Disclaimer in previous chapters. Please see Author's Notes at the end.
-x-
"Back-"
That was all the warning there was. No gentle glow. No soft ping. Not even a change in air pressure. The bulb was angrily buzzing its protest against the Plants on the exterior, still trying to penetrate the glass, and it shifted neither in pitch nor frequency.
But somehow, Elizabeth knew.
Meryl was yanked bodily off her feet as brilliant light exploded in front of her. The afterimage was blinding, and she groped clumsily at the iron fist that was buried tight in the collar of her jacket, holding her up. Carter. Carter had ripped her away.
Just in time.
After some frantic blinking, she started making things out. There were shadowy blobs on the bulb – the Plants, she realized with a start. The bulb was burning like the suns of Gunsmoke in comparison with them. They didn't seem disturbed by the sudden change in lumens, and she would bet Knives was right where he'd been, on the other side of the glass. Somewhere, a claxon was screaming.
Vash was clearly still alive.
He was more than alive. The Plants were not generating that power. Vash was. It was the brightest bulb she'd ever seen.
Much brighter than on the ship.
Meryl squashed that thought before it could continue. The brighter the bulb, the higher the power draw. She shook herself free of Aaron's grip and turned to Elizabeth, who was pushed against Carter's outstretched arm, studying the bulb intently. Her expression was difficult to read in the stark white light. She looked older, almost ashen.
"What do we do?" Meryl shouted, not sure she could be heard above the alarms.
The engineer didn't immediately respond. She extended her right hand, palm towards the bulb, as if checking it for heat.
"We wait," she said finally, her voice barely audible. "It's up to him now."
Meryl wasn't sure which one she was referring to.
Her eyes never adjusted to the light. It scorched her corneas to look at the bulb directly, so Meryl watched it out of the corner of one eye. Watched the blobs shifting on the glass, still seeking a way in. Watched light squirming and swirling inside the bulb itself, like milk curls in coffee.
On a whim, Meryl ducked down, glancing under the bulb. The Plant was still there, glued to the bulb base, but she was moving backwards beneath it, towards its connection with the wall. As she shifted, the red alarm from the bulb console was visible on the rock floor, and then she made out two wide calves, attached to two strong thighs.
Knives was still there, head against the bulb.
Probably completely oblivious.
Meryl glanced at Carter, and found that he was watching her. His eyes were questioning.
But they had no weapons. It would be easy to walk around the bulb and shoot him, but they didn't have a gun. Getting into a fistfight with Knives was bound to end in failure, no matter how much better Aaron was feeling. They had no tools; not even a loose rock on the cave floor.
And what if Knives was helping? How many times had she seen Vash in that position, trying to calm a Plant out of control?
Meryl hesitated, then shook her head. Carter frowned at her, then crouched himself, still keeping his right arm outstretched to prevent Elizabeth from moving any closer to the bulb.
The engineer followed suit, apparently not sure what it was they were looking at, and her gaze seemed to focus more on the Plant, still scurrying in slow motion backwards up the wide curve of the bulb. Gravity didn't seem to be a problem for her; her long hair was not trailing beneath her but glued to the bulb as well. For the first time, it made Meryl think of a nest of worms, seeking a way in.
Knives had not moved.
Meryl straightened hesitantly, then started to edge around the end of the bulb. It was incredibly hard to make out the Plant above it, the bulb was too bright, but Knives was a black outline against the light. His nose upturned the same way. His mouth was not drawn into a grimace but relaxed, and his hands were empty, flat against the glass.
Was he helping? Was he even capable of helping Vash?
The bulb pulsed, she could feel the low, deep reverberations in her lungs as she held her breath. A new alarm joined the others, a deeper, more insistent claxon, and there was a loud, heavy slap of impact. Meryl jumped, and then she saw the golden worms creeping out from under the still-brighter bulb. The Plant did not move towards Knives, nor towards Aaron or Elizabeth, but towards the bulb end, and Meryl hastily gave ground as the Plant fully emerged.
She was not the same starkly black outline as Knives, but she was certainly dark, and it was impossible to see anything besides her silhouette. With one beat of her wings, she launched herself towards the ceiling, and Meryl watched her go, wiping sweat out of her eye.
Sweat. She was sweating. It was hot.
Meryl looked back at the bulb with a start. It was like staring up at the sky. It was hot.
The bulb was giving off heat. A lot of it.
She didn't recall the exact Bernandelli documentation that cited it, but heat generation was a Class C indicator of imminent property damage due to a critical plant malfunction. Class C called for immediate evacuation of the area for a half an ile radius, and injury and property damage that occurred from a bulb giving off heat was covered by Bernardelli except in the case of gross negligence.
Had the Plant been burned?
She shielded her eyes with her arm, trying to make out anything besides the bulb, but it didn't help. The light turned whiter, cooler, but no less blinding, and she gradually noticed that the alarms were no longer screaming. It wasn't perfectly silent; a wind was blowing somewhere, not a lonely desert wind but rather more like the breezes that had cut through Eden while she had waited with Millie for the end.
There was an exhale just behind her, somehow sad.
Meryl very carefully didn't turn. ". . . is he going to die?"
There was a short pause. "God I hope not."
That pious voice did not belong to the priest.
She whirled, arm still raised, still in defense, but there wasn't a need. He was about two feet behind her. His eyes were pupil-less, glowing softly, his arms at his sides, and two sets of toes were just dragging whatever it was they were standing on. He was-
He was a Plant. Far more completely than she'd ever seen him before. There had been a wing, feathers, the Angel Arm, but before he had still looked –
Human.
"I hope one day the sound of the wind in trees doesn't hurt," he continued softly, and yet his voice was his, as serious and vulnerable as she'd ever heard him. "Normally I wouldn't intrude, but I wanted to say . . .thank you."
Meryl stared up at him, and her emotions wrestled anxiously with one another. "Can we help?"
He laughed, looking surprised at himself. "You already did."
He called this help? "Vash . . . when I told you to remember who you are -"
"This is who I am," he confirmed softly. "This is who I always was."
Somehow her cheeks were wet. "No, it's not!" He wasn't some glowing god to be placed behind glass. How could he have brought so much happiness to the kids of April? How could he have ridden that thomas backwards stealing donuts intended for the real Vash the Stampede? How could he have –
How could he have been the one who had entrenched himself in her heart like this?
"You're so much more than this!" she cried, wiping her face angrily with her arm. "Dammit Vash, you don't have to die for us!"
A hand, warm against her wrist. "I'm not," he told her, and she allowed her arm to be pulled away, staring at him. "At least, I'm trying not to." There was a little too much uncertainty in it, and he frowned.
His face just didn't look the same.
Meryl hesitated, then she reached up her free hand, and gently touched his jaw. He didn't move, and despite the strength there his skin was velvet soft. It didn't hurt to touch him, any more than it had hurt when they had touched her.
"Your eyes are blue," she corrected, then swallowed. "And you have a mole. Right here." She tapped the place it should have been. "And you eat donuts, and hang out in bars, and pull stupid stunts and laugh and talk and breathe and-"
He took her other hand into his own, and only then did she realize that his right arm was still missing, it was a set of arms below he was using. They touched her gently, firm and sure.
He had total control over them. Over . . . this.
Maybe because he'd always been meant to have them.
"I'm this too." He ducked his head a little. "I'm both, and neither, and I know that doesn't make sense. I'm doing the best I can. I just wanted to tell you . . . no, I wanted to show you . . ." Then he stopped, and swallowed, and she realized he was crying too. "This may be a little scary," he admitted.
Then he released her hands, only to embrace her.
When her face touched his chest, the lights blinked out. She tensed against him, and he stiffened in response, but he was still there, warm and real, even if he was no longer alight. She leaned away, searching the darkness, and the first thing she made out was a tiny pinprick of light.
It was a star.
Then she saw another. Then another. Slowly the sky filled with them, as clear as a night in the desert. There was no moon – there was no desert, she realized with a start. She was standing on nothing. She wasn't even standing. She was weightless, grounded to nothing but his arms around her.
His chest shook with a quiet chuckle. "Even if I let you go, you wouldn't fall," he assured her, and she realized she was clinging to him like he was a tree, her legs wrapped around his waist.
"Where . . . is this?" she managed, trying and failing to relax. It seemed like they were gently rotating in the sky itself.
"Believe it or not, we're in my mind."
She said the first thing that occurred to her. ". . . a big empty space?"
He pulled a face, and she somehow managed to force herself to release him. He kept hold of one of her hands, and she drifted around him effortlessly.
"All of these stars are my thoughts and memories," he explained. "There's something you should see."
With a beat of his great wing, he pulled away, tugging her along like a traincar. They flew through constellations and giant, brilliant clouds of multi-colored gases. They seemed to be moving at a ridiculous pace, it was only when they brushed past a large blue and white swirled planet that she realized how small everything was.
She could have picked up that planet in her hands.
Gradually Vash brought them to a stop, before a clustered group of stars. There was a small purple-grey planet, its atmosphere stormy. It had several moons, one of which was in pieces, and the rocks had circled the planet in a rough ring, and glistened in the light. Farther from the planet were several icy comets, trapped in an oblong orbit. One of them was moving faster than the other, and they silently watched the first comet lap the second.
Further out, but still close enough to be part of the system, a large, squat-looking grey planet hunkered down. It had no satellites, and it appeared barren and unfriendly. There was something moving on the surface, though, or almost under it, like it was the grey film on a pond and beneath it, a few salmon still swam. Beyond it was a moderately sized planetoid in a deep, vibrant red, and its gases swirled like fire in slow motion.
Meryl studied each one closely, the careful dance as those planets flew past one another, never quite colliding. "What is this?"
Vash took a deep breath. "This is you." His fingers wound tentatively into hers. "These are . . . all the memories and thoughts I have about you."
She looked between the planets and Vash, and he seemed to be waiting nervously for a response.
"Why is one of my moons all cracked up?"
Her brain faceplamed.
Vash barked out a laugh, his fingers tightening in hers, and she watched the tear on his face float away, frozen perfectly. "I don't really know," he admitted. "What I feel about you is . . . complicated, I guess."
She turned and studied the planets in a new light. It made sense that not all of his memories that included her would be happy ones. What was it he'd said? He'd gone through a lot of hell after he'd met them? Hesitantly, she reached out, brushing one of the rocks in the ring around the purple planet.
She suddenly saw herself, sitting flat on her backside, one derringer held in both hands over her head, clearly having discharged. It was from a distance, there were trees in the way, and then the scene changed, and she was staring at a large brown ball that was unfolding, tumbling head over heels between the trees. Mother of the Nebraska Family was staring, stunned, as her son tumbled to a stop far short of his intended target.
A silver Colt crossed the bottom of the scene, as if it was hers, and she was lowering it to holster it.
Meryl drew her fingertips back, and the rock stayed in place in the ring.
"I would have thought that was a good memory," she said softly. "We won that day, didn't we?"
Behind her, he was quiet, though his fingers never left hers.
"If . . . if I wanted to, you would let me look at everything, wouldn't you."
"Yes."
She looked down, watching a tiny little shard of light, the smallest little fragment of moon, slowly make its way around the purple-grey world. "There's only one reason you'd do that, Vash. That you'd do this."
Though she knew that he probably didn't have saliva, she clearly heard him swallow. "I . . . I don't know what's going to happen now. But you waited a long time for me to come back. I . . ." He hesitated, then stretched out their hands, indicating the grey, barren planet. "Knowing that, that's how it makes me feel."
And then he straightened his fingers, and his hand glided away.
True to his word, she didn't fall. She didn't move; she floated exactly where she was, and she watched the planets drifting, everything in its place.
Something he wanted to show her.
She didn't want to touch it. She knew that immediately. Whatever was beneath the surface of that grey, dead planet, it would be horrible. Knowing that he felt guilty, or suffered, because of the hurt she had felt, that didn't make her feel any better. He should have known that.
She splayed out her fingers, cold now that his were gone, and she reached out to take up the red planet.
She lay burning in the sand. Her arms were bound behind her, and everything ached. She could barely pick up her head, her vision out of focus, and in front of her, a figure in white was standing, back to her, arms outspread like an angel. The figure had black hair, her eyes strong and compassionate, and for a second, she seemed to blur with another woman.
Meryl was staring at herself.
She watched herself walking forward, arms outstretched not in defense but in welcome, walking towards a man with a gun. A man whose hands were shaking so badly she couldn't tell where the bullet would go. She heard herself talking, her voice didn't even sound like her own. And she felt something, deep in her stomach, a warm something that she hadn't allowed herself to feel in so long she almost didn't recognize it.
The scene changed. She was standing in a hotel room, leaning against a doorframe. Her right arm ached where a bullet had grazed it – more than a graze, but it would be alright. In the room, on the bed, she saw herself and Millie sprawled out, dead to the world. Her mouth had fallen open in her sleep, and her position was carelessly vulnerable. Her eyes didn't linger on the places she had always thought his would; instead, the eyes over which she had no control watched her face, relaxed in a carefree and exhausted sleep, and that warm feeling was just a shadow, so faint that she wasn't sure it was even there.
She blinked, staring down one of the men that had taken them hostage, and waited patiently for the ceiling fan to fall. A derringer, if she wasn't mistaken, nice and quiet in the noise the others had made. They had no idea. And somehow, a one shot derringer was just perfect for a girl like her. The fan landed exactly where it should have, on the threat behind her, and she focused on the one in front, who was just beginning to realize that he was on his own.
Meryl withdrew her hand, but the warm feeling, there in her stomach, it remained, and the planet pulsed at her, beckoning.
A long time. For a long time, he'd felt it and not even realized what it was.
This man, who had called her idiot before he'd used her real name, he loved her.
Meryl glanced between the red planet and the grey one, and then, without quite knowing why, she drew back her right foot and gave that dead planet a hard shove. It pushed her back, away from the system, but she saw immediately that it had done the same to the grey planet – it drifted outside of the dance, no longer in place, and she watched it grow smaller and smaller as she bumped into something solid behind her.
Her foot ached with cold, with loneliness, with fear, and with guilt. It ached with feelings that were too hard to sort out from such a quick exposure. Not that she needed to sort them out.
"That's not complicated at all," she said, hating how thick her voice sounded.
His arms came around her shoulders, timidly, and she leaned back into him. That seemed to give him courage; he hugged her close, his chin nestling into the hair on the top of her head.
"No, I guess not," he said at last. "Just scary."
Yes. That.
She tilted her head, trapping the hand on her left shoulder, and closed her eyes. "Can you see into my mind?"
". . . I could. But I haven't, I wouldn't have done this if-"
"If you could have just said it," Meryl finished for him. "Because you don't think you will."
Behind her, his chest constricted in a little hitch. "Don't wait for me."
"I . . . Vash-"
He hugged her closer still, and she wrapped her arms around his and promised herself that she was never going to let go.
He was silent a long moment. "I'll miss you."
She shook her head a little, hating that his skin was wet. "Please don't say it."
"I couldn't, last time. I can't do that again."
She sobbed into his arm. "Vash, there has to be another way, there has to –"
He squeezed her tight. "It's okay, Meryl. It's gonna be all right."
Meryl couldn't form any words, couldn't do anything but cling to his arms and cry. She didn't want to hear it, she knew what was coming next and she didn't want to hear it, if they could just float here forever that would be fine, even just another minute-
"Take care of them for me, okay?"
"No, no-"
He turned her around in his arms – no small feat – and the light from his face reached through her closed eyelids, opening them against her wishes. He was smiling through his tears, one of the rare real ones.
"Goodbye for now, Insurance Girl."
Her heart welled up in her throat, and Meryl leaned her forehead on his chin. ". . . I love you."
"I know." Vash's voice faltered. "I can feel it."
She squeezed him tight, trying to memorize the feeling of being in his arms, and then she leaned up and looked into his eyes.
"Now stop being a b-broomhead and concentrate on not killing yourself, got it?"
Though there was no depthless blue, somehow she had the impression of it, and he saluted smartly with an extra hand. "Yes ma'am!"
It only caught a little.
There was a flash of light, one she found she'd expected, and then all support dropped out from beneath her, and Meryl fell.
For a long moment, it seemed like she was going to fall forever, but her butt made contact with something incredibly unyielding, bruising her tailbone, and Meryl rolled painfully onto her back as she tried to get her bearings.
Searing light. The bulb was even brighter now than before. She flinched away, squeezing her eyes almost completely shut – and a blob of that light coalesced on the bottom curve of the bulb before falling in a thick glob to smack wetly against the floor.
The bulb was melting.
Meryl continued her roll, getting her feet under her, and she kept her back to the bulb, trying not to notice the radiant heat boring into the back of her head. "We have to go!" she bellowed, hoping she could be heard over the alarms. "We need to get out of here!"
There was an explosive release of gas as the melted globule of bulb began melting through the cave floor, and Meryl stumbled several yarz away from the bulb, searching frantically for Aaron and Elizabeth. She finally made them out, relieved to find they were even further from the bulb than she was. The cave was lit as if it was daylight, and Meryl watched one of the more distant female Plants fly straight at the cavern ceiling. It looked as if she was going to crash, but she disappeared into the surface like it wasn't there.
Meryl turned back to the bulb, but she could no longer make out whether Knives had held his position.
"Stryfe!" Carter bellowed, and she nodded and sprinted in their direction. There was one of those elevator doors by an unoccupied bulb, and Aaron gestured urgently. "Move!"
She slid the last few feet into the tiny cab, finding Elizabeth already pressed against the back, looking more openly frightened than Meryl had ever seen her. There was a terrific crack, as if the earth itself had broken, and then a series of crashes.
The ceiling was collapsing.
Carter crowded in behind her, and then the doors slid shut. The blue strip lighting seeming to be almost dark in comparison to what they had left, and the car juddered alarmingly. She wasn't sure it was actually moving, and they all heard a strange whine as more muffled crashes continued outside.
She and the engineer exchanged a look, and then the cab shuddered, and the blue lights blinked out.
-x-
Author's Notes: As usual, it's taking me forever to get to the point. The next chapter will probably answer quite a few questions, and come hell or high water it will be the second to last chapter. I expect to have it posted by the end of the night – if Knives will make up his effing mind. Meanwhile, thank you guys so much for sticking with this! It's wrapping up, I swear!