[Author's note: This is my first Bebop fic ever. Make what you will of that]
Voices.
That Martian blues. The sound of rain rattling loose windowpanes. Gunfire. Voices of old friends.
The pale lips widened into a cruel imitation of a smile, and the voice said--
"God DAMMIT!"
His eyes snapped open. Faye was standing with her back to him, hips cocked slightly, unknotting the red pullover. She flung it away dramatically and sank down into the couch. "It's too damn hot in here," she said.
"Jet's working on it. Quit whining." He leaned his head back and closed his eyes...
and all he could see were those pale lips around the tip of his finger, the long elegant hands, the slanted blue eyes looking up at him. He tried to change the memory, make the hair golden, long and flowing with that unnatural shine, breasts, wide woman's hips... It was no good. He was no alchemist.
Voices.
"Spike's dead."
"What?"
"There was a shootout. Fong's men. In the cathedral. He's dead."
He hung up the phone.
The bird cawed softly at him from the windowsill. He looked into its black reflective eyes. "Spike's dead," he told it. The taste of the words in his mouth didn't make it feel true. His eyes burned.
When was the last time he had cried? When he had woken up in Spike's arms and realized he had surrendered his heart into the hands of another person? The first betrayal? The last?
Now he couldn't even remember how it felt to cry. All he remembered was the walk through the graveyard in the rain, pushing his blade against the gravedigger's throat, the man's thick fingers shaking as he opened the casket. A casket full of bricks.
No, Spike. I won't let you abandon me. I'll kill you first.
He had not forgotten his promise, not even after three years. He remembered all of it.
Turning his face to the sky, staring into the Martian rain as it stung in his eyes like acid, looking into the open sky that had swallowed his whole world and closed again to lock him in with a casket full of bricks at his feet and raindrops running down his skin.
