It was over before anyone could react. By the time whole town had cried out in dismay, the wreckage of the saloon was reduced even further to dust by the giant's flying punch. Meryl could hear Nebraska cackling hysterically, practically hooting in glee. Somewhere behind her, Sandy was sobbing and Milly was whispering quietly in an attempt to calm the girl.
Meryl just stood as still and cold as marble, staring blankly into the debris. She couldn't accept it; he just couldn't be dead, not really. Not here. Not now. How many times had she seen the Idiot disappear into that man who could face insurmountable odds without hesitation? How many times had she watched the man in red walk away, unscathed, from a dangerous situation? And when had she started expecting the impossible from him?
High above, Nebraska's laughter cut short and Meryl glanced up to see a look of shock on the scientist's face. The celebratory cigar he had lit fell from his slack jaw as he goggled, open-mouthed, at the wreckage across the square. Meryl looked too.
And there he was.
A breathless sort of laugh burbled up inside Meryl in her almost shocked relief to see the man in red still there, seemingly untouched in the aftermath of the second attack.
"Feh!" spat Nebraska, shouting at the man in red. "I suppose I had hoped you might live, so my son could beat you again, but—ha! I see you ditched the woman to save your own skin!" Meryl felt a shock at the words; the woman was gone. The man's long arms were empty, wrapped around his own torso to protect himself. "You as good as killed her, Vash the Stampede! Just as I'd expect from the Humanoid Typhoon!"
"No!" shouted Milly. She had stepped up beside Meryl, still holding a sobbing Sandy in her arms, and her eyes were fierce as she glared up at Nebraska. "Mr. Vash would never—" But her retort was drowned in gasps from the rest of the crowd.
Across the square, the man in red let his arms unfold from over his chest and the long jacket fell open. Meryl was amazed to see the woman there, sheltered by the heavy red fabric, and the man caught her as she fell, cradling her limp form in his arms again.
"Oh, Ma'am," Milly murmured at her shoulder, sounding as awed as Meryl felt.
"That's impossible," whispered Meryl. Even as she said it, images flashed through her mind: the man in red evading a giant bladed boomerang, escaping Ruth Loose's deadly explosives, emerging from the crushing flow of water through Schezar's pipes, surviving hailstorms of gunfire, twice managing to dodge a bullet from only iches away... All of them impossible feats. No normal man could have lived as this man had, it was inconceivable. For one incredible moment Meryl almost believed this man really could be Vash the Stampede. "That's... impossible."
Nebraska spoke to the man in red again, dispelling these thoughts. "Alright, so you wouldn't leave her to die," he allowed, "but I know at some point you had to have killed those who got in your way."
For all Meryl could tell, the man in red hadn't even heard the scientist's goading. He just picked his way carefully over the ruins of the saloon and carried the woman to her comrades, laying her gently alongside the others several yarz from the destruction.
"How do I know?" prompted Nebraska. When he continued, his words were so quiet as to be barely audible: "Because you haven't yet had your turn to be killed."
Meryl felt the chill of Nebraska's words and knew there was always truth to that claim; a gunfighter only survived as long as he—or she—was the fastest draw, the best shot. Then again... Meryl realized she had never seen the man in red fire a single shot. No matter the situation, no matter how many opponents. In all the time she'd known him, the man had drawn his revolver only once, and even then he had refused to shoot, despite the gang of heavily armed men surrounding him.
Impossible...
"The $$60 billion reward on your head is proof!" Nebraska continued, practically screaming now. He leaned so far out of his giant-son's harness compartment to taunt the man in red that he seemed to be teetering dangerously over the edge. "What do you say to that, eh? Vash the Stampede!"
In her paralyzing haze of disbelief, Meryl felt her heart give a strange hiccup in its beat to hear the name; she expected her mouth to fall open and to shout her usual, by now involuntary, "He's not Vash!"
But it never came.
"Why won't he say anything?" someone whispered from the crowd, as the man in red remained silent. "Why is he taking that kind of abuse?"
Returning to stand before what little was left of the saloon, the man in red reached into his jacket and produced the zig-zag frame glasses Meryl had seen him wear so many times in the past. He turned his face to the ground as he donned them, and when he looked up again the suns glinted briefly on the yellow lenses—and then Meryl saw those unmistakable, razor-sharp other eyes again.
She could feel the change in him, even from this distance, and the raw power suddenly radiating from him seemed to force all the air out of her lungs. Her knees nearly gave out and she clutched at Milly's sleeve just to keep from falling over.
The naturally-dominant rational side to Meryl's thinking rebelled violently at the thought of accepting the fact that this man, this walking disaster in and out of her life for months, could actually be the Humanoid Typhoon. But something else somewhere inside her kept pushing her closer and closer to that conclusion; the inexplicable certainty she had felt before, in Orleans and here on the outskirts of town, that she had finally found Vash—the real Vash—was so strong now that rational thought was struggling to keep its hold on her.
Meryl's head ached, trying desperately to reconcile the two warring beliefs. She was hardly aware of her surroundings anymore and was taken completely by surprise at the thunderous explosion of Nebraska's giant-son launching his fist again. The man in red shouted in alarm and Meryl realized that the giant's great fist was hurtling, not at the man in red, but towards the injured women he had tried to protect.
The man in red threw himself sideways and took three long strides before diving directly into the fist's path, disappearing behind it. Over the screams around her and the screeching sound of the massive winch, Meryl could hear five rapid shots—was it five? She couldn't be sure—and suddenly the fist was spinning out of control. It smashed through the front of the building just to the right of its target, missing the man in red and the women behind him by mere yarz.
Meryl finally just collapsed, falling hard on her knees there at the edge of the square. "That's... not..." she choked out in a broken whisper. Her throat seemed to be tightening in that way that meant tears were coming, but she couldn't understand why.
There was a heavy, stunned silence hanging in the air, until finally someone exclaimed, "He changed its course!"
"He veered off my son's fist with just six bullets?" Nebraska shrieked, his high-pitched voice a mix of fury and disbelief.
"Not quite," replied the man in red, finally speaking for the first time. Meryl recognized the low, dangerous voice that complemented the sharp edge of his eyes and her spine actually tingled at the sound of it. The man in red opened the cylinder of his revolver, ejecting five empty shell casings which glittered in the bright sunlight as they fell at his feet. "I have one left," the man continued. "It's a special one." He spun the cylinder with a flick of his gloved thumb and the faint whirrrr echoed through the stillness of the square.
In one fluid movement, the man in red brought the revolver up and snapped the cylinder into place, firing his last bullet an instant later. The giant gave a great rumbling howl that shook the ground and he gripped his arm at the metal stump of his elbow. The bullet had hit its mark exactly, tearing through the mechanical inner workings of the giant's arm.
For a moment the giant staggered unsteadily on his feet, letting out low bellows of agony, and the crowd scattered in a desperate attempt to avoid being flattened, whichever way he fell. Finally the giant collapsed backward, landing hard enough on the packed dirt of the street to crush the great metal winch attached to his back. Nebraska was screaming from somewhere high on his son's chest, but it was drowned out by the cheers of delight and triumph from the townsfolk as the giant fell.
Meryl knew she should be running in the opposite direction, should be making sure the threat posed by Nebraska and his son was actually neutralized, but she didn't care. She was already on her feet and racing across the square, and both Sandy and Milly were only a few steps behind her. A matter of moments later they had all three reached the scene: Sandy leapt into her mother's arms and Milly knelt beside the most seriously injured woman, but Meryl ran forward to seize the man in red by the collar and dragged his face down just iches from her own.
"Are you truly Vash the Stampede?" Meryl demanded, shaking him as roughly as she could manage. Her own hands felt shaky and weak even though she gripped his jacket so tightly her knuckles went white. "Are you?"
He looked entirely shocked to see her, his mouth slightly open and eyes wide in surprise.
"Am—what?" he spluttered, bewildered, suddenly much more the Idiot than the man in red.
"Tell me!" said Meryl, desperately. She realized she was on the verge of unexpected tears again and blinked them away angrily; she needed to know, needed to hear it from him—needed to hear it from Vash.
What happened next happened very, very quickly.
His baffled expression vanished in the time it took her to blink once. Someone behind her screamed and the man in red moved impossibly fast, so fast it didn't register until Meryl found herself flat on her back on the ground, gasping for breath. A gun had sounded loudly in her ears.
Now he was kneeling next to her and he held one of her derringers, still in its holster in her cloak. He must have reached down into her cloak, found the pistol, aimed, and fired, all in an instant. And knocked her off her feet to do it—he had pushed her down and out of the way with his free left hand, which was still pressing her shoulder into the ground.
Meryl coughed, trying to catch her breath, and the man in red glanced down at her. For a moment he still wore that fierce expression that seemed to embody him as the man in red facing an opponent, but his gaze softened considerably when he caught her eye. Before Meryl could say anything, he put a hand under her arm and helped lever her to her feet again.
He had dropped the derringer (and, by proxy, the end of her cloak) and as it fell back into place Meryl caught a quick glimpse of the bullet hole now burned through the white fabric; it barely registered in the midst of everything else happening around her. She looked automatically in the direction the man in red had fired.
Across the square, Nebraska had managed to crawl free of the giant's bulk, hauling that long-barreled pistol with him. But the gun was on the ground at his feet now and Nebraska was backing hastily away, swearing loudly.
"He did it again!" one of the townsfolk whooped. "Vash knocked it right out of his hands!"
Meryl turned to face the man in red again, half in shock. His eyes were clear and brilliantly green and staring back at her with an unreadable expression that inexplicably gave her goosebumps. She was quite literally speechless, unable to come up with a single word, not even simply a thank you, and continued to just stare at him in silence.
How many times must you see the impossible before you believe?
"Are you...?" she whispered, finally.
The man in red winced and gave her a painfully guilty little half-smile.
"Um," he murmured, almost choking on the word.
Meryl was so close she could hear him swallow nervously. He seemed to be cringing away from her already, apparently preparing for the blow he thought would come at this next word:
"Yeah."
For a moment there was silence. Then Meryl spoke, softly, "Oh."
The man in red—Vash—seemed to relax when she didn't lash out at him immediately.
Oh...
She realized she believed it, and Meryl's knees buckled under the weight of this discovery. Vash moved quickly to catch her, looking somewhat alarmed. She steadied herself on his arms—on the arms of Vash the Stampede—and tried to think of something to say. Her mouth just worked silently for a few moments, half-open and breathless, and Vash looked down at her as if he were actually waiting anxiously for her reaction.
There were sounds of a scuffle in the distance and their strange moment was broken, both turning to find the source of the commotion—though neither of them released hold of the other, Meryl noticed.
Two young men had (finally) rushed out of the crowd and tackled Nebraska to the ground. He let out a squawk as the burly youths practically squashed him flat and Meryl saw the green monocle pop off and roll away.
"Don't think for a second that you've won, Vash the Stampede!" Nebraska shouted, fighting feebly against his captors as the men hauled him up to his feet. "Mark my words, I'll be back for both of you!" Meryl realized with a little shock that Nebraska must be referring to her now, too. "When you least expect it, Vash!" the scientist vowed, "I'll be coming for you, and for your woman!"
Vash actually stumbled and fell over backwards from the force with which Meryl reflexively shoved him, bodily, away from her.
"His what?!" she shrieked.