Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Of three things, Wolfwood is sure:

One; whatever ill-contrived afterlife he had reached, it was silent. And warm. And soft, like well-loved blankets or forest moss. A final mockery of comfort in his dire hours – though there were certainly worse ways to be teased by death, he knew.

Two; he ached in ways he had never known. Down to his bones, the fine tangle of his tissue and sinew, the soft sponge of his marrow. His skeleton rearranged and his body bled dry. Heavy and twitching, he cannot move himself.

Three; he was just as alone as before. Whatever strange place he had found himself was as desolate as it was gentle.

No, there. The sound of footsteps. The disgruntled creak of a floorboard. A door swinging wide on old hinges and the soft tune of a man humming off-key.

The stranger idles about the room, moving clinking objects and shuffling about. Wolfwood cannot bid his eyes open but he can feel the other as they totter about—a presence lingering. Somehow both all around him and so far at once.

Hackles raised, mind panicked, all he can do is remain where he lay and listen.

There’s the tinkle of glass struck by something. It rings like old windchimes.

“Hard to think something so small can do such damage,” comes a soft voice. It’s hushed, warm in its own way, clearly lost in their own thoughts. A man whose sigh sounds like spring rain.

Whatever Wolfwood is sprawled across dips under him with an added weight to his right. His heart hammers so hard he worries it may shatter whatever is left of his monstrous, bursting ribcage.

“It didn’t hit anything vital, and the silver wasn’t even pure—but still...”

The words linger, edged and distracted, before trailing off. There’s a hand on his flank now. Its touch is gentle and fleeting, like petting a stray mutt. All Wolfwood can do is tense and growl—but the sound is wet with blood. It catches in his barrel chest.

“Sorry! Sorry. It’s a bad habit,” the stranger says. Then, quieter, “It’s been a long time since anyone’s been here.”

They move further away, those noisy floorboards tracking movements. Wolfwood thinks they say something else but his brain is going grey and cloudy at the edges.

He never hears the door shut.

In primary school, before the gunshot and the orphanage and the adults in suits looking at him like they pitied him, Wolfwood had a dog.

He had loved it in his childish way. Loved its big brown eyes and how it greeted him at the door, but he abhorred every early morning and clawing whine. Bleary-eyed, without thinking, he had opened the door before the sun rose to stop its irritating cries at the backdoor—and fallen back asleep without realizing she hadn’t returned.

They had found her two days later. Struck and left to freeze in the December snowfall. Wolfwood had sobbed for hours—and then hours more, whimpering and hiding under a rack of linens, when his father hadn’t taken kindly to his caterwauling.

Wolfwood wakes now with that memory like bile on his tongue, and thinks, This must be how it felt. Like seeing the other side of the mirror. Like doing penance with his broken bones for his childish cruelty.

Everything hurt. His very being seemed to throb with every heartbeat, every unfortunate thought. As if a malevolent god had squished him beneath its gigantic thumb.

With agonizing slowness he tries to move one leg. Then another. His muscles give in twitches and screaming tension. He feels like every bone had been disconnected and left to float in agony about his body.

He didn’t realize he had made noise, or that he hadn’t been alone, until there was suddenly a man crouched in his vision.

“Poor thing,” the stranger tsks. He looks fuzzy and distant. “Try not to move too much. I’m sure it’ll take a while to heal. You’ve had a rough go of it.”

A while. A limitless drift of time Wolfwood doesn’t feel foolish to imagine slipping well past the full moon. Wolfwood’s mind offers the true agony of shifting back human with such an injury and the fear of it draws a cry from his throat.

“I know, I know,” the man soothes. “I can give you something for the pain now that you’re awake. Is that alright?”

Wolfwood gives no answer, finds he has no voice between his monstrous condition and injury, but the man receives it positively enough and sprints from the room.

There’s the distant clatter of iron, each like a dagger to his tender flesh.

He needed to leave. If there was a chance of this man finding out Wolfwood’s condition, he might take the opportunity to finish the job while Wolfwood was defenseless. And if by chance it was clear to him that Wolfwood was cursed, caught in the December moon’s hold, well—what kind of weirdo would let a wolf into their bed?

Nothing of this spelled a good idea.

Paw over paw, joints and ligaments and bones alight and screaming, Wolfwood drags himself to the bed edge. He tries to measure the distance to the floor but his vision still blurs and flows, unreliable.

Head-first, Wolfwood stretches for the floor and misjudges the distance by a mile—falling to a crumpled heap of aching flesh and shattered bone.

The stranger’s thundering steps can be felt through the floorboards as he returns to the room in a panic, fluttering around Wolfwood’s ruined body.

Easily, carefully, Wolfwood is lifted and set back on the mattress to writhe and whine. There’s a gentle hand to the back of his furred skull, “Hold on, I’ll be right back.”

He can barely keep track of the man’s coming and going. He reappears like a ghost, hauntingly quickly, and the disorientation makes him retch.

He was completely at this stranger’s mercy.

“Here you go,” the man whispers—as Wolfwood is manhandled upright for a moment, a cold touch to his lips. The angle makes the sharp aches of his lengthened spine more obvious.

The liquid is thick and hot and tastes like he’s bitten into something divine. But there is a familiar tang that coats his tongue, his throat, makes him gag—then a warm hand cradles his jaw, wrenching his head back just enough to force it down his throat like a disobedient pup.

“I know, it probably tastes awful to you,” he’s told.

Awful is one description, he thinks, gagging, but he can’t fight. An ease begins to seep through his body as he haltingly takes gulps of it. His muscles unlocking, the tether of his body begins to go fuzzy and warm until it snaps completely and suddenly he’s laid out on that soft thing again and his head feels cotton-stuffed.

He dozes to the stranger’s murmuring voice, listening to it drift further and further till the world falls away completely.

The next time Wolfwood comes to, he feels as if he’s seeing the world clearly for the first time in days.

A room of dark, stained wood with nothing in it but the mattress beneath him, a book-cluttered bedside, and a little desk in the corner. The blankets under his paws look handmade.

Body aching and taught, Wolfwood realizes in slow margins that the agony of his injury has subdued—the worst of its throbbing burn sits along his flank, between ribs and sinew, where the bullet had taken him by surprise.

The high window to his left gives him a view of nothing but sky and treetops. It seems the sun is setting. He’s lost an entire day.

The monstrous lycan body caging him in tells him his time is slipping by. The fullness of the December moon would be beginning to wane tonight and his curse would break at moon-set. It was not an agony he looked forward to.

There’s the creak of wood to his right. Wolfwood flops just far enough to spy a pair of bright eyes and a ridiculous array of blond hair peeking around the open door.

“You’re awake!”

The blond mop smiles so wide it looks as though it aches before eagerly crossing to Wolfwood’s side.

“Are you hungry? You’ve slept most of the day, I’m sure your body needs something while it heals and you haven’t taken anything more than the yarrow root since I found you. You did gag some of that out, though… are you hurting? Is it worse than before? How are you feeling?”

He prattles a million thoughts at once. Even uninjured, Wolfwood thinks it would have made his head spin.

He must know, comes Wolfwood’s next thought. He speaks to me like a man, not a pet. He must know what I am.

And that simply baffles him further – some mop-headed fool taking a lycan in his arms and giving it a warm bed. Knowing that Wolfwood is something cursed and violent.

The man putters about righting stray books among the floor and the bedside, shuffling away empty mugs and fluffing anxiously at the bedding.

He watches Wolfwood with his sparkling eyes and too-wide smile, not with the edge of a man that could have his throat removed if he stray too close.

“I guess you can’t really tell me anything, huh? Probably just driving you mad with my endless talking,” he says. His smile looks sad but the expression brightens so fast Wolfwood feels dizzy. “I made stew! Let me bring you some.”

The wooden bowl the strange man brings him smells incredible. Thick and dark with spices that remind Wolfwood of a little cottage a hundred miles away.

Wolfwood drags himself upright to where the bowl is cautiously perched and embarrassingly shoves his whole muzzle into the mess.

Even still, the man chatters.

“It’s just tubers and vegetables I canned at the turn of the season. Slow-cooked it today to keep it tender—I wasn’t sure when you would wake up and I didn’t want it to get mushy. I hope it tastes alright. It’s been a while since I’ve cooked for someone else—or had a guest at all, really.”

A guest. As if Wolfwood was here for a meal and a spot of gossip. A high society sort. The thought would make him laugh if he wasn’t sure it’d end with his insides staining the nice strangers bed.

“How is it?”

Wolfwood feels that gaze on him. His bullet wound burns. He chuffs deep in his chest but offers nothing else as he finishes his meal.

The night sprints by in terrifying bursts of haunting dreams and wounds that require care.

Wolfwood cannot stop himself from snapping at the stranger as he cleans his flank, dabs at the ooze of blood, feels out the fractures of his bones and makes kind comments about their healing. It’s all very practiced but it hurts like a bitch.

Wolfwood thinks this pretty man must be a doctor or a witch – or else just a lunatic with terrible luck.

He can see slivers of the moon in the southwest sky, just barely out of view, when he wakes in fits. The velvet night slowly softens to the rich azures and deep amethysts of an approaching sunrise.

Silently Wolfwood begs and pleads for this odd man to find business elsewhere. To leave the room and let Wolfwood suffer this indecency, the agony of it, alone.

But the pretty idiot settles by the window, long legs stretched in front of him and book in hand, facing Wolfwood like a particularly irritating sentinel. The candles on the desk and bedside make him shine—warm and golden and unbothered.

It begins with the sharp twinge of nerves, an ache deep in his marrow. He aches as if he’s weathering through the first fits of boyish growth. As if his bones have become too large for his body. His ribcage feels as if it might rip itself wide to escape him.

The joints of his body feel wrenched in all the wrong ways—out of socket, detached. His teeth dig into his gums and his skull feels compressed, the skin stretched too tight. Nauseous and retching over the bedside before he can catch himself.

The world is lavender now and the stranger is on his knees at Wolfwood’s side, watching raptly, poised as if to draw Wolfwood close.

Wolfwood’s blood singes his veins. They seem to burn, close, reroute through his body. Twine around his sensitive nerves and fracturing bones.

Wolfwood doesn’t realize he is screaming till the world settles to a wobble and the other man is closer now. His hands are warm on Wolfwood’s shoulders and he is murmuring soft little assurances as Wolfwood pants and groans.

Eventually, with a grimace, the man says, “Least it’s past, right?”

“What, getting shot or the werewolf bullshit?” he pants.

The stranger makes a face that tells Wolfwood he regretted his words. Sighing, the lycanthrope presses his face to the pillows and groans long and low and trembling.

There’s a tentative pat on his back.

“I’ll go get more of that stew.”

At the unfamilar touch, it dawns on Wolfwood that he is naked. Starkly so. It is not a fact he is pleased with as he usually would be in a beautiful man’s bed. The stranger eyes him, gaze adrift on some passing thought.

“You going to keep staring like that?”

The man has the decency to look ashamed as he leaps from the bedside, eyes darting away. He stutters some thought that takes no form before awkwardly pulling a knit blanket from the foot of the bed to drape over Wolfwood’s immodest body.

“I’ll find you something to wear, too, I hadn’t thought about that—that you’d be, ya know,” he prattles, then escapes out into the hall with a flush creeping along his neck.

Wolfwood feels no better than he had when he had been lycan: his body was still struggling to stitch itself around a bullet wound that had been meant to kill him. He swore he could feel his bones mending under his skin. The rush of blood with his fever.

Man or monster, he would be at this stranger’s mercy for the foreseeable future. The luck of finding such a good Samaritan type this deep in the mountains feels like a cosmic gamble, but he’ll take what he can get at this point.

His savior reappears in the doorway, hesitates, then shakily deposits some folded clothing on the bed.

“You can change when you feel up to it. Don’t feel rushed,” he flushes, mouth working soundlessly as the words catch up to him. “I mean, I know you must feel awful after all this—I can get you more blankets so you’re not cold, at least—”

A chatty one, Wolfwood thinks. He watches the other man turn pinker and pinker as his mouth runs ahead of him—endearing and dangerous with his gemstone gaze and an angel kiss just below one eye.

“What’s your name?” Wolfwood asks.

It pulls his host up short. “It’s bad manners to ask without giving your own.”

“I don’t like to give everything away so quickly. It wouldn’t be ladylike.”

“No, neither do I,” the man snorts, the sound ugly and surprising.

“Why am I here?” he tries—because surely there were more to the machinations of his saving than a kind heart. Wolfwood was quite pressed to believe those didn’t exist.

The pretty mop looks at him as if he has lost his mind. “You’re injured. You were shot the other night.”

“I know that, Spikey, I was there. Why did you bring me here? How did you even find me?”

“You’re injured,” he answers again—more firmly, some of his easy confidence slipping back into place. “And you weren’t hard to find, you left a trail a mile long. I’m amazed you were still alive with how much blood you lost.”

Everything after the crack of the gun and the burn of a bullet through his side is a blur: he remembers staggering through the forest, deep enough in the pines he didn’t recognize the meadows and mountain ridges. He remembers feeling cold, and then suddenly hot, and then suddenly—nothing.

“I owe you my life,” he acknowledges, then turns his gaze to the window as the solemn surety of his near-death settles. “Thank you.”

When Wolfwood peeks at him again, the man looks sad in that distant way pity often does.

“You don’t owe me anything,” he smiles. “Just rest, alright?”

The stranger’s soft voice lilts as if he’s posed Wolfwood a question, but his expression brooks no argument. Not that Wolfwood could, pathetic thing he is, veins still laden with silver poison.

Wolfwood watches the stranger’s back as he turns and strolls out the door.

Simmering and helpless, Wolfwood lets himself drift.

He wakes to the stranger shaking him—just a gentle enough rattle to get his attention. He grins at Wolfwood’s annoyed glare from under the bedding.

“You should eat.”

“Dunno if I can move,” Wolfwood grunts into the pillow.

“I’ll bring it to you.”

As he darts off on his quest Wolfwood tries to force himself upright, but his body fights him at every turn. Groggy and weak as a kitten. The blanket pools in his lap and Wolfwood can’t find the energy to acquire more modesty. The clothing lays by the pillow, mocking.

The stranger returns with a steaming plate of tubers and green things Wolfwood thinks he recognizes. When he sees Wolfwood’s naked body he carefully keeps his eyes trained on the low ceiling.

The lycan watches him squirm for a moment before admitting, “I don’t know how this is going to work. I can barely lift my arms.”

“May I?” he gestures down at the bed but his gaze doesn’t settle, flitting anywhere but Wolfwood’s bare chest and limbs. When Wolfwood doesn’t argue he takes a seat next to him and holds out the plate.

Trembling, Wolfwood takes the fork in hand and lifts a meager cut of the gracious meal—on the third try he actually makes it to his mouth.

Wolfwood is completely mortified. Bled dry and left on display for this man’s thinly veiled pity like a helpless child.

“Here,” the blond murmurs before taking the utensil into his own hand. His skin is warm and calloused where it brushes Wolfwood’s.

“You don’t actually expect to feed me,” Wolfwood balks.

“At this rate it’ll be cold before you finish.”

“But I can do it.”

“You can,” the other agrees mildly. “But you’re still healing right now, so let me help you—just until you’re better.”

Face hot with his shame, Wolfwood obediently opens his mouth for the offered food. It’s exquisite: tender and spiced and fresh. Easily the best Wolfwood has eaten in years—or perhaps he was just starved and desperate after narrowly escaping death.

He feeds Wolfwood in silence. Awkward, painful silence that makes Wolfwood consider the outcome of that silver bullet having struck true.

Eventually, the other man says, “Vash.”

Around a mouthful, Wolfwood asks, “What the fuck is a Vash?”

The lycanthrope hadn’t thought himself to be particularly funny—no one but Livio ever seemed to get his dry humor—but that gets him a bright laugh regardless. “It’s my name.”

“Oh,” Wolfwood startles.

Vash. Not a common tongue. He had never crossed it before. It has an odd ring to it that made his tongue curl behind his teeth. He likes the way it sounds like wind curling through overgrown waves of grass in the summer.

Vash watches Wolfwood shape his name again and again, fascinated with the sound, and flusters. “You don’t have to keep repeating it!”

“It’s a nice name.”

“Are you going to tell me yours?”

“Huh? Why the hell would I do that,” Wolfwood leans in to snatch the forkful of greens Vash offers.

“Because it’s polite.”

“I don’t know what that has to do with me.”

“Are you always so grumpy? Because the other lycanthropes I’ve met have been very nice. You’re giving them a bad name.”

That brings Wolfwood up short. “You’ve met other werewolves?”

Vash gestures towards the window where the sun was beginning to set. “My backyard has been a hunting ground for decades. You eventually cross paths. Strike up conversation. Send tea party invites.”

“Decades, huh?” Wolfwood sits back to study Vash where he fidgets next to him. His eyes crinkle when he smiles and there is a knowing gleam in his eyes— but he couldn’t have been more than a decade older than Wolfwood himself. A plural of decades seemed a stretch. “How old are you?”

“Older than you,” Vash snorts.

“You don’t know how old I am.”

“I don’t,” Vash sets the plate on the desk and returns to Wolfwood’s side, sitting a little closer than before. “But I guarantee you, I’m older than you.”

“You don’t look older than me. You can’t even be a day over forty, and that’s me being impolite.”

“I moisturize. Are you going to tell me your name?”

Wolfwood hums as if he’s considering. “Will you tell me how old you are if I do?”

“I don’t know what that has to do with me,” Vash snarks, leaning back across the bed to smile up at Wolfwood, cutely defiant. Already charming his way under the lycanthrope’s skin.

“Fine. I won’t tell you, then.”

“What if I can guess?” Vash kicks his feet.

“What if?”

“Would you tell me if I was right?”

“Maybe. But I’m not giving you any hints.” Wolfwood sniffs.

Vash props himself on his elbows and looks smug. “What’s the fun if I don’t win myself?”

Wolfwood is warm and full of a home cooked meal and Vash is the prettiest thing he’s seen in a long time. With his fine-boned hands and dark lashes, smiling up at him as if they hadn’t met through dire circumstances. Wolfwood blames it on these facts as he opens his mouth and boldly embarrasses himself.

“What do you get if you win?”

Vash’s left eyebrow cocks. Wolfwood quickly decides he doesn’t like the curious tilt of his smile. “I didn’t realize we were playing for anything other than bragging rights. What will you give me if I win?”

“Depends.”

It’s a little stupid. But he likes Vash’s kind eyes and the gentle way he handles him as he changes his bandages. He can very easily imagine himself kissing Vash’s smug little mouth as a thanks for his service and enjoying it.

“You look tired,” Vash tells him softly to disengage before sitting up. He straightens out the blanket that had been caught under his body and scrambles away. Grabbing the plate from the desk, he makes for the door. “I’ll let you rest. I’m just down the hall, so holler if you need anything!”

“Thanks, Vash.”

The other man does a dorky little salute then grimaces as it catches up to him, shaking his head at nothing as he shuts the door behind him.

Wolfwood lies in bed, side throbbing, and wonders at the absurdity of it all.

When sleep finally takes him, he dreams he is in the forest again.

That same night, that same February moon—the fields desolate at the cruel tail of winter and his brother clinging to his hand, shaking, the shadows creeping closer. Twigs and brush snapping underfoot—but not their own.

“We should turn around,” his brother says. His breath plumes in the frozen night air.

And, just as in every nightmarish memory as before, Wolfwood only clutches his brother’s hand tighter to murmur, “It’s not much further.”

It repeats. A memory taunting him night after night. He can feel the hot blood on his hands, the shuddering fear as his brother screamed. But he can never see the thing stalking closer. The thing that tears into his flesh and infects Wolfwood like a fever.

When he finally startles awake, Vash is near. He hovers with wide eyes and anxious, idle hands.

“You were screaming,” is all he says.

Wolfwood grunts as the world slowly rights itself: the cabin tucked away in the pines, the pretty-faced witch feeding him and fluttering about like he worried.

“It happens.”

“Are you alright?”

“I’ve got a bullet in my gut. Never been better.”

“Oh,” Vash blinks. “I removed that the first night.” He pulls open a bedside drawer and fishes out a little vial. Inside it sits only the dirty, long-tip of a .308 Winchester cartridge.

Wolfwood takes it in hand. This was the thing that almost killed him. This little scrap of metal had torn through his body and poisoned his blood and left him for dead. Had almost freed him of his curse.

Looking closer, Wolfwood realizes it is not woodland grime that crusts the bullet.

“You a doctor?” the lycan asks.

“Not at all!” Vash waves his hands, looking bashful at the assumption. “Just some hands-on experience from a long time ago.”

Wolfwood hands the bottle back and lets himself settle deeper in his cozy blanket cocoon. “I’ll have to come to you next time I get shot up,” he says—a joke, maybe, but it feels too personal as Vash pales.

“I’m actually not too good with blood,” he simpers, twiddling his fingers. He doesn’t meet Wolfwood’s eyes. “Makes me kind of lightheaded, you know? So, it’d be nice if you didn’t get shot anymore.”

Wolfwood blinks up at him.

“I’ll, uh, do my best?” he murmurs in confusion. “Do you usually take in strays?”

It’s Vash’s turn to blink dumbly. “What do you mean?”

“Like me—do you make a habit of finding less fortunate monsters out in your backyard to nurse back to health?”

“Well, first of all, you’re definitely not a monster,” Vash snorts—and it sets Wolfwood ablaze. The nonchalant coddling, the golden world view. Wolfwood was a man of practicality, and nothing practical was golden unless it was just useless gild.

“Unless I’m suddenly misunderstanding the meaning of the word, I’m pretty sure you’re just runnin’ off at the mouth about that one, Spikey.”

“It’s Vash.”

“That’s what I said.”

Vash rolls his eyes hard enough to hurt and settles in the chair at the desk. He lays his tall bulk over the back of it, arms crossed, expression clearly spelling out that he thought Wolfwood was a particular brand of idiot.

“Monsters aren’t people with conditions,” he says haltingly. “Monsters aren’t people just—just trying to survive.”

Wolfwood scoffs. “Oh, shove the good Samaritan poetic. Once a month I get a bloodlust so strong it makes me ache and I spend three days killing anything I can get my hands on. Nothing about what I turn into is human.”

“I didn’t say it was human—I just said it didn’t make you a monster.”

“And what about you?”

Vash visibly startles. “What?”

“I said, what about you? Arguin’ so hard on this, hidin’ all the way out here in the mountains. Who else would be willing to drag a werewolf home than someone with their own chip to bet?”

“Do you think I’m just lecturing you to make myself feel better?” Vash stares like he thinks Wolfwood might be stupid, then laughs—a sharp little mean thing. “You’re not the first lycanthrope I’ve met. Probably won’t be the last, either. I’ve met werewolves and fae and nymphs. These mountains are owned by things that people would call monsters and yet the kindest creatures I’ve ever met were never human to start with.”

Vash looks genuinely hurt. Almost indignant as he stares Wolfwood down, ready for a fight. Wolfwood finds himself a little surprised, a little endeared, at Vash’s fighting spirit—but it doesn’t curb Wolfwood’s instincts: why would someone like Vash have such a strong stance on a game he was just spectating?

“Sure,” Wolfwood acquiesces, twining a loose thread around his fingers. “Sure—but you don’t know me. I could be any number of awful things.”

“You’re not,” Vash tells him firmly.

“You can’t know that.”

“I can. I can see it in your eyes.”

Wolfwood pauses and lets the flush that overtakes him at that sentiment settle. Kissing a pretty boy that saved his life on a whim is one thing — being given kindness because he’s been deemed deserving is an entirely different fire to throw himself into. And it’s certainly not one he feels keen to approach right now with his side barely scarred closed and blood still drying.

“That’s the dumbest reason I’ve ever heard.”

Vash pouts at him, harrumphing. He looks like a puffed-up cat. “It’s true. You have kind eyes—there, you went red again!”

“I did not.”

“You did!” Vash crows, pointing. “Don’t like being told that you’re kind?”

“Don’t like you saying fucking nonsense.”

“Mark,” Vash declares after a moment. “You’re grumpy like a Mark.”

“Thinking I’m anything like a Mark is an insult.”

“Arthur, then.”

“Why the fuck Arthur of all things—”

“Your temper. Am I right?”

Wolfwood breathes deep and meets Vash’s eyes. He’s practically sparkling at his chance to rile Wolfwood so easily—he suspects a pattern for his upcoming days. “No.”

“You’re right. Arthur is too refined of a name for you.”

“Calling me scruffy?”

“Well,” Vash hums. His gaze flicks from Wolfwood’s hair to the scruff on his chin. When it lands on his bare chest it quickly flits back up to his face. There have been no mirrors to catch a glimpse but Wolfwood can feel days of grime and forest grit on his skin. Even without his own reflection he knows he must be disgusting.

Wolfwood sighs and tamps down his pride. “Any chance I can bathe sometime soon?”

Vash eyes him for a moment, thinking, then stands to head for the door. “Let me check your wound. If it’s healed enough it shouldn’t be a problem.”

“And if it’s not?” Wolfwood calls after his back.

“I’m not giving you a sponge bath, Kenric.”

“Wrong again.”

He thinks he hears Vash curse from down the hall. It makes him smile, though realizing it cuts the delight short.

Vash returns with a white cloth and a long strip of linen. The cloth is full of something, carefully closed at the top with a knot.

“I should also repack your wound while you’re awake.”

“Repack?”

“It’s a poultice,” he flashes the packed cloth. “Calendula and mandrake—to help leech out the poison from the silver. You may have not lived through last night if I hadn’t had them on hand.”

“Well, I’m lucky you found me, aren’t I?” Wolfwood murmurs. He smiles just for the way it makes Vash fumble the little cloth pack. Annoyance or none, there was a charm to the other man in his clumsy gait and too loud laugh that Wolfwood was not immune to. “So, how do you use a postule?”

“Poultice. It’ll just rest against the wound. Snug, but I won’t press it too hard. The worst seems to have passed so this is more precaution. I’ll be careful, I promise,” Vash gives him a knowing look then gestures Wolfwood closer. “Let me get a look.”

Vash works carefully: unwinding the bandage looped around his ribs, sliding the once-white poultice free. The linen is stained dark red but surprisingly the skin beneath it has stitched itself a shiny pink. A fresh new scar.

“Wow, you healed even faster than I thought you would!” Vash declares.

Surprised, Wolfwood twists just enough to cross-check Vash’s statement: sure enough, the wound has healed into a jagged, pink scar weaving down his ribcage. It stands out on Wolfwood’s darker complexion next to older scars gone silvery.

“I’ve never healed so quickly from anything,” he sputters. Knife wounds, claw marks, cigarette burns—all of them had healed with time and moderate negligence, taking months to stitch themselves back together.

Vash is practically sparkling as he traces the edge of new skin like he was lost in wonderment. His feather-light touch makes the sore muscle jump.

“Knock it off,” Wolfwood simmers. “Leave a guy some dignity!”

“That’s very Matthew of you.”

“You like M-names.”

Vash resumes cleaning up the remnants of Wolfwood’s Very Bad Night. He takes his time wiping away dried blood gone dark and disinfecting Wolfwood’s bare torso, gentle in a way that makes Wolfwood want to peel off his own skin. After a more thorough inspection of the magically-healed wound Vash declares him free to bathe.

“Do you think you can make it out to the main room?” Vash asks, setting his fancy little poultice aside.

“If I fall, are you gonna leave me there?”

“Probably not,” Vash shrugs.

Wolfwood pretends to consider the offer. “Well, probably the best I’ll get from a weirdo hiding in the mountains. Help me up, Spikey!” he demands, making grabby hands at the other man.

Vash side-eyes him. “I’ll let it slide for now,” he decides before taking Wolfwood’s hands in his own.

The two of them shuffle Wolfwood to the edge of the bed and the lycanthrope is pained to realize how much his body fights his every movement: a bullet wound and a few days in bed, and suddenly he couldn’t stand anymore? Humiliating, really.

“Do you, ah, want to put pants on before you get up?” Vash asks, grimacing. He’s not meeting Wolfwood’s eyes. His embarrassment is palpable.

“I mean, I’ll just have to take them off again to bathe. Feels like a lot of extra work.”

Pink-cheeked, Vash agrees. For all his flustering he’s kindly clinical with the way he grasps Wolfwood’s bare waist, tossing Wolfwood’s other arm over his shoulders to steady him. He keeps his eyes forward as they budge their way across the room and down the hall into the front room.

It seems to be the only other room in the house. Everything is the same dark wood as the room Wolfwood had been residing in except for a lopsided table and bookshelf. Two windows let the last dregs of daylight in to warm the room.

Vash deposits him in one of the two chairs at the table, laying a blanket over his lap and another across his shoulders, before scurrying off to light the candles scattered about the room. The sun is beginning to sink.

Wolfwood runs his thumb along the rough edge of the tabletop. The cut is a little uneven, the staining too light and splotchy. Novice-made at best and that was being kind.

“Whoever sold you this table gave you a raw deal, Spikey. Where’d you get it?”

Vash pauses where he had been lighting a tapered candle on the fireplace mantle and pouts. “I made it.”

Oops.

“It’s a nice cabin.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t make that,” Vash snorts. He finishes his task and discards his matches in favor of a bright red coat hung over the back of the second chair. “Found it empty except for a family of raccoons and some spiderwebs. Lucky me, huh? I need to go out back to grab firewood. Think you’ll be okay for a few minutes, Charles?”

“I can’t answer for a Charles, but I think I’ll make it just fine.”

“Damn, I’m usually better at guessing games than this,” Vash smiles in a way that makes Wolfwood feel like he’s missing out on the punchline of a joke.

“Don’t quit your day job, nurse Vash.”

The stranger disappears out the front door with a flurry of snow and Wolfwood takes the time to peek around the home.

It’s cozy. Especially with all the candles and sleek spruce wood. It’s clearly a well-loved home with little shelves of knick-knacks and dried herbs and an overflowing bookcase—not exactly neat or organized but clearly well-kept in its own way. A small counter with a knife block and a large metal tub tucked into the corner. Two windows look out into the darkening, snowy meadow with sun-yellowed drapery.

Both sparse and cluttered somehow. Cared after by a man with nothing but time yet who didn’t seem to want for much. And certainly no obvious sign of murderous intent unless he planned on using his kitchen knives – which, clearly, would be in bad taste.

Vash returns with an intimidating armful of chopped firewood and begins arranging them in the gaping maw of the fireplace. “Tried to grab enough for the night. It’s starting to snow again and I don’t want to go back out there,” he shivers. “Did you plan your escape route while I was gone?”

“No, but I think I’ve figured out what you are.”

Vash glances over his shoulder. “Did you now?”

“The Bull of Minos,” Wolfwood declares, crossing his arms on the table to rest his head. The sudden fatigue is equal parts new and unwelcome.

Vash turns fully then, eyeing him in confusion. “Why’s that?”

“Because of all the bullshit.”

Vash does that ugly laugh again—the one that’s a little too loud, that makes him snort when he can’t catch his breath. Wolfwood thinks if he had been standing it would have bowled him over.

“You’re so close,” Vash simpers. All bright grins where he crouches in front of the unlit fire.

Setting up the bath as the logs catch is an ordeal: the stranger drags the metal tub to the fireplace before beginning the arduous task of shoveling buckets of snow from the meadow to heat over the fire. It takes long enough for Wolfwood to start shivering beneath his blankets. The thought of a hot bath sounds mythical at that point.

“Sorry I can’t help, Spikey.”

“I’m sure you are,” Vash grumbles.

With the tub mostly full, Vash helps Wolfwood to his feet. The lycanthrope takes a moment to stand by it and let the steam waft over him. It’s a comfort so surprising Wolfwood feels like he might collapse right there—but Vash has a firm grip on his arm, nervously glancing anywhere but at how Wolfwood half-clutches the blanket to his hips.

“I can leave if that would make you comfortable,” Vash offers as he points at the door. “Do a lap around the pine trails.”

“Trying to step out to pick up some more vicious woodland critters? Am I not enough for you, Spikey?” Wolfwood titters. He presses a hand over his heart, pouting like Vash seems prone to do and it does the job of drawing the man’s gaze.

“Of course you are, uh… Franklin?”

“These guesses are somehow getting more insulting.” Wolfwood looks down into the deep tub with its high lip and sleek metal sides glimmering in the low light. It was a hazard for his rehabilitating ass just waiting to happen. “I wouldn’t mind it if you stayed, by the way.”

Vash quirks one of his dark brows. “I can wait in the room.”

“Here’s fine,” Wolfwood admits—and when he finally pulls his nervous gaze back the other man looks scandalized. “Don’t look at me like that! What if I fall?”

“You’re just trying to mess with me,” Vash accuses.

“There are far less humiliating ways of doing that than having my dick out in a stranger’s house,” Wolfwood holds his hand out, palm-up and begging. “Can you help me in the tub?”

Vash glances down at the blanket still wrapped around his body. “You’ll need to take that off, you know.”

Wolfwood loosens his death-grip on the soft knit blanket and sloppily balls it up with his free hand. Body completely bare, skin goose-pimpled at the touch of cool air, he holds it out to Vash with his most charming smile. Vash takes it in hand and tosses it onto the table behind him without looking.

“I’m helping,” Vash takes his hand. “But I want you to know that I think you’re insufferable.”

“You wound me.”

The other man’s hands are calloused, still a little wet and cold from the snow. It fits snugly under Wolfwood’s and it feels a comfort of its own.

The first touch of hot water is heaven. Wolfwood didn’t believe in a god anymore, certainly not now with his ailment, but if there was a loving paradise at the end of the tunnel surely it wouldn’t be clouds—it would be a hot bath up to your neck after a sordid ordeal.

Wolfwood doesn’t realize he’s made a noise at the sensation till he hears Vash splutter and scuttle away to tidy up the blankets on the table.

“Sorry to offend your delicate sensibilities, darling.” Wolfwood sinks lower to hang his head over the tub. Vash is at the table, only his back and bright red ears visible. “Why are you so scared to look at me?”

“I’m not scared I’m just trying to be polite. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

Wolfwood supposes he can mark ‘pervert’ off his list of concerns.

“Who said I’d be uncomfortable?”

Vash tosses his head like an irritable cat and stalks from the room. “I’m ignoring you.”

He lets Vash go without a fuss and focuses on the task at hand: scrubbing days worth of grime from his busted human body. Shouldn’t being transformed keep him tidier, what with all the fur? He can’t keep a pair of pants but he also can’t get rid of a splatter of mud from two days ago when he’d been gutting a deer? What a scam.

Vash returns with a single towel and a cut of homemade soap, complete with little dried herbs mixed into the oil. A quick sniff shows it to be something bright and floral.

“Lavender,” Vash says. He smiles as he watches Wolfwood sniff curiously at it and the lycanthrope suddenly feels bashful to be seen acting like a nosy pup. “I grew it myself.”

“Do you grow a lot of things out here?”

“I try. I don’t have the greenest thumb,” Vash admits. “The mountain has a lot of wildlife on it, though. I just try to never take more than I need.”

“Sounds like a paradise,” Wolfwood muses. The only sound for a long moment is the sluice of water as Wolfwood shuffles about to lather the dirt away, and the thought comes to him slowly that Vash had not answered.

The stranger sits at the table, angled away from Wolfwood’s body, but Wolfwood can spot the distant look on his face regardless. “Did I say something wrong, Spikey?”

“No!” Vash startles. “No, no not at all. I was just thinking,” he stutters for a moment, clearly uncomfortable with whatever thought has come to mind. “It can just be a bit quiet, sometimes. Boring.”

Wolfwood tries to keep his tone light as he asks, “Get a lot of visitors out here?”

“Used to.”

He’s lonely, Wolfwood realizes. He’s lonely and pretty and sits here nursing Wolfwood back to health as if it mattered to him. Wolfwood feels like he’s fallen ass-first into a cheesy harlequin novel like the ones some of the nuns used to hide under their beds. The ones where pretty-faced heroes pressed their lovers to the wall or kissed them senseless in the rain.

Flustered at his own turn of thoughts, Wolfwood resumes his scrubbing with renewed vigor. The water melts to a dingy grey as he works. He’s able to reach most of his body with minimal strain, only a twinge or two when he puts too much pressure on his new scar, but keeping his arms raised to scrub at his hair after everything else feels like pushing a rock uphill.

He lets his arms flop down to the tub rim and whines. “Spikey?” The other man hums but Wolfwood is too drained to try to catch his eye. “I can’t wash my hair. It hurts to keep my arms up.”

“Then lower your head.”

“It hurts to bend that far. Spiiiikey,” he finally turns then and Vash is watching him, chin propped on his fist, but he hasn’t budged an inch. “You won’t help the wounded?”

“Just dunk your head,” he grins.

Wolfwood does his best to look pathetic. “You’re being cruel.”

“This seems like a lot of work. What’s in it for me?”

Wolfwood feels his insides tremble. He prays it doesn’t show on his face, nor his embarrassment at how quickly he had jumped with the notion of payment.

“I won’t stink up your house,” Wolfwood tells him flatly.

Vash, looking unconvinced, stands and crosses the room to kneel just behind Wolfwood—close enough that he can feel the heat of his body, the cool pass of his breath.

Or maybe it was just the sensation of wishful thinking. The anticipation of the other man’s hands on his body, being the centre of his focus. Wolfwood is suddenly grateful the dark water hides him from the waist down.

Vash meticulously lathers some of that lavender in his hands, “Tilt your head back.”

Wolfwood obeys without thought. He bears his neck, eyes closed and completely at whatever mercy Vash sees fit as he works his fingers through the matted curls. He runs his nails along his scalp just rough enough to raise goosebumps then follows the line of baby curls along the nape of his neck.

It feels incredible. Wolfwood is pinned by the feeling, the way it stretches from his scalp to his entire body and makes him shudder. He can’t remember the last time someone had touched him so fearlessly, so firmly, willing to dig into the grime of him. Vash is just this side of rough as he sloughs off days’ worth of dirt and blood and the tang of near-death. It takes conscious effort for Wolfwood to not embarrass himself.

“Sit up and scoot forward,” Vash nudges him upright and suddenly Wolfwood realizes he had been melting in his hands, tipping backwards thoughtlessly. Operating on some submissive instinct he hadn’t considered. Feeling Vash’s eyes on his neck, he darts forward to put space between them. His heart is pounding.

Vash uses a lopsided clay cup to rinse out the suds, fingers shaking the lather free. Wolfwood thinks he might start shaking. Might throw himself into Vash’s arms, might accidentally vocalize the feeling creeping up his spine—realizes he wishes Vash wouldn’t stop.

A final pass through his sodden hair and Vash chirps, “I think you’re done!” as if Wolfwood wasn’t having a crisis.

“Finally,” Wolfwood sighs, voice and shoulders tight. “The water is getting cold.”

“Mouthy.” Vash pokes at his shoulder. He retrieves the cloth towel he had laid out beforehand. He holds it out, eyes on Wolfwood’s face, a perfect picture of unbothered. As if he wasn’t devastating and handsome and incredible with his hands.

Was he being toyed with? He can’t read any intentions in the way Vash’s eyes crinkle with his smile, but it charms him nonetheless.

Wolfwood stands, dripping in the biting air, and takes the offered towel to cover himself quickly. Vash gives him a smile that’s a little too vicious. The useless organ behind his healing ribs stutters over itself at the glint of his grin.

“Let’s get you dressed before you corrupt my virtue with your hedonistic ways.”

“Is it hedonistic if I didn’t have a choice?”

Vash pops back around with his offered clothing to where Wolfwood is still bare and shivering in the front room.

Perched on the kitchen chair, Wolfwood sidles the soft drawstring pants as high up his lower body as he is able—when he stands and pulls them over his hips there’s the pinch of an agitated nerve, the twinge of a muscle overworked, and Wolfwood feels himself crumple to the floor.

Vash catches him before he can hit the hardwood. Chest-to-chest, an arm wrapped around his bare waist to press along the length of his spine, Vash is suddenly there as if he hadn’t been across the room stoking the fire. His other hand lands fleetingly on Wolfwood’s other hip. The touch raises a chill along his entire body.

“You should be careful,” Vash tells him. He’s far too close—or still too far, depending on which hedonistic want he chooses to run with—and he smells like lavender and fire starter and there’s a boldness in him that makes Wolfwood remember he’s being played with.

The thought is enticing.

“I thought I’d take my chances and crack my head open on your floor.”

“That’d be an awful mess for me to clean up.”

“What, no mops in the mountains?”

“I just hate cleaning,” Vash grins, wide and boyish. “Besides—I think I’d miss your company if you died on my kitchen floor.”

“Sounds like you’re going soft on me. Maybe I’ve tricked you.”

“Mm,” Vash’s gaze flickers around Wolfwood’s face. “I don’t think so.”

Wolfwood laughs—at the absurdity, the frustration of his limitations. So he presses his forehead to Vash’s firm shoulder and laughs. The hand on his side pets at his scar.

“You’re ridiculous. Help me into the chair.”

Seated, Vash circles around behind him to pull his sweater overhead. It gets stuck partway over Wolfwood’s face, caught over his ears, and he squawks as Vash dissolves into his own laughter.

“I can’t fix it if you keep moving!” the blond gasps out.

Wolfwood can’t quite get a grip on the material. His body seems wrung out from his big bath adventure and fights him at every turn. “This is attempted murder!” he accuses.

“Hold still,” Vash giggles.

Together they manage to best the soft-knit sweater and free Wolfwood. Vash manhandles the sleeves over his exhaustion-heavy arms without waiting for Wolfwood’s complaint. It fills Wolfwood’s foggy head with half-thought visions of Vash embracing him like before—keeping all his little tired, aching pieces together.

“There,” Vash smooths a hand over Wolfwood’s shoulders while the lycanthrope droops his head over the back of the chair to groan.

“Don’t feel rushed,” Vash tells him. Wolfwood hums, confused, and watches Vash don his red coat a second time. “I mean, don’t feel like you have to leave while you’re still healing. Stay as long as you need. I meant it, earlier.” Vash comes to stand between Wolfwood’s knees. The kindness in his eyes as he gazes down at him is baffling. Wolfwood finds himself wishing to reach for him. “I like having your company.”

“Even though I’m mouthy?”

Vash gives him that glinting smile again. “Because you’re mouthy.”

It makes Wolfwood laugh. He stares up into his pretty face and feels a fondness. “You’re a strange man, Vash.”

“Likewise, Alden.”

Wolfwood clicks his tongue. “So close.”

“Ah, I’ll get it one of these days,” Vash murmurs airily before wandering towards the tub. “I’m going to dump this water.”

Wolfwood is about to offer whatever meager assistance he can muster but he watches, rapt and warm under his collar, as Vash lifts one end of the monstrous thing and drags it to the doorway as easily as if tugging along a child’s toy wagon.

“Be good while I’m gone!” he cheers, waving with his free hand, then disappears out into the night.

“Well, damn.”

The hour darkens as they sit and prattle at the table. Vash is a good listener, Wolfwood learns: asking about Wolfwood’s little brother back home, his job in the butcher shop to make ends meet, his meager schooling at the church. Wolfwood didn’t have the heart to tell Vash about much else. Felt it could only ruin the easy atmosphere and teasing camaraderie.

Vash himself doesn’t offer much else other than a few anecdotes about the continuing deer-squirrel turf war and how much he misses fried food.

“Especially donuts,” he groans, pressing his forehead to the tabletop. “I miss donuts most of all. But it’s such a hassle going down the mountain side!”

“You could move down to one of the villages in the foothills,” Wolfwood suggests.

Vash peers up at him then and his eyes look a little glassy. It’s that distant, sad look he had caught before. “I really couldn’t,” he murmurs.

Vash withdraws then to putter around his meager kitchen: pulling little vials of something dried and crushed, manifesting mugs from seemingly nowhere. Wolfwood shifts in his chair at the awkward anxiety that fills him in place of the other man’s chatter and his heels knock against a pile of books he had missed.

“Would you like some tea?”

“If you’re making some,” Wolfwood shrugs.

Wolfwood searches for any sign of a shift: a lingering gaze. Trailing hands. Or worse yet, a bitter side glance or frigid quip. The usual signs of a companion growing weary of Wolfwood’s barbed existence.

But Vash hums as he heats their water. He shows no sign of displeasure at Wolfwood’s lingering but also no salacious intent. Wolfwood figures it had all just been his imagination running away from him earlier. The storybook fancy of their cozy, secluded get away and Vash’s star-bright eyes.

With Vash’s attention averted Wolfwood tries to shake the yearning from himself – he should be grateful for Vash’s kindness, that alone was more than he deserved, but he realizes with dread that he feels crestfallen.

He was always such a greedy, ungrateful thing.

The brewing tea smells richer, warmer, than the gentle herbals Vash had drafted before. Something robust like from the fancy stores in town that Wolfwood used to pass on his way home.

Vash returns to the table but rather than slide the second mug to Wolfwood’s waiting hands, he rounds it to stand just behind Wolfwood. “Here you go.”

He leans close enough to press his chest to Wolfwood’s back—but not quite. More like the whisper of the motion. A suggestion. His arm curls around Wolfwood’s side to set the mug in front of him. It almost feels like an embrace. His breath catches.

But before Wolfwood can even consider the excitable, clawing tremble up his spine, Vash has retreated to the other side of the table. He makes a pleased noise around a drink of his own. Eyes closed and moaning around a mouthful Wolfwood knows has to be scalding.

“I hope you like this one! This past summer was the first season I managed to grow the camellias myself! They’re not quite hardy enough for the mountains, but –“ Vash continues prattling on names of shrubs or roots or trees, something of the like, as if any of it would be decipherable to Wolfwood. He glances nervously about the room and fiddles with his mug, picking at its chipped rim, doggedly avoiding Wolfwood’s gaze across from him.

Wolfwood realizes with a non-negligible amount of intrigue that perhaps Vash wasn’t indifferent to their circling fondness after all.

“What are you whittling?”

Vash appears over his shoulder at the kitchen table, watching Wolfwood work. He had commandeered one of Vash’s smaller kitchen knives to peels back layer after layer of the old bark he had fished out of the firewood pile.

Wolfwood hadn’t started his project with anything in mind but the small piece of wood has begun to take the shape of movement. Flow, flight. Maybe birdlike. It had merely been something to occupy the days as they begun to stack, one atop another, but he can feel that idle breath of almost-life in his hands now.

“No clue.”

Vash gives him a fond smile that tells Wolfwood plainly he thinks the lycanthrope is ridiculous. “Just don’t cut yourself.”

“I haven’t cut myself whittling since I was thirteen.”

“Ah,” Vash sets something on the counter. “So you do have a hobby.”

Wolfwood shrugs. He hadn’t thought of it as a hobby so much as a nervous habit: when adults toured their halls like an underfunded zoo, when the men in their white collars came around, when the days dragged a little too long.

“Was just something to do back at the orphanage. Ms Melanie always confiscated the knives I stole, though.”

“Yet you always found more,” Vash hums. His words are cheery, song-like, but they halt Wolfwood where he sits.

“Yeah, I did,” he says slowly.

Vash half-turns to him. Wolfwood can’t see his face but there’s no hitch in his voice as he offers, “I’m just assuming. Given, well,” he gestures vaguely at Wolfwood, grinning a notch too brightly for Wolfwood’s tastes.

“It’s a fair thing to assume.”

And it was, technically. It wasn’t anything extraordinary or suspicious. But something nags at the back of his mind anyway. Like the distant thunk of acorns too deep in the forest, or a swarm of wasps hidden between the thatching on a roof.

Lost in the way Vash’s strange statement had unnerved him, Wolfwood pays too little attention to the practiced motion of his knife. It cuts quick and clean through the soft pad of his thumb.

“Shit.”

He drops his project to the table and presses his thumb to his tongue. The iron tang of it is strong, familiar, and the burn of bile begins to rise. When he inspects his thumb a second time it’s still welling with thick drops of blood. One breaks away to streak a path down the back of his hand.

“Pack it with snow,” Vash tells him frantically. He’s turned away, shoulders tense. “It’ll help stop the bleeding.”

Wolfwood follows the order mindlessly and stumbles out to the porch where a solid few inches of fresh fluff has overtaken the veranda. Vash, disappointingly, doesn’t join him.

Vash arranges a rainbow of jars on the counter top. Each one has the looping scrawl Wolfwood has come to recognize as Vash’s handwriting across their little metal lids. The large pot from the wall is already bubbling over the fire.

Wolfwood hobbles his way down the hall, a little stronger day by day. He pauses in announcing himself and watches Vash’s bent head as he works. Broad-shouldered in a soft flannel with his hair flopping every direction. He looks as though he’s just rolled out of bed. An absolute mess.

Fighting through a brief bout of tongue-ties, Wolfwood asks, “What’s on the menu?”

He was hoping for a jump or a yelp or a skitter, but Vash simply pushes the blond hair from his eyes and reaches for one of the brightly-colored jars.

“Just a veggie stew. Haven’t caught anything in the traps lately. Sorry.”

Wolfwood thinks of the stray elk he had caught on the mountain side what seems like months ago—only a week before—the iron tang of blood still in his mouth as the crack of a gunshot tore through him like a gods wrath.

“I’m good on meat. Veggie stew sounds good.” A pause, twiddling his fingers as Vash continues to not look at him. He doesn’t like the way it makes him feel—adrift, pathetic. “Can I help with anything?”

Vash’s bright blue eyes peek over his shoulder. “You feeling up to it?”

“I’m sure I can cut a vegetable or two.”

“I’m not convinced, Arrun.”

The little quirk of a smile Wolfwood gets in return makes him want to run headlong into a frozen lake.

Vash pulls a large knife from a block on one of his shelves, twisting it nimbly for Wolfwood to take handle-first—and then just, turns away. Puts his back to Wolfwood and dumps out a bundle of carrots across the cutting board. Paying Wolfwood no mind.

He hands Wolfwood a deadly weapon, injury or none, and seems to think nothing of it in Wolfwood’s hands.

Whether it’s well-earned or Vash was just an idiot, he trusted Wolfwood. Or, perhaps more accurately, Vash truly wasn’t afraid of Wolfwood.

Vash hums a little under his breath. A nonsensical melody of notes that follow no measure.

“You can cut these.”

Vash slides two jars to Wolfwood’s side of the counter space. He’s still smiling.

He swears the air vibrates with Vash’s tune. As if he could glance to his side and see the notes trill through the cabin air. Wolfwood steps closer to follow his instructions and realizes they’ll be bumping elbows. Brushing shoulders.

One of Vash’s elbow knocks feels a little more intentional than the last.

“Are you trying to sabotage my carrot cutting?”

Vash peeks at the thin Julliard bits of vegetable Wolfwood had been piling and his mouth twists. “I don’t think you need help with sabotage.”

“Hey! I’m a lot of things but a bad cook isn’t one of them.”

“When did you learn to cook?”

Wolfwood hesitates. Vash had blessedly avoided asking after the minefield of Wolfwood’s less savory memories. The agonizing blur of time before he had been kicked out on his ass into adulthood isn’t something he often divulges. It changes how people look at you. They see the weight of your tragedy in every slumped posture and bad hair day. You’re less a human and more a newspaper clipping—but to balk at such a thing wasn’t even fair anymore, not with a kill count and bad luck of mythical proportions.

“I used to help cook at the orphanage, and then I did all the cooking for my brother and I once we aged out.” He chances a look at Vash’s face but he’s impassive, focused on his celery cubes and broccoli stalks. “I’d bet money I’m a better cook than you.”

Vash throws his head back and laughs. “That’s not hard to be. I’m awful.”

“That soup you made before was pretty good.”

“Ah, that was special,” Vash winks. “A secret recipe.”

The wink sends a shooting, ailing thrill through him. In a panic, Wolfwood changes the topic.

“What are you doing to that poor celery?” He pokes at a wayward piece with the point of his knife. They were less cubes and more… oblongs? Half-stars? A mountain silhouette?

Vash pushes the ill-shaped mound of greenery towards him. “Finish them for me, Mr Chef?”

“Was this all a con to get me to cook?”

“No,” Vash pouts but Wolfwood is unconvinced. “Would that have worked?”

“Maybe,” Wolfwood returns his wink and the shocked little smile that overtakes Vash’s face feels like the grandest victory. He nudges Vash aside by his waist but lets his hand linger. “Go check the broth. I’ll dice up all this.”

“Really?” Vash slumps into him, batting his eyes.

“Not if you keep being a brat.”

“I’m not good at much else these days.”

“I can tell.”

“Hey!”

Vash squawks at him from the fireplace about young men these days and their lack of manners. Wolfwood tunes him out on accident when he gets distracted by Vash’s pretty silhouette—painted warm and soft by the fire, shamelessly bent over to tend to the stew base.

Wolfwood makes quick work of the canned vegetables Vash had laid out and the other man dons his red coat to rinse their empty jars outside. “Clean as we go!” he chirps.

“What’s this we business?” Wolfwood grumbles—but it’s just his nature. He likes feeling useful, capable. Cooking for one and hiding away in a single room shack to spare his brother the pain of watching him become a monster month by month had worn him down. It was his duty now as something other to sequester himself, at least if he wanted to keep his bloodshed to a proprietary minimum. But that didn’t mean he had to like the solitude.

He couldn’t stay with Vash. He knew that. But it was fun to pretend. To embrace the domesticity of stirring their dinner to prevent the bottom from scalding and nitpicking Vash’s spice shelf. It was just nice to hear the comfort of a voice other than his own or the frightened chitter of stalked prey.

“We make a real good team!” Vash cheers around a second bowl.

Wolfwood thinks to make some remark about Vash spending more time perched on the counter than cooking. But he feels weak and a little soppy with the sentiment. He wants to lean into this little haven Vash has given him. It would be too soon he’d have to give it up.

“We do, Spikey.”

Their meal leaves them too full to do much else than complain about being too full. Then Vash procures a bottle of something rich and amber from a cabinet and somehow they’re no longer quite as full. It all makes Wolfwood a victim of nostalgia.

“Livio was so sick of soups and stews and all that shit. I made them all the time because they were cheap. He came home from work one day, saw the pot on the stove, and asked me if we could eat something solid for once.”

He can see it in his mind’s eye still: Livio groaning, framed by the front door he had painted blue because it was something they had put on their Future Home List when they weren’t even double digits yet. A blue front door and potted plants on the front steps. That was all they had wanted.

Wolfwood wonders how those plants are doing. If Livio has drug them inside to brace them from the bitter air without his brother’s nagging reminder. Wolfwood had accidentally destroyed the mini roses underfoot the last night he had been there.

Around a sip, Vash asks, “Do you ever plan to go back?”

“No,” Wolfwood shakes his head. “No, I don’t want to risk it.”

He lifts his glass to take a drink, to steady himself against the ache of missing his family, when the thought strikes him nearly sideways.

“Did I… Did I tell you I had left? That I had left my brother?”

Vash’s eyes cut to his. His glass is held against his mouth, prepped for a second swill, and it hides his expression. “The other night, yeah,” the man murmurs. “When we were talking about the garden you two had started. You said he was scared of the field mice.”

He hadn’t. Wolfwood knows with a beguiling certainty that he hadn’t. His curse, the noxious choice to abandon his brother. He had never even said a proper goodbye. The sun had begun to set and Wolfwood had felt his bones ache and he had fled in a desperate bid. Livio at his back, screaming and pleading. It was his greatest guilt, too heavy a shame to unload on another.

He had not told this beautiful stranger those haunting memories, of that he was sure.

“I didn’t,” Wolfwood argues. His voice is pathetic and soft. He’s still confused.

“Wolfwood,” Vash murmurs in that placating way he has. “You did.”

Wolfwood’s head feels fuzzy. Gauzy. He hadn’t had more than a shot of Vash’s aged bourbon but he feels loose and bold like a trawling night at the bar.

“I didn’t. I know I didn’t. How would you know about that?”

“I know because you told me, Wolfwood, please.”

But that’s not right, either, is it? Vash’s begging hangs between them but it only serves to daze Wolfwood further—it was wrong, felt wrong, what was it? Wrong wrong wrong—

“I never gave you my name, either,” Wolfwood realizes. Vash grimaces as if he had called a lover the wrong name in bed, not like he had turned Wolfwood’s brain inside out. It’s too nonchalant.

“Oops.”

Wolfwood’s stomach sinks and turns acrid.

“What, d’ja stalk me? Been followin’ me for months?”

Vash holds up both hands, “I never saw you before I found you in the woods. I swear it.”

“How’d you find me, anyway? Pretty convenient—all this forest and you manage to scoop me up and bring me home before I die?”

“You weren’t far from here and you left a trail of blood a mile long! I could smell you before I even opened my door!”

Vash’s tone spirals to something desperate and Wolfwood’s reservations rear their head: murderer, stalker, Helsing, pervert, experimentalist. He could still be bleeding out in the snow and this was all a final cruel joke by whatever god had put a target on his back.

“How am I supposed to believe you? Huh?” He stands but the movement is too sudden. The pain in his side is sharp. He has to catch himself on the table edge.

“I don’t want to hurt you!” Vash’s eyes are glassy, hands outstretched as if to catch Wolfwood as he staggers, even now. “Dammit.”

Vash turns his head away. His face is red like embarrassment, like a flood of tears about to burst. He rubs at his eyes but otherwise makes no move to grab at Wolfwood or reach for a weapon. He sits, pathetically, and lets the silence swell.

With a longing to be wrong, Wolfwood sits.

“How do you know that shit? About my brother and my name?”

He’ll give him a chance, he decides. He’ll give him a chance to explain. Maybe Wolfwood had run his mouth and simply forgotten. Maybe Vash had passed through his town and they spoke in a park or in the butcher’s shop.

Vash had taken a gamble on him. Wolfwood decides he’s willing to do the same, at least this once.

He doesn’t want it to just be a fanciful jaunt through near-death, he knows. He doesn’t want the way Vash looks at him to be a placeholder for a performance he hadn’t bought a ticket to see.

“I just,” Vash stutters and the nervousness of it is unsettling in its way. “I just know things, sometimes.”

“You know that’s a really shit answer, right?”

For a long moment Vash simply stares, mouthing working around silent, desperate explanations that he can’t quite bring himself to give. Wolfwood waits.

“I—I catch bits and pieces, sometimes,” Vash eventually mutters and waves a flippant hand at Wolfwood. “Passing thoughts. Memories, if they’re strong enough. They’re just extra voices in the room.”

“The hell’s that mean?” Wolfwood snaps. “My thoughts? You been reading my mind?”

“Not on purpose!” Vash bursts—like he thinks that’s Wolfwood’s point of contention. “I try to stop it most of the time. It’s exhausting the way human brains constantly throw out thought after thought. I try to block it but—I mean, you, I couldn’t get you out of my mind.”

Regardless of his nature, Wolfwood had haunted him in some enticing way. Whatever veil-less version of Wolfwood he had glimpsed had drawn him in. It shouldn’t thrill him, but dangerously, it does.

“You said human,” Wolfwood takes a swig. “Implying that you’re not.”

“I’m always talking myself into trouble,” Vash pouts.

“What are you then?”

“In the words of the only friend I ever made: an idiot.”

“They seem wise.”

“She was,” Vash murmurs. He seems downtrodden, all the mirth of a hearty meal and warm drink swept away. “I meant what I said before. You’re not a prisoner here, you can leave when you want. I like having you here but I won’t keep you. Definitely not now. I’d understand. I can help lead you down the mountain.”

“Who said I want to leave?”

Vash’s eyebrows arch. “Who says you shouldn’t?”

Wolfwood stares at him: pretty and soft and sad. A lonely creature staring into the face of some error he had been trying to avoid. With a dash of hopefulness Wolfwood had thought the world had already tamped out of him, he wants to believe Vash. That he’s just a harmless idiot.

“Answer me three questions,” Wolfwood suddenly demands. His enthusiasm takes Vash by surprise. “What are you?”

“Not a human. Not a person, really.”

“That’s not an answer, Vash,” he sighs.

Vash crosses his arms and leans back in his chair. “It’s an answer, it’s just not the one you want.”

“We’ll circle ‘round: why are you living out here alone?”

“To lure handsome travelers into my bed then gut them for fun,” Vash rolls his eyes but Wolfwood doesn’t budge. He suddenly finds that he has all the patience in the world. “I just wanted to be left alone. I wanted to make sure I couldn’t hurt anyone and they couldn’t hurt me. Trying to live like people do, it got… tiring. I was tired.”

Wolfwood can sympathize with that much. Vash’s forlorn expression and deflated posturing give Wolfwood confidence.

“Three: were you really going to skim me on a bet when you already knew my name?”

“I kept giving wrong answers, you can’t call that skimming! Besides, Wolfwood is a family name, right? I don’t know your given name. Even in your own mind it doesn’t crop up—which, for the record, is weird.”

The thought of his given name makes something behind his ribs twinge. “Only one person ever really called me by it,” he murmurs. The image of Livio, small and terrified in an orphanage hallway calling after him pops into mind before Wolfwood can remember Vash’s terrible party trick. He slaps a hand over his forehead and warns, “Don’t!”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Vash bursts out laughing.

“What does it work like?”

“That’s four questions,” Vash points out but at Wolfwood’s withering look he sighs. “There’s no hard and fast rule for it. Sometimes I hear someone’s thoughts like they had said it out loud. Other times I can see it in my mind like it’s my own memory. It’s just bits and pieces and like I said, I try to tune it out. Most human thoughts are about food and sex.”

“Can we say we’re any better?” Wolfwood snorts.

As he’s taking a fortifying sip, Vash grins, “Well, you’re definitely not.”

Like a horrific memoir album Wolfwood recalls his appreciative stares at Vash’s willowy figure. Eyeing the way he bent forward to fetch items from lower shelves or the way his sweaters fit a little snug over his shoulders and biceps. He was a pretty picture that Wolfwood had spent plenty of his time admiring. And if he had in passing considered tasting his skin or kneeling between his legs, well—he had thought that was fucking private. Shit.

Wolfwood chokes.

“Oh dear,” Vash pops up at his side to pat him on the back. It’s more mortifying than reassuring as Wolfwood is facing the realization that his fantasies might have been as brazenly on display as a magazine cover.

God that is fucking embarrassing.

“Fuck, that burns,” Wolfwood chokes out.

“Maybe I should have delivered that one a little more gentle-like,” Vash simpers. Probably thinks he sounds sympathetic but Wolfwood just hears the gleeful undertone.

“Peeking in my head feels voyeuristic, so I wouldn’t point fingers,” Wolfwood gets out after a final bout of embarrassing throat clearing.

“It was never intentional. Your thoughts are just loud. Besides, who said I minded?”

Wolfwood tries to look at Vash’s face as if the act would prove he was unafraid by the gnawing thing between them but it’s like staring into the sun. He feels too hot, his heart seems to be misfiring, and it all feels so unfair. “You’ll be the death of me, Spikey.”

“That’s definitely not what I want.”

It feels good to hear the other man laugh even if the tune is subdued and a little insecure. It feels right, Vash’s hand on his shoulder and his body near enough to draw Wolfwood to him like a star. His common sense is properly shaken but he can’t find the momentum for his worry to pry him away.

He liked Vash. That was the short of it. And knowing that Vash himself carried this heavy burden of other as well only endeared him further. It was camaraderie, not a warning.

“I love being right,” he eventually grins.

They spend the drawling hours of evening playing a drinking game—but it’s less of a game and more of a series of questions they each beg off answering properly.

“You really won’t tell me what you are? I doubt you’re a lycanthrope since you found me on the full moon, so that’s one less,” Wolfwood tilts this way and that in his seat as if he might find the one angle to show Vash’s truest self. Maybe he was a little deeper in the bourbon than he thought.

“It’s—difficult,” Vash starts haltingly. “I don’t really like to talk about it.”

“What if I can guess it?”

“I doubt you can.”

“But what if I can?”

“I don’t know,” Vash rests his chin on his fist. They’d since shuffled the chairs to sit catty-corner, bumping knees and thighs under the table. Vash’s socked foot knocks against his. “What if you can? Do you win something?”

“Your hand in marriage,” Wolfwood simpers dramatically—likes the way Vash laughs.

“Maybe something more realistic.”

Wolfwood is struck with the drunken thought of taking Vash’s hand in his and kissing the laughter off his lips. He liked his smile. A lot. It was too easy to imagine his soft mouth sweetened with the taste of bourbon and his cheek warm where he would cradle it in his palm.

“Oh,” Vash chirps. He turns a wondrous shade of pink. “That one was loud.”

Oh, fucks sake.

“What does that mean?” Wolfwood gripes. “This ‘seeing my mind’ business hardly feels fair!”

“Why not just ask plainly then?”

Wolfwood splutters and it’s embarrassing how much the idea of broaching the subject of such a thing throws him off kilter.

Vash presses a little more firmly against his foot. “Go on.”

“If I win,” Wolfwood breathes, “Can I kiss you?”

“Oh, Mr Wolfwood!” Vash fans himself like one of the church ladies at mass. “How forward! Sins of the flesh? What kind of man do you take me for!”

It’s cute. Vash is cute. There’s an earnestness in his goofy nature that just feels sweet and Wolfwood is beginning to recognize that he craves it like a coveted dessert, the kind that were few and far between in his childhood poverty.

“Oh, fuck right off,” Wolfwood laughs, face hot, and reaches to playfully shove him—but Vash catches his hand and draws him in, arms twined around Wolfwood’s own. They’re nearly nose-to-nose and Wolfwood goes silent.

“What if I win? What if I guess your given name before that, what do I get?”

“What do you want?” Wolfwood stutters out. With no fancy ability to read his mind, the lycanthrope is stuck watching the way his bright blue eyes flicker down to his lips, then noticeably lower.

“I’ll have to think on it.”

“Bastard.”

Vash smiles and Wolfwood realizes he might be in trouble. “Do your best for me.”

Chapter Text

“How old are you exactly?”

There were a number of creatures that could pass decades or centuries as if they had been frozen in time—but everything had a lifecycle. Even the mystical world wilted and suffered rebirth in fits. If Vash’s allusions to a hefty number weren’t just bluster it could narrow the mythical list down to something useful.

“I don’t have an exact number—and besides, it’s rude to ask a gentleman his age.”

“So probably old as hell if you don’t remember.”

“I didn’t say I don’t remember. You’re just trying to cheat.”

“Fine. A naiade?”

Vash makes an obnoxious incorrect sound and smirks. “My turn—what does your name start with?”

“Okay that is cheating.”

“A kistune?” Wolfwood mumbles around a bite of fried tubers on a sunny afternoon. The light reflecting off the snow in the meadow keeps getting in his eyes but Vash looks like he’s glowing and Wolfwood likes how the other man hooks his feet behind Wolfwood’s ankles, so he’s loathe to move.

“I’m flattered, but no.”

“You’re sneaky like a fox,” Wolfwood argues. Vash doesn’t appreciate that quite as much.

Vash is stretched languidly across the floor at Wolfwood’s feet to watch the lycanthrope whittle some stray debris from the forest into what he had hoped to be a bird in flight but was looking more like a mare. Vash’s stare made him nervous.

“Is it Old Dialect?”

“Common,” Wolfwood corrects. There’s such a sea of possibilities it doesn’t feel unfair to give away. Vash hums and makes a show of thinking up how to snake more information for his cause.

“Will you tell me what letter it starts with?”

“You ask this every time,” Wolfwood nudges him and scrambles when the other man makes a grab for his leg. “I’m not giving the man with the ability to riffle around my mind any more hints! Put in some effort, Spikey.”

Vash flops to lay spread-eagle and whines, “I am but there’s so many names!”

“Guess you better get to asking.”

“Benedict.”

“Like the Saint?” Wolfwood balks. Vash nods enthusiastically. “Gods, you’re bad at this.”

Vash’s traps snag a hare. Belatedly, Wolfwood realizes that Vash had never intended such a thing. The other man seems put off by that fact, twitchy and distraught in that withdrawn way he sometimes has, so Wolfwood offers to take care of the starved thing on Vash’s behalf.

He leans over the little thing. Scarce with the depth of winter, frightened in a way Wolfwood too readily recognizes. Releasing it back into the forest would be no less a cruelty. So he prays soft and sure under his breath like the nuns had taught him—minds his manners and gives his thanks—then makes quick work of the task. It’s a familiar kindness, but he feels no joy from the fact.

Grateful, Vash offers to cook what meager cuts Wolfwood had been able to salvage.

“The winter’s been harsh for everyone, I suppose,” Vash tells him but it lacks his usual optimism. He moves stiffly like he’s lost in his own kitchen. His mind is elsewhere. Wolfwood tries to imagine the mild-mannered man skinning and dressing these creatures, hands bloody out of necessity, but he can’t reconcile the two: the harsher cycles of life with the nervous man in front of him.

Softly, Wolfwood muses, “You could be a Moon Rabbit.”

Vash looks up from where he had been preparing the fire. Its light paints him warmer, so soft it almost looks like a veil has come between them. As if he was another world away.

“All your little potions and elixirs,” Wolfwood half-jests. He gestures at the jars and vials lining the walls. They’re filled to bursting with herbs and roots and bright, crushed petals. A rabbit-hearted creature, at least, but that Wolfwood does not say.

“Interesting,” Vash smiles wanly. Whatever thought has crossed his mind seems to have amused him in some gentle way, but he still turns away, much to Wolfwood’s disappointment. “But wrong. Sorry, Mr Wolfwood.”

Wolfwood sighs and collapses at the table as if the news has dispatched him. If he thought about it too long, he could see the routine of it all: a thousand and one mornings at this table. Doing the bloody work of living to spare Vash the sight. Passing questions back and forth like a well-loved bottle of brandy.

The future had always been harrowing. But softened by Vash’s raucous laughter it felt less like a noose.

“It’s your turn,” Wolfwood reminds him. At Vash’s curious sound he adds on, “To ask a question.”

The fat of the meal sizzles as the pan heats over the open flame. The sound makes Wolfwood think of holiday mornings and meals laden with the rich syrups they could never afford.

“Let me think, then.”

He’s distracted. It digs at Wolfwood and he feels the burgeoning need to draw his eye.

“What if I gave you a hint?”

“What, and sacrifice all your principles?”

“I can be benevolent.”

“Well, if you’re keen to be so gracious, I’d never complain.”

“All you do is complain.”

Vash turns and the glint of his smile is a little overwhelming after an exhausting morning while still on the mend, but it soothes some of the ache the pitiful creature had carved into him. “Were you going to give me a hint or not?”

Wolfwood takes a lingering moment to form the letter in his mind. He envisions it boldly drawn, an uppercase, and for some odd reason a sky blue. It sits behind his eyes like a missive waiting to be delivered.

“What letter am I thinking of?” he asks, unable to contain his excitement. Getting to poke and prod at Vash’s strange abilities evoked the same gnawing curiosity that often made him the orphanage troublemaker or sitting out meals locked in a room.

Vash watches him for a moment. His expression shifts a little oddly. It’s a silly but endearing show of concentration. “You’re a bit shuttered off today. You really don’t want me to know your name, do you?”

The question isn’t unkind but Wolfwood starts in surprise. He did: he did want Vash to know. He wanted him to work for it then plop his find at Wolfwood’s feet like a self-satisfied cat, smiling, see? I can know you. I can see what you are.

“You can’t hear it? Or see it?”

“Not today,” Vash shrugs. “But…”

When the strange man doesn’t jump to conclude his thought Wolfwood tosses his balled up handkerchief at where Vash leans, languid and thoughtful, against the cabin wall. “But what? You’re so dramatic.”

“Being rude gets you no answers!”

Wolfwood puts on his best pout, trying to be beseeching or alluring or some distant field between. “What’s on your mind?”

“Just,” Vash twiddles his fingers again—a tell-tale sign that he was about to say something embarrassing, Wolfwood now knew. “Sometimes it works better with touch. Like if we’re touching in some way?”

Wolfwood thinks of all the lingering touches as Vash cleaned his wound or helped him lumber out of bed to use the outhouse. Hands on his waist and shoulders, fingers twined in his hair when he bathed, fingers brushing over mugs and utensils and chair backs. How many little wayward memories had Vash caught like butterflies in a net?

“Sounds like a ploy,” he snorts. “If you wanted to hold my hand you could have just asked.”

“Who says I want to?” Vash huffs. He crosses his arms and tosses his head. “You’re rather presumptuous, Mr Wolfwood!”

“You brought it up!”

“Forget it!” Vash blushes. It’s a pretty shade, made ruddier by the heat of the fire. He looks like he’s regretting every choice he’s ever made.

“No, no no,” Wolfwood chides with greedy delight at Vash’s panic. He crosses the room to stop at the other man’s side, only an arms arm’s length away, and takes a full gaze of the way Vash looks fit to melt at the turn of events.

I’m always talking myself into trouble, he had sulked.

“What do I do?” Wolfwood notes belatedly he should feel more embarrassed asking after next moves like a docile virgin—neither of which he was—but it had been a long time since he had played this game, this back and forth. It felt new all over again. It felt different.

“You don’t need to do anything,” Vash squeaks.

“Do you want me to?”

“This is silly—”

“That wasn’t the question,” Wolfwood points out. Vash seemed the type to swerve around answers with as wide of a berth as he could dig. He wouldn’t give the man the ease of letting the conversation crumble.

“I wouldn’t mind, exactly.”

“But do you want me to?”

Vash chews his lip. He won’t—or can’t—raise his eyes from their socked feet, now too warm from lingering too long and too close to the fire. Shoulders rolling back like he’s steeling himself for a war, he firmly answers, “Yes.” Then, a moment later, far softer and sweeter. “Please.”

Pathetically, Wolfwood hadn’t considered getting this far. Being too forward now would seem crass, and a kiss by any degree would break their tentative deal.

Vash still seems too abashed to look him in the face. Wolfwood’s need to tease him and abate his shyness wars back and forth. He was precious, he was infuriating, he intrigued Wolfwood to no end. At no point has he felt prepared to face all the little things that Vash makes clash inside him.

With deliberate slowness, Wolfwood reaches to lay both hands high on Vash’s waist—then curls his arms around to embrace him completely. He draws Vash forward and he bends like a willow to rest his head on Wolfwood’s shoulder.

It’s the kind of hug that lays you top to toe. Enthusiastic and full-armed and cozy like a little cabin in the pine forest lit by candlelight and a waning moon. Wolfwood could count the number of times he had done such a thing on one hand. The number of times he had received one was even less.

Vash seems to have no moral quandary with returning the gesture: his arms loop around Wolfwood’s neck and his embrace is tighter than Wolfwood’s own by a large degree. Wolfwood thinks he can sink into the feeling. Disappear into it.

Eventually, Wolfwood murmurs, “What am I thinking of?”

Vash sluggishly draws far enough away to rest his cheek to Wolfwood’s temple. Their height difference exacerbated by the neat tuck of their bodies.

Vash sighs. Wolfwood thinks he nuzzles him, just a quick moment of nestling his cheekbone against Wolfwood’s dark waves, but it ends so quickly Wolfwood thinks he must just be feeling pathetic and mushy from it all.

Wolfwood waits. After a silent, unmoving drag of time, Vash tilts his head. “An N,” he murmurs. He presses the words to the side of Wolfwood’s head. “Your name starts with an N.”

“Well, lookit here, you finally got one right,” Wolfwood laughs.

“That’s right! Which means you’re behind now.”

“I’ll figure it out. You talk too much, you’ll give yourself away eventually.”

When Vash laughs he can feel it through his entire body. The rumble in his chest, the light-hearted jump of his shoulders. It’s soothing to have him so near. They stand there, curled close, neither willing to be the first to retreat. Wolfwood doesn’t think he ever wants to.

An acrid scent wafts by.

“Oh shit,” Vash ducks away. “The food!”

Vash bemoans letting the meal go to waste until Wolfwood steps in to salvage what he can for their dinner. He can still feel the phantom weight of Vash’s arms around him, the press of his chin to his shoulder and fingers clutched in the fabric of his borrowed sweater as he fidgets with the overcooked food, scraping and salting and shredding meat gone a little too tough.

Vash sets the table as Wolfwood finishes his task, then pours them each a glass of his fancy brandy. His smile is devastating. It leaves Wolfwood tongue-tied and downing the warm amber liquid quick enough to choke—and Vash’s stifled laugh is devastating, too. Entrancing. Wolfwood, spluttering and trying to hide his embarrassment behind a napkin, realizes he longs for the sound.

Realizes he might be in deeper than just a bet to kiss a pretty man.

Vash accompanies Wolfwood back to the bedroom. His worry is not well-hidden with the way he hovers.

“I’m fine, Spikey. I’ve been getting around just fine the last couple days. It barely even hurts anymore—I’m really just sore from laying around so much.”

“I just worry,” the blond huffs back.

It sends a thrill through Wolfwood that makes his insides feel as if they’ve knotted themselves together. Someone worried about Wolfwood—it’s a laughable concept.

Wolfwood clambers into bed and realizes he could fall into oblivion right there. He has been trying his level best to contribute by tidying the small cabin and taking Vash’s place over the cookware when he has the strength. It surprises him how, despite the speed his skin had reknit and his blood coagulated, he spends most of his days exhausted.

Movement and good conversation and the heavy weight of feeling seen and trusted all wear him down as well as a full days’ work once had. It feels a little pathetic, if he was being honest.

Eyes heavy, he spies Vash lingering by the window, “What’cha lookin’ at?”

“The moon’s got a halo again. It’ll probably snow tonight.”

“Gon’ be cold,” Wolfwood grumbles into the pillow, feeling slighted in some cosmic way between the impending snowfall and Vash’s distance.

Vash gives him an amused glance. “Yeah, it usually is during the winter.”

“But now it’s gonna be colder.”

“I’ve got plenty of firewood and food stock,” Vash leans against the sill and crosses his arms. Wolfwood decides he likes the way Vash is staring—fond, sweet. Like Wolfwood might be enticing him. “I’m sure we’ll survive.”

Wolfwood feels himself tipping steadily into that line just beyond coherent, but he scuffles with it, not yet willing to let Vash slip away. He’s digging his fingers into the sinfully soft knit blanket he has commandeered when the thought comes to him, hazy and slow.

“Where do you sleep?”

Vash blinks, eyes owlish. “Hm?”

“You let me stay here,” Wolfwood pats sleepily at the covers. “Where do you sleep?”

“Oh! Just down in front of the fire.”

“On the floor?”

Vash shrugs one shoulder. His smile is good-natured. “I don’t mind it.”

The guilt of it burns Wolfwood from the inside out: a burden, an embarrassment, a charity case. The idea of this kind man making a pile of blankets on his own floor every night so Wolfwood could drool all over his pillows is a heavy one. One he doesn’t want to abide.

“You can sleep here,” he offers. His voice comes out small, timid, and that hot embarrassment builds. It’s hardly the first time he’s offered to share a bed with someone, but Vash might never guess that with the ridiculous bashfulness Wolfwood suddenly can’t shake.

But Vash looks offended at the idea, “I’m not kicking you out of the bed.”

“I’m all healed up.”

“You’re still a guest.”

“We can share.”

The following silence makes Wolfwood think ripping his spine from his own body would be preferable. He hates how quickly the words come. How honest they are, how bare they make him feel. An emotional dressing down that felt as severe as if he had sprawled naked in the other man’s bed.

Vash is completely still, beautiful and unreadable by the candles he leaves at the bedside.

“You’re barely awake. Saying yes would feel like taking advantage,” the other man eventually murmurs but he fidgets with his matches like he isn’t sold on his own argument.

In defiance, Wolfwood sits up and shakes off those clinging dredges of sleep, anxious with an urgency he can’t place, “I don’t want you to have to sleep on the floor,” he argues. But Vash simply rolls his eyes like Wolfwood was a child asking for a third bedtime story—fond but with an air of dismissal.

“It’s really not a big deal. I’ve done it plenty of times.”

“What if I said it was a big deal to me?”

“And why,” Vash asks slyly, “would it be a big deal to you?”

Because I’ve been lost since living my life cursed. Because I can still feel how you felt when you held me by the fire and I’m an awful, greedy man.

“I was raised to be hospitable—it wouldn’t be right to send you off to sleep on the floor after all you’ve done to take care of me. The least I can do is share a bed,” he pauses, feeling too bare, “But if you snore I can’t promise I won’t knee you in the ass.”

Vash’s eyebrows arch. “Snoring isn’t half as bad as the rivers you drool.”

“So you do snore.”

“I’ve been told I sometimes snore a little bit—” he cuts off at the obnoxious laugh Wolfwood can’t choke back. Wolfwood might feel worse for Vash’s pout if he didn’t catch the little gleam of promised payback in his narrowed eyes. “What was all that just now about being hospitable, huh?”

Wolfwood makes a show of stretching out as long as the persistent stitch in his side would allow. He makes sure to leave half the bed open, its tousled blankets a message loud and clear.

“Go change and get in bed,” Wolfwood tells him.

Vash does as he’s told and scampers from the room with a haughty “harumph”. The speed at which he changes shows his defiance is all for show—he’s back at the bedside within minutes.

But they’re agonizing minutes. Just enough time for Wolfwood to lie there and imagine his new friend curled next to him, snoring in his ear or elbowing him when he tossed with a particularly irritating dream. Or maybe he was a starfish sleeper, and Wolfwood would wake at dawn with Vash sprawled across the mattress, limbs completely askew, the lycanthrope trapped beneath him.

After those few minutes for Wolfwood to fantasize about the fate he’s drawn for himself, Vash reappears in soft drawstring pants and a long-sleeve shirt—perfect to keep out the chill. Yet something in Wolfwood mourns not being able to feel their arms press together or their calves brush under the blankets.

The other man is trailing a large duvet like a child. “You’re in my spot.”

“That’s unfortunate,” Wolfwood smiles.

Playful scowl still artfully in place, Vash tramples over Wolfwood like an idiotic pet to cross to the other side. He swears he hears Vash giggle to himself as Wolfwood ‘oof’s at the stray elbow to his stomach.

“That was unnecessary,” Wolfwood complains.

“You’re a spot thief.”

“We’re sharing, it’s not thievery.”

Wolfwood allows himself to rest further into the cocoon he finds himself, but his dreamy headspace does not return. He’s too wired up with Vash next to him, not even a foot of space between, rolling about to fluff up his supplementary blanket. He tosses half over Wolfwood’s legs.

“It’s going to get colder the next few nights,” he explains at Wolfwood’s arched brows and silent glance. “A snowstorm is going to move in soon. The temperature is going to drop pretty hard. I left the fire smoldering but sometimes it’s not enough.”

“The winter’s get pretty rough this high up?”

“Usually,” Vash flops onto his back. The blankets puff around him like powdery snowfall. One of his hands land near Wolfwood’s hip—close enough that if he rolled even an inch they would touch. “The storms get trapped on this side of the mountain and the snow can pile up for days. Sometimes I can’t go out at all because I can’t even see a foot in front of me. It’s all just snow and low-lay clouds.”

Wolfwood can’t really picture it: the pines completely blotted out, the moon and sun rendered useless. Lost in a single point of the wilderness. “Do you like winter? You must love the snow to live up here like this.”

“Not at all!” Vash chirps, bizarrely. “I hate winter. It’s my least favorite season. I hate never feeling warm and how everything dies and all the animals leave. The forest is so sad this time of year. It’s depressing!”

Wolfwood blinks at him. His smile is softened by the candles that flicker just over Wolfwood’s shoulder. Hearing now how he hates this existence feels like a punch, but now Wolfwood can see it: his sunny disposition and sky-blue eyes fit with a verdant spring, or a blistering summer. The backdrop of a June thunderstorm or the bright burn of a maple tree in fall suit him.

“Why stay?”

“I’ve been here a long time,” Vash says softly.

“That doesn’t mean you can’t leave. A long time isn’t the same as forever.”

Then, even softer, like he was sharing a shameful secret, “It’s fitting. I deserve it, that much I know.”

“Deserve to suffer through winter half the year?” Wolfwood scoffs, confused. Even he knew the chill of the mountain tops wasn’t reserved for the darkest season. The climate was a serious and unforgiving one, its winters drawn out well into the summer months, snowfall from the mountain caps cutting off the pass even as the hottest days of the year baked the earth of the villages at their feet.

It was why Wolfwood himself had chosen a shack not too far from the Eastern Pass when he had tucked his tail and ran. Desolate, quiet, and cut-off from the world most of the year: though not the foggy, dense hellscape Vash had settled.

Knowing that this was something they also shared was a bit of a blow. He thinks himself half-mad with desperation to shake some sense into his companion, grab his shoulders and plead: you don’t have to stay here alone. You don’t have to stay here at all.

You could come with me, when I leave. The thought takes him by surprise, and he finds himself too stunned to voice it, letting the silence linger.

Vash cranes his head and he’s all glinting smiles and sparkling eyes again, “Besides, it makes me really appreciate it when the winter does finally thaw. Seeing the forest come back to life is something I may not have appreciated if it was so easily done—I get to see the worst of it, which means I get to see the best, too!”

“You are completely ridiculous,” Wolfwood decides.

“Think about it!” Vash rolls onto his side to face Wolfwood and it buttes them against one another. Vash gestures grandly, “The first sound of the mountain rivers when they begin to melt after months of silence because everything’s been frozen! Or—or the first fox creeping through the meadows when they haven’t been out for weeks. If I didn’t live in a place like this, if things like that were the norm, I wouldn’t look at them the same.”

“Sounds like a lot of mental work to convince yourself you don’t want to move,” Wolfwood grunts.

But, he sees it. Trying to pick through all the little things to be grateful for to balance the scale of tragedies: a particularly good sandwich at snack time, a soft bedroll stuffed into the hallway closet, a really sunny day after it had rained for weeks. A dozen and one things to list during Sunday prayer so the bruises and screaming and cold nights felt a little more distant.

He wonders what tragedies Vash is trying to outweigh.

“Well, moving does suck,” Vash agrees good-naturedly.

“You’d have to pack up all your little knick-knacks.”

“And something always gets broken when you move! I’d be inconsolable if I broke one of my little knick-knacks,” Vash intones. “I dropped a carving I had gotten from a man that sold them on the street once. I’ve never been able to replace it. I have all the little pieces in a box.”

“I can take a look at it,” Wolfwood offers quietly.

“Really?” Vash is sparkling. He’s still on his side, cheek pressed to his half of the pillow, knees curled close like a child at a sleepover. Wolfwood keeps to side glances in the hopes of not embarrassing—or tempting—himself.

“Sure,” he shrugs. “I carve, so I might be able to fix it. But no promises,” he amends when his heart stutters at Vash’s hopeful look. “I don’t want to hear your whining if I can’t.”

Vash thanks him in the low whisper of a man bewitched or bewildered. Wolfwood keeps his eyes on the ceiling and tells himself he has no want to find out which it is.

“You haven’t asked any more questions since this afternoon,” Vash pipes up in the demure silence. “I figured you’d have a list by now.”

“Elven.”

“Elven? Really? Do you really think I’m an elf,” Vash deadpans.

“You’re old but you don’t age, you’re pretty, you’re not human so—”

“What was that second one?” Vash asks quickly.

Wolfwood thought he could wedge that in there and dangle his own personal bet of whether Vash would even notice.

“You’re not human?” Wolfwood feigns confusion. Even musters the courage to quarter-turn to show off his carefully arched eyebrows and curious set of his mouth.

“Before that.”

“That you’re old?”

Vash squawks something about Wolfwood being disrespectful. But all Wolfwood can focus on is Vash’s hand curled around Wolfwood’s bicep to shake him indignantly.

“So, not an elf, then?” Wolfwood deflects.

“No, not an elf.”

Wolfwood rattles around his brain for creatures of myth and sermon and passing knowledge now that he’s been thrust beyond the veil himself. There is little that comes to mind and he knows, distantly, that Vash will win their bet. That he probably already has Wolfwood’s name tucked away and his game is a kindness. But he is willing to play along if it kept Vash smiling like that.

Acting on instinct, like the moon-full nights he is something else, he reaches out to Vash who doesn’t so much as flinch: he watches, bright-eyed and rapt, as Wolfwood catches stray golden strands between his fingers to tuck them back over his forehead.

“A Goldhorn, maybe? Living high in the mountains. I read a story about it, once, when I was little. It had been shot by a hunter and where it bled it left flowers,” he remembers.

Wolfwood thinks Vash’s eyes are glassy but if there are tears, they never fall. “No, not that, either,” he whispers. His voice wobbles.

Through the fogging glass of the window, a small flurry has begun to fall. The night is dark with the waning moon but the little glimmers of snow catch in the candlelight. It makes the world look like it’s glittering.

Suddenly, Wolfwood is hit with the urgent ache of knowing he is running out of time.

Even if Vash’s kindness is endless, Wolfwood can’t linger longer than another week or two at most. The moon will go dark soon then begin to fill and Wolfwood’s curse will strip away his humanity—and regardless of what Vash may be under his handsome visage, Wolfwood has no interest in drawing Vash isn’t such a thing. Not again, not now when he has the choice.

Vash is staring. He’s curled his hands to his chest and the back of one brushes Wolfwood’s arm—he wonders if his thoughts are plain to him, as well laid as a handwritten note.

They’ve been lingering on a crossroads and Wolfwood is dissatisfied with merely toddling between the split.

“You know my name, don’t you,” Wolfwood says. It’s not a question and Vash seems completely unphased.

The other man speaks slowly, as if giving up their game, even at his victory, ailed him. “Yes.”

“What’s my name, Vash?” But the other man hesitates. Shifting around, looking torn at some passing thought. Wolfwood rolls to lay on his side—two halves turning to interlock. “What’s my given name.”

“But—”

“I think I’ve known for a while now that there’s no way you’ve been able to poke around in my head and missed something like that. I also think your ability is far stronger than what you explained. Knowing you, you didn’t want to scare me.”

Vash sighs softly, looking crestfallen, “I didn’t.”

“Well,” Wolfwood flicks him on the nose and draws his irritated glance, “I’m not scared of you. You’re just a soft old man with the prettiest eyes I’ve ever seen—so, c’mon. What’s my name?”

They’re nearly nose-to-nose. Vash presses impossibly closer and the world is just his glittering eyes and the blankets twining them together.

“Nicholas.”

“But?” Wolfwood prompts. Take your win, he wants to say.

“Your brother always called you Nico,” Vash finally sighs—as if the knowledge had burdened him. As if he was grateful to be released from it.

Wolfwood’s curiosity overwhelms him. “What else?”

Vash hesitates. Wide-eyed as if he thought Wolfwood was laying a careful snare. Then, with a witting shame, he confides, “He started calling you big brother Nico after you taught him how to sneak into the kitchens at your orphanage. Food was scarce that year and he cried a lot.” Then, impossibly softer, “You were scared he’d get sick like Michael did.”

The memories had been buried deep but they ache no less. “A few kids passed that year,” he remembers.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s been a long time,” Wolfwood gently dodges. No one but who had lived within those walls that year knew about the food scarcity or the funeral Masses the children had filed into.

He wonders if Vash knows the way Wolfwood’s nails had cut into his hands as he prayed, terrified of dissolving into tears kneeling in front of the pew. The way Vash eyes him makes him think he might.

“It’s official, you won the bet,” Wolfwood smiles. The sentiment tastes sweet—knowing that Vash has seen him at his basest, in multiple ways, yet the kindness in his eyes hasn’t waned. “So, what do you want?”

Vash fidgets and glances away. “This isn’t fair to you,” he grits out.

“What do you want, Vash?”

“You don’t know who I am—what I am,” Vash’s voice is low but panicked. Guilty. And Wolfwood knows that a man who punishes himself by living in the deepest mountain winter will never properly ask for what he wants.

Wolfwood takes Vash’s face in his hands. The air is already chill and they’re on their sides, so close they share breath, but the need to nestle under Vash’s skin like a fever makes him twitchy.

“It doesn’t matter, Vash. It’s okay. It doesn’t matter.”

“It does—”

“Whatever you’ve done, whatever you’re punishing yourself for, I promise you: I’ve done worse.”

Vash shakes his head but makes no move to disentangle himself. “I promise you, you haven’t. I’ve lived a long time. Too long. I’ve wracked up a long list and I don’t think I can ever fix it.”

“My hands aren’t clean,” Wolfwood argues. “Whatever you’ve done, it doesn’t matter because my hands aren’t clean either. I know that you’re a man that would drag a dying werewolf home and save his life, for nothing more than the want to do it, and that’s enough for me.”

“You’re dumb,” Vash decides—but it’s elegantly undercut by the sniffling that makes his lower lip tremble.

“I am, sometimes, but not this time. I mean it. You’re enough, just like this—even if I never know. I can live with it. So, what do you want?”

The candles dance wildly with some passing draft. The storm that had been hedging around the mountainside has kicked up a gale against the roof. Wolfwood waits, holding the most beautiful and intriguing man he had ever met between his palms, and thinks solemnly it’s enough.

Vash sputters around a wordless answer before giving in: he curls one hand around Wolfwood’s neck and draws him into the sweetest kiss he’d ever been given.

Slow, searching. A bright spark in the frigid chill. Vash kisses as if he was asking for permission—so Wolfwood kisses back, warm and firm, and hopes it’s enough for Vash.

One long, sweet kiss. Cheeks cupped in hands, nose pressed to cheeks. And then Vash pulls away and it almost shatters him.

“Is that all you wanted?” Wolfwood asks. His voice cracks and pitches itself embarrassingly.

Vash’s voice still sounds clogged with tears when he says, “I don’t think I can ask for anything else. Hell, I would have been happy with just your company. Even if you’d never looked twice at me.”

“How could I not have?” Wolfwood soothes, petting at the fall of golden hair. “How could I ever have looked at you and not thought the world of you?”

Vash kisses him hard and fast then, frantically trying to convey something through his nervous hands and trembling mouth. Wolfwood is more than willing to be his solid ground. To ease him into the sureness of it, to tell him again and again: yes, really.

Wolfwood kisses him senseless but takes no time with it. Plies his mouth open to taste his tongue and pulls away just far enough to sink his teeth into Vash’s bottom lip—and that unlocks something rigid in him, Vash melting into the spark of pain and making a sound that Wolfwood is very keen to repeat.

“You didn’t answer,” Wolfwood pants. “What do you want?”

Vash hides his face in the pillow. “Too much,” he whimpers.

“Whatever you want. I’ll give it,” Wolfwood lays lingering, open-mouthed kisses along Vash’s ear, down the long column of his throat. Each earns the lycanthrope a shiver or a wobbling little moan, as if even now Vash couldn’t completely lay himself at ease.

“What’s wrong?”

“I should be careful,” Vash tells him firmly. Forlorn but thoughtful, peeking up at Wolfwood who drops another kiss to his clothed shoulder and prays it’s comforting. Vash seems to wallow in his decision. His torn expression betrays his internal waffling till he finally allows with some sense of shame, “I want to touch you—but we should keep it at that.”

Wolfwood cards his hands through Vash’s already mused hair. Runs his nails gently along his scalp like Vash had done for him. “Just tell me how you want me.”

Vash gives him another firm, nipping peck before clambering atop him—yipping and apologizing as he knees Wolfwood in his bad side.

“I’m so sorry,” Vash gasps, running nervous hands along Wolfwood’s scarred side like he might find a new injury.

“Nothing to be sorry for. I knew you were a clutz when I invited you into bed.”

Vash smiles wanly and Wolfwood knows his attempt to lighten Vash’s serious mood is plain. “This is my bed, you know.”

“Finders keepers,” Wolfwood sings.

He pulls Vash down lower to search out his mouth again. Even if this is all the exploration Vash would allow Wolfwood was determined to map it thoroughly. Every valley and dip—and every sweet sigh or wavering moan he could win from his efforts. A victory of his own.

“Was all this a devious plan to steal my bed?”

“Clearly. And what are you going to do about it?”

Vash watches him closely. It makes Wolfwood feel pinned, like an insect in a golden frame.

“Depends,” Vash hums. “How well can you take orders?”

“Oh, I’m terrible at it. Unless given the right incentive.”

Vash perches himself more thoughtfully above Wolfwood, one of the lycan’s knees caught neatly between Vash’s long legs, then fists his hands on either side of Wolfwood’s head: a perfect cage. A better vantage point.

Vash leans close enough for their grins to brush as he laughs, “You’re trouble.”

Wolfwood is sure he’s dreaming. That he’s in the clutches of a fever, perhaps on death’s doorstep with silver still in his veins, and his failing mind is giving him a final kindness.

“You like it.”

“Overconfident, too,” Vash hums, leaning back. Wolfwood reaches for him with panic in his heart before he can register it.

“Wait—”

Vash shushes him. The severe furrow of his brows is weakened by the coy smile he flashes as he reaches down to touch Wolfwood through the front of his trousers—of Vash’s trousers.

Wolfwood fails to trap his groan behind his teeth and melts into the bed.

Vash’s touch is tentative, searching, just like his kisses. When Wolfwood cracks his eyes open Vash is watching him, expression rapt on Wolfwood’s face. Distantly, Wolfwood wonders what his companion sees there: was he flush? Did Vash like his eyes, his stubble, his dark hair? Did Vash feel as snared as Wolfwood did?

The other man takes his time feeling out the shape and length of him. Strokes him from head to root and lower, like he might commit the feel against his palm to memory—like he too felt their limited time closing around them like a noose.

It takes no time for Wolfwood to fill out, hot and gasping in his hands and under Vash’s devastating watch.

Wolfwood thinks to tease him: is this why you’ve kept me? Have you thought about this? Do you keep this cabin in the pines to seduce men, or am I just special?

Rather, he forces himself to be honest. He whispers, “You’re so far away.”

Vash’s smile is cutting—and then he’s gone. He pulls away entirely to slink to Wolfwood’s side, then gently touches his cheek.

“Sit up.”

His tone is playful but Wolfwood can hear its underlying steel: it’s an order. And the lycan’s body feels warm and pliant and willing to follow whatever his lover wanted. There’s an itch under his skin, a needling desire to be pleasing.

Vash palms Wolfwood’s shoulder and sits him upright as easily as straightening a porcelain doll. The movement is so quick it leaves Wolfwood a little dizzy but it also makes his cock twitch in his trousers, so he shuts his mouth to not betray how breathless he already is. Vash sits just behind him.

He links his hands with one of Wolfwood’s, running reverent fingers over Wolfwood’s rough knuckles. “If you had won,” he murmurs just near his ear. “Would you really have just wanted a kiss?”

“Vash, if I had won, I’d be on my knees begging for a taste of you. For whatever you’d give me. So if you’re worrying yourself about being selfish or some shit like that, I can assure you, you’re the furthest thing from it.”

“I have a worrying sense you really mean it when you say ‘whatever I want’,” Vash sighs.

Wolfwood cranes towards Vash’s pouting mouth. The air outside their blankets raises goosebumps on his arms and he frantically misses Vash’s warmth.

Vash kisses him softly. The sound of it sends a thrill through Wolfwood’s body: wet, lecherous, promising. It’s in that kiss, with Wolfwood slack jawed and already beginning to pant, that Vash must make a decision.

As he pulls away, Vash wraps his right arm over Wolfwood’s shoulders to cup his jaw and firmly turn his head away.

“Eyes forward.”

His voice is still that sweet, rain-soft tone. All gentle edges and kindness. But there’s something just beneath now, something a little more self-assured in the way he gives his orders, that makes Wolfwood leak in his borrowed trousers.

“Yes sir,” Wolfwood laughs, taken off-guard. Vash brushes his knuckles along the length of Wolfwood’s throat. The gesture feels praiseful.

“Undo your trousers.”

“Your trousers,” Wolfwood corrects—though it does nothing to slow how quickly he complies.

“Yes, they are mine. Good job,” Vash simpers.

The button slips between Wolfwood’s trembling fingers once, twice, and it’s agony until the waistband slips free.

Vash strokes Wolfwood’s jaw, the sensitive skin under his ear.

“Pull them lower for me?”

Vash lets the question hang: an offer for Wolfwood to backtrack. To let the moment crack in half and disappear. And Wolfwood knows Vash would never broach it again. He’d never lay a hand on him, or tease him about it. They could leave it behind as just a silly game and Wolfwood could walk away.
A ridiculous, stupid notion. Very Vash of him.

Wolfwood wrestles the trousers low enough to bare himself, the soft fabric caught around the wide splay of his thighs. With Vash to his back and the other man’s arms twined around his middle, Wolfwood felt well and goodly trapped.

Vash removes his right hand from where it had been tracing idly along Wolfwood’s pulse point, and when it returns to Wolfwood’s vision there’s a thick wet stripe from the heel of his palm to the tips of his calloused fingers.

“Spit.”

Wolfwood decides to do him one better.

He takes Vash’s wrist in hand and trails his tongue up the length of it once, twice, laving into the tight spaces between his long fingers. He wanted to give a show even if the other man couldn’t quite see his face.

Vash’s other hand comes to rest around his throat. Gently, just a circlet of pressure at the base. But now when Wolfwood’s cock twitches at the needful feeling that dizzies him Vash can clearly see it even by the weak snow-filtered moonlight and low flame.

“Good job. See, you can listen so well. I knew you could,” Vash presses the words against Wolfwood’s ear. There’s the nip of teeth on the soft lobe and Vash’s right hand wrests free to drift lower. His hand stops just short of Wolfwood’s body.

“Can you keep your hands at your sides for me?”

Wolfwood makes a strangled noise.

“I need an actual answer, Nicholas.”

The lycan tucks his hands beneath his own thighs hoping it would be enough to deter their wandering. He wanted Vash to pour those compliments over him again. To call him good again.

“I can be good,” he whimpers.

Vash ghosts his fingers along the side of Wolfwood’s cock—not quite a touch but enough to make Wolfwood groan and twist against him.

“You’ll be so good.”

Vash works slowly. Thumbing the thick vein and dark red cock head, smearing the little pearl of clear cum already in his slit—and that makes him hiss and twitch, too sensitive, and Vash shushes him again as he trails down the length of him in a lazy stroke.

“You’re so pretty,” Vash sighs. He shows no sign of picking up his pace or taking any pity. “Could play with you for hours.”

That one lands deeper than perhaps even Vash had anticipated, and Wolfwood whimpers around the hand still resting against his throat. His insides feel quivery and pathetic. He worries he could come from this alone.

“You like when I talk,” Vash points out. He sounds almost surprised. If Wolfwood hadn’t known that his voice would fail him he might have offered a no fucking shit in agreement. “I can do that for you,” Vash murmurs, soft and low.

His hand on Wolfwood’s cock speeds up to some actual semblance of a rhythm, his grip a little tighter.
“You are mouthy and overconfident and ridiculous and I have been completely enamored with you.” Vash twists his hand over the cock head, just once to make Wolfwood gasp, before continuing on. “I’ve thought about sitting you in that old kitchen chair and riding you till it broke. Thought about letting you bend me over my own bed—or fucking you nice and sweet in front of the fireplace. Let you come in my mouth, then on my fingers, then filling you up nice and warm right there on the floor.”

For his own agonizing moment, Wolfwood can imagine it: Vash between his legs on the hardwood floor, fucking him senseless by the heat of the fire, or his long willowy figure bent over his own mattress for Wolfwood to mount him.

Wolfwood chokes, head thrown back, and the hand around his throat tightens.

“I’ll take care of you,” Vash promises, and Wolfwood desperately believes him. “Whatever you want, Nico, I’ll take care of you.”

Vash’s hand works over him hard and fast now, angling his hand on the upstroke to grip the head properly and smear the clear cum leaking from his slit. Wolfwood’s entire body feels strung tight enough to fray like a bow.

“So pathetic,” Vash sighs against his neck. He sounds fond. “Perfect boy.”

It’s unfair.

Wolfwood feels like a dam broken under pressure. It surges and he can’t stop himself from whining, writhing in Vash’s grip, as the other man joyfully works him dry. The sound of cum and spit is obscene and Wolfwood embarrassingly tries to hide his face as he shakes and mewls through the sensation.

He’s so hot. He’s burning, feverish, and his thighs are wet but suddenly Vash is there drawing him back to face him.

“Good job, Nico, that was beautiful,” he coos. “Tell me what you want.”

Wolfwood feels like an overplayed instrument. Frayed, wrung dry, well-used. In his delirious haze Wolfwood eyes Vash’s mouth, now curled in a playful smile.

“A kiss,” he gasps wetly. “You haven’t kissed me, since—.”

He isn’t sure why the notion makes his eyes burn as if he might burst into tears, but it doesn’t matter as Vash cups his jaw a second time and presses their lips together without a moment of hesitation.

It simple and sweet and Wolfwood feels as if he can’t move—all his little strings cut, completely at Vash’s mercy as he mouths at him as if they had all the time in the world. It makes his skin tingle. His eyelashes feel dewy.

Vash kisses him again and again. All chaste, grounding kisses as Wolfwood slowly comes back to himself.

“You did so good. You were perfect, Nico,” Vash is murmuring. He plants little kisses on Wolfwood’s nose, his forehead, his brows, his eyelids—until Wolfwood scrunches his nose and can’t suppress a laugh. Vash’s hands wander soothingly over his spine. Unwind the sudden knots of his shoulders. An easy comfort settles back into where his heart had lain bare. “There you are,” Vash whispers.

Wolfwood kisses him, helpless, and sniffles, “Thank you.”

“Did you just thank me for getting you off?” Vash snorts. His grin stretches against Wolfwood’s own.

“You were really good at it.”

“My, what a compliment.”

They giggle into one another’s mouth but the light-heartedness quickly dissolves into the lingering, open-mouthed drawl of two men perpetually drawn into one another. Wolfwood fumbles to tuck himself away and twist in Vash’s arms—nothing but the thought of kissing him breathless and returning the favor on his mind.

Vash, laid out beautifully on the pillow beneath him, stops him gently.

“You shouldn’t,” he says, shifting their entwined legs. The sheets are a rumpled mess and Vash’s eyes are unreadable. He rubs absently at his own cheekbone. “There’s a lot you don’t know, still.”

“What if I told you it didn’t matter to me?”

“It matters to me,” Vash says solemnly. “I should do this right.”

Wolfwood isn’t sure what “right” is, or what Vash is so determined to manage, but he presses a kiss to Vash’s temple anyway. If he could trust Vash with a bullet in his gut, he can trust him to handle whatever it is he’s warring with, even now.

“Whatever you want,” Wolfwood promises him again. Vash sighs, long and heavy, like some wearisome burden has just been released.

Wolfwood spends an unwieldy amount of time wrangling blankets and Vash’s lanky, pokey limbs. He’s a flushed, clumsy mess, and Vash’s lingering stares only serve to dig deeper into that now gaping want—but he finds a comfort in gathering Vash into his arms where they lay, twined and giggling, the candles still burning.

“Should we snuff those?”

Vash noses his way closer against Wolfwood’s throat, “Too cold.”

“That’s not good fire safety,” Wolfwood snorts as Vash stretches one arm over Wolfwood’s side like a great wing.

“We’ll be fine,” he mumbles. “Please stay.”

He peeks up at Wolfwood then: all wide, dark blue eyes and blurry golden tones. His duality between ordering Wolfwood around and then pleading up at him like that is wholly unfair.

“You’re a menace.”

Vash merely gives him a goofy grin before bedding down against Wolfwood’s chest again. And in the silence, he can’t help himself.

“How long have you known?”

“Your name?” Vash asks, tracing shapes along Wolfwood’s throat.

“Well, yes.” And everything else.

“The first night,” he admits. He must feel Wolfwood startle because he is quick to add on, “I carried you home. You were dying and panicking so it was just a flood of information—like fanning through a card deck. Just memory after memory. I didn’t mean to,” he hiccups.

Wolfwood cradles Vash’s head. “I believe you.”

“It’s awful, having someone paw through all your thoughts and memories without asking. I’m sorry.”

“Has anyone ever done that to you? Been able to read your mind, I mean?”

“There’s no one,” Vash says, each word bitten out as if it was tough to chew. “That can do that—to me. Not anymore.”

Wolfwood can recognize the ache of regret. An ever-present mourning that leaves you gutted at the strangest moments. So, rather than prod at the wounds he cannot see, he merely takes Vash in his arms and huddles from the encroaching chill.

Vash returns the clinging embrace. It snows through the night.

“Feeling up to a walk?”

Vash is at the doorway, peering out into the wilderness. The fire is crackling by Wolfwood’s feet as he scrapes the bottom of a bowl of oats. Their morning had been slow: both tentative to overstep in this new domain—Wolfwood out of fear of chasing Vash away, Vash’s reasons still unknown to him.

Wolfwood hums around his final spoonful and sets the dishes in the basin. “That sounds nice.”

They bundle up in Vash’s thickest sweaters and socks. Wolfwood finds it unnecessary with his abnormally high temperature average but as he steps onto the porch he makes a note to thank Vash for his sensibility: the world has been completely whited out, thick with fresh, fluffy snow. The mountain winds are frigid and shake small flurries from the iced pines.

“I’ve never seen so much snow,” Wolfwood murmurs in wonder.

“Isn’t it beautiful?”

Vash is already shaking next to him in little violent tremors, cheeks bright just over the edge of the knitted scarf wrapped around his lower face.

“You hate winter,” Wolfwood ribs him.

“I don’t hate winter, I just hate the death. In the summer this meadow is so thick you can’t see through the trees.”

Wolfwood starts down the porch steps. The snow crunches satisfyingly under the sole of his borrowed boots, and he hears Vash follow with his loping, easy pace. “Hell, you can’t see through the trees now. Down in Hopeland we were lucky to get a flurry.”

“I like taking walks down the mountainside right after a snow,” Vash appears at his elbow. “Everything is bright and shimmery. It’s pretty.”

“None of the grey, slushy stuff you get down in the villages,” Wolfwood agrees.

Vash leads them down a winding path through the pine thickets that Wolfwood can’t predict—a deer path, maybe, hidden under layers of powdery snow and ice. Vash seems to know it by heart.

“It’s colder down this way,” Wolfwood notes in surprise as they enter another clearing. The trees are a little thinner here, their needles tiny where they cling to the branches.

“Hemlock!” Vash chirps. “The oxygen they put out is colder than what they take in. It lowers the temperature of the whole clearing. Neat, huh?” he brushes his hand along the bark of one as they pass.

Wolfwood points to a taller trunk, peeling with white layers beneath. “What’s that?”

Vash eagerly launches into a list of eager facts about the looming pines Wolfwood had gestured at, but the lycan gets a little lost in the deluge: he can’t stop fixating on the way Vash’s entire expression has lit up giving his grand spiel, how beautiful he looks against the desolate backdrop.

“How’d you learn all this?”

Vash gives him a coy smile over his shoulder as he continues down the trail. “I’ve had nothing but time. I got really into reading a while back.”

“Ahh,” Wolfwood pulls up even and nudges Vash’s arm. “So not all those books in your cabin are erotica, hm? Color me impressed.”

The other man jumps, eyes wide—caught. “What?”

“I might have gone poking through your shelves the other day when you were out getting firewood,” Wolfwood shrugs. “A little surprising but you’ve got some good taste.”

“It’s rude to look through other people’s things, you know!”

They round the bend and begin to descend lower, a drop off to their left. Wolfwood thinks he sees the glimpse of a winding river below.

“I was bored,” the lycanthrope tells him. Then, drifting closer, “If you’d be so kind, I’d love to read more.”

Vash tosses his head. “Didn’t think you could read,” he harrumphs.

“Just never found anything I enjoyed reading,” Wolfwood winks.

The path leads them down to the hardened earth of a riverbank. The water has frozen to a lazy grumble around clumped ice and deposit, too wide and vast to ice completely. A few tracks lead to and from the wide mouth: deer, coyote maybe. The last brave souls willing to risk the mountaintops during the darkest heart of the year.

“Where are we?” Wolfwood asks. He doesn’t quite recognize the banks nor the angle of mountains and cliffs in the distance, but something nags at him. The icy scent of river feels familiar.

“This is where I found you.”

Wolfwood turns and finds Vash more than a few paces away, hands in his pockets, suddenly bashful where he hovers. As if having entered a sacred space he was not welcome. The lycan gazes about the sloping banks and rock formations as if he might still find his blood drying, flaking from the striations of lime and granite. But he can spot no evidence he had ever been here—that he had almost died here.

“I don’t think I’ve ever come this far into the upper valley,” Wolfwood muses. Much of the forest looks the same but there is a crisp isolation to the area he thinks he would recognize. “When I got shot, it hurt like hell—I don’t think I could describe it. I’d never felt something like it before, a silver bullet. I just… ran, I guess.”

“Death throes are a terrifying thing,” Vash agrees. “There’s no logic in it. It’s when we’re our most animal, I think: starving or dying.”

“Have you almost died?”

“Many times,” he laughs, light and airy.

Wolfwood wanders back up the bank to Vash’s side. For whatever reason the other man seems unwilling to set a foot further. “How?”

Vash seems to mull the question over. Just as Wolfwood thinks that Vash will keep this, too, tucked away from him, he sighs, eyes distant, “Shot, stabbed, dropped from cliff edges. Too many ways to keep track now. I don’t remember most of them well anymore—but I know I deserved every moment of it.”

The statement catches Wolfwood off guard. The idea feels achingly wrong, that Vash could do anything worthy of being tossed to the far edges of death, teetering on its knife again and again.

“Don’t make that face,” Vash laughs again. “People will do anything to survive. I got caught on the wrong end of that instinct by my own hand. I can’t complain when I pushed them to it.”

“If you won’t be angry, I’ll be on your behalf,” Wolfwood snarls.

Vash grins and catches Wolfwood’s face in his mittened hands. “My knight in shining armor,” he simpers.

Wolfwood holds him by his arms, hands steadying. He can feel Vash’s body heat against his frozen cheeks even through the thick red knit.

He can’t imagine this world would ever be better without Vash in it. That his death could ever be anything righteous or earned.

“I’m glad you found me,” he confides. The northern wind howls through the trees. The river gives the occasional gurgle, and some indignant bird screeches from the cliffsides. There are no witnesses to the way Wolfwood draws Vash to him and presses his thanks against Vash’s waiting mouth—tries to imbue the grateful, needful feelings that suddenly feel too big for his body.

Vash kisses him back with a surety that warms Wolfwood from the inside out even as the winds bites at them. They huddle, boots knocked together, and kiss in long, lingering moments—Wolfwood enamored with the romantics of it, with how his heart races as Vash curls his coated arms around him.

Somewhere distant, a single gunshot cuts through the sky.

They break apart, startled, clutching at one another as they wait in the following silence: then, there, a quick series of three. Incessant, climbing. Too far on the other side of the river to trace but too close for Wolfwood to feel comforted.

“We should go,” Vash whispers. He grips Wolfwood’s hand and leads him up the hillside at a fast enough clip to steal their breath.

The travel home is silent.

They don’t discuss it, but Vash hovers about with tense shoulders and an anxious quirk to his normal grin. He won’t say it but Wolfwood can read the tension in every line of his body. And if anyone knew the dangers of the forest, it’s Vash with his endless isolation. Wolfwood knows not to press on that graze for now.

So they make their meals quietly, weaving around one another, ghosting comforting touches as they pass. Their conversations are a little stilted, Vash lost in some nagging thought, and Wolfwood does his best to give him the space—even if it does leave him feeling a little soured to not have his lover’s attention. It’s childish, but he’s been lovingly spoiled for weeks.

“Sorry,” Vash breathes over dinner. He knocks his socked feet against Wolfwood’s bare ankle. “I’m just worried.”

“I don’t think that’s unreasonable.”

“Do you…” Vash trails off, looks too nervous to say the thought that had been festering between them.

“Do I think its whoever shot me?” Wolfwood dares. Vash flinches as if the memory wounds him. The animal of his body had reacted as if he had been shot just yesterday—a dizzying fight or flight that kept him bustling about the cabin all evening. “I don’t know, how many hunters do you think come this far into the mountains?”

“Not many,” Vash says miserably. “Not this late in the season, with the nights so long and all the wildlife moving south.”

“It could be,” Wolfwood concedes. “It could be the same person. Maybe hunting other… things like us.”

The thought disquiets him. He hadn’t spent long dwelling on the semantics of it: that someone had seen him, hulking creature that he was, and taken aim. Had used silver instead of the cheap bronze that was custom. Someone had tried to kill him, and had been good enough at the attempt that it almost worked. Wolfwood had never seen the shot coming. There had been no footfall, no scent on the wind. And that person might still be stalking their backyards.

“How many people know you live out here?”

“Not many,” Vash promises quickly. “A few old friends—no one that would give me away. I trust them.”

Wolfwood reaches across the small table to take Vash’s hand. He had begun fidgeting with his cutlery, twisting it between his fingers, but he stills at Wolfwood’s touch. “I trust you.”

Vash twines their fingers. The smile he gives Wolfwood right then is devastating. He can’t stop himself from rounding the table to taste it—sweet and laughing and perfect.

“I need a bath,” Vash laughs breathlessly as he pulls away. “I’m gross.”

“Let me take care of it,” Wolfwood grins. He kisses the back of Vash’s hand and ignores his half-hearted protests as he gathers his jacket and boots. “I’ll be quick.”

He is not quick.

The process is annoyingly slow, the bucket not quite large enough to simplify the trips Wolfwood has to take out into the bitter dark. The only saving grace is the roaring fire Vash had carefully fed just before dinner. The water heats quickly over its aggressive flames. Vash sits nearby at the table, his expression unreadable again.

“I can go sit in the room,” Wolfwood nods down the hallway. “Maybe grab a book on the way,” he grins.

Vash, pink-cheeked, shakes his head. “Keep me company?”

Wolfwood’s heart does that irritating flutter again, as if it’s forgotten its one purpose. He presses a kiss to Vash’s cheek in hopes of masking the way he faltered, “Whatever you want.”

The other man bids Wolfwood to turn away as he disrobes. Wolfwood obeys, eyes squeezed closed with the fear of disobeying, and listens to the soft sounds of Vash tossing his clothes into a pile—then the gentle laps of water disturbed.

“Okay,” Vash calls. He sounds nervous, distant, like he’s turned away. Which is how Wolfwood finds him: huddled in the tub, spine curved as if he can hide from Wolfwood’s view entirely even though he’s easily too lanky for the old metal basin.

“I really can go,” Wolfwood offers again.

He doesn’t like the nervous way Vash holds himself, sunk low in the water and twisted nearly fetal. He begins to step away.

“No,” Vash turns to catch his eye. “I want you to say,” he mumbles, voice trembling.

Hesitantly, Wolfwood drifts forward. Vash tracks his approach and something in his sharp gaze reminds him of predators—owls stalking mice from groaning branches, or a lynx prowling a cliffside.

Closer, Wolfwood finally sees it: the low candlelight catches on the deep gouges and divots of scars. They’re long and wide and look as if someone has carved him open. His shoulders, along what of his thighs sit just above the water line, the wide, massacred canvas of his back.

Vash crosses one hand over his body to shield a pattern of old, poorly done stitches from view.

Wolfwood sinks to his knees next to the tub. He does his level best to keep his eyes on Vash’s face—the nervous tick of his jaw, the rare furrow of his brow. He’s golden by the firelight. Beautiful in a way that makes Wolfwood’s knees feel weak. It was a powerful blow having the full attention of a man like Vash. He will never be worthy, he knows.

“I don’t like to show people,” Vash begins to explain. “They sometimes… react poorly.”

“Fuck them.”

Vash snorts, ducking his head. His expression melts from his shuttered tension to something lighter, a little giddy. “Such a poet.”

“I didn’t realize you wanted poetry from me. I’m just a simple farm boy, but I can try,” Wolfwood grins then drops his voice, low and serious. “You are the loveliest thing I’ve ever laid eyes on. There is no part of you that deserves less than complete adoration, and even if I had died that first night in your bed, having been here with you for my final hours would have been better than a man like me could ever deserve.”

Vash is staring, wide-eyed, a little slack-jawed. Wolfwood feels himself preen at having caught the other man so off-guard: every word had been lingering thoughts of his days in Vash’s care. Wolfwood had never been a poetic man but Vash was a divine inspiration.

Wolfwood’s pride withers a little as Vash merely swallows hard enough for his throat to click, then turns away to watch the fire roar in the stone hearth.

“Sorry,” Wolfwood gets out, rocking away from the basin. He feels turned to stone, dunked in the frozen river, rolled off a cliff. He had pushed—ruined things with his mouth, prodded some deep wound in some way.

Before Wolfwood can stray too far, Vash reaches out to catch him by his jaw. His palm is calloused against his unshaven stubble, warm and wet from the bath water.

“Don’t do that,” Vash chides before he draws Wolfwood in.

This kiss is crushing, a little urgent. Vash plies his mouth open to taste his tongue and press his teeth into Wolfwood’s bottom lip. He can’t stop the sound he makes into Vash’s mouth, a whiny little thing, completely caught off guard with Vash’s enthusiasm. Wolfwood ends up leaned too far over the tub, held in place by Vash’s surprisingly firm grip as he swallows down the lycanthrope’s whimpers.

Vash seems to come back to himself, drawing away far enough to speak, but his hand remains in Wolfwood’s curls. He pants, flushed, “Wash my hair for me?”

“Huh?” Wolfwood mutters eloquently.

“Wash my hair for me—you owe me, after all,” Vash smiles.

“I do,” Wolfwood agrees, easy as breathing. Presses a soft kiss to Vash’s cheek before he stands. “I do.”

Wolfwood kneels behind Vash and lathers that same bar of homemade lavender between his hands. His hair lays in a messy, wet array from where the blond had dunked his head under the water, chirping something about he was helping. Wolfwood takes his time combing his fingers through the sopping tangles, scratching at Vash’s scalp and behind his ears—it makes the other man hum, melting further into the tub, head lulling in Wolfwood’s hands.

“Ain’t you content,” Wolfwood whispers.

Vash only makes a sound that sends an overeager little thrill through his body. His eyes are closed. Wolfwood takes the liberty of digging his thumbs into Vash’s neck, the slope of his shoulders. He’s built with deceptively corded muscle, whipcord lean, but his spine is knotted as if he’s never relaxed a day in his life.

Wolfwood takes the time to work a few of the larger knots free and smooth his hands over some of the silvering scars dotting his body—each pass earning him a shiver or another shameless groan.

Idly, Wolfwood wonders when the last time Vash had been touched like this was: if he had experienced the simple intimacy that Wolfwood denies himself. He was newly turned, but if Vash was as ancient and dangerous as he alluded to, he can’t imagine the other man made it a habit to partake in the simplicities of being touched, or held. The thought makes him feel terrible.

“Sit up,” he murmurs into Vash’s ear—earning him a bratty grumble for his trouble. Wolfwood has to man handle him upright to rinse the suds from his golden hair. Vash sighs as the warm water passes over him.

His task complete, Wolfwood presses his lips to a particularly deep gouge of a scar over one shoulder.
“Thank you,” Vash sighs.

“Any time.”

It earns him a laugh, but Wolfwood can’t quite bask in it. He is sincere: knows he would do anything Vash asked of him. Knows he is indebted and enamored in a way that a lifetime of servitude couldn’t slake.

“You can go get ready for bed, I’ll finish here,” Vash dismisses him. A little nervous and adrift, he finds no reason to do otherwise.

Wolfwood putters around the room arranging blankets and fluffing their single pillow. He fumbles the matches from the desk to light the long, tapered candles at the bedside. He perches on the end of the bed, not sure what he’s waiting for—just that he feels like his task is incomplete. That he’s failed in some way.

Vash enters the room silently. The door snicks shut behind him, and his smile is made all the more magnificent by the deep shadows of night.

On instinct, Wolfwood parts his knees as Vash approaches. The other man stops between them then stoops to take Wolfwood’s face in hand again.

The kiss he gifts Wolfwood with now mirrors the urgent, eager open-mouthed mess from before: hands clutching in hair, Vash panting against his tongue then whimpering as Wolfwood hikes him into his lap.
They spend long, idle minutes simply tasting. Wolfwood presses his hands flat to Vash’s shoulder blades and feels them shift like wings as he clutches at Wolfwood’s body.

Vash pulls back to pant, “There are rules.”

Wolfwood freezes, waiting patiently. Vash seems to be debating something with himself. He stares down at Wolfwood thoughtfully and the lycanthrope finds himself too nervous to breathe.

“You can only touch me when I tell you,” Vash chews on his lip. “You have to follow my directions—please,” he tacks on, looking bashful, as if demanding such a thing left him uncertain of the moment.

Eager to put his lover at ease, Wolfwood agrees. “However you want me.”

Vash shifts in Wolfwood’s lap, looking terribly put out. “This is more for you than me.”

“Vash,” he whispers. He nudges Vash’s flushed cheek with his nose, drawing his attention, hopeful for another kiss. “I mean it—I’ll listen, I promise, sweetheart.”

The blond kisses him slow and sweet. He groans as if pained when he draws back a second time. “I’m going to blow the candles out,” he says. Wolfwood has no time to react before Vash stretches past him to snuff out the bedside light with one breath.

The room now dark with the new moon, Vash tumbles them into the bed and sprawls beneath him. He seems content with their lazy kisses so Wolfwood puts his effort into drawing those noises from him again—he wonders how many pitches of sighs he can discover, how loud he could make him from a bite alone.

Wolfwood presses his face to Vash’s neck but makes no other movement. “Here?”

“Here’s fine,” Vash whispers, hands carding through Wolfwood’s dark hair. He tilts his head to give Wolfwood room to lay a trail of wet, open mouthed kisses against Vash’s bath-warm skin. He sighs, shifting under Wolfwood, hips twitching at the teasing drag of teeth.

He spends a length of time working Vash pliant under him with kisses to the tendon of his neck, the sensitive skin just behind his ear, the spot where his pulse jumps wildly—then, splayed and humming content beneath him, Wolfwood sinks his teeth into the pretty slope of his neck. The instinct is too strong to resist, the need to mar his perfect skin with his incisors, the need for the tang of iron on his tongue.

Vash goes taught and his back bows. The sound he makes is ragged, elated. His panting doubles as he cranes his head away, baring his neck completely as Wolfwood twists the flesh between his teeth a little meanly.

“Fuck,” Vash gasps. His hand slaps at Wolfwood’s back before clutching the fabric between his fingers hard enough to tear. He groans a second time. “Keep doing that.”

Happy to serve, Wolfwood releases him just long enough to map up Vash’s bowed neck to the sensitive spot beneath his ear that had earned him a gasp just before. He nips gently, teasing, and feels Vash twitch impatiently. The second bite is as hard as the first. Some bone-deep animal in him delighted to leave the other marked and bruised.

Vash laughs, the sound a little delirious. He fists his hand in Wolfwood’s hair tight enough to make Wolfwood rut against him. “Good,” Vash pants. “Good boy.”

Wolfwood sinks his teeth in deeper at the praise—that he was good for Vash—and it earns him a strangled moan.

“Should have done this sooner,” Vash rambles. He holds Wolfwood to his neck, trembling and panting as he mouths at the burdened skin. Distantly, Wolfwood finally comes to realize that Vash is pressing himself against the leg Wolfwood has wedged against him, grinding in halting little thrusts.

Against Vash’s bruised neck, he murmurs, “That looks unsatisfying,” and presses his leg more firmly between the blond’s legs. “I can do better—I can take care of you.”

“I know you can,” Vash soothes. He sounds winded, but not nearly as wanton as Wolfwood would like. “Just—let me,” he sighs, the sound frustrated, and moves Wolfwood’s hands to bracket his head on the pillow. “Just keep your hands here for a moment.”

Wolfwood perches above him and listens to the rustle of clothing, Vash’s deep, lingering breaths as he shifts under him. Eventually there’s a tentative touch against his wrist, guiding him. Wolfwood goes dutifully.

“Here,” Vash murmurs—his cotton sleep pants are tugged low enough to expose him, giving Wolfwood room to trail his hand between his legs. There’s the soft, downy touch of hair between his legs, nestling his cunt, matted with a warm wetness already. Wolfwood feels himself salivate and begs whatever god would hear him this night to not let him embarrass himself.

“Your hands are big,” Vash notes thoughtfully with the tense air of someone who had idled the thought a dozen times over. “Go slow, please? It’s… been a long time.”

“Nervous?” Wolfwood whispers against his ear.

“Terribly,” Vash kisses him and Wolfwood can feel his grin. Distracted, the lycan lets Vash guide two of his fingers between his folds and against the tight smoothness of his hole. Wolfwood traces the soft give of its entrance, gathering the wetness on his fingers, mapping out the shapes of him.

“So wet already,” he notes—voice betraying him with its low drawl. “Were you thinking of me?”

“You’re very good with your hands,” Vash breathes. Wolfwood feels fingertips brush the corner of his lips. “And your mouth.”

“You sound put out.”

“It’s a devastating discovery,” Vash murmurs playfully. They share breath, exchanging slow kisses like they couldn’t help themselves. Wolfwood feels as if he’s fallen from the riverside cliffs—plunged beneath the frozen tow.

Wolfwood wedges the tip of his first finger inside. The way Vash tenses and sighs makes Wolfwood drip in his trousers. “Keep going,” the other man sighs sweetly. He wiggles his hips and Wolfwood can feel his cunt clench around the intrusion. “Deeper, Nico, please.”

Helpless to Vash’s wants, the lycan fucks his finger in—slow, teasing thrusts working him open, petting at the soft walls, till he can fit in up to his knuckle. The slide is made easier by the way Vash seems to just gush around him. Wolfwood wishes he could taste him. Gather up all that earthy wetness on his tongue and swallow it like a fine, aged brandy.

Vash hums, pliant. “Can you give me another?”

Wolfwood kisses at his collarbone, tracing the shape with his tongue, and fits a second finger in on his next thrust. Vash groans and fucks his hips down on Wolfwood’s hand—so the lycanthrope stills, crooks his fingers for Vash to fuck himself mindlessly on. By the dim starlight he can just make out Vash’s head thrown back on the pillow, arm flung overhead.

“Talk to me,” Vash suddenly pleads. “I want to hear your voice.”

And fuck if that didn’t do something for Wolfwood.

“Oh, sweetheart,” he simpers. “You’ve completely wrapped me around your finger. I’ll beg for the chance to taste you—I’ll get on my knees and everything. I just want you—everything you’ll give me. You could collar me like a dog and keep me here for the rest of my damned life. I don’t want to be anywhere else.”

Vash’s back bows. He tenses, holding himself impossibly rigid, whimpering.

“You feel amazing around my fingers. Wanna know how you feel on my tongue, too, or my cock, if you’d let me. Wanna take care of you,” Wolfwood dips to press his mouth to the expanse of Vash’s tense belly. His tongue finds the edges of a scar and Vash wails. “C’mon, sweetheart—let go. Just for me.”

Vash falls with the grace of something divine. The desperate, agonized sound he makes roots itself in Wolfwood’s body, the hot centre of him clenching around Wolfwood’s fingers as he fucks him through the sharp waves of sensitive nerves and twitching thighs. He mourns the darkness obscuring his face, his eyes, the damp brow of a man wrung good and thorough.

Unable to help himself, Wolfwood licks the still-warm slick from his fingers: he tastes like earth and sky and petrichor.

Panting, Vash draws him down into a kiss. He still a little slack-jawed and weak, pawing at Wolfwood, gently reminding him to keep his hands proper. Wolfwood whines high in his throat like a wounded creature.

“I know,” Vash sighs. He pets at Wolfwood’s hair, his stubble, carefully shielding himself in the shadows. “I know. But not—just, I don’t think either of us are ready for that. Not yet,” he whispers.

Wolfwood nestles his head into the crook of Vash’s neck, blearily mouthing at the skin there. His heart is in his throat and Vash’s hands soothing all his frayed edges. This is enough.

Wolfwood wakes with daybreak—or what passes for it with the blustering clouds and fog-smudged pine trees. The deep greys of night are only just beginning to recede. The candles at the bedside have been relit while he wasn’t looking, burning low and soft.

Vash is gone.

The other half of the bed sits empty, blankets tossed aside obscenely. The fireplace is a low smolder and the table is clean of any slapdash breakfast. His boots are gone from their spot by the door. There is no answer when Wolfwood calls his name.

The adrenaline of panic just beginning to make itself known, Wolfwood pulls on the spare set of shoes and a threadbare jacket then shoulders his way over the threshold.

The wind is bitter. Even the doorknob stings against his bare palm and his skin seems to freeze as he kicks his way through the pile-up. It soaks him to his knees and he’s shaking down to his marrow before he even reaches the porch steps.

The night still sits heavy enough to obscure the winding gaps between the pines. Everything outside the clearing of Vash’s home is dark, endless, and Wolfwood is struck with the paranoia of being watched.

Then, the lycanthrope realizes: the woods have gone silent.

No distant chirps or trills. The land is as still as a grave.

The hair on Wolfwood’s body stands on end and a sickness creeps up his throat as he stares out at that nothingness. An uninviting, frozen wasteland.

From between two pines emerges a small speck of light. A lantern swung from an outstretched hand, a body without a silhouette picking its way across the snow.

Vash looks genuinely surprised to see him. He picks up the pace, snow crunching underfoot. “What are you doing out here?”

“You weren’t here,” Wolfwood tries to explain but the groaning of the wind steals any early morning eloquence he might have managed. “You weren’t here. I didn’t know where you were.”

“I just went for a walk,” Vash tells him softly—it’s that toddling tone again, the one he uses to soften the edges of a conversation.

“Where did you go?”

Vash pauses at the bottom of the steps. “Just for a walk,” he soothes. He reaches to cradle Wolfwood’s elbow but the lycan can’t feel it through the cold, aching tremors. “You must be freezing. C’mon.”

None too gently the strange man leads Wolfwood back inside. A wild spray of wind had followed Wolfwood’s frantic departure and left a mess of melting snow in the main room.

“Sorry,” he grunts, trying to kick some of the flurry back over the threshold.

“No harm,” Vash hangs his now-dark lantern and guides Wolfwood to the fireplace. “Once I stoke the fire it’ll all melt.”

As Vash tends to the fire, Wolfwood studies him: his hair nearly frozen, flakes on his red coat just now beginning to melt. He should be flushed and numb and maybe even fighting frostbite with his face left bare—but he looks as unflappable as ever. Cheerily shoveling about bits of ash and fresh wood.

“I didn’t realize it had snowed so much last night,” he is chattering.

“Why take a walk in that mess?” Wolfwood grunts.

Vash turns and studies him and for the first time Wolfwood hates it: because he can see the moment Vash translates Wolfwood’s crossed arms and unkind tone. How easily he is read through and laid bare before he himself had parsed the root of his agitation.

He had been scared. Vash’s vanishing act had scared him, left its own wound.

Wolfwood’s brain feels hazy, as if three cups deep and several sheets to the wind. His mind can’t seem to focus on one thing—Vash’s hair, the eerie pines, the panic at waking to an empty cabin.

Vash takes his face in his warm, sooty hand. “I’m sorry I left without telling you.”

“You don’t need to tell me nothing.”

“No,” Vash dips his head and puts them eye-to-eye. “I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry for,” he argues. He covers Vash’s hand with his own, eyes fluttering closed at the simple feel of him—blood-warm and real— before pressing apologetic kisses to the palm. “You go out on walks this early often?”

Vash smiles, but the effect is flat. His mind is clearly elsewhere. “Sometimes.”

Wolfwood doesn’t press.