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tampered2007-11-17 11:09 pm
inyourbusiness.livejournal.com) wrote in tampered2007-11-17 11:09 pm
(no subject)
When; November 18th
Rating; PG-13 - R (uh, I dunno)
Characters; Maria (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ladymaria) and Meryl Stryfe (inyourbusiness); glimpses of other characters from both girls' canons
Summary; Rerun curse day, Meryl experiences one of Maria's memories.
Log;
Another meeting with Dasher. It was disgusting being around him, because his payment for the information he offered was both monetary and involving her buying him food. He was such a slovenly pervert, Meryl always made sure to keep her guns armed and tucked in her waistband of her pants from behind. It was different, wearing the clothes she did in the City from back home. Her traveling attire was lined with holsters for her derringers, but the jeans and sweaters, slacks and blouses she wore were hardly made to handle such equipment. She often would sit perched awkwardly in the seat across from him, almost as a callback to that raccoon-faced Ryuzaki, never taking her eyes off of him unless she heard something behind her.
He left after a couple of hours from the abandoned building he'd asked them to meet in. Her nerves were already on high, because the building reminded her of the building she was trapped in, back in October. Back when all those horrible things happened that Vash the Stampede (by some grace of God) hadn't been around for. The trauma that had yet to really leave her, although Meryl did her best to pretend everything was alright. She still didn't like locked doors or small areas. Even her new apartment got to her after a while, and not only because of the ticking. It was a stifling feel, like the walls were going to cave in on her, and when the dizziness began, Meryl would take her leave. Even the corridor that she was walking through in the airy abandoned building had begun to stir those feelings inside of her, and her pace quickened. She chastised herself for not being used to it; that she had found herself in more narrow passageways and small rooms in the last week than she had in her entire life, and she should have started to get desensitized to it already.
She ignored the fact that she kept her fingers to her lips the entire time, just to make sure those wires wouldn't reappear.
The hall broke right at one point, and Meryl was going to ignore it and press on to the stairwell down aways, when a dense scent smacked her in the face. It was so powerful, so disgusting, that Meryl was literally taken aback. The smell was of hospitalized decay, and a gag flexed out of her mouth, as her hand clapped over it. So putrid, so--
Her dark eyes focused down on the ground then, broadening as it seemed that the aged carpet had begun to flake apart, like a crumpled piece of paper burning on the floor. A soft wind blew from a wall behind her, and Meryl would have paid attention, if it hadn't been for the fact that the wind was pushing the carpet away like ashes outside.
A soft pling of an elevator bell rang out through the even more narrow ajoining hall, and Meryl lifted her eyes as light spilled in from the broadening doorway of the dirty elevator she thought was out of commission for a very long time. Beyond the doors, a familiar figure. Dark hair, red jacket; standing there, silent and statuesque. "V-Vash? What are you doing here?"
He provided no response.
The shift was subtle at first. The walls seemed to darken, altering by a tone or two before flecks of paintwork began fluttering off, floating to the ground and merging with the seemingly crumbling carpeting. It started discreetly, the flecks so tiny and insignificant that one would barely notice. This would not last for long, a noise like that of an air-raid siren sounding in the distance like an ill-omen as the walls themselves began to move. They rippled, as though a thousand tiny worms were trapped beneath what should have been solid, writhing and twisting.
And as those walls too started to flake, pieces began to literally melt from the walls, landing on the ground with dull thuds; sounds that fragments of wall should not have been making. But, then again, the carpet should not have been flaking away at the frequency that it was and those fallen pieces of wall should not have been floating like ashes in the air and melting into the ground, as the ground itself shifted into hard, grey concrete.
What may have been painted walls then were changing quickly into dark, grey cement walls. Steel grates were embedded into various areas of wall, allowing anyone walking through those narrow corridors to see through to the other side. Thick grime was laden on the walls, mixed with flecks of suspicious red.
Why wasn't he responding? She tried to call out to him again, a hand reaching out towards him as the bitter smells bit at her nose and burned at her eyes, but she was cut short by that screaming siren that rattled through the grates that appeared around her from the dissipating walls and bit at her hearing like spikes. The sound itself wasn't rough at all, but that shrill sound--she'd never heard anything like it before. And it wasn't some sort of emergency system in the City going off. The disaster investigator inside of her had her constantly observing her surroundings for such things, and not once did Meryl see emergency sirens anywhere.
Through her peripheral vision, two quickly approaching figures made Meryl flail a little and step to the side to prevent being hit. She threw up an arm protectively, but when she looked beyond her arm, there simply was no one there. Hallucination. It had to be the City messing with her. A curse? A humid gust of putrid smells slapped her in the face once more, and she squinted her eyes as she started towards the elevator. "Vash..."
He wasn't moving. He still wasn't moving. Was something wrong with him? She couldn't tell beyond his glasses, and something told her if she could look just beyond those, she'd know if something was wrong with him. He'd move by then, he would--
And then that sound began.
It was the sound of thick, heavy metal scraping the concrete; a disturbing cacophony that would have certainly instilled a particular level of fear into most of those whose ears it fell upon. It rattled the senses; this enigmatic and unnerving sound with no obvious source, coming from nowhere at all. Something was certainly approaching, but it was hidden away in darkness. It was slow, and sounded almost lumbering but it was also powerful, and presented a warning of sorts to anyone close by.
Accompanying the scraping was the occasional shuffle of feet, like a child dragging his feet in a slow manner. The shuffles would cease, only to be followed up with another long scrape as metal ran along hard concrete once more.
Meryl had no idea how to respond to the noise. It didn't... it didn't sound real, and her heart felt as though it was pounding in the back of her throat; it was hard to keep breathing without falling into hyper ventilation. None of it seemed real, and she tried to look around for the source of that noise as her hands ripped open her jacket and one reached behind her for one of her guns. A good shot to the face or the neck would do it; her shot was a long ways off from Vash, but it was better than most. On the occasion that her father was sober and sane, he felt it important to give her experience in marksmanship. It served her well, even though it made her physically ill whenever she had to use those guns.
The sound overrode that siren piercing from beyond the boundaries of the morphed hall. It was heavy, deafening, and yet subtle and distant. The hallway felt so much smaller by then, and not just from the fact that her way towards the stairwell that had been her original target had been locked away by whatever was happening around her. Meryl would have been a fool for lying about being calm; the sad fact was she was trembling viciously, and was having to clutch that small pistol in both hands as the sound rolled over her with such an amazingly dense power that the smell was all but forgotten.
A feeling slammed into the pit of Meryl's stomach then; the feeling that someone else had joined that Vash behind her. It was an eerie form of a sixth sense, Meryl supposed when she could contemplate it, and the second it hit, she spun to the elevator. Nothing, but Vash, looking as though he'd simply taken a few steps back in the elevator.
All in all, the experience had only been going on for seconds, the whir of events overwhelming and hardly giving Meryl time to contemplate them, before she was training her derringer on moving shadows.
The sound was definitely growing louder as the seconds ticked by, and then all seemed to stop. The grating sound has ceased, and there was nothing but eerie silence in the darkened corridors.
Two seconds. Two seconds of silence, before something devastated the wall; an almighty crash sounding the presence of something or someone who clearly wanted his or her presence known. Stone crumbled to the ground, completely shattered from such a powerful impact, courtesy of—
--What was it? The sword, now embedded in the wall, looked far too heavy for most people to wield. Far too heavy for whoever was gripping the oversized hilt; a petite, slender hand wrapped around it tightly. The long, pink lacquered nails pointed towards the owner being female. Her hand loosened around the hilt, and her fingers appeared to caress it for a moment in a seemingly loving manner, fingertips brushing upwards before she gripped the hilt with a new-found ferocity.
And she stepped out into the open, finally allowing those in presence to see her as she brought her other hand up, using both hands to aggressively tear the blade out of its trappings. She did it with a frightening ease, the tip of the sword striking the ground with an unnerving clunk. As she did this, she turned, her head lowered as she shuffled herself around. Her blonde, matted hair obscured her features, and her movements were slow-paced. Any idiot could see that there was something definitely wrong with her, from the hollow and lifeless way in which she walked to the faint grey tone of her skin, splattered with blood and marked with dark, purple bruises. The tattoo of a red butterfly on her hip might have given her identity away to anyone who had noticed; it seemed to stand out strangely enough.
She stumbled forward for a moment, her feet strangely inverted as her boot-heel dragged. With one furious tug, the sword came sliding after her. She lifted her gaze, training it directly at Meryl. Black, lifeless eyes stared at the woman before she brought the sword upwards slowly, pointing the blade at the woman to indicate that she had, indeed, noticed her.
With a gasp, Meryl lowered her aim and took uneasy steps backwards. "M-Maria?" she asked with a choke. The woman, she hadn't gotten to know too well over the past few days. They went out for drinks and got into a little trouble in a bar or two, mostly on account of Meryl being the most bipolar drunk in the world, and... to find the rather nice woman, albeit a woman akin to being a devil's advocate in some respects, and...
She was pointing at her, and the darkness in her eyes--that wasn't Maria. That wasn't Maria. And with a grit of her teeth, Meryl matched the gesture with that unbelievably large weapon with her gun. It was a small projectile, but it would take her out if Meryl needed. Her mind was weighted between the surreal changes around her, the woman before her, her best friend standing idly behind her, and what felt like flashbacks to memories that she'd never encountered herself. It was playing out in a rush as much as her body itself urged to be in as Maria approached. Fight or flight, but Meryl always was more of a fighter than a runner, and that was why she was standing there, facing her weapon on the blonde woman. "Maria, what's wrong with you?!"
It was shouted in the hope that maybe, just maybe, that was Maria, and it was just some sort of cruel joke. Surely Maria and Vash were in on it. ...even though Meryl knew very well Vash wasn't that cruel.
One foot forward, followed unsteadily by the other, and Maria wrenched that sword, the same chilling sound following the woman as she did so. She did not hear Meryl. Or perhaps she did; there was an ethereal awareness to the woman at this point in time. She could see, and hear the woman’s calls amidst whispers in a jumbled tongue comprehensible and audible only to her. Any awareness of what the woman was doing and who was before her was minimal; almost non-existent. Something had taken over her body and mind; those arcane whispers guiding her to fulfill a purpose known only to her.
She saw the woman before her as both blonde and tall, short and dark-haired. Reality seemed to shift constantly, between now and somewhere familiar yet distant.
She did not stop, and seemed completely unconcerned with Meryl’s gun. She simply kept moving on, raising the sword once again over her head in a manner that should not have been as easy as it was for the woman. She was about ready to strike again, her shallow gaze trained on Meryl.
That weapon was large; beyond anything that Maria should have been logically capable of carrying. In fact, Meryl had to wonder if only someone like Livio should have been able to tote that weapon, especially like that. However, the desperate grasping for reason was stifled as Maria hefted that weapon overhead as a means to harm Meryl.
The derringer was steadied at Maria's head as Meryl began to backstep. A quick shot or two; Meryl wasn't the best shot at a distance, but Meryl was a hell of a one in close range. That wasn't Maria, but maybe... A quick couple of shots to the head would end it quickly, and the last thing in the young woman's mind was to preserve the life before her. She wasn't good enough to afford herself that room, and that's what she told herself as she squeezed the trigger twice, and staggered backwards further. Her feet shuffled clumsily on the ground, the texture now unfamiliar to her, and Meryl found herself stumbling to a save from hitting the ground, and not paying attention to her shots that she knew connected.
And a glimpse of Vash, and he was leaning out of the elevator, reaching for her with that sober look from before.
Maria’s head snapped back as the bullets met with her skull. But the damage was minimal; so stunningly minor. It was as though Meryl had merely thrown a blunt object at the woman. She was far too quick to recover, regaining her composure and bringing her attentions back to Meryl, with not a glimmer of emotion in her eyes or on her deathly looking features. The wounds were healing at a swift rate, skin growing over the damage in mere seconds.
And she was still moving. She was readjusting the weapon in her hand, readying herself for another attempt at striking down upon Meryl.
Meryl was attempting to turn to see how successful her attack was, only to be greeted with a blade swinging down on her and she was hopping backwards again to attempt to evade it. It was met with just enough success in that the edge of that massive knife was the only thing that connected, shooting past her cheek with a disturbing closeness, before it connected to her chest just outside her collar bone and shooting down her left breast. It happened with such shocking speed, the pain ripped through her and for a moment she went blind.
Blind in her sight, but more visions poured into her mind. Not of Maria taking an offensive, but of a loping man with a large, bizarre apparatus on his head as he continued to drag that knife the way Maria had before her lashing out. And screaming, screaming behind her. Incoherent, and dissipating as Meryl's vision returned and despite the burning liquid pouring from that wound, Meryl spun and began to desperately make her way for the hand reaching out to her. Perhaps, just perhaps, it was happening so quickly he didn't know how to react, and the only way out of that uncomfortably small corridor was him.
Her vision shook as Meryl reached out for him and her other hand abandoned the derringer and grasped her wound. She cried out to him--maybe he was just assuring the doors wouldn't close, she thought... until the doors did, in fact, begin to close and she attempt to move herself faster as he pulled himself into the elevator, causing her to cry out for him again. It couldn't have been him, but it was the only thing she had. There was no way past Maria then.
And Maria cared not for the man reaching out to her. He would shift between colours of red and green; changing too and for a split second she heard a man’s voice calling even though his lips weren’t moving at all. But the man was unimportant for now. Maria’s focus was on Meryl because a deep, conscious part of her knew that it was her that she had to target.
And she had turned the blade so that it pointed directly at Meryl, her arm bent at an angle that suggested that she was getting ready for another strike. She was closing in, with no focus on Vash or the closing doors. Her focus was concentrated on one thing only: Her.
Just as Meryl reached the doors and her hand grasped for Vash's hand, the doors slammed against her shoulder and continued to attempt to close despite her being right there. Ahead of her, the calm, almost amused face of her friend played double to images dancing in overlap in her mind. The images were of a smaller man crying out with words Meryl couldn't understand; they were in her own tongue, but for some reason, she simply couldn't understand what he was saying. And where the apparition of Vash, whose hand her own sank clear past his as though he wasn't even there, stood still and calm, the other image of the man she'd never seen before screamed and grasped out to try to pull her in.
Not Vash.
Vash would be trying to help her.
But he was all she had, an inexplicable dread washing over her; an acknowledgment of the inevitable of what was approaching behind her. The image played as much in duality as the situation in front of her... and inside of her, as though she beat against the doors with her bloodied other hand and continued to try to pull herself in, her normal need to fight and go down swinging was overpowered with the feel as though this was meant to happen, and tears brimmed as she felt a duality to... Maria? She couldn't understand that thought that just crashed into her mind. Maria was behind her, not beside her, and she was trying to kill Meryl, not get in from the animal behind...
She screamed out again for Vash, and her eyes broadened as his arm dropped to his side despite the frantically grasping overlay from that strange image in green.
Maria’s movements were slow, as though whatever had taken her over was gleefully taking it’s time. It was drawing out it movements, as if savouring the fear and confusion of the moment. The incomprehensible chaos of a meld of voices around her. That sick knowing that the woman in front of her was meant to die. This was meant to happen, and…
Meryl--
-- Maria--
--Mary…
She knew it was inevitable, didn’t she? In Maria's subconscious, three names merged in with each other; those names all familiar and yet so distant at the same time. They all meant nothing and yet they meant something.
But that split second of recollection and human thought was quickly overridden; erased from her mind completely. And she thrust the sword forward, aiming the blade directly at the woman’s upper back.
It was unlike anything, absolutely anything, Meryl had ever encountered. The explosion that ruptured through her back and ripped out her frontside, turning her vision white and red, and finally back to a dim, foggy haze as she looked at Vash's fading face, and the panic stricken through that other image's eyes. Blood burned up into her throat, and she slipped away from the door, further back onto that blade without realizing. It already felt as though her body was being ripped into two, her heart burning like acid and beating with a slowing rhythm in her ears.
She whispered his name one last time as those doors, then coated with her blood, crashed shut. One last attempt to cry for help, before her knees gave out on her as her eyes went dark on her once again. It felt as though her soul was sinking further and faster than her body...
...is this what death feels like...?
Rating; PG-13 - R (uh, I dunno)
Characters; Maria (
ladymaria) and Meryl Stryfe (inyourbusiness); glimpses of other characters from both girls' canonsSummary; Rerun curse day, Meryl experiences one of Maria's memories.
Log;
Another meeting with Dasher. It was disgusting being around him, because his payment for the information he offered was both monetary and involving her buying him food. He was such a slovenly pervert, Meryl always made sure to keep her guns armed and tucked in her waistband of her pants from behind. It was different, wearing the clothes she did in the City from back home. Her traveling attire was lined with holsters for her derringers, but the jeans and sweaters, slacks and blouses she wore were hardly made to handle such equipment. She often would sit perched awkwardly in the seat across from him, almost as a callback to that raccoon-faced Ryuzaki, never taking her eyes off of him unless she heard something behind her.
He left after a couple of hours from the abandoned building he'd asked them to meet in. Her nerves were already on high, because the building reminded her of the building she was trapped in, back in October. Back when all those horrible things happened that Vash the Stampede (by some grace of God) hadn't been around for. The trauma that had yet to really leave her, although Meryl did her best to pretend everything was alright. She still didn't like locked doors or small areas. Even her new apartment got to her after a while, and not only because of the ticking. It was a stifling feel, like the walls were going to cave in on her, and when the dizziness began, Meryl would take her leave. Even the corridor that she was walking through in the airy abandoned building had begun to stir those feelings inside of her, and her pace quickened. She chastised herself for not being used to it; that she had found herself in more narrow passageways and small rooms in the last week than she had in her entire life, and she should have started to get desensitized to it already.
She ignored the fact that she kept her fingers to her lips the entire time, just to make sure those wires wouldn't reappear.
The hall broke right at one point, and Meryl was going to ignore it and press on to the stairwell down aways, when a dense scent smacked her in the face. It was so powerful, so disgusting, that Meryl was literally taken aback. The smell was of hospitalized decay, and a gag flexed out of her mouth, as her hand clapped over it. So putrid, so--
Her dark eyes focused down on the ground then, broadening as it seemed that the aged carpet had begun to flake apart, like a crumpled piece of paper burning on the floor. A soft wind blew from a wall behind her, and Meryl would have paid attention, if it hadn't been for the fact that the wind was pushing the carpet away like ashes outside.
A soft pling of an elevator bell rang out through the even more narrow ajoining hall, and Meryl lifted her eyes as light spilled in from the broadening doorway of the dirty elevator she thought was out of commission for a very long time. Beyond the doors, a familiar figure. Dark hair, red jacket; standing there, silent and statuesque. "V-Vash? What are you doing here?"
He provided no response.
The shift was subtle at first. The walls seemed to darken, altering by a tone or two before flecks of paintwork began fluttering off, floating to the ground and merging with the seemingly crumbling carpeting. It started discreetly, the flecks so tiny and insignificant that one would barely notice. This would not last for long, a noise like that of an air-raid siren sounding in the distance like an ill-omen as the walls themselves began to move. They rippled, as though a thousand tiny worms were trapped beneath what should have been solid, writhing and twisting.
And as those walls too started to flake, pieces began to literally melt from the walls, landing on the ground with dull thuds; sounds that fragments of wall should not have been making. But, then again, the carpet should not have been flaking away at the frequency that it was and those fallen pieces of wall should not have been floating like ashes in the air and melting into the ground, as the ground itself shifted into hard, grey concrete.
What may have been painted walls then were changing quickly into dark, grey cement walls. Steel grates were embedded into various areas of wall, allowing anyone walking through those narrow corridors to see through to the other side. Thick grime was laden on the walls, mixed with flecks of suspicious red.
Why wasn't he responding? She tried to call out to him again, a hand reaching out towards him as the bitter smells bit at her nose and burned at her eyes, but she was cut short by that screaming siren that rattled through the grates that appeared around her from the dissipating walls and bit at her hearing like spikes. The sound itself wasn't rough at all, but that shrill sound--she'd never heard anything like it before. And it wasn't some sort of emergency system in the City going off. The disaster investigator inside of her had her constantly observing her surroundings for such things, and not once did Meryl see emergency sirens anywhere.
Through her peripheral vision, two quickly approaching figures made Meryl flail a little and step to the side to prevent being hit. She threw up an arm protectively, but when she looked beyond her arm, there simply was no one there. Hallucination. It had to be the City messing with her. A curse? A humid gust of putrid smells slapped her in the face once more, and she squinted her eyes as she started towards the elevator. "Vash..."
He wasn't moving. He still wasn't moving. Was something wrong with him? She couldn't tell beyond his glasses, and something told her if she could look just beyond those, she'd know if something was wrong with him. He'd move by then, he would--
And then that sound began.
It was the sound of thick, heavy metal scraping the concrete; a disturbing cacophony that would have certainly instilled a particular level of fear into most of those whose ears it fell upon. It rattled the senses; this enigmatic and unnerving sound with no obvious source, coming from nowhere at all. Something was certainly approaching, but it was hidden away in darkness. It was slow, and sounded almost lumbering but it was also powerful, and presented a warning of sorts to anyone close by.
Accompanying the scraping was the occasional shuffle of feet, like a child dragging his feet in a slow manner. The shuffles would cease, only to be followed up with another long scrape as metal ran along hard concrete once more.
Meryl had no idea how to respond to the noise. It didn't... it didn't sound real, and her heart felt as though it was pounding in the back of her throat; it was hard to keep breathing without falling into hyper ventilation. None of it seemed real, and she tried to look around for the source of that noise as her hands ripped open her jacket and one reached behind her for one of her guns. A good shot to the face or the neck would do it; her shot was a long ways off from Vash, but it was better than most. On the occasion that her father was sober and sane, he felt it important to give her experience in marksmanship. It served her well, even though it made her physically ill whenever she had to use those guns.
The sound overrode that siren piercing from beyond the boundaries of the morphed hall. It was heavy, deafening, and yet subtle and distant. The hallway felt so much smaller by then, and not just from the fact that her way towards the stairwell that had been her original target had been locked away by whatever was happening around her. Meryl would have been a fool for lying about being calm; the sad fact was she was trembling viciously, and was having to clutch that small pistol in both hands as the sound rolled over her with such an amazingly dense power that the smell was all but forgotten.
A feeling slammed into the pit of Meryl's stomach then; the feeling that someone else had joined that Vash behind her. It was an eerie form of a sixth sense, Meryl supposed when she could contemplate it, and the second it hit, she spun to the elevator. Nothing, but Vash, looking as though he'd simply taken a few steps back in the elevator.
All in all, the experience had only been going on for seconds, the whir of events overwhelming and hardly giving Meryl time to contemplate them, before she was training her derringer on moving shadows.
The sound was definitely growing louder as the seconds ticked by, and then all seemed to stop. The grating sound has ceased, and there was nothing but eerie silence in the darkened corridors.
Two seconds. Two seconds of silence, before something devastated the wall; an almighty crash sounding the presence of something or someone who clearly wanted his or her presence known. Stone crumbled to the ground, completely shattered from such a powerful impact, courtesy of—
--What was it? The sword, now embedded in the wall, looked far too heavy for most people to wield. Far too heavy for whoever was gripping the oversized hilt; a petite, slender hand wrapped around it tightly. The long, pink lacquered nails pointed towards the owner being female. Her hand loosened around the hilt, and her fingers appeared to caress it for a moment in a seemingly loving manner, fingertips brushing upwards before she gripped the hilt with a new-found ferocity.
And she stepped out into the open, finally allowing those in presence to see her as she brought her other hand up, using both hands to aggressively tear the blade out of its trappings. She did it with a frightening ease, the tip of the sword striking the ground with an unnerving clunk. As she did this, she turned, her head lowered as she shuffled herself around. Her blonde, matted hair obscured her features, and her movements were slow-paced. Any idiot could see that there was something definitely wrong with her, from the hollow and lifeless way in which she walked to the faint grey tone of her skin, splattered with blood and marked with dark, purple bruises. The tattoo of a red butterfly on her hip might have given her identity away to anyone who had noticed; it seemed to stand out strangely enough.
She stumbled forward for a moment, her feet strangely inverted as her boot-heel dragged. With one furious tug, the sword came sliding after her. She lifted her gaze, training it directly at Meryl. Black, lifeless eyes stared at the woman before she brought the sword upwards slowly, pointing the blade at the woman to indicate that she had, indeed, noticed her.
With a gasp, Meryl lowered her aim and took uneasy steps backwards. "M-Maria?" she asked with a choke. The woman, she hadn't gotten to know too well over the past few days. They went out for drinks and got into a little trouble in a bar or two, mostly on account of Meryl being the most bipolar drunk in the world, and... to find the rather nice woman, albeit a woman akin to being a devil's advocate in some respects, and...
She was pointing at her, and the darkness in her eyes--that wasn't Maria. That wasn't Maria. And with a grit of her teeth, Meryl matched the gesture with that unbelievably large weapon with her gun. It was a small projectile, but it would take her out if Meryl needed. Her mind was weighted between the surreal changes around her, the woman before her, her best friend standing idly behind her, and what felt like flashbacks to memories that she'd never encountered herself. It was playing out in a rush as much as her body itself urged to be in as Maria approached. Fight or flight, but Meryl always was more of a fighter than a runner, and that was why she was standing there, facing her weapon on the blonde woman. "Maria, what's wrong with you?!"
It was shouted in the hope that maybe, just maybe, that was Maria, and it was just some sort of cruel joke. Surely Maria and Vash were in on it. ...even though Meryl knew very well Vash wasn't that cruel.
One foot forward, followed unsteadily by the other, and Maria wrenched that sword, the same chilling sound following the woman as she did so. She did not hear Meryl. Or perhaps she did; there was an ethereal awareness to the woman at this point in time. She could see, and hear the woman’s calls amidst whispers in a jumbled tongue comprehensible and audible only to her. Any awareness of what the woman was doing and who was before her was minimal; almost non-existent. Something had taken over her body and mind; those arcane whispers guiding her to fulfill a purpose known only to her.
She saw the woman before her as both blonde and tall, short and dark-haired. Reality seemed to shift constantly, between now and somewhere familiar yet distant.
She did not stop, and seemed completely unconcerned with Meryl’s gun. She simply kept moving on, raising the sword once again over her head in a manner that should not have been as easy as it was for the woman. She was about ready to strike again, her shallow gaze trained on Meryl.
That weapon was large; beyond anything that Maria should have been logically capable of carrying. In fact, Meryl had to wonder if only someone like Livio should have been able to tote that weapon, especially like that. However, the desperate grasping for reason was stifled as Maria hefted that weapon overhead as a means to harm Meryl.
The derringer was steadied at Maria's head as Meryl began to backstep. A quick shot or two; Meryl wasn't the best shot at a distance, but Meryl was a hell of a one in close range. That wasn't Maria, but maybe... A quick couple of shots to the head would end it quickly, and the last thing in the young woman's mind was to preserve the life before her. She wasn't good enough to afford herself that room, and that's what she told herself as she squeezed the trigger twice, and staggered backwards further. Her feet shuffled clumsily on the ground, the texture now unfamiliar to her, and Meryl found herself stumbling to a save from hitting the ground, and not paying attention to her shots that she knew connected.
And a glimpse of Vash, and he was leaning out of the elevator, reaching for her with that sober look from before.
Maria’s head snapped back as the bullets met with her skull. But the damage was minimal; so stunningly minor. It was as though Meryl had merely thrown a blunt object at the woman. She was far too quick to recover, regaining her composure and bringing her attentions back to Meryl, with not a glimmer of emotion in her eyes or on her deathly looking features. The wounds were healing at a swift rate, skin growing over the damage in mere seconds.
And she was still moving. She was readjusting the weapon in her hand, readying herself for another attempt at striking down upon Meryl.
Meryl was attempting to turn to see how successful her attack was, only to be greeted with a blade swinging down on her and she was hopping backwards again to attempt to evade it. It was met with just enough success in that the edge of that massive knife was the only thing that connected, shooting past her cheek with a disturbing closeness, before it connected to her chest just outside her collar bone and shooting down her left breast. It happened with such shocking speed, the pain ripped through her and for a moment she went blind.
Blind in her sight, but more visions poured into her mind. Not of Maria taking an offensive, but of a loping man with a large, bizarre apparatus on his head as he continued to drag that knife the way Maria had before her lashing out. And screaming, screaming behind her. Incoherent, and dissipating as Meryl's vision returned and despite the burning liquid pouring from that wound, Meryl spun and began to desperately make her way for the hand reaching out to her. Perhaps, just perhaps, it was happening so quickly he didn't know how to react, and the only way out of that uncomfortably small corridor was him.
Her vision shook as Meryl reached out for him and her other hand abandoned the derringer and grasped her wound. She cried out to him--maybe he was just assuring the doors wouldn't close, she thought... until the doors did, in fact, begin to close and she attempt to move herself faster as he pulled himself into the elevator, causing her to cry out for him again. It couldn't have been him, but it was the only thing she had. There was no way past Maria then.
And Maria cared not for the man reaching out to her. He would shift between colours of red and green; changing too and for a split second she heard a man’s voice calling even though his lips weren’t moving at all. But the man was unimportant for now. Maria’s focus was on Meryl because a deep, conscious part of her knew that it was her that she had to target.
And she had turned the blade so that it pointed directly at Meryl, her arm bent at an angle that suggested that she was getting ready for another strike. She was closing in, with no focus on Vash or the closing doors. Her focus was concentrated on one thing only: Her.
Just as Meryl reached the doors and her hand grasped for Vash's hand, the doors slammed against her shoulder and continued to attempt to close despite her being right there. Ahead of her, the calm, almost amused face of her friend played double to images dancing in overlap in her mind. The images were of a smaller man crying out with words Meryl couldn't understand; they were in her own tongue, but for some reason, she simply couldn't understand what he was saying. And where the apparition of Vash, whose hand her own sank clear past his as though he wasn't even there, stood still and calm, the other image of the man she'd never seen before screamed and grasped out to try to pull her in.
Not Vash.
Vash would be trying to help her.
But he was all she had, an inexplicable dread washing over her; an acknowledgment of the inevitable of what was approaching behind her. The image played as much in duality as the situation in front of her... and inside of her, as though she beat against the doors with her bloodied other hand and continued to try to pull herself in, her normal need to fight and go down swinging was overpowered with the feel as though this was meant to happen, and tears brimmed as she felt a duality to... Maria? She couldn't understand that thought that just crashed into her mind. Maria was behind her, not beside her, and she was trying to kill Meryl, not get in from the animal behind...
She screamed out again for Vash, and her eyes broadened as his arm dropped to his side despite the frantically grasping overlay from that strange image in green.
Maria’s movements were slow, as though whatever had taken her over was gleefully taking it’s time. It was drawing out it movements, as if savouring the fear and confusion of the moment. The incomprehensible chaos of a meld of voices around her. That sick knowing that the woman in front of her was meant to die. This was meant to happen, and…
Meryl--
-- Maria--
--Mary…
She knew it was inevitable, didn’t she? In Maria's subconscious, three names merged in with each other; those names all familiar and yet so distant at the same time. They all meant nothing and yet they meant something.
But that split second of recollection and human thought was quickly overridden; erased from her mind completely. And she thrust the sword forward, aiming the blade directly at the woman’s upper back.
It was unlike anything, absolutely anything, Meryl had ever encountered. The explosion that ruptured through her back and ripped out her frontside, turning her vision white and red, and finally back to a dim, foggy haze as she looked at Vash's fading face, and the panic stricken through that other image's eyes. Blood burned up into her throat, and she slipped away from the door, further back onto that blade without realizing. It already felt as though her body was being ripped into two, her heart burning like acid and beating with a slowing rhythm in her ears.
She whispered his name one last time as those doors, then coated with her blood, crashed shut. One last attempt to cry for help, before her knees gave out on her as her eyes went dark on her once again. It felt as though her soul was sinking further and faster than her body...
...is this what death feels like...?