Chapter Text
Meryl rolled her ankles, grimacing as a wave of pins and needles washed over her legs. Vash's head was surprisingly heavy. Possibly all heads were. Though Meryl would admit it to no-one, it was the first time anyone had used her lap as a pillow.
Everything after the Sandsteamer had gone by in a blur.
Vash had not stirred once ever since he had collapsed, now hours ago. He lay on his back over the back seat of their new ill-begotten vehicle, his legs awkwardly bent, head on Meryl's lap. She was squeezed against the door to give him as much space as possible. Roberto drove on in silence, while Wolfwood stared moodily out of the window in the front passenger's seat.
For now, everyone was safe.
The sunset steadily dimmed the sands outside. The windows of the car rattled now and then with leftover gusts from the storm they had just narrowly avoided.
Meryl tensed and untensed her legs, trying to work feeling back into them without jostling Vash too much. Both of her arms were squished against her sides. She had nowhere to put them.
"How much further?" she called to the front.
The undertaker shrugged one shoulder. "The more distance we get the better."
Roberto gave him a frustrated glance. "Thought you had somewhere in mind. Am I just driving blind here?"
"There’ll be some rocks, later on," Wolfwood said lazily, not turning from the window. "We’ll get some cover from prying eyes. We can’t exactly be picky right now."
Roberto sighed heavily.
Meryl turned her attention back to Vash. His eyes were shut, features at rest, mouth a straight line. It was strange to see, since Vash was usually so animated. He had been far too still ever since he had collapsed, his breathing slow and deep and as even as a metronome.
The car jolted suddenly, and Meryl had to scramble for an awkward hold on Vash's shoulder to keep him from sliding off the seat.
"Hey!"
"Bad suspension on this thing," Roberto grumbled, shifting to a lower gear.
"I’d like to see you find better with a fire under your ass," Wolfwood threw at him.
Meryl and Roberto had nothing to say, in a silent agreement to not ask too many questions. Wolfwood had ‘found’ them a new car in the lower regions of Hopeland, and had done so questionably quickly. The thing was older and noisier than their Bernardelli vehicle, but at least there was a little more seat space. At least they had something.
The going became steady again. Meryl pulled Vash fully back onto the seat with her and let go, her hands hovering awkwardly. Maybe she ought to hold onto his shoulder in case the car jarred him again...? But what if he woke up while she was doing it? How would she explain it?
"Wish you would," Meryl mumbled under her breath.
She tried to focus on watching the scenery outside, but the effort was wasted. There was nothing to see but sand out there, maybe a rock or two if she was lucky. Just like her hands couldn't find a place to stay, her gaze kept drifting back to Vash's face.
He looked very young in his sleep, with wisps of fluffy blonde hair falling over his forehead. Meryl wondered if it could mean something. If a person might stay... not young, exactly, but something like that anyway, even throughout untold decades of wandering No Man’s Land.
Because she was looking at him, Meryl caught the moment when the unnatural stillness in Vash went away. Frown lines appeared on his brow and his lips pressed together just a touch, and suddenly Vash was there again. His jaw tensed and Meryl thought she caught some kind of weak noise over the hum of the car.
"Vash?" she asked, left hand moving to hover over his shoulder.
Roberto turned for a quick glance over his shoulder. Wolfwood looked over for a longer moment, but turned back with a bored huff when Vash didn't stir any further.
Vash’s breaths were slowly becoming shallow and irregular, almost little gasps as the furrow in his brow deepened. It was like something pained him. It took a little talking herself into it, but eventually Meryl managed to make herself lift her other hand. She brushed her fingertips over the mess of blonde hair covering Vash’s forehead.
Meryl’s eyes widened in surprise. The hair was very soft to the touch.
Curiosity allowed Meryl's touch to become more confident. She slowly brushed her hand over Vash's hair a few more times, gently combing through with the tips of her fingers, and Vash’s frown began to soften, fraction by fraction. Eventually his mouth even opened into a small snore.
It was a relief that he seemed to be just sleeping now, and yet...
Meryl lifted her hand away. Her legs were still very numb. She tensed them once again, trying to shift some of the agony away. It did fairly little. She placed her right arm along the divot between the car door and the window.
She rested her left hand on Vash’s chest for a split second, but it just didn't feel right. Her hand hovered nervously with nowhere to go.
Worry had kept Meryl’s usually short-ish fuse burning for a long while despite her discomfort, but there was a limit to all things.
"Hey, come on," she muttered under her breath and poked Vash's cheek.
His eyes shot open and he jerked upwards. Meryl, toma in headlights, froze as he hurtled toward her, his forehead smashing into the underside of her chin as the result.
Meryl fell back against her seat with a yelp while Vash was knocked back down into her lap. She cradled her chin with one hand and glared down through teary eyes. Vash stared up at her, bright blue eyes wide and startled.
"Meryl?"
"Oh, hey. Looks like you’re alive after all, needle-noggin."
Meryl turned her glare onto Wolfwood, who grinned at her from between the front seats and slowly transferred a stick he was chewing on from one corner of his mouth to the other.
Roberto made a tired noise, not bothering to look away from the road.
---
He curved the car into the shade of a rock face shortly after.
They parked as out of sight as they could and everyone piled out, wandering away on their own to stretch or to clear their heads. Or so Meryl assumed. It had been her own intent, at first, but she wasn’t so sure anymore. She realized after a few minutes that she had just been staring blankly into the twilit middle distance, less than a dozen paces from the car.
She found herself drifting to where Roberto was standing with a smoke. The undertaker was off on a smoke break of his own in the opposite direction. Vash had remained in the car, sitting at an open door. He met Meryl’s eyes when she looked over and gave her a quick wave, but he didn’t hold the look for long.
Meryl turned to Roberto.
"Um, so..."
He lifted his eyebrows at her and held up a hand. He dug into his jacket pocket, took out his hip flask and took a long drink, all without breaking eye contact.
Meryl pressed her lips together and fought back her usual urge to tell him off.
Roberto took the flask off of his lips with an overblown sigh of satisfaction and returned to his smoke.
"Well, here we are then," he said. "And me on my last pack."
Meryl bit the inside of her cheek and looked around. A wall of rocks shielded them on one side, but to the other the sands opened before them, empty and endless. If not for the faint indent of tire tracks, Meryl would have had no idea which way any kind of civilization might lay. She tried not to feel too hopeless about it.
"What do we do now?" she asked.
"Oh, now you’re asking me?"
Meryl looked at her feet sullenly. "I wasn’t expecting it would turn out like this."
There was a pause, then Roberto sighed and shifted his weight.
"Yeah, yeah. I’m not chastising you, believe it or not."
Meryl warily lifted her head.
"That said, what I told you earlier still stands," Roberto continued. "Since your little undercover investigation didn’t pan out, our job is to return to headquarters and to try and turn this whole mess into some kind of story. And to do so without getting filled with brand new holes. And I want you to remember that, this time around."
"I know, but—"
"That being said," Roberto interrupted her, too tired to let her get going. "Pretty sure we’re about to be in for one hell of a detour."
"What do you mean?"
Roberto dropped his cigarette and stomped it out. He nudged his head toward the car and headed toward it. Meryl followed.
He reached into his back pocket and brought out his notebook. He shook it until a tightly folded bit of paper fell out. He unfolded it and spread it out over the hood of the car.
"A map?" Meryl asked. The paper was worn and faded, but the curving lines drawn on it looked vaguely familiar.
Roberto gave the map one last smoothing sweep, then searched out the spot marked Hopeland with one finger. He tapped it twice.
"We’re still about here. See any problems?"
Vash had watched curiously as Meryl and Roberto had returned to the car. He rose at Roberto’s words and ambled up to Meryl's side to look at the map with them.
"Um," Meryl started, trying to focus on the conversation and not on the man hovering next to her. She stepped closer to the hood and peered at the map.
"There's a sand lake between us and JuLai for one. Ugh, what is that? Sage's Vomit?" she read.
"Not just JuLai, it's between us and any point of real civilization," Roberto corrected her. "Not counting Hopeland, where they've gotta be putting up our posters up by now. And we've got no chance trying to drive across a lake in this jalopy."
"Ugh, don't remind me. Here, then?" Meryl speculated, drawing a line across the map with her forefinger. "To the north-east, near the coast? This looks like a straight path to JuLai."
Vash spoke up, "The terrain is pretty bad over there. You can make it through on a toma if you take your time, but it would be tricky with a car."
"Besides that, it's outlaw country," Roberto added. "Narrow passes make for ripe pickings."
"Then we’ll need to go around the lake," Meryl said, putting her hand to her chin.
It was a far longer detour. It also probably meant her and Roberto's path would be diverging from Vash's a good while before they could ever reach JuLai. JuLai was northeastern, but the Bernardelli headquarters were back in December to the northwest.
"It won't be easy going that way either," Vash admitted, "but at least there should be more space to maneuver."
Meryl turned to look up at him. She startled a quick, apologetic smile out of Vash.
"I..." Vash began, looking between Meryl and Roberto with a pleading wince, "I need help getting to a settlement from here. That's all though! And I'll definitely repay you both, somehow."
"Sure you're not getting something mixed up here?" Roberto asked gruffly.
Meryl cleared her throat loudly. Roberto lifted an eyebrow at her, but she turned her back to him to address Vash.
"Roberto and I still have some work to do out here, actually. Reporting stuff and... and things, you know. So really there's no harm in just helping each other out as long as we're headed the same way, right?"
Meryl thought she could hear a beleaguered sigh from behind her, but she cheerfully ignored it. Vash was watching her with slight bewilderment. Meryl conjured up her best saleswoman's smile and waved a hand to dismiss any worries.
"So you don't have to worry about repaying us or anything. We can just help each other out for a little while and then call it even."
"Huh," Vash said. "Okay?"
"Okay!" Meryl echoed.
She turned to Roberto with a smug grin. He rolled his eyes toward the heavens, but by the tired slope of his shoulders Meryl was fairly sure she wouldn't be hearing any arguments right away.
"In any case," Roberto said, "We'll need supplies. We're pretty much running on empty already."
"There's got to be at least one place to charge the car between here and, uh..." Meryl peered at the next location notable enough to be marked on the map.
"Stinky Lakeside," she read in a disappointed monotone.
They all looked between each other. Vash shrugged.
Meryl looked to the side, where Wolfwood was apparently trying to smoke down an entire pack just by himself and in record time. He had settled into an uncharacteristic melancholy, unusually quiet ever since the rush of energy from their escape from the Sandsteamer and Hopeland had wound down.
The undertaker was one big question mark for Meryl, but he was apparently from around these parts. She took a step toward him, but hesitated. He was radiating an obvious desire to be left the hell alone.
"I'll talk to him," Vash said.
He passed her before Meryl could formulate more than a small, uncertain noise of protest.
Roberto watched him go and began to fold up the map.
"That undertaker guy seems like the stubborn type. He'll gather himself together, sooner or later. But, more importantly: what's the big idea?"
"What?"
Roberto gestured between Vash’s retreating back and her. "That whole spiel, just now."
"Oh. Nothing," Meryl said, "We just don't want him slipping away too early now that we've got another chance to keep an eye on him, right?"
"We—" For a moment Roberto looked like he had more to say, but he seemed to think better of it with a shake of his head. “Ah, well. Fine. You've got the reins now, newbie. Hope you know what to do with 'em."
Meryl opened her mouth, but couldn't think of anything to say. Roberto went back to the car and began fiddling with the radio.
Vash and Wolfwood were still standing to the side, but Wolfwood’s back seemed less tense. He was saying something to a nodding Vash and gesturing carelessly at distant sands.
Meryl breathed out and looked up.
The sun had set and the sky was littered lousy with distant stars. The suns were long gone, but two almost full moons were shining a cold light over the sands in their stead.
It had been a long day.
Meryl went to the car and clambered into the back. Roberto acknowledged her only with a distracted glance. He was having no luck with the radio so far, only getting fragments of words and bursts of static for his trouble.
Meryl took out her notebook from a coat pocket and turned to an empty page. So much had happened in just one day. She readied her pen and took an expectant breath.
Nothing. There was no great strike of inspiration, no one image clear in her mind. Meryl furrowed her brow in annoyance. What bubbled up in her mind was a cacophony of impressions and emotions, none of them clear enough to really grab onto.
Once Meryl realized that she wasn't even sure why she would jot anything down—it wasn't like she was likely to ever forget everything that had happened on the Sandsteamer—she huffed and returned the notebook into her pocket. The empty back seat invited her to stretch out into it so she did. She closed her eyes.
The seat dipped down and Meryl opened her eyes, feeling inexplicably groggy. She pushed herself up to her elbow. Vash greeted her with an apologetic smile from the other side of the back. The undertaker had appeared in the front passenger’s seat somehow.
"Sorry," Vash said. "Didn't mean to wake you."
"I wasn't sleeping," Meryl said, rubbing the fog out of her eyes as she sat up. "Um, so you talked? Is everything alright?"
Vash looked at the back of Wolfwood's head. The undertaker shrugged without looking back.
"A caravan route still runs nearby, roughly along where we’ll be headed," he said, "Some of the stops should still be around."
"Not really what I meant," Meryl said, mostly to herself, "but okay. That's good, right?"
"We might live," Wolfwood agreed.
Roberto, still in the driver’s seat, turned to look back at Meryl. "Might be tight, though. There's no end to all the supplies we're gonna need if we're doing this. I'm assuming you've at least still got your wallet still on you?"
Meryl patted at one of her pockets and nodded.
Wolfwood sighed. "Don't expect me to make a habit of it, but guess there's no choice but for all of us to pitch in."
"You’re coming with us?" Meryl asked.
"Got business in JuLai, that's all. And don’t try and tell me you guys don’t need me. I've got ample evidence to the contrary."
Meryl and Roberto exchanged a look. They looked next to Vash, who patted his pocket with a wince and a nervous laugh.
"I'll find some other way to pitch in. I promise!"
"Uh huh," Roberto said, and turned to flick the radio on again. A low buzz of static filled the car, interspersed with stronger bursts of noise as Roberto cycled through different frequencies.
Vash sighed, dejected, then gathered himself together.
"I wanted to thank you all again," Vash said, looking around the car, "The people on the Sandsteamer and in Hopeland are safe because of all of you. Thank you, everyone."
"You already thanked us," Meryl mused. He'd done so during the earlier drive, when she and Roberto had put together a quick and slightly disjointed explanation on what had happened during the hours Vash had been unconscious.
Vash looked at Meryl with such a warm look that it stopped her short for a moment. "I wanted to do it again."
Meryl's eyes widened. Oh. They had really done it, hadn't they? It had not been another Jeneora Rock. Meryl hadn't had time to really feel or understand it yet, not like that. It hardly erased what had happened to Tonis and everyone else, but for a moment there was calm; a chance to put down the guilt, even if it was for just a small while.
Wolfwood acknowledged the thanks with only a grunt, and Roberto not at all. Vash didn't seem to mind, however. He gave a genuine soft smile in answer to Meryl when she looked up at him again.
He seemed to quickly find the eye contact awkward, looking restlessly away. He tried to run a hand through his hair, still a mess from when he'd spent a long while first hauled around by Roberto and Wolfwood in turns, and then on his back. He winced in pain when his fingers snagged on a tangle.
If not for that wanted poster, Meryl never would have recognized him as the Humanoid Typhoon, she realized. Vash was weird, lanky and prone to trouble, but at the end of the day just a guy. And, in some strange way, in some moments more human than any of the rest of them.
Roberto finally found something other than white noise on the airwaves: a low female voice crooning about a lost love, the strumming of a guitar just audible over hissing and crackling background noise. It wasn’t what Roberto was looking for, however, and the song quickly dissolved into the thrumming of low random noise again.
When Vash turned to look outside, finally done fidgeting, he did look strange to Meryl for a moment. Narrow in the moonlight, a soft shadow against the blue night outside. It was like he might blow away or disappear in the blink of an eye.
Meryl didn't like it.
She cleared her throat. "If anyone should be thanked, it’s you. You—"
Vash interrupted her with a dismissive wave of his hand. "Nah, it wouldn't have worked without any of you. And none of you had to stay."
"You didn't have to, either."
Vash turned to her with a rueful smile and said nothing. Meryl narrowed her eyes.
"Thank you, too," she insisted. "We couldn't have done it without you."
Vash shook his head slightly and opened his mouth again, but thought better of it in the face of Meryl's narrow-eyed suspicion. He gave a polite, fake laugh and scratched at the back of his head.
"Alright, alright," he said. "Consider me duly thanked."
"Really?"
"Yeah! I wouldn't lie."
"No fingers crossed behind your back?"
"Haha, would I do that?"
Vash showed Meryl both hands and wiggled his fingers at her. At least he seemed to be in good humor again.
"So are you alright now?" Meryl asked. "You were out of it for hours."
The bursts of static from the radio grew muted. Meryl didn't know how to approach what she'd seen in the Plant room of the Sandstreamer, and it seemed Vash didn't either. He reacted by freezing in place for a slightly too long moment.
"Oh, ha. Yep. All good now."
Meryl looked him over thoughtfully. Vash shifted nervously under her gaze.
"I'm okay now, really. How about you? I, uh, I'm sorry about your chin."
Meryl prodded the side of her jaw. She'd honestly forgotten about it, but it was still a little sore to the touch. Vash looked like he was about to apologize again.
"It's fine. You already apologized," she said, cutting him off. "Profusely."
It was all he had done for the first ten minutes or so since he had woken up in her lap—first hovering uselessly next to her, then pressed against the other side of the back seat in a permanent sympathetic wince when she’d tried to scoot away for a little more space.
The uneven rattles of static from the radio being tuned began anew.
"I mean... I guess I spooked you, anyway," Meryl admitted, her turn to awkwardly shift in place. "It wasn't your fault."
Vash tilted his head in question. "I don’t remember anything like that."
"I, um. My legs were getting numb so I poked your cheek a little," Meryl admitted in a rush. "Gently, though!"
"Oh. That's fine, I don't mind. Sorry about your legs."
"So it wasn't your fault." Meryl didn’t know where to look. "And it's not like that setup was my choice either, I'll have you know. I got herded into the back and then the undertaker just kind of threw you in."
"Ah," Vash said. "So that's why my shin hurts."
"What?"
Meryl turned a fierce glare onto the back of Wolfwood's head. He was staring out of the window, apparently not listening, but Meryl thought he was a little too deliberately motionless for that to be true.
"I thought he was being too careless," she said, turning to look at Vash. "You'd better give him a piece of your mind later!"
"It's alright," he said cheerily. "What matters is that he helped."
"It's not alright! If you aren't going to say anything, then I definitely will."
Wolfwood twitched at the words, finally giving himself away.
---
A chill swept in as the night grew deeper. They all slept in the car that night, shuffling their way one by one into their usual seats as the evening wore on. Meryl had it relatively easy compared to the others, who all had longer limbs they had to cram and jam somewhere, but even for her the car wasn’t ideal. Even in the Bernardelli vehicle she could never get her seat far enough back to be comfortable without squishing the person behind her—which had usually been Vash.
When she finally closed her eyes, Meryl's sleep was restless. The night was full of dreams of things falling out of her arms and blue light and words worming their way into the spine of a book.