Third Person Interlude
AN: OMG, ten years late to this little jewel… !
I'm going to be posting these as 'vignettes'. They will be continuous but not plot-constructed (curated selfishly, lazily). Disclaimer: I do not own Bebop, nor do I own Grimes' lyrics below.
Chapter 1: Colours of Moonlight
"Boys on the roof, and you can't say you're taking your time, that you're taking your time, well you're taking your time"
The day she started to fully piece her memories together, Spike decided he wanted to die. Faye decided that she was not okay with that, but she had already played her part, and all that was left for her was that last bit where she had to sing her song. She didn't know the words to it yet, but would catch faint traces of the melody from time to time, a refrain from another century, and another life. The lazy strain of notes flitted continuously when she had aimed her Glock steadily at Spike's temple and then chose to let him go. The next day, she heard the same notes, clashing horribly against her hangover. A sour tune that provided the appropriate soundtrack for the news coverage reporting the devastation that had occurred to the Red Dragon site in Tharsis.
Jet, more adamantly casual than ever, made no note of the way Faye had rigged the screens and computer interfaces throughout the ship to reflect the news. Shrugging, he took all these things in stride, moving to the sound of his own beat, flipping old vegetables in oil and fixing parts of his beloved Bebop. Ed and Ein, long gone, no longer filled the ship with background chatter. Faye noticed the hush of the ship in stasis, aided only by the drone of continuous televised reporting that filled the silence with knowledge that Spike was not there.
After a month, with her part played out and only a splintered song to sing, Faye decided she had enough of being the third person narrative in her life. She had been a victim of others' actions, a temporary solution for a haphazard team, and the most passive of first person accounts. It took an earth artifact to jump-start her memory, but she figured better late than never. She'd leave the Bebop, figure shit out, and then return for Jet and Ed when she had cards of her own to play. As for Spike, she didn't have the wherewithal to even begin thinking about him, yet. All her thoughts and feelings about him would be left behind, gathering intergalactic dust. And Faye was tired of collecting metaphysical and fiscal dust. Time to hit the open wild.
Jet had been understanding in his own gruff way. He heard the well-rehearsed lines with his head bent over ship repairs, only spicing up the monologue with a grumbled, "Hand me the drill over there", or a "'Bout time, got tired of babysitting your free-loading ass myself."
When he finally emerged from underneath the Hammerhead, his grease-smeared face had a weary look of resignation on it. Faye couldn't hold his gaze for too long, and settled on her feet instead, "You know it won't be as long as it feels."
Jet snorted, "Easy for you to say. Time stood still for you. For the rest of us normal people, the beat goes on."
Faye bristled at first, but then grinned—she knew Jet was doing this to diffuse the tone of tragedy from the air. "Alright, you old Dog. Baby girl's goin' out into the wide, wide world. Do you proud."
The remark had the intended reaction. Jet, blushing, scoffed, "Who you callin' old, you defrosted hag!"
Faye flipped her hair, "You know it. Hottest granny in the star system." She shared a laugh with Jet before the ship grew silent again. Then, she pulled a pack from her pocket and lit a cigarette, "You know I'll be back, but on my own terms."
Jet nodded slowly, "I felt as much. The same as Ed…"
Faye closed her eyes on the exhale, "You, too? Little signs, here and there, huh."
Jet bent over to pick up his gear, "Yup, in a way I don't think she's ever left the ship. Probably had it rigged from day one."
Faye smirked, "And yet you still say 'women betray, men stay."
Jet smirked back, but his eyes were serious, "The jury's still out on that one."
Faye sighed, then dug shoved her hands in her pocket, all calculated nonchalance, "Alright, Old man bet's made—I'll come to collect when we get to the bottom of that, but in my weight in alcohol." She reached out, her hand vertical and her elbow firm.
Jet smiled, this time softly, and clasped her hand with his right, all human musculature, "Easy come, easy go…"
Faye turned to walk away, "What can I say? The wild's calling me…"
She settled down in the Redtail, her mind abuzz with thoughts she had no intention of tuning into. One foot in front of the other… She had a place—or rather, not exactly a place per se—where she hid all of her personal effects, the little memorabilia that she had collected over the few years following her awakening. It was a military postal deposit on a little moon off the coast of Venus. Beyond her miserable knapsack of things she had stashed with the meager belongings she had accrued while on the Bebop, this little nook held a few more important pieces of cargo she'd need to start afresh. The possessions she had stuffed in the locker were nothing that anyone would consider valuable, but they were things she had scavenged over the past three years or so. Gren's wind-up music box, the last box of cigarettes she had ever stolen from Spike, Jet's favorite bonsai shears, etc. But, the things she had in mind had nothing to do with the Valentine she had so carefully crafted, but rather the little girl stuck on tape. When she had returned to her home in a last-ditch attempt to salvage her past, Faye had found a girl's room full of a girl's useless, obsolete possessions. Out of a whim and a healthy dose of macabre humor, Faye had noticed a neat stack of untouched medical textbooks. She could only surmise that in her long, forgotten past, she must have been quite studious. If Spike and Jet were privy to such thoughts, they would've laughed her off the ship. Even if they knew the half-baked ideas she had thrumming in her cryogenically defrosted mind, they would have still laughed her out of this tiny, Venusian postal satellite. As it was, Faye knew it was folly to pursue this particular idea, but it keep niggling in the back of her mind. And, at this point, what did she have left to lose? Blank woman, no past, no family, and no one waiting for her to come back home. Hell, no home, either. It was time for her to call in a few favors.
Around the same time but quite a few planets away, another ex-member of the Bebop would experience a blast from the past. Approximately ninety-seven miles off the coast of California, several large chunks of Moon satellite had fallen into Pacific Ocean, creating a curious canyon underwater. The human survivors, the last of Earth's pioneers, had seen the stretch of irregular tectonic architecture as an opportunity. Throwing the remains of construction material, old metal, and fallen crafts, they created a pair of jutting twin towers that housed only the most adventuresome. Locked in one of those self-styled alcobas were an androgynous child and a little Welsh Corgi. The child—adolescent, really—the notorious Radical Edward, was practicing a particular style of code that was all the rage with the Earth-bound hackers of the day. Lazily jamming code so archaic with cutting-edge security and military ciphers, she was pratically a virtuouso in the style many were calling 'syncretismo'. Her eyes skimmed the multiple screens in front of her with a look of playfulness until she found a single-phrase hieroglyphic flying across the screen in red signs. This phrase, done in basic, pre-Gate crash binary code, moved with sudden through old medical records. Whoever—or whatever—it was, it certainly didn't want to be detected. Ed, however, recognized it with a howl of glee, crushing the startled dog against her bony ribcage. The dog Ein yelped in surprise and a degree of pain before Ed dropped him to the ground and focused on the multiplex screens before her with renewed fervor.
"Bebop! Bebop! Olly olly oxen freeeeeeee!"
Plip, plip. The sound of precipitation hitting the window horizontally woke up the woman curled up in her coral-colored bed. She opened bleary eyes to watch the rain pool atop the window before bouncing off to obey the pull of gravity. For the past year, Faye had been waking up to more or less foggy, violet mornings. Weather in Saturn was consistently gloomy, yet she seemed to face each morning with a healthy dose of brio. There was enough novelty to this terraformed Saturn that she found it difficult to be discouraged by the weather. Saturn was one of the planets colonized more recently, and as a result, little quirks amused her endlessly. As a result of terraforming, Saturn scientists found that the magnetic poles artificially implanted to stabilize the atmosphere inadvertently inverted several interstitial layers of the atmosphere, leading to horizontal rain and the tendency to levitate in static with drastic changes in temperature. Any planet as fickle and tempestuous in temperament as she was scored highly in her books. The only thing she missed were those sunbathing sessions atop the Bebop…
Shaking her head loose of such sentimental thoughts, Faye hauled her ass out of bed and moved over to the kitchenette to make some cheap coffee. The scent of coffee perked her up as she sat down by the table with a fresh mug and a cigarette. The only table in the entire boxcar flat was a circular artist's model that was covered with cigarette butts, textbooks, and coffee mugs. Nothing new—she already knew she had a tendency to build towards chaos, anyhow. Shrugging off the powder-blue men's pyjama top she usually slept in, she walked briskly over to the white nurse's smock draped over the suede sofa that graced her living room. More like a few paltry square feet, but this was more than she had ever called her own before. Grinning ruefully, her fingers circled the rim of her mug as she thought of her arrested childhood. While this existence was eons away from the bourgeois lifestyle she had taken for granted, she had never felt such ownership over her own life until now. While the debts hadn't disappeared overnight, they had stopped accruing.
She had found that her freedom, while a high price to pay, afforded her little moments of freedom carved in the unlikeliest places. True, she was now the proud owner of a pillbox apartment, and she couldn't lie about the fact that she had eaten tuna sandwiches for the last few weeks. It was also true that she still had to pick up small-fry bounties every once in a while to make ends meet, but Faye found that she was motivated, driving towards life in a way she never had since she first woke up from her cryogenic sleep. The inner melody she had heard was no longer dissonant to experience, and she found it tweaking a little, even. Slowly, but surely, she was reconciling the child she had seen on the beta tape with the woman she had become in the past four years. She had come to know that there was no poetic justice to tie a pretty bow to her broken story, nor was there a mysterious villain to blame for her unintended victimhood. The Gate Crash occurred—another Lisbon library burning, yet another tsunami engulfing indigenous villages—yet, mankind moved onwards. What she could piece from her own spotty memory and the visit she had paid to her broken home in Old Singapore, she had been on the fast track in medicine. The best was that she had first been duped by a pair of quack doctor and a slick con artist. If there was anything poetic to her life, it was the heavy dose of irony that seemed to follow her wherever she went.
Realizing that she had been lost in her thoughts, she zipped up the back of her smock and then glanced at the antique wrist watch that she had taken from one of her mother's drawers in Old Singapore.
"Fuck," she swore eloquently, "First day of inter-mamm phys, and I'm already late!"
The sound of her intercom warped to life, "Going somewhere?"
The male voice made Faye tense for a split second before she willed herself to relax, and recognized her old partner's gruff tone, "Jet, catching the lady when she's on the run as always."
"Trust a broad to book it—does that mean you're out of commission for tonight?"
Faye snorted archly, "Hardly."
"Let me guess—this is the fifth day in a row that you've had tuna."
Faye ignored him and grabbed her tote, shutting the intercom off to the sounds of Jet's rich laughter.
It was sometime later, amidst lab coats and petri dishes, that her phone made a beeping noise—a bounty. Fucking Jet, she thought wryly, He's just begging to get me in trouble…
"Valentine!"
"Y-yes, Professor Heinrich?"
"Sniff any fumes lately? Hit your head too hard after a couple of drinks? Or did you suddenly blank out on the class policy?"
Faye scowled as she silenced her phone. She'd get the old dog later. Stabbing the piece of slivered tissue in the dish, she grumbled over payback and strangleholds.
This class dragged on longer than the others, and when the Professor had finally collected the last of the samples, Faye sighed out of relief and then reached for her things, intent on scampering off and giving Jet a piece of her mind. She was suddenly aware of a presence looming over her desk, and looked up out of curiosity. "Valentine?"
Jacob, a slightly older male student in her nursing program. Deep brown eyes, both matching. He looked down at her with an easy grin. Faye blinked a couple of times to dislodge the memories from taking over. She knew they were nothing alike—Jacob was a bit on the stockier and shorter side—more muscle than length. Yet, the eyes and that smile threw her off for a bit.
"Valentine, you alright?"
Faye shook off the moment with her gamine default, "Oh, don't mind me. Four hours of lab… gets to the best of us."
Jacob laughed, his eyes lightening a shade too gold, "I know exactly how you feel. Say, I was—"
Faye cut him off by standing up and slinging her tote over her shoulder, "Hey," she intoned, wry and apologetic, "Sorry, I gotta dash. Y'know—finals looming, etc."
She tried not to notice how taken aback Jacob appeared for a moment, before he recovered and shrugged, "Sure thing—good luck and all that."
Faye wove a hand in the air, vaguely, "Right back at ya, Jake."
As she walked away, she could make out Jake muttering disgruntled, "Jake?" And, whistling a jaunty tune, she flicked her phone on, groaning at the message that popped up postmarked over an hour ago: Bounty on the prowl towards Caprician Square—made a headstart. Move it, or you lose it.
Faye climbed into the Red Tail and revved up the ship. With a swipe at the intercom, she buzzed her partner to touch bases: "Jet, class went on and there was this kid I couldn't shake off—"
His face carried a familiar and comforting scowl, "Can it, Valentine. This ain't the time to swap secrets in the girl's locker room."
"What's got your panties in a twist?"
Jet sighed, "Bounty bolted, and I've looked for him everywhere—the Spit-Ale Platoon, Nishi's, and those odd murals with the runes on it, and it's like he evaporated."
"Another ghost," Faye whispered, almost to herself.
"A what?"
"Nothing," she said hastily, ducking her head to rummage through her bag, tossing out papers, lipstick, lab notes, pens, empty cigarette cartons…
"Er, now isn't the time to touch up on your make-up."
Faye growled, then let out a portable detector with triumphant laugh, "Aha! This isn't premium grade hacker style, but it'll have to do."
"You bugged him?"
Faye smirked, "Fancy what drops in your lap when you're concentrating too hard on living an ordinary life."
Jet's look of surprise gave way to a look of begrudging admiration, "Well, look at that…"
"Let's get this movin', cowboy."
That had been nine hours ago.
The target had long since left Metis and hit deep space. This forced Jet and Faye out into the open, and they agreed to take tangent trajectories and recoup at the Bebop, which was docked on a minor moon near Titan. Now, Faye was stuck in the ship just killing time, floating to their rendezvous spot. With a lusty sigh, she shucked her empty pudding carton aside and fingered the beaten screen of her reader. Then, she cracked her knuckles, and hunkered down for a sleepless night of… cramming. She was sure that somewhere, Spiegel's ghost was laughing at her.
Ghost… she scowled, smacking her forehead with the reader. She'd slipped up. Just when she had convinced Jet things were okay, she had to go all space cadet on him, and on the hunt, no less. She knew that he'd be checking in on her regularly for weeks now.
She didn't know why she was so hung up on this. At first, she thought that it was because the time she spent awake was so short, she had little to compare with this experience. Then, she thought perhaps, that it was because she had formed her first real attachments to him at the same time she had with the rest of the crew. But she couldn't lie to herself. While she was devoted to Jet, she was devoted in such a catty, sororal way that precisely preyed on the ex-cop's avuncular instincts. She cared enough for Ed and Ein to 'allow' the child to check in on her from time to time, always leaving little things—messages, favors, souvenirs—to tide the young hacker over until their next exchange.
No, this was something else. Faye was not naïve enough to call this love, nor was she delusional enough to call it lust. The temptation had been there, that was for certain. There had been plenty of drunken moments where a heavy gaze shared between the two would freeze the moment. Faye would feel like she was drowning, but that was all the more reason why she would react with a well-timed quip, thickly layered innuendos laced with irony, or—when all else failed—good old-fashioned violence. All of the above seemed to work on Spike, because his eyes would reflect a wary awareness, and he would revert to his same biting, lazy self.
No, nothing had happened, but something had grown there. Stunted by their mutual aversion towards emotional intimacy and their deep distrust of the outside world, neither made much progress while aboard the Bebop. Faye couldn't be certain to trust her emotions when she couldn't even register the memories of how she had felt in the past—her entire lexicon of expressions had been wiped out with the Gate Crash. She could never have a firm grasp on the depth her emotions went to, nor the complexity of the sentiment that coursed through her body. Ultimately, she was wary of sharing those kind of charged moments with others. Faye had lost so much of herself in the past three years that she couldn't afford to willfully give pieces of herself out for free.
As for Spike, he was right. He couldn't see Faye when he had one eye focused on Julia, and the other on his death. She simply didn't register in his optical spectrum; she was yet another outlier making a lonely orbit around him, awaiting a sign to tell her she belonged.
The woman was late. Typical.
Jet ran a hand over his head, a nervous habit. A Ghost, she said. He knew it—couldn't take any woman at face-value; such creatures were irrational to the core. His trust in women only went so far. When Faye had picked up nursing, he believed her. When she opted to remain in touch, pick up the odd bounty, he believed her. With anything and everything regarding their dearly departed ex-shipmate, he'd sell Bebop before he'd take her word for anything she said about his circumstances. Her circumstances, on the other hand, were starting to pick up. Every painstaking move towards the right direction—the future—counter-intuitively seemed to bring her closer to her past. He watched her slow yet steady evolution: her disappearance in pursuing her past; her reemergence in realizing that the past couldn't solve her present.
"Hey, wise guy—open the goddamn hatch already!"
Ah, such dulcet tones. That was Valentine, through and through.
Jet made his way from the main cabin towards the landing dock. He watched Faye land gracefully, in spite of herself, and raised his prosthetic arm in greeting. She lifted herself out of the cockpit, a moue of impatience stretching across her unpainted lips. "What are we, sitting ducks?"
Jet's impressive eyebrows stretched downwards, "What?"
Faye waved it off as another one of her Old Earth anachronisms, "Never mind that; where's the target headed? Why the delay? I got exams to pass, bodies to slice up—"
It was Jet's turn to grimace, "Bodies? You know what, don't even. I figure you'd be hard-pressed to let this one go."
Faye drew out a cigarette with a magician's flare, "Oh? How so?"
"This is one of the few who got away."
That caught Faye's attention, alright. "What do you mean—are you saying…"
Jet's eyes were unwavering as they drilled into her head, "You know exactly what I mean. One of the last survivors and escapees from the Syndicate coup a year ago."
Faye turned her face down so that the older man couldn't read her eyes, "I see."
Jet shrugged, "I knew you'd be like this."
"What!"
He continued, "Volatile, just as all women tend to be."
"Now, listen here!"
"I mean, if you think it's too much to handle, I'll let you sit on the sidelines. Don't expect to split this though."
"You old bastard!"
"Is that a yes?"
Faye crushed the cigarette butt under her ballet flat and glared. "I could strangle you myself."
"Save the violence for someone who cares, Valentine."
After an entirely lackluster meal of beef and bell peppers sans meat, Faye hunkered down by the mast's viewing window and treated herself to Jet's secret stash of bourbon and a cigarette. Space peered in through the window, blinking at her in odd increments. The drone of the intercom wavered in and out, slicing through what would have otherwise been a heavy, pregnant silence throughout the ship. It was unusual and downright disconcerting to see the ship so silent and still. What had initially attracted Faye to the Bebop was the lure of the everyday. Concerns about food, money and gas ate away at the hours of the day, leaving less time to mull over the considerable weight (or absence) of bygone lives. The Bebop hosted bounty-hunters that masqueraded as low-lives during the day, and a skeletal crew at night, weighed down with pasts so heavy as to cast shadows that made them loom larger-than-life. It made cosmic sense that Faye, a woman whose ultimate fear was her own weightlessness, would gravitate towards that idiotic mop-head the strongest. It wasn't quite at the romantic level, yet she couldn't deny that there was a certain fascination in watching him move. Here was a man with weight—past so heavy he sought to make every action in the present as light as possible. How could such a tall, lanky man carry such weight? The train of thought she had followed the night Spike left to confront his past was undeniably melodramatic, yet magnetic. If he could carry that weight, could he keep her tethered to this ship, as well?
That thought had nearly done her in. Between Jet's tough love and her own tenacity, Faye recognized that this was one trip she'd rather skip. Weeks after they realized Spike was gone, Faye decided that all this weightlessness would suffocate her. All the things that kept her chained to this life—the big freeze, the debts, the amnesia—were events that only allowed her to react. Up until this point, she hadn't taken many steps to reclaim her life, to write her own story. As such, Faye decided to start from what she knew: a cocktail shaken with resilience, sweetened by the talents she'd acquired along the way, and a liberal splash of bitter reckoning. She gathered the sharp memories from the past three years with the fragments that were starting to surface, and found that they didn't entirely make sense when she lined them up. She wasn't heartbroken by this discovery. Very little about the important things in life ever made sense: why grant her life a second time, this time with a deck stacked against all odds? Why did it always rain in Ganymede? Why did coffee on Jupiter always taste so bitter, and the cigarettes so dank? Why was Jet balding so young? Why did he…?
Oh well. Time to put on the brave, big girl face and greet the world.
A slice of time carries the momentum to a hidden beat.
See you, Space Cowgirl…
Author's notes:
Inter-mammalian physiology: a sci-fi play on the classic pre-requisite medical courses mammalian physiology. Faye refers to it quite casually as 'inter-mamm phys', and other students sometimes call it by its acronym IMF.
Metis: the a fictional city on Saturn, where Faye calls home.