#[ stardate: 0116+ ]

[eventheodds]

@full-of-mercy

“Meryl!?”

Milly’s voice is drowned out by the rushing wind that’s beating against her as she urges her toma to go faster, the fowl beast of burden squawking as it feels small heels dig into its flanks while it navigates the dips of the sand dunes.

“Meryl, please wait! Slow down!”

Milly is closer now, almost caught up, though Meryl doesn’t look behind her when she can hear another set of galloping toma feet pound the sand, nor when she can just barely make out the edges of her junior’s cloak as it, too, flutters in the wind. “Meryl, please, we don’t know—”

Meryl, for the first time since leaving Wolfwood’s grave, stops and grips the reins and turns her toma around. In the light of the moons that are shining down upon Noman’s Land, there are tears in her eyes, though she’s not uttered a single sound.

There was nothing but a yawning grave, a chrysalis of some kind, and the Punisher was gone.

The place where Vash had buried Wolfwood was empty.

Milly’s brow furrows as she takes in the appearance of her senpai, feeling at a total loss of what to do or say. Brad had told her Wolfwood had gone on a journey and she knew what he meant by that—knew because whenever someone she knew passed, she would have been told the exact same words or something similar. Maybe as a child it hadn’t dawned on her, not yet, but as she got older and she could clearly see the sadness in people’s faces, well…

Right now, Meryl is expressing a gamut of emotions though Milly can see how hard she’s trying to stay strong, to keep a level head.

Meryl, for her part, hasn’t been able to fully overcome what she had witnessed through that residual touch of telepathy when she’d been trapped in that lift. She’d not told anyone about it, carried it all by herself because she thought she was strong enough to handle the fallout and pick up the pieces of her life, continue her work thinking that staying occupied would help—it hadn’t, and it all accumulated to that point when she sat over a prone Vash, begging for him to come back, begging for him to realize he didn’t have to do this alone.

Seeing the grave Wolfwood was buried in empty, yawning and filled with substances that resembled something like feathers—it had truly felt like the final straw to break the toma’s back.

“No, we don’t know! We don’t know anything but we need to!” She can hear the frantic edge in her voice and it makes her inwardly wince because she never meant to yell at Milly. “We visited his grave and he was buried. We saw the mound of earth, the Punisher as a marker, right?!”

The reins she’s holding are pulled again, this time directing her toma to where they’d been heading before this. “I need to know what happened, Milly. We need to find Vash—he needs to know.” She gives both a click of her tongue and a soft kick to the toma’s flank once more and the giant bird resumes its course, navigating the sand dunes at night with ease.

She’s thankful that Milly can’t see her, because the tears are streaming down her face freely now. Meryl doesn’t make a sound, doesn’t call back, just looks ahead. At least with this, there is a purpose she can focus on rather than let her mind wander to places it doesn’t want to go.

But even with such focus, Meryl knows they can’t continue on like this without exhaustion catching up to them. Before long, the toma will need food, water and rest, and so will she and Milly.

“Meryl, I think there’s a small town up ahead. Maybe we can stop there for a bit before continuing on?”

She catches the hopefulness in Milly’s voice and knows that it would be in their best interest to make that stop. She’s lost the number of hours they’d been riding through the desert since leaving Wolfwood’s grave—the image of it being empty save for whatever residue and feathers left behind is branded into her mind and she can see it clearly whether her eyes are open or not. A sense of fear and dread had come over her when she stood near it, feeling like she could fall in and be lost forever.

The lights up ahead shake those thoughts from her head. Their soft and dull orange glow makes her think of lighthouses leading ships to shore from an endless sea, or ports in a raging storm. Either way, she follows them with a ferver as it makes her think there’s safety to be had there once they’re within the city’s limits. It’s by no means bustling like one of the seven cities, but there’s enough to see that it’s well off to suit everyone’s needs. She misses the sign of which city this is as her toma slows down to a more leisure pace but there is still an edge to its rider as she navigates the streets to a building that has the words Saloon & Inn painted on the sign out front.

Their toma are taken into the stable on the side and Milly, thankfully, is the one who goes up to the counter to request a room with two beds. Meryl overhears her asking about food and she can feel Milly’s gaze upon her, but Meryl is too focused on gazing out at those who are still awake and present at this late hour.

It’s not packed, though she’s no stranger to seeing saloons occupied this late, patrons still dining and drinking until Last Call is announced.

“Last Call!”

Seems they made it just in time. “We’re upstairs,” she hears Milly at her side and Meryl turns. “They didn’t have one room with two beds left, so we each have one room to ourselves. We might need to consider taking on part-time work because our funds are running a bit low…”

“Okay, thanks Milly.” She’s since turned back to continue looking at the patrons in the sitting area. Something isn’t right…

“Here, the key to your room. I ordered us breakfast for the morning, so don’t forget okay?” Meryl can only nod as she hears receding footsteps. Then, Meryl feels a sensation overcome her, similar to when she’d been dealing with the fallout of those events on her own—like it’s become harder to breathe, though she makes no move to grip at her chest like she had once done, but there is that sensation of cold sweat forming.

And the feeling of being watched.

[full-of-mercy]

@angelictyphoon

Echoes. It echoes. Memories, impressions, fabrications of the mind, flickers of reality, of surreality, at the end of a life.

Rhythmic.

You'd see a man...

Fists battering compacted sand in the shadow of a sacred place - sacred, not just in a manner of faith, but in the spirituality of survival.

Percussive.

...forcing himself to play the Devil...

Bullets slamming from a gun barrel - sacrifice means to make sacred. 

Guttural.

...while his heart screams.

Engines roaring, popping, ripping like thunder through the desert sky, shadows blotting out the suns. Doom can look like salvation, and salvation can spell doom. 

When a man is about to lose everything, he realizes what mattered to him most. He sees it clearly for the first time.

Confetti - crimson petals - embers.

I don’t want to go. I want to live!

An anguished howl. A dome of light. 

Silence. Blackness.

Yawning and vast and dark, it echoes. Glimpses. Flashes. Dreamlike over rolling dunes and falling skies, playback-rewind, cascades of electricity and chemicals through fading pathways. A word here, a joke there, reaching out without acknowledgement. Haunted, haunting.

Alight. Fulgurating, branching. Reaching out, reaching out.

Beat. Heartbeat. Breath, whispering and dry and close. 

It echoes.

“...Vash?”

...

Gloaming light slants through dust-streaked windows. Another day in No Man’s Land promises insipid heat, rippling with the mirage of relief over endless rolling dunes, over the blackened and blasted structures that cling to the sand with the dogged determination of human life.

The ceiling fan turns languidly overhead.

The trouble with cigarette smoke is that it lingers - a trace in the air, a stain of nicotine on fingertips and skin and clothes, detritus on lightbulbs and ceilings. Ash. Ash and sweat, musk and gunpowder. There, just the faintest of wisps, a shadow of vetiver and sandalwood in the dim space. There and gone, an echo of an echo. 

Time.

A flat circle, a straight line. Has it been weeks, months, years? The dreams are there on the edges of reckoning, discordant, haunting.

The floors and the streets below the cramped hotel room are awake with the dull rumble of morning activity. Voices through thin walls speak of banal things - of coffee, of breakfast, of hangovers. 

Nothing changes except everything. 

[angelictyphoon]

pas de deux

@full-of-mercy

Their legs hang off the edge of a shorn panel alloy, peeled back and away from the fuselage like the pop tab of a soda can. It has become their perch, providing an uninterrupted view of the horizon and the burning edge of the twin suns as they make their ascent. Colors they have seen, colors they have shared before. Swatches of brilliant vermillion bleed into the dark sky as they turn their eyes up to the gradual migration from night to day. 

This is the second sunrise he has shared with Nicholas after two years. 

His hands hurt. He can feel the blisters swelling up beneath his gloves, but it’s a good sort of pain. One of the shovels pilfered from the rear adjoining workshed of Marlon’s Monuments leans against his left shoulder with his arm slung over it. 

Vash tips back, farther and farther until he lies flat across the plane of metal. A dubious-looking raider pistol twirls off the end of his finger until it flies off and joins the pile gathered below their feet with a clatter and scattering of the other weapons caught in the tumble. He hugs the handle of the shovel against the front of his coat and clasps his fingers over his chest.

“See? I told you it was gonna be worthwhile to leave the Punisher and your belt with me for a bit,” he grins, turning his head to look up at Wolfwood. “Thought you would’ve been more excited about me asking you to take it off.”

The raiders are long gone, forced into a humiliated retreat after Vash convinced Wolfwood to put on enough of a show to lure them all near the imaging room in the remnants of the medical bay. 

“Just needed you to buy me a little time and look juicy.” 

Enough time for him to generate enough power to engage the magnets in the long-dormant MRI machine and summarily disarm every scavenger within a forty foot radius. There are still a plethora of dusty, greasy dirt angels and dents left on the walls where the unfortunate souls wreathed in heavy metals got pulled in along with their weapons. He left them at Wolfwood’s mercy while he hunted through the rubble for the quench button that would kill power to the magnets.

Whatever Nicholas had convinced them of by the time they were dumped on the floor, not a single scavenger stayed to challenge them.

“It all worked out. No one got hurt– mostly– they left, we were able to bury the colonists and all the others. Weirdly enough, the black box wasn’t where it was supposed to be but it didn’t look like it got destroyed, either.”

It is out there, somewhere, perhaps already pawned off to a novelty space-tech shop in the growing underbelly of December.  The SEEDS ship had been caught in low orbit for over a century and a half. He would have liked to learn the story of its crew. With Luida's help, it is likely they could have cross-referenced the passengers back to their descendants.

Light continues to spill out over the sand, glazing the landscape in a warm glow. He can't recall exactly when he stopped questioning the rise of the twin suns, wondering why it is that people can go on living.

This rhythm is altogether familiar yet also new in that they have yet to choreograph their next steps. Nothing has been preordained and the rest of the world is not in need. Not at this very moment.

Angelina II waits patiently for them in the shadow of the fallen ship.

“Anywhere you wanted to stop by before we head back? The girls are probably still a day or two out so we have some time.”

[angelictyphoon]

"Can we just..."

Wolfwood pauses, struggling against restlessness, the need for constant motion. His life is a series of divisions, of befores and afters, though the same can be said for anyone. Before first blood, and after. Before Hopeland, and after. Before the Eye, and after. Before the end, and after the beginning.

Fear defined so much of that time, a constant companion ground into flesh and bone and battered soul. There was little room for want, less for living.

And he wanted to live. Beyond survival. Still does.

To see Vash's face light up in such a place is just as much of a balm as the existence of a Geo-Plant this far out in the craggy wastes. There is so much green in the shelter of high canyon walls, in the crashed fuselage repurposed not for horror but for this.

For life after an end.

For a chance to live.

"...Let's stay here a couple days," he concludes, more than half-asking, because they have the space to do that now. To ask. To explore. To be.

Can we just..? 

Wolfwood’s question fades with the wisps of smoke trailing from the tip of his cigarette and Vash watches him in that moment. The breeze carried past their faces does not prickle with grains of sand nor does it form an unpleasant dryness in their throats and noses as they breathe it in. Wolfwood casts his gaze forward and backward, a divide as distinct as the delineation of desert stone funneled out by time and the foliage and shrubs that have sprouted up in their shade.

 “Okay.” 

The Geo-Plant here has flourished despite the odds. He can hear her far below the ground. Vash lifts his palm from the grassy floor and rises from a kneel. On the way up, a leafy plant catches his eye. 

Not that his eyes ever stopped sparkling as soon as they rushed to investigate the scent of green in the air and the murmur of rustling leaves in the canyon, Vash looks more dazzled than he did before.

What he mistook for a mound of clover is something else entirely.

“Wood sorrel!” Vash pinches off a few bunches, happily nibbles off a few leaves, then laughs. “They became a huge problem on Ship Three at one point. Luida was losing her mind and I just…started eating them by the mouthful one day."

A little sour, a little lemony.

"C’mon, try it, Nick.”

[angelictyphoon]

❛  you are everything to me.  ❜

Fat gobs of tears are already rolling down his face, blurring his vision, splotching his cheeks red. 

“How am I supposed to go out like this?!” Vash practically wails, grabbing their sheets by the fistful and shoving them into his face. He can feel the fabric scratch and lisp against his skin as he shakes his head vigorously and dampens them with his tears. 

When he peers over the crest of the comforter, Wolfwood still looks at him like that, eyes hooded, warm, smiling and perfect and haloed by sunlight streaming in through the cracked blinds. Now Vash suddenly has an outgrowth of feathers and winglets curling out from his ruddy cheeks to join the stream of tears running down his face and he no longer has any need for the sheet in his hand to cover his face.

“You mean that,” he murmurs through a loud, wet sniff, more to himself than to Nicholas. It is stupid to even give voice to, knowing that he has felt Nicholas resonate with the feeling, with feeling, and still, Vash peeks through his feathers in wonder. 

He isn’t quite willing to relinquish his cover just yet, too red, too gross, but there are other outgrowths to reach out with, winding tenderly around Nicholas’s wrist and fingers, splashing over his thigh. 

Wolfwood continues looking like the most gorgeous thing he’s ever seen dressed in rumpled sheets and bite marks.

“‘s not fair. Sounding all stupid sexy saying that…I try to say ‘I love you’ or ‘I want to spend every day with you’ and I get all choked up.”

[full-of-mercy]

Uninvited, unrepentant, Vash catches Wolfwood by the chin between his fingers and walks his prosthetic up the exposed window of Nicholas's chest with a purr.

"Is that suit of yours for sale? I'm looking for a one hundred percent off discount."

Lips part, quirk at the corners, a flicker of amusement-challenge narrowing dark eyes behind darker lenses. He tips his chin far enough to look down the slopes of his cheeks toward Vash as a deliberate breath presses his chest right back to the wandering palm.

"That's ridiculous, Tongari, that's not how sales work," Wolfwood rumbles.

"What would you even do with my suit, hm?"

And in semi-public, no less. He gestures with his lit cigarette, quirking a brow with a show of teeth worthy of his name.

[full-of-mercy]

from (x) @angelictyphoon

Wolfwood knows some of the words coming out of Vash's mouth. A couple. Maybe. Somehow he does not think that if Vash were sober he'd be any more comprehensible, and at the moment he is a little too pickled to consider if it would be better or worse.

He's distracted.

Color high on fair cheeks, the animate insistence of movement, and then - of course - a gesture jabbed in his direction, tantalizingly near. The rowdiness of the bar around them seems ever more distant now, even if the bustling-jostling crowd demanding space and liquor and changes to the jukebox occasionally brushes in with the unavoidable crush of humanity.

He should be more on edge but he isn't.

"Hmm... pretty sure you're bullshittin' me there. Sounds fake," he drawls as the weight of the needle-noggin becomes too much to carry. Mischief, amusement, affection, it all gleams in narrowing eyes. Might've been a mistake to go without the sunglasses, to keep them tucked arm-first into his unbuttoned shirt given the glint at the backs of his pupils, but that thought isn't at the forefront.

His eyes cross briefly as the hand - and its pointing finger - remain lofted.

It's an invitation at this juncture.

Nicholas cranes his neck, leans closer.

Parts his lips, and folds them around the digit, sealing it in without a whit of hesitation (and with a scuff of teeth and tongue).

Perfect timing, because a glass sails over their heads and smashes into the wall behind the bar, spurring a ripple of indignation. Spark to a powder keg.

[full-of-mercy]

"Where did you go?" He's not sulking about it. Not openly, anyway. Splitting up makes sense, given that they have been on the road for so long and this is the first proper town they've found flush with enough stores for a full re-supply.

Vash is not sulking openly. But there's something about his tone. Maybe he's gotten suspicious, or maybe he was worried, or, or—

Something else.

Wolfwood squints, walking his cigarette to the corner of his mouth with a purse of lips. He'd left the Punisher in their quarters for the day, but he still carries a burden slung over his shoulder: a ratty duffel with promise hidden in its many pockets.

"What d'you mean where did I go? Where did you go?"

...granted, maybe he should have considered his plan. Vash probably has a keen sense of smell. Scratch that, he certainly has a keen sense of smell, and in all likelihood he will catch the scent of something toward the top of the bag soon if he has not already.

Something sweet, something fried.

Not even the spice of smoke can fully disguise it.

"Find anything good?"

[full-of-mercy]

"Do you trust me?"

Vash sounds unusually serious while he circles around Nicholas with something hidden behind his back.

The question hardly bears asking in the first place, but there's value in ceremony. Pique Wolfwood's curiosity, loosen him up a bit before stoking his ire with obvious mischief.

"Ship Three's materials engie made me this neat little thing with some leftover fabric from my coat."

Nothing to be afraid of.

Vash completes his orbit, beams at Wolfwood, then gestures with a jut of his chin before relaying instructions.

"Close your eyes. No peeking! Good...Hold out your hands. Stick out your index fingers and point them at each other. Yup, just like that. Leave a bit more space. Aaand...perfect!"

While Wolfwood still has his eyes closed, Vash produces a small sleeve of fabric woven together in a lattice pattern with thin strips. Left finger in one in, right finger in the other...and Vash steps back.

"There you go!"

[Object prompts: accepting]

"You know askin' that question doesn't exactly inspire," Wolfwood drawls around his cigarette, eyes at a lazy half-lid. He plays along, though, because he is curious, and because he does trust. Wholly. Entirely.

Small pleasures in careful arrangements of hands aside, what he gets is not what he expects, and when he reopens his eyes and looks at the... thing, he isn't certain what he's looking at.

Well. It is very red, whatever it is.

Mouth a moue, brows scrunched, head tilted, he articulates a most eloquent, "Hmmwha?"

The trouble starts when he tries to spread his hands.

Maybe the trouble started a split second before, when Vash stepped back, dubiously out of range.

The engineered lattice grabs hold of his fingers and stretches, holding them captive no matter how hard he pulls.

"Tongari..."

Maybe he could engage preternatural strength to shred and break, but the thought doesn't occur to him.

No, the look of mischief on Vash's face inspires a chase.

"What the hell, get back here you little shit-"

[angelictyphoon]

"Do you dance? Do you wanna?"

“Oh.” 

Vash flushes, because ‘oh’ is not an answer, and neither is the brief stutter that takes all hope of salvaging his dignity and the saucy response he had originally intended with it. He salvages a few precious brain cells to manage an almost convincingly coy, "How could I say no?"

The dinged-up little radio suffusing the crackle of campfire with the openings of an old Earth ballad beckons him along with the dancing shadows, and Vash smiles as he rises to his feet to meet Wolfwood halfway in the arched layers of stone forming the alcove around their camp. A complement of open strings played in the e major scale, cheerful and pleasant to the snapping of crisped embers. The song is familiar, and Vash can't quite put his finger on why it sounds so strange even as he approaches, taking Wolfwood's right hand into his left and rests his right gently over the back of his partner's shirt. 

'...And nothing else matters, never opened myself this way…'

With a slight bend to his knees, they move through concentric circles in time to the music. Step forward, step back, Vash leads first, sweeping and guiding with the point of his boots as they trace patterns in the figure of climbing grape vines into the packed dirt. 

 ‘Life is ours, we live it our way…all these words I don’t just say…’

Halfway through, when they lean away and into a slow turn, Vash encourages Nicholas to direct them out with a back step and pull back in for a near-embrace.  

‘So close, no matter how far…It couldn’t be much more from the heart…’

Vash starts laughing at some point, he isn’t sure when. His heart and mind are too busy elsewhere to keep track of anything other than the rhythm of dance and song and how Nicholas grins at him in his wolfy way every time they spin towards firelight.

As he nestles his chin against Wolfwood’s left shoulder and the last few closing bars of the song drift into the desert, Vash kneads into the fabric of Nicholas’s opposite shoulder with his right hand. Smiling and dopey with unfettered affection, he murmurs, “It’s been a while since I’ve danced. Hopefully you couldn’t tell.” 

[angelictyphoon]

❝ are you drunk or something? because that was some of the weirdest shit i’ve ever heard. ❞

“Nooo…don’t say that, Wuffy. Wolfy. Wolfwuh…” Vash squints and licks his lips, because it takes an incredible amount of discipline and concentration to form words correctly at all. Also to say: "I'm not drunk."

Just a lot buzzed. The distinction is important. 

"It really happened!" Vash insists, banging his fists on the table and causing his drink to slosh in its glass. "This whole misinformation around a pacifist character thought to be an overflow error in the character's behavioral programming wasn't even possible at that time when people were supposedly documenting it. The ship's computer kept a copy of the most recent database before they left Earth. They called it…mmmh…a wikipeedy! Wik…pedia?"

Dismissing the tangent with a frantic wave of his hands, Vash continues with a finger pointed inches from Wolfwood's nose. 

"Nuclear Gandhi, they called him. And they were wrong. What a tragic mischaracterization. Shounds familiar, right?" 

Gravity seems to win out then, because Vash has slumped his face into the crook of his arm. He manages, at least, to keep his finger still pointed at Wolfwood's face. 

[full-of-mercy]

“Your laugh is so...”

She can’t quite remember when she heard it last, when she took the time to go back through all those memories despite now having the time to finally catch up on the things and moments that were left behind.

Except, that’s not entirely true.

She’s not had time, not had a moment to catch her breath. But she does now. It’s a blip in time, something inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a space where she doesn’t have to look over her shoulder.

She leans forward, running her finger along the top of sugar packets stuffed in the too small cup, letting them flip and flick against each other, a small smile on her lips, “…I missed it."

Meryl sounds pleased.

Moreover, she sounds... warm.

Damn it, that little notion shouldn't feel like something unfurling, or like a thumb running over a deck of cards ahead of the shuffle. There's something to be said about a hand dealt.

Something to be said about a hand held, too.

Wolfwood cracks a grin. His squint crinkles at the corners of his eyes. Brief, the flash of gold in his pupils. Brief, the flash of sharp teeth.

"Heh."

Breathed into a hot cup of coffee, a sip affords him just a moment to scrape together something coherent. Brewed bitterness to offset the sweet that threatens to turn syrupy in the amber light of dawn.

"Keep talkin' like that and you're gonna get real tired of it real quick." Another beat. A deeper squint. "...Bite-Sized."

[angelictyphoon]

"Is this what you want, or what you think you owe?"

“That’s not…” Fair, is what he might have said. Reflex, defense and deflection. This is fine. Whatever happens, happens. He would deserve it, in the end. He has the power to make it better, so he has to. The life of every human being that still yet breathes on this planet is his responsibility, his atonement, his burden. Rem saved them, these people she would never meet, these people she never got to know. Wolfwood did the same, in the end. Protecting, saving. 

Hopeland prospered in the wake of disaster. A safe haven for all those who became displaced by Knives’s crusade, aided by various benefactors who would not see Miss Melanie wanting. The children of the orphanage are well cared for, they are loved, and not a single one is ignorant of Nicholas D. Wolfwood’s name.

Vash felt compelled to do the same, to drive himself off the precipice of some sacrifice that would give his own life meaning. If he didn’t, if he dared to wonder whether saving lives mattered, then–

Nothing has changed, really. Not two years on, maybe not ever. If he is more reckless, more heedless than ever, only the bottom of an empty bottle of whiskey would know.

Or Meryl Stryfe.

He stayed too long this time. Empty bottles, not all of them intact, take up various amounts of floorspace in the hotel room. Broken glass lies at the bottom of the far wall from his unmade bed, jagged and broken like a terrible metaphor. 

Not that he could leave now if he wanted to.

Vash looks away, but she has already managed to see him like this. Bruised and battered from head to toe, wrapped in bandages where blades bit skin, ugly blotches in various stages of healing and thankfully no worse, owing to the bulletproof weave of his jacket. Not so different from all the other times, if he’s being honest. The girl must be part bloodhound, tracking him across the desert with even a scant trail of clues to follow. 

“I had to do something. They’re strong-arming townspeople and for what? For their own protection? I watched those thugs drag out half the men in this town and beat them near half to death just so they could send a message.” 

His anger sounds hollow even to his own ears.

“And the sheriff was in on it!”  

[angelictyphoon]

❛ you’re not very good at retiring. ❜

“And you’re not any good at picking jukebox music so quit bullying me and convince those security guys there’s a fire sale on worm steak or something before they figure out I’m in the Plant room,” Vash hisses back with one hand cupped over his left ear to block out the thrumming energy fed from the Plant nacelle and through a massive nest of cables that ran out to a network of poles distributing power throughout the town.

What was supposed to be a quick stop at the lively little town of Pleasanton swiftly derailed when their Plant’s obvious distress meant Vash would absolutely not leave the town until they visited her. 

What they hadn’t accounted for, however, was that this particular little town sat directly in a neutral zone between two major gangs that ran the fledgling spice trade between the longtime inhabitants of No Man’s Land and Earth, with honorable mention towards all the bribery that went towards ensuring that the Federation continued to turn a blind eye to the whole operation. 

Vash learned two other critical facts about the town in a very short span of time:

Previous attempts by both the Brass Pincer Posse and Black Fang Ravagers to take control of the town meant that no one but the town’s engineers were allowed in or out of the Plant room.

Approaching the Plant facility without clearance from the sheriff may as well have been an act of war.

His ‘I’ll sneak in and out before you know it!’ has gone on for a good four hours now while alarms blare and guards crawl every inch of the facility in search of the unknown intruder in the dead of night had, in fact, been the worst possible approach.

[full-of-mercy]

"What is that?" Lips rounded with open curiosity, Vash hooks a finger around one of the straps crossing Wolfwood's chest. It's a good excuse to pull Nicholas over for closer inspection as he lays his hand flat and edges beneath the breast panels with adroit fingers. The other, his prosthetic, flows over the curve of Nicholas's waist and comes to a rest over his hip with a squeeze.

Close, Vash purrs by the outer shell of Wolfwood's ear. "And why haven't I seen you wear it more?"

"Heh—"

A squeak protests Vash's pull.

And each of Nicholas's step-stumble-steps.

And the squeeze, for that matter.

Skin-tight latex is a sensory something-or-other. Black with silver piping, it creaks with every adjustment, every shift. It is practically painted on, and of course he doesn't have an underlayer. He is grateful that it provides his back full coverage, such as it is, even if the zipper binding him shut from waist to nape is a questionable proposition.

He manages, though. Manages a grin, albeit not without a traitorous prickle of gooseflesh. The tinge of russet on his face doesn't help matters. Or maybe it does.

"—well, ain't often I'm paid to dress up specific for a guard job."