The glow from the marred fifth moon illuminated everything in the room with a pale blue light which, when spilt through the warped glass of the window, made ordinary objects seem ethereal, while nondescript shadows embraced childhood imaginings and became demonic.
But Meryl Stryfe was not admiring this phantasmagoric scene before her – she was watching the ceiling, as she had a habit to do when she could not sleep. The clockworks of her mind were spinning incessantly while she pored over the nights events.
“Why is he here?” she whispered to herself. She folded her hands under her head and sighed. It had been an hour since she had aided a drunk and stumbling Milly into her bedclothes and under the covers to sleep off the liquor, and Meryl’s body protested the late hour.
Meryl rolled onto her side restlessly. The bed creaked, but Meryl hardly noticed this as she stared intently at her mantle, draped over the back of the desk chair. She pushed herself into a sitting position, still staring at the guns she knew were there. He was coming, she knew, but would she bring her guns when she met him?
Would she need to?
Her legs dropped over the side of the bed, toes brushing against the cold wooden floor, and pushed the heavy blankets back. An anxious hand crept up under the hem of her nightshirt and settled on a spot just under her ribs to worry.
She sat there for a long while, thinking and rubbing the patch of skin to numbness in her anxiety. She jumped, startled by a faint scratching noise, and quickly scanned the room for its source. Meryl was tempted to brush it off as a rodent burrowing in the walls but, unfortunately, knew better.
In silence, she stood and tiptoed to her mantle, extracting a single derringer and continuing to the window. She pushed herself up against the wall beside the sill and peered out, hoping to catch a glimpse of the person she knew was out there somewhere.
A few moments passed and the scratching stopped. Meryl held her breath and watched as a shrouded figure dashed quickly into and out of her line of sight.
She counted a full minute before abandoning her post at the window and scurrying quietly to the front door. This was what she had been waiting for – this was when her fears would either be realized or dispelled.
Upon opening the door, Meryl scanned over the walls of the house for a sign of the visitant. She found it, etched lightly into the doorframe.
She spun back into the house and went quickly and quietly to the bedroom, leaving the derringer she had been holding on top of the dresser and going immediately for the suitcase stowed under the bed. Dropping it unceremoniously on top of the bed, she began the hurried task of digging through the now mostly empty bag. In frustration, she upended the bag onto the blankets and began scanning the scattered items. She fished out a shirt, then pants, and a few other articles before expeditiously dressing.
*
It was the darkest hour of the night as Meryl walked out past the town and into the foreboding desert. The hard-packed dirt of the roadway faded and was swallowed by the desert which stretched out endlessly before her. The frigid desert air was still, bringing new meaning to the phrase “the dead of night,” but Meryl was not by any means frightened by the nature of the desert that had always been her home. She was intimately familiar with the idiosyncracies of the desert at any given moment; she knew how to survive sandstorms and the typhoons that caused them, what animals in the desert were good to eat, which plants hoarded water best, where to look out for quicksand. She could recognize the tracks of sandworms and several other dangerous desert fauna, and how to protect herself from the freezing cold of the desert after nightfall.
All this knowledge failed to calm her nerves and settle her stomach however, as she was keenly aware of being watched. She didn’t really know why, but for some reason she looked up across the desert to the distant promontory a half an ile away. Where the bedrock jutted up from the sand – and where she had once shared a few precious moments of emotional intimacy with the Humanoid Typhoon.
She thought she saw the outline of a shrouded figure standing up at the edge of that promontory, but it never moved and as she continued to stare at it in the nebulous darkness, the edges of the outline blurred until she could no longer discern the shape at all. If only it would move – redefine itself in her eyes – then she could either confirm or dismiss this gnawing anxiety that was eating at her as she trudged deeper into the desert.
*
“Mister Vash! Mister Vash!”
Milly Thompson pounded on the door and without waiting to see if he was getting up, barged into the darkened boudoir and happened upon the semi-awake form of Vash the (Former) Stampede.
“Mister Vash, please get up!” she mewled, standing over the prone figure of the deadly gunman in his bed and began shaking him by the shoulders violently. By this point, “Mister Vash” was of course very much awake and wondering why one of the insurance representatives that followed him around was in his room and mauling him – before the sun had risen, at least. His wakefulness did not seem to affect the blonde woman’s actions, however. “Mister Vash!”
“What?!” Vash whined, his brain bouncing back and forth in his skull. Milly relinquished her grip on his shoulders, leaving him to flop back down on the mattress as she clasped her hands together in a groveling fashion.
“You’ve got to do something!” she pleaded with tearful, warbling eyes. Vash’s head hurt and his mind was still clouded with sleep, but he knew something was wrong.
“What happened?” he asked, rubbing his forehead.
“Meryl’s gone!”
“Hmm?” The last vestiges of his dreamscape melted away. “So?” he pouted, as was his nature, despite the strong possibility the tall insurance girl couldn’t see the facial expression in the weak, predawn light. “She’s a big girl – she can take care of herself.” He hoped.
“Mister Vash, this is no time for you to be surly! You know she wouldn’t just leave in the middle of the night! It’s not like her!” Vash dropped his scowl, watching Milly’s face in the greyish light.
“When did she leave?” Vash quickly rose from the bed and began scrounging on the floor and in the sheets for his clothes. He found his shirt under his pillow and jammed his arms into the sleeves. “Where did she go?”
“I – I don’t know.” With the way her pitch rose at the end, Milly seemed to have surprised herself with her own lack of information. Vash came up from under the bed with his jeans and cast her a questioning look. “I just woke up and found her gone. One of her guns was on top of the dresser and all her stuff was scattered on the bed.”
“What?” Vash had been pulling his jeans up over his flannel sleeping pants, but now stopped in shock with the waistband just up to his hips. “Was it discharged? No,” he continued, answering his own question, “she couldn’t have let off a shot – I would have woken up. What about her other guns? Were any of them missing?”
“No, it was just the one. All the others were still in their holsters.”
“So she’s somewhere out in the desert in the wee hours of the morning, alone and unarmed?” He pulled his blue jeans the rest of the way up, buttoned them, and crossed the room to grab his gun and holster. When he turned back, Milly was still sitting on the edge of his bed wearing that pathetically worried look that made anyone want to stop whatever they were doing and comfort her. Vash was about to say something when her expression unexpectedly changed and she jumped up from the bed.
“And she’s not wearing her uniform!”
“Huh?”
“She’s got two sets of the same uniform, and they both were lying on the bed.”
“So ... what? She’s out there naked now, too?”
“Don’t you see? What ever she’s doing must have something to do with her personally – otherwise why not wear the uniform like she always does?” Vash’s movements slowed and it was with hesitation that he fastened his gunbelt around his waist. The deceleration of his actions did not go unnoticed. “What is it? What are you thinking, Mister Vash?”
“It’s just that ... this–” he fumbled for the right words, but found none. “Look, I don’t want to go out there looking for a damsel in distress and end up interrupting some ... romantic interlude.”
“Romantic ... interlude?”
“Well, doesn’t it seem kinda like that might be it? I mean, she dresses up, sneaks out in the middle of the night, maybe contemplates bringing a gun for protection before realizing that there’s no room to carry it in her skimpy, sexy outfit. . . .” Vash trailed off, obviously having convinced himself of this scenario already, and wholeheartedly imagining it play out with a catlike smirk.
“Mister Vash!” Milly seemed honestly outraged by his insinuation, and motivated to tell him so. “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard! After all this time you should know that Meryl–” the sentence hit a bump as Milly stopped herself, then continued again, “–would never do something like that!”
“Something like what?”
“Like have a ... romantic interlude ... with someone she’d just met!”
“Well I don’t know about that ...” Vash offered, while taking up the professor-esque pose of holding his chin between his thumb and forefinger. “I’ve always maintained that somewhere within that catty exterior was a party girl raring to be set free.”
“Mister Vash!” Milly was thoroughly annoyed with him now. She stomped over to him and glared at him, nearly nose to nose. “If you won’t do something, I will!” She “hmphed” at him and stomped past him, out of his room.
Great, now Milly was mad at him. He followed her back to her room with a sigh and encountered the evidence of Meryl’s disappearance firsthand. Vash found that despite his previous reasoning in his own room, now that he was faced with the uncharacteristic disarray of her articles on the bed, the seemingly forgotten pistol resting on top of the dresser, and the overall panicked feel of the room left in such a way, he understood Milly’s urgency and staunch disbelief of his half-baked theories.
“Stay here, Insurance Girl,” he said softly, causing Milly to halt her actions and turn to face him, an expression of mild surprise on her face. “I’ll go out and look for her – you wait here in case she comes back.” Milly nodded, dumbly at first, then her face simultaneously hardened and lit up as she crossed the room quickly and snatched him up in a hug.
“When you find her, give her that for me, ok?” she requested innocently as she started to pull away.
“I will.”
*
“What are you doing here?” Meryl stared at the shrouded figure perched like a bird of prey at the edge of the promontory, trying to remain nonchalant and equanimous. Finally, the figure moved. He turned away from the spectacular view to confront her, but his face was still hidden behind the hood of his sand blanket. It didn’t matter to Meryl. She knew every detail of his face without having to see it. She could even imagine his expression at that very moment.
“Looking for you,” he replied succinctly, his voice harder than she had anticipated. He took a step toward her, then paused. “Aren’t you afraid of me?”
“How could I ever be afraid of you?” she asked in honest disbelief. He took another step toward her, his booted feet barely whispering across the sand in a ghostlike manner. Meryl held her ground, unintimidated. He stopped a few paces from her and pushed back his hood.
“I’m not the same person you knew years ago.” Meryl stared into his eyes, predawn light trying and failing to reach their dark depths. “I’ve done many things since then. Killed many people.” He paused, then turned his head slightly away to stare at something down toward the town. “They all think I’ve gone crazy. I heard them talking once; they think it’s because of you. Because you left.”
“You’re not crazy. You’re just as cold and calculating as you ever were.”
“You think you can predict me?” he asked whipping his head back to face her, incredulous. “Is that why you didn’t bring any weapons? You don’t believe I’m capable of hurting you?” In a heartbeat, his hand flew to his belt and he had a gun cocked and pointed at her.
“Why are you doing this? Why are you here?” she asked again, desperate for an answer. He stared at her blankly, then stepped back and raised the gun, pointing it at her head, point blank. He was totally unreadable to her, something she hadn’t foreseen. Her gaze traced the scar that traversed his face, starting at the bridge of his nose and fading at the hollow of his cheek. She remembered how he had gotten that scar and wondered once again what he was plotting. His eyes were only mirrors to her, showing a false world without any true depth.
“Crazy men don’t need reasons.” At that moment, she knew he was going to shoot her. She dodged instinctively and managed to avoid the bullet meant for her head, but her ears rang from the noise, momentarily deafening her. The second bullet grazed her side and Meryl fell to the ground, muffling a cry of pain. She rolled onto her back in time to see him standing over her, gun once again pointed at her head. He cocked it slowly, giving her time to let the fear build, then aimed it squarely between her eyes.
Meryl could not believe what was happening. She didn’t understand why he would try to kill her, and began to wonder if perhaps he was crazy. It went against everything she knew in her heart. Everything that had been ingrained in her since before her birth. She knew this man better than she knew herself; how could she not recognize insanity in one so close to her? But why else would he be here, about to put a bullet in her brain?
Her mind reeled in confusion and rejected what her eyes were seeing. This ... just wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be happening. This had to be some horrible nightmare. But the pain in her side assured it was no dream, and heavy reality seeped into her mind, fighting for recognition.
She felt the tears welling in her eyes, and closed them, determined not to let him see her weakness when she had been so sure of herself just a moment ago. She tried to breathe, but found it easier to just hold her breath and wait for him to fire.
“If you’re going to kill me, do it now.” When he hesitated, hope flickered to life in the back of her mind and she almost opened her eyes, but the frail creature was obliterated as the gun finally went off, exploding in her ears.
*~*~*