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In the old days, his days on the road, on the run, there had been gunfights, people shouting his name, explosions. The sort of noise that came with being a wanted man. Sometimes, he still wakes with his ears ringing from the memories of it all.
Days like today, he thinks about how much has changed. The noises that reach his ears are a far cry from gunshots, from wanted posters with his face on them fluttering in the breeze. This morning, he's hearing the delighted cries of children, a few of Milly's visiting nieces and nephews playing, out behind the stables. He's hearing the rhythmic thunk of his and Meryl's shovels as they do the mucking out, cleaning up after their thomases, currently grazing in their pasture.
And he's hearing a car approaching the house.
Maisie, the oldest of the kids, runs into the stable to let them know. "It doesn't look like Auntie Milly's car, though."
Meryl frowns a little, and she and Vash share a look. Milly and Nicholas haven't been gone long enough to be coming back. It's not Tuesday, when their neighbors on one side come to pick up eggs.
And the farm is far enough out of the way that anyone coming to them has to be looking for them.
He can hear the approaching engine rumbling, and gives Meryl the faintest nod. Meryl sets her shovel down and straightens a bit, giving Maisie a bright, unsteady smile. "Maisie, can you take Rachel and Philly inside for a bit? And stay in the house until Uncle Vash and I say so? I know Auntie Milly said those cookies are for later, but you can all have some, okay? Just stay in the house until we say so."
Vash has known Maisie a few years now. A few quiet, out-of-the-way years, him and Nicholas having settled into a quiet life on the girls' farm. He's watched Maisie grow from the most rambunctious of the Thompson kids to a slightly less rambunctious preteen. He can tell, from the way she's looking at Meryl, that she knows something is strange. But she backs slowly out of the stables and gathers up her cousins, and Vash listens for their footsteps retreating to the house.
He moves before Meryl can, over to the lockbox they keep tucked off to the side. The key is taped, perhaps unwisely, to the bottom of the shelf. There isn't much inside, but he hopes it will be enough for their purposes. Meryl takes the Derringer he hands her and tucks it carefully under her waistband, at her back. Vash hefts another pistol in his hand, one of the spares Wolfwood had kept in the Punisher, once upon a time.
There's a duster hanging on a hook by the door, and he pulls it on as quickly as he can, to conceal his holster and the pistol. He's absurdly grateful he still wears a holster at all, these few years on, when he's had no need of a gun in all that time. Maybe instinct had served him well.
He doesn't want to consider how awful it is he's developed an instinct for such things at all.
He hopes it will just be them being overcautious. That they can laugh with whoever's coming up the drive, laugh at themselves later as they put the guns away. He wants to think they're being paranoid, that those instincts they'd once all had to live by haven't quite faded away.
He wants to think they'll be just fine.
The car has pulled into the drive by now. He can see, through the doorway, four masculine figures emerging from the car, crunching slowly up the gravel and towards the stables. Meryl takes a step back, and into him; he stays at her back, reaching out to rest a hand at her hip. He thinks she might be shaking. He can feel how hard she's trying to stay still, not to look towards the house.
Vash tries to mentally place the men who walk up the drive and through the stable doorway. The faces before him don't ring any bells in his decades' worth of memories, and he doesn't know if that's better or worse than if they had.
"Thompson Farms?" the biggest of the four men says. Vash hears Meryl swallow. "I'm Meryl Stryfe," she says, steadily as possible. "Co-owner. We're a ways away from town. What brings you out here?"
"Heard from some folks around town you got more thomases than you know what to do with," says the slightly smaller man to the leader's left.
"Fetch a good price these days," one of the other men adds. "Eggs bein' harder to come by, an' all."
"Tried some other farms ‘round these parts." The man on the left spits what looks like worm tobacco into the sand. Vash fights back an absolutely imbeclic thought that he'll just have to muck the stall out again later. "Their birds weren't worth a damn. Malnourished. Barely producin'."
"I see." Meryl can't quite rid her voice of a faint tremor. "I understand times are rough. But we just can't spare any of our birds. Some of them—they're old. We need the young ones to take their place. If we could—"
"Sounds like a lotta talk to me," the rightmost man sneers. "Wouldn'tya say so, Webster?"
The leader smirks. "Sounds like it."
"We've got money." Vash keeps his voice even. "At the bottom of that lockbox. Several hundred double dollars. You can have—"
"Money runs out," Webster snaps. "Get a good couplea birds, ya may as well have a golden goose. We know what you got. We're just givin' you the option of handin' ‘em over all quiet like, or us takin' ‘em."
He's still standing at Meryl's back, close enough that he can feel her starting to reach tremulously back for the Derringer. Subtly as he can, Vash reaches out to cover her hand with his to stop her, and steps out to her side, nudging the duster open so the gang can clearly see the gun.
The rightmost man draws his own gun, even as Vash keeps his holstered.
"I don't want to have to use this," Vash starts, holding up both hands. "But if I have to, I think you'll find I'm very good at it."
"He looks awful familiar, boss," one of the men on the left says. "Don't ya think he looks like—?"
"It don't matter," Webster snaps. "There's onea him, and this useless bitch."
The leather of Vash's gloves winces as he grips the holster of the gun. "You really shouldn't have said that."
Meryl takes an unsteady half-step back. "We can give you the money," she tries again. "And—and the name of someone we know who sells—it should be enough for—"
"Didn't you hear me, you cu—"
Webster's snarl turns into a howl of pain as a shot rings out. His right leg abruptly buckles and he drops, his whole body hitting the stone floor. His head hits after the rest of him, but not hard enough to knock him out; it's almost absurd how it bounces back up. Blood pools from his knee and the back of his head, the rough stone having torn a small but profusely-bleeding gash in it.
"Like I said," Vash raises his voice to be heard over Webster's moans, gesturing with the smoking pistol, "he really shouldn't have said that."
"He shot you, boss," says one of the men, almost in disbelief. "You always said we didn't have to worry because anybody'd be too chickenshit to—"
"I was wrong, all right?" Webster glares up at them from a pool of his own blood, his breathing coming slightly ragged. "An' I'm sick of this shit. Kill ‘em."
It's not like Vash is unfamiliar with those words. He's been slated for death hundreds of times, and always managed to worm his way out of it. But when he thinks of the children (still in the house, please let them still be in the house), when he thinks of Meryl, when he thinks of Milly and Nicholas blissfully unaware a few dozen iles away—
His blood feels like ice in his veins.
Instinctually, he edges closer to Meryl's side. He doesn't want to fully shield her, as though she can't defend herself, but the urge is there. "Spare her," he says, because it's the first thing that comes to mind. "Please. She wasn't the one to shoot you. She—"
"What'd you say before, he shouldn't have said that?" sneers one of the goons.
"You shouldn'ta said that, either," another laughs. "‘cause now we'll just shoot the bitch first."
Later, when he tries to—over and over—Vash won't be able to pick out the individual threads. Who shot first. Who was closest. Who he shot at in turn, if anyone.
Because all that registers, in the moment, is that he lunges forward and checks Meryl's shoulder as hard as he can, using all of his weight to knock her forward, down, into the fresh hay lining one of the cleaned stalls. He wants her out of the path of the bullet, and as they hit the ground, as blood begins to stain the hay they're lying on, the only thought he has is that he was too slow. Too slow. Too slow. Because she shouldn't be bleeding. Not with his reflexes. She should never have been hit at all.
He lies in the hay, half on top of her, counting Meryl's breaths—she's still breathing thank god thank—and dizzily hearing everything else. Webster being pulled up by his cronies, and the four of them peeling out and speeding away from the farm. The door of the house slamming, and someone running out—light footsteps, frightened cries—the kids, the kids—
"Vash," Meryl is gasping. "Vash, I can't move, you're—"
He's too heavy, of course. Too heavy for her and he's pinning her down. But he can't move, either. When he tries, pain lances through his abdomen, pain like fire, within and without him. Beneath him, Meryl is thrashing as much as she can, trying to get enough momentum to heave him off her. She manages, finally, and he falls heavily back into the hay, and Meryl is saying something, saying—
"Kids," she's saying unsteadily. "Ki—Maisie, go—go back in the house, call—call for an ambulance, call—"
He should be asking Meryl if she's hurt. It's rude of him not to do that. It looks like she is. There's blood on her shirt, on her arm, a wound that looks like she got clipped by a bullet.
"Too slow," a voice mumbles sadly. His voice.
His voice?
"Vash," Meryl is whispering, only Meryl, the children are gone now, it's just them, and there are hands pressed against his belly for some reason, Meryl's hands, shaking, "Vash—why did you do that, why—dammit, Vash—"
Dizzily, Vash raises his head. If he can just see what's happening, surely it will make sense why Meryl is so upset. Why her hands are on him, why she's crying, why—
There really is a lot of blood on the ground. Blood soaking him, staining his white shirt, pouring from a wound in his side. For one giddy, delirious moment, he feels like he's wrapped in his coat again, red and warm and familiar and comforting.
"Huh," he breathes, when it occurs to him he isn't, and darkness rushes in to claim him.
+
He wakes up sometimes. It hurts when he does.
He thinks he has a fever. He thinks he thrashes sometimes, even when it causes him agony. His body doesn't like this bed. Doesn't like lying still. Doesn't like whatever's in his throat tube, in his hand needle, in his side drain.
He thinks sometimes he hears voices. Ones he knows. (Scared. Warm. Shaking.) Ones he doesn't. (Neutral. Clinical. Steady.)
He thinks it hurts so much he doesn't want to wake up again.
+
The ceiling looks weird.
That's his first conscious thought in… he doesn't know how long. That this isn't his ceiling. His ceiling is white plaster, little bits of adhesive left over from plastic stars a former resident had put up. His ceiling isn't acoustic tiles, white speckled with black, light fixtures here and there. One of those light fixtures is buzzing. It's insistent and annoying and ever-present.
He's sure if he could get up he could stop the buzzing. He's good at figuring out that kind of thing. He's done it with Meryl back at the farmhouse. It bothers her when she can hear any appliance or light making that noise, and they've solved a few mysteries together, her sensitive hearing, his way with this kind of thing—
"You're really a fuckin' idiot, you know that?"
His voice. Even lying leaden in a bed he doesn't recognize, Vash's heart seizes at the sound of it. He goes to sit up, and moans sharply at the pain that shoots through him then, deep and harsh and burning.
There's a hand on his brow then, that hand moving to stroke his hair, another hand pressing him back down into the bed. "Nick," Vash breathes out. "Nick, what…"
Speaking even a few words brings home how painfully dry his throat is. Nicholas braces an arm behind his shoulders and helps him sit halfway up, just enough to take a drink from the cup of water that's waiting on the side table, a pitcher alongside. He holds the cup for him, too; it's sinking in now he isn't wearing his prosthetic. When he feels the tears wet his face, he knows it isn't just the pain—because it hurts, worse than it ever has, worse than it ever would have when he'd been… more. He's disoriented, unsure of what will come next, of what's already happened.
"The girls?" he manages when he's lying back, Nicholas now seated at his bedside, threading their fingers together.
"Big girl and I've been takin' shifts. Lucky you woke up while I was here so I didn't have to bust a door down tryin' to get in."
He doesn't miss the way Nicholas' hand, squeezing his, trembles.
He has a feeling what the answer will be, but Vash takes a painful breath and asks, "Meryl?"
The look Nicholas gives him is rueful. Almost pitying. "You took a bullet for her, Vash. Almost died in her arms. … She's gonna need a bit."
He wants to laugh. In his pain and exhaustion, he nearly does. He's never going to get it quite right with Meryl, is he? He's burdened her once with his memories, the sheer weight of a cataclysm of pain and fear, and now, in saving her, she's felt his blood on her hands, the breath leaving his body.
"The kids?" he asks next, and Nicholas sighs.
"Rachel and Philly didn't see mucha anythin'. Maisie knows there was a lotta blood." The hand holding his faintly trembles again. "She woulda found out what the world's like eventually."
But she'd found out now because of him.
He'll be thinking about that for some time.
Nicholas looses his hand from his after a while and rests it back in Vash's hair. Sometimes he can feel in Nicholas' hesitation how unused to it he is still. Every now and then he chokes back an instinctual Blondie that still rises to his lips. Sometimes, at a mirror, it's hard not to think of what Nicholas must see—something burnt out, broken down. Something maybe even living past its usefulness.
"We gonna circle back now to what an idiot you were, or you wanna save somethin' for tomorrow?"
He's been trying not to focus on the thread of desperation in Nicholas' voice this whole time. It isn't as though it's their first in a hospital like this, one or both of them battered or bruised or blood-stained. And it isn't as though this is the worst thing they've lived through. Nicholas might always be the crowned king on that front.
But he can't find it within himself just yet to apologize. "They were going to kill her."
"I get that." Nicholas pulls a breath in, then lets it out. "You know damn well I don't want either of ‘em gettin' hurt, myself. But ya can't just—the time for takin' bullets for someone was three years ago. When you were—"
"Useful?" Vash spits, and Nicholas sighs, irritated.
"Shut up, idiot. I didn't say that. Don't put words in my mouth."
"You didn't have to. It's true." Vash squeezes his eyes shut, trying to ease the headache building. Thirst and the fluorescent lights ganging up on him, he expects. "I wasn't fast enough. Not like I was then. She still got hit. I—"
"—could've died," Nicholas cuts in sharply. "Ya ever think about how I didn't crawl out of a grave just to put you in one three years later? Did ya think about us coming home to a damn corpse, did y—"
"Of course I did! That's why I had to protect her!"
"Ya still don't think you matter to anyone, that it?" Nicholas lets out a breath, then, with the sound of a chair scraping back, presumably stands. When Vash briefly opens his eyes, it's to see him stalking over to the window and bracing his arms against the sill. "Fuck off with that, Vash. Not a damn one of us wants to lose ya. Really thought you had that figured out by now."
He lets Nicholas cool off, mostly because his head is still pounding. "Tell me what I should have done." With his one hand he pinches at the bridge of his nose. "Let Meryl get shot? Shot the rustlers myself? Stood there frozen, not doing anything? I'd love to know your answer."
"I don't know, all right?" A harsh breath out. "I'm glad she's okay. Glad you're alive. Glad Short Stuff remembered enough about the rustlers to get ‘em put behind bars for now." When he manages to open his eyes for real and look over, Nicholas is still standing at the window, his shoulders slumped. "Whole thing shouldn't've happened. But that still doesn't mean I want ya—want ya throwin' yourself in front of bullets."
"We're both mortal." Vash doesn't mean it as a dig, not really. More of a reminder. They'd both spent so many years taking the hits, for others and each other, it doesn't always register that now there are consequences.
But they'd each gotten a taste years before, hadn't they? Nicholas drawing what they thought was his last breath on that couch. Vash with his corpse in his arms, laying it to rest.
A grave once dug now standing empty and sometimes, it feels like, waiting, for its turn to come again.
"Yeah." Nicholas turns back slowly, his arms crossed. "Yeah. We both are."
He doesn't walk back to the bedside right away. Moving, getting up and going to him like he wants to, doesn't seem like a good idea; he's sure he'll learn from doctors soon enough what will be possible for him in the coming days. What his limits are, with his body as it is now.
He wants to get up, wants to wrap his arm around Nicholas, pull him close. For both of them to know they're still alive.
But he stays where he is.
Eventually, Nicholas strays back to his side, rests that hand in his hair again. Eventually, he's forgiven enough for Nicholas to kiss his brow, smooth his eyes shut.
"Gonna have to warn Milly to let ya get some more rest and not wake ya right up when she gets here," he murmurs, "but she'll probably be here when you get up, or the doc. I'll stay here ‘til ya sleep."
"Can you stay longer?" Vash hates himself a little for asking it; it slips out just as soon as Nicholas hints he'll be leaving soon. "While—while I sleep. I—"
I don't want to dream that you're gone again. Or that I left you and the girls alone. I don't want them taking my blood questioning things locking me up holding me down—
"I'll be right here," Nicholas says finally. The hand in his hair starts stroking, softly, sweetly. "I won't go."
+
The following days are a blur of professionals keeping an eye on his wound and everything to do with it—he'd had no shortage of internal injuries to go with it—and Nicholas and Milly periodically switching places. He falls asleep to Milly's knitting needles just as often as he does Nicholas' hand in his hair or holding his. Some days he only has the energy to watch the scarf Milly's working on grow, row by row, as she knits.
The first time he woke to Milly by his side, her lip trembled, but she stayed composed, merely giving him a kiss on the cheek and telling him how glad she was he was all right. He'd tried as hard as he could not to pry about Meryl, but he'd had questions nonetheless, about whether she was all right, whether she was sleeping. Milly hedged only slightly, not wanting to invade Meryl's privacy, but he learned in the end Meryl was badly bruised, her arm stitched up, but functioning. Running the farm, with some extra help from a neighbor of theirs who'd showed up the day after the rustlers with a shotgun and no intention of moving until all of them were settled back on the homestead.
Even knowing she's not coming, he still can't stop himself from looking at the door every time it opens, hoping to see Meryl beyond it.
He physically can't run from the hospital when the time comes, but he may as well, with how eager he is to leave it. Milly stands fretting at the driver's side door of the truck. "The suspension isn't at its best lately, we were going to fix it before… before you got hurt, but the mon—"
Vash sighs when her meaning hits him, even when she bites the sentence sharply off. The money had surely gone to his medical bills. He knows the girls don't consider him to owe them anything, but the knowledge that he does owe them—so much more than financially—settles deep in his soul all the same. He forces a smile. "I'm sure it will be fine, Milly. You don't have to worry about me."
At his side, his hand wrapped around Vash's elbow, Nicholas snorts, unamused.
He finds, back at the farmhouse, things in the bedroom have been arranged for his comfort. One of the nightstands has an array of painkillers (though he's found they don't make as much of a dent in his pain as he'd like, perhaps because of his odd metabolism), a glass water bottle, and a small stack of books.
He's so sure this is Meryl's doing he bites back the urge to ask. She's still nowhere to be seen.
Arranged at the back of the nightstand, against the wall, are some things he almost can't bring himself to touch. He's well familiar by now with the sight of crayon drawings and cards made by Milly's cousins and nieces and nephews, but he's never quite gotten used to being the recipient.
"They wanted to say get well soon," Milly offers softly, still hovering in the doorway. "We… we had to tell them it would take some time for you to recover. That you wouldn't be back in time to see them off, when Samantha came back to pick them up."
Vash swallows the tightness in his throat, letting his fingers play over one drawing, more detailed than the others. Rachel's the most skilled of the children at art, probably on her way to mastering some form of it in the future.
"I'll call them soon," he manages. "To thank them." Softly, Milly agrees they'd like that.
With all of them back on the homestead and everything needing to be kept in order, he's on his own most days, reading the books left for him and attempting sleep when the pain is too much. It doesn't escape his notice that most days, when he returns from Nicholas helping him wash and clean the healing wound in his side, the books he's finished are replaced with new ones. He recognizes many of them from Meryl's shelves, but others are clearly new, or stamped with the logo of a bookmobile that rolls through town every month or so.
He won't feel entirely easy again until he and Meryl have a chance to really talk, but it matters she's thinking of him, all the same.
Some nights, when it's Nicholas' turn to cook dinner, Milly sits with him for a chance to rest after the strain of the day. The scarf she'd been working on at the hospital is done, and she's moved on to something more complicated, a blanket for one of the thomases. When he isn't too hazy from pain he enjoys holding her yarn, listening to her soft, unhurried chatter, often stories about her family or old antics of hers and Meryl's at Bernadelli.
"—which is when I knew I wanted to work with her for a long time," she's saying, at the end of a story about one of their very first cases. "She was so kind to me, and I hadn't liked my previous partner at all, so it was a welcome change. If it wasn't for Meryl I don't think I'd have stayed at Bernadelli…"
"Well, then, I'm very glad it worked out and you did." Vash gives her a small smile, heartened that she looks up from the blanket and smiles a little back. "I'd have hated not to know you."
He isn't sure what does it, exactly—the smile or the reference, however brief, to the days they'd been on the road together, but before he knows it she's dropped her needles and covered her face with her hands, crying. He regrets, as soon as he shifts forward on the bed, his own sudden movement, the sharp and painful ache it causes in his side and the resultant hitch in his breathing, but he manages to close his hands gently around her arms and pull his hands away from her face.
"Milly…" he tries softly, using his right hand to cup her cheek, brush some of the wetness away. "Milly, what is it? It's all right… I'm sorry I upset you, I didn't mean—"
"You didn't upset me," Milly whispers tearily, looking up to meet his gaze. "You—you did what I would have if I had been here. I should have been here. To protect her—both of you—from those—those horrid, awful men."
He'd expected that eventually Milly's composure would crack, but it doesn't make his heart hurt any less. For want of anything else to do he rubs her shoulder, waiting for her breaths and sniffles to slow.
"I hope you won't continue blaming yourself for not being here," he says when he's sure she'll hear him. "I'd do anything to protect you both, and Nick, and everything here. I don't want you thinking it's all on you."
"But I don't seem to protect her when it matters," Milly whispers. "She—they took her back at Dragon's Nest, and now—they shot at her, they—"
"That isn't true, Milly," Vash says, with a hard swallow. "There was… there was all that time Nicholas and I weren't with you. After. You kept her safe then. I got to see you girls again, because you stayed alive. That was far from guaranteed, back then."
Milly's breathing has mostly slowed back to normal, but it hurts his heart to see her face so streaked with tears, to see her so clearly miserable. Dwelling on everything that hadn't happened, and everything that had, and her powerlessness in the face of it all.
He does know what that's like.
Vash leans forward and softly presses his forehead to hers, a gesture of comfort he can tell helps at least slightly when she closes her eyes and nods, whispers a thank you. He reaches out to give her hand a squeeze and say softly, "I'll get you a wet washcloth for your face. I'll be right back."
He's learned, since his return to the farmhouse, things he didn't know before, like exactly how many steps it is from his and Nicholas' bedroom to one of the bathrooms. He knows because some days the pain makes those steps seem unbearable, because even those few steps have a way of making him feel defeated, like this body—a shell of what it was once—isn't meant for a life like his, however much he might want that life, with the people he loves close to hand.
The door is closed over but not fully closed and locked. He's learned in the last few years that now and then there's a draft, one that plays with doors, pulling them nearly shut or blowing them open. He assumes, of course, it's the draft that did it, and pulls the door open, ready to step inside.
He freezes at the sight that greets him then, Meryl standing at the sink, the sink counter a mess of things she needs. He recognizes a small heat pack Milly made her, a star-patterned fabric stuffed with corn she can heat and use as she needs. A bottle of aloe. A bandage wrap, probably for her ribs.
With her shirt drawn up as it is, so she can tend to her side, he can see the mess of bruises there, half-healed and yellowing. He'd hit into her harder than he'd really realized at the time; he's sorry for it now, if he'd hurt her ribs. On her arm he spots a nearly healed row of stitches. Getting shot has hurt, unquestionably, but he's sure the aftermath has been difficult for her too, with everything still to do around the farm. She hasn't had a chance to really rest, to—
"Meryl," he starts, when he realizes they've both been standing there frozen, his eyes locked on her bruises. He looks at her face for the first time in too many days, little details pinging off his brain. Her hair has started to get shaggy again. Her usual light touches of makeup are nowhere to be seen; she looks a little pale, more than a little tired. "I just—wanted to get something for Milly—I didn't think—"
He doesn't have to say what he didn't think. She closes the door in his face before he can finish the sentence.
+
Unsurprisingly, he tires of the bedroom fast.
It isn't that he had to stay there, of course. It had just been easier, with how tired he'd often been, and how close it had been to the bathroom he now scrupulously avoids. Nicholas doesn't ask questions about why, the next time his own wound needs cleaning, he trudges to the bathroom downstairs.
He starts feeling cooped up one morning shortly after Nicholas heads outside to mend some of the fences. Unable to resist the urge to get up and actually move, he grabs at random for a book from the nightstand. The stacks replenish more slowly these days, but he supposes the replenishment not stopping entirely is his good sign.
At some point recently Milly must have swapped out the blanket that waits on the back of the couch to keep anyone who needs it warm; now it's the temperature blanket she'd made Meryl as a birthday gift one year, if he remembers correctly. He's always liked it, the warm array of reds and oranges and yellows reminding him of a desert sunset. He runs his fingers over it as he sits, looking down at the book in his lap to see what he'd grabbed. A fantasy satire, the back cover proclaims; he smiles slightly to himself. If he had to guess, Meryl remembered what he'd mentioned once about one of his old favorite movies, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. He settles in and starts to read.
Meryl steps into the living room an hour later and freezes like the proverbial deer in the headlights at the sight of him.
It would probably be comical that this keeps happening, but it's merely down to the size of the farmhouse and there being a not-inexhaustible number of rooms for them all to use. He expects her to turn around and leave again, before he can say anything, but she's got her typewriter in her hands and her eyes are on the coffee table, sitting in a beam of light from the window and in the direct path of one of their lamps.
"The light's better in here. I need to change the ribbon," she says quietly, and strides to the table.
He starts to make space for her on the couch, but she sits on the floor, her legs pretzeled in a position that makes him hurt just looking at it. (Meryl's over a century younger than him, so it probably won't hurt her in the same way it would him, but still.) She keeps her back to him, so she doesn't have to look at him, but he doesn't miss, as she sits, that her eyes dart to the book, his bookmark in it.
Vash runs his fingers over the bookmobile stamp on the flyleaf. "I like this," he starts, simply. "But you guessed that I would."
Meryl shrugs carefully, her attention focused on the typewriter. "I'd—I'd borrowed it for myself, that's all. I figured we could get some more use out of it before they come back and I return it."
He wants to sigh, but bites it back. Remembers the look on Nicholas' face in the hospital when he'd explained how Meryl was feeling about it all. "I'm saying thank you, Meryl," he says gently. "For the books. For all you've been doing lately. I appreciate it. … I shouldn't have let the silence go on this long, of course. It just—seemed to be what you wanted."
Meryl rattles the typewriter slightly, maybe a bit more than she needs to, and Vash leans forward to steady it for her. She pulls the ribbon free with some force and lays it aside, holding still a moment before she whispers, "I just don't see why you bothered."
"What?" He squawks a little too loudly, judging by her flinch. "Meryl, you're my friend. This is our home. You really think I wouldn't protect you?"
"I just don't know why—" Meryl starts, before she breaks off. Vash scrambles, ungainly, down to her side, and sees her eyes are wet, before she swipes her hand roughly across them. "Milly has her family. You and Wolfwood have each other. I don't—I'm not special, I'm not worth it, I'm not worth your life—"
Before he can do something like hold her shoulder or try to pull her into a hug, she fumbles blindly to the side and finds the new typewriter ribbon. Through her tears, she starts trying to jam it into the typewriter, haphazard and at an awkward angle.
"You survived so much." It comes out a whisper, hoarse and strained. "I remember a lot of it. Times you've been hurt. Other people you saved. I know how you felt. How—how lonely. People hurt you, but you never stopped trying. You saved people. Sometimes you made good people out of bad people. And to think that—that all of that could've ended because of me, because I didn't—think fast enough, or talk my way out of some—bullshit like that—because I didn't draw my gun, like some weak, stupid—"
"Meryl. Meryl."
Softly, he lays his hand over hers, still resting on the crooked typewriter ribbon. He helps her ease the ribbon into place, watches the tears that streak her cheeks drip slowly down.
"The three of you," Vash says softly, "are worth any sacrifice I could make. You have us, and I know you know that. I'm sorry, Meryl, sorry that I put you in that position. I never want anyone to have my blood on their hands. But I'm not sorry for saving you. I could never be sorry for saving you."
He's used to not hugging Meryl. She expresses her affection somewhat differently than the rest of them, not as touchy as Milly or as casually affectionate—a hand on his shoulder, or slipped into his—as Nicholas. In some ways they're evenly matched; Vash often finds himself hesitating to offer touch or comfort, a mix of not liking the sensation and not wanting to bungle any contact.
So when Meryl dives for him, her thin arms encircling his neck in a tight embrace, it surprises him, but only briefly. Her face burrows into his neck and he wraps his arms around her waist to pull her in, adjusting his grip when she whimpers softly due to her bruises.
They sit there a long time, until Meryl whispers, with a teary laugh, "I think I smeared ink on your neck. But you can't really see it because your hair's so dark now."
He laughs too, one of his first real ones since the whole thing. Meryl lets go slowly—like she's afraid he'll fade away if she stops holding him—and inches back to the safety of her typewriter.
When Milly and Nicholas come in hours later for dinner, Meryl is curled at his side on the couch like a cat, Vash holding the book out in front of them so she can read it, too. Nicholas breathes out a chuckle, shaking his head.
"Goddamn finally. Was startin' to wonder if you two were ever gonna talk again."
Meryl foregoes any ruder gesture she could have used by sticking out her tongue instead, something so cute and childish Vash would never have thought her capable of. She'd never had any siblings, and she and Nicholas have fallen into that sort of rhythm, a gentle and enduring affection Vash finds comforting any time he's privileged enough to witness it.
"I don't have to make dinner right away," Milly says, keeping her voice soft, "and I'd quite like a minute to rest… may we sit with you?"
Vash nods.
Nicholas settles at his other side, slinging his arm softly around Vash's shoulders. Milly scoots in next to Meryl, and Meryl stretches her legs over Milly's lap, cuddling closer to both of them.
It's the warmest Vash has been in months, the closest he's been to so many people in quite some time. For all the discomfort it sometimes brings him—to be truly settled somewhere, after so many years on his own—there's every advantage, too. Every moment of care the past week or two—Nicholas tending his wound, Milly gathering any number of blankets from around the house so he can be warm, Meryl bringing him practically every book in the county—makes up an image he'll never tire of looking at.
They sit like that for long enough it gradually becomes clear not a one of them wants to break it. It is, of course, Nicholas who points out the absurdity. "Any of us gonna get up and make dinner, or are we in what you'd call a standoff?"
Vash closes his eyes and huffs a laugh, squeezing Meryl slightly closer to him. "In a minute," he murmurs, and doesn't move an inch.