Jerome stopped. "I shouldn't really be telling you this. It was a secret plan between Emma, Tim, Ludwig and me. Even Francis wasn't allowed to know: I think he knew the person involved or something... But since the plan didn't work out, I guess it's not that secret... I don't know... I just thought it was an odd coincidence that you saw a link between the Machine and those names you mentioned, so perhaps it was not coincidental..."

"Those names I mentioned?"

"Gilbert something? And Matthias... No, that's the high school gym teacher. But it was something like that..."

"Matthew?"

"Yes."

Vash and Matthew looked at each other, not knowing what to expect. Jerome was going to talk about Matthew without even knowing that he was right there next to them.

"It was stupid," Jerome continued. "We wanted to do something stupid. We couldn't have actually done it, though: it was more of a fantasy..." He shook his head. "No, B could've done it. I think she would've done it, and we would've all died of guilt. But we were lucky and someone was there before us..."

"If you tell me a secret," Vash interrupted, "at least tell it to me clearly."

Jerome hesitated. "It... It has nothing to do with me: you understand that, right? It was Emma's plan: no, it was B's plan, and the rest of us just went along with it... It's hard not to go along with stuff B says. She brought all of our wishes into it, too: Tim wanted money, Ludwig did as well, Flanny and Wally wanted recognition, and I... I don't even know what I wanted, but she usually has such good ideas and I always agree with them and suddenly she's here proposing this plan and I'm not very good with peer pressure and I'm just like Flanny in that way and it was somehow very tempting to do this simple thing to get so rich and... Here I am, making up excuses. I agreed: that's bad enough. It doesn't matter for what reason..."

"What was the plan?" Vash was getting impatient. This boy kept trailing off topic. If he was already so easily carried away by his own words, he could quite imagine him being easily manipulated by those of others.

"You won't tell anyone, right?"

Easily manipulated, huh? If Jerome didn't mind Emma's sneaky tactics, surely he wouldn't mind if Vash used them on him now... He remembered seeing Emma use rhetorical questions several times: she had used them on him when he'd snuck into her club meeting, and if he remembered right, she might have used them in music class when she helped remove Ivan's little sister from the classroom. He could give it a try...

"Do you really think so, Jerome?" This actually sounded like something Emma would say. Vash almost had to laugh, but he kept a serious look on his face as he added: "You do realize that I am entirely neutral, without exceptions?" Except that there were exceptions...

Jerome nodded quickly. "Yes, of course..." He couldn't believe that Emma's little brother of all people was so gullible. Whenever she had lies to tell, she probably fed them to him from the tablecloth. "And you don't have any friends, so there's no one you'd tell anyway."

"Mm," said Vash.

"So what we were doing..." Jerome continued. "I don't even remember it so well. There was this guy who had no friends and Emma was annoyed that we kept having to delay the plan because we kept forgetting..."

"And I'm guessing the guy with no friends was called Matthew? Or was it Gilbert?"

"Something like that... Not Gilbert: it was something like Math..."

"And what were you planning to do to Matthew?" Vash asked, glancing sideways at Matthew. He remembered what he'd told him about Emma: I met Flanny when she came to apologize for something. Something she'd planned to do, but hadn't. Something mean...

"So Tim had this idea about how we could easily get extremely rich, and it haunted him, and so Emma thought we could do it in a safe way that wouldn't harm many people... since no one would notice if he was missing..."

That wasn't an answer. "What were you planning to do?!"

"We were planning... to put Matthew in the Machine."

"You were what?!" Vash jumped forward and grabbed hold of Jerome's shoulders. He couldn't believe it. He knew Emma was conceited, but that it would go this far... How could anyone, anyone, consider locking someone up for the rest of their life, and claim this is okay because the person in question wouldn't be missed anyway? Even from a politically neutral point of view, this was completely sick.

"Vash, calm down..." Matthew whispered, but his voice was so soft that he barely registered the words.

"What were you thinking?" he shouted, shoving Jerome against the wall. "Friendless people don't matter? Friendless people don't mind if you leave them to die?!"

Jerome was looking very scared. "I... I already said it was a terrible thing to think of... and I don't think he would've died, for several reasons... and we all feel really bad for having thought of doing that..."

Vash took a step back. Perhaps he was taking this a little too far. He had all the right to be disgusted by that idea they'd had, but it was clear that most of them strongly regretted this plan, judging by Jerome's reaction and Flanny's earlier apology that Matthew had told him about. Hadn't he thought only yesterday that it didn't matter what people thought about as long as they didn't act on it? No, the disturbing part hadn't been their idea to make Matthew disappear (Vash was certain that he too, at some point, had wished someone would disappear, or fantasized about getting rich through some sort of crime). The disturbing part was how Emma - how B - had made a plan for this to actually happen, and had manipulated her friends and siblings into helping her and even believing it was okay to do this. His instinct to hate Emma had been right after all, or was it only B who was so coldhearted?

"Can I ask you something?"

Jerome nodded, still looking worried from Vash's previous outburst.

"It's about your sister. Does she have some sort of mental illness? She seems to believe she is three different people..."

The worry faded from the boy's face and he laughed. "Wrong! I don't have a sister who thinks she's three people. I have three sisters stuck in the same body. There are some people here at school who suffer from mental illness, but Emma isn't one of them. What Emma has is something different."

Vash didn't see what this would change. "Isn't that just a different way to look at it? From a psychologist's point of view, she has a mental disorder, whereas from her own point of view, she is three different people stuck in one body?"

"No," said Jerome. "Flanny, Wally and B are literally three different people. There's even a possibility that they could split apart into separate bodies. This actually happened to one of the high school first years: ever heard of Yong Soo Im and his brother?"

Vash shrugged. He knew he'd probably heard the name somewhere, but it didn't ring a bell.

"How can three people even share one body in the first place? That's not physically possible."

"It's a simple reason," Jerome explained. "Same reason you speak all those languages. Same reason Feliciano loves pasta, and Elisaveta and Vladimir hate each other. I guess you don't know much about the world. Maybe you should fix up your geography and look at a map."

As if Jerome knew so much about everything. "Well, it looked to me like she was delusional."

"Well," said Jerome, "things aren't always what they look like. Just like how Mr. Oxenstierna is a lot happier than his permanent glare lets on," - and there he was trailing away again - "or how Roderich doesn't have an eating disorder..."

"An eating disorder?" What the hell was Jerome even talking about?

"You haven't noticed how he worries about his weight?"

Vash grunted. Why would he pay attention to someone he had no interest in anymore?

"He keeps saying he needs a diet, even though he doesn't look fat," Jerome continued, "and Tim-Govert told me he often locks himself in the toilet to change into his gym clothes, and Emma told me he throws his lunch into the Machine every day. So anyone with common sense would figure out that he throws away his lunch because he's trying to lose weight. Except this isn't true. Roderich may be worried about his weight, and there are rumors he wears a corset to appear thinner, which would explain his changing in private, but he's not actually dieting."

"Then why does he throw his lunch in the Machine?"

Jerome laughed. "He simply finds the school lunches so appalling that he can't eat them without throwing up. So he throws them out and goes to the nearby town to buy himself something better, and he acts very sneaky about it because he feels pathetic for not being able to eat the food. I admit I was tempted to throw my lunch away the first time I tasted that awful food. You'd almost think they make Arthur Kirkland cook."

What had the Machine said about Roderich again? Vash rummaged through his pockets until he found the right note:

I'm never ever gonna die thanks to insecure poopooheads like Ivan and Roderich!

That was what Ivan and Roderich had in common. Insecure or not, and whatever their reasons were, both of them put food and beverages into the Exchange Machine. Both of them, without knowing it, kept Gilbert Beilschmidt alive.

Remembering that Matthew was still there, Vash looked over at him. He was crying. And however often Vash had wished for an invisibility like Matthew's, he completely understood that anyone would be upset if someone had seriously considered getting rid of them and claimed this wouldn't make a difference to the world. He knew that Jerome wasn't responsible for this, but he couldn't help feeling angry at him nevertheless.

"You know what, Jerome?" Vash spoke up. "I may not know much about your family, but you don't know much about us either. Matthew happens to be my friend. And he's standing right here next to us. Maybe you should get some glasses, or clip those bangs of yours, since you clearly can't see further than your own nose."

"Oh... Ehm... Sorry..." Jerome stammered, heading back towards the door.

"Thank you for the information, though," Vash added. "Most of it was very useful."

Poor Jerome probably already regretted having told Vash these things, but that didn't matter to him. He went to his friend and patted his shoulder, like he'd done to the Machine. Then Matthew pulled him into a tight hug, and instead of being annoyed about this like he normally would, Vash hugged him back and mumbled:

"You're unforgotten too..."

"Wait!" Perhaps Jerome didn't regret anything after all. He suddenly ran back to them, yelling: "I forgot to tell you why our plan didn't work!"

Vash sighed and stepped out of Matthew's hug to turn to Emma's little brother again. "Why didn't your plan work? Did you forget about Matthew?"

"No..." said Jerome hesitantly. "Well, yes, at first, so we kept delaying it because we kept forgetting... But then suddenly, the Machine stopped working. And this Gilbert guy was gone, and we thought... someone else must have stolen our plan..."

Matthew blinked and wiped the tears from his face. Then they exchanged uncomfortable glances. The worst part was, they already had an idea who this someone could be...