Boris el gato

“Hey,” Meryl says. She catches Vash by the wrist and he tries very hard not to flinch. “Can I tell you something?”

Vash knows she’s not asking.

He stops trying to take his leave — like a coward, he knows, but she was home alone when he fit the spare key she foisted on him a year or so back into the lock on her door, and there’s only so long he can talk around the various elephants in the room without Milly’s easy, charismatic small talk as a buffer. Only so long he can ignore the empty space at his side.

"Yeah?" he asks, putting on the smile, thin and watery as he knows it is.

Meryl hasn't let go of his hand. "It was good seeing you. I know coming by so often is hard for you, but I'm glad you do. It makes me happy."

She swallows, wets her lips with her tongue, and Vash sees the words on her face before they spill out, catching in her throat, soft and terrible.

"I love you, you know."

He does know. He's known for years, even before the world ended and she came back to him reborn from the fire with her eyes wet and bright as twin suns.

That doesn't make it any easier to hear.

Meryl squeezes his wrist, lets him go.

Vash doesn't look back. He knows what he'll see, just like he knew what she'd say. No expectation, but something a little like hope. Optimism, maybe.

She should know better.

He shouldn't have given her hope.

Nearly every fiber of Vash's being wants him to bolt. Run for the dunes and never come back, never see her face again until she's old and grey and he's not tempted by the possibility of decades stretching out ahead.

It would be safer for both of them.

"Meryl," Vash hears himself say, low and strained. "Now?"

She laughs, just as low, just as strained. "I keep wondering whether I'm ever going to see you again, and I don’t want to not have said it."

Vash squeezes his eyes shut. Breathes deep and slow and deliberate through the vice around his chest. "I can't—"

"I know. It's okay."

No, it isn't.

And there's nothing he can do about it but turn back, reach out — catch her hand, hold it tight.