I've decided to write another chapter because I felt like it. Hope you all like it and review, review even if you don't like.
Cowboy Bebop: Dream Sequence
Session 28:
Angel Standing By
Angel left his side and walked towards the open door. Spike tried to grab her and drag her back; undoubtedly she would be hurt if she went to investigate the fighting in the hall. Unfortunately he was too slow and the pain that was rioting through his body didn't help either. He could only watch helplessly as she moved closer to her assured death.
He cried out as a figure staggered into the room and collapsed into her arms. It was Lewiston.
"Angel..." was all he managed to croak before all animation left his body. Slowly the brother and sister sank to the floor, she wasn't strong enough to support his weight. She didn't cry or say anything, she stared vacantly at the corpse in her arms, smiling eerily.
Cursing darkly, Spike struggled out of the clutches of the couch and hobbled towards the girl. He had to get her out of here, if he didn't they would be dead alongside Lewiston. If it had just been himself he wouldn't have cared as much, but this was his fault and the girl was in the line of fire because of him, otherwise he most likely wouldn't have bothered.
Before he reached her another person stepped into the room, gun raised high. The stranger fired off a few shots and then pointed the gun at Spike. He froze, muscles screaming from lack of use. If only that idiot had given him a gun, now he was dead and most like so were he and the girl.
Suddenly the girl stood, leaving her brother's body sprawled on the floor. She stood between Spike and the armed intruder, her whole posture radiating unawareness. She probably didn't understand what was going on; most likely she couldn't tell that her brother was now dead.
"Well, well, if it isn't the syndicate's little Dreaming Angel," the intruder sneered, lowering his gun. If Spike had been in better condition he could have used that opportunity to disable the man, perhaps permanently. Since he could barely stand without pain and didn't have a gun, there was nothing he could really do. He hated this.
"You're a pretty thing," the man leered, raising the gun to stroke her cheek. She stood impassive under his exploration as if she wasn't even in the room, or maybe her mind.
Suddenly the man grunted lowly and lurched away from her a bright red stain seeping across his chest. It was then that Spike noticed the gun the girl held, it had a silencer on it. The girl fired twice more, once into the guy's chest and once to the brain. The man wasn't going to be getting up during this lifetime.
"Let's go," she said, her voice cold and completely lucid. He stared at her in shock, noting the sudden alertness in her actions and the emerald flames dancing in her pale green eyes.
"How...?"
"There's no time to explain. Here take this." She tossed him a gun and then ducked out into the hall. There was the sound of gunfire and then she came back into the room, reloading her gun. She slammed the door close and then moved swiftly across the room to the windows that overlooked the city. Deftly she opened one and leaned outside, firing off a few shots.
"There's a fire escape in the bedroom," she told him. He nodded mutely, figuring that talking would only distract her. Questions were boiling in his mind though. Where had this sudden animation come from? Was that vagueness that had characterized her before only been a ruse? She was a better actor than he could ever be then. Could hide her pain better.
She helped him into the room and then opened the window there, quickly scanning the street below. Silently she motioned him to follow and crawled out onto the rickety metal support. He managed to climb out, but only after cursing and struggling as his wound shot fiery brands throughout his body.
"We have to go down, there's no other way," she told him looking thoughtfully at the descending fire escape ladder. He followed her gaze and mentally groaned, if the gunmen didn't kill him the exertion certainly would.
He couldn't help grimacing every time he pulled the muscles in his abdomen the wrong way or whenever they made an especially loud noise. Adeptly she scaled down the ladder, feet landing with delicate surety on each rung. He envied her agony-free mobility as he clumsily followed her down.
"Where are we going to go?" he asked her when they had made it down finally. Before she could answer, though, a shot rang out and she flung herself atop him. A few seconds later she was up and firing at the opening of the alley.
"Get under cover," she yelled shoving him behind a dumpster. He hated feeling so completely useless, allowing someone else to take control and make all the decisions. Not that he could do much injured as he was, but he should be able to do something, damn it. That girl shouldn't be forced to handle his problems, she was an innocent bystander in the whole affair. Well, not exactly, but if she had been as vapid and dazed as she had been before he would say that. The new Angel was anything but helpless, he had to admire that.
"How dare you try to harm your leader?" she demanded between shots, there were a few cries of pain, but still the enemies fired.
"Angel stop this, the syndicate doesn't need some half dead old-timer that can't even shoot," a cold voice announced and a man stepped into the dim light filtering down from apartment windows.
"My brother and I are have pledged our lives to this man, as have the rest of you, no matter what his current condition," she retorted, training her gun on him but not firing.
Spike couldn't recognize the man, obviously the guy had joined long after he had left. Narrowing his eyes he noted that he had a clean shot, if only his hand would stop shaking he could take it.
"That is a fool's ambition, a worthless goal. I'd hate to have to hurt you, my dear, but I might have to if you don't step aside."
Angel's silvery laugh echoed like a siren's song between the buildings, seeping into the deepening night, and the guy hesitated momentarily. "You might hurt me?" she demanded, still chuckling, "I am no longer the syndicate's Dreaming Angel, you don't need my fortunes." There was something so cruelly amused about her manner that he felt a slight chill travel up and down his spine.
"If you are no longer the Dreaming Angel, then what are you? What can you possibly be?" the man demanded angrily. Spike guessed that he was trying to compensate for his earlier pause. Showing fear in front of one's "loyal" followers was the surest way to the grave in this business.
"I am Death's Angel," the girl replied emotionlessly. The sound of four objects thudding into a yielding surface filled the night after her announcement.
"You bi..." the man collapsed at her feet, a stunned silence ensued.
"You swore your life to him and I have taken the debt owed," she said calmly. "Does anyone one else dare to challenge his authority? He is you leader until the day your blood is spilt upon a dirty floor defending him and the syndicate."
"Can I say that I don't want to be a leader?" Spike piped up helpfully, a sheepishly pained expression on his face. She gave him a warning look and turned back to the alley.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw a sudden, darting movement. With a fluid motion, that would most definitely be costing him later, he swung around fired once. The man he had hit cried out, reflexively shooting into the air, and landed with a dull thud on the dingy asphalt.
A muttered damn echoed through the shadows and the sound of feet moving away at a frantic pace was the only sound. His whiskey brown eyes scanned the area but detected no other life besides himself and Angel.
Speaking of Angel what was that all about? Pretending to be completely out of it and then snapping back to reality with an alacrity that left his brain turning summersaults trying to figure it all out. He had to know her game, his survival might depend on it, even if it didn't he was too curious to leave it alone.
"We should head for the sanctuary," Angel told him as she turned back to him. He tried to read her expression in the faulty light, but shadows crept across her face and obscured it.
She took a step towards him and stumbled, the gun dropping from her pale fingers. Ignoring his own pain he half sprinted half limped towards her. When he had finally crossed the few feet the separated them he could see her inspecting a suspiciously dark area on her shirt.
"You've been shot," he told her stating the obvious; she gave him a wry look.
"Appears so," she remarked casually. "Damn it." With his help she stood up, more or less.
"When?" he asked. For the life of him he couldn't honestly remember he ever showing any signs of pain until then.
"The time I jumped you," she replied, dark amusement coloring her deceptively soft voice. "Showing weakness is the fastest way to die." He remembered thinking something similar to that moments ago. This girl was more aware of the world than she had first let on.
"Then what's with this sudden..." he waved his hand in an attempt to express what he couldn't quite vocalize without sounding like a complete idiot.
"Lucidity?" she filled in, her face without an hint of emotion. A cool flame flared deep within her eyes, which were trained on his own.
"Yeah, that."
"Have you ever heard of Dream Sequence?" she asked, giving him a tug to get him walking.
"The drug?"
"That's the one."
"You're a Dream addict?" he asked incredulously. Either he was losing his skill of observation or something else was going on because he couldn't recall ever seeing her shoot up.
"Not quite, but close," she replied with a small shrug. "Do you know anything about it?"
"A little," he admitted as the emerged from the depressingly filthy alley. "Its original purpose was a new form of anti-depressant, but clinical testing and studies proved it to be highly addictive. Not only that but users were put in a trance-like state of euphoria."
"They were like sleep-walkers," the girl added nodding. She appeared mildly impressed by his not so extensive knowledge of the drug. "I'm like that only I don't need to take the drug," was her ambiguous reply.
He gave her a questioning look, which she ignored as she pulled him into another alley. Overhead a few glittering dots could be seen through the artificially created atmosphere. With a strong sense of yearning he remembered hurtling through space in the Swordfish II. The Bebop...what were they doing? Faye and Jet, he was dead to them. He should be dead, that had been his whole goal, not that he would tell anyone that. He had thought the only escape route was death, his only choice.
"My mother was an addict," Angel remarked interrupting his dark reverie.
"What?" he asked, pulling himself out of the morass that was his mind.
"My mother took it when Lewiston and my father left her, she was pregnant with me at the time," there was something coldly bitter in her tone, she probably blamed her mother for whatever it was that was the matter with her now. "None of the doctors and researches ever tested how it would interact with an unborn fetus. Why would they?"
"So..." he prompted after a long pause, their soft breathing filling the stagnate air.
"How are you feeling? We're here," she told him as they stopped in front of an unexceptional dumpster.
"Fine," was his terse reply as another brand of pain flared up from his wound. "And so?"
She ignored him and felt along the side of the trash receptacle. She grunted in pain as she pulled the untreated wound. He took a half step to assist her though he really had no idea how.
"There," she announced as a soft hiss surrounding them. He cried out and stumbled backwards, falling on his butt, as the front of the dumpster suddenly flew up.
"Sorry," she said with chagrin.
"You could have warned me," he told her in annoyance. She shrugged in a way that said that she could have but hadn't.
She offered him her hand, which he wouldn't have accepted except that his injury wouldn't let him keep the last remnants of his pride. He followed her into the dumpster and the tunnel beyond. When the dumpster closed up behind them he jumped at the gun-like bang, she chuckled softly and opened a door that was invisible in the complete darkness.
He heard a soft click and a soft golden glow burned his eyes. Blinking against the sudden brilliance he sensed her moving away.
"It's so hard to stay conscious," she murmured from somewhere before him. Slowly his sight returned and he noted the bunker-like room he now stood in. Angel was opening the cupboards that lined one side of the room. Finding what she was looking for she gave a satisfied grunt and removed a medium sized white case.
"What's that?" he asked suspiciously, it was in his nature and he wasn't about to lose it.
"First aide," she answered setting it on the small table that occupied one corner. "I'm afraid that you'll have to take over for a while."
"Why?" he asked coming closer to examine the case's contents. He took note of the painkillers and clean bandages, those would definitely come in handy.
"Well, my brain creates a chemical that is similar in structure to Dream so it's hard for me to maintain lucidity for...long...periods..." As her voice trailed off he glanced up.
"What the..." The flames faded from her eyes and were replaced by a glassy unconcern. The same eerily serene smile that he had come to know bloomed on her lips. Angel was no longer home.
* * * *
On to the next chapter. The reason this took so long was that whole system shut down. How annoying was that? It said something like two and half months of waiting and I would have waited too if I hadn't of gotten an email from a reviewer for another story. Anyway, please review and I'll start working on the next chapter.
Cowboy Bebop: Dream Sequence
Session 28:
Angel Standing By
Angel left his side and walked towards the open door. Spike tried to grab her and drag her back; undoubtedly she would be hurt if she went to investigate the fighting in the hall. Unfortunately he was too slow and the pain that was rioting through his body didn't help either. He could only watch helplessly as she moved closer to her assured death.
He cried out as a figure staggered into the room and collapsed into her arms. It was Lewiston.
"Angel..." was all he managed to croak before all animation left his body. Slowly the brother and sister sank to the floor, she wasn't strong enough to support his weight. She didn't cry or say anything, she stared vacantly at the corpse in her arms, smiling eerily.
Cursing darkly, Spike struggled out of the clutches of the couch and hobbled towards the girl. He had to get her out of here, if he didn't they would be dead alongside Lewiston. If it had just been himself he wouldn't have cared as much, but this was his fault and the girl was in the line of fire because of him, otherwise he most likely wouldn't have bothered.
Before he reached her another person stepped into the room, gun raised high. The stranger fired off a few shots and then pointed the gun at Spike. He froze, muscles screaming from lack of use. If only that idiot had given him a gun, now he was dead and most like so were he and the girl.
Suddenly the girl stood, leaving her brother's body sprawled on the floor. She stood between Spike and the armed intruder, her whole posture radiating unawareness. She probably didn't understand what was going on; most likely she couldn't tell that her brother was now dead.
"Well, well, if it isn't the syndicate's little Dreaming Angel," the intruder sneered, lowering his gun. If Spike had been in better condition he could have used that opportunity to disable the man, perhaps permanently. Since he could barely stand without pain and didn't have a gun, there was nothing he could really do. He hated this.
"You're a pretty thing," the man leered, raising the gun to stroke her cheek. She stood impassive under his exploration as if she wasn't even in the room, or maybe her mind.
Suddenly the man grunted lowly and lurched away from her a bright red stain seeping across his chest. It was then that Spike noticed the gun the girl held, it had a silencer on it. The girl fired twice more, once into the guy's chest and once to the brain. The man wasn't going to be getting up during this lifetime.
"Let's go," she said, her voice cold and completely lucid. He stared at her in shock, noting the sudden alertness in her actions and the emerald flames dancing in her pale green eyes.
"How...?"
"There's no time to explain. Here take this." She tossed him a gun and then ducked out into the hall. There was the sound of gunfire and then she came back into the room, reloading her gun. She slammed the door close and then moved swiftly across the room to the windows that overlooked the city. Deftly she opened one and leaned outside, firing off a few shots.
"There's a fire escape in the bedroom," she told him. He nodded mutely, figuring that talking would only distract her. Questions were boiling in his mind though. Where had this sudden animation come from? Was that vagueness that had characterized her before only been a ruse? She was a better actor than he could ever be then. Could hide her pain better.
She helped him into the room and then opened the window there, quickly scanning the street below. Silently she motioned him to follow and crawled out onto the rickety metal support. He managed to climb out, but only after cursing and struggling as his wound shot fiery brands throughout his body.
"We have to go down, there's no other way," she told him looking thoughtfully at the descending fire escape ladder. He followed her gaze and mentally groaned, if the gunmen didn't kill him the exertion certainly would.
He couldn't help grimacing every time he pulled the muscles in his abdomen the wrong way or whenever they made an especially loud noise. Adeptly she scaled down the ladder, feet landing with delicate surety on each rung. He envied her agony-free mobility as he clumsily followed her down.
"Where are we going to go?" he asked her when they had made it down finally. Before she could answer, though, a shot rang out and she flung herself atop him. A few seconds later she was up and firing at the opening of the alley.
"Get under cover," she yelled shoving him behind a dumpster. He hated feeling so completely useless, allowing someone else to take control and make all the decisions. Not that he could do much injured as he was, but he should be able to do something, damn it. That girl shouldn't be forced to handle his problems, she was an innocent bystander in the whole affair. Well, not exactly, but if she had been as vapid and dazed as she had been before he would say that. The new Angel was anything but helpless, he had to admire that.
"How dare you try to harm your leader?" she demanded between shots, there were a few cries of pain, but still the enemies fired.
"Angel stop this, the syndicate doesn't need some half dead old-timer that can't even shoot," a cold voice announced and a man stepped into the dim light filtering down from apartment windows.
"My brother and I are have pledged our lives to this man, as have the rest of you, no matter what his current condition," she retorted, training her gun on him but not firing.
Spike couldn't recognize the man, obviously the guy had joined long after he had left. Narrowing his eyes he noted that he had a clean shot, if only his hand would stop shaking he could take it.
"That is a fool's ambition, a worthless goal. I'd hate to have to hurt you, my dear, but I might have to if you don't step aside."
Angel's silvery laugh echoed like a siren's song between the buildings, seeping into the deepening night, and the guy hesitated momentarily. "You might hurt me?" she demanded, still chuckling, "I am no longer the syndicate's Dreaming Angel, you don't need my fortunes." There was something so cruelly amused about her manner that he felt a slight chill travel up and down his spine.
"If you are no longer the Dreaming Angel, then what are you? What can you possibly be?" the man demanded angrily. Spike guessed that he was trying to compensate for his earlier pause. Showing fear in front of one's "loyal" followers was the surest way to the grave in this business.
"I am Death's Angel," the girl replied emotionlessly. The sound of four objects thudding into a yielding surface filled the night after her announcement.
"You bi..." the man collapsed at her feet, a stunned silence ensued.
"You swore your life to him and I have taken the debt owed," she said calmly. "Does anyone one else dare to challenge his authority? He is you leader until the day your blood is spilt upon a dirty floor defending him and the syndicate."
"Can I say that I don't want to be a leader?" Spike piped up helpfully, a sheepishly pained expression on his face. She gave him a warning look and turned back to the alley.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw a sudden, darting movement. With a fluid motion, that would most definitely be costing him later, he swung around fired once. The man he had hit cried out, reflexively shooting into the air, and landed with a dull thud on the dingy asphalt.
A muttered damn echoed through the shadows and the sound of feet moving away at a frantic pace was the only sound. His whiskey brown eyes scanned the area but detected no other life besides himself and Angel.
Speaking of Angel what was that all about? Pretending to be completely out of it and then snapping back to reality with an alacrity that left his brain turning summersaults trying to figure it all out. He had to know her game, his survival might depend on it, even if it didn't he was too curious to leave it alone.
"We should head for the sanctuary," Angel told him as she turned back to him. He tried to read her expression in the faulty light, but shadows crept across her face and obscured it.
She took a step towards him and stumbled, the gun dropping from her pale fingers. Ignoring his own pain he half sprinted half limped towards her. When he had finally crossed the few feet the separated them he could see her inspecting a suspiciously dark area on her shirt.
"You've been shot," he told her stating the obvious; she gave him a wry look.
"Appears so," she remarked casually. "Damn it." With his help she stood up, more or less.
"When?" he asked. For the life of him he couldn't honestly remember he ever showing any signs of pain until then.
"The time I jumped you," she replied, dark amusement coloring her deceptively soft voice. "Showing weakness is the fastest way to die." He remembered thinking something similar to that moments ago. This girl was more aware of the world than she had first let on.
"Then what's with this sudden..." he waved his hand in an attempt to express what he couldn't quite vocalize without sounding like a complete idiot.
"Lucidity?" she filled in, her face without an hint of emotion. A cool flame flared deep within her eyes, which were trained on his own.
"Yeah, that."
"Have you ever heard of Dream Sequence?" she asked, giving him a tug to get him walking.
"The drug?"
"That's the one."
"You're a Dream addict?" he asked incredulously. Either he was losing his skill of observation or something else was going on because he couldn't recall ever seeing her shoot up.
"Not quite, but close," she replied with a small shrug. "Do you know anything about it?"
"A little," he admitted as the emerged from the depressingly filthy alley. "Its original purpose was a new form of anti-depressant, but clinical testing and studies proved it to be highly addictive. Not only that but users were put in a trance-like state of euphoria."
"They were like sleep-walkers," the girl added nodding. She appeared mildly impressed by his not so extensive knowledge of the drug. "I'm like that only I don't need to take the drug," was her ambiguous reply.
He gave her a questioning look, which she ignored as she pulled him into another alley. Overhead a few glittering dots could be seen through the artificially created atmosphere. With a strong sense of yearning he remembered hurtling through space in the Swordfish II. The Bebop...what were they doing? Faye and Jet, he was dead to them. He should be dead, that had been his whole goal, not that he would tell anyone that. He had thought the only escape route was death, his only choice.
"My mother was an addict," Angel remarked interrupting his dark reverie.
"What?" he asked, pulling himself out of the morass that was his mind.
"My mother took it when Lewiston and my father left her, she was pregnant with me at the time," there was something coldly bitter in her tone, she probably blamed her mother for whatever it was that was the matter with her now. "None of the doctors and researches ever tested how it would interact with an unborn fetus. Why would they?"
"So..." he prompted after a long pause, their soft breathing filling the stagnate air.
"How are you feeling? We're here," she told him as they stopped in front of an unexceptional dumpster.
"Fine," was his terse reply as another brand of pain flared up from his wound. "And so?"
She ignored him and felt along the side of the trash receptacle. She grunted in pain as she pulled the untreated wound. He took a half step to assist her though he really had no idea how.
"There," she announced as a soft hiss surrounding them. He cried out and stumbled backwards, falling on his butt, as the front of the dumpster suddenly flew up.
"Sorry," she said with chagrin.
"You could have warned me," he told her in annoyance. She shrugged in a way that said that she could have but hadn't.
She offered him her hand, which he wouldn't have accepted except that his injury wouldn't let him keep the last remnants of his pride. He followed her into the dumpster and the tunnel beyond. When the dumpster closed up behind them he jumped at the gun-like bang, she chuckled softly and opened a door that was invisible in the complete darkness.
He heard a soft click and a soft golden glow burned his eyes. Blinking against the sudden brilliance he sensed her moving away.
"It's so hard to stay conscious," she murmured from somewhere before him. Slowly his sight returned and he noted the bunker-like room he now stood in. Angel was opening the cupboards that lined one side of the room. Finding what she was looking for she gave a satisfied grunt and removed a medium sized white case.
"What's that?" he asked suspiciously, it was in his nature and he wasn't about to lose it.
"First aide," she answered setting it on the small table that occupied one corner. "I'm afraid that you'll have to take over for a while."
"Why?" he asked coming closer to examine the case's contents. He took note of the painkillers and clean bandages, those would definitely come in handy.
"Well, my brain creates a chemical that is similar in structure to Dream so it's hard for me to maintain lucidity for...long...periods..." As her voice trailed off he glanced up.
"What the..." The flames faded from her eyes and were replaced by a glassy unconcern. The same eerily serene smile that he had come to know bloomed on her lips. Angel was no longer home.
* * * *
On to the next chapter. The reason this took so long was that whole system shut down. How annoying was that? It said something like two and half months of waiting and I would have waited too if I hadn't of gotten an email from a reviewer for another story. Anyway, please review and I'll start working on the next chapter.
