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don’t stop if I fall and don’t look back
don’t stop, bury me and fade to black
"Did you see this? They're making a lake!"
"Hm?"
"We should go."
"Why? There's a reservoir in December now."
"No, this is a lake - for visiting. Swimming and stuff."
"What?"
Vash lowered the newspaper so Wolfwood could see his face. They were on the big porch swing out back, Wolfwood sitting up on one end with Vash sprawled across the rest of the seat, his calves over Wolfwood's lap, feet bare. Wolfwood's hands were occupied with a threaded needle and a child-sized dress.
“Swimming?” Vash raised an eyebrow. “People have enough buoyancy to float in water, so you can move by -"
Wolfwood pinched his shin and Vash yelped. "I know what swimming is, Spikey."
Vash pouted at him. "Then what, what? It's a lake, c'mon."
Wolfwood stuck the needle through the cloth and pulled another stitch closed. The dress already had three patches on it from previous tears; his fix wouldn't be as pretty as those. He was slowly getting better at sewing with practice, but his hands were a little clumsy. Stiffened in the joints by his artificial age and by all the abuse he'd given them while handling a weapon that weighed as much as he did.
"Waste of water," Wolfwood said, not sure why he was so uncomfortable with the idea.
"It's not! There's hydro generators and redundancies all over now."
"Just because it's a time of plenty doesn't mean people can't be wasteful," Wolfwood muttered. He poked his finger with the needle and winced.
"You're being a real ass today, you know?"
Wolfwood flopped his hands onto Vash's legs, scrunching the dress in a fist (but keeping the needle clear of his fingers). He sighed. ”Okay. Fine, tell me about the lake."
"Umm, says here it's in Augusta, so pretty close. There's a natural bedrock canyon in the eastern lowlands, and they've laid pipe works all through it and now they're just letting it flood. They excavated one side of the canyon to make it sloped. Like a shore?"
Wolfwood tried really hard not to scoff. But still, he said, "Sounds like a death trap. No one on this damn planet can swim."
Vash cast him a glare and flipped the paper back up to read from the article. "'Augusta's Department of Homeworld Support Services is currently taking applications for lifeguards and swim coaches. Trainees will undergo a two-month training course to become as proficient in the water as any homeworlder. HSS anticipates hiring enough personnel to have one lifeguard per dozen visitors. Pierce -' the head project guy - 'Pierce said, "We want to take as much extra precaution as possible while the citizens of No Man's Land adjust to this new landscape. It's startling to people, and we expect to see accidents, but we want to keep everyone safe and happy, too. Access to water for play is as much a human need as water for living."'"
Something had tightened in Wolfwood's stomach. A small, ugly feeling. A meanness.
Vash dropped the paper again and stared at Wolfwood like see? Told you so.
Wolfwood breathed in deep, trying to temper his automatic rejection of the whole concept. He wouldn't ruin Vash's day by fighting about it. He couldn't even put his finger on why it felt so wrong to him. So he just said, "Okay."
Vash's glare was turning into a pout again, a real one this time. He could see through Wolfwood's self-restraint.
"When's it opening to the public?” Wolfwood asked.
"Not for a couple months," Vash said, fiddling with the paper.
Well. Time to digest the news, at least. Get used to the idea, and get himself braced to go there even though he hated the idea. There would definitely be a ton of people - and Earth officers, guards, plenty of people who had been in Octovern and had sharp memories for faces - and then with Vash's health as off-and-on as it was -
Quietly, Vash said, “We don't have to go.”
Wolfwood looked down at him. He had turned his head to the side and was looking out over the fields. Hands folded on top of the newspaper, over his stomach. He looked serene, but also blank in a way Wolfwood knew too well.
"No, we're going," Wolfwood told him.
Vash twitched the corner of his mouth in an insincere smile.
"The kids'll all want to go as soon as they find out it's a thing," Wolfwood said. "So we need to scope it out first."
"Oh," Vash murmured. "True."
Wolfwood put his hand over Vash's shin and squeezed a little. Vash looked back at him. Wolfwood gave him an apologetic smile. "Ignore me," he said. "It sounds good."
Vash softened. He gave Wolfwood a smile that was tired but warm. "I can't swim either," he said. "In case you thought I could."
Wolfwood snorted softly. It was a frequent point of contention, most often with the youngest of the kids - the ones young enough to whom the Earthers didn't seem like strange newcomers, just a different set of everyday folks. Because all other independent plants were Earthers, the littlest kids assumed that Vash must know everything about Earth and have had the same experiences as Earth plants.
"No, I didn't figure you had a lake to swim in in space," Wolfwood said.
Vash smiled more and bonked Wolfwood with the side of his foot. "We had null G," he said. "I always figured swimming must feel similar? I don't know. Wanna find out."
"You will," Wolfwood promised.
-
When Nick was nine, a few of the younger kids came up to him while he was hanging out laundry. They had a scarce handful of seeds, given to them by the trader who'd just passed through that morning. The trader's van had had flowers painted on the side, and she'd given a pinch of wildflower seeds to the little kids who had run up to gawk and stare at the beautiful images. She'd meant the gesture in kindness and charity.
The kids wanted their Big Brother Nico to help them. They didn't know what to do with the seeds because they didn’t understand how plants grew. He tried everything to talk them out of it - told them the pinch of seeds would probably sell for a couple of double-dollars at the bazaar in December, enough money to buy some candy. But they wanted flowers. He told them they could sell the seeds and buy flowers. They said no, no. Please. We want to see them grow.
Nick knew it wouldn't work, and cursed the trader every waking second while he got started on the flower bed. Why had she done that? One look around was all it took to know nothing would grow here. She'd done the cruelest possible thing, giving hope to little kids who were still young enough to believe in it. Nick poured sweat, working with a shovel and spade to break up the top of the ground in a tiny patch by the back door. He agonized over the placement, even though he knew it was useless - close to the kitchen, where they could spare some of the dishwater for watering; the only spot near the house that got double shade at the suns' height, a shadow cast from two angles.
Maybe after all that sunk cost, he even started to believe a little bit himself. The project had leaked to all the kids by then, not just the littlest ones. When Nick helped the original recipient of the seeds - Izzy, barely four years old - press the precious dots into the dampened earth, it was with an audience of every child at the orphanage, all standing with bated breath. At the back of the group, Miss Melanie looked on. She hadn't done anything to stop them, but to Nick, she looked sad.
"They're not gonna do anything right now," Nick grouched at all the watching kids, once the seeds were covered. "Shoo!"
If the ground would have just stayed flat and barren then, that would have been for the best. If the seeds would have the fucking decency to understand that they should play dead. God. Of course not. A week later, they came up.
The excitement around the orphanage was astronomical. Everyone had gotten so damn invested in these stupid flower seeds, and the tiny sprouts got treated like royalty. Kids would go out and dribble some of their precious juice into the flower patch, trying to feed the plants, until Nick caught them and yelled at them that plants didn't want apple juice, dammit, they wanted water! Kitchen scraps got taken outside and carefully arranged around the sprouts, in a theoretical effort at fertilizing. (The peels and cores all just dried up in the open air and blew away.) An old-Earth textbook had a diagram showing that when people breathed out, plants breathed that air in, and vice versa; so some kids would crouch over the seedlings and blow on them, in case they didn't have enough of the right kind of air.
The following couple of months were a nightmare. As each seedling struggled up, anemic and misshapen, it became more and more obvious that they couldn't make it. The ground had nothing to give them. This wasn't soil, it was just sand. Proto-sandstone. Barely a foot beneath the surface, you hit the stuff compact enough to cut into bricks and build houses out of. No amount of kitchen waste-water could leach nutrients out of what was essentially glass.
Nick bore the brunt of comforting the kids who came to him upset, holding brown leaves that had fallen off, or whole plants that had shriveled, roots and all. He drew so many consolation flowers in chalk and colored pencils that summer, saying look, you don't need plants to have flowers. He hated flowers after that summer. Just the concept of them made him feel nauseous.
But at the bottom of it all, he was caught in his own personal descent into hell by the one person who'd known how it would go all along: Miss Melanie. He was washing dishes after all the other kids were in bed. She came in from outside, hamper of dried laundry in her arms, bags under her eyes. He ducked his head, not wanting her to see that he was crying.
She put the laundry down and came over to him, lifted his hands from the scummy water, dried them on her apron, and held him hard while he shook. He didn't make any noise. He'd already bit his tongue, keeping it inside.
Finally, when he was done, she sat down with him in the common room and took something out of her apron pocket to show him. He stared at it - a tiny green thing, the size of a pinhead. "What is that?" he asked.
"A bud," she told him. She put it in his palm. "The stem of this one broke earlier today. The whole plant will be dried up by the morning. There was no chance it would ever have bloomed."
Nick stared at the little thing and felt his throat getting tight again. He picked at the green with a chewed, dirty thumbnail, and saw a hint of yellow inside.
"But it wanted to bloom," he said. "Even here?"
"Even here," she told him, and hugged him again for a long time.
-
They called him Nick now. Melanie still called him Nicholas, and sometimes Livio called him Nico - but the kids all called him Uncle Nick. And Vash called him Nick, but it sounded different when he said it. He’d whispered it over and over, hoarse with grief and joy, when he’d first seen Wolfwood walking away from his grave. The spot where Vash had buried him, alone.
It only sounded completely right when Vash said it.
Wolfwood tried to think of himself as Uncle Nick, the graying, kindly man who taught kids to read, always had candy in his pockets, and was learning to mend torn clothing in his spare time. He tried to see who the kids all saw when they looked at him and assumed he was ancient and wise.
He hated to even try to count the real number. Had he even hit thirty yet? He wasn’t sure. Sometimes it felt like centuries and sometimes he felt like he’d just woken up in Miss Melanie’s old bunk room yesterday, three feet shorter and full of a potential future. Now he looked like he was sleeping with partners half his age. Sometimes the other resettlers in their little township gave him dirty looks, and he knew it wasn’t about their genders or their number because Vash and Livio never got those looks. The other resettlers just saw him as the obvious third wheel, the one with a predatory, untrustworthy look about him.
When they were alone, just him and Vash and Livio, everything felt perfect. Like those were the only times he was a real, complete person who was fully of this world. He didn’t have to explain anything but also didn’t have to hold his tongue; they knew everything, understood it all, and all they cared about was that he was alive and present and himself. No place or people had ever made him feel so grounded and centered before, and he doubted anyone else ever would again.
He no longer felt like he was full of a potential future. He felt like he’d skipped most of the middle and gone right to the end chapters, the happily ever after. In the course of gaining everything he could have ever wanted, he’d lost most of a life.
Who would he have been, given different options? It made him tired to even try to think about it. No time for hobbies when he was raising other kids at the old orphanage. Only time for training after he left. Then he’d died, except he hadn’t, and the world had ended, except it didn’t.
And now the land flowed with milk and honey, and he was old.
He had no right to be angry. What could he be angry at? Circumstance? Bad luck? Fate? Not fate. If fate were real, it had put Livio and Vash both into his life, and he wouldn’t bite the hand that gave them to him. God?
Was he angry at God?
He’d always been angry at God, to be fair. When his world was a narrow tunnel of training, pain, violence, suffering, and betrayal - well, anyone would be angry. It had always been fundamentally one of the most infuriating things about Vash, that he wasn’t angry. How could he not be? Wolfwood’s fury against God doubled when he shouldered all that rage that Vash didn’t feel.
But. It felt different to be angry at God now that his life was as perfect as he could have ever hoped for it to be. It felt wrong and ungrateful and wretched and… small. Just small.
Why did he still believe, anyway? Why had he ever? If all God was was a vessel that Wolfwood could pour his anger into endlessly? He supposed he’d needed that, once, but now…
He sat at the window to smoke in the dark of pre-dawn. Hadn’t been able to sleep. He watched the two of them on the bed, Livio gone soft all over from good food and a calm life, Vash pressed against the warm, protective body of a man who at least looked like an age match. They looked right together. They looked safe, they looked happy. Looked like they’d gone out and saved the world instead of lying in the ground, dead to it.
Under his hand, Wolfwood traced the embossed letters on the cover of an old, beat-up Bible. The gold flake was long gone from the title. The inside was a mess, many pages ripped or completely torn out. He didn’t really need to read it, or want to. But he drew in a lungful of warm smoke and considered it nonetheless.
He’d never been a good student of the actual text. He’d always learned better by listening than by reading, so any effort by Miss Melanie or a foster family or Chapel to get him to sit still and read a religious text was doomed from the start. He preferred physical tasks with tangible goals, household labor or combat training, and his caretakers had always eventually realized that once his muscles were occupied, his mind was wide open. That’s when they’d talked about God. Told all the old stories in their own ways - with their own agendas, of course - and he’d listened. Soaked in the stories and then turned them over and over in his head for hours, days, weeks afterwards.
The idea of God had always been a comfort to him, even when God was a punching bag he could direct his wrath towards. Maybe especially then. He remembered thanking God for some things, long ago - saying his prayers at bedtime because Melanie wanted him to, because it pleased her to hear him thanking God for her and for the food and for the other kids’ health and for the orphanage’s roof. But after he’d left that place, he’d never thanked God for anything again.
The idea of thanking God now for Vash and Livio made him feel furious. And it made him grieve for something he never really knew he’d clung to until it died. Faith, maybe. Or at least some twisted version of it.
He stubbed his cigarette out on the cover of the book and watched the suns rise.
-
The bar brawl wasn't Vash's fault, but as soon as one guy had pulled a gun, Wolfwood hadn't been able to stop Vash from throwing himself into the mix. Fifteen minutes after the first thrown punch, Wolfwood had had more chairs and beer glasses broken against him than he could count, the floor was rolling with spent shells, and the air was thick with cordite smoke and pained groans. The moment Wolfwood saw that every other player was going to stay down to nurse their wounds, he grabbed Vash by the collar and hauled him out while the air was still too hazy to see through. Vash was breathless and laughing, that too-much laugh he let out when things got hairy.
"Bastard," Wolfwood shouted at him the moment they'd crossed the street. Wolfwood hauled him to an alley under the shadow of a water tank, where they were surrounded by rickety ladders and crossbeams like prison bars. The wall that blocked them from the view of the street was a piece of ship's hull, buckled and rusted.
Vash kept laughing and raised his hands as if in surrender.
Wolfwood backed him against the metal wall with enough force to generate a resounding clang, fists full of red coat.
"-ahahaha, stop, shh, they'll hear!" Vash gasped. The laughter seemed involuntary.
"I told you to get out!" Wolfwood yelled in his face.
Vash tipped his head back and kept gasping, grin wide.
"You almost got your brains blown out -"
"I'm fine," Vash wheezed. "It's fine, I would'a been fine."
"You're bleeding!"
"What? No," Vash giggled, even though Wolfwood smashed a hand against the graze on his forehead and held the bloody palm up to his face like an exorcism. "Ow," Vash said, and hiccuped again. He looked cross-eyed at the blood. "That's okay," he said.
"It's not!" Wolfwood yelled, and slapped Vash as hard as he could without realizing he was going to. The wet smack rang in his ears. Vash had stopped laughing, still breathing hard, one cheek pink with blood smear and the other pink with - something else.
"I'm okay," Vash tried again, but it came out thin.
"I hate this," Wolfwood growled at him. "I hate you doing this shit!"
"Sorry," Vash rasped.
Wolfwood shook him by the collar, but it was weak. Vash jostled against the metal wall without any resistance. Wolfwood's blood sang in his ears and his gaze caught on the shine of blood on Vash's lip. A streetlight somewhere was casting a dull reflection.
Vash looked him in the eyes and smiled.
"No," Wolfwood said, suddenly desperate, urgent. He slapped a hand over Vash's mouth to hide it, and Vash wrinkled his brow at him, mumbling something too muffled to make out, and Wolfwood told him, "Don't you fucking look at me like that, never met anyone so opposed to suicide trying so fucking hard to get himself killed, you hypocrite," and finally Vash went silent and his eyes looked truly hurt.
"D'you need incentive to stay alive, huh?" Wolfwood asked, his mouth almost touching the back of his hand that blocked Vash's mouth away from touching his. Between them, Wolfwood reached down and grabbed and could immediately tell that Vash was adrenaline-hard. A rough squeeze made Vash let out a startled, panicky groan. "Saved a bunch of lives back there, huh, so you deserve something, right," Wolfwood said, throat dry. "Deserve some kinda big damn hero reward, payback -"
Vash was shaking his head, eyes getting wider. His hips bucked into Wolfwood's hand.
It was tricky to get inside Vash's stupid buckled leather with one hand, but Wolfwood had practice. Vash made increasingly urgent noises as Wolfwood finally got his hand inside, completely incomprehensible whether they were objection or encouragement. He was wet and burning up and Wolfwood jammed three fingers into him and Vash yowled and bit his hand hard enough to finally make Wolfwood let go of his face.
"You think this is what you deserve?" Wolfwood demanded.
"No," Vash hiccupped, but he grabbed the back of Wolfwood's suit jacket by the neck, hauling it into tight fistfuls.
"I don't care," Wolfwood said, working him roughly, yanking his odd, alien cock down to get it trapped between thumb and palm while his fingers kept thrusting. "Every idea you have is bullshit."
"I just," Vash said breathlessly, "need to - help -"
"No you don't!"
"I - "
Wolfwood took his anger out on Vash's cunt and Vash wailed and broke off his objections, shaking all over and grinding into the touch.
"Promise," Wolfwood demanded. "Promise you won't pull any shit like that again."
"I can't," Vash sobbed, and finally squeezed his eyes shut. "Don't stop."
Wolfwood buried his face against Vash's neck and didn't stop until Vash had come hard, soaking his hand and the front of his pants, and then not even until Vash begged him and pushed him away long enough. He let Vash take his wet hand and hold it hard in his unforgiving prosthetic grip, while Vash's warm, living hand carded through his hair and held him by the scalp. Vash's neck smelled like gunsmoke and blood.
"I'm okay," Vash breathed, "it's okay, it's over," but whether he was saying it to Wolfwood or to himself, Wolfwood couldn't tell.
-
Seeds were cheap and plentiful now. At the very beginning, Earthers had distributed tech and survival supplies for free - but given enough time, the trade and haggling culture of No Man's Land had caught up with even the staunchest altruists, and now most Earthtech cost something. High supply drove prices down, though. Homeworld Support Service outposts sold terraform crates by the dozen, and seeds for a pittance.
The crates were three-foot cubes that contained a small, one-use geobattery packed in the center of a dense soil-nutrition mix, enzymes and compressed gases so potent that they gave chemical burns to anyone who touched the contents bare-handed. HSS was supposed to oversee installation of every crate, but of course that was laughable - the moment they were out in the world, there was no stopping people from getting them.
The safety-spec way to install one was to bury it at least five feet deep, then trigger the small charge that came with each of them to unseal the edges and let the contents start to leach into the ground. Except, who the hell lived somewhere where you could dig five feet down? And it worked pretty damn well if you just popped the edge-seals above ground, anyway. If you installed one correctly you could turn a few hundred square feet into deep, permanent soil, but if you did it above-ground you still were likely to get several dozen, maybe a hundred, square feet of topsoil, even with all the energy that got lost into the air. Enough soil for a small garden. And the crates were plentiful. Why do one crate correctly when you could pop twenty open and get the same result, faster? Never mind the Earthers whining and moaning about water retention and root depth.
Who cared, when thousands of locals were eating fresh vegetables for the first times in their lives? Who cared, when kids were now getting to learn that food could come from anywhere, instead of only from one precarious, limited source protected only by glass and prayers and "engineers" who barely knew what they were doing?
At the new orphanage, they'd tried their best to bury the damn crates. Miss Melanie worried about what the exposed chemicals and the battery itself might do to the kids. But the ground was too hard, bedrock only a couple of feet below the surface. So they'd spaced out their dozen crates, mounded sand over them to make Melanie feel a little better, and opened their seals from a safe distance. Within a week, the mounds were dark brown and grass had started cropping up.
That had been at the very beginning, when they'd first settled at the abandoned hotel. Now...
Now, there were fields. The ground underfoot got softer and darker every day as the geobatteries injected life where there had been none. The dirt happily drank up all the water that trickled onto it from their hydrostations, which put out plenty of water for running all the plumbing and irrigation. One hydrostation could supply a small town, and when the Earthers had first come through delivering their life-saving supplies, they'd handed out two to every populated place. No strings attached. Free, clean, plentiful water. Just like that.
Nick stood at the edge of the field, leaning on the fence that Livio had built, looking out at the throng of kids shouting and playing around Miss Melanie and Jasmine. The adults were trying to get the kids to focus on helping to plant some new seeds. In Nick's hand, he held one of the packets - wildflowers.
He flipped it between his fingers, looking at the printed drawing on the front - a pretty bouquet - and the text on the back, which instructed how to plant them. The kids weren't doing any of that, mostly just throwing handfuls of seeds in the air and letting them fall. A few songbirds were flitting around, avoiding the grabby little hands while they dived for the seeds. Nick wondered if there would be any left to sprout. But... of course there would be. Jasmine or Livio would probably come out later and make sure there were a decent amount of seeds properly buried in the soil, safe from the birds.
It was all so easy. At first Nick had tensed up in resistance to the idea of using any of their resources for something as inedible and frivolous as flowers - but then Vash laughed him off, said that flowers fed the bugs that helped the food plants grow correctly. The science lesson - about things Vash had understood for decades, but which had never been relevant to Nick's life before - had made Nick unaccountably angry. He hadn't taken it out on Vash, but he'd needed to cool down for a while afterwards.
These flowers weren't going to have to fight. Everything was perfectly laid out for them - the rich, dark earth; clean, drinkable water flowing freely into the soil like they were some wealthy mansion-owners. There would be so many flowers the kids would get bored of them.
There would be flowers, and Nick hadn't needed to raise a finger. No one had asked him to make impossible promises this time. They hadn't needed God for this miracle.
He felt ungrateful and selfish, and he didn't know why.
All he could think to do was to remove himself from the others, so they could enjoy their well-earned riches. He couldn't fathom resenting a child getting the chance to grow up in luxury. So the moment he felt himself getting irritated about any of this stuff, he just... left. Went for walks or had a smoke on the upper balcony. Whatever the hell his problem was, no one else deserved to have to deal with it.
Footsteps crunched up behind him. The fence was well outside the edge of the terraformed area; the ground was still sandy here. Nick glanced over his shoulder and quickly clocked who it was.
"Hey, Raz," Nick said, flipping the seed packet between his fingers again.
Razlo just grunted at him. He stepped up next to the fence rail and looked out at the kids, too. "Fuckin' waste," he grumbled.
Nick snorted. Of all the people who understood what he was going through... well. Razlo had gotten more Eye training than Livio, really. "Didn't get the ecology lecture from Vash?" Nick asked.
"I checked out," Razlo said. "Liv thinks it's interesting." He rolled his eyes. As they stood in silence for a long minute, Razlo's gaze picked out a point in the distance and followed it closely. Eyes still on whatever it was, he bent down and picked up a few pebbles.
"What're you doing," Nick sighed, long-suffering.
"Bet you I can take all those birds out in under a minute."
Nick groaned and stuck the seeds in his pocket, pulling out his smokes and lighter instead. "You know you can't do that shit," he said.
"One?" Razlo asked, looking pained. He flicked a pebble up and caught it.
"No," Nick said. "No killing birds for fun. And the kids are right there."
"So? Not gonna kill them."
"No killing for fun," Nick snapped.
Razlo pitched the handful of pebbles as hard as he could to the side - in the distance, a few miniature mushroom clouds of dust bloomed from the ground. "Fine," he growled.
Razlo gave Nick such headaches, and yet he couldn't hate the guy. He understood Raz more than he wished he did. Nick rubbed his eyes and the bridge of his nose, wishing he could just relax. The nicotine wasn't helping. "You talked to Livio lately?" he asked.
A grunt in response. Unhelpful.
"About the trip to Augusta," Nick pushed.
"Ugh," Razlo said.
"Are you okay with the trip?" Nick ground out.
"Yeah, fuck, who cares," Razlo said. "Liv can have all of that shit."
"It'll probably be crowded at the lake," Nick said. "You can't front there if you're gonna do anything that'll get feds or security after us."
"I won't," Razlo snapped. "Get yer asshole unpuckered, dipshit. I don't wanna play in the goddamned water, Livio can have it, I'm not going to the fucking lake with you."
Nick wanted to snap back again, but he bit his tongue. Razlo's baseline of communication was acidic; even when he was abrasive, he wasn't actually angry. Just a shithead. Instead, Nick hauled on his smoke, huffed out the cloud, and asked, "Chapel baptized you, right?"
Razlo started. He turned a baleful glare at Nick and said, "The hell?"
Nick just waited.
"Yeah," Razlo said, shifting his weight.
“Did anyone else, before him?”
Razlo made a negative noise. But in a rare instance of curiosity from him, he asked, “You?”
Nick fiddled with the shortened cigarette, looking at the ember. “Yeah,” he said. “With water, y’know, how the book says you’re supposed to.”
Chapel hadn’t used water, of course. The blood of the covenant had always been fairly literal with Chapel. At least it was just a smear on the forehead with his baptisms; confirmations had been different. For confirmation, trainees had to supply the blood themselves. It was an act of spiritual and bodily commitment, after all.
“Don’t really care what the book says,” Razlo said. “The book wasn’t real and in the room with me, makin’ me strong.”
“You made you strong,” Nick told him.
Razlo snorted. “Drugs and training and fuckin’ purpose made us strong. Don’t come over all woo-woo just ‘cause you’re decrepit now, old man.”
“Fuck you,” Nick muttered, but it was without heat. He stubbed out the dying end of his cigarette on the fence rail and flicked the butt away. “So you didn’t really believe, huh.”
Razlo growled deep in his chest and said, “I believed, motherfucker. Don’t you ever say I didn’t believe.”
Nick dropped his head low in wordless apology. But even in Razlo’s heat, there was a thin undercurrent of uncertainty in himself: he’d believed, past tense.
If he believed in anything nowadays, he was keeping it to himself. Nick felt that.
“The sacraments are different, you know,” Nick said quietly. “Than what he taught us.”
Razlo didn’t say anything.
“I took confessions, sometimes. Gave people penance to do.” Nick looked up at the sky. There were more clouds these days than there used to be. “Confession’s supposed to cleanse you of sin, but I don’t think it counts when you’re confessing to someone not in a state of grace. But I don’t know if it mattered, really. Mostly people just needed someone to talk to.”
“Stupid,” Razlo muttered. “To think that anything can… erase sin. If you did it, you did it, you’ll always have done it.”
“Penance?” Nick hazarded.
“Makin’ up for it ain’t the same thing as not having done it in the first place,” Razlo said.
“You think trying to make up for it is worth it?”
Razlo huffed. “Better fuckin’ be, or I’m wasting my time,” he said. “And what else am I gonna do? Just keel over? Fuckin’ hell.” He turned a glare on Nick. “This is almost as boring as the ecology lecture. Own the shit you do in life, that’s all there is to it. Like - I killed you. Fuckin’ sorry about it now, sure, but I can’t take it back and I ain’t gonna pretend I can.”
Nick blinked. Razlo had never actually apologized before. This seemed like the closest thing Nick was ever going to get.
Nick pitched his voice to a drawl and said, “Oh, I don’t think you killed me, exactly.”
“Excuse you?” Raz barked.
“Chapel and the overdose, really -“
“Oh, fuck you,” Razlo snarled, “that was my fight and I won.”
“Might’ve worn me down a little,” Nick taunted. “And you only came in after, what, a dozen goons and Livio had had a turn? You so proud of getting sloppy seconds?”
Razlo’s face went lobster red in no time. “You filthy fuck,” he declared, and kicked the fence while Nick laughed, before striding away, cursing Nick a blue streak.
The conversation with Razlo had made Nick feel a little better, oddly. Better fuckin’ be, he thought to himself, or I’m wasting my time. He pulled the seed packet back out of his pocket and unfolded the top, peering inside at the black specks that looked like nothing. He dumped them into his palm. Different-shaped little pieces of grit, barely enough to make a snack for a bird.
He balled the seeds in his fist and climbed over the fence. Melanie and Jasmine were just starting to usher the kids away from the garden, back towards the hotel. Nick would go behind them, empty his handful, and make sure enough of the seeds were buried and safe.
-
Somehow it didn't sink in that Wolfwood's whole world had ended until he saw one of Razlo's hunched minions hauling Vash down the stairs.
That awful, nauseating atmospheric pressure hadn't stopped, and from up above Wolfwood could hear a chorus of rising voices - inhuman, ecstatic - while from beneath he could hear a slow, building groaning noise, and the floor creaked and cracked with the beginnings of movement. Elendira, next to him, looked up and laughed, elated - and down the stairs, thumping at each step with all the banality of a corpse, came Vash's limp body, held by the feet by some bandaged mutant, overseen by -
Legato, scraping his metal coffin down the stairs after them with fevered joy in his eyes. Wolfwood's heart thundered harder than ever, he felt the thick heat of adrenaline in his limbs and the copper on the back of his tongue that meant he had to do something, now, NOW, he -
Elendira took a step to the side and pushed Wolfwood back with one hand on his chest, like an adult telling a child not to get involved. She was getting out of Legato and his beast of burden's way. They passed by, as the groaning and screaming of metals began to crescendo and the floor began to lift and sway, and Wolfwood just. Watched.
He could only watch.
Legato met Wolfwood's eyes and the pure, mad cruelty in them was tempered with a moment's approval. Legato blinked in a way that said Good. Your job is complete. And then he passed into a door and down, down, taking Vash with him, and Wolfwood wanted to vomit but couldn't move, that atmospheric, psychic pressure from Knives exerting his power was still crushing him, he felt his knees buckle, he wanted to shoot Legato until he ran out of bullets and Legato was just little wet pieces in a puddle of blood, he wanted to die rather than keep existing in this moment -
Elendira patted his shoulder and said, "Hold onto something."
He didn't. When the Ark rose into the sky, he was on his knees, knocked down by the enormity of the motion, the moment, the world... ending.
He simply stopped.
He stopped thinking. He stopped caring. He felt numb, every waking minute, in a way he'd never achieved with alcohol. Sometimes he slept because his body turned the lights off in his brain until his internal battery recharged enough for him to open his eyes again and keep feeling like the walking dead. He would eat, sometimes, again because his body acted on survival instincts so deeply ingrained that he had no conscious say over what they wanted, but he couldn't taste anything. He couldn't taste the cigarettes that he kept getting, somehow, from somewhere. One day he woke up in his barren bunk and saw one of those gnarled mutants in his room, by his pathetic barrack-bed, cleaning some garbage off the floor and then tossing an unopened pack of cigarettes onto the empty desk before leaving.
Wolfwood spent so many seconds considering the possibility of pulling the gun he slept with and blowing the thing's brain out that he didn't actually do it.
It would be a mercy. He was positive of that. Those things, they were failed versions of him. They had been kids, once, but the drugs - the drugs hadn't worked right.
Yeah. Yeah, like they'd worked right on him, on Livio. He sure felt right.
He thought about the gun he slept with being at his own temple, cold and heavy. He was a failed version of himself. Mercy, mercy, mercy.
The two-toned hair in front of him and the moon behind, on a rooftop somewhere, somewhen, who cares anymore, gunfire and shouting in the distance of the night air, the same pistol now under his pillow pointed at the slump-shouldered figure who sat so very still like he was daring, he was helping Wolfwood's aim by staying so still, and in Wolfwood's mind ran a chorus of it would be a mercy but to who? to who? the world, himself, the man in front of him? was it justice if the harm had already been done? could punishment balance the scales against crime or just bury the scales under more weight until they were crushed and useless - and who was weighing, anyway, the sins and the atonements, who was weighing them and why, to what end, what the fuck do you want from us, God -?
Wolfwood turned onto his side and stared at the open door. He didn't pull his gun. Not today.
He locked his bunk door after that and the garbage stayed in his room, while the fresh cigarette packs were shoved into a gap in his doorjamb, outside. What the fuck did it really matter, anyway? Elendira could probably shoot a nail through three decks and pin him to the floor by his throat.
But she wouldn't, because he was her... ally. On her side. He didn't fight back, he obeyed his orders. He walked through the world as a ghost enacting someone else's vengeance. He wasn't even haunting his own story anymore. Alien minds and alien voices sometimes raised in cacophonous song above him, in the upper decks where Knives stayed and looked out over his conquering devastation.
Wolfwood could leave the Ark. He wasn't a prisoner, not like - Wolfwood couldn't even think the name anymore. It stuck in his head like he was choking to death on it. When he thought of the color blue-green, shining wide, Wolfwood couldn't breathe. So he didn't think. He left the Ark on orders, went landside, barked at feds to stand down. Pointless demands, since dead men couldn't follow orders. Who killed them varied - sometimes Elendira, sometimes those hunched minions who couldn't speak, sometimes Livio (in silence) or Razlo (laughing). Wolfwood wasn't even sure why he wasn't killing them, anymore. Dying by his bullet would be a mercy, compared to the alternatives.
Wolfwood didn't go on the Ark's deck anymore. He didn't want the fresh air, the sunlight, the vast expanses with ant-sized people running and screaming beneath him while their beautiful guardians, their life-sources, their angels flew up and away and left them to wither...
He stayed in the Ark's depths, smoked in the dark, and remembered what it felt like to be a starving child.
There were kids down there.
Sometimes he could hear the echoes of screaming from the place where Legato permanently lived, and which Knives only rarely visited. Every time Knives came out of there, he was so angry.
Surely Legato was getting tired. How long had it been? Months?
Wolfwood was walking on autopilot over to the mess for his usual heap of ration bars that tasted like ashes, when he passed Livio in the hallway and smacked against his shoulder. Didn't bother sidestepping.
Suddenly he found himself against the bulkhead by the throat, short on air, head ringing, bared teeth in his face. Oh. Not Livio, then.
Razlo tightened his grip and growled, "Get it the fuck together."
Wolfwood coughed and raised his lip in a snarl, which only earned him another thump against the wall that rattled his brain around his skull.
"Do you know how much it hurts Master Chapel to see you like this?" Razlo hissed. "You're a fucking waste of everything he gave you, you pussy bitch, waste of the Goddamned air you breathe."
Dazed, Wolfwood halfway agreed with what Razlo was saying. But also - what? "Chapel can eat another grenade to the spine," he spat. "Don't give a fuck what he thinks."
Razlo threw him. Razlo's throws were nothing to laugh at; if it hadn't been an enclosed space, Wolfwood would be falling a few hundred feet to become a smear on the sand right now. As it was, he hit the steel wall at the end of the corridor hard enough to leave a dent, and he smeared quite a lot of blood around as he staggered to his feet.
Wolfwood spat out blood and a piece of tooth.
Razlo glared at him with the hot fury of a true believer, and said, "Like you give a fuck what anyone thinks. You've never believed in anything, you fucking puppet."
It might as well have been one of Elendira's nails going through his heart. Wolfwood coughed again, put his hand out to steady himself against the wall. He's believed in so goddamned much, he wants to scream. Losing faith can't be such fucking agony if the faith wasn't real at some point -
But Razlo had already turned and left, footsteps loud on the metal grate floor, apparently satisfied with having the last word. Wolfwood slumped against the wall and sank down to sit on the floor. He tipped his head back and waited for his nose to knit into shape. It wasn't enough damage to waste a vial on, but he didn't heal as fast as Razlo and it would hurt while he waited.
The pain was oddly clarifying. It was the most he'd felt of anything in... he didn't know how long. His head throbbed and he chewed on his anger, his reflexive defensiveness, his feelings of betrayal and loss. Why should he bother to feel betrayed, anyway, he was the one born to do the betraying.
But he had been betrayed. By pretty much everything and everyone he'd ever trusted, he'd been betrayed.
Except one.
His face was hot from the broken bones, the swelling, and the wetness was just trickles of blood, he told himself. The coughing, wracking spasms in his chest were because Razlo'd partially crushed his windpipe and it was hard to get enough air. That was all.
God, to be smiled at again.
God. God?
Even when he'd believed most fervently, he'd clung to the maxim God helps those who help themselves. He'd never believed in a God who would do his job for him. Who would take the cup from his lips.
To be smiled at. To take it all back. To choose different, just once.
Legato had to be getting tired...
He needed a plan.
-
The whiskey burned, but at least he could taste it. It washed away the iron tang of blood and it didn't taste like ashes. He looked to the side and said you look good with a smile, or close enough, words were becoming distant even in his own head.
So Vash smiled at him. Eyes wet, job done. Tired; alive.
He wanted to say don't stop. No matter what, don't stop.
He didn't want to go, he didn't want to go like this but if he had to then at least it would be by drowning, in the sky and in blue eyes and in the blood filling up his lungs, air getting so short, sorrows drowned in the bottle slipping from his fingers, he could drown on this dry land and that was enough of a miracle, enough...
Welcome home, Nicholas.
-
There was air. Hot, dry. Moving. A tickle across his mouth. Everything was heavy. Lead-heavy, punishment heavy. Eyes pressed shut, sticky, pressed, pushed, down, down, down.
One eyelid cracked open, a gritty blur. Too dry. A little light, from somewhere. Hot air caressed his temple. He closed the eyelid and opened it again. The blink took years. His fingers were cold. Fingers? Still had them. Pieces of a body distant from perception. Somewhere a mile away there were toes, which he twitched. Inside... shoes. Yes. He felt the sole. Pressed his toe against the manmade thing and reminded himself of his own size. His feet weren't so far away, they were part of him. All of him, here, now, all one piece, still one piece.
Shouldn't be.
He became aware that he was breathing. The awareness came with an uncertainty of whether he'd been breathing before he became aware of it. Maybe not. The hot air was in his chest, maybe for the first time? He felt warm, now, in a way he didn't think he had been before.
His fingers were still cold. He moved them a little. Tips and nails dragged against something unyielding-hard, flat, covered in thick grit. He dragged again, realized he could hear the scratch. Slow, faint.
There was a little light from somewhere. His body felt heavy. Breaths were stopped by something pressing. Down, down. Stay here, lie here. Don't move. Was he hiding? Was there danger to hide from? Or was he seeking? Into the crack in the rock, Davy fell. Nicholas, you're small enough to go in after him. Small enough and the only one not scared. There's snakes down there, Nick. Davy's crying. Be quick, just catch him by the hand and pull. Hold on, hold on tighter, don't stop -
Nick? He opened his free eye wide. Something stung it and he blinked again, watering. Nick, that was him. His toes and his scratching fingers and the gritty eye, those were Nick. Yes. I am a person, alive. I am alive and under something heavy.
He moved a hand and his arm slid a little to the side. Things above him clicked and shifted, softly. He took a break, because it needed so many breaths and so much focus just to make a move so small. Then he moved his hand again, and there was the clicking, the gentle tumble of small weights. And a break, to breathe. And another push...
The light had fully gone away by the time he felt a rush of cool air, so much more clean open air than before. It wasn't near his mouth but his hand was outside of something, unweighted, in a breeze. It felt so good.
Tumble-scatter. Click, click, thump, rustle. Stones, he named them. And beneath him, sand. He knew where he was, and it made sense. It didn't bother him, although he didn't know why. Maybe he should be more worried to wake up in a grave, but some deep part of him knew it was right. Memories tickled at the edges, but he didn't want them yet. He was too tired for them. Too tired, too heavy.
He hadn’t been buried, or at least not deep. That felt right to him, too. He remembered this ground like an old friend, this stained glass landscape. Nothing within it, no matter how far down you broke, and you couldn't break far.
He lifted his free fingers and somehow remembered a curling green head pushing up, seed-shell still stuck on it like a little sun hat.
Maybe he went to sleep for a while then. It seemed like time slipped forward, anyway. Time was another concept that came back to him. When he blinked his eye open again, a handful of other basic facets of reality flickered back to life: pain, hunger, thirst, and urgency.
Something warm surged inside him, through his chest, out along his arms and legs, and he felt his heart beating and the air as it rasped in and out of his chest. He remembered this, oh, yes, his old friend adrenaline. He felt more awake more suddenly than he could ever remember. He pushed hard this time. Buried? No, no, absolutely not, he was not dead, he needed out.
Weights thudded down against him, pushing air out of his lungs and blocking his face completely, but as the topmost stones went, the whole pile shifted. Cairns were structured to withstand forces trying to get inside but they did not typically have to account for something wanting out. A few more foundation stones pushed out from the side brought the pile down in a heap, unfortunately a heap Nick was underneath, but as he shifted and struggled with his newfound strength, he felt something big... let go. A loud thud and rumble. Suddenly, he could breathe so much easier. He pulled in lungfuls, brought his weak, heavy arms up, pushed masses of rock from his face and shoulders. And...
Nicholas Wolfwood looked up at the moons.
-
The sky grew pale. Faint, dusty pink licked at the horizon, seeping into the endless gray. Nicholas stood and stared at the edge of the world, reflexive tears streaking lines through the rock dust coating his face. He couldn't help the watering; his eyes were full of grit, and his body wanted it cleared out, moisture loss be damned.
He felt so, so weak. He had no idea how much time had passed. Memory still stalked the edges of his mind, and he still resisted it, but he could see the shape of it better now; he had a general idea of what had happened.
An old, deep, barely conscious part of him wanted to assume he'd only been gone for three days. Historically, it was the only amount of time he'd ever heard of someone being dead and then rising from a tomb. But he knew better than that. If it had only been three days, there'd still be stains on the ground. If it had been three days, he wouldn't be so weak.
He walked forward, uncertain at every step if his knees were going to support his weight. A broken structure lay crumpled in the sand before him - most of a wall here, corners in the shape of a room there. Sand and wind and time had softened its jagged edges, brought down its bell tower. He stepped past what was once a threshold and muscle memory informed him of where he was. In the dark recesses of his mind he saw the common room; through a window, laundry lines out back; barrels with flour and grain, once. Bottles and jars of food all along the ghosts of walls and shelves long gone. Remember the spiced pears? Sticky and syrup-heavy, they tasted so different when they were fresh-canned warm or year-old chilly, lifted up from the shallow cellar. Both ways were so good. One of the big jars held just enough for every kid to get a half of a pear each. Nick could count the times he'd eaten them on one hand.
… Out back, the water cistern. It wasn’t a well because it didn’t pull from anywhere - but there was a natural hole in the ground beneath, lined with masonry, a manmade reservoir, enough space to store each month’s water delivery. Only a month’s worth, surely it would be dry now… but that was when a dozen kids were using it. Two dozen, thirty, forty. So many, coming and going over the years. Nick's mind smeared their faces together, his eyes blurred memory down his cheeks.
He needed water.
He found himself at the edge of the cistern as the sky brightened. He put his shaky hands on the edge of the broken cap structure and peered down. He couldn't tell... it was too far to see. Beside his foot, a tin bucket without holes was still attached to a long piece of cable. The winch was gone, and he wasn't sure if his hands were strong enough to hold on, but he had to try.
He ended up simply sitting down on one end of the cable to weight it, not trusting his grip. He leaned against the side of the cistern, lifted the bucket up to the lip, and pushed it over. The cable hissed through his loose hands as the bucket fell - fell - and then, ever so faintly, splashed.
Nick sat for a while in the rising sun, eyes closed, breathing deep, unable to make the next move. Wind pushed the hair off his temple and for a glorious few minutes it was neither hot nor cold but perfect, out here in the world, alive. Alive.
Getting the water took too long, but he did get it in the end. First he pulled the bucket back up but realized it had just floated on the surface. He found chunks of rubble to use as weights and dropped it down again. This time it sank and filled correctly, but that made it so heavy, it took Nick forever to haul it up again. Once he could tell it was near the surface, he had to stand and use the absolute limit of his strength to get the bucket to the top of the cistern, where he could grab the handle. He felt like an infant. A lot of the water sloshed back out; his hands were shaking badly.
It was murky and swirling with sand. He drank and drank and drank until he felt sick.
He cupped a handful of the dregs and splashed his face, sloughing dust in a filthy trickle down his chin and onto his shirt. He looked down at himself, taking in his funeral clothes: the same as all his other clothes. Not surprising. His jacket was gray with dust and sand. He tugged at the sleeve to test the stitching - it held together. He hadn’t been down long enough for thread to get brittle, clothes to rot. That was something.
He hesitated, then undid the jacket’s buttons with fingers that felt sluggish and thick. Looked down at his shirt. It wasn’t… white, exactly. Not anymore. Time and stone and weather had done a lot to render it one dull color, not a mottled patchwork of rust-colored stains, but he could still see the marks… a life’s worth of blood.
And then his fingers found a strip of roughness. He pulled it out so he could see it. Stitches, mending a rip. He hadn’t sewn those, nor seen a tailor do it, but he knew - he knew the rip. The spike that had driven through him with sledgehammer force -
Memory would not be denied any longer.
Now that he had more water in his system to draw from, his body decided to make up for lost time. He sat against the broken cistern at the place where he’d spent the only halfway decent years in his whole Godforsaken life, remembering being held by a mother’s arms when he’d cried here before, remembering the last time he’d seen her, his body made of liquid fire, running hot and powerful on pure poison, hiding his bloodshot eyes from her and telling her to let him go, let him go, let everyone forget his name -
And his brother’s half-lightning face at the end of it all, the despair at knowing what he’d done, the gratitude for what he’d been given, the infinite stretched-out chord of longing and regret that lingered in the smoke after a battle hard-won, and it had been won, hadn’t it? Wolfwood remembered feeling pride. He remembered love, so much love. It hadn’t been a bad way to go. It hadn’t been. It hadn’t.
So why couldn’t he stop weeping?
Sometime later, dried out, his face stiff and his head aching, Wolfwood pushed himself upright. He needed to haul water again, and then find shade. The suns were too damn high.
-
By some cruel irony, the only room still intact was the kitchen.
Well, intact might be a stretch. One wall was a landslide of broken sandstone, but it was the most sheltered part that remained of the old building. There was no power - either the electric grids lost to the Ark were still out, or if they’d been restored elsewhere then they certainly weren’t here. It wouldn’t surprise him either way.
Wolfwood had only just begun to consider the possibility that the world had truly ended and maybe he was alone in it, when that possibility was dashed. The proof of humankind’s continued existence came in the form of clear signs of squatters. The walls that Wolfwood remembered scrubbed clean were now littered with graffiti. Notices from travelers, marking their passage.
N. V. 6/28
whitten famaly of 7, awgust, took sum water lef sum blankits
To Luis - passed thru end of year - will stay in Dec until summer - Adrianne
Cactus wuz hear!!!!!
200 days no booze still alive, miracles are real JJ
eat shit erth
God Bless You Who Walk In the Wilderness You Wont Be Lost Forever Everyone Comes Home In The End We Are All SAVED
FUCk the stampEde
He lingered on each one except the last. He couldn’t look at that one.
Other signs of life - a chair and an unbroken table with a small stack of plates and bowls on top, currently filled with the grit of disuse. A map nailed to a wall, jotted all over with much pen and pencil, ripped in so many place that it hung in big loose flaps. A couple of canteens in a corner (he picked one up; empty). A small pile of ratty blankets. Offerings from desperate people to other desperate people, Wolfwood supposed. Take what you need, leave what you can spare.
There were no doors left on any of the cabinets, so it was easy to search them all and find them empty. The water had woken his stomach up and it was fucking pissed. The hunger made it hard to think.
Think. Yeah. He knew this place better than wanderers, surely. The cool-storage cellar, the shallow crevice in the earth covered by the floor slabs. If it were a trapdoor, he was sure it would have been found by now. But it wasn’t a door, it was a block of sandstone that Miss Melanie had had to raise with a crowbar.
It took him the rest of the afternoon - he had to stop and rest many times, hydrated enough now to form sweat, lungs still struggling against rock dust, muscles still weak as a newborn’s. His trekking around took him out into the harsh suns again, where he squinted and coughed, stumbled and got turned around too easily by the destruction that marred his mental map. What should have been a quick task took him until the great sun had already begun to set.
But he got there. Makeshift crowbar found, floor slab levered up and pushed to the side. And there, beneath -
Not the rows of jars he’d expected. Instead, there was a large travel pack, a couple of shallow crates, and a guitar case.
He stared at the stuff for a while, trying to decipher it. Finally, he knelt down and pulled up the travel bag. It was heavy, fully packed. He opened a zipper and found a lot of first aid materials. Another pocket, a thick poncho. Another pocket - ration bars.
He inhaled the first one so fast he set himself off coughing and couldn’t stop for long minutes, until his throat was raw and tears were squeezing out of his eyes again. The second, third, and fourth bars he made some effort to chew. By the fifth, he’d actually slowed down enough to taste them. A little stale, but a hell of a lot fresher than they had any right to be.
With the sixth bar in his mouth, he reached down and tried to pull up one of the crates, but it was too heavy. He lifted the lid instead. The inside was packed solid with boxes of ammo. He bit down hard on the ration bar and chewed, a suspicion forming. He put the crate lid back and opened the guitar case.
No guitar, of course. But yeah… he knew that gun.
He put it back, left the flagstone open, and dragged the travel pack to the kitchen to get out of the suns. He’d need to take stock of what was in it, figure out how long it would last him. The cistern sounded nearly empty, too. If he needed to move on, he’d need to do it soon.
-
Livio’s emergency cache would keep Wolfwood alive for two weeks. On foot, December was a week away. His best chance was to start now and pray that the world had not ended, and that December was back on its feet in some capacity. Otherwise he’d get there just to die there, instead of here. And honestly he preferred dying here. After all, he’d already done it once.
But instead of repacking the bag, arming himself, and striking out while the suns were setting so he could make time before the midnight freeze… twilight found him on the floor in the kitchen, on top of the ratty blankets in the corner, back to the wall, knees raised. On his knees he held Livio’s grooming kit. Just a torn swatch of leather wrapped around a pair of scissors, a razor, a tube of lotion, a chunk of soap that felt as hard and rough as the sandstone Wolfwood was leaning against, and a small mirror.
It was the mirror that had caught Wolfwood’s eye. Over the course of the day he’d wiped sweat off his face enough times to know that he was scruffier than he ever let himself get. So he’d picked the mirror up, peered at himself.
He drew his fingertips down the gray hairs on his cheeks and chin. The straggly beard growth was gunmetal gray speckled with bright salt-white. He tilted the mirror, angled his face. The unkempt, untrimmed shock of hair that fell across his forehead was the same color - except more salt, peppered with the darker gray. He pushed his hand through his hair. It felt a little more coarse, but it hadn't thinned. He'd put it at... mid-fifties, maybe.
The lines on his face agreed with his estimate. He supposed he looked weathered. Maybe even dignified. He looked like...
Wolfwood put the mirror down and pressed his face against his knees, hugging them with both arms. It didn't matter who he looked like. He looked like himself, but old. He looked like he'd never get to feel his actual age, and what did his actual age matter anyway, it hadn't mattered since he'd walked away from the orphanage with Miss Melanie looking on worried and proud while she restrained twenty weeping children who were all losing their brother. He didn't know how long ago that had been, anyway. Time meant nothing anymore. He’d made his choices and he'd die by them.
He'd already checked his jacket pocket and found the vial pouch missing. Probably Livio. Hopefully Livio. Maybe he made use of it, maybe it saved his life.
But not like this, Wolfwood prayed. Don't let him have been put in the ground too.
The gray hair was all the explanation Wolfwood needed for his miracle of resurrection - those vials had burned through his body, broken it down to an invincible plasma of cellular regeneration and unhinged speed. And that had killed him, yes. But apparently the poison hadn't been finished with him just because it'd pushed his heart and brain too hard. If there had been any living cells of him left, he could just imagine it, slowly forcing them to repair themselves - preserving his corpse, not allowing it to decay, not allowing his brain to degrade, and finally reaching a critical mass of living tissue, contracting his heart, sparking his nerves -
He shuddered and held his knees. He didn't know it could do that; he was sure even Chapel hadn't known. The hands that had buried him couldn't have known.
After a while of breathing hard against his knees and regaining his composure, he realized that the moons were high outside and that the air had grown chilly. He shifted and pulled the threadbare blankets over himself, and hauled the poncho out of Livio's travel bag. He unbuttoned his jacket, added it to the makeshift blanket pile, then paused - looked down at his shirt, and started to unbutton it as well.
He wanted to see it better. Once it was off, he laid it over his knees. He'd gone through many a white shirt in his life - sometimes he bothered to repair them when they got shot up, but most of the time he just bought new ones. He definitely would never have tried to mend one that had been this badly ruined. But the careful stitch-work was there at all of the major tears. The thread was black.
In his mind's eye, Wolfwood saw one strong pale hand and its mismatched counterpart pulling black thread through a hole in a bodysuit... armor that wasn't being worn, that was draped over bare knees. The thread dipped down and drew taut again and again. On a bed in a room so far away and so long ago, and warm and bright from the suns through the window; there was a joke and then a laugh and then the pricking of a finger, a yelp and a dot of blood, and an accusation that Wolfwood had been distracting -
Wolfwood realized he was holding the shirt in his hands so tight he was about to tear apart one of the mended spots. He forced his hands to relax.
He needed to sleep. He'd figure out what to do in the morning.
-
For days, Wolfwood told himself he still had time to decide. He completely scoured the ruined orphanage, collected and counted every scrap of food he could find. He hauled and filtered the cistern water and topped up every watertight container. He walked around, stretched, regained his strength. He slept a lot. He even shaved as best he could.
The Punisher laid next to the scattered stones of his cairn. It had been his headstone, he knew, but it had fallen at some point. Had been the weight that pressed so heavily on him when he’d been working to get free. He didn’t even try to lift it; he knew he couldn’t.
So he hauled the guitar case and some boxes of ammo out of the cellar, and spent a lot of time in the kitchen cleaning up and refitting the half-cross automatic. He'd never used Livio's Double Fangs, but the basic structure was familiar enough.
Outside, he set up targets and put in some hours practicing. He tried to be sparing with the ammo, but he needed to know he could still protect himself. He was rusty, but muscle memory returned with relieving speed.
Recoil left bruises on his shoulder. He rubbed them at night, lying under his covers in the kitchen corner. They hadn't healed by the morning.
Wolfwood had a feeling that he'd run out of miracles for one life.
-
Just enough food and water to make it to December, now. He'd get there running on fumes, and he had no choice but to bet his life on the city being inhabited. Morning found him sitting against the wall outside the orphanage, his packed travel bag next to him, watching the suns rise and still trying to decide if he wouldn't rather just lay back down under the stones that had been left for him.
And in the light of the second sunrise, he spotted a puff of rising dust on the horizon.
Well. He could wait a little longer. He opened the guitar case, pieced together the well-oiled pieces of machinery, and set the gun across his knees. Then he took out half a ration bar and chewed as slowly as he could, making it last, balancing the calculations of desert survival against the potential need for sudden, violent energy.
As he watched the tiny glint of a vehicle grow larger in the rising light, he pondered the fact that he hadn't craved a cigarette since he woke up. Pseudo-death was one hell of a way to cold turkey an addiction. He wished for one now, though, as the anticipation of a fight itched under his skin. Why hadn't he been buried with a pack? Seemed rude. His lighter was gone, too.
An ile away, maybe. Jeep? Motorcycle? Hard to tell. Then it was close enough to see that there were two wheels and two riders, but it didn't look like any motorcycle Wolfwood had ever ridden, that was for sure. What he'd taken for the flashing of sunlight on metal was actually white material. Metal, but painted? Plastic? That much heavy-duty plastic was expensive as shit.
Wolfwood squinted at the figures. Both helmeted. One tall, broad shoulders; white t-shirt stretched over biceps that wanted freedom. Black pants, metal pieces flashing in them, studs or eyelets maybe. The other figure was pressed up against the big guy’s back and was harder to make out, except that he was smaller and wearing jeans. Something uneasy spoke up at the back of Wolfwood's mind, but he shushed it - no, obviously not. Why would it be...
He stood up, hefted the gun to his shoulder, finger outside the trigger guard. It was so much lighter than what he was used to. He walked out from the wall of the orphanage, into the light, as the vehicle got closer. It didn't have much engine roar; the noise was more like a loud, persistent hum. When it pulled up to a stop a few yarz away, it gave out a high whirr and sank on its axels, like a release of hydraulic pressure.
Wolfwood didn't say anything. Maybe nothing needed to be said. If travelers were stopping for water, they'd be sore pressed to find anything left at the bottom of that cistern; but if they had anything to trade, Wolfwood wouldn't mind giving up a canteen. As long as this stayed civil.
The riders stood up and that unease tickled at Wolfwood's mind even harder. Something clawed and feral trying to scratch its way into his mind. Familiarity so intense he couldn’t breathe. The smaller man stumbled a step away from the vehicle, mismatched hands rising to his head. No. Why? How?
He was supposed to be out of miracles for one life, damn it.
The dark helmet lifted away and dropped to the sand with an anticlimactic thunk. Wolfwood barely noticed the shaggy, sweat-matted black hair that had replaced the gold he’d always known. All Wolfwood could see were blue-green eyes and an expression of terror and divine awe, like he was witnessing something holy, like a claw was against his throat threatening to rip him open and release a flood.
Wolfwood lowered the gun to his side. Let it slide out of his fingers and hit the ground, useless. He said, "Don't cry." Pleading.
The face in his hands, his knees on the ground, this whispers of his name - it was all a blur. He noticed the hair, finally, after he already had fistfuls of it. He couldn’t speak. He thought he might die all over again; no gunshot wound had ever hurt as badly as this.
He raised his eyes and looked over the shaking shoulders pressed against his chest. Wide, wet green eyes, jagged black ink, cropped pale hair. Before he could think he wobbled to his feet, pushed himself to walk forward, and then he was enveloped by hard arms and Livio was strangling sobs against his shoulder. Wolfwood held on tight. A moment later, Vash’s arms joined the tangle.
They didn't ask any questions. They didn't ask if Nick was real, or how he'd come back, or for forgiveness. Wolfwood ugly-scrunched his face up against Livio's dusty t-shirt, teeth gritted and bared, while intolerable joy ravaged him like a fever.
Who had allowed this? Once, Wolfwood would have thought this was more goodness than he deserved. Now he didn't know or care what he deserved, he only knew what he wanted, and what he wanted was to never let go, ever again.
-
Nick drove them to the lake.
The car was Earthtech, with a light carbon-plastic body and a battery engine that ran almost silently. It never needed refueling, never overheated, never let out weird smells or coughs of noise, never so much as jostled on its axels since it used grav-tech to repulse slightly from the ground. Conditional safety programming wouldn’t even allow Nick to slam the brakes. The car detected obstacles around it so it could speed up and slow down like a granny.
Nick missed Angelina in all her iterations.
Livio sat shotgun because he needed the leg room, and Vash spent a lot of the drive flat out asleep in the backseat. They left before dawn and it took a long day's drive to get to Augusta, so the child sun was close to setting when they saw the lights of the city glowing up the horizon.
Livio reached into the back and poked Vash in the side. “Hey,” he said. “Wake up, sunshine, we’re here.”
“Eh?” Vash blinked and smudged drool off the side of his chin with his wrist. He pushed himself upright and yawned, squinting out the window.
The half hour or so between suns setting was something Nick had always taken for granted, before the Earthers showed up and started exclaiming about it. The doubled shadows, the half-sun twilight, the kaleidoscopic mix of colors in the cloudless skies. No one who’d lived here all their lives thought it was strange or exceptional, although Nick rankled at some Earthers’ insinuation that no No Man’s Land native had ever thought sunsets were beautiful before an outsider came along and informed them.
A hurt, small part of Nick deep inside couldn’t help clinging to the petty notion that only people who had survived this planet’s hells deserved to love its heavens.
Again, he made himself walk away whenever he found himself thinking like that. Just walk away and nurse his wounds.
Nick didn't want to deal with anything except finding somewhere with a decent bed he could crash in, but a glance to the backseat told him there was no chance of that. Vash was pressed to the window like he was some kid who’d never seen a city before.
“We’re coming in from the north,” Nick said, his petty funk overridden by fondness. “The thing’s all the way on the other side of town, you can’t see it from here.”
“Right,” Vash said, glancing sheepishly at the back of Nick’s head. “I know that.”
Livio laughed and rolled his window down to let in the hot, dusty air and the approaching sounds of civilization. Vash immediately followed suit, so Nick humored them by doing the same. The slap of moving air helped wake him up after the monotonous day.
On the outskirts of Augusta, the changes were immediate and dramatic. Earthtech was everywhere, in the vehicles and the brightly lit electric signs and the rebuilt silica-brick buildings standing on the old, scorched sandstone foundations. The sand that had once been the scourge of every dwelling on this planet could now be worked into solid, breathable building material. Small bots chirped and zoomed around on either sand treads or grav-tech bases, non-sentient servants that could do anything from picking up trash to providing security for businesses.
The amount of people out and about was overwhelming, the boom of everything new and exciting and hopeful palpable in every face, every raised, hawking voice, every exchange between hands. The noise of vehicles and voices was cut through with occasional horn honks, clanks and clangs, and the distant music of performers entertaining from dozens of street corners.
“Look!” Vash said, pointing. “There’s signs for it!”
There was, indeed, a sign at the side of the road pointing to the correct turn to take for Augusta Lake. Lots of vehicles were coming back in the opposite direction, heading into the city after a day at the water. Nick dutifully turned towards the lake, knowing better than to point out that it would soon be too dark and cold outside to sightsee. At least there wasn’t much traffic this way, so the drive was quick.
The child sun was down and the great sun was sinking when they finally crested a rise and saw the lake, stretched out through the valley below them.
Nick hadn’t wanted to be impressed, but all his internal tangles and hangups crumbled when he saw it. He paid just enough attention to his surroundings to get them down the other side of the hill without running off the road, but as soon as there was some open space, he just turned the car out into the sand and parked.
“Jesus,” Livio breathed, opening his door and stepping out without taking his eyes off the monster in the valley.
Nick followed him, but Vash beat them both to the front, staring down into the blazing mirror of water with a manic expression of glee. He took off running, and Livio yelled out, “Hey!” and bolted after him.
The lake was absolutely massive, far bigger than Nick could have imagined. The great sun hung low, red-gold syrupy light coating the landscape and making the water’s surface look molten. Wind rippled it and broke the liquid bronze into flakes and glimmers that made Nick’s eyes water.
He found himself following his partners, but slower. They were approaching the shore side of the lake, and in the distance he could see that the opposite side was a low cliff-rise. There were still plenty of people around the water’s edge, and laughter, yelling, and all the sounds of joyous life echoed across the valley. The air even smelled wet here, a green and alive and sharp sort of smell that Nick had only recently started to recognize from their irrigation lines at home.
Down by the shoreline, Vash had stripped off his shirt and was hurriedly unfastening his arm. He’d exchanged the high-tech, full-auto machine gun for a light, hollow, purely mechanical build months ago. He hadn’t want any part of himself to be a weapon anymore.
None of them had clothes specifically made for getting wet - Nick still boggled at the idea that that was a thing clothes could be - but Vash clearly didn’t care. He ran directly into the water in his drawstring sleep pants that he’d worn so he could pass out comfortably in the car. When the water was at the top of his thighs, he stopped and turned back to Livio and Nick, face wide-open with more than he could ever hope to express in words.
Livio didn’t bother to even take off his shirt to catch up with Vash. “Holy shit,” he said, laughing hysterically, as soon as water was lapping at his knees. He went further than Vash, arms raised, white shirt soaking to see-through in a heartbeat. “Holy shit, this is insane!” he yelled to Nick, still laughing like he couldn’t stop.
Vash dunked his hand into the water, brought up a palmful and let it run out between his fingers, sparkling in the failing light. Then he dunked again and brought his hand up much faster, splashing Livio in the face.
“Hah!” Vash screeched, and Livio spluttered for an instant before returning the attack. The two of them became a whirlwind of limbs lost inside heaving waves and giant splashes, with Vash’s shrieking cackles rising above it all.
Nick walked down to the place where Vash had abandoned his shirt and prosthetic, next to two pairs of shoes. He added his to the collection. Slowly, as if mesmerized, he took off his shirt. It was a clean, new one. Pale gray, not white. Somewhere at the bottom of an old travel bag, itself at the back of a storage closet, he still had the stained and mended shirt. His shroud.
He’d collected a few small scars since losing the ability to heal them, but none were as blatant as the pale gash down his chest. Chapel’s last resort. One blow too many.
He stepped into the water. The lakebed was sand and small stones, easy to sink his toes into, and the water was cool but not cold. At a slight distance from the wrestling match between Vash and Livio, Nick walked forward until his hands met the cool, blinding surface.
It felt so strange, but also like a need as primal as human touch being met for the first time after an eon of starvation. His whole body was a raw burn and the water that rose up around him was a cool compress. His hands, cracked and callused from a lifetime of abuse, drank up the moisture and grew soft. He kept walking.
When the water reached the scar on his chest, he stopped and looked up at the setting sun. The light had gone the color of fresh blood, and the water reflected it. Nearby, the splash-fight had gone conspicuously quiet.
Livio touched his shoulder and Nick started. The strange weightlessness of the water put him off-balance, and he lost his footing. Coming up on his other side, Vash caught him by the arm.
Nick didn’t know what to say to them. He didn’t know what to say to himself. He’d lived to see an impossible future come true and no matter the paradise that surrounded him, he couldn’t stop being human. It was as if he’d been allowed back into Eden, but still containing all the knowledge of the fruit. Shame rendered him incompatible with grace.
Livio said, “Raz told me what you talked about.”
Hoarse, Nick said, “Yeah?”
Livio moved to stand in front of him and lifted a cupped double handful of water. “You deserve a real one,” Livio said. “A better one.”
Nick laughed, breathless and disbelieving, except it came out a little more like a sob. “I’m supposed to confess first,” he said, “and that would take too long.”
Vash moved closer to his side and reached up to hold the side of Nick’s head, drawing his face against Vash’s. “Nothing for you to confess,” he said softly.
“Bullshit,” Nick whispered.
Vash pressed harder against him and said, “You were never my Judas, Nick.”
Nick squeezed his eyes shut and bit back the feeling starting to boil in his chest. He couldn’t tell if it was a scream or a laugh or a sob. “I love you,” he choked out, and that was his confession.
“Love you,” Vash told him, and that was absolution.
Livio reached up and touched the side of Nick’s face with a wet hand. “Come on,” he said.
So Nick let Livio and Vash take his weight between them, and he let his feet leave the ground and he sank with their arms behind his back to keep him safe. When the water closed over his ears the world went strange, quiet but loud, a sound like the whispers of something bigger than the human mind could comprehend. When it washed over his closed eyes, the blood-light of the setting sun went softer. Dimmer.
He didn’t know how long he stayed down. His lungs never started to hurt for oxygen, so not long, certainly. But when the clasped arms behind him raised him up, and he felt the air on his face and took a deep breath, he felt like it might as well have been a lifetime.
Livio held him tight, and Vash pressed against his back and threw his arm across Nick’s shoulder to Livio’s neck, and Nick could pretend all the moisture on his face was from the lake but he didn’t want to pretend that, really. Through the blur of tears, he watched the great sun finally set. The water went dark, stretching out and out and out into the falling night, and Nick didn’t want to be the kind of person who thought something this beautiful was a waste. He longed to make himself the kind of person who could return to Eden.
It would be hard work, maybe for the rest of his life. But he figured it was worth it.
When they finally got out of the water to go find a hotel, the moons were starting to rise.