Vash looked up into the endless blue sky of the day. It had seemed like forever ago when the world had seemed to hold this much promise. He tried to live everyday he could with verve and enthusiasm, taking time out for the things he really enjoyed in life like eating donuts and playing with kids to teach them the value of love and peace. With all of the guilt and sorrow he carried with him, with all the knowledge that he would forever live his life on the outside looking in, it was that much more important to him that he have something to fall back on, something to remind him that there were things out there that were worth living for, worth fighting for, and that it all wouldn't only be sorrow and heartache, that there were things that made life good.

Now there was a distinct possibility that maybe he'd finally found the end of his troubles. If he could manage to convince his brother to see Vash's point of veiw, there was the chance that all of his days would be ones of endless blue and happiness. Things could finally be starting to go right! Vash wasn't certain how, exactly he was going to convince his brother, but there had to be a way. Once Knives woke up, Vash could sit him down and get him to see somehow... he just knew he could.

He was distracted from his half-baked plan to save his brother by the sight of one of his housemates walking down the street, returning home from the part-time job she'd taken to help support him and his brother while they stayed there. Part of him felt like a burden, he was making these two girls work to keep him and his brother fed and housed while he just loafed around all day waiting for his brother to heal so he could teach him about the good side of humanity.

Milly waved cheerfully at him once she was within sight. She was strong, the tall insurance girl, with a tremendous desire to live and see her friends happy. She was not just a physical foil for her partner but an emotional one as well, bringing her own brand of simplicity and observation to their two-woman team. Meryl was generally all business, not a woman who let her heart rule her head and she sometimes needed to be reminded to think with her heart every once in a while, Milly was there to remind her. The sisterly affection between the two was obvious in the way that Milly seemed to take it upon herself to get her elder partner to open herself up now and then, and in the way Meryl was so protective of Milly. Vash thought that if it came down to a choice between someone harming Milly and someone harming her, Meryl would throw herself into the path of a bullet without any hesitation whatsoever. Vash hoped it never came to that.

"Hey Mister Vash," Milly greeted when she reached the front porch where Vash sprawled out on the swing and let his long limbs stretch out.

"Hey Milly," he said in reply.

"Whatcha doing? I thought you'd be inside."

"Knives is the same now as he was ten minutes ago," Vash said, mentally checking on his twin in his deep healing sleep.

"I meant helping sempai," Milly corrected.

"She chased me out of the kitchen," he said, smiling sheepishly. It had been surprising, Meryl was actually faster with that wooden spoon than Vash was... and he could dodge bullets! He could dodge bullets, but when he was caught with his finger dipped in the sauce Meryl's wooden spoon snaked out faster than a sand-snake striking and smacked the offending fingers smartly across the knuckles. And she never missed either.

"She has eyes in the back of her head," Milly marveled right along with him, nodding. Clearly a fellow sufferer of the Meryl Stryfe Wooden Spoon of Doom. "She's pretty territorial when it comes to her kitchen. You know it was Meryl who cooked that meal at the Schezar Manor?"

Vash's eyes widened, it had been quite an impressive spread, certainly it was one comparable to how the wealthy and upper class who could afford professional wait staff ate. So she was some kind of closet chef?

"I know that you two were hired on for a time, but I thought that you had been working under his cook or something."

"Apparently most of his staff left along with everyone else," Milly said. "It was just the two of us there. I got all the water I could drink. And let me tell you, after going that long without water then finding that dried up well, I was more than happy to cook for my drink! Who'd have guessed that he was really feezing up the water in the spring and keeping it for himself to sell? He seemed like such a nice person."

"Yeah," Vash agreed. He wondered how he was going to broach the subject without coming off cackhanded. Vash's usual method was to blunder his way into things but matters of emotion required tact and delicacy and he was not long on either of those two things when it came down to it.

"Sempai's a very good cook," Milly continued. "You like to eat, don't you mister Vash?" It was strange, but if he didn't know any better he'd have thought that Milly had come out with a purpose in mind.

"Eh-heh, yeah," he said, still trying to figure out a way to broach the subject. "What man doesn't like to eat? I gotta say, since you two have been traveling with me, I've been eating better."

That was certainly true; in many of the places where they'd stayed for any significant amount of time Meryl had insisted on a suite with a kitchenette in it so that she could "have a decent meal for once" she tended to dismiss the stuff from roadside vendors and restaurants that Vash called his staple fare with a disdainful sniff. That was fine for a temporary situation, she seemed to feel, but if you didn't cook it by hand it was only something to subsist on.

"That was before we all started traveling together," Milly said, sounding a little wistful. Vash missed those days too. Despite the pain and the battles and dear god the thing that had happened at Augusta, there had been plenty of good things that had happened.

"I remember the time Mister Wolfwood gambled away his favorite pair of sunglasses and asked me to win it back for him," she said with a smile. "It was funny because when he said he was my servant for life, sempai took him at his word and made him wash the laundry. There he was for the rest of the afternoon, up to his elbows in soapy water scrubbing away. She told him to consider it his penance for gambling. I think she just wanted someone to do the laundry, sempai hates doing laundry."

Well, Vash couldn't ask for a better opening than that.

"Hey big girl?" he asked, a little hesitantly.

"Yes?" she replied.

"How are you... I mean, how're you holding up? Really?"

She looked over at him with those bright, cornflower-blue eyes, so much brighter than Knives' and, certainly more compassionate, and said

"I'm... getting by," she said honestly.

There was a sadness there that hadn't been there before and Vash was sad to know that just a little bit of her innoscence was gone due to her association with him. If she'd never met him, would she have remained that innocent forever?

"I'm sad he's gone, and I'm missing him, but I don't regret it either. How could I?"

A typical Milly answer, and Vash couldn't help but smile a little. Typical Milly.

"I miss him too," Vash said.

It felt oddly good, if one could ascribe that word to feeling awful, to actually be able to share a time of grief with someone else. When Rem had died there had been no-one left to mourn her besides him (and Knives, the instrument of her death, had been unsympathetic). There had been others whose deaths Vash had mourned all by himself, many of them, over the years. It had been rare that he'd been able to grieve for the passing of a friend with another friend. Vash's friends were few and far between; he'd wanted to give his brother as few a number of hostages as he could.

"What's for dinner?" he asked next, after a long moment of silence in which they said everything they needed to say. Milly didn't regret it and Vash wasn't to blame himself. Now as far as he was concerned if you could still eat that meant that you were alive for another day and should start acting like it.

"You saw," Milly reminded him. "Meryls making pasta with sauce, she makes very good sauce and asparagus on the side with hondaise."

"Should we go and drive her crazy?" Vash invited.

"She'll come after you with the spoon," Milly warned him.

"Yeah," Vash agreed, grinning. She was cute when she was angry. Milly shook her head at him, clearly able to right through him to his aims.

"You go ahead and have fun," she said, fondly. Vash smiled and went inside.


:It's strange...: she thought to herself. :Ever since that day there's been something odd going on inside me. I've been noticing things that I shouldn't be able to notice.:

Like in the crowd earlier that day when those boys had brushed right by her, it had seemed like she could actually feel what it was they were feeling for a brief moment, but of course that was impossible.

:Then again, my definitions about what is and is not possible seem to be changing since I started traveling around with Vash,: Meryl thought a little wryly. Maybe his weirdness was contagious?

It felt like she'd had a head cold for the last several years and now, suddenly, it was clearing up. The world seemed strangely more distinct to her now, as though there was a veil over her eyes that had been making everything blurry and now it was slowly being lifted and all those vageu shapes and impressions clarified into true forms. Meryl tried not to allow a shiver to run up her spine when an vague echo of memory tried to nudge its way into her consciousness; her father had once told to her "the allegory of the Cave" from Plato's the Republic. It was a theory about how all of humanity was shackled to the inside of a cave, and the only things that they could see were shadows from the world outside the cave playing upon the wall. The story had questioned whether anyone could truly understand the nature of reality if all they could make out was merely the form of it and not the substance.

Instead of dreaming about Legato last night, she had dreamed about her father. It had been shortly before she'd woken, so the dream had stayed fresh in her mind, the story he'd told her had stayed with her, and so had the vague feeling that there was something else, something more that her fther had been trying to tell her. She recalled very that they' been down in Crackback Canyon and that when she had looked down at her dream-self, her legs and wrists had been bound in shackles and all around her were drifting shadows. At the end of the dream, one of those shackles had started to slip loose.

Her new sensitivity to people warned her that there was someone in the room, even though she couldn't be certain how she knew he was there.

"Don't even think about it Vash," Meryl said, smiling a little as she dug in the pantry for the dry noddles she'd sealed away in a container earlier. She could tell that he was right near the stove, and if he was right near the stove then he was thinking about trying to sneak a taste of her sauce.

"Nuts," he muttered. "I can't sneak anything by you, can I Short Girl?"

Meryl didn't dignify the remark with a response. It went without saying of course.

"Anything I can help you with?" he asked next.

"That depends," she replied. "Is your definition of "help" doing something useful around the kitchen, or do you just want to stick around hoping I'll turn my back so you can get into things?"

Vash affected an injured look, mixed with one that clearly said 'you can't possibly suspect harmless little ol' me of such duplicity could you?'

"Uh huh," she grunted, knowingly, while trying not to smile. "But if you really want to help, you can rinse out the asparagus in the sink and put them in the steamer."

Vash went over to the sink and there was the sound of softly dribbling water. She frugally placed her spaghetti-noodle pot under the faucet to catch the rinse water, the asparagus came to the market pre-rinsed and the secondary washing was mostly a precaution, but it didn't do to waste water.

"So," he said into the companionable silence. "What do you do when you're not being an insurance girl?"

"I'm always an insurance girl, twenty-four hour surveilance means exactly that Mister Vash," she pointed out. "Trouble doesn't take a day off, unless you decide to sleep in." She had a sort of sly teasing glance out of the side of her eye.

"Ouch," he said dryly.

"The truth hurts," she commiserated mockingly, even going so far as to pat his shoulder in mock sympathy.

That was two for her and none for him.

"Nice," he said, ackowledging her hit. "But seriously, you must have some hobbies. Sewing perhaps? You did a good job on my coat, real neat and even stitches."

"Thank-you," Meryl said pleased at his compliment. "But no, sewing is something I do more out of necessity than enjoyment. I learned how to sew neatly because I pride myself on competency and self reliance... and because we didn't always have the extra money for new clothes."

That last was added with reluctance.

"Money tight when you were growing up?" he asked next, curious.

"Sometimes," she said vaguely. "Not so much when I got older, but as a young child, there were times when we had to scrape by."

"You don't talk much about your family. Even Milly doesn't seem to know a whole lot about them," Vash remarked.

"Stir the sauce please, I don't want it burning to the bottom," she said, her tone firm and instructory as she turned away to put the pot of water on the stove to heat up. Vash gave her a long look even as he did as she bid. The look said 'my, now you got off that subject quickly enough.'

"It's nothing bad," she defended reluctantly. "Just a typical story on this world. You asked about my hobbies earlier?"

Meryl knew that he was noting how she very much did not go into the details, or even the general outline of what that "typical story" of hers might be. She knew deep down that it was only making him even more curious.

"Well, I like rock-climbing," she said. "Spelunking too, actually, I like spelunking a little more than I like climbing cliff faces, because I'm not out in the sun so much, it's nice and cool down in the caves. My papa and I-"

She broke off unconsciously, and swallowed, feeling habitually for the little lump that was always there in her throat. Time, it seemed, had at last diminished it or at least made it so that it stayed firmly in her heart. She could practically feel Vash's avid interest, his piercing gaze trying to peel back the layers around her and look at what was happening inside of her.

"I grew up in the canyons," she explained, her voice and posture probably a study in defensive reluctance, but she felt she owed him this much at least so wether she liked it or not, Meryl forced the words out. "And my papa really loved to be out of doors so I was raised that way as a child. He was an avid rock-climber too, so we did that a lot together."

"Wow," he said, his eyebrows raising in surprise. "I actually never would have guessed that about you, you're so tiny. But maybe I should have, I mean, now that I think about it, it suits you completely. I can just see you clinging tenaciously to the side of a cliff by your fingernails, completely not willing to give up until you reach the top. It really suits you."

She smiled a little at that.

"I already know all of your hobbies," Meryl teased. "Let's see, when you're not dodging bounty hunters and saving the world, you like to let schoolchildren climb all over you like a jungle-gym, scarf down donuts at a local cafe and find ridiculous new ways to pick up women. And let's not forget your prodigious appetite for all things booze-related. Oh, and the lazing about too, let's not forget that either."

"Heh, sound's like you've got me figured out," he said, scratching behind his head and giving one of his empty smiles.

Somehow she'd managed to offend him, or maybe she'd poked at an open wound or something. Meryl was no good at talking with people in general, talking to them was another matter, she could get stuff done! But dealing with them as people rather than professionals was something that she wasn't so good at. And Vash was a mystery at the best of times, he seemed so simple, but he had such surprisingly complex depths, she didn't think that even a bondmate would be able to understand him fully... certainly his own twin didn't and that was with the help of the twin bond.

:Idiot: she thought, feeling a sad little pang, she'd meant to have a little fun with him, try to cheer up the suddenly serious atmosphere in the room. She hated people prying into her past so maybe the words had come out sharper than she'd meant. Still, she could fix this... maybe.

"Feh!" she scoffed straightening her spine and lifting her chin confidently. "You're darn right I do! I also know that you can't ever seem to fold up a shirt but your socks always match, that you like peas but hate green beans, and that you think there's something seriously wrong with people who mix their food in with their mashed potatoes." (An Irish custom of which Milly was fond.)

"If we're naming my personal habits, you forgot that I clean my gun every Wednesday," he pointed out.

"Well yeah, but you do that out of necessity rather than because you want to so it doesn't count as either a quirk or a hobby," Meryl replied primly. She couldn't hold in the amused little smile that snuck its way onto her face. She tried to press her lips together to keep it in, but it willfully quirked away at the corners of her mouth, and when Vash's head snapped around to look at her in surprise, Meryl helplessly started to laugh. Vash joined her a moment later.

"Oh, so we're getting started on quirks now are we?" he said with a glint in his eye that Meryl couldn't entirely trust. "Well that's good because you have enough of them to fill the cargo hold of a SEED's ship."

Meryl gasped in offense.

"I do not!" she replied hotly. She was not quirky. Competent, temperamental and determined yes, but never quirky.

"When you're writing your reports," he said, grinning. "You won't write them without your typewriter, and even then you'll only use it if the surface it is resting on is perfectly level."

"A wobbly desk is a distraction," she defended.

"And when you sharpen your pencils, you always have three of them and they are always sharpened to the exact same length, if one is shorter, you'll file the other two down until they match. And then you'll line them up perfectly beside each other exactly three inches from the right side of your typewriter," he said, very very clearly enjoying himself.

When he put it that way, she did sound a little quirky... it was just that she liked things nice and neat and organized.

"Oooh! I have another one," he said a heartbeat later. "When you wash the dishes, you follow an exact order that is never deviated from; first the cups and then the bowls and then the plates then the smaller pans followed by the pots and last the silverware. And if someone tries to put them on the drying rack "wrong" you'll move them until they're right."

"Well..." she said helplessly in the face of his amusement of her apparently quirky nature.

:But... it's where they go!:

Meryl cocked her head to the side in recognition of the fact that she was probably a little O.C.D. about some things because she was always vaguely irritated whenever she came out into the kitchen after Vash had washed the dishes and left them piled on the rack any which old way.

"And you don't like your food touching," he added. He was very clearly enjoying himself, poking fun at her little oddities.

So she was quirky, so what? He had some strange ones too, and after having traveled with him for about three years off and on, she was aware of some that he himself probably wasn't aware of.

Like whenever he was really upset, he reached immediately for the sunglasses. It had (sadly enough) taken Meryl a while to notice that one but once she did, she could always tell when things were about to get serious. Too bad she hadn't noticed that one back during the time he'd pulled off that bluff to save Jullian and Moore from that slaver caravan, then she wouldn't have laid into him like she had. Vash also had a funny way of flexing his left hand, the bionic one, when he was feeling self-conscious, especially around a room full of people staring at him for being Vash the Stampede. But she wouldn't tell them any of these because Meryl considered them "hers," she'd noticed them through long careful study and observation. She had in essence worked for them. The man could be inscrutable enough without her giving him his "tells" so he could block them.

"Well you," she said instead. "Always rub the outside rim of any glass handed to you, empty or full, with your right middle finger."

Vash looked at her in blank surprise.

"Do I?" he said, apparently not aware of it. Meryl nodded, somewhat smugly.

"And your pinky curls up under the bottom of your whiskey glass," she added, pleased with herself. "And you always pause for a second after you turn a door handle before opening the door."

Vash looked like he was examining his memories a little and wondering if she was right. Then he looked... sly? Yes, there was definitely an air of something about him she wouldn't call it quite smugness, but it was something akin to it. Meryl wasn't sure what it was.

"Wow Short Girl, that's quite a list you have there," he remarked, his tone was one of admiration but it had the slight ring of falsity to her that whispered to her inner Meryl sense that she was being set up for something. Meryl narrowed her eyes at him and waited for it.

"I mean, I wasn't even aware of the whisky glass one," he added.

"I pride myself on my skills at observation," she said, a little on edge, just knowing her was setting her up. "Twenty-four hour surveillance and all that."

"Still, that's a lot of observing, I mean... I can fully understand, me being such a good target for a woman's eyes and all." He flexed ala "manly-man pose" and tried his best to look dashing.

Was that it? That was the set-up? Weak! And easily shot down.

"You being such a good target, period, Mister Vash," she said, slipping it right in there. He was going to have to do better than that.

"Ahhg!" he said, miming a shot to the heart and a dieing gasp. "But seriously, if you've noticed all that, you must not be able to take your eyes off me."

His posture was that of someone preening with victory.

:Don't start your victory lap yet mister,: Merl thought with an inner smile as she took aim and fired.

"Because every time I do, I spend the rest of the night filling out paperwork," she replied, miming something crashing downwards and spreading out in destruction.

Vash hung his head in defeat, she had an answer for everything. It was a nice moment of smiling playful... it was almost like flirting.

"But I'm curious, since you brought it up," Meryl said genuinely a moment later. "Aside of the obvious ones, do you have any hobbies you enjoy? Secret talents or--"

Meryl shut her mouth quickly at the devilish grin that flashed onto his face, he waggled his eyebrows suggestively at her and said

"Secret talents? I have lots of them..."

Meryl raised an eyebrow and tried not the blush at the innuendo. That really would make this little conversation they were having a lot more like flirting.

"I'm serious," she said, pushing on his arm softly. "Like, have you ever... oh, taken up knitting or something? I mean you must have something you like to do on those long bus rides or when you're out in the sands."

Vash paused for a long moment, looked over at her mildly, then admitted

"I like to fold paper."

Meryl looked at him blankly. Actual real paper was a rare commodity on this world, the sheets she used for her reports were plas-film, the typewriter didn't use ink, but had a special magnetic pattern on it that made the word form into the plas-film. Paper was hard to come by, and he liked to fold it into squares or what?

"Here," he said grabbing a nearby napkin. "I'll show you. It doesn't work as well with these but..."

With quick deft hand movements Vash folded the square into a triangle and then into another, did some more creases and with a final flourish wound up with with a three dimensional bird figure, almost like magic!

"Wow!" she marveled, surprised. "That's really neat." She'd never seen anything like it.

"I can do lot's of other shapes too," he added proudly. "Flowers, rabbits, horses, bears, stars... all kinds of shapes."

She supposed that was what came with a lot of time to practice.

"Kids love them," he added. " I can do coin tricks too."

"How about card tricks?" she asked next, needling his ribs. "Ever get caught cheating at poker?"

Vash didn't dignify that with a response. Firstly, Meryl figured that if he were fast enough to dodge bullets there was no way anyone would ever be able to catch him pulling some slight of hand at a card game, secondly he rarely ever played cards in the first place and even then it was mainly as a way to pass time.

"So besides spelunking, any other hobbies you like?" he asked next.

"Well... there is one, but it's a little strange," she admitted. "Not many people are into it."

He could see a strange look cross his face and his tone was markedly cautious as he asked

"Do I want to know what it is?" there was a quirk to his mouth that told her that his thoughts probably were not as pure as the driven snow right then.

"Archery," Meryl replied, her tone repressive. "You know..." She mimed pulling a bow string back and loosing an arrow.

"Yeah, you're right, that is pretty obscure, especially here where you can't find wood so easily."

"My set was made out of fiberglass," Meryl replied. "I begged my papa for it, even though I knew he was a pacifist because it was just like--"

Meryl suddenly cut herself off having suddenly stumbled upon a shocking realization about herself. She looked over at Vash for a moment, her face taking on an "no, it can't be" look, then she glanced away to think about it again. She took a moment to process it, and prod it a bit in her mind and then decided, yes, that was indeed part of where she got the reference for it. She shook her head at herself and dismissed the matter from her mind.

Vash meanwhile was waiting for her to finish her sentence.

"Just like what?" he asked. "Meryl are you okay? You look a little odd there."

"Hm? Oh! Um, yes, it's just that... I suddenly realized something and it surprised me a little."

"What?" he asked curiously. Meryl shook her head, signifying that it wasn't very interesting so he probably shouldn't pursue it, but Vash apparently saw the embarrassed look she was trying to hide, and he chased after it like a sand fox down a chitter-hole.

"Aw c'mon, tell me," he smiled winningly.

"It's nothing," she insisted. She felt her face trying to smile even harder and she ducked her head and bit the inside of her lips, hoping the didn't look as embarrassed as she thought she looked. She wasn't embarrassed enough to get angry about it, but she didn't really want to have to explain it either. He'd never let her live it down. Never.

"It doesn't look like nothing," Vash said, cocking his head down to the side where she was trying to hide her embarrassed look, which of course only made it worse. Meryl turned away looking desperately for something else to do, but dinner was almost done but not quite done enough to let her escape.

"Well, it is nothing," she tried to insist. They both knew he wasn't buying it.

"Tellll meeee," he squeaked, then he pulled himself up and added. "Don't make me sing Henry the 8th."

"Anything but that," she muttered.

She hated that song, and he knew it. Vash cleared his throat threateningly and took in a deep breath.

"Okay fine!" she relented. "But you have to promise you won't laugh."

"I promise," he duly swore.

"Or tease me about it," she added.

"..." he paused. "Well, that I can't swear. But I'll tell you what, if you tell me this and I tease you, I give you full liberty to tell everyone else about the time I got drunk and woke up in the gutter with a litter of kittens in my trouser legs."

Meryl laughed out loud at the memory. She had been the only one of the four of them to find him the next morning, and he'd had the devils own time finding something to bribe her into silence with. She'd wrung a weeks worth of good behavior out of him, as well as a lovely new pen set.

"Only you, Vash," Meryl said in amusement. "Okay fine... I'll tell you what it is."

"I am the soul of discretion," he promised.

"Especially when I have so much blackmail material on you."

There was a small pause as she took the stuff off the stove, pulled the garlic bread out of the oven, and checked the asparagus spears.

"Well, my papa always read to me as a child." She wasn't able to not look a little wistful then, she'd loved the sound of his voice. "All the classics; Through the Looking Glass: and What Alice Found There, which to this day I am conviced had to have been written under the influence of opiates, Phantom of the Opera, Sherlock Holmes, Pinocchio... but probably my favorite one of all of them was..."

She paused looked over at him, her face utterly non-plussed, and looked away with an expression of "I don't believe this" on it.

"What?" he pressed. "I'm hanging here." Meryl sighed and admitted it.

"Robin Hood." Her tone said 'there, are you happy?'

At first, Vash didn't seem to catch the significance, then his expression cleared and transformed slowly as he then begun to see why it seemed to bother her. He looked, in a word, gleeful.

"Not a word. Not one word." she blushed.

Robin Hood, the story of an outlaw who risked life, limb and reputation to give people hope when times were hard. Oh, the parallels!

"Oh. No, I wouldn't dream of it," his face a study in confidentiality... except for the little smirk. She saw it, and she knew exactly what he was thinking. And he knew that she knew what he was thinking, which only caused the smirk to grow.

"I mean it," she told him.

"I know..." he drew out the pause, but apparently just couldn't resist. "Even at a young age, she has a--"

"Vash!" she snapped. He chuckled. She blushed and tried to hide it. He'd been about to say 'even at a young age she has a thing for outlaws.'

"Just put the bread on the table you goof," she said, sighing.

Vash just smiled, and did what she told him to.


I like this chapter mainly because it was so fun to write. Please leave a review and tell me what you thought.