Archive of Our Own

I believe in the kingdom come
Then all the colors will bleed into one
But yes I'm still running
You broke the bonds
And you loosed the chains
Carried the cross
Of my shame
You know I believe it
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
-U2

I.

Blood in the dust of the road, bright as sunset in that colorless town. It wandered drunkenly down the street in an uneven trail, daubed between the footprints of a dead man. The faces of the empty buildings wavered like a heat mirage, and the still, sweltering air pressed down on Vash's tongue like fingers to choke him.

Oh no.

Vash did his best not to follow the trail this time. He always tried; he always failed. He was drawn along like a toy on a string, doomed to follow that sickening line to its inevitable end.

Wake up.

The outline of the church loomed above him like a tombstone, and already he was counting his mistakes. There were so many. Too few words said. Too heavy of a promise to ask. Too long burying a stranger. Too late to save a friend. Two graves in one day.

please.

The church doors were open.

No. no no no no no

A man, kneeling at the altar as though in prayer. Blood soaked into the faded carpet all around him, returning it to a crimson color it had lost decades ago. Long, cold shadow of a cross. Hard, cold hand of dread closing around Vash's heart. Smell of old candle smoke, fresh cigarette smoke, spent gunsmoke.

(And toast-smoke.)

I don't want to--Wait, what?

(Someone was definitely burning the hell out of breakfast, that was for damn sure. They were gonna pull the fire alarm any minute.)

"I thought you said you fixed this thing," Wolfwood said behind Vash, in spite of being dead in front of him.

What the actual hell--

Ten decades later, and ten flights up on a run-down apartment building in the city of December, a door burst open onto the fire escape with an explosion of boiling black smoke. A man rushed out onto the balcony and hung himself over the railing, coughing violently as the cloud slowly began to dissipate into the sweltering morning air. He mopped his face with his shirt, took a deep wheezing breath, and staggered back to the doorway.

"Toast's up!" Nick yelled.

And inside the apartment, twisted up in sheets and pillows and two or three discarded articles of clothing, Vash the Stampede opened his eyes.

The nightmare church with its not-empty-enough sanctuary vanished, returning to the place where it belonged, somewhere far in the distance and a century in the past. Vash was lying in bed, double suns glaring through the slats in the blinds. They hit his glasses on the bedside table, splashing little golden pools on the chipped imitation wood. Somewhere nearby a radio droned on about the heat wave. Cats were having a scuffle in the apartment next door. Down in the street, a local vagrant and self-appointed prophet was preaching to the whole block about the wages of sin, as he did every Friday.

Vash held on to the bed for a second as though expecting it to dissolve under him, and when it didn't, he curled into the pillows, clutching the sheets to his face, blotting out the remembered smells of the dream with the present ones. Bed. Safe. Nicholas. Gradually, his thundering pulse slowed, his shoulders relaxed. More recent memories took their rightful place. They'd gone out to the movies the night before. They'd tried to stifle their laughter at the unconvincing zombies, then spilled their popcorn at an unexpected jump scare, and were too busy making out to notice the ending. Late night at the bar afterwards, cheese fries and whiskey and old songs on the jukebox, lurching home after midnight and falling asleep half-undressed in the bed.

This was Vash's life, now. Not back there, in the dream.

Once Vash had convinced himself of that, he untangled himself from the bed and staggered into the bathroom. He took off his left arm, wrenched on the water full blast, and stood under the deluge to let the miracle of it wash the traces of tears off his face.

Home.

Most of the smoke had cleared by the time Vash got to the kitchen, his hair still wet from his shower, towel around his scarred shoulders. A rickety metal fan pushed the sticky air around the room, but to little effect. It was after noon and mid-July, with both suns squinting down on the city in a merciless glare.

Doing his best to ignore the heat, Father Nick Wolfe of the diocese of Our Lady of December was using his butterknife to carve an obscene doodle in a blackened piece of toast.

"I could try to fix the toaster again." Vash offered.

Nick added a realistic smear of butter to the detailed genitalia on his toast, and took a bite out of it. "I think you fixed it enough the last time."

"I'm not very good with modern appliances," Vash admitted, and the toaster on the counter spat out a few stray sparks, for emphasis.

Nick crammed the rest of the toast in his mouth, balls and all, and chewed furiously. "Well, you're gonna have to get good at something, Tongari. Rent's coming up on the apartment, offerings are down, and those kids at the orphanage keep on needing to eat and wear shoes, the cute little bastards." He reached for another slice of toast, which, like the first one, was charred on one side and still soft on the other.

"Maybe offerings wouldn't be down if you actually turned up at the church once in a while?" Vash suggested, all innocence, while one hand rummaged around in the donut box on the table.

Nick's eyes flashed and he rammed his butterknife into the box, narrowly missing Vash's fingers. "Maybe it wouldn't matter if somebody wasn't chocolate-sprinkling me out of house and home."

"You're the one who offered to let me stay." Vash's apologetic smile was more like a wince as he rescued the mangled half of the donut from the box. It was the last one. "You know my job skills are both very specific and somewhat limited, right?"

"Oh, you've got skills, all right." Nick's eyes raked over Vash's torso in a meaningful way, as though interested in testing out a few of those skills then and there. "But you're lucky I'm selfish, and pimping's not a good look for a man of the cloth. Otherwise you'd be earning your keep one way or another."

"I get so nervous performing in front of new people anyway," Vash said, blushing through his donut. It was not the first time they had had this conversation, and it was never entirely serious, but solutions grew more scarce every time. The portion of Nick's salary that he allowed for his own living expenses was already the bare minimum, even before two people had attempted to live on it, and he refused to dock anything from the orphanage or the other church employees. Vash knew full well that Nick would sooner let them both starve in the street than deprive the orphanage of anything, and while things were not quite that bleak, they were certainly tight.

Nick sat back hard in his chair, and the legs squeaked in protest. "I suppose I could rent you out to the museum as a living history exhibit."

Vash looked at him in horror. "You wouldn't!"

"I would," Nick scratched thoughtfully at his unshaven jaw. "If we had a museum in this shithole town."

"It's nowhere near the shithole it used to be," Vash interjected, going after the other half of the donut while Nick was distracted. "There was a time when they used to have five dead outlaws for breakfast in December every morning. It was a point of pride about the city's low tolerance for troublemakers."

"Oh god, don't you start with that old timey shit, you sound like my old man." Nick stood up in an annoyed burst and began flinging dishes into the tiny sink. The heat made him cranky. Talking about money made him cranky. Vash making noises about how things used to be a million years ago without telling him anything of real importance made him cranky. Lots of things made him cranky lately, for reasons he would very much prefer not to examine.

"Dad's bad luck anyway," Nick continued, "sticking me with his lousy orphanage, and this lousy apartment, landing me with a lousy--" He turned to look at Vash, sitting at his kitchen table with his chin in his hands, smiling at him like a happy angel covered in donut crumbs, and all the fight went right out of him.

"Put on a shirt, will ya," Nick said, turning back to the dishes and hoping the steamy water would explain the flush in his face. "Before I have to come over there and do something about it."

There was a brief pause before the other chair scooted away from the table. Vash's arm slid around Nick's waist, his thumb tracing the soft path of dark hair between Nick's navel and his belt-buckle. "…Is that a promise?" he asked.

"Vash," Nick said in a throaty gurgle, bracing his hands on the sink. "It's too hot for this."

Vash nuzzled a kiss just behind his earlobe, tongue flicking out to taste sweat and skin, and Nick's bare torso prickled all over with a chill as though he was standing in front of an icebox.

"Feels to me like you're shivering," Vash said.

"Tongari," Nick groaned, his fingernails dragging down the stained wooden countertop, his hips arching helplessly back into Vash's.

"Sorry for not earning my keep yet," Vash breathed, in a teasing tone against Nick's ear. "Can I make it up to you?"

"Yes," Nick gasped, pulling Vash hard against him in invitation. "Right now."

Sometimes, they actually made it all the way back to the bed.

This was not one of those times.

Two hours later they lay limp and exhausted on opposite sides of Nick's old sofa. It was a secondhand furnishing that had been none-too-sturdy even before it was obliged to endure their daily activities, and now, much like its occupants, it was on the verge of collapse.

Nick, naked except for his old communion-tray ashtray in his lap, lit up his third consecutive cigarette before he could manage any words. Even then, "Goddamn," was as far as he got.

"Amen," Vash answered weakly, his damp towel draped over his face. He was going to need another shower. Possibly several.

"You know," Nick said, smacking into his cigarette and holding up one finger as though speaking from the pulpit, "there is a not infinitesimal chance that this is why we haven't accomplished jack shit for the past two months."

"The thought had crossed my mind," Vash confessed through his towel. "Sorry, it's my fault this time."

"I don't want any apologies from a man who just did to me what you just did," Nick said. "Twice." He smoked a moment longer before venturing to ask. "...Bad dreams this morning?"

Vash's face went very still under his towel, giving his profile a shroudlike quality that Nick did not like one bit. He regretted bringing it up immediately, even though Vash's enthusiasm that morning had masked a deeper kind of need, and they both knew it.

"Nevermind," Nick said, a little too quickly. "None of my--"

"Just an old one," Vash said at last, and flipped down the corner of the towel to wink one blue eye at Nick. "This cut-rate circuit rider preacher sold me off to a history museum, and the worst part was, I was totally naked the whole time. It was the worst."

Nick snorted so hard he coughed on his cigarette. "You idiot, you're totally naked right now."

"Actually," Vash went on as though Nick hadn't spoken, "the real worst part is they wouldn't take me, and you had to haggle--"

"Chrissakes Vash, shuttup," Nick laughed, knowing that by doing so he had conceded the discussion once again. But he was lazy and sated, and it was just too hot outside to press the point. It was easier, in these moments, to just exist together, and let his sleeping dogs have a well-deserved lie-in with all their questions.

"I am sorry the diocese is cash-strapped, though." Vash made a thoughtful sound under his towel, and said, as though to himself. "I wonder if Nai just never paid him..."

Nick chewed around his cigarette filter for a minute. Vash was always careful to never commingle the past and present Wolfwoods, even when he used the same name for them. But when he talked about the other one like that--the dead one--in a way that only sounded like half a conversation, it made a hot little spike of emotion jab into Nick's heart. He would never allow himself to name it, but he knew jealousy when he felt it. And how dumb was it to be jealous of a dead guy? Much less a long-dead guy, one whose face (apparently), name (more or less), and lover (definitely) Nick already had.

Nick wasn't even sure what he even believed about any of it, which was why it was easier to ask Vash to fuck him than to explain things. One shut down the questions in his mind, the other just caused more. Unfortunately, until he had a few hours to recover, questions were the only viable option now.

"Who's Nai?"

Vash went suddenly, utterly still. "My brother," he said, carefully.

Nick had every reason to keep asking the questions that could naturally follow that. What does your brother have to do with him? could be a good start. Followed by And why would your brother be paying him anything? Or maybe he could begin with a lighter option like So where's your brother now? That one could be asked of a stranger in a bar, but Nick couldn't scrape up the nerve to ask it of the man he'd been living with for two months.

The two of them had bickered plenty over the summer, in a way that frankly could be put down as flirting, but as far as genuine fights, there had been only one. Or possibly half of one, because it takes two for a fight and Vash had simply shut down. But it was nothing Nick wanted to repeat.

There had only been one question, then. Why won't you tell me anything? And by the time Nick actually asked it he had gone through a whole string of grievances, none of which really mattered. But Vash had gone ice-still under the hot torrent of Nick's anger, and said nothing. Furious at the lack of answers as much as the lack of opposition, Nick slammed the door behind him and spent half the night circling December on his bike.

When he finally got back to his apartment building it had changed from late to early, and he was bone-weary in body and mind. He wanted nothing but the oblivion of sleep--until the thought occurred to him, just as he was climbing the stairs, that Vash might be gone. Vanished without a trace, just as Nick thought he might do on the first night they spent together; gone with nothing but the faded name of a half-forgotten outlaw to remember him by. There might be nothing and no one waiting for Nick in that apartment.

A fear like he had never known fueled him in a desperate run up all ten flights of stairs. He was drenched with sweat by the time he burst back through the door he'd slammed shut a few hours before, and for a mad, wild second he thought that if Vash really was gone, he was going to go to the balcony and take the shortcut straight down to the street.

But the balcony door was already open, and Vash was standing in it, waiting for him. As if he knew exactly what Nick had been thinking, and exactly where to place himself between home and heartbreak. Nick went into his arms like a lost child. Without any censure or recriminations Vash held Nick as he broke down, then got him out of his clothes, into a blanket, and into the bed.

"I'm sorry", Nick had said, when he could. He was shivering hard as though working through a fever.

"What are you sorry for?" Vash's cheek rested on top of Nick's head, fingers stroking the scrappy tassel of his ponytail.

"For doubting you."

Vash laughed a little, sadly. "The church is way too hard on doubters," he said. "You can doubt me as much as you want. Hell, I do it all the time."

Nick's fingers curled around the old grid-iron scar above Vash's heart. "I thought you might be gone."

"I know. But I'm not." Vash said his name then, said, "Go to sleep, Wolfwood," and as always it fell over Nick like a soft blanket. With one word Vash could give him the calm that Nick's job ostensibly advertised as a service, but one that he could never manage to deliver to himself.

Peace like a river, he thought. Two things about which he knew very little. Except for when Vash said his name over him like that, like a benediction. It was enough to give a man faith.

"And that's enough," Vash had said, though Nick had said nothing out loud. He was already asleep. The next morning Vash had bought donuts and flowers, had asked Nick to give him a hair trim, griped at the crossword in the paper, and in every way acted as though nothing had happened. Nick remembered the whole thing now the way you would remember a nightmare, one from when you were still too small to understand what was happening and know it wasn't real.

Back in the present, Nick felt Vash's leg tense against his own, as though he could read Nick's thoughts and had relived the whole memory with him. Just like Nick knew that Vash was bracing for a question he could not--or would not--answer. But that was the last thing Nick wanted to do, so he blew a lopsided smoke ring instead and flopped his head back on the ugly down cushions. "Well, why don't you go ask your brother that?"

Nick felt Vash relax, and he hated himself for how relieved he was by it. You're a coward, Nick Wolfe, he thought to himself. You don't want any truth. You're just scared that things will change.

"I ...can't," Vash said at last.

"Oh," Nick said, beginning to think he might understand why Vash would not have mentioned him. "My condolences, Tongari."

"He's not dead," Vash said, and then made a face that was visible even under his towel, as though he knew had just said too much.

"Bad blood?"

"Something like that. And...he's not...really a person. Anymore."

Nick was completely silent for five seconds. Then he put his head back up. "People are usually still people even if they're dead or not speaking to you, y'know."

"He's a tree," Vash said in one breath, as if surrendering one fact would keep him from giving up more. "Well. More of a whole orchard at this point, but..."

Nick was torn between disbelief and outright laughter. Vash could say some things that were full on bonkers, but that usually had a certain tone, and he certainly didn't sound like it right now. He was telling the truth, and that was what made it so alarming. Nick could deal with the concept of Vash's brother being dead or an asshole or both but...

"Okay." Nick traced Vash's outline in the air with one baffled finger. "If he's your brother, and he's a tree... then you're...?"

Whatever question Nick was about to ask was obliterated by the explosive sound of a fist hammering on his front door. Nick startled hard enough to upset his ashtray. Vash dove behind the sofa for cover, mostly of the decency kind, before a familiar voice rang through the apartment.

"Nicholas!! Get up!! Get up right now, it's an emergency!"

Vash fell back behind the sofa with a clink of discarded bottles. "Phew, it's just Billy."

"Who did you think it was, the sheriff's posse?" Nick snatched up Vash's discarded towel and tried to cover up his glory somewhat before opening the door for his junior priest. "I'm comin, I'm comin. Chrisakes, Billy Lee, what is it? Did the orphanage run out of popsicles or--holy hell, what happened to you?"

Nick's second-in-command stood in the doorway of the apartment, his suit ripped at the shoulders, his lip swollen and bloody, and one eye good and black. "Nick," he gasped, the shortened name a sure sign of something serious, "trouble--at the orphanage--I just--" he stopped, getting a good look at his superior, and he went red to the roots of his hair in commingled fury and embarrassment. "Merciful God, Nicholas, it is three-thirty in the afternoon!!"

"Screw that!" Nick took the young man by the shoulders and rattled him until his teeth clicked. The towel fell by the wayside. "What's happening at the orphanage?!?"

Billy, addled by the shaking and the rather overwhelming vision of Nicholas D. Wolfwood standing there in nothing but what the good lord gave him, could only stammer out, "It's been on the radio for the last hour--"

Nick dropped him in the doorway, yanking his pants off the sofa and snapping on the dial of the cheap weather radio he kept wedged on the bookcase, along with spare church hymnals, unpaid bills, and the technical manuals that Vash seemed to pick up wherever he went. The yellow dial bloomed with light as a newscaster's flat voice crackled into the room.

--members of the Glorybones Gang holed up inside the orphanage two hours ago following the robbery of the nearby December Bank & Trust, demanding they be allowed to leave town with their several million doubledollars of loot in exchange for the safety of the children inside. This is not the first time violence has visited the orphanage of Our Lady of December, as listeners may recall some twenty years ago when the caretaker of the orphanage was murdered in cold blood outside the--

Nick cut the volume back down with a sharp gesture, hauling Billy into the apartment with one hand and his jeans up over his ass with the other, his eyes as hard and hot as dimes freshly spat out from the press.

"Billy, stay here. There's a phone out on the landing, stick by it in case I need to call. Don't say anything to the press, don't say anything to the cops, just don't say anything. Tongari--"

Vash the Stampede stepped out of the bedroom already fully dressed, his face as grim as an obituary behind his yellow glasses. He clicked a load of bullets into his gun and snapped it shut again with a speed and silence that raised all the hairs on the back of Nick's neck, and then tossed Nick his shirt and jacket.

"Let's go," Vash said. The twin suns outside were mirrored in his glasses, and he was an utter stranger behind them. "It's time for me to earn my keep."

II.

"What can you tell me about this Glorybones Gang?" Vash asked. "I haven't heard of them before."

Vash and Nick clung to the shadow of the orphanage wall, watching the commotion going on out front. They'd parked Nick's bike some distance away, and drawn up to the south corner of the orphanage unnoticed, and lingered there out of sight.

"When was the last time you were in town?" Nick asked, turning away from his survey of the emergency exits. In the years since the orphanage had been built, things like fire safety had taken precedence over fortifications, and the wall encircling the property had plenty of doors and windows, although so far neither the cops nor the occupying forces had staked any of them out.

"Right after the big landslide fifty years ago," Vash said, "when most of the townsfolk moved closer to the orphanage."

"And I don't suppose you had anything to do with that, did you?"

Vash made an evasive noise and busied himself with fussing on his gun. Nick sighed.

"Well, they're local boys. They live way out in old December, along with a bunch of other outlaw wannabe types. Every year or so they'll come into town and knock over a jewelry store or a bank or something, whenever they run out of funds, I guess."

Vash looked at Nick for a long moment, and Nick could feel him unfolding the hasty wrapping of dull facts he had been given, looking for the one sharp, secret thing that Nick had not said.

Please don't, he thought, and instantly, the sensation was gone.

"Do they normally take hostages?"

"Nothing this big before." Nick's face scrunched up into a snarl. "I swear, if they hurt so much as a hair on onna my kids, I'm gonna wrap their guts around the--"

"Let's just get inside," Vash said.

"Well, we're not doing that from the front," Nick glowered at the ring of cop cars circling the entrance, just out of shooting range, and the mob of reporters and nosy onlookers taking up the rest of the street. He scanned the scrubby wasteland beyond the sprawling walls of the orphanage. "There's a couple of other ways in, though."

"Which means there's plenty of ways out as well, and for some reason, these guys haven't taken it." Vash gave Nick a look that was almost as penetrating as the pressure Nick had felt inside his thoughts a moment ago. "There wouldn't be anything inside here they would be looking for, is there?"

Nick shook his head hard. "I don't give a damn about that. I only want to make sure my kids are all right. C'mon, or I'll go by my--."

"Wait a second." Vash put his hand to the earpiece of his glasses, and stared hard at the wall of the orphanage. "I'm checking something." He concentrated for a long moment, and a drop of sweat trickled down Nick's jaw while he waited. Even in the shade of the wall, it was sweltering. Finally Vash stirred again. "There's a large group of individuals over there on the west side--"

"Is it the kids? Can you tell if they're all right?"

"Yes. They've only got two or three adults guarding or watching them, it seems like. They're scared, but they all seem fine."

Nick let out a grateful breath. "Thank God."

Vash swept his gaze back and forth over the wall, and stepped back to look at the roof line. "That large structure there in the east..."

"That's the chapel."

"And it looks like it's our hot spot. Six... maybe eight adults. It's hard to pin them down, they're moving a lot. And... excited? They're excited about something. But whatever they're doing, they're busy focusing on it. We should split up. You go check the kids. I'll take the chapel. You think you can handle about three guys?"

Nick nodded, cracking his knuckles. "Won't be a problem." He started up, but Vash put a hand on his arm to stop him.

"Nicholas." Vash's face was tense and still. "Promise me you'll be careful. These men are armed and they are desperate. No matter how foolish they might seem, never forget that even a fool can still kill you." He shot Nick a meaningful look.

"I guess you're a fool that would know," Nick said, and Vash smiled at him.

"That's the idea."

"Right. Okay." Nick studied the wall, mapping out his path in his mind. "I can take that window up there and go down past the cafeteria...Good thing you have that thermal vision or whatever on your glasses, huh?"

Vash raised his eyebrows. "Who said anything about my glasses?"

Nick stared at him. "Uh."

Vash drew his gun with businesslike speed. "Make sure the kids are okay, take out their guards if you can, and meet me in the chapel as soon as you're done. Go." Vash was up and gone before Nick could get out a confirmation, flicking along the back wall of the orphanage like a black shadow and vanishing.

Nick checked his knife was secure his boot, and was shaking his head as he went in the opposite direction. "Christ almighty, I'm sleeping with a weirdo."

It was easier for Vash to move once he was out of Nick's line of sight. He didn't have the heart to engage his full speed and reflexes around him, and as far as his other senses, he would just as soon leave those unmentioned as well. He hadn't really had a choice when it came to finding out where people were in the building, but he could have handled it better, and he scolded himself for it the whole way around the orphanage to the chapel.

I should have let him think it was my glasses, Vash thought to himself, bitterly. He gave me the opening, I should have taken it. But he hadn't, and he knew why. He didn't want to lie. He didn't want to hide anything from Nick. It was why little truths escaped him all the time, no matter how hard he tried to keep them inside. I shouldn't have said anything about Nai this morning, either, he thought. I was comfortable, I was careless. I forgot he wasn't the same Wolfwood. I forgot he didn't already know.

But Nick's expression, in that fleeting instant, had been more than one of confusion, it had been the expression Vash had seen a million times over, in the eyes of every human who had ever known him. And in the flash of an eye a yawning gulf opened between the two of them, and Vash's stomach still fluttered with vertigo at the distance.

What are you? Was the question Nick had not managed to ask that morning, and even unspoken it had landed like a fist in Vash's sternum.

I want to tell you, Vash thought, with a longing so keen it almost brought the taste of blood to his mouth. But I don't want you to see me any differently. It was the same heartache regardless of the year, regardless of the man. I just want to be Vash for you, for as long as I can.

A door slammed open nearby, breaking Vash's train of thought, and he skidded around a corner and up a drainpipe just as two men passed beneath him.

"I still say we should just dynamite the place," one said, with the tone of a man who has one bad idea and refuses to let it go. "If it's a bunch of lost tech it should hold up just fine."

"Dynamite it?" the other man said, and chucked a trash-can full of rubble just outside the door. "You idiot, after how long the boss has been planning this? Broke outta jail for it, had to rob a bank just for cover--"

The door shut again, and Vash flipped down from the scalding-hot roof tiles. All they'd thrown out was a bunch of dirt and stone, and from the pile, it was not the first load by any means.

Lost tech? Vash wondered. Again he saw Nick's face in front of him, again he felt the wall rise between them. There was something more to all this than what Nick was telling him, but Vash, stomach twisting with guilt, could not demand more. He wished, with every fiber of his being, that the whole thing didn't feel so goddamn familiar.

Nick made it through the orphanage unchallenged, grateful to see how little the place was disturbed. But the silence crawled into his ears and nested there like a worm larvae, hissing a song of death and destruction. He had too many bad memories about that kind of silence in the orphanage, and his mouth was dry and his palms were sweating by the time he heard voices coming from the direction of the library. He flattened himself against the plaster wall and slithered towards the sounds as quickly as he dared.

Around the corner, two men were talking, and someone was moaning softly in pain. Only Vash's warning kept Nick from charging right into them and scattering them like buzzards on a carcass. Instead he pulled his knife out of his boot, weighing it as well as the best tactics of throwing it versus wading in with it edge first. As he tried to decide, the polished surface mirrored his own eye back at him, and a thought came into his head like a sudden stranger at midnight mass.

You know how to look around a blind corner, right?

Nick didn't bother to wonder where the flash of inspiration came from, but he followed it all the same, and tilted the edge of the knife to reflect the hallway. The blade showed him a bulletin board covered in construction-paper flowers along the wall, and an overturned book-cart barricading the library doors. Two men stood in front of it, ostensibly on guard, but more interested in the third who lay on the ground in some kind of obvious distress. He had some kind of massive weapon beside him, but was in no fit state to make use of it.

One man made a vague kick at his downed friend's boot. "Mike! Oi, Mike! Wassamater with him?"

"Dunno," the other said, scratching the back of his head with his semiautomatic. "Maybe he's allergic to kids?"

"No," the one on the floor gasped, clutching his belly. "That lil' girl... with the pigtails... gave me a sandwich."

"Aw hell," the nearer man said. "You didn't eat it, did you?"

"She was so cute," the wounded man wheezed, and doubled over, gagging.

God bless you and your sandwiches, Lizzie, Nick thought, with a swell of pride. I'll never tell you to throw one away again. He hesitated just a second, long enough to be sure that one man was about to throw up and the other two were suitably distracted by it, and then knife and Nicholas both shot down the hallway with unerring aim.

The blade caught the closest bandit square in the knee, sending him down on his retching companion, and Nick barreled into the other man so hard his head cracked against the wall, gun discharging a spray of bullets to add to the confusion. Nick racked him in the groin to make him drop his gun, dove for it, and brought the butt into the other man's face as soon as he managed to pull Nick's knife out of his leg. The sick man had blacked out, which was probably a mercy for all concerned. In a matter of seconds all three kidnappers were down, and Nick, forgetting there were kids behind the door, let out a whoop of triumphant profanity.

"That'll teach you to keep yer goddamn hands off my kids, you motherfu--!"

"Mr Wolfe!"

Nick spun around, and saw a crowd of faces pressed to the pebbled glass windows of the library door. He kicked the book cart over the bandits, yanked out the mop wedged between the door handles, and flung them open, falling on his knees into a crowd of crying children. An impossible number of them tried to get into his arms all at once, and Nick did his best to accommodate them.

"Okay, it's okay, it's okay, I'm here, it's gonna be all right."

Jessie, the eldest at twelve, was white-faced at the back of the crowd, but steady. "Sorry, Brother Nick, I tried to keep 'em quiet but--"

"It's fine, don't worry, you did just fine." Nick swept his hand over as many small heads as he could reach, with an extra pat for Lizzie's ponytails. "In fact, you all did a great job and I couldn't be prouder."

"You said a bad word," Lizzie said, in an awed whisper.

"Yes, yes I did. Because I was scared." Nick flicked his eyes up to Jessie. "Jess, is everybody all right? All accounted for?"

"Yessir, but Brother Billy--"

"Brother Billy's fine," Nick assured him. "He came to get me."

"He said a bad word too this morning," Lizzie said, very much impressed. "Like, a lot of them. And he shot somebody."

"And I'm proud of him too," Nick said, getting to his feet, "But I need you all to stay brave for me just a bit more, okay?" He looked up at Jessie. "There's a bunch of police outside, but Vash is going after the rest of the bad guys first, and I gotta go back him up. Can you keep everybody quiet here?"

"Mr. the Stampede is gonna save us?" Lizzie's eyes were huge with excitement and shining with probably the first thing she'd ever had close to a crush. Nick resisted the urge to ask her what the hell it was he had just done if not save them himself, but it was a close call.

"That's right," he said, with a confidence that he dared not examine too closely. "Vash the Stampede is gonna save everybody, and I'm gonna help, and so are all of you. So we both need you all to stay quiet in here until it's over, okay?" He turned to Jessie. "Jess. I'm gonna block the doors again from the outside, and I want you to do the same from the inside. Pull over a desk or something. Don't open it unless it's for me or somebody you trust. If it's a cop, ask 'em to show you a badge under the door. You got that?"

Jessie nodded, their face serious at the gravity of such an adult task. "Yessir, Brother Nick."

"Good. Everybody, do whatever Jessie says like they're talking for me, and remember, quietest one will get the biggest ice-cream sundae in December tonight, okay."

A wave of suppressed excitement rippled through the children, and Nick disentangled himself from the self-shushing crowd and then re-barricaded the doors behind him. From inside the library there was a loud bang and a roar of falling picture-books, as Jessie and the older kids tipped over a shelf against the door.

Nick retrieved his bloodied knife and looked over the incapacitated robbers for an additional weapon that didn't make his stomach turn, and finally picked up the bazooka-type thing that Lizzie's victim had dropped. It was huge, with a cross-bar either for balance or to look more menacing. He hefted it onto his shoulder and pelted down the hallway towards the back entrance of the chapel.

He was only halfway there when his head started to ring like church bells, and his legs turned to quicksand underneath him. The orphanage hallway dwindled into a black tunnel as he missed his next step and fell to his knees, dizzy and bewildered.

I can't-- Nick thought, even as the rocket launcher slid from his nerveless fingers, and the floor lurched up at him. Vash--

I know, he's a real problem. It was the same voice he'd heard in the hall. A voice he realized, with fading consciousness, was his own. Don't worry. I'm gonna talk some sense into him for us.

Vash had followed the two bandits silently through the door, and tracked their trail of dirty footprints to the blown-open main doors of the sanctuary. Whoever had destroyed them had done so with indifferent prejudice. From inside came a clamor of laboring men and scraping shovels, and no effort was made to keep either quiet. Vash took a deep breath, drew his gun, and stepped into the chapel.

And instantly he knew it was the wrong one.

The disorientation was so severe that for a moment he didn't know where he was in time or space, and then he did know, and that was worse. He was in a little church on the outskirts of some forgettable town a hundred years ago, a church with a threadbare strip of carpet splashed over with colored light and blood, a church where a man's body would be lying in front of the altar, waiting for Vash to find him.

"Oh god, no," Vash breathed, shutting his eyes hard, as if that would change something. "Not now."

"Sorry, Tongari. Now's all I got."

Vash opened his eyes again.

"Knew you'd be here." Nicholas D. Wolfwood was in front of the altar, where he always was when Vash's mind came back to this place. Only he wasn't dead. He was standing, looking perfectly alive and solid, and lighting a cigarette off of one of the candles. "Idiot," Wolfwood added, fondly, as he blew smoke up at the altar. "I ain't even here anymore, so why'd you keep coming back?"

Vash boggled. This was a new wrinkle, and one even less expected than the intrusion of the toaster that morning. "Wolfwo--How the--"

"Doesn't matter. " Wolfwood's indifferent wave of his cigarette conveyed his extreme disinterest in explaining the technical aspects of his appearance. "I ain't got time for that. I just came by to put a stop to your fuckwittery. Was hoping I wouldn't have to step in personally like this." He paused over a spray of flowers that Vash did not remember being on the altar, and picked a red lily out of the bouquet. "But the way you're wasting time, I didn't think I had a choice."

"Wasting... time?" Vash repeated dumbly. He felt like his brain was underwater, and he struggled to find the drain plug while he could still breathe.

Wolfwood tucked the lily into the breast pocket of his suit. It bloomed there like a bloodstain over his heart. "Yeah, wasting time. Two months, by my count. And you've dodged every question that boy has asked you like they're bullets." He shot Vash an exasperated look that Vash had seen on Nick all too often of late. "Why won't you tell him anything?"

There it was, the same question, and he had even less of an idea how to answer it coming from Wolfwood than he had from Nick. In all the times he had retraced his steps in this memory, Wolfwood had never called him on the carpet for something. He'd always been too busy being dead on it instead.

"You know," Vash coughed, sounding the tiniest bit defensive, "Aren't you butting in a little bit on things, here? And even if you aren't, two against one is hardly a fair fight."

"First of all, do you see anybody else here?" Wolfwood flung his arms out to indicate the little sanctuary. "Second, you ain't even been dead once yet, so you have no idea what the fuck you're talking about, and third, since when have you given a damn about the odds?"

Vash sighed. If they were going to have an argument, they might as well have it, because there was no getting around it now. Just because Wolfwood was dead didn't mean he had changed in the least. "All right. Fine." He held out his arms helplessly. "What am I supposed to do, then?"

Wolfwood raised his eyebrows. "I dunno, have you tried talking to him instead of fucking him?"

"I haven't gotten any complaints," Vash answered, with what he felt was a justified dash of acid in his tone.

"No, you wouldn't." Wolfwood sighed expansively. "Look. Tongari. You're gonna have to talk to him sooner rather than later, or you're gonna lose him. And trust me when I say I have a personal stake in this outcome and I will be really fucking pissed if that happens." He jabbed Vash in the chest with a surprisingly corporeal finger. "Do not. Annoy. The dead guy. Cos I'm not gonna fool around with cold breezes and whispers and that flickery light shit. It's gonna be screaming curses from the closet, corpses coming out of the floorboards, fucking walls running blood. I will give you the works."

Vash's mouth went flat in distaste. He was thinking of the bad zombie movie the night before. "That's a little unorthodox for a priest, isn't it?"

"I'm not Orthodox, I'm a Methodist," Wolfwood answered, and exhaled smoke through his nose. "And I don't have time for this. Just talk to him. Open up to him a little, and I don't mean just those pretty little thighs of yours. Answer his questions. Let him confide in you. It won't be as hard as you think."

"Not so hard, huh?" Vash shook his head with a bitter laugh. "No, it wouldn't be. It would be the easiest thing in the world to dump all our past on him and expect him to deal with it. But it's not his burden to bear, it's yours and mine."

"Wrong." Wolfwood pointed at Vash, then himself, then Vash again. "It's yours, because I'm dead, and youhave a bad habit of picking up everybody's shit and trying to carry it all by yourself."

Vash folded his arms and held on to his resolve as best he could in the circumstances. "Either way, my point still stands. There's no need for him to take it on. He's got a good life here. A simple one. One without the pain that we had to--"

"Bullshit." Wolfwood cut him off with utter contempt for that line of reasoning. "If you believe that any life is simple and without pain, then you're a bigger fool than I ever took you for. And trust me, I took you for a big fool plenty of times." He leaned on a pew as though he owned it, and brushed an invisible speck of dust from the sleeve of his jacket. "His life has hardly been painless. And you'd know that if you talked to him about it. If you let him talk to you. But you won't." The note of disappointment in his voice cut Vash open to the heart. "I didn't know Vash the Stampede had turned into such a chickenshit while my back was turned."

"Fine, I'm a coward," Vash retorted. "I've been called worse. But I won't risk Nick's happiness for anything, and certainly not to force him into becoming a replacement for you. How the hell is that fair to either of you?"

"You are risking it plenty, buddy," Wolfwood reminded him. "And nobody here is getting replaced or forced, even if either of you would put up with that, which you won't. As for what's fair..." Wolfwood scratched his cheek idly. "Maybe you're the only one worrying about that. All that man wants is for you to trust him. And to help you. Confide in you. Protect you. Share your pain and ease it. To love you and stand by your side as an equal. The same things you want. The same things we've always wanted."

Vash was quiet for a moment, thinking about that we, and what it implied. "But... what about your life? The life we lived together?" Vash felt like something was slipping out of his hands, but he could not tell if it was treasure or just broken glass covered in blood. He did not know whether to clutch it to his heart or throw it away before it cut him to pieces. Somehow, where Wolfwood was concerned, he'd lost the ability to tell the difference. Everything was priceless. Everything hurt. "The life you lost!"

Wolfwood shrugged as though he couldn't care less about that part. "What about it?"

Vash shook his head hard. "Wouldn't it... cheapen everything you--"

"It won't, and that is exactly what I am trying to tell you." Wolfwood stepped forward and took Vash by both shoulders, the same as Nick had done to Billy that morning. "How the hell would him knowing about the past change anything we had? Anything we were? It can't. It's not possible. The only thing it can do is make it that much stronger. You aren't a time machine, Vash. You can't undo what's been done. Nobody can."

"You think I don't know that?" Vash whispered. His eyes were stinging behind his glasses.

Wolfwood let both his grip and his voice soften. He brought his hand up to Vash's face, his thumb catching the one tear that had escaped. "Tongari. Listen to me, for once. That life, that death, it's over. And that's all right. I had a good run. I couldn't live forever beside you anyway, no matter how much I wanted to. At most you got shorted a couple decades with me, and at the rate I was going that's a pretty generous estimate."

Vash hugged himself as though he could pass his hands through flesh to clutch his own aching bones. "It was still too soon."

"You don't know that." Wolfwood squeezed his arms. "Things could have gone so wrong for us that we both woulda wished I'd died sooner. There were things about me that you never..." He swallowed hard, and shook off that line of thought. "Anyway. It's all the more reason for you to quit standin' around on your own dick and do something about it now."

Doubt closed around Vash's throat like a cold fist; he could barely get words out past it. "But what if I'm wrong...what if it's all just chance, and he's not--"

Wolfwood was so annoyed he actually growled, and his hold on Vash intensified accordingly. "Jesus H Christ, he's got my name and my face and my ass and my charming personality, how much more fucking proof do you need?! What's something so definitive your stupid pointy brain won't argue with you about it?"

"I'm not asking for proof," Vash wheezed. He had dreamed for years of being in Wolfwood's arms again, and now he was going his level best to get out of them. The man had a grip like a vise, and for being in a hallucination, Vash was certainly having a realistic problem getting enough air in his lungs. "I just want to do the right thing. For Nick. For you."

"And for you?" Wolfwood asked, relentless. "What about the right thing for you, Vash? What about the right thing for us?"

Vash ceased his struggles, all at once. "There is no us, Wolfwood," he whispered, achingly. "Because you're gone."

"I am, huh? Is that what you think? Because I can fix that." Wolfwood pulled him closer. The flower in his breast pocket sent up a cloud of scent in protest as it was crushed between them, as Wolfwood caught the back of Vash's head in his hand, and kissed him. Long and hard and lovingly, and as real as he had ever been. The moment took eons, and was still somehow far too short. The roughness of his jaw, the taste of smoke on his tongue, the soft noise he made, all were unforgettable to Vash, no matter the passage of years. Wolfwood smiled against Vash's mouth as he let the kiss end. "...Does that feel gone?"

"Wolfwood." Vash shook his head. His glasses were sliding off, loosened by tears.

"Not trying to make you cry, darlin'." Wolfwood wrapped him up in his arms, put his cheek to his. His hands were warm and solid in Vash's hair, over his back. "Just trying to get through that pointy little head of yours. Just because I died doesn't mean I was ever gone. I'm always with you. Just like the past. Just like your memories of me."

"I never forgot," Vash said, and buried his face against Wolfwood's collar. "Not for a second."

"I know. But Vash, you can't keep coming here. To this past. To this place. You aren't going to find me in here anymore. You already know where I am. You just have to have enough faith to accept it."

Vash crumpled against him, trying to hold on to the shape of him, the angle of his shoulders, the smell of his skin. It was not so long-lost as he had thought. Like the kiss, it was all intimately, recently familiar, in a way Vash dared not examine. There would be time for pondering those things soon enough. For the first time in a long while, Vash felt like was ready to stop running.

"I'll try," he breathed.

"Good enough." Wolfwood kissed his temple. "I'm out of time, now. I called in a lotta favors, but I gotta go. I'm waking up."

Vash looked up at him. Something had gone suddenly still in his heart, as though he had spied a tiny, struggling flame on a candle before him, and was afraid to breathe lest he put it out. "You're waking--"

"Well," Wolfwood looked a little cagey, and wouldn't meet Vash's eyes. "Language is shit for stuff like this, you know? And I've already broken enough rules today." He let Vash go, easily and without near as much reluctance as Vash would have expected, as though it would only be a matter of minutes before they would see each other again. "One more thing though, Tongari."

"Yes?"

"Duck."

"Wha--"

Vash blinked. He was back in the orphanage chapel, and a fist was coming straight for his face.

Nick woke up with the taste of dust in his mouth, and peeled his face up off the hallway linoleum with a sticky noise of confusion. For half a second he wondered what he'd been drinking the night before, and made several solemn vows to never touch the stuff again, before his memory swam back to him. A befuddled look at his watch told him he'd been out for less than a minute.

That's what I get for trying to have three good fucks and a heroic rescue on nothing but burnt toast and black coffee, he thought, as he staggered to his feet. I should start making smoothies. I wonder how much a blender costs. He picked up the rocket launcher without looking at it, and lurched forward again. With any luck he would make it around to the vestry before Vash was on his own for too long. And for some reason, which he did not quite understand, Nicholas D Wolfwood was feeling very, very lucky.

"I dunno, boss, he was just standin' there like an idiot. Didn't even flinch when I cold-cocked him."

"Maybe he's the orphanage janitor or something," someone else piped up.

"Pretty heavily armed for a janitor."

Vash shook his head in an attempt to clear it, and found himself on his knees and staring into the barrel of his own gun. There was a loose crowd of unsavory types around him, and behind their threatening forms he could see that all the pews had been pushed back, and a large hole had been chipped into the floor of the sanctuary.

"Maybe he knows where the treasure is, boss," one of the weasiler ones said, to the man holding Vash's gun.

"You shut your cakehole, Phipps," the man snarled, before turning his attention back to his captive. Vash's gun barrel moved uncomfortably close to his temple. The man holding it, a large wall of heavily-armed greed without much intelligence to back it up, was clearly the leader of the gang. Vash knew the type all too well. "Hey, you. What the hell're you doing in here? Did the cops send you in? Spill it, or I'm gonna paint the wall with your brains."

Vash instantly summoned up his best hapless face, the one that made him look like he didn't have two brain cells to bang together, and added in a dash of cowardly fear for good measure. "I'm so sorry! I didn't know we were having construction done today! I just came in to do the windows, you know, before Sunday. They gotta be clean or I won't get paid, and I gotta pay the doctors, my girl Sally, she's had the typhoid real bad, and--"

"Just shuttup and answer my questions, you little shitstain. What kinda janitor packs this kinda heat?"

Vash yelped in convincingly-feigned terror. "We have to! I don't like it, I hate guns, but the boss insists everybody's armed. Apparently there was a murder years ago and he's scared they'll come back for something, I don't know, I just work here, but I mean, have you seen the guy who runs this place? He's a nutcase."

"He ain't the only one." The man holding the gun seemed to be more than half convinced, though, scrubbing at his dusty beard.

"He's right tho, boss," another man piped up from the back. He had a bloody bandage around his head. "That priesty kid we sent out with the ransom note had a pair of pistols on him. I ain't gonna forget, little punk clipped my ear before we jumped him."

Good on you, Billy Lee, Vash thought.

The boss chewed on this information a long moment before crouching down next to Vash, whose eyes began to water from the smell. At least it made him look like he was crying with fear. "Listen, you runny thomas-turd." Vash's gun muzzle traveled to between his eyebrows. "You tell us what we need to know, and maybe I won't turn your skull into a purdy little birdhouse."

"Of course! Of course!" Vash babbled, all the while taking in the number of men, their armaments and capabilities, and the general structure of the building. The chapel was modest compared to the big church in town, but it still was a roomy and much-loved space, plastered in cool white with stained glass windows. His heart swelled a little when he realized why the dimensions and windows were so familiar; Wolfwood used to carry a little model of it around under his arm.

A large wooden cross--once an unspeakable richness of material--hung suspended over the sanctuary. Beneath it, the robbers had pulled up the flagstones right in front of the altar and had been industriously digging straight down, apparently without much success. As for the altar itself, it was on a dais slightly raised above the rest of the room: a simply-made, long wooden box dressed with candles and fake white lilies, with the lectern just to the right. And behind it, beneath a massive stained glass window, was a tiny side door for the clergy. It was cracked open a bare breath, and Vash saw the glint of one gray eye and knew who was waiting just behind it.

His assessment took less than a fraction of a second, and then he was all nervous hiccups again. "Anything you want to know, boss," he chirped. "Lemme see, I just started working here in April, or maybe it was May? Oh right it was May, because my third cousin's birthday had already--"

"Shuddup and let me ask the questions, dipshit!"

"Ofcourph, boff," Vash said, around the gun barrel in his mouth. Behind him, he heard the faintest creak of hinges, the lightest footfall. "Wafchu wannfa knof abouff?"

"We been diggin' here all day," the boss said, showing a mouthful of unkempt teeth. "Right under the cross, see? X Marks the spot."

Vash's eyebrows drew together in a nervous smile. "I um, I don't really think that's why that's there."

"Well we sure as hell do," the boss said, with a leer. "Didn't you know? This whole orphanage is built on top of a fallen ship. Got everything down there. Plants, big fancy guns, just waiting for someone to come get it. The stuff with the kids is just a coverup."

"I can safely say that's my very first time hearing about this," Vash said, and neglected to add that it was because it was unlikely there was even a scrap of truth to it. The orphanage was built on solid bedrock to keep it from having trouble with worms, and even if it hadn't been, the nearest plant was twelve iles away in the New December suburbs. Vash could hear her from where he was. But he whistled anyway, as though impressed but this information. "So you came to get the treasure?"

"Heheh. Nothing like that word to make a man feel a little greedy, right?" The boss tapped Vash on top of his head with his gun. "Maybe you're not so dumb after all, if you get why we're here."

"Are you gonna dig it all up?" Vash let his eyes get very wide, and he looked so earnest and helpful that even the boss seemed to reconsider shooting him.

"Maybe. The old man who used to run this joint wanted to keep it all for himself, see?"

"No!" Vash shook his head in disbelief. "And let me guess, this was after you had helped him out, right?"

"Hee hee," Phipps said, leaning on his shovel a moment. "Yeah, helped him right out of his--"

"Shut it, Phipps," The boss said again, and the chastized bandit went grudgingly back to digging. "It's been a couple of decades," he said, in the closest he could probably come to being thoughtful. "I had to bust outta jail, you know."

"Always a pain in the ass," Vash agreed, with a microscopic flick of one eye. Nick had ghosted away from the door and had moved up into the pulpit unnoticed.

"But now I've come to get what I'm owed, and if you want to stay alive, you're gonna help." He bent down to pick up one of the discarded shovels.

Now, Nick! Vash thought, and immediately heard the sound of boots landing on wood, and the ominous whine of something very destructive powering up.

"That's enough. Drop your weapons. All of you."

The laboring members of the Glorybones Gang froze in hesitation, looking first to their boss, and then to the man who had spoken. The child sun had slipped down far enough to light the window above the sanctuary, and Nick stood there on top of the altar, a menacing silhouette in front of the blazing colored glass, armed with a massive cross on his shoulder that took Vash a moment to recognize as some kind of rocket launcher. There was something a little weird about it, but--

"I said drop 'em!" Nick shouted, and this time the gang obeyed with a clatter of falling hardware. The leader deliberately threw Vash's gun out of anyone's reach.

"Long time no see, kid," he said, like some long-lost drunk uncle. "Knew you'd turn up eventually. Huh. Looks like you growed up pretty good for someone without a daddy. Told'ja you would."

"Yeah well, you can tell him all about it when you see him." Nick slapped a few buttons on the launcher, and the whining increased in threat and pitch. "Which is gonna be right now. Get back, Vash. I'm taking this trash outta my church."

Vash scrambled to his feet. "Okay, Nick, just hold on a minute--"

Nick's hands tensed on the launcher. "These bastards shot my dad, Tongari!"

Vash closed his eyes as Nick's anger and grief hit him like the eyewall of a sandstorm. "I know, I know. But that doesn't mean you have to become a killer--"

"I'm already a killer!" Nick yelled, and the targeting eye of the launcher wavered slightly as it circled the head of the gang leader. "You--you miserable shitsack, you couldn't even give him a clean death. You left him bleeding out in the dirt with half his face gone and his guts blown out but you couldn't even shoot him through the heart. You made me do that. Me! I was ten fucking years old and you made me kill my dad!"

"Oh, god, Nick." Vash said. He knew it, of course. Somehow he always had known it, no matter how much he wished and tried to believe that he didn't. But that didn't keep Nick's pain from lancing out of him like rays of holy judgment, piercing everything around him. No wonder Wolfwood had been so scornful of Vash's talk of Nick's simple life.

"But some idiot I know has taught me something about mercy lately," Nick continued, to the men in front of him. "So I'll give you three seconds to say your prayers before I blow you and your shitfuck friends straight to Kingdom Come."

The sun slipped behind the window-leading, and for a moment the radiance was dimmed enough for both Nick and his weapon to be seen clearly.

Vash ran forward, both hands waving in warning. "Nick, you really don't want to--"

"One!"

"The launcher it's--"

"Two!"

The gang leader started laughing, and just kept laughing.

"Nick you've got it--"

Nick's eyes flashed with a horrible light.

"THREE."

Nick pulled the trigger, and the launcher went off with a flare of fire, a deafening noise, and a screech of shattering glass... right behind him.

"Backwards," Vash finished, weakly.

Nick stood there stunned and smoke-blackened, the end of his ponytail smoking, the stained glass window above the altar a dripping, ruined kaleidoscope of destruction at his back.

The Glorybones gang fell into peals of laughter as bits of the chapel fell around them, gravel plinking like hailstones.

"Goddamn, boy," the leader yelled, wiping his streaming eyes. "You were smarter when you killed up your daddy! But don't you worry, cos I'll be sending you to--"

"Boss! The little blond shit's getting away!"

Vash had jumped up onto the altar, placed himself face to face with Nick, and put his left arm on his shoulder, the other on his hip.

"Don't move," Vash breathed into Nick's ear, and took aim.

"He's not going nowhere, just wants to kiss his boyfriend before we send 'em both to the undertaker--"

Vash fired three shots from his gun hand through the open wreckage of the chapel window.

This just made the gang laugh harder, falling over onto their shovels. "Hell, I haven't seen anybody with worse aim in all my--"

Vash smiled against Nick's cheek, and then he threw them both down behind the altar before the redirected rocket came whistling down through the chapel roof. It exploded on impact, sending down a roar of roofing and tiles, showering the Glorybones gang with enough rubble to bury them and all of the first Nicholas D. Wolfwood's secrets. In the moment of silence that followed the collapse, the massive wooden cross hanging above the sanctuary swayed, creaking on its steel cable moorings for a second before they all popped free like breaking harp strings. The cross plummeted straight down into the pile as though directed by the unerring hand of God, lodging itself there, upright like a tombstone.

"Right, so. Tell me how you knew that wasn't going to kill them all outright."

An hour had gone by in a flurry of activity. The paramedics had just unearthed the last gang member from the sanctuary wreckage, and had wheeled him out to the ambulance to go get his multiple bone breakages set before taking him and his companions all to jail. In the courtyard outside, Billy Lee was helping a medical team check over the kids. They were fine, but having a grand time with all the excitement. Many expressed that their main concern was when they were going to get the promised ice cream. Nick had been more than happy to let Billy handle that part, and on pretense of supervising the extraction of the injured bandits, had fled back to the chapel where Vash was waiting for him.

Vash shrugged innocently, locking his wrist back into position. "They were already down in the pit they'd been digging. The steel roof beams would fall first and slow the resultant debris that followed. You've also got metal sheeting on your roof, so as long as they ducked, which they did, it would form a protective bubble over them and give them all pretty good survival odds."

"And the cross?"

Vash slid him a sidelong look. "Would you believe I had nothing to do with that?"

Nick grinned in spite of himself. "You know. I think I actually would." He leaned back on what was left of the altar, staring up at the sky though the broken roof, fingers ruffing the singed place where his ponytail had been before the launcher fire backwash took it off. "I guess I made a fool out of myself, huh."

Vash hopped up to sit beside him. "Even if you did, I don't care. One good fool deserves another. You didn't kill anyone today, that's what matters."

Nick studied the bloody scrapes on the back of his hand. "And my dad?"

"That was mercy, Nick. I thought that was what priests do." Vash frowned. "You know why they targeted this place?"

"What, the cache of ancient tech thing? Yeah, I know that story. It's horseshit. Something my dad made up as collateral so the gang would loan him money. Said he just had to figure out where it was. That day, when they came to claim it in lieu of his payment, he had nothing to give them. They thought he was holding out. So they shot him." He took a long, shaky breath, and slowly let it out again. "I guess today they thought they'd finally come back and check, but. There was never any treasure."

Vash's eyes caught on something amid the broken floor by their feet. In the ruins of the dais where the pulpit had been, an old metal toolbox was just poking one corner out of the rubble. "Are you sure about that?" he asked, and slid off the altar to retrieve it.

"Hey," Nick said, in surprise. "I recognize that. It's dad's. Always wondered where it got to."

"Looks like he put it here for safekeeping years ago," Vash said, brushing dust off the rusty surface before offering it to Nick. "Do you want to open it?"

"You go ahead," Nick said, and made room for Vash to sit next to him. "I'm not feeling too steady right now, to be honest."

Vash felt a little shaky himself as he thumbed the latches up, though he could not say why. The hinges creaked as the lid fell back across his knees. Inside the old tool box were two envelopes, one flat and one lumpy, both yellowed with age. The flat one was unmarked, but the lumpy one read, in spidery handwriting: for Nicky, if he would like to have it someday.

"Nicky?" Vash repeated, in a voice that very nearly got away from him.

"Shuttup," Nick replied, coloring, and took the crumpled parcel. "What's in the other one? Documents, maybe?"

Vash opened it, tilted it into his hand, and a sheaf of photographs slid out. He passed them to Nick one at a time, wordlessly.

"These are all old shots from the orphanage," Nick said, turning them around. "I remember this lady, she used to be the cook when I was a kid. She looked over the place after dad died and stayed until I took over. Passed away about ten years ago. God, could she make some chicken and dumplings tho." He flicked the photos over; they were all neatly labeled on the back with names and dates. He pointed to one freckly girl in a group photo. "Hey, that's Angie. We were best friends when I was six and she was eight, but then she got adopted, and I cried nonstop for like a month. She lives out in New Jenora now. Always sends me a card at Christmas." Nick went through several more photos, sometimes with a comment, sometimes with nothing but a curious noise or a grunt of recognition. That was the year they got a puppy, that was the time they tried to make a pinata, that was the old jungle gym. Nick himself was in most of them, de-aging from a bony, band-aided kid to a fat toddler with a shock of black hair. Vash handed him the next-to-last photo, and Nick went very still.

"That's my parents," he said, in a low voice. In the photo an old man and a middle-aged woman stood under the orphanage gate, the woman heavily pregnant, the man with an arm around her shoulders. They were both beaming with happiness and pride. The glossy scrap of paper shivered slightly in Nick's hand, making the smiling faces wobble up at him. "He never expected to get married or father a kid, you know. In his sixties when he met Mom. Seventies when I was born. Ma was no spring chicken either, but I took her out on my way in." Nick touched their faces lightly, reverently. His mother's resembled his own more than his father's, but he looked like neither of them so much as he looked like someone else. "After dad died, the only thing I knew for sure was that I'd managed to kill them both. None of us here were really orphans before that day, we were just a big family. But after..." He shook his head. "I spent ten years doing everything I could to put myself right into the grave with them. But somehow I managed not to. I don't know how. Musta had a guardian angel, honestly."

"What changed?" Vash asked.

"I turned twenty-one," Nick said, with an ironic smile. "And legally got access to the money from Dad's life insurance policy. Didn't even know he had one until the lawyers turned up at my door. Apparently a couple of girls sold him one decades ago and he'd been quietly paying into it ever since. And I realized I'd just been handed everything for my life, a life I'd been doing my damndest to throw away since I was eleven." He sighed, looking up from the photo and out the shattered window, blinking hard. "And eventually I started to believe that maybe they didn't both resent me. They both wanted to have a baby so bad, and Mom had already lost two. I was their last chance. And as much as I hated myself, I couldn't waste that. Or at least, if I didn't care about living or dying, I could scrape up enough giveadamn to do something for them. So." He took a deep breath, put down the photograph, and pulled out a cigarette. "I cleaned up my act. I set up a couple of investments for the orphanage. Dad always wanted to build a nice church in the new part of the city, so I used the rest of the money for the Lady of December, made the diocese, and that was that." He paused to light his cigarette, turning the lighter over in his hand. "So much for buried treasure."

Vash picked up the picture again and held it out to Nick. "This was his treasure, Nick. You were."

"That is the most hokey thing I have ever heard. How can you even say that with a straight face?" But Nick took the photo and stared hard at the smiles in it, pinching the bridge of his nose, trying to get his breathing under control. As he did so, Vash turned his attention to the last picture he held, which was back-side up. Vash flipped it over, and the noise he made brought Nick's head up again.

"What? What is it?" From his side he could only see the back of the photo, which was labeled with too many names to parse at a glance. But the date at the top was clearly visible: December 25, 0130. Vash's hand made a dent in the corner of the photograph, as though he could not help how tightly he held it. It took him a minute to speak, and when he did, his voice sounded like it was coming from a thousand miles away.

"I met him three months after this was taken," Vash breathed, his face strained and pale, "on a bus to May City. He carried a copy of this picture in his breast pocket all the time. A reminder of what it was all for, he said." Vash closed his eyes. "...I buried him with it."

Nick felt like all the blood in his body had just drained into his boots. "It's him, isn't it."

Vash passed him the photo. "You tell me," he said, and watched Nick's face.

"Sure." Nick forced out a laugh as he reached for it, but it came out all wrong and died suddenly. He took the photo and a hard pull off his cigarette. "I mean, I always wondered just how much this bastard looked...like..." He looked, and his voice utterly abandoned him. His mouth moved around the word me, but if it was finishing his sentence or another kind of recognition, he would have been hard pressed to say.

Both of them stared in silence at the picture, a picture of a man who could only be the same one sitting next to Vash, but taken seventy years before he was born. Nicholas D. Wolfwood, it said, on the back of the photo, with a list of all the names of the orphanage kids crowded around him. Nick recognized his father by the shape of his smile--even though he could not have been more than four--and by the small silver cigarette lighter he held reverently in both hands.

"Tongari," Nick said, and was understandably at a loss for words for a long moment, before he said, "Why do we even have the same goddamn moles." He shook the picture at Vash as though it was all his fault. "How is this even a thing. How can something like this even happen."

"Beats me," Vash said with a suddenly untroubled smile. "But moles are important, you know." He winked with the eye next to his. "Like little stars on your face. Supposed to tell your fortune."

"It can't be real," Nick said, in one last gesture of disbelief.

Vash shrugged. "I know," he said. "But it still is."

Nick looked back at the photograph and then reverently slipped it and the one of his parents together into his breast pocket. The air seemed less heavy, but not empty, when the faces of the past were put to rest.

"So what's in the other envelope?" Vash asked, as Nick took a shaky drag off his cigarette and stared out through the ruined chapel wall to the scrubland behind the orphanage, where the first stars were coming out. "The one for Nicky?"

"Don't you even start," Nick said, but he was glad to give his hands something to do. He opened up the envelope, and shook it over his hand. A strip of black leather tumbled out of it, somehow still supple in spite of its age, and a tarnished silver cross chimed like a bell on the clasp as it landed in his palm. They both knew the necklace immediately; Wolfwood had been wearing it in the photo.

Nick turned it over in his hands for a full minute and then, without saying a thing, he handed it to Vash. Vash smiled down at it for only a moment before holding it up between them, and fastened the choker around Nick's neck.

"Suits you," he said, touching the cross in the hollow of Nick's throat. "Nicky."

"Oh god, you're gonna call me that forever, aren't you?"

"Yep," Vash said, beaming.

Nick shook his head with a sigh, and reached up to feel the choker on his neck. "Well, it's not gonna pay any bills, unless there's a bunch of cash in the bottom of that toolbox."

"No," Vash said, looking back inside it. "It was just the two envelopes--" he stopped, because even though he was certain that nothing else was in the box, something was certainly in there now. Something soft and slightly crushed, with fragrance still clinging to the petals. A lily. Unlike every other flower in the church it was not white, nor was it made of silk. It was a bright, bloodstained red, the color of an outlaw's coat, and Nicholas D. Wolfwood had been wearing it in his jacket. Even though he had not really been there, and the box had been under the floor of the altar for at least twenty years.

"What the hell?" Nick asked, utterly baffled as Vash held out the flower. "Where did this--?"

After a stunned second Vash fell into him, laughing soundlessly, tears running down his face. Proof you can't ignore.

But all he said out loud was, "Hell had nothing to do with it," and kissed him.

IV.

"Tongari," Nick said the next morning, shoving his sunglasses hard up his nose as though he could cram them on permanently, "tell me why we are out here in the boonies at this godforsaken hour of the morning after the day we had yesterday?"

"You have questions, right?" Vash slid off the back of the motorcycle and walked across the parking lot of the New December Outskirts Plant No. 0032 facility, which was empty, because anybody with any sense was still in bed, including one out two suns. "I thought I should answer some of them."

"You have to answer my questions at a power plant?" Nick asked, engaging the kickstand and catching up to Vash in three loping strides. "At dawn?"

"It'll make it easier," Vash said, smiling behind his own glasses, which he seemed to be wearing to amp up the mystery, unlike Nick, who was wearing his to hold his exhausted eyes in his face. "C'mon. The fresh air'll wake you up, and the breeze is really nice."

Nick's curiosity was awake even if the rest of him wasn't, and Vash knew it would propel him up the multiple flights of stairs to the public observation deck. Which would, hopefully, also be empty. There might be those who would make the climb early in a more populated area--and Vash had seen everything from plant spiritual devotees to sunrise yoga classes on those viewing platforms--but for a small one in the suburbs, that was less likely. Vash surveyed the metal deck as he came up the last flight of stairs, and was pleased to notice they had it all to themselves.

Good Morning, he announced to the intelligence in the giant glass globe in front of the viewing deck, because it was always polite to greet your relatives first when you dropped by to visit them. Mind if we join you?

What he got back wasn't really words; this plant was an old one and she had never been very chatty. But she didn't mind at all, she was glad to see her little brother, and she felt that he looked better than the last time she had seen him. That pleased her.

"Listen," Nick wheezed, pulling himself up onto the platform by the railing. "If what you have to tell me is that you are secretly actually a morning person, I don't think this relationship can continue." He flopped himself over the fence beside Vash, who was gazing up dreamily at the morning light on the curve of the plant housing. It was getting hot again already, as the heat wave was predicted to continue on for another week, but compared to the suffocation of afternoon the morning air at their height was almost pleasant. Far below them, however, the heat was already shimmering up in waves from the ground.

"Don't worry, this is a special occasion," Vash said, and folded his arms on the rail.

"National Plant Appreciation Day is in September," Nick gasped, and then pulled himself upright. "It's July."

"July Twenty-first, in fact," Vash said, and smiled. "It's my birthday."

Nick stared at him, and Vash, for once, just let him do so. Without trying to appear normal or approachable or calming, but not strange and fey, either. He just let himself be Vash, because it was who he was, and sometimes it can take centuries to allow oneself to do the most simple, obvious thing. He was pleased to find that Nick's presence remained unwavering beside him, comfortable and unaffected.

"You should have told me," Nick said, reaching for his smokes as soon as he could breathe. "I would have bought a cake, because you honestly don't want me to make one." He tapped a cigarette out of his pack. "Twenty-nine again, huh?"

"Oh, always," Vash laughed. "This is like the two-hundredth one of those for me."

Nick's tapping slowed, just slightly. "And the reason for that has something to do with these." He tilted his head at the plant before them, the bulb suffused with warm pink light from the second sunrise. He had not asked it like a question.

"It does," Vash said. The breeze kicked up between them, smelling of warming sand, succulent desert leaves, and all the breakfasts being made in the houses below.

Nick looked at the plant, then looked at Vash. "I always just figured you had some kind of lost tech go wrong on you," he said, and remembering his cigarette, paused to light it. "Maybe had something experimental done when you were getting treated for one of those scars. Stopped you from aging. But it's not that simple." He took a deep drag, exhaled it. Vash could feel the jittery edge of his nerves, but also his pure anticipation. He wanted to know everything, and so badly. He wanted to get the truth and crush it in his teeth, drain it dry until it couldn't escape from him if he tried. He was so hungry for it. No wonder he had been so irritable in the last month. Vash, all unintentionally, had been starving him to death this whole time.

"Is it?" Nick prompted.

"Oh no," Vash shook his head. "It's actually way simpler. But it does have to do with the plants."

"Well," Nick said, and subtly braced himself against the railing. "Lay it on me, then."

"I am one."

It was ridiculously simple to say. Three words, out of him in less than as many seconds. And Nick did not scream or faint or start gibbering in horror, not that Vash had expected him to. But neither did he pull away, nor did his eyes grow cold. Instead his cigarette ember went very bright as he inhaled. But that was all.

"Oh," Nick said. He looked at the globe above them, and the lush, green nucleus of it, and then back at Vash's face. Vash knew what he'd realized, that his eyes and the heart of the plant were the same impossible shade of blue-green. "Ah," he continued.

"It's okay, you can ask questions." Vash leaned his elbows on the rail, enjoying the breeze. Enjoying also, perhaps a little guiltily, the look on Nick's face. "I promised somebody I'd start answering them."

"Okay well, for a start, you sure don't look like a plant," Nick said, and then went very red in the face. "I mean. Wait. Sorry, that sounded kind of racist. Was that racist?"

Vash choked back a tiny laugh.

Nick put his face in his hand. "Oh god, it was, I'm sorry."

Vash couldn't stop the laugh this time. "No, no it's fine. I'm not--I'm a little different than these. That's why I look like I do. I've spent a long time looking like a human. All my life, really. I was born looking like one. Most plants don't. At least, not the parts of them you can see."

"I didn't know plants came in cute idiot models," Nick said. "So, um." He stopped, and was quiet for a minute.

"It's okay, you can ask anything you--" Vash began.

"I know I can ask, Tongari, shut up." Nick said it as though it was one word, taking his cigarette out of his mouth and clapping it back in almost immediately. "I just. I can't think of a goddamn thing to ask right now, okay?"

"That's a first," Vash said, and dodged the swipe Nick made at him, but in such a way that made them stand closer together. For a long time neither of them said anything, watching the sun rising behind the plant, listening to the wind and the distant sounds of a waking town. "I brought you here in case you needed me to prove it, somehow, but--"

"You've never lied to me," Nick said, at once. "Maybe there have been times when you wouldn't answer--"

"A lot of times," Vash admitted.

"...But I believe you." With only the slightest hesitation, Nick looped his arm around Vash's waist. "I'll have plenty to ask later," he said at last, in a low voice. "Is that okay?"

"Of course," Vash said, because it was. "We're not really so different, though."

"No kidding, I've been sucking your dick for two months and couldn't have told you otherwise." Nick took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. Vash watched as he looked at the plant, and then through the glass and beyond it, towards the blurry horizon on the other side. The suns slowly climbed up the dome of the sky, and scattered rainbows through the glass globe.

"What's it like?" Nick asked, and then clarified, with a nod to the mountains. "Out there? You must have seen all of it."

"Most of it." Vash leaned his shoulder against Nick's, and looked into the distance with him. "In many ways, it's the same as it's always been. Ugly, beautiful, cruel, generous, everything in between. Greener than it used to be, but the cities are the places where things really have changed. And people are pretty much people everywhere, so if you like them, you'll like them, and if you don't you won't. I'm lucky I do, or I'd be really bored by now."

Nick smoked the last of his cigarette silently for a moment, then ground out the butt on the pitted rail and pocketed it rather than throwing it away. "I've never left December," he said. "Always seemed more reasons to stay than to go. I was never even curious."

"Does that mean you are curious, now?"

"I guess that's what you'd call it. There's so much I don't know. Not just about the world, but about you, and--You've never told me everything that happened out there. All those years ago. You never told me exactly what happened to me--" Nick caught himself too late. Vash sucked in a startled breath that they both heard. Vash felt like the platform was an elevator, and it had just dropped five floors.

"...him?" Vash offered. He was still holding open a door to the past, as he had been all this time. But he was fully prepared, at Nick's next word, whatever it was, to let it close forever. It would be all right, he told himself. The words were meaningless, after all. It was the heart that mattered.

But then Nick said, "No," and curled his fist into his chest, as though trying to catch something before it could escape his chest. "I want to know what happened... to me. Then. With you. All of it. The things we did and failed to do. Good and bad. I want to see those places and I want you to tell me what happened there. But more than that, I want to know what happens to me. Now. With you." He turned to Vash then, and the light of the sky behind him set him on fire like a saint in stained glass. "I want to know what happens to us, Vash."

Vash was unable to speak for several seconds. Without realizing it, he had stopped holding the door open, because it had ceased to exist. In the end, there was only then and now, as there always ever had been.

"That's... quite the proposal," Vash managed, at last.

Nick lifted his eyebrows in that inimitable Wolfwood way. "Do you want it to be?"

"What?" The invisible elevator dropped another foot and a half, and Vash made a grab for the railing. His gun hand wound up in Nick's instead. "I didn't mean it was a--"

"Do I have to get on one knee, is that it, Tongari?" Nick chuckled down in his throat, and unfolded Vash's fingers. "I don't have a ring, anyway. So take this instead."

Vash looked down at his palm, and even though his vision was strangely, suddenly blurry, he didn't need to see to know what was there. Wolfwood's lighter.

"Sorry, it's the only dowry I've got," Nick said, and pressed Vash's fingers around it. "But I want you to keep it. So you can give it to me next time you find me," he brought Vash's hand to his lips, and his voice slipped into a whisper, "and the time after that, and the time after that, and the--"

Vash couldn't stand it any longer, closing the space between them like the preacher closing his Bible at the end of a funeral, and giving Wolfwood the only answer he had ever needed in any life.

"So that's it. It'll be a while before we're back, probably. I hope you don't mind."

Meryl's candle, sitting demurely among the others in the niche of Our Lady of December, bobbed and nodded in an understanding way. I'd tell you two to stay out of trouble, Meryl would have said. But that's a lost cause.

Milly would have asked him to please look after Mr. Wolfwood, as he had a bad habit of not admitting how he was feeling and what he wanted. It can lead to hurt feelings and misunderstandings, you know?

"I know," Vash murmured, to the rack of lit candles. "We'll try to get it right this time."

You'd better, Meryl would have said. Don't make me come down there.

"No, ma'am."

Take care! In his mind's eye, Vash could see Milly waving. We love you!

Vash bowed his head, tears in his eyes, a smile on his lips. "Love you, too."

Somewhere outside the church, a horn honked with a note of impatience.

"Time to go," Vash said, and, picking up his duffel, walked out of the Church of Our Lady of December.

Outside, it was very much the same as any other morning in the city, like the morning Vash had arrived there, months ago. The sky was blue, the suns were shining, and the fountain in the park across the way was burbling happily to itself. Two things were new, however. One was the brightly-colored banner across the columns of Our Lady of December, thanking the city for donating the bounty for the escaped leader of the Glorybones Gang to the December Orphanage, and the other was the shiny new black motorcycle parked at the bottom of the church steps. The man leaning on it and lighting a cigarette, however, was the same one he had always been.

"All prayed up?" Nicholas D Wolfwood asked, clicking his new butane lighter closed.

"Yeah," Vash said, setting his bag down on the step and gesturing to the bike. "What's this big boat for? I thought you were gonna get one with a sidecar?"

"Where's the fun in that?" Wolfwood asked, and patted the seat. "This one's bigger than my old beater, should be comfy for both of us."

"Wolfwood," Vash asked, carefully unfolding the earpieces of his glasses before putting them on. "Are you telling me that you intend to make Vash the Stampede ride bitch all the way to May City?"

"No, but I'm telling him he's gonna unless he wants to walk there instead." Wolfwood reached behind him and pulled out a lumpy package inexpertly wrapped in brown paper. "Speaking of, though. I've got your birthday present. A couple weeks late, but you should have told me when your birthday was before the actual day, you know."

"Aww, Nicky." Vash took the package, smiling with genuine delight. "From you?"

"And the orphanage kids. Well." Wolfwood adjusted his sunglasses. "They made the card."

"I see that," Vash said, beaming at it. It was covered in red crayon flowers and had his name on it six times, with many inventive spellings. "But you shouldn't have, you know. We're gonna be traveling, there's not a lot of room for... extra...baggage." Once the card was out, the string came loose, and a tumble of red fabric spilled over Vash's hands, all the way down to the marble steps.

"No, but you've been wearing that raggedy old thing since we met, and it was falling apart then." Wolfwood stood up from the bike, and with a practiced hand undid the snaps of Vash's black coat. "C'mon. Let's see it on you."

"I haven't worn this color in a hundred years," Vash said, but it was all the protest he could manage. Wolfwood bundled him into the new coat like he'd been doing it every day of his life, and surveyed his handiwork with a pleased glint behind his sunglasses. "That's more like it," he said, tugging on a few seams and straps. "That's my outlaw."

Vash the Stampede blushed almost as brightly as his coat. "You know, ever since you started wearing that necklace, you've just gotten more ostentatious," he said. "Maybe I shouldn't have put it on you."

"Oh?" Wolfwood grinned at him. "You gonna try and take it off me now?"

"I'd sooner put my foot through a grand piano," Vash said, reverently. In point of fact he had insisted Wolfwood leave it on, often and especially in certain select situations.

"That's what I thought." Wolfwood picked up Vash's old coat and bag and stowed them under the seat. "Anyway," he said, "You don't have to ride bitch all the time. We can take turns."

"Ahh." Vash looked at the gleaming handlebars, and the intimidating array of dials and gauges. "I um. I don't. Really. Know how to... drive."

Wolfwood stared at him.

"What?" Vash said, defensively.

"How old are you?" Wolfwood demanded, squinting.

"Two hundred and thirty two, but my stylist says I don't look a day over--"

"And you've traveled all over this planet in that time, but you still don't know how to drive?!"

"I mean I can steer," Vash began, and added, "Well, mostly. But motorcycles are precision machines and--"

"How are you even still alive?" Wolfwood demanded in exasperation, first to the heavens, then to Vash. "How?!"

"I support public transport, if you must know," Vash said, primly smoothing his new coat.

"I hope by the time we come back I've figured out why I was the one who had to get reincarnated," Wolfwood said, and slung one leg over the seat. "Because it makes no sense from here. Get on, Tongari."

"Hmph," Vash said, but did so. Wolfwood had been right; the seat was pretty comfortable, and being able to wrap himself around Wolfwood's back and hips was an extra pleasant consideration. It was definitely better than being perched on the back end of his old street bike, and honestly, was a step up over being folded into a side car, too.

"Here. I'm giving you your first lesson." Wolfwood turned the key on the bike, and it roared to life underneath them. He tapped one handlebar, then the other. "Throttle," he said, in a raised voice to be heard over the engine, "Brake."

"I want you to know that I'm not going to retain any of this," Vash said.

"Speedometer," Wolfwood went on, with a determined grit of his teeth.

"Oh, I take it back, I know that one." Vash leaned his chin on Wolfwood's shoulder. "Maybe there's hope for me yet."

"I hope you're better at directions than you are driving," Wolfwood said, and eased the bike forward. "Cos here we go."

"Yes," Vash said, and squeezed off an invisible finger-bullet towards the horizon. "Go thattaway."

"One last thing, Tongari," Wolfwood said, and then he revved the engine a few more times, pressed Vash's gun hand securely to his belt buckle, and grinned over the handlebars. "Hold on."

With the engine fully engaged and the bike peeling out into traffic like a bat out of hell, Vash wasn't able to answer, but he didn't have to. They both knew he was never letting go.

~o~