When the Dream is Over
A Cowboy Bebop/Sandman crossover by YT
I don't own Cowboy Bebop or Sandman. The former belongs to Sunrise Animations and the latter to Neil Gaiman and Vertigo Comics. I know I'm using them without permission, but I'm not intending to make money off them either, so please don't sue me.
I'm sure someone has done this before, but it's been bouncing around in my head for a while and I just had to write it down. I revised it from its original form, which I wrote in the small hours of the morning when I wasn't thinking to clearly. After midnight is a good time for my inspiration, but a bad time for my technical style.
I'm working from the Japanese-with-subtitles version here, which is why it doesn't match the English dialogue version. Okay, now that that's over…
~*~*~*~*~*~
This is…a dream…
Yeah…Just a bad dream…
The sunlight was streaming down through the broken roof just as the rain had a few minutes before. The stairs, the tiles, the rubble, the guards standing in the lobby staring up at him – all washed out into black and white and gray by the pure rays of light.
Spike took the stairs one at a time, cautiously, gripping the wound in his side. There wasn't much time left; he could feel his life draining out of him, like the last few grains of sand slipping through the neck of an hourglass. The funny thing was, he didn't hurt at all. He just felt tired.
When he was halfway down the staircase he stopped. He raised his head, just a little, to survey the bodyguards below. They were giving him their full, goggle-eyed attention, their guns forgotten in their hands. Good.
He wanted to tell them what he had done, that Vicious was dead. But he knew he didn't have enough time left – enough life left – to say it. Instead he raised his head a little more, smiled, and extended his right arm, making a gun of his thumb and forefinger.
"Bang."
That, he was sure, would get the message across. And it made him want to laugh, too, because it meant that he really was going out with a bang. But he didn't laugh, for just then the last grain of sand fell through the neck of the hourglass, and Spike fell with it. After that there was a moment of cool, sweet darkness.
He blinked, got to his feet and brushed himself off. Then it occurred to him to be puzzled by the fact that he was unhurt, and feeling perfectly fine. In fact, he felt great. He spread his arms, looked down at himself to see where his wounds had gone. For some reason, he was not as surprised as he should have been when he saw his own corpse at his feet. Well, not at his feet exactly, because he was actually standing in it. His feet passed through it as if it were no more than an illusion.
"Oh," he said, as the realization hit him. He looked down at the bodyguards clustered at the foot of the stairs. They were only just starting to blink, close their gaping jaws and get over their shock. He looked down at the mortal shell he had, until just recently, inhabited, and then back at the guards again. Spike grinned to himself. It had been a truly spectacular way to die. More than spectacular, it had been perfect. It had been right.
"Spike," said a voice from behind him. He couldn't remember having heard the voice before, but it sounded very familiar…
Upon turning around he saw a young woman standing a few steps above him. She was petite and pale, with an unruly mane of shoulder-length blue-black hair and sparkling dark eyes. She was dressed in a black tank top, jeans and clunky boots. A glittering silver amulet, shaped like a T with a loop on top, hung from a black cord around her neck. She was smiling at him. Spike had never seen her before in his life, but he knew who she was. Even though he had expected her to look rather different, like, say, a cloaked skeleton with a scythe. Death, like life, was full of surprises. "I guess you finally got me, huh?"
She shook her head. "I don't 'get' people. They come to me." Some of the guards were running up the steps now, to the place where his body had fallen. Spike moved up the stairway a little so he would be out of their way, even as he realized that it was physically impossible for him to be in anyone's way anymore. He turned, looked up at the sky – how blue it was! – and ran a hand through his hair before turning back to the young woman.
He grinned. "It was all just a dream," he told her, "Just a bad dream." It was all so incredibly funny that he started to chuckle, and then he threw back his head and laughed. It just felt so good to be truly awake at last, to see reality for what it was. When he finally managed to get the laugh down to just giggles, he looked up at her again. She walked down three steps, so she was standing on the stair right above him. Stairway to heaven, he thought to himself.
"To some people, yes, it's just a dream," she replied. She held out her hand to him. In the light of the sun, it seemed as if her skin were glowing. "It's time to go now," she said softly. "Julia's waiting."
Spike took one last look down the stairs, at the guards turning his body face-up and confirming that he was indeed dead. He felt a momentary sadness, because he knew that Jet and Faye were going to miss him, as would Ed when she found out about it. But Jet had always known it was going to end this way, even if he never admitted it to himself; Faye would mourn for a while and probably change, at least a little, for the better; Ed would be sad, but she had already left the crew and as far as she was concerned it wouldn't be much different from him being alive and away. They would be all right, he assured himself. There was nothing he could do for them now, anyway. Having made that conclusion, he turned back to the woman, the Grim Reaper, the merciful angel, and took her outstretched hand.
There was a sound like the beating of mighty wings…