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“You really should have let one of us come with you,” Meryl Stryfe says. It’s the fourth time she’s said so in the last twenty minutes; she thinks it imperative that she says it again. To her side, she also throws, “Vash, stop sniffing the bleach.”
Meryl’s hands continue to work the bleaching solution into Milly’s hair as she glares at the video call. For not the first time in her life, Meryl thinks it’s lucky that she’s very good at doing multiple things at once. Right now, she has three important tasks to juggle: re-bleaching her sweet partner’s hair for the first time in years, glowering at stubborn-assed partner no. 1 through a screen while he’s halfway across the planet, and keeping an eye on stubborn-assed partner no. 2 out of the corner of her eye as he sits on the edge of the bathtub and sniffs at the cup of bleach goop Meryl asked him to stir.
“S’not a big deal,” insists the blurry profile of Nicholas D. Wolfwood on the other side of the call. Their tablet is propped up against the bathroom mirror, giving him a full view of Milly’s de-brunetteification process and far too many opportunities to commentate on Meryl’s technique. “Brad wanted to go speak with the big lady in charge fer some outreach program. Helped that we were off to the same city at the same time.”
“Brad’s very reliable,” Vash adds helpfully, though he sounds a little distracted by the chemical concoction Meryl regrets giving to him.
“And he’s got a spaceship,” Wolfwood argues. “Faster lettin’ him give me a ride than all of us pilin’ in yer jeep for a check-up.”
Meryl points at the screen of the Earth tablet—probably Brad’s, dammit—Wolfwood’s calling them through. Wolfwood’s pixelated grin mocks her as she scowls. “You’ve just had enough blood drawn to kill me,” Meryl says to Wolfwood, “and you,” she points at Vash, “have been wafting chlorine gas badly enough you’d give poor Miss Luida a heart attack.”
Vash sticks the tip of his finger in the gloopy blue mess. “I’m figuring something out,” he says, wearing what Milly calls his “calculating digits” expression. “Let me think, please.”
He sticks his tongue out. His fingertip approaches his mouth. Meryl’s entire body clenches from head to toe in horror.
“—Ma’am,” Milly interjects politely, “you’re pulling.”
Meryl gasps, almost dropping the comb and brush in her hand. “I’m so sorry, Milly!” she exclaims.
Milly sits on a short stool right in front of Meryl with her hands in her lap and her ankles crossed neatly, humming as Meryl adds the foils to her hair. She’s in nothing but her underwear and an old, ratty t-shirt she claimed belonged to her third-biggest brother, chosen because apparently he wouldn’t mind if drips of stray bleach ended up on the collar. Meryl claimed that wouldn’t happen; she’s very good at dyeing hair, because she used to dye her mom’s gray hairs for her every few months, and Meryl’s perfectionist tendencies also extend to smearing bleach solution on every square inch of warm brown hair she can get her little hands on without making a single mistake.
Milly believed her, excited as she was to dye her hair like she’d done in her earliest days at the Bernardelli Insurance Society. She called it a fun and exciting throwback for her; it was a throwback for Meryl, too, though a tad more bittersweet. Except, Milly shouldn’t have believed her. Or better yet—Milly should’ve only believed her on the condition that Vash was not in the bathroom with them during the process.
(There’s a big blob of gritty, goopy bleach on Milly’s shoulder from when Vash threw open the door and plopped himself down on the countertop, bringing Wolfwood on video call with him. It scared the shit out of Meryl, making her drop her bleach and her folded foils. Milly didn’t flinch; she’d only warbled a happy “Hello!” that Vash had immediately parroted back. For his crimes, Vash was immediately banished to the bathtub.
Wolfwood was off in Octovern—the only city on the whole damn planet with a functional medical facility, courtesy of Luida’s colony ship, and no courtesy to the Earth Federation Security Forces—for an evaluation. A little medical check-up. A couple of tests. It’s the sixth time he’s had to leave for one in the last year, operating on a bi-monthly schedule. Usually, she, Milly, or Vash go with him. Both Wolfwood and Vash are dicey on the specifics and the whys, but Meryl knows enough about what happened before and after the fact to put together a pretty clear picture. It’s why she doesn’t like that he’s gone alone this time, and that he’s far out of her sight. Feels like a risk he might up and disappear on her and Milly again; Meryl knows that he knows she thinks like that, too.
So Wolfwood’s kinder to her feelings, even if he isn’t always kinder with his words. The video call was his idea, not any of theirs; Vash had bolted into the bathroom to bring all four of them together when the tablet started buzzing with the surprise incoming call. Nobody got left out, anymore.)
“It’s okay, Meryl,” Milly says, sweet and unbothered like Meryl hadn’t just yanked on a chunk of her scalp. She leans back out of habit, tipping her chin to ask for an apology forehead kiss she knows Meryl loves to give—and Meryl jumps away from her, just dodging the top of Milly’s foil-encased hair before it can squish against her tank top. “Ah, oops! Sorry, ma’am, I forgot.”
Wolfwood laughs at them. The sound is staticy over the distance and a little lethargic from all the vials of blood the colonists had to take to make sure his body was still in working order, but undeniably warm—warm and alive. Meryl swallows the lump in her throat. She really should have gone with him. Flicking his eyes between them, Wolfwood says, “Yer like two mirrors apologizin’ to each other like that.”
“It comes with being partners for years now!” Milly beams. “Right, Meryl?”
(But alas, she’s in their bathroom dyeing Milly’s hair, far, far away from the miracle man walking and any chance she might have at fisting her hands in his coat to make sure he doesn’t vanish. She knows Milly well enough to read on her face that she’s thinking the same thing. Milly keeps halting herself before she can grab the tablet and cradle it close to herself, as if Wolfwood himself was kept in the little box and she could’ve kept him safe by surrounding it. Vash is the only one of them that isn’t letting himself be so obvious about it, but Vash has always been better than them at keeping to his subtleties unless he needs to throw up a distraction.
But Meryl still sees how his eyes gain more focus whenever the video connection crackles or freezes. He drifts on their periphery, but as always, he’s ready to jump into the thick of it once he’s given permission—by himself, or by them.)
“Exactly right, Milly—Vash!” Meryl does drop her comb and brush this time, darting over to the bathtub and snatching the mixing cup from him. “What are you doing?!”
Vash licks his lips, contemplating the chemical he’d just casually ingested like a tasty spoonful of peanut butter. There’s a dribble of blue on the corner of his mouth, and Meryl can do nothing but watch in horror and wait for him to keel over and die as she clutches the cup of bleach to her chest and tries not to faint. She tried so hard to find this stupid, stupid man. She worked so hard to locate him and then chase him down—and now she’s been working so hard to clear his stupid name and also throw so many false rumors into her broadcasts and fight all of the bullshit that the stupid Terran-Corp News Agency had been saying about him and—
“—Yee-up, that should be strong enough,” Vash says, wiping the bleach from his chin with his thumb and then sucking it off, too.
Meryl makes a pithy, strangled noise.
(It was a little fun, she had to admit, lying straight to the faces of the Terran-Corp News Agency in the name of her silly romantic feelings. She and Milly had added an entire special program to the NLBC: the “rumors” of Vash the Stampede, which consisted primarily of them interviewing old ladies that adored spreading gossip and causing chaos. Meryl didn’t even have to pay them to lie; the residents of No Man’s Land loved their local typhoon so very much after everything that they would happily spin stories at the drop of a hat if those strings could help throw the Earth Forces off of Vash’s tail. He was their planet’s darling force of nature, thank you very much. He would not be taken by Earth.
The newest trend fondly threw Meryl back to her own days of searching for Vash the Stampede, when she’d worked for Bernardelli and was tasked with cataloguing the destruction wrought in his wake. The last old lady they interviewed—Samantha, a nasty woman that doted on Milly Thompson like she existed solely to give homemade pies to Meryl’s partner—claimed that Vash had gotten prosthetic leg enhancements and now stood at least eight feet tall. The woman before her—Helen, a tomas farmer and Wam expert—insisted he’d grown out his hair and now exclusively wore yellow. Yet another—Hillary, a stone-faced behemoth of a woman that used to teach Earth history—declared that Vash’s face (the only place on his body not scarred) now sported a terrible burn scar, which he’d earned by saving her beloved pet puppy from an explosion.
The first person who’d started the trend was actually Miss Luida herself. When Meryl and Milly were interviewing her about the ongoing Noman recovery efforts, the topic of the Humanoid Typhoon had come up—and as smoothly as any other slimy, skilled politician constantly bathing in the public’s critical eye, Luida had hummed thoughtfully to herself, before lying straight through her teeth.
“Oh, Vash the Stampede?” Luida had said, never missing a beat. “Ahh. Yes. After everything, I heard he went bald from the stress. When do you suppose they’ll update his bounty poster?”
—And then she’d winked when Milly’s giggles made the camera move off of her face, and Meryl had smiled like she’d just found a nugget of pure gold in a pile of tomas shit.)
“Meryl,” Vash says to her, and Meryl expects the worst (because he only ever uses her name when something serious is happening, he only ever uses her name when he needs something from her, or he only ever—well, she did once have that nightmare about him using her name right as he croaked like a suns-cooked frog in her arms, but that was a bit goofier and not something that she should be thinking about right now), “when you’re finished with Milly, do you think you could try dyeing my hair, too?”
Meryl places the bleach on the countertop and strips off her gloves. And then waltzes across the bathroom like a magpie on a mission and she grabs his face.
“—Are you sick? Do you feel woozy at all?”
She tilts his head back and forth, squishing his cheeks between her palms and checking his eyes; a little bloodshot, but still big and blue and clear and ringed with those devastating fluttery lashes. Dilated pupils, when he looks at her. She puts two fingers underneath his nose to make sure he’s still breathing; shallow, as always, like he’s afraid of eating up the oxygen that other people might need more than him. She moves her hand to his jaw to feel his pulse; strong and quick, and jackrabbiting faster and faster as Meryl exhales in relief and runs her hands down the sides of his neck to rest them on his shoulders.
“Are you worried about me?” Vash asks, smiling innocently as she pitches forward and taps her forehead against his. No fever, no sweats, no stress; he’s even a little on the cooler side. Perfectly healthy in every way for a non-human natural disaster.
Meryl gusts an audible sigh as she says, “Vash, I’m always worried about every little thing. You know this about me.”
“That’s true, ma’am!” Milly agrees, making Wolfwood bark out a laugh.
Vash rarely ever touches first—but Meryl touched him first this time, so his hands come up easily to thread his fingers through the loops in her shorts. He doesn’t do much else but hold her hips as Meryl calms her heart rate and suppresses the urge to stick her fingers down his throat to make him throw up.
“—Why did you do that,” she snaps after about thirty seconds of internal deliberation. Why did you eat bleach? Why did you touch bleach with your bare hands? He didn’t even use his prosthetic, for God’s sake—just raw-dogged it straight in with the only flesh hand he has remaining.
“Oh, that,” Vash laughs like a man who has hands to spare. “I was checking how concentrated it was. I wasn’t sure if it would work on my hair as well as it’s working on Milly’s.”
“The concentration’s written on the bottle, Vash,” the long-suffering Meryl Stryfe says.
“My hair is very special,” Vash reasons. Only a moment later, he amends: “Milly’s hair is also very special, of course.”
“Thank you, Mister Vash,” Milly says, resuming where Meryl left off without complaint. She watches her own reflection in the mirror as she slathers a bit too much goop on her bangs, tongue peeking out of the corner of her mouth.
Meryl, best known for her willingness to do hands-on research and her enthusiasm for experimenting until something works, shoves her hands into Vash’s styled black hair and rattles it until the gel cracks and Vash yelps an “Oi!” at her. It is pretty special hair. Aside from being Independent instead of human, having magically turned black as Vash burnt through his freaking life force like a madman, and seeming to stand up against the force of gravity even without the half-hour of a styling routine Vash calls his daily meditation, it’s also crunchy as hell.
Like burnt leaves. Or lettuce left out in the suns for too long. Uncooked broccoli stems, curls of wood shavings, and tumbleweeds. Meryl isn’t sure if it’s a result of the planet’s dryness, the styling products Vash uses and doesn’t wash out as often as he should, or something else entirely.
“I’m doing you a favor,” Meryl says to him. Vash’s immediate pout and ashamed patting of his messed-up hair makes Milly giggle. “If you want any dye to take, you’ll need to wash that sludge out of it.”
She leans in closer, keeping her balance by propping a hand on his knee, and Vash’s eyes track her like a hawk as she reaches behind him. Meryl keeps the movement slow, steady, maybe even a little sensual if she’s feeling devious in her descriptions. Vash’s eyes go wide and a little hopeful even as his hair flops in his face. Poor thing probably thinks he’s about to get a nice, sweet, comforting kiss for his troubles. Meryl grins slyly when she flicks on the bathtub faucet and splatters his back with water instead. Vash makes another comical noise—some cute “Yeep!” of surprise that makes Meryl really want to rethink the whole not-kissing him—and shrinks away to the other corner before he can get soaked.
“I’ll finish up with Milly as you take a shower~” Meryl tells him. “And she can wait for the dye to take when I work on you.”
“You have no respect for my vanity,” Vash whines.
“Ma’am only has respect for a very few select people,” Milly says, right as Wolfwood snorts, “Missus doesn’t have any respect fer anybody.”
They make eye-contact through the tablet screen.
Milly opens her mouth again: “—So you really shouldn’t feel too badly about her teasing you, Mister Vash.”
Wolfwood also opens his mouth again: “—She ain’t half as fun once she’s got it in her mind to kowtow to you, though, so you should be glad ‘bout that, Blondie.”
Vash blinks in surprise at the return of the nickname. The immediate return of the nickname. Wolfwood’s blurry face looks so pleased with itself that it makes even Meryl giggle a little bit. Then, Vash chuckles, rubbing the back of his neck as he says, “Can’tcha wait another forty-five minutes before you…?”
“Nope,” Wolfwood says automatically.
“Nosirree,” Milly agrees.
“Not a chance,” Meryl smiles. “—Blondie.”
Milly cheers, “We’ll be matching, Vash!”
Vash drops his face in his hands as his lip wobbles and the tips of his ears turn a bright, marvelous red.
Allowing herself to simmer in her fuzzy and warm feelings, Meryl returns to her place behind Milly, putting her gloves back on and gently taking the dye brush from her partner’s hand. On her own, Milly hadn’t made much progress without a proper mirror setup, especially with the back of her head. Now relieved of dye-duty, she hums at Meryl, and turns properly this time on her stool so that she can give Meryl a kiss on the cheek. It’s a little bit wet. Little bit eye-burning from the bleach in her hair. Meryl loves her so bad it isn’t even funny anymore.
“—Thank you for doing this for me, ma’am,” Milly says, fluttering her lashes. “Really, I was just struggling so much.”
“You were doing great on your own, Milly,” Meryl tells her, and she means it when she checks to make sure Milly hadn’t missed any part of her bangs. “Really. It’s almost—” she laughs, consciously switching to a euphemism before she can outright say too much, “—well, you might end up with some white money pieces, let’s just say.”
The foils are a tad lopsided, but Milly put enough bleach on her roots to kill even a chemical-hungry Independent Plant like Vash. Meryl picks up from where she left off, sectioning off portions of Milly’s soft brown hair in order to coat it from scalp to end before folding it up with foil. In the background, she hears Vash run the bath water until he’s satisfied with the scalding temperature, and then the sound of the pipes groaning as he switches the flow to the shower.
“Oh, leave some hot water for me, please, Mister Vash,” Milly says.
Vash gives her a thumbs-up in the mirror after slipping his shirt over his head. “Will do, big girl,” he replies.
He doesn’t take anything else off; instead, he takes the hand-held shower head off of the wall and hangs over the edge of the tub to scrub his gelly hair with his flesh hand. Something goes click click in his metal arm, and a clamp pops out of his palm to hold the shower head in place so he can focus entirely on picking little chunks of old hair gel off of his scalp.
“Hehe,” Milly giggles, picking up the tablet and showing Wolfwood the view of Vash’s back as he works, “look, it’s no longer a shower head, Mister Wolfwood. It’s a shower hand.”
Wolfwood cackles more at the joke than Meryl thinks he really should. Milly’s own giggles join in the chorus, and Vash glares at them over his shoulder with a hurt look on his face. Guess Wolfwood loves her so bad it is still funny.
“Coulda at least called it smart,” Vash mutters.
It takes Meryl another ten minutes to finish coating the rest of Milly’s hair. It’s shorter than it was before, cut closer to her chin and just long enough to be kept in a ponytail instead of draping down to the middle of her back, but it’s still a lot of thick, curly hair. Meryl groans when she leans back to stretch, surveying her work as she rolls her shoulders. No spots missed, no little brown patches remaining, no problems she’d have to solve in the future; even if she knows Milly wouldn’t mind at all if they had to go back in for another round, the part of her that wants to get it right on the first try nags at her until her eyes start to cross from staring at handfuls of hair strands.
“—Good enough,” Meryl sighs out when she sees Milly’s hopeful eyes in the mirror begging for her to be satisfied with her own work.
“I’ll start the timer,” Milly says gleefully, popping up from the stool like a daisy through the sand. “Forty minutes?”
Meryl nods. “That was a good amount of time on your test strand.”
“Oh, test strand?” Vash, still upside down in the bathtub and now scrubbing his third round of Meryl’s expensive shampoo through his hair, pipes up. “Maybe we should’ve done that with mine.”
“Instead of you eating the bleach,” Meryl deadpans.
“What?!” Wolfwood, affronted, shouts through the call: “I leave for one frickin’ day, Blondie!”
(Meryl realizes that he hadn’t seen exactly what Vash had done to make her freak out. It makes her feel very vindicated, that the experienced child-caretaker has such strong opinions about poison ingestion and what should and shouldn’t be eaten in the name of science. It only makes sense. She can only imagine the number of things the kids at Miss Melanie’s orphanage have tried to eat. Or smoke. Or cuddle with. Meryl shudders to herself. Kids…)
“We still could,” Meryl says, shrugging. “Or we could just… go for it.”
“Spontaneity,” Vash laughs into the bathtub. “That’s my girl.”
—His hair stands up in stupid directions when he half-sits up and looks at her, lathered in the soap that Meryl’s always running out of because it’s the favorite of everyone in the household. She complained for only a month before promptly giving up and buying more bottles so they could all have their own—but in her head, it’s still Meryl’s expensive shampoo, and in their heads she knows it is, too. She’s heard Vash take a whiff of Wolfwood’s hair and muse “Mmm, Meryl’s expensive shampoo,” with a content smile on his face. Milly’s asked Wolfwood for the brand name of “Meryl’s expensive shampoo” so she could give it to her cousin as an early birthday present. Wolfwood had told Miss Melanie that she should try some of “Meryl’s expensive shampoo” if she was having trouble with frizz.
And it sure does work wonders as an expensive shampoo, because Vash’s crunchy black hair now feels soft and smooth when Meryl reaches out in wonder to tweak one of the stupid, still-gravity-defying points. Vash allows her to play with his hair with an all-too earnest smile on his face.
(He was trying to be funny. Probably trying to make her laugh by shaping his stupid hair into horns. The things he does sometimes…)
“…Hurry up and wash that out,” Meryl coughs, averting her eyes when she feels heat rise in her cheeks. “You still need to blow-dry before I can get started.”
He does exactly as she asks. To a perfect, flawless, satisfactory-T—one that Meryl can’t even nitpick, or comment on, or add another condition to. It’s only upon her request that he behaves with such casual precision, losing all of his flaps and his blunders and his ease-bringing errors. She knows he adds those eccentricities in because it makes other people feel more comfortable around him; she also knows that he can shed them as easily as an inebriated Milly can shed her clothes, because he knows it makes Meryl more comfortable when something’s done correctly. All his special little treatments. All his special little behaviors for the people he’s chosen to stay with. Meryl gets his exactness, Wolfwood gets his intensity, and Milly gets his depth; it brings Meryl a sense of relief every time she sees him allow another carefully-curated facet of himself out when he’s in their comfortable company.
She likes the nuance of him. She likes the full picture, instead of just what Vash thinks is palatable to human beings. She hopes that the feeling is mutual.
—Vash washes the shampoo out of his hair, rubs in some of Meryl’s expensive conditioner, washes that out, too, and then ambles out of the bathroom to go fetch the hair dryer from Meryl’s bedroom.
“Even if it doesn’t work out, I think it’ll be fine, Miss Meryl,” Milly says to her once he’s gone. “I think he just wants to give it a try. He won’t be too upset if the bleach isn’t strong enough for black hair.”
Meryl exhales before giving Milly a small smile. “You’re probably right, Milly, but I still hope it does.”
(Because maybe she does want to respect this little piece of his vanity, bringing back some buried fragments of that proud golden peacock in her memory even if he’s been tried by tough times and tenderized like lean meat by circumstance. Vash still puts just as much effort into his appearance as he used to; hell, he even still wears that bright red coat, almost like he wants to get arrested. He styles his hair every day, even on the weekends when they don’t leave the house. He only forgoes his ritual when he’s really, really tired.
But there’s something more subdued about him with that blackened hair. He’s still radiant; he’s still impossibly clever. There’s still the same light in his eyes that Meryl was terrified of losing after he pulled that trigger. Sliding around from the aphelion to his perihelion has only made Meryl’s life into more of a raging, chaotic inferno. Still—sometimes, she catches him looking at himself in the mirror, as his eyes slide over to Wolfwood, and then down to a faded slice-scar on his palm. There’s grief in his countenance in those moments, world-shaking and hollow—a grief that time has only just barely started to mend, with the cause of it defeated after a hundred and fifty years of fighting and three new, patient, tangible reasons to try to heal in the first place.
Meryl knows how he got that scar; he gave it to himself to match with her. Meryl was in his damn head, and he was in hers. She knows the name Rem Saverem even though she’s never heard his voice utter its shape to her directly. She knows that Rem Saverem, too, had black hair.
It’s a good thing that it’s easier to dye blonde hair back to black if he finds he doesn’t like what Meryl does to him.)
Humming another tune to herself, Milly rifles through the dye boxes for the plastic hairnet. Upon finding it, she hands it to Meryl, and then bends at the waist like a chivalrous warrior waiting to be knighted, a spark of mischief in her eyes. Meryl laughs as she wraps the hairnet around Milly’s goopy hair. Before she can even take the gloves off, Milly takes Meryl’s wrist and tries to guide it to her lips to kiss the back of her hand to complete the silly dance—except she exclaims an “Ah, oopsie!” and instead goes for a kiss higher up on Meryl’s arm so she doesn’t plant her mouth on chemical-coated latex.
Meryl keeps her forearm under Milly’s chin and uses it to guide Milly’s head upwards, tucking her wrists in so that she doesn’t dirty any of Milly’s clothes. Milly smiles when Meryl kisses her, a sweet press of teeth on teeth, and a momentary back-and-forth of movement. How readily her good moods show on her face makes it rather difficult to kiss Milly during her brightest moments—which is a terrible tragedy in Meryl Stryfe’s eyes, because Milly’s brightest moments are almost always the moments that Meryl wants to kiss her.
“Ah!” Milly exclaims suddenly, pulling back. Meryl rests her forearms on the dips of Milly’s waist, raising an eyebrow. “We can’t be leaving out Mister Wolfwood, he must be so lonely!”
—And then Milly snatches up the Earth tablet again and plants a dramatic mwah! of a kiss directly on the plastic screen. Wolfwood’s noises of approval can be heard through the tinny speakers.
“Do it back,” Meryl tells him before Milly can put the tablet back down.
“Huh?”
“Kiss it back.”
Wolfwood’s chuckle turns sheepish, a little embarrassed. He’s good at public displays of affection when they aren’t so public as him sitting in a hospital wing talking to a tablet screen—and also when they can be passed off as teasing, silliness, or something that benefits himself more than it benefits other people. Things like that aren’t vulnerabilities; they’re fun, lighthearted, plain and simple. But Meryl knows it means more to Wolfwood when he’s able to do something for somebody else. Kindness, simply for kindness’s sake. Meryl knows it makes him nervous, even when he really wants it. It’s cute. Now, he’s being pretty cute.
“I’m a poor injured soul, girl,” Wolfwood wheedles, holding up his arm to show the bandage around his elbow, “and yer makin’ me do work?”
Vash’s head pops into the room, hair dry as the dune sea and face flushed with mock-anger as he gasps: “Kissing Milly Thompson is not work.”
“That’s right,” the Milly Thompson in question agrees, nodding her head sagely. “It’s a privilege to kiss Milly Thompson.”
“A true monolith of love and peace,” Vash says, sidling up behind Milly and craning his neck to watch the tablet over her shoulder.
“A lip-gift from the Lord himself for very, very special people,” Milly giggles, leaning back into Vash, “don’tcha think, mister preacher? You must know better about this stuff than us.”
“He is the expert, after all,” Vash insists solemnly, “even if he is a bit of a devil priest.”
“…Mmnf,” says Wolfwood, bringing the tablet’s camera up to his face and giving it a quick, grumbling peck. Milly and Vash cheer.
It only takes a couple more minutes of banter and back-and-forths for Vash to find himself occupying Milly’s stool, and for Meryl to situate herself behind him to start working on his hair. It’s soft, now, smooth and glossy as dewy grass she’s only ever felt in the colony’s geodome, and it smells like her. She combs her fingers through it more indulgent than necessary; Vash watches her in the mirror as she does, the expression on his face somewhere in the limbo-space between cat-like pleasure and peace.
Meryl grabs the comb and promptly gives him an atrociously flat middle-part, giggling when his whole body crumples with over-dramatic horror.
“You’re so cruel to me,” Vash bemoans, pitching the back of his hand against his forehead. He puts the other to his chest, rocking back on the stool until his shoulders lean heavily against Meryl’s front. “So, so cruel. Don’tcha have any empathy for how much work goes into my good looks?”
“You look like a banker like that, Mister Vash,” Milly snickers. “A really, really slimy banker. With very pretty eyes, though.”
“It’s like Wolfwood said,” Meryl says matter-of-factly, “it’s how I show love.”
“Oi, I did not say that about you,” Wolfwood counters. “Let a man have his own love language to himself, Jesus. Damn copy-cat.”
Milly, the skilled peacekeeper that she is, slots herself in behind Meryl and reaches around to fluff up Vash’s hair, soothing the dismay he’s throwing at his own reflection. Her efforts manage to squish Meryl between her two very large, very heavy partners, and Wolfwood lets out another laugh when she wheezes an “Oof,” at the attack from both sides. Milly, light of her life, only takes this as further encouragement to wrap her arms around Meryl’s waist and cuddle up behind her with her chin on Meryl’s head. Vash, bane of her existence, takes it as an opportunity, and spins around to hold them both in his long noodle arms. He drops his cheek on her shoulder with a contented sigh, and Meryl sticks her tongue out at him, copying his signature pout with only about half of the effectiveness.
“Yayyyy,” Milly bleats through a sleepy yawn, “Meryl sa~andwich. My fa~vorite kind of sandwich.”
Meryl attempts to keep brushing out what bits of Vash’s hair she can get her hands on at this angle to preserve her dignity.
It takes another few minutes before Meryl’s finally able to start putting some bleach in Vash’s dark hair. She scoops up a glob with her brush and smears it from the roots outward, following his part first to the left, and then returning to the middle to go to the right. She fixes up his hairline and the tufts by his ears before moving on to the back of his head. Coating his hair is a lot less work than Milly’s, considering how much less of it he has and how much shorter his hair is than hers. (Not that Vash has thin hair by any means—Milly Thompson just has very thick hair.) Meryl falls into a comfortable rhythm as she works, like when she files reports or paints walls. Milly, warm and cozy and dozing off right behind her helps to keep her calm and on-task.
Meryl hovers a gloved index finger over Vash’s widow’s peak. “Hey, look here. I can already see some lifting,” she says. Like a loaded spring set loose, Vash immediately scrambles to check out his hairline in the mirror. “You should probably keep it on for about half an hour, since we don’t know how your hair will take it. We can always do a second round tomorrow if you’d still like it to be lighter.”
“Better to be careful so we don’t get Baldie instead of Blondie,” Wolfwood says, resting his chin on his fist.
Vash’s mouth parts when he takes in the lighter strands framing his face, and a fractional change passes through the way he holds the rest of his body that has Meryl’s heart clenching and Milly cooing an “Aww.” He’s almost always perfectly still; now, Meryl can see the line of his back trembling.
“…I wasn’t sure it’d be possible,” Vash admits. There was a chance it wouldn’t work. There was a chance Independent hair didn’t react the same way to dye. There’s awe in his voice and in his eyes, and when he looks at Meryl in the mirror, it feels like he’s crediting her with this miracle instead of the bottle of gloopy toxic chemicals in her hand. “You know,” Vash swallows, “I don’t think I realized how much I missed it until just now.”
(It could’ve just slid off, ineffective, and the evidence of everything Millions Knives put him through would’ve been stuck on his body forever. Meryl knew there was a difference between how Vash regarded his blackened hair and how he saw his scars. He’d never put it into words for her—but she knew based on how he talked about them in starkly different ways. The hair is a passing mention, not looked at too closely so that it doesn’t start to ache like an open sore; the scars are all fond memories, painful in the past yet beloved in equal measure. He remembers who healed him. He remembers who caused them, and why he accepted each and every one.
She knows Vash would’ve readily embraced anything given to him by humanity. He loved them. He loved them. He loved his brother, too—but the scars on his skin were accepted willingly. The hair was forced upon him.
Vash probably still would’ve ended up with those scars if even a single one of the humans who gave them to him didn’t exist.
Yet his hair never would have turned black if Millions Knives had never set out to make him hurt.)
Meryl runs her fingers through his hair, bringing some of the clumped dye on his roots down to the tips of his spikes. “I’m glad you’re happy with it, Vash,” she says honestly.
“Happy,” Vash echoes around a shaky inhale. “I… guess that’s one way to put it.”
Then, the corners of his eyes soften, and Vash smiles—small and private, barely a quirk of his lips and a flash of sharp teeth, and it’s all for the three special people that love him and made him want to stay.
Meryl feels Milly’s mouth on the back of her neck placing a quick, chaste kiss on her spine. “Pass that to Mister Vash, please,” Milly whispers, and Meryl does.
Vash’s hand finds her wrist. She can hear his throat click when he swallows; she doesn’t have to look at his face in the mirror to know that his eyes have gone misty.
“…Please don’t cry until I’m sure I haven’t turned you into a raccoon,” Meryl says softly, nosing into his broad shoulder. It’d be really embarrassing if she left uneven stripes of black in Vash’s hair after all of that. She doesn’t think she’d ever be allowed to live it down. Light as a feather, she kisses the ring of scar tissue right over Vash’s heart that runs all the way through his chest and out the other side.
Vash garbles out a wet laugh, and sure, maybe she believes he isn’t crying. Yet. “Half an hour?” he asks.
“Half an hour,” Meryl reaffirms. “I’ll set a timer. Then, you can cry all that you want.”
“—Take a shower first, though!” Milly reminds him. “You’ll never really know how well it took until you wash out all of the product! There was this one time that I tried doing my hair myself in my own bathroom and gosh, it did not go well because I really panicked before I’d cleaned it all up and thought that it hadn’t processed enough and that I was gonna have to go into work lookin’ like a carrot or someth—”
…
(Vash and Milly agreed to not show Wolfwood the results of their endeavors until he returned home the next morning. A surprise, they called it; something fun they thought would suit Wolfwood’s tastes and encourage him to hurry up and commandeer that stupid spaceship from Brad before they all died in the deadly Nicholas-Drought. Upon his arrival, the nearby neighbors would be made privy to two joyous crows in quick succession: “Blondie!” was followed closely by, “Shit, two blondies! It’s my lucky day!”
And the neighborhood’s few more patient souls—who were unadvisedly still paying even a lick of attention to the ruckus going on outside—would have then had their ears graced by a much less joyous and much less dignified shriek of:
“Shortie, what the fuck did you do?!”)