Author's Note: I just rewatched the series for the first time in nearly 20 years. 20 years! I can't believe I remembered my password! And I still loved it and it still broke my heart and I felt like I didn't really watch it if I didn't write a little something. And this is just a teeny tiny something. The imagined conversation that took place between Spike and Faye after her attempted rescue in Pierrot Le Fou.

Spike stared at the space that once contained a parade, no less busy for it having passed. He could still hear the manufactured merriment somewhere off in the distance. He assumed that everything was running on some kind of program? That it would just...go home? As opposed to walking off a pier or into traffic? It was a pretty large assumption to make but he did not have the energy to take ownership of that right now, so he was happy to make it.

He took stock of what he did have energy for. The idea of leaving this nightmarish place for the real world was a bit much. This was too not that for his brain. It would be like coming down off a terrible trip too soon. What he wanted was to lie down and wait for daylight. An abandoned amusement park at sunrise seemed like an ideal transition. He could do hellish to slightly less hellish to mundane. Slightly less hellish was his wheelhouse, in fact.

So he leaned back on the pavement and stared at the stars, or where the stars would be if they were visible through the neon. Which was just enough stillness for the pain to assert itself. He haphazardly slapped at his own body and his palm came away bright red. That...was a lot. That was probably not great. Perhaps spending the night was not a viable option.

And then in that second he remembered. "Faye."

Without sitting up he hit his comm. She answered but did not look at the monitor or greet him. He just saw her face in pissy profile, sitting in the cockpit of her ship. It seemed he would have to get this conversation started. "Hey."

She relaxed slightly at the sound of his voice but still did not dare to look at him. "Hey," she said back. Somehow she said it sarcastically. Spike would not have thought it was possible to deliver a sarcastic greeting, those usually were what they were, pretty straight forward, but she did it.

"How's the Red Tail?" he asked.

She made a little finger gun, pointed it to her temple, and made an explosion sound. Her head slumped limply to one side and she crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue. She did all of this without looking at him.

He smiled a bit. "How are you?"

She sighed a deep, heavy sigh. The sigh of all sighs. A summary of her existence thus far. "Fine." In truth she had a splitting headache. "I thought about getting out and looking for you. But I figured I made a big enough ass of myself this evening."

Spike felt a little niggle of something at that, a spark of an emotion trying to make itself known which he quickly swatted away. "Tow you back?"

"Why don't we just call Jet?"

"I...don't want to call Jet." He hung up on Jet. He was kind of a dick to Jet, he realized then. The proper adult response to his actions was to avoid Jet.

Faye was intimately familiar with being a dick to Jet and then not wanting to call Jet, so she did not press the issue. "Can you make it to the Swordfish?"

"Yeah," Spike said without really thinking about it, but he wasn't sure. He began the laborious process of standing up. Faye was looking at him now but her expression was hard to read. "I'll come get you," he said.

She winced. He'll come get her. She was supposed to be rescuing him. "I'll stay on the comm," she said before she realized it. It was like some buried personality that was reasonable in a crisis emerged from the depths.

Spike nodded, also in a place where he was cool to accept what was reasonable and responsible for one second. He shambled on in silence, Faye's face hovering on his wrist, until he stumbled a bit on a surprise pothole. It felt like it jostled every organ in his body and he took a moment to compose himself.

Which was when Faye said, "I am really mad at you." Her voice broke on "really." She was not expecting to say that and she was not expecting to mean it. She truly was angry at him, and not as theater performed for leverage.

Spike stood with that for a second.

"Really, really angry," she continued, unable to stop once she started, which was enough to trigger Spike's defense protocol.

"I didn't ask you to-"

"That's not how it works! And you know it! You know it." She made it clear that she would hear no argument on that point, and she was right. Spike resumed his journey and Faye, realizing she had a window of opportunity, resumed her riot act. "It's really unfair. I know life isn't fair," she said in a mocking tone as if she was imitating a specific person. It was easy to imagine a lot of people have said that to Faye. "But it still really sucks! It sucks being the one to find you. It sucks dragging your body to a second location. And you...you just get to sleep through it."

Spike inhaled sharply and it made his whole body ache. Of course, he was no dummy. He could fill in the blanks between going in guns blazing and waking up on the Bebop. He knew he didn't just respawn at the save point. He thought he never acknowledged it because that was the agreement. No one acknowledged anything. But maybe he was not being entirely honest with himself.

She wasn't asking him for a defense or explanation but he felt compelled to lob one over the fence anyway. "If I don't come to them, they come to me," he said. "And I don't want them to come to me." To us, was the word he meant but still somehow couldn't bring himself to say. He already had so much blood on his hands, what was a little more on his shirt? "When you come along, it screws up the whole thing."

Faye rubbed her eyes. She knew all this. She and Jet wanted nothing more than to screw everything up for Spike. He just had to let them. "Don't be so certain about how things are going to go," she said. "Take it from me. No one has a clue."

That was surprisingly sage advice. Spike did some quick breathing exercises to psych himself up. Hauling his ass into the Swordfish was not going to be pleasant. Feeling like he curated just enough adrenaline, he shouted some nonsense (Faye thought she heard him say "marzipan mother trucker") and hoisted himself into the cockpit. Damn, that hurt. Now that he had reached his goal, his body was relaxed enough to remind him of his many grievous injuries. He leaned back and closed his eyes, re-calibrating. "You still OK?" Faye's voice floated into his consciousness.

He opened his eyes to meet hers for the first time in this conversation. They were both a little struck by the accidental intimacy but for once, they didn't rush to break the spell. "Yeah," he said. And then, "Thanks."

Thank you for trying so hard to screw it all up.

She smiled a bit. "Whatever. Come get me," she said. She tapped the screen with her hand before she signed off, an odd little gesture she never made before. Spike was instantly transported to his Dragon days. His friends used to tap the hood of the car as they were leaving it. No one officially defined its meaning, it just seemed a natural way to show affection when affection wasn't easily shown.

The last thing he ever expected when he faked his own death was to make friends in the afterlife. Maybe Faye was right. Maybe he really didn't know jack.

But he would keep that to himself.