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The room was tense with an unsaid worry shared between the two women; while Chronica wore a stoic mask, Milly couldn't stop making faces. The both of them were being slowly crushed under the burden of their separate problems, now compounded with the knowledge that Chronica's greatest asset—and Milly's best friend—was broken in a way that neither of them could repair.
Just as Milly grew the courage to unbox wrapped meal bars and noisily fill the space with something other than her own heartbeat in her ears, the vibration of a deep boom rumbled out from beyond the bathroom door.
If the door had even been locked to begin with, nobody would ever know; Milly powered through into the room as if she had simply materialized there. The dying lantern light contoured every rib and crater on the limp body recessed in the basin of the tub. The immediate confusion of the unfamiliar thing she was looking at kept her from shrieking, and one too many moments passed before a recognition clawed through her fog; Milly called his name, shrill and horrified. The flickering light did not bother to comfort her by feigning an illusion of Vash's chest expanding with breath.
Steaming water drenched her mantle as she folded herself over the porcelain lip. Her body was a shield against the burning turrets, but cast the detail of his face in an unreadable shadow. The faucet was quickly turned off but Milly didn't perceive when or how, completely ignorant of the woman standing beside her. Both of her hands cradled his cheeks but they felt so sunken in her palms. Every muscle had become lazy, his eyelids and jaw totally slack—she could see his dull expression in what little light threatened to extinguish in the small bathroom. Not once did she feel him breathe.
"He'll be alright." A voice from beside her made her flinch.
Milly anxiously looked at Chronica, her eyes huge and wet.
"He'll be alright." She repeated her lie firmly; Vash the Stampede had only so many golden threads in his hair and he had left the battlefield with no more than a cat’s nine lives left to waste. She didn't know how many he had already used up before they arrived.
Chronica knelt beside Milly and removed her pair of gloves, setting them aside to be lost in the windowless dark. She reached out her arms for the fallen man's head, placing firm fingers under his jawline and another under his nose. Signs of life were dim, but existed. Chronica wasn't sure how pleased he would be to wake up alive.
"He's okay." She announced, making sure her voice was more authoritative than before.
It was then, whatever Milly was holding onto collapsed. She wailed.
Chronica extricated her hands and they came away tacky with blood.
The echo of crying faded into another place; Chronica stared at her slender fingers in the warm light, coloring Vash's blood a bottomless black. She felt that she was losing herself in it. The longer she stared the more endless the tunnel became.
Her vision tried to find something to anchor itself to but his dark hair was just as abyssal. The shadow of his body blended right into the obscurity of the room until he melted into it, belonged to it, until she didn't even know what Milly was crying over.
She wobbled upright and scraped her palm across her pants, so that when she went to retrieve additional lamps she wouldn't have to see that she had Vash the Stampede's blood on her hands.
"I'll be back." Chronica announced.
Milly palmed uselessly at her cheek a few moments after Chronica’s heavy bootsteps had become quieter than her sniffling.
Meryl was somewhere out there and she hadn't looked hard enough. Maybe she hadn't looked in any of the right places. Maybe she wouldn't even know what to do if she were here but she would be a far greater comfort than a newborn fawn struggling to stand for the first time, and Milly was no mother. She was starting to feel like she was no friend, either.
Chronica’s consoling felt empty. For the first time since they met, Milly accepted that she was going to have to do everything alone.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Vash..."
With her vision swimming, Milly turned the faucet back on and painfully got to her feet, calves tingling with a crushing static that matched the one roaring in her head.
Chronica returned with a lamp in each hand. The room was brighter, and, with that, the extent of Vash's pitiful form that Milly hadn't wanted to acknowledge became painfully clear. She had felt it in their hug; how his mass was now different in her arms, and how unsteady he had become to need to lean into her when in former times they were both pillars of strength.
One last lamp was added. Milly thought it looked like a candlelight vigil.
She filled the tub until it was dark with mud. Milly hoped Vash would understand why she couldn’t just wrap him up and put him away in some corner until he woke up in order to preserve his modesty.
"Oh, Mr. Vash, what have you done to yourself?" Her voice wobbled, but the more she spoke, the less she cried.
Milly used her hand to weakly splash at his dirty skin, almost afraid to touch him, as his pallor was sick and thin and appeared as if it might tear. The lump in her throat grew twice in size.
Chronica appeared again; Milly was beginning to lose stretches of time once more, not knowing how many times the woman came and went. She had returned with a ceramic mug, freshly cleaned out, and Milly recognized it as Chronica’s personal tea mug. She looked up Chronica's arm when it was offered to her.
What she saw in Chronica's face was much more brightly lit; this dour thing that ate away at her inhibitions. She didn't look at Vash anymore. She secluded herself to the corner of the room furthest from them, leaving her mug in the grasp of Milly's slightly shivering hand.
And Milly poured fresh water over Vash's graying skin. The rivulets of sediment and dirt collected around the drain, soon joined by a milky soap that she hesitantly ran through his hair. Milly had never touched Vash like this before—she knew he was a proud man. But he needed help. Milly bit her tongue when several rinses later the filth continued to shed off of him.
Vash never responded. Milly still didn't think she could see him breathing, but it hurt her the more her eyes studied his body when she looked for signs of life. This felt too intimate. Milly didn't belong in Vash's most private suffering, but in the absence of anybody to comfort her, she put her hands to better use than rubbing tears from her eyes.
Chronica crossed her arms across her chest and tried to fade away into a shadow on the wall.
"I think..." Chronica said suddenly, her voice as tremulous as the water that Milly ladled from her mug. "I think, for the time being, I want to stay in town."
Milly continued on, her response absent of any vigor, "Is it the feeling you have?"
"Yes. It's become more developed." She spun her wrist, trying to gesticulate a concept she couldn't describe, "More... solid. I'm seeing things that aren't there. I think... It's trying to communicate."
"What is?" Milly's rinse of Vash's hair paused and she twisted at the waist.
"I... The feeling."
Chronica was frustrated with her lack of proper language. She could describe it all in code and computers, but being her wholly independent person gave new meaning to the continuous visions.
"I really want to get Mr. Vash to a proper hospital and keep looking for Meryl." Milly told her. Her eyes were already red, but felt molten with the development of new tears. She didn't want to leave Chronica behind when she was also so vulnerable, but it looked like it might shake out that way if she had to choose.
"I would like for him to stay. I need to discuss with him." Chronica swallowed audibly.
"Miss Chronica... he needs a doctor."
"He will be okay. What's happening here feels important, and I need him. There's nobody else on the planet that I can talk to about this."
Milly looked at her out of the corner of her eye, nearly aghast. "You aren't serious, are you...?"
"He will be okay." She repeated tightly. "When he wakes up, we can ask him what he wants."
Milly wasn't in the business of forcing Vash to bend to her will, but she and Chronica both very well knew that, given the choice, he would stay in this pit. She had merely hoped that her companion would help make her feel more justified in spiriting him away. Whatever she had hoped to say was buried under hushed tears; hands laboring until the water ran clear with the exception of the occasional red line of blood.
It wasn't fair. What Chronica wanted wasn't fair, and a kernel of anger formed in her stomach while she toweled her friend’s body and the fabric came away still heavy with dirt.
She stood and gathered Vash's wide shoulders into the crook of one arm and his legs in the other. She had expected for him to have some heft when she lifted him, but he was feather light even as dead weight. Milly felt every bit of his heaviness pushing in on her heart when she looked at him up close; his eyes sunken and the pale flesh of his cheeks sticking to his skull... Milly lurched as she went to move him to the bed.
And, he woke up.
Unexpectedly, his arm flailed out and grasped at the air, desperate for stability. When his elbow struck Milly, she lost her grip and his bones clattered onto the floor.
"Mr. Vash!"
Milly dropped to her hands and knees. Chronica watched from seclusion, her eyes unmoving but sharp, only the slightest tension in her fingers denoting the thought that she maybe considered doing something.
A crackled exhale labored itself out of Vash's body, sounding more like it came from his chest than from his mouth. Milly gritted her teeth; it was the first time hearing his breath and, now, his obvious signs of life felt irreparably broken. Yet, he breathed.
She pulled him into her lap and Vash's lungs rattled less. His metal arm felt as heavy as he did, and a stretch of redness and wrinkles disappeared under the port that tucked in his sagging skin. Milly moved it off of his flank and his chest expanded a little wider, loudly sucking in more oxygen. A numbness began to chew at the edges of her panic.
Vash's eyelids, dewy and half-lidded, peeled apart and lolled his gray irises around unseeingly in his head. His laborious gasps were a dirty trick that initially fooled Milly into thinking that his mind was present, but the unveiling of a perturbing gaze was just cruel.
Her hands were not hesitant; they indulged in stroking his dark hair. Flaxen wefts revealed themselves when her fingers carded down to his scalp. They seemed darker now than they had been in the daylight. The knot in her stomach was pulled tighter by her new knowledge and the anger returned to burn the rope to strands of fray.
"Miss Chronica," Milly said with a flustering voice, "I'm going to trust that whatever you want from him has his best interests at heart. I've half the mind to just leave here with him."
She lifted her chin, "So, why don't you?"
"I know Mr. Vash, and..."
Milly's hands trailed from his hair to his neck. The scab had turned bright white in the water and lifted at the edges, crumbling away in some places to show a dark, yawning hole that left a crystalized platelet line on the long edge of her thumb when she touched his wound.
The rest of him was scar tissue holding together bones. Vash’s eyes were hard for her to look at; unfocused and losing luster. He breathed more quietly only after an enormous sigh, the world shaking rattle in his chest was now felt under her hands rather than heard.
"I..." Milly chewed her lip puffy and raw, "If I took him now and left for somewhere else... I don't know if he would make it."
Chronica’s eyebrows pinched, "He's going to be okay."
The Vash that Milly knew was strong and tall even in unconsciousness. She had seen him cry, she had seen him defeated, and she had seen the end of the world with him. The carcass of the man she loved lay in her lap. If he lived, everything was going to be different from then on.
"I don't believe that."
She got to her feet and gathered him again, padding away into the darkness and leaving Chronica with her lamps and her mess that was beginning to dry at the bottom of the tub.
After a moment, Chronica picked up her mug and absently held it, barely taking in any of its details. She filled the cup with water and rinsed the basin.