Disclaimer: Cowboy Bebop is not mine and never will be mine. Quoted excerpt is from a Wikipedia article, and therefore also not mine.

"Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, or by justifying or rationalizing them."


She stands in the hallway, fingers clenched tightly around her gun. It takes everything she has to stay calm, to keep breathing, to keep her shaking legs from giving way completely.

She knows he's leaving. And she is plagued with an all-consuming desire to know why. Why he's leaving them behind. Why he's going to throw his life away like an idiot with a death wish. Why he can't just let go of the goddamn past and move on with his stupid life.

He walks by, and she whips out her gun in a flash to stop him, pointing it directly at his head. If he is at all surprised, he doesn't show it. He probably expected her to be there.

"Where are you going?" she asks, taking care to keep her voice cool and even, to maintain that front that she's always put up to hide her feelings. She doesn't want to seem vulnerable, she just wants answers. He turns to look at her, his expression as blank and unreadable as always, but there's a flicker of something in his eyes that she's never seen before. Could it be sadness? Pity? Regret? She doesn't know.

Something inside her snaps. She doesn't want any of his games, any of his signature bullshit. She wants the truth, and she wants it now. "Why are you going? You once told me to forget the past, because it doesn't matter. But you're the one still tied to the past, Spike!"

When he turns his whole body towards her, he leans in dangerously close, completely taking her by surprise. "Look at my eyes, Faye."

She's too paralyzed to do anything but obey, her breath catching in her throat as his eyes bore straight into hers, his face barely inches away. "One of them is a fake because I lost it in an accident. Since then, I've been seeing the past in one eye, and the present in the other. So I thought I could only see patches of reality, never the whole picture."

She swallows nervously, taking an excruciating amount of time to find her voice once again. "Don't tell me things like that. You've never told me anything about yourself. So don't tell me now."

"I felt like I was watching a dream I'd never wake up from," he continues quietly, almost pensively. A brief beginning of a hollow laugh escapes him before he goes on. "Before I knew it, the dream was all over."

He turns to walk away from her with finality, but she's not finished with him. She's not sure exactly what she wants to say to him, something, anything. "My memory came back," she blurts out without really thinking about it, "but nothing good came of it."

Her hands are beginning to shake and her breaths are becoming increasingly shorter, but the words continue to rush out, airing her deepest secrets, before she can stop them. "There was no place for me to return to. This was the only place I could go."

She tries in vain to choke back a sob. "And now you're leaving, just like that! Why do you have to go?" Her emotions are getting the better of her, that careful mask that she had been building with him for so long peeling away piece by piece. "Where are you going? What are you going to do? Just throw your life away like it was nothing?"

"I'm not going there to die. I'm going to find out if I'm really alive." He pauses again, taking a deep breath, as if he's trying to renew his resolve. "I have to do it, Faye," he says almost more to himself than to her.

He turns away from her, to leave the Bebop for the last time, and she knows that there's nothing she can say or do to convince him of anything otherwise. She's left there to helplessly watch him go, to watch his retreating back walk out of her life forever.

She doesn't even try to hold it back this time. Sobs rack her entire body, tears blur her vision and her capacity for rational thought. With a shaking hand, she aims the gun in his direction and holds it there unsteadily for a long moment before turning it upward. She closes her eyes and unthinkingly fires her entire clip into the ceiling.

She barely registers the sound of the gunshots, the dissonant clash of metal on metal ringing painfully in her ears. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Nothing but the feeling of her heart shattering into a thousand pieces.