It had taken him more than a few hours to complete the grid for each separate shard, but he discovered that when he completed a panel it floated over and connected itself to the edge of its already completed siblings, slowly making a shape, panel by panel. It didn't take longer than three panels for Vash to begin to recognize the shape. A pyramid shape formed, side by side, and since there were eight panels in all, it was a reasonably safe bet to make that the final shape would mimic that of the keystone, an octahedron.
He was on the eighth panel at last, and nearly finished, a mostly whole octahedron shape floated aimlessly in the air nearby, the grids glowing with a dull grey-ish light in a complex spiderweb of spiraling knotwork patterns dotted with regular nodes of intricate lacework designs. It was pretty, but he was more than ready to be done with it.
Vash tapped out the parameters on the sub grid at the last node on the tertiary grid to to the main function and followed it back to the secondary grid, absently checking for errors as he did so, but really he wasn't the sort who made errors on paper like this, his only errors were in real life.
:In real life, where I always wonder if I should have just told her how I feel and damn the consequences,: Vash thought to himself.
Altogether it had been nearly four years that they had known each other. Sure, Vash had people who had known him longer; the Doc for instance had known him for close to sixty years, but all of the people who had known him for a long time (save his brother) were on the now fallen SEEDs ship in New Oregon. The people on the SEEDs ship weren't bad people, but up until the point where they had been more or less forced to join the rest of humanity on the surface world, they had all had a bit of a phobia and paranoia with regards to their unfortunate fellow humans. They lived in a world apart, a separate world devoted to keeping the order and civilization of a by-gone day alive. It was an order of people forever looking backwards, as if by clinging so desperately to the past they could ward off misfortune. Vash had very little to do with them to be honest, and could not sympathize one little tiny bit with their attitude. In fact, he privately thought it stank. He'd been there in the hard years after the Great Fall, witnessed humanity sink to a level of almost bestial fear and occasional depravity, then pull itself up by its bootstraps and force itself into something better, force itself back onto the road to peace and hope and order. All the generations of the SEEDs shippers just looked down on them from their height with a very distant sort of pity and the hope that they'd never have to end up that way. Vash couldn't sympathize with any of the ones who lived each day in isolation and fear of change at all.
:But Meryl...: he thought.
Meryl was a surface worlder, like him. She was tough, and ornery, and occasionally violent... and yet capable of such kindness and compassion (even though she tried hard to hide it). Jessica was nice enough, and very sweet, but he just couldn't connect with her the same way. Meryl was from his world, she could understand the struggle it was just to survive from day to day, even the people who had known him the longest didn't really know where he was coming from most of the time. It was because she knew what suffering the world was capable of bringing about that Vash felt he had a greater bond with Meryl than he and Jessica were capable of. Meryl knew things about life and the world that Jessica couldn't begin to comprehend. In many ways (despite the similarities in age) Meryl was a woman where Jessica was still very much a child.
She had followed him and helped him and even protected him during some of the hardest times of his life. Granted that the Great Fall had been no picnic and traveling with Knives through their adolescence and young adulthood hadn't been a barrel of laughs either, nor had July and the ensuing years in which had been hunted by bounty hunters and the law. In Vash's mind however, none of all of those many long years in his life could hold a candle to what had happened in recent years; Legato, and the Gung-Ho Guns coming at him one by one, testing him, torturing him in different ways, making him suffer. No matter how hard he'd tried to ditch her or shake her from his trail, there Meryl had been... just a pace behind him. He hadn't realized it then but her being there had given him something real and present to focus his energy on. He had always protected people in the abstract, the face of every person he'd saved, man or woman, had been painted over by the visage of the one person he hadn't saved. Rem. But Meryl had swiftly become very much a person in her own right (if only because her sheer force of personality would not allow anything less) she'd very forcefully hollowed out her own little niche in his life (and in his heart). Now, instead of protecting people in general, he protected her.
:And a fine job I've managed of that one too,: he thought dejectedly.
Maybe it had only been a matter of time before his life caught up with her. Really, the fact that she had survived being around him for so long unscathed was beating the odds. If he'd cared for her at all, he'd have sent her packing right after she'd caught up with him on the sandsteamer but... he hadn't, and he hadn't wanted to. He'd liked having her near.
:I even kept that handkerchief she loaned me,: Vash thought with some wry amusement as his hand reached of its own accord into his coat pocket to touch the little square of white cotton like a talisman.
He'd meant to wash it and return it to her but he kept making excuses not to and she never demanded it back, so since she had seemed to forget about it, he'd just kept it. He wasn't in the habit of keeping much in the way of possessions and momentos, a hard life always on the run had made him a light traveler by necessity, but this was one possession Vash didn't intend to leave behind as useless.
He'd toyed with the idea, in his absent fantasies, of telling Meryl how much she had come to mean to him, but had always given the idea up as ludicrous. He was pretty sure she didn't see him that way, even if she was relatively nice to him. Even if she did, he was still Vash the Stampede, man with a sixty billion double dollar bounty on his head, how could he possibly hope to have anything that approached a normal life with her? He couldn't! There were assassins and Gung-Ho Guns and bounty hunters (not to mention the law) all out for his blood and that was not even factoring in his vengeful brothers input into the matter (which was not favorable). No matter what way you looked at it, it just wouldn't work. But if he were to be honest with himself, he'd admit that he'd often wished that it would.
Sometimes, during the interim year between what had happened at Augusta and when Wolfwood had found him again, he'd day-dreamed about what it would be like if he could just go to her as just an ordinary man who liked a pretty girl. He'd imagined tracking her down in her city (he knew she lived in the 2nd city of December and she worked at the Bernardelli's branch office there). He'd fantasized about casually showing up one day, with various different scenes of touching reunion (and in none of which did she hit him) and asking her out. In his mind he thought he might perhaps ask her to dinner, or, since December was famous for its theater district, he could ask her to a play. He'd imagined them doing all of the normal couple-type things that he saw everyone else getting to do (and he never got to) like strolling arm in arm down the street to take in the evening air, or attending an outdoor night-time festival. He'd imagined taking her out for drinks and dancing, playing cards at a local casino... kissing on the front porch. He knew it had never been more than an idle fantasy (for one thing, he was pretty sure Knives probably had some of his employees watching his old friends to see if he popped up) but the fancy had been an attractive one to him and one he'd indulged in often during his idle hours. Even on the SEEDs ship he'd never gotten a normal life, but even if it could only have been for a little while, he wouldn't have minded "playing house" with her. He'd even let the fantasy play out one lazy afternoon to the point where she had accepted his marriage proposal and had been neatly installed in some small apartments with him on the (then) floating Sky City. He had known that it wouldn't happen, but he hadn't seen the harm in letting himself dream a little bit.
When he'd gotten back with Knives slung over his shoulder he had been so hopeful that maybe his dreams wouldn't be just a fantasy anymore, maybe he could tell the lady who'd come to mean so much to him how he felt about her and there wouldn't be any Sword of Damocles hanging over his head to prevent him. Maybe he could stop being Vash the Stampede and just be Vash.
:Of course, then Knives just had to go and pull this crap,: he thought in irritation, tapping the last of the grid parameters into place and releasing the last panel to join the figure they made hanging in the air. It looked like someone had taken two glass pyramids and glued them together end to end and just left them floating in midair.
The octahedron descended, along with their little lift, back down to the ground and floated over to the little waist high pillar in front of the lift and inserted itself into the triangular indented slot in the top surface of the pillar. a moment later there was a great flare of light. The spiderweb-like patterns of the grids decorating the outside of the transparent octahedrons pulsed and a brilliant nimbus of pure white light osmosed into the center of the newly made multi-facted grid like someone had trapped a genie inside a strangely shaped bottle. Thick ropey strands of the glowing star-stuff spiralled out into the Source nodes of each grid from the central cloud of it and light raced along the channels of the freshly made grid like someone had set a match to an oil puddle. Once completed they pulsed once, as if making a point, then just glowed there. the pillar beneath it glowed softly as well.
Vash and Milly exchanged a long glance. Finally Vash said, with resignation
"One down, five more to go."
"You can do it Mister Vash!" Milly cheered.
A cheer which was flattened a little bit by the fact that it was followed by a yawn and the sound of her stomach rumbling.
"How about we take a short break for some food first?" he said. "I don't know about you, but I never think well on an empty stomach."
She quickly agreed and they unpacked the picnic basket that Jessica had packed for them. He felt a little bad about ordering her to stay on the ship when she had gone to such troubles to take care of him (she'd even packed his favorite foods) but only a little bad. He still didn't think having her along was such a good idea, to his mind that meant one more hostage for Knives to shoot at, or remove fingers from.
:Clearly, she's from the "the shortest route to a man's heart is through his stomach" school of courtship,: Vash thought with a wry bit of humor when the unpacking was through.
She'd packed enough to feed a small army. Granted, some of that could be because she'd thought she was going too at the time, but really, there was enough food there to feed five comfortably. It was all from the ships synth-machines, ancient technology that recombined organic substances into recognizable foods, but he could tell that she'd taken the time to rearrange the foods into an attractive display as a sign of her domesticity.
Regardless of whether or not the person who made the food for him might or might not be trying to lure him into domestication, the food was good and filling. Between the two of them they polished off most of it, the rest they set aside for later and Vash boarded the next lift to start on the next panel. Soonest started was soonest done, and he wanted this done with so he could go rescue Meryl from his brother.
