Sorry for the long delay, people, but the end of the school year has been hectic. I swear I'll seriously buckle down and write during the summer! Long, meaningful chapters! Really! *Shifty eyes*
If you haven't looked at my profile, er, good for you, because…um…it's a sort of important spoiler kind of thing for this story. So if you have a relatively deductive mind and want to save the ending, don't read it! Even though I still have a few more plot twists up my sleeve…*looks at tank top* Er…arm-hole…whatever…
Thanks to:
Kayla, Agent Apples, Sforzando, AmoebaFive, KaikaNozomi, Tigerrelly, TeaRoses, Molly-chan the Anime/game fan, Garden Panda, Saiyan Butterfly, Alucard, FallenStardust, Mikara, and Legato's Girl.
HERE IT COMES, PEOPLE! PREPARE TO SEE MILLY ACTUALLY HAVE SOME LINES!!!
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That man was not easy to catch.
We scoured the town for hours on end before an old man sitting on a porch at the edge of town told us in a slow, gravelly voice that a young man had calmly strolled out into the desert about an hour and three quarters ago.
I smacked my forehead and walked around in a distressed little circle, pondering my next move. We had just found him and he had already slipped out of our hands. A little voice in the back of my head reminded me of how Vash had always evaded us like that when we had first met.
"Aren't we going to go after him, Meryl?" Milly asked hesitantly.
I had another fit of deja vou. That had been happening a lot lately.
I shook my head, torn between two undesirable options. According to Bernardelli policy, if a criminal like Wosharu ran, we had no obligation to follow him and were expected to return to the main office. Since he hadn't gained his bounty for extreme property damage, just murder, we were only supposed to supervise him if the conditions were safe and stable for ourselves. I could either go back to a world of boredom at the office, or I could follow a man who might very well kill me and risk losing my job.
I let out a long-suffering sigh. "He wasn't supposed to leave the town! DAMMIT!" I shouted, releasing some of the frustration that had been pent up in me from all of the events of the past two weeks. From Knives wrecking the restaurant to us having to leave Vash to this strange attraction towards this Wosharu fellow, I was definitely having a bad month. And two weeks ago I had been so carefree, in such a good mood! It wasn't fair, damn it. I looked around desperately at the little houses in this town with families inside. Children playing in the street. Mothers calling in the distance. Fathers returning home from work.
Why couldn't I have all of this? I thought desperately. What have I ever done to deserve such a depressing, abnormal, lonely life? I had reached such a low that I had only two short hours ago felt the urge to kiss a man I'd only known for 15 minutes! I was pathetic. I blinked a few times, fighting back the moisture rising in my eyes.
"Meryl? Are you okay?" Milly asked hesitantly, moving closer to me. She put one arm over my shoulders. "I know it hurts, Meryl. It hurts for you, but you can't dwell on it or else you'll never be able to recover. You can't stop loving, but you have to move on."
"I don't know how you do it, Milly." I said with a certain degree of awe. "I could never understand how you got over it so quickly after...well, you know." My cheeks burned. I was so insensitive.
But it didn't seem like Milly noticed. She was looking off into the horizon, a distant look in her eyes. "I didn't get over it," she said softly. "I'm not sure I'll ever get over it. We didn't know each other for all that long and it wasn't much more than one night of happiness for me before…" she choked slightly. "…he left. But I loved him. Loved him more truly than I think I've ever loved anything or anyone in my entire life."
I remembered Milly's face when she had seen Wolfwood's body slumped before the altar in that small church. I never wanted to see that expression ever again in my entire life. I had never known that eyes could hold that much grief.
She turned to look at me, and I could see that she was struggling with tears just as much as I had been. "We still might see Vash, Meryl. I don't know if you were actually watching him when we left that hotel, but he looked just as devastated as you did when the chief first called us about leaving."
I couldn't come up with a retort to that, no matter how much I wanted to. All along I had been telling myself that if he had wanted us to stay, then he would've tried to stop us, but now that I thought about it I realized that he had been trying to do that in his own, fumbling manner.
"Vash, you're a big boy. I'm sure you got along fine before we came along."
"Not nearly as well as I did once you came along."
Now that I thought about it, what had that cryptic comment meant. Had it been his way of telling me that he wanted us to stay…that he wanted me to stay? At the time I had hardly been listening to what he had said because I had been concentrating so hard on concealing my own grief.
I shook my head, trying to clear it of all of these wayward thoughts and concentrated on the task at hand.
"We have to do our job, Milly. We can't follow him. It's not worth it." I turned to smile sadly at my partner. "It looks like our adventures are over. Let's head home."
Milly mirrored my smile and nodded. "Yeah, let's go home."
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A shadowed figure watched as Meryl and Milly walked back to their Thomases and departed, smoking a cigarette contemplatively.
"So, I guess I've pushed two more people away," Wosharu sighed. "Well, I gave them the opportunity. I'm sure they could've caught me if they wanted to…" He walked slowly off to the bar to have a drink or two.
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Traveling with Knives across the desert was more enjoyable than I thought it would be. I was used to traveling alone for the most part, so it was a pleasant surprise when I found that Knives enjoyed frequently engaging me in conversation, despite the fact that much of it ended up turning into good-natured arguments. Knives proved to be a master of sarcasm, and I left him with an enormous amount of things to make fun of me about.
The fact that I didn't know which way Meryl and Milly had gone was one of his favorite, and he brought it back at random times to rub in my face for the duration of the journey.
But underneath his cool, sometimes snide exterior, I could sense that he was desperate for some information about who he was. That was, of course, a subject that I still had to tread carefully around as I had no idea what he would do if he knew the entirety of his past character and actions.
Other than the fact that I didn't have to travel with only the conflicting voices in my head as companions, the trip wasn't all that pleasant. Firstly, I had no idea whether we were going in the right direction or not. For all I knew, we would have to completely circle the planet before we got to where Meryl and Milly were, and that wasn't a prospect I was looking forward to.
Eventually, to my and our food supply's relief, we arrived at a town. Small and dingy, maybe, but still a town. It really didn't consist of anything more than a main street lined with houses with a well in the center.
"There's no reason your insurance girls would want to stop in a place like this," Knives sniffed. "We should continue."
"Yeah, well my stomach thinks otherwise," I countered. "We'll just stop and get some food and water and then we'll keep going again, alright?"
"It's a waste of time. We have plenty of food."
"Well, last time I checked, you didn't have any important appointments scheduled, did you?"
Knives snorted and folded his arms moodily but didn't say anything else.
"Look, you can wait for me in there," I jabbed a thumb towards what appeared to be a bar. "I won't take that long."
Knives nodded shortly and I walked off to the store.
------------------------------------------(Knives' POV)----------
The bar was dark and dingy, and its occupants relatively disreputable-looking. I sat at the bar and made sure my coat fell back to openly reveal the hand gun Vash had given to me before we had left.
I ordered a drink and leaned on one elbow, zoning out the bar's other patrons. Vash was such a wuss. We could've lasted at least another three days with the supplies we had left, and then some. I pondered just why I was staying with him anyways.
You can live perfectly fine on your own! A small, sinister voice said in the back of my head. You were alone before you lost your memory and you can be alone now, too!
But Vash is the only person you have! Another, different voice responded. He's the only person who knows about your past. You can't just abandon your past, can you?
I mentally shook myself. All this inner conflict did was succeed in making me more confused. I felt eyes on me and turned to the man next to me, who was casually sipping a drink and watching me openly.
"What do you want?" I asked roughly, eyeing him suspiciously. He reminded me of someone…
He gave me a half-smile. "You were talking to yourself. I think it's fun to listen to schizophrenic people."
"And I think it's fun to gouge idiots' eyeballs out," I snarled. "Mind your own business."
"Whatever," he shrugged. "Then I guess you wouldn't want to know about the two girls from the Bernardelli Insurance Society that passed through here two days ago."
My head snapped up. "How did you know we were looking for girls from the Bernardelli Insurance Society?" I asked suspiciously.
He smirked and took a swig from his glass. "I know lots of things. In fact, I bet you'd be surprised at how many things I know."
"Oh really," I narrowed my eyes at him.
I didn't like this. I didn't like this at all.
I stood up abruptly and strode towards the door, turning back to look at the man before I exited.
"You stay right there." I waved one finger at him threateningly and went off to find Vash.
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Oooooo! How does Wosh know all this stuff? Is Knives' old self slowly starting to reappear? Am I making this up as I go along? Yes I am! So help me out and review!