Chapter Text
Sitting across the cab from Vash makes Nicholas restless. Sometimes his hand comes to rest in the middle, between them, where a third, smaller person could fit. Then his eyes drift toward the driver’s seat where ‘the girl’s’ small, fingerless-gloved hands steer the car over the rolling apparent nothingness of the desert. Then his own fingers curl up and try to find something to do: rest over his thigh, rub at the back of his hair, adjust the arm of his sunglasses, brush along the edge of his loose collar.
“It’s gonna be a while,” she volunteers after she seems to notice that his attention is redirecting around her a few times. She seems irritated by it, but he knows he could tell her that he’s just a little worried about fingering some dried spot of her come. Of his come. Of anything they almost certainly left on the bench of the backseat the night before. He scoffs and looks out the window instead at the blue and orange, undulating haze of heat and emptiness.
Finally, Nicholas feels around in his jacket for his dwindling pack of cigarettes. He pulls it out and slides one from the pack, stuffing the pack back down in the inside pocket where it belongs. He smoothly glides his lighter into his hand to replace it, fiddling with it to light it as is his habit.
“Just what we needed. Another heat source,” Meryl says.
Nicholas tries to glance at her eyes through the mirror, only to note that it’s Roberto she is jabbing at. Mostly.
Roberto shows his hands and his fingers, all free for the moment. “I did object to him taking anymore cigs from me.”
Meryl seems to be spluttering not to say something rude. If it had been Nicholas, he would have just told his boss what he thought. Then again, not many people had the luxury of near absolute job security. He glances over at Vash - his job at the moment - who is dozing against the side of the car and the glass. He’s on the side of the car furthest from the beams of sunlight coming in, which must make it easier.
Nicholas can’t help thinking that it must also be easier given that he had tired himself out the night before, apparently. It shouldn’t get to him, and he wonders why it does.
Maybe it’s that Vash is attached to these people. As much as they can’t fight back, when they get to July, which might keep them alive, it means something else to deliver Vash away from. Then again, Vash seems to have the idea that he is going to walk right into July and up to his brother on his own, making Nicholas’s ‘job’ rather redundant.
Having someone to drive, rather than walk all the way to the Terminal, isn’t that bad, maybe.
He smokes with practiced deep breaths. He blows it out. The scent of sweet tobacco and stinging smoke both fill the cab a bit, and he notices in time to reach over and nudge down his window. Air rushes in from outside as he taps off the first ring of excess ash out the car window.
The air that comes in is warm but dry, and it has a pleasant drying effect on his forehead as it tickles his hair against it.
Abruptly, he hears Vash’s voice drawing in a deep breath and expelling a great ahhh-choo! Then he is rubbing his eyes and looking around, blinking. He catches Nicholas’s eyes and smiles, waving at him. As he looks away, he notices that Meryl is giving him another look in the rearview.
“I rolled it down,” he says.
“I’m okay,” Vash promises them sheepishly. He breathes in with a bit of a rattle and itches his nose with the back of his hand.
Meryl reaches over and touches the controls on the driver’s side door, nudging it down a bit more.
He draws in another breath and blows the smoke out through his nose. It isn’t comfortable, but the discomfort won’t last.
“Thanks,” he says.
“Don’t mention,” Meryl replies as if she actually means the command.
The juxtaposition between how tense she seems and how blissfully unaware Vash seems isn’t lost on him.
He wastes only a little of the cigarette as he flicks it off to fly past the car and back into the sand behind them.
Vash folds his hands behind his head and cradles himself like that, stretching without rising to full wakefulness. He stretches out one leg and rotates his ankle a bit. When it’s planted back on the floorboard, he jostles his knee a bit restlessly and hums a bit. There’s a happy curve to his lips.
When Meryl looks back at him, it’s with a smile and an effort to look back over her shoulder that she gives up on only because he is in the seat behind her.
“Is there something you want to listen to on the radio?” she asks. It’s extremely obvious from her tone, somehow, which of them she is talking to.
“Mm,” Vash considers. “... Music?” he suggests. He looks across at Nicholas. “Or something funny. So we can laugh,” he says, obviously still stuck on the farce Nicholas had put on with Zazie over the bodies of murdered charging station attendants. He almost certainly doesn’t know that it makes Nicholas’s burden just that much harder to bear.
Static and snatches of voices fill the car as Meryl switches on the radio and dials between the stations until, eventually, an upbeat and stringy melody fills the car at a low, easy volume. Nicholas tunes it out until his eyes glaze over but never close for very long, trying not to think too much about how counter to how he feels the music is, like scraping slate.
“Could take a nap,” Roberto volunteers in his direction after a while, taking a swig from his flask. Nicholas wishes he’d bummed some the last time anyone stopped to take a piss. He seems perfectly oblivious to whatever is going on between Vash and Meryl. It makes Nicholas wonder if he’s just a shit reporter or a very good one.
For lack of anything better to do, Nicholas snorts and nods at the space between himself and Vash. Vash who seems pretty content and still sleepy, if not actually out anymore. Whatever did or didn’t happen, he seems content and sated in a way that makes Nicholas shake his head a little, smirking to himself as he catches sight of Vash’s face.
“You’ll fit,” Roberto carries on in jovial reassurance. He nods in the mirror at Vash. “Sometimes he sprawls across the whole thing.”
“Roberto,” Meryl chides and then mashes her lips together and fixes her eyes on the windscreen ahead of her. There’s fresh red in her face.
“What? I’m just—” Roberto complains, turning his head toward her plaintively and gesturing at her with his flask in hand.
Nicholas’s smirk stays etched in place as he dives for the focus Meryl clearly doesn’t want now that she has almost admitted to something she doesn’t want her superior to know. Or, at least, to think about. Not that Roberto is showing any clear signs of thinking.
“Don’t think he wants my feet in his lap,” he says, nodding toward Vash.
“Me?” Vash asks. He blinks a few times and looks down at himself, hands brushing along and smoothing his duster over his lap, one side of its tail wrapped around the thigh closest to Nicholas. “I don’t mind,” he says with an easy, sleepy smile.
Nicholas raises his eyebrows at him and glances at the back of Meryl’s seat without actually looking at her. He shakes his head and reaches for the cup filled with water that had simply been given to him when they’d last stopped. He takes a drink of it, remembering to be grateful as he busies himself with looking out the window again.
“Yeah, like you don’t mind jumping down the gullet of a Great Worm,” he says after he has a chance to think of something to say to that. He hears Meryl make a likely involuntary sound of revulsion.
“We got out fine,” Vash reminds him.
“Because of me,” Nicholas insists.
“And we saved Roberto and Meryl, too. So it’s good we have you,” Vash explains in a tone that verges shy of singsong. No one in this wasteland has a call to be that content.
“If you hadn’t had me, you’d be fucked,” Nicholas argues. He hears Meryl’s little gasp of scandal and smirks. “But then aga—” He is so tempted to just pull it out of the bag and burst the bubble somehow. Part of him is relieved when Meryl at least has the spine and awareness to stop him.
“What’s the point of carrying that big thing around if you’re not going to use it? And don’t say it’s because you’re giving funerals. Seems more like you’re causing them,” she snaps.
Nicholas grants her a snort and grin. Wanting to stretch or do something with restless energy, he walks his loafers up the back of Roberto’s seat. Roberto doesn’t seem to mind, but suddenly Meryl is batting at the space behind the seat, going for Nicholas’s shins. As soon as she catches the skin of his ankle with her fingers, she stops and tries to reorient herself to maintaining control of the steering wheel as Roberto seems to key into some anxiety about it, reaching out to steady it for her.
“Wolfwood,” she scolds him, perhaps using his name for the first time since they’ve been in the car together like this, “put your feet down!”
“Oh, the upholstery is that uninsured, huh?”
“Just do it.”
“Here,” Vash says, patting his lap again in gentle offering. Nicholas puts his feet down, back effectively stretched. He rubs a bit at his haunches as he gives Vash an up-and-down look and back to his eyes.
“Still can’t tell if you’re just messing with me.”
“Ah, censorship returns,” Roberto quips.
“No. I can choose my words as carefully as you,” Nicholas says with a slyness in his smile that feels satisfying, almost like it isn’t covered up with so much irony and deceit that he could choke.
Around moonrise, one of the rounded and dipping lines of the landscape ahead forms into a ridge that seems rather fixed on the horizon, growing taller and darker as they get closer and closer.
“What’s up there?” Wolfwood asks. Eventually he had managed to at least get a sense of being tired, even if he couldn’t let himself go to sleep. It was a pleasant sort of weight, blocking out some of the rest. He rubs at his forehead as he squints, not wanting to remove his glasses.
“A town,” Meryl says. “Or at least something that might resemble one.”
Nicholas turns his head over toward Vash who seems a bit less like he’s still in a permanent afterglow and is, therefore, a little easier to look at.
“She’s kind of sheltered, isn’t she?”
Vash’s eyes widen slightly as he looks up toward Meryl. He seems ready to surrender in an instant, but it doesn’t reveal very much information. Nicholas wonders if Vash just hasn’t known her long enough or well enough to notice.
“She’s just a fresh grad. They’re all a little uptight and particular. And this one got good grades,” Roberto says. He jabs a thumb toward her indicatively.
Meryl’s hand goes out to push back at his jacket sleeve.
“Stop talking about me like I’m not here,” she says as the shadow at the base of the mound that some might call a mountain deepens and spreads far enough to start to further darken the interior of the car.
“You’re right there!” Roberto insists, pushing to jab his thumb closer still as he starts to laugh. “Right here!”
“Shut up and let me drive,” Meryl says with another push. Then, when he draws his hand away and lets her catch a breath, she adds, “Sir.”
“November University,” Vash supplies with a smile and a nod. He seems proud to have been listening, at some point prior to Nicholas joining them.
“I’m not snobby about it. I just c—” Meryl says, but then she stops as they finally drive onto something that abruptly smooths out their ride. She is a bit in awe as there are enough buildings and flat surface to be called something like roads and blocks of market space and a few residential buildings.
The glow of lights - fire and some with faintly browning and then steadying electricity catches Nicholas’s eyes, too.
“Looks like they’ve still got their plant,” he remarks. He glances over at Vash. He really hopes he hasn’t jinxed it and that they haven’t ruined it by showing up.
In any case, it’s not his business to judge. The only way through this is to keep going through it, now with Vash in tow.
He leans forward up into the space between Meryl and Roberto’s seats. Meryl and Roberto make surprised noises. He puts an elbow down like he belongs to a second.
“Betting that’s where we go,” he says, pointing to a building that is long and a floor taller than the rest with a small, short belltower at its center, made from the nearby rock and earth.
“Well, it’s the biggest building around, so I wonder why you thought that,” Meryl replies, looking over at him and seeming surprised by how close he is, pushed between the seats. She looks past him and at Roberto with the remaining glance she can spare as she starts to navigate packed down sand that’s nearly smooth. “It’s not a church, is it?”
She seems to know better but must recognize the bell tower as a signal of one. He chortles with the knowledge that he seems to have created some association, however misplaced it might be.
“Don’t think so. Too big,” Roberto agrees. He gestures when he spots the signage that becomes visible shortly before the entrance doors do. One of the several signs tacked on and the largest among them indicate that it’s an inn.
“Well, thank God,” Meryl sighs as it comes into view.
“Oh?” Nicholas asks her with a tentative nudge, the first even slight touch he’s dared since the night before around the campfire, performance done. He glances at Vash doesn’t seem bothered, only enthralled in watching. “Don’t like churches?”
“Not that. I like baths,” Meryl points out. She takes a turn to find a place to park the car that she likes.
“Well, we’ll be sure to tell them ladies first,” Nicholas replies as he leans back into his seat, lungs filling up with mostly-clean, food-steam filled air.