Stuck in Hell, same old game
We know it well
I don't mind
Anyway"--Dynamite Hack, "Anyway"
Every day, diligently, Spike had been checking the 'net and other such sources for the right time to reveal his plan. It'd been a week and nothing had been forthcoming yet.
It was starting to make him somewhat nervous. The more he thought about his plan and how delicate and precise everything would have to be in order for it to work, the more he started to think that it probably wouldn't work at all. The longer he waited for the right situation, the more nerve he knew he would lose.
If the right situation didn't hurry up and present itself, he had a feeling that he was going to end up saying 'Fuck it' and simply forget about it.
He stared blankly at the pair of clippers in his hand, and even more blankly at the small bonsai tree on the coffee table. Jet had thought it would be a grand idea to make a present of the tree to Spike, commenting that he was 'tired of the bitching and moaning every day about being bored'. So far, Spike had been sitting there for ten minutes with the clippers, wondering if he should even try to prune it at all. Wasn't one supposed to wait for it to grow for a while before snipping it? He'd only had it for all of ten minutes and there he was, all ready to hack away at it.
He pondered, briefly, snipping it into the shape of a gun or a car or something, but then figured that Jet would probably stab him with the trimmers if he were to see how Spike had defiled the precious little plant. In agitation, Spike reached out and chopped off one innocent little branch, and then threw the trimmers down on the table.
This is what boredom does to a man, he thought, bitterly. It drives him to abuse foliage and ponder robbing mints.
That was his plan, after all. Spike considered himself a pretty honest, upright kind of guy—well, mostly, anyway. He didn't believe in hitting women or kids, and he didn't believe in the little man being trampled on. He brought criminals to justice as a bounty hunter, even though he himself had once been a criminal. He liked to think that the larger part of his reason for bounty hunting was the satisfaction of it, but when he really thought about it, the larger part was actually the money. He'd been chasing bounties around for long enough, and sometimes, he didn't even catch them. Sometimes they got away with whatever they were doing and left him in an even worse position than he had been in to begin with. However, every once in a while (more often than Spike would have liked to admit), that whole nagging conscience thing drove him to do what he believed was inherently right.
So why not beat the bounties at their own game? While working for the White Tigers, he'd been on a mission on Venus, infiltrating a rival syndicate's puppet corporation or some such bullshit when he caught wind of some upcoming top secret heists that were supposedly going to be happening in the next couple of months. Apparently, a small faction of the other syndicate's members had broken off into their own little band, and had been evading the syndicate for months. They hadn't been able to keep their plans away from the eyes of the syndicate entirely, though, and as a result, it was somewhat common knowledge that these bozos—who called themselves the Sombras (some language's word for 'Shadows') were planning a string of pinches on the various government mints on at least three or four planets.
But there was the catch that had caught Spike. Word of these rumoured events still hadn't caught the ISSP's ears, and as a result, the syndicate—the Olmo Nero Syndicate—wanted their renegade men back before they could get caught by the ISSP and reveal a bunch of nasty secrets. Supposedly these Sombras guys were good enough to be able to pull a job of that magnitude off, but still, the syndicate was covering its ass by spreading the word around in the world of the other syndicates: Catch these guys, bring 'em to us, and we'll reward you handsomely without bringing the ISSP into it.
That was where Spike and everyone else would come into play. Go in, catch the jerks, make off with what they would have stolen, and then watch them catch the blame for it. Alas, since the Olmo Nero would probably kill them brutally for going AWOL, there wouldn't be anybody left to reveal what had actually happened, would there now?
On top of that, Spike and everyone else would also get whatever delightful reward the syndicate decided to give to them for bringing in the Sombras.
Spike picked up the clippers again and did some fancy jabs and slices with them, slouching back into the couch. He considered himself a pretty honest and upright guy, but he was tired of getting fucked over.
It was high time that he fucked someone over.
The bonsai gift was sitting on the table still, where Jet had set it, and he frowned at seeing what had apparently been a branch at one time laying in fine mulch upon the table. The discarded clippers lay next to the miniature pile of mulch, and Jet's eyes went from the neglected tree to Spike, who was sitting in front of the laptop, looking frustrated.
"Problem?" Jet asked, folding his arms over his chest and waiting for Spike's reply, which was not exactly snappy in the coming.
Spiegel snorted and flicked the computer screen, brow furrowed. "I can't find any information or trails or evidence or locations or anything related to Ed."
Jet neatly swept the bonsai mulch into his metal hand, and poked at it a bit, silently awed at how finely chopped up it was. Spike must have spent about an hour to get it into that tiny of pieces. "Ah, I see. Looking for someone else to traumatize this week with your sudden reanimation?" He chuckled in lieu of Spike's absent response. "Well, you are in her world, there. You might as well just start flying from planet to planet asking if anyone's seen Ed—you might have better chances at that than with finding her location on the 'net."
"Thanks for the reassuring words," Spike growled, obviously not wanting to hear the obvious. Finding Jet and Faye had been easy; finding Ed was going to be damned near impossible.
"My advice?" Jet said suddenly, even though the other man had not asked for his advice, "My advice is to just wait. Ed gets in touch with me every once in a while. She bounces around a lot with that coot of a dad of hers, and she usually drops me a line every couple of weeks or so, just to say how's it going." He put a hand over his eyes, groaning. "Of course, it's usually in some colour of crayon, and is mostly gibber about Ein and a lot of smileys, but…"
"…it's something." Spike rolled his eyes and slapped the laptop shut, ignoring the look his treatment of the equipment earned him from Jet. "A couple of weeks might be too long. She's the most crucial part of the plan. I need Ed." He pulled a slightly bent cigarette out of a pack hidden in the discarded jacket next to him. "At times like this I wish I was telepathic."
"Coming into that close of contact with Ed's brain might permanently damage yours, anyway," Jet replied in monotone. "Sometimes I wonder what happened to that kid to make her like that. She's running on sixteen and she's still acting like she's five."
"I'm running on thirty and I'm still acting like I'm five," Spike retorted, grinning. "Although in a different way from Ed. I wear shoes. Ed doesn't."
Jet absent-mindedly sprinkled the bonsai mulch onto the floor of the Bebop, wiping his hands off on his pant legs when he was done, and then looked over to Spike. "You eaten yet today?"
Spike, for his
part, looked incredulous. "Are you
kidding? Me? Fix my own food? Never! Of course I haven't eaten today." He arched his eyebrows and rubbed his hands
together, devious. "What's cookin'?"
Jet turned away from Spike and walked up the steps, towards the hatch. He paused with his hand on the hatch,
wondering if what he was going to do was the brightest idea. Finally he told himself 'to hell with it'
and looked over at Spike. "Y'know, that
diner that Faye works at has the best damn onion rings you'll ever eat in your
lifetime."
Spike jumped up, throwing a few quick jabs and one quick roundhouse kick at an invisible opponent, and turned to grin at Jet, still bouncing about and weaving as if he were facing off against that same invisible opponent. "Well, what're we sitting around here for, then? Let's jet…Jet." He dropped his loosely balled fists from their attack stance, and stood in the middle of the living area, blinking. "That was the worst coincidental pun ever. I should be shot for that."
"I'm too hungry to do anything about it right now," Jet replied, heading towards the hangar. "Let's go."
The diner was actually rather dead for a Friday lunchtime, only a few tables here and there were occupied, and the waitresses had resorted to gathering around the register, blabbing until they needed to go check on their tables or until someone seated themselves in one of their sections.
Faye had resigned herself to doodling on her order pad until she jerked her head up at the utterance of "Faye, your friends are here". She shot a weary glance at Jet and bland, indescribable look at Spike, and made her way over to them, holding two menus. Jet had already started to head for his usual table that he always sat in whenever he dropped in on Faye, which was usually any time he was on Mars and he could afford to eat out. Spike followed, climbing into the booth with his back against the window and his long legs poking off the seat into the walkway. Faye swatted at them with the menus, and then tossed said menus onto the table, favouring the two men with her best 'You've got to be kidding me' look.
"I'd like to place a complaint with the manager," Spike drawled, grabbing an ashtray from the empty booth next to their table. "My waitress is surly."
"Spike," Jet growled from across the table, telling him without words not to get into it with Faye today. He kind of felt sorry for the poor woman. He couldn't imagine what it would be like to be so completely in love with someone who was…well, Spike. And who treated her like utter crap most of the time. The woman was, sometimes, too masochistic for her own good.
"Sorry, dad," Spike muttered, grabbing his menu and sticking his nose into it. He was, for lack of a better description, pouting.
Faye gave Jet a look of thanks, and smiled at him. "What's up, old man? No food on the Bebop—as per usual?"
Jet shrugged, taking up his own menu and perusing it. "Nah. Just too lazy to cook for once."
Faye nodded in understanding and looked from Jet to the menu with legs. "Whadda you guys want to drink?"
"Margarita on the rocks, salt please," the menu with legs commented dryly, and Jet slammed his own menu down on the table in irritation.
"Spike!" he reprimanded, and the menu dropped to reveal a disgruntled Spike. Jet widened his eyes at him as if to say 'I can't believe you', and Spike put the menu back up in front of his face with a profanity under his breath.
"Jesus, sorry, ya killjoy," he grumbled, sounding somewhat cowed. "Okay. Fine. Just a cup of coffee, if it's not too much of a hassle to Her Highness Faye. Shall I get down and kiss her toes while I'm at it, too?"
Faye was grinning at that point, enjoying watching Jet put Spike forcibly in his place. Jet could be rather intimidating when he wanted to. It cracked her up to see cool, collected Spike pouting like a baby behind his menu, refusing to meet either of their eyes. "That won't be necessary," she said, airily, and then turned back to Jet. "And for you, sir?"
"Coffee, as well," Jet replied, and returned Faye's smile. She trotted off to pour their coffee mugs, and then and only then did Spike toss his menu down and stare in front of him, running his tongue over his teeth and shaking his head.
"'Kay, I missed something," he said suddenly, as Jet continued to skim his menu. "Since when did you start taking the shrew's side on everything? Because, I mean, it wasn't like I was insulting her or anything. I was just being a smart-ass."
Jet decided that he would just go ahead and have what he always had when he came to the diner, which was the number eight cheeseburger and onion rings meal. It came with a malt. Jet never could decide whether the seller was the onion rings or the malt. They were both damned good. "That's just it, Spike. Would it kill you to be pleasant, for once? You did just forcibly reintroduce yourself into the poor woman's life about a week ago, after all. She doesn't need any more stress in her life. I think you'll find that you get a lot farther with Faye by being nice to her rather than giving her an attitude all the time."
Spike's eye twitched. He looked like Jet had just told him to eat a big pile of dog shit. "Stress? She's a waitress in a little po-dink diner, for crying out loud. That's not stress. It's a cakewalk compared to what we used to do for a living."
"For Faye, it's stress." Jet looked around, making sure the woman was nowhere about close enough to hear, and then leaned across the table a bit, towards Spike. "Look. After you…died, she just couldn't really get back into the whole guns-blazing-bounty-hunting deal anymore, okay? Your death hit her a lot harder than she might have admitted to you, and whether or not you know it, she kind of actually cares about you. I guess I just don't like to see you treating her like a doormat after seeing how she fell apart after you left." Jet rolled his eyes towards the window, wondering if he had said too much, due to Spike's silence. "It just doesn't seem right to stand by and let you continue to treat her like she was just the annoying bitch handcuffed to the head anymore."
"Huh," was all Spike could muster, fishing for a cig.
"Faye's been trying to live a somewhat normal life for a while, now, and it's not easy for her," Jet continued, upon still not seeing Faye around anywhere. "She's kind of in limbo between lives right now. She's still got too much Poker Alice in her to completely fit into this life, but she's still got too much doubt in her to fit into the Poker Alice life anymore. She's lonely and confused a lot. So if you could just try not to be a raging jackass—"
The clink of two coffee mugs setting down on the table cut Jet completely short and for a moment made him afraid that still, perhaps he had said too much, and perhaps that Faye had heard too much of what he had been rattling off to Spike. "Thanks," he muttered to Faye, and waited for her to grumble at him for talking about her. It never came, though. Apparently, she hadn't heard him.
"Ditto," Spike muttered just as lowly, and grabbed his coffee to take a long chug of it, apparently not offended by the fact that it was freshly brewed and probably somewhere around a billion degrees.
Faye looked between the two men for a moment and could tell immediately that she had interrupted Jet giving Spike a verbal spanking for something. And judging from the way that they were both avoiding her questioning verdant eyes, she deduced that the verbal spanking had been related to her in some way. Great, she groaned mentally. The last thing I need is Jet trying to convince Spike to magically fall in love with me. She cleared her throat, and motioned for Jet to scoot over a little bit in his seat, since she would have died before she asked Spike to move his legs.
"It's pretty dead in here," she replied, getting goosebumps when her bare legs touched the cold vinyl of the booth. "I don't think they'll kill me if I sit down for a minute. You having your usual, Jet?"
"Yeah," he replied. "Extra syrup in the malt."
"Ugh, God," she said, rolling her eyes and dropping her chin into her open palm. "You're going to give yourself a heart attack." She looked to Spike, who was smoking and looking in the opposite direction, doing his best to ignore her existence. "What're you having?"
"Dunno," he said lacklusterly, tapping some ash into the glass tray on the table. "What's good?" His hand with the cigarette in it came to rest on the table next to the ashtray, but he still wasn't looking at her, which made it easy for her to pinch the cigarette out from between his fingers, bringing it to her own lips. She noticed, with a small twinge of jealousy, that he was eyeballing the other waitresses grouped by the register.
"Half of them are engaged," she couldn't help but comment, and then immediately regretted it. Hey, great. Just make yourself sound like a completely jealous bitch.
He gave a sardonic little smirk, and chuckled to himself. "Aren't all the pretty ones already taken?" he asked rhetorically of no one, and then turned to look at she and Jet. "It's not so much them as it is the uniforms. These uniforms can make even you look good to me, Faye!" he chirped in too cheery to be real enthusiasm. "That one girl's looks like it's about five inches too short on the bottom. Isn't there some sort of regulation as to exactly how much ass you guys can show, or what?"
Faye gave him a flat look, his cigarette smouldering away in her hand next to her head. "What would Julia say," she said, coldly, "if she could hear you now?"
Spike turned and looked at her, that same small smile plastered on his face, once again masking whatever he might have really been thinking. "You're a woman. Why don't you tell me what she'd say?" he murmured. He cleared his throat, and blinked at her, apparently determined not to get ruffled by her comment and her steely gaze. "So what's good here? Order something decent for me—and gimme back my cigarette, Romany. Don't you ever have any of your own? I thought this job kept you in the eats—shouldn't it keep you in the smokes, too?"
Faye simply flicked the cigarette at him, regardless of the fact that it was still burning, and he caught it with a small amount of bouncing around and utterances of the word 'fuck'. "It's just much easier to steal yours," she replied coolly, and then stood, collecting the menus and walking off. She scribbled orders on a ticket and stuck it on the turnstile in the kitchen window, and then joined the group of waitresses by the register again.
The waitress with the skirt that was five inches too short tried to make it five inches longer by tugging on it after Faye's mouth moved at her, indicating that she was obviously informing her of the situation. The mollified waitress looked over at Jet and Spike with a blush, and then bustled off to check on a table in the far corner of the diner.
Despite the fact that there was absolutely nothing for her to be doing at the moment, Faye refused to go back over to where Jet and Spike were sitting. Instead she settled for doodling on her ticket pad again, one hand jabbed into her little white apron, jingling the change she found there. She pointedly avoided most of the questions directed at her about Jet and Spike, claiming that she didn't feel too good and just kinda wanted to be left alone.
Somewhere in the middle of her scribblings, the order up bell in the kitchen window rang, and Faye looked over to see her order sitting there waiting for her. Sighing, she stuck the pad in her apron and shuffled over to the window, shooting the guys in the kitchen a look. "Couldn't you have been slow, just this once?" she asked tiredly. Normally the boys in the back had to be fast to keep up with the lunch rushes, but on days like this where there was absolutely nothing to do, they seemed to make the food even fast, chomping at the bit for something to alleviate their boredom.
"We're bored," one of the cooks whined at Faye. "D'ya got a cig, Faye?"
"Get my keys out of my purse. They're in my car," she replied, grabbing the plates of food and starting towards Jet and Spike with what seemed like lead feet. Upon reaching their table, she clunked their plates down with nary a word, and then stalked off to retrieve Jet's malt, and then returned that to the table.
"Anything else?" she asked, without much gusto at all. Somehow, being around Spike seemed to sap her of all her energy. Jet shook his head and gave his thanks, already digging into his onion rings, but Spike looked up, of course, with something to say.
"What's this?" he asked, pointing at his plate like a finicky child with a plate of brussel sprouts in front of them.
Faye sighed and rolled her eyes, reached out, and lifted up the top piece of bread on the sandwich on Spike's plate. "It's a turkey, ham, and bacon sandwich with lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise, and onion on rye bread." She re-closed the sandwich and then pointed her finger at the cluster of French fries on the plate. "Those are French fries. You take this," she reached across the table, almost leaning in Jet's malt, and grabbed the ketchup, "ketchup, and put them on the French fries. Any other questions?"
"Is the sandwich good?" Spike asked, eyeing it warily.
He picked a fine time to suddenly become picky about his damn food, she thought. "I like it, anyway," she replied, feeling the beginnings of a headache coming on. Spike shrugged; that was apparently enough for him, and he picked up the sandwich and took a bite that neatly removed approximately a fourth of it. He then proceeded to take the bottle of ketchup from Faye and pound on it until about half of it came out onto the French fries.
"Tasty," he managed around a mouthful of sandwich. "Hey, Jet. You like see food?" He opened his mouth towards Jet and proudly displayed a half-chewed wad of turkey, ham, and bacon sandwich on rye.
Faye turned suddenly when she felt a hand touch her arm, lightly, and then suddenly her purse and her keys were being handed to her by a smiling Jenny, the waitress five-inches-too-short skirt. "You're acting half dead," she gently chastised Faye. "Go home, okay? It's dead, anyway. Nothing we can't handle short one person."
Spike looked over at Jenny and smirked, causing her to once again blush, obviously remembering the skirt comment. "Do you like see food?"
Faye slapped Spike's arm and shoved into the booth next to him before he could open his mouth at Jenny and effectively traumatize her. "Good Lord, Gorgio, where'd you learn your table manners? A barn?" she groused at him, and then looked up to Jenny with an apologetic smile. "I can stay, you know. I don't feel so terrible."
"Nah." Jenny did her best to ignore the man behind Faye, who was currently engrossed with making the biggest mess out of fries and ketchup that she had ever seen in her life. Faye's friends sure were weird. "We can handle it. Go home and get some rest."
Faye relented, realizing that the united task force of friendly coworkers wasn't going to rest until she went home that afternoon. She set her purse up on the table and looked from Spike to Jet, who was slurping at his malt and raising an eyebrow at her.
"You sick?" he asked, in a tone that was concerned but trying not to be concerned.
"That's why she sat next to me," Spike said, shoving a ketchup with a side of fry into his mouth.
"Uh," Faye began, feeling kind of ridiculous for being sent home sick when she wasn't even really sick, "not really. Kind of. Just feeling a little…under the weather, more like it." She noticed the way Spike and Jet were looking at her oddly while she scrambled for a description. "I slept like shit last night. My neighbours decided to play death metal really loudly until about four in the morning," she lied, and that seemed enough to placate Jet, but Spike continued to watch her, stuffing his face all the while.
"So where do you live?" he asked her, popping a piece of ketchup-covered tomato into his mouth. Faye steeled herself to not stare when Spike's tongue flicked out to catch the stray ketchup at the corner of his mouth, and she instead looked out the window over his head, suddenly interested in the traffic.
"Not too far from here," she replied simply. "About ten minutes away."
"You live downtown?" he asked, polishing off the rest of his sandwich, leaving a bit of crust behind. Faye wondered if the man actually chewed his food at all or whether he just swallowed it whole.
"Mm-hmm."
There was silence for a while as both men ate, and Faye simply fell to staring at the tabletop with nothing better to do. She realized that Spike must chew his food, because his jaw popped while he was eating in a continual pattern that belied chewing. She also realized that Jet had a habit of not eating food that became cross-contaminated; he hadn't eaten the onion rings that had been touched by the ketchup that fell off his cheeseburger.
She was suddenly poked in the cheek with something, and turned her head to find Spike jabbing her with a cigarette. She took it from him and fished in her bag for a lighter, producing a pack of matches instead and lighting it. "Thanks," she said, and Spike said nothing, but lit up his own cigarette. She looked over at his plate. All that was left was the neglected piece of crust and enough ketchup to fill an empty bottle.
"So can I come over?" Spike asked suddenly, blowing smoke out his nose. Faye blinked, and then looked over at him incredulously.
"The hell do you want to come over for?" she asked, suspiciously. "It's an apartment. There's nothing special about it to see." Faye knew she was fighting a losing battle, though; Spike, most likely, had already set himself on going to her apartment, and it was pointless to try to convince him otherwise. She bit her lip, and threw in the towel without an argument. "How're you going to get there?"
"With you," he said matter-of-factly. "Then you're going to drive me back to the Swordfish later on and I'll go back to the Bebop."
Jet looked at Spike as if the younger man had just grown a third eye. "You two can't even sit next to each other without some sort of argument—what the hell makes you think that you can stand to be alone with her for however long without killing each other?"
Faye's eyes snapped over to Jet, somewhat wide. "You mean you're not coming with?" she asked, mildly hysterically. "Jet. I swear to God they'll find his body in a dumpster somewhere if you don't come along to play chaperone." Jet looked at Faye apologetically, pushing his plate away from him, obviously having finished his meal. She pleaded with him with her eyes, but eventually he looked away.
"I've got to go back to the Bebop. I need to get a bounty here, soon. I'm starting to run kind of low on funds," he explained, and Spike grinned, digging in his pocket for his wallet.
"I take it I'm paying for my own lunch, then," he quipped, tossing some money on the table, and then jabbing some money in Faye's purse. "Tip," he explained.
Faye reached into her bag and pulled out the money, counting it with a quickness that belied prior experience with counting money, other than waitressing. "Cheapskate," she muttered, and Spike jabbed her in the ribs with a bony elbow.
Jet laid payment for his half of the lunch down on the table as well, and then handed Faye a bit of money, which she also counted deftly, but made no comment about as she had with Spike's.
Five minutes later, Faye was walking to her car with Spike in tow, whistling through his teeth, as the Hammerhead took off overhead, wondering what the hell she had just gotten herself into.
