Work Text:
the class discussed falling asleep
without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—
something important—and how to believe
the house you wake in is your home. This prompted
Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing
how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,
and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts
are all you hear; also, that you have enough.
The English lesson was that I am
is a complete sentence.
–
You drink one vial too many and your world explodes into technicolor.
You know it’s a bad decision, even without the sudden sense of doom and your abused heart accelerating to triple-time, but there are too many bullets in the air and not enough bodies to catch them.
Behind the crumpled wooden remains of the crate you hide behind there is a (two? three?) too big man (men?) with an ever bigger gun (guns?). They are Limbed in horrible ways that mean they could have been you and you need them to stop moving five minutes ago so you can never think of them again. You have been killed too many times to consider the words Vash will have for you afterwards. Bullets ricochet scarily close by, so close the air whispers against the shell of your ear with the force of them. Too close. You drink one vial too many and you hope it won’t kill you for good. You weave through the air because you are a 170 pound killing machine and you are just doing your job, and you don’t think of how this grotesque thing in front of you is just a boy who cannot be more than 17 because you don’t know how old you are but surely it must be more than that. You drink one vial too many and it explodes like sulfur gas down your esophagus. You feel it like glass splinters spread in your bloodstream because it is One Vial Too Many and it hurts like your veins are tripling in size under the force of it, hurts like you are 8 again and everyone around you has died.
You look the boy in his eyes as you shoot him dead, because you are Nicholas the Punisher baptizantes eos in nomine Patris and your job is to punish the lost souls whose sin is to have been born in the wrong place.
Vash runs up to you, (or at least you think it’s him. The world has narrowed down to a pinpoint and all you can see is a vague approximation of a person.) But he yells at you and nobody does that quite like him so that means your guess is right. You hide behind tinted glasses and hope he won’t see that your veins are full of shrapnel.
Once you are all crammed together in the car you sit still like a statue because it feels like your bones are made of needles and everything that touches you makes them penetrate your skin. The people in front are so tired of guns and the man next to you is so tired of blood and so you get away with your usual dark-and-brooding-spiel all the way to your empty motel room. As soon as the door is locked behind you and there is no one to see you crumple, your knees connect with the floor with a loud bang. You can only barely hear it because your head is full of static and technicolor has started to creep into your vision and you know that means that it’s bad bad bad.
/You
shake/
With a hitch of breath you try to lean against the wall to heave yourself up. Immediately a bolt of electricity runs through the length of your spine. You choke on an inhale, barely catching your weight against the wood before you can fall down again. Oh god everything hurts. It hurts it hurts. You pity yourself for just one short moment. You have been tempered to withstand worse things by the hands that fed you. You are so good at being in trouble, you are practiced in the art of surviving what has been done to your body. So you grit your teeth against it, squeaking the rusty hinges of your body and stumbling your heavy legs through the room like a ping pong ball made of lead.
You manage to catch yourself at the toilet bowl without getting concussed. Would that heal itself right now?
The wrongness is coming from within, not out.
Super juice pemdas?
Maybe You Are Concussed. These things can slip away from you after you ingest half a gallon neurotoxin.
Your intestines have assembled into one complicated knot and you can feel your stomach acid rise to the back of your skull . You don’t even get a chance to retch around the saliva pooling in your mouth before it gushes out of you.
You throw up into the toilet bowl (and you are so ugly so ugly so ugly because all that comes up is thick/acrid/black/ that burns your throat which by all reason should mean something is terribly wrong but you are just glad it’s coming out of you that you don’t haggle over details.) It is way more liquid than what should fit in your body. At least the tile is cool at your knees and feet, pinpricks of ice against reddened skin.
You feel more than hear a steady thumping beat inside your head echo painfully, the wheeze of a hinge and /oh that was footsteps/. You feel more than hear the trilling heartbeat of a person inside your room that you would know without senses and without words, and holy shit if Vash is here to fight this is Not A Good Time.
You open your mouth to tell him as much. This is a mistake. Black bile retches out of you and you wish it were puke colored but it’s not and there is no way you can talk to another person like this, unless there is a language in which cough-retch-heave means Leave Me The Fuck Alone.
“Hey, Wolfwood. Are you okay?”
You painfully– painfully stay quiet. You were made of sturdy stuff. Maybe he’ll forget you’re here. Please God don't let him see you like this. Not when you are this ugly.
“Wolfwood? Please answer me.”
You gurgle on air. Once. Twice. Thrice.
“I’m fine.” Your voice responds from somewhere to your left. But what you really want to say is
tell me if
you’ve heard this one
before
You manage these whole two words before you vomit more terrible black. Maybe he’ll politely pretend not to hear you. Maybe he’ll turn into a balloon and float away. Both scenarios are equally likely.
The voice comes in more frantic this time. “Wolfwood please open up. Please, you don’t sound okay.”
You don't answer. You are busy trying to choke down a scream because your insides have all turned to whiskey soda.
a
like wave
rises
Pain
Since you were a child
you have been taught
that Pain is a lesson to be learnt.
So you breathe it in greedily, let it into your bones and pray it will unmake you, shape you into something better.
(You have prayed
for autonomy
since you were 12.
You know it won’t change anything
this time either.)
There is a crack of splintered wood from somewhere. It might be from inside of you. Your senses have stopped making sense. Then there is the patter of feet against tile, so you look up.
For one second, everything stills. Because you think maybe it’s Livio coming through that door, and maybe you are just two children at an orphanage whose bodies are their own. You are just a child with a tummy sickness and that’s as far as your knowledge of pain goes.
Then your heart breaks into a million pieces/like the splintered wood. Because it can’t be Livio because The Eye took him and turned him into something else and then he shot himself in the head. You rest your forehead against the chill of the toilet seat. Can’t get much more disgusting than this anyways.
Either Vash gets chopped in half or he crouches down next to you. The sudden proximity makes his face slightly clearer. His features are all twisted – he looks worried sick. He wavers for a second before touching you so so gently, like you are a thing made of glass. At this point you might be.
“Can you speak right now?”
Your head jerks in a way that could be perceived as a shake. The movement jostles more black out of you. You try not to think about how it smells.
“Okay. Okay. You’re okay. You’ll get through it. It’s the vials right? Just let it all out.”
You make:
bile/
bile,
bile!
Through the buzzing of your eardrums his voice sounds like it’s shaking. He sounds like he’s convincing himself as much as anyone. You must be a sight.
You try to formulate a response, but your tongue is a carcass in your mouth. It sits alkaline against your teeth. The bathroom is blessedly cool and the walls taste like rust. Smell? You have forgotten your senses.
Fluorescent sparks leave negative images against the back of your eyeballs. You can’t possibly hope to be a person right now.
(This isn’t your first rodeo.
You know it will only get
worse from here. You wish
he wouldn’t look at you
when you are a crumpled piece of tissue)
His fingers are cool metal against feverish skin as he strokes your forehead and holds your sweaty hair back. You want to crawl in on yourself. You don’t want him to see this, how much ugly black is in you. You wish he wouldn't see you at all. Whenever he looks away from you it grants you cool respite from the burning suns.
You make
you fucking guessed it.
Bile !
Three hundred years from last second, liquids stop coming out from you. Which is good. But the room has stopped being shapes? Which is bad. You know the man in front of you, but you cannot name him.
He says I’m gonna move you now, okay? You think you make a rasp. The edges of your vision spot black, and now you are higher up than before, and there are strong arms around you.
The man puts you down somewhere soft. He doesn’t know Pain is a lesson. He says something else, but it’s through miles of glass/too close to make out/???
The room is jumbled/black/technicolor. You flit through them with a blink. Sometimes black stays for a while. It feels restful. When you open your eyes, the man is in front of you:
The man in front of you has the shape of petrichor. You are sure petrichor is supposed to be a smell, but your senses are being dishonest right now.
Black/Technicolor/
Black.
The man in front of you is a sleight of hand. Here I Am, Now I’m Not, Is This Your Card? He loves so hard you hate Him for it. He hurts so bad you love Him for it. He’s a thorn in your side and you know that pain is a lesson so you push him in deeper so He will leave a mark when he leaves.
Black,
He’s the paycheck you want to burn. He’s a ticking bomb you want to hold tight against your heart. Pain is always a lesson to be learnt.
Black.
The man in front of you looks like his brother.
He had told you once
that he was the evil twin
(before it all went wrong)
and you had laughed
but right now
you think/
that you’d rather have
the cold uncaring of the knife
than this unbearable solaris/
of eyes that are always/
watching you
The man in front of you is beautiful, and you hate him for it.
Black-black-black.
The man in front of you
(–holds your hair so gently in his hands as his–)
fingers stroke featherlight against your sweaty temple, and he is so god damn beautiful. You want to trace his figure with bullet holes. His bottom lip is jutted in a worried frown and you want to catch it between your teeth.
The man won’t let you touch him, because he thinks you’ll crush yourself against the shore of his body. You have tried to tell him so many times that you were made of sturdy stuff, that you are Unstoppable Force against Immovable Object, but it never sticks. Maybe he doesn’t want it to, because that means tragedy. It means you weren't born of sturdy stuff, you were hardened by the hands that fed you, and that's the type of thing that makes Vash cry.
(Oh! That’s his name.)
“Wolfwood? Can you hear me?”
You make a rattling sound that apparently passes for an answer, because Vash suddenly crowds into your space so hard you jerk back in surprise. His eyes are red-rimmed. It makes you ache.
His skin glows ghostly pale against rust red dirty motel wood and moonlight pearlesces his hair.
(you don’t say
For God so loved the world
that he gave his only begotten Son
but you think it
very hard.)
“Can you drink some water, do you think? You lost a lot of–” he stills at the look of your face. “Um. I think you’re dehydrated”
“Yeah, sure,” you rasp. This is probably what you would sound like all the time, if your lungs were in the state you deserved.
He flits across the room and back in a second, tilting your head back as he tilts a glass against your lips. Even in this state, it pisses you off. It’s the principle of the thing.
“You don’t have to baby me. Not my–” you cough, once, twice. “Not my first rodeo.”
He sours at that, eyebrows turning downwards. “This has happened before? Wolfwood…”
Your eyes dodge sideways. Walked right into that one.
“Still kicking, ain’t I? If you worry too much you’ll get wrinkles.” He probably won’t. He’s a hundred-and-something and has barely lost his baby fat.
“And what happens if you find out your limit? I don’t like this. It isn’t a game, you can’t just gamble like that.”
“Fuck around and find out,” is all you say back.
He looks like life just gave him its sourest lemons. Please never do this again. He doesn’t say it, because it would be selfish and hypocritical and Vash the Stampede is only one of those things, but it’s plain in his expression nonetheless.
“The others alright?”
He nods. “They’re across the hallway. They were worried about you too, you know.”
Damn it. You thought you had been so good at acting normal. Maybe it had been naive to think you could fool the three most annoyingly observant people in the universe.
Vash pokes your cheek. “You snore a lot, you know.”
You act offended, thankful for the reprieve.. “I do not.”
He grins. “Yeah, you do. Like an old man.”
His smile could power a whole goddamn city. I would crawl out of my open grave for you. You don’t say it. The room you share is full of aborted words, as it always is.
(Would you still love me
If I didn’t need saving?
Would you love any of us
if we didn’t need it so bad we hurt you?)
His teeth gleam white in the moonlight. You didn’t even notice it had gotten dark. The suns of his eyes makes dirty red hotel rust incandesce gold, submerges you in terrible warmth. You wish this was a love story, and that was enough for the story to end. You wish it were enough.
He will never want to kiss you again, after the job is done. If he were smart, he would leave you to rot in your blackness, to chase fire and brimstone elsewhere. But he looks at you like he’s already offering up his still bleeding heart, because he has never known what’s good for him. You wish this pain was a lesson.
Silence fills the room with quiet benediction.
His fingers card through your damp hair like a pearl rosary, accipietis donum Sancti Spiritus.
You wish it were enough.
You wish it were enough.
–
And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation
look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,
and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking
for whatever it was you lost, and one person
add up to something.