"You know, Vash, the last time I took a bus ride with you I almost ended up getting killed." Wolfwood gives the blonde man across the aisle a sidelong look.

"That happens anytime Vash is around." Meryl inches over and puts more space between her and the man sharing her seat. She gives Vash a hard poke in the ribs. "At least have the courtesy to feel guilty or something! I'm not talking to myself here."

Her seatmate stirs and yawns. "Oh, I'm sorry… were you talking to me? I was sleeping. Are we there yet? I'm starting to feel a little hungry."

"Oh, what's the use? You're hopeless. I don't know why I put up with this -- this isn't a job, this is more like… like… Purgatory or something. I'm being tried for sins that I committed in a past life, aren't I?" Meryl glares at the priest seated across from her. "And if I'm patient in my suffering I'll be rewarded with a Vash-less life, and peace, and quiet…"

"Peace and quiet sure would be nice about now." The object of her tirade tries to get comfortable against the bus window. "Some of us were trying to sleep. And it's not like I ask you to follow me around." He closes his eyes as the woman next to him begins to turn an interesting shade of red. Her small hands creep up…up…

"Stop, ma'am! You don't know what you're doing!" The tall woman sitting beside Wolfwood lunges across the aisle. "You're just tired, we've all been under a lot of stress…" Her voice subsides into meaningless soothing, and she subtly nudges the man beside her.

"Ow! What's with you girls? Can't a guy relax around here?" Wolfwood stands abruptly. "Look at this: everyone on the bus is staring at us. Can't we go anywhere without you two making a scene?" The tall priest moves past Milly, who is still holding Meryl, whose fingers are beginning to twitch in a new direction. "I'm moving. Vash may be hazardous to my health, but at least he's quiet."

Meryl allows herself to be moved, and for a while the night is peaceful. For a while.

Vash falls into an uneasy sleep, the kind of sleep where the dreamer is unsure of what is real and what is not. But he is pretty sure that this is not. In his dream, he is alone in the desert, and someone is calling his name. First loudly, then softly, now gently, now harshly. The air rings with his name, as if the speaker is testing it. Tasting it. Full of joy, full of grief. Warm with love, cold with hate. The sand, the suns, the wind… the chant is taken up and the sound of his name surrounds him, caresses him, stings him. Stop… his hands move to block out the sound, and then there is silence, and a low, mocking chuckle. How can the sound of his own name make him feel so ashamed, so soiled?

In the distance there is a glint of light, there and then gone. He doesn't want to go, but the boundary between dream and reality has disappeared and he no longer has a choice. His feet carry him further into the desert, and at last he can see what lies before him. The only object in an otherwise stark, unbroken landscape. It's a mirror. And at last he feels truly afraid, because the terrible foresight common to nightmares has given him a glimmer of what might happen. And with that realization he knows that he is dreaming, knows what he will see, and then the mirror is before him and it's too late.

Vash looks at his reflection, although he knows that the figure before him is not him. The hair is lighter, for one thing. And the eyes are different. Darker, in more ways than one. Polluted. And then it is him, only the eyes haven't changed. Then, as his dream begins to break up, he realizes that the two figures are one and the same, and that no matter how hard he tries, they will never be any different…

He wakes with a start, unsure if he is awake or if this is some new twist, a trick designed to catch him off guard before hurting him again. No, he knows the man sleeping beside him, is aware of the hard seat beneath him and the darkness just beyond the window. He thinks he can still hear the sound of laughter, though. Then something in the air changes, and the dream releases him fully.

Meryl glances across the aisle at Vash, catching his attention. She opens her mouth to speak, works up her face to scowl, and then… doesn't. The look on the man's face stops her cold, and she realizes that he hasn't really seen her at all. He's not asleep, but nor is he fully awake. And the expression on the normally cheerful, obnoxious, loudmouthed face is so foreign that it belongs to a stranger. Under her stare, the object of her attention stirs and comes fully awake. But before he can shake off the dream and step into reality (or is it the other way around?) his eyes meet hers, and for once in her life, Meryl is speechless. Then the illusion is broken, and his face fits itself into a smile.

"Still awake? I hope you're not still mad at me… no hard feelings, right?" His grin seems ready to split his face.

She mumbles something, she is unsure what. She turns away and closes her eyes, but she can still see him. And his eyes. The bottomless torment and endless pain of his eyes. And his face, made ancient and exhausted by grief. And as she falls into a restless sleep of her own, her last conscious thought is that if she could hurt so much by just looking into his eyes, then how could anyone survive behind them?

Milly sleeps, and her dreams are clouded with images of the tall man in black, the priest who says he is a messenger from God but who seems so adept at letting his guns spread the word. There was something about him that seemed…

"…wrong…" she mumbles, and in her sleep her two hands clasp themselves tightly together. Although outwardly naïve, her insights were sometimes frightening in their accuracy, even to her. And the fact that she had these feelings about the man whom she was beginning to feel… something… for marred her happiness and her frank and guileless joy of life and all things in it for the first time that she could remember.

The swiftly moving bus hits a bump, and Milly shifts in her seat. Half-conscious, she squirms to find a comfortable position and comes to rest against the small woman beside her. Sighing, her head finds the hollow between neck and shoulder, and she settles into her dreams. As happier thoughts begin to make their way into her mind, she is aware of something external, something strange, that nags at her brain and won't let her surrender into sleep. The woman next to her makes a low sound, dragging Milly even farther from sleep.

"Ma'am?" she begins, picking herself off of her pillow. And then puts her hand to the top of her head as realization dawned. She rubs moisture from her fingertips. "M..Ma'am?" It is no more than a whisper. Beside her, Meryl dreams, her cheeks wet with tears and her face twisted in pain.

Nicholas D. Wolfwood sleeps, and in his dreams he is a child again. But is this before… or after…? Anyway it didn't matter. He is young, and his whole life is stretched before him. "Your ticket to the future is always… blank."

Where had he heard that before? There is a low laugh beside him, full of understanding and compassion, and then another figure is there with him, sharing the empty landscape of his dream.

"Vash!" The dream-Wolfwood is delighted by this turn of events, although he knows that it isn't quite… right. The figure beside him is as young as he, as vibrant as he, untouched by the past and open to the future. "It's true. What I said about the future, that is. Someone taught me that when I was very young." The boy beside him begins aging as he speaks, becoming the figure of the man dreaming beside him on a bus, a world away.

It's not that easy, he tries to say, but just then the quiet is shattered by the sharp report of a gunshot. The dream-Vash looks down at his chest as the red of his coat begins to turn an even darker shade of crimson. Wolfwood looks wildly around for the enemy, the person who dared to enter his dream and take the life of his companion. He had thought to offer peace within the sanctity of his dream, and now his friend was dying, betrayed. He looks up as Vash began to fade away; already the red of his coat and the yellow of his hair were blending into the endless sands of the desert. Remember…

Wolfwood stares at the figure as it disappears, hearing his voice on the wind, seeing his eyes in the blue of the sky. And only then did he become aware of the gun in his hand, the barrel still hot from the bullet, the trigger still damp with his sweat.

Dawn brings the city of November on the horizon.

"It's about time," Wolfwood groans. He pokes the dozing figure beside him. "Do you know you drool when you sleep?" If he remembers his dream he doesn't show it.

"Really?" Vash yawns and stretches. "I must have been dreaming about breakfast. I'm starving."

"There's more to life than food, you know." Meryl is vaguely mad at Vash, but she can't remember why. "Don't plan on just lying around and eating when we get to November -- if I have to work than so do you. And since you're going to be under 24-hour surveillance again, I'm sure that between the two of us we can find something productive for you to do."

"Maybe I'm being tested." Little Meryl-imps dance around inside Vash's mind, waving pitchforks and screaming at him from behind forked tongues. "Yeah, that's it. Don't they say that if you ignore evil, it will go away?" Wolfwood looks on as Vash closes his eyes and begins humming to himself.

"Ma'am…" Milly's tone is both warning and frightened. "We're almost there - just a few more minutes now…."

Vash opens one eye and looks at Meryl. "Nope, still there."

"Just take a deep breath," Milly pleads. "Come on, Meryl, don't get up…"

The bus nears the city, racing across the desert as the morning sun clears the horizon.