Summary: Faye has a few too many and meets someone she shouldn't, in a place she shouldn't be in the first place.
A/N: "Sex on the Beach" is a horrible tasting, girlie-drink (I think) but it was the first thing I thought of when I wandered into this prompt. Remembering a bar scene was that much harder. Playing with "Bebop" feels like a sin – I couldn't possibly make it any better than it is. Takes place in the general vicinity of Sessions #12-13: Jupiter Jazz. 'Night By Night' is the title of a Steely Dan song from the album "Pretzel Logic".
Her eyes were unfocused but it looked just like the beach... white, fresh sand being ground into her knees, so cold it burned...and behind her, a murderer drove himself so hard into her, over and over, she could feel the sun on the sand and remember... and it was so cold, he was so cold it burned...and she remembered...
There had been a long-haired man playing a heart-achingly good sax in the bar but then he'd gone and there was another man, next to her, someone she might have known if not for the fifth glass of that reddish-orange slush the bartender kept pouring her with a nasty smirk. She thought it tasted like sunshine and so, not just a little drunk, she struck up a halting conversation with the closet person, who happened to have met her before.
Not that Faye knew it then; she gambled with her life all the time. Deja vu was like a free hand in any game of chance to her. Faye thought for a split-second of clarity that it was just damn nice to see someone who looked familiar – even if she couldn't for the life of her remember why.
"Buy me a drink, handsome?", she purred to the smirking bartender, waving her empty glass in his direction.
"What're you drinking?", the gaunt man beside her rasped out, blowing his silver hair out of his black eyes.
"I don't know- something strong. That's how I like them.", she lilted smartly, arching her back with a heated giggle. Those who don't work it, don't get to drink for free, she always said.
"It's called 'Sex on the Beach', doll. You've had enough of them to call it a virtual gang-bang.", the bartender waggled his eyebrows suggestively at the mirror behind the counter. Six large, hungry pairs of eyes got his drift from their various seats through out the room. How long had it been since they'd had a real woman here on Ganymede? Too long – and everyone wanted a taste.
"Seems like you're going to get it that way, sooner than you think. Why don't you settle up and come with me?", her neighbour answered, cutting her coy response off in med-breath.
She looked askance at him and still, despite a quiet little flutter of that feeling you can only say what it is in French, didn't know she'd have been safer with the waiting rape gang... safer by far.
"She's doing just fine on her own, pal." the bartender squinted with annoyance, making a show of washing glasses that didn't need it.
"Of course she is.", the not-so-stranger grated back and before she could blink, the bartender had sprouted three feet of steel from his throat.
"Holy fucking god, Stranger – that was vicious.", she breathed out in numb shock. His eyes never left the mirror behind the bar but the small smile that slithered across his pale lips made her want to place him in her hazy memory that much more. She'd seen that slasher smile, his profile splashed in tiny splatters of multi-colored glass-light, tiny black flecks of blood scattered like static on his raw-boned face, now and just as then...
"I know you...", quoth Faye Valentine, former opera aficionado and hostage, poised on the drunken verge of remembering something terrifying.
Her quietly menacing rescuer pulled his blade from the meat it was wedged in and requested that anyone else who had a problem with his settling of the lady's debt step on up to the bar. When no one moved or even appeared to breathe, he flicked his steel free of gore and getting off the bar stool, made it disappear into one side of his long voluminous coat. The other side he held open to her with that same small hungry smile.
Faye forgot she had her own coat. Being drunk, she could only feel a strange mix of terror and desire. No one else wanted her, that's why she'd run out here in the first place. Even if she didn't know the first thing about the cold-blooded killer before her, she knew he wanted her and it was good enough. She wobbled the slightest bit, smoothed her stockings to cover it up and tucked herself next to her former captor, slipping her arm around his waist to keep close. Her encircling wrist bumped the sword on his hip, but she let her hand brush his other weapon as well, just to get to see some blood going in his pale face.
Vicious narrowed his dull eyes at her trespass and closed them together within the wings of his coat, wearing a smile that never was.
Outside the bar, the ever-present snow ran white like sand on a pristine beach. She thought she could even hear waves if she strained her ears, but it was only jet-craft above the rim. She envied their purpose and then her foggy mind was onto other, closer, warmer things. They walked down more empty streets while she mused and when her drunken steps became discordant with his, her escort drew his arm hard around her waist and drove her to the rhythm of his stalking steps. The hidden hilt of his sword began to bruise her wrist the longer his stride became. She had to stop soon, it was really beginning to hurt...
"Please, I need to stop!", she whispered into his wind-wild silver hair and made to remove her arm from around his waist.
"You don't look like his kind of woman – but I'll take you from him too.", Vicious rasped out at the frigid night, pinning her arm to his side with a snarl and slamming Faye to her knees.
Somewhere through the haze of all her decades of loneliness, Faye remembered.
"You killed him... Mao...", Faye shuddered out, getting tangled up in the coat around her, drawing Vicious down hard over her, his dead eyes blazing with possession.
"So did you.", he snarled back in loss, driving her legs apart in the dry snow.