Session Four: Change
Change is a very strange thing, happening to people whom you really think it wouldn't happen to. Yet, inevitably, it happens and there is nothing anyone can do about it. I cannot profess that I know what had changed Spike or Vicious for that matter and nor would I care. It's the small things though that made me take notice, like Spike being too distracted to bother smoking in my office or slight evil glances between the two. Love and Jealousy are the great destroyers of men.
I finally had to get on the lunkhead 's case about it.
I looked up from my work with a sigh; it was the third time this week that Spike came in with nothing to do except to lay on the sofa, that served as a waiting room, and not smoke. That sent red flags shooting out in my mind. I finally worked up the nerve to go see exactly what was wrong, "Spike, what's the matter with you?"
He looked up with a very devoid expression as I walked around to sit next to him, "nothing." I watched my feet trying to formulate a sympathetic sentence. He was a comrade, after all, albeit a slightly annoying one. "Whatever happened to the self-confident syndicate man who smoked in my office just to bug me," I asked quietly.
"Nothing happened to him," he took his head out of his hands, "he just had a taste of his own mortality, is all."
"C'mon," I hauled him up by an arm, "we need some stiff drinks." We got into my sadly beaten up Dodge and drove off to the furthest bar we could find. We passed the bar and kept going, talking sparsely, just wasting the night until I finally turned back toward a safe house in a very dingy section of the city. Before we got there though he asked me to stop at a flower stall on the street, coming back with a bouquet of roses. I didn't bother to ask, already knowing the tactics of hiding weapons. I just wish he wasn't going to do what I thought he was going to do. I finally came to stop at the decrepit safe house, "sorry, I guess we're not as drunk as I'd planned."
"That's fine. This time I think it's better that I'm sober," he said quietly. He slipped out a rose, handing it to me and, with one the most sincere thank you' s I've ever heard, he left into the dark, dismal night. I once heard somewhere that there are few things in life worth fighting for.
Spike was the epitome of those ideas worth dying for.
After the tale of his death had spread, the office seemed grayer than it did; I realized that I was alone in the world. I questioned my future with the Red Dragon, but all paths seemed to lead to an untimely end. The years passed, powers rose and fell, deals were made and people were killed quite often, but all of us toasted to the soul of the great Spike Spiegel, comrade in arms and local psycho. I kept Mao's age old search running until the upheaval of the syndicate and Vicious' violent rise in power, as the head of the Red Dragon.
Life is ever changing, and we only kid ourselves if we think it won't happen to us.