Disclaimer – I don't own this show, and that's all I'm going to say. I own nothing, not even merchandise! *cries* But I'm getting an Ed keychain soon! Weeee!!!

Content – I'm sticking to the basic content of the show… which means darkness, fight scenes, blood, cigarettes and sarcasm. This is totally Spike's point of view.

Moonflower

Chapter 1

It was dark, here. And she was, here. She was close to me, this faceless woman, close enough for that milky skin to be breathed in, as it were scented with a velvety fragrance. Her dark hair seemed to curl itself around me as her fingers touched my spine, like I had been warned she would do. I was wrapped in her cocoon of raven feather colored spirals of hair and hands of poured black-market ivory. Somehow, I knew, but somehow, I didn't care either.

"You're dreaming my nightmares," she said to me, she whispered. Then she leaned in closer to me, nose touching my neck. I knew.

And so the spell was somehow broken between me. I tried to get her away, off me, away from me. I ripped at her soft jacket and necklace. I tore at it, because somehow I knew.

Falling pearls…

The sound of falling pearls…

It began as a tiny sound on the pavement, rushing on to the growth of being a gigantic waterfall. It escalated, then fell, then rushed right back to my ears and running through to my brain. It pushed me to an edge I had never imagined my self ever going near. And I still knew.

My limbs were frozen under her touch. I felt as if I was sliding through the thickened waters of hot springs and onto the sand on the bottom of turquoise seas, and yet I had not moved nor swayed in any of the four winds' directions. She touched my cheek and I felt her smile, sadly. Her crimson petal lips moved again, parting the sound like it had been merely the waters of the Red Sea.

"They used to be just moons…"

And that's when the world fell away beneath me. There was no more pavement, no more pearls… nothing more than silence. I opened my eyes and saw the sky, and to me it seemed only to be a veil of deep purple, speckled with glued on rhinestones that caught the light so that they glimmered. I smiled. "Isn't it funny? I used to think it was… real," I said, but yet no vibration of air had passed through my closed mouth. Her head bent to the side, almost like she had died as she clung to me, but her breath was still ever present on my neck, each exhale brushing my skin like feathers. I knew, God I knew…

And so, through stilled lips, I screamed.

A beeping noise rose from the darkness. I opened my eyes.

"Huh?" it fell from my lips as if it were alien to every part of me, like I had truly fallen through the looking glass and into a world of white rabbits and red queens. But everything seemed normal enough. We were going to Mars weren't we? Yeah, we were. I remembered.

I wiped my hand up and my face and into my hair, feeling the cold sweat the dream had created. Why had it come again, this dream? It had occurred a few nights ago, leaving me detached with the realness it held.

The air was filled with a distinct smell, an almost ominous scent sometimes. It depended on the mood of the cook, I suppose.

The beeping came again.

"Spike, could you get that?" Jet called from the kitchen over the sizzle of vegetables in oil. I groaned and moved my hand over to the convenient keyboard. I pressed the Enter button and tried to go back to sleep, though the recent prints of my dreaming were still present behind my eyes. The woman haunted me with her words and sounds… why was it another woman? One woman was already here in the present and the other left to blurry memories and distant sounds. I didn't need another one.

"Jet? Is anyone there? Hello?"

It was Bob, one of Jet's old comrades or something. I knew his voice like I knew his face, bearded and tan. With one finger, I turned Jet's laptop towards me. "Yeah?" I asked, pulling my arm back to my side. It felt warm there, pushed halfway under my ribs.

"Oh, it's you again. Where's Jet?"

I didn't even open my eyes to reply. "Cooking up a storm," I said, smirking just a little bit.

There was a pause.

"Oh," he said. I didn't say anything. Somehow, my thoughts drifted back to the woman.

Falling pearls…

The sound of falling pearls…

He sighed. "Swell, he's cooking. It's a miracle you guys aren't dead," he said then chuckled a bit. I finally sat up to look at the screen. Bob was sitting at his desk, as usual, sifting through some papers. "But, seriously, I've got some new info on some new guy that the Feds want in their hands. Since you're in the territory anyway, I thought you might be a bit interested. The guy's worth… uh, twenty million woolongs."

"I'm listening."

Bob coughed a bit to clear his throat. "Derek Gene Johnson, some kid. He's wanted for trying to destroy some facility on Europa. I dunno, too much of this has red tape wrapped around it. I'll feed you the info now. But I just wanted to tell you guys…"

As the new file loaded up and the information was displayed, I pulled on my grey shirt, adjusting the twisted parts to fit their right places. I then pulled out a broken cigarette and lit the handicapped thing to put it out of its misery.

Falling pearls…

'Damnit,' I thought, cursing the woman with no eyes or features for the mind to grasp.

"…cause you're in the area, and I thought you might take up the challenge."

I shrugged, dismissing both the thought of a challenge coming from this and the image of the woman floating through my head. "Rebellious teenagers have no sense of style," I said. Then I sighed, breath falling out like some sort of broken chorus. He didn't like talking to me. I made him nervous inside somehow. Maybe it was because he knew too, like I had in the illusion during sleep. He'd read through to my Syndicate past maybe? Bob usually spoke to Jet, laughing about old times with the occasional insertion of an inside joke, but to me he moved as if he were pulled with levers and a mix of springs and wires. He was always straight to the point with me.

I clicked through the file, overriding the stream video of Bob. The bountyhead was just some stupid kid, wanted the freedom of the people held within the prison on Europa or something, called the buildings "concentration camps" and the leader of Europa a "modern-day Hitler"… whatever that meant. I minimized the window, putting me back to Bob.

I blew the smoke out from behind my lips slowly. "So what's the kid's motivation?" I asked. The terms he used didn't make much sense to me anyway. Bob shrugged through the computer. "He been protesting the prisons for years, says the government won't let out the information about how they're torturing the inmates, performing experiments and that kind of junk. He's the vice president of an organization called Lavender Freedom. Pretty name, but the group's got a bad rep for destruction," he said. Pictures loaded as he spoke. I saw a blonde kid in all the pictures, never seeming to be different in any of them. The boy held the angry look that I had carried in the frustrated part of my youth… and lots of hardware. He was constantly pictured with a gun in his hand, or someone around him held one for him.

"Lot of action in just a few years…"

Bob raised an eyebrow. "Decades, you mean," he corrected, "This kid's stumbled onto either the fountain of youth or a very skilled plastic surgeon. His face hasn't changed in years, and neither has his intentions." I sat there a moment, saying nothing.

"So are you going to or not?"

"Some kid with a good doctor and some cash who happened to play with a little dynamite on Europa…"

"It's a big bounty."

"Twenty million sounds like it's too much. I don't like this…"

I put out the cigarette in a nearby cup of coffee. "But I'm going," I said with a grin lifting on one side of my face. Bob smiled. "Good. He was last seen on Mars… he hides well, so don't expect to find him right away. 'Night Spike," he said and shut off the com. I blinked at the abruptness in his leaving.

Falling pearls…

"So who was that?" Jet asked, coming up behind me with a wok-fry in his hand, still sizzling as he stirred it. I smelled the mushrooms and onions of the fried vegetables. I turned back to him, jerking a thumb in the direction of the laptop. "That," I said, "was your good friend Bob, and he just gave me something to do besides sleep."

Jet grinned. "You mean square-dancing?" he joked. I rolled my eyes and grabbed my jacket off of the back of the couch, slinging it over my shoulder. I peered into the dish. "What's in it?" I asked, peering in, steam invading my nostrils and condensing on my cheeks. Jet looked in it with me. This made me a little uneasy…

"Mushrooms, onions, carrots, bell pepp–"

"Well, then, count me out," I said, heading towards the hangar.

In the hallways lay Edward, sleeping and quietly mumbling pudding oriented things. the strange tanned sprite had her head laying on top on Ein. I carefully stepped over her and crawled through the space to the hangar, closing the door slowly.

I stepped into the Swordfish II and closed the hatch, grabbing the controls.

Falling pearls…

The sound of falling pearls…

'Damn dreams…' I thought as my ship was thrust into space in the direction of Mars.

. This first chapter aggravated me, and it still does. So tell me what you think before I drag myself down into the wallowing pits of writer's block. Praise me, poke me, or beat me with a flaming stick… I personally don't give a bowl of Cheerios which of those you wish to leave with my story.

And, in case you didn't know, Europa is one of Jupiter's moons.