CHAPTER 3
Vash seemed galvanized, compelled into motion.
He quickly swept away the army of cartridges and cards, looking stricken. There was pause, and he slowly looked up.
"Nicholas," he said, quietly.
It was intimate, uncommon, Vash invoking his given name.
"Yes?" Wolfwood answered, with difficulty.
The gunman's hand reached out and touched his shoulder.
He closed his eyes.
Which arm was it? The real arm? Or piecework? He couldn't tell. The gesture was tender and subtle in any case.
"Do you want a drink?" Vash asked, pushing the whiskey toward him.
Wolfwood opened his eyes.
"Yeah," he said, slowly.
He reached for it, and felt Vash's fingers beneath his own. Vash held fast, staying the bottle.
"I need to say something, Wolfwood."
Vash the Stampede, with his bleeding heart and devastating arm.
His voice was almost plaintive.
Wolfwood looked at him, bemused.
"Eh? Why sure," he said. "Whatever you want."
Vash released the bottle.
Wolfwood pulled it to his lips. He drank, and drank deep.
All the while the infamous Vash the Stampede sat, looking slightly morose, hunched forward with his elbows rested on his thighs.
"Well?" The priest said, after a decent interval. "Do I have to haul out the portable confessional?"
The outlaw smiled faintly, eyes forward, watching the swirl of sand against the window glass, milling and striking like an ocean of furious bees.
"They make something like that?"
"If they don't, they should."
Silence, except for the steady fanning brush of storm-flung sand.
"When I touched you, just now. You didn't pull away."
Vash paused.
"And it reminded me," he said, "of how you never do."
Wolfwood dropped his gaze, staring at the worn blanket beneath them. The coppery taste of compassion filled his mouth.
Vash kept his eyes straight.
"Everyone else is afraid," he said bluntly. "I've scratched that shiny surface by looking too long, or too hard… Meryl, of course. Even poor Milly, a little bit.
"Fear never looks back at me from you. And you have no idea--," he trailed off, almost wearily. "You have no idea, that's all. But thank you."
Wolfwood exhaled against the sensation welling upward in his chest.
He snatched a cigarette and lit it, the motion quick and light.
Vash had a beatific smile on his lips, as if he'd confessed after all, and been absolved.
I ought to charge him, thought the priest, absently, even as his thoughts began to turn and shift and betray him, falling away beneath his feet like the treacherous sands outside of town.
He drew in fumes, intangible and diaphanous, and found he couldn't hold them. He blew them into the air where they dissolved and left him wanting.
"Vash," he said, the cigarette held between his lips, sullenly trailing smoke.
"Yes?" he answered, in his genial tone, his eyebrows aloft as if he'd been gently but unexpectedly pulled from thoughts in deeper places.
What was it I wanted to say?
Something about hits, and face cards. Something about odds and impulses. Something about friends and philosophy.
Or to say nothing at all, except that Vash had laid down his hand, and it was his turn.
Wolfwood's inclination was sudden, beyond all rational thought.
Everyone has to give a little, Vash had said, once, as they walked together in May City. Necessity is the mother of concession.
I think you have that wrong, he'd said. It doesn't go like that.
But now he wondered vaguely if Vash hadn't been right after all.
Not about the phrase, no, that was sure as hell wrong as wrong ever got-
But what about the concept?
Risk.
"Want a drink?" he asked.
Vash nodded.
If he was surprised when Wolfwood took a sip of whiskey himself instead of handing him the bottle, he didn't betray it.
Vash the Stampede- universally empathetic, understanding to a virtue and a fault, his eyes open and clement. Vash the Stampede, who foresaw every forensic intention like blazing neon in the empty blue sky.
Omniscient oblivion. Anathema.
Wolfwood reached out and took hold of him by the front of his coat, pulling him forward.
Vash just looked at him, artless, unassuming.
Even now, with their faces apart by mere inches, no comprehension lit in the bright-bright, brilliant green of those eyes, as if it foreshadowed nothing to Vash to find them in such intimate proximity.
If I had a gun, you'd have read me by now, Tongari.
The steady, shallow lightness of his breath. The intensity that infused and informed his stance.
Wolfwood was no longer watching for the light to dawn. His eyes drifted downward, seeking the unaffected curves of Vash's mouth.
His head tilted, lips parting of their own volition, as he caught that mouth against his own, roughly, stealing the slight space between them.
Vash responded instinctively in the wake of his shattered nonchalance-- aware of the warm, firm lips that enveloped his, his mouth easing open beneath their insistence.
He tasted soft brimstone, and the undeniable promise of Wolfwood's intentions. The bite of the whiskey on his tongue.
His tongue.
He felt Wolfwood's fingers relax their grip on his collar, slowly, as he eased back, though he didn't release him completely. The priest's lips were full and dusky, stained by the slow burn of the liquor.
"No," Wolfwood told him, breathlessly. "I'm not afraid of you."
Vash stared, but it was not his usual innocuous, ingenuous look of wonder. It was decidedly more studious, his eyebrows level, the eyes below them open but narrowed in assessment.
Wolfwood knew that expression.
He looks like that when he's sizing up a trick shot, he realized, fleetingly, and might have found it funny enough to laugh at, oh, if only he were less distracted.
Vash breathed in.
"I can see that," he said, at last.
"You always were sharp as a knife," Wolfwood managed, barely registering the words as he spoke them. "As sharp as your hair, anyway…"
Yes, that hair. Swept upward from his temples like a flaxen crown of thorns. A forest of tiny javelins pitched into sand from a distance.
Vash's lips were vibrant, flushed from the ardent abuses of his mouth.
He hesitated to say it.
"-Tongari."
The gunman actually shuddered.
"What are you doing, Wolfwood?" he said softly. There was still a hardness about his eyes, but it seemed brittle, breached somehow.
Unbidden, perhaps unconscious, his leather-gloved hand crept around the priest's back and upwards, finding his hair, coming to uneasy rest.
Was that ever a happening.
It was the tactility, Wolfwood realized, that he was unprepared for- his physical reaction. Entirely different from willfully, premeditatedly touching Vash was the first reality of Vash, touching him.
The priest bit his lip at the oddity of it all, throwing his head back against the mercy of those tentative fingers.
He remembered the question, dimly.
Christ wept tacks, Vash, he thought. What does it matter, what I'm doing. We're polarized, we're infinite; we're opposed and the same. We push violently apart only to meet on the other side! We ache for that, don't we, in the other's absence?
But Vash wanted him to answer, and he deserved that much, so he looked him in the eye, and gave him one, the only one that came to mind.
"I'm compromising myself," he said.
The statement was plain and unadorned.
Vash looked incredulous, yes- there was that wide-eyed wonder, the brows tilted outward, heartbreaking, really- half concern and all hope.
For a moment, Wolfwood doubted him.
Could he truly exist and draw breath- someone so artless, lacking even the smallest mantle of guile to conceal his true nature?
True nature.
Wolfwood swallowed, trying to repress the primal motives of his own. The more Vash stood resistant, or at least indecisive-
But he wasn't really…was he.
The priest became cognizant of the gunman's posture, which had shifted, ever so slightly, betraying his perspective on the issue. His hand, which slid down Wolfwood's back, was not going chastely.
"Has anyone ever told you, Friend, that you lack compassion?" Vash said, solemnly, looking at him.
The outlaw's other hand reached across him, taking the cigarette from his waiting fingers and killing it deliberately in the ashtray beside the bed.
Wolfwood wanted to laugh, but he felt transfixed for the moment, unable to react, unable to do anything but wait for the mercilessly slow descent of Vash's mouth, and when it met his, at last, it was a crush, and a clash, and a beautiful wreck-
And there was nothing compassionate about that, now was there-?
But there was.