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“It’s not your fault, Meryl,” Milly insists.
Meryl just scoffs, not missing a step as she paces back and forth across their narrow apartment, one hand running fretfully through her hair, the other clutching one of her No Man’s Land Broadcasting branded microphones like it’s personally done her a disservice.
In fact, it’s just about the only thing that hasn’t — even Milly can’t claim that. She’d helped convince Meryl to take the reporting job, that it was the best chance they had to find Vash and not burn through their dwindling savings in the process, now that things are dragging themselves back together after what people have started calling the Age of Chaos — economy and all.
Milly wishes she’d been surprised, when it turned out the whole find Vash project they’d been suspiciously-easily approved for turned out to be less of a news story and more… Milly doesn’t even know what. A small part of some stupid contest between the planet-dwellers and the Federation — whoever caught Vash first won. Or something.
But it hadn’t been surprising. Just a disappointment, all the harsher for the fact that Meryl and Milly had been helping them.
Vash wouldn’t be angry with them — that just wasn’t the kind of person he was. But it still curled harshly in Milly’s chest, knowing what they’d been complicit in.
“I should have known better,” Meryl says, not for the first time. She finally stops pacing and drops down on the couch next to Milly. “I should have thought—” she trails off. “Should I have waited for him?”
Milly’s heart clenches tighter in her chest. “I think it helps him,” she says. “To be looked for.”
Meryl drops her head into her hands.
She stays there for a long time.
Milly stays beside her.
The one-room house — one of the few survivors at the outskirts of a ransacked town — is the first place they’ve found with running water in almost three weeks.
Magnanimously, Meryl lets Milly have the first go at bathing. The water’s just shy of frigid when it comes out of the pipes, but it’s nothing a few minutes over a chemical fire can’t solve.
As Milly strips to the waist and starts scrubbing herself down, Meryl rifles through the wardrobe tipped on its side near the door.
Just as Milly’s dunking her hair into the bucket of water, working her fingers through the snarls, Meryl makes a low sound of interest.
“Found something?” Milly asks.
Meryl holds up a pair of cargo pants. They’ll need a belt to fit her around the waist, and maybe to be cuffed an inch or two, but that’s closer to her size than anything else they’ve drudged up over the months.
Milly’s hair drips onto her bare chest. She swears under her breath and wrings it out, which for some reason makes Meryl giggle.
She tries to remember the last time she heard Meryl really laugh, then stops trying to remember.
“It’s always nice to have clean clothes to change into,” Milly says, mildly. “I’ll warm up some more water, Miss Meryl.”
Meryl’s still looking down at the fabric scrunched in her hands. She nods, without really seeming to hear.
Milly’s just started to drift off when Meryl sits up at her side, making a frustrated noise in the back of her throat. Milly hums questioningly, opening her eyes to blink away the sleep.
“I should’ve said something,” Meryl says. “To Vash. Something about Wolfwood.”
It’s tempting to say we don’t know what happened to him. Play along with what they’d been told, like they were a pair of children — though, Milly was sure, it had been to spare Vash, and not them.
Maybe a year ago, she would have played pretend, and Meryl would have let her.
A year ago. Maybe.
“In front of the cameras?” Milly asks, instead. “And don’t tell me I should have shut them off, we didn’t know, then.”
Meryl huffs again. “I should have said I was sorry. I think then, he might’ve — he might’ve seen through it.”
As far as Milly knows, the Vash they met, black-haired, grinning like a mask, had already made up his mind that he was going to run, cameras or not.
He was never all that good at promises.
“Next time we see him, we’ll tell him,” Milly says. Firm enough to sound reassuring. Gentle enough, too. “We’ll all get a drink together, and have a proper memorial.”
Meryl drops back down in bed, curling against Milly’s back. “Okay,” she agrees, through a yawn. “Okay.”
“I need to do something about my hair,” Meryl says.
Milly very nearly startles. It’s the first time either of them have spoken in hours, trudging in silence across the desert. She shifts the stun-gun on her shoulder, settling it more comfortably. “You think so?”
Meryl flips the hood of her travel jacket back. Her hair is longer now, almost to her shoulders, hanging loosely across her forehead and around her ears. “It’s a mess.”
“I don’t know, Meryl, I think it suits you,” Milly pulls off one weatherproof glove and reaches out, pausing with her hand hovering for a moment before she sweeps Meryl’s bangs out of her eyes. “It looks very handsome.”
It’s just barely visible under the sunburn on her cheeks, but Milly’s pretty sure that Meryl flushes. “You think?”
Milly runs her fingers through the wispy ends at the back of Meryl’s neck. “I could trim it for you. But I like it like this.”
“Okay,” Meryl breathes out, and waits for Milly to pull her hand away before she puts her hood back up.
“I’m going to work at the Plant facility,” Meryl says, out of nowhere, over breakfast.
It’s been two weeks since they turned in their gear at NMLB — except for one handheld camera that Milly had left in the inside pocket of her coat and ‘forgotten’ to return, and left them to chase each other and Vash in circles until they worked something out.
Milly had wanted to go into politics, when she was little. Or at least be a sheriff somewhere. Now, the idea gives her shivers.
Instead of that, or the reporting nonsense, she’s been picking up whatever odd job she could talk her way into, while Meryl… apparently, went looking for work at the new Plant facility in the refugee camp on the city’s outskirts that’s blooming into a township of its own — just out of range of Octovern’s own restored Plant.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea, Meryl?” Milly asks. She doesn’t set her fork down, but she sops her next bite of pancakes in too much syrup, appetite waning with anxiety. She thinks of asking Meryl what she’s trying to prove, but decides that would be too much, too out of character.
Even now, half a year and change past the seven-month end of the world, Milly has a role to play. A sounding board, a soothing surety against Meryl’s oft-frazzled nerves.
Meryl’s-Milly doesn’t say things like What are you trying to prove? or Do you think Vash will come back any sooner if you’re doing something he’d be proud of instead of chasing after him like we used to?
Meryl’s fork taps against her plate. “I think it might help. To work close to them. I’ve been thinking about it, since...” Her voice drops low, soft. “When all the feathers fell, I could feel them reaching out. I want… I want to feel that again. I want to know what they’re trying to tell me.”
“If you’re sure,” Milly says, and nothing about Vash.
“I should be able to protect you too,” Meryl whispers.
Milly pauses in scrubbing at the barrel of the stun-gun. She licks her thumb, leans over, and scrubs at Meryl’s cheek until the smudge of brownish-red is gone.
“I don’t mind,” Milly replies, almost smiling.
With a bit of sweet-talking and an unpaid hour of probationary work crawling over scaffolding, Milly slots herself right where she belongs. Working at Meryl’s side.
The Plant facility is operational, in the sense that the Plant curled in her bulb at its center is producing electricity, but there’s still work left to do.
While Meryl stands for hours at a bank of machines with an array of buttons and blinking lights, looking wonderful and familiar in her white coat with her name on a little badge on the lapel, Milly lays bricks, sweeps floors, gets a brush-up on her soldering skills and rewires an entire section of the facility in an afternoon.
It takes all her restraint not to brag about it, when Meryl, half-asleep on her feet, regales her with the day’s projects. Not that Meryl wouldn’t want to hear — just that Milly would rather listen to her than have to arrange into words how it felt to twist a wire nut onto a pair of cables six inches deep into a wall by feel alone. She has the memory in her hands. She doesn’t need to share it with Meryl to make it real, for all that she feels the urge to. It would just be talking to fill the space between Meryl’s sleepy sentences.
They’re both quieter now than they were. There are things people go through together that puts them past the need for words.
Milly realizes, with only moments to spare, that they’re cornered.
She brings the stun-gun up, and—
Clunk.
Behind her, Meryl makes a tiny noise of realization.
They haven’t found any bullets for her derringers. Not in weeks.
Now Milly’s out of ammo, too.
Milly lifts the gun to her shoulder and swings with all her strength.
Brings it to her other shoulder, swings again—
Crack, like a broken egg.
Then, silence — just her and Meryl breathing hard.
“Let’s keep moving,” Milly says. She doesn’t look over her shoulder.
Milly’s lucky to be in the room when it happens.
She’s eating her lunch standing up, leaning against a wall, one hand cupped under her chin to catch the sandwich crumbs.
There’s a table for everyone to eat at set up outside, but when Milly stepped out, one of the scientists had been smoking a cigarette, and her throat had gone tight and her eyes had burned, and there was no way she would get through her lunch like that, so she’d stepped back in.
Sandwich in her mouth, Milly’s eyes drift up to the podium under the lowest part of the bulb, where Meryl’s standing. She’s bent over one of the stations — Milly can imagine the focused scrunch of her brow — when she straightens up, suddenly, craning her head back to look into the bulb.
Milly’s breath catches.
The Plant drifts down in her bulb, unfurling into a strange flurry of limbs and feathers, incoherent and overlapping around the pale, bare torso. Milly ignores the urge to look away, feeling a brief surge of giddy embarrassment, like she did as a teenager when she accidentally saw one of the farm hands back home with her shirt off, scrubbing dirt from her chest.
Meryl doesn’t look away either, but she twitches like she wants to, for a far different reason than Milly nearly did. Her knees lock and her eyes widen, and she slowly raises her hands.
So does the Plant.
Sheer instinct drives Milly forward.
Meryl presses her palms up against the glass. On the other side, the Plant lowers herself to the bottom of the bulb, pooling there like a cat settling into an empty box, bringing her long-fingered hands up to the glass, head tilting to the side, a perfect mirror of Meryl.
“Miss Meryl—” Milly starts, forgetting herself. Meryl doesn’t even react, her eyes out of focus. Her hair, shorter than it was while the world was ending, but longer than she wore it before, stands on end.
Touching her like this seems like a bad idea. But that’s never stopped Milly before.
A white-hot surge of sensation goes through Milly, like the feathers that fell when the Ark went down had felt, but at once more intense and more intimate. Like an electric shock. Like flipping through a book, but the book is Meryl.
Meryl, Meryl, Meryl.
Milly knows, even without really knowing how she knows, that Meryl is reading her too. Looking back, wiping the fog off the glass between them. Hesitating for a moment, then — reaching back.
Something’s different about Meryl, suddenly. The Meryl that Milly can see. Hair falling loose and long, a plain shirt and heavy canvas pants with a sturdy belt under the crisp white coat.
Eyes so bright, so certain — so afraid.
“Oh,” Milly says, past the current running through her, the rush of feeling. “Oh, Meryl, I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”
It’s quiet, suddenly, inside Milly’s head. Her ears are ringing, but Meryl isn’t there anymore. Just standing beside her, hands lifted away from the glass.
They stand there together for a long moment, in the raw quiet.
“Milly?” Meryl says, voice low. “You don’t have to be sorry. I didn’t — tell you. I didn’t know how to.”
Milly nods, not willing to argue the point — she doesn’t want Meryl to be angry with her, for knowing or not knowing. “Do — do you want me to call you something else?”
Meryl hesitates for a long moment, gaze turned up towards the Plant. Milly looks up too, wondering if the Plant had known what she was doing — known there was something Meryl couldn’t put to words. If she’d called for Milly, or if Milly had just come all on her own.
“I’m still Meryl,” Meryl says, at last. “But… I don’t know what else I am. I think I wanted to be Vash?” Embarrassment colors Meryl’s cheeks. “The way he is. So certain of himself. He makes concessions to everyone, on everything but that. He’s just… Vash. Exactly how he is and how he wants to be. But I don’t feel like Vash.”
Milly folds her hands together to keep herself from interrupting Meryl by reaching out, listening raptly.
“I just feel like…” Meryl makes a vague grasping gesture, fingers rubbing together. “Like a Derringer. Or a camera. Or a piece of equipment. Or… or a sandworm. Like there’s no question what I am, but I’m just… a something. I don’t really… work on my own. I’m… not she like a sandsteamer’s a she. It like a car’s an it. ”
Milly unclasps her hands and puts her arms around Meryl, hugging it to her chest. “Thank you for telling me,” Milly says. “I’m glad you figured it out.”
A little shiver goes through Meryl, then its arms wrap around Milly in turn, fingers curling into the back of her shirt. “Me too,” it mumbles, sniffling slightly. “I think I just needed… perspective.”
Milly looks up at the Plant again. “They certainly have a good view from way up there,” she chirps, loosening the hug to look down at Meryl and grin at it.
Meryl’s laughter echoes in the wide, empty room, and it’s beautiful.