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It’s just like every other stupid fucking fight, at first.
Wolfwood hadn’t even been paying enough attention to catch why they’re being shot at this time—all he got was a single raised voice, and then Vash grabbing the back of his neck and almost smashing his face into the bartop getting him out of the path of a bullet. A bottle of Wild Turkey on the shelf behind the bar—right at the height Wolfwood’s head had been—shattered in a spray of glass and noise and amber liquid, and then they were running.
It’s a nasty thing to get used to, being chased out of town by a mob, but that’s the kind of life Wolfwood lives now, traveling with Vash the Stampede. He tries to keep it lighthearted, because the only thing worse than this bullet-dodging nonsense (at least it is bullets this time, and not stones, because Vash dodges bullets but lets himself be hit with stones) is putting up with Vash sulking about it afterwards.
So it’s nothing out of the ordinary—scrambling towards where they left the motorcycle, squabbling with each other, Vash launching into some tirade about how Wolfwood better not get his gun out, thou shalt not kill—
—and then one of the idiots chasing them has a coherent thought for once in their miserable life and fires past them at the motorbike. It goes up in an impressive gout of flame, throwing Wolfwood backwards against Vash, and he winces as he hears the ugly thud of the Punisher slung over his back impact against Vash’s chest. He manages to plant one foot and interrupt his own fall before all hundred-fifty-odd kilos of his weight and the Punisher’s pins Vash to the ground, which means ending up facedown in the sand with the Punisher on top of him , but, hey, sacrifices.
Vash makes a noise, a tiny little whine, and Wolfwood doesn’t have time to worry about it, because a bullet drives into the sand next to his head, and any broken ribs will have to wait, because they have to go.
Wolfwood gets his hand wrapped in the strap of the Punisher and the other hand around Vash’s wrist, and they run.
For anyone else, rushing out into the desert with no warning would be a death sentence. Fortunately, they’re used to this—even without the bike, they have enough supplies in their packs to make it to the next town, or the next one after that.
That’s why it’s such a surprise that as soon as they’re not being chased anymore, Vash stops moving and stands stock-still, his face slicked with sweat and pale, eyes wide with shock and fear.
“What?” Wolfwood asks, shifting his weight uneasily, glancing back to make sure the crowd stopped at the edge of the town. “You drop your sunglasses, Needle-noggin?”
Vash makes that noise again—a throaty, almost panicked whimper. “Wolfwood. We need to find shelter.”
Wolfwood scowls at him, but he scans the horizon for any rock formations. There’s something that might even be a decent cave close enough that he doesn’t even have to squint to see it. He points. “Let’s aim for there. What’s the matter?” He didn’t see Vash get shot, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. He’s good at hiding injuries.
But Vash isn’t guarding a bullet wound. He has his hand hovering over his chest, right where the grate covering his heart is. He looks—he looks fucking terrified. “I—” he starts. His eyes well up, and he blinks quickly, biting his lip. “Start walking.”
With anxiety chewing at the insides of his ribs, Wolfwood starts walking. Vash follows him, moving slowly and deliberately, like he’s trying to balance some invisible weight on his head. Wolfwood slows down, matching his pace. “Explain.”
“You’ve seen my chest,” Vash says, his voice high and tight. “That, the metal, it’s held in place with pins and magnets, it’s—” he takes a shallow breath. “It’s not the best work, but the doc did his best. I would have died, otherwise.”
Wolfwood feels sick. “And what happened to it?”
Vash swallows. “One of the magnets slipped out of place, I think when—”
“When I hit you,” Wolfwood interrupts.
“When the bike exploded in your face and threw you into me,” Vash corrects. His smile is wan and strained, but he makes an attempt at it. “Sorry about that, by the way,”
Wolfwood hums, a little too worried to laugh. “Ah, well. She probably would have broken down in the desert halfway to the next town, knowing our luck.” He clears his throat, unwilling to be distracted. “So. Magnets.”
Vash makes a face, clearly not pleased with being forced back on topic, then plasters that uncomfortable grin back on. “The magnet slipped. Which means the pin is loose, and it’s right…” he gestures. “I have to get it back into place.” His face goes even paler, his voice wavering a little. “Before it ends up somewhere I really don’t want it.”
Like his heart. Or his lung. Shit.
“Yeah,” Vash breathes. “I carry magnets in case something like this happens, uh, again, I can probably manage it with those, but—” his voice drops. “It’s easier if it’s a little more, um, hands on. It’ll be messy. I just want you to know. Ahead of time.”
Wolfwood takes a deep breath, just to stop himself thinking about Vash, alone, fishing a metal pin out of his chest with a magnet and his fingers, Vash bleeding in the desert, alone, Vash half-dead on some hack doctor’s table, no one to take care of him or bring him somewhere safer—
“I’ll help you.”
Vash lets out a long, slow breath. “I wasn’t going to ask.”
Wolfwood shrugs one shoulder. “That’s why I’m offering.”
“You don’t—” Vash tries, a petulant little whine in his voice.
“Shut up.”
Vash shuts up.
They keep walking. It takes an unbearably long time to get to the rock formation at the pace Vash is moving, but Wolfwood isn’t going to ask him to go faster, not with a loose metal pin in his chest. He just puts up with it, his heart racing, thinking of Vash’s heart, behind that metal grate and the vivid pink scar tissue, where his body tried to heal over whatever was missing. It looks ghastly even now, healed over—Wolfwood can only imagine (in vivid, gory detail) how bad it must have been when it was fresh.
“Wolfwood,” Vash says, as he ducks under the overhang. “I’m sorry about this.”
Wolfwood just sighs at him. He drops the Punisher onto its side, unpacking his bedroll onto the sandy stone and setting up a fire. He’s done field surgery before. Find a clear-ish, flat-ish bit of ground, start a fire, boil some water, tear up some clean fabric for bandages. He knows Vash doesn’t have any spare shirts, so Wolfwood’s going to have to sacrifice his.
Whatever. Vash can put up with him smelling like unwashed fabric for the next few towns.
As Wolfwood rips his spare shirt into strips, Vash strips off his coat with trembling fingers, sitting down in tentative, jerky motions. “You don’t have to do this. I can take care of it.”
“Knock it off,” Wolfwood starts picking through Vash’s bedroll. “You said you had magnets? Do you have a knife, too?”
“A knife—oh.” Vash goes pale. He nods.
Wolfwood finds the magnets, stuck together with a strip of cloth between them, and the folding knife. His hands shake, just a little. He makes them stop.
Vash is flat on his back when Wolfwood turns back around, stripped to his waist, palms braced against the sandy stone. His face is bone-white, sweat standing on his temples and his hairline. He puts on a smile when he meets Wolfwood’s gaze, hollow and tremulous, barely hiding his terror.
Wolfwood feels sick. “Can I knock you out for this?”
Vash just grimaces. “You won’t know when it’s in the right spot.”
“Fuck,” Wolfwood says, mildly. He unfolds the knife and sticks the blade into the fire to sterilize it. The water is bubbling, so he takes the pot off the fire to cool. He strips off his jacket and rolls up his shirtsleeves, then pulls a ratty towel and a bar of soap out of the mess of things on his bedroll and dips the corner of the towel into the pot, washing his hands clean.
Vash makes a strained sort of noise. “Could you hurry up?”
Wolfwood glares at him. “I’m about to stick my fingers in your chest. No, I won’t skip on the disinfecting.”
“I don’t get infections,” Vash says.
“Be that as it may ,” Wolfwood replies, his voice ratcheting up half an octave, threatening to crack. “I’m not risking it.”
A familiar guilt settles on Vash’s face, a pathetic little expression that jabs Wolfwood’s heart with something between pity and fury. He settles on frustration, pulling the folding knife out of the fire and gesturing at Vash with it. “Don’t fucking start.”
Vash doesn’t start. He lies still while Wolfwood finishes his preparations, and goes even stiller when he approaches, chest just barely moving with each shallow breath.
“Okay,” Wolfwood says. He wills his hands to stay steady, knife in one hand and magnet in the other. “Tell me what you need me to do.”
“Pull the pin out,” Vash says, his voice tight. “It’s the one—on the bottom edge, inner side. Use the magnet. Do you have a towel?”
Wolfwood swears, wishing he had another hand. He holds the handle of the knife between his teeth and grabs one of the strips of shirt, bunching it up at the edge of the metal plating. He rests the magnet against the pin, feeling it click against the metal, then pries it back off. The pin comes with it, and a spill of blood.
Vash doesn’t make a sound.
Wolfwood tosses the pin into the pot of hot water and mops up the blood with the scrap of cloth. “Now what?”
“Um,” Vash says, barely a whisper. “Realign the magnet. You’re going to have to… fuck.” His shallow breaths go uneven and hiccupy, and he sniffles quietly.
Wolfwood doesn’t look at his face. He can’t bear to. “Spikey.”
Vash sobs, just once, a punched-out noise that’s more a panicked heave than anything else. “Push the knife in. Two ribs down from the plate, at an, an angle. Toward the plate. A couple inches. And then use your… your fingers. You’ll be able to, um, to feel the magnet from there, without, um—!” he laughs, breathless and miserable in a way that makes Wolfwood’s chest ache. “There’s a slot you can push it into, it’ll, um, I’ll tell you when I feel it click.”
“Okay,” Wolfwood says, more calmly than he feels. It’s not okay. It’s nothing close to okay. Fuck this, fuck everything about it. “Two ribs?”
“Two ribs.”
Wolfwood doesn’t think about the trial and error that must have gone into that specific measurement. He doesn’t think about Vash’s heart behind that grate, Vash’s lung, his scar-ridden skin, his pale, trembling fingers buried in the flesh of his side. He just pushes the knife in.
He’s seen a lot of blood in his life, some of it his, more of it his fault. It stopped making him even slightly nauseous a long time ago. It’s just not sustainable to have a weak stomach, as a murderer.
But this—this makes him want to heave. The blood spilling up around the knife. He drops his soaked rag and grabs a clean one, holding it to the wound as he pulls the knife out and pushes his fingers in.
Vash makes a noise somewhere between a scream and a retch. There’s a thud—probably him knocking his head back against the ground. Don’t fucking do that, Wolfwood wants to say, but he doesn’t dare open his mouth.
Flesh squelches under Wolfwood’s fingers. Blood runs down his wrist. It’s hard to get his knuckles past the ribs, but the one closest to the plate has… give to it, that no rib should ever have.
Wolfwood knows, very suddenly, that he’s damned.
It’s the same sickly surety that he felt staring down the barrel of the first gun he ever held at his shithead guardian’s corpse. Murder is nothing, compared to cutting stigmata into the side of an angel.
His fingers, through the flesh, press up against something hard.
“That’s it,” Vash says, his voice wet and broken. “Now push it in. Towards the, the plate.”
Wolfwood pushes. Vash makes a choking sound, like Wolfwood’s fingers are in his throat and not his chest. The magnet shifts. Wolfwood shifts his fingers, presses deeper. There’s a horrible squelch, a gush of blood around his knuckles.
“Almost,” Vash says, his voice thready and weak. “A little further.”
A little further. Wolfwood feels the magnet click, but he waits until Vash makes an affirmative noise before he pulls his fingers out.
The noise makes his stomach lurch, but Wolfwood bites down on his tongue and sees the horrible thing through—he wipes up the blood the best he can with the wet corner of his towel, packs one of his shirt-scraps against the wound and uses one of the longer pieces to tie it in place, then slides the pin back through the plate.
As soon as the metal is in place, Vash sits up, curling forward and pinning his head between his knees, his controlled breathing shattering all at once into sharp, panicked gasps.
Wolfwood washes his hands clean, watching the water in the pot turn pink. Then he pushes himself to his feet and walks slowly out from under the overhang. He manages to get a decent few steps away before he doubles over, retching.
He spits, wipes at his eyes, kicks sand over the mess, and turns around, unwilling to be embarrassed by his sudden childishly weak stomach. It had been a biological necessity. Purge the horror from his body, so he can go on.
By the time he gets back to the overhang, Vash is back upright, doing his level best to pack up their things with shaking hands.
“What are you doing?” Wolfwood asks, his voice coming out in a slight rasp. Fuck, his mouth tastes awful. He picks up his canteen, gargling a mouthful of water. It’s unpleasant to swallow, but they don’t have the luxury of wasting water.
“Packing,” Vash says. He sounds as bad as Wolfwood feels, probably worse. “We should keep moving.”
Wolfwood kneels down beside him and grasps him by the wrists before he can start cleaning up the mess of supplies over Wolfwood’s bedroll.
Vash flinches.
Actually flinches, jerking out of Wolfwood’s grip and recoiling, arms withdrawing to his chest, guarding himself.
Wolfwood’s stomach drops. It’s entirely expected, for Vash to instinctively fear him, after what Wolfwood just did to him, but fuck, it hurts.
“Sit down, Needle-noggin,” he says, instead of the torrent of apologies that want to rush out of him. “You look like shit. I can see you shaking. Settle the fuck down before you hurt yourself again.”
He didn’t hurt himself, you hurt him, Wolfwood thinks, bitterly, but of course Vash doesn’t say that. Amazingly, he actually settles down, wrapping his arms around his knees, shuddering slightly.
Wolfwood cleans up the mess, packing everything away. He can’t imagine eating, but Vash probably should, so he gets started on dinner, moving instinctively, not letting himself think. The cooking pot had bloody water in it, so he doesn’t use it, heating up a can of soup from their supplies right in the bowl.
Vash eats. Halfway through the bowl, he hands it over to Wolfwood, and Wolfwood can’t bring himself to argue. The soup sits uneasily, but he’s stomached worse.
“I’m sorry,” Wolfwood says, eventually.
“No,” Vash shakes his head. “You saved my life. I’m sorry, for putting you in that position.”
Wolfwood sets the empty bowl down, too hard, and closes his eyes so he won’t have to see if Vash flinches from him again. “Fuck, Needle-noggin, let me be sorry that I hurt you. And if you can’t manage that, just let me be sorry that you were hurt at all.”
Vash takes a breath. “Why?”
“You’re not a fucking child,” Wolfwood snaps. “I shouldn’t have to explain the concept of empathy to you.”
“Oh,” Vash murmurs, his voice that coiled-up, uncertain thing that Wolfwood hates even when it isn’t directed at him. “I’m sorry.”
Under any other circumstances, Wolfwood would smack him. “I’m not pissed at you, Spikey. Jesus. I’m fucking—I’m fucking sad for you. That you have to go through this shit. That you had to do it on your own. That someone hurt you badly enough that this fucked up medical shit is still giving you problems. It bothers me. I don’t like knowing that you’re in pain.”
“Oh.” Vash says again, very differently to the first time.
“Now,” Wolfwood says. “The suns are setting, so you’re going to lie down, and I’m going to lie down next to you, and we’re going to pretend that I can actually do a single damn thing to keep you safe.”
Vash, for once, does the polite thing, and doesn’t comment on how Wolfwood’s voice went to pieces by the end of that sentence.
Instead, he lies down on his bedroll, and lets Wolfwood drag his over to lie beside him, and doesn’t say anything, while both of them pretend they're trying to fall asleep.
With his forehead pressed against Vash’s chest, hearing the steady rise and fall of his breathing, Wolfwood eventually manages to close his eyes.
He doesn't sleep.