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scoundrels-in-love · 3 months

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How long we've been wishing for the things that we're still missing (But you still can learn a lesson if you try)

It is not always easy to love, but even less so when the people Meryl loves hardly know what they want - what they're allowed to want. And much less how to ask for it. It's a good thing she's always had a knack for solving a good puzzle, she figures. | Mashwood but in Queerplatonic way | Soft character study with love as central theme | Also on AO3 |

It is not always easy to love, but even less so when the people Meryl loves hardly know what they want - what they're allowed to want.

And much less how to ask for it.

It's a good thing she's always had a knack for solving a good puzzle, she figures.

When Vash curls up on the couch near her as she reads a book or scribbles away in a notebook, feigning interest in some cop procedural rerun he's seen four times already, she's learned to let him take some time to settle before opening her arms so he can burrow himself into her side, rubbing face into the soft fabric of her sweater she's taken to wearing around the house for a moment, and making almost purr-like noises as she scratches softly through his darkened hair.

Later, when he feels assured she is not running away, he may drape over her lap like a large cat, demanding more direct attention, and perhaps she doesn't hate tossing a boring article draft aside as much as she might feign to.

When Wolfwood's shoulders are tense and he is smoking third cigarette in row by the window, she knows he will let her slip her arms around him, hold him until the cig has burned down to the filter and he can tease her about being needy. "Gotta spoil ya today, I guess," he'll say, carrying her to the bed and draping her on his chest like a blanket, arms locked over her waist. Meryl doesn't mind him using her as an excuse to take what he craves, to feel wanted, because he is.

In time, he might be soothed enough to start humming a song or sharing tidbits from his time at Orphanage, or perhaps asking about her.

Part of solving them means she has to solve herself. Learn patience, how to be gentler, kinder. Not because they don't love her as she is, not because they expect her to, but because they deserve it, because she does. Because she wants to give them, herself, what they've lacked so deeply in their life that the absence has become a definition on itself.

Meryl learns to reign in her helplessness that easily veers into frustration and anger on the bad days - hers and theirs, especially theirs - and accept that being there and letting them be is all that she can do. Perhaps all that is needed, even.

Meryl learns not to feel a sting of rejection when the boys seek solace with each other, curled under blankets and into each other, on the days everything hurts in ways that only the other can really understand. Licking wounds with quiet murmurs of sin confessions and forgiveness that only the other man can grant.

Meryl learns to speak softly when one of them wake her on accident, still trembling from the nightmare that refuses to let go, learns not to turn on the light immediately. Learns how long she can hold them so very tightly before her arms start to ache and how to keep holding, still.

Meryl learns to let herself be loved, too. In all the clumsy, devoted ways they pour their hearts into every little thing and then feign nonchalance (but less so with every passing month), while everything about them speaks of a child that begs for acceptance of their hearts, for validation of their attempts to love, because it (and she) is a language they're learning, too.

She knows the look, because she's been that child and received what she sought too few times for a part of her not to be almost as lonely as her boys have been.

It is difficult to love, it is harder still to love someone back to some semblance of wholeness. But there's two of them to do it for every crumbled corner of their triangle and, really, they've done more impossible things as a team, Meryl thinks.

#rainy writes stuff #my fic #trigun #trigun stampede #mashwood

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