Spoilers: If you haven't seen the last few sessions of this series, don't read this or it'll spoil it.
"The effect of settling in space decades ago wrought changes in the human psyche," the doctor tells a camera somewhere in a studio a vast distance away from here. Jet is on the couch in his ship the Bebop, waiting for something, with a cigarette burning down between his metal fingers. His head is turned away, staring to the left of the tv feed on the table before him. The only light is from the screen, and it covers Jet in its flickering glow. He wears only his boxer shorts and an undershirt. Beside him on the couch are his pants and a sewing kit. Since the bandages came off his thigh, he's needed to sew up the pant leg Spike had ripped off after Jet got shot in that bar.
The ship is freezing.
His back hurts in the position he's in, with his legs up on the table, and his one arm with the flesh and blood intact slung along the back of the couch. With eyes half shut he observes nothing. Space outside the Bebop is cold and strange. If water were suddenly released into the vast vacuum out there, it would not freeze. Instead it would initially boil upon first contact. Jet learned that from the same tv he is not watching now.
His upper body stretches and tenses with a yawn that makes his eyes water.
"For once," the doctor on tv says to the camera, "human beings finally realized it is just us out here. No aliens or other civilizations, just us and everything that comes with us."
"There is nothing but each other."
Sleep takes over, finally, as soon as he hears the hangar opening. The cigarette winks out between his unfeeling fingers. He feels someone putting a blanket over him later, but is too tired to stir.
--
When Jet wakes up he walks into a scene. He doesn't mean to, but it happens anyway. Predictably, it starts out when he goes to find Faye. While slipping through the ship in his newly repaired clothes, he notices the old scuffs and dents left by the shoes of another crew member who used to live here. He's gone now, and he's not coming back. The corridors are chilly and smell like stale cigarettes. He expects Spike is just around every corner in the ship, but he is disappointed to find only rough remnants of his existence as he moves from empty room to empty room.
He finds Faye in her room in near-darkness. She's putting clothes into a new designer bag. Designed for travel. She covers a white poker chip with the edge of a sock as she sees him in the doorway.
The sounds of Faye packing fill him with cold shock. She's reminding him of sleepless nights spent under the sheets of his bed on Ganymede, his old home, after a long shift on the police force that had left his senses overflowing with the sights and smells of desperation and terror in the streets.
As he sprawled in bed late into the night, the very start of the dawnless morning hours would always be heralded by the cruel song of birds somewhere in the dark. The birdsong filled him with dread at the coming of the sleepless day, with no hope of rest, with nothing to look forward to but a lonely pot of coffee and everyone around him rousing from their dreams to join him in his wakefulness. And now listening to Faye was like hearing those unwelcome birds all over again.
Jet speaks to her in song titles, his favorite language.
" 'Autumn Leaves'," Jet says.
"What? Jet?" Faye spins towards him as if noticing him for the first time. She's wearing a stylish powder blue outfit that covers her, head to toe.
"It's an old jazz song. The mystery is, no one knows if it's about falling leaves, or a girl named Autumn who is escaping something."
"Maybe it's both."
"What happens when Autumn leaves?" Jet asks her.
"Winter comes. That's easy."
"Easy come, easy go," Jet murmurs. He quits crowding her doorway and heads back to find his cigarettes. As he goes up the stairs, his knees crick and groan. He winces remembering what happened just a few days earlier between them.
---
He had gotten spectacularly drunk from the whiskey he'd brought on the ship, and was soon confused by the noises coming from the bathroom. He thought Faye had left the ship for a shopping spree. Then who was in the bathroom? Grasping at conclusions, Jet stumbled towards the bathroom door.
He walked right in on Faye while she was lounging in the bathtub. Their eyes met in the bright uncompromising light of the bathroom, and in a slow moment, comprehension dawned. She shrieked loud enough to make Jet bite his tongue in surprise.
"Lock it next time!" he bellowed, tasting blood in his mouth. He slammed the door.
"I thought you were Ein!" she yelled at him after he'd shut the door. "Not like he's here anymore…"
"I thought you were Spike," he said inaudibly, with a low laugh out of his whiskey-burned throat that wasn't really laughing at all.
--
Jet dreams about having his next cigarette, and when he wakes up, he has one. Jet's dreams are simple. Other people he's known have had bad dreams, and good dreams, and dreams in between. Spike coveted a dream too, Jet knows, but that's all it was. It was just a dream that could not be willed into reality. And that, he tells himself, is why he is gone now. To think like that helps Jet have simple dreams. He's got a not-quite healed wound on his leg that reminds him otherwise, but as living on the Bebop proves, wrap enough bandages over your pain and it'll be healed, somehow.
The only reason Faye would want to leave is she wants to stay, if you understand the logic of a woman like that, Jet is thinking as he navigates through multiple message platforms on the net. There's a thread that's caught his eye the last few days. A hysterical net diver is spamming one of the forums about a famous crew of bounty hunters who's just lost half of their team, and so all the bounty money they've collected is on their ship somewhere, fragile and unprotected and ripe for attack. Equipment hums around him, like maddening persistent mosquitoes in his ears.
Frequently, as he's deleting the posts using a few tricks he knows, Jet fantasizes about tracking down the net diver and how easy it'd be to teach him something about shutting up, but it seems pointless. While mulling over the other precautions he's taken he wonders if he should warn Faye or if she'll be gone by the time anyone out there decides to act on Hysterical Net Diver's advice. His hands are poised over the keyboard like a piano player as he coaxes the program into his will. "Come on baby, don't be like that," he mumbles. It beeps at him. "Ah, good girl," he responds, smiling.
"Bounty hunting is so boring, Jet," Faye says in an echo, clomping down the corridor out of sight. She emerges into the room and swings herself around to the other side of the couch, where she falls in a huff. She stares at the ceiling fan above as it whirs. Agonizing minutes pass.
"So's being alone," he responds finally, his words mechanical, while not looking up.
"Being together is boring too."
"That makes you damned hard to please. There's nothing glamorous out there. Believe me, I know," Jet rants. "Just a lot of rocks and people you have to catch. It's gotten to where you can't tell the good from the bad anymore." His hands fly up into the air. One flutters to his side, the other clunks home onto the back of the couch.
"This ship, it's too small for us both. It's too small, and it's too big. I gotta go."
"And go where? And do what?"
"You've forgotten how resourceful I am. And it's more fun to be spontaneous. You don't have to parent me, you know."
"So when?"
"Well… Right after you make dinner. Ship's all packed." She looks down at her fingernails.
Jet just laughs. Don't parent her, really now. Inside his heart goes a little cold. It was sooner than he'd imagined. Before he'd ever taken anyone on to the Bebop to work with him, he had spent five years collecting bounties alone. Most of those years he had needed the solitude. He thought he deserved it, a self-inflicted purgatory for the weight of all his sins. That was until some stray cats showed up.
As he is grating out the sound of his laughter, a buzzer from somewhere begins to ring.
"We have company, Faye."
"How wonderful. You sound delighted. What's the big deal? That buzzer goes off all the time." While she lights a cigarette he explains the mounting evidence that someone, maybe a lot of someones, might be after all their rumored bountiful riches.
She takes one puff and they stand up together. She's eye to eye with Jet who's cracking his one set of knuckles. She stretches out her arms over her head and yawns.
"Gonna need my gun, I guess," she says, watching him.
"Hurry up and get it, and get in your ship, then," he says. He stares at her in the eyes for a long moment. Her expression uncontrollably changes to underscore the indelible childhood Jet sees in her.
"It's all right, Faye," he tells her quietly. He crosses his arms. "Ed left without a goodbye, too." His mouth is dry and tastes like copper. He is cold with dread; a pit of it collapsing in his stomach, as he clenches his jaw, trying to force away what loneliness will feel like again.
The buzzer continues to bleat out a warning, until its mechanical pattern silences it. She looks away, startled by the silence. Suddenly she breaks from his side and dashes out of the room. He turns to follow.
"All we even have is your whiskey and the money we got from Doohan for selling the Swordfish!" she yells in a frustrated rage as they part in the corridor.
"Try telling them that," he growls. He's thinking, surely, she won't leave after this. She'll see: that alone out here, no one can survive long. The buzzer goes off. The sequence ends and begins again.