A/N: Okay! I'm going to do it! I'll finish the story. I get these spurts every once in awhile. Basically, it's whenever I go to take down Truth or Dare officially. And then I start reading the reviews, just for the heck of it, I tell myself. I'll just read them for the heck of it. And then I find myself smiling because you guys are so darn nice, and I think: "How long would it take, really, to push out another chapter, if I didn't edit it or anything?" And then I get sucked into the long, tortuous path of writing another chapter on a story that's come painfully close to dereliction multiple times. So here it is! The latest chapter! I'll undoubtedly get sidetracked and wander back in another eleven months or so and put up another one, maybe, if it doesn't get trashed first.
Renleek: Have I told you I love you lately? No? Well, I do. You have to be one of the best reviewers ever. Seriously, 40 of the reason I wrote this chapter was because of you.
ReadingWhiz89: Prepare to be surprised again! I know I am. I expected this to be on permanent hiatus. I started this chapter off with evil Knives just for you, and the beginning of the next chapter (which has, ironically, been written for over a year) also starts with Knives! Thanks so much for your support and uh...I'll work on the "update more often" thing.
SiN: Well, you'll be surprised. You didn't even have to bribe me this time. Hope you had fun on your camping ship with your smelly fish and your porty pottys and your lack of showers. Welcome home!
Aku: Thanks! I hope you like this one. I hope you read this one, considering how it's been um...a year?...since my last update.
Rain: You give very sound advice. I decided to shorten the story, as you suggested, though it will still be ungodly-long by the time I finish it. If that happens. I'll be eighty or something. I'm really glad you like it so far, though!
DrowningOphelia : Wow. That was really nice. Thanks. The update came. Late, but not never. Maybe I'll get cracking on the next chapter...it's funny, how much my style's changed since I started this story. I hope you enjoy "Deadline"!


WARNING: readers may be seriously displeased with the shortness and abruptness of this chapter. It's rather almost painful.

Knives was sitting on the edge of the bed when Rene knocked on the open doorjamb. Just sitting there, his features as cold and hard and beautiful as if they'd been cast in porcelain and kiln-fired. He face was upturned, toward the full moon, the white light delicate and bright on his profile and on the tips of his cheekbones. Rene had seen pictures of a statue once, a Grecian statue called "The Lizard Killer." That's what Knives reminded him of when he sat on the edge of his bed like that, torso bare and muscles taut—The Lizard Killer.

But perspiration beaded that smooth, gypsum skin, belying the marble facade, and strands of damp hair the color of white sand clung to his forehead and his cheeks. And in that sweat, Rene saw evidence of another nightmare. Another sleepless night. Another spell of darkness paralyzed by the pain of scars that had healed but not yet disappeared.

"My lord." Rene said.

Knives didn't respond, not at first. Rene could see him swallow, Adam's apple bobbing, long white eyelashes flickering closed, then open again. The heat of the summer was heavy, the kind that made Rene feel like he was choking in tepid water, and a sheen of sweat sugarcoated his skin, made his dress shirt stick to his back. After an interminable silence, he heard Knives' voice—wintry, lilting, authoritative. "The girl."

Rene wiped the back of his neck with his sleeve, running his hands through lank hair. "The target, you mean?"

Knives turned to look at Rene, one half of his face bright and glowing in the moonlight, the other black and unlit in the shadows. There was something chilling in the dichotomy, something so symbolical of the battle between good and evil this man had fought once—a battle, Rene suspected, that Knives still fought sometimes, on nights like these. "Yes," he said. "The girl, the target." He turned back to the window, the latticework on the pane casting two long, linear, crisscrossed shadows across his shoulder. "Meryl," he said quietly, to himself.

"What about her, my lord?"

Knives inhaled deeply through his nose, chest rising. His full lips stuck together, just a little, when he spoke. One terrible, little word that had the power to change four lives forever:

"Now."


It had its perks.

It was windswept, and little breezes would pick up pieces of trash—shopping bags, coffee cups, cigarette butts—and carry them a ways. It would send them skittering across blacktop that was scarred and ruptured, with knotty weeds tangling up through the cracks in the tarmac, before they'd hit a building or a fence. Then the litter would flutter a bit, batting against the wall the way a moth's wings bat up against a closed window. And then the breeze would die down and the trash would fall back to the hot pavement, where it would stay until the next zephyr came along.

It smelt. The smell wasn't overpowering, but it was obvious and unpleasant. It was that ammonia smell, that piss-and-vinegar, three-day-old-vodka smell. And it never seemed to go away, no matter how much cologne Vash dabbed beneath his chin.

It was old. Derelict. Everything seemed to be infected with rust or weeds or House of Usher-type fractures.

And yet, the city had its perks. Like now, Vash thought as he closed his eyes and listened to the smack jazz on the streets. The clouds lowering in the sky were almost pleasant in contrast to the ugliness of the cityscape. There were birds of some type way up on the steel rafters of the unfinished building skeleton above him, their talons making clicking sounds against the metal. The construction site where he'd stopped to eat his donuts was lovely, in its own right, he supposed.

And it gave him a chance to think. To process what it meant to be hot and cold at the same time; to muse over why his heartbeat had doubled when Meryl had touched his face. Why his lips went dry when she looked at him. Why he was feeling nauseated and exhilarated at the same time, unable to look away when she way in the room, unable to think because he was so consumed with feeling. The symptoms were all there. What he couldn't figure out was why.

Vash had decided to get rid of those troublesome emotions two years ago, when they'd both willfully made a mistake that had cost them their friendship. When he'd broken her heart. When she'd written that letter. And now they were all back, the crummy things, and twice over.

"Mr. Vash, sir?"

Vash cracked his eyes open. A little boy was standing in front of him, a little child wearing a pageboy hat and short slacks that showed off dirty little knees and scuffed-up bowling shoes. His thumbs were looped around his suspenders, and he rocked back and forth on the heels of his scuffed-up shoes in a nervous idiosyncrasy.

"Hey, there," said Vash, sitting up with what felt like the first easy smile he'd managed in years. Then he saw something in the boy's plump hand, something that made his smile go cold and his stomach turn into a stone. It was a paper. A yellow paper envelope without any markings on it at all. "What's that in your hand?" He asked as casually as he could manage around the knot that had tightened in his throat.

The boy gave Vash the envelope, which had five small dimples in the paper from where his five small fingers had clutched it. Vash didn't bother to look up; he didn't notice the pit-pat of scuffed bowling shoes as the boy ran down the street, ran past playground with faded hopscotch and abandoned double-dutch jump ropes. He didn't notice anything at all, except a rushing sound in his ears and the stone in his stomach and the knot that made it hard for him to swallow.

His fingers did not tremble when he tore the side of the envelope open, rattling it until a paper and something glittery fell out into the dust. Vash picked up the paper, hands steady as he unfolded the white paper and read the two, black-inked words with desperation.

Then he dropped the letter, digging into the dust between his knees, looking for the glittering thing, though he already knew what it would be. And as he held up the achingly familiar slender, gold earring, his fingers were shaking.

Oh, they were shaking.

A breeze came along and picked up the white paper with the two black-inked words, carrying it a ways. The paper skittered across the blacktop, tumbling over knotty weeds that tangled up through the cracks in the pavement. And then, all of a sudden, it hit a chain link fence. The paper fluttered frantically for awhile, until the wind died down, and then it drifted to the dirty street. Illuminated by the setting sun and the lampposts, one could just make out the words:

WHERE'S MERYL?

Another zephyr came along, and then the paper was gone.


Meryl did not like the city at all.

It had no redeeming factors. The grit of industry clung to everything—to the windows, to the streetlamps, to the stop signs and yield signs and traffic lights. Grime clotted doorknobs and brick and rebar. And it was always windy here, and unfriendly, hostile, hot wind. There was trash everywhere, and with the trash came the slow, infiltrating smell of decay and compost. And then there was the quiet.

God, it was quiet.

Like now, when dusk was just about to fall. There should have been noise—the banging of shutters and doors, the shouts of children, the creak of rotten ropes as the well bucket swung in the breeze, the click of glasses and cueballs. Instead it was silent as a grave.

Meryl walked down the street, right down the middle of the street, following the broken yellow line of the median. The streetlights on both sides of the avenue were dark, all of them, but she could take care of herself. There'd be hell to pay if someone thought that this short, slender— almost boyish—woman would make an easy target. Hell.

Something black moved behind her.

Meryl saw it, just barely, in her peripheral vision. Something black—and big. She slid her hand inside her coat, feeling the stock of a derringer worn smooth by the patina of years and polished bright, as if it were new-minted.

Something light sounded behind her.

Meryl unbuttoned the holster with a near-silent pop, the sudden weight of the one-shot pistol in her hand reassuring. Familiar. Meryl turned around with molten, recited speed, bringing the gun up as she did, one eye closed. Just like when she'd been a kid and she'd practiced shooting bottles in her backyard with one eye closed, and her father had chided her. "Both eyes open, Meryl," he'd said, frustratedly, shifting his bulk on the bleached wood fence. "You'll see twice as well."

Only, the street was empty. She was alone.

Meryl hesitated before she lowered the derringer, not quite satisfied with chalking it up to nerves. Though she hadn't been sleeping well lately, a certain blond gunman monopolizing her thoughts. Meryl turned around again, too stubborn to hasten her steps as darkness dropped all around her.

The scuffle to her left wasn't her nerves though, not this time. Meryl whirled, cocking the pistol. "Halt!" She cried, her own authoritative voice echoing back to her tauntingly: halt, halt, hahahalt.

No reply. This time, though, the suffocating silence didn't fool her. She slid out another pistol, squeezing off a shot and hearing the ricochet of the bullet off the wall, the spray of brick, the tinkle of a shell falling. No cry of surprise. No shout of pain.

A miss.

The fear she felt next was unexpected, unfamiliar, and Meryl detested it. She turned on heel, hating the way the derringer in her right hand had suddenly become hot and slippery with sweat. This time, she could only sense the motion. On the right. Fast. She raised the derringer cautiously, peering into the phantasms that shifted in the shadows. "Who's there?" She asked.

The lack of reply was eery now, now that she knew for sure she wasn't alone. Finally the loneliness and the silence, the ache of travel that had settled deep in her bones and the exhaustion of too much fitful slumber overwhelmed sense. She ran. In the sides of her vision, she saw things. Streetsigns that ran together. Plays of lights. Patches of darkness. She ran.

At the end of the street, she turned a wide corner, foot catching on a lip in the asphalt. She tumbled forward. Meryl tried to catch the fall with her hands, but her right arm slipped, skinning her elbow, and her right shoulder and jaw took the brunt of the fall. She could taste the salt of gravel and the metallic blood inside her mouth, felt vague fires and pains and heat on the right side of her body. The empty derringer bounced out of her hand, though she managed to clutch onto the loaded one through some sheer dumb luck.

Still, there was no indication that she was not alone. And yet, she knew that she wasn't. She brought herself up on quivering arms, a tiny drop of blood rolling off her swelling lip and landing on the blacktop. Then another. The air smelled rotten.

She reached forward an abraded hand, fingers jittering and jumping as she tried to make them close around the empty gun she'd dropped. And then all of a sudden there was an arm helping her, picking her up.

Vash. It was Vash, she thought to herself with relief. But the thought was cut short as the gentle arm suddenly tightened, turning steel as it clamped around her neck and her mouth, making spots of white pop around the corners of her vision. She had few impressions before she passed out: something rough over her nose. Screaming lunge. The smell of sterile alcohol. Black. The spasmodic flex of her finger on the trigger. The ring of gunfire, as though coming from the end of a very long tunnel. A shot gone wild. Black. Aching. Color. And then, Black.

Only this time, everything stayed black.


A/N: Er. Reading that, it seemed quite a bit worse than it sounded when I was writing it. Unfortunately, I no longer have to patience to sit an hour or two with my chapters and make sure they come out decent. Sorry!
Maybe the next one will be better...
Maybe the next one will be less than ten months away...