Disclaimer: Trigun is sadly enough not mine, or there would have been way more episodes!

Chapter 20: Milly's POV
It had been very odd to wake up with Meryl not cooking in the kitchen. Meryl was always up before her, and she was always cooking when she would stumble into the kitchen to get her coffee. Yet this morning, Meryl was nowhere to be seen. She would have been concerned if not for the fact that Mr. Vash seemed to be nowhere as well. So drinking day old coffee she rubs her eyes and debates about what to do with breakfast. While debating she starts a new pot of coffee. Eventually she comes to the conclusion that she is not making it so she heads to the room and changes into some work clothes.

Once changed, she leaves the house, fetching a thing of donuts and jelly bagels from the bakery before going home. The owner will let her stop after her shift to pay for it.

When she gets home Mr. Knives is sitting in the kitchen glancing around the room in interest. It's the first time she can remember seeing him show an actual interest in something other than his brother. He seems to be determining where everything is and as she sets the bag of bagels down, he glances at her with a smile.

A jolt of shock shoots through her as she realizes that his smile makes him look gentler somehow, approachable. Beautiful even.

Oh no, I am not going there, she thinks to herself as she tells him to help himself. As he mutters thank you she takes her spot and can't help but wonder why the attraction is appearing now. It could have happened while he was still bed bound, then she could have dealt with it without ever having to deal with him at the same time. Yeah, like that was going to be that simple. Not.

That same beauty that Marianne and she had commented on about Vash so long before was equally true of his brother. Maybe even more so because there was nothing that really hampered his fluidity. Well that was a rather large realization. This was going to get messy before it finally clears up, she thinks, and now I am the one who is about to end up in a dance if those unusual looks he keeps giving me are anything to go by.

Sighing, she drinks a cup of coffee from the new pot, hoping that the caffeine in it will help her get some energy together. Not until the third cup of coffee does she feel awake enough to do anything. Meryl doesn't have to work until later tonight while she is due to go in here shortly to help build a second well.

Stretching, she glances at the clock before starting to clean the bathroom, then moving on to the kitchen, and finally working on the bedrooms. Through all of it she can feel Mr. Knives keeping an eye on her though she does so. She is not sure why and she does not plan on asking, she just keeps doing what she's doing. Meryl is not the only one who cleans when trying to work through something, Milly does the same thing and there had been times in the past that they had run out of things to do because they were trying to deal with something each in their own way.

Eventually she stops cleaning and just stand in the middle of her room giggling. Almost every one of those had been because of Mr. Vash. How odd is it that her cleaning right now is due to his brother instead? Shaking her head she realizes its time to go and she bids farewell to Mr. Knives before taking off for work. She can still feel his eyes as she walks down the road, but he is not following her as far as she can tell.

Her day at work goes smoothly, calmly. Her boss has to remind her to stop for lunch, which she does. When she is done eating she goes back to working on the well. She enjoys the pure beauty of manual labor. It doesn't require any sort of deep thought to do, just physical excursion which is easy for her. It leaves her free to think while she works which she is happy for.

When she gets home shortly before Meryl's shift she is happy to see Meryl in the kitchen cooking dinner but blushes when Meryl reminds her to get changed out of her mud-gear. After changing back into her normal clothes she returns to the kitchen to visit with Meryl as she cooks and is mildly surprised to see both brothers already in there as well.

Dinner goes surprisingly well, if a bit awkward with the new dynamics between Meryl and Mr. Vash.

A lot of people think that she is slow, but she really prefers just to watch and listen, to pay attention to the things going on around her. You can learn a lot about a person by how they act and sound. She also intentionally says things that other people don't always want said because it needs to be out there. The only problem is since she is so direct, there are times it takes her a little bit longer to comprehend when someone is skirting an issue and not being direct about it.

She loves having Meryl as a partner, Meryl was good at the indirect, at understanding the things that people do but don't mean. Or say but shouldn't have. Meryl also helped keep her ground, since both girls often forgot some of the important things in life like food, it was always good that they were able to remind each other. Past that they were friends. Really, how many other friends could say they helped take care of not one but two super intelligent, highly annoying, way too beautiful, extremely powerful men who weren't human? Probably not a lot, even fewer had the task of keep one of that pair out of the trouble that had gotten them assigned the task to begin with.

Yes, things were changing but for the better. It looked like Meryl had finally got herself to admit what was going on, it had taken two years, lots of crying, and patching Mr. Vash up a couple of times but hey, she wasn't raised to always be open with her heart so it makes sense. Past that it probably was a good thing she waited until he resolved things with his brother because it meant that wouldn't be in the way. So there it is again, four of us in our rag-tag band.

After Nicholas' death she had wrote to her second youngest sister Elisi and asked her to go to the orphanage to see if they needed anything. She was surprised to hear that it had been given a large sum of money to make it run smoothly, and that two of the children who had once lived there were now running it. The children had been heartbroken to hear of Nicholas' death according to her sister, but had expected it to happen eventually. Elisi had stayed on and was now the full time matron.

It was a time for new beginnings. Maybe they would be able to find that place that Meryl suggested where they could all live happily. That would be nice. The four of them, soon to be five, could have a good life.

Tomorrow will be time for a talk, she thinks as she cleans up after dinner.

AN: Since Milly's family isn't given any names that I have been able to find, I plan to name them as the story involves them or she refers them. If someone does know their names please direct them to me, thanks!