Trigun Fan Fiction ❯ Life Thereafter ❯ Nightmares ( Chapter 28 )

Disclaimer: How I wish I owned Trigun. Sadly, I own it not.

 

A/N: Salutations my friends! I bring you my first post in 2006! How time flies…

Anyway, just so everyone knows, the format of this chapter may strike some as odd since there are a lot of flashbacks. And, I borrowed a great deal for this chapter from Trigun Maximum Volume 7. For those of you who have read the manga, you will notice the borrowed material immediately. SO, in advance, I'm just admitting that it does not belong to me. No plagiarism.

And now, on to the fic!

 

 

Nightmare

 

The sound of electrical equipment hummed in her ear, a constant reminder of what they were about to do. Wires, machines, artificial lights, all hooked up and ready to put to use. The only question remaining was whether or not activating them was the right thing to do.

“Begin the procedure,” a cold voice ordered.

“Are you sure about this?” she asked nervously, her hand on the switch.

Knives narrowed his eyes at her. “If I weren't, would I have told you to begin?”

Meryl bit her lip, unsure what to do. “But-”

“Do not make me tell you again.”

Meryl could taste the blood trickle from her punctured lip onto her tongue as she licked it away. She glanced at the patient for reassurance, wanting to know if he was prepared. She needed to know if she was doing the right thing.

Vash nodded, a calm look on his face. “I'm ready.”

Meryl looked away, the lever cold and metallic beneath her fingertips. Taking a deep breath, she pulled it and hoped for the best.

Meryl blinked, lifting her head off of her hand. Looking around blearily, she realized that she had fallen asleep waiting up at Vash's bedside. Noticing a feeling of wetness on her hand and cheek, wiped her face and hand, a little disgusted that she had drooled on herself. Still, most people did, no matter how vigorously they denied it. Millie did it, Meryl knew, and she sometimes woke up with a wet spot on her pillow.

“It's ok, Sempai! I'll just blow-dry it,” she would say with a smile.

It brought a wistful smile to Meryl's face. I wonder how Millie's doing. I hope she's alright. It would have been nice if she had come, but…

She sighed, rubbing the sleep from her eyes as she yawned and stretched. Meryl stared blankly across the room for a moment, noting once again that her view was unobstructed. That had not been possible since…

…since we first arrived…

Meryl's gaze shifted downward, watching the steady rise and fall of Vash's chest. He had been asleep for the past couple days. Meryl had tried to stay awake and keep a constant vigil while waiting for him to wake up, but the lack of sleep had finally gotten to her last night. Tracing the area beneath her eyes, Meryl could almost feel the bags under them. She grimaced a little, but she knew there was no real point in trying to fix it. After all, who did she have to impress?

Leaning forward, Meryl dug her elbows into the soft bed, her face cupped between her hands. It had been a while since she had felt this tired. She thought it was somewhat odd that such weariness should be weighing so heavily on her now since hope seemed to be in sight now. Everything would be alright now. At least, that was what Meryl hoped.

A small noise caught Meryl's attention and she lifted her head up slightly. Vash moaned a little again, shifting restlessly beneath the covers, his face pale and slick with sweat. Meryl reached out, tentatively resting her hand on his forehead.

“He's burning up…” she muttered, quickly pushing herself off of the hard stool, wincing and rubbing her backside after sitting there so long, before rushing from the room.

The device began to glow, nearly blinding Meryl with the intensity of the light it was giving off. Shielding her eyes, Meryl squinted at Vash, trying to see what was happening to him. She could barely make out the box encasing Vash's right arm in it, a few feathered tendrils sticking out as the glow nearly blinded her.

“Is it supposed to do that?” she asked Knives, alarmed.

He nodded curtly. “Yes. The cylinders are reacting.”

Meryl bit her lip some more, thinking to herself, This is such a bad habit. I really should stop. But…I can't help it…

Then, a bloodcurdling scream struck Meryl's ears, and she jumped, shock etched across her features. She watched, horror-stricken, as Vash writhed violently in torment on the bed, his voice about to tear. Meryl was about to rush forward and break the device with her bare hands when something hard clamped around her arm.

She jerked fiercely on the grip hold her. “Let go!”

“No.”

Meryl glared up at Knives, her eyes burning. “Let. Me. GO!”

Knives tightened his hold on her, making her wince with pain. “One more word from you and I will not hesitate to do what I should have done weeks ago,” he hissed, his tone dark with anger.

“But he's going to die!” she cried.

Knives looked away, staring at the spectacle. “No, he won't. The cylinders are reversing the effect of his Angel Arm and forcing the extra appendages back into his arm. It is a painful process but not one beyond his capacity to handle.”

“How did you-?”

“Simple. I reversed the charges in the cylinders.”

The screams steadily increased in volume as tears began to leak out of the corners of Meryl's eyes.

Meryl slipped quietly into the mess hall, the door sliding shut behind her. She had discovered this place a while back when she had still been injured. Meryl had grown a bit restless after being stuck in the medical bay all the time so she had explored and found the kitchen. It was a good thing, too, because Knives was not the best cook. In fact, the food he prepared could be almost inedible at times.

Even though Knives didn't say I cooked better than him, at least he approved, she thought wryly.

Wandering across the room, which was rather luxuriously decorated (so much so that the term “mess hall” really did not apply), Meryl made her way behind the slick wooden counter to the back where a large kitchen setup was. Swiftly grabbing a bowl from a nearby cabinet, Meryl filled it with cold water and dropped several ice cubes into it. Looking around for a rag of some sort, Meryl snatched one and left the room, once again noting how fancy everything was.

This was probably once a place where the Gung-Ho Guns used to hang out, she realized, shuddering a little. And that man, Legato, who Vash killed, he probably came here, too…

Meryl shook her head. This was no time to be thinking about that. She had to get back to Vash and see what she could do for him. It had been a while since he had been sick like that. She remembered him tossing and turning with fever about two months ago before he had gone to face Knives. That was after…

Stop THINKING about it, she berated herself angrily. Why are you trying to bring that up again after all this time? Leave it alone!

Meryl clutched the items she was carrying closer to her. Even though months had passed, she was still dwelling on that one incident when she had really almost died. That blue-haired man - no, demon, with those frightening golden eyes had forced Vash to break the most fundamental rule he had set for himself. Vash seemed to have moved beyond it so why was she still thinking about it?

She stopped short of the door and paused. Her face turned somewhat pink when a loud rumbling sound drifted upward from her midsection. Meryl sighed, shifting the bowl onto her left hip, the rag still in her right hand. Looking down at her stomach, Meryl smiled weakly.

I guess I can get a snack before I go back since Knives told me not to disturb him for whatever reason. I guess it's because he didn't sleep for two days straight building that device…

Her grip tightening on the bowl and rag, Meryl returned to the kitchen and began to search for a suitable snack.

Meryl wrenched her arm from Knives's grasp and clamped her hands over her ears, her eyes squeezed shut, trying to block out the sinister glare of the brilliant light. But the screams, the screams would not fade away, no matter how hard she stuffed her fists into her ears. She had no idea how Knives could just stand there, seemingly unaffected by this!

“Watch.”

She shook her head, not wanting to see. Knives jerked her around, his nose inches from hers. “I told you to watch,” he snapped.

Meryl gulped and nodded, too disoriented by the screams to tell him off. She turned her gaze upon the mechanism itself, unable to handle the terrible look on Vash's face. The longer she watched, the more astonished she became as those feathered tendrils that hung out of the box began to slowly recede.

“Is that supposed to-?”

“Naturally,” Knives replied high-handedly. “The cylinders are doing what I knew they would, reversing the effect.”

“Are you sure there won't be…unintended consequences?” Meryl asked hesitantly.

Knives looked down his nose at her. “There may be some…psychological trauma for a brief period of time.”

“Psychological…trauma?”

“Nothing permanent,” he said irritably. “Nightmares and such. Why?”

Meryl bit her lip. I really should stop doing that… “Never mind…”

Setting the bowl and rag on the table, Meryl opened the refrigerator door, her eyes sweeping quickly over what they had. For some reason she could not fathom, the refrigerator never seemed to run out of food. One day, when she had dared to ask Knives about it, he had told her that it did not concern her. After that, Meryl had decided to ask Vash instead of Knives again (since Vash was by far the more friendly of the two), and he had said that the ship's Plants helped produce many products (such as food) synthetically. When she asked why Knives would not have wanted to tell her that, Vash shrugged.

“He's always criticizing humans for abusing Plants so I guess he didn't want to give you the impression that he was doing the very thing he condemns humans for doing,” Vash had said, a sad look on his face.

Meryl had thought about that for a long time, the issue of Plants and humans living together. At the moment, she knew, humans could not live without the power and energy that Plants provided. On the other hand, she also knew that humans were often abusive of the Plants and were careless with their maintenance or how much energy they were allowed to put out, leading to processes like the Last Run.

“Father, why do the lights keep flickering on and off?” Meryl asked, looking up from her homework from school that day.

Adam Stryfe sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “The Plant is being…retired.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was in the newspapers today,” he said, picking up a discarded article. “`Plant engineers warned residents today that they should expect haphazard power outages sometime around 6 PM tonight due to the Last Run.'”

“What's the `Last Run,' Father?”

Meryl's father sighed again. “Something I hope you never have to witness.”

“Why? What is it?” she asked, puzzled.

He hesitated. “The Last Run…is the result of human abuses of the Plants.”

“But what happens to them?” she questioned persistently.

“Meryl?”

“Yes?”

“Ask me again when you're older.”

“But-!”

“Meryl.”

“…Yes, sir…”

Meryl never did learn what the Last Run was until she entered high school. At first, she had believed that it made sense. It was logical to retire a Plant once it had reached its limits. She remembered having many a disagreement over dinner about it with her father, who insisted it was wrong and inhumane while Meryl said it was...reasonable.

Then, about a year after she had joined the Bernardelli Insurance Society, Meryl found out first-hand how wrong it was when a Plant went berserk during a Last Run, causing the facility to self-destruct as well as millions of double dollars worth of property damage and injuries. When she had finished the investigation, Meryl had found out from many of the residents that the Plant engineers had been careless and wasteful with the Plant and that most believed the Plant could have lasted many more years had they been more conscientious.

And then I met Vash. It…really has changed my perspective a lot… And why am I just standing here letting the cold air out of the fridge?

Looking quickly around, Meryl picked an apple, checking to see if it was ripe. It was so she stuffed it in her pocket before taking a knife out of the nearby drawer. She disliked eating the skins so the knife would come in handy later. Then, before she forgot, Meryl got a plate out a cabinet.

Scooping up the other items in her hands, Meryl wobbled out into the hallway, trying very hard not to drop anything.

The screams reached a pinnacle of volume, nearly causing Meryl to scream back to drown out the sound. Then, electricity crackled as the light began to fade. The screams stopped suddenly, and Meryl looked up, wondering what had happened as the room's lighting returned to normal.

Knives brushed roughly past her, heading straight for the box encasing Vash's arm. Meryl stood still in shock for a moment before racing to Vash's side, alarmed over what had happened to him. He lay on the bed, his face twisted in pain and slick with sweat.

“Is he-?”

“He'll be fine,” Knives said tersely as he prepared to remove Vash's arm from the box.

“But…”

“It will take him time to recover from the procedure.”

“Did…did it work?”

Knives looked at her disdainfully, removing the device. “Of course, it did,” he stated, revealing Vash's right arm, completely featherless and back to normal, scars and all.

Meryl's eyes widened. She had grown so used to seeing Vash with feathers that seeing him without them was…strange. Still, it was good that he was better now, right? His hair would stop getting black, and he would be alright now…

“Wait a minute… What are you doing?” Meryl asked suspiciously, noticing Knives taking the mechanism apart.

“Not that it is your business, but I am removing the cylinders,” he told her shortly.

Meryl stared at him, trying to hide the anxiety that statement had caused. “What are you going to do with them?”

Knives's lips twisted in a grin. “Reinstall them in the Colts. It's what I created them for, after all.”

“What about Vash?” Meryl wanted to know, becoming increasingly unnerved by what Knives was implying. “Will he be alright?”

“Within a few days, yes. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have more pressing matters to attend to,” Knives snapped, turning and leaving the medical bay.

Meryl watched him go, a chill coursing through her. I don't trust him, but…

She turned her gaze back on Vash, a worries expression on her face. “I have to look after Vash now.

The door to the medical bay slipped open, and Meryl edged carefully inside, knowing she would drop something if she was not careful. Grateful for the automatic door sliding shut behind her, Meryl set her load down one item at a time on the countertop. She pulled the stool back up to Vash's bedside, the bowl and rag clasped in her hands.

Meryl sat down, setting the bowl in her lap, and dipped the rig into the ice cold water. She squeezed the excess liquid from it began to rub Vash's face with it, hoping it would help bring down his fever. He moaned a little, his eyes wandering restlessly beneath his eyelids. Meryl bit her lip, not sure what else to do since she had tried to give him food and water earlier. He had rejected most of it, but she hoped it was enough to keep him from getting dehydrated.

Vash calmed a bit as Meryl continued to mop his face with the cold rag. Deciding it might be a good time to have that snack, Meryl stood and fetched the apple and knife. Sitting back down, she began to peal the apple, discarding the strips of skin on the plate. When she had finished, Meryl set the blade down on the bed and took a bite of the sweet, ripe fruit, her brow furrowed.

I hope he'll be alright. But then, he always seems to bounce back…

She set the half-eaten apple aside, her appetite disappearing. I still feel tired, but I haven't done anything today. But, maybe I should take another nap…

Meryl rested her head on the bed and closed her eyes, unaware as Vash began to dream and toss and turn once again…

“You deceived us.”

Meryl jerked awake, disoriented as she looked wildly about for the source of that harsh, accusatory voice. She nearly fell over from shock and horror when the voice continued, a voice twisted nearly beyond recognition, but Meryl still knew it.

“It's been exactly…one year,” Vash rasped, his eyes squeezed tightly shut as if to block out the light. “Perfect…for continuing what you started with her on us!”

“Vash…?” Meryl whispered. “What are you talking about?”

His face twisted further, his voice rising in volume. “Wouldn't you? Can you prove it?”

“Vash, snap out of it!” Meryl cried, her eyes tearing up at the pain in his voice as she began shaking him, trying to get him to see. “VASH!”

 

 

That woman…why does she bother? She brings me food. She tries to make it better. But it never will be. They killed her. Tessla. Rem, you killed Tessla!

She stares at me with concern. No, she's not worried about me or Knives. She just wants to do to us what she did to her. Continuing the experiment. The liar. The liar.

I knock the food tray out of her hand, and she bends down to pick it up, her long black hair that she always refused to cut obscuring her features. I glare at her, daring her to speak to me. When she doesn't say anything, I mutter something to myself. She looks at me so I repeat it louder.

“You deceived us,” I hiss.

She looks almost surprised so I continue. “It's been exactly one year,” I say hoarsely. “Perfect…for continuing what you started on her with us!”

“I'd never dream of-!” she shouts in protest.

I interrupt. “Wouldn't you? Can you prove it?” I scream, my throat tearing from the strain, dry from refusing food and drink for days. “Can you prove you wouldn't do the same to us? You people, who did that to her? How can you prove it?”

She looks down, her face wracked with some personal torment. “…I will never make that mistake again,” she says, her voice hard.

“Are you so sure?!” I shriek, not believing her lies for one minute.

“Yes I am sure! Don't mock what I went through!” Rem shouts back, matching me in volume.

I stare at her silently. I still hate her. I don't care what she says. She's one of them! It's her fault. It's her-

“I never want to feel that way again. So powerless…” She bows her head. “I should have stopped it by any means necessary. There isn't a single day I don't regret. That's why…when you two were born…”

I don't care what you say. I don't. Liar. LIAR!

“Kill me.”

“What?! What are you saying?!” she cries, shock etched on her face.

I don't want to live anymore. I don't. I can't stand it! “Kill me. This place…there's no one but humans here!” I yell, curling into a fetal position.

She's silent for a long time, and when she finally replies, her voice is muffled. “That's right…that's the way it is now…and that's the way it's going to be, too.”

I drift in and out of consciousness as the days pass, and she keeps trying to get me to eat. I don't want her food. I don't want to be here. I'm doomed to die in a test tube someday anyway. Like Tessla…

“Now then,” Rem says, her voice falsely cheerful. “Today, you're going to eat. Guess what I've got?!” She holds up a piece of fruit. “TA-DA!! This is a rare item,” she says, peeling the skin off of it with a knife.

I watch her, my hair falling over my eyes as she slowly skins it and sets the knife down with a clink sound. My eyes widen. This is my chance. I snatch the knife off of the table and prepare to plunge it straight into my heart. I'm ready to die. I want to. I want to.

My eyes widen with shock when she…catches the blade (?!), blood running down her hand and arm in rivulets. She stares at me, and I can't even see pain in her expression. Just…

“Is that your answer?” she asks me softly. “You're going to let go of everything so easily?”

“Ahh…ahh…” I pant.

“You take yourself too lightly.”

“Ahh…ahh…AHH! AAAHH!!” I howl, ripping the blade from her grasp, and then I-

Vash's eyes snapped open, his breath coming ragged gulps. “I…what happened…?” he asked, his voice trailing of into a strangled silence when he saw what he had done.

Meryl stared at him, her face blank with shock as she looked down at her stomach, a red stain spreading across her midsection, the handle of a knife protruding from her belly. Her gaze lifted again, the word “WHY?” written all over her face.

“Vash, I…”

“Meryl…” he whispered hoarsely, horror-stricken.

Meryl gasped, coughing violently as crimson leaked out of her mouth before she collapsed forward onto the bed, blood pooling around her.

“Meryl, I…what…have I…” Vash rasped, staring at the red liquid smeared across his own hands, “…done…?”

Then, everything disappeared into the white sound of his scream.

 

 

WAAAHHHH! CLIFFHANGER!

Knives: The human is dead. Good.

o.O Say what?

Knives: You once told me that I could not kill her. Obviously this is because you wanted Vash to.

O.o You're twisted.

Knives: No. I'm stating the obvious.

Hnnn… -chucks him into a deeper mud hole- Don't worry, Kuroneko-zilla will keep you company down there.

Knives: -bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep-

Yeah, I love you, too, Knivesy-Wivesy! And now, REVIEW please! XD