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
- 2
- 3
- 4
Author’s Note: This is probably my least favorite chapter. It drags and it’s not overwhelmingly plotty, but it gets the job done. *shrug* It seemed better when I was writing it. (But isn’t that how it always goes... *sigh*)

-----------
Chapter 3: The Calculator Effect
-----------

Vash woke with a myoclonic jerk, the sudden sensation and fear of falling so intense that he almost cried out. For a split-second, everything was inverted -- flying and falling, reality and hallucination, speech and thought -- he couldn’t tell if he was speaking aloud or just shouting at himself, but either way, something inside him snapped. His hands clenched into fists involuntarily, curled in a death grip around folds of the sheet.

And then the sensation passed and he woke up all the way -- only to find himself already sitting up in bed, and, apparently, talking. Or at least, he had been talking. Meryl was sitting cross-legged on the side of his sickbed, leaning forward as if they had been in deep conversation. Vash could remember none of it.

Meryl frowned at him, reaching out to feel his temperature. He flinched away, still unsettled by the rude awakening. “Vash?” she queried, touching both sides of her hand to his forehead. “Are you all right? Are you feeling sick again?”

“I...” he said automatically, not knowing what he was feeling. He floundered, at a loss for an explanation. “I... I’m sorry... were we talking?” It sounded stupid as soon as it left his lips. He winced.

Her frown deepened. “What do you mean, were we talking? Of course we... Vash, what’s wrong?” She looked more than just a little worried now; from behind her gruff, sharp voice, a little hint of fear slipped through.

Vash looked around him as if the room itself could offer an answer. They were definitely on a ship; the unimaginative crackerbox of a room was standard issue crew’s quarters. Two bunks, storage compartments in the walls, a tiny hygiene cubicle, and the door were the only things that stood out from the empty gray backdrop. One wall was curved -- they were on the outer rim of the ship, then, if they had direct access to the hull. Some half-buried part of Vash’s mind kicked into high gear, calculating the dimensions of the room, the arrangement of the keys on the door’s lock panel, the colored bars striping one corner of the door to the bathroom... and within seconds, he knew which ship they were on, what sector within the ship, the names of the original crew, and the floor layout of the area immediately surrounding them.

Why am I thinking this? Vash interrupted his own train of thought, trying to shut down that alien part of him that was a living calculator. He’d thought he had gotten over the whole higher-IQ-than-should-be-legal thing. He hadn’t consciously thought in terms of numbers and blueprints for decades. Why start again now?

He shook his head, even more unsettled than he had been already.

“Hey -- Vash, look at me.” Meryl was still trying to get his attention. He snapped back to reality only to realize that mere seconds had passed since her last question. His brain seemed to be working faster than his body could keep up with. He wished it would stop; it was already making him tired.

“I don’t --” he started, then paused. He’d already gotten so off track that he’d forgotten what she’d said. “What?” he asked dumbly.

“I asked what’s wrong, Vash,” Meryl said crossly, feeling his forehead again. He almost caught her wrist and stopped her from doing it, but he resisted the urge to. “You were just talking about the ship, and then you just stopped and looked away... and now you act like you didn’t even know you were talking in the first place.”

“But I... I just woke up,” Vash said helplessly. “Didn’t I?”

“You’ve been awake for nearly an hour,” Meryl said disbelievingly.

Vash just stared at her. “No, I haven’t,” he said finally. The contradiction sounded weak even to his own ears.

Meryl shook her head, exasperated “I’m getting the doctor,” she said, swinging her feet to the floor and standing.

Vash’s eyes widened a little and he straightened, calling, “Wait!” But Meryl didn’t stop, didn’t seem to hear him. It was only after she’d gone that he realized he hadn’t said anything aloud at all.

He stared at the closed door for a few minutes, trying to stop his hands from shaking and failing miserably. The calculator effect... the autonomic waking routine while still physically asleep... losing track of what was spoken and what was telepathic. None of these things were unfamiliar to him, but... he hadn’t done them in over a century. He pulled his knees up under the covers until he could rest his forehead on them, focusing fiercely on remaining calm.

Finally managing to still his errant limbs, Vash raised his hands to his head and rubbed at his temples. This had to be because of the fight. He remembered it... vaguely. He remembered greeting his brother... remembered drawing his gun and leveling it at a spot just over Knives’ shoulder, still unwilling to aim at anything vital. That was how it had begun. He knew that, and yet...

Vash shook his head sharply, causing a low-level ache that had been building up behind his eyes to stab up into new, vibrant life. He winced as the splitting migraine settled in. Maybe he wasn’t as healed as he felt.

In all honesty, he’d thought he wouldn’t be able to remember the fight at all; it surprised him that he could call up a hazy image of white feathers and light in his memory. He didn’t really know what the Angel Arm looked like -- he could never remember using it. He assumed he must have been aware of what was going on when he’d fired it in July and Augusta, but even if he had gotten a good look at it then, it did him no good now. Those memories had vanished as if surgically removed, the only legacy of their passing being two ragged mental scars to match the scars criss-crossing his body.

But this time it was a little bit different, and he didn’t know why. He remembered small things -- the scarlet color of the sky, the acrid smell of gunpowder, hot smoke cascading around his head and shoulders, the stinging burn of breathing in a faceful of kicked-up dust. He remembered the echo of laughter, and a sharp scream. The feel of splinters prickling under his gloved hands, unable to break the leather. Little things. A figure with gruesomely deformed arms standing in front of him, insanely tall... or maybe Vash himself had been on the ground, and the other figure had just seemed tall from the wrong vantage point. Things kept slipping away as soon as he caught hold of them...

As soon as he realized that the memories were evading him, he tried to go back to the beginning, but that only made it worse. What color had the sky been? He couldn’t remember now... but... he knew he’d had it a moment ago.

Damn it all, he thought bitterly, letting his face fall into his hands again.

A few minutes later, Meryl returned with a kid -- well, he looked like a kid to Vash, at least. He was probably in his late teens, maybe early twenties, a doctor’s apprentice or just some hopeful follower of Doc’s or Natalie’s. He looked vaguely familiar. Everyone always looked vaguely familiar to Vash, though. It was just a byproduct of longevity -- faces ran together, times and ages and days started to lose meaning. It was hard to remain fully aware of the world around himself, sometimes. Time passed no more quickly for Vash than it did for the average human, it just kept on going... indefinitely.

Meryl was talking to the kid when the door opened, but she stopped when she saw Vash watching them. “Vash,” she said tentatively, stepping into the room.

He nodded in acknowledgement, but he wasn’t looking at her. The kid was eyeing him in a way he knew all too well. The old-timers here, the ones who had actually gotten to know him a little, had always been the ones who were most comfortable around him. This kid -- he would have never been up close and personal with a legend before. He might have seen Vash from a distance when the city crashed, but... that was really no kind of situation to pass judgment on a person in.

“Ahh...” the kid began, sweating under Vash’s gaze. “Vash-san! Good to see you up and about. Miss Meryl came out earlier to say you’d woken, but I was otherwise occupied... so, ah, can I get you anything?”

‘Can I get you anything...’ You? Get me anything? Anything I want? Vash felt hysterical laughter bubbling just below the surface, mirthless and vaguely sick-feeling. Words couldn’t describe how very much he hated that question.

“It’s really nothing,” Vash said softly, blanking out everything he really wanted to say and drawing an iron curtain across his face. The kind, calm grin that was programmed into his facial muscles appeared and fixed itself there... although, after more than a century of use, it was getting more than a little worn.

The kid looked nervously between the faintly smiling outlaw and the short insurance agent, who, as it happened, was shooting Vash a death glare.

“Liar,” Meryl said sharply. “You know it’s not nothing! You’re forgetting chunks of time, how normal is that?”

The kid blinked. “Forgetting what?” he repeated, his nerves abating a little when medical curiosity took over.

Vash sighed, finally looking away from the kid. He made a vague gesture with one hand, brushing the matter aside. “I’m losing time, that’s all. I’ve done it before. It’s nothing to worry about.”

The kid took a step towards Vash’s bed, curiosity completely piqued now. “You say this has happened before? When, and for how long? Can you describe the exact symptoms?”

He’s got the makings of a good doctor, all right, Vash thought ruefully. He just wished the kid would drop this... it wasn’t something he felt like dealing with right now. He just wanted to go back to sleep...

Fine. If the kid wouldn’t let a sleeping dog lie, Vash would just have to drop the shell that he knew would put some distance between them. He didn’t like abusing his own practically-mythological status like this... but he liked being interrogated even less. “Yeah, it used to happen a lot back on the SEEDS ship,” he said truthfully, knowing that somewhere out of his field of view, the kid was stiffening up again with apprehension at Vash’s tone. “Knives did it, too. When we were kids. It was like sleepwalking. I haven’t done it in a few decades, but it’s not a big deal.”

That did the trick. The kid was dumbstruck, silently struggling with the casual way the legendary outlaw could talk about his true age and his psychopathic brother. It was just as Vash had suspected -- the kid had idolized him already, had done exactly what everyone on the planet did at one point or other. Nobody wanted anything more from Vash than a monopoly on his name and a taste of his blood.

Nobody wanted the real man. Nobody wanted the truth.

Vash closed his eyes, wrapped his arms around his knees, and bowed his head. He just couldn’t do it... he couldn’t drive the kid away. The need for someone, anyone, who could understand him -- the desperate need to stop the alienation before it could take root was far too strong. Call it weakness. Call it sentimentalism. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore.

“Stop looking at me like that,” he murmured. He wasn’t sure if he was talking to Meryl or the kid, or...

Meryl came up to his side and raised a hand as if to touch his forehead. This time, he really did grab her wrist and lower her hand by force. She winced a little, but said nothing.

“Ahh... Vash-san?” the kid asked weakly. He raised a trembling hand to the bridge of his nose, rubbing fiercely at the side of it.

Vash almost laughed out loud at the sight, looking up again with a twinkle in his eye that had been gone for much too long. “You’ve got contacts, right?” Vash asked cheerfully, smiling away. Both Meryl and the doctor kid stared at him. He imitated the kid’s nose-rubbing nervous habit. “Only people with glasses do that much,” he explained. “I know. The nosepieces on my shades used to pinch like the devil until I got them fixed. Hey, do I remember you mentioning talking to Natalie-sensei? I didn’t know she was still around these parts. Don’t guess I could convince her to make an appearance on such short notice...”

“Ah! V-Vash-san, of course! I’ll go get Natalie-san right away!” The kid did one of the most spectacular double takes Vash had ever seen and nearly cracked his nose on the doorframe on the way out.

Vash chuckled a little to himself, and looked up to find Meryl glaring down at him, arms crossed dangerously. He gave her a hopeful, conciliatory grin.

She was having none of it.

“How could you play the poor boy like that? He was only trying to help! You nearly gave him a heart attack! Don’t you realize you can’t just go around blabbing about your brother like he’s a tame pet project of yours? No one here believes your story, no one believes they’re safe while he’s here! And what the hell do you mean, sleepwalking is no big deal? Vash, you idiot! You -- you -- gyah!”

Vash tuned her out, wincing at all the right places and throwing out a few empty objections whenever her ire needed re-stoking. Maybe the damage wasn’t completely healed over yet, but at least he’d managed to salvage that conversation before it turned into an uncomfortable silence. If anything could hurt Vash, it was an uncomfortable silence. Silences like that gave other people time to think about what he was rather than who he was, and it was only then that they molded him into a false idol or a moon-scarring legend.

“Where’s Milly?” Vash asked into the midst of Meryl’s tirade, too tired to think anymore.

Meryl faltered and stopped in mid-sentence, fist still raised. “I --” She spluttered for a second. “I -- she’s -- over in the other room. Hey! Don’t you dare change the subject on me!” She gave him a death glare, her cheeks flushed pink with adrenaline and anger.

Vash gave her a little smile, knowing and level. “I only wanted to know.”

Meryl lowered her hand and pulled her lower lip between her teeth. Her eyelid was still twitching spasmodically, but her fury seemed to have passed for the moment. “Milly’s... busy,” Meryl said carefully, not meeting Vash’s eyes. “She’s taking care of herself just for now.”

Vash nodded and decided not to push the subject any more. Obviously something was up, but he didn’t think he could deal with it now. He would wait for the kid to come back, talk to Natalie... and deal with everything else in the morning.

The door slid open just then, admitting a red-faced, huffing doctor-kid. “I -- I got her, Vash-san,” he gasped, stepping out of the doorway and doubling over with his hands on his knees, trying to get his breath back.

Vash smiled up at the person who had been standing just behind the kid in the doorway. “Hey, sensei!” he said as cheerfully as he could manage. “How are you these days? He didn’t have to run, you know -- I mean, it’s not an emergency or anything.”

“Oh, I know, Vash-sama,” said the figure sardonically, stepping into the room and waving the door shut behind her.

Vash winced. “Awwww, sensei, don’t call me that!” he objected. “You know I don’t like my reputation...”

“Ah, I know, I know.” Natalie waved her hands in apology, then seemed to notice Meryl for the first time. “Oh, you must be Miss Meryl! I’ve heard of you from your partner. Vash getting on your nerves at all?”

“Oh -- I, uhm...” Meryl stammered, taken aback. “Well, yes. I mean, it’s a pleasure to finally meet you, ma’am! Milly told me about you last night.” She recovered herself and held out a hand, eyeing Natalie up and down.

She was an older woman of average height and a stocky build, although she acted like she was much older than she looked. Her hair was iron-gray and frazzled, stuck up in a messy, lopsided bun with one chopstick and a broken pencil stub. Her clothes were similar to those of everyone else on the ship -- an antiquated fashion statement, half-uniform and half-casual. Natalie had made her clothes her own, though, unlike the neatly-pressed outfits Meryl had seen on most of the people here. She wore a gray-and-orange men’s uniform, with the tunic sleeves cut off and hemmed in by hand in a clashing color of thread, and a Project SEEDS wing-symbol roughly embroidered on the breast pocket. Her pants were too long, dust-stained all the way to the knee, and shredded at the heel where she’d trodden on them.

But what struck Meryl wasn’t her apparent sloppiness or uncouth bluntness. It was the fact that as soon as she walked into a room, she owned it. If ever there was a queen on this godforsaken planet, then that monarch surely wore hand-modified tunics and torn pants, because Meryl was positive that she was shaking hands with royalty.

“Did Vash just call you ‘sensei’...?” Meryl asked before she could stop herself, momentarily forgetting that she was still holding Natalie’s hand.

Natalie smiled lightly and gently disengaged Meryl from the handshake. “Hai, hai. Yes, Vash likes to think he learned something from me. He didn’t, really -- I could have talked to him all day long and it would’ve been like arguing with a brick wall.”

“That’s not true, sensei!” Vash complained, putting on a look of feigned devastation.

“Give it a rest, boy,” Natalie said, pulling up the room’s only chair and sitting backwards on it, leaning her broad forearms on the backrest. She looked over her shoulder at the door. “Hey, don’t be a useless lump, kiddo! Come over here, have a seat.”

The doctor-kid gulped nervously, taking a hesitant step away from the wall, towards Natalie, Vash and Meryl. “Well, I d-don’t really think it’s exactly my place to --” he began, looking perfectly solemn and sincere.

“Can it, Jones,” Natalie cut in amiably, motioning towards the empty bed opposite Vash’s. “Count yourself the Doc’s representative, if you want. It’s not like you’re going to learn any life-endangering state secrets that I’ll have to kill you for later.”

“Jones” hesitated, but eventually managed to loosen up a little and sit on the foot of the bed. Meryl resumed her place at Vash’s side, still looking at Natalie in a mixture of respect and bewilderment.

Natalie shifted, resettling herself on her chair. She nodded between Vash and Jones, saying, “I suppose you two would have never met. Vash, this here’s Michael Jones, one of the Doc’s med students. Not one of the new kids, either. Doc’s getting on up there now, needed someone to take over for a while. Jones is the only one he felt qualified. So don’t traumatize him, will ya? And Jones, meet Vash the Stampede. I know you don’t need to hear any more about him. Am I right?” She laughed, a firm, unarguable sound that came from somewhere deep in her chest.

“I -- y-yes, I met Vash-san earlier,” Michael said, flustered. Natalie had somehow managed to give him a compliment and a put-down in the same breath.

“Sensei...” Vash cut in imploringly, leaning his chin on his knees again and looking across the space between them to catch her sharp grey eyes.

Natalie shook her head, reluctanctly letting go of her pretense of joviality. “Vash, I’m serious. Stop calling me that.” He nodded, and she sighed in response, scratching just behind her ear.

“So,” Vash prompted.

“So. You’re awake. You asked for me. What the hell are you ‘so’-ing me for?”

Vash recognized the tension in his old friend’s stance, the way she kept finding reasons to touch the same spot behind her ear without even noticing her own movements. He hadn’t seen her mood swing so far so fast since the loss of July. Laughter to snapping in under a minute -- it had to be a record.

“I just thought someone should know how I’m doing,” Vash said softly, looking away. “So you can tell Doc. He’s probably worried.”

Natalie shook her head again. “He’s not so good right now, Vash,” she said gently. “Doc caught a bug that was going around -- something from the outside, something we’d never seen before. No one here had any natural immunities like your outsider friends do. Meaning no offense, ma’am,” she added, glancing at the other woman in the room.

“None taken,” Meryl murmured. This didn’t feel like a conversation she was particularly welcome to take part in.

“How’s he doing?” Vash asked, his voice a little strained. “Doc’s too tough for some cold to stop him from coming to see me.”

Natalie said nothing for a moment, pursing her lips a little. “He’s not got that long to go, Vash,” she said eventually. “You knew he was old to begin with.” Vash winced at that. “Tough a cookie as he is, even he can’t take an alien disease on top of a sudden lifestyle and climate change. You know?”

Vash nodded slowly, squeezing his knees together tightly as if that might force him to wake up. “I understand,” he said quietly.

“He would like to see you again, Vash,” Natalie said gently, leaning forward against the backrest of the chair. “Even if it’s only once. Taking care of you was his life.”

Vash closed his eyes and nodded again. “I’ll go when I can,” he muttered against the muffling sheet. “I don’t... not yet. No one just yet.”

“Okay, Vash, it’s okay,” Natalie said calmingly, reaching one broad arm over and taking Vash’s shoulder in a firm grip. “Listen, I didn’t come here to put more weight on you. You wanted to talk, so you do the talking. How’s that?”

Vash took a couple of steadying breaths. When he raised his head and opened his eyes, Meryl was slightly surprised how clear they were -- considering how he used to bawl like a baby at the drop of a pin, she was more than a little shocked that such harsh news hadn’t caused more damage.

Or maybe it had... and Meryl just couldn’t see.

“I... I wanted to get a second opinion on something,” Vash said, only faltering a tiny bit before recovering his composure. His expression was a little more vacant than it had been, but otherwise he showed no outer signs of grief. “I’ve been behaving like I used to when I was five for the past day, maybe longer. I’ve been losing time and forgetting how to speak... I haven’t done that much since I was a toddler. I think it’s just a side effect of the Arm, but I’m not so sure all the time... I feel like... it feels like there’s too much of me in my head...” He trailed off, sighed heavily. “I’m just tired,” he amended quietly. “I’m too damn tired all the time.”

Natalie pursed her lips again, settling her chin on her forearms in thought. “Could be a side effect,” she said finally, although she didn’t sound convinced of it. “Could be somefin’ else. You said you haven’t lost time and all since you were a little kid... but just before, you said you were acting five. What’s the equivalent of your five in human years, hm? About, what, twelve or thirteen?”

Vash shrugged uncomfortably. “Yeah, something like that.”

“Infancy and puberty, then,” Natalie muttered, nodding hesitantly. She sat up straight and tapped two fingers against her skull. “Your hormones’ve done gone all wonky on you for some reason, Vash. That’s why you’re so tired. Brain’s working constant overtime. Have you been spacing out, multitasking without meaning to?”

Vash nodded mutely.

“Well, that’s it,” Natalie confirmed. “The Arm never had any side effects like that before, did it?” Vash grunted a negative. “Well, then. I’ve only got one other idea, and you aren’t gonna like it.”

Vash looked up sharply.

“You were still with your brother when you were that young,” Natalie said bluntly.

Vash stared at her for a second, unfocused, thinking at lightening speed. It could be true, but -- he’d put up so many barriers, so long ago -- if Knives could have influenced him like this before, why didn’t he? No, no. It couldn’t be. Knives would have known, would have exploited a connection like this a long time ago. Vash’s barriers had held for decades -- he couldn’t... not now...

A little voice in the back of his head leered at him, scared.

Breakingbreakingbroken... something’s fallen inside... something’s still wrong with me-him-us.

Tentatively, forgetting to breathe for a moment, Vash nudged at the walls in his head, felt them crumble, felt the gaps, felt the seeping alien filth and perfume of someone else’s thoughts and feelings creeping in, like a factory polluting groundwater.

Fear clenched in the pit of Vash’s stomach. He didn’t want to know Knives this closely again -- not until his brother was healed in body and mind, not until all the old wounds were stitched shut. If Knives could get inside now, he might lose his only chance.

Vash didn’t realize people were speaking to him. He lost focus on his surroundings, cradling his head in his hands and curling into a ball, trying to block the seepage -- throwing up new barriers only to have them washed away, like trying to build a dam with mud. And every time he touched those stranger-feelings, those mixed emotions that weren’t his own, he only saw a burning image of his brother’s peaceful face, sleeping and staring at clouds and holding him when he cried and everything that he missed that he loved that he wanted to feel again

I just want to be able to feel again --

Vash didn’t realize he was crying. Natalie and Meryl were at his side, the older woman holding him while the shorter patted his back awkwardly. Everything felt so strange... this wasn’t how it was supposed to work out. Why was he getting such a mixed message from his brother’s mental presence? It was almost like -- like nothing had ever happened -- like there had never been a single moment of hate between them.

There were footsteps in the hall outside, and a loud knock at the door. Vash barely noticed when Natalie let go of him to point Michael towards the door. The doctor, who had been lookng extremely nervous about this whole turn of events, was grateful to have something to do -- palming the door panel, he started to tell the person outside that this wasn’t a good time, and to please wait a moment...

The person outside was having none of it. A familiar voice drew Vash back towards reality, making him raise his head an inch or two from where it rested on his knees.

“Sempai! Sempai, something’s happened --”

“Milly? Hey, you know you’re not supposed to be in here --”

“I had to come, Sempai! You told me to tell you when --”

“What about --? Did you leave him alone? Milly --”

“Sempai... he’s woken up.”
------------
- 2
- 3
- 4
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