Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

You build up an image of a famous person in your head. Not on purpose; it just happens. You hear about the Humanoid Typhoon, the $$6 million bounty, the first human natural disaster, the monstrous gunman who sows chaos everywhere he goes and leaves only destruction in his wake, and your brain paints a picture. And then you see him through the open bathroom door of crappy saloon lodging, flossing his teeth in his ratty old sweatpants, and that neat picture slides out of focus.
Now I know that the legendary Vash the Stampede’s nose makes a faint whistle sound out of one nostril when he sleeps. I know he has a really fucked up relationship with food (and with his brother). I know he’s an insanely talented marksman and also, conversely, the most staunch pacifist I’ve ever met. He’s not a larger-than-life one-dimensional villain. And I don’t know how to put all that in an article.

Meryl tapped the end of her pen against her chin. Roberto was already dead-asleep and Wolfwood had wandered off to go smoke or do whatever it was that he did. So it was just her, curled up with her journal on her rickety bed, and Vash in the tiny en suite bathroom.

He spat in the sink, then looked up and caught her eye in the mirror. “What are you writing?” he asked. His tone was light and cheerful, all innocent curiosity. She didn’t quite trust it, as she often didn’t.

She pulled her knees in closer to her chin and rebalanced the journal atop them. “Just notes.”

He reentered the room and dropped his toiletry kit into his bag. “For your article,” he said, half a question.

“Not just that. I like to keep track of everything that’s happened. So I can keep it all straight.”

Vash made a thoughtful noise and squatted to rummage around in his bag. He and Wolfwood were rooming across the hall, but Meryl and Roberto had claimed the better room with the attached bathroom so he’d come in to clean up before bed. His big canvas bag was dirt-stained and sun-bleached. His shirt and sweats were worn from use, just one shade above threadbare. Without his tinted glasses and bright red coat, and with his Lost Tech prosthetic mostly covered by his sleeve, he didn’t look like the infamous Humanoid Typhoon. He could have looked like anyone.

He glanced up at her to find her studying him too hard, again. He flashed a sheepish little smile and she glanced down at her journal.

Meryl chewed the inside of her cheek for a moment. “Why do you look so conspicuous?” she asked.

His head tilted to the side. His hair was still damp from showering and hadn’t fluffed back up to its usual volume. It made him look smaller.

“Your coat and your earring and your—“ Meryl gestured vaguely at him. Him, his whole look. “You could blend in if you wanted. A normal shirt and pants and no one would recognize you. So why do you do it?”

He looked down and fidgeted idly with the bag’s drawstring for a moment. “The coat was a gift,” he said softly. Then he pulled the drawstring tight across the mouth of the bag. In one fluid move, he rose from his crouch and slung the bag over his shoulder. He let out an exaggerated yawn. “Well, I’m beat. Goodnight!”

And he strode out with all the false confidence of a man who didn’t want you to know he was running away from you.

Meryl sighed and glanced across the room at the lump of Roberto’s back under his blankets. He continued snoring peacefully.

She jabbed the flat end of her pen into her chin again as she thought. Vash was very good at technically answering questions without actually answering anything at all. It just sparked more questions. A few years ago, her grandma had given her an awful sweater as a birthday gift. She loved her grandma dearly, but no sentimentality could convince her to wear that thing all over the planet. Especially not if it got her shot at.

He also didn’t seem to care at all about how he was perceived so long as it got him the results he wanted. He cried at the drop of a hat. His lies and obfuscations were usually painfully obvious. He couldn’t actually believe his big fake yawn had fooled her. But it let him scramble off with the minimum social graces intact.

But if you don’t care how you’re perceived, Vash, why have you cultivated such a distinct appearance?

Roberto let out an especially loud snore and shifted in his sleep. Meryl glanced over at him again and sighed. She suddenly felt wide awake and desperate to get away from her sleeping coworker. She’d been trapped with enough of Roberto’s snoring on this trip. She tugged back on her shoes and jacket, grabbed her journal, and snuck out of the room.

Across the hall, she couldn’t see any light escaping under Vash’s door. She resisted the urge to knock.

Downstairs, the saloon was having a quiet night. A handful of people were scattered throughout the tables or slumped at the bar. Conversation murmured, glasses clinked, and cards shuffled. The mood was relaxed and sleepy, which suited her just fine. Meryl ordered a beer (look how well she was adapting to the local culture now, Roberto) and retreated to an empty table.

She flipped listlessly through her notes as she sipped her beer. What had seemed at first like a simple (if physically risky) assignment just kept getting more complicated. How could she be expected to write it all succinctly in an article? It was going to take a damn novel.

I kept that picture– the one of him holding the baby with the birthmark. The baby that somehow grew into that enormous…man? Vash called him ‘Rollo.’ I keep looking at it. He looks exactly the same. Exactly! Although it’s been years. Long enough for a tiny baby to turn into that. I haven’t asked him yet how old he is. How has he managed to somehow twist us around into not digging for answers? That’s our job! And yet I think Roberto and I have both gotten the sense that if we push too far too fast he’ll just run. Vanish into the desert. And

The saloon door creaked open and drew Meryl from her rambling notes. Wolfwood strode inside, his enormous ridiculous cross-gun over his shoulders as always. He crossed the room to her and slumped into an empty seat with a bitten-off sigh. The big metal cross hit the floor with a thunk. “Thought you’d be asleep,” he drawled around the lollipop in his mouth.

Meryl shrugged. “Wasn’t tired yet. And Roberto’s snoring again. Where were you?”

He shrugged back. “Out.”

She rolled her eyes, and took another drink to keep herself from picking a fight. Wolfwood eyed her and then reclined further in his chair, stretching out. The rickety wood groaned.

Meryl set down her glass. “Why do you wear black?”

He gave her another curious look from behind his sunglasses. He rolled the lollipop around behind his teeth. “Comes with the job. Gotta look the part.”

“All black? In the desert?” she demanded. “I don’t think anyone would blame you for dressing more comfortably in the heat.”

He shrugged one shoulder. He always tried to look so casual, like he was melting in place, not a care in the world. “Black hides a lot. Dirt, blood…” He grabbed the edge of his suit coat and held it out. “Know how many bullet holes I’ve patched in this thing? Can’t even tell.”

How much had he been shot? How many times could one person get shot and live? She leaned in for a closer look. He helpfully jabbed a finger at a spot in the fabric. “See? There’s one.”

He was right. The stitching was visible if you knew to look for it, but otherwise blended in. It was very neat work. Her grandma would have been proud. “You’re good at sewing, too.”

He shrugged the same liquid shoulder. “Eh. You pick things up. You gonna get another drink, missy? I’ll get one if you do.”

Meryl picked up her half-empty drink and swirled it around. “This is it for me.”

Wolfwood blew out a disappointed breath but stayed languid in his chair. There must have been some magic in the saloon atmosphere, Meryl thought. The two of them almost never got this far into a conversation without sniping at each other.

“What about red?” she asked.

The look he gave her over his glasses was sharp. “What about it?” he replied.

“What are red clothes good for?” Neither of them said the name of the man sleeping upstairs. There was no need.

“Red’s also good for hiding blood,” Wolfwood said. From the way he pursed his lips around the stick of the lollipop, she could tell he wished it was a cigarette. “I don’t think it’s a regular coat, neither. Reinforced, I think.”

“Bulletproof?”

Another shrug. “Or as close as you can get.”

She mulled over that as she took another sip of her beer. It had long since hit room temperature and she was starting to resent it. She heard Wolfwood’s teeth crunch down on the last bit of candy in his mouth. Now his lollipop was just a stick. He kept it doggedly stuck between his lips.

“But why red?” she wondered aloud.

He tipped his head back against the chair so his face pointed up to the ceiling. He was quiet for a moment. “There’s some critters with bright colorful spots and stripes ‘n things. So the other ones know they’re dangerous and stay away.”

“And?”

He kept his face angled at the ceiling, but glanced at her from the corner of one eye. “And some of ‘em do it as a trick. So they look dangerous and get left alone.”

Meryl glanced at the ceiling herself, as if it would show her something beyond just weathered wooden beams. A lanky man in ratty old pajamas, maybe, curled up asleep in bed, his shower-damp hair sticking to the pillow and drying in ridiculous shapes. Or a towering outlaw in red, crouched in a dark corner, moonlight glinting off the barrel of his gun and making his inhuman eyes flash. “And you think that’s what he’s doing?”

Wolfwood stretched his arms over his head and she heard his joints pop. He sighed again, and rose to his feet like his spine had forgotten its purpose and had just been rudely reminded. “I dunno, little miss. I’m just waxing poetic about some of God’s magnificent creations. You gonna finish that?”

She pushed the last inch or so of lukewarm beer across the table to him. He downed it in a gulp. “Why is your…why is that thing so stupidly big and heavy?”

Wolfwood hauled the cross in question back over his shoulder. “Now that’s a double-dollar question. Unfortunately I’m too sober for it tonight.”

She pouted, and he smirked.

“Try not to think too hard. Thanks for the beer.” He gave her a lazy salute, then sauntered off upstairs.

These men and their goddamn enigmas. She would love to get a single straight answer for once in her life. She hoped they enjoyed bunking together. She hoped they stayed up all night doing each other's hair and whispering all the secrets they wouldn’t share with her. She waited a few minutes, snapped her journal shut with too much force, then went up to bed.

Chapter Text

The storm warning had sent everyone racing to the nearest towns for cover. Typhoon Jacqueline, they were calling it on the radio. “How ‘bout that, kid? We’ll get to meet your namesake!” Roberto had laughed, smacking the dashboard for emphasis. At least he cracked himself up. Meryl, gripping the wheel and trying to get them to shelter as soon as possible, hadn’t found it terribly funny. One humanoid Typhoon had been more than enough for her already.

“Originally, a typhoon was a circular storm that formed over warm oceans,” Vash had said to the view outside his window. “But there’s no oceans here. I guess because of linguistic drift, now it’s just a word for a big wind storm.”

“...The fuck are you talkin’ about?” Wolfwood asked into the ensuing silence.

Vash turned from the window, a sheepish look on his face. “Oh, uh…just thinking out loud, I guess!” He laughed his hollow ‘please stop paying attention to me’ laugh.

The wind was already unusually strong by the time they made it to town. Meryl had to hold her hat firmly atop her head as she exited the van. Vash’s coat whipped around him with audible snaps of fabric. They rushed inside and managed to secure one of the last available rooms in the saloon. The four of them would have to share, which wasn’t ideal. But they’d been sleeping on and off all cramped inside a van or camping outside in the desert, so having four walls at all had taken on the feel of a luxury. Meryl Stryfe, roughing it in the desert with an infamous outlaw, she thought as she carried her bag upstairs to the room. My friends at NU would never believe it.

It was as dingy a room as any of the others they’d stayed in so far. Two beds, a battered little table and chairs, a single dusty window. Meryl started her usual checks for bedbugs and Roberto followed her lead. Vash wiped the dust from the windowsill and exploded with an enormous dad-sneeze. “Ugh, cover your mouth,” Wolfwood said.

Two journalists, an undertaker, and Vash the Stampede walk into a saloon… Meryl thought, but couldn’t fathom what the punchline would be. Maybe the punchline was just her life. Or her career aspirations.

Back downstairs, the saloon’s main room was packed. The air crackled with anticipatory tension, though she didn’t think it felt hostile or violent. It felt like the energy that built up in a crowd before a big sporting event. People laughed and joked a little too loud, over the wind that seemed to be blowing louder outside the walls with every minute that passed. It was kind of exciting, she supposed. It wasn’t every day that a typhoon, humanoid or otherwise, blew through town.

The four of them squeezed in around a table and ordered food. Roberto could probably fall asleep in his chair if they gave him a minute, and Wolfwood chewed on an unlit cigarette as sullenly as ever, but Vash sat perkily in his seat. He studied the room full of people attentively. “It’s like a party,” he commented.

Meryl nodded. “I thought everyone would be more nervous about the storm.”

He flashed her a smile, then sat up even straighter in his chair like an idea had struck him. “We should party too. Let’s drink!”

Wolfwood also sat up a little straighter and pointed at him. “Now that’s the best idea you’ve had since we met.”

Vash the Stampede was a trouble-magnet at the best of times. Meryl wasn’t sure she wanted to find out what he was like when he was intoxicated. “I don’t know about that–” she started, but he was already standing from the table and worming his way to the bar. Wolfwood wiggled his eyebrows at her triumphantly and she stuck her tongue out at him.

She thought he’d come back to their table wrangling four beers, but instead he showed back up with shot-glasses and a bottle of something dark. He clacked them all down on the table triumphantly and Wolfwood gave him an excited punch on the shoulder. Roberto straightened up in his chair as Vash cracked it open and started pouring. Meryl groaned. “This is a bad idea. We haven’t even eaten yet.”

“Oh right! We’re getting food,” Vash said, like he’d completely forgotten and was thrilled to remember. He clinked a full shot-glass against Roberto’s and downed it. “Don’t worry, Meryl. Liquor before beer, uh…”

“You’re in the clear,” Roberto said.

“Heard that was bullshit,” said Wolfwood.

Roberto scoffed. “I’ll take yours, then.”

Wolfwood glared and slammed back his shot.

Vash tilted the bottle questioningly in Meryl’s direction. The look on his face was easy and open: she knew he at least wouldn’t give her any shit if she turned down the booze.

“Don’t say we’re on the job now, Newbie,” said Roberto. “Take one night off. We’re stuck until the storm blows over.”

Well, at least that meant she probably wouldn’t have to drive out tomorrow morning with a hangover. That always made the glare of sun off the dunes seem doubly bright. She sighed, picked up the fourth shot-glass, and held it out to Vash.

He smiled and poured her a shot. She threw it back. It was cheap stuff and it burned on the way down, but she’d been to her share of parties at NU. She could handle a slug of cheap booze.

Wolfwood thumped the table in approval, and then Vash was topping off all their glasses again. Roberto held his up in a toast. “To the typhoon.”

Two back-to-back shots on an empty stomach wasn’t her best idea, but the others held up their glasses to complete the toast, and the grin on Vash’s face actually looked genuine for once, so–

The second shot went down much easier than the first.

***

The saloon really had turned full-swing into a party as the night wore on. People burst into a cheer and held their drinks up every time a gust of wind blew strong enough to make the walls groan. Someone had set up an impromptu game of beer-pong on one of the tables, and Vash had kicked everyone’s ass at it before losing interest and wandering off.

Meryl felt comfortably warm and content to just sit in her seat and people-watch. Roberto sat next to her, puffing along on a cigarette. She watched the room shift around her, occasionally catching a glimpse of Vash’s red or Wolfwood’s black through the crowd. The lights and sounds were pleasantly dulled by the haze in her brain.

Maybe taking shots hadn’t been a bad idea, after all. She felt great. “Hey, Roberto,” she said.

He seemed to blink out of his own daze. He exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Hm?”

“Two journalists, an undertaker, and Vash the Stampede walk into a saloon.”

He looked at her. Waited. “What’s the punchline?”

“No, I need a punchline! Help me come up with one!”

“Ah, shit. I’m no good with those kinds of jokes.”

Vash and Wolfwood appeared in front of them. Vash had somehow acquired someone else’s necktie and was wearing it around his head. He was using it like a headband to push his mop of hair up and out of the way, and it looked ridiculous. He looked, even more so than usual, like he’d been struck by lightning. “What’s the joke? I love jokes.”

“What is on your head?” asked Roberto.

“I won it at cards!” Vash exclaimed. He flipped the dangling end of the tie sassily over one shoulder like it was a lock of hair. “D’you like it?”

Meryl looked at Wolfwood, who was looking at Vash. He had the slightly glazed, intense look of someone fighting a massive internal battle.

She repeated her joke setup to them. It felt very important to establish the punchline. She watched Wolfwood refocus and then ponder seriously.

“Think it’s s’posed to be ‘walk into a bar,’” he said. “‘Cause then you can say something like ‘only Vash hits it cause he’s the tallest’ or somethin’.”

“Hits what?” Vash asked. He had stopped listening to trace a pattern in the table’s wood grain with his fingertip.

“The bar.”

“What bar?”

Wolfwood rolled his eyes and smacked Vash lightly upside the head.

“Ah, ow! Now you owe me another drink!”

“What the hell for!?”

“Injury! Emotional damage!”

***

At some point Meryl was aware of Roberto shepherding them all up to the room. She felt a bit like a kid being sent to bed by her parents, but she was tired. Her feet dragged on the stairs. She bet Vash would carry her if she asked, but he also might lose his balance and they’d both fall. That would be bad.

He made them all drink a glass of water before they crashed, like it was his most solemn duty. He still had the tie on his head. Wolfwood griped and grumbled about being told what to do, but drank his water. Vash beamed at him, and he ducked his head a little like he was flustered.

Meryl might be wasted, but she wasn’t blind or stupid. She’d tease Wolfwood about it if she wasn’t so sure he’d punch her right through the wall into the storm.

She fought her feet free of her shoes and collapsed into bed. It was a gross, lumpy saloon bed. It was the most comfortable surface she’d ever laid on.

***

She woke to a tacky mouth and the sound of the wind still howling outside. The window rattled in its frame. There was only a hint of light sneaking between the curtains.

She needed a drink of water and she needed to pee. She sat up as her eyes adjusted to the dim light.

On the floor, across the room near the table and chairs, was Vash. He was doing push-ups. She stood and he glanced over at her. For a moment, she swore his eyes flashed in the gloom like a cat’s. “Did I wake you?” he whispered.

She shook her head and slouched in the direction of the door and, ultimately, the bathroom. “No. What time is it?”

“Just past dawn.”

She nodded, shuffled out of the room, took care of business, and shuffled back in. He was doing sit-ups. He turned when the door opened and she got another quick flash of eye-shine. Her head hurt. She decided she wanted none of it and crawled back into bed.

***

Typhoon Jacqueline continued for the entirety of that day. It was just as well, because she—and to a lesser extent Roberto and Wolfwood—were three soggy piles of hungover regret. Vash seemed the same as ever, and Meryl wasn’t entirely sure she hadn’t just dreamed up their early-morning encounter. They’d gone to sleep after 1am. No one would wake back up at five to do a floor workout. Right?

The four of them stayed in their room to spare their aching heads from the lights and noise of the saloon proper, only venturing out for food. The wind howled endlessly outside. The walls creaked and groaned and the window rattled, almost rhythmically. The daylight stayed a dim, sickly yellow-gray, from all the sand being stirred up into clouds that blocked the sun. They played a thousand games of cards until boredom threatened to send Meryl’s brain leaking out her nose.

She retreated to write in her journal as Vash endeavored to teach Wolfwood and Roberto every method he knew to cheat at cards. Of which there were a lot, apparently.

Wolfwood seemed more and more likely to pop a blood vessel in his forehead every time he tried and failed to sleight-of-hand a card up his sleeve. Even more so when Vash’s fingers gently touched his hands or wrists to correct his form.

Meryl caught his eye over the top of her journal at one point and gave him her best raised-eyebrow look. Wolfwood glared daggers back, face flushed.

She scribbled in her journal, more for her own amusement than anything else:

Wolfwood, you know reading this is off-limits, but if you ever see this: I KNOW you have a big fat crush on Vash. You’re so obvious! We could fry eggs on your face. Are you messing up some of the card tricks on purpose so he’ll touch you more?

She tried to stifle her smile and Roberto shot her a curious look. She just shook her head at him and held the journal up a little higher to hide herself. She could feel Wolfwood’s eyes trying to burn a hole through it to incinerate her.

“It’s okay, Wolfwood!” Vash said, all reassurance and good cheer. “These tricks take a lot of time and practice to master. You’ll get there!”

***

The storm blew unabated into the night. Despite all the dull time they spent simply driving across the desert, Meryl felt like she hadn’t had a real chance to just relax and breathe since the moment she spotted a man in a red coat dangling in a row of corpses. It felt beyond nice to have two whole nights in a real bed, in a real town, to let her guard down and sleep.

Roberto and Wolfwood seemed to feel the same. Roberto went to bed early, like usual, and his snores added a bass undertone to the staccato whistles of the wind. Wolfwood played Solitaire and smoked, his giant gun unmoved from where he had propped it against a wall yesterday.

Only Vash seemed ill at ease. As the weak sunlight melted away into night, he stood and stared out the window. As if there was anything to see through the scouring sand and the fading light. When Meryl finally asked him what he was staring at he asked, almost to himself, “Do you think the wind’s let up at all?”

“Nah,” Wolfwood grunted around a cigarette. Vash let the curtain drop as he turned from the window. He excused himself to the bathroom with one of his trite, empty smiles, and slipped out of the room.

He hadn’t returned by the time Meryl decided she was going to turn in for the night. Wolfwood glanced often at the door, but didn’t move from his chair. She fell asleep to the shuffling sounds of cards and the dull background roar of the endless wind.

***

There was still no Vash when she woke up the next morning. There was something else missing, too. It gnawed at her as her sluggish thoughts slowly churned to life.

Roberto lifted his head off his pillow just enough to crack one eye open and cast it about the room. “Storm broke.”

That was it! She’d gotten so used to the sound of the wind that it felt too silent without it now. She yawned and popped her ears. “Finally!”

Wolfwood rolled over with an elderly-sounding grunt. “Spikey ever turn back up?”

“No.”

He groaned and sat up, then shoved himself out of bed and into his loafers. “I’ll find him.” He slouched from the room like the parent of a young child who regretted the life decisions that had led him to this point.

He returned to the room a few minutes later with Vash on his heels. “The storm passed!” Vash beamed. “Should we get going?”

“You in a rush?” Roberto grunted. “Breakfast first, at least.”

Meryl watched his smile flicker like a faulty lightbulb before returning to full, artificial wattage. “Oh, right! Breakfast first!”

He strode further into the room to start shoving a few of his scattered belongings into his bag. As he brushed past Meryl, she noticed the fine layer of grit clinging to the folds of his jacket. Was that sand?

They packed up, ate breakfast, and checked out of the saloon. The van was right where they’d left it and looked undamaged, but the wind had piled a small sand dune against the driver’s side. They’d all have to clamber in through the passenger side to get in, but it could have been much worse.

“Brush all that dirt off before you get back in my car,” Meryl told Vash. His eyes snapped to her in surprise before his mouth twisted up in one of his signature plastic grins. He bent in half to scrub at his scalp with his fingers. A shower of sand fell out. The same thing happened when he dusted at his jacket. He eventually gave up and took the coat off so he could flap it vigorously into the wind, the way her mother used to beat the rugs.

“Did you go out in the typhoon?” Meryl asked as she watched him in bemusement.

His face scrunched as he fake-laughed. “That would be dangerous!” He gave his hair one last scruff and scrambled into the van.

It wasn’t an answer. Avoidant little bastard.

Meryl clambered across the passenger seat into the driver’s seat, and held her breath as she turned the key. The van rumbled to life and she exhaled. They all loaded in and then were on their way again.

Vash fell asleep in the backseat nearly as soon as they started moving. Why would anyone go out in the middle of a typhoon? Had he been that stir-crazy? Or self-destructive?

Maybe he went out and stopped the storm, her brain whispered as she drove. The town shrunk rapidly in her rearview mirror. But that was wild thinking. There was no basis in fact for it.

Right?

Chapter Text

They stopped to rest in the pathetic strip of shade cast by his cross-gun. He wiped his forehead with the cuff of his sleeve. She dug her fingers deep into the sand where she sat. Sometimes if you went deep enough the sand was still cool. Not at this point in the day, though. It felt warm as far as she could reach.

“That scientist said you were one of his experiments.”

Nicholas looked at her. They were shoulder-to-shoulder, trying to fit into the shade. She could see the sweat beading on his upper lip. “Yeah.”

She probably shouldn’t be bringing it up. It was probably the horrible sort of private. But the silence had been pressing down on her inner ears for hours. It felt like just the two of them left in all the world. Just them and the sand, stretching endlessly, and behind them the smoking crater.

“You don’t look…like the others we met.” The words dropped like stones from her dry mouth: clunky, awkward. It was the best she could manage.

He scoffed. “Normal? Yeah, I got lucky.” His voice was deadpan. It was clear what he thought of his luck. He reached in his pocket for a cigarette. Shoved it in his mouth. Didn’t light it. She knew he was running low and was trying to ration them.

Her need to ask questions dried up as quickly as it had come. After all, she wasn’t going to like any of the information she learned.

The wind whispered over the dunes. Grains of sand rolled over one another, shushing and sighing.

“You know the man on the sand steamer?” Nicholas asked into the silence. “That was my brother. They got him too.”

Growing up an only child, Meryl had always wanted siblings. Maybe it was for the best she didn’t have any. They seemed a special brand of heartbreak.

She bumped his shoulder with her own. He bumped back and left it there. One small point of contact amidst the blazing heat. She could feel it rise and fall gently as he breathed.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” she said.

They sat there until the sun’s movements stole their wisp of shade, then picked up and moved on.

***

She and Wolfwood split up on the outskirts of civilization. She needed to return to the newspaper’s home office, inform them of Roberto’s death, write up her story. She wanted to see her family. He would go do…whatever it was he did.

“How will I find you again?” she asked. She didn’t care about the obvious desperation in her voice. If he vanished back into the sands without her, they would all be gone. With no bodies to bury for Roberto or Vash, and no Nicholas at her shoulder, would it seem like it had all never even happened?

The bus, old and rattly and crowded with refugees, would be leaving in a minute. He took the newspaper business card with her info scribbled on the back and slipped it in a pocket of his suit jacket. “I’ll contact you,” he said with a wry smirk around his cigarette.

She hoped that was a promise and not a platitude. She pointed a finger at him. “You better. You got it? Don’t stand me up.”

“I would never,” he said, dry as the desert. He hefted his gun as the final boarding call sounded. “Stay outta trouble.” That was the best goodbye she could hope to get out of someone like him.

The hug she pulled him into caught him completely off-guard, like she knew it would. “You too,” she said, then rushed onto the bus.

She was one of the last ones on, standing room only, but she managed to glimpse him out the windows. He didn’t wave, but he stood there and smoked until the bus rumbled to life and rendered him a tiny smudge in the distance.

***

Her old bedroom in her parents house felt like a dream. It should not have been so unchanged. She felt like an ancient, grimy stranger; one who should not be allowed to sit on the pastel-blue duvet atop the bed. It was softer than she remembered.

Her journal was heavy and awkward in her hands. She opened it to the next blank page.

How are you going to write about this, newbie? The thought sounded like Roberto, like Wolfwood, like her professors. But mostly it sounded like herself.

One sand-steamer ride had turned into a frantic race against time. That experience felt, in her mind, like a mirror to everything that came after it. Barreling along from one location to the next, from one revelation to the next. Running around trying to stave off complete disaster while the universe threw complication after complication in their path. The ion cannon had rumbled the entire ship and filled the air with a burning coppery stink. The smoke from July had risen into the atmosphere and fallen back down as little flakes of ash. They stuck to her hair and clothes so that even once they were out of range and back under clear skies, she could smell it on herself. Felt it like an oily film she couldn’t wash off.

An entire city was destroyed and I was an eyewitness. Not just a witness. The witness. The one to speak to the manifestation of the Worms, to hear about the experiments being done to ‘perfect’ the human race. The one standing in the epicenter, watching a mad doctor at a control panel. Watching her friend through the glass of an enormous tank as he was, literally, stabbed in the back by his own brother.

Watching. Watching it all. Looking, and screaming, and waving Roberto’s gun around like she had any clue what to do with it. All while it still had a little smudge of his blood still on the side, right above her hand.

Careening down the slope of a roof, fingers scrabbling at nothing–sand-steamer raging across the desert— only to be caught at the last moment. Carried like a sack of flour to safety by Wolfwood, deposited in the sand, watching roots on the city, lights in the sky–

–swarms of worms like a constellation–

–wind in her hair–

–hot metal burst of the ion cannon, hairs rising, ozone on her tongue–

–tackled and curled over in the shockwave, the smell of Wolfwood’s sweat and sand in her nose–

Meryl put the tip of her pen to the empty page. Held it there. Removed it and shut the journal before her tears could blur any of the ink. Held her knees to her chest and cried.

***

Every time she tried to sit down and put pen to paper, to construct the narrative, she found it wouldn’t come. All that came were more tears, more disjointed flashes of memory, fear and heartbreak that crashed over her like the Worm exploding from the sand to swallow them whole. The newspaper was giving her some time, but they wanted the story. Everyone wanted the story. Even her parents, helpful and sensitive to her grief as they were trying to be, couldn’t disguise their curiosity. Nor the fear that lay beneath it.

It was imperative that she establish the correct narrative before the worst rumors took hold in the popular consciousness. Everyone wanted someone or something on which to place the blame for the disaster. Vash the Stampede had been confirmed sighted by the July Military Police that same day. A tailor-made puzzle piece to fill in the inconvenient gaps.

But she couldn’t do it. Not for days. Instead she wrote down little snatches of memories. The ones that didn’t hurt (as much) to think about.

One time Vash bought that entire box of donuts for himself. Wolfwood tried to take one and he smacked the back of his hand like a parent with a naughty kid. They were both so scandalized that it basically broke them for a minute. I swear they just stared at each other for like a full 10 seconds before they rebooted.
Roberto gave his “cool speech” and then when Luida told him no smoking on the ship he immediately choked. Made a pretty funny noise. That was the first time he called me by m
That one time Vash got really wasted and started talking about all the words people don’t use for “cool tones” anymore since we live on a desert planet. He wanted me to say them all with him so I didn’t forget them. “Azure, Meryl, isn’t that beautiful? How about cerulean?”
I think that was the same night Nicholas tried to pick up his stupid gun, overbalanced, and fell over on it. Vash asked him if he’d ever hit himself in the face with it while spinning it around over his shoulders and WW told him to fuck off, which I think meant ‘yes.’
That night around the campfire Roberto spent teaching WW how to blow smoke rings. I’d catch him practicing sometimes when he thought we weren’t looking.

The liquid in the tank was cyan, or teal? Aqua? That cube of energy was violet, maybe? Or lilac or amethyst? Hey, newspaper– my friend got dropped in a tank of cyan something and got turned black or dark brown or maybe eggplant and yeah he did grow endless weird appendages that almost consumed the city but he’s innocent, I swear. He tried to stop the city from being

It was all his evil twin’s fault. Yeah. They’ll love that.

Emerald, sea foam, chartreuse, olive, sage, jade, mint, indigo, sapphire, lapis, cornflower, periwinkle, mauve, plum,

Chapter Text

When Meryl finally saw Knives—the feared, fabled twin—she thought they really looked nothing alike.

Sure, the similarities were plain to see: the height and build, the hair color, the eyes and nose. But Knives’s skin and hair were moon-pale where Vash’s were sun-gold. The curves of Vash’s face were sharper on Knives. And though if you were to stand them side-by-side they’d be of a height, the way Knives held himself could not be more different.

Vash was all loose limbs and broad gestures. He moved like a gangly young tomas still finding its legs. His spine swayed like a worm’s antenna and that, along with the flapping of his coattails in the breeze, lent him the air of a spinning weathervane, always being pulled this way and that.

Knives’s body was dense with muscle. He held himself still and unyielding, posture perfect even in the liquid of the tank. He could have been forged from the same steel as his namesake. And his ice-blue eyes were cold as iron. She could see none of Vash’s humor or sadness in them. This man was a photo-negative of the man she had come to care for. The bones of such a familiar face, but she couldn’t imagine a smile curling that hard mouth. She could not imagine him drinking himself to tears with strangers-turned-friends, or brushing endless donut crumbs from the folds of his clothes.

Setting aside, even, the fact that Knives had two organic arms—dress him up in Vash’s coat and glasses, style his hair (an unthinkable proposition; like dusting blush across the hungry jowls of a sand worm)— she knew she could never mistake one twin for the other. It would be like mistaking night for day.

Tall and knobbly though he was, Vash could always find a way to sit bent enough to rest his head on her shoulder. He was so warm, and his head so heavy where he rested it in the crook of her neck. His hair smelled of sweat and sun and gunpowder and was always slightly gritty with sand.

She couldn’t fathom Knives (Millions Knives, what a name) scooching himself into the cradle of anyone’s embrace. He looked immovable, hovering steadily in the glowing blue tank.

Knives’s hand extended smoothly, palm up and open. He was an actor who knew his lines and blocking perfectly. Vash lurched back, surprised; the unwilling audience participant dragged onstage. Endless chains of knives snaked from his back and Vash kicked frantically away from them as they approached.

Meryl shouted and pounded on the glass, but it didn’t stop the knives from encircling Vash. They curled around him and sliced deep into his back. She thought she should have been able to feel the awful tha-thunk vibrate through the glass of the tank as they hit home. Vash thrashed then went limp, his strings suddenly cut. It was a brutally fast attack; over in a moment.

This was his twin? The brother he still believed could be redeemed, whom he still gently referred to as “Nai?”

(When she had finally mustered the courage to ask him what happened to his arm, she had hoped to discover that it was simply congenital. Instead he had written her a horror story in five reticent words: “My brother cut it off”).

Amidst the monologuing, as she watched her friend’s dangling body get stained black, Knives said “Happy birthday, Vash.” The words were self-satisfied, but also, she thought, layered with genuine affection. And a feeling of woeful unpreparedness sunk all the way into her toes.

They never should have helped carry him to July. They should have driven in the opposite direction as far and as fast as possible and not stopped. She didn’t know how to untangle this spider’s web of horrible love. She couldn’t. All she could do was scream and scream and hope–

And he heard her.

Chapter Text

Wolfwood sent her a set of coordinates, along with two words: Found him. It was only about a three-day drive from her current location; two if she hurried. She made it in two.

She arrived in a sun-worn little village that looked like a million other little villages on this planet. She made her way to its single rickety saloon, bought herself a drink, and waited.

Nicholas sauntered in eventually, as expected. Every town had a saloon. It was the easiest landmark to coordinate meeting up in. She couldn’t help but look over his shoulder as he cast a brief silhouette in the doorway, searching for another figure. A flash of red. But he walked in alone.

“Where is he?” she asked as he pulled up a chair.

“Good to see you too,” he drawled.

“Hi, Wolfwood. So he’s here? You found him?”

He pulled a rumpled cigarette from his shirt pocket. “Yup.”

Meryl stood up. Her chair scooted loudly back across the floorboards. “So where is he? Let’s go say hi!”

Wolfwood grabbed her by the shoulder and yanked her back into her seat. The chair wobbled back on two legs and then steadied. “Cool it, hotshot. We’ll stop by in the morning.”

She felt the frown pulling on her face and didn’t fight it. “Why not now?”

He puffed at his cigarette until he got it to light. “He’s stayin’ with an old lady who goes to bed early, and we’re not gonna disturb her this time of night.”

“You’ve turned into a softie,” Meryl told him.

He took an irritated drag of his cigarette. “It’s been two years already, shortie. One more night won’t make a difference.”

Logically, she knew he was right. If only logic had ever worked better against the insistent itch in her gut. She resettled in her seat with a bit more dignity and picked up her glass. “If he vanishes overnight I’m taking it out on you.”

His lips curled upwards around the cigarette. “Deal.”

***

Wolfwood led her to a neat little house on the edge of town early the next morning. A girl with short brown hair flung open the front door at his knock. She invited them in, seemingly unsurprised to see them, although she looked at Meryl with frank curiosity. She led the way down the short hall to the kitchen, all knobbly adolescent knees and elbows.

“Eriks!” she hollered. “Is breakfast ready yet?”

The sound of a man laughing was layered over by an older woman’s aggrieved sigh. “Lina, please.” She pushed herself up from her chair to shake both their hands. “Mr. Wolfwood, good to see you again. I’m Sheryl.”

“Meryl,” Meryl said, with a little smile at the symmetry of their names. Sheryl’s eyes crinkled back, although there was tension in the lines of her face that didn’t entirely smooth away. She shook the proffered hand and allowed herself to be shooed into a seat at the kitchen table. A man stood at the little stovetop, his back to them, blonde hair in a ponytail at his neck. He had a spatula in one hand. The arm of his other sleeve was empty, and had been rolled up neatly to keep it out of the way.

Lina flounced up to him and peered at the sizzling pan he was manning. “Is it almost done?”

“It was going a lot faster before my helper ran off,” laughed a soft, painfully familiar voice. He hadn’t yet turned to greet them. The tension was starting to fill her like helium in a balloon. She was going to pop.

There was a stormcloud hanging over this house. She’d felt it as soon as she crossed the threshold. The air was too heavy, despite the relaxed business-as-usual facade the residents were attempting. Everyone in this home was upset about something and not talking about it.

“I had to get the door for your friends!” Lina protested dramatically.

“Will you help me dish onto the plates?” he asked her.

Meryl watched Lina hold out each plate for him so he could scoop food onto them. She ferried them to the table, piled high with steaming golden eggs and potatoes, so Sheryl could put a thick slice of bread on each one and pass them around. It all had the flow of a well-established routine. When Lina set his plate on the table, Sheryl pulled it to herself first so she could butter the slice of bread and then scoot it back into place.

The food smelled great, but Meryl’s stomach was a knot. When he finally turned around, she let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.

She had been right, years ago: a normal shirt and pants and he was nigh unrecognizable. The white button-up shirt was as ordinary as they came. It even looked a bit oversized, and the rumpled quality disguised the breadth of his shoulders. His ponytail hadn’t caught all his hair, and long chunks drifted loose at his temples. It changed the structure of his face: made it look longer and thinner. Hid the edges of his jaw and the beauty mark under his eye.

But those downturned blue eyes were exactly the same, as was the grace with which he slid into his seat at the table. He smiled down at his buttered slice of bread, then over to Sheryl. “Ah, thanks.”

She rolled her eyes fondly. “As always, you’re on your own with jam.”

“Jam’s easy,” he said, and picked up his fork.

“Get it while it’s hot,” Sheryl told the rest of them. Lina dug into her eggs with abandon, and Wolfwood followed her lead.

Guileless blue eyes gazed at Meryl. “Is the food okay?” he asked quietly, like he didn’t want her to be embarrassed to admit she disliked it. Not that she’d been openly staring at him for too long, ignoring her breakfast.

“No–I… it’s fine.” She picked up her fork and took a bite. It was good. She hadn’t known he could cook; even something as simple as hash browns and scrambled eggs. Maybe he’d learned in the last two years. You never really knew anything about him, she thought to herself, and hated how the thought curdled in her stomach.

“So how d’you guys know Eriks?” Lina asked around a mouthful of potatoes.

“Lina, manners,” Sheryl sighed.

Meryl glanced at Nicholas, but he was impassive behind the rim of a coffee mug. “Eriks” watched her with polite, open interest: the way an acquaintance would after asking “So, what do you do for a living?”

“We…traveled together for a while,” she managed. She didn’t want to lie, but she wasn’t sure how much to say. Memory Manipulation said the scientist’s voice in her own memory. “Do you…remember that?”

“I remember you,” he said with a soft, beatific little smile.

Meryl, I heard your voice too.

Then he glanced around, the smile slipping away. “Where is…Where’s your coworker?”

“Roberto,” she said, and his face lit up in recognition. The backs of her eyes burned. “He passed away.”

The light in his face snuffed out. “I’m sorry,” he said. From anyone else it might only have been the typical condolences. From him it sounded guilty. Empty eyes stared down at his plate, as though he couldn't remember how it had ended up in front of him. Then he excused himself and exited the kitchen. Meryl heard a door open and close a moment later.

Sheryl and Lina exchanged a look, and Sheryl sighed. “Second helpings,” grandmother told granddaughter. “He won’t be back for it.”

Lina pulled his mostly-full plate to herself and dumped its contents onto her own, but she didn’t look happy about it.

“He’s sensitive,” Sheryl said with an apologetic smile. “With all the trouble going on when you arrived, Mr. Wolfwood, I didn’t get a chance to ask you– do either of you know where he was two years ago? Were you traveling with him then?”

The trouble when he arrived? Was that the cause of the miasma of worry hanging over them all? Or something else?

Meryl glanced at Wolfwood again, but he only shrugged as if he didn’t care what she said.

She swallowed around the lump in her throat. “Yeah. We were…in July.”

Sheryl’s mouth flattened. “Knew it,” Lina muttered. The two of them exchanged another look.

“Has he been here since then?” Meryl asked.

Sheryl nodded. She was neat and methodical as she scraped jam across her slice of bread. “Lina stumbled across him a few days after the July Incident.”

“Literally,” Lina added. “I tripped over him in an alley.”

“He was hurt. We brought him home and patched him up, and he’s been with us ever since.”

Meryl wished Wolfwood was contributing in literally any way. Every time she glanced over at him, his mouth was full of food. She was starting to think he was doing it on purpose. She didn’t want to reveal any of Vash’s secrets, but she hadn’t expected any of this and she was reeling. “And…he introduced himself as Eriks?”

“Nah, I named him that,” Lina said with a note of pride in her voice, slightly muffled around a large bite of bread.

“How much did he remember?”

Sheryl’s brow tightened. “I don’t think that’s for me to share. You should talk to him.”

They helped clean up after breakfast, then Nicholas stepped out to smoke and Meryl looked around for Vash…Eriks?

She found him upstairs in a neat little bedroom, sitting on top of the bed with his back against the wall. He was fiddling with something in his hand. Meryl knocked on the doorframe. “May I come in?”

He looked up and nodded. She stepped into the room. There wasn’t a chair, so she leaned against the opposite wall.

He seemed content to let the quiet stretch out. Meryl took the opportunity to just…observe him. The long hair both suited him and didn’t, she thought. It looked soft. Clean and well-cared-for, like his clothes. Like this room, this house.

“It’s really good to see you,” Meryl told him. He shot her another quick, polite little smile. The item in his hand looked like a small wooden ball. He rolled it around in his palm, then tossed it absently into the air and caught it. Tossed and caught. Tossed and caught.

“What happened to your other arm?” she asked. “Did it get damaged?”

The ball dropped back into his palm and his fingers curled around it, hiding it from view. “It’s too conspicuous.”

From downstairs came the muted sound of knocking at the front door. Even from a floor away, she could hear the insistent beat. It kept up until the door opened, and then there were the muffled sounds of male voices.

A figure slipped past the open bedroom doorway. “Lina,” Eriks called.

Lina reversed course down the hallway to poke her head into the room.

“Let Sheryl talk to them,” he told her.

She scowled. “But they’re being such dicks. All you did was help out! It’s not fair!”

He sighed, and scooted a little further to one end of the bed. He patted the space next to him. She crossed the room and plopped down on the bed. She folded her scrawny arms over her chest in a huff, but Meryl saw how she leaned comfortably against Eriks.

“I’m just happy you’re safe,” he told her.

“But they want you to leave,” Lina cried. Her gaze sharpened on Meryl, still reclining against the far wall. “I bet you wanna take him away too, huh? Both of you.”

“I–what? No,” Meryl started, flustered at the sudden aggression pointed her way.

“That priest guy does,” Lina muttered. She curled sullenly into Eriks’s side.

Wolfwood did? That was news to her. “No, I– I just wanted to know you were alive,” Meryl said. She wanted to say more but her throat felt suddenly clogged. The backs of her eyes burned again.

“He’s alive, he’s fine. Now go away and tell everyone to leave us alone.” No one could drip scathing contempt quite like a twelve-year-old. Though the effect was undercut by how incredibly small and knobbly Lina looked, curled like a polyp attached to Eriks’s ribs.

She would grow up tall and lanky someday, like Vash. Meryl bet people already mistook them for father and daughter. He might have slotted so neatly into the middle generation of this household. She wondered if he’d ever wanted kids of his own, and something burned sickly in her chest like acid reflux.

“Lina,” Eriks chided gently. “Meryl and Wolfwood are my friends.”

“I don’t like him.”

“He helped save your life.”

“Doesn’t mean I gotta like him.” Lina’s arms folded even more tightly across her chest.

Eriks looked like he wanted to keep arguing the point, but instead tried and failed to stifle his laugh. He looked down at the stubborn child at his side with so much love that Meryl felt like a voyeur.

“Don’t laugh at me, Eriks!” She jabbed a finger into his ribs.

“Ah, I’m not! I’m not!” He squirmed away from the attack.

“How did Wolfwood save your life?” Meryl asked.

Lina ceased poking Eriks in the side so she could look back at Meryl. “It was mostly Eriks,” she said loyally.

“Okay. So what happened?”

“Some gross bandits showed up in town and were causing trouble. One of ‘em touched my butt so I kicked him in his stupid face and ran,” Lina said. “I tried to hide but they found me. Then Eriks…convinced them to leave. But they came back ‘round and snatched me, so Eriks went and kicked all their asses and saved me.”

“Me and Wolfwood,” he added.

“Sure. Him too.”

That seemed like a lot, but not the sort of thing that usually got Vash run out of a town. “And was anyone killed? Anything destroyed?” Meryl asked.

Negative. The fighting occurred out in the desert, and the bandits had either been arrested or fled, Lina informed her, with Eriks nodding his assent.

“So why do people in town want you to leave?”

Eriks looked at his knees, but Lina glared ferociously at Meryl. “Now everyone in town thinks he’s some big evil monster just ‘cause he fought all those people and won! They think he’s Vash the Stampede and he’s gonna kill everyone or something. Which is stupid ‘cause he’s been here for ages and all he does is be helpful and nice all the time!”

“Like I said, all that matters to me is that you’re safe,” he repeated.

“Well, not to me!”

Erik bumped his side against hers. “I think your grandma is starting to lose steam lecturing those men on the porch. Maybe you want to go help her out?”

Meryl wondered if he could actually hear them from here, or if he was making it up.

Lina gave him a skeptical look. “I thought you said let her handle it.”

He tilted his chin and nearly smiled. “Hm. Maybe I changed my mind.”

She gave him a delighted, conspiratorial grin. Then she leapt from the bed and darted from the room with a final passing glance at Meryl.

They waited in silence until her footsteps thumped all the way down the stairs and the door slammed.

“She really loves you,” Meryl said.

“I know.” His voice was mournful.

Meryl shifted her weight from one foot to the other, still leaning her back against the wall. “How much do you remember? Really?”

He looked at the window. Buttery sunshine poured in through the glass. She waited while he gathered his thoughts.

“We were traveling to July together,” he said eventually, still facing the block of sunlight painting the wall. “You and me and Wolfwood and…Roberto. Then…I don’t know. I thought Wolfwood and I went into the city alone, but I thought I saw you both there too? And then…I was here. In the bathtub down the hall.” He pointed loosely at the door without bothering to look. The space between his eyebrows was pinched.

“That’s it?” Meryl asked, as gently as she could. That didn’t clarify how much of their travels he remembered. How much he remembered of them. If he’d forgotten Roberto’s name, how much else had he lost?

He scooted himself off the bed to crouch in front of a plain wooden trunk at its foot. He opened the lid and retrieved something from inside. He held a black bundle out to her, balanced in his single hand.

Meryl took it and felt the texture of sturdy cloth. She let it fall out of its neat folds and held it up in both hands.

Oh. It was his coat. It was surprisingly heavy, dangling aloft from her hands. All unfolded, she could see the deep red inner lining and the silver accents.

“It was…it used to be red. Right?” he asked. He still crouched by the open trunk, looking up at her uncertainly.

“Yeah, it was red,” she confirmed. “It turned black when—“

The trunk lid fell shut with a bang. “Don’t.”

“You don’t want to know?” she asked, her tongue wooden.

“What good will it do?” he asked the closed lid of the trunk. “It won’t bring…all those people back.”

It went against every journalistic bone in her body. Not knowing was anathema. But for him maybe it was a mercy. What was there for him to remember? The violence and violation his brother had enacted on him and their sisters? His desperate, failed attempts to save the city? “I’m sorry,” she said. It felt like a stupid, worthless thing to say, but it was all she had to offer.

He still knelt on the floor, hand on the trunk, not looking at her. “According to the rumors, I crawled out of the crater the next morning. Do you think there’s anything that can actually kill me?”

The question raised hairs on her neck. “I don’t know.”

He reopened the trunk and reached back inside. He pulled out a familiar prosthetic and stretched up to set it on the bed. It caught the sunlight and threw refractions on the blanket. Turquoise, her mind supplied. That was its color. He reached in again and retrieved a large, bulky gun in a holster. Set it on the bed too. Gently shut the lid of the trunk.

“I really liked it here,” he said, still not looking at her. “I wanted to stay.”

“I’m not asking you to leave. I don’t care if Wolfwood is. I’ll tell him to shove it. You don’t have to listen to those townspeople either. They can’t tell you how to live your life!”

He shook his head, still bent down in profile. A loose lock of his hair hid his eye from her view. “No town is safe with Vash the Stampede in it. Besides, Wolfwood told me about a place I need to go. I’ve just…been putting it off.”

He stood up, but his neck and shoulders stayed bowed like the weight of the planet was pushing him down. He finally looked at her, and his tired blue eyes carried the sorrow of all his decades. “I need to talk to Sheryl and Lina.”

***

Meryl and Nicholas excused themselves to the back porch so the three of them could talk privately inside. Nicholas, predictably, lit up a cigarette as they stood at the railing together.

“He said you told him about some place he had to go?”

He took a long drag. “Yeah. Been collecting rumors. Knives might be alive. There could be evidence there we gotta check out.”

Meryl felt a cold chill despite the day’s heat. Do you think there’s anything that can actually kill me? “What if he can’t…confront his brother again?”

Nicholas grunted. “Nobody else can, either.”

She hated that he was almost certainly right. She’d felt about as helpless as a new Worm larva, watching Knives tear at her through the vines in that lab. Before Vash had snatched her away at the last second, faster than human reflexes could ever hope to match.

She changed the topic slightly. “How did you find him?” They’d been looking for two years with no luck. Until now.

He tapped ash over the railing so it landed in the sand. “Heard Vash the Stampede was terrorizing some small town and came here to check it out. Turned out to be a copycat, of course. Just a pack of lowlifes, but they stuck one of ‘em in a red coat and dyed his hair. Not a bad likeness, from a distance,” he said wryly.

“Those are the ones that attacked Lina?”

“Yup. Shoulda seen the shoeprint she left on one idiot’s face. Kid knows how to land a kick.”

“So how’d you recognize him? If I hadn’t been looking right at him– like if I’d passed him in the street, I’m not sure if I would have…” It pained her to admit, even halfheartedly. Shouldn’t she have known him better than that? It would take more than a change of hair and clothes for her not to recognize her parents, or Nicholas. But then, at this point, Sheryl and Lina had known him for much longer than she ever had.

Wolfwood blew a smoke ring the way Roberto had taught him, letting the silence stretch. “Saw him naked,” he said finally.

The brakes in Meryl’s brain screeched loudly. Threw up smoke and the smell of burnt rubber. “You what?”

“He’s got lots of scars. Can’t mistake ‘em.”

“But– but when did you see him naked the first time? Did you– Nicholas, are you fucking with me?” She turned to glare up at him with all the force she could muster.

“Nah,” he said, but with that little twist of his lips that said he enjoyed winding her up.

She whacked his shoulder. “Tell me the truth!”

“That is the truth, shortie.” His face reset into seriousness around his cigarette, which he puffed fervently. Game over.

“So, did you two ever…”

“Nah,” he repeated, this time with a hint of red creeping up his face. “I just saw him dig a bullet out of his stomach one time. Saw the scars.”

She leaned against the railing. “Well, I thought you might have at some point, anyway. I could tell how much you liked him. You were head-over-heels.”

Nicholas sighed but didn’t deny it. “Yeah.”

“Did you love him?”

“I don’t know.” He blew a cloud of smoke. “There wasn’t enough time to tell, but I think…” She understood. He could have, maybe, if things had been different. If July hadn’t happened. If he hadn’t been working for Knives the entire time, trying to hold himself at arm’s length while leading Vash to his doom. Maybe if he had confessed sooner, rather than just to Meryl and the view of a smoking crater, when it was too late.

“You found him. You’ve got time now.”

In profile, she saw the furrow in his brow. “He’s not the same as he was.”

Meryl nudged him with her shoulder. “Neither are we.”

That made the corner of his mouth curl up. “Guess not.”

From inside the house, Meryl heard the distinct sound of Lina shouting. They both angled their heads at the noise. Then quiet fell again.

Wolfwood dropped his cigarette butt and ground it out with the toe of his shoe. “All three of ‘em have known for days he was gonna leave. But they haven’t wanted to accept it.”

“You make it sound inevitable.”

“If his brother is alive? Yeah. But his vacation ended as soon as he picked up a gun again to save that little girl. He was never going to be able to hide forever.”

There was no heat in his voice, the way there used to be when he loudly bemoaned Vash’s moral code. He just sounded resigned.

***

Lina gave Eriks a haircut as the sun set. He sat in the kitchen chair they dragged onto the back porch, an old blanket draped over his shoulders. She paused a few times to wipe tears from her eyes, but her hands were steady as she cut and trimmed.

Bit by bit, Eriks was shorn away and Vash emerged in his place. When it was done, Lina handed him a chipped old hand mirror. Meryl watched him examine his reflection. He tilted his chin to look at the familiar fluffy blonde undercut. “It’s perfect,” he said in his soft, careful voice. “Thank you, Lina.”

Before brushing the rest of the hair from his shoulders and removing the blanket, Meryl saw Lina fold a single lock neatly away in a handkerchief and put it in her pocket.

***

They agreed to come by and collect him first thing in the morning. Lina had vanished upstairs shortly after the haircut, Eriks not long behind her.

“Please take good care of him.” Sheryl sat at the kitchen table, looking between Wolfwood and Meryl. She looked wrung out by the day, but her gaze and her posture were firm. “I don’t want him to end up half-dead again in another alley somewhere.”

“We will,” said Meryl. She wanted to reach out and take the older woman’s hand, but she wasn’t sure if she’d allow it.

“That’s a member of our family you’re taking with you.” The slightest quaver in her lip as she spoke betrayed the feeling behind her steely facade.

“I know, ma’am,” said Wolfwood. “I’m very sorry.”

They returned to their lodging at the saloon in sober silence. Wolfwood slipped into his room with no more than a parting glance.

Meryl curled atop the bed in her own bare little room. It was a bit grimy, as most saloon lodging was, and careworn from use by many travelers. Eriks’s room had been bare as well, but it had been neat and sunny. The bed had looked comfortable. He, more than anyone, deserved the chance to have slept in a familiar, comfortable bed each night.

She opened her journal to document the day, as was her habit. Sometimes it helped her sleep. But her pen hesitated. It felt perverse, almost, to recount the details. This was no newsworthy disaster. It was just one small family’s small tragedy. Maybe it should be allowed to stay within the walls of their house. She scribbled only a few sentences and then turned out the light. She was exhausted, but sleep didn’t come easy.

We’re not forcing him to do anything he doesn't want to do. And he probably does need to leave quietly before the other townsfolk decide to really come down on him. His brother might be alive and out there. I get that. And yet I still feel as though we’re doing something incredibly cruel.

***

Meryl pulled the news van up in front of the house not long after dawn, Nicholas only nominally awake in the passenger seat.

Despite the haircut, they had said goodnight to Eriks last night. Vash the Stampede stood on the porch waiting for them, a travel bag slung over his shoulder. He still wore his nondescript shirt and trousers, but his prosthetic now filled out the formerly-vacant sleeve. His gun was holstered to his thigh. As he stepped off the porch, he placed a purple-tinted pair of sunglasses over his eyes.

He slung himself and his bag into the backseat and reached for his seatbelt. She didn’t know where he found the strength for his chipper voice, crucial piece of armor though it may be: “So! Where are we going?”

Chapter Text

“I spy the color orange,” Wolfwood said. His chin stayed cupped in his hand, face angled out the window.

“Is it goddamn sand again?” Meryl asked. Her fingers clenched around the wheel.

“Yeah, it’s sand,” he said, deadpan. “You’re real good at this game.”

Roberto choked down a laugh.

“Okay, my turn!” Vash said brightly. “I spy with my little eye, uhmm…something blue!”

“The sky,” sighed Wolfwood, like he regretted everything.

“Nope!”

“Your eyes,” Meryl guessed.

“No, I can’t see my own eyes,” Vash laughed.

“Yeah, duh,” Wolfwood muttered.

She flipped him off in the rearview mirror. “Um…the inside of your jacket?”

“Turquoise, although I’d have accepted it. But no,” he said with a smile.

They gave a few more guesses, all wrong. Vash’s victorious little smile grew each time, as though he couldn’t believe they hadn’t gotten it yet.

“Okay, I give up!” Meryl said finally.

“It’s your hair!” Vash cried, then had the gall to look bemused when she gave him her best eyebrow-raise in the rearview.

“My hair is black,” she told him, and watched his eyebrows pinch together in confusion.

“It’s a dark blue, but it’s blue,” he insisted.

“Does have a blue tint in the sun,” Roberto chimed in, then acted very interested in the bottom of his flask when Meryl gave him the don’t encourage this look.

“I’ve seen blue hair. Hers ain’t it,” Wolfwood said. “Next you’ll tell me mine’s purple or some shit.”

“Your hair is brown,” Vash informed him.

“It’s also black!” Wolfwood exclaimed.

Vash studied him intently, cocking his head to the side like a bird. “Umber. Or hickory.”

Wolfwood shook his head and muttered under his breath. He procured a lollipop from his suit jacket and jammed it in his mouth.

“I think that one was cheating,” Meryl said, and Vash gave a shrug like what can you do? “Who’s next? Sempai?”

“No more I Spy,” Wolfwood groused. “I’d rather get run over again.”

Meryl felt her eyes roll so hard she swore she caught a glimpse of her own brain. “Fine, what do you suggest?”

“Nothin’ wrong with silence,” Roberto offered hopefully.

“I’ll fall asleep!” said Vash, as though napping all day in the backseat had seemed to bother him at any point prior.

Meryl chewed her lip as she tried to think. “I don’t know any other car games.”

“Me either,” said Vash, drooping. He looked like an orphaned kitten.

If Roberto knew any others, he maintained his vote for silence and kept it to himself.

“I might know…” Wolfwood muttered, with the defensive hunch of someone who wasn’t sure he actually wanted to be heard. When Vash caught his eye, he cleared his throat. “Uh, you go through the alphabet. For each letter you say your name, your spouse’s name, where you live, and what you sell.”

“Oh, wait! I remember this one!” Vash interjected. “Like, A: my name is Alex. My partner’s name is Annelise. We live in Augusta, and we sell ammo!”

“Yeah, you got it,” Wolfwood said. Meryl thought she could probably fry an egg on his face.

“Where’d you learn this one, Undertaker? I’ve never heard of it.”

“It, uh. Helps kids practice their letters.” He scratched the stubble along his jaw. That didn’t quite answer the question, but he already looked ready to pop so she decided to leave it be.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have jumped in. Did you want to start?” Vash asked Wolfwood.

He shook his head and waved him off.

Vash leaned in towards the center console. “Okay, Roberto, you do B!” Meryl liked the way Vash emphasized the “ber” in “Roberto” when he said it aloud. Soft and rolling, behr or bair. She wondered if he would answer honestly if she asked him what languages he spoke. He was so damn evasive about literally everything. Wolfwood, for all his many faults, was at least more than willing to teach her every swear word in Spanish that he knew.

Roberto cleared his throat. “My name is Bob. My partner’s name is Belinda. What was next?”

“Where you live and what you sell.”

“Okay, we live in, hmm…Bristol Town, and we sell…”

***

“Ah, Q is a tough one!” Vash lamented good-naturedly. “Umm…Q: my name is Quentin, my spouse’s name is…Quinn. We live in, oh, Quincy? And we sell—“

“Where the hell’s Quincy?” Wolfwood cut in.

Vash stopped. “It’s near, uh…Colnago, I think? Mostly ore miners.”

“Haven’t heard of it.”

“‘Cause it died off years ago,” Roberto informed them. “The mining boom happened when my parents were young. Most of those veins had dried up by the time I was born.”

“Are we allowed to do historical towns that may or may not exist?” Wolfwood asked the vehicle at large. “‘Cause I’ve been sayin’ real places.”

“Where’d you learn about it?” Meryl asked Vash.

He put his hand to the back of his head. “Oh, you know how you just pick up random facts here and there! I guess it just stuck with me, haha!”

Meryl felt the same skeptical curiosity leaking off herself and Roberto. She glanced over and caught his eye briefly.

“What school did you go to, Vash?” Meryl asked.

“I’m mostly self-taught, I guess!” he said effacingly. “What was November University like?”

“Great,” Meryl told him, refusing to fall for the misdirect. “What year were you born?”

“Oh, I never had any of those sorts of records! Everyone says age is just a number anyway, right?” His smile was modest and 100% entirely bullshit. He was such a bad liar for someone so deeply allergic to telling the truth.

The Humanoid Typhoon was a terrible interviewee. With every day they traveled together, Meryl increasingly silently lamented her chances of ever getting clear biographical information from him. Most people on this planet didn’t have official records of their existence, but families kept track of their relatives. Some towns kept a census. He should have at least had an estimate.

What are you hiding? Meryl thought with no small amount of frustration.

When she glanced in the rearview, she caught eyes with Vash. He was looking at her pleasantly, his typical soft smile curling the corners of his mouth, but he had that glint in his eye: the one that hinted at him knowing much more than he let on. She flushed, feeling like he’d just read her mind, even though that was impossible.

He let his eyes slide past her to refocus on Roberto, and she felt briefly like a mouse that had just been passed over by the shadow of a hawk.

“Okay, Roberto, your turn! You’ve got R, but if you say your name is Roberto, that’s cheating,” Vash chirped.

“You forgot to say what you sell,” Wolfwood told him. He was much more of a rules lawyer than Meryl would have ever assumed of him.

“Right, we sell…queso cotija!”

Wolfwood nodded approvingly. “Man, that’s good on, like, everything. One of these days we should stop in a town with some real food.”

“I thought you loved eating Worms,” Meryl said. Even just saying it made her throat clench and her face twist up.

“Some people know how to cook ‘em up right,” he told her. “Slow-cook the meat and wrap it up in a tortilla with spices, garlic, onion, and salsa verde, sprinkle queso cotija on top…even you couldn’t turn your nose up at that!”

She considered. It did sound pretty good. “Well, maybe not…”

“Mmm, or elote,” Vash added wistfully.

“Not usually meat in that, though,” Wolfwood said.

“Oh, even better,” said Meryl, and Wolfwood loudly rolled his eyes.

“Okay, okay,” Vash cut in, waving his hands as though he could shoo any brewing conflict out the windows. “Sorry, Roberto. Go ahead.”

Roberto unscrewed his flask and lifted it to his face. “Okay. R: my name is…” He paused and took a long swig. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and pretended not to notice how he was winding the rest of them up. He meticulously screwed the cap back on.

“Roberto,” said Roberto, and cackled to himself as the other three of them exploded into synchronous groans.

He waited until they had settled back down, nodding along with Vash and Wolfwood’s insistence that he had to come up with a different name, but Meryl saw the spark of trouble in his eye. He was funny when it wasn’t directed at her. She held back her preemptive giggles.

“My partner’s name is Roberta,” he added, and set them all off again.

Chapter Text

Wolfwood was being a dick. This wasn’t especially noteworthy on its own: being a dick was one of his favorite hobbies, right alongside drinking and smoking. But Meryl had thought he’d mellowed out in the last two years and she wasn’t sure where this resurgence was coming from. And it was pissing her off.

“Wolf. Wood. Knock it off,” she snarled from the driver’s seat. He was sitting shotgun, and had reached into the backseat to snatch the purple-tinted shades off Vash’s face. Vash had been staring peaceably out the window and not doing anything to provoke this sort of behavior. He’d made a few cursory swipes back at his dangling glasses and uttered a few lackluster “hey, c’mon, give ‘em back”s before returning to his view, squinting a little against the glare.

Wolfwood was twisted around in his seat, glasses dangling from his fingers, and his coiled predatory energy said he still hadn’t gotten whatever reaction he was after. He ignored Meryl’s threats, as he had been for the last minute.

“Hey, how’d you and your brother’s weird magic turn these purple, anyway?” he asked. It was less a question and more another poke with the stick. Meryl’s eyes flicked up to the rearview mirror. Vash hunched his shoulders and didn’t answer.

Meryl elbowed Wolfwood hard in the ribs. “Shut the hell up and give him his glasses!”

He kept ignoring her. “How’d they turn purple, Vash? I gotta know. I bet purple blocks more light, but d’you miss when they were orange?”

Vash kept ignoring him. They were a lopsided triangle of ignoring one another. In moments like these Meryl missed Roberto something fierce. He’d been good at breaking up stalemates.

She hit the brakes and they all lurched forward. Nicholas’s back hit the dashboard with a thud. She hoped it hurt. “Give him the glasses and lay off or you’re walking.”

He looked at her from behind his own dark sunglasses. This was a threat she had made good on before and, by god, she would follow through on it again. As he damn well knew.

He handed Vash back his glasses. “Sheesh,” he muttered. He slumped back down rightways in his seat. “Tough crowd.”

Meryl eased back onto the gas and rolled the news van forward again. “Since when does the ‘D’ in Nicholas D. Wolfwood stand for ‘dickhead?’”

He feigned shock. “Who showed you my birth certificate?”

She was pissed at him, and tried very hard not to find him funny. In the rearview, she watched Vash slip the glasses back onto his nose and point said nose right back to the window. And there he sat, eyes hidden by violet panes of glass, like a statue. Like he had been all day, and most of the days before that. He vacillated between silently withdrawn and falsely hyper-cheerful, and she wasn’t sure how to get through to him in either state. Maybe Wolfwood was trying to snap him out of it. Or maybe he was just bored.

He started fiddling with the radio dial, clicking past station after station of empty static. Meryl bit back a sigh. Probably just bored.

***

So far, between the two of them, having Vash back has just been…kinda weird? Not that I expected everything to be the way it was before, but maybe deep down that IS what I expected? And I have to circle around to HQ to pick up my newbie, and I have no clue what she’ll be like.

God. I hope she’s not like me. Roberto was the only one with any brain cells or sense of self-preservation. If she’s another me we’re all doomed. But they said she asked for me specifically so that’s not a good si

“Whatcha writin’ about over there?” Wolfwood called from across their little campfire.

“You. Fuck off,” Meryl said without bothering to look up from her page. The last slip of daylight was vanishing behind the horizon and the fire wouldn’t cast enough light to write by. She didn’t want to be distracted.

“I hope you’re describing my good looks in detail.”

She kicked sand in his general direction. None of it came anywhere close to hitting him, but she thought it sent a clear message regardless. He snickered.

In her peripheral vision, she saw him slide around the edge of the fire to where Vash was seated atop his travel bag. Vash had dutifully eaten dinner and scrubbed his dishes out with sand, then sat gazing blankly into the flames, eyes a million miles away.

Wolfwood crouched next to him, right up in his personal space. Their knees knocked together. Despite her better judgment, Meryl looked fully up from her journaling. She sighed internally and readied herself to intervene, since Nicholas had apparently decided regressing to schoolyard bullying was his best form of entertainment.

“Double dime for your thoughts?” he asked Vash.

Vash very slowly pulled his mind back to this planet. “Oh, uh, nothing much!” he answered with a punctuation of tinned laughter.

Wolfwood clicked his tongue. “Typical.” He reached suddenly for the side of Vash’s head.

Vash ducked out of the way. He looked surprised. “What?”

“Hold still! I’m tryna look through your ear to see if I can see right out the other side.”

Vash’s single burst of laughter was perplexed.

Nicholas reached for him again and Vash ducked back out of the way. His balance shifted precariously atop the makeshift seat of his duffel bag.

“Stop squirmin’! I wanna see if I can hear the wind whistling.” Nicholas reached out whip-fast and pinched a hold of Vash’s ear to pull him in.

Vash yelped. “Ow! Wolfwood!” He always reacted to minor injuries like a puppy that had had its paw stepped on–as big-eyed and pathetic as could be. The injuries he didn’t mention were, aggravatingly, the ones they actually had to worry about.

“Wolfwood! Quit it!” Meryl called across the fire. She tried not to feel like a babysitter. Vash was over 150 years old, Wolfwood was…something, and she had never liked babysitting.

“He’s a big boy, Stryfe, he can handle himself,” Wolfwood replied smarmily. Vash used the slight distraction to grab Wolfwood’s pinky finger and bend it back until he released his hold on his ear. “Yowch. Isn’t that right, needle-noggin?” He snatched for Vash’s ear again, undeterred.

Vash brushed his hand away with a sharp flick of his wrist.

Wolfwood redirected his attacks and instead hooked his elbow around Vash’s neck. He dragged him in close, and Meryl half-expected him to dig his knuckles into Vash’s scalp for a noogie. She remembered Wolfwood clutching her head in a similar manner, waving a cooked chunk of Worm meat under her nose, and felt a deep empathy for Vash’s position. She considered telling Nicholas to just ask him out on a date like a normal person, but decided she didn’t want to escalate things in that particular direction. She also considered throwing a clod of sand at him, but figured chances were good she’d just manage to hit Vash instead.

Vash very silently and deliberately unwrapped Wolfwood’s arm from around his neck and pushed it back down at his side. His face, which had briefly animated in baffled, begrudging amusement, was going blank again. Meryl watched him slip back into the far-off place inside his head as his attention turned back to the lazy flickering of the fire.

Wolfwood brought his arm up again and, without looking at him, Vash pushed it firmly right back down.

“Oh, are you getting irritated, blondie? Do you want me to stop?”

“What do you want, Wolfwood?” Vash murmured, face empty and eyes still on the fire.

Wolfwood’s sneer was unpleasant. He seemed to be having about as much fun as Vash. “I want you to tell me to fuck off,” he said.

Vash’s eyes cut to him for a moment. “Will that make you happy?”

Wolfwood smacked him lightly upside the back of the head. “No, that’s not the point! The point is: why aren’t you pissed?” His voice was tight with frustration.

“At some juvenile antics?” Vash asked, his voice still flat and soft. He gazed into the fire, and Meryl caught a glimpse of his true age in the set of his shoulders and the draw of his mouth. He looked so young, it was easy to forget he had lived for generations. She couldn’t help but wonder how he saw them in moments like these. Did their actions no more warrant irritation than the gurgles and flailing limbs of an infant?

Wolfwood shot to his feet. “At any of it! What about any of the other reasons you have to be furious at me? I know you remember more than you let on. So just say it!”

Vash turned his head to smile gently up at him. “I forgive you, Wolfwood.”

Nicholas snarled and kicked sand at him. It sprayed across his lap. Clumps caught in the folds of his clothes. “Jesus! Be honest for once! For one fucking second!”

Meryl watched them across the campfire with bated breath. Vash looked up at Wolfwood in silence. In profile she couldn’t quite read the expression on his face.

“I’m sick of your fake shit! Even if you don’t remember everything, you know what happened, don’t you?” Wolfwood asked. His voice was low and strained. “D’you know what July is like now? It’s just a big endless pit in the ground. It’s so goddamn massive it’s changing weather phenomena in the area. I read about it in Meryl’s own newspaper.”

The line of his body had curled inward, held tense and waiting to snap. His irritable prodding had finally boiled over into honest rage. Vash sat quietly and watched him. Wolfwood in his dark suit, standing over them in the dim firelight, could have cut an imposing figure. The Meryl of two years ago probably would have thought so. Nicholas, with his rumpled suit and his shaggy hair, instead looked very young, and all she felt was a pang in her heart.

“Your brother hired me to lead you back to him so he could use you for his fucked up plans,” Wolfwood continued. “He used you to destroy July. He used you to kill all those people.”

Vash’s chin finally tipped down and away. “Stop.”

Wolfwood leaned into his space. He thrust a finger into Vash’s face. “You stop. You’re gonna act like you’re not even upset?”

“Of course I’m upset,” Vash whispered, a tearful wobble in his voice.

“I mean for you,” Wolfwood pressed. “You’re not upset about what he did to you? What I did to you? You’re not mad you got used, or your own brother tried to kill you, or the whole world blames you for it?”

“It doesn’t do any good.”

Wolfwood stared at him for a long moment. “Hit me,” he finally said.

“No,” said Vash.

“Hit me. It’ll make you feel better.” Wolfwood widened his stance like he was bracing himself to take a punch.

“No, Wolfwood,” Vash said again, with a scolding hint of drop it just creeping into his voice.

“Hitting something makes me feel better when I’m pissed. Blows off some steam. You should try it sometime.” He held out the lapels of his jacket and shook them, opening up the target of his torso. He was persistent, Meryl had to give him that. She wanted to say something, but she didn’t know what. She could feel how her eyes were wide in her face, darting between the two of them.

Vash started to turn away from him, towards the fire. “I’m not going to punish you, Wolfwood. I understand why you did what you did.”

“Dipshit! I told you this isn’t about me!” Nicholas lunged at Vash and tackled him off his seat. They crashed into the sand.

Meryl shot to her feet. “Nicholas!”

Nicholas straddled Vash’s chest and ignored her. He drew back an arm. “Come on, then. Hit me first. I’ll break your nose unless you stop me.”

“Wolfw–” Vash started, but then Wolfwood’s fist swung down with a fleshy thud. Vash made a pained sound.

Meryl found herself suddenly standing on the other side of the fire, hands already grasping at Wolfwood’s shoulders to try and pull him back. “Stop! Nicholas, stop!”

“You just let anyone do anything to you and you never fight back, is that it? You got all those scars ‘cause you like letting people treat you like shit?” Wolfwood snarled down to Vash. His back was like stone under her tugging hands, immovable. Meryl couldn’t see Vash’s face from this angle, with Wolfwood’s body blocking out the firelight.

Wolfwood swung down again. His fist connected with another thud and Vash grunted. “Next one’s the nose, swear to God–”

His arm drew back again. Vash threw him. He flung Nicholas aside in a rolling move that had him pushing upright as Nicholas was still skidding across the sand. Meryl staggered back, narrowly avoiding landing on her ass in the fire.

Wolfwood righted himself and launched at Vash in another low lunge. They grappled in the sand as Meryl stood by, watching helplessly. She could see how Wolfwood kept trying to get Vash in a pin, to get the right opening to punch him in the face. Vash fended him off, favoring evasion over offensive moves.

“Wolfwood, stop,” Vash said as he twisted himself free of a hold. He sounded miserable.

“Fight me,” Wolfwood panted. “End this if you hate it.”

He moved in and Vash dodged him. Lunge and sidestep, Vash seemed determined not to let him back into his range. But Wolfwood was a quick study, because when Vash tried the same dodge again, he intercepted. They both went down in a tangle of limbs once again.

“Remember when I killed Rollo? Or did your brother rip that out of your brain, too?” Wolfwood grunted, and Vash gave a wordless pained cry. “Some little kid of yours got turned into a big bad monster and I put a bullet in his skull. Remember that?”

Meryl had her hands over her mouth, taking it all in in appalled horror. Rollo was something they had all tacitly agreed not to bring up. Vash had given Wolfwood the silent treatment for a week after his death. She felt the familiar weight of the derringer in her pocket. Should she fire off a shot in the air to get their attention? Make this stop?

Vash kicked Wolfwood off of him, and he went flying back with an “oof” of air leaving his lungs. They both scrambled back to their feet, eyeing each other.

Wolfwood wiped his hair back from his forehead as he gulped air. “Was he a cute little kid? Before your brother’s cult got him? Before I put him out of his misery?”

Vash yelled and flew at him. This time he was the one to tackle Nicholas to the ground. “Stop it!” Vash shouted. “Shut up!”

“Putting him down was a mercy,” Wolfwood hissed. Vash grabbed his lapels to pull his head up off the ground. Meryl watched Wolfwood lean up and in even further, defiant in the face of Vash’s bared teeth. “I did you both a favor.”

“Shut UP!” Vash yanked on Wolfwood’s lapels, and Meryl watched his shoulder blades leave the ground.

“Make me,” Wolfwood snarled up at him.

Vash crouched astride Wolfwood’s waist, hauling his head and shoulders up by the jacket as though winding him up for an especially heady punch. His chest heaved with rapid panting as he seethed. Meryl remembered seeing the exact same expression of contorted fury on Millions Knives’s face in July. The hair rose on the back of her neck. Nicholas lay beneath him, staring up at him in challenge but not trying to throw off his pin. She saw one of his hands come up to rest his fingertips gently on Vash’s wrist. It looked…supportive. Like the last thing in the world Nicholas cared about was the threatening hand attached to that wrist, fisted up tight in the fabric of his suit jacket.

Vash glared down at him, hunched, muscles shaking with tension. Wolfwood looked back up at him, almost calm. The moment seemed to draw out for an age.

“Aren’t you angry?” Wolfwood asked. His voice had gone soft, curious.

“Yes,” Vash hissed. His hands flexed, drawing Wolfwood half an inch closer, and then back down.

“Hit me,” Wolfwood said again. “It’ll make you feel better.”

Vash curled towards him, body bowing, like he was going to rest his forehead against Nicholas’s. “I can’t,” he whispered, voice thick.

“Sure you can.”

“I’ll kill you.” Vash’s whisper was full of horror.

Wolfwood scoffed. “You can try.”

Nicholas always refused to tell Meryl about the work he’d done that had earned him the name of The Punisher, though she could guess enough. She could see what he was trying to do for Vash, but she also thought he was too quick to paint a target on himself. Nicholas the Whipping Boy. He and Vash sometimes had too much in common, even if he would deny it to the grave.

Meryl watched Vash look down at his own hands, grasping Nicholas’s jacket. She saw realization bloom across the half of his face illuminated in the firelight. His hands opened, and Nicholas fell back into the sand. Vash tipped himself off of him and landed in a slump at his side. His long legs drew in towards his chest.

“You’re right, Wolfwood,” he said, almost too quiet for Meryl to hear. It was like they’d both forgotten she was there. It might have stung–maybe should have–but she couldn’t find it in herself. She had long suspected they were different with each other, maybe more honest (or far less), when it was just the two of them. She held very still, though her heart still thundered in her chest. She didn’t want them to notice her now. It would break the spell; they would close off again, and she would never get to hear what either of them had to say.

“He used me and I’m– I wasn’t strong enough to stop him. I tried to fight back and I failed. It wasn’t enough.” Vash’s arms circled around his knees. The light caught along the edges of his prosthetic. “What good will getting angry do now? He got what he wanted.”

“Dipshit,” Wolfwood said without censure. He propped himself up on his elbows. “What d’you think would’ve happened if you hadn’t fought back? You think he was going to stop at July?”

A cool breeze caught in all their hair and Meryl shivered. Vash looked up at Wolfwood from studying the toes of his boots.

“Your brother would have used you to wipe out every person on the planet,” Wolfwood continued. He sat back up fully, cross-legged, his hands draped in his lap. “My contract was to deliver you alive, in exchange for safety for the orphanage. You think one flimsy little paper was gonna spare those kids once his purge started? I got played, like an idiot.” His words were bitter, but softened when he added: “You stopped that from happening.”

“It couldn’t have started at all without me. I’m…I’m a bomb. I’m too dangerous to exist. I can’t lose control, Wolfwood. I can’t. People get hurt.”

“Every sack of shit on this planet deserves a million second chances, except for you, huh? How special,” Wolfwood drawled sarcastically.

Vash tucked his face down into his folded arms and knees, but he huffed a laugh. Then he was quiet for a moment. “I’m glad your orphanage is safe,” he said from between a gap in his limbs.

Nicholas started to fidget in the way that meant he wanted a cigarette. It was identical to the way he fidgeted when he wanted out of an uncomfortable situation, because the two went hand-in-hand. “The stuff I said about Rollo was…I didn’t mean…”

Vash rested his chin on his forearm. “I know. It’s okay.”

Nicholas reached into his pocket for a cigarette. He twirled it between his fingers. Took a breath. “You can be angry without being a bomb. Sometimes it’s just that or…lay down and sleep.”

“I want to sleep,” Vash whispered, an admission that barely caught on the breeze.

“You had two years to catch up on your rest, blondie,” Nicholas said. “It’s time to get back to work.”

“Getting angry helps you get the work done?” Vash asked. He looked like a child, curled up and absorbing a life message with wide eyes.

Wolfwood stuck the cigarette in his mouth and drew out his lighter with his usual showy flip. “Yeah,” he said as he lit up. He puffed until it caught, then exhaled a cloud of smoke. “It’s fuel. Powers me. Like a sand steamer.”

“Like a sand steamer, huh?” Vash repeated with a touch of humor.

“Yup. But you gotta release some of the pressure or the whole thing explodes. Remember that little fiasco?”

Meryl would never forget their out-of-control steamer ride toward Hopeland. How could anyone? Memory manipulation, the old scientist whispered in her mind. She tugged her jacket tighter against the nighttime chill.

“I’m…not sure how,” Vash admitted.

Meryl watched Wolfwood inhale deeply, filling his lungs with smoke. He blew out an endlessly long cloud, like he really was doing his best impression of a steamer’s smokestacks. “I’ll show you the ropes. Stick with me, kid, you’ll go far.”

Vash huffed another small laugh.

“How’s your face?” Nicholas asked after a moment.

“It’s fine.”

“Didn’t break nothin’?”

“No.”

Nicholas’s head tilted back and forth as he appraised Vash’s face. He could never set the older brother piece of himself aside for long, no matter how he tried. She could imagine him looking over scraped knees and elbows with the same calm, critical eye. “‘S gonna bruise,” he concluded.

“That’s okay. I heal fast.”

“Yeah,” Wolfwood sighed. “Last chance to get a free hit in. If you sock me in my sleep tonight I’ll kill you.”

Vash chuckled softly. “I’m good. Thanks.”

Nicholas shrugged, as if to say suit yourself. Vash stood and brushed the sand off his clothes. He held a hand out to Wolfwood, who took it and allowed himself to be pulled back up to his feet.

They reentered the rough circle around the campfire and took their original seats again, both looking a bit sheepish as they glanced at her. “I’m sorry we almost knocked you into the fire, Meryl,” Vash said meekly. She could see how the warm firelight licked around a darkening spot on his cheekbone. Nicholas was right: it was going to bruise.

“No harm done,” she demurred, although the whole situation still had her heart thumping. She busied herself picking up her journal (from where it had fallen in the sand in her panic) and packing it away for the night, just to give her hands something to do.

“You can take lessons from shortstack. She lets off steam all the time– ‘S why she yells so much. Her body’s too small to hold all that anger,” Nicholas said knowingly. She looked up from wrestling with the zipper of her bag to stick her tongue out at him.

“See!” he said, pointing at her cheerfully. “Blowing off steam. It don’t take much.”

Vash observed them both with the intense absorption of a scientist. Meryl thought he looked a bit skeptical. Still, they all resettled themselves around the fire for a while with no further incidents, before finally retiring for the night.

***

I dropped the boys off in that town WW heard about so I can stop in HQ without them. If everything goes smoothly I’ll meet back up with them there. But since obviously something will go to shit, probably within the first hour, we have some backup rendezvous spots planned.

But the thing that happened this morning before we broke camp, I have to write it down. I kept thinking of it while driving and trying not to laugh.

The boys were talking, I wasn’t really listening, but Vash said something and WW smacked him upside the head like he’s done a dozen times. But V looked at him, screwed up this big angry face like >:( and socked WW right in the stomach! He folded, even made an actual wheeze like a comic strip character! Then V jumped up like “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I was trying to do what you said!” with his hands all flapping around.

I started cracking up, WW flipped me the bird, etc. But when he could breathe again, he told V it was “a good first effort.” It was kind of sweet. Maybe V actually CAN be taught! And I bet WW will think twice before smacking him next time.