Adult-FanFiction.org : Anime

Earth to Earth	By : Ravenclaw42 Category: +S to Z > Trigun Views: 2957 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Trigun, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1
- 2
- 3
The Amazing Universal Disclaimer: Don’t own it. Won’t own it. Can’t own it. The end.

Author’s Note: Every even-numbered chapter is either outside the normal timeline or outside the plot entirely. This one’s a flashback. (I’m posting chapters in pairs until I catch up with myself.)

--------
Chapter Two: Lullaby
--------

The one thing that would stick with Meryl forever about that night was the sound of humming.
It was late -- way too late to still be up and about, but Meryl couldn’t help it. She felt like Milly, pulling an all-nighter with her monthly letters home. Except that Meryl wasn’t writing to her family, she was writing to Bernardelli -- and to herself.

Really, she didn’t have anything to say in her reports anymore. The first couple of times, she tried to write a full report of everything that had happened, everything in Vash’s history that would lead to his being such a nuisance to the insurance companies of the world. She’d given up on that idea, though. Who would believe her if she told the truth? Sure, everyone on Gunsmoke knew, logically, that they came from a different world. But that knowledge was starting to pass into legend, into myth -- some grandparents still understood the phenomenon that was life, still remembered the planet just after the Fall; but they were few and far between, and they were dying out fast. The new generation, Meryl and Milly included, was more removed from those pioneer roots. The only link that could bridge the generational gap was Vash, and he was... well. There just wasn’t much that could be said about him that could do him justice.

Meryl sighed, leaning back in her creaking desk chair and looking at the cheap clock on the wall above her. 2:10 a.m. She winced. She didn’t really feel sleepy... tired, maybe, but that was a generic weariness of the soul, nothing more.

Sighing, she stood and stretched. Eleven reports typed, eleven rejected. She’d never been at this much of a loss for words before. Except right after the incident with that Gale character -- but no, even then she’d had inspiration, just no clear way to channel it. Ever since he’d walked away for the last time, she’d felt like she was wrung dry...

Abruptly, she raised both hands to her drawn face and rubbed at the corners of her eyes, drawing her fingers back through her dark, uneven locks. No time to think about him. He was gone now. It had been two weeks. He wasn’t coming back.

The thought used to elicit unwanted emotion from her -- when she thought about the tilted sea-green eyes that would never look up to meet hers again, her throat would tighten, her chest constrict. Only a week before, she might have fought tears at the bitter memory of their silent parting in front of this very house. But now... now it was almost worse, the way she could think all she wanted of him and feel nothing at all. She could sit and rifle through her memories like drawers in a filing cabinet; everything organized, simple, cold. It was exactly the same way she looked through her old reports at the main office.

Meryl shot her typewriter a disgusted look. It sat there on that desk that wasn’t hers, the keys grinning at her like the teeth of a squat little reptile. The metal panels marred by patches of fixative and duct tape looked almost like scales in the moonlight. A half-finished report drooped over backwards, limp, the machine’s dead prey.

Was this what she was subjecting her memories to? Consigning them to this monster? Death by typewriter. Death by cold logic.

Meryl turned away from the desk, sickened with herself and Bernardelli and the world in general. The inside of the building seemed stuffy all of a sudden. The air was full of the ghosts of her typewriter’s victims...

Careful not to turn on any lights or close any doors too loudly, Meryl crept out of her room and down the hall. Milly slept in the bedroom on the other side, and seeing as she’d been working constant overtime at her temporary consruction job to support both women, Meryl didn’t want to deprive her of what little sleep she could get. Meryl felt guilty about not helping out financially, but the townspeople had been really touchy about the insurance girls’ presence after they’d discovered Vash’s identity, and Meryl couldn’t get a part-time job anywhere. Milly was allowed to stay on at the construction site because -- well, because she was Milly. Everyone knew her, even though she’d only been there for less than a month, and she got along with even the most stubborn and obnoxious people as if they were her best friends. She was a small-town girl, and this was her territory. Meryl needed a city to thrive, needed famous anonymity and a series of desks to hide behind; Milly only needed her work-calloused hands, her cheerful demeanor, and a special cuff link to neatly pin her heart out on her sleeve.

Meryl sighed, passing Milly’s closed door. The younger woman was no less the cheerful, childish co-worker she used to be, but somewhere, somehow, she’d lost something too deep to ignore. Over a month since the rogue priest’s death, and neither of them had really come to accept it yet. It hurt to watch Milly’s antics... knowing what she’d suffered, who she’d lost.

The same way it had hurt to watch Vash.

The front door was just in front of her now; she needed air, badly. A tendril of chilly night air drifted in between the cracks in the aged wooden door, and she shivered. For some reason, her fingers tingled when she touched the doorknob. Something didn’t feel quite right... some lingering sixth sense at the back of her mind was trying to tell her something.

She automatically put it down to static electricity and paranoia, and turned the knob.

The thing that stuck with her the sharpest about that night was the sound of humming.

The soft sound was the first thing to reach her ears; soft and broken, and completely unfamiliar. Stepping out onto the small deck of the rented house, Meryl wrapped her arms around herself to battle the dry cold of the desert night, frowning. The sound of the door clicking shut behind her was abnormally loud, maybe because it was counterpointed against the discordant notes of some alien song drifting through the air. She let her hand fall from the closed door, peering out into the street to try to find where the sound was coming from. The rented house fronted a wide area, almost a plaza; the moonlight, shunted away from all the town’s narrow alleys, reached the ground here easily. Sand drifts like molten silver puffed across the bare stone of the demi-plaza, nudged onwards by the slight breeze.

Across the plaza -- there, in the patch of dim shadow by the town gates. Meryl adjusted her vision, tried to will more light to the deformed blur of darker shade within the pale shadow. Someone was definitely there -- and they were singing, or at least trying to.

Meryl pulled the tender inside of her cheek between thoughtful teeth, biting down as if this were a dream she could will herself to wake up from at any moment. No such luck. To say she fought a bitter inner struggle over whether or not to approach the hulking shadow would be a lie; in fact, she couldn’t help but laugh mirthlessly at herself at just how resigned she felt as she stepped off the low porch and started moving across the open space.

It was a picturebook meeting of strangers. Her -- the angel clad in white -- gliding forth into the silvered night to bring her grace and mercy to a gruesome, lost, twisted soul in the shadow. That wasn’t as comforting a thought as she wished it could be.

Each step drew her closer to the twisted shape, sharpening lines and highlights until she could distinctly see two figures. One was sitting cross-legged, slumped over the other, whose head was cradled in the lap of the first. The second figure looked to be completely prone and unresponsive, either unconscious or... dead.

The strange song suddenly took on a sharp note of grief and bitterness to Meryl’s ears. As soon as she thought of death, she thought she could sense it, the phantom smell of blood and gunpower tickling at the back of her throat. The humming figure might as well have been singing a dirge.

Recognition came gradually... or maybe she had known all along who the two darkened figures were. She couldn’t tell; somehow it didn’t seem to matter anymore. From the moment he’d gone -- before then, even -- life had felt like a dream she couldn’t wake up from. Each day she felt more disconnected from herself; each day she found that she had been unconsciously molding herself to her new life with Vash, and that when that left abruptly vanished, she had nowhere to go. She wasn’t sure what had changed her. Vash, certainly. Milly, even -- a little. The big girl had surprised and surpassed Meryl in more ways than one over the past few years. But it wasn’t just a person or a set of circumstances; it was the sharp smell of smoke at dawn, it was the way sand slid and squeaked underneath her boots, it was the familiar weight of her gun-laden cloak and the feel of a trigger or a leather strap or a steering wheel under her searching fingers.

What had changed her? Children’s laughter. Drunken bar brawls. A steamer foreman’s stout devotion to his job and his honor. Spending five minutes watching a Plant technician at work, and finally understanding to a full extent what -- who -- it really was inside that seemingly dead bulb. Intervening in a lynching... and succeeding.

What had changed her?

Life. The world. The human race. Things she couldn’t understand when she was sitting behind her neat and orderly desk in an office building, being pressed to death by her own paperwork.

The thought of returning to Bernardelli as if nothing had happened was sickening. Meryl didn’t want to go questing for adventure or anything -- exactly the opposite, really -- but she no longer questioned herself when she followed her gut rather than her mind. She didn’t question the fact that she needed to see the figure in the shadow across the street, even if seeing him -- them -- would only serve to confirm what she already knew.

She drew closer now. Silver twilight blurred everything at the edges; she couldn’t see their faces or hands, or even fully make out what they were wearing. But their figures were enough to give them away, slender, broad-shouldered, regal... lost royalty to go with the planet’s lost technology. How fitting.

Vash’s hair had lost its spike, falling around his face and clinging to his neck in a tangled, straw-like way. The sweat had dried in it, stiffer than any gel. She wondered how long he’d walked to get here. He leaned over his brother’s sleeping face, swaying back and forth in a tiny arc, no more than the wind could have pushed him... the matted frame of his hair hid his face from view, but from the way his shoulders rose and fell, she knew he was the one singing.

It didn’t sound like Vash’s voice. Meryl had heard the full gamut of his expressions, knew his laughter and his tears in equal measure; she knew the rasp that betrayed his inner pain when he cracked an awkward joke; she knew the hidden measure of concern that honeyed his tongue when he flirted; she knew the repressed scream behind his quiet anger and the mourning wail that threatened to overtake him when he was in a blind rage. His drunken ramblings, his tearful apologies... his silent goodbyes. She’d even heard him sing before.

But nothing... nothing compared to this.

If there were words, she either couldn’t understand them or didn’t bother to make them out. There was a melody, but it was elusive... as soon as it stopped, she knew she would forget it, like a lucid dream at the edge of waking. His voice was neither bass nor tenor, just... soft, sad... like simple speech, and yet unlike. It was haunting, it was beautiful... it was...

It hurt.

Vash moved with the breeze, and for the first time, Meryl saw the flash and glitter of tears, dripping slowly from the end of Vash’s nose onto his brother’s pale cheek. Vash’s right hand rested in the little cave formed by his brother’s neck and ear, curled fingers entwined in the pale locks as if afraid to let go. His mechanical arm lay across Knives’ shoulder, hand splayed palm-down against what Meryl could now clearly see was a blood-soaked bandage. His back bent as if under a heavy load, head tilted downwards so he could see nothing but the upside-down countenance of his brother -- if his eyes were even open, which Meryl distantly doubted.

Meryl knelt slowly in the sand, barely two yarz away from the mourning twin and his unconscious burden. She closed her eyes and let the sound of Vash’s broken voice pierce her to the bone, acupunture needles of grief. She understood that no matter what happened from now on... nothing could ever quite be the same. Even if Vash succeeded, things would be different... even if he failed, he had already changed too much to ever be the same man she’d met three years ago.

The song welled up inside her like blood from an open wound. She didn’t even notice hearing it anymore... it didn’t have to pass through her ears to get to her heart.

She drifted then, losing herself for a few brief minutes in the empty nothing that had been trying to claim her for two weeks. No tears touched her cheeks; this feeling in her was not sorrow, not grief. It wasn’t a feeling at all. It was gray.

Silence was what finally brought her back to reality, dead silence and the prickling feeling of being watched. She opened her eyes and found herself staring straight into the aqua depths that she had nearly convinced herself she would never see again. Vash and Meryl said nothing to each other -- there were some things that couldn’t be spoken aloud simply because no words in any language could bear any meaning deeper than what a look could convey.

Meryl felt acutely aware of everything around her; of the triple shadows cast by the moons, of the small breeze and the way it flattened her shirt against her back and ruffled her hair over her eyes, of the rough sand-coated stone she sat on. She gazed at Vash for nearly two whole minutes, and each second felt like a year. She wanted to move, but not to make the first move; and as far as she could tell, Vash felt the same way.

Finally, after a thirty-second eternity, Vash broke their eye contact, turning to look down at his brother once again. The hand that was by Knives’ ear flexed a little, moving up to brush Vash’s tears from Knives’ face, to draw stray strands back from his too-pale forehead. Meryl shifted, rolling back on her heels to stand.

She didn’t remember much of the process of getting Vash and his brother inside the house, although she knew she had done it without waking Milly. Part of her wanted to remember that night more clearly, but more of her knew how wrong it would be to try to understand it. Sacreligious, almost... the same way it had felt wrong to try to understand the words -- if there were any -- in Vash’s alien song.

Lyrics couldn’t have made a difference, no matter how haunting they might have been. Besides, all that stuck with Meryl about that night...

was the sound of humming.

--------

A/N: Vash’s song was not intended to be any song in particular. I know everyone has some piece of music that affects them the way Vash’s melody affected Meryl -- something that scours you from the inside out, that twists your heart up and leaves you empty inside. Whatever that song is for you, then that’s what Vash is singing. Personally, I was listening to Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah” as I wrote. I’ve heard it a thousand times, and it still gives me chills.
--------
- 1
- 2
- 3
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

Earth to Earth