DISCLAIMER: Trigun and its characters belong to Yasuhiro Nightow.
"Long as things remain the way they are, anything can pop off –"
Ranger was interrupted by the sound of gunshots from up the street.
Vash was still in a shaky place, feeling that with Silver he had gotten even closer to the line he had sworn not to cross than he had with Pierre. He had willingly taken a gun in his hand…for what? Pierre at least had made an actual threat. The most Silver had done was run his mouth in a taunt. Vash had heard much worse in his long life and not responded; keeping control was getting harder and harder to do around these people.
But well past a century on Gunsmoke had instilled in him a reflex to run toward the danger, to see what he could do to help. That reflex kicked in now, overriding his personal concerns.
"Stay here!" he snapped, already in motion. Was he addressing both insurance girls in concern for their safety, or primarily Meryl? That would have to be a question for another time.
"Maybe you're worth a damn after all," Ranger commented, hot on his heels into the street. Unlike Vash, he was more than willing to have a gun in his hand, and it was already drawn before he was even out the swinging doors. Barkeep, like Vash, had no gun but willingly followed Ranger out. He had made his promises to Jamie, but he also knew he would support Ranger as long as those promises remained unbroken.
The need for night vision was eliminated by the hellish light of a fire in full burn, haloing the dust their boots stirred up.
"The barber shop!" Ranger charged ahead of Vash. "Stay sharp, bastards might still be around!"
Unheeding of his own advice, he ran headlong to the scene of the fire, directing traffic to others who were emerging on the scene from around town. "Water brigade! Water brigade! Get some water on it, damn it, we need to make sure Heck and Jeck aren't in there!" People ran to fetch buckets and whatever water they could find, desperate to douse the fire enough for someone to dash in to check for the Hydes. A clamor of voices began to fill the night.
"Ranger! I've got the kid!"
The man with the badge hustled over to where Vash was, seeing Jeckle Hyde bleeding in his arms. A quick scan told him the barber's son wasn't long for this world, not with a wounded leg, two holes in his chest, and the death rattle that indicated a punctured lung. That meant there was only one priority for Ranger.
"Who shot you?" he asked urgently. Vash had his hands clamped over the wounds, but pressure was only going to do so much. "Jeck, godsakes, who was it?"
Eyes fluttered open, focusing in and out as Barkeep joined the two men at Jeckle's side. A weak sound came from him.
"Say again! Jeck, damn it, man up and spit it out!"
The teen's eyes momentarily hardened with resolve, and he managed to get out one word: "Kurtz."
Now for the next order of business. "Did they nail Heck, too? Jeck, where is he?"
A weak lifting of Jeckle's hand, pointing at the barber shop.
"Barkeep, with me! Passin', do what you can for Jeck!" Ranger ran for the blaze, shouting at the nearest person with a bucket of water to douse him.
"Hang on, you'll be ok," Vash lied desperately, as much to himself as to Jeckle. "You just have to hang on!"
The words were faint, but unlike in his room earlier, Vash was paying attention. "Wanted…to be good…"
Vash jumped the gun in an attempt to soothe him. "You are good, you're a good man –"
"…good enough to kill them all…like the Stampede…"
The last two words hit Vash like a bullet between the eyes. The Stampede.
All the good he tried to do, the example he tried to set…and a dumb kid idolized him as an unbeatable killer…Sat/fell back, catching himself with his hands behind him, dazed.
"Hey! Hey!" A hard slap brought him partially out of his shock. He looked down to see Jeckle had expired. It had been going to happen anyway, but a part of him felt the kid might still be clinging to life if only he hadn't taken his hands off the wounds.
He had chosen to spend his life trying to save others; why did he so often have to fail in his mission?
"Snap out of it!" Meryl's voice, sounding like it was coming through a tunnel. She slapped him again, bringing him into better focus. He shook his head to clear it and took in a good look at her from his reclined position on the ground, for a change the one who had to look up. Milly stood at her flank. They both were dirty with soot.
"I told you to stay in the saloon!" he snapped.
"Not when we could help out here!" Meryl snapped back. "You don't get to be the only one in danger; we're willing to take the same risks as you."
"What, I'm supposed to take comfort in that?" He pushed himself off the ground and rose to his feet.
"I don't give a rusty damn what you're supposed to do," came Ranger's smoke-strained voice.
Vash and the insurance girls turned to look at him. He and Barkeep were sharing the load of carrying the heavy corpse that had been Heck Hyde between them, night shadowing the grime that covered them even more than Milly and Meryl. They struggled over and laid it next to the body of Jeckle Hyde. Father and son were at least together in death, which sometimes is just the best you get.
Putting his vexation with Meryl on the back burner to simmer with everything else, Vash knelt to look at Heck's body. The fire had only started working on it. If he had still been alive, the pain from his burns would have been excruciating, but the fire had only really begun its damage when Ranger, soaked down with water as at least some form of protection, found the body and was able to heft it out of the blaze.
Meryl and Milly stood well back from the body, and he could understand why. It wasn't the sight of a badly burned body bothering them, it was the smell of flesh that had started to roast. A completely burned human body will not smell good because of the mineral content of the blood, which lends a slightly metallic smell, and because the organs tend to wind up smelling like burnt liver. That would still be preferable to a body that had only just started to burn; the burning fat and muscle smell like cooking meat and momentarily remind one of something delicious.
It was disturbing to be reminded of dinner when looking at a fire-damaged corpse. Vash, in his long life, had dealt with a few and learned to ignore the smell. He forced himself instead to focus with clinical detachment. "Throat was cut," he observed. The soft tissue around the throat was badly burned, but the cut had been deep enough that it was still evident.
Took a deep breath and willed himself to turn the body over. Grimaced at the feel of the burned body and the way he had to hold it tight to keep from losing his grip as burnt tissue sloughed off. Held it that way several moments as his eyes searched the back of the body, which was burned worse than the front was, having been exposed to the worst of the flames and heat. Using his body to block anyone from seeing, he took off his glove from his right hand and gingerly ran his fingertips over the back, searching by feel until he found what he had been looking for. Wiped his hand on his jeans and pulled his glove back on, letting go of the body and standing up to face Ranger. "He was stuck in the back as a first strike, then his throat slit."
Ranger nodded grimly. "Five'll get you ten we know who did the job."
A few of the townspeople had drifted over within earshot as they fetched water for the bucket brigade. They had heard Vash's summary and knew enough about O'Brien's people to reach the same conclusion Ranger just had.
"That son of a bitch Pierre!" one man snarled. "I'll string that bastard up myself!"
"You won't be alone!" someone else joined in. A rising clamor rippled throughout as people echoed agreement. Others in the water brigade, under heavy stress both from the general situation in town and from the loss of the barber shop and now hearing of the loss of the barber and his son, started to join in. It wasn't going to take too long before a lynch mob formed to take justice into their own hands.
Ranger was quick to take action. "Shut the hell up!" he commanded. "Everybody, shut up right now!"
"You shut up!" someone told him, only to be backhanded across the mouth by the man with the badge. The blow was heavy enough to stun and the man, caught off guard by it, was knocked to the ground. Ranger stepped over him and into the middle of the crowd.
"I didn't ask y'all," he informed the crowd, voice hard and loud enough to be heard. The fire cast an orange glow to his face, revealing to the crowd the soot that had accumulated on his face and clothes while he dashed in to retrieve Heck Hyde; he had known from the lack of screams the barber was likely dead, but hadn't been about to simply abandon a good man just because the soul had left the body.
"I didn't ask y'all," he repeated once he had their attention. "Y'all asked me. Y'all gave me this hunk of metal and asked me to wear it. All y'all people wanted me to keep the peace, to protect every man jack from Big Sister. Now you've got some piss'n'vinegar and think you'n take the law in your hands. But you can't, because I've got the badge! Not you, or you, or you – the badge is mine, because y'all put it there!
"So, everyone wants to go after Pierre? All y'all are pissed off and not thinking straight. This is what happens if y'all go after him with a rope – every man jack dies. They'll cut every onea y'all down and raze this town to the ground, because y'all got pissed off and went charging in. Y'all'll go in there, no proof and no warrant with your dicks flapping in the wind and everyone'll get chopped down, and in any other town they'd be in the right to do so because y'all ain't the law!
"I know y'all; y'all know me. Y'all put this damn badge on me for one reason and one reason alone – because I can back it up. So what y'all need to do right now is go and make sure this fire don't spread beyond the barber shop.
"Because I'll tell y'all something else – this badge means I protect the whole town, every man jack, not just any onea y'all. So the first one that endangers everyone in Kirk by going off half-cocked – I'll put a bullet in him, God as my witness."
Ranger turned slowly, looking everyone in the eye. One by one, they each looked away from his steel gaze and re-joined the water brigade.
The possibility of a lynch mob quelled, Ranger went back to the others.
"Took on a different way of talking for a minute," Vash observed.
"Wasn't always from Kirk," Ranger said flatly.
"Why did they do this?" Milly asked. Her eyes were watery; not entirely from smoke, either. "What happened to keeping the lid on the pickles?"
"I'm sorry, ma'am," Ranger said sincerely, ignoring her slight misremembrance of his phrasing. "You can probably blame me for that. This is a reminder of what happens to people in a war zone, a warning to let her be."
"A warning to the whole town," corrected Barkeep. "She's letting us know just how bad things can get if she doesn't get her way."
"What do you intend to do, then?" Meryl asked, careful to be in the group without being near the dead bodies of Heckle and Jeckle Hyde. "This is still murder, and as you so eloquently put it, the badge is yours. Are you going to go after this Pierre?"
Ranger shook his head. "What I've got is circumstantial, nothing more. Anybody with a knife could have done this; we don't have any way of matching wounds to blades or anything else because of the burn damage. And he's at Big Sister's right hand. I go after him without hard proof, I get either laughter or bullets. But there's someone I do have proof against."
"Kurtz." Barkeep's voice was taut as he said the name, his expression flushed. If not close, he had been at least on friendly terms with the Hydes and knew them to be good people, even if Jeckle had been dazzled by foolish romantic notions of what constituted manhood. The bartender was no fonder of Kurtz than anybody else right now.
"Damn right. I heard it, so did you and Passin'. Hard enough evidence for me, and I've got an idea where he'll be tomorrow."
"Dodd's thomas coops."
"Dead on. If nobody in Big Sister's camp knows the kid lived long enough to talk, it's a good bet he'll be with the rest of that bunch. Might even be planning to use Dodd's temper against him, goad him into shooting first. Could be why she's sending so many, act as witnesses to say whoever does it had no choice. Whatever the plan, I go in there with a warrant for his arrest all proper like, spelling out what the kid said and affirming we heard him say it, maybe I can keep them off guard long enough to leave with Kurtz."
"That sounds pretty risky," Meryl said, worry tinging her tone.
"Doesn't matter, ma'am. I do nothing, people might get worked up again and make things worse; people here are well-intentioned, but they can't stand up to men who kill for a living, no matter how much they want to. Arresting Kurtz is the best card I've got, and I have to play it.
"Besides, in spite of what you may have seen, Jeck was a good kid, and his old man was one of a handful of men I like well enough to drink with. So Kurtz ain't walking away from this."
Vash tried to keep the hope he felt off his face, even as shame spread through him for feeling it. It wasn't anything personal against the man with the badge; just that if Ranger tangled with Kurtz, the chances of being able to extricate himself from this mess without the thing inside exerting itself again went up.
Whatever it took to get out without becoming a killer.
Ranger continued, "But the priority now is making sure that fire stays contained. The shop's ruined, but we can't let it spread any further. And I've got two bodies that need proper burying. Passin', you going to help fight this fire? Don't have to, not your problem, but we could use every man we can get."
"You said it, not me – not my problem." Unwilling to meet Ranger's eyes, Vash turned and walked away, fleeing from a kid that had died because he wanted to be like Vash the Stampede.
Meryl pulled Milly down and whispered something in her ear. Her partner nodded. "I'll help!"
While Milly went with Ranger and Barkeep to join the water brigade in at least keeping the fire contained until it died out, Meryl went after Vash.
She caught up with him back in the saloon. Grabbed his arm before he could get to the stairs, forcefully turning him to face her. "What was that back there?" she demanded.
Vash's face was firmly set. "Don't want to talk about it."
"I don't care anymore what you do and don't want to talk about," Meryl snapped at him. "Whatever you're keeping inside is eating you alive! Talk to me!"
He was insistent, shaking his head no. "You don't want to know."
"When whatever it is has you as rattled as it does, yes I do!"
Vash leaned down at her, almost shouting. "No, you don't! You don't want to know that I nearly killed Monev! You don't want to know how badly I wanted to pull the trigger, how deep I had to dig to take my finger off it! You don't want to know what it's like having to always be the one who lets people have their second chance when you know they won't change! You don't want to know what it's like to be so damned angry that staying in control of yourself is like hanging from a cliff by your fingernails! And you sure as hell don't want to know that kid out there died because he thought you were some badass killer and wanted to be one, too!"
Meryl reeled back in shock, both at the vehemence in the words and the realization that he felt somehow responsible for Jeckle Hyde's death. Started to protest, but Vash cut her off.
"I heard him. He said he wished he were good enough to have killed them all, just like the Stampede would have. Just like the Stampede. I had a chance when we came in here last night to actually talk sense to him, but I was so wrapped up in my own damn self I smacked him and left. Does that sound like any kind of good person to you?
"If I can't even keep one kid from getting killed, then what good am I? Answer me! What the fuck good am I?"
He left her without waiting for an answer.