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Roberto figures it should probably get on his nerves more than it does, the way Meryl talks.
She has that college-educated flair to her, a know-it-all assuredness, like the few years she’s spent out in the world have given her the means and understanding to fix it all with her bare hands — or, more like, with a camera, a journal, and boundless love for the whole human race.
Her journal was probably a graduation gift — it’s full to bursting with photographs and notes in her cute cursive, with dozens of circular, repetitive interviews with Vash.
Listening to her talk to Vash is more irritating than anything she comes up with on her own — Vash stops just short of accepting blame for everything Millions Knives has ever done, and Meryl tries to corner him out of it with the kind of soft-cornered therapeutic language the grad students in November University’s journalism program get schooled in before they get thrown out into the field to suffer and die or come home with nightmares like everyone else.
Roberto remembers when he thought the way she does. When he was young and spry and didn’t have three slugs and a metal plate in his hip. When he still thought reporters could change the world.
It starts as a fondness — for the bygone days, for her earnestness, that genuine sense of justice she sometimes misdirects.
(And something else, too, something that makes him force his eyes away from her. Something warm and overbright in his chest. She’s young, she has her whole life ahead of her. She deserves better—)
Things get complicated, after that. Almost immediately.
Not… bad. It’s the most alive Roberto’s felt in years. But… complicated.
Long hours in the car, listening to Meryl talk, never quite getting as irritated as he knows he should be, listening to her bicker with the two boys in the back, neither men nor monsters, but something in between.
Too many opportunities to put his hands on Meryl, throw or drag or carry her out of danger. She’s so damn small, so damn brave —
He didn’t want to be responsible for a newbie. He knew he’d fuck it up somehow.
End up here.
On a hotel bed with her, both of them dressed down to a pair of his shirts, going over her notebook and his loose-paper scribbles. Her eyes on the work.
His eyes on her.