VIIII. Darn That Dream
Faye wandered through the twilight.
She was a little girl, six years old, and she was home sick from school. Faye secretly loved the mornings when she woke up with her throat tickling or her head aching. It meant that her mother would take the thermometer down from the bathroom shelf and slide the slick metal under her tongue. When Mom touched Faye's forehead, her hands were always cool and soft.
"You've got a fever," her mother murmured, frowning at the thermometer's illuminated display. "I'll call the school once Daddy leaves for work, okay?"
They always waited until Daddy left to call in sick. He thought that children should be tough and go to school no matter what. But Mom let her wear her pajamas all day and watch Curious George cartoons on the old VCR and eat chicken soup from a can. (Daddy said canned soup was bad for you.) When he was home, Mom never cooked anything, because they already had a maid and a chef. Still, Faye liked it better when Mom made macaroni from a box, or cookies from a tube, and the two of them would take their food onto their patio. They could see the lion fountain from their backyard.
Faye stretched like a cat under her fluffy pink comforter and waited in happy anticipation for Mom to bring her the medicine that tasted like cherry bubblegum. You could see the ocean from her bedroom, the sun slanting off the waves and casting soft dappled shadows on her walls. It made her feel sleepy and safe. Her blankets smelled like Mom's gardenia lotion. She pulled her stuffed bunny up to her chin and dozed off.
When Faye opened her eyes she was fourteen, running up the hill to her house, heart exploding with joy. She had just kissed Samuel Chang for the first time, right there under the hot May sun on the tennis courts at school. It was all too exciting. There were only three more weeks of eighth grade, and now she might have a real boyfriend over the summer! The kiss was everything she had ever dreamed of and more, but also weirder, and more thrilling, and somehow there was a lot more spit involved than she had expected? Fortunately, she was too ecstatic to mind his St. Bernard-like technique at the time. Fifty-something years later, she would realize, fondly, how terrible that kiss was. Her pleated navy skirt flapped over her bony knees as she dashed across the cobblestones, and her shiny Mary Janes chafed her ankles raw through her sagging knee socks.
Mom stood on the patio with a glass of white wine in one hand and a pair of pruning shears in the other. She was trimming her rose bushes and humming softly to herself as Faye burst through the wrought-iron gate. Her mother's dark hair glimmered in the sunshine, and her pointed nose (so similar to Faye's) sported a tiny smudge of dirt on the tip. She looked up at her daughter, smiling.
"Mom! Guess what just happened!"
The garden faded into blackness just as Faye reached her mother. She tried to draw a breath but couldn't. Something heavy and cold pressed down on her chest, slowing her heartbeat and weighing down her eyelids and filling her mouth with the tang of chlorinated pool water. Her arms felt like two sacks of cement. She couldn't think. What was happening to her? Garbled voices echoed through a layer of suffocating gel, and she struggled to catch snippets of what they said.
"...not expected to recover...with current medical technologies..."
"Her injuries are far too extensive. We can only delay certain inevitable..."
"...no surviving family that we know of..."
A woman sobbing. The ear-sucking sound of a vacuum being sealed. The sting of formaldehyde. Blobs of eerie turquoise and lavender, floating through the blackness like luminescent jellyfish. Sinking down, down, down, into the deepest ocean caves. A phantom underworld untouched by sunlight. Drowning. And then, finally, nothingness.
As the zipcraft hurtled into Europa's surface, Spike braced himself against the cockpit with one arm and flung out the other to catch Faye across her chest. They slammed into the rocky ground with a bone-rattling impact, and his head snapped forward and clipped the center console. Faye lay slumped against his arm as he raised his throbbing head, squinting into the smoke curling out of the control panel. Through the shattered cockpit, he saw a desolate rocky landscape. It was so profoundly dark here that the Milky Way stood out against the black sky like a splash of cloudy paint.
Miraculously, they were both relatively unharmed. Faye was still unconscious, but she seemed to have avoided any further injuries besides her souvenir gunshot from the casino guards. Spike gingerly probed his forehead and found a goose egg rising up against his hairline, but it didn't hurt too much yet. He placed two fingers on Faye's neck and found a pulse, slow but steady. Relieved for the moment, he set to work.
The front of the zipcraft had crumpled like a piece of tinfoil when it hit the ground. Spike yanked on the glove compartment, hoping that it would contain a first aid kit and emergency provisions of some kind. The compartment was collapsed on one side, but after a few moments of fierce tugging, Spike wrenched it open with a metallic screech. Inside, he found a small white box painted with a red cross, matches, a wadded-up plastic tarp, two sleeping bags stuffed into a polyester knapsack, a few packages of dehydrated chicken, granola bars, an empty plastic bottle, and a packet of water purification tablets.
Faye stirred slightly as Spike extricated her from her tangled safety harness. Scooping her easily into his arms, he lifted her out of the ship and set her on the ground.
"Hang on for one second," he told her, hopping back into the destroyed cockpit and gathering up the supplies in his arms. He deposited them on the pebbly ground next to Faye's prone form. Shaking out the mildewy tarp, he dislodged a few desiccated Martian lizard carcasses before draping it over the wing and the tail of the zipcraft like a tent. He unzipped both sleeping bags and laid them under the tarp, using one as a cushion for the ground and one as a top blanket. Lifting Faye once more, he took great care not to disturb her injured hip as he placed her gently on the piled sleeping bags. He grabbed the first aid kid and pulled her bloody leggings down on one side to inspect the bullet wound.
Faye flinched as he swabbed her hip with rubbing alcohol, but her eyes stayed shut. The wound was small and clean, but Spike needed to get the bullet out soon or she could risk a dangerous infection.
Faye's face was drawn with pain. A muscle twitched in her jaw and her eyes moved rapidly behind her lids.
"Faye, I'm sorry, but this is going to hurt for a minute," Spike told her, mentally preparing himself. "Just...grab my arm if it hurts too much. Nod once if you can hear me."
She raised her eyelids a fraction of an inch and nodded. Her skin looked frighteningly pallid in the starlight; he didn't want to think about how much blood she had lost.
Spike took a deep breath and grabbed a wicked-looking pair of tweezers out of the first aid kid. He drove them swiftly into the wound, hearing the clink of metal on metal as the tweezers made contact with the bullet. Faye yelped and thrashed but he kept going, gritting his teeth and trying to get a grip on the bullet as quickly as he could.
"'Almost done. One more second and it's over. I'm so sorry," he told her over and over, barely registering the sound of his own strained voice. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, honey."
The bullet came free with a nauseating pop and Spike fell back on his heels, clutching the bloody bullet in the tweezers. He hurled it away from their campsite, cringing, and turned back to Faye. She had curled herself up into a ball, and he reluctantly straightened out her left leg to tend to it once more.
"Leave me alone," she rasped, her face twisted in agony. "Just leave it..."
Spike worked quickly, ripping open more alcohol-soaked wipes and swabbing down her bloody hip. He taped a bandage loosely over the whole thing. She seemed to be drifting in and out of consciousness.
"There. That's it. You did great," Spike told her, head swimming. He felt sour bile burning in his throat. Jumping to his feet, he stumbled backwards a few steps and vomited. He wiped his mouth with a shaking hand, resting his palms on his knees and breathing hard. Although he had dealt with far more gruesome injuries in the past, this felt different.
Faye's leggings were soaked through with blood, and after a moment of deliberation, Spike pulled them off carefully and and covered her with the sleeping bag. He wadded up the bloodstained pants and tossed them into the ship's ruined cockpit. Quietly, he lifted the blanket and sat down next to Faye, close enough to feel the heat emanating from her small body. He laid back, resting his weary head on his arms.
Gazing around their makeshift campsite, Spike tried to remember what he knew about Europa. He had never been on this asteroid before. It had a far smaller population than the other Jupiter moons, and the inhabitants were generally hard-living transient types, working in the desolate uranium mines for a few months at a time. There were only a few ramshackle towns here, and Spike recalled hearing dark murmurs amongst the Syndicate about miners driven mad by the radiation poisoning. He shuddered. Not a great place to hang out.
As Spike lay next to Faye, silently counting the seconds between her breaths, he realized that he had been awake for over two days straight. He would figure out a plan after he napped for a moment, he told himself; he just needed to rest for a few minutes. Ever so cautiously, he shifted himself a few inches closer to Faye. He reached for her feverish hand under the covers and held it, stroking her wrist with his thumb until his eyes closed.
Spike emerged from a deep sleep in the early morning. A frozen mist had settled over the two of them as they slept, and his face was covered in icy dew. He propped himself up on one elbow to look at Faye. Tiny beads of condensation clustered on her eyelashes and cheeks. Spike took a corner of the sleeping bag and wiped her face dry. Worryingly, her skin burned with fever even in the cool morning air. Spike pulled the covers off of his stiff legs and folded them over Faye, tucking them securely around her body as she slept. To keep her even warmer, he took off his suit jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders.
Spike stood and stretched his sore limbs, gazing around the wreckage of the zipcraft. Weak sunlight filtered through patchy clouds onto the barren ground. The flat grey landscape stretched for miles in every direction as far as he could see. His head ached where he had hit it on the console, and his teeth felt like they had grown fur. He picked up the water purification tablets and the empty plastic bottle, walking slowly and scanning the surrounding area for any signs of water. Every few steps he glanced back at Faye as she slept. To his relief, he found a tiny stream of freezing water trickling down the side of a boulder about twenty feet away from their campsite. Crouching, he held the bottle up to the side of the rock for several minutes until it filled to the top. The water had a faint greenish tinge, but it smelled fine. Nothing that the purification tablets couldn't fix, and besides, they didn't have a choice. He dropped a tablet into the bottle and waited for it to fizz before he took a grateful swig. His body immediately responded with powerful thirst, and it took every ounce of his self-control to stop himself after a few swallows so he could give the rest to Faye.
He returned to the sleeping bags and gently shook Faye's shoulder. She opened her eyes blearily and threw an arm over her face to shield herself from the sunlight.
"Hey. Sorry to wake you up, but you should drink some water."
She groaned and rolled away from him. "Don't want any."
"You really need to drink something. You lost a lot of blood. You're dehydrated."
Faye attempted to sit up and fell back, gasping. Spike caught her by the shoulders.
"Take it easy," he said, lowering her back onto the sleeping bag. "You might not remember, but I just dug a bullet out of you."
Faye shot him a drowsy glare and reached for the bottle. She took a few noisy gulps, water spilling out of her mouth and trickling down her chin.
"It's worse than I thought," she mumbled, her eyelids lowering again.
"What is? Getting shot?" Spike asked, crossing his long legs next to her and screwing the lid back onto the bottle. He thought longingly of his cigarettes back on Mars and wondered if there were any in the cockpit.
Faye was silent for a moment. "No. Remembering."
Her breathing slowed and she was asleep again in a moment.
Spike sat watching her for a long time. He realized that he had never actually seen Faye asleep during all their time on the Bebop, even though she had certainly seen him passed out on the couch hundreds of times. The thought gave him a funny feeling in his gut, like he was witnessing something slightly illicit. She looked startlingly young to him as she slept, her chest rising and falling under the sleeping bags. He felt a sudden rush of protectiveness. Faye wasn't supposed to be lying on the ground with a gunshot wound on Europa. She should be playing cards and wearing beautiful clothes and enjoying herself somewhere nice. Life had not been fair to Faye, Spike thought, his stomach twisting with guilt.
What does it mean to be alive?
Breathing the fresh morning air. Embracing your lover. The thrill of skin on skin. Eating a ripe peach in the summer. Drinking until the world blurs soft and golden around the edges. Kissing unfamiliar lips for the first time. The last drag of a cigarette. Listening to jazz in a smoky cafe. The smell of rain on pavement. Walking home alone in the blue evening, your mind buzzing with unexplored ideas and unexpected pleasures. A quiet glance across a room.
Faye wanted to be alive. God damn, did she ever want to be alive. Robbed of her first existence in the strangest way, Faye fought valiantly to reclaim her second. If anyone deserved a little hedonism, it was her. Being frozen for fifty years was bullshit. She was young (sort of), and beautiful (definitely), and she wanted to drink and smoke and experience the entire galaxy. She wanted to fall in love. What was the point of living if you couldn't kiss the person you wanted to kiss?
These were the questions that Faye asked herself during her time on the Bebop. It was fun to gallivant through the cosmos as Poker Alice, separating idiots from their cash and getting into trouble left and right, but at the end of the day it was all meaningless. Her first life was over before it had a chance to begin, and she felt a vast emptiness in her heart. When the lanky, wild-haired cowboy sat down at her poker table for the first time all those months ago, her soul sang out in instant recognition. That's the one, it said. Right there in front of you. Grab him and don't let go! But, of course, it wasn't that easy. Was it ever? If there was one thing Faye could tell you, it was this: it's never that simple.
Spike wouldn't call himself an outdoorsy sort of guy. Given the choice, he preferred the climate-controlled interiors of spaceships and casinos. However, he had picked up a few tricks during his sojourns out to Laughing Bull's encampments over the years.
While Faye slept, Spike set about collecting dry twigs and dead shrubbery. It was a cool and breezy morning, and they would need a campfire to stay warm when the sun went down. He dumped his findings in a pile near the zipcraft and picked up the first aid kit. Kneeling next to Faye, he lifted up the bandage to check on her wound, swabbing it with an alcohol-soaked tissue and re-taping the bandage more securely. She barely moved as he worked, only opening her eyes for a second. When he finished tending to her hip, he brushed her hair off of her sweaty forehead, smoothing it behind her ears.
Spike didn't know why the zipcraft had malfunctioned and crashed last night. Most likely, the owner had built an anti-theft mechanism into the controls. He puttered around inside the cockpit, wondering if anything electrical had survived the crash. To his surprise, the built-in comm screen sputtered into life, and he navigated the controls expertly, flicking a switch to enable the GPS locator. Maybe he could find the signal of a nearby ship and call for help.
Almost immediately, the screen let out an ear-piercing ping, signaling an incoming message from another ship. Spike jumped at the sound, hitting his head on the ceiling. Swearing under his breath and massaging his head, he clicked on the blinking message notification.
CALLISTO 2 EUROPA
REPLY 777 FOR HELP
He frowned and tapped the reply button, typing out a message on the cracked keypad.
EUROPA TO CALLISTO
777
CRASHED AND NEED MEDICAL SUPPLIES
Right as Spike pressed send, the panel emitted a forlorn whirring sound and died, static zapping across the screen like lightning. He gave the cockpit a hopeful kick, but the shattered screen remained resolutely black.
The day passed slowly. Spike found a tattered deck of cards under the zipcraft's passenger seat and played solitaire for a few hours, checking on Faye whenever she stirred. Around noon, he woke her up to give her an ibuprofen pill and some water, and he opened a stale granola bar for himself. Chewing slowly, he wondered if his message had reached that ship on Callisto. With a lurch of guilt, he realized that Jet was probably arriving in Tharsis City right about now, too. Well, nothing he could do about that, Spike thought grimly as he shuffled the deck. Jet was going to be pretty pissed off.
The sunset turned the landscape into a ghost world, throwing long violet shadows across the boulders and the windswept foliage. Spike got the campfire started and tore open one of the packets of dehydrated chicken. It was an unappetizing gray, but Spike was starving. He stuck the bag on a branch and held it over the flames for a few minutes before his patience ran out. Pouring the contents of the pouch directly into his mouth, he wolfed it down in two swallows.
As he ate, Faye yawned loudly and propped herself up, squinting around and looking confused. Spike tossed the empty packet into the fire and padded over to her.
"Morning, sleepyhead. You slept all day."
"Sleepyhead?" she croaked, smirking. "Since when are you so nice to me?"
Spike scratched his nose, feeling vaguely embarrassed.
"Well, I...uh...forget it. Anyways. How are you feeling?
"I mean, I'm alive, I guess. What the hell happened?" she asked as she prodded her hip experimentally. A spasm of pain darted across her face in the flickering firelight.
"What's the last thing you remember?"
She rubbed her eyes wearily. "Closet, casino, shooting, you stole a zipcraft...and that's about it. Did we crash? I thought I dreamed that part."
"Nope, unfortunately. We're on Europa. I tried to ping a ship on Callisto, but I dunno if it went through."
"Blech. Europa. Hope we don't get radiation poisoning," she said, wrinkling her nose and looking down at his blazer wrapped around her body. "Why am I wearing your coat? Where are my pants?"
"Oh. Sorry. You kind of bled a lot," Spike said, blushing, "so I had to take them off, and you were cold so I gave you my jacket."
"Huh. Thanks." She frowned. "I got shot, right?"
Spike nodded guiltily. "Yeah. I'm...really sorry about that."
Faye scoffed.
"What?" Spike said, offended.
"I just never thought I'd hear you apologizing for anything, Spiegel."
He didn't have a good comeback for that. Faye pulled the blankets up around her ears.
"Eh. Don't worry about it. Got anything to eat?" she asked hopefully. Spike got to his feet and went to fetch the food. As he heated up a chicken packet for her over the fire, she attacked the granola bars like a ravenous animal, eating four of them in less than a minute. Spike stared, too impressed to be angry.
"You know, each of those bars are meant to last you an entire day."
She shrugged, cheeks filled to the brim like a chipmunk."Too bad," she mumbled, crumbs spilling out of her mouth and onto the sleeping bag.
Spike rolled his eyes. "You haven't changed a bit, have you?"
After they ate, Spike stoked the fire and Faye shuffled the deck of cards.
"I'm bored," she called over to him, tapping the deck with her long nails. "Wanna play gin rummy?"
Spike folded his long legs under himself and sat across from her on the blankets. She was still wearing his blazer, and he shivered in the damp evening air. Faye dealt their hands and they began to play as the Milky Way emerged in the sky.
"I thought you were my mom," Faye said as they played.
Spike glanced up at her, but she kept her eyes on her cards, a strange look on her face.
"Hmm?"
"Earlier. When you gave me that pill. I was dreaming about her."
"Do you...I mean, can you remember her? Now that your memories are back?"
She paused, one hand lingering on her cards. "Well...yeah. Sort of. They didn't all come back at once, you know. I get bits and pieces. Since you...left, there's been more and more."
Spike realized that he was holding his breath. Faye gave her head a little shake and played her next card.
"Well. Anyways. Thanks for taking care of me today," she said. Spike played his final hand and she crowed triumphantly, slamming her palms onto the blanket and scattering the cards.
"Ha! Bad move. I won!"
Spike threw up his hands in defeat. "You beat me again."
Faye laid back on the blankets and looked at him with half-lidded eyes.
"Jet's not going to be happy about this, is he?" she asked through an enormous yawn.
Spike laughed as he stoked the fire, gazing up at the crystal-clear stars.
"I'll buy him a couple of bottles of whiskey and a season pass to the Ganymede botanical gardens. He'll get over it eventually," Spike said, but Faye was already asleep. After refilling the water bottle at the slimy boulder, Spike tiptoed back to the sleeping bags and started another game of solitaire. All sixty-seven of Jupiter's moons rose as he played, crowding the sky with their pale faces.
Faye was awoken by a strange noise. Opening her eyes made the world tilt jarringly to one side, so she quickly squeezed her eyelids shut and listened closely instead. It was a low, rumbling, rhythmic noise, and her first thought was that she was back in her room on the Bebop and that she was hearing the ship's engines. Jet must have found her somehow. But as she listened for another moment, she realized that she was hearing someone snore. Well, that couldn't be right. She hadn't slept next to anyone in over fifty years. Cautiously, she cracked open one gritty eyelid and turned her head a fraction of an inch towards the sound.
Spike lay sleeping next to her in the darkness, flat on his back with his arms splayed overhead. His mouth was slightly open, and every time he exhaled, his hair fluttered off of his forehead. He was shirtless, and Faye spotted his yellow button-down, rumpled and tossed aside. The remnants of a campfire crackled nearby, the firelight casting a dim orange glow over Spike's bare chest.
Faye rolled over to get a better look at Spike, and a bolt of white-hot pain shot through her entire left side. She whimpered and grabbed her hip. It felt inflamed and warm to the touch under the bandage. Shit. Once Spike woke up, she would have to ask him if they had more ibuprofen or something. Faye was no doctor, but she wasn't stupid; she knew that she was in bad shape.
Impulsively, in spite of her discomfort, Faye leaned over and planted a kiss on Spike's stubbly cheek. He smiled faintly in his sleep. Faye felt certain that her breath could strip the paint off a wall at the moment, but she nestled her face into his neck and tried to reposition her hip in a tolerable way. Spike sighed and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her tightly against his lithe body. Faye lay still, feeling her heart pound rapidly in her throat. She prayed that this wasn't a fever dream.
Spike was only pretending to sleep. He woke up as soon as he felt Faye's lips against his cheek. A rush of warmth flooded him from head to toe. Something told him to keep his eyes closed, and after a few seconds he felt her hair tickle his chin as she pressed her face into his neck. He held his breath for a long moment, and when it seemed as though she wasn't going anywhere, he embraced her. His body reacted obediently to the contact of Faye's skin against his, but for now, he just wanted to hold her close. To shield her from everything.
Unbidden, his eyes stung with tears, and he tightened his embrace. He kissed her sweet-smelling hair, her hot forehead, her smooth cheeks. Faye lifted her face to look at him, her dark eyes luminous in the starlight, and she kissed his mouth with a tenderness that he had never known. Spike returned the kiss, gently at first and then more insistently, running his hands across the small of her back, her uninjured hip, her sharp collarbones. Hesitantly, he slipped his hand under her shirt and cupped her velvety breasts. She made a small noise of approval in her throat and he pulled her shirt over her head. His body ached with anticipation at the sight of her. Faye kissed him deeply, nipping at his lower lip with her sharp little teeth and dragging her nails over his shoulder blades until he was trembling.
Spike paused, hovering over her shadowy face.
"Can you...uh, do this?" he asked her softly. "I don't want to hurt you."
Faye nodded and ran her small hand down his chest, past his hard stomach and into his boxers, caressing the sensitive skin of his upper thighs. He drew a shuddery breath and kissed her again, eagerly exploring her mouth with his tongue. Breaking away, she gave him a look that he would remember for the rest of his life.
"What are you waiting for, cowboy?" she whispered.
He exhaled sharply and kicked off his boxers, wondering if he was dreaming. It had been so long.
She wrapped her legs around him and pulled him down to meet her body. Spike gasped as he sank into her, trying his hardest to avoid hurting her hip. Faye closed her eyes, her mouth slightly open. A pink flush spread across her neck and cheeks. They moved slowly together, and Spike reached down to stoke between her legs. It thrilled him to hear her moan softly, biting her lip and pressing against his hand.
Spike wanted it to last forever, but he felt the core of molten heat building up in the pit of his stomach almost immediately. Shit, he thought, better think about something decidedly unsexy. Tearing his eyes away from Faye, he cast his gaze about the campsite for something to distract him for long enough to delay the inevitable. He spied the deck of cards splayed on the ground next to the blankets and pretended that he was playing solitaire in his mind's eye. Okay. Shuffle the deck. Five on a four. Queen on a Jack. He lasted another thirty seconds before his brain started waving a white flag back and forth, just as Faye reached up to take his earlobe in her mouth, running her hands through his hair. She cried out, arching her back, and all at once every sensation in his body came to a head and burst through him like fireworks. He rolled onto his back, panting.
Spike stared up at the tarp. He felt like he'd just been hit by a train. Turning his head slightly, he saw Faye looking just as shell-shocked beside him.
"Whoa," Spike began.
Faye nodded slowly. "No kidding. Wish we had cigarettes."
"Me too." He paused. "Are...um. Are you okay?"
He couldn't read the expression on Faye's face in the moonlight.
"Spike?" she asked, so quietly that he could barely hear her.
He looked at her, concerned.
"What's up?" he replied.
"Do you have any idea how long of a dry spell I've had?"
Spike waited, confused.
"I'm serious. I haven't gotten laid in...let's see...about, oh, fifty years." She began to snicker uncontrollably. "We wasted...so...much...fucking time...on the Bebop!"
Faye let out a snort as she laughed, stopping abruptly and looking embarrassed until Spike started to laugh too, softly at first, and then he couldn't stop as they both shook with laughter. He laughed until his gut ached and tears ran down his cheeks.
After a few minutes they quieted down and she settled herself close to him once more, laying her head on his shoulder. Spike held her and twirled the ends of her violet hair in his fingers. They were silent as they lay together under the night sky, intertwined under the lonely, distant stars and moons.
