OTP Menagerie

Meryl is on the same ship as Vash, Nai, and Rem. Her cryopod malfunctions during the voyage — maybe Nai tampers with it, curious about whether he can connect with someone his own age. Whatever the reason, she wakes up right before the Tesla discovery, and Rem takes her in while working to repair the pod.

Rem tries to keep the twins away from Meryl to protect the secret of their existence, but eventually curiosity wins and the three of them start spending time together. Rem is a bit uneasy about it, but allows it. It’s good for Vash and Nai to interact with another human, and it’s good for Meryl too, who’s alone while her family sleeps. Still, Rem is clear: once the pod is fixed, Meryl goes back into cryosleep. She promises the twins they’ll be able to find each other when they reach the new planet.

The three of them bond. Meryl tells them about life on Earth. They show her the rec room. Nai gets along with her, but Vash becomes her best friend. They have a lot in common, and there’s some puppy love happening on both sides. Nai starts to feel left out.

Nai suggests to Rem that she look for available pods on other ships. Rem understands what he’s doing (partly trying to help, partly wanting Meryl gone) and that puts her in a difficult position. But she knows Meryl’s safety comes first.

Rem makes the arrangements. There’s an open pod on another ship. It’s hard for Vash and Meryl to say goodbye, and even Nai feels it more than he expected. They make a promise to find each other in the new world. Vash doesn’t know Nai was the one who set this in motion.

Rem takes Meryl to the other ship. Shortly after, they find Tesla.

The Big Fall happens.

Vash survives carrying two losses: Rem, and the near-certainty that his friend didn’t make it. And if she did, she is growing old somewhere without him. He hopes she’s having a good life, and leaves it at that.

The story follows its usual course. But here’s the twist: Meryl survived the Fall, though only her pod and a handful of others made it — her parents not among them. Survivors only wake others up when there are enough resources to sustain them, so it takes a long time. Meryl is woken up about twenty years before the story begins, in a world she doesn’t recognize, with a family that’s already gone. She gets taken in by relatives and builds something like a normal life, but her memories of the weeks before the Fall are fragmented and dreamlike, and she’s never been entirely sure they were real.

Still, the need to find out never fully goes away. She looks into a lady REM Saverem and confirms she existed, which means the woman from her maybe-dream was real. But the twins are another matter, since they were never officially registered on the ship, so there’s no record of them anywhere. She can’t prove they were real. She carries that uncertainty for years.

Eventually she becomes who she is in canon: competent, stubborn, someone who imposes order on chaos for a living. That’s not unrelated to waking up alone in a world she didn’t recognize.

And then she gets assigned to track down Vash the Stampede, and something strange clicks before she even meets him. The boy she knew was named Vash, yes — but what are the odds it’s the same person? And that he became Vash the Stampede, of all things? Besides, she didn’t know he was a Plant. If he is alive, he would be really, really old.