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Telling Brad and Luida that Vash is dead isn't the worst thing Wolfwood's ever had to do.
He thought it might be, might out-compete even bringing Vash there in the first place. Even killing Rollo. Even all the deserters — kids like him but luckier — he's gunned down in the years that the Eye's owned him.
But it isn't.
He has help, for one. Meryl, braver than he'll ever be, picking up and continuing when he falters. He doesn't even know what she says, where she goes from the fumbled beginnings of an explanation he tries to offer, what details she adds from what she saw that he didn't.
Just that it's enough. Sufficient to deliver the news.
For two — he didn't pull the trigger.
He didn’t even get close enough to really see it happen, to know exactly the moment Vash — stopped being. He watched from a distance, like a coward, out in the dunes with one hand on the Punisher and one arm around Meryl's waist so she wouldn't run back down the slope and then — July was gone. Just gone. Immolated all at once, an instant funeral for Vash, for Roberto, for every other poor soul still in the city.
Vash's blood is on his hands. Of course it is. But it hasn't stained him in a way Vash's surrogate parents can see. Even if they suspect him, they don't know for sure. He doesn’t have to force them to accept the news from the obvious cause of their suffering.
Three — they don’t have to stay.
Luida offers, of course. Even as her voice wavers. She tells them they have a home there whenever they want, no matter what happens.
Wolfwood doesn't say he would rather just die. But it must show on his face, because Luida falls silent.
She tells them to wait, before they take the truck — Meryl's truck, now — and leave. For her to get some things together.
Wolfwood doesn’t know how he could begin to deserve a parting gift. But Luida's expression is set, and he can't bring himself to argue.
He and Meryl sit together in the holding bay where the truck's been parked for the last miserable week. Wolfwood stares at the dent in the trailer from where it slammed into him and tries not to think about anything.
Meryl checks the whole truck over like she expects it to have been tampered with, then — apparently finding it just as she left it, minus one reporter and one angel — drops down beside Wolfwood on the metal flooring.
“Fuck,” she declares, in the wobbly voice of someone trying very hard not to cry, without much success.
Wolfwood nods without looking at her — he already knows what he'll see. Meryl's red face, eyes already swollen from the last few days of grief and terror, streaked with fresh tears, and he knows from the last two days that if he sees that, he's going to cry, again, and he's goddamn sick of crying.
And more importantly, crying in front of Vash's family of a century and a half, inviting their comfort for his own crime — it would be the worst thing he's ever done.
"Fuck," he agrees.
It's Brad, shock-calm and dull-eyed, who brings them their sendoff — duffle bags stuffed full of supplies, and two folded blankets, thick and heavy enough to make a noise as Brad settles them on the ground.
"It'll be… a hard couple of weeks, at the very least," Brad says, roughly. "These are weighted. Good for shock." He clears his throat. "We'll be disabling the storm cover in about forty-five minutes. You two can head out after that."
Wolfwood opens his mouth to say… something. Thanks, apology, denial, confession — but they all get stuck in his throat, and then Brad turns away and disappears.
Meryl, into the silence and Wolfwood's stillness, hefts the duffles into the passenger seat — a not-so-subtle indication that her senpai's old seat is off-limits — and wraps herself in one of the blankets as she settles into the driver's seat, curled into a huddle underneath the fabric.
After a moment of awful vertigo, a sweeping certainty through his whole body that he so deeply and thoroughly deserves to be dead that he may as well lie down and wait for it, Wolfwood remembers how to move.
He loads up the Punisher, and forces himself to pick up the other blanket.
It's soft. It settles warmly around his shoulders.
Wolfwood gets into the backseat and stretches himself out flat. The blanket covers him entirely, a firm weight like a tight hug, and he can hear Meryl's wet breathing in the front seat but nothing else. No one else.
The silence smothers him with one hand, and with the other, snaps his composure cleanly in two.
He pulls the blanket tighter around himself, balling up one corner of it against his face, muffling the sobs trying to escape him. He squeezes his eyes tightly shut, but nothing he does will stop the tears once they've started. He learned that the hard way, trying to talk Meryl out of searching the remains of July for survivors — for Vash — between sobs that shook his whole body.
It had been hours before he stopped weeping. Meryl hadn't fared much better, once she admitted defeat.
Just lying under the blanket isn't enough to keep back the vertigo, suddenly, and the fabric against his mouth isn't enough to stifle the sobs. Wolfwood curls in on himself, as small as he can go, burying his face against his knees.
He should be smaller. He should be able to disappear under the blanket like Meryl can, cover himself entirely, vanish into the weight of it.
Wolfwood would be fully-grown by now, even if the Eye hadn't taken him. But he knows somewhere deep inside himself that he should be small. Smaller than he is. Smaller than they made him.
Small enough to hide from himself.
But he isn't small.
He only has his own ribcage to hide in, his own sobs shaking him apart, the blanket pressing him into himself, the dampness of his own tears, the warmth of his breath.
The metal walls of the truck around him, haunted and terrible.
Worst thing he's ever done or not — there's something of him that won't be salvageable after this. Some part of him that won't ever emerge from under the blanket.
It's probably better that way.