Desafinado: Slightly Out of Tune

"And what is that, besides something spelled out in light bulbs, I mean - besides something called a temperament, which consists mostly of swooping about on a broomstick and screaming at the top of my voice? Infants behave the way I do, you know. They carry on and misbehave - they'd get drunk if they knew how - when they can't have what they want, when they feel unwanted or insecure or unloved." -Margo Channing (Bette Davis) in All About Eve, 1950


Session Two: Fly Me to the Moon

Spike came back on the twentieth of May, two months in Venus' lunisolar calendar time, and as if nothing had happened like most things go. He slipped in early in the morning, parking the Swordfish II in the flight deck of the Bebop as if it were just like any other day.

Jet yelled and Faye gawked, dropping her bowl of stale cereal without the milk because Jet had forgot to go grocery shopping this week. She watched the two men bicker, well, watched Jet reprimand the lanky man, while the Lunkhead himself did nothing but shrug and keep his hands buried deep in his pockets.

"Do ya' guys have anything to eat? I'm starving." Were his first words and just like that, Jet forgot all the unspoken profanities that dared to drip off his tongue and proceeded to walk in to the kitchen to fix the other man up something to eat.

Faye, was noticeably taciturn however, staying in her own corner, atop the chair across the infamous, and by that she meant almost evil-looking yellow couch, with a bowl of her stale cereal that she had swept up from the floor moments ago and a notebook in the crook of her left arm.

Spike eyed her cautiously, but said nothing, choosing only to slump down onto that damnable yellow couch and close his eyes.

"Do I have something on my face?" He queried after twelve tense minutes of silence that clung to the air, eyes still closed, with that annoyingly smug voice he saved especially for her. She did not avert her gaze still glaring at the man who should have been dead.

"Chatty aren't we?" She replied with equal sarcasm as she opened her notebook and procured a pencil from a pocket in her cigarette pants.

"Answering questions with more questions, huh? A bit childish don't you think?"

"Only because I'm speaking to one right now."

She began to jot down little notes on her pad, small observations that she had now noticed in Spike's demeanor that somehow sparked that same old interest she once had as a psychologist. Who knew that in her presence, the whole time, stood the most perfect case for observational learning, the basket case himself in all his dull, emotionally-constipated glory. It would be the case study of her lifetime, the case study of all case studies; it was brilliant, utterly, brilliant.

"If I'm a child, you're an infant." His voice was monotone, nothing spectacular, no inflections, just stale and boring much like her cereal.

"Mhm," she hummed as she began to pen down more and more words, her hands working a mile a minute. "If I'm an infant, you're a fetus."

"Well, you're a bitch." ...And they were back to being Old Spike and Faye again the famous bickering duo.

"Better than being a fetus, you know, since bitches actually possess conscious thought, and all, enough to tell you how lame your comeback was."

"I'm glad you're back on the Bebop you, Lunkhead." Was left unsaid hanging in the air as if it were ready to be wrung out to dry under Spike's burning cybernetic eye.

He kept quiet after that - his only indication of conceding in their little argument. It was all fun and games really. And Faye went back to scribbling down words in her little black notebook while Spike went back to dreamland or limbo or hell or nothing or whatever the hell he did when his eyes were closed.

Save for what little noises, that of Spike's slow and steady breathing and the sound of graphite scratching on to paper, the only significant noise was the sound of something frying in a pan and Jet shuffling about in the kitchen the other room over.

Faye looked over her notebook and gazed intently at the man, noticing every detail, every nuance of what made Spike inherently Spike - from the way he so easily lay on the couch with his arms crossed behind his head, to the way a small wrinkle from furrowing his brows made its way on the side of his temple, to the way he twitched every so often, the way he ground his teeth in silence, to the visible frown lines pulling on the corners of his lips.

He was as rigid as a block of ice trying to feign the smooth undulations of flowing water.

It was obviously contrived, poorly done, and all in all, not much of a good act - but Faye would never speak on it. She would rather observe to her heart's content, drinking in every bit of information this cold shell of a man could offer.

After all, nothing could get past one who made it a living to strip down the human mind into the barest layer of truths, one who studied the grey matter and its many facets that was interconnected between neurons and more neurons enough to produce the most basic level of awareness; the human conscious thought process.

"Breakfast is ready! If any of you are hungry, you better get your lazy asses up before it's all gone," Jet's voice reverberated across the halls.

With that, Spike stood up lazily, arms still crossed on the back of his head before ambling towards the kitchen with Faye following suit as she continued to scribble in her notebook.

Breakfast consisted of scrambled eggs with chives and burnt toast with the last of the scraps he found in the fridge. "I should go grocery shopping today," Jet mumbled as all three bounty hunters huddled around the table.

Faye sat opposite of Spike, sipping lightly on a box of orange juice and occasionally taking a bite of toast, too engrossed in the notebook she had been lugging around ever since he walked through the hangar. "Faye, wanna come with? I'll let you pick out the cereal this time for the bounty you pulled in last Thursday," Jet continued.

Spike's eyes narrowed as he chewed on his food at the exchange before swallowing. "Since when were you two all buddy-buddy?" There was no malice in his voice, just pure, unadulterated curiosity that rose with each word.

"Since we had to start pulling our own weight for two," Jet replied. Since you left, was what he meant.

"When you dipped out of here, we had to find a way to compensate for a lack of income from a usual third party," Faye chimed in rather patronizingly as her head shot up from her writing. Her sparkling eyes darted towards Spike's muddy ones trying to gauge what reaction she would get from him.

"Yeah, well, Jet and I did just fine when it was just the two of us," Spike spat, his voice like venom," Don't see why it would be any different. I guess it just goes to show that you're utterly useless at pulling your own weight for Jet's and your own sake."

The woman's lips quirked up slightly, before she hastily began to jot down more words into the journal.

"Better than playing the disappearing act, but you know, I'm not one to judge."

She smirked, biting on the tip of her pencil in anticipation for whatever his response would be.

"Why don't you just shut the hell up, Faye? I get it, you two are a little sore that I dipped, can we just not fucking talk about this and have a decent fucking conversation," he shouted. His shoulders rose and sloped over and over again as he heaved in heavy breaths, angry and sullen and such a poor, poor image of a man.

Faye smiled slightly before writing again and Jet could do nothing but pinch the bridge of his nose. She paused, setting her pencil down gently and gave the two men a calculating stare - which had been mostly directed towards Spike. "Sorry," she said lightly. What would he say next?

Spike's eyes widened and she could have sworn that both Jet and the prick had nearly spluttered. "What the hell?"

"I said I was sorry, you're right. I was being a bitch -" she looked over towards the shell shocked man as he was beginning to speak again "-you didn't really say it, but we all know what you were thinking." She ended it with an airy laugh to help negate the mixture of anger and shock that the man was probably struggling to differentiate between his mind.

She knew it was wrong to antagonize a mentally unsound person, however this was Spike, and it was in her nature to do so - the fact that she could analyze some of his more volatile reactions was a bonus too. However, to blunt the momentum of her patronizing, she had to resort to doing something out of the ordinary. Because it was a given fact of the universe that Faye Valentine never apologized (maybe only once when she had come across Spike after regaining her previous memories, and that, was a moment of weakness - so it did not really count all things considered).

"Whatever..." He muttered before shoving another forkful of egg in his mouth.

Jet laughed abruptly, his booming laugh, reverberating around the makeshift dining room much like the way it always did. "Feels like old times, huh?"

"Yeah, I guess," Spike said begrudgingly, nursing a hot mug of black coffee, still as angry and confused as ever.

Faye only smiled at this as she began to hum that old tune from her grandmother's record player.

A/N - Song: Fly Me to the Moon By. Julie London