TWENTY-THREE: untold troubles
Stryker had tried to understand, but women were still a mystery to him after all this time. He lay near the campfire, gazing into her face, trying to contemplate what was going through her mind. She must be dreaming again, but what?
This was about as close as it got to torture, he realized. Milly was as gentle a creature as he had ever laid eyes on, as far as her heart was concerned. Well, that didn't mean she was physically gentle. She lugged around that damn stun gun, which in itself was enough to make him shudder. And he had patched the new holes that Vash had returned with after his bout with the other plant spawn. Meryl had been pissed that they had come all this way without him saying a word, but Vash had insisted that they hadn't had the time to wait around back at the shuttle.
He sighed. Milly was a hell of a woman. Every inch, every feature, but she still had the mindset of a child on occasion. He found himself drawn to her, as though guided by an angel to all the better things in life. He couldn't begin to describe the feelings that slammed through him with every pulse of his racing heart. Nobody understood the better things in life quite like Milly Thompson, and in the short time he had known her, he had already come to understand. She head one of those smiles that bore into him, whittling away at his heart and soul, shaping it into the mold of a man he did not recognize. A man he wanted to get to know.
Milly made Stryker feel like a new man.
He gazed out away from the campfire to see the man in red, sitting out in the desert and watching the Fifth Moon. He wondered what his duplicate was thinking, but he didn't plan on interrupting. Vash hadn't said much in awhile, and if he really wanted to say anything, Stryker knew that he would.
On the other side of the fire lay Meryl, curled up comfortably near the roaring flames. She slept as peacefully as her gentle counterpart. It was no wonder that Vash had grown so close to the pair over the years. It was an honor that they had accepted him into their tightly-knit group. Stryker had never been so readily accepted into any group in his past; only the Rykers had ever made him feel accepted. Now, Vash, Meryl, and Milly drew him in as if he were family.
It occurred to him that the three of them were closer than any family, tightly bound by the spirit of love and friendship.
They had traveled for twenty-four hours since the destruction of the SEEDS ship. Vash had wanted to get as far away from the ruins as physically possible. Somewhere along the line, they had run out of gas in the bikes and had to leave them to continue on foot. Stryker hadn't been too disappointed; after all, he had reached his target, and he could walk forever if he had to. His one concern was the girls. They only stopped now because they didn't have the near stamina of the plant spawn.
A smile crept across his features. He watched Milly dream.
He thought to the discussion they had shared back in the shuttle while Meryl waited for Vash to return from the desert with news of his brother's execution. While Vash was suffering great pains, Stryker was coming to understand Milly in a way that drew him ever closer to her.
She'd talked more about her family and her desire to build one of her own. She'd talked about Meryl the workhorse, Meryl the shrew, Meryl the angel, the dedicated, the determined. She'd talked about Vash the Stampede, the most human soul she had ever met despite the fact that he wasn't human at all. She even described herself in her own, simple words.
I'm just me!
Well, it had been short and sweet, at least. In its own simple way, it had been a profound explanation. He respected that. But it was the things she didn't say that drew him to her, the things that didn't require words to reveal truth. She was overflowing with love. She loved Meryl, and Vash, and all her family, and all of the people of this desolate realm. Love was a beast of many colors, and he could detect a hint of sadness when he asked if she had ever found on brand of love she hadn't mentioned.
Well, there was one, but he went away. He left me to take care of them, and I always will. Not just because he asked me to but because I want to with all my heart.
She hadn't said a name, and he hadn't pressed matters.
He must have been a good man, he had mused.
Milly had simply glowed as only she could. He was the best of men, like you and Mr. Vash, she had replied.
He reached out and brushed a strand of hair from the sleeping girl's face. If he was the best of men, it was only because she and her friends had somehow brought it out in him. As he moved his hand away, she stirred, an odd little smile playing on her lips. Slowly, her eyes slid open and she stared into the rippling flames of the campfire.
"Oh…"
She turned her face to look at Stryker, and in a moment, she realized precisely where she was and her face began to glow with embarrassment that he was watching her.
Not that she didn't like the prospect of his eyes on her.
"Mr. Stryker!" she started, sitting up. "You're still awake?"
He smiled. "Couldn't sleep." He smiled and scooted a little closer to her. He held out a canteen, offering her some water. "Just thinking, that's all."
"Oh, thanks." She took the canteen and took a healthy swig. "Wow. It's still cold."
She shifted into a sitting position and slid to his side. "Thank you for coming with us. It means a lot."
He had to smile. "I don't know why I wouldn't. You three are more amazing then anyone I've run into in a long while. Your friendship reminds me of my foster parents. You guys care so much for each other. I don't think there's a place in the world I'd rather be." He cast her a sidelong glance, smiling.
She beamed. "That's really nice of you to say, Mr. Stryker. I'm just glad you decided to come, that's all."
She sat there a moment, gazing into the fire with a sparkle in her eyes. She couldn't help but shoot an occasional glance to Vash's duplicate. Apparently he was around 24 years old. Vash had been born well over a century ago. She wondered what life had been like back then, before Knives had destroyed Project SEEDS.
She sighed happily and sat there, soaking in life for all its worth.
Meryl lay upon the cool ground in a peaceful sleep. Her hair was strewn across the sand, collecting particles that caused it to glimmer in the faint light of three of Gunsmoke's moons. Her mouth parted slightly to allow her to breath silently. They were slow and deep, peaceful and calm. Stirring slightly, she laid her face against her slightly clasped hands, locked together as in silent prayer.
Her frame lay curled tightly together, much like a child in a fetal position, protecting itself. Eyes fluttered ever so slightly to give wake to the sleep cycle known as REM. She was lost in the world of her dreams, where life becomes the nightmares that can terrify any soul…the one place she could not escape her fears.
.... .... x .... ....
"Higher, Daddy! Higher!" she cried.
The man behind her laughed as he tossed her into the air with a grin. "Richard!" a woman screamed. "You're going to drop her! Put her down right now!"
The man relented and gave her a kiss on the nose, letting the small child run towards her mother. She was a younger image of Meryl, the same violet eyes sparkling up to her mother as she attempted her version of a puppy-dog face, something Meryl had never learned to master.
"Oh, but Mommy! It was wonderful! I felt like a bird."
The woman merely smiled and gave her a kiss on the forehead, and then turned to glare at the man who was staring out over the desert. "Go inside Meryl. Set the table."
The image faded into inky blackness. For a time, there was nothing, only the darkness of sleep, and then the haze of the dreamworld returned. Meryl stood there, two or three years older than she had been only moments ago, a pair of scissors clasped in one hand, a wad of black hair in the other.
"Oh Meryl! What have you done to your lovely hair!" Her mother swept into the room as those same violet eyes turned and offered a cheesy grin. She gently pried the scissors from the girl's hands. A man stood behind her mother. He took one look at Meryl and started laughing. "Richard! Stop it! Look what your daughter has done to her lovely hair!"
But Richard didn't stop laughing. He walked over to Meryl and gave her a kiss on the nose, just the way he had always done. She loved it when he kissed her nose. "Don't listen to your mother, sweetheart. You look beautiful." With that he walked out, his laughter fading with the memory until it slowly washed away.
A new image replaced the one before. Ten years later. She could remember to the day what she was seeing now, because it had been her eighteenth birthday.
Two suitcases sat on the bed, clothes strewn about the room as she packed. Her mother stood in the doorway, drying the fresh tears from her face.
"I have to go, Mother," Meryl said, folding another shirt and slipping it atop the others in the suitcase. "Can't you see that? I have to live my own life. I want to travel. I want to see the world. I'm sorry, but I have to leave."
She leaned down and clicked the suitcase closed before turning to stare at the woman leaning against the doorframe, crying. "You could end of dead, Meryl. Don't you know it's a dangerous world out there? The world is filled with dangerous people. I don't want to lose you like we lost your brother."
Meryl shook her head and walked over to her mother, laying a hand on her cheek. "I'll be careful, Mom. You know me."
"Of course I do, but…"
"I promise, Mom. If I run into any dangerous men out there, I'll run the other way as fast as I can, alright? But I really have to leave."
She lifted her suitcase and left the room, walked down the hall she had run through so many times as a child, and stepped out onto the porch where she used to play checkers for hours on end with her brother. A man waited for her outside, staring out into the desert as he had so many times before. She moved beside him and set the suitcase down to stare off into the rising sun, right alongside him.
"So, you're really leaving us, are you?"
She paused a long moment and then nodded, never turning to look at him.
"I'm glad. You need…no, you deserve better than this." He cracked a tiny smile and turned to kiss her on the nose, then walked away from her, never even saying goodbye. Meryl raised a hand blindly to her eyes and wiped away the tears before she picked up her suitcase and walked away from her childhood, disappearing into the horizon she had so often gazed upon wondering about a world she had never seen before. And now, she somehow belonged there.
.... .... x .... ....
Silent tears slid down her cheeks as she lay with her back to the fire, lost in a miasma of troubled dreams. Most were a mix of images of her past somehow molded into the visions of her parents and things she had done in her youth. Memories she didn't know she had filled her own, private dreamworld, giving rise to the pain of untold troubles.
She slowly tossed and turned as her dreams shifted to her career, and the girl she had met within three months of the beginning of her tenure at the Bernardeli Insurance Society.
.... .... x .... ....
Meryl stood at her locker, reading a recent letter from home. Things weren't going well, but that was no surprise. Her father had been gone a lot recently, doing God-knows-what at God-knows-where. With a sigh, she folded the letter and shoved it into her locker. She slammed it shut, turned, and leaned against the cold metal.
Her thoughts were interrupted a moment later by the faint sound of crying from the next room. She straightened her blouse and headed into the adjoined room to see the new girl reading a letter of her own, crying softly to herself over them. She leaned against the lockers and spoke softy: "Hey, are you all right? I'm Mer…" The big girl suddenly flung herself into Meryl's arms, swallowing her into a crushing embrace. "Whoa! Hey, it's okay."
The girl pulled back and nodded. "Oh, I just miss home. It seems so much has happened since I was there."
Meryl couldn't help but smile. The girl had only been here for three or four days, straight from home if she remembered correctly. "I know how that can be. But if you ever need to talk I'm here, okay?" She smiled and squeezed the girl's hand gently.
"Really? Oh, you're so nice! I'm Milly, Milly Thompson! You're Meryl right?" She grinned brightly. "You're not as bitchy as the others said you were."
She gave Meryl her biggest, sweetest smile. Meryl couldn't help but smile back, though she was secretly plotting against her other co-workers. "Nice to meet you, too, Milly. And yes, I'm Meryl. Meryl Stryfe." She held out her hand for the girl to take but was sucked into another enormous hug…
.... .... x .... ....
Meryl turned about in her sleep and yawned.
.... .... x .... ....
"Milly, look at all these new reports. House destroyed, cause: Vash the Stampede. City decimated, cause: Vash the Stampede. Plant ruined, cause: Vash the Stampede. How can one man cause so much damage?" Meryl asked as she shuffled through file after file. All of them were in the file under Vash the Stampede.
"Well, Meryl, he is the sixty billion double-dollar man," Milly replied. She raised her head from her pen and paper.
"I'm tired of being in the office Milly. I think we need to take the boss up on his offer and take the assignment."
Milly gawked at her. "But Meryl, wouldn't that be dangerous?"
Meryl gave her a look and simply shrugged. "Well, yeah, but I'm dying of boredom sitting at this desk all the time. I didn't leave home to sit around reading reports all day. I'm more of a field worker, you know?"
"I guess. Me too."
"So you don't mind going with me?"
"Not at all. You've been my best friend for six months. I don't want you going off to do anything foolish without me."
Meryl grinned. "Well then, let's go tell the boss." She rose from her seat, and soon the memory was drowned in shadows, replaced by the void of sleep.
For only a short time. Soon, Meryl was engulfed in a new series of images. She saw the man in red, the fool of a man who would do seemingly anything for a thrill. He was a nut job. Looking back, she had no idea just what she was getting herself into. She had a difficult time convincing herself that Vash was truly the feared outlaw that she and Milly had been sent to investigate. She was always yelling at him, knocking him upside the head and shouting demeaning names at him.
She'd been wrong, terribly wrong about Vash the Stampede. Here she was now, typing out what was supposed to be a report for the insurance company about all the destruction and devastating deeds committed by the Humanoid Typhoon, but she couldn't find the words. Truth was, he wasn't at all like the man she had come out here to find. The way she looked at him had changed over her time with him, as the truth behind his way of life was revealed. In time, she even began to develop feelings for the Humanoid Typhoon.
"Stop! You're hurting him!" Remembrance shifted to her racing heart. God, it hurt. She was running, she had to keep running toward the jeep racing her way, dragging Vash behind it along the desert floor. Keep going! her mind screamed. You can't let it end like this! Not like this!
A man stood over Vash, firing repeatedly at him, demanding that he smile, to have the decency to die like a man. But Vash lay beneath him, a defeated soul with no real reason to go on living. They were right about him. He was Vash the Stampede, and no more than a killer. He had pulled the trigger on Legato. He was just like Knives.
"Don't get defiant with me! I've heard enough of your crying! This is for everyone you've ever hurt!" The man fired at him several rounds, though he did not kill Vash. Not yet. Meryl ran, her heart hammering against her chest. "Now smile! At least you can have the decency to die like a man! Smile!" Vash lay there, taking his punishment like a rag doll, as if he had already given in, as though he were already dead. The scene broke Meryl's heart. The man with the gun glowered: "I said smile, damnit!"
"Stop it!" Meryl shouted. She got to his side, falling to her knees beside the man she had fought so hard to nurse to health, though he already acted dead inside. Violet eyes pleaded up to the man with the gun, aimed at Vash, her fallen friend and comrade. "Please, don't kill him! You don't understand…he fought to protect everyone. I beg you, please don't kill him. He just came here to heal; he wasn't going to hurt anyone."
"Get out of my way!" The man swiped out with his gun, knocking Meryl away from him, clearing a path for his bullet.
Milly was at her side in an instant. "Meryl!"
The man glared at her. "Could a normal human being have done all of those horrible things? He had to be the one! Who else could've been responsible?"
"No! You're wrong!"
"Then tell me why! Why the hell did Steven have to die such a horrible death, huh?! Answer me!" The man started to break down. His voice wavered as a sob threatened to disarm him. "Answer me…"
Meryl sat there, unsure of what to do. She shot a sidelong glance at Vash. He hadn't moved. He was broken, but he was alive. She had to defend him, as he would have defended anyone else. Slowly, she rose to her feet. "I've…I've watched him for a long time so I know. It's true that he can't avoid fighting, but this man knows how to live. To live like a decent human being. Shooting him won't help anyone."
A shot echoed across the desert. Meryl flinched, but held her ground. "Don't feed me your garbage! We have the right to shoot this monster for everything he's done! We lost friends, families, neighbors, and even children! We should hate this bastard and now he deserves to die!"
Meryl turned her fearless gaze back to him. "But you're wrong," she whispered. This wasn't just about Vash anymore. Her heart spilled a thousand tears for every soul that had suffered in the wake of the nightmare that clung to him like shadow. Wherever this man goes, he always leaves trouble behind him. It was true, far more than she realized. "No one ever has the right to take the life of another person. No one. No one ever has the right to take the life of another. No one." She took a step forward. "And everyone. Everyone deserves a future."
She heard Vash move at her side. She heard him turn his gaze to her for the first time. Her heart sang for him. The dark spirits evaporated, and suddenly she knew she was in the right. "Oh, Rem," he whispered. There was that name again. But what did it mean? Who was this Rem that he held so near to his heart?
Her eyes shifted back to the man with the gun. It wavered, slipping back and forth from Vash to herself. "Don't you think it's true?" she asked, taking another step forward.
"Wait…stay back! Didn't you hear me?! I said stay back!"
"Please," Meryl murmured. "Please, it's time to stop the fighting now."
She held her arms out at her side. Now she came forward in slow, intent strides. There would be no going back. She didn't want to go back.
"Why…why are you doing that? Please get back!"
Meryl refused to stand down. Not now. "It's up to us to end the cycle of hatred. If we don't work to end the sorrow this time, then the cycle of pain will just continue on. When we were all born, were any of us made to steel or cause others harm?"
Slowly she held out a hand. She lay it on the man's sidearm, knowing without a doubt that he would not pull the trigger.
And he didn't.
.... .... x .... ....
Months later, she stood at the edge of the town where she and Milly had nursed Vash back to health, staring out at the vast desert. He hadn't come…it had been eight whole months and they still hadn't heard a peep from him, no sign that he was even still alive. Not so much as a rumor. She frowned and shook her head. The wind swept sand about her like a tunnel cloud as Milly came to her side, watching the horizon with her.
"He'll come back, Meryl. It's just like you said, Vash would never leave you waiting."
"That's what I thought too," Meryl whispered, but she'd been waiting for far too long already. "And I actually believed it."
She couldn't reach him. She watched as the life drained from him and she couldn't help him. God no… She struggled against the ropes that bound her in place but it was no use. She couldn't break free. The sounds of laughter filled her ears as she watched in horror as his life faded away.
Tears threatened to blur him from her vision. She fought against them, desperate to see Vash one last time.
"Don't cry. I'll always be with you…no matter what."
But then he fell silent and fell limp. Meryl screamed, muffled by the gag that covered her mouth.
The sick, sinister laughter filled the night once more.
A grisly face, a face she barely recognized, half-flesh and blood, half-mechanical, including a cybernetic eye. But it was the flesh and blood of his large, rounded face, with the big dimples and the twinkle in his real, human eye, that revealed the truth.
Father…
.... .... x .... ....
"No!" She sat up with a start, breathing heavily as tears trailed down her cheeks.
"Meryl?"
She gave Milly and Stryker a look through the flames and pushed herself to her feet. Slowly, the small woman turned and walked off into the desert, raising a hand towards her friend to tell her now was not the time she wanted or needed to be comforted. She pulled her hands back to her face and wiped the tears away before she folded her arms over her chest. She didn't stop for a long time, until the fire was only a dim glow in her gaze and the chill of the night was the only thing that surrounded her.
Oh God, she thought. His face…
It had been a terrifying glimpse into the future. She was certain of it. A future that stood only over a few more dunes, waiting for them. He was dying and she couldn't even help him. Worse over, her father was the one responsible. But what about his face? Where had that odd-looking device over his right eye come from? Some sort of lost technology?
It had to be.
Oh God, she thought again, letting her tears fall to the ground as she stared off over the horizon, lost in her own silence.