This ficlet takes place in-show, just after the events of the destruction of Augusta. Meryl and Millie are on their way back to December City after having gotten the statement that in all cases concerning Vash the Stampede bernardelli's would remain uninvolved, and Vash the Stampede has been declared missing, presumed dead. The song lyrics are from "Muio Per Te" of the Zucchero and Company album, by Zucchero featuring Sting. (I only borrowed the English parts, I don't understand the Spanish).
"From the dark secluded valleys, I heard the ancient songs of sadness. And every step I thought of you, every footstep only you."
The hole in the fifth moon stared unwinkingly down at her, feeling like an accusation. Five shadows cut into the stark pale white sands, fanning out around her from the differing positions of the moons. The desert was so peaceful at night, nothing but an endless horizon of light and dark in all directions. The crystal grains of the sands twinkling from the reflected glow of the moonlight at her feet and the distant burn of the stars themselves. The only sound she could hear was her breath, her heart, and the continuous murmur of the wind that never ceased in the desert. The soft swish of sand and the gentle rock-sway of the tomas that carried her farther and farther away from the site of her most colossal failure to date. She'd never see him again, she knew this and yet... Meryl resolutely turned her mind away from the thought, and tried to concentrate instead on what, precisely she was going to say in the verbal debriefing back in December.
Her mind wouldn't be still, it flitted constantly from one thought to the next to the next, refusing to settle, and when it tried to settle on its own it went straight for the one thing she wanted to avoid thinking about. It was like a moth circling a flame. It was just like him, never still, never serous always-- She jerked her thoughts irritatedly away again from the still-tender subject she wanted most to avoid.
"And every star a grain of sand, the leavings of a dried up ocean. Tell me how much longer? How much longer?"
She looked up above her, at the slow wheeling kaleidoscope of stars burning bright and cold in their orbits as if they could provide the answers to questions she didn't want to think about asking.
When she'd been a small child, being raised by her father in December, she'd always taken great comfort from the stars. Her father had once told her that they came from the stars; not just that they had fallen from the sky of the world in ships, but that they were made of the same stuff that the stars were. That long ago there had been ancient suns that had exploded, dieing in their own way, and that the particles that had been left behind were the same particles that made up their bodies, and the stars. They were made from star dust. She had always found great comfort in the fact that there was a part of her that was eternal.
Now there was no comfort when she looked up at the stars, just a vast cold emptiness. While her body felt like it weight three times more than it normally did, her mind felt like it had drifted away to go and join those distant, solitary points of light so far away, so cold and numb.
Far behind her there was a faint glow still bleeding into the sky. She didn't look back to look back. To look back would be to remember and she wasn't certain she could handle that just yet. To remember would be to believe.
"These are the works of man... this is the sum of our ambition."
It's gone, she thought, trying to make the realization sink in through the haze that seemed to have settled over her thoughts. It's all... gone.
It was hard to survive on this world, harder still to prosper. Any real hope of supporting the human population that was trying to get by on the harsh and inhospitable world lay in the cities that had sprung up around the old SEEDS ships. Those were where the major population centers could be found, the basis for all pretense at law, order and prosperity. There weren't many of them, but what few there were were all treasured as precious symbols of hope and endurance. And now one of them was gone. Snuffed out like a candle in the night.
Where there had once been a thriving metropolis filled with life there was now nothing more than a glassed-over crater, the heat from the blast had been enough to melt the sand into black slag. At the outskirts there were still some small structures that had managed to retain most of a standing wall or a corner here and there sticking up out of the sands like strange fungus, but most of the buildings had been obliterated clear down to their foundations. Gone. All of it, just gone within a single moment.
All that was left of what had once been a thriving desert community, built in the shadow of a ship that had carried their ancestors from their homeworld to this strange world they had crash-landed on, was a glassy black crater and a hole in the moon.
"And I have never in my life, felt more alone than I do now... and though I claim dominions..."
Uninvolved The word played over an over again in her head. Even if he, by some miracle, had managed to survive, she still wouldn't see him again. The work that had brought her world into his had reclaimed her, pulling her back to her ordinary existence again. When she got home, it would be back to a life of filing forms and pushing around papers, of filling out routine reports and handling everyday problems. In so many ways it felt like the last few months away had been some kind of surreal dream, a dream that she spent out in the endless rolling dunes far away from her office and desk, a surreal fantasy filled with strange figures and bigger mysteries than she'd ever dared imagine. Going back to her ordinary world where everything was defined, delineated, ordered, categorized sanctioned, numbered and approved by others seemed so confining now.
Her partner rode beside her in silence but she might as well have been alone in the wind-swept, sand-scoured dunes outside of Augusta. They hadn't spoken a word of the event since they'd seen it happen. Even when Meryl was writing her report to the Bernardelli Insurance Society about it, trying to find a way to make sense of it, a plausible way to explain an event that was, in an ordinary existence (such as the one she'd led until now), impossible. She hadn't actually spoken to Milly about it. To speak about it would make it real. To confirm it with another human being would make what she'd seen an actual event, something that couldn't be taken back in her mind. For though the new hole in the moon stared down at her in silent accusation, and she had seen with her own eyes the destruction of one of the worlds largest metropoli, if she didn't have to acknowledge it in the world outside of her mind then she didn't have to admit that it was all gone. That he was gone.
She'd never see him again. No-one could have been at ground zero of that... she didn't even know what to call it. No-one could have survived being in the center of that blast, not even a man who had survived everything else she had seen. Not even Vash the Stampede could have lived through that.
"A stones throw from Jerusalem, I walked a lonely mile in the moonlight. Though a million stars were shining, my heart was lost on a distant planet."
She let the tomas underneath her carry her slowly away from the place where she'd last seen him. She'd never see that tall lanky (shade providing) form of his, or that dopey smile he always had on. She'd never again have to scold him for ditching them or try to track down wherever it was he'd found to hide from them this time, never have to bundle his inebriated carcass into a wheelbarrow after a night spent drinking and flirting (spectacularly unsuccessfully, she was more than a bit suspicious that his skirt chasing was nothing more than another part of his "too dorky to possibly be the right guy" act). She'd certainly never have to clean up another of his messes, or attempt to make the impossible situations he got into and out of on a regular basis sound remotely plausible and not the ravings of a fanatical lunatic on paper. She should be celebrating! She should be congratulating herself on a job well done and looking forward to her triumphant return to headquarters. But she wasn't, and she couldn't. If nothing else, against all odds, against all of her attempts to maintain a professional distance and objectivity, that idiot had managed to make her care about him. He'd made her care enough to where her return home was something she was doing with reluctance rather than relief. Though she ignored it, and told herself it wasn't really sadness, there was an ache in her chest that hadn't been there the day before.
"And though you hold the keys to ruin, of everything I see... with every prison blown to dust, my enemies walk free."
It didn't matter now. Everything was gone and she hadn't been able to stop it, she hadn't been able to do anything at all. Meryl was not a woman accustomed to feeling helpless, but against such a force, what was she? She hadn't felt so small and insignificant since she'd been a small child all alone out on the dunes staring up at the vast empty expanse of stars and thinking that they were so huge they could swallow her up. She'd felt safer in the city, surrounded by tall buildings, and streets, with the light to drown out the inky blackness of the stars and dull it to a softly glowing haze. The thrumming heartbeat of humanity had enveloped her and made her feel safe and secure, not so insignificant of her place in the vast scheme of things.
She'd been so sure of everything before, so confident of her little world and the place she had in it. Now it felt like everything had changed. She felt set adrift, lost among a sea of stars, never to return to her familiar home shores again.
"I'm lost without you..."
When had she started to orient her internal compass to face him, instead of her own heading? And now, what was she going to do, now that every compass in the world no longer faced north?
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