She'd left the entry-way to the stone shelter open to the night air that night instead of sealing it closed because she didn't think she could have handled being closed in right then. Her two (now three) companions all seemed to be sleeping the sleep of the mentally and physically exhausted. She had laid down at the same time the rest of them had, with the plan of getting some sleep, with all of the grid-casting and fighting and... the other thing she'd done that day, she was feeling drained herself, but even though she'd closed her eyes and her body was crying for rest, sleep would not come to her.

Though she was wrapped warmly in a blanket she'd liberated from the enemy camp her body shook in visceral memory.

It felt different from the way that using her Channels to take power from a Source-stone felt. That sensation usually felt like a mildly sharp sting, like a cat-scratch with salt water poured on it. What she had done to free her friend from Legato's psychic clutches had been another order of matters altogether. It had burned through her like fire but it had felt so cold. She hadn't thought that cold could burn so painfully.

Legato had fought her. Even as she had wrapped her Channels around him like tiny grappling vines, tangling in and taking hold of his meridians to draw him out of the body he wrongfully inhabited, Legato had struggled against her, clawing and lashing and thrashing desperately with his own powers. She'd fought him, drawing his remaining life-energy into her Channels like pulling water into a straw. It had felt like she was tearing him out, bits of him, piece by piece.

She'd pulled on him, on his vital essence, and something within her had been sickened by what she was doing. That was his Source, his vital essence, the core of him, that eternal energy that was more than the sum of the "meat" that a person was, and she was treating it like it was nothing of greater import than a Source-stone. Her spirit had rebelled against what she'd been doing, but at the same time she knew she couldn't leave Legato alone to do what he wanted with a body that was not rightfully his, so she'd continued to disentangle him from his grip on Wolfwood's Sources and his meridians. Bit by bit she'd won the battle but it came with a bitter cost.

She discovered, to her pain, that connecting her Channels so intimately to another persons Source and meridians forged an intimate connection with that person. She'd Seen him, she'd seen what made him what he was. Legato was a crazed as a mad dog, but there was no other way for him to be, the terrible things he's seen in his life and the even more terrible things he'd been made to do as a small boy... it was sickening. That anyone, especially an adult that should know better could do such sickening things to a child that could not defend himself, worse yet that the person had known of Legato's abilities and enjoyed the fact that he could feel the pervesion taking hold was beyond sick. No wonder he'd thought humanity was a low, vile thing that deserved eradication! Meryl supposed if she'd survived the things that that poor boy had to, and then been "rescued" and trained by a person who's only thought was to end the suffering of a people who had no choice but to support the rapaciousness of an ungrateful people in order to survive... maybe she'd have felt the same way.

Regardless of what had made him what he was, what she'd done to rip him out of Wolfwood's body him had felt awful. It had been a slow, cold fire spreading out along her meridians, even as she had taken him in through her Channels, he had raced along like a flame on an oil spill, trying to take control of her. Desperately she'd twisted her Channels this way and that, weaving them into patterns, blocking and sheilding him by whatever peice of his life-energy she could get a hold of, then releasing him, bit by bit into grids she wove. Every time she'd done it, she'd felt a flare of ice, so cold that it was excruciating, slam through her. He was dying, bit by bit, inside of her and she was killing him. It had been horrible. Absolutely terrible.

Meryl slipped out from her bedroll and out of the cave to be by herself. Right at that moment, she didn't think she could take being around other people whether they were awake or not. The constant grate of their energy along her own sensitive nerves and Channels still raw from the act she'd been forced to commit was maddening. The took a deep breath of the chill night air, already the temperature had dropped like a stone and it was almost cold enough to see her breath. Meryl tried not to let the sensation of sucking cold air into her lungs remind her of how it had felt to pull him into her Channels.

She'd killed him, perhaps in one of the worst ways possible because not only was his body no more but that vital energy, his Source, had been spent. It was gone, dispersed, and she did not know what happened to it. And she knew deep down without knowing exactly how she knew, that while she had killed him, he had killed a little bit of her. The cold fire that had spread out through her Channels had had left her feeling empty and achingly cold, like she would never be quite warm again.

She'd stuffed it aside in the interests of getting on with the day, but now that she had stopped moving, the horror of it had caught up to her.

Meryl hung her head, alone in the night, her shoulders bowed in an attitude of defeat. The stars burned cold and distant far away from her, and tears welled up, unbidden, in her eyes.

She'd never killed anyone before, let alone felt them inside of her, next to her heart, when they went, so she imagined that she must be feeling even worse than someone who merely had to pull a trigger or insert a knife in the correct spot (or any of the other various ways that one might visit premature and violent death on another). She had pulled out his very life's essence, struggling like a desperate beast and then she had killed it like a treacherous snake, hacking it apart bit by bit until it was no more. All of this and she had seen the person he was, she had felt the last little trickle of him slip away.

:am i a monster,: she wondered.

Was this what this power of hers was really about? She had been given a gift that was meant to create and to heal, and she had used it to destroy, worse, she had used it to take a life! She'd never asked for her powers, but she had always, in the back of her mind, figured that if she were ever really going to use them for something important, she'd use them to help people and to make the world a little better. The situation had not been a good one but Meryl couldn't help feeling that if she would have just looked a little bit harder, maybe she would have been able to think of a way to save them both.

:Impossible,: her logical mind supplied for her.

Legato had already been dead. The body-stealing meridian of what was left of his consciousness was unnatural in the world. If she had left it alone he would have continued to use it to do terrible things, things that he would have not had the right to do while he was alive, and doubly did not have the right to do while he was dead. No-one else could have pulled him out of his host and disposed of the last of him.

:If you were going to try to save what was left of him somehow,: she thought at herself. :Provided you had been able to draw all of him out of there without him taking control of you instead of his original host, what would you have done with him? Where else could you put him?:

She didn't have an answer to that question. The only thing she could think of was simply not feasible... put him in another body. Ew. No. Bu that did not change the lingering horror in her heart that she felt when she thought about how it had felt to disperse the last of his energy. That cold, terrible emptiness.

And yet... despite this horror, despite the icy grief that welled up inside of her at what she had done until her chest felt like an icy cavity, there was a core inside of her that was curiously unmoved by it all. There was a part of her made of steel and lightning that looked at the terrible thing she did with clear a clear unwavering gaze, acknowledged it and then said, 'yes it was terrible, yes I feel terrible, but it was necessary... in the end I couldn't have just left matters they way you were.' She did grieve, but there was a greater part of her that accepted her action as being the hard, but terribly correct path.

Yes she had wiped out the existence of a person, and yes the icy-fire that burned all along her had made her feel terrible... but the worst thing in her mind was that she had thought she would feel worse about it than she did. And that was why she cried.

:I must be the worst person in existence,: she berated herself. :If I were a better person, I'd feel worse about this than I do. There must be something wrong with me... do i have no principles? Am I just as cold-hearted as everyone in the office whispers about me behind my back? I must be, because even though what I did bothers me, it doesn't seem to be destroying me from the inside.:

When Vash had had to kill a person (the same one she had as a matter of fact) it had very nearly destroyed him from the inside. His cries of agony still echoed in her memory, and his pain, like the Lingering that had killed her father, had very nearly sucked his soul dry. Meryl was sad, but she wasn't torn. There was a cold, nearly indifferent part of her that said that Legato had made his decisions and she had made hers. She would live with them and he would not be around to harm anyone she held dear again.

But even so the horrible feel of his energy lingered in her senses like the horrible afterburn of swallowing a strong brandy. But it was cold and it wasn't fading, her body wouldn't stop shaking...

A great heaving sob clawed its way up from deep within her even as she tried to hold it down it was followed by another. Her body shook with the effort of trying to hold them in and she was unsuccessful. Like the contractions of labor, her body would give birth to its grief, with or without her willing consent. She curled around her misery in the night and helplessly let it do with her what it must.

She did not grieve for the fact that the person was dead, and she didn't grieve for the fact that she was the one who did it. Meryl's heart twisted with the inner knowledge that if she had the same situation to deal with all over again she'd do exactly the same. And that was what made her chest heave with grief and her throat ache with her sobs. Sure she felt bad, but if she were a better person she'd feel worse about it. What kind of a woman- what kind of a human being was she?

She heard the scuff of a heavy, and familiar footstep in the gravelly sands behind her. She tried to hurriedly scrub at her face and even out her breaths to cover up the fact that she'd been crying. She should have gone farther away if she was going to grieve, but Meryl had been wary about abandoning her friends for very long so shortly after events.

"Hey. Cold night," the deep mellow tone of the priest remarked to her.

He still sounded weak, last she knew he hadn't been able to even hold himself up... it looked like his own meridians were flowing back into their proper places faster than she had suspected they would. He was leaning against the wall to hold himself up, but his eyes were as sharp as ever and that hazy, half-stuporish look had left his face. It looked like he was back to his old, annoying self. How very inconvenient.

"Yeah," Meryl said, neutrally, hoping her voice didn't betray the fact that she'd been crying.

She wanted to maintain at least the pretense of dignity, even though it seemed that her usual iron-clad facade of capability and competence had fled her. Meryl had always prided herself on her ability to hold it together in any and all situations, she hadn't panicked as a child in the events of Stryfe, nor in the aftermath, not at Augusta nor at the Legato Incident. She didn't like people seeing her weak.

Wordlessly the strong large hand of the priest extended to her a clean square of plain white cloth, letting her know without saying anything that he knew.

"I'm good," she maintained, trying to gathered up her scattered shreds of composure and re-knit her cloak of pride.

She was betrayed by a sniffle.

"You, ah... y'wanna talk about it?" he asked.

His tone was more circumspect than she had ever heard come from him, normally he was loud and somewhat obnoxious.

"I'm f-" she started.

"You're not fine," he said flatly. "Otherwise you'd be in there with the other two sleeping the sleep of the just."

"So then why are you out here?" Meryl demeanded.

In her book, offense was always the best defense. It was one of her life's mottoes.

"Same reason y'know?" he said, slumping down to the ground and leaning his back against the rock right next to her and staring up and out at the chill, impersonal light from the stars brightened whitely by the light from the second moon.

"You don't share space with... well, I mean, we were both trying to live in this same shell, against the laws of man, god and nature I'd like to add, and you don't have that guy's soul in the same place where yours is supposed to be and not... be affected by it."

Meryl looked beyond her own sense of self-pity at what she'd just endured and noticed that the priest, nominally one of her friends, though they didn't actually interact much, was going through something too and it might be worse than what she'd been going through. After all, he'd been supposed to have been dead and suddenly his body is playing host to a cold-blooded, murdering sociopath and he couldn't do a damned thing about it. And it had been that way for weeks.

"It must have been awful," she said quietly.

Not trying to pity him, but letting him know that she could sort of understand where he was coming from. He made a small grunt of acknowledgment, typical man, always putting on a manly strong front... He was patting himself, searching for something.

"What?" she asked curious (despite the fact that she was still wiping away tears and sniffles) as to what he was looking for.

"Figures that sadistic bastard wouldn't leave me a single cig," he muttered.

Meryl laughed weakly, as she was sure he'd meant her to. They didn't say anything for a minute or two, but when the silence was broken, it was Mister Wolfwood who spoke.

"When he, uh, took up housekeeping, I tried everything I could think of to push him out, but he was just too good and I didn't have the stuff to hold him off. The only thing I could do was keep to the shadows of my own mind and poke around here and there to see if there wasn't a way I could get him out. I couldn't find a way to fight him off but I found out everything he knew about what Knives is up to. And one other thing..."

"What's that?" Meryl asked.

"He was one sick puppy," Wolfwood said with finality.

"But I saw-" protested, oddly moved to defend him, at least a little, after what she'd seen of his past.

"You saw what he wanted you to see," Wolfwood replied. "You gotta remember that he's a master manipulator. He knows that one of the ways to win out over an enemy is to make them feel sorry for ya. If you had hesitated, even for a moment, and he'd gotten even a toehold in you, things coulda been bad. Really, really bad. So, for what it's worth... I don't think you were wrong so you shouldn't, you know, beat yourself up over it."

Meryl turned, tears still creeping out of their own volition from her eyes and looked at him.

"It was awful," she whispered. "Feeling him there, like a snake made of ice, trying to weave himself inside me and take control. I think the only thing that saved me was all that practice I got with grounding, shielding and centering. I could isolate bits of him and disperse the energy before he could wrap himself around my Source. But even so, it felt terrible. Cold, and dead, and... it burned but it was still so cold. I can feel the cold in me still. But that's not the worst thing about this mess."

"What is?" Wolfwood asked quietly.

The serious side of the priest was something she rarely saw but she was glad of it on this occasion.

"Well... my father always told me that it was wrong to take a life, no matter what the provocation was. He always told me that that was a right reserved for God and not man. But then he- well never mind. But I've always tried to honor his memory by living up to the values he instilled in me."

"So you feel like you've failed him, or at least failed his memory," Wolfwood pressed gently.

"That's part of it... but to be honest that's not really what bothers me so much."

"So what is it?" he asked curiously.

So she told him.

When she was done he looked blankly back at her and after a long pause said

"Lemme get this straight. You're not freaking out over the fact that you essentially killed a person, but the only thing that bothers you is that you don't feel worse about it inside than you do?"

"Put that way, it does sound a little odd, but... yeah. It bothers me. I think there must be something wrong with me."

Wolfwood still regarded her with a blank expression and she scowled over at him

"You're a priest, you're supposed to have something yo say about this!"

"I think you're knocking on the wrong chapel door sister," he grinned wryly. "I mean, there's that old saying about he without sin having the right to cast stones. Lord knows I'm no bastion of purity and goodness over here."

Then he got a wan lopsided smile on his face as he quasi-cheerfully added

"Besides... technically he was already dead. So what you did was more like an exorcism."

"Don't slice trivialities with me," she grumbled.

Wolfwood sighed and leaned his head back, obviously trying to think of something to say. Finally he said

"I don't exactly have the purest of pasts you know. The number of people you've killed stacked against the number I have is... well, hardly worth mentioning put it that way, so I think you can understand why I don't exactly feel qualified to preach about how much guilt you should or should not feel."

"I should at least feel something!" she said with soft intensity. "But every time I poke at it and turn it over to see what's on the other side, I keep waiting for this great up welling of guilt and shame to pop up and it just doesn't. All I get is the feeling that you're right, the guy was sick. I mean, there was nothing anyone could do to save him; he wasn't just twisted, he was warped beyond all repair. There's this cold knowledge deep down in me that says you don't show mercy to a rabid dog, you kill it before it destroys something you love. I feel sad that he's dead, and I feel sad that I had to do it, but there was no-one else to do it and the consequences of my doing nothing don't bear thinking of. Even with that knowledge, I still think I should feel more than just sad about it."

"That's a toughie," he agreed with her. "But you're too practical for self-flagellation Short Girl."

"I guess you're right," she replied softly, resting her chin on her knees and staring out into space in silence.

"So... I guess you know about Knives now, I mean if you didn't before you have to by now."

"Vash told me, at least he told me the basics. Hard to believe sometimes, still. How did you find out?"

"My uh, my teacher was also my uncle-"

"Are you really a priest?" Meryl demanded skeptically, looking over at him.

"Of course!" Wolfwood replied, a little offended. "We just took a little different interpretation of the Word, that's all. Or at least my uncle did. I was trained by him. At the time he hired on with the Guns we were sort of a package deal. Ya buy one, ya get the other. My uncle mostly had me doing make-work at the time, guard a caravan, save a woman's life and so on. I got to save lives, so I guess I was okay with it. Then he hired on with Legato, this assignment was supposed to be the one where I became an equal instead of a junior partner and I got assigned one thing, tail Vash the Stampede and keep him alive."

"You were working for Knives?" Meryl said, genuinely surprised. "I don't believe this!"

Wolfwood cleared his throat and avoided her glare.

"I can't defend it," he said after a long heated silence. "The only thing I can say is that I came to realize I was on the wrong side. He's my friend y'know? I uh, I wasn't expecting ta ever have a real friend."

Meryl made a small considering noise in her throat, like she wasn't sure whether she was going to believe him or not.

"I even went against my teacher in the end," Wolfwood continued. "Fat lot of good it did me. I'm not sure that wasn't all part of his master plan now. You know, get me in close and even if I change my mind I'm still someone he trusts and Legato can sneak in through the backdoor. It sounds like something he'd think of."

"Yeah, I guess," Meryl said unhappily.

"You're, ah, sure he's gone... right?" Wolfwood said, understandably anxious.

"Oh yes, he's definitely gone," Meryl said with a heavy certainty.

Wolfwood let out a long sigh of relief. They sat for a few more minute with nothing to say, just enjoying a peaceful breather. Finally, it was Meryl who broke the silence.

"It's good you decided to be a loyal friend Mister Wolfwood," Meryl said in more normal tones. "Betrayal doesn't suit you. But there is one little matter I'd like to bring out into the open and discuss with you, just so you know how I feel."

Wolfwood must have sensed something in her secure, business-like tones that put him on edge for he looked warily over at her.

"And what's that?" he asked cautiously.

She turned and looked at him squarely, holding his gaze with her own in that strict, direct manner she had when she took on her full authority as Meryl Stryfe of the Bernardelli Insurance Society, Senior Partner and Class A-1 Disaster Investigator.

"You made Milly cry, Mister Wolfwood."

She did not sound pleased and the priest rightly winced.

"I never meant to hurt her but-" he started.

"I accept no excuses," she cut him off firmly. "Milly is my junior partner as well as my friend, and it is a credit to her that she has managed so well through a time a great grief that you, sir, are the source of. However, I do not believe that I am wrong in chastising you for your careless disregard for your own life and her feelings. It is not company policy for employees to meddle in one another's affairs save where it interferes with their working relationship; on such grounds I feel free to give you fair warning..."

Meryl paused and looked over at a nearby rock, Sighting it and spinning out a grid. A heartbeat later she gestured and it exploded. Woldwoods eyes widened.

"As the senior partner I feel it is my place to look out for her better interests; if I do not feel that you are her better interests, I will remove you. I trust I have made myself clear."

Wolfwood was still staring at the blackened spot where the little pebble had just been with wide unbelieving eyes. The rock had actually disintegrated into blackened slag in one spot.

"Cr-crystal," he managed.


I love this chapter. ^_^