Cowboy Bebop is copyright (c) Sunrise, Bandai and possibly others.
Faye Valentine spread her fingers on freezing glass, watching the heat of her skin gently frost around each finger, only to fade as the bitter cold of space stole the heat away. The white light of starlines flickered over her hand. Unintended, her eyes traveled down to her watch, checking the time. Another hour in hyperspace. Another hour until Mars.
Faye took her hand away from the window. The handprint lingered in a rime of frost that melted softly away as she watched. She shook the feeling back into her numb fingers and fumbled a cigarette out of the pack in her pocket. She started to flick the lighter --
--and a memory flashed before her eyes, so strong she could actually see it: Spike, gunning the Swordfish's jets to light the cigarette clenched between his teeth. How he managed not to set his hair on fire with those antics was completely beyond her...
Faye bit down on the cigarette hard enough to bite right through it. She spit it out with a mumbled curse and got out another one. This one she lit without preamble, resisting the lure of memory. She drew in a lungful of burning smoke.
"Those'll kill you."
Faye turned toward Jet's voice, and grinned when she saw that he spoke through a haze of smoke himself.
"I'll just go to a clinic and get a cancer shot."
"What if you're stranded somewhere and can't make it to a clinic?"
Faye laughed. "What -- stranded for five years? Cancer's not like a heart attack, silly. It doesn't just kill you like that." She snapped her fingers.
"It doesn't?"
"No. Idiot. It's slow." The smile faded as she realized that no one Jet's age had ever seen cancer as she remembered it -- tumors eating away the body from the inside, men and women with skin like paper drawn over bones, wasting away... men like her greatuncle, who had died of throat cancer. She remembered, as a child, the entire family gathering into his hospital room, staring at his body hooked up to all kinds of machines...
But her family were all long since dead, and no one remembered cancer but her.
"Never mind," Faye whispered, and turned back to watch the rolling starlines.
She heard Jet's footsteps approaching, and then his arms were around her, one warm and alive, one cool and metal. Faye closed her eyes, leaning back against him.
"We don't have to do this if it's too hard for you," he murmured into her hair.
"It's no harder for me than it is for you. Thank you... for this. For everything."
The ship burst from hyperspace into normal space in a blaze of light. They paid their fee and entered a flightpath with Martian traffic control.
Faye sat at the window, watching the red landscape scrolling past beneath them.
Ten years ago today.
I could have turned back. I didn't have to come here, and bring them with me... why do I feel I have to?
Why must I do this to set myself free?
The sun was setting in a blaze of glory over red Martian hills when Faye's little speeder set down in a courtyard with a fountain in the middle. Once, this space had housed office buildings -- and the headquarters of the Syndicate. After the organization had straightened out its leadership woes and moved to a less highly publicized location, they'd given the land to the city for a park. Faye knew it was just an empty gesture to help ameliorate the black eye that the very public battle had given them in the court of popular opinion. Still, it was a pretty little park. And she didn't want to walk in it, not at all.
The speeder was cramped with two people in the cockpit, but still she waited to open the canopy until her companion's restless wiggling forced her out.
The place was quiet and still, a working-class park on a worknight. A few people wandered around -- an old woman being pushed in a wheelchair by a nurse, a young couple hand in hand, a man with a toddler, a young woman walking a dog. None of them paid any attention to each other or to Faye. A wind stirred Faye's hair, and ruffled the brown curls of the little girl clutching her hand.
"Why are we here, Mommie?" the little girl asked.
Faye looked up the red Martian sky, and answered quietly. "This is where your daddy died. On this day, ten years ago."
Valentine Spiegel Black looked up at her mother, confused. "Daddy's back on the Bebop."
Faye clenched her left hand, feeling Jet's wedding ring dig into her finger. She had worn that ring for eight years, yet sometimes its presence still startled her. "No, your blood father. You never had a chance to meet him, and I'm sorry for that."
"Oh," was all the girl said. She looked around, but it was plain that such an abstraction meant nothing to her. She was nine years old, and concerned with the here and now, the things that could be touched and felt. A father who had died before she was born could not be grasped; it was only a dream, blown away on the wind of morning.
And that's why I had to come here, Faye thought. So that I can stop seeing the past with both eyes, and live in the present with my family.
She walked over to the fountain with her daughter and sat down on the damp stone. The young dog-walker had also paused to rest there, but she was sitting with her bare brown feet dangling over the side into the water. She looked up when Faye sat down, and Faye met the girl's golden eyes with her own -- and gasped.
"Edward!"
"Faye-Faye!" the girl cried, and clapped her hands.
Wow, Faye thought, she hasn't changed at all. It was strange and a bit sad to see Ed's childish mannerisms on the body of an adult. Faye had often suspected that Ed's strange, lonely childhood had made the girl incapable of relating to the world like a normal person -- a little bit insane, perhaps.
But she seems happy, and she seems to get along just fine the way she is. How many people can say that?
Ed flopped down on her back on the edge of the fountain and began petting her dog with her toes. The dog wagged its tail and perked its ears forward, watching Faye. It was a Welsh corgi, but not Ein. A descendant? Just another dog that Ed had found somewhere after Ein died or wandered away? No way to tell.
"Ed is watching the clouds," Ed announced. "Pretty, pretty clouds."
Faye looked up. Ed was right, the sky was beautiful, with huge plumes of steam from the city gleaming pink and gold in the sunset's fading light.
"Did you come here just to look at the clouds, Ed?" Faye asked. Her daughter, sitting on her other side, regarded Ed with wide-eyed curiousity.
"Ed goes all sorts of places to look at clouds. Ed goes all sorts of fun places." Ed trailed her hand in the water. "Fun, fun, fun..."
"Did you come here because of Spike?"
Ed folded her hands on the edge of the fountain and laid her head down, doglike. "Don't be silly, Faye-Faye," she said, and her gold eyes, gazing at Faye, were suddenly wistful and distant. "Spike-person is dead."
"I know," Faye said, feeling the old pain grip her heart.
Ed's gold eyes stared through her. "But sometimes Ed comes here to be closer to Spike-person. Pretty park. Pretty clouds. Pretty place to think about Spike."
"Yes, it is," Faye whispered, grief and regret choking her.
"Francoise!" a voice called.
Ed's head came up. If her ears had been capable of pricking, they would certain have been standing at attention.
"Francoise!" the voice called again, and this time Faye saw the source: a man, his jacket pulled tight against the evening wind, standing at the edge of the park. For a moment, his spiky blue hair stirred some kind of memory deep within Faye. Hadn't she seen him before?
"McIntyre!" Ed squealed happily, and bounced to all fours -- not bothering to stand all the way up, she bounced across the courtyard like a big cricket and flung herself into his arms, wrapping her arms and legs around him. "Happy, happy, happy!"
The man laughed and petted her hair. To Faye, he called, "I hope my wife wasn't bothering you. She can be a bit exhuberant."
Wife? Ed is MARRIED? "No, we were having a nice conversation."
"Come on," the man called to the dog, and it trotted to join them.
Ed pulled herself up to sit on the man's shoulder's, her ankles locked together under his chin. Faye watched the three of them wander off into the growing dusk. Ed looked back once and waved cheerily, and Faye wanted to jump up and run after them, screaming, "Don't go! Come back to the Bebop with us!"
Surely the two of them lived around here somewhere. She could find where they lived, get reacquainted...
But that would be silly. Ed's time as a member of the Bebop's crew had ended long ago. She seemed to be happy here with her husband and her dog. Faye knew she would probably never see the girl again.
She's moved on. Why can't I?
"Mommie?" Valentine said, and Faye looked down at her. "That lady was really strange."
Faye smiled faintly. "I know, honey."
"I'm hungry, Mommie."
"Yeah, me too, sweetheart."
"I bet Daddy's making dinner..."
"Yeah, I bet he is."
Valentine tugged on her hand. "Well? Can we go?"
Faye pointed at the speeder. "Tell you what. You go start the engines and I'll join you in a minute."
"Oh boy!" The girl raced off.
"Be careful!" Faye called after her. "Remember, don't push the red button!"
She turned around, staring across the little park. It was almost totally deserted now, and quiet.
Ed was right. It was a pretty place, and if Spike's restless wanderer's soul could find rest anywhere, maybe it could rest here.
Faye closed her eyes as her grief welled up again -- grief, and regret so powerful she could hardly breathe. Missed opportunities. Lost chances. Words never said, that would never be able to be said...
And then, it began to fade.
One eye sees the present, and one eye sees the past...
Faye opened her eyes, startled to find them dry, and gazed into the cool dusk. Behind her, the speeder's engines whined, warming up -- drowning out the sound of the restless wind.
"You were the one who taught me that you can't live in the past, Spike Spiegel," she said aloud. "You are a valued part of my past, a treasured memory... but I have a life here now. A family at last.
"I wish you could have been part of it, but I know better than to live in a dream. My eyes see only the present now.
"I love you."
She wished she'd brought flowers, so she could scatter the petals on the wind, but she hadn't thought of it. So she raised her hand, and opened it, let the wind blow through her fingers.
The dream is over. It's time to wake up.
Faye Valentine turned in the dark and walked back to her speeder, to her daughter, to her family. The speeder took off in a roar of light and noise, a shock to the senses that slowly faded away, until the only sound in the park was the whisper of the never-ceasing wind.