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'Home' was so green and damp that it made Wolfwood's skin itch.
"Make yourself comfortable, okay?" Vash was as painfully earnest as ever. "If you need anything, ask."
Wolfwood rolled his eyes and said the first thing that came to mind. "Okay. I need you to cut your goddamn hair. Or I'm gonna."
The idiot grinned, big and wide and like he hadn't seen in years. "You could cut my hair if you wanted."
He let his eyebrow go sky-high over the top of his sunglasses. "You'd trust me with that, Blondie?"
"Sure." Vash's voice was warm, like Wolfwood hadn't heard in years.
He smirked back, intentional and toothy and threatening violence. "You shouldn't."
Unfortunately, that earned him not an end to the conversation, but a look like he'd just said something sweet and kind instead. Vash stepped in closer, cutting away the personal bubble between them, and leaned a little closer to murmur near his ear, low and private, "I know it sounds like you're threatening to shave it all off, but you wouldn't do that. Wouldn't leave you with anything to grab a handful of anymore, now would it?"
Wolfwood hadn't come up with a response yet when Vash stepped back out of his space again, straight-faced but with his one visible eye absolutely dancing with the laughter he was holding back.
It didn't go anywhere when that little girl bounded into the hallway, calling for Vash to go see Brad and get his busted metal arm dealt with.
Wolfwood backed down, something he was doing more and more of these days. Biding his time, he decided as he walked off to join Meryl and the tall girl in the dome with all the green stuff in it. The green-dome. Greenhouse? Stupid name for it; houses didn't look like that. Homes didn't look like any of this.
***
"Is that a soulmark?" Tall Girl's voice was bright and invasive. Wolfwood blinked out of the staring contest he'd been having with some kind of round-leaved bush.
He shoved his left hand into his pocket by reflex. "Anybody ever tell you it's not polite to talk about that kinda thing?"
She tilted her head to the side; the upturned ends of her hair swung perkily around with it. "No?"
"Were you raised by wolves?" God, he wanted a cigarette.
Her grin was like a sunbeam and totally inappropriate to the bitchy interaction he was trying to have and get out of. "No," she said slowly, "but my mom mighta said I was raised with them. I have seven brothers," she added, conspiratorial and still way, way too cheerful. He'd had enough of people trying to be his friend.
"And how many of them have soulmarks?"
"Five! I have one too. It's… in a place I don't really show off. But I guess if I ever meet my soulmate, they'll be able to find it!" She winked a little ostentatiously. This kid was fucking unbelievable. "I don't meet a lot of people who have one on their hand like that. I guess it makes things easier for you, though, huh?"
He'd goddamn eat a cigarette at this point. Paper and all. "How do you figure that?" It didn't seem to matter how much venom he injected into his voice, because she just ignored it all anyway, but it felt good to do it all the same.
Tall Girl blinked. "Well. I mean. You can just look at people's hand and see if they match you! Unless they're wearing a glove, I guess." She looked down at her own left hand, with the reinforced fingerless glove covering the back of it where Wolfwood's soulmark was branded into his skin. Thankfully, she at least didn't offer to take the damn thing off for him.
"And why would I wanna see if they match me?"
She looked back up at him in blank surprise. "To… see if they're your soulmate?"
Maybe he could just turn around and walk away and this would end. No. No, she'd just follow him. "Who gives a shit?" he asked instead, willing her to finally take the hint.
She squinted at him a little and opened her mouth again, but then Meryl (of all people) rescued him by calling out, "Milly!" from the other side of the grass.
Tall Girl—Milly, whatever—straightened her spine like she'd just been told to stand to attention. "Coming!" she called back, shooting him an apologetic look before scurrying away. If only it had been an apology for talking to him in the first place.
He went back to glaring at the bush.
***
Vash thought Wolfwood had spent the last two and a half years looking for him.
And he had, yes.
But he'd also spent the last two and a half years looking (for the first time in his adult life) for anyone besides Vash.
And Tall Girl wasn't wrong. A lot of people really did wear gloves on their left hands, or both hands. You didn't really notice until it started mattering.
He'd gone through off-and-on periods of it mattering. It had started mattering every time he'd lost Blondie's trail and struggled to pick it up again. Those moments had blown him into shitty little towns across the dustbowl, looking for leads on the pointy-headed idiot but also looking for excuses to drop the search completely.
And he'd never found that person.
He'd probably been right his whole life, thinking that person couldn't possibly exist in the first place, that his mark was a cosmic joke played on him by a God he only believed in when it hurt.
Or it was a gift, maybe, because most of the kids at the orphanage had had matched-up parents. And they were still in a fucking orphanage, weren't they? Dead, separated, gone with no forwarding address: same outcome. Wolfwood knew a scam when he was looking at it.
Case in point: the first person he'd ever seriously taken up with in his whole goddamned miserable life didn't even have a left hand to begin with. There was no point to any of this shit. There was no ineffable cosmic plan. This—this would not have been it, if there'd been a plan.
***
The upside of that bullshit with the Hornfreak (musicians… disgusting people) was the excuse it gave him to tell Vash that it was actually the sight of the new haircut that had made him go blind. It was almost a shame when it wore off, aside from how many times he'd hit his head on stuff in the interim.
Well, and there was also how Vash got the idea in his head to 'take care of him'. Sense deprivation was… new territory for Wolfwood, but he thought he was beginning to see the appeal (and the haircut did let him keep a solid grip even when he couldn't see what he was doing, or the smirk that was probably on Vash's face as he grabbed Wolfwood's hand and placed it into that spiky mop he called hair).
The downside was that it also led to him digging through a storage room in Brad and Luida's goddamn ship with Tall Girl at his side, and her distracting him from the argument over how she would not be getting on the motorcycle they'd found by saying (blurting out, really, like she'd been holding it back for a while, which he'd thought her incapable of doing) out of nowhere: "So it's him, huh?"
"What?" He almost dropped a flashbang on the floor and juggled it into his loot-sack instead.
"Mr. Vash." She gave Wolfwood's left hand a very obvious and meaningful look. "I bet that was tricky, even worse than people with gloves, since he's got a metal arm! I mean, it took me a little bit to even realize! But I guess my mom was right when she said, 'you just know'." She beamed at him.
"What the fuck are you talking about?" He would take refuge in denial till his dying breath. He wished that any of the dozen times he'd tried to carve or burn the fucking mark off his hand had taken instead of healing over like nothing had ever happened. Some people didn't know how lucky they were in being goddamn amputees. If any of the hundred missing or scarred-up chunks of skin and flesh on Blondie's body had once held a soulmark, he'd never informed Wolfwood of that. He wouldn't have dared, probably.
She was giving him a look like he was being silly. It was uncomfortably close to the type of look Miss Melanie might have worn once. "Your soulmark, of course!" She pursed her lips thoughtfully. "Or was he able to tell you he had it before he lost the arm? I guess that was always possible, huh?"
"He lost that arm before I was ever born," said Wolfwood, too tired to police himself before the words came out, and then he winced.
"So!" Tall Girl looked triumphant, finally having won this interrogation (maybe she was a better journalist than he'd given her credit for). "You really did 'just know', huh?"
He fished out a cigarette to stick in his mouth, unlit, just so he could chew on the filter for a while. "That ain't it. And quit asking."
"Why?"
When he turned around to face her again, she was standing with a wrench held slack in one hand, staring at him like she pitied him a little. He stood up straight and squared his shoulders.
"Because it ain't your fucking business, Tall Girl, and because I don't wanna talk about it, alright?"
She was studying him now, a lot more attentively than she ever had before. Like a mask had fallen off, maybe. "You still don't know." It wasn't a question; she wasn't trying to check her facts, now.
"There's nothing there to fucking know!" He dug a hand through his hair so violently it almost knocked off his sunglasses in the process. "There's no fucking… grand romance, or whatever, here, okay? That shit ain't real, and it never was. And the sooner you figure that out, the less your life is gonna hurt, got it?"
"You care about him, though."
"No," he said as sarcastically as he could. "I'm here, going fucking blind and shit from cleaning up his fucking messes that he makes by being too fucking nice to every asshole in the world, and I spent two goddamn years hunting his stupid ass down to see if there was anything left to find in the first place, all because I don't care about him." He threw an empty box at a corner of the room.
The silence hurt. It rattled through him a little. He wanted another box to throw. It would have to be one that didn't have grenades and shit in it though, because going blind once had been plenty.
"Thank you."
"What?" His neck cracked from how fast he turned around. Tall Girl was watching him all somber and shit, now.
"I never really thought, before… I think maybe that's what my mom really meant, wasn't it? The…" she waved vaguely at his left hand, then down at her right hip, "the soulmarks. They don't really matter at all, huh? Whether they match, or whether you even have a hand for it to be on. The point is that you really just know, and you don't have to have anything to check if you were right." She gave him another one of those disgustingly sunny smiles. "So thanks, Mr. Undertaker! You taught me something important!"
This was too wholesome for him to tolerate. He stooped and grabbed up his bag of flashbangs. "Let's get the fuck out of here," he said, for lack of anything else to put her off with.
He heard her scrambling after him as he left the storage room at speed. "But what about the—"
"You're not riding that motorcycle."
THE END