Categories > Anime/Manga > Trigun > needful
Author's note: Sorry the update was so late on this; I was out of town and away from my computer. To make up for it somewhat, I'm uploading two parts (Part VI and Part VII)! Yay! This chapter is even ever so slightly a little bit longer.
Also, to everyone who has read and reviewed, thanks a million! Reviews make fanfiction authors smile like little girls. ^__^
Warning: This story will contain disturbing sexual content (heterosexual and homosexual) in the near future. I'm just slow getting to it...sigh.
Part VI: The Storm
Vash wouldn't answer the phone.
"Dammit!" Wolfwood screamed at no one in particular. The window of his car was down and he noticed the heads of drivers and passengers in nearby cars swivelling towards him with shocked expressions on their faces.
Wolfwood really didn't care. He needed to talk to Vash and the sooner it happened, the better. But several calls to the station later and Vash was nowhere to be found. Wolfwood cursed again. Where was his partner when he needed him?
That guy...
He tried to calm down and kicked himself mentally for thinking badly of Vash since the reality was that his partner had an uncanny ability for being at the right place at the right time. It had saved Wolfwood's life once.
He closed his cell phone with a flick of his wrist, going over all the things that had to be done. He needed to get to the station. He needed to go through his files.
More than anything, he wanted to look at the wall.
Carefully juggling a cigarette and the wheel of his car, Wolfwood retrieved the photograph from the passenger seat. He rested it on his lap like something precious even though it was only a greasy photograph in an ugly frame. He stole a glance at it.
These two girl, smiling at him from the shot. Maybe, just maybe, they were the key, the thing he needed to finally...
He let that thought die. He didn't need to build air castles. He needed clues.
And in the back seat of his car were other photographs. Several albums worth of photographs, in fact. Lisa Morgan was a shutterbug and had taken thousands of shots of everything from first birthdays to proms and speech contests. She had given them all to him and told him to look hard. If there were anything in these pictures that would help, he would find them.
Kelly's life was a still-frame movie waiting to be viewed. Somewhere in the middle of it all, he could find Picasso.
The sleek black car stopped at a corner. Wolfwood's eyes swept the intersection. The police station was to the left.
He should go left, this he knew. He had a new lead; he had calls to make and duties to delegate. Yes, everything he had to do was to the left.
Somehow, without noticing he was doing it, Wolfwood turned right. He only felt a minor twinge that said this was the wrong way--that this was not the way he usually took. But he was following a route that his mind knew.
A few corners and several narrow, grungy streets later and Wolfwood found himself standing before a yellow strip of tape marking off a crime scene, his car left in a parking lot three blocks away.
Kelly had died here.
Mostly, the alley looked like what it was: all that was left of a crime scene. The chalk outline was faded, the yellow tape looked tattered, and trash was already piling up in corners that his team had gone over meticulously.
But this place marked an event, so it was more than what it seemed.
Wolfwood was feeling something. Something odd. It was all related to his conversation with the sobbing, broken Lisa Morgan--with seeing pictures of a still-smiling, still-vibrantly alive Kelly. For the first time in his life, Wolfwood felt the loss of a victim from one of his cases profoundly. Kelly was more than a case to him now; she was a personality, a girl with a life that was over.
It was a dangerous place to be. Because if he cared about one, he would care about them all. If that happened, how could he work--how could he live--with the guilt of not catching their killer?
Because Picasso was still out there, and he would kill again.
Wolfwood stood there, silently, watching the stillness of a place where a good daughter had passed away into nothingness.
If one were to have watched carefully, they would have seen that his lips moved silently around old words usually uttered in stone structures with tall spires and stained glass windows.
He said them and meant them and then said them again and again until they ran out like a river drying up.
His prayer over, he lifted a tiny cross that hung from a chain around his neck and brought it to his lips.
"I'm sorry," he whispered to no one at all. In the distance, a clap of thunder sounded out, echoing across the gray sky of his city. He waited for the storm.
Part VII: Milly
Milly had a nice life, he decided.
Her routine was perfect. She awoke by 6:00 every morning, made her bed, took a shower, got dressed, and then ate breakfast. On Wednesdays she did a load of laundry; on Thursdays she set out her recyclable garbage; and on Friday she set out a single bag of trash.
She wasn't a wasteful girl. What she was was methodical. She separated her garbage into smaller bags and then bundled them up in black garbage bags: fruit and vegetable peels in one bag, plastic wrappers in another, batteries and metals in yet another.
It was easy to see that she had a sweet tooth; her trash was often filled with the wrappers of little snack cakes and individual cups of pudding.
She left the house by 7:30, drove through rush-hour traffic, and arrived at work in time to get started by 8:20. Her office had tall, wide, clean windows and blinds she rarely closed. He liked her windows a lot. Through them he could see her perfect posture, her sweet smile, her crystal blue eyes that were so unlike his own. Hers had feeling in them; hers had stories for anyone to read. Milly would never lie. Not to him.
On the days when he could watch her, he was lulled by her consistency, soothed by the idea of life uninterrupted. Even when the heat of the sun on the roof burned his skin, as it often did; even when his body ached from holding this position--arms shaking from the strain of keeping binoculars up to his eyes--he was at peace here, watching her.
She took tea at 11:00, had lunch at 12:45, returned one hour later and always set back to her documents and phone calls and forms with rare enthusiasm.
Watching her, watching her, watching her. He took a deep breath and imagined that this must almost, almost be what love feels like.
And then everything went wrong. It started at exactly 1:32 and kept getting worse. Yes, everything was wrong, wrong, wrong and he hated that.
Someone was ruining her routine. It wasn't her fault. Never her's. She was not the reason someone knocked on her door, and started speaking to her. She wasn't the reason they kept talking and wouldn't go away.
This was supposed to be the time when she made copies of forms and updated files on her computer. This was supposed to be his respite.
Instead of doing what she should have been doing, Milly was talking to a short, balding man that he recognized as her supervisor. He didn't like Mr. Supervisor. His temper rose and kept rising.
But Milly smiled and nodded to Mr. Supervisor, then frowned and looked troubled for a moment. When she nodded again, she wasn't smiling. The conversation continued for so long that it cut into the time when Milly should have been going to the restroom and getting another tea.
When Mr. Supervisor finally went away, he nursed an infant hope that she might return to doing what she should have been doing, that the day was not completely wrecked. But she didn't.
Instead, she stood, glanced out her wide window and studied the view for a minute. Her stare was unflinching, steady, knowing.
His heart beat wildly in his chest. Surely she was staring right at him, looking foolish stretched out on a roof like this, sweating in the summer heat.
And her blue eyes, they saw right through him. He couldn't breathe, could only wait for her eyes to widen in horror as she realized he was there. He was watching her and she knew. She knew.
His heart shuddered to a quiet beat again when she turned away from the window, and then grabbed an umbrella from where it rested beside the door.
He noticed it then, too, the clouds gathering overhead, the gray drab mass of them piling up above.
He was safe. She didn't know. He was safe.
Milly, however, was not.
**************************
There was a respectable pile of cigarette butts at his feet.
The answers were coming to him out here. Normally he needed the calm of his office, the heavy sound of classical music in his car. Now all he had was a cold crime scene and a pack of cigarettes waiting in the wing once he finished this one off. Somehow it was enough.
Angela Beasley was Picasso's ninth victim. They knew more about the way she died than they knew about her as a person. She had been--what? --two detectives ago? Three? To Wolfwood, she was nothing but forensic reports and figures, clues he couldn't confirm, evidence he no longer had access too. Not like Kelly...
Kelly was...real.
But Angela Beasley and Kelly had known each other; had even been friends so it seemed. And the hotel in the picture was the last place Angela had been before Picasso got her--in the parking lot of a grocery store mere days after she checked out. No one had even heard her scream.
That Hotel--the Southern Inn and Lodge--was a sharp, white shape in the background of almost every picture taking of Angela Beasley's twisted body.
Wolfwood wouldn't forget it. He couldn't.
What was the connection between the hotel and Picasso? Wolfwood was going to find out, but first he needed to locate his ever-so-helpful, but absent partner.
He was reaching into his pocket to retrieve his cell phone and try to call Vash again, when movement to his right and the sound of footsteps caught his eye.
It was a girl--a woman, actually--walking towards him. The sky groaned and the clouds churned above, but Wolfwood didn't notice them. His attention was focused only on her.
She was tall, about his same height, and carried herself well: she walked with a bounce to her step and her head high. She was wearing office clothes, but they were in lighter colors--a soft white shirt and a pale blue skirt--not the severe black that he was used to seeing.
Something about her was free, childlike. He couldn't explain it, but he wanted to see her smile very much.
But what truly made him stare were her eyes. They were wide and open--a light blue color like a lake or a shallow pool.
Just then, accompanied by booming thunder, the rain began to fall. It splattered down in fat drops for a moment, and then slipped into narrow, needle-like darts that would soak through everything in seconds. Wolfwood craned his neck back to look up at the sky. A few drops caught in his eyes and he could feel his hair sticking to his forehead. His cigarette was ruined and he let it drop from his mouth to join the pile at his feet.
Then suddenly all of his world and the sky above it were pink. With flowers and hearts. And a shiny handle held in a long-fingered hand.
"You'll get soaked, standing there like that in the rain, Nicholas."
He lowered his head. The woman from before was holding an umbrella over his head, smiling at him knowingly. He knew now why he had wanted to see her smile: it was worth waiting for.
She stood close to him, both of them shielded under the umbrella, shoulders brushing. He noticed that she smelled like lavender. It was a very distracting fragrance.
"I'm sorry," Wolfwood whispered as if anything too loud would break the spell cast by her perfume, "but do I know you?"
She pouted. "Awww," she said with mock sadness. "You forgot me? That's not very nice. I'll tell you what: you think hard, Nick. It'll come to you. Give it a try."
Wolfwood had things to do. He had calls to make and a partner to find. He had to catch a killer.
But what he did was stand right there, staring at the girl, getting lost in eyes like pools of ice. Because if he knew her, if they had met before, he wanted to remember. He wanted to remember everything.
The moments passed in silence like that with neither one minding the downpour around them nor the close proximity of their bodies.
And of the two standing beneath the umbrella, neither of them knew that off in the shadows, not so far away, closer than they could ever have know, someone was watching.
And what he saw, what he saw, what he saw...
It took his breath away.
He waited.
He wanted.
And somehow, watching from his dark corner of the world, he felt everything that made sense wither and die beautifully. He clutched at his throat, nails digging in and took steadying breaths.
He stared and stared as if his eyes were starving. How he stared.
But he wasn't looking at Milly...
To be continued...
Also, to everyone who has read and reviewed, thanks a million! Reviews make fanfiction authors smile like little girls. ^__^
Warning: This story will contain disturbing sexual content (heterosexual and homosexual) in the near future. I'm just slow getting to it...sigh.
Part VI: The Storm
Vash wouldn't answer the phone.
"Dammit!" Wolfwood screamed at no one in particular. The window of his car was down and he noticed the heads of drivers and passengers in nearby cars swivelling towards him with shocked expressions on their faces.
Wolfwood really didn't care. He needed to talk to Vash and the sooner it happened, the better. But several calls to the station later and Vash was nowhere to be found. Wolfwood cursed again. Where was his partner when he needed him?
That guy...
He tried to calm down and kicked himself mentally for thinking badly of Vash since the reality was that his partner had an uncanny ability for being at the right place at the right time. It had saved Wolfwood's life once.
He closed his cell phone with a flick of his wrist, going over all the things that had to be done. He needed to get to the station. He needed to go through his files.
More than anything, he wanted to look at the wall.
Carefully juggling a cigarette and the wheel of his car, Wolfwood retrieved the photograph from the passenger seat. He rested it on his lap like something precious even though it was only a greasy photograph in an ugly frame. He stole a glance at it.
These two girl, smiling at him from the shot. Maybe, just maybe, they were the key, the thing he needed to finally...
He let that thought die. He didn't need to build air castles. He needed clues.
And in the back seat of his car were other photographs. Several albums worth of photographs, in fact. Lisa Morgan was a shutterbug and had taken thousands of shots of everything from first birthdays to proms and speech contests. She had given them all to him and told him to look hard. If there were anything in these pictures that would help, he would find them.
Kelly's life was a still-frame movie waiting to be viewed. Somewhere in the middle of it all, he could find Picasso.
The sleek black car stopped at a corner. Wolfwood's eyes swept the intersection. The police station was to the left.
He should go left, this he knew. He had a new lead; he had calls to make and duties to delegate. Yes, everything he had to do was to the left.
Somehow, without noticing he was doing it, Wolfwood turned right. He only felt a minor twinge that said this was the wrong way--that this was not the way he usually took. But he was following a route that his mind knew.
A few corners and several narrow, grungy streets later and Wolfwood found himself standing before a yellow strip of tape marking off a crime scene, his car left in a parking lot three blocks away.
Kelly had died here.
Mostly, the alley looked like what it was: all that was left of a crime scene. The chalk outline was faded, the yellow tape looked tattered, and trash was already piling up in corners that his team had gone over meticulously.
But this place marked an event, so it was more than what it seemed.
Wolfwood was feeling something. Something odd. It was all related to his conversation with the sobbing, broken Lisa Morgan--with seeing pictures of a still-smiling, still-vibrantly alive Kelly. For the first time in his life, Wolfwood felt the loss of a victim from one of his cases profoundly. Kelly was more than a case to him now; she was a personality, a girl with a life that was over.
It was a dangerous place to be. Because if he cared about one, he would care about them all. If that happened, how could he work--how could he live--with the guilt of not catching their killer?
Because Picasso was still out there, and he would kill again.
Wolfwood stood there, silently, watching the stillness of a place where a good daughter had passed away into nothingness.
If one were to have watched carefully, they would have seen that his lips moved silently around old words usually uttered in stone structures with tall spires and stained glass windows.
He said them and meant them and then said them again and again until they ran out like a river drying up.
His prayer over, he lifted a tiny cross that hung from a chain around his neck and brought it to his lips.
"I'm sorry," he whispered to no one at all. In the distance, a clap of thunder sounded out, echoing across the gray sky of his city. He waited for the storm.
Part VII: Milly
Milly had a nice life, he decided.
Her routine was perfect. She awoke by 6:00 every morning, made her bed, took a shower, got dressed, and then ate breakfast. On Wednesdays she did a load of laundry; on Thursdays she set out her recyclable garbage; and on Friday she set out a single bag of trash.
She wasn't a wasteful girl. What she was was methodical. She separated her garbage into smaller bags and then bundled them up in black garbage bags: fruit and vegetable peels in one bag, plastic wrappers in another, batteries and metals in yet another.
It was easy to see that she had a sweet tooth; her trash was often filled with the wrappers of little snack cakes and individual cups of pudding.
She left the house by 7:30, drove through rush-hour traffic, and arrived at work in time to get started by 8:20. Her office had tall, wide, clean windows and blinds she rarely closed. He liked her windows a lot. Through them he could see her perfect posture, her sweet smile, her crystal blue eyes that were so unlike his own. Hers had feeling in them; hers had stories for anyone to read. Milly would never lie. Not to him.
On the days when he could watch her, he was lulled by her consistency, soothed by the idea of life uninterrupted. Even when the heat of the sun on the roof burned his skin, as it often did; even when his body ached from holding this position--arms shaking from the strain of keeping binoculars up to his eyes--he was at peace here, watching her.
She took tea at 11:00, had lunch at 12:45, returned one hour later and always set back to her documents and phone calls and forms with rare enthusiasm.
Watching her, watching her, watching her. He took a deep breath and imagined that this must almost, almost be what love feels like.
And then everything went wrong. It started at exactly 1:32 and kept getting worse. Yes, everything was wrong, wrong, wrong and he hated that.
Someone was ruining her routine. It wasn't her fault. Never her's. She was not the reason someone knocked on her door, and started speaking to her. She wasn't the reason they kept talking and wouldn't go away.
This was supposed to be the time when she made copies of forms and updated files on her computer. This was supposed to be his respite.
Instead of doing what she should have been doing, Milly was talking to a short, balding man that he recognized as her supervisor. He didn't like Mr. Supervisor. His temper rose and kept rising.
But Milly smiled and nodded to Mr. Supervisor, then frowned and looked troubled for a moment. When she nodded again, she wasn't smiling. The conversation continued for so long that it cut into the time when Milly should have been going to the restroom and getting another tea.
When Mr. Supervisor finally went away, he nursed an infant hope that she might return to doing what she should have been doing, that the day was not completely wrecked. But she didn't.
Instead, she stood, glanced out her wide window and studied the view for a minute. Her stare was unflinching, steady, knowing.
His heart beat wildly in his chest. Surely she was staring right at him, looking foolish stretched out on a roof like this, sweating in the summer heat.
And her blue eyes, they saw right through him. He couldn't breathe, could only wait for her eyes to widen in horror as she realized he was there. He was watching her and she knew. She knew.
His heart shuddered to a quiet beat again when she turned away from the window, and then grabbed an umbrella from where it rested beside the door.
He noticed it then, too, the clouds gathering overhead, the gray drab mass of them piling up above.
He was safe. She didn't know. He was safe.
Milly, however, was not.
**************************
There was a respectable pile of cigarette butts at his feet.
The answers were coming to him out here. Normally he needed the calm of his office, the heavy sound of classical music in his car. Now all he had was a cold crime scene and a pack of cigarettes waiting in the wing once he finished this one off. Somehow it was enough.
Angela Beasley was Picasso's ninth victim. They knew more about the way she died than they knew about her as a person. She had been--what? --two detectives ago? Three? To Wolfwood, she was nothing but forensic reports and figures, clues he couldn't confirm, evidence he no longer had access too. Not like Kelly...
Kelly was...real.
But Angela Beasley and Kelly had known each other; had even been friends so it seemed. And the hotel in the picture was the last place Angela had been before Picasso got her--in the parking lot of a grocery store mere days after she checked out. No one had even heard her scream.
That Hotel--the Southern Inn and Lodge--was a sharp, white shape in the background of almost every picture taking of Angela Beasley's twisted body.
Wolfwood wouldn't forget it. He couldn't.
What was the connection between the hotel and Picasso? Wolfwood was going to find out, but first he needed to locate his ever-so-helpful, but absent partner.
He was reaching into his pocket to retrieve his cell phone and try to call Vash again, when movement to his right and the sound of footsteps caught his eye.
It was a girl--a woman, actually--walking towards him. The sky groaned and the clouds churned above, but Wolfwood didn't notice them. His attention was focused only on her.
She was tall, about his same height, and carried herself well: she walked with a bounce to her step and her head high. She was wearing office clothes, but they were in lighter colors--a soft white shirt and a pale blue skirt--not the severe black that he was used to seeing.
Something about her was free, childlike. He couldn't explain it, but he wanted to see her smile very much.
But what truly made him stare were her eyes. They were wide and open--a light blue color like a lake or a shallow pool.
Just then, accompanied by booming thunder, the rain began to fall. It splattered down in fat drops for a moment, and then slipped into narrow, needle-like darts that would soak through everything in seconds. Wolfwood craned his neck back to look up at the sky. A few drops caught in his eyes and he could feel his hair sticking to his forehead. His cigarette was ruined and he let it drop from his mouth to join the pile at his feet.
Then suddenly all of his world and the sky above it were pink. With flowers and hearts. And a shiny handle held in a long-fingered hand.
"You'll get soaked, standing there like that in the rain, Nicholas."
He lowered his head. The woman from before was holding an umbrella over his head, smiling at him knowingly. He knew now why he had wanted to see her smile: it was worth waiting for.
She stood close to him, both of them shielded under the umbrella, shoulders brushing. He noticed that she smelled like lavender. It was a very distracting fragrance.
"I'm sorry," Wolfwood whispered as if anything too loud would break the spell cast by her perfume, "but do I know you?"
She pouted. "Awww," she said with mock sadness. "You forgot me? That's not very nice. I'll tell you what: you think hard, Nick. It'll come to you. Give it a try."
Wolfwood had things to do. He had calls to make and a partner to find. He had to catch a killer.
But what he did was stand right there, staring at the girl, getting lost in eyes like pools of ice. Because if he knew her, if they had met before, he wanted to remember. He wanted to remember everything.
The moments passed in silence like that with neither one minding the downpour around them nor the close proximity of their bodies.
And of the two standing beneath the umbrella, neither of them knew that off in the shadows, not so far away, closer than they could ever have know, someone was watching.
And what he saw, what he saw, what he saw...
It took his breath away.
He waited.
He wanted.
And somehow, watching from his dark corner of the world, he felt everything that made sense wither and die beautifully. He clutched at his throat, nails digging in and took steadying breaths.
He stared and stared as if his eyes were starving. How he stared.
But he wasn't looking at Milly...
To be continued...
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