owing another two nights, 25% last-minute-service-charge increase and $$15 laundry fee. Settle at bar before leaving.
The curling edge of the paper hung off the edge of the bedside table, next to Vash’s face. He wondered if they would be able to cover it. Maybe if they did the laundry themselves?
“Drink.” Wolfwood supported his neck as he tipped Vash’s head back. A trickle of water streamed into Vash’s mouth. He swallowed, and managed not to cough.
Wolfwood put the glass down on the note. Through the distortion of the water, some letters blurred, others cleared. Owing, and then right beneath it, service came into prominence as the rest of the words became squiggles of ink.
Vash giggled a little, feeling suddenly vastly tired and vastly sad.
Wolfwood, sitting at the bedside, snapped his focus onto him. It was a focus Vash could feel, like light gathered by a magnifying glass. The opposite of a PLANT: an inward sucking up that pulled everything into a point, rather than the endless generation of his bulb-housed sisters.
“Spiky,” Wolfwood said. His voice was almost light, the effort too keep it so a taut band like a tightrope. “Mind telling me what the fuck you were thinking there?”
Vash peered at him, smiling helplessly.
Wolfwood slammed his fist down on the table. The glass of water gave a little shake.
“You almost died, idiot!” Wolfwood’s face twisted, snarl or grimace or sorrow. They were going to talk it out, drag it into the sun, flayed and bleeding. Vash settled himself in. “Yer dehydrated, ya didn’t eat for somethin’ like a week straight, could barely get ya sleepin’ the way ya went on and on and on. What the hell did ya take?”
“Why are you so sure I took something?” Vash was vaguely offended that Wolfwood wouldn’t even entertain the possibility of it being some sort of lateborn innate wellspring of desire. He felt, with a twinge of self-conscious embarrassment, that his efforts were not being appreciated.
“Because a rut doesn’t kill you. Or leave ya fucking away when yer dick’s bloody from chafing. Or stop ya thinkin’ about eating and drinking. People in cycles still sleep – you didn’t.” Wolfwood deflated a little, the sharp point of his gaze diffusing a fraction. “Also, I found yer pills.”
“You’re sitting weird.” Vash narrowed his eyes. The area between his own thighs was still a map of pain. The haze of heat came back to him, drifting like a misty red cloud. He had pressed into – into Wolfwood. Suddenly alert, he jolted upright. Regret was instantaneous, but he manage to lever himself up against the headboard instead of collapsing back to the mattress. “Did I hurt you?”
Wolfwood looked as if he were biting back choice words. He’d jolted forwards when Vash had sat up, and they winced in unison. The two halves of the same injury. Their pain fit together. It was almost funny.
“I did,” Vash said. Wolfwood’s gaze suffused with a studious intention of looking away, though he never actually moved. “I hurt you! Didn’t I? Wolfwood, did I hurt you?”
“Look to yerself first, dumbass.” It was not a denial. Vash’s heart sank.
“I’m sorry.”
Wolfwood looked at him for a long time. His eyes were dark, once again veiled, clouded with thoughts. The silence between them had deepened, widened. At last, Wolfwood scoffed.
“Ya piss me off so bad if I didn’t think you’d kick it for real I’d punch ya. Yer Vash the Stampede, there’s a six billion dollar bounty on yer fat fuckin’ head that no one ever claimed, ya blew a hole in the moon and I almost kill ya with my cunt. And now yer sayin’ sorry!”
“Was,” Vash corrected. “I’m a natural disaster now.”
Wolfwood let out a muffled sound, a cross between a scream and a curse. But when he looked at Vash, his eyes were a wound, still a wound, and made more jagged than before.
“Ya wouldn’t stop.”
“I’m so – ”
“Yer killin’ yerself, and ya wouldn’t stop. Ya just kept going. I had to push you off, tie you down to get us somethin’ to eat. And when I came back, you grew – you grew feathers – ”
“What.”
Wolfwood shook himself, then continued in a brisk voice. “Only the once, and ya quietened down soon enough. But you weren’t all there, if ya get my meaning. And you were cryin’ when you weren’t fuckin’, or you’d make these – these sounds like ya got something stuck inside ya, like somethin’ were splittin’ you open and not in a fun way. Ya moved like a whip was at yer back. I just don’t – is this something about Knives? Some, I dunno, some thing that’s gonna help – some stupid savin’ the world shit.”
“What the hell would Knives have to do with it,” Vash said, temporarily shaken out of the horror of Wolfwood being in the same room, naked, with Vash’s feathers by the instinctive recoil of ew, he’s my brother.
“Then why.” Something gave in Wolfwood’s voice. It dropped, suddenly, from accusation to pleading.
“I wanted you to have what you wanted!” Startled into sincerity, Vash did not fully register what he said until Wolfwood looked at him with betrayed hurt.
“Ya thought I wanted yer dick that bad for you to kill yerself?”
“No!” Vash yelped. “No, I. Ah. I just wanted you to have it. I didn’t know it would be like that. You wanted to have it! You – the last time.”
You were so upset, he didn’t say. You were looking forward to it so much.
The flicker of the familiar wound drew up in Wolfwood’s eyes. Vash watched it pass through his gaze, a procession of pain.
“The last time,” Wolfwood repeated, voice hollow. And he let out a gusty sigh.
“I really tried,” Vash said. The shame, the humiliating embarrassment, the helplessness of lying there and realising that it wasn’t going to happen, the simple calm of his body at completely incongruous rest, all came rushing back. “I wanted to make it work,” he said, stubborn.
Wolfwood waved a hand expansively, as if to encompass their entire situation. The implication was clear: like this?
“It could have,” Vash maintained.
“Yer regrowing the skin on yer dick.”
“Maybe it just means I didn’t get it right.”
“You try it again and I’ll kill ya myself. Legato and yer mad brother can get in line.”
“I wanted you to have it,” Vash said, petulant like a child. And somehow he felt the grief welling in him, that it was not himself.
“Ya don’t know what it looked like,” Wolfwood muttered. “It wasn’t you there, that night. Well. Those nights. It was only…only a cock. The rest of you weren’t there. It was like you’d gone somewhere, away. Vash, I know. It’s fine. It’s not going to happen and it’s fine.”
“You want it.” Vash, suppliant, tried again. “Me and it. I could try to make it happen.”
“I want you more than yer cock,” Wolfwood snapped. “I can get a cock anywhere. Heathouses are a dime a dozen on this shithole.”
“You want mine.” Vash leant forward, overcome with bitterness. “You want me to fuck you. I could. I did. There are patches, scent masks, things like that, you know. I’ve looked. I could – I could try. We could make it work. I could be your alpha.”
Wolfwood turned his face away for a long, long time. At last, slowly, like he was breaking his own heart: “I’d rather have you than any of that.”
“You don’t have to choose.”
“That’s the problem with you!” All of a sudden Wolfwood seemed to fly into a towering rage. It was all in his eyes – they were both too sore to move, really. But his eyes lit like a furnace, like a pair of suns. “Yer always tryin’ to get out of choosing. The best of every world – but we’re stuck, Vash! This is it! Ya gotta choose in the shit instead of dreamin’ about the clouds. Enough of the tricky bullshit. Someday yer gonna have to put yer foot down and say I’ve got no more space for anythin’ – I’m stuck here, so I’ll stand here. You’ve got to, Vash. It’ll kill you otherwise.”
“You don’t want to have to choose,” Vash said, “and I don’t want you to choose. I can see it. Your eyes are a pair of bleeding cuts, and I can see straight down to your soul. It’s hurting you, and you don’t want to do it. I’m telling you, you don’t have to. Wolfwood, we could try. I look at you, and I can see the way I hurt you. I could try.”
“No one on the face of this shithole,” Wolfwood said, “has ever gotten exactly what they wanted. You scrape yerself off in the desert and die a bit every day. You live yer life and stick with it, even when yer hands are red and the days ahead are a pit. Ya can’t have everythin’. You just can’t. Ya ruin it all by tryin’. It would kill you, needle-noggin. I’d rather have you, and I’ll stick with that. That’s the way of the road – you choose a way early and ya stick with it, all the way through.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“You’re a dumbass, that’s why.”
“People can change. You give them chances, and they change. You make your choices too early, make your judgements too early. Wolfwood, there’s always a chance.”
Vash stopped, short of breath. The old contours of the argument had slipped in without him realising, and somewhere they’d mixed up the threads. It was almost comforting, to have that particular old axe to grind instead of all these new knives to step around. He was almost happy to have Wolfwood arguing with him again, and he looked up at Wolfwood, almost expecting to see the same exasperated contentment settled in Wolfwood’s face.
But Wolfwood was looking at him, with the feathered glance like the brush of bird’s wings. And there was no joy on his face, nothing like it. A deep, deep valley lay beneath the surface of him. Gingerly, Wolfwood stood. There was an awkward openness to him, as if he were trying not to let his thighs touch. He walked over, legs moving in their awkward, open gait, the few short steps until he was seated on the edge of the bed. He lowered himself carefully as well, and a twinge of discomfort passed over his face as he settled on the mattress.
Dread pooled, despite Vash’s best efforts, in his guts as Wolfwood pulled the sheet lower. Vash was naked. He was generally unabashed about nakedness, but what had passed between them made the fact enormously significant. His nipples were exposed, the line of his neck, the dip of his hips into his abused groin. He waited, afraid of what Wolfwood would do.
Wolfwood passed his hand over one of the long scars across Vash’s chest, then to his shoulder, before finally tracing the stump of his arm. It tickled, the fingers tracing the circle of his stump. There was no pleasure, no want in it now, just the ticklishness.
“All your chances,” Wolfwood said. And his fingers mapped out the geography of Vash’s scars.
Slowly, Vash relaxed beneath the chaste touch of Wolfwood’s hand skating over his chest. He was almost ready to fall asleep. Exhaustion pulled at him. He closed his eyes as Wolfwood’s hand rose to cup his face.
Wolfwood kissed his eyelids. He could feel the heat of Wolfwood’s breaths against his eyelashes, before the small, regular brush of it moved down to his lips. He waited, expectant and resigned.
“I refuse.”
The words hung like a sword in the space between Wolfwood’s lips and Vash’s. By the time Vash opened his eyes again, the heated space of Wolfwood had departed. He was once again sitting on the chair, gazing at Vash with implacable seriousness. His eyes were like the eyes of the stars, where they gazed out from the night in their ancient thought, and did not speak.
Vash licked his lips, tasting Wolfwood’s refusal.
It was a sweet, sweet thing.