Disclaimer: I don't own Trigun, nor do I own any of its characters or the world in which it is based. Those are copyright to their respective owners/creators and i make no profit off this fic.
Her fingers danced unhappily over the keys to her type-writer as she tallied out the damages and payments owed from the last debacle involving her assignment; one Vash the Stampede, the legendary Humanoid Typhoon, mans first and only Act of God. There were a variety of other colorful nicknames for him but none of them came close to what he was really like. Most of the time she was inclined to be charitable towards him seeing as she had developed certain unpredictable feelings for the goofy gunman, however today was not one of those times.
"I have the last of the claims here ma'am," Milly said helpfully, unloading a stack of triplicates five inches thick beside the piles she had just sorted through. Meryl's shoulders slumped and she rubbed a temple, sighing. Those had taken her all night to go through.
"Thank-you Milly," Meryl said tiredly, a vague feeling of annoyance spiking up at the thought of the cause for all of this hard work and sleep loss. Vash was going to pay for this.
"I'm home!" called the Source of all Chaos from the front door of the two-bedroom they were renting.
"Hello Mister Vash!" Milly called cheerfully while Meryl continued typing at her report.
...make the damages payable by return of post to Brumwelt, Gurgusson and Splelch to the total of...
She frowned for a moment and looked back at the current claim she was filing in. Darn, she'd misspelled the last name. Meryl reached off to one side for her white-out (the white-out button on her type-writer was no longer in working order since Vash had taken it upon himself to play around with it one evening and had spilled beer down the side of her baby) only to find that her white-out had been left open by somebody and was all dried out. Meryl gritted her teeth in annoyance.
Take deep cleansing breaths, she advised herself. Reality was the leading cause of stress. Scratch that, Vash led the pack with reality coming in a close second.
"Hey look, the mail's here!" Milly said reaching for the stack of envelopes currently being held by Knives, Meryl's other headache.
He had the most overbearing attitude and seemed to take especial delight in his brother's accident prone destruction sprees (in fact had been the likely cause of the most recent one as well as a few others she could name). Meryl was no saint and certainly didn't have the patience of one; finding her workload doubled and her compensation cut was bad enough but the man was an insufferable pain. Proud, arrogant and a finicky eater to boot. He seemed to derive a certain sort of amusement by baiting his brother; Vash was learning his way around his brother's verbal traps and so he'd begun picking on Milly and Meryl as well. He was like the schoolyard bully only with aristocratic snobbery.
"My big, big sister wrote!" Milly said happily. "And here's one from my cousin Jake, and my little-big sister, and my little brother, ooh ohh! My nephew wrote me!"
Knives rolled his eyes while Meryl tried to figure out an alternate source of whiteout. No help for it.
"Vash," she called out into the hall. "I know you just got back, but could you run to the store and buy me another bottle of white-out? Mine is dried out."
"Hey look Meryl!" Milly said excitedly holding an envelope aloft in the air and waving it excitedly. "Here's one for you!"
Meryl suddenly felt her stomach cramp up in nervousness at the sight of an envelope of cream-laid vellum with gold-flecked red wax sealing it.
"I've never seen you receive mail before," Milly remarked, trying (and failing utterly) to not look too curious.
"Is it from work?" Meryl asked hopefully. Silently adding to herself 'please let it be from work!'
"No, the return stamp says Trevino Vineyards," Milly said. Meryl's stomach plummeted. Great, just what she needed. Still business before pleasure and all of that (meaning that she was going to put it off as long as she could).
"Put it on my desk please Milly," Meryl replied. "I'll get to it when I'm done with work."
"Don't you want to open it?" Milly asked curiously. "It looks important. Maybe you've won something really yummy."
"Don't be silly, they're never serious until the envelope is pink anyway," Meryl said continuing her typing until Vash could go to the store and bring back her white-out. However, instead of walking right back out the door Vash seemed to have picked up some of Milly's curiosity and was examining the envelope Milly had set down, holding it up to the light to see if he could read to contents.
"I beg your pardon," Meryl said, glaring at him for his presumption. "What do you think you're doing?"
"Do you know someone there?" he asked, apparently not willing to make an attempt at concealing his nosiness.
"Could you please go and get me some white-out?" she growled, annoyance lacing her tone. If he had any sense at all, he'd be aware of the fact that she had approximately one nerve left and he was beginning to grate on it.
"My brother is not your errand boy, lowly one," Knives interjected looking down his aristocratic nose at her.
She muttered something inaudible and probably not very complimentary under her breath, to which Knives replied
"Anatomically improbable, but you're welcome to try I suppose. It might be amusing to watch you dislocate that many bones in the attempt."
She took another deep cleansing breath. Vash, seeing that she'd been pushed just about as far as she was going to go, set the letter back down and announced he was going down to the general store and did she want anything?
"A rope to hang you with," she gritted.
Vash blinked, looking injured. Meryl softened a bit, apologized, and politely requested white-out once again. She chose to ignore the long, measuring look Milly and Vash treated her to.
"She seems a bit out of sorts," Vash said in an undertone to Milly. "Is it that time of the month?"
Deep cleansing breaths, Meryl reminded herself. I must not kill my assignment.
Milly massaged her own hand, cramped and sore from finishing her hand-written "Milly Monthly" for the better part of the evening.
The two brothers were facing one another across a table with a chessboard on it, squabbling just as siblings were supposed to; unfortunately the subject matter of their on-going squabble left much to be desired. Whether or not the human species should in fact be terminated was, in Milly's opinion, a bit of a no-brainer. There really was no story quite like them; two brothers forced by a dichotomy in thier basic philosophies to an ongoing struggle that might just range until the last of the stars grew cold in their orbits. It seemed such a sad thing.
Milly was willing to believe in Vash's belief of the basic goodness of Knive's character; to his brother Knives wasn't actually a bad person despite all that he had done to other people over the years, but was merely flawed in his reasoning. she personally approved of the assessment and was willing to keep giving Knives the benefit of the doubt even when he was deliberately insulting, cocky, overbearing, and downright rude.
It had been a long time since he'd been among normal people (those Gung-Ho strange persons didn't count) so he had probably lost the knack for convivial conversation. Milly had made it her personal quest to get a genuine smile out of him if it was the last thing she ever did. Considering his usual temperament however, the thought had crossed her mind a time or two that it might very well be.
The tap-tap-tapping of keys brought her mind about to her partner. Vash had been home for the good part of a month, granted most of the time had been spent with his brother, but she'd had plenty of time with him to go nuts on him and still nothing. Milly had never regretted that last evening that she had spent with her own...
She resolutely turned her mind away from it. Despite her assurances to the contrary, it still hurt. She cold get through the days just fine; helping others was where she had always found her greatest strength, but she knew that if she thought about it for too long at one time she;d start to cry and would never be able to stop. Better to dwell on her partners problems than to start wallowing in self-pity. Her big sister had always said that the difference between a sand-mire and self-pity was that one swallowed the body and the other swallowed the heart.
Milly was nearly eaten alive with curiosity about that letter Meryl had gotten earlier today; Meryl had never gotten a letter that wasn't from Bernardelli's before. Was it from a friend or a relative perhaps? Milly couldn't tell; in fact there was a lot she didn't know about her sempai despite the fact that the older woman was her best friend. She never talked about her family, and if she'd had boyfriends previous to Milly joining the team three years ago Milly had never heard of any of them. Meryl seemed to have absolutely nothing to her life except for her job, but Milly knew that that couldn't be so; Meryl had someone she wrote to on occasion but she never went into the details about who.
Meryl was one of those enclosed individuals; people who liked to keep things to themselves, especially when it concerned their hearts. Milly had been happy and honored that Meryl had actually chosen to admit her feelings for mister Vash out loud to her; that showed a great deal of trust. Her senior was what some would call a perfectionist; she liked to have things "just so"; the kind of person who would spend an entire afternoon untangling a rope on the floor just because it was there and interfered with her sense of order in the universe.
Milly often thought that Meryl would be a lot more easy going if she didn't insist of being so formally attired from the moment she arose to the time she changed for bed. She didn't even take off her cloak inside the house.
Not that she isn't elegant, Milly thought. But does she always have to be so perfect?
Milly had never seen Meryl look anything less that perfectly groomed. She wore white in a desert where there was dust everywhere and yet somehow the dun color of the sands never clung to her clothes like they always seemed to do to Milly's. It was as if even the dust particles wouldn't dare to mar her perfect image.
Of course, all of that's probably just another way of keeping her guard up.
It was a little sad that she seemed to have such a hard time letting people in; granted she could talk your ear off about work but when it came to things like what she was feeling or if there was something wrong... it was like pulling teeth.
"...and it's called a knight Vash, not a horsey-piece. You can't move it in a diagonal line, it only moves in an L-shape," Knives was saying with exaggerated patience.
"I know that," Vash replied. "It was just a joke. My real move is this... check."
"This is not check," Knives said.
"Yes it is, I can take your king," Vash protested.
"But my bishop can kill yours before you can take mine..." Knives replied. "I win."
"Aww man, I can't believe I didn't see that," Vash whined. Knives looked smug when Milly looked over.
The tapping stopped. Milly looked over curiously. Meryl had stopped her typing, pushed aside her paperwork, and was now gazing down at the envelope she'd received. She did not look pleased to receive mail and Milly couldn't understand why; she loved getting mail herself. Milly liked nothing better than to hear about all of the latest happenings among her family.
"I guess there's no point in putting it off," Meryl grumbled under her breath, eying the note with antipathy. She slit open the top with a letter opener and pulled out a large white placard with gold embossed lettering. Her frown deepened to a true scowl, the kind that usually marred her face when Vash had done something...noteworthy.
She flipped open the top and scanned the insides. For a moment her face was completely blank then it flushed, segueing slowly into anger that progressed quickly to rage and seemed to stick there. For a moment her mouth worked soundlessly. Her hands shook, clenching and unclenching in wrath.
"What's wrong Meryl?" Milly asked concernedly.
"Wrong?" Meryl said, trying to cover her obvious distress with a false laugh. "Nothing! Ha hahahahaha! What could possibly be wrong?"
"Did you get bad news?" Milly pursued.
"No," Meryl declaimed. "No it's not bad news at all... In fact it's very good news."
"You don't look very happy about it," Vash noted from where he and his brother were putting away the chess pieces. Meryl glared at him with more than her usual heat; she was probably still mad at him for being the cause of all of the paperwork she was still filling out.
"Here, you read," Meryl practically growled, shoving the placard at Milly. The younger insurance girl opened up the top and smoothed out the crumples from where Meryl's hands had clenched around it.
"Trevino Vineyards is proud to announce the wedding of Dylan Mori-Korin and Mellisandra DeGhent-Trevino on the date of blah blah blah..." Milly said skimming over the rest of the wedding announcement.
"Why Meryl!" Milly said, cheefully. "You've been invited to a wedding. Is Mellisandra your sister, or a cousin?"
"I'm sending my regrets," she replied flatly. "I have work to do."
"Sempai, I'm sure the boss will be happy to give you time off to attend, you haven't taken a break in the entire time I've known you and you certainly have leave time stored up," Milly replied, not a bit fooled by what was obviously an excuse. Meryl was like that, she liked to hide behind Duty to avoid this-and-that if it made her uncomfortable.
"I said I'm not going," Meryl snapped, plopping back down to her desk and turning back to her paperwork scowl still firmly in place. The staccato tapping of the keys against the paper sounded much louder and even more quick than usual. Milly wasn't about to let her best friend off the hook so easily, Meryl only got really angry like this when she was covering up being hurt.
"Alright Meryl," Milly said casually. "You don't have to go if you don't want to."
"That's right," Meryl said, nodding firmly as she turned back to her work.
"I mean it's only a wedding," Milly continued, her tone completely blase, but with every intent of striking a nerve when she was off guard.
"Yes," Meryl agreed, typing away.
"It's not like it's for family or anything," Milly said. there was a sudden jarring note, out of the corner of her eye Milly saw Meryl give a start as if stung.
"And it's not as if you have a duty to attend," Milly kept on, knowing very well that her partner valued propriety highly.
"Or might upset some of the other guests if you were absent," Milly added.
"Grrrr," Meryl grumbled, frowning. But she also looked guilty too. After a long moment, Meryl sighed.
"I don't really want to go," she grumbled. "It's not just that I hate weddings either. It's an awkward position for me."
"Awkward?" Milly questioned. "But they're your family Meryl!"
"Exactly!" she hissed. Milly just looked at her patiently. After a few minutes of Meryl staring back with cool-eyes she at last gave in and explained.
"Milly, you're really close with your family," she started. "All your letters home have that old-fashioned close-knit letters from home feeling to them. My family isn't like that, especially with me. That one particular sister in the note is one I've never gotten on with, I used to day-dream about dropping her off a cliff."
"But you still love her," Milly replied, not fooled.
"I suppose I have to," Meryl said and added. "I just don't like her is all."
"I'm sure it'll work out fine sempai," Milly soothed. "Just put in an appearance, wish them well, smile for the camera and then come back here. That's all you really have to do."
"You don't get it," Meryl said, getting up and for the first time Milly had ever seen her, Meryl started pacing. Not only was she pacing, she was clearly very nervous. A nervous Meryl? Was the world going to end? In the entire time Milly had known Meryl she'd always been calm, controlled and capable, unflappable in even the worst desert storm and fearless in the most trying of circumstances. She never got nervous, she just got more determined. She was a woman who knew what she wanted and went after it, she had her act together.
But we're dealing with family, and that changes anything, even confident Meryl has her own insecurities, I'm sure, Milly reminded herself.
"Because it isn't just my sister, it's the whole tribe of them," Meryl went on, still pacing. "It's my stepmother and aunties wondering why I'm twenty-five and still unmarried. It's my step-sisters wondering just what I'm doing with a real job out in the frontier instead of finding a husband and settling down to have kids. It's my daddy demanding that I give up this career nonsense of mine and start acting like a properly bred daughter. And then there's the rest of them, the Peerage, always gossiping and talking about me and my unwomanly penchant for making something of myself besides just being a wife and mother. You know that they actually hold me up as an example to their daughters about how a girl can go wrong in her life? And if they saw me come home with my hair cut off and dressed like this..." She gestured downward to her usual elegant white cape, skirt hose and boots that covered her from neck to toe.
"Father would have a cat!" she finished.
"But Meryl," Milly said in confusion. "That's what you always wear."
Meryl quickly fished into the bottom of her bag and pulled out a photo in a silver frame.
"That's what I'm supposed to look like," she replied pointing emphatically to a girl down in front.
It was obviously a picture taken some years ago, Meryl couldn't have been more than fifteen. It was one of those formal pictures too, no-one was smiling. The men were all dressed up in their best suits, shirts pressed, brass buttons polished, silk ties with diamond pins in them and their shoes shined. The women wore elegant dresses with corsets, petticoats and lace. The family was obviously Money, with a capital M (which might explain a few things). The younger Meryl had long daintily curled locks piled on her head under a wide lacy parasol, a dress the height of fashion clung to her petite body and her face was painted to fashionable unrecognizability.
"Whoa! Who's the babe?" Vash demanded, looking over Milly's shoulder. Meryl shot him a withering look and did not deign to answer.
"And there's no way I'm going to another one of those family affairs, especially this one, without..." Meryl cut herself off.
"A date?" Milly finished for her. Meryl nodded curtly.
"Why's it so important now Meryl?" Milly asked curiously.
"See the other name on the invitation? The prospective bride-groom?" Meryl asked tightly.
"Yes," Milly said.
"He's my ex-fiancee," she ground out. "And he's marrying my younger step-sister."